Bad things happened when you went out of bounds, and she'd spent much of her life wondering if one of them had been her fault. But those bounds were being redefined, and Cerea wasn't completely sure where the new borders were.

To a small degree, she (theoretically) had the gallop of the palace: a recruit was expected to memorize all of the hallways, and she'd been told that a full map would be delivered to the barracks for her study. But she hadn't done that much exploration on her own. The training sessions generally left her exhausted, whatever amount of strength she somehow retained had to be dedicated to clearing that much more of her sleeping quarters, and... the palace staff understood that to be her most typical location. If she wasn't on the training grounds, then she was likely in the barracks, or within a kitchen which she most likely had to herself. (The most frequent other option was an isolated restroom, because she hadn't quite broken through to the one attached to her quarters. The training grounds had a building off to one side for the cooking of meals when larger numbers of recruits were passing through, along with personal effects storage and toiletries. Lying down in front of multiple showerheads allowed her to wash up -- but once she was back in the castle, she had to go somewhere.) They wouldn't be expecting her in any other location, and...

...Cerea had taken several lessons away from the press conference, and one of the loudest echoes told her it could be a bad idea to put herself anywhere that an unsuspecting pony could just come across her. Or worse, a few dozen unsuspecting ponies, with every last one feeding the others with their fear.

It made her reluctant to explore. But the Sergeant had given her an order, and he'd also told a few ponies on the palace staff what that order had been. Nopony had been willing to even think about overriding him, and so Cerea was outside.

Outside and... alone.

How long had it been, without true privacy while under open sky? Count the time starting from the last seconds before the dark Princess had captured her in the forest, and the fever from the infection meant that most of what she remembered of that final desperate gallop was its conclusion. But she was outside in the palace gardens, because that was what the Sergeant had ordered. And she was alone, because...

"It's something a recruit should do," he'd told her. "They take the trot. Every class. Sometimes that's as a group, when there's nopony in the gardens to distract them. Others do it on their own. All of them get a statue to visit. A Guard to learn about. And that's when some of them decide they're not right for the job, because the trot is what makes them think about it. You're a class of one. So you're going."

In that sense, there had been no special accommodations made for her: if recruits were taking the trot, then the gardens were cleared. Those who maintained them departed for a while, no pegasi flew overhead, and she had been told to go early. Start the journey as the sun was still coming up, watching the sky shift from deep navy into rose and burnt orange before finally phasing into a brighter blue. Because the gardens were open to the public: the palace staff had made a special point of telling her about that. Schoolchildren took tours (and for no reason Cerea had been able to identify, two members of the staff had shuddered). They could keep visitors out for a few hours, until the time came to move her back to the training grounds. But it couldn't go on any longer than that.

She'd pictured it: coming across a touring class of colts and fillies, who hadn't been expecting to encounter

a monster

and it had taken a long time to banish the phantom echoes of their screams.

Her first time outside and alone in weeks, on a chill autumn morning. Her body temperature provided some degree of resistance to the cold, and the angora sweater -- white this time -- did the rest. (She usually felt the chill first and foremost on her human portions anyway, and it wasn't quite cold enough to be wearing gloves.) Trotting by herself, carrying a few books in a clumsily-rigged improvised backpack of looped and tied otherwise-useless blanket fragments (because she hadn't wanted to ask for anything better, and couldn't exactly shop), outside...

Too long in the cell, perhaps, and longer still on that lower palace level. Enough time for the combination of natural breezes, sunlight, and privacy to feel slightly strange.

But the breezes weren't natural.

It was her first time outside the palace while within view of it, and so she often found herself glancing back as viewing angles changed and the sun rose higher in the sky. She... hadn't been expecting it to be so large, not with so many towers rising that far into the air. A palace built during a certain age needed to be its own city, and this one was trying to do the job through occupying the space required for -- all right, not a city, and not even a town. But take the largest of sporting arenas, expand them to cover what would normally be a portion of the parking lot, render the whole thing in marble and then...

...split it.

It took multiple views before she saw what had happened, and most of that was based in the angles of the walls, added to some glimpses of structures rising from the mostly-hidden half. But the palace existed as something which had been cleaved. There appeared to be a central entrance (just barely glimpsed from the top of one minor hill), and that joining point rose what Cerea would have considered to be about eight floors into the sky: this seemed to be about right for the ponies, as the white Princess required a fairly high ceiling. There was a fair amount of structure around that entrance, enough to accommodate multiple offices on the higher levels and what might be a grand gathering space at the center. But beyond that... the palace split. A marble wing stretched out at one slightly-curving angle, and the alignment of visible, slightly more distant towers suggested a mirror structure on the other side.

