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The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter One – From the Ashes

        The first thing she remembered was how scared Rainbow Dash was.  She could feel the blue pegasus' panting breath beneath her wing muscles as the young filly clung—trembling—to her backside.  Undaunted, Rainbow Dash flew the two of them over the panicked sprawl of Cloudsdale, darting every which way around herds of frightened and hysterical ponies.  There was a great shadow falling over the land of Equestria, as if some titanic curtain was being drawn over the noonday Sun, and the pegasi's home in the sky was the first to fall under the blight.

        As the chaos reached a deafening cacophony, the tiny pony buried her shaking snout into Rainbow's prismatic mane.  “I don't get it!” she shouted.  “Wh-What's going on?  Why's everyone so freaked out?”

        “I can't believe it.  Harmony was right!  She was right all along!”  Rainbow Dash's voice sounded strangely cold, contemplative, distant—like she was flying a million miles away from where the two of them were presently hurdling.  “I wonder who else knew about this!  Twilight?”

        “R-Rainbow, you're scaring me,” the filly murmured.  Tears welled at the edges of her eyes as she clung all the tighter to her sky-barreling protector.  “Who was right about what?  Where are you taking us?”

        As Rainbow Dash veered around a stampeding herd of rain factory workers, she daringly ignored the pony's first question and only half-tackled the second, “I'm taking you somewhere safe!”

        “M-Me?”  The filly blinked.  “But what about you?—WHOAH!”

        She shrieked as Rainbow ducked low beneath a falling column of skymarble.  Gasping, the little pony atop her looked back to see an entire cloudbed dissipating in a wisp of steam; every pegasus that was galloping across it floundered and flailed in the sudden plunge and all too tragically succumbed to the weight of several ivory structures overtaking them from above.  Far below the clouds, where the hapless pegasi plummeted, the great green expanse of Equestria shuddered and bulged as if a serpent of epic proportions was shredding its way upwards through the surface.

        More screams, and the young pony turned forward once more to witness a rainbow factory imploding as three whole levels of cloudbeds collapsed through it.  Before her trembling eyes, half of Cloudsdale was crumbling into a gigantic earthbound comet.  Streams of shattered rainbow patterns and marble shrapnel soared towards her vision.  Before she could scream, Rainbow Dash was banking hard to the left, yelling at the youngling to hold on tight.  She obeyed, and clamped her hooves around Rainbow's spine with an iron grip as the blue pegasus spun them around surging chunks of debris, falling droves of screaming ponies, and white-hot spurts of Cloudsdalian steam.  At the end of her acrobatic sky dance, Rainbow Dash heroically soared the two of them heavenward towards a patch of brown haze beyond the last wisps of evaporating clouds.  As the clouds gave way, the brown haze turned out to be a caravan of abandoned hot air balloons conjoined about a metal framed gondola large enough to fit four dozen ponies.

        Rainbow Dash effortlessly threaded the two of them through an open porthole in the side of the abandoned royal cargo vessel.  Touching down inside, Rainbow planted the young filly on her hooves.  The littler pony stumbled numbly across the interior of the gondola—ushered forward by her older blue friend—until she dazedly blinked at what she was being led to: a series of dark cubicles fashioned out of obsidian metal.

        “Arcane vaults?”  The filly blinked and glanced confusedly up at the pegasus.  “Rainbow Dash—Ponies are dying!  Why are you bringing me here?”

        “Kid, if I place my bets right—and I sure as Celestia wish I didn't have to—all of Equestria is dying.  There's no place in the sky or on the ground that's safe—except for here.”

        “Why here?”

        “It's what Harmony told me.  And so far, she's been right about a bunch of stuff,” Rainbow Dash's voice echoed once she had shoved them both into the hollow of one of the arcane vaults.  The great dying world shrieked and howled outside the claustrophobic interior like a reverse seashell.  “It all makes sense now.  I can't take any chances; You're staying here, alright?”

        “Staying here?” the filly squeaked in disbelief.  She trotted shakily around the interior, eyeing the floor, the roof, the two tiny windows of sickly pale sunlight growing dimmer, dimmer, dimmer.  “But Rainbow Dash!  What about our friends?  What about my--?”  There was a large metallic clang, and the girl gasped to find herself shut inside the box-like vault.  “Rainbow Dash!”  She ran up and scratched her hooves in futility against the thick black door.  “Let me out!  Wh-Why are you doing this?”

        “Because I'll be darned if I let you die!”  The colorfully maned pony stared from outside a barred vent in the door frame.  She reached a hoof down and playfully ruffled the filly's hair while sporting a brave smirk.  “Don't fret!  I'll be back in—like—half an hour, tops!  I just gotta find Harmony!  She'll know how to fix all of this!”  A not so stealthy gulping of a lumped throat:  “Sh-She has to ...”

        “Rainbow Dash, don't leave me!” the filly sobbed, all her tiny weight pressed against the door.  “Please—I don't want to be alone!”

        “I'll be back!  I promise!  Now you promise me something!  Promise me you'll not leave this airship until one of us girls comes to get you!”

        “Rainbow--”

        “Promise me!  Pinkie Pie Swear!”

        “I-I swear,” the filly hiccuped, fighting back her tears.

        “Everything's gonna work out.  You'll see!”  Rainbow Dash's hoof let go of the filly's head as she trotted backwards towards the porthole in the side of the gondola.  “Seriously, kid—Would I let the world be any less cool by disappearing?”  A wink, a flick of the tail, and she was gone.

        The little pony sat there—trembling—in the dark shadow of the arcane vault, with the penumbra of light from two opposite windows acting as her only view to an apocalyptic crescendo.  For what seemed like an hour of molasses creeping terror, she listened to the thunderous echoes of her own heartbeat.  A sour tumor formed invisibly in the base of her throat.  With a dry trembling tongue, she reared herself up and started calling—mewling—Rainbow Dash's name, then Fluttershy's, then even Applejack's.  And when nopony and nothing answered her foalish cries, she cleared her throat and—in a braver breath—she tried a name that she had barely come to comprehend, much less believe in.  “H-Harmony?”

