The conference was called “The Great Succession and Its Aftermath.” The current panel was called “Alternatives to Our Monetary and Political Order” and featured a debate between Professor Arpeggio of Canterlot University and Soarin, a member of the elite investment management group known as the Wonderbolts, one of the few financial institutions in Equestria that actually made money in the recent economic turmoil caused by Nightmare Moon’s transient accession to the One Bank.

The auditorium, on the second floor of the biggest hotel in Canterlot, was stuffed with many of Equestria’s elites and representatives of organized interests, here to form their thoughts and determine Equestria’s future three weeks after the Great Succession left Princess Celestia temporarily deposed and the economy briefly depressed. They were listening to Professor Arpeggio set out his radical new theory of government.

“I call it democracy,” he said. “From ‘demo’ as in, a test or trial, and ‘cracy,’ government. A temporary government that can be voted out if ponies don’t like the results.”

“We all agree that Princess Celestia has screwed up for the last time and has got to go,” said Soarin. “But this democracy thing just won’t work. Everypony will vote for themselves.”

“Not so,” said Professor Arpeggio shrewdly. “Since there are many ponies, the odds of anypony winning the election is low, thus the expected value of a vote is low. So it should be cheap for particularly motivated parties to buy lots of votes.”

Soarin quirked one exquisitely plucked eyebrow. “Government by bribery?”

“Yes, so that the primary candidates will be those who expect to get the most return on their money, that is to say, those who expect to maximize the economic output of our nation. After all,” he continued, “they would become the manager and Prime Investor of the One Bank.” He nodded at his fellow panelist. “As an investor yourself, Soarin, I’d expect you to be a pony others look to for deciding whose payment to accept come voting day.”

“Personally, I don’t care who’s running Equestria so long as they aren’t a proven failure,” Soarin said. “I’m concerned about the current status of the One Bank. I think we have to consider the possibility that the entire Nightmare Moon event was a false flag.”

He leaned forward like he was sharing a secret with the audience. “The Bank was unable to anticipate the return of Nightmare Moon, did not respond in a timely or adequate fashion, and proved susceptible to her manipulation. You’d expect the logical response to be a sharp curtailing of the Bank’s powers and responsibilities at the very least. But what do we see? Nine new ‘Daughter’ banks! Moreover, Celestia’s staffed them with her own students. Blatant nepotism aside, some of the locations don’t even make sense. Why is there a Daughter bank in Ponyville? And I don’t feel any better about Princess Cadance in the Crystal Empire having one. Princess Celestia’s talk of international monetary coordination is pure hogwash: I don’t believe it, and neither does she. This is about Alicorn dominance over the rest of us, that’s what this is. Princess Celestia is saying to the rest of us, ‘learn my propaganda at my school, or be consigned to the periphery of finance.’ Princess Celestia wants to keep ponies scared so that she can control them and expand her power. But I’m not scared. It’s time we did away with the Bank.”

“That’s a very radical proposal,” said the moderator, as if it wasn’t the same proposal that the Flim Flam brothers, who were sponsoring the conference, had been making for years. “How do you suggest we do that?”

“Equestria shouldn’t be hiding its gold and silver away behind locked doors,” Soarin said. His light blue coat was the color of the open sky, and his sunglasses, resting on his forehead, were shaped to resemble goggles, a Wonderbolts symbol. “Monetary policy should be actively anticipating economic trends and profiting from them. Instead of a One Bank, imagine a One Hedge Fund—”

“Pfah!” interrupted Professor Arpeggio. “The monetary system is the whole reason our economy was subject to a Nightmare Moon event in the first place. We should take the gold and silver and divide it evenly among working mares—”

“Stallions do work too!” an angry stallion shouted from the crowd. “Just because labor and office jobs aren’t valued as highly as household management—”

“Hold questions to the end,” scolded the moderator.

“—and working stallions,” said Professor Arpeggio, unruffled. “Share the wealth, I say.”

Questions were opened up. The angry stallion got straight to the front of the line. “I just want to say, in response to Professor Arpeggio’s comment, that stallions work just as hard as mares do. We’re still judging ponies by an outdated set of values based on the winter years—”

“Ha! The windigos-and-winter myth,” said a burly pony in the audience, the wealthy, athletic Tom Bucking. “Get a load of this guy, he believes in global warming.”

“I’m talking!” the first stallion said. “Anyway, we’re still judging ponies by an outdated set of values based on a time when mothers who could bear and raise healthy foals were the most valuable economic asset. Stallions are still being treated like we’re less important fifteen hundred years later!”

“Do you have a question?” the moderator asked.

“I was just getting to that. I feel that the real source of Equestria’s economic problems is the gender imbalance. Half the population is male, but no pony expects a stallion to be a great economist or CEO, even though the greatest economist ever, Walras the Bearded, was a stallion. And in the newspapers they talk about how the Bank’s all to do with expectations, well, it seems we could be expecting a lot more of stallions instead of just telling them to get a job and provide for their families. We could be doing a whole lot more. And it just stings when other stallions perpetuate the stereotypes and prejudices that keep our gender down.”

He waited, as if expecting applause, then found his seat and sat down, quivering with self-righteousness and nerves.

“That was really inspiring,” said Fluttershy next to him. “I feel so honored that you shared your feelings with us. Would you like some more juice? A cookie?”

The stallion, whose name was Dry Mouth, grudgingly accepted a refill of apple juice and a macadamia nut cookie. He didn’t know why Fluttershy was a member of the Voices of Angry Gentlestallions or how she had become the head of their local group. She organized all of the meetups, collected money for activities like the trip to this conference, and brought the snacks. She always had the freshest apple juice and most delicious baked goods.

It didn’t prove anything, Dry Mouth thought. A stallion could have done just as good a job.

Fluttershy dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “I’m glad you like the cookie. My friend Pinkie Pie worked hard to bake them.” She smiled kindly at him.

Dry Mouth decided to be the bigger stallion and let it slide. “I guess it was tough for you to listen to them say your fight with Nightmare Moon was faked.”

“Oh, I don’t really mind, they have a right to their opinion,” Fluttershy said. “I was happy to organize the trip to come here because I wanted to find out what different ponies think about the Great Succession.”

“Even when the ponies on the previous panel said all those things about Twilight Sparkle? How she’s a power-mad conspirator in a national act of financial fraud?”

“Oh, yes. But I listened very skeptically to that one,” added Fluttershy loyally.

A pony leaned over them. “Fluttershy!” Rarity squealed quietly. “Look at this dress!” She dumped it on Dry Mouth’s lap. “I’m going back to this boutique I saw, there was this bag in the window that I simply must have. I’m so glad you invited me on this trip!”

She vanished. Dry Mouth considered the dress, then looked down the row of his fellows. Most of them were watching the conference under piles of Rarity’s recent purchases. He felt he ought to do something about it, and experienced a moment of disquiet when he noticed that what he felt he ought to do was ask Fluttershy for help.

A year ago, he had read an editorial in a newspaper about growing discontent among stallions who felt they were being discriminated against when being considered for management jobs. The writer had said that, due to the natural division of labor, it stood to reason that mares were inherently better at organization and leadership than stallions. Mares stayed indoors while they were pregnant and nursing foals, and so it made sense for them to raise the colts and fillies and to oversee the household, whereas stallions had nothing better to do than menial labor like gathering firewood and kicking fruit down from trees. As a result, mares had evolved to be socially more adept and more conscientious than stallions. Mares had to manage a household, anticipate the diverse needs of her family. and provide for them in an efficient way, and raise fillies and colts, which required the ability to outmaneuver greedy mini-ponies playing a Machiavellian game, albeit over the jar of cookies instead of the throne. Moreover, being in charge of the household made them natural leaders and the focal point of organization in the family unit. Compare that to stallions, who just had to evolve to be strong. It was no wonder that while stallions were suited to lower-paying jobs at the bottom of the corporate ladder, all the executive positions were taken up by mares. Trying to discriminate against the most meritorious ponies for the sake of gender equality, the writer had argued, would just harm the economy and only increase discrimination against stallions when everypony saw how bad a job they did.

The name signed to that editorial was Twilight Sparkle. He had never forgotten it, in case he ever got the chance to meet her and tell her what he thought of it.

He thought that maybe she was right.

He didn’t believe it. But it niggled at him. Made him hesitant, made him slow. Made him afraid to take risks. And when things didn’t go his way, or he suspected somepony had slighted him, part of him wondered if it wasn’t nature taking its course.

Fluttershy noticed him looking at her and patted his leg. He turned his attention back to the conference. Tom Bucking, from a family that could trace its roots and its wealth all the way back to Princess Platinum, had just finished delivering an elaborate put-down to Soarin. The moderator asked members of the audience to please actually ask a question, your voice should go up? at the end.

Rarity hadn’t come back by the time the conference ended. Fluttershy herded the members of the Voices of Angry Gentlestallions onto the bus for the trip home and went back inside to get a signed copy of Soarin’s book, The Philosophy of a Wonderbolt: One Trader’s Journey Toward Personal and Financial Freedom, to bring to her friend, Rainbow Dash.

After they had been waiting for fifteen minutes, Dry Mouth was fed up. He set Rarity’s dress aside and got off the bus. He found Rarity and Fluttershy outside the building where the conference had been hosted, talking to Soarin and a mare he didn’t recognize. That mare glanced at him, then moved away, turning the corner and disappearing.

Soarin gave a book with his smiling face on the hard cover to Fluttershy. “Tell your friend Reindeer Dash I said hi.”

“Rainbow Dash—”

“And Rarity, if you’re free this evening—”

“She’s not,” said Fluttershy firmly, putting a hoof on Rarity and beginning to push her in the direction of the bus.

“I’m not?” said Rarity, sounding a little starstruck. “Are you sure?”

“Very sure. Oh, hello, Dry Mouth. Can you hold Rarity’s bag for me? It’s heavy.”

Dry Mouth slung it over his shoulder. It was studded with gems and weighed like it would make a good blunt weapon in a pinch.

“Hold on,” said Soarin as they began to walk away. “Not you,” he said to Rarity and Fluttershy. “What’s your name?”

“Dry Mouth.” At Soarin’s motion, he stepped toward him.

“Listen,” said Soarin, closing the rest of the gap. “That group of ponies you were with, what were they called?”

“Voices of Angry Gentlestallions,” Dry Mouth answered.

“I read something about them in the newspaper just the other day. Your message is really spreading, huh?”

“It got easier after Nightmare Moon,” Dry Mouth recalled.

Soarin made a sarcastic gesture. “Right, but what’s next? What’s the strategy?”

Dry Mouth didn’t understand. “For what?”

“Political representation. You know Celestia is never going to take your concerns seriously.”

“We’re trying to educate ponies.”

Soarin shook his head. “They’re plenty educated. You’ve got to persuade them. It’s like when I was trying to get an investment before I was a Wonderbolt. I thought I’d just go in and lay out the facts, right?”

Dry Mouth didn’t understand.

“For a presentation. I was trying to convince them to give me their money. Didn’t work. You know what worked? Talking to them. What mattered less than any facts or numbers was how much they felt I understood them. How much they felt they understood me understanding them. I guess you could say, how clearly they could hear my voice in their head, and what it was saying about their voice in my head.”

He clapped Dry Mouth on the leg. “I’ll be in touch,” he said as he began to walk away. “One word of advice,” he added, turning back around.

“Yeah?”

“Lose the bag. It’s not your style.”

When Dry Mouth got back to the bus, there was an empty seat next to Fluttershy. (Rarity was sitting depressed in the back, staring forlornly at Canterlot out the window as the bus began to roll away, whimpering like a puppy watching the park shrink in the distance.) “Hold this,” he said, depositing the bag on her lap.

She took it. “Is everything all right?”

He didn’t answer, just stared out the window, head resting on his hoof.

“I thought this trip was a lot of fun,” said Fluttershy. “And very educational. I know Rainbow Dash will love this book.”

“You can’t be in charge of our group anymore,” he said.

“Oh, I’m not in charge,” Fluttershy said.

“Everypony does what you tell them.”

“So do my NMEOLEs^*.” She took out some yarn and busied herself with knitting. “But I’m not in charge of them.”

^* Animals. Recently they had decided “naturally evolved organisms” was a speciesist term, since it excluded unnaturally evolved organisms, as well as non-organic life-forms and sentient entities that couldn’t be called alive at all. Hence “NMEOLE,” or naturally or magically existent organisms, life-forms, and entities. But it wasn’t likely to last—most of them felt it was terribly existentist.

“We don’t have to talk about it now.”

“You can talk to me about it whenever you feel ready.” She said it with such sincerity that he felt oddly grateful.

The bus lumbered on. Canterlot slowly faded, and the whistle of a distant train could be heard coming from the mountains.

A change was happening in Canterlot, one that was touching the untouchable Bank itself. It was, apparently, considering touching him as well. He wondered how far it reached, and whose hoof it was that was reaching.

Twenty years before the Great Succession

Missy Marmalade undid the straps of her bonnet so that when the ladies knocked, she would be doing something with her hoofs.

There was a knock at the door. Missy Marmalade busied her hoofs with the straps and said, “Come in!”

There was a push, a thud, and a muffled curse. Missy Marmalade looked over in alarm. Blast! She had forgotten to undo the door chain. She hurried over, then stopped because she mustn’t hurry, then realized the beat of her hoofs would have been audible, and now they had heard her stop, and in just a moment she was completely paralyzed, frozen by her own thoughts.

“Can we come in?” said a voice, not unkind, after a moment.

“I suppose I might as well let you,” said Missy Marmalade imperiously, about as convincingly a pawn on the second rank imitating a queen. The sound of her own voice made her want to slap herself on the forehead. Nerves, nerves, she had seen this interaction going differently in her head when she’d planned it out last night. Why had that seemed like a good thing to say? It might have been, if she had the commanding tone and the total self-assuredness to go with it. And some amount of social awareness. And some confidence in her ability to carry on a conversation without relying on a pre-written mental script.

On and on with the list of inadequacies. It was the only thing her mother had been able to teach her. While her mother hadn’t done a very good job of teaching her anything about growing fruit, she had taught Missy Marmalade plenty about how to doubt and fear and deny her own self. That and the oranges were all she had ever shown an interest in.

And she was still standing here while the chain on the door rattled and somepony outside coughed and muttered something. What was wrong with her? Aside from the obvious.

Move!

Missy Marmalade took the chain off the door and jerked back as the door shot open. Three mules stood in the way, holding empty wicker baskets. They wore simple dresses that were gray or faded green, and they blinked at her. Then their expressions changed.

Missy Marmalade felt something sliding down the side of her face. “I was just fixing my bonnet,” she said, adjusting it with only a faint look of horror on her face.

“It’s natural to be afraid, grower,” said the closest mule, middle-aged, stepping inside.

“Natural, but unwise,” said the next, quite old, following her in.

The third hovered in the doorway. “Really? That color bonnet with your coat?”

“I’ve worn it since I was a girl!” Missy Marmalade snapped, fumbling with the straps under her chin. She was aware there might not be any “was” about it to the mules, and especially not to the mares of the association. She was also aware she was arguing with a mule. “Anyway, I wasn’t afraid. An Orange ripens when she will.”

“Yes, but the gardener might not care,” retorted the eldest mule. “We bring you the program for the weekend, grower, and ask what you require of us.”

“Though we cannot hold your hoof through it,” said the middle-aged mule, a somewhat nasty look on her face.

“Nor give fashion advice, apparently,” said the third mule, who was quite a bit younger than the other two.

Missy Marmalade felt she was being disrespected. She drew herself up. “I didn’t think an Orange asked the dirt to wait underneath it. It does because it is dirt. Your names are Soil, Buckwheat, and Haymanger, you are servants of this association, and so you are servants of me. I would like to be spoken to as a lady.”

She saw on their faces that she had gone too far. She also felt that she couldn’t back down. She tried to think of a way to do so graciously and failed.

“You are not yet a lady of the association,” said the middle-aged mule, grinning darkly.

“I am!”

“Oh, officially, officially. But not really. Not yet. Not till they’ve seen you, not till they’ve judged.”

“They have no right—”

“Don’t they? If a fruit is not picked off the branch it falls into the mud, however promisingly it once hung.”

“I can pick myself,” Missy Marmalade said.

“Perhaps, but your sweetness will be judged by others.”

“I don’t fear the judgment of those mares!”

“Clearly not, you’re wearing a bonnet that makes you look like a foal and an old lady,” said the youngest mule. “What?” she added. She gave the other two contemptuous looks. “I don’t want to work for some stupid fruit grower association. I’m going to start a flower boutique in Canterlot.”

“The memorial service is this afternoon,” said the eldest mule. “You will not have to speak.”

“I intend to.”

“Very well.”

Missy Marmalade’s mind flashed back to the key, and the cellar, and the documents there that she had made copies of. Some of those copies were in her pack.

She had quite a lot to say about them.

Missy Marmalade’s mother had died. Missy wasn’t very upset about this, mostly because her mother had treated her like a cat might treat a duckling that had accidentally imprinted onto it: mild annoyance at being followed around, inborn confusion at the possibility of displaying affection or care, and general disappointment that her shadow wasn’t much good at catching mice or climbing trees. But Missy Marmalade was upset about the farm, and the association, and the key.

The farm because she wasn’t very good at it, and the trees knew. At least she felt like they did. It might have been that she was, what was the word, projecting. But, walking the fields the morning after her mother had passed, the trees seemed to draw away from her. The oranges were hard when she touched them, the skin tough and unyielding and the meat tasteless. In the cold fog it was hard to see where the orchard ended. Chilly and wet, she went back inside and saw the invitation that had been pushed under the door.

So. The fruit business association her mother had belonged to, the Voice of Equestrian Growers, or VEG, had already heard of her mother’s death. Well, that was no surprise. No pony said that the members of the VEG were witches…but you could hear them not saying it, like the silent judgment a fat pony feels when eating a slice of cake in public.

She knew from listening to her mother talk about the VEG that their goal was to maintain prices for seeds and manure and things. “Fair” seemed to mean “at terms we dictate.” And they really didn’t like it when anypony outside their club tried to sell fruit. They couldn’t stop anypony, not by force. But there were rumors: of accidents under healthy trees whose branches snapped and fell all of a sudden, of fertile soil that turned cold and hard and wouldn’t grow so much as mushrooms after a rain, and mushrooms can grow anywhere after a rain, and of sheds that burned down mysteriously in the night. And it was the way her mother had talked about it. Like it was just the same as chasing birds away from the oranges. Like they had a right to push others around, like something was being asked of them when somepony else wanted to maybe have a watermelon vine or sell some strawberries at the local fair. They were a bunch of bullies, and now they wanted her to take her mother’s place.

Well. The Oranges were quitting the fruit business. The growers of the VEG could take their invitation and stuff it up their—stuff it somewhere quite unpleasant.

Then there was the matter of the key. It was lying on her mother’s bedside table. Missy Marmalade left it alone.

So much work to do. The lawyer was coming by tomorrow. There was the funeral, which she had refused to attend: It wouldn’t make a difference to her mother, and it certainly wouldn't make a difference to her.

Now...cleaning, she wanted to clean. Dust everything, boil water and sop the floor and furniture. Suds and sponges and more hot water. Fill the house with steam.

So she did, lighting a fire for more hot water and not even bothering to take a sponge, just drenching the floor and not minding what splashed on the walls. She catalogued in her mind as she went, noting what to throw away, what to sell, what to donate, and what to burn. The proceeds from selling the land the orange trees grew on would be plenty to set her up in Canterlot for a while. The only question was, what would she do there?

She found that she actually liked to clean. It was peaceful and vigorous at the same time, requiring concentration and an attention to detail while also allowing the mind to drift, to imagine, to envision.

She could start a cleaning service. Everypony needed their house clean, especially the busy high-fliers in Canterlot. She could see the newspaper ad already: Write now for a top-to-bottom interior clean that’s as durable as an Earth Pony and leaves the whole house smelling like oranges. Forever. Even if you set everything on fire, it will still smell like oranges. And the air will taste like oranges. And your eyes will water and sting from the orange particles, and you’ll never completely get used to it. And this amazing deal comes with a free T-shirt!

Maybe not.

It was dark out already. Funny how time flies. One moment you’re alive, and the next, whoops, haha, you’ve fallen off the ladder while fixing a branch. Oops, haha, whoops, and the orchards are big, haha, you could just be lying there for hours before anypony finds you, and that’s time plenty for the blood to fill up in your head so that even the Pegasus doctor who rushes there as fast as she can can’t do anything but record the time of death.

Only maybe somepony did hear you, only they just thought you were yelling again. Yelling to come out into the fields. You need help in the fields. You always need help in the damned orange-stinking lily-colored fields. Screaming your head off because it’s so far away. Yelling like you’re the only pony in the world who matters. No pony could possibly be doing anything else important, especially not if they’re your pony, your little pony whose hair you can comb however you want and whose bonnet you can tie just how you like, with a customizable cutie mark and lifelike voice that can say anything you tell it to, no, she couldn’t be doing anything else at all, especially not the one thing she likes to do. No, you’ve made sure she can’t do that, she couldn’t possibly be, so keep on screaming, keep on yelling, she doesn’t treasure these stolen minutes, these rare moments when Missy Marmalade is just...a miss. Without inheritance, without destiny. A face in the crowd. She can see herself. Walking down a Canterlot street. Who’s that? they wonder. I’ve seen many a mare come to make her fortune in Canterlot, but none so striking as that young...miss. Excuse me. Excuse me! Miss! You’ve dropped your...my name is Solar Wind, I’m quite wealthy, may I take you to dinner, miss…?

And she could say anything in response, she might even say, “SHUT UP, YOU OLD HAG!” and it would be the last thing you ever heard her say, it might be the last thing you ever heard at all.

And the key is still there on your bedside table, and she wonders what you might have done with it.

Missy seized the key and held it like a filly with a stolen treat from the kitchen. She looked around to make sure she was alone, which was ridiculous, and, heart pounding, peered under the bed. Nothing. In the cabinet. No. Not under the mat, or behind a loose brick, or in the back of the oven. Where was the door? What did the key open?

In desperation Missy even went out to the old shed that had been in disuse since before she was born. For all the disarray it looked to be in, broken windows and a door that had to be wrenched open, the grooves on the floor where the corner of the door cut in were fairly deep. This was a door that somepony used.

Missy picked her way through broken glass and the pieces of a collapsed table, squinting. The shed was full of dust and splinters. At the end of it, behind the remains of a cabinet, was a small black keyhole to a cellar door. The key fit into it perfectly. She left and came back with a lamp and went down the steps into the hollowed-out cellar.

It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. The cellar was full of papers. They were stuffed into boxes, and written on the boxes were names. There were the names of every major grower of the VEG. She opened one at random and took out a sheet. There was a name on it that she vaguely remembered. Wasn’t it the name of the mare who had been in the news? She had been selling oranges from a tree in her yard. No, wait, she had been making juice, and selling that. No, no, her filly had been selling the juice. From a little stand. Right. And then...the filly had stopped...because….

Oh, Mother.

Missy stuffed that sheet back into its place and looked through the boxes of the major growers, which were overstuffed with papers. The Apple family, the Melon Matriarch and her extended family, the wine clan in Caliponia, who mongered rumors almost as jealously as their grapes, the Cherry Hill Ranch mare, Cherry Jubilee, the Lemon Lady, and the Berry sisters. Every single one. Even the Oranges had a file, Missy Marmalade didn’t know why.

Was there anything about her? Missy looked. No. Nothing that mentioned a Missy Marmalade. Not that there should have been. It would have made no sense.

Missy set the lamp on one of the boxes, took out all of the papers for the Melon Matriarch, and began to read.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to meet with you again.”

“That’s quite all right.” The lawyer smiled kindly and patted her hoof. “I understand you were quite distraught at the death of your mother.”

“Yes.”

“I’m pleased to hear there’s nothing to the rumors that you were planning to sell the farm.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Bore, I fully intend to take up my mother’s role as a leading member of the Voice of Equestrian Growers. And I would certainly need my farm for that.”

“Indeed you would.” He risked a smile. “Have you thought at all about doing something to commemorate your mother? The funeral was very small and private, and she was very influential in the community and involved in many organizations. I’m sure a memorial service would be a great opportunity for you to meet those whose lives your mother touched.”

Missy frowned. “Then...oh, this might be silly of me. But I am just a silly girl. All this business is so complicated. And I’m still so sad about Mother. I just want to cry.”

Mr. Bore patted her hoof as desperately as a rabbit thumping to indicate danger, in this case the danger of having to provide emotional comfort, which frightened Mr. Bore. He liked contracts. Contracts didn’t burst into tears and accuse you of neglecting them. And if they took your house, the kids, and a significant fraction of your bank account, at least it was because you had signed them. “There, there. Would you like a hoofkerchief?”

“Yes, please.”

“I...don’t have one. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I offered. Sometimes I...when ponies, I mean, they need things...that aren’t written down...if it had been written down, but it wasn’t….”

“Oh, Mr. Bore.” She smiled weepily at him. “You are such a comfort. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You’d contact my partner,” Mr. Bore said, relieved to be on firm ground again. “He’s retiring next year, but until then—”

“About the memorial….”

“Yes?”

“Could I...I mean, would it be possible...maybe to have a memorial service at the next meeting of the VEG? Which I believe is very soon?”

Mr. Bore blinked. Then he opened his briefcase and flipped through a frighteningly large stack of papers.

“I don’t see why not,” he said eventually. “The association can refuse, of course, but I don’t know why they should….”

“Could you arrange it? Please?”

“Of course, my dear.”

“Thank you.” She wiped her eyes and smiled at him. “They knew her the best, I think, in their own way. Or rather, she knew them.”

It was time for the VEG to meet. Missy Marmalade picked out her best bonnet. Otherwise, she packed lightly. She would only be at the hotel for one night. The meetings went on for longer than that. But the memorial service would be on the first day of the meetings, and she doubted they would ask her to stay after that.

They were being too nice.

“Sugar, I was beside myself when I heard about your poor mother,” said Cherry Jubilee. With coiffed hair the color of dark red cherries and a scarf the same pink as cherry blossoms in the spring, Missy Marmalade felt that Cherry Jubilee was laying it on a little too thick. Mother always said that oranges advertised themselves—not that she cared what Mother thought.

“I could hardly contain myself,” agreed Missy Marmalade.

“Your mother was a fine woman,” rasped the sallow Lemon Lady. She was incredibly fat, in contrast to the carefully arranged figure of Cherry Jubilee. Missy Marmalade had been surprised to see that the Melon Matriarch was quite trim. Two of her daughters were in attendance as well. They had expressed their condolences in the briefest possible fashion before retreating to sit and whisper together.

“A fine woman,” the Lemon Lady repeated.

“She had such an effect on me,” said Missy Marmalade.

Green old Granny Smith was sitting a little ways away with her cane over her lap and her straw hat with the green ribbon slightly askew on her head. Missy Marmalade was grateful for the distance. Granny Smith was constantly chewing apple seeds. It stank up her breath and made it bitter. She wasn’t saying much, just “hrumph” and the like.

A wrinkled leg brushed Missy Marmalade and made her jump. The Wine Princess of Equestria, often said to be the wealthiest pony in Equestria, had turned out to be a rather unimpressive-looking reddish-purple Earth Pony whose hoofs were stained with clay. More wrinkles swam over her face when she smiled at Missy Marmalade from under a wide-brimmed sun hat.

“Pomela did a lot for the organization,” she said. “She understood the importance of fruit.”

“Is fruit really worth all this?” Missy Marmalade said.

“What do you mean?”

“The association, an entire hotel floor just for us, all the rules about who can grow fruit and how much of it. I just don’t see the point.”

An obnoxious grinding noise filled the room. Granny Smith had taken out a wooden pipe and was chewing on it.

“Why, sugar,” said Cherry Jubilee in her molasses-sweetened drawl, “if we didn’t grow fruit, all the hard-working ponies of Equestria who look forward to a bowl of cherries in the afternoon would go hungry.”

“I know why fruit exists,” said Missy Marmalade scathingly. “Tell me, why can only the Cherry Hill Ranch grow cherries?”

“Bless your heart! Anypony can grow cherries.”

“Not for mass distribution. They have to pay you a fee and submit to your rules.”

“I don’t make the rules, sugar.”

“But you do have a standing appointment every year with the pony who does.” It wasn’t a difficult guess. Her mother had done the same.

“They told us there was going to be rules, darling. All we could do was ask them to be reasonable.”

“Why would anypony but you all want to make rules about who can grow fruit?”

The leading mares of the VEG looked at each other.

“You mean you don’t know?” said Cherry Jubilee.

“Know what?”

“She doesn’t know,” said the Wine Princess. “Pomela must have never told her.”

A chomp of teeth on a wood pipe made her jump. “She can’t hear the fruit,” said Granny Smith, giving Missy Marmalade a withering look. “Pomela went and had a dud. This filly here is no better than the mules.”

“I beg your pardon!”

“No need. It’s Pomela who owes us an apology, and she was too prideful to give one even when she was alive.”

“Calm down,” said the Melon Matriarch in the commanding tone of a mare who had had over twenty children. “Pomela must have had her reasons. If she’s going to be in the VEG, she should know, so we’ll tell her.”

“She can’t hear ‘em,” said Granny Smith. “How’s she going to be a voice for those as whom she can’t hear?”

“What are you talking about, old woman?”

“Watch your tone,” snapped the Wine Princess. The sun-wrinkled smile never left her face, but her eyes were stern.

“Why should I? I’m not a filly anymore. I am the leading mare of the Orange family. The groves are mine to do with as I wish. I think I shall burn the trees, then sell the land.”

Cherry Jubilee laughed. “She’s got a gutsier mouth than a run-over frog.”

“If you burn the trees,” said Granny Smith, “you will never be able to eat fruit again.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so,” said Granny Smith with such simplicity that it left Missy Marmalade momentarily off balance.

The conference room filled up with more arrivals while Missy Marmalade tried to think of a retort. This was utter insanity—they thought that growing fruit gave them the right to boss others around. If they knew about the papers in her traveling bag, they would speak to her more politely.

The many Berry sisters entered within minutes of each other. They shot nasty looks at each other while they greeted the other members of the VEG, and none of them sat next to one another. Meanwhile, the peaceful-faced heiress of the fig fortune smiled and blessed everypony with serenity as she moved among the group. “Durian” Diane, as she was called, sent a wave through the crowd as everypony scrambled to get away from her unbearable smell. Just Peachy, of the Peach clan in South Canterlina, and Pearl, who had a pear operation up in Ostleregon, entered chatting together and lost their hats as they tried to walk through the door at the same time. There was Tomato Tammy and the Eggplant Countess, walking in quickly and sitting down together, looking like they knew they didn’t belong. Apparently the Squashmistress had hurt herself while playing sports and wasn’t able to make it.

Missy Marmalade was overwhelmed by middle-aged and elderly mares introducing themselves to her and offering condolences and sharing stories of good things “Pomela” had done. Missy Marmalade said polite things in response and thought: She was keeping records on every single one of you. Every single dirty underhoof thing you did. All of you have been telling me about how my mother did so much for the association. She did this as well. She gave me the weapon to destroy it.

The memorial service began. Just Peachy smiled sadly at them all. “One of our own has died.”

“Come with me,” murmured Cherry Jubilee into her ear. Missy Marmalade, who didn’t care to listen to more lies about her mother, ducked out and followed her into a side room.

“Have a cherry,” said Cherry Jubilee, offering her a small bowl of red cherries she had procured from who-knows-where.

“No thanks.” Missy Marmalade knew better than to accept fruit that you didn’t know was washed. Otherwise it could have anything on it—charms, curses, prophecies. Sometimes the editorials did a job of not calling the VEG a coven. Missy Marmalade didn’t believe in witches, but…better not to risk it.

“Suit yourself, sug.” Cherry Jubilee popped one into her mouth and spat the pit aside.

Granny Smith, the Lemon Lady, and the Wine Princess were also there. The Melon Matriarch was not—probably talking to the others in the main room; she was very social, Missy Marmalade had noticed.

“I knew your grandmother,” said Granny Smith. “Sunny Jam. Good mare. Good head on her.”

“I know about your daughter,” said Missy Marmalade. “She doesn’t want to take care of apples all day, does she? That’s why you’re still the leading mare of the Apple family.”

Granny Smith sighed and took out her pipe. “This girl don’t know when ponies are trying to help her.”

Missy Marmalade was fascinated despite herself. “What’s that smell?”

“Apple tobacco.”

“You mean tobacco flavored with apples?”

“Did I say that? I said apple tobacco.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Well. There’s no such thing.” Granny Smith chewed the pipe thoughtfully. “I reckon I must be dreaming then.”

“Enough,” said the Wine Princess before Missy Marmalade could retort. “If you want to be in the VEG, then you need to listen to what we have to say.”

“All of them out there know this?”

“Of course.”

“Then tell me.”

Cherry Jubilee held up a cherry and squished it. “See the red stuff?”

“...The juice?”

“That’s right, sugar, the juice. Know what juice is?”

“Water and fruit stuff?” Missy Marmalade hazarded. She had never taken to fruit the way her mother had wanted.

“Water and fruit stuff,” Granny Smith snorted. “Why, that’s exactly right.”

“None of us know how to grow fruit,” the Lemon Lady said. “The fruit knows, somehow. It’s hard to explain...inside the fruit is a little code. This code tells the seed how to become fruit.”

“I’ve never seen any code inside an orange.”

“That’s because it’s really small.” The Lemon Lady grinned and patted her sides. “Not like me.” She really was jaundiced, not just yellow. Missy Marmalade wondered if she was healthy.

“I thought fruit doesn’t grow itself,” said Missy Marmalade. “That’s why Earth Ponies have to help—you know, talking to the plants and things.”

“Things,” sneered Granny Smith.

“If you’re going to mock me,” Missy Marmalade said angrily, “then I think I will choose better company.” She spun on her heel and slammed the door on her way out, reentering the main auditorium. It was quite a good heel-spin, she thought, they wouldn’t take her so lightly next time. Next time, when they came to beg.

She was last to speak at the memorial service. The mares of the association were anxious to stand up by this point, but they remained patient out of respect for Pomela’s daughter, who was also the leading mare of the Orange family now. Very fine old acres they had. Very fine trees. Stores of rare seeds.

She stood at the microphone. She had imagined this in her head over and over.

“My mother was lying to you all.” She didn’t wait for a response, just tore pages out of her bag. “Right here. She documented every scummy, shady, and outright criminal thing every one of you ever did. The ponies you violenced, bullied, intimidated, extorted—they’re going to have their day in court. And some of you are going to have many nights in jail.”

“Oh, sugar,” sighed Cherry Jubilee, watching from the door. Beside her, the Wine Princess shook her head, while Granny Smith laughed quietly.

Missy Marmalade raised her voice. Some of them were standing up, trying to say things. She talked over them. “I know. I know because I was raised as one of you. But I never belonged. My mother was a horrible, forceful mare who saw everypony around her as gardening tools. I know how you do things, I know how you operate, and I know how to take you down.

“Here’s what’s going to happen.” She was shouting now over the tumult. “First, SHUT UP!”

They did, for the most part.

Missy Marmalade was panting, grinning. “That felt good. Shut up, you stupid hags. Now here’s what’s going to happen. You’re selling your fields, all of you, liquiding at market value or less. I don’t care if they get burned down or what, all of you are out of fruit. And you’ll publicly apologize, and never try to stop anypony from growing what they want, selling what they want, or how they want, or anything—you’re all through, finished. Understand? Or I go to the press with these documents.”

“Or we’ll trample you,” said the Melon Matriarch after a moment. The mass of angry ponies surged toward the stage.

“No!” said Cherry Jubilee with a voice that cracked like a whip. All motion stopped.

(Not all the members of the VEG were equally puissant. They said Cherry Jubilee could hear the whisper of a cherry in the middle of a thunderstorm.)

Cherry Jubilee’s voice was as calm as the slow drizzle of molasses. “I tried to tell you, sugar, I really did. You wouldn’t listen.”

(They said a lot more about Cherry Jubilee than that.)

“What are you talking about?” Missy Marmalade demanded. She was shaking—she hadn’t quite thought about what would happen after she gave her grand speech.

Cherry Jubilee held up a cherry and squished it. “See the red stuff?”

“It’s water and fruit stuff,” said Missy Marmalade, looking for the trap.

“That’s right. Do you know where it comes from?”

Missy Marmalade hesitated. “The fruit comes from the little code, if you weren’t lying. And the water comes from the rain labs in Cloudsdale.”

“That’s right. Now, would you like to have the rest of this conversation in private?”

“We’re running out of water?” said Missy Marmalade, horrified. She felt weak, unsteady—she needed to sit down, and slumped on a stool nearby.

“Sugar, relax,” said Cherry Jubilee. Granny Smith was also there, for some reason, as was the Lemon Lady. “We’re not running out exactly. But water dies easily. The population of Equestria is growing, and agricultural methods are outpacing the work the weather Pegasi use. Have you ever seen dead water? It’s like rubbery custard gone bad.”

“Why can’t you just use dead water to grow the fruit?” Missy Marmalade asked desperately.

“I’ve never tried,” said Cherry Jubilee. “I wouldn’t feed a cherry grown with dead water to my worst enemy.”

“Use less water then!”

“That’s what we do,” rasped the Lemon Lady. “That’s the point. There’s a yearly quota for fruit production, which is enforced through monopolies on markets. If we let just any filly or colt open up a lemonade stand, the result would be chaos.”

Missy Marmalade shook her head, reeling. Her mother—the papers—this wasn’t right, this couldn’t be. “You’re criminals! Thugs!”

“We protect Equestria, sug,” Cherry Jubilee said.

“No, no, no! You can’t trample a lemonade stand—”

“Every fruit has a voice inside it—” Granny Smith began loudly.

“IT’S JUST FRUIT, YOU OLD HAG!”

“Just?” Granny Smith said. “Just? Who is this, she ain’t the granddaughter of Sunny Jam.”

Missy Marmalade glowered at her. Her mother and all her friends were evil. She had known that less than ten minutes ago. She had to find her way back to that world.

“Done whining?” Granny Smith shifted her pipe around in her mouth. “As I was saying, every fruit has a voice inside it. It’s a voice that asks for air and light and water. Well, it’s more like a foal demanding, not asking so much. You got to discipline them a bit. Raise ‘em right. Anyway, point is, the voices are getting weaker.”

“Weaker?”

“Quality of water keeps degrading. A little bit of life gets lost permanently every cycle. Cheapest water is what’s closest by, of course, so they keep reusing the same stuff. You can taste it in our imitators; the water they’ve got is too cheap to get the fruit to ferment right. They end up mixing it with cornstarch to get there. It don’t taste right, and it ain’t good for you neither.”

Missy Marmalade felt dizzy. If what they were saying was true, then Equestria was on the verge of a major crisis. Forget ponies needing licenses to grow fruit, the whole thing needed to be shut down. How much water did Equestria have? How long would it last? She hunched over and held her head between her knees, breathing hard. It had to be a lie. “No, no, no—you’re criminals—”

Cherry Jubilee was beside her, stroking her mane and murmuring. “Try a cherry. Go on,” she added when Missy Marmalade hesitated.

Missy Marmalade got her breathing under control long enough to eat most of the cherry, woozily spitting the rest out onto the floor. “It’s very sweet,” she said.

“Yes. The magic is lasting. For now. But you understand now, don’t you, sugar?”

There was a pit in Missy Marmalade’s stomach that had nothing to do with the cherry. “Yes,” she said. “I understand.” But my mother was still evil—and so are you. So are you all. They don’t call you witches, but you can hear them not saying it. And I can hear things that you all can’t. I’m not going to sit on my wicker throne and push ponies around and call myself a savior. I’m going to solve this problem. And if that means getting rid of you and your farms….

“Wait,” said Granny Smith to her as the other mares left the room. Missy Marmalade stayed where she was.

“Are you going to scold me for wasting fruit?” she said, nodding at the mostly-eaten cherry on the floor.

“A rat’ll eat it,” said Granny Smith evenly. “No, I wanted to talk about your mother.”

“She—”

“Your mother knew the land. She was the sun’s daughter. No mare ever did work with the morning like she did.”

Missy Marmalade swallowed a lump in her throat. “You didn’t know her. What she was like.”

“Oh, she was bad all right. Cold and hard. I think there’s a few mules who might say the same of you.”

Missy Marmalade looked up sharply. Granny Smith shook her head. “Know why they carry empty wicker baskets?”

“To show no favoritism,” Missy Marmalade said.

“Take the dirt away, and there is no fruit. No trees—and then we’d have to figure out to make leaves like they have, to have something to strain the sunlight through and make oxygen. I reckon the Pegasi in Cloudsdale could come up with something. But it wouldn’t be as good.”

“They’re just mules,” Missy Marmalade protested.

“That’s true. Very true.” Granny Smith turned and opened the door to leave. “Your mother always sent them several bushels every season. A good farmer feeds the dirt.”

“Is the dirt dying too?” Missy Marmalade said sarcastically.

“The way I see it, the world died a long time ago. Equestria’s like a zombie. Oh, it’s up and moving, but you can see the skin sliding off, and the missing bones and organs. We’re all scurrying around trying to keep it going. But it won’t last. But while it does, feed the dirt.”

She left and closed the door behind her.

“What did you want to do, if not farming?” Cherry Jubilee asked. The two of them were watching the papers burn behind the old abandoned shed.

“Draw,” said Missy Marmalade.

“Your mother wouldn’t let you,” Cherry Jubilee guessed. “Took away your pencils and chalk and anything you liked to draw on.”

“How did you….”

“She couldn’t let you be distracted. You need to listen to the fruit to be a grower. That means quieting the voice inside your own head.”

“It hurts my soul not to draw,” said Missy Marmalade. “And when I am drawing...I can’t explain it, but I know it’s what I’m meant to do.”

“We all make sacrifices. If you want to help.”

“You’re a witch,” said Missy Marmalade. She was close to tears.

“We all make sacrifices,” Cherry Jubilee repeated.

They watched the papers burn until the last of them were nothing but ash. It was a good thing, thought Missy Marmalade, that she had spent that horrible week in the cellar copying them all out. Mr. Bore would hold onto them—for now.

Polished Shoes was glad he had bought a new suit for the interview. Among the skyscrapers of Whinny City, the undecorated Daughter bank didn’t stand out. But inside, the work of the bank was organized with stunning efficiency, turning along like clockwork.

An alarm clock beeped as the big clock on the wall turned 11. Polished Shoes watched as a flurry of activity erupted in the main office. Ponies switched tasks like mechanical puppets. Some moved one set of papers aside and started on another; others got up and deposited their worksheets in a folder on the wall. Three ponies started eating from lunches they pulled automatically from inside their desks. There was a water cooler; no two ponies went to get water at the same time.

There were rumors that Vela Flicker, chief executive economist of the bank, was a tyrant. But she couldn’t have been as much of a tyrant as the rumors said; she paid above market rate.

If Polished Shoes had been a brighter pony, he would have given that last thought special consideration, and perhaps withdrawn his application while he still had the chance.

Six ponies didn’t react to the bell. They were Unicorns sitting in a tight row, their horns glowing identically over floating arrays of raw numbers. He watched them with interest. They must have been casting Argh, a newfangled magical sorting and calculation program. He didn’t understand how it worked, but apparently it let Unicorns find patterns in more data than anypony could sort through without magic. It had been invented only days before the Daughter banks had been announced. Suddenly economists, mathemagicians, and any Unicorn with a working horn and the ability to tolerate long periods of boredom were in high demand. Daughter banks and anything to do with economics and data were booming.

He wasn’t a Unicorn, just an Earth Pony, and one who wasn’t very strong or good with plants or animals. But Polished Shoes was good with ponies, and he had a degree, and he looked good in a suit, if Mom was any judge. Businesses that hired lots of Unicorns to do their magical statistics had quickly found out that they also wanted to hire ponies like him, in case one of the Unicorns went crazy and tried to bite their manager.

A brown filly came down the hall. “Where—” she began. She looked at the desk behind the chair he was sitting in, which was unoccupied, and made a dark face.

“Come along,” she said tightly to him. “Your interview was scheduled to begin a minute ago.”

Polished Shoes got up and followed her to Vela Flicker’s office. Vela Flicker’s secretary looked like she was still in high school. She was also remarkably foul-faced; she looked like she woke up stuck in traffic and had a root canal with breakfast.

To his surprise, she went around the desk and sat behind it.

“I apologize for my lateness,” she said with a clenched jaw. “We try to be punctual around here. Unfortunately, that’s only so possible with the quality of help we sometimes find.”

“I’m sorry, you’re Vela Flicker?”

She looked around the office as if trying to find another candidate for the name. “Who were you expecting?”

“Sorry, you’re just a lot younger than I imagined.’

“I’m sure. Let’s begin.”

Vela Flicker had been dreading this. Interviews were so stupid, she just wanted to try him out for a week at zero cost. There were so many applicants for any opening at the Daughter bank that she could probably get away with it. But Pony Resources said she would have to pay him severance even if he had only worked here for one day. It was so stupid.

And she was having to do a lot of interviews. Employee turnover was too high. At least her current secretary had been with them for two month now. And the janitors were still the same quiet, tubby mules they had always been. Although who knows if that was really true; all janitors had the same face to her. The perfect crime probably involved a mop, a sign that said “Caution - Wet Floor” and an industrial laser cutter.

“We’re looking for an employee retention specialist because we’ve been having problems with employee turnover,” she said curtly. At least she could skip all the stuff about his hobbies and where he saw himself in five years. “What can you contribute in that position?”

His eyes widened. “Um, well, I think that, as someone who is very passionate about helping others, and contributing to a synergistic, enhanced workforce that combines the best qualities of Equestria’s industrial titans of old with modern ideas that push the envelope of what can be considered the new normal—really, I think the question we’re asking here is what are the best practices of employee retention, and what sort of capabilities can we build to empower the worker while increasing profits?”

Vela leaned back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Digesting word salad on an empty stomach was never easy. Deciding she was dealing with an idiot, she slowed her speech and raised its volume to compensate. “Hiring is an investment under uncertainty. That means I don’t know what you’re worth, and if I hire you to find out, I can’t put you on an unpaid trial period for a month and fire you without severance the moment you slack off. Unfortunately. So the more you can signal your productivity now, the more I can pay you. This isn’t about whether you get the job—there’s a price at which I’ll hire you, under reasonable assumptions. It’s about whether you get the job at a price that keeps the heater on in the winter.”

“I understand,” he lied. “Let me tell you more about myself. Ever since I was young I cared about employee retention.”

“What?”

“I always knew I was meant to assist for-profit, non-profit or governmental organizations in employee retention.” Polished Shoes felt his confidence returning; he had rehearsed this a dozen times with the career help staff at his college. “Before I went to college I did charity work in a poor community in Appaneighchia for a summer. It was a transformative experience that showed me the importance of employee retention.”

Vela had no words. She had passed all of Princess Celestia’s comprehensive exams in her elite economics graduate program. She was the youngest graduate...ever, actually, in its thousand-plus year existence. Even if it made her the baby of the group, the Little Sister, though she wasn’t that much younger than Twilight. No pony had intuition for economics like she did. It was what had allowed her to test out of classes she hardly studied for and join the cohort she had graduated with. Her nose for economics was like a wolf’s following a trail of blood, and she honed in on the answer with laser precision. And she was, right now, very confused.

Polished Shoes had no idea what Vela was going through. He was on a roll and couldn’t stop. “In college I took many classes relevant to employee retention such as Music Appreciation I, Film History, and Introduction to Business (twice), which gave me a wide-ranging understanding of the diversity of pony culture and how to retain all kinds of ponies in a private or public work office. It is believed by me that I can add value quickly to your business slash non-profit slash government agency by employing my skills and unique perspectives to contribute to the mission goal and thus adding value.”

“Are you engaged in a brilliant game of signaling your intellectual dexterity and mastery of workplace norms?” Vela asked, clutching to her last shred of hope, and sanity. “If you are, and you continue to play it, I will kill you.”

This wasn’t a question Polished Shoes had rehearsed for. He decided to hedge. “I think it’s mission critical that all employees engage in, um, games of signaling and so forth,” he said. “So as to, perhaps, synergize, such as.”

“You’re actually the smartest or stupidest colt I’ve ever met.”

Polished Shoes bristled at that. He was clearly older than her by several years, maybe more. “I graduated college, so I must be fairly bright.”

“Wow, I graduated as the youngest pony ever from the most recent cohort of Princess Celestia’s elite economics graduate students,” Vela said. “The homework was pretty intense.”

Polished Shoes tried to think of something that had been hard about college. “It’s graded for accuracy, not completion?” he said weakly.

“Harder than that.”

Polished Shoes tried to imagine. “Gosh.”

Her alarm clock beeped, the same noise as in the main office, just quieter. “Hold on,” Vela said, looking past him at the door. “My secretary brought me lunch.”

Polished Shoes blinked. It seemed rude to have ordered lunch in the middle of a scheduled interview. It was also early for lunch.

The door failed to open. Vela Flicker stared at it a few more seconds, then glowered as she reset the clock.

When she turned her face to him again, there was anger, frustration, and, he thought, a touch of humiliation on her face. But it was the anger that scared him. It was tight and focused, like a laser. He feared it would slice right through him.

