November 2nd, 1075

Her ears pivoted toward the slow, heavy plodding of hooves. A sheet of old parchment clung to the corner of her lip when she lifted her head, eyes slitted while her sleep-deprived brain stuttered back into motion.

She inhaled deeply with a barely stifled yawn. Her neck was sore, the product of once again falling asleep on the plush rugs of her private library tucked below the Ministry of Arcane Science. The quill she’d been using to draft a formal letter to Celestia regarding Trixie’s fiasco lay crushed beneath her shoulder, a bit-sized spot of black ink staining her coat as well as the imported fabric.

It had been nearly three days since the explosion that destroyed a ministry laboratory, and she still couldn’t decide on how to broach the issue with Celestia. Now that she’d already threatened to bring their talisman research to the princesses for review, she had no choice but to follow through. Magical research was the purview of her ministry, not Applejack’s. The fact that Trixie was flaunting that while facing no consequences for her little catastrophes made Twilight’s blood boil.

“Uh, Twilight? Are you down here?”

She rubbed the ridge of her wing across her nose and sat up, squinting in the direction of the unusually deep yet familiar voice. At the foot of the stairs, flanked on either side by shelves stacked high with thick books and brittle scrolls, Big Mac’s head peeked over the final step.

He was breathing hard, his amber mane clinging to him like a wet mop. He looked like he’d just cleared his family’s entire orchard by himself. Twice.

She pushed herself the rest of the way off the floor with a twinge of genuine worry. The door to her private staircase was charmed to open for him, however the “him” in question had been a good two feet shorter and half as wide when she cast the spell. The stallion stepping into her library stood a full head above her, something she hadn’t experienced since growing into her alicorn body.

“Something’s wrong with the spell,” he said, thudding toward her.

Twilight shoved aside her exhaustion as she hurried toward him, her hoof slapping aside a book unfortunate enough to be caught in her way.

“Stop. Sit,” she said, careful not to allow her concern to show.

He knew the drill by now, swallowing thickly as he dropped his haunches to the floor and bringing himself eye level with her. He was right. Something was wrong, but it couldn’t be from her spell. She went over the stages and permutations enough times that she would bet her horn she had it right. Something had to be interacting with it.

She pressed the flat of her hoof beneath his jaw, feeling his pulse. Nothing abnormal there, but his skin was hot to the touch. “When did this start?”

He swung his head side to side like an anvil on a hinge. “Ain’t rightly sure when it started. I noticed it a few days ago. Got stuck in AJ’s armor prototype. Just been gettin’ worse since.”

She lit her horn and tipped his chin down. “Look to the side?”

He did, and she spotted the barest hint of yellowing around the rim of his eyes. “Have you been eating anything? Drinking?”

“I’ve been eatin’ just fine,” he said. His ear dipped so subtly she nearly didn’t notice it. Just a whiff of irritation seeping through the otherwise stalwart stallion. “It’s your spell that’s doin’ this, not the haycakes.”

She released his chin, turning her attention to the thick mats of sweat-dampened hair down the ridge of his back. His skin twitched like he was beset by flies, trying to shake off the slow moving droplets. He was nervous.

“I’m just checking some boxes,” she said. “How are you feeling right now?”

“Hot,” he said. “And cold. Like I got a fever without bein’ sick. I feel fine but I know I ain’t.”

She reached out with her magic as she listened, feeling the thrum of the spell she’d cast on him over a week prior. It still flowed through him like a hundred tiny rivers, eddying through his biology just like they had discussed it would. Her magic swarmed around his hips and hind knees, drawn most powerfully toward the years of slow, steady damage he’d built up in his joints. As far as she could tell, it was working exactly as she had constructed it.

A simple seek-and-repair spell, or at least that was what she would call it once it was ready to publish. Advanced healing that would not only repair current injuries, but actively seek out new ones for the duration of the spell. The version she’d cast on Big Mac was designed to work slowly and delicately, and had at least another week before it fizzled out. Less if he happened to hurt himself. Here in Equestria, a conjuration like this could be worth billions to the right company. Something to consider once she had a fast-acting form of it to work with.

A charm with that much potential would be headed straight to the front lines once it was perfected. No more hiding in trenches. No more reports of front line commanders too afraid to engage the enemy for fear of losing a few measly yards of mud. Thanks to a painstakingly designed blend of Equestrian magic and the regenerative DNA harvested from a species of lizard discovered in the Badlands, her spell would make it possible to send a swarm of ponies straight into the melee, unafraid of bullets, blades or the hideous effects of blindweed. Vhanna, faced with a rejuvenated, quick-healing enemy, would have no choice but to surrender or be overwhelmed.

She dimmed her magic and squeezed his sweaty shoulder between her feathers. “My spell is telling your body to heal things it didn’t know needed healing, and the fever and sweats are likely just a natural biological reaction to the process,” she said. “You’re going to be fine.”

Big Mac didn’t look convinced. “Twilight, I’m the size of a barn.”

I have eyes too, she thought. “It’s very likely a side-effect, I’ll admit,” she said, hoping to ease some of his discomfort. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. All of the growth spells I’ve dabbled with are generally harmless and tend to be short-lived. My best guess is you came across something that reacted to my magic. It’ll be a little more uncomfortable than we initially thought, but it’s best we let this run its course.”

He frowned at the rug beneath his hooves and blew out an agitated sigh. “If you say so.”

“Hey,” she said, bending down a little until he met her eye. “I’ll take a look over my notes this afternoon and see if I can find any imperfections with the spell, but there’s a chance that this just might be what has to happen for it to work. I know you’ll tough this out, Big Mac. You’re going to save lives.”

A spark of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, then faded just as quickly. “I’m not doin’ this for the war, Twilight.”

Twilight went still for a brief moment and pretended not to have heard him. “You look exhausted. If you want, I can get some extra blankets and clear out a spot in the library so you can get some rest. I can check on you in the morning and see if you’ve stopped… swelling.”

Big Mac turned to survey her library as if he were deciding, even though he already knew his answer. The stallion had been infatuated with her since the day she got her wings, and Twilight was relatively certain the attraction was less of an emotional connection and something closer to a personal proclivity of his. The feeling had never been mutual, something she’d made sure he knew early on, but some flames are hard to snuff. While she would never say it outloud, Twilight suspected that one-way attraction had played a large part in Sugar Belle’s decision to leave him.

“I guess some sleep couldn’t hurt,” he said.

She set him up on a white divan Rarity had brought down as a gift not long after the six of them took their posts within the Pillar. Big Mac dwarfed the mostly decorative bit of furniture. Its wooden frame creaked under his substantial weight, but it held, bowing as his hind legs dangled off the far end like a colt who had outgrown his foalhood bed.

While Big Mac settled in, Twilight gathered her aborted letters to Celestia from the nook she’d dozed off in and checked the time.

The wall clock above the stairs marked a few minutes before two in the morning. She grimaced. There was no point in going back to sleep now. Not when she was expected to be up in a few short hours to keep the unicorns in her ministry from finding new and creative ways to burn it down. She considered sitting down to finish her letter or perhaps get a head start on reviewing the spell Big Mac had volunteered to test, but he needed to rest and she knew he’d get around to misinterpreting her invitation for him to stay, given enough time. Best to be somewhere else when he did.

“I’m going to head out for a bit,” she said.

Half-asleep already, Big Mac mumbled something that sounded like “okay.”

“I’ll be back in a few hours to check on you,” she added, forming a tiny bubble of magic around her papers and quill. It popped, and they were gone, dropped into the locked drawer of her desk two floors above. It wouldn’t help the situation for him to come across a formal complaint over his sister’s ministry.

A second sphere of magic shimmered around her as the image of her destination formed in her mind. Somewhere secluded where she could sit down and disconnect from the world for a little while. Canterlot Garden sounded nice.

With Big Mac softly snoring at the far end of her library, she released the spell and vanished.

“I don’t trust her,” Roach said in his low, permanent rasp. He shrugged, emphasizing how hollow Julip’s convenient story rang with him. “The Steel Rangers wanting to harvest our Stable for tech, that I can believe.”

Aurora pursed her lips at the mention of Elder Coldbrook’s threat and glanced at the Pip-Buck still resting above Ginger’s hoof. Then she looked west, back down the highway where Julip stood unarmed, waiting for their answer.

“What doesn’t make sense is this story that the Enclave, who keep in mind make it their mission to hunt down and exterminate ghouls and dustwings since the dawn of armageddon, would send one of their own agents halfway across Equestria to render aid to the three of us, sight unseen.”

He leaned against the chassis of a burned-out carriage, the ancient steel complaining as he gestured to where Julip waited. “There’s obviously something she’s not telling us.”