        It was around that very moment that a tremendous shockwave ricocheted across the roof of the world.  The filly felt it, as the entire body of the gondola rattled like a ship dashed against a rocky seashore.  The pale bands of light from the opposite windows swam across the vault's interior, and the young pony realized to her horror that one or more of the balloons had exploded.  The entire body of the dirigible spiraled in a suicidal plunge earthward.  She was only faintly aware of a horrified little voice calling out all the names she had ever grown attached to in her abbreviated life.  Several more spins later, and her young body was thrown violently towards the side of the vault, forcing her to look out the barred window and see the entirety of Cloudsdale falling like a bag of ivory bricks towards an Equestrian countryside drenched in endless flame.  Droves of screaming pegasi fell towards the gaping maw of the burning abyss—until suddenly their airborne carcasses exploded in a hurdling wall of ash.

        Breathless, the filly's eyes tilted upwards to see the source of the holocaustal blast wave.  As a great shadow fell over the plunging vault, she saw the Sun being blotted out by a great circular phantom.  It wasn't until the pull of gravity boiled her blood from the inside out that she realized that this 'phantom' was the Moon.  The cold body completely eclipsed the burning one—creating a solid ring of fire for a few brief breaths—until the Moon itself exploded and covered everything everywhere in one thunderous scream that masked hers.

        Her scarlet eyes opened wide, twitching.

        Ash and snow danced across the field of cloudbeds, stretching dark and gray from horizon to horizon, as far as anypony could see... as far as only she could see...

        She sighed, her eyes thinning as they were encompassed once more by the perpetual grayness of that monochromatic world outside.  A hint of moisture sprang from the trembling edges, but they cleared in a huff as the frowning pony sat up straight in the cockpit's seat and flung a pair of amber-brown goggles over her optics.  The adult mare reached both hooves forward and pulled at a series of levers flanking the left and right sides of her seat, which was positioned in the center of a cramped airship.  Gazing forward across an instrument panel, she focused on the altitude meter as it ticked down a spinning scale.  The gears and servos within the dashboard hissed and puttered incessantly, speaking to the mare in a language of her own design.

        The entire body of the cabin rocked and veered as she navigated her way through a pocket of windy turbulence.  She tilted her gaze back towards the curved windows that stretched in front of the dashboard.  Beyond the copper-framed translucent sheets, the flurry of ashen snow kicked up.  The air was anything but calm here—a rock face had to be nearby.  It was time to stop relying on the instrument panel and instead trust in gut instinct.

        A deep breath, and the pony reached a brown hoof up and pulled at a chain-linked handle.  A whirring noise, and a great iron boiler positioned at the very rear of the cabin hissed and billowed hotly.  A series of brass pipes rattled against the curved walls of the gondola as steam throttled up through them and into a series of gears that controlled the exterior rudders of the airship.  The pony's hoof pulled at another chain—And a shrill whistling sound lit the foggy air as the vessel's lateral vents briefly opened.

        A ringing noise; the ship descended, rapidly.  The pony ignored the alarm and proceeded with her sharp plummet.  Her brow creased above her amber goggles as she squinted hard through the mist-laden windshield, the fluttering ash outside parting every which way to make room for the ship's piercing path.  The altitude meter was clicking like mad; the metal framework of the dashboard rattled and buckled.  Finally, as the centripetal force of the fall gave slack to the pony's seat harnesses, she spotted a break in the ashen blizzard.  A great black mass was surging just beyond the gray mist.

        She immediately reached her snout up and yanked at a chain-linked handle while simultaneously shoving two levers back with a pair of strong hooves.  Every dangling supply net and rattling cage inside the gondola swayed forward as the zeppelin came to a hovering stop then gently fluttered down towards a granite cliff jutting out from the mist like a great black knife.  Slowly, slowly, the pony piloted the dirigible downward one meter at a time, then one half meter at a time, then she cut all power and simply let the thing naturally drift until there was an inevitable thump of iron against rock.

        In one motion, she unclasped all of her safety harnesses and dashed towards the port side of the vessel.  Clad in brown leather armor from snout to flank, the agile pony raised her head towards a valve and grasped its handle in her teeth.  With a tightly held breath, she cranked and cranked and cranked the cylindrical device forward until—through the edge of her squinting vision—she saw a giant mechanical claw stretching icily outward from beyond the leftmost side of the great yawning windshield.  Once the claw was within reach of the rocky cliff, she let go of the valve and in the next breath pulled at two hooks positioned right next to it.  A hissing of steam and hydraulics, and she watched in deadpan satisfaction as the metal 'fingers' of the claw clamped down tightly onto the edge of the cliff.  Locking the fingers in place with a pulled lever, she then trotted to the starboard side of the ship and performed the same feat, so that an identical claw stretched outward from the right and similarly clasped onto the mountainous promontory—successfully anchoring the vessel in place.

        A solid breath, and the pony trotted over towards a supply locker on the port side.  Instead of a handle, there was a black stone within which a glowing rune was etched.  Reaching towards a work bench, she grabbed a leather bracelet within which half-a-dozen severed horns were interwoven with fine stitches.  After sliding the multi-colored band onto her right hoof, she cleared her throat and solidly throated one word:  “H'jem.”

        One of the many horns on the bracelet shimmered in a brief purple haze.  Immediately, the glowing rune on the supply locker faded to black, and the hulking metal cabinet opened with a resounding metallic ring.  Reaching into the locker, the pony grabbed and shouldered another thick layer of armor.  After donning the dull brown material, she then snatched two sets of saddle bags, followed by a pair of lanterns which she yoked over her neck.  Once suited, she procured a long collapsible cylinder of brass fused to a wooden stock.  She then made sure to grab two hollow metal magazines filled to the brim with faintly glowing runestones; afterward she slid the brass rifle into a sheath on the right flank of her armored shell and the magazines into the left side compartments.  Finally, she grabbed a tiny glass jar fitted with a runed cap.  The container was custom made, as was everything else on her and around her.  So adequately geared, the pony took a few backtrots from the closed supply locker and grunted a different word into the air:  “W'nyhhm.”

        The rune over the middle of the cabinet glowed once again, locking the doors with a magical seal.  The pony made one final check of her instruments, lowered the temperature on the boiler in the back, extinguished the lanterns lining the interior of the cabin, and made her way down a winding brass staircase towards the dark-lit hangar floor below.

