The Spines loomed all around us, towering sentinels that disappeared high into the clouds. I wondered what they would look like on a cloudless day, or if they were visible from space. They’d looked absolutely enormous from afar, but now that I walked among their petrified trunks, they felt like they were on a whole other level of huge. It took a long time to just walk past one of their massive trunks, and by my best estimates, they averaged a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet in diameter. They might as well have been mountains in their own right.

But to the ponies leading us deeper into the Spines, they were just an everyday sight, something they’d grown used to that held no meaning for them. The Feati ponies that had helped fight off that monster—something they called a shwikskit, or at least that’s what Surge thought after listening to them talk for a bit—had watched us approach them warily, and their shimmering tattoos had made it look like they were ready for a fight. But Teka said something to them, and somewhere in the flurry of musical conversation, she’d gotten them to agree to take us with them to wherever they were going. Where that was, I had no idea, but I could only hope it was their tribe. I mean, they said ‘Feati’ a few times, so that had to be where we were going, right?

They certainly didn’t want us really wandering off or doing anything without them knowing about it, though. The four ponies had split into two groups, with two in front and two in the back. Teka walked with the front group, and now that she was back among her own kind, she’d turned awfully chatty. A beautiful fountain of the Feati’s interesting and kinda cool-sounding words just constantly streamed forth from her muzzle, and I could tell the two stallions walking with her were quickly growing tired of her chattering. The irony wasn’t lost on Nova, who seemed to remember a specific phrase Teka had used on her not too long ago.

“S’a takka allae,” Nova said, trying to do her best to mimic Teka’s pronunciation of those same words. When the three ponies in front of us all looked at her in surprise, she smirked. “Takka, takka, takka.”

The two stallions both smiled first at her, then at each other, before turning their amused expressions to Teka, who hung her head and pouted. “A soe’set U’a bele tunkto T’a’hn mak,” one said.

“To, U’a lenwen’sat saso Mum’a tokto? ” said the other. “E’un tu’set S’a T’a takka’set floff?”

Teka scowled straight ahead. “S’a agga takka’set wuh A takka’sat S’a. S’a takka’set allae gwa S’a takka’set.”

“Maybe they have a pony who speaks Equiish,” I said. “That’d be nice instead of just playing guessing games.”

“I bet they do,” Ace said. “I reckon they encounter other ponies from Auris often enough. We ain’t the first ponies, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah,” Gauge said, trotting along at Nova’s side across the damp and muddy ground. “If it wasn’t for Teka, I’m pretty sure they were going to attack us. They probably have a problem with slavers raiding their land, if she’s any indication. What else are they supposed to think when they see a bunch of armed ponies with lots of high tech equipment on them wandering near their territory? Especially if it’s a problem they’ve had to deal with before?”

“I’m just glad that we’re actually making progress with this,” I said.

“We at least know Yeoman hasn’t gotten to them yet,” Surge said.

I frowned. “How do you know?”

“Do you really think there would be any of these tribal ponies left alive if he did?”

“That’s… a good point,” I admitted. She was right; if Yeoman found the Feati tribe before we did, then he’d tear the place apart and slaughter them all with his high tech weaponry from the Ivory City. I hoped somepony at their place spoke Equiish, because we had to warn them somehow that a monster was coming and he’d kill them all just for the hell of it.

I at least decided to try and make progress on the first step now. “Hey,” I said, raising my voice enough to catch their attention. “Do any of you speak Equiish? You know, the common tongue? Anypony?”

They frowned at me in confusion, and shortly after they began whispering things to each other in their tongue. “Wuh takka’set S’a?” one asked his companion. “A to tunkto’set’un.”

“A tunkto’set S’a takka’set ete oe pohna’hn S’a takka.” Teka said, shrugging.

“S’a unta’set’un tenten A U’a Feati lewal, thenne,” the other said. “Lentowenye E’un Santy S’a hilf.”

“I’ll… take that as a ‘no’, then.” I sighed and rolled my eyes. It looked like the confusion was only going to continue for the time being.

“On the bright side, if they have contact with the outside world, however small it is, then they have to have somepony who can speak our language,” Nova said. She fluttered over a puddle to avoid getting her hooves dirty, and I saw the tribals watching her metal wing warily. “They can’t have gotten along this long without somepony becoming fluent in it.”

“There better be somepony there,” I grumbled. “I don’t intend to learn their entire language from scratch just to translate things for a few days.”

