Over the next few days, Rainbow Dash tried vainly to work herself enough to move about the prison on her own hooves. Every minute of the first day of these attempts was spent lying on the ground, trying hard to execute only a single push-up. Her spine screamed at her to stop, and eventually she did, falling back into a heap on the floor of her cell. Throughout all of this, Gray Fins did nothing to stop her, perhaps because he knew she was unable to do anything, or perhaps because it was too much fun watching this poor thing flounder on the ground.

On the fourth day of this, he finally spoke up about her obsession. Or, rather, the blind griffon one cell over barked something, and he translated.

"You must straighten your back first, he says."

Rainbow Dash looked up from her push-ups (she could do two reps before losing feeling in her body now) and grunted, "How would he know?"

The griffon mumbled. The drake translated.

"He was the prison doctor, before he became blind. A morphine addict who earned the displeasure of many of thse in this prison. Your masked friend included."

"How?"

The griffon spoke through Gray Fins. "Many years ago, when he was still one of the imprisoned, Spike was attacked by the other inmates. The doctor's attempts to help him saved his life, but left him in perpetual agony. The mask he wears feeds him a gas that keeps the pain at bay." He paused, finished with the griffon's speech, then added his own say: "He was only a child."

He still is, technically, thought Rainbow Dash. What she said out loud was: "So he was born here, am I correct?"

Gray Fins nodded.

"The legend says that there was a warlord, who had hired a mercenary to do his dirty work. The mercenary fell in love with the warlord's daughter, and they married in secret." He brought a rope from the hall and tied it under Rainbow's elbows as he recounted. "When he was found out, the mercenary was condemned to this pit. Instead, he found himself being exiled, dropped off on the side of a barren road.

"He knew that the warlord's daughter had pleaded with her father, and gotten him pardoned. But he could never have known what price she'd paid for doing so. She took his place in the pit."

Rainbow shuttered at the thought of a mare like, as Gray Fin's had described her, a princess, however little a kingdom she was heir to. There seemed to be no other mares (or females of any kind, for that matter) around the prison, as were there no guards. They were not needed, as she understood.

"And she was with child," Gray Fins continued. "The mercenary's child." He pointed at the Blind Doctor in his cell. "The doctor delivered the child back when his eyes were still young and full of light. But one day, years later, he forgot to lock the cell behind him."

Rainbow imagined the prisoners ganging up on the mare (or dragoness, she didn't know which), hungry looks in their eyes.

"Innocence cannot flower underground," the drake said. "It was to be stamped out. But the child had a friend. A protector. This protector showed the other prisoners that the child was their redemption. That his innocence was their redemption. Something to be prized." He hung his head low. "The child's mother was not so lucky."

Blind Doctor, who had this whole time been silent, now shouted something at Gray Fins. He shook his head.

"This is Spike's prison now," he said. "He would not want his story told. And most certainly not to you."

Rainbow had wondered for a while whether or not she could consider the drake and griffons as her companions. She still wondered.

Gray Fins knotted the rope he'd slung around her, and tossed the other end over the open door of the cell, stepping around to grab hold of it. Tugging on the rope, he pulled Rainbow Dash upright off the floor. She shrieked with pain as though she were being tortured on the rack. Which she was, if one thought about it.

The pain was overpowering her, and she could feel Spike beating down on her head as he had in the sewer (was it only a month ago, or a year?). It was worse than when she'd been set on fire by the Scarecrow, worse than when the Joker had stabbed her in the side. Worse than when she'd pulled Blueblood up over the edge of a cliff with only one wing.

She convulsed, trying to slip out of the loop and praying to pass out. She didn't know how much longer she could endure it, or whether it was worth calling it endurance at all. She prayed for oblivion, for that deep black cave she'd dreamt of in her time here.

She realized with horror that the pit was what she'd been dreaming of, not death.

Gray Fins, meanwhile, had tied the rope to the metal bars of the cell. His claws ran along Rainbow's spine, and for a second she thought he was going to tear it out, for the pleasure she'd offered her first day here. But he simply observed, adding to the pain of her broken back with his gentle touch. She bit her lip as he located the source of the pain. When he found it, she tasted blood.

"You have a protruding vertebra," he said simply. "That's all."

"OH, THAT'S ALL! GOOD!" Dash was in hysterics as she screamed at him. "I THOUGHT IT WAS SOMETHING SERIOUS!" She shuddered again, licking the blood from her punctured lips.

"I'm going to force it back in."

"How-"

Without warning, the dragon punched her in the back, hard enough to send her swinging across the cell. There was a spasm of pain, and Rainbow realized it was in her wings, which were standing straight out on her sides. She was overjoyed to see that they could feel again, but she still howled like a Timberwolf separated from its pack. She finally sagged, being held up only by the rope tied around her. Drool dripped from the corner of her mouth as Gray Fins circled back around.