        Strolling past several tables of chemistry equipment and engineering tools, she nonchalantly approached a widely yawning aperture of copper plates positioned towards the lower bow of her airship.  “H'jem,” the mare uttered once more.  The circular door in front of her opened from the inside out, its shiny metal hole pouring a gray spotlight of misty haze across her weathered features.  A deep breath, and she reached a hoof up to the side of her pilot's cap, dragging a cloth mask down so that it covered her mouth and snout.

        A flurry of bone-chillingly cold wind dotted with snow and ash, and she was greeted by the foggy wail of a dead world beyond.  Trotting forward, she hopped down onto the black rock of the cliff face—her brass horseshoes nearly slipping on the polished obsidian.  She hissed a muffled curse under her breath, groaned inwardly, and marched on past the gently swaying hull of her anchored airship and the faded letters of its name that had been half-heartedly spray-painted thereupon:  'HARMONY'.

        Pausing briefly to measure the direction and intensity of the wind, the pony reached a hoof up and parted the mask from her lips just long enough to throat:  “H'jnor.”  The entrance to the Harmony's hangar closed shut like a cats-eye.  “W'nyhhm.”  Six glowing runes positioned around the closed aperture suddenly lit up, encasing the body of the entrance in a thin haze of purple shielding.

        The pony trotted forward, marching across the glassy black surface of the mountainside.  Her clopping hooves were mere pin-drops in an endless howl of wind and snow.  Above her thickly armored neck, the sky swam infinitely across a ceiling of dark gray clouds, and beyond that souless mesh the pony knew only to expect the sputtering hint of starlight, or something halfway like it. Soon, the shrieking wind drowned away as she grew more and more distant from the Harmony and closer towards her goal.  It was a haunting silence, like suddenly being at the bottom of a magical well with no echoes.  But this hardly surprised her—after all, she had been there before, long ago.

        It took barely two hundred meters of trotting before she found the first signs of the ruins.  The softly falling snow gave way to a great white mass—an overturned cylindrical tower that had fallen thunderously on its crumbling side countless years ago.  Emblazoned across the shattered stalk of the lopsided spire was the faded image of a bronze Sun, splotched with ash and rusted streaks of long-lost life.  This same image blotted the sides of several more buildings—some collapsed, others in a perpetual state of decay—as the grand skeleton of a deceased city exposed itself coldly before her.  The pony had reached her destination: the elevated, unclimbable ruins of Canterlot.  She pressed on, in search of her target.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The mountainous spires that shadowed Canterlot were natural weather breakers; they pierced the high clouds of ash like gigantic plows.  In brief spurts, the endless twilight of the sky glanced down in its dull gray glare, but the remaining towers of the crumbled urbanscape blocked even those meager attempts at 'light', so that the streets were reduced to veritable black chasms.  A dead-thick ink bled through the winding alleyways and sporadic courtyards and marble-stepped corridors of the granite maretropolis.  What was once the capitol city of Equestria and home to the Royal Equine had become what it was inevitably constructed to be all along: a grand mausoleum.

        Through this, the pony marched slowly, eyeing every shape and shadow beyond lingering corners.  Her snout twitched anxiously, ready to reach back towards the rifle on her right flank at any given blink.  Her hooves made lonely clopping sounds of crafted metal against decayed stone.  Her breaths—muffled by her cloth mask—came out evenly and calmly, howbeit balanced upon the precipice of caution, the sign of an expert explorer who had ventured through many an unwitting graveyard much like this one.

        Her amber shaded goggles reflected abandoned storefronts, their dangling signs and painted windows preserved icily through the death-blink of time.  She sauntered past lonely market vendors; the many fruits stacked inside had long-decayed into dry pits with hanging scraps of papery skin.  Tattered and tossed flags bearing the Celestial crest rested on either side of her as she ascended winding streets of mildew-stained cobblestone, pointing her way towards the palatial center of the cold granite labyrinth.

        A break in the spires, and a curtain of snow fell to greet her once more.  Soft flecks of ash settled on her armored neck and flank; she made no attempt to shrug any of it off.  The dead powdery substance had become like a second skin to her, a precipitation that never ceased to fall for any single moment of any single day ever; not that 'days' could any longer be quantified in the gray miasma that everything had become.

        Another row of steps, and a gaping wide entrance yawned before her, announcing the front half of a large ten-story structure built upon the highest point in Canterlot.  The Royal Quarters; she had made it there in record time.  Pressing onward, she twisted her snout left and right—nudging switches built into her yoke that activated a pair of spring-loaded flints which scratched each other inside of a pair of gas lanterns.  After a few diligent tries, the two lanterns were lit, and they shone a swath of light directly ahead of the pony in a golden halo as she ventured into the darkest part of her sojourn.  The last time she was here, she made the mistake of not crafting herself any form of light projection.  A near-plummet into a gaping hole in the floor that led into the heart of the mountain taught her a thing or two about such brainlessness.

        With the lantern light as her guide, the pony made her way through the former living quarters of Equestria's two crowned princesses.  She trotted over checkerboard tiles dotted with bits of gravel and debris, hopping over a collapsed coat of arms in order to make her way into the grand library.  The silhouettes of hundreds upon hundreds of collapsed books moved before her like shadow puppets as the  shuffling pony shone her light left and right, finally finding the detour she needed through the dining hall.  Tables and troughs were filled to the brim with clattered silverware, shattered plates, and bits and pieces of petrified fruits and vegetables.

        And it was here—finally—that she saw them: bodies, the hollowed out shells of ponies.  Either in a clattered sea of bones or in the seared cornucopia of plastered leather, she always stumbled upon them this deep into a fortified structure.  Any of the ponies that had been left out in the open air of Equestria had turned into ashes ages ago, to forever be lifted up by the cold winds of the plains and snowed back down onto the endless graveyard of Equestria.  Here, in Canterlot, in the heart of the Princesses' Palace, many of the remains were hidden in smokey heaps under helmets and saddles of armor, like worthless lint collecting under rusted dustpans.  The last time she was here, she confiscated a few of the brass horseshoes off of the guards' remains and smelted them to form new rivets for the Harmony's hangar extension.  It was almost worth the near-plunge into the heart of the mountain, almost.