“Why not?” Nova asked. “It’d be fun! Learning a new language is good for cognitive development and stimulation!”

“Will it make me not be retarded?” I asked her. “I can barely do fucking simple math.”

“At least she hasn’t tried fucking complex math,” Surge said, forcing my lips into a smirk. “You have to buy it dinner first.”

Ace snorted and shook her head. “Nah, she wouldn’t want to fuck math. It’d bend her over the railing and ream her plot.”

“Fuck off, all of you,” I grumbled, hanging my head. “Fucking assholes…”

“I didn’t know you liked it in the butt,” Gauge quipped.

“I’ll shove my rifle up your butt, how about that?”

Nova blinked. “Didn’t you once shove a rifle up your—?”

“Don’t say another fucking word,” I growled. And great, because Nova had brought that up, I felt Surge start digging through my memories for it for her own amusement. “Surge, get out of my fucking memory filing cabinet shit, or I’ll blow my brains out and take you with me.”

My friends all shot each other looks and snickered, and I just grumbled and hung my head. Ever since Surge let that secret of mine out of the bag, I knew I’d never be free from it.

As we continued to walk through the Spines, I started growing restless. For some reason, I’d imagined that the Feati tribe must’ve been just like, on the other side of a couple of these big trees or something, but apparently we were a long ways away from it. We passed by enormous tree after enormous fucking tree and I still hadn’t seen any signs of civilization. At least, not until Surge noticed I was looking for it and then adjusted my eyes to look higher up the trees.

“Do you see those?” she asked, making sure my eyes were pointed at exactly what she wanted me to see. “Up in the trees?”

I blinked and furrowed my brow. They looked like smears of color decorating the gray of the petrified bark, though there was a sort of uniformity or purpose behind their shape. They seemed to be placed every few trees, and when they were placed on a tree, it’d be repeated two more times, one for each third of the monstrous thing’s circumference. Not only that, but the color composition changed. The first one I saw was an even mix of blue, yellow, and orange, but the further we went, the less blue there was painted on the bark, and an ever increasing amount of yellow and orange. Much further along, I saw that the yellow even began to be overtaken by the orange, which had been joined by a little red smear.

“They’re like… signposts or something,” I said. “But what’s with the colors?”

Me and Surge talking to each other caught the attention of the rest of my friends, and they likewise turned their eyes to the paints in the trees. “They’re measuring something,” Nova said. “The color turnover makes that pretty clear.”

“It’s likely distance back to their main camp,” Surge said. “The closer we get, the warmer the colors get.”

“Warmer?” Gauge asked. “Like telling somepony they’re hot or they’re cold depending on how close to something they are?”

“Seems to me like the basic gist of the thing,” Ace drawled. “And I mean, these are simple folk we’re dealing with. Smearing colors on a tree probably works better as a guide to clue you in on how close you are to home than chiseling numbers into the bark.”

“Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one,” Nova said.

“Huh.” I returned my attention to the path ahead of us, my curiosity sated. “Guess I know how to find my way to their camp then if I ever get lost.”

“I don’t see why we would end up getting lost,” Nova said, her oiled metal feathers hissing against each other as she idly flexed and relaxed her wing. “It’s not like we’re going to go anywhere while we’re there, right?”

“Who knows exactly where this facility housing the code piece is,” I said. “It could be a bit away from the Feati home.”

Ace nodded. “These Synarchy facilities can be pretty spread out. I mean, we’re all the way out here in the middle of nowhere to find this one. It ain’t gonna be sitting right there, I don’t think.”

“Dr. Hozho’s facility was an observation complex,” Surge said. “It would likely be located in close proximity to her subjects, but hidden enough to allow them to develop naturally without Equestrian interference.”

“I guess we’ll just have to go looking for it when we get there,” I said. “Or maybe somepony there speaks Equiish and they can tell us where it is.”

“Fat chance of that,” Gauge said. “If they don’t like outsiders too much, I don’t think they’ll bother to learn how we speak.”

“You’d be surprised,” Surge countered. “If they don’t like us much, assuming they’ve had contact with us before, then somepony there has likely learned Equiish. How else would they know if they’re being cheated, or what their enemies might be planning?”

“Don’t know which is worse,” Ace said, “Them not knowing our language, or them knowing our language but thinking we’re gonna cheat them before we can even say boo.”

“I’d rather take the latter,” I said. “At least it’s something to work with.”