Vela stopped slouching like a teenager. She sat straight, with her jaw clenched. “Everything works on a timer in my bank,” she said. “It keeps my workers wound up and the whole bank ticking.” Like the grandfather clock in the quiet room, she didn’t add.

“Maybe—I might have a suggestion—”

“What?”

“The assembly line clock schedule thing might be the reason for your high turnover.”

“That’s not the reason,” Vela Flicker said, as cold and focused as a beam of frozen atoms.

“I agree,” said Polished Shoes instantly. The contradiction didn’t register—he was trained not to disagree with his interviewer.

Vela Flicker rolled her eyes and slouched again, and let out a petulant sigh, like she was bored in school and the clock said there was still a whole hour before the final bell rang.

She glanced at her list of questions. “How would you increase employee retention?”

“Right.” He turned the page of his notepad. “My plan involves utilizing an incentive scheme to identify the core competencies of our workforce while simultaneously increasing morale. By offering a sustainable prize for good behavior and meritable activities, we can—”

“You want to pay them to work.”

“No,” he said, because it wasn’t just his best idea, it was his only idea.

“It sounds like you want to pay them to work. Which we already do, by the way.”

“That’s a valid perspective,” he admitted cautiously, not seeing a way out.

“Is it right, though?”

“I think there are a lot of ways of looking at what I said.”

“What other ways are there?”

He shrugged helplessly.

Vela was gazing at him like he was a new species of bug under her microscope, and she was trying to figure out why he had seven legs. “Do ponies prefer this? Do they prefer you? The way you talk, I mean, instead of more…direct instruction and clear requirements. Why would anypony want to make an uncertain….” She trailed off, lost in thought.

“Conflict!” she said a moment later, making him jump in his seat. “There are no battlegrounds when no pony knows what’s going on.” She had a satisfied expression for a moment, then frowned. “But...it would still be harder to do the work, if they just cared about the work….”

Wherever her thoughts were going next, Polished Shoes couldn’t say, because the door opened. At that point the interview, which he honestly felt could have been going better, got completely out of hoof.

“You’re late,” Vela said.

Polished Shoes shivered. Whatever coldness Vela had directed at him was like a warm sauna compared to this. Ice would have melted in embarrassment at what real cold felt like. Liquid nitrogen would have shattered in her gaze.

“I’m sorry,” said an flustered, overweight mare by the door. Her mane was a mess and she looked exhausted and panicked. “I told you, I’ve been helping my sister with her foals while she recovers from her surgery—”

“Where’s my lunch?”

The mare, whose name was Patty Cake, gasped. It was a true gasp of shock and horror. Polished Shoes would have found it a very interesting noise if he hadn’t been leaning away from Vela and wishing he had a warm jacket.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Flicker, I must have forgotten,” said Patty Cake. She was clearly at least twice Vela Flicker’s age. “My nephews will not sleep, and—”

“I’m getting sick of your lazy attitude, Patty.”

There was a sharp intake of breath, and a long pause, as though somepony was counting to ten before answering. “Sorry, Ms. Flicker,” Patty Cake said. “I’ll bring you your messages for today, and then I’ll go get your lunch.”

“I won’t hold my breath.”

Patty Cake started to close the door, then stopped. She was staring into space with an intense look of concentration.

She stepped into the office and closed the door. Then:

“No,” she said, and opened it.

“Patty,” Vela said in a warning tone. “There are a lot of ponies who would take your job the instant it was offered to them.”

Patty Cake gave Polished Shoes a frozen smile. “You must be the candidate for the employee retention position. Good. You’ll need to hear this so you can do your job.”

The tired, overworked secretary faced Vela Flicker, blazing with the calm knowledge that she was going to be fired, and that it was worth it.

She advanced into Vela Flicker’s office, which she was only allowed to do when it was most inconvenient—to pick up something from Vela Flicker’s desk, or to deposit a lunch on it. Otherwise she was to wait at the door like a servant.

“You are the rudest, meanest, most ungrateful pony I’ve ever met.” Her voice rose while Vela Flicker stared up at her. “You never say please, you never relent—I told you I had to help my sister, I left your damn messages on my desk, you just had to look—but you don’t notice anypony but yourself, do you? We’re all gears in a clock to you. Not everypony can tick along like you do!”

An alarm clock beeped on Vela Flicker’s desk—the end of the interview, Polished Shoes guessed—but the stunned Unicorn didn’t move.

“Candyfloss cried yesterday after you yelled at her. I had to spend an hour consoling her before I could even get her back to her desk. All she did was format her report differently from how you wanted. She told me it was how they did it at the firm she worked at before this one, she just forgot, but you treated it like a personal attack. Did you even think about how it affects other ponies? If you want productivity, stop screaming at ponies over nothing, stop getting offended by everything everypony says, I don’t even know what gets you angry anymore! Your temper is like a, a, a fire that just comes out of nowhere and tears everything apart. No wonder you were sent here, you’re perfect for this city.”

Polished Shoes had no idea what the secretary was talking about. Vela was colder than cold, not hot.

Patty Cake stopped in front of Vela Flicker’s desk, and glared down at the plain-looking, brown Unicorn, who was half her age and thought herself ten times more important. She was quite young, Patty Cake noticed; she realized she had never looked at Vela Flicker so closely. The girl was barely a mare, practically a filly still. No wonder her body was so awkward, her face so dark and angry—the bank was being run by somepony still in the grip of puberty.

Vela Flicker slammed her forehoofs down. Patty Cake flinched as Vela Flicker leaned forward over her desk, tears in her eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! All I did was ask you to bring a lunch! You’re always so, so,” Vela gave off a high-pitched growl, a teenaged whine of frustration. “I’m trying to be reasonable!”

“I’d like some respect!” Patty Cake cried, stepping back in alarm.

Vela made another frustrated noise. “You’re so irrational!”

“Why do you always have to get so mad?”

“I don’t —STOP MAKING THINGS UP!” Vela’s voice was already hoarse; there was a raw, ragged edge to it as she shouted. Her laserlike precision was completely gone.

All work in the main office had stopped. Ponies gathered by the stairs and looked up at Vela Flicker’s office, murmuring to each other—another secretary gone by the sound of it, who knows how Vela kept finding replacements?

Vela noticed her tears and averted her wet eyes in shame. Patty was so unprofessional to do this to her in front of a potential hire, in the middle of the workday, opening the door on purpose just to embarrass her in front of everypony. She was so stupid and selfish, she never thought about what Vela needed. And she wanted to yell or throw something, but she couldn’t in front of Polished Shoes. Thanks, Patty, you’ve been a big help.

Vela tried to calm down. At least she could control her emotions, unlike Patty. “I asked you,” she hissed, her eyes looking at the table through a watery film, “to bring me lunch.”

Patty Cake didn’t react.

“I don’t want to fire you,” Vela Flicker said. She sniffled automatically, piggish with mucus, and instantly hated herself. Patty was being so unfair to do this to her like this. She wanted to throw something at her, and to crawl under the desk and die. “Please, Patty—look, I’m sorry, okay? Now will you just get my stupid messages? Forget about lunch.”

“I want you,” Patty Cake said, “to treat me with respect from now on.”

“I DO RESPECT YOU!”

The scream was raw and angry and confused.

“I do!” Vela said, her voice ragged from shouting and crying. “So will you stop being so STUPID and get me my damn messages, oh Celestia.” She choked off at the end and turned away from them, butting her head against the wall.

Patty Cake was utterly frozen. Polished Shoes had a thought—what if this was all a test? He had been warned the Daughter banks had unusual interview methods, maybe this was meant to see if he could retain the employee.

“Excuse me,” he began.

“Shut up,” Vela said with so much disdain that Polished Shoe felt a very strong need to write to his mother and ask for some compliments, the unconditional kind. “You’re fired,” she said to Patty Cake.

Patty Cake drew herself up. “Obviously I’m quitting,” she said in a voice that carried out into the main office, “or I wouldn’t be calling you a stupid, arrogant bitch to your face!”

Vela collapsed behind the desk, sobbing. Patty Cake whirled and walked out. The moment she had left Vela grabbed the door in her magic and slammed it so hard that it bounced off the frame and fell off its hinges, banging onto the floor.

In the silence, apart from the sobs of a single filly, Polished Shoe began to worry that he hadn’t nailed the interview.

“Get out,” Vela said after a moment. Her voice was just a hoarse whisper.

“I’ll write to you about the job in a week if I haven’t heard back,” he said desperately.

“GET OUT!”

Vela stayed behind her desk after he left, crying and sniffling to herself. Why had Patty done that to her? She knew she was in an interview then, she had opened the door on purpose, she had called her a, a that to her face, why? She didn’t want a new secretary! She had liked Patty, she knew good restaurants and had become a familiar face among the constant turnover, she had even been the one who suggested hiring an employee retention specialist— sarcastically, but she had.

There wasn’t any noise coming from the main office. They were probably all talking about her. They probably all thought the same as Patty did about her.

Vela was hungry. She didn’t want to be here. She refused to sneak out of her own bank, but she didn’t want to face the stares and murmurs from the main office.

So she went out the window.

Vela got a chickpea bun at a stand. This was the one thing Whinny City did well. They took a yellowish, steamed cylinder of garbanzo bean, placed it in a long poppy bun and piled it high with pickles, relish, tomato, onion, and finally a squirt of mustard under a heap of peppers. Celestia above, it was good.

Her hunger sated, Vela felt a lot better. She was still angry at Patty, but she could think now.

She checked her face in the reflective surface of the metal stand. Her eyes were red. Nothing she could do about that, but she fixed her mane as best she could. What a terrible day.

“None of my business, but shouldn’t you be in school?” the stallion cooking chickpeas said. “I don’t want to get in trouble with your parents.”

She didn’t answer. Instead she turned so her flank, and her cutie mark, were showing. When he realized he was looking at nine stars constellated in the shape of the sails of a ship—heading over the edge of the world, she liked to imagine—he busied himself with his chickpeas and didn’t say anything more.

Vela grinned to herself. That was one of life’s little pleasures she had discovered since taking over the Daughter bank here. It had its drawbacks though. Her very first day in Whinny City somepony had tried to steal her purse. It had been the best part of her day; she had gotten to break his leg. Now if somepony attacked her from the side, they were just as likely to jump back and apologize.

Still, being powerful afforded her ten opportunities for fun for every one that it took away. She understood why Princess Celestia hadn’t abdicated the throne after more than a thousand years as princess. The Sun only knew whose legs Princess Celestia got to break when she wandered down whatever passed for grimy alleyways in her life.

Vela knew she should go back. No way did anypony stick to the clock when she wasn’t around. But she was still angry. And she wanted to...break some legs.

What was there to do in this city? She could take pictures in front of the stupid bean sculpture that everypony loved. She could go bother the high-security lakeside research unit and remind them that she was smarter than they were, or she could do her civic duty and take a guided tour along the river to help keep the water relatively alive.

None of that appealed to her. There were sports teams to watch, but she wouldn’t be caught dead at a hoofball game. Somepony would take her picture, and her Sisters would see it, and they would never let her live it down.

There had to be something.

She turned to the stallion tending his chickpeas. “What do ponies do for fun around here?”

Whinny City smelled permanently of corn. It was overpowering near the cornpacking plants and stank through the railway lines that traversed the city. The walk from her apartment to her Daughter Bank took her right across it every day. She should have numbed to it eventually, but it only grew more intolerable.

Walking through the city wasn’t so bad if she stayed away from the smellier parts. The skyscrapers gave her an uneasy sense of vertigo when she looked up at them, but she studied them anyway because she could still see the effects of the fire. There was a jagged line of terra cotta houses and buildings through the wooden industrial sector, marking the path the fire had taken.

The whole city had been in the process of rebuilding when a bank had suddenly failed. Vela’s first job she had set for herself, after dealing with the aftermath of Nightmare Moon and helping to pull Whinny City out of the downturn called the Great Succession, had been to sort that whole mess out.

There had been complaints about her mandatory fire insurance; she dealt with that by obtaining permission from Canterlot to give a voluntary defense fund credit to everypony who couldn’t afford it. Buying fire insurance was completely voluntary, and if you didn’t and your house mysteriously burned down in the night, well, you never knew when disaster would strike, that was what insurance was for. A newspaper had pointed out the unlikely correlation between ponies who had refused to buy insurance and ponies whose houses mysteriously incinerated in controlled burns all in the same night. But the newspaper organization had bought fire insurance, so Vela had their printing presses kicked in instead. After that, there was no more trouble.

Vela Flicker knew she wasn’t popular among the citizens of Whinny City. Whatever. Public opinion rolled off her back like criticism in an academic workshop. She knew she was right, and if it took others longer to see that, that wasn’t her problem. You didn’t fight with idiots, she reasoned. You surrounded yourself with brainiacs and waited for the idiots to beg to join the club. Then you had a better bargaining position and could get their labor for cheap.

She hadn’t realized she was so unpopular with Patty.

It was lunchtime, so the streets were crowded and noisy. Ponies were rushing off in groups to get pans of the local soupy casserole called pizza. Others, like her, were headed to the stadium.

She had never been to the racecourse before. It wasn’t exactly her speed. It was a place where dumb stallions with more muscles than brains ran around in a circle for the amusement of thousands. Whoever ran around in a circle the fastest was considered the fastest circle-arounder and got a prize.

A stallion in a uniform tried to stop her at the gate. She walked past him, and he was lucky enough to see her cutie mark before he laid a hoof on her.

The races were just starting. Ponies were balancing trays of greasy vegetables and cups of overpriced beer as they navigated to their seats while the announcer’s voice boomed around the interior of the stadium, talking so excitedly about their sponsor’s new line of shaving cream that it was like he thought it could bring dead water back to life.

Part of her was hoping to see Patty there. There was no reason for her to be there, but it was fun to think about. Patty was probably full of regret and nerves; she’d beg for her job back. Vela would say no, of course, which would only make Patty beg more.

Looking around for her as she walked down the rows, she spied instead a group of well-dressed stallions sitting up close to the track, gulping down beer and snacks and arguing animatedly with each other. Finance types on their lunch break, she guessed.

She sat behind them. She didn’t know why, but she never started knowing why she did anything.

In this case, it didn’t take long for her to figure it out. The races began, and the traders or bankers or whatever they were, started gambling on them. She quickly noticed there were patterns to the bets they placed, stupid patterns. They were betting based on some combination of information in little booklets they had—there were ponies going up and down the steps selling them for two bits—their own impressions of who seemed to be particularly fit or energetic today, and a desire to defy the odds, which were publicly displayed on an electronic screen. They bet on the favorite racer less often than they should have.

I can beat them.

After the end of the next race, Vela nearly got up to challenge them when she felt a thrill of fear run through her. She didn’t know anything about racing. It all came down to chance anyway. She’d be exposing herself to further humiliation if she lost.

But Vela rebelled against that note of caution. It would work, even if she had to make it work. A sense of invincibility flowed through her. Animated with bravado, she stepped out of her seat and down to their row, angling herself at a T to them like a ship maneuvering into firing position. This way they wouldn’t see her cutie mark.

“Who’ve you got?” she asked bluntly.

One of them looked at her. “Sorry?”

“I’ve got Lucky Stripes to win and Speed Racer to come in second for thirty bits.”

“I’ll take that bet,” he said.

One sitting further down the row said, “Dude, she’s just a kid.”

“Ignore them,” he said. He smiled at her. “Trying to stretch your allowance?”

Vela forced a smile. “My mom hardly gives me any.”

“She wouldn’t want you gambling with it.”

“It’s my money,” said Vela. It was easy to sound petulant, it was her money now that she was responsible for the local money supply.

“Well, I’m not a very lucky pony. You can bet with me a little. I don’t mind.”

“You’ll take money from anypony,” the other one said.

Vela forced herself not to roll her eyes.

“Know much about racing?” the investor said.

“They try to be the first to go in a circle, right?”

He laughed. “You’ve got it.. Want to sit down?”

She sat in the empty seat next to him and ignored his spasm when he noticed her cutie mark.

“I’ve never been to the racecourse before,” she said. Their row reeked of beer and fried food. This close to the track, the pounding of hoofs on the dirt was like thunder. “It seems like so much fun.”

“Mngh,” he answered. A few of his friends glanced over, but they couldn’t see her cutie mark.

Lucky Stripes won, but Speed Racer came in third.

“Darn,” Vela said. “You won.”

He managed to unstick his jaw. “No, no, tell you what. This was your first time, so let’s call it even.”

“That wouldn’t be fair. I insist.” She floated thirty bits into his trembling lap and looked at the card for the next race. “Who do you have for race seven?” she said to the investors farther down the line.

“Sherclop Pones to win,” one answered, grinning. Apparently they were willing to bet with her now that their friend had broken the ice. Another had Stupid Jones to show. Vela took those bets, and won the second one.

It wasn’t a bad afternoon, watching muscular stallions sweat and exert themselves in the sun while someone twice her age squirmed and sweated in the seat next to her. Still, she wasn’t really making money. Actually, she had lost money

But she was picking up on things. It wasn’t the stallions on the starting line that mattered; she didn’t know who would win any more than anypony else did. So instead of trying to figure out what caused race outcomes, she was keeping track of what caused bets to be placed. The investors weren’t weren’t doing what had become muscle memory as a graduate student studying under Princess Celestia, where she had learned to chain back feelings within herself to so as to distinguish between the causes of her moods and the causes of her expectations, so they couldn’t stop themselves from betting based on how loud the last race had been or how recently they had used the bathroom. They were drinking more, and thoroughly enjoying the company of a girl with bad luck and apparently endless amounts of money. All she had to do to win was to lean on the moments where the differences between the information causing her predictions about the outcomes and the information causing them to bet were most different—since she deferred to the public odds, and these bozos didn't.

By the end of the next hour, she had made more than twice as much as she had put up, and the investor sitting next to her had pissed himself.

Vela unclenched. It was working.

“Say, what gives?” one of the investors said angrily. Vela had won another bet, paying out seventeen bits to one and taking a total of one hundred and eighty-three bits from the others. She couldn’t ruin them at these stakes.

“What say we stop playing with loose change, boys?” she said.

The stallions for the next race were lining up. Vela watched a large gray one shake his head inside his lane, his whole body twisting with power.

“Two thousand on Greathoof to win,” the investor spat. “I don’t care what the odds are.”

“Hey, calm down, she doesn’t have that much,” one of his soberer friends said.

“Yes I do,” she said mildly. “Is he the big gray one?”

“He’s never lost,” the investor said.

“Gosh golly gee-whiz. You’ll give me 500 to 1 odds.”

“Fine,” he said instantly. His friend sighed and shook his head.

Vela sat back and waited for the race to start. She glanced around. The stadium was completely full now, and everypony’s attention was held rapt by the stallions lined up at the starting line. She wondered if she was the only pony in attendance betting against Greathoof.

The race started. It was one and a half miles. Greathoof started out in the lead, and he ended in a bigger lead.

“I won,” the investor snarled. “Pay up, if you can.”

“Hold on.”

“Don’t think you can back out of this. I don’t care if you have to call Mommy to pay your debt.” He was quite drunk, Vela thought.

Her horn was glowing. A moment later a check poofed into existence in front of her. She scribbled the amount on it and signed her name.

“Here,” she said, floating it over to him. “You can turn that into any bank in Equestria for two thousand bits. It’ll work only for you.”

By now he had read the name signed on the check. His head whipped in her direction.

“I—hold on—”

She got up, showing them the nine-starred sail on her flank in the process.

“Well, it’s been fun, boys,” she said to them. “But I’m quite busy, so I can’t play all day.”

She sauntered up the steps. The investors, frozen, watched her go, then stared in horror at the check.

“Don’t cash it,” one said instantly. The unlucky winner nodded miserably.

“Dude, did you know?” he said to their friend who had first bet with Vela.

“Mm-hmm,” said the investor, whose jaw had been stuck shut from tension for at least an hour. It would take some serious massaging before it loosened up again.

The winner let his head fall into his lap. “Dude, I’m so screwed.”

Vela went up the steps, then walked around and down to the entrance to the racers’ stables. The door was locked. Her cutie mark got it unlocked.

She found Greathoof’s stable, or the door to it. A fat stallion was chewing a piece of straw by the door. He rolled his eyes when he saw her.

“Not you,” he said when she got close.

She stopped. “What?”

“He likes prettier girls. No offense. I’m just doing my job.”

A disbelieving grin spread over her face. “What is your job?”

“I’m his manager. Now get out of here.”

“What do you manage, pray tell?” Vela was icy now, feeling the anger focus into a tight, cold beam—so much better than when it exploded in unpredictable fire, like an erupting volcano.

“I manage him. You deaf as well as ugly?”

She turned so he could see her cutie mark. The straw fell out of his mouth.

“Look, I didn’t mean nothing by it. I didn’t think you were anypony important.”

“Don’t worry,” she said sweetly. “I don’t pay your salary.”

“I—”

“I’m the reason your salary is paid in bits and not in bundles of hay. May I go in? Please?”

He nodded quickly and jerked aside. She pushed the door open and closed it behind her.

Greathoof was simply the biggest stallion she had ever seen. He was the biggest pony she had ever seen other than Princess Celestia, and while she was tall, he was thick with muscles. They stuck out of him like geography, with mountains of shoulder and rocky hills for thighs and tectonic plates moving along his chest. She didn’t think she had all the types of muscle he had. He might as well have had a fifth leg for all their anatomy had in common.

He also stank. Sweat rolled off of his shuddering body as he took in huge gulps of water from a container that was, without exaggeration, bigger than she. Then, pausing just to breathe, he started on an incredibly smelly mix of grass hay and oats. There was more than she ate in three days. Maybe more than she ate in a week.

“Excuse me,” she said. He didn’t respond, just kept eating. He must have swallowed five or ten pounds of food by the time he looked up at her. Then he took another long drink of water. His muscles shook as he swallowed.

“I don’t mean to bother you,” she said. She realized she was just buying time. Why had she come here? It wasn’t his fault she had lost money.

He looked past her at the door like he was expecting somepony else to come in. “Pondella sent you?” His voice was intimidatingly deep and booming, like his vocal chords had been replaced with a tuba and a microphone.

Was Pondella the manager? “He let me in.”

“You?” He was looking at her closely, nakedly inspecting her body. He sounded skeptical. “Why you?”

It took her an unusually long moment to think of an answer. “I’m, uh, a stable inspector. To make sure the conditions are fair.”

“Oh.” He turned back to his food and took another enormous bite.

“Congratulations on your win,” she said. He didn’t answer.

She looked around his room. Other than the incredible amounts of food and water, there wasn’t much else. There wasn’t a bed, just a long, thick mattress on the floor. He probably would have broken the bed anyway.

He noticed her examining the place. “All good?”

“Huh? Oh. Yup. All very...inspected.”

He was looking at the door again. “You can go now. I think somepony else is coming.”

She took a step toward him. “Maybe we could talk first. I bet against you, you know.”

“Why? I always win.”

He seemed so genuinely confused that for a moment Vela forgot herself. “The odds were too good. Five hundred to one.”

“You lost five hundred betting against me? Serves you right.”

“No, no, those were the odds. I lost two thousand bits.”

“You said five hundred to one.”

“Yes, that means I would have won five hundred bits for every bit I bet.”

“I don’t get it,” he said impatiently. “How much did you lose?”

“Two thousand.”

“Serves you right.”

He was dumb, she realized. Or maybe he was really a genius, but his brain was so tied up in coordinating all his muscles that it couldn’t do much else.

“I didn’t think you looked like a winner,” she said.

“I’m the greatest,” he said darkly.

She shrugged. Her head felt a lot clearer now. “I don’t think so. Sorry to waste your time.”

Vela turned to leave. She had barely gotten a step when his shadow fell over her. His forelegs were on either side of her. The heat from his belly, heaving up and down with each huge breath he took, emanated over her back.

“There’s something I always do after a victory,” he said. “Usually my manager sends a pretty filly to my stable. You’ll do.”

His breath was hot against the top of her head. Something hard bumped against her leg that definitely wasn’t his leg.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Like hell,” he said, and grabbed her mane with his teeth.

Her body surged with panic and her horn glowed. She flung him off of her, sending him crashing against the wall, knocking over the water container, which began to spill onto the floor. He might have been more than twice her size, but he was no match for her in magic.

“What was that noise?” the manager demanded outside. He cringed when she glared at him.

There were two pretty mares simpering at the manager. They fixed envious glares on Vela.

“Have fun, girls,” Vela grinned mirthlessly at them. She started to walk away.

“She’s not even pretty,” she heard one of the mares say.

There was still an hour until normal working hours at the Daughter bank were ended. Feeling hungry, she bought a grass kebab along the way. See, Patty? How hard was that?

Patty. That’s right. She had forgotten after the...incident at the racetrack. Her gut squirmed. She didn’t want to face her right now.

She couldn’t finish the kebab, so she threw it away and sat on a bench. What was wrong with her? She should be working right now. She had gone away gambling for hours. What a joke.

She didn’t want to face Patty right now.

It’s her fault, she wanted to rage, but that just made her stomach twist. Vela wanted to apologize, that was the hard part. She wanted Patty to be her secretary; she was the only one there whom Vela felt comfortable with.

Just do it[/i/], she scolded herself. Suck it up. Even if you can’t just tick along like Patty thinks, you can tick along better than this.

When she got back to the bank, the first thing she saw was Patty at her desk surrounded by employees, most of whom ducked back to their own desks when they saw Vela come in. Candyfloss and a few others stayed.

Vela saw the cardboard box in Patty’s lap and made a snap decision. “You’re fired.”

Patty’s face turned red. “I was just taking my things home.”

“Good, see if you can scrub the seat and desk off so it doesn’t smell like you either. I’d rather not have to be reminded that somepony as lazy as you exists.”

Vela turned sharply down the corridor and stopped at her office, where the door was still laying on the floor, broken off from the hinge. She went inside, closed the window, and levitated the door up against the doorway, blocking the entrance more than closing it.

Why had she said that? Vela sank into her chair and felt her eyes burn, though she didn’t cry. Patty usually came in smelling like fresh bread. Vela loved that smell. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t Patty have just asked for her job back?

Vela barely remembered her own mother, aside from the yelling. She didn’t need Patty. She had toughed it out by herself since always.

It just had never hurt this much before.

Struck by inspiration, or at least by the desire to change something, she got out a pen and parchment and began to write.

Dear Princess Celestia,

But just then the alarm clock beeped on her desk. Right. She stuffed the unfinished letter in a drawer. Back to work.

And when Vela found the unfinished letter at the end of the evening spent catching up on the work she had missed, she couldn’t remember what she had wanted to say.

It was late October. The wind had an edge to it now, and it was sharpening every day. Autumn was technically scheduled to last for another eight weeks, but everypony could tell a bad winter would follow—because the yearly Cloudsdale weather schedule said it would.

The days were ending sooner. Nights lasted longer. Anticipation was building up, because soon it would be Nightmare Night, when the fillies went door-to-door asking for candy, and cobwebs hung from every roof. It was a night when anypony could put on a mask and become anypony or anything….

As usual, some concerned parents had arranged a town meeting the day before the big night. Last year the town meeting had been about a concern over nails in candy apples until Applejack shut it down with the threat of a lawsuit. This year the meeting was about whether a vengeful demigoddess might bring destruction upon their town.

Town meetings about Nightmare Night had a very different atmosphere when your little town had recently been visited by Nightmare Moon herself, the night’s ostensible honoree. Even Applejack was there.

“Please, everypony, if I could just have your attention,” said Twilight Sparkle, standing up to be heard above the clamor. “When I last met with Princess Celestia, she assured me that she had Princess Luna kept in a safe place.” It had been three months already, but Twilight couldn’t imagine that the princess’s dark sister had escaped again.

“Nightmare Moon, you mean!” said one of the concerned parents. Twilight wasn’t sure if her name was Bark Nibbler or if that was just something ponies said she did. Either way, she had a face more imperious than the one Princess Celestia put on for royal occasions; there was no majesty like an offended parent.

“That’s unclear right now,” said Twilight, trying to remain calm. She felt protective of Nightmare Moon, oddly enough. I defeated her, and I’d do it again—she’s mine. So don’t act afraid when I’m here. “But I believe there is no threat, and Princess Celestia assured me that Nightmare—that Princess Luna is under wraps.”

“She escaped from Princess Celestia before! How do we know we can trust her?”

“The particular conditions that led to the temporary overthrow of the One Bank are not currently present,” said Twilight, realizing she didn’t know what those conditions were. How had she never asked? Princess Luna shouldn’t have been anywhere near as strong as Princess Celestia after a thousand-year banishment. Simply wrestling control away from her elder sister wouldn’t have worked. It was a puzzle that needed answering.

“Well, I don’t feel safe,” said Bark Nibbler with finality, as if that was all anypony needed to know.

“I understand that, and my friends and I have taken steps to ensure that ponies feel safe tomorrow night,” said Twilight. “I’ve asked them all to come to this meeting wearing their Element of Equilibrium, and to wear them tomorrow night as well. Girls, could you all stand up please? So that everypony can see? Oh, um, Rainbow Dash, you can sit down. Where’s your Element?”

“I lost in a poker game.”

“I hope you’re joking,” Twilight said.

“Tank’ll give it back, she said I needed to learn a lesson.”

“Just wear it tomorrow night, okay?”

Rainbow Dash saluted. “You got it, boss.”

Twilight sighed. “I really do feel that we can celebrate Nightmare Night tomorrow like normal. I’m personally looking forward to my first Nightmare Night in Ponyville. I’d hate for it to be ruined by fear. It’s called Nightmare Night, but it isn’t any different from any other night. It’s just a name. We have nothing to be scared of.”

“Other than imported fruits,” coughed somepony who sounded a lot like Applejack.

“Have you seen the state of the decorations some ponies have put up?” Rarity said. “Nothing to be scared of, Twilight, you do exaggerate.”

“We have nothing serious to be scared of,” Twilight said. “But thanks, girls.” To the rest of the assembly, she added, “Nightmare Moon is not coming back. I repeat, Nightmare Moon is not coming back.”

At midnight that night nothing special happened. There was no such thing as Nightmare Morning.

Nightmare Night didn’t have an official start. But as it happened, Nightmare Moon showed up around eight p.m.

“Don’t stay out past midnight,” Applejack said as she helped Apple Bloom into her costume. “Why’re you going as a bumblebee anyway? They’re not scary.”

“I’ve got a real working stinger. Why’re you an apple? Nothing scary about an apple,” lied Apple Bloom, whose future had been laid out for her before she had even gotten her cutie mark. She saw only apples on the horizon; dreams of being a professional dancer in Manehattan were as likely as an assortment of fruit on the Apple dining table.

“You can’t tell? Shame on you. I’m a knockoff apple, the sort that tries to hide under our brand illegally, but Princess Celestia refuses to crack down on them.”

“What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference?” Applejack spluttered. “Look at the coloration! You call that red? See the shape? Does this look appetizing? Does it?”

Apple Bloom leaned away from the butt being aggressively shoved in her face. “I’ve seen better. Can I go now?”

“Stay with your friends the whole time. Have fun. Don’t eat all your candy in one night!”

“You just want to have some of mine,” said Apple Bloom as she tottered toward the door.

“And watch out for Nightmare Mo-o-o-on!” Applejack called after, laughing. “But seriously, if you see Nightmare Moon, run and get Twilight and the rest of us.”

(Bumblebees dozing in beds of autumn crocuses were mildly surprised by the sight of a giant bumblebee tottering along the way. For this was Nightmare Night, where a bit of cardboard and string could turn a pony into a superhero, or a ghoul, or anything. But it was cold, and the bees went back to sleep.)

Apple Bloom met up with Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle in front of Rarity’s house. Sweetie Belle was taking off a dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a fancy ball, and Scootaloo was helping her put on a black skeleton suit instead. Scootaloo herself wore a shadow pony outfit, one suspiciously similar to the costume Rainbow Dash had worn last year. It was also way too big for her and smelled like it had spent some time in a dumpster.

They nodded at each other and began their jaunt.

“Where do you want to go first?” Sweetie Belle asked. She was easily the fiercest filly Apple Bloom knew, tough-snouted and boisterous. Her rough-and-tumble image was marred only by her perfect hair and coat, which shed dirt and grass like a duck shed water, and her voice, which tended to squeak.

“Rainbow Dash’s house!” said Scootaloo. It was her answer every year. Scootaloo didn’t have much in the way of family, and Rainbow Dash was something like an older sister to her. Apple Bloom didn’t really understand her situation and hadn’t asked. It sounded nice though. Being an Apple meant being suffocated by family.

“No, I hate her pranks,” said Sweetie Belle. “Remember that imitation thundercloud she made last year? Rarity said she got written up by the Cloudsdale Weather Service.”

“How about the town square? We could go bobbing for apples.”

“Eugh,” Apple Bloom said. “How about Twilight’s house? We’ve never seen her house on Nightmare Night.”

“She’s kind of weird,” said Scootaloo uncertainly. “She likes books.”

“At least it’ll be something new. I don’t want to be where everypony else is tonight.”

They got what she meant as they started heading down the path to Twilight’s house. There was a certain edge to the night air. Amid all the grand costumes and spooky decorations was a certain...alertness. It was like a wasp buzzing around while you were working outside. You didn’t let it stop you. But you had this prickling all over your skin, like you’d jump ten feet in the air if you felt something land on you. Nightmare Night was different when your town had been personally visited by Nightmare Moon only a few months earlier. No pony knew if Nightmare Moon was out for revenge. But if she was, surely she would come to Ponyville, where Twilight Sparkle and her friends lived.

Considering the impression Nightmare Moon had left on the citizens of Ponyville, that of a cackling, booming force of darkness, tall and vengeful and radiating danger, it was hard to imagine that she wasn’t out for revenge. You couldn’t really picture her saying, “Well, sometimes you have to know when you’re beat.”

“At least Twilight doesn’t have anything to be afraid of,” said Apple Bloom. “She beat Nightmare Moon once already. I bet she’s put up real scary decorations.”

But when they got to Twilight’s house, they were disappointed. A few uninspired cobwebs hung from the branches of her treehouse. A couple of plastic spiders failed to alarm anypony. Spike answered the door at their knock and gave them each a carrot and a small booklet on the importance of brushing their teeth.

“Twilight’s idea,” he said apologetically, seeing their expressions.

“Don’t you want to go have fun tonight?” Apple Bloom asked.

“Heck no,” Spike said. “I never get the house to myself. It’s a bubble bath and an early night for Spike.”

“That was disappointing,” Sweetie Belle said as they walked away. “No wonder no pony’s here.”

“Let’s go around back at least,” Apple Bloom said. “We can always head to Fluttershy’s from there.”

There weren’t any more decorations behind Twilight’s house, just a single tall Unicorn peering in through the window.

“Hi!” said Apple Bloom.

The pony jumped into the air like she had felt a wasp land on her and whirled around. Her eyes were dark and wild like a hunted creature, and her horn was long. Her whole body was long. She was even taller than Big Mac, Apple Bloom realized as she looked up and up at the pony in front of them.

She came down with unnatural grace. Her face was hard to see in the darkness; her whole body was a dark color, a purple deeper than Twilight’s.

She had on a cloak with a hood, and two lumps showing underneath on her back. Sacks for candy, Apple Bloom guessed.

There was a darkness about her, a darkness that seemed to suck in the night.

“I’ve never seen you around,” Apple Bloom said. “What’s your name?”

“Lunula,” the mare breathed. With her breath came a rush of cold air. Apple Bloom blinked and squinted against it.

“Were you looking for Twilight Sparkle?” Sweetie Belle asked. “She’s probably with her friends.”

Lunula hesitated. “Friends?”

“Our sisters and their friends. They’ve all got their Elements on, you’ll see ‘em straight away.”

“You’re really tall,” said Scootaloo. “Is that part of your costume?”

“Your sisters?” said Lunula. “Who are your sisters?”

“My sister is Rarity, and Apple Bloom is Applejack’s sister,” said Sweetie Belle, gesturing. Her voice squeaked as Lunula turned her gaze on her. “And, um, Scootaloo isn’t actually Rainbow Dash’s sister, but they hang out all the time.”

“Are your sisters home?”

Apple Bloom hesitated. She had never been told not to talk to strangers. Ponyville was a small town, and the most anypony preyed on fillies was by selling them overpriced candy. But Lunula hadn’t asked “Are your sisters home?” like she wanted to ask them a question or bring something by. There was this bubbly amusement in her voice, a smirk etched across her face like the slash of a knife.

“We should go,” Apple Bloom said. “Come on,” she said to Scootaloo, who was standing there frozen.

“Don’t go!” said Lunula. She sounded so upset that Apple Bloom stopped. “Wait, please. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t scare me,” Apple Bloom lied. “It’s Nightmare Night, that’s all.”

“Isn’t it? I’ve never celebrated it before,” said Lunula. She looked around like the night sky and the trees and the owls were all new to her. “Can you show me how it’s done?”

The three of them shared a look. “Sure,” said Apple Bloom. “First you need a costume.”

“A costume? Whatever for?”

“To look scary. For scaring folks.”

Lunula peered at them. “Is that why you three are dressed so oddly?”

“Scarily,” corrected Sweetie Belle.

“You gotta get in the mood,” Apple Bloom added. “Nightmare Night is sort of a state of mind.”

“Nightmare is not formally a state, it’s barely an organized territory at all,” Lunula said. “What’s so scary about a bumblebee?”

“Um,” said Apple Bloom. “I could sting ya?”

“Could you? And you are a skeleton,” she said to Sweetie Belle. “Very scary. And you….”

“A shadow pony,” said Scootaloo.

“They were called umbras long ago,” said Lunula. “I know lots about them.”

“Are you a historian?” Apple Bloom asked.

“No more than an oak tree is,” said Lunula, looking up at the Golden Oak Tree that Twilight called home. “Creatures like us collect memories like rainwater—but they live to be very old, you know. This is at least as old as the other one.”

“What other one?”

“There’s more than one oak tree,” Lunula scoffed. “But there’s only one Golden Oak Tree. Many great ponies have called it their home. Did you know it was Walras the Bearded who first lived here? He was the greatest wizard of his day.”

“Wow! Do you know any stories about him?” Scootaloo said.

“I know the story of his first love,” said Lunula. “I know about the spell that wove a tapestry from the stars and the grass and the birds in between.”

“Did he enchant them?” Scootaloo asked.

“He wanted to know why we enchant them,” Lunula said. “Shouldn’t they enchant themselves? Did you know that long ago, the Earth didn’t need Pegasi to stamp the water out of clouds? Rain just fell by itself.”

“No it didn’t,” said Apple Bloom. “How could it?”

“By getting very heavy,” Lunula said mildly, “and falling. Try jumping and you’ll see.”

“I want to hear more about Walras the Bearded,” Scootaloo said.

“Shall I tell the story of how he slew the Dragon of Ponedor?”

“Yeah!”

“I don’t think I want to,” said Lunula, and began to walk away.

“Wait!” Scootaloo dashed after her. “I want to hear a story about wizards and dragons. Please? It sounds so exciting.”

Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle caught up with their friend as Lunula turned around. Her eyes were dancing, mischievous and shrewd.

“Do you want my stories? How selfish!—but if you have something to give me in return….”

Scootaloo started rummaging through her bag of treats. “I got a toothbreaker, and a gummy bat, and a peanut butter chew, and—”

“No! I don’t want your candy. I already told you what I want.”

“W-what?” Scootaloo asked.

“A costume, of course.” She looked at Apple Bloom. “It was your friend’s first suggestion.”

Apple Bloom wished she hadn’t said that.

“So,” said Lunula, “I need a costume. What should it be?”

“It’s supposed to be scary,” said Sweetie Belle.

“Oh? But you are a skeleton, which is utterly necessary for ponies to exist, however unglamorous it is. It is a fitting choice to celebrate the namesake of this night, but it isn’t scary.”

“I’m scary,” said Scootaloo, jutting out her small chest.

“You represent an entire species,” said Lunula without even looking. “Do you think all of them were evil?”

She centered on Apple Bloom. “And you are a bee. They can sting, yes, but they are important to life—Earth Ponies in miniature, they help the flowers breed. So I don’t see what’s so scary about any of your costumes.”

“You don’t have to dress up as something scary,” protested Sweetie Belle. “My sister’s going as Marelyn Poneroe.”

“Again?” said Apple Bloom. Sweetie Belle sighed and nodded.

“Is anything scary about tonight?” Lunula asked dryly.

“There’s Nightmare Moon,” said Apple Bloom after a moment. “But my sister and the rest are guarding the town against her. She won’t be able to come back as long as they’ve got the Five Elements of Equilibrium.”

“Guard against Nightmare Moon? Why, she’s the mare of the occasion.”

Apple Bloom had never thought of it that way. “Well, she’s scary. So...so we want her out.”

“But the whole point of the night is to be scared,” Lunula pointed out curiously. “She would be welcome.”

“Because she tried to take over Ponyville and all of Equestria!” Scootaloo cut in. “She was at the NGDP Targeting Festival! It’s okay to be scary on Nightmare Night. But I don’t think she could stop being scary the morning after.”

“Maybe,” said Lunula, “if there was a special night where everypony wore costumes to look scary, she could wear one that made her look less scary, and it would balance out, she wouldn’t look scarier than anypony else.”

“No pony would invite Nightmare Moon,” Scootaloo said.

“Oh, I thought this was her night,” said Lunula airily. “Well, that gives me an idea for a spooky outfit. Will you girls help me make it?”

Apple Bloom had a hunch. “Is it a Nightmare Moon costume?” she guessed.

Lunula looked shocked.

“Of course not,” she said. “I want to look like a princess.”

“A princess,” repeated Apple Bloom.

“Princess Platinum, to be specific,” said Lunula. “Oh, but she was before your time.”

“Oh! I’m Princess Platinum,” squeaked Sweetie Belle. “I’m playing her in the school pageant for Hearth’s Warming Eve.”

“You know your part already?” said Apple Bloom.

“Miss Cheerilee asked me to play her so Rarity’ll do all the costumes for free. She already did mine—it won’t fit you, Lunula, but maybe the crown—”

“Show me,” said Lunula.

So they took her all the way up to the Carousel Boutique, which was beset by ghosts from every corner. The spookiness of the decorations was somewhat undercut by the fact that all the ghosts were wearing fancy dresses with the prices on them advertised as “frighteningly low.”

Sweetie Belle came out a minute later with a dress and a crown on a rack. Lunula started laughing.

“It’s a little small on you,” Sweetie Belle admitted.

“It’s not that. This dress is—” Lunula cut off, laughing uncontrollably. “Oh, how the form changes, yet the spirit remains,” she said finally, wiping a tear from one eye. “It’s perfect. The size is no matter. Give it here.”

Lunula’s horn glowed a dark, swirling purple. The dress changed and grew until it fit her. She drew the dress over her body and let it settle, the hooded robe and the sacks on her back underneath seemingly fading into nothing.

She took the crown too and let it dangle on the base of her horn.

The transformation was stunning. Even Apple Bloom wasn’t sure for a moment whether they were in the presence of a real princess. The purple dress looked positively royal on her, and the white trim around it was like fluffy clouds carrying her through the sky. As for the crown, she pulled it off with practiced ease—when Sweetie Belle had modeled it for Rarity, she tended to forget she had it on and dropped it whenever she bent down. The modeling session had ended when a vigorous shake of her head had sent the crown through a window.

“How do I look?” said Lunula.

“Not very scary,” Apple Bloom admitted.

“But Princess Platinum was very scary. She was raised in a time when Equestria was nothing but ice and snow. Ponies had to be tough.”

“Will you teach me how to play her?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“And tell us stories!” demanded Scootaloo.

“Yes, yes, now where to begin? Come, fillies, let us hasten to the center of the festivities...Nightmare Night will not last but a few more hours. I will probably have to leave town tonight.”

Apple Bloom trailed after them, doubting herself. She had a worrying feeling that there was something off about Lunula. Still, she had sounded sad when she said she would have to leave. Weird as she was, Lunula looked like she was having fun. No pony liked to have their Nightmare Night cut short, Apple Bloom supposed.

“You are summer fillies,” Lunula explained as they walked. “That is what you would have been called over a thousand years ago. You are fillies raised in warm weather, with plenty of food and no predators.”

“Predators?” Sweetie Belle squeaked.

“Ponies used to be hunted like any other creature. The windigos hid in the wind and walked under ice. They were very good at finding ponies.”

“Did Walras the Bearded defeat them?” Scootaloo asked.

“No, this was before his time. This was before Equestria’s time. This was a time when the land was dark and the Sun was slipping away from the earth. It was cold, and getting colder.”

“So who defeated them?”

They were coming onto the main scene of Ponyville’s Nightmare Night. The roads were merry with orange flame, and pumpkins lined the way. The square was full of activities and ponies in outlandish costumes cavorting with the confidence and abandon of those in masks.

Lunula watched a group of six mares push a yellow-coated one in a bunny outfit into a temporary tattoo booth.

(Bees nestled inside their petal beds. A chill wind rustled the leaves. This was Nightmare Night, where anypony could be anypony or anything….)

She turned and smiled at Scootaloo. “I did,” said Princess Platinum.

The tall mare in the royal dress drew stares as she strode into the square. The fillies trotted to keep up, caught in the sweep of her majesty.

“Great costume,” a devil told her.

A ghoul dropped his candy bag when the tall mare looked at him.

A zombie with rotting wings stumbled toward her to give her a spook, and thought better of it.

You could put on a mask and makeup any night. But Nightmare Night was one of those special nights.

Princess Platinum knew there were barriers in the world. She also knew, unlike most learned ponies, that there were divisions in time. Special times, like twilight, when the sun hadn’t quite set and the moon hadn’t quite risen.

Nightmare Night was a special night, when anypony could be anything they wished, and no pony was really scared of anything.

She approached a pool with fruit bobbing at the surface. “What game is this?”

“Bobbing for apples,” said a burly red stallion. He looked so absurd in his apple costume that even Nightmare Night wasn’t powerful enough to suspend her disbelief.

“Is there a price?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, but there’s always a price. There must be.”

“Um….” The stallion was having a hard time concentrating. He was fighting an urge to bow. “A piece of candy?”

“Very well. I just dunk my head in and take?”

The stallion was about to warn her to take her crown off or risk it falling in when the princess’s head flashed. The water rocked, and she had an apple in her teeth.

“I’ph goo’,” she said, taking a bite. “These are your apples?”

“Ee...eeyup.”

“What would you dream of, if you could dream of anything you wished?”

No apple had ever considered a question so gravely. “My parents, I reckon.”

Princess Platinum concentrated. A small piece of candy in a silver wrapper fell into his hoof.

“Don’t eat it all at once,” she warned. “Take a bite with each phase of the moon.”

She walked away. A bonfire rose above the square; a clown and a fencer ran away from it, giggling. In their wake brilliant orange fire spiked and sent pops of flame into the night.

“Watch,” said the princess to the young skeleton, who had caught up to her. Her horn flared, and the fire blazed up thirty feet into the air, sending green and purple smoke billowing out.

Ponies clapped and cheered. A door opened, and Walras the Bearded came out to see the commotion. She looked at the blazing fire, and then at the tall mare.

“Hey!” she said. “I recognize you.”

Lunula swallowed.

“Yeah,” said Twilight Sparkle. “You’re Princess Platinum. Great costume!”

Lunula steeled herself. She had come here tonight for a reason, she reminded herself. She had come to give something to this mortal mare who had deposed her.

Concentrate, she told herself. Remember why you are here. Don’t let the night take you away.

But while it was a princess’s walk that took her near the lavender Unicorn, it was Princess Platinum who spoke.

“Walras the Bearded. How we would have danced, had we met.”

Walras grinned uncertainly. “I didn’t know princesses were so forward.”

“Those who are winterborn know how to make the most of their time.”

“Nightmare Night’s not a night for dancing.”

“But the holiday it grew out of is. The dance of death. It was one of the first really effective weapons against the windigos.”

“You want to dance with me?”

“Are all summer ponies so hesitant?” Princess Platinum took Walras’s hoof. “Or are you embarrassed in front of your friends?”

A bunny rabbit, an actress, a high-speed trader, a fuzzy-headed aberration of pinkish hues, and an off-color apple blinked at them from the entrance of the booth. They all wore brilliant crystals on their chests.

Walras’s smile grew fiercer and more joyous. “No—never. We’ve been through too much for that.”

Princess Platinum led her toward the square. The bonfire rose over them as the princess took the young wizard by the hoof. Her other hoof found the wizard’s hip.

“Do you remember this old song?” she said as they danced. The leaves were rustling, the fire popping.

Walras the Bearded stumbled over unfamiliar steps. “I know about it,” she said. “Unicorns are gifted with time, as Earth Ponies are with place, and Pegasi with change.”

Princess Platinum danced like she had danced this dance a thousand times. She closed her eyes and for a moment let the music of the night carry her. She could hear the roots and flowers singing for water, and the distant percussion of the burning stars, and the gentle strum of the far currents, the piano tapping of rain on the horizon, all these things.

“What is equilibrium without the passage of time?” she murmured. “A stone rolls to a point and stops; in time, it changes, and comes to rest. The greatest riddle and the simplest puzzle are but two different sizes of dress, and the latter may be stretched to fit a pony who is master of it.”

