Holy shit.

Holy shit, okay… stay calm, Anon. Breathe.

You’ve still gotta get everyone else outta here somehow.

Hearth is befuddled in her cell; her lips are curled upward in a half-smile, but the urgency in her eyes is still clearly present.

Once again, your body moves on its own, ahead of your thoughts by at least a few seconds. After you retrieve the key from the ajar door, you stride over to her, kneeling down to be better leveled with the keyhole. It goes in a fair bit smoother this time, and after another quick turn, you’ve wrenched Hearth free from the jaws of her prison.

You hold the door open for her, and she doesn’t hesitate to bolt out of her cell and join your side, repulsed by the thought of staying for even one moment longer. She draws a shaky breath before looking up at you, every single ounce of despair from earlier nowhere to be seen. In its place is pure, focused determination.

“Let’s get Pal, and then we’ll start with everyone else,” you all but command, not even sure the voice belongs to you.

She nods, falling in behind you.

As you trudge over to his cell, you wonder why none of the commotion woke him up. Sure, everyone was mostly whispering, he definitely should have heard the cell doors opening. Regardless, you don’t have time to speculate.

Just before you come to the front of his cell, you call out to him as loudly as you think you can get away with.

“Pal! Wake up, man!”

As he comes into view, though, you’re stopped dead in your tracks, mouth hanging open in dubiety.

Your initial thoughts for what Pal might’ve been were nebulous at best. After your lengthy conversation with him earlier, your mental image of him settled on a griffon, and it never really deviated from there onward. His personality reminded you of your meat vendor back in Canterlot, who just so happened to be one as well, so it stuck.

You expected to be wrong, but not quite this wrong.

Before you, lying perfectly still on the cot, is a concerningly large bipedal skeleton. A minotaur skeleton, if those horns on his head are anything to go by.

…

You know you aren’t hallucinating. If you were, Hearth wouldn’t have outwardly gasped behind you.

You’ve a myriad of questions, but you don’t have time for speculation. Focus, Anon!

“Pal? You gotta get up, come on!”

As you draw closer to the latch and kneel, he stirs, his inappropriately small blanket sliding off of his bones as he returns to the waking world. A faint green glow populates his eye sockets, and after a second or two, the light concentrates into two pin-prick sized points of color. He wrests his head - skull, rather - from his pillow, ethereal gaze locking onto you after a few moments of supposed confusion.

“Anon? Whadda ya…”

To your absolute astonishment, his skull contorts to display an uncanny mixture of embarrassment and horror. He extends his bony arm out toward you, five-fingered hand attempting to defuse the situation.

“N-Now I know what this looks like, an’ I jus’ gotta say-”

“I got plenty of questions about it for later, man. We gotta get the fuck out of here.”

This time, the key’s giving you all sorts of hell trying to get into the lock. It’s all you can do not to strain to insert it fully. Pal, bless his soul if he still has one, seems to understand exactly what’s going on as his skeletal expression switches to one of anxious enthusiasm.

“Say no more,” he replies, rising to his full height, almost a full head taller than you. No idea how he still pronounces words without lips or a tongue, but that’s a thought for another day.

You curse under your breath as the pin struggles to get past what feels like a layer of hardened rust. It finally does, and you breathe a sigh of relief, only for the turn of the key to be an even more daunting task.

Inch by inch, though, it trudges counter-clockwise.

“What’s wrong?” Hearth asks from behind you as it’s halfway turned. “Is it not-”

She’s cut off by the swish of a unicorn’s horn firing off a spell.

As the key snags something in the lock, you turn to face the source of the noise, but are interrupted by a pair of hind hooves colliding with your upper left cheek at an alarming velocity. You’re sent toppling over onto your back as you clutch your ringing face, vision painted over with stars from the brutal impact. Blood drips from where you were hit - the strike broke skin, it seems.

You look down, and in your hand, the bow of the key lies broken and useless, snapped off from the pin that’s undoubtedly still lodged in the lock. It slips from your grasp as the reality of what it means hits you.

Your only method of freeing everyone… gone.