        She had no need with horseshoes or armor this time.  She was here for one thing and one thing alone.  She pressed on, ascending several curved staircases lined with tapestries.  The woven illustrations divulged her lantern-lit waltz one historical lesson after another: of colorful ponies overcoming gray hardships before building a golden interwoven city under the watchful gaze of a silk-plastered Alicorn with a starlit mane.  The winding staircase was suddenly pelted with a flurry of cold ash and snow.  The pony found herself trotting onto an open balcony overlooking a great westward blight: a land of dead gray fields and exposed black earth, sleeping forever under a swirling bed of cold drifting mist.  She had seen it all before, from above and from below.  Intriguingly enough—to her at least—she found that the Equestrian Wasteland looked the same on either side of the clouds.

        Glancing right, she paused for the first time since she entered the ruins of Canterlot.  A three-story tall stained glass window stretched above her.  In its epicenter was the swirling infinitude of the Goddess of the Day and the Goddess of the Night in perpetual pursuit of each other; below and above them were joyous green mosaics of jagged equine figures in hoof-rearing reverie.  The tints in the segmented glass were amazingly well preserved; not a single chip of paint had faded from the artistic craftponyship, a work of art that was two Ages' old at least.  But the pony could hardly tell—or care.  Color no longer shone in Equestria; not like it used to.

        Lowering her snout—she gazed through amber goggles and was mutely pleased to see a loose panel of glass covering the flank of one of the prancing ponies beneath the twin Goddesses.  Pushing her leather-armored mane against it, she was able with minimal effort to push the panel off its frame and crawl through the pony-shaped hole.  Trotting softly through the stained glass window, she tilted her snout up and flashed her yoke-lanterns widely to reveal the cavernous hollow of Princess Celestia's Royal Throneroom.  A curved series of steps led audaciously towards the holy seat in question, still draped with rich purple banners, all emblazoned with the solar crest.  The gold plates below the throne had lost their shine, and the water fountains flanking the base of the seat had long dried up.  Otherwise, the place was well preserved with what could only be described as appropriately bitter irony.

        She gazed around, reaching a hoof up to adjust the apertures of her goggles.  The shadows of the room cleared before her engineered vision; and as she flashed her lantern light around she finally saw what she was looking for.  Trotting over for a closer inspection, the pony lowered her snout to study a series of blood-red feathers littered along the far side of the throne room.  Her goggled eyes wandered a little further; she spotted a large 'nest' of golden thatched threads, huddled just beneath a grand tapestry woven in the image of Princess Celestia herself.

        This was it.  This was its hiding place.  If the pony had any chance of catching it, she had to act soon; she had to bait it here before it was too late.  The window of opportunity was closing even before she had lowered the Harmony into its anchorage.  If she had any hope of getting paid—much less out of Canterlot alive—she had to act swiftly or lose ...

        What was there left to lose?

        She knelt down and reached a snout back past her yoke, yanking a string that loosened a pouch on the right side of her forward saddle bag.  Shaking to the side, she dropped loose a paper cylinder crafted onto a wooden block.  Tightening the pouch shut, she then propped the fireworks cannon up at the entranceway beyond the throneroom. Stepping back, she kneaded her hooves in counterclockwise twists.  With a metallic sound, cleated spikes shot out from the base of her front horseshoes.  Next, she scraped her cleats until sparks flew—which she then used to light the tiny cannon's fuse.  Swiftly retracting the cleats, she galloped back to the far side of the room and hid beside the throne, out of sight from the entranceway to the grand corridor.  Kneeling low, she squinted her eyes and reached a hoof up, dimming her amber goggles just in time for what was about to happen.

        A bright flash of light; the fuse burned into the cannon and the homemade pyrotechnics fired a flare ceilingward.  Here in the stone heart of the Royal Granite Castle, the burning plume of golden light shone like a beacon.  Its frothing core let loose an unearthly howl; a banshee scream that filled every abandoned corner of the Palace and its surrounding alleyways.  There was no way that a living soul in the catacombs of Canterlot could not hear this flashy desecration of silence, and the pony knew that there were only two souls to be had in the entire city: herself, and her target.

        The first minute of howling zoomed by like a skittering rat.  The second swum by with the delicateness of swarming moths.  By the third minute—a limping, shuffling, decaying minute—the pyrotechnics had begun to dwindle into a low groan, like a sea of dying cats.  The pony felt her heartbeat once again, and she grew increasingly anxious as the shadows of the throneroom recollected in the absence of her flickering distraction.  Taking a few deep breaths, she glanced right for any sign of her prey: none.  She glanced left—and her head did a double-take.  The dangling haze from her yoked lanterns had caught sight of an unmistakable silhouette forever etched into the surface of her starved eyelids.  It was the shape of a record player, and where there were record players...

        She trotted over swiftly, keeping one eye on her dwindling flare, all the while feeling the weight of the rifle on her armored flank.  Once she had reached the left side of the throne room, she exhaled at the sight of a series of supply crates, atop which was indeed a record player, its needle and crank having fallen off and dwindled into splinters long ago.  Energized with a seemingly alien euphoria, the leather-clad filly hoofed through the ashen mound of debris besides the crate—kicking up a few red feathers in the maddening search.  Finally, she found what she was looking for, hoping for:  a black disc encased in white shreds of tattered vinyl.  Hungrily, she rotated the record to its side and was astonished to see one particular name on the water-stained label.  For the first time in immeasurable 'weeks', a smile graced the last pony's masked lips—or something that skeletonously resembled a smile.  Her hairless tail briefly flicked.

        A thunderous roar; the floor and granite foundations of the throneroom shook.  Pebbles and precipitous bits of dust fluttered downward from the painted ceiling.  She gasped and immediately tossed her snout left and right, shoving tiny knobs in her lanterns and killing their golden glow in a blink.  With a single gallop, she slid back into place besides the throne with the labeled record in her gentle jaws.  Reaching back, she tossed the black disc into a safe pocket of her left rear saddle bag.  After tightening it, she flung her right shoulder forward and bucked her legs.  Her rifle was launched in midair like a spring.  She hoisted her snout up and grabbed its wooden stock in gnashing teeth and gave it a shake.  With a series of clack-a-clacking noises the brass cylinder extended and exposed its chamber.  Reaching back in a single breath, the pony unsheathed a magazine full of runestones and chanted breathily into them.  The armband of horns on her right leg flickered, and the stones glowed a bit brighter as she slapped them into place, cocked the rifle, and slid two hooves into a pair of levers welded into the weapon at ninety degree angles with each other.  Sliding into the triply dark shadows of the throneroom, she squatted besides the golden seat and waited, her goggled gaze locked down the sight of the rifle barrel aimed towards the entranceway beyond the smoldering fireworks.