Ginger sat sideways in the passenger’s seat, nodding in agreement as she kicked a bit of broken asphalt with the rim of her hoof. It skittered off across the travel lane and dropped into a dust-filled fissure. “It’s somewhat suspicious that the Enclave would send only her,” she said. “That’s assuming they did send her at all. She could be a deserter hoping we might be the ones to protect her.”

Aurora chewed her lip thoughtfully, the cool concrete slowly sapping the heat from her flank. She had no doubt Julip was omitting some details, but some of what she said seemed to have a grain of truth buried below the surface. The way she referred to her as pureblood, the word tumbling out of her mouth like an apology, felt genuine. Once they had stepped away, Roach and Ginger both verified that the Enclave’s figurehead was known to hold unadulterated pegasi genes in the highest regard.

The question she seemed unwilling or unable to answer was what the Enclave wanted in return for their assistance. Julip insisted that the Enclave only wanted to see Stable 10 continue, uninterrupted, and untainted by the radiation and disease of the wasteland. It was such a selfless offer, it almost sounded noble. Almost.

Which was exactly the reason why she didn’t buy it. There was a piece missing somewhere, and the fact that Julip was trying to hide it made the mane on her neck stand on end.

“I believe her when she says she’s Enclave,” Aurora said. “Back at the array, she shared some pretty colorful opinions about Autumn and me that fit the way you described them. I feel like we ended up parting on okay terms, but I don’t buy that she’s here just to be my volunteer bodyguard. She’s trying to keep a few cards up her sleeve and I don’t like it.”

Roach looked to Ginger, then Aurora. “Then we’re in agreement.”

They were. Aurora stood up and lifted a wing, signalling Julip to come back over. The moss colored pegasus trotted toward them, her ears standing forward as she glanced briefly over to Ginger and Roach. There was the faintest glint of dislike in her eye when she made eye contact with the ghoul which Aurora did her best not to notice.

“So,” she said, “our answer is no. We don’t need the Enclave’s help.”

They watched Julip close her eyes and exhale a quiet, choice profanity. “You do understand that I can’t go back home with a no, right?”

“That’s not our problem,” Roach said.

“I wasn’t speaking…” she stopped, turning her attention to Aurora. “Look, I wasn’t sent all the way out here to hurt you. This isn’t a thing where I stab you in the back, steal your caps and leave you the raiders.”

She pointed a green feather past them, toward the nearby hills. “Which there are a shitload of in there, by the way. You’re the first pureblooded pegasi to walk on Equestrian soil since the bombs. Everything the Enclave stands for demands that we keep you safe.”

Ginger lifted an eyebrow at Roach, who shrugged. “If she’s that important then why did they send only one of you?”

Julip regarded her with irritation. “How would you have reacted if an entire flight of pegasi you never met landed at your hooves? It’s hard enough for one pegasus to hide their wings without being noticed, let alone three. I got sent back out here because I’m a familiar face that you’d be less tempted to put a bullet through.”

“Look,” Aurora said, forestalling the debate before it devolved into an all-out argument. “We’re not stupid. Nobody here believes you’re standing there out of the goodness of your heart. You want something from us, and the fact that you’re not willing to say what that might be has me more than a little on edge about your offer to help.”

They waited, letting the silence settle in while Julip frowned at the concrete, deciding on her response. Her lip twitched with disgust, as if the conversation were giving her a headache.

“Alright,” she muttered. “Fine. Fuck it. Minister Primrose sent me here to keep you safe, and to figure out why you left Stable 10. Happy?”

Roach visibly tensed. “How did you know where…”

“It’s in her file,” Julip said, waving him off before turning back to Aurora. “You identified yourself to one of our sprite-bots the same day we met at the array, remember? Fucking freaked out half the brass when they found out you pitched a brick at a deathclaw right before it turned our bot into a tin frisbee.”

Ginger turned to her. “You contacted them?”

“I didn’t know what else to do!”

“Anything else!” she said, her eyes wide. “Aurora, we explained to you how dangerous they were!”

Aurora fumbled for an answer, but Roach spoke first, taking a step directly toward Julip. “What does the Enclave want with Stable 10?”

Julip held out her wings and stepped back. “Woah, woah, woah. Look, all we want to know is why you left and…”

“Horseshit,” he snapped, unlocking his shotgun from its rail. “I’ve seen what your people do to Stables, and if you think for a second that I’m going to stand by while you violate my daughter’s resting place for a few pieces of scrap, you’ll have to make sure I’m very well and truly dead before you try.”

Julip took two steps back for every one that Roach took forward, her eyes alternating rapidly between his and the weapon attached to his foreleg.

“You have three seconds to turn around and get out of here,” he rumbled. “One.”

He didn’t get to two. Julip’s hooves scraped a half-circle on the cracked pavement and she was airborne, pumping hard into the air.

Aurora blew out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and watched the pegasus fade against the grey dome of clouds overhead. A silence grew between them like a thick fog as they watched Julip fly away. It stretched, devouring the minutes even as the three of them eventually turned to resume their trek toward the mountains.

“Roach,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I didn’t know.”

He stared ahead, his expression unreadable. “It doesn’t matter. Everybody knows, now.”

The scaling concrete crackled under his hooves as he pulled ahead, taking point like he had in the beginning.

“Let’s get your talisman so you can go home.”

Her nostrils flared, taking in the earthy smell of dry leaves and the bright scent of the nearby arborvitae hedges. There were times when she spent so long cooped up inside her library that she forgot how full the world could be, even in the dead of night.

The air spilling into Canterlot Gardens was cold tonight. Colder than usual for early November, but then she knew better than to meddle in the business of weather ponies. Twilight could feel her winter coat chilling at the fringes. It would be another month before she had to start covering herself with something thicker.

Her bare hooves were silent against the pliable loam paths of Canterlot’s famed garden. The smartly trimmed hedges towered above her, growing healthy and strong in a climate they normally had no business being in. The master gardeners hired by Blue Blood were experts at their craft, coaxing life out of the fragile flora unsuited for the altitude. Twilight had dabbled with gardening when she was younger, back when she still had the Golden Oak Library, and knew how much of an art it was.

She could still smell the smoke. Just another victim in a long line that followed in the wake of Lord Tirek.

Historians still debated just how many ponies lost their magic at the hands of Tirek, but it had been enough to force Twilight into a corner. The fates of her six dearest friends and a single betrayer hung on which choice she made. To give up the barely tamed magic of the three alicorn princesses churning inside her and secure the release of her friends, or continue fighting in a stalemate that would likely raze Ponyville in the process.

She was distantly aware in that moment that she stood on a precipice. One way or another, the decision she made would alter their lives in ways she couldn’t hope to foresee. And then she had the epiphany.

Tirek was a threat. Ponies wouldn’t suffer under his rule. They would die.

As he opened his mouth to demand her answer, she wrapped the magic of four alicorns around his horns and pistoned his skull into the exposed rock beneath his hooves. Stolen magic and aspirations for global domination paled in comparison to brutal, hard math.

Mass times acceleration equals corpse.

Tirek’s abrupt death brought with it a return to normalcy they hadn’t felt since they first became Elements of Harmony. Magic returned. Discord, for his betrayal, was returned to his stone prison, a sentence he surrendered to without so much as a quip. It had been a lesson in misplaced trust as much as it was a realization that desperate times sometimes required desperate measures.

They never did find that sixth key. There were days she wondered about the chest and why the Tree of Harmony sprouted it, but the longer peace lasted, the less she felt the need to seek out the test that would reveal whatever was inside. After a few years of waiting, the six of them had returned to the tree and pried out their amulets, safer in the knowledge that should anything ever happen again, their elements would be close by.

She followed the mossy path past the entrance of the hedge maze, leaving the nameless statuary of the garden behind.

The deep night brought a sense of privacy that the towering hedges could not on their own. With her horn illuminated, she slipped through the dense walls of foliage as if they were little more than a particularly thick mist. She loved this spell. The book containing it had dedicated ten full pages to its application, describing a litany of ways it could go horribly wrong if cast incorrectly. It was no wonder it had been locked away in the restricted section.

She giggled. Her entire library was a restricted section.

Passing through the innermost wall of the labyrinth, she stepped into an ignoble little square clearing hardly large enough to accomodate the statue at its center. Most ponies passing by this little garden never realized they were at the center at all, mistaking it for a minor detour on the way to the end.

Once fully through the hedge, she doused her horn and walked to one of the four stone benches surrounding the undecorated plinth. Her eyes tracked up to the statue, to the draconequus that had caused Equestria so much disharmony. The Lord of Chaos sat frozen with his head bowed, his mismatched tail curled peacefully around his hind legs. Hands resting in the coil of his lap, a gryphon’s thumb softly kneaded the upturned palm of a lion’s paw. A pony wouldn’t be blamed for thinking he might have been in prayer, though she knew better than to expect something so primitive from him.