“Does every star have its Alicorn?” Walras the Bearded asked.

“Not every star needs one.”

“Then that’s the puzzle, isn’t it?”

“Dance,” commanded Princess Platinum, all skirt and pride and glittering crown.

In the presence of two puissant mares filled with the magic of Nightmare Night, others were pulled into their grasp, like moons into the orbit of a planet spinning in time to an ancient cosmic song. Apple Bloom found Scootaloo and grabbed onto her.

“This is some kind of magic,” she gasped. “Can’t you feel it? The air’s so cold.”

The umbra tugged away from her, joining a growing circle of ponies in motion. “Come on! It’s the only night of the year—”

She disappeared into the whirl of bodies. Apple Bloom ducked and found Sweetie Belle.

“Come on,” the skeleton squeaked. “Our sisters are dancing too.” And she took the bumblebee’s hoof and brought her into the circle, and the purple smoke rising from the bonfire joined the night sky.

Partners changed, and no pony was keeping track, but somehow Princess Platinum and Walras the Bearded found themselves together again. It was nearly midnight, and while the festivities might continue into the morning, it would, technically, no longer be Nightmare Night.

They were getting very close together, until with a bump Princess Platinum and Walras the Bearded were snout-to-snout. Walras the Bearded’s eyes widened—Princess Platinum opened her mouth to say something—

—a cesium atom shivered, and it was 12:00 a.m.

Twilight stumbled back and fell at the sight of the mare growing over her, dress ripping off as a cold blackness grew over her coat. Her dark wings spread out like the shadows of creeping wolves.

“No!” Twilight shrieked, and tried to scramble away. Nightmare Moon lazily reached out a hoof and pinned her to the ground.

“Hello again,” she said. Her voice was like the lingering smoke after a fire.

Twilight’s horn glowed purple. She tried to teleport, and felt something catch in her horn, the magic snatched away: She blurred momentarily and remained pinned under Nightmare Moon’s hoof.

“Twilight!” said Rainbow Dash, moving forward with her Element. Something black flashed by her face so fast that she didn’t even react. She heard the sound of air rushing into a vacuum and felt a faint sense of pressure; the spell had obliterated everything it had touched. Rainbow Dash reared back and felt her heart thump with fear.

“Don’t,” said Twilight. “We can’t fight an Alicorn.”

Nightmare Moon cackled. She surveyed the astonished and panicked townsfolk: Twilight’s pathetic friends, various dumbfounded ponies in costume, and three pale-faced fillies looking guilty and afraid.

To the east the sun was already cresting over the horizon, rising unnaturally fast.

“Give it up,” Twilight said. She had seen the sun as well. “Princess Celestia knows you’re here. If you try to take the Elements—”

Nightmare Moon leaned down and whispered into Twilight’s ear. Twilight’s eyes widened. Then Nightmare Moon raised a hoof, placed it with deliberation, and smiled at Twilight, who had just a moment to realize what was going to happen. Nightmare Moon pressed down hard with her hoof on Twilight’s ribcage, in the same spot they had fractured in the Everfree Forest only a few months ago. Twilight made a pained squeaking noise, that of a helpless creature drawing in breath just as it became impossible to do so.

Doubled over in pain, Twilight only heard the loud crackas Nightmare Moon teleported away.

Her friends rushed over to her. Fluttershy pushed them out of the way and began to examine her.

“It’s the same spot,” Twilight gasped.

“Shh,” Fluttershy said. “Nothing seems punctured,” she said after a moment. “Twilight, I’m going to turn you onto your injured side. Breathe, okay?”

“The next time Nightmare Moon shows her face,” Applejack began angrily.

“No,” Twilight wheezed. “If she wanted to kill me, I’d be dead. It was a stupid plan. My fault.”

Fluttershy sent Rainbow Dash racing to her house and back, returning with bags of ice and a bowl of what smelled like powdered willow bark. Fluttershy stirred the bark up in a cup of water and fed it to Twilight.

With the adrenaline from the violent attack, Twilight was in pain but could focus. She focused on her mistakes and on what the other ponies needed to know if Nightmare Moon came back. “I’m so stupid, we could never defend against her by just waiting. The Elements have to be focused and aimed, or else they just happen, you don’t use them—” Her voice trailed off, getting weaker, her flank shuddering up and down.

“Breathe slower, deeper,” said Fluttershy.

“It looked like she said something to you,” Rainbow Dash said. “What’d she want?”

Twilight took a deep breath, wincing in pain. “Oh, um, nothing. Just that if I figured out how she defeated Princess Celestia and the One Bank, she’d give me a bad dream as a special present.”

“I never thought I’d say this, but don’t accept that present,” said Pinkie Pie, fiercely protective. “Don’t let her turn you into a gray economist, remember?”

“I won’t,” Twilight said. “Thanks, everypony.”

There was a bit of commotion as the rest of the town tried to panic in different ways. It wasn’t organized, like a good riot or a proper mass hysteria, and so it was just a lot of noise and ponies bumping into each other. Mayor Mare, who was wearing, for whatever reason, a multi-colored afro wig, reasserted order.

“Twilight, are you okay?” she asked. “I thought you and your friends were watching out for Nightmare Moon.”

“She got the jump on me,” Twilight admitted. “Sorry.

“Did no pony see her come in?” said Mayor Mare.

“Um,” said Apple Bloom. Everypony looked at her. “Oh, phoo,” she said. “Why do I gotta be raised by the most honest sister in the world?”

“You knew?” said Applejack.

“Kind of?” said Apple Bloom, squeaking a lot like Sweetie Belle.

“Why didn’t you tell anypony?”

“We wanted to show her the magic of friendship?” said Sweetie Belle. The faces on their sisters told them this was not a winning try.

“We’re grounded, aren’t we?” Apple Bloom sighed.

“Eeyup.”

“Oui.”

Scootaloo was waiting nervously by her friends. Everypony looked at Rainbow Dash.

“What?” she said. “I’m not her sister.”

Scootaloo looked crestfallen.

“Oh, all right,” Rainbow Dash said. “You’re grounded. Happy?”

Scootaloo broke out into a wide grin. “Yes!”

“Why is she here?” Apple Bloom demanded.

Twilight levitated a sponge from the bucket. She was sitting down, but unbandaged, manually holding an ice pack to her damaged ribs. “I messed up last night too. It’s only right that I share in the punishment.”

“I tried to talk her out of it,” Applejack said. “But she kept insisting, and I reckon it’s the same as volunteering to give me a hoof, which I always do appreciate. Anyway, have fun cleaning the old barn, you four.”

Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, and Twilight worked in silence for a few minutes, scrubbing and sponging and moving out of the way to let Sweetie Belle come by with the mop.

“Tell me about her,” Twilight said suddenly.

It took Apple Bloom a moment to understand. “You mean Nightmare Moon?”

“She said her name was Lunula,” Scootaloo said.

“Then tell me about her,” Twilight said. “Tell me about Lunula.”

The fillies all shared a look.

“Well,” Apple Bloom said, “she was really tall, and really scary, but also kind of sad. And she told us things….”

“Chef’s Vegetable Garden, done with sous vide and a selection from the chef’s personal garden.”

“Oooh, gimme!”

It was lunchtime in San Franciscolt's finest gastropub, and the barstools and the fancy upholstery on the booth sofas were empty. A lone Unicorn ate at the bar. Or rather, she had been served at the bar, but first she had to take a picture.

“This is...perfect.” One eye closed and tongue sticking part of the way out, the lime-green mare snapped a picture of the crystal glass and its carefully arranged balance of carrots, beets, rhubarb, onion, peas, and flower petals, all drizzled with balsamic vinegar, and with some sort of rehydrated gelatin delicately placed in the middle that spread across the beautiful assortment in a sort of honey-ooze effect when she touched her fork to it.

It was actually the sexiest thing she had ever seen.

“I love it I love it I love it!” she squealed, and then silenced herself with a mouthful. Her eyelids fluttered and her body slumped in her seat. Shivering with delight, she took another bite, and another, teasing the flavors apart with her tongue, dancing with the delicate interplay of ideas and sensations in every new mouthful until it was suddenly, horribly gone.

Gamma Glisten leaned over the counter, gasping. “Olive, dear, that was delish. What’s next? I can’t wait!”

Olive Gourd was one of the most successful and inventive nouveau chefs in Equestria. His menu changed every day, and he published a new cookbook every year. He supposed he should have counted himself lucky that the chief executive economist of the Daughter bank of San Franciscolt was a regular customer.

“Bread and apple pudding in a sweet sauce,” he called out from the kitchen. He loaded up the plate and gave it to the waiter.

Gamma clapped her hoofs at the sight of the immaculately arranged desert. If she minded that she was the only pony in a successful restaurant during what should have been the busiest hour of the day, she gave no sign.

It wasn’t Gamma’s mannerisms that kept the restaurant empty. It was the bugs. There were bugs clutching the banister and lurking in the rafters. They gathered on the roof and on the texting wires that hung across the street, messages whirring down the lines. (Anyplace hip in San Franciscolt had a paybox where you could send a text message to anywhere in the city.)

They only looked like bugs from a distance. Up close they resembled miniature ponies with delicate butterfly wings. They were called Breezies, and Gamma had brought them with her to San Franciscolt.

They waited on carts and carriages. They alighted on rooftops and street poles. They swarmed in the air and warred with the bees, having already scared off much of the local bird population.

They watched along rain gutters and observed from windowsills. They listened on railings and the backs of chairs. When it rained, they found perches on the stretchers under open umbrellas, smiling and drying their wings and wringing out their manes.

You could only get away from them by going inside, and that was if you had windows closed. Otherwise, the Breezies heard and saw everything that happened in San Franciscolt.

Gamma Glisten was the one they reported to.

The windows of Olive Gourd’s restaurant were open. This was very unusual in San Franciscolt ever since Gamma had arrived, but ponies opened their windows when Gamma visited. Otherwise she would know you wanted your windows closed while she was there, and then she would wonder why, and then her Breezies would find out and tell her. And then Gamma would take “the most logical next step,” which always ended up being painful for those being stepped on.

If it had just been that Gamma was in the restaurant, it would have been packed full of customers at this hour. But the windows were open. It was dark and deserted, except for Gamma’s spot at the bar.

Just then, a pony in a hood walked in. He walked past the bar and to a dimly lit booth in the back. The waiter came by with a menu, but the pony waved him away.

Gamma looked over, but she wasn’t done with her meal, and she wasn’t going to rush this beautiful lunch.

“I want another cocktail,” she said. “Something sour, after that sweet dessert.”

The waiter brought her something pale green and fizzy, along with a small plate of finely sliced mint hay, compliments of Olive. Only after finishing both, and leaving a tip, did Gamma slouch over to the hooded pony in the back of the restaurant.

“Everypony knows I’m here,” she murmured. “The windows are open. So you’re not exactly being subtle, whoever you are.”

“I’m sorry, miss, but you’re only alone when you’re in a place like this. Not my fault.”

“Miss? Who are you?”

He pulled back his hood. Gamma groaned at the young, vaguely familiar face.

“I’m Acoustic Shear, miss—”

“It’s ma’am, not miss.”

“Sorry, mi—ma’am, I’m in your engineering group.”

“Why are you wearing a hood like that?”

His cheeks turned red. “I, I want to be one of your spies, ma’am.”

“Then dress normally!”

“But, but….” His face looked horribly conflicted. “But it’s not cool, ma’am!”

Patience, Gamma told herself. “What do you want? I was enjoying my lunch break.”

“It’s about your mission, miss—”

“Ma’am.” He was probably three or four years older than her.

“Sorry, ma’am. It’s about your mission. I believe in it. I want to help make Equestria great again!”

Gamma hid a smile. “That’s the goal. So what did you want to tell me?”

He leaned forward. “We just got the plan from Accounting last week. I’ve been looking over it, mi—ma’am. It won’t work!”

“How do you know?”

“I’m an engineer, m—”

“Stop. You know what? You don’t have to call me anything.”

He swallowed and rocked nervously in his booth, looking confused.

“Why are you telling me this here? Why isn’t my Head of Engineering telling me?”

“He doesn’t know, m—um, um. He doesn’t know. Only us on the bottom know, because we’re trying to figure out how to make it work.”

“So your whole team knows?”

“No pony is saying it. But we all know, I think.”

Gamma leaned back, chewing on the tip of her hoof. “Darn,” she finally said. “I didn’t think it would be obvious.”

“Ma’am? Sorry.”

She sighed and wiped her eyes. Maybe it was the three cocktails sloshing inside her, but she felt tired and incautious. No reason she couldn’t explain just a little to this overeager engineer, especially if it kept him from pulling another stunt like this one.

“Of course the plan won’t work. Caliponia is enormous. We can’t move the whole thing. Not at a reasonable cost, anyway. I checked.”

“Then—then what is the plan?”

“The plan? To move a giant island? There is no plan. That’s not—” She shook her head in frustration. “That’s not how this works.”

“It, it could work, I have some suggestions—”

“No. It couldn’t work. It’s not even about cost. Right now the problem is just the dead water between Caliponia and the mainland. It’s expensive just to ferry ponies across that turgid sludge, let alone push a whole island through it. It’s like trying to shove a boulder through a tar pit. But if we do push hard enough? Then some new barrier will arise. Here—let me just show you.”

She concentrated. Thin green rays beamed out of her horn and onto the table, showing a map of the world. Globes were rarely seen in Equestria, but there was one in the Canterlot library, and another in Princess Celestia’s office, along with scale models of the Sun and Moon. Between the princess’s observations and old records from long ago, they had a pretty good idea of what the Earth looked like.

“Equestria is here,” she said, pointing to a continent that looked like a bird, its beak pointing into the ocean and its wing stretched back behind it, while it perched on a lumpy ice cream cone. “The wall between us and Mexicolt is here.” She drew a line through the bird’s upper thigh. “Up here is the Crystal Empire, where Princess Cadance rules. And here is Caliponia,” she wiggled a piece on the end that looked like a feather had fallen off the bird’s back in flight.

“This world’s lands are separated by barriers that are virtually impassable,” she continued. “They say that if a Pegasus tries to fly over the great wall between us and Mexicolt, she will run out of sky before she runs out of wall. If you try to cross the ocean here to go to these little islands, or down this way, or across to this huge landmass, there are typhoons and giant sea monsters and unnatural whirlpools and winds. If you try to cross the ocean this way, there are virulent, fast-acting diseases and tremendous storms.

“There are barriers between nations. The Crystal Empire is the only known case in history when the barriers were successfully brought down, crossed, and prevented from arising one more. It took an Alicorn to do it, and her reward was to contend with the darkness waiting there. Technically I guess Princess Celestia and Princess Luna did it too for Equestria, but at least we were already living here, kind of. Fighting the windigos was the easiest challenge we’ll ever face. Meanwhile, every attempted voyage across the ocean has turned around and come back defeated or not come back at all. Practically every historical explorer of note has tried to get past the Wall of Mexicolt and every single one of them has failed.

“I know Princess Celestia has been to Mexicolt. There’s gold there, I think, but I don’t think she ended up bringing any back. That’s it for international travel. There are barriers between nations, and they do not come down without a fight.

“Now Caliponia is separated from the Equestrian mainland, because of tectonic plates and fault lines and so on. I would like to make Equestria whole once more—to make it great again, as you said. But while Caliponia may have drifted apart from Equestria due to mere physics, there are magical barriers now. A ship probably couldn’t pull the island back to Equestria no matter how large.”

Acoustic Shear looked terribly sad. “Then why the plan?”

“Just a decoy so it looks like I’m on the wrong track. I have very competitive sisters, okay? I will replace it with something more opaque, and you will say nothing about this. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You know I can find anypony anywhere, anytime.”

“I said okay.” He looked hurt, like he was offended at the suggestion that he might betray her.

Then he looked thoughtful. “Um, ma’am? Sorry.”

“What?”

“What is the real plan to rejoin Caliponia to the Equestrian mainland?”

Gamma looked at the map of the Earth glittering in bright green on the table.

“I need to know how they tamed the Crystal Wastes long ago,” she mused. “Princess Cadance won’t say, and it’s not in any book in the library.”

She looked thoughtful, and brushed her golden-brown mane, with a thin silver stripe running through it, out of her eyes. Acoustic Shears, for whom this mane was as much a reason to support Gamma’s plan as the sheer grandiosity of it, swallowed.

“It’s not a matter of power, or she wouldn’t need us,” Gamma went on. Acoustic Shears didn’t know who “she” was supposed to be. “There’s got to be a puzzle to it.” Gamma mumbled something that sounded like “send ships tragic,” which didn’t make much sense to Acoustic Shears.

“Well, enough of that, anyway,” Gamma said. The map disappeared from the table.

“Shouldn’t I tell the others something?”

“Did you tell them you were coming here?” He shook his head. “Then it’s fine, I know how to keep a group of nerds occupied. Now get out of here.”

“But—”

“Get out of here. You wasted half my lunch break.”

When he had gone, Gamma made an odd clicking-rustling noise with her mouth. It was barely audible, but at once three Breezies floated down from where they had been waiting in the rafters.

“Extra eyes on him,” Gamma instructed. “Give him a little...reminder if he seems like he’s going to run his mouth.”

The Breezies waved and fluttered off.

Gamma went back to the bar. Olive Gourd was standing by her stool with a bag.

“These are some housemade cookies, clove and cinnamon and dried fruit.”

Gamma took the bag. “Thanks, Olive, you know I’ll be recommending you to all my friends.”

He watched her go, then made a face at the waiter, who shrugged. Gamma Glisten tipped like she had a printing press in her attic.

Olive climbed up on the table and watched Gamma until she was out of sight. “Close the damn windows,” he said to the waiter. “I hate those damn Breezies.”

One of them stared reproachfully at him.

“What?” he said. “I’m a chef, we’re high strung. It’s practically a compliment.”

Like birds at a thunderclap, the Breezies took off from the roofs and wires. They formed a swirling, swarming vortex around Gamma, a storm of wings and wind and a thousand chattering voices. Most of it was protective, a gale around their guardian and master to ward off any attack—a single Breezy could create upwards of one thousand pounds of force with a flap of its wings. A smaller, secondary swarm flew around Gamma within the vortex, whispering rumors in a strange, high-pitched language.

Gamma puffed air out her mouth, and the swarm dispersed to the roofs and rain gutters and lamp poles.

Something that silly engineer had said kept playing in her head. Make Equestria great again. Gamma laughed out loud as she texted at the post for a taxi. Equestria wasn’t half of her ambitions. Maybe Princess Celestia was content to rule over the same country she always had. As for Gamma, she had seen the maps of the world.

She wanted more.

It was Hearth’s Warming Eve, and fillies were crying.

At the center of the jingle-belled, green-and-red-wreathed commotion was a lavender-coated Unicorn with a pink stripe running through her mane and a hoof in her mouth.

“What?” said Twilight. “It’s a school play. I’m trying to be educational.”

“What is going on?” demanded Cheerilee, the school teacher, striding over in a fuzzy red hat. She had organized the school pageant depicting the story of Hearth’s Warming Eve—the story, that is, which was a lot less bloody and speciesist than the history.

Twilight had been trying to explain this, which was why fillies were crying.

“She asked me what I thought of the play,” Twilight said desperately. “I didn’t know she would start crying.”

“What happened, Diamond Tiara?” Cheerilee asked the crying filly in a much kinder tone than she’d spoken to Twilight with.

The filly choked out her answer in between huge sobs that, in Twilight’s opinion, were really unwarranted by the situation. “I—asked—Ms. Twilight—if she liked—the play and—she said NO! She said—” here the filly in question sucked in several deep breaths, “that lots of p-p-ponies had DIED and our play was in—in—in—”

“Inaccurate,” said Twilight helpfully. Cheerilee shot her a glare.

Diamond Tiara struggled to catch her breath. “And she said we left out how Princess Platinum and Stormfeather the Pegasus had a fair—”

“An affair,” corrected Twilight.

“And she said when Commander Hurricane found out, she cut off his—”

“That’s enough,” said Cheerilee. “Go along now, Diamond Tiara, go blow your nose.”

Cheerilee waited until Diamond Tiara was out of sight. She advanced on Twilight until they were snout-to-snout.

“Um,” Twilight began. It was important to take charge of these kinds of confrontations.

“Do you have any respect?” Cheerilee said.

“For wha—”

“It’s a pageant for fillies and colts.” She was moving forward, and Twilight, cross-eyed, was moving backwards, somehow not fast enough to ease the pressure on her snout. “It is not about accuracy. If you can’t keep your comments appropriate and respectful, then I suggest that you keep them to yourself.”

Twilight’s back was against the wall. If Cheerilee kept moving forward, there was going to be some serious snout-on-snout damage.

“Do you understand?” said Cheerilee. Her tone was as sweet as her glare was terrifying.

“Mm-hmm,” squeaked Twilight. Cheerilee snorted and went away.

Twilight turned around and yelped. Diamond Tiara was right there.

“My daddy doesn’t like you,” the filly said. Her coat was a warm pink color, like fresh blood.

“Well….”

“He says the Daughter Bank is Canterlot control. He says Princess Celestia wants to rule everything.”

“The Daughter Bank reduces Canterlot control,” Twilight protested. It honestly hadn’t occurred to her that anypony would think otherwise.

“Daddy says ponies like you who think they can tell others what to do are going to get what’s coming to them.”

“We’re just trying to rebuild,” said Twilight. She felt confused, and sad. She had never been comfortable around fillies, but it was another thing to be disliked by them.

“Well, Daddy says Princess Celestia brought back Nightmare Moon on purpose so that she’d have an excuse to make the Daughter banks,” Diamond Tiara said. “Wasn’t Nightmare Moon her sister?”

“Leave her alone!” said a voice with a familiar Southern twang.

Her rescuers turned out to be the little sisters of her friends. There was Apple Bloom, a yellow, red-headed miniature version of Applejack, and Sweetie Belle, who had a voice that was as clear as glass and cracked just as easily. And there was Scootaloo, she of the chicken wings and nebulous relationship to Rainbow Dash. All three of them were still in their costumes: a tree, in Apple Bloom’s case, a rather overdone Princess Platinum dress for Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo wore a rather fanciful version of a Pegasus raider’s black outfit.

“Pick on somepony your own size,” Scootaloo said to Diamond Tiara, which made Twilight feel just super about herself.

“Yeah, don’t pick on Twilight,” Sweetie Belle said. “She saved the world.”

“That’s what they say,” Diamond Tiara sneered. “How much did Princess Celestia pay your sisters to stay silent?”

Apple Bloom got right up in Diamond Tiara’s face. Twilight started casting about for an adult, and then realized to her horror that she was the adult.

“Get along, children,” she said with about as much force as Fluttershy making a public announcement. They ignored her.

“Say one more word about my older sister and I’ll wallop you,” warned Apple Bloom.

Diamond Tiara was outnumbered. She started backing away.

“Daddy is Filthy Rich, and he has friends,” she said as she backed away. “They’re going to get together and vote for a new Princess. Princess Celestia and all her helpers are going to get what’s coming to them.”

She stuck out her tongue and flounced away.

“Thanks for saving me,” Twilight said.

“It’s okay, not everypony can be brave,” said Apple Bloom. “Lucky for you my sister and her friends were with you in the forest.”

Twilight agreed completely. “Could you please not tell them about this? It’s kind of embarrassing.”

They looked at each other. “Actually, we were hoping you could tell us more about the real history of Hearth’s Warming,” Apple Bloom said.

“It sounded really interesting,” Sweetie Belle added. “Until you talked about Stormfeather, I didn’t even know Pegasi had—”

“They don’t,” Twilight interrupted before she could finish.

“Because we asked Scootaloo, and she doesn’t have a—”

“Yup, I was wrong,” Twilight said quickly. She didn’t usually find it easy to admit that, but she would have challenged Nightmare Moon to a duel if it meant getting past this subject. “So, you want to know the story of Hearth’s Warming?” she asked. They nodded. “Let’s find a place to sit down. It’s long!”

Lots of ponies were eating in the big hall after the pageant. Twilight and the fillies found an empty table that was decorated with gold tinsel and red and green ribbon and sat down at it. Apple Bloom disappeared and came back with a hoofful of candy canes, which she distributed.

Twilight nibbled on the end of hers thoughtfully. “I wasn’t there, but I can tell you the story as it was told to me by somepony who was: Princess Celestia!”

“Wow,” Scootaloo said. “She’s the second coolest pony in all of Equestria!”

“Close enough,” Twilight agreed. “So, the story. Where to begin...you all know the story is about the founding of Equestria. But that’s the end of the story. It begins….

...once upon a time.

It was very cold. The ground was covered with snow and ice. There were no seasons. Seasons hadn’t been invented yet.

In those days ponies lived separately. Unicorns, Pegasi, and Earth Ponies regarded each other as foreigners and guarded their borders jealously. I lived in the Unicorn Kingdom with my sister and our mother.

Under the rule of King Bullion, the Unicorn kingdom was entering an age of prosperity. We mined jewels and ore and forged metals and built radiant spires. We traded our gems to the Pegasi for the fresh water they farmed from the clouds, while they used our crystals to control the lightning from the clouds they lived on. This was in the days when water was still living, the oceans frigid but full of life, but water already did not refresh itself after use, and the snow was hard and unyielding, not like the soft powder you know. And every day, the Pegasi, who were nomadic, roaming wherever the clouds went, had to fly farther and farther to find fresh water.

We bought food from the Earth Ponies, who made tools from the metals we traded them and used them to cut through the deep snow. They found soil, and filled it with life, and green sprouted under their hoofs. The first time I saw dirt, I will never forget. Chancellor Puddinghead sent a container of the stuff as a gift to King Bullion. It was displayed in the center of the city for a while, until life left it. But the Earth Ponies, who lacked the flight of Pegasi and the magical protections Unicorns could muster, were the most vulnerable to windigos, whose hoofsteps were concealed in the howling winds, who walked under ice, who hunted ponies. When the windigos ravaged their fields, Princess Platinum of the First Bank of the Unicorn Kingdom lent them platinum bits at usurious rates.

Princess Platinum was very proud and cruel. She used the bank selfishly, skimming off of every transaction, quoting interest rates she chose for political purposes. Thrice she stymied the efforts of Commander Hurricane to unite the scattered Pegasi under a single military leadership. And she used this power to grow wealthy.

She did not grow popular. The Earth Ponies called her Princess Deficit. The Pegasi dropped eggs on her house. Even many Unicorns resented her—they had no choice but to use her bank, and to accept her rates.

But Princess Platinum was only the focal point of the tensions between the three races. The Earth Ponies were exposed and vulnerable when tending their farms. They suffered the brunt of the windigos’ violence and saw themselves as sacrificing their own lives to sustain the ostentatious lifestyles of ponies like Princess Platinum. Commander Hurricane was growing more aggressive in her attempts to unify the Pegasi, blaming Unicorns and Earth Ponies for their problems—the Pegasi were being assaulted by hail more and more, fillies and colts struck down on their first flights: The windigos, wraithlike in the freezing wind, had learned how to hunt in the sky. We Unicorns, meanwhile, grew more resentful of the envy and criticisms of the others, seeing ourselves as the lynchpin of the pony economy. More and more there were calls for us to close our gates to them, to forbid all trade and contact with the other races. I regret to say that I was among those calling for such things.

It was not like the peace you know now. When a clan of Pegasi….

Twilight stopped talking.

“What?” said Scootaloo. She had been absorbed in the story, along with her friends. “What happened next?”

What happened next was that a clan of Pegasi raided Earth Pony crops. They stole food, which was was worth its weight in platinum, even including the premium for Princess Platinum. Seeing an opportunity, Commander Hurricane offered the injured Earth Ponies her military protection. But the Pegasi sentries abused their position and took food that wasn’t theirs, and they looked down upon the Earth Ponies. A group of Earth Ponies caught two Pegasi sentries in the act of thieving. When the sentries tried to fly away, the Earth Ponies lassoed them. Then they trampled them.

Meanwhile, Princess Platinum asked her father to hold a meeting of the wisest Unicorns, which ended up being a meeting of their best politicians. She asked those assembled what could be done to protect Unicorns from the mercurial Pegasi and ungrateful Earth Ponies, and most of all from the windigos that followed in the wake of every disagreement between them. The prevailing sentiment was that Unicorns needed to be independent from the other kinds of ponies. The Unicorn Kingdom finally closed their borders to trade. Princess Platinum herself used her bank to fund Unicorns as they farmed and gathered water. But the magic to grow crops drained the bank at a steeper rate than lending it to Earth Ponies and Pegasi had. Even though Princess Platinum could control the rate herself, it was steeper no matter what she tried. The walls that her magic protected grew weaker.

War broke out between Pegasi and Earth Ponies. This was just what Commander Hurricane wanted, as she used stories of Earth Ponies lassoing and trampling Pegasi to unite the scattered cloud-clans, the powerful Cirrostrati and the heads of the Cumuloso families all falling under her wing. Chancellor Puddinghead of the Earth Ponies, probably the only fat pony in the world at the time, did something similar, assuming powers befitting a dictator and seeing to it that her foolish relatives, mostly a family of growers of Cruciferae, could grow their crops when and where they pleased, without regard for the ancient compact of crop rotation.

Pegasi were hungering, Earth Ponies thirsted, and Unicorns were doing both. Somehow, even before the added dimension of war, none of the three races could provide for themselves; the sum of their trade had been more than the whole of its parts. And this was not realized, even as Princess Platinum bled her bank dry, as Commander Hurricane burned Earth Pony crops and houses, as Earth Ponies built weapons of war to launch ice and rocks into the sky and used the shattered bones of Pegasi for fertilizer. Foals were born hungry and died hungry. Mothers began saving their thin milk for their older children, who had a chance of being able to survive, and let their hungry foals wail and wail until the cold took them. Everything was falling apart, the fragile equilibrium fraying, more threads being pulled out of its weak stitching than could possibly be sewn in.

Then the windigos attacked. The Unicorn walls collapsed. Frost grew over the soil the Earth Ponies had jealously guarded. The winds themselves turned against the Pegasi, slicing their wings apart with icy razors. And there was blood, so much blood, as the windigos had their fill of us, and hunted us like prey.

We were losing. We were dying. The forces of darkness were winning.

Twilight didn’t say any of that.

Cheerilee was right. These were summer fillies. To darken their eyes, to put ice in their hearts, it was a crime as sure as a selfish thought in winter. For though the windigos were defeated, the winds still howled over distant hills and on the tops of storm-ridden mountains where not even griffons went. Hearth’s Warming Eve was a time of warmth and gentle kindness, of friendship and family and all things good and worth protecting. It was not a time to talk about how ponies used to be and maybe still were, deep down in a part of the brain that didn’t know about comparative advantage and compound interest.

But those were lessons for a different day. A warm day, a bright summer day, when these three were older and could hear, under the sun’s golden rays, of the violence that lurked in the hearts of ponies, and what economists tried to do about it….

“Come on, what happened next?” Apple Bloom prompted.

Twilight fixed a smile to her face. “It’s just like what you performed in the play. All the different kinds of ponies squabbled endlessly. It got colder and colder, and it looked like the windigos were going to freeze everything. But then….”

Princess Platinum was brilliant and very selfish. All ponies were hard in those days, except perhaps my sister. She was as sweet as living water, whatever she became later. But Princess Platinum, though she still did not understand the symbiotic relationship of mutual economic dependence among the pony races, did understand that her remaining wealth would not protect her from freezing to death for much longer. This, to Princess Platinum, was unacceptable. And while I might have hoped that the deaths of many foals would have been equally unacceptable, if not more so, it remains, alas, that ponies are interested only in themselves. And so, to Princess Platinum, the cold was never really as important as her power and her pride until even the thickest blankets could not stop her from shivering at night, until the kernels of black corn that made a meal in those times reached even her dinner table.

She called a meeting of the heads of the races: herself, for King Bullion had died of sickness; the haggard and paranoid Commander Hurricane; and the gaunt, mad Chancellor Puddinghead, who laughed as others might cough or sneeze—she was truly insane, and scared me. I was by Princess Platinum’s side as her advisor, for even in those days I was a powerful sorceress and had a gift for warming. My sister, a shade less powerful and a touch more impersonal, was not there.

Commander Hurricane had brought Stormfeather, whose body was lean, but muscles rippled along his form when he moved. I am no Princess Cadance, but I sensed a change in Princess Platinum, that she was smitten with him, though Commander Hurricane only found out later, and took her revenge, for she prided Pegasi on their wings, and forbade interbreeding, lest some fliers be born out of her control.

Chancellor Puddinghead had brought Smart Cookie. Smart Cookie was as sane as Chancellor Puddinghead was not. She was deeply, deeply sane, and were it not for her presence, all might have been lost.

The meeting devolved into arguments almost instantly. Accusations and denials ran around the room. Stormfeather proposed that we kill the windigos. Commander Hurricane rebuked him for speaking—to be accurate, she struck him—which was fortunate. Princess Platinum defended his position at once, and invited me to speak, to show herself as more open-minded. I conceded that it might be done. Smart Cookie inquired how. In truth I had never thought about it. But I knew there were forces that had once tethered the Earth to its sun, and I conceived that there were spells that could join them once more. Smart Cookie asked more questions, prodding at my knowledge of sorcery and natural history, until it became clear that we could burn the windigos out.

Princess Platinum thought it was mad. This brought Chancellor Puddinghead onto our side. Commander Hurricane was taken with the idea of an assault on the windigos. And Smart Cookie, blessed be she, brought the princess to a revelation that the plan called for Unicorns to do the most important work, for which she would win the highest status. Then the three of us, the three of us who could think, drafted the plan that night, and my sister amended it in brilliant and subtle ways. We four became good friends during the preparations for the final battle. It is a shame what happened to Stormfeather, although he was no less of a stallion for it. As for Smart Cookie, she gave her life on the front lines of the battle. I would have wept for her, but the Sun was hot on our backs at that point, and I could make no tears.

The plan was this: We Unicorns used the last of the platinum to build a tether into the sky, by which we could lasso the Sun. The Earth Ponies tied the knots and made the throw, and the Pegasi monitored it in the sky, watching it past where we could not, and passing instructions for necessary corrections down to us. It worked, and we seized the Sun—though my sister and I had worked out that gold would be better for the task than platinum, and I wove strands of it into the tether.

The Sun was very far away. We pulled, and it nearly yanked us off our hoofs. At first the Earth Ponies and Pegasi were skeptical. But slowly the distant yellow speck began to grow in the sky. It would take one month in all for us to pull the Sun down to the Earth. Once we all had some experience maintaining the tether, Unicorns traded out in rotations for each other so that we could rest. Pegasi and Earth Ponies fed us, and each other, for the windigos had begun to sense the rising warmth, as we knew they would. We were preparing for battle.

Fighting had already begun on the day before the Sun would be close enough to use against the windigos, according to our calculations. We saw the bodies of Earth Ponies and Pegasi carried inside the perimeter, and we hung our heads at the lives given to protect us.

Yet we chose to celebrate. Maybe it was the impending death of all ponykind. Maybe it was a giddiness at the prospect of the end of war. Either we would all perish, or we would live free of predators and cold, those of us who survived.

A tall tree had been felled in the fighting. It was an old tree—all trees were old, young ones were not being born during the bitter cold—and we chose to bring it in and erect it as a symbol of what we were fighting for: a world of green, a world of life. Earth Ponies stabilized it and kept its leaves from drying while we Unicorns decorated it in gaudy colors, and Pegasi placed a miniature sun at the top. We gave each other gifts under the boughs of the tree, to thank each other for what they had sacrificed, and to show we knew them, and cared. That day became Hearth’s Warming Eve, as you know, and the day of the battle was Hearth’s Warming.

The Sun came hurtling down. I was on the team that met the brunt of it, beside my sister, and we felt such heat on our backs that you would not know if a dragon breathed fire over you. Some Unicorns were burned up instantly. I did not hear their cries; my senses were totally consumed by the heat and light all around me.

Our defenses failed. The windigos tore through the perimeter guarding us, but they could not approach us with the Sun so close. Snow was melting, the very ground was catching fire.

The plan was insanity. I think Smart Cookie knew that. I think she wanted to die a member of a united species, going out on their own terms. We could not control the Sun. The windigos turned and fled, quite correctly, because the Sun was dropping well below what we had calculated was the lowest acceptable point. The Sun is much bigger than the Earth. It would have swallowed all of us as easily as you swallow a single oat.

My magic gave out. I felt, but did not hear or see, my sister collapse beside me. We were going to die, and we were taking the planet with us. I, I don’t know how to explain it, but I felt that was quite unacceptable.

My eyes opened, somehow, in the fire. They did not burn. I saw, or maybe I imagined, the Earth Ponies and Pegasi still around us; they did not flee the falling Sun, not that they could have escaped it. I saw my fellow Unicorns, many of them still fighting to hold the Sun back, to balance it in the sky as we knew we must. I saw the connections and felt I understood things in that moment that I have failed to remember ever since. Things that maybe no pony but Walras the Bearded ever knew.

There was a fire inside me that was hotter than anything I'd ever felt. And I rose, and spread my wings, and raised the Sun.

There was no snow, just a steaming pool of water. The windigos were dead and gone. Many ponies were dead as well. The earth was scorched black as far as I could see. It would take us a long time to undo the damage of that day.

I remember that the tree was unblemished by the fire. At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me. But then a small red bird climbed out of a hollow in the tree and made a noise at me. It transpired that there had been a phoenix egg in the tree. A very hot fire is needed for them to hatch. The sun, it seemed, sufficed.

Our problems were far from over. I could raise the Sun, but not lower it. Without the ability to raise the Moon as well, to lower the Sun would have left our land in a timeless zone, neither hot nor cold, neither awake nor asleep. I remained awake for one month while my sister spun a tether out of silver to the Moon. The Moon is much smaller than the Sun, and there was less danger, and we were more experienced. I collapsed for a week, during which I suppose the land saw night for that whole while, and when I awoke my sister had her wings as well. After that we established a rhythm, trading off at dawn and dusk.

We celebrated, and we cried, and for just a short time, politics became easier. Princess Platinum became the de facto leader of the ponies. There were too few of us left to pretend to be different peoples, and we had learned of the danger of doing so. It was agreed that there would be no barriers of trade between ponies. This was the only law I was prepared to enforce myself. Maybe because everypony knew that, I never had to.

Other things happened. Princess Platinum rebuilt her bank. It was discovered, with a bit of trial and error, that she didn’t need to keep all that much platinum in the bank for it to work. Commander Hurricane discovered the Everfree Forest on one of her expeditions. Chancellor Puddinghead died of a heart attack, which on the whole was quite fortuitous. The major grower families who had prospered under her bickered among each other and never accomplished much.

And every year, on the same date, we celebrated Hearth’s Warming Eve under a tree, and swapped presents, and ate sweet things, and remembered the lives lost, and burned fires in our homes, and sang songs, and did everything we could to make the coldest time of year feel warm and alive with possibility.

Because once the world had been cold and dark, and it would be again, but in between was our time….

Twilight stopped, aware that the three fillies in front of her were crying.

“I’m sorry!” Twilight said. “I forgot, you’re fillies, don’t cry.”

“Why didn’t they make FRIENDS with the windigos?” Sweetie Belle squeaked between sobs.

Twilight hesitated. That was a good question. It was the classic Equestrian strategy. It wasn’t like the windigos weren’t thinking creatures.

“They shouldn’t have fought,” Apple Bloom said hotly. “With each other, I mean. That was stupid.”

“They disagreed about things,” said Twilight, “and, and that seemed very important. It’s, it’s hard to explain, it’s like ponies can get locked into certain ideas...or….” She sighed. “War doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you happen to like it. Trade just beats it. So I don’t know, really.”

Twilight thought for a moment. “Actually, trading with the windigos could have worked. We could have figured out how to give mentally retarding birth defects to foals while they’re still in the womb. Then you let them breed and repeat the process, and pretty soon you have a farm of unintelligent ponies. We could have let the windigos eat them, in exchange for leaving the rest of us….”

They stared at her like she was, well, literally proposing to build a farm of mentally retarded ponies for consumption.

“It’s just a hypothetical,” Twilight said. “I, I think they weren’t eating us just for our meat, we wouldn’t have tasted as good if hey look a distraction.”

Applejack, Rarity, and Pinkie Pie walked up in the nick of time. Each of them deposited a gift-wrapped box on the table.

“Merry Hearth’s Warming Eve,” Applejack said, ruffling Apple Bloom’s mane. “What’re the tears for? Shame about you forgetting your line.”

“It wasn’t a line!” Apple Bloom protested. “It was just a cue, only Twist didn’t see it because her costume hasn’t got any per...peripheripheripheral vision. Besides, trees don’t talk.”

“They do if you listen. Open your present.”

“Wow! My very own shovel!”

“It’s proper adult sized, for you to grow into,” Applejack said, a proud tear in her eye. Apple Bloom did her best not to look horrified.

“Frankly, my costume work is gift enough,” Rarity said, pushing a box toward Sweetie Belle. “But to a good cat, a good rat, as they say.”

“No pony ever said any of the things you say,” Applejack said.

“Oh, excuse me,” Rarity said. She put on a rather abysmal attempt at the Apple accent: “To a good rattlesnake, a good rattlesnake. ‘Yeehaw.’ Gravy.”

“Knock that off before somepony thinks we're related,” Applejack grinned.

After Sweetie Belle had carefully unwrapped the layers of ribbon and exquisitely decorated paper (Twilight had learned on her birthday, after helping Rarity dry her tears, not to tear Rarity’s wrapping paper), she opened a pair of thick furry boots.

“They’re the latest fashion,” Rarity assured her. “Right from Canterlot.”

“You can make ‘em better,” Sweetie Belle said, eyeing the boots critically.

“I can’t! I can’t. Haha! Also, it’s them, not em. I see the Apple way of speaking is wearing off on you.”

“That explains where ‘peripheripheripheral’ came from,” Applejack said, sitting down next to Apple Bloom. “Side-vision’s a perfectly good word.”

“It’s a compound word, and no, it isn’t. I mean, it ain’t,” Apple Bloom sighed. “I checked the dictionary. It ain’t in there.”

“Cuz the dictionary’s wrong. I told you that last week when you thought I’d misspelled that word. Why’s environment got a silent ‘n’ in it for?”

“Cuz it ain’t silent, I told you.”

“I don’t hear it.” Applejack nodded at Scootaloo. “Whatcha got there, sugarcube?”

Pinkie Pie was positively bouncing with excitement. She usually was, but she was doing it now as well. “Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy are celebrating Hearth’s Warming Eve with the weather Pegasi who are stuck making snow on the clouds for the rest of us today, but Rainbow Dash asked me to give you this.”

“A scooter!” Scootaloo said. Twilight tutted. It was clearly dangerous, and the gift did not include a helmet, but all three fillies were soon distracted admiring it and planning their first adventure with it once the snow melted.

Twilight was relieved that the fillies seemed to have forgotten all about her story of Equestria’s founding. She excused herself and went outside and found a place to sit. She looked at the sun, which was pale in the winter sky, as if it had taken cold. Could suns get sick? And when they died, what happened to the planets they looked after?

Twilight felt reflective, without really having anything to think about.

Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy were keeping the weather Pegasi company. Twilight wondered who Princess Celestia was celebrating Hearth’s Warming Eve with. For all the time they had spent together, Twilight had never gotten Princess Celestia a present. It didn’t seem proper.

Twilight wondered if anypony gave Princess Celestia a present on Hearth’s Warming Eve.

She thought about how long Princess Celestia had borne the weight of the Sun, and how the last time she had been given a personal, sincere, present was probably over one thousand years ago. And Twilight resolved, then and there, to see Princess Celestia into retirement before long. That was probably what the Daughter banks were for. No doubt her Sisters were already working on their ambitions.

And yet Twilight Sparkle, frankly the best and brightest of them—it wasn’t bragging, her test scores proved it—was living a perfectly mundane life in Ponyville. Going to friends’ houses, eating lunches, planning minor social events. It was amazing how busy such a quiet town could keep you. It was to do with how slowly things moved. The hours oozed over into each other like syrup and fruit juice together on a plate.

How bizarre. She needed to find some ambition again.

“Excuse us? Excuse us. Twilight!”

Twilight was jerked out of her thoughts. “Oh, hello, girls,” she said to the three fillies. “Enjoying your presents?”

They glanced at each other. “Actually, we wanted to know more about the windigos. Are there any more out there?”

“Not in Equestria, I hope,” Twilight said. “But there are more creatures out there like them. There were the umbras in what became the Crystal Empire, before Princess Cadance defeated them. And in other lands to the south and across the ocean, who knows?”

“Who studies them?” Apple Bloom asked.

“Who fights them?” Scootaloo said.

“No pony really,” Twilight said. “Economists, I guess.”

“Then,” said Sweetie Belle, “how do we become economists?”

Princess Celestia looked out her window at the falling snow. She heard carolers on the street below, and the chime of bells from the university tower. The giant tree in the middle of the city was visible from her office, and the star that decorated its top had been personally enchanted by her. Her gift to the city this year was an efficiency-improving adjustment to the trash pickup schedule. It wasn’t as grand or majestic as many might have hoped, but she was trying to make a point about recovering from the Great Succession.

Princess Celestia always put up a small tree in her office for Hearth’s Warming Eve. This year, for the first time in a very long time, there was a present under it. The wrapping was as dark as the night sky, and there was a letter. It read, “Dear Sister, I will Destroy You! Hahaha!!! Love, Nightmare Moon.”

She hadn’t opened the present yet. It would probably explode, anyway.

She wondered what Twilight Sparkle was doing. Now that was a pony who knew how to organize a proper Hearth’s Warming Eve.

Princess Celestia remembered the flowers they had picked after the final battle with the wendigos. Orange-and-yellow-mottled with black spots, they had sprung up out of the black and scorched ground, exploded out of their seeds and budded and bloomed in a moment by the fiery sun. They didn’t grow any more, unless you were willing to set fire to a lot of things, but Princess Celestia kept a small patch of them in a private garden.

Finally, there would be an occasion to pick them again.

“One week,” she cooed to Philomena, the phoenix who was perched on her table. “I want you to do something for the celebration. I have it all planned out.”

The bird bothered the flaming feathers of one of its wings, then began pecking a toy rat.

Princess Celestia watched it smolder. After a while she got up and closed the blinds to the window and turned off the lights. In the darkness she watched the phoenix’s light burn, and remembered Princess Platinum.

Before the contradiction between light and dark was a metaphor, it was a fact.

All metaphors are the shadows of facts. But when you clear away the shadows, what comes is not the clarity of light. Because something was causing the shadow, and you got rid of it.

Whoops….

Twilight Sparkle’s first choice wasn’t a matter of great significance. Her mother had dangled a pair of jangly objects over her crib, and Twilight had reached for one.

She hadn’t gotten it. Her mother had been looking away and just kept shaking them. But even then, Twilight was a pony who knew what she wanted.

Twilight was a frustrated baby. Everypony commented on how cute she was to her parents, but they did so with a stretched smile, for Twilight was quite an ugly baby. She was too fat in some places and not fat enough in others. Her mane sat wrong on her head, like a giant feather sticking out of a tiny hat. And there was something unnerving about her eyes. They made ponies feel sized-up, even judged, by a gurgling purple pile of fat and hair.

Her mother said to her father once, “There’s something not quite right about Twilight. She stares at me. I know she’s too young to, you know, think. But I can’t help but feel that she is staring.”

“Foals stare,” her father had suggested.

“Not with intent,” her mother said. She had always wanted three foals. Twilight was her first, and she would be her last. Even two of them staring at her like Twilight did would be too much.

Her parents felt outmatched for Twilight as she grew into a filly, like a well-meaning couple whose foal had been swapped out for a baby alligator in the hospital. Twilight was not a rebellious child. But her body grew out of one awkward phase and into another. Just as her hair started to sit right on her head, her knees began sticking out at jarring angles. She was more cube than pony when she walked—she called herself Cubit for nearly six months and wouldn’t answer to anything else.

Feeding Twilight was always frustrating. She never ate carrots until one day she did, only to abandon hay the very next day. She developed heretofore unnoticed allergies that were gone in twenty-four hours, and she seemed to be susceptible to catching a cold on a moment’s notice, whereupon she would insist on drinking hot apple tea for dinner and nothing else, regardless of whether they had any. One day Twilight’s mother gave up and bought a big box of tea bags to keep in the pantry. Twilight’s condition never came up again, and when she did catch a cold once a year or so, she ate soup and pudding quite reasonably.

Twilight had too many interests. She took notes on everything. She was obsessed with taking notes. She tallied how many hours she slept, what she ate and the number of bites it took to eat it, where she sat and for how long. She counted the words ponies spoke and broke them down into letters and syllables and then wrote up an advisory note for her parents telling them helpful ways to change their speech patterns to use more vowels and fewer consonants. Consonants, Twilight argued, were a stress on the tongue and lips, and doctors didn’t tell you this because they were after your money. (To say that Twilight hated going to the doctor would be like saying Nightmare Moon hated Princess Celestia—accurate, but frightfully insufficient.)

