Julip wrinkled her nose at the flask clutched between her feathers, unscrewed the cap and tossed back a mouthful of the urine-tinted swill.

She hated Rebound. For as bad as the stuff tasted, it may as well be piss in a bottle. She chased it with a swig from her canteen and swished the brackish mixture through her teeth, mindful not to give into the powerful temptation to spit. She swallowed, winced, and scrubbed her tongue against the roof of her mouth in a vain attempt to rid her palette of the flavor.

The chem’s effects kicked in slow and steady. Julip could feel the weight behind her eyes lighten, the sluggishness slide out of her tired joints and a persistent nudge from her wings to get up and cut the air. Rebound was awful in every way except one: it kept her sorry ass awake.

She didn’t bother trying to guess how many doses she had left. When it ran out, it ran out. Not a common sentiment among wastelanders, especially the hopelessly addicted among them, but she always regarded chems with a healthy amount of mistrust. They helped, until they didn’t.

Julip took a second swig from her canteen before packing it and her flask away. She didn’t know much about addiction beyond what little she’d seen of the used-up earth ponies loitering outside the slums of New Canterlot, begging for caps or offering illicit services in hopes of finding that day’s quick fix. Julip steered well clear of harder chems like Mentats, Psycho or worst of all, Jet. Any alluring qualities those tailored drugs might have were lost to her the first time she saw a lifeless stallion being heaped into the back of a wagon like so much cordwood.

The Enclave had a less-than-forgiving approach to chem abuse within its ranks. A pegasus who found themselves caught had the option of spending several months in a dark cell until the addiction burned its way out of them, or spend several months in a dark cell until it killed them. The strong survived and the weak weeded themselves out of the genepool. More often than not, pegasi didn’t come back from “treatment.” It was a powerful disincentive.

She bent her neck to the side, wincing until the stiffness released with a satisfying crick. The sandstone outcrop she’d perched herself on wasn’t much of a watchpost but it was good enough for the stallions she went out with. The little camp Aurora and her friends had chosen far below was almost inviting by comparison. Their meager fire colored the oblong dirt bowl they’d settled in a deep orange, throwing their shadows long like hands on a strange clock.

Even with the cold sandstone sapping the heat from her backside, it wasn’t enough of a motivator for her to risk starting a fire of her own. Their shotgun-slinging ghoul friend made it clear what he thought of her - the feeling was entirely mutual - and Aurora and Ginger didn’t seem eager to intervene. Something told her he wouldn’t take kindly to spotting her lurking above them for a second time.

Why two perfectly capable mares would hobble themselves with a ghoul, a changeling ghoul of all things, was beyond her. What bothered her even more was that he was apparently connected to Stable 10. By a daughter, he’d claimed. She shook her head, watching the tiny figure of Aurora sitting down with the other two.

Last she checked changelings couldn’t reproduce without a queen, so where in the wasteland did he find himself a kid? She grimaced and stopped herself from picturing anything she would regret later. He was probably just being theatric.

It didn’t take long for Aurora to nod off. Julip snorted. Some lookout she was.

She tried not to read too much into the way the three of them seemed to naturally fold into one another. Warmth was warmth, and the nights out here were anything but balmy. Still, just because the world had gone to shit didn’t mean decency was dead too.

She sighed and settled in for another night of pony watching. A dim light glinted on the northern horizon, briefly drawing her attention. Too small to be a raider camp. More likely to be one of the hundreds of ponies that dotted the wasteland trying to eak out a life in whatever hole they called home. Julip didn’t understand why they insisted on living out here, entrusting their tomorrows to the whims of whichever raider or local wildlife might catch their scent. The Enclave offered safety. Stability, even. Yes, sacrifices were required in order to stay within their good graces, but what sacrifice wasn’t worth security?

It was like the ponies out here refused to make sense on purpose.

The wood Aurora had thrown into the firepit shifted as it burnt down, throwing sparks up through the narrow column of smoke. Julip watched the embers as they winked out one after the other, trying to imagine what would make someone leave a perfect life behind to live in a shithole like this.

She let her eyes wander despite there being so little out here to see. The dim glow of Kiln reflected off the clouds on the horizon, barely noticeable unless you knew what you were looking for. A scant few miles to the east, the low mountains of the Pleasant Hills loomed above them like the silhouettes of sleeping giants. Whoever had named them “pleasant” had a twisted sense of humor. They were anything but.

Julip knew she would need to approach them again sooner rather than later, ideally before they ran into one of the raider tribes that plagued the mountain pass. She might earn herself a load of buckshot for the trouble, but the ghoul’s shotgun was nothing in comparison to what Primrose would do to her if she stood by and watched a pureblood get herself killed.

As she scanned the dark ribbon of road leading deeper into hills, she noticed something strange. Movement. She narrowed her eyes.

Beyond the little camp, a dark shape was quickly descending the shallow hill on the far side of the highway. Julip frowned and dug a wing into her mailbag to produce a pair of worn but working binoculars. Goddesses bless Hayflinger for including them in her kit. Peering through the optics, she scanned for the same patch of road.

Something sour rose in her gullet as she found what she was looking for. A dozen or more distorted shapes poured onto the roadway like a solid mass, shambling across the empty lanes toward the low incline that formed the bowl Aurora and her companions had chosen for their camp. They moved with the certainty of predators that had scented prey, and they were approaching fast.

“Fuck!” The binoculars hit the sandstone and she pitched herself off the outcrop, diving for the camp below. “Fuck-fucking-fuck!”

January 19th, 1076

Celestia stared up at the afternoon sky, watching the hazy brown smear drift east toward the ocean that bore her name. If the ponies living in Manehattan, Fillydelphia and Baltimare hadn’t felt the explosion, they would doubtless smell the metallic odor once the remnants of its plume reached their homes.

Her guards had wasted little time barricading the local roads but the sudden influx of curious pegasi overhead had forced them to call in reinforcements from Canterlot. She didn’t have to speak with Rarity to know that word of the mysterious plume would be traveling wider and faster than her ministry’s net could cast. The ring of pegasi treading air around the site would carry word to any ear willing to listen, and there would be many of those in the coming days. Powerful as she was, there was little she could to to keep this accident a secret.

The Ministry of Image would have its agents pulling double shifts to pay visits to the largest publications. Even now their photographers snapped away, the flicker of flashbulbs drawing her woefully outnumbered guards like moths as they tried in vain to stop them. They likely knew their film would be confiscated and, loyal to their craft, they were burning through every roll they could in the hopes that one or two might make it back to their printers. Old habits died hard.

Celestia wasn’t looking forward to what would inevitably come after the war ended and the ministries were finally dissolved. She wasn’t so naive not to believe there was a treasure trove of film, audio recordings and unpublished documents waiting to be released as soon as the censors disbanded. Newspapers would have a field day vindicating themselves by printing previously forbidden stories. Publishers would churn out books detailing a revised history featuring snappy titles and provocative covers. There would be decades of questions for her and her sister to endure.

It would be an annoyance, but they would outlive the consequences as they always had.

She turned her attention away from the hovering belt of gawkers and down the burning slope toward what remained of Stable 2.

There wasn’t much left.

The cement-reinforced ramp that led down to the hinged blast door below simply didn’t exist anymore. The Stable’s superstructure and much of the valley floor above it had been blown clear into the sky like a monstrous pressure cooker releasing its lid. Deep, wandering fissures radiated out from the glowing pit the blast left behind, evidence that some portions of the Stable were still in the process of collapsing. Here and there, green flame still lapped up out of those fissures, burning through the roots of trees that bent away from the crater like the petals of an alien flower.

The chances that any of Stable-Tec or ministry staff survived the blast were so slim they weren’t worth exploring. There had been some intermittent chatter coming across the buried cables following the explosion but it hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes. If anyone was still alive in that pulsing inferno, death was likely a preferable option to survival.

“May we leave?”

Luna stood beside her, lips twisted with discomfort.

“The air here is making me feel ill.”

Celestia nodded with some reluctance. The inexplicable scent of ozone and metal had begun to make her stomach churn as well, though she was doing a better job of hiding it than her sister. Luna was right. There was something bad in the air here. Likely fumes from whatever materials Scootaloo used to construct her now destroyed shelter.

She turned and addressed the retinue of gold-clad guards behind her. “We’re leaving. Take a message to Applejack and Twilight. Tell them to be at the castle before sundown.” She glanced at the shadow beneath her guard and did the quick arithmetic she’d learned to do in her head centuries ago. “That should give them enough time to delegate what they need to here before departing.”

The lead stallion snapped off a crisp salute and pitched himself into the air. Celestia eyed the three guards who lingered.

“All of you. Go.”

She saw a flicker of doubt pass across the eyes of the foremost mare before she saluted and led the others toward Stable 1. It wasn’t often Celestia asked to be alone, but these were unique circumstances.

Stepping away from the burning valley, she spread her wings and flung herself into the January sky. Her ear twitched at the sound of Luna taking off behind her and for several silent minutes they climbed. Only when the smoke and its ring of onlooking pegasi were well behind them did they speak.

Luna pulled up alongside her, the placid mask of royalty subsiding into an expression of hesitant concern. “I’ll have my night guard help with the recovery efforts after dark. There may still be data-”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” She grimaced, not for having interrupted her sibling but due to the unwelcome lurch of her stomach. She swallowed to regain her composure. “Let them collect what information they feel is necessary, but when they are done this M.A.S.T. project needs to be redirected.”

Luna was silent for several miles. Celestia didn’t need to look at her to know she would be disappointed.

“You don’t trust the Ministry of Technology with this work, do you?”

Her tone was brisk. “Twilight was right. Magical research belongs in the hooves of unicorns.”

“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

She blew out a long sigh and looked ahead, knowing it would be several more hours before Canterlot rose up from that distant horizon. “Ponies died today. We don’t have the luxury of coddling them anymore.”

“More may suffer needlessly if Applejack feels that she doesn’t have the support of her princesses,” Luna countered. “Taking this away from her could stifle her ministry’s production in the long run.”

“And what do you propose we do?”

She waited while Luna mulled her options. “I assume you want to give this project to Twilight.”

Celestia nodded. Twilight’s ministry had done little more than send a steady trickle of new spells to the unicorns on the front lines, most of which were so complicated that only a few gifted casters could wrap their heads around them. It was like she was hard-wired to make magic difficult.

“It would finally give her something tangible to work on rather than hiding away in that library of hers.”

Luna nodded, hardly willing to argue that point. “Then I suggest we have their respective ministries solve this talisman puzzle jointly. The Ministry of Magic can oversee research and development while Applejack’s ministry focuses on practical application.”

