The call came in to the Department of Public Hygiene sometime near eight in the evening, something about a mess way out on the eastern ledge. No one was quite sure where it had come from. Maybe it had come from the fourth ledge, or maybe even as high up as Circuit City?

But, since it was their job over at the Department of Public Hygiene to deal with stuff like that, a dispatcher wearily glanced at the decade-old tracking map on the wall and noted that one of the clean-up crews on duty was close enough to make the call.

It was one of the older vans, and he knew the ponies who worked it well. Taking a drag on his cigarette, the dispatcher lifted the phone with a wing whilst his hoof spun the dial, listening to the clunk of the building's switchboard as it patched him through.

≤ΘΘΘ≥

With a faint whirring and the drawling metallic noise of metal against metal the phone began to ring loudly, causing the dashboard to shake ever so slightly. Sighing loudly with apparent exasperation, Thunderlane reached across the dashboard with a wing and picked up the receiver of the phone, bringing it up to his left ear without taking a hoof off the wheel.

“Three-oh-seven here,” he drawled in a tired voice, scratching at the stubble on his cheek with a hoof. Beside him, his partner in crime, Windfree, pulled his face out of his customary bag of doughnuts, his eyes glancing over to Thunderlane before realizing that it was just another office call and turning his attention to a more pressing and interesting matter: the consumption of his Sugar Cube Corner doughnuts.

“Thunder, it's Tombs here,” a voice crackled in the receiver, its harsh scratch causing Thunderlane to pull the phone away from his ear slightly. “I've got another one for you: a faller. The guy came down on the eastern ledge, just short of the waterworks. You should be able to reach him if you take the service duct under Seventh and Electric out to the ledge. There's not a whole lotta stuff out there, so he should be real easy to find. The blue key on your jumpsuit should get you through any municipal locks in the way.” Thunderlane sighed again and raised a hoof to scratch at the bridge of his muzzle, closing his eyes. His other hoof tapped irritably at the steering wheel of the van as the pegasus vented some of his frustration.

“Come on, Tombs. Don’t do this to me. We’re fully loaded in the back and only a couple of minutes from coming off shift. Can’t you pass it over to another van?”

“Sorry, Thunder, that’s a no can do. At this time of night it’ll take another van at least a half hour to get out there, and if we leave the body any longer it’s gonna start stinking up and drawing a crowd, not to mention rigor mortis could begin to set in. Just suck it up and earn some overtime.”

Thunderlane groaned lightly and massaged the bridge of his muzzle. “Fine, we’re on our way. But we’re seriously loaded up in the back; make sure another van meets us there or we’ll have to stick him in the back with the others, and I'm not gonna make any promises that he’ll keep.”

“I’ll get on it. Call back in once you've peeled him off the floor; I’ll get started on the paperwork. Oh, and watch your step out on the ledge. It’s a long way down and I don’t wanna have to call our counterparts in Geartown and tell ‘em they got a couple of fallers of their own they need to deal with,” with that the dispatchers' voice was replaced with the monotonous sound of the dial tone. Thunderlane returned the phone to its holster on the dashboard and sunk into his seat, sighing as he contemplated at least another half-hour on the job.

“Another faller?” Windfree asked, pulling out yet another doughnut from the paper bag in his hooves. He eyed the piece of baked confectionery with an appraising look before shoving it whole into his maw and biting down on the soft pastry, sending a jet of strawberry jam flying to land with a splat on the mucky dashboard.

Thunderlane rolled his eyes at the display as Windfree leaned forward and ran a hoof through the trail of jam, raising it to his mouth and licking his hoof clean. “Yeah, some guy landed out on the ledge by Seventh and Electric.” The pegasus leaned over to Windfree. “Gimme one of those,” he said, plucking a chocolate doughnut from the paper bag. Windfree shot him a dirty look before returning to chewing on his own doughnut, which had left a sugary frosting all along his lips. “Another fucking ledge job,” Thunderlane grumbled as he took a bite out of his pastry treat. “And they know how much I just fucking love ledge jobs.”

“Come on, Thunder; suck it up and earn some over time like Tombs said. A job’s a job, and over-time rates ain't too bad.”

“You're only saying that because you've got a sweet tooth for doughnuts and expensive marefriends.”

“It’s called having a life outside of peeling meat-pancakes off the street, Thunder. You should really try it sometime. It’s one hell of a party.”

Muttering something derogatory to himself, Thunderlane reached down with a wing tip to pull on the flywheel switch, before backing the van up into a pick-up slot and driving out onto the main road. As Thunderlane engaged the vans capacitors, traffic was indeed beginning to thicken, vehicles stacked up almost nose to tail on the roadways as traffic moved sluggishly around the cities spiral, drifting like some great, lazy river of metal. Far above them the crescent slashes of Luna's two halves were on the rise, surrounded by a gently twinkling field of stellar debris.

