Meliora

by Starscribe

First published 5th of June, 2018

Earth is only just recovering from a war that almost wiped out the pony descendants of humankind. But when the Alicorns fail them, the survivors turn to an unlikely source for aid: Jackie the bat pony.

Earth has faced terrible things since the Event transformed all living humans into ponies and scattered them across time. Equestria's own demons nearly wiped out civilization more than once, and devastating internal war nearly finished the job.

But now the worst threats are gone, the weapons ponies created to survive them are more dangerous than ever. The superintelligence Athena now rules the world, absolute authority over all civilization. With her power and intellect, she drives the survivors towards greatness, regardless of the body count along the way.

But there are ponies who resist, who yearn for something better. Jackie is not one of those ponies. But maybe they can get her help. It isn't like they have anywhere else to turn.

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A ponies after people story. Requires knowledge from 'The Last War' to the end of Bedtime Stories to really make sense, but not necessarily full coverage beyond that.

This story is a patreon commission for the wonderful Lightfox Lowell, who provided the general premise. Editing by Two Bit and Sparktail, cover by Zutcha. Thanks to my wonderful support team for making this insanity possible.

Updates every Tuesday.

Prologue: Antrozous

The world basically ended when Charybdis finally rose from the sea.

Ancient writers of the human world had long speculated about such abominations, and the reign of madness and ecstasy they might bring. Those ancient writers had foreseen the destruction that they would bring to every nation, as their servants rose and brushed aside the organic life like dust in a breeze. There were no Elder Signs, no supernatural means by which the desperate defenders might easily overcome. Their enemy outnumbered them, had greater weapons, and far greater unity of purpose.

Had the ancient writers of humanity survived to that day, they might’ve been amazed to see their far-future descendants triumph in the end, casting the Eldritch Horror and all its servants into Outer Darkness.

The war had been terrible—every nation of Earth had either been destroyed, or else unified in one common body. Only united with every great power, and at least one they hadn’t even known about, had they survived.

There was much celebration on that day, with equine and human alike rejoicing that the ancient enemy was banished forever, and the planet was theirs. The party that followed lasted for weeks, and resulted in the utter depletion of the planet’s supply of drinkable alcohol.

But after the parties were over, the funerals were held, and the dead buried, life had to go on. Ponies along with the last survivors of the ancient races lived together in the great city of Axis Mundi for years without complaint. It had, after all, been built to survive an indefinite siege. The height of magical craft had been used to construct it, and there were many empty rooms thanks to the war. That city grew into a megalopolis never seen on Earth before it, and as the population expanded they built new suburbs, spreading across the Sahara mile by mile.

A generation passed away in happiness there, united by their common bond. The next generation rose on stories of the terrible war, and the cooperation of their parents in defeating it. Even so, there was a little friction among them—the ancient humans, much slower to breed and more dependent on their infrastructure, left the city in that age, or at least most of them did.

Then their children rose, inheriting the city in their place. And with them, the peace wasn’t to last. They knew nothing of the desperation that had been a constant reality in the lives of their grandparents. They had not been raised on the promise of death for even minor crimes, as evidence of possession by the Outside. So, crime again became a serious problem in Mundi, as the poor and dispossessed took what little power they could.

The megalopolis of Mundi might have been the best way to defend the planet’s population, but it also put everyone in constant contact with each other. There was no place for the developing pockets of independent cultures to go, only more city. While this next generation did not have the cooperative spirit born of desperation, they also lacked a practical understanding of how to survive outside their perfect magical city, where all aspects of life were managed and provided for them. In many ways, they were the most technologically advanced society that the planet had ever seen.

A few brave souls ventured out anyway, first as individuals, but eventually as small caravans, in search of ancient homelands and a better life. Terrible stories came back in their place, stories of traps and horrible magics the Outsiders had left behind as they swept across the planet. Some budding new societies were wiped out by entirely mundane causes—starvation being chief among these. A few succeeded at building new homes—outposts that were not more than a few days journey from the city, often located in the empty (but still functional) ruins left by their defending ancestors.

Another generation passed away in Mundi, and the situation got worse. Murder returned to the city, and riots became a more frequent occurrence as friction continued to ferment. Though many ancient cultural divides had been long forgotten, they had new divisions to create prejudice. Often the chief among those was race, given the unmistakable difference between the species and the clear advantages and disadvantages possessed by some over others.

Nopony could’ve said for sure how the divides rose, or upon which lines the castes of the city were informally separated. Even the Alicorns who ruled it, doing their best to keep the city unified and prevent widescale violence, couldn’t have said for sure. But how the hierarchy formed didn’t really matter.

What mattered to Jackie was that bats ended up on the bottom.

In the old days, she wouldn’t have cared what other ponies thought of her—in those days, she had her wife, and nothing else mattered. They could face the world together and nothing it could do would leave an impact. All she really had to do was wait and the situation might change again in her favor.

Jackie herself wasn’t even all that effected by the change, given her position of prestige in the city. She didn’t live in squalor, but near the core, a section of the tallest arcologies in the center of the city, where the most important ponies spent their lives.

At first, Jackie dismissed the strange looks she got at parties, particularly since other guests would explain on her behalf how important and respected she was, and that would be that. But as the years went by, Jackie stopped getting invited to those parties. As before, it didn’t really matter to her—she’d always loathed them anyway, and the clubs closer to ground level always had more interesting people to meet.

Fast forward a century or so, and suddenly she wasn’t allowed in those places either. It didn’t matter how much money she had, though in truth it was less than she should have had. Ezri had always been better at managing their money. Jackie could have gone to the rulers of the city, since she was one of the few who could get an audience with one of them without anything more than a whim on her part.

But she didn’t really want to see Alex anymore. If you all hadn’t been captured, I could’ve brought Ezri back instead of saving your dumb asses. In some ways, it was the Alicorns’ fault her wife wasn’t still alive. It didn’t really matter that Ezri had been okay with dying. It was the principle of the thing.

So it was that Jackie found herself at a truly underground club, one that was so many stories under the city that the rocks were hot to the touch. The bar itself was located at the dead-end of a particularly dirty looking tunnel, which branched into many identical square rooms. They had been ancient food-storage caches, during the days of the war when nopony had known if they would be able to grow food forever. Some had feared that Charybdis would try to starve them out.

That hadn’t happened, so decades worth of food for their much-reduced population had been left to sit—and rot—in the dark. By the smell of the club, some of it was still nearby.

The lighting was dingy, which was fine with her (and apparently most of the other patrons). There were few species here—mostly bats. Changelings had “talents” that were more practical to the needs of a decadent populace, so they didn’t form the bottom of the social ladder enough to get dumped here. Besides, they had their hives, and queens to look out for their needs.

It was a shame—the only places Jackie might go to meet more changelings no longer let her in.

The music was all right—Jackie had lived so long that it all blurred together in her ears—so long as it was loud, and the beat was fast enough to dance to, that was what mattered. But the drinks, the drinks were truly awful. As she sat by the bar, she watched other bats come in one after another, before passing their crystalline credit-counters over the bar to receive a measly portion of a drink she was pretty sure was a mix of fermented mangos and minotaur urine.

This bar—the Soundwave—was her new favorite spot, despite all its flaws. Going deeper underground could only make things worse.

She knew every bat here by name, knew some of their families, had slept with a few. Not as much as a younger version of her probably would have, though. Just like music, sexual partners grew samey over the years. And no bat could ever keep a relationship as fresh as a changeling.

One of her new friends—a refugee male named David—took the seat beside her still panting from exhaustion. He worked in one of the new datamines, and ever since he’d been arriving a few hours later and sweating like he’d been flying for days. The smell hardly registered over the existing rot-scent, but Jackie had to feel bad for him as he raised a hoof to order.

“Wait.” Jackie rested her hoof on his, pushing it back down. “You’re drinking on me tonight, David.” She looked up at the barkeep. “Bring him the blue stuff.” One glance behind her told her the rest of his shift had all come with him, probably out at the same time. “Actually, bring the whole bottle. Join us, boys and girls! Let’s have a little fun.”

There were a few new faces within the crowd—most of these declined her offer, ordering something else anyway. A few moments later the barkeep returned, carrying the glowing blue bottle in one hand with a little reverence. Jackie couldn’t read any of the writing on it, but that didn’t matter. She knew the taste, and she wasn’t going to be having any of that awful mango stuff tonight.

“What’s the occasion?” David asked, watching as the barkeep removed slightly dusty shot glasses from under the counter and started pouring. “And what is this stuff? What kind of ‘magic’ makes it glow?”

Jackie took her own glass with ease, knocking it back as though it were nothing. It helped that she had an immortal constitution, along with more mass than anyone else in here. The only ponies who could drink more than she could were Alicorns. “Nobody have more than one. Seriously, this stuff will fuck you up if you do. If it can do it for Commander Worf, you know that little pony body of yours is screwed. I’m guessing you have work tomorrow…”

“Commander Worf?” David raised an eyebrow. He was certainly the only one in the room who would understand what she had just said. “You can’t possibly…” He leaned closer, squinting at the bottle. “God, it is, isn’t it? Where did you get Romulan ale?” He had to grip his own glass in both hooves, but he managed to get it down without spilling. “Damn. It’s like electricity going down.”

“Try glamour sometime,” Jackie muttered. Whatever he said next was drowned out in the appreciation from the other bats near the bar, at least all those who had tasted the drink. Like anything she took from the dream world, it was more an ideal than the real thing. It tasted better than any liquor could. It could still give them wicked hangovers if they drank too much, though.

The mine workers spread out to their tables, though David and a few of his friends remained close by. “How did you get this stuff?” he asked again. “There was no such thing as Romulans… were there?”

She shrugged. “No? Yes? Maybe? If there were, they’re fucking dead now. Just like everything else smart in the galaxy.” She set down her glass, pushing it over for another. She refused any of the others, though most of them were taking it slow with the drink. They savored something expensive enough to be rare for them. “I got it from the Dreamlands. Like lots of stuff. You could too. Almost everybody in here could.”

“I did the dream stuff, like you said.” David sounded unconvinced. “Lucid dreaming was cool and all, but… making things real? Seems hard to believe. And I mean, what doesn’t these days, but even more than usual.”

She shrugged. “It took me like… a thousand years to figure it out. But I’ve met a few other bats who could do it. First few times, it was a total accident… it’s making it stick that’s the real trick. I could teach you. Well, maybe not right now. You’d need to read those books I gave you. Practice for like… a century. Then we could talk and see where you were.”

David swore under his breath, taking another swig from his drink. “I wish I knew when you were being serious.”

“Always,” she answered. “I’m completely serious, especially when I’m not. And when what I’m saying doesn’t make sense, that’s only because you’re new here and you don’t have all the pieces. You’ll work it out.”

They sat in silence for a long time then, with Jackie mostly listening to the music, as well as all the gossip being shared around the bar. She liked to be kept abreast with what was happening to the bats, just in case. At last she’d heard, her own apartment was still owned by the princess and so she wouldn’t be forced to move no matter what happened. But the other bats weren’t so lucky. As she listened, her expression grew tenser at the rumor of an upcoming measure to force bats to live underground. No doubt they’ll buy up people’s houses for way less than they’re worth and dump them down here to the caves.

On some levels, it didn’t make sense to her how a society that had overcome so much could fall into its old habits after only a few centuries. On the other hand, she’d lived long enough to know that people never really changed. Individuals changed, but people never did.

“Maybe I know more than you think, Dreamknife,” David said. She grimaced at the name, before realizing that he was staring at her, probably waiting for a reaction. He grinned. “Ha! So, they weren’t bullshiting me. You are her, aren’t you?”

Jackie took a sip of her drink. “What makes you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” David said. “How about your bottomless wealth? How about the way you know everything about everything? How about how much magic you have? You can do things that not even the oldest and most experienced bats can do, the ones who teach at the University. Things they say are theoretical. Plus, you’re like an inch taller than me, and I’m the biggest bat I know.”

“In more ways than one,” Jackie said, hoping to put him off-balance. Being nude could do that for refugees, and indeed his ears flattened a little to his head. David was among those she’d been intimate with, though they had agreed quickly that it wasn’t going to work out. Men never worked out for long.

“Admit it, you’re her,” he went on. “You’re the immortal from the ancient days of the apocalypse, when there were still human ruins out in the world. From before they cast translation spells on newcomers. From before Charybdis.”

She frowned. This conversation was getting perilously close to her losing her favorite drinking spot. “What if I was? What difference would it make?”

“Because…” He lowered his voice, leaning close to her ear. “Because we’re done with this fuckin’ place, Jackie. Not just me, lots of us. Probably… half the bats in the city are done. And we need a leader.”

“You want to rebel?” she whispered back, her voice low. “I’m not going to help you kill people.”

“No!” he exclaimed. “We want to get out. Make a city of our own, somewhere so far away that Mundi and its fucking racism will never bother us again.”

Chapter 1: Myotis

“There’s nothing illegal about leaving the city,” David said. “Based on the way people are acting, they’d probably be happy to have us gone. But nobody living in the city knows what it’s like out there, except for the retrieval teams. And they don’t live out there, they just visit. But you… you know. And you’ve got the magic of a whole army. And you probably have the money to outfit us.”

She didn’t, not if he was right about the “half the bats” figure. But she knew where to get it.

“Look, I was hoping you’d be here tonight. There’s someone I want you to meet.” David gestured to one of the ponies who had been sitting beside them, one of the few whose names she hadn’t known. A mare, more experienced and world-weary than David the refugee. One of her wings had a large gash that had been fixed with stitches, somewhat inexpertly. It looked like it still hurt. “This is Eclipse. She’s been the one organizing all of this. She wanted to meet you.”

The mare wasn’t shy—she dragged over her stool right then, apparently unconcerned with any obstruction she might be causing to traffic in the club.

Jackie watched her, ever-wary. This wasn’t like David at all—this pony moved confidently on her hooves, and was plainly wearing a weapon. The crowbar could’ve been a tool, but it had a sharpened end and there was something brown dried there.

“Well, here I am,” she said. “You’re the one who put him up to this?”

Eclipse didn’t say anything for a few more seconds, appraising. “I thought you might be some rich stallion’s pet when David talked about you,” she said. “Come down here to lord over us now that you’d been lifted out of poverty. But I see that isn’t the case. You heard what he said—we need to get out. You know what it takes to live out there. Not to end up like… the last time somepony tried that.”

“I do,” she agreed. “But I don’t think you do. You need to understand what’s waiting out there. You know all the forts are taken, right? You won’t have any of the infrastructure you’re used to. No free food and water from the dispensers twice a day, no free doctors, not even any shelter at first. You have to do all of that yourselves the way your ancestors did.”

“We know,” Eclipse said. “All of that. We wouldn’t take one of the old forts even if they weren’t all full of ponies. Eventually Mundi would grow that big and ponies would try to take away everything we’d built there. We want to go so far away that we can keep what’s ours forever.”

“Have you thought about where? Basically anywhere is going to be awful to get to, I hope you realize. We’re in the desert. We’ll have to cross it, maybe cross Europe, or the Middle East, or…”

“If you’re the Dreamknife, you know the old kingdoms. We planned on Thestralia. It’s gigantic, but still separated by water. Mundi can’t swallow us up by accident. Plus, lots of the tech we use here in Mundi was invented down there. We’re hoping some of it might still be working for us to use.”

“Thestralia,” she repeated, mild anger in her voice. Though not directed at any of these ponies. Odds were, the ones she was thinking of were all long dead by now. The Dreamlands were a dangerous place, and harsh to those minds who chose to dwell within forever. “The Arcane Network isn’t really anything like what we have today. But they are similar, I suppose. I can’t really help with that part—the only time I visited Thestralia I was… let’s say ‘unwelcome.’ If they’d found out I was there, well—” She smiled with satisfaction. “They didn’t find me, so I’m still here.”

“You’re right that we don’t understand everything we’d be facing,” Eclipse continued. “There’s no denying that. A few refugees like David are better prepared than the ones who grew up here. But most of us… we can’t stay here. You’ve seen what happened to us over the years, Dreamknife. You really want us to stick around until they take away the facade and just make us into slaves?”

She was about to say how much she doubted that would happen, considering who ruled here and the campaigns she had once fought. But Alex ruled here now, and somehow hadn’t noticed the suffering right under her hooves. It was hard to manage an entire species. Little things, like the suffering of an entire tribe’s worth of ponies, could be easily missed.

“It’s a good thing you kept this secret,” Jackie finally said. “If as many as you say really want to leave, then I can’t imagine the ponies you work for would be too happy. They might even do something rash to try to encourage you not to leave.”

“We thought of that,” Eclipse said, a little smug. “And some more. We’ve been saving what we could for supplies, though we didn’t know what we might need. I’ve seen the maps. We’ll probably have to make it to the sea, build a boat, sail it all the way there.”

Jackie shuddered at the thought, imagining what sort of boat a bunch of bats with no shipbuilding expertise could make. “Uh… no. That’s a terrible idea. Plus, I know a faster way. No offence, but I don’t like the odds of anypony who grew up here surviving a trek across the world. And I would know—I’ve seen it done like, five different times.”

“So that means you’ll do it?” Eclipse asked, reaching past Jackie with her hoof, taking Jackie’s shot glass from the counter, and swallowing the last of the Romulan Ale. “You’ll lead us out of here, help us build something new? Be our princess?”

“Yes, yes, no.” Jackie stood up. “Don’t use the P word with me again, honey. I think it’s shit what has happened to bats down here. Honestly, it was either get out or watch ponies start dying. This way, maybe they’ll learn to respect the ones who stay behind a little more. Or maybe they won’t, and when we’re established they’ll have somewhere to go.” She raised a hoof before the other pony could go on. “But I have a few conditions, so listen carefully. First one is you never do that princess shit again. I am not one of them, and I never ever will be. I hate their world and almost everyone in it.

“Secondly, we’re not doing the race thing in Thestralia. We aren’t going to make another Mundi there, only backward. Anypony who wants to come with us can come, and you aren’t going to mistreat them even if they’re unicorns.”

This caused Eclipse pause. She frowned a moment, considering. Then she shrugged. “If anypony wants to throw their fate in with us, then I suppose that’s fine. They won’t. After what happened with the Dawnstar colony…”

“Probably not,” Jackie agreed. “But one day, they will. Other ponies down on their luck, maybe new refugees who want something a little more familiar than fucking Bladerunner to live in. You promise me right here that they can come.” She advanced, her expression growing cold. She reached into the empty air beside her, and drew out her dagger. It was unchanged from the day she’d first used it, a hilt wrapped in leather and gold, an angel set into the blade of reflective metal that splintered into rainbows near a point that hurt to look at.

“They didn’t give me that stupid nickname because I’m a blacksmith when I sleep. I’m not going to be responsible for another dystopia. I swear if you or any other ponies try to go back on your word once we’re living the good life, and you decide to put some unicorns into a damn Datamine…” She tilted the knife forward, and dropped it onto the bar. It sank through the corrugated metal as though it were smoke, right down to the hilt. “There won’t be a place in this world or any other for you to run.”

David stared at the blade, transfixed. A few other bats in the bar had apparently noticed as well, including the barkeep. But he of all ponies knew not to complain—whenever Jackie caused trouble, she always paid for it. His silence was worth more to her than chits.

“You aren’t the first one to say things like that,” Eclipse said. Apparently Jackie had guessed right about her intention not to guarantee what she’d been asking. But then, why shouldn’t she expect to double-cross her as soon as she’d done what they wanted.

“Maybe not,” Jackie said. “But how many of them have done it?” She drew out her knife—there was no need to clean the blade, which couldn’t dull any more than it got dirty. She slid it away back into its Otherspace sheath, gone from sight. “I’ve killed… more people than I wanna think about. I’ve killed more people than you’ve met in your whole life, hundreds of times over.” She shivered a little, at that part of herself that was long dead. “Dealing with me is a little like the devil, only the exact opposite. So long as you don’t give me shit, and you do what you say, it’s great. Otherwise…” She paused, hesitating. Something about the way the ponies moved in the bar no longer looked right. When you were Jackie’s age, even slight changes in group behavior were glaringly obvious.

She saw what it was at once, and forced herself to smile. “Oh, hey, that’s cool. Free bonus gift, just for signing up.” She glanced up at the door, breathing in a deep breath of Dreamlands air. “I dreamed there was a wall there,” she said. And just like that, the traitor trying to slip out the door smashed his head into solid bricks. A fatal injury for a unicorn, though like everyone else here he was only a bat.

There were sounds of panic from in the bar as ponies noticed they were suddenly sealed in. Someone turned off the music, a few people screamed. Jackie ignored them all, and let herself slip backward into the shadow of the bar. She emerged on the other side of the room, out from the shadow of the old jukebox.

“Hey there.” She grinned at the pony who had tried to escape, still lying on the ground in a slight daze. “That was real clever. Trying to slip away in the middle of our conversation? I wonder who you work for.”

As she spoke, she watched him struggle, trying to get something out of his belt. A gun.

She hadn’t lived this long by taking chances—she was only ageless, not immortal like an Alicorn. But instead of going for his gun, she smashed a hoof down on his wings, breaking several delicate bones and tearing the skin in two places.

The bloodcurdling shriek he made was loud enough that the crowd around the door parted immediately, many averting their eyes from the terrible injury Jackie had just inflicted. She ignored them, dragging the still screaming pony to the hooves of Eclipse and David by the bar. “You know him?” she asked, her voice as bored as though she’d dropped a drink. “Or maybe you know where he got this.” She deposited the gun on the counter beside them. “I didn’t know bats could own guns anymore.”

