-Perspective-

Everything hurt, the pain radiating out from her chest as the bone needle was pounded into her skin again. Rainbow yelled out, screaming profanities and wailing in pain as the needle punched through the skin on her chest again. Her screaming had devolved into broken curses and wails of unintelligible rage and agony.

The thick frame of her torturer loomed over her, the needle in one hand and a small mallet in the other. His muscles rippled in a single torche’s light that lit his silhouette. The full moon loomed behind him, looking down with disinterest at this strange ritual. Strong calloused hands held her down against a roughly cut tree stump, the jagged wood tearing through Rainbow’s dress shirt and scraping into her back.

The shirt had been torn open, where her tormenter relentlessly stabbed into her chest with the bone needle. But it wasn’t just some strange torture,  they were using a very old method of applying a tattoo. The needle was dipped into a wooden bowl, returning pitch black at the tip before it pricked into her bare chest again and left its mark.

Even the ink wasn’t what it appeared to be. Rainbow had watched as someone had led a huge wolf to the bowl, using a wickedly curved knife to cut open one of its forelegs and draining black blood into it. The wolf hadn’t even flinched or resisted. It had stared at Rainbow with determined eyes, throwing back the flickering torchlight at her.

Now they were all simply nameless torturers in her eyes, enemies to either be defeated or escaped from. Fight or flight.

“He’ll be a very strong one,” her tormentor noted with his scratchy basso, taking another swing down to complete the mark on Rainbow’s chest. It was a rune, the meaning warped and lost as time went on. It resembled a cross, the arms pushed upwards into a ‘Y’ shape so that it almost resembled a pitchfork.

Rainbow snarled in rage, not even realising her own actions anymore. She was seeing red, her heart pounding and chest aching. Her lips had cracked, her throat was sore, and her ribs ached from having to flex with every scream that she forced from herself. She wanted her captors to know how much she hated them for the pain they gave her.

The pain blossomed in a wave across her entire body, stiffening her struggles as it did. “Stand back! It’s starting!” someone yelled outside of her field of vision. The stinging exploded out from her core again, making her wail in crippling agony. She tried to curl in on herself, to try and block out the fiery burning that swept through her veins.

The rough hands that held her down retreated, letting her roll off of the stump and onto the soft grass and soil beneath it. She struggled to stand, managing to lift herself up on her hands and toes. She balanced precariously like that for a moment, her pain making it hard to concentrate on her balance. Endorphins and adrenaline flooded through her veins, trying in vain to alleviate the choking fire all over her body.

Rainbow’s bony hands filled her vision, the tendons and vessels just under her tightening skin standing out with every violent beat of her heart. The blood under her fingernails from the struggle that had led to her even being in the forest in the first place turned black in the dim, orange light of the torch. Her fingers clutched at the grass as if it were an anchor, keeping her from being torn away by the agonizing pain that continued to well inside of her.

Her knuckles buckled violently, suddenly popping out of place as the tendons in her hands rapidly tensed. Rainbow screamed out again as her feet did the same, her black dress pants starting to feel tighter as her limbs started to shake and perform their own change. Her metacarpals erratically cracked and shifted under her skin, lengthening and shifting into different shapes. The skin around her wrists cracked and tore as the bones stretched, oozing dark blood onto the dewy grass.

The only thing that kept her standing was the fact that all of her muscles had suddenly gone completely rigid, freezing her in place. All she could do was scream.

The pain in her chest shifted to her sternum, every nerve capable of sending a signal in her chest shooting off like fireworks. With a sickening crack, her sternum shot out from its position, her ribs shifted painfully as they compensated for the difference. She felt her heart start to worm its way into a new position, the cardiac muscle spasming and stopping erratically as it shifted and grew. Her lungs ached as they filled in the new space, popping and burning as they adjusted.

Her shoulders dislocated several times as they shifted alongside her chest, the scapulas spreading out flatter over her back. She felt the bones in her upper arm twist and shrink as her shoulders shifted forward, the bone snapping and popping back into place randomly as it shifted.