With adrenaline and anger now pumping through you, you find enough willpower to sit up as much as you can and face the incoming threat. Beside you, Hearth lays slumped against the floor, no wounds visible on her still form. Her chest rises and falls slowly, and her eyelids twitch uncontrollably with every breath that leaves her.

She was put to sleep. Which can only mean-

“Sacrilegious fool.”

Heavenly Virtue marches toward you.

“You were given a golden opportunity to be of service to Her Grace, and to our future, and what do you do with it?” he asks facetiously, not intending to wait for an answer. “You spit in Her face, as if she were nothing more than a common lay.”

You backpedal on your ass until you can rise to your full height, vision still clearing after the blow.

“I warned you, creature,” he spits, malice overflowing. “All you had to do was behave, and you would have had the privilege of siring a new age of royalty with Her. You will be punished for your flagrant disobedience, you undeserving, godless whore.”

Every word that leaves his mouth seems to make him even more furious than before. Against all odds, shocking even you, you find time for banter amid this dire situation.

“You’re really gonna do this, huh? Didn’t she tell you all not to lay a hand on me?”

His frown deepens as a sick smile curls into his cheeks.

“She will understand.”

He charges you, baring his horn toward you as he charges a spell. Although you’ve only been in a proper fight once in your life, your guard goes up instinctively as you wait for him to get closer. If you can bait that spell out, then-

Too late. Halfway through his charge, he lets it fly straight at your head.

You just barely manage to bob your head to the left enough to dodge it, but the sudden jolt so soon after his kick threatens to throw you off balance. Your left hand shoots out against the wall to stop you from falling, and before you know it, he’s on you, jumping straight at your chest in an attempt to tackle you to the ground. You’re able to catch him with a glancing blow from a right swing, but with him already hurtling through the air at you, it doesn’t do much to slow him down.

His full weight slams into you, his head angled precariously with his horn just barely slipping under your armpit thanks to that punch. You stay on your feet for a second or two, but the weight proves to be too much, and the two of you fall backward onto the cold, damp stone.

Virtue gets his bearings before you and starts trying to wail on you with his two front hooves. Your arms go up to block all of the incoming hits. A few find their mark on your body, but your arms catch most of them. It still hurts like hell, but you get the feeling that Virtue might not be a fighter either.

How lucky you are.

He relents, channeling a spell through his horn as he rears his head back. Your hands shoot out from your guard and wrap around his snout, stopping him from angling his head downward. He pushes with all his might against your grip, but you hold him off, and his spell fires at the ceiling. The impact loosens some debris from the ceiling, dust and rocks raining down on the two of you. Virtue’s grip loses some of its strength when a stray falling rock hits him in the snout.

Mustering together all of the strength you can manage, you maintain your grip on his face and twist yourself to the right in an effort to throw him off of you. He buckles, and when you sweep your left leg outward, he falls over completely, slamming against the floor next to you.

You scramble to your knees, and he levels an unholy glare right at you, charging up another spell. Your fist flies out to his head to try to stop it, but you’re a little too late, and the spell is sent into your left shoulder.

A distant, far-away voice - your own - cries out, but the pain dulls as you surge forward with your other hand, rocking Virtue on the chin as he’s trying to get back up. He’s knocked back down onto his side and shuffles toward the opposite wall, but you’re on him the whole way.He brings his hooves up to cover his face as you throw blow after clumsy blow at him, a fusillade of soft-handed wrath.

He rears his head back again. Another spell being charged - not happening.

Operating on instinct alone at this point, your wounded arm shoots out, grabbing his horn before he can fire anything at you. You wrench his head forward and drive your knee into his nose as hard as you can, which is inhibited by the fact that you’re on your knees to begin with. It still hits hard enough to draw blood, though, and Virtue yelps in pain.

His hind legs frantically strike against the right side of your ribs over and over, but you hold out against the pain. Somewhere in the distant soundscape, a metallic scraping sound rings out, but it barely registers in your single-minded frenzy.

Your grip on his horn holds, and you drive your knee into his nose again.

And again.

