Pinkie Pie was awake like a shot as soon as the lights came on over the Second Circle, though with the thick canopy of trees overhead, it was hard to tell that the lights were on. Still, Lightning Dust got mad if Pinkie didn’t wake her up on time, so she’d gotten really good at waking up with the lights.

It was still super early, so Pinkie decided to have a little looksee around her party’s camp; they were resting on a massive hill with a clear road down the center, giant bushels of trees on either side. Sticking to the open road was dangerous, but so was getting lost in the trees, so their camp was nestled in the trees within sight of the road.

Rainbow Dash and Gilda were both snoozing, cuddled up together like two adorable peas in a pod. It was hard for Pinkie to watch them and not wish she was cuddling with them, so she turned her attention elsewhere.

Limestone was not sleeping. She was perched on a low-hanging branch, watching the road like she was expecting it to come alive, though the rings around her eyes made Pinkie think that maybe she was only half paying attention.

“Limestone!” Pinkie called out, and Limestone barely turned her gaze to Pinkie before returning it to the road. She was always the prickly type, but something about her standoffish behavior struck Pinkie as odd. “You okay?”

“I don’t understand you, Pinkie,” Limestone said in a low growl. “Do you know how long you’ve been away from the surface? Almost ten years. We’ve dedicated so much of our lives to finding out what happened to you, and now that I’ve finally found you, you’re acting like nothing’s happened.”

Pinkie huffed and puffed up her cheek for a sec, but then she was kinda bowled over by an overwhelming sadness. She was trying really hard not to see things from Limestone’s perspective, cuz it just felt too sad, but that was just Pinkie being selfish.

“I’m sorry, Limestone,” Pinkie sighed and held her arms up to Limestone’s branch, jumping an inch off the ground to futilely try to jump up beside her, but instead Limestone just hopped off and sat down on the grass next to Pinkie. “I’ve missed you. You and Maud and Marble and mom and everyone else. Now that I’m seeing you again, it’s like… is this real? No way, how can it be? It’s… a lot, I guess.”

“Yeah, I feel that,” Limestone sighed and put her claw on Pinkie’s shoulder. “Things can’t have been easy for you down here. What I don’t get though is why we’re not just bailing on these monsters and booking it back to the surface.”

“Well for one, we’d need a soul to cross the barrier,” Pinkie huffed, and then sighed. “But also, like? You said it yourself, I’ve been down here a long time. I have a whole life down here, such as it is, and I wouldn’t be able to just abandon it like it doesn’t matter, or pretend that it never happened. I have some stuff that I need to do, and I would like it if you could support me.”

“Your life down here is being treated as a slave and a court jester,” Limestone scoffed, her voice dripping with disdain, “and you’re choosing that over your own family.”

“Hey, that’s not fair,” Pinkie spat, “you’re the one forcing me to choose.”

“Yo, what’s up, nerds?” Rainbow Dash asked as she and Gilda walked up to the sisters, Gilda stretching her arms over her head and yawning.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Limestone said as she stood up.

“Yeah, okay,” Pinkie sighed.

The girls headed up the hill, opting to stay on the road side of the trees, but still very close to both. Whatever, Pinkie wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention, she was kinda lost in her own thoughts. Or at least she was until, as she was lagging behind the group, she watched Gilda smack Rainbow’s ass outta nowhere and became intrigued.

“Ack! Gilda!” Rainbow said indignantly.

“What, what’s the matter?” Gilda said teasingly, putting her arms around Rainbow and down her shirt. “C’mon, I know you like this kinda stuff.”

“Gildaaa, c’mon,” Rainbow whined, “there’s people around.”

“Eh, let ‘em watch,” Gilda picked Rainbow up off the ground and hoisted the comparatively miniscule harpy over her shoulder, giving her ass another smack for good measure that got the cutest little yelp outta Rainbow. “Let ‘em all see who you belong to.”

“Gilda,” Rainbow huffed and squirmed around a bit, but if she was trying to put up an honest fight, she wasn’t making it very convincing.

“Ooh, me next! Me next!” Pinkie ran up in front of Gilda and bounced in front of her. “I wanna play! Pick me up and show me who’s boss!”

“Um, well I—” you’d think with all that bluster before, Gilda wouldn’t get so easily flummoxed, but here she was.

“Pinkie,” Limestone griped, looking back from the front of the group, “the least you could do is not give strangers total control over your body.”

“I’m not, I’m in control of my body,” Pinkie said sassily, “and you’re the one telling me what to do with it, so…”

Limestone just groaned loudly and kept on walking, and Pinkie just sighed. All these years hadn't changed Limestone that much.

“Gilda, put me down for a sec,” Rainbow said, and Gilda did just that, allowing Rainbow to get in front of Pinkie. “Hey Pinkie, if you want, I could carry y—”

“Oh no,” Gilda scoffed, “you think you’re just gonna show me up like that, dweeb?”

“What are you— waugh!”

Gilda hoisted Rainbow and Pinkie both, putting ‘em over her shoulders as Pinkie giggled and cooed in delight, and it was pretty obvious that Rainbow was having a good time too, what with her face turning all pink and stuff.