Twilight glanced at his face, noting the subtle crease in the corner of his eye as he winced in preparation for what had been coming.

“Twenty years later and it still feels like yesterday, doesn’t it?”

She grimaced, caught looking yet again. “Hello, Discord.”

“Hello, Twilight,” he said, merely a voice in her head but still very real.

They were long past the point of debate on whether he was a hallucination or a returning problem. The first time he reached out to her, she came deadly close to destroying his statue. She fled to find the girls, fearing he’d found a way to escape his prison, but when they came back with their Elements nothing happened. There wasn’t a threat to react to.

“Come to visit?” he asked. “I thought you’d stopped.”

She sat on the stone bench and sighed, leaning back until the ridge of her wings pressed into the cold surface of his plinth.

“Something like that,” she said with a meager shrug. “It’s been a day.”

A smile creased her lip as she listened to the rich chuckle echoing between her ears.

“You’re preaching to the choir, sister. The pigeons have been mistreating me for weeks, and I’m beginning to suspect the garden staff are neglecting to wash me off on purpose.”

Bending her head back until her nose pointed vertical, she could just make out the little white plops of bird droppings speckling his statue. She closed her eyes and tried not to chuckle. “I’ll have someone sent in the morning to scrub that off.”

“Nonsense. You know I’m only joking.”

She did, but she also knew how these little signs of neglect stung him.

“It’s rather quiet tonight,” he said. “Mind if I sit with you?”

She obliged, scooting down the bench until the draconequus appeared to fill the empty space. He wasn’t there, not in any physical sense that would allow him to be any danger. The strangely placid creature beside her could no more touch the grass beneath his foot and hoof than Twilight could turn off the sun. As Celestia had put it, the bridge formed between the Elements and the prisons they manifested was unavoidable. Until the spell was broken, magic would flow passively from the Elements, renewing the seal any time their bearers drew close enough for the connection to take form. Most creatures were unaware of the link between their prisons and their wardens, and those few who sensed it were far too weakened to make any use of it.

Discord, however, was not most creatures.

“You look tired,” he said.

She tipped her head toward him with a weary smile. “I am tired.”

He sighed. “War will certainly do that.”

Twilight hummed agreement and watched as he lifted the thickly padded fingers of his lion’s paw, pinching them into a theatrical snap. A glass of chocolate milk appeared in the talons of his left hand, complete with a purple bendy straw. She couldn’t help but snort a little at the sight of it.

He offered a small smile and snapped his fingers a second time. A glass appeared on the bench beside her hip. “You look like you could use it more than me.”

She didn’t reach for it, knowing from past experience that these illusions of his were incredibly fragile. The gesture alone made her feel a bit warmer. “Not the drink I need right now, but thanks,” she said.

Discord brought his straw to his lips and sipped. It felt strange to expect the rim of the glass to sink rather than the surface of the milk, but that was Discord. She frowned a little as sweetened cream, or the illusion of it, did the perfectly normal thing she didn’t think it would do, spiralling up the straw and disappearing behind a subdued smile.

He swallowed, letting the straw to bob freely along the rim of his glass. “I’ve seen conflicts like these wear down creatures far more experienced than you, Twilight. As much as I’ve come to enjoy your company, you shouldn’t have to come to me whenever you feel overwhelmed.”

A cold breeze whispered through the hedges. She wrapped her wings around her legs to warm them. “I’m not overwhelmed,” she said, though her tone was unconvincing. He knew as well as she did that she confided in him because, at the end of the day, she was the only one left willing to visit him. Despite all of his power, he was trapped. Not even the garden staff could hear him.

She glanced at him and his arched brow and rolled her eyes. “I’m… alright, fine. Maybe I’m a little overwhelmed.”

His smile widened and he bent his neck to sip.

“It’s just been a rough few months. Rainbow Dash just had a friend die, Pinkie Pie is barely keeping it together, Fluttershy’s stirring the pot by sending Zecora out on diplomatic missions, and if that’s not all bad enough, I’m pretty sure a spell that I wrote is doing something I didn’t tell it to do.”

“How is Fluttershy?” he asked.

Twilight pursed her lips, staring off toward the hedges. “She’s holding up alright.”

Discord set his glass beside hers, his expression cautiously hopeful. “If you asked for me, do you think she might…”

She shook her head. Fluttershy had made it painfully clear she would not be making any trips into the hedge maze unless it was to seal Discord a fourth time.

“I imagine I shouldn’t have expected otherwise.” His shoulders sagged and he leaned back against his own statue, unintentionally mirroring Twilight’s posture. He turned his eyes skyward and, eventually, Twilight did the same.

They sat together in silence, watching the stars on their imperceptibly slow march across the night sky. In a few hours, Luna would be out on her balcony, telling the same little lie to the world for the sake of keeping order. Twilight wondered about that. Whether anyone would notice or truly care if one of them failed to make an appearance. She wondered whether admitting the truth would do more good than expecting the world to believe in myth.

“Ah, would you look at that,” Discord said, lifting a claw toward the sky.

Crossing the endless black dome twinkled a dim pinprick of light, sliding into the northern constellations on a fixed orbit.

“Ponies in space!” he abruptly laughed, spreading his open palms apart to make the declaration seem even more grand. “It’s such a rare treat to watch a civilization take its first step outside the nest.”

Twilight turned to look at him and felt a little warmer at the sight of him grinning at the passing satellite, tracking its path until it disappeared over the top of the hedge. “Some days I wish I could go to one of those other worlds,” she said. “What’s it like out there?”

He continued to stare after the little beacon, his grin fading a little at its departure. “Dark, infinite and more marvelous than you could begin to imagine. Or at least that’s how I remember it. This may surprise you, but I’ve been a part of the landscaping for the better part of a few millennia. I’m woefully behind on all the new hot gossip.”

“You had a couple breaks in between,” she noted. He glanced at her as she tried to think of a polite way to ask the question in her head, but her exhaustion muddled the attempt and she gave up. “Why didn’t you leave Equestria while you were free?”

“Because you ponies are far too interesting.” He crossed one leg over the other and added, “And, despite how many of you view me, I rather enjoyed getting to know the locals.”

“Does that include Tirek?”

Discord pressed his mouth shut and turned his gaze back to the stars. No matter what way Twilight tried to approach the question, he never answered. In the beginning it was maddening that he would have the gall to cloister himself to what felt like the most important question at the time, but as time passed she found it more and more difficult to keep letting it under her skin.

He never sneered at her when she pressed for an answer. He never mocked or derided her. He just looked sad.

“You make me feel so small sometimes,” she said.

He tilted his head toward her. “My dear, you are anything but small. You’re terrifying.”

She snorted. “I terrify you.”

He took a pull from his straw, nodding. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t share that with Tia. I doubt that prodigious neck of hers would support the matching ego.”

She watched him, trying to suss out whether he was lying. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“Twilight, I’ve been dipping my toes across the universe since this planet was still molten. I’ve encountered more civilizations than I can hope to remember and witnessed wars spanning galaxies. I’ve been many things to many people, and not all of them particularly nice. Do you know how many times I’ve been trapped against my will?”

She hesitated, watching him take a long sip from his straw while aiming an arched brow at her as he waited. When she didn’t answer, he rolled his eyes.

“Exactly four times,” he said. “Once by Celestia and twice by you.”

She frowned. “That’s only three.”

Discord rolled his eyes, though there was some mischievous pride in the gesture. “A very long time ago my peers thought it wise to strip me of my powers and throw me aboard a ship belonging to a starfaring man who I had a bad habit of pestering. As far as I’m concerned, it was all a misunderstanding and should hardly count.”

Twilight took a moment to let it all sink in.

“Only a handful of civilizations sip from the wells of power,” he continued. “Most aren’t capable of detecting magic, or if they do they give it the wrong names. But you and your kind? You don’t just sip from that well, you gorge yourselves on it. You swim in it. Magic is the essence of creation itself and you ponies use it to wash your laundry. It’s what drew me here and in many unpleasant ways it keeps me here despite what I assure you have been very earnest attempts to leave. So, yes, Twilight. You scare me.”

She frowned at the grass, and he grimaced.

“Perhaps we should change the subject. I know you didn’t come here for this.”

“It’s fine,” she said even though her head was spinning. “You’re the one creature I know who can take my mind off of everything else I have to worry about.”

Discord tapped his claw against the side of his glass and smirked. “And you’re the only creature I know who would come to the Lord of Chaos for discount therapy.”

It was just ridiculous enough to tickle a laugh out of her. She pinched her lips together and smiled while he looked on and chuckled.

