Night was winging over the southern country now, preying on the last of the high, thinning light. In the lanes of the valley below us, pale and barely perceptible ponies were running by, as quietly as cloud. These far, traveling strangers seemed almost not to be there at all, and took on a shy, retreating quality that reminded me of hard to pin down memory, always just out of reach. I watched them pass, these distant strangers, then looked gratefully at Perigee who had lain down a little ways off on the hillside; now lifting her head to look back at me.

Inside the ruins of the church, by what was left of the faint firelight there, the rest of the free pegasi’s faces seemed to hang like masks out of the darkness. Usually, in strangers you see only puppets of flesh, and not much sign of whatever vital, deeper force actually shakes that flesh to laugh. But now I was grateful, and glad not to be alone, with these other spirits in the dark. It seemed death’s shadow had swept closely over our ears here, and left us each grateful for our friends.

Nimble was sleeping uneasily now in the ruins, by firelight. While behind us, Wile was setting a pan onto the charred grate of one of the church’s ignited braziers. She followed this pan with a silver kettle, set to one side. Then, she poured some thick batter into the pan, and started to make pancakes and coffee. These were for the dozy watchponies hunched against the cold to guard our camp, and for us.

Wile served the watchponies first, with a plate of small pancakes and a tin of hot coffee each. Next, I helped her to set a sort of table on the ground for us. The coffee was black and oily, and its steaming tin cup almost burned me. Wile sat down to eat with us. I was grateful, again, just to see her. She had a round maternal face and alert, familiar eyes, which at least to me, seemed always to be bright and friendly.

Our pancakes were moist and white inside, and specked with precious honey that surprised our tongues. And soon we all were being overtaken by a warm and sleepy feeling, despite the cups of coffee. The girls and I had volunteered, to partake in this first watch.

“I still remember my father,” Wile started, for of course we all still had Nimble’s father in mind. “Or, I still dream of him sometimes,” she said. “This’ll sound strange, but I remember hiding from him in one dream. In a house over a wide, black cove. Hiding because I’d overslept and hadn’t washed, or because I’d done some bad thing the previous day. And meanwhile, outside in the wind, I could see my father preparing to set off on some kind of hang-glider.”

“A hang-glider?” I repeated.

“Like a kite, which carries a pony under its wings,” Wile said. “A bit like our wings today, actually. And this wide glider I saw was starting almost to fly, as the wind lifted and tested it. Until finally it got off the ground, and flew my father away. And I saw his glider pass down over the dark surface of the cove, visible as little more than a point of light, passing close over its own reflection. My father, I mean, this shrinking point of light...”

“And the bearing of this dream?” Perigee asked.

“It’s hard to say in so few words,” Wile said. “But I only have to think of it, to feel its bearing on me. He's gone, is the point. Somewhere I can’t follow. And it will forever feel like he deserted me, and all his bastard children.” She had taken out her bottle of bourbon, and was busy sharing it out between our blue tin cups.

I couldn’t think of a response to this. At last Perigee responded for us: “Your father did you each one great favor, at least.”

“What, giving us life? That was no favor,” Wile said. “Leaving a scattering of children behind on the wastes; who does that help?” she shook her head. “It was careless of him, to have so many. We’re just the accidents of him chasing skirt.”

Again, for me, this was at a level of intensity that I felt unable to address then, and again I waited for Perigee. “It’s no accident, Wile,” she said. “Your being here. And if your father accomplished nothing else, at least he made his contribution toward the continuing of our race.”

“Just doing his part, then,” Wile said, again shaking her head. “I wonder, would his contribution have been much smaller, if every colt and filly had cost him nine months’ heavy disfigurement, and then the pain of childbirth?”

“Much smaller, probably, yes,” Perigee agreed. “But still, all I mean is maybe it was more than chasing skirt. Maybe a part of him did care, at least, about leaving behind some legacy. Or about keeping our species alive.”

“That can be your opinion,” Wile said. “Mine is that it was all for his own sport.”

“Couldn’t it have been that he just loved his partners?” I asked, suddenly, getting their attention. “Your mothers, I mean.”

“What,” Wile said, almost laughing. “All of them?” And even Perigee looked amused.

“Why not?” I asked. “Wasn’t there time for it?”

“Well, sure it’s possible,” Wile said, hesitating. “It’s a long life, and a pony goes through changes, obviously. Multiple lifetimes, it almost feels like.” She paused to think. "Maybe he did love them each in turn. I mean, for me, I know I’m much happier these days. And it seems like a long time ago, that I had any really dark turns. Like other lifetimes, almost.”

“It’s the same for me,” said Perigee

“And me,” I said. “Or, if I was as happy before, I didn’t ever seem to notice it as much as now, with you.”

“To noticing our happy turns, then, before it’s too late,” Wile said, offering us the cups of bourbon.

“And to our friends tiding us over in sadness,” Perigee said, agreeing. “Until we’re happy again.”

