The temperature fell fast as the storm pounced on us.

I could hardly see more than a few tail lengths in front of my face as the skies roared at us. The rain fell almost horizontally, thrown into my eyes by huge gusts of wind that threatened to blow me off of the mountainside. I was exhausted, cold, and soaked to the bone, my orange and yellow mane reduced to little more than ratty, tangled cords of color clinging to my charcoal face.

Lightning flashed above us, and I nearly jumped at my own shadow, a stark black outlined against a white flash on the rock. Thunder boomed, rattling the ancient stone under my hooves and sending a few loose pebbles clattering down the slope to my left. I watched them fall, squinting into the darkness as the little rocks bounced and rattled a few hundred feet toward the canopy of a forest below us. The trees bowed and creaked in the wind, scattering tufts of dull, orange leaves into the air.

A touch on my flank made me turn around. A zebra looked at me with concerned eyes, his short mohawk plastered to one side of his head from all the rain, and the scruff on his chin dripping water. “We have to stop!” he shouted, barely audible over the storm around us. He winced and held up a foreleg to try to block the rain flying into his eyes and shuffled a step forward. “This storm is going to blow us off the mountain!”

He was right. I’d wanted to push through to the next peak of the mountain pass before settling down for the night, but the storm had slowed our progress considerably. What I thought was going to be a quick squall had turned into a nightmare, a watery, windy nightmare. Perhaps my only consolation was that we were in the mountains, not on some fields somewhere. A storm this strong would’ve kicked up a tornado miles high, and we wouldn’t have survived that.

“Do you see anything, Ember?!” the zebra yelled again. He was trying his best to anchor himself against the wind, and I couldn’t tell if the bags on his back were helping or if they were just giving the wind more area to push against. A white figure capped with red and yellow streaks clung to his side, ragged wings held in front of her face to try to block out the rain.

I squinted into the rain and wind, water dripping from my full eyelashes and making it even harder to see. “There’s fucking nothing!” I yelled into the fury of the skies, angling my head off to the side so I didn’t immediately drown whenever I opened my mouth. “Just rocks and rocks and fucking rocks!”

I raised my hoof to stomp in frustration, but a strong gust of wind came roaring through the narrow mountain pass at precisely that moment and struck me square in the chest. Yelping, I flailed my legs as I tottered backwards, the weight of the bags on my back pulling me toward the ground. Only, there wasn’t any ground off to my left. Just the endless expanse of trees hundreds of feet below me.

“Ember!” the zebra screamed, lunging forward and managing to hook a hoof through a strap on my bags before I plummeted to a painful death. I bit on my tongue as I suddenly came to a stop, the straps of my bags holding me by the shoulders while my limbs flailed above open air. Rocks tumbled down around me, and I saw the stony mountainside light up beneath me in another strike of lightning. A tree burst into flames in the forest, and flaming branches flew a good twenty or thirty feet into the air before landing back in the canopy. A few more small fires began to spring up, only to struggle and wither under the smothering rain and wind buffeting them.

Great. I’d get to fall to my death and be burned to a crisp. Just what I always wanted.

Something began to tear in the bag keeping me from becoming an orange and black pancake, and I felt my shoulders slump suddenly. My horn flared with brilliant orange magic, though it was more mana leaving my body in desperation and fear than an actual attempt to cast a spell. “Gauge!” I shrieked, the wind starting to blow me around like a ragdoll. “Pull me up! Pull me up! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck I don’t want to die, fuck!”

“Hang on!” Gauge yelled back at me, and I could feel him heaving and struggling to try to drag me and my bags back onto the stony ledge. “Nova! Drop your bags! Get ready to catch h—!”

The straps keeping me attached to the bag Gauge held in his grasp suddenly gave way with a gut-wrenching tear of fabric, and my stomach flew into my throat as I began to fall.