Being in a municipal vehicle, the two ponies could engage the vans electric engine and go off-slot if they wanted, but that would still require detailed knowledge of the flow of traffic at this time of night to prevent getting snarled up, not to mention the damn thing had been on the blink for months now. Sometimes Thunderlane liked to think that he should quit working in a clean-up crew and become a taxi driver; it would probably make him a lot more money. Except corpses didn't require any need to make conversation, and Windfree, who often had his muzzle shoved in a bag of doughnuts anyway, didn't particularly count.

It took them twenty minutes to reach Seventh and Electric, the flow of traffic conspiring at every red light to hold them up just a little longer. The service duct was accessed via a sloping ramp between two decrepit buildings facing out from Canterlot. Disengaging the pick-up line that connected them to the slot, Thunderlane switched to the vans flywheel to take the vehicle down the slope, though he wasn't sure if he’d have enough spin left in the axle to get them back up once the job was done.

Climbing out of the van, Thunderlane reached back in to grasp a ring of keys off the dashboard before closing the door, the vehicle rocking slightly as he did so. Windfree emerged from the other side of the van, a heavy, police style torch strapped to his head and a camera on a loop around his neck. Across his back was a saddle bag stuffed full of all the necessary equipment needed to document anything they might come across.

Normally the police would be on hoof for situations such as these, but recently they’d been falling behind after Mayor Mare had declared a greater effort was needed in tackling street crime. As a result law-enforcement was perfectly happy to let the clean-up crews deal with any fallers; just so long as everything was documented and the paperwork filled out correctly. If anything fishy showed up in the report the police would get involved further down the line, but mostly the fallers were just victims of unfortunate accidents.

Thunderlane had no reason to suspect anything different this time round.

Unlocking the municipal gate with a key from the loop, Thunderlane and Windfree made their way down the dank service duct. The place reeked like a sewer, water run-off seeping down cracks in the floor to form a foul smelling little stream. Bits of cladding were peeling off from the roof, lying in small piles here and there every few meters or so.

At the end of the duct was a half circle of indigo sky, a faint breeze flowing through the opening occasionally to blow away the ripe smell of decay in the tunnel. Emerging out from the tunnel, Thunderlane took a deep breath of fresh air, his wings opening slightly at the sight of so much empty sky.

This far out on the ledge it didn't take a whole lot to absorb the sounds of the city; the rattle of commuter trains as they wound their way up and down the cities lazy tapering spiral, or the whine of police sirens as they sped from one crime scene to another. It was a lot quieter out here, and a whole lot fresher, with the wind blowing straight in from the open plains that surrounded the city; completely free from pollutants or vehicle exhaust.

Beyond the service duct, the concrete gave way to Canterlot's underlying fabric. No one had ever bothered to really give the plain, jet-black substance a name, for it was as ubiquitous as air in the last city of equine kind; but for the sake of municipal purposes it was known as Megastructure.

From the point where the two ponies stood the ledge was seemingly flat. But over to the left it began to rise and curve round with the cities spiral, and to the right it gently sunk downwards. Thunderlane watched his footing warily as he stepped out onto the Megastructure. The stuff was treacherous, everypony knew that; it could feel as firm as rock one moment and then become as slippery as ice in the blink of an eye.

Windfree slowly stepped out beside Thunderlane, his torch scanning all around for the faller. There was about fifty or so meters between the backs of the buildings and the sheer drop of the ledge, a bleak, featureless no-pony’s-land where anything stuck out. “There’s our guy,” the earth pony said, tapping on Thunderlane's shoulder and pointing off to the right, down the gentle curve of the spiral. “Unicorn by the looks of him.”

Thunderlane nodded in recognition. “I see it.”

They walked in steady, sideways steps as the structure sloped downwards; both uncomfortably aware that one slip was all it would take for them to land flat on their backs and slide helplessly down the curve and over the edge.

As they neared, Thunderlane glanced over at the body, just able to make out some features in the dimming light of the setting sun. He spied a horned head and four legs, all where they should be, and something crumpled underneath the body, like some kind of delicate gossamer cape.

You could never be too sure with fallers... but this guy didn't look like he had fallen very far.

Dismemberment was commonplace amongst fallers, since heads and legs had a penchant for popping free from the body; either from impact with the ground or glancing collisions with the sides of buildings as the body bumped back and forth before coming to a messy, bone crunching halt.

This jigsaw, however, seemed to come with all the pieces put together.

Thunderlane glanced upwards at the gleaming sky, lit up with distant stars and the distinct glow of the advertisement boards of Neon Heights. As far as he could make out, he couldn't see any buildings or overhangs that the body could have fallen off, and even if this guy had taken a running jump from the nearest ledge there was no way he would end up all the way out here; there was at least a league or so of drop-back before the next ledge came rearing up out of Neon Heights. Plus there should have been a lot more damage, a whole lot more. Something about this just didn't sit right with the pegasus.

“Something’s seriously screwed up here,” Thunderlane voiced, glancing over to Windfree.

“Just starting to feel that way myself,” Windfree replied, raising the camera to his eye with a single hoof and snapping off an exposure. The two ponies slowly crept further forwards, hardly daring to breathe as the corpse came closer and closer. When they were about ten or so meters out Windfree directed his torch at the body much more steadily, the beam illuminating the faller in his entirety.

