The ERN Stardust finally set us down in the Ivory City’s spaceport after two weeks of travel. Even though mana-charged warp drives allowed ships to ‘teleport’ across the vast reaches of space, the journey was hardly instantaneous, and the drives were far too weak to move the corvette more than a lightyear a day. But now the long voyage across the ether was finally over, and after spending two weeks with its artificial gravity field turned on, the Stardust finally switched it off and gave us our first welcome to Auris’ gravity.

I felt like somepony put heavy saddlebags across my shoulders and pushed down on them. I felt slow and sluggish, and for a second, my heart began to flutter as I suddenly found it more difficult to breathe. Around me, the rest of my team had similar reactions, and Petunia, heavyset mare as she was, looked like she was practically crushed into her seat.

But the sensation passed in the few minutes it took to securely dock the corvette to the spaceport. We had been cruising across the cosmos at a little more than seven-tenths of Equus’ gravity. Auris, as I very quickly remembered, was around double that. Though not quite one and a half times stronger than Equus’ gravity, I certainly felt like I’d just put on fifty pounds in the blink of an eye. Ever the scientist, I noted that within a few generations, the ponies born and raised on this planet would likely be stockier than they would be on Equus just to account for the additional gravity.

I left my seat and blundered over to the observation deck, my hooves practically stomping on the ground as I still tried to get used to moving in this gravity. When I finally reached the window, I flicked the switch to pull away the blast shielding and let some natural light onto the deck. My first observation was how everything seemed slightly blue-tinted, and my blue coat seemed to stand out in a more vibrant sapphire display. Far away and high in the sky, the blue giant Meadowbrook star bathed the planet in high energy blue light. It was a miracle that the Synarchy had even found this world. Right on the far edge of the star’s habitable range, its distance and thick atmosphere gave it just enough protection from the deadly radiation and scorching heat of the monstrous star to support life. And if what I’d heard from some of the reports I pulled with my clearance back on Equus is true, then life on Auris was exotic and monstrous. As ready as I was to see my new installation and get to work on my role in the Dusk Protocol, I hoped to find time to go and see some of the planet before I secluded myself away in my work.

It had only been two decades, but the Ivory City actually looked like a city, and that was beyond impressive. In two decades, the Synarchy had set up enough industry to start erecting towers and prefab housing in the plains of the planet’s capital. While the city had none of the height or density of Fillydelphia, and certainly couldn’t even be considered a matchstick next to the megatropolis of Manehattan, it was the only sure sign of development across an almost pristine world. Still, it was gilded in a way the brutal buildings back on Equus weren’t. The towers seemed to reach for the sky in curving and sloped shapes, and the swooping edges were trimmed in gold and alabaster white—or at least, were either painted or enchanted to look that way. Just the mere difference in architecture alone made the city feel more inviting, more promising, than the world I had left behind.

If this was what the ‘non-conformal architects’ the Synarchy had shipped out here had come up with, I found myself wishing they’d been allowed to stay on Equus and work their magic on the buildings there. It would have been a shot of joy and grandeur into a bleak and almost hopeless world.

“Is it what you expected, doctor?”

I looked over my shoulder to see Flask stumbling over to me. She seemed like she’d recovered well enough from the news I’d given her earlier… or maybe the awe at joining an exclusive hoofful of ponies to set foot on another world had merely driven everything else away. She stopped by my side and regarded the world beyond the glass with wide eyes, almost as if she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” I admitted to her. “But first impressions are positive.”

“Is this where we’re going to be staying?” she asked me. “It’ll remind me of Baltimare, at least.”

I shook my head. “We’re not nearly that lucky. We have a remote installation a day’s flight by ringbird from here. Don’t expect to see this place too often.”

Flask’s face fell. “And here I was hoping for something a little more relaxing than another lab in the middle of nowhere. Does it at least have good views of the outside? These pink trees and orange grass… it’s so exotic!”

“It’s in the middle of a gorge filled with waterfalls,” I told her, neglecting to mention the part where our facility would be buried in the ground there. “I think we’ll get a lot of picnics outside. It’s sure to be beautiful.”

That got her excited, and she started to tap from hooftip to hooftip—at least until the prancing proved too exhausting in Auris’ gravity. “That does sound amazing! This place is so wonderful! It’s like the war is lightyears away!”

“That’s because it is,” I reminded her. “But don’t think we’re getting off easy. We still have a job to do for the Synarchy, and we have to do it well. Otherwise, there may not be an Equestria to go back to.”

The reminder of the war—and what the Synarchy had forced her to leave behind to come out here for Protocol Dusk—dampened her spirits. I put my hoof on her shoulder and gave it a supportive squeeze. “Come on. The ship should almost be done pressurizing. Our ringbird doesn’t leave for the installation until this evening, so we have time to kill around the city. And in case you forgot, Auris has long days. We’ll get a lot of use out of these four extra hours a day.”

That snapped her out of her momentary melancholy, and with a smile back on her muzzle, the mare followed me away from the observation deck and toward the airlock, ready to take her first breath of life on a new world.

The noises of the forest were the first thing to tell me that I was awake. I lay on something cool and firm, unable or unwilling to move for the longest time. But I was breathing and I could hear the blood rushing through my ears, so I knew whatever I had drank wasn’t poison. Or, if it was, it wasn’t strong enough to kill me.

And then I realized that I was alive. My heart began to race, and I sat bolt upright, cracking open bleary eyes and rubbing them with the backs of my fetlocks to try and get them to focus on what was around me. My body ached from horn to hoof, and my throat felt as dry as the ashy crags of the mountain back in Blackwash. Even though I was alive, I felt like death. And when I finally began to take in my surroundings, I had a feeling that death wouldn’t be too hard to find here.

The tall, petrified titans of the Spines loomed around me, gargantuan trunks reaching through the ceiling of dull orange leaves like pillars supporting the canopy above. The dense tangle of leaves from the smaller trees didn’t let much light hit the ground, shrouding everything in shadow. I was sitting on a damp stretch of dirt, covered in fallen leaves and bits of moss. But no matter where I looked, there was no sign of the Feati settlement. I was all alone in the middle of nowhere with no idea where to go or what to do next.

