The tent flap danced in the wind, and Zecora allowed herself the time to tie it down leisurely. The other occupant was not awake, but Zecora was certain it would be very obvious when they were. In the time before that happened though, the zebra felt freed. In fact times like these were the only ones in which she found any relaxation anymore, tainted though it might have been.

Because she had a job to do, but right now she was being prevented from doing it by forces outside of her control. So there was no way anyone could blame her for easing herself into her chair and pouring herself a well-earned cup of tea. She reached back into the saddlebags she’d hung up and withdrew a book.

When she flicked it open, it was both comfort and agony to know that no one else within miles would be able to decipher it. Zebras didn’t write in the same way as the citizens of Equestria. Their books were more tactile, more immediate, and all the more beautiful for it. She ran her hoof over the ornate series of ridges and peaks moulded into the paper.

There was a sudden noise from the centre of the tent. An angry, seething strain of leather, the hollow thud of hooves against metal. Zecora sighed, and put her book down. However, she did feel entitled to finish her tea. So she brought the cup up to her lips, blew on the surface of the liquid and took a long, deep sip. It wasn’t hot though, Zebras never made beverages at temperatures like the Equestrians liked. It was too much of a risk.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Zecora called out, prompting the other pony to turn and stare at her. She had not been easy to subdue, that was for sure. She was particularly gifted with magic and not afraid to use it violently when cornered. Zecora saw some recognition flick through her captive’s eyes, coupled with a subtle glance up at her own horn. The zebra muttered something under her breath and, at once, said horn was enveloped in an understated shimmer. It was a shimmer Zecora used to associate with the rich, comforting heat of her home. Now she associated it with different things.

“You won’t get much use out of that now.” Zecora explained, gesturing a hoof towards the now disabled appendage. Her captive scrunched her eyes up, clearly trying to cast something, anything. In the end the tension in her body was released when it became too much, and the unicorn slumped back against the metal table, breathing deeply through her rag in her mouth.

“Magic is very important to you, isn’t it?” Zecora asked baitingly, and getting a hateful stare in response, “I know this. The cutie mark is a big tipoff of course, but it’s written all over everything you do. It’s almost overacted, honestly. Like you’re desperate for everyone to know it. I wonder why that is, Twilight?”

Zecora walked around the table, not even looking at the unicorn. She did however, keep a distance that broached sufficiency with subtlety. Twilight wasn’t defenseless, or at least not as defenseless as Zecora was acting. The key question, however, was whether Twilight knew that.

“You may be wondering, why I am not speaking in verse?” Zecora began as she unrolled her tool wrap, “Ponies know so little about my homeland, but they all know the lyrical manner of speech we practise back there.”

She took out a fresh needle and, while making sure Twilight got a good look, screwed it onto the end of a tube which was connected to a ramshackle looking device. It was cobbled together from scrap metal, and nearly burst at the seams with gears and wire. The contraption had taken a great many minds working while over stressed and under resourced. Now however, it would at least give Zecora the information she needed.

“We do not rhyme because we have to, we do it because it brings a little joy to a world that is so often bereft of it. Right now, I don’t feel like rhyming, because I don’t feel like you deserve it. Because I hate you. Truly, as much as anyone can hate anything, Twilight, I hate you.”

At this point, she was dangerously close to really meaning it too.

She walked closer to the table, the needle clamped between her teeth. She allowed herself some small measure of satisfaction at the look of horror on Twilight’s face. But it was utilitarian, not, malicious. A scared captive was easier to deal with, and revelling in pain was something she wouldn’t let herself do. She wasn’t a monster. Zecora bent down and inserted the needle into a jar of ink. The machine needed to write its results after all.

Zecora leaned across the table and retrieved a metal dome, connected to the contraption by a series of wires. She then placed it roughly on Twilight’s head and fixed it in place with a strap. She noted with relief that Twilight hadn’t attempted anything while this happened. She seemed to be more convinced of her own powerlessness than most were in this situation.

“Words are beautiful, there is nothing we love more back home. When you decorate your speech was we do, with rhyme and rhythm and colour, then you start to get music. And I will not play music for you, Twilight. But I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I’ve heard you’reyour quite the scholar, I’m sure you know all about my culture. I’m sure you know, also, how Zebrish magic works,” Zecora finished off with noticeable sarcasm.

