Nova

by spacebrony

Chapters

• From the Sky (Last One Out, Shut the Door)
• The Legend of the Coriks (A Light beneath the Door)
• Memory (The White Crow)
• The Domino Effect (Lies)
• Seventy Four Days (The Tyrant King)
• The Sergeant (The Storm)

From the Sky (Last One Out, Shut the Door)

A quick note: this is a sequel to A Rose is a Rose, and though you needn't have read it to fully understand, I highly suggest you do if you want to know everything.  Thanks!

Nova

From the Sky (Last One Out, Shut the Door)

In the heavens, the stars burn.

Bathed in the light of the moon, Equestria is still but for the nocturnal creatures of the Everfree Forest and the odd Ponyvillian stumbling home after a night out.  Neither the nocturnal creatures nor the stumbling civilians bother to glance to the sky.

The stars burn on.

To the north, Cloudsdale is silent—though weather duties will begin well before sunrise, for now the pegasi sleep, wings fluttering every now and again while they dream.

South now, past Ponyville, to the farms and fields and barns.  No sound from the Carrot residence.  A low mooo rumbles through the silence at the Apple farm, and then all is quiet once more.

The stars burn yet.

Going north, across a field of green and over several streams, to a quaint cottage at the edge of the woods.  All is still here, too.  The soft bubbling of a nearby brook somehow makes the silence around it ring louder.

The stars burn on.

North and east, to the great towers of Canterlot.  West, over plains and fields.  South, to Appleoosa and beyond.  Equestria sleeps under the cool blanket of night, waiting for the sunrise.

And still the stars burn—one brighter than the rest.

In Ponyville, something breaks the silence: a dull crash followed by a muffled curse.  Its source is a tree, but not one like those in the forest; no, this is a very large tree, a beautiful great oak.  It is also a home, and the commotion is caused by its inhabitant, who is now clumsily bending down to gather her fallen instruments.

A tired and disgruntled voice asks if the pony really needs to be doing measurements at this hour, because a young dragon needs his sleep.

If the pony hears, she does not answer, and continues erecting her machinery and instruments, glancing up to the stars every so often to make a calibration.

Back, back now, down Ponyville’s Main Street, past the town hall, beyond the storefronts, which blur by.  Back across streams and cottages, trees and shrubs.  Over bridges and crests, towns and lakes.  Far across Equestria until Ponyville is but a dim light upon the horizon.  Slowing, now.  Stopping.  A slight breeze carries the scent of dew and, faintly, petals.

The field is in no way different than the other fields of Equestria—its grass is just as green, its hills just as smooth.  It is just as quiet as the others, just as serene and peaceful, until—

Overhead, the stars burn still, one brighter than the rest.  One larger than the rest.  And, though stars are not normally loud beings (at least not at this distance), one louder than the rest.  It begins as a low mmmmmmmm that sounds almost like a rumbling snore, then grows to a powerful roar not unlike a waterfall.

mmmmmMMMMMMM

The star grows louder because it grows larger, and it grows larger because it grows nearer.  The sight of a star as it grows nearer is a very beautiful thing, and a sight to behold indeed.  Of course, it can also be blindingly bright, so it is very fortunate that on this night the only observers are one surprised pony and one disgruntled dragon, the first with a protective lens and the second with eyes half-shut from fatigue.

Like a meteorite the star plows through the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen and all the other gasses combusting around it, creating an intense streak of light that slices through the night sky—an ember slit, like a knifewound.  The moon is eclipsed by a luminosity that rivals even the sun, and for a moment the once-peaceful field is alight like high noon in spring.  The sky itself seems to burn and quake, forced aside by the apex of the falling star’s descent.

MMMMMMMMMMMMRRRRR

It is terribly loud, it is terribly bright, and then, after it reaches the climax of its ear-wrenching scream, it is terribly small.

Gone is the comet’s tail that lit the night like a second sun.  Gone, too, is the earth-rattling noise.  The night is peaceful once more.

It would take a very astute observer to notice what has become of the star that so recently burned through the night sky.  Now it falls slowly, like a body underwater, giving off tiny glowing particles that trail behind it as it descends.  It still glows, but with a gentle pulse of dull yellow light, as if its surface is translucent and inside it is an intense brightness that can only dimly escape.

It is pony sized.  It is pony shaped.

Lower and lower it falls as it continues drifting down toward the ground.  Nothing else moves.  It is as if this moment in time is reserved for one purpose only, and that purpose continues its patient descent from the heavens.

Like a spark from a fire, it pushes through the thick air, until, with a silent greeting of sky and ground, it stops.

Motionless, the star lies there, illuminating the grassy ground around it with its dull yellow pulse of inner light.  The particles that have trailed behind it now rest around it on the ground, little red dying embers.

Some time passes, and as the sun begins to peer over the horizon to the east, the star emits one last pulse of yellow.

Then, with an almost inaudible groan, its leg twitches.

***

Twilight Sparkle had been watching the sky ever since she received her first telescope on her fourth birthday.  Nothing intrigued her more than the unknown, the unsolved.  And while there was plenty of unknown and unsolved all around her in Equestria, there was still infinitely more in that great expanse of night sky, that unending infinite blackness which contained all things.

In the night sky, perspective deteriorated, the large became very very small, infinitesimally small, and sometimes she would get dizzy when she looked through her telescope and saw a faint dot that she knew was not a star, not a solar system, but an entire other galaxy, one containing  billions of bodies so large that light itself bent around them.  And she knew she was staring not just into the distance but also into the past, for those bodies could be millions of light years away, meaning she was actually seeing them as they were millions of years ago.  In the expanses of space, she was just a small dot on a small dot within another small dot called the solar system.  And it intrigued her more than anything.

And so on that night, when she witnessed an incredible celestial event unlike anything she had ever seen or read of before, she could do little more than stand and stare as the sky above her melted and flared as though a sparkler the size of a mountain were slowly descending, and then continue to stare as everything suddenly returned to normal.

“Spike, did you see that?  I can’t believe it!  That was incredible!”  She was nearly prancing up and down.

“I saw it, all right,” Spike replied, holding his arms in front of him and wandering blindly.  “And now I can’t see anything else.  Why didn’t you warn me that was gonna happen?”

“Because I didn’t know that was going to happen!  Oh my gosh, what do you think that was?  I should ask the Princess!  I haven’t read of anything like that in any astronomy book.  Spike, help me find—”

She paused suddenly.  She had seen something.  Something in the night sky where only moments ago there had been some sort of unimaginable cosmic display of fire and sparks.  With a squint, she thought she could make something out.

“Spike, hold that thought.  What was the telescope set to just now?  When that whatever-it-was was happening?  I accidentally moved it when I fell back.”

The little dragon moaned dejectedly.  “Twilight, I still can’t see anything.  And what does it matter?  It’s over, right?  Can’t you just make a log of it and let me go back to sleep?”

“Spike, what was it set to?  Thirty four degrees, nineteen minutes, and what?  Tell me!”  She spun around to face him, and though his vision was only slightly restored, Spike could imagine the look on her face.  He decided it would be best to just deal with her and hope that whatever she found was so exciting that she forgot about him.

“Thirty four degrees, nineteen minutes, and forty two seconds.”

As quickly as she could, Twilight dialed the numbers into her telescope, mumbling hypotheses and postulates.  Spike, deciding this would be the perfect time to make his getaway, sought a pillow and blanket.

“There!”  With the correct positioning dialed into the telescope, Twilight removed the protective light filter and eagerly peered through the sight, notepad and pen hovering nearby.

At first she couldn’t see anything except for a yellow blur that obscured the entire field of vision.  Then she carefully adjusted the focus, watching as the blur became defined, as smears became lines and points and details... until finally...

She gasped, and her jaw failed to shut itself afterward, leaving her mouth hanging open in absolute surprise.  “Dear Celestia,” she whispered,  “that’s a pony!”

As she watched through the sight, the limp yellow body fell slowly and gently through the air, until it passed behind a patch of trees and out of her vision.

“Spike!  Spike, come quick!  That thing, that thing in the sky... it was a pony!”  She turned, half of her mind wondering where Spike had gone to, the other half calculating trajectory and searching for memories and information that might help her figure out exactly what she had just witnessed.  The first half of her mind fumed that Spike had run off, and the second half roared in frustration because not a single filing cabinet in her brain contained anything about falling sky-ponies.  The combined anger of the two halves was overwhelming; Twilight Sparkle might have kicked something if she were more simple-minded, and if everything around her weren’t so expensive and delicate.

Instead, she converted her anger into that familiar old passion to figure things out.  And though she preferred to take measurements alone, for some reason she thought most clearly when surrounded by her friends.  Even the shenanigans of Pinkie could trigger a brain spark that became a thought that evolved into an idea that grew into a realization.  Maybe the level-headedness of AJ or the brashness of Dash could come in handy now, too, as they so often did.

With that, Twilight conjured up five pieces of parchment, scribbling the same quick message on all of them:

Sorry to wake you.  Meet me at my place soon.  This time, it’s actually important.  I promise.

~T.S.

“Spike, send these to—ugh!  You lazy...”  She couldn’t continue.  Even from the observation balcony she could see his figure sleeping inside, and it was pretty cute.  I’ll yell at him later, she decided, and one by one the five letters popped quietly into nothingness, transported via mind and magic to their recipients.

***

Knock... … … … … … knock knock... … … … knock...

Twilight absent-mindedly pulled the door open with a glow of her horn, even while her face remained crammed into one of a dozen books that lay open upon the library floor.

A yellow pegasus peeked in from the outside.  “I... I didn’t want to knock too loudly... I know Spike is probably sleeping.  I came as quickly as I—”

“UGH!  Nothing!  Nothing about sky-ponies!”  Twilight pulled her head out of the book as it soared across the room at a devilish speed, finally landing upon a pile of similarly rejected textbooks and essays.

Fluttershy instantly recognized that Twilight was having one of her episodes, and suddenly she was nervous about crossing through the door and into the room.  It wasn’t that she was afraid of Twilight, or even mad at her—why would she be mad?—she just knew that Twilight could become very touchy when she thought she was onto something.  Nevertheless, she stepped inside, gently closing the door behind her.

“Twilight, what exactly was it that you—”

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCKKNOCKKNOCK

Fluttershy jumped, but before she could even open the door, the pony on the other side forcefully let herself in, slamming the door open so hard that Fluttershy could hear the wood splintering.

“C’mon, Twilight!  It’s... what?  Three A.M.?  I thought we agreed: no more important discoveries at three A.M.!”  The blue pony’s voice was raspy from sleep, her mane frizzled at crazy angles and her wingfeathers bent and scrunched slightly out of place.  “Oh.  Hi, Fluttershy.”  She yawned.

Twilight never even looked up from her current book.

Fluttershy grinned the way mothers grin when they say “Colts will be colts!”  Dash took it to mean that “Twilight Sparkle will be Twilight Sparkle,” and couldn’t help but grin back.  Yes, if one thing’s for sure, it’s that Twilight will always be Twilight, and the occasional three A.M. wake-up call was just part of being her friend.

“Hello, Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy said, yawning as well.

“What is it this time?”  Dash asked, glancing first to the purple figure hunched over a book, then to the growing pile of books in the corner.

“Oh, probably some new particle, or maybe she figured out how Pinkie Pie’s mane works.”

Dash guffawed and turned to Fluttershy in surprise.  “That was pretty funny.  I didn’t know you could be so—”

“HIYA!”

Dash had left the door open, leaving no barrier against Pinkie Pie’s entrance.  She quite literally popped through into the room, stopping in front of Dash and Fluttershy, who rolled their eyes with a grin.  She continued to bounce slightly, as though the floor were made of rubber.

“Ah see Pinkie found her way over here—” the newcomer yawned mightily, “—with no trouble at all.”  

The three ponies turned to the doorway where Applejack stood, hat askew upon her head and eyes puffy from sleep.  “What’s goin’ on?” she asked as she stepped into the library.

“I don’t know,” Pinkie said.  “Maybe Rarity knows!  Hi, Rarity!  Cool costume!”

There appeared to be an entire wardrobe standing in the doorway.  “Hello, everypony,” the wardrobe said in a muffled, cottony voice.  “Sorry I’m late.”

Dash nearly burst out laughing for the second time that night, while Applejack pulled a hoof down her face, shaking her head in disapproval.

“Rarity,”  Applejack said, exasperated, “is that, uh, outfit of yours really necessary?”

The wardrobe ambled into the room.  “Of course it is.  Do you know how many hours of sleep I have received tonight?  Less than eight.  Far less.  Because somepony’s note burst through my door and started jumping on my face at three in the morning!” The wardrobe shot a ferocious glance toward Twilight, who was buried in yet another book.

Dash floated up above Rarity, trying to see if she could find her friend beneath five layers of cloth.  “So what happened, Rarity?  Did your closet attack you?”

“No!  And stop messing with the fabric!  I can’t be seen like this!  I haven’t had time to—”

“Oh, good, you’re all here!”  Twilight exclaimed as she ran to greet her friends, throwing the final  book into the pile.  “Is... is that Rarity?”  With a glow of her horn, Rarity’s entire ensemble of sweaters and dresses flew off, forming their own pile next to the books.

“Thank you, Twilight,” Rarity said behind her teeth.  At least she looked better than Applejack, who was leaning against the wall, fast asleep.

“What is it, Twilight?”  Fluttershy solemnly asked.  “What’s going on?”

“Well,” Twilight said.  Her four friends (Applejack still asleep) shared a knowing glance—Twilight had just used her lecturing voice.

“At precisely oh-two-hundred-and-thirty-four hours,” she continued, “I was preparing my telescope for my bi-monthly observations, when I saw... something.”

Rarity waved a hoof impatiently.  “Something?”

“Well, yes,” Twilight said.  “Something.  It was really—Applejack, wake up, this is important!”

Applejack jumped up, looking around in confusion.  “Huh?  What happened?”

“Twilight saw... something,” Rainbow Dash informed her.

“Oh,” Applejack said, unimpressed.  “Again?”

“Yes!  Listen: I was setting up my telescope, when I saw some kind of explosion in the sky.  Like a supernova, only bigger and closer... and louder.  You guys didn’t hear that?”

Four of her friends shook their heads to convey the negative.  One of them shook her head to clear it of sleep.

“Well, it was sort of far away.  I have a feeling that wherever that thing hit, it was a lot louder there.”

“Wait a second,” Dash said, gliding over to Twilight.  “Hit?  Like, hit the ground?”

“Yeah.  It began as an enormous light in the sky, but not directly overhead—I’m still doing calculations, but I think it was at least five miles west.”

“Five miles west there are hills and fields,” Fluttershy added.

“Oh, I’ve been there!”  Pinkie said, no longer hopping.  “Those fields are so pretty.”

“Keep going, Twilight,” Rarity said.  “If I’m going to be here at three in the morning, I’d at least like to hear the whole story.”

“If you’ll all give me a minute, I can explain.”  Twilight began pacing slightly, like a sergeant about to give orders.  “It started with a star.  I remember wondering why one star was larger than it should have been.  It didn’t make sense.  So I aimed my telescope toward it, and realized it was actually growing.  Not because it was getting bigger, but because it was getting closer.  Soon I realized that the star was falling from the sky—well, that’s what it looked like, but it can’t be true; stars are massive, and really far away.  They can’t just fall.”

Applejack, now wide awake, glanced to Twilight, bemused.  “So did it fall or didn’t it?  Ah’m not certain Ah follow you, Twi’.”

“Well...”  Twilight looked to the ground in uncertainty.  She hated not knowing things.  “I still don’t know.  I’m just telling you what I saw.  It looked like it fell from the sky.  But that’s not even the strangest part.”

Dash nodded and motioned with her hoof, a gesture that said “We’re listening, please continue.”

“It was enormous.  It seemed to fill up half the sky.  But then it was gone, like nothing had happened.  Except... except when I looked through the telescope again, I saw something falling.  Well, somepony, actually.”

Fluttershy gasped.  “Twilight, you saw a pony falling from the sky?  Was it a pegasus?  Please tell me it could fly!”

“I couldn’t get a good enough view to see what kind of pony it was,” Twilight said, her voice reassuring, “but it wasn’t falling very fast.  Far slower than the acceleration of gravity would suggest.  It should be fine.”

“Let me get this straight,” Dash said, dropping elegantly to the ground.  “You saw a star grow larger in the sky—”

Twilight nodded.

“ —and then the star seemed to disappear—”

Twilight nodded again.

“—and then you saw a pony falling from where the star had been.”

“That’s what happened, Dash.”

The room was silent for a moment.  Then Dash spoke, her voice uncharacteristically sheepish, even embarrassed: “Did it create an intense streak of light that sliced through the night sky, a big red gash, like a knifewound?”

Her friends all turned to her in surprise.

Twilight’s eyebrows rose.  “Actually, yes.  It did.  Rainbow Dash, how did you know that?”

Pinkie gasped, eyes wide.  “Dash... were you pony that fell from the sky?”

“Ugh!”  Dash turned to face her friend in frustration.  “Pinkie, how does that even make sense!   Do I look like a supernova to you?  Supernovas are big... and probably yellow, or something.”

“Heh,” Applejack chuckled, “you were yellow at the Best Young Flyers competition.”

“Hey!” Rarity exclaimed, stepping between Dash and Applejack.  “That’s not funny.  Don’t forget that she saved my life at that competition!”

“Ah’m only teasin’.  Right, RD?”

“I got it.  Not like I don’t make fun of you too, cowgirl.”

Twilight scraped a hoof across the ground in annoyance.  She invited her friends over because they usually helped her to think more clearly, but with the drawback that discussions such as this one get completely and hopelessly off topic.

“Everypony,” she said, raising her voice above the din, “please just listen to me!  This could be important.”

Once her friends were staring quietly and expectantly, she continued.  “Rainbow Dash, how did you know the pony was yellow?”

“I... guessed.”

“That was a really good guess!” Pinkie giggled.  “Guess what color I am!”

“Oh, come on, Rainbow Dash,” Rarity said.  “Just tell us how you knew!”

Her face burned red, easily visible against her blue cheeks.  “I... read about it.”

Twilight nearly tackled her friend, grabbing her and holding her by the shoulders, staring solemnly into her eyes.  “Dash, I just went through every astronomy book in the library,” she nodded toward the enormous pile of books in the corner, “and I couldn’t find anything!  Where’d you read about this?  And why are you so embarrassed?”

“Well,” Dash grumbled, “that’s sorta why I’m embarrassed.  I read about it in a storybook.  Magic and Myths, or something like that.  It’s a bunch of short stories.  Not my favorite book, but it was pretty cool.  A little outdated.”

“Aw, Dash,” Fluttershy said, grinning at her fellow pegasus.  “Why are you embarrassed?  We already know you like to read.”

“Well, yeah,” Dash said, looking away.  “But isn’t it silly to bring up a storybook when we’re talking about something that actually happened?  It’s not like the the pony you saw has anything to do with an old storybook, right?”

But Twilight was already on the other side of the library, scouring the shelves.

“Dash, what was the name of the book?” she called out over her shoulder.

“Magic and Myths, I think.”  This was becoming a very strange night indeed.  Rainbow took a moment to glance at each of her friends.  Rarity was watching Twilight with interest.  Applejack was rubbing her chin in thought, as was Pinkie.  Fluttershy was hopping from hoof to hoof, an agitated expression covering her face.

“Fluttershy, what’s wrong?” Rainbow asked.

“It’s that pony,” Fluttershy responded, desperately turning to Dash.  “I hope it’s okay.  What if it’s hurt?”

Rainbow Dash grinned reassuringly.  “I’m sure it’s fine.  You heard Twilight—it wasn’t falling very fast.  Besides, if this really does have anything to do with—”

“Rainbow!”  Twilight yelled from the “M” section.  “The book isn’t here!”

“Oh... right... that’s because it’s at my house.  I sorta... borrowed it... from your library.”

Pinkie stepped forward.  “Dashie, can’t you just tell us the story?  Maybe it really does have something to do with Twilight’s crazy magical falling star-pony.”

Just then, Fluttershy burst out with a gasp, as if she had been holding her breath but could contain it no longer.  “We have to go find that poor pony!  It could be hurt!  Or something could be wrong with it!”

Applejack nodded.  “Fluttershy’s right.  Ah don’t know much ’bout storybooks and star-ponies, but if that creature needs help, we’re responsible for seein’ that he...she... that it gets it.”

“Twilight,” Rarity said, “can you teleport us to where it is?  Five miles isn’t very far for that, right?”

“Well,” Twilight closed her eyes, considering.  “I’m afraid I can’t.  I’ve never been there before, and that makes it a lot more difficult to concentrate on arriving.  Also, there’s no way I could bring you all along.  I’ve been practicing, but... that’s a pretty big task even for a powerful unicorn.”

“We’ll have to hoof it,” Dash said, floating above her friends and clapping her hooves together in determination.  “While we walk, I’ll tell the story.  It’s just a silly fairy-tale and might have nothing to do with this... but you never know.”

“It’s a plan, then,” Twilight said.

“Oh, I really hope this doesn’t turn into another adventure,” Rarity groaned in partly-genuine distaste.  “I’m still recovering after that last one.”

“An adventure, huh?” Applejack grinned.  “Don’t know if it can top Fluttershy and her Rose, but sure, Ah’m up for one.”

“Oh, this will be fun!”  Pinkie giggled, bouncing a little.

“As long as we can help that poor thing,” Fluttershy said, her worry upsetting her normally-soft features.

“Last one out, shut the door,” Applejack grinned, and with that she headed outside, followed by her five friends.

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The Legend of the Coriks (A Light beneath the Door)

The Legend of the Coriks (A Light beneath the Door)

Anypony who’s ever been on a real adventure knows that the hardest part is watching your home shrink into the distance, until it’s so small you’re not sure if you’re really seeing it on the horizon or if it’s just your mind imagining what it has already begun to miss.  But the sadness that comes with the shrinking home is miniscule compared to the excitement that arises from the road ahead, the uncertainty, the peril, the unknown.

None of the six friends were feeling that excitement as they ventured off to the west, Fluttershy least of all.

“Can’t we move faster?” she groaned, landing with a puff of dirt and then lifting up again.  “Rainbow Dash, maybe you and I should fly ahead.  We could get there sooner!”  She had been pacing side to side the entire eight minutes they had been walking, unable to escape from the image of a lonely and injured pony lying in pain, miles from civilization.

“Fluttershy,” Dash explained calmly, “if we leave the group, we wouldn’t have Twilight to guide us.  And, uh, no offense, but I don’t know if you’re capable of keeping up with me for five whole miles.”

Twilight politely nudged past Rarity and Pinkie, making her way to the two pegasi up front.  Her face was buried in a map that levitated before her, surrounded by a hovering compass and pen.  “Rainbow’s right,” she said.  “I’m still working on—thirty four degrees, remember that—pinpointing exactly where he would have landed.  Without us, you wouldn’t know where to go, and we wouldn’t know how to find you if you got lost.”

Dash turned to Fluttershy, nodding in agreement.  Twilight returned to her mumbling.

“Angle of elevation was ten point seven degrees, falling from a height of one thousand six hundred and nine meters...”

Though they had only been walking for a short time, the streetlamps of Ponyville were far behind them; the world was illuminated only by the light of the stars and the glow of Twilight’s horn.  Below them was a neat cobblestone road, which stretched out ahead into the distance until disappearing behind a hill.  For a few moments, all was silent but for Twilight’s mumbled calculations, their own light hooffalls, and the breeze through the the grass that stretched out in a small field to their right.

Then Applejack spoke.

“Ehem.  Dash, I believe you have a story for us?”

“Yeah!” Pinkie said.  “Tell us the story, Dash!”

“It sure would make this journey more interesting,” Rarity added.  “I love a good story.”

“Oh,” Dash said, her voice betraying her nerves.  “Yeah.  You know what, I don’t think I want to tell it anymore.”

“Oh, please tell it,” Fluttershy said, floating back to the front of the group where Dash kicked anxiously at the ground.  “It would take my mind off things.”

“...five point four miles directly west...”  Twilight mumbled, her face never leaving the map.

Rainbow sighed.  “I guess... I guess it couldn’t hurt to tell it... it’s not like it’s true...”  She turned around to face her friends, walking backwards.

“It began with a war...”

***

It began with a war.

Far before the land which we know of as Equestria was named, there was chaos.  And far before that, there was peace—a fragile peace, a peace made of sand in the low tide.

The unicorns of the west were aware of the civilization to the east, known as the Coriks.  The two empires traded goods and exchanged culture and made peace.  However, the unicorns were wary of what they didn’t understand, and it frightened them that the Coriks had no horns and yet built towers that stretched into the sky and commanded giant beings made of cold, lifeless metal.

With every day that passed, the unicorns began to fear that the age of magic was ending, that the Coriks to the west had surpassed the need for magic with their enormous constructs that walked and thought even though they lacked blood and tissue.  However, the unicorn leaders, afraid of igniting animosity from the Coriks, feigned friendship.

They sent the Coriks gifts.  Cloaks of invisibility, baskets of food that never ran dry, lanterns that could light up the night.  To the Coriks they gave their most valuable gems, their most sacred heirlooms, hoping that it would be enough to prevent the expansion of the western power into their homeland.

But the Coriks already had all that—they built such devices on their own, without magic; sometimes their creations were even more effective than the unicorns’ enchanted gifts.  Still, the Coriks appreciated the trinkets, admiring the impressive craftsmanship of their neighbors to the east.

On one fateful day, the Coriks returned the favor.

It arrived in a box.  A small box, slightly thinner than a brick.

To the leaders of the unicorns, read the note upon the box.  We hope that you find it as useful as we have, and that soon we may become connected in peace by this device.  We have enough for your whole kingdom, as well as ours.  May it bridge the gap between our worlds and bring us peace everlasting.  

P.S.,

Don’t get it wet!

The loyal subjects of the king watched in a mixture of fear and curiosity as their leader tentatively opened the box and pulled out the object inside.

It was rectangular.  It was cold, and hard, and fit neatly within the king’s hoof, as if designed to do so.  It was black.

The king could see through it, though only just—through the translucent material he could see only a shadow where his hoof should have been.  It was perfectly consistent, built in the proportion of the golden rectangle.  No carvings, bumps, or lines blemished its surface.

To the king, it appeared that he was holding a black gem, carved flawlessly to fit into the shape of his hoof.

“Well, it’s pretty,” the king said in a gruff voice.  “But what does it AHH!”

He dropped the device to the ground.  It had beeped, the sound seeming to emit from inside the immaculate artifact.  Within seconds it was surrounded by royal guards, who aimed their spears at where it lay, their horns glowing in preparation of attack.

“It made a sound!  Did you hear that?”  The king backed up, nervously eyeing the gift.  It lay innocently upon the floor, surrounded by threatening spears.

“Yes, my king!” sputtered the closest royal subject.  “I heard a sound, yet I sense no magic within it!”

“It’s one of their cursed creations,” the king muttered.  “But what in the Blazes of Al Dayr—”

“THE BLAZES OF AL DAYR,” the device spoke, “WERE MYTHOLOGICAL FLAMES THAT WERE SAID TO BURN WITHOUT FUEL.”

