So my first impression with the Feati and their leader had gotten off to an awful start. I’d already insulted him and made a fool of myself, and only my friends managed to bail my ass out of the fire before I sunk the whole thing entirely. Now, we were just kinda hanging on to their hospitality, hoping that we didn’t do anything that would get us kicked out faster than we already were. And by we, I mostly meant me, because I’d be the only one fucking stupid enough to blow this in some way.

At the very least, the food was good, and it really, honestly made me forget about all the awful shit I’d gotten us into over the past several days. This wasn’t trail rations or stuff we killed and cooked up plain over a fire; this was true home cooking. Word must’ve gotten ahead of us that we were looking for food, because shortly after we sat down around an empty fire pit, several mares trotted out seemingly from the woodwork and dropped wooden bowls filled with piping hot stew in front of all of us. After the misery I’d been suffering through, hot food on its own was a godsend, but hot food that tasted awesome was practically a miracle. I think I had three or four bowls of the stuff before I finally decided I couldn’t eat anymore—and that was mostly because I didn’t want to overdo it and cramp my lean stomach, so used to surviving on barely more than starvation rations after wandering the wilderness for so long.

Ace didn’t really seem to have that problem. I was becoming increasingly convinced the longer I traveled with her that she was basically a bottomless pit of hunger with wings. She ate all the time like each and every meal would be her last, and given her history in Auris’ wildlands, that honestly made a lot of sense. Death could come from anywhere out there, without even a moment’s notice.

At any rate, she’d gone through her fifth or sixth bowl—I’d honestly lost count, but whenever she put a bowl away and waved a wing, it’d barely take a minute before a fresh one was delivered to her. Despite the cold reception we’d gotten from Lentowenye, it seemed like many other tribesponies were fascinated with us and were practically doting on whatever we wanted. We were outsiders, we were amazing to them, and they wanted to see us and our strange ways, even if they didn’t know how to communicate with us.

“You need to slow down, girl,” I said to her, shaking my head as she contemplated getting yet another bowl of stew. “I know it’s really fucking good, but you’re gonna have a food baby when this is over.”

“I ain’t planning on having kids anyway, might as well make it a food baby,” Ace quipped, winking at me. “I haven’t eaten like this in months. I ain’t letting this opportunity slip me by.”

“What about those meals we had in Three Rivers?” Gauge asked. He and Nova had eaten far more reasonable portions: only two bowls each. They wouldn’t be passed out in a food coma for the next few hours, at least. “Don’t those count?”

“Eh, sure, but then it don’t sound as impressive.” Finally, though, Ace decided she’d reached her limit, and dropped her bowl into the little tower the rest of us had built in the center of the fire pit. “Whew! That hit the spot. Good way to finish off a day spent running from a freaky scorpion centipede monster thing!”

“It is getting late,” Nova noted, her eyes drifting up to the sky. “It’s getting hard to see my hoof in front of my face. The clouds combined with the trees and thick canopy… nighttime comes early around here.”

She was right; I didn’t really know how late it actually was, but the Feati’s home was already thickly swathed in shadow and growing darker by the second. Everywhere I looked, I saw ponies trotting up to torches and touching them with their hooves. Their tattoos would flash red for a second, and when they took their hoof away, they’d leave a tongue of fire on the torch wick, healthy and strong. They even moved through bridges and hidden pathways in the leaves above the camp, lowering lighted fire bowls to hang above the camp and illuminate the buildings below. Again, the mastery these ponies had over the elements was amazing to me, and it was all done through the strange designs inked onto their bodies. I’d seen their pegasi fly and their unicorns use basic spells, but they didn’t seem like they knew any advanced magic apart from what their tattoos could give them. I’d noticed that last part mostly because Surge’s academic interest kept drawing my eyes to them as they went about their business while I was thinking or spacing out.