I had a heated, unsteady night’s sleep. In a dream I was alone, but I could feel, as sure as another pony’s protective presence, the mountains of Peirene behind me. Overhead on either side of me were ambitious towers of humid, pink cloud, with stars ranked finely all around them, as faint as specters in the haze of morning. The same old ruined church of ours was cheered up now by a coat of flowering ivy. No sound troubled the air, besides one - broad and sustained as day – what sounded like the last, audible trace of a great bell ringing, somewhere in the valley below. Or, like water crashing down, far away and abundantly.

I was alone besides a mare in a straw hat, with a fringe of sandy hair that played in the wind, and with happy, shining eyes. Shining in their creases, her eyes, under her straw hat’s crosshatched shadow. She was tending to the flowers of the church - somehow so familiar, the mare. She came over (actually covering the distance, or just appearing at my side?). And like a baby, I smiled back automatically at her, not knowing why. My face just opening up and brightening, at the sight of hers.

She looked so clean under the sun, whereas I felt my very flesh like a film of oil and grime all over me, or like a weight of damp and dirty rags. “I’m sorry,” I said to her, half kneeling, ashamed of my condition; feeling like I hadn’t washed in days, willfully, just to offend this mare.

The mare shook her head, and smiled at me – such a rush of warm forgiveness, I was almost glad I’d committed my offense.

“I love you,” she said, in a musical way. “I love you.”

I laughed happily, and said: “I love you, too.”

It was her. Shady Sands. Uninjured here, waiting, with her own clear, light hair falling across her eyes. And in spite of her violent death, I knew somehow that she’d been brought here by a force as soft and gentle as the wind under a gliding wing. I knew that she was safe, and happy.

I felt heat and energy returning to my body, numbed before by the pain of seeing Nimble’s grief. I was happy again, and why not? This was all I could have ever wanted for a pony. Wealth beyond possession. Total, patient satisfaction - paradise. I sighed and bent to press my forehead to the earth at her hooves, on the giddy verge of laughter now. I felt so grateful, suddenly.

"I do love you, Lemony."

And at that she was gone - without leaving, she was gone.

Now, my dream was ending. The vast blue sky overhead was beginning to darken and close, and the stars shone down more fiercely, like barking dogs discovering me there, beyond the veil of the dead: trespassing where I shouldn’t yet be.

I came around to what sounded like more clamor and panic - but turned out to be celebration. In the darkened ruins of the church the free pegasi had woken, and were celebrating - wholeheartedly: for the day had been long and difficult. Now they went around with skins of wine, embracing and laughing, invoking the memory of Nimble’s father, commending him to the ministers’ eternal care. The remaining walls of the church flickered from their fires, and fell dark under their playful shadows.

I heard Perigee’s happy voice once over, laughing from inside the church. And her laughter came out in strange contrast with the cracked and shrouded, familiar silhouette of the ruins’ exterior. Overhead, the beginnings of morning were spreading as a slow, sea-gray wash. I looked around for Wile, and identified the outline of her sleeping body under a blanket, with its fibers already flecked with dew, lain out close beside a hearth of cold, wet firewood.

Creeping up the back of my neck now, came fear at the sense of a large presence overshadowing me. With wings outspread at its sides, like some agent or functionary of death. Still, at the same time another part of me was not afraid. A diminishing part of me that seemed to have seen, with Shady Sands as my guiding light, the distant country of the dead. A part of me that had been there, and remained unafraid.

The figure behind me was Keats, but even after I turned around I did not greet him. He was dark against the grainy sky, and I was too busy misinterpreting our meeting as another dream. With the faint stars around his head, Keats seemed somehow night-like against the morning. Like a residual part of it.

“Good morning, Lemony,” the great pegasus said. “Were you dreaming?”

“Of a friend,” I said, bowing slightly without thinking. “A very good friend, who’s gone now.”

“Not gone,” he said, and sat down there like a great lion or griffon, folding in his wings. How he came to be there with me, I didn’t wonder at the time. What a rare opportunity this was, I didn’t realize.

“You always recognized her face by memory, didn’t you – your friend?” he asked me. “She was already mostly memory, to you, even in life. Now doesn’t that make her almost as real and as present as she ever was, even now? She’s there in your mind, isn’t she? Almost complete, in memory. You can still be with her. You can move toward her. As toward warmth in darkness.”

“Of course,” I answered him. “The memories are there. And vivid.” It wasn’t hard at all to find her, if I looked. “The first few times I really met eyes with her, I remember, it was like looking down from a high place.”

“And by her eyes,” he said. “Were you brought nearer, or sent further away?”

“Sent away,” I said. “Yes: sent away. But toward what, I don’t know. Just something high and good. It’s like with a word where I know what it means, but still it’s hard to define. What she’s meant, to me.”

“So, after this dream,” Keats started to ask. “Has all that mysterious significance she had just disappeared? And do you really think you’ve stopped dreaming of her, just because you’re awake again? Why? You make your dreams of thought. You make your life, or at least this lived experience, all out of thought. That’s all your own identity is. That’s all hers is. So? Why shouldn’t it continue, now, your relationship with her, and whenever you wake up? Why should you say she’s gone, when she’s alive in you?”

“Thinking of her as alive,” I said, hesitating. “That would be healthy?”