The royal guards jumped back, doing everything in their power to distance themselves from the blasphemy on the floor before them.

“It spoke!  It spoke!”

“Somepony do something!  Somepony destroy it!”

The bravest of the guards expertly hurled his spear from across the room, striking the device with enough force to impale twelve soldiers.

With a feeble dink, the spear fell to the floor, useless.

“A SPEAR IS A POLE WEAPON CONSISTING OF A SHAFT, USUALLY OF WOOD, WITH A POINTED HEAD.”

A translucent image of a spear appeared above the device, slowly rotating as diagrams, arrows, and bullet points floated as if by magic, noting each component.

“THE HEAD MAY BE THE SHARPENED END OF THE—”

“AAAAARRRRR!” the king roared in a frenzied rage.  “BEGONE!”  His horn glowed a furious red, and the device glowed with it.

“MAGIC IS THE SOURCE OF ENERGY USED BY THE PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATION KNOWN AS THE UNICORNS, WHO—”

“AHHHH!” the king screamed, lifting the device in an incredible aura of magic and flinging it across the room, where it landed with a mighty splash inside the ceremonial reflecting pool.

Everypony in the room fell silent and listened.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then:

“CAUTION: DEVICE IS NOT WATERPROOF.  CAUTION: KEEP AWAY FROM WATER.  CAU—BREEEAKKDKDA—TION: KEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeePPPPPPP awaaaYYYYYYYYY frommmmMMMMMMMMmmmmmm!!!!!!”

With an anticlimactic sizzle, the device fell silent.

Still, nopony moved.  They waited for it to speak again.

It did not.

Satisfied, though fear still coursed through their veins, the royal subjects turned toward their king.  He looked to each one with the gaze of a proper king:  undaunted, unafraid—uncompromising.

“My loyal subjects,” he declared, “today we have witnessed the Coriks’ greatest folly.  What they call a peace offering is nothing more than a declaration of war—war against our culture; war against our history; war against our way of life.  This... this... monstrosity that they have sent us was birthed in their factories and labs, their places of industry, where they make still more terrifying and powerful constructions.  These constructions threaten our natural right to exist on this world.

“We have no other choice:  now, we go to war!

His subjects cheered.

“War to defend our land!”

They cheered again.

“War to defend our kingdom!”

They cheered once more.

“War to defend our mares and fillies and our very way of life!”

They cheered louder than ever, pumping their hooves into the air and bellowing.

“WAR! WAR! WAR! FOR THE KING!”

======

It was devastating for both sides.

The Coriks suffered heavy losses in the first battle, a surprise attack upon one of their outlying cities.  It was completely and utterly unexpected; until then, they had considered the unicorns to be peaceful, if not their allies.

In the burning embers of their fallen city, the Coriks planned their revenge.

Days later, one of the most populous trading cities of the unicorns fell to the giant walking machines of the Coriks.  A hasty teleportation brought most of the mobilized warriors of the unicorns to the city’s defense, but the force was too little and too late.  The unicorns retreated, licking their metaphorical and literal wounds as they scoured the city for survivors.

The back-and-forth losses continued for months.  Occasionally there would be a week of peace, and the inhabitants of both kingdoms would hug their loved ones close and hope that it was all over, that the empty chair during dinner would soon be filled again by a returning soldier.

But those moments of peace didn’t last.  One city would fall, and then another, and then the weaponized magic of the unicorns would level an enemy base while the mechs of the Coriks would destroy a shrine.

Soon, the unicorns realized they were losing.  The Coriks could simply build more fighters made of metal and wire, while the unicorn army fell in number one by one.

Something had to be done.

And so the unicorn leaders assembled and came up with a plan.  A risky plan.  A plan that some called impossible, too likely to fail, too dangerous.

But the unicorns had no choice.

They began constructing an enormous fighter of their own, but not one made of iron and steel.  They built it out of the ruins of their cities, the crumbled clay of their houses, the wood of their burnt forests.  They built it larger than any of the Corik’s machines.

And then they gave it life.

Not artificial life, like the monsters built by the Coriks.  Real life.  Life drawn from the very source of magic, the Spring of Magic, accomplished by a spell designed by the king’s most talented wizards working together.

It took every one of the nineteen unicorns in the royal league of wizards to channel that much magic.  Every drop was pure, tapped from the Spring itself.

Days, it took.  Days of tirelessly pouring magic into the enormous, straw warrior.  For two of the king’s ponies, it was too much.  They pushed themselves too hard, channeled more magic than they could.  Those two died; the rest took a day to recover their spent strength.  Then they reconvened to admire their creation.

The High Wizard of the court stood atop a balcony, staring directly into the giant lifeless eyes of the paper-mache warrior.  With a tremendous glow of his horn, he unleashed all the magic that had been stored within the towering figure, releasing it from within its heart made of mud and ash.

Magic coursed through every wooden beam and clay wall, every straw filling and marble reinforcement.  More magic than had ever been used at once in the known history of the unicorn race.

And then, with a mighty roar, it breathed life.

The Coriks could do nothing against the monstrosity.  Their machines failed, their courage fled.  The artificial warriors were swept down one by one like trees in a typhoon.

Magic had triumphed over metal.  The Coriks ran, long and far, until the colossus that had destroyed their cities and burned their villages was nothing more than a legend told among a dying community.  Far from their homeland, the Coriks dwindled in number, unable to rebuild their society without the factories that had once sustained them.  They disappeared from the planet, never to be heard from again.

“Hold on there for just a minute,” Applejack said, breaking the spell of the story.  “Are you gonna tell us that the pony Twilight saw fallin’ from the sky is one of those long-gone Coriks?”

“Nope,” Dash said, shaking her head.  “And stop interrupting the story!  If you let me finish, I could explain.”

“Well, go on, then,” Rarity said impatiently.  “I want to know what happens!”

“Okaaaaaay,” Dash said in frustration.  “I can finish it if nopony interrupts me!”

“Duly noted,” Applejack said, nodding respectfully.

“Now, where was I... Oh, yeah.  Soon after their victory, the unicorns began having problems.”

***

Soon after their victory, the unicorns began having problems.

Their way of life had been secured.  Their land had been defended.  They had disassembled their monstrosity, so that it could never be used against them.

But their magic was failing.

All throughout the land, unicorns everywhere were trying desperately to levitate bowls, to open doors, to complete all the mundane tasks that magic had assisted them with since the beginning of their existence.

But they couldn’t.

When they tried to use magic, they were no longer greeted with that comforting feeling of infinity, of that stockpile of power that never dwindled even as they constantly borrowed from it.  That feeling of cool liquid running through the horn was replaced with a dry scraping, an emptiness, a nothing.

It was as if the magic had run out.

Throughout the kingdom there was panic.  The king bawled in his private room, mourning the loss of thousands of good ponies who had died in defense of his land, in defense of magic... only to have the magic run dry after their sacrifice.

The kingdom nearly erupted into anarchy, thwarted only by the unicorns’ devout loyalty to their king, who day after day promised a solution would come, the magic would return.

A lie that—though the king didn’t know it—would actually come true.

For one night about a month later, the sky erupted in light.

Unicorns everywhere stepped outside into the streets of their crippled villages to witness the event.  It was as if a star itself had fallen from the sky and down to earth.

The ground shook, the heavens burned, and the night was lit like brightest day.  An enormous point of light billowed ravenously toward them from the sky, trailed by flames of light and sparks that showered down like fairy dust.

And then it was over.

And from the dimming star fell a pony.

Slowly it drifted to the ground, where it was quickly surrounded by hundreds of civilian unicorns.

“Is... is that a unicorn?”

“Is it still alive?”

“Look!  It has no horn!”

“That must mean it’s a Corik!  This is their revenge!”

“No!  Everypony, step back!  It’s not a Corik!  Give it room!”

“Look!  It’s moving!”

The smoldering blue pony began getting up... but couldn’t.  Its arrival had drained it of energy.  Helplessly it lay upon the ground.

“Everypony stand back!  It needs help!  Here, drink this.”  An elderly unicorn had stepped forward, and began tilting a mug into the eager mouth of the mysterious hornless unicorn.

It drank without shame, and everypony gasped as it slowly began getting up.

“Thank you,” it said quietly, facing the elderly unicorn and kneeling down into a bow of respect.

“Please, don’t thank me,” the unicorn said.  “Especially because you need help yet.  Can you walk?”

“Not quite,” the  pony breathed.  “I’m... sorry.  I’ll explain... later... Thanks...” then it collapsed to the ground once more.

“Everypony step back,” advised the elderly unicorn.  “I will have to carry him.”

“Don’t touch him!” shouted out a pony from the crowd.  “It’s a Corik trap!”

“That’s not possible!” shouted another.  The crowd erupted into a barely-civil quarrel.

All the while, the elderly unicorn pushed the limp blue pony up onto her back.  He was far lighter than she had expected.  As if he were hollow.

“...Thanks...” he breathed into her ear.  Then he was still once more.

“It’s nothing,” the unicorn said to herself.

As she began walking through the crowd, the unicorns around her stopped yelling and turned to watch.  Soon their arguments simmered into a quiet murmuring of speculation and appreciation for the elderly unicorn who had reacted so peacefully to the mysterious newcomer.

The crowd followed her as she carried the blue pony all the way back to her house.

When they got there, the front door burst open and balloons spilled out into the street!  Then everypony started dancing to music that came from the rooftops!  Then—

“Pinkie, let Rainbow tell the story!” Applejack nudged Pinkie with her elbow.

“I’m sorry,” Pinkie said, “but this story is so... sad.  I thought it could use some cheering up!”

Rarity sighed.  “Yes, it is pretty sad.  But let Rainbow finish!  I want to know what happens.”

“Ok,” Dash continued.  “When they got there...”

When they got there, the crowd backed off, allowing the unicorn to carry the blue pony into her house.

“Do you think he’s dangerous?” some whispered.

“What a kind thing to do,” others said.

Inside, she laid him down upon her bed.  He was fast asleep.

The next day, he awoke and gave a message to the unicorns:

“Hey everypony!  Just dropping in to say hello.  Thanks for having me!  Goodbye!”

“Rainbow,” Twilight said, glancing dubiously at the pegasus, “are you sure that’s how the story went?”

“Um,” Dash said, tapping her chin in thought.  “Essentially.”

“I liked the part where the unicorn helped that poor blue pony,” Pinkie said.

“Um, speaking of that,” Fluttershy edged her way to the front where Dash had just told her story.  “Are we there yet?”

Twilight turned to her map, staring intently at it for a moment.  “Actually, yes,” she said.  “According to my calculations, this should be around the area where he landed.”

They all looked around.  They were in a field, just as Twilight had predicted.  The sky to the east burned bright red as the sun peered up from behind a distant mountain.  Around them were several sparsely distributed trees, the precursors of the forest that grew thick just to the west.

Fluttershy looked every which way, then hopped up onto Applejack’s back.

“Oof!  What’re ya doin’ up there?”

“Getting a better look!”

“Fluttershy... you can fly.”

“Yes, but this is saf—ohmygosh look!”

They all turned to where Fluttershy was looking, off into the distance.

“I don’t see anything,” Pinkie said.  “Unless you’re talking about the trees.  Because I do see those.”

“No,” Fluttershy said as she hopped down from Applejack’s back.  “Look!”  She indicated toward the ground with a hoof, and the other five followed her gaze.  “Do you see it?”

They saw it.  Just up ahead, only a few meters away, the grass glowed dully, pulsing with yellow light.  After getting a closer view, they discovered that the sources of light were clusters of little golden specks, burning yellow and then red and then white.  They covered the ground in patches like golden flour.

Dash reached out to touch one.

“No, Dash!” Twilight warned. “What if—”

“Ouch!”  Rainbow pulled her hoof away quickly, licking the burn.  “Thapt’s haw,” she said around her hoof.

“It makes a trail,” Rarity observed.  Following her gaze, they realized that she was right.  The little yellow-golden specks trailed off along the field, nearly out of sight.

Fluttershy squinted.  “I think it ends at that tree.”

Dash followed the trail with her eyes.  “That tree way out there?  That little one?”

“Yeah,” Pinkie added.  “I think Fluttershy’s right.  It ends at that tree way over there.”

Now they moved quickly, following the golden trail even though they could see where it ended in the distance.

“What... a curious... material!”  Twilight noted between breaths.  “I should... collect some!”

“No time,” Applejack said.  “Later.”

Within minutes, the friends found themselves approaching the tree, panting and gasping for air.  It was much larger than it had first appeared, and cast a long shadow even in the dim morning light.  At the base of the tree, however, the shadow thinned; here, the trunk was alive with shimmering and sparkling yellow, which illuminated the entire base of the tree so that it appeared almost as though it were submerged in a glowing golden ocean.

“Look,” Fluttershy breathed, “behind the tree!”

Simultaneously, the six friends stepped around the tree to the other side.

There, leaning up against the tree, was a pony.  Fast asleep.  She was a brilliant shade of yellow, so yellow it was as though white and gold had joined forces, creating an immaculate coat that seemed to shimmer in the night air.  Her tail protruded from beneath her, bright white, with traces of her yellow coat mixed in.  She breathed slowly and peacefully, though her face was anything but peaceful; her wariness drifted off her like a scent.  Her brow was furrowed even while she slept, and her mouth was turned down into a frown.  Her hooves and lower back were covered in dirt, as though she had crawled through the field.  Which, Fluttershy realized, she probably had.

“Everypony step back,” Fluttershy said, slipping easily into the position of control.  This was her talent, this was her gift.

Her friends obeyed, creating a radius around the yellow pegasus as she approached the sleeping pony.

“Hello?” she whispered, placing a hoof gently on the mare’s shoulder.  “Can you hear me?”

“Mmmmph,” the golden pony murmured, turning her whole body toward Fluttershy’s voice.

“Everything will be alright,” Fluttershy whispered.  The pony shifted toward her once more, but her eyes remained shut, as did her mouth.

Fluttershy turned back toward her friends.  “I think she’s just sleeping.  Stand back further.  I’m going to wake her up.”

“Why don’t we take her back to your cottage and wake her there?” Pinkie asked.  “You have all your supplies there, don’t you?  And a warm bed?”

“Because it’s scary to be woken up in a place you’re unfamiliar with,” Fluttershy said.  “Though I don’t know how familiar she is with this place...”  She turned back to the sleeping pony, who now lay almost sideways against the tree trunk.

“Here I go,” Fluttershy breathed.  Then she gave the pony a soft nudge on the shoulder.  After receiving no response, she pushed again, slightly harder.

The pony’s eyes fluttered.  Then they opened.

“Don’t be afraid!”  Fluttershy said quietly, stepping back to give her room.  “We thought you might be injured.  We’re here to help.”

The tired thing looked from pony to pony, eyes wide in surprise, if not anxiety.  Then she slowly and weakly got to her hooves, grimacing as she did so.

“Are you hurt?” Fluttershy asked.  “Where are you hurt?”

“Not... hurt... just... tired.”  Her voice was labored but soft, forced yet somehow calm.

Twilight slowly stepped toward her.  “Fluttershy, I think I might be able to get you two back to your cottage.”

Fluttershy was silent for a moment, her mouth turned in doubt.  “I don’t know, Twilight.”

“I know I can do it.  Just hold on.”  She stepped between Fluttershy and the golden yellow mare, who now stood on shaking hooves, eyes closed and panting heavily.  Fluttershy moved closer, allowing Twilight to wrap a hoof around both her and the tired mare.

“Applejack, take that map and guide them home.  We’ll see you soon.”

“You got it, partner.  See you soon.  Be careful.”

Three things happened almost simultaneously.

Twilight’s horn began to glow.

The panting mare noticed this.  Her eyes went wide and she let out a little gasp.  Then she turned and fought to escape Twilight’s grasp.  Twilight was unprepared for this, and the mare easily escaped from under her hoof.  Then she turned and dove, as if to escape a projectile or an explosion.

She turned and dove.

Directly into the tree.

She collided head first, and a terrible dull THUD escaped into the field.  Fluttershy and her friends gasped all at once, and the yellow pegasus ran immediately to the injured pony’s aid.

“Are you okay?  Oh, why would you do that?”  She gripped the unconscious pony and rolled her onto her side so she wouldn’t choke.  Gingerly, she stepped over the mare, inspecting her forehead.  A large bump emerged directly from the center, as though she were some sort of terrible half-unicorn.

“What in the hay just happened?”  Rainbow Dash asked.

Rarity stepped forward to get a closer look, grimacing when she saw the lump and what might have been a small trickle of blood.  “I think she... ran into the tree.”

“Oh no,” Fluttershy groaned.  “She may have had a concussion.  We need to get her back to my cottage right now.  Oh, why would she do that?”

Twilight stepped back.  Too many thoughts ran through her head; normally her mind operated like an efficient machine, where everything took the shortest path and arrived at the right place quickly and easily.  Now her thoughts were jumbled, too much input and not enough output, while she tried to piece together what she had just witnessed.

The pony had seemed fine—tired, but fine.  She saw that.

She had wrapped her hoof around the pony’s shoulder, and the pony was fine with that, too.  She could see that.

Then she started the teleportation spell, and the pony had panicked.  She fled... and in doing so, ran directly into the tree behind her.

Clearly it was Twilight’s magic that had caused her to react so... so powerfully.  Twilight wasn’t sure why, but she was sure that they now had a very injured pony on their hooves, one that needed care immediately.

“Fluttershy, hold on to me.  I’m going to teleport us three back to your cottage.  Help me grab hold of her.”

Dash landed in front of Twilight with a huff, stepping forward aggressively.  “Are you kidding me?  You saw how that pony reacted to your magic!  And now you want to try that again?”

“Well, she’s unconscious, so she can’t... overreact... again, can she?”

“Yeah, but maybe she wasn’t overreacting.  Maybe she was just... reacting.  Maybe there’s a good reason you shouldn’t touch her with magic.”

Now Twilight’s temper began to flare.  This pony needed care fast, and Dash wanted them to walk all the way back?  “Oh, yeah?  Well, what makes you think that?  Your book of fairy tales?”

“Well...” Dash faltered.  “Well it may be a book of fairy tales, but it explains everything you saw.  Just... just don’t use magic near her.  Maybe she had a good reason.”

“Dash is right,” Rarity said, stepping between the two heated ponies.  “Did you see the way she panicked?  That was real fear, and she must have had a reason for it.”

Powerful gears turned in Twilight’s head.  “Fine,” she said.  “But I only capitulate because you all seem so sure.”

“Ah don’t care why you camipulate, s’long as nopony gets hurt... more so than they already are, of course.”

During this exchange, Fluttershy had been working her own type of magic.  She smeared Milk-herb atop the cuts on the mare’s forehead, applied cold soil to the diminishing bump, disinfected and cleansed the tender cuts and bruises with dew from the grass.

After she had utilized the full extent of the natural medicines around her, she bent down next to the pony and spread a wing beneath her warm, motionless body.  Then, with an experienced upward motion, she rolled the pony up her wing and onto her own back, extending both wings to keep the mare steady and balanced.  Finally, she stood up slowly, testing her own balance as well as the mare’s on her back.

The pony was lighter than she had anticipated, far lighter.  Her head rested just upon Fluttershy’s shoulder; she could feel her deep breaths repeatedly warming her neck.

“Everypony, we need to start heading back now.”

Her friends stopped their discussions and turned to her in surprise, amazed that she had done so much in such a small time, and also a little embarrassed that they had done nothing to help.

“Back to Fluttershy’s place, then?” Rarity asked.

“That’s the plan, if we can’t teleport,” Twilight said.  “Let’s go, everypony.  We have no time to lose.”

And so off they went once more, traveling back they way they had come.  The journey back was much quieter than the first trip; the only sounds were those of the early birds, their own hoofsteps, and a rare groan from the yellow mare upon Fluttershy’s back.

Eventually, as the sun melted from the early red of dawn into the yellow of midday, Fluttershy’s cottage appeared in the distance.

As it grew closer, she turned to her friends.  “Everypony, I’m sorry to say this, but I’d like you all to leave.  I need to do this alone.”

“You sure, sugarcube?”  AJ glanced to the still-unconscious mare upon Fluttershy’s back.  “Do you want me to carry her the rest of the way?”

“Thanks, Applejack, but I think I’ll be okay.  She’s light... very light.”  She stopped with her friends at a fork in the road, one way leading to her cottage and the other back to Ponyville.  “I’ll send for you all some time tomorrow,” she said.  “I think she’ll be awake by then.”

“Okay, if you’re really sure, Fluttershy,” Rarity said.

“Yeah,” Pinkie said, “you sure you don’t need any help?”

“Really, I’m fine.  See you all soon.”  She began her way up the short cobblestone path to her home.

“Fluttershy!” Twilight called out.

Fluttershy turned, a difficult maneuver with the mare upon her back.

“Thank you for doing this.”

“Thank you for finding her,” Fluttershy called back.  “I don’t know what would have happened without you.”

“Good luck,” Twilight said, turning back around and following her four other friends up the path to Ponyville.

“Oh,” Fluttershy said to herself, glancing sadly to the hoof that hung limp across her left shoulder, “I’m not the one who needs luck.”

***

For the remainder of the day, Fluttershy went to work on the pony, icing bumps, soothing bruises, salving cuts.  She smoothed out knots within the mare’s back and washed out the dirt that soiled her coat.  Nothing went unnoticed, and even the tangles in her gold-and-white tail were removed, even the pressure within her joints was alleviated, pressure that Fluttershy could not feel yet knew was there.

She hummed softly to herself while she worked, an old song her mother used to sing while cleaning or tending the garden.  A sweet song, but also a little melancholy—it had always reminded her of autumn, of colorful leaves but wilting flowers, beauty in death.

It was while she was humming and picking out splinters from the mare’s forehead that her eyes opened.

Fluttershy was immediately struck by those eyes, those bands of gold and white and yellow, that peered up at her in innocence and confusion.  They gleamed like stars, and Fluttershy watched as they focused upon her, as the mare’s eyebrows rose up in a question.

“Wh... what... where...”

“Shhhhh,” Fluttershy whispered.

“Who?” she asked, then shifted on her stomach.  She was lying down upon a bed, positioned that way so Fluttershy could access her injured head.

“My name is Fluttershy, and I’m helping you.  Please, don’t try to move.”

“No... who... am I?”

“Oh no,” Fluttershy breathed.  “Oh no, oh no, oh please no...”

The mare shut her golden eyes.  “No... wait.  I know.  My name is... Nora.  No... it’s Nova.  I’m Nova.  Nova Blare.”

Fluttershy was nearly crying, though she wasn’t sure if it was out of happiness that the mare could remember her name, or out of heartache that she nearly couldn’t.  “That’s a very pretty name, Nova Blare,” she said.

“Nova,” the pony murmured, opening her eyes once more.  “Just call me Nova.”  Then she began struggling to get up, shifting her weight off her stomach and onto her hooves—or, at least, attempting to.

“No, please don’t move,” Fluttershy said.  “Stay there.  I’ll be right back.”

Nova just closed her eyes once more, too tired to give thanks, head too muddled to think clearly.

Moments later, Fluttershy returned, bearing a cup of water.  “Here.  Drink.”  She poured it gently into Nova’s mouth, careful lest she choke.

“Thank you,” Nova said afterward.  Her mouth had been dry, absolutely parched, and she could feel her tongue absorbing the water like a sponge.  It felt wonderful.  “...What happened?”

Fluttershy sat down opposite where the golden-yellow pony lay upon the bed, watching as those brilliant golden eyes peered into hers.  “We found you against a tree, asleep.  We woke you and my friend began to teleport us back here so I could care for you, but... you sort of panicked.  You turned around and ran directly into a tree.”

“A... tree?”  She said the word uncertainly, as if she had never heard of one.

“Yes,” Fluttershy nodded.  “A tree.”

The mare winced, then began raising a weak hoof to her forehead.  

“Please don’t touch your forehead—there’s still a really bad bump there.”

She collapsed the hoof back to the bed.  That’s when she noticed the bandage wrapped around her foreleg.  “So... you did this?”

“Yes!” Fluttershy grinned.  “As much as I could.  It’s what I do best.  I’m sorry if I missed anything... any bruises or bumps I didn’t find.  I really hope you’re feeling better.”

“No, it’s fine,” Nova said, mentally inspecting her body for pain or discomfort.  “Actually... I don’t feel that bad.”  That was an understatement; Nova nearly felt great.  As if she had just received ten years of sleep followed by an extensive massage.  Beside her headache, she couldn’t remember ever feeling better—but the more she thought, the more she realized she couldn’t remember anything at all.

“Even... even my headache is fading.”  A look of concentration came across her face, but soon it was replaced by one of confusion.  “My head... is still fuzzy.  I can’t think well.  I don’t remember much.  I don’t remember anything.”

Fluttershy frowned.  “That... could be a side effect of the concussion,” she explained.  But in her mind, the worry spread like a fire—there was a possibility it was bad, worse than she had feared.  As much as it terrified her to think it... permanent damage was a possibility.  Fluttershy cringed at the thought, and the tears threatened to appear once more.

“I can’t think well... but I feel okay.  I don’t hurt.”  She blinked, then looked up to Fluttershy as if seeing her for the first time.  Suddenly, tears welled in those great golden eyes, which stared at her with a look of gratitude so immense Fluttershy could nearly feel it, like sunbeams of light warming her skin.  “Thank you,” she said once more, but this time the emotion spilled down her eyes and through her voice.

Fluttershy smiled warmly.  “It was the least I could do.”

“No,” Nova said, now strong enough to wipe her tears with a hoof.  “No, it was more than that.”  As she wiped away her tears, she ventured a hoof to her forehead, despite Fluttershy’s warnings.  An intense, sharp pain greeted her, and she winced, quickly withdrawing her hoof.

“I told you not to touch that,” Fluttershy said.  “Now I think it would be best if you got some sleep.  A muscle injury heals faster if you rest the muscle, and similarly a head injury heals faster if you rest your head.”

Nova nodded, expecting her neck to be stiff and aching, but finding it instead to be loose and relaxed.  She glanced up to Fluttershy once again with more appreciation and gratefulness than she had ever experienced in her life—that she could remember.

“Thank you,” she whispered, closing her eyes and laying her head down upon the bed.  “Thank you.”

“Please don’t thank me for doing something anypony else should have done.  Just promise that one day you’ll do the same, if you ever can.”  And with that Fluttershy turned off the lights, left the room, and gently shut the door behind her.

Nova sighed into the bed, her tears cooling its surface upon her cheek.  All she could think about was that yellow pegasus, the one who had saved her... that and something else.  Something that seemed incredibly important, but that she couldn’t remember.  Her mind was like a city ravaged by a hurricane—all the pieces were still there.  They just needed to be put back together again.

She slept, and in her dreams everything became clear.  Who she was, where she was from, what she must do—in her dreams the doors within her mind flew open, every thought became free from the murky blackness that shrouded her waking mind.  She dreamt of an immense power within her, of a towering stone room that smelled of roses and spoke like a murmuring spring, of the task she must fulfill.  She dreamt of the stars.

And, sometime after that, she dreamt of a yellow pegasus.

***

It was late, and Fluttershy couldn’t sleep.  Something Nova had said was floating through her mind like a wraith, disturbing her thoughts.

