It was time, Wile told me, to meet Keats. And because he, as leader of the free pegasi, had to keep himself obscure, the path his way was wild and potentially dangerous. Wile and I needed to be properly outfitted first. The innkeeper, Bottles, helped us there. She agreed to store away Wile’s fishing gear, and gave me some armor left behind by a former guest. That being: a dog-collared white shirt with patterns embroidered into the shoulders, and a tried and tested police officer’s vest from “Salt Lick City”. Wile also tied a little red bandanna around my hind leg for “style points.”

She had equipped herself with a scoped hunting rifle, which had a frayed sticker on its stock of three pink butterflies, and she now wore a blue, weather-worn sleeveless jacket and what looked like a child’s muted rainbow-colored scarf (her own, in fact, from ages past). Around her neck too hung a small re-breather or gas mask, which Wile later explained she used for the grisly work of skinning and gutting Peirene’s hares or for defeathering pheasants. More just to prevent herself from using her own mouth on these tasks, out of habit.

Once we were dressed, still under the cover of foggy darkness, we bade goodbye to Bottles at the side of the inn. A signpost sighing on its hinges just over the door read In the Lap of Legends Old. Wile told me that the inn was more colloquially known as the Lap, with the pun on lapping up a drink. Wile seemed to appreciate puns, and shared another with me then, in a false Manehattan accent: I was playing in the hills, when I stopped to pick a buttercup. Who leaves buttocks lying around I’ll never know!

So it was laughing, that we started on our way. “I feel like we’re really partying,” I said, being freshly dressed and fed on sugary marmalade, and feeling a slightly loopy energy from lack of sleep.

“You know what, that’s not a bad idea,” Wile said. “Just to look like we're partying, as a cover I mean: in case another soldier sees us, leaving town. Better we look hammered than like we’re sneaking around. Why don’t we sing a song?”

I was more than willing, so we started on a slow version of one of Pinkie’s:

Oh, the Grand Galloping Gala is the best place for me!
Oh, the Grand Galloping Gala is the best place for me!

Hip hip! Hooray! It’s the best place for me.
The best place for me. . . for Pinkieeee

I felt free and clear: we were outdoors again! Compared to the Stable, another miracle of this wide, natural environment was that it was ever-changing. The humidity and temperature were not controlled, but variable. And night here was not just the plain lack of light, but seemed to have its own glow of varying velvet shades, affected by the unseen moon.

I felt fresh and changing too. Maybe that’s why ponies liked to go out and feel like part of nature, because nature was almost never stagnant but lived and grew and changed. Of course, in gladder times we ponies had been much more a part of it, with traditions like the running of the leaves in fall. How did it work now? What made the seasons change? In wartime days had we automated the process with industrial-size spells which were still in operation even now? Or had nature never needed us as much as we liked to think?

Great mysteries. Too much for me to solve – as someone who didn’t even understand what formed the mist around us. Wile seemed to be in a similar, curious mood, because she asked:

“So, what is it that’s doing that?” She gestured at the faint, guiding light I was casting around us. “I know it’s a spell, but what’s happening, exactly? What’s the actual source of the light? Is there heat involved?”

“I can’t really answer,” I said, which seemed to surprise her. “I think of it as saying a word. One second you have the word in mind, and the next you’re saying it out loud. It’s almost automatic. And it’s sort of the same with a spell. I just think of a kind of light, and I can produce it as easily as - well, not really as easily as speaking – but as easily as singing, maybe. With some songs being much more difficult than others. And with their being children’s songs, I started off with. Yes, actually that’s not a bad analogy, for spells.”

“I guess I couldn’t really explain how we sang our song either, just then,” Wile said. “I mean, how it was we actually produced the sound.”

I nodded. “And if you think about it,” I said. “How is it that we can even commit a song to memory, and then take that song from memory later, and turn it into actual sound? And what is memory?” I added, getting excited. “Or, where is it? Where are all the songs I know I know? If I tried to, I could remember them. But where are they right now, before I remember them? I can’t explain. So, the way I see it: so what if I can cast a spell! There's natural magic all around, much more critical to daily life than that.”