I screamed and wailed as the wind began to spin me through the air, and I quickly lost track of what was up and what was down. I was too terrified to do anything meaningful with my horn; it just flared and sputtered sparks of orange as mana flew out of it in desperation. But just before I could enjoy the lovely sensation of belly flopping a slab of stone a few hundred feet down and having my guts expelled through my teeth, I landed on something much softer, something that also grunted when I hit it. After wavering in midair for a few seconds, I felt gravity pull my stomach back into my chest where it belonged, and I began to rise with the frantic beating of a pegasus’ white wings.

“I’ve got you!” Nova panted through clenched teeth, her wings working hard to keep the two of us plus a few spare bags that’d come along for the ride aloft. The wind tore at her wings, knocking a few feathers loose, white lines that quickly disappeared into the veil of gray surrounding us. A good twenty or thirty feet above us, Gauge’s striped face peered down over the edge of the cliff, his hoof outstretched as if that somehow was going to help us not get blown away by the strong headwind Nova flew into.

I felt my sodden mane begin to prickle with static electricity, and I looked above us to see a particularly fat storm cloud flying in low. “Nova…”

She didn’t say anything, but the next thing I knew, Nova had turned her wings vertical, allowing the wind to send us flying backwards, almost completely out of control. The static buildup in my mane disappeared in an instant, and a moment later, I went blind as a searing white light burned my retinas into scorched discs. Thunder exploded around us, and the shockwave was strong enough to forcefully eject the breath from my lungs. A moment later I found myself sucking down air, and one by one my senses returned to me. It took me a solid minute to recognize the feeling of stone beneath my cheek, and another two minutes to even see it.

Dazed and disoriented, I managed to stand on shaky hooves and take a single step forward before I tripped over Nova, who simply groaned and rolled over, clutching her head and flattening her ears against her skull. I saw Gauge galloping toward us from a ways away, leaving our bags in a soaked pile on the cliff. I staggered toward him, but after only hesitating for not even half a second to make sure I was okay, he slid on his knees toward Nova, cradling the pegasus in his forelegs and showering her with kisses.

“H-Hey…” Nova feebly protested, fighting Gauge off with increasingly strong limbs as her senses returned to her. “I’m alright, I’m alright! Stars, you’re such a worrywart!”

“The fuck happened?” I asked from where I stood. Still feeling more than a little dizzy on my hooves, I slumped over and sat against the wall, cradling my aching skull. I felt like a group of Crimson had taken turns beating me over the head with rocks.

“You almost got struck by lightning!” Gauge exclaimed. “If you hadn’t have flown backwards, Nov, the two of you would’ve been fried!”

“I blame Ember for carrying her gun,” Nova said, rubbing her undoubtedly sore head. “Metal and lightning storms don’t mix well…”

I frowned at somepony insulting my baby. “Yeah, well, this gun has gotten us a few dinners since we left the dam, okay?” Another throbbing ache wracked my brain, right behind my eyes, and I pressed my hooves against them to try and blot out the pain. “But thanks for saving me, you two. I thought I was gonna be a fucking abstract paint smear on the side of the mountain.”

“At least you’d be a p-pretty paint s-smear,” Nova teased. Grunting and groaning, she managed to stand up in the face of the wind, her wings held tightly at her sides so she didn’t get blown away. Nova was a small pegasus to begin with, but with her wings little more than waterlogged messes and her mane and coat flattened against her body, she looked like a drowned rat. The spaces between her ribs from her starvation at the Crimson’s hooves hadn’t entirely filled in either, giving her a thin and bony look. A chilly gust blew over us again, and she began to shiver violently. “W-We need to t-turn back,” she said, teeth chattering and wings shaking at her sides. “T-T-There w-was a small hollow we could hide in. W-W-Wait out the s-s-storm!”

“Nova’s right, Em,” Gauge said, wrapping his hooves around Nova and trying to keep the little mare warm. “We’re gonna freeze to death if we stay out here any longer. If the wind doesn’t blow us off the mountain, that is.”