Her vision suddenly darkened, her eyes growing with pressure that felt like they were about to be crushed by a pair of invisible thumbs. “Look at his eyes! There they go!” a voice called out from the darkness around her. The pain suddenly blossomed until it felt like her eyes would simply pop. She could numbly feel the skin around her eyes stretching, twisting around as her muscles moved without her consent.

The darkness slowly retreated as a new stinging lanced through the tips of her fingers and toes. They writhed as something pushed through the sensitive flesh underneath her nails, cracking them and pushing them out of the way. As her vision cleared, she could see that large black claws had cut through her nails and replaced them.

Her skin was stretching across her fingers, pulling itself up until a short web of flesh separated her digits. Blood turned the grass black around her, shining in silver and orange light.

Her hips bucked forward, the bones shifting and nearly dropping her to the ground. She felt the pelvic bones shift up, making her legs stand slightly wider. Her tailbone cracked audibly with a blossoming of intense, white hot pain. It stretched out, new pieces of bone rapidly shaping themselves from the shards of the others. Her skin stretched as the tail ripped through the last of her clothes, letting them fall to the ground. Nerves burned as they stretched and split to fill the new part of her body, swinging and writhing until it was done growing.

“There’s his tail!” she vaguely heard someone crow. Rainbow’s cries were starting to become weaker as something gripped onto her windpipe. Her throat was very suddenly tight, making it hard to do anything but gasp in pain.

Muscles in her neck suddenly twitched in one direction, lifting her head skyward sharply and dislocating several vertebrae. The bones burned and shifted as they elongated, stretching her neck out as her skull began to change as well. Her skin burned as it stretched and flexed to compensate, itching and writhing as it did.

Her skull cracked as it suddenly shifted, her cheekbones popping outward as her jaw slid forward. She could feel her nose and mouth start shifting erratically forward, creating a thin muzzle. Her lips stretched and cracked, bleeding onto her gums as her teeth started to ache. Her ears twitched and twisted as they crawled up the side of her head until they were sitting near the top. She felt her skin sliding over her as it tried to keep from ripping further.

She couldn’t even scream anymore, her vocal chords stretching and changing as her neck writhed around the stretching bones. Every tooth in her mouth suddenly cracked open, splitting as another, larger fang pushed its way out of her gums in its place. She felt her tongue stretching, a strangely numb experience next to all the unbearable pain coursing through her limbs.

Just as she thought that there could be no end to her pain, it slowly started to subside. All of her skin tingled, and as she watched, small pores opened up as dark fur slowly showed itself out. She numbly felt some of the normally thin and wiry hairs on her arms and legs falling out, creating small lines in the blood around her where they stretched the liquid along themselves. Her skin even seemed a shade darker than it should have.

Below her, her hands and feet no longer supported her. Instead, some sick rendition of a paw held her above the bloody forest floor. They were thin and the claws stretched out unnaturally from the too tight skin. Her knuckles bent and knotted the shape, making them look blocky and malformed.

“It’ll take a little while for him to grow all that in, but it looks like he’ll have a fine black coat,” someone noted, drawing her attention back upward. Standing around her were naked people, all holding a strange familiarity about them. One of them held a torch that lit the small clearing much better than it seemed to have before. And standing among them were several monstrous wolves, much bigger and stronger looking than any normal wolf should have been. Every eye of the people and the wolves around her threw back the light as they looked at her.

“Bring the mirror out for the boy,” one of the wolves said quietly. His voice rang surprisingly clear, even though he spoke barely above a breath.

One of the men broke off, returning with a large mirror framed in sturdy, simple wood. When he turned it toward Rainbow, she could only stare at the creature that was reflected back at her.

It was wolf-like in shape, but clearly far from what the ones around her looked like. It was nearly bald, the fur that it did have was nothing more than a light fuzz that did little to hide its sensitive skin. It was bony and thin, barely much more than a skeleton with skin. It looked emaciated and dehydrated, an animal on the verge of death.

