February 10th, 1076

He missed his collar.

The thought stumbled into his head like it often did whenever he found himself stuck down here among Twilight’s books, with nothing to do for the next twenty-four hours but eat, sleep and think. His mind always did have a tendency to wander.

Before he and Applejack made the decision to sell the farm, letting his thoughts get away from him was a perk of the job. He enjoyed the quiet, preferring to listen to the sounds of the orchard over anything else. It was the sort of peaceful existence that he once had hoped would last him until retirement like it had for Granny. She’d gone peacefully in her sleep, content in her accomplishments and accepting of her shortcomings which, as far as he was concerned, was the best anyone could hope for. Big Mac fancied that was how he wanted to go, given the choice.

The chuckle that snuck through his lips caught him by surprise. He paced the bookshelves wrapping the walls of Twilight’s library and wondered if he was finally losing it. He couldn’t blame himself if he was. His eldest sister stood at the helm of a ministry responsible for developing weapons of war, aided in no small part by the new technologies that poured out of Applebloom’s startup-turned-robotics-titan, Robronco Industries. Equestria was ready to tear itself apart at the seams and his two sisters were doing more than their fair share of pulling to keep it together, and here he was lamenting about hanging up his old plowing collar.

Having that steady weight around his neck had always felt like a totem of strength. After a rough day of loading wagons, hauling supplies or pulling the latest harvest into town to be sold, he wanted nothing more than to flop back into bed and pull the covers up over his eyes until well after dawn. There would have been a good chance Applejack might have let him get away with it too, at least once in a while, but it would have also meant that she would be pulling double duty for the day. Chores waited for no one and he was raised better than to dump work on his siblings. Putting on that collar pushed him through the early morning funk and reassured him that whatever the day had in store for him, he could handle it.

With Twilight’s healing magic and a cocktail of unpronounceable chemicals flowing through his body, it felt like the right time to be wearing that collar. Even if it didn’t feel like it, he was doing important work right now. Arguably some of the most vital work any pony had ever done in Equestria’s storied history, and all it required of him was to stay sequestered inside Twilight’s library for the next...

He squinted at the clock on the far wall. Nineteen hours. He grimaced at that, swearing it had been more than five hours since Twilight teleported away to make her phone call. His hooves let out slow, muted thumps as he plodded across the rugs that hid the harsh concrete floor. He stepped past a wide bookcase filled with ancient tomes she had scavenged from Celestia-knew-where, his eyes scanning the spines for anything that might distract him for the remainder of his quarantine.

Selecting one at random, he nipped a musty-smelling spine between his teeth and pulled it off the shelf. Setting it down on the reading table at the center of the library, he took a moment to scan the title. He winced.

After a few attempts, he stopped trying to pronounce the author’s name before he sprained something important. Reading had never been his thing unless he was counting the Power Pony comics Shining Armor had gotten him hooked on some years back. How that stallion had grown up to be an unapologetic nerd while his sister surrounded herself with some of the driest nonfiction written in Equestria was beyond him. Now that he and Cadence had a minor empire and a teenager to occupy them, he wondered if Shining ever got around to his old hobbies anymore.

Cracking open the book, he didn’t worry about the actual contents of the worm-eaten pages. It was getting late and it had been clear for a while now that his mind wasn’t going to settle on its own. He wanted to blame Twilight’s regenerative medicine for him being so wired, but that excuse held as much water as a screen door. The fate of Equestria might be running through his veins right now, but he was excited for tomorrow.

Dinner with Twilight Sparkle. He grinned to himself. The last time he had butterflies in his stomach this bad was the day he proposed to Sugar Belle. That felt like a lifetime ago, and the memory of signing the divorce papers still stung. He’d given enough time to that pain. Now he was ready to move forward.

One-sided as his infatuation was, he had an eye for Twilight since she first came to visit the family farm. There was something about her that he could never quite put into words that just felt right. She was ambitious, self-conscious, kind and even a bit of a dork on the rare occasions she let her guard down. Between his tending to the farm and her obligations to Equestria, he’d given up on that fantasy a long time ago. Now, with the war on, it felt like they were being pulled together once again and Big Mac was happy to surrender to it.

He even had a plan. Once he was clear to leave the library, he’d call up the Town Hall back in Ponyville and reserve some time in the apple orchard. Sure it was the middle of winter, but Twilight never seemed bothered by the cold any more than he was. He could already picture the two of them walking through the snow, enjoying the stillness of the bare trees. They could warm up next to the fire back in the family house and talk about simpler times and, if he was lucky, maybe a future spent together.

He stifled the grin yanking at his mouth, knowing he was probably getting ahead of himself. Twilight had always been a solitary mare, and she wasn’t going to be begged into something she didn’t want. Real life was never as simple as a Harlequine Romance novel.

Still, there was no harm in asking.

Setting his anticipation aside, he forced himself to pay attention to the words beneath his nose. Whoever this Houyhnhnm was, he or she wasn’t fond of short sentences. He did his best to follow the meandering descriptions of fundamental magic and its importance in a modern Equestria - ironic considering the author died centuries ago. He skipped over a theory that magic was tied to the orbits of certain heavenly bodies, something he didn’t think Princess Luna would appreciate catching him dreaming about, and soldiered on in the hopes that the dead unicorn’s words would lull him to sleep.

Ten minutes in, he frowned. Something was distracting him.

Out of the corner of his eye, the green flame of Twilight’s strange candle flickered and danced around its wick. Despite her assurances, he found that he couldn’t stop worrying that bumping the table might cause the candle to tip and the flame to leap onto any one of the closed books lying nearby. Granted, the table was rock solid and he wasn’t exactly clumsy, but now that the thought was in his head he couldn't focus on anything else.

He leaned forward, pointed his muzzle at the little green flame, and puffed it out.

A thin filament of smoke curled up from the blackened wick, forming a haze that spread over the table. Big Mac wrinkled his nose at the faintly metallic scent and coughed as the smoke scraped at his lungs. He swallowed, then coughed again, harder. Shaking his head, he stood up from the table and stepped away from the lingering pall.

It didn’t help. It was like he’d inhaled fiberglass. He grimaced as his lungs rioted against the persistent irritation, forcing him into a hacking fit that left him dizzy and gagging. Stumbling to Twilight’s workbench, he fumbled the door to her minifridge open and retrieved a bottle of water from the back. He didn’t have patience for the cap. Clamping it between his teeth, he yanked until the plastic threading gave way and half the water geysered out of the bottle. He drained what was left. The burning in his throat subsided but his lungs continued to burn. He could feel it spreading throughout the barrel of his chest, like a coal mine catching fire from within.

He sagged against Twilight’s workbench and clenched his eyes shut, willing the pain to go away.

Sweat darkened his coat to the color of wet bricks. He pressed his forehead against the cool tabletop and groaned. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

When he opened his eyes again they wouldn’t focus. This was bad. He needed to get Twilight. He swallowed again and his throat clung shut for an agonizing moment as if he’d swallowed a tube of glue. The library lurched as he pushed away from the workbench, his vision sloshing as he searched for the stairs leading up to the rest of the ministry. Someone up there could help. He just needed to reach the door.

Racking coughs pounced on him again, this time hard enough that he retched up the water he just drank. Whimpering, his vision milky, he staggered forward in the direction he thought the stairwell was. His hooves swung forward and landed as if he were walking with someone else’s legs. His entire body burned as if it were on fire and he knew, distantly, that he wouldn’t make it to the steps.

The shelves surrounding him rolled, and he hit the ground. The wind rushed out of his lungs with an undignified grunt and gravity kept him there, pinned to the floor while his brain struggled to make sense of where up ended and down began. He vomited. Instinctively he moved his hoof to wipe the muck from his mouth, but he stopped when he saw it.

Through distorted vision, he watched his ruddy coat sloughing away from his leg in clumps. He forced himself to blink, to clear his eyes and dispel the nightmare, but it only made what he saw that much worse. His leg was too large. His hoof split down the center, weeping blood like a quartered piece of firewood. His coat came loose whenever he moved it, leaving a smear of red hairs wherever they touched the rug. Thick, foul-smelling scabs formed over the open wounds as regeneration and decay fought over him like a cheap carnival prize.

He opened his mouth and screamed. Not for help, but because the fire radiating from his chest wouldn’t permit him to do anything else. The smoke, he realized.

There had been something in the smoke and it was killing him.

“We can always go around.”

Ginger scoffed. “As much as I would love to ‘go around,’ I left my mountaineering equipment back at Gussets & Garments. Unless you’re suggesting you can fly now, in which case I would ask why we’ve been walking in the first place.”

“You didn’t seem to care when you threw me off the fucking tracks.”

“And yet somehow you managed, dear.”

Aurora rolled onto her side and shushed the two mares hunkered down in the stones behind her. Ginger pressed her lips together and nodded an apology while Julip rolled her eyes to avoid both their gazes. At the rear of the group, Roach offered a lopsided shrug that said what’re you going to do?

Aurora resisted the urge to rub at the headache forming between her eyes. She was already beginning to regret allowing Julip into their little group. Not even half a day in and it already felt like someone had thrown a bag of sand into the gears of a well-calibrated machine. The prospect of keeping Coldbrook happy was stressful enough. Lump in the fact that he was trying to deceive her with a fake ignition talisman and the risk that he might try to break into Stable 10 if he discovered she’d seen through his lie with the Enclave’s help…

She forced herself to focus. The last thing she needed was more distractions.

With Julip and Ginger’s bickering on pause, she rolled back behind the butt of Desperate Times and pressed her cheek behind the scope.

“There’s only seven of them,” she said. “I should be able to clear them out from here. Then we can see if there’s anything worth taking on board.”

On the other side of her crosshairs rested what was left of an old passenger train. Like so many aspects of the wasteland, Aurora had only known what a train was from the pictures in her schoolbooks and the odd film. There had been an entire section on prewar methods of transportation and trains were featured heavily throughout. Most of the ones she remembered had looked roughly the same: a sleek, pill-shaped diesel engine attached to a long line of containers bearing the logos of prominent Equestrian companies.

This one, however, was different.

Instead of the smooth, modern shape Aurora had come to expect, the black locomotive attached to the front of the line was the epitome of utilitarian design. Its long, behemoth boiler sat exposed, mounted atop an interlocking series of wheels and driveshafts that had been forged at a time when oil was still considered a novelty fuel. It was a precision tool no different than the generator back home, an unstoppable invention of Equestrian ingenuity.

Or, it had been right up until it derailed.

The locomotive and its attached coal car had skipped the rails and slid drunkenly against the carved granite wall, the centuries-old gashes still visible in the stone. The cars behind it hadn’t been so fortunate. While the first three followed the locomotive toward the safety of the mountain, the fourth had jumped the tracks at a diagonal that had swung the fifth out over the cliff overlooking the valley below. Even now that fifth car still hung there with the rear third of its cabin suspended over the drop. Its rear coupling had been sheared away by the force of the derailment, leaving behind a rusted claw of steel that had tried and failed to prevent the remaining cars from plummeting into the valley below.

Aurora considered taking a glide down to find the rest of the wreckage, but something about that thought felt wrong. Voyeuristic, even. Even out here where every ruin was a reminder of the holocaust that preceded her, she was starting to learn that there was a fine line between finding death and reveling in it.

“Looks like they’re locked inside,” she said, panning her rifle across the ghouls standing inside the passenger sections. “All feral.”

It still fascinated her how something a quarter mile away could appear close enough to touch. The ghouls stood stock-still like half-dressed mannequins, oblivious to their visitors. They stared vacantly in the direction of the last thing to draw their interest which, for many of them, seemed to be their own reflections in the cracked and dingy windows. Bits of old clothing clung to some of them. A broken pair of glasses hung from the neck of a mare by a tarnished chain. Echoes of who they had once been.

She leveled the crosshairs on a withered stallion standing in the car dangling over the cliff. He seemed to stare back at her, curious about his new visitor. He looked just like Gallow. For a brief moment she heard his shrieks as she had struggled to put him down.

Aurora clenched her eyes shut and forced the memory back down.

When she opened them again the nameless stallion was still there, the remains of a black bowtie fluttering in the breeze against the knob of his shoulder.

She settled her sights over his temple and squeezed the trigger. Her rifle bucked against her shoulder, the sound of the report slapping her eardrums like a physical thing. In the distance, the stallion’s tiny silhouette flicked sideways and dropped beneath the window.

“One down,” she breathed, and settled her cheek back behind the scope.

The ferals trapped inside the train never fully understood they were under attack. At the sound of the first gunshot they had all turned to face her, their expressions twisted with something amounting to consternation as they began milling back and forth inside the cars. With every pull of the trigger they became more agitated, knowing there was prey nearby but struggling to find a way to reach it.

The task of clearing out the ghouls quickly devolved into a twisted version of a shooting gallery as the train’s desiccated occupants hurled themselves around in search of an exit. A mare missing the majority of her lower jaw came the closest, crawling out through a shattered window and finding herself trapped again as the tatters of her sunbleached dress snagged on the broken glass. Half in, half out, she battered her cracked hooves against the wall of the car until a bullet thumped into the back of her neck and ended her struggle.

