Gallow wobbled in her crosshairs, facing her, his sad eyes watching as she struggled to keep her rifle still. He didn’t run because he was already dead. He knew it and so did she. And still here she lay, her belly scraping against the road as her untrained wings fumbled with a weapon she had no business using. She pulled the trigger and the butt kicked her shoulder. The gunshot echoed in the trees, there and not there both at the same time, and she was looking through the sights at Gallow once again. Helpless to stop herself, she shifted her grip and took aim again, his willowy shrieks reaching toward her from down the road. Familiar voices yelled for her somewhere in the distance while between her shaking crosshairs, Gallow’s terrified eyes met hers.

Aurora woke with a start, her eyelashes warm with fresh tears. Her heart raced as reality settled and solidified through the confusion like the silt of a waterlogged crater. She lay there in the dark, afraid if she moved she would fall back onto that lonely road and squeeze the trigger all over again. Her jaw worked this way and that until she could swallow the little sobs rising in her throat. The little mantra that she told herself when the guilt started to rise came back fresh as ever. Gallows had lost the right to mercy after what he and his mother did. Killing him had ended their quiet predation. He deserved it.

Time passed, and the vision faded enough for her to begin shifting her focus to a different problem: she didn’t know where she was. Frowning, she tried to piece together what she could. She remembered flying, aimlessly, with the wind scraping her bare skin like a grinding wheel without an off switch. Her hearing had come back somewhere during that flight and with that recollection came the realization that her sight hadn’t. Hesitantly, she opened her eyes. Her heart fell as she felt her eyelids move but only saw the faintest hint of red surrounding the edges of a void. Her fragile composure slipped and as if taunted by fate, she could feel the salty sting of tears across her eyes.

It didn’t occur to her that she wasn’t alone until a strange set of hoofsteps approached where she was laying, followed by the sudden presence of two digits gently pressed against her neck. Her body went rigid at their touch which quickly outwore its welcome, but as soon as she thought about jerking away the offending presence was gone from her neck.

“You’re safe,” an unfamiliar voice assured her.

She didn’t believe him, and winced at the bright sensation of discomfort when she tried to pull her hind legs closer to her chest. Only one leg responded, something that took her a beat to understand. Adding to her confusion, she found her wing wouldn’t work when she tried to drape it around herself. Unlike her missing leg, it was still firmly attached. Something was pinning it against her back. She jerked at whatever it was with mounting distress.

The same digits settled over said wing, along with the same gentle voice. “As confident as I am in your ability to tear your bandages, I’d prefer you refrain from leaking any more fluids on the upholstery than you already have.”

He gave the ridge of her wing a pat when she stopped struggling. “How are you feeling?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t want to talk to this stranger whose walk sounded wrong or feel the guilt that had clung to the relief from knowing she somehow managed not to fall to her death. What she wanted she knew she’d never have again. The image pulsed across her mind, of Ginger pushing her away in that final moment, like a tattoo she hadn’t asked for. She would never forget the flash of fire. The soundless motion of bedrock slabs peeling away from Foal Mountain like tissue paper. The absolute certainty that she had just watched something too important for words simply evaporate. Ginger, their Stable, everything she’d ever known had just… gone.

Something inside her broke at that moment. She didn’t know what it was or if it even had a name, but she felt it deep in her chest. The tears welling in her eyes stopped. The lump in her throat softened and disappeared. She swallowed, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did. She didn’t feel sad, or angry, or guilty. It was as if someone had climbed up into her head, found the switch to whatever little engine powered her emotions, and flipped it. Distantly, she knew that wasn’t a good sign. Presently, she didn’t care.

Whoever was taking care of her didn’t seem put off by her silence. She listened to him move about the room on what sounded like two hooves, the second of which she pictured wearing a sock or slipper to account for its softer fall. Occasionally he would pause on his way past where she lay and she would feel his gaze on her, checking on her like her mom used to when Aurora spent the school day sick at home. Other times she would hear him open a squeaky door, mutter to himself, or disappear into what she imagined must be an adjacent room.

She drifted off into a fitful sleep only to wake again to the sound of steam whistling from a kettle. Her face crumpled and her ears pinned back to seal out the shrill squeal while her caretaker crossed the room, mumbling something that sounded like I hope you like peppermint. If he was making candy, he was doing a lousy job of it. All she could smell was woodsmoke. She did her best to ignore the clatter of glassware from the other room and sank a little deeper into the lumpy cushions of her bed.

A moment later. “Here.”

She frowned and tried to steal a look over her shoulder toward him, only to be reminded she couldn’t see at all. Maybe he would go away once he realized he wouldn’t get an answer. It worked before.

The silence that lingered made it clear he hadn’t moved. “You need to drink something.”

She shrugged.

He sighed, and the cushion next to her hind hoof deformed under his weight. It finally clicked in her head that she was on a couch, and it was like having a lit match held over a dark map giving her the tiniest bit of confidence of knowing where she was. She was laying toward the back of it. The edge was behind her. Tiny steps.

He set something on a wooden surface behind her, then sat back and sipped. “Mm. Good tea. You should try yours before it gets cold.”

It would have to get cold, then. She wasn’t thirsty, she was exhausted. Her body ached with the dull, all-encompassing hum of discomfort. Even if she did want to try it, she couldn't. Her wings were bound and she didn’t know where the cup was. The fact that moving from her spot would hurt even more enticed her even less. All she wanted was to go back to sleep.

Plus she hated tea. No one from Mechanical drank tea.

Her caretaker chuckled. “Now there’s a face that could turn me back to stone. Would you like help sitting up?”

“Don’t touch me.”

The ragged edge of her voice surprised her, and for a split second she felt embarrassed for the harshness in it. She swallowed again, staring into nowhere, unsure whether to apologize. She knew what Ginger would do.

“Sorry,” she said. “Just…”

“Hands off,” he confirmed with the slightest smile in his voice. “Oh, I’m certain I’ll find a way to restrain myself. That being said, your tea is going to get cold.”

“I don’t drink tea.”

He let out a self-pitying laugh. “My apologies. I hadn’t realized Mouse knew ponies of such discriminating standards. Shall I check the pantry for a glass of sparkling water, or will a bejeweled horn of bloodwine suffice?”

She pursed her lips, saying nothing. Then, “Who’s Mouse?”

The voice beside her grunted. “A curmudgeonly breed of shaggy moose, by some accounts. A begrudged friend, by mine. He’s the reason you’re here gluing scabs to my couch instead of feeding whatever passes for buzzards out there.”

“I don’t remember him.”

A quiet sip. “He bit you.”

Her expression changed. “That I remember.”

He chuckled again, his weight shifting. His cup clicked against what she guessed was a coffee table. “For a brute, he means well. And for what it’s worth, whoever did this to you doesn't know you’re here. When I said you’re safe, I was being sincere.”

She chewed on that, wondering just how long she’d been flying before blacking out. “I can’t see,” she murmured.

A pause. “Ah. That would explain your unhealthy interest in that particular patch of cushion. I assume it happened recently, given your current situation, well….”

She nodded to keep him from spelling it out.

He shifted somewhat, causing her hind leg to sag a little. “I may have something for that.”

“For blindness,” she stated dryly. “Why not.”

The couch shifted again and she could feel him standing. “Wonderful. Now naturally this will be easier to administer if you were sitting up, if you’ll allow me to assist that is.”

The offer was as unnecessary as it was unwelcome. He could take his delicate lamb treatment and cork himself with it. She wasn’t useless. Not when she first left home, not when she lost her leg, and not now. She rolled forward and propped her hoof against the cushion, ignoring the concerned noise her host made, and pressed down to hoist herself up. No sooner had her muscles flexed than did a shot of white hot pain erupt from the joint immediately above her hoof. The sound she made when she fell back to the couch was embarrassing enough that she quickly blocked it out, focusing entirely on piecing together what was wrong with her leg.

“Fuck,” she hissed, her shoulders tense as she waited for the pain to subside. But it lingered, making it clear her injury wasn’t minor. She thumped her head against the couch’s armrest and cursed again. “Fuck. Fine. Help me up.”

He must have been waiting for her to relent, because as soon as she gave him the word two mismatched appendages carefully hooked under her forelegs and lifted her up in her seat. Without sight it felt as if the world itself was lurching around her instead of the other way around. Her stomach lurched for a few awful seconds until her equilibrium settled.

“You broke your leg in the fall,” he told her, close enough that she could smell some sort of smoky, perfumed odor coming from his coat. Whatever he was, he was tall. Unnaturally tall, if she trusted her hearing enough to believe what it was telling her. Not a stallion, then. A gryphon, she assumed, though for all she knew Fiona might have been an outlier.

A thought popped into her head that made her snort. She could be sitting in a deathclaw’s den and would have no way of knowing. Wouldn’t that be something?

It occurred to her that her host was still talking.

“...splint will do most of the work, so don’t go meddling with it until he brings them. In the meantime, you’ll have to suffice with the loathfully slow process of healing naturally.” Two fat fingers touched her face, pulling her left eye open. She tried not to flinch back but only partially succeeded. “That’s a promising sign.”

He moved to her other eye. “Flash blindness. You watched it explode, didn’t you?”

She jerked her head away from him and glared roughly toward where she assumed his face was. “Who told you that?”

“You did, just now.” The coffee table creaked with the unmissable sound of him sitting across from her. “Oh, don’t give me that look, I’m entitled to a cliche or two. Nobody had to tell me anything. I’ve seen enough raw Entropy to know what it feels like when it’s been unleashed again, but then I have no reason to be surprised. Your species has been fetishizing your own self-destruction since the day I first–”

He went silent, and for a moment Aurora wasn’t sure whether he’d left or not. A tired sigh answered her question.

“It’s natural to look toward the light,” he said, his tone oddly subdued. “Here. Drink this first. Small sips.”

Steam wafted across her muzzle and, reluctantly, she found the offered cup with her one good hoof and guided it to her lips with the help of her strange caretaker. Despite her earlier complaints the tea went down with a pleasant warmth that awakened a deeper thirst she didn’t know she’d been ignoring. Warm water spiced with something she only absently recognized as peppermint slicked her throat and left a thin debris of something course across her lip when it ran out. She wiped the dregs away and struggled to think of how to ask for more without opening herself up to his derision. As it turned out, she didn’t have to.

“I’ll pour you another cup.” His pad-thump, pad-thump of a walk led him away to where she’d heard the kettle squeal. “But after that it’s plain water for you. I can’t have you using up all my tea leaves before Bullwinkle comes back.”

Her wing twitched reflexively at the hazy memory of someone biting down on it hard enough for her to feel their teeth break skin. “You said you had something for my eyes.”

He pad-thumped back into the room. “Time may be eternal, but your patience is not. I’ll have to gather a few ingredients from the garden first, and only after you drink until I’m sure I won’t come back to a vaguely equine-shaped raisin in my den. Fair?”

She hated knowing he could see through her just as easily as everyone else, enough to know there was enough going wrong inside her head that something as simple as hydration might not outrank the deep desire she had to lay back down and let the world spin without her. This person she didn’t know, who she couldn’t even see, had effortlessly slipped into the same soft bargaining that she’d forced Roach to do.

Forced Ginger to do.

Steam tickled her nose again. “Go slow this time, it’s still hot.”

She drank with his help, carefully this time, but something about the flavor had dulled in her mind. Hot water and leaves.

He took back the cup and stood after she finished. “Well I suppose nothing is as good as the first time around. Let me see if I have a canteen with a strap you can hold onto. In the meantime, perhaps you could tell me what your name is?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but then she hesitated. This was how it started, she realized. A name, a few kind words, a little help from a stranger who couldn’t predict she would be throwing herself in the middle of their lives. Whoever and whatever her caretaker was, he seemed nice. He wasn’t someone who deserved to be punished because he’d chosen to do a good deed.

So she swallowed her name. “I don’t know.”

She couldn’t tell if he believed her and his silence gave no clues. It felt as if he were taking a minute to reassess how much of a burden he’d taken on by allowing her into his home, even if his uniquely jovial tone was unchanged.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this obscenely colorful world of yours it’s that despite your tendencies toward self-annihilation, you’re all irritatingly resilient. Which, I suppose, is a compliment.” One of his claws gave her shoulder a reassuring pat before he turned to leave. “Give it time. It’ll come to you.”