The only peace Twilight’s parents could ever get in the house was when Twilight was reading at the library. Fortunately, she was at the library a lot, and they encouraged her to spend as much time there as possible by getting her a library card and letting her check out anything she wanted. The librarian soon became fond of the awkward, jerky lavender Unicorn who would spend entire days sitting at a table in the far corner with a pile of books and a small bag of apple slices. After she tried engaging the filly in conversation, this impression quickly flipped: Twilight was arrogant, ungrateful, had seemingly no control over the decibel level of her voice, and would ask a question and then run on through with some tangent without pausing for a response, or indeed, breath.

She was also distressingly nervous. The librarian found it uncomfortable to watch her up close, all jerks and tics—her ear would twitch one way while her tail swished the other, and her mouth would spill over with words as she rushed to correct whatever imperceptible error she seemed to think somepony else would detect in her. The librarian suspected abuse at one point, but the fear that she might be asked to take in Twilight for a while stayed her from any investigation. It was cruel and selfish, perhaps, but few could take those eyes that bored into your soul and then still worry what that filly did to herself when she looked in a mirror.

Twilight eventually grew into her body, like her alien brain was finally learning how to wear its horse shell. Her proportions evened out, her hair started to make sense on her head. If she still talked too fast, at least she was coherent: The traffic jams of speech that got stuck in her mouth until they built up and overflowed were getting rarer and rarer.

But while her brain was learning to be a pony, the ponies around Twilight were finding it harder to accept Twilight’s brain. The way her eyes diced you up and valued your parts, the way she moved from warm to cold when she wanted something from you or didn’t—her personality was like that one week when Princess Celestia had the flu and kept jerking the sun around every time she sneezed—her arrogance, and even more grating, her power and genius to back up every brag, or maybe she thought of her bragging as honesty, which really grated....

It wasn’t a mystery why she didn’t have any friends, a fact that Twilight’s parents had twice been called to the school to discuss with Twilight’s teacher and the principal. It was a mystery why they hadn’t all ganged up and killed her.

So Twilight’s acceptance to Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns came as a relief to her parents. It was a boarding school. Year round. They were very proud, of course. Very proud. The full scholarship helped.

And Twilight was very excited, spilling over with joy, and at the same time more seized with worry than ever. She insisted on reading in the bath now, using magic to keep the book out of water. Twilight’s mother had never seen Twilight endanger a book before—she had seen Twilight trip once while reading and walking at the same time, and rather than land on the book, Twilight had twisted over so that her body protected the volume from damage. But Twilight said reading in the bath gave her motivation to get stronger to ensure the safety of the book. And she did not get so much as a single soap bubble on any of her books.

So Twilight would be going, which was wonderful for her parents—wonderful that she was going to get an excellent education, of course. And they would be very sad when she left, for she would be staying at the school in Canterlot except on holidays.

Twilight’s application had been accepted at the end of the spring semester. A long summer stretched ahead. It now included a baby dragon. They hadn’t been expecting that. A pony from the palace had come with special instructions about it, and Twilight was taking responsibility, which meant that there was now always a fire-snorting lizard perched on her back while she went about her unpredictable routine. But there was light at the end of the tunnel.

At least Twilight was spending most of her time at the library.

If her parents expected Twilight to not fit in at her new school for gifted Unicorns, they were wrong. Or at least, they were right for the wrong reasons.

For most fillies and colts, their first and most traumatizing experience at Princess Celestia’s school was the realization that they were no longer the top of the class. Instead of effortlessly being the smartest pony in their entire school, it now took real work just to keep up with everypony else.

But one pony still had to be the best, and that pony was Twilight. She was effortlessly at the top of her class, although she worked hard, just on her own projects. She invented a new language and wrote an essay in it. She spent an entire day using only three legs to walk. She practiced teleportation spells until her classmates complained that the constant flashes of lavender light gave them headaches.

If anything, though, Twilight was less sure of herself than before. Her arrogance was checked, but not by the company of fillies and colts nearly as smart as she was. Only one thing could distract Twilight from her latest obsession or game at school, and it was not her peers or teachers.

Some of the fillies began to notice the way Twilight’s head snapped around whenever Princess Celestia walked by. Princess Celestia didn’t run the school in an active way, but she was around often enough, walking through the halls and smiling at fillies, occasionally talking to one, asking if they were enjoying their classes and making sure the students felt comfortable letting her know if they thought a basilisk was creeping around in the school pipes or if one of their teachers was a werewolf.

It seemed to them like Twilight was avoiding Princess Celestia. She shrank back in the hallways behind others lest she be addressed by the princess. She didn’t volunteer to be one of the presenters for a class project to the princess at the end of the semester.

But Twilight would stare at the princess when she was around, and then she would go to her dorm in the evening and look at herself in the mirror. It was starting to have a strange effect on the filly.

“I can’t talk to her until I’ve read this difficult book,” she would tell herself. And then she would read it. “I’ll have nothing at all to say to her until I master this advanced spell.” And mastered it soon was. But each peak she climbed only lifted her above the fog to see another. She might as well have been running toward infinity.

Simple Pleasure beamed at the fresh new crop of Gifted Unicorns. Every year, she took the new class on a tour of the One Bank at the end of their first semester. This year they were going to see the Gold Room.

It had taken years to get approval to visit the Gold Room. Usually the tour stuck to the approved parts of the Bank: the entrance, the exit, and the gift shop. Admittedly, the gift shop was pretty great. You got to spend fake money and experience inflation and deflation in real time. The artificial economy took you through speculative booms, spectacular busts, and then it gave the visitors control of the artificial money supply to try to get the economy on track. Simple Pleasure let the fillies take turns being central bankers. Every year somepony went for pure destruction, and the chaos was always glorious to behold, especially when some of the other fillies were bright enough to pool their resources and fight back.

“Can I have your attention, everypony!” she said. It took several more iterations for everypony to quiet down. Getting a group of restless children to be quiet was a matter of finding something else to hold their attention. For Gifted children, it was as simple as asking a question.

“Can anypony tell me when the Bank was first established?” she asked.

“One thousand, four hundred and eighty-six years ago,” a filly immediately answered.

“Very good!” said Simple Pleasure, putting a note of surprise into her voice. “I’d forgotten this was a class of Gifted Unicorns.”

This earned quite a lot of pleased laughter. Simple Pleasure knew that many of these fillies were here because they didn’t fit anywhere else. Too smart, too weird, too reclusive, and often too dedicated to peculiar interests to form bonds with the other ponies their own age or even with their own parents and siblings. Princess Celestia seemed determined to find and gather not simply the best Unicorns but the ones who were struggling to find their place. Undervalued, that was the word, it was how an economist sought out opportunities.

After a tour, there were always one or two fillies who came up and spoke to her. They thanked her for being an adult who treated them, not like they were normal, because they didn’t want that, but like they were...natural. Like nothing had gone wrong for them to be the way they were. Like they could be accepted, like how a family was supposed to. Unconditional love—most of these fillies had good parents, but that didn’t mean unconditional liking, or unconditional knowing-how-to-deal-with-a-filly-who-could-read-and-add-numbers-before-she-could-talk. She knew that the senior cohorts ended up calling themselves Sisters, the few who could make it to the very end of Princess Celestia’s training, anyway.

Most wouldn’t and weren’t meant to. The division of labor didn’t require everypony to become an elite economist. Still, she had fun picking out the ones she thought would make it all the way as they walked toward the Bank.

They turned left, and the Bank loomed over them. It was not an especially large building, although it stood out over the bookshops and cute little coffee-study dens that populated the area around the school. But the Bank loomed. It had weight, like gravity, that drew your eyes to it. Simple Pleasure had to stop herself from walking faster, and from a sudden commotion behind her she knew fillies had bumped into each other.

“Take care to walk slowly,” she called out, turning around to make sure no pony was hurt as the confused children sorted themselves out. “The Bank can pull you forward if you’re not prepared.”

Some of the fillies looked uncertain, others intrigued. For most of them, this would be their first experience with Princess Celestia’s peculiar brand of magic. It wasn’t just stronger; Princess Celestia had access to whole categories of magic that most Unicorns would never explore.

“Does anypony know why the Bank is so heavy?” she asked once it seemed like the fillies had mostly gotten used to walking near the Bank.

A lavender Unicorn spoke up. “Because the Bank has the Numeraire in the very center.”

“But why does that make it heavy?”

“Because the Numeraire weighs One. No matter how much you take out of it, it still always weighs One, but it erodes, and all the little pieces weigh something too, and they add up to make a bigger One. Princess Celestia has it in a chamber that’s nearly a vacuum, but it’s still had over a thousand years to build up dust.”

“But that doesn’t have any effect on the economy, surely.”

“Actually, it causes inflation because it keeps taking more bits to add up to One. It’s about two percent inflation per year.”

“Then why doesn’t Princess Celestia clean out its chamber?”

“Because outside of the chamber the dust might form a second Numeraire, and then you’d have two units of account. You’d get two different prices every time you went shopping.”

Simple Pleasure was impressed. Now she wanted to keep pushing. “So what happens when the Numeraire completely erodes?”

“It’s only theoretical,” said the lavender Unicorn, completely undeterred, “but it’s called the heat death of the economy. Simply put, value won’t have any meaning. But we’re a long way from that.”

“That’s right,” said Simple Pleasure, making a mental note. The lavender Unicorn moved like she hadn’t mastered walking even before they had gotten near the Bank. Yet she was also levitating a small rock along the street as they went, knocking it against the ground in a way that was as smooth and natural as her physical movements weren’t. She was odd, but Simple Pleasure had already moved her to the top of her mental Going To Make It list.

She also made a mental note of the murmur and soft laughter in another part of the clump of fillies. No surprise there. Even among the best and brightest, there was still a best and the brightest. She looked at the filly at the center of the noise, a Unicorn with a coat so bright pink and glossy it almost looked like the candy coating that would go around a piece of chocolate. The filly beamed back at her with a face of perfect innocence. It was so convincing that Simple Pleasure doubted herself. Maybe they had been laughing at something else.

The doors of the Bank were made of glass, which was meant to signify transparency—ironic, considering most of the Bank was walled off by magic, as well as by mundane physical locks and barriers. Princess Celestia’s philosophy was that expectations mattered more than reality. It was also her philosophy, according to rumor, that eating an entire cake at three a.m. was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

“Slowly, slowly!” she urged as the fillies started coming in. They squawked or jumped as they moved into the entrance lobby, their hair sticking out and their horns sparking. There was so much atmospheric magic in the One Bank, even in the front lobby, that sensitive Unicorns often reacted this way. The lavender filly was chattering and rocking back and forth on her heels.

Simple Pleasure gave them a few minutes to adjust to the Bank while she made conversation with the receptionist at the front desk, Pocket Protector, who had become an aunt only last week.

Twilight Sparkle was grateful to have some time to explore by herself. She loved museums and historical sites but hated tours. The guides always knew less than she did.

But even she didn’t know much about the One Bank. There wasn’t much to know, or rather, there wasn’t much that Princess Celestia was willing to say. So Twilight looked around eagerly, her eyes wide to expand her peripheral vision and her eyebrows raised to maximize creative thinking. Was it likely that the lobby of the Bank held a clue to its deeper mysteries? Probably not. But there was a chance, and she was going to make sure that chance was hers.

The front desk was made of white marble and had a very classical look to it, as did the Ionic columns. A few royal guards in gold armor stood stiffly by the doors, holding ceremonial spears that would have done about as much against a real threat to the Bank as actual toothpicks.

But what caught Twilight’s eye was the map. It was in an awkward spot, partially hidden by the front desk and one of the columns so that you had to look down from the high ceiling with its elaborate gilded patterns and away from the rare paintings on the walls to spot it. And it wasn’t like there was any pathfinding to do in the Bank; anypony who wanted an adventure was sure to get one, one way or another.

But Twilight went over to the map anyway. It seemed a little too inconspicuous in this vast space of gold and marble and other ostentatious displays of old grandeur. The map was kind of like a subway station map, with an arrow pointing to the lobby saying You Are Here. The gift shop and the exit were helpfully marked as well. Nothing else was. And yet it was full of detail. Rooms were displayed as small colored shapes on a flat circular plane with passageways shown as gold lines running criss-cross between them. At the center of the circle everything seemed to flip over, and for a minute Twilight thought the two halves were symmetric. But as she studied the map intensely, she noticed small incongruities. There were more and more of them the more she looked, until she couldn’t even remember why she had thought the two halves of the circle had anything in common.

The glass covering the map was fogging up. Twilight realized her snout was pressed up against it and pulled back. Now she could see why she’d thought of the circle as being made of two halves: the entrance was at one end, the exit was at another, and there was a straight line between them that went through the circle’s focus.

The gift shop was a one-minute walk from the lobby.

The absurdity of it overwhelmed Twilight. The map made no sense. It was as if it existed to taunt them with just how little of the Bank they were actually going to see.

She peered at the map again. Was her mind playing tricks on her? The incongruities weren’t the same incongruities as last time….

Needing resolution, Twilight cast a light from her horn, the same she would use to find something that had fallen and rolled underneath her bed. But as soon as her magic touched the map, the passageways between the rooms lit up, and everything started to move. The rooms drifted along the golden paths like stars in orbit. Only the center remained constant. Twilight wondered if it was supposed to represent dead water.

“Hey!” said a voice. “Look what Twilight did!”

Twilight looked up guiltily. Of course it had to be Candy Coating.

The glossy pink filly was grinning. “Ms. Tour Guide, Twilight’s touching something she’s not supposed to!”

Twilight’s heart jumped, but Simple Pleasure was unbothered. “That’s just the map of the Bank, fillies. You’re allowed to look at it.”

Candy Coating instantly switched tactics. “Wow, great find, Twilight! Come on, let’s see what Twilight found.”

Candy Coating’s entire group of friends followed her like bees to their queen and circled around the map, butting Twilight out. Twilight couldn’t help but roll her eyes at the use of physical force. In the company of magically prodigious Unicorns, the biggest filly was hardly the most threatening. Indeed, Candy Coating had a slight frame. It was her instinct for social weaknesses that made her powerful. For Twilight, “social weakness” was a tautology.

She had learned to brush off Candy Coating’s taunts and cruel little games. She had taken a look at her, after all, and seen nothing there. That was why Candy Coating hated her so much.

“You think you’re smarter than me, don’t you?” Candy Coating had said furiously at the end of the first week of school. The pecking order, although not fully sorted out, had already established Twilight firmly at the top by that point.

“I, yeah, I guess so,” Twilight shrugged helplessly. They both knew it.

Their first clash had been over monetary policy. It hadn’t been anything important, just a classroom discussion about how to define quantities of money in various circumstances. The argument had gone Twilight’s way, which made her feel bad afterward reflecting on the debate in her room—there was nothing Candy Coating could do, Twilight had read more and thought faster, she could have won from any position—but Candy Coating’s pride had been wounded.

“My sister is a Sister,” Candy Coating had said as the ultimate trump card. “She’s going to graduate and work for Princess Celestia, and I’m just saying what she said. You don’t think you know more than a Sister, do you, Twilight? No, you’re too good to be a Sister, aren’t you? You think you’re better than everypony.”

Twilight didn’t know what she had done to give that impression, so she stayed silent. Apparently it was true: Candy Coating’s sister really was a Sister, a member of one of the elite cohorts in Princess Celestia’s economics graduate classes. Sometimes the cohorts were as small as ten mares, and some years no pony graduated at all. Candy Coating used that borrowed status like a cudgel, beating down challengers and forcing others into her social orbit, which was unusual for her. Usually she worked like a surgeon with a scalpel, but her sister was a big red button, and Twilight had inadvertently pushed it.

“I hope you make it,” Candy Coating had said with narrowed eyes after Twilight confessed her intellectual superiority. “I hope you become a Sister. Because I’m going to be a Sister, and when I am I’ll get to do whatever I want to you. You better drop out now, Twilight. It’s only going to get worse for you. I guarantee it.”

It all bounced off of Twilight. It wasn’t like she expected to make friends. She didn’t see what friends were for. You could talk to them, but most ponies were boring. Books said things too and were more interesting. You could play with models. Equations were toys you could take anywhere and never had to clean up.

Seriously, what were friends for? How many other social institutions were obviated by libraries? Aside from schools. Actually, what were schools for?

But for once, Candy Coating was getting to her. Twilight wanted to see the map. She had barely gotten a moment to study it. And now they were keeping her out. What was she going to do, toss one of them aside with magic? She’d get in trouble and not get to explore the Gold Room.

And she very much wanted to see the Gold Room. According to what she’d read, it was the room where Princess Celestia worked her greatest magics. Being inside the Gold Room would be as close as she could get to being inside the mind of the princess herself.

It was also said to be full of so much gold that trying to look at it was as blinding as staring at the sun. This rumor, according to what she’d read, had inspired some very stupid and short-lived thieves. Greed was the ultimate motivator, Twilight reflected, if it could make somepony try to take on the Bank.

Candy Coating and her lackeys were bored of the map now that they had taken it from Twilight. They wandered away, but before Twilight could look at it again, Simple Pleasure clapped for their attention “Are you all steady on your hooves? It’s time to visit the Gold Room. Follow me and do not stray I will be watching yes that means you Ms-Thinks-She-Can-Wander-Off.”

They were lined up into two columns and followed Simple Pleasure down a corridor. A minute later, a guard in shiny gold armor and a shiny gold helmet stopped them at the door to the Gold Room. He produced an oversized gold key and inserted it into the lock. It didn’t open. Instead the number 2 indented into the door.

“Uh,” said the guard, but professionally, so that you knew he still had things under control. He tried the key again, but nothing changed.

“Does it usually do this?” Simple Pleasure asked while the guard continued to fiddle with the lock.

“Lady, I’ve been a guard for my whole life. In all my time I’ve only seen three doors open in here: the entrance, the exit, and the gift shop. My father was a guard his whole life, and he only ever saw three doors open. His father was a guard his whole life, and he only ever saw three doors open.”

“Were you given any instructions?”

“Don’t lose the key.”

Just as he tried turning the key again, it snapped in half. He reared back in fright as the lock opened up like a mouth and chomped the broken-off half of the key to bits. Twilight winced at the metallic crunching noise. It sounded like Spike when he was eating rocks.

“Don’t panic!” Simple Pleasure said, which is never the right thing to say inside a bank, or Bank. Fillies started speculating all at once.

“I heard that if you go into a part of the Bank you’re not supposed to, a monster will eat you,” said a green filly with a spying-glass cutie mark.

“Princess Celestia could do much worse than that,” Twilight said mildly. Her calm tone had the effect of drawing the attention of everypony there. “Look at the number on the door. Maybe it’s a clue, like you’re supposed to feed two keys to the door.”

“I only had the one,” said the guard, who clutched onto Twilight’s words like a drowning pony to a thin branch in a raging river. If he had lost a key of Princess Celestia’s—a key to a room in the Bank—then he was fired if he was lucky. He was dead if he was lucky. There were rumors about the Bank. His father said his father said his father said he had been told dragons had tried, centuries ago, to melt the bank with fire so hot it would blacken a pony’s coat from a mile away. But—so his great-grandfather had been told—all they got for it was an eruption of molten gold that melted them, and now their bones were inside the Bank and made it stronger.

“Well, let’s try something else,” Twilight continued, unbothered. “What else could ‘2’ refer to?”

They all stared at her.

“What?” said Twilight. “We’re trying to get into the Gold Room.”

“I-I’m not sure that we are….” Simple Pleasure trailed off. She was staring at the broken key with a stunned expression on her face.

But Candy Coating was sure. “We’re not allowed,” she snarled at Twilight. “That’s why the key broke.”

“If I wanted a bunch of smart Unicorns to try to get into a locked room in the Bank, I don’t know that I would give them permission and a big golden key, then have the door eat the key and a big number ‘2’ appear on the door, but having seen it, I have to respect the technique,” said Twilight. “Of course we’re supposed to get into the Gold Room.”

“Don’t you know anything about the Bank?” Candy Coating said. “Only Princess Celestia is allowed in.”

“I think that’s up to Princess Celestia,” Twilight said. She glanced at the 2 again. “Maybe you’re supposed to go in as pairs, like she might have done with Princess Luna long ago.”

“None of us are going to go in with you!” said Candy Coating. She was furious, and Twilight didn’t understand why. “You’re not a Sister, Twilight, so shut up about the Bank! You don’t know everything!”

Before Twilight could think of how to respond, another filly interrupted. “I’d like to see what’s behind this door,” said Twinkleshine. “Not because I care about the Gold Room. But adults always try to hide things.”

This sent ripples through the class of Unicorns. Even Twilight, who had as much grasp of social dynamics as the average pony has of fluid dynamics, sensed how momentous this moment was.

Twinkleshine was talking to somepony.

If Twilight was top of the class at academics and Candy Coating was queen bee of the social hive, then Twinkleshine was like a cloud passing high overhead: untouchable, but good for gazing at. Because Twinkleshine was pretty. Really, really pretty. Even Twilight could tell how pretty Twinkleshine was, and Twilight was the sort of pony who’d written a letter to the administration at the start of the year suggesting that the school uniform be gray overalls because they were easy to clean and functional in a variety of situations.

Twinkleshine hadn’t said a word to anypony since joining their class three weeks after the start of the semester. Her dad was a very wealthy businesspony, and there were rumors that he’d gotten Twinkleshine into the school with a large donation after she’d failed the entrance exam. Whatever the truth was, few ponies had approached Twinkleshine, and Twinkleshine hadn’t tried to make friends. She always sat in the back corner of the classroom, looking out of the window at the sky, and ate lunch alone. But as far as Twilight was aware, Twinkleshine was getting good grades, and she never looked stressed when the teacher called on her for an answer.

While the rest of the fillies processed the shock of what was happening, Twinkleshine walked around to where Twilight was standing, frowning at the door with an intense look of concentration. “Two keys is silly unless each key has to be found in turn, and then you might as well lock one key behind two tests. As for going in together, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna were said to have traded off duties between day and night. They didn’t go in together except for very momentous occasions.”

Twinkleshine’s face was too serious for her young age as she studied the door. Oh, thought Twilight vaguely. Is this what other ponies see when they look at me?

She’d never wondered that about anypony before.

“Yeah,” said Twilight. “Those weren’t good ideas, just my first ideas.”

“Those were good first ideas,” disagreed Twinkleshine. “As you can see, most ponies’ first ideas are to panic and to freeze. A lot of commotion, but no motion.” She grinned at Twilight, whose brain felt utterly confused. But her face figured it out, grinning back without any conscious input on her part.

“So what could the ‘2’ mean?” Twilight asked, still unsure of how to process the giddy sensation that seemed to be making her cheek muscles stretch. “I can’t think of anything that you need two of to go through a door.”

“Two forms of identification? Banks always require that.” Twinkleshine’s smile was wry, to show the suggestion wasn’t serious. “When adults want to hide things from fillies, they just put it in plain sight and don’t say what it is. What the ‘2’ is is right in front of us, one way or another. I’m sure of it.”

The shock of seeing Twinkleshine reach out to somepony seemed to counterbalance the shock of the door eating the gold key. Now other ponies were warming up the idea of using their intellect to get into the Gold Room. Muttered suggestions were offered up as a conversation began to flow. “Maybe there are two doors, and this is the second one,” said a blue filly with an hourglass cutie mark and a mane like a swoosh of toothpaste.

“Maybe,” Twilight said, “but by that reasoning there could be a dozen doors.”

“It depends if the game is fair or not,” said the blue filly’s companion. Twilight recognized this one as Lemon Hearts, who was infamous for getting her head stuck in a beaker on the first day of class.

But the suggestion was good, and Twilight regretted being quick to judge Lemon Hearts. “Are there other entrances to the Gold Room than this one?” She directed this question to Simple Pleasure and the guard.

They didn’t know, so Twilight moved on. “Two could mean a lot of things. Is there anything you were told about the key or the door? Something we should know?”

The guard concentrated like his career depended on it. “Don’t lose it,” he finally said.

“You’ve already done that. I like the door idea. Does anypony have any other suggestions?”

“Prime numbers?” a filly suggested, but Twilight didn’t know what to do with that, and neither did the blue filly, who introduced herself as Minuette.

“There’s a map by the lobby,” Twilight said. “Let’s go find another door.”

The lobby receptionist made a consternated face as a rush of excited schoolfillies piled out of a corridor and swarmed the map. Simple Pleasure and the guard followed behind with nervous expressions. Twilight touched the map with a lavender spark from her horn, and it lit up and began to move again, the rooms orbiting slowly around the unmoving center.

“This is the entrance,” explained Twilight, pointing, “and this is the exit. See how it bisects the Bank?”

“Where’s the Gold Room?” Twinkleshine asked.

It took Twilight a minute to locate a room that corresponded to the path they’d taken in the corridor. “Right here,” she said, pointing at a room immediately west of the immobile centerpoint. The Gold Room wasn’t moving either, or else it was moving very slowly.

Minuette and Lemon Hearts squeezed around to see. “There’s only one golden passageway running into it,” said Lemon Hearts, crestfallen. “I guess that means there’s only one door.”

“Or there’s a second door to a second room,” said Twilight. She was looking at a room that was also right next to the centerpoint but on the opposite side of the Gold Room. “Maybe there are two Gold Rooms, or the Gold Room is the second part of a pair.”

Twinkleshine had been studying the orbits with an intense look. “Okay, is it just me, or does the motion of the rooms not make total sense? Look, when one of them crosses over the line determined by the entrance and exit, it, like, loses a step, or something.”

“It looks like it loses a beat to me,” Minuette said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I never took music lessons, but when I was really little my mom would play the piano, and I would sit on her lap and read the sheet music. You can change how a piece sounds by, I don’t know the terminology, but by slipping or shifting a beat, you can make any piece sound jazzy or waltzy or anything. It looks to me like there’s two different dances on two different sides of the Bank.” She demonstrated by whistling a tune, shifting down a beat, then back up.

“But if you watch how it comes back around, it doesn’t end up where it originally was on the first half of the Bank,” said Twinkleshine in frustration.

“You can’t necessarily cut a beat and then add a beat back in,” said Minuette. “Because, um….” She paused for a moment, looking for words. “If you have a pizza with spicy peppers, and you take the spicy peppers off for somepony who doesn’t like spicy food, you can’t look at the resulting cheese pizza and know that spicy peppers were the specific topping taken off.”

“So why does this room end up here?” demanded Twinkleshine.

“It’s guessing?” Minuette shrugged.

“Guessing is fine,” said Twilight vaguely, her thoughts suddenly very abstract. “Sometimes you have two mathematical structures that don’t, uh, entirely ‘know’ each other, but they’re trying to figure each other out….”

Lemon Hearts rubbed her eyes. “Looking at this is making me dizzy. What’s the point of the two halves anyway?”

That was a good question. Now that she knew about the guessing, the flow of the rooms into and out of the two halves looked so natural that Twilight hadn’t thought to ask why it was happening in the first place.

They stared at the map together. Finally Twinkleshine said what they all were thinking: “Either she couldn’t make up her mind as to what she wanted, or she had to compromise. Why would Princess Celestia have to compromise?”

A fifth filly spoke. “I mean, it’s probably to do with Nightmare Moon. Obviously.”

They looked at her. She was Moondancer, if Twilight remembered correctly. Moondancer had a distinctive mane, red with twin stripes of different shades of purple, like a national flag designed with the only colors left in a well-used box of crayons. She wore thick glasses and her tail needed to be combed, but the most notable thing about her was that she was always reading, always.

But now she had put her book in her bag. Twilight had never seen her complete face before. Moondancer was squinting, like there was too much light hitting her face at once.

“Princess Celestia didn’t build the Bank on her own,” Moondancer continued. “I was just reading about it in Ae Hiftorie of the Newe Bank. They don’t talk about it now, but Princess Luna didn’t merely take over the Bank’s duties at night. She built half of it, and half of it was hers.”

She pushed through their group to point directly at the map. “The two sides of the Bank were meant to be in communication as long as the princesses were. So I can only make sense of this one way. The Bank is actually moving.”

They all paused as if to listen for the sound of mysterious rooms sliding along unseen tracks.

“Except for this part,” Twinkleshine indicated the center. “And if the Gold Room is moving, it’s too slow to see.”

“But that’s just it,” said Twilight excitedly. She’d made a connection; something that had been bothering her previously now slotted neatly into the conceptual space that Moondancer had opened up. “See on the other side of the center? There’s a room parallel to the Gold Room.”

“...The Silver Room?’ said Twinkleshine in disbelief. Her mouth was open as she looked at Twilight.

“It might be!” Twilight answered. Her mind was racing now. Everything felt true, even if she didn’t know how to prove it. “How do the rooms know which side of the Bank they’re on? It would have to be by proximity to the Gold Room or the Silver Room. That would tell them whether they’re in the orbit that Princess Celestia chose or the one made by Princess Luna.” Her mind made a further connection: “The Gold Room really is like the Sun; if you’re on the same side as it, then you’re on the Day side of the Earth. And the Silver Room is like the Moon: If you can see it, you know it’s Night. And then this thing in the center here, I thought it was dead water, but it’s actually the Earth, which doesn’t move because it’s the origin that everything else revolves around. So in the morning, there would be one version of the Bank that Princess Celestia used, and at night Princess Luna would open up a different Bank in this same space….” She trailed off, wondering just how that was possible.

“So a Day side and a Night side of the Bank,” said Minuette. “Like using a key change in a musical piece to evoke the rising or setting of the sun.”

“It’s a key change, all right,” said Lemon Hearts eagerly. “I bet there’s a Gold Key for the Gold room and a Silver Key for the Silver Room.”

“And the Earth in the center,” said Twinkleshine in a low voice. “Pulling in everything around it. That must be where the Numeraire is. The Gold Room and Silver Room are where the princesses do magic because of the proximity to the Numeraire. I told you it was hidden in plain sight!”

“Yeah,” said Twilight, trying to control her breathing. She could feel the excitement buzzing around them as their other classmates were starting to see where this was going too. “And the other rooms are like stars and planets and things. You can imagine it, can’t you? Standing in the very center of the Bank, learning about the universe by play of light and shadow, picking out the patterns. One of those patterns would be a golden light filling the room, as if reflected from a room full of gold, and that pattern would be called the Day, and the room would be called the Gold Room—”

“Which we have to get into,” said Twinkleshine, “and can’t because we don’t have the key, because Princess Celestia didn’t give it to us, because she doesn’t actually…oh….”

They all looked at each other in a moment of understanding.

“If I was mad at Princess Celestia,” said Minuette quietly, “I would have stolen her key too. Do you think that if an Alicorn says, ‘stay out of my room!’ maybe the other has to obey that, that maybe the Bank was set up that way?”

Lemon Hearts lowered her voice as well. “Do we know where the real key is?”

“We do,” said Twilight, not whispering quietly enough, still entranced by her new vision of the Bank. “Because the other pattern would be that as light starts falling away, the shadows run up along the eastern wall,” Twilight gulped in breath, “and you would look east and see a light that wasn’t bright enough to notice during the long bright hours called Day, but now is the most brilliant thing in the universe—”

“A silver light,” said Moondancer, “reflected from a room full of silver—”

“Which has the second door!” Twilight said. “No, the first door!”

Simple Pleasure screamed.

“What is it?” said Twilight, shaken. “What’s wrong?”

“Children, you mustn’t—get away from that!” She began to drag them away from the map. “Children, the Bank is very dangerous. We’ll just go to the gift shop, you’ll love the gift shop—do not mess with the Bank, children!”

The five fillies looked at each other. “We weren’t messing, we were playing,” said Twilight honestly.

“Yeah, it was exploring,” said Minuette. “It was fun.”

“Maybe we should listen to the fillies,” the guard said. Generations of his forefathers had faithfully guarded the Bank.^* He was clinging to any hope to not bring shame upon them—and to keep his job. “I mean, they’re pretty smart, aren’t they?”

^* Uselessly. Anything that could threaten the One Bank could flatten a royal guard like a pancake under a steam roller.

“They are children,” snapped Simple Pleasure, “and the Bank is not a toy.”

“Get out of our way,” Twilight said furiously, but Simple Pleasure didn’t budge. The unfairness of it boiled inside of her. Adults always did this. Every time she was making progress on anything real, any time she had an idea she actually cared about, they wanted to take her away from it and make her live in their dull little world where nothing interesting was allowed to happen. And there was never anything she could say to get them to listen; they didn’t think of fillies as real ponies, just cute little imitations….

Because this wasn’t just a test. Twilight was sure of that. Princess Celestia could have played a million different games with them without tempting them to go into unexplored parts of the Bank. So maybe this wasn’t a game at all. Because if Nightmare Moon actually had stolen Princess Celestia’s key to the Gold Room before being banished, and if it really was hidden on the Night side of the Bank, and if Princess Celestia really couldn’t get into that side of the Bank, then no pony had checked on the Numeraire in quite a long time.

The Numeraire was pulling everything toward it, and no pony was sure just how much it weighed.

We have to get that key.

“Get out of the way,” Twilight repeated. There was an edge to her voice.

“Excuse me?” Simple Pleasure snapped.

“If I may,” said a new voice, which projected powerfully through the room like an actor speaking in a play. A filly from their class trotted forward to stand next to Twilight. Her coat was on the darker side of light blue, like a sky that hadn’t made up its mind as to whether to shine or to rain, and her mane and tail were ethereal and silvery like fairy wings. She faced Simple Pleasure with the kind of poise and confidence that Twilight normally reserved for math problems.

“I’m Trixie Lulamoon, pleasure to meet you.” She bowed bizarrely, like introducing herself at the start of a show. “Ma’am, I think we can all agree that we should respect Princess Celestia’s security decisions. I mean, that’s what all of this is about: understanding how Princess Celestia protects our economy. And she’s the one, not, with all due respect, you, who decided to give us that key. She made the map. She made the 2 appear on the door to the Gold Room. She even told us about the orbit of the Sun and Moon around the Earth on our first day of school. I’m not saying we’re going to explore, um, I guess we’re talking about Nightmare Moon’s side of the Bank?” She glanced at Twilight, who nodded. “Of course we’re going to stay away from that. But I think Princess Celestia wanted us to figure this out. I really think she did.

“Yeah,” said Twilight, “so—”

Trixie quickly interrupted her. “I was one of the presenters to Princess Celestia for our end-of-the-semester class project. She told us that being an economist is sometimes like filling in a map of a city with more details so that the map is more accurate. But sometimes, she said, being an economist is like venturing out into new lands with no map at all. You have to make the map. And then sometimes, she told us, it’s like going to a new planet, and you have to figure out what principles of mapping even apply. That, she told me, is what being a real economist is all about. And I’d hate,” she choked up suddenly, “to disappoint her.”

She buried her face in Twilight’s chest, who jerked back in surprise. More astonishing than the contact from a pony she barely knew was the fact that she was trying to reason with an adult, and it looked like it was working.

Trixie clung to her dramatically, but Twilight saw the wink and bit back a grin of her own at the realization.

“Oh—all right,” said Simple Pleasure unhappily. “But we’re going right back to the Gold Room to try whatever ideas you have, and if we can’t get in, then that’s it.”

“Um,” said Twinkleshine. She glanced at Twilight, who had somehow become the leader of the group.

Twilight looked back at her. She knew what the others were thinking. The first door was the door to the Silver Room. That was where they were meant to go.

Then Lemon Hearts did something very brave.

“I know where the key to the Gold Room is,” she said.

Twilight knew too. But there was no way to say it without causing Simple Pleasure to panic.

“Where?” said Simple Pleasure.

“I think Nightmare Moon stole it.”

Simple Pleasure raised her eyebrows in alarm. “How do you know that?”

This was when Lemon Hearts stole the show. She burst out crying. “Because she visited me in my dreams and told me!”

Minuette held the sobbing yellow filly. “It’s true! She told me all about them! It’s why Princess Celestia brought us to the school. It’s so she can keep an eye on Nightmare Moon.”

“Nightmare Moon is locked away in the Moon,” said Simple Pleasure. Twilight was impressed by their performance—Simple Pleasure was arguing with the scenario, rather than dismissing it outright or fighting back on the asymmetric plane of authority.

“But she’s coming back,” said Minuette while Lemon Hearts wailed even louder. “Everypony knows it, the Numeraire is getting heavier, it’s probably sucking her out of the Moon.”

“That’s preposterous!”

“Is it? Is it? What if Nightmare Moon is coming back, and Princess Celestia needs the power of the Bank to stop her! What if she needs the power of the Gold Room, but Nightmare Moon stole the key as a last act of revenge! And she needs us to get into Nightmare Moon’s side of the Bank and retrieve the key!”

“If Princess Celestia can’t do it, why could a group of schoolfillies?” Simple Pleasure shrieked.

“Because the only power that Nightmare Moon wouldn’t even think to guard against is the power of children,” Minuette said triumphantly.

Simple Pleasure wavered—visibly, she was rocking on her hoofs.

“And, and, our friendship is a magic greater than even an Alicorn’s,” Lemon Hearts added.

The walls were cracking. Simple Pleasure was falling, but not yet.

“Maybe the true door to the Bank is inside our hearts,” Trixie said.

“Yeah, and, um, the real keys are the friends we made along the way,” Twilight added.

Moondancer and Twinkleshine looked at each other. They hugged, spontaneously, like the power of friendship had simply compelled them to, irresistible, an attraction beyond even that of the Numeraire.

“If there’s even a whiff of danger,” Simple Pleasure said hoarsely.

“Nothing bad can happen to a group of true friends who are loyal and true,” said Twinkleshine. Lemon Hearts started to snigger, but Minuette clapped a hoof over her mouth.

Simple Pleasure sagged. “Oh, all right. But be very careful.”

“So,” said Twilight. “I think we need to get to Nightmare Moon’s side of the Bank.”

Simple Pleasure spasmed at that, but Trixie was quick to smooth things over. “If it was really dangerous, Princess Celestia wouldn’t have us do it.”

Twilight, who had been asked by the princess to care for a baby dragon, wasn’t entirely sure. Spike tended to breathe fire when he was fitful, and while the flames weren’t especially hot or difficult to dodge, her mane had been singed on more than one occasion.

“How do we get there?” Minuette asked. “No pony has been there in almost a thousand years, presumably.”

Twilight didn’t see how they could figure that out, which suggested there wasn’t much to the puzzle. “It’s going to have something to do with day and night. If Princess Celestia’s entrance is a day entrance, then Nightmare Moon’s entrance is a night entrance.

“Oh! Um,” Moondancer started looking through her book. “Here! It says here that Princess Celestia and Princess Luna—that’s Nightmare Moon—entered where the other left.”

“So the entrance to Nightmare Moon’s side of the Bank is just the exit door?” said Twilight. “I’m not sure that this is even making astronomical sense anymore.”

“Only one way to find out,” said Twinkleshine. Her eyes gleamed. “Want to go open that door with me?”

“Hold on,” Minuette said. “Somepony must have tried to go into the Bank through the exit door before. Like, if you’re leaving, and then you realized you forgot something, would a guard make you go all the way around to the front to get in?”

“Would you?” Twilight asked the guard.

“Of course not,” he said. “Ponies go back in through the exit door all the time. If I’m guarding that side, I’ll just go back in through the exit myself when it’s time to clock out.”

“Maybe it has to be done at night?” Lemon Hearts suggested. Moondancer leafed through her book, frowning.

Concerned they were missing something, Twilight looked at the map again. She realized that she was thinking of the Day side as normal and the Night side as weird. Once she stopped that, they were just two different behaviors. Somehow, the map was translating between them. Strangely, it wasn’t a perfect translation, and yet she couldn’t see how to improve it. Because if you fixed the way the Night moved into Day, then that would change how the Day behaved, and you’d have to rush over to the other side faster than the light did to fix how the Day moved into Night….

Why can’t they just talk to each other? she wondered desperately.

“It’s beautiful,” said Trixie quietly. She was standing very close to her, studying the same map.

“What do you mean?” said Twilight. “It’s terrifying.”

Trixie looked uncomfortable. “They’re doing their best,” she said. “I bet this map has been moving for at least a thousand years. It must have looked very different once, right? And yet I think that somepony from a thousand years ago would see this map today as the same map.” She smiled suddenly. “I’ve got it.”

“Me too,” said Moondancer.

“You go first,” said Trixie.

“The original goal of the Bank wasn’t to maintain a particular supply of bits or a rate of inflation or deflation,” Moondancer explained. Twilight noticed that although she’d flipped to a particular page in her book, she didn’t seem to be relying on it to relay the information she’d read. “It was to maintain a constancy of nominal spending so that what is sold gets bought and what is bought gets sold. See, ponies change what they want and when they want it, and ponies what they want to make and how they want to make it. So even as everything about buying and selling changes, you have to keep the relationship between buying and selling the same.”

“It’s about managing expectations,” said Trixie. “Not our expectations, the Bank’s expectations. See how even though the rooms always end up in different places as a beat gets added or taken away when the centerline is crossed, no two rooms ever bump into each other? Even though everything else may change, and even though something has to change every time a room crosses the centerline, that remains constant.”

“What remains constant?” asked Twilight. “The pattern of orbit translation across the centerline?”

Trixie shook her head. “The mutual consistency of orbits is what remains constant. I don’t think there even is a pattern of orbit translation per se. Instead, there’s a rule defining the relationship between the back-and-forth of day and night, a pattern of structure through the Bank that’s always being preserved.”

“My head hurts,” said Lemon Hearts. Minuette giggled softly.

“But you see it, don’t you?” Trixie insisted. “The night isn’t what happens when the day goes away. It isn’t any time that the Earth is between you and the Sun. In the absence of ponies, there is no night and day, just stuff moving around. Night is what we bring with us from the day so that we can see what’s different when the Sun is on the other side of the Earth.”

“Okay,” said Twilight. Trixie was looking at her like she was desperate for Twilight to get it without being told. The look was so intense that Twilight felt like a need to oblige. “I think I understand. Night is what is consistently different depending on our position relative to the Sun. The things that are the same aren’t worth talking about, and the things that are inconsistently different don’t get identified with our position relative to the Sun. So the night, or Night, is specifically what we observe when we go from day to night, the changes that we consistently notice no matter what else seems to be going on.”

“Yeah,” said Trixie. “Reaching the Night side of the Bank isn’t about going in through the exit. It’s about going through the Bank to the exit. It’s specifically about going from Day to Night.”

Moondancer frowned again at her book. “It doesn’t say that Princess Luna had to walk through the Day side to get to the Night side.”

“Then it’s something mental,” Trixie said. “Or I’m wrong,” she added. Something about the way she said that last part left Twilight feeling certain that Trixie didn’t think she was wrong.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Twinkleshine grinned. “Let’s go to the Night side of the Bank.”

As they all headed down the long corridor through the Bank to the exit, Twilight felt a strange bubbly excitement floating her along. It was strange because she didn’t think it was excitement about seeing the Night side of the Bank.

Part of it was that she didn’t actually expect to get into the Night side of the Bank. Princess Celestia would appear in a flash of golden light, congratulate them on getting this far, and deliver a thrilling lecture on the history of the One Bank. The alternative was that Princess Celestia actually needed their help to get into the Night side of the Bank because the Gold Key was there, and she really hadn’t checked on the Numeraire in a thousand years. That thought was a little too terrifying to think.

But the other part of it was these other five ponies trotting along with her at the head of the class. Twilight had been on plenty of intellectual adventures before. But she’d never been on one with anypony else.

She wasn’t the only one feeling it. The other five were exchanging the same glances and smiles that she was. Minuette whistled a jaunty tune as they walked, and Moondancer wasn’t looking at her book at all.

They reached the exit, and the entire class, along with Simple Pleasure and the guard, assembled outside. Blinking in the sunlight, Twilight found it hard to believe that this was the entrance to an alternative nighttime version of the One Bank.

Everypony was looking at her. “Well,” said Twilight after a moment. “I guess there’s one obvious thing to do.” She pulled the exit door open and looked into the Day side of the Bank.

“Yeah, I’ve gone through that door a million times,” the guard said.

“What about at night?” Twinkleshine asked.

“Even then,” he confirmed.

“It’s not about the door,” Trixie said. “It’s about what you bring with you and what you give up.”

“Do you want to try?” said Twilight.

“You’re the smart one,” answered Trixie.

Twilight studied the door. Before they’d left the lobby, she’d examined the map one last time, committing it to memory. Now she had the feeling that the entire map was the Day side of the Bank, and the Night side would look very different.

So….

I’m not leaving and reentering, she told herself. I am coming to this place! I have been to the Day side of the Bank, and now it is time for me to visit the Night side.

Twilight caught herself. Thinking the words in increasingly insistent tones wouldn’t change anything. Instead…it was already true. She had come to the Night entrance. If she opened the door, she would be looking at the Night side of the Bank.

She pulled the door open. There were gasps and a few shouts of terror. The corridor that the open door revealed was not the corridor they had come out of. Twilight got a glimpse of a dark tunnel stretching into shadow, and then Simple Pleasure was in the way.

“Children, do not go in there!” Simple Pleasure stood in front of the door, blocking it. “Well done, Twilight, now we have to call Princess Celestia.”

“We don’t!” They were so close, why didn’t she understand that? Princess Celestia wanted them to do this, she probably couldn’t do this but they could; what Minuette had said was right, it had to be them. Her parents, her teachers, they all did this, they just said things that were stupid because, because they were adults and they just had to.

“Twilight—”

“Get out of the way!” Twilight shouted. “We have to go in there! The princess is counting on us! She needs our help!”

“I think you should listen to the kids,” said the guard, who had never seen anything like this. If the fillies found a key to the Gold Room in there, his rump was saved.

Maybe it was the influence of another adult. Simple Pleasure looked horribly conflicted.

“Fine,” she said, “I will go in alone.”

“No! We have to do it!”

“Then you will come in with me, and we will go together,” Simple Pleasure said. “No pony else can come in.”

“Awww!” said the other fillies. “That’s not fair!” Twinkleshine complained.

“But it’s safe, which is my responsibility,” said Simple Pleasure. “Twilight, stay behind me.”

Twilight followed Simple Pleasure into the Night side of the Bank and was greeted by a blast of cool air. The corridor was very dark. There wasn’t any dust or cobwebs to indicate that it had been abandoned. It was just empty and cold, like something forgotten.

They only had to walk a short while before they saw a small table. On it was a small gold key and an envelope.

The real Gold Key was much smaller than the one the guard had. But while gold was soft and malleable, this looked like iron that had been forged in the heart of the Sun and taken on its color as a result. In the cold emptiness of Nightmare Moon’s side of the Bank, the Gold Key was the only thing warm and bright.

The envelope was plain and unopened and said Celly in neat, careful writing. Twilight took the key, and would have taken the envelope as well. But the instant she touched the key, a force took hold of her body that dragged her toward the door. She resisted until she was pulled off her hoofs and bounced and skidded the rest of the way, landing in a bruised pile outside the Bank. Simple Pleasure ran out after her in alarm, and the door slammed shut.

Twilight was surrounded by fillies. “Are you okay?” “You did it!” “Wow, that key is so pretty!” “What was Nightmare Moon’s side of the Bank like?”

Twinkleshine bullied her way to the front and helped Twilight up. “Lucky,” she sighed. “Still, you’ve got a good head, Twilight.”

Twilight grinned at her. “I just really wanted to be able to go on my class trip to the Gold Room.”

“Now can we call Princess Celestia?” Simple Pleasure asked. “That was very brave of you, Twilight. I’m sure she’ll want to reward you.”

“If she wanted to be here, she’d be here,” Twilight said confidently. “In fact, I bet she’s watching us right now. I think we should visit the Gold Room.”

Now Twilight led the way back to the Day entrance, as she thought of it, and then to the Gold Room. After a pause, she offered the Gold Key to the guard. “Here. So you can do your job.”

“Thank you,” he said, and inserted the key into the lock.

Click.

And they were in.

The Gold Room was pure gold from floor to ceiling. It should have been blinding, but it seemed like the room was lit from within the gold walls and floor. The effect was soft and warm and gave the impression of walking on pure light.

After the initial shock wore off, everypony broke off into small groups to look around, Twilight joined Trixie, Twinkleshine, and Moondancer, who were marveling at some of the patterns etched into the walls. Princess Celestia was either a very intricate designer, or she had simply gotten bored over the years. Simple Pleasure, still a little breathless, tried to organize an activity with the main body of fillies.

Trixie stopped them from heading over to join the group. “I’ve been wondering something about the Bank. There’s a room still unaccounted for.”

“The central room?” Twilight said. “You’re right, I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be on the Sun side or the Moon side.”

“If it represents the Earth, then it’s probably not on either side,” Twinkleshine reasoned.

“Or it’s on both,” said Moondancer, looking through her book again.

Minuette and Lemon Hearts overheard them talking and came over. “Did you want to find the Earth room?” Minuette asked in a low voice.

Trixie raised an eyebrow at them. “Notice the slope of the floor?”

Twilight had, actually. It all sloped toward the same point, a small but perceptible valley.

“I bet directly under there is where the Numeraire is,” Trixie said.

“Which confirms the worst case scenario,” Twilight said. “If you have to go through the Gold Room to get to the Earth Room where the Numeraire is, then Princess Celestia really hasn’t checked on it in a thousand years.”

“You still have the key, right?”

“Yeah.” She had taken the Gold Key back from the guard, and though some fillies had asked to hold it, Twilight only let them reluctantly, and quickly swiped it back.

They moved in a huddle to the valley of the Gold Room. Though it was actually slight and nearly imperceptible, Twilight felt that the slope was deep and obvious, and she kept glancing over her shoulder to check that Simple Pleasure wasn’t about to pounce on them.

