Wings! And with them, a new sense of lightness. Of an athlete’s nimble, effortless agility. I’d never swum at all, but to hang in the air brought back ancient memory of being small enough to float in the bath - with as much of a feeling of fun. Like grandponies who complain of slowing down, but sometimes find new energy, I felt suddenly youthful. As if the heaviness that had until now held me to the earth was only due to age. As if as a child instead, I’d flown like a cherub from game to playful game, as freely as this.

It made me nervous and giddy to be moved on the wind, as Wile’s wings and mine were filled like sails, while our now redundant hooves held no purchase on the ground. No mooring, or tether at all to the earth, and worse: with infinite room overhead to be carried off into. I was afraid, but thrilled to be afraid, and I laughed every time the breeze picked up as we started our lessons with Perigee. Wile, instead, was less willing to give over control to the wind.

“Let me land!” she said, to Perigee. “Just for a minute, let me land.”

“Ok: well, if you’d like to land, stop flapping,” said Perigee, from on the ground. We were out on a hillside, still in view of Limerick’s cottage. The old alchemist had gone inside, but sometimes appeared at his window, observing. “Wile. Just stop flapping your wings.”

Instead, still flapping, Wile started to tread nervously at the air, which actually seemed to lift her a bit higher. “No, Wile, lock your wings out flat, at their full span,” said Perigee. “And if you lean forward, you’ll start to drift down. It’s mostly drifting, involved in this. You should only be flapping to gain altitude.”

“So, why aren’t we gaining altitude now?” I asked, also flapping.

“Well, while you are both flapping quite a lot,” Perigee answered. “I wouldn’t say you’re flapping very well. Ideally, to really have an effect, both wings should be flapping at the same time.”

“So, you’re saying there’s some redundant flapping going on,” I nodded, sagely.

“Yes... in fact, you could afford to be a lot more frugal with the flapping.”

“Since we’re all throwing around f words...” said Wile. “I’ve got one.”

“Now wait, Wile: don’t fold your wings back,” said Perigee. “You’ll just drop out of the air if you do that. Fan them out instead, and lock them there, and you should drift down to the ground.”

“Look at me, Wile,” I said. “I’ll show you.” And I banked back around to face her as I landed, to which I think I heard her mutter teacher’s pet.

“The drifting part you’re quite good at,” Perigee said, to me.

“It comes from drifting through life,” I nodded. I felt confident: for the first time, my own movement seemed less stiff and unathletic. I felt physically fluent and easygoing. “What do you think, should we try some laps around the cottage, Wile?”

“How is it that suddenly, you’re a jock?” she asked. “But sure: that actually sounds safer than landing, right now. Just as long as Perigee comes with, and hangs close to me.”

So, still under Perigee’s patient tutelage, we tried it. And I could feel the pockets of air underneath me, which picked me up whenever I flapped my wings. And as we gathered a little speed it started to seem like the planet must be turning against the path of our flight, as the hillside passed underneath us, and the cottage’s garden, and the stream, then all three again.

Losing altitude once, I managed to skip back off of the flowery ground, and it was such a relief to be carried off onto the air again, as it felt fat and pillowy underneath my outspread wings. Like as real and reliable a medium as water under the broad hull of a boat. While the rolling clouds above us had a soft and peachy color, under the light of late afternoon. Maybe it was because I was happy, but all things felt weightless and soft.

That’s when Wile appeared, inching past me on the inside track of our lap, with Perigee as close to her as a sidecar.

“The last one to Limerick’s window,” Wile shouted. “Is a stinky griffon’s egg.”

“The egg of a stinky griffin or-“ I just heard Perigee asking, as they pulled ahead of me.

I was happier to watch the girls fly than to actually race them, so I didn’t stand much chance of winning. It seemed the suggestions of color across the eyelike patterns of their wings matched their heads of hair somewhat, so that Wile’s wings had a reddish tincture, and Perigee’s were plummy. I wondered what that meant. Were these wings real parts of our bodies, somehow based off of our distinguishing genetics? But I found it hard to wonder, and to fly.

I caught up to the girls as they were landing, lightly, outside of Limerick’s window. I instead almost didn’t stop in time, and so fanned a sizable gust of wind into the cottage's study as I pulled up suddenly, sending some loose papers flying off Limerick’s table and leveling a stack of books.