She didn't understand the design. How it was supposed to work for defense, much less where anyone had found that much marble. There were ways in which it was two palaces joined at the center, and beyond that --

-- there were times when she also had glimpses of the city.

The majority of the buildings had to be smaller than the palace, and so were lost behind its shining bulk. And ponies seemed to build on a smaller scale than humans when it came to reaching for the vertical, perhaps because a third of them could seek the skies at will. Using the palace as a baseline... the tallest buildings were about twenty stories tall, and very few reached that high. Very little of the architectural styles she could try to identify from a distance could truly be compared against human counterparts, mostly for lack of detail. From what she could see, ponies seemed to largely be against sharp angles: there were a few blocked-off constructs, but the majority allowed the soft lathe of the sky to meet their walls on a gentle curve.

Stone and wood made up most of the identifiable materials. She could see very little metal at work, and most of that reinforced the sides of a rather stately clock tower. And yet there were ways in which it could almost be mistaken for a human city, at least from a distance for a few seconds. A city with great birds migrating through the upper layers --

-- birds with hooves.

How long would it take, for someone who was seeing it for the first time? To recognize that they were looking at flying ponies? How much longer to understand they were observing commuters who were taking an aerial path to work? That all of this had been built by ponies, four intelligent subspecies working together. And so many others populated the world, griffons and yaks and donkeys, holding their own nations...

She could get glimpses of the city, when she looked back. She could see a little half-circle of low-lying clouds on its northern edge, completely still on a slightly breezy day. But when she turned her attention to the west... that was when she saw civilization.

It came at the top of one of the little sculpted hills, that first truly clear view. Cerea had known the palace was built on a mountain: Nightwatch had casually mentioned it, and the girl's lungs occasionally provided reminders that full acclimation had yet to take place. The largest of multiple plateaus hosted the capital, while another held the training grounds: winding paths connected the level areas. But it was the artificial hill which gave her some concept of how high up they were, along with giving her an idea of the total scale.

For altitude... she could only guess, looking at the increasingly-sharp rise of stone as it slanted away from the city, narrowing into a peak for which winter might exist in perpetuity. But from base to snow-covered cap -- perhaps three and a half kilometers, and the city was roughly a kilometer up. It was sufficient height to let her look across a tremendous amount of landscape to the west, and nearly all of what she saw was forest. No power lines, no cell towers. Just about no roads. The trees grew wild and free, with very few signs of the desperate attempts at control which humans always seemed to inflict upon the landscape.

Forest: mostly deciduous, because it was autumn and she stared out across a riot of browns and red, with a few stray deep purples and the verdant shades which showed where the evergreens were. But she didn't see suburbs, or satellite cites. No homes were arranged around the base of the mountain, none of the little clusters of residences and businesses which would have been expected near a capital. She certainly didn't spot an airport, although an oddly-stable double-line cloud formation stretching off to the west looked a little like the borders of a runway. The capital almost seemed to be completely isolated, placed on a mountain at the edge of a forest the size of an exceptionally small country: she was sure she was looking at enough trees to create a botanical overrun of Liechtenstein. But when she looked towards the mountain's base...

No trees had been cleared for power lines, cell towers, or because a human just thought there shouldn't be a tree there. But there was a path stretching off to the west, and the reason she'd found it was because her ears had automatically tried to orient on the train's whistle.

They have railways.

Nightwatch had told her about them. But seeing the engine puffing its way along (oddly white puffs, which dispersed quickly), pulling cars behind it... it was the first real sign of technology. Closer examination found four other major trestle trails departing from the base of the mountain, and one awkwardly-angled glimpse suggested that at some point, the trains ascended towards the capital. But the one going almost directly west... that was the precious one, because it was the path she could track. The remaining four curved away after a while, leaving her sight. The western rail went on for kilometers and kilometers, until it reached a town.

She couldn't make out any real details, not from her current distance. Shapes suggested buildings, there appeared to be a dam structure off to one side, and a ring of farmland surrounded the whole thing. But there was a little pocket of life in the center of the forest.

Ponyville. She said that was the closest.... 'settled zone'.

Not that Cerea was necessarily looking at it, because there could be something closer still in another direction. But it was a new place, one which could be reached by train, and...