I don’t remember much... I don’t remember anything...

It could be bad.  Memory loss, or worse: retrograde amnesia.  Fluttershy shuddered at the thought.  To have to live like that, not knowing your own history, your own past...

Slowly she pulled off her covers, slipping out of bed and onto the wood floor, which squeaked quietly with years and years of that one repeated action.

Down the hallway.  She yawned.  Hopefully Nova was still asleep, hopefully she was resting.

Turning the corner.  Fluttershy stopped.  There was the door to the guest room.  But light was spilling out from beneath the crack.  Nova was awake, and had turned the light on.  No, no—this was not good.  She needed sleep, she needed rest.  Especially at this hour.

Fluttershy opened the door, the words already formed and waiting upon her tongue.

Nova, you shouldn’t be awake.  You—

But the words never came.  The light wasn’t on.  At least, not the light on the bedstand.

Nova was asleep.  And she was glowing, illuminating the entire room in a warm golden yellow.  

Fluttershy stared, eyes wide, noticing how the light wasn’t coming from Nova’s coat.  No, it was coming through Nova’s coat, coming through from the inside, from within her very body.  As Fluttershy watched, the mare rolled over in her sleep, letting out a meek yawn—light poured out from her open mouth as she did so, like a lighthouse.

Fluttershy breathlessly closed the door, eyes still wide, mouth still open.  She stood there like that for a while, first in incredulity, then in thought.  Light continued to pour out from beneath the door.

I don’t know how to treat that, was her first thought.  No, don’t be silly, that’s not a condition.  At least, not a bad one.  That’s... that’s....

“That’s something to ask Twilight about,” she whispered aloud, then headed back toward her room.  Sleep eventually found her, and despite the worry and uncertainty that plagued her waking mind, in her sleep all was forgotten and she drifted peacefully toward sunrise.

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Memory (The White Crow)

Memory (The White Crow)

There’s something I’m forgetting...

I am Nova Blare.

I came from... I am from...

I’m supposed to do something.  I have a purpose.  What is it?  What am I forgetting?

She lay awake in her bed

(Fluttershy’s bed, it’s really her bed)

staring at the ceiling.  Sunlight leaked through the closed curtains, the orange beams of morning creating patterns and shadows across the floor.  Nova watched, captivated, as the early light painted the dust in the air a hue so warm she could almost feel it.  The sight was amazing, and somehow very important; as Nova felt the sunlight begin to spread over her, she felt a familiar comfort—she felt at home.

Rigel?

…What is that thought supposed to mean?

She was pondering the caved-in depths of her own mind when there was a knock upon the door.

“Come in,” she said, feeling uncomfortable and guilty—why did she deserve a knock?  This was Fluttershy’s own home, wasn’t it?  You shouldn’t have to knock on your own doors.

The door slid open, and Fluttershy slowly walked through.  One wing was extended, balancing a bowl of something steaming hot.  She smiled cordially at Nova.

“I brought you some breakfast.  It’s porridge.  I’m not much of a cook, but I did my best.  Oh! I forgot napkins.”  She slid the bowl off her wing and onto the dresser that sat across from the bed.  “I’ll be right back.”

On her way to the kitchen, Fluttershy performed a mental analysis of Nova.  She had been wide awake, sitting up in bed—that was a good sign.  It meant her back was well enough to sit, and her hooves were healed enough and strong enough to push her into a sitting position.  The cuts and bruises were nearly gone—and far sooner than she had anticipated.  But it wasn’t Nova’s body that worried Fluttershy.  It was her mind.  She knew head injuries were terrifying things, and the mind was a complex machine that could behave erratically when broken.  She could deal with broken wings, Bloom Fever, splinters, headaches.  But she had never before encountered an amnesiac.

She grabbed the napkins off the counter and returned to the room.

“Here you go!  Let me—”  She stopped mid-sentence.  The porridge was no longer on the dresser.  Now, it sat in Nova’s lap, above the comforter.  Nova herself looked up questioningly at Fluttershy, a steaming spoonful of porridge hovering just before her open mouth.

Sensing something was amiss, Nova returned the spoon to the bowl.  “What’s wrong?  What happened?”  A blemish of guilt spread across her face—suddenly she couldn’t escape the feeling that she had done something wrong, that by eating the porridge she had broken some unspoken rule.

“Oh, no, don’t worry,” Fluttershy said soothingly, heading toward the bed.  “It’s nothing, it’s nothing.  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”  She sat next to Nova’s side of the bed while Nova stared red-faced into the porridge.

“What... what did I do?  I’m very sorry for it, I promise.”

“No, it’s nothing.  It’s just... I put the porridge on the dresser.  How did you get it without leaving the bed?”

Nova looked at Fluttershy, then at the bowl of porridge, then at the dresser, then back at the bowl of porridge with an intense scrutiny.  She closed her eyes, focusing all of her efforts on remembering.

“I... I don’t know.  I mean, I remember you putting the porridge on the dresser.  And then I remember thinking it looked delicious.  I could see the steam rising from here, and I could smell it, too.  So... I just wanted it.  And then I was eating it.”  She turned to Fluttershy with pleading eyes, eyes childlike with innocence and remorse—but adult with a deep, striking fear that went beyond the scope of the porridge; the porridge was merely a reminder that she didn’t belong, that even in the mundane act of eating, she was able to estrange herself and upset her new friend.

“That’s okay,” Fluttershy said.  “I’m not mad.  Of course I’m not mad!”  She smiled in an attempt to prove she wasn’t upset.  “So,” she said, hoping to change the topic, “how is it?”

Nova brightened immediately.  “It’s delicious!  I love it.  Thanks so much, Fluttershy.”

Fluttershy smiled.  “Just glad to see you’re feeling better.  Oh—I’d better go make sure I turned the stove off.”

As she closed the door behind her, her smiled faded.  Now there was another mystery on her list, another unknown to be solved.

Oh, Nova, she thought.  Nova, Nova...

***

“...And then the porridge was in her lap, even though I was only gone for a few seconds and she couldn’t have possibly gotten out of bed.”

Twilight waved a hoof, dismissing the issue.  “Okay, Fluttershy.  She probably just... moves quickly.  To be honest, I’m more worried about her health.  How is she?”

Sitting around the table in the kitchen, Fluttershy lowered her voice while throwing a glance to the hallway.  She didn’t think Nova could hear from such a distance and behind a closed door, but it couldn’t hurt to be safe.

“She’s healing just fine.  Faster than I expected, actually.  Listen, Twilight, I think there’s something... unusual about her.”

Twilight smiled.  “Aw, you’re just underestimating your abilities.  She’s healing quickly because of you, Fluttershy.  Nopony can nurture a creature back to health like you can.  You really have a gift.”

Fluttershy bit her lip.  She didn’t know why she was so worried.  It had to do with Nova’s little curiosities—the porridge, the glowing, the amnesia; and even though each of those mysteries was innocent enough, she couldn’t escape the feeling that combined they signaled something with great foreboding.

“But... the porridge...”

Twilight rolled her eyes.  “I told you, Fluttershy, she probably just got out of bed.  Don’t worry about it.”

“I think she used magic.”

Another eye roll.  “Fluttershy, she doesn’t have a horn.”

Fluttershy was beginning to feel frustrated—emotion she didn’t feel very often, and so when she did, it was very difficult for her to control.

“Twilight, you saw her fall out of the sky.  Why won’t you believe that she can use magic?”

Twilight blinked; such an assertive tone was Fluttershy’s way of yelling, and therefore was always a surprise to hear.

“Well, Fluttershy... it’s logic.  Inductive reasoning.  Every unicorn ever observed has been able to perform at least some amount of magic, and every non unicorn ever observed hasn’t.  Nova isn’t a unicorn.  Therefore, Nova can’t use magic.”

“But—”

“Here’s another example to help you understand.  All crows we’ve ever seen have been black.  Therefore, all crows are black.”

Fluttershy looked away, mumbling something.

“What?”

“I said, I’ve seen a white crow.”

“Well...”  But she could think of nothing to say.  Had she just lost a game of reasoning?  She began to reevaluate their discussion.  It was true, she had seen Nova fall out of the sky.  Would it really be so incredible if she could also use magic?

“I think I’m right, Twilight.  And...” She lowered her voice to a hushed whisper, though she still wasn’t sure why.  “She glows.”

Twilight’s eyebrows rose.  “What do you mean—”

Just then, the kitchen door burst open, and a pink blur sped through it.

“Is she awake?  Can I meet her?  What’s her name?  Did you tell her about me yet?  Oh, also, is she okay?  I think I should have asked that first.”

“Hi, Pinkie,” Fluttershy and Twilight said in chorus—Twilight with an amiable smile and Fluttershy with a troubled frown.  She was always happy to see her friends, but at that moment she didn’t feel like dealing with Pinkie.  Too much was happening too quickly, and the feeling of dread kept growing, spurred by some deep intuition that she didn’t understand.  But she had no way to express this feeling, not without Twilight scoffing at her like before.  So she kept her mouth shut, and all the while the feeling grew.

“She’s improving,” Fluttershy said, responding to Pinkie’s question, “but she still needs to be alone.  Maybe you both should—”

Just then a voice, small and meek, spoke out from behind.  “Fluttershy?”  The three ponies turned in surprise.  In the doorway connecting the kitchen and the hallway stood Nova, who peered back with a nervous and nearly apologetic grin.  “I’m sorry to bother you.  I just wanted to stretch my legs.  Are these your friends?”

“Yep!”  Pinkie nodded her head so voraciously that her mane sprung crazily up and down like a yo-yo.  “And you’re that pony who fell from the sky!”  In the blink of an eye she was next to Nova, wrapping a hoof around her shoulder and pulling her close in a friendly, albeit rather tight, hug.  “I’m Pinkie Pie!  And now you know my name and I know yours and so therefore by Pinkie’s Law, we’re friends!”

Pinkie’s foreleg was squeezing her so tightly that her golden face began burning bright red.  “It’s... nice... to meet you,” she said, her voice strained.

“Pinkie!  Give her room!”  With a pop Twilight teleported to Pinkie and began prying her off the light-headed Nova.  “Sorry about that,” Twilight said, as Nova regained her breath, face returning to its normal color.  “That’s just Pinkie.  I’m Twilight.  It’s a pleasure to meet you.”  She extended a hoof.

“I’m Nova,” the golden mare said, staring at the hoof in confusion.  She could tell she was supposed to do something, but she wasn’t sure what.  Twilight’s friendly grin faltered while her hoof stood out awkwardly in the air, alone.  After a few awkward seconds, Nova realized what she was expected to do, her face lighting up in recognition.  She extended her own hoof, meeting Twilight’s.

Is this a gesture of greeting? she thought.  I hope I am doing this correctly.

Twilight, no stranger to awkward scenarios, visibly relaxed and let out a mental breath of relief when Nova caught on.  She put her hoof down and smiled once more at the quiet golden pony before her. Maybe Fluttershy was right—there was something unusual about her.  It was hard to tell just what, though; she was of average size, and though her color was unusual, Twilight had met golden mares before.  Perhaps none with this magnitude of... sheen, however.  And maybe there was something strange about those curious honey-gold eyes, not in their color but in their shape, the way they stared out at the world as if everything were new but familiar at the same time.

After several moments of studying her closely, she realized she was staring.  “So, where are you from?” she asked, hoping the return of conversation would break the awkward quiet.

“Don’t be silly!” Pinkie chimed in.  “Didn’t you see her fall from the sky?”

“Well, yes,” Twilight said slowly and carefully.  “But there must be more to it than that.  It’s not like she appeared out of nowhere.  So,” she smiled brightly at Nova, “where are you from?”

Nova shrunk back under Twilight’s gaze.

The sky?  Up there from the blue?

“I... don’t know...”  She retreated back to the doorway.  “I don’t remember.”

The sky?

“I’m going to go back to my room—Fluttershy’s room—the room Fluttershy is letting me use—to lie down now.”

Twilight’s grin faltered for the second time.  “Oh... kay?  Goodbye?”  But she was already gone.  “Gosh, Fluttershy.  She might be even shyer than you are.”

Fluttershy sighed, leaning against the table and resting her head in her hooves.  “I think she’s just confused.  She doesn’t know who she is.  That blow to the head really damaged her memory.”  She sighed again, this time with sadness weighing down the wavering breath.  “I don’t know if I can help her.”

“Of course you can, Fluttershy,” Twilight said, smiling and sitting down at the table opposite her friend.  “She wouldn’t even be out of bed if it weren’t for you.”  Her horn glowed, and so did the mug of tea on the table.  “If I were you, I’d—AH!”  She let out a blunt yell, falling back from the table.  The mug crashed to the ground, where it shattered into a puzzle of shards.

Pinkie gasped.  “Twilight!”

Fluttershy bent down to help her friend up.  “What’s wrong, Twilight?  What happened?”

The unicorn groaned, rubbing her head with a hoof and shakily getting back up.  “I... don’t know.  It didn’t hurt.  I just didn’t expect it.”

“What was it?” Pinkie asked, looking her friend all over as if expecting to find an injury.

“I’m not sure... I just tried to levitate this mug and it felt... weird.”

“Weird?” Fluttershy asked.

Twilight nodded.  “It’s hard to explain if you’re not a unicorn, but... when I used magic just then, it felt... off.  Kind of like—”  Her eyes widened, and with a gasp she turned around, facing the door.  “I’ve felt this before.”  Turning back to her friends: “Fluttershy, Pinkie, I have to go.  I think something’s happening, but I can’t be sure.  It could be serious.”

“...Serious?” Pinkie gulped.

Twilight smiled.  “Don’t worry, Pinkie, it’s probably nothing.  But I have to go run tests.”  Then she turned again, and with a hasty gallop and a gentle slam of the door, she was gone.

Pinkie turned to Fluttershy.  “Do... you know what just happened?”

The pegasus shook her head.  “I have no—”

“If you... see AJ or Rarity or Rainbow...” Twilight said between enormous breaths, peering through the kitchen’s circular window, “...tell them... I said... hi.”  Then she was gone again.

After a few moments of silence, Pinkie turned slowly to Fluttershy again.  “Oooooooh... kaaaaaay... I do not know what just happened.”

“I don’t, either,” Fluttershy said, but in her head the pieces were beginning to fall into place.  She wasn’t sure what had just happened with Twilight.  She wasn’t sure why Nova glowed in the night, or why she fell from the sky, or where she came from or even who she really was.  But she did know that, in some way, each of those peculiarities were connected.  And the feeling that something enormous was heading directly toward them grew and grew.

***

“Your friends seemed nice,” Nova said, sipping from a hot mug of something delicious.  She wasn’t sure what it was, but Fluttershy had made it on the stove by pouring leaves and some sort of powder into boiling water.  It was bittersweet, and reminded her of... of a similar drink from her home.  Something her mother used to make.  Conflicting emotions washed over her as she took another sip.  How could she remember the taste of a drink but not her own mother’s face?  Suddenly she felt incredibly alone, and it was only by glancing up to the yellow pegasus sitting next to her bed that she was able to hold in homesick tears for a home she couldn’t remember.

Fluttershy grinned.  “Oh, you’ve only met two of them.  I’m sure you’ll like the others just as much.”

“When will I get to meet them?”

“Tomorrow, I think.  They were going to come over today, but something’s going on in town.”  She glanced to the window, peering into the night.  “Living out here, all that commotion never reaches me.  At least, not for a few more days.”

Nova nodded and took another sip.  Though she didn’t know it, she was beginning to glow again.  Fluttershy had noticed immediately when she walked in, and as the dusk turned to night it only became more and more apparent; she grew brighter as the sky grew darker.

Fluttershy said nothing to her luminous friend.  Over the past two days, they had gotten to know each other through conversation as well as silence.  In the silence, Fluttershy learned from the little details of Nova’s actions; from the way she stared with wonder and wistfulness out the window each night, from her habit of squeezing her eyes tight with every blink, from her restless sleep of tossing and turning that nearly always resulted in the comforter shed onto the ground.

Fluttershy nearly mentioned to her that she was glowing, but decided not to.  Maybe if her memory started coming back, she would notice on her own.

“I don’t know if I want to meet them,” Nova said suddenly.

“What?”

“Your friends.”  She shrank back under the comforter.  “I don’t know if I want to meet them.”

“Why not?  They’re excited to meet you.  And they’re the best friends anypony could ask for.  You’ll love them, I’m sure.”

“I know... but Fluttershy... what if they get to know me, and we become friends, and then my memory returns?  What if I’m a very different pony with my memories?  Maybe they wouldn’t like me as much.”  Her eyes widened with a new realization.  “What if I’m actually really mean?”

Fluttershy smiled reassuringly.  “Nova, that’s not how it works.  You may have lost your memories, but you’re still you, and when we find a way to get your memories back, you won’t be any different.”

Nova nodded, then stared off into a distance seen only by herself.

Twilight had been right—she was incredibly shy.  Not in the same way Fluttershy was shy, with quiet, nervous mumblings; no, Nova was more reserved, opting for silence rather than meek conversation.  She said little because there wasn’t much for her to say—except to ask questions.  Many questions.  She was curious about everything, asking about Fluttershy’s wings, the photos hanging on her bedroom wall, the ingredients used in her delicious porridge, the dim and somehow lonely wailing heard in the distance every night before she went to sleep.

Fluttershy had patiently answered each question.  “These wings are for flying.  All pegasi have them.  Those are my parents, back before I was born.  I grow my own grain and sprinkle in daisy shavings.  That is the sound of the Ponyville train, which runs twice a day.”  Explaining each one while Nova listened, golden eyes soaking up everything.

She was quick to learn, but also quick to guilt.  After almost any action, be it eating porridge or making her bed, she’d look to Fluttershy for signs of anxiety, to make sure nothing she had done had disturbed her new friend.  It was a habit that bothered Fluttershy, who simply wanted Nova to be happy, and to foster the return of her memory.  But day after day, she continued to give that glance, like a child looking to her mother for either encouragement or admonishment, unsure which she would find.  And day after day, her memory showed no sign of improving, and Fluttershy began to fear that the old Nova, the one that existed right up until she ran into a tree, was being replaced by a new Nova, a Nova who knew only what Fluttershy taught her, a Nova that was born in the exact moment the old Nova disappeared with a heavy thud of skull meeting tree.

Nova took another sip from the steaming mug.

There was a knock on the front door.

Fluttershy looked up in surprise.  “I wonder who that could be?  It’s getting late for visitors.”  Maybe Twilight is back with news about... whatever it was that happened to her in the kitchen today.  “I’ll be right back.”

Nova just nodded.

Fluttershy left the room and made the short journey to the front door.  She pulled it open, unsure what to expect.

Outside, seemingly every unicorn in Ponyville was massed together in one large lump of distress.

“Miss Fluttershy, you need to help us!”

“I can’t use magic and I feel dizzy!”

“Me too!”

“Do you know of any cures for this?”

The murmuring voices of anxiety increased and rose to a crescendo as she stepped out onto her porch.  This was Fluttershy’s worst nightmare, every one of her fears combined: a large number of ponies staring at her, all of them needing her help, none of them with a problem she could cure.

“Um,” she said, beginning to panic, retreating slightly into the doorway.  “Um... have you talked to... Twilight?”

“She wasn’t home!”

“She’s probably having the same problems!”

Fluttershy gulped.  “So... what’s the matter, again?”

“We can’t use magic!”

“It just won’t work!”

“I think our horns are broken!”

“Oooh,” Fluttershy groaned, and she couldn’t think of anything to tell them so she just repeated that over and over, nervously looking around and unsure what to do.  “Oooh, dear....”

She shut the door and shakily headed back to Nova’s room.

“Who was it?” Nova asked, sitting up in bed and watching Fluttershy with concern.

Fluttershy closed the bedroom door.  Then she slouched down against it, sliding to the floor and covering her face with her hooves.

“It was the unicorns,” she said.  “I think something very bad is happening.”

***

“Are you sure, Princess?”

“Yes.  I’ve been afraid this would happen ever since the incident with Thade, but I was never sure until now.”

“Then Fluttershy was right. Oh, I feel awful.  I didn’t believe her.”

“She will forgive you, if you ask it of her.”

“I know.  I will.  So if Nova’s here... why hasn’t it happened yet?”

“You say she doesn’t remember anything, and that maybe she has amnesia.  That could be why.  Also, it is up to her to decide.”

“You mean she has a choice?”

“Of course she has a choice, Twilight.  She could very well refuse.”

“But why would she refuse?  How could she say no?”

“Twilight, we are in this position because of our own flaws.  She will determine if we are deserving.  It is a privilege, not a right.”

“Do you think she will refuse?”

“I don’t know.  But I trust she will make the right decision.”

“So then... what do we do?”

“The question is not what will we do; it is what will you do.”

“Me?”

“Yes.  You and your friends.  It was you who found her, and it will be you who see her through.  Help her, teach her, learn from her, and the question of what you must do will be answered.”

“I still don’t understand, but if you say so, Princess, then that’s what we’ll do.  And I know my friends will agree.”

“Thank you.  I have faith in you.  Oh, and take this with you.  It may come in handy.”

“What is it?”

“If you ever need it, you’ll see.”

“Thank you.  It’s beautiful. But... take it with us?  Are we going somewhere?”

“I don’t know.  But soon you’ll find out.  Good luck, Twilight.”

“Thank you, Princess.”

***

The Cures and Curiosities of the Pony Brain

Chapter Eighteen: Amnesia

Amnesia can be caused by many factors, the most common being a head injury or brain damage.  Amnesia may also occur after a traumatic event causes psychological repression; however, this is not due not to physical impairment but instead to an intense desire to forget.  This chapter will primarily discuss the “physical” amnesia caused by an external injury.  To learn more about repression, turn to Chapter Six.

Amnesia can be broken down into two categories:

Anterograde amnesia, in which one cannot form new memories, and

Retrograde amnesia, in which one cannot remember old ones.

Retrograde amnesia is often considered to be more serious because it has a much larger impact upon one’s life.  Sufferers cannot remember old friends, family, their home, and possibly even themselves.  Because of this, the afflicted require constant supervision and care to prevent them from becoming lost or confused.

While a powerful unicorn may be able to cause retrograde amnesia through a curse (recall that to do so is incredibly illegal), no known magic is able to cure retrograde amnesia.  There are potions and herbs that are said to help regain memories; however, the mind is a complex thing that is not well understood (as you have read).  To provoke the brain through such medicines can be incredibly dangerous; therefore, the safest and most advisable route to treating an amnesiac is through more natural means.

It is well documented that an amnesiac does not have “erased” memories; he simply has “misplaced” memories.  They are still there in the brain somewhere, waiting to be fished out and put back into order.  This can be done by exposing the afflicted to their pre-amnesiac life—by visiting their home, an old friend, reading scrapbooks, tasting and smelling the food of their youth.  Sometimes—very rarely, but sometimes—doing so can cause a domino effect, wherein one returning memory triggers another, which triggers two more, which each expand exponentially until the mind has regained most if not all of its lost pieces.

This is, of course, very rare—the sufferer of retrograde amnesia is almost surely doomed to forget.

Twilight closed the book, sending up a cloud of dust that carried the delicious scent of ancient paper and old knowledge.  It reminded her of her home, of her studies, of herself at a younger age, reading old and forgotten books of magic that she rescued from the most neglected of library shelves.

Memories...

She gently slid the relic of paper and binding back into its place upon the shelf, standing as tall as she could on her back hooves; such a thing would have been simple with magic, and she cursed the dull ache in her head that reminded her that there was none to use.

In one hoof, she grasped the vial that Celestia had given her.  Filled with some unknown, sparkling-clear liquid, it seemed as though it contained a million tiny glowing galaxies.  Its aura was enchanting, and she brought it up to hang before her eyes by its short chain.

There must be at least six or seven ounces of liquid in there.  Wouldn’t it be best to try a drop now so that when we need it, we’ll know what it does?

She stared deeper into the vial, considering.  It wouldn’t even be noticeable if a small drop were missing.  She shook the flask, watching the incredible liquid splash up the sides and then run back down.

Just a drop, just to see.

With a gentle tug, the cork slid right out, not even making the popping sound she expected.  She gave the open neck a sniff, but could detect no scent.  Holding it up before her face, she peered deeply into it once more, as if hoping to see its secret within the beautiful field of pulsing light.

Here goes, she thought, tilting the vial carefully to her open mouth.  It must be safe, she thought.  Celestia gave it to her.

She intently watched the bottle before her face as a small drop formed at the tilted rim and began to grow fat and heavy.  Then, she watched it fall, losing sight of it at the end but feeling it land on her tongue.

She almost dropped the flask.  The sensation was unlike anything she had felt before, though for some reason she thought of her experiments with capturing lightning, the way it could course through her if she wasn’t careful, the immense power of it and its need to spread, its desire to find a way out.

She thought of lightning while this energy spread through her, originating from the point of contact on her tongue but within seconds reaching into every limb and every bone and every hair, a feeling hot and cold and neither at the same time.

And then, like a rubber band that has been stretched too far snapping back into place, or perhaps more like the pull of a magnet, it stopped spreading and began compressing back with immense strength, retreating back the way it had come.  Except instead of flowing back to her tongue, it flung itself directly into her horn.

She gasped, and then it was over.

For a moment she simply stood there, eyes wide, feeling like she had just run many miles but not feeling tired at all.  In fact, she felt... energized.

With great awe she brought the vial back before her eyes, staring at the liquid inside, watching it swish and flow as though it had a life of its own.

Is this what I think it is?

She was afraid to try, afraid to find out.  But the invisible vestiges of power still sparked across the hairs of her coat, and she felt full of a familiar energy, whose presence comforted her like an old friend.

Only one way to find out.

She cautiously focused on one of the books from the shelf, and gently began pulling energy up to her horn—but not from the familiar old source, which she knew to be the Spring, but instead from the new energy that had so recently coursed through her.  She felt it come first as a trickle, then as a stronger flow, until the book that was the subject of her concentration began glowing with a deep purple aura, and then began sliding off the shelf.

“YES!” she cried, grabbing the book from the air and hugging it tightly.

But on the inside, she could feel that power, that magnificent energy, had diminished by a little.  There was less, now, and with a few more tricks like that, there would be none.

I’ll have to be conservative with this.  She stared at the luminous vial once more.  How long could that last?  The drop she had tried felt like enough for a few lifting and displacement spells.  The vial held much more, but she needed to make it last.  Especially with the upcoming journey.

Fluttershy has to know, she thought suddenly.  About Nova, about everything.

She placed the book she had been squeezing back onto the shelf and stepped outside into the night.

***

Fluttershy eyed the sleeping Nova with compassion as well as worry.  Whatever it was that caused the sense of dread that grew from deep within her, it had to do with the glowing golden pony who breathed softly upon the bed before her.  Though Fluttershy had nursed her back to health, it was clear there was still more healing to do—there was still the matter of her mind.  The fragments needed to be pieced together.  But such treatment was beyond her capabilities, and as Fluttershy watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Nova’s chest, she felt the dread that had snaked into her conscience begin to grow, a dread strengthened by the fact that she didn’t know how to help this girl.