Her ears followed him out of the room and she sank a little more into his couch, answering his kindness with silence.

Primrose’s hooves clicked alone through the Bunker’s empty corridors, both mentally and physically exhausted from endless meetings insisted upon by hungry generals eager to pry some advantage from the disaster at Foal Mountain. She glanced down at her Pip-Buck without breaking her gait and could only shut her eyes for a moment upon seeing the time. 04:14. In less than an hour the early birds would be filing down the elevator in orderly groups, professional smiles and courteous morning greetings as they presented their badges to base security. They would be lining up to burrow into her asshole with a hundred different questions before her next caffeine pill had time to kick in.

Her shoulder smacked into the corner as she turned into the hall that led to her quarters, sending her into an unseemly stumble almost fully toward the opposite wall. She hadn’t slept since… she shook her head, too exhausted to count the days. The Black Wing unit she’d assigned to eliminate Stable 10 still hadn’t reported in. They wouldn’t. She was confident of it. They would have attempted to recover the bomb at all costs, which meant they were less than charred molecules floating east along the jetstream.

It didn’t make sense, and the more she tried to figure out what went wrong the more it felt like assembling a jigsaw with fucking vaseline in her feathers. The balefire talisman should have gone off instantly the second Aurora’s unicorn friend sparked her magic. It was the entire reason why the exchange had to take place at the Stable’s doorstep, in case someone with a horn decided to grab it. Balefire didn’t burn slowly and yet every report the Enclave had taken thus far described some kind of rising star ascending over Foal Mountain before it detonated. No pegasi could will balefire not to explode, which meant that the unicorn had to have been involved somehow.

She squeezed her eyes shut again, forcing herself to focus. The Dressage mare was the only unicorn near the Stable for miles, and her sudden, wide-eyed appearance in the dream realm confirmed Autumn Song’s story of using her stash of prewar stims to prolong the unicorn’s suffering weeks earlier. It had to have been Ginger. There was no other explanation.

And still, it didn’t make sense. To be seen from so far away, the reaction would have had to be occurring right next to her. Canterlot had been shielded by two alicorns at the height of their power and even they failed to save themselves in the end. What made Ginger Dressage so fucking special?

The guards posted outside her quarters stood at attention as she approached. She barely lifted a feather in greeting, too tired for formalities and too frustrated with the shit she was already fetlock deep in. They opened the door for her and she retreated inside, knowing things would only snowball if she kept denying herself sleep. She stopped and turned around before the door could close, leaning against the doorframe as the guards glanced down at her.

“Which one of you wants to piss off everyone left in the war room?”

They stared at her in silence. Surprisingly, the mare to her right lifted a wing.

Primrose mustered enough energy to smirk. Nobody liked the shit-starters until they actually needed one. She made a mental note of this one. “Tell them I won’t be available for the next ten hours. I’m going to bed. Anyone who wakes me up for anything short of a second apocalypse will have… fuck, I don’t know, you look creative. Threaten them with something.”

The mare’s smirk widened. “You want me to threaten a superior officer on your behalf?”

“Multiple superior officers, yes. You’re not likely to get a freebie like this again, captain, so make it count.”

“Yes ma’am!”

Primrose rested her temple against the doorframe, blinking slowly while she watched the mare all but prance away. It occurred to her she hadn’t formally dismissed her. She shook her head and lifted a brow at the stallion to her left. “You. You’re my bullshit filter. Any bullshit comes down this corridor, you filter it. That’s your job. Filter the bullshit.”

Hesitantly, he nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s your job?”

“Bullshit filter, ma’am.”

“Good. Your partner’s got a sadistic streak. Keep that in mind, because if you fuck up, whatever blackbrain nonsense she makes up is happening to you first.”

He swallowed. “Understood, ma’am.”

With that done, she turned away from the doorway and let it slide shut behind her. She stood there for a moment and stared at her well-appointed quarters. Her bed, the centerpiece of the generous space, had been made for her. Not by her personal staff, that much was clear, but an attempt had been made by someone with good intentions. It took a beat for her to remember she’d left a very giving mare in here when she left. Hayride, that was her name.

She grunted, smiling a little as she stumped toward her mattress’s welcome embrace. None of her nightly consorts had ever taken the time to clean up after. Strange mare. She’d need to make sure someone performed the usual security sweep to ensure she hadn’t left anything behind or, more likely than not, took something she shouldn’t have. Something to be done after she woke up. She climbed up onto her comforter and let out a happy little groan as her pillow puffed around her head, easing her into some deeply-needed sleep.

The dream came easily, even if the stage design for the night’s punishment was an unwelcome one. Once again, she found herself relegated to the awkward proportions of the body she’d suffered through as a filly. Short legs, pudgy in places most fillies had grown out of, and the obnoxious bounce of tight blue curls in her mane and tail. A reminder of the routine her mother forced her to suffer through each morning before school.

Of course the Tantabus had plucked the tiny yellowed bathroom of her family home from some neglected shelf in the back of her mind. It was better than the decades-long fixation it had with her scourged relationship with her father, but not by much. The stink of cigarettes and hairspray brought back memories she thought she’d forgotten. She sat in place in front of the sink atop a sticky plastic step-stool, watching herself in the mirror as her mother manipulated the old curling iron in her magic. The cord clattered over the countertop, threatening to snag the cup of toothbrushes next to the hot water handle, while hot metal clamped and curled her mane with quick, sharp clicks.

“Don’t slouch, Cozy.”

Her mother’s voice was like sandpaper. She sat up a little straighter, but never enough. Not the first time. Then came the irritated sigh from behind, the fresh cloud of smoke stinging her eyes, and the reflexive jerk as the iron touched the same bare spot behind her right ear.

“Ow,” she whimpered. She’d learned not to cry out anymore. That always made it worse.

“I told you not to slouch.”

She straightened more fully, and her mother proceeded without so much as asking if she wanted a bandaid. They were long past that point by now. Cozy knew where to find the ointment and how to wear her curls to hide the scar.

“Don’t forget, I’m picking you up today at lunch for your doctor’s appointment.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know.”

“Don’t get smart with me. You know because I told you.” Pale pink light unwrapped a curl and the iron clapped shut on its end. “How do we behave when we’re at the doctor, Cozy?”

“Don’t be rude, never frown, and don’t tell lies.”

She fixed her with a stony gaze. “Good. You be sure to be on your best behavior. I don’t want to have to tell your daddy you weren’t.”

Her breath stuck in her throat. “Yes, mama.”

The moment passed, and her mother resumed fixing her mane. “We’re going to Red Delicious for dinner tonight, so don’t worry about heating up leftovers after school. Okay?”

“Okay, mama.”

“I love you, kid.”

She glanced up at the mirror. “Love you t–”

Her mother was gone. Where she’d stood, the Tantabus loomed behind her. The illusion wafted from her mind like stale smoke, along with the lie she’d been prepared to utter.

Primrose cocked an eyebrow at Luna’s lost pet. “Did you miss me so much that you couldn’t let her fuck with my head for a whole two minutes?”

“You have not dreamed for several nights, little tyrant.”

The bathroom dissolved, giving way to a familiar vista of burning doors ad infinitum. Old reflexes caused her to squint, or at least dream she was squinting, as her perception adjusted to the crystal clarity of billions of charred and melted fragments of long defunct portals. The Tantabus rarely shied away from showing her what was left of Luna’s happy little dreamscape, as if a constant reminder of lives cut short in their sleep had the same impact it did the first time she’d been forced to bear witness.

“I’ve been busy,” she muttered, passing her feathers over a burning length of oak trim. Her words seemed to fall flat, because the creature didn’t immediately counter her. Feeling just a little impatient, she added, “So if you’re not making me endure mommy and daddy’s psychological kirin shit, what’s on tonight’s docket? I haven’t relived my first eviction in a while. Or maybe we could do a montage of all the times mommy forgot to pick up pills for my heat? Lots of trauma to choose from, so don’t make up your mind all at once.”

“You were busy.”

She blinked and looked up at the creature. The Tantabus always appeared to her as a sort of nebulous absence of anything, like a mare-shaped hole punched through the fabric of whatever this place was made from. The unfamiliar stars on the other side of that hole never moved when it moved, remaining stationary as if she were looking through a shifting window and out into the night sky of some other world. In many ways it was beautiful, but she knew better than to allow herself to be entranced by a dead alicorn’s magic.

“Yes,” she said, staring back at the twin galaxies that formed the creature’s eyes, “I was busy. Forgive me if I don’t subject myself to your personal schedule.”

The creature continued to stare.

“Get out of my head,” she warned. “You know the rules.”

“I peer into the minds of all dreamers, little tyrant.” Its head tilted, no doubt mimicking a gesture it had witnessed other dreamers perform. “You were evading me.”

She flinched as the creature’s probing increased in intensity, no longer the cursory skimming of information from which its illusions were inspired. She could feel her digging. Absorbing. Her eyes clenched shut without her permission and she became aware of herself grimacing in bed, her legs curling against a discomfort taking place entirely within her subconscious. Something had changed in the creature. Its search felt intentional. Personal.

Then it clicked what she was searching for, and in that instant the Tantabus knew.

The presence in her mind faded and Primrose opened her eyes.

One by one, the stars drifting within Luna’s creature winked out like guttering candles. The galaxies dimmed and darkened. The nebulas scattered like dust.

“She’s gone.”

Black horizons appeared at the edges of the infinite doors and rushed toward the two of them from all directions. The wreckages of burning dreams sizzled and vanished, swallowed by the rim of a collapsing reality. Primrose spun in place, heart racing as deeper instincts woke within her. She needed to escape. A door. She needed a fucking door!

“You have to believe me that I had no way of knowing,” she chattered, searching the dwindling paths for a dream to escape into. “That Stable, it wasn’t just a threat to me, it was a danger to everyone!”

Her body froze. The creature wrenched her toward it, forcing her to stare into the void. All the lies, the justifications, the clever paths to talk her way out of whatever was happening tripped and tangled into a gibbering heap of nonsense in her mind. Eyes wide, gasping for breath, she bore witness to the death of that creature’s innocence.

“She just… got in the–”

“SHE’S GONE!”

Its voice detonated within her skull like a grenade, echoing and reverberating onto itself in a terrible, screaming chorus. Her mind was little more than an ember cast into a boiling ocean of sorrow and rage, and in it she drowned, her psyche ejected from that creature’s domain with a force unfathomable even to someone who had witnessed the demise of an entire world.

She awoke, screaming, her wings and hooves sprawling in a panicked melee that sent her tumbling to the floor in a tangle of sheets and pillows. Her bedside lamp came down with her with a hollow pop, scattering a glitter of glass across the carpet from the broken bulb. The Tantabus’s voice resonated in her head like a struck tuning fork, its echo fading as consciousness caught up with her. Slowly, she recognized her bed, the walls of her quarters, and the warm sensation of urine flowing out onto the floor between her legs.

Primrose stood on trembling hooves and stumbled around her bed, her body following her eyes as an afterthought on her way to the bathroom. With piss still dribbling behind her she reached above the sink, opened the vanity, and plunged her wing toward the little orange bottle on the top shelf. The cap clattered to the tiles and she shook one of the little white pills into her feathers, then another. She tipped them back and chewed them dry. The shock was already beginning to wind down and she could feel the tendrils of sleep creeping toward her again.

She couldn’t go back to sleep. Not ever. Not while a monster waited for her on the other side.

Something stank.

Aurora had managed to fend off curiosity when she heard a flimsy door slap shut followed by the musical humming of her nameless caretaker. She supposed not knowing his name was a fair turn for keeping hers from him. Probably he knew she was lying about having forgotten it and was just too polite to prod her for it. More likely he didn’t care. She might be blind but her ears worked well enough to hear the forced manners when he spoke. Playing at amnesia had been a relief. One less connection he’d have to make with the burden on his couch. She didn’t have to see him to tell he was as much a loner as she’d once been.