Discord finished the last of his milk and dispelled the glass with a snap of his fingers. Twilight glanced down at her hip to see hers still waiting for her, the glass sweating despite the temperature.

“Why do I get the feeling you’re using me again to procrastinate on something important?” he asked.

She glanced up at him and was surprised to see him wearing the same suspicious expression her dad used on her whenever she was trying to get out of something. “Probably because you’re right,” she murmured under her breath. “I wrote a new spell this fall and I’m starting to think I got something wrong. It’s supposed to regenerate a pony’s injuries, and it’s working, but my test subject’s experiencing some side-effects I didn’t plan for.”

“Ah,” Discord said. “Entropy can be such an irritating thing.”

Twilight looked at him, confused. “Entropy?”

He opened his palm and held it out to her. Looking into it, she saw a tiny green flame dancing between his fingers. “It’s been given many names by many peoples. Entropy, The Decay, Baal’s Fire. Nasty little thing, but essential in keeping magic in balance. It’s been nibbling at the fringes of everything since the beginning, making problems where there shouldn’t be, or fixing them, depending on your perspective.”

Closing his fingers, the little flame snuffed out. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Every civilization to tap into magic has struggled with it.”

She frowned. He was getting ahead of her again. “I don’t even understand what ‘it’ is.”

Discord reached over and picked up the glass he’d set out for her. His expression became distant as he sipped. “You’re in the majority, then. Starswirl came the closest of your people to truly understand entropy, though he had a tendency to muddy the water by waxing philosophical.”

Her ears pricked up. “You knew him?”

“He bore your Element, Twilight. Of course I knew him.” He disappeared the glass with a snap. “I don’t have to tell you what a brilliant mind that stallion had, but he had a personality like pumice. He would come to visit me with a list and a quill hoping I would give him the answers to every little question that kept him up at night.”

“Did you?”

Discord scoffed. “Absolutely not. That would be cheating. My role isn’t to hand out the answers like candy. I provided him with enough breadcrumbs for him to know certain possibilities existed, but it was always up to him to follow the path to discover whether I was being truthful.”

She could see where he was leading her and wrinkled her nose. “You’re not going to tell me what entropy is, are you?”

He shrugged. “I never planned to tell either of you it existed in the first place until you both came to me complaining about your perfect spells going wrong. What I can tell you is that understanding it wouldn’t help fix your spell. It’s hardly worth worrying about.”

A stronger breeze poured through the maze, bending the tops of the hedges and sinking deep into her coat enough to make her shiver. She tightened her wings around herself, gritting her teeth against the chill.

“You’re going to get sick if you stay out here,” he said. “Why don’t we call it a night? You can come back once you’ve gotten some warm clothes on and I’ll tell you some embarrassing stories about Starswirl.”

She sniffed at her running nose. “I’ll hold you to that.”

He smiled, and when she blinked she was alone again on the bench.

“Goodnight, Twilight,” his voice murmured in her head.

She stood, knowing if she lingered he would likely find some way to pester her until she went back home. “Goodnight,” she said.

The wind was picking up and the idea of strolling back through the hedges had lost its appeal. As she lit her horn to teleport back to the Pillar, she couldn’t help but wonder about the little green flame Discord had held in his palm.

Entropy. A balancing force against magic. She had never heard of anything like it before.

Canterlot Garden rushed away and her library swarmed in to fill the void. The warm, recycled air of the Pillar gave her a pleasant sensation of goosebumps as it chased the chill from her coat.

Big Mac still lay where she had left him, sprawled on his back across the divan with one leg slumped off the side. He snored loudly, making it clear her entrance hadn’t disturbed him.

Twilight glanced at the clock. She’d been gone less than an hour. Plenty of time left for some light reading. It wasn’t like she would be able to concentrate on fixing her spell until she scratched this new itch, anyway.

Besides. Starswirl was her favorite subject.

They made camp for the night at the foot of Pleasant Hills.

The walk from Kiln to the base of the eroded mountain range had been quieter than the previous legs of their journey, both in terms of danger and conversation. They made good time, stopping once to tuck into their rations and twice more to eliminate a particularly determined pack of mole rats. Roach had borrowed Ginger’s newly acquired blade to butcher the densely muscled back half of the largest, strips of which now roasted on a flat stone nestled into the coals of their fire.

The old highway didn’t cut through the shallow elevation changes here like it had back in the bluffs. It rose with them, bending where it needed to in order to follow the low spots between the growing humps of dusty soil. The prospect of camping out in the open on an unprotected highway didn’t appeal to anyone, but the bomb that made Kiln’s crater had stripped the soil bare of the few structures that once dotted the old road. Their only other option was to push deeper into the foothills in hopes of finding something less exposed, but as the sun dropped behind them and the shadows ahead grew longer and blacker, they ran out of time.

Faced with being stuck out in the open, Roach led them over the nearest hill where they were less likely to be noticed. A cluster of ancient tree stumps provided enough wood to start a cookfire, chasing the shadows out of the bowl-shaped depression.

They sat around the fire, watching as the cool evening breeze turned the coals into a rippling puddle of reds and blacks. Aurora found herself staring into the fire, mesmerized by it in a way she hadn’t been in the right mind to appreciate back at the cabin. The wood was so dry that it crackled like broken glass as it burned. It felt like mere minutes passed before the sparse fragments were reduced to glowing embers.

Ginger lay next to where Aurora sat, using the tip of her knife to turn over the pink strips of sizzling molerat while she read a dead filly’s journal. Some several dozen yards uphill, she could hear Roach grunt as he kicked at one of the crumbling stumps, breaking off shards of wood that would keep the fire going.

Wood crunched in the distance. Aurora tried to spot Roach, but his black chitin made the perfect camouflage against the deep shadow. She gave up and returned to staring into the fire with a sigh.

“He’s really mad at me,” she said.

Ginger closed the journal and looked up. “He’s mad at the situation, not you. Just give him time.”

Aurora didn’t share her optimism, but there wasn’t much else she could do. Another sharp clack of hooves against old wood echoed out of the dark. She tried to distract herself by fishing her canteen from her bags, unscrewing the cap and tipping a mouthful of lukewarm water over her tongue. With a full treatment of RadAway sleucing through their bodies, the unavoidable side effect that followed had both of them passing water just as quickly as they drank it. At least they weren’t wearing matching IV lines anymore.

Aurora’s canteen sloshed with one or two mouthfuls of clean water remaining. Ginger’s had run dry before they made camp. That left the one in Roach’s bags, thus far untouched since his metabolism was apparently on a two-hundred year stretch of extreme fasting. As far as he knew, he didn’t need to eat or drink, but he could should the mood strike him. From what she observed Roach only did so communally, either when there was an abundance available or simply to participate in the oldest bonding rituals outside of procreation.

None of them knew what waited for them in the east beyond what Aurora’s Pip-Buck reported and Roach had made the decision not to consume anything they may need later. Aurora glanced at his bags slumped in the firelight and worried they would wind up draining that canteen sooner than they could afford.

In a strange way, the RadAway that was clearing their system of Kiln’s radiation was simultaneously forcing them to literally piss their lives away. She snorted and covered her mouth, waving Ginger off when she gave her a questioning look. “Sorry, just thought of something dumb,” she said, and glanced at the unicorn’s foreleg. “Anything new from Sledge?”

“Nothing since this morning.” She lifted her leg off the ground and used her horn to unlatch the heavy clasp. “Before we sleep, you need to check whether Coldbrook has sent anything. The warning you gave Sledge will have ruffled his feathers, and it bears on us to know how that might have changed the conditions of his bargain.”

Aurora held her tongue as she let Ginger slip the Pip-Buck onto her foreleg. The Steel Rangers ranked near the bottom of her list of ponies she wanted to hear from again, especially that crow-footed asshole Elder Coldbrook. Making her resort to flying south after Ginger unarmed had been bad. Taking the opportunity to create a duplicate of her Pip-Buck had been a betrayal.

Threatening to crack open her home if she didn’t help them discover the truth behind SOLUS? That was unforgivable.

As her Pip-Buck detected her unique biometrics and stuttered through the process of booting up her profile, Aurora felt certain Coldbrook would have flooded her message queue with threats of doom and destruction. When the little computer finished working and she tabbed over to her inbox, she was surprised to see one single message waiting.

A message from herself.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 6
To: Aurora Pinfeathers
From: Aurora Pinfeathers
Subject: An Incentive
04/08/1297
[1 image(s) attached.]

Good morning, Aurora.

I hope this message finds you in better circumstances than when you departed yesterday evening. My scribes have informed me that you relayed a message home not long after we spoke. After reading it for myself, the most I can say to you is that I’m disappointed.