Its eyes had turned into an angular shape, as if the normally almond shape had been twisted up. The irises had dilated to a point where it seemed like there wasn’t anything but the black pool that dominated their place. Its sclera was shot through with black veins that pulsed in time with her aching heart beat, a new shot of pain lancing up through her eyes with each beat.

Its lips parted in an almost permanent snarl, its lips too torn and tight to hide the huge fangs that now stretched out of its blood blackened gums. Its nose had stretched alongside its muzzle, turned forward like a dog’s.

Its ears pointed skyward, pushed into a sharp, pointed shape near the top of its head. They twitched painfully at any slight sound around her, even the gentle sound of the people breathing. Her black hair had shifted from its head, most of it near the top of its neck where it made a scratchy looking mane.

And it was covered in its own blood, the thick liquid slowly clotting in the cracks and tears in its skin. The dark liquid drooled and dripped off of it, anywhere that the flesh had broken was smeared with the life giving fluid. The grass around it was slick with her blood, staining the place where she had changed a deep crimson-turned-black in the night.

It was her, or it used to be. That was her blood on the ground, and those were still her eyes staring back. Or, at least, they felt familiar. Her new tail twitched in the cool night air, pushing a small wave of air over her crotch and sending shivers up her spine. Even that had been changed.

And there was something else, a strange feeling at the edges of her perception. It felt like, just outside of where she could see, there was a huge empty space. Like she was standing with her back to a pit, where it waited for her to take that final step backwards so that it could swallow her.

“Hello, Douglass,” a deep voice said to her clearly. It tore her away from the haunting new image of her body, drawing her to look at the particularly large wolf standing to her side. This wolf was a varying tone of grey, small scars parting his thick fur on his chest and shoulders. A small scar was underneath the wolf’s right eye, another strangely familiar feature. “Welcome to the family, son.”