Somehow, this didn’t bother the old stallion. His hoary, spectacled head appeared in the window, and addressed us more than politely: “Wonderful demonstration, my little ponies. The wings seem to fly themselves.”

“They’re peachy,” I said, to a querying look from Wile. “How long do they last?”

“Well,” Limerick laughed, somewhat nervously. “That depends of the user’s size and metabolism. Much like the inebriating effect of alcohol, so I can’t really say. But don’t be so quick to worry,” he added, to the concerned Wile. “I engineered a fail-safe, of course, built into the potion. When the user’s wings are about to thin away, she’ll begin to hiccup...”

“To hiccup?” repeated Wile.

“It’s very clever, really,” Limerick nodded. “Much like a vehicle’s empty fuel tank signals for re-filling, your own body will warn you, by this signal, when the effects of the Opening Cocoon are about to wear off. It’s organic engineering. In a few hours, each of you will be given about a five minute grace period, in which to land.”

“A few hours...” Wile said. “Then we could still make it out to see Keats, tonight.” Then, to Limerick: “Listen, you’d like more ponies to test your potion on, wouldn’t you?”

“Well...” he hesitated.

“If it helps,” I stepped forward and said. “I just a minute ago noticed that the color scheme of each of our pairs of wings matches our hair. Which seems to mean that some of our own genetic information was included somehow, in the makeup of the wings. I’m not sure, but maybe that might merit closer investigation?”

Limerick took a moment to look us over, and confirm this. “Yes, that’s not a bad hypothesis...” he said.

“Then we can bring you back more ponies, to test it on?” Wile asked, of course with Peirene and the free pegasi’s plight in mind. “Think about it: the more of us flying,” she said. “The more of us defying whatever ancient prescript reserves the sky to pegasi alone. Just off the strength of your potion...”

“Defying the ancient prescripts...” Limerick repeated, hesitating still.

“I’ve found it’s made me very happy,” Perigee added, simply. “To fly again. And more than that, to fly with friends.”

And I felt somehow, without Limerick saying it, that of our three arguments it was this one, from Perigee, that convinced him in the end. I was sure it had made the old alchemist happy too, to see us flying. To have made us happy. But whatever his motivations were, he said:

“Well, why should I be hesitating? By all means, yes, bring me more ponies.”

Being novice flyers, Wile and I closely followed the contours of the land, and never dared to fly to more dangerous heights. We kept to depressions in the hills, where we were more likely to go unseen, and avoided the farmsteads of the Shy. It was just she and I now, flying by sunset, as Perigee had stayed behind at Wile’s insistence. In case we two were somehow caught or trapped in Peirene, we needed Perigee to remain free, still available at Limerick’s secluded cottage, to guide the other grounded allies of the free pegasi in their own first, clumsy flights.

I was getting the hang of it now, but we flew slowly enough that if we needed suddenly to land, we would land softly. An ewe and little family of lambs on a hillside were frightened by our passing closely by. I looked back and saw the little ones cantering this way and that, then grouping underneath their mother. I wondered if these other living creatures also longed for the days we ponies had lived and governed in love and glory. And if in a way we’d failed them, and failed all living creatures, in our role as the supposed caretakers of this once good, green country.

I imagined how I’d passed over those lambs, as an unfriendly shadow against the clouds, and felt associated for the first time, suddenly but strongly, with the terrible balefire bomb. The final declaration of our race’s selfish, self-destructive desire that, making itself globally heard, speaking for us, had said: we will be satisfied. Yes, that seemed to be our last word. That without compromise, no matter the cost, we would be satisfied.

The Zebras weren’t the issue. I felt sure we’d harbored no greater hated or dissatisfaction at the time of the Great War, than toward ourselves. For it was we ourselves that had starved and squandered our own precious lives in vain pursuits. Lived half lives, removed from love, and failed to defend even those. How long had it been since last the ponies of the Old World properly flowered, under Celestia’s light? And wasn’t it as crucial to nature’s happy procession that ponies should flower, as it was for flowers themselves to? Weren’t we part of nature, with a vital role in it, as its stewards?