And again, and again, and again, until he stops crying out, and his legs fall slack.

When you finally deign to stop your amateurish assault on Virtue’s face, you fall onto your hands, left shoulder buckling as you make acquaintance with the individual bricks that line the floor.

Every single ragged breath heaving in and out of your lungs sets your chest ablaze. You look over to your unconscious assailant, blood dripping from his snout into the cracks of the damp stone beneath him.

Amid the subsiding anger pounding in your chest, a profound sense of what might be called guilt creeps forth, as if you’ve just done something terribly wrong. It holds your gaze leveled at Virtue’s battered body, forcing you to drink in the product of excess violence. Your regret is, at once, irrational; this much, you can recognize.

And yet, it’s there. Gnawing at you. Undiminishable.

Fortunately, it isn’t allowed to eat at you for long; a slender hand slips over your shoulder, pulling you from the upsetting scene before you. Your head twists in the direction of the unexpected contact, only to be greeted by Pal’s skeletal visage, towering over you even as he kneels down.

“He’s done, Anon,” he reassures you, grip tightening as your muscles start to go slack. “He’s done.”

Your eyes shut as the catharsis of his words crawl over you, and you shiver as if to rid yourself of the excess of emotion you just experienced.

“H-How did you… How’d you g-get out of the cell?”

Even talking is a tall order for you right now.

“Key got just far enough ‘fore it broke off,” he replies, his usual light-heartedness missing. “Can ya stand?”

You flex the muscles in your leg; even though they burn like hell, you can still feel them.

“Yeah. Yeah, I can s-stand.”

Proving your point, you shakily get up on your own two feet, glancing down the whole time to make sure Virtue stays asleep. From up above, he-

“Don’t,” Pal says simply as he traces your gaze. “He deserved it, end of story.”

You don’t have a reply readily available for that.

…

Oh, fuck, how much time did you lose fighting him? Why the fuck was he even down here, anyway?

“Pal, we… we gotta go. They’re doing a shift change, we gotta get out of here before they’re done.”

“How’d ya know that?”

“Guy came through to pick up his friend and he left the key with me.”

A glimmer of disbelief flashes through his eyes before he shakes the feeling off.

“Good enough for me. He happen to tell ya a way outta ‘ere?”

You nod, recalling the stranger’s directions.

“Yeah, but… what about everyone else here?”

You nod at the long hallway of cells, most of which house faces that peer out at you from between the bars.Races of all kinds; pony, gryphon, dragon… some you couldn’t even recognize, just like before. Some surprised, some shocked… some anticipating Pal’s answer.

A good number of the faces you recognize as having been on the train.

“We’ll be back for ‘em,” Pal replies, grip tightening further. “All of ‘em. I swear it.”

With great effort, you tear your eyes away from their pleading expressions as they begin to make more and more noise to get your attention. A great wave of stinging agony in your shoulder slowly throbs its way to your attention, and you grab around the afflicted area with your other hand, groaning as you do so.

A cursory look at the source of the pain reveals a torn-up section of your long-sleeve shirt, soaked through with your sticky lifeblood.

Virtue wasn’t firing sleep spells at you. He was trying to carve you.

Fuck’s sake, if that one aimed at your face had landed, you’d have been way worse off.

You can still move the afflicted arm, but not without grievous waves of pain spreading from the shoulder.

“Carry Hearth for me, he put her to sleep.”

“You got it,” he replies, jogging over to where she lies and hoisting her into a piggyback hold. “Lead the way, big guy.”

You don’t have to be asked twice. As fast as you can muster with your shot nerves, you gun it down the hallway where Virtue came from, Pal following close behind. Slowing your roll when you get to the door, you crack it just a smidge and peek through to see if there might be anyone on the other side.

No one so far - the coast is clear. Throwing the door open wide, you make for the leftmost hallway that you can see, opting for a brisk run instead of a slow sneak.

The room immediately adjacent to the cells is lined with various instruments of pain - hot irons, pliers, needles, syringes of various fluids, et cetera. The very center of it is a slightly raised platform with drainage ditches along the side, housing a long, concrete table atop it that sits under the same blue lamplight from the prison hallway.