Twilight didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to Zecora. She was looking around wildly, desperate to see if there was any potential avenue for escape. If it wasn’t so easily explained away as fear, it would have been insulting. To assume Zecora was so stupid as to slip up like that. Perhaps Twilight was hoping there was a large knife right by one of the straps fixing her to the table, or maybe some potion left carelessly in full view which would allow her to use her horn again.

Ridiculous.

“See, words are beautiful and powerful. And they’re beautiful precisely because of this power. Entire armies have been broken by mere sentences. Love both destroyed and created with a single change of inflection. Do you think if more ponies knew this, that they’d be more inclined to think before they opened their mouths?

“We zebras do not say anything we haven’t considered first, because we understand this. For you, all it takes to work miracles is a simple flare of your horn, But for us, it’s just a matter of finding the right words. There are tales of powerful zebrish mages, wrapped in battle with their rivals. They could change the weather, undo brick and mortar, flatten the very mountains themselves, all through the power of their voices.”

Twilight scrunched her eyes up again, and actually managed to make her horn shoot a couple of sparks. Zecora took note and redoubled her incantation, and at once the light show stopped.

“So, as to why we’re here. There’s something I want to know about you, specifically around something you can do. I’ve seen your kind do it after your horns have been snapped off, so I know it’s nothing to do with that. It’s something deeper, tangled up in all the magic that makes you up.” Zecora continued. She walked up to Twilight’s restrained head and lightly touched Twilight’s horn, prompting the unicorn to wildly shake her head and scream in outrage, “You know full well what I’m talking about, don’t you? I want you to perform the trick for me.”

Predictably, Twilight did not do as she was asked. She stared down Zecora, eyes burning with defiance and rage. Zecora decided to at least give her a couple more moments before proceeding. She muttered another incantation, and the modest fireplace she’d set up erupted into flames. At once, Twilight looked less sure of herself.

“If I am going to find out how to stop you from performing your nasty little trick, I need to understand how you do it. So we can do this one of two ways. Either you do this for me, and my contraption there does all the work painlessly. Or, I have to force you to do it. I will overload you with so much magic that whatever damn is holding back this river will break. Allow me to ask, does that sound painless to you?”

With the few centimetres of maneuverability she had with them, Twilight hit her hooves against the metal table again, and again, and again. It rang out in a symphony of furious despair, a clanging death rattle of whatever hope Twilight may have had that she was going to get out of this. This was good, Zecora needed her to be overwhelmed with anguish, she needed Twilight to not be thinking clearly.

The problem was, while she knew the horn was not the source of the power she wanted to know about, it was the simplest point at which to introduce magic into Twilight’s system. Zecora was going to flood the barrel, and her device was going to work out exactly how and where it eventually sprung a leak. The issue was that, to do this, she needed the tap. Zecora was going to have to undo her muting spell on Twilight’s horn.

If she was very skilled, and very lucky, the massive amount of pain her captive would be in would distract her from the fact that she could cast spells again. The problem was that, as of late, Zecora had only been one of those things.

“Are we going to do this easy?” Zecora asked, giving her captive a short while to glare at her, “Okay then. Let’s begin.”

She muttered the incantation to remove the muting spell, then immediately coupled it with another that would overflow the appendage with magic. The effect was instantaneous, and painful. Twilight’s back arched and she screamed around her gag. It felt strange to Zecora. It wasn’t natural, to do as she was doing. It cultivated a sensation like an itch behind the eyes, or something like the grinding of bone.

She could only imagine how it felt to Twilight.

Zecora increased the volume and intensity of her chanting, and Twilight chewed so hard on the rag in her mouth that she bit clean through it. Now she could cry out in ernest. Zecora stared, transfixed in horror by the agony she was causing. She tried to focus on how much she hated her victim, how she held her in such seething contempt that it would make all this okay.

But it didn’t seem to work, and when Twilight finally summoned the presence to cry out ‘please’, it became harder still. But her incantations only strengthened as she focused more, more, more power on Twilight’s horn. Because it was bigger than Zecora feeling like a monster. This was something that had to be done.

And finally, Zecora’s luck ran out. Twilight fired off a magic missile that scorched a hole through the tent’s ceiling. Time stood still for a second as the unicorn finally realised her power wasn’t being bound anymore, and then Zecora started screaming. If Twilight had had any presence of mind right now, she would’ve undone the straps binding her to the table. But since every nerve ending in her body was likely as close as they could be to igniting, she instead craned her head around to look at Zecora. The unicorn let out an incoherent scream of malice and panic and loosed several bolts in the zebra’s direction.

