South of the crash site, Equestria-bound, we followed a long and sandy riverbed, with a meager stream winding down its middle, and with banks tattooed by the lofty shadows of the spare, surrounding trees. I was wounded to the point that it hurt me to walk. However, we'd found out a curious fact: that I could now rest on clouds, like a natural pegasus.

So, Perigee had fetched some clouds, still clinging to the wreck of the Temerity's wings, and made me a little cot. Some residual effect of Limerick's potion, or some more permanent transformation it had worked in me (and in Wile, as it turned out) allowed me to ride in convenience: on a small, very low-hanging cloud, which I drifted forward telekinetically, feeling a fraction of my own weight.

So, we travelled this way, and the sun seemed to hit us in soft, slow waves, as the bright stream wobbled along, leading the way. Sometimes, where the waters pooled, Wile and Perigee went wading or swimming. Or else, stayed lazing with me on the banks. From Wile’s supplies, we chewed on tough dried apricots, and stale ginger biscuits.

We lounged the longer, later part of the afternoon away in sleepy retirement, sapped of our strength, each almost falling asleep with a happy, heavy feeling. After a while, Wile went and tried to catch us a fish downstream. Next, she started a fire on the bank, and loose blue fish scales gleamed in the sand as we waited to eat. Soon, we were eating the seared fish, and drinking the last of Wile’s bourbon, and it wasn’t long before we’d each lain down, falling asleep in the sand; with Wile and I under one blanket like twins in a womb, and with plenty of light left behind in the high, wild pastures of the sky.

In the Stable I’d retreated so often into spaces all artificial, formed in and limited to pony intelligence. In books, on terminal screens. Incestuous, pony-made spaces. Whose mysteries and wonders must be limited, of course, to the intelligence of their authors. Works of artifice which in fact, at best, can only remind us of what lies outside, without limit. In real life. In the wild world - this more complete work, without errors - where the dewy shell of every snail opens new depths of mystery. Actual gaps. Actual mysteries. In the spiral of the snail’s shell, or the delicacy of shadow there, or the hair’s breadth of the light: seeming proof of intelligence beyond our own, whose limit we cannot know.

We had laid our heads aside like heavy pitchers to dream our individual dreams, sometimes dreaming of each other, linked as we were by shared memory. There out in nature, but remembering that the mind is nature's highest flower. For where does more apparent proof of Celestia’s love flower and wait to be found, than in the grateful mind? Contact with which mysterious proofs, of course, must be the source of all poetry and song. Of all our fumbled attempts, to describe the divine.

Now in a dream: I was peeking through the crack of a door, into a room whose walls were decked with light and twiggy shadow. A small room, like a foal's - with little furniture, and drawings pinned up. And passing quickly in the hallway outside, Shady Sands came, alive again, with a happy, healthy face. And we were, in this dream, little straw-haired, jam-faced schoolmates again.

Somehow there, I made her laugh. And hearing her laughter, I knew I had had no higher purpose than this. No other worldly concern more worthwhile than making positive contact with this creature, or than moving another mind, like mine, to greater joy. And I heard, or was reminded of:

My name is Pinkie Pie (Hello!)
And I am here to say (How ya doin?)

I’m gonna make you smile and I
Will brighten up your day

It doesn't matter now (What's up?)
If you are sad or blue (Howdy!)

Cause cheering up my friends is just what Pinkie's here to do

Cause I love, to make you smile, smile, smile.

I hadn't realized: remembering this song, I would always think of her. Shady Sands. By what light do I see her in dreams, in the dark of night, with eyes closed? With what light? Nearer than near to me: a part of me.

The next morning, dry and clear, I was first to wake. I looked down at Wile and saw her sleeping close to me, and I was tempted for a moment to slip back under the blanket where it was warm.

“Lemony.” Strange to hear my name, so early. It was Perigee, addressing me. “Take a look,” she said.

And I found her standing over Wile’s saddlebags, which lay open and clumsily gutted, missing food.

“It seems we’re not alone."

Once upon a time, long before the peaceful rule of Celestia, and before ponies discovered our beautiful land of Equestria, ponies did not know harmony. It was a strange and dark time. A time when ponies were torn apart... by hatred!

During this frightful age, each of the three tribes – the Pegasi, the unicorns, and the Earth ponies – cared not for what befell the other tribes, but only for their own welfare. . .