“Welcome to the pack,” the crowd around her stated in unison. Each of them lifted a hand, or a paw, to their chests. They pointed with the ends of their hands, and their respective claws, to a small mark there, practically glowing in contrast to the people’s pale skin. The same glyph that was now stained into her own flesh.

~~~

‘... The first time is always the worst,’

If that dream had been what she thought it was, then that sentence held much more weight than Rainbow had first given it. She struggled with the memory of the dream, straining to commit every detail she could to memory. Strangely, the details had remained concrete in her mind throughout the day, not fading as a dream normally would.

They had stopped shortly after she had woken up from her fitful sleep, the familiar surroundings of the cart ready to greet her. The company had stopped to rest at midday, resting for a meal before the long climb to the top. Inside their cart, she could hear various conversations drifting in with the smells of woodsmoke and warm food.

At the moment, she rested with her back on top of Coalback, letting him gently preen her extended wings with his hands. It was a blissful experience, his fingers gently stroking through her feathers and delicately turning any feathers that had shifted out of place back where they belonged. It was a massage that no unicorn or earth pony could ever appreciate, the tight coils of nerves in her wings singing with relaxed pleasure.

It had actually taken her awhile to reach that delicate balance of blissful relaxation, only kept together by Coalback’s gentle preening. She had a quick scare in discovering that the extremely comfortable blanket that Non had given them was actually made from rabbit skins. Luckily Coalback had woken up and calmed her down. It had also made her question the contents of the wine she had tried as well, but thankfully that had been made with mountain berries.

But now that she was calm, a sensation enhanced by deciding to accept more of the wine, her mind wandered. With each pass of Coalback’s fingers through her feathers, she drifted further into her own thoughts. She sighed as a particularly bothersome feather was tucked and straightened back into place.

‘... The first time is always the worst,’

That single sentence suddenly held a thousand times the weight it had before, and just the idea of what her dream could mean, if it was connected, formed a nervous lump in her throat. Just the idea that she could have sat in on that horrible moment, was so ludicrous that it … actually sounded possible.

The things that Coalback had shown her with only a look into his eyes was enough to give that theory an actual toehold. And if his first transformation had been anything remotely similar to what she had seen in her dream, then she could finally understand his occasional distance. The memory of the pain that she had felt in her dream made her chest ache, but only for a moment.

She shivered as several feathers on her wing fell into place, Coalback’s dexterous fingers searching for more out of place feathers. A sharp tug of relief shivered down the length of her wing as a feather pulled free from its itching root.

“... Uhm … Did you want this, or something?” Coalback asked her as he moved it in front of her, twirling the cyan feather in between his finger and his thumb. She heard a small twinge of worry in his voice, an unsurity of whether or not the feather was actually supposed to have pulled out or not.

“Yeah, I’ve been waiting for that one to fall out for awhile … Why don’t you keep it?” Rainbow suggested after a moment of looking at it, bending her head back to look up at him. “You know, ‘cuz we never really did anything with flowers, or a date, or anything,” she said, seeing a smile grow on his face. It was a good feeling for her, knowing that he could still smile with her.

“Alright,” Coalback said, looking at her thoughtfully. He pulled the feather up to his own face, examining the barbs and running his thumb through the vane. After a moment he tucked the feather behind his ear. “How about that, just until I figure out a better way to keep it,” he said softly, his hand returning to gently caress her withers.

She nodded, leaning into his hand and simply enjoying the feeling. Her heat hadn’t disappeared, and it showed no sign of doing so any time soon, but it wasn’t nearly as intrusive on her concentration as it had been before. She savored in the feeling of being wrapped in Coalback’s arms, the heat in her groin growing to a comfortable warmth.

“You know, this kind of reminds me of a tradition that we had,” he said after a moment, drawing her attention back to his face. His hand moved up to the dark necklace around his thick neck, the dexterous fingers finding their way inside it. When he finished fishing into the strong, frayed cloth, his hand returned with a white spike held between two of his fingers. He carefully held it out in front of her so that she could look at it properly.

It was a fang. Long, white, and slightly yellowed near the base where a few jagged ends marked where it once held itself in his mouth. “I lost this while I was out in the forest. We’re sort of like alligators, I grew a new one the day after,” Coalback explained with a small smirk, twirling the sharp spike between his two fingers. “Sometimes, as a show of respect or … a show of commitment … we give them away,” he said, starting to trail off as he looked at the fang in his hand.