“Now what?” Lemon Hearts whispered.

Twilight bent low, inspecting the golden floor for anything resembling a keyhole, but aside from the slope, the floor was perfectly uniform.

“Try finding the Numeraire,” suggested Moondancer. “Everything in the Bank knows where it is by the way they move around it.”

Twilight pressed the Gold Key to sloped part of the floor. A force like magnetism tugged the end of the key toward the deepest point, and the key sank in. Twilight turned it.

Click.

A familiar golden flash of light lit the room as the door underneath them began to slide open. Twilight quickly retrieved the key as they all stepped back. She bumped into something.

“Well done!” said Princess Celestia behind her, beaming.

Twilight was too stunned by the sudden appearance of her princess to answer. Then the door fully opened, and a horrible suction yanked her into the dark tunnel. She saw Trixie, Twinkleshine and the others falling after her. A golden glow wrapped around them, and Twilight felt herself slow momentarily, but then she was torn free of the magical grasp and plummeted into the darkness below.

There was darkness, and weight. Twilight couldn’t move.

Simple Pleasure ran to the closed door. “Don’t worry!” she shouted at the floor. “Princess Celestia is going to rescue you! Stay put!”

“Don’t bother,” said Princess Celestia. Her expression was grim. “Nothing, not even my magic, can pass in or out of that door.”

Princess Celestia was summoning books from somewhere in her library and had five of them open at once, pages turning at different speeds as her eyes flicked over them.

“Can’t you go after them?”

“It takes both of us, or our agreement,” Princess Celestia said distractedly. “That was a precaution we chose.”

“Then send me!” Simple Pleasure was almost frantic.

“They have the key, and no.”

“Girls!” Simple Pleasure shouted at the closed door, even though she had been told it was useless. “You have to open the door from the inside! Use the key!”

“They can’t make the climb. There’s a magical draft that would stop even the most fearless weather Pegasus from flying up there. That was also a precaution.” Princess Celestia discarded two books. Three more floated up in front of her eyes.

“Why did you send them there?” Simple Pleasure demanded, whirling around.

Princess Celestia’s eyes closed for a fraction of an instant, as if in pain. “I underestimated how much One the Numeraire weighs. It tore them out of my grip.”

Simple Pleasure stood in front of Princess Celestia and glared at her, though she barely came up to the princess’s chest. “Get them out! Please!”

“I am trying,” said Princess Celestia mildly. “You’re blocking my view of several books.”

Simple Pleasure stepped aside, but was undaunted. “Are they in danger?” The princess’s horn was starting to glow intensely.

Princess Celestia frowned. “That...depends on where they choose to go.”

“Go?”

“Into the Silver Room, of course.”

Twilight wasn’t paralyzed. She could move her legs and tail just fine. But her horn seemed to be stuck to something, and she couldn’t lift her head.

Her rump ached where she had landed. She couldn’t see anything because the room was totally dark. She felt the others thrashing about next to her, and heard their shouts and whimpers.

Panic and shame took hold of her. This was all her fault. Everypony knew better than to poke about inside the Bank. She had wanted Princess Celestia’s praise so badly that she had behaved very stupidly. And worse, she had dragged five others into her mistake.

“I’m sorry,” Trixie said. “I had the idea for how to get into the Night side of the Bank. It’s my fault we’re stuck here.”

“What? No, I wanted to get the key, I hallucinated a quest for us to complete,” Twilight said.

“Girls, I’m sorry,” Twinkleshine said. “I shouldn’t have said anything at the beginning, but I was so excited to see the Gold Room.”

There was a pause, then Minuette started to laugh. “Does everypony blame themselves?”

“I’m not used to having others to blame,” Twilight admitted wryly. “Most ponies are for dealing with, not for having expectations of.”

“Girls, we’re Gifted Unicorns,” Trixie said. “Have some faith in the rest of us.”

“You blamed yourself first!”

There was more laughter, which gradually died down, leaving them in the darkness. The air was creepily still. Twilight blew out with her lips a few times just to have visceral confirmation that there was air in the room.

“We made it to the Earth Room, anyway,” Twinkleshine said. This brought out a few giggles. But not many.

Twilight was nervous using her magic when her horn was stuck to something. She had a good idea what it was anyway. But she didn’t want to lay helplessly in the dark any longer.

The lavender glow from her horn lit up a small, round chamber. It was bare but for the circular table they were stuck on and a couple of chairs that were wooden and plain and looked very, very old.

“This is really uncomfortable,” said Minuette.

Twilight agreed. They all seemed to be lying in a circle on the table, their horns stuck to something at the very center that she couldn’t quite angle her neck to see. But she knew what it was, and knew escape was impossible.

She looked elsewhere. There were words in gold wrapped around the ceiling.

“Make new friends, but keep the old,” Twilight read out loud. “One is silver, the other is gold.”

“There are words over here too,” Moondancer said. Twilight could see soft pink light in her peripheral vision. “A circle is round, it has no end. That’s how long I will be your friend.”

“What color are the words?”

“Color? Um, silver?”

“The ones I read are gold.”

Trixie snorted. “They have a theme, don’t they?”

“There’s a tunnel leading up,” Twinkleshine said. Her light was intensely white, like a flashlight. “I think it goes to the door we fell from.”

“Do you think we can get up there?” Lemon Hearts asked.

“...It’s really high up,” said Twinkleshine. “It looks like it goes a really long way.”

“We should stay where we are,” Twilight said. “Princess Celestia will come rescue us soon.”

“I can’t move anyway,” Twinkleshine said. “Just saying I can see a tunnel.”

“Will Princess Celestia come rescue us?” Trixie said. “She needed our help to get in here in the first place.”

“Heeeeelp!” Lemon Hearts shouted at the tunnel they had fallen out of.

“They’d be shouting things at us already if sound got through the door,” Twilight said. “You know what we’re all stuck to, right? It’s the Numeraire.”

“But Princess Celestia has the key and is going to open the door and rescue us,” said Minuette in a rush. “Right?”

“I have the key,” admitted Twilight. “I don’t think she can get in here.”

“We’re going to die?” Lemon Hearts asked.

No pony answered. “Moondancer, did you read anything in your book about the Earth Room?” Trixie asked.

“No,” said Moondancer. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Sorry.”

“I said it’s okay.”

We really are going to die, Twilight thought. Starving to death while stuck to a table. Not how I was planning to go. I wonder if Mom and Dad can get back the money they spent on clothes and books for next year.

Twilight turned her magical light off to preserve energy. After a minute, so did Moondancer and Twinkleshine. In the darkness, Lemon Hearts began to cry.

Twilight lost track of time in the absolute darkness. There were a few half-hearted attempts to make conversation, but they didn’t last long. Twilight’s back was starting to hurt, but there wasn’t a way to get comfortable. In the end, she slept.

She dreamed. She was standing on a beach, and the ocean was bobbing and flowing in a strange way. It took her a minute to realize that she was looking at waves. That was when she knew she was dreaming. The ocean didn’t move like this anymore. The ocean didn’t do anything anymore.

The other sign that she was dreaming was the color of the water. It wasn’t blue or clear like it was in old picture-books, and it wasn’t black and disgusting like the real dead ocean was. This water was silvery and sparkling under a cold blue sun that was much too big in the dark and starless sky. Despite the proximity of the sun, the sand on the beach was freezing her hoofs. She hopped in place to keep warm.

Waves crashed against the shore. Some were forty or fifty feet high, but even when they slammed onto the beach like a giant’s palm, Twilight wasn’t afraid. Nothing bad could happen to you while you were dreaming.

She walked along the beach for a while, shivering and looking for some driftwood to make a fire with, but the beach was bare. There was a hill sparse with vegetation on the other side of the beach. It looked like she could climb it, but when she tried, the sand crumbled under her hoofs. She gave up and returned to the beach.

Twilight kept walking, but there was nothing to find. Her legs hurt from walking so much. She did her best to curl up into a tight ball for warmth, settled down on the sand, and closed her eyes to sleep.

She dreamed.

“...I fell asleep,” said Twilight. In the total darkness, she wasn’t sure how much time had passed. “Is anypony awake?”

“I was asleep,” said Moondancer. “I woke up just a minute ago.”

“Hi,” said Twilight. “Anypony else?”

There were no answers but the sound of soft, rhythmic breathing.

“They’ll write about us, you know,” said Moondancer.

“Huh?” said Twilight. “What do you mean?”

“When they write about the history of the Bank,” Moondancer said. “We’ll be in it.”

“Oh.” That was morbid.

“We’ll be in a book,” said Moondancer. She sounded pleased. “I’ve always imagined myself in the books that I read. Now somepony else will imagine me in the books that they read.”

“I guess you found the silver lining in our Gold Room adventure,” Twilight said, cracking a smile.

“I would always watch you in class,” Moondancer said. “When I wasn’t reading, I mean. All of us struggled when we came to this school. But not you. You’re, like, perfect. You just know everything and figure things out so fast. I saw Candy Coating try to bully you. I saw that it didn’t work.”

“Oh,” said Twilight awkwardly. “Um….”

“The reason Twinkleshine spoke up, the reason Minuette and Lemon Hearts stepped forward, it was all because of you,” Moondancer went on. “They believed in you. They believed that if Twilight Sparkle is thinking about something, then that something is worth thinking about. They believed that if they followed your mind, then they’d be led to somewhere amazing.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“You didn’t,” said Moondancer happily. “I only regret…that there were a lot more books to read.”

To her right, Twinkleshine made a few smacking noises with her mouth.

“Good maybe-morning-maybe-evening,” said Twilight.

“Hi,” said Twinkleshine sleepily. She sat up. “So we really are down here, huh? Normally the bad stuff ends when you wake up.”

“Twinkleshine, how did you—” Twilight sat up as well. There was no resistance. She lit up a bright lavender light from her horn, twisting around to see that the plain wooden table they were on had nothing at its center but a small photo in a picture frame.

“Girls, wake up!” she shouted. Trixie, Minuette, and Lemon Hearts all blinked and sat up as well.

“We’re free?” said Trixie muzzily. “How come?”

Minuette hopped off of the table and stretched her legs. “What a relief!” Lemon Hearts jumped off too, stumbled on unsteady legs, and lit a dim yellow light from her own horn to explore the Earth Room.

Twilight looked at the photo on the center of the table. She saw two young fillies, one with a white coat and a pink mane, the other purple like herself with blue hair. Curious, she reached out to angle the frame toward her, but when she reached for it, it disappeared, and it didn’t return when she retreated her leg.

“There’s a door here,” Twinkleshine said.

“To the Gold Room?” Twilight slid off the table and tried to hurry over, but she ended up doing an awkward dance as blood began to flow into them and feeling returned

“I don’t think so.” Twinkleshine was standing in front of a tall but otherwise ordinary-looking door. “We fell down from that long tunnel above us. This is a door to somewhere else.”

“It’s to the Silver Room,” said Moondancer, adjusting her glasses as she joined them. “There’s no other possibility.”

“It wasn’t here earlier,” said Twinkleshine.

“Well, we went to sleep, and….” Twilight shrugged. “It is Nightmare Moon, right?”

“So this door leads to Nightmares.”

“Um….”

Trixie, Minuette, and Lemon Hearts noticed them congregated by the door and trotted over. “Are we getting out of here?” Lemon Hearts asked.

“It’s the door to the Silver Room,” said Twilight. “Probably. So…no?”

“We can’t just stay here and starve,” Minuette said.

“We can’t brave the Night side of the Bank and live.”

“Look, all we have to do is find the exit, and we already know where it is,” Trixie pointed out. “We just retrace our steps to the entrance. Sure, we might be killed horribly by a creature of pure nightmare, but that’s better than dying mundanely of starvation. What we do, we should do amazingly, and that extends to death.”

“That’s quite a philosophy,” Twilight grinned.

“I’m quite a pony,” Trixie said. “Twinkleshine, would you do the honors?”

Twinkleshine pulled the handle down and opened the door. A frosty chill swept into the Earth Room and left them all blinking against it.

“Go!” said Twinkleshine hurriedly. One by one they rushed into the Silver Room, shivering together and looking around.

After a while, they forgot about the cold. There was so much to see.

Dark purple light ebbed and pulsed in walls of pure silver. It was an otherworldly experience, shadowy and unreal.

The walls weren’t covered in tiny detailed etchings like the Gold Room. Instead, the purple light took on dimensions that seemed to respond to proximity or body heat, shifting in ways that were as patterned as they were formless. It was like trying to make sense of a dream.

“We can’t get distracted,” said Trixie like she was coming out of a dream herself. “If we really were asleep for a while in the Earth Room, then everypony is totally panicking about us on the Day side of the Bank.”

Twilight tore her eyes away from the flowing shadows in the walls. “Yeah,” she said in a quiet voice. “Come on.”

There was another door opposite the one leading to the Earth Room. Twilight opened in, and the others followed her out.

The corridor was cold and still and silent. Twilight found herself huddling together with the others for warmth without anypony having said a word.

There was hardly even any dust. That was how empty this place was.

“Is this what space feels like?” Twinkleshine said. They were all whispering for some reason.

“You can breathe, so no,” whispered back Trixie, to muffled giggles.

Suddenly Lemon Hearts started choking.

“What’s wrong!” Twilight shouted in alarm.

“Choking—no air—on the Moon!” wheezed Lemon Hearts, before breaking into a grin at Twilight’s face.

“You scared me,” Twilight said accusingly while the others laughed.

“It’s better that we should be scaring each other,” Lemon Hearts said shyly. “Otherwise we might get scared by stuff that isn’t us.”

Twilight thought about that, then nudged her, smiling. “Hopefully we won’t be here for long. I remember what the map looked like, so…this way.”

In the middle of the hallway was a wavy, blurry patch of air, like looking through a piece of distorted glass. Twilight couldn’t see a way around it.

“Does anypony know what this is?” There were murmurs and head-shakes. Twilight cautiously reached her hoof out to touch the shimmering air. Nothing happened.

“Well,” she said, “it seems like—”

The air rushed over them. Twilight was in school, and she’d forgotten to wear her homework. Everypony was pointing and laughing, but that mattered less than the itch in Twilight’s upper tooth, which she had to scratch. She wasn’t sure what her upper tooth was, but it was very itchy.

Anyway, she was flying, which was good, because she’d lost an important book, and she could see a lot flying overhead like this. Only…now she was starting to fall….

“AAAAAH!”

Twilight stumbled backwards out of her vertigo, landing on the floor. The other five had fallen around her with similar expressions of shock. They were several feet away from the distorted patch of air, which was hovering in place.

“I was falling,” said Minuette guiltily. “I was flying and then it went bad—”

“I was dreaming in there,” said Trixie. “When the air touched me, I started dreaming.”

“I had a nightmare,” said Lemon Hearts.

“What happened?” Twilight asked, fascinated.

“Nothing really. Just this feeling of dread. But it was really bad. I felt like I was going to wet myself.”

“How do we get past it?” Twinkleshine said. “If it puts us to sleep when we touch it, then we’re stuck.”

“We could try to blast it apart,” Twilight suggested.

“Do you know what happens when you fire a magical laser at a patch of dream air?”

Twilight chewed her lip. There had to be something she could do. Teleporting past it might work…unless the magic went through the dream patch, with whatever resulting effects. This was no time to be experimenting, yet she couldn’t think of any sure answers.

“Princess Celestia probably made it easy to walk around her side of the Bank for the visitors,” said Moondancer morosely. “But Nightmare Moon didn’t have any reason to do that. This isn’t a game like we were playing with the princess. These are real barriers, and we might not be a match for them.”

Twilight bodily refused that possibility. “I’ll try teleporting through it. If that doesn’t work….”

“Wait, hold on,” Trixie said. “There’s no need to do anything drastic. We know exactly what this is. It’s dreaming. We do that every night, haven’t you girls gotten good at it yet?”

Before anypony could answer, Trixie marched into the patch of distorted air. A trance came over her. Twilight watched as an odd relaxation moved through her, a visible sort of anti-shudder traveling down her body like a wave. Her forward motion stopped, and she began to drift very lightly through the air, as though gravity no longer took notice of her.

“Grab her!” said Twilight, and didn’t wait, sending out her magic to rescue Trixie. But first, she had to explain to the teacher why she hadn’t remembered to eat her homework.

“Hey, Twilight,” said Trixie. “You’re dreaming about homework? I didn’t know ponies actually did that.”

Twilight peered through the splotchy colors at Trixie’s face. “I need to my leg.”

“Think you missed a verb there. Guess you’re all in here with me, huh? Oh, and there’s Minuette, looks like she’s falling again. Hold on….”

Everything was dark for a long instant. Trixie’s face suddenly appeared again, cartoonishly large and blurry, squinting at Twilight with one enormous eye. “Try to pay attention, huh? I’m saying logical words. You can understand me somewhere.”

Twilight struggled to focus on the words. Trixie was making sense. Just a sort of splotchy sense that so easily faded into needing to her leg.

“Hey. Twilight. Stay with me.”

Trixie’s giant face loomed, and suddenly came into sharp relief.

“How are you doing this?” Twilight asked. The words came out painfully slowly, like she was trying to move her mouth but couldn’t. She didn’t think she would be comprehensible, but Trixie responded easily.

“I’m a lucid dreamer. Pretty great, huh? I always thought to myself, ‘Trixie, you never know when you’re going to need to take control of your dreams.’ And here I am.”

Twilight started to close her eyes.

“Pay attention to me!” said Trixie. Light exploded, reds and blues and greens and purples exploding in particle showers against a dark velvet background. Twilight squinted in anticipation of the next round as the pop-pop-pop of fireworks went off.

“Welcome to my show,” Trixie said. They were standing on a hill together. Trixie was wearing a purple hat-and-cape combo with colorful star patterns all over. She carried a wand as well, and she carried herself majestically. “Just a second, Twilight, I need to get you all together.” Her wand flashed four times. “There! There! There! And there!” Twinkleshine, Minuette, Lemon Hearts, and Moondancer all appeared on the hill by Twilight, blinking and looking around in astonishment.

“Now,” said Trixie. The sky was a red curtain, and Trixie stood before it on a sparkling platform. “Welcome, one and all. I, Trixie Lulamoon, wizard extraordinaire, Great and Powerful, do proudly present to you the show of yourselves!” Fireworks exploded together in the shape of Trixie’s head.

“Well?” said Trixie’s head, not falling to the ground like fireworks should’ve. “You can do whatever you want in here?”

“How?” Twilight shouted up at her. “How are you doing that?”

“Don’t shout, Twilight, I’m right next to you. As for how I’m doing it, it’s the same trick you’re using to stand on that hill there. See, it’s all in your head, so you’ve just got to look around in there and see what you find….”

Words flew over a sky that was suddenly the color of paper.

“Amazing!” said Trixie as the plane they were standing on was domed by the text of a book. “Great job, Moondancer!”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“I just had a feeling.”

Lemon Hearts suddenly lifted in the air. Laughing, she wobbled one way, then began to float in another direction, giggling as she revolved like she was turning in space.

“No fair,” complained Minuette. And she rose as well, at an awkward angle, and collided with Lemon Hearts. Laughing, they began to tumble, and the sky of words opened up for them, making space as if it was actually quite close. And yet when Twilight tried to touch it with her hoof, it seemed as distant as the real sky.

“Aren’t you going to try, Twilight?” said the giant floating Trixie head as it passed by.

There was an explosion of light. When the pale glow faded, Twinkleshine was reclining on a couch, dressed in torn jeans and a black tank top, her hair done up in a way that Twilight was pretty sure would get her kicked out of Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns immediately. But she seemed perfectly at ease with herself in a way she hadn’t since she’d first joined their class. “Hey, Trixie, how do I get a drink?”

“The taste is all in your head,” warned Trixie. “It doesn’t fill you up.”

“I don’t know, I kind of like it anyway,” Lemon Hearts said. She and Minuette were sharing a lemonade in the sky, drinking from a glass with two straws. Or, Minuette was drinking, and Lemon Hearts was struggling to close her giddy smile around the straw.

“Come on, Twilight?” boomed Trixie’s giant head. “What about you?”

Twilight watched them start to dance, with Minuette leading and somehow managing to make Lemon Hearts look like she didn’t have four left legs.

“You have to pay attention to yourself, Twilight,” Trixie tutted.

Twilight had, and she didn’t like it. “This is great and all,” she said, “but don’t you think we should be figuring out how to escape?”

“But it’s easy,” Trixie frowned. “You can do anything when you’re dreaming. You can even wake up….”

It was as instant as opening your eyes. Twilight blinked, and she was standing in the silver corridor along with the others, looking normal again and feeling, perhaps, quite a bit different. The distorted patch of air was gone.

“You did it!” Twilight said. “I’ve had enough of dreaming.”

“I think you’ll have more of it yet,” Trixie said. “I think we’re still asleep.”

Lemon Hearts pinched herself. “I think I’m awake.”

“I disagree,” said Trixie. “I’ve been thinking about it. At first we went from day to night, but we remained awake that whole time. But to Nightmare Moon, that’s not how it would be. She’d awaken to the Bank and a land full of sleeping ponies.

“It’s not the Night side that we’re on. It’s the Sleeping side.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Then Minuette said, “Does that mean the Bank has been awake for almost a thousand years?”

“Wouldn’t you go crazy?” Twinkleshine said.

“I don’t know,” said Twilight gravely. “But I think we really need to escape from here. We’ll bring Princess Celestia the key to the Gold Room. The Bank needs to be taken care of.”

Do not mess with the Bank, children….

“Come on,” Twilight muttered. They started walking again. While Lemon Hearts took the lead, skipping ahead, Trixie grabbed Twilight and pulled her back.

“Don’t worry,” she said quietly. “About what happened back there in the dream patch. I don’t let anypony find out what I’m really about either. That’s why I took control of my dreams. It’s something you can do too, if you want.”

“I found something!” Lemon Hearts shouted, her voice echoing from a distance. Twilight and Trixie hurried to catch up.

Lemon Hearts had found a dining room. It was filled with round tables covered with white tablecloths, like the tables were set out for guests. Each table was surrounded by six chairs, and there were nine tables in all.

The tables each had a silver candlestick for a centerpiece, each holding a long white candle. Each candle had dried wax-drip down their sides; none of them were pristine. All of the tables had six white plates with floral patterns except for one, which had only the centerpiece.

The tables were arranged in front of a stage as if there would be a speech or musical performance during dinner. The stage, though, was bare.

“Where are we?” Twilight asked in a whisper. “Trixie, do you know….”

But Trixie’s eyes were wide with terror. Twilight followed her gaze and saw a giant, sand-colored bug leaning against the wall, tall enough for its head to curve against the white ceiling. It was shaped somewhat like a beetle, but with the uniform body of a worm. All together it had ten long, thin legs.

They were all frozen for a moment, like frightened deer.

“I think it’s asleep,” said Twinkleshine after what felt like an eternity. Her voice was barely audible, just a faint breath.

“What does that even mean here?” Twilight mouthed back. Twinkleshine looked uncertain.

Then Lemon Hearts sat down at one of the tables. Twilight’s shout of terror died in her throat as the sand-colored bug stirred and lowered itself down from its reclining position, landing on all ten of its legs. The floor rumbled as it swiftly made its way across to Lemon Hearts.

Twilight was so utterly convinced that Lemon Hearts was going to die that she didn’t even comprehend at first what was happening when the bug took out a sheet of paper from nowhere and put it in front of Lemon Hearts.

It set out a thin crystal glass in front of her too and skittered away to the wall.

“It’s a menu,” said Lemon Hearts, smiling at them.

“Lemon Hearts, what are you thinking?” whispered Minuette. “Get back here!”

“Um, but, let’s see...they’ve got Château Rêver by the glass. Oh, I don’t think it knows I’m underage.”

She glanced up and giggled at their pale expressions. “What? What are you all scared of?”

“The giant bug!” said Minuette, tears in her eyes.

Lemon Hearts blinked at them. “Oh. That’s just my imaginary friend.”

“Your friend?” exclaimed Twinkleshine. “Have you lost your mind?”

“I know it’s silly.” Lemon Hearts looked a bit embarrassed. “But I used to have imaginary friends, and this bug is the only one left.”

“You dreamed this bug?” said Trixie.

“Not exactly.” Even Lemon Hearts looked unsure. “I just know it, that’s all. Maybe Nightmare Moon knows it too.”

“But she couldn’t have done anything to the Bank since you were born,” pointed out Moondancer. “She was banished almost a thousand years ago.”

Lemon Hearts turned the menu over and looked it over. “Um, that might be true, but…there’s oat fries with star salt.”

There was a moment while they mulled it over. Finally, Minuette said what they all were thinking: “I would quite like to know what star salt tastes like.”

“It wouldn’t be real, just whatever Nightmare Moon could make up,” said Trixie, but she didn’t sound very full of conviction.

They all sat down at the table. Lemon Hearts waved the bug over. “Six orders of oat fries with star salt, please. And do you have anything non-alcoholic to drink?”

“It’d be a Surely-From-The-Temple,” Twinkleshine said sarcastically, but to her surprise, the bug bowed and slithered away, returning a minute later with five more glasses and a bottle of something pink, which it poured for each of them.

“We can’t stay long here,” Twilight said after the bug had slithered away to…wherever.

“Why not?” Lemon Hearts inspected the drink, then lifted it to her lips and sipped. “I like it better than the real world.”

“I’m about 100% sure that you just drank liquified brains,” Twinkleshine said.

“It’s fizzy.”

“Are liquified brains fizzy?” Twinkleshine whispered to Twilight, who shrugged.

The bug waiter brought out the basket of oat fries, which were golden and steaming. It placed them on the center of the table along with a shaker of salt, clasped its forelimbs together in a sort of “Please enjoy” gesture, and ducked away to somewhere.

Twilight tried a fry on its own first. They were good, if unremarkable. The star salt elevated them. It tasted like regular salt, but there was a warmth to it that stayed in her stomach long after the fries had cooled down. Good for eating, if you were floating out in space….

“So is a show going to start?” Trixie nodded at the stage.

“It might have ended.” Twilight pointed at the built-up candle wax near the base of the candlestick. “We weren’t the first ones here.”

Twilight knew they should have been moving on. But now that they were seated, eating and drinking, she found that she didn’t have the willpower to urge them to get up. Ever since they’d first arrived at the lobby on the Day side of the Bank they’d all been in a state of elevated excitement. It was nice to finally relax.

They were also hungry. It had been a long time since breakfast. The basket of fries was generous even for six ponies, but they went through it in no time at all.

“...I ate too much,” Minuette complained, settling back in her chair.

“Dunno, I kind of want a hayburger now,” said Twinkleshine.

“It was fun when we ordered hayburgers while we were working on the class project over the weekend,” Lemon Hearts. “It felt like having a vacation at school.”

“School is a vacation,” sighed Trixie.

“Wait, I don’t remember this,” said Twilight. “What weekend?”

“You weren’t there,” said Moondancer.

“I worked on the class project.”

“For a day,” Twinkleshine said. “The rest of us barely finished in a month.”

“I would have come by for hayburgers.” Twilight tried to smile.

“Really?” Lemon Hearts looked surprised. “I wish we would’ve invited you. I don’t think anypony could imagine eating hayburgers with Twilight Sparkle. ”

Twilight frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Just that you never eat lunch with anypony,” Minuette said quickly.

“Neither does Twinkleshine!”

“That’s because I don’t want to,” said Twinkleshine.

“Yeah, no pony is scared of Twinkleshine,” Lemon Hearts laughed.

Twilight felt hot around the ears. “I’ve never done anything to anypony! Has Candy Coating been saying…oh, that filly, I’m going to—”

“No, no,” said Moondancer quickly. “It’s not like that. It’s like…with the class project, I almost went crazy figuring out a spell to get the stars to animate right, and Trixie had to ask some older girls for help with the physics of the nine orbits. But you just came in and were like, boom, here’s what the solar system used to look like, boom, here’s how living oceans move, and then you were gone.”

“I hated that project,” Twinkleshine said. “Remembering when you stuck Neptune in and everything went haywire?”

“Yes,” said Trixie sourly, “and I figured out what was going wrong. Only took me an entire weekend.”

“No, the funniest thing was when Gamma went and found out what previous classes had done,” Minuette cut in, “and she thought she was being so clever, and then it turns out our project was way harder than anything girls in our year have done before. Gamma fully freaked out in the middle of the classroom. She had a literal meltdown.”

“That’s because she’s never done anything without cheating before,” Trixie said. They all laughed, except for Twilight.

She hadn’t been there for Gamma’s meltdown, or whatever Moondancer or Trixie had to do with the stars and planets. The class had voted for her to do the hardest job, which was perfectly reasonable, she had done it, and that was that.

The class project had been the focus of the last month of the semester, and she had barely been there for any of it.

“So I’m a jerk, is that it?” Twilight said. “You could have asked me for help.”

They looked at each other.

“What?” demanded Twilight. “Didn’t think of that?”

“I didn’t think of asking the teacher either,” Moondancer said.

“I am not the teacher!”

“No,” said Moondancer, “you’re smarter than she is.”

“We all are, that’s the whole point of the school!”

“Maybe. Maybe I'm more intelligent than she is. But I’m not better than the teacher, not yet. That’s why she’s the teacher and I’m the student. You shouldn’t even be in our class. You could be a Sister already, it seems like.”

“So—so why is that bad?”

“It isn’t bad,” Moondancer said. “But you only focus on Princess Celestia like she’s your goal and none of us even matter.”

Twilight stared at her. Twinkleshine spoke up. “Lay off Twilight, you all. No pony here is normal.”

“Easy for you to say,” Minuette said. “You weren’t here for the first three weeks.”

“Why, what happened?”

Twilight said it before any of them could. “The teacher would start lecturing normally. I’d raise my hoof to answer a question. Then I’d keep talking. I’d go to the board and start scribbling with the chalk. My lectures would go on for a while.”

“The teacher stopped calling on Twilight a few days before you showed up,” Minuette said to Twinkleshine.

“I guess I can’t say I wasn’t like a teacher,” Twilight said. The star salt was still warm in her stomach. She thought she wanted to cry, but she felt like she wanted to laugh.

“You were a better lecturer anyway,” Trixie said. “Frankly, I think the teacher stopped calling on you because she was worried about her job.”

Twilight laughed. It wasn’t a handsome sound. And there was a hiccup in there from the fizzy drink.

“I’m glad you’re all here with me,” Twilight said. “Sorry for not being around more.”

“I thought you’d be scary,” Lemon Hearts said shyly. “When you and Twinkleshine were figuring out the door, Minuette made me share my idea, I didn’t want to. But you’re actually really nice.”

“...I think I’m scary too,” Twilight said. “I look at myself the same way I look at other ponies.”

“I think we’re hearing somepony pretty great,” said Trixie. “So try listening to yourself the way other ponies do.”

Twilight breathed in and out, feeling the strain of her full stomach. They all looked at the empty basket of fries. Even the loose pieces of star salt had been eaten.

“...So,” said Twinkleshine. “Who’s paying for this meal?”

Who?

“Um,” said Twilight. She was trying to remember something Simple Pleasure had said, something on the Day side of the Bank, which seemed like much more than a day ago.

“Dine and dash?’ shrugged Minuette.

“I’d feel better if we left a note,” said Moondancer.

Do not mess with the Bank

“I think Princess Celestia was supposed to pay for lunch at the Bank anyway,” said Trixie. “She can handle the tab. Let’s get moving. Twilight? …Twilight!”

The Bank is dangerous

Do not mess with the Bank, children

Princess Celestia would never put us in danger

but Princess Celestia didn’t put us here

DO NOT MESS WITH THE BANK, CHILDREN!

The bug was leaning over Lemon Hearts. There was a straw being held between its legs, and it was nearly about to touch the end of the straw to the head of Lemon Hearts.

“NO!” screamed Twilight. She leaped over the table, knocking over the basket of fries and the candlestick, sending Lemon Hearts crashing to the floor. Twilight landed on top of her.

The bug swiveled around, its horrible long straw held to its mouth, pushing it down past Twilight to get to Lemon Hearts. Twilight held onto Lemon Hearts and did a spell she’d never done before, which was to teleport with another pony attached to her. They disappeared in a lavender flash, and to Twilight’s relief, neither one of them had lost any body parts.

But she hadn’t gotten the direction right. They’d gone further into the restaurant, the bug between them and the door.

Minuette was screaming. Twinkleshine threw the empty basket at the bug, which bounced off and clattered away.

“Can you teleport on your own?” Twilight said to Lemon Hearts.

“No, but—”

“Hang on.” She grabbed Lemon Hearts and teleported again just before the bug slammed the end of the straw onto the floor where Lemon Hearts had been standing.

They reappeared on the stage. “Twilight, stop, that’s so disorienting,” Lemon Hearts gasped.

Twilight wasn’t paying her any attention. The bug was coming for them—no, for Lemon Hearts—again. She stepped in front of her. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she snarled at the creature. “But if you were listening, then you just listened to them talk about how scary I am. You can walk away, or—”

The bug moaned in a distorted female voice that hurt to listen to. “She-e-e’s mmmmmine! Nnnnot yours!”

Twilight stared. “Wait, you can talk?”

It grabbed her. Such was the horror of the clicking mandibles and waving antennae as she was lifted to the bug’s mouth that she completely forgot how to teleport.

“DO SOMETHING!” screamed Minuette.

“STOP IT!” yelled Lemon Hearts. “THIS IS MY FRIEND!”

To Twilight’s astonishment, the bug stopped.

“You too!” said Lemon Hearts. She was glaring at Trixie, who’s horn was glowing dangerously. “This is my friend!”

“...What?” said Trixie, mouth agape.

“Put her down,” Lemon Hearts scolded the bug. It set Twilight down, who stumbled away feeling like she very much wanted to puke up the oat fries sitting in her stomach.

“I told you!” Lemon Hearts said. “This is my imaginary friend.”

“It’s a horrible monster, and there’s something wrong with your imagination,” Trixie said shakily.

“Maybe,” said Lemon Hearts. “Yeah, actually. I totally suck. Right?” She grinned up at the creature, which was leaning its straw toward her again. “Not now,” she scolded it, and it stopped.

“I’ve been living with this bug for as long as I can remember,” Lemon Hearts said. She jumped off the stage and trotted over to Minuette to wipe the tears from her face. “It’s okay, Minnie, I’m here.”

Minuette was shaking. “What’s going on, Lemon Hearts?”

“I owe you an apology,” Lemon Hearts said.

“No kidding!”

“Listen to me,” Lemon Hearts’ voice was urgent. “Listen to me. I’m really sorry, okay? I’ve been greedy like this my whole life.”

“Lemon Hearts, we need to get out of here!”

“Listen to me! Oh, Celestia, I’ve thought about explaining this a million times, and now I can’t remember how I was supposed to start. Okay, uh, so, we’ve been friends a really long time, right? Well, you have a lot of friends, but you’re sort of my only friend. I was really scared when we came to this school together that you’d make a bunch of new friends and I wouldn’t be friends with any of them, which is pretty much what happened, but, um, I sort of also stopped it from happening as much as it could have. I’ve been a little clingy. I’ve been a lot clingy. I’ve literally clung onto you a few times to stop you from noticing other ponies you like to talk to.”

“Lemon Hearts—”

“This bug is me,” Lemon Hearts said in a rush. “I made her up so I’d have something else to be the gross part of myself.”

“You said it was your imaginary friend!”

“Yeah, isn’t that what imaginary friends are?” She glanced around at the others.

“No,” said Trixie, sounding as shaken as the rest of them felt.

“Oh.” Lemon Hearts looked genuinely surprised. “Okay, well, that changes things—I had a speech planned out, I promise—”

Minuette clapped her hoofs against Lemon Hearts’ cheeks. “What the heck are you talking about?” she shouted.

“The bug is the way I feel about chaining myself to you. The straw is for sucking up all the good memories. The bug is sort of bad because it’s ugly, but when it’s full it looks happy, and so I figured I must’ve been happy.”

“That’s not great.”

“Yeah, I know. But since I wasn’t benefiting from it, I figured it wasn’t immoral but something else, something that doesn’t have any bad or good in it at all—”

“Dead water,” said Twilight automatically. She felt like she was learning about something horrible, yet what she was seeing happen was good, and her body was very confused about it.

“—yeah, anyway, I’ve got four new friends now, so I don’t think I need the bug anymore.” She turned around and looked up at the bug, considering it. It waved its straw at her, and she pushed it away like it was the snout of an intrusive dog.

The bug spoke in its twisted moan. “Nnneed fooood….”

“I’m not going to abandon you here,” Lemon Hearts said. “But me and my friends are going to go, and you’re not going to stop us. I’ll come back someday, and if there’s anything good in my head, you can suck it out then. Got a problem with that?”

“I have a problem with that,” Minuette said.

“Yeah, me too, actually,” said Twilight.

“We can talk about it,” said Lemon Hearts. “This is a part of me. I can’t just stop being who I am. But I hope that you’ll all stick with me, and I’m sorry for putting you in danger, Twilight.”

“N…no problem.”

The bug didn’t move. Twilight began to edge backwards toward the front of the restaurant with the other girls, and it didn’t so much as twitch.

Lemon Hearts stopped though. “Also, if you have any more of those oat fries in the back, I’ll totally take some to go,” she said. “Extra star salt, please.”

Twilight wouldn’t have expected to be hungry after eating that much, but utter terror was a great stimulant to the appetite, apparently. The extra fries were nice to munch on as she led them down the next corridor to where the exit would be according to how she remembered the map on the Day side of the Bank. Lemon Hearts and Minuette leaned against each other as they walked, and Moondancer was talking about the symbolism of bugs in ancient mythology according to some books she’d read.

They were getting pretty close to the exit, according to Twilight’s internal map. It was just around the corner, in fact.

Twilight turned the corner and saw…what looked like one wall smashed through another, a pile of rubble around it, and no way through.

The others trotted around the corner after her and stopped short.

Moondancer gasped. “That shouldn’t be here.”

“Help me clear the rubble,” said Twilight. She was fighting down panic, telling herself to be calm. But after levitating the rocks away, what remained was a wall in front of them.

“I must have missed something,” said Twilight. She glanced at Moondancer, who seemed to have memorized the map as well.

“I thought we were going the right way,” Moondancer whispered.

Twinkleshine got up close to the wall to inspect it. “Girls, this wall is warm. Like…Sun warm.”

“Princess Celestia is coming to rescue us?” Lemon Hearts said excitedly.

“I don’t think so,” said Twilight quietly.

Oh, Princess…you messed with the Bank, Princess!

Trixie was apparently thinking along similar lines. “She was trying to get into the Night, or Sleeping side of the Bank. And…messed it up.”

“There has to be another way to the exit,” Trixie said.

“No, there doesn’t,” Moondancer said, looking down. “There doesn’t.”

“We should go back to the Silver Room,” said Twilight.

“Why?” demanded Twinkleshine. “Want to waste away in there instead of here?”

“Princess Celestia was trying to get onto this side of the Bank for a reason,” Twilight said, recalling something she’d heard about the story of Hearth’s Warming Eve. “If she wants the Bank to take a nap, then she can’t just have it not be awake. It has to also go to sleep. That means something has to be done on this side of the Bank.”

“What has to be done?”

“I don’t know, but it probably requires the Silver Key. Maybe we can open up some other stuff with it and get out of here and give Princess Celestia both keys.”

No pony had a better plan, so they followed Twilight back to the Silver Room. She’d been so concerned by what lay beyond the door out of the Silver Room that she hadn’t looked at the side of the door going into the Silver Room. There was a key in the keyhole, the same size as the Gold Key. Twilight took it out.

The key was as silver as a beam of light. It wasn’t silver like the Moon, which was dusty and gray. It was silver like the light that reflected from it at night. That light seemed to be billowing off the key, wisps of moonlight that didn’t quite glow or shine, but moved like smoke and faded.

“Now what?” Minuette asked.

“Well, if we go around opening random doors, we’ll certainly die,” Twilight said matter-of-factly. “So we want to find a non-random door to open. So there’s the entrance, the exit, the gift shop, but I doubt Nightmare Moon has one, and the Silver Room.”

They went into the Silver Room.

“So I have an idea,” said Twilight. “It’s probably going to kill us all, but we’re going to die anyway. I’m a little more worried that it destroys the world, but…I don’t think that’s super likely.”

“We’ve got to work on your presentation skills,” Trixie said.

Twilight took a deep breath. “Princess Celestia works her greatest magic from the Gold Room because of its proximity to the Numeraire. I think the same must be true for Nightmare Moon.”

“You want to use the Numeraire to cast a spell to get us out of here?” Trixie’s voice rose in pitch syllable by syllable until she was shrieking. “Twilight, and I say this with love, but that’s a super bad idea.”

“If there’s a way out, then I want to find it,” Twinkleshine said.

Trixie threw up her hoofs. “Oh, well, if it’s a way out you want, there’s a million of those! I was hoping for a way out that didn’t involve being splattered against a dimension of reality or, I don’t know, redefining Time so that it works differently depending on whether it’s day or night!”

“Moondancer, do you know anything about how they used the Numeraire?” Twilight asked.

“No,” she said, “but I don’t know if we could use it in here even if we knew how. On the Day, or, no, on the Awake side of the Earth Room, we were stuck to the Numeraire at the center of the table. But after going to sleep, it wasn’t there. I don’t know if there’s a sleeping version of the Numeraire.”

“Okay,” said Twilight. “I’m going to sit down and think for a bit. Is everypony okay with that?”

They looked at each other.

“Honestly,” said Twinkleshine, “I think it’s what we’ve all been waiting for.”

One of Twilgiht’s favorite techniques when thinking about economics was not being stupid about metaphors. Sometimes, a problem wasn’t tractable to mathematical analysis or required too much data to solve. What you had to do then was come up with a toy example and work through its details, and then it was very important not to be stupid about it. The toy example was just a toy, no more predictive of the real economy than a doll was of an actual pony, and if you tried to use it anyway, then reality would violate your predictions along many margins.

Twilight was going to break that rule.

The Numeraire was older than Walras the Bearded, but most of what she knew about it had first been set down by him. The Numeraire was basically the observation that goods didn’t have to be priced in terms of money. They could also be priced in terms of other goods. If you had an economy of apples, oranges, and pears, and one apple traded for two oranges or four pears, then you could say that oranges were priced at ½ of an apple and pears were priced at ¼ of an apple. And since one apple always traded for one apple, then the apple, the numeraire good, was worth 1, always.

The Numeraire, or numeraire, when you weren’t talking about the Bank specifically, wasn’t the idea of using apples as a substitute form of currency. It was simply the idea of using apples, or any good, as a form of measurement.

One advantage of thinking about the numeraire was that it let you understand the nature of general equilibrium as a circumstance of mutually compatible measurements, or beliefs held by the measurers, between all goods in the economy. So if somepony grew five pears to buy three oranges, this wouldn’t make sense from the orange-seller’s perspective, as they could instead buy two pears for one orange and take their remaining two oranges and trade it for one apple, which buys four pears. So we have an excess demand for pears here which is being balanced by an excess supply of oranges. Relative values will have to adjust, or the pear-grower will have to grow another pear for everything to make sense. But at this moment, something that the pear-grower thinks, some belief the pear-grower has about reality, is not compatible with some belief held by the orange-grower.

You could go a bit further than that if you wanted, and Twilight didn’t want to. She could feel herself preparing to rules-lawyer reality, to insist that it let her behave in a way compatible with her motivated reading of it rather than its own logic. This was extremely not okay, and she fully expected to get blown into a million pieces for trying. It was only the knowledge that five sweet, dear ponies were depending on her that kept her going.

So she did go a bit further, and she noted that the concept of mutually incompatible beliefs suggested that there might be some reason to think about equilibrium along the lines of Autumn Agreement’s Theorem. Autumn Agreement was a notably acquiescent pony who lived centuries ago, and her theorem said that ponies should never agree to disagree. While this had ended tragically for Autumn Agreement, as she’d had her house stolen by a group of ponies who had followed her around loudly insisting that it was theirs, the theorem, modified to have the requirement of “truth-seeking,” lived on.

There was an analogy between disequilibrium and disagreement, which is that their very existence functioned as evidence for irrational behavior. If the pear-grower and the orange-grower both had the same belief about the relative value of their goods in terms of the numeraire, and they both knew that they both believed this, then there was no sane reason to be growing incompatible amounts of fruit or to be trading them at incompatible exchange ratios. Profit-maximizing, or utility-maximizing in this moneyless example, served the same function as truth-seeking, which was to disallow an equilibrium of disagreement.

Twilight further reasoned that although rational agreement was surely the domain of intelligent ponies, a general equilibrium of trade could be reached by simple rule-following behaviors about how to logically adjust exchange ratios. There was no reason you couldn’t build a simple buyer-seller for a simple market, and if the teacher hadn't started screaming in horror when Twilight suggested it, she would’ve already done so. (This was no discredit to the teacher, who would have been encouraging of anypony else. It was only the fact that the suggestion came from Twilight Sparkle that caused her to experience a certain degree of existential horror. It didn’t help that Twilight’s initial sketch including glowing red eyes “to distinguish it from sentient ponies and to enable long-distance binary signaling with other artificial traders.”)

Once you took the intelligence out of economic equilibrium, it only stood to reason that you could take other pony things out of it as well. Because it was all well and good to say that general equilibrium consisted of mutually compatible measurements taken by all traders, but that raised one final question: what were they actually measuring? In the world of science, this was a pretty fundamental question. And the answer Twilight had usually been given and had usually accepted was “value.”

But her hypothetical artificial traders didn’t have values in the sense of wants and goals and pleasures and distastes like real ponies did. So what were they valuing? The answer to that was obvious: their values were the values of the measurements they took, specifically the measurements that could conceivably cause them to behave differently. Measurements came in values—e.g., “this table is six feet long”—and there wasn’t an obvious difference between pursuing equilibrium on the basis of externally measured values versus internal values of the “I like oranges more than pears” type.

And once you’d made that leap, it was hard to remember why trade played an important role in this process. The process of the mutual compatibility of measurements did not need to be managed by a dimension of property; two ponies walking on a street toward each other, on a trajectory to collide if one or both did not move aside, would either have to update their beliefs or accept a painful disequilibrium of slamming into each other.

And then you remembered no-trade theorems and realized that trade was actually a pretty weird thing in economics, it wasn’t something that economics found so easy to talk about in a natural way. If it didn’t happen so often, economists might never talk about it at all.

So if you stopped thinking about trade and just started thinking about general equilibrium as a situation of mutually compatible paths, then you could really take the pony out of it altogether. Rocks bumped into each other too…and while they couldn’t make plans to avoid bumping into each other, they way that they bounced off of each other sure looked like they were trying to minimize the probability of bumping into each other again, either shooting off in opposite directions or coming to a stop. Sure, this didn’t work so well when there were lots of rocks or other things to bump into, but that just meant ponies were smarter than rocks….

Because rocks didn’t buy and sell things, but they did have values—descriptions of their mass, location, three-dimensional structure, etc.—and those values changed when rocks interacted with other rocks. A rock might gain velocity in one direction while losing it in another direction, for example. And while those tradeoffs didn’t happen intelligently, they did happen in a predictable, rules-based way, just like they did for her artificial traders. And it sure seemed like for any particular interaction, the function of the rule was to minimize further contradiction, however unsuccessful that rule would be over time and across multiple objects.

So yes, goods could be priced in terms of each other. But that wasn’t fundamental. The Sun and Moon didn’t bargain, and the ocean had never gone shopping even before it had died. So there had to be something else, a more general sense in which things could be compared in terms of each other. And if you believed, as scientists apparently had before water had died, that all of reality was governed by a single rule, then there was just one quantity, one value being tracked for all things that governed all interactions so that no contradictions ever occurred in terms of that quantity.

It sounded like a numeraire, which didn’t mean that reality wouldn’t laugh at her for the theory and blow her up for the application. But maybe in the Bank, it didn’t matter if it was true as long as Princess Celestia and Nightmare Moon had been trying to make it true….

Where was the Numeraire on the Sleeping side of the Bank? That was obvious. It was where it was everywhere else, which is to say, it was everywhere else. The Numeraire on the Awake side of the Bank had been at its very center, perfectly centralized. And the Numeraire on the Sleeping side of the Bank was utterly throughout it, perfectly decentralized.

Because dreams may have been about unreality, but they themselves were perfectly real….

Twilight opened her eyes. “Let’s give this a try.”

The purple light that filled the silver walls seemed to pulsate as Twilight stood up. “What are you going to do?” Minuette asked.

“I’m going to dream about a way the world could be,” Twilight said, “and find out how much it costs to get there. Stand back, please.”

They cleared a space around her as a lavender glow surrounded her horn. She wasn’t sure how to actually touch or talk to the Numeraire. But the Numeraire pulled things to it, or in this case, it already ran through everything, so maybe there wasn’t much she needed to do.

I’m not trying to do anything crazy, she thought. I just want to move that wall out of the way. So if this is going to destroy the world or anything like that, please give me warning.

BAM! The purple light slammed against the walls. Twilight jumped back.

“Twilight,” said Minuette shakily, “are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

That wall can’t be good for you either. It’s not supposed to be there. So we can work together to get rid of it.