As the echo of the last gunshot rebounded off the mountains, Aurora continued sweeping her crosshairs across the train. Nothing else appeared in the smeared windows and no other ghouls rose from tracks beyond the locomotive.

“I think we’re clear.” She left the last round in the chamber as she stood up, listening to three sets of hooves scrape against the grey stones as they did the same.

On Roach’s insistence, they approached the crippled train slowly to give any ferals that might still be lurking inside ample time to give themselves away. The wooden ties muffled their steps as they drew close. Scooping up a few loose stones between her feathers, Aurora flicked a wingful against the side of the rearmost car. Most thudded dully against the wooden chassis, shaking loose a snow of flaking green paint while the rest sailed through the windows with a bright crash of broken glass.

Nothing answered.

“Looks like you got them all.” Roach walked to the front of the car where two rusted steps hung out from beneath the lip of the sealed door. “Julip and I will check the rear two cars while you two look over the others. Sound good?”

Julip made an irritated noise as she trotted up the tracks to catch up with Roach. Aurora pretended not to notice her, instead glancing back at Ginger as the unicorn sidled up beside her.

“Sounds good,” they said.

Julip chewed the inside of her cheek as Aurora and Ginger trotted off to explore the forward cars. The swelling at the root of her wing had died down a little since the morning, no thanks to the unicorn Aurora had somehow become infatuated with since she found a way out of her Stable. A Stable that, as far as the archives were concerned, had been destroyed by the bomb that had collapsed a measurable percentage of Foal Mountain.

Now, it seemed, Commander Spitfire’s experiment had not only survived the end of the world but it had just ejected one of its residents into the wasteland for reasons known only to Aurora. She was on a mission, that much was evident, and she had been willing to enlist the help of a unicorn and the irradiated husk of Equestria’s oldest enemy to complete it.

As she waited impatiently for Roach to loosen the car’s rusted door, several thoughts passed through her head. The first one being how Aurora had managed to leave her shelter in the first place. Stable-Tec had layers of protocols in place to prevent unauthorized access to the primary door, least of which were the heavily guarded security offices positioned ahead of every Stable antechamber. Even if she had gotten through somehow, the door wouldn’t open for anyone short of an overmare or stallion.

Stealing a glance at Aurora as she fished what looked like a pry bar from her saddlebag, Julip was willing to bet she wasn’t the overmare.

However she managed to get out, it meant there was a way through the landslide that had buried the entrance and that the Enclave had missed it. To be fair, they hadn’t made monitoring several million tons of compacted rubble a top priority after losing contact with Ten. By then the remnants of Equestria’s domestic military had begun the long process of consolidating under an independent banner, and they were eager to plant that banner anywhere they could.

Julip sighed as Aurora pried open her door and led Ginger into the car. Half-standing on the step in front of her, Roach had only just gotten the handle to wiggle. Goddesses, he was slow.

If there was a silver lining in this whole debacle, it was that the Steel Rangers had done something to piss off Aurora well before the Enclave got word of her. The fact that Aurora looked ready to kick a puppy at their mere mention surprised even Julip. There was no arguing that the Rangers were opportunistic predators in their own right, but they also tended to have a deceptively good bedside manner. The “noble warriors of Old Equestria” bit was a sales pitch that ponies were annoyingly eager to buy into.

And yet Aurora hadn’t.

The passenger car screeched open on rotten hinges, jarring her back to the present. She waited as Roach climbed up the steps, peeked down the walkway and stepped fully into the car. She felt some relief at the sound of his shotgun locking back on its rail and followed him inside.

The fetid smell of leaking ferals was rank. Two distinct bursts of dark matter painted the right side of the car, clinging to the wall and seats like old soup. She had to force herself to breathe, reminding herself that the smell would become less unbearable if she breathed through her mouth. At least that was what her wing leader used to say before Autumn’s people put a hole in his chest.

Her stomach lurched and she had to fight to keep it under control.

“Fuck.”

The two ghouls Aurora executed hadn’t been the only passengers. Bones littered the padded seats, some intact enough to resemble bodies while others were so scattered and tangled that she couldn’t tell where one pony stopped and the other began. The glass partitions that separated each pair of benches were smeared with brown streaks that had dribbled and dried along the edges of each seat. Dark stains discolored the floral pattern of a once-beautifully carpeted floor, marking where each passenger had decomposed.

She watched Roach make his way as close to the rear of the car as he was comfortable, staying clear of the section that hung over the ledge. He turned, looked back at her and indicated the broken glass partition that separated the seats beside him. “Everything beyond here is off limits. No sense in tempting fate.”

She swallowed her gullet and nodded. Knowing that she couldn’t fly back New Canterlot and take a long soak in a decontamination shower made the smell that much worse.

He arched an eye at her. “If you need to puke, do it outside.”

She shot him her best glare, but he had already set about unbuckling a suitcase on the seat beside him and didn’t notice. Probably the odor made him feel at home. She backtracked to the front of the car and tried to distract herself. Using the back of her wing, she swept a dead pony’s bones off a rumpled backpack and began rummaging.

Unsurprisingly, its contents had little value to anyone beside its former owner. A stack of musty textbooks, a thick green and white folder filled with neatly typed papers lay inside. A similarly colored sweater bearing the blocky logo of Fillydelphia University stared up from the bottom. Unimpressed, she opened one of the backpack’s smaller pockets to find an energy bar wrapper and a leather pouch filled with a modest amount of prewar bits.

She considered the bits for a moment before putting them back and dropped the bar into her mailbag. Turning, she pulled a briefcase to the edge of the seat behind her and popped the latches.

They worked in silence for several minutes, falling into an almost pleasant rhythm were it not for the decaying stench of the freshly re-deceased ferals they shared the narrow space with. As they pulled apart zippers and broke into hard cases, it became obvious the travellers that boarded this train centuries ago had not done so with any aspect of their own survival in mind. They found an abundance of clothing, literature, bits and a decent amount of uneaten snack foods that, while technically edible, were just as likely to make a pony sick as they were to fill their stomach. They pocketed the food anyway just in case.

As they worked toward each other, it became harder for Julip to ignore the strange reverence Roach showed as he looked through each passenger’s luggage. He took care to disturb as little as he could, avoiding moving bones whenever possible and only removing items from bags he intended to keep. Everything else got placed back where he found it. She frowned a little. As an archivist, she understood the importance of preserving important historical sites, but this was a common commuter train. He was treating it like the gryphons treated their sacred burial grounds.

She watched him step over one of the fallen ferals and couldn’t help herself. “Anyone you know?”

Roach stopped and looked at her for a long moment. He opened his mouth, then closed it with a shake of his head. She tensed as he approached her, but instead of lashing out like she half-expected, he squeezed past her.

“You can finish up here if you want. I’m going to start on the next car.”

She stared after him as he descended the first step toward the door. “It was a joke.”

He mouthed a silent, Ah, and dropped onto the stones outside.

For several seconds she stood there, dumbfounded that a ghoul would actually try to guilt trip her. This was the wasteland, not Nana’s Cottage for Sensitive Souls. Since when was a little humor off the table?

Okay, she thought. Maybe it wasn’t her best example of wit, but Roach had over two centuries to grow some thicker skin. How was she supposed to get anywhere with any of these ponies if they couldn’t grow a pair. Figuratively.

Julip groaned inwardly as she listened to Roach working on the handle of the next car. What did he expect her to do? Feel sorry for him? Fuck that. There was only one pony alive in Equestria who earned the right to live this long and it wasn’t some ghoul in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. If he expected pity when she was the one with an expiration date, he had another thing coming.

The next door over wrenched open on rusted hinges. With a muttered curse, she trotted down the aisle and down the steps.

She climbed into the second car and found him in the process of navigating the cluttered walkway toward the back. A subtle twitch of his ear was the only acknowledgement he gave to her arrival.

“Look,” she said, her voice low. “I’m sorry, okay?”

He sat down on the filthy carpet and proceeded to lift the lid of an unlocked suitcase. “Okay.”

She blinked. “Wait, seriously?”

Roach looked up from the case and down the aisle at her. “What do you think?”

Her mouth hung open, abashed. He was actually going to hang onto this one. “Honestly? I think that you’re taking a joke about a mindless eating machine waaay too fucking seriously.”

He nodded and resumed leafing through the case. “You must not be much of an archivist if you believe they’re all mindless.”

She leaned against the partition at the front of the car, her eyes drifting to the splayed hooves of one of the ghouls that had fallen between the seats a few feet away. “So you’re one of those ponies.”

He shrugged, opting to read the engraving on a flask he’d pulled from the suitcase rather than answer. Setting it back among the other articles, he closed it up and leaned forward to lift a pair of foal-sized saddlebags off the floor.

“Name one feral that’s ever come back,” she said with a hint of challenge in her voice.

His lip curled with a sad smile. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He lifted a brick-shaped device out of the saddlebag and squinted at the dark screen. A green crust had seeped out of the toy’s battery compartment, ruining it. He set it back in the saddlebags and set them beside the small collection of bones tucked into the corner of the seat.

“You haven’t stopped prodding at us since we landed.” He gave her a knowing look as he pivoted to the pair of benches behind him. “When you told us you had a tendency to be abrasive I thought you meant that in a soldier-of-the-Enclave sort of way, but you’re just punching at every button you can just to see if we tell you something useful.”

Julip slid her tongue across her teeth and stared out the window. “It’s my job to ask questions.”

“Believe me, we can all tell.”

The dig was more subtle than she expected to come from a ghoul, and it stuck like a bramble. She narrowed her eyes at him, but his attention was firmly set to the task before him. When he didn’t acknowledge her glare, she gave up and turned to the seat beside her. She chose a satchel and started untying the strap. Much to her annoyance, Roach continued speaking.

His voice sounded like how it felt to step on wet gravel. “How long have you been with the Enclave?”

The satchel flopped open with a puff of dust. A gentle sweep of her feathers sent the motes wheeling toward the broken windows. “Eight years.”

Roach made a thoughtful noise as he closed one case and shuffled sideways to begin searching the next. “Do you enjoy it?”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes as she pulled a stack of old magazines from the satchel by a band of twine. At the top of the pile, a well-muscled black stallion stared up at her from the cracked cover of Taboo Tattoos. A decorative knife-like pattern traced a white line along the curve of his hip before twisting out of sight around the inside of his leg. Julip’s eyes grew wide and she carefully snapped the fraying twine, sliding the magazine into her own bag.

“It’s steady work,” she said while leafing through the rest of the stack. Ponies hadn’t known how good they had it, being able to decorate themselves with magic like that. These days tattoos had to be done with ink and a hopefully clean needle. And even then a pony had to shave their coat down to the stubble if they wanted anyone to see the damn thing.

Her heart somersaulted into her throat as a pair of Wonderbolts appeared near the bottom of the pile, the two stallions grinning over their shoulders at the camera with their signature flight suits puddled around their hooves. Julip hadn’t known Wonderbolts could have tattoos there.

She swallowed to wet her throat and stowed the magazine away with the other. “Being an archivist doesn’t come with all the glamor of infantry work, but there’s something to be said about safeguarding our history from the Steel Rangers.”

“Is that what you’re doing,” Roach chuckled.

A frown crossed her expression and she looked over to him, only to realize he’d been watching her from across the car. Her neck warmed with fresh embarrassment, but she stopped short of saying anything that would give him satisfaction. After a moment he shrugged to himself and went back to scavenging.

“I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain the irony of the Enclave going to war with Equestria to preserve its history,” he murmured.

It didn’t take much effort to catch the subtext. She set her jaw, refusing to bite.

Then, a metallic click caught her ear.

“Come over here and look at this,” he said.

Against her better judgement, she spared Roach the slightest glance and saw a narrow thread of gold swinging from his upturned hoof. Laying open over his sole was a locket no larger than a bottlecap. Grudgingly, she closed the flap to her mailbag and picked her way across the car to where he sat.

From past experience she knew the locket would hold someone’s photo. They usually did. It was a trend that survived even the war, buoying their trade value well above what the raw metal was worth. She stopped a few steps away from him, but he was persistent and held the locket out for her to take. She accepted it if only to keep him from getting up to put it in her wing himself.

A fuzzy brown photo of a mare and what looked to be her foal grinned up from her feathers. On the opposite half, a tiny inscription had taken on a patina of rust that made the message illegible.

Roach watched her with his disconcertingly opaque eyes, making her feel like the dull recruit at the academy. “Okay?” she prompted.

“That’s history worth preserving.” He tapped the open face of the locket. It was everything she could do not to pull her wing away from his touch. “And that’s where the Enclave consistently gets it wrong.”

Of course he would try to guilt her again. “Oh for…”

“Just hang on for one second and let me finish.”

He held out his hoof for the locket and she dumped it out of her wing with a flick of irritation.

“History is more than just artifacts,” he said, turning to the pink suitcase splayed open on the seat in front of him. A small box made of polished oak sat atop a folded yellow sundress. Roach pressed the locket shut and poured the trinket and its chain into the box, then slid the lid shut. He patted the musty dress with his hoof for emphasis. “It’s the ponies who lived it. You could take home a convoy of wagons loaded to the brim with antiques, but you may as well be saving the headline and cutting out the article for all the good it’ll do.”

Julip watched him close the suitcase. “We have an entire database filled with Equestrian literature. Anyone who was ever anybody has been preserved thanks to the work we do.”