        The strange roar cascaded through the stone hallways of the palace once again, rattling the royal seat besides her crouched body.  More dust and paint chips fell from the ceiling as the heat of the room increased by several degrees per minute.  Sweat formed in bulbs between the pony's brown coat and her thick leather armor as she waited on her prey.  She shook the fear off like she had trained herself to do long before, and her goggled eyes roamed the lengths and breadths of the hollow throneroom in mute anticipation of the inferno that was heading her way.  The temperature reached a fever pitch and a bright copper glow washed over the place.  But as the sizzling seconds piled up on one another, she could not tell from where the brightness was coming...

        The truth made itself evident to her very quickly as the pony spotted the circular image of the swirling Horse Goddesses swimming over the stone floor and towards the seat.  Blinking under her goggles, she craned her neck and turned around.  A brilliant cross of gold and scarlet light was billowing from just outside the stained glass window, illuminating the entire mosaic of Equestria in ghostly bright colors.  A pair of shimmering eyes flickered to life and glared straight through the etched surfaces—and found her.  A grand shriek—filling the Palace once more with a blood-curdling roar—and the great burning thing plowed straight through the window, shattering through a sea of stained glass shards as the flaming creature swooped down towards the figure hidden behind the seat.

        The pony held her breath and dove forward into a full-bodied roll.  Princess Celestia's age-old throne caught aflame as a pair of golden talons ripped through it with trails of seeping plasma.  The air of the room positively boiled, the distant ashes of dead guard horses evaporating in an instant.  Sliding to a stop against a far wall, the filly hissed as her leather armor positively steamed from the sheer heat.  She propped her brass rifle up over a supply crate and took aim.  From her vantage point, a giant flaming bird stared down her sight and shrieked its golden beak wide, a burning tongue lashing at the equine intruder.

        “H'rhnum!” She shouted into her mask.  Her bracelet of horns flickered; the first runestone inside the rifle's magazine burst in a puff of smoke.  A shot rang out as a manabullet throttled down the brass barrel of the rifle and soared across the room, finding its way into the avarian inferno's chest.  Chunks of plasma and plumes of scarlet feathers littered the floor as the thing shrieked and flailed its billowing wings up high, causing the paint on the ceiling to melt and curl.  Without a second's hesitation, the pony yanked at both levers of the rifle with alternating hooves, cocking the weapon.  It spat the smoking dead runestone out of its magazine and loaded the next one.  “H'rhnum!”  Another bang.  This time the manabullet screamed its way towards the nape of the flaming fowl's neck.  The creature intelligently dodged at the last second, and with a bubbling howl the phoenix dove its way at the rifler.

        A grunt—the pony scampered and dodged to the side just as the burning creature slammed into the wall behind her.  The supply crates burst into flames, spilling sparks and embers all over the mare's rolling body.  It wasn't until the pony stumbled back onto four hooves that she realized her mask was on fire.  Cursing, she tossed her snout madly left and right until the fabric was successfully flung from her sooted face.  With gnashing teeth, she cocked the gun and spun about, only to meet a flaming talon being flung into her chest.  Under the dull thunder that followed, she thanked her lucky stars that she had packed extra armor.  Though her brown coat was slightly singed, the smoldering husk of her chestplate remained in tact.  She realized this—of course—after only the third or fourth bounce off the palace walls.  Groaning, she got up and could tell from her dancing shadows that the phoenix was clawing towards her for another strike.  With a sharp breath, she flung her rifle once more over her shoulder—sheathing it—and broke into a full gallop in time to narrowly escape a snarling beak strike of the flaming creature, now hot on her hairless tail.

        The last pony ran, dashed, and scampered down a series of meandering hallways at full speed.  She had no need of the lanterns anymore, as the bright flare of her pursuing target lit everything hellishly for her.  She flung the heavy yoke off and leaped in time to avoid a plume of fire bursting at the top of some winding stairs which the pony then rapidly descended, sliding icily down the laminated banister.  Reaching the bottom, she dove with a forward flip, slid comically sideways on a loose rug, and regained her hooves in time to avoid the impaling beak of the dive-bombing phoenix scrambling murderously after her.

        Now on even ground, the lone pony made for a gray light at the end of a long passageway leading into the open courtyard of the palace's center.  The tapestries and portraits flanking her caught flame as she galloped past them.  Up ahead, the passageway yawned open to reveal a marble balcony, at the edge of which a brilliant purple banner hung.  Taking a wild chance, the pony jumped with all her might and grabbed the edge of the royal fabric in her teeth.  Using her momentum, she swung violently forward and leaped at the end of her self-imposed body toss.  It was just in time; the phoenix had burst out of the palace behind her—shrieking—and snapped at her flailing hooves with a surging beak.  The pony out-'flew' the flaming bird, landed her hooves in a dried up aqueduct, and slid down the mud-laden bridge until she cleared the palace gates and pounced full force into the snow-kissed blackness of the Canterlot streets below.

        Landing on a second-story awning, she fell through tattered fabric and awkwardly ragdolled through a wooden market stand, smashing it to splintery bits.  After scampering up to her hooves, she prepared to gain some bonus distance, only to gasp at the realization that her left rear saddlebag had flung open in the haphazard landing.  Glancing every which way, she froze jubilantly upon the sight of the black record disc she had swiped earlier; it was still intact.  She ran back, slid on four hooves, and snatched it off the street in her teeth.  A shrill shrieking noise.  She glanced up, and her goggles reflected twin golden comets sailing burningly down towards her.  A muffled squeal from within, and she barely dashed away from the phoenix's talons scraping the cobblestone street.