That’s when Thunderlane realised what they were dealing with here. That wasn't a gown crumpled under the faller’s body; it was a pair of feathered wings.

“It’s... ” Windfree began.

“Yeah.”

The creature that lay sprawled on the floor wasn't a unicorn as they’d first believed; it was an alicorn, a Post-Equine.

Thunderlane looked up again, but higher this time. He looked up beyond the nearest line of buildings, beyond the electrical flicker of Neon Height. Up beyond the shimmering holographic mirages of Circuit City. Up past the cold plasma aura of the Cyber Polities. He could just make them out against the twinkling backdrop of deep space, circling and wheeling leagues overhead as faint pastel-hued specks around the tapering needle of Canterlot's spire, like insects around a bug zapper.

And as he saw them flying up there, as he saw the Post-Equine alicorns dance and caper so high above the realm of mortal ponies; eternal creatures who were destined to see the entirety of time in all its immeasurable glory, a single thought ran on a repeating loop in his head, spinning like a record.

How the fuck did one of you lot end up all the way down here? And why the fuck did it have to happen on my shift?

“Let’s bag, tag, and get the hell out of here,” Windfree said, a grim look on his face. “That thing’s starting to freak me out already.”

“You ever dealt with one of these... creatures before?”

“Nope, first time. You?”

“The first time I ever saw one up close like this was about ten years ago, when I was new on the job. The bastard came down on the green-line elevated, right onto the live-rail. The current had turned the thing into toast by the time we managed to get up there and scrape it off. The second time was about four or five years later, when one of them came down over in Cheapside. Not much left from the impact though, just some bloody shreds. Nothing much you could recognize at first glance.”

Windfree gulped and nodded again, raising his camera once more to snap of a couple of exposures. In the flash of light that followed, Thunderlane had the freakish sensation that the corpse had just twitched, shifting almost subliminally from one position to another to give its photographer the best shot.

Thunderlane steadily approached the alicorn’s body, kneeling down beside it and pulling his equipment from the pockets in his jumpsuit. The pegasus examined the creature beside him, taking in its alien form. Surprisingly, it seemed that the alicorn’s wings were the only broken part of its body. It had come to rest with its head lolling to one side, huge cyan blue eyes staring up at Thunderlane. It could have been alive if he didn't know any better, but there was no movement behind those eyes, no life; there was only death.

Death and silence.

“Damn alicorn must have been alive for the whole trip down,” he said. “This was a controlled landing, not a crash landing. It's the only way to explain the lack of blood.”

Windfree looked over at his partner before raising the camera and taking another shot. “You reckon this was a suicide?” he asked, lowering the camera. “I don’t know much about taking your own life, but I’m guessing that going through at least three or four transitions in one night isn't exactly the most peaceful way to go. You think maybe it just... you know, lost its way?”

“I... I doubt it. Alicorns spend their whole lives up in the Celestial Levels. They do more flying in a month then most pegausi do in their whole lives.” Thunderlane gently lifted one of the creature's wings, marvelling at how light the organic construct was. Compared to the alicorn's, Thunderlane's wings felt like they were made out of granite. Shrugging, he looked across to his partner, his brow furrowing slightly. “Hell, who knows how it got down here? Let’s just bag him, tag him, and get the hell out of here; the sooner he’s out of our hooves the better, I say.” Thunderlane stood up, groaning slightly as he stretched his wings. “Sweet Celestia, I need a stiff drink.”

Opening up Windfree’s saddlebags, they had the alicorn bagged and tagged in good order, ensuring to shoot a decent amount of exposures for law enforcement once they got involved. Taking care not to worsen the damage or break any of the alicorn’s twig-like bones, Thunderlane hauled the now body-bag encased corpse across his back. The sensation of the creature’s weight on his back – or more rather, the lack of the sensation – unsettled Thunderlane to no end. Carrying the corpse of an alicorn was like carrying a sack of bones and little else. They didn't even need to hose down the ground when they were done; not a single drop of whatever passed for blood within the alicorn’s body had been spilt.

There was no sign of another van waiting for them when they got back, annoying Thunderlane to no end. Climbing up into his seat, the pegausi leaned across the dashboard and plucked the phone from its holster with a wing tip, whilst his hoof spun the dial.

"Department of Pub-" Tomb's began on the other end of the line once the receiver had been patched through.

"Thunderlane here."

“Talk to me Thunder,” came Tomb’s scratchy voice. “Have you got the faller?”

“Yeah, we got him, but I don’t see another van anywhere. I told you that we’re loaded up in the back; we don’t have any more room for another body.”

“Sorry Thunder. I had Blinker on standby for you, but I had to send him down to the boundary with Geartown. There’s been a report of a zone shift and we needed a clean-up crew on hoof in case of any fatalities.”

“Well, you might wanna rethink that decision,” Thunderlane spoke, glancing across at Windfree. “Turns out that the faller was an alicorn, no joke.”