It was with this cautionary tale in mind, that we three went, short of food, relying solely on each other. We passed the next day in hard traveling, broken up with grateful rest: on our backs in the shade, hearts beating, saying nothing. Wile seemed to have a natural aptitude for reading the terrain, to find the easiest way forward. It came from long practice walking in Peirene: never too steeply uphill, if it could be avoided, or into the thickness of the mist.

Perigee, being uninjured, had the most stamina of us three, and we often saw her waiting further ahead on that climbing, blustery landscape, like a little flag to mark our way. Now, looking ahead for her again each time, I felt like a birdwatcher searching patiently for something small, swift and obscure. And I was pleased to catch sight of her, each time.

Wile had figured out where our missing food was going, for it continued gradually to disappear, as if a fourth pony was feeding slowly off of it with us. At last, she explained her theory to me, softly:

“It’s Hereafter,” she said. “Using Stealthbucks from the wreck.”

And I knew of course that it was true. Perhaps unable to fly after the crash, watching us all that time. Hereafter.

“You take this,” Wile said, and slipped me her flask of Limerick’s potion. Our last dose of it. Too little to carry all three of us back, to Equestria. “Just in case.”

Still, we made no effort to uncover or catch the Lieutenant Colonel, even knowing he was there, invisible, potentially within earshot. It seemed easy now to forgive him for all the pain he caused far off from here, in Peirene. Pursuing in vengeful combat what those violent means could never achieve: an end to his grief.

He was not different from us. Not another kind of creature, darker and heavier, but the same – just not as well taken care of. Alive and worthwhile, and not beyond repair. As deserving of forgiveness and fair treatment. With as much of a conscience as all ponies have, if he would listen for it. Not forever disconnected from Celestia. But as close. Waited for, too.

Whose behavior is ever really unimpeachable? It’s difficult to stay steady for long, and on an even tack. Always, being full of temperamental energy, a pony must take pains to watch herself. To watch for wild energies - the daily sway of strong, upsetting memories and grievances, or lower, meaner thoughts and impulses, feeding on those happy things at play above them. Dragging down joy. As my own father had been dragged to despair, by his own grief.

All this to say that as I felt Hereafter following us, I knew that parts of each of us must resemble him somewhat, in his unstable grief. And I wanted to take care of him as well as we each would want our own unstable parts taken care of, and made calm. So, we went a little more hungrily along, for the old pegasus’ sake.

After about another hour’s traveling, from on a hillside at the mouth of an unnamed valley, we were surprised by a view of vast wetlands, where the naked water caught no light (it being late in the afternoon), and the sun only barely flecked the heads of the creaking reeds, or caught the flights of sweeping cranes, which my eyes followed. The sky in the east was pinkening and soft as a peach, and wracked by distant lighting, presumably wasting itself over the sea on the coasts of our continent.

We could see a little fire burning, down in the watery wetlands. A part of the Temerity, black and unnatural there, which we would never have noticed but for the width of our view. It was one of the ship’s turbines, dropped off here. Now, we traveled down together to it, with Hereafter still unseen.

The gas fires of the turbine flashed back at us from across the shallow water, playing over its surface. And there in front of the discarded turbine, like a sword planted roughly to its hilt in the mud, lay Nature’s Call. Face down, wings hanging strangely at either side with feathers loose, and sticky with congealing blood. With as little dignity as a seagull, dead on the beach, already rotting, she lay there.

After a pause, we heard a voice shakily exhale from somewhere in view of this carnage. Hereafter, invisible behind us. Relieved to see his hunter dead. Conveniently taken out of play by some midair collision with the Temerity’s debris or, for all we knew, succumbing to her injuries after day’s long combat with the ship’s missing pilot.

Nature’s Call. My friend, it now felt like. And, even with tears starting to speck my eyes, I almost laughed to look down at her there. Not because she lay dead, but because I was realizing even as I looked at her that, of course, I’d thought of her also as a friend.

So easy to make friends, if what counts is any leverage from outside the mind, which happily tests and engages it. Which gives it life, and makes it grateful to be engaged. So, here around me: all manner of friends. With Wile and Perigee close and dear to me, and even Hereafter, further removed, and out to the smallest, unknown star, appearing overhead. There above me: another sudden, canter-levering friend. Sparking off further gladness and engagement, in me.