The same door creaked and slapped again, and she briefly wondered if he’d forgotten something before realizing how much time she’d spent silently kicking at the boxes stacked in her own head. It must have been an hour at least. He didn’t announce himself. His only greeting was the return of his humming, the happy little notes trilling from the kitchen as metal clinked and clanked along with him. With a wince she had wormed herself over, bandaged wings locked uselessly against her back while the rest of her injuries ached and stung with each movement. Once she was settled on her left side she probed for the edge of the cushion with her unbound foreleg, hanging her fetlock against the edge for reference as she relaxed to the sounds of cooking.

Or, what she assumed was cooking. The odor that eventually wafted into the room reeked worse than the drawer at her old workbench where she kept all her resins, a combination of something equally rotten and acidic, like a hot fart preceding a slow working case of food poisoning. She shoved her nose under her splinted foreleg and groaned.

Some time into his terrible chemistry experiment, her caretaker tapped his utensils against something dense and passed through the room, the stonelike grinding he’d brought with him stopping long enough for him to open a window above where she lay. A warm breeze flowed across her back and pushed away some but not all of the stinging odor. She said nothing, nor did he. He returned to the kitchen and his humming resumed. Part of her wanted to know what the song was.

Sinking into the pillow, feeling something like comfort as she listened to the sounds of this place she didn’t know, she loosened her grip on her mind’s leash and let it wander. Only a little, but far enough for it to bump into the question she’d been asking herself ever since confirming the generator was experiencing more than a routine hiccup.

Why did it have to be me?

The question rose to the surface without self-pity or anger. It just was. One of countless, bitter curiosities she’d collected over the years. She could feather through them like pages in a book, reading them off one after the other confident in knowing she would never find a satisfying answer, and yet she packed them up and tossed them to the back of her mind with everything else she’d been too scared, too weak, or too overwhelmed to deal with. Now she lay here in a stranger’s house having been wrenched from the abyss, and in front of her lay open the first of those many questions.

She scratched her nose against the little pillow and stared at nothing, remembering the sinking sensation in her gut when she first understood what the generator’s diagnostics were telling her. The gradual power loss descending one tiny step at a time, having been marching its way down unnoticed while generations of pegasi checked their boxes and followed their protocols unaware something far outside Stable-Tec’s meticulous routines was scraping away at Stable 10’s beating heart. But she’d seen it. She’d recognized the story those numbers were telling her, that centuries of routine had allowed the generator to slip silently over the line marking the end of a steady decline and the beginning of a cascade. She’d seen her Stable’s future in the extra load the generator would begin to take as systems failed more frequently, sucking more and more life from a failing ignition talisman until the brownouts became blackouts and the blackouts became something much, much darker.

Sledge had seen it too. Aurora wondered whether things would be any different if he’d gone instead of her. Would he have befriended Roach? Killed Cider? Fallen in love? The tiniest smile touched her lip and faded just as fast. What would his path across the wasteland have looked like? How far would he have flown if she’d hunkered down and stayed behind?

She thought about Cider and his fast obsession with her Pip-Buck. Things might have been easier if she’d just given it to him. Ginger would still be safe in her shop, they wouldn’t have been forced off the roads by Autumn’s bounty, and Roach wouldn’t have been forced to use his corrupted magic to save her from a raider’s bullet. She wouldn’t have been pressured to lie her way into Blinder’s Bluff. Elder Coldbrook could have been an ally, not an enemy. So many things could have been different. So many lives left alone.

But she’d stuck her nose into it because it was her generator. Her Stable. Her Pip-Buck. Sledge always told her she was shit at delegating work, that she needed to share the burden with the pegasi around her, and she refused to listen no matter how much sense he made. Putting the weight on her shoulders of going outside to find a new ignition talisman came to her as easy as breathing. It was what she did. It was what she always did.

The question was never ‘why me,’ she thought. It was always me, because I refused to give anyone else the chance.

She could still clearly see the regolith lifting off Foal Mountain like tissue paper. Stable 10 was either dead or waiting for death. There was no in between. Even if the door sealed before the explosion, even if another ignition talisman somehow landed at Sledge’s hooves, Primrose and her Enclave would continue to do everything in their power to ensure the truth stayed buried.

She thought of Gallows and his screams as her bullets arced through him, removing pieces of him, one after the other.

Then she imagined Primrose making those same sounds.

“Feeling better?”

She blinked at the uneven pad-thump leaving the kitchen. “What?”

He chuckled as he drew near. The coffee table creaked as he sat down across from her. “I thought I saw you smiling. I must have been mistaken, you look as scowly as ever.”

“I’m not scowling,” she snipped.

“Oh, well pardonne-moi, mademoiselle.”

Her irritation climbed. “I don’t know what that means.”

He made a noise. “No one here does. Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that despite your little apocalypse I successfully single-handedly reinvented eye drops. Come. Sit up.”

Somehow she wasn’t sure if he was referring to the end of the old war or the state of her own body. She didn’t ask, nor did she fight off his touch when two asymmetrical appendages hooked under her shoulders to help her sit. The world lurched around her like a bubble level that had been given a hard shake. She felt the blood rushing from her head as the back of the couch bent around her bandaged wings, and she sat there for several long seconds until the worst of the dizziness passed. Her caretaker, for his part, didn’t rush her.

She breathed a tired groan. “Okay.”

A talon, or what she imagined one felt like, tapped the bottom of her chin. She lifted her eyes toward where her equilibrium suggested the ceiling might be and listened to the sound of something being dipped into liquid near her ear. A few droplets pittered into a bowl.

“This may sting,” he warned.

Her eyelids fluttered in anticipation and she suddenly felt like a yearling too untrusting to cooperate with the doctor. The hot rush of embarrassment had barely enough time to form before the droplet hit her eye. He was right. The sting was immediate and intense, reminding her of a younger day when she’d forgotten to wash her feathers after helping her mom make vegetable soup. She’d been old enough to help measure out all the spices in the tiny aluminum spoons, but too young to be trusted with the stove. She’d wandered off as soon as her part was done and it wasn’t long after that she lifted a feather to scratch her eye, and all the crying that came after.

Despite the burn, she felt her lip twitch at the memory.

The same claw lifted her chin again and she imagined him dripping liquefied onion powder into her other eye. The second burning drop came as less of a shock even though the discomfort was just as bad. Somehow, though, this pain was tolerable. It was something she could control.

Paper crinkled against her closed eyelids, dabbing away the excess. By the time he finished and stood to take the bowl away, Aurora could already feel the burn retreating and a new numbness taking its place. An alien sensation of her eyelids moving across the convex surface of nothing startled her. Was this how the cure worked?

She opened her eyes and frowned. “I still don’t see anything.”

The sound of fabric tearing came from the direction of the kitchen. A laugh. “Presuming your vision can be saved at all, my dear, the drops aren’t the remedy. Time is. And I suppose whatever magical macguffins Mouse manages to drag back, but even that won’t be for several more days.”

Her frown deepened with worry. “Then what did you give me?”

He pad-thumped back into the room. “A numbing compound to relax the muscles in your eyes. Speaking of which, they’ll need to stay covered up while they heal. If you wouldn’t mind closing them…?”

Exasperated with his half-answers and too tired to argue, she obeyed. A strip of cloth pressed across her eyes and wrapped around the back of her head, the front, and the back again. He tucked something behind her ear, which twitched at the sound of more fabric being ripped, and another strip began wound around her head.

“It’s a waste,” he said as he finished up. “Giving things such uninspired names.”

“What, blindfolds?” Despite not being able to see, she lifted her nose to see if there weren’t any gaps under the cloth.

“Blindweed,” he said with an air of correction. “It’s the same nearly everywhere I’ve gone. Something mundane is called something beautiful, and something potent is remembered with a grunt. It’s ridiculous.”

She couldn’t tell if he was being serious or just wanted to hear himself talk. Whichever it was, she didn’t have the energy for it. Everything she had was reserved for someone else.

“I guess,” she sighed.

He sounded disappointed. “I was expecting more of a reaction to blindweed than I guess.”

Her shoulders bounced with a shrug. She knew what blindweed was and why so many ponies regarded it so warily, but her dad had been as much an educator in her life as the history teachers. Before the zebras learned to concentrate blindweed into a chemical weapon, it had been used for thousands of years for its medicinal properties. Even the name that her caretaker took issue with had preceded the war, owed to the startling effects it could cause to anyone caught downwind at the height of its pollination. Aurora understood the sensation of her eyes dilating from the drops she’d been given, but for someone under the Vhannan sun with working eyesight the temporary effects could understandably be mistaken for blindness.

The name made enough sense, even if she wasn’t about to say so out loud. As she thought of a way to change the subject, or stifle the conversation completely, her hoof absently moved toward the splint around her other foreleg where she remembered wearing her Pip-Buck.

“They’re in there,” he reassured her. Something in his tone softened as if he were setting his levity aside. “Mouse wanted to sell the older of the two to pay for the medicine you’ll need. It took half a bookshelf just to get him to leave the thing alone.”

She felt the bulges beneath the layers of bandages and makeshift rods. One for hers, one for Ginger’s. Her chest swelled with emotion. She pressed it back down. “Thanks.”

“He’s decent as far as people go, but he’s a scavenger at heart. It’s good neither of them worked or I doubt you would have been wearing either when he brought you here.” She could hear the smile fade from his voice. The tone shifted as he realized she wouldn’t reciprocate his rambling observations with ones of her own. “If you don’t need anything else…?”

She shook her head.

“Well,” he breathed, “I have some work I should return to. If you need something just holler.”

A thought occurred to her. “I don’t know your name.”

She thought she heard him chuckle again, but it was too quiet for her to be sure. A long silence filled the room until, finally, he answered.

“Discord,” he murmured. “My friends called me Discord.”

Three days after leaving Discord’s cottage, Mouse arrived home.

His knees ached as he dragged his wagon under the painted sign welcoming him to Crow’s Grove, something the mayor had insisted be maintained with a fresh layer each spring to encourage travelers. A cartoon crow head, its beak hinged open like a pair of hedge trimmers, waved its greeting to Mouse as it passed behind him. He hated the thing. The messy rectangle of two-by-fours tied on either end to two dead street lamps made the town look more worn down, not less. It practically advertised the fact that no one here knew how to build, not properly anyway. Not the way people did before the bombs fell. Crow’s Grove was a community held together by the trade generated by those of them brave enough to leave long enough to bring back things worth buying. Without scavengers this place would fall apart within a year.

He tried shaking off his annoyance. It wasn’t his call.

“He lives!”

A familiar voice rang out from one of the second story windows overhead. He didn’t have to look up at Tamarind to recognize her voice, but he did anyway so as not to be rude. She beamed down at him from her rocking chair, knitting needles clicking together in a cloud of magic.

The former mayor waggled one toward his cart as the wheels bumped over the dirt. “Find any good fibers?”

She was always looking for something to turn into yarn, and for good reason. The winters this far northeast had a tendency to be unforgiving. Mouse liked to think he’d grown used to them after so many years, but even with his shaggy coat those first cold snaps never failed to steal his breath away. Just the thought made him break out in goose pimples.

“Sorry, ma’am. Not this time,” he called up. She waved off the honorific, knowing it had more to do with her decades in office than it did her comparative age. It was a habit few had broken themselves of despite her protests that they tried. The new mayor had been at her desk for over two years now. Still, it was Tamarind’s seal on Mouse’s vending license and he made no secret of disliking change. “Either no one knitted in Cloudsdale or the map I bought was a bust.”

She grinned at that. “Toldja you were wasting caps. Looks like you made some of ‘em back, though.”

“A few,” he agreed, feeling the pads under his straps bite into his shoulders. One of these days he needed to find someone who could carve him a good yoke. “Next time.”

Tamarind nodded her agreement and turned her wrinkled gaze back to her knitting before he’d have to stop walking on her behalf. She was considerate to all her scavengers like that. Never taking more time than she needed or that they could spare, but always managing to greet them in the ways they preferred. Mouse supposed it was what made her a good mayor for all those years, and it was a habit she had carried into retirement.

The wagon let out a dubious groan as he pulled it around a fresh depression in the street, and thanked his lucky stars none of the other three wheels had gone to pieces. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened if they had. There weren’t any trade monopolies to rely on out here like the one that owned the routes out east, which meant there was as good a chance at being robbed by the next wagon on the horizon as there was getting help. Just the mere mention of F&F Mercantile tended to make the scavs out here wrinkle their noses, but after a run like the one he’d just finished he wondered if losing a cut of his profits wasn’t a price worth paying for safe roads.

