Trixie stared at the transfer orders, and wondered whose prank they were. The forgeries looked convincing, and that certainly was Brigadier Deep Field's distinctive hoof-print, but really, who did they think they were fooling? Sixth Guards indeed.

Everypony knew there were four guards regiments. The four-cornered foundation of the EUP, famous and even glorious. The Firewatch on the Draconic Marches; the Meltstream Guards in their garrison-city beneath the glaciers of the Far North; the Sparrowfall Guards in the Vale of Tail; and lastly, the Royals in the celestial city, Canterlot herself. Even after nearly ten years of war to the knife's hilt in the Griffish Isles, those old moss-grown stones had sat, still, square, holding down the corners of Equestria like polished pebbles keeping an unrolled parchment map from curling up on itself.

A sixth regiment of guards, indeed!

Still, even bringing it up to her major might bring embarrassment to Trixie. She knew they were just waiting for her to report to the battalion staff office, to take it seriously, to expose herself to laughter and jeers. Hecklers!

Still…

Trixie's eyes crept to the bottom of the document, the details and direction. Captain Gleaming Shield, commanding; by the hoof of Corporal Two Pings, squadron clerk, 6/1st Guards.

How would anyone in the battalion know that Gleaming Shield was her old bête noire? That the blasted filly - she was still a lieutenant, like Trixie, damnit! - had tried to shake her down for black powder a while back. As if they had the sort of relations that allowed for such casual exchange of favors!

Well, she had directed that annoying bat-hen to the correct supply sergeant, and suggested the proper paperwork. It was only what was expected of her, as a commissioned officer in Her Royal Majesty's equally Royal Artillery!

Even if nopony else thought Trixie was worthy of the service. Thought she'd cheated or slept her way into her inexplicable commission. A dropout from PCSGU? Dime a dozen. And yes, she'd breezed through the artillery officers' candidate school with room to spare. Plus or minus a few scorched tail-hairs. But any idiot who could do low-order math like trigonometry and simple calculus could sleaze their way through that curriculum.

Trixie couldn't help it if most earth ponies were a little thick, and needed math tutoring. She'd tried her best not to lord that over them, but Celestia knew, it wasn't easy.

She leaned back on Big Bertha, and thought about the forgery. Was her paranoia running away from her again? There hadn't actually been anything she could point to, that proved her fellows were conspiring against her. At least, not in the last several weeks.

Months, if Trixie was honest with herself. Ever since her transfer back from the flying batteries to the siege gun battalion. Or before, not since the… incident.

Trixie knew better than to think the expression distorting their faces been respect or admiration. She was wiser than that. She knew she hadn't done anything worthy of either, so it must have been contempt and derision, however little it looked like it.

Trixie kept waiting for the other shoe to drop off its last nail, but the clang never came.

She looked at the forgery. This was the clang, wasn't it?

Trixie knew her battalion commander didn't want her, although she was almost certain the chief of artillery didn't even know her name. Some clerk probably had a cast stamp made of the brigadier's hoof.

But the major definitely didn't want her. Everypony knew unicorns were bad luck among the cannon - any and all of them, falcons, howitzers or the big guns. And since they didn't fire the great guns but twice a year - during the Princess's Birthday, and to herald the end of the Summer Sun Celebration - she was the least amount of bad juju here, in the harbor batteries. In between those ceremonial exercises, the siege battalion's job was to polish the big guns, keep them shining and uncorroded by the punishing salt air, and to stay out of trouble.

Trixie had never been good at that last bit. She was under orders to stay out of the dockside bars. On either side of the Blue Line.

Trixie got up off of the great barrel of Big Bertha, and went to report the forgery to her battalion major. She'd get in trouble either way, so might as well follow regulations and get in trouble by the manual.

The orders hadn't been forged. Trixie found herself staring at the hateful aristocratic features of Sparkle. Not that Captain Shield - captain! if you could believe it - would tolerate Trixie calling her by that epithet. But in Trixie's most secret mind, she couldn't help but call her nemesis by that name.

Sparkle.

The mare herself had long since abandoned her noble and aristocratic name, distillation of two hundred years of dedication and brilliance in service to the princess. Thrown it away like it was trash. Took up that ugly, stupid cutie mark as if she'd willed herself to be the perfect, idiot soldier. As if she'd conjured that lie upon her flanks by pure perverse will.

A prank played on destiny by a filly too poisoned with hate and cross-tempered ill-will to be who she clearly ought to have been.