Celestia chewed on that. A division of responsibilities wouldn’t hurt. “I would expect them to conduct this research well away from Canterlot.”

“Naturally.”

“Ideally someplace where our subjects would be least likely to see detonations like the one we saw today,” she finished.

Luna hesitated. “You expect this to happen again?”

“I’m counting on it.”

She watched her sister’s expression darken as understanding took root. Luna’s wing twitched, a subtle movement that slid her a scant few inches away from Celestia’s feathers. “We can’t weaponize something like that.”

Celestia took a slow breath and stared down at the white expanse below. “I believe it’s our responsibility to do just that. A weapon that powerful, we likely wouldn’t need to use it. Vhanna has nothing to defend against something like this. We could force their surrender with threat alone.”

“And what if one of their spies catches wind of it? The zebras created the talismans in the first place. All it would take is one lapse in security and we could be staring down the barrel of a weapon just as deadly as the one you’re proposing!”

“Which is why we would need to move quickly,” she urged. “Sister, we’re running out of time to win this war. We’re not going to capture their oil fields before our own bunkers run dry. When that happens, it won’t be long until we see zebras landing on our shore instead of the other way around. It’s our duty to ensure that day never comes, and a weapon like this would secure that future for us indefinitely.”

Luna stared at her, the dismay on her face as clear as the anger behind it. Celestia knew she didn’t have to explain to her how dire the war had become in recent years, but it worked to drive her point home. Vhanna understood their only advantage in this fight was time, not technology, and they were content to wait out the clock in their muddy trenches while Equestria burned through its limited resources in the hopes of prying them loose.

They were running out of options. Vhanna wouldn’t be content to run Equestria off its land. Once the oil ran dry, their industries would seize like an engine without fuel and their ability to continue fighting would collapse with it. The gates to Equestria would be vulnerable and Vhanna was not likely to show mercy to their former invaders until their monarchs were dead.

Luna glared forward and pumped her wings through the frigid air. “You’re gambling their lives on a future you only pretend to see. I want history to reflect that I’m against this.”

Celestia banked toward her until the white tips of her outstretched feathers mingled with the deep navy of her sister’s. Luna pretended not to notice, but the angry lump in her throat betrayed her indifference.

She swallowed and leaned away until, slowly, they slid apart.

Aurora’s ear flicked.

Time felt slushy as her unconscious mind clung to the ragged edges of sleep. The rhythmic rise and fall of Roach’s barrel beneath her cheek was soothing, radiating warmth that sank into her weary muscles and softened their aches. She shimmied forward until her hind legs grazed Ginger’s tail, and she let herself drift.

Her ear flicked again, spinning this time toward something. Roach took a waking breath, bending her neck sideways until the discomfort forced her awake. She grunted in protest and cracked her eyes, unsurprised to be greeted by a panorama of deep shadow and the knowledge that she’d been cheated out of yet another night’s sleep.

Roach lifted his head and peered back at the two mares curled against his belly with half-lidded eyes. His brief confusion at seeing Aurora there turned into a deeper frown as the remnant of his own ear twitched at the sound of scraping dirt, drawing his attention up to the rim of the camp.

His eyes shot wide.

Aurora frowned, pushing herself up to follow his gaze.

Standing on the north rim of their camp a single figure stared down at them. The waning firelight traced a vaguely equine silhouette, but something about it was wrong. As her vision resolved Aurora could see that the pony’s hide was little more than pink skin hung from its skeletal frame like melted candle wax. Its neck bobbed, first left then right, swinging its head like a pendulum while its unblinking grey eyes remained fixed on the glowing coals.

“Roach.”

“Shh.” His breathing slowed as he brought a hoof to Ginger’s shoulder, gently nudging her awake. “Be quiet and don’t move.”

As Ginger stirred, a second creature appeared beside the first. Its shape was… wrong. Like a foal’s first attempt to draw a pony, brought to life. Its neck bulged with a tumor the size of a bowling ball. Its torso was too wide, propped up by at least six rigid stalks that could only loosely be referred to as legs.

Aurora’s first thought was that they were feral ghouls, but as he brain caught up to what her eyes were seeing she felt the hackles along her neck stand on end. These weren’t ghouls. These were different.

The creature emitted a clicking noise from deep within its throat. No, throats. Two ponies, not one, fused unevenly down the center. Its too-wide torso was a ragged network of interlocking rib cages. The tumor standing out from its neck was nothing less than the remains of the second pony’s head. Aurora watched the slow motion of its vestigial jaws working open and closed as if trying to complain about the injustice of its fate.

The dominant of the two heads locked onto the smoldering fire and let out a low, crackling gasp from the pit of its shared lungs. The monstrosity beside it stopped the hypnotic sway of its head to echo the noise.

Along the rim of the camp, more nightmares limped into view. Some dragged themselves forward on backward-facing limbs while others scrabbled over the dirt on stumps torn open by naked bone. A pony staggered forward, the trunk of its neck adorned by a head smeared to one side like an inexperienced stroke of a painter’s brush. Conflicting sets of eyes bent this way and that as they fought to turn their malformed gazes toward the dim light that led them here.

Behind her, Aurora could hear Roach and Ginger slowly getting to their hooves. The soft click of Roach’s shotgun unlocking from its rail coincided with the harsher clack of the safety on Ginger’s pistol. The lead abomination's head lolled toward the source of the sound, its pale eyes sliding away from the red glow of the embers and settling on the three ponies gathered nearby.

Its lidless eyes grew even wider.

Aurora watched in quiet terror as the creature’s barrel expanded, sucking air into its withered lungs with a buzzing wheeze. Its jaw lurched open, mimicked by the second mouth erupting from its neck, and released a wordless bellow. Then it charged.

A choir of wails went up from the gathered monsters and they poured into the depression like an overtopped dam. The creature leading the swarm screamed again, the pupils of its too-large eyes abruptly dilating as it decided on Aurora.

Gunfire coughed up behind her, startling a scream out of her chest as Roach planted slugs into the approaching monster’s body like lead seeds, tearing gouts of flesh away where the soft metal flowered and burst out the other side.

The living horror didn’t care. It descended the slope of the rim like a starved animal carried forward by a primal will. It occurred to Aurora that Roach and Ginger were screaming. Not at the approaching horde, but at her, pulling at her shoulders as they tried to get her to move.

She stood there, frozen, overwhelmed by the nameless anathema tearing toward her across the dead soil. As it skittered into the dying light of their fire, something happened.

A dark shape dropped out of the sky and slammed into the frenzied creature’s neck with a meaty thwack. It lurched sideways in a sprawl of flailing limbs and discordant howls, violently raking its many hooves through the air as its diverted momentum sent its body rolling across the coals.

An arcing leg caught its attacker across the crux of Julip’s wing, spoiling her landing and sending her sprawling across the packed soil with a string of curses. The creature shrieked as the searing embers blistered its flesh, spasming madly on the ground while glowing coals clung stubbornly to its skin. Its cries and the odor of fetid, burning meat filled the air. The twisted mass of creatures behind it stuttered to a halt, wary of its noises and the glowing fragments kicked out from the fire by its flailing hooves.

Aurora’s heart pounded in her throat as she struggled to cope with what she was seeing. She felt dizzy, like she wasn’t getting enough air. Her sense of reason was drowned out by the voice of fear screaming that if she moved, then everything she was seeing would become real. That if she did nothing, she would wake up and the mass of furious creatures stamping at the scattered remains of their fire would be forgotten.

Ginger stood face-to-face with her now, her mouth forming words that Aurora couldn’t seem to focus on. She stared past her at the churning wall of hungry flesh and knew she needed to get away. That if she listened to that voice in her head, she would die. But the distance between knowing and doing was so wide that the two may well be separated by an ocean. Her hooves clung to the ground as if they’d thrown roots. Even as one of the conjoined creatures grew impatient and staggered forward in a renewed charge, Aurora’s legs refused to budge.

She braced herself for the inevitable and watched as Ginger was shoved harshly aside by a bloody-nosed green pegasus. Julip lifted a wing high into the air and cracked Aurora across the muzzle hard enough to snap off two primary feathers.

“FUCKING RUN!”

The pain was sharp, instant and just enough to shock Aurora out of her paralysis. Her heart jumped into her throat as she darted forward, snatching up her saddlebags between her teeth and scooping her rifle into her wing. Pushed forward by Julip’s impatient wings, the four of them ran.

She could feel the thunder of their pursuers’ hooves through the dirt as she threw her rifle strap around her neck. Ginger and Roach were quick to pull ahead and crested the distant rim first, descending into the next valley beyond. Aurora felt her chest tighten as she lost sight of them, urging her hooves to move faster as she struggled to catch up. As she mounted the hill and caught sight of Ginger’s fearful eyes staring back at her, Aurora realized two things: she was a slow runner and the creatures bent on killing her were not.

She looked to the growing gap between her and her companions, then to Julip galloping beside her. “We need to get airborne!”

“No shit!”

“You take Roach! I’ll grab Ginger!”

“Wait, what?!”

“You said you wanted to help me so fucking help me!”

The creatures broke over the ridge behind them like a deranged tide, bellowing a buzzing chorus as they caught sight of their prey. The flecks of dirt kicked up by their misshapened limbs peppered Aurora’s hind legs as they closed in. There was no cover. Noplace to hide. Nothing but the gradual march of ever-steepening hills.

She gave Julip a look of desperate determination and flung open her wings. The relief she felt when she saw Julip spreading her feathers was indescribable.

They angled themselves evenly with the descending slope and for a few seconds Aurora was back in the bluffs, sliding down a shallow hill for the first time on untested wings. Except this time she knew what she was doing.

Ginger let out a startled yelp as Aurora grasped her by the midsection and pulled her off the ground. Roach uttered a curse of his own when Julip practically landed on his back and hooked both pairs of her legs around either end of his barrel in a single, practiced maneuver. They lifted into the air, chased by a cacophony of predatory howls as they ascended out of reach.

Julip grunted discomfort as she pumped her wings. “Fuck, you’re heavy for a bug!”

Roach ignored her and gave the creatures below a final look. “Where are we going?”

Aurora shouted against the wind to be heard. “Anywhere but down there!”

She tightened her grip around Ginger and risked a glance back. Even now, the monsters were little more than a slow-moving clot of black against the deep gray terrain. A few had given up the chase but the majority of the herd was still kicking up dust far below. Aurora banked gently to what she approximated as north and Julip mimicked the course change without complaint. She let herself relax a little as she watched the herd continue its mindless charge southeast, oblivious that its prey had changed direction.