Zecora ducked under them while continuing and intensifying her spellwork. She allowed herself a brief moment to breathe, and then she was screaming all over again. She tried to hold onto the fact that it would be over soon, and then she could finally kill her captive and have done with it. Still she didn’t feel better.

The two of them continued, and with mote of power forced into Twilight’s horn so did the unicorn’s attacks increase in ferocity. Zecora continued to duck and dive and scream her lungs out, but eventually she slipped up. A bolt sliced open her shoulder like a hot knife through butter, and then a second scorched her cutie mark from her right flank. And just before she broke her focus to scream in agony, she saw Twilight’s skin seem to wobble and shimmer. So instead, Zecora forced all the pain into one final shriek that tore her throat to shreds.

There was a thunderous bang, then a low hissing crackle. Twilight had only a couple of seconds to stare down at herself in disbelief before she exploded in a blinding flash of green light.

Zecora tried to mutter a spell to fix her wounds, but found her throat tightened and protested, rejecting the magic. That last scream seemed to have done more damage than she’d first feared. Magical wounds were unpredictable at best, and it was not unlikely she may never be able to work the magic of her people ever again. She wondered fleetingly what this would be like, a zebra without her voice was little better than a walking corpse.

And the thought would have destroyed her, if it weren’t for the consolation of her machine. It whirred into life and began its work, analysing what exactly had given way to destroy the mirage. Now they’d all know. Now they’d know how to undo it. Now maybe they could win.

The changeling looked down at its body as its disguise had done before the break. While it was harder to glean emotion from it’s chitinous, insectoid face, Zecora could pick up the sense of numb despair. It’s wings were limp and lifeless, its horn was charred and ruined. Zecora supposed she’d pumped so much energy into it that its connection to the leylines had been destroyed entirely. A being truly without an ounce of magic.

“What will you do now?” it asked, its voice a distant, metallic buzz.

“I should probably kill you,” she managed to choke out.

“Yes, I think I’d like that.” It replied, and Zecora knew it was half a lie. Even now, as it teetered on the edge of the deepest despair as a ruin of itself, with no connection to what made their world beautiful, it was still proud. Still afraid.

Zecora had learned to hate these beasts ever since Canterlot fell. She knew vaguely of Twilight Sparkle. She had been a scholar at Canterlot University. Three times it had taken her to get into Celestia’s school and yet she’d managed to rise to the top. A famously solitary mare. The fact this creature had been imitating her meant Twilight was most likely dead.

But now, as Zecora’s throat bled, and she felt cut off from the music of speech, she could come to some understanding of her enemy. The way it tried to hide its sorrow, how it failed to beat its now useless wings. They were nothing now but two warriors robbed of their former glory in a battle neither started.

“I don’t think I have the strength for that right now, nor the stomach,” Zecora garbled around bloody coughs.

She limped towards her chair, wincing in pain every time her injured leg hit the ground. The second she was close, she allowed herself to fall into it.

“I can’t hear them anymore,” the changeling muttered, breaking into alien sounding sobs, “I’ve been able to hear them all my life.”

Zecora supposed it was referring to the hivemind its species was connected to. She couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like to lose that. But as a traveller in a foreign land, so far away from the lyrical music and wholesome heat of her homeland, she thought she could sympathise more than most.

She didn’t want to think about how they were going to dispose of the changeling, that could come later. Instead, she reached down to fetch her book. She hadn’t gotten to properly read it before. Not the way Zebras liked to read them, anyway. She ran her hooves over the carvings, and at once she felt herself connected to them. And as the magic flowed between them, the book lit up.

Above their heads, sounds and images from her home began to unfold. She turned the pages and continued, and for just a moment it felt like she was far away from this strange, hostile place. Over on the table the changeling had gone quiet and was watching.

“It looks like a beautiful place,” it murmured tearily, and Zecora hummed her assent. They remained in that delicate refuge of calm and banished thoughts of what needed to come later. Zecora had forgotten how nice it was to not hate something for a short while.

When she looked over at her captive, tears still leaked from its eyes. But its breathing had steadied, and its muscled relaxed. It seemed like it had found some small comfort in the display created by the zebrish book.

And Zecora could at least be glad about that.