I looked to my right, in the direction we were going. I could faintly see the outline of the next peak through a momentary break in the clouds. I’d wanted to hit that marker before stopping for the night just to keep up our pace. But with this storm and all…

Water dripped from Nova’s eyelashes, and she sniffled a few times as the rain tickled her nose. Streams of runoff poured from her wings, audibly splashing on the ground. And Gauge didn’t look much better; somehow his blue bandana around his neck looked like it weighed twenty pounds with all the water it’d soaked up.

“Okay,” I said. “Gauge, take Nova back and find us some shelter. I’ll grab these bags. We’ll want to get dry before nightfall.”

Gauge nodded, and I could see the silent appreciation in his eyes. He carefully helped Nova turn around on the narrow cliff, and the two of them staggered back through the rain in the direction we had come. I watched them go for a few moments before trotting in the opposite direction, to where we’d dropped our bags when I nearly died. I made sure to stay close to the rocks, though, so the wind couldn’t send me flying away again.

“What have I gotten them into?” I muttered to myself, getting a gulp of water while I was at it by merely opening my mouth. We’d been on the trail for two weeks now, two long and boring weeks of walking. After helping the Sentinels drive the Crimson out of Celestia Dam, me, Gauge, and Nova left them behind to venture deeper into the heart of Auris, chasing a murderer and some scattered bits of code. It didn’t help that he could fly while we were stuck to the ground.

I grabbed the bags in my magic and turned around after making sure everything was here. When we left the dam, I’d been optimistic and eagerly hit the trail, chasing the promise of revenge. Yeoman’s days were numbered, and I was going to be the one to end them. But everything went to shit when we tried to take a shortcut through the mountains instead of following the caravan paths down the river, which would’ve taken another week, maybe more, to loop all the way back around. It was a miracle none of us had caught blue lung or any other nasty disease so far. Getting horribly sick on the trail was about the only thing that could’ve made this journey worse.

It took me almost fifteen minutes of backtracking to find where Gauge and Nova had set up shop. They’d found a crooked ‘L’ shape in the mountain with a bit of an overhang to at least keep the corner dry. More importantly, the walls were between us and the wind, so we didn’t have to worry about being blown away. Just simply getting out of the wind made me feel a little warmer, even if I was still soaked to the bone.

I threw the bags down in a heap at the back of the shelter, behind where Nova and Gauge were trying to make a firepit out of some rocks. “I didn’t think you guys went this far back,” I said, combing water out of my mane and tail with my magic. “I was worried you’d fallen off the mountain.”

“This was the first good place we could find,” Gauge said, rummaging through the bags and pulling out a few sticks of miraculously dry wood. “It’s dry and not windy.”

“The best we could ask for,” I agreed, sitting down next to the fire. I frowned a little bit and lit up the wood with a thought. In a few seconds, we had a nice fire going, and I relaxed as I felt the heat begin to worm its way under my coat.

“Hey, you’re getting good at that!” Nova said, smiling at me. “I thought you said you were bad at pyromancy!”

“Don’t worry, Nov, she was,” Gauge said before I could respond. “She couldn’t even scorch a piece of wood for the longest time.”

“Shut up,” I said, frowning at him. “I just needed practice.”

“And how!”

I responded by summoning a few sparks to dance over the tribal swirl on his flank, making him furiously swat at them until they disappeared. “What was that?”

Nova snickered into a wingtip and nuzzled Gauge’s cheek. “Before you ask, I’m not gonna kiss that and make it better.”

“Good call,” I said. “The last thing Gauge needs is somepony kissing his ass.”

“Now you girls are just ganging up on me,” Gauge said. He dug through the bags for a few moments until he pulled out a cloth bundle, which he unwrapped to reveal a dormant sentry drone. He tapped it a few times and the thing suddenly sprung to life, buzzing and squawking as it hovered around and scanned the area. “I’ll just find new friends, then.”