...Cerea had very little experience with trains, and quite a bit of the early portions had been bad. The vibrations from the wheels, the constant shaking under her hooves... centaurs knew a lot about human civilization and up until the moment of emergence, had directly experienced almost none. Looking at a train chugging along -- it gave her a choice of things to think about. France was

stay low

something she didn't want to recall. But in Japan... with her own size and the amount of space Rachnera took up, trains had been the easiest way for the household girls to move around the country, at least when their host had been with them: the typical other option had been no travel at all. And they'd fought for access to the windows, everyone except Lala because the dullahan would just quietly ask someone to hold her head near the glass. Battled for the best views, and the chance to watch the world go by.

To see

"You forgot how long you were flying again." Because someone had to admonish the harpy and in the total absence of any parental figures within the household, Cerea had more or less elected herself.

Technically, none of them were supposed to leave the residence without their host close by: the main exceptions were Cerea's (legal) morning gallops and the arachnae's frequent sneak-outs. But Papi could fly, and so she'd decided that not leaving the house only applied when she was traveling along the ground.

She usually got away with it. Papi could operate at high altitude: the majority of harpy gaps tended to be located in the most isolated parts of mountain ranges, and the species had adapted accordingly. It let her fly at levels where observers couldn't identify what she was. But that height also put her at a point where she could no longer identify major landmarks -- not that she tended to remember what those were in the first place -- and so the first months of cohabitation often found the others looking for a girl who could take a very long time to find her way home and had no real way to answer her phone while in flight, assuming she managed to locate the source of the sudden noise. And, if she became distracted enough, just might forget that there was a home waiting for her at all.

The household had finally convinced Ms. Smith to pay for a homing beacon while giving Papi an ankle bracelet which softly beeped as she neared the central signal: the key then became getting her to remember any need to put it on.

"Papi was having fun!" the slim girl had happily exclaimed, because a harpy was a creature which generally felt guilt and remorse for wrongdoing just got in the way.

"You are late for dinner," Cerea had patiently tried to explain. Food had a way of momentarily focusing Papi, especially if she was being threatened with its loss.

But the harpy had just tilted her head to the right, doing so at a speed which made it seem as if there had been no movement between the states. An upright skull at one moment, the angle at the next. Birdlike movements added to the very human expression of confusion.

"Flying is better than food." And before Cerea could react to what the harpy would normally treat as near-blasphemy, that statement was followed by another: something which emerged with an odd lack of mirth. "Flying is food for Papi's eyes."

She'd stared at the smaller female for a few seconds, even backing up a little so she could stare down more properly.

"I do not understand." Common enough when dealing with the thoughts produced by Papi's deadly combination of low intellect and horrible memory, but... the harpy looked serious. Utterly so, with even some of the larger flight feathers appearing tensed...

The cowlick curl at the front of the short-cut blue hair bobbed as Papi's head flicked back to a center position.

"At home," the harpy told her, "fly all the time. When Papi wants, without worrying about laws or Boss. But only so far. Fly over the same things every day, every year, for Papi's whole life. Beautiful, in the Carpathians. Want to show Cerea someday, take her to old home to see. But... looking at the same things, only beautiful so long. Only so many times you can see the same hollow, or stop because you saw the same outcrop. It's abhoring --" paused "-- boring. And when Papi realized it was boring, then... Papi wanted to leave. And now, can't fly as often, and Boss gets worried when Papi's gone too long, because Boss cares about Papi. Cerea cares about Papi, because Cerea worries too. But..."

The smaller girl was nearly half a meter under Cerea's height. It made the harpy's frequent spontaneous hugs exceptionally awkward, at least for how various portions of their anatomy aligned. But one loved to be hugged, the other loved to be the one who was hugging, and wings which were good for so little when their owner was back on the ground... they could still wrap a willing form. Sometimes the feathers tickled.

The harpy snuggled as close as she could, because Papi had very little sense of personal space and loved softness. Stretched up on the tips of her talons and angled her wings carefully, because the one thing Papi never forgot was how easy it could be for her to hurt someone.

"...Papi isn't there any more. New home. And when Papi flies, or when there's a train, or we're just all out together... it isn't boring. There's too much new to ever be boring again. Papi needs to fly, because Papi's eyes need food."

She'd pulled back just a little, looked up at Cerea's shocked face with the open love of a little sister.

"Papi flies," the harpy declared, "for the same reason Mero wants to swim in every new river. And why Cerea gallops." Hopefully, "Cerea understands now?"

She hadn't said anything. She'd just hugged the harpy back.