Just what was I catching happening here? Appreciation for these many, living surprises around me. A degree of urgent happiness, or mirth, high-flying and unsteady as a laugh, spurning the nearby shadow of death.

When I was content and calm, how must that different from this giddy feeling? What must that be? Well, a longer, more peaceful happiness, like mirth but on a longer, redder wave.

In the longer run, deeper down, it seemed I would be happiest when I could see the whole construct of the world, and all its happenstance, as a steady, surprising friend to me, which of course could never die, but must outlive me. Making me laugh always, like this, but much deeper down than could escape as sound, and more calmly than could shake my body. A longer, redder wave, that went on and on.

I felt both now. This urgent laughter passing, and lasting gladness underneath. And I realized, in the very winking of the star overhead, why there had to be loneliness, why there had to be unhappiness, and what it was the many pains life on earth were given in payment for.

Wasn’t it good, in fact, that we had each been created? Singled out from the rest of creation, and given our own place to stand? Feeling separate, yes, and suffering some pains from our separation, but needing to be separate in order to exist at all. Because what was I if not separate; if not a single point, removed? Removed at birth. Turned against the rest of creation passing, so that it passed around me, and so I saw it pass? And so that sometimes, as now, I had to see it pass away?

It was the burden of form! Which divides the seer from what he sees, and the lover from his beloved, as each by needs must occupy its own space, and close off this space for itself. But sweating on a run, or swimming in water, or sunbathing under a steady beam, there has been ambiguity, where I felt the division close. As when Wile and I slept closely, and met each other up on passing, airy stages, in dreams. When we were joined, as toward a single star, folding in on itself forever: the heart of life, heaven itself. And after death, without these forms, to what might we be more securely married, there?

I understood: for now I had to stand as if opposed to all creation, even to see it. The day I was turned back around would be the day I ceased to be. This was duality. Otherness. And at the cost of some loneliness and fear, this was what allowed me to know Wile and Perigee, and all my friends, and to ever laugh at all.

All this to explain why I stood there, on the giddy verge of laughter, over the demise of Nature’s Call.

Her days of opposition had ended: her tireless flight against the odds. Now her life was over, and she had returned onto the wind. But what a miracle that she had lived at all, and that I had seen her brief passing.

We carried Nature’s body over to the fire of the turbine, and passed it into the fire. We stood back from the new burst of heat, and looked up to admire the smoke that flew off and thinned away; admiring too the now starry gaps in the free moving cloud – the sky arranged over our heads like another, upside-down landscape opposed to this one, with smoky valleys of cloud, and twinkling black lakes and streams. Like the surface of another planet, passing close to ours. Or, a reflection of our own.

In silence we watched this great arrangement pass, or spin away, over our heads. And in time Hereafter appeared, sheepishly at our side, to watch in silence too. Without his clothes and guards or the bulk of the Temerity around him, fallen from his high position, he looked like any ageing stallion of Ponyville.

“After what I’ve seen, following you...” he said, after some time. “I’ve started to feel sorry for what I’ve done.” I noticed that his wings were sorely damaged: healed by potions stolen from Wile's saddlebags , but unusable all the same.

“I’ve had only friendships of convenience,” he said. “Political friendships, for professional gain. I've never put much stock in the stories, of the famous old summers in Ponyville. But maybe the heartfelt friendship that seems so high and good in those stories is just private: difficult for an outsider to see. Maybe it can only be caught in glimpses. For wasn't it in privacy too that Daymark and I lived, in her youth, and our happiest days?”

He spoke as the fire burned and spat, as if in elegy for Nature’s Call, saying: "I’ve seen you now, in your privacy. The evidence is there, so shouldn't I trust that love and happiness prevail? Here, yes even here. Shouldn’t I trust that their fullest expressions must be private and precious, and forever less obvious than all this death and pain? Less talked about. Still, privately in your little tribes, you ponies must be being sustained, somehow, by some encouraging force."

"Why else would you still insist on living?" he said. "Willing to take this risk, or with no other choice. To be brave. To struggle again, and to sigh at the end of your efforts, believing that it's been somehow worthwhile. I've seen you, now," he said. "So full of faith. So much more credible and valid, than I've been."