Ginger’s heart pounded against Aurora’s vice grip. “What were those things?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Roach called back. “I’ve never seen ghouls like that before.”

“That’s because they weren’t ghouls.” Julip clenched her jaw as she trailed Aurora’s ascent.

Aurora frowned at Julip’s discomfort and leveled out. The foothills rolled beneath them like black waves on the surface of an increasingly agitated ocean, rising higher and higher to meet them the further they flew. “If they weren’t ghouls…”

“They’re not,” Julip said, her tone harsh. A flash of anger played across her face and was gone just as quickly. “They’re called centaurs and they’re not supposed to exist anymore.”

Roach craned his neck up to her. Julip lifted hers away with visible revulsion. “They were real enough for me.”

“Not the point.”

“Then what is? You’re not making any sense,” he pressed.

She adjusted her grip around him with a strained grunt.

“It’s all rumors, but decades after the end came, survivors reported seeing them around a few remote facilities the ministries used to build the bombs. Every so often a warhead would come off the line with a minor defect and leak raw balefire. Normal procedure was to take them out and bury them somewhere, though anything that might detail where that was didn’t survive the war. When the bombs fell, the production sites went into automatic lockdown. You can pretty much figure out what happened next.”

Roach exchanged glances with Ginger and Aurora before shouting against the wind. “Some of those sites must have had defective warheads waiting for disposal when the doors came down.”

“Change some to all and you’d be right,” Julip said. “The second they went on lockdown, those places became tombs.”

Aurora tried not to think about how similar those facilities sounded to her Stable. “If they were exposed to balefire, why didn’t they just turn into ghouls?”

Julip pulsed her wing and hissed a curse as she struggled to stay level with her. “Best guess the archivists had back then was that they did, at least at first. Ghouls out here had the luxury of getting away from the sources of radiation that turned them in the first place. The ponies trapped in those facilities were trapped with the stuff and we assume it only got worse as time went on.”

Aurora shuddered at the thought of what that transformation must have been like. Roach had shared a few nuggets about his own change, and what she knew was enough to convince her not to ask for the gorey details. Balefire had some sort of deconstructive effect on the body that Equestrian science never had a large enough window to properly study.

In her head she imagined it as a droplet of liquid gallium being set atop a chunk of aluminum. For several minutes, nothing seemed to happen, but beneath the surface the invading liquid would seep beneath the surface of the aluminum, dissolving it from beneath a flimsy skin floating atop the liquid alloy. Wiped away, the reaction would stop but the aluminum would be irreversibly changed.

Left to soak, the gallium would reduce the solid aluminum to an unrecognizable puddle.

The centaurs had been left to soak.

She tightened her grip around Ginger and tried not to think of what it might have gone through those ponies’ minds as they huddled together, terrified as they watched themselves deteriorate. Horrified at the realization that they were sinking into their neighbor.

She looked at Roach and saw that he was watching her. He pursed his lips as he recognized what was going through her head.

Ginger broke the lingering silence. “You said they weren’t supposed to exist anymore.”

“They aren’t. Once the Enclave realized what happened, we sent teams out to put the centaurs down. Back then the Rangers only controlled a few cities along the east coast. They were happy to sit back and watch us work.”

“I think it’s fair to say you missed a few,” Roach said.

“The Enclave doesn’t miss a few,” she snapped back. “We have every balefire production facility mapped. There’s nothing like that out here.”

Ginger grimaced at the deep valleys below. “Perhaps they migrated.”

“Not without being seen,” Julip said. “The Rangers might be dense, but they’re not stupid. They wouldn’t let something like that wander around their territory unchallenged. These ones came up from somewhere recently.”

A gust of wind flared up from the west, forcing Aurora’s wings to billow like a parachute in an updraft. To her right, Julip spat out a colorful string of curses as hers did the same. The feathers along Julip’s left wing trembled from the effort it took for her to keep her level. In the diffuse moonlight, Aurora could see a peach-sized welt forming where Julip’s wing joined her shoulder blade. With their adrenaline waning, the pain of the injury she’d suffered at the hooves of the creature she’d attacked had begun to settle in.

The Enclave mare looked ready to throw in the towel. “Start looking for a place to land,” she grunted. “My wing’s shot.”

Roach frowned up at her, then at Aurora. His expression was equal parts suspicion and worry, the latter of the two becoming much more prominent as he realized the mare carrying him likely regarded him as dead weight.

“Aurora,” he prodded. “Let’s set down.”

She turned her eyes to the dark expanse of rolling terrain below. Here and there, dim pinpoints of firelight flickered where travellers just like them hoped to go the night undiscovered. Many of them traced out the long line of the highway as it curved through the mountains, unaware of one another and apt to be less than friendly to uninvited visitors dropping out of the sky.

She looked to Julip. “I’m open to suggestions.”

She didn’t need to be told twice.

Julip began to descend, slowly, settling on a tack that brought them farther north of the highway and away from the skirt of lights that speckled its path. The mountains rose up around them as they scoured the terrain for a suitable place to set down, but at this point she wasn’t in a position to be picky. Necessity won out over comfort as she spotted the unmistakable parallel lines of a prewar railway cutting through the hills several miles north of the main road.

Her wing buckled a few yards above the rails, low enough for the ghoul to safely absorb the impact while still being high enough to knock the wind out of her when the changeling’s back rammed into her stomach. Aurora dropped Ginger off a few feet behind them, the two mares watching as Roach bent his knees to allow Julip to slide unceremoniously onto the loose stones next to the rails.

She sucked in a shallow breath and coughed out a wheezing, “Fuck…”

The ghoul flicked his foreleg forward, eliciting a muffled pop from his knee. “I can’t remember the last time I landed that hard.”

Julip glared up at him and took another breath. “...you.”

“Don’t start,” Aurora warned.

The ballast stones scraped beneath Julip’s hooves as she stood up, making one hobbling turn to get her bearings. Aurora and her companions took her cue and cast wary glances at their new surroundings.

On the inside bend of the tracks stood a near-vertical monolith of cut bedrock that interrupted the otherwise continuous slope of the mountain looming overhead. On the other, a weather-worn descent led into a dry valley below. A few patches of scrub brush managed to make a home out of the deep grooves carved into the slope by ages of unimpeded erosion, leaving furtive brush strokes of hardscrabble flora wherever they could take root. It was nothing compared to the greenery of the bluffs back west, but it was a welcome sight after wasting the last two days in the blasted flatland that surrounded Kiln.

Thick scabs of rust flaked off the rails all down the line, tracing reddish parallel stripes east and west. The old train line clung to the girth of the mountains like a saddlebag strap cinched two notches too tight. Julip peered off in both directions, straining to see further and wishing she hadn’t left her binoculars back on the sandstone outcrop.

The uncertainty in Aurora’s voice was hard to miss when she piped up. “Are we sure those things won’t track us somehow?”

Julip sat down on the nearby rail, shaking her head. “I doubt it.”

She lifted her injured wing and sucked a breath through clenched teeth before folding it back to her side. “Fuckers kick like an alicorn in heat.”

The swelling around the joint of her wing had widened considerably over the last several minutes, but thankfully it didn’t appear to be broken. If it had been, at least one of them wouldn’t be here right now.

She watched Aurora pick her way down the stones toward the sheer wall while Ginger followed. The two of them sat down with their backs resting against the granite, making no attempt to hide their exhaustion.

Looking at the ghoul, she couldn’t help point out the obvious. “Maybe this time you don’t let the Stable pony take the first watch.”

“Remind me again why you’re still here,” he rumbled. “I thought we made it clear we didn’t require the Enclave’s services.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not the first time I’ve been accused of thinking for myself. And judging by that shitshow you three had starring roles in, I have to say I was expecting a little more gratitude for saving your lives.”

The ghoul narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

“Thank you,” Aurora said, pressing the back of her head against the cool stone wall. “We owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” she said. “You saved my life, I saved yours. That’s even.”

“There’s something we can agree on.” The ghoul stepped toward her and gestured west with a sweep of his hoof. “Now you can fly home with a clear conscience. You helped us. Mission complete.”

The balls on him. Julip shook her head at him incredulously and half-lifted her injured wing to drive the impossibility of his pipe-dream home. “I’m not flying anywhere like this.”

He shrugged, unmoved. “You’ve got legs. Use them.”

“Roach.”

She watched him turn to look at Ginger, who regarded him with a tight frown.

“Don’t be cruel.”

He pressed his lips into a thin line, took a slow breath and released it all in a displeased huff. The ghoul looked primed to argue with the unicorn, but despite his degraded nature he managed to think better of it. He shot Julip a look of deep mistrust before sitting down on the stones halfway between the rails and the granite wall.

While the ghoul sulked, Julip let a few moments pass in silence to observe the two mares. It didn’t take a head shrink to tell they were exhausted both physically and mentally. It had only been a little over three days since they met at the solar array and some of that time had to have been spent recuperating at Blinder’s Bluff. That left a day at most to make the walk from the Bluff to Kiln, and Julip had observed them spending the majority of the last trekking from Kiln to the mountains. A late night at the Gaping Gash, a couple hours of sleep followed by a wholesale dismantling of a slaver depot… these three had to be dead on their hooves. It was no wonder Aurora nodded off.

The ghoul wanted her gone, and judging by the way he continued to give her the side-eye, he definitely wasn’t going to let a gentle thump upside the head deter him from pushing the issue. Her window to appeal to them was closing.

She looked Aurora in the eye, drawing a tired frown out of her. Stable pony or no, she wasn’t stupid. Back on the road, she’d smelled her pitch coming from a mile away. But at this point, Julip didn’t have any other options beyond physically grabbing the mare and dragging her away from these other two. Or at least that had been an option before she fucked up her wing, and even then the whole point of her assignment was to ingratiate herself with them. Not kidnap her.

“Look,” she said, “I know you have your mind made up about me, but I’m not some evil boogeymare out to stop you from doing whatever it is you’re out here to do. Whatever rumors you’ve heard about us, they’re not true. Or... not all of them.” She eyed the ghoul. “The one thing I can say with confidence is that we don’t crack open Stables that are still operational. We only empty the ones that have already failed, and only to keep the tech inside from falling into the wrong hooves.”

“Like the Steel Rangers,” Aurora supplied.

There was an edge in her tone that suggested not all was well between Aurora and the self-appointed knights of the greater wasteland. Julip couldn’t help but smirk. “Like them, yeah. Sounds like they’re already on your shit-list. Can I ask what they did?”