“I think you’re smart enough to know that’s not the point I’m making.”

Her lips pressed into a narrow line. “So you lived back then. That doesn’t change the fact that ghouls are an aberration of nature.”

“I agree.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “You agree.”

Roach shrugged, lifting his unarmed foreleg for her to see the obsidian chitin that had seemingly shattered and fused into a pattern of warped and overlapping plates. This wasn’t her first time standing this close to a ghoul, but the dimly luminescent flesh that peeked between his cracks made her skin crawl.

“There’s nothing natural about this.” The observation came to him as casually as if he were commenting on the weather. “Had the bombs never fallen, I would have died centuries ago. Same with all the first ghouls. But they did and we didn’t, simple as that. Nobody asked us for our opinion before they pushed the button. They just pushed it.”

Julip frowned and took a step away, careful not to disturb the remains of a unicorn sagging against the window as she sat on a nearby bench. The padding wheezed. She was starting to like this conversation less and less.

“In any case,” he continued, “you and I could bat this ball back and forth until we’re blue in the face and still get nowhere, so maybe it’s best we don’t try. What I would like to do is set some ground rules going forward.”

She snorted. “Oh joy.”

“I know, I’m excited too,” he said, mimicking her deadpan with a disturbing level of accuracy. “First, stop it with the ghoul jabs before Ginger overhears something and magics you into a mountain. This isn’t the Enclave. The whole holier-than-thou schtick isn’t endearing.”

She paused before reluctantly nodding.

“And second, don’t lie to us. I guarantee I know how to detect bullshit better than you’ve been trained to deliver it. We have more than a few doubts about why you’re really here and there are going to be questions you’ll be expected to answer if you plan on staying with us. If you want to avoid telling your minister you failed, you’ll be honest.”

That made her eyebrows drift skyward. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“Not when it comes to them.”

She glanced at him and noted the hardness in his expression. Ghouls were notoriously stoic, but this was different. An almost paternal protectiveness. Now she understood why he insisted on hitching his wagon to her despite them being, in every sense of the word, enemies.

“Fine. I’ll try to be… nicer,” she said carefully, “but I won’t be answering every question you ask. I have an ass to cover, too.”

To her relief, Roach nodded. “I can work with that.”

“Alright then.”

A quiet moment passed, signalling the merciful end to an uncomfortable discussion. On some level she knew she’d been pressing her luck antagonizing the ghoul, but how could anyone blame her? It wasn’t as if her previous encounters with their kind led to polite chats. They usually ended with someone on her team putting holes in them until they stopped twitching.

“So, is Julip your whole name?”

She wrinkled her nose at him, but his attention had been drawn to the trio of almond-shaped leaves on her flank. Without thinking, she covered her mark behind a drape of similarly tinted green feathers. “Not technically.”

Seeing his expression, she relented.

“First name Mint, last name Julip. With an i. Like the drink, except my mother spent more time indulging her favorite cocktail than she did trying to spell it correctly on my birth certificate.”

The heat in her voice caught her off-guard, and the two of them exchanged mildly startled expressions before Julip let out a chagrined chuckle. “Wow. I did not intend to tell you that.”

“Well,” Roach said with a careful smile, “at least now I know you’re capable of honesty.”

She nodded uncomfortably. “Any chance you’re capable of keeping that to yourself?”

By some miracle, his response came free of judgment. “When I abandoned my hive, I named myself after the weather and a particularly large field I once flew over. Then I survived the end of the world and decided to name myself after the bugs that infested the tunnel. Trust me, I know first-hoof how quickly a shitty name can stick.”

“So,” she hedged, “is that a yes?”

“I thought that was obvious.”

With a grunt, he stood and turned to face the remaining unexplored section of the car. It didn’t take a shrink to tell he was as dubious about their prospects of scavenging anything useful here as she was. His gaze turned toward the crooked-facing car’s line of broken windows and the three remaining segments of train resting against the rock face outside.

“Unless there’s anything in here you think we should look at, we should check on the ladies.”

Julip scanned the remaining jumble of unchecked luggage strewn across the seats. “You sure? Why?”

Roach nodded out the window toward the front of the train, a resigned smirk playing on his muzzle.

“Because Aurora’s playing with the engine.”

February 11th, 1076

Twilight lit her horn. With a flash of light, the neatly stacked bindle of contracts and its requisite trio of holotapes containing the details of her regeneration spell vanished from her desk. She breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the unmistakable sound of the packet materializing on the other side of the line.

“Thank you, Miss Sparkle.” The stallion at the helm of Maiden Pharmaceutical spoke in a measured, professional baritone. “Give me one moment.”

She listened to the receiver shuffle against what she assumed was the ridge of his chin as he began looking through the promised materials. She didn’t know Golden Dunes all that well outside his origins in Saddle Arabia and that he and his family maintained a home in Canterlot’s historical district. What she did know was that Maiden Pharma was the company best equipped to fast-track this spell to the front lines, and Golden Dunes had not been shy about his eagerness to purchase the manufacturing rights.

“Everything looks to be in order. Once we’ve synthesized a viable sample and verified the effects, the Ministry of Magic will see the second half of the agreed amount. Provided everything goes smoothly, we can expect to see manufacturing begin inside of three months.”

Twilight’s smile widened as her terminal chimed with a notification of deposit. She took a slow, deep breath to steady her nerves at the sight of the number. On paper it seemed so abstract. Now she was staring at more than twice her annual budget on one line. The fact that she could expect to see a second payment for the same amount had her quietly bouncing in her seat. The things her ministry could do with these funds felt boundless. It more than made up for Discord’s sudden tirade in the garden some hours earlier.

She glanced at the clock tucked away in the periphery of her terminal. Almost six in the morning. Normally she would be dead on her hooves having gone this long without rest, but she felt the exact opposite. In a short few months, Equestria would have its first real advantage over Vhanna in years: near-instant, fully regenerative healing.

Let the zebras have all the herbs and poultices they liked. The war would finally tilt back in Equestria’s favor.

“Miss Sparkle, are you still there?”

Twilight shook herself out of her daydream with a silent curse. “I’m here. The first payment came through just now, thank you.”

“That’s good to hear. I’m looking through your notes and I’ll be honest, your reputation for thoroughness is well-earned. Our marketing division will be excited to know your technical analysis lines up with the paperwork in your preliminary offer. That’ll help keep the branding list concise.”

Twilight pursed her lips and leaned back in her chair, her eyes scanning absently across the three sparsely decorated walls beyond her desk. Even when she lived in the Golden Oaks Library, before Tirek saw fit to reduce it to burning splinters, she had never owned much. The books had never been truly hers, and the few framed photos hanging around her office rested in frames picked out by other ponies.

On the far wall near the door, a photo of her and the girls enjoying a meal at one of Ponyville’s outdoor restaurants had adopted a slight lean from what sometimes felt like the unending traffic in and out of her office. Identical copies of the same photo adorned the girls’ offices as well. The fact that it had been taken without their knowledge spoke of the height of their fame as Elements and the casual invasions to their privacy that they had been forced to adjust to. Fluttershy had taken a liking to the picture after spotting it in the Ponyville Gazette, and she had gone through great pains to track down the photographer for proper prints.

Now, among a few notable nicknacks she had managed to hang onto from their past adventures, that photo of the six of them had become something sacred for the six of them. As much as the war had irreversibly changed them, they all yearned for the day when things could finally go back to the way they used to be.

Golden politely cleared his throat across the line.

Twilight shot upright in her chair. “Sorry! Sorry. I’m still here.”

The sound of his chuckle was rich like honey. “It’s quite alright. Before I present these plans to the board, do you have any questions for me?”

It felt so strange to be spoken to by someone in a position of authority who didn’t wear a tiara twelve hours a day. The thought renewed her grin and threatened to make her laugh, something she didn’t think Golden Dunes would appreciate given the moment. She cleared her throat, trying not to mimic him, and decided she did have one question.

“I have been wondering,” she said. “What do you think you’ll name it?”

A pause. “Well, like I said, the marketing division already has a list. So far the frontrunner has been ‘StimPack.’”

“StimPack,” she said, testing it out. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Somehow she didn’t think it was possible for years of research beyond the fringes of magical theory could be boiled down to something so… clinical.

Then again, that was probably the point. Unicorns didn’t need to be sold on the magic, it was the earth ponies and pegasi who would need help getting past the taboo of casting a prepacked spell on themselves. Clinical would be familiar for them, and in spite of the uninspiring name, she could already feel it rooting itself into her mind as the only reasonable choice.

“It fits,” she said.

“You sound just as disheartened as I was when I first heard it,” he said warmly. “Rest assured, my people are the best at what they do. Give it a year and StimPack will be a household name.”

She smirked at the glowing screen of her terminal and reached forward with a lavender feather, turning it off. “I feel like I should be toasting to that.”

“Clink,” Golden said.

She laughed and raised an imaginary glass in her wing. “Clink.”

“Congratulations, Twilight.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she meant it. With the task of perfecting the single most daunting spell she’d written behind her, she felt like she could finally breathe again. “I should let you go. Call my office if your people have any questions about the spell structure, okay?”

“I think we can handle it, but we know who to ask if we do. Get some sleep.”

Just the thought of sleep kicked in a reflexive yawn. They said their goodbyes and she dropped the phone into the receiver. For several minutes she enjoyed the fullness of accomplishment. They’d done it. Even in her windowless office she could see the sun cresting a distant horizon. No more torturous updates to Equestria’s death toll. No more gruesome stories of ponies drowning in the yellow haze of blindweed.

It slowly hit her that everything was finally going to be okay. She dabbed a feather against the corner of each eye, wicking away the moisture gathering there. One way or another, whether the zebras saw their end approaching on the wave of a rejuvenated Equestrian army or the glowing green plume of a new weapon her research division assured her would have the potential to devastate cities once it was finished, this war was coming to an end.

She needed to break the good news to Big Mac. Of all the ponies in her life, he’d given the same if not more time to this project than anyone. Keeping his symptoms a secret had been no small feat given his family’s tenacity at wringing information out of ponies. Knowing he could finally tell Applejack and Applebloom the honest truth of what he’d been up to for the past two years would be a heavy weight off his chest.

Dipping her horn, she cast the spell. Her office vanished and the secluded sublevel of her ministry’s library rushed in to greet her. As the familiar draft of the library stairwell cooled her flank, a gasp jumped out of her throat at the sight of the panorama in front of her.

It was all destroyed.

Paper and parchment littered the floor like ragged strips of confetti. Deep slashes ran in diagonals across her bookcases, leaving shelves quartered like dry timbers. Her reading table lay in a shattered heap in the nook she’d spent countless late nights sleeping in among half-written notes, the remains of which were indistinguishable from the shredded disaster of priceless Equestrian literature.

Her stomach climbed into her throat at the oily scent of smoke. The far corner of the library where her lab tables and a fortune of bits’ worth of precision tools had been gathered had been reduced to little more than a blackened scar. The bookcases she’d hung her blackboards from had been physically torn from the walls, adding to a charred mound that now dominated the former workspace. Taking a step forward, her hoof squelched into a rug soaked to the last fiber in soggy paper and gallons of lukewarm water.

It took her a beat to understand that the blaze had triggered the fire suppression system. Yet while the mechanical triggers had worked as intended, the enchantments intended to shield her bookcases had somehow failed to deploy. Centuries of irreplaceable original works were simply gone.

Forget the books, she thought.

“Big Mac?”

The mound in her burned lab space shifted at the sound of her voice, followed by a low, rumbling moan.

Something about the noise stopped her hoof midstep. Her eyes widened as some deeper, forgotten part of her brain remembered a distant time before kingdoms or towns or locked doors. A remnant of an instinct that screamed at her to kick and yell and run.

As the seconds ticked by, something else settled into her subconscious. Worry. A different brand of fear brought on by the knowledge that someone she cared about could be hurt.

Stepping toward the mound, her voice was barely a whisper. “Mac? Are you-”

The pile shifted again, sending a cascade of torn books and wet ash sliding toward what looked like an opening in the burrow.

“Away,” he groaned.

Her heart leapt. She hurried forward, sending a spray of filthy water ahead of her.

The deep rumbling from beneath the wreckage grew with every one of her steps until she made the connection and stopped.

“No! Twilight, away!”

She lit her horn, intending to peel back the heap of damp debris Big Mac had taken shelter under. A faint haze of magic enveloped the blackened dome and, just as quickly, she lost her grip on the spell and it fell to pieces. Confused, she tried again. Her magic appeared, a lavender blanket, and then it was gone. Compounding her bewilderment, a sharp pain bloomed behind her eyes. The jagged edge of a fresh migraine, and a bad one at that. Already she could feel the nausea churning in her gullet.

Something was wrong. Not just with her magic, but with Big Mac.

Damn the magic. She didn’t need a horn to help a friend.

She stepped forward.

The den exploded.

Shards of shelves and wet clumps of pulped paper sprayed outward in a flat arc, painting the walls and Twilight’s chest black with the stinking material Big Mac had used to construct his makeshift hovel. The pony at the epicenter stood easily twice her height. Taller than he’d been when he’d suffered the growing pains of their earlier tests. Tall enough that he stood hunched, his shoulders dangerously close to crushing the recessed lights. Clumps of what appeared to be leather clung to his back and shoulders in strands that dripped with something pungent and mucosal.