A chill breeze entered through the window, and Fluttershy watched as Nova’s body curled up with a shiver.  The blanket was lying uselessly upon the floor, leaving her completely uncovered and exposed to the cold night air.

Fluttershy moved to pick it up when suddenly it was enveloped in a warm, soft glow.  A golden glow.  With a gasp she stepped back, watching as the blanket floated into the air, as Nova’s body began to shine with a greater luminosity than she had ever seen before.

The blanket carefully unfolded itself over her, then slowly and steadily drifted down atop her, muting but not hiding the bright gold light that radiated from within and without her body, light which escaped through the creases and seams of the quilt.

Fluttershy slowly backed out of the room, closing the door gently behind her.  There was too much to think about, too much to figure out.

She made her way to her bedroom.  With a tireless yawn, she pulled back the bedsheets.

Once in bed, she rolled and turned.  Her body told her it was exhausted, but her mind was too busy to rest, too burdened to shut off until morning.

She was saved from a night of fruitlessly pursuing sleep by a soft yet rapt knock upon the front door.

She slipped out of bed and headed down the hallway to the front door.  She paused, wondering who it might be.  More unicorns hoping to get help?  She had already told them there was nothing she could do.

Laying her worries aside, she slowly pulled open the door.

“Twilight!  Thank goodness!  The unicorns in town are panicking, and I don’t know how to—”

“It’s Nova,” Twilight said.  Without waiting for an invitation, she slid past Fluttershy and into the cottage living room.

“Nova?”  Fluttershy asked.  “What’s wrong?  What’s been going on in town?  Why are the unicorns having problems with magic?  What does Nova have to do with this?”

Twilight sighed.  “Nova has everything to do with this.  Fluttershy, listen; do you remember Thade?”

Her yellow brows furrowed in thought.  “Yes, of course I do.  But what does Nova have to do with Thade?”

“Thade was trying to bring somepony back from the dead, remember?  And he needed a powerful spell to do so.  An incredibly powerful spell.  So powerful that it threatened to use up all the magic contained in the Spring.”

“Yes, of course, Twilight.  I remember.  But we stopped him.”

Twilight looked away, unsure how to explain.  “Yes, Fluttershy.  We—you—stopped Thade from bringing that pony through the portal.  However, in doing so, you let Thade pass through it himself.”

Fluttershy didn’t know what to say.  Did that make everything her fault?  Was she the reason the unicorns’ magic was failing?  After a moment, she managed a few words. “Let’s sit, please.”

Twilight took a seat upon the couch, while Fluttershy dropped herself into her armchair.  Suddenly she felt very weak, as though all the strength she had spent journeying to the Spring, separating from her friends, confronting Thade, and then traveling all the way back had been for nothing.

“Fluttershy, what I’m trying to say is... he still used the spell.  Sure, he used it for a different purpose—and we’re lucky he did; traveling from our world to the next requires far less magic than crossing from there to here.  But he used the spell nonetheless, and as a result... the Spring is running  low on magic.  Very low.”

Fluttershy bit her lip.  She didn’t like where this was heading, and she definitely didn’t like the sadness in Twilight’s voice.  To unicorns, magic was more than a commodity or convenience—it was a way of life.  It was necessary for their race to exist.  Magic rose the sun and lowered the moon, magic cured illness and brought stability to all creatures.  Fluttershy glanced out the window.  How much longer until magic was depleted for good?  When the sun rose the next day, would it ever set again?  Or would magic run out even before then, dooming the world to eternal darkness, just as Nightmare Moon had once tried to accomplish?

“What are we supposed to do, Twilight?”  That heavy weight of responsibility returned, like every set of eyes in Equestria was focused directly on her, watching to see what she would do and if she could succeed.

“It’s Nova,” Twilight whispered, leaning forward on the couch.  “You were right, Fluttershy.  She can use magic.  But there’s more to it than that.  Fluttershy, she contains the magic needed to refuel the Spring.”

Fluttershy drew in a sharp breath, trying to comprehend.  Could it be true?  She had known Nova could use magic—she had seen it with her own eyes earlier that night.  But what did Twilight mean about the Spring?  Nova has to refuel it?  Why?  How?

“Twilight, how do you know this?”

“The Princess told me.  I spoke with her earlier today.  I’ll explain everything once the others are here.”

Fluttershy nodded, head still swimming with questions.  “Are you saying that we need to take Nova to the Spring?”  The idea caused her to grow weak in her chair.  The amount of pain and sacrifice she had gone through—that they had all gone through—on their first journey to the Spring was enormous, and she doubted that it could be done again.  Not even a chance.

Twilight turned away, inspecting the neat and cozy living room, the fireplace that sat below a mantle of family heirlooms, the portraits smiling down at her from the walls.  “I don’t know.  But even if we do... there’s somewhere else we have to go first.”

“Somewhere else?  Where?”

“Somewhere that Nova is familiar with.  Somewhere that reminds her of home, even if she doesn’t know it.  Something to ignite her memories.  She has to fuel the Spring, but she can’t do it if she doesn’t know how, if she doesn’t even know who she is and what she is.”

“Wait.”  Something Twilight had said lingered in her mind.  “She has to fuel the Spring?  Is... does that hurt her?”

Twilight looked away once more.  “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

Another sigh.  “Fluttershy, there are a lot of things I don’t know.  I know about physics, I know about math, I know about letters and numbers.  I know about magic.  But this... this is something different.  Yes, it’s magic, but it’s magic at a caliber that I’m not even sure Celestia understands.  So... I don’t know.”

Fluttershy nodded, hating the truth but understanding it nonetheless.  “So, where is this place we need to take her?”

For the first time that night, Twilight smiled.  “Actually, that’s a question you should ask Rainbow Dash.  I think she knows.  We’ll ask her tomorrow.”

“Rainbow Dash?” Fluttershy said doubtfully.  “How does she know about this?”

“She read about it.  I didn’t want to believe it at first, but I think that old storybook might be pretty close to the truth.  However, I don’t think the version Dash gave us was very truthful.  I don’t know about you, but the ending seemed a bit fabricated to me.”

“I guess so,” Fluttershy agreed, though her mind was elsewhere.

Will it hurt her?

“I’d better go,” Twilight said, lifting up off the couch.  “We’ll all need a good night’s rest.  We might have a big day tomorrow.”

“She glows,” Fluttershy said suddenly.

Twilight paused.  “Yes, you mentioned that today.  She glows?  Like, she’s shiny?”

“Well, yes,” Fluttershy said, trying to help Twilight understand.  “She shines.  But she glows, too.”

“...May I see her?”

***

Fluttershy nervously shuffled her hooves across the floor.  “I don’t know, Twilight.  I don’t think it’s polite to stare at ponies.  Especially while they’re asleep.”

Twilight’s face displayed no such concern.  Instead, it was illuminated by wonder, as well as the soft golden light that radiated off the sleeping pony before her.  

“She’s beautiful,” Twilight said, her voice empty of worry and full of amazement.

“Yes,” Fluttershy grumbled, “she is.  Can we please leave?  This isn’t polite.  What if she wakes up and sees us both staring at her?”  Of course, when Fluttershy was alone, she would stare at Nova, but only as a watchful protector, and always with her best interest in mind.  But Twilight was staring at her like a scientist examining an interesting experiment.

Twilight didn’t respond.  She just kept her eyes locked onto that mesmerizing glowing golden coat, on the light that seeped through the quilt’s seams.

Nova shifted in her sleep.  Fluttershy drew in a breath, afraid she was about to wake up; after a few uncertain moments, however, Nova sighed contentedly, her breathing becoming regular once more.

Twilight noticed that the quilt had begun to slide off her and onto the floor.

Let me get that for her, she thought. There was still some magic left in her from the drop she had tested earlier, and she was anxious to use it again, to reassure herself of its existence, to feel that familiar rush once more.  And as she watched the quilt comforter begin sliding to the floor, she thought of the vulnerability of the sleeping pony before her, of her heartbreaking innocence, of the loneliness that must come with being the last of her kind in a place so foreign to her.  She doesn’t remember.  She doesn’t remember why she’s here, doesn’t remember the sacrifice that she must make.

In that moment, Twilight saw the Nova that was, the Nova that would be, and Nova that had been.  And her horn began to glow, and so did the quilt on the ground, which raised up into the air over the sleeping figure and slowly began descending until it rested atop her.

Then Twilight was on the floor.

Her head hurt.  Not in her horn—in fact, that dull ache was mysteriously absent—but in her skull.  It had collided with the floor.  Hard.  She looked up, trying to focus her blurred vision, trying to hear beyond the ringing in her ears.  The glowing pony—she was awake.  She was sitting in bed, staring back with horror-filled eyes, the quilt pulled up to her face as if to shield her from some ghastly image.

Twilight turned her aching head to follow Nova’s gaze.

It was Fluttershy.  She lay on her back, mouth hanging open, wings crumpled and bent.  Crimson blood stained her yellow head in little red rivers, pooling on the ground beneath her.

Twilight could only stare in shock.  She hardly even heard the quilt fall to the floor, or the bedroom door slamming open, or the front door slamming closed.  She could only stare at her friend.  Soon she would move, soon the tears would come, but at that moment she was frozen.

***

Nova ran.

The night air was cold.  The grass below crunched with each hooffall, and her breath came in desperate gasps, trailing behind her like ghosts of the past.

She ran, tears born from confusion and agonizing guilt falling behind her and freezing in the cold grass.

Her mind, already so scrambled, was falling apart.  The one thing that she loved.  The one thing that she knew.  That pony, Fluttershy, the one who had saved her life and given her food and shelter and affection—and it was her fault that she now lay upon the floor of her own home, broken and bleeding.  Probably in pain.  Possibly worse.

A forest on the horizon.  Nova ran to it, unknowingly passing the very tree where she had been rescued by six friends only days ago.  She ran, but the images in her mind didn’t fade, she couldn’t leave them behind like the tears in the grass or the ghosts of her breath in the air.  Instead, they grew even more harrowing, as they were twisted by her imagination and guilt to portray a truth more horrible than she could bear.

The forest quickly grew dense and difficult, but Nova was driven by emotions so powerful that they pulsed within her and without her in a golden aura, an energy that cleared her a path in the thickets and trees that loomed over her.

She gave me tea and a bed and hope and her head was bloody and broken wings because of me—

A golden force pushed aside a bush as she ran through it.

She said your coat is beautiful gold it reminds me of my mother’s and oh her hoof was bent the wrong way and it is YOUR fault and why did you do that why—

She jumped over a rock, landing heavily on her hooves, ignoring the ache of impact.

She saved your life she made you live and cleaned you and picked out thorns one by one and made you whole again she saved your life and you took hers—

An ancient and giant log blocked her path.  Without even slowing, she ran straight through it, the golden sphere of energy around her leaving a clean hole in its layers, which for a moment burned with a brilliant golden singe.

And there in her mind was Fluttershy, as clear as if she were standing right before her.  She smiled sweetly at Nova, her face alive with kindness and caring and covered in blood.  Nova shut her eyes, trying to dispel the image, but it was only stronger there in the dark where everything was a stage for her mind’s eye.

She was beginning to slow.  She could run no further, and her aura began to fade as she stumbled over a rock, falling hard onto her stomach.  But even as her head smashed into the dirt, her stream of thoughts never faltered, and she lay there, head reeling, body exhausted, dirt and debris coating her golden downy fur.  Though she didn’t know it, she looked almost exactly as she had when she was found against a tree by six friends.

As her vision faded and her thoughts began to dim, the last words to run through her conscious mind weren’t her own.

...Just promise that one day you’ll do the same, if you ever can...

***

In a cottage near a forest, a unicorn desperately nudged her motionless friend.  The unicorn’s cries sounded out into the empty moonlit field around the house, but there was nopony near to hear them.

In Ponyville, the damp cobblestone streets were quiet, the shops sitting vacant in preparation for the next day’s market.

In the depths of the Everfree Forest, a golden glow began to fade, and then was extinguished.

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The Domino Effect (Lies)

        Back, I have to go back...

        You can’t.  Not after what you’ve done.

        But I need to!  I owe her my life!  I owe her my life and in return I hurt her...

        Exactly!  You saw her there, on the floor, bleeding.  Do you think she’ll want to see you ever again?

        I don’t care!  I need to help her!

        What if she’ll never fly again?  What if she’s d—

        DON’T THINK THAT!

        Why?  It could be true.  You can’t go back. They may even be looking for you right now.  Hunting you down, to make you pay.  Maybe there’s a bounty.

        That doesn’t matter.  I need to help her.  I need to fix what I’ve done.

        How could you do that?  You don’t know anything about this place.  You don’t remember anything.

        I can help her, I know it.

        How?  How do you know?

        Because it’s part of who I am.  I don’t understand it... I can’t remember... but it’s there.  It’s in me, and I can help her.

        Good luck with that.  You’re an amnesiac lost in a maze of trees.  You’ll never find your way back.

        I’ll find my way back because I have to.  We’re saving her.  You’ll see.

        Fine, then.  Go.  She’ll hate you forever.  She may not even want your help, not after what you’ve done.  Or it could be even worse... like I said, she could be—

        Stop.  I told you not to think that.  She’s alive, I know she is.  And she won’t hate me.  She doesn’t have the ability to hate.  Which is horrible, because if anypony deserves hate, it’s me.

        You shouldn’t have run.

        …

        …

        I know.  I shouldn’t have run.

***

The magic simply wouldn’t come.  There was none to use, nothing left from her experiment with the vial.  It was all gone.

But Twilight still stood before her unconscious, bleeding friend, head lowered in concentration, face twisted in effort and desperation.

“Grraaaaaah!” She stood, hooves digging hard into the cottage floor, attempting to summon something, anything.  Even a low-level healing spell for cuts.  But still nothing came, and instead of that indescribable sensation of cool flowing water, she was greeted by the unbearable feeling of her mind scraping against the bottom of a rough well, like nails on a chalkboard.  Her head and her horn screamed for her to stop.

But she couldn’t.  Her friend needed her.  She just needed magic.  A puddle, a drop.  Anything.

And still none came.

And then she realized: the vial!  She searched herself for it, ignoring the way the world spun about her.  Where is it WHERE IS IT?

Then she remembered.  It was at home in the library.  She had left it there to keep it safe, and also so that she wouldn’t be tempted to waste any more before they even left on their journey.  She had left it there, and now she needed it more than ever.

Eventually the strain became too great for her, and she collapsed upon the floor.  The world closed in on her like a black drape, but before she submitted to the blissful emptiness, she caught sight of her friend who also lay upon the floor, breathing in haggard breaths.

It took all her strength to get back onto her hooves, but when she did her mind felt clearer than before.  No magic.  It wasn’t an option.  There was only one choice now.  Twilight moved next to her friend and began to roll the pegasus onto her own back.  She would have to carry her.

***

Oh, not this tree again!  I don’t have time to go in circles!

She was crying, racked by a host of emotions that drove her forward.  The desperation, guilt, frustration, self-loathing, and isolation overwhelmed her thoughts and all hope of finding her way back or discovering her original path were wiped away.

She needs me, I can’t stop, I just need a way out...

In her mind all was yellow: that yellow pegasus, the one who saved her, the one whom she reduced to something unthinkable.  And she couldn’t wipe away the image of that pegasus upon the floor...

For what seemed like hours she ran, this time with no aura of energy to blaze her trail.  The forest fought back with every step, brushes and rocks snagging her coat and tripping her.

Trees, barbs, vines, stones, mud.  The world was a labyrinth that had no entrance and no exit, only twists and corners and dead ends.  And then she was in a clearing.

She began to calm down at once, just a little.  Because now she was bathed in that impossible color of starlight, that strange hue that only seems to exist in the latest hours of night when the grass has begun to dew and your breath is pierced by those rays of white that travel billions upon billions of miles in a journey that takes years even at the speed of light; and she felt that light warm her and spread across her, and she felt home.

She looked up to the sky, and there they were, old friends and neighbors that she knew by name.  There was Acamar, the old and wise; Mira, the joker; Nashira, the farmer; Rigel, the watchpony...

These names—where did she know them from?  Each beautiful twinkling dot in the night sky sparked a million memories of her old life, which flared across her mind’s eye like a meteor shower; but, like a meteor shower, each memory—every taste and scent and vision from those old days in the comfort of friends and loved ones—faded into nothingness, and she was left wondering what it all meant and why that fantastic matrix of silent celestial lights filled her heart with such feelings of comfort and belonging.

But though in the incredible expanse of infinity above her she felt a confused kinship, she also felt a guiding force, a sense of direction, a waypoint—there was Rigel, brother of Sirius, pointing west.  And Spica, brighter than his neighbors, defining east.  That’s the way she needed to go.  That was the way back to her friend.

Without wasting any more time she ran east, guided by friends who existed only as shadows in her blurred memories, but guided by friends just the same.

***

Fluttershy didn’t hurt.  In fact, if anything, her world was defined by a numbness, one that spread throughout her body, its gentle tendrils reaching even into her mind, caressing it and lulling it.

That was bad.  She knew somepony who suffered from amnesia after an accident.  What if she was amnesiac now, too?  Suddenly she feared more for her memory than for her body.  What if the blow to her head had jumbled her thoughts, had dispersed her memories into the furthest corners of her consciousness?  What if she wouldn’t recognize her friends ever again?

Desperately she tried to conjure images of them.  There was Twilight—that bookworm of a unicorn.  She sensed that Twilight was nearby, wherever she was, and that eased her aching mind.  If Twilight was near, she had nothing to worry about.

And there was Rainbow Dash, her fellow pegasi, that lovingly arrogant speedster.

She let out a mental sigh of relief—there were her memories, safe and sound.  Twilight, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Rarity.  All where they belonged, right there in her head.

An inquisitive part of her subconscious spoke up: How do you know you’re not forgetting anypony?  If you really were amnesiac, you wouldn’t know that you forgot.

She couldn’t think of an explanation, but yet she knew it to be true.  It was like a dream in which she realized she was dreaming: she had no proof.  She could just tell.  Everything was right in her mind.  Simple as that.

Her attention turned to her body and surroundings.  That comforting-yet-worrisome numbness still prevailed, though she was aware she was on her back, facing the sky.  There was a displeasing taste in her mouth, like it was filled with coins.

She wasn’t sure if she could move.  She didn’t want to find out.  She didn’t want to do much of anything.  Instead, she just lay on her back (which, though she wasn’t aware of it, was held up by Twilight’s own) and tried to resubmerge herself back into that floaty sensation.  Dimly she was aware that she was in trouble, that she would soon be in pain, that something bad had happened.  Instead of acknowledging this, she just drifted, lighter and lighter.  If there would be pain, let it come later.

Everything became blank once more, the all-encompassing numbness stealing her mind away.

***

A light through the trees.  Maybe one of those night-lamps that Fluttershy had told her about, the ones that were like little stars in glass that lit up the ground when the sun was away and the moon was not enough to see through the night.  Or maybe it was something else.  It didn’t matter—she could see it beyond the trees, and if she could see beyond the trees, the end of the forest was just ahead.

With new determination, she ran on.

***

Twilight heard a choked groan.  She could even feel it, traveling through the pony on her back like a clash of seismic plates, and finally down into her own body, where it reverberated through her chest and came out her mouth as a gasp of weakness and exhaustion.

She could move no further.  Fluttershy wasn’t heavy—like any pegasus, her bones were hollow and built for flying—but the effort she had put into summoning magic had ravished her mind and body, and now each step was a struggle, but one that she had to endure, for she was beginning to fear that her friend’s life was at stake.

With a grunt, she took another step, no energy left to call for help, not even enough to cry.

***

The house was empty.  Nova ran madly from room to room, calling out in desperation.

“Fluttershy!  Fluttershy, where are you?  Twilight?”

The bedroom, her bedroom, the one Fluttershy had let her use.  That’s where it had happened.  The floor was still red with blood, but it had darkened as it dried, staining the wooden planks a deep crimson in splotches and patches, thickest where a floor board had split in two.  The room she had come to love was now deathly silent, the blood stains and strewn furniture telling a story that she couldn’t bear to revisit.

After checking every room, Nova stood in the silent kitchen, breathing heavily and suddenly feeling completely and hopelessly alone.  The silence threatened to swallow her whole, pick her apart; it bore into her skull, painting a picture of a happy little cottage on the edge of town that was inhabited by the kindest soul a pony could meet.  Then that image melted away, leaving a deserted, dilapidated ruin that sat dead when there should have been candlelights in the windows and a stream of smoke from the chimney, where instead of a neat bedroom with perfect white walls and a figure sleeping peacefully in bed, there were walls dotted with red spatters like a deadly nebula and a bed with sheets hastily thrown upon the floor next to broken floorboards.  And she knew it was all because of her.

She almost broke down completely, she almost submitted to the despair that seemed to leak from the kitchen walls like jam.  But then she heard a distant yell.  It was Twilight.

Like an unstoppable force, she was off again, closing the distance, not sure what she could do to help but still certain that she could do something.

***

Twilight opened her eyes.  Focus.  She had to focus.  She shifted her attention to the weight on her back—but it was gone.  Fluttershy wasn’t there.

She drew in a sharp breath.  Her mind was clouded by exhaustion, muddled by over-exertion.  She tried to open her mouth to call out, but couldn’t—she realized her chin was against the ground.  She was on her stomach, legs spread out on all sides.

The muscles in her neck ached when she tried to move them.  With some effort she managed to look to her left.  There, on the ground, was Fluttershy.  Standing above her, hunched over, was Nova.

She opened her mouth to say something, but couldn’t manage more than a weak croak.  She had been running completely on adrenaline, but now that was all used up, just like her magic.  Though she tried to fight it, the darkness was creeping in again, blurring her vision and trying to steal her away into a safe unconsciousness.  Little by little she began slipping away.

The last thing she saw—or thought she saw—was a great flash that for a moment pushed back the spreading darkness, but then faded into nothing as she finally drifted off.

***

Even before she opened her eyes, Twilight knew she was in a bed.  She even knew which bed, because she had been in it plenty of times before during periods of sickness ranging from a slight cold to a severe case of Bloom Fever.  It was a very comfortable bed, and she lay there contentedly for nearly a minute until she remembered that one of her best friends was dying.

The comforter exploded off her and onto the ground as she leapt from the mattress and landed on the floor beside the bed with a vigorous thud.

“Fluttershy!”

She turned around frantically, looking every which way.  The room.  That was the room in which the explosion—or whatever it was—had happened.  She glanced to the walls, her quick mind racing to find evidence of the disaster.  No aberrations, no tears in the flowery wallpaper.  Down to the floor.  No broken floorboards.  No blood.  Nothing to suggest that somewhere out there a yellow pegasus was bleeding and unconscious.

Had it been a dream?  A terrible nightmare?  How much of it had been a dream?  Was Nova a dream?  Suddenly she felt completely disorientated, unsure of what was real and what was delusion.  Was the magic actually gone—was the Spring actually empty?  She wanted to know, but was afraid to find out.

“YesTwilightwhatisitareyouokay?”

Fluttershy burst through the door, and Twilight nearly tackled her in an embrace.

“Fluttershy, I thought something horrible had happened to you!  I think it was a dream, in fact I’m sure it was a dream, but it’s over now and I’m so happy to see you.”

“Oh, right.  Well, um, don’t worry about it now; I’m okay and you’re okay and everything’s fine.”

Twilight ended the embrace, stepping back to get a better look at her friend.  No cuts, no marks.  A dream.  That’s all it was.  “It was awful... something happened to you, and I was carrying you, and... I don’t even want to think about it anymore.  It was the worst dream I’ve ever had.”

Fluttershy looked away, inspecting the wallpaper.  “Well, Twilight, you see... none of that was a dream.  But it’s okay, because everypony’s fine, so you don’t need to worry.”

“But... so then...”

“Twilight.”  Fluttershy turned back to her friend, glancing solemnly into her eyes.  “I’m okay.  You’re okay.  Everypony is okay.  There’s nothing to worry about anymore.  It’s over.”

It’s over.  Twilight tried to process it.  Something bad had happened, but it was over and there was no need to worry.  She stopped thinking and grabbed her friend in a tight hug again.  “Okay.  It’s over.  I’m so glad you’re okay.”  Then she remembered something.  “So then Nova wasn’t a dream, either?”

Fluttershy shook her head.

“Where is she?”

“She... she hasn’t come out of the other bedroom.  I’ve been bringing her food, but she won’t open the door.  She’s locked it somehow.  I don’t know how, since it doesn’t have a lock.”  She lowered her voice, eyes somber and wide.  “I’m really worried about her.”

Twilight nodded, trying to piece everything together.  “Fluttershy... do you know what happened?  Do you have any idea why there was that... explosion?”

Fluttershy was about to explain that she wasn’t sure what caused the event, but she noticed Twilight’s eyes drift over her shoulder to something behind her.

She turned around, and there was Nova standing in the doorway, head lowered and body limp, as though she no longer wished to inhabit it.

“It was my fault,” Nova said.  “It was me.”

Even with her head down Fluttershy could see her eyes squeezed shut tightly and her face contorted from the force of her guilt.  “I don’t know why or how it happened.  I was sleeping.  And then I felt this... discharge.  I think I’ve felt it before, but I don’t remember.  It was all because of me.  I’m so sorry.”  Trembling, she nearly collapsed to the floor, as if the weight of her conscience were too great for her to carry any longer.

“Nova,” Fluttershy said, voice so stern that Twilight’s eyes widened in surprise, “listen to me.  We don’t know what happened or why it happened, but I won’t have you acting like this.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t your fault, and if you try to blame this on yourself, I... I’ll be very upset.”

Nova sniffed, lifting her head to meet Fluttershy’s gaze.  Like a child, Twilight thought.  Like a little filly.

“There’re a lot of things we don’t understand right now.  But what we do understand is that you saved my life.  And I won’t have somepony who saved my life acting like this.”  Fluttershy stepped toward Nova and pulled her into a tight embrace.  Twilight noticed that as Fluttershy moved forward, Nova’s eyes grew wide, as if she feared that simply touching the pegasus would cause another disaster—but after nothing happened, she returned the embrace, pulling her friend tightly.

“I’m so scared,” Nova whispered into Fluttershy’s shoulder.  “I don’t know who I am or what’s wrong with me.  I don’t know why that happened, or if it will happen again.  I can’t be near anypony.  I’m not safe.”  She took in a choked breath.  “I’m a danger.”

Fluttershy patted her back gently.  There was nothing she could say to that, not without lying.

“Actually,” Twilight said, staring out the window in thought, “I think I understand.”

The two ponies turned to Twilight.  She took a breath, meeting first Fluttershy’s gaze, which peered back with somber curiosity, then Nova’s, which brimmed with tears.  She realized that the time had come—Nova had to learn the truth.  Or, at least, most of it.

Nova’s glance burned with such fear and confusion that Twilight’s heart nearly broke; the feeling was intensified knowing what she was about to say.

“Nova... do you know the First Law of Magic?”

“First Law of Magic?”  She turned from Twilight to Fluttershy, more lost than ever, hoping for some guidance from the one who had taught her so much.  But Fluttershy didn’t return Nova’s gaze—her eyes were still transfixed upon Twilight’s, now with new understanding.