        The pony tossed the record back into her bag and galloped down the careening snow-laden avenues of Canterlot.  The pursuing phoenix lit the stone-dead blackness of the ruined City like a torch at the bottom of a deep grave.  As the seconds wore into minutes—the phoenix gave up running on its talons and took to the air.  It hovered a violent halo over the distant image of the scampering pony, all the while screeching angrily like the shimmering ghost that it was.  The filly looked up breathlessly to witness a veritable forest of scarlet feathers falling loosely from the lurching fowl's wings.  That was just the inspiration she needed to take a sharp left, leap over a rooftop, slide down its crumbling shingles, leap again, fall two stories, and cannonball weightedly through the balcony window of an abandoned hotel room across the street.

        Glass, wood, and bed stuffing flew through the air as the pony barreled over a mattress, tumbled across the floor, and somehow landed on her back with her shoulders pressed up against a wall.  A clack-a-clacking sound, and the leather-armored equine had her rifle aimed out towards the hole she had just made in the windows—peering through the softly raining ash beyond for any sign of her glowing target.

        “Come at me.  Come at me.  Just a matter of time.  Just a matter of time.”  She gulped, sweated, and hooked her hooves tighter in the levers attached to the rifle.  The foremost runestone in the magazine was rattling noisily.  Glancing briefly at her limbs, she realized that she was shaking.  A growling voice:  “Nuh uh, Philomena.  You're not scaring me!  There's only room in the Equestrian graveyard for one ghost, and it sure as heck isn't you!”  Her voice echoed loudly against the rattling halls of the shadowed bedroom, but no screeching response came from beyond the shattered window.  As the upholstery beside her started to sizzle and smoke, she gaspingly realized why.

        She barely had time to flip up onto her hooves and gallop away when the closet doors behind her smashed inward with smoldering splinters.  The phoenix's burning beak ate through the cramped hotel room like a hot knife through butter.  Snarling, the last pony spun, propped herself against another wall and took aim.  “H'rhnum--!”  The shrieking fowl rammed straight into her just before she could get a shot off.  The bullet flew pathetically into the floor as the two went smashing through the wall and plunged several meters into the corpse-strewn hotel lobby below.

        The pony collapsed under a rain of horse bones and petrified skin flakes.  The phoenix floundered and thrashed, raining fire and dead feathers all across the cold tile floor.  Bounding wincingly back up to her hooves, the filly limped over a chair and sofa, reaching back and grabbing at the other magazine of runestones.  These glowed with a purple aura as she shoved them into her rifle and galloped out into an open garden full of leafless, gnarled trees.  The hotel lobby imploded right behind her from the phoenix's violent thrashings, forcing the pony to collapse from the sheer heat of the shockwave.

        Crawling over the gray sand and dead grass of the garden, the last pony rolled to her side and finished clapping the magazine full of runestones into her weapon.  Pivoting so that she lay on her chest, she aimed her barrel at a pair of marble columns still standing in front of the smoldering heap that remained of the hotel lobby.  “H'rhnum!  H'rhnum!”  Despite the sheen of sweat and soot covering her goggles, her aim was true, and both manabullets embedded a runed dart into each marble column.  The darts continued to glow a deep purple, even as the pony watched the heap of hotel ruins bulge up from deep within and explode.

        The phoenix emerged—wailing—for it had lost a great deal of its plumage.  As a heap of its scarlet feathers had fallen loose, so had its flaming brilliance.  The fowl now stood—or more appropriately stumbled—as a three-meter tall creature with wrinkled skin and crackling flesh.  Its flickering eyes dimmed for a brief moment until it shook its snout and roared with a renewed burst of flames kindling across its body from wing to tail.  It scampered like a drooling flightless reptile the pony's way, passing between the two columns...

        The pony took a deep breath and shouted high into the broiling garden air, “Y'hnyrr!”  Her bracelet flickered.  In response, the purple glow over the twin darts faded as their runes died.  The  enchanted shields on them dissipated, and volatile chemicals stored inside each dart—otherwise magically separated—were instantaneously fused.  Dual explosions rocked the heart of Canterlot, utterly engulfing the phoenix in shrapnel and plasma.  By then, the pony had flung herself behind a thick bramble of thorns, using it as a shield.  By the time the thunder of the twin blasts had faded, she peered up to see that the briars had burst into flames, as did all the dead trees lining the garden.

        And sprawled out in the center of the courtyard of burning trees was the phoenix, trying breathlessly to hold its naked weight up on two quivering talons and a pair of withered wings, its feathers now black smoldering husks.  The flickering glow faded from its eyes, revealing two jaded red orbs of pale invalidity.  The creature hacked and wheezed, crying forth a warbling voice that barely mimicked its years of pride and royal ferocity.  It limped and lurched on the four shuddering limbs suddenly given to it, plowing its beak through the dead garden as the pony cautiously paced around the creature, her rifle propped on her shoulder.  As the trees' flaming 'leaves' died with several plumes of smoke, the phoenix's breaths grew further and further apart.

        The last pony eyed it knowingly.  The bird’s helpless gaze danced like dying twins in her amber goggles.  The mare had studied hard on the physiology of phoenixes.  In a dead world starved of magic, the creature's life cycle was far shorter than normal.  The pony had arrived at the precise time she needed to get the job done.  It wouldn't be long now ...

        Staring at her, the phoenix managed one last snarl.  Its gnarled flesh glowed from underneath and produced a few scant feathers of hot burning plasma.  The pony stopped pacing and immediately propped herself back against a dead tree, cocking her rifle towards the thing's snout until the avarian metabeast simply gave up.  In a sickly slump, the great bird's eyes closed with finality.  One lasting breath; just as it exhaled, its body dissipated into a brittle pile of obsidian ashes in the center of the garden.  Deafening silence returned ever so softly to the snow-kissed hovel of Canterlot.

        The pony wasted no time.  Leaning her rifle against a dried fountain, she slid down on two knees and reached back to her saddlebag, taking out the glass jar that she had procured from the locker on board the Harmony.  Carefully, she unscrewed the runed cap and lowered the jar down—scooping up every single speck of black ash from the garden floor.  This was it; everything counted on this moment and no other.  She sweated briefly, but was swiftly done with the task.  She slapped the cap back onto the jar, lowered her lips to within a millimeter of the thing, and softly-but-succinctly murmured: “W'nyhhm.”