Just how had these ponies survived out here for so long? Everything they did was so primitive but so practiced and oiled that I knew they’d been doing it successfully for generations. What might have started as a twisted sociology and linguistics experiment two centuries ago had given rise to an entirely new civilization in the isolated forests of the Spines, and now, these ponies were unawares custodians of a piece of the old world that could forever change the present and the future. If only they knew what they were sitting on, if they knew just what that code meant for Auris, and why it was so important that we got it…

But they weren’t capable of understanding it. There was no way. Forget the fact that hardly any of them seemed to know how to speak our language; the mere concepts of what this shit meant were so far beyond them there was no way they’d ever come close to understanding. And my hope of saving Auris, of saving them from the storm coming straight to their doorstep, hinged on me getting access to this thing they called the ‘Walsalhn’. I knew, just knew that that was where the code piece was held. But if I couldn’t get access to it… what could I do?

I heard a snicker from off to my side. “Em’s thinking again,” Gauge said with a laugh. “You can see the smoke.”

I glared at him. “Somepony’s gotta do the thinking. If it isn’t gonna be you guys, then I guess it’ll have to be me.”

“At least you’ve got Sparky in there to do most of the work,” he teased. “What’s it like sharing a head with her?”

“I think it’s kinda neat, now that I’m used to it,” I said.

Gauge chuckled again. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

Surge made my ears twitch as she started paying attention again. “I was given a Class D dwelling back on Equestria before I came here,” she said. “Ember’s skull is a Class B at least.”

“I think she just insulted me,” I grumbled, mostly to Ace, since I knew she was particularly fond of being on my side as of late.

“At least it’s a pretty noggin,” Ace said, winking at me. “Honestly, I bet it’s an improvement over Sparky’s old mug.”

Surge blinked my eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Just sayin’.” Ace laughed a bit at the frown suddenly appearing on my face. “I mean, no offense, girl, but you were in your forties or something when you died. Ember’s a nice pretty mare in the prime of youth. A lot fewer wrinkles, right?”

“Her face is very attractive, I will give her that,” Surge said. “She ruins the look with her enormous mane, however, and the battle damage detracts from it quite a bit.”

Nova giggled. “You just had to insult her mane, didn’t you, Surge…”

I crossed my forelegs and huffed. “I like my mane,” I grumbled. “It’s like, the one thing I actually care about in how I look. You don’t know how upset I was when a shrike ripped a big chunk of it off, or when I lost half my tail in a teleportation circle.”

“At least they’ve grown back a bit since then,” Gauge said. “They’re not as short as they used to be.”

I fluffed the end of my mane with a hoof. “Yeah, that’s true. What I wouldn’t give for a comb, though. Or some conditioner.”

Nova laughed at that. “Em, Blackwash didn’t have any conditioner. We’d been out of conditioner for a hundred and eighty years!”

“Then those mares way back when should’ve learned to ration better. Our makeshift shit never did the job right.”

We all had a little giggle at that, but Nova brought it back down to earth soon enough. “So, what were you thinking about, Ember? I know we tease you about it, but whenever you do get thoughtful like that, it’s usually about something important.”

“Like when she’s gonna find some quiet time with her rifle,” Gauge said, accompanied by a few guffaws from Ace.

“Shut up, Stripy,” I said, borrowing Surge’s (racist) nickname for him for a moment. Focusing my attention back on Nova, I shrugged. “I’m just… thinking about how we’re going to get that piece of code. We’re not leaving here until we do.”

“We certainly came far enough,” Ace said. “Would be a real shame to turn back now. Whatever it is, I’m in.”

“Yeah, but I don’t even have a fucking plan.” I frowned at the ground between my hooves. “It sounds like there’s something important about this ‘Walsalhn’ of theirs, and I’m willing to bet that there might be an installation hidden under it. But if that tree is super important to them, then I just know they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep us from getting into it without their permission.”

“They probably couldn’t stop us if we tried,” Ace said, and her right wingtip stroked the body of her compacted rifle on her back. “Surgical strike, get in and out before anypony even knows it.”