Trixie Lulamoon knew something about lying cutie marks, she could see that falseness in others like a mirror reflecting her own twisted visage at her. Judging her. Knowing what lay beneath the silvered reflection.

"Trixie does not understand in the least why the great Gleaming Shield requires her humble resources. A pony of the illustrious House of Sparkle has no need of an artillery lieutenant. A captain of the guards, even less. What could you possibly want me to help you with, Captain Shield? To load griffons into the great guns and blast them at the harbor approaches like bonemeal grapeshot?"

The griffon sergeant beside Sparkle grimaced in disgust at Trixie's imagery. Sparkle said nothing, just waiting with her hoof on the not-a-forgery orders sitting on the desk in the Duchess's own Quarters. Why was Sparkle occupying the Duchess's Quarters in the garrison? If Trixie had any friends she could exchange gossip with, she might know why Sparkle was here, might have some clue as to why Trixie was here.

Burst barrels, if Trixie had only developed the habit of reading the powder-burned libels, maybe Trixie might know what the draconequus was going on here.

"Captain Shield," Trixie said, trying to not show the outrage on her muzzle. "Lieutenant Trixie Lulamoon of the Third Siege Battalion of the Royal Artillery Regiment, reporting as ordered according to transfer number 344215, this third day of May, year 199 of the Fifth Era of our Celestial Princess."

"Lieutenant Lulamoon, by this transfer, you will be accepting a commission in the Sixth Regiment of Guards. Do you so swear and affirm that this is your free will, uncoerced and acknowledged?"

Trixie tried to not gasp in astonishment. She wasn't being seconded?

"Lieutenant Lulamoon, do you so swear?"

"I- Trixie does so swear and affirm."

"Then by my senior commission in the Sixth Regiment, I acknowledge your acceptance of your new commission in the regiment. Welcome to the Crystal Guards, Lieutenant."

"But- but why?"

"Because I need a battery commander. And you were available. And everypony says you distinguished yourself in the Battle of Gilbert Square."

Trixie found her gorge rising, and fought her own body to keep it from vomiting the morning's breakfast all over that nice, clean desk. Who had Sparkle found to keep her office so spic and span?

"Are you quite alright, Lieutenant Lulamoon?" asked the big griffon, speaking for the first time. "You look sick. Do you need a bucket?"

The fucking Crab Bucket.

Trixie glared at the damnable griffon and her taunts. "Trixie has had enough buckets to last a lifetime, sergeant - what was your name again?"

"That's Gilda, Trixie. Talk to me, not her. You're in my line of command, not hers. So you didn't relish doing your duty? I have a commendation here in your file. And a recommendation for a medal. Marked 'refused'."

The stench of sulfur, and the dull red glow of her falcons through the stinking cloud blowing back in her gunners' faces. Number 3's barrel bursting, her number 2 falcon's rammer gargling out her last drowning wheezes around a ruined throat underhoof as Trixie took up the ram and forced down one last soaked charge before the barrel got so hot that it would flash on contact the screaming behind Trixie's back heralding one more rush by the griff-

Trixie blinked.

"Trixie has no interest in discussing such matters with anypony, ever."

"Not even your own commanding officer?"

"What do you want, Sparkle? Fu-fuck you, and fu-fuck your commission. I'm going to go find a stockade to report myself to, and you can take your stinking guards regiment and shove it up your war-crazed posterior."

Trixie fled the Duchess's Quarters and the present, falling into that terrible, horrible, endless second - that instant when she was turning away from her smoking, steaming falcons, glimpsing for the first time that shattered, smoky stage spread thick with fire and blood - and smelling what she'd made with her cannon and her hard work and the lie burned into her flank.

"Well, that could have gone better, captain ma'am."

"I thought I knew Trixie Lulamoon."

"I could have told you not to do that, just from looking at the file. Battle fatigue case if I've ever seen one."

"Gilda, you've been in the service for a year, stop talking like an old salt!"

"I'm still right." The blue mare's file had contained a draft of the medal citation. Her battery had dealt the majority of the damage to the rebels in Gilbert Square. The graves registry ponies had removed the remains of over a hundred and thirty griffins from in front of Lieutenant Lulamoon's battery's position.

"You didn't help any with that dig about the Bucket."

That's a wound that was festering. "She needed a sharp rap. Better for it to come out here, than in front of the ranks, or worse, outsiders."

"I know, I know, but I thought for sure that mare didn't care about anypony but herself."