“Will you take a message, for me?” he asked, after a pause. “Back to Peirene.”

And the girls left it to me, to answer him. Clear in mind now, I remembered sunlight filling the clear, airy windows of the Temerity. Of course, Hereafter had lashed out there, and left that broad, condemning evidence down Keats’ throat. But the evidence of the Lieutenant Colonel's goodness, of his daily warmth and care, of his games and singing all his daughter’s life, was unavailable to us. And to Daymark, his daughter, maybe this better evidence, redeeming him, would have seemed infinitely clearer. So, who were we to condemn him now, given our limited experience? No, that task didn’t fall to us, thank goodness. What business was it of ours? In fact, even Celestia was reserving judgment!

I nodded, to let the old stallion know at last that we’d hear his message.

“Then tell them...” he said. “That the Grand Pegasus Enclave cannot feel love. That we soldiers live in service to it: providing hosts to sustain its old ideas. Winging out, spreading death in its name. Almost unaware of what we do.”

“Where did it start, where does it come from?” he asked. “Our government is so vast now, preventing any true return to the old and gentle ways. Ensuring the country’s surface population may never rise again to much more than a few divided tribes. It’s another plague on this planet, the Enclave. Trapped in its last function, falsely treating us all, this country, as if it loves us in the slightest.”

“But doesn’t it start to seem like a toy’s love, when you look at it?” he asked. “This government is not alive, and cannot choose to love us for what we are. It doesn’t choose, and is that love? We’ve only been devices of it, and in return it’s sheltered us pegasi from harm. But yes, it makes a toy of love. And now... at least to me, to suffer seems better; and to be changed. Instead of the Enclave’s easy, spoiling love, for the pegasi to bear our rightful burden, rather – to return, and to bear our happiness as well as sorrow as it comes. Here, on the surface. To have difficulty. To feel remorse. To suffer these things, and not to be indulged.”

“You understand?” the old stallion asked us. “I’m choosing to stay on the ground. Tell them I want to stay. Without all the safeguards I’ve had, to place me above life. Without wealth, without position. Without the illusion that I am somehow more than another mortal creature. And yes, even without all this, I don’t think I will be as miserable. Why should I be, if life in a pony is natural and good, and he is meant for it? Meant for nature, and for his family and children. Meant to live…”

“Meant for his friends,” Perigee said.

“And for his friends,” Hereafter nodded. “Will you tell them?”

Now, without his clothes, I could see that Hereafter’s cutie mark was a heavy-looking manuscript, turned to a half blank page toward the end. The book’s margins were decorated with minute, flowery illustration, and with gold flaking that even at this murky hour, caught a light somehow. A hopeful mark. Always, there was more to come.

Yes, we had yet to hear the final word. Here was another moment, now. A chance to choose again, and to choose differently, perhaps. Look! How immediately the present dissolves, evaporates, and is scattered on the wind. How immediately it passes under that fount of quick, clear waters, which wash the present and make it new. Yes, the passing waters are always quick and always clean, and the present always new.

“You do it,” I said, and presented him with Wile’s flask. The last we had, of Limerick’s potion, to grant the flightless flight. "Get to Peirene if you can, and tell them what you've just told us."

Wile took a half step forward at this, but stopped herself there. I knew what it meant. She would shoulder the burden: with or without the Opening Cocoon, she would get us home somehow. So, with Wile’s consent, Hereafter took the flask from me and, after a moment’s hesitation, deciding to trust me, drank from it.

The effects were sudden, and lifted the old Lieutenant Colonel off the ground. Soon, he had dropped Wile’s flask, and his wings, until now mangy and dogeared, were rounded out with new, living material. Given new margins, brightly decorated, like those of an illuminated manuscript. Much like his own cutie mark, in fact. With flowery illustration too, and what looked like gold flaking, which even at that murky hour, caught the light.

And in time, after some short, happy practice, shouting back to us in thanks, Hereafter swept slowly away, glad to fly on youthful wings again; heading south under the wide span of evening, following the still fiery, mirrored paths of the wetland’s waters. And Wile, Perigee and I sat around the last of the Temerity’s gasping fire, watching him go.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Flower Child: With this Perk, you are less likely to be addicted to chems (50% less likely, actually), and you suffer half the withdrawal time of a normal pony.