        The rune lit up, and a purplish haze bathed over the jar, sealing the cap magically onto the container.  Not a second too soon; for within a blink, the ashes inside the glass jar sparked, sparked again, and lit aflame with such ferocity that the container nearly leaped out of the pony's hooves.  With a deep exhale, she gazed as the black ash inside disappeared, and in place of it there billowed a plasmatic core of crimson and gold energy.  The flames splashed and kicked inside the glass sarcophagus for a few moments, until the deep glow was finally still—and constant.  The phoenix was imprisoned, contained.

        “Welcome to my life.”  Sighing, the last pony stood on three limbs, juggling the glowing jar briefly before saddlebagging it and marching limply with rifle in tow through the dead streets of Canterlot.

The End of Ponies

        Several dozens of hours later, somewhere above the mountainous spires of the Northern Reaches, the Harmony came to a puttering hover in the midst of a great gray cloudbed, just one gray body in an endless sea of thousands more like it.  The vessel's spinning rear propellers came to a stand-still, and the copper rudders flanking the bulbous rust-red body of the miniature zeppelin pivoted back, slowing the airship's velocity to nil.

        Inside the cockpit of the floating vessel's suspended gondola, the goggled pony finished locking her levers into place.  She raised a hoof and hung it loosely from a chain-linked handle.  Taking a deep breath, she gazed sharply through the wide windshields of her vessel.  Once again, there was nothing to behold but endless gray mist and ash.  The filly raised an unamused eyebrow.  This was the agreed-upon coordinates for their rendezvous; she expected at least a mere hint of her client by this point.

        She sighed.  Undaunted, the filly unharnessed herself from the cockpit seat and trotted across the gently swaying lantern-lit cabin until she came upon a long wooden spout welded to an elaborate speaker system along the port side of the gondola.  With one hoof, she grasped a handle and viciously cranked it.  The spout glowed deeply from within as two teslacoils on either side of the device sparked to life.  A deep breath, and the pony spoke into the spout, listening passively as her own voice was broadcasted in loud crackling intensity beyond the hull of her hovering craft.

        “I know that you are out there somewhere, Gilliam!  I went through the gauntlet to get what you ordered.  Now show your smelly faces before I go and sell this to that baboon at the M.O.D.D.”

        She prepared to wait an hour for a response.  She only needed a few seconds; out from the thick soup of mist there boomed a voice on immense speakers that severely dwarfed those of the Harmony.

        “No need to get testy, pony girrrrl.  We have been expectingggg you.”  This, of course, was followed by a tumultuous rumbling sound as the clouds parted ways to reveal the thick black bow of a gargantuan airship lurching forward and above the Harmony.  The arrogant proximity of the giant craft forced the pony's vessel to rock back and forth like a foal's tiny balloon in the breeze.

        The last pony hissed and muttered foul things under her breath as she leaped back into her cockpit and grasped both hooves to a lever, glaring up through the dashboard windows as the massive cloud-ship elevated high above the local mountaintops.  Groaning inwardly, she pulled a chain-linked handle, adding more fuel to the boiler at the rear of the cabin, so that the steam vents pumped heated gas into the zeppelin's balloon and raised the craft's altitude to match that of the battle-cruiser.

        Both aircraft pulled above the highest cloudbeds, so that the ceiling of overcast transformed into a milky sea; and above, the dull gray sky twinkled with distant dying stars.  There was no Moon in sight.  In the dim everlasting twilight, the pony pilot could see 'Gilliam's' sky vessel in all its glory.  It was a long, narrow, iron-clad thing with six horizontal propellers constantly spinning and giving it lift.  The stern of the ship was slightly thicker than the rest, built to house innumerable bits of cargo, both nefarious and really nefarious.  The bow of the ship was a narrow stalk of a thing that flattened towards the front and acted as a runway, atop which several bipedal creatures were busily moving crates and equipment to make room for the Harmony's mooring.

        The filly lowered her tiny airship towards the bow with residual hesitance.  The huge looming vessel resembled more an upside down legless crocodile than it did a cloudship.  And yet, this was the only place where she wanted—or needed—to be.  Without the payment for this latest job, she wouldn't get the strips she needed to buy a flamestone.  Without a flamestone, she'd have to go for yet another consecutive stormfront without being able to fire up the signal.  And without the signal...

        “Park her in the same 'ol place, pony girrrrrrl.  Make yourself at home.”  The booming voice was punctuated by what sounded ever so briefly like a chuckling voice before it was cut short by the transmission's end.  If the pony was amused, she made no attempt to show it.  Touching down to the runway of the airship, she locked her vessel's claws in place, cooled the boiler, stocked up on a few necessities, and—last but not least—saddlebagged the glowing little jar that this entire exchange centered upon.  With a strong breath, she made her armored way down the spiral staircase, and stepped through the hangar's aperture.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Izzat—?”

        “Shhh!  The girrrrrl might hearrrr you!”

        “But izzat—?”

        “Shhh!  Of course she isss!”  Two smelly hunched-over shadows squatted behind a series of crates and watched with glued anticipation as the four-legged mare trotted out of the gaping exit of the Harmony's gondola.

        Three canine creatures greeted her with untraditional salutes and pointed towards the entranceway positioned halfway down the airship's bow.  She proudly lifted her snout and marched slowly towards her destination.  When her back was turned, one of the canines greedily rubbed his paws and made to peak inside the Harmony's hangar bay.  Without looking, the pony voiced two blunt words; the aperture shut loudly, shielded with glowing runes.  The sneaky dog fell flat on his stubby tail and shook an angry fist at the pony while its two companions snickered at him.

        The two hunched shadows shuffled to the other side of the crates and watched with panting breaths and wagging tails.  “Look how she walksssss!  So bizarrrrre!”

        “You dunce!  That's how all ponies walk!  Or at least how they usedddd to.”

        “Poniesss?  What are 'poniesssss'?”

        “Grrrrrrghhh—Silly, ugly, selfissssssh creatures who hogged the Sun and the Moon when Equestria had color!”