“... Are you okay?” Rainbow asked, lifting a hoof to still his hand. It was almost hypnotizing how the different muscles moved under his skin in his hands, how the shape of his forearm would change subtly with every movement. And the range of movements, it was a kind of dexterity that she wasn’t sure that most unicorns had.

But that kind of wonder was drowned out by an increasing worry that was fueled onward by Coalback’s continued silence. “I’m fine …” he said after a moment, the twirling of his fingers halting. His voice was a relief, even if he had that distant sadness in his voice again. “My grandfather was the only one in my family who ever saw me as worthy of having one of his fangs,” he said hoarsely, gently placing the ivory spike on her chest.

She was lifted up as he took a deep breath. His fingers caged the fang on her chest as they gently massaged her fur there. “You don’t have to pierce your ear if you don’t want to, but I’d like you to keep it for me,” he said quietly.

The stillness of the cart became very evident in that small silence. It seemed like even the sounds of the ponies just outside had been muffled, the light that speared through the tight canvas covering shifting only in the stiff breezes from outside. His arms around her chest felt heavier, his breathing almost forced.

“Of course I’ll keep it, Coalback,” she said hoarsely, holding his hand close to her chest and turning onto her side in his arms. She pressed her cheek against his chest as she looked up at him, her breath disturbing the wiry little hairs there. “Are you really okay? Or are you just saying that so I won’t get worried about you?” she asked after a moment, holding his hand tighter to her chest.

“How’d you guess?” he asked after a moment, a bittersweet smile weakly growing on his lips.

“It’s what I’d do,” she said simply, closing her eyes for a moment as she nuzzled into his chest. His heart nervously beat under her head, that distant stillness of his struggling to place itself again. But she wouldn’t let him, using a hoof to lightly trace the shape of his collarbone. “Can you talk to me about it?” she asked gently, opening her eyes to look up at him again.

“... I have two, my grandfather gave me one of his …” Coalback said after a long pause, turning his head to the side so she could see his ear. It was still slightly mangled from the fight with the jaguar, but somehow not nearly as bad as it seemed it should have been. The two white spikes in his ear swaying slightly and tapping against each other as he did, and now that she knew what they were, she could easily tell they were fangs pushed through the flesh of his flat ear.

“Right …” Rainbow mumbled, turning to look at the fang still pressed to her chest with his hand. It was a strange sort of symmetry between the trade that they had made.

One old tradition of the pegasi was to keep feathers that fell out, since it was a rare occasion for the the durable plumage. It wasn’t luck that had saved her wing from being totally destroyed during her last major crash. It would take a lot more than that to hurt her wings beyond repair.

And teeth don’t just fall out on their own. So, to give each other such intimate parts of … basically themselves, wasn’t something done lightly. It was a sign of commitment.

“The other one is my father’s,” Coalback said distantly, drawing her thoughts back to him once again. “I took it from him before he died,” he said shakily, his heart fluttering weakly in his chest. “... Right out of his bloody mouth. We usually use this … it’s like a big hole punch, to put them in. There’s a layer of cartilage in our ears, basically flexible bone, so it’s harder to pierce that part,” he explained. “Take a close look at them, at the places in my ear where they come through.”

Rainbow looked back up at him, concentrating on his ear. The strangely shaped flesh curled around in a relatively flat shape, the outer edge curling around to direct sound into the center of it. Along that curve, those two spikes punched neatly through, one above the other. Or, at least the top one did.

The lowermost piercing had a strange wrinkle around it, roughly hugging the fang. And then she realized what it was, a very mangled scar. “I used a shard of glass to cut the hole, and then forced it in. It was messy, and painful. But at the time, I felt it had to be done,” Coalback said quietly, his other hand lifting up to gently stroke the scarred ear with his fingertip.

“Does it still hurt?” Rainbow asked robotically, her mouth moving before she could stop it.

“Only when I lay on it, or if they turn inside it,” he replied, unfazed by the suddenness of the question. His hand moved away from his ear and returning to rest on her shoulder, the fingers gently massaging the base of her wing. “We should talk about something else. I think I’ve had enough of being all mopey,” he said with a forced smile.

Rainbow leaned back into his touch, immensely enjoying the feeling of his fingers coaxing the muscles underneath them to relaxation. “Maybe we should go on a date,” she said after a moment, breathing out the words as her tail gave a violent twitch. “You know; dinner, go fly in the park or something,” she said, her eyes starting to drift shut.