Skin. It was his skin.

The thing that was once Big Mac craned his neck toward her and released a tortured scream. Her ears pinned back in a futile attempt to drown out a noise so deafening that it shook a slab of clotted, dead flesh sloughing away from his ribs. She was distantly aware that her bladder had begun to empty itself, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t think.

Even now she could see what appeared to be muddy green scales boiling out from his bleeding chest like scabs forming on fast-forward. He stood on the shattered remains of what had been his hind hooves, the walls of which had split apart like the shell of a crushed walnut to give form to something more predatory. She watched as the sections of what used to be his front hooves flexed and clutched at the empty air, vainly searching for something to hold onto.

“Away,” he moaned. “Twilight, away, away… please, away.”

His knees bent and he clutched a loose bag of red-coated skin as it split and sagged from his face like the flesh off a bruised tomato.

Tears stung at her eyes as she took one trembling step back, then another. The sound of Big Mac sobbing into the hemorrhaging palms of his new hands skittered its way into her ears and seared itself into her brain like a physical thing.

There wasn’t a spell for this. There wasn’t anything for this.

Her hoof pressed down on a wet chunk of shelf, slipped off and splashed into the fetid carpet below. Big Mac’s head whipped up from his hands like a gunshot. Without warning he charged forward, sending a curtain of matter splashing toward her. He stopped barely a wing’s length away from her and bellowed the only word he remembered.

“Away!”

Balling his fists together he slammed them into the floor, bringing the gruesome carnival mask of his deforming skull within inches of her. The sobbing hitch in his monstrous voice caused her own throat to catch.

“AWAY!”

On trembling legs she did as she was told, stumbling through the scattered debris until she reached the stairs. He stalked after her every step of the way to ensure she didn’t stop. Halfway up the stone steps, she hesitated and was punished by the sight of Big Mac forcing his shoulders into the narrow corridor in an attempt to herd her the rest of the way up.

He couldn’t fit. Even now, the effort it took to squeeze whatever he had become over the first step sheared away the last of his old flesh. She tried again to harness her magic, to teleport herself away, but the headache and Big Mac only grew more furious.

Covered in matter that she knew hadn’t all come from the sprinklers, she forced herself to ascend the last of the steps until she stood at the unimposing wooden door to the great library of her ministry. He couldn’t follow. He was trapped, bent into something that she couldn’t explain.

He stared after her with a terrible sadness, and she knew they had come to the same conclusion. Big Mac was gone.

And the creature he had become could never be allowed to leave.

“Okay, I think I got it this time.”

“Aurora…”

“I’m serious! Just hold on.” She hopped out of the locomotive’s cab, billowing her wings to soften the landing.

The passenger cars further down the tracks had offered little by way of useful supplies, though Ginger had insisted Aurora let her stow a bottle of crafting adhesive she’d found in a dead mare’s sewing case. Apparently the stuff had some value with weapons traders back in Junction City. She wasn’t about to argue the trading power of glue, and it did go a long way to explain the shoddy quality of the weapons the slavers had used. Every day spent in the wasteland gave her a new reason to be thankful for taking the overmare’s rifle when she did.

Ginger waited with patient amusement as Aurora gestured to the broad side of the hulking black machine.

“You just need to start out here to make sense of it,” she said, framing the attached coal car between her feathers. “Okay. Coal goes there.”

“Coal goes there,” Ginger repeated with a tired chuckle.

She slid the tip of her wing to the narrow platform connecting the coal car to the cab of the locomotive. “Someone shovels the coal from there into the fire… pit? Box. Okay, now come up here with me.”

She hurried back up the steps into the cab before Ginger could protest. Once they were both inside, Aurora aimed a hoof toward the rounded bulkhead in front of them. It loomed like the firing cap of a giant bullet festooned with a myriad of pipes, valves, levers and gauges. At the center of the bulkhead, just above the floor plates, a pair of thick sooty doors sat open.

Aurora directed Ginger to the hatch and continued her harried lecture. “Fire burns in here and the heated air gets plumbed through the boiler up front. Hot air heats the water tank, water turns to steam and builds up pressure.” She tapped the largest of the gauges where the needle rested against its backstop. “Pressure drives the pistons at the front, pistons push the drive shafts, and those turn the wheels. Boom, you’re moving!”

She waited for the same realization to hit Ginger, but she stared back with a tired smile that told her she’d gotten lost somewhere along the way again. Aurora let out a frustrated sigh as she tried to think of an easier way to explain it.

“I am trying to understand,” Ginger offered. “Really.”

She frowned at the maze of plumbing and levers and forced a smile. “I know you are.”

Ginger reached out with her magic, grasping one of the slender iron handles attached to one of the many mechanisms buried beneath the floor. She gave it a gentle tug and it clunked into a new position. “You told me they showed trains like these in those western movies you watched. What makes this one special?”

Seeing her tinkering with the lever made Aurora’s smile feel a little less forced. It was like watching someone experiment with a family recipe for the first time. “It’s hard to explain.”

“I can tell. Try again.”

She smirked and stepped toward the bulkhead, placing her feathers against the cool metal. “Being here… I don’t know. It’s different. I mean, for the longest time machines like these were the pinnacle of technology. Ponies were still using water wheels in some places back when these boilers were hot. Think about how driven ponies had to be to think something like this would even work, let alone build one.” She set her hoof on a levered plate mounted to the floor and pressed down. The double doors to the firebox clapped shut and her smile grew. “The principles behind it are so simple. Light a fire, boil some water and channel the steam. You don’t have to know what all the peripheral stuff is for to understand how a steam engine works.”

Aurora wrapped her wing around a cherry red lever, closed the grip and pulled it toward herself. A low, rusty squeak echoed within the firebox in answer.

“I have no idea what that did, but one time someone did. Someone had to figure all of this out before any of it could work, and they designed it into one interconnected system. How much airflow does a fire need to burn efficiently? How much fuel is too much? What are the pressure tolerances on the boiler? How do coal, fire and steam interact if you need to adjust your speed, or go up an incline? Not to mention the buildup of soot!”

She looked back to Ginger who offered a confused, albeit charitable smile in return. “I lost you again, didn’t I?”

“It was a valiant effort.” She gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder and turned her eyes to the strange engine. “The only machinery I’ve had to operate was the sewing machine back at the shop. And, if I’m being completely honest, I hated that miserable thing. The pedal was torture on my hooves.”

“Yeah.” She nodded and dropped her wing from the lever. “I just… I like this stuff. And when you said you wanted to come back to the Stable when we’re done and see what I do, I don’t know. I’ve never had that before.”

Aurora blew out a resigned breath as she accepted the reality that it would take more than a ten minute tour to get Ginger excited about the mechanical ruins that had been a part of the Equestrian backdrop for generations. Like it or not, there was no way around the fact that their relationship was still young. In a twisted way, fate had done them a kindness by throwing Autumn Song into their path. That experience had formed the foundation of what they were building on now, but it was hard not to feel like she was at a disadvantage being unable to show Ginger pieces of her own life.

She felt a pleasant rush of warmth up her neck when Ginger pecked her on the cheek. “You’re adorable.”

Aurora wrinkled her nose in mock protest. “Those charges will never stick.”

“We’ll see.” She hooked her hoof around Aurora’s wing and gave her a gentle tug. “Speaking of which, it looks like Roach finished giving our little stalker a piece of his mind. Ready for more walking?”

Aurora let out a tired groan as she let Ginger lead her back to the steps. “The minute her wing gets better, we’re flying the rest of the way. My hooves are ready to fall off.”

“I think that depends more on whether Roach trusts her to carry him. Celestia knows you’re not going to let her carry me.”

Just the thought of it sent Aurora’s hackles bending skyward.

“Easy,” Ginger chided, lifting a hoof toward Roach as he and Julip trotted down the last few yards of track toward them. “Find anything?”

Roach offered a noncommittal shrug as the two descended the locomotive, his pale eyes scanned the machinery for any signs that Aurora might have actually gotten the thing started. “Just some energy bars I wouldn’t trust unless we’re already starving. Nothing we can use.”

“Any water?” Aurora hadn’t wanted to ask, knowing what the answer would likely be, but the Rad-Away she and Ginger had taken after leaving Kiln had pushed hydration to the top of her list of her concerns.

“Nothing,” he said, nodding toward the ledge. “If I had to guess, the dining car is somewhere at the bottom of the ravine. I doubt we’d find anything potable down there.”

“Great.” Her throat was already feeling tacky, and swallowing only served to remind her that she was getting thirsty. According to her Pip-Buck, the next notable landmark on their eastward journey were the suburbs surrounding Fillydelphia. There was no telling what condition they would be in once they cleared the mountains, or whether they would even be safe to enter let alone search for water. Pushing on would be a risk, but so was this entire trip. Flying all the way back to Kiln to top off their one remaining canteen would only expose her to more radiation, requiring another dose of Rad-Away and erase any gains by dehydrating her all over again.

Backtracking would cost her more water than she could carry, and then there was the issue of leaving Julip with Roach and Ginger alone. The only way forward was, well, forward.

She glanced at the canvas satchel hanging around Julip’s neck. It bulged at the bottom with whatever supplies the Enclave had given her. If she had water with her, Roach might know. He hadn’t let her leave his sight since she literally dropped into camp.

“Hey, Roach? Can we ta-”

“Halt, scallywags!”

The four of them spun around to level two weapons and a lit horn at the sudden intruder. A curtain of Ginger’s magic slid soundlessly across the rails, startling a surprised curse out of Julip.

The rails beyond the derelict train bent uphill and out of sight, following the steady curve of the mountains as they climbed skyward. Standing at the top of the bend was a pony too small to be full-grown. Aurora squinted through the shield, trying to make sense of what exactly she was seeing.

The pony, or rather the filly if her voice was any indication, wore a collection of dun-colored rags around her neck and what looked to be a genuine eyepatch over her eye. It was hard to be sure at this distance, but what had Aurora’s attention wasn’t her strange attire. It was the stubby curve of metal held aloft between the filly’s small feathers.

“Am… I the only one seeing this?”

Ginger’s shield began to fade. “If you’re referring to the tiny pirate foal waving a sword, then no. I see it too.”

“Be ye friend or be ye foe?” the filly shouted, giving her blade a threatening waggle.

Aurora glanced at Ginger. “Maybe we sh-”

“AHOY!” The gravelly burst of Roach’s voice startled a yelp out of her. He stepped forward, the confident smile on his lips suggesting he actually had some sort of grasp on whatever was happening right now. “We be friends to all except the bilge-sucking Enclave and their slaver ilk! And now I pose the same question to you. Be ye friend or be ye foe?”

Despite the distance, the sudden perk of her ears was impossible to miss. The strange filly bounced on her hooves, emitting an excited knicker at the realization that she’d found a playmate. She stowed her blade and half-ran, half-glided down the rails toward them. Once she was close enough to get a better look at them, she closed her wings and deftly trotted to a stop across the old wooden ties.

“I’m a friend, too!” Her hazel eye glittered with barely contained excitement. Then, hastily, she tried to imitate Roach’s deeper, ragged voice. “I mean, I be a friend! What’s your name?”

Aurora couldn’t help but chuckle. Beside her, Ginger appeared similarly charmed by the newcomer, but her eyes weren't on the filly. She was solely focused on Roach. Aurora looked to him and spotted the same expression her father used to wear when she was little enough to make up games for them to play in their compartment. There was an infectious warmth to it.

This was well-worn territory for him.

“On these seas they call me Roach. These hearties behind me are known as Aurora, Ginger and Julip,” he said with a hokey grin pulled straight from the cover of an adventure novel. “And who be ye?”

“I’m Captain Beans!” The little mare’s voice cracked with an unbridled cheer. “Mom, Dad and me are the mighty crew of the, um… well we didn’t name it yet. Dad’s always busy and Mom’s really bad at naming stuff but I have a whole bunch of…”

The filly, hardly out of her foalhood years, tumbled into a breathless ramble like a stone rolling downhill. Aurora’s ears twitched and spun backward as Julip’s hooves crunched forward across the stones.

“That’s a dustwing.”

Before she could take another step, Ginger reformed her shield inches from Julip’s muzzle.

“That’s a foal,” she hissed.

Aurora turned to see the Enclave mare staring down Captain Beans like a wolf sighting easy prey. The nib of one of Roach’s ears turned back toward them to listen, leaving Aurora and Ginger to stand between Julip and her newly acquired target.

Julip licked her lips as she did the math. Rather than test her luck, she took a single step back from the barrier.

Aurora’s eyes flicked to Ginger. She didn’t have to ask to know they were on the same page. Despite her purportedly peaceful intentions, Julip had been selected to represent Equestria’s most onerous juggernaut. She came with baggage. More than that, she had obligations to that baggage. By allowing Julip to see her, this filly had put herself in more danger than she could imagine.

Aurora faced Julip, keeping her voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry beyond the four of them.

“You don’t touch her. You don’t threaten her. Are we clear?”

Julip grit her teeth through the haze of Ginger’s magic. “She has a fucking sword.”