Insofar as our agreement is concerned, the terms have not changed. An ignition talisman for your Stable in exchange for information and access to SOLUS. While I understand our discussion became heated, I am a stallion of my word. An Elder of the Steel Rangers would not stoop to a petty bait and switch, nor would my immediate successors tolerate if I did. I have attached a photograph taken from one of our stockpiles in order to impress upon you the legitimacy of what I’m offering.

Should you decline, either by your silence or outright refusal, the consequences will still be borne by Stable 10. I don’t take pleasure in playing the heartless landlord, but you must understand that these days there is no middle ground in the world. Either you are for the Steel Rangers and the good work we are trying to do, or you stand against us. I will not hesitate to evict those residents if it means keeping a functional Stable out of the Enclave’s bloodstained hooves.

Understand that at the moment I write this message to you, a company of Rangers has been dispatched to Foal Mountain. If I don’t hear from you within three days of receiving this message, we will begin excavating. I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,
Coldbrook
Elder, Steel Rangers
Commanding Officer

“Asshole,” Aurora growled.

She checked the timestamp attached to his message and glanced at the date glowing at the bottom of her Pip-Buck. He’d sent it off to her not long after they left Gallow’s house. Below the attachment header waited a prompt to open it. Reluctantly, she spun the knob mounted in the casing until the field glowed green. With a click, her Pip-Buck went black and began chattering as line after line of fresh pixels scanned down from the top of the screen.

Slowly, the grainy green image of a crate began to appear. It rested between two identical boxes on a shelf of industrial racking, the cinder block wall behind them not giving away any clues as to where it might have been taken. The shot was angled down, peering over inch-thick planks bearing fresh marks of a pry bar.

Aurora’s breath stuck in her throat.

A single, symmetrical black object lay nestled in a bed of dessicated straw. Six triangular facets joined together at the tips to create two identical hemispheres from a material so dark it may as well be raw carbon.

She’d never seen a talisman outside of a few mentions in the training schematics for the generator, and even then the depictions had been vague and focused more on maintenance and power output tables than they did the object that made it all run. The hoof-sized stone on her screen loomed with a gravity all its own, tempting her to reach through the glass and grasp it.

“He wasn’t lying,” she whispered.

Ginger sat up to see, her eyes widening at the sight of it. “Is that it?”

Aurora offered a solemn nod in reply. Her eyes had drifted from the diamond-shaped talisman to the skewed letters stamped on the face of the crate.

“That’s it.” She could feel her heart beating in her throat. “Either that, or it’s a convincing fake.”

She felt torn. Ahead of them, beyond the mountains, waited Fillydelphia and Stable-Tec HQ. The odds that a talisman waited for her there were high, but even if they came up empty there still might be information tucked away in a filing cabinet somewhere that would tell them where the talismans were stored. It was entirely possible that the stockpile from Coldbrook’s photo would be mentioned in one of those documents. It was also possible they would find nothing there except empty ruins.

She stared at the image. It was right there.

Without warning, Roach dumped a legful of wood shards at the edge of the light, startling both of them. Carrying one of the larger splinters in his mouth, he dropped it into the fire and sat down on Aurora’s left side.

She blinked at him as he stared forward, his opaque eyes watching the fire consume his meager offering. She had expected him to sit apart from them where he could brood in peace, but he sat so close that she could feel the heat radiating from his carapace like a small furnace. It occurred to her that she should tell him about the talisman still shimmering on her Pip-Buck, but something about the way he stared forward made her stop. He’d come to sit with her because he had something to say.

The silence stretched as the wood blackened and burned. Roach’s jaw worked back and forth, the tension coming off of him in waves. When he finally spoke, his voice was subdued.

“I was working in Canterlot when the sirens started up,” he murmured, glancing at the two of them and then back to the fire. He took a breath and continued. “When Saffron brought the registration forms home from work, they had this mandatory quiz at the end to make sure we’d read everything through. The first question it asked was what we should bring with us in the event we needed to evacuate to the Stable. The answer was nothing. Bring nothing but yourself and your family. Don’t pack a bag. Leave the family photos behind. Missiles fly faster than pegasi.”

He sneered at the fire. “I wasn’t thinking. When the sirens came on, I flew home to go get Violet and Saffron. When I got to the house, it was empty. It was a Thursday. Saffron was at work and Violet was still at school. Everyone was in a panic by then. I heard the neighbors screaming that the Wonderbolts had just pulled the pegasi students out of the school and were taking them east. They were both unicorns and couldn’t understand why the other foals had been left behind.”

The firelight shimmered in his eyes. He swallowed. “It was too late by then. I got back into the air and started making my way to the Stable. The skies looked like someone had kicked a tree full of birds. There were so many of us flying in different directions, trying to get to wherever we thought it might be safe. Then the first bomb fell in the west and it was like someone had pulled a rake across the sky. When the first flash appeared, everyone turned east to get away. It rained luggage. Suitcases, backpacks, anything slowing us down got tossed away. We could hear the bombs going off behind and those… long, long shadows on the ground below. I was too terrified to look back. I thought if I did I would die.”

He went silent for a long moment, his face churning with more emotion than she’d ever seen in him. Tears spilled from their pools and flowed into the fissures of his broken chitin as he struggled to maintain his composure.

Aurora didn’t dare speak. As he struggled to find the words, she wondered if this was something he’d been building himself up to since he first showed her the way out from the tunnel. Back when he had screamed toward the open door, begging her not to let the approaching ferals inside her home.

Their home.

“I made it in time to find out Overmare Spitfire had already sealed the entrance,” he said. “She waited long enough for a few hundred pegasi including her Wonderbolts to arrive. I didn’t know whether I should stay and wait or go back out and look for my family, and then the tunnel collapsed and made the choice for me. I waited a whole day before an earth pony told me she’d seen my daughter and her classmates being flown into the tunnel ahead of her.”

His voice cracked. “She got in safe.”

Aurora lifted a wing, paused, then settled it across his shuddering shoulders. He dropped his head and watched the tears patter into the thirsty soil. “Not knowing which side of that tunnel Violet was on was the hardest twenty-two hours of my life. If I hadn’t had Rainbow Dash to focus on, I would have been screaming at the door with the rest of them until my voice gave out.”

“Roach, I’m so sorry.”

He looked at her from the corner of his eye. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. I just want you to know that I know what it feels like to fear you’ve lost something irreplaceable. I would have done anything to force open that door just to know.” His chest swelled, and he blew out a sigh. “I wasn’t there when you went to save Ginger. I still don’t understand everything that happened down there. But I know how desperate you must have felt when you resorted to asking the Enclave for help, and I know I was wrong for treating you the way I did when I found out. I’m sorry.”

Before she could stop herself, she wrapped her other wing around him and yanked him into an awkward hug. She squeezed hard enough to force a tiny squeak out of his lungs, refusing to ease up until he was good and crushed. It was the kind of hug her mother had inflicted on her when she came home from her first days in Mechanical, near tears from Sledge’s merciless criticisms, wanting nothing more than to quit and try something easier. She’d engulfed Aurora in her white wings and let her cry while whispering encouragement in her ear, and that had always been enough.

She felt him relax in her grip, one of his hooves settling around her back in quiet reciprocation.

“Thanks for telling me,” she said, giving him one more squeeze for good measure before finally letting him go. “I was starting to worry you would run out of stumps to kick and go digging for the roots.”

“The night’s still young,” he rasped, forcing a smile. Free from her grip, his gaze dropped to the flat piece of stone still resting in the coals. The corners of his eyes creased with a gentle wince. “Hey, Ginger?”

A misty-eyed unicorn looked up at him, using the back of her leg to wipe the damp from her face. “Yes?”

Roach nodded toward the fire and the shriveled, charcoal-black strips of molerat in the coals.

“I think they’re done.”

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Ministry Interoffice Mail :: Crusader Encryption Enabled
To: Applejack, Rainbow Dash
CC: Applebloom, Sweetie Belle, Board of Directors
From: Scootaloo
Subject: Test Site Approval
12/20/1075

Dear Ministers,

I’m pleased to share that Stable-Tec and its board of directors have approved your joint request to temporarily delay construction of Stable 2 for the purpose of hosting your demonstration. All nonessential Stable-Tec personnel will be relocated for two weeks preceding and following the proposed date in order to give the Ministry of Technology the time it needs to set up and vacate any sensitive equipment. Please be aware that ministry personnel should refrain from “exploring” while making use of the facility. Stable 2 is currently on umbilical power from Stable 1 and we cannot guarantee that the diesel generator will support the additional power draw if ponies start flipping on all the lights.