“That might not be such a bad idea,” Coalback agreed, his hand working up her wing slowly. “We could fly far away, just you and me, camp out near the mountains. Or we could buy out a train car, you could show me all the countryside,” he suggested, the hand on her chest continuing to gently massage the strong muscles underneath.

“You can do that?” Rainbow huffed, the massage on her wing starting to fan hot flames again. His fingers kept stroking over the sensitive nerve clusters there, putting a new sensation of pressure on them that only succeeded in making her wings flare out stiffly.

“You could back where I was from, get a whole car to yourself. And it wasn’t just a bunch of empty seats either. They’re like their own house in there; a lounge, a bar, a bed, everything,” he said quietly, pulling her wing down toward his head. She gasped as the stiff limb gained a whole new amount of pressure on it, pleasure flooding out of her wing in waves as it tried to resist the movement.

It wasn’t painful, or if it was it was simply washed out with the intense feeling of euphoria that poured out of her wing like a broken dam. His lips gently pressed against the base of her feathers near the end of her wing, sending shivers down it and all along her spine. “You know,” he said, his warm breath breaking her down into whimpers. “If we’re really quiet, and really quick …” he said, trailing off as he gently kissed slightly lower on her wing.

“I’m- F-fuck …” she stuttered, his thumb suddenly pressing into a sensitive spot on her wing. She shivered stiffly as that pleasure filled in where the pressure had started to fade. “I think I’m see-hing a pattern here,” she breathed, twitching as his fingers concentrated on the spot. “Does talking abou-oot this stuff- Mm! Turn you on, or something?” she managed to spit out, quickly melting into his embrace as his hand wormed back down her wing.

“No, sitting with you turns me on,” he chuckled, following his hand with his lips. “And these wings …” he breathed into her feathers, tickling them and making her heart race. The hand on her chest started to move down, but she stopped it with her hooves and pulled it up to her face. She nuzzled into his hand, taking the fang from him and gently setting it onto the mattress with her other hoof.

The fire in her crackled violently to life, urging her on as she clenched her rear legs together as hard as she could. Without another hesitation, her tongue found its way onto his hand. She licked greedily at his fingers, trying to take in his taste. Her tongue danced along the strange lines in his hand, tracing them up to the crooks of his fingers.

The salty flavor of his skin was like ambrosia to her, unusual but far from uncomfortable. She was barely aware of her own actions now, barely realizing that she had started to suck on his fingers until it was already pressed into her mouth. She sucked greedily at it, trying to get as much of that salty, coppery taste onto her tongue.

“Coalback! You need to see this!” someone crowed, quickly breaking both of them out of their motions. Rainbow heard Coalback sigh, her own groan quickly following as his hands moved away from her.

What a wing-tease! she screamed at herself, the pleasure giving way to a dull ache in its absence now that Coalback had released her. “What could you possibly want?!” she yelled out, the stranger’s voice more than bothersome to her. A full day without the attention that she’d been waiting for was starting to make her especially angry, the fire coursing through her veins demanding release.

“I know you two were having a hell of a time in here, but you really need to see this. Like, now!” the voice said, Mayor Mare’s head popping into view from the flap at the front of the cart. “Look,” she said simply, a ghost image of a horn revealing itself as part of the tarp undid itself next to their heads. The pale cloth pulled up, revealing the sky toward Ponyville.

What Rainbow saw turned her blood to ice in her veins, all ideas of pleasure gone. In the middle of the day, bright pink clouds should not line the horizon. Fluffy curls floating far above the tips of the Everfree, a dark rain trickling out of them. There was only one explanation for that.

“Oh shit,” she mumbled, a dark memory of the thick, pink clouds resurfacing in her mind’s eye. Cleaning cotton candy out of her feathers had not been fun.

“I think … that Discord finally got around whatever you did to him. I think that they’re marching again, sir,” ‘Mayor Mare’ said darkly, a flash of segmented blue punching through her eyes for just a moment. Her disguise faltered for a moment, barely perceptible to anypony not paying attention. And for some reason she looked … tired, extremely so.

Coalback grunted, pulling himself up and pushing Rainbow off of himself. “Coalback, wait,” she said harshly, ignored as he pulled himself stiffly to the edge of the cart. A worried grimace spawned on her face as Coalback lifted himself up, his leg held stiff by the tightly wound bandages there.