“Yeah, yeah. Hey, SCaR,” I said, waving to the drone. “Be happy you didn’t have to get your shiny metal ass all wet.”

Nova sneezed and drew some blankets closer around her shivering wet frame. “I wish my coltfriend cared as much about me as he did his pet drone…”

Gauge rolled his eyes and wrapped a foreleg around Nova’s shoulders. “Shush, honey. SCaR’s just more sensitive to the wet weather, is all.”

“What is he, a fucking old stallion with back pain?” I asked, watching the drone buzz around under the dry safety of the overhang. “Do his thrusters act up whenever a storm comes through?”

Apparently satisfied with its scan of the area, the drone deployed four little peg legs and landed near Gauge before going into some kind of sentry mode. “He might as well be an old stallion,” Gauge said, patting the drone’s casing. “He’s older than all of us. He’s got exposed circuitry and shit underneath his cracked casing. Enough water will short him out.”

“Good to know that our watchdog doesn’t function well in the rain,” I said, shaking my head at the drone. Groaning, I quickly tore apart my bags and stretched out a bedroll between two comfy-looking rocks and moved to it. I couldn’t help but sigh as I stretched my aching muscles out on my bedroll, hooves splayed all around me and eyes fluttering with bliss. “Fuck, I feel like I could sleep forever.”

“If you could save that until after we’re done with all this bullshit, that’d be great,” Gauge said, gently stroking Nova’s mane as she leaned against him. “We’ve still got to find this ‘Yeoman’ pony… wherever he is…”

“He’s out there, somewhere,” I said. “He’s looking for the same pieces of code we are. If we’re fast enough, we’ll cross paths with him eventually.”

“But what if we aren’t?” he asked. “He can fly and we can’t. I don’t know where this ‘Ivory City’ he’s from is, but he’s probably been all over Auris in the time it’s taken us to get this far. How do we know we’re not just chasing him for nothing?”

“Are you really gonna bring this shit up now?” I asked him, fixing him with an accusatory glare. “After how much we’ve been through to get this fucking far?”

He raised his hoof like he was going to try to calm me down. “Ember, I’m just saying that… why does this concern us, anyway? We’re miles and miles away from civilization, on our own in the middle of the mountains! If something bad happens to us, there’s nopony who’s going to come save us.”

“And what would you rather us do, huh? Turn back? You know I can’t do that, Gauge. Not after what he did.” Memories of an orange mare, of happier days, threatened to break out of the closet I’d thrown them in, so I growled and shoved more metaphorical junk in front of the door to keep them inside. “I never asked you two to follow me.”

“If we hadn’t have followed you, you’d be dead several times over.”

“So?”

Bitter silence hung in the air between us, Gauge not sure how to respond, me regretting everything I’d just said. I could feel that dark void opening around my hooves, those thousand pound shackles that nearly threw me off of the dam when I learned Zip died. I had a feeling that Gauge and Nova knew I was depressed, maybe even suicidal, after what had happened. But nopony could even bring themselves to say anything about it. Not even now, when I’d all but played my hoof on the table for everypony to see.

Instead, when the silence dragged on for so long I was afraid it was going to kill somepony, I cleared my throat and tried to dismiss the conversation with a wave of my hoof. “How much farther until we’re out of these mountains?”

Thankful for the excuse to talk about anything else, Nova pulled out a soaked map from a bag at her hooves and spread it across the ground, careful not to rip it. “Last I checked, we were a day’s hike away from the end of the mountains. After that, Hole’ll be in sight.” She shivered, though not from the cold. “I heard some of the Crimson talk about Hole while I was there. Do we… do we have to go there?”

“It’s the first settlement we hit after we get out of the valley,” I said. “I’ve heard all about Hole, too, but we need to stop there. We need food and supplies and information. How are we going to find Yeoman if we don’t even know where to look? Besides, if he’s looking for code pieces around here, then he might be in Hole, too.”