“The First Law of Magic,” Twilight continued, “states that magic repels other magic (with some rare exceptions).  The meeting of two bodies of magic, if they are powerful enough, can cause a reaction that can emit a great amount of energy.”

“This has happened before,” Fluttershy said suddenly, eyes far away in a memory.  “I think I understand it now.”

“What?” Nova said, turning desperately to Fluttershy.  But she was still far away, reliving a moment from the past.  For one terrible second Nova felt abandoned, nopony there to guide her, nopony to help her understand the unknown and dangerous thing she held within herself.

“The Rose,” Fluttershy murmured, emerging from her memory.  “Twilight, in the very beginning, when you tried to fix it with magic... there was an explosion just like this one.”

“Exactly,” Twilight said.  She turned to Nova.  “The Rose was a very powerful magical artifact.  When I tried to touch it with magic, there was an enormous explosion—just like the one that happened last night.  Do you see?” she said soothingly, hoping the truth would ease the terrified pony’s mind.  “Do you understand?”

Nova looked down in thought.  Magic repels other magic.  Causing damage.  Explosions.  Which is exactly what happened the night before.

“Are you saying... that I can use...”

“Magic,” Twilight said, nodding encouragingly.

Nova looked to her two friends in frustration, her normally timid demeanor replaced by a helpless dismay.  “But all the magic is gone!  If nopony else can use magic, why can I?”

“Because other ponies draw their magic from the Spring.”  Twilight sat down next to Nova, wrapping a comforting hoof around her shoulder.  “But not you.  Your magic is held right inside of you.”

Nova looked down at herself, eyes wide, as if expecting to see some hint of the power within her, perhaps a faint twinkle or a dull glow.  “Inside of me?”

“Yes.  In fact,” Twilight said, standing up, her eyes growing wide with new realization, “do you know why you ran into that tree, causing your amnesia?”

Nova closed her eyes in thought.  “...No,” she said.  “I can’t remember that far back.  I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Twilight said.  “There’s no need for that.  You see, when we first found you against that tree, I decided the best way to bring you back here to Fluttershy’s was to teleport you.  Because it would have been quickest, and you needed urgent care.  But when you realized I was gathering my magic for the spell... well, you panicked, and dove out of the way.  Into the tree.”

Nova squeezed her eyes shut in frustration.  Too much, too much information and too many questions.  It threatened to overwhelm her, and only by taking a deep breath and thinking of the night sky was she able to calm herself.  “But why?”

“Because you knew.  Because you knew that there was magic within you, and you knew it would erupt if it encountered my teleportation spell.  So you dove out of the way.”  Twilight cocked her head to the side, surprised by yet another realization.  “Nova... you prevented a huge catastrophe.  You... you might have saved all of our lives.”

Nova thought.  The unknowns swirled around her, tormenting her, taunting her.  But what Twilight said made sense.  “So, last night, when I was sleeping...”

“...I used a small amount of magic to place the blanket over you.  It must have encountered your own magic, causing another outburst.”  Twilight looked down, her features marred by guilt.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t know.  I mean, I knew that you had magic within you, but I didn’t expect it to react so violently.”

“It’s okay.  You didn’t—wait.”  She pulled herself out from under Twilight’s hoof.  “You knew that there was magic inside me?  The whole time?”  She stared at Twilight, waiting for an explanation.

“Well...”  Twilight said, glancing to the ceiling and quite clearly taken aback.  “It’s... yes, I had suspected that.”

Nova just kept staring, features unchanging, apparently unsatisfied with the answer.

“But only because we wanted you to figure it out for yourself,” Twilight added quickly.  “I’ve done lots of research on amnesia since we met you.  Looking for answers, looking for ways to heal your memory.  And each book I read noted how important it was that the amnesiac rediscover herself on her own.  It’s like how you’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker.”

Nova looked down, silent.  Nearly expressionless.

Oh no, Fluttershy thought.  Oh no.  She knew what Nova would ask next.  Oh please don’t ask.

“But...” Nova said, looking back to Twilight, eyes now wide, earnest, and lost.  “Why?  Why am I here?  Why now?  I know... I know I have a purpose...” She shut her eyes tightly, as though her purpose were awaiting her in the ensuing darkness.  “I know I’m meant to be here.  For... for something.  But I just don’t know what.  I just don’t remember.”

Twilight stared into the unlit fireplace.  “She has to fuel the Spring, but she can’t do it if she doesn’t know how, if she doesn’t even know who and what she is.”

“We don’t know, Nova,” Twilight lied.

Nova nodded slowly.  “I just wish I understood.  It’s so... so scary not knowing why I’m here.  Not even knowing where I came from or what I’m supposed to do.  But now I know that there’s magic within me.  That’s a start.”

“Wait,” Fluttershy said.  “She has to fuel the Spring?”

“It certainly is,” Twilight agreed.  “And now we know to be more careful when using magic near you.” Twilight sighed, crossing her eyes to look up to her useless horn.  ”Though I guess that won’t be an issue any more.”

Will that hurt her?

“Nova,” Fluttershy said suddenly.

Nova, who had been staring at the ground in deep thought, turned to Fluttershy inquiringly.

“You saved me last night.  You saved my life.”

“Well... well, it was my fault that—”

“Nova.”  Her voice wasn’t as stern as before, but it was very solemn, so solemn that Nova shut her mouth.  “Listen.  I was bleeding.”  She held a hoof before her eyes, staring at it intently.  “I think this leg was broken.  It didn’t hurt.  I was too dazed to feel anything.  But I knew I was injured.  It was bad, Nova.  I shouldn’t have made it.”  She looked up from the hoof and into Nova’s eyes, which stared back in amazement.  “I shouldn’t have made it, but you saved me.”  Her own eyes teared up, and her quiet voice shook with gratitude.  “Thank you.”

Nova smiled, flustered.  She just couldn’t accept gratitude from the one she had harmed.  The image of her friend bleeding on the floor flashed through her mind, and she shuddered.  But she remembered what Fluttershy had said about blaming herself, so she did her best to brush those dark and corrosive thoughts from her mind.  “Well, Fluttershy... you saved me.  I guess I was just returning the favor.  And I hardly remember any of it, it just happened.  But I’m so glad it did.”

Fluttershy smiled in gratitude, but on the inside she groaned in frustration.  I hate this.  I hate having to lie to her.  But what else can we do?  We can’t tell her she’s meant to refill the Spring.  How do you tell somepony that?  That they’re a tool for the rest of pony kind?  Oh, I hate this so much.  She doesn’t deserve this.  Nopony deserves this.

Fluttershy’s eyes must have betrayed some of this deep sorrow, because for a moment Nova appeared puzzled, like she had seen something through Fluttershy’s fake smile.  In that moment, Fluttershy thought Nova saw the truth, right through Twilight’s lie.

You don’t have to do it, Fluttershy thought.  Princess Celestia said you get to choose.  You don’t have to.  Please say you don’t want to do it.

“So what do we do now?” Nova asked.  “Is there any cure for amnesia?  Twilight, I miss my home.  I miss it and I don’t even remember what it looks like.  Getting my memory back would solve everything.  Please tell me there’s a cure.”  Her eyes knew the truth, knew that nothing could be done, but they pleaded with Twilight anyway.

“Well, actually, there is,” Twilight said seriously.  “Nova, do you know what dominos are?”

“Dominos?” she said doubtfully.  There’s a cure?

“They’re little rectangular game tiles that fillies line up for fun.  When you tip over the first one, it hits the next, and that hits the one after that, and they all fall over.  Even if there are hundreds of them, they all fall, and all it takes is for you to push the first one.”

Nova nodded, though Fluttershy could see she was still lost.

“What I’m saying,” Twilight continued, “is that memories are a lot like dominos.  If you can trigger just one, then it may just trigger another, which may trigger two more.  If we can unlock just one of your memories, we may be able to unlock all the rest.”

“I think I understand,” Nova said.  “So then... what’s the first domino?”

“Well,” Twilight said, easily slipping into her scholarly role, “the sense that is most closely linked to memory is smell.  The problem is, I’m not really sure we could find anything that would smell like something you remember.  So we go on to the second most powerful connection with memory: location.  We need to bring you somewhere you’ve been before, somewhere that has strong links to your past.”

Nova squeezed her eyes shut in thought once more.  “But where?  How do we know where I’ve been if I can’t remember anything?”

Twilight turned to Fluttershy, hoping to give her a knowing glance, reminding her that they had already discussed just that.  But Fluttershy was staring at something far away, beyond the walls of the room.

“Well, you see,” Twilight said, turning back to Nova... but then she paused.  How could she explain to Nova that she already knew her purpose, knew where she’d been, and knew where she had to go?  How could she explain that she already knew all the answers to all the questions that kept Nova awake at night, that caused her such distress?

At that moment, there was a powerful and relentless pounding on the front door.

“If that’s who I think it is,” Twilight said, grinning despite the circumstances, “maybe she could explain it better than I could.”

***

“Listen, Twilight,” Dash said, floating around the room and gesturing wildly.  “Half the town—no, the whole town, and probably every other town in Equestria—is going crazy.  Where’ve you been?  The magic just isn’t working!  It’s like there’s none left.”

“Dash,” Twilight said, “I think—”

“No!  Let me finish.  Do you know what the worst part is?”  She landed beside Fluttershy, who blinked and backed up timidly.  “Not only is all of Equestria panicking because there’s no magic, but Princess Celestia herself has made the announcement that her most capable companions are on the case to get everything working again.”  She spun around, glaring first at Twilight, then at Fluttershy, then at Nova, who shrunk back.  “And those capable companions are us.  We’ve got all of Equestria counting on us to help them.  And you know what happens if we fail?  Crops won’t grow nearly as well without magic fertilizer.  Ponies will starve!  And that’s on us!”  She finally stopped her dizzying path around the room and turned to Twilight, floating in the air and panting.

“Dash,” Twilight said, exasperated, “listen.  Nopony’s going to starve.  We’ll see this through.  But first I need you to explain something... I need you to explain about the city of Dressage.”

Dash gawked.  “Twilight, did you hear anything that I just said?  This isn’t the time for that!  We’ve got big problems, huge problems!  Like, Discord-returned-and-brought-friends problems, except worse than that, since—”

“Dash,” Twilight said assertively, staring down her friend with a glance that she hoped said I understand, but shut up and listen to me for a second.  “I know.  We know.  But this is even more important than that, trust me.  Actually, everypony should be here to hear this.  I can't use magic to send out a message, so you're going to have to wake the others and bring them here, Dash.  Then you're going to tell all of us about the city of Dressage and what happened there.”

Dash pulled at her face in frustration, looking around the room for support.  Fluttershy just stared back with an expression that was both apologetic and pressing.  Nova wasn’t even watching—she had her eyes closed and wore a look of deep concentration, so great it nearly looked like pain.

Because that name, that city of Dressage, sounded so familiar...

Rainbow, with nopony to side with her, turned back to Twilight in defeat.  “Alright, fine, I’ll tell you about Dressage.  But why?”

“Because we’re going there,” Twilight said.

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Seventy Four Days (The Tyrant King)

Seventy Four Days (The Tyrant King)

Seventy four days.  Seventy four.  She had kept count, scratching tallies onto the cell wall, next to the tallies of all the ponies before her.  Those other patches used to comfort her—they reminded her that she wasn't the first, that others had survived before her, and that lent her strength.  They were also comforting because each one eventually came to an end, after which she imagined the pony was set free.

But over time, her tower of scratches grew larger and larger, and now it dwarfed the patches around it; now she loathed those tiny patches, the ones left by ponies who had only been captive for a few weeks or a month.

And the more she thought about it, the more she began to doubt that ponies were really set free after the final tally.  She had an idea as to what really happened, something to do with the ropes hanging outside the dungeon, the ones she saw when they dragged her in.  But that couldn't be right—that couldn't be true.  Those were just there to intimidate captives, they had to be.

She sighed, and used the edge of her empty water bowl to add the seventy-fourth mark.  Then she sat and stared at her collection, knowing that somewhere in there had been her birthday, somewhere in there had been the summer solstice celebration.  Each mark looked the same—just as each of her days were the same, full of nothing but fear and loneliness and an occasional meal.  Each day blended into the one before it, until freedom felt like just yesterday; but then one day she would eat her stale bread and think “They used to give me rice and beans, I miss the rice and beans,” and she would realize how long it had truly been.

There was a rattling on the cell door, and she looked up, startled.  She had already received her two meals for the day.

She retreated back into the corner, unsure what to expect.  She wondered if she had just scratched her final tally without knowing it.

The door swung open with a screech, and she peered suspiciously into the darkness beyond.  She couldn’t make anything out, but after a moment she heard a low grunt of protest.  Then a figure flew through the doorway and into the cell, landing upon its side with a harsh thud.

The door slammed shut once more, and everything was quiet, save for the labored breathing of the pony upon the ground.

Nova stayed in her corner and eyed the newcomer with more suspicion.  He remained motionless, though his chest rose up and down in heaves.  He didn’t seem dangerous.  She cautiously stepped out from her spot and moved around him to see his face.

His eyes were shut tight, and his features were stretched in pain.  His coat was a peaceful blue, which nearly seemed to shine in the barred rays of light that fell over him like glowing zebra stripes.  But the most striking thing of all was that he had no horn.

He was a fellow Corik.

Nova was at once both thrilled and saddened.  Thrilled that she now had a companion, somepony to speak to, somepony like her.  Saddened that the unicorns had taken another prisoner of her race.  Wasn’t it enough that they had won the war?  What good did taking a prisoner do them now?

She watched while he continued to take in sharp breaths, and a righteous fury rose within her.  Why the violence, why the pain and death?  What had the Coriks done to deserve this?  It was sickening.

The fury gave way to a deep, unquellable grief—for her land, for her race, for the cruelty that ponies could have against one another, and finally for the figure on the floor before her.  Though she didn’t yet know his story, in him she saw every casualty of the war, every innocent life ruined by a conflict that nopony seemed to understand.

She reached out a hoof and stroked his strained face, which relaxed at the touch.  His eyes slowly peeked open, green as an olive branch.  He must have seen the worry in her, because his mouth turned up into a weak reassuring smile.  Then he closed his eyes again.

Nova, once again alone now that the blue pony was sleeping, gave herself a little smile, though the sadness still pushed against her chest as if trying to break free.

She went back into her corner, where she curled up, and, after one more glance to the newcomer, drifted off to sleep herself.

***

In the darkness of night, with only the stars to illuminate the damp cell walls, a dim light began to grow from within the blue pony.  It was as though his coat were translucent, and from within him emanated a little azure sun.

Nova did not see how the walls of her home and prison for a moment turned as blue as the sky.  Had she been awake, she might have thought of the decorations that kids made for Hearthswarming Eve by putting a candle inside a milk carton.  Instead, she slept, her golden fur blanketed in blue.

The light within him soon began to fade; they slept then under nothing but the stars.

***

When Nova awoke, the blue pony was sitting with his back to her, staring out the barred window.

She sat up and yawned, ignoring her grumbling stomach.  “How are you feeling?”  He didn’t look injured.  She had been worried, especially after hearing his harsh breathing the night before, but that seemed to have passed.

“I need to get out of here,” he said, then turned to her.  “How long are they going to keep me here?”

“That depends.”  She wiped her eyes of sleep.  “What did you do?”

His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.  “Do?  I didn’t do anything.  At least, I don’t think I did...”

She let out a tired breath.  That’s what she had expected.  “Neither did I.  Welcome to Dressage, where you’re either a unicorn, or imprisoned.  Let me guess: you’re a refugee from the war, and you stumbled through Dressage in search of shelter, where they grabbed you.”

“Well, sort of,” he said.  Nova waited for him to elaborate, but he just sat there, staring through the ground.

She sensed there was something strange about him, but she couldn’t tell what.  It was like she was talking to a sleepwalker, or to somepony who had just woken up and wasn’t sure where he was or what was going on.

“Sort of?”  She moved to sit next to him and wrapped a hoof around his shoulder.  She, too, remembered waking up in a cell, alone and confused.  “Tell me what happened.”

He grinned sheepishly at the gesture.  “Two nights ago, I arrived in... Dressage, you called it?... I was exhausted, and barely conscious.  A kind old pony took me in for the night, and fed me.  But in the morning two ponies burst the door down and took me here.  I think they took the old pony who helped me, too.”

Nova nodded, but on the inside she began to bubble with that old anger at all the injustices of the world.  “That’s awful.  The unicorns have been taking Coriks as prisoners of war ever since the fighting began.  They don’t call us prisoners, though.  They call us ‘suspicious individuals,’ and keep us penned up.  But prisoners is what we are.  I can’t believe they’re still taking us even after they’ve won.”

The blue pony glanced around at the stone walls surrounding him as if seeing them for the first time.  “I can’t be stuck in here.  There must be a way out.”

“There isn’t.  Not unless they release you.  There are guards all throughout the building, and the prison is laid out like a maze.  Not to mention their magic protections.”

“Magic?”  He stood up and tapped his hoof against the hard stone wall, as if testing it for something.  “No, no magic.  They don’t have magic anymore.”

“Of course the unicorns have magic.  Magic is what makes them unicorns.  That’s like saying pegasi don’t have wings.”

“No,” he said, taking his hoof down from the wall.  “They’ve run out.  There’s none left.  Trust me, I know.”

“Well, magic or no magic, there’s no getting out of here unless they release you.”

There was a rattling outside the door.

Nova jumped up and turned to her companion, frantically motioning for him to back away from the door.  They both moved to the back of the room, where she held a protective hoof out in front of him.  He turned to her, surprised by the gesture, but she was staring intently at the door, upon which a narrow slot slid open.

“Prisoner thirty-four, I am here to inform you of your sentence,” a gruff voice said from beyond the slot.

“That’s you,” Nova whispered.  “I’m thirty-three.”

“My name is Ebb,” he said to the door, hoping he sounded as defiant as he intended.

“Thirty-four,” the voice continued, “I am here to inform you that unicorn law for the treatment of suspicious individuals, as decreed in the Maneforth Convention by the King, states that such individuals are to be held for no longer than five months after the end of conflict, or sooner if the appropriate bail is paid, or if an agreement between the two warring parties is reached.”

“Five months?” Ebb whispered, mostly to himself.  “I don’t have five months.”

“However,” the voice continued, stretching the word out with great emphasis, “due to your special conditions, which include: one—your disturbance of the city of Dressage; two—your suspicious means of arrival to the city of Dressage; and three—your identification as a Corik, our former enemy—we are extending your sentence indefinitely, or until you are no longer considered a threat to our peace.”

“Indef...?” Nova’s eyes widened in horror.

“Listen,” Ebb said, as reasonably as he could, “you need to let me go.  You don’t understand.  There’s more—”

“Thirty-four,” the voice interrupted, “as a representative of the King and his Government, I am obliged to warn you against begging, as it will only make your punishment worse.”  He paused, and Nova felt the air turn sinister.  “But the King’s not here right now, so I don’t need to be so polite: speak like that again and you’re no longer a prisoner of war—you’re a casualty.  I’d see to it myself.”  He paused again, and there was an odd sound, like that of a steam engine backfiring.  Nova realized it was a sob.  “My best friend was killed by one of you gutless Coriks.  Using your metal toys to fight for you.  Despicable.  Well, we beat you at your own game, didn’t we?  Our magic beat your steel.”  Then came the revolting sound of the guard spitting on the ground in disgust, followed by the even more revolting sound him blowing his nose.

“As for you, Thirty-three: you’re free to go in four days.  Unless I find you associating with this cretin.”

Then the slot clanged shut, and the voice was gone.

For a moment, they both sat in stunned silence.  Then Nova’s protective hoof wrapped around Ebb's shoulder in comfort.  “Don’t worry.  I’ll get you out of here somehow.  They can't keep you here forever.”

He shook his head.  “Thanks.  But you said it yourself: there’s no escaping from here.”  He gently pulled her hoof off his shoulder.  “I’m Ebb, by the way.”

“I’m Nova Blare.  But you can just call me Nova.  Listen, Ebb—”

“Nova.”  His voice was so calm—a departure from the worry they had both expressed moments ago—that she paused immediately.  “Nova.  I like that name.”

She smiled.  It was a meek smile, the smile of somepony who had been alone for months—he remembered the tally marks on the wall behind her, row upon row upon row.  Seeing that smile made him realize just what type of hardships she had surmounted, and filled him with a pride that she hadn’t let it beat her down.  She hadn’t let it kill her spirits.  Maybe she was what he needed.

“Nova,” he said again.  “I need you to do something for me.  I need you to tell me everything.  About the war, the Coriks, the unicorns, everything.  Can you do that?”

She blinked.  “You... really don’t know?  You’re...” she squinted, as if trying to see something beyond the range of normal vision.  “...You’re not a Corik, are you?”

“We can talk about me after.  But right now I need to know what’s happened here—all of it.”

She stared at him a moment, searching for something, but not sure what.  “Okay,” she finally said.

“The first I ever heard of the war was the day the recruitment officers knocked on our door...”

She told him that her brother was drafted.  She told him how the day he left, he promised it would be nothing dangerous, it was just for training.  She told him how for three weeks there was nothing—no letters in the mail, no news of battles, no burning cities.  It was almost like there was no war at all.  She began to think maybe everything would be fine.

Then, Greenwood, the city only six miles from their hometown of Cobblestone, was struck down.  They could all see the pillar of smoke in the distance.  It burnt for three days.  There was word of an evacuation—but where was there to go?  Nowhere.  So they stayed, and hoped that war would pass them by.

But it didn’t.  She told him how she woke up one night to screaming and the smell of smoke.  Outside, ponies were running through the streets, glowing an eerie orange from the flames that ate right through the city hall.

She ran, taking only enough time to grab her emergency kit—the one she had felt so silly making, as if war could ever come to Cobblestone.

She told him how she wandered through forest, lost and alone, for two days, until she saw lights in the distance.  A city.

A unicorn city.

It didn’t matter.  She was freezing, her food nearly used up, and she prayed that the civilians of the unicorn city would be just as disgusted with the war as she was, and that just maybe somepony there could give her shelter.

She told him how a unicorn just outside the city walls took pity on her and snuck her in by covering up her hornless forehead with a cloak.  He gave her enough food to last a few more days, and a bed to sleep on for a night, but then kicked her out the in the morning.  There were severe punishments for harboring enemies, and he had a family to care for.  He apologized over and over, but in the end he still slammed the door on her face, leaving her to navigate the foreign and hostile unicorn city all on her own, with nothing but a cloak to protect her from discovery.

She told him how, on her way out of the city, she was stopped at a checkpoint, where a guard ripped the cloak from her head.  Not even an hour later she was in that cell.

She told him how nopony was quite sure how the war started, or what it was about.  Nopony knew what the goal was, or what there was to gain.  But they all knew what there was to lose, because so many of them had lost everything: homes, family members, cities.

She told him how the Coriks had been winning, until the unicorns crafted their enormous living clay beast, which stomped through their cities and had no weakness at all.

She told him how the unicorns and Coriks had made peace for many years, and it was only once the unicorns’ king rose to power that the animosity bloomed; she told him how King Hornfire didn’t trust the Coriks, and how his fear fostered a growing hatred, and that in the Coriks he saw a threat that wasn’t real, and made an enemy out of a friend.

She told him everything she knew.

At the very end he sighed and rubbed his forehead, a gesture of heavy weariness.

“War,” he said, though mostly to himself.  “I should have known.”

“What do you mean—”

“Listen.”  He held a hoof up, interrupting her for the second time.  His voice was suddenly urgent, the weariness gone in a flash.  “Nova, you’ll be free in four days.  Where will you go?  What will you do?”

“I... don’t know...” For three months she had prayed for freedom, but as each day had gone by her hope dimmed a little more; by the seventy-fifth day, she had nearly forgotten what the fresh air smelled like, and she hadn’t considered what she would do if she were set free.  “I’d find my brother Ember, I guess; he must be worried sick—they haven’t let me write to him, or anything, so he doesn’t know where I am...”

“Nova,” he said, nearly breathless in his mounting excitement, “what if you could change everything?  What if you could make the fighting stop, not just now, but forever?  Would you?”

She blinked in surprise.  “Well, yes, of course!  But—”

“Because if what you say is true, then this isn’t over; as long as the king has his power, the wars will never stop.  Even if he’s defeated your ponies, the Coriks, he’ll find others.”  He stood and started pacing back and forth across the cell.  “No, the fighting won’t stop.  The unicorns were never meant to have a king who rules through fear.  And once there are no more ponies to fight, there will be civil war, and the unicorns will fight amongst themselves. History repeats.”

“Ebb, I’d do anything to stop the fighting, anything to save our ponies from dying out.  Of course I would.”

He stopped pacing, and their eyes met, but he looked away, down to the floor.  “It’s too late for the Coriks, Nova.  I’m sorry.  We can’t change the past.  But we can make sure the future is different.”

The pain in her chest, the one that flared in agony whenever she thought of her home or her brother or her burning city, swelled into an all-consuming ache.  “So... it’s really happening, then?  The Coriks are going to die out?”  For some reason she thought of her grandmother, who used to tell her stories of times long ago, when the Coriks had first come to Equestria.  She tried to imagine how an entire culture could cease to exist, how the stories she knew and the ponies she had met would one day be forgotten.

“I only know what you told me, but if what you told me is true... then yes, it seems that’s what will happen.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she felt a pain that very few individuals ever feel—a completely hollow sadness, a sickening type of loneliness that not even a hundred years in a cell could match.  She felt the pain of being the last of her kind, one of a dying number, the last leaf on a wilting tree that had grown and prospered for centuries but was now violently and pointlessly cut down.

Ebb wanted to comfort her somehow, but there was not much he could do—no pony could quell a suffering like that.  So he turned his head down in somber respect.  “I’m sorry,” he said.

She wiped her eyes and sniffed.  Inside, she felt something stirring, like the beginning of a transformation.  The grief that had run through her like a thick and viscous oil was suddenly ignited into something even more powerful: an anger, a righteous fury, which she could hardly contain.  The tears that streamed down her face now were born from this outrage and passion.

“What can we do?” she asked, nearly shaking from the power of these new emotions.

“Nova, I’m sorry—nothing can be done to save the Coriks.  I know you—”

“No.  What can we do to end it once and for all.”  It was hardly a question—it was a demand.

“We can take down the king.”

“How?  You’re stuck in this cell, until they decide to let you out, which could be forever.”

“Yes, but you’re not.  You’re free in four days.”

“Me?  What could I do to take down King Hornfire?”

Ebb studied her intently.  He needed to know he could trust in her absolutely.  He needed to be sure she could handle the responsibility.  It was risky, but he had no choice—and his intuition told him that she could handle it.  She was perfect.  It were as though fate had locked them up in that cell together.

“There is something you can do.  But... it would require great sacrifice on your part.”

Nova smiled grimly.  “I don’t exactly have much to lose.”

“Your brother?”

Her smile vanished, and she flinched, as if he had slapped her.  “I told you how I never heard back from him,” she said, looking down.  “That was a lie.  He’s dead.  He was in Greenwood when it fell.”  It was the first time she had said this aloud, and the first time she had admitted it to herself.  For seventy-five days she had to pretend it wasn’t true, because otherwise the pain would have killed her, it was too much to spend every day alone with a wound like that.