So, what fell to me now? What could I do, for the lambs on the hillside? I felt somehow that I was on the right track, already. To live, and be happy, and under these conditions: to do what came naturally to me. For what comes most naturally to a truly happy pony should of course be the health and well-being of the world. While only the unhappy wish for wider ugliness and destruction.

All I had to do was look at Wile beside me, to know I cared for her. And because I cared for her, I wanted the environment she lived in to be happy and safe. And so of course I would endeavor, with what little means I had, to make it that way. And this must be how love engenders love.

“Wile?” I asked her, as we rested our wings in the shade of one tree, alone on a hillside just under Peirene’s pillar of clouds. “After all you’ve seen, traveling, would you say hatred seems more powerful than love?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Not at all. Maybe easier to slip into the habit of at first, but nowhere as powerful. Seemingly powerful, yes, but that’s only due to the loop we’re currently stuck in. I’d just say, in recent years, we ponies have fallen into some nasty habits.”

She paused to think. “I think we’re simpler creatures than we want to admit. So, if we think a hateful thought often enough, we call it a belief. But mostly we believe it because we’ve committed it to memory, by thinking it so often. And if we do a hateful thing, we’ll call it our decision. When really, the more we do it, the more we’re becoming trapped in the habit.”

“We’re trainable, you mean?” I asked.

“Yes,” Wile nodded. “I’d say so. So a lot of it comes from our parents, or whoever was around when we were foals. But once we’re older or once we’ve gone off on our own, it falls to us, unhelped, to raise ourselves. Into whatever else we will become, for better of worse.”

“I guess the religious perspective is the same as that,” I said. “But we believe we all can still get outside help, from higher forces, as long as we’re willing to ask for it.”

“Funny then, that I never asked,” Wile said, “And yet you just appeared.”

“Have I helped you?” I asked, surprised.

“Oh, immeasurably,” Wile said, looking forward. Over the Shy in front of us, the cloud cover was slowly being drained of light. “My own old and lonely habits seem far gone now,” she said. “You’re more than a friend to me, Lemony: you started my day, after what seems now like a long, looping night.”

“It still might have been a lovely night,” I said, remembering how content she’d seemed when I met her fishing on the riverbank. How much more comfortable than me.

“Oh, sure the night was often nice,” she said. “And we all need nights, of course. With their privacy. The time alone, to think. To feel how we’ve grown by day, and to dream. For a long time, I would have claimed to need only the quiet of night, and myself for a friend. But I always knew: ponies wilt inside, by night eternal. By total introversion..."

"It’s clear to me now: I need more than just myself,” she said. “I need you, too.”

“Someone?” I asked.

“You,” she said.

We lingered long on that hillside, and so at last it was hiccuping that we flew toward Peirene’s pillaring cloud: with the effects of The Opening Cocoon wearing off. The tips of our wings had started to molt and flake off on the wind as we flew, scale by mosaic scale. Still, Limerick’s simple warning system did save us some pain, as we made safe landing soon after the hiccuping started, leaving ourselves a long, misty climb toward Fluttershy’s Lament. I felt as slow as a slug, sticking again to the ground, but all the same I was glad to be returning to Peirene.

Shafts of deep blue light hung like ghostly tapestries from high breaks in the clouds, draping the backs of winged, prayerful forms amid the region’s cloudy ruins. I could see why pilgrims came here. The place seemed to make it obvious that there was more intended for us than just this earthly life. That the veil was very thin, which concealed the divine from our eyes.

The spectral light of evening seemed to prove it now: for what must this brief life be, and these scenes in front of us, but a shifting, colorful veil over our eyes, that would one day be lifted? We were every one of us being led somewhere, weren’t we? With our eyes covered now, in the interim. And when at last they were uncovered, how short our lifetimes of blindness would seem - even as brief as a dream, after waking.

None of this was real - least of all pain and death. Nowhere as real, at least, as everlasting love, or the alluring deep blue light, in which the divine laughter seemed now to sound. Laughing not at our pain, but kindly, knowing just how safe we really were. It excited me, to almost hear it there. Just to be alive, with Celestia’s mysteries, with cherubs and Pinkie Pies, it seemed, hiding behind the shadow of every cloud, like foals who wanted really to be found – who were only waiting for us. As if this earthly life was just the painful, lonely suspense before a surprise party.