“You know who else is going to be in Hole?” Gauge asked. “Slavers. Maybe even some Crimson that haven’t gotten the memo that their boss is dead. And when they see the two of you with your brands…”

I shifted my leg slightly, the flesh where the Crimson had seared a heart over my cutie mark a month ago itching at being mentioned. Across from me, Nova glanced at the pair of brackets burned into her left flank and wilted in embarrassment. I knew exactly how she felt; even though we were free, and even though we’d destroyed the Crimson, those brands marked us as somepony’s property. And no matter where we went, we’d always have to carry those marks and that shame. For the rest of our lives.

“We’ll have to keep them covered,” I said. “It’s the only way.”

“And how long do you think that’s going to work?” Gauge said. He pointed to the map. “We’re going to a pleasure town! If you two can go two steps without somepony grabbing at your flanks then I’ll be amazed!”

“But what if we already have owners?” Nova asked, and both Gauge and I gave her confused looks. She looked up and nuzzled Gauge under the chin. “You don’t have a brand, Gauge. What if you pretended to be our owner?”

“But we don’t even have his swirly ass mark branded on our right flanks,” I said, looking at my natural mark on my right. “That’s where they put the owner’s mark. What if they don’t buy it?”

“I’ll make them buy it,” Gauge said. “Maybe we can make some things out of our supplies. Some simple rope bridles. Anything to look the part.”

I shrugged. It was as good of a plan as we were gonna get. “Yeah, I guess,” I conceded. “Just don’t make me kiss your hooves or any shit like that or I’ll make your life hell.”

Gauge just smirked at me. “Come on, Em, you have to make it look authentic! I’m your master, remember?”

“Dammit, Gauge, I’ve kicked you in the balls before, and I’m not afraid to do it again.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Nova said. “I don’t mind calling him master…” she added in a squeak of a whisper.

I just blinked at her. “Nov, I did not need to hear that.” Her cheeks began to turn red, and even Gauge looked like he was a little uncomfortable. Looks like the two of them were going to have a lot to discuss the next time they wanted to fuck. Just so long as they didn’t do it while I was around. I’d come back from hunting once to find the tent rocking and one of them making the strangest noise I’d ever heard. The less I had to deal with that, the better.

Nova giving us an unwanted sneak peek at one of her fetishes kind of threw our collective train of thought for a loop, so I cleared my throat like a half dozen times to put us back on track. “Right, so… yeah. So the plan is this: we go into Hole, we ask about Yeoman and any old Equestrian installations that might be in the area, and then we get the fuck out of there before some slavers kidnap our asses and fuck Nov and I raw. Sound like a plan?”

“I’m all for it, especially that last part,” Nova said, rubbing at her cheeks to try and force their blush to go away.

Gauge sighed. “It’s as good as any we’re going to get out here. Let’s just hope this pays off.”

“It’ll work,” I said, feeling a fire burning in my chest. “I just know it will. Trust me. I’ve got a feeling.”

“That’s what you said when you made us take this dumb shortcut through the mountains!” Nova protested.

“And it’s working! Kinda!” I winced as a bolt of lightning blasted some rock off of the mountain about a half mile away. “Mostly! We’re alive, that’s all that matters, right?”

Gauge chuckled and shook his head. “Whatever, Em. Not like we’re going anywhere now. Let’s just try to enjoy the rest and not get blown off the mountain again.”

“Hey, sounds like a great plan to me,” I said, digging into my cigarette box and pulling one out. Fuck, only two left. I was going to have to stock up when we got to Hole. Lighting the cig up, I stuck it between my lips and took a long pull. As soon as the nicotine hit my blood, I immediately felt myself relaxing, the stress of trying to hike in the storm suddenly bleeding away. “Yeoman, you fucking half-faced cunt bag, I’ve got a bullet with your name on it.”