“If she encourages you to live your life more healthily. If you lived more healthily because of her living memory. Why not? Call her memory close to you, if she ever seems far away. Keep her with you. Why decline her?”

I sat there dwelling on her bright memory, in a little pain, until Keats surprised me: brushing the side of my cheek with his own great, overshadowed face, and prompting me thereby to lift my head. And as I looked up, he asked me:

“What comes from the passing of a day? We start with new energy, then start to feel it fail us. The light peaks and drops away. But it isn’t all the same. All around, strangers are gathering their thoughts and speaking. And some of what gets said changes the minds of those that hear it. And those that are changed are speaking again. All the time, we’re listening and thinking. And what we think is changing how we act, and what we do is changing how we think. And in all this time, we’re growing. Even in our sleep. Life is passing through us, and it doesn’t pass without producing change...”

The longer he spoke now, the more I could feel my own ears tingling, feel the damp of tears unshed behind my eyes: the intensity of the moment, high and free. I was really here now, hearing this. Keats was here. I was awake.

“This memory of your friend,” he said. “She often appears by surprise, doesn’t she? Like a little green sapling. She grows out of you, out of what you knew of her. She stands before you as a living dream.”

“So,” he continued. “While your friend has died, isn’t the memory of her still like living material in your mind - in the garden you’re busy growing, and which you yourself grow out of? The only place you ever are. From whose soil all the joyful feelings, pleasant memories and dreams that make you happiest come flowering, by surprise; formed from where or out of what, you do not know, but formed somehow. As much as these dreams of your friend, your little sapling, are somehow formed.”

I laughed once, understanding. Even in the Stable, when I was away from her, Shady Sands would appear to me. Like a flower stands as the final, focal point on its stem: the sum of what was written in the seed, finding expression. Sustained by some better part of me. Some part allowing her to sit securely in my heart, and steadily to flower.

“It’s enough,” Keats said. “Just the outline of a personality, or a rumor of life in memory. It’s enough, if you’ll accept it for what it is, and ask no more of the dead. But for those still deeply set in their grief, who must dig and search and gripe for more: for them even the beloved's memory begins to pale, beneath their grief. And this has been the fate of our enemy: the Lieutenant Colonel, Hereafter.”

At this, looking up at Keats' overshadowed face, my vision seemed somehow to sharpen, with the brightening church ruins becoming larger behind him, and my fond and dreamy thoughts of Shady Sands clearing away. We were here on a mountainside of Peirene, still in the troubled world of the living.

“His daughter was killed in the Crop Duster's secession,” said Keats. “When we first fought for our liberty, and came to Peirene. Hereafter’s child was a fighter for their side, and I was responsible for her death.”

“Hereafter’s mind is on her always, now,” Keats continued. “Or, if not on her, then on her demise. And on her killer.” The great pegasus shook his head. “A meeker, more introverted stallion, without forces at his command, might have wrestled all in secret with the same pain and conflict. The Lieutenant Colonel instead, has reshaped Peirene in the image of his pain, little concerned with the fact that other, blameless ponies now have to share his same painful, grieving landscape.”

Keats turned his head to look skyward, and in the increasing light I saw that his face was all seared and bare and pockmarked on that side, like the lifeless, waxing surface of a planet. “I encourage you to remember your friends, Lemony,” he said. “Here and gone. You may need their reinforcement, today.”

As I waited where Keats had left me, the wind and sun worked their changes in the clouds, shifting and brightening them.

And this came to me, unasked for: please give her our love. From somewhere deep, or high, inside. Please give her our love. Yes, I realized that I was only a servant. Of something like me, but much larger, under the surface. Shown to me in dreams. Something that loved Wile and Perigee, and all ponies, much more than I could feel at once. The very source of love. Now this mind by day: my conscious life, was only a little keyhole, letting in a fraction of its light. Still, it let in light.

I found Nimble in the ruins and I embraced her, and as happy as I felt, I couldn’t help but cry with her when she started to: touching cheeks. But after this interim of pain, how gratified and glad even this mournful pegasus would be - in a dream, or memory - to find her beloved father waiting for her, outside the confined space of this created world. Still alive.

As the free pegasi lay his body out in a funeral procession, preparing it for transport back to sacred ground, I thought of what Perigee had said to Wile, yesterday: that the gifts Celestia had given us far outweighed what she would take away. I believed it even now. Nimble’s face was streaked with tears, but I trusted her to laugh again in time, after this mournful, yearning gap. To laugh.

Now red javelins of daylight were fending off the darkness overhead. Another cycle starting, so carefully made and convincing - what was the purpose of all this? Why give us life at all, and run us through this difficult program?

At the moment, I didn’t feel as if I needed to know. Not as I looked at Wile and Perigee, and at the last few stars faltering overhead, like buoys against a tide. Or even as I looked at Nimble’s suffering, which after all was only further proof that the damp, true root of a pony’s heart must be love – even if it was sometimes love unwanted, which hurt this much to bear.

Was that Celestia’s intended purpose for us here, then? To love, or to long and search for love? If so, to me, at least for now, it seemed worth our time and pain.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Gain Luck: +1 to the respective Statistic.