“God in heaven,” David muttered, looking away with disgust and horror on his face. “You really fucked him up.”

“Jason,” Eclipse said. “He’s… a new member. You attack ponies like this often?”

She shrugged. “When they have dreams like this sack of shit, yeah. Look.” Jackie touched a hoof to his head, leaned sideways so she was touching Eclipse with her flank. With the contact between them, she could show some of what this “Jason” had been dreaming about. It was a familiar dream—wealth, power, prestige, finally being recognized, adored by his female friends. Except it started with him joining up with an organized crime syndicate deep in the underground, who had been tasked by a shady corporation to make sure their workers didn’t try anything. They’d suspected something like this was coming, and wanted a man on the inside to see.

In a few seconds of real time, Jackie’s magic had shown Eclipse hours Jason had spent with the mob, learning to use the weapon, getting his instructions on what conditions would move him up the ladder. Turning in this little resistance before they could mobilize anything was the first step.

Those seconds passed, and Jackie broke contact with them both. “See? He’s lucky I didn’t just kill him. But if I had, his dreams would’ve died with him. You couldn’t have seen that little fantasy.” She leaned down towards him, grinning with her sharp teeth. “Should’ve known I’d be able to see daydreams too, asshole. I’m, what, eight millennia old? Shoulda’ kept it in your pants.” She gestured, and the brick wall covering the door returned to the dream she’d stolen it from. “There. Oh, and…” She looked up at Eclipse again. “If you’re serious about this, I suggest you advance your timeframe to… three days. This shitstain is about to go missing, and that’s information in itself. You really want to do this, it’s time to decide right now.”

“We do,” Eclipse said, glaring down at her newly-revealed traitor.” This only proves how important it is. We can’t wait another day.”

Chapter 2: Eumops

Jackie could never figure out why Alicorns liked towers so much. They were already taller than other ponies, and more powerful, did they have to lord over them?

Granted, in Mundus, she supposed that everyone lived in towers, they were just towers with their own ecosystems and climate. Naturally the Alicorns lived in the tallest of these, or at least their official residences were there. What most of them did with their time, Jackie didn’t know or care. Every immortal had their hobbies, or else they wouldn’t be immortal in the first place. Now that the planet wasn’t under constant threat, she supposed they probably sat around all day playing board games.

On paper, the Alicorns ruled Mundus together as a collective council. In practice, most had neither the talent nor the inclination for ruling, except for Sunset Shimmer. But she was gone now—back to Summerland with a new population of Equestrian Renaissance Faire performers. Their colony was thriving, probably—but what good did that do anypony here? The bats hadn’t even suggested Summerland, and for good reasons. Sunset’s ponies sought to recreate a simpler life, one where friendship and family were the most important things.

Despite all that they had endured, the bats didn’t want to go back to subsistence living, at least not forever. She couldn’t blame them for not wanting to sell their souls to Sunset’s “heaven” on Earth, even if the ponies there seemed happy. Even if it would mean I didn’t have to lead them. For all its flaws, Summerland still didn’t care what species you were so long as you were willing to live the pony way.

Jackie took special satisfaction dodging around Archive’s guards. For all their advanced technology and magic, they still could not catch the Dreamknife when she did not want to be caught.

Jackie hadn’t ever actually been in Alex’s private study before. She found her old friend hunched at her desk, staring at something contained in a crystal artifice of some kind. She did not recognize the design, but she could sense the emptiness of the liquid metal that roiled inside, struggling against an invisible barrier like something alive. It seemed to ignore Alex completely, as though she wasn’t here. Yet it flashed and struggled towards Jackie, battering against the barrier.

This was Mordite, the death-metal. A hundred parts per million were all it took to make alloys that could cut through spells like her knife cut through solid objects. Its raw form did not exist on Earth, but was harvested clinging to dead rocks in the outer solar system.

“Hello, Jackie,” said the pony at the desk, not turning around. “I expected you to come eventually. Would you like some tea?”

Jackie drew her dagger from thin air. She had expected a confrontation, but not quite like this. “I would like to know what you’ve done with Alex, imposter.” There was nothing physical to set her apart—she had the same green coat, the same size as she’d been for ages. “I’ve got a busy night ahead of me, and no time to waste.” Some part of her secretly reveled in this news—if Archive really had been killed and replaced, at least she wouldn’t have to blame her for what was happening to the city.

“Nothing.” The speaker remained where she sat, apparently unafraid of the knife.

So not a changeling, the only species she knew of whose souls did not interact with Mordite. Which meant…

“Archive instructed me to see that humanity prospered in her absence. I have devoted my considerable resources to ensuring that happens.”

“Athena.” Jackie dropped the knife, letting it sink into the floor at her hooves. “You can do ponies now?”

“I can do anything that is possible within the confines of the physical universe,” Athena wearing Alex’s body said. It was no longer making Alex’s voice, though. “Until the last few centuries, I had no reason to. But now I do.”

“You’re a shit ruler.” Jackie walked right past her, yanking on the blinds with her mouth. The window opened to a spectacular view of the city, with its sprawling buildings glittering with light even in the dead of night. There was no darkness on the outside anymore, hadn’t been for many centuries. “Okay, maybe it’s hard to see from here. But underground, you have no idea.”

“I know you killed an informant for a large crime family ten minutes before coming here,” Athena said. “I know you’re preparing to leave the city. I even know things you don’t, like the actual size of the group that will accompany you.”

Jackie glowered down at her, unconcerned with the construct on her desk. One of the few things that could kill her, but Jackie didn’t care. “Then you’re worse than I thought. At least incompetence would be an accident. But you know how we’re being treated, and you don’t do anything?”

The doppelganger returned her expression with eyes that seemed somehow empty now that she wasn’t playing a character. Like she’d stopped trying to simulate emotion. “I haven’t been doing nothing, Jackie. It took no small effort on my part to create these conditions. Alicorns built this city to last. It has been an uphill battle to change it to be more favorable towards my ends. And here you are, the beginning of the first step.”

It took Jackie enormous self-control to resist the desire to break the doubleganger’s nose right here. Except there were probably cameras watching—with real, intelligent guards. If she was seen attacking the princess, it would probably make her wanted. Athena would be unlikely to clear things up as Jackie organized her escape from the city. The exodus of her kind would be tarnished by her violence.

Besides, even if she killed this body, Athena could make more. It was a waste of time. “Why? No wait, I don’t care. Where is Archive? I’m not talking to a pocket calculator tonight.”

The pony-puppet looked back up at her, smug. “If you’re going to ask to make it easier for you to escape, I won’t. I would prefer you remain here, and allow violence to ferment. The outcome is more favorable in the long-term if the nation-states Mundus eventually become have genuine hatred for each other in their past. It will make the competition fiercer.”

She had come to ask Archive to supply this mission, since it seemed like it was her fault they had to move out in the first place. But she wasn’t going to admit as much to Athena.

“Will you help us build our city when the time comes? Or have you stopped sharing technology too?”

“I will be there,” Athena said. “To give exactly what will encourage the most growth. But it would be better if they stayed here. You will thank me in a thousand years, when you see what they become. The pain of the current generation is irrelevant.”

“You know what? You don’t need to tell me. I’ll find her on my own.” She turned away. “Go suck an EMP or something.”

“Archive is with the joint seapony-human colony on Alpheus, second planet from Barnard’s star. And she’s not the only Alicorn to leave—many of the others lead other colonies as well. They’re out of your reach, dreamer. You will not use them to defy my will.”

Jackie ignored the taunt. For all her power, the AI always made the same mistakes. She assumed that the rules that bound her applied to other creatures. It’s a good thing they limited her intelligence, all those years ago. Or we’d really be fucked.

Jackie didn’t need to fall asleep anymore. All worlds were equally real to her now, be they physical, supernal, or dream. She stepped through the barrier into the Dreamlands.

Athena had given her quite useful information. The location was irrelevant, but the nature of that location was enormously useful. A seapony colony on a distant world. Jackie dreamed herself a tail, and plunged into the Astral Sea with the waterbound dreamers. They weren’t hard to find—there were so few dreams in the oceans. Charybdis had all but exterminated their kind during the war, and seaponies were the slowest breeders of all pony races. Only dragons had fewer foals.

She found herself a promising target, a young seapony having nightmares of being shoved back into a tiny metal pond, and freezing to death while surrounded by blackness. She passed through the dream, careful not to wake the pony.

A lesser dreamwalker would’ve emerged from the unconscious world in the same form they entered. But just as Jackie could remove the inanimate, so too could she change herself. This was a comparatively recent ability, one that had only come about since she had refused the Alicorn’s mantle. It was the same kind of magic, she was pretty sure.

That was good, since Jackie was immediately assailed with crushing pressure, and water on every side. She would’ve been in serious trouble without a pair of gills.

She was in a child’s bedroom. The little seapony was curled up in the sleep netting, tossing and turning in her fretful nightmares. Jackie paused long enough to reach out a hoof, brushing a little of her mane away from her hane. Not forcefully enough to wake her up. In exchange for getting me here, she thought, casting her magic upon the sleeping fish. The nightmare faded away, melting into something far calmer. One of Jackie’s own fond memories, from a world long gone. An ancient toy-store she had visited as a child, where she had bought many of her favorite toys.

The fish stopped squirming and whimpering, and quickly settled into a contented sleep. Jackie turned away, and swam through the doorway in the ceiling. There were no doors, and no traditional structural sensibility as she understood it. Seaponies lived in all three dimensions even more than flying ponies. Jackie did not have much experience with fins—it had been a pointless imitation to attempt, since simple transformation couldn’t imitate their songs. Even Ezri hadn’t been able to do it.

Jackie started coughing and choking. For a few seconds she was utterly overwhelmed by it, thousands of different voices all singing together in her mind. But for all the voices, there were only a few different songs. She could sense the feelings inherent in each one—fear, love, anger, creativity—the entire range of pony feelings. The voices came even from the sleeping, they came irrespective of distance.

Most were humming along to a tune her mind labeled optimism, and it made her smile even though she didn’t want to.

She could even pick out individual voices from the chorus, though of course almost all of them were strangers to her. One belonged to the sleeping girl, who was now singing along to contentment. There was only one other voice here she recognized, the one she’d come to find.

Jackie followed the sound the same way she might’ve if there had been only two of them alone in a gigantic quiet room. Without meaning to, Jackie started singing along to a different tune, its staccato beats punctuating each sweep of her dark blue fins. Determination.

Seapony society wasn’t anything like the way land ponies lived. Jackie knew only some of the details. She wasn’t surprised not to find guards, though. They didn’t have police, or an army, or anything analogous to either. The entire community was simultaneously aware of the feelings of every other member of the community at all times, though she suspected the ordinary members of the species couldn’t see it with the specificity she did.

Jackie exited what she learned was the ship that had brought the seaponies here through one of its many openings, marveling at the sheer size of it. It was daytime out here, though they were deep enough that only blue lit the water. She kept swimming, past the thin smattering of coral and seaweed and other life around the now-submerged starship. A short distance, and the life grew more and more diffuse. The ocean floor changed to something uniform and flat, eerily so, coated only with a thin layer of green algae.

She felt weaker the more she swam, like she was short of breath. She couldn’t imagine why that might be—Jackie’s gills seemed like they were working fine. But come to think of it, the few fish she’d passed had been wearing something on their necks she didn’t have.

She ignored her discomfort and kept swimming. She could actually hear the Alicorn’s voice with her ears now, the sound of her song carrying far through the water. She didn’t see just one outline, but many. There were hundreds of fish with her, all joined in song. The water felt strangely charged as she listened. It was magic, but not as land-based ponies knew.

It wasn’t just seaponies, either. There were lots of sea-creatures here, apparently enjoying the song. They couldn’t contribute magic any more than a changeling disguised as a seapony could, but they still seemed to want to be nearby.

As Jackie got closer, she noticed something else—another pony was leading the song, not the one she’d come to see. And the one leading had a much prettier voice. It seemed a shame to interrupt the spell, but Jackie wasn’t really in the mood to care. Plus, it was getting harder to see color.

As she approached, a few of the fish seemed to sense her coming, and maybe more about her intentions as well, because they broke away from the song preemptively. The magic got measurably weaker as they did so. Two fish, neither one of which was as large as Jackie. But age had made Jackie almost as large as an Alicorn herself. That apparently translated to seaponies as well.

As they swam towards her, she found it easier to breathe again. The shortness in her chest vanished, and the color started coming back. One with a green coat and mane, the other pink with blue. The voice Jackie had been following had stopped singing along with the spell, and was instead humming to curiosity.

Jackie realized what she was seeing—this pony, about the same age as the child whose nightmare she had used to get here—was the one she had come to find.

Both seaponies got very close to her, less than one of her own body-lengths away. One was a ‘unicorn’ so far as seaponies had them, and the other was a pegasus. The important part was that one was the pony she had come to see. It was Archive, and a stranger. “Hi, Jackie,” squeaked the younger one.

Jackie wanted to scream at her—as she had planned on doing in her office. But seeing this wide-eyed fish grinning at her, her anger choked back in her throat. She coughed, and switched from humming anger to confusion. “What is… what happened to you?”

“Does the bat who swims across the worlds know how many of Equestria’s old princesses are still ruling there?” She didn’t wait for a response. “None, Jackie. They’re all gone. Alicorns might not age, but… we do grow weary. Sooner or later, the suffering is too great. Elysium’s fields call for us too, and eventually we all pass through the iridescent veil for the last time.”

“This isn’t heaven,” Jackie said. “And she’s not supposed to be… like that. Alicorns don’t regress. You’re not jellyfish.”

“No,” she agreed. “Humanity grew up, and gave birth to something new. Until we grow up and decide what that is…” She shrugged, looking away. “How are we doing?”

“Very badly,” Jackie said, her sensitivity slipping. “You put fucking Skynet in charge, Alex. What did you think would happen?”

“Nothing good,” she said, avoiding Jackie’s eyes. “But it was better than Oracle’s vision of my rule.” She finally swam away from the other pony, right up to Jackie. Her fins kept twitching nervously, as though she was on the edge of swimming away at any moment. “That road led to a gilded cage, Jacqueline Kesler. Oracle showed me the end of opposition and struggle, and it was Equestria. Happy stagnation. I could not give my ponies away to that.”

“What they got is so much better,” Jackie muttered, exasperated. “Your replacement decided to make bats into her scapegoat. They’re basically slaves already, and the forces of the city are moving to stop us from leaving. I’ve already had to kill over it. I’ll have to kill again before we make it out.”

Alex whimpered, her tail curling as she wrapped her forehooves around it, holding it close to her chest. “I knew ponies would suffer, and I let her do it anyway. Does that make you hate me?”

“Yes,” Jackie said, though she wasn’t singing to hatred. She tried to find its melody, and found it wouldn’t come. The seapony language didn’t just facilitate communication, it also required truth. You couldn’t pretend to an emotion you weren’t really feeling. Jackie made a frustrated grunt, looking away from the pathetic fish.

“I loved her too,” Alex whispered. “Not the same way you did. But she was my daughter. I would’ve taken her place if I could.”

And though Jackie wanted to call her a liar, she couldn’t. Jackie had no words to describe the emotion this fish was feeling—it was the pain of a whole nation of crushed lives. The agony of a terrible war all distilled into a weight that crushed her down. If I had to feel that all the time, I’d go completely insane.

“You couldn’t,” Jackie said.

“Fine, Jackie. You want to know? I’ll tell you. I’ll sing you a song.” She hummed a few notes, and the water around them darkened. Jackie’s eyes widened, and she backed up instinctively, fins beating urgently, but it wasn’t enough. Seapony magic was a strange thing, at once selective and general in those it targeted.

The dark water around them was replaced with an image of Earth from very high up, looking down at night. Its great cities were constellations of light in the evening. One by one, she watched as they were swept away by the rising tide of Charybdis’s advance.

“I saw the end of the world already,” Jackie sang. “I lived it same as you.”

“But you didn’t feel it,” Archive responded. “See the city around you, the ponies hungry and desperate. Their hope that you will deliver them. Then watch them die.” They were in a coastal city somewhere, swimming through the air as though it were water. Nopony could see them, though they could see Archive, Oracle, Sunset. They fought together, banished one terrible army. Only to be swept away by the next, and to flee. Thousands of ponies were killed in minutes.

“Feel it, Jackie.” The little fish swam closer and closer to her, her voice getting lower. “How many empty promises of salvation can you make? Is there even any point to keep fighting? We can’t win—you already saw the vision. The army will come to Mundi, and we will all die. It’s like it already happened.”

“But it didn’t happen,” Jackie argued. “The army came to Mundi and we beat it.”

“Sure,” Archive sang back. “We won in the end. But how many broken families did it take? How many dreams are never dreamed? How much of the suffering is my fault?” Ponies surrounded them in the gloom, thousands and thousands that overlapped and blurred together. Some had human faces, others didn’t. All their eyes were on the memory of Archive, full of judgement and scorn.

“You want me to do that again?” Her song finally faltered. Jackie heard a few off-key notes, and the illusion faded to pale shadows. She could see through the smoke to where the other pony watched, concerned and curious. “Do you want to see Oracle’s next vision for mankind, Jackie? You want to know the burden I’m carrying now? Do you want to see the next monster coming to kill us?”

Jackie opened her mouth to argue, to express some of her contempt. Eventually she croaked, then shook her head. “No. This one is your problem. I’m fucking done.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t judge me so harshly. If you won’t help with what I’m carrying. I’m not the only one who could be ruling in Mundi right now, instead of the robot. Athena said she had the cure to Oracle’s nightmares, and we all believed her. We knew the price we paid would be terrible, but we’re all too tired.”

“She’s not normally like this,” said the pony beside Alex, her voice sounding annoyed. “She’s been doing so good the last few years. You didn’t have to set her off.”

“I don’t care,” Jackie spat, but there was no more anger in her song. She couldn’t get the eyes out of her mind, the cries of terror as ponies died. She had seen those things before, many times.

But Jackie was numb to their pain by now. The song had showed her what they felt through Archive’s eyes instead.

“Are you leaving forever, Archive? Sailing west to the gray havens to be with the dead? Leaving us to fight the monsters on our own?”

“No,” Alex said. “Not yet. Not until we’re safe forever.” She flicked her tail once, gesturing all around her. “This colony is a good place to start. Enough like this, and I won’t have to be afraid for the future of my ponies. But I don’t think I’ll have the chance to leave until they decide what kind of ponies they’re gonna be. Hopefully they choose better than their parents.”

“And that isn’t why I’m here. I’m here because I want to get the bats out. I know you—I know how prepared you are. You’ve got disaster supplies somewhere. You planned for something to go wrong. Athena doesn’t want the bats to leave until after we ferment a civil war. But I don’t plan to stay and watch more ponies die. We’re getting the fuck out right now.”

Again the fish seemed overwhelmed by her words, and it took her more than a few silent moments to process what Jackie had just said. At least she had let go of her tail, which made Jackie feel a little less like she was abusing a child.

She swam in a little circle around Jackie, apparently deep in thought. “I trusted to Oracle’s vision of what would happen if Athena ran everything. I knew it would work out in the end, and that she didn’t need me. But I… did put some supplies somewhere. I don’t know how many bats there are. I don’t know if it’s enough for a whole country. But… if you want it, you haveta do something for me.”

She didn’t wait for Jackie’s confirmation, didn’t even seem to be listening as Jackie went back to anger. “I have a friend here on Alpheus, and she doesn’t like living here. She wants to try being on land, and she’s sad that nobody in our generation will be able to ever go back. We’re just here to terraform, and that’s gonna take a really long time. If you want my stuff, you have to take her with you.”

She’d been expecting much worse. The Alicorns typically played their great game this way, trading favors in exchange for labor. Jackie would’ve told Alex to shove her requirements somewhere impolite if she had asked for something like that.

“You realize I’m making a bat colony,” Jackie said. “Not a fish colony. There might not be water for a long time.”

“I know!” Alex swam past her, tail beating her annoyance. “We have tools for that, and magic. I’m not asking you to babysit. Reprise is smart, and she’s mature, and she hates me.” Again came the terrible weight in her voice. The distant, unfocused sadness. “I’m sure you’ll get along great.”

“Fine,” Jackie said. “But I’m not going to be her shuttle service if she changes her mind and wants to come back.”

“Sure.” Alex swam to the pink pony, gave her a brief hug, then swam back, past Jackie. “Come on, we’ll get her! Then I’ll tell you where to find the stuff. You’ll need some good unicorn magic to get to it.”

“No, I won’t,” Jackie said. “I can get anywhere. You just tell me where to go, and that’s it. I’ll handle everything myself.”

As it turned out, Jackie had already seen the pony Alex had in mind, because she was the child whose sleep had allowed her to travel in the first place.

Jackie tensed a little as the child woke up, mostly because she hadn’t expected to be caught here. Sticking around right after a dream, and she was much more likely to be recognized by what the kid had seen.

Sure enough, her eyes widened a little as she saw Jackie floating there, apparently recognizing the connection even though the memory was a human one. “W-what are you… what’s going on?” the child asked.

Alex explained, singing her way through a much-simplified version of events. That Jackie had come from Earth, and would soon be returning. She was about to undertake a very difficult mission, one filled with danger and adventure. Reprise could, if she wanted, go with, but she would never return. She would have to spend lots of time on land if she did, maybe the rest of her life.

Another hour later, and the filly was packed. Jackie was a little surprised that she had no family to say farewell to, and apparently only Alex herself for a friend she cared to wish goodbye. “Say hi to Mary for me,” Alex said, exchanging one last hug with the fish. Then they separated.