“I don’t care if she has a fucking bazooka,” she snapped back. “She’s a kid. If she takes a swing, we will deal with it. You stay back and forget you ever saw her.”

“But-”

“Julip, this is non-negotiable. I saved your life. I’d like to make it home without knowing I had to take it.”

She watched Julip stiffen, then glare at the rails with an intensity that made Aurora’s feathers tighten beneath the hooks of her rifle.

“Fine,” she said, and thumped the edge of her hoof against Ginger’s shield. A dim ring of light rippled out from her touch. “But we’re going to talk about this, after.”

Aurora looked to Ginger who appeared satisfied with the compromise. Behind her, Roach’s pirate-speak still occupied the entirety of the young dustwing’s world.

She relaxed before turning around to whisper to him. “We should get going.”

“Working on it,” he rumbled back, the bright pinpoints of his otherwise featureless eyes flicking briefly to the frustrated mare behind them. Then, to their blade-bearing visitor, “Alas, captain, my crew and I must continue our voyage. Time is precious and we mustn’t waste a minute of it. May we pass safely through your waters on our way east?”

Beans paused to unscramble his meaning before bobbing her head with a vigorous nod. “You shall, kind sailor! These seas be trench… treacher… dangerous, but you’ll be safe under my protection!”

Behind them, Julip groaned.

Aurora ignored her and let her wing fall away from her rifle. The weapon settled against her ribs with a reassuring weight. A week ago, she would have felt lost without her tools. Now she hardly had any of them left and, even more strangely, she was okay with that. The challenges of the Stable weren’t the challenges of the wasteland. Out here, she had different tools to work with.

As they walked, the rhythmic crunch and thud of stones and wood helped soothe some of her worry. Forward momentum. One more step toward their shared goal of fixing Stable 10, even if it meant enduring the presence of their Enclave “aide.”

Aurora and Ginger kept close to one another, mindful of the mare trailing them. Wherever this filly lived, Aurora hoped it was close by. She didn’t like the idea of running interference on Julip’s homicidal sense of duty any more than the prospect of walking off with someone’s kid.

Ginger bumped her shoulder and nodded at Roach. “He’s good at this.”

She watched him for a bit and nodded. “He certainly is.”

“Are you watching?”

Roach smiled. “I’m watching.”

Captain Beans balanced herself on the narrow rail and trotted forward two hooves at a time, her brown wings splayed out and waggling to keep herself from falling off. Flakes of rust crackled like puddle ice beneath her little hooves, coating her soles in ruddy orange powder. When one of her legs slipped onto the stones, she quickly recovered. For his part, Roach pretended not to notice.

He tried to remember how old Violet had been when pirates became the hip new thing at school. Ten, maybe eleven years old? Before the war, that much he was sure of. Beyond the southern border of Equestria, even further south than the hive, an author had written something of an unauthorized biography for a creature who had coined herself the pirate queen of that region. Captain Celaeno had carved out a significant amount of territory for herself in the southern deserts, though most ponies at the time argued there wasn’t much down there worth carving out in the first place. A few junk towns and a handful of smoke-belching airships an empire did not make.

To the princesses, it was just another potential nuisance to monitor. To the ponies of Equestria, the biography sparked a minor sensation that triggered new fads in everything from fashion, cinema and literature. For a good two years pirates were everything, though the seafaring sort of the old days garnered more favor than the skyfaring birds that inadvertently kicked off the trend.

Saffron had given him some much-needed guidance on how to handle a filly who had taken a sudden liking to brandishing an umbrella and mercilessly poking at her fathers when they didn’t acknowledge her authority as Captain Violet, Empress of the Celestial Sea.

The memory rushed back to him with vivid clarity. Violet bounding into the kitchen, sliding across the linoleum with Saffron’s good umbrella clenched between her teeth as she reenacted scenes from her favorite movie. There was always a dent in the oven door where she’d slid too fast and crashed into it. Saffron had wanted to buy a new one but became one of those things they never ended up getting around to.

He savored the bittersweet memory while Captain Beans hopped off the rail and hurried over to the other. The “sword” that hung by a braided length of nylon rope around her shoulder wasn’t a sword at all, but instead the cutting arm of a prewar paper slicer. The last time he’d seen one of those was when he’d accompanied Violet to school for parent-teacher conferences. The cast iron bar had a convenient loop shaped at the end for gripping, though the inset blade had since been removed. Likely by someone who had an interest in keeping Beans from accidentally lopping off one of her legs.

“Beans,” he said, drawing a curious look from the filly. “Do your mom and dad know you’re out here?”

She nodded as she stepped up onto the rail. “Yup. Well, kinda? Dad’s at work and Mom’s napping, but the ghoul alarm went off and we’re supposed to always check if that happens.”

“The ghoul alarm?”

Beans took a few steps down the rail, jumped off and started hopscotching from one wooden beam to the next. “The train, duh! Dad puts the mean ghouls in the train and locks them up so they can’t get out. Sometimes ponies come up from the valley and find it, and they gotta shoot the ghouls before they can look for treasure. Dad’s super smart like that.”

He looked to Aurora and Ginger. They both looked equally as uncomfortable with the realization they’d set off a trap without knowing it. It did explain why an untouched passenger train had made such poor scavenging. The ferals had been bait and they’d done the hard work of announcing their own presence. He began to wonder how many other ponies had heard this ghoul alarm of hers.

“So, Beans, is it just you and your parents up here?” Ginger asked.

She nodded again. “Uh huh! Mom says we’re safer alone cause there’s lots of bad ponies that want to hurt me and Dad.”

Roach didn’t have to look to know Julip was already enduring the heat of two sidelong glances.

Almost as an afterthought, Beans frowned back at Roach. “But you’re not bad, are you?” Her hazel eyes drifted behind him, first to Aurora, then Julip. Her frown disappeared. “You’re dusties, like me!”

“Yep,” he said, speaking before Julip had a chance to say anything she’d regret. “They’re both dustwings. And we’re all good ponies, but you should listen to your parents. Not all ponies are-”

“Don’t move!”

Roach’s eyes shot up from the filly to see a giant galloping down the tracks toward them. She was tall, what ponies used to refer to as princess-tall, and the contraption mounted over her right shoulder only made her furious approach all the more disquieting. She had a protective momentum that screamed angry mother. Enclave, cannibals and balefire be damned. None of that held a candle to what was barrelling toward them.

The four of them stopped. Roach looked to Aurora who, thankfully, was raising her wing away from rather than toward her rifle. Meanwhile, Beans looked between Roach and the approaching mare with cheeks reddening from embarrassment.

“Mooom!” she complained.

Her mother ignored her, kicking up a hail of stones as she positioned herself between Roach and her daughter. She had the same hazel eyes as Beans and a stripe of cream that ran from her mane down to her flared nostrils. The rest of her chestnut coat glistened with the understandable fear of a parent who had caught her child being accompanied by four unknown strangers.

“Beans, stay behind me,” she instructed.

The contraption rigged onto the ridge of her shoulder was unmistakably a weapon, and a completely foreign one at that. It looked like a cross between a gatling gun and a carriage muffler, and judging by the subtle dip of the earth pony’s shoulder, it weighed just as much. A thick post and ball joint secured the weapon to her barding via a pair of heavy leather straps. Near the end of the rifle, a worn bite trigger stood out on a smaller post barely an inch from her muzzle.

“All of you,” she said, her eyes on Roach. “Turn around and go back the way you came.”

The barrel of her rifle loomed toward him, the diameter of its bore belying the ridiculous size of its ammunition. There was no doubt in his mind she would bite that trigger if they didn’t listen.

“Mom, you’re not listening!” Beans whined behind her. “They’re friends! Two of them’s got wings like me and dad!”

The mare narrowed her eyes at Aurora and Julip, daring them to move. “Wings aren’t what make a pegasus a dustwing. You know better.”

“But they were being nice to me!”

She eyed them a bit longer before turning back to Roach. “How many of you are there?”

“It’s just the four of us.”

“Why are you here?” Her rifle swiveled on its post as she indicated the tracks, the ball joint creaking.

“We’re trying to get to Fillydelphia,” he said.

“There’s a perfectly good road that will take you there a few miles south of here. Go find it.”

“It’s not safe,” Aurora piped up, drawing her attention.

The mare looked at her as if she’d said the most obvious thing in the world. Probably because she had. “You’re definitely not a dustwing if you think…”

She stopped talking and frowned at her foreleg. “Where’d you get that?”

Roach risked following the mare’s eyes to Aurora, and the scuffed and battered device clamped above her hoof. He saw the flash of fear pass over her as she realized her Pip-Buck had drawn the attention of another stranger. It had been several days since she’d even spoken about the night Cider ambushed her, and it was clear on her face that she hadn’t forgotten.

“It’s not for sale.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to buy it.” Then she blinked and her expression grew more inquisitive. “You’re the Stable mare from the radio, aren’t you?”

Aurora’s eyes went wide. “Um.”

The mare looked to Ginger, the barrel of her rifle squeaking toward the unicorn. “And you’re that Dressage mare. I heard about the two of you on Hightower.”

Roach glanced at Beans, then her mother. She had a devil of a poker face and he couldn’t tell whether it was good or bad that she recognized Aurora and Ginger.

“Is that fused to your leg, or can you take it off?” she asked, pointing a hoof at Roach’s shotgun.

Carefully, he turned his leg to show her the buckles that kept the rail tight against his carapace. She eyed his weapon, then looked thoughtfully to Aurora’s rifle. “I can understand why you might want to avoid the road. The ponies working for F&F Mercantile were making good caps and now they aren’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them weren’t looking to even the score.”

She looked back at Beans and seemed to relax slightly. “If you give me your weapons, I’ll let you follow the tracks the rest of the way to Fillydelphia. You can have them back once you’re far enough from our home.”

“That’s insane,” Julip blurted.

The mare frowned at her but said nothing. She waited until, slowly, Roach lifted his foreleg and began undoing the straps with his teeth.

This wasn’t a situation where they had a choice. Not a real one. Beans’ mother wasn’t going to let them anywhere near her daughter while they were still armed. No reasonable parent would. They could turn around and make their way back the way they came, hoping to find a path back to the road, but he didn’t think that offer was truly on the table.

Were he in her situation, presented with four strangers who knew the area his family was hiding in and who stood to make a lot of caps by turning them into the Enclave, he wouldn’t let them walk away with that knowledge. Not very far, at least.

Behind him, Aurora’s rifle clacked against the stones. His shotgun swung loose from his hoof, dangling from his teeth by the final strap. None of this was ideal, but he didn’t care to find out what kind of stopping power the mare’s weapon packed.

He pitched his shotgun onto the stones and stepped back.

She breathed a visible sigh of relief and went to work gathering their weapons. As she did, Roach watched Julip to ensure she wouldn’t try to stop her. Ginger’s eyes hovered on her as well. The jade-feathered pegasus looked about as happy as a fly on a web.

A minute passed as the mare used her teeth to eject the round Roach kept chambered. It was an awkward process for an earth pony, one that Roach had typically performed with his tainted magic before he joined up with Aurora, but once his weapon was safe to handle she held it behind her for Beans to take.

“I repeat,” Julip murmured. “This is insane.”

“Hush.” Ginger shot her a harsh glare that was fringed with exhaustion. “Be glad she isn’t throwing you off a cliff instead.”

Roach glanced at the two mares and noted Julip’s brief flicker of indignation before it shifted into something closer to recognition. She shifted on her hooves, eyes momentarily on Ginger’s horn as she understood. Roach and Aurora might have given up their weapons, but Ginger hadn’t. A perk of not only being a unicorn, but of one that was still exploring the limits of her abilities.

“Honey, keep your feathers away from the trigger. It’s not a toy.” Her mother shrugged at the strap of Aurora’s rifle until the muzzle tilted skyward. She stepped toward the wall and tipped her head eastward. “You four will be walking ahead of me where I can see you. Once I’ve decided we’re far enough from our home, you can have your weapons back and we’ll part ways. Understood?”

They nodded. One by one, the four of them passed Beans, her mother and the ramshackle weapon she carried. Julip was quick to put as much distance between her and the strange mare, falling in beside Roach at the front without a word.

“Mom,” Beans whispered, her words muddled by the straps clenched in the gap behind her teeth. “You’re being really mean.”

“It’s not mean, it’s safe. It’s good to be safe, Jellybean.”

The filly gasped, grumping at the use of her nickname. Roach smirked and stole a glance over to Julip, who looked wholly unmoved. His smile faded.

“So,” the mare said.

Roach looked back to see her looking at him and Julip.

“Do you two have names?”

Julip rolled her eyes. “Do you?”

“That’s Julip,” Beans announced. Roach’s shotgun thumped against her knees even as she resumed dancing along the narrow beam of the rail. “She’s the grouchy one.”

Behind him, Aurora snorted. Julip flattened her ears and glared forward.

He offered a polite nod to the heavily armed mare. “Roach.”

“Meridian,” she said. “You’ve already met my daughter.”

“Captain Beans,” the filly clarified while snapping off her best salute.

“Yes, and Captain Beans nearly gave her mother a heart attack when she flew off without telling her first. You’re lucky these ponies were decent to you.” Meridian gave her words time to sink in before looking up to them. “Thank you for that, by the by. Not all ponies are kind to children.”