“Surge?” I croaked, my tongue still feeling sluggish and uncooperative. I could taste bile on top of the sandpaper in my mouth, and I wondered how much fluid I’d puked up while unconscious. “Surge, you there? Fuck, my head…”

I felt another presence in my head begin to stir, and soon my body staggered and lurched as Surge inadvertently poked at the controls. My eyes went cross and I dry heaved as my stomach did flips, but apparently I’d already vomited my brains out and didn’t have anything left to give.

“E-Ember?” Surge croaked and winced. She tilted my head left and right as she looked around. “Where… where are we?”

“I don’t fucking know,” I groaned. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Whatever poison was in that brew sent me out cold just like you. I don’t even know how long it’s been since that ritual.”

I groaned again. “I bet this is our fucking trial,” I said. “If we can make it back to the Feati lands, then we win. If we don’t, then we’re fucked.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Surge muttered. “But how are we going to get there?”

I looked around again, hoping for some hoofprints or tracks in the dirt and mud. But there was nothing, or at least, nothing I could see. I had no doubt that a pony raised in the wilderness and taught to hunt and track would have seen something I didn’t, but I didn’t have any of that training. I was a forgemare way out of her element, and I was hopelessly lost in the Spines.

“Forget that,” I croaked, and I felt like the inside of my throat was going to start cracking and flaking. “We need water and food. We’re not going to get very far without them.”

For once, I was the expert when it came to this shit, and it brought me a tiny bit of joy in this grim situation we found ourselves in. Surge had some military training, sure, but she was a spaceship engineer, not a soldier on the ground, and that was a long time ago. She was a better scientist than anything else, and advanced energy manatronics and shit wasn’t going to get us home. Meanwhile, I’d been spending the past few months wandering around the wilderness on my own, fighting for survival. I at least knew what I had to do to stay alive. And the first step on that front was to make sure I didn’t die of dehydration and starvation. Unfortunately, that second step was going to be a lot harder than I thought. When I looked around, all my supplies were gone. My canteen, my box of ReadyTack, and my rifle and ammunition were all gone. The Feati had stripped me of everything, then dumped me out here in the middle of nowhere.

If this was Lento’s way of ensuring I died during the trial, he was already off to a great start. I was so weak I could hardly use my magic, otherwise I would have had Surge help me make just a little bit of frost to slake my thirst.

With nothing in sight to drink and no food to follow it with, I hauled myself to my hooves and began to stagger through the thick undergrowth of the Spines. Bugs whizzed around my head and little animals skittered off through the leaves as I struggled to even move. And I didn’t know where the fuck I was going. I just hoped that I’d find a river before I passed out, because if I passed out now, I probably wouldn’t wake up again.

And as the minutes dragged on, it certainly looked like I was staring option two in the face. I didn’t hear anything indicating water, only the noises of the wildlife around me. They seemed like they were taunting me, laughing at my failure. I was an outsider and an alien on their world, in their turf, and I was going to die there. Auris was always their world, not a pony’s world. I felt like my skin was shriveling up and my teeth were going to start falling out. Spots began to dance in front of my eyes as the humidity sucked the energy out of me. I began to stumble left and right as my sense of balance slowly failed. Moving was tough, and I only grew more tired the more I moved.

“Surge,” I mumbled through my dry mouth. “How did you always think you were going to die?”

The question was a strange one, but my mind wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe it was thinking too straight about my likely impending demise. I’m not sure if it caught Surge off guard or not; I wasn’t really in any capacity to try and read her right now. Regardless, it didn’t take her long to give me an answer. “The war was going to kill me,” she said. “I never doubted that for a minute.”

“But didn’t you hope you’d win the war?” I asked her. “Wasn’t that what this was all about?

“I would die before it ended. When the cruiser I served on was lanced by anti-orbital defences, it nearly broke apart in low orbit. I would have died if the bulkheads failed. After that…” She shrugged. “Either a bombing or an assassination would get me. One way or another, the war would kill me before it was over. Considering I died on a project involved in the war, I guess I was right.”

“Huh. I always thought I’d die by falling off the mountain,” I said. “Because I’m a stupid idiot.”

Almost as if to prove my point, I stepped through some undergrowth—and promptly tumbled down a sharp slope. I cried out in surprise as I rolled toward the bottom, banging my head and shoulders on the damp and dense ground. By some luck, I didn’t bash my head open on a protruding rock or something as I fell, and by some miracle, when I finally came to a stop, my entire chest and underside ended up slick with cool, wet mud. It took a full ten seconds from coming to a stop for my eyes to stop rolling in their sockets and my black-spotted vision to settle on what was in front of me—and the rippling lifesaver I had been searching for.

The sight of water popped open energy reserves I didn’t know I had. I managed to get just enough lift from my legs to fling myself out of the mud and into the pool of water, and I stuck my parched muzzle beneath the surface and practically chugged down as much as I could. But after two deep gulps, Surge craned my neck back and out of the water, leaving me sputtering and coughing.

Slow! she shouted at me from within. You’ll cramp if you aren’t careful!

It sounded like such a stupid warning—what the fuck was a cramp compared to slaking my thirst?—but she was right. If I cramped myself, I wouldn’t be moving for a while. And I needed to be in top shape to get out of here alive. The longer it took me to find the tribe, the more danger I was in. Light was already fading, and I knew I didn’t want to be out here after dark. Any number of horrible monsters could appear in the darkness of the Spines once the sun disappeared, and I bet half of them would snap me up without a second thought, especially since I didn’t have a rifle to defend myself with.

So I forced myself to measure my gulps, however painful that was. Soon, I finally felt the desperate need clawing at my throat subside, and I propped myself up on my knees. I’d stumbled down into a little bowl-shaped hollow in the earth, where the rain that had battered the Spines a few days prior had collected into a stagnant pool. Trees and undergrowth protected and shrouded the bowl from its rims, hiding the topography inside. I didn’t want to think about just how contaminated the stagnant water might be, or what kind of parasites may have been lurking in it, but it was either die of thirst now or maybe catch some nasty bug later. Besides, if there was one good thing about life on Auris, it was that its diseases hadn’t really adapted to pony biology yet. I’m sure one day that would change, but for now, I didn’t have much to worry about on that front.