The walls came down around Aurora in the form of a polite smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”

Stop pretending to be her friend, she reminded herself. She didn’t blame Aurora for not trusting her. After spending her time with two seasoned wastelanders, having a less than positive outlook of the Enclave was expected. If she came at this like they were going to end the day braiding each other’s mane, she may as well cut her losses and give this up.

“I know I can be… abrasive. I get that. But if I go back to New Canterlot and tell Minister Primrose that you didn’t want my help, she’s just going to send someone else who’s more stubborn and a lot less charismatic than I am.”

The last bit earned a derisive snort from Aurora.

“I’m serious,” she said. “If they spot you and don’t see me with you… it wouldn’t be healthy for me. The minister sent me out here to ask you. If she has to send someone different, they’re not going to ask.” She gestured to Ginger and Aurora. “You two could have left me in that cage and not a single pony out here would have blamed you for it. That deserves better than just being strong-armed by whoever has to take over for me. All I’m asking is for a chance to prove I’m not trying to fuck you.”

“Interesting choice of words,” Ginger murmured.

Julip opened her mouth with a ready-made retort on the tip of her tongue, then thought better and closed it.

The three of them regarded her with varying degrees of suspicion. It was evident that none of them were ready to leap on her offer, but as the seconds ticked by Julip could tell that they weren’t as eager to dismiss her as they had been back on the highway. A full minute passed before the ghoul finally answered her.

“If you want to help,” he rumbled, “you can start by taking the rest of tonight’s watch.”

She blinked and looked at him with a healthy mixture of surprise and wariness. Aurora and Ginger shot him a similar look of confusion that begged an answer. It wasn’t the response they’d expected of him.

The ghoul regarded the three of them with tired indifference and waved his weirdly perforated black hoof at Julip. “She’s made it clear she won’t stop tracking us unless one of us shoots her.”

“Um,” she said.

“And as tempting as that is,” he continued, speaking to her directly, “you’re unarmed and you haven’t done anything to harm us… as far as we know. Besides, your people have a reputation for holding grudges and we’re already on the Rangers’ bad side. No sense in doubling our problems without a good reason.”

Suspicion mingled with the anxiety of knowing her weapon was laying in the dirt somewhere back at their camp. In hindsight, surrendering that submachine gun during their last encounter hadn’t been her brightest decision.

Her eyes went to Aurora who, in spite of everything, looked to be on the verge of dozing off again. Her rifle, with its beautifully preserved wooden stock, lay across the top of her saddlebags beside her. Something about it niggled at the back of her brain, like meeting a pony for the first time after only seeing them in file photos.

“I don’t trust you,” the ghoul continued, pulling her attention away from the rifle.

“But if you’re going to insert yourself into what we’re doing then you’re going to demonstrate that you can be useful.” He nodded toward Aurora and Ginger. “They need a good night’s sleep before we go any further, so you and I are going to take watch while they rest.”

Julip arched her brow and laughed. “Us.”

“Yes us,” the ghoul rumbled. “Either that, or you’re free to walk home.”

She looked to the two mares in hopes of finding an opportunity to negotiate the changeling’s term’s. They stared back at her, exhausted and indifferent. Neither of them were champing at the bit to invite her to stay, but at least they weren’t trying to chase her off anymore. It was an improvement.

Turning back to scrutinize the ghoul, she had to work to keep the contempt out of her eyes. A changeling. One of Equestria’s oldest enemies and, worse, a corruption. One of the millions who didn’t have the dignity to accept that their time had expired lifetimes ago, and who continued to compete for what little resources the world had left to offer to the living. It wasn’t enough for them to defy the natural order of life and death. They had to make living harder for everyone else.

She chewed her lip. Each breath they took was time stolen away from Equestria’s recovery.

Now here she sat, miles from the comforts of New Canterlot, taking orders from one of them. Pushing herself off the rusted track, she tried to think of it like her first days as a recruit. Nobody liked being told to dig a latrine, but saying no would land a pony in even worse shit.

“Fine by me,” she said.

The ghoul grunted acknowledgment and turned to his companions. “I’ll keep an eye on her. Get some sleep.”

They nodded and settled in as best they could on the loose stones. Julip watched as Ginger lay her head against Aurora’s shoulder, who in turn slipped a wing between the wall and the unicorn’s back. The simple act of intimacy was unmistakable. The two were an item.

She made a mental note of that and turned to follow their walking corpse down the rails.

Roach’s hooves thumped over the dense wooden ties holding the rails together, the spacing between them just wide enough that every third step or so would land in the stones between them. It wasn’t a pleasant walk, but he was used to the little discomforts the wasteland had to offer. The reliable pattern of wooden beam, stones, beam and stones was a marked improvement from navigating the webwork of fissured and uneven concrete that had taken them this far.

Ahead of him, Julip followed the rails as if she were on a death march: silent, sullen and under the watchful eye of the changeling behind her. Knowing nothing about her strengths, Roach wasn’t willing to let her walk beside him let alone where he couldn’t keep an eye on her. Her weapon along with Roach and Ginger’s saddlebags were far away now, laying in the misshapen hoofprints of the creatures who had ambushed them in their sleep, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous.

They paced a quarter mile east, turned and backtracked an equal distance west.

He had the sinking feeling that those supplies were as good as gone now. Their caps, his shells and the last of their water had been in his bag when they were attacked. And that didn’t include the medical supplies and food Ginger had topped up on before leaving Kiln. They weren’t in the direst straits, but if something attacked them again in earnest, that would quickly change.

He frowned at the knot standing out from the root of Julip’s wing. It wasn’t a terrible injury. A common strain at most, but he remembered how badly even a bruised wing could hurt back when he was still able to shapeshift. He was impressed that she’d been able to carry him at all, let alone injured as she was. Even with his slimmer changeling anatomy, he wasn’t exactly a lightweight.

Julip slowed, forcing him to do the same. He watched as she scanned the tracks ahead, the cliff above, and then the deep valley below. Same as the last several intervals, there was nothing to report. Just empty rails and dark scenery. She turned and avoided his gaze as she stepped around him, beginning the long walk back toward where Aurora and Ginger slept.

He didn’t care for her any more than she liked him, and that was fine. Lift the tail of any Enclave soldier and a pony was sure to find any number of sticks rammed up their ass. Their inexplicable hatred of ghouls and dustwings were just the two most egregious traits the Enclave imprinted on its recruits. Even if she was telling the truth about wanting to help Aurora, he knew better than to believe there wasn’t an ulterior motive attached to her mission. The Enclave was many things: ambitious, ruthless, conniving.

But it wasn’t a charity.

Julip’s hoof slapped against an upturned stone and caused her to briefly stumble, followed by a muttered string of quiet profanity. He tried not to take too much pleasure in her embarrassment.

The silence between them was well-worn territory. If it weren’t for present company, it might have even been a comfort. The years spent guarding a place he’d been shut out of had given him a deep appreciation for the breadth of his own imagination. During those rare moments when Blue wasn’t sleeping or hunting the ever-growing cockroaches that made the tunnel their home, he would walk the old flagstones with her and weave new stories from the fairy tales he used to read Violet before she went to bed. Blue would listen sometimes, or at least pay attention to his voice, and that was enough for him.

They passed the spot along the wall where Aurora and Ginger slept, the two sharing Aurora’s wings like a too-small blanket. Seeing them together like this at first had made Roach a little less than comfortable. The wasteland had a tendency to force ponies together for survival’s sake, and there was no stronger glue than a shared near-death experience. Those couplings didn’t often last beyond the first night, leaving both or more participants to awkwardly tiptoe around each other until the group found a reason to fall apart. Yet over the past three nights, he didn’t see that brittleness forming between the two. If anything, their bond was getting stronger, not weaker.

Sometimes two ponies rolled simultaneous sevens. It was like seeing something from a bygone age. He smiled a little as they walked by.

“Autumn Song chose the wrong unicorn to pick a fight with.”

Roach blinked at her, the passing comment so quiet that he nearly missed it. “Her brother was the one who started it,” he said.

He thought he saw her nod, but she walked for a long while without answering.

“Cider had that reputation,” she said. “Did he do anything?”

Roach felt his shoulders stiffen. “Not my story to tell.”

“Yeah, no. I get it.”

Of all the idiotic questions to ask. He glanced over his shoulder, thankful that Aurora wasn’t close enough to hear. The last thing she needed was for some newcomer to come along and rip that wound open.

“Let me ask you a question.”

He grit his teeth and sighed. “We really don’t need to talk.”

She looked back at him with irritation. “I really don’t need a walking corpse staring at my ass for the next several hours, but here we fucking are.”

Roach snorted, meeting her gaze. “Trust me, you’re not my type.”

Annoyance turned to disgust and she narrowed her eyes at him.

He set his jaw and looked away, kicking himself for giving into being petty. Just talking about the Enclave brought out the worst in him. Being dogged by one of them until she finally forced herself into their group was wearing on all his nerves at the same time.

He tried to think about the days to come, and how he only had to endure this for a little while longer until Aurora was back safe at home. He sighed. “What’s your question?”

She ignored him just long enough to be a pest. “I doubt you’ll give me a straight answer.”

“I probably won’t,” he agreed.

Her ears flattened and she looked ready to fire another sour look his way. Instead, faced forward and kept walking. “Back on the highway, how close were you to pulling the trigger on me?”

“You don’t want to know,” he rumbled.

“I can probably guess. You said you had family in Stable 10, but that place hasn’t been open since before the bombs dropped. That means you’re prewar.”

“Move on. We’re not talking about my family.”

“I’m not asking that.”

Roach frowned, recognizing the question she was trying to get to. It was the same question most ponies asked when they met a ghoul from before. A chance to separate the truth from the myth and finally understand what it was they had lost.

It didn’t take a genius to tell that she didn’t know how to ask the question because, as far as the Enclave was concerned, they already had all the answers. It was that confidence in knowing their history that made it so easy for them to kill the ghouls who lived it.

“You want to know what it was like.” He watched Julip as she kept her eyes forward, carefully not committing herself in any way to the question. “Well what do they tell you in the wonderful land of New Canterlot?”

She glanced down the slope of the valley, shrugging. “Same old, same old. Open skies, amazing food, no raiders or bandits waiting to strip you down and leave you bleeding on the side of the road. Kind of hard not to oversell utopia.”

“I wouldn’t call it that,” he said.