While we’re excited to hear that the princesses will attend the demonstration, I would like to invite the Ministry of Technology to avail itself of our recently completed Stable 1 as a remote command post. While I understand this might create some technical hurdles for the test, the board feels that Celestia and Luna’s first impression of our work would be significantly improved from inside a completed prototype. Given the relative close proximity of both sites within Pleasant Hills, I can assure you the latency will be minimal.

I would like to personally thank you again for entrusting us with what we hope will be a pivotal moment in our nation’s history, and a first real step toward peace.

Sincerely,
Scootaloo
Stable-Tec, CEO

January 15th, 1076

Twilight glared at the unlit candle on the table before her, then back at the monstrous tome beside it. What had survived of Starswirl’s treatise could have fit neatly on the back of a postcard. Like so many of his less known spells, this one had been ripped from the bindings of Twilight’s first editions by some nameless censor. Rather than giving up, she’d done what she always did when presented with a challenge and redoubled her efforts to find the missing spell.

Her search had taken the better part of two months before coming to an end. It was almost cathartic to disassemble half her library again. She was a researcher, after all.

Starswirl’s spell had managed to sneak its way into a fifth edition limited reprint of an anthology that sold poorly and was quickly forgotten. The book was massive, heavy enough to make the little reading table in her library wobble under its weight. Twilight flipped forward a page, rereading the incantation for what felt like the tenth time, and turned back to the candle.

Closing her eyes, her horn glowed as she recited the words in her head. When she finished and opened her eyes again, the candle was unchanged.

This was the part she hated the most. Finding spells that relied on incantations was like reading assembly instructions written in gibberish. The words themselves didn’t matter so much as the intentions of the pony casting it, with the rare exception of that pony overthinking the pronunciation of a word she’d never seen before.

A category Twilight fell neatly into right now.

She dropped a hoof against the book and yanked it toward her, scanning the four lines of a painfully overused rhyme scheme and finding herself getting stuck on the final two words: “Baal’s Fire.”

What was a Baal? Was it pronounced “ball or bale?” What language was it even derived from?

She rubbed her eye and groaned, using her free hoof to flip back a page. Like her, Starswirl learned about entropy from his conversations with Discord. According to his notes, the name likely didn’t originate on this world at all, and was taken from one of the many other civilizations Discord had tormented during his travels.

Starswirl wrote that the spell served no notable function beyond making the caster feel slightly queasy and creating a uniquely bright, green flame. In the final lines of the entry, he attributed his research as a wild goose chase created by Discord with the sole purpose of tormenting him for asking too many questions.

Prank or no prank, Twilight wasn’t about to give up on a spell that had taken her this long to unearth, let alone one that refused to cast. She briefly considered heading back to his statue to ask for the correct pronunciation, but the idea fizzled. This wasn’t a multifaceted scholarly brain teaser. It was one word!

“Fine.” She snatched her quill from its inkwell and crossed out the offending word, scratching four quick letters in the narrow space above it. “Balefire. Easy enough.”

Tipping her horn again to the unlit candle, she sealed her eyes and concentrated on the spell. Word by word she recited the incantation with a renewed confidence, feeling the familiar thrum of magic gathering. Her mind slid over the final, refined syllables and pushed the spell forward.

When she opened her eyes, she was greeted by the sight of a tiny green flame dancing at the tip of the cotton wick. It grew, taking root as wet wax puddled beneath it. She gave her wing a victorious little pump.

“Hey there, little guy,” she murmured.

She reached out with her magic, gently sweeping it above and around the dancing teardrop of balefire, trying to feel for anything that might signify its purpose. Already, she could detect the gentle pressure of nausea forming in the pit of her stomach. Discord’s apparent prank on her foalhood idol, transposed forward through the centuries to torment yet another caster.

Frowning, she tried to sense the delicate structure of the flame’s spell but felt nothing. No currents of magic, no eddys, nothing to even indicate it was influenced by magic at all. It was like touching a void.

Then the little flame did something unexpected. It pulled.

Not at her. Not at anything tangible. It pulled at her magic.

She doused her horn and frowned at the flickering flame. Curiosity piqued, she threw a guilty look across her empty library before turning to the tome in front of her and tearing off the corner of the page. Small sacrifices, she reminded herself.

Holding the wedge of paper in her magic, she dipped it directly into the balefire. The flame curled up the scrap and touched the fringe of her lavender aura.

Balefire swarmed over her magic as if it were kerosene vapor, blooming bright enough to startle a yelp from her before it rebounded straight down the core of the candle like a lit fuse. The candle popped like a cheap firecracker, spattering wax chunks in every direction.

She doused her horn and shook bits of candle from her mane, her eyes darting across the library for any sign that the flame might have hitched a ride to a better source of fuel. To her relief, she found the wick lying on the rug below her chair, the flame snuffed.

She lifted the blackened length of cotton back to the table and stared at it.

Whatever that was, it wasn’t just some prank. That flame hadn’t just been attracted to her magic, it had immolated it before she could pull away. She had felt her aura being deconstructed like a spell being passed through a paper shredder. How was that even possible?

She winced as her stomach churned with displeasure. Starswirl hadn’t been kidding about the nausea.

With some effort she gathered up the fragmented pieces of wax from the floor and deposited them onto the table in a loose heap. She was going to need something to settle her stomach if she wanted to test this spell more thoroughly.

She found herself remembering something Discord had said several weeks before.

“It’s been nibbling at the fringes of everything since the beginning, making problems where there shouldn’t be, or fixing them, depending on your perspective.”

That tiny flame had done a bit more than just nibble. It devoured.

A spell that consumed magic.

She wondered about that.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Proxy Connection :: Stable 1
To: Aurora Pinfeathers
From: Aurora Pinfeathers
Subject: Re: An Incentive
04/10/1297

Elder Coldbrook,

You stole my Pip-Buck, used it to find my home and then threatened to attack it. You better believe I’m going to warn them. As far as I’m concerned, we’re even.

As for your offer, I don’t get the impression you’re giving me much of a choice, so I guess my answer is yes. I’ll do what I can to get you information on SOLUS and I expect you to honor your word to leave my Stable alone while I work. Bear in mind that if I so much as hear that your Rangers are thinking about making an attempt on the door I will come back there, find you, and the two of us can find out how high I can carry a full grown stallion before I lose my grip.

Also, the photo you sent was convincing, but you’re going to need to send me some specs on that talisman before I buy that you’re not trying to screw me over. I want exact numbers on its dimensions, power output, and anything else that came in that crate. If you send me a guess, I’ll know. So don’t.

Now do me a favor and change the name on that cloned Pip-Buck of yours. It’s creeping me out.

Sincerely,
Aurora Pinfeathers
Shift Lead, Mechanical
Stable Fucking 10

She pressed send with a smug little smile, wishing she could watch Coldbrook read her response. If she was going to be forced into this partnership, fine. That didn’t mean she had to be his chipper little lapdog. Borrowing a bit of inspiration from Julip’s expansive vocabulary had been a fun little touch.

Of course, that brought up the question she’d been dreading. Now what?

A yawn clawed its way out of her as she got up, resuming her slow procession of laps around the rim of the small depression they’d camped in. With Roach emotionally drained and Ginger nodding off even while they gnawed on a charred strip of molerat, Aurora had volunteered to take the first watch. She knew enough from watching movies back home to have an idea of what that entailed. Her rifle bobbed lazily beneath her folded wing as she meandered, casting the odd look toward the vague shape of the highway further downhill before continuing on.

She was worried. With Julip gone, she wasn’t sure how she planned on holding up her end of Coldbrook’s bargain. There was always a chance they’d come across another Enclave sprite-bot, but what would they say if she suddenly appeared asking for help again? Would they even answer or just deactivate the bot if she drew too close like the one outside of Kiln?

Aurora let out a frustrated sigh and stared fruitlessly up at the rolling clouds.

The Enclave made those clouds, somehow, to mask their movements while they poked and prodded at sites of interest throughout Steel Ranger territory. At least that was how Ginger described it. Aurora wasn’t so sure. There was something about it that felt like it ran deeper than that. Like it was personal.

No pegasi wheeled below those clouds tonight. Just open sky half-lit by a shrouded moon. The clouds were pretty, in a sad sort of way, but they were nothing in comparison to the stars beyond them.

A deep, ratcheting snore reached her from their camp.

She watched Roach shift in his sleep, his legs splayed out toward the dim pile of embers that remained of the fire. Ginger lay against him, her withers tucked between his ribs and elbow while her chin bobbed gently against her breast. Their unconcealed intimacy was yet another reminder to her that the two of them had known each other well before Aurora came along. Roach had been Ginger’s protector once upon a time, a relationship that grew into something more paternal as life went on.

A thought formed in her head. She frowned and tried to think about anything else, but the invading fear took root and blossomed before she could tear it out.