When I’d finally sated my thirst for the time being, I stopped and let the water in the pool fall still again. There, I finally got the chance to look at myself for the first time in a while. And when I saw the mare staring back at me, I nearly froze, because not only was she unfamiliar, but she was exotic and—dare I say it—beautiful, even. Sure, I looked like shit given my haggard expression, but the silver paint covering my face and dried to my coat… I’m not even sure how to describe it. Delicate swirls of silver coiled around my eyes, and gently curving zigzags moved in a step-like pattern down the length of my muzzle. Dots of silver paint ringed the edges of my ear and a half, and broad strokes of silver colored in my cheeks, my jawline, and spotted down my neck. For a moment, I felt like I was looking at an alternate reality, one where I’d been born down in the Spines instead of high on a mountain, one where I had never had this code and this responsibility forced upon me.

What a life that would have been.

“You’ve spent your whole life stuck on a mountain until now,” Surge said, reading my thoughts. “Have you ever wished you were somepony else?”

I guess we’d gone full circle from the death question earlier. “I always wanted to live in Equestria,” I told her. “I didn’t know what the Synarchy was like back then. I always figured it was better than the hard life I had to scratch out on top of a mountain. The Synarchy had put ponies on another planet, and then they’d disappeared.” I sighed. “I prayed that one day they would reappear and I wouldn’t have to live this life anymore. When the code showed up and the Crimson destroyed Blackwash… I guess I got my wish.”

“You should be thankful for it.”

I blinked and frowned. “Thankful? Why the fuck should I be thankful? My mom died, so many of my friends died, my home got burnt to the fucking ground! My flank got branded and I was nearly raped! Why the fuck should I be thankful?!”

“It gave your life purpose.” When I stopped, my anger slipping to confusion, Surge pressed on. “You were a forgemare on a mountain, and you were going nowhere with your life. You were born in that village, you were raised there, and you’d fuck a stallion with a little too much shared DNA, raise a family, and die there. That was all that your life was leading up to.

“But out here?” She gestured around us. “You have a purpose. You have a reason for doing what you’re doing. You’re changing the world, Ember, whether you realize it or not. You’ve met people and done things you never would have done on top of your little mountain hideaway. Be thankful for that; instead of going nowhere, you’re going somewhere in a hurry. Wherever that trip takes you, it’ll be better than not moving at all.”

When she stopped, I found I didn’t have anything to say—at least, not at first. Finally, though, a thought formed. “You sound like you’ve had experience with that.”

“I didn’t have a choice in who I would be,” she said, looking away. Her mind’s eye wandered, and I caught glimpses of her childhood, her service in the navy, her long nights spent staring at mountains of textbooks and lecture notes. I saw through the eyes of a little filly staring up at a cruiser flying low over her hometown, patriotic music blaring from enormous speakers, while her father stayed her with a hoof on her shoulder as soldiers marched down in parade formation. I felt the heat of an overheating fusion reactor as it scalded the hair of my coat, my flame-retardant jumpsuit curling and smoking as the fabric began to melt while I tried desperately to repair a leaking coolant valve with sweat stinging my eyes. I tasted the lips of a stallion as we watched our foals run in circles in the living room, playing tag while the bombardment shields over the city flickered and boomed. And I felt my heart break in two as a government official rejected my maternity license and told me the Synarchy needed my brains, not my womb, and since my husband was a marine and I had no family left to look after them, they were going to take away my children so I could focus on my work.

I heard my wails echo in the bathroom of my lab as the life I’d wanted was taken away by a High Queen who didn’t care about me, who I couldn’t say anything bad about lest I disappear forever, and nopony would dare question what had happened to me.

When my world finally flashed back to the present, and the emotional ride Surge had accidentally dragged me on ended, I almost collapsed. I nearly couldn’t breathe. I’d caught glimpses of her life in dreams before… but nothing like that. That was a visceral experience, not some hazy, half-remembered dream. And suddenly, Surge seemed to make a lot more sense.

“I spent my whole life doing what my country wanted,” she finally said in a vulnerable, hitching voice. “Just when I thought I’d finally earned something for myself, they took it away because they wanted more. You never had that… that prison around you your entire life. And I was so indoctrinated by the system that I didn’t realize it until I died… and a mare out of her element gave me a second chance.”

I smiled, and if she had been a flesh and blood pony sitting next to me, I would have hugged her. Instead, I could only wrap a foreleg around my barrel as if I was trying to hug myself. “Yeah, well, what can I say, Sparky? You’re electrifying.”

She sent me an image of herself smiling, though that quickly faded away to focus on the task at hoof. “I appreciate the compliment. But I think we’ve dallied long enough, don’t you agree?”

Nodding my head, I groaned and stood up. “Yeah, you’re right about that. We’ve got water taken care of, but we’re still not out of the woods yet.”

“I don’t think we’re getting out of these woods anytime soon.”

“You know what I mean.” Bending over, I took one or two last drinks, then looked around at my total lack of basic supplies. “I guess we don’t have any fucking canteens or shit to keep some of this water in.”

Sure shook my head. “We’ll have to go nice and easy,” she said. “We can’t risk dehydrating ourselves.”

“I just hope we’ll find our way back home,” I said. “They must have had pegasi put us here, because I didn’t see any hoofprints when we woke up.”

“I don’t think we were out cold for a whole day, only a few hours,” Surge said. “So a few hours flight by pegasus… we’re probably a half day’s walk from the settlement. If we keep at it, we’ll be back by tomorrow morning, sparing time for sleep.”

“Think we’ll even be able to sleep out here?”

“We’ll have to,” Surge said. “We’re tired and hungry. That poison stew they gave us sapped our energy. We’re not going to make it home in one go.”

“Great.” Spying the most shallow path out of the bowl, I set about getting out of here, pretty face paint and all. “Well, we got water. Now we need food. Know anything that’s good eating out here?”

“I didn’t spend much time outside once I got to Auris,” Surge said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Great.” I shook my head and grimaced as I began the climb and stressed my aching legs. “I wish we had Ace out here with us. Stupid Lentowenye chieftain bitch…”

Surge chuckled along. “I couldn’t agree more.”