“Well,” Wile said. “I’m sure there are books out there that go into detail about how the tongue and throat create sound. Maybe a few about memory too, I don’t know. But in all this time, someone clever must have looked into what goes on in a unicorn’s horn? How magic technically works, I mean.”

“I was never very good at retaining the technical stuff,” I said, because I had tried a few of those books. “But I didn’t make much of an effort. I mean, I use the rest of my body without knowing how it works. So, with my horn it’s the same. I’m less curious about it actually, than I am about a pegasus’ wings, or an earth pony’s...”

“Good, true heart?” she suggested. “General farm acumen?”

“Good, true heart,” I agreed, and smiled at her. Suddenly seeing her presence with me for what it was: a recent, happy accident. “You know, I like talking to you, Wile...”

“But?”

“But nothing.”

In time we came to quite a narrow ravine, with walls all mossy green, and with shallow, running water underhoof. The sound of the falls at Fluttershy’s Lament dropped off; openings in the clouds high overhead (for Pereine seemed to have a permanent field of ‘wild’ clouds above it, always rearing and changing) gave me a view of Luna’s stars. And I imagined each of these distant, twinkling points as a dream being dreamt, right now, by a pony somewhere sleeping, so that each star would disappear as morning woke the dreaming ponies, interrupting their dreams. Could there be so many of us left alive, I wondered, under Luna’s nightly care?

I asked Wile - forgetting that as we entered the ravine, she had cautioned me to stay quiet: “Wile, would you say there are many ponies still alive on the wastes?”

“We’ve talked about this,” she said, under her breath. “Not so many here. More in the south.”

“As many as before?” Maybe a stupid question, but it had been a long time.

“No, Lemony,” Wile said. “Not as many as before.” She looked back at me with a pained expression. “Could you save your questions for the end of the mission?”

“Oh,” I said. “Got it.”

Wile seemed to feel bad about this last exchange, because after a minute, when we’d almost reached the close of the narrowing ravine, she said: “I’m sorry. It’s just that voices carry here, because of the ravine. I mean, whatever we say rises just to the place a pegasus would be if–“

Saying this, she had looked up, and stopped mid-sentence. Above us now on the wall of the ravine, just as Wile had feared, stood a pegasus: silhouetted against the high moonlit clouds, with her wings fanned up aggressively. Not dressed in armor, to Wile’s relief, or bug-eyed, but with a darkened, illegible face. Startled, I had drawn the .45 automatic, but now Wile made a gesture for me to lower it.

“It’s alright,” she said. “It’s Nature’s Call.”

At that, of course, I knew it had to be her. Who else could it have been? So locked in place, as if she lived like an eagle on the wall of this ravine, and we’d found her at home. With her wings spread out to catch the moonlight, and cast us into their fatal shade. Interested in us, or not: she didn’t move.

Now, based on the little picture I had of Wile, as a personality I mean, I expected her to shout something up to Nature’s Call to break the tension. Something funny like: how’s the weather up there? Or something funny, anyway. Wile would have to think of it. But instead, still all just staring at each other, Wile kept us walking. Which meant that now, without moving, the silhouette of the pegasus seemed to draw nearer, hang over us, and then pass behind at last, as we walked sheepishly by.

Say a boulder had been wedged there between the ravine walls, and was groaning uncomfortably with its own weight. Passing under that would have felt about as unnerving as passing under Nature’s Call. So of course it was a relief when Wile brought us under the cover of the cave mouth at the end of the ravine.

“She makes me think of everything I’ve ever done wrong,” Wile said, fanning herself. “Like I’m hearing the charges read.”

“What did she want?” I asked, also sweating a bit.

“I don’t think she has wants,” Wile said. “She just does what she does. I guess she must have noticed us coming Keats’ way, and followed us to see who we were? Or else she was just here, waiting. I couldn’t tell you. But she must know me as one of Keats’ friends, thank goodness, because we’ve been spared.”