BAM! The light bashed against the walls like it was trying to break through. Twilight’s heart thudded in her chest. She spun around, looking at the purple shadows shifting behind the silver barrier as they surged forward a third time.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

“TWILIGHT WHATEVER YOU DID STOP IT NOW!” Trixie shouted.

“I didn’t do anything!” The six of them circled up together, forming a perimeter, watching the shadowy light crash and recede and smash against the walls of the Silver Room.

Something broke.

Whatever you did, stop it now, the shadows seemed to say as they began to choke the light from the room. But it didn’t stop, did it?

“Girls!” Twilight screamed, but she was all alone in a void. It wasn’t dark, just empty. It wasn’t quiet, just empty. It wasn’t sad, just empty.

It’s never stopped, and it never will.

“Girls?” said Twilight, but she wasn’t alone, just empty.

Minutes or eons might have passed, Twilight wasn’t sure what the difference was. There was nothing else to look at, so even without a mirror, Twilight began to look at herself.

She saw the difficult child she had been. All of the meals she had refused to eat, the room layouts she had refused to sleep in, the battles over brushing her mane and reading during family hours. She saw that a lot of what she had read had been very pleasant for her but not very productive either. Had she read different things, maybe none of this would have happened.

She looked at herself in school, saw herself flinching away from Princess Celestia every time she walked through their part of the building. Had she been less of a coward, maybe none of this would have happened.

How much of this was my fault? What if I’d cared more, paid more attention, asked the questions that I should have asked if I had been thinking like I should have been?

How can I prevent this from happening again?

The emptiness all around her seemed to pull at her, and that gave her an idea.

Twilight examined herself again. She looked deeper and deeper and saw that a lot of the way she was wouldn’t be reformed so easily. It made much more sense to junk it all and start all over again. So she began to empty herself out.

First she got rid of all of the distractions. The tastes of delicious food and the pleasures of comfy bean bag chairs, those were out. Every pleasant fantasy of being a heroine or great wizard that she’d gotten from her books had to go. In fact, the interest in books themselves had no utility. Books were sources of information, not things to be treasured themselves. Her parents were still a distraction, so she let the void take them. Concerns over grades and report cards were in the same bucket. Good grades followed from good work, so she would do the work and let the teachers worry about grades. It all got tossed into the void, and the void sucked it away.

She’d always pretended not to care about her looks, but now she would really have to not care. The mane would be cut to stay out of her eyes, clothes would guard against the weather as needed. Everything else was given to the emptiness.

Priorities had to be set. If she was in pain, she could address the issue medically to maximize productivity, but otherwise it would be kept to a dull background setting so as not to be a distraction. Food did not need to taste like anything, as she could verify its caloric and nutritional content by other means. Sleep could happen when it needed to, but only for a few hours, and was to otherwise be minimized. Indeed, its minimization seemed like the best way to achieve her goals for the reformulation of herself.

She kept going, marveling at the waste. So much of her was a creature that attended to light and warmth and pleasure and comfort. There would be room for so much more when she had gotten rid of it all.

It took a while, but she’d done it, thrown everything out into the void so that she could start on the process of remaking herself.

Now….

She reached inside of herself for something to build with, and found that there was nothing there.

Not a problem. She reached outside of herself, to the void, for something to build with, and found that there was nothing there, the void had taken everything and was still utterly empty.

It should have been scary. But Twilight didn’t feel anything about it at all. She was nothing, and that didn’t seem totally congruent with something she’d been thinking a few seconds or maybe a million millennia ago, but there were pluses to the way she was now. Nothing hurt or felt scary anymore. And if she never ate and never slept and never felt again, at least what she wasn’t eating didn’t taste like ash, at least the dreams she wasn’t having didn’t terrify her, at least the feelings she wasn’t feeling weren’t pain and loneliness and loathing.

The thing checked inside itself one last time to make sure the job was done.

“Hey, Twilight,” said the ivory Unicorn within. “What’re you doing?”

The thing looked at it.

“You too, huh?” the ivory Unicorn sighed. “What’d you do, throw it out? It’s not gone, you dingus, it’s just making you feel that way.”

The thing felt totally indifferent to what the Unicorn was saying.

“Here,” said the Unicorn. “Take this.”

The thing looked down. It was holding a sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly. Wheat bread.

“You look like you need to eat,” Twinkleshine said. They were sitting next to each other on the end of a slide at a playground that the thing didn’t recognize. “If you stop eating, it’s all going to fall to shit. Trust me.”

The thing looked at her. It was hard to express in words how little she cared about that happening.

“I know you don’t give a shit,” said Twinkleshine. “Neither did I. When my parents...my dad’s a total dick, you know. He builds things just to sit on top of them and show the world how high up he is. I don’t understand how anypony can be that high up and still not take the bird’s-eye view of things. He’s happier with Mom out of the way. It lets him do the things he wanted to do anyway. Mom was all right. Well, she was pretty useless. Like, I don’t know how you don’t see it coming. How do you date a guy like that and not realize what he’s going to do? Maybe it’ll make more sense to me after I hit puberty. Do you know what puberty is, Twilight?”

She had read books about it, yes.

“That’s good, Twilight. It’s great how much you like to read. I stopped reading for a while after I figured out that my dad’s secretary is my real mom. I love the characters in stories so much. I can really imagine being friends with them, you know? So when I felt like I couldn’t be friends with myself, I had to stop reading, because I knew the characters would be just as grossed out by me as I was. Eat the fucking sandwich, Twilight, or I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

She bit off a piece of the crust. It didn’t taste like much.

“Lemon Hearts is struggling with it even worse than you are. Trixie is being weird. Minuette doesn’t know how to handle it at all. Moondancer is trying to turn herself into a book, I’m pretty sure, and it’s not a good look at all. Eat the fucking sandwich.”

She started to eat, chewing mechanically.

“I have to say, I’m impressed by how methodically you went about it. You really emptied yourself out block by block, step by step. But I don’t give a fucking crap what you want. This isn’t a world where you get some of what you want and I get some of what I want and we compromise and trade off our values. This is a world where I get everything I want and no pony else’s opinion matters at all, and I want you to be full of light and life and to be my friend, Twilight Sparkle, eat the fucking sandwich.”

Twilight was getting thirsty. Twinkleshine gave her a water bottle.

“When I was little,” said Twinkleshine, “and I know I’m just a fucking filly still, shut the fuck up, Twilight, I read a book about how the Earth used to be in a solar system with eight other planets traveling around the Sun. Don’t fucking look at me like you know this shit, just keep eating. But now the Earth is going on wherever, just wherever its inertia at the moment of the break sent it. And that kind of sucks because we left the other planets behind and the stars we used to be able to see, but on the other hoof, there’s going to be new planets and new stars, right? Most of those places don’t have anything interesting going on with them. This universe has some crap in it, but mostly it’s empty, and mostly the crap that’s there isn’t doing anything. But we can make it do stuff. I mean, if you think about, like, a stage play, right? You can just slap some particles around and suddenly the particles are going on about to be or not to be. You just have to regulate their behavior right. Then the regulated particles get so interested in crap that they start freaking out about how interested they are and try to turn back into regular particles. I don’t know. Anyway. I started thinking about filling things up some. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a little more out there? Finish the fucking sandwich, you eat so slow, for fuck’s sake.”

Twilight ate the last bite and drank the water.

“Cool,” said Twinkleshine. “Sorry for cursing. I sat in the back corner during a lot of meetings with a lot of stressed-out businessponies.”

Twilight shrugged.

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t care. So cool, Twilight. Want to hang out?”

Twilight didn’t have anything better to do.

“Siiiiick. Help me get the merry-go-round started, will you?”

They got the merry-go-round moving with their legs, and then got it going a lot faster with their magic after they jumped on. Twilight got so nauseous that she had to teleport off, and only realized after slamming herself along the woodchips that she’d forgotten to account for her momentum.

“How's that feel?” Twinkleshine crouched down by her with an ice pack. The intense cold hurt a lot worse than the stinging from her scrapes.

“Get off of me!”

Twinkleshine stepped away, then turned back around, eyebrows raised. “I bet we can get it going a lot faster than that.”

Twilight grinned. A few minutes later, tears were streaming from her eyes as the wind pulled at her lips and eyelids. She grabbed Twinkleshine and teleported them both off the merry-go-round, and this time, she got the momentum right. Twinkleshine was nice enough not to say anything about the tears that kept coming well after the ride had stopped.

It was nice to chill. Twinkleshine had chips and juice and very loud music about how screaming was a fun and cool way to express yourself. Twilight was exhausted, and she dozed off at one point against Twinkleshine and woke up to Trixie and Lemon Hearts standing over them.

“Can I have some pretzels?” Trixie said.

“Twinkleshine, you’re amazing, but if I have to listen to this music for one more minute, I’m going right back to that void, ” Lemon Hearts said.

“Help yourself, Trixie. No problem, Lemon Hearts. I’m still working on Minuette and Moondancer. Twilight, you can take over here. I’ll handle the rest when we’re all together.”

Twinkleshine didn’t leave, but she did go sit by herself under the monkey bars. Twilight made sure that Trixie and Lemon Hearts got something to eat. They chatted for a while on one of the benches. Lemon Hearts mentioned that she and Minuette were going to play frisbee at the park near the school this weekend, and Trixie and Twilight both confessed to having no plans.

“Maybe we’ll see you there,” said Lemon Hearts.

Twinkleshine came over to them with Minuette and Moondancer in tow. She watched them eat and drink and insisted they all take a nap, even Twilight. When they woke up, she gave them a few minutes to stretch and rub their eyes.

“Ready?”

“For what?” Twilight asked.

“For the rest.”

“No,” said Twilight honestly.

“That’s all right, Twilight. That’s why you have me. That’s why we have each other.”

The playground disappeared. The void was around them, but it wasn’t empty, because they were in it.

The void was angry about that. Twilight could feel the cold sucking at them, trying to take everything out of them and put it somewhere that it couldn’t exist.

“It’s not angry, Twilight,” Twinkleshine said. “It’s afraid. It’s afraid of what happens when you let others in. It’s afraid of the pain of living.”

The cold pulled. Something sharper than ice and more invisible than air was cutting into Twilight, making her whimper. She knew the pain would go away if everything else did.

Lemon Hearts’ teeth chattered. “I hate this,” Minuette hissed. Moondancer was muttering to herself, and Trixie’s eyes were unfocused like she was daydreaming in class.

“It’s cold here, isn’t it?” said Twinkleshine. “That’s what cold is, isn’t it? Things going away from you. But the void isn’t getting any warmer. When you lose things like this, it doesn’t go anywhere else. It just goes away.

“I think it’s missing its old master,” Twinkleshine went on. “I mean, the entire Sleeping side of the Bank has been abandoned for almost a thousand years. That’s just what it feels like to me. And now it’s trying to…cope.”

“Y-y-yeah?” shivered Twilight. “D-d-do something!”

Twinkleshine took a step forward. “I’m not going to tell you it gets better,” she said to whatever was listening. “Because it doesn’t. But you can get better.”

The cold pulled at them again, a faint vacuum scream reaching into everything.

“Sh,” said Twinkleshine. Her voice filled the void, and Twilight realized that the void was very small. “Listen, I’m not even saying it’s a bad decision. If the pain is too much, sometimes you have to turn it off. We’re hurting you right now by being here, aren’t we? Because you’re starting to remember that being alone isn’t always how it is. You can shut it off if you have to, but that has to be the start of something, not the end. You can’t quit the game and announce that you win.

“I’ve been empty too. You can get to a point where that doesn’t feel reversible. You’ve shut so much down and taken so much out of yourself that there’s nothing left to rebuild with. But things you can’t do alone, you might be able to do with others. If you let others in, you won’t feel so empty.”

The void seemed to twist around them, shuddering like it was in pain.

“Is blood rushing into your legs for the first time in almost a millennia?” Twinkleshine mused. “I get pins and needles like that if I sleep in a funny position for a few hours. I can’t imagine how bad it would be after a thousand years.”

The cold rushed through them, yanking at their insides. Minuette shrieked again, and Moondancer stumbled into her.

“That’s a bad habit,” Twinkleshine said quietly. “Attacking others. I think that’s the worst part about pain. The habits you form to protect yourself make it harder to let yourself heal.” She looked down. “I wish somepony had found a way to fill the empty spaces up for you sooner, so that even if you were banished to the Moon, it wouldn’t be lonely there.”

Twilight winced at an explosion of light. It took her a moment to realize that they were back in the Silver Room. The silver walls were blinding after the utter emptiness of the void.

“You did it!” squealed Minuette, holding a hoof up in front of her eyes.

“I’m glad you were the one dealing with that,” moaned Lemon Hearts. “I just wanted to give up.”

“That’s what friends are for,” said Twinkleshine, a look of mild puzzlement mixed with amusement on her face.

Twilight went over to her. “Twinkleshine,” she said quietly, “are you okay? You said a bunch of stuff back there…and I don’t know how you did any of that.”

Twinkleshine shrugged. “I know what it’s like to feel abandoned. I’ve been alone for a long time even though there were a lot of ponies around me. But really, it’s all thanks to you, Twilight.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you’re alone all the time, you learn how to keep yourself entertained. I build worlds and friends and adventures alone in my head. I never cared about science or anything like you do. I just like making stuff up.” She grinned at Twilight. “But when you started trying to get into the Gold Room, that was way more interesting than anything happening in my head. Thanks for bringing me out here.”

“I don’t think anypony owes me thanks for bringing them to the Sleeping side of the Bank.”

“That’s not where I am.”

“No?”

“I’m with my friends.” For a moment, Twinkleshine’s smile was brighter than the light of the Silver Room. “And I’m pretty sure they can do anything.”

“Hey,” said Minuette. “Look!”

They looked. A doorway had opened up in one of the silver walls, showing a deep, dark space beyond. But it wasn’t a void. It wasn’t empty at all.

It was full of stars.

“I hope that’s a way out,” said Moondancer.

“It’s definitely a way out,” said Trixie. “But it looks like a way far out, if you know what I mean.”

“It wouldn’t want to take us out,” Twinkleshine said. “It wants to take us in. Somewhere deeper into the Bank, the real heart of whatever is going on here.”

“Wouldn’t that be the Silver Room?” Twilight said.

“Apparently not.”

Do not mess with the Bank, children….

...Yeah, right.

Lemon Hearts groaned. “Why does everything on the Sleeping side of the Bank have to be so crazy?”

“Because the Numeraire is everywhere throughout it,” Twilight said. “If you really wanted an answer to that question.”

“No, it was rhetorical!”

“Still, it’s nice to be able to answer it,” Twilight mused. “Look, either it’s perfectly safe or we die instantly, so let’s just try it.”

“I too have studied decision-making under uncertainty,” Trixie said. “I too am familiar with this theorem you just cited.”

“It doesn’t want to hurt us,” said Twinkleshine.

“Which is different from saying that it won’t hurt us,” Trixie countered. “This room was built for an Alicorn!”

“We can test it,” said Minuette. She trotted over to the black doorway and stuck her head through it.

“Can you breathe?” asked Lemon Hearts breathlessly.

Minuette pulled her head back in after a few more seconds. “No,” she said, “but I wasn’t suffocating either. I think we’ll be fine.”

“If we get out of here,” said Trixie, “I am going to go to an actual bank and I am going to stand in line and talk to a teller and I am going to deposit some money and order a new checkbook and complain about something on my statement and—”

“You’re too young,” interrupted Twilight.

“—and it’s going to be really normal and really boring!”

Twilight went over to her. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll go first, and I’ll bring you along second. We’ll be holding onto each other the entire time.”

Holding Trixie’s hoof, she led her to the doorway to the stars. Looking out, she was relieved to see that there were too many stars dancing in the blackness. This wasn’t really space.

Probably.

It might have been what space was like when it was sleeping.

Twilight held her breath—then realized how pointless that was and let it out—and pushed off into space.

With Trixie’s grip on her, she didn’t go far. Twilight rotated around. “Give me your other hoof.”

‘You’re not suffocating? Freezing? About to explode?”

“No, no, define ‘about’?”

Trixie waited a few seconds. Then she offered her other hoof. Twilight took it and pulled Trixie gently out into space.

They spun around a shared point between them until both of them gradually settled their back hoofs on…something.

“What are we standing on?” said Trixie.

“I definitely have a logical explanation for all of this,” Twilight said, “and I’m not telling you what it is because it’ll stop working if you know about it.” Trixie stuck out her tongue at her.

One by one, Minuette, Twinkleshine, Moondancer, and Lemon Hearts jumped out into space as well. With a little bit of flailing, all of them eventually found purchase on the same nothing that Twilight and Trixie were standing on.

“I’m never going to believe anything I read in a science textbook ever again,” Moondancer muttered under her breath.

The Silver Room was floating in space, a box with light shining out of the doorway.

“Now what?” Minuette looked around. “Where do we go?”

“There,” said Trixie.

Twilight twisted around. She saw it as well: suspended in space, round with brown lands and black oceans, dappled with clouds, spinning gently: the Earth.

“We can go home!” Lemon Hearts cheered.

“We could land in the ocean or another continent,” Trixie said.

“That’s a sleeping Earth,” Twinkleshine pointed out. “Who knows how it works?”

“We can get closer and figure it out from there,” Twilight said. “Come on.”

There wasn’t a path for them to trot along, but Twilight found herself naturally moving along a slow looping orbit toward the planet. It was hard to judge distances, but it seemed like it would take a while to get there. To pass the time, they pointed out different groups of stars, making up new constellations and marveling at the continents visible on the surface of Earth that they’d only ever read about in old books.

Eventually Twilight felt a pull in the direction of the planet. It wasn't like the pull of the void, which wanted to suck everything out. It was more like the pull of gravity.

“Hey, girls,” she said. She put her hoofs out in front of her to slow down and found that she couldn’t. It was like running downhill, and the hill kept getting steeper as she went. “Hey—whoa!—HELP!”

It was all she could do to stay on all four hoofs. If she lost balance now, she would be falling too fast to recover. They had to aim, and the Earth was spinning, and she wasn’t in control. Shouts and cries from behind her confirmed the others were in the same boat. Twilight had to run even faster to avoid falling over, and they were going to crash into the ocean and drown in dead water.

Something blazed past her with all the fire of a blue star. “Follow me!” said Minuette. She changed the path, nearly stumbling, but carrying herself onto a wider orbit. Twilight strained to keep up.

After a few minutes of the most intense uphill run Twilight had ever done, the gravity slackened. They all fell in a heap together, breathing hard.

“Okay,” gasped Twinkleshine, wincing from a stitch in her side. “That was scary.”

“It was,” Minuette agreed. "Twilight, why did you choose that path?”

“I didn’t!” Twilight said.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Minuette said grimly. “O-kay. Look how it’s spinning. That’s our continent, that’s Equestria right there. And so the school is up there somewhere. We just have to be really precise as we get close. It’s all down to timing. Luckily, I'm kind of good at that.”

“That’s not the Earth,” Twilight said. “We’re still in the Bank.”

“It’s the Numeraire?” Minuette asked.

“I don’t think so.” Twilight felt puzzled as well. “I don’t think we woke up. We’re still on the Sleeping side of the Bank. The Numeraire isn’t anywhere in particular.”

“It’s a way of getting around,” Twinkleshine said. “Since we’re blocked off by the wall that got moved.”

“Do you think this can take us to the exit?”

Twinkleshine hesitated. “I don’t think…so. I think…maybe…there was a part that it didn’t want to keep because it didn't want to keep anything, but there was also a part it didn’t want to throw away, so it put it somewhere else….”

“So where should we try to end up?” Minuette paced back and forth, studying the Earth.

“...The Bank,” said Twinkleshine. “We’re going to another part of the Bank.”

“Yeah,” said Twilight suddenly. She felt a little panicked at the realization. “All of this is the Bank, so if we want to end up in a part of the Bank we’re relatively familiar with, we should aim for the ‘actual’ Bank. That’s where the exit is.”

“Gotcha. Okay then,” said Minuette. “Right. No problem.” She jumped up and down a few times, then paced back and forth like she was warming up for an athletic event.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready. Finding a rhythm. Cool, cool.” She was talking to herself now. “Just gotta…come around and…take it slow…so we can hit it real fast, and…yeah. Follow me.”

She took off trotting. Lemon Hearts glanced at them and raced after her.

Twinkleshine grinned. “Gifted Unicorns are just full of hidden depths. I say we trust her.”

They followed behind Minuette in a tight line. She took them on a long curving path heading away from the Earth.

“Minuette!” Trixie called out from behind Twilight. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

In response, Minuette began to whistle. It was an old, slow, dancing tune that made Twilight think of ponies in gray wigs and stuffy clothes. But the sound was stunningly clear without the medium of air to get in the way. Listening to it, Twilight felt like she could run forever without tiring.

It felt like they were running forever. Twilight lost track of time as the sound endlessly repeated in variations that were never the same, yet the changes were never distracting.

They were speeding up. The strange, shifting colors of the stars seemed to blur against the endless night until the six of them hit a certain stride. Then everything refocused, and the stars were in motion.

Constellations built themselves out of scattered arrays. Stars dipped through wells of gravity to bow to each other and clasped hands in fiery explosions. Partners changed and structures developed, nova pulsing in the darkness like heartbearts.

The stars were dancing.

Minuette kept whistling.

The Earth was coming nearer. They swung around it, closer and closer, the fiery tail of their orbit sweeping around like the end of a dress. They rushed by the Earth so fast that the atmosphere sizzled. The Earth whipped around on its axis, and Twilight laughed. They were dancing with it and spinning the Earth around.

Then the Earth stopped moving.

We’ve matched speeds.

They fell through layers of dreamy atmosphere and sleepy clouds. The mountains dozed as they plummeted by and heard the snoring of the forests further down. Only the ocean was as it ever was, dead and dull and silent.

Twilight saw the dark towers of Canterlot at night and the tumble of a single leaf along an empty street. There was the castle, with no guards, and the school, with no lights visible in the windows and no troublemakers sneaking out. And there was the Bank.

They were galloping through its empty corridors, hoofs barely disturbing the scant dust on the floor. The gallop became a canter, then a trot, then they were walking as their momentum wore itself out. They stopped. Minuette stopped whistling.

“Minuette!” Lemon Hearts had tears in her eyes. “That was amazing.”

“I’ll say,” said Moondancer, looking up at the sign on the door they had stopped in front of.

It read, LIBRARY.

“It brought us to the library?” Twinkleshine snorted. “Nightmare Moon is such a nerd.”

“We should be careful,” said Twilight.

Moondancer pushed the door open.

“We should be careful,” said Twilight.

“Libraries are only dangerous to bad ideas and boredom,” said Moondancer, “and I am neither.” She trotted in.

Twilight and the others followed her in, glancing around. It looked like an ordinary library, with a central desk and bookcases going all around. It wasn’t particularly large, and the books didn’t seem to be unusually magical.

Moondancer stopped in the middle of an aisle and took a deep breath. “Do you smell that? It smells like books!”

Twilight wiped some dust off of one of the shelves. “I mean, yeah….” Twilight had fond memories of the library by her home because she could read anything she wanted and the librarian had stopped bothering her after a few days. But whatever experience Moondancer was having was something else altogether.

Moondancer started taking a book down.

“Don’t touch that!” Twilight said. “You don’t know what will happen!”

“I want to see if these are Sleeping versions of the books,” said Moondancer. “Oh, no, but I haven’t read this one.” She sat down in the middle of the aisle with the book open.

At this point, Twilight was half-expecting a giant book-monster to jump out and start reading them. But with Moondancer’s act apparently triggering no alarm, the lure of shelves upon shelves of books was too much for any of them to resist. Twilight found one for herself, a history of Walras the Bearded, and sat down on a cushion to read.

Minutes or hours passed like that. The six of them converged eventually and sat quietly together on a small pile of cushions as a large pile of books built up between them. Nothing broke the silence but the sound of pages turning and the occasional cough or sniff, or, when Lemon Hearts was reading a comedy, stifled giggles.

Then it must have been evening, because the lights came on. Their silver surroundings had faded to an evening purple, and all along the walls and ceiling little white lights winked on like decorations on Hearth’s Warming Eve.

“It’s beautiful,” whispered Twinkleshine, who looked more gorgeous than ever in the starlight. Her eyes were wide and utterly rapt by the sight of the tiny little stars.

Hoofsteps clicked down the hallway. Instantly the fillies drew together.

“It couldn’t be Nightmare Moon,” whispered Minuette. “Right?”

“Shh!” said Twilight, eyes strained. They were behind a shelf, able to see the door to the library through the gaps in the books.

Dark purple smoke, almost black, curled under the door. Twilight’s heart was thumping so loudly she was afraid it would give them away.

The creature that stepped through the door wasn’t a pony at all. It looked like a Unicorn, standing taller than even Princess Celestia, but it was all shadows and smoke, impermanence given order, for what reason Twilight had no idea. The clacks its hoofs made on the ground didn’t quite match its steps, as if they came from some other source.

Its voice was as loud as a volcano erupting. “WOULDST THOU LIKE TO CHECK ANYTHING OUT?”

“What?” whispered Trixie. Twilight felt her body trembling against her.

The shadow Unicorn waited, then spoke again. “IF THOU WOULDST NOT LIKE TO CHECK OUT A BOOK, PLEASE RETURNEST THE ITEMS THOU PERUSEDTH TO THEIR ORIGINAL LOCATION ON THE SHELF.”

“It’s a librarian?” Twilight said in disbelief.

“PLEASE KEEP NOISE TO A MINIMUM,” the shadow librarian added in a voice like thunder.

“Enough of this,” said Moondancer. “I’m not afraid of a librarian. I’m going to be the royal librarian one day.”

She trotted out despite Twilight and the other’s attempts to pull her back.

“Excuse me,” said Moondancer to the shadow librarian. “We’re fillies who got lost on a school trip, and we need help finding our way out. Can you help us?”

“DOST THOU FIRST WISH TO CHECK OUT ANY BOOKS?”

Moondancer cast a longing look back at the bookcases, but shook her head. “No, my friends and I really need to get out of here as soon as possible. Everypony is worrying about us.”

“THEN FOLLOW ME.”

Twilight and the others hurried after them, not wanting to miss the opportunity to get home. The shadow librarian went down a few twists and turns rapidly until they reached the same blockading wall as before, albeit from a different direction than they had previously. The shadow librarian passed through the wall like it wasn’t even there. When Moondancer tried the same, she got a bruised snout.

After a minute the shadow librarian emerged from the wall. “FOLLOW ME, YOUNG ONES.” It passed through the wall again.

Twilight tried to get through the wall, and so did the others, but it was totally impermeable. The shadow librarian returned again and repeated its message to follow.

Twilight had a horrible sinking feeling in her gut. “It doesn’t know the wall is there. It’s not intelligent.”

“Do you know if there are any other ways out?” said Moondancer to the shadow librarian.

“WOULDST THOU LIKE TO CHECK OUT A BOOK?”

“No, a way out,” cried Moondancer.

“FOLLOW ME, YOUNG ONES.” It passed through the wall again.

Trixie collapsed, holding her head between her legs. “It’s somepony else’s turn to freak out,” she mumbled.

“I don’t have the energy,” Minuette said. Her face was deathly pale. “I don’t want to, to, to have to stay here forever.”

“You won’t, you’ll die before forever happens,” said Lemon Hearts, sinking against the wall.

Twinkleshine had a wry expression on her face. “It could be worse. I’m not exactly the ideal daughter.”

Minuette gave a hollow laugh. “My parents couldn’t get me into a boarding school fast enough.”

Twilight thought of her relationship with her own parents. “It’s tough when you don’t know how to help somepony,” she said. “I, I think at some point, it’s like if somepony had a thorn in their leg that you couldn’t remove. And you could see it hurting them every day. Wouldn’t you just want to cut their leg off?”

Trixie looked miserably at Twilight. “I get along perfectly with my parents.”

“Lucky you,” said Lemon Hearts. “I wish I knew mine.”

“My parents are really smart,” said Moondancer. “They buy me any books I want and answer all of my questions.”

“That’s great,” said Twilight encouragingly.

Moondancer shrugged. “They don’t do anything else though. They just read all day. And write. And send their letters and manuscripts out. They’re very bright. I mean, I was doing most of the cooking before I left to come here.”

Twilight called up the image of the map in her mind again. “I’m not giving up.”

But she did, after fruitless minutes spent studying a map that had only one way in and one way out.

“The library’s open,” said Moondancer with a hopeful note in her voice. She sounded like she was trying very much not to scream. “If anypony else wants to go with me.”

“Anywhere we go, we go together,” said Twilight. She was glad to have a sense of purpose. “The library sounds good. I saw a fireplace there, maybe we can light it and get some rest and come up with a plan in a few hours.”

“We need food too,” said Trixie, but she got up quickly to go.

The library was a twinkling night sky. Twilight glanced back to see the shadow librarian had followed them inside.

“Do you have any food?” she asked it, just in case.

“HAST THOU HEARD THE MOON IS MADE OF GREEN CHEESE?”

“Um, yes?”

“IT IS A LIE.”

Was that a no? Maybe there was just no eating allowed in the library. But she was too worn out to care.

No, she had to try. “Is there some food we can have if we eat outside the library?”

“NOT EVEN GREEN CHEESE.”

Oh well.

“The library by my house at home has a coffee shop to one side where you can get snacks and things,” Minuette told it. “If you get that too, then the next group of fillies to get trapped in here will have something to eat.”

“I WILL TAKE NOTE OF IT. THANK THEE FOR THY SUGGESTION.”

“Thy’re welcome.”

With the shadow librarian’s help they were able to light a fire in the library’s fireplace. There were a few chairs and a couch big enough for the six of them facing it.

They all settled together on the couch. A couple of questions to the shadow librarian procured a few quilts, which it settled over them. Twilight noticed the way its mouth bit through the quilt rather than against it, yet there was no visible mark on the quilt after. Just what kind of spell was this? When you had lived for centuries, and were an Alicorn, what kinds of magics could you perform? This wasn’t a peak she had never seen, this was a completely different mountain range.

But she was so tired that she couldn’t even work up the desire to ask the shadow librarian about its origin. She leaned her head on Trixie's shoulder and listened to the conversation.

Any attempt to come up with a plan once they had rested died quickly. They watched the fire flicker and dance. The occasional pop from the fireplace was incredibly soothing. It was a natural sound, one of the outside world.

“Shame we don’t have any marshmallows,” Trixie said.

“I always wanted to go camping,” said Lemon Hearts. “Is it fun?”

“Do you like walking into a grove of black walnut trees? And then running out and tumbling down a hill and spraining two of your ankles?”

“Oh, yes!”

“We never did family outings,” Twinkleshine said. “I don’t look like my dad and I don’t look like my ‘mom.’ I think it makes everypony uncomfortable.”

“I only pretend to get along with them,” Trixie said suddenly. “My parents, I mean. I pretend a lot. I would play Pretend because I didn’t have anypony to talk to. I wasn’t allowed to read the books I wanted to either, so I just played Pretend.

“Why couldn’t you read what you wanted to?” Twilight asked with morbid curiosity.

“They wouldn’t let me. The books were too hard for me or something. Just because they only had pictures on some of the pages.”

Twilight felt a wave of appreciation for her parents. However...insufficient they had been, they hadn’t done that.

“That’s wrong,” said Moondancer firmly. “And Twinkleshine, you should try dyeing your mane to look more like your mom.”

“Of course I tried that,” Twinkleshine said. “My dad just got mad and told me to wash it out. When it wouldn’t wash out, he had it cut really short.”

“Oh.”

“It was a good thought though.”

The conversation moved on to other things. What the other fillies thought of their disappearance. How much Simple Pleasure was freaking out. What Princess Celestia was doing.

Eventually the conversation slowed down. Twilight blinked at the stars and realized that she was nodding off. She sat up suddenly.

“Hm?” said Trixie sleepily.

“Girls!” Twilight whispered.

“What?” yawned Minuette.

“We’re not going to sleep. We’re not…staying here. We’re going to figure something out.”

“Then why are you whispering?”

Because it was evening and they were in a library and the fire was cozy and the quilt was soft. Twilight got up and struggled out of the pile of fillies on the couch and trotted off to perk herself up. The shadow librarian was visible on the other side of the library, walking through the shelves one by one as if in search of errant books.

Twilight stopped at the central desk. It had things on it like sticky pads and paper clips and a photo frame turned down on its face and a small black cube. Twilight picked it up.

The cube was very, very cold, almost too cold to handle, yet an inner warmth pulsed within it. It was the same kind of warmth as the out-of-place wall. It felt like a little bit of the sun. Twilight glanced again to check where the shadow librarian was and quickly pocketed the cube.

She strolled back over to the fireplace. Moondancer was sitting up and keeping the rest of the girls awake by reading to them from one of the books she’d taken off the shelves. Twilight leaned over the back of the couch to tug the quilt up over Lemon Hearts’ shoulders and walked over to a window. She opened the blinds and blinked out at a purple sky. The sky seemed to be made of clouds and was a dim, deep violet color. In the distance was the shadow of a city, the silhouettes of buildings standing out against the horizon. It didn’t look anything like Canterlot.

Where are we? What is this place really?

A burst of high-pitched giggles made her turn around. Moondancer was doing voices for the characters as they spoke, and right now her impression of a disgruntled toad was making Lemon Hearts shriek and bite her hoof while Twinkleshine snorted uncontrollably. Twilight went over to the couch, nudged Trixie over, and curled up under a quilt with her to listen. And she couldn’t help but think even while she did.

The weakening eye of day…like strings of broken lyres….

It really was a funny story. Moondancer didn’t just have a suite of voices, she also had a great sense of comedic timing, and her eyes and movements were incredibly expressive.

Alluring, Earth seducing, with high conceits….

It was a sad story. Friendships were made and broken and remembered and forgotten. Twilight had read sad stories before, but Moondancer brought them to life in a way that was different from her own imagination. With that perspective, Twilight could see that the events weren’t just sad but were also something to be sad about. And there were reasons to tell sad stories, which was a different point altogether.

Burning to wash, at every beach….

Mostly it was a strange story. Twilight thought of thoughts that followed from water like alluvium. Economists had stopped writing books when they all agreed enough on everything that papers sufficed instead. If you were writing a book, then you were probably pretty lonely.

It was nice to be listening to a story together.

And I wonder about this lifetime with myself, this dream I'm living.

It ended. Moondancer closed the book and smiled at them.

“That was wonderful,” said Twilight. Something felt like it was glowing inside of her. It was too bright to look at, and yet she couldn’t tear her eyes away.

“It was a story,” said Moondancer simply.

“Look,” said Twinkleshine sleepily.

Twilight looked. Outside the window, the sky was changing color. Its deep purple was brushed with silver all of a sudden, and lights from the distant nameless city began to reflect along its surface.

“I think we stayed up all night,” said Twinkleshine. “That’s twilight.”

“It’d be dawn, wouldn’t it?” said Moondancer.

Trixie flashed a smile. “Dawn is twilight, just coming around from the other side.”

The sky continued to come to life. Silver light became a warm, generative blue. Twilight could make out the shape of the clouds now and saw how they were made of fine strands tossed over each other like wind-combed manes. Reflected images of city streets swam between them.

“I, I think,” said Twilight, “that if you reverse everything, you don’t get a sunrise with different colors. Everything sort of starts changing, and it changes in unexpected ways.”

“Do you get this?” Minuette gawked open-mouthed at the sky.

“What makes you think I’ve done the math?”

“You’re Twilight Sparkle!”

Everypony laughed.

“I suppose I am,” Twilight said, “for voluntary defense fund purposes, if nothing else. But I’m not sure I’m the same pony that I was at the start of this field trip. I never paid much attention to the ponies in our class before…maybe I got too used to having no pony to pay attention to before I came to this school. I’ve learned now how incredible you all can be. Trixie, who helped us take control of our dreams so that we could explore the Sleeping side of the Bank….”

Trixie blinked at her, then dipped her head in a bow.

“Lemon Hearts, who faced the monster in her mind and soothed it with promises of care….”

Lemon Hearts grinned toothily.

“Twinkleshine, who put light into the darkness and built structure into the void….”

Twinkleshine’s smile was pretty and sad and proud.

“Minuette, who danced with the Earth and led us into the heart of the Bank….”

Minuette beamed.

“Moondancer, who passed this night for us with joy and laughter and the good kind of sorrow, the anticipated pain of realizing that good memories are being made….”

Moondancer looked like she was about to cry, her smile being squeezed by her quivering cheeks.

“I wish that I hadn’t taken you all along with me on this adventure because it doesn’t seem like it’s going to have a happy ending. But I’m glad that all of you are my friends.”

Light was blooming in the sky. Rain fell like melting silver from finely spun clouds, and light weaved a path through the raindrops. As the light curled and spun past the rain, it began to bend and refract, the light brighter and brighter as the light twisted to find a path through the rain. As the angles sharpened, the light brightened, separating, until a brilliant rainbow arc suddenly erupted in the middle of the sky. Half of it went in one direction, flying over the end of the Earth or something else, wherever they really were, and the other half of it flashed through the window and spilled into the library. It dodged past them and struck a hard right angle at the central desk, heading out of the door.

As the light brushed by Twilight’s cheek, it didn’t feel like a Sun-thing or a Moon-thing, an Awake-thing or an Asleep-thing. It felt like a real thing, because light really is built like that: it’s not one color but many, and when you challenge it to find its way, it shows you how beautiful it really is.

“Follow that rainbow!” Twilight leaped to her hoofs. The others didn’t need to be told twice.

“NO RUNNING IN THE LIBRARY!” the shadow librarian thundered as they galloped toward the door.

“Sorry!” Moondancer called back to her. “Thank you for the lovely evening!”

“THANK THEE FOR ENJOYING THE BOOKS!”

The rainbow zigged and zagged down the sleeping corridors. Twilight and her friends raced to keep up. They were going so fast that she didn’t notice when they were running up the underside of a flight of stairs or down a winding ramp of shadow and starlight. Their dozen-and-dozen hoofs hammered the floor and made the only sound that’s ever heard in space, the sound of things following paths anciently determined and newly computed.

They stopped in a lobby with a welcome sign, a map, and a front desk for somepony to sit at. Aside from them, it was empty of ponies. Twilight gazed at it all and saw the dream of visitors….

The door to the exit of the Bank was right in front of them.

“I guess this is it,” said Moondancer. “Will we still be asleep when we go out there?”

“It is morning,” said Twinkleshine, a smile free of irony on her face. “So we had better be waking up, like it or not!”

“My alarm is probably going off soon,” Trixie said. “I bet the girls in the adjacent rooms will be upset if I don’t get back in time to turn it off.” She grinned mischievously. “But they’ll miss the beautiful sunrise if they don’t wake up.”

Lemon Hearts suddenly had a dreamy expression. “And they’re probably making breakfast in the cafeteria…hot oatmeal crammed full of apples and cinnamon, pancakes smothered in honey, hazelnut smoothies and hashed oats….”

“No pony is going to believe us,” Minuette said. “They’ll say we made it up while we slept in the Earth Room, waiting for Princess Celestia to rescue us. I’ll be wondering myself in a week if we didn’t dream this whole thing.”

“There’s no mistaking that,” said Twilight, looking at the rainbow light flowing through the crack under the door to the Bank.

They looked at each other, none of them wanting to say it, none of them sure what would be lost and what would be gained when they stepped outside, what they would wake up to and what they would dream of again. Something was pulling them together, and it had nothing to do with the Numeraire.

“Come on, girls,” said Twilight. “I think they’re worried enough about us out there.”

She took a step toward the door.

“EXCUSE ME.”

They turned to see the shadow librarian drifting through the wall blocking off the corridor they had tried to walk through earlier.

“I BELIEVE THOU HAST SOMETHING THAT BELONGS ON THIS SIDE OF THE BANK.”

Guiltily, Twilight pulled out the icy-cold, faintly warm black cube and held it out, but the shadow librarian didn’t respond. “Here,” said Twilight. She handed over the Silver Key, and the shadow librarian drifted back through the blocked passage.

“Didn’t Princess Celestia need that?” Moondancer asked.

Twilight remembered the strange dance of gain and loss on the map in the Day side of the Bank. “I think…maybe she wants the key to the Night side, but what she needs is somepony to walk in with.”

She took a deep breath. “Ready?"

They were. Twilight opened the door.

Golden sunlight flooded in. The rainbow rushed out and disappeared in the morning air. But Twilight never forgot what it had looked like.

It was as cold as the surface of the Moon, empty and dark.

Dust slept on the silver floors and surfaces. There was a photograph on the desk that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in centuries.

Every shelf in the library was crammed full. Economics and science books, yes, but also adventure stories, fantasy novels, mystery and romance paperbacks. Twinkleshine found a first edition of The Mystery of Rainy Lud, one of her favorite books. The pages were yellow and the ink hard to read in places, but the binding was in good repair. This wasn’t the library of somepony who dog-eared her books.

The others were exploring their own favorite sections. The emptiness kept anypony from straying too far. For a time, everything was forgotten: the cold, the dark, the fear, the silence.

They waited a long time down there.

“A private table,” Twinkleshine said. “Thanks, Party Platter.”

The hostess gave her a perfect smile. The reservation list for Qua, the fanciest and most expensive restaurant in Manehattan and therefore Equestria, extended over one year into the future. Any openings were filled almost in the same moment.^* Even Princess Celestia had to write the day before to make sure there would be a table open for her.

^* The efficient market hypothesis was first generated by an economist trying to get a reservation at Qua.

“Wonderful,” she said. “I’ll put you down for sometime next year.”

There was a subtle shift in the way Twinkleshine was standing. Without really seeming to do anything, there was a cock to her hips, a bat to her eyelashes, a tease of something more at one corner of her smile.

“Tonight, please.”

“I’m afraid we’re totally booked.”

Twinkleshine sighed inwardly. Something might have sighed back.

Burn up inside.

Twinkleshine closed her eyes and opened them. The look she gave Party Platter was…hot.

“Please?” said Twinkleshine.

Party Platter stared back, her face flushed red and her pupils dilated. Twinkleshine counted the seconds for her to recover. She was up to eight before Party Platter glanced down at her guestbook, blushing, and drummed her pen nervously against it.

“I-I could move some things around—”

“I know you can. For me.”

Party Platter fought back a dumb smile. “Wonderful,” she managed. “Perfect, Twinkleshine, that will be no trouble.” And the Buckings have a table for six tonight. Let's see, I could move the Riches to tomorrow night, they’re bringing their daughter though, what about Coco Pommel? But she’ll make such a scene, why must you do this to me, Twinkleshine?

“We’ll want wine, something old, I’m thinking. Three tasting menus. No disturbances.”

“Of course, Twinkleshine.”

“We’ll arrive at seven.”

“I can’t wait!”

And as Twinkleshine left, Party Platter realized that she couldn’t wait. Twinkleshine was pretty enough to make a straight mare break up with her boyfriend. Infamously, this had actually happened as part of Twinkleshine’s legendary first week in Manehattan. Manehattanites were always attracted to the latest and greatest, and Twinkleshine and the new Daughter Bank were definitely both. Add to that Twinkleshine’s gorgeous ivory coat and full pink mane, her expensive lifestyle, and her wit, and she was swiftly becoming a genuine celebrity.

Maybe I’ll move Fancy Pants, Party Platter mused. Oh, heck, somepony’s going to be mad no matter what.

“This place is cute!” Minuette said. Under her breath, she whispered, “I’m underdressed.”

“You look great,” Twinkleshine assured her. “I haven’t seen you in so long.”

Minuette was distracted by the tasteful, modern glamor of Qua, dark tables and silver walls. There was a great view of the city from the second floor, the street lights glowing like enchanted baubles on a Hearth’s Warming tree.

“It’s stunning,” Minuette sighed.

“What are you talking about?” Twinkleshine grinned, moving next to her. “You live in Canterlot. Manehattan is just part of the silver ring holding that great diamond up.”

“But this is the city of poets and artists and musicians. If I want statues and fountains, yes, Canterlot, but what if I want smoky air and a beat rising from the street corner?”

Twinkleshine laughed. “Then stick to your Mane Hatter stories. Here you’re more likely to get a lungful of some bum’s breath.”

“What about the beat?”

“Okay, the music is pretty good here. But I hate jazz.”

They laughed, then Minuette sighed again. “But it really is lovely. I’d trade with you in a heartbeat, but I could never be in charge of a Daughter bank. You don’t know how excited we were when the news of the Daughters came out—I mean, it’s not like all of us dropouts keep in touch or anything, but wow, to think it was our cohort.”

They sat down while Minuette kept talking.

“It’s been fun, and kind of annoying, being the ‘expert’ on the Daughter banks at my job. But I’m sure I don’t really know what really goes on inside one.”

Fishing for information already? Twinkleshine unfolded her napkin and motioned at the waiter for glasses and wine. You can take the mare out of the school, but….

But Minuette, you’re a dropout. You don’t know, none of you know, the gap between regular prodigies and us Nine.

“It’s busy,” Twinkleshine said. “Try this, it’s a Chateau, uh, something or other. All I know is that it costs a lot and it’s supposed to taste like chalk.”

“Chalk?” said Minuette in disbelief.

“Oh yes, chalk is a sign of good quality. I’m completely serious.”

“I can tell by your face that you are!” Minuette laughed as the waiter poured her a glass. “I can’t imagine how far in advance you must need to get a reservation at this place.”

Twinkleshine smiled slightly. “So did Moondancer tell you when she was getting here?”

“You know her. She’s always late.”

“That’s a habit she got from Twilight. Twilight never came to anything I invited her to.”

“Just be happy Moondancer is coming at all.”

“I know.”

Moondancer showed up into Minuette’s second glass of wine, bent to one side under a heavy bookbag. Her hair was as much of a multicolored mess as ever, although done up in a severe bun like she was a librarian or a schoolteacher.

“Sorry I’m late. I was reading about the restaurant in the paper on the subway and missed the stop.”

Twinkleshine got up and hugged Moondancer. “It’s fine, I knew I’d either have to ban reading material from the city or wait for you. If I were really smart I would have told Minuette to come half an hour later than what I told you.”

Minuette and Moondancer embraced as well.

“It feels like so long ago that we were all starting in the same class in Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns,” Minuette said.

“It was long ago,” Moondancer said. “Look at us. We have jobs and go to reunions. We’re old!”

When they were all seated and had a glass of wine, the waiter brought them their first course. In between bites of foie grass, they swapped information about their lives. Minuette did financial planning for the government, and Moondancer was a librarian at the royal library.

“You get paid to read!” Twinkleshine said.

“I get paid to read,” Moondancer agreed, and laughed.

Twinkleshine told them stories about life as part of the elite cohort of Princess Celestia’s academy. She stuck to funny stories, like the time one of Nova’s experiments escaped from its cauldron and hid under her bed and refused to leave until they agreed to let it die, or the time when Gamma forgot algebra while giving a practice lecture and stared at a simple system of equations for an actual minute, completely blank.

They asked about the Daughter bank, and Twinkleshine told them about her meetings with Door Avenue executives and what it had been like cleaning up the monetary mess after Nightmare Moon. She had them both choking with laughter when she told them how she had caught the manager of Manehattan’s largest hedge fund staring at her rump during a gala, and how she had spun that into a major concession regarding financial regulation.

“You always were gorgeous,” Minuette sighed, staring at a picked-apart bowl of lightly salted sprouts in some kind of foam sauce. She had finished her third glass of wine, and she was considering a fourth. Twinkleshine had to be breaking the bank on these fancy bottles, but it was a sacrifice well worth making, in Minuette’s increasingly slurred opinion.

Twinkleshine glanced at her. “I've been talking through most of the dinner. I’ve hardly tasted these, um….”

“Charred asparagus with tomatillos in a radish-infused dressing,” said Moondancer, who didn’t forget anything after she had read it once. Hadn’t been enough to keep her from begging Twilight to let her drop out, Twinkleshine thought.

“Yeah, that. Come on, it’s like having a conversation with Twilight. I’m doing all the work here.”

“So how is Twilight, anyway?” asked Moondancer, sounding very casual.

Twinkleshine hid a smile behind a sip of wine. “I haven’t seen her since the NGDP Targeting Festival last year. I mean, I get letters from her, all the Daughter banks send correspondence.”

“Oh, and what about Trixie?” said Moondancer far too quickly.

“What about Lemon Hearts?” Minuette said.

Moondancer’s face darkened. Twinkleshine waved over another bottle of wine.

“I don’t know,” she said as she took a sip from something gold-colored and rare. “She still lives in Canterlot, doesn’t she? I haven’t seen her in years, I’m embarrassed to say.”

“I dropped out earlier than Moondancer, so I don’t know exactly what happened,” Minuette said. “Lemon Hearts won’t talk about it. Part of the reason I came here is because I was hoping you would want to come clean.”

She had said the wrong thing. She knew it by the crack in Twinkleshine’s perfect face and perfect smile. For just a flash, Twinkleshine looked ready to kill.

“I wasn’t involved,” Moondancer said. Twinkleshine turned that demonic stare on her, but Moondancer was looking down at her lap and didn’t notice. “I was already on my way out then. But I heard about it, and I knew about that kind of thing from the girls in the cohorts ahead of us. Minuette, they hurt her.”

Twinkleshine calmly regarded her glass of wine while Moondancer told Minuette what she had heard, of how Twinkleshine, Twilight, and a few others had torn into Lemon Hearts’ mind and practically turned it inside out.