The sun was getting real low—or at least, so I thought. I really couldn’t tell through the canopy of the Spines, but it was getting harder and harder to see. And as the light in the forest dwindled, so too did my time to find food and shelter for the night. I was so used to having eighteen hours of daylight and ten of darkness during the summer months, but here in the Spines, it was more of an even fourteen hour split.

Now that I’d rehydrated myself, I found I could use my magic again for simple spells. Teleporting would probably take too much energy, but telekinesis and making sparks with my horn wouldn’t be too difficult. Unfortunately, neither of those were going to help me get back to the Feati, at least not directly. But they would help me find food and defend myself, and I knew I’d have to do both before I got out of this.

I’d left my pond of stagnant water behind and struck out in a random direction, with no way to tell where I’d been dropped, and no way to tell which way was north, since I couldn’t see the sun. In any event, I tried to go in a northern direction, since that meant if I was going the complete wrong way, I’d end up back in Three Rivers eventually. But of course, like I said, I had no idea which way was north, and Surge and I would stop and argue about it almost every fifteen minutes. Things got particularly bad when she accused me of going in circles, and when I followed her lead as a compromise, I nearly blew up when I found the tree I’d shat under two hours earlier. We were going nowhere in a hurry, and eventually we just decided to stop and try and get some food. After all, our body was hungry, and it was making both of us cranky and irritated.

Getting the food was something else, though. So far, I’d supplied almost all of our food in our expedition across the continent with the aid of my rifle. But now, I didn’t even have a knife to work with. I only had what I could find lying around, and that wasn’t much. The sticks that were on the ground were soaked through with water and beginning to rot, meaning they were more likely to splinter and break before they killed something, so that left me looking for rocks. Thankfully, I found one about the size of my hoof with a jagged edge to it near the roots of one of the towering, petrified behemoths, so I wasn’t totally helpless. With a sharp rock and my ability to swing things in my magic like a sledgehammer, I could probably kill a pony in one or two good shots.

Unfortunately, the game I was trying to hunt happened to be stone hares.

I’d caught a pack of them while wandering through the forest, and after managing to sneak up on them and close the distance, I found myself at a loss for how to go about killing them. Stone hares were heavy, and if I tried to pick one up, it’d probably break free of my weak magic before I could haul it back to me. And I doubted I’d be able to break through their armor with my rock. Stone hares didn’t get their name because they just looked like rocks (which they did), but because they basically were rocks. Little rabbit-like things with six legs and heavily armored backs. They lived around Blackwash too, and when threatened, they’d roll up into armored balls and fling themselves down the side of the mountain. If they could survive that seemingly suicidal escape tactic, how the fuck was I going to kill one without a gun?

You know anything that can get through their armor? I asked Surge. This rock isn’t going to make a fucking dent.

I might have been able to help if you had any excess mana to use, she said. Our little agreement is great when you’re not starving and tired and you have mana to spare, but not when you’re too exhausted to replenish it for me.

No wonder I felt like I was going to die after half a day of dehydration and starvation, I mentally grumbled at her. You’re eating my life energy shit!

And it’ll kill both of us if we don’t get some food to help you replenish it.

Yeah. Right. Whatever. Frowning and chewing on my lip, I idly rolled the rock in my hoof as I watched the hares chew through the sprigs of grass popping up from the forest floor. It was hard to keep my mouth from watering as I watched them. I would have gladly followed their example, but grass on Auris was mildly poisonous, and after puking up my lunch before the trial, I didn’t need to get sick a second time. If I killed one, I could cook its meat with my magic… but of course, killing one was the hard part.

My eyes narrowed on one that wandered farther from its pack and closer to my hiding place. As it chewed on tufts of orange grass, I got a good look at it. Its little head seemed almost entirely too small for the four eyes sticking out from it, and it crawled about on six legs. The legs were too short and stiff for it to run away quickly, I knew that much. That was why the ones on the mountain let gravity do the work for them. If I attacked it, it would likely curl into its armored ball, and then…

A plan came together, and I licked my lips. We were going to eat well tonight.

I waited for the hare to get a little bit closer, and then I pounced. I whipped my head downwards as I lunged at the hare, the stone sailing right for its skull. It cried out in alarm and began to tuck itself into its armored ball, but my stone was faster. It crashed onto the hare’s bony head with a booming crack and split in two, but I had accomplished my goal. Though not dead, the hare was dazed, and it fell onto its side and flailed helplessly as I picked up the two pieces of my stone and flipped it onto its back. Without any further hesitation, I took the two pieces of rock and jammed them into its soft underbelly, one in its gut and the other in its neck to at least try and kill it mercifully. It squealed and wheezed, but after a few final twitches, it fell still.

Pulling my stone shards out of its body to save for later, I picked up the fresh kill in my telekinesis. “Hard part, fucking done,” I proudly proclaimed, already eyeing up its armor. I’d cleaned stone hare kills in Blackwash before, so the process wasn’t exactly new to me. Unfortunately, I usually had a knife when I did so, but my newly split stone shards would have to do. Humming to myself, I gathered everything in my magic and set off for a clearing to build a fire and clean the kill. Thank the stars I wouldn’t be going hungry tonight!

Of course, while stone hares are pretty big, a lot of their size goes to their stout bones and armored hides. By the time I’d finally gotten its bony plates peeled back and started gutting the thing, I realized that I was famished enough to eat two. But it’d taken me this long to get the first hare ready for cooking and I didn’t really have enough time to go hunting for a second, especially since I’d chased the pack away. One would have to do, and if I didn’t find my way back to the settlement soon tomorrow morning, I would have to hunt a few more to keep my energy up.

Wood for fuel was pretty easy to find on the forest floor, so I had myself a fire going in no time. I didn’t bother making a spit to roast the hare with, however. I just held it in my telekinesis and slowly rolled it through the flames. I suddenly missed my forge again, because I used to take raw meat and slap it on top of the furnace to get it seared nicely through, medium rare. And if you think that sounds unsanitary… well, maybe. They did sometimes taste a little ashy, but a little seasoning took care of that problem. And I’d be surprised if any germs or disease could survive on the surface of a furnace regularly brought to hundreds of degrees.