Roach pursed his lips, his thoughts drifting against his will to the scene they had uncovered in Gallow’s shed. The foal on the hook.

He closed his eyes, burying the memory. “No, they’re not.”

Ginger’s legs were on fire.

She assumed following a smooth railway would be better than the harsher rise and fall of the highway back in the bluffs but their slow, steady ascent was proving to be an altogether different form of torture. At least the road had dipped downhill once in a while. These damnable tracks just kept going up, up, up.

Then again, it wasn’t all bad. Between the murmur of conversation and the slow, rhythmic crunch of their hooves over the dry stones, the broiling pain in her thoroughly abused muscles was the only thing keeping her awake.

She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, trying to chase off her exhaustion. For the second night in a row, her sleep had been interrupted by… whatever those visions had been. She hesitated to call them dreams. Those had died with Princess Luna. Hallucinations, perhaps, stirred to life by the very exhaustion that beckoned her to lay down. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that they were awful.

She absently tracked the motion of Roach’s hooves, watching them tilt the stones they landed on before kicking off to the next. His perforated extremities had always been a source of quiet fascination for her. Now her interest betrayed her by lulling her to sleep.

Her eyes drifted shut.

Green flames licked at the fringes of her father’s-

She stumbled forward with a gasp and pitched into Roach’s hip, nearly toppling both of them in the process. Aurora must have been watching her because a curtain of ashen feathers braced her chest before she could go the rest of the way over.

Their procession ground to a stop.

“Mommy, she’s sick,” Beans complained.

Aurora plied at Ginger’s cheek until she reluctantly met her eyes. “Hey. Are you okay?”

“Just a little tired, dear.” Her practiced impression of Rarity crept into her voice quicker than she could stop. She bit the tip of her tongue behind closed lips. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Do you need us to stop? We can take a break.”

If they stopped, she would fall asleep again. She shook her head hard enough for a lock of her mane to swing down in front of her eye. “No,” she said, pulling the stray curl away. “I don’t want to sleep just yet.”

Lighting her horn, she gently pulled Aurora’s feathers away. She knew she was putting her in a hard spot. She needed to lay down. She needed sleep. Yet every time she closed her eyes that wriggling foal on her father’s desk grew more tangible. The syringe heavier. The flames hungrier.

“I have Rebound.”

She regarded Julip with exactly the amount of scorn her affiliations warranted, but the pegasus was too busy sifting through her ridiculous mailbag to receive the full force of Ginger’s disdain. In the short few seconds it took Julip to pull a battered flask into the daylight, the effort of maintaining her glare had already waned.

Aurora held out her wing to intercept the silver container. “And what is it, exactly?”

“It’s an illicit chem,” Ginger said, using her magic to ferry the flask out of Julip’s feathers and drop it back into her bag before Aurora could touch it. “A highly addictive one. I need rest, not party drugs.”

“What do you mean illicit, it’s barely worse than coffee!”

Ginger shot her a withering glare that made it clear she would brook no argument. When Julip rolled her eyes and looked away, she composed herself as best she could and turned to the towering mare behind them.

Her eyes lingered on the beastly weapon attached to her barding as she spoke. “Meridian, I understand we’re trespassing on your territory…”

Meridian nodded understanding. “But you want to trade.”

“If you have anything that might help, yes. If it’s not too much trouble.”

She looked them over, all of them, as she thought about it. As they waited, Ginger found herself wondering if it was possible for an earth pony to carry alicorn traits. Meridian wasn’t as slender as the princesses were usually depicted, nor was she particularly regal. Her body bore enough muscle to put Latch’s power armor to shame, something that must make it tolerable to carry such a cumbersome weapon.

No, she thought, Meridian had just come into this world... large. “Built like a brick shithouse,” as they used to say at the slave auctions. She pitied anyone who came between that mare and her daughter.

Meridian’s eyes eventually settled on Julip. Her brow drew together as her attention settled on the pegasi’s bare foreleg.

“Which Stable did you say you were from again?”

“I didn’t,” Julip said.

For a moment, Ginger forgot her exhaustion and the potential of trade. She went rigid, as did Aurora and Roach as they turned to stare at the Enclave mare.

She looked at them each in turn. “What? I’m not going to tell her which-”

“Julip and I came from Stable 10,” Aurora interrupted, regarding Julip with a tight smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “No sense in keeping it a secret when everybody already knows, right?”

Julip frowned. “Everybody?”

The realization bloomed in Julip’s eyes before they could think of something to say to knock the thought from her mind. In that moment, she knew they’d gotten involved with the Rangers somehow. Her expression hardened with something like worry.

Behind them, Meridian watched them with growing concern.

“Julip,” she said, drawing the mare’s attention before she had a chance to say anything regrettable. “Tell Meridian how you lost your Pip-Buck.”

It was a gamble, but they couldn’t risk letting this snowball. Aurora had managed to avoid suspicion because she carried a visible relic of her Stable on her foreleg. Fiona’s broadcasts had greased that wheel even further by making it easier for ponies like Meridian to identify her at a quick glance.

Julip didn’t have that luxury. It was clear by the way she carried herself that she didn’t understand how dustwings behaved. Ginger had done business with enough to know she wasn’t keeping an eye on the clouds from which Enclave hunters preferred to descend. She grabbed at everything with her wings, never once using her teeth like the earth ponies that dustwings pretended to be. And the more she talked, the more she sounded like a pony too confident in her own safety. Dustwings survived by minding their words and drawing as little attention to themselves as possible.

Julip’s open contempt screamed Enclave, and the matriarch that had taken a risk by escorting them across her territory was beginning to clue into those red flags.

“I didn’t lose it,” she said, standing a little straighter as she cobbled the lie together. “I sold it because we needed the money to eat. I don’t care what you say, I got a good deal on the thing. Two hundred caps got Aurora and I all the way to Kiln. That’s pretty fucking good for a beat up Model 3000.”

Ginger blinked surprised. She was actually pretending to be an idiot.

Meridian’s expression changed. “You sold a Pip-Buck for two hundred caps.”

Julip shrugged her wings with a little grin. “I could’ve gotten more if I wanted.”

“You could have gotten two thousand.” Meridian stared, trying and failing to understand how someone could get swindled so badly and still be so smug about it. Then she pointed a hoof directly at Aurora’s Pip-Buck. “Those things are worth their weight in gold.”

She shook her head at the clouds. “Two hundred. Good goddesses. That might be part of the reason Cider went looking for you. That stallion had a nose for easy caps.”

Aurora turned her eyes to the stones. “Yeah, that’s probably it.”

Ginger grimaced. This was starting to feel like playing buckball in a minefield.

“Continuing the topic of trade,” she prompted. “If you were to have any tea, or coffee, or anything that could get me through the next eight hours, I’d be more than happy to make a fair offer.”

Beans tugged down her eyepatch and excitedly patted her hoof against Meridian’s leg. “Mom, we have lots of stuff! We can share!”

She looked down at Beans and accepted that she’d been caught. She gently tousled the filly’s mane with the sole of her hoof and sighed. “I don’t drink caffeine, but my husband lives on the stuff. Though to be honest, it doesn’t look like the four of you have much to offer.” Her eyes went to Julip. “We don’t allow chems in our home.”

Julip scowled at the valley while Aurora shrugged out of her saddlebags to see what they had to work with. Her ears dropped as she moved a few of her remaining tools around and picked out a few of the dubious energy bars Roach had dropped into her bags.

“Oh, if those are from the train, don’t eat them.” Meridian said.

Aurora lifted an eyebrow at her.

“Briar soaks them in castor oil and repackages them. Helps motivate travelers not to come back.”

Beans let out a conspiratorial giggle. “They make you poop!”

“Oh. Great.” Aurora tipped her wing and let the bars fall onto the tracks. “Are you willing to trade for some tools?”

“Caps spend better.”

“They do if you have any.” Ginger watched as she briefly touched the cover of Teak’s journal before laying it back on top of the holotapes she’d taken from Quincy. “What about work? Need anything fixed?”

Meridian’s cannon creaked on its mount as she shook her head, dismissing the offer with a chuckle. “You’re in the wasteland, honey. Everything out here needs fixing.”

Ginger stood up a little straighter. “Then that means you must have work for her.”

“I might.” She gave Beans a gentle nudge with her hoof. Roach’s shotgun swung beneath her teeth as she grinned up at her mother. “But we’re going to have to hold onto your weapons until she’s done.”

She looked to Aurora, who shrugged and said, “It’s basically what we’re doing right now. Think you can walk a little longer?”

Ginger nodded and took a heavy step forward, urging Roach and Julip to lead the way.

She blinked with heavy lids, hoping it wouldn’t be much longer.

February 26th, 1076

Twilight sat in her darkened office. Her leg bounced nervously beneath her desk.

She’d shut her terminal off and shoved it to the side. She needed to think, and she couldn’t do that with her rapidly filling inbox staring her down. There had to be a way to fix him. And yet two weeks had gone by and she’d come up with nothing. Not a spell, not a charm, not even a rough concept of how she might undo whatever it was she’d managed to do.

It was like she was trapped in a nightmare that refused to end. It didn’t make sense. The spell was sound. The serum had worked. Maiden Pharmaceutical had already sent her a congratulatory letter citing the meticulous detail to the recipe she’d spent more than two years of her life designing and their preliminary tests with it had gone off without so much as a hiccup. She couldn’t figure it out. Seven days holed up in her office and she couldn't figure it out.

She bent over her desk and dragged a hoof across her damp cheek. She needed a shower. She needed sleep.

Applejack would never forgive her when she found out. If she found out. The thought made her breath hitch in her throat, threatening to devolve into another sob. She couldn’t decide what was worse. Telling one of her best friends that she’d turned her brother into a mindless, wailing monster or leave him buried beneath the ministries and deny Applejack closure.

Discord could probably tell her what went wrong, but she didn’t trust him not to dangle more hooks around her again just to see which one she’d bite. No, she was done giving him free therapy. Let him serve out the next ten centuries alone in a prison of his own making. She didn’t need to give him a reason to make this even worse.

Her phone rang, stoking the edges of a migraine she hadn’t been able to shake for days. At least her magic was on the mend. She lit her horn with a wince, lifted the phone and slapped it back into the receiver. Researchers within the Ministry of Magic were crawling up her ass about being locked out of the grand library, especially Starlight. For a mare who nearly froze herself to death thinking she could travel through time, she didn’t have the common decency to give Twilight one day to herself without calling her office for updates.

She needed her books. Not the ones in the grand library, where Big Mac’s moans echoed through the floor. The ones beneath it. The ones he’d spent the past two week tearing to shreds or dumping into the stinking muck that soaked her once beautiful rugs. Even if there was anything down there to be salvaged, he wouldn’t tolerate her presence long enough to let her find it. And yet, the problem remained.

She needed books.

Canterlot Library would have been an option had she not raided its shelves to fill her own. There was nothing of real value in Manehattan, Fillydelphia or Baltimare. Las Pegasus was steadily devolving into a gambling center and its public library was a joke. Cloudsdale exported its academic programs to the universities on the ground since they certainly couldn’t expect the non-flying population to attend where they couldn’t stand.

She blinked. Exporting.

The Crystal Empire had a library. A big one.

What time was it? She reached over and dragged her terminal toward her, flicked the power button and squinted against the harsh green light as it booted up. When it finished, its tiny clock indicated it was half past eight in the evening. If the library wasn’t closed yet, it would be soon. She hoped.

Her leg sped up its nervous bouncing. This was a bad idea. She didn’t even know what she was looking for, let alone if Cadance might have it on her shelves. Her stomach soured. Diplomacy wasn’t her strong suit, but she didn’t have to be Fluttershy to know how bad it could be for a foreign minister to be caught skulking over a closed border.

The phone rang again. She hung it up and took a deep breath.

Fuck it, she thought. I’ll be quick.

Her horn lit and her office vanished with a rush of displaced air. She appeared on the edge of a frozen lake north of Canterlot, one that she and the girls used to frequent during the summer months back when nobody knew it was here. She smiled at the memory and lit her horn again.

The night sky vanished and reappeared, cloudier than it had been before. She stood knee-deep in drifting snow, the temperature noticeably colder. In the distance she could hear the roar of Neighagra Falls. Pinkie had taken her here years ago as a surprise. She couldn’t remember what the occasion had been. There rarely ever had to be one for her.

The falls shrank away, replaced by a cabin. A light was on in the window and Twilight watched as a familiar stallion frowned from the seat of his rocking chair at the sudden flash. Bad memories here. She teleported away before her uncle could see her.

Jump by jump, she crossed the vast distance of Equestria’s great north in the time it took most ponies to buy a bottle of milk at the market. Her time as an Element of Harmony had given her countless memories to focus her spell on, like breadcrumbs leading her through the snow until she lit her horn and found herself standing within sight of the jewel of the Crystal Empire.

She would never admit it outloud, but the Crystal Castle made Canterlot look like a backwater kingdom by comparison. Even as the driving wind threw flecks of ice into her mane, she couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of a structure whose existence was owed entirely to the same magic that held some of the worst weather imaginable at bay.

One last time. She closed her eyes and focused on where she needed to go. If she miscalculated, if a crystal pony was standing in the wrong place or even if the furniture had been moved since the last time she was here…

Focus. She cast the spell, and the glittering panorama of crystalline architecture vanished.