“Amazing how events get exaggerated over the years,” Twinkleshine said. “We just teased her like we teased everypony, and she couldn’t handle it.

“That’s not what I heard,” Minuette said. “I heard it was worse.”

“You heard wrong. Lemon Hearts and I were friends. Why would I want to hurt her?”

“I don’t know. Why did you?”

Minuette felt a twinge of fear. Was she pushing too hard? Twinkleshine’s face was becoming fiercer, yet strangely more beautiful. There was a hint of fire and shadow in her eyes, something that didn’t look like it belonged in their world.

“I got hazed too,” Twinkleshine said. “We all did. It was part of being Sisters.”

“She never was a Sister,” Moondancer interrupted. “She dropped out before she made it.”

“Neither of you were Sisters,” Twinkleshine said with open contempt. “Lemon Hearts wasn’t going to make it. We helped her figure that out.”

She looked through lidded eyes at her glass of wine. “If not for us, Lemon Hearts would have been broken on the first day of real school. We saved her.”

“From what?” Minuette demanded. She was trembling.

“From an education,” said Twinkleshine, and drained the glass.

She looked at Minuette, who was looking at her with a mix of disgust and concern.

“We used to be friends. Remember? It was the six of us,” Minuette said. “Us three, Lemon Hearts, Trixie, and Twilight.”

“Trixie and Twilight had a falling out,” Moondancer said quietly.

“I know about that, everypony knows about that. I mean everypony; ponies at my work asked me about it after Twilight was in all the newspapers for saving Equestria. But what about the rest of us? How did we drift apart?”

“You dropped out.”

“I know that, Twinkleshine. What I’m saying is, don’t you remember? That time in the One Bank, in the Silver Room, where we….”

They were trapped. And yes, they were afraid. But the empty silver corridors that trailed in a dozen different directions had an odd, calming presence. It was the sheer nothingness of the place. Nothing alive had been inside it for a long time.

“It was so fun finding it,” Moondancer said. “When we were trapped inside the Bank, I was scared. But it was also nice, because I had never been with ponies like….”

“Like what?”

“Like myself.” Moondancer lowered her eyes, embarrassed. “I mean, Twilight and me especially, but with all of you. I hadn’t even known I was lonely.”

“We weren’t alike,” said Twinkleshine coldly. “Some of us became Sisters.”

“Stop it!”

If they hadn’t been in a private room, Minuette’s shout would have drawn the attention of the entire restaurant. As it was, Twinkleshine stared at her, frozen by Minuette’s flashing eyes.

“You are not better than us,” Minuette said. “You toughed it out, that was all. It’s not even intelligence, not mostly. You were just willing to stick it out. I didn’t want to be a Sister, okay? I didn’t want to be.”

“You really think you could have been?”

“You should know you can’t tell preferences from ability—”

“As if ability won’t predict preferences—”

“Shut up. Shut up. Celestia above, shut up.”

The door opened. The waiter came in to clear some plates and bring new ones. Twinkleshine’s gaze remained fixed on Minuette.

“These are stuffed bean pods with rosewater and white lily petals,” the waiter said. “Enjoy.”

He left. Twinkleshine blinked and looked away. “Eat,” she said.

Twinkleshine lifted the delicate lips of the pod to her mouth. She caught Minuette’s eye when Moondancer wasn’t looking.

Keeping her eyes on Minuette, Twinkleshine extended her tongue and licked along the edge of the pod. Her tongue slid up the pod and inside it, feeling around the inside of the walls. Her lips met those of the pod as she slurped and sucked, the pink rosewater spilling down her chin. She pushed deep with her tongue, pulling a wet, creamy lily petal into her mouth and swallowing. Her eyes never left Minuette the whole time.

Moondancer hadn’t noticed, absorbed as she was in her typical self-distraction from the world around her whenever it was inconvenient.

Minuette had noticed, and she looked away. She was quite cute when she was afraid, Twinkleshine thought.

Dessert and more wine followed. Twinkleshine cracked some jokes, and the mood lifted a little. She was able to get Minuette to smile, in a nervous sort of way, and Moondancer ate most of the cucumber sorbet.

Stumbling over each other, they staggered outside and shivered in the frosty night air. The wine in their stomachs was warming, but the sudden way the air knifed through their clothes was capable of piercing even the shield of alcohol.

Leaning against each other, they went into an alley by the restaurant and sank against the wall. Moondancer squeezed her eyes shut, trying to focus herself.

“It’s way later than I expected, and I planned to take the train back tonight,” she said. “Um, this was f—it was good catching up with you two. Twinkleshine, say hi to Tw—to Trixie and Twilight for me the next time you write to the other Daughter banks. Bye, you two….”

They watched her disappear into the evening gloom. Then, quite suddenly, Twinkleshine kissed Minuette on the lips.

She grinned as Minuette jerked back. “I always thought you were cute, Minnie. Ever since first year.”

“I have a boyfriend,” Minuette said.

“Me too.” Twinkleshine leaned in again.

Minuette pushed her away. “I’m serious.”

“I can do a lot better than you, you know, I’m the most important pony in Manehattan. I know you think I’m pretty. I saw the way you looked at me while I licked that bean. I could try the same on yours.”

“Stop.”

“Or what? You’ll have me arrested? You’ll fight back? I’m the most powerful pony in Manehattan. Come back to my place, I guarantee you’ll enjoy it, Princess Cadance has books about how to do that.”

Minuette trembled against the wall, but her voice remained steady. “I don’t know what reaction you want. You want fear? I’ll cower. You want me to admit you’re stronger? Fine, you’re stronger. Are you proud of this? Being able to do this to me? You, a great Sister, over me, an early dropout? Princess Celestia would be so impressed.”

Twinkleshine grabbed Minuette in a pink magical glow and shoved her against the wall, forcing her head back. “If you apologize, and beg a little, I’ll still make you enjoy it.”

Minuette couldn’t answer. Her throat was being constricted.

“What’s that, Minuette? I can’t hear you talking now. That way you spoke to me inside there, I knew how you wanted it to end up. You wanted me to remind you that you’re a little girl, and I’m your Big Sister.”

Something black cracked from out of the air against Twinkleshine’s head. She stumbled back and whirled as Moondancer, horn glowing protectively, approached from the alley entrance

Twinkleshine dropped Minuette, who wheezed and collapsed to her knees. She glared at Moondancer, breathing furiously.

“You just struck the chief executive economist of a Daughter bank of Equestria! I’ll—”

“If I don’t send a second letter to somepony I will not name by tomorrow morning, then she will send a letter to Twilight Sparkle saying that you did to me what you helped do to Lemon Hearts,” Moondancer said rapidly. “So no, you won’t do anything.”

“You sneaky bitch,” Twinkleshine said, panting. She felt a surge of power from within, but winced and forced herself to calm down. No use killing somepony over a little joke; she wasn’t so drunk or so angry to forget what really mattered. “Fine, I can respect that.”

She grinned and winked at Minuette. “Me and Minnie were just playing around. I think she had a little too much to drink. Write to me again, Minnie, the next time you want to catch up like this.”

“Come on, Minuette,” Moondancer said quietly. Once Minuette was behind her, Moondancer turned as if to leave, but Twinkleshine called out.

“Why did you double back?”

“Because I know what you did to Lemon Hearts.”

“You heard about a prank that Twilight and a few others, and yes, I did.”

“I know what you did because Twilight told me! If I left out any details, it was only because it was hard to make them out through Twilight’s sobs!” Moondancer turned fully and faced Twinkleshine. “What happened? The Sisters are supposed to be the finest economists, the foremost scientists of friendships, why are you all like this? Nasty and vicious and controlling and cruel and demanding and neurotic and paranoid and completely incapable of normal relationships!”

“Are you describing your ideal lover, Moonface?”

“What happened in your cohort, after the rest of us dropped out? It was never this bad, and then it got so bad.”

In the darkness, Twinkleshine’s eyes were sunken and black.

“We did what orphans do. We raised each other.”

“You needed a mother.”

“Yes, some of us.” There was an air of unconcern in Twinkleshine’s voice as she started to walk away. “But make no mistake, Moondancer, Minnie. You two didn’t choose to leave the family tree. You fell off the branch.”

She walked deeper into the alley, and out into a street she didn’t know, a part of the city she didn’t recognize. A normal pony would have been scared, but Twinkleshine would have welcomed an attacker.

The Silver Room had been cold and dark and quiet. Twinkleshine blinked muzzily in the daylight before the golden, glorious form of Princess Celestia.

Minuette started to cry. Lemon Hearts hugged her, and Trixie exhaled a shaky sigh of relief. Twilight was staring at Princess Celestia with utter devotion. There were books fallen and scattered all around Princess Celestia, and even Moondancer didn’t so much as glance twice at them.

Princess Celestia spent a while with them after, with donuts and warm drinks for the six of them, as she answered their questions and soothed them with magic. And she told them:

“There is power in friendship, and I suspect the six of you have become good friends today. It is auspicious, I think, that there are six of you.”

She smiled, as radiant as the Sun. “This was your adventure today. Remain friends, and I suspect you six will have more of them.”

But that was a long time ago, and Twinkleshine had long since let go of childish things.

The bird was looking for something.

“Philomena?” said Princess Celestia. The bird turned her head. The Alicorn looked unusually beautiful today. There were flowers in her mane, fiery black-mottled ones with orange and yellow exploding across their petals.

“Philomena, the New Year is tomorrow,” she said.

The bird looked out the window. Her memory flickered like a flame. It wavered and changed.

It was hard to remember, when you were made of fire.

“Philomena?” said Princess Celestia. “I have an idea for how to make the celebration a little more….”

She looked outside, where the sun was rising over the horizon for the last time. Like a Viking funeral, tonight the star would be sent away in a fiery chariot over the edge of the world.

“But I need your help.”

Equestria hadn’t had a new year for a long time. It had one very old year. The Sun’s journey around the Earth hadn’t ended, so why should the year? There was a counting of seasons: “Haven’t had a frost like this since the 378th winter,” and so on.

This year Equestria had a new year. Nightmare Moon had imprisoned Princess Celestia, however briefly, and so while one revolution proceeded, the Sun's came to an end. Like an old family dog, Princess Celestia still had her leash of gold attached to it and could get it up and moving again for its daily walk, but, also like an old family dog, it was slow and uncertain, and its path tended to be marked by yellow streaks. It was time to let it go.

And for a new year, they would need a new sun.

The current winter, instead of being the thousand-and-first, was the first winter, the second first winter ever. The New Year should have been celebrated as soon as Princess Celestia was restored to the One Bank. But with the normally slow pace of bureaucracy at Canterlot reduced to a snail’s crawl without Twilight Sparkle there to manage and intimidate, the official date for the New Year had been delayed and delayed until January 1. No pony was sure how to celebrate a New Year. Princess Celestia was the only pony who had ever been at a New Year celebration before, and she only spoke of a phoenix’s fire and the pooling water of melted snow around her hoofs.

So the town and Twilight had to make things up. It was like dragon claws on a blackboard to her, making things up for an official ceremony. But this was a New Year, a time of invention and reinvention, when you could look at your murky reflection on the surface of a frozen pond and imagine that, in the spring, it would melt into something new….

The sun rose for the last time. Twilight awoke with it, thrust open the window, and soaked her face in the thin rays that barely reached her through the thin morning mist. She had woken up to this sun thousands of times, and now she had woken to it for the last time. A wave of nostalgia swept her, and she reflected for a while on her childhood in Princess Celestia’s academy and the strange arc her own life was taking. From Canterlot to Ponyville! It was like going from the finest restaurant to the Hayburger. But she had a Daughter bank, which at least meant she was manager of the Hayburger, and she had friends....

Of course, she had made friends at a time when the sun had been stolen and Equestria faced a thousand years of night. But in making friends, she had brought back the sun. In a way, she felt responsible for it, and the goodbye between them was not completely unlike that between a mother and a daughter.

At the same time, she felt a motherly affection from the sun toward her. The warm rays were like a gentle caressing her cheek, the pale trembling light like that of eyes full of gentle love. With the sun just hovering over the horizon, slow in its lazy rise, she could look directly at it. Together, mother and daughter shared a final moment.

Somewhere, was Princess Celestia doing the same? Twilight pictured her watching the sun from the balcony outside her bedchamber, quietly remembering. Or was it a tearful goodbye? Or relief at the lifting of a heavy burden? Excitement, nervousness at something new?

Regret, at having failed?

Twilight eventually closed the shades and went downstairs. She roused Spike, who wouldn’t be allowed to miss the morning sun no matter what, and started making breakfast. She made it slowly, letting the batter sizzle in the pan until the pancakes were a deep golden brown, the color of sunlight illuminating an old, silent library. She ate her pancakes without syrup across from Spike and sent him outside afterward to sweep the snow from the walkway from the treehouse to the road. She took her time doing the dishes and scrubbing the bowl and whisk and pan. She wanted this day to last, and the slower she moved, the slower she felt that time would pass.

After tidying up, she read for a while in a chair by the window in the ground-floor library. The book, carelessly chosen, proved to be a good one: The Mystery of Rainy Lud, it told the story of a small town in the countryside encountering a cloud that rained by itself. While the cloud eventually rained itself out and disappeared, the effects on the town lingered.

She took her time with it, and it was around noontime by the time she finished. Twilight, still in the reflective glow of a book recently completed, looked outside at the sun. Now at its peak, from here on out the great yellow ball would only be falling until it passed below the horizon, tiredly descending to its final resting place. In the new year to come, a new sun would rise.

There was work to do before the New Year celebration that night. Pegasi flew by carrying torches and poles. The torches had been Twilight’s idea, enthusiastically taken up by the whole town at the town meeting after Hearth’s Warming, and she and her friends had helped mark the places to put them yesterday. And drinks and food and things were being supplied communally, which in practice meant that Pinkie Pie and Applejack were doing it all. It wasn’t for lack of volunteers; Twilight suspected that they were too shrewd to miss an opportunity to advertise.

Her role was to mark the time of death and give the eulogy, as the only expert qualified for either job. All over Equestria, other towns were preparing their own festivals, and in each, a pony had been selected to perform the same somber job. ...Twilight was sure she could guess the identities of at least eight of them.

Spike’s tail swished irregularly against the wall, a sign of nervous energy. Twilight looked over her notes and eventually crumpled them up, sighing. There was nothing she could say. This sun had been a companion for Princess Celestia longer than anypony, even Philomena.

“Did you read the comment Princess Celestia gave in the newspaper yesterday?” she asked.

“Which one?”

“About what the first thing she was planning to do in the new year is.”

“Um….”

“She said she had made a resolution,” Twilight said. “She resolved never to let another sun die.”

“Don’t tell her about entropy then,” Spike said. He expected a sharp reaction, but Twilight seemed to be deep in thought, and the sarcasm didn’t register.

“I was—thinking,” said Twilight. “That maybe, if the sun can change, so can ponies. And if Princess Celestia means to change, then so should I.”

“You’ve changed a lot since coming to Ponyville. You even go outside. For non-utilitarian reasons!”

Twilight started chewing on her pencil. “What do you think is most wrong with me?”

“Too introspective, too worried about other ponies’ opinions,” said Spike, hoping to quash things before Twilight could get started on one of her negative cycles. They usually ended with a frenzied bout of reorganizing that made the house unlivable until she was done.

Twilight shook her head.

There was one more thing to take care of. Under the still-watchful eye of the dimming sun, Twilight trotted out along a path she rarely took.

The whole town wanted to know, “Who is Twilight Sparkle?” For the Unicorn had come into their lives with great suddenness and brought behind her, like the first car of a derailing train, changes and transformations.

There was Nightmare Moon, of course, who had even come back on Nightmare Night. The idea that Nightmare Moon was personally targeting their little town was an unsurprisingly fruitful source of bad dreams. Yet the fact that their little Unicorn, proven helpless after the events of Nightmare Night, had nevertheless survived two encounters with the dark sister of Princess Celestia gave rise to legends and murmurs. There were no prophecies about Twilight Sparkle, nor none ancient that had subsequently been connected with her, yet it seemed quite obvious that she was a prophesied heroine of destiny, and if the prophets disagreed, that was only to their fault. The future too, if it had no grand place for Twilight in its pages, had obviously been miswritten and was in dire need of some editing.

There were the Elements of Equilibrium. Occasionally Rarity wore her gleaming cloud-like crystal around the town, and Applejack kept hers in a box on the mantel that she displayed for curious visitors. Everypony who touched one swore they felt a flash of heat or a warm throb. In fact they felt no such thing, but that too was a sort of magic.

Then, most obviously, the monsters. The first time the good citizens of Ponyville saw a Cerberus working the plow, several ponies fainted before one had the sense to call animal control. When Fluttershy arrived with a net and a bag of treats, it took several attempts to communicate to her that “the sweet fuzzy-wuzzy doggy” was the reason she had been called.

Of course, Fluttershy was hardly any better. She had a “baby” serpent that was growing at an alarming rate. Fortunately, it mostly kept to itself, working out huge grooves in the earth and laying there contentedly. Fluttershy assured them all that once it could fly it would be out of everypony’s way, though not everypony was relaxed by the idea of a giant flying snake. And Rarity, who never talked about pets, and Rainbow Dash, who got grumpy about it if she was asked….

There was the Everfree Forest. Pinkie Pie was its unofficial liaison with Ponyville. That the pony most often seen laughing madly at her own jokes around enormous mouthfuls of cake was now the single tie between ponies and the dark, wild forest was even more cause for concern than Nightmare Moon was. At least the latter was clearly the stuff of destiny and great magic, with both Princess Celestia and Twilight Sparkle on guard against that danger. The Everfree Forest, however, was always nearby and more plain in its intentions to ponies—namely, to eat them. It was the difference between the fear of monsters in the night and the fear of crime in your neighborhood. Pinkie Pie as chief of police was the stuff of nightmares, though no pony could say whether it was the criminals or the good citizens who should be trembling in fear.

Twilight’s permanent residency in Ponyville brought with it a Daughter bank. A surprisingly humble building, it squatted on a hill by the post office as if it was embarrassed to be seen amid the rural setting. It meant that their small, backwater town was suddenly one of nine centers of national monetary activity. Sociopolitical implications aside, this gave Ponyville bragging rights over the nearby towns, and every opportunity was taken to rub it in their faces.

Equestria itself was changing. Calls to audit the Bank, though stalled at the first refusal of Princess Celestia, signaled a dramatic change in how the Bank was perceived. Fringe ideas were suddenly front and center on the policy table, being debated across Equestria by seasoned thinkers and amateur economist-philosophers alike. There was, ostensibly, a rival to Princess Celestia’s throne lurking somewhere. It had been shown that the untouchable, invincible princess could be defeated and captured, and saved by a mortal pony. And the One Bank had shared its power with the Nine. Ponies who had long detested the throne or the Bank, or who had been stymied in their political ambitions by the immovable princess, were organizing. And the effects were not limited to ponies alone. Griffons, banished from their ancient farmlands to the mountains, looked at the sky and recalled the stories of their ancestors, stories that told of taking royal command of dumb herds and supplicating beasts, of the rich taste of pork and the tenderness of lamb. And their wings stirred….

Reptiles chewing leaves in swamps and lakes communicated with footprints and droppings, and in that way ideas traveled over miles without notice by mammals.

And deeply hidden, in icy corners of Equestria, a faint cry carried on the wind. The windigos walked under ice and whispered to their hunger, that soon it might be sated.

And who could say what the Everfree Forest thought of it all.

And now, even the sun was changing. It had burned over the earth for billions of years. Now it was time for a new one.

All this, it was felt, came on the heels of Twilight Sparkle’s coming to Ponyville. And when the good citizens of Ponyville looked to the uncertain future, they wondered what Twilight Sparkle made of it all, and what it was she planned to do.

And so they asked themselves: Who is Twilight Sparkle?

It wasn’t hard to find, since it was the biggest and fanciest house in Ponyville. Twilight affixed a bright smile to her face and knocked.

“Who is it?” shouted a voice.

“Twilight Sparkle,” she answered confidently. “I was hoping to talk about your daughter.”

Twilight heard hoofsteps, then the door opened. “Oh, yes,” said Spoiled Rich. A sort of grapefruit color, Diamond Tiara’s mother had aging but keen eyes, and regarded Twilight with a sort of restrained disinterest. She wore a gold necklace and had coiffed hair that looked like Rarity’s work. There was a calm mastery in her stance that reflected good breeding, Twilight felt. “Diamond Tiara did mention. Her teacher, Miss Cheerilee, said she had already spoken to you about it. I suppose you’re here to apologize.”

Twilight wondered exactly what Diamond Tiara had told her mother. “I am sorry that I upset your daughter, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Are you aware of what your husband has become involved with?”

An eyebrow raised. “This should be good,” said Spoiled Rich. She let Twilight in and led her to a sitting room. Twilight was impressed by the tasteful art and understated decorations. A family named “Rich” that lived in a town where dolls were still made from straw would surely be gaudy and ostentatious. But the interior of the house showed the refined touch of a mature mare.

Spoiled Rich sat Twilight down in a bergère and served tea without asking if Twilight wanted any. The cups and teapot showed some of the ostentatiousness that the house hadn’t, with elaborate designs and finely cut handles.

“This is a beautiful tea set,” said Twilight as Spoiled Rich sat across from her.

“It was my mother’s,” she answered, a severe look on her face as she took a sip. “We were never to drink from this set. I never fathomed the point. To be rich just to be rich...I can’t imagine what kind of deprivation fosters such an attitude. Money is to be spent, things are to be used. As an economist, don’t you agree?”

“I suppose I would.” Twilight took a sip and tasted tannin. “Still, it’s all up to the owner.”

“And not to you?”

“No. I don’t know what you mean.”

“So what is it about my husband?”

“I was wondering if you knew about his current political views…?” Spoiled Rich just looked at her, so Twilight went on. “I heard about it from Diamond Tiara after the pageant. Apparently Filthy Rich has been giving her some very odd ideas about what I do at the Daughter bank.”

“What do you do at the Daughter bank?” Spoiled Rich took another sip of tea.

“Primarily help Ponyville and the rest of Equestria recover after the Great Succession. Things are mostly back on track, but only because the Daughter banks helped coordinate local monetary—”

“I see.” Spoiled Rich set her cup on the saucer with a clink. “And Diamond Tiara told you what, exactly?”

“That the Daughter bank is an imposition from Canterlot, and Nightmare Moon was a false flag attack to achieve it.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“What? No!”

“I saw your battle with her on Nightmare Night. She defeated you without making an effort. But we’re supposed to believe that, out of sight, you easily vanquished her?”

“It wasn’t easy. Look. if Nightmare Moon was a false flag attack, why would she show up again at Nightmare Night to make me look bad?”

“Because she’s out of control, obviously,” said Spoiled Rich. “The government isn’t very good at getting things done, you may have noticed.”

Twilight started and stopped her speech several times, trying to find a thread of logic to hold onto. “Princess Celestia is in full control of the Bank—”

“Quite. I can see that you’re content to parrot the Canterlot propaganda.”

“I guess Diamond Tiara is getting this from both her parents,” Twilight said more calmly than she felt.

“Filthy got it all from me, he doesn’t have any imagination. All his family has ever known is how to lie in wait for an opportunity. I’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit he simply hasn’t. But you know how stallions are. Or, I suppose you don’t,” said Spoiled Rich. There was a smirk on her face, and Twilight knew she had investigated the old rumors from Twilight’s days in school.

“How do you do this, as a mother?” said Twilight, a cold anger suffusing her words. “I’ve never been one, so I don’t know. But I’d never feed my daughter poison, and that extends to her mind.”

“But you drank the tea,” said Spoiled Rich with such venom that Twilight jerked away from her cup in surprise. “Only joking,” Spoiled Rich laughed. “But Princess Celestia and all her little devotees are going to get what’s coming to them.”

“Some family,” said Twilight coldly, standing up. “I’ll see myself out.”

“Who are you?” said Spoiled Rich suddenly. “How can you serve that tyrant?”

Twilight stopped, but didn’t turn around. “She raises the sun. She only ever missed one day in over a thousand years.”

“You don’t seriously believe in all that stuff, do you? An educated pony like yourself?”

“What stuff?”

“That the earth was frozen, of course!” Spoiled Rich barked laughter. “Global warming, really. You can’t be serious. The sun dropped all the way to the earth, somehow didn’t burn everypony alive, but did conveniently eradicate all the windigos, and of course Princess Celestia did it all single-hoofedly. Quite a story. And what a coincidence that she banished the only other pony who was there to the moon!”

“Not all the windigos were destroyed,” said Twilight, her voice so icy she could have passed for one. “And it’s my job as chief executive economist of the Daughter bank of Ponyville to see to it that ponies like you don’t succeed in bringing them back.”

She doubted she’d have a better exit line than that, so she left.

“I tried,” sighed Spoiled Rich to herself. “I don’t understand how such a talented mare can have such little ambition. Well...when the oceans are rising, you rise too...or you drown.”

Twilight shook with anger as she trotted out of the Rich’s house. Arguments swam through her head like piranhas at a hunk of meat, nibbling away at everything Spoiled Rich had said until there were only bones left.

But the sun overhead was not warm at all. I’m not angry, it seemed to say to her. Let’s enjoy these last moments together.

To relax, Twilight did a tour of the location for the final goodbye and the celebration for the new year. She shouted instructions to the Pegasi installing the torches and checked the oil on each. By the end of it she was feeling much better.

Back at home she carefully reviewed her astronomy equipment and made sure the telescope was pristine and working. She opened the freezer to peek in on the small, black metal cube secure in its bed of ice.

Around five o’clock, the sky darkening, Twilight and Spike packed up and headed out to the town center. Twilight floated her telescope behind her along with the box of ice holding the black metal cube. They weren’t alone: the same roads were full of townsfolk all heading to the same destination, and Pegasi flew overhead. They were all going to watch the sun set for the last time, and to see what would rise in its place. The sight of the whole town streaming toward the same destination filled Twilight with a sense of purpose and duty. The conversation with Spoiled Rich, still replaying itself in her mind, now seemed to be happening from behind a thick, soundproof wall.

The town gathered at the base of a small hill that Twilight climbed up alone.

Colors passed overhead. Beautiful colors, a magnificent spread, as though the sun were saying goodbye, and showing its best. A deep red bloomed across the sky, lit up by brilliant orange. There was a lump in Twilight’s throat. She couldn’t make herself enjoy it.

The sun set, for the last time, a little after five-thirty. Twilight didn’t feel the need to use her telescope to check for any last edge of the disk poking over the horizon. She could feel that the sun had been let go.

Now it was twilight.

The first stars did not blink over Equestria. The Moon’s silhouette did not show. They wore black, Twilight thought, out of respect.

She felt a pang of sadness for her teacher, Princess Celestia. Surely it was like putting an old friend to rest. She remembered how painful it had been to part with her old doll, Smarty Pants, whose button eyes were falling out by the time her mother had gently pried it out of her hoofs for the last time.

The sun had been taken off its respirator, so to speak, and now it was dying. And the great danger was that, in less than an hour, there would be no sun anywhere in the world, and Equestria would freeze.

She took the black metal cube out of the icebox. It was freezing to the touch. She wished she could have made it colder, but the idea had come to her only a couple of days ago.

Twilight watched the light from under the earth glow faintly over the horizon. The sky was pink and pale like the wading birds in the pictures Princess Celestia had shown her of them balancing on one leg beside a sunlit lake. Twilight held up the black cube which warmed faintly and began to glow almost imperceptibly while the sky dimmed. Until at last what little light remained faded.

Up on that hill, Twilight looked at the solitary torch beside her and focused the glow of the cube through her magic until the torch caught flame.

The crowd of townspeople, who had clumped together from the cold, stood and watched Twilight descend the short hill with the torch that held the last light of the dead sun.

Spike handed Twilight a candle. She touched the flame of the torch to the wick of the candle until it caught flame. And like that, the sun’s fire was flickering and waving before all of Ponyville as if it had only been sleeping a moment.

She lit Spike’s candle, who passed the flame on to Fluttershy, while Twilight lit the candle of another pony behind them, who lit another in turn. Rainbow Dash took her lit candle and flew off to light torches on the other side of town. Other ponies fanned out on the ground, lighting empty torches wherever they were.

When the whole town was alight, the party started. Twilight, after double-checking the torches and the candles to make sure there weren’t any fire hazards—she admired the spirit of keeping the town burning bright with the last light of the dying sun, but spirit and safety rarely went together, in her experience—and found a bench to nurse a small drink and look at the dark sky. Rainbow Dash and the other Pegasi had cleared it of any clouds, leaving a starless black canvas for Twilight to project her thoughts onto.

Rarity interrupted her almost immediately. “Hem hem, darling, but you did ask for this dress, and I insist that you wear it.”

Twilight smiled gratefully. The cut was simple, but it was the colors that mattered: black-spotted with fiery orange and yellow patterns exploding across the dress. “Thanks, Rarity. I just didn’t want it to accidentally catch on fire.”

Rarity peered at her. “You didn’t have anything to drink before the party started, did you?” Twilight shook her head. “Then whatever did you think would happen up there?”

Twilight just smiled as Rarity helped her into the dress. Wearing it was the closest she could get to putting flowers on the sun’s grave.

“I didn’t know what to wear for a new year,” Rarity admitted as she zipped Twilight up and turned her around, nodding in approval. “You don’t think my hat is too big, do you?”

“Never.”

Her tone surprised Rarity. “Twilight, whatever is the matter? You look so serious.”

The world nearly ended, and Princess Celestia didn’t even send me a letter. She just...trusted. I think she trusted me. To save the world. Ahhh! Rarity! Help me! Help me! I’m going insane!

Because she’s wrong! So wrong! You’re all wrong!

“It’s a celebration,” Rarity advised her. “Have some fun.” She kissed Twilight’s cheek. “Jument curieux.” She left, leaving Twilight with a warm glow in her heart and a sick feeling in her stomach.

The party was merry amid the torchlight. There were no rules and no customs for a new year, so ponies were making it up as they went. In practice this meant drinking, singing, and games, ponies kicking up snow as they danced through the frozen streets, laughing at a sky that was as dark as the view from underneath their eyelids. The Moon wasn’t visible in the sky, as if it had dipped under the Earth in a somber pose. No stars shone down, as if their eyes were closed in grief. The result was a dark, rippling blanket of sky, the fire in the torches straining toward it like it was trying to kindle a new sun.

Fluttershy sat down next to her, snapping Twilight out of her reverie. She wore a bright green dress, and her pink mane was done up in elaborate curls. She did smell a bit like dung and sweat though, like she had finished work at her animal sanctuary and quickly dressed before heading over to the celebration. “Hi! …Are you okay?”

“I like planning parties better than actually ‘getting down,’” Twilight admitted, shifting over to make room for her.

“Do you think Nightmare Moon might show up?” Fluttershy said in a low voice.

Twilight’s eyes widened. She felt a hollow pang in her ribs. “What? No—why? Did you see something?”

Now Fluttershy drew back. “No, sorry. You just seemed so tense. And considering what happened at the last party you planned...and then she showed up at Nightmare Night, so ruining the celebration of the new sun seemed like the sort of thing she might...sorry, I’m worrying you.”

“No, it’s fine. I honestly didn’t even think of it. Um...now that I am thinking about it, I don’t think Nightmare Moon will want to brave the birth of a new sun. It’s a special time,” she added, not entirely sure what she meant by it.

“I like your dress,” Fluttershy said, changing the subject.

“Thanks.”

“What did you do with the black cube?”

Twilight looked at her.

“You don’t have to tell me,” said Fluttershy with such innocent sincerity that Twilight sighed and fished it out.

It was freezing cold to the touch. Fluttershy drew back her hoof, shivering. Twilight levitated it back into a small pouch and put it out of sight.

“Why is it so cold?”

“It was full of the sun’s warmth. Like a gourmand who tasted the best food under the stars, how is it supposed to go back to eating anything else?”

Fluttershy was quiet a moment. “Is that how you feel?”

“What?”

“About us. About living here.”

“No, I—.”

Fluttershy rushed on, as if she had been meaning to ask this for quite a while. “I mean, compared to Canterlot, this town doesn’t have a lot to offer. And none of us are very smart or know much about economics. You must get bored.”

Twilight didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You’re all very sharp, trust me. Smarter than me in so many ways. I….”

She had been about to say that she wished she could trade her intelligence for theirs, but that wasn’t true. She’d give up her mind to save them, that she knew. But not to be them.

“Just sometimes you seem unhappy,” said Fluttershy. “It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it. But sometimes it seems like you don’t want to talk about something. Maybe we’re not smart enough to understand. That’s totally fine!”

Now Twilight knew laughing was the better option. The problem was that they would understand all too well. “Would you trust me to save the world?”

“What, now?” Fluttershy looked alarmed.

“Like, ever. Without warning, without a word, just because it was me, and I was there, watching and thinking, would you trust me to do it?”

“No.” Fluttershy smiled shyly. “But if we were there….”

“You are smart. But any econopony would do. The Elements don’t need to be worked through me.”

“Oh, I disagree.”

Twilight didn’t sigh, but she did exhale louder than usual.

“But you wanted me to agree,” said Fluttershy, who picked up on things like that, annoyingly. “Why?”

Twilight looked up at the velvet sky. It was so empty. Tabula rasa, a blank slate that anything could be imposed onto. The perfect canvas for any artist.

Fluttershy seemed to be thinking along similar lines. “You could paint anything up there. There aren’t any clouds to get in the way. Or you could write on it. Doesn’t it look like parchment?” She smiled encouragingly at Twilight. In the torchlight, the slight curl to her pink hair looked so pretty that for a moment Twilight wanted to tell her everything. But the insane desire passed after a moment.

“Whenever you’re ready,” said Fluttershy. “I’d wait out the life of another sun for you.”

“Oh, you’re a good friend,” whispered Twilight. Stop, please. You’re hurting me. Can’t you tell you’re hurting me?

Fluttershy seemed content to just sit a while. She was happy just to have somepony quiet to be with during the party. If she wasn’t socializing at all then Rainbow Dash would notice and make her do something embarrassing. To Fluttershy, just being noticed was embarrassing.

Twilight chased her mind away from thoughts of despair and caught a ride instead on the train of thought that had been alert and running ever since Fluttershy had mentioned Nightmare Moon, who had surprised them on Nightmare Night. Had Nightmare Moon escaped again after recovering her strength, or had Princess Celestia let her go, and why?

Nightmare Moon had told her, “Thou knowest how I quelled the Bank. Know what thou knowest, and I will give thee such a nightmare.” Twilight had a guess, a pretty good one. In fact, she was sure she was right. But she didn’t like it. And in the context of Nightmare Moon’s promised nightmare, it made Twilight think of the blacker-than-black coat she had seen fading from Nightmare Moon in the old castle of the Knights of Economics, which seemed to occupy the very lower bound of lightlessness, and the deep purple coat of Princess Luna, scarred with burn-rings like a great hot disk had been pressed to her skin again and again, that had shown through underneath.

She’d encountered Princess Luna before that, technically. The Night side of the Bank hadn’t been a mirror image of the Day side, but that was because Princess Luna wasn’t a mirror image of her older sister. The Diarchs, the Heavenly Sisters, the Duality Principle, all of those ideas were just plot elements in the story ponies told about Equestria, about themselves. It was a plot that was at best only based on a true story. Like all fiction, it was forced to simplify, clarify, arrange and order in ways that defied the messy complexity of reality. Princess Luna really was just a regular mare on the inside, one who didn’t try to set herself opposite to Princess Celestia for narrative convenience. At least, Twilight thought so, because she herself had suddenly become a savior of the world and had had to explain to a number of disappointed journalists that she wasn’t interested in answering questions. What was there to say about their time in the Everfree Forest? “I was scared and made bad decisions and got bailed out every step of the way by my friends until Nightmare Moon decided I was too weak to even pay attention to.” The books that would be written about her would make her into more of a hero, Twilight was sure. The fear she felt and the mistakes she made would be turned into lessons and wisdom. The parts where she was ready to cry from fear, the parts where her mistakes weren’t inspiration for young colts and fillies to be brave but were instead just unplanned idiocies that would have led, in a fairer and more just world, to a thousand years of economic depression, they would all be shaved away like unwanted lip hair in the morning.

If Nightmare Moon was still out there, then their next confrontation was shaping up to be quite a sequel. But the thought of facing her again made Twilight feel sick to her stomach. Nightmare Moon was so much stronger than her that it was like a newborn foal fighting a grown elephant, if the elephant was also an immortal demigoddess with centuries of practice with sorceries so dark that the books containing them had to be kept in an underground vault so they wouldn’t drain all the light from the world. Both the newborn foal and Twilight pretty much had one option, which was to wet themselves and hope their opponent stayed away out of disgust. It was the sea cucumber style of fighting, and Twilight felt about as able as a vegetable when it came to fighting Nightmare Moon. But of course the books would say that they were destined foes. Twilight hoped they would make the writers peel her pancake-flat body off the floor. Try writing poetry about that.

She wished for snow to fall suddenly. If only the Pegasi hadn’t taken away the clouds. She wanted to hide her face in it and retreat from the noise and crowd of the party. There was too much wrong with her, too much that wasn’t what it needed to be. Looking at herself in a mirror didn’t hurt like being stabbed with daggers anymore. But that itself was a fault. And there was so much work to do at the Daughter bank.

She felt something warm on her shoulder. Fluttershy was leaning her head on her, pink hair spilling down Twilight’s leg artistically, like the curve left by a brushstroke on a painting. The curl was so pretty, in fact, that Twilight was sure Fluttershy had done it on purpose. She told her so.

“You’re in such a funny mood, Twilight.”

“Come on,” Twilight said, agreeing with her. “Let’s join the party. For real, not just hiding from Rainbow Dash.”

“But...but…!”

Twilight dragged Fluttershy toward a large group of ponies that included most of their friends. Hours passed in conversation under the empty sky.

It was a long night. The sun would not dawn for four or five more hours still. Fillies could be seen asleep in little clusters here and there under piles of their parents’ winter clothing. Technically it was past midnight, but that meant little in a sunless world. Still, the hours passed just the same, dragging on their bodies like waves against a boat, pulling them to a destination. Most ponies relieved themselves from the party proper and broke into small groups. For Twilight and Fluttershy, that meant joining Applejack, Rarity, and Pinkie Pie in front of the torch on the hill that Twilight had lit, its fire whipping around like it was looking for something. Their conversation died after a couple of hours, and like true friends, they huddled together and watched the fire in silence without the need for empty talk.

“Been a good year, anyway,” Applejack said after a while. It was said that there were three things a pony could look at without getting bored: fire, the stars, and moving water, and only fire was present right now.

“It’s the only one we’ve ever had,” Rarity said.

“I’m not worthy,” Twilight mumbled, looking down from the flame. The moment was too intimate, too peaceful, and she felt her heart ripping.

Rainbow Dash flew down suddenly. “I have something to confess,” she said breathlessly. “I was scared, that time in the forest with the parasprites. I was scared and I hated it and I hated hating it and I ran away.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’ll never leave you all again. I’ll be more loyal than a dog—sorry, Fluttershy.”

“No offense taken.”

“That’s all I’ve got to say,” Rainbow Dash said, a set to her jaw like she was waiting for somepony to challenge her about it. Instead, Fluttershy patted her side, and Rarity flashed a smile at her. That was the end of it.

“I guess a new year’s a good time as any to make resolutions,” Applejack said. It was clear she had been thinking about something. “I’ve been thinking about Nightmare Moon. She got the best of us last time. But next time….”

She didn’t say anything more, but the resolution was felt, like a belt being secured into place.

“I want to go next,” announced Pinkie Pie. Twilight felt a muted dread. “I’ve got to meet my sisters again.” She also ended there, without elaboration.

Rarity glanced around, as if making sure it was her turn. “Well, somepony’s got to watch after the rest of you. I promise I’ll help you all fulfill your dreams.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Rarity, but I was going to resolve to never let anything bad happen ever again,’ said Fluttershy in a whisper.

“That’s a tad ambitious, darling.”

“Then...I’m going to be a good mother to the sky serpent. I’m going to teach her how to fly.”

“I’ll help,” said Rainbow Dash instantly.

“Thank you.”

Twilight was the last one left. “Oh, girls, I can’t tell lies anymore. But I’m scared to tell the truth. I’m scared you won’t be able to understand me. I'm scared that if you did understand me, you wouldn't want to be my friend anymore. But right now, while the sun’s eye is closed forever, if you want, I can tell you.”

Her friends shared confused glances. “You can tell us anything,” said Rainbow Dash.

Twilight breathed in. “Look…I have a weird family. They’re not my family. They’re my Sisters...it’s just what we called ourselves, a cohort of Princess Celestia’s graduate academy. I don’t think there have been many Brothers…stallions just aren’t socialized to be interested in household management, I guess.”

Fluttershy was listening intently but didn’t react.

“Anyway...we helped each other with problem sets and tests. It was very hard...and we became very close. But we also fought terribly.”

“Sisters can be like that,” said Pinkie Pie sagely.

“I don’t think...not like us,” said Twilight. “I don’t come from somewhere normal. The hardest adjustment to Ponyville hasn’t been the, um, humble surroundings or simple pastimes. It’s been you five.”

Twilight let out a long breath. The night was chilly—unnaturally warm considering the absence of a sun, but still cold. She didn’t know where to put her face, or what to do about the lump in her throat.

“So...before it was just the Nine of us...in the beginning we were maybe thirty or forty in a class. We were schoolmates. At around the age when the very last of us were getting their cutie marks. ...One of my best friends there was named Lemon Hearts. She was very funny and inquisitive, and...oh, I guess she wasn’t keeping up with the rest of us. I don’t even remember what it was exactly. I don’t remember when or why we decided she was going to drop out. Anyway….” Twilight’s eyes were shut tight with shame and horror. “We played the game, Why Is Lemon Hearts So Stupid? And...oh, Celestia...we opened up her head to find out.

“Don’t touch me!” She had felt her friends instinctively reach out to her. “If you had seen the way her eyes rolled around, the way her tail…and how she talked after, because we didn’t fold her brain back up right, it was like trying to stuff something you had ordered back in the box it came in. If you had seen her then, you would not want to be my friend. If you had seen me laugh at the way her tongue lolled and the way she babbled, you would hate me forever. Our friendship is protected by this ignorance.”

“We’ve all done things we’re not proud of,” said Rainbow Dash quietly.

“None of you have done anything as bad as me,” said Twilight confidently. None of them contradicted her.

“I think Nightmare Moon gave me a gift on Nightmare Night,” Twilight went on. She wiped her eyes. “When she broke my ribs, she knew I wanted pain. And she reminded me that I deserved it. I was getting too happy here. Too willing to pretend that it was okay.”

Pinkie Pie was crying too, weeping without seeming to realize it. “No….” Applejack began.

“Don’t try to tell me that it’s okay or in the past,” Twilight said. She had imagined this conversation a hundred times. “I’ve done worse than what I did to Lemon Hearts. And for that matter, I’ve failed the only ponies who were ever as precious to me as you all.”

“But you’re doing fine,” said Fluttershy.

Twilight had never dreamed of such an answer in her hundred simulations of this conversation. She just stared at Fluttershy, dumbfounded.

“You’re doing fine,” Fluttershy said again. “Admitting it and crying like this is the best possible action you can take at this point.”

“You’re going to lecture me on sunk costs on the night of a new year?”

“There aren’t any rules for how tonight works,” Fluttershy said stubbornly. “You had such a great idea with the torches. You can keep having good ideas, you’re not obliged to take a bad one next.”

Disoriented, Twilight closed her eyes—and then opened them abruptly, because the vision of that pink roll unfolding across the floor appeared on her eyelids and made her stomach heave. But it wasn’t the gruesome sight that sickened her most, it was the memory of her own bright suggestions in helping to bring it about.

“We’re not going to stop being your friends just because you feel guilty,” said Pinkie Pie.

“Again, if you had seen….” Twilight trailed off. The expressions of her friends were unanimous in their meanings: This is not negotiable, you are our friend.

“Even Princess Celestia doesn’t know, I don’t think,” Twilight mumbled, but she already saw the stupidity of what she had tried to do. Far from being the mature or responsible thing, her confession had been intended to sow discord and misery. What was the point in admitting fault if she was only going to use it to hurt others, and herself? At the same time, though, she recognized that her feelings were real: It was impossible to accept herself as part of this group when she had shown herself to be so unworthy.

Don’t, a rare part of her cut in, the part that gave voice to her sensible thoughts, and therefore spoke rarely. Stop thinking. A single real conversation yielded more insight than a hundred simulated ones. So learn the lesson, and keep talking—

Twilight didn’t let the voice finish. She took hold of that accelerating mass of thought and let it yank her forward, pulling her and the scattered, confused and hurting ideas in her head along behind it like the flags of a kite soaring through the air.

“I don't come from somewhere normal,” Twilight said, “and I'm worried that no matter how close we become and how long I have with you all, I'll never be able to tell you what I am or what's going to happen.” She glanced at the Daughter bank. “When I realized I was going to be with you all for a while, at first I only wondered two things: how long would I be consigned here, and what will life be like with five friends in it? But on Nightmare Night, I realized this town has the power to change me. And on Hearth’s Warming Eve, I realized I have the power to change it.”

She focused her eyes on the flame now. Neither the stars above nor the bubbling water of Canterlot’s fountains and marble pools were there to gaze at, and she needed the distraction from her senses. “None of this will make sense, but let me explain as best I can. I was useless in the journey through the Everfree Forest and the fight against Nightmare Moon. I failed at every point that it was possible to fail. Only when Nightmare Moon turned away in disgust and boredom did I have a chance, and even then I needed you all to tell me what to do. Never mind if what I just said is correct or not. It’s just how I feel, because I felt afraid and helpless the whole while, and I saw courage and decisiveness from you all. Maybe inside you were afraid and saw courage and decisiveness in me. I’m just telling you how I felt.

“So I would do anything for any of you because I remember when doing anything felt impossible. But when I consider myself as your sister, fellow, or friend, I don’t feel like I’m worthy of my place here among you five. Because you don’t know. You really don’t. You didn’t see Lemon Hearts. Or what happened to my brother, or how my first group of friends fell apart. You just don’t know, even after I tell you.”

“Don’t care,” said Pinkie Pie with uncharacteristic bluntness. Or, no, Twilight realized, Pinkie Pie was always that plain. But there was no icing in her voice, no balloon-pop in the way she spoke.

“I’m not saying, ‘let’s not be friends,’” said Twilight cautiously. What was she trying to say? “I just want you all to be able to make an informed decision about being my friend. Because it usually isn’t a good one.”

“We’ve been through a forest with you,” Rainbow Dash said. “We fought an Alicorn and went trick-or-treating. I think we’ve already decided.”

There was such a thing as tacit knowledge, Twilight knew. Not everything could be communicated in bytes of data or as logical propositions.

In fact, most ideas couldn’t be. That was why, despite the appealing metaphor of math as language, scientists communicated with each other in natural language. That was the problem she was running into now. Language really only captured small fragments of reality. Context, “understanding,” “meaning” filled in the rest, like a big box that was mostly full of packaging.

She couldn’t make a time machine and take them back to the scene. But it was still there inside her head, playing over and over again….

Twilight felt the determination as fundamentally as the rotation of the earth: Let me show you my mind.

But even the thought of taking it out, never mind how to do it safely or put it back, but just the thought of it spilling out and unfolding across the snowy mound made her knees wobble and her stomach lurch. She remembered seeing wobbling gyri glistening under cold light, and flinched.

I don’t know what to do.

Again the sensible voice spoke: You never do. Ask them. You were just saying that, remember?

Amazing, Twilight thought feverishly. Two sensible thoughts in one day.

They say a clear sky means a clear mind. Ha ha ha….

“I’d like you all to get to know me better. And, selfishly, I’d like to get to know all of you better. I can’t do better than that.”

“You’re darn tooting, missy!” said Pinkie Pie. It occurred to Twilight that she was probably quite angry.

“I think you did so well,” said Fluttershy, like she was congratulating a shy puppy that had stayed mostly calm while being introduced to ponies.

Twilight felt months of stress slough off her back. Her mind was still reaching for that misery, trying to find its anchor, but what had been the central attractor of her emotional life over the past weeks seemed to have vanished like the sun on this night. What had she imagined? That she’d confess a crime, and they’d abandon her? For crying out loud, a screaming sea serpent had made Rainbow Dash come back. These girls didn’t leave a sister behind.

I’m not worthy. Not of this, not of the Daughter bank, nor Princess Celestia’s trust.

But I have these things. So I need to use them. Or else I really am unworthy. Because as I learned in the forest, even if I’m not good enough…. The rest of the thought completed itself as a warm sensation inside her. She knew what it meant. Just another thing that couldn’t be communicated, but could be felt….

Three sensible thoughts. Princess Celestia should kill a sun every week, I’d solve most of the outstanding problems in economics by the end of the...well, a year, anyway.

Now there was only one hour until sunrise.

“Philomena,” said Princess Celestia. “Now would be perfect. Show them what it was like when….”

The phoenix took off from the windowsill. Her scarlet wings were a flash in the night sky, and then she was gone.

“When we first met,” Princess Celestia murmured.