The silence that followed could only be described as sceptical.

“We've had no reports of anything falling from the Levels. Circuit City would have given us a notification if something had, and the Cyber Polities would be up in arms by now if an alicorn had passed through their airspace.”

“This one didn't fall, he flew down.”

“As they do.” The scepticism in the dispatch’s voice was plain to hear. After all, this wouldn't be the first time that somepony had faked an alicorn’s corpse for their own twisted amusement. For all Thunderlane knew this body could have been a prank played on him by one of the other crews to test how gullible he was.

But no, one look was all it took to convince him that this one was the real deal.

“Look, if you want us to squeeze the alicorn in the back with the rest of the bodies, we will. But you've gotta understand that I'm not taking any responsibility for any breakages that might occur. So, you want us to ship this thing over to Third?”

“If you think it’s the real deal, then that's the only place to send it.”

“I’ll take the fall if it’s not.”

The dispatcher sighed, the voice transmitting through the connection as a rustling spit of static. “Alright, take him over to Third. Just make sure that anything technical gets bagged up separately. Once you've dropped the body off at Third, we’ll box it all up and send it over to imports for shipping back to up the Levels. Now get to it, I’ll phone ahead and tell the morgue to prep one of the surgeries.”

Thunderlane hung up the receiver.

“Why Third? We never deal with Third,” Windfree asked, a frown on his face.

Shifting aside the frozen bodies of other fallers that they had picked up during the day, Thunderlane and Windfree stowed the alicorn’s body on a shelf in the back of the van before climbing back into its cabin. Thunderlane fly-wheeled the van back up the ramp and onto a pick up slot, once more becoming absorbed into the flow of traffic that ran the length of Neon Heights.

It was a twenty minute drive to Third District Morgue from Seventh and Electric, the van filled with a tense silence. The minds of both ponies were fixed on the Post-Equine entity that was currently stiffening in the back of their van, separated from them from only a few sheets of metal, some coolant pipes, and the thin fabric of the body-bag.

≤ΘΘΘ≥

Third District Morgue of Neon Heights was a drear building to say the least. Situated towards the centre of the ledge, the building was an ash-grey slab of concrete, its monotonous surface punctured occasionally by the yellow glow of light escaping through one of the windows. It sat lower than the buildings around it, hunched over like some small foal, whilst the apartment blocks and offices on either side loomed over it, jostling with each other for space.

Thunderlane circled the van round to the back of the building and pulled up into one of the delivery bays, the engine cutting out with a grating cough as he pulled his key from the ignition.

Waiting for them was a unicorn clerk in a white lab coat, a notepad telekinetically held in his grip. “A dispatcher from the Department of Public Hygiene phoned in a couple of minutes ago,” he informed Thunderlane, as the pegasus circled to the back of the van and unlocked the rear double doors. “Said you had something juicy for Twilight?” The stallion scratched his nose with the pen. “Twilight was starting to think that maybe you lot had forgotten the arrangement.”

“As if anyone could forget an arrangement that weird,” Thunderlane snorted, taking the pen and scribbling his name on the delivery form.

“Erm, what are you two on about?” Windfree asked, hopping up into the van and gently lifting the body-bag containing the alicorn onto his back.

“Twilight likes to have first dibs on anything freaky that falls into Neon Heights,” the clerk explained. “It’s just this weird little hobby that she has.”

“To each their own,” Thunderlane muttered, shrugging.

“Plus is saves the other morgues from having to wade through a mountain of paperwork; there’s always a lot of triplicate to do when one of these things makes it down here.” The clerk peered at the bagged form as Windfree lowered it down to Thunderlane, who set it gently across his back. “So... do you mind if I take a look?”

“Knock yourself out.”

The clerk leaned in and unzipped the body-bag, peeling it back to reveal that the alien creature’s features were serenely calm in death “They look so beautiful don’t they? When they’re flying about so far up there in the sky, glowing and all.” The clerk zipped the bag back up, hiding the alicorn from sight.

“Give the guy a break,” Thunderlane said. “He’s had a rough day.”

“You’re sure it’s a he?”

“Well, now that you mention it... ”

“Twilight is just outside the surgery, so head on in. I gotta stay down here and take more deliveries.”

“Rough night?”

“Rough week’s more like it. The boundary's getting shifty again, it’s causing all kinds of trouble."

“Yeah same here,” Thunderlane said, nodding in agreement. “The department's been running errands around the boundary zone for about a week now. Guess we better batten down the hatches and get our watches wound.”

Nodding goodbye to the clerk, they stepped inside the building through the back door. The morgue was all green walls and white tiles, the air filled with the eye-watering chlorine reek of industrial strength cleaning fluids. The lights in the ceiling had been dimmed down, casting dark shadows at every corner. Thunderlane hated the morgue – how the hell could anypony willingly work in a building where they cut open dead bodies? At least being in a clean-up crew meant that he got some fresh air.