After this was done, after her Stable was fixed and their journey reached its end, what happened then? Would Ginger come with her or would she want to stay in the wasteland? What about Roach? The two of them had lived their entire lives on the outside. Forcing them to spend the rest of it inside a Stable, away from the world they knew, would be cruel. And that didn’t begin to address her own feelings.

The Stable was where Aurora’s family was. She had friendships there, ones that ran deeper than she’d been willing to admit when she left. She couldn’t stand the thought of watching that door close on her a second time. She also understood that, despite the ironic design, her home wasn’t a revolving door. Exposing the ponies inside to the wasteland would inevitably result in many of them dying in ways they didn’t deserve.

The door had to remain sealed. The question was, which side of it would she be on when it did?

She needed a distraction before her idle brain drove her crazy.

Making her way around the rim, she descended the shallow slope toward the stand of tree stumps Roach had used to take out his frustration. She blew out a breath through pursed lips. He’d done a thorough job of it. Chips of wood peppered the dirt around them like confetti. There was a fair bit of heartwood left to work with, at least. Quietly, she dipped a wing into her saddlebag and fished out a woefully dull chisel she kept in her kit for knocking off welding slag. It wasn’t great, but it was something to do.

She went to work prying off chunks of near-petrified wood, gathering them in a neat pile and taking them back to their camp.

Laying Desperate Times on the ground alongside the weapon Julip abandoned when she fled, she sat down beside Ginger and began sliding one piece of wood after the other into the still hot coals until yellow flames began lapping at their edges. She stopped before going overboard, knowing a roaring fire would roust her companions from their sleep.

Ginger’s hind leg gave a gentle kick toward the fire. For a moment Aurora thought she would wake up anyway, but the mare breathed a deep sigh and rolled until her cheek came to rest against Roach’s neck. She didn’t blame her. Even with his belly barely touching her back Aurora could feel the heat that radiated from the changeling’s chitin. Roach was his own warming blanket.

The fire crackled. It was mesmerizing to watch. She understood why the old western flicks featured so many ponies sitting around one, staring into the flames. Despite the damage they could do, they were beautiful. Hypnotic.

She yawned and silently chastised herself for feeling so tired. She was supposed to be patrolling the rim, but sitting in the crease between Ginger and Roach, staring into a warm fire, she couldn’t convince herself to get back up. She could see the rim from here.

Her eyes roamed the black and red waves that drifted over the coals. The stubby mound shifted, sending a column of sparks into the black sky. She could feel her head becoming heavy. It bobbed. Once, then again. She blinked, slowly, and couldn’t think of a good reason to open her eyes.

She fell asleep.

High in the slopes overlooking the foothills, the west wind pulled smoke into the blackened grotto. A set of nostrils twitched. Malformed eyes slid open and sighted something peculiar beyond the mouth of the shallow cave. Sparks, twisting skyward.

The creature rose, disturbing its neighbor. It rose too, disturbing more.

They shambled into the diffuse moonlight and sighted the dim light of a fire. Disparate minds came to disparate conclusions.

Food. Danger. Seek. Eat.

The creature stumped forward on crooked legs, dragging the tattered shreds of a jumpsuit brought with it from a dark place it couldn’t remember. A skin that it couldn’t shed.

A deep, clicking moan gurgled up from its throats.

It descended the mountain.

The others followed.

January 19th, 1076
Pleasant Hills
Stable 1

Princess Celestia regarded the glowing wall of monitors with an impassive stare that she had whittled into an artform over the course of nine millennia. Her eyes slid from one screen to the next, pausing at each one before moving on, quietly hoping that what she was being made to look at would eventually make sense.

Columns of numbers, strange charts and diagnostic readouts hummed away at the periphery, spitting out updated information in real time. Screens closer to the center of the control board dominated her field of vision, displaying multiple angles of the same symmetrical black object. It rested on a simple white surface which she had been informed was nonconductive.

What the significance of that detail was, she hadn’t a clue.

The entire Stable smelled faintly of gasoline, or diesel perhaps. She couldn’t tell the difference. Ponies from the Ministry of Technology monitored technical readouts behind two unbroken rows of blocky consoles set a few yards back from the wall of screens. Among them, Trixie Lulamoon, a unicorn whose name she only vaguely recalled from an incident stemming from an early rivalry between her and Twilight Sparkle. The little blue unicorn sat behind a console of her own with a thick binder spread open across her workspace. Like the rest of her team, she was painfully aware of the gathering of alicorns just over her shoulder.

If the dark sheen of sweat along the nape of her mane was any indication, Trixie was on the verge of abject panic. She didn’t blame her. Celestia was in a less than charitable mood this morning that had everything to do with the fact that this test was being conducted within not one but two of the new bastions of surrender finally made real by Stable-Tec.

It was her first time visiting one of these shelters. Stables, they called them. Holes for ponies to duck their heads into should Equestria fall, though it was never stated so bluntly by their people. The vast, empty corridors of this prototype did little to impress her and she was willing to assume that, many miles away, the incomplete Stable 2 housing the black talisman displayed on those monitors would be equally devoid of merit.

What good would hiding underground do if the zebras did invade? Even if they could fill their bunkers with enough diesel to last the full five years their creator boasted, it was a strategic misstep. These ponies were spoiled by luxury. They didn’t understand how easy it was for a siege force to set up camp and wait their victims out.

The one saving grace of this entire fiasco was that her government was Stable-Tec’s single largest sponsor, and that was a tap Celestia was becoming impatient to shut off.

The CEO of Stable-Tec, Scootaloo, stood at the far corner of the room wearing a simple white collar and black tie. She was present only because she had offered two of her subterranean panic rooms for the test and was shrewd enough to leverage that for a seat at the table. She pecked at the buttons of her Pip-Buck, a sleek little thing that somehow sent messages without the aid of dragonfire or wire. Another departure from the natural order of things.

Celestia looked to her right where her younger sister stood. Luna gawked at the screens, doubtless finding them to be a source of endless entertainment as did seem every new electric bauble the world was intent on cobbling together. She coughed gently into the flat of her hoof. Luna glanced at her, saw the grim expression on her muzzle, and recomposed herself nearer something befitting her role.

To her left, Twilight Sparkle watched the preparations with a clenched jaw. Every few seconds her eyes would flick down to Applejack, who had seated herself beside Trixie shortly after Twilight arrived.

Celestia could sense the tension between those two like an unpleasant odor. Twilight’s repeated letters over the past two months made it clear she didn’t trust this project, but it was what her former student had omitted that finally wore Celestia down. Twilight deeply mistrusted Trixie and, by extension, Applejack. That needed to be resolved.

Minor infighting between her ministers was to be expected, even healthy in some cases. It demonstrated that they were invested in their work and its outcomes. However, she had known Twilight since she was a filly. A generous pony would suggest she was unusually driven. An honest one would call her obsessive.

She watched Twilight and saw the anger building behind that placid smile. As little as Celestia expected to glean from this test, her presence alone would likely keep Twilight’s emotions in check. In spite of accepting her ascension and despite being the first alicorn since the founding of Equestria’s thrones to turn down what many still regarded as her duty to lead, Twilight Sparkle was still the most qualified mare to lead the Ministry of Arcane Science. It would only do her good to have this fixation of hers smothered while it was still in the crib.

She stared forward as she brushed her wing against her sister’s. Luna’s ear turned toward her.

“How much longer will this test last?” she whispered.

“It has yet to begin,” Luna murmured. “Have some patience, sister. This is exciting!”

She sighed and continued pretending to know what it was she was looking at. The black object at the focus of this minor drama had a quality of looming that Celestia didn’t much care for. Barely larger than a chicken’s egg, its flattened hexagonal shape was reminiscent of Twilight’s cutie mark, were someone brave enough to connect the points and paint in the gaps.

Movement caught her eye. Trixie leaned back in her seat, crossed her forelegs and nodded to Applejack. Celestia’s Element of Honesty clapped Trixie on the shoulder and spoke a few words of quiet encouragement.

“Here we go!” Luna whispered.

Celestia said nothing.

The doe-eyed unicorn stood from her chair and turned to address the royalty at the back of the room, swallowing hard before she spoke.

“Your highnesses,” Trixie began, wincing as her voice cracked. “Minister Twilight Sparkle. Minister Applejack. I want to thank you all for coming today, and I would especially like to thank Stable-Tec for offering their Stables for this flagship test of the world’s first mass arcane storage talisman.”

She gestured toward the black object displayed in multiple behind her, as if expecting applause. When none came, Trixie cleared her throat and continued.