When she reappeared, everything was exactly as she remembered it.

The castle library stretched in every direction. Books of every shape, size and design adorned slender mahogany boards set into the semi transparent mineral cases polished to a mirror-like shine. Royal purple carpeting covered every square inch of the floor, so soft against her soles that it felt like she was the first pony to stand on it. Glassy blue pillars stretched toward a vaulted ceiling adorned with glittering chandeliers, each one a work of art on its own and, to her relief, each one glowing with the dim half-light of a library past its closing hour.

It was magnificent as it was silent.

Long wooden tables stained to match the shelves surrounding them lay empty, their chairs pushed in, ink and quills stowed away until the doors were thrown open again tomorrow. Twilight felt her muzzle quirk at the memory of scratching notes from the tip of a feather. Nowadays everyone used ballpoint pens and pencils. She felt old.

Taking a breath through her nose, she found comfort in the scent of dusty books and weathered scrolls. If there was an answer left anywhere in the world that could help her, it had to be here. For Big Mac’s sake, it had to be here.

She walked the sections, reading the bright brass nameplates on each shelf until she found the rows for Magical Theory. Lighting the tip of her horn, she set to work.

It was slow going, and the hours passed like water through her feathers. The shelves dedicated to Starswirl’s works proved to be a disappointment. Transmutation had never been his speciality but she had hoped her idol might have some insights to offer. Reluctantly, she moved on to lesser known writers. Brighthoof, Fetlock, Hayber, Remedy… none of them wrote of a phenomenon that spontaneously turned ponies into monstrosities.

Books littered the carpet. Just one more. She would pick them up later, she told herself. Just one more.

The night sky outside the library windows began to lighten, and Twilight resorted to skimming indexes. She was tired. Angry. Tears stung at her eyes as she realized her time was almost up. That the ponies back at her ministry would be wondering why she wasn’t answering her door. It wasn’t fair that she had to sneak around like this, trying not to be heard while she rummaged through her old babysitter’s library in the vain hope that she might trip over the right passage.

She didn’t notice the chandeliers coming to their full glow. She didn’t hear the footsteps behind her. Sitting between the shelves, trying to keep it together even as she flipped through pages she could hardly read through angry tears, she didn’t know she’d been found until he spoke.

“Twilight?”

She looked up from the book splayed open in her lap and turned to see a face she hadn’t seen in years.

“Spike?”

He stood at the end of the row, his broad shoulders barely clearing the shelves. A silver key held between his scaled fingers reflected the shallow morning sunrise as it spilled through the east windows. That was right. Cadence had appointed him head of the royal library. There had been a ceremony.

His fingers and the key slid into the pockets of a hazelnut cardigan she’d never seen him wear before. He was careful to palm his claws to avoid damaging the cloth and stepped into the row, his docile face turned down to her. “You can’t be here.”

Twilight said nothing, afraid to speak. Unable to trust herself not to say the wrong thing and ruin whatever this was. He sighed, turning his eyes to the mess she’d made. She watched him bend down and pick up one of the books from the floor.

He scanned the cover. “Do I want to know?”

She took a shuddering breath and shook her head.

“Can you at least talk to me?”

The invitation was the last crack in a dam she’d been trying desperately to hold together. The shelves around them blurred and the first wracking sob lurched out of her chest, followed by another. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d missed him until he was standing in front of her, and suddenly all those years apart came crashing together at once.

It was too much. She selfishly wanted Spike to rush forward and hold her, to wring the tears out of her until she was spent, but her former assistant simply cleared a space for himself on the carpet beside her and wrapped one of his heavy arms around her shoulder. Something about the politeness of the gesture, as if he were fulfilling the bare minimum of an obligation, made the tears fall even faster.

She wanted to go back. To do it all over again, to fix whatever mistake that led them all into this awful existence. Undo the war, undo the ministries, undo whatever she did wrong to ruin Big Mac. Undo the decisions she’d made to ruin her friendships.

She wanted Spike to stop rubbing her shoulder and just hug her.

After a while the tears ran dry and her sobs subsided. A childish part of her wanted to keep crying, to punish herself for feeling even a sliver of relief for having gotten it out of her system. Then Spike took his hand away and she knew the moment was over.

She dried her eyes as best she could and stared at the mess of books that surrounded them with painful clarity.

“I screwed up,” she choked.

She watched Spike lift the open book out of her lap and begin dabbing the corner of his cardigan against the dampened pages. “Yeah,” he said, “this is definitely a ‘Twilight-needs-to-fix-a-problem-right-now’ sort of mess. How bad is it?”

“Really bad.”

She tried not to think about the sound of his mangled voice as he stalked her out of the library. The sight of his skin falling away from a body that had grown too big for it. The mindlessness of his attack when she’d tried coming back down the next day to see if he’d gotten better, and the realization that he’d gotten even worse.

“I hurt somebody. And I’m starting to think there isn’t a spell I can learn to undo it.”

Spike closed the book and held it up between his fingers. With a puff of dragonfire, the pages ignited and reappeared on the shelf she’d taken it down from. “Something tells me you’re not speaking figuratively.”

Twilight frowned at the shelf where the book now rested. “No, I’m not. How did you do that? I thought your magic was tied to Celestia.”

He picked up another book and shrugged. “Cadence broke the binding. Don’t change the subject. You hurt someone so badly that you had to break an international treaty just to pillage my library. The least you can do is tell me why.”

The book vanished within his flame. A green flash lit the row behind them as it found its home. Curiosity nagged at her to ask how it worked, but she could tell his patience with her was already wafer thin. She didn’t exactly blame him.

“I wrote a spell.” Slowly, she began gathering up the books around her and slid them toward Spike. “It took a couple years to finesse, and we had some problems with early testing, but this time it was perfect. I accounted for every variable, every stray digit in the math. I still think it works but…”

She was sharing too much. Equestria and the Crystal Empire weren’t enemies by any stretch of the imagination, but her brother and his wife had sealed the border for a reason. They wanted nothing to do with Equestria’s war with Vhanna. With all the killing they had done up until now, one failed experiment wouldn’t sway the Crystal Empire one way or the other.

But it would for Spike. Big Mac had been one of his closest friends. Still was, as far as he knew. If he caught so much of a whiff of what had actually happened and to who, he would demand to see him. He’d tell Applejack in the hopes that she could force Twilight’s hoof, uncaring of the damage it would do to their ministries at such a delicate time. Telling him would have the same disastrous result as casting balefire on Applejack’s talisman.

She blinked. Balefire.

The candle.

She swallowed. “I just thought I could find an answer here.”

Spike surveyed the floor around them and grunted. “No one can say you didn’t try.” With that, he got a foot under himself. His knees clicked as he stood. He held a hand down to her and helped her to her hooves, the two of them mindful not to step on any of the remaining books. “Twilight, we’ve known each other long enough that I think I can be brutally honest with you.”

He gestured to the half-empty shelves surrounding them. Her mind was reeling, swirling around the realization that it hadn’t been her spell. That candle. It had been that damned balefire.

“You never know when to stop.”

She frowned and looked up at him.

“Normally, it’s fine. You’re driven. That’s what I always liked about you. You’d see something wrong with the world and, bam, you needed to fix it. No questions asked. Well, a lot of questions actually. And lists. Still, being near that, even if it meant I was just finding books for you or making breakfast in the morning… it made me feel like I was a part of something greater than myself, you know?”

She nodded, unsure how he’d managed to make a criticism sound like a compliment.

“But you also have this tendency to make up problems just so you have something to focus your energy on. Like that time Rarity mentioned she’d run out of silk and you took it upon yourself to travel halfway across Equestria just to find her some rare, magically infused silkworms.”

Twilight frowned. “I don’t see how that was a bad thing.”

“I’m not saying it was.” He gathered a stack of books and began setting them on the shelves by hand. “But she ended up selling them because she would have never had the time to learn how to spin silk, and she always felt like she needed to stay stocked up after that so you wouldn’t find out. She needed to go shopping, and you saw it as an opportunity to go on an adventure.”

“I mean, I get it,” he said, his brow knitting together. “You’ve always been a natural with magic. You make things that should be impossible look easy because, for you, they are. And I think that’s why you lose sight of the important things sometimes. Every little problem you can’t solve turns into the biggest problem in the world when it doesn’t need to be.”

He reached out and clasped his hands around the books she’d levitated into a neat stack. Gently, he pulled them free of her aura and started putting them away.

“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you have to. You can always say no.”

She watched him and noticed how, despite having freer reign of his own fire, he still seemed to enjoy the tactile sensation of the old bindings between his fingers. Maybe that was the point.

“I miss you, Spike.”

His scaled lips twitched into a melancholy smile. “I miss you too, Twilight. But you need to leave before someone walks in and sees you. We don’t close public buildings on Sundays like they do in Equestria, and I’d really like to keep this job.”

She pinched her lips together and nodded, knowing in some small corner of her mind that this was a problem without a solution. If balefire had been the catalyst behind Big Mac’s change, it would explain a lot. It would mean Discord had been truthful to some degree. That balefire was an entropic force that burned through magic like gasoline.

The M.A.S.T. explosion, Big Mac, the lapse in her ability to teleport out of the library… and at the core of it all, balefire.

“I should be getting back, anyway.” A book tumbled out of Spike’s hand as she wrapped her wings around him. He was nearly as tall as she was, no longer the tiny dragon standing on his tiptoes to get his arms up to her shoulders. For a long moment she rested her chin against his soft cardigan and sighed relief as she felt his palms settle against the back of her neck. “I’m sorry you had to leave Equestria.”

“Don’t be. I chose to leave.” He pulled away sooner than she wanted. With a pinched expression, he shoved his hands back into his pockets and stepped back. “I hope you find something that will help your friend.”

She wiped the corners of her eyes with the ridge of her wing and shook her head.

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do to help him that wouldn’t make it even worse.” Lavender light wrapped the length of her horn as she prepared to depart, knowing the truth of her words even before she spoke them. “It’s like you said. I need to know when to stop.”

“Beans, stop!”

“Captain Beans!” she shouted over her shoulder, and fell into a fit of giggles as she raced across the last few yards of track. With a puff from her wings, she jumped over the rail and landed at the entrance of her home, spraying stones behind her as she came to a halt. “First! I win!”

Her mom trotted close behind, leading their four new friends with a stern frown that told her she probably should have listened the first time. At least it wasn’t her real mad face. Beans had only made her mom really angry a few times. The last time had been when she saw a flock of ponies flying over the valley below and tried to wave them over to say hello.

Her mom got so mad that she almost cried. She made her wait until bedtime before she and dad told her about the bad ponies who would always be looking for them. Beans hadn’t known they were hiding until then. Now whenever she saw ponies in the sky, she got low like her dad taught her and waited for them to be gone.

But she was older, now. When the next winter came and went, she would be ten years old. Double-digits. She was practically a grown-up and wasn’t afraid of no On-Caves.

“Your father and I are going to have a talk with you tonight about listening,” her mom said, and pointed to the granite wall behind her. “Now go inside and put your costume away, captain.”

She groaned at the thought of going back to regular old Beans, but she knew if she pushed her luck she might not see her sword or eyepatch for a super long time. She looked over to Roach and wondered what kind of costumes he had at home. He probably didn’t even need one. He already looked extra scary and did a better pirate voice than the ponies on her holotape player. Maybe if she was good, her mom would let them play pirates again before they had to leave.

“Hey, Roach!”

He was already looking at what she wanted to show him with those big flashlight-eyes. So were his friends. But they wouldn’t know how cool it was until she showed them how it worked.

“Watch this!”

Spinning on her hooves, she grabbed a clump of grey netting hanging against the dusty stone and threw as high as she could over her head. The momentary gap lasted long enough for her to zip into the cave on the other side and turn around in time for the net to drop back to the ground between them.

“Ta-da! I’m invisible!”

Roach and his friends exchanged looks while her mother hooked her hoof around the far side of the net and pulled it away from the stone. “But they can still hear you. Wipe your hooves and go sit by the hearth. Then you can show me the safe way to start a fire.”

They followed Meridian toward what appeared to be a recently dug cave.

The fabric net had been knitted out of braided strands of thick, monochromatic yarns that camouflaged the entrance better than it had any right to. Unequal gaps in the weave allowed for ventilation while adding to the illusion of jagged stones casting shadows over themselves during the daylight hour. Up close it was easy to pick out, but Aurora could see how at even a moderate distance it would blend seamlessly into the stone wall.

“Leave your bags by the wall and sit on the rail.” Meridian blocked their way, waiting for them to comply. After a moment’s hesitation Aurora and Julip obliged and stepped back, joining Ginger and Roach on the rusted iron with an air of uncertainty.

Seeing their tension, Meridian held up a placating hoof. “I’ll put on a kettle and bring you your project in a minute. Just stay there and… don’t try anything to screw me.”

They remained seated while the earth pony vanished behind the netting. For the first several minutes the four of them stayed on guard for any hint of danger. Ears forward, eyes straining to see through the larger gaps in the weatherworn weave, they waited for the other hoof to drop. To Aurora’s relief, it didn’t.