But I had some cooked meat in short order, and I tore through it with a ravenous frenzy. Surge didn’t even complain about it; I think the hunger was getting to her enough that she put aside reminding me about how Equestria was largely vegetarian in favor of getting something into our belly. I cleaned the hare to its bones and tossed them into the fire, then relaxed with my back against a tree as my hunger pains slowly faded away. I was right in that I probably could have gone for two, but I wasn’t about to go back out there and start hunting again. Especially not when I looked around our little camp and saw that the rest of the forest was shrouded in shadow and that it would very shortly be pitch black.

“I don’t think we’re going to make much progress tonight,” I said. “It’s getting harder to see.”

“We’ll need to find someplace to shelter,” Surge said. “If the sounds of the forest are anything to go by, we don’t want to be caught out in the open.”

I perked my ears and listened to the woods around us. As the singing of the birds began to thin out with the encroaching darkness, new sounds began to replace them. Distant branches cracked and creaked, piles of leaves on the floor shuffled and hissed, and the occasional bark or yip of some distant creature would make its way to my camp. I thought I recognized the howls of wargs, and I began to shiver. As far as I knew, wargs were everywhere on Auris, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they called the Spines home too. Larger than a pony and roughly twice as fast, their teeth would rip me to shreds in an instant if they caught me. And exposed as I was in the open, I would be absolutely out of luck if a pack happened to stumble across my camp. With a little worry, I wondered how long it would take before they found my scent or the smell of blood and followed it back here.

I didn’t really want to wait around and find out. Standing up, I grabbed my shards of rock and a bundle of wood I hadn’t dumped into the fire with my magic. I pulled one of the lightly-burnt logs out to serve as a torch and held it in front of me where it could illuminate my path. “Yeah, let’s not be caught out here,” I said, and I paused just long enough to kick dirt over the remains of the fire. “I think getting eaten alive would really put a damper on this whole Grass Trial thing.”

So we ventured off into the forest, straining harder and harder to see as the trees grew darker and darker. Soon, the only light under the thick canopy of the giants was my single torch I carried with me. The night had become alive with the calls and cries of nocturnal animals, and enormous insects and grubs began to emerge from the damp soil in search of food. I screamed aloud and bolted off blindly through the forest when something crawled onto my hind leg, dozens of tiny feet gripping at the hair of my coat. I never found out what it was, only that it must have fallen loose in my panicked sprint. I didn’t really like bugs (I loathed the spider rats that skittered around the old prefab buildings in Blackwash), and I really didn’t like ones that crawled on me in the middle of the night that I couldn’t see. Surge had to take over for a few minutes while I shivered and cried inside of my head as I imagined what sort of horror had tried to latch onto me.

By the time I finally stepped back into control of my limbs, Surge seemed to have miraculously guided us to a passable shelter for the night. Before us stood the colossal trunk of one of the Spines’ petrified giants, only the roots had been exposed by a frothing river tearing between us and it. The whitewater rapids had dropped the earth out from under the tree, creating a dense network of enormous roots that formed almost a protective shell over what looked like a dry interior space. Not only would it provide shelter for the night, but it was another water source, and those were very important to cling to. My panicked retreat across the forest earlier coupled with the charred flesh of the stone hare I’d eaten had left me parched, and so I was glad to see water again. It was everything we were looking for, and I suddenly felt a lot better about surviving the night.

After stopping for another drink, I carefully built mana into my horn to teleport to the other side without stressing it out. I’d only had one stone hare to eat since waking up out here, and so my magic was still pretty spent, but I could afford to spend a little to get to the safety of the other side without having to look for a way to cross the river where I wouldn’t get swept away. Once there, I quickly scuttled to the underside of the tree and threw the meager supplies I’d scavenged onto a plot of dry land away from the river and flopped down onto my side. It wasn’t as cramped as the literal hole in the ground I’d hid with Nova and Gauge when we fled Hole, but the gnarled and petrified roots of the behemoth above me left the hollow feeling claustrophobic and tight.

“Home sweet home,” I muttered as I looked around. The shelter was secure and almost unassailable; I doubted that any wargs could claw their way inside and get to me, which was nice. The thick mass of roots and brush created a curtain against the outside world, and the only places that could see into the hollow clearly were along the banks of the river. Sighing, I closed my eyes and let my muscles relax. I should be safe inside for the night, and I was eager to get some rest and try to recover my energy for the next day.

“Are we just gonna crash?” I asked Surge. “I don’t think my body can stay awake much longer.”

“It would be wise just to recoup our strength,” Surge said. “We’ll need it for tomorrow. Wasting any energy trying to remain alert tonight would doom us tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I get that.” I rolled my neck and listened to the stiff vertebrae pop; I started to wish I had collected some plant material to use as a makeshift pillow or something. “I just hope nothing sneaks up on us. Say, do you know if there are any poisonous bugs or stuff around these parts?”

“Venomous?” Surge asked.

“What’s the fucking difference?”

Surge dropped that with an inward sigh; even she was too tired to argue the finer points of Equiish with me. “I’m sure there are, but I never encountered any. Most of the life on Auris tends to be more directly violent and lethal than that. We should be fine sleeping out here.”

“Good.” I let out a huge yawn and rolled over, turning my head away from the roaring rapids behind me. Hopefully I was tired enough that I’d fall right asleep and they wouldn’t keep me up. “Fucking… see you in the morning or something, Sparky.”

“Goodnight to you as well, Ember.”

And then I was gone, too tired to dream for the night.

But that didn’t mean Surge wasn’t.

I sat on a metal bench in a domineering room made of brutal concrete. Across from me, a door with a frosted glass pane loomed, flanked on the left by a secretary tapping her way through a computer screen, and a soldier on the right. I tried for the eighth or ninth time to focus my eyes on the name written on the glass, but I simply couldn’t. My mind was still reeling from the day’s events, and I knew my makeup was ruined by the tears I hadn’t quite been able to suppress. Professionalism dictated that I should have gone home and cleaned myself up before coming here. I was here at the Synarchy’s request—no. No, it wasn’t a request. The Synarchy never requested anything of us. It only commanded, and like a good soldier, I obeyed my orders without question and without hesitation.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t wear my misery into this office so the monster who blocked my maternity license renewal could see what she had done to me.