“We are not murderers!” I realized I was leering at her, and I took a deep breath to calm myself down. “Just because we could slaughter these ponies with our guns and magic doesn’t mean we should or will. I’m not going to be a murderer like Yeoman. That’s exactly what he would do if he found these ponies.”

“Then what option do we have?” Gauge asked. “We already know that their leader doesn’t want us to go anywhere near the tree. We’re not welcome. And something tells me it’s going to take a lot to change his mind. More than we can possibly manage in only three days.”

“Maybe we can make a trade?” Nova asked.

I lowered my brow at her. “What could we give them that they could possibly want?”

She fidgeted in place. “Maybe some of our guns? We have a lot…”

“We have enough for the fighters in our group,” Ace said. “Meaning me and Ember. Ain’t got a whole lot to spare. Got plenty of ammo, but without a gun, it don’t mean shit. And I doubt these primitives trade in Cs.”

“Information, maybe?” Gauge asked. “Surely they’d like to know more about the outside world.”

“Do these ponies look like they care about the outside world?” I asked, gesturing around us. “They know that there are other ponies out there, but they aren’t interested in connecting with them. I don’t blame them, really; it sounds like they have to fight off slavers trying to pick up some exotic products more than anything else.”

“Then… fuck, I ain’t got no ideas,” Ace drawled. “Maybe you let their leader rut you senseless and then you can get in?”

I immediately slapped her across the cheek, though she was already drawing back by the time I leaned over so it was much less effective than I’d hoped. “I’m not whoring myself out to a tribal pony to get inside this tree,” I said. “I don’t want to catch like, super turbo Auris AIDS or something.”

“That’s racist,” Gauge said.

“Your face is racist,” I grumbled back at him. “But that is absolutely off the table. You go let him fuck you if you think it’s a good idea, Ace.”

Ace chuckled and fluffed her wings. “He could be into dudes, too. They don’t look like they got no zebras around here; maybe something spicy will loosen him up a bit.”

Nova wrapped her forelegs and wings around Gauge. “Nopony touches him,” she said, nuzzling into his shoulder. “He’s mine!”

Gauge chuckled and patted Nova’s back. “Don’t worry about it, Nov, it’ll never happen.”

“Just like anything happening in this discussion,” I grumbled. “So we’re back to square one.”

Surge surprised me by offering a suggestion of her own. “If Lentowenye can speak fluent Equiish, then he’s likely not the only one here. Somepony had to teach it to him. Maybe we can find them and speak with them about it.”

“Maybe they’ll have a sunnier disposition,” Ace drawled. “The chief ain’t exactly somepony I’d want to be stuck in a small room with for very long.”

“Define very long,” Gauge said, his eyes following SCaR as the little drone did its usual thing of idly patrolling around us.

“Like… more than three seconds.”

“At the very least, it’s something for us to do,” I said, standing up. I grimaced from forcing myself to move; I’d definitely eaten too much, and now my gut felt like it was bloated. Four bowls was, in hindsight, probably way too much. “Come on. We’ve basically got free roam of most of this place, right? Let’s go do a little asking around.”

“Asking what, exactly?” Gauge asked. “If they speak Equiish?”

“If we get a response, then it worked,” Ace said, quirking her brow. It took her even more effort to stand up than it’d taken me, especially considering how she’d stuffed herself, but soon all of us had left the campfire behind and started wandering off in a random direction.

We passed by… well, in a word, life. On my left, a mother watched her foals chase each other in circles in front of their hut, the kids squealing as they played, and on my right, a trio of stallions talked and laughed in their own language. Ponies went this way and that, minding their own business and acting real friendly to their neighbors as dinner in the Feati stronghold wound down. But apart from it all, I couldn’t help but notice how much we stuck out like sore hooves. Everywhere we went, even from just a brief walk from the campfire to the streets of the tribe, we attracted the attention of curious onlookers. Old and young, mares and stallions, we were outsiders that they watched with curiosity. And everywhere I looked, every single place I looked, colorful coats made a lively background for silver tattoos covering hooves, legs, faces, and barrels. It left me with little doubt that every adult the Feati had knew how to use their magic to some extent, and made Ace’s foolhardy idea seem even more pointless and hopeless. We couldn’t fight our way through an army of ponies who could command fire and ice and the other elements at will, even with superior technology.