She listened to the murmur of Meridian’s voice as she gave Beans instructions. Somewhere inside, a door clapped shut with the strike of wood on wood. She heard Beans apologize and hooves beat a short run over what sounded like loose planks and fabric. Then the noise fell below her hearing, and a wisp of grey smoke slid out from the topmost edge of the net. Aurora leaned forward and squinted, and the others eventually saw it too. A section of pipe fixed to the roof of the cave directed the smoke out to be dispersed by the steady mountain breeze.

“Seems a little dangerous,” Ginger mumbled, her cheek pushed up by the flat of her hoof as she struggled to keep her eyes open. “Starting a fire in a cave.”

“Something tells me they don’t have any better options,” Aurora said. “How’re you holding up?”

Ginger grunted. “My legs feel like hot rubber and my brain is made of pudding.”

She wrapped a wing around Ginger’s shoulder and gave her a gentle shake. “Wakey-wakey.”

“Mm. Trying.” Her head bumped against Aurora’s shoulder and stayed there. “Don’t let me fall asleep.”

The only thing Ginger needed right now was sleep. Aurora looked to her right where Roach had planted himself and gave him a questioning look. He shrugged, offering no answer for what was troubling Ginger. Further down the rail, Julip pointed a feather toward their bags and made a face that asked what gives?

She frowned at Julip and shook her head, forming the word no with her lips. If Ginger didn’t trust whatever Rebound was, she wasn’t going to push her into taking it.

Gradually, Ginger sagged against the bowl of her wing as she dozed off. Aurora made some adjustments to her grip on the sleeping unicorn and whispered at Roach.

“I thought she slept pretty good last night?”

He made a face that made it clear she was wrong. “You slept through it. She was up and down right until the centaurs showed up. Couldn’t settle down.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He pursed his lips and winced. “She told me not to. Didn’t want to worry you.”

Aurora closed her eyes and tried not to be angry with either of them. It was hard work. “And earlier, while you two were keeping watch?”

“Pretty sure she was awake the whole time.”

“She hasn’t…”

She stopped before her voice had a chance to rise. With her free wing she pinched the bridge of her muzzle and tried to think of a cause. She snorted a quiet laugh. What hadn’t happened? They’d been ambushed by half melted horrors, killed an encampment of slavers while they were still sobering up from cheap liquor, seen the work of an actual cannibal in such detail that Aurora could barely shoot him when the time came and had been forced to leave Blinder’s Bluff under the threat of her Stable being cut open like a tin can should she disobey a high-ranking officer of one of Equestria’s two superpowers.

Celestia’s teats, she thought. If anyone should be losing sleep, it’s me.

Against her better judgment, she did the math.

Three days, give or take. The last time Ginger had a full night’s sleep was three days ago, right before their unfortunate meeting with Coldbrook.

She blew out a long breath and closed her eyes. “Maybe Meridian will let us camp here for a few hours while she rests.”

“Uh, Aurora?”

“Yeah?”

“We might want to move that up the timetable.”

Confused, she opened her eyes and turned to look at him. She got halfway before she saw it.

Ginger’s dome surrounded them, thrumming with unfiltered energy and painting the mountain outside a shimmering bronze. Its edges sank into the stones, forcing them up where they could shift away and gradually pulverizing them where they couldn’t. Rust trickled off the rails in a fine powder where her shield had fallen over the steel lines. As the unyielding pressure of Ginger’s magic bore down on the tracks, the rust began burning off. Slowly, the metal changed color, first blackening and then glowing cherry red as heat built up within the steel.

Julip let out a shout. Aurora looked to Ginger and her eyes went wide. Her horn had lit up like it had back at the holding tank, her face a twitching mask of fear behind still sleeping eyes.

“Ginger.” She sat up straighter, pulling the dozing unicorn off her shoulder in an attempt to wake her. She didn’t stir. Aurora gave her a harder shake, her heart climbing up her throat. “Ginger.”

Behind her, Julip hucked a wingful of rocks at them hard enough to hurt. “Holy shit, Roach get up and help me!”

Aurora cursed as a stone pelted her hip and she looked away from Ginger to see Roach already scrambling to his hooves to help the panicking mare. The dome had crossed the rails barely a foot from where Julip sat, trapping her tail against the rocks and forcing her to scramble to her hooves as best she could manage while the rail beneath her began to cook. The cramped edge of the bubble gave her hardly any room to work with, forcing her to turn sideways with the rail running between her legs and dangerously close to her belly. The glowing metal radiated like an oven stuck on broil, forcing a fearful whimper from her throat as her skin grew hot.

Frantically, Aurora brought her muzzle to Ginger’s ear and shouted for her to wake up, but save for the unsettling motion of her eyes shuddering behind closed lids, she didn’t flinch.

“Cut it!” Julip screamed, her eyes wide as dinnerplates as she bore down against her own tail. “Cut it off!”

“I don’t have anything to cut it with!”

She beat her hooves against the rocks, the heat causing her to shake uncontrollably. “RIP IT OUT!”

Aurora didn’t know what to do. She could hear Meridian shouting from the mouth of her cave. Her Pip-Buck hissed. At the same time she heard the unmistakable rending of hair as Roach used his poisoned magic to rip Julip away from the baking steel.

Through it all Ginger slept, and the confines of her dome grew hot.

“And where do you think you’ll go?”

“Anywhere but here!” she snapped, jamming the family first-aid kit flat into the bottom of her saddlebags. They’d been a gift from one of the many suitors her father had invited to the house. She didn’t remember which one. Didn’t care.

Three years. Three years she’d been sitting on the memory of that foal he made her kill. For three years, Hickory and his wife thought her family sold it off to be raised by one of the neighboring homes. And then yesterday, Thistle cornered her and asked for the truth and Ginger had been too startled to lie. So she told the truth.

The noise Thistle made would stay with her like a brand.

“What do you think is out there, Ginny? Verdant fields and white picket fences?” Her father stepped fully into her bedroom doorway. “It is called a wasteland for a reason. There is nothing out there but death and violence. Is that what you want for yourself? A short life and a painful death at the hooves of some nameless mud?”

Ginger pressed the decorative wooden box of caps next to the first-aid kit and carefully secured the false bottom across them. She knew from listening to the slaves that it rarely worked against a proper bandit, that they knew to check for compartments, but it couldn’t hurt to try. Over the false bottom went a change of clothes and a serrated knife she’d taken from the kitchen when the servants weren’t looking.

“Don’t ignore me, Ginger. I’m your father.”

Bitter tears ran down her cheeks as she laughed. “Oh, don’t even! You cashed that chip when you made me…” Her voice caught in her throat. She couldn’t say it. Even now, she was too afraid to say it out loud.

“You stained me.”

She lit her horn and tied the flap down by its delicately braided straps. She gave the knot a hard tug, jerking her head in a futile effort to put more force behind the motion. Several long strands of her mane fell into her vision as she spun the saddlebags around to check the other knot.

“I stained you.” Her ears went flat as she heard the scorn in his voice. “This house has rules. Rules that I didn’t think you, of all ponies, needed to be reminded of. You know what happens when they start to think they have influence over you. They will use you in any way they can in order to escape their responsibilities. You’re old enough to remember what happened to the Wiselucks. Do you want to risk putting your family through that kind of hardship over one mud’s foal?”

She rounded on him. “You are not my family, and if Rarity were alive she would be disgusted with us!”

Tongues of green flame curled over his eyebrows and spread to the ridge of his mane. She blinked in confusion at the sight of her armoire beside him blackening as the same fire consumed it, lighting the wallpaper behind it like a torch.

Someone should do something about that, she thought.

“For goddesses’ sake, of all the unicorns you chose to fantasize over....”

Ginger ignored him and hefted her bags over the obscene mark her father’s beloved goddesses saw fit to burn into her flank. “I didn’t think I needed your blessing to respect an Element of Harmony. Now move. The sooner I’m gone, the sooner you can stop worrying about your daughter respecting someone with higher morals than you.”

Her father didn’t budge from the door. He stared down at her, his jaw cemented shut with rising anger. The curtains over her picture window began to smoke.

No. I don’t want to remember this.

She crossed her bedroom toward him, filled with a righteous indignation that had made her feel immortal. Her father towered over her like a stone, refusing to move.

“Take those bags off and you’re welcome to go wherever you like, but I will not have my daughter running off to her death over a temper tantrum.”

Don’t say it. You don’t have to say it.

“Why not?” she hissed. “Don’t you have a spare?”

He surprised her by stepping over the threshold of her bedroom, forcing her to take two steps back in turn. The flames were crawling down his mane, sending roots down his ribs as his coat boiled away.

“Watch your mouth.”

She moved to step around him. He reached out to block her but she slapped his hoof away. “Don’t touch me.”

His magic wrapped the crystal knob on her door and yanked it. The brightly painted wood slapped into the jamb barely an inch from her nose. Startled, she grabbed the knob with her own magic and plied clockwise until his grip finally relented. She shoved the door back open. Behind her, the room burned.

Stop.

“Ginger, I won’t warn you again.”

She pretended not to hear him and took a step into the hallway.

Her tail caught on something, and for a moment she was confused. Then her father wrenched back on it hard enough for her legs to stiffen and slide out from under her. Her chin contacted the polished floorboards hard enough that her gums would bleed for the next two days.

Behind her, her father was in a fury. He dug his hoof under the strap of her saddlebags and pulled hard. “Take these ridiculous things off.”

Just stop.

“Let GO of me!” Her mouth tasted like old bottle caps as she rolled onto her back to protect her bags. He reached for her. She wasn’t sure why. All she knew was that fury in his eyes was the realest emotion she’d ever seen in him before. Instinct took over and she kicked, hard.

Her hooves struck at an angle, glancing off his burning ribs and spoiling the brunt of the impact. He stared at her, his dark mane spilling over his face as he realized what she had tried to do. In that brief moment, she was no daughter of his. She was just another mud who had made the mistake of striking out at her master. His eyes lit up like a furnace.

Ginger braced herself for what she knew would come next. The beating that would serve as her father’s final farewell, leaving her face swollen and bloodied in a final attempt to leave her too ashamed to leave his house. His hooves would fall on her like hammers while her mother and sister hid silently in their rooms, listening to it happen.

She shut her eyes and waited for the first blow. And kept waiting.

She cracked one eye open, then the other.

The burning room shimmered with bronze magic. Her magic, she realized. Her father still stood over her, beating against the dome with his hooves in a frustrated attempt to reach her. He shouted at her, his mouth forming shapes that didn’t match the words she couldn’t understand. For what felt like minutes she lay there, disoriented by the incongruity. The little bubble that kept her safe rippled with every impact, but it felt larger than what she was seeing.

She wasn’t alone. Somehow, she knew there were other ponies with her. Ponies who needed to be protected, too. She grit her teeth and poured more magic into the shield to keep her enraged father at bay.

She tried to think of her future. Of her first terrified steps outside New Canterlot. Crossing the border into Steel Ranger territory, afraid that any one of them might recognize her and drag her back home. The raider ambush and the changeling ghoul who would save her life. Her shop and the pegasus who he would bring to meet her years later.

“This door shouldn’t be here.”

The voice came from everywhere, sharp and clear as if she were listening to a bell from the inside. Her shield faltered but she rebuilt it as quickly as it faded, pressing her father back out of reach.

“Oh.”

Oh?

Ginger strained to keep the spell intact as she bent her neck to the only door in the room. What she saw nearly caused her shield to collapse a second time. In the corner of her vision, a midnight-blue mare stood over the threshold. A mane filled with stars wafted and coiled around the doorframe.

The mare’s tired eyes passed across the inferno consuming Ginger’s foalhood bedroom and frowned.

“You mustn’t dwell on bad memories, little shade,” she said. “It is better to pass over to what lies ahead. Let me help.”

Before Ginger could speak, the mare lit her horn and the dream fell apart.

She lurched against Aurora’s wings with a shout as she dropped out of one strange reality and into another. A rush of relief swept through her horn like a cramp finally releasing its grip. Her throat stuck to itself as she tried to swallow, dried out by a pall of stiflingly hot air that began to dissipate as the dome of her shield melted away.

“You’re awake!”

Her shoulders were sore where Aurora’s feathers tightly clutched them, the mare’s face full of worry as she yanked her into a crushing hug. Confused, she returned the embrace while watching Roach hurry after Julip as she staggered away barking a litany of obscenities. From the cave, Meridian stood outside the netting with an expression masked with confusion and mistrust. Beans hid beneath the drape of her mother’s tail, watching Ginger with wide eyes.

The steel rails clicked and pinged as they cooled. It wasn’t difficult to tell that something had happened while she was asleep. When Aurora finally let her go, Ginger’s hooves came back damp.

“You’re soaked.”

“Look who’s talking. Are you okay?”

It took her a moment to realize she was right. Her short-cropped mane clung to the back of her neck like a mop. She looked down at her legs to see the slick sheen of sweat coating them. She felt as if she’d sprinted a good five laps around Junction City in her sleep.

What was happening to her? Her father, her burning bedroom, the appearance of a dark mare who up until now she’d only seen in photos taken before the bombs fell. It had all felt real.

“Aurora,” she said, frowning at the deep ring cut into the stones around them. “I think I've been dreaming.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 24: Trade Estimated time remaining: 52 Hours, 7 Minutes