He thought about this as he dragged his wagon toward the large plot of asphalt that had once been a used carriage lot and never quite shook off the ghosts of that original purpose. Disused parking lot lights still stood atop rusting poles, their concrete bases clinging to the smallest chips of yellow paint. Where gleaming motorized carriages were once parked waited half a dozen fully built wagons, their wooden sideboards and spoked wheels dark with cheap varnish. More wheels were stacked like books between the guards of a salvaged bicycle rack, their prices advertised on a sandwich board sign propped open at the far end. Mouse eyed the latter of these displays, noting the empty slots where someone had recently been duped into paying top cap for a fresh set. The skin around his neck flushed with fresh anger as he stopped his wagon in front of the pouted lip of concrete across which Verdant had carefully stenciled the words, “NO PARKING.”

He didn’t bother bundling his straps into the jockey box at the front of his wagon. Nobody would be idiot enough to steal his wagon in broad daylight. Mouse might not be inclined to socialize with his customers more than was necessary to make a sale, but he didn’t burn bridges either. The whole reason he dealt with the winters in Crow’s Grove rather than pack up for warmer pastures was for the folks who lived here. It was an old fashioned community, or at least it tried its best to be like the ones the ghouls liked to brag about living in way back when. The locals knew if they sat on their hooves while a neighbor got robbed, that neighbor likely wasn’t going to help them when it was their turn. Mayor Tamarind had made sure that’s how things ran around here, and Mouse suspected he might not have a license to sell had he not intervened a few years back when he happened across a couple of colts who insisted, after being scared to tears, that they’d only been practicing their lockpicking and weren’t really going to steal anything from Pebble’s gun store.

He snorted at the memory as he climbed into his wagon and retrieved the chunk of busted wheel he’d saved. Both of those colts were stallions now. Technically, anyway. He was pretty sure the one who’d pissed himself was shadowing at the old electronic repair shop on the north side of town. He made a mental note to stop by before he left for Old Leer’s.

Road dust and flaking varnish soured his tongue as he carried the quarter wheel between his teeth. One of the benefits of the town being this far from the major population centers was that it had come out the end of the world more or less unscathed, even if its original inhabitants had been forced to leave it behind when the food and water ran out. It had been left to decay on its own terms until it was rediscovered decades later by those who were equipped to settle here. Most of the original structures had survived including, of all things, the squat building that presumably showed off more expensive carriages and which had been converted into Verdant’s bastardized version of a scavenger’s shop.

The door rattled when he shouldered it open, drawing the eyes of an earth pony couple who were perusing the rows of folding tables laid out across the showroom floor. Various junk lay out with paper tags tied with string advertising their deceptively generous prices, few of which had much to do with the wagons for sale outside. A collection of galvanized plumbing scraps here, a neat stack of magazines there. Garbage without a purpose, but which Verdant’s customers always seemed to pick from despite needing none of it. Mouse forgot the word he’d used for it. Some sales tactics he couldn’t bring himself to adopt in his own store. Impulse buying, that was it. The taste in his mouth grew a little more sour.

Beyond the hodgepodge of junk stood a short receptionist’s desk shaped like a checkmark, its short end blending seamlessly into the rear wall while a square of polished wood formed a decorative little door on the open end. There, Verdant waited behind a brass cash register whose top sign advertised a bar destroyed by the bombs. The thing didn’t work. Just a display. A shiny chunk of metal that told visitors he was the one to give their caps.

Verdant’s silver coat practically gleamed under the buzzing electric lights. The stallion, barely halfway through his twenties, grinned like the ministry mares on their billboards when he recognized Mouse entering his shop. When he caught sight of what Mouse was carrying, that smile flinched.

“Moose!” he called across the showroom floor, not making any motion to leave the security of his desk. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in years!”

He was getting his name wrong on purpose, trying to distance himself from the comeuppance he could see storming its way through the tables. Mouse excused himself as he passed the curious couple and came to a stop on the other side of that desk, the little numerical flags of his register shuddering its last total as he dropped the hunk of termite-rotted wood beside it.

Verdant’s jaw tightened as he feigned nervous ignorance. “Trouble on the road?”

Mouse dropped the steel sole of his prosthetic foreleg beside the wheel with a sharp crack. “Your scam almost got me killed.”

“Scam?” He shook his head, eyes darting to the prospective customers still in his store to the jointed metal leg scratching his desk. “I can assure you I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everything I sell is–”

“It’s shit,” he finished, loud enough for the words to echo in the too-large space. He thumped his hoof against the fragment of spoke and wheel. “This ain’t okay, Verdant. This is as bad as selling bad ammo and poisoned water. You know full damned well all the roads east go through raider territory, and I was within spitting distance of the fucking Cinders when this bug-ate shit you sold me folded.”

He could tell by the frown forming on Verdant’s lips that his customers were watching, and one sale had the potential of growing into several lost ones. His tone grew unfamiliar, less friendly. “Sir, everything I sell is guaranteed to perform as intended with proper and regular maintenance.”

Mouse didn’t need a billboard to catch the insinuation. A slow smile crept across his muzzle as he looked down at the holes insects had bored through spokes he’d been assured could bear weight. When he spoke, he did so with a calmness that threatened violence.

“I’m not haggling with you, Verdant. What you’re going to do right now is offer me one of two numbers: the number of caps you think I’m owed for the danger you put me in with your reckless scheistering,” he growled, deploying a word Discord liked to use which Mouse had worked out the definition of through context, “or the number of days you’d prefer to walk with the limp I’m going to give you if you fucking lowball me. So pick.”

It was a bluff. Mouse knew he could get his license pulled for assaulting another business owner unprovoked, but Verdant’s scam had muddied the definition of provoked enough to make the stallion second guess what could and couldn’t happen. It didn’t hurt that Mouse knew his way past a good deadpan glare, something he’d learned from his dad when a younger version of himself tried to get out of trouble.

Verdant was still learning that skill. He fidgeted behind his counter, fumbling for a third option. “Look, Mouse, this was just a fluke. I’ll replace the set you bought free of charge, alright?”

Mouse slid his prosthetic off the wheel, leaving behind a trail of fresh scrapes in the desk’s smooth wood. He sighed and began walking toward the little hinged door on the far end.

Verdant visibly bristled. “You can’t come back here.”

He knocked the door open with his knee.

“Fu-u-uck,” the silver coated shit complained, rolling his head on his neck as if someone above might swoop down from the flourescents to save him. The couple had already seen enough and were politely retreating toward the door, not wanting to be dragged into someone else’s troubles. “I’ll give back what you paid for them, how about that? And a new set! The good stuff! Custom, even!”

Mouse continued to approach. His silence turned Verdant’s panic into anger.

“It’s less than three hundred caps! Your shop pulls that number in a week, for goddess’s sake! You fucking want double? I can do double!”

He grew more desperate when his tail bumped into where the desk met the wall. “You want me to open the damn safe for you? Will that make you fucking happy?!”

Mouse stopped, not because Verdant had spoken the magic word, but because he’d run out of space to stalk. Either way, it communicated some kind of reprieve that Verdant took as assent. With some hesitation the smaller stallion weaseled around him, whispering a stream of profanity as he hurried to the squat safe tucked into the desk beneath the broken register. Mouse waited, saying nothing, knowing how easily a single word could turn a repayment of a grievance into a robbery.

The rotary lock spun this way and that, guided by a weak fog of smoky magic. The lock clanked and the door swung, revealing contents not dissimilar to what Mouse kept in his. Out came several densely packed cylinders of caps, fifty apiece, bound together by two twists of wire. A revolver lay on the top shelf and for a moment Mouse considered how out of control this could get if Verdant decided to do something supremely stupid, and thankfully he didn’t. When the safe slammed closed, a total of fifteen rolls stood on the counter like tiny soldiers awaiting their orders.

Verdant stood and flicked a hoof at the caps, eyes darting about the floor instead of meeting Mouse’s gaze. “Happy? Are we good?”

He considered saying no, they weren’t good, and turning to the violence he’d been craving since the faulty wheel first broke in the middle of nowhere, but he resisted the urge and bent his good foreleg to the buckle of the strap keeping his saddlebags secure. It bent back, the pin slipping loose of the leather, and he let the bags drop. Verdant watched in embarrassed silence as Mouse picked up the bags with his teeth and set them on the counter, the flap held open with one hoof while the other herded all but two of the rolls inside.

“Okay,” Verdant mumbled unsurely, noting the ones being left behind.

Mouse considered suggesting some nobler endeavor Verdant might put those caps toward, then thought better of it. If he’d come to put this idiot on the straight and narrow he would’ve gotten the sheriff. Verdant was going to use this lesson to be less overt about the shit he pulled, and who he pulled it on. He wouldn’t try this con on anyone he thought Mouse might know, and that was something. Besides, leaving behind some money would make it hard for Verdant to claim he’d been cleaned out. This was a transaction. A refund.

He swung the bags around his neck, not wanting to trade embarrassment for embarrassment by making Verdant watch him fumble the buckle back together. He’d probably offer to help, if not to glean some sense that he’d done some charity that balanced the injustice of having given away more profit than Mouse’s place pulled down in a month. He said nothing as he slipped past the stallion, deciding he’d gotten enough of a point across.

Behind him, Verdant whispered under his breath. “Manehattan bitch.”

He stopped, lifted his hind leg, and pistoned the flat of that roadworn hoof into the delicate pouch slung under Verdan'ts tail. The stallion stumbled forward a few steps before his brain caught up to his balls, and he collapsed to the floor in a whimpering heap.

The wagon lurched back into motion and Mouse set his sights on home.

Home, as luck would have it, was just three blocks north and two more west. Not far from what most folks in Crow’s Grove considered to be the main drag, but far enough for his little store to suffer from the distance. It worked out, he supposed. The rent was cheaper, and business never boomed enough that he couldn’t get away to do his own scavenging. The thought of paying the main street premiums made him shudder. Too much stress. Too much time being locked down to a regular schedule while wondering if the people he hired to do the scavenging weren’t skimming the richest cream for themselves.

The dusty street that took him to his shop had once been one-way, which meant it only needed one lane. He did what he could to keep two wheels close to the gutters, mindful of the sagging steel sewer grates that were more rust than metal. He imagined one day someone might fix up the old foundry in the hills up north and figure out how the ponies of the old world made the same, perfect castings. It was a silly dream, but everyone dreamed it. The knowledge was there for anyone to find. The problem was always that there were too many links in the chain for one pony to fix.

The wheels thudded across one of the grates. He grimaced at himself for getting distracted again, then pulled further toward the curb to make room for a larger covered wagon coming his way. He greeted the stallion pulling the outsized load and smiled, a gesture that was returned in kind as the stranger passed, then rolled his smaller cart up the next block toward the engraved wooden sign hung above the old sidewalk.

He regarded the sign with a lopsided smile. It hung from two short lengths of nice chain that he’d blued himself, giving them a sturdy black appearance. The sign was shaped like the shield symbols the old Equestrian highway system once used, and which he thought suited his business nicely as he was regularly away on those same roads. The name Snap-Traps stood out from the weatherproofed slab in thick, charred font. It hadn’t cost him too much to commission, though it had been an uncomfortable sum at the time. It was worth it, he thought. Quality on the outside always suggested quality on the inside.

He’d almost gotten himself unhitched when the bell of the bakery next door jingled and a familiar face leaned against the frame. “Welcome back, stranger. Bring me anything?”

He snorted as he shrugged off the straps. “Why is it that every time I come back, everyone wants to know if I brought them something?”

Peri shrugged coyly. “Everyone else can ask what they like, but they’re not the ones watering your plants when you’re gone. So, spit it out. Whatcha get me?”

Mouse didn’t bring up the fact that he’d paid her with perfectly good caps to keep an eye on his things while he was away. No sense in making a fuss. She knew he’d be looking for the same thing while he was out in the wastes and it wasn’t particularly hard to come by, either. Not the ordinary stuff, anyway. The good stuff, well, he didn’t exactly advertise when or where he found that.