I did believe in eternal life – in us each one day returning forever into our creator’s fold, in some form or another. And this belief would save me a lot of pain. When we first came back into view of Fluttershy’s Lament, on either side of the weeping, familiar falls, the houses were squat, dark mounds in the mist, with their lighted windows like bulging yellow eyes.

“First, we’ll tell Bottles to spread the word,” Wile was saying, cheerily. “Perigee’s flight school is open for business! And free of charge, of course, for all friends of the free pegasi. Then after a little rest, under cover of darkness, we’ll go and see Keats again...”

It was not quite dark now. The sky still had a pink grain to it. I looked up and saw a broad, near-transparent sheet of cloud pulling back from off of a few first stars, like a wave that leaves behind pearly points of sand. And as they were gradually fogged over again, I got an ominous feeling from these stars, as if from far off shouts of warning, barely audible to me.

Without much of a sense of urgency, Wile unharnessed her hunting rifle then, sat back on her haunches, and aimed the rifle at the falls ahead of us. Just to see down the scope, it seemed. Without the aid of the scope, I could now make out two crosses, suspended with cables from the high, graceful little bridge that connected the two sides of Fluttershy’s Lament. I knew crosses were used to represent Celestia’s rising, silhouetted wingspan, and I assumed that that was the idea here. But these crosses swung a little with the wind, seeming somewhat weighed down.

“Luna forgive them,” Wile said, and I knew that whatever she was seeing wasn’t good.

I didn’t ask questions, but followed as fast as I could while, in a few breathless bursts of running, and without a word, Wile led me back into town to Bottle’s inn, In the Lap of Legends Old. Once inside, ignoring poor Bottles behind the unattended bar, Wile took us directly upstairs, into Peanut Gallery’s same little stonewalled room, where we had once searched for and failed to find him.

This time, the slight, dark-haired stallion was in bed, on his side under a sheet. Out of the room’s one window you could just about see the falls, and the two crosses hanging there. Now it was with urgency, that Wile unharnessed her rifle.

“Get out of bed, you scum,” she said, loudly. But the stallion didn’t stir. “I’ve got a rifle trained on you; you'd better snap to it.” Wile prodded him with the rifle's barrel, and still he didn’t stir. “I said: get up.” Now, she moved to turn him over toward us, and the stallion fell heavily out of bed. A bottle of wine on his bedside table was knocked over, and started to spurt out inkily onto the floor.

Wile swore, and harnessed her rifle. “Lemony,” she said, in a harsher tone than I was used to. “Fetch that bottle, will you? With your magic.” So, I floated it over for her to see.

“Our Night Owl wine is dark, bold, and jammy,” Wile read, from off the back of the bottle. “With aromas of blackcurrant pie and bittersweet chocolate. And a smooth, lingering finish.” I cocked my head, confused. “Enjoy under an evening sky.”

“It’s new,” Wile added. “It’s not prewar.”

“Which means what?” I asked.

“That it was a gift from the Enclave, I assume. And poisoned.” She kicked gingerly at Peanut Gallery’s limp body. “I guess they got all the mileage they needed out of him. He’s kaput.”

I stepped back. He looked just like he was sleeping, with his hair falling over his heavily lidded eyes; already busy drooling onto the floor. Cold, congealing saliva. “Wile,” I said, carefully. “Why did you bring us here?”

“The bastard gave them Nimble’s location,” she answered. “That must have been the throwaway information he mentioned last time we were here; what he used to get into the Enclave's good books. You remember a little after that, when we went to Nimble’s cave – neither she nor her father were there...”

“So, where are they?” I asked. To which Wile looked at me sadly. At last, she passed me her hunting rifle.

I was sitting at the window, in the frame of its faint light. Now I sat with Wile’s rifle in my lap, not using it to look. Outside, the two heavy crosses swung.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Mutate: Change one of the user's traits. It’s hard to say what the lasting effects of The Opening Cocoon might be, but with further use, your wings will grow sturdier, nimbler, and longer-lasting. Almost as if they have a save file in you, to recover their progress from on regrowth. Wouldn’t you like to recover your progress, from an earlier point?