But even if they all knew how to use their magic tattoos and shit, that didn’t mean like, any of them knew how to speak Equiish. Nova, always excited about shit like this, had taken it upon herself to ask everypony we met if they spoke Equiish. Without fail, every single one of them just stared at us in confusion or muttered something in their own language. But we knew there had to be somepony who could communicate with us who wasn’t the tribe’s chief, because Surge was right: somepony would have had to teach him. The problem was, finding that one somepony in a settlement as big as this was proving pretty fucking challenging. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, or to use an analogy probably more relevant to my life, a single cartridge in a fucking mountain of shells.

“Equiish? Equiish? Anypony speak Equiish?” Even Nova’s enthusiasm was beginning to run its course, and she growled and fluttered her wings in frustration, her metal prosthetic slicing through the air at a frightening speed. “Grr! Why is this so difficult! You’d think at least a few of these ponies would know a couple of Equiish words and be able to show us what we want!”

“Wishful thinking at its finest,” Ace said with a chuckle.

“Wishful thinking is about all we have to go on,” I said. I flicked a cigarette out of my little box and got it between my lips as fast as I could, lighting it with a spark from my horn. I needed the nicotine after all this shit, but I noted that the box of fifty I’d left Three Rivers with had become worryingly light over the past few days. “We’re certainly not getting very far on our own.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Gauge said. He frowned at a crowd of tattooed ponies and suddenly froze in place. “So, all of these ponies have tattoos, right?”

“Yeah?” I blew out a stream of stinky smoke and walked up next to him because I knew he was going down some logical train of thought. Or at least, that’s what I hoped. “That isn’t exactly new.”

“Right. And they seem to get more of them the older they get?”

I glanced at a couple of nearby foals and noted the significantly fewer tattoos decorating their bodies—again, only clustered around their ears and eyes. “Yeah. It’s probably a coming of age thing or something. Fuck if I know.”

He pursed his lips for a few moments, then pointed across the way to an older stallion sitting inside of a hut, talking with several colts and fillies. “Then how come he doesn’t have anywhere near as many tattoos as the other ponies his age?”

“He… doesn’t?” I frowned and squinted across the way, my cigarette momentarily forgotten as it dangled from my lips. The stallion was obviously middle-aged, and his body was thin and wiry beneath a thin and wiry sandy coat. He had a horn, gnarled from use and probably a fair bit of trauma and healing, and his deep blue eyes almost looked as dark as some of the beautiful sapphire waters of the Bluewater Gorge. He had a mark on his flanks that seemed to be a pile of woodworking tools, which I thought was fairly odd; as far as I could tell the Feati ponies didn’t use tools like that. But, as Gauge had pointed out, his lack of tattoos was the most striking thing. He had a few around his eyes and ears, like the foals did, and a few on his shoulders and chest, but other than that, his body seemed like a blank canvas to the more filled-in coats of the ponies we’d seen so far.

Ace hummed and frowned. “He’s certainly different,” she concluded, saying the obvious thought on all our minds.

“No shit,” I said, already striking off to go talk to him, and somewhat surprising my friends as I did so. “He’s the most different pony we’ve seen since we got here, which means I wanna talk to him.”

“How do you know he’ll even speak Equiish?” Nova asked, scurrying to my side.

“I don’t, but that’s why I’m going to talk to him,” I said. “I think we’ll learn pretty fucking quick whether he does or doesn’t that way.”