Julip swung a hoof forward and kicked a stone laying on one of the ties. It clattered over the rusted iron and tumbled into the valley. “Then what would you call it?”

“Stressful,” he said. “You couldn’t open a newspaper or sit down for dinner without hearing something new about the war. It was a constant drumbeat right up toward the end. Equestria gained a hoofhold here, the zebras took back a trenchline there. On and on.” It always surprised him what little details bubbled back to the surface after he was sure he’d forgotten them. His lip quirked into a private smile. “But, if you could ignore the war, things were pretty nice. Canterlot claimed to have the best food, but you couldn’t do better than the strip in Manehattan. Gryphon cuisine was the big thing back then. Lot of spices, though.”

Julip glanced up at the mountain above, allowing him to see the conflicted frown in her eyes. “I didn’t think ignoring the war would be an option.”

It was his turn to shrug. “I had a life to live. I wasn’t going to spend it obsessing about something I couldn’t control.”

“Complacency like that is why the stripes won the war.”

The urge to roll his eyes was powerful. “Nobody won the war, least of all Vhanna. And don’t call them stripes.”

She looked at him with an eyebrow cocked. “They dropped balefire on us. I’m pretty sure that qualified as victory in their book.”

“Debatable,” he said.

“Then let’s debate.”

Roach shook his head. “If the Enclave wanted the truth, they wouldn’t be killing the ghouls who knew it.”

She stared back at him, chewing her lip before shaking her head and turning to watch the gently curving rails ahead. “There’s enough history scattered across Equestria to confirm what we already know.”

“Is that why Autumn had you looking for SOLUS? To confirm what you already knew?”

Her ears perked up for a split second. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A smirk crossed his lips. “Bit strange that she would think a ground pounder would know anything about that project.”

She continued to stare forward, offering him nothing in response.

“It’s because you’re not a soldier, are you? You’re an archivist.”

Her tone grew brittle. “If you say so.”

“I mean, it’s obvious once you stop to think about it.” He watched her gait stiffen and knew he was onto something. “Autumn picked you because she knew what you were. That’s why you got sent out to find us with such limited gear. The Enclave knew if one of us shot you, they wouldn’t lose anything they would miss.”

Julip was silent.

“Were you even combat trained?”

“I can fight.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Roach pressed. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

They reached a buckled section of track that had served as the terminus of this leg of their patrol. Julip cast her eyes ahead, then down the valley before turning around to glance at Roach. “You’re nosey, is what you are.”

He turned as she tried to step around him, intent on heading back the way they came. She frowned as he fell into step next to her rather than behind.

“If you’re trying to piss me off, bug, it’s working.”

“I’m not worried.”

She lifted a disgusted lip at him and stepped over the rail, putting the steel ribbon between them. Her hooves slopped and crunched over the looser stone but she stubbornly persisted forward.

From what Roach knew about the Enclave’s archivists, they were only put through the most basic of military training before devoting the rest of their time to learning how to identify, recover and restore the artifacts littering the Equestrian ruins. Scavengers who knew what to look for could identify a potentially lucrative location just by recognizing an archivist’s handiwork. Unlike ponies whose livelihood subsisted from tearing apart old tech for their component parts, both Ranger and Enclave archivists were well known to be more diligent in their hunt. Something as innocuous as an access panel laying against a wall with its screws set neatly on the ground was evidence that a site had been valuable enough to draw the attention of a specialist. It was the equivalent of an old-timey miner discovering gold sand in a stream. One word spoken to the wrong pony could and historically had turned many forgotten ruins into heated battlefields.

Archivists never left New Canterlot without an escort, which meant that whatever reason Julip had for being here on her own might actually be as important as she claimed. Which begged another question.

“What’s your specialty?”

She glowered at him out of the corner of her eye. Seeing that he had no intention of leaving her alone, she looked ahead and sighed. “Computer systems and prewar electronics.”

“Not too many of those lying around still working.”

“Yeah well, the ones that do are the ones worth cracking.”

He supposed that made sense, though it was just as likely that she was feeding him a line. “So you hack terminals and fix toasters?”

“That’s not…” Julip shut her eyes and took a steadying breath. Roach watched her with a pleasant smile as she composed herself. “What do you do that doesn’t involve lurking in dark corners?”

“I happen to like dark corners.”

She regarded him with something bordering on derisive pity.

He snorted. “I was a master gardener before all this.”

Her expression didn’t change. “You. A gardener.”

“Master gardener,” he corrected.

“So you grew carrots and watered flowers.”

Roach couldn’t help but chuckle at having his dig thrown back at him. Something told him Julip only had a passing understanding of what he was talking about much in the same way he hadn’t the first clue how to break into a terminal that didn’t want to be broken into. As much as he disliked his current company, the chance to talk about his old profession rarely ever came up. He realized to his own annoyance that he’d baited his own hook.

He wetted his lips. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Sounds like something someone might say when they want to tack ‘master’ onto their job description.”

“Look up Sunny Meadows in one of your coveted archives,” he said with just enough heat to make her lean away. “I was one of the ponies responsible for keeping Canterlot Gardens as pristine as they appear in your books.”

Julip eyed him for several seconds. “Horseshit. They’d never knowingly allow a changeling that close to the princesses.”

“Huh. Good thing they never knew.”

She stared, trying to see if he was bluffing. He watched her with calm indifference. Whether or not she believed him didn’t matter. He knew that garden from stem to stamen.

“So you were a spy.”

“Nope, just a gardener.”

“Master gardener,” she corrected.

He cracked the smallest of smiles at that and nodded. “That’s what it said on my nametag.”

Julip’s eyebrows lifted with exasperation. Roach waited, trying not to stare even as she appeared to argue something with herself. Almost reluctantly, she looked over to him and asked the question she’d been struggling with.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“The gardens? There’s a lot to tell.”

She looked up at the sky, still hours away from sunrise, and shrugged. “I’ve got time.”

February 10th, 1076

Big Mac waited with trepidation while Twilight rooted through the cluttered contents of her minifridge.

Mounds of books lay in disorganized stacks all across her library where she had picked up and dropped threads of research just over the last few months. She wouldn’t deny that her studies had been more harried than usual since Big Mac’s unfortunate growth spurt, but thankfully those effects had subsided over time. The red stallion was back to his normal stature and, to her relief, willing to give the spell another go. And this time she was confident she had it right.

Two black-capped tables sat corner to corner against the northeast nook of her library with the little icebox shoved underneath. The books on the shelves behind them had been hastily relocated, replaced by two green slabs of slate that hung precariously from the lip of the bookcase. Chalk dust peppered the far edges of both tables, a byproduct of Twilight’s tendency to jot notes on the blackboards with sharp little pecks. Beakers, vials and her prohibitively expensive centrifuge cluttered both tables, hardly leaving room for the chemical-stained terminal that glowed in front of her work chair. A younger version of herself would scream bloody murder at the mess but she didn’t have the luxury of a perfectly tidy workspace, nor did she trust the ponies in the Ministry of Technology to do the work for her.

Celestia knew they had made a mess out of simpler work.

Big Mac cleared his throat. “Are you sure it’s safe to be burnin’ candles in here?”

Twilight stopped digging long enough to glance over at the single candle burning on her reading table at the center of her library. The slender green flame danced around the wick on a breeze that wasn’t there.

“It’s part of a new initiative. Helps keep me focused,” she said, turning back to the fridge and spotting the particular vial she was looking for. She plucked it out in her magic and set it in front of her terminal. “You can blow it out if you want.”

Big Mac gave the candle a dubious look, but decided to leave it be. He turned his attention to the reddish fluid in the vial. “Is that it?”

“This is it.” She grinned as she retrieved a sterile needle from the desk and tore it from its wrapper. “Regeneration in a bottle. Maiden Pharmaceutical already put in an eight-figure offer for the manufacturing rights. If everything goes well, they’ll be able to keep the front lines topped up twenty-four seven.”

A broad smile crossed Big Mac’s lips. “Here’s hopin’ it goes well, then.”

The empty needle sank through the rubber stopper with a muted squeak. The medication - the reps at Maiden insisted it was easier to market if she stopped calling it a potion - drew into the syringe one milliliter at a time until the bottle ran dry.

“Bottoms up,” he chuckled.

Twilight smirked and guided the needle into the meat of his shoulder. The corner of his eye twitched with discomfort while she pressed the plunger. It was over in seconds.

Setting the needle atop the empty wrapper on her desk, she stepped back to him and placed her ear against his chest. Focusing her eyes on a patch of rug beneath their hooves, she timed his heartbeat while the medley of stimulants and meshwork of spells found their way into his bloodstream. Little by little his pulse ticked higher until, after nearly two minutes, it plateaued to a reasonable rate.

She stepped back and looked him over. No sweats, no signs of discomfort, no strange gigantism. Big Mac looked pleasantly underwhelmed.

“Anything?” she asked.

“Just a little warmth where you stuck me,” he said. “I feel good. More alert, if I’m being honest.”

“Must run in the family.” She opened a side drawer on the desk and lifted a clear plastic box out of it. “Ready to see if it works?”

Big Mac groaned. “I hate this part.”

“It’s either this or we wait five more years while Maiden Pharma tests it on lab mice.” She popped open the box and pulled out a fresh scalpel and a wrinkled silver tube resembling toothpaste in miniature. “Besides, you can’t even feel it.”

He eyed the scalpel with a dubious grimace. “Ain’t the point. I know it’s happening.”

“The price of expedience,” she said, uncapping the tube. Big Mac offered his foreleg which Twilight held aloft with a wad of gauze. Using her magic she squeezed a clear glob of gel onto the front of his pastern, massaging it through the red bristles of his coat and into the dark grey skin below. She gave the numbing agent time to work before removing the cap from her scalpel and drawing a smooth, shallow incision across the skin.

Blood welled up from the wound immediately, dribbling down either side of the limb and into the gauze waiting below. Big Mac let out the breath he’d been holding and spared a glance at the weeping gash she’d inflicted on him.

Twilight’s heart leapt into her throat as the bleeding abruptly tapered off. The two of them watched as fresh, pink skin flowed forward and knitted itself along the edges of the cut. Several days worth of healing took place over the course of seconds until, after a full minute, the wound bore little more than a pink scar in its place.

“That’s faster than I expected,” Twilight whispered.

“I think you got it, Twilight.”

She nodded as she tugged and pinched at the healed wound. The new skin was tight as a drum, still not quite at the point where it could be considered fully healed, but they weren’t looking for cosmetic perfection. This worked.