I heard the click of door’s magnetic locks releasing before the secretary turned her attention to me. “The Councilor will see you now,” she announced, and her eyes flicked back to her screen as soon as she decided she’d given the wreck of a mare on the bench enough attention. I was slow to get up, but when I did, I found my hooves plodding toward the door, knowing that there was nothing I could do but let fate drag me onwards.

I didn’t bother to knock on the door before entering. I merely opened it, stepped inside, and moved right for the closest chair, firmly shutting the door behind me.

The pane rattled in its frame.

My eyes stayed glued to the desk in front of me; I couldn’t bring myself to look at the gray mare sitting behind it. I only wanted her to spit out my orders and send me away so I could go back to my husband and wallow in my misery with him. That would have been the kindest thing… but the Synarchy was never big on kindness. Only efficiency and order. And I was just another part that had gotten out of line and needed to be brought back to where it could be most useful. The machine never stopped turning, even when it chipped the corners of the gears that turned it in its merciless grind forward.

I did not get my wish. Instead, the mare gently put her hooves on the edge of her desk, just inside the upper reach of my vision. “For what it’s worth… I’m sorry, Dr. Surge. As a fellow mare and a mother of my own, I know your pain.”

No you don’t, I wanted to scream at her. She was a member of the Synarchy’s High Council, second only to the High Queen herself—on paper. But I knew as well as she did that the High Queen was little more than a demented shell of a mare the Council paraded around to let them do what they want. I’d seen as much during the test run of our mana torus. And I knew for a fact that she never had her maternity license revoked or was asked to sacrifice something for the nation. She could do what she wanted, and there were no repercussions. And even though I was one of the best scientists—no, the best scientist the Synarchy had in the field of manatronics, I had no such freedoms.

So instead, I only bobbed my head. “We all do our part,” I said, flatly recycling a line I’d used so many times throughout my life. Then, steeling myself, I raised my head to look her in the eye. “But if the Synarchy is going to cut my foalbearing days short, may I at least know why?”

That was just the polite way of asking why she had done this to me. I’d always wanted to have a large family when I left my military service, and I’d been allowed to bear two foals. But that wasn’t why I was so hurt by the rejection of my renewal; my pain lay in the fear of what would happen to my family if the Synarchy needed me this desperately that they would deny me from taking time to raise more children.

The Councilor sighed and stood up, and that made me raise an eyebrow. She was usually such a calm and collected mare, but something was obviously bothering her. She held her tongue until she walked to the window of her office, overlooking the towering skyscrapers of Canterlot below us. Far beyond them, a flight of two cruisers and an escort of corvettes slowly lifted into the sky, ready to do battle against Coalition ships somewhere else above the planet. As a former naval engineer myself, my heart went out to the souls on those ships. Gone were the days of unquestioned orbital superiority the Synarchy had enjoyed years ago. The Coalition could finally field ships capable of squaring off against our own—and in ever-increasing numbers.

“The Synarchy is in desperate need of your skill and knowledge,” the Councilor said, finally turning away from the window. “I think you’re a smart enough mare to realize that the war has gone nothing like the propaganda and drivel we spew out across the radio on a daily basis suggests.”

I nodded. “I realized that when Whinnypeg’s suburbs were flattened by orbital bombardment two months ago,” I said. “That wouldn’t happen if we were winning.”

The Councilor’s shoulders sagged. “We need your help if we’re going to turn the tide,” she said. Walking back to her desk, she opened a drawer and pulled out a folder. Setting it in front of me, she gingerly pushed it forward with an almost grim finality. “I’ve taken the liberty of getting everything in order for you. You can read this folder so long as you’re in this office, but the moment you leave, I will break the etch glass. This is Onyx Star clearance, do you understand?”

Blinking in surprise, I pulled the folder closer and lifted it in my magic. Printed across the front in stenciled lettering were the words ‘PROTOCOL: DUSK’. Opening it up, I pulled out the sheets of etch glass and scanned through them, my eyes growing progressively wider.

When I was finally finished, I felt my chest tighten up. Putting the folder down, I looked at the Councilor with wide eyes. “Auris… it’s real?”

She only nodded. “It is.”

“But… but that’s impossible!” I stood up in shock. “The navy doesn’t have drives that are good enough for interstellar travel. I know because I worked on them for my service! Any attempts to reach another star system would take centuries, let alone one that has a habitable world!”

“You’d be surprised.” The Councilor took the folder back and waved a hoof. “The details need not concern you, but the technology exists, courtesy of our High Queen’s labors. The brightest minds of the Synarchy will never be her equal when she’s lucid and devoted to the diversions the Council gives her. But this colony has been kept a secret for years now, and it will continue to be so.” Then, hesitating, she put the folder out of sight. “It is easy to do so when ponies only go one way. Ships are lost in combat all the time; it’s easy to make a ship disappear to bring ponies to Auris and nobody will be the wiser.”

My mind came to a screeching halt when I heard her say ‘one way’. I looked up, horrified, and she gave me only a grim nod in return. “You… you aren’t… b-but my family!”

“The Synarchy needs everypony who can help to give their all,” the Councilor said. “We must all be prepared to sacrifice for Equestria, or there will not be an Equestria left to sacrifice for.”

“But my children are still young!” I shouted at her in dismay. “Circuit is only five, and Solder—Celestia, Solder is two! You can’t take me away from them! You can’t take away their mommy!”

“There are a million foals younger without either of their parents, each suffering because of the war,” the Councilor grimly noted. “A million more will grow up orphans if this war is not brought to an end, and soon.”

“So my children are the price to pay for Equestria?”

“When your husband is deployed to the front, they will be taken care of by the state,” the Councilor told me, as if that would help me feel any better. “They will not know want. They will be raised well, and they will become effective members of our great nation. Perhaps one day, when the war is over, you will be allowed to see them again.”

I was caught between rage and desperate sorrow. Tears streamed down my face as I clenched my teeth and had to restrain from tearing the Councilor’s head from her body. But I couldn’t; I knew that my family and everypony I knew would be tortured beyond imagination in reprisal, and I knew that I would be forced to watch. That was if the soldier standing outside her office didn’t merely gun me down as soon as he heard the screams.