Must be the little asshole’s favorite room here.

Deeper analysis of the decor is shoved aside as you and Pal file into what must be a maintenance hallway, given how tight and desolate it is. You aren’t quite sure just how unguarded this place is at the moment, but right now, you’ve no choice but to trust that your new friend meant very unguarded.

Before long, the staircase comes into view, almost as tight as the hallway you barrelled through. Your legs burn like fire as the two of you descend downward through several flights, and as you reach the bottom floor, you hear one of the doors three or four floors above you swing ajar. Holding your breath, you gesture back at Pal to keep quiet, and he nods, freeing one of his hands to reassure you by metaphorically zipping his lips - teeth, rather - shut.

As the mystery individual’s steps begin to ring out through the stairwell, you peek through a glass window on the ornate door at the bottom. It leads to an outdoor courtyard of some kind, stretching out a good distance with plenty of shrubbery, benches, and other architecture that you can duck behind if needed. As opposed to earlier, when you could hear the howling of the wind even from your cell, the wind has died down a bit. Thankfully, though, the snowfall is still heavy, helping reduce visibility for you, Pal, and Hearth.

The entire yard is covered in a blanket of white, and there are only a handful of guards milling about closer to the other end of the space. They’re looking in your general direction, but you think you can duck behind a bench adjacent to the right wall without being spotted if you’re quick enough.

Echoing footsteps from above compel you to take the chance. You whisper back to Pal so that he’s on the same page.

“Keep up with me.”

He nods, and with his acknowledgement, you open the door just far enough so that you and Pal can squeeze through. You don’t even bother looking in the guards’ direction; with speed you didn’t know you were capable of, you drop as low as you possibly can, almost crawling over to the far end of the stone bench so that he has enough room behind you to slide in. Resting on one knee, you deign to peer around the side, praying that the gaggle of assholes across the yard didn’t notice anything.

They’re still milling about and gazing in your general direction, but aren’t focused on anything in particular. It’s hard to see from this far away, but it looks faintly like five of them are more focused on listening to the leftmost one, who switches to looking at them every once in a while. Maybe you can time your advance with that…?

You don’t get a chance to mull over it - the leftmost guard turns to them, and they respond in kind. You book it over to the next set of benches using shrubbery and statues as partial cover, keeping your eye on them the whole time as you quietly dash forth.

As the guards continue to yammer on about who-knows-what, you seize the opportunity to extend your small dash all the way into the rightmost covered hallway, ducking back into the belly of the beast and out of the elements.

Compared to the auxiliary hallway from earlier, this one looks like you’ve stepped right into the Biltmore, with elegant crown molding and the like. You’re too focused to soak in all of the details, though - most of your attention is directed toward making sure you’re not followed, and that no one sees you as you delve deeper into the unknown.

So far, so good… but why the hell is the hallway so long? Not only that, you’d swear this part of the compound would have had at least a guard or two patrolling, even during a guard change.

A quick check behind lets you know that Pal’s still right on your tail, just like he said he’d be. Before long, you both come upon a dead end, just like the stranger said you would. You frantically search the doors’ labels, hoping for-

The latch of a door to your leftmost rear clicks, indicative of a turned handle.

A muffled female voice drones out from within.

Without a moment’s hesitation, you reach for the nearest door, labeled ‘Document Storage’, and fling it open. You grab a surprised Pal and drag him into the cramped room behind you, throwing the door closed up until the very last second, where you shut it gently with the handle still turned. Slowly, you release it, and the latch makes little noise.

As you do so, you hear the other door swing all the way open, voices becoming understandable even through your wooden threshold.

“-don’t see the reason for his overwhelming concern. The only place she could have run off to was the mecca, and we have informants in every district waiting to report back at the mere sight of her.”

That voice…!

The older, gravelly texture, that middling baritone… he’s the older male from the crash site, you’re sure of it.

What the hell is he-

“His anxiety is well-founded, Grand Vizier Atlas. If she was cunning enough to escape the compound, she might cause further trouble for us in the future.”