“M.A.S.T. is a reliable, resilient and reproducible source of near-limitless potential. It is a talisman inspired by and vastly superior to its Vhannan predecessor, capable of capturing and storing more magical energy than a single unicorn will utilize during his or her lifetime. What we will be demonstrating today is the capability of a M.A.S.T. talisman to convert its stored magical energy into raw, electric energy. The same energy we use to power our factories and illuminate our cities.”

She turned halfway toward the bank of screens, her aura highlighting the edges of one in particular that displayed a single figure:

“Our first designs, though flawed, were capable of outputs of 200 kilowatts. That’s enough to power several city blocks. Today’s M.A.S.T. was fabricated from a superheated obsidian filament which, with the skilled application of a unicorn’s magic,” she said, her eyes flitting to Twilight for a brief moment, “such as my own, conditions within the talisman become ideal for fractal voids to form within the internal structure. We can expect to see outputs approaching ten megawatts from today’s test. Enough to power the entire city of Canterlot.”

Trixie offered Celestia and Luna a polite bow before turning to a narrow microphone standing out from her console. “Proceed with the test.”

Celestia and the others turned their attention to the talisman on the monitors. A stallion wearing a Stable-Tec jumpsuit appeared slightly out of focus in the background. His hazy aura lifted the stone off the white surface, sliding a C-shaped device of some kind into the frame. Two thick discs the size of dinner plates connected by a fat band of insulated cable offered just enough space for the talisman to fit between them. A second cable snaked out from the disc resting on the table, dropping out of frame toward a machine in the background Celestia didn’t have a reference for.

The unicorn carefully slid the talisman between the plates until, almost violently, the six-cornered stone snapped into the space between them. The unicorn departed off frame, and the heavy clunk of a shutting door could be heard through a tinny speaker in the ceiling of the control room.

The stallion’s monotone voice crossed the gap between Stable 1 and 2. “The M.A.S.T. is primed. Beginning ignition in five. Four. Three…”

Celestia’s brow rose as the talisman began to rotate on its vertical axis. Slowly at first, but after the space of a few more seconds, she could hardly see its edges as they blurred impossibly fast. A growing whine peeled from the speaker until someone switched it to a different channel, dimming the noise to a tolerable level. A voice from Stable 2 reported nominal readings. The monitors grew fuzzy with static, giving the talisman a ghostly quality.

The power output on the monitor began to climb. Celestia heard her sister breathing with excitement as murmurs of approval rippled from the ponies below.

Trixie pivoted on her hooves with a bit of theatrical flare, smiling wide at the princesses above. “And there you have it. We’ve created literal lightning in a bottle.”

Celestia scratched the corner of her mouth with a feather to hide the crease of a smile. To her credit, Trixie had delivered. She turned ever so slightly to see Twilight’s reaction and was unsurprised to see the lavender alicorn staring at her hooves, her jaw locked. Like so many other times, she had miscalculated. Instead of shaming this unicorn, she had brought her accolades.

Were she younger, Celestia might have consoled her with the obvious lesson this was meant to teach her. Give her a little light to fly toward while encouraging her to learn some humility for once. That was before Twilight accepted her wings with no intention of accepting the responsibility that came with them. That was Celestia’s lesson to learn, and learn from it she did. It taught her to be more cautious with these ponies. To stop playing the doting mother and resume her role as their matriarch.

“I think we’re ready to call this a successful test,” Trixie announced. Beside her, Applejack smiled up at her from her seat.

A glint of purple light to Celestia’s left. She thought Twilight might have teleported away but when she spared a glance, the mare was still there, her eyes now fixed on the screens in front of them.

The stallion leading the team at Stable 2 clicked onto the channel. “Output is stable. Winding down in five. Four. Three…”

Through the snow on the screens, the talisman whirred like a top. Then the static shuddered and for a split second the image distorted. A burst of static came over the line, drawing a look of concern from the technicians stationed below.

Trixie’s smile faltered and she turned to look at the feeds.

The talisman’s shadow was beginning to widen at the poles. A low, rising hum began rising from the speaker.

“We’re observing a wobble,” a stallion stated.

Trixie bent over her mic. “Abort the test.”

Celestia frowned at the output monitor.

“Aborting,” he confirmed.

The technician’s voice shifted up an octave. “We’ve got resonance. The M.A.S.T. is…” static chopped across the feed. “...ing itself.”

The hum rose to a steady wail. Static poured across the camera feeds in shifting stripes, giving the illusion that the talisman had begun to dance.

“Night Glider,” Trixie said, “get your team out of the test chamber now.”

His voice was barely audible over the haunting shriek burrowing its way through the line. The output monitor crashed through its seventh digit. Then an eighth.

“I’m goi…”

Static.

“...isconnect manua…”

Applejack leapt from her chair toward the mic. “Negative on manual disconnect, Night Glider! Do not-”

The speaker above drowned her order with a final, painful squawk that made the entire room shield their ears. Then, silence. The screens flickered and went dark.

For several stunned seconds, nobody moved. Static hissed across the void between Stables. Bright green letters appeared on the camera feeds: NO SIGNAL.

Then, from nowhere and everyone at once, a titanic boom rang the reinforced skin Stable 1 like a struck bell. A collective shout ran through the gathered ponies as thin wisps of dust filtered down from the vents above.

Celestia lit her horn, poised to move everyone in the room to the surface should the mountain above give way, but while it took several long seconds for the walls to stop vibrating, the Stable held.

“Would somebody like to explain to me what just happened?” she demanded.

Her words jarred Trixie out of her trance. With a shuddering breath, she turned to face her princess with wide eyes. “I-it could have been a power surge,” she stammered, looking to Applejack for support. “Right?”

Celestia watched Applejack’s expression grow distant.

From the back of the room, Scootaloo’s shaking voice broke the silence. “Two’s network is down, and HQ is reporting that the hard line just stopped sending data.” Her ears lay flat with worry as her feathers blurred across her Pip-Buck. “I’m not getting anything from the cameras outside, either.”

A mare whose name Celestia didn’t know stood up from her console and turned to whisper something to Trixie. The unicorn’s ears dropped. Slowly, she nodded. The mare swallowed and sat back down, pulling a headset over her ears as she used a hoof to tap a series of keys. She pressed the speaker against her ear with the other and waited before seeming to deflate.

“Civilian bands are reporting a plume in the vicinity of Two,” she said, shaking her head.

“Let me see if I can get a picture up,” Scootaloo said. “There’s a firewatch tower not far from here. It’s a government feed. Princess, I need your permission to…”

“Do it,” she said.

Scootaloo’s short feathers went to work.

As Celestia surveyed the room, the few ponies with the courage to meet her eyes looked at her with open fear. Fear for having failed in the presence of royalty, yes, but more pressing was the terror of not knowing what had just happened. Whether the team down in Stable 2 were alive or, if they were, whether they would stay that way for long.

The monitors flickered to life with the same image.

Mounted under the eave of the tower’s square roof, the camera Scootaloo tapped into pointed toward the snowy, pine-studded mountains of the Pleasant Hills. At the left edge of the frame a dark, greasy smear boiled into a crystal blue sky. Celestia frowned.

Unnatural green flame churned up from the center of the plume like a chimney fire. A mist of pine needles tumbled in a slow arc away from the source of the explosion, but then it occurred to her that they weren’t needles but entire trees snapped clear of the ground, their stripped trunks hurtling through the air like burning confetti. Boulders the size of houses traced graceful lines across the sky before impacting the ground with such force that smaller, secondary plumes rose from the forest canopy through the entire frame.

The mare on the radio turned away from the screens. “Emergency services in Quarrytown are starting to get calls about the plume.”

Trixie dropped into her chair and put her head in her hooves.

Celestia took a breath and tipped her mouth toward her sister’s ear. “We need to get ahead of this,” she murmured.

“That will be difficult,” Luna said, her eyes flicking to Scootaloo.

“Bring her with us when we depart.”

She turned to address the gathered ponies, noting that Applejack had already begun the grim task of having her team begin preserving all the data they’d collected. It took an inner strength few ponies possessed to create order from chaos, and despite the pain in her eyes, Applejack once again demonstrated that strength. There was a time when Celestia would have given the sun to have a pony like her among her generals.

“I want you all to remember that despite this tragedy, every one of you acted admirably in pursuing a better tomorrow. Their families will be cared for. I will see to it personally,” she said, watching their misty eyes turn to watch her. Trixie remained where she sat, head bowed, tears dotting her console. “Your work, however, is not finished. Your duty now is to ensure the preservation of the events we just witnessed so that we may learn from this mistake and never repeat it.”

She paused, knowing they would wait.

“Dry your eyes, little ponies,” she said. “There is important work to be done.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 22: A Means to an End Estimated time remaining: 54 Hours, 48 Minutes