“Nova...” Ebb didn’t know what else to say.  He moved to wrap a hoof around her shoulder, but she pushed him back.

“I’m fine.  He’s gone.  There’s nothing out there for me, not without Ember.  Whatever sacrifices it will take to make things right... I’m willing.”

“Good.  The King’s tyranny will end, and the unicorns will be free again.  Their magic will return, and balance will be restored.”

Something about that last part, about the magic returning, confused her.  What did that have to do with balance and order?  She was about to ask, when just outside the door there was an enormous clanging sound.  They jumped, spinning around to face the clamor.

“HERESY!” screamed a voice from beyond the door.  “PLOTTING!  TREACHERY!”  The door swung open, and an enraged guard stormed into the cell, clad in metal armor and decorations.

Nova turned to Ebb, face stricken by panic.

“I heard your conspiracy!  It’ll be your head for this, Thirty-Four!”  The guard swung around fiercely from Ebb to Nova.  “And you!  Indefinite stay!  You’ll never feel freedom again, you scheming wretch!”

Ebb’s mind worked frantically, scurrying to find a way out.  They couldn’t take down the guard—he would easily overpower them.  And soon more would come.  He turned to Nova, who was sneering rabidly at the guard, nearly as frenzied as the armored menace himself.

There was only one way out.  He hadn’t had time to tell her about himself, about what he was, and about what she would have to become in order to restore balance to a teetering world.  And he never would.  She would have to discover all that on her own.

He put both hooves on her shoulders, then closed his eyes and began to focus.  The guard’s voice faded, gradually replaced by a drip drip drip like a leaky faucet.  That drip was once the sound of a roaring ocean tide, and he desperately hoped it would be again as he reached out to flip some unseen and instinctive switch.  Something

(purple clouds)

began to change.

Suddenly she was there, too.  He could feel her.  She was confused (?? ?), and a little (!) frightened.  He sent out a wave of reassurance, to let her know that he was (↓ ) there and everything was okay.  She responded with relief, but also bewilderment.  A moment ago she had been staring down an enraged guard, and now she was unplugged from that plane, stranded in some other zone of existence where sight and sound and scent meant nothing.  It was like the world had been replaced by the darkness she saw when she closed her eyes, an emptiness that somehow still had colors and shapes.  Purple clouds against a black sky.

He radiated ((((((())))))) as much compassion toward her as he could, mixing in some comfort, like an embrace.

There was nothing from her for a long moment.  Then, a question (☄ ???), timid but earnest, and a little frightened.

He responded (♒ ) with the negative, and he felt some relief from her.  But he was running out of time, and knew that he couldn’t afford to comfort her any longer.  The inner realm of thoughts and feelings couldn’t protect them forever, and he had already begun a process that could only be stopped if she decided to resist.

He reached to his neck and began unfastening the cloak that hung from it (a metaphor—that's what it was.  How fitting that the realm of thought and mind would deal in metaphors).  Nothing was physical, everything was thought, but he knew that the cloak was beautiful, made of a shining golden fleece that undulated on its own in mesmerizing waves and crests.

The knot slid apart, and the cloak fell off his back and into his hooves.  He felt naked without it, and realized that he would never again feel the rush of energy, the smooth soothing exodus of water that was refreshingly cool but also warm with life.

But he knew his time was through, and he reached out blindly (⇝) for her presence, grasping in the emptiness for a moment until he brushed against her waiting and anxious essence.  He took the cloak in his hooves and spread it over her back.  The moment it made contact she jolted, surprised by the rather pleasant sensation of smooth and warm silk wrapping around her.  He sensed her apprehension begin to fade, and finished tying the knot around her neck.

Immediately he felt a tugging sensation, one that pulled at him gently but insistently away into the void.  Nova emitted a wave of distress (!!♯!!) as she felt him begin to slip away from her.  He wasn’t sure how to respond.  His job was over—that world had no need for him any longer, and began to push him out like a foreign invader.  Or perhaps the next world began to pull.  It didn’t matter.

What mattered was that he was receding fast, leaving Nova behind to pulse like a strobe light with panic, confusion, and fear (؟!!?¿¿؟??).

She could feel him growing farther and farther away, until the only trace of him were two thoughts that came in weak and muddled by static.  However, she could still make them out: one was a farewell, bittersweet and rueful.  The other was warmer, and felt much like the amazing cloth upon her back—she didn’t have a word for it, but it contained some amount of faith, an emotion that said “Everything is as it should be, and everything will be well, as long as you do what feels right.”

Then the emotion faded, leaving nothing but a reverberation of ruefulness to comfort her in the unending darkness, the no-pony’s land where he had taken her to pass down what had been his for so long.

The emptiness was terrifying, the silence unnerving.  It was like she existed in a universe that contained only her and nothing else.  If she didn’t leave, she feared she would go insane.

She opened her eyes.

The guard was still there, but he was no longer shouting.  Instead, he was staring at the ground, wide-eyed and mouth agape.  She followed his gaze and saw Ebb upon the floor.

With trembling legs, the guard took a step back.  “What have you done to him?” His voice shook almost as much as his legs.

Nova fought against her confusion.  She was confused by the guard’s panicked expression; she was confused by the strange vitality that coursed through her, a vitality that replaced the aches and cramps of living in a stone cell for months; she was confused by the motionless Ebb upon the floor, clearly dead; but most of all she was confused by how she didn’t feel any sadness for him—at least, not the type of sadness one feels for a pony who has passed away.  She felt sad, but it was the type of sorrow one feels at an untimely parting, nothing like the harrowing grief she had felt when the note came in about her brother.

He didn’t tell me what to do next, she thought.  He didn’t get a chance to say what his plan was.  But when she looked up from Ebb’s peaceful—yet empty—body, she understood exactly what to do.  The guard was gone; in the distance she could hear his hooves clopping against the stone floor as he sprinted away, running either out of fear or to get backup or both.  It didn’t matter, because in his panic he had left the cell door open.

She took one last look at the body of her ill-parted friend.  His beautiful blue coat was somehow duller, and she realized that she didn’t feel grief because she knew that the body was not Ebb—Ebb was somewhere else, somewhere she couldn’t see, and the body was just a heavy thing he had left behind. Despite this, the sight of his once lively self lying so still upon the floor made her chest ache, and she fought the urge to cry.  He had been her one friend in those long and frightening days, even if she had only known him a short time.  He had dispelled the loneliness that ate at her for three months.  But she knew he hadn’t made such a sacrifice for her to stay and get captured by a guard.

She turned away, staring down into the dark and seemingly endless corridor ahead.  Then she ran.

***

The city of Dressage was never meant to be the capital of a kingdom.  The city of Dressage was never meant to be any sort of capital at all.

It began as nothing more than a few humble cottages along a river, long before even the Coriks came along.  The unicorns who built their homes there did so because the land was fertile, the air was clear, and there was something about the calm murmur of the river that enchanted them.

The outpost became a town, the town became a village, and then, about forty years after the first cottage was built, the village became a city.  And all this growth, from outpost to bustling city, was the work of one unicorn.

Aura Augury was the first schoolteacher of Dressage.  She arrived around the time the first few cottages were built, in search of a place to study and a place to teach.  After her banishment from Weanington, she was eager for a fresh start, one in which she could practice her techniques more freely.  The University of Weanington had found her methods too extreme—she believed there was much to be learned not just in magic, but in nature; in trees and birds and the stars.

The University of Weaning thought otherwise.  How did birds fly?  Magic.  Why did stars twinkle?  Magic.  What made grass grow?  Magic.  The University would not tolerate any other answers to such simple and fundamental questions.  But Augury, though she was very wise in the ways of magic, believed there was more to the workings of the world than that.  She studied grass and birds and insects, and while she could measure magic in each of them (just as there was a small amount of magic in all living things), she believed that there were better answers to many important questions than simply ascribing everything to magic.

Augury wanted to know why some bird had beaks that were small and sharp, while others had beaks that were thick and strong.  She wanted to understand why sunflowers turned to face the sun, why the northern lights were visible only in the north.  Perhaps the “how” to each of those questions really was simply “magic”.  Or maybe it wasn’t.  Either way, it didn’t matter—she wasn’t interested in the “how”.  She was interesting in the why. If she knew the why, the how would follow.  

In the newly founded outpost of Dressage, Augury was free to study the why.  And what she learned, she taught to her students.  Her first class consisted of just four foals, the only foals in the entire outpost.  Soon, though, her class had tripled, and then became a school, which attracted many of the most curious and intelligent unicorns around, who all wanted their children to receive the best education—and Augury’s really was the best education.  Not only were her methods groundbreaking, but she was as kind and caring a teacher as any student could want.  Her classes produced some of the greatest scientific minds of the time.  Around then is when her school evolved into a full university.  She took the reigns as chancellor.

The University of Nature and Magic became the heart of Dressage, and as the University grew, so did Dressage.  The city expanded against the river, until it became the intellectual center for all unicorns in the northern half of Equestria.

Augury grew old and, in a beautiful and very tearful ceremony, retired.  She lived a humble life on the edge of the city, and died peacefully in her home.  The University built a new wing in her honor, named after her.

Her place as chancellor was given to one of her oldest colleagues.  He had been appointed by Augury herself—he had been one of those first four students, from when Dressage was just a few cottages.  He had watched as she single hoofedly grew a flimsy collection of shacks into what was essentially an empire.  Everywhere he looked he could see how Dressage respected Augury, made statues of her, made holidays to commemorate her, asked for her advice during pressing times.

He wanted to take that respect and turn it into fear.  Respect might earn trust, but fear earned power—and power is what he desired.

And he did it.  It was as easy as he had imagined.  After all, he was extremely intelligent—he had been taught by the great Aura Augury herself!  Over the course of three years he converted his chair as chancellor into the throne of a ruler.  All it took was a little conniving, a booming shout, and an adept understanding of magic.

And so the Dressage University of Nature and Magic became the castle of the King.  He ruled over his subjects with a mighty, yet incredibly fair, hoof.  He was disliked, but not loathed, just as he intended.  He understood how kingdoms fell, he had studied history with Augury—he knew what mistake had brought down King Slyder, King Sunstorm, Queen Chrysalis: they had all overstepped their bounds.  They had all let their ambition consume them, and the fear they used to control their subjects only unified those subjects against them.

So the King ruled with a hoof that was mighty, yet just; strong, yet careful; ambitious, yet reserved.  The King pulled his punches.

Only once did he ever fear a revolt.  It was the day he declared the Augury Wing of his castle—once her commemorative wing in the University—to be renamed after himself.  The backlash had been brutal—many unicorns in the city called it the last straw, the final act of a tyrant.  The King saw the uproar as an opportunity to instill a message: “Threaten the King, and enjoy your stay in the dungeon.”  The loudest protesters were imprisoned, and the quieter ones scampered away with their tails between their legs.

That was the last time anypony openly questioned the will of King Hornfire.

“So is he still the king to this day?” Pinkie asked, wide-eyed, around a mouthful of popcorn.

Dash hovered a little lower, trying her best to keep her frustration in check.  “Pinkie, stop interrupting!  And no, he’s not.  According to the story, the City of Dressage disappeared a long time ago.  Where did you get popcorn?”

“I made it when the story started to get good.  Does anypony want some?”

“Pinkie, cut it out!  I’m not finished.”

Applejack absentmindedly adjusted her hat.  “There’s more, Rainbow?”

Dash tapped a hoof to her chin.  “Actually... no, there isn’t.  That’s the end of the story of Dressage, and the beginning of the story of the star—”

“So!” Twilight burst out, glaring sharply at Dash, while discreetly nodding her head toward Nova.  The mare sat with her eyes squeezed shut in thought next to Fluttershy, the warm flickering of the cottage fireplace igniting her golden coat with light.  “Thanks for the story, Dash!”

“Uh, no problem, Twilight...hey, why don’t we get some hot cider from the kitchen for everypony?”

“Oooh!” Rarity said, suddenly very excited.  “You have cider, Fluttershy?”

“Oh, um, no, I don’t think—”

“Hot cider sounds great!” Dash said, then flew across the room and landed beside Twilight.  “We need to talk for a sec,” she whispered, cupping a hoof against her mouth.

Fluttershy’s kitchen was well removed from the living room, giving Rainbow Dash the welcome ability to speak above a whisper.

“What’s going on here?” she said.  “Why can’t Nova know the story?  It’s almost about her, isn’t it?”

Twilight sat down, hoping the gesture didn’t appear as tired as she felt.  “Rainbow Dash, the thing is... we can’t just tell her a story about who she is.  That’s what the book says about amnesiacs: you can’t just tell them who they are.  They need to discover that themselves.”  She paused, thinking.  “Besides... something happened last night.  I’ll tell you all about it later.”  She stood up to leave.

“No, not later,” Dash said, stepping in front of her friend.  “I want to know about it now.”

“But later I can tell you all at the same time, and—”

“Twilight, you realize I never finished the story, right?  The one I was telling you all the night we found Nova?  That wasn’t the real ending.  You know that.”

Twilight opened her mouth to say something... then stopped.  Dash was right—she had never given the true ending.  Twilight had completely forgotten about it.

“You want to know what really happened?  The pony fell from the sky, and then King Hornfire threw him in a dungeon, and that’s where he died.  The end.”

The room fell silent while Twilight sat in surprise.  “That’s... how the story ends?”

“Yep.”

“There’s nothing after that?”

“Well,” Dash said, considering, “there is a sequel.  It’s about the fall of King Hornfire.  Some pony came along and united all the citizens of Dressage against the King.  It was pretty awesome.  But yeah, in the end of the story... the star pony dies.”

For a moment, Twilight stared at the ground in silent thought.  “Fluttershy nearly died last night,” she said suddenly.  “That’s what happened.”

“What?”

“It’s true.”  Then she told Dash everything.  She nearly broke down at the part where she carried Fluttershy on her back.

When they returned to the living room, Dash was still reeling from the story.  She glanced uneasily at Fluttershy, who was whispering something to Nova.  She appeared unharmed, perfectly fine.

Nova’s eyes were still shut tight.

Pinkie crossed her front hooves accusingly as Twilight and Dash walked in.  “Hey!  I don’t see any cider!”

“Oh,” Twilight said, “well, turns out Fluttershy didn’t have any.”

Fluttershy looked up.  “That’s what I was trying to—”

“Alright, here’s the deal,” Dash said.  She flew up against the ceiling and looked down upon everypony.  “A lot of stuff has been going on recently.  Twilight told me all about it.”  Below, Fluttershy shifted uncomfortably.  “But we need to set things straight, because there’s work to do.”

“Work?” said Rarity.  “Will it involve... sweating?”

“It sure will.  Now everypony listen to Twilight.  She’s going to tell you all what’s going on.”

All eyes turned to Twilight.  She cleared her throat, then took a moment to look at each of them: Nova, who sat leaning against Fluttershy, her eyes no longer shut; Fluttershy, who blushed, but looked back earnestly; Applejack, who rose her eyebrows in curiosity; Pinkie, who took another bite of popcorn and tilted her head questioningly; Rarity, who gave a small and serious nod.  Then she told them what she told Dash, being careful not to mention the Spring or Nova’s real purpose—that would have to wait until Nova was out of earshot.

When she got to the part where she was carrying Fluttershy on her back, Pinkie ran over to the yellow pegasus and enveloped her in a tight hug, and both Applejack and Rarity put a hoof around her shoulder.

In the bright cottage living room, nopony noticed when Nova began to faintly glow.

“...and the best chance we have of restoring Nova’s memory is by taking her somewhere she is familiar with.  That could be the first domino.  And if Nova really does have a connection to Dash’s story, that place is the City of Dressage,” Twilight concluded.  “That’s why we’re going there.”

“Uh, Twi’?”  Applejack had her hoof raised like a schoolfilly.  “Is it, um, far?  Cider season is comin’ up soon, and Ah’ll be needed on the farm...”

“I’m glad you asked, Applejack,” Twilight grinned.  “In fact, nopony knows where the City is.  It’s a lost city.  So I have no idea how far it is.  I mean, if you need to, you can stay here...”

“She will do no such thing!” Rarity said, getting to her hooves.  “If I’m going on an adventure that might involve forests and mud and... ugh... bucolic surroundings, Applejack is coming with!”

“Bacolic whatnow?" Applejack blinked.  "Doesn't matter!  ’Course Ah’m comin’!  Granny and Big Mac will just have to work a little harder.  Ain’t nothing they can’t handle.”

“It’s settled, then,” Dash said, landing on the ground.  “When do we leave?”

Twilight glanced out the window.  “Well, it’s about noon right now, so to make the best time, I’d say tomorrow morning.  Does that work for everypony?”

Pinkie gasped.  “I’ll need to hire a Gummy-sitter!  And cancel all my plans!  Somepony else will have to give sousaphone lessons at the orphanage!”

Applejack’s eyes widened in surprise.  “You do what?”

“It’s called community service, Applejack!  Besides, kids love the sousaphone.  Gotta go!”  In a blur she was gone, presumably to find a sitter for Gummy.

“So, meet here tomorrow morning?” Rarity asked.

“Sounds like a plan,” Dash said.  “I’ll go pack.  Oh man, this could be fun!”  She turned to Nova.  "And helpful to our new friend, as well, of course."  Then she opened the window and flew out with a gust that sent Applejack’s hat flying.

“Too cool for doors now, huh?” Applejack said, picking her hat up off the floor.  “Well, Ah’d better go tell my family the news, and make some sandwiches for the road.  See y’all in the mornin’!”

As the door closed behind Applejack, Rarity turned to the rest: Twilight, Fluttershy, and Nova.  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.  But before I go...”  She hesitated for a moment, then ran up to Nova and gave her a tight hug.  “Thank you so much,” she said.  “For saving Fluttershy.”

Nova wasn’t sure how to react—part of her still felt guilty for causing the whole incident in the first place.  Then she felt a wetness on her shoulder, and realized Rarity was crying.  She could only think of dumb things to say, like “It was the least I could do,” or “I was just returning the favor.”  So she said nothing at all, and allowed Rarity to keep embracing her.

Then Rarity jumped back, like she had been shocked.  “Oh my!” she exclaimed.  “You’re... glowing!”

Nova looked down at herself, and nearly fell over when she saw it was true.  It was very faint, and wouldn’t have been visible if the sun hadn’t hidden behind the windowsill a few minutes earlier—but it was there: a warm and golden light radiated from within her, cloudy, as though through water.  “Fluttershy!” she gasped.  “What is this?”

“I don’t know what it is, Nova, but... it happens sometimes, mostly when you sleep.”  She paused, still enchanted by the beautiful glow.  “You really never noticed it?”

Nova, still staring down at herself with wide eyes, just shook her head.

“You’re full of mysteries, Nova,” Twilight said.  “We’ll get you to Dressage, and there your memory will return, and everything will become clear.”

Nova nodded slowly, Twilight’s voice reverberating in her mind.

Everything will become clear...

...Dressage...

...Everything...clear...Dressage...

Dressage....

Dressage.

***

Dressage was a big city.  Because it grew unexpectedly fast from a small settlement of cottages, it was also a very unorganized city—little planning had gone into the winding roads and twisting streets that ran through it like cracks through a mirror.  As a result, buildings were clumped here and there, streets met in hectic intersections, and even a long-time Dressagian could find himself lost if he traveled too far from home.

There was only one certainty: eventually, all roads led to the University.  Or, under King Hornfire’s rule: all roads led to his castle.

As Nova ran through the city, she did so blindly, hoping that the maze of pavement would eventually lead her to her goal.  The stars above were of no help—the night was overcast and murky, leaving no view of the sky.

She ran with an impossible amount of energy, a soaring vitality that she didn’t understand; nopony who had been caged in a cell for three months should have been able to run so quickly.  But she did.  She had never felt so alive—it was like something inside her had awoken, like she had tapped a well of stamina that never ran dry.  She could feel it flowing through her, pushing her forward down the wet and rainy streets, splashing thunderously through the occasional puddle.  A smile spread across her face, and she began to giggle, and then she began to laugh in earnest—she was free, she could run forever, and somehow everything would be alright.

She didn’t even stop to consider how there were no other ponies in the street, or that such a large city could be so empty.  She didn’t notice the frightened faces in the windows, faces which peered cautiously from behind half-drawn curtains as she ran, laughing.

She rounded another corner, then took a left down a narrow alleyway, and ran through it to the other side.

The alleyway led to yet another street, and it was there that she finally stopped, almost literally skidding to a halt in the slippery wet road.

Because there, maybe half a mile away, beyond the field of stucco houses that rose up on a gentle hill, was the University.  The castle.  It sat atop the hill like a great stone crown, and its walls were illuminated red and white from some concealed source.

“The castle...” she whispered to herself.  That was her goal, that's where the tyrant king must be.  She had no idea what she'd do once she got there, but she wasn’t riding on logic or thought—she was driven by pure emotion, as well as by the mysterious and delicious energy that ran within her.  She wasn’t thinking about the sentry towers or the guards or the high security, she was thinking of Ebb and her brother and her family and friends, and everypony who had suffered from the tyranny within that giant stone construct.

“Hey!” a rough voice shouted from behind her.  “You’re violating curfew!  Nopony outside after nine o’clock!  Come with me, citizen.”

She turned to face the guard, and immediately recognized him.  He was the one who had pulled her hood off when she tried to leave the city.

His eyes widened.  “You!”

She ran.  He followed.  She was fast, still fueled by the immense strength within her, but he had a better knowledge of the city.  Even as she took evasive twists and turned many corners, she could feel him leading her into a dead end.  The sound of his mighty hooves grew nearer, and her options grew fewer and fewer, as soon there were almost no sideroads or intersections.  She could see the tall outer wall of the city ahead, and knew that’s where he was forcing her, that was the wall he would pin her against.

All the while, shadowed faces peered out from the second-story windows above, watching fearfully.

She ran a little farther, and there it was: the wall.  There were no other paths to take, no place to go but to turn around—and that was the direction from which came the merciless clopping of the guard’s hooves, louder and louder.

She continued forward, face to face with the wall.  She threw herself against it, as if she could pass through it, but it pushed back with equal force, unforgiving.

“I’m so stupid,” she said, and began to cry.  Not because she would no doubt spend the rest of her life in a dungeon, but because she had let so many ponies down—she was caught, the King would never fall, his tyranny wouldn’t end until the day he died.

Just then she heard a voice.  But not the guard’s.  It was softer and gentler.  “Hey!  Psssst!  Hey, over here!”

She looked around quickly and saw that one of the doors to the houses along the street was cracked open.  In the crack was the dark face of a pony, who beckoned urgently with a hoof.

Deft “Four-Spear” Dagger came barreling around the corner, running right through an enormous puddle that accented his entrance with an explosive splash.  “Nowhere to run now,” he shouted.  “You little dungeon rat!”

When he noticed she was gone, he froze.  “Wh...Hey!  Where’d you go, you hornless runt?”  He spun around, looking for potential escape routes, but found none.

From one of the many windows along the street, Nova watched.  The house was pitch dark, just like all the others, and though it showed no sign of life from the outside, the inside was warm and smelled of bread and delicious soup.

The mare who had beckoned to her now held the curtain open a small amount for her to peek through.

Outside, Four-Spear suddenly perked his ears and looked up, then slowly began turning in a circle as he stared intently into the windows of the houses around him.  Nova realized he would soon get to hers, but she was too afraid to move for fear that he would see the motion.  So she remained perfectly still, hoping the darkness would be enough to protect her.

He kept turning: now he was glaring to the left of her, and soon he would be looking directly at her.  Nova watched, her heart pounding, but then it became difficult to see; there was a golden glare in the window, as though a light had been turned on in the room.  The world outside vanished, covered by a bright golden reflection—a reflection of herself.

Then Nova hit the ground with a sharp thump.  Her savior stood above her, face stricken by panick.  The tile floor was hard and cold, and as Nova began to get up, the mare pushed her back down again—more gently this time, but still with great urgency.

“Stop glowing!” the mare whispered through clenched teeth.

“Wh...what?”

“STOP. GLOWING.”

Nova, still lying on her back, raised her head up to stare down at her body.  And to her immense surprise, she was indeed glowing—a brilliant golden orange, which radiated from within her like a light through the fog.

“What is this what’s happening to me why am I—”  She was cut off as the mare forcefully covered her mouth and held her down.

“Shhh!  No talking!  And stop glowing!”

Nova saw the fear trembling on the mare’s face and, to her ever-increasing confusion, the glowing began to fade.  Soon it was totally gone, and the room was dark once more, but the pony above her still looked to the window with terror.

Nearly a whole minute passed, Nova on the floor, mare holding her down and covering her mouth.  Neither moved.

“I’m going... to go look... out the window,” the mare breathed.  “Don’t... speak.  And don’t... glow.”

Nova wanted to say that she didn’t know how to glow, and, even more importantly, that she didn’t know how to not glow.  But her mouth was covered, so she just nodded quickly.

The mare slowly took her hoof away and began to ease toward the window.  When she got there she pulled the curtain back half an inch and peered out for nearly twenty seconds.  Nova watched all this with apprehension, but most of her thoughts were focused on another pressing matter:  Was I just... was I... glowing?

“He’s gone,” the mare breathed, dropping her head with relief and letting the curtain fall back into place.  “I don’t think he saw us.  He’s gone.”

She began to help Nova up, allowing her the chance to finally get a good look at her hero.  She had a light red coat with a pumpkin-orange mane and a warm complexion, though in her present state her pretty face was lined with distress and glistening with nervous sweat.

“You were... glowing, dear.  How were you doing that?”

“I don’t know!  That’s never happened to me before.”

“Well, you sure picked a good time to start!”  Then the mare laughed, and, after a moment, so did Nova.  Everything was okay, she was safe in a warm house that smelled of home-cooked meals, the guard was gone.  There was still the matter of the King, and half her mind was still bewildered by the glowing, but she could deal with those issues later.  At the moment, she was interested in meeting her hero.

“I’m Nova Blare,” she said.  “You saved me.  That guard would have caught me.  Thank you, I don’t know what I could ever do...”

The red mare smiled.  “Think nothing of it, dear.  We must all look after one another in times like these.”  She pulled open a dresser drawer and brought out a match, which she used to light several ornate candles on the table.  “I’m Rosemary, by the way.”  One of the candles flickered and died.  She pulled the drawer open again, then shut it quickly with a grunt.  “Out of matches.  Oh well.  It’s been dreadful since the magic disappeared—having to use matches to light candles, having to run gas to use the oven, and all sorts of other things.”  She peered at Nova’s forehead.  “Maybe you could teach me a thing or two, seeing as you’re a Corik.”

“Maybe...” Nova said, not really paying attention.  She was focused on the candle that had gone out, from which rose a thin trail of lavender-scented smoke.  It was so strange how a flame could die so easily on its own, while the two other candles continued to burn.  How could that be?  There hadn’t been a draft in the room.  She wasn’t sure what sparked this strange obsession with the candle, but the more she thought about it the more it intrigued her: one moment the candle was lit, and the next it was not, leaving nothing but that thin line of smoke behind.