As I struggled and raged in my seat, the Councilor stood up and had the gall to put her hoof on my shoulder. “Go back and be with your family,” she told me, “but you will not say a word about what was discussed here to anypony—not even your husband. You will have until the end of the week to prepare your team for transfer to Auris and say goodbye to friends and family. Celestia willing, you’ll see them again when the war finally ends… however long that may be.”

I managed to choke some words out of my constricting throat. “But… the weekend is in three days.”

The Councilor merely nodded. “I know,” she said. “So use them wisely.”

I woke up with tears staining my cheeks the next morning, and it took me a minute to remember why.

Surge had come to before me, and she’d moved our shared body down to the river, peering intently at the churning water before us. A small pile of four-eyed fish had been laid on a rock next to us, their necks snapped with a telekinetic twist. Even as Surge felt my presence appear in our head, she snatched a fish out of the river with my magic and broke its neck with a thought before adding it to the pile.

“I took the liberty of catching breakfast,” she said, picking up the five fish she’d collected. “It seemed like a better solution than bashing stone hares with rocks.”

“Can’t say you’re wrong about that.” As I switched back into full control of my body, I turned away from the river and stared at the fish, trying to push Surge’s private memories out of my mind. “I’ve never cooked fish before. I’ve never fucking cleaned one. There really aren’t a lot of fish on top of a fucking mountain.”

“You have to scrape the scales off and gut it like any other animal,” Surge said. “Be careful of the little bones inside. They’re almost as bad as fish back on Equus.”

Taking the sharp edge of the stone, I began to run it against the grain of the fish’s scales and started to knock them loose. “You cleaned Auris fish before?”

“Never personally, but my installation was in Bluewater Gorge, remember? Some of the ponies on my team liked to fish to pass the time. Sometimes they’d dissect fish for fun when there was a lull between testing phases.” When I snorted, she shrugged. “Scientists get bored too, especially when they’re isolated light years away from everything they’ve ever known.”

“Yeah, that probably sucks. Probably about as much as this does when I don’t have a fucking knife or anything!” I growled in growing frustration as I tried to cut open the fish’s flesh to clean it out, but the rocks I had to work with were not nearly fine enough or sharp enough to cut cleanly through its skin. Groaning, I flopped the descaled fish onto the ground and picked up the next one. “Fuck it, I’ll just cook these things whole and pry the meat off with my magic. Otherwise, this is going to be way more effort than it’s worth.”

And even then, it still kind of was, but after a lot of effort cooking the stupid fish with my magic and burning a good bunch of it in the process, I at least had something to eat. And when I finally began to stuff my face with food, it didn’t matter how much effort it had taken to open them up. I could finally stop feeling like shit and actually focus on making it out of this forest in one piece. But I noticed I still trembled from time to time, and my throat felt tight, like I'd spent the whole night sobbing. Perhaps I had.

When I noticed Surge wasn't going to say anything about it, I decided to clear my throat and broach the topic. "Surge, that dream, is... is that when you stopped believing?"

I felt Surge freeze inside my brain, and after a moment, sorrow began to soak over me like a tidal wave. "Yes," was all she managed.

"Only three days, I... I didn't know it was that bad. I couldn't imagine what that was like."

"I couldn't, either," Surge weakly admitted. My whole body trembled again as her inner turmoil swept through me. "When you're growing up, you don't think about the sacrifices you have to make. Not in explicit terms, anyway. When I married my husband, I promised him we'd have five children together. We'd be a strong and healthy family, loyal to the Synarchy, and we'd help win the war. But..."

The pain came at me again. The rejection at the Citizen's Office bit deep, even though it wasn't my pain and wasn't my memory. "How could you possibly say goodbye to everything you knew in three days?"

"I couldn't," Surge admitted. "I had to leave a lot of messages to ponies I wouldn't be able to see. I never got to see the responses before I departed. And even then, I had to spend the third day in a hotel, far from my family, before I left Equus for good. How do you say goodbye to your husband and children in two days, not knowing whether you'll ever see them again?"

It was a question I couldn't answer, and I doubted Surge intended for me to do so anyway. I could only stare helplessly at the river rushing past the shore as she drowned herself in sorrow. "I... don't know," I said. "I really don't."

Surge mirthlessly chuckled. "Well, neither do I. I thought dying would solve those worries for me. I could see my family again, but..." She sighed. "That's not how things worked out. It seems I'll have to wait." She used my throat to whimper and tremble one last time. "I want to know if my foals grew up and lead good lives. I want to know if they remembered their mommy. If they didn't..."

Stars, I wished I could hug her. She needed it so badly. It was like through that one memory and conversation, everything about Surge made sense. She'd been betrayed by the country she'd been raised to believe since she was a filly, and even now, two centuries later, she was trying to reconcile what happened to her with what she believed in. But I knew I had to say something, I just didn't know what, so I took a bite of fish to stall for a response.

Before I could say anything, I heard a twig snap behind me.

My ears perked straight upright. Swallowing the piece of fish I had in my mouth, I turned toward the noise. Almost immediately, I froze as still as a statue, my eyes widening as some instinctive fear gripped at my gut. There, standing not even twenty yards away, was a warg. Its four eyes were locked on me, watching every tremble that ran through my body, and the hooked teeth of its lower jaw meshed with the razors poking out from beneath its upper lips. Two tails swished back and forth, and the claws on its six paws dug into the earth as its muscles tensed.

And it wasn’t alone. I saw movement out of my peripheral vision as more began to circle around me, though I didn’t dare break eye contact with the first one. I didn’t know how many there were, but I knew there were more than me, and that was a problem. I was about to become a very bloody chew toy for a pack of monstrous wolves, and that was absolutely not okay. I didn’t even have a gun to fight back with. All I had were two rocks and a pile of fish bones, and somehow I didn’t think I would get the wargs to choke on the bones no matter how much I asked.

Ember, Surge warned me, worry creeping into her voice. She'd pushed away her inner turmoil and sorrow to focus on the danger at hoof, and I was at least grateful to have her mind working alongside mine. Don’t back down. Don’t make a move. If we stand our ground, maybe we’ll be fine.

I swallowed hard. I think that’s wishful thinking, I replied. We’re gonna have to fight.