We hesitantly gathered outside of the hut, unsure if now would be a good time to intrude or not. I obviously wanted to just barge right on in and talk to him, but Surge forced me to do the courteous thing and wait to be acknowledged. So while we did that, I took the time to get a good look around this place. The hut was pretty sturdily built, and it was very spacious, with open holes in the walls to serve as windows and let whatever meager light there was down here into the interior. Numerous little totems and knickknacks decorated the walls, and about ten young ponies sat on a woven mat on the floor while the stallion spoke to them. He gestured to something on the wall, and my eyes widened in shock and surprise when I recognized the Equiish alphabet, scrawled there in large letters so it was easy to see.

“It’s a schoolhouse,” Surge murmured.

“And that’s the Equiish alphabet,” Gauge said.

The stallion flashed us a smile that said he at least acknowledged us and would be happy to talk in a few moments. Then, turning his attention back to the kids around him, he began to wave with his hoof. “Ahso, ahso, lenbab tunn. A U’a tunn agga le’hn unta’hn. Unta, A takka’sot immapohna’hn’un. Galep’set, galep’set.” The colts and fillies glanced at us, and then they stood up and began to stream out of the hut, dispersing once they made it past our legs. “Goodbye!” The stallion called after them in perfect Equiish. “See you tomorrow!”

We all stood there, dumbstruck, until the stallion chuckled and leaned against the wall, looking us over. “What’s the matter?” he asked us. “Never heard anypony speak Equiish before?”

“You… can actually speak it?” I asked. Surge immediately pulled on some nerves in my temple, making me wince and rub the side of my head like somepony had kicked it. Of course the stallion could speak Equiish. But sometimes, I didn’t listen to myself before I spoke.

The stallion nodded. “It’s kind of a rare thing out here, isn’t it?” he asked. He gestured after a few of the kids still trotting along the street. “But I’m trying to teach it to these ponies. It’s important that they learn it while they’re young, because it’s a lot harder to pick up later in life.” He shook his head. “It took Summer Light some time to learn, and he’s a hotheaded young colt. But he’s chief of the tribe, and so like it or not, he had to put up with me trying to teach him our language until he was fluent.”

“Summer Light?” I asked, cocking my head to the side. “You mean Lento… whatever?”

The stallion nodded. “His full name is ‘Lentowenye Ilum’. ‘Lentowenye’ means ‘Summer’, roughly speaking, and ‘Ilum’ is ‘Light’. Now, his sister’s named ‘Tekawenye Kakehote’, which means ‘Spring Breeze’.” He chuckled at my confused and probably pretty stupid expression. “I could explain the finer points of the language further, but for that you’d have to attend my daily classes, and for some reason I don’t think you’ll enjoy being surrounded by foals less than half your age.”

“Oh, I’d love to attend!” Nova exclaimed, fluttering forward. “We traveled with Teka for a bit after Ember saved her from slavers! I’ve been trying to figure out her language, but I don’t have any common ground to base it off of.”

The stallion eyed her mechanical wing and took a nervous step back. “I guess I should have expected a group of heavily armed and augmented ponies like you lot would be the ones to bring the chief’s sister back. That must be why Lento’s letting you all stay. Normally he chases off outsiders before they can get close.”

“And what about you?” Ace asked, striding closer. “You sure as shit ain’t one of them.”

The stallion raised a curious eyebrow at her. “Was I really that obvious?”

“You ain’t got as many tattoos and you speak Equiish like it’s your first,” she said, her wing pointing to the large, blank spaces on his coat. “No way you were raised here.”

He chuckled and smiled at us. “Good eye and good ear,” he said. Then he stuck his hoof out at her. “Name’s Sandy Banks. I was a mechanic for a caravan company, but through a wild series of events, I ended up as the Feati’s schoolteacher about eleven years ago. Plenty of time for me to learn the language and pass on my own to them. Lento’s and Teka’s father wanted me to teach them when they were young.”

“Wait…” Nova frowned at the dirt between her hooves. “Teka knows how to speak Equiish?”