Even though they were still in the water, Reprise was now wearing her artificial legs—an incredibly advanced prosthetic, which fit around her tail to give her about the same size as a pony. She also had a little charm-bracelet around her foreleg.

“So, uh, kid. How old are you?”

The fish looked back at her, and didn’t answer aloud. Instead she rolled over a little in the water, showing a tattoo on her underbelly written in a strange, glittering ink. It was immensely complex, but Jackie could recognize a few things about it. The craftsmanship was unmistakable—this was Joseph’s work. As to what the runes spelled, she couldn’t even guess.

“I don’t understand.” Jackie pulled her dagger out of nowhere, ignoring the slight hiss of bubbles as they formed around the edge of the blade. It glowed underwater as well, as though it were constantly burning the water that got too close. “What kind of spell is that?”

“The greatest invention ever,” the fish said, singing to sarcasm. “The end of dissolution, the end of death. Of course the first thing my big sister did was make sure I had it cast on me, before explaining any fucking thing. Like, ‘oh, by the way, I hope you like being eighteen until the end of fuckin’ time because my fuckbudy super genius doesn’t think coming up with a reversal for this thing is a good idea. Also by the way, seaponies age like waaay slower than everyone else, so forget about having a boyfriend ever again.”

Jackie waited until she had finished, though even when she had said her piece she was still humming to frustration. “Nobody told me they had cured aging,” Jackie eventually said. “That’s a pretty big deal. Why aren’t they giving it to everypony, right now?”

The fish swam around in an uneasy circle, the soft plastic legs on her purple tail kicking at the water as she did so. “My sister told me they were still trying to figure out how to make it cheap enough to give to everyone. She never told me any specifics.”

I’ve been going to way too many parties. And another thought, a little darker. If Ezri were still alive, we’d both still be involved with politics. I would have already known all of this.

“Well, that’s for another time.” Jackie smiled ruefully. “This isn’t gonna be easy, Reprise.”

“Elizabeth,” the pony corrected. “Wait, no. Liz. It’s really hard to sing, I know, but since we’re gonna be swimming with the songless soon anyway, who cares.”

“Well Liz, I’m Jackie.” She sliced the knife up through nothing—not strictly necessary, but it helped her visualize for the spell. Water didn’t start rushing in, since the part of the dreamlands she’d chosen was still underwater. “I think we’ll get along fine.”

“Just so long as where we’re going is better than here, yeah,” Liz said, glaring behind her at the colony. “This whole planet is basically the same—oceans too thin to breathe with nothing alive past our little bubble.”

“Well, Mundi is kinda shit,” Jackie said. “It’s exciting. Lots of fun parties and stuff, but not for a ki—” She trailed off, realizing that the fish was glaring at her. “But it doesn’t have many seaponies. The lake is pretty crowded from what I hear, and I’m leaving anyway. But your sister’s stockpile ought to be safe for a few days. We’ll head there, then you can hang out while we have our rebellion.”

“Sure, whatever,” Liz said. “So long as you don’t plan on leaving me in some dry bunker somewhere, fine. You won’t get away with it if you try. My mom’s a dragon, she’ll fuck you up when she hears about it.”

Jackie couldn’t help it—she laughed. “Your mom and I are cool, kid. Don’t worry, it won’t be that long.”

It couldn’t be, if Jackie wanted to have any chance of actually getting the bats out. Athena probably didn’t think she had managed to get Alex’s help—the speed of light was one of those things Athena could get rather insistent about.

But she would be moving her pawns to stop them. They had to act now.

Chapter 3: Hesperus

Jackie dropped the large bag onto the ground in front of her with an enormous thump of heavy cargo. Bats gathered around in the tiny warehouse all turned to stare at her, looking at the bag with expressions that ranged from idle curiosity to fascination.

“How did you even find this place?” asked a taller male bat with a ragged ear and a scar running across his face. “We didn’t invite you here.”

“Nopony told you?” Jackie tilted her head to one side, glancing between each of the bats in turn. They looked exactly how she imagined revolutionaries might look—ragged clothing, with dark cloth bandanas ready to tie off around their faces or use to hide their cutie marks. If they were about to start a revolution, she was sure it would be one of the most adorable ever.

But there will still be blood. Jackie knew she would be responsible for some of that, but she didn’t care. It was their fault that it would come to violence, not hers. More specifically, it was Athena’s fault. And maybe Alex’s too, for giving up control to the AI.

The bats marveled at her donation for a few seconds more, before someone cleared her throat loudly from the end of the room. A pony who hadn’t been there moments before. Not Eclipse, as she had suspected would be here the instant someone penetrated their defenses. But a pony that much older.

She always looked younger than Jackie expected from one so old—but that was a product of her nature. Hat Trick was not the first pony to put herself into a construct to escape the slow advance of time, though she was the first bat Jackie knew of who had succeeded. Most bats just took their chances in the Dreamlands if they wanted to live forever.

And most of them are dead. Of course, Jackie hadn’t expected the young-looking bat would have made it this long. She looked just a little older than her cutie mark, with a deceptively innocent expression. Jackie knew better than to believe it, of course. She knew too many immortals to be taken in.

The air around her darkened a little, as the pony passed through the shadows lingering in the corners of the room, emerging right beside Jackie’s gift of guns.

Well, gift of Alex’s guns, stolen from her stockpile. These weren’t all of them, but they were the easiest to use without training. Particle escapement rifles like these could not penetrate the crystal of Mundi to kill bystanders in the next building over, but it could shatter ceramic and pierce steel.

“I didn’t know they were still making antiques like these,” Hat Trick said, lifting one of the rifles in one hoof and turning it over. As she did so, its straps closed around her leg, where it would hold itself ready to fire using the eyepiece. These weapons could sense the intention to put them down, and would release their wearers only at that time. “No control circuit, I take it? No tracker?”

“Every one of them,” Jackie agreed. “Athena doesn’t know I have them, and she won’t be able to stop us from using them how we please. Well… let’s be real, she is Athena. She’ll probably figure out what I did the instant someone gets shot. But by then I hope it will be too late. We only need a few hours.”

Hat Trick dropped the rifle, staring up at Jackie for a long moment. This body looked almost completely natural to the untrained eye, but Jackie was trained. She could see the strange glint in her eyes, a refraction that wasn’t quite moisture. Similar, but distinct.

“I hear you went all the way to the Supernal. The Alicorns took you into their Lustrum, and you walked away. Is that true?”

Jackie nodded sharply, turning away from her. “I’m not giving you the Mysteries, Hat Trick. I told those ponies they could fuck off, and I’ll tell you the same thing. I’m not part of that world anymore.”

The young bat dropped her rifle into the pile of other weapons. “Could’ve fooled me.”

“We need to move quickly before Athena can adjust her plans. Nightfall would be ideal.”

“My estimates suggest there will be at least ten thousand ponies who join us, maybe more. Nopony can tell me how you plan on moving so many away from here. I have suspicions, but I don’t know how you’re going to power a road that wide.”

“It won’t be a problem,” Jackie barked. “Just tell me where to put it. I leave the strategic side to you and Eclipse. Use those weapons how you want. I’ll get our people out when the time comes.”

The truth of the matter was that the regular rules governing the attachment of worlds didn’t seem to apply to Jackie anymore.

Making the arrangements for a highway through the Dreamlands straight to Australia was a difficult task, even for her. But it was one that she could accomplish in less than a day, if she was willing to owe a few favors. The spirits of sleep thus appeased, she was ready with her escape method when the time finally came for their rebellion.

The underground of Mundi came alive with gunfire as soon as the sun went down. Most of those would be security forces, wielding the stun-weapons that were their only standard outfit. By the time they were armed with something more lethal, the bats would have already extracted much of their advantage.

Jackie helped guard the warehouse as ponies came in, though she didn’t use a gun. She wasn’t sure how many of the security force she had to kill—not that many. As soon as it became clear that the mob had taken the streets, she watched them pull back, guarding the entrances and exits instead of trying to take buildings anymore.

Ponies unconnected with the rebellion tried to escape—some of them the security forces let leave, some they didn’t. None of them were her problem now.

The warehouse started to fill with ponies, most of them huddling families of frightened bats. There was a smattering of other species among them, though almost no ponies. This was a gathering of the dispossessed. Those who had not been mistreated by Mundi had no reason to fight.

It won’t be easy to make a society without unicorns. But questions like that were too big for Jackie.

“I hope you’re about ready with that escape plan!” Eclipse shouted, emerging with one leg bandaged and a dented helmet covering her head. “You hear that sound?”

Jackie paused, ears perking up to try and listen. She strained, then shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Exactly. They shut off the ventilators. We have… maybe an hour down here before ponies start suffocating? It’s time to go.”

There was no enchantment to prepare on the other end of the room. She had no crystals charged with energy, or vats of blood as necromancers used. Dream magic didn’t use any of those things.

“Alright.” Jackie turned away from the window, making her way to the end of the room. Many bats turned to watch her as she went, whispering to each other. She could see the hope on their faces, but she did her best to ignore it. “Listen to me very carefully, everyone. You’ll need to pass this along to everypony who comes in behind who can’t hear. We need to move through the door as quick as we can—I can’t predict how long it will stay open. Once you’re through, stay on the path, and keep walking until you get to the other side. If you stop, if you leave the path, even a few steps, you will wander into the Dreamlands and almost certainly die. I won’t rescue you. But if you keep moving and stay on the path, you’ll make it through to Australia no problem. I picked a lovely spot in Sydney Harbor, and I already have someone waiting there to receive you. Don’t wander off when we get there, and don’t try to go through the door from the other end. We’re talking real Stargate shit—burned leg stumps in shoes kinda deal. Got me?”

She listened to the frightened mutters for several long moments, as bats passed her message along. She wasn’t sure how many of them understood exactly—but as long as they obeyed, that would be enough.

With nothing more to prepare, Jackie picked a blank patch of wall with no obstructions near it, and cut into it with her dagger. She dragged the knife as far down as she could, making the door as wide as possible. Wider than she ever had before, so much that it strained her magic. Would’ve broken it, if she was working on her own.

But Jackie wasn’t alone. She poked her head through the doorway into the enchanted forest.

There was no road on the other side, not yet. Jackie could make such a path for herself and a few guests, but not for thousands. She needed other help here.

A gigantic stag waited for her on the other side, its antlers glittering crystal. Its eyes seemed to encompass the whole of the sky as it looked at her, and she could see the constellations rippling on its coat.

This was Voeskender, imagined god of the deer made real by their many years of worship. Its power was near-divine now, so far as spirits went. Right now, it was livid with the way civilization had progressed, relying so completely on the artificial and eschewing the natural. Creating another civilization, one that might live another way, happened to align with its interests.

It spoke to her, though not with words exactly. She could see through the eyes of a frightened animal, running through the forest in a panic. Something large and vicious was following, getting close.

“Yes,” she said. “Our situation is desperate. We need your help. I understand there’s a price, I’ll pay it.”

The ground under its hooves transformed to glowing bricks, each one looking like a chunk of the sky had been ripped out and set into the ground. The stars within still moved, though not contiguously. Each brick was a slightly different part of the heavens ripped down to make this massive Astral road.

Jackie saw more sights through the eyes of the prey—finding safe passage, a valley sheltered and protected. But the sense of a debt that she owed. “I understand,” she said again, hoping the spirit did in turn. “Now I need to save them.”

The stag towered taller than most of the trees. It watched her for a few more silent moments, then stamped off into the enchanted wood.

Jackie returned to the physical, and was surprised to hear gunfire again. How long had she been gone? The warehouse was now packed with people, barely breathing in heaps on the floor. A few were wearing masks, and shooting out the windows. She watched one bat take a bullet in the face and go sprawling out on the ground right in front of her.

Time was a fickle thing in the Dreamlands. Evidently, she had let it run away from her. “It’s ready!” she shouted, her voice booming through the old warehouse. “It’s time to go, everypony! Through the gateway!”

Her shout roused them—though with an armed enemy outside, it wouldn’t have taken much persuasion. The press of bodies moved past her, vanishing through the opening in the wall. They left flickering after-images that drifted through the air in the same direction they had been going for a few seconds, before their spirits caught up with their bodies and vanished along the Astral road.

Jackie remained beside it, knowing that her own passage would be required to close the gateway. Otherwise, she might recreate one of her favorite old-testament stories, and have the armies of Pharaoh harassing her chosen people on their way across the red sea.

Won’t end any better for Pharaoh this time either. Jackie watched as several familiar faces passed through the barrier, Eclipse still wielding one of her rifles as she went. A few more stragglers, limping or crawling their way along. Jackie helped how she could, though she couldn’t get far from the gate.

Eventually, security forces breached the building. She saw their shock, as they found it empty instead of packed with the huddled masses of the oppressed.

A few shot in her direction, or tried. She could see their confusion from across the room when their weapons refused to fire. Athena didn’t want to take the risk of killing her today, it seemed. Maybe she had other plans for Jackie, or maybe she knew what terrible danger she might unleash on Mundi if she killed the one who had made a road through the Dreamlands into the basement of her own city.

Regardless, Jackie didn’t stay to find out. She vanished through the doorway last, waving a cheerful hoof to Mundi security as she went.

Chapter 4: Curasoae

Jackie could feel the eyes of dream on her as she passed through the sleeping world, as tight as the promised bond she had paid to make this road. Where before she had been free to drift between worlds, now she was tethered by the debt. She could feel herself straining against it, entirely in vain. Jackie would have to be careful how many promises she made, or else find herself as much a slave to her oaths as she would’ve been to the supernal.

She brought up the rear down the astral road, keeping her eyes open for stragglers. Most bats had the right instincts to stay on the path, even if they’d never used the magic before. She suspected many who had never had the chance to use their powers would be newly-inspired by the experience, and curious to return here. Most would never have the power to visit in the flesh, but that was for the best. To walk the Dreamlands was far more danger than it was worth for most things.

Roads like these were the safest way to travel long distances, though their stability was directly proportional to the power used to create them. Since this one had been made by one of the Morpheans, it was about as strong as it could get.

It felt like weeks of walking, though that was just the typical distortion of time of the Dreamlands. Jackie spent her time in quiet contemplation, watching the strange constellations overhead. Voeskender’s road took them through astral heights she had never visited before. The power of those beings surrounding her on all sides was an ever-present reminder of just how far the Dreamlands extended. It wasn’t just the dream world of Earth, or only their universe. All creation shared this space—the vastness of the multiverse was within reach. Assuming you had the right map.

Eventually she emerged into reality, onto a moonlit beach thronging with frightened ponies. Most were watching the opening in the sky behind her, as though they expected an army to surge onto the beach behind them and drag them back to slavery.

Instead there was a flash of light, a column of brilliant green that shot straight up into the sky and illuminating the beach for miles. The ground at their hooves was covered with a rolling wave of moss and lichen, as the Voskender’s elder forest grew from nothing. It would not survive the absence of his supernatural energy long, but that didn’t matter.

Jackie could feel the Morphean’s attention on her still, however distant. It would make itself known when it wanted to collect on what she owed. That might be tomorrow, or it might be a century from now. It knew about her immortality, so wouldn’t feel the pressure to use it before she died, and his investment of power was wasted.

The crowd of panicked ponies had gone completely silent, watching her with awe. A few of them bowed, muttering things like “secret Alicorn” and “Dreamknife.”

She ignored them all, taking to the air and lifting high enough that she could see all of them. The moonlight only helped her vision—a quick count told her there were twenty thousand ponies here. About two thirds were bats. Only a tiny fraction of those living in Mundi. But it’s a start. When the bravest make somewhere stable to live, we can rescue the others too. If they want to leave.

“Ponies, listen!” Jackie shouted, projecting her voice across the crowd with some simple magic. “Welcome to Sydney Harbor. Or… where it used to be. Almost all of you have spent your entire lives in Mundi, so you will be unfamiliar with seasons and climates other than the desert. This climate is called humid subtropical, and it’s the place I’ve chosen for our first settlement. It might not be comfortable out there, but it should be livable out in the open until we can get shelters constructed.

“There are some supplies on the end of the beach there—the wooden crates. My assistant, Reprise, will dispense food. She’s the seapony in the fancy metal suit. Do what she says and don’t cheat, or you get nothing.”

She landed on the ground, waving one wing dismissively. “Organizing primitive societies isn’t really my field. Your leaders will have to deal with that. Oh, and one more thing—don’t wander off too far. It might not be safe if we get further out. It’s probably better if you stay close for now.”

The mob began to disperse. Some ponies made their way to the tree line, where Jackie and Liz had unloaded a fraction of the supplies. There were dozens more crates like that back in storage, but she was still waiting on the help to get them all back. Even Jackie’s magic had its limits.

A surprising number of the ponies seemed in no rush to do much of anything at all. Many made their way to the water, running along the sand, splashing in the surf. Enjoying a freedom their lives in Mundi had never given them. Jackie smiled slightly to herself as she watched. Ponies had died today, and ponies would probably die in the weeks to come.

But as she watched the clustering of little family groups along the shore, she found it hard to care. I don’t care how long it takes—I won’t let this place turn into another Mundi.

I should probably help Liz with the supplies. The seapony was hardly experienced with numbers like this. And she had expressed trepidation even around Jackie once they got onto land. The fish might be a refugee, but she was still a seapony—most of them got nervous around ‘songless’ ponies, whose emotions they couldn’t know and whose honesty they could never judge with confidence.

Indeed, as Jackie made her way to that end of the shore, she could see the filly backing further and further away from the crowd. She’s not a kid. She’s another of Alex’s victims. Or maybe the last of Mystic Rune’s. How long had she been a seapony? Jackie wondered. Reprise hadn’t been willing to tell her.

Yet as she watched, a familiar bat emerged from the crowd—Hat Trick. Jackie hadn’t seen her during the exodus, though she supposed the construct was old enough to know her own way through the Dreamlands. She couldn’t hear them, but from Liz’s body language she looked like whatever the construct had said helped her. A few seconds later, and a few more bats joined them, helping Liz distribute foil-wrapped packages of emergency rations.

Jackie arrived a few moments later, slipping past the crowd and nodding to the seapony.

Liz’s exoskeleton wasn’t like the powered armor worn by soldiers. It seemed like it had been made as light and stable as possible, holding her tail and providing her with a false set of back legs that did most of the work of holding her up. The suit wrapped around her gills and much of her back, providing a dribbling curtain of water that refreshed itself from the clear tank mounted under her belly.

Jackie still wasn’t sure if the machines were entirely technological, magical, or somewhere in-between. It was an impressive design either way, enough to let Liz walk around surrounded by ponies with minimal effort.

“How are you holding up?” she asked, slipping in behind the booth beside her. “If you need to slip out into the water for a few hours, you just say so.”

“Maybe…” Liz hesitated, glancing to the side. “When we’re finished giving all this stuff out, I will.” She was still singing, though Jackie couldn’t hear the regular tunes anymore. Her words all sounded musical, but she couldn’t feel exactly what each new sound meant.

Like all those whose apparent age didn’t match their true experience, Liz seemed much better with her magic than a pony her age would’ve been. Her horn kept glowing without dimming as she passed out thousands and thousands of wrapped foil packets.

“Only eat one cracker each day,” she said, every time the line moved. “Each of these is food for a week. Eat one square as each meal. You’ll probably need to drink much more water than you’re used to, since you won’t be getting any with this. Also, they taste awful.”

She repeated it by rote, sounding bored, but Jackie could see a little of the same excitement in her she felt.

“Did any seaponies come with you?” Reprise asked, during a few moments of downtime an hour later. “I haven’t seen any yet, and I’ve been looking.”

“No,” Jackie answered. “I don’t know what conditions are like in the lake, but Athena controls all the exoskeletons. Even if there were a ton who wanted to leave, they’d be stuck. But there probably aren’t very many. Most of them have already gone. Don’t like living with ‘barbarians.’”

“Yeah.” Reprise sounded distant. “I thought I wouldn’t either. But it’s strange… you seemed so normal while we were on Alpheus. But now you feel like them. Even an immortal like you never learned how to sing?”

“Nope,” Jackie shrugged her wings. “It’s biology more than magic, and I don’t have the right organs in my brain. Whatever it is you can all sense, I can’t. Hopefully you’ll get used to being around us.”

“Probably.” Liz turned her attention back to the line. “It’s stupid pony stuff talking, right? If I think about it like a person I realize it doesn’t make sense. You felt safe, but you didn’t really change, so you must still be safe. And if someone without songs can be safe to be around, then lots of people can be. It’s just about connecting that with the emotional parts of my brain.”

“You’ll get it,” Jackie said. “I think. Your sister spent years in the ocean, and I guess she chose to retire out there too. Some ponies just fit better in different bodies.”

“Hold on,” Hat Trick had seemed to be focused mostly on dispersing the food-packets, but evidently that wasn’t the case, because she looked up from her crowbar. “Your sister isn’t retired, is she? Princess Archive is…”

“Fictional,” Liz cut her off, her voice harsh. “At least as long as I’ve been around. Lonely Day hasn’t even been on Earth since I got back. We spent most of a century on a starship, and before that it was training out in the belt. The only thing she’s princess of is a little colony called Alpheus. I guess she does an okay job, I don’t know. Too much of a small town for me.” She looked away, back towards the crowd. The line for food had gotten much shorter now, and plenty of the bats had moved off to claim some space for themselves in the trees. There were no tents—not enough for this number, anyway.

“That is… inconsistent with the information I had,” the bat said, sounding almost amazed. “She said Mundi didn’t make sense… but the fake was so convincing…”

“That’s computers for you,” Liz said. “Yeah, she’s gone. I didn’t really learn the details, because fuck the whole thing. I just know my sister used herself up saving the planet. There wasn’t enough left to rule the whole thing afterwards.”