“Keep your shirt on,” he muttered, using yet another one of Discord’s nonsense phrases. Climbing up the back of the wagon, and mindful not to step in the rusty stain left by the pegasus he’d rescued, he stumped to an unmarked crate near the middle. Two nails on either corner kept the lid loosely in place, enough so that he was able to nudge it open with the edge of his hoof. Peri stepped out and met him at the sideboards, smiling with anticipation as he shuffled around inside. Tucked safely beneath the now mostly empty sack of vegetables he’d taken for the trip rested a thick rectangle of cheesecloth half the size of a brick. He nipped the corner, careful not to bite too deep, and lifted it out to her waiting hoof.

“Holy cats,” she marveled, giving it a sniff. “What’s this, half a pound of… cheddar?”

He nodded as he watched her tuck the block into her apron. “So I was told. Fair warning, the guy I got it from didn’t own any cows from what I could tell. Could’ve gotten the milk from anywhere.”

If the caution bothered Peri, he couldn’t tell. “Beggars can’t be choosers. Thanks, Mouse, I’ll remember to point a few customers your way once I decide what to use this in.”

Beggars could absolutely be choosers, he thought, which was why he’d given her the full block and not half. For as much shit he sometimes took for his appreciation for cheese, he’d come across more than a few wastelanders who were reluctant to divulge the source of their base ingredient. Mouse wasn’t a prude by any means, but there were lines even he wouldn’t cross.

“Actually,” he said, stopping Peri before she could carry away her prize, “I was hoping you could keep an eye on the place for another week or so. I gotta unload and head back out. Some things on the back burner I didn’t have time to wrap up.”

She paused, pursed her lips thoughtfully, then nodded. “You know my price.”

As if there had ever been any question. Here was another reason he preferred living a little bit off the main drag. Folks had time to talk, give each other shit, and cobble together these friendly deals. It didn’t hurt that Peri was the sort who knew when he was getting tired of talking, even if the conversation had its own momentum. She didn’t keep that ball rolling until it sapped his patience dry. And for that, hey, what’s a half pound of probably-pony cheddar between friends?

“I’ll try to make it a quick trip,” he agreed, knowing she wouldn’t mind keeping the garden behind the shop topped off with water. Speaking of which, he made a note to pick some tatos for the trip back to Discord’s. “Thanks, Peri.”

She arched her brow in mock threat of what might happen should he forget, then tipped her chin at him and went back inside. The bell jingled once more and the painted green door of Half Baked clicked shut behind her.

With no one left waiting to be charmed for their favors, Mouse got to work. The deadbolts turned over with reassuring clunks and he pushed inside, savoring the smell of the familiar. Grease, dust, and just a little bit of soot. Home, he thought as he walked past the two sections of display shelving he’d managed to salvage from the ruins of a grocery story years ago. The cream, rust-pocked shelves were mostly empty, indicating his need to make this scavenging run in the first place. He liked how ubiquitous these kinds of shelves were. Parts for them could be found in just about any of the big, blocky stores down the west coast. Some kind of chain, he thought.

Either way, they all used the same equipment and he’d managed to collect a fair bit of the little plastic sleeves that clipped to the concave edge of each shelf. They made fantastic labels which cut down on the amount of questions his customers asked. The name of the thing, the price of the thing, all the things about the things could be jotted onto a scrap of paper and shoved into the little label holder thingy. It was great. He strolled past the shelf he reserved for medical supplies with its little rolls of gauze, a pile of clean cloth for cheaper bandaging, and some plastic bottles of prewar pain medicine he’d found in a pharmacy whose seals were still intact. Other shelves bore a sparse selection of other goods. Snare kits for small critters, cage traps for larger ones. A shelf of heavy duty knives. One long since emptied of the Equestrian Army MREs he’d found a few months back. For the most part he just stuck to selling the things he himself needed for the long haul trips across the wasteland. Survival gear. Stuff he knew he could find, vouch for, and sell to the travelers who had no choice but to walk several days just to reach the next nowhere town. Anything he didn’t think he could sell in his store he’d take to the Saturday market on the main drag where he knew there would be stalls flush with caps who were willing to take a risk on the stuff he didn’t want.

The back of his bookended shop featured a low counter and a kitchenette barely wide enough for the woodburning stove tucked in the corner. It was enough for his purposes, even if sometimes his customers would mistake the mixed purpose space as a source of free samples. Mouse was quick to disabuse any of the more entitled visitors of this notion through a variety of means at his disposal, including but not limited to hauling them back out to the street by their own tails.

The side door near the stove took him to what used to be a garage intended for the same carriages once sold at Verdant’s parking lot, and which Mouse had since converted into a hybrid workshop and storage area for anything he didn’t have room for in the store. A bright red tool chest, another painful but necessary investment in his own self-sufficiency, dominated the back wall of the garage alongside two long tables made from heavy timber. Several incomplete projects waited for him there, none of which he’d been able to find the right parts for. Among them, several window-sized solar panels whose functionality he hadn’t been able to suss out. Electronics weren’t his strongest suit but he’d worked out enough to know the blobs of melted plastic mounted behind the cells weren’t meant to be melted. Until he figured out what they’d been and how to replace them, the panels were just another thing taking up space.

He crossed the roughly wagon-sized patch of empty floor between emptier storage shelves and stood on his hind legs to reach the plastic ball dangling from the overhead cord with his teeth. The door squeaked and shuddered as he dragged it backward on two legs, something Discord would mock him mercilessly for if he knew. The creature had an affinity for bipeds, which led Mouse to believe he’d met the reptiles in the dragonlands before the world’s end put their species firmly beneath the column marked “Extinct.” He thought about asking Discord about them as he hauled his wagon across the sidewalk, deciding as he dropped his straps on the garage floor that he’d do just that when he got back just to see what sort of nonsense the former Lord of Chaos might give in answer.

He debated unloading the wagon, but his knees convinced him to leave it for when he got back. His inner scavenger grumbled, reminding him of the caps he’d left on the mare’s foreleg. Two Pip-Bucks, and Discord wouldn’t let him take just one. He’d chewed his ear for even checking to see if they turned on, which neither of them had. He shut the garage door and stalked back into the shop where a false tile behind the counter concealed the dial to the floor safe underneath. Muttering to himself, he opened it and deposited the caps he’d gotten from Verdant alongside his own emergency fund. He kept two hundred in his bags, grudgingly accepting the fact that he was going to kiss almost all of that goodbye in one trip to the chemist on the main drag. He sighed. The mare had looked like a steak someone had forgotten to flip on the grill. If Discord hadn’t accidentally killed her by now, she was going to need a lot of stimpacks.

A quick stop to his garden out back to pull up some fresh carrots and tatos, pausing only briefly to shake off the larger clumps of dirt before adding them to his bags. On his way back through the store he scooped up the gauze from the medical shelf, hesitated a moment, and then added one of the bottles of pain meds without thinking too hard about the heavy dent in his profits. He’d make it back some way or another. It wasn’t as if she could go through the entire bottle. At least, he hoped. He put the thought out of his head as he locked up behind himself and ducked into Peri’s place just long enough to toss her the keys.

She looked up from behind her curved glass display case, then to the countertop against the wall behind her where two worn keys on an equally worn ring had skittered across the freshly floured surface.

“Really?”

He shrugged, smiled, and let the door jingle shut behind him.

The sun hung low in the sky, low enough to be obscured by colorful rooftops along the western slope of the Bluff. Long shadows would cool the air well before night ever arrived and they signaled to those still browsing the thinning market square that bartering hours were close to over. A chill ruffled Fiona’s neck as she blinked away what little sleep she’d allowed herself to steal during the daylight hours. It had been three days since the bomb over Foal Mountain lit up the sky, and now it was looking like she would be greeting the fourth having accomplished nothing.

She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her wing as she plodded toward the first beverage vendor she saw. Someone she didn’t recognize stood beneath a wooden sign advertising a small menu ranging from purified water to standard liquors, the latter of which was likely thinned by the lesser. No matter what was on tap it all apparently landed in the same paper cups procured from a sagging box loaded with unopened sleeves. One such cup stood near her side of his stall, the word TIPS scrawled over the Belle’s Sweet-Tea logo in thick, black strokes. With so many Rangers arriving to pulverize the cobbles, she doubted anyone would risk so much as giving the cup of caps a wanting gaze.

The wait in line was brief. When it was her turn, she pulled five bottle caps from the satchel slung across her shoulder and dropped them onto the worn countertop, indicating a picture of coffee with a talon. “One, please.”

The stallion whisked her caps out of sight on a cloud of magic and proceeded to pour a cup of something closer to the color of dehydrated urine than coffee. She noted that he gripped the pot’s plastic handle between his teeth instead of his magic. A week ago she might have teased someone like him for his horn’s failure to “get it up,” but now she feigned not having noticed at all. She dropped an extra cap into the tip cup and headed down the cobbles toward the tunnel of Stable 6. One of the knights posted outside the cavern stepped forward to meet her as much as prevent her from going further, and for a moment the two of them regarded one another with a polite hostility until Fiona conceded.

As with the last couple of evenings, the knight followed her toward the spot where the precisely sectioned granite arch bent down to meet the rough hewn cobblestones of the marketplace grounds. She transferred the cup from her feathers to her hand and sat down with her back toward the slope. The knight posted himself between her and the tunnel, symbolically blocking her view of it even as he begrudgingly acted as her conduit to the information it guarded.

“So,” she spoke, the cup warming her palms, “what’re the chances I’ll get to talk to him tonight?”

Latch watched the thinning crowd as citizens wrapped up their errands. “Zero, same as the last time. The Elder barely has time for his paladins let alone an unemployed DJ.”

She sipped her coffee and ignored the barb. She’d begun to think Latch wasn’t being an asshole because he was an asshole. The more time she had to chew on it, the more she thought she understood him. It hadn’t been long since he was just another Ranger assigned to the wall. His duty rotations had been mostly uneventful - Fiona rarely heard news worth reporting come from the gate - and he’d felt comfortable enough to risk having a kid. And then three strangers show up at his wall one night and turn his entire life upside-down.

Fiona had been a part of that, she knew. Coaxing Latch into allowing her inside, unescorted, had landed him a demotion and reassignment to one of the excavation teams sent to dig up Stable 10. She didn’t have the heart to ask him whether he was the breadwinner of his family or if his wife, someone she’d been quick to dismiss for the sake of a few crude quips at Latch’s expense, worked for someone in the Bluff. At the time Fiona had only been focused on retrieving Aurora’s stolen Pip-Buck and cashing in on an opportunity to shame Paladin Ironshod in front of his subordinates. She didn’t blame Latch’s motivation for keeping her at arm’s, or leg’s, reach.

And still, like it or not, Coronado had assigned him to Stable 6’s security rotation. The other Rangers monitoring traffic into and out of the tunnel were implants from Fillydelphia whose unblinking stares were as familiar as they were disheartening. These were ponies who had never seen a gryphon up close before, and despite their stiff upper lip she could see the fear behind their eyes. Latch was a local. He knew her. Not even the burn scars were enough to hide his annoyance toward her.

Plus, despite being impossible to talk to at times, he at least respected that they were both playing for the same team.

“I passed along your message about the pulse, by the way,” he said, eyeing her watery coffee for a beat. “Paladin Shire said his techs were working on a similar theory to explain the blackout. He told me to ask if you’d be okay letting them crack open some of your radio equipment to see if there’s a pattern in what got fried first.”

She started to shrug, but nodded instead. “Yeah, sure. Tell them I already got a head start on that. All my newer equipment bit the dust. The high tech stuff, with the chips in them, all of it’s scorched. The only kit I have that still takes voltage runs on vacuum tubes which means I’ve got as much a radio station as the next third-rate scavenger.”

Reconsidering, she decided to shrug anyway. “Probably be easier if I went in and told them myself.”

Latch snorted. “Not likely.”

“Worth a shot.” She sipped, savoring the buzz of caffeine more so than the taste of weak coffee. The grit slowing her thoughts was steadily working itself loose. She tapped the cup with a finger and sighed. “If I can’t talk to him, the least you can do is tell me whether or not all of this…” she gestured toward the steadily growing population of armed and armored soldiers loitering around the market stalls, “should worry me.”