They laid the body-bag out on a wheeled stretcher and took a freight elevator to the third floor. Once the machine had come to a grumbling stop, Thunderlane pulled back the trellis work door and pushed the stretcher out into another dark corridor. Twilight was waiting for them at the far end by a pair of double doors, flicking a cigarette butt at a wall-mounted ash tray.

It had been four years since Thunderlane had last seen Twilight Sparkle, but he recognized the mare instantly. There wasn't a whole lot about the unicorn that ever really changed.

“When I heard that there was a delivery coming, I was hoping for some more medical supplies,” Twilight said in her calm, measured voice. “If the cupboards were any barer, we’d have to start turning away dead bodies.”

“Be nice, Twilight,” Thunderlane replied. “We've brought you a present.”

“How’s work, Thunderlane?”

“Up’s and down’s, Twilight. Up’s and down’s. But whilst there’s a city and it’s full of ponies, something tells me that you and I won’t have to worry about losing our jobs any time soon.”

Twilight had always been thin, slightly gaunt on the edges; but now she looked like she had opened her eyes and just crawled off one of the dissection tables herself. The white surgical coat seemed to hang off her frame like it was on a coat hook, and her purple, fringed mane, complimented by a single pink stripe, was covered with a white surgical cap, her horn peaking out through a hole at the front. She wore tinted glasses, even though the lights of the morgue were far too dark anyway. The hooves on her forelegs were covered in green latex gloves, the hooves themselves looking gaunt and skeletal underneath their taut coverings. The shadows under her cheeks bones seemed deeper than last time, giving her face a sort of sunken, skeletal look.

Everything about the mare seemed to evoke the image of a corpse.

No getting away from it, Thunderlane thought to himself. The girl’s found herself an ideal place for employment.

“So what have you got for me?”

“We've got an alicorn for you, my friend. He’s just come down on the ledge.”

Twilight's reaction was hard to judge behind the glasses, any flicker of emotion hidden behind their tint. The rest of her face didn't seem to move much, even when she spoke. “All the way down from the Celestial Levels?”

“That's what we figured. Funny thing is though, there doesn't seem to be much sign that it was going fast when it crashed. From what we could garner at the site, seems like this guy made a controlled landing... or at least a controlled descent.”

“That’s interesting,” Twilight said in the uninflected tone of someone who would be hard pressed to think of anything less interesting. But Thunderlane wasn't sure.

“What you've got is essentially a naked corpse with wings and a horn.” Thunderlane smirked slightly. "I'm sure you'd find that interesting enough."

“That is what we deal with here,” Twilight said, either oblivious of the joke or just ignoring it outright.

“Do you... erm... cut many of these things open?” Windfree asked.

“The odd one or two, I can’t say that they drop in with any great amount of regularity. Have we met?”

“I don’t think so,” Windfree replied “What is it about alicorn's that you like so much?”

At that Twilight paused, her mouth twitching slightly into a faint smile. “I wouldn't say that like comes into it, more rather that cutting open alicorns is a sort of speciality of mine. That’s all it is. We’re set up for it down here after all. We've got the positive pressure room in case anything toxic boils out of them and blast-proof doors as well, just in case things really do go south. Plus, when you’re all done, the paperwork is fairly routine.” Twilight shrugged. “Way I see it, an alicorn isn't that much different from a regular pony, the only difference is that down here they’re a rarity.”

“Takes the pressure off other morgues as well,” Thunderlane added in. “Not everyone likes to deal with Post-Equines."

Twilight flexed her scrawny neck, a faint popping sound emitting from under the skin. “Everypony’s a winner.”

There was an awkward moment. The two of them by the trolley, Twilight with her green gloves and Thunderlane fidgeting slightly.

“Well I guess we’re done here,” Thunderlane said, passing Twilight a file from his jumpsuit pocket. “The docket has everything you need to know. Most of it’s fairly routine, usual details and all. Sorry about the stains though, that's Windfree's fault. Once you’re done with the bag send it back to the Department, but make sure you hose it down first.”

“I’ll see to it,” Twilight replied, taking the docket in her telekinetic grip and flipping through a few pages, glancing at several of the notes present.

“Well then, until next time.” Thunderlane said, nodding his goodbyes as he backed up into the still open elevator.

“Until next time,” Twilight nodded, raising a hoof in farewell but failing to look up from the docket in her grip.

“It was great meeting you,” Windfree added, raising his own hoof.

Thunderlane pulled the doors shut with a screech, and the elevator began to descend, the motor rumbling at the top of the shaft like some grumbling beast stirring in its sleep.

≤ΘΘΘ≥

Twilight stood still in the corridor until the display above the elevator told her that it had reached the ground floor. She slowly trotted up to the stretcher, gave the docket another brief inspection, and then wheeled the stretcher into the surgical room, donned a surgical mask and transferred the body-bag onto the dissection plinth before carefully magically removing the alicorn from the bag.

It seemed to Twilight that even in death the alien creature that was the alicorn seemed unnaturally beautiful. She placed the alicorn on its back, its eyes closed. Its wings hung listlessly over the edges of the plinth, their tips gently brushing against the tiled floor. Under the hard lights of the dissection plinth, its white coat was ghost pale.  