We didn’t have a whole lot more to say as we wandered through the Spines, but the further we went, the more I felt like we were being watched. It was a strange sensation, because the undergrowth at the base of the Spines was only clustered in the dead zones between the trees, as there wasn’t exactly a lot of sunlight that could get down to the forest floor for shit to grow, yet I still couldn’t see anypony. No matter where I looked, no matter where I thought eyes were staring at me from, I couldn’t tell if there were actually ponies watching us, or if it was just our imagination.

“You guys feel that too, right?” I asked my friends after my skin had been crawling for like, five minutes.

“What?” Nova asked, looking around. “I don’t feel anything.”

“We’re being watched,” Ace muttered. “Got lots of curious eyes on us right now.”

“But where, though?” I asked. “I haven’t seen anypony else except for Teka and her friends.”

Teka’s ears twitched at her name, and she looked back at me, but when she saw I wasn’t actually talking to her, she went back to ignoring me. Ace, meanwhile, took her wingtip and twitched it upwards over her flank. “Watch the trees,” she said. “You might see some movement here and there.”

“In the trees?” Gauge asked. “You think they’ve got a whole network of bridges and platforms above the leaves where we can’t see them?”

“Either that, or they’re just wandering around from branch to branch,” I said. “That seems exactly like something these ponies would do.”

“Can’t SCaR go check it out?” Nova asked. “He could fly up into the trees and take a look.”

I glanced at the drone and frowned. “You think these guys down here would really let us start sending a drone around?”

“Yeah,” Gauge said, shaking his head. “If I sent SCaR up into those trees, they’d chop him up or something. That’d be the last we’d see of him.”

“Plus, we don’t wanna piss off the locals none,” Ace said. “That ain’t gonna win us any favors.”

“Best to just keep him down here, then,” I said, to which everypony else agreed. “He’d probably be more useful with us in case shit goes sideways.”

“When shit goes sideways,” Ace corrected.

“Don’t tempt fate,” Surge muttered. “Just don’t do it.”

“Are you kidding? That’s my specialty.” I smirked at Surge’s inward dismay, but kept on walking. “C’mon, I think I can see something up ahead. We’re almost there.”

I wasn’t exactly sure if ‘almost there’ was the right way of putting it, but I could at least see something past the enormous petrified trees towering around us. Or, well, mostly the lights of something. The Spines were already so thick and dense that they let hardly any light fall to the ground, and the clouds from the storm certainly didn’t help either, but somewhere in the distance, I could see flickering torchlight, a sure sign of civilization—or what passed for it out here. Honestly, just any signs of a settlement were good for me. It meant we were closer to our destination, closer to another piece of the code, and Yeoman hadn’t burned the place to the ground and butchered its population.

I also noted that the activity around us started to pick up. The closer we got to those lights, the more I saw obvious signs of ponies, from artificial, wooden structures like fences and ladders, to other things as simple as churned dirt and tilled earth. The paint smears on the trees had shifted toward red, and it wasn’t long before I noticed other ponies watching us from the shadows or from behind the trunks of these enormous trees.

Soon, we were right in the thick of Feati civilization. The further we went, the more ponies I saw. They were all tattooed, and many of them wore decorative garb with feathers and furs and painted tree bark. Many carried primitive weapons like spears and slings, and they watched us with wary distrust, even despite our escort. But then there were fillies and colts, elderly mares and stallions, and other ponies simply occupied with their day to day lives and giving us more curious looks. I noticed that many of the younger ponies weren’t as heavily tattooed as the adults, or even adolescents like Teka. They had some paint and tribal designs around their faces, especially their ears and eyes, but a lot of the rest of their bodies were blank, clean slates for future art.

And they were really curious about us, too. They watched us pass with equal parts wonder and fear. We were something new to them, something they’d never seen before, which led me to believe that despite their primitive technology, the members of the Feati tribe were strong enough to defend their territory from slavers and the like. After watching them fuck up that horrible monster that’d almost eaten us all earlier, I started wondering if maybe I wasn’t giving them enough credit. Teka must’ve been surprised and caught unawares if a bunch of slavers had taken her captive and then managed to get out of Feati territory without having to deal with all their freaky tattoo magic and shit.