Rather than let the pack get the first move, I suddenly widened my stance and let magic flare up on my horn. The wargs immediately barked and began to charge, but my magic was at least faster. I immediately erected a semicircle of fire around me, crackling flames taller than my head bursting forth from the ground. Animals, whether they were from Equus or Auris, feared fire, and I hoped that would work to my advantage. And astonishingly, it did. I saw the warg in front of me dig its paws into the dirt and slide to a stop as the wall of fire lashed out at it, forcing it back. I quickly spun around to make sure I was safe from the other end of the semicircle, and I saw one of the wargs running away as fire latched onto its tails. A third prowled around the edge of the fire, lunging forward only to retreat when the flames crackled in its direction. I was safe for now, but I hadn’t exactly had any time to digest my breakfast. Maintaining the wall of fire was taking its toll on me, and I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep it up.

Something Surge was sharply critical of. We should have teleported to safety while we had the energy, she said. Once that wall goes down, we’ll die here.

“Fuck off,” I growled at her through gritted teeth. “Get us out of here, then.”

You don’t have the mana. If I teleported us someplace far away enough to be safe from the wargs, we’ll pass out cold. And even then, I can’t guarantee they won’t find us while we’re uncon—wait. There were only three…

I blinked and counted the two remaining wargs. “So? What the fuck does that have to do with anything?!”

Wargs hunt in packs of four or five!

Almost as soon as she said it, searing pain raced through my left hindleg. I cried out in pain and my magic failed as something heavy dragged me backwards. Casting a terrified look over my shoulder, I saw the fourth warg sinking its claws into the riverbed, its fur soaking wet. Did the fucking thing jump through the rapids to get me?! Fuck!

My legs instinctively bucked and kicked before I could even react, trying to shake the monster loose, but I couldn’t just slip out of its bite, not with teeth like that. To make matters worse, the other two who remained jumped through the dying flames to rush me as my magic failed. It felt like I was watching my own impending doom in slow motion. So many teeth lunging for me, ready to tear the flesh from my bones and drag my intestines out of my still-screaming body. It was, all things considered, an absolutely terrible way to die.

It was a good thing, then, that Surge and I were both fighters. We wouldn’t go down quietly.

My horn flared blue as Surge caught the two lunging for us in her magic. That blue shifted to orange when I turned her telekinetic grip into fire, engulfing them in an inferno that clung to their furry coats. We turned my horn to the last one still clinging onto my leg, but that was where our luck ran out. Seeing its friends flee, it jumped backwards, its six muscular legs easily kicking it off the ground—and dragging me with it. It fell over backwards into the rapids, and I could only scream helplessly as its weight whipped me through the air. My shoulders and hind quarters hit the frothy surface of the water square on, and I coughed just before my head could go under.

And to make matters worse, the warg still hadn’t let go. As its six legs secured its footing against the rocks in the rapids, it twisted and began to whip its head back and forth. It took all my effort and then some on Surge’s part to keep my mouth closed and not scream as I felt its teeth rip through my flesh. Surge mercifully began to dampen the painful sensations coming from my leg, but that didn’t stop the whiplash from tearing at my neck as the monster tried to throttle the life out of me and drown me in the water. I was choking on the white water around me, and my forelegs flailed in front of my head to keep the warg from bashing it against any of the rocks.

Then my desperately kicking hind leg scored a hit. I don’t know what part of the warg I bucked, but it recoiled and let go of my leg. Freed from its grip, I struggled to get my head above the water, barely managing to suck down another breath before the strong current dragged me back under again.

Sunken rocks whizzed by as I spun around and around in the water. Surge pulled my limbs together and covered my head with my hooves, but as my mangled hind leg struck rock after rock, I realized I could hardly move it, much less tuck it against my body. Dull aches made their way to my brain, and I knew that if it wasn’t for Surge, I’d be screaming in pain right now. But even if I wasn’t screaming in pain, I certainly had to fight to keep myself from screaming in terror as the riverbed blurred past.

A drop in the rapids sent me spinning out of the foamy froth for a brief second, and I took another breath while I had the momentary opportunity. Then I was down again, the knee of my foreleg taking a sharp crack on a rock poking out from the ground. The water around me began to take on a crimson tinge as my profusely-bleeding hind leg dumped my lifeblood into the river, and I knew I had to get free of the rapids now or I would die, either from rocks I barely avoided through luck and desperate flailing, or from simple blood loss from the massive gash in my leg. I was already feeling woozy, and I didn’t know if that was the blood loss, the adrenaline kicking my exhausted body into overdrive, sheer terror, or all three. Even inside my brain, Surge’s shouts had become muddled and distant. Black spots began to dance around my vision, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before they coalesced into a total blackout.

Then, above all the chaos, I heard Surge scream one word clearly through my brain:

Rock!

I reached my forelegs out on instinct, and instead of bashing my brains against a sunken stone, I coughed as the rapids threw me onto the rock, crushing the wind from my lungs just as sure as the stone bruised my ribs. But it wasn’t until I began coughing that I realized my head was above the water and I was clinging onto salvation. This single boulder, overgrown with moss and slime, was all that stood between me and the rest of the raging rapids surging over my flanks. Driven on by strength fueled by desperation, I dragged myself out of the water and onto the rock, ignoring the disgusting feeling of the slime beneath my chest. Survival was the only thing that mattered; everything else was secondary.

Panting, I looked back at my leg, and nearly lost the breakfast I’d eaten. The warg’s teeth had ripped so much flesh off of my leg, severing muscle and tearing tendons free from the bone that now glistened in the muted light of the forest. Those severed strands of muscle twitched and tugged at nothing when I tried to move my leg, and the blood profusely pouring out of it had already painted the rock red. I doubted I had even a minute left to live at the rate it was going, and it was already getting exceptionally hard to focus on my injury.

I had no other options. I needed to stop the bleeding now, and there was only one thing I could do.

Not even Surge’s pain dampening was enough to stop my screams as I set fire to my destroyed leg.

I heard Surge crying out to me, but I was already too faint to even hear what she was saying. Her words, too, had turned to garbled mutterings and fruitless warnings. As my body started to shut down and I began to pass out, it dragged her along with me, despite her desperate efforts to remain coherent.

It was a fruitless struggle; my limbs fell slack, and soon we were both gone, our shared body helplessly clinging to a slippery rock with only three working limbs.