"You stay like this until you stand," he said, and the inky blackness of unconsciousness took her.

Days and nights blurred past as she hung there, drifting in and out of delirium. Her life was ending one moment, and then she felt herself grip the edge of everything again, fighting to stay in the light of life, just as Spike had predicted. Apparitions of her parents, of Spitfire, and finally of Ra's al Ghul himself, looking as dapper as ever, appeared before her. Each one angered her more, and the thought of Ponyville, her city, being obliterated and forgotten was too much. One day (or maybe it was night, she didn't know or care), she snapped, and woke screaming her defiance.

"NOOOOOO!!!"

Prisoners outside looked over at her, puzzled by her outburst. They went back to their duties (whatever those were) when Dash looked back. They saw a fallen angel, ready to return to its rightful place again. By any means necessary and through any test.

The cyan mare staggered, and Gray Fins noticed the sudden slackness in the rope holding her up, and untied it, seeing that she could indeed stand. He stood next to her, ready to catch her if she fell, but amazingly, miraculously, she didn't do so. Instead, she took a step forward.

Dizziness passed over her, but the ghosts had given her the need to return to Ponyville. She wasn't broken. Not anymore. Her bad knee was a problem still, but she was glad to see that she now acknowledged the pain in it over the pain in her back.

Rainbow Dash was healing. She took another step. By the next week, she was doing fifty-rep sets again.

Gray Fins was interested by this mare. She was the same as any of those willing to try and escape this hell, and yet there was something that made her different (besides the fact that she was female, of course). Her wings, which had been effectively disconnected when her spine had been dislocated, were withered and useless, and still they fluttered when she worked.

She was indeed healing. Physically, at least.

"Why build yourself?" he asked one day.

Rainbow pushed herself up off the floor again.

"I'm not meant to die here."

Gray Fins glimpsed at the television, which Rainbow herself was staring at with hatred. The super on the screen read: "SIEGE OF PONYVILLE: DAY 84."

"Here? There?" He gestured to the screen. "What's the difference?"

She ignored him, and he knew why. He was speaking for the pit, as he had done for the fist weeks of her stay here. Over time, though, he'd grown to like the mare with the rainbow mane, and though it would get him killed (he almost hoped), he helped her. He wondered if the Blind Doctor felt the same way.

The pegasus pushed herself further. He heard her counting under her breath.

"...thirty-five...thirty-six...thirty-seven..."

She was ready to climb to meet the sun.

She approached the wall, and gestured for the tattooed drake to give her the rope. She could hear prisoners behind her laughing. She didn't care. At all. Right now, there was only one goal, one solid thought in her mind, one destination she had to reach at all costs.

Up.

The prisoners began chanting as she began climbing. The hoofholds were there, and though Rainbow had gone rock-climbing many times in her life, she still wished for the equipment in her manor, or the spikes on the Batmare's gauntlets, or even for her wings to work enough for her to be able to glide down gently, if not move upward a little bit.

Now now, a voice in her head that sound like Spike told her. Or maybe it was the Joker. No cheating.

Perhaps it was Pinkie Pie. She briefly wondered what the pink mare was doing, and whether she was enjoying her little "storm."

She intended to ask her when she saw her again, in Ponyville.

She reached a ledge, and looked out to another one, far out of reach. Or at least, it appeared to be out of reach. Rainbow knew that somepony before her had made it, and therefore justified that she could make it as well. The chanting below had grown, and it cheered her on as she calculated her step. She brushed a hoof against the rope, and flexed her knees, making sure that they wouldn't fail on her at her most needed time.

She breathed deep.

Here goes nothing.

She leapt for the upper ledge, outstretching her hooves as far as they could go. She felt her wings flutter the tiniest bit, and for a second she thought she would fly again, up to the mouth of the pit. Her hoof brushed against the rugged stone edge of the ledge...

And she slipped away.

Gravity took hold of her, and Rainbow plummeted. In the two seconds of her fall, she imagined Spike's face, smiling with his eyes at the feeble attempt to leave. She felt rage build up in her, and when the rope jolted taut and swung her brutally towards a wall, she did something incredibly stupid.

She tried to punch the wall.

She screamed as her hoof cracked against the stone. She felt something break, she felt warm blood dribble down her arm, and she felt hot tears roll down her cheeks as she was lowered back into the pit. She was not crying because of her now fractured hoof.

She was crying because she had failed. Again.

She stepped into her cell again when the tattooed dragon untied her, and she sat on her cot, cradling her disfigured hoof. She was not worried about it, knew that it would heal (with some help from Blind Doctor and Gray Fins, of course), but the pain in her chest hurt her more.

She did not notice the large chunk of rock come crashing down from the section of wall she'd punched.