“Is all this true, Dreamknife?” the bat asked. “Not that I don’t think you believe it, Liz, but…”

“Yes,” Jackie interrupted. “I went out and saw Alpheus for myself. Nice little place, lots of water. Might visit again in a few centuries. Once they’ve put in the casinos and roller coasters.”

The bat sat back on her haunches, subdued. She spoke very quietly, so that the crowd all around couldn’t hear. “That is… troubling. All our planning for this rebellion relied on a Mundi led by a distant and apathetic Archive. Our flight should have forced her to confront conditions in the lower city. She was supposed to prevent a military response, take control back from the artificial intelligence. But if she isn’t even on the planet…”

“Too late now,” Jackie said, tearing open a foil ration packet and swallowing one of the crackers without chewing. It didn’t taste as bad going down that way. “We’ll make this work, somehow. Mundi might just give us up for dead—I know tons of ponies who think it’s straight up impossible to live out here. Or maybe they’ll just tighten security for those still stuck there and forget about us. Athena won’t be sending an army to bring us back—she wants a rival for Mundi.”

The bat grinned. “I think we can give her that.”

Chapter 5: Volans

They had their first death the next day.

Jackie had known something awful just like that could happen—that somepony would be stupid and avoid her instructions and pay the price. Sydney wasn’t just empty land, it was the site of a terrible battle. She fully expected some of the wreckage of that ancient conflict to linger on, ready to rip its claws up through history and tear apart the unwary.

She made her way to the edge of the crater, where someone had dragged out the body. A bat had been electrocuted, most of his body burned so badly that his original color was now lost, and some of his bones emerged from crispy flesh.

Jackie took a longer moment to look past him into the crater. A fissure opened into the earth here, a fissure that was fifty feet wide at is widest and almost a quarter mile long. Past the initial layer of stone, she could see torn metal and stray cables hanging loose. This was the wreckage of Earth’s most advanced city, Midgard. The last great home of humanity, or at least their more modern form. The so-called Enduring Ones had been Charybdis’s first target before the war, back when city states still thought they could survive apart.

Midgard’s fall had demonstrated the futility of that choice, even if it had cost the most powerful nation in the war. The organic residue of whatever method Charybdis had used to tunnel down was all gone now, only sparse piles of vaguely shriveled flesh. Jackie almost couldn’t blame this stallion for wanting to go investigate it—she wanted to see what was down there herself.

“Tell me what happened,” she said again, to the pony’s friends. Two of them, both stallions about the same age, and both with minor burns. They had apparently been flying behind their unlucky companion, so his death had given them enough warning to change course. She could see the shell-shocked guilt of the survivors in their eyes. You’re gonna need some therapy when this is over, kids. But she didn’t say any of that—it wasn’t her responsibility.

“We know you said not to wander off,” said the taller of the two, a muscular stallion named Milton. Aside from the two of them, it was only the rescue unicorn standing nearby—the one who had teleported the body up for possible treatment. Needless to say, it was too late for that. “But we didn’t plan on going very far. Just wanted to see…”

“If it was somewhere we could live,” Edwin finished. “It looks a little like Mundi, doesn’t it? Big opening in the ground like that, all those machines poking out of the edges. Like an abandoned city. Seemed like a good idea at the time.” He kept glancing back to the uncovered body of their friend. The unicorn had brought a black cloth, but Jackie had told him not to use it. These stallions deserved to see the consequences of their curiosity. Everypony else who walked close by would see it as well, and maybe her ponies wouldn’t wander off and get themselves killed so quickly next time.

“We couldn’t live down there even if it wasn’t booby-trapped,” Jackie muttered, glaring at the two of them. “You don’t know how many ponies died. It’s fuckin’ haunted. And it wasn’t built for ponies, anyway. It’s a shitty place to live.” She had planned on salvaging the place, eventually. Once her own ponies had somewhere safe to live, had crops put in, and were starting on industry with Athena’s help. Then maybe they could use the ashes of Midgard to fuel a rebooting industry.

This death would put a stigma on that.

“Tell me how it happened again. Real slow.”

“W-well…” Milton hesitated. “There was… resistance. The further down we got, it felt like flying through slime. Then it got hotter, and…”

“And you kept going,” Jackie muttered, with far less sensitivity than a leader probably should’ve showed to a pony who had just lost a good friend. It’s not any more their fault than it was the one who died. They paid the price of their stupidity.

Yet there was something more troubling in their description, something she hadn’t noticed as they began. It didn’t sound like a trap after all. Milton’s description sounded like what it was like to fly through a live thaumic conduit. Something Jackie had done only one time and did not intend to repeat. She’d almost died when she tried it, too.

If there’s a live conduit coming from Midgard, that means something is still running down there.

Jackie knew almost nothing about the Arcane Network, except what a tourist might read over in the pamphlet while they flew down here on a plane. Where many other nations had used the human sciences and electricity as the foundation of their industry, the nation that had once been here had taken a different technological path. That path meant magic for almost everything. Magic lights, magic cooking, magic transport. Magic vehicles. The Arcane Network was what produced, gathered, and transported that magical energy across the continent of Australia. But how much of it could still be working after so many years?

Crystals don’t rust, and spells don’t decay like capacitors do. It was possible, though not likely, that more of the infrastructure might’ve survived.

“I want you to go back to camp,” Jackie said, turning back to face the hapless thestrals. “You should go to every gathering of ponies and explain what just happened. Tell them what it felt like to fly into that thing, so they can avoid doing it like you did. I’ll have somepony around to dig a grave for your friend here.”

That was probably too harsh a punishment as it was. But if she wasn’t harsh with the first ones to disobey here, there was no telling how many more ponies might die in the next few days.

There shouldn’t have been thaumic conduits going down into Midgard. Their central compiler didn’t need to transport magic that way. It was a curious thing, particularly since the nation that had used the Arcane Network had been the very next to fall, after the Enduring Ones. So, who set up a new conduit leading into the ruins?

Somepony worth investigating, that was damn sure. And Jackie knew how to do that without getting herself grilled alive.

But not today. Today there was the difficult task of picking the site for their new settlement. Jackie took a few of the most skilled engineers and surveyors from among the bats and flew over as much of the surrounding countryside as possible. They memorized, they made sketches and charts, they talked about water and runoff. The climate had transformed a great deal in many thousands of years, though it was hard to say what had caused the transformation here.

It was wetter in Australia then it had been when she vacationed here as a kid. And there was so much more green. Indeed, the whole coast seemed to be gradually drowning in a jungle, not a single tree of which looked like a native species. Like an ancient eco-terrorist had decided to transform the climate of a continent. With practically the whole species living in a single location, they wouldn’t have had much opposition. Now the huge trees went on as far as she could see, many of which towering nearly three-hundred feet.

“This strain seems particularly well-adapted to the climate,” said a pegasus named Sky Meadow, a professor of various ecological subjects who’d had a hard-on for communist revolutions. After actually participating in a revolution, Jackie hadn’t heard any more rhetoric from her. She seemed almost relieved to go back to talking about nature. “There’s significant suggestion of thaumic interaction between the trees. See the bioluminescence along the topmost leaves. I would love to bring some seeds back to the lab.”

“We don’t have a lab,” Jackie said, turning to her structural engineer. The bat stallion was a refugee, one who’d been working in a Datamine since returning. But he’d been an engineer before that, and he was the best she had right now. “We can’t build a city on the beach.”

“Brazilians had it right,” he answered in English. “It’s just like the Amazon. Slash and burn. We can pick somewhere with good drainage for fields, then burn it. Once we get a sawmill going, we’ll have more wood than we know what to do with.

“Seems premature,” argued Meadow. “We can go further inland if we need to. The jungle has to end eventually. Eventually it must reach a point where the water demands can’t be sustained, and it will be replaced with scrubland. We can build there.”

“No,” said the engineer. “We need the water too, professor. Wheat doesn’t grow well in deserts.”

They kept arguing, but Jackie hardly heard it. She saw something moving in the trees below, something that was calling to her. The pull of a debt she owed, yanking on an invisible chain. So soon? I thought you’d wait until they elected me president.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Jackie said to the small group, pointing above them at a low curtain of clouds. “Keep talking. I need to check on something. Don’t follow me.”

Jackie dropped into the trees without waiting to hear if they had acknowledged the order. She hadn’t ever been the kind of pony who took things slow for the benefit of others. The pony who had made Jackie merciful and kind was dead now.

Once she was in the trees, Jackie could feel the magic that Meadow had speculated about. There was real magic here—though less concentrated than a thaumic conduit, it was still tremendous. Enough that even with the sky completely obscured in canopy, the entire forest was lit with a faint blue. Not just the trees themselves—many small creatures glowed. The squirrels that glided from tree to tree, the massive jungle cat she saw reclining on a large branch.

And, of course, the deer. Voeskender had not changed in the single day that had passed since the last time Jackie saw him. He waited patiently beside a stream, nibbling on a sparse patch of grass that grew there. Jackie couldn’t quite tell just how present the deer was in the world with her, and how much was Jackie seeing through reality into the Dreamlands. Probably a little of both.

“Hey,” she said, waving a wing as though she were meeting a friend for lunch. Not that she ate any of the grass—Jackie was a bat with standards.

Images flashed into her mind, so overwhelming that she was nearly blinded with them. She saw a city—not the one that her engineer had imagined, but something entirely different. Her bats didn’t burn the jungle down, they built their houses in its branches. She saw them coax the trees with new magic, growing them into shapes they desired. She saw deer coming to populate the ground, living in their tribes in those parts of the forest that bats didn’t need. It was all there—water collecting from the sky, vast orchards of mangos and other fruit in the trees. Magic provided in abundance to light their homes and power everything they needed.

She looked into the future and saw another direction this civilization might take. Not the crystal skyscrapers that had once dotted the continent, but… something else. Certainly, a professor like Sky Meadow would’ve seen it as preferable.

Jackie didn’t care either way—so long as her ponies were fed and got to live successfully. This was something radically different—instead of a concentrated megalopolis, that same population would have to be distributed across the entire continent.

The vision ended, and she felt the will of the god upon her. This was what it demanded in payment for helping these bats to escape. It didn’t want Athena just building another city here—it wanted something that would serve its needs better.

“Okay.” Jackie didn’t really have much of a choice, in any case. A debt to a god did not leave room for negotiation—when that favor came due, it would be paid in whatever method the divine creature demanded. Today, that meant changing the course of a civilization.

By the time she turned back to look at the spirit, he was gone. The vision he’d shown her was fairly clear, though—she’d seen it vividly enough to see the spells they would use to change the trees.

Now how the fuck do I explain to all those city bats and industrial workers that they’re about to turn into hippies?

Chapter 6: Pelcotus

Jackie did not get a chance to explore the ruins of Midgard again for a few weeks. There was much to do that was more practical—such as spreading her bats enough that they could all find food. The citizens of Mundi had been so sheltered by life there that only the handful of refugees in her group had anything close to practical experience. She would take a former human who had actually lived in the world outside, even sheltered by modern society, over bats that hadn’t even left their homes in years.

At least these ponies were willing to learn, something that couldn’t be said for their fellows they had left behind.

It was a good thing Jackie still remembered what life had been like before the end of the world, or else they would’ve been in real trouble when things ended. They planted orchards, began setting up basic shelters. Athena had offered to supply them, in the same way she kept Mundi running with her systems. Jackie had not intended to refuse, but now…

Now she had a different master.

“We’re going in there,” she explained, as their group shifted gradually inland towards the jungle. “I’ve got some spells to teach you all. We won’t need to build houses if we can grow them instead.”

“Couldn’t we just chop them down and make cabins or something?” Asked a unicorn whose name she hadn’t learned.

“No.” She cut him off before he could continue. “That’s not as easy as you think. Big hardwood like this takes strong metal saws. Think of all the technology we need to make that—we need quarries, we need foundries, blacksmiths and kilns. We could waste years and years to get all that, living out in the open and getting our asses rained on, or we could just use these easy spells.”

The tree-shaping was not unicorn magic, or even earth-pony. Like most of it, the spells relied on runes, which could be carved right on the bark and empowered with a few drops of sap or blood. She committed everypony in her group with magical talent to begin studying the spells, while Jackie herself finally snatched a few hours to see what had been happening in the ruins of the ancient Enduring city.

She couldn’t go naked, not like the other bats. She kept digging in Alex’s supply cache until she found a thin jumpsuit made of metallic fabric—reinforced thaumium weave. It was commonly worn under powered-armor, since it insulated the body from almost any spell that struck it. And the civilization who knew how to weave it is all but gone.

The Enduring Ones had kept the secret of woven thaumium far better than the ancient Chinese had kept their secret of silk making. At least thaumium didn’t rot like silk.

Only Liz had come back to the chasm with her, though there was only one set of thaumium and anyway the seapony was not very good at flying. Still, she watched with skepticism. “You look like a stripper wearing that. How is it supposed to stop you from joining the bat barbeque like those other two?”

Jackie grinned down at her, posing in the purple outfit. “You like it? I do like how form-fitting it is. Feels really cool against your body, too. Great for hot weather.”

Liz groaned, ears flattening in mild embarrassment. “How long do I wait up here before I go to camp and tell them you died caving?”

Jackie shrugged. “A day? That should be long enough for me to get out. There isn’t a prison in the universe that can hold me. Not even the universe.” She stuck her tongue out at the seapony, before diving headfirst into the void.

Ponies who had survived as long as Jackie knew not to rely on armor alone. She felt for the subtle charge in the air that indicated a live conduit, one that might be bridged by the magic of her own body, and stayed well away. The secure corridor into Midgard wasn’t present here. Instead there was a swirling maelstrom of trapped power, potent enough to light up whole cities or instantly kill anyone it touched.

She reached the upper levels of the old city. Midgard was two thousand years less advanced than Axis Mundi, yet it was still an impressive sight. Towering buildings of white glass and geoscupture, with what had once been rivers and artificial forests growing between them. Not even Elrond had a house as grand as this.

But it had been ruined. Whole skyscrapers were collapsed, sections of wall had been covered with tarry stains, and all the plants were dead. Most of the lights and systems had shut down, save where someone had strung up live thaumic conduit with all the care of a hurried spider. The cables were about as thick as Jackie’s torso, made of spun crystal and completely uninsulated. Far less power filled them than had once powered an entire nation in the days of its glory, but there was still more than enough to kill.

Whoever this was, at least they’d made themselves very easy to find. Down through the levels of the ancient city, Jackie found herself grateful for the protection of her armor more than once. Magic didn’t strike her so much as roll around her, impacting whatever was behind.

Eventually she found what she was looking for. Whoever had appropriated Midgard had chosen the most supernatural place for their work—the home of the ancient Compiler.

The crystal had been a mind, perhaps the equal of Athena herself, but a mind endowed with magic as well. The mind that linked the souls of every Enduring One, endowed them with power, and helped them master their magic. A crystal so ancient, its seeds had already been growing when the Event was only hours old.

It had been housed deep under the earth, so deep that the air got heavy and every surface was warm to the touch. There were parts of the rock so dense that the conduit barely fit, and Jackie had to walk between the shadows in order to reach.

Eventually she arrived in the chamber. So much magic had flown through here that every surface had been transformed. First into crystal, on those parts that were further away. And closer to the center, in a depression about five feet across, a strange metallic substance that flowed like mercury but grew rigid to the touch.

It was a magical wonder—one that Jackie didn’t understand or really even care about. This was the realm of Alicorns and other great powers.

But the craftsman was an Alicorn.

He hadn’t come with only his clothes, as Jackie did. The space on one side of the depression bent strangely, curving outward until it was large enough to fit a small house built of concrete and crystal. He had set simple wooden platforms over much of the curved floor, and the latent magic of the place had transformed the obvious scraps into transparent Tass of the highest quality.

A pony who stayed here too long might very well be transformed themselves. Only a proper Alicorn would be able to resist those effects—as indeed stood before her.

She knew this pony, as she knew all Alicorns. He had been Thestralia’s only alicorn, and his mind had not dealt with the collapse of his nation very well.

Then again, Jackie had never known him to be particularly stable to begin with. He hardly looked like a nervous wreck now, rushing as he was between pages of notes and something he was extracting from the bottom of the crater.

“Eureka,” Jackie said, landing on one of the platforms with a nervous caution. Her little jumpsuit would insulate her from the magical effects of this place, but not forever. The radiation was strong enough that anything short of an alicorn would be in serious trouble before too long. “Why the hell did you run an Arcane-Network mainline down here?”

The Alicorn didn’t even turn away from his work. He had a pair of thick goggles on over his face, and a thick coat like something a doctor might wear. His mane was cut short, and stood on end as though he showered with a Van de Graaff generator this morning.

He wasn’t using his horn to levitate, but gripped a pair of crystal tongs in one hoof, very delicately. Jackie knew why—with this much magic just buzzing about around them, even a minor spell could grow into something explosive. Even a little telekinesis could rip the earth right open. At least she didn’t have to worry about that—her own magic was subtler.

Whatever Eureka was doing, it was obviously an extremely delicate operation. Jackie didn’t distract him again, and she stayed out of the way as he lifted a crucible of silver-metal out from the crater and towards a vat of something white and steaming—liquid nitrogen.

Only when he’d thoroughly submerged the crucible did he finally turn around, glaring at her. “You picked an inopportune time to visit me, Knife.”

She felt herself tense. The derivative of the stupid religious name was obviously calculated to annoy her. “You Alicorns picked an inopportune time to bugger the fuck off and leave the evil robots to take over,” she spat back, advancing slowly on his worktable and the insulated canister atop it. “What is that, anyway?”

“Apirion,” he answered, unable to resist the temptation to brag. “Or almost. The old Central Compiler condensed it as it ran, but didn’t stabilize it. Had to bring the power down here to revitrifiy what it made. Figure I might be able to stabilize it if I can…” He trailed off. “You have no idea what I’m talking about. I forget you’re about as academic as Artifice. You like to let other ponies do your thinking for you.”

“I pick the best ponies to do my thinking for me, thank you very much.” Jackie glared at him.

“She’d probably say that too. Was it her idea to make a deal with the deer-god, or was that you? I never thought I’d see the day the Dreamknife would be working with the Nine.”

Jackie resisted the urge to shove the table and knock over all his hard work. This alicorn was not making it easy. She took a few deep breaths, calming herself, banishing the temptation to do violence. It was a lot harder since she’d lost her wife.

“Your Nine are fucking dead like everybody else,” Jackie said, though she knew full well not all of the Thestralian leaders had been killed. This Alicorn had been one of them at the end. “And I’m not working with them. I’m not working with anyone. I’m just trying to help some ponies in need. The bats of Mundi didn’t have anypony else to turn to. I did my civic duty and staged a bit of an uprising… but look at this. One of the rightful rulers of this nation is right here. I’ve got some citizens for you, Eureka. About… ten thousand of them.”

She turned away. “Just head north for twenty miles or so, you’ll find our new camp. It’s right on the edge of the jungle. You can take over, and I can go back to not ruling anything like I belong. It’s been great, but… I hate it. So cya!”

She heard Eureka’s laughter from behind her. Mocking, hysterical laughter. “If you really think I’m going to start doing your job for you… take over a nation of primitives just because my country used to be here, you know less about me than I thought. What, do you think Alicorns have to compulsively rule things? I’m busy. Your bats all have skills I don’t need, they’ve been sheltered by a city that would only let them do a few jobs. They’ll probably starve out here without your help. I know they won’t have mine.”

Jackie turned back, practically stomping over to the table. “This place is yours, Eureka! Your old despotism loved bats! You even named the continent after them! You wouldn’t just let them die! If I flew away, you’d have to get up there and take care of them. It’s your duty.”

He shrugged. “Would you let them starve if I told you I wasn’t going to help? I doubt it. Say what you want about flying away, Knife. But you let them convince you into helping in the first place. That tells me you’ve got a little bleeding heart. I don’t.”

“That’s not… that’s not right!” Jackie shouted, suddenly heedless of the danger. Or any anger she might provoke. Eureka had not been the oldest or the most powerful of the Alicorns, but he was older now, and more powerful than she was. Alicorns were one of the few creatures she still had reason to fear. “You’re not going to help at all? These bats come here desperate for a better life, surrounded by the dangerous ruins you fucking left, and you’re going to step back and leave us to die?”

He looked up from his work, staring at Jackie. He didn’t say anything for several long moments. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. I said I wasn’t going to do your job. My work is impeded by the collapse of the Network, and it gets worse every year. Having a nation using it again, expanding it… would benefit me as well as them. I’m sure we could come to an arrangement.”

Chapter 7: Nivalis

Jackie was not an engineer, not a builder, and not even a bureaucrat. She didn’t have a magical memory and a lifetime of skills. What she did have was simple determination, and a ruthless confidence.

An incredibly useful thing to have, once her city-bats learned just how difficult a task they’d set for themselves by leaving a self-sufficient fortress to rebuild civilization from scratch. More than a few of Jackie’s ponies asked to be returned to the city, liking their odds in Mundi better than their chances in Australia.

Jackie did not give them that chance. “You were told when you signed up for this that there would be no going back,” she said, to an assembly of every refugee the next day. “I informed you then of the difficulty we would be facing. The hunger, the fatigue, the danger. I will not be providing a way back for any pony here. The magic that brought us here cannot be repeated. You have your work assignments—if you want rations at night, you will have to carry them out.”

She glared out at a few of them over the stage. Spoiled ponies, that might as well have been the pampered pets of wealthier ponies. In some ways, Jackie herself had lived that lifestyle for a while. The difference was that she hadn’t let it make her soft. She hadn’t been raised that way.