Not expecting to be disturbed, she removed her glasses.

Taking a moment before the autopsy began; Twilight gave the creature a look over, her eyes running up and down its body. The alicorn was thin, as was all of its kind. The limbs were spindly and skeletal, the skin seemingly pulled taut over the bone, with only small groups of muscle standing out with any real definition. The alicorn’s mane was a thick mixture of light and dark blues, the bands of colour organised into stripes. For a few moments more she admired the creature, its alien body and unusual aesthetics, before sighing and getting back to work.

After all, a corpse was just a corpse. And like all corpses that were brought to the morgue, it needed to be cut open.  

She pushed a squeaky wheeled trolley to the side of the dissection plinth, pulling aside the green cloth covering to reveal a selection of medical tools. There were scalpels, gleaming forceps, bone saws, sterile scoops for removing tissue, spatulas, and a multitude of glass receptacles for storing tissue samples in. Once she would have found such implements as laughably crude, but now they came to mind with a comforting familiarity.

A microphone dangled from the ceiling, Twilight tugged it closer to her face and threw the heavy rocker switch on its side, activating the microphone with a deep clunk of metal on metal. Somewhere beyond the room in one of the buildings technical bays, a cassette-tape recorder began to run. She cleared her throat, glancing to the row of clocks on the wall.

“Doctor Twilight Sparkle speaking, the time is now nine-fifteen pm. Beginning autopsy of corpse, docket number is one-zero-zero-one-nine. Recently delivered to the Third District Morgue by the Department of Public Hygiene.”

She paused and cast her eyes over the corpse; the appropriate observations springing to mind with minimum conscious thought.

“Initial indications suggest that the subject is an alicorn, probably an adult male. The alicorn appears to be undamaged, apart from impact damage to the wings. There is some longitudinal damage to the limbs and some sub-dermal swellings, recent enough to suggest that they might be contributing factors to the alicorn’s death. However, the limbs are otherwise uninjured with no signs of any major breaks or dislocation. Indications are that the alicorn’s descent was controlled until the last moment, at which point it fell with enough force to inflict damage to the wings but not to cause any visible damage to the rest of its body. Reason for the descent is unknown, however, the cause of the death is likely to be due to massive maladaptive trauma through exposure to multiple zones, rather than impact with the ledge.”

She paused again, letting the tape keep recording, whilst she reached for a syringe with a hoof. She plunged the needle into a small rubber capped bottle, one of the last dozen such bottles in the morgues inventory, ensuring not to take more then was strictly necessary.

“In accordance with protocol, I am now administering a lethal dose of Morphax-55, to ensure final morbidity.”

She leaned over the alicorn and lowered the needle until the tip was just over its chest, millimetres away from piercing the white coat. In the nine years that she had been working as a pathologist Twilight had cut open hundreds of Pre-Equine bodies. Some had been victims of accidents, medical negligence, or homicide. But she had only dissected eleven alicorns.

That was still more than most pathologists ever did in their whole career.

“Commencing injection of-” she began.

The alicorn’s left hoof suddenly whipped over and seized her hoof, moments before the needle entered its body.

“Stop,” it said.

There was a moment of silence, before Twilight continued. “The alicorn is still alive,” she spoke into the microphone, not taking her eyes off of the creature. “It has expressed visual awareness, comprehension, and fine motor control. I will now attempt to alleviate the subjects suffering by... ”

She hesitated and looked into the dying creature’s eyes, which were fully alert and terrifyingly focused on her own. The alicorn still had her hoof in a vice like grip, the needle hanging like a dagger over its skin.

“Let me do this,” Twilight told the creature. “It will help ease the pain, stop your suffering.”

“You mean it’ll kill me,” the alicorn said, speaking slowly and with visible effort, as if it had barely enough air in its lungs to make a sound.

“You’re going to die anyway.”

“Break it to me nicely, why don’t you?”

“There’s nothing nice to break, you've fallen out of the Celestial Levels and into Neon Heights. Your cells can’t take it, and even if we could get you back home the damage has already been done.” Twilight paused for a moment before deciding to say what she knew both her and the alicorn were thinking. "You're a dead pony."

“You think I don’t know that?” The alicorns voice was little more than a wheezing grumble, the creature's chest barely rising and falling. “I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t want your medicine. Now then, will you answer my questions truthfully?”

“If you have any to ask, then yes I will,” Twilight replied.

“Are you Twilight Sparkle?”

Twilight was silent for a few seconds. She had often wondered how it would happen when her pursuers finally caught up with her; though she had never imagined that the encounter would take place in the morgue. She had always assumed that the time would come in some dark alley or in her own apartment as she arrived home.

A shadow moving into view, a glint of metal; the sound of a blade as it sliced through the air, and then... that would be the end of it.

“Of course,” she said with as much dignity and calm as she could muster, trying to prevent her voice from trembling.