Everything around her began to fade, until the world consisted of only herself and the candle.  Then something strange began to happen: in her mind she could see the flame, though it wasn’t really there.  But she could see it, and she could feel it, too—a little persistent heat that radiated off the wick, warming her face.

Then she snapped out of her daze and the world returned to normal.  Rosemary was staring at her, eyes wide with surprise.

“How... did you...”

Nova glanced to the table and saw that the candle was lit again, flickering and dancing along with its two neighbors.

“I mean, there’s no magic!” Rosemary continued.  “How can it be that a unicorn like me can’t use magic... but you can?  You haven’t a horn!”  She raised her eyes to Nova with a sort of reverence.  “Maybe you’re what we’ve been waiting for!  Somepony who can help us!  You could take down the King—after all, you’ve got magic, and he doesn’t!  Nothing could stop you!”

At the moment, Nova felt like a gentle breeze could stop her.  She was exhausted.  The incredible energy that had surged through her before was gone.  She wobbled on her hooves, almost too weary to hold herself up... but Rosemary’s words still invigorated her.  “The King...” she said, yawning, “...we’ll take him down.”

Rosemary fidgeted with excitement.  “Oh, wonderful, wonderful!  You truly are a gift to us!  But it’s late, and we’ll need our energy if we’re to usurp a king!  Here, follow me to the guest bedroom, dear Nova...”

Nova fell asleep within seconds, sinking into the cottony mattress.  It was the first time she had slept in a real bed since her imprisonment.  Rosemary gently pulled the covers over her, then stood back and watched her sleep for a few moments, thinking that she should set out a glass of water next to the bed.  It was so nice to have somepony in the house again, somepony to talk to when the guards were patrolling the streets at night.  She hadn’t yet heard this pony’s story, but she could only imagine that it was awful—how else would a Corik end up in the middle of the unicorns’ capital city?  The poor thing must have gone through hell and back.

Rosemary turned to leave, her own bed in mind, when she noticed that Nova had very faintly begun to glow once more.  The light strengthened, until a beautiful golden hue illuminated the entire room, as though Nova were a miniature sun.

She must be the answer to everything, Rosemary thought.  She must be.  How incredible.  The unicorns’ freedom, at the hooves of a Corik.  If that’s not justice, I don’t know what is.

Then she left, closing the door quietly behind her, and found her own bed—and, soon after, sleep.

The Sergeant (The Storm)

“Twi’, Ah hate to be the one to ask, but... how do we go about finding a lost city?”

They had only been traveling for about two hours, but already Ponyville was far behind them, the sun was high above them, and the great northern fields of Equestria were spread out before them like motionless waves of flowers and grass.  When they had left Fluttershy’s cottage, the sky had been dark and the air had been brisk and dry, and as they traveled out of Ponyville the sunrise was a blessing that brought light and warmth.  But as the day went on, the sun continued to beat down upon them, and soon the morning’s savior became the afternoon’s oppressor.

With nothing but open field in every direction, there was no shade to be found—the rolling hills were not nearly tall enough to provide even a crevice of cover.  Soon the sun was a great fiery torment in the sky.

“... ’Cause Ah don’t mean to complain or nothin, but it’s a mite hot, and—”

“Really, Applejack?”  Rarity, who trotted alongside her panting friend, gave her a look of disappointment.  “I’d have thought that you, of all ponies, could stand a little heat, what with all the work you do on the farm.”

“That’s precisely it!  Work.  At least on the farm, Ah’m doin work, under the shade of apple trees and with all the cider Ah want back at home.  But this is just walking!  Ah can’t get my mind off this heat.”  Then she grinned deviously.  “Seems like it’s hot for you, too.  Is that sweat on your forehead?”

Rarity shrieked.  “Twilight, we must find shade immediately!”

Twilight groaned, partly from the heat, and partly because she had intended on covering far more ground on their first day.  “Alright, fine, we’ll take a break to find some shade.  Must be thirty seven degrees out here.”  Confused glances from the group.  “Celsius.”

The entire party, except for Nova, sighed with relief.  To her, the sun was rejuvenating, and its warm rays seemed to energize her as though she were a golden solar cell.  She had been quiet most of the trip, sometimes smiling at the antics of her new friends, but mostly she was nervous about the entire ordeal—the dangers of the quest, the uncertainty that they’d ever find their destination, and finally the relentless fear that if they did, they’d discover terrible things about her, or unlock awful memories from within her scattered mind.

Twilight paused to wipe the sweat from her forehead.  “And to answer your question, Applejack, we don’t know where the City of Dressage is, but we do know it’s to the north, and that’s where we’re headed now.”

Dash landed in front of Twilight with a refreshing gust of air.  “Twilight, do you mean to tell me that we’ve walked half a million miles on a whim?  You couldn’t have, I don’t know, done some research first, or something?  I’m sure the location of this place is in a book of yours somewhere!”

To Dash’s bemusement, Twilight broke out into a huge—and slightly cunning—grin.  “A few things, Rainbow—one: we’ve only walked about thirty miles so far.  Two: the only mention of the City of Dressage was from your storybook, remember?  And that didn’t give any clues as to where it may be.  Three: we’re not stopping for shade anymore.  I just had an idea.”

Pinkie gasped excitedly.  “Oh Twilight I just had an idea too!  On the count of three, say your idea: onetwothree we should send Celestia a letter and tell her to lower the sun!”

Twilight planted a hoof against her forehead.  “Pinkie, that’s crazy for so many reasons I won’t even bother listing them all.”

“I thought it was a good idea,” Fluttershy said, smiling reassuringly at Pinkie.

Twilight regained her composure and turned to face her friends.  “Okay, here’s the real plan...”

“This is stupid,” Dash said.

“WHAT?” Applejack shouted, clutching her hat tightly with a front hoof.  “YOU’LL HAVE TA SPEAK UP!”

Rainbow Dash was at the head of the group, wings flapping so fast they were nothing but a cerulean blur.  They sounded like the roar of a hundred hummingbirds, and generated a gust ten times a strong, which she aimed back at her friends.

“I SAID... ugh, nevermind.”  She kept flapping.  It was easy work; she could keep it up for hours if she had to.  Thankfully that wouldn’t be the case—the sun would be going down soon, and then she’d be able to stop.  The noise was so loud that she couldn’t hear anypony or join in on the conversations, which made the trip excruciatingly boring.

“Wow, Twilight, your idea was way better than mine!”  Pinkie giggled, her poofy hair flying back against the refreshing breeze.  “No wonder I put you in charge!”

“Oh, this is just divine! Rainbow, you’d be rich if you charged ponies for this in the summer!”  Rarity grinned contentedly, feeling the sweat evaporate off her forehead in the cooling gust.

Applejack failed to stifle her laughter.  “And you’d be rich if you offered to fix their manes afterward.”

Rarity looked up, and noticed her mane was completely unkempt, forced back behind her from the wind like a flag in a hurricane.  “For your information, Applejack, this is still better than sweating.”

Fluttershy closed her eyes and smiled to herself, enjoying the cool air.  Then she turned questioningly to Nova.  “How are you doing?  You’ve hardly said a word since we left.”

Nova smiled back warmly, pushing her worries aside.  “I’m okay.  I really enjoy your friends.  They’re very fun to watch.”  She turned her face into Dash’s artificial breeze, letting it wash over her and run through her mane.  “I don’t think I ever had friends like yours.  I mean, if I did I wouldn’t remember... but when you showed me lightning bugs, there was this little feeling in my head like I’d seen them before.  But I don’t get that with your friends.  I think it’s new.”  

Fluttershy was about to respond, when suddenly the refreshing wind disappeared.

“Why in tarnation’d you stop, Dash?  We’ll roast alive!”

But Dash had her back to them, looking forward into the distance.  Everypony followed her gaze.

“Um, Twilight, what should we do?” Rarity asked, eyeing the horizon fearfully.

Twilight thought frantically for a moment, but no answers came.  She resorted to her backup plan.

“Run for cover!  Everypony ruuuuun!”

***

They stood in Rosemary’s kitchen, the dusk sun peering through the curtains and casting thick shadows that conspired along the walls.

“I still don’t believe it,” said the emerald-green stallion who sat at the head of the table.  “There isn’t a magical thing about her.  She doesn’t even have a horn.”

“Let Rosemary finish,” said the mare who was with him.  She had a warm auburn coat.  Nova could see her cutie mark was a sewing needle and thread.

“Than you, Weave.  I’m telling the truth.  She really glows.  It’s very pretty—she becomes translucent, like a foggy window, and then this warm golden light... it’s like it comes from inside her.  It’s beautiful.”

Rosemary gave Nova a smile, which she nervously returned.  She didn’t like being the centerpiece of the conversation, with everypony staring at her and judging her like a prize hog.  And a small part of her was far away, trying to put it all together—the glowing, the strange but not unwelcome feeling of power, the candle incident.  She had come to realize that whatever Ebb had done to her that day in the prison cell was the root of it all, but there were still so many questions.

“Maybe she glows,” huffed the stallion.  “In that case I suggest you take her to a doctor and then get her out of the city.  I’m not going back to the others with your false hope.  It’ll crush them.”  His brows lowered into a grimace of resentment, which he directed at Rosemary.  “You were foolish to tell us this mare was our path to freedom.  Ridiculous.  Not even a horn on her head.”

“Alpha!” Weave gasped.  “How could you—”

“Listen to me!” Rosemary shouted, pounding a hoof against the table and ignoring Weave’s mediating words.  “This girl, this Corik, is our best hope.  She escaped from the Choke!  She’s used magic, I’ve seen it!”

“More lies!” the stallion shouted back.  “Nopony escapes from the Choke!  Nopony ever has, and nopony ever will.  That prison is impenetrable.  You’re clearly not thinking rationally.”

“Don’t you dare call me irrational!  I’m the one presenting a solution, and you choose to ignore it!  I know what your problem is—you want me to be wrong.  Because you’re afraid of hoping.  You’re afraid to believe in anything, because if it lets you down, you’ll be crushed.  Well guess what?  We’re already being crushed!”

“Rosemary, Alpha—”

“How dare you say that!  I want to end this tyranny as well as you do.  I just don’t want to put faith in this girl, who’s barely a mare, and who who hasn’t even a horn!”

“Rosemary, Alpha, I think—”

“Alpha, you’re a strong leader.  But you’ve got a thick skull.  You must learn that sometimes all you can do is hope—even if you’re afraid to, even if you don’t want to.  Because if you can’t put your faith in something, then what are you even fighting for?”

Weave, who had been trying desperately to intervene, finally grabbed Rosemary by the shoulders.  “Rosemary!  Look!”

Rosemary, face still sharp from arguing, snapped her head toward Weave.  “What?”

But the answer was right in front of her.  Nova was on the ground, eyes shut and breathing in weak shallow bursts.

***

Nova slowly opened her eyes, then waited for her vision to clear.  She was in a bedroom.  Rosemary’s—she could tell by the pictures on the nightstand.  The bed beneath her was cozy, the blanket atop her warm.  Alpha sat in one corner of the room next to Weave.  Rosemary herself sat at the edge of the bed.  She sprang to her hooves the moment she saw Nova open her eyes.

“Nova, you’re awake!  How are you?  How do you feel?  Drink this water.”

Nova took the glass from Rosemary and drank a small sip.  The color began returning to her face, which had become dull, like a sepia photograph.  “I’m sorry, I just got really lightheaded... all those months in the cell, almost no food...”

Alpha fought to contain a Hmph! of reproach.  The way she had said that made it sound like she really was imprisoned, which couldn’t be possible.  A small part of him began to think that maybe she was an enemy Corik infiltrating their city, but he pushed that thought aside immediately—the Coriks weren’t really enemies, that was just a myth created by the King to fund his war.  To accuse Nova that way would mean accepting the lies put forth by the one pony he was sworn to dethrone.  Then maybe she speaks the truth, the rational part of his mind said.  Why would she lie?  The King is her enemy, and the King is my enemy, and the enemy of my enemy is my—but he shook his head to clear that train of thought.  Down that path were too many conflicting sides, too much uncertainty.

Nova took a big gulp from the glass.  “I feel better now, really.”  She gave a weak smirk.  “All the running I did from that guard yesterday caught up to me, you know?”

Rosemary took the pitcher and refilled her glass.  “Well, as long as you’re okay,” she said.  “It almost looked like you couldn’t breathe.  We were so scared.  But as soon as Alpha carried you up here and put you in bed, you started to improve.  Thank goodness.”

“Are we done here?” Alpha said, promptly getting to his hooves.  “It was nice meeting your frail friend, but there’s a real solution out there, and I intend to find it.”

Nova studied the blanket, embarrassed.

“Don’t you storm out!” Rosemary shouted.  “She can prove it!  She can prove she’s the one we need.”  Alpha watched with indifference as she stood up and grabbed one of the candles from the nightstand, then carried it over to the side of the bed.  With a small huff, she blew it out, and the shadows grew a little thicker.  “Light it, Nova.”

Nova perked up in surprise.  “...Light it?  I don’t know if I can do that...”

Rosemary frowned.  “You did it before, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but... I don’t know how I did it, it just sort of happened...”

The room fell silent.  Rosemary and Alpha stared at her intently, waiting for her to do something.

“Oh, stop it, both of you!” Weave finally said, getting to her hooves.  “Let the poor thing rest!  There will be time for that when she’s feeling well.”

“No, there won’t,” Alpha said, heading for the door.  “Have fun with your candles.  If this city is to survive, I can’t be distracted by hoaxes or pipe dreams.”

“Alpha, don’t you walk out,” Rosemary said, her voice menacingly quiet and quaking with rapture.  “If you care about this city, and the unicorns, then don’t you dare walk out.”

For one tense moment, everypony was silent.  Then, without turning, Alpha spoke: “I hope you feel better, Corik.”  Then he opened the bedroom door to leave.

BUM BUM BUM.

Everypony froze.

That had definitely come from the front door downstairs.  Alpha turned around slowly, eyes lowered and calculating.  Weave glanced to Rosemary, grimacing, as if expecting a bomb to go off at any moment.  Nova looked at her three companions in turn, not sure what was happening but certain that it was very bad.

They remained that way for a few moments, perfectly still, hoping it could just be a neighbor, or maybe a package delivery.

BUM BUM BUM.

But no neighbor knocked so loudly—not in these times, when everypony did their best to remain quiet and insignificant, moving about with their heads down and their voices soft.  And the delivery service had been shut down long ago, as one of King Hornfire’s first orders.

“ROSEMARY BEAUFORT,” boomed a baritone voice, “BY THE KING’S WILL, YOU ARE TO STEP OUTSIDE AT ONCE UNDER SUSPICION OF HOUSING A FUGITIVE.”

Slowly, everypony turned toward Nova.  Under their gazes, she suddenly wished to disappear; she wished that the guard had caught her, or that Rosemary had never been kind enough to let her in.  She had come to them with the intent of freeing them from oppression, and instead she had brought it right to their door.  And she knew the penalty, too—she had lived through it herself.  The prison, the Choke, whatever it was called: that’s what they would face.  That or worse.  All because she showed up to help.

“The guard must have seen you come in!” Rosemary whispered.

“WE ARE AUTHORIZED TO USE DEADLY FORCE SHOULD YOU DISOBEY!” the voice continued.  “IF THIS DOOR IS NOT OPENED IN TEN COUNTS, WE WILL OPEN IT FOR YOU, AND YOUR PUNISHMENT WILL BE MORE SEVERE.”

“What do we do?” Weave whispered, her voice shrill.  “Are there any doors or exits we could escape through?”

“ONE!”

“There’s a backdoor, but guards will be waiting there,” Alpha said, instinctively taking control.  He turned to Nova.  “Can you walk?”

“TWO!”

“I... maybe, I mean, probably not, I—”

“Then there’s only one thing we can do.”

Nova gasped as he threw the covers off her and physically lifted her up onto his back.

“ALPHA!” Rosemary hissed, her eyes wide and frenzied, “what are you DOING?”

“THREE!”

“The way I see it,” Alpha said, carrying the mare easily—she weighed almost nothing—“we either all die or get thrown in prison, or we turn over this one here, who claims she’s been in the Choke already anyway.”  He headed for the door, his luggage hanging limply on his back.

Rosemary threw herself in his path, spreading her front hooves to block the doorway.  “You can’t do this!  She’s my friend, Alpha!  How can you throw her to the dogs like this?”

“FIVE!”

“It pains me to do it, Rose, but it’s her or us.  I’m sorry.”  He pushed past her like he’d push past a flower.  Nova lay on his back quietly, weak and resigned to her fate.  She deserved it for putting her new friends in danger.  But what about Ebb? a little part of her thought.  What about his sacrifice?  What about your promise to him?  What about ending everything once and for all?  And it was like a spark inside her ignited, and suddenly she felt like she was emerging from a dream.

“Let me down!” she said, thrashing weakly and beating at him with her hooves, to absolutely no effect.  “I made a promise!  Let me down!”

“SEVEN!”

“Alpha!” Weave hissed, running out the bedroom door to follow him.  “You can’t!”

Now he was at the stairs.  Rosemary and Weave were behind him, trying to somehow grab Nova off his back, but it was no use.  Out of desperation, Rosemary bit Alpha’s tail and gave it a rough yank.

It worked—he leapt up in surprise, bucking Nova off his back and smashing her against the hallway wall with tremendous force.  Rosemary and Weave were immediately by her side, simultaneously trying to awaken her and shielding her from Alpha, who snarled at them, enraged.

“You can’t take her!”  Rosemary pleaded.  “What kind of leader are you?  She’s one of us—a friend!  And look what you did—she’s unconscious!  She could be really hurt!  How dare you?”

“NINE!”

Alpha would have explained that it was for the greater good, and that they’d thank him eventually, but instead his face lit up, first with a calm and golden light, then with awe.  Rosemary knew from experience what was happening, but Weave had never seen it before, and so when she turned to follow their gaze, she gasped.

Nova’s eyes were loosely shut and her face was slack with empty unconsciousness, but indeed she was glowing.  The entire landing was suddenly golden and yellow and shimmering, and reflected with wonder in the eyes of her three companions.

“TEN!  Everypony stand”

***

“clear of the door!” Sgt. Boots shouted in his much-rehearsed voice of authority.  He was indeed an intimidating figure—taller, wider, and louder than just about any pony he’d ever met.  This was advantageous to his line of work, and to his lifestyle in general.  He wore only a thin vest, upon which was a little red and grey pin that identified him as a servant to King Hornfire.

Nopony backed away from the door because nopony had been standing near it.  Sgt. Boots very much liked to make a good first impression, and he did this by shouting, and if he couldn’t find a good reason for it, he made one up.  He also wasn’t really a sergeant.  Nor did he wear boots.

Sgt. Boots was all about image.

He had been having an awful day until the King had given him the order to break into a rebel’s home.  He had happily obliged—of course, if he hadn’t, he probably would have been exiled from the city.  The key word there was “happily.”

It was one of his most favorite pastimes.  Nothing gave him the sense of power he so desperately craved than breaking into somepony’s home and hauling them off to prison.  And he suspected that when this job was over, he’d be promoted, for yet another mark in his flawless record.  Plus, the King seemed to have special interest in this Rosemary Beaufort and whomever she was hiding.

He turned to his right-hoof pony and gave a nod.  This was his favorite part.  Sometimes they actually opened the door before he got to ten, and that ruined all the fun, but not this time.  This really was turning out to be a great day.

His subordinate wheeled back the ram, aligning it with the door.  Normally this was done by magic, since the ram—which was really just a big wooden log—was quite heavy.  But because of the magic crysis, they had to make due with physically pushing the thing.  Sgt. Boots found that doing it manually was actually quite gratifying—he’d never say it aloud, but perhaps this was one case where muscle was superior to magic.  The grunting of his companion, who struggled to get the contraption rolling, gave him an even greater sense of superiority.

The cadet put his back against the ram, his face burning red and his eyes squeezed shut as he began inching it toward the door.  It started slowly, but soon accelerated, gaining massive momentum, until it finally collided with the door in a wood-splintering, bone-rattling CRACK.

Sgt. Boots watched with disdain as the entire door collapsed into the house, the ram going with it.  He had hoped it would resist the first collision, so as to retain some suspense and to prolong his enjoyment.  Oh, well—if the ram was the best part, what came next was his second favorite.

“Alright, boyo, I go in first.  Just watch and learn and don’t touch anything.  This one’s a young rebel mare housing a convict.  We’ll nip ’er and her friend and then grab some lunch.”  He stepped through the doorway, making sure to trample the fallen door, producing a satisfying splintery sound.

The inside of the house was dark.  The curtains had all been drawn.  “You rebels and your games,” Sgt. Boots muttered.  “Drawing the blinds like fillies playing clubhouse.”  He looked around the foyer, taking in the portraits and flower vases and furniture, smelling the smell of recently cooked meals.  “Nice abode.  Quaint.  Perfect for a little schemin’ and plottin’.”

During his initial overview, his eyes were immediately drawn to the stairway landing.  If he were a rebel in hiding, that’s where he’d be: upstairs.

“Where are they?” his companion asked, glaring around like a fawn in a forest.

Sgt. Boots chuckled the chuckle of an experienced sailor taking his son to sea for the first time.  “Well, they’re hidin’, you see.  Hidin’ is what rebels do best.  But findin’ rebels is what I do best.  Look up yonder, laddie,” he said, motioning toward the staircase.  “I’ve been doin’ this a long time, and I’m never wrong.  Up there is where they’ll be.  In the master bedroom, probably the closet.”  He winked.  “I’ll bet yer lunch.”

The younger stallion, still nearly a colt, grinned wickedly.  “Will you need my help grabbing them?”

The Sergeant laughed his hearty laugh, his chest bellowing.  “I think for your first bust, it’s best if you just watch a master at work, ya understand?  Now let’s go get ’em.  They’ve been listenin’ to us talk this whole time, hopin’ we’ll leave or forget.  Probably quaking in their boots!”  He laughed harder than ever.

They slowly crept up the stairs, like lions ready to pounce.  They climbed two steps, then another two, then Sgt. Boots held his hoof up, and they both froze and listened.

There was no sound for a moment.

Then there was a shifting sound from somewhere upstairs, like that of a pony trying but failing to remain still.

Sgt. Boots and his protege turned to each other and grinned.

They continued their ascent, until finally they were at the top of the stairs, which opened into a wide and oak-floored hallway.  Lining the hallway were several rooms, each open and seemingly empty.  At the far end was a door that stood ajar, the entranceway to a dark and quiet room.

“Right in there,” the Sergeant whispered, nodding toward the room.  “That’s where they are.  Alright, yeh scum,” he bellowed.  “We gotcha cornered.  Come out quietly and we won’t hurtya.”  At this he turned to his assistant and winked.

They waited in silence for a moment, then the Sergeant began to trod down the hall.  “They never do listen,” he said.  “Oh well.  We have no choice but to take ’em by force.  What a pity!”

Fink followed his superior down the hallway, trailing a few steps behind.  He was actually a little nervous, though he trusted fully in Sgt. Boots’s abilities.  The Sergeant was clearly very good at what he did, and Fink looked up to him with a respect and admiration that was nearly reverence.

There was a short and sharp “Ah!” from just behind Fink and to his left.

He froze.  Already he knew that it was an ambush, the rebels were right behind him, prepared to bash his head in or cut his throat.  There were three of them, maybe four, and if they didn’t kill him they’d use him as a hostage to get to Sgt. Boots.  They’d do this because they hated the King and justice and civility.  Because they were savage rebels.

He gulped, already feeling a cold knife against his neck.

“What’re ya waiting for, boy?  We got rebels to sack, and I’m buildin’ up an appetite for some grub.  Get a move on!”

Fink opened his eyes and slowly turned around.  There was nothing behind him.  Of course there wasn’t.  It had been his imagination.  Suddenly he felt very stupid, and he was glad the Sergeant didn’t know what he had been thinking.  The first-day jitters had gotten to him.

He swallowed his shame and caught up to his burly leader, who kicked the open door off its hinges and lunged into the room.

“Alright, I don’t wanna waste your time and you don’t wanna waste mine,” Sgt. Boots shouted into the darkness, looking for a candle to light and then remembering he couldn’t use magic anyway.  “I’ve got a delicious sandwich waitin’ for me, and you’ve got a nice prison block lined up for you.  Wherever yer hiding, why don’t ya come out?”

He ambled blindly but expertly through the darkness, reaching out randomly in the hopes of snatching a mane or a leg or a neck.  Out of all the hiding techniques he had ever come across, the darkness was a favorite of his for two reasons: one is that it always made the experience more interesting and exciting.  The other is that when he eventually grew tired of it, he could simply turn on a light and end the games.

With none of his grasps returning any catches, he decided enough was enough.  There was a thin band of light along a nearby wall, and he approached it, dodging a chair and a stepping over a pillow that had been thrown on the floor.  Already he had the room memorized and could navigate it just fine in the dark—that was a skill he had acquired over time—but these rebels were sly ones, as he had caught neither hide nor tail of them so far.

Once he reached the window he pulled back the blinds, bathing the room in revealing sunlight.  His eyes adjusted immediately, while Fink staggered backward, shielding his sensitive vision.

If one were to look closely, they’d see a vein thumping mightily in Sgt. Boots’s forehead.  He grit his teeth, and his eyes narrowed menacingly.

There was no sight of anypony, rebel or otherwise.

“So these fellows want to play games, do they?” he growled.

“You said they’d be here, Sergeant.  Where are they?”

It was all he could do to not smack the boy.  Instead, he glanced around the room again, his keen eyes studying details and looking for signs.

The bed.  Its covers were thrown to the floor, along with several pillows, as if its inhabitant had left in a hurry.  He walked over and felt it with a hoof.  It was warm.

On the nightstand was a blue candle.  He squinted, and saw liquid wax running down its side.

There was a glass of water, half empty, next to the candle.  It was perspiring, and there were fresh water rings on the table.

“They’re still here,” the Sergeant said.  “They haven’t left.”

Fink looked around dubiously.  “Are... you sure?”  He caught Sgt. Boots’s eye and glanced down.  “I’m sorry, sir—you’re right.  They’re still here.  But... how do you know?”

The Sergeant—a bounty hunter in his younger days—squinted, taking in the rest of the room.  “Son, when ye’ve been doin’ this as long as I have... you learn the signs.  Now get searchin’!  They’re here, I can smell ’em!”

***

Alpha couldn’t stop staring at the golden mare, his green coat blanketed in warm golden patterns that swam across his dazzled face.

“Rosemary,” Weave murmured, as illuminated and incredulous as Alpha, “is this what you meant the whole time?  Is this—”

“Yes!  But there’s no time!  We need to leave now before they find a way in and—”

CRACK.  The splintering, shattering sound could only have been the door breaking down.

Alpha and Weave broke out of their stupor and they all gasped—except for Nova, who lay there motionless and knocked cold, though still incredibly bright.

Weave turned to Rosemary in desperation, to the mare who had always known exactly what to do in the face of any danger, even back when they were both young foals misbehaving in class.  But now she looked lost, with no solution, all the doors around them were closed—except for one, which had been broken down, and in its doorway stood a brute.

“You rebels and your games,” came a voice from downstairs.