She waited for him long enough that she started to wonder if he would answer at all. When he finally did, he didn’t speak with the same conviction he usually dismissed her with. “The Enclave popped a balefire bomb above a Stable. Who’s to say that wasn’t a test run for an attack on this one? We have an obligation to defend ourselves.”

“And how much of this ‘defense’ is earmarked for Stable 10?”

This time he remained silent.

She closed her eyes. Even if she still had the ability to broadcast, she knew there was nothing she could say that could stop or even slow what was already in motion. What little rumors she’d been able to verify all pointed toward an all-out push to retake Foal Mountain. Even those not wearing Ranger colors knew by now the potential locked away inside Stable 10. Ironshod had known weeks before the war had thawed. He’d pieced together enough to understand that beating the Enclave to the treasure trove of prewar tech inside that Stable could break the stalemate between them overnight, and he had whispered into Coldbrook’s ear how finite this single opportunity could be. Taking Stable 10 wasn’t a stepping stone for the Steel Rangers, it was a springboard. A raging tailwind that would convert their storehouses of confiscated tech into the blueprints of a new war. One they could win.

Fiona recalled the way Aurora appeared to teeter on the edge of rabid panic as she steadied herself for the long flight south to save her friend from Autumn Song’s solar array. She’d initially believed Aurora was only afraid for her companion. She hadn’t known Ironshod had stolen her Pip-Buck shortly before her arrival atop the bluff, nor that it was her only tangible connection to the people she’d left behind. Fiona knew how it felt to turn away from everything she knew, but she couldn't begin to imagine the terror she must have felt at having that connection severed with all those lives weighing down on her.

That mare was dead now, and the people she’d come all this way and farther to save were likely doomed as well.

“I should have helped her,” she breathed.

Latch cocked a brow at her.

“I just sat up there and made both of them into a headline. Fuck me, I knew what was going on and I didn’t lift a finger.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Latch murmured, “I made the ghoul promise to come back to help with the gardens.”

It didn’t make her feel better. She could feel the coffee shaking her awake and now she wanted nothing more than to fly back to her firetower and sleep the night away. And yet the little ripples inside her cup reminded her of the hours ahead she had reserved for pestering soldiers, shaking them down for nuggets of news or guiding them to the nearest private room within which she might ply their secrets a different way. All in the name of… what? Habit? The sake of knowing something she hadn’t known before? What was she even supposed to do with the information she already had? Her broadcast range was limited to how loud she could shout.

Suddenly the prospect of sitting in her chair behind a warm microphone felt ridiculous. She downed the last of her coffee and flicked the empty cup onto the cobbles. An idea was beginning to form. Not much of one, but something better than wasting another night deciding who she could fuck a headline out of for a radio station she no longer had.

At least it was something.

“Hey,” Latch said, tipping a hoof toward the empty cup as she got to her feet. “Are you going to pick that up?”

She flexed her wings, their heavy joints crackling as she did the mental math.

“Flipswitch.” He said. Then, more firmly, “Fiona.”

She looked at him and smiled. “Don’t let anyone touch my records while I’m gone.”

He opened his mouth to ask what she meant by that only to slam it shut against the abrupt torrent of dust kicked off the cobbles, leaving him and his fellow Rangers to stare mutely as the gryphon’s skyward trajectory bent steadily west.

A filly dressed in rags poked her head out from the edge of the treeline, gave one look to the city built upon side slopes of the monolithic bluff, and pouted.

“Beans,” her mother called from the road, “stay where we can see you.”

She stepped back and trotted toward the old pavement on tiny legs, hopping over fallen branches and winding around the bushes with all the pickers waiting to snatch onto her costume. When her mother caught sight of her, she was wearing a face that warned she wasn’t going to ask nicely next time she tried to explore without permission. Beans found it hard not to let her frustration show, but she tried. She thought leaving the mountains meant leaving that scary part of the sky where bad ponies hid above the clouds, and with it might come rules that were easier for her to follow.

Her mother smiled a little as Beans clamored through the scratchy reeds growing in the ditch, the dull cloak her parents insisted she wear at all times lifting momentarily as one of the dry stalks levered the fabric away from one of her wings. If anyone from the caravan noticed, they didn’t say, but she saw the momentary flicker of tension in her mother’s eyes and she felt her neck run hot. The cloak settled back down as soon as she was on the road again, and she was relieved when nobody lectured her about being careful. She trotted along the faded flecks of white paint that traced the edge of the road, her hooves beating three times for every one of her mom’s. Her dad rode in the back of the covered wagon ahead of them, his front leg wrapped tight with bandages made brown from the caravan’s dust. He caught her looking at it and shot her a reassuring wink, but she could only manage half a smile in return.

“What’s wrong, honey?” he asked.

She wrinkled her nose as the caravan cleared the treeline she’d been peeking through. “It’s too little.”

“What’s too little?”

She nearly lifted a feather to point out at the bluff just up ahead but thought better of it, using her nose instead. “Blindy Bluff.”

Her dad half-turned to look through the little hole in the front of the wagon while her mother sidled closer to the edge of the road to see as well. “Well,” he said, “that’s because it got squished by all those houses. See?”

Beans squinted toward the tall hill and saw all the colorful squares that speckled its slope, not quite sure if mountains could be squished. The bluff was nothing like her mountain. It was short and all alone. Her mountain was tall enough to touch the sky and there were many, many more just like it, some that were even taller! She could see everything from her old home, but she imagined even if she stood at the very tip top of the skinny fort at the top of Blindy Bluff she wouldn’t be able to see anything.

She spotted a pebble ahead and swung her hoof at it, sending it skittering off into the ditch. “Houses don’t squish mountains.”

He chuckled. “Aye-aye, Captain.”

That made her smile, and as her mood lightened she remembered a question she’d been told to stop asking until later. It felt like a long time since then, so it was only fair that she got to ask it again.

“Are we closer to Aurora’s house, yet?”

Her dad made a face to her mother that said it was her turn to answer. She looked up to her expectantly, hoping for better news than before.

“We’re almost there,” she said, sounding tired. “Remember how I said we’re going to spend the night at Blinder’s Bluff? Tomorrow morning we’re all going to get up early to find someone who can take us the rest of the way. One more road, hon, okay?”

She wanted to complain but she didn’t think the people in charge of all the wagons liked it when she did that. Instead, she sucked on her lip and nodded.

The urge to explore dwindled as they crossed the clearing, its wide rows of low-cut stumps making her picture a pony closing giant scissors through swaths of trees. The empty space made her nervous, but not as much as the imposing steel wall waiting for them at the end of the road. Her eyes grew wide at the sight of ponies stomping together in groups in front of the wall, some of them wearing big suits that made them look just like robots! Her mother reminded her to stay close and this time she did as she was told, unsure of all the stern faces staring down at them from the top of the wall. The wagons stopped to join a line of other ponies who had gotten there before them, the adults talking to each other in serious tones that made Beans wish she were back home. She kept her eyes on the dusty road when one of the ponies in the big metal suits stopped to ask her mother if he could verify the gun mounted to her shoulder wasn’t loaded. Normally she didn’t allow anyone other than dad or herself to touch the big cannon, but for this stranger she obliged without even making sure he knew where the safety switch was or which way it was never meant to point.

Beans wanted to tell them that just because they looked scary didn’t mean they had to act scary. Roach looked scary and he hadn’t been mean to her at all, and when she and her parents first arrived in Kiln she’d been relieved to discover the ghouls living there were just as nice to her. Some of them had been just as surprised to see a filly her age as she was to learn how old they were, even if one of them had whispered something to her mom and dad that made them both angry. Beans smiled at the memory of being given a treat by the mare who owned the inn, a swirly red and white candy that melted on her tongue with an explosion of flavor. She almost wished she could live there in Kiln, but her dad said the air there was bad and that they all had to take medicine while they were there so none of them got sick. She’d wondered if the ghouls had to take medicine too. When they left, the old mare hadn’t been at her desk to give her another candy even though the air was starting to taste what the water pump smelled like when it got hot.

The ponies in the suits stomped and grumbled anyway, giving her mother directions to a place they called an arm-marry while another quietly noted the exposed tip of her father’s wing and began asking him lots of questions in a real big hurry. More soldiers came over to watch and only when he said he was married to her mom and that Beans was their daughter did someone lift the skirt of Beans’ rags with a mote of magic to confirm. She watched the robot-faced soldier, not sure whether to be afraid, as he let go and nodded to someone else who murmured “dustwings” to another. A mare with a stern expression and a squeaky voice led the three of them away from the caravan and through a big hole in the wall and into the chaotic city it protected.

“Stay close,” her mother whispered to her as the dirt road turned to lumpy stones and the quiet of the outside transformed into a tangle of shouting voices, grinding wagon wheels, and stamping hooves. Beans did as she was told even as she was transfixed by the sheer number of ponies around her.

Blindy Bluff was like Kiln but a hundred times bigger! Her jaw hung open as their escort led them past colorful covered wagons, brightly painted signs, and vendor stalls from which dozens of voices clamored to boast their best prices to the stream of inbound travelers. More than once she felt her mother’s hoof guiding her back toward her as her own legs led her toward bright colors and porcelain grins. They stopped outside a low building that reminded her of her cave, where a pair of soldiers grunted under the weight of her mother’s gun and a third held up a rectangular box that flashed and spat out gray paper, which he kept.

Beans wanted to ask what the paper was for but the squeaky soldier had begun leading them away before she had the chance. There was talk between her and her father about a shelter for dustwings and whether or not he wanted someone to come by later to take a look at his injured foreleg. She listened, her stomach rumbling as they passed a stall with something savory sizzling on a slow-turning spit, as her dad declined the latter. He probably didn’t want the soldier mare to know he’d scraped up his whole leg when he walked straight into a pothole when he should have been paying attention like he always told her to. Her lips pursed with a smile as she fought not to blurt out the embarrassing secret.

They passed soldiers grouped outside a stall whose sign tried to make a shiny glass bottle of something bubbly and brown inside look tasty, and Beans wondered if she could have some if she asked. The thought lingered with her all the way to a skinny yellow building nestled in a row of several others, reminding her of her bookshelf back home. Their escort gestured them through a creaky door and left without saying goodbye. Beans frowned after her as the door scraped shut between them.

A single painting of a field of purple flowers hung on the wall inside the front room of the bookend inn. Beans stared at it, wondering if it was real or just a picture like the ones in her books. She hoped it was real as she turned to see if the adults were talking about anything interesting. They weren’t, as usual. Her mom and dad stood at a stub of a desk behind which a young stallion counted their caps while simultaneously offering them a discounted price on Rad-Away. Her dad chuckled and shook his head, mentioning they’d taken more than enough during their trip through Kiln. The stallion frowned and glanced between them, his sales pitch more insistent. He said something about residual radiation still coming in on the wind. The dust would be contaminated for weeks, he said, prompting her mother to ask a question.

The counter pony noticed Beans watching and his voice lowered so she couldn’t hear, but could see the words Stable 10 flash across his lips. She frowned and trotted over to her mom so she could listen in but their conversation only got quieter with proximity. They were keeping secrets. That wasn’t fair at all. She thumped her mom’s leg so she could tell her as much but she looked down and shook her head, saying nothing as she turned back to listen to what the stallion was explaining.

Whatever he said made something change in her parents. Her dad took a half step back, his gaze distant and full of fear. Her mom shook her head and spoke more earnestly, one of her big thumper hooves coming up to rest on the desk. Her eyes were wet like they sometimes got after a good yawn, but they weren’t good tears. She blinked fast, trying to hide them, but Beans saw that her mom was crying and her dad had broken his own rule by putting a wing across her shoulders. When he looked down and met her gaze, Beans knew something awful had happened.

“This would be easier if you let me pick you up.”

“Don’t,” Aurora warned, her tone prickly but not for her usual reason. At least, not entirely for that reason. Being mollycoddled was humiliating enough on its own, and having strangers going out of their way to aid in her recovery made her feel… she couldn’t decide on the right word. Guilty? Undeserving? Parasitic?