Sandy snorted in amusement. “If she does, that’d surprise me. I tried tutoring her for a year, but she absolutely didn’t want to be there. Eventually, I realized it was a fruitless endeavor. No doubt she still knows the bare basics, but she hates the language. Her brother, though, he didn’t get a choice as the chief’s son. He took to my lessons better than she did, anyway.” The stallion shook his head and sighed. “Probably to one-up his sister again. The two hardly ever see eye to eye, and there’s some real bad blood between the two of them, at least from brother to sister. Lento wasn’t happy to see you all bring his sister back, if the stories I’ve heard from earlier today are true.”

I remembered the harsh words Lentowenye had given Teka and the way she tried to make herself seem so small and nonexistent. “Was he really? What kind of sick fuck would want to see his little sister dead?”

“Teka’s always been trouble for the tribe,” Sandy said. “She’s reckless and fearless. Those two things don’t combine very well. She’s endangered a lot of ponies with her antics, and I think it’s fair to say a few ponies have died because of them. This isn’t some kind of family power feud for control of the tribe; Lento, I believe, genuinely doesn’t want her around because he sees her as a danger to the tribe, but she’s still family, so the poor stallion’s caught in a difficult position. You don’t just send a thirteen-winters old kid out on her own into the wilderness, especially not in a place like the Spines.”

“So I’m guessing he hoped that her disappearance to the slavers and everything would just solve the problem for him.” I groaned, already exasperated at the stupid fucking family drama in the Feati power structure, and sat down so I could suck on my cigarette in peace. “Really nice guy. Really. Fucking dick wouldn’t even let us go check out his stupid tree for what we’re looking for.”

“Oh? You’re looking to get into the Wahlsalhn? The World Tree?” Sandy shook his head. “You probably stood a better chance of getting in when Lento’s father ruled the tribe, but he’s been dead four years now.”

“Lento made it pretty fucking clear he wasn’t going to let us in,” I said. My cigarette had all but ran out at about that point, much to my annoyance, and I snuffed the butt into the ground. “But we need to get inside. We have to.”

“It wouldn’t be no exaggeration to say that the fate of this whole damn planet hinges on it,” Ace said.

“Can you help us?” Gauge asked. “We really just need to get something that’s inside. That’s all we need.”

To my frustration, Sandy shook his head. “I’m still an outsider by blood. I’m not allowed in there, even if I’m integrated into the tribe. The only time any ponies go inside is when they complete their adulthood rituals, at which point they are allowed to enter and pray for one hour. Since I wasn’t born here, I don’t get to participate in it. I got some of the tattoos: Listen, Watch, and Learn—” He pointed to the tattoos around his ears, eyes, and forehead, respectively. “—but none of the adulthood tattoos. Strength, Bravery, Honor, Loyalty, such and such. I’ll never get them because I’m not one of them.”

“Well, so much for that fucking idea,” I grumbled, really desperately trying to resist the urge to pluck another cigarette out of my box and start smoking it to curb some of my tense frustration. “We really, really need to fucking get into that tree,” I insisted. “There’s an old Equestrian installation under it, and it has something we absolutely need. So if you can help us get inside one way or another, that would be really fucking fantastic.”

Sandy sort of looked up and down the street before gesturing for us to come further inside. “Why don’t we talk about this inside,” he said. “It’ll be a little more private.”

“Why?” Nova asked, even while Ace and me just slipped right on in. “Are we not allowed to talk about this?”

“Can anypony even understand us?” Ace asked.

“They’ll recognize what we’re talking about the moment they hear the word ‘Walsalhn’. It’s a touchy thing for these people,” Sandy said, gesturing for her and Gauge to enter. “It’s the one big religious symbol these ponies have, and they’ll get very uncomfortable and suspicious about outsiders trying to get inside. But, nevertheless, I think I can help you.”

“If you’ve got an idea, I’m all ears,” I said, hastily following him inside. Sandy went behind his crude, makeshift desk and sat down on a stool, and seeing as how there weren’t seats for the rest of us, I walked right up to it and put my hooves on the edge. “We need to do whatever it takes to get inside there. I really don’t want to force the issue with my guns.”