Alpha knew that voice.  That was none other than Sgt. Boots.  Even with Nova’s warm light bathing his face, he could feel cold hatred seeping into his heart.  Sgt. Boots—a ridiculous name for a ridiculous pony, one who had taken or killed too many of his friends to count.  The Sergeant himself, the hound dog, the King’s favorite little errand boy.  And he was just down the stairs.

Alpha couldn’t win in a fight, and he knew it.  More powerful ponies than he had been torn down by the Sergeant.  And even if he could win, killing the Sergeant would only bring the full might of King Hornfire down upon them, the resistance would be crushed, and all would be lost.

And yet Alpha wanted nothing more than to storm down those stairs and make that monster bleed.

He was torn out of his thoughts by the quiet movements of Rosemary and Weave, who were attempting to lift the unconscious but still-glowing Nova onto Rosemary’s back.  He lifted a hoof to help, but Rosemary glared daggers at him.

Stay away, she mouthed.  Monster.

“I’ve been doin’ this a long time,” came the voice from downstairs.  “And I’m never wrong.  Up there is where they’ll be.  In the master bedroom, probably the closet.”

Rosemary and Weave redoubled their efforts, but even though Nova weighed very little, her limp body was somehow heavy and difficult to lift.

Alpha offered a hoof again, and this time Rosemary’s glare was less severe but just as mistrustful.

“Now let’s go get ’em,” the voice downstairs said.  “They’ve been listenin’ to us talk this whole time, hopin’ we’ll leave or forget.  Probably quaking in their boots!”  It erupted into laughter, a rattly hollow sound like wind through a dead tree.

Rosemary stepped aside, allowing Alpha to bend down and pick up Nova like a bag of flour, but her eyes were full of hate the entire time.  It hardly mattered—there was nowhere to go.  No other exits, no escape from the killer who would come up the stairs.

And even so, Rosemary had hope, dim as it might have been.

The moment Nova was in Alpha’s grasp, her eyes flung open, wide and staring like a caged animal, and she would have screamed if he hadn’t immediately covered her mouth.  She began to beat at him weakly again, assaulting the pony who wanted to throw her to the killer, but Rosemary put a hoof against her side and she calmed down a little.

They all heard the creaking of the bottom step.

They looked to each other, all thinking the same thing.  This is it.  We can’t run now, there’s nowhere to go.  There’s nothing we can do that won’t make a sound, nowhere we can go that they won’t search.  There’s no plan of attack we can use to take down the King’s most prolific killer.  All we can do is sit here.  Alpha considered pouncing on Boots the moment he emerged onto the final landing; maybe it’d be enough to buy the others time to run.  But he knew it would be no good.  Not with guards waiting outside, too.

Nova’s mind whirled like a hurricane, all types of thoughts and emotions bubbling up within her.  Hide, disappear, friends in danger, the Choke, the nooses, your fault, your fault, hide, disappear, Ebb... Ebb, I promised... Hide disappear...

And then she felt it.  The same power that had surged through her when she ran from the guard the day she escaped the Choke, the same vibrating hummmm that charged through her mind when she lit the candle.  Only much stronger, a waterfall now, dwarfing those past moments.

It was that place, that special place Ebb had taken her in her own mind (or maybe it wasn’t her mind, maybe it was somewhere else, but it felt like her mind).  Except when Ebb had taken her there, it had been hollow and empty.  Now it contained an ocean—a shallow ocean, like a puddle that went on for miles and miles, but an ocean nonetheless.

Without even thinking about it, Nova drew from that pool of energy, converted it to what she needed most.  It flowed through her like a cool stream, and the hallway grew darker as her golden glow began to fade away—not because she had stopped glowing, but because her entire body was fading, becoming first translucent and then completely transparent.

Alpha, Weave, and Rosemary watched in amazement as Nova disappeared before them, and then as each one of them began to do the same.

Weave brought a hoof to her face and stared at it, watching it fade away, until she was staring directly through it—and into the dark eyes of the wraithlike pony who had emerged from top of the stairs.

She fought every urge to run.  He can’t see me.  He can’t see me.  He can’t see me.

They all held perfectly still while the the Sergeant passed by them, trailed by his scrawny assistant.

“Right in there,” he whispered, nodding toward the bedroom they had run out of what felt like ages ago.  “Alright, yeh scum!” he shouted.  Though he had already passed them by a few paces, Rosemary could smell his horrid breath.  “We gotcha cornered.  Come out quietly and we won’t hurtya.”  He turned to his assistant and winked.

Alpha imagined himself pouncing onto the villain, attacking him from nowhere.  He’d have the element of surprise, and Boots couldn’t fight what he couldn’t see.  He might stand a chance.  But it was too risky—there were guards outside, and it would only be a matter of time before one of them tripped over Rosemary and figured out their game.  So he sat there, blood boiling, trying not to grind his teeth for fear it would be heard.

“Oh well.  We’ll have to take ’em by force.  What a pity!”  He began to prowl down the hallway, his muscular and crude personality somehow shoved into the smooth body of a feline; even his eyes were like a cat’s: orbs that hovered green in the dark and stared at you like they were watching you die.

His apprentice followed, clumsy and bumbling behind to his silent boss.  He took a few steps, and then one landed directly on Weave’s tail.

“Ah!” she gasped, unable to contain either the surprise or the pain.

The young pony froze.  Nova, Alpha, Weave, and Rosemary held their breaths, watching anxiously.  Rosemary was actually afraid they could hear her drops of sweat pitter pattering on the floor.  But the young stallion remained perfectly still and tense, while his older partner crawled silently down the hallway, completely focused on the door at the end.  

The Sergeant noticed his protege was dawdling by the stairs.  “What’re ya waiting for, boy?  We got rebels to sack, and I’m buildin’ up an appetite for some grub.  Get a move on!”

The invisible ponies watched as the young unicorn slowly turned to face them.  If they had been visible, he would have been looking right into Alpha’s chest.  But instead, he only saw the wall behind it, and with a sigh of relief, he hurried up to join his boss.

Sgt. Boots turned around and bucked the door off its hinges, then lunged into the room, shouting wild threats.  With the hallway all to themselves, Alpha wasted no time, and nudged each of his three invisible companions with a hoof, hoping to convey that now was a very good time to leave.

The message was well received, and the ponies shifted quietly to their hooves, joints cracking and popping from the strain of remaining motionless for so long.  But Boots heard nothing—he was still in the bedroom, and had just pulled open the blinds, revealing an empty room and renewing his rage.

Down the stairs the invisible ponies went, into the foyer.  Rosemary felt like crying when she saw the front door smashed to pieces, fragments lying all over her living room floor.  It was a sight she had imagined and yet dismissed many times, and seeing it before her now was somehow more shocking than the Sergeant walking down her hallway or into her bedroom.

There was another shout from upstairs.  “Get searchin’!  They’re here, I can smell ’em!”

Rosemary stepped gingerly over a door fragment, them collided squarely with Alpha’s flank, which, of course, she hadn’t seen.  Alpha stumbled for a step, kicking a door fragment against the wall by accident.

A rather bored looking guard peeked his head through the doorway, peered around suspiciously, then disappeared.

The invisible ponies waited a second longer, then Rosemary heard Alpha start to move again, and followed suit.  They stepped through the door where the guard had just been, out into the delicious midday sunlight.  The guard was standing beside the door, trying to scratch himself beneath his metal plated armor.

They walked past him quietly.  Rosemary knew Alpha was in the lead, but once they passed the guard, she wasn’t sure where he had gone.  Then she saw a splash in a puddle to her right, and followed after it.  She was relieved to hear the quiet clip-clopping of the others behind her.

They rounded a corner, then another, then another, following Alpha’s purposeful splashes or mudprints or other signs.  Eventually, they came to a stop, deep in the back of an alleyway between a recruitment post and what was once a toy shop.

“Are you guys there?” Rosemary heard Weave whisper from just behind her.

“I’m here,” Rosemary responded.

There was a strange tingling sensation, like the feeling returning to a hoof that had fallen asleep.  Rosemary looked down at herself to see that she was becoming visible once more, slowly fading into existence like an image developing on an instant-film camera.  A quick glance confirmed that the others were becoming visible again as well.

“That was amazing!” Weave exclaimed, voice still a hushed whisper even though they were out of danger.  “She really can use magic.  And such a high-level spell, too!  I’d—wait...”  Her face fell, and the three looked at each other with horror—even Alpha.  “Where is she?  Where’s Nova?”

***

“What is it?” Applejack said, staring at the horizon, mouth agape.  A gentle but ominous breeze began to play with the rim of her hat.

“I don’t know!  Just do what I said and run!”  But nopony paid Twilight any heed—they could only watch the distant sky, transfixed.

A storm was approaching.  But not like a Ponyville storm, carefully constructed through much planning by pegasi weather teams.  This storm was monstrous.  It billowed and rolled all along its exterior as it steamrolled through the air, reaching higher into the atmosphere than most pegasi dared to fly.  Diminished flashes of white blotched its surface intermittently, the result of internal lightning strikes that somehow seemed to power its expansion.  It spread in every direction, stretching rapidly toward them.  The blistering midday heat was suddenly gone, replaced by a deceptively light and cool breeze that, oddly enough, blew toward the storm rather than away from it.

All at once the day seemed to darken, the sun rudely interrupted of its duty as tormentor by an even more malicious spirit.  The lower portion of the storm was blotched by two segments that were slightly red, two eyes that stared gleefully down at its new victims.

And all the while, it rolled toward them, preceded by an alarming drop in pressure that made the air feel motionless and thin despite the foreboding breeze.

“I’ve heard of these,” Dash said, voice full of frightened awe.  “They’re rogue storms.  Every once in awhile the cloud factory makes a dud—a bad cloud.  They dump those somewhere safe, away from Ponyville.  If enough of them group together, they can form... something like this.”

Fluttershy suppressed a whimper.  Something deep within her, some instinct shared by all creatures with wings, shouted danger, danger!  She could feel the pressure drop by the second, making every breath seem like a desperate gasp for air.  “Is... is it dangerous?”

“Oh yeah,” Rainbow said.  “They’re dangerous, all right.”

“Uh, fellas,” Applejack said, clutching her hat, which kept trying to fly away toward the cloud-behemoth, “Ah say we take Twi’s advice and get the hay out of here!”

“Where will we go?”  Rarity gasped, looked around in a panic and nearly hyperventilating.  “There’s nothing out here but field for miles and miles!”

“I’m getting bad vibes from this,” Pinkie said.  The once-distant pillar was now approaching them at a terrifying pace, and the wind was picking up considerably, now nearly matching Dash’s breeze from earlier—though much more threatening.  Those watchful red eyes loomed down over them.  There was a flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by ear-splitting thunder.

Nova began taking steps backwards, subconsciously putting distance between herself and the storm.  “So, running?  Is that what we’re going to do?  I mean, I know I’m new and all, and you guys probably have a preferred way of dealing with stuff like this, but it’s been suggested three times now, and nopony has—”

Applejack’s hat flew out of her grasp and spiraled through the air, disappearing into the clutches of the storm, which spread fast and thick above them now, like an oil spill.  “Everypony run!” she shouted, and the seven ponies finally began to sprint away as fast as they could, daisies and grass and weeds being pulled up around them by the storm like dirt into a vacuum cleaner.

They ran, gasping for breath, and the storm gave chase.  Dash spread her wings, knowing she could outfly a misbehaving stormcloud any day of the week, but the moment she did the gust began to suck her up off the ground and into the mouth of the storm.  She folded them again in a hurry, and began to push herself to run faster.  She was nearing her limit.  They all were.

Like a child playing with its food, the storm pressed them on.  Fluttershy ran as fast as she could, and then a little faster, and then suddenly the ground left her hooves and it didn’t come back.  She looked down, and realized she was floating several inches above the earth—the storm had begun to pull her in.  A panicked glance showed the same was happening to Dash; the pegasi were lightweight, they were built to fly.  Even when they didn’t want to.  They hovered inches off the ground, galloping uselessly with their hooves.  Fluttershy noticed with surprise that Nova, too, was being lifted up.  She recalled carrying Nova on her back to her cottage the night they had found her, how light she had been.

The others, the non-pegasi minus Nova, continued to sprint upon the ground, unaware that their lightweight companions were being sucked into the monstrous cumulonimubus.

“Twilight!” Dash shouted.  “Help!”

Twilight looked back, gasping for air, and saw Fluttershy, Nova, and Dash floating farther and farther into the widening maw of the storm.  Oh, no!  There was nothing she could do—not without magic.  She watched as the three ponies spiraled into the storm, disappearing into its whirling and tumultuous grasp.

“No!” she shouted.

Her remaining companions turned back as well, gasping and panting as they ran, the reach of the storm right at their tails.

“What?” Applejack yelled. “What happened?”

“It... got... Rainbow and Nova and Fluttershy!” Twilight managed between gasps.  A bolt of lightning shot into the ground just behind her, and suddenly the screech of the storm was gone, replaced by a low and droning buzz that thrashed through her skull like a trapped animal.  She could feel her charged coat raise from the static.

Rarity was shouting something to her.  She could see her mouth moving, but the ringing drowned out the words.  “WHAT?” Twilight yelled.

“I SAID USE MAGIC!”

“There is none!”

“CELESTIA’S VIAL!”

Oh yeah! Twilight thought.  I forgot about that!  She fumbled open her saddlebag with her mouth.  Two sandwiches and a book whizzed past her face, sucked away into the storm.  For a terrifying moment, she thought the vial had gone with them, but then she felt it against her nose, and grabbed it in her mouth.  As she maneuvered the top open with her tongue, she saw Pinkie fall behind, slowing to a trot and gasping for air.

“You... go on!” Pinkie shouted.  “Sugar reserves... empty!”  Then she disappeared into the rampant and blistering storm.

The lid finally screwed open into Twilight’s mouth, and she tilted her head back and took a small sip of the liquid.  Immediately she felt energized, like she could outrun the storm while levitating a schoolhouse.  Oh, yeah!  I’m back!  With a wonderfully fresh burst of magic, she screwed the lid back on the vial (careful not to allow her magic to touch the liquid itself—she didn’t want to blow up all of Equestria) and then dropped it back into her bag.  Suddenly, the storm hardly felt like a threat.  She could take on a team of Discord and Chrysalis and Nightmare Moon if she wanted to, it seemed.

“A simple weather spell should do the trick, I think,” she said, no longer gasping for breath.  With a grin, her horn flashed a deep purple, and then let loose a luminous violet cone that grew larger and larger until it was a great cyclone in the sky, rivaling the monstrous storm.  The storm’s red blotches grew wide with surprise, then were compressed and sucked into the cone like strands of spaghetti, along with the rest of the enormous cell.  Seconds later, the sky was clear, without the trace of a single cloud.  The sun was back, not as a ruthless deathray, but as Celestia’s normal, life-giving star.

Applejack and Rarity slowed to a stop, turning to join Twilight, gasping and wheezing.

“That... was... great!” Rarity said, choking out the words.  “Where’re... the others?”

“I’m right here,” said Pinkie.  They turned in surprise.  Indeed, there was Pinkie, just a short way away, mane somehow even messier than ever—it stuck out in all directions, like she had been struck by lightning.  “That was so cool Twilight!  First I was in the storm because I was tired of running and then it swept me off my hooves and I was flying around in the air and I think I saw a witch on a broomstick but maybe that was just in a book I read—”

Rarity gasped.  “Pinkie!  Your tail!”

“Huh?  What about my AHH!”  She had turned to look, and saw that there was nothing where her tail used to be.  “The storm must have pulled it out!  So that’s what hurt so much!  One second.”  She jammed a hoof into her mouth, and her face turned bright red as she blew into it like she would a balloon.  Somehow her entire body puffed up from the pressure, and then, with a pomp!, a tail sprang out of her flank, identical to the old one.  “Good as new!”

Applejack’s jaw dropped.  “How... did you...”

Pinkie frowned.  “Enough chitchat!  Where’s Nova and Dashie and Fluttershy?”

“The storm lifted them away,” Twilight said.  “They should be fine, since it’s gone now and they can fly and—” her face fell.  “Wait... Nova can’t fly...  Oh, no!”

“Oh, don’t worry, Twilight,” Rarity said.  “Dash is very good at saving ponies who are falling.”

“Yeah!” Applejack chimed in.  “And, hey, didn’t Nova arrive here in the first place by falling from the sky?”

“Huh,” Twilight said, rubbing her chin.  “That’s actually a really good point.  You guys are right—they’ll probably be fine.  But,” she turned in a circle, searching the endless field in every direction, “where are they?”

***

“Uggggh,” Dash groaned, groggily rubbing her face.  “What happened?”

“There was a storm and it sucked us in and sent us flying.  We landed pretty far apart, but I could see you lying on the ground, so I came and met up with you.”

“I know all that, Fluttershy.”

“Oh.  Well then why did you ask?”

“Force of habit, I guess.  Where’s Nova?”

Fluttershy looked around, surprised.  They had been blown so far across the nearly endless field that she could see the edge of a forest in the distance.  But no sign of a golden mare.  “You didn’t see her land nearby?”

Dash got to her hooves, carefully brushing her feathers off.  “No, I thought she blew off with you.”

“Fluttershyyyyyyyyy....!” came a distant voice, carried by the wind.

“Dash!” Fluttershy gasped.  “Did you hear that?”

“Fluttershy, Applejaaaaaack....!”

“There it is again,” Dash said.  “It’s coming from that forest in the distance.  Let’s go!”

Somehow, Fluttershy managed to keep up with Dash’s rapid speed, and soon they were at the edge of the forest.

“Nova?” Fluttershy called out.  “Nova, can you hear me?”  Even when yelling, her timid voice was eclipsed by the wind and the forest ambiance.

“Let me try,” Dash said.  She took a deep breath.  “NOVAAAAAA!  You there?”  The treeline exploded into feathered flight.

Soon after came a response: “I’m over here!”

They found her in a tree, hanging on tightly to a branch that seemed hardly thick enough to carry her weight.

“Fluttershy!  Dash!  Thanks for finding me!  Could you, um, help me down?”

The pegasi flew up to her, and she held on to them both as they lowered her back down to the ground.

“Thanks,” she said, appreciating the earth against her hooves.  She had been hanging on to that branch for over twenty minutes.  “I’m okay.  The trees broke my fall... mostly.  I’m fine.”

Dash gave her a pat on the back and grinned.  “Well, it’s good to have you back, kid.  But we’ve still got a problem: we’re here, and the others aren’t.”

“Oh, I’m so worried,” Fluttershy said.  “What if the storm got them?”

Dash rolled her eyes.  “Fluttershy, the storm got us.  And we’re fine.  Except for Nova being stuck in a tree.”

Fluttershy kicked at the ground anxiously.  “Why don’t you fly ahead and look for them?  Then come and get us when you’ve found them.”

Rainbow squinted into the distance.  Green—endless green, as far as the eye could see.  The hills rippled and rolled in mesmerizing patterns, with no end in sight—and no ponies in sight.  “Fluttershy, this field is huge.  I could fly a mile up and still not see the other end of it.  There’s no way they’d see me, especially since it’s getting... dark.”

“What?” Fluttershy asked; Dash was grinning cunningly and staring at Nova, who shifted uneasily.

“I think I just had an idea.”

“Why don’t you just send up a flare, Twi’?  That’s how Ah found you when Ah was lost the time Fluttershy’s rose shard led me astray.”

“Because, AJ,” Twilight said, collapsing onto the ground in defeat, “I used up all my magic with the weather spell, and Celestia’s vial only holds so much.  I don’t want to waste any more unless we absolutely have to.”

“It wouldn’t be wasting it, though, would it, Twilight?”  Rarity said, finding a soft and clean patch of grass upon which to sit herself next to the betrodden unicorn.  “Celestia gave it to you for use in emergencies, and we’ve lost Dash and Fluttershy and Nova... isn’t that an emergency?”

“I don’t think you should waste any more,” Pinkie said.

Rarity and Applejack turned to her in surprise.  “Pinkie, Ah would have expected just the opposite from you.  Don’t you want to see the rest of our friends again?”

Pinkie gaped at them both.  “Well, duh.  But we’ll see them again.  Probably within the next few minutes.  I’d bet Sugarcube Corner on it!  But Mrs. Cake said I’m not allowed to bet anymore on account of losing their refrigerator.”

Twilight suddenly looked up.  “Pinkie, do you really think they’ll turn up?”

Pinkie smiled and nodded fervently.

“Oh, thank goodness!” Twilight said, putting the shimmering vial back in her knapsack.

Rarity and Applejack shared a glance of absolute confusion.

“Twilight, you cannot be serious!” Rarity pleaded.  “Pinkie has no idea what she’s talking about.  Our friends are missing, the sun has gone down, and it’s starting to get cold.  Just take a sip from the vial and send up a flare!”

Twilight frowned and shook her head.  “I trust Pinkie.  Let’s wait a few minutes.”

In one fluid motion, Pinkie crossed her front hooves and leaned against Twilight, staring back at the other two with an expression of merry victory.  “Yeah!  I wouldn’t lie, or my name ain’t Pinkie Pie!  And my name is Pinkie Pie!  Modus ponens, sisters!”

Rarity sighed.  What a day.  First it had been cold, then blisteringly hot—she had even sweat a little—then a cloud monster had eaten three of her friends, and now Pinkie was talking in gibberish.  “Fine, then.  But only a few minutes.”

They sat in silence.

“Granny Smith gave me that hat,” Applejack said suddenly.  “It was Pa’s.”

She had never told her friends that before.  Maybe they had guessed it, since she took it with her everywhere and had a habit of hugging it in times of distress, but it had never been said aloud.  Her friends were sympathetic enough to never bring it up.  Twilight was about to share words of comfort—We’ll find it, it can’t have flown far—when Pinkie Pie jumped up like a loaded spring.

“Look!” she said.  “It’s them!”

They all got up as well, and looked around madly.

“Where?” Rarity said.  “I don’t see anything!  The hill does sort of look like Rainbow Dash, though.”

“You’re looking the wrong way!  Look up!”

At first, the sky seemed just the same as always: a glorious matrix of stars of all different sizes, each pulsing and twinkling to its own rhythm.  Soon, however, it became clear that one star was brighter than the rest.

Applejack squinted.  “Is that...”

“...Dash?  Fluttershy?  Nova?” Rarity finished.

It was like one of the billions of stars in the sky had broken free, and was moving toward them at an undeterminable speed.  It traced through the sky like a shooting star in slow motion, and when Twilight squinted, she saw that it was Nova, held aloft by Dash and Fluttershy, the former of which was wearing a familiar hat.  They each grasped one of her front legs; she dangled beneath them.

The sight was both ridiculous and beautiful.  Twilight could see Fluttershy was straining to keep up with Dash.  They kept growing nearer, and eventually Twilight could see Nova’s face.  She was beaming.

“She really does glow!”  Applejack said.  “You weren’t kiddin’, Rarity!  And... oh goodness, is that my hat?”

“Wooooow,” was all Pinkie could manage.

They kept watching, and then suddenly the two pegasi and their glowing friend were directly above them... and then suddenly they were past them.

“They’re... not stopping.  They didn’t see us!” Twilight said.  She started to run in their direction, following their path through the sky.  “Waaaaaait!  Stop, we’re down heeeeeere!”

Two minutes later they were all together once more, giddy with the excitement of a foe defeated, alive with the idea that they could surmount any obstacle.

“That was amazing!” Nova breathed, glancing to the sky, like she wished she was still up there.

“Yeah,” Dash said matter-of-factly, “flying is pretty neat.”  She took off the big hat and planted it firmly on Applejack’s head where it belonged.

“You found my hat!  I can’t thank you enough!  Oh man, Ah’m so glad y’all are okay!  That storm sure was something, wasn’t it?  And boy howdy, Nova... you’re beaming like a lantern!”

“You’re like a birthday candle, or a glowy-bug!”

“Hmm,” Twilight said.  When Dash and Fluttershy had slowly lowered her to the ground, Nova had been ecstatic, vivacious.  She had nearly danced with excitement, staring longingly at the sky and glowing harder than ever.  Twilight suspected that was the old Nova showing through, the one from before the amnesia; now, with her six new friends surrounding her, admiring her golden aura in wonder, she became submerged again, shyly bowing her head, as reticent as ever.

And Twilight noticed something else, too.  It had bothered her before because, if it were true, it meant she was wrong.  And she hated being wrong.  But being wrong was a very important step to being right, and so she made a quick note of it in her head—something about the way Nova was glowing...

“Can we stop here for tonight?” Rarity asked with a yawn.  “All this adventuring is making me tired.”  She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a miniature tent, like an incredibly ornate prop for a tiny doll.  She pushed in the flag at the top with a click, and immediately it began to expand.  A few seconds later Rarity was stepping into her tent and zipping the entrance shut behind her.

“Well, I guess it’s unanimous, then,” Dash said sarcastically, grinning at the tent.  “Her Majesty wishes to stop,” she yawned, “so I suppose stop we shall.”

“I heard that!” the tent said.

That night they slept in the soft grass beneath the stars.  At some point Rarity peeked out of her tent, saw her friends resting peacefully beside one another, and quietly joined them.  Within moments she was asleep as well, and that’s how they remained until sunrise.

Nova glowed the entire time.

***

In the City of Dressage, the day crept along.  Unicorns wandered the cobbled streets listlessly, heads down, under the watchful eyes of the King’s postponies.  Nopony spoke, nopony ran.  Eye contact was rare, not because the unicorns were shy or antisocial, but because staring into the eyes of a fellow unicorn in the street was like looking in a mirror: is this what has become of us, is this really what we are now?

Nopony could acknowledge that awful truth, and so they crept along, seeming to move as slowly as the sun across the sky.

It was another day in Dressage, and nopony laughed, nopony smiled.

A young colt leaned against a flag post that hoisted the King’s red seal, eyes glazed and half shut.  Nopony helped him, because nopony wanted to be on the King’s list—and besides, nopony could provide what it was he needed, nopony could bring his father back.

In the stone district, unsurprised eyes peered from behind curtains as an elderly stallion was dragged away by two young guards.  He kicked and struggled, but didn’t scream.  Like he knew there was no point.

In the schoolhouse, a young bespectacled mare methodically tore pages from the large red textbooks she had been given by a royal representative.  She would not teach their propaganda for them, could not preach to her young students that the King was wise, the King was their leader, the King was the keeper of order and peace.  She looked up, seeking reassurance.  On her desk stood Aura Augury, smiling sagely, a little statue she wasn’t supposed to have but kept anyway, and she pulled out another page with vigor.  They’d come for her when they found out, she knew.  But with every lie she tore apart she felt better and knew it was right.

And in number Two Oh One, the home behind the mailbox with the rose etched into its side, a young stallion stood in the living room, mouth hung open and eyes wide.

“Sergeant?” he said.  “Sergeant, get up!”  Only then did he notice the girl in the room with him, who likewise stood gaping at the motionless figure of Sgt. Boots.  “You killed him.  You killed him!”  Suddenly he became frightened, and backed up in terror, then trampled over the broken-down door and fled into the streets.  “Help!  Guards, the Sergeant was killed!”

Alone now, the golden mare remained deathly still, seeing but not understanding, remembering but not believing.