Because there were so many species. And for every last one, there had been a gap.

They had been freed, and so train windows had become worth fighting for.

This was a different world. One with a forest which stretched to the horizon, mountains and monsters and ponies. She could spend the rest of her life exploring --

-- alone.

She existed in the world, and did so without truly being a part of it.

Again.

Cerea silently turned away from the west, because a view was all there could be when you were gazing through the window of a larger prison. And after she squared her shoulders, breathed until she could imagine the familiar sadness had been driven back to its ancient home... she trotted down the little wooded peak, directly into the first dunes of the desert.

She tried to see it as touring the world, and doing so in a rather compressed format. What it mostly taught her was a little more about the range of what pegasus and earth pony magic could achieve, because human botanical gardens -- she'd insisted on touring one in Tokyo, and had almost managed to fully restrain herself from nibbling on a few samples -- needed a lot of help. It took precision to duplicate the soil balance required for growing plants so far away from their homes, enclosed areas were required for those from the most exotic climates, and then you had to worry about local insects and diseases for which the floral immigrants had no natural defense. It wasn't easy for humans to manage and you couldn't get a full range of offerings without shutting most of it within walls, relying on artificial sunlight and the kind of rain which only fell from sprinkler systems. But with magic...

It wasn't dunes being reproduced with mounds of imported sand: it was the desert. Step within and feel the heat rise, the morning sun seemingly concentrated upon cacti (with oddly-flexible, hollow needles) and those fragile blooms which usually had to lurk in wait for that precious burst of moisture. The air dried out as she crossed the border, because that was what the desert plants knew and at any rate, the moisture was being used about fifty meters to her left, in the little patch of rain forest.

She spent some time there, retreating back to the desert when her sweater threatened to become too damp. But it was hard to leave, especially when staying just another minute would have allowed her to hear that much more birdsong. And there had been a moment when bright yellow wings had flown right up to her, shining eyes hovering so close to her own, just looking at her...

A world which barely knew centaurs and had never known humans hadn't evolved a fear of that form. When dealing with monsters, it was a problem: for birds, she was a curiosity and unless she made a move which startled them... they simply looked. And so she stayed as long as she could, listening to the whirring of wings and snippets of songs as something deep within her searched for a glimpse of blue feathers and hoped for a welcoming hug.

But it could never come, not here. To the birds, she was simply something new, and only that which could think had decided to see her as a threat.

Back to the desert, just long enough for the fabric to dry out. And then she proceeded through glen, around a swamp and over a clear stream, paying more attention to plants and climate than the myriad of stone decorations. The pegasi created the proper environments for each section of the gardens, making sure they remained distinct from each other. Earth ponies ensured that every plant received exactly what it needed from the soil in order to thrive, and it made the gardens into the most variegated source of beauty she'd ever seen.

There were blooms which she recognized, things replicated in her own world. Others shimmered, or curved in odd ways while fruits of strange shapes sagged from low branches. She was careful not to touch anything, because she had to be a good guest -- and while neither poison ivy nor oak grew in France, she was familiar with the concept. She'd seen some of what the local forest could produce, and plants which knew magic could have their own ways of discouraging contact. And that was just the plants...

Nightwatch had called Ponyville a 'settled zone'. It was a term which would normally beg a number of questions -- but she'd also experienced a few of the risks to be found in the wild. Ponies trying to carve out places in which they could safely live, in a world where nature had many more means of fighting back.

Many of the plants had little signs nearby: she presumed those were identification labels for species and origin. Others had signs bordered in red: those were perceived as having added warnings. But she couldn't read them, and when it came to making any active attempt to decipher... that was waiting somewhere up ahead.

She trotted. There were places where it was more of a hike. Upslopes tended to have little hollows placed for hooves to find purchase, but hers weren't at the standard separation distance: it took some time before she spotted the side path of supports which had probably been intended for the larger Princess. She looked at the plants (but still not the inanimate which was hosted among them, or the words she couldn't read at their bases), found a few insects known and non sheltering within the miniature biomes, and carefully dipped her body low enough to gather one handful of soil, wanting to see if it felt as rich as it smelled. It did.

There was a section of the gardens which was almost like the south of France and upon realizing that, she quickly went around it.

And then she saw the little peak.

The air changed as she crossed the border, coming in from the little northern prairie. It chilled, and did so at the same moment it thinned.