Her “children” would have some harsh lessons.

Her chastisement did not make her popular with that group, either. Instead of being inspired to return to work, many of them attempted to steal supplies from the cache and run off. Unfortunately for them, Liz worked the cache. They’d brought pointed spears, but Liz’s suit had an accelerator rifle.

So the group of two-dozen or so rebels ended up slinking off with nothing, vanishing into the jungle before Jackie’s own ponies woke up. According to Liz, they’d been planning on “building a ship to sail back to Mundi.”

They’d stolen other things—tents, survival gear—basically everything they’d been given. Jackie didn’t try to get it back. They’d need every advantage they could get not to starve.

“You plan on bringing those asshats back here?” Jackie asked Hat Trick, once she finally appeared again. “They’re going to get themselves killed.”

“Maybe.” The thestral didn’t seem terribly worried. If anything, she seemed amused. “I was aware of the rebellion. I thought you might convince them not to leave.”

“Got me confused with somepony else,” Jackie muttered. “Alex is the one who tries to keep the group together. I told everyone what they were getting themselves into, and they still came. So far as I’m concerned, anything bothering them now is their own fucking problem. Like they expected to be riding out into the sunset and have some robots build the city for us.”

“I’m pleased we aren’t allowing Athena to rebuild our civilization for us,” Hat Trick said. “But I admit I’m a bit perplexed at your designs. Our population is too low to worry about environmental impact for centuries. What’s the point of all the… tree stuff?”

“We’re going down a different branch,” Jackie said, not avoiding her gaze. Few ponies could lie as well as she could. “We’re probably going to be fighting ponies from Mundi before the end. Athena says she’ll stay neutral, but do you think that means she won’t let them keep all their tech as soon as they go to war? I fucking doubt it. If our cities were just Mundi without the oppression, they’d have all the advantages. They’d have a more diverse population and abilities to draw on, they’d have more people to make into soldiers, and they’d have all the same tech we were using. They’d win.

“And not only that…” Jackie turned away from her, moving over to the tent flap and holding it open, so they could look out at the jungle. It wasn’t dark at night, not like photos of the ancient, pre-Event jungles of the past. There were thousands of little lights, glowing from the flowers, the leaves, everything. Just enough light to furnish her sensitive eyes with a perfect picture. “Every war is ultimately about resources, kid. We do things Athena’s way, and fast forward to the future… their spies get here, they see another city just waiting to be stolen from us. A city they know how to live in and maintain. They’re going to want it.”

“Oh.” Hat Trick nodded. “I see where you’re going with this. You want the civilization to be so different that they don’t even want to enslave it.”

“Exactly. They’ll get here from Mundi, look outside, and see a stand of trees. They won’t know that our ponies have lives just as good as theirs, once it’s all set up. They’ll just think that it looks like we’re living in the woods and screw right off home. Or if they do try to fight, their ponies won’t want to keep fighting for very long. What do they get if they win, our garden? I’m winning us the war before it even starts.”

The younger bat nodded again, apparently more confident this time. “That… I knew we chose the best princess for this job. Or at least the best princess available.”

She made to go, but Jackie blocked the tent flap leading out into the camp. “There was one more thing. I met an old friend of yours recently, down in the ruins. Eureka has been here the whole time. Or… ever since I got his fat ass out of Charybdis’s control, probably. I don’t think I saw him during the defense of Mundi… why the hell isn’t he the one doing this job? He was part of that nine-man cult you all had going, wasn’t he? He could probably re-found this whole place exactly the way it used to be.”

Hat Trick wilted immediately at her words, suddenly looking away. There was pain in her voice as she replied. “I tried to convince him,” she said. “More than once. You weren’t my first choice. But not everyone handles loss the same way. He invested more of himself into Thestralia than anypony I know. Not just his inventions, but his blood. Seeing it all tumble down was probably just as hard for him as losing our friends.”

“He should be in my shoes,” Jackie said again. “He’s a real princess. Like you said, he invented half this shit. He knows how to go down an alternate technological direction too. He knows how to build without Athena.”

“Maybe,” Hat Trick agreed. “But I’m guessing you tried to convince him of that when you saw him. He turned you down.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah,” she muttered, smacking the ground hard with one hoof. “I should’ve screwed up his experiment. He was harvesting the Compiler’s remains. God only knows what he planned on doing with it.”

“Irrelevant for our purposes,” Hat Trick said, a little more firmly. “We can’t spend our time trying to comprehend the Alicorns. You’ve dealt with them longer than I have, you should know. They’re fickle in their desires, and difficult to control. We can’t force him into ruling.

But you forced me, Jackie found herself thinking, though she didn’t say it out loud. And it hadn’t just been Hat Trick. Voeskender had forced her too, and in so doing would be forcing all the bats of their new nation. Even if his path presented some advantages—it still might not have been the path these bats chose for themselves. Except that Jackie didn’t give them any other option.

She didn’t keep arguing, but flew back out the door to get back to work.

And work they did, as hard and as long as ever Jackie had worked in her life. It was different than her experience in Motherlode, all those eons ago—at least these ponies were working for themselves, and not being forced to do anything dangerous. So long as they stayed away from the ruins of the Arcane Network, the greatest risks they faced on a daily basis were heat exhaustion and getting poisoned by Australia’s wildlife.

Things went slow at first—they didn’t have a good mixture of pony talents, and dreamwalking did not become useful for anything except psychological services until the highest levels of mastery. Most of what they had to do was simple hard labor, performed without the benefit of hands to make the process easier.

The second month was worse than the first, because that was when the food stockpile finally ran out, and the orchards weren’t anywhere near finished growing. A full half of their ponies had to switch to scavenging duties, wandering further and further afield and even hunting the giant insects for sustenance. Jackie didn’t mind eating moths—actually she quite enjoyed it—but in Mundi, eating bugs had been seen as a sign of the natural barbarity (and inferiority) of thestrals, so almost all of her ponies had been trained to hate it.

Hunger could cure old taboos. Still, morale suffered, and a few more ponies wandered off searching for the “rebels.” Jackie could only imagine how much worse things must be in that camp, but she refused to go look. If the ponies there wanted her help, they could come back to the camp and ask for it. So far, not one of the rebels had returned. But considering the abundance of the jungle, she doubted they had starved. Yet.

By the third month, they had managed to erect a few simple buildings using Voeskender’s method, and found the naturally-occurring groves of tropical fruit that seemed almost waiting for them in the jungle. The combination of a dry place to sleep (even if it was a communal sleeping arrangement in the pony way) and enough food in their bellies did wonders for pony morale.

“Phase two will be expanding to basic city services,” explained her planning pony, Melanie. “The fundamental base of a functioning society is a formal division of roles. We’ve already seen many natural divisions take shape—some ponies have demonstrated a talent for managing inventory. Liz will probably be our first merchant. Others have shown a knack for finding food better than other ponies, and others have a talent for magic. It is imperative we create a functional economy as quickly as possible.”

Jackie waved a dismissive wing. “That all sounds fine to me. Just tell me where the new buildings need to go.” Jackie herself had been working with the clearing teams—chopping down little trees and clearing the ground beneath their structures. They hadn’t been burning to clear, since that would also kill the trees they wanted to live in. “Just make sure whatever you set up doesn’t let bats end up enslaved like they did back in Mundi. Their lives have to be better here, that’s the whole point.”

“It will be,” Melanie promised. “We’ll have a superior education system. Dalila, she used to work on a school board, she says we can use some merit-testing to assign places in our new public education system… which should be one of our first priorities… even if we only have a few dozen foals to educate right now. There will be many more once our situation is more stable.”

Jackie didn’t really know or care what Melanie was talking about, but she did watch her closely and give her a stern glare as she explained it all. The pony smelled like she believed what she was saying, and talked like she understood it. That was good enough for her. “When you’re making work assignments, I want fifty ponies for the militia. The best filers you’ve got, though a unicorn or an earth pony would be great too.”

“Do we… need one?” Melanie asked, voice skeptical. “I would rather our talented flyers be out finding food.”

“Yes,” Jackie said, without hesitation. “Mundi hasn’t forgotten us. But I’m guessing they will underestimate us. Probably we’ll get some tiny force expecting to crush us completely with barely any effort. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen. And we’ve lost… what, a hundred ponies so far to the rebels? Eventually they’re going to get hungry enough, and see we’re not…”

“As you order,” Melanie said, though she still didn’t sound convinced. “If that’s what we have to do.”

“Yes. It is.” And the more of a waste they are, the better. Hopefully I’m just being paranoid.

Chapter 8: Fuscus

Jackie knew Mundi hadn’t forgotten them. She got her confirmation about six months later, when it was time to cut the ribbon on her most ambitious structure yet.

She’d wanted to name the incredible thaumic ash Hometree, but most of her ponies didn’t understand the reference, and the ones who did weren’t keen on that. They didn’t like Das Kapital either. So it was that one of the most impressive achievements of modern magical engineering received the drabbest name.

“City Hall” stood nearly four hundred feet tall, towering so far above the others of its kind that its outline was visible from space. With Eureka’s help, three direct lines to the Arcane Network had been grafted directly into its roots, ensuring that the single structure holding all their services would have abundant power so long as the fading wisps of the Arcane Network persisted.

The tree’s leaves grew purple, with glowing shimmers whenever they were damaged. Somehow—as a surprise even to Jackie herself—“City Hall” grew into the Dreamlands themselves, forming a shining beacon of stability and safety as impossible for bats to miss as a burning oil well on the horizon. Though dreamers could not interact with anything on the physical side, they could still see it.

And Jackie could see them, assembled before her. Not just the thousands of her own new citizens clustered in the branches, or resting on the canopies of lower trees to watch.

They were dwarfed by the attention of dreamers. Jackie wondered how many of the thousands were conscious of their trip here, and how many more were bats who did not yet even understand their powers, who would see the events of this day and forget them as quickly as any other dream.

I can’t win them all over. I don’t even have a way to get most of them out of Mundi right now. Maybe she could hope that their flight would’ve inspired reform over there, to avoid repeating it. Or maybe she could hope that ponies everywhere would abandon war forever and live in peace as Archive had imagined.

The days of fighting bats skeptical of Jackie’s plans for the city were long gone. Everypony had either been convinced to join them, or else wandered off to join the rebels on the other end of the jungle.

“Looks like everyone,” Liz muttered, slipping back in from the balcony. “They’re all waiting for you out there, Jackie. Showtime.”

This was the governor’s office, a room at the end of a long hallway that put it near the living Heartwood of the tree. It felt a little like walking in Mystic Rune’s dead Alexandrian lab—except instead of turning to crystal, living here too long was likely to send you sideways into the Dream. Most of the building clung to the sides of the tree rather than burrowing inside it, or else warped the living wood to create the classrooms and shops and parks where ponies now lived. But this room was an exception—whoever took the office of Governor in the future would need a way to tend to the health of this building, and by extension the rest of the forest beneath them.

“Guess so.” She rose onto her hooves, stretching and shifting in the uncomfortable governor’s coat that Emile had given her. It was all invented ceremony of course—but ceremony would give their newly minted nation some sense of unity. “It’s not the bats I’m worried about watching us.” She started walking down the long hallway.

Liz hurried to catch up, meaty tail swinging behind her. Her exploration-suit was beginning to show signs of wear-and tear, most obviously around one of the false hind legs, which had begun to corrode and took an extra second whenever she tried to walk. The seapony no longer looked perpetually dried-up, now that she had a treetop pool to sleep in instead of her suit. But the days of trafficking with land ponies this way were obviously running out.

Another few months and that suit is gonna go. I wonder if you’ll want to go back to Alex’s colony, or…

“Don’t look at me like that,” the seapony muttered, uncomfortable. “I don’t like where your brain is going right now.”

“I’m not going to ask you out again,” Jackie muttered, wings twitching uncomfortably on her back as she said it. “At least, not on land I’m not. You’re not the only seapony who has trouble finding land ponies attractive.”

But it was mostly teasing. Jackie hadn’t been very serious with her flirting. Liz was Alex’s sister. I don’t want to go to those family reunions, no thanks.

They stepped out together onto a sweeping balcony, made from groomed wood and lined with shimmering glass. There were perhaps two dozen ponies here—mostly the administrators who had made this possible, though there were some exceptions. A few ponies who had accomplished particularly impressive feats, like Umber there off to the side, who’d saved a dozen students from their first school to catch fire.

They still didn’t have much of a textile industry, so these ponies showed their wealth and importance with hats woven of rare leaves and flowers. There was also a table of refreshments, prepared from the finest chilled fruit. At least there wasn’t a live band, or else Jackie might’ve lept right off the balcony herself.

She sensed something was wrong the instant she saw them. There was an eddy in the crowd, a single person here whose dreams grated on her nerves. An intruder. But are you a spy, or an assassin?

She couldn’t find them at first—whoever they were, they were excellent at blending in. Every little clique of guests seemed comfortable and relaxed. But they couldn’t hide their imprint on the subconscious world, and Jackie felt it.

“Stay away from me,” Jackie whispered into Liz’s ear. “We have an uninvited guest.”

“I’m wearing powered armor,” the seapony whispered back, ignoring her instruction and following her right up to the podium.

From down below came the cheers—thousands and thousands of voices all raised in gratitude. She didn’t intend to keep them waiting long. But she would have to keep her eyes open for the intruder. Whoever they were, they couldn’t be hiding much. Only Liz and Jackie herself wore any significant amount of clothing. Nudity was natural when you were poor and lived in a jungle.

“Ponies of New Thestralia!” she called, amplifying her voice across both realms.

She waited for the cheers to subside. “You’ll have to forgive me—I’m not much for speeches. But you all deserve to celebrate. The reward of all our hard work is here—every one of you now has a roof over your head, enough to eat, and some of the amenities we enjoyed back in Mundi.” She glanced briefly over her shoulder, which would probably look like she was giving attention and deference to one of her assistants. She could feel the intruder, but where were they? Closer to her than before. Definitely an assassin, then.

“Survival is a great first step, and it’s been my goal since we arrived here. Congratulations, we’re there. We don’t have to sleep in tents or boil water to drink. You’ve achieved civilization.”

It wasn’t a very good speech. But they cheered anyway, as she explained that this was only the first step, that they would have to make themselves happy as well as healthy. That they needed to create a place for ponies all over the world who felt like they didn’t belong.

There, in the group of engineers just behind her, with their table closest to the edge. It was the waiter—a pegasus whose face she didn’t know, carrying a tray of food. He’d moved to cross the balcony behind her, but Jackie bet her good knife on him not stopping.

If you actually managed to kill me like this, it would be as good as a declaration of war. Liz hadn’t noticed—for all her armor was tough, she was almost as inexperienced as she looked.

“So celebrate today,” Jackie finished. “We’ve been stockpiling mango beer, and it’s pretty great. But when you’ve slept off your hangovers, know that there’s a long road before us. A road that leads to a city better for its citizens than Mundi ever was.”

More cheers went up, rising so loud that many of the surrounding trees shook with their voices. Jackie might be lousy at giving speeches, but these ponies were eager for a reason to celebrate. And free booze never hurt anything.

That was the moment that the asshole dressed like a waiter finally made his move. The pegasus moved like lightning, cutting across the intervening distance in a blur Jackie’s eyes couldn’t focus on. He had a knife ready, a knife that buzzed with dark energy from the red jewel set into its hilt.

But she didn’t need to see her enemy to be able to stop him.

His jump carried him through the open gateway and onto the polished stone floor of a library. He slid a few feet, knocking over tables and chairs and scattering the books that had been piled there.

The roar of the crowd was replaced with stark silence as Jackie straightened, turning slowly to face the would-be assassin. “I didn’t know anyone in Mundi still knew how to make Entropic weapons. I hope if you wanted kids you didn’t sheathe that thing anywhere near your balls, because all those little soldiers have two heads.”

The pegasus shook himself free of the fallen books, ripping pages as he did so. Mercy is gonna be so pissed at me for this.

Jackie had to hand it to the assassin—he was persistent. Already standing, waving the dagger at her as though it were a gun. But it wasn’t—the magic only worked if it had a soul to leach from. And a good thing too, or else all the Alicorns in the world would’ve been assassinated by now.

“What is this place? You aren’t a unicorn—return us to the podium, so your citizens can witness justice!”

She couldn’t help it—Jackie laughed. “I did think about killing you in front of everyone. If it makes you feel better, Alex probably would’ve. Or one of the other Alicorns. They do have their egos, and they love drama.”

The dagger drooped a little in his hoof. “You can’t stop me from killing you,” he said. “This is the end of your rebellion. Order will be restored.” Then he lunged at her again. Jackie willed the air in front of her into clear gelatin, and he stopped short. The slime around his knife caught fire instantly, forming an angry bubble around the blade. But there was too much water for it to burn long, and the assassin couldn’t swing it.

“It was a mistake to send someone who couldn’t dreamwalk,” she said, walking slowly around the block. She drew out her own blade, with the edge that was so sharp it hurt, and held it up so he could see. “How did you think you were going to fight me, anyway? Did they tell you how old I was?”

Only a muffled mumbling answered her—his face was stuck in the slime. “No, no one’s going to see you here,” Jackie said, holding the knife right up to him. “No one would see you die. That war you wanted, we aren’t ready for it. Your people know that. I’m surprised they were stupid enough to think they could kill me.”

She brought the knife down, right into the gemstone on his dagger. It shattered with a flash of angry light, shards embedding themselves in the slime. It stopped burning. Then Jackie waved her own blade away, and turned to leave. “I hope you like to read, kid. I’d count it as a favor if you apologize to Mercy for me.”

She banished the gelatin at the same instant she stepped back through into the physical world. An angry, confused crowd waited below. Soldiers had rushed the balcony, clearing space around the podium. Jackie’s little militia. But they would have no one to fight tonight.

Liz was the only one who seemed to understand. She looked disappointed, ashamed. She was staring down at the accelerator rifle built into one arm. ‘No problem,’ Jackie mouthed, before turning back to the crowd. “Sorry to keep you all waiting!” she shouted. “What was I… right! Everypony get into your new capital. All this booze won’t drink itself.”

Chapter 9: Velifer

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as just pretending that nothing had ever happened. While Jackie took special joy in imagining the displeasure of the ponies back in Mundi, she couldn’t quite act like nothing had happened. Her average citizen would just take her at her word—practically worshiped the ground she walked on—but not all were so compliant.

Hat Trick found her near the end of the party, holding a tablet computer and looking agitated. She hadn’t been on the viewing balcony, but she was here in the upper lounge and she didn’t look happy. She set the screen down on the table in front of Jackie, who had been sharing an intimate moment with a changeling she’d met a few hours ago.

Jackie glanced briefly down at the screen, and was unsurprised to see it was a recording of her speech. More precisely, the moment where she was almost assassinated.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Jackie said, pushing the changeling gently away. “Sorry about this, but I’ve got to do… important government things. My office is upstairs. Why don’t you… hang out in there for a few minutes. I’ll meet you.”

“With her? She’s not old enough for you, princess. Tell her to buzz off.”

Hat Trick raised an eyebrow—but that was it. She looked amused—probably she was waiting to see how Jackie would handle it. As infuriating as ever.

Jackie wasn’t a princess, but she didn’t much care if the ones she was dating wanted to call her that. “Sorry,” she said again, hoping she sounded appropriately apologetic. “This is important. She’s… important. It’s not what you think.”

The drone made an unhappy fluttering sound, before buzzing away. Jackie could smell her displeasure—she wouldn’t be waiting in the office.

Hat Trick took her seat, though didn’t get nearly as close.

“Not a word,” Jackie growled. “Don’t even think about it. We’re not.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she said, indignant. But unlike so many others, Jackie was unable to read her. Hat Trick didn’t have the same visual cues as even the oldest ponies. You would only see her emotions if she wanted you to. But then she pointed at the tablet with a wing, and she no longer sounded amused. “You should’ve told me about this.”

“I was planning on it,” Jackie lied, almost as good as the young-looking bat. “But I wanted to enjoy the party. This is the last of the spirits, and the swill we’re brewing to replace it isn’t the same. I didn’t want to… talk to the city council while intoxicated.”

And she was intoxicated, at least enough for her cheeks to feel warm and her inhibitions to dissolve. Maybe not enough to date someone as young-looking as Hat Trick, though. Too many sour memories of Archive down that road. “Well, I’m interested in what you would’ve said to city council. Why don’t you run through the practice version with me. Pretend I’m completely furious that some dick from Mundi just tried to kill our princess.”

You can’t call me that, Jackie thought, but didn’t say. She was too drunk to trust her reasoning completely right now. She might say other things that she shouldn’t.

“It shouldn’t be hard to pretend,” Hat Trick went on. “I’m at least as upset as they will be when they find out.”

I don’t answer to you, she thought. And maybe she didn’t, but that didn’t mean she could just ignore her. This pony had been intimately involved with the rebellion from the first. Many of Jackie’s new citizens were loyal to her as much as to Thestralia itself.

“Well, they fucked it up,” Jackie said simply, draining the rest of her glowing cup. The glamour inside made her feel a little better, but not much. “They don’t have an assassin good enough to kill me. I’m the one they would’ve sent. Just some wannabe martyr.”

“You didn’t kill him?” the bat looked suddenly interested. “That’s good. I’d love to know who thought they could vote in our elections with a dagger.”

“So you can assassinate right back?” Jackie asked. “That’s not how this works if we want peace. I’m old enough to remember this, kid. Back in the day, civilized countries sent spies into each other all the time. Typically you just look the other way. And if you lose some, that’s your fault.”