“That’s good; I was hoping I would be brought to you.” The alicorn grinned weakly, evidently pleased with its triumph.

“Why?” Twilight asked, acutely aware of the painful grimace behind the alicorns smile. As his cells began to denature and lose function, she knew, the alicorns body would begin to slowly devolve into a cancerous mass of maladaptive tumours. The pain such a transformation would induce wouldn't be anything less than excruciating.

She was very happy to not be in the alicorns hooves.

“Because I have spent the last nine years searching for you. It wasn't easy, I’ll admit. After you went rogue the princess ordered the destruction of all data pertaining to the Adaptive-insertion Initiative, every shred of evidence that could have proved you even existed.”

Twilight had only a vague recollection of her past life; flashbacks and snippet images of existence in another world. Yet she knew enough to know that if somepony up in the Levels was looking for her, it was far from good news. She thought about killing the alicorn then and there. She still had the Morphax-55 in hoof, poised to deliver its deadly payload, but the Post-Equine knew she was capable of that and yet it was still talking. Twilight had no idea what its end game could possibly be, but something told her she should hear the creature out. So, she decided to ask the most obvious question.

“So then why did you fall?”

“Because I chose to. This was the quickest, if not least risky way of reaching you.” The alicorn shuddered, bloody flecks leaving its mouth as a raking cough overcame it, when it came around the creature continued. “I was under no illusion. I knew this was a suicide mission, and that I would not be returning to the Celestial Levels. But still I fell, and stayed alive long enough to reach you. I heard that when an alicorn falls into Neon Heights, it gets brought to Twilight Sparkle for autopsy.”

“Most of the time.”

“I can see why that would work for you,” The creature quipped, smiling faintly. Its lips quivered slightly as the muscles struggled to maintain the expression. “Though I'm pleased to find out my information was accurate.”

“Can you?”

“Yes, Twilight Sparkle, yes I can,” the creature said, its voice suddenly becoming more serious. “I know who you are; I know what happened to you. You were once one of us, a true alicorn of Canterlot. Yet now you live here, down amongst the Pre-Equines, with their dull electric lights, their stinking factories, and their polluting cars.”

“Do I look like an alicorn?” Twilight asked; a note of derision in her voice. "I'm not sure if you can tell, but there are no wings on my back, only a horn on my head."

“I know what happened to you, Twilight. Don't try to play that game with me. You were remade to look like a Pre-Equine. Your wings were removed, your body reshaped, and your blood purged of machines. You were sent to live amongst the Pre-Equines, to prove that it could be done. There were others as well, a whole team, then something went wrong, and now it’s just you; now you can’t ever go back home. You knew you would be safe here, since alicorns can’t leave the Levels and survive. But it seems you've grown slack, Twilight, complacent in your isolation. If I was an agent of the Celestial Levels I could have crushed your skull by now.”

“It's just you and me in this room,” Twilight said slowly. “If you’re one of these agents, why haven’t you killed me yet?”

“Because that’s not what I came here to do,” The alicorn stated. “I came to warn you. Things are moving up in the Levels, Twilight, events that haven’t occurred in millennia are about to unfold; and unfortunately for you, that means you’re back on the agenda.”

“What do you mean, 'things are moving'?”

“Signs and portents, Twilight. There're indications of unusual instability within the Mire, or the Eye of Faust, if you are religious. You’re not religious, are you, Twilight?”

“Not really.”

“If you were, you’d say that Faust was getting restless again. You've probably noticed the pre-shocks down here already, boundary tremors, warnings of zone slippage, and so on. There’s something happening inside Canterlot, something not even the alicorns understand, and it’s got a lot of us in the Levels rattled. The ponies who sent you down here, the ones you’re hiding from, they want you back.” The alicorn frowned, his facial expression twitching as a muscle spasm ran through his cheeks

“I'm useless to them now,” Twilight told him in a flat voice. “They’d have no need for something like me. I'm an outdated model, a ninth generation; by now the project will be at least three generations further ahead.”  

The alicorn shook its head, the movement seeming weaker than before. The damage caused by the zone transitions must have been starting to take greater effect. “Unfortunately, Twilight, that's not the case. There’s information in your head they’d very much like to suck out, and if they can’t, well... they’ll kill you just to make sure no one else can get at it.”

“Then I’ll hide,” Twilight replied, licking her lips. “I've been hiding for nine years; I'm pretty good at it.”

“You've already tried hiding, and that hasn't worked. I, a single alicorn, tracked you down easily enough once I put my mind to it. As for your employers, I cannot say, though it’s likely that by now their agents probably already have a trace on you, sniffing out your forensic trail. Running is your only option. Being here is already pushing them to their limits; they won’t be able to track you if you cross zones.”

“Leave Neon Heights?”

The alicorn licked his lips. His eyes, the cold cyan blue of twilight verging on true night, were devoid of any visible structures. “Leave Canterlot, go all the way down and into the great wide open, the Outzone. It's safe to say that’s your only shot at survival.”