There was already some degree of change present, this far up the mountain. Her initial step across the line had brought her forehooves up by about fifteen centimeters, resting on the first flat plane of snow-dusted granite: the lowest part of what was meant to serve as a staircase formation. It had also instantly elevated her lungs by about two extra (and virtual) kilometers, and she spent a few seconds in gasping, trying to acclimate to the lower oxygen level.

There was a miniature stone pillar on her left, one where the top had been hollowed out in a half-sphere of vacuum, with multiple clear partial bubbles of glass lying within. It would have come up to a place just below the average pony's snout, and that realization made her understand what the half-bubbles were for -- but she didn't have a snout, and so the one she managed to recover couldn't fully adhere over what didn't exist. She felt the magic trying to take hold, and the air she breathed from it was normal enough -- but the whole assembly kept slipping down her nose, and she eventually wound up using one hand to stabilize it at just about all times.

It was cold as she moved across stone and snow, becoming more so with every hoofstep. But her free arm didn't come up to cover the results, because the sweater was fairly plush and... she was alone. Unblinking eyes placidly watched her from the peak as she ascended, and she was still completely alone.

And then there was a statue.

She hadn't been entirely sure what an ibex was. A truly dedicated study of naturalism was like looking at tourism guides: she would have been learning about things which could never be personally seen and at any rate, animals didn't have the same power to inspire dreams as towns and towers. There were things she knew -- but they weren't enough and in any case, there had to be species which were native to this world alone. Not recognizing 'ibex' as a name had suggested that the latter was potentially in play. But when she saw it...

How to perceive it, when compared to something of her world? Her mind began with the concept of mountain goat, and quickly added full sapience. The stone hooves were cloven, but it was in a way which had left portions projecting forward in wedge formations: something suitable for being jammed against rock, or into the smallest of cracks. It was hard to pick up on the full shape of the barrel: stone suggested a rather dense coat of fur in that area, especially along the underbelly. All four legs were somewhat thin, but the shoulders and hips were powerful, and the tail was so short as to resemble a dusting brush.

The head... she hadn't been expecting the horns or rather, she hadn't been expecting their direction: they both arced back over the skull, the ridged cones curving along the length of their growth to the point where they almost touched the creature's neck. Both deer-like ears were fully upright and alert, carefully-carved stone hairs seemed to twitch within their interiors. Stone eyes possessed horizontal pupils, and that was the hardest part of the fixed gaze to get used to. But the mouth...

There were different hues of stone around the jaw. They suggested a lightening of fur on the muzzle and under that nearly-flat nose. The sunlight soaking into the motionless form added highlights and a degree of softening to that area. It was something which seemed to imply a smile.

The stone ibex stood eternal watch. Partially checking the approach staircase to see if anyone was on the way, with the rest of its regard on the distant castle. And at the base of its forehooves, there was a granite plaque which bore runes from two alphabets, rendered from gold and silver blended in twisting harmony.

She carefully reached into the backpack (and, just for a second, was glad no human had seen her left arm bend in such an unnatural fashion). Extracted a slim notebook, and flipped through the pages until she found the characters which Nightwatch had told her to trace.

(Nightwatch had seemed so distracted during that last lesson. Talking more at Cerea than to her, and the little knight's scent had told the girl that the pegasus was concerned about something -- but the small mare hadn't been willing to talk about it. Any attempts the centaur had made to ask if everything was okay had been deflected in favor of lessons, and the excuse was that there had been a day when the pegasus had taken her own trot through the gardens.)

Cerea looked at the first rendition: Equestrian characters. Below that, a language which no longer had a native speaker in the capital, placed both in memory and the hopes that someone from a lost homeland would visit. But in the decades of the statue's presence, only ponies had come...

...and now there was a centaur. Looking at two rows of runes, each with the same meaning. A name.

Blitzschritt.

She looked into stone eyes again, and did so from slightly below: staying on a lower step, allowing the statue to keep its watch unimpeded. Went back to the book, and eventually wound up bringing out the rest of her language class notes, brushing the snow off a step in order to give her a reading surface.

It was impossible to translate the whole of it. Nightwatch hadn't recited the inscription from memory: instead, she'd softly told Cerea that every recruit had to take their own trip into the centuries. And if the Sergeant had told her that Blitzschritt was the place where a centaur should begin... then all Nightwatch could do was point the way.