He tore away the last of the tarp, one of his hands steadying him on one of the bows that curled above them. His eyes trailed across the area around him, darting from detail to detail as he examined the area. Rainbow could see the muscles in his back and arms tighten, each one standing out sharply on his pale skin.

Spread out in a wide, tightly packed mob, were the exiled citizens of Ponyville. Covered with blankets and sipping on warm broth, apples and bread spread as fairly as possible among them. Small campfires, made from what little dry wood they could find created small wisps of grey that floated up and away from them as they warmed the ponies huddled around them.

The hard march showed itself in the huddled masses, exhaustion taking its toll on the gentle ponies. Only a half night worth of sleep, no breakfast, and the shock of events from the previous night weighed on them heavily. Ponies comforted each other, trying to stave off the fear and grief of any possibility that their homes wouldn’t be there to return to.

And the amount of ponies forced to ride had nearly doubled, split hooves and exhausted muscles crippling them. The hospital staff, already stretched far with having to pack up and move everything, was now nearly overwhelmed as they tried desperately to help as many of them as possible.

Despite this gloom, some had found ways to distract themselves from it. A song, a game played with neighbors, even the foals found the energy to play between the wheels of the still wagons. It was almost certain that Pinkie Pie had found a way to keep morale at a relatively even level.

Their protective circle still held, slightly spread out and warped due to the irregularity of the land at the foothills. The ponies who could walk, who would fight, still stood guard. Their wall of boxed carts still surrounded them, watchful of another calamity that might befall the savaged ponies. Now was not the time for a timber wolf attack, or a mishap with a cockatrice.

But, in the presence of those clouds, all had come to a dead stop. Too many still remembered the chaotic days in Ponyville during Discord’s return, the newly dubbed ‘Capital of Chaos’ still a fresh memory. Those strange days had nearly been the end of many a sane pony, both mentally and physically.

Coalback was unsure of what to make of them, their origin far from a mystery however. His lightshow had done little but to buy time, barely a stunning blow. As much power as it had taken to do what he had, basically cutting off their path, was nothing more than an inconvenience. And a temporary one, at that.

But, he did know that he had done one thing. Discord was bound to where he stood, and would have to travel with his army. So there shouldn’t be any special surprises from the self-proclaimed god, he hoped.

But this was an issue nonetheless. Discord was on the move, and their pace had slowed considerably. They were barely at a halfway point and still slowing. The steep climb up a mountain wouldn’t help that either. If they were particularly unlucky, they wouldn’t make it before the army.

“Get us moving again,” he said quietly, his strength gone from his voice. “We need to get to Canterlot as soon as possible, drop anything that we won’t need. Eat while we walk, we can’t afford any more delays.” He carefully lowered himself back into the cart. The Mayor’s voice cut through the air almost as soon as he had finished, a calming relay of the order to move.

Coalback’s sudden stillness was jarring for Rainbow. She could see lines of worry etching into his face. And if he was worried, it meant that it was something important. “Coalback, what’s gonna happen?” she asked, a nervous shaking in her voice drawing his attention.

The cart lurched forward, shouts and scared utterances drifted through the loosely hanging tarp. The sounds of wooden wheels creaking began to fill the air as the group began to move again.

“Before, I thought that they were just cutting their way through. But now …” he said, settling back down onto his mattress. “I think that they’re clearing a path …” he said, shivering as a cold breeze infiltrated the cart.

Rainbow hopped up, her stiff wings swaying around her as she pulled the tarp back into place and secured it. She settled back down next to him, lowering one of her wings enough for it to act as a blanket. “What’s the difference?” she asked, searching with her eyes for a blanket that wasn’t made out of something that once had a face.

“I think that that,” he motioned with one of his hands toward the tarp and the approaching army beyond it, “is only the first wave. I think that Discord plans to keep barraging Canterlot until it either breaks apart from the inside, or he’s able to break through,” he said, starting to grow distant as his thoughts spun through his head.

“A-are you sure?” she asked, the question turning into a plea that he was wrong. Hoping desperately that he would sigh, frown and say that it was only a slim chance. She distracted her suddenly twitchy muscles by reaching up and pulling a thick woolen blanket over them.

“Yes,” he said darkly, his arm wrapping around her again underneath the blanket. “It’s what I would do,” he said distantly, drifting into thought as their cart slowly trundled alongside the rest. The two slowly rocked into a fitful, dream like state. Neither awake or asleep, simply contemplating.

A race had started, and time was very much against them.