“I really don’t want to see you try,” Sandy said. Then, sighing, he raised an eyebrow at all of us, now that we’d filed into the privacy of his schoolhouse. “Before I even begin, I feel like I should ask exactly why you all want to get under the tree. This is my home now too, and I don’t want to do anything that will endanger it.”

I glanced at the rest of my friends to see if they had any reservations on talking about this kind of thing to Sandy, but the most I got were a few shrugs. Apparently, that decision was up to me. “Since you’re not from here, I assume you know what the Silence is.”

“Of course I do,” Sandy said, waving his hoof. “Every pony who claims to be civilized knows what the Silence is.”

“Then you’ll be surprised to know it’s over,” I said, trying to make and hold a level gaze with him. “For the first time since it began, we’ve heard something. It’s over.”

He blinked in surprise, and I could tell he was searching my face for some kind of clue that I was joking or lying to him. “No, that’s… what? Really?” One of his eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “You’re not joking around, are you?”

“She isn’t,” Nova said, moving to stand by my side. “We were originally from an old Synarchy communications outpost. Our settlement used to be the link between Auris and Equus. We still had the satellite dishes, and we went through a lot of effort to get them working again. And when we did, we heard something. A message. A code.”

I nodded, thankful for Nova’s help. “We got some kind of coded message sent from a probe traveling to Auris. It broke the code into parts and sent them across the world. One of those parts ended up here, in the installation underneath your big tree. We need to get access to it.”

I decided to neglect mentioning that another piece had gone to the Ivory City. The last thing I needed was him to get fearful or suspicious that us being here would bring Reclaimer’s wrath down on this place… even if it was true. If Yeoman found the Feati’s home, I knew he would do terrible, terrible things to these ponies in search of that code piece.

“And… what will it do?” he asked, suddenly looking very concerned.

“We don’t really know,” Gauge said. The zebra had taken a seat on one of the mats on the ground and was currently fiddling with one of SCaR’s little thrusters. “But I think we can both agree that there are a lot of hidden Equestrian military and science facilities scattered across Auris. That code could go to any one of them, or it could wake up all of them. We don’t know. But what we do know is that we need to get it before other ponies get it—other, terrible ponies who could use it for evil ends.”

“How do I know that you all will do anything good for Auris with it?” Sandy asked. “How do I know that helping you find this code piece will leave the world a safer place?”

“Ever hear of the Sentinels?” I asked him. When he nodded, I put a hoof over my chest. “I helped them fight off the Crimson. We took the fight right to the dam and blew them apart. We even killed Carrion. They made me a sergeant and sent me off on this mission to get the code pieces. If nothing else, you can at least trust them to do good with it.”

“That’s almost as hard to believe as what you’re saying about this code.” He held a hoof to his chin and thought for a moment. “Alright, you’ve convinced me.”

I smiled and relaxed a bit, letting out some of the tension in my shoulders. “Awesome. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me just yet,” Sandy said, looking me in the eye. I should have immediately known this wasn’t over yet judging by the look he gave me. “You’ve still got to convince the chief. He’s the only one who can give you access to the tree.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you have some kind of idea that can help me?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. I did not go all this way and basically spill the beans on everything to some random stallion just to get stonewalled and told to go away.

“I do,” he said, nodding. “But you’re probably not going to like it.”

“Why’s that?” Ace asked, her ears perking in our direction. Apparently, when Gauge had decided to do some maintenance on SCaR, she’d decided to do the same with her rifle. She had the entire thing broken down into parts in front of her and used her feathers to fiddle with little screws while she cleaned it out. “It ain’t gonna be bad, right?”

Sandy steepled his hooves together and pursed his lips. “There’s a rite that ponies must perform when they wish to pray at the Wahlsahn,” he said. “They call it Alaenin Kallengen–we’d call it the Grass Trial.”

Nova shrunk back from the desk. “A trial? That sounds… foreboding.”

“It sounds confusing,” was all I said. “What do I have to do?”