The Phoenix streaked up, up. The clouds fell away. Somewhere, far below, there were barriers within the world. But up above was a vast space colder than Equestria had been under the snow. Blacker than the shadow ponies. More empty than the nests of dragons, long abandoned. Even the moon was faceless now. It remained white and pitted, like a mass grave had been dug on its surface. There were barriers between the worlds, and this troubled Philomena far more.

Space was terribly cold, and she didn’t know how to warm it up.

Somewhere far below, there were barriers within the world. Philomena could see the great wall of Mexicolt jutting out above the mountains. She heard the roar of the roving whirlpool that kept Equestrians from the lands to the east.

There were barriers in the world, and they meant nothing to a Phoenix.

Her body was fire, and that meant sparks were constantly flickering from her. They faded, but didn’t die as they left her body.

(Somewhere far below, the Unit was quietly eroding. It still weighed One, it would always weigh One, but the total weight in its small box was increasing. And with half its counterbalance sealed and unresponsive, the Bank was tilting….)

The molecules spread out over the earth.

Met the young light just dawning over the edge of the world.

And began to burn.

Rainbow Dash was the first to see the light blooming over the horizon. She shouted and climbed out from the weary pile they had formed. All over Ponyville ponies were pointing at the sky, rousing slumbering fillies, and drawing nearer the torches, the flames atop them all straining to the east as if trying to reach something there. Twilight risked glancing back as Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo walked up the hill with their sisters and Rainbow Dash. Their eyes were wide as they gazed at the orange oozing over the sky and the pale yellow ball cresting over the horizon.

New light washed over the world for the first time since before ponies had thought of anything but grass. Applejack nudged her little sister.

“What do you resolve for the new year?”

Twilight expected Apple Bloom to be confused, but after a moment, she said, “Be an economist.”

Twilight’s friends sent questioning looks Twilight’s way. Twilight just shrugged and smiled. She wasn’t good enough, but maybe she didn’t have to be. That was the division of labor, after all. What luck that she had met such different ponies. They could be all the things that she wasn’t. And she would be the same to them.

What luck.

“Look!” said Rainbow Dash. She couldn’t contain herself any longer and lifted from the earth, gazing up at the sky. Fire was spreading out in all directions, setting the atmosphere alight.

“Sunlight!” Twilight gasped. “The sunlight is so young, it’s catching on fire!”

Red lances of fire burst along the rays of light, streaking over the sky. The sky itself was reddening as if being baked by the heat. Some ponies shrieked, but Twilight felt completely calm. She knew this fire: It was Philomena’s, and it cloaked life. A bird could live in this fire, and fly, and think. There was nothing to fear.

The sky and the sun were red over the Land of the Rising Sun. It seemed to Tako that the sun that burned red like a giant, angry eye over them was not the sun that had risen yesterday. This did not make sense, and he said so.

The other octopus took a while to answer.

While he waited, Tako slithered over to a nearby tree, his tentacles working nimbly on the smooth stone floor. When he reached the tree, he wrapped himself around the trunk and swiftly pulled himself up—he was so strong, as were most healthy octopi, that he could pull himself with just a few suckers of one tentacle attached to a branch. From there it was easy to swing over the wall and into the mango grove. His tentacles caressed the mangos, feeling the outer layer for ripeness. Finally he picked one, attached a sucker to either half, and split it open over his beak. Juice spilled down into his waiting mouth. Then he scooped the fruit out with his beak.

When Tako returned, the other octopus had not moved from his chrysanthemum chair.

The fire over the world was falling in a rush of glimmering red particles, like the sparks from fireworks at the great festivals. They landed in harmless showers on the stone floor, quickly winking out. The sun was then yellow in a sky as blue as fresh water.

“That,” said the other octopus, “was weird.”

Tako rushed over to him. “Lord, what was that?” Tako’s skin was changing colors rapidly, indicating stress and confusion. “That was not the same sun as yesterday. The whole sky was on fire!”

The other octopus, who was really a nonapus, scratched around his beak with a tentacle thoughtfully. “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”

Tako settled on a nervous purple color. “Lord, the sun is a [life-mind-God]. Unlike the ocean, it is alive, but it moves according to its own spirit. This is the second irregularity in the past five months. Previously, there had only been one irregularity a thousand years ago!”

The nonapus chuckled and assumed his golden color, the color that marked his age, his status, and his power. As a nonapus, he was the lord and guardian of their island, which was really an archipelago consisting of about four thousand small islands. Of the three main ones, Honshokushu was the greatest and where the nonapus typically resided.

Tako asked the question that had been bothering him. “Does it mean an earthquake?”

He did not need to explain the devastation that would mean. The golden nonapus waited awhile. His face was inscrutable at these times. Tako could not guess what he was thinking, nor how his color remained so solid under stress. His own skin was flashing red and blue in waves, and hints of silver and brown.

“No,” the golden nonapus said eventually. “I don’t think so. This is something different. It is about those nightmares I told you about.”

Tako’s skin flashed red. “The dark star-horse? This is her doing?”

The golden nonapus didn’t answer. This time Tako took it as ignorance: the golden nonapus had nothing true to say, so he didn’t say anything. Tako took the opportunity to advance his own hypothesis:

“Lord, this is the zodiac’s work. We have long known that the stars are [life-mind-Gods] since they move by themselves and do not die—”

“The sun died yesterday.”

Tako turned pure silver. “Lord, what did you say?”

He waved a tentacle as if dismissively. “I don’t have words for it, so don’t take this too literally. But as you said, the sun that set yesterday is not the sun that rose today. Something killed it and took its place.”

“How...how is that possible….”

“Who knows? A war between great spirits.”

“You are one of them,” said Tako bravely.

“Eh.” The nonapus turned green briefly, a sardonic blush. He was the only one who did things like that, Tako had noticed. If a court priest turned green in front of others, he would blame it on rotten fruit. “My [power-of-divine-wind] does not cut the heavens, and it cannot be used to wrangle the clouds. Frankly, compared to the total raw energy in the universe, I am as weak as a [small bird that eats seeds.]”

“But, lord….”

“Killing a sun is probably not that hard. There are a lot of them out there. If they all ganged up on one, it’d be a piece of [rice cake.]”

“Speaking of which, I’m hungry.”

“Because you’re getting married. Fine, let’s have tea.”

Tako and the nonapus went inside the archway and from there to a small white building overlooking the sea. Tako prepared the table and fetched the tea set. The nonapus waited impatiently for him to perform the ceremony, audibly sighing several times. When Tako finally poured the tea and served crackers, however, the nonapus only sniffed it.

“Your bride to be, is she beautiful?”

Tako took a moment to answer; his mouth was full of cracker. “Yes, so lovely. She is always a beautiful shade, and her grace as she swings through the trees is like none other.”

“Are you going to procreate with her?”

“Yes.”

“Soon?”

“Yes, lord.”

“You will die.”

“Yes.”

The nonapus gave a long, long sigh.

“You have been a good student, faithful and true,” he said. “A finer assistant I have not had in centuries.”

“I apologize, lord,” Tako said. But the excitement in his voice that had been there when he spoke of his wife was still evident.

“You’re eager to die,” the nonapus said. The golden color of his skin seemed unusually opaque, Tako thought.

“Not to die, but to procreate. That is the purpose of life, is it not?” Tako sipped tea, pleased with his wisdom.

“Pbbbbhh,” the nonapus said. “If life has a purpose, it’s something bizarre and inscrutable, and we are only minor pieces in its epoch-spanning plot.”

Tako was surprised by this answer. “What do you think life’s plan is, lord?”

“Eh,” said the nonapus. “To wrangle the stars, maybe.”

“The stars, lord?”

“Sure. Life wants to eat, but it has always been looking up at the stars, the greatest source of energy in the universe. Wouldn’t it want to consume them? Wouldn’t it do anything to build a ladder that goes beyond the atmosphere so it could reach up and pluck stars like fruit off the bough?”

“And who set this plan in motion? It must have been a very great spirit.”

“Whoever it was,” said the nonapus, as if he had been thinking very carefully and had come to a conclusion, “it was probably not a horse.”

Maybe it was the memory of the new sun burning in the sky that made Tako bold, or maybe it was the thought of his coming marriage and the end of his life. Whatever it was, he asked a question he had often wondered, but never dared put to words: “Lord, why are you the only nonapus?”

At once the nonapus flashed a series of brilliant colors, alternating too quickly for Tako to perceive any message. Finally he settled on a dull orange. “There was another.”

“What happened to him?”

“She fell in love.”

The nonapus turned gold again. “So! Before you get married, you have one last job: You must investigate the new sun and gather information. You are to prepare for your replacement to take over.”

Tako couldn’t keep himself from turning silver. “Have you already chosen a replacement, lord?”

“Yes, but now I think it was the wrong choice. We have looked to the dead sea too long, wishing to return. Instead, I will need an octopus who understands the stars. That is your other last job. Look for a suitable replacement! Understood!”

“Yes, lord!”

“Stop drinking tea! Your marriage is soon! An [engaged octopus] is a [very busy octopus.] Get going!”

“At once, lord!”

The Imperial Palace was still red with fire after the fire in the sky had gone out. Soldiers were going around gathering the corpses of other birds and throwing them into the flames. The smell was horrible, and so were the occasional screams of birds who were still alive.

The revolution had gone exceedingly well, thought Hè Na. Not a single member of the Imperial court had survived. Their smoldering gray feathers covered the path outside like ashes from a mass cremation.

Now I really am red-crowned.

She craned her head to check, but she really was alone now inside the throne room. The former emperor had been dragged out by Hè Na’s followers, along with his servants, and killed with a kick to the head by Hè Na.

Alone now, Hè Na regarded her prize at the top of the platform. The floor was strewn with feathers and broken glass and the occasional eyeball. Hè Na picked her way around it. Still gazing at the throne high above, she kicked bones and shattered porcelain out of her way.

The throne itself was splattered with blood but otherwise pristine. Gold pillars reaching up to the ceiling fifty feet above gave her a sense of freedom as she climbed the platform and regarded the Throne of First Wing. Thirteen specimens of mythical birds were arranged around the grand perch, which she ascended with a flap of her wings and gazed out from.

Down the platform stretched a grand hall full of pillars and high perches. There were also, she saw, many places where hawks and falcons could hide and swoop out at an enemy, and there were holes where buzzards could shoot arrows. What a paranoid regime. Little good it had done them.

From the perspective of the throne, the stone statues of ospreys and owls seemed to be her guardians and soldiers. She could imagine taking flight and ordering them to attack.

The back of the throne was quite wide and tall. If Hè Na did not have impeccable hearing, she would have been decapitated by the attack that came from behind her. Instead, she scrambled to one side, cutting back with one long leg. She missed, but it forced her enemy to dart away, giving Hè Na time to react before it dived again at her.

The next attack pierced her wing. Hè Na tensed her neck and struck with her beak, but the small, dull-colored bird darted away again. It kept advancing, stinging and drawing blood, forcing Hè Na to retreat under an onslaught of tiny wounds. True to her kind, red blood streamed down her head and into her eyes, blinding her. Angry, she swept low, trying to anticipate the next attack, but her kick missed, and its beak nearly took out her right eye, Hè Na dodging at the last second but earning a gash across her face.

How absurd that the throne’s final guardian wasn’t a sleek kestrel or mighty eagle, but an unremarkable white-eyed yuhina. Unlike Hè Na’s crane tribe, the white-eyes weren’t worth designating a caste. Pests, they were allowed to flit from tree to tree looking for seeds to steal, and anybird was allowed to kill one for trying, or for looking like it was going to try, or for just being a white-eyed yuhina in the wrong place at the wrong time. How could the former emperor have put his faith in such a worthless creature?

Or is he not protecting the emperor, but the throne?

“Wait,” gasped Hè Na. “We should be allies—” She screamed, a new cut opening on her leg, nearly severing it, making it impossible to walk. Collapsing onto one knee, she held her wings in front of her face and barely blocked the killing blow. “Stop!” she begged. “I will make you a general, I will give you freedom—”

His beak was tearing at her feathers and muscle and the thin bones across the wing. She felt things snapping, ripping: She knew she would never fly again. Would never dip her wing along the bank of the dead river and imagine life under an emperor who cared about the people. Would never crack open the shells of the tiny crabs at the bottom of the bank and feel the satisfaction of pecking out the burrowing snails in the mud. Would never listen to the strange song of the fairies and follow their laughter into the forest, only to lose them and wonder, and then be laughed at by Hè Wei because there was no such thing as fairies, and it didn’t matter anyway since he loved her no matter how silly she was.

Would never dream again. Would never see that dark mare and her silver light again.

What a strange final thought.

Although she saw a light now.

A concerned chirping woke her up. She stared up at the fat, familiar face of Zhègū Yumei. The frightened partridge shrieked when Hè Na opened her eyes and began dancing in place, hopping from one undersized foot to the other, which echoed in the great hall of the palace.

“Are you okay are you okay are you okay—”

Hè Na winced and rose to a sitting position, looking with bemusement at Zhègū Yumei. The rotund, white-necklaced partridge had been a close friend of hers for years, and had proven herself a faithful comrade in the assault under the red sun this morning. She also tended to dither and was attracted to the most ridiculous of several options like iron to a magnet.

Zhègū Yumei grabbed her by the shoulders. “Answer me!”

“I’m fine.” Hè Na smiled beatifically. “Actually, I feel amazing.”

“You’re covered in blood!”

Hè Na looked down. It was true: Dried blood was smeared over her ruffled feathers. She could feel the stickiness around her face and knew she must look frightful.

“I feel fine,” said Hè Na honestly. “How did….”

But Zhègū Yumei stepped aside, casting a meaningful look behind her at the white-eyed yuhina. He was bowed by the throne, gazing at her with a calm expression.

Hè Na jumped to her feet. “Why did you not kill me?”

He was kneeling as if in contemplative repose. Now he considered this question with tranquility. “I don’t know how to. The holes in your wings and skin closed. Your bones healed. Only the blood remains.”

He rose, causing Hè Na to flinch and raise a wing protectively, to bat him out of the sky if need be. But instead he bowed. “The throne is lost, and I cannot kill you. I have no honor and no purpose. Please fight me fairly and win swiftly.”

Hè Na did have honor though, and her blood turned cold. “I offered you the position of general. That offer has not been rescinded.”

“I humbly refuse.”

“It is now an order. I am your empress.”

“With deepest respect, I will not obey the empress’s wish.”

“Zhègū Yumei,” said Hè Na, “please stand back.”

“Oh, oh dear,” said Zhègū Yumei, wobbling backwards. She began to hop in place again. In another body, she would have been biting her nails.

A strength suffused Hè Na that she had not noticed until she prepared herself for the white-eyed yuhina. Her movements were unusually fluid and relaxed. Her eyes took in the small disturbance of his beating heart; her ears heard the individual clack of each of Zhègū Yumei’s talons on the stone tile.

“I cannot give you a fair fight,” she said sadly. “It seems I have achieved enlightenment. I sincerely apologize.”

He didn’t answer, just launched himself at her in a line like an arrow. She saw the feint and the attempt to switch directions; the arc of her kick, initiated almost simultaneously with his launch, didn’t alter.

The small body of the dead white-eyed yuhina bounced away and stopped against the throne.

The clacking stopped. “Let’s leave,” said Zhègū Yumei. Her voice trembled, and it really did tremble, each subtle vibration altering the sound so that it was like a stream of air running through a mountain path.

“You’re staring,” said Zhègū Yumei. These trembles were different. There was so much variation in every breath.

“I know,” said Hè Na.

Outside, the sky was blue again. Some sparks from the atmospheric fire were cooling on the ground or smoldering on the damaged and broken rooftops and trees. Soldiers were busy cleaning up bodies and putting out fires. Hè Na looked anxiously for the one that mattered.

She heard him before she saw him: His deep voice bulging in his throat before his mouth and tongue shaped the vibrations and gave them order.

“Hello,” Hè Wei said, coming up behind her.

She traced out the word with her mouth as he said it and felt how their mouths were different. His heart quickened around her; that was good.

She turned and saw that his feathers were messed from a fight. Good, thought a part of her that was growing louder and stronger every day, no bird will doubt his courage. Then she thought, I hope he wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t hurt; she could tell by the way his blood swam through his body—she could feel the heat—and by the gurgle of his organs.

“I am the empress,” she told him.

“You better be, or all of this was a sorry waste of time.” He smiled easily. “Have you sat on the throne yet?”

“No,” she said, hesitating imperceptibly. “Has the fighting stopped?”

“Mostly, although every now and then some nut flies out of a tree and tries to take somebird’s head off.”

She nodded. The day was won. It was time to repair and heal.

“Are you alright, Hè Na?”

He put his wing on her shoulder. She heard each of his feathers rustle and slide across each other. She felt the exact distribution of his weight.

“Don’t call me Hè Na. There are no more castes. Zhègū Yumei, you are no longer Zhègū.” The partridge gave an excited yelp in response.

“I can’t just call you Na,” said Wei.

“I’ll think of something.”

Together the three of them looked out from the palace. Mountains encircled the city from the west, north, and east. The sight of the dead river Na avoided. How would she heal that? How would she begin?

The dark mare entered Na’s memory suddenly. She remembered how the mare had walked through Na’s most familiar dreams. Na had walked with her and seen things from angles she had never seen before. She saw how no object in her dream was complete; many were three-dimensional from one view and just a point from every other. Colors swam and faded and popped nonsensically, yet it all seemed real, at least when bathed in the silver light the mare gave off. This was a mare to whom dreams were real, Na knew.

But now the waking world brought a sight that was even more strange. An unexpected fog was coming up the steps. Shapes separated in the fog, becoming white bodies. She saw antlers rising….

“What is that?” she gasped as the ethereal deer ascended to the top.

“What?” said Wei. Neither he nor Yumei seemed to think anything was out of the ordinary.

“There are deer there! Walking toward me! Don’t you see them coming up the steps? They’re practically fog!”

They stared at her.

Na rose to her full height and lifted a foot in the air. “Stop, deer! I am the empress of this palace and these skies!”

The deer continued to rise.

Her name was Sahara. She didn’t know how she had gotten this name. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she was walking to, or from. She didn’t know if it meant anything for her to be somewhere.

Sand stung her eyes as she walked. Hot air burned her dry throat. Wind whipped her hair and forced her back so that every step was like climbing uphill. In the sand she lost her footing many times and stumbled or fell. Each time her knees would sink into the burning sand and force her to stand from the pain. Her palms, blistered and burnt, sent shivers of anguish through her.

The sandstorm got so bad that she couldn’t take another step. Holding her arms in front of her face, she waited until the wind and sand stopped battering her. As the wind subsided, she squinted at something there. A single cactus was sticking out of the earth.

Sahara staggered over and collapsed in front of it, hands held out toward the cactus. It wasn’t very large or pretty. It was coated in a layer of sand. But she could hear the water in it. She could taste it on her tongue.

In her haste to break it open and drink, she stabbed her fingers repeatedly on the spines. No matter how she tried to get through, they were there, penetrating her sensitive skin and making her whimper. And the spines stayed in her skin, and she was scared to remove them. She sobbed later from the pain.

The cactus defeated her. Sahara wandered on.

A familiar mountain rose in the distance. That mountain meant water. But the great bodies of water everywhere were dead now. Their water tasted like sludge and had the texture of melted rubber.

Anywhere else was just as bad though. So she walked toward the mountain.

When she reached the water, the strait looked calm. She knew, though, that anything that tried to swim across would be crushed against the rocks by an enormous underwater mixer. Boats that tried to skim along the surface would be stopped by the viscous water, and then the chaotically swirling water under the surface would coincidentally heave in the direction of the boat. The force could shear a ship in half. So it had been for as long as she could remember.

But there was something new. When was there ever something new? A pale yellow light she had never seen before glinted off the water. It resembled a sun, but she didn’t recognize this sun. Its reflected glow drew her to it like a lighthouse flashing a signal. She reached the edge of the water and felt a sudden tiredness. In a moment everything went dark.

Zigzag lowered her binoculars. “Run.”

“Is it—”

“Run!”

There was no time to take everything. Zoomer grabbed the most precious equipment: their bag with the compass and filter, and the scale, and she galloped toward the main body of zebras waiting at the dunes. Zigzag was right behind her, her breath coming too quick for how little they had been running.

“She’s shaped like the fossils,” Zigzag gasped as they ran. “Run with all your muscles!”

Zoomer was already straining herself. Now she ran even faster, striking off the earth and leaving it briefly before coming down and driving forward. In a way it reminded her of the dreams she’d had recently of loping along the surface of the moon. But the scream of the wind behind them and the rumbling earth pulled her back to reality. They ran and ran, and she didn’t dare look back.

They were too slow. The wind caught them. The storm was unbelievable, a tornado of sand and sediment that threw them off their hoofs and struck them hundreds of times. Helpless, Zoomer and Zigzag curled up where they had been tossed and covered their faces, taking the beating on their sides and legs. Even that became unbearable, but somehow Zigzag crawled on top of Zoomer, shielding the younger zebra with her body. Zoomer’s tears of relief and shame were whipped away by the wind.

Eventually the storm subsided. Zoomer unfolded her body and began to shudder from the pain. She was bleeding and bruised in a hundred places. Zigzag was bleeding too. She didn’t respond to Zoomer’s touch or words. Her body remained limp.

Zoomer heard the noise of a dozen zebras galloping toward them. Zero and Zap lifted Zigzag gently and laid her on her side. Others surrounded Zoomer and gently touched her, whispering to her in rhyme. Zinc, the elderly zebra in charge of the expedition, grimly lifted her binoculars and gazed at the small storm by the water until it faded altogether and showed a creature there that couldn’t have possibly existed. It would have been less jarring to see a triceratops.

“It came so suddenly,” Zoomer sobbed. “Zigzag saved me doubly.”

There were murmurs for her not to rhyme. Living water was dribbled into her mouth. It would have been a great crime to spit it out, but she wanted to. “Save it for Zigzag,” she begged.

They ignored her request. “We need to leave,” said Zinc. “No point in going back for the sieves.”

She looked again through the binoculars. The creature was just kneeling there, totally vacant. A chill ran through her despite the hot air, and she shivered.

Sahara woke up from her doldrums. She felt refreshed and invigorated. Strength flowed through her, enough to stand. She remembered feeling like this near the beginning. She wanted to go back to the cactus and tear it apart, she was strong enough for that.

She turned and saw a group of zebras in the distance, walking away from her, carrying two of their own. They were very pretty. Occasionally they would look back at her, and she waved to them, but they didn’t stop.

Sahara brushed the snow out of her hair and watched until they left.

The crystal ponies in the Salon of Madame Ciel were discussing the latest gossip when, quite unexpectedly, the sun dropped off the face of the earth. The conversation stumbled, and they were all grateful when Madame Manteau-Blanc, the doctor, suggested they all go outside. Together they scrambled outside and stared at the horizon. Normally quite a poetic thing, the horizon now had the feeling of being the blade of a guillotine, and the sun itself was up for execution.

It was eerily chilly, as if nearly all the warmth had been sucked out of the world. Privately, all of them weren’t sure if it was just a feeling.

Everypony was stunned except for Mademoiselle Grand Coeur, who was the daughter of a family of jewelers. She sensed an opportunity.

“Oh, my!” she said dramatically. She swooned to get some attention when the other ponies couldn’t tear their eyes away from where the sun had disappeared. “Oh my, I said.” She pitched herself into the side of another pony, who awkwardly held her up. “Oh, thank you. I’m ever so sorry, but I just had the most terrible thought, one that was too much for my fragile constitution.” She was quite aware of how awesome she looked in her giant dress and pale makeup, blush on her cheeks and diamonds glittering around her neck.

“What thought was that, Mademoiselle?” asked the young lawyer, Monsieur Bouché. He was looking at her nervously, though he looked at everything nervously. He even blew his nose, which was always runny, like he was afraid of it falling off.

Still, his family was quite rich. Mademoiselle Grand Coeur artfully righted herself, breathing heavily so that her chest heaved up and down. “I’m afraid this will sound terribly naive, but I have a feeling in my bosom that the sun is not going to rise again.”

There were murmurs from the other ponies. “Thoroughly unscientific,” scoffed the grocer, Madame Beurrée. Grand Coeur glared at her.

“I think the sun fell asleep,” she insisted. “Or died.”

“It’s past curfew anyway,” said Monsieur Narine, glancing around nervously. “Perhaps the sun just wanted to be out of view, like the rest of us should be.”

“Why would the sun have fallen asleep?” Monsieur Bouché asked.

Grand Coeur had just made it up, of course, but it was a fun idea, and she seized the attention with the first idea that came into her mind. “It might have fallen asleep because it was terribly bored. Why, just the other night I had a terribly boring dream about the Moon. I was on it, and a dark mare was looking at me. It went on for hours, just the two of us staring back and forth. I tried to say something, but my voice wouldn’t come out. I suppose there is no sound in space, after all.” Her dreams were always very interesting to her, so it stood to reason that everypony else would feel the same way.

“The Sun is very different from the cold and empty Moon,” corrected Madame Mesure, the chemist. Grand Coeur glared at her, but she didn’t notice. “It is much more active. Using a process called nuclear fusion, little particles of hydrogen are turned into the light and heat we enjoy today. I assure you that you would find nothing boring about its surface! But as to your other hypothesis about the death of the Sun, the Sun can and indeed will die through a process called entropy.”

“That sounds interesting, what is it?” Grand Coeur asked, thinking about murder.

“All stars undergo entropy, the aging process for things that are hot. All life is hot, but like water, life cannot be replenished perfectly. For example, every seven years your body replaces all of its cells to maintain its crystal form. However, it does so imperfectly, and you get a bit weaker and more fragile. That is why ponies age and fail. Similarly, stars never fully restore all the hydrogen they use. There is no perfect reset. Even stars dwindle and die.”

“I thought the sun seemed perfectly hot this morning,” said Madame Beurrée.

“Yes, well….” Madame Mesure blushed. “This is—rather beyond my calculations. I shall have to, ah...check...the…..” But she trailed off, having no idea what error in her measurements could possibly have led to this.

“Will the sun ever rise again?” asked Monsieur Narine.

“That is a stupid question, of course it will,” said Madame Beurrée. But silence followed as everypony shivered in the unnatural chill. All of them wanted to believe Madame Beurrée. But the sky was very dark tonight. Even the moon and stars were gone, as if shielding their eyes from the awful sight of their fallen sister.

They all turned at the sound of hoofsteps and looked up at the massive figure looming behind them. “Why aren’t you all inside, friends?” demanded the booming voice of Madame Ciel. She towered over them, looking like a miniature star with her rosy cheeks and pink sweater. Madame Ciel was fat, but not overweight; it was hard to imagine her any other size. “What is the subject of conversation? Democracy? Revolution? The magical sciences?”

“We were discussing the sun, of course!” cried Grand Coeur. “Didn’t you see it, Ciel? It fell straight off the edge of the earth! Like the guillotine took it!” She sounded nearly about to cry, and was a little stunned to realize she wasn’t totally faking it.

Madame Ciel snorted. She wasn’t actually married, as far as any of them knew (and who really knew Madame Ciel?), but no pony could imagine referring to her as a mademoiselle. “Of course the sun will rise again, as will the cry of an infant sucking in breath. It died, but I haven’t heard you say why that matters. Tell me, where will we get another one? It’ll rise again if we have any say in the matter.

“Come now. Come inside, all of you. It’s chilly, and all I have is this sweater. Come inside, and continue the conversation there.”

She led them back into her salon. They sat on cushions and sofas while she sank into her pink chair at the heart of the room, where the conversation was loudest.

Madame Ciel, who sometimes seemed as grand and wide as the sky itself (and as stormy in her anger), leaned back and exhaled. They watched her, straining forward like kites fluttering toward a sky that was at once both close and distant.

“The sun will rise,” said Madame Ciel, “but only if you talk. You must all keep talking to each other. Close the windows,” she ordered, “light the lamps.” She settled further into her cushy pink chair. “Let me hear you speak.”

The order to stop the beating had not been given, so the beating had not stopped.

In the middle of the circle Captain Muffins stumbled sideways, only to jump back at the snap of jaws. The circle of teeth and claws closed in slowly, nipping at him whenever he got too close to the edges. He was bleeding from dozens of wounds: one ear was torn and hung oddly, and his weight was distributed across only three of his legs.

His mouth hung open, and his tongue lolled out. He was panting hard, and his eyes were wild and dark. A song ran through his mind,

How happy we’ll be when the Lord we see—

Teeth locked around his hind leg and made him yelp. They released, and fresh blood trickled down his matted fur. He nearly fell, and a rough paw shoved his head away.

A pup is born in Birmingham, and all a-hush the city sleeps, the night the pup is born—

The circle pressed in, jaws snapping, catching the edges of his skin, and there was nowhere to go.

He leadeth me, O blessed thought, O words with heavenly comfort—

“Stay!”

The growling pack held fast, though a few dogs snapped at him. Lord Fluffernutter of the Royal Society made way through the mass of dogs, which parted for him like the Red Sea.

“Sit,” he said to Captain Muffins, who fell back on his haunches, panting hard. “Now, don’t you feel better? They weren’t really going to hurt you.”

Captain Muffins’ black eyes still darted around. He didn’t answer.

“You poor thing, and all this over a simple misunderstanding,” said Lord Fluffernutter. “You’re not a bad dog, are you? You want to be a good dog.”

Captain Muffins began to sing inside his head. He is King, worship Him. Call the bells to ring. Worship Him, He passes through today, On the way to the holy city, call the bells to ring. He is King—

“This little misunderstanding over this morning’s astronomical distraction, you do realize how silly you were being? A silly dog who doesn’t know anything.”

“You can’t hide this,” said Captain Muffins. “Everydog saw what I saw. What you saw. The Sun revolves around the Earth.”

“Nonsense,” barked Lord Fluffernutter. “According to Sir Fig Newton’s theory of gravity, smaller things are attracted to larger things. Is the Sun not larger than the Earth?”

Say, ye holy sheepdogs, say, What your holy news today…. His mind fuzzed, and spat out, The joyous light that gave sight to sheep that wandered—

“Speak! Come on, boy! Speak!”

“It is larger,” said Captain Muffins wearily.

“Then it is proven,” said Lord Fluffernutter. “The Sun is as permanent as His Grace’s reign.”

“There we are in agreement,” said Captain Muffins.

“Hm.” A smile curled at the edge of Lord Fluffernutter’s mouth. “I do enjoy our banter. It is a shame you are unrepentant. But I am in a lenient mood. If you bow and swear loyalty to the king, we shall kill you without torture. Give us the names of your fellow traitors, and we will spare your wife and pups. They will be treated as loyal subjects—if they are loyal subjects.”

A confused expression slowly made its way across Captain Muffins’ face. “I am unmarried, as you know.”

“Daisy, and your sons Butterbeans, Goobers, who has is teething currently, and Paw-Paw, and your daughters Chalupa and Twinklestar, who has been complaining about having bad dreams,” said Lord Fluffernutter smugly. “You must give our spies some credit.”

Captain Muffins’ face could have been carved from stone.

“I see you need some time to think it over,” said Lord Fluffernutter. “You have an hour. If I have not sent the message by then to stay her rape and murder and the deaths of your pups, then I am afraid it will be entirely out of my paws.”

Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?

“Take your time,” said Lord Fluffernutter.

Hark! the song of the Lord comes down the mountain—

Oh blest Creator of light, who makes the day with radiance bright—

Oh Morning Star, how fair and bright, thou beamest forth in truth and light—

“I wonder what you are thinking,” said Lord Fluffernutter. “I would be so happy if there were a way to know. I would have no need for such ugly arrangements, never mind crude instruments of torture.”

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Captain Muffins was looking for a song.

He had fifty-seven minutes left.

On this world slung out of its system, hurled away from its ancient orbit in a straight line, followed by its sun like a mother chasing after her wayward child, growing more and more distant in the eyes of its brothers and sisters, who fade in the darkness and disappear among the stars,

where oceans, turgid and black, no longer washed and rolled in great waves, and the sun and moon were tethered by metal, or the belief in metal; and creatures were magical, or had the help of magical creatures, or died; and lands were covered in snow and darkness, or were possessed by strange dark creatures with hearts of ice; except where the land was burning hot and dry and nearly unlivable but for magic, and odd women walked to rivers and fainted and revived with snow in their hair; and it had been this way for so, so long;

giant spiders hopping across the dusty red road turned their many eyes upward,

purple flowers in the Forest of Giant Women stirred at the peculiar tickling of new light,

and in other places, in other ways, the new sun was seen and felt and noticed,

and in their own different fashions, something like this thought passed through their minds:

The world is beginning to change again. And each wondered what the reason was, and each came to their own conclusion.

The Earth continued its journey into the perpetual darkness.

For the first time in a long time, life thought of going home.

The fire burned out across Equestria, leaving behind an unblemished blue sky. The sun blazed proudly above them, yellow, fat, and healthy, a babe and a queen, a newborn mother, warm and bright and new.

Everypony was exhausted from staying up all night, and most ponies in Equestria had gone home to nap until the afternoon. The torches were all extinguished. But Twilight couldn’t bring herself to leave the glow of the new sun, and so her friends hadn’t left either. They leaned against her in a tired circle, warm breath rustling her mane, a tail occasionally flicking against her side.

Twilight had thought of something.

There was probably one pony who hadn’t seen or felt the new light at all.

Twilight wondered just how deep and dark was the cave Nightmare Moon had waited out this terrible dawn in, and how alone it was in there. And how long it would be before she came out again.

Thank you for this pain, Twilight thought. And thank you for these friends. If we’re enemies, then we’re the kind who strengthen each other after every battle. Let us fight a thousand times then, if you want to. I’ll be ready. I’ll become strong enough. And if you have to wait for that, I’m sorry. But I won’t cry any more.

How’s that for a resolution?

“Let’s go to bed,” Twilight said. “Come on, Spike.”

The day passed and turned to night. The sun rose and fell like suns do.

It was the start of a new year.

Before Princess Cadance was Princess Cadance, before she was the ruler of the Crystal Empire, before she was an Alicorn and the Princess of Love, she was simply the most beautiful pony in the world.

This was before the Crystal Wastes were tamed. Umbras still stalked the shadowlands north of Equestria, and every expedition north for treasure-finding, knowledge, or conquest had ended in utter ruin and defeat. This was before any pony had ever gone north for love.

Cadance lived in the biggest house in the city. Her wealth, it was rumored, came from generous gifts from wealthy stallions who sought her hoof in marriage, or any other extremities she was willing to part with. Cadance was hardly the only mare to ever make a living off of the favor of wealthy stallions, but she was the only mare to be able to afford a mansion and a household of servants from it, and without doing anything whatsoever for anypony in return.

Cadance was, if anything, too beautiful. It was said that no stallion could view her face without falling in love. As such, she always wore a mask in public, and no pony ever saw her take it off, though no pony was sure if this was because the myth was true or because she wanted ponies to think that it was.

But a mask could only do so much. She was endlessly bothered by suitors. When she refused to pick one, it became a problem. The city was mobbed by the richest stallions, the handsomest stallions, and the most optimistic stallions in Equestria. They came to woo, to worship, or to conquer, each in their own understanding of love.

There were some upsides. The flowers, chocolate, and jewelry industries thrived. But time dragged on. Cadance was dragging her heels.

Proposals for her hoof in marriage grew ever more elaborate and bizarre as wishful stallions tried to guess what would finally cause her to accept their proposals, or at least agree to go out on a date for a hay pasta and maybe a movie. Finally the mayor herself begged Cadance for relief.

“They congest the streets and halt traffic. They wake up the whole city playing music outside your door. My own deputy is being investigated under suspicion of facilitating the illegal artificial rose trade. You must choose a husband. Or at least tell them you’re gay. Are you gay?” the mayor added hopefully.

So the next morning Cadance addressed the typical throng of lovestruck stallions from the balcony of her mansion, under which the rose gardens were being tended to by the gardener. She went through the usual routine first:

“Did anypony take in my mail?” snapped the future princess.

“I did!” yelled a bloodied stallion below. His clothes were torn and he was swaying on his hooves. “I had the honor of taking in milady’s—”

“And the trash?” barked the empress-to-be.

There was still a bit of a scuffle going on. A pony was attached by the mouth to the handle of the rubbish bin while two other stallions were attempting, bodily, to dislodge him from it.

“Hurry up,” she said. “And don’t tip the bin over like last week.”

“The bin will not be tipped or my life I shall end!” shrieked a stallion below.

“Don’t raise your voice with me,” scolded the future leader of an entire nation. “Anyway, I’ve decided on a test. Whoever passes it shall be my husband.”

Even the stallions by the rubbish bin stopped fighting and listened.

“First,” said she who would be known as Princess Cadance, Ruler of the Crystal Empire, “I want you all to tell me what I am to you. I want you to tell me what you would do for me.”

Sighing, she listened dispassionately as they professed noisily, shouting over each other, that she was the most precious jewel among jewels; a prize worth more than all the gold and silver in the Bank; that they would climb any mountain, face any danger for but the chance to gaze upon her face, etc., etc., yada yada.

“Shh,” she said, and at once they were quiet.

“In my readings,” she said, “I have come across the idea of revealed preference. Talk is cheap. So I want to see if any of you values me so much as, oh, a store-bought pencil. Yes,” she said, as if the idea had just come to her, “whoever brings me a commercial-grade pencil the fastest will have my hoof in marriage.

“But,” she added, raising a hoof to preempt the stampede to the nearest office supply store. “This pencil needs to be made from scratch. From scratch. The only thing you need not make yourself is the idea of a pencil. Everything else you must make as an individual. No food may you buy to fuel yourself while you labor. You must grow it. Nor may you buy wood, nor an ax to chop wood, nor may you buy graphite nor a shovel and pickaxe to mine it. If you intend to use it, you must make it yourself.”

She leaned over the balcony, the cold smile of a future queen on her flawless face. It was a face that would have launched a thousand ships, had the dying oceans to Equestria’s east and west permitted such an action. “Let me lay out your task. You must journey to the cedar forests of Ostleregon. There you will need to collect cedar wood. First, of course, you must have a saw. So you will go to Whinnysota, to its mines. But you will need a shovel and a pickaxe, which are made of metal and have wooden handles. So you will scrabble for ore with bare hoofs.

“This will make you hungry. But you cannot buy food. You must plant or gather it yourself. Scavenging might seem appealing at first, but it will consume your time and force you to roam away from the mines. So you will have to learn the seasons and the soil and learn to plant crops without shovel or plow, and you will learn to wait to harvest them. To make bread, you will stamp grain into flour and mix it with water to turn it into dough. Of course this will all be easier once you have tools, but to make tools you need a smelter and a mold, which themselves are made with tools.

“But you persist, and finally you have your tools. You will take them and as much food as you can carry, in whatever wagon you fashion yourself, to the cedar forests of Osterlegon, and you will cut down a cedar tree and turn it into lumber. This you will cut in the way that pencils are made, I do not know myself. Then you will go to Broncodale to mine graphite, and you will have to figure out how to get it in the pencil, and how to give the pencil its color and shine. Then there is the rubber eraser, I admit this is totally a mystery to me. Will all this make your pencil? I do not know, I have probably missed some steps.”

The smile under her mask was cruel now, and yet more beautiful than before. “Now will any of you prove what I am worth to you? I tell you now that you won’t. And we shall see what I am really worth to you.”

Many of them tried. But hunger got to some, and the sheer impossibility of the task weighed on the minds of others until they broke. Others were driven to surrender by the pain of mining with bare hoofs. Not a single stallion completed the task. Not a single pony made it a week, in a task that would have taken years.

“I knew it,” she said to herself often after that. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”

There was a stallion already in Cadance’s household on the day she issued her challenge. He had been her gardener for several years, and he was blind.

Cadance had the voice of an angel. But angelic voices were not known to send stallions into rhapsodies of desire. Since he could only hear her and not see her face, his opinion of her was that she was rather ignorant about greenery and otherwise a dull mare who obsessed over extracting gifts from suitors for nothing in return.

Her opinion of him was not much better. His body was broad-chested and well-built from a youth of laboring in fields, yet his touch among the flowers was delicate and caring. His speech was mild but confident, as firm and solemn as the trunk of an oak tree. He listened as ponies rarely did, and besides, he was the only stallion she could talk to who wouldn’t drop to his knees and beg to marry her before the pleasantries were halfway finished. And he did everything she told him to do without complaint, and in the evenings he would take a guitar and sing to the plants and didn’t mind that she sat in the garden and listened. It was fair to say that he utterly disgusted her. Just the thought of marrying him made her feel as nauseous as if a thousand butterflies were warring inside of her stomach.

After he finished with the roses, he thought about what she had said about making a pencil from scratch.

He found her after trimming the hedges. “I’d like some time off.”

“Whatever for? To go sightseeing?” She was not pleased that he was leaving and mocked his blindness to let him know how little she cared.

“I will travel, yes.”

“How long?”

“Could be fifty years.”

“I’m not sure you have that kind of vacation time.”

“You don’t have to keep me on. But if I come back, you have to keep your word.”

“My word? About what?”

“Your hoof in marriage.”

She laughed. “What are you going to do to earn that, my blind lawn-keeper? Worship me? Shower me in riches?”

“I’m going to prove you wrong.”

She had nothing smart to say to that. He turned to go, but she stopped him at the door.

“Where are you going?’ she demanded. “I didn’t give you permission to leave.”

“A pencil factory, just to ask some questions. I think it’s fair.”

If he could have seen, he would have seen her pink face burn red with annoyance. “You idiot, it was just to get rid of them all. It’s not possible, and anyway I wouldn’t marry you over a crummy pencil.”

He’d had enough of being insulted. “Your hoof in marriage isn’t worth a pencil. Isn’t that what they all think?”

“I can get any stallion to buy me a pencil made of pure gold.”

“Yes? Then where are they?”

She trembled. “I wanted them to go away.”

Maybe it was the frustration over several years of abuse and disdain bubbling to the surface. Maybe it was something else. For whatever reason, he said, “Yes, but they did go away, and not because you told them to. This is the first time a stallion has ever put an upper bound on your value. You’ve gone from a princess to somepony who isn’t worth a pencil.”

“Next time I shall hire a mute gardener instead,” she said, and slammed the door in his face.

He brought nothing with him but the idea of a pencil, as was the challenge.

In the end it took him a very long time to make a pencil. Once his anger at Cadance had faded, what inspired him then was curiosity. The more he labored, the more the apparent impossibility of making a single pencil overwhelmed him.

His journey began, as Cadance had suggested, in the cedar forest of Osterlegon. But the journey was long on foot, and he arrived hungry and blistered. He had to make food. He had to make an ax. An ax required wood and metal. Metal required metal and wood. And then there were the mysteries of the actual cut and polish of the pencil, the graphite, and the rubber eraser. He was very grateful to the friendly ponies at the pencil factory he had visited, who had shown him some instructive things.

I will not bore you with the details of his work because they are not boring. But I also will not exhaust you with them, and they are exhausting. An entire library could be dedicated to volumes describing the work that he did. Please trust that he did it. Pencils get made somehow, after all.

I can tell you that he worked very hard. There was no other choice. In the beginning, the work was very hard. Then afterward, the work was still very hard. But then toward the end, the work remained very, very hard.

He could not say what drove him on. Perhaps it was the idea of a garden so big that no pony could tend it

Some fifty years passed. But the end came, and at the end, he had his pencil.

It was time to return to Cadance.

Surely she was very old by now.

She did not live in the same house anymore. But when he identified himself to the new owner, she had a message for him.

“I was told by the previous owner that if somepony with a pencil came asking after Cadance, that I should tell them where she has gone.” she said. She gave him new directions. This also took him somewhere that Cadance was not.

“She moved away twenty years ago,” said the stallion who answered his knock. “Here is where you should go.”

When he knocked, it was Cadance who opened the door. He could not see her face, but he imagined it was very wrinkled and gray.

He did not expect to recognize her voice.

“Who are you?”

It was the voice of a young mare.

“Who are you?” he said.

“I am Cadance. What is wrong with your eyes?”

“I can’t see,” he said simply.

“I know you,” she said. “You’re that blind gardener with the foolish idea.”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“It was you who had the foolish idea. Mine was excellent.” He took the pencil out of its case and showed her.

She studied it skeptically. “I don’t believe that you did this without help.”

“We can discuss it.”

She let him in and set out tea and biscuits. It had been a long time since the blind gardener had eaten food he hadn’t grown himself. The biscuits, although plain, were delicious to him.

“So,” she said. “How did you make this pencil?”

He told her the entire story. She interrupted him constantly with questions and demands for clarification. All in all it took four days for him to satisfy her curiosity.

“Why do you sound so young?” he asked when she had run out of questions. Now it was his turn.

“I had to see the outcome,” she said simply. “I didn’t know how long you would be.”

“You could have visited me.”

“And risk affecting the results? Never. This way it was, haha, a double-blind study.”

He pushed the pencil toward her.

She broke it. He heard the snap. “It is only a pencil, worth hardly anything. Besides, I am not even worth a pencil. All the proper suitors gave up in a week.”

He breathed slowly. “If you break it, you buy it, or so I understand.”

“Funny, I don’t seem to have spent anything.”

“I said I would prove you wrong.”

“What a waste of your life. I could have bought a box of equally good ones for a couple of bits.”

“It is not the pencil you were wrong about.”

“I know you haven’t been keeping up with the progress of academic economics in the last fifty years, but really, I’m never wrong. You spent your whole life making a pencil for nothing.”

“I wasn’t making a pencil,” he said. “And it wasn’t for nothing.”

“No?”

“I was making this moment. And I made it for you.”

He reached into the case and took out a second pencil.

“It got easier,” he said. “After the end.”

Probably the sun crashed into the earth and the mountains stood up and leapt into the sea and rain fell from the clouds unaided, or so it seemed to her.

“Fine, have it your way,” she said when the earth had settled once more. “Let’s get married.”

“Oh, I don’t love you,” he said. “I just wanted to see if I could falsify your hypothesis.”

This story is mostly true, or at least it contains most of the truth. What the second pencil might have been traded for is anypony's guess. But it is known to every student of economics the story of how a pencil is made, the incredible vast amounts of knowledge and labor it takes to create a single pencil.^*

^*Some other things happened afterward. He died. She built an empire. And so on. Science continued its work.

It is a solemn tradition in Equestria that when this story is told, everypony who hears it breaks a pencil in half. Because the most amazing thing about a pencil is that for all the effort and knowledge it takes to create one, you can buy a dozen for a bit these days. Where are you shopping? Oh, yeah, the deals are pretty good there right now. Well, you know how it is when the school year starts up again. Hey, can I borrow your pencil? I’ll give it back—thanks. Look, if I shake it like this it looks all floppy….

”La fin,” said the old mare. (The end.)

The filly was giggling at the wobbling pencil, but she looked up sharply at those two words. (That’s not the end. How did she become a princess? Did they ever get married? You skipped all the important parts!)

(I told the part of the story that matters.) The old mare smiled at her beloved granddaughter.

The filly sniffed. (Becoming an immortal all-powerful Alicorn princess matters.)

(Don’t talk back. I have a present.)

(What is it?)

(It’s this very pencil that made you laugh so.)

(A pencil.) The filly was clearly disappointed.

(Yes, a wonderful pencil, just like in the story.)

(But...but, it’s just a pencil.)

(Only just a pencil, hm? If you don’t like it, then go ahead and break it. I won’t be offended.)

The filly gripped the pencil at both ends. But she hesitated.

(Yes?)

(Well, it’s just that it was so hard to make this pencil. Even though I’ve broken so many in the past. They were easy to break. And hard to make. And I broke them, and didn’t know….)

Wrinkles moved across the old mare’s face. (Now you know the worth of a pencil, which not even Princess Cadance was equal to. Except perhaps to a single gardener, tired and old and hobbled, who might have played a song for her with arthritic hoofs in the garden under the moonlight, and then….)

(Aha! There is more to the story!)

The old mare’s eyes sparkled. (There is more to every story than you know. Even a pencil’s story takes years to tell.) The old mare leaned close to the filly so that her mouth was against her granddaughter’s ear. (Be a voice for those who can’t tell their stories.)

The filly giggled at her grandmother’s lips tickling her ear. (Mémé, do you think I will ever find true love?)

(Yes, I do. Because you are a little princess of Cutebuck. Do you know what the name of our province means? It means Narrow Passage, little one, because the path to all good things is narrow, like the path to creating a single pencil. To care for something is to present the world with a narrow path, like a gardener guiding trees to grow where they will be tallest and healthiest and most fruitful. Never forget it.)

The old mare lifted the covers over her granddaughter’s shoulders. She kissed her cheek, straightened up to leave, then paused. (It's funny.)

(What is?)

(You asked how she became a princess and what happened next. Ponies always ask that. You never asked how she became so beautiful in the first place. But that is even more mysterious.)

(How do you know so much, Mémé?)

(It is the heritage of Cutebuck. In time, you’ll know more. Now sleep, little cabbage, and do not fear the shadows. The Heart of Love protects you at all times. Even in the dark.)

The filly closed her eyes and slept. In the morning, she looked with great curiosity at her spoon during breakfast and studied it instead of eating, to the consternation of her mother. But her grandmother’s eyes twinkled like crystals in the snow.