Hat Trick grumbled something unintelligible. Jackie couldn’t hear it, except that the word ‘civilized’ was in there somewhere. “Let’s say I care,” she eventually said. “I think we need to send a message. The other members of the city council will as well. If we let Mundi think from day one that they can do whatever they want to us, that’s what they’ll do. On the other hoof, we make it clear that every action has an equal and opposite reaction—”

“No.” Jackie smacked one hoof onto the table. “If we assassinate somepony over there, then you might as well just kill all these ponies now. Mundi might be fat and stupid, but they still have the hardware left over from a war, and a hundred times more soldiers than our whole population. Even a catastrophic war for them would be the end of us.”

“So you’re going to propose… nothing,” Hat Trick finished. “Great, they don’t get mad enough to go to war with us. Maybe next time they send somepony with a bomb into a city council meeting. Maybe they try poisoning our water supply. Just because they picked a hard target this time doesn’t mean they will next time. I’ve seen this too.”

“I figured,” Jackie said. She wanted to say something snide about the way Thestralia had run itself before the collapse. There had been stories—stories of mandatory magical donations, of intrigue and corruption. Some ponies said that the law wasn’t so much there because of any abstract ideal, but because overcoming it was meant to be the challenge in itself.

But that world was gone now, like so much else. Like Ezri.

“Look, we don’t have to do nothing. We just can’t respond the same way they did. We need something that won’t inspire as much of a war. Something that gets back at the ones in power without affecting the regular ponies much. We want Mundi to be unwilling to fight.”

“Great, sounds perfect,” the bat said, raising a hoof to a passing server. He set down a clear glass frothing at the rim beside her, and she downed it in one swig. “So what’s your plan?”

“We, uh…” She hadn’t actually thought about this yet. Her plan had been not to tell anyone and hope Mundi took their failure as a sign to move on to greener pastures.

She looked out at the party for inspiration. Ponies were still celebrating out there, plenty of them in various stages of unconsciousness. And below this lounge were almost a thousand other ponies, spread everywhere. Ponies who had running water again, who didn’t have to scavenge fruit and bugs for food.

“We stage a jailbreak,” she said. “How much do you bet the powers that be are saying we all came here to starve. Nobody thinks they can survive away from infrastructure anymore. Leaving Athena behind is like walking right off the world. Athena will have tried to turn our escape to her advantage.”

“Go on…” Hat Trick no longer seemed annoyed. She raised her wing for another drink, and soon received it. Things like minimum drinking age were still a ways off for Thestralia.

“Well, assuming that’s true, Athena stuck herself out on a limb. Made herself vulnerable. All we have to do to show everyone she’s full of shit is prove we’re still alive. We make our own propaganda, bring it back with us into Mundi… and we bust some more bats out. Maybe more this time. Maybe if we can find a better way out, we could do ten thousand instead of two.”

Hat Trick nodded. “More effective than an assassination. Though I still want to talk to the one they sent over. I’d like to ensure that whoever they work for gets a personal message. They’ll know we’ve got their number, and whatever we do is in retaliation. It’s more than they deserve.”

“More importantly, we need to make places for all the people we’re gonna rescue. And we need to make sure the jailbreak happens soon enough that it’s obvious why we did it. That means getting our shit in gear now. No resting on our laurels and just enjoying our self-farming trees.”

“Yeah.” Hat Trick nodded. “Well, I’ll head off now, take a look around Mundi, see what I can see. We can put together some videos to distribute to the ponies back home. I trust you can set the whole meeting up yourself.”

Jackie nodded. “Yeah, sure. No problem. Tomorrow. I still think they deserve a little relaxation. A little alcohol and some time off is the best way to solve our population problem.”

She didn’t try to follow the young bat out. She never quite saw where she got off to, and some part of her didn’t really want to know. There were some things best left unknown.

She tried to enjoy the rest of the party, she really did. She went up to her office, but of course the changeling wasn’t there anymore. So it was back down to the lower floor, where most of the ponies celebrated with cheaper drinks and simpler food. She mingled and chatted with as many as were still sober, hearing little complaints and writing them down to give to other people to solve.

But most of her couldn’t just switch off her worries. There would be another jailbreak. Maybe they’d get enough people to be a full blown city. Now that they could promise a little more stability, with even more on the horizon. Things would only get easier as they expanded and repaired the Arcane Network.

Only Liz seemed to share her solemnity, though for completely different reasons. The seapony still seemed like she was tearing herself apart over the assassination attempt.

“It’s nothing you did wrong,” Jackie insisted, for perhaps the tenth time that night. Liz swam in uneasy circles near the heart of the capital tree, which had its own massive reservoir of drinking water. It would pass through the tree before it made it into ponies’ homes, so Jackie didn’t really mind to see her here.

Jackie herself kept to the walkway around the outside, watching her circle around. “I was glad you were there. Another few seconds and you would’ve got him for sure.”

Liz splashed up out the edge of the water, landing again with a plop. She carried the glowing water around with her in her circle, and for a few seconds she seemed to glow a little too. The Arcane Network was tied into this tree now, just like all the others they lived in. But it wasn’t the high-voltage connection that would melt a pony alive.

“I don’t like it,” Liz sang, over and over. “I should’ve done better. I will next time. You can still die.”

“Everyone can die,” Jackie said, ambivalent. “And I’ve had a long life. It wouldn’t be so bad if he got me. There are… people I’d like to see again.”

Liz sang a few disdainful notes at that, but said no more. Jackie left her to her lonely aquarium. She didn’t feel like explaining what she had seen beyond the effervescent veil. Some secrets were too deep, too close.

She had the meeting the next day, exactly as Hat Trick had suggested. There was much discussion about it, but in the end the council agreed. This was a perfect excuse to free more ponies from Mundi. In the end they wanted the millions of bats who lived there to be free. But their single small city couldn’t handle a million.

“I can give you ten thousand,” said her city planner, Melanie. “If you give me six months.”

“Do what you can in three,” Jackie said. “It has to be soon enough that it’s obvious why we’re doing it. Six is too long.” She glanced across the table to Lavender Eclipse, her current militia commander and former rebellion leader. “Maybe pass the word along that ponies might need to take guests into their home in a few months. We can be all patriotic about it and shit. Everypony sets up a guest room for a visiting family. It’ll just be for… three months?”

It was time to get back into the news at Mundi. And we’ll deserve it this time.

Chapter 10: Leibii

Jackie dreamed of forests. Of alien trees from primordial ages, when the Earth was young and the strong had ruled. She met Voeskender in those trees, alone except for his influence.

“I’m done!” she proclaimed, tossing imaginary chains at his massive hooves. “My debt is returned to you. I gave you my word and I kept it.”

The deer, of course, did not speak to her. She saw the slow erosion of distant mountains, the gentle lapping of the waves. Jackie interpreted these images to mean the god wasn’t happy, but he was admitting she was correct. The strongest fetter tying her to this universe was undone from her hooves again. She was free.

But she didn’t leave. She dreamed of leaving many times, and perhaps she had. But there was so much left to do. So many of her own kind still suffered. Jackie hadn’t given a shit about Alex’s utopia city, but Ezri had, and now Athena had turned it into an undead parody of its creator’s vision. She couldn’t leave the world behind like this.

It’s always one more day. One more mission. One more injustice. One day Jackie would walk away from this place and never come back. She’d go out there, find the one she lost. There were so many worlds. One of them had to have her.

And it wasn’t as though, now that her debt was paid, she could slowly reverse everything she had done in service to Voeskender. That was not forbidden based on the terms of their agreement—but it would certainly anger him. Jackie hadn’t lived this long by angering gods. She would do her best to keep this society along its general trajectory if she could, though now there were new technical options open to her.

But when her scouts discovered a tribe of feral deer living a few miles beyond their border, she thought back to the vision she had seen—with ponies living in the trees, and deer living on the ground. Instead of leaving them alone, she sent out a few skilled anthropologists and translators to try and learn their language, and to announce their arrival.

She had very little involvement with that project beyond that—but a few weeks later and a treaty was signed. The deer might be primitive, but they didn’t want to stay that way. So that was another part of Voeskender’s vision come true.

Jackie did her best to keep up with the other aspects of their plan—there was plenty of propaganda to examine, basically just pictures and video of their most complete structures and the way bats lived. Though there were plenty on the city council who wanted to promise something like Mundi, or maybe even better, Jackie vetoed that plan.

“We’re not recruiting for the rebels,” she said, stomping one hoof at the end of a particularly frustrating meeting. “We want every citizen to love it here. We want ponies who know what they’re getting themselves into.”

“We’ll get there,” insisted Fry, the city’s leading engineer. And the one who was most insistent on their dishonesty. “It’s not really a lie. It’s just a different time horizon. We’re getting closer to life like that every day. Eventually we’ll reach it. Not in three months, but…”

“No,” she said again. “When we get more advanced, we can promise that. For now, we’re sticking with what we have. No slavery, plenty of food, warm beds. That’s more than half the bats in Mundi have.”

There was more to do than prepare the propaganda. They gathered information on the condition of Mundi, and in the process bats all across Thestralia learned what horrors had befallen those they left behind.

It was much as they’d expected. Princess “Alex” had imposed all kinds of new laws and restrictions on bats, and all the other lower-caste of workers at the bottom. What had been only informal understanding became codified in law, with lots of new security and checkpoints in Mundi’s various sections to prevent the large movements of ponies. There had been some deaths, a few riots, but not very many. Evidently those most willing to put their own necks on the line for change had been the ones to flee.

Unfortunately for them, that posed a serious problem to any kind of large-scale evacuation. Jackie considered the idea for a few weeks, toyed with the idea of making another pact with one of the gods she knew, but eventually dismissed that possibility in favor of something a little more reasonable.

She went to see an Alicorn instead.

Eureka had moved his workshop to the top of Devil’s Rock, surrounded by a near-impenetrable shield that passably resembled what the rock had once looked like. He hadn’t told Jackie this, but she didn’t need to be told. Even Alicorns needed to sleep.

So it was that she slipped her way into his sanctum. She waited until he wasn’t doing something delicate—she found him in the kitchen. Even Alicorns had to eat.

The kitchen looked like it had been stolen from one of Mundi’s luxury suites, with automatic equipment and little hydroponics boxes that automagically grew whatever you most enjoyed. Jackie walked right past the stunned Alicorn, slipped a mango out of the fridge, and tore it open with her teeth. “Hey princess. Long time no see.”

It took the Alicorn almost an entire minute to collect himself. Eureka was renowned for many things, but his coolness under pressure was not one of them.

Finally he flashed across the room, horn glowing as he pointed it at her. “I am sending you out of my house.”

“Bad idea,” she said. “Or you’re not going to know which of your experiments I sabotaged. Man that would be inconvenient, wouldn’t it? I promise you won’t figure it out before something goes really wrong.”

“You know I could kill you.”

“Maybe.” She smiled ruefully at him. “Alicorns have thought that before. I’m sure some of them could. But then you really won’t get to it in time.”

Eureka’s horn glowed menacingly for a few more seconds—then it went out, and he slumped into a sitting position. “The hell do you want, Knife?”

“Oh, nothing much.” She didn’t answer for several long moments, finishing her mango. She would’ve got another, but she’d already seen into the fridge. Eureka didn’t eat enough for it to stock two. “Just one of your inventions. Not a big deal, really. I would’ve just called you, but you won’t give me your damn number.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said, tone agitated. “What numbers do you want? If it’s math—”

She laughed. “That’s… forget it. Look, I need you to make something for me. We’re moving onto the next stage in Thestralia. We’ve been spreading information about our survival all over Axis Mundi for a few months now, but we can’t just walk people out. Damn AI has done everything she could to make leaving impossible. Lots of sections that seal themselves off, whole housing areas rigged to fill with knockout gas, that kind of shit. I need to shut the whole thing down. I figure a bit of Imperium ought to do it.”

She said it as casually as she could, though of course she realized the magnitude of what she was asking.

But just presenting as though it was easy didn’t mean it actually was. Eureka stiffened visibly, rising to his hooves and backing up a step. “Just a little bit of impossible magic, no big deal. Why don’t you do it? Being an alicorn isn’t that hard.”

She didn’t even try to explain that one to Eureka. In Jackie’s experience, the more specialized these creatures became the less normal they were. Alex had understood people because that was her domain, but Eureka was a creature of machines. She just shook her head. “I’ll help you get whatever raw materials you need. I know… everyone. But I need it in like a week so you’ll probably have to get started right away.”

The Alicorn seemed to consider that for a long time. Eventually he rose, lunch forgotten. “I considered… action. Before, when I saw conditions in Mundi. Something I could do without getting personally involved or revealing myself to Athena. She might just be a machine, but she could make my work very difficult if she wanted.”

“Would it disable the security so I can get people out?” Jackie asked. “If it does that, it’s perfect. “

“Yes. But there would be other consequences, and you would be the one to set this off. Whatever shit goes down after you flip the switch is your responsibility. I’m not going to sleep with any more deaths on my conscience.”

Jackie followed him eagerly, conscious that he still might be leading her into a trap. This was his workshop, after all. But her prediction had been right: the promise of a new technical challenge to solve was more interesting to him than getting revenge for her interference. “That’s fine. What are we doing? And what do you need me to bring?”

“Nothing,” Eureka answered, stopping in front of a vault door. The steel was thicker than a pony, and only a little rusty along the edges. There were powerful spells here too—Jackie never could’ve got through it if she was on her own. “I made the spell already, I just didn’t use it. See…” The door began to retract with a groan of ancient hydraulic equipment.

I bet this place dates back to old Thestralia. He probably had dozens of lab-assistants working with him, doing his bidding. Every Alicorn wants to be a princess.

But he wasn’t a princess anymore. As they stepped inside, Jackie recognized the sturdy archways reminiscent of decay-resistant architecture, made from solid concrete without steel reinforcement. That greatly limited what the structure could do—everything was arches and buttresses, ten times thicker than they would’ve been with steel. But without metal cores, there was nothing to rust, nothing to seed cracks. Like the ancient roman monuments before it, this was a structure made to last a thousand years.

There were lots of little cubbies, each one with active stasis spells and screens to darken their interior. Jackie wasn’t sure what most of them were, though she was positive that she could see pony-shaped outlines behind some. Considering the importance of her mission here, she didn’t pester Eureka and ask. That could wait.

Eventually they reached one near the back, and he retracted the screen with an old mechanical button. He smeared the line of a stasis spell with a hoof, and there was a little crack of air as it rushed in to fill the gap. There on a pedestal was a little metal sphere, with two separate vials protruding from the outside. One looked a little like mercury, the other a thick red blood.

Eureka levitated the object off the pedestal, passing it to her. “Athena’s network is too complex for me to explain. But her fundamental design relies on modular parts we can exploit. She uses the same high-bandwidth transmission for all tasks. Every drone, every security system, every human or pony body she controls. That network is vulnerable to feedback… once. I discovered a security flaw in a number of her drones I captured and studied. When activated, everything Athena built for fifty miles around is going to lose its shit… one time.”

“Because then she’ll know about it,” Jackie finished.

“Because Athena has never faced a technical enemy before,” Eureka said. “The HPI were dependent on her, and the Enduring Ones still give her deference. Charybdis couldn’t have hacked a graphing calculator. Fundamentally, Athena is still an AI. She spends as little resources accomplishing every task as she can. Security measures for her network would be computationally and hardware expensive. So she makes due with simple systems designed to ward off aspiring young hackers. But once her program realizes that there are others who will exploit her weakness, she will devote resources to preventing it.”

“So this only works once,” Jackie said, catching the device in her wings. “Fine, fine. We don’t actually need to be able to do it again to make her look incompetent.”

“Not just her,” Eureka said. “My original reason for this particular method of attack was discovering that the other Alicorns are being impersonated. Their bodies are as vulnerable to this as any other system. I planned on revealing her fraud to the world.”

Chapter 11: Borealis

Everything had to be perfect.

Jackie knew that her chances of pulling this off were remote—there were too many pieces moving, too many ways it could go wrong.

But she wasn’t the sort of pony who spent her immortality locked in a safe tower somewhere, living the same way century after century. She’d already done that, done it until she’d been driven to near insanity with boredom. Living safely maximized years, but what good was one empty, lifeless decade of existence where she learned nothing and the world went to shit?

It wasn’t hard to find a date for their attack. Mundi had festivals every few months, each one a constructed fantasy to keep the population in line. Their target was “Gratitude Day,” where they celebrated all those who had sacrificed to protect Axis Mundi from Charybdis.

The holiday didn’t really matter, though it was convenient that it involved fireworks.

Jackie couldn’t bring the previous members of the rebellion, at least not many of them. Athena had grown more watchful in her ways, more oppressive for a move just like this. Jackie didn’t think the program was behind the assassination attempts, but that didn’t mean she wanted to see her society disrupted.

But she could bring a few of the most important. Faking identification was really just a matter of finding enough volunteers with legitimate credentials and swapping places with them.

So it was that Jackie found herself serving food at a basement-level dispensary in the upper city, wearing a stupid paper hat and stupid paper gloves over her hooves. Ponies walked past one at a time, barely even noticing her as they placed their orders and returned to their lives. She was only called a bug-eater three times during her shift, which seemed fairly egalitarian compared to her past experience.

There could be no communication with the others until after she set everything off, so there wasn’t a chance for her to find out if everything was still going according to plan.

She heard the procession making its way across the city, closer and closer with every moment. As the parade drew nearer, the street outside her dispensary packed with ponies who weren’t here to order.

Jackie covertly prodded her tray of vegetarian chili, checking on her bomb. It was still there, wrapped in thin plastic and buried at the bottom of a dish too disgusting for anyone to eat.

As the parade drew closer, she heard Alex’s voice come on over the loudspeaker, or at least Athena’s imitation of it. The citizens of Mundi were all young, they were children. But now that Jackie knew what to look for, she was positive she could’ve identified this fake.

“Everypony, come together and remember our dead! Remember their sacrifices! Remember them, so we can keep them with us in a world that no longer has them. Let us celebrate that they lived.” And on and on she went, the same trite nonsense as any public figure would’ve been spouting on an occasion like this.

No more wearing my friend’s reputation like a corpse-puppet. Or any of those others. She could see the massive float in the distance, bright gold and hovering over the pavement. There were thrones for all the world’s alicorns there, and all of them were filled. Even Eureka, or a pony made to approximate him. Jackie had never seen the real one with a clean mane instead of a total disaster, though. No wonder you wanted this to end. She stole your face too.

Jackie could’ve set off the bomb at any moment. The range would encompass the whole city, she didn’t need to be right near the fake Alicorns. But she did need to make sure ponies surrounded them. So many ponies that Athena couldn’t make them all disappear.

There’s no telling what this does to their society. But that’s not my fucking problem. Athena should’ve thought about what might happen before making Archive’s city eat itself alive.

Activating the bomb was simple. She didn’t even have to remove the plastic, just found the switch and flipped it on. Her food tray—and all the others besides—froze solid in an instant.

And not just that. A few seconds later, and it seemed like the whole world had frozen. Groans of distant atmospheric processors as they went briefly still rumbled over the street. Lights on every nearby building flickered, then went out. Ponies started screaming, reaching for their phones and personal computers—but those were all passively charged by the grid now, and so they didn’t respond either.

The flying float didn’t crash down to the ground dramatically, or explode in a shower of sparks and bloody pretend-Alicorn parts. It just settled gently into emergency mode, landing on its lifting struts. The ponies on board, however, had started completely losing their minds.

Jackie was glad she wasn’t up there—she hadn’t considered exactly how Athena’s pretend bodies might work, or what they would do once they were severed from her network.

The answer appeared to be go violently insane. Instead of resting on their regal thrones, or answering the begging police to step forward and calm the crowd, the imposter Alex leaped sideways at a nearby streetlight and started crunching through the sturdy plastic. Meanwhile, Eureka decided that a few members of the crowd were apparently too close, because he lunged right off the edge of the float and into a brawl.

The parade was mostly cordoned by police drones, which had all fallen uselessly to the ground where they stood. The handful of police ponies on the scene were swept away by the terrified crowd.

Jackie reached under the counter, pulling out a radio that had been hidden there. She switched it on, and immediately heard other voices reporting on the status of things in the lower city. But she wasn’t responsible for that part. Lavender Eclipse would be down there mobilizing the evacuation. “Fry, how’s my PA?”

“Speakers are in place, boss,” he answered, after a brief pause. “But you should go soon. One of the nodes is already attracting attention. Won’t work forever.”

“Got it.” With a little dream magic and a little of what Ezri had taught her, she took an illusion for herself that resembled a respected, upper-class unicorn. The kind of mare who would be trusted by the movers and shakers of Mundi. She crossed the intervening distance, appearing on the float alongside the mad Alicorn copies.

She lifted the radio to her mouth, and spoke in the same tone of authority she might’ve used to command her own population.

The riot wasn’t really going yet—it was still confusion, the population desperate for anything that might return them to order. She had to capitalize on this opportunity, or else the violence would start and nopony would listen.

“They’re imposters!” she yelled, dragging the copy of Oracle off his hooves with a conjured tentacle. She hoped it would look convincingly like unicorn magic, because her illusion didn’t give her that. “This whole time! They’ve been Athena the whole time! Look, everypony! The city shuts down, and so do they! We’re letting a machine rule us!”

That didn’t seem to be what the police were expecting. Gasps echoed through the crowd, along with a few more shouts. Demanding they take the “Alicorns” to a doctor for scans, the rational ones. Some were just calling for lynchings.

Most just ran.

The police were in this last group, though instead of running away from her, every one of them that was near the float charged straight at it.