“I don’t know,” Sandy said, much to my frustration. “It could be anything, really. You have to complete something that the village chief and the shaman agree to test you with. Usually it involves going out into the Spines to do something, but they could ask you to do anything.”

“Alright,” I slowly said, already trying to think of what kind of impossible shit Lento would try to get me to do so I’d automatically fail. “Is that it?”

“No, in all likelihood, it’s gonna be the easy part.”

“The easy part?” Ace blinked and raised her head. “What’s gonna be harder than doing who knows what out there in the wilderness?”

“Getting tribe members to vouch for you,” Sandy said. “You need two ponies to agree to let you attempt the trial. Two ponies who know you, respect you, and see value in letting you participate. Good luck finding total strangers to help you. No bribe is going to convince any random pony who doesn’t know you to say you should be allowed into the holy tree.”

“Fuck.” I scowled at the ground and turned to look at my friends “We have three days to try to figure out how to get ponies to vouch for us. Two, more likely, because I bet if we try to start the trial when our time’s almost up, Lento’s gonna tell us to fuck off.”

“And we’ve already burned away most of today,” Ace said. “Ain’t gonna get much done tonight.”

“Shit.” Who was I going to get to help me? How was I going to get strangers to vouch for me? “Can you vouch for us?” I asked Sandy, hoping that he could be at least one of my two supporters.

Unfortunately, he shook his head. “No. I’m not a full tribe member. Just a welcomed outsider. My vote means nothing because you’re outsiders like me. They’d see it as favoritism.”

“As if this whole stupid fucking thing isn’t favoritism enough,” I grumbled.

“What about Teka?” Gauge asked. “Think she’ll vouch for us?”

Well, it was a better idea than I’d come up with so far. “I don’t know. Maybe. We did save her hide, after all.”

“And brought her right back here to get chewed out by her brother,” Nova glumly observed.

That might complicate things a bit. “She’s still worth a shot,” I said. “She’s probably our best bet. Maybe she can help point us to where we can get somepony else on our side.”

“Ain’t gonna be easy if we don’t speak her language,” Ace said.

I shook my head. “We don’t have to. Sandy here does.” I turned to him and wiggled my eyebrows. “You’ll help us out with this, right? We’d be super thankful.”

Sandy sighed and reluctantly nodded. “Only because the fate of the world is at stake… or something to that effect.” He turned to the window and looked outside, where the glow of fire bowls hanging from the canopy cast dim, flickering light across the camp. “I’ll meet up with you again in the morning. It’s nearly high time I went to bed anyway. Daylight is precious here in the Spines, and we can’t afford to sleep in when the sun actually does come out.”

“Yeah. That kinda sucks. I’m used to living on a mountain where there’s always daylight. The sun stays out longer when you’re higher up than the horizons all around you.”

“Where are we going to stay?” Nova asked. “We didn’t get a whole lot of direction when we got here.”

“Head up the road to the top of the settlement,” Sandy said, vaguely gesturing with his hoof to something outside. “There’s a longhouse up there that’s communal. Just pick some unclaimed mats and sleep. I’d have somepony be mindful of your stuff, though.”

“Why?” Ace cocked an eyebrow. “Somepony gonna steal our things?”

Sandy laughed and shook his head. “Curious little hooves might,” he said. “Outsiders that are welcome inside the settlement are always something new and exciting for the foals to see. Some are more adventurous than others when it comes to finding out more about you all.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” I said, turning to Gauge. “We’ve got a little drone that can watch our stuff while we sleep.”

“He’ll beep and let us know if somepony tries touching our stuff, don’t worry,” Gauge said. Then he bowed his head to Sandy. “Thanks for all of your help.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling at the stallion. “I think we would’ve spent another three hours asking ponies if they spoke Equiish before crashing under a rock or something otherwise.”

“It’s no problem,” Sandy said, waving his hoof in front of us. The corners of his lips pulled back in a smile as my friends began to file out the door. “Take care, and I’ll see you in the morning.”