Limestone however, was not having a good time, and as soon as she turned around and saw Pinkie in Gilda’s grasp, she stomped up to the quetzal and confronted her.

“Put Pinkie down right now,” she demanded, but Gilda just took a step closer.

“Or what?” Gilda puffed out her chest. “You gonna make me?”

“Gilda, please don’t antagonize her,” Rainbow sighed irritably.

“No Gilda, please antagonize her,” Pinkie insisted, “she’s being a real jerk.”

Limestone just let out a loud groan of frustration before stomping off into the forest, Pinkie squirming out of Gilda’s grip and running after her sister until she was yanked back by her collar by Gilda’s claw.

“Hold on there, you,” Gilda said. “Don’t make her problem into your problem. We’re all headed in the same direction anyway so it’s not like she’s gonna go too far. Just let her blow off some steam for a bit.”

“Yeah,” Pinkie sighed and pouted, but she knew Gilda had the right idea. “I guess you’re right.”

The former mining town that the girls had finally reached definitely looked like it was haunted or cursed or something. Towering stone buildings were arranged in a labyrinthian pattern and had become engulfed by foliage, with moss, vines, and even trees covering every inch of the walls and pouring out of the windows.

The ground was moist and black, and while the canopy of trees that covered most of the Second Circle was absent here, the buildings still drenched the village in perpetual shadow.

Pinkie, Rainbow, and Gilda hadn't caught up yet with Limestone by the time they reached the village, and Pinkie was starting to get a little nervous.

“Limestone!” Pinkie called out, only to get immediately shushed by Gilda’s claw over her mouth.

“Hey, shut up!” Gilda whispered. “Who knows what could be skulking around in this creepy place.”

“Well, we gotta find Limestone, quick!” Pinkie attempted to whisper but she wasn’t very good.

“Yeah, I’m with Pinkie,” Rainbow said and rubbed the back of her neck. “If something happened to Limestone, it’d kinda be on us.”

“No it wouldn’t,” Gilda scoffed. “She’s the bran genius who decided to run off on her own. But yeah, I get it, we’ll find her. Who knows, maybe we got here before her or something.”

“I hope so,” Pinkie said as the girls started combing the village; this place gave her the creeps.

The girls searched the village, and with every corner they turned into another empty street, Pinkie’s nerves got more and more shredded, until she was literally hanging off Rainbow’s arm cuz she couldn’t deal with the idea that something might’ve happened to Limestone and it was all her fault.

The others tried to calm her down by suggesting the Limestone might’ve taken a detour or fumed a bit before heading to the village, and while that was true enough, Pinkie couldn’t shake the horrible ominous feeling she had.

They turned another corner, into a T-shaped road that was sandwiched by three towering buildings, almost suffocating in its enclosure. Pinkie was starting to panic, and she never wanted to see a damn building again in her life, or a vine or a tree for that matter.

But when she set aside her horrible feelings for a moment, she noticed something.

It was Limestone.

“Limestone!” Pinkie called out, but her sister didn’t respond, so Pinkie ran to her, ignoring and avoiding the others as they tried to hold her back. When Pinkie finally reached the gargoyle, she understood why she hadn't responded, as Pinkie’s eyes stung with tears.

She had been fully turned to stone. She was nothing more than a statue in Limestone’s image.

“Woah, what happened to her?” Rainbow asked as she caught up, her and Gilda following Pinkie with heightened caution. “Is that just a gargoyle thing, or—”

“I don’t know!” Pinkie said panickedly. Limestone’s face was frozen in a mask of rage and frustration, but that’s what she always looked like anyway so it was hard to tell what had happened to her.

“This is definitely magic,” Gilda growled, looking around cautiously for whatever could’ve done this to Limestone. “We shouldn’t just be hanging around—”

Everything happened so fast. Gilda was cut off mid-sentence by something, but before Pinkie could even tell what was happening, she was already in the monster’s grasp, being hauled away against her will. Rainbow Dash fired a laser at the monster, which forced it to let Pinkie go, and only then could she see what they were up against.

When she was a pony, she would have been a unicorn, but you could hardly tell by the sparking stump that was all that remained of her horn. What kind of monster she was supposed to be, Pinkie couldn’t even begin to tell.

She was tall and muscular, with dark burgundy fur in most places. She had the claw of a tiger on one arm, and the other hand was a grim mesh of stone, flesh, and crystal. She had the tail of a dragon, and the eye of one too, but only one cuz the other was a normal pony eye. There were crystals jutting from various places on her body, and mismatched patches of fur sewn into her skin.

Pinkie wasn’t sure if she should be looking on in awe or in terror, so she settled for a mixture of both.

Gilda charged the mysterious woman, who barely gave the quetzal any thought as she threw a bomb in front of Gilda that detonated into a lime-colored smoke, Gilda’s skin hardening into stone as the smoke consumed her.

It seemed pretty obvious what’d happened to Limestone now.

And what was about to happen to Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash.

lemme tell ya, when i realized i could make tempest shadow's monster form a throwback to her frankenstein-ass design from the mlp movie artbook, i felt like a genius