I looked around at the damp cave mouth. “I feel like some kind of toad now,” I said, laughing.

“I’d rather be one of two toads hiding together in here, than out there alone,” Wile said. “Maybe when I was a teenager, I would have envied Nature’s Call. Not these days.”

“You speak harshly,” I said, just as an observation.

“Well, yes, let me admit it: I did want to be someone like her once, and it embarrasses me to think of now. The effort I put into the act! I had a rifle which I'd named, and I smoked unceasingly, and I had the piercings of course. I would have said I was a mercenary; I used to think I was a little badass.”

“Just a little?”

“A small badass, I mean,” she laughed. “I was fourteen. I could have even been a raider, I think, if I’d had the guts. That’s how much I wanted to be seen as hard. You know, not to be trifled with.” She shook her head. “Now I feel sorry for raiders, in fact. I’m sure a lot of them made the same bad choice at fourteen, and got stuck with it. That kind of lifestyle does not leave you unchanged. And I take it it’s the same with Enclave soldiers. They’ve lived and grown into what they are, all under unnatural conditions. You can’t expect them to just choose differently, and change.”

I thought of the soldier’s severed head that Nature’s Call had presented to us all in town, then thought instead of the frayed sticker on the stock of Wile’s hunting rifle. Of the three pink butterflies.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’d be happier too, with being a toad.”

The cave mouth led into a wet tunnel, which split into different, drier tunnels that we followed under Wile’s direction, by my light. All I knew was that we more often went the steepest way, and seemed to be gaining altitude. The climbing actually grew tedious after a while, and I passed the time in carefully grading the light around us from early morning to midday, and then to evening colors. At last, I could hear a slight sound of water falling again, and Wile said:

“Well, here we are,” sounding a little nervous. “No light now, please.”

So, it was in near darkness that I felt the tunnel open out into a great cavern around us, at the far end of which was another, taller cave mouth. This framed a waterfall, mysteriously lit, falling just outside the cavern, exposed to the starry atmosphere of the night. I could barely hear it landing. How far up were we? The question didn’t seem to matter, after what I saw next.

If I didn’t know for a fact that alicorns had horns, I would have said this was one of them here, in front of me. On a stout aerie of rock, with the waterfall like a moonlit curtain behind it, there sat a roosting pegasus, fanning his wings out at the sound of our approach. Keats. The memory of Nature’s Call paled in comparison. Luna was the only pony I could think of that was said to loom so dark and large. I couldn’t find a point of focus on his long face, overshadowed as it was, so I had to read his body for expression: his whole, frowning wingspan at once.

“Wile,” he said, in a deep but somehow mareish voice, which seemed to fill the cavern easily. “You’ve identified the Enclave’s informant. Well done, and thank you. We’ll be controlling the amount of information Peanut Gallery receives, until we’re sure where his allegiance lies.” Wile didn’t speak at this, but bowed slightly, waiting for his lead. “Now, to more present matters: who’s this you’ve brought with you?”

By no fault of his own the figure frightened me, and I stayed shyly back, halfway behind Wile as she answered: “This is Lemony Cream, sir. She’s from the Stable.”

“So, here she is," he said. "Hello, Lemony. Have you been treated well thus far?” I only nodded. To speak was too much to ask. “I’m glad,” he said. “Yours is a sensitive position. Your attitude toward the nature of our world as it now stands will be determined in these early days, outside. I wonder: will you come to think of life on the surface as worthwhile, and full of love's potential, or as a cruel and pointless trial? It remains to be seen. I for one am glad you’ve found the likes of Wile to guide your early steps. Our cause could use someone like you at the moment. If you’ll accept, I have a task well suited for you. Of course, Wile would be at your side as well, if she’ll agree to it.”

“Of course,” said Wile.

“Then let me explain,” said he. “You both know the story, I’m sure, of the second recorded Sonic Rainboom?” We both nodded. “Then, I wonder why you think Rainbow Dash was able to perform it?”

“To save her friend,” I managed to say. “Out of love.”