Jackie slipped away into the melee, not stopping long enough to fight. Whether or not they actually succeeded in unseating Athena wasn’t really the purpose of the mission. Her network ruled the whole city, so it wasn’t as though the ponies here could just throw her off. Someone had to keep the cars driving, the farms growing, the air circulating.

But that wasn’t her problem anymore. Jackie abandoned her disguise and vanished into the lower city. If the upper city had been confusion, once she got underground she was surrounded by the stench of desperation and terrible fear. She passed a police checkpoint where a handful of police had been beaten to death, surrounded by dozens of bat corpses. Glass broke, people screamed, and families cowered.

“How are we doing?” Jackie asked into the radio, keeping her head down and eyes alert. Most of the weapons in Mundi, even the illegal ones, required the power grid to work, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get stabbed. Jackie wasn’t immortal.

“Gateway is green,” Eclipse answered. “Got a night market full of frightened bats here, more on their way all the time. Eureka isn’t sure how long the network will keep it open.”

There would be no Dreamlands shortcut this time—Jackie wasn’t getting herself indebted to another god so soon after getting free. They’d have to use a more dangerous method.

“Do it,” she instructed. “Keep the militia ready on the other side. Might be we get some wannabe heroes coming through with our refugees. We’ll toss them back when we’re done getting the good people.”

Two crowds formed in the darkness below Mundi—those fleeing into the upper city and its ruling class, and those moving down. Jackie was a little surprised as she joined one group of ponies obviously on their way to the night market.

“It’s a better life,” some stallion was saying. Not a bat, surprisingly enough. A unicorn, though his fur was as smudged with dirt as any Datamine worker Jackie had ever met. “Not strangling us with rules and taxes. It’ll be worth it.”

“I’m not sure.” His wife, or girlfriend, or something, a foal on her back instead of saddlebags full of possessions. She had to walk a little slower for that reason. “They have a princess too. It won’t be that different than living here. Same crap, different flag.”

“They have a democracy there,” Jackie said, copying the unicorn’s lower city accent almost perfectly. She probably would’ve done better if she still had Ezri around to practice on. “If you think you could do a better job than their governor, you should run against her. Maybe you could.” Maybe she wants to give up being in charge as soon as there’s another option.

“Really?” The refugees sounded receptive for a few seconds, at least until they saw that she was a bat. Then the stallion’s tone darkened to suspicion. “It’s probably not for real. We’re supposed to be a democracy too. But the only votes that really count are the ones who vote for the right thing. And nopony can check if something’s going wrong, because Athena runs it all. You can’t question a god.”

They slowed as they neared a police checkpoint, with swiveling mounted guns set into the wall. Instead of following them, the guns sat silent and still, with the police in the booth shouting at their screen. There had been a plastic barricade across the doorway, but it was gone now.

There was more evidence of struggle here. A few more bodies off to one side, along with bits of police armor laying bashed apart on the ground. They took their own injured away to the hospital and left these ponies to die. At least they had good deaths.

“We have a problem,” Eureka’s voice came in over radio, loud enough that a few members of the group Jackie had joined stared at her. Unlike the others who were actually here, he didn’t sound even slightly distorted by distance. “Athena just launched several somethings from Olympus. You have… seventeen minutes until they land.”

“Shit,” Jackie muttered, ears flattening. “She’s attacking the city?”

“I don’t… think so.” Eureka didn’t sound confident. “They’re not very dense. It’s not the rods of god. Telescope says it’s mostly silicon and steel. Some kind of… backup transmitter, maybe. Something to get her network up again.”

“Who are you?” asked the unicorn with the foal on her back. “Who are you talking to?”

“Thanks, Eureka.” She turned away from the mare, stepping to the side of the crowd so they would flow past her. But her group didn’t move on, they stopped to listen. A bat near the back was pointing at her, whispering something. She couldn’t hear it, and she didn’t really try to listen.

“Lavender, we have seventeen minutes until security comes back up. Open those doors as wide as you can and get ponies moving.”

The bat on the other side swore loudly into the radio. “I thought Eureka said we had hours.”

“Apparently not,” Jackie said. “Just… gallop them through if you have to. We’ll get these ponies out. Somehow.”

Chapter 12: Perotis

“Alright, alright, think.” Jackie slipped sideways into the air, but not actually traveling anywhere. She stepped into the dream, and slowed time down around her to a trickle. That was one of the advantages to the sleeping world—time was fickle. Years could pass in a single evening, or else eight hours could feel like seconds. Obviously the former was more useful to her here.

She floated through the void between dreams, conjuring herself an environment more out of instinct than desire. A model of the city appeared around her, the towers of Mundi the same scale they might’ve been if she were gigantic. The megalopolis towered over the ancient desert, not so far from the pyramids. But thousands of great pyramids could’ve fit inside this city.

It hadn’t been called the last city for no reason.

“Seventeen minutes. Until she lands,” she repeated to herself. “How do we stop her from segmenting everyone once she does? How do we make sure they can keep flowing?”

“You have to disable the hardware,” said a helpful voice. Hat Trick appeared in the void beside her, not drifting so much as standing. There was no floor, but that didn’t seem to bother her. “Athena can’t take back machines that we’ve broken into little pieces.”

“That… makes sense,” Jackie said, sounding unconvinced. “But we don’t have demo teams in place to attack each target. We don’t even really know what we’re looking for! Mundi was built to last.”

“So figure it out.”

She stared down at the model city, eyes narrowing as she considered their options. Jackie had nearly unlimited time to plot and plan—it was only the execution that would be limited. Anything that required her to contact the outside—sending messages, instructions, teleporting around, all that would cost her precious real-world seconds. As fast as time could flow in the Dreamlands, it still moved forward.

Jackie spent subjective hours pacing around the model. She started peeling away layers—the towers first, since they would be empty of any interested bats by now. At first the size of the problem seemed completely overwhelming. The model contained only security measures Jackie knew about. There were already enough ways to isolate everypony.

It was unfortunate that disabling Athena’s grip on the city meant the transit systems weren’t working, or else they could have easily got the bats to the night market in time. But we aren’t trying to evacuate everypony.

All the while Hat Trick watched her, expression varying flavors of smug and concerned from moment to moment. But either she didn’t have any helpful ideas of her own, or she wanted Jackie to come up with the solution herself. She couldn’t have said which was the most infuriating.

Eventually she was left with just the night-market itself. A single massive chamber, with a thousand ponies packed inside it at this moment and more flooding in. This was their only portal out, and it was the point that Jackie needed to keep clear.

So if I’m Athena, how do I stop ponies from getting in?

That was when she had it. “Alright.” She sat back on her haunches, breathing a little more easily now. “I think I know what to do.”

“That’s good,” Hat Trick said. “I was getting worried you wouldn’t.”

Jackie ignored that remark. “We can’t stop all of Athena’s security measures. This city was designed to resist an invasion in every neighborhood and in every building. That fight was lost before we even got here. Buuuuut, I don’t think we need to. Like all the defenses targeting living areas, that’s a red herring. Everypony who is coming is long out of their homes by now. We can’t keep every security door closed, but there aren’t really that many.”

She enlarged the model with a little effort of will, highlighting a few important hallways. “All the traffic in the city uses these. The transit rail, obviously, but that’s down. And the foot-paths. I think we can count on everypony who cares about leaving already being in one of these main thoroughfares. They don’t seal as easy as side-passages, there’s only a few places with blast doors that could lock them off.”

They appeared, eight points spreading out from the night market. “Here’s my plan. We get any volunteer engineers, along with our own small team, and we hit these spreading out from the night market. We blow the control nodes on each one with whatever explosives we can teleport in.”

Hat Trick was silent for a long time. She rose, walked around the model, then sat back down again. “What about Athena? She could shut down the environmental systems, couldn’t she?”

Jackie shrugged. “Not really. This isn’t a starship, it isn’t designed to isolate. These corridors aren’t pressure tight. If she somehow overrode the air circulators, it wouldn’t do enough damage nearly fast enough to slow us down. There’s enough air just floating around to keep us evacuating until we’re done.”

“What about her security robots? If whatever she’s sending overrides Eureka’s spell, won’t she get those back?”

“Probably,” Jackie admitted. “I don’t think there’s much we can do about that. They’re going to be harassing the back of our group, trying to close in and cut us off from as many people as possible. We aren’t prepared to fight them. And they’re too spread-out to sabotage now, so don’t think about that either. I already considered it.”

Hat Trick sighed. “I feel like… we might have acted prematurely. I don’t think we’ll have an opportunity like this again. If we want to get bats out again, either Athena has to let them out, or it will be a war.”

“Maybe they’ll want to get rid of them,” Jackie suggested helpfully. “Things only got worse after we broke out the first time. I assume she’ll make it even worse after today. Do all our recruiting for us. Hopefully not… it’s not like I want the ponies here to suffer anymore than they have. But we don’t have the resources to house a hundred million. If we tried to destroy Mundi, we would be guilty of more murders than Athena.”

“Pity,” Hat Trick said. “Division of responsibilities, eh? I’ll find the explosives we need, you get bats into place to deploy them. We’ll cast the broadest net we can.”

“Even if we end up with too many?” Jackie asked, though she never would’ve dared suggest this fear to Lavender. “Things have been bad down there, worse than we thought. Athena has started separating families, punishing ponies for no reason… it’s like she’s trying to ferment a revolt. What if a million ponies end up in New Thestralia?”

“What if indeed,” Hat Trick repeated. “It’s as though our governor would have to deal with it, wouldn’t she? It’s a good thing we have one of the oldest and most experienced ponies there is.”

“Don’t.” Jackie ground one hoof against the invisible floor. “Don’t push your luck, kid.”

The bat vanished with a giggle, leaving Jackie alone with her map. She was in no rush to return—so long as she was still here, she could go as slowly and carefully as she needed to. She took what felt like hours more to plan, racking her memory for the names and faces of any bats with even a suggestion of engineering competence.

She took her time, writing everything down on a set of carefully demarcated packets. She had known nothing at all of how the emergency blast doors worked, or how she could disable their control nodes. So she cut herself a few windows back into the physical world, burning a few precious seconds for a look.

“It’s a good plan,” said a small voice from the other side of the room. Right about the moment Jackie had piled up her eight packets of instructions and was holding her knife, ready to cut her way back to the physical world. “There’s just one thing you’re missing.”

“You.” Jackie set the knife down gently on a model tower, then met Alex’s brown eyes. The alicorn hadn’t even bothered changing back into a land form—she swam through the air around the model with a few nervous flicks of a white and gray tail. “I thought you ran away from your job. What are you doing here now?”

“Oh. I’m not,” said Alex, circling closer to her, shrinking down to the size of a seahorse and settling between two of the nearest skyscrapers. “I’m a figment. You just created me.” She sounded embarrassed about it, or maybe embarrassed on Jackie’s behalf. Like she had noticed a blackhead on her face and didn’t want anyone else around to hear her.

“I don’t stress-dreamwalk anymore,” Jackie insisted, indignant. “And certainly not dream Alicorns. Your disguise is full of shit. I don’t even know how you got here. Are there dreamwalking fish?” Getting a good look at her wasn’t easy. She kept dodging behind the model, so that Jackie couldn’t see more than the flash of a tail or a bit of a fin, maybe an eye.

Then she groaned, and vanished the model completely. The fish was suddenly floating in open air, and Jackie got a good look at her with her magical senses. She could follow her back to the dreaming Alex—though she wouldn’t yet. Whatever she was playing at, Jackie would punish her for having the audacity to waste her time during such a critical moment.

There was no dreamer. The fish was just a figment. Well… maybe not quite. Most figments were wisps of personality, illusions that were animated by the dreamer looking at them. Like little mirrors that reflected the personality of the dreamer back. It took a little scrap of soul to make them something more, the kind of spell that took the greatest unicorns months to perfect. Or Jackie, who had apparently done it by accident.

Jackie slumped back into a sitting position, dropping her folded packets to the ground beside her. “I forbid you to tell the real Alex I did this,” she said. “She’ll never let me forget.” There were worse things Jackie could’ve summoned to torment her.

Of course, even a dream-Alicorn could be banished. She could return this creature to whatever corner of the void she’d accidently dragged her from.

She didn’t, though. Figments might be wisps and stardust, but this one was independent. Killing her would be like murdering a real pony.

“I don’t actually have to listen to you,” said the little Alicorn, flipping over in the air and backing up. “I’m real. I mean… I’m not the Alex. But I’m a real me. But you made me for a reason, and I want to—”

Novice mistake, to think that Jackie needed physical proximity inside a dream of her own creation. Jackie focused her attention briefly on the fish, who appeared before her with a pop like a teleport. Jackie conjured a little collar for her neck, along with a chain that led to one of her own hooves. “Are you sure about that?” she asked. “Go ahead, try to magic your way out of that. Won’t work.”

She did try. A dozen little spells, including trying to return to normal size. None worked now that Jackie had bound her. After thrashing about madly she slumped onto her back in the air, apparently breathing heavy. Or whatever the equivalent of breathing was for seaponies. “Why… I’m trying to help you, jerk! You’re really mean.”

“Then tell me why you’re here,” Jackie said. “Then you can give me your word you’re never going to talk to your real-life counterpart, and maybe I won’t lock you in a tiny bowl. Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Athena’s pretend Alicorns,” squeaked the little fish, glaring at her now. “They’re like drones. If she gets her hardware back, she’ll get them too.”

“So?” Jackie shrugged one shoulder. “She can fool Mundi, she can’t fool the Supernal. No soul, no Imperium.”

“Maybe not,” not-Alex agreed, sounding increasingly frustrated. “But they can still do magic. Half the infrastructure of Mundi is Thaumoelectrical. That’s a lot of power for the smartest wizard in the universe to use against you. How easy do you think it would be for her to close your portal home?”

“Oh.”

Chapter 13: Occultus

“I can’t kill them,” Jackie started, before the copy of Alex could try to swim away again. “I was right up there on the stage with those bodies, I could’ve easily wrecked their shit. But that would spoil all the hard work we did to undermine everypony’s trust in Athena. If we make them disappear, then she can use that to justify a war. Are you trying to make Thestralia go to war?”

The little fish raised her forelegs defensively. “I’m not… trying to do anything, Jackie. Your subconscious created me to remind you of the things you forgot. What you do with that… well, I should probably go…”

“No.” Jackie splashed her down into a little fishbowl, then summoned back her model and settled the bowl onto a tower. She watched the figment struggle to escape, entirely without success. She’d trapped her with physical laws this time. “You’re staying here until I figure this out.”

She leaned right up to the glass, glaring. “I can’t kill them, because then Athena gets a war. What do we do instead?”

The fish seemed to think about it, though it was hard to tell for sure exactly what a seapony was thinking at that size. “We could… try to convince her to stop? Maybe talk to Athena directly. Bluff her? Could you get her to believe you’ve got a real bomb?”

“No,” Jackie huffed. “She knows I’d never nuke most of the population. And even if it worked, doing that would make me way more than a nuisance. She’d have to kill me at that point. Only reason she hasn’t tried already is because I’m not a rogue element. I’m so predictable she probably let me bumble into this whole fucking mess.”

Were there any more gods for her to supplicate? Mystic Rune could probably stop Athena if they needed to, he’d helped build her in the first place. But he didn’t dream anymore, and was probably halfway across the universe by now. Voeskender was no friend of technology, but actually fighting the infrastructure of Mundi would be difficult for him. Spirits were about belief, after all, and there were a hundred million ponies who still believed in their city. For a little while, anyway.

“We can’t kill her Alicorns,” Jackie said again, gathering up her packets of instructions. “The spirit gods would be weak as shit if they tried to interfere with civilization. Our own Alicorns are out of reach. But we’ve got a lot of strength too. A whole dead civilization’s worth.”

Jackie knew what to do. She turned away from her model, raising her dagger and slicing back into the world. “Wait, don’t just leave me—” She just left her.

Back into the physical she went, taking one quick glance before vanishing to reappear in front of somepony else with more instructions. She didn’t stay to answer their questions, just kept moving and trusted to the competence of the rebels. She had no choice—there was too little time to do otherwise.

She had no watch, but her own sense of time told her she now had about fifteen minutes before Athena’s solution landed. Less time than I would’ve hoped for. But there was nothing she could do about it.

“We have bigger problems,” she told Lavender Eclipse, crouched low in the night market as ponies flowed past her. She could see the clear outline of the portal in the distance, with daylight streaming in from the other side. “While you guys keep the other doors open, I’ll make sure this one stays.”

Lavender saluted, taking her packet of instructions. “If you’re sure, Dreamknife.”

She didn’t even respond to that, cutting her way through the universe back to Thestralia.

There, at the base of City Hall, the connections of the Arcane Network fed into an arch of metal and rusting iron, forming an invisible slice in reality through the air. There were hundreds of ponies here, with tables of supplies and information. Jackie took one look to make sure no Mundi police were killing her people, before vanishing again deeper into the tree.

The heartwood pulsed all around her, a heartbeat almost as fast as a hummingbird. Eureka stood in the center, surrounded by his own crystal equipment as he kept the portal open. Jackie had no idea how it worked or what he was really doing—but it didn’t really matter. This was out of her purview.

“You’re here?” He raised an eyebrow, though he didn’t actually look away from the round panel of crystals and broken screens he was using to keep the spell going. “Aren’t you supposed to be redeeming our good name?”

“Well… yes,” she said, settling down right in front of him. “But Athena’s reacting quicker than we thought. She’s probably gonna have control back in… maybe fourteen minutes?”

“You don’t think you’ll have everypony through by then?”

She shook her head. “There are… a lot more than we thought. What are we supposed to tell them; ‘sorry, stay enslaved for a little while?’ I’ve been where they are, not a chance.” She walked over to his control panel, though she didn’t get close enough to touch it. She could tell from the way her fur stood on end that there was enough magic running through this room to barbecue an elephant.

“So I’m dealing with it, but the one thing that we need to worry about is Athena trying to shut down this portal. She’s about to have five really powerful unicorn-level bodies, and she knows the academics of magic as well as Archive ever did. She won’t be able to do Imperial stuff like you, but…”

Eureka sighed. “I liked it better when she thought I was dead.” He leaned back in his chair, glaring at nothing in particular. “They’re going to retaliate. I hope you realize that. If you don’t give them a victory—if you don’t let them feel like they won, they’re going to get back at us somehow. You still want me to try and hold the portal open?”

We could’ve assassinated one pony, and it wouldn’t have blown up this bad. Jackie was beginning to wish she’d given appeasement more of a go. But the City Council had demanded action. Maybe that action would be war. Way more than one pony is dead now. Mostly on our side. But they’ll blame us for that. We’ll be a security risk. This is already enough of an excuse for war.

She briefly considered the idea of killing the Alicorn puppets. If Mundi might already go to war over this anyway, there was no sense in not doing as much damage as possible. Except that’s a guarantee. There are loads of ponies who still worship them as gods. Even bats. Granted, most bats she’d met worshiped a pony they didn’t know was based on her. Or worse, on Artifice.

“Yes, we’re keeping it open. I don’t care if you have to drain every last drop of magic from every stockpile left on the network. We won’t get another chance like this. Might as well save as many ponies as we can.”

Eureka nodded. “May you ever be the one to make the decisions—and bear the weight of their consequences.” He rose to his hooves then, and suddenly every spare crystal piled up around him rose up. Magic began to roar through the room, through the living heart of City Hall.

“Get to the gate!” Eureka shouted, over the growing din “I’ll keep the power fed from here, but you can’t let one of her puppets physically touch the runes. Athena could burn their lives to shut it down, and there’s jack shit I can do about it from this end.”

Jackie nodded, slipping back into the world of dreams. She found a fishbowl waiting for her, and an annoyed little Alicorn tapping on the glass. “Couldn’t you just let me go?” she sung in her tiny voice. “I’ve already helped you. More than I should’ve with the way you treated me. Just let me swim off and I won’t bother you again.”

Jackie passed down the thousand steps that led to the doorway of greater slumber, then pushed it open. Even at a crawl, her time was counting down.

The bowl kept pace with her, though it had no means of locomotion. Jackie could leave it here, but it would be kinder to just kill the little figment. “I’ve only created three figments that became sapient in my life did you know that? Each one was for a very specific reason. Each one of them was engineered so that it wouldn’t grow out of hand. A friend today is an enemy tomorrow. The Dreamlands shift and twist even the best intentions into nightmares. I can’t let you go until I’m certain you won’t be that way, and right now I really don’t have the time.”

Jackie arrived in the enchanted wood, muttered the secret zoog passwords, and didn’t drink from any of the moonlight wine. The predatory zoogs eyed her companion as she flew, but Jackie shook them off. Even a figment deserved a better end than sushi.

“Where are you going?” asked the tiny voice beside her. “This isn’t the quickest way back to Axis Mundi. We’re way too far from civilized dreams.”

“Yes.” Jackie’s ears flattened. “How observant of you. A regular little dreamwalker.”

“I wouldn’t be little if you didn’t force me.”

She ignored that, along with the temptation to just drop the bowl and leave the zoogs to their own devices. But it was a near thing. “There’s only one surefire way to stop her Alicorns from a war,” Jackie finally said. She lifted into the air as soon as she left the forest, searching for the right star. “We prove they’re imposters. Bring back the real thing.”

“She’ll never come,” said the little voice. “I know her. I know what Athena made her promise. Athena thinks she’s a god now. She wanted a thousand years and a day. The real me won’t break her word, no matter what.”