The euphoria was enough to make her light-headed. She sat down on the floor, grinning like a fool despite Big Mac’s sudden show of concern, and shook her head with disbelief.

“I’m okay,” she chuckled. “I just… wow.”

As she set her tools behind her on the desk, Big Mac sat down beside her and held up his leg. The pink scar was already darkening to match his charcoal skin. “I don’t suppose this might be a good enough reason for drinks?”

She sputtered a little laugh and shook her head. “Not until the observation period is over, and that only started a couple minutes ago. Like your sister would say, them’s the rules.”

“How about after?”

He was nothing if not persistent. In the euphoria of the moment, she couldn't help but smile. “One drink.”

“Plus dinner.”

“Big Mac…”

He held up a placating hoof. “Now hold on, I ain’t tryin’ to get under your tail or nothin’. I just figure if we’re gonna celebrate, we should do it proper.”

She arched an eyebrow up at him but couldn’t quite bite back the smile on her lips. “You know there’s something to be said about being too honest.”

He shrugged. “Agree to disagree.”

Something told her that he would die before he stopped chasing the mares he took interest in. Oh well, she thought. Everyone had their sins. “Okay, but you’re picking and paying.”

She watched a grin split his muzzle. “Ever been to a Red Delicious?”

“If that’s a euphemism for…”

He shook his head and laughed. “Naw, it’s this restaurant chain Applejack endorsed last year, and it’s really good so long as you like greaseball burgers and haystack fries. Drive-up service too if you have a carriage, but I figure you can zippy-doo magic us there if that’s alright.”

“‘Zippy-doo magic.’ You mean teleport?”

If he weren’t already beet red by default she would have sworn she could have seen him blush. He nodded with a sheepish grin.

“Okay,” she said. “I can move some things around for tomorrow. And if there’s a place nearby that serves proper drinks, I don’t see why we couldn’t indulge a little.”

“I’ll try not to fill up on water until then.” He took a breath and let out a content sigh, eyeing the terribly warped divan on the far end of the library. “S’pose this means I’m spending the night one last time.”

“Them’s the rules,” she repeated, and he rolled his eyes. Her knee emitted a quiet click as she rose to her hooves, yet another reminder that her forties were a stone’s throw away. It barely put a dent in her excitement. “In the meantime, I need to make a call with Maiden Pharma and get them in the loop. With any luck I’ll be spending the next week signing contracts.”

Big Mac followed her across the library to where a cream colored vest hung on a hook beside the stairs. As she went through the cumbersome process of getting her wings and forelegs through the requisite holes in the right order, she couldn’t help but admit that while he wasn’t exactly her type, Big Mac had made sacrifices for her that not many ponies would have.

She zipped up her vest and sighed. Turning to face him, she wrapped a hoof around his considerable neck and pulled him into a quick hug.

“Thank you.”

He gave her a gentle squeeze in return and let her go. “Dinner tomorrow. Don’t forget.”

Taking a step back, she had to work to keep her smile under control. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She lit her horn and gave a quick thought to where she wanted to go. Lavender light flashed and with a rush of displaced air the library was gone, replaced by the frigid air just outside the castle.

Twilight peered up at the overcast sky and wondered if the pegasi were scheduled to bring in more snow today. She hoped so. Even in the dead of winter, fresh fallen snow had a way of making Canterlot Garden even more beautiful.

She wasted no time trotting toward the garden’s hedges. The phone call could wait an hour. It had been three months since her last visit, and between figuring out Starswirl’s spell, the princesses giving her the lead on the talisman project and finally perfecting a regenerative medicine that any pony, not just unicorns could use…

Her wings shuddered with giddy energy as she lit her horn and passed through the hedges. She and Discord had so much to catch up on.

The eastern clouds glowed the ashen gray hue that Aurora learned to coincide by now with early morning. The pale light chased the black edges of sleep away and, reluctantly, she came to the unpopular conclusion that she was waking up.

Her wing ached, not from the hurried evacuation of their last camp but from being squished between Ginger’s back and the stone wall she’d slept against. They sat reclined in the same position they’d fallen asleep in, sitting on an uncomfortable bed of grey rocks with her wing wrapped loosely around the unicorn beside her. It wasn’t that bad, she supposed. Ginger’s head rested against her shoulder, giving Aurora a place to rest her own. A loose curl of Ginger’s short-cut fiery mane tickled her nose. They were both getting a little rank, but she still loved her earthy scent.

A gentle clicking caught her ear, and curiosity coaxed her eyes open. Standing prominently in the center of her view was Ginger’s horn, glowing with a wavering bronze aura. She watched the warm light pulse and coil for several seconds, her eyes tracing the darkened band of blackened bone that Autumn's shattered suppression ring had left behind.

She could tell by the gentle tug on her foreleg that Ginger was playing around with her Pip-Buck again. She took a slow, deep breath to let her know she was awake. Ginger’s head tipped up slightly in answer and Aurora took the opportunity to kiss the base of her horn. She felt the electric shudder run through Ginger’s body and chuckled as the mare sat upright.

“Roach is right there,” Ginger scolded.

“I plead ignorance.”

She glanced down the tracks to where Roach and Julip walked, their backs turned to them as they chatted back and forth on their patrol. She couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but whatever it was seemed to have turned into a strolling lecture.

“They’re still talking?” she whispered.

Ginger hummed in the affirmative. “Ever since they took watch.”

“I’m surprised she stuck around at all. Or that Roach hasn’t shot her yet.”

“She got him talking about his old line of work.” She turned her attention back to Aurora’s Pip-Buck, her magic working the large black knob with a renewed series of clicks. “Roach won’t stop unless one of us saves her.”

Aurora watched as the two ponies followed the tracks around the curve of the mountain, disappearing from view once again. She feigned despair as Roach’s voice faded around the cliff. “Oh no, please stop…”

Ginger giggled and turned her attention more fully to her work.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked.

“Just some light reading,” Ginger murmured, relinquishing her grip on Aurora’s foreleg so she could see the screen.

She scrolled back to the top of the open document and offered Ginger a perplexed smile when she saw the header. “You’re reading my old work orders? You know I have a whole library of books on here, right? You don’t have to skim my notes on broken plumbing.”

Ginger’s eyes never left the screen. “I wanted to know more about what you did down there.”

Aurora smirked to hide her discomfort. She’d been inside Ginger’s shop and even watched her work on installing the custom wing hooks to the stock of Delphi’s rifle. It occurred to her that she rarely spoke about her work back home beyond passing mentions of the generator, its talisman and the responsibility she felt for not catching the power bleed earlier. She grimaced, knowing the reason for that silence.

Ginger looked at her and frowned. “What’s wrong?”

She waved her off and forced a smile. “It’s nothing.”

“Aurora, we’ve been traveling together for a week now. I can tell when you’re lying.”

“I’m f…” She stopped and her smile faltered. How many times had she said she was fine when she wasn’t? When was she going to stop packing her fears away for later and start dealing with them?

Ginger sat up a little straighter, the Pip-Buck forgotten.

Aurora felt rooted, keenly aware that she was at a place where she could choose to either continue the lie and pretend not to be worried, or be honest and risk hearing the words that she feared since the night they spent together at Stable 6.

Her mouth worked open but her voice didn’t come easily. Wincing, she tried again.

“When this is over,” she began, her eyes fixed on the stones between them, “I’m not sure what happens after.”

“After we fix your Stable,” she clarified.

Aurora nodded. “I want this thing we have to last, but...” Her throat tightened and she laughed a little to mask her frustration. Ginger gave her time to gather herself.

She’d always been too stubborn to cry. Whether she was being picked on at school, hazed during her apprenticeship in Mechanical or suffering through her painful breakup with Carbide, she rarely let herself go to tears. Self-pity wasn’t territory she had much interest in exploring when it was far easier to work out her frustration over a stiff drink and a good drag-out brawl outside a moonshiner’s compartment.

And yet, she had one soft spot that refused to scab over and the wasteland seemed to enjoy prying the damn thing open at the worst moments.

“My dad’s alone down there,” she murmured. “I’m the only family he has left and if I leave…”

She grit her teeth and swallowed the lump in her throat, the rest of her fears needing no further explanation.

Ginger sighed and gathered Aurora’s trembling hoof between the two of hers and layed it in her lap. Aurora wrinkled her nose and pressed the back of her head against the cold stone wall, bracing herself for the hard dose of reality that she knew was coming.

“I would never force you to choose between me and your family.” She stared across the tracks, across the valley and toward the range of mountains beyond. A sheepish smile quirked at her lip. “When we’re done, I’d like to meet him. I want to see where you grew up. I want you to show me how you fix these machines of yours and listen to your friends tell me embarrassing stories about you.”

Aurora clenched her jaw to keep it from chattering. A tearful smile pulled at her cheeks with a force all its own.

“There’s too much death and sadness out here, and I’ve always wondered what it might be like to finally let my guard down,” Ginger said. “I don’t know if Sledge will be okay with it, but I want to make a life with you and I can’t think of anywhere safer than your home.”

She wanted to stay with her.

Tears matted Aurora’s face. Without warning she gathered Ginger up in her wings and pulled her into a crushing, laughing hug. All the fear, all the worry dissolved away. She didn’t bother wiping her eyes as she lifted Ginger off the ground to stand on her hind legs, letting out an elated whoop. Ginger coughed out a surprised laugh as Aurora spun her in a tight circle among the stones before finally putting her back down.

Ginger blinked the mist out of her eyes and grinned at the sight of Aurora standing before her, wings spread with unabashed excitement. “I take it that was the right answer?”

Aurora swept forward, her saddlebags a hapless tangle between her legs, and kissed her. Ginger hummed a note of delight across her lips and pressed forward with enthusiasm, her horn igniting to stroke the back of her neck. Aurora felt a bolt of anticipation fire down her spine, sending the churning warmth in her chest on a journey to more distant and familiar locales.

As her tail bent skyward, a two-toned wolf whistle peeled across the air behind her. Aurora and Ginger’s eyes shot wide and they abruptly pulled apart, spinning to track the sudden sound.

Julip stood at the far bend of the tracks, still pinching a pair of green feathers between her lips. The grin on her face was a direct contradiction to the flushed embarrassment Roach wore as he carefully averted his gaze.

Ginger narrowed her eyes at the catcalling mare, then looked at Aurora. “She can still fly, correct?”

“With difficulty,” she confirmed.

“Lucky for her.”

Her horn flared and Julip found herself swamped in Ginger’s magic. The pegasus yelped as Ginger hoisted her into the air, yanked her wings open, and heaved her into the valley like a badly made paper glider.