“Out of love, yes,” Keats nodded. With his wide wings, still just a black cross hanging in the dark. “The ministers were six ordinary mares who, by chance of meeting each other, more so than any ponies before them, gave full expression to the divine quality of love. Like six beads of dew, burning with the reflected light of this love, while others hung much duller, at less perfect angles around them. And on the day of the Best Young Flyers’ Competition, when Rainbow Dash saw her friend in danger, it was as if her bead of dew was primed exactly to catch the light – so brightly did she burn with it. Such a pure expression of this love, had she become. But why, if you remember, was her friend in need of saving?”

“It was Rarity,” I answered again. “Her wings had failed, and she was falling.”

“Her wings,” he repeated. “Yes, her enchanted wings.” He allowed that image to hang in the air, for a breath. “And that magic, at least, isn’t lost to us. We may have strayed far from the light of love, but that old magic isn’t lost. There are still those in the country that can grant the flightless, flight.”

We didn’t speak then, but waited for him. “Living in the Shy, there is an alchemist,” Keats said. “And with his potions he can replicate that same effect on any subject he so chooses. By a simple draft of potion breeding wings, wherewith to scorn the earth.” Again, the image hung in mind: this time of a multitude of ponies, playing on the air. “He’s become very old now, the alchemist. And yet he hasn’t shared his secret.”

“He refuses?” Wile asked.

“He has refused,” said Keats. “So far. It won’t hurt to ask again, however little our cause interests him. He hasn’t seemed to care much for what goes on outside his little house on the Shy, away from his alchemical instruments. He’s a stranger in the wasteland. You see, he came to us from a Stable...”

“Mine?” I asked.

“Yours,” said Keats. “Exiled over forty years ago, for his work.”

“A little before your time, I’d say,” said Wile. I shook my head, confused. I’d never heard of him.

“Still,” said Keats. “My hope is that your connection stirs something in him, and that he can eventually be convinced to teach you what he knows. Or, at the least, to listen to you longer than he ever has to us, so we can rest assured our case is made. It would be of immeasurable benefit to the free pegasi, to have our flightless allies fighting at our side. As it stands, the Enclave rarely engage us on the ground. More often our conflict goes on unseen, on the heights of these cloudy ruins.”

“You’ve fought them for very long?” I asked.

“Too long," he said. "It’s a difference, again, in our attitudes toward the world as it now stands. To the Enclave it seems frightful, vacant, and uncaring. While to us it rings with the spirits of the divines, in every laughing shaft of light. To us it’s a world of love, that was made for love. Not one of violence, that demands violence.” He shook his head. “It pains me to fight them. It isn’t natural for ponies to fight. Still, for now it’s our only realistic option– until we exhaust their Commanding Officer's allotted resources, or convince him to withdraw.”

“Then, how can we find this alchemist?” Wile asked.

“I’ve arranged for a native of the Shy to meet you, and show you the readiest way. A returning pilgrim, who needs an escort down the mountain. I’ll be trusting you, Wile, to keep her out of harm’s way.”

“Count on it,” said Wile.

“I’m grateful,” he said to her. “Of course: I haven’t yet asked Lemony, if she’s still willing.”

“Willing?” I repeated.

“Being free of your Stable, you’ll have some choices to make now,” he said. “The country’s wide, and Peirene’s only a small part of it. There are long, challenging pilgrim's trails to Canterlot and Ponyville. Simpler work, on the farms of the Shy. We can’t force you to stay and help us. Now, your life is yours.”

They both waited for my answer. “Well,” I said. “So far I’ve just been going where the wind takes me.” I looked at Wile, who smiled at me. “And it’s been very generous, I’d say. I don’t think I’ll turn against it now.”

“Very well,” said Keats. “Then it’s decided.”

And the gravity with which he said this made all the other choices I could potentially have made seem like paths behind me, darkening and falling away without the light and favor I’d given this single, delicate line, leading forward and never back. My one life.

“May your friendship preserve you.”

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Magnetic Personality: +1 to the number of party members who can be recruited.