“There’s nothing out there,” Twilight said, shaking her head. "And even if I made it past the Everfree, it's nothing but ruin beyond. I'd never survive the wastes, not even pegausi can fly across them."

“There’s enough out there for survival," the alicorn snapped irritably, his brows furrowing in anger. "If you've survived down here, then you’ll cope out there. What matters the most is that the information inside your head mustn't reach your hunters. I didn't take on a suicide mission to hear you say that you wouldn't even bother to try.”

Twilight frowned back at the creature. “And why do they care now, hey? You never gave me an answer.” Twilight's hoof, though still in the grip of the alicorns, lowered a fraction of an inch. The needle coming that bit closer to piercing the alicorns coat.

Feeling the mare exert her strength, the post-equine tried to push back on her hoof. However, the zone damage had taken its toll, and he was too weak to stop Twilight from lowering the needle. “The work you were involved in was only ever the tip of the iceberg," he said, his voice strained from trying to push her back. "It was part of the Adaptive-insertion Initiative, a covert program designed to create an occupying force of alicorns with sufficient built in tolerance to different zones to occupy the entirety of Canterlot.”

“I know that,” Twilight dead-panned. “I believe there was a reason I was assigned to the initiative.”

The alicorn gave her a humourless bark of laughter. “True, true, but now’s not the time to get bitchy. Without you, the work stalled. But now, with the prospect of the realignment, the initiative has been revived and accelerated. They want that occupying force and they want it soon, which means they want your knowledge.”

“And what do you want? For all I know, you could want the exact same thing, except a different ruler on the throne."

The alicorn smiled again. “True, I desire the same thing, your knowledge. However, I would see my faction use it for a different purpose.”

“It seems to me that the safest thing to do what have been to kill me.”

“That was... considered, I won’t lie to you about that.” The alicorn gave Twilight a weak, pitying smile. “But in the end, it was agreed that you were simply too valuable for that. I cannot see your knowledge wasted, not with all the potential it has.”

Twilight lessened the pressure she was putting on the alicorns hoof, raising the needle slightly. “Then help me get back home.”

“That’s not an option. The best I can do is to warn you to get out, after that you’re on your own. Can you leave Canterlot without being followed, Twilight?”

“I don’t know.”

The alicorn frowned again. “If you cannot be certain, then there is very little point in even trying. If they know that you've left it's only a matter of time before they send a newer model after you. Is there anyone else you can turn to? Anyone else who can help you?”

After a moment of thought, Twilight answered. “Yes... there is somepony who could help.”

“A pre-Equine?”

“A pony who has helped me from time to time, yes.”

“Can they be trusted?”

“He knows what I am, he’s never betrayed me.”

“And now?”

“I see no reason to assume otherwise.”

“If this pony can help you, then go to him. But only if your trust in him is absolute, if not then you’ll have to go on your own.”

“How long am I supposed to be away?”

The alicorn gave her a weary grin. “You’ll know when it’s safe to return, trust me.”

“I can’t just drop everything and leave; I've got a life down here.”

At that the alicorn genuinely smiled, chuckling slightly until he began to cough. “My intelligence says differently, Twilight. No special somepony, no family, just your work. You cut open corpses day in and day out, and lately you've started to look like one as well.”

Twilight stared at the alicorn. “And you sacrificed yourself for this?”

“To reach you, Twilight? Yes, yes I did, even though I knew that my death would not be an easy one. But I also knew that if I could reach you, and persuade you to take your own survival seriously, that some good might come from it. Something that would make my own demise seem a small price to pay.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

The alicorn smiled one last time, his face sad beneath. “I’ll take that injection now, if you have no objections. You don’t have to feel bad about this; it was my choice to come here. Just don’t waste this chance.”

“I won’t.” Twilight tapped the needle to make sure that the syringe was still free of air, before gently piercing the alicorns coat with the implement. “Hold still, this won’t hurt.”

She pushed the syringe in and squeezed the plunger.

“How long?” the alicorn asked, smiling weakly as he released her hoof and lay back on the dissection table. The creature sighed weakly, a contented sort of noise as he visibly sagged.

“A couple of minutes, maybe less.”

“That’s good.”

“I never got your name, you know,” Twilight said, feeling odd that she had just delivered death to another creature, even one as alien as an alicorn.

The alicorn looked up at her, the smile still on his face. “In another time, another place, you and I were very close, Twilight, very close indeed.”

“We were... lovers?” Twilight asked hesitantly. How could she be lovers with this creature? She didn't even remember her old life, let alone something as significant as who her mate was.

“No, no, Faust forbid!” the creature said, smile still in place. “My name is Shining Armour, and I was... I was... ” the creature shook its head slowly. "No... Never mind, you probably won't even remember me."

“It’s nice to meet you, Shining Armour,” Twilight said, taking one of the creature's hooves and shaking it gently.

“It’s nice to meet you too, Twilight Sparkle,” the alicorn replied, his eyes suddenly widening. “Oh, that reminds me. There’s something I forgot to tell you.”

Next Chapter: Prologue. Estimated time remaining: 6 Hours, 9 Minutes