As they listened to the indignant trail of profanity that chased Julip over the ledge, a quieter chime tugged at Aurora’s attention. She glanced down at her Pip-Buck while Ginger chuckled at the Enclave pegasi flailing back up toward the tracks.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 6
To: Aurora Pinfeathers
From: Elder Coldbrook
Subject: Talisman Data-Sheet
04/11/1287
[1 file(s) attached.]

Dear Aurora,

I’m pleased to hear from you again and applaud your directness. I’ve sent orders to my Rangers to stand down until such time you become uncooperative. I expect to receive daily reports on your progress.

Attached is the data-sheet for the ignition talisman, as requested.

Sincerely,
Coldbrook

“Daily reports,” she muttered. “What is this, homework?”

She clicked open the attachment, setting her Pip-Buck chattering as line after line of scanned documents slowly appeared on the screen.

“Are you actually fucking crazy?!” Julip stormed across the tracks toward them, her eyes welded to Ginger. A narrow band of magic formed in front of her chest, pressing her back before she could get within reach of the smug unicorn. She leaned over it, incensed. “You could have killed me!”

Ginger arched a brow at her. “You look fine to me, darling. Call it a lesson in respecting one’s personal privacy.”

“Do that again and I’ll give you a lesson in breaking your fucking neck.”

Aurora lowered her Pip-Buck and stared at Julip.

“Sorry,” she ground through clenched teeth.

She looked to Ginger, who shrugged in return.

“I suppose she has some right to be angry.”

“I could do without the death threats this early in the morning,” Aurora added with a pointed glare at their disgruntled guest. She shook her head and sighed, turning her attention to the changeling trotting up behind her. “So what’s the verdict? Can we keep her?”

Roach tipped his head toward Julip. “Probably best if you heard it from her.”

The three of them looked at her and waited. As the silence stretched, Julip turned to Roach to see if he was serious. He stared back at her with his characteristic nonexpression.

She deflated a little and turned back to face Aurora. “I’m not a soldier, I’m an artifact recovery coordinator for the Enclave’s research and development wing.” She frowned at Roach. “There.”

Aurora stared at her with a blank expression. “Okay? Is there a version for ponies who haven’t been job-hunting at the Enclave recently?”

“She’s saying she’s an archivist,” Ginger supplied, eyes narrowed at the mare with new curiosity. “I overheard them discussing it at some length last night.”

“Wait, you were up?” Aurora frowned, finally noticing the thin bags under Ginger’s eyes. “Didn’t you sleep at all?”

Ginger tried to reassure her with a weary smile. “We’ll talk about it later.”

There was nothing she could do about it now, though there was something in Ginger’s voice that told her there was more going on than a bout of insomnia. She pursed her lips and tabled it for later. “So you’re not a soldier,” she said, giving Julip a dubious look. “Okay, then explain why that’s important.”

Julip took the tacit insult in stride. “The ghoul thinks I can help you identify something, but he’s being cagey about what that is.”

She looked at Roach, who offered a mild shrug in response. “I figured it might help us know whether he’s on the up-and-up.”

Aurora chewed her lip, knowing Coldbrook probably didn’t expect her to run his offer by the Enclave for verification. She lifted her Pip-Buck and scanned the data-sheets he’d just sent, making a point to check the benchmark output levels against what she knew the Stable generator was designed to produce. At a quick glance, the numbers checked out.

She closed the document and brought up the photo Coldbrook sent. The carbon-colored diamond waited there in its bed of crushed straw, the heavy letters stamped under the lip of the crate advertising the ignition talisman inside. After a moment of consideration she ticked a switch on her Pip-Buck, zooming in until the identifying stamp was safely out of frame.

Holding out her foreleg, she turned the screen toward Julip. “Don’t touch it. Just tell me what it is.”

Julip squinted at the grainy image, then frowned at Aurora. “Really?”

Aurora lifted her eyebrows, waiting for an answer.

“It’s a shield talisman,” she said, glancing back at the screen. “An early model, guessing by its size. Maybe a mark two?”

Aurora’s frown deepened, bringing her Pip-Buck back to where she could see the black stone. “How can you be sure?”

“I mean, I can’t be one hundred percent.”

Roach spoke over her shoulder. “Could it be anything else?”

Sensing she was being herded toward a different answer, she knitted her brow and shook her head. “At the very least, it’s an emitter of some kind, but that diamond shape is pretty indicative of an early-model shield talisman. It funnels a barrier spell from the four points to form an oval shield in front of the bearer, or at least it was supposed to. They were never deployed to the front lines as far as anyone knows.”

Aurora turned off her Pip-Buck and swore.

“What?” Julip asked, a touch of worry on her face. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Nope, you pretty much got it right.” She pushed past her and climbed up onto the tracks. She needed to think about anything else right now before she flew back to Blinder’s Bluff and gave Coldbrook an extra hole to breath out of. “Where do these tracks lead?”

Ginger and Roach joined her, trailed by Julip.

“You’ve got the map,” Roach gently reminded her.

She bit back a frustrated remark and rebooted her Pip-Buck. As she waited for the lines of computer-gibberish to finish scrolling, Ginger nudged her hip to get her attention.

“We’ll find another one,” she said.

Aurora wasn’t sure about that, but she nodded anyway. “It feels like ever since I left home, it’s been two steps forward and one step back. I’m getting tired of being yanked around.”

“Well, it’s best not to let him know that we know.”

“Yeah,” she muttered.

The screen flickered back to life and Aurora brought up its built in map. A swirl of elevation lines, roads and markers flooded the map until she could hardly make out where they were. She zoomed out, forcing the resolution to drop until the little green triangle appeared at the center right on top of a bending, hatch marked line.

The tracks continued on a relatively straight trajectory east. She toggled the map to the right, pressing the button a little harder than she had to, dragging mountains and crossroads over the screen until the topography drew lower and flatter. The highway to their south never left the frame as it branched off into dozens of smaller roads that fractured into a network of intersecting grids. An icon at the center of the maze read FILLYDELPHIA.

Straight east. Two days, maybe less if they kept a good pace, and they would finally be there. Fillydelphia and Stable-Tec HQ lay just beyond these mountains.

On a whim, she zoomed the map out as far as it would go. The highways blipped dark, leaving only a few notable points of interest and a single custom waypoint far, far away to the west. A little triangle marked with the letters HOME waited for her out there.

She hesitated before dropping her hoof to the stones.

“This will take us the rest of the way,” she said.

“And does that include me?”

Julip loitered behind them, her stubborn bravado wavering slightly as she waited for permission. Aurora stared at her for a long moment, then turned to Roach. “Your call.”

He looked at her and shrugged. “She’s not the worst pony we’ve come across.”

“I’d rather not meet whoever they intend to send if we turn her away,” Ginger chimed in.

“Alright,” Aurora said, waving the sage-green pegasus over. “Welcome aboard, I guess. You get to help us after all.”

Twilight passed through the innermost branches of the castle hedge maze with a spring in her step. She hadn’t felt this hopeful for the future since the days following Tirek’s death. For the first time in years, she could see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Instead of sinking into the pristine snow blanketing Discord’s alcove, her hoof dropped into a rat’s nest of dead twigs. The sharp crackle of wood startled from her reverie, but not quickly enough for her to react when the narrow wooden sled beneath the detritus slid out sideways from under her.

She toppled, but was caught by a wheat-colored curtain of feathers. Blinking surprise, she peered down at a stallion wearing a grey knit toque kneeling in the snow below her. He stared back up at her with moss-green eyes twice as wide as hers. Still clutched between the feathers of his right wing was a pair of crescent-shaped pruning scissors, the open blades carefully pointed away from the alicorn who had nearly squashed him.

He gave her a push and she hurriedly found her footing, careful not to step on the sled she kicked halfway under the hedges. Dead sticks and brush stuck out from the snow around her hooves like strange new plants. As the strange pegasus struggled for words, Twilight realized there were several voids carved into the evergreen walls surrounding them.

Packed snow dropped from the thick leather wraps protecting the stallion’s forelegs as he pushed himself upright. “I-I’m so sorry, minister. If I had heard you coming I would have moved.”

“It’s alright,” she absently replied, her eyes passing over his handiwork like a parent deciding how angry she should be after discovering her foal had been drawing on the walls. “May I ask what you think you’re doing to our garden?”

The stallion removed his hat and wiped the wet blades across the wool before returning them to a leather sheath belted to his waist. “Pruning the dead patches before the next growing season, ma’am. I’m with the groundskeeping staff.”

She watched him tuck his ears back beneath his toque, then glanced at the ring of disturbed snow following the hedgeline. A few sprigs of brown poked up from his trail where the odd stick had fallen off his sled, lending proof to his claim.

“Huh,” she said, looking down at the haystack of snapped and tangled twigs around her hooves. “Well, thank you for not sticking me with those scissors of yours. Is there any chance I can convince you not to tell anybody I almost crushed you?”

He shook his head and extended a wing toward her. “No need. I don’t take part in the gossip mill. My name’s Sunny, by the way.”

Twilight grasped his feathers with her own and smiled a little, having chalked up these new wingshakes as something only younger pegasi did. She couldn’t help but feel a little silly doing it herself. “Twilight, though most ponies already know that.”

“Price of fame,” he chuckled, and released his grip. With an apologetic smile, he reached past her and hooked his feathers around the rope attached to his sled. Twilight stepped aside as he pulled it free of the hedges and began gathering the scattered sticks from the snow. “I should go dump this before I start any more cuts, but it was nice to finally meet you.”

“Oh, let me,” she said. Lighting her horn, dozens of lavender flickers illuminated the snow and in an instant the brush pile appeared atop the wood slats of his sled, neatly stacked.

Looping the rope around his wing, he nodded to her with an appreciative smile. “Thanks a bunch.”

“Next time I’ll try not to trample your work.”

He chuckled at that, already making his way to the western break in the hedge with his sled in tow. He did a decent job hiding his eagerness to leave, but by now Twilight knew how to recognize the subtle cues. Ever since getting her wings, ponies tended to be intimidated by her almost by default. It was irritating at first, but as time passed she grew used to it. The sting of it never quite faded, however.

She learned to let these chance happenings play out on their own rather than cling to them in the hopes of beating the odds and making a new friend. Sunny retreated into the maze without a goodbye, leaving her earlier brightness slightly dimmed.

“If it’s any consolation,” Discord’s voice murmured around her, “he’s a married stallion.”