She tried to push away the dark thoughts but they were strong as they were persuasive. Ginger had gone out of this world knowing her death would save hundreds of lives, one of which being Aurora’s. The one who promised Ginger love and safety and whose ignorance allowed others to steal it away with hardly any effort at all. Aurora Pinfeathers, the mare who survived, being doted on once more because someone had felt sorry for her and hadn’t stopped to consider whether or not she might be a poison.

A mare whose bladder felt like a hot stone between her hips and who knew with confidence that if her caretaker so much as jostled her would shortly find himself in need of a new floor.

She put some weight on the sling hooked beneath the shoulder of her fractured foreleg and breathed silent relief when it took her weight. Her benefactor was holding the ends of it somewhat level, allowing her just enough stability to hobble forward on her two working hooves. It made her feel like one of the little wind-up toys the engineering team in Mechanical would assemble before Hearth's Warming. Painted aluminum ducks, bunnies, princesses and ministry mares would weeble-wobble forward with the help of an offset cog and some spring steel. No one remembered where the tradition came from. All they knew was it was something the adults had done for them when they were foals and which was their duty to do for this new generation of youngsters. The foals loved the little gadgets. Aurora suppressed a smile at the memory as she weeble-wobbled along with the aid of her seeing-eye nanny.

“Just tell me where to go and don’t lift the sling too much. Lower is better.” She frowned, then added, “Please.”

A low chuckle. “However you like it. Five or six more steps this way and we’ll be at the back door.”

He directed her with a very slight pull on her sling, something they hadn’t discussed before but which made intuitive sense as soon as she felt it happening. One hop forward with her foreleg, dip her weight into the sling, and kick forward with her hind leg. At this rate she was going to run out of limbs by the end of the month. Her mind quickly rejected its own attempt at gallow’s humor. She stumped forward another step.

“So,” she said, “earlier today you said your name is Discord. Is that something gryphons are okay with, or…?”

His voice rose an octave as if he were just understanding the punchline to a bad joke. “You think I’m a gryphon?”

He laughed with a haughty inflection that caught her off guard and made her think for a moment he was laughing at her. Her brow furrowed beneath her blindfold as she hopped forward another step, embarrassment rising in her cheeks. She hadn’t been sure what he was, but she’d been sure she’d read something about gryphons being able to alternate between standing on their hind paws as well as all fours as needed. Fiona hadn’t demonstrated anything like that, sure, but she’d read about it, and Discord definitely favored his hind legs.

“I suppose you’re not entirely wrong,” he continued once he got his fill of jollies, “but no, my dear, I’m not a gryphon. I’m, well, me.”

His tone changed when she didn’t react. “Do you not… know who I am?”

If she could have shrugged without toppling over and pissing herself, she would have tried. As things were, she settled with a passive tilt of her head. “I know where your folks got the name from. Discord, Lord of Chaos, Trickster and Betrayer of Equestria. How much further? I really have to pee.”

A doorknob jostled and a door whispered open, answering her question. “Three steps across the porch, then four stairs down to the yard. The outhouse is a ways further. You don’t believe it’s possible that I am who I say I am, do you?”

She made noncommittal noise. “I think if you were actually Discord you wouldn’t be grinding medicine for my eyes or living out of an abandoned house in the middle of the wasteland. You’d snap your fingers and I’d be healed, or dead, or a vanilla milkshake.”

He laughed again, this time with warmth. “You strike me more as a caramel parfait. Stop here, you’re at the stairs. Careful does it.”

Dull pain radiated through her slinged leg as she rested her weight into it enough to probe the empty space ahead of her with her other hoof. Discord lowered her a little, the sensation causing her muscles to tense in preparation for a fall, but her hoof touched the first step instead.

“Chaos gods don’t say careful does it.”

“This one does,” he countered. “Next step.”

He lowered her to the next step, her body tilting even lower. It took some coaxing for her to risk hopping her back hoof off the porch and onto the step behind her. Each time she did, she had to fight her brain’s internal alarms that insisted her hoof was going to pass through nothing and drag the rest of her into some interminable abyss. If only she could be so lucky.

“Agree to disagree,” she said. He didn’t argue the concession, instead focusing on getting Aurora all the way to the grass. It only occurred to her several aching steps later that she wasn’t hopping across a barren surface, but a living one like the underbrush Roach had led them through on their way to the cabin where she spent her second night away from home. The blades were cool against her hooves, something that might have been refreshing were she not full to bursting. Her tail clamped down and she hobbled faster.

The outhouse took longer than she expected to reach, but she made it in time. Discord made a half-hearted offer at helping her inside but she wasn’t about to risk stumbling the wrong way and pissing all over this stranger and his toilet. As soon as her front hoof found the bench seat she all but pogoed her back end one hundred and eighty degrees to its destination. It was blissful relief. Her shoulder found the outhouse wall and she leaned against it as much for support as to assume some primal posture of Oh Thank Celestia.

When her tank finally dripped empty, Discord was ready with the crude sling. It occurred to her the outhouse had no door that she was aware of and for all she knew he could have been watching, but something about his demeanor suggested he wouldn’t have. She decided not to ask as he led her back to the house.

“What time is it?” she asked.

A pause. “A little past midnight. Why?”

She didn’t answer because she didn’t know why she’d asked. Did it matter what time it was, or what day? She wasn’t tired. At least, she wasn’t so tired that she felt like going back to sleep. All she’d done for the last several days was sleep and feel miserable, and yet some part of her wanted to keep a running tally as if it made a difference what answer she got back.

She shook her head. “Curious, I guess.”

They reached the steps and after several failed attempts to climb them, she relented and allowed him to pick her up and set her down on the porch. A paw and talon. His lone hoof thumped along beside her, adjacent to the padding of some other clawed appendage. Understanding clicked in her head not with a crash of shocked disbelief, but rather with an unenthused half-shrug. This creature leading her into his house was some breed of chimera who walked, talked, and casually claimed to be Discord. Sure, why not? Another wasteland revelation to chuck onto the pile on top of finding out an Element of Harmony was living outside her Stable, that two mid-level government employees were responsible for killing ninety-nine percent of the planet, that the two superpowers who rose from the ashes were quietly competing to be first to find the coordinates of a leftover orbital superweapon, and that the mare who pushed the button two hundred years ago was more than happy to do it again so her sycophantic subjects wouldn’t find out she wasn’t a Special Substitute Princess.

The door clicked behind them and Aurora let Discord, Lord of Chaos lead her back to his creaky old couch. Because fine, this was the world they all lived in now. She was too exhausted in too many ways to waste any more energy on surprise.

Moving up onto the cushions stirred a jagging cough out of her. She swallowed the little moisture she had in her throat to stifle it from the harder, racking fit she could feel it building toward. Her burns ached as she settled into a dent in the couch that barely had time to shed its warmth, her chest still tickling from an unseen irritant.

“Can I have some water?”

He obliged by bringing her a glass with a straw, which she could hold in place if she clutched it to her belly with the crook of her hoof. It saved Discord the effort of having to hold it for her and gave Aurora a tiny sense of autonomy. Something in her life she could control, no matter how small it may be. She drank room temperature water in silence and thought dark thoughts.

Discord yawned into the knuckles of his fist as he sank into the creaking springs of his easy chair. He watched his nameless guest sip her drink for a long while, his lips dipped in frustration. Gone were the days when sleep was merely another bit of nonsense mortals seemed happy to spend their limited existences indulging in. Now it was something his body craved, this comical haberdashery of species he’d knit together for his brief visit to a world brimming with species on the cusp of sentience. His eyelids felt like they’d been cast in lead, which wasn’t far off from the truth.

Blackened flecks of the granite prison Twilight made for him still clung to him like scabs. He could still feel the entropic fire as it boiled away the magic keeping him trapped in that forgotten corner of pristinely trimmed topiaries, peeling back the stone shell with the same violence that always preceded the death of an otherwise prospering world. The masters of this ball of dirt were no different than innumerable other intelligent species whose fear and mistrust drove them to collective suicide because they couldn’t bear witnessing some Other enjoy a sliver of time standing over them with the power to judge.

And yet this world’s cataclysm was different for him because he knew he’d given them its seed. So when the fire came to disassemble the matrix of will pinning him to this one point in the universe, when the window opened and he’d seen the ungracious exit presented to him which he normally would never give a second thought, he hesitated. He hesitated long enough for the fire to reach inside of him and burn to ash the very core of power his people had lauded over less fortunate civilizations for time immemorial.

He fell, his screams one among billions, and survived. Discord watched this mare drinking his water and knew she’d survived a cataclysm of her own.

“Is there a chance,” he began, noting the cautious pivot of her ears, “that someone out there could be looking for you? Your family, or friends?”

Her hoof pulled the plastic cup a little closer, the sudden tension betraying the lie in her reply. “No.”

He hummed in response. Tired eyes looked over her bandages as a matter of course, noting the milky pink stains that bled through the cotton over her shoulder and ribs. Her burns were deepest there and would leave scars no amount of wasteland medicine could erase. He looked down at the back of his forearm, at the ugly whorls of pink flesh beneath the thinned golden fur and imagined hers would heal much in the same way.

“Did you know,” he asked, “that I was in Canterlot the day your princesses launched the missiles?”

The mare’s face wrinkled at his phrasing. He smiled without comment, knowing these ponies had grown a sort of folklore around referring to the collapse of their civilization as “the day the bombs fell.” It was a misnomer. The bombs were never dropped. They’d ridden skyward atop missiles stuffed to bursting with guidance hardware. Primitive by most technologically attuned species' standards, but one didn't always need a vibration dampening hammer to do the work of a stone.

She sipped her water and shook her head. “No.”

He was tempted to get up and fill a glass for himself, but he was too comfortable to bother. “They kept me in the Canterlot Gardens next to the castle, trapped inside a statue. I could see and hear but not much else. The bomb went off underneath the city and it threw everything into the air. I watched it happen from behind the hedge walls. Thousands of ponies thrown so high that I could see them suspended there, not knowing what was happening and yet knowing it was–”

“Stop,” the mare said. Her jaw was trembling, the muscles in her face drawn tight. “Just stop. Please.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he was. He’d wanted to get a gauge of what she’d experienced and her reaction had come more abruptly than he expected.

Sure, he was being deliberately insensitive but this mare had borne witness to the first balefire bomb to explode in two centuries and she was being cagey about the details. Maybe he was abusing his role as a host just a smidge but if Equestria was gearing up to wipe itself out a second time, Discord thought he deserved a forewarning this time around.

He let the silence settle between them before trying again. “Did you lose anyone?”

The question landed like a physical blow. For a split second the mare regarded his general direction with molten annoyance, but as the seconds ticked by and no rebuke came, she relaxed in her seat and nodded.

He nodded too, even though she couldn’t see it. “So did I.”

A pause. Her voice was quiet. “Who?”

His thoughts didn’t have to drift to Fluttershy. She was already there, fully present in his mind even now. For a few short years she’d seen through his cryptic quips and bewildering performances and saw not some terrible deity, a timeless creature whose simple existence was a galaxy beside her mote of dust. No, Fluttershy had known him for what he truly was: lonely. Rather than throw it in his face or use its truth to prize some petty boon from him in exchange for silence, she’d sought to fill that void inside him with her company, unasked.

He sank the dull claw of his thumb against the tip of his index finger until the indentation grew deep enough to hurt, and he stopped to rub the spot as he remembered how quickly he’d thrown that rare compassion away. One selfish mistake of allowing Tirek, an unremarkable centaur gifted with a mildly interesting parasitic ability to steal magic, to tempt him into sowing chaos without considering how quickly out of hand it would get. Because of him, Tirek grew into a threat warranting the intervention of the Elements of Harmony.

He could still see the silent horror in her eyes when Twilight, exhausted and cornered, caved Tirek’s skull against a slab of bedrock like so much rotten fruit. Those eyes turned to look at him just seconds later, and he knew in that moment that she blamed him.

The room shimmered. He cleared his throat, blinking away the dampness. “A dear friend. Somebody who cared very deeply for me, whom I loved and was too afraid to admit as much.”

The mare lowered her head, deep in thought as if considering whether to share her loss in kind. Discord watched as something knotted within her before finally relaxing.