By the time we made it to the Feati’s settlement proper, we’d attracted a small crowd of curious tribesponies who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. But now, in front of us stood a massive wooden wall, illuminated by weird glowing stones embedded in the surface of the wood. I couldn’t even imagine how many tree trunks had been chopped down to make up the twenty foot tall wall, but I knew that it stretched around the entire settlement, however large it was. The tribal ponies had even built watchtowers at regular points around the walls, and on top of that, they’d attached a platform that went over the walls to one of the giant petrified trees, and ended in a staircase that went up and above the canopy of the smaller forest trees. I’d never seen anything like it, and it was incredibly impressive to see from a bunch of ponies that were basically just primitives with sticks and stones. It rivaled even the architecture and engineering of Three Rivers simply by how impossible it should’ve been that these ponies could create something like it.

The gate, a colossal structure that was taller than even the walls around it, was already open and waiting for us. By the looks of it, I doubted that the tribal ponies shut it all that often. I couldn’t imagine how many tons that oversized door must have weighed, and I imagined it would have taken the entire village to even start to close it if they needed to. But even then, the gate wasn’t just wide open. It was opened enough for three ponies to enter side by side, and no more. I had a feeling it was specifically left that wide to prevent some of the nastier creatures that might prowl the Spines from getting into the camp, while allowing the Feati themselves easy access both in and out. Given what I knew about how Auris’ wildlife tended to be like, these ponies had to be tough as nails and pretty fucking resilient to survive out here since the Silence began.

But who knew how much longer they could stick around if Reclaimer got his hooves on the pieces of the signal? Somehow, I doubted very much that he’d tolerate their mere existence, from what I knew of the stallion.

Teka and the two tribesponies in front went through the gate first, followed by the rest of us, and then the pair of guards behind us. Once we got through the gate, however, Surge and I let our shared jaw drop in wonder. This wasn’t just a tiny settlement in the middle of the woods; this was basically a village, a town, a small city… something! It was a lot larger than I thought it would be, could possibly be. There weren’t just longhouses and a few huts scattered here and there; there were multiple-story wooden buildings, a market district (or as close to one as a bunch of tribal ponies would have), living quarters, an armory… just all sorts of things I would’ve expected to see in Three Rivers, not here. I could only see so much of the interior of the camp from the entryway, but what I saw left me impressed beyond words.

Thankfully, words have always been something Nova was good at, even if the ones that came out of her mouth were just a simple, awed observation. “There’s so many buildings here,” she said. “And the engineering… they know how to build things better than many ponies can these days.”

“I’m amazed,” Surge said. “These ponies’ ancestors had their ability to understand language completely wiped clean, but they were a very diverse set of subjects. They somehow must have preserved some of their knowledge in engineering and construction to their descendants without the ability to read, write, or even effectively understand each other.”

“Kinda makes you wonder what they could have done if they weren’t subjects of some psychotic mare’s experiments,” Gauge said. “Out here, they were perfectly isolated and didn’t have to retreat to tiny havens of safety like our ancestors did.”

“Don’t know how long that’s gonna last,” Ace said. “Ain’t gonna be too long before Reclaimer’s got his rat bastards all over the Spines.”

I nodded, but there wasn’t much we could do about that at the moment. Right now, the important thing was figuring out what was going to happen to us next. It seemed that word of our arrival had reached the Feati settlement before we ourselves did, because there was already a large crowd of ponies waiting for us not too far from the gates. Teka seemed surprised by this, and I saw a look of excitement and relief flash across her face, before it quickly melted away into dread. She almost seem to cow before the ponies standing around her, and her escorts quickly abandoned her to stand closer by us.

One pony stepped out of the group of colorful and tattooed individuals looking us over, and I immediately knew he had to be the tribe’s leader or something. There was hardly any space left on his coat to cram more ink into, and he wore what looked like a set of haphazardly patched together combat armor, painted with swirls and other colorful details. Enormous feathers that had been tied into bundles of color sprouted from the armor, and the feathered headpiece he wore reminded me of an exaggerated griffon’s head crest. Even his tail had braids, colorful cords, and more feathers woven into it. But underneath all that, two things struck me about the pony himself. For one thing, he seemed awfully young for a chief, maybe around my age or so, and as for the other, his green coat reminded me a lot of Teka’s lighter green coat.

The chief briefly glanced over us, but soon his attention fell on Teka, and his eyes seemed to pierce through her. “Tekawenye,” he said, using her full name. “A U’a tunkto’sat U’a tol”

Teka swallowed hard and briefly lifted her eyes to the other pony. “Lentowenye… A hatot hommo ba’set.”