She turned and found him sitting on his side of the stone bench, an open hand gesturing to the curl of white snow occupying the other. “I’ll stand,” she said, and he shrugged with a wry smile.

“Well, you can’t say I didn’t try.”

As expected, a glass appeared in his hand as it always did, filled near to the brim with chocolate milk. Frozen, this time. She smirked. A spoon appeared in his lion’s paw and he wasted no time scraping curls of sweet ice from the surface.

She glanced over to the grooves Sunny’s sled left in the snow. “And how do you know he’s married?”

Discord pointed a spoonful of ice shavings toward the maze entrance before popping it into his mouth. “He brings his husband to the gardens at the turn of every season. It’s a tradition of theirs.”

Seeing her expression, he gave her a peculiar grin. “Come now, Twilight. Just because I’m imprisoned doesn’t mean I can’t see or hear. Frankly, it would be rude of me to ignore them.”

“Uh-huh,” she murmured, crunching through the snow toward the bench. Her eyes went to his statue. “Looks like they’re keeping you clean.”

Discord’s upper half twisted fully around while his casually crossed legs remained unsettlingly still. His jovial smile faded by the barest degree as he looked at the tired and beaten version of himself. “I imagine they’ll be less enthusiastic about it when the geese return in the spring.”

She snorted, then laughed when he cocked an eyebrow at her. “Sorry, sorry.”

He smirked and returned to chiseling away at his frozen milk. “You seem happier since the last time you visited.”

Twilight pressed herself up onto the tips of her hooves, her eyes glittering. “I am. We made a breakthrough today that’s going to save thousands of lives. Millions, once it reaches the civilian market.” She waited for a few beats, imagining her own personal drumroll in her head. “Tested and portable regenerative medicine!”

Discord’s smile warmed the same way her father’s did when she used to tell him what she learned at school that day. Having experienced so much already, he was a hard creature to impress. Still, that subtle curl of his lip was all the praise she needed. It was as close to a hint that she was on the right track that she would ever get out of him.

He scraped the shavings out of his glass and closed his mouth around the spoon, making a show of waiting for the metal to warm before removing it again. “Regenerative? Not healing?”

There was a subtle but detectable nudge to his question, the barest hint of what she suspected was his inner academic.

“Both,” she said, and not without a little pride. “I designed it to mimic the regenerative genomes of a species of lizard I had imported from the southern swamps. It took more than a year getting the magic and science to play nice together, but I finally figured out the correct strength and sequence of spells to make it work!”

She paced back and forth through the snow in front of him, flattening the soft powder into a dense crust as she explained the process in detail. Occasionally she would look up to see his reaction and each time he would smile back, giving nothing away as he enjoyed the illusion of chocolate shavings. When she finished, she couldn’t help but scour his face for clues.

He pecked at the edge of his frozen milk until a nugget broke off along the glass, which he promptly scooped out and pocketed in his cheek to suck on. “It feels like yesterday you ponies were still relying on poultices and boiled roots to cure yourselves. Now you’re bottling magic.”

“Is that good?”

Discord swallowed a bit of melted ice and smirked. “I suggest you take some time to celebrate your discovery before moving onto the next.”

She offered a noncommittal shrug and tapped the edge of her hoof into the line of packed snow she’d paced into the ground, idly nudging up a slab to reveal a mat of dormant grass beneath. “If you count cheap fast food and a drink at the nearest bar as celebration, Big Mac is way ahead of you.”

“Which one is he, again?”

“Applejack’s brother,” she said. “He’s half the reason my research ever got this far, but he’s a bit of a hopeless romantic.”

Discord caught her tone and nodded understanding. “I take it you don’t feel the same way.”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “He’s nice, but like I said. He’s Applejack’s brother.”

He frowned. “I thought the two of you were inseparable.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, flicking the upturned patty of snow away, “she likes to stick her hooves where they don’t belong.”

Discord watched her for several long seconds, then set his spoon across the rim of the glass and snapped then away with his fingers. She waited for him to say something, but he simply nodded to the open space between her and the far hedges. She turned to see five ponies waiting behind her.

Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie smiled back at her, their manes free of the stray gray hairs that had begun showing up in them shortly after taking on their duties as ministry mares. They stood as Twilight often pictured them, at the prime of their youth, ready to defend one another against whatever threat came their way.

At their center stood Applejack, with one leg crossed over the other and a lazy smile creasing her lip. The illusion caught her off guard, sending her heart into her throat.

“At the risk of being a little too on the nose,” Discord said behind her, “I’d like to be honest with you, Twilight.”

She took a deep breath and nodded as Applejack’s illusion stepped forward, smiling up at her. “Okay.”

“You’re afraid that you’re growing apart from them, but you haven’t told them that. You need to set the war and your research aside for one day and talk to them. You ponies are flying forward faster than you know. If you don’t hang onto one another, you’ll end up lost.”

Twilight stared down at Applejack. “It’s not that easy.”

“If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” he countered.

“You don’t understand.” She turned. Discord reclined on her right while the vision of her friends lingered to her left. “Applejack’s ministry was running a demonstration last month and there was an accident. An explosion. One-hundred and seventeen fatalities, including twelve ponies sent in to try to put out the fire. She’s been taking it hard.”

Discord watched her while she spoke. “And you haven’t spoken to her about it?”

She shrugged, glancing at the younger version of Applejack beside her. “What’s there to say? She let an irresponsible unicorn develop an uncharted form of magic and called it a new technology to keep it within the purview of her ministry. Trixie dove into the deep end of the pool before she knew how to swim. I just gave her a small challenge to prove my point.”

The change in Discord’s tone was subtle. “A challenge?”

Twilight nodded, oblivious to the slight shift. “I used the spell you showed me last time we talked. The balefire.”

“I never showed you a spell.” Discord paused as a frown settled on his lips. “Balefire. Wait… Baal’s Fire?”

She stepped through the space where the illusions of her friends stood, making her way to the hedges where she slipped on Sunny’s sled. “I fed barely enough into Trixie’s talisman to light a candle,” she said, breaking a sprig of crisp smelling arborvitae from the wall with her magic. “And it just went up. Boom.”

Turning so that Discord could see, she cast Starswirl’s spell and the little branch ignited with a sickly green flame. Sooty black smoke spiraled up from the living wood as it curled and blackened. She dropped it into the snow where it continued to burn.

“It was bound to happen, and they’re lucky it did out where nobody else could get hurt,” she said, wincing as she snuffed the stubborn flame beneath her hoof. “I don’t want to think about what might have happened if they had run that test beneath Canterlot. Applejack would never have forgiven...”

When she looked back to Discord, he was standing.

“Put that out!”

She frowned. “I did.”

“No.” His voice brimmed with something she had never heard come from him before. “No, you wouldn’t know if you did or not because you don’t have the slightest inkling of what you’re doing!”

“Discord, calm down,” she said, stepping away from the blackened remains of wood. A few narrow filaments of smoke curled up from it, but the fire was out. “I’ve been casting this spell for three months. I got this.”

The draconequus vanished from the bench and appeared directly in front of her. He gripped both sides of her face and to her shock, she could feel his fingers digging into her coat. It took her a panicked moment to understand he was pouring everything he had into tricking her brain into thinking he was actually touching her.

It was a dirty trick, something he’d been keeping from her until now, but it was startlingly effective.

“Entropy is the death of all things.” His voice rang in her head as if he were speaking from a dozen mouths. “It is purposeless in its destruction and devours magic as if it were dry tinder. Every time you bring that scourge into existence you are lighting a match over a powder keg!”

This was a side of him she had never seen before, and it terrified her. She wrenched herself away from him but it felt more like he chose to release her rather than the other way around. Her hooves slipped in the snow and she stumbled backwards against the hedge, her feathers tangling in the dormant foliage as she landed hard on her backside.

Discord loomed over her, his eyes wild. “Promise me you will never cast that spell again.”

“Get away from me.” Yanking her wings free, she scrambled onto her hooves and stepped around him. Her heart hammered in her chest as she became painfully aware of how far she was from her Element.

“Twilight.” His voice grew desperate. “Please, promise me.”

“Get away!”

To her surprise and relief, he shrank back from her. His ruddy pupils had shrunk to pinpoints. He was as close to the verge of panic as she was, but for an entirely different reason that she couldn’t understand. How could he be so afraid of her casting a spell on a twig when she had watched an entire valley boil with the same green fire? The world hadn’t ended. No doom fell from the sky to devour them. The explosion had been stunning but the fires had eventually snuffed themselves out.

Of course, she thought. He’s lying.

“I don’t know why you would tell me about a spell this significant and expect me to ignore it,” she said, surprising herself with the heat in her voice. “But the only ones who are going to die will be the Vhannans if they don’t surrender this war.”

Discord stared at her, the betrayal in his eyes unmistakable. “You’re turning it into a weapon.”

She took a sharp breath and nodded. “One that we won’t use unless we have to. We’re not monsters.”

“Yes you are,” he groaned, as if discovering something he’d chosen to ignore. “You all are.”

He turned away from her, staring at his statue. “I want you to free me.”

Twilight blinked. “No. Why would I do that?”

“You imprisoned me because you wanted to banish me from your world.” He spoke slowly, each word measured and calm despite the terror in his eyes. “I want to leave it, now. Please.”

“Is that all this was?”

She gestured at the bench where the two of them had shared more conversations than she could count. How many secrets had she shared with him, thinking she was doing so in confidence? How long had he been waiting to spring this on her?

“Just you looking for an opportunity to scare me into setting you free?”

“Twilight…”

“No,” she said, cutting him off with a slash of her wing. “One thousand years, Discord. That’s the sentence you earned for betraying Equestria. Why am I not surprised that you would try to trick me into getting out of it?”

“You are tampering with a force that has snuffed out civilizations in the space of a breath! One thousand years among yours is a death sentence!”

She shook her head at the overcast sky. “You know, I came to tell you what I’ve accomplished thinking in some weird way you would be proud of me. I almost thought you were getting better.”

Discord took a step toward her, his hands trembling. “Twilight, please don’t leave. Let me go. I won’t tell anyone. They won’t even know I’m gone.”

“The girls were right,” she murmured. “I should have never kept coming here.”

“Twilight, please just stay for-”

She pictured her office and lit her horn, barely hearing Discord’s desolate shout over the rush of displaced air. Her magic pulsed and she was gone.

Without an anchor to cling to, his illusion collapsed, and the Lord of Chaos found himself wrenched back into a lonely statue at the center of an impossible prison.

Next Chapter: Chapter 23: Nightmares Estimated time remaining: 53 Hours, 38 Minutes