“Telling them doesn’t make it hurt less,” she said to the cup in her hoof. “I told Ginger I loved her. It wasn’t enough. There’s nothing I could have done that would have been enough.”

He waited to see if she would add anything else, and when she didn’t he leaned forward and pushed himself up to his feet. His curving back let out a few errant pops as he straightened and reached forward to pinch the rim of his guest’s cup, pulling it out of her grip.

Confused, she looked up in his general direction and frowned. “I wasn’t finished with that.”

He didn’t trust his voice to answer, so instead he crossed the den and walked into the kitchen in silence. Dirty bowls and cutting boards shared the length of the hardwood countertop with screw top jars filled with ground herbs, reagents, and a few simple spices. He set the plastic cup inside a dented strainer in the sink and fished two stout, heavy glasses from the cupboard. There was a tradition shared by species separated by both millenia and the expanding void between galaxies which was more reliable than senseless war or even finches. Discord was never much of a drinker, but neither had one of his oldest friends and the man still managed to retire in the comfort of his own vineyard.

He drew a bottle from the back of the cupboard and unscrewed the cap. It had originally contained some awful flavor of mouthwash and now harbored a deep red liquid that came as close to Cabernet Sauvignon as this husk of a planet was ever going to manage. He poured a little into each glass, enough for tradition, dropped a straw in one and tromped back to the den with both in hand.

The bottle landed on the coffee table with a satisfying thud. He tucked a glass into the nook of his guest’s foreleg and sank into the recliner with one of his own.

“What’s this?” the mare asked.

“Something better than well water,” he answered. Then he lifted his glass above the armrest of his chair. “To those who are gone and to those they left behind. We’re living proof that shattered hearts can still beat.”

He took a sip of too-sweet wine and looked toward the mare on his couch. She hadn’t touched her drink but she swallowed thickly, and Discord said nothing as he watched the bandages across her eyes grow damp.

Their conversation trickled to an uncomfortable end, one which neither of them quite knew how to tie off neatly. Her mouth dry from rough wine and avoiding the pitfalls of sharing too much, she’d allowed Discord to take her empty glass. She rolled onto her side, her aches and stings shifting into familiar posture as she listened to the sounds of dishes being cleaned a room away. When Discord was finished he pad-thumped back into her room and paused for what felt like a long time, apparently trying to discern whether she’d fallen asleep. Eventually he decided she must have. A blowing sound and the scent of candle smoke signaled his departure and the world slid into a deeper, comfortable silence.

Beneath her blindfold, heavy eyelids slid shut and sleep rushed in to steal the night away.

Her eyes cracked open to the impossible.

She was seated at a workbench in Mechanical. Her workbench. The one she’d spent the years of her apprenticeship behind alongside more skilled and seasoned pegasi than herself. A flush of nerves rose in her chest as she tried to remember what it was she was doing, knowing Sledge would be nearby to catch her looking stupid. On the scarred metal surface in front of her sat the remains of a bright red box, its panels clean and freshly painted, its screw heads stripped and unsalvageable. A welding machine, brand new from Fabrication. Her heart sped up. Why had she taken this apart? It was new! She had no business loosening so much as a locknut on this equipment and she could tell the pegasi at the stations around her knew it too.

She searched her bench for a driver. Nothing. Where were her tools? Feathers weighted with lead hauled open drawers and found nothing except their silhouettes cut into the foam lining where they should have been. Sweat beaded on her neck. Another drawer greeted her with a loose mix of screws, their neatly organized boxes missing. Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.

Tears welled in her eyes as familiar hoofsteps thudded up the rows behind her. She could feel her mom’s disappointed gaze from her workstation just three tables over, wondering how her own daughter could have made such a mess. A piece of new equipment, ruined. Tools missing. Hours of work for whichever apprentice got assigned to sort the disaster of mixed fittings once Sledge pulled her out of Mechanical and threw her at the hooves of some other department head with the patience to teach a fuckup like her.

A voice rang inside Aurora’s head, dull like a cracked bell. She looked up, startled, and saw the hall of a dead Stable spread around her. Chairs empty, tool drawers hanging open like protruding teeth, the lights long since darkened by the cataclysm that swept its thousands of residents screaming into a coffin designed for them. The cavernous rows of Stable 1’s Mechanical level yawned around her, perfectly dark except for what Aurora recalled from her memories of being there herself.

This place, this silo filled to the top with nightmares, wrapped itself around her like a promise. This was what happened to the Stables that didn’t survive. She’d known this, and still she’d entrusted the lives of everyone she ever loved to the mercurial oath of a mass murderer.

The voice came again. Clearer now. Ahead of her, green light flickered through a cracked door. The generator room. She got up and began walking past the empty benches, weaving around tipped buckets of metal scrap and overturned chairs as she drew closer to the crackle of something burning. The door sat ajar, propped open by the handle of a screwdriver on the floor. Her feathers moved without permission, grasping the edge of the door and pulling. Half a ton of insulated steel hinged open without effort and Aurora felt her eyes widen at the pyre burning on the other side.

Her generator was ablaze, consumed by a column of balefire burning high enough to lap at the conduits and cooling lines mounted across the domed ceiling. A scream crawled up her throat as the heat sliced across her like a knife, blackening her coat and bubbling the exposed skin underneath. She wrenched herself backward and slammed the door shut, sending an explosion of sound across an amphitheater of forgotten workstations. Her wing clutched around something hard and when she looked down, the black screen of a sleek white Pip-Buck stared back up at her.

“That belonged to her.”

She startled and looked up toward the voice. Standing in front of her was… nothing. An absence that featured defined borders, curving lines which joined to create the vaguely equine shape of a mare who Aurora realized had been at the center of many of their early dawn conversations. A mare whose name she knew because she’d been there when Julip first suggested it.

“Tandy,” she whispered, the word a logjam in her mind that refused to let any other thoughts pass until she spoke it. As soon as she had, a clearer thought came to her. She glanced around at the dead Stable and realized she could see the inaccuracies in her own recollection. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”

Twin lights of swirling matter glowed where a pony’s eyes might be, and something like pained compassion shaped them. “Yes. She gave you a little of her magic at the end, and now you are here.”

The lights blinked on around them and the signs of a panicked evacuation returned to order. Workbenches became organized. Refuse in the aisles faded away. The nightmare changed to something benign, and Aurora relaxed at the sight of everything sliding back into its place. Only a temporary salve, but one she desperately needed right now.

She found herself sitting down with her back against the generator room’s wall, and she tried to imagine the comforting hum of a perfectly balanced machine emanating from the other side. “This is weird,” she said. “I wasn’t so sure you were real.”

Tandy continued to loom, and Aurora remembered a night when Ginger told her this creature had a bad habit of doing that. “I know. She feared you may come to think she was cognitively unsound.”

“I would never think that about her.” The words came with a heat that embarrassed her. She winced. “Sorry.”

Deep within that unsettling void, a few points of light glowed to life. Aurora thought they looked like stars and remembered how Ginger described her first encounters with Tandy like speaking to a window pointed up toward a cloudless night sky. Something warmed inside her at being able to see for herself what her partner struggled to put into words.

“You have nothing to apologize for, Aurora.”

The creature spoke with a strange familiarity that tugged at some buried part of her.

“You shoulder burdens which are not yours to bear. She would have wanted you to believe that you were blameless in her death.”

Her vision blurred. Somewhere else, a blind mare wept.

“I am not,” she uttered miserably, like a foal shielding herself from the teasing of older fillies. “I knew what Primrose was capable of. I knew she helped end the world and I took that bomb from her anyway.”

“You did not know.”

Tandy spoke with unwavering certainty, because she was a creature that could peer into the minds of her dreamers and sort through their memories as if she’d lived them herself. Aurora brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them with her wings, refusing to speak lest she say something she regretted. No, not regret. Something she couldn't take back. Something too honest. Something that might let her off this hook she’d hung herself on.

But Tandy already knew. She’d known the instant Aurora slipped into this place she only half-believed was real.

“You are the victim of lies woven by a tyrant who abused your desire to save your loved ones. She fed you the illusion of salvation and went through great pains to ensure you did not discover her true intentions.” Tandy sat, the motion meant to express empathy despite how unnatural it looked. “And you are not the only one she deceived.”

Aurora remembered something Ginger had mentioned and reached up to scrub at her eyes. “Primrose was keeping herself awake.”

Tandy nodded. “She became aware of the connection I felt toward Ginger and sought to shield herself from me.”

Her attention focused on a single word. She eyed Tandy. “What connection?”

“Friendship,” she answered, evidently unconcerned by the flicker of protective jealousy in Aurora’s tone. “Ginger gave me a nickname. She spoke to me about things other dreamers do not trust me to know, even though I already know. She was kind to me when she did not have a reason to be.”

Aurora’s throat thickened. “Yeah. She did that a lot.”

She didn’t know how long the silence between them lasted. Time felt less fixed here. When Tandy did eventually speak again, there was something lingering at the boundaries of her voice that warned of a deeper, more potent anger.

“It is in Cozy Glow’s nature to deceive. You and I… our Ginger… we are not her first victims, nor are we her most recent. She is aware the war the Enclave fights in her name will fail, and she has prepared contingencies for this which will end to her benefit. She will blame her enemies for the explosion above your home and her people will worship her for it.”

Aurora listened and nodded. With the exception of the strange name Tandy used, these were all things about Primrose she either suspected or knew. She was a mare who wore power like a cloak of armor, whose Enclave clung to ancient weapons capable of reducing their enemies to molecules should they ever come too close to victory. Sledge and Rainbow Dash had crossed that threshold. She shuddered. She could still see the layers of Foal Mountain peeling away under the balefire bomb’s fury.

“I just want… five minutes. Just five fucking minutes alone with her and a rusty fucking screwdriver.”

“No, you do not.”

She looked up at Tandy as if to scorn her, but something about the certainty in which she spoke made her hesitate. “You’re in my head, aren’t you.”

Tandy lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. A mimicking of how Ginger would coyly shrug away questions they both knew the answer to. “You want to hurt her.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, not liking how ugly it sounded coming from someone else. “I don’t want her to just walk away from what she did. What she’s done. Not just Ginger, or you and me. Do you understand? All of it. I want her to feel all the pain she’s ever caused… and more.”

“You want her to suffer.”

For a split second Aurora thought Tandy had repeated herself, but something about the way that last word rumbled from the creature’s throat spoke to something deeply unpleasant. She nodded, feeling the resolve hardening inside her.

“I want to kill–”

“Suffer,” the creature interrupted, as if urging her to agree. “She deserves to suffer. You agree, yes?”

She nodded, unsure why the admission was beginning to feel so contractual. “I do.”

Tandy stood and bent toward her, leveling the tip of her horn toward her like a spear. A flicker of light and a quick jolt that felt like she’d picked up both leads of her multimeter with the same feather. She flinched, but not from the contact with Tandy, but from the sudden clarity of the dream surrounding them. Details that were muddy before were sharper. She could smell hot metal and grease in the air and swore she could make out bits of conversation drifting from the break room. Electric lights buzzed overhead and in one of the fixtures, a fluorescent tube flickered with uneven pink light as it verged on dying. It was as if a fog had been lifted from her brain and suddenly all of her senses were firing in synchrony.

“Woah,” she whispered. “What did you do?”

“I renewed your magic,” Tandy stated.

She sputtered. “Renewed? I never had magic to begin with. I’m not a unicorn.”

“You are a pegasi who articulates individual feathers as if they were made of tendon and muscle.” She spoke as if she were making a point.

Aurora frowned at her open wing. “That’s not magic, it’s biology.”

Tandy lifted a brow. Or, rather, a constellation of light bloomed above one eye and rose an inch.

“Isn’t it?”

“Your magic ensures you will continue to dream. I would like to continue our discussion when you do. Primrose is not the untouchable god she has duped others into obeying. She can be made vulnerable.”

She stood, unable to mask the eagerness in her voice. “How?”

The smallest of smiles crept across Tandy’s lips.

“There are many ways, Aurora." Her gaze dipped toward the slim Pip-Buck still clutched between the pegasi’s feathers. "However, I know of one method with much more promise.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 43: Preparations Estimated time remaining: 21 Hours, 19 Minutes