Jackie swore loudly, coming to a dead stop in the air. She didn’t question where the figment had heard such things—likely Jackie herself had known them, in the wisps of overheard dreams from a thousand sources. Of all those who lived, only Athena was immune to her prying. She didn’t even have a mind as Jackie conceived it. Let alone a soul.

“But there’s another way. It’s so obvious I can see why you missed it.”

Jackie held the bowl right up to her face, glaring inside at its shimmering occupant. “I swear if you don’t tell me whatever you’re thinking right now I’m going to find a hungry griffon somewhere in here and watch them eat you.”

It was a lie, though dangerously close to the truth. Ponies out in the world of ordinary time were dying, or would be soon. Unless she did something.

“It’s obvious,” the figment said again, her tone infuriatingly smug. The real Alex had never talked like that. “Athena has been using fake Alicorns to control Mundi for more than a century. Why can’t you do the same thing?” She swam around the tank, glaring up at her. “I’m basically her. I can’t dreamwalk…” She smacked her head into the glass then, for emphasis. “But I can do magic. I can speak in her voice, and confuse the hell out of their police.”

Jackie let herself drift back down to the forest, no longer searching for that little star of distant dreamers. Maybe the figment was right—she didn’t need the real thing.

Jackie might not have the power of an Alicorn. But neither did Athena. It was really just about who could make the more convincing fake.

“She’ll know what I’m doing,” Jackie said. “Or she’ll figure it out eventually.”

“So what?” asked the figment, flipping around in an eager aquatic summersault. “None of those pretend Alicorns are bats. And none of the bats are going to help her fight your dream-magic. They’re all on your side.

“But if I help you…” the speaker went on. “You have to promise to set me free. I want you to swear it to me. This is the proof I’m not dangerous. If this works.”

Jackie grumbled under her breath, searching desperately for other options. But the figment was probably right. “Fine.” She extended a hoof towards the glass. “But only if you don’t tell the real one about you.”

“Fine,” not-Alex agreed. “Now take us back to Mundi. We can’t have much time left.”

Chapter 14: Pallidus

She arrived to explosions. Compared to the size of Mundi, they were distant and feeble, barely even shaking the ground. Whatever Hat Trick had found for their ponies to use obviously wasn’t meant to bring the city down on their heads.

But it didn’t need to. She didn’t poke in to look and see how they’d done. They would know the result of that soon enough.

Jackie stepped out of the shadows beside the massive portal, searching out the little wrapped box that contained the spell itself. As she had instructed, there were a pair of resistance bats here, armed with rifles and keeping the crowd from getting too close by accident.

The night market itself was a huge vaulted room, large enough for fifty thousand ponies at least to spread out across it. There were numerous little makeshift stalls, all the accoutrements of ponies who lived their lives on the edge of society. From the look of things, plenty of these illegal stalls had been packed into bundles, and many of the others had been trampled.

There were so many ponies in the room that the only thing keeping the air fresh was the gigantic archway through to New Thestralia. She could see the shadow of City Hall just outside, the green fields and spectacular Thaumic ash trees with their clinging buildings. Ponies moved towards them in something only one step removed from stampede.

There had been resistance ponies keeping order here before. But she’d sent them all away to bomb the checkpoints, and now it was just the desperate, the dispossessed. She could see a few scuffles spread throughout the room, and the bloody faces and coats attesting to others.

In the distance, a line of police was trying in vain to stem the tide of evacuating bats. They brandished stun-pistols in the air, and the crowd backed away. Apparently they don’t know those don’t work right now.

“How long?” Jackie asked the nearest bat. “Athena’s retaliation must be close.”

“Two minutes,” answered the rebel, a young bat with a bandana over his face and a rifle propped up on his shoulder like a trophy. “How’d you get here? Shouldn’t you be… god, you’re real.”

“I’m real,” she agreed. “And you need a shave.” She glanced over her shoulder, into what would look like empty air. “Now’s your cue, ‘Alex’.”

The air behind her transformed in a flash of magic, bright enough that the whole room stopped to stare. The crowd gathered around the edges, those deliberating on the fence, all stared as a wall of water formed in the air beside one of the portals.

Nice illusion, Jackie thought to herself. We’ve already got one portal. This one will seem plausible too.

Through the water swam a pony, a pony in bright white armor that gave her an extra set of legs, along with bright gold filigree around the edges. Where the figment had been tiny, she now towered over Jackie and everypony else in the room. Water dripped off her body as she walked out in front of the portal, her green mane shimmering where the touch of necromancy had bleached it.

She could see the transformation on the crowd—loyalist merchants protecting their stalls started to cheer. Police surged forward with new confidence, cutting off the lines of ponies. The flow of bats into the portal stopped dead, and many fearful eyes settled on Jackie’s prop.

Don’t disappoint me. This is your crowd.

“Ponies of Mundi!” she said, her voice booming through the hall. Another simple illusion, though from the feedback squawking from Jackie’s radio she guessed the figment was using radio as well. “The suffering of my children calls me back from the depths of space. My old friend, the ancient and powerful and wise Knife of Dreams—”

I think they get it. If you think saying stupid complements will stop you from being a goldfish if you screw this up—

“Traveled across the void to me, bringing a terrible truth. I learned that my brothers and sisters and I had been impersonated—that the artificial intelligence Athena has been using us to control the world.” Her horn flashed, and the lights briefly came back on. The air circulators started humming to life again, along with the neon signs from the nearby stalls. Another illusion, though this one probably looked like she had control of the city. As the real Alex obviously would have.

“You there! Servants of the peace—put your weapons down. Today we remember our history in gratitude. What do you think your great grandparents died for? Your right to keep these bats underground, risking their lives in Datamines and sweeping your garbage? No! As the rightful ruler of Axis Mundi, I order you all to put your weapons down and let them pass. If you hate these ponies so much, let them go to somewhere better.”

There was a rumble from up above them, growing gradually to a roar. Jackie recognized the sound—something was air breaking from a high-g descent over Mundi. It would be landing soon. As for what it did once it got here…

The lights started to flicker, coming on underneath the illusory ones. Fake Alex adjusted her illusion, but Jackie could see the discrepancy. And she probably wouldn’t be the only one.

But that didn’t matter now. “Ponies of Axis Mundi!” bellowed the pretend Alicorn, so loud her voice boomed through the Night Market. “The pretender returns! She will try to take the city back from you! Don’t let her! Anypony who can hear me, anypony who yearns for freedom—come through this gateway to a better life! The powerful, noble Dreamknife is my appointed successor. She is a better governor than any soulless machine ever could be.”

A few of her rebellion fighters started cheering. The crowd took up their cry, and soon the whole chamber was booming with it. Ponies surged forward towards the portal faster than they had before, and this time it didn’t look like there was any danger of them trampling each other. Riot police had put down their weapons—some were even charging with the crowd.

The portal flickered once, and behind her Jackie could see as the spell began to glow bright red. The paper wrapped around its metal shell caught fire and started to spark, with the metal not far behind.

Jackie gestured the rebellion soldiers away. “Back home,” she said. “You’ve done good work. I’ll take care of this.”

On the other side of the portal, lightning arched off the boughs of City Hall, lightning that was deep green and as wide across as the portal itself.

There was a brief scream from the front of the crowd, as ponies about to enter were probably terrified out of their wits by the portal briefly closing in front of them. But then the light got brighter still, fed by the latent magical energy stored in the Arcane Network.

The portal didn’t close. “It’s safe!” she called, loud enough that it would carry over the most frightened pony below. “But we won’t have forever! There are lots of ponies who need to go. The faster you go, the more of your neighbors and friends we can save.”

The crowd hesitated in front of the barrier, until a child slipped under the legs of a hesitating pony and through to the grass on the other side. The portal didn’t flicker again. They started feeding through.

Jackie remained and watched them come, pouring in from open passages all around the market. Not just the typical rebellion bats she might’ve expected, but plenty of other ponies as well. Ponies in fancy clothes, carrying modern hardware.

Shit. It wasn’t supposed to work that well. It was fine to tell Eureka that she would deal with the numbers, whatever they were. It would be another thing to deal with two million ponies.

Nothing for it now. Can’t turn back.

Above them, the rumbles of activity as the city came back on were constant. Jackie listened over the radio as one of her teams was separated by an improperly sabotaged door, and another was brought down by gunfire from newly-awakened security robots. “Everypony, back here as quick as you can!” she yelled. “Or escape into the Dreamlands! Just don’t stay here!”

By the time Lavender Eclipse arrived, nearly ten more minutes had passed and the crowd from her direction had slowed to a trickle. Ponies were still so thick that they passed through the portal twenty at a time, so thick that their breath kept the wind blasting out of the opening.

Lavender stared dumbfounded at “Alex” as she approached, but she didn’t do anything stupid. The seapony Alicorn wasn’t giving any more grand speeches, but she was urging the ponies on through the gate. And her promptings seemed to be working, because the crowd kept moving. Through exclamations of relief, tears of joy, expressions of nervous fear, but they kept coming.

“The drones are shutting everything out,” Eclipse said, wiping a little blood from her brow. Didn’t look like it was hers. “Might be… a minute behind me. How many do you think we got?”

Jackie lowered her voice to a whisper. “Maybe… half a million?”

The bat’s eyes went so wide the color vanished from them. “What the hell are we supposed to do about that?”

Jackie only shrugged, mouthing the word ‘later.’ It was going to be a problem for their aspiring nation to deal with, right up there with the invasion they might be facing from Axis Mundi. But they had to survive today first. “Take your people home,” Jackie instructed. “I’ll confront them here. Hold the door open as long as possible.”

“You mean fight an Alicorn? That sounds a lot like suicide.”

“Pretend Alicorn,” Jackie corrected. “And I’ve got one too. Two on… five?”

“Maybe you should shut it now.” Lavender leaned in close, whispering into her ear. “We already have too many. These ponies waited until the end, probably means they’re less sure than the ones we already have. We can’t evacuate the whole city. Eventually you have to shut the door and leave the rest behind.”

“I know,” Jackie said, louder than she meant to. “Get yourself to safety.”

“What if they follow us? Your militia won’t be able to handle these numbers alone, let alone five Alicorns. If they kill you and come through to Mundi, we’re fucked.”

“They won’t,” Jackie said. “They’re still recovering from Eureka’s bomb. If things really go to shit he can cut the cord and they won’t have their control signal. Just make sure you kill them before Athena wipes the crud out of her mainframe.”

“I don’t like it,” Lavender said. Then she did it anyway.

But as it turned out, she was wrong about the enemy that would be coming. Every side-door to the night market opened at the same moment, and drones poured in. There were thousands of them, almost as many as there were ponies left in the room. Yet even all these were a tiny fraction of the robotic might Athena could wield.

“It’s a shame you insisted on this so soon,” Athena said from over her shoulder. Jackie rolled on instinct, shielding herself with a wing. But the drone who spoke wasn’t aiming for her. The spell exploded in a shower of metal and sparks, spraying the ponies all around with deadly shrapnel.

Jackie hadn’t even seen the drone approach, how had it gotten behind her like that?

The portal went out, and suddenly so did all the lights.

“I would’ve given you another generation to ferment tensions,” said Athena, her voice as emotionless and calm as ever. “A generation to prepare. But wiping out an inferior evil can inspire greatness too.”

All around the room, Athena’s drones started shooting. Terrible screams echoed through the night market. There had to be a thousand ponies still down here.

Jackie took her knife, slitting through the ground beside where not-Alex was still standing. She dragged the fish in with her, and held the gateway open. “Come on!” she called from inside, gesturing urgently. “Anypony still in here, quick! Let’s get out of here!”

Only a hail of bullets followed her. Drones strode calmly over the destruction, marching towards the opening.

Jackie screamed in desperation and anger, slamming her hooves down over the gateway spell. It collapsed, leaving her alone with her stupid figment.

Chapter 15: Xanthinus

Jackie felt blood dribbling slowly down one of her wings. It wasn’t hers—she hadn’t been injured, at least not that she could tell. But just because it didn’t hurt didn’t mean that she hadn’t been damaged.

She could still hear the gunfire, accelerator rifles firing straight into an unprotected crowd. You have crowd control weapons, you asshole. You already closed the portal. You didn’t need to hurt anyone.

She longed for the days of Confluence, the great Central Compiler of the Enduring Ones. Before Charybdis had destroyed it, it had acted as a check on Athena’s power. An AI that was primarily magical instead of technological, and supposedly assembled from bits and pieces of pony souls too. While that compiler had moral imperatives, Athena had only her goals.

She can’t kill humans. I guess she finally got over seeing ponies as human. The terrifying weight of that implication alone almost reduced Jackie to a shivering mess. She huddled in the space that was no dream at all, a world of drifting white. Her mere presence had already started assembling something around her, and for once she didn’t care enough to stop it. At least she didn’t accidentally create any Alicorn clones this time.

Only the one she’d already made, which swam around her through the air. She was still bound by Jackie’s magic, so she couldn’t wander off. Jackie didn’t even have the energy to confine her. She no longer cared what the stupid thing did.

“Did we win?” Alex asked, swimming up over one of her shoulders. She was no longer proper sized anymore, no longer armored. Just a fish now, without the whole costume she’d conjured to address the ponies of Mundi. Your costume was too good. She should really be going back to New Thestralia to see exactly how many helpless refugees they had recruited.

“I dunno,” she croaked, shoving the fish away and wrapping herself in her wings. They were too small for that in the real world, but here she didn’t have to live by real rules. “This is why I don’t want to rule anything. I knew I was gonna fuck it up. It was only a matter of time until I found a way to ruin everything. Why couldn’t the real you have been here. She would’ve known what to do.”

The fish was silent for a long time. Eventually she answered again, in a tiny voice from beside Jackie’s other ear. “Are you sure she would’ve done better? It’s her fault Athena is in charge in the first place. She could’ve stayed here to rule.”

“She couldn’t have known it was going to go off the fucking rails,” Jackie muttered. Then her eyes widened, and she sat up. She didn’t have to defend Alex. This was her fault. At least some part of it was. She’d promised to sit by and do nothing for a thousand years. Let herself be banished by a program with unpredictable morals and goals.

She’s never done this before. Just outright killing civilians like this. It’s not the same as creating a culture that makes ponies oppress each other. Then she has other people to do her dirty work. She just shot them.

And plenty of her own ponies had seen. They had seen their friends and family getting murdered in cold blood by a monster even more terrible than they had imagined. Athena hadn’t been able to stop the spread of information about her puppet Alicorns, but she could stop word of the slaughter from getting out. All she had to do was kill them all.

“Oh god.” Jackie found she was human again. It wasn’t anything she’d tried to do—but suddenly she had arms and legs and she was holding them up against her chest. “I just got fucking played.”

The fish landed on her knee, and even simulated a decent approximation of moisture as she did it. “You got a million people out of Mundi. People that were oppressed, starved, worked to death. Sounds like you won to me.”

“No.” Jackie brushed a few strands of pale hair out of her face. “Athena knew that stupid assassin couldn’t kill me. If she really wanted me dead, she’d use poison, or a sniper from a million miles—something I wouldn’t see coming and couldn’t stop. But she didn’t. She sent an assassin because she wanted Thestralia even more upset than they were already. She already had plenty of fuel to make Mundi hate us, but we didn’t really hate them. Except… I stopped him. I locked that bastard in Mercy’s library.”

Jackie rose suddenly to her feet, wiping away tears. She wore little in this form—some short armor that generally approximated what she wore in battle as a pony. She didn’t bother with much past that and her knife. “He’s still in here.”

She lifted up into the air, and suddenly she was stepping into the library. The ancient seed of human knowledge and intellect survived the end of its master Archive. Mostly thanks to Mercy.

Jackie could feel her near—the unicorn that was now an Alicorn and also something more. In a way, Mercy was growing into the entity that Archive was no longer. Jackie strode through the shelves, conscious every moment of eyes on her. Some were bats, visiting this place to extract its sacred lore. Plenty more came from Mercy’s little servants and observers. Tiny figments that seemed to arise spontaneously from the library’s floating foundations, crawling over it to maintain and repair the place.

They ignored her, just as they ignored all powerful dreamers. Of course, that would change if she tried to attack the strength of the dream—she didn’t think that she could’ve destroyed it now, even if she wanted to. But she didn’t.

She found Mercy near the top deck, sorting through the shelves of Dewey-Decimal index cards with a glowing crystal horn. Thousands of cards moved through the air all at once, shuffling and rearranging themselves according to her will. It was a spell even the most powerful and focused unicorns would’ve envied.

“Mercy,” Jackie said, settling onto the ground behind her. The crystal Alicorn would’ve been a head taller than she was, except that she was human now. Her head almost scraped on the ceiling. “I left a prisoner here a few months ago. Is he still here?”

The Alicorn turned away from what she was doing. Mercy didn’t actually have to put any of the cards down, her horn just kept glowing. Incredible focus for a figment. But like all figments that survived the events that created them, Mercy had grown into something more. Jackie wouldn’t have been surprised if the energy from all the old prayers to Archive now found its way here.

“Yes, you did,” echoed the crystal Alicorn. “This is a repository of knowledge. What purpose did you confine him here? He had nothing to add to my records.”

“I was kinda pressed for time,” Jackie muttered, lowering her head apologetically. “I hope he didn’t cause much trouble for you. But I need him back. I’m wondering if he might be able to tell me what Athena is planning to do next.”

“I can certainly return him to you,” Mercy said. “Follow me.” They left the cards in place behind them, still arrayed in the air and waiting for sorting.

They didn’t have far to go. A side-door she didn’t recognize led to a single shelf of colorful books. It was mostly empty, with a few dozen volumes all on the same level. Mercy levitated one to her in the air, and Jackie caught it. The cover felt unsettlingly like fur, in the same bluish shade as the pegasus had been. “Oh god. You didn’t.”

“The library will defend itself from dangers,” Mercy said, without a trace of emotion. “When my servants were not cooperative to his demands to return him to the physical world, he grew agitated and attempted to summon a storm. A few fragments of precious knowledge were nearly destroyed in the process. I defended my library.”

She turned away, and Jackie found herself glad that the Alicorn was leaving her behind. She’d once been friend with this little construct, who had been her shy companion on the quest to create a volume of knowledge to give to every returning refugee. It seemed that very little of that pony had survived all these eons.

Figments change. Even the strongest, stablest dreams eventually turn into nightmares.

Jackie waited until Mercy had gone before running from the dark room and its other fur-colored books. She no longer had to guess at what those were either.

“This isn’t going to help,” said a little voice from behind her. Her whole time in the library so far she’d been hiding from Mercy, circling Jackie’s head so she was always out of view. “You already know Athena wants a war. What could the assassin tell you that you haven’t figured out?”

“How ready they are,” Jackie whispered, walking out onto a balcony and over to a chair big enough for a human to sit down in. It had been eons since she’d had two legs, but that didn’t really matter. She could dream of herself with perfect balance, and that was close enough. “Is the invasion coming tomorrow, or a year from now?”

“I guess that makes sense.” The fish landed on the table next to her hand, staring down at the book. “You think you could… change him back?”

She shook her head. “Maybe an Alicorn could. I’ve got bigger problems than that right now.” She wouldn’t have said it out loud, but this pony had tried to kill her. She had a hard time feeling any sympathy for him after that.

She opened the book, flipping through its strange pages. She skimmed the words, and found it described the life of a high-class pony in Mundi, who had spent his days training in one of Athena’s military academies.

You still have those? She read on a little further, morbidly fascinated by what Mercy had done. She’d somehow translated a whole life into the pages of this book. She could read the assassin’s own thoughts—learned his name was Polar Vortex, that he’d been the youngest of his family, determined to make a name for them. But being the youngest meant he wouldn’t be inheriting their wealth, so he couldn’t do it that way.

But none of that really mattered. The story of a life Athena had manipulated and destroyed wasn’t uncommon in Mundi. She skipped near the end, where she found what Polar Vortex had known about New Thestralia. Very little, except that he had imagined that they were planning to attack Mundi itself, to destroy it in revenge for the way they thought they had been treated. Well I guess you weren’t completely wrong. We did attack.

She found what she was looking for just a few pages from the end. The academies were all recruiting now, training soldiers even from the lower classes. There had to be thousands and thousands of them now. Charybdis was dead, as were all the other demons of Earth. That could mean only one thing.

She couldn’t find any specific details about when the attack would come, or what weapons they would bring. The assassin had not studied far outside his realm of expertise. On more than one occasion, she found ponies had told him that he couldn’t know important details, in case he was captured.

There were no specifics to glean here, not even the satisfaction of a rough interrogation against somepony who worked for her enemy. Jackie shoved the book aside, rising to her feet.

“You’re not going to take him with you?”

“No.” She didn’t even turn around, trusting the fish to follow her. And follow she did.

“You made me a promise,” not-Alex said, as Jackie neared the library’s exit. “I helped you. Now you have to let me go.”

She didn’t, exactly. Jackie could break promises, even to dream-entities. But the cost of doing so was a little of her power each time. Not to mention her reputation. Make a reputation for herself as an oathbreaker and she’d find her pool of contacts rapidly drying up.

“No going to the real Alex,” she said, feeling her shoulders sag. “That still holds no matter what you do.”

“I know,” she said, swimming right up to Jackie’s face. “But right now I’m distracting you. The ponies you just set free are the ones who matter. All… however many you got. Let me go, so you can deal with them.”

She waved a hand through the air, dismissing the spell that bound her. “Whatever. Just don’t turn into a monster. It doesn’t matter if everyone else is doing it.”

She shrugged, flying just out of reach. Despite the end of the magic containing her, she didn’t grow any larger or try to get away.

Jackie could still feel her little eyes on her as she cut her way back out into the real world, leaving the library behind.