So all the girl had was her notes, and it wasn't enough. Entire lines were lost to her: all she could do was take out some carefully-wrapped charcoal and make a rubbing

a tombstone rubbing

of the whole thing, so she would be able to carry the words back. But she could make out some of it, because there had been lessons and... some words had come early. The pony written language had a very simple way of indicating the past tense, and a single character changed 'death' to 'died'. The Sergeant had pointed out 'service' engraved into the arch of the building entrance at the training grounds, 'Princess' had been one of the first words, and teaching Cerea about money had meant going into the realm of numbers...

She flipped between pages of multiple books, made notes in another, until a portion of a sentence yielded.

died in service to the Princess, so that all could live.

There was more than that, above and below: words she could not read. But there were also numbers and after a while, she assembled a few of them: 1127. Numbers which followed two words...

Her badge number? Not that she'd seen Guards wearing badges. Something about which shift she was on, and how long? Days of service, or...

...time. The name of a day. A month, or in this case, a moon. And then a year.

A hundred and forty-eight years ago. Which, if her guess was right and the date marked the ibex's death, made the current year 1275. (Not that she knew how long a year was, or how the ponies had chosen a point to count from.)

'in service to the Princess...'

That seemed odd, to have no mention of which Princess had been involved. But it was possible that the identification was in the portion she couldn't read. Or -- this felt like a possibility -- that the names were inherited with the position. If you held the Solar throne, then you were Celestia: similar to how human royalty liked to attach 'the Second' on up to titles, only without the need to keep count. Maintaining continuity.

Not that she understood how Princesses were chosen yet. Perhaps it was alicorns only ('alicorn' had been another early-arriving word), because they came from a single royal bloodline where the current rulers had yet to produce heirs...

...for all I know, they're elected positions. It would be in the citizenship classes. But for what she had before her, the statue and the plaque... a name, what might be a date, and a dedication of sorts. That was all she could make out.

And once again, she looked into the stone pupils.

Who were you?
How did you die?
Why did you make that choice?
Did you... the cold increased ...think about it? Was there a second where you knew you were going to die if you acted, but... she would live?
Did you doubt yourself?
Or was it instinct? Did you just move, and you didn't realize what had happened to you until...
Maybe you never knew. Maybe it was that fast. You were here, and then you were...

Cerea had been presented with teachings about the afterlife. They were, like so much of centaur culture, heavily modified from an ancient Greek base, and that had initially meant something so dismal as to have generations of religious philosophy working overtime just to soften the final blow. There was supposed to be a place waiting for centaurs who led good lives, or found a way for their deaths to help the herd. Something which served as a reward.

But the girl didn't know what she believed, because the teachings about centaur afterlife talked about centaurs. Occasionally, one of the other liminals would drift through a paragraph, and it was suggested that they had their own regions within the ephemeral realms. But humans weren't really mentioned at all, and...

...it felt like centaurs had decided existence after death was something which came with its own gaps.

It was hard enough to live that way. The thought of dying for the best of reasons and just finding herself... isolated...

There had been some unexpected side effects to the first wave of integration, and one of the least surprising (to Cerea, anyway) was seeing liminals taking up human religion -- in the same manner that someone visiting an all-you-can-eat buffet could be described as taking up food. You might try things from a single section of the long table. Others freely mixed odd ingredients on their plate, then covered it with a binding sauce while all the other diners glared at them. Some switched their taste every other week, trying to find something which would fit. Liminals had found Catholicism, and that had generally been followed by finding a Reform temple right next door which had better songs. (The Orthodox branch had been rejected by most species, in large part because some of the dietary requirements were impossible.) Anything with reincarnation was popular, because the thought of eventually experiencing humanity from the other side had a certain appeal. But when it came to what Cerea believed...

...she wasn't sure she did. Or if she ever had.

She didn't know what ponies believed: a single faith, or an assemblage as chaotic as human and liminal religions combined. There were other species, and that suggested other systems of belief. But it was an awkward topic to ask about, and in any case...

Everything she had been told about was a world away. This was somewhere else, a place with magic and ponies and what might be its own deities. If her promised afterlife had ever been real, it might not be able to find her, or she it. And if there was something true waiting for the dead in this land -- it might not have any place for a centaur.

The girl looked into the stone eyes again, and realized she was shivering.

You could be an ibex, or you could be a Guard.
You died for your Princess.
You thought you would be dying for something...

On the way to the false peak, she had been looking at the plants.

On the way out, she finally examined that which she had been overlooking in favor of the living. She looked at statues. And some of them were of monsters, and others of creatures. Animal species which echoed those she knew, only with an aspect of sapience in motionless eyes.

But there were also statues wearing stone armor.
Nearly all of them were of ponies.
There were so many statues...