When Gray Fins entered the cell, he had dirty bandages. He set her bones (not gentle) and wrapped her hoof up. He did not look disappointed in her, merely sad.

"I told you it could not be done."

Rainbow Dash's voice cracked as she answered: "You said that a child did it."

"No ordinary child," Gray Fins shot back. "A child born in hell. A child forged by suffering, and hardened by pain." He finished his work on her hoof, and mumbled, "Three days," before stepping away from the pegasus.

Dash turned over and tried to sleep, ignoring the pain in her hoof as best as she could. Before she drifted off, she heard his final words to her. They were an insult. His first, really.

"Not some child of privilege."

A week later, Dash tried again. This attempt was caused by Spike more directly than the last time.

She had been watching her city slowly walk into the arms of Death unknowingly, when the image shifted to the railroad where supplies were allowed through. Two of the dragons guarding the area were eating something. Something that looked to be-

"No," Dash groaned, and leaned over her cot to vomit.

The dragons were eating several ponies. What was worse, it was ponies she knew that were having their guts torn out and gobbled down. Rapidfire's blank face stared up at the sun, and his partner Sweetie Belle lay nearby, her face pressed to the ground. The other ponies were beyond recognizable. Too much of their faces were missing.

She snapped again. Rolling of the cot and wiping her mouth with her newly-healed hoof (which still looked the slightest bit lumpy, as it always would from now on), she landed on the ground and began a set of push-ups, flapping her wings weakly as she did so. She loved them more than anything, and was ready to make Spike regret not tearing them off.

Blind Doctor spoke to her, and Gray Fins translated again.

"He says that the leap to freedom is not about strength."

"My body makes the jump," she replied evenly. She had gone up on her hind legs, and was shadow-boxing now, throwing punches and kicks at what she imagined was Spike.

The griffon suddenly spoke.

"Survival is the spirit." His voice was broken, as was his Equestrian, but his message made it through to Dash. In one way, at least. "The soul."

"My soul's more than ready to escape," she insisted.

Blind Doctor shook his head.

"Fear is why you fall."

"Oh, I'm not afraid," Rainbow countered. "I'm angry." She imagined the mask adorning that bucking, that fucking dragon's face cracking as she punched the air. She imagined the screams of pain he uttered as his gas supply was cut off, and the pain of the scars from this pit returned. She imagined all this, and smiled.

The griffon shook his head. What she didn't know, of course was that he wanted to help her out of this place. But she would not listen.

Not yet.

She tried the climb again the next day. Not as many prisoners came to chant.

Too lazy for an encore, I guess, she thought, snatching the rope from Face Tattoo's grasp. She knotted it herself, and began climbing immediately, not waiting for the drake to start pulling the rope with her.

She fell only a third of the way up. She didn't cry this time, but she did punch the wall again (though, when she was back on the ground, not swinging at it full force). Her wings flapped uselessly behind her as she returned to her cell.

Gray Fins watched her go, shrugged, and went back to playing a game of cards with a fellow inmate. He was a unicorn, and a disfigured one at that. His horn had been effectively split down the middle, and half of it was missing. He didn't seem to mind, and was actually one of the happier prisoners in the pit. He always had his cards, when all else failed.

This unicorn was grimacing at his cards now. Some of that damned mare's blood had dribbled on one of them. He looked up at Gray Fins, annoyed.

"Shouldn't you go to her?" he asked, slowly grinning. "You are her 'caretaker' after all." He winked.

Gray Fins shrugged without looking up from his cards. "She'll keep," he replied, and laid out a full house.

"Why do we fall?"

The voice was comforting, fatherly. The angel lifted her up in his forelegs, pulling her out of the dark place, away from the Bats and the bad things and the nightmares. She nuzzled into his chest, glad he was there to watch over her, as he would for now and forever. He smiled back down at her, and asked the question again.

"Why do we fall, Dash?"

Rainbow looked up at her father, still smiling. She knew the answer, had always known the answer, and now, because of him (and even the dark place, a little bit), she knew what it meant.

"To learn to pick ourselves up."

Rainbow woke up on her cot, crying. She had not had a dream about her parents since she was first place in here, and before that, not since the Scarecrow had drugged her with that gas. She had long accepted that her parents were gone, but now, the fact seemed to wash over her again, and she could no longer hold in her sadness.

In a pit far away from the rest of the world, Rainbow Dash cried.

There's no one here to help me pick myself up again, she thought grimly when she was done. She had to escape. And soon.

The griffon cleared his throat. Dash turned her head to look at him. She wondered if he'd watched her while she cried.

"You do not fear death," he croaked. "You think this makes you strong. It makes you weak."

Rainbow didn't understand. She always fought without fear, and always, she had won.

Almost always.

"Why?" she asked.