From the way she said that sentence, I wondered if ‘Lentowenye’ was the name of the stallion. The ‘wenye’ part fit with Teka’s name, so I assumed they shared the same root word for their name. In that case, they had to be related somehow. Brother and sister, maybe? I looked again at Teka. Did I accidentally save the sister of the Feati’s chief?

Even if that was true, Lentowenye did not seem happy to see Teka back. “A hatot’sot U’a la.” he said, and even the ponies around him murmured slightly and glanced at the two ponies. “U’a bepbo wyklo noppo, e U’a tol’sat T’a’hn. Unta U’a wetwa ite T’a’hn awwe mahaha wiwiw U’a kolwil. To la U’a galep lewal imma salhn’an li onotni pohnaa’ae.”

Teka’s gaze hardened, and she seemed to find some steel to retort to whatever her brother accused her of. “A galep’sat’un kampno’un. Immapohna’hn’un fumpo’sat A U’a. U’a soe’sat owow oal T’a’hn kolwil’an. Ka’hn immapohna’hn’un nitkli’hn! T’a’hn timm’sat A loklok e mnib’sot A stafiwi!”

Lentowenye’s eyes turned toward us. “A soe. E U’a bwonm’sat T’a’hn lewal ite owow’sot T’a’hn of fumpo’set A U’a?”

Teka glanced over her shoulder and shook her head. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. “T’a’hn’un immapohna’hn’un A mak loklok. T’a’hn A mak’un loklok. T’a’hn lifte’set Mum’a hommo.”

I’d had about enough of listening to this and wondering what the actual shit was going on. “Can we have somepony who speaks Equiish translate for us?” I asked, looking around. “I hate being caught out of the loop.”

Nova roughly slapped me behind the head with her wing. Unfortunately for me, it was her metal one, so it actually hurt quite a bit. “Be quiet, Ember,” she hissed at me. “You’re making a bad first impression in front of the chief!”

“He can’t understand me,” I said, my eyes wandering over the crowd, looking for somepony a little more advanced in years who probably actually knew basic Equiish. “And I’m tired of listening to this stupid, made-up language.”

Lentowenye’s eyes fell on me, and I should have realized I’d fucked up by the way he glared at me. Wordlessly, the stallion advanced down the slight hill between my party and his, brushing aside Teka with a forehoof as he passed her. He stopped right in front of me, and though he was just a little shorter than me, he certainly knew how to make his presence felt when he wanted to. “My language does not agree with you, outsider?”

Immediately, every last one of my friends glared at me. Even SCaR turned in my direction, squawking and buzzing a few times. As for myself, I could only swallow hard and put a nervous smile on my face. “Oh… you can speak Equiish?”

“I learned how to speak your language before I was named chief,” Lentowenye said. “I would need it to protect my people from the cunning ways of outsiders like yourself. Understanding your violent thoughts can save the Feati from your aggression.”

“Well… great!” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Then we can understand each other and shit. Cool! That’ll… that’ll make this a lot easier.”

Lentowenye squinted at me. “I am not interested in negotiating with you, outsider. My sister, Tekawenye, tells me that you rescued her from slavers, and that you were looking for us. Tradition dictates that I welcome and entertain you briefly as a symbol of gratitude from the tribe, but I do not want you here. So tell me what it is you want with us, and then I can be rid of you as soon as I am able.”

Well, there wasn’t any point beating around the bush any longer, I guessed. Might as well just try to get this over with and move on quickly. Maybe Lentowenye would be able to just point us on our way and we could be off. “I’m looking for an old installation,” I said. “You know, like, something from before the Silence. It’s got a thing I’m looking for.”

Lentowenye just gave me a blank and confused look. “I do not know what you are talking about.”

“Like… is there a bunker or something around here? Something Equestrian?” I quirked my eyebrows, hoping that maybe I’d get a response, but I just got more blank looks. “Ummm… You guys know what Equestria is, right? The Synarchy?”

“Ember, none of those words mean anything to them,” Nova said, shaking her head at me. Clearing her throat, she stepped forward and waved her metal wing—a motion which immediately caught everypony’s attention. The mare kind of froze in place, not really anticipating such a reaction to her prosthetic, but nervously laughed it off and smiled at the tribe’s leader. “Are there any places of metal around in these woods? It would probably be… underground? Partially in the ground?” She looked at me for confirmation, but it wasn’t until Surge forced my head to nod did I realize she was asking the Equestrian, not the Aurissian. Aurelian? I don’t even know what we call ourselves, honestly.