Ambrosia.

Your startled eyes find a similar reaction in Pal’s glowing eye sockets when you exchange glances. Both of the strangers you met earlier were male - was there another escapee?

Putting that aside, why are they both here? Isn’t it three or four in the morning…?

As their voices fade into the distance along with their hoofsteps, you try to pick up on more of their conversation.

“Be that as it may, Your Grace,” Atlas replies, “She is still only one child, and one bearing the crest of foreign royalty, at that. It won’t take long for us to find her once more.”

The voices grow dim, but you can still just barely make out what’s being said…

“Perhaps,” Ambrosia replies, just as level headed as she was with you earlier. “But I won’t leave anything up to chance. I’ll consult the Holy Mother when we return to the city, after I’ve spent some time with my husband-to-be. I had planned to, anyway. Something happened earlier that I need to investigate…”

The urge to vomit is replaced with a sharp, twisting pain in your ribs, and in all honesty, you’re not sure which you prefer at this point. After a time, their voices fade along with their hoofsteps, but the prospect of stepping out into the hall after having heard them is a daunting one indeed.

“Ya good?” Pal whispers, just loud enough for it to be discernible.

“Y-yeah, I’m… Yeah. I’m just waiting for a second before I open it.”

“We don’t got that kinda time, Anon,” he replies, urgency present in his expression. “I’ll lead the rest o’ the way, if ya want.”

“No, no, I’m good… Ready?”

“Go.”

With utmost caution, you gently pry the door open once more, mouth ajar in concentration. Through the slit of clearance, you see that the door they came through is closed once more. Without the insulation of the door, you can hear much further - their hoofsteps are still present, but you thankfully can’t see them anywhere.

They must have headed the way that you came from. Probably on their way to get ready for departure, no doubt. There’s no other reason they’d be up this early.

Slowly, steadily, you push the door outward, thankful for the fact that they evidently keep their doors well-oiled, apart from the cells. You and Pal file out into the hallway as quickly as you can without making too much noise, and continue your search for the correct label.

Conference room, bathroom, another storage room…

A mountain of relief washes over you as you finally spot the properly labeled door.

‘Janitorial Staff Only.’

You grab the handle and give it a twist - unlocked. Pulling it open, you’re greeted with a relatively tiny custodial storage room, but there’s enough space for the both of you to fit without any trouble, Hearth included. You file in one by one, locking the door behind you once Pal is in.

At this point, with your goal so close to completion, your capacity for caution is waning. The stack of pallets in the corner of the room stick out like a sore thumb amid all of the cleaning supplies. Before either of you can say anything, you’re already clawing pallets off with your good arm, discarding them haphazardly to the side as you dig for the prize.

And what a prize it is - the wooden hatch with metal fixtures lays bare, free for you to open…

…apart from the padlock keeping it sealed.

The mountain of relief makes way for an ocean of unending despair. The key that the Abyssinian gave you was probably for this lock, too, not just the cells.

“Pal…” you croak.

“What is it?” he asks, giving up his watch on the door to hold your defeated gaze.

“We’re locked out.”

“…What?”

“It’s got a padlock.”

“Lemme see,” he says, turning his back to present Hearth to you. “Hold ‘er for me.”

You take her with your good shoulder, her head resting against your shoulder as you struggle to find a good grip with only one arm.

Huh. Apart from the obvious grime of having been in a prison for a whole day, she smells like a freshly-lit log fire. Ironically enough, it fits her cutie mark. Go figure.

An alarmingly loud crunch, followed by an even louder metallic snapping sound, yanks your startled eyes over to Pal.

Below him sits a ruined padlock, guts of its mechanism strewn about on the floor. Its ring that held it to both the hatch and the floor lies distorted in two pieces. Pal steps back from his handiwork, gesturing for you to hand Hearth back to him. You gladly oblige.

“Were you always that strong…?”

“Yup,” he replies, looking between you and the hatch expectantly.

“Could you have done that to your cell, too?”