"How can you move faster than possible," Gary Fins asked, "fight longer than possible, if not from the most powerful impulse of the spirit? The fear of death. The will to survive."

It was then that Rainbow Dash realized something.

"I do fear death," she said, gazing up at the sunlight peering down from the aperture above. "I fear dying in here while my city burns with nopony there to save it."

"Then make the climb," the Blind Doctor said.

"How?" she asked.

"As the child did. Without the rope." The griffon cackled, something that offed Dash to no end. "Then fear will find you again."

Rainbow thought, and thought, and thought until morning, weighing the risks and chances in her mind, pondering the point of trying it at all, before finally coming to a decision. That morning, she rose from her bed, taking her sheets off and wrapping them into a sort of knapsack, into which went scraps of food and a wool coat. Then she stepped out of her cell for the last time, ready to make one last ascent.

Gray Fins smiled as she went. He pointed to the pack.

"Supplies for your journey?" he asked, and the prisoners standing behind him laughed. She turned to look at him, and smiled when she saw the sincere hope glint in his eye. She had decoded now. Gray Fins was her friend. As was the Doctor (the Blind one, that is).

She approached the wall, and when the tattooed drake offered her the rope, she waved him off, looking up.

That did it. The word buzzed around from ear to ear. The crazy Equestrian, a mare, a pegasus that couldn't fly even with her wings intact, was going to climb without the rope! A crowd gathered around her, and she heard a familiar chant begin anew. This stopped her for a moment. Throughout her time spent in the pit, she'd heard the chant several times, and it had always sounded like it was simply creatures of all kinds shouting something unintelligible. Now, she heard words. Foreign words, but words all the same. She turned to Gray Fins, who was still smiling at her.

"What are they saying? When they chant?"

He never broke his smile.

"Rise."

She looked through the crowd once, and turned her back, settling her hoof into the first hoofhold. Behind her, the prisoners chanted.

Deshi deshi, basara basara...

Rise.

She scaled the wall slowly, not letting her life go to waste because of impatience or carelessness. Hoof over hoof, she made her way to where the ledge that had defeated her twice waited, perhaps to send her down, for the final time.

In the cell next to the one that had been hers, a blind griffon was chanting, slowly, quietly.

Deshi deshi, basara basara...

Rise!

She hoisted herself up onto the ledge, steeling herself for her final leap. She steadied herself, running her hoof along the wall...and slipping it into a dark hole. She yanked it out in time to avoid blocking a swarm of bats that came bursting from the hole. It was impossible, she must have been hallucinating, but there they were, buffeting her face and body and screeching in her ears. She didn't dare move. Beneath her, the chant rose.

DESHI DESHI, BASARA BASARA!

RISE!

She was afraid. She was afraid of falling, falling down to the hell that surely would welcome her back with open arms. She was afraid of the bats, now circling up towards the sun, like an omen. She was afraid of Spike, and the symbol of his mask, and the mask itself. But most of all, Rainbow Dash was afraid of failing, afraid of dying and letting her city burn without her, she was AFRAID!

And so she jumped, before she lost her nerve. She reached out, praying for the sun and the safety. The chant was all around her now.

DESHI DESHI, BASARA, BASARA!!!

RISE!!!

...And she caught the ledge.

Wild cheers erupted from the pit as she pulled herself onto the ledge. The stone was old, very old, but it held her, and she kissed it when she was completely on it. The cheering caught her attention, and she looked down to see the prisoners cheering her onward. Gray Fins was hugging Face Tattoo, and she saw he was crying. She realized that she was, too, an let a teardrop fall down to the hell below. She imagined it a prayer.

Inside his cell, the griffon was crying through his cataracts. She was free.

The sun. The Sun. Celestia's Sun, the Sun that she'd missed for how long?, the sun that beat down on her as she pulled herself up and out of the pit, the sun that cast only a fraction of its light down on the poor souls below. The Sun. How it shone.

She was free.

Rainbow Dash looked around at the world above once more. There were no guards, and none of Spike's goons guarding the place. They had believed that she would stay there for all time, rotting with the other prisoners.

Hell, so did I, she thought, and found herself laughing for the first time in months. It felt odd on her lips, but pleasant.

There was an enormous rope sitting at the edge of the pit nearby. She trotted over to it, no longer feeling the pain in her back or her knees. Her wings fluttered happily, and she thought about whether or not she could fly herself back to Ponyville, if tried hard enough. She believed she could. She stared down at the rope for a minute, considering it. Then she kicked it over the side of the pit, where it uncoiled and uncoiled until it reached the bottom, making a much easier way out than the one she'd taken. She laughed again, at the irony, and the cheering that erupted again from the pit.

Free yourselves, she thought, looking out into the desert that awaited her. I gotta get out of here.

She cricked her neck, fluttered her wings, and started walking, even as the rope behind her tautened with the first of the prisoners.