Lentowenye nodded once at her, and I was once again immediately thankful that I had Nova with me. There was probably no way I’d ever figure out the right combination of words to use to get my point across with these ponies. “You are looking for the gods’ den beneath the Walsahn?”

“Yes, I believe so,” Nova said, even though I had no fucking idea what this ‘walsahn’ was supposed to be. “We need to get inside of it.”

“You cannot,” Lentowenye said, his features setting into a hard frown. “The holy tree is not for outsiders. None may enter it.”

“But it’ll only take us, like, ten minutes!” I exclaimed. “We’ll be in and out before you know it! We just have to find a computer in there, and then we can get what we need and leave!”

Lentowenye stomped his hoof, and his tattoos momentarily flickered and glowed silver. “You will not enter the roots of the Walsahn,” he growled at me. “I will not allow it. If you try, we will kill you, and not even your horrible weapons of death will save you.”

I already felt my temper beginning to boil over, and I probably would’ve gone nose to nose with this kid and tried shouting my way into their holy tree had Surge not paralyzed me with her force of will. But while I tried to fight her off, Nova filled in for me and nodded her head in understanding. “Of course. This is your tribe, so we will follow your rules. Perhaps we can come to an agreement later.”

“There will be no agreement,” Lentowenye said, turning back to her. “My word is final.”

“Right, right.” Nova dipped her head and smiled at him. “In that case, we’ve traveled a long way from home. Some food and rest would be wonderful, if you can afford to spare it.”

Though I was pretty sure Lentowenye would have liked nothing more than to turn her down and spurn us away, I guess honor or tradition meant he had to act otherwise. “Of course,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Nova all the while. “We will provide food and shelter for three nights. No longer. You are welcome to come and go as you please during those three days, but we will be watching. Remember that.”

He didn’t really wait for us to nod or agree to his terms, even, before he turned around and walked away from us, back toward the crowd of his fellow tribesponies. As he passed Teka, though, he slipped back into his native tongue and said something to her in a stern voice. “Unta’un of A imma Mum’a hommo. A U’a ho’hn takka’set, thenne.”

Teka bobbed her head in reluctant acknowledgement, and Lentowenye continued on past her. The ponies in front of him parted as he approached, reforming their solid mass when he moved by, and began to follow him deeper into the settlement. Around us, with the spectacle apparently over, the tattooed ponies of the Feati began to disperse, returning to whatever other tasks they had to still take care of today.

That included our guards; they just sort of left to go do other things, I guessed. Soon, it was just us standing there, with Teka a little bit farther away, ears drooped and eyes turned toward the ground.

Ace looked around us, even spinning in place a few times as she tried to figure out what happened. “That’s it?” she wondered aloud. “They just up and left us to our own shit? Ain’t they worried we’re gonna do something dumb?”

“They said they were watching us,” Gauge said. “Don’t doubt that. These ponies can be sneaky when they want to.”

“Or just fucking confusing assholes,” I grumbled. I raised my eyebrow at Teka and nudged Nova in the side. “What do you think’s going on with her? Their leader didn’t seem happy to see her back.”

“I don’t know,” Nova said, shaking her head. “But I wish I could help.”

Sighing, Teka looked over her shoulder at us for a few seconds before she began to trudge deeper into the camp. The young mare looked like she was marching off to her death or something. I wanted to help her… but I had no idea how.

By my other side, Ace shrugged and looked around. “Ah, whatever. We’ve got three days here before they boot us out the door. Reckon that’s plenty of time to take a gander about and see what we can find. In the meanwhile…” She raised her nose to the air and started sniffing, before triumphantly pointing her wing somewhere deeper into the camp. “I smell food coming from there. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m famished!”

“Didn’t we eat not too long ago?” Gauge asked her.

“That was before we got chased by a horrible abomination.” Ace pointedly shrugged her rifle between her wings and started walking off without us. “It’s been a long day!”

“That it has,” Nova said, setting off after her, Gauge not far behind.

That just left me standing in place, alone with Surge in my head. Sighing, I reluctantly set off after my friends, my eyes wandering about the area. We were close to our destination—that much I knew for certain. But if the Feati ponies wouldn’t let us into it… what was I going to do?