“Nah, too sturdy. Get the damn thing open already, somebody prob’ly heard that.”

No arguments there. You throw the hatch open, revealing an eight-or-so foot drop into a narrow dirt passageway, a ladder lining the way down on the side closest to you. As far as you can tell, there aren’t any lights, leaving the passageway swathed in pure black.

“You first, ya take up less space.”

Heeding Pal’s words, you descend down the latter, dropping the last few feet as opposed to climbing all the way down. You look back up to see Pal sizing up the entrance before readjusting Hearth slightly higher up on his back. He hops onto the first few rungs and shuts the hatch behind him, ushering in total darkness. He then hops down the rest of the way, the impact of which is ever so slightly felt in your feet.

Feeling along the wall, you quickly trudge forward into the unknown. You’d call out for Pal to check if he’s still following, but his footsteps and shuffling are all the confirmation you need in the confines of this dingy tunnel.

Eventually, after what feels like ages, you feel the mushy dirt beneath you begin to slope upward. As a precaution, you hold your hand out in front of you so as not to run into anything, and before long, the sound of muffled wind graces your ears as you come to what must be the tunnel’s end.

Your hand finds resistance at last against an angled, steel hatch. Resituating yourself to face slanted with your bad shoulder turned away, you prop your good one underneath the door and place your right palm flat against it.

If anyone is out there listening, anyone at all…

Please don’t let this one be locked.

To your relief, the door does budge. With the added weight of what must be snow, however, you have to strain against it with all of your might to make any headway on getting it opened.

Once it reaches a certain angle, it becomes far easier; you feel the heaping pile of snow sliding off of the door as your legs catch fire from the force needed to lift it. When the hatch fully opens, you stumble forward, half of you exposed to the elements and half of you still in the tunnel.

Before you commit to either, you spin around onto your back and gaze back up at the compound. The snow has calmed down considerably, making the ominous structure more visible given that there’s a full moon out.

The core building itself seems featureless on the outside - must be an ominous sight for prisoners that are still awake when they’re taken in. Ambrosia’s tower must be somewhere over the main building, since you can’t see its exterior from here.

The guard towers look like they’re made out of sandstone brick, culminating at the top in a traditional rounded outpost. From where you are, you can see three of them; one directly in front of you, one to the far left, and one way in the distance to the right.

And if you squint…

There are no guards manning those towers yet.

They’re empty.

You’re still within the time frame, somehow! Which means-

“Holy shit, we’re out!”

You involuntarily yell it out, cringing after you’ve realized how loud that actually was, even against the blowing wind.

“Then go, dumbass! We’re still in eyesight o’ the place!” Pal’s volume isn’t much better as he pulls you to your feet, clambering out alongside you with Hearth still asleep on his back. When he lets go, you hit the ground running, trying desperately not to trip over yourself in the deep snow.

Something that should have been apparent in the courtyard now beats you over the head as the wind whips against the exposed parts of your skin.

It’s cold. Very, very cold.

You thank your lucky stars that you had the foresight to at least wear one of Rarity’s sweaters for the train yesterday.

As Pal runs beside you, he pulls ahead slightly thanks to his bigger build, despite being literally nothing but bones. Your eyes are glued to your feet, but as you find your balance navigating through the copious snow, you find enough confidence to look up as you run.

There, in the distance, lies a behemoth of a city. Divided into rings with buildings spider-webbing out from the middle and reaching for the sky towards its center, it sits miraculously amid an endless expanse of pearly white dunes, lights from its seemingly ancient architecture reaching out amid the darkness as beacons in the night. Even from what must be a considerable distance, its size is staggering - certainly deserving of its title as ‘the mecca.’

It whispers to you over the harsh winter winds of the frozen wasteland.

‘Run to me,’ it calls. ‘Run to me.’

So, on weary legs, you do.

FUN FACT:

A Horse With No Name is the song that I had in mind the whole time I was writing Act I. Honestly, it's responsible for The Wanderer existing in the first place; the idea for extending the original story came to me while I was listening to it. I felt it fitting that we cap off the first act with it as the outro song.