"Doesn't take empathy to get hurt. Some things touch you no matter how callous you are." Gilda knew that well enough, herself. And she wasn't a squishy hearted pony.

"Blast. They didn't want to give me anypony else."

"They don't think much of us over in personnel, captain ma'am. All they're going to let us have are broken toys like Lulamoon."

"So you think this is it, this is what we've got to work with?"

"Captain ma'am, we need a great deal more than a cracked battery lieutenant. If we reject her, we won't be getting any other subalterns, not even ensigns for the platoons, not if they decide we're 'picky'."

"OK. So she doesn't want any buckets. I can work with that. What was her deal, what was her deal... damnit, I really didn't pay much attention to her while she was still at the school. Hades, she wasn't even in the academy, she was Gifted Unicorns... oh, right. Showpony family. Kind of a showoff? Smartass."

"Seems to like to refer to herself in the third person. Or is that some sort of psych thing?"

"No, she was always like that. Tartarus, Gilda, there's no point in cheating her into working for us. Let's go track her down before she turns herself into the MPs and demands a nice dank cell in the dungeons."

The cracked unicorn hadn't really gotten that far. They found her two floors down, sniffling in the mare's restroom. Gilda listened as Gleaming Shield tried to therapize her new lieutenant through a toilet-stall door.

"Look, Lulamoon, nopony blames you for what happened. You saved a lot of lives that day. It kind of ended the war."

"Horseapples! I don't pay much attention to things anymore, but I know the war isn't over out there! You can smell the smoke when the wind's in the right quarter!"

"Well, there's some burning and such going on out there, yeah, but it's in the last days. The rebels have lost, the raiders are just burning down all the barns and houses of sympathizers and the like. They're figuring it out. It'll just take them some time."

"It isn't a bomb."

Gilda blinked at the complete non sequitur. She exchanged perplexed glances with her captain.

"Trixie..." Gleaming Shield began, cautiously, "What isn't a bomb?"

"M'cutie mark. Everypony looks at it, says I'm a born grenadier. Or mad bomber. Or genius gunner. It's all Brokeback Mountain oysters. It isn't a bomb."

The powder-blue unicorn's cutie mark was a rounded black device with a flame coming out of a fuse, surrounded by a cloud of grey smoke blending into her blue coat. It couldn't look more like a bomb if it had 'bomb' written on it in twenty-five point type.

"What do you think it is, Trixie?" asked Gilda's unicorn.

"It's a damn stage smoker. A theatrical smoke - well, smoke bomb, but not like that!"

A pause. And just as Gilda started gathering herself to break down the stall door…

"My dad loved them," Lieutenant Lulamoon said. "Used them all the time in his act. Sometimes to escape an enraged mob, but hey, that's show business for you."

"Trixie," Gleaming Shield replied through the stall door, "You graduated from the artillery officer candidate school. Somehow. You became a lieutenant in a reasonable period of time. You would have been a decorated officer of the Royal Artillery if you'd just calm down and let them give you your medals. How can that not be your special talent?"

"I DON'T KNOW! Not everything is special talents! I don't even really understand how I ended up here, Sparkle. I wasn't supposed to be this."

A chill went down Gilda's spine, and she remembered a pink lunatic screaming in a dungeon.

"Should bes and would haves will get us nowhere, Trixie. What do you want to be, today?"

"Want to start over," the hidden mare sniveled, like a fledgeling.

Gilda snorted. Lulamoon should get in line.

"We can't go back, Trixie. You're an officer of Her Royal Majesty's armed forces. Hades, you just reaffirmed it, swore to it, not twenty minutes ago."

"I don't want to kill griffons anymore. I don't want to take my beautiful explosives and break things, ponies, people. It isn't fun. It isn't interesting. 'Life's short, and people are delicate.' That's a stupid truth, and I don't want to tell it."

"What do you mean by that, Trixie?"

"My dad used to say that the world's two things - stories, and truths. Good stories are lies that reveal good truths. Bad stories are lies that hide 'em, or distort 'em, or make ponies think that up is down and down is fire and out is in."

Gilda leaned in to whisper in Gleaming Shield's ear. "Wants to be a storyteller. With explosives. Think we can work with that?"

Gleaming Shield looked at her griffon, and shrugged.

"OK, Trixie," Gilda's unicorn said, smiling slyly, "Let's talk about how to tell good stories with the tools we have to hoof. Would you like to do that?"

The toilet stall's door swung open, and the artillery mare nodded her tear-stained muzzle at Gilda and her captain.

Author's Notes:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, and the general Company.