        “Hah!  Hahah!  Silly mutt!  The Moon is a myth!  It neverrrrr existed!”

        “Baaah!  Shows how much you know!  The night usedddd to have a Moon!  And there were living thingsssss in the sky as WELL as on the ground!”

        “On the ground?  You lie!  What happened to them all?”

        “They left when the poniesssss left Equestria.”

        “They all left?”

        “Mmmmm-Yes.  All died.  All exceptttt herrrrr.”

        “So izzat--?”

        “Yessss!  Don't you see?  She is the lastttt one.  The end of poniesssss.”

        “Ohhhhh.... Mmmmm—I bet her flankssss are scrumptious.”

        “Heheheh—I know, right?  What I wouldn't give to have one bite—”

        “BAH!  You two!  Back to workkkkk or Gilliam give no bone!”

        “Yes, boss.”  “Y-Yes, bosssss.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The metal doors to the runway closed with a rusted thunder behind the pony.  The mist and ash of the Equestrian sky dissipated, giving way to an odorous brown haze that permeated the stuffy air of the battle-ship's interior.  Her goggles practically fogged from the stench as she gazed left and right.  Corridors bled rustily into haphazardly-riveted hallways full of bickering and brawling canines.  A few metal-helmeted guards leered and drooled at her.  Others poked sticks at rabid brothers rattling inside iron cages.  In mess halls, dozens of mangy bodies dug their maws into basins full of rum and laughed over crucibles of brimming incense.

        The pony's brow furrowed.  Clumps of panting creatures gathered behind her, watching with mixed curiosity and stupidity as she sashayed her armored self up a final flight of stairs and entered the command center, the ship's bridge, and the waiting presence of her client therein.  A pair of guards parted ways to grant her access, but growled sideways at her passing form all the while.  Once on the bridge, a wide panorama of glass windows and portholes bathed the black metal surfaces and instrument panels with an endless gray gleam.  At four windows towards the front of the bridge there were swivel chairs fixed to giant harpoon guns that aimed straight out into the clouds.  Standing around a broad table in the center of the bridge were several tall dogs, far bulkier and more intimidating than the grand pack of lackeys whom the pony had marched past on the lower decks.  They all muttered and clamored over an ugly-but-practical map of the Equestrian Wasteland.  Upon first sight of the pony's arrival, they parted ways to reveal one husky canine seated with his back to the mare-for-hire.

        “Hrmmm—Your swiftness is either a gift or a jokkkke.  I do hope you have brought evidence to disprove the latterrrrrr, Harmony.”

        The pony rolled her eyes.  “For the last time, Gilliam,” she muttered, “'Harmony' is the name of my ship.  Not me.”

        “Then what does that make you—I wonderrrrr?”  The figure swiveled around in his chair.  He was a stubby, stout excuse for a canine.  The upper right portion of his skull was substituted with a metal riveted iron plate.  His left eye housed a whirring aperture lense that pistoned slowly in and out, focusing on the lonesome sight of her.  “A mercenary with no name?  Perhaps you should just settle for 'pony'.  That's easy for all of us to remember, yes?  Even you?  Heheheh.”  Gilliam's fellow cabinet of airdogs chuckled in cadence with him, at least until he silenced them with a vicious pounding of his paw against an armrest.

        The pony took a deep breath, her goggled gaze fixated on the captain of the canine airship.  “Have you had your fill?”

        “Mmm... Of laughterrrr?”  He raised a clawed finger.  “Yes.  But—er—Of magic red flame?  No.  That is why I am—eheheh—droolingggg in anticipation of what you have brought us, lone pilot of the Harmony, infamous rogue of the sky.  Eheheheh.”  He leaned forward, grinning ear to metal plate with ruby-studded teeth.  “Did you gettttttt it?  Did you get the phoenixxxxxx flame?  Yes?  Y-Yes??”

        The pony stared apathetically back at him.  She reached a hoof back towards her saddlebag.  A ringing noise; as every guard in the room took the sudden movement as an excuse to show off the lengths of their serrated polearms in her general direction.  She glanced at them with no less boredom, then proceeded to produce a glowing glass jar from the depths of her leather pouch.  A gold-and-crimson glow lit the room as the impossibly shrunk bird shimmered from deep within the tiny rune-capped prison.

        A deep howling chant filled the bridge from every canine's slobbering lips, most of all Gilliam's.  “Oooooooh—So beautifulllll!  And trust me, childdddd.  That's a compliment coming from someone who—like you—knows that there are very few beautiful thingssssssss left in this world.”  He scratched his scraggly chin as his one ear flickered curiously.  “Funny.  The burning bird is a lot smallerrrrrr than I had imagined.”

        “I have a Second Age Equestrian Rune Seal enchanting the container,” she explained matter-of-factly while gesturing towards the jar with professional nonchalance.  “Laws of mass and energy can be bent when magic is at play.”

        “Something you poniessssss were all good at, once upon a time, no doubtttttt.”  Gilliam hobbled up with the assistance of a diamond-studded cane, greedily eyeing the glowing item in the filly's grasp.  “You really should be proud of yourself, girrrrrl,” he slurred as his eyepiece pistoned her reflection in and out.  “In spite of everything that has happened, you are a shining—no—a radiantttttt example of true Equestrian grit.  Only someone of your—eheheheh—calibre could be so capable of ensnaringgggg such a creature, and in the dead heart of your much beloved capital, no lessssss.”

        “I didn't come all this way to be paid in compliments, Gilliam!” she snapped, her brow creasing over an angry amber glint.  “I expect strips.  Lots and lots of silver strips.”

        “Please, little girrrrrrl,” he smiled, his ruby-studded teeth glistening.  “Humor an old pooch—Yes?  After all, you are a very precioussssss specimen.  Why, it isn't just everyday that my fellow cohortsssss and I get to have dialogue with the only known pony in existence.”

        “The day I sit and have tea with diamond dogs is the day I know I've really sold my soul.”  She casually juggled the glowing jar of Canterlotlian essence to emphasize her statement.

        Gilliam jolted noticeably, pointing with his cane.  “Easy—Easy girrrrl!”  A brief frown.  “And don't call us 'Diamond Dogs'!  We are the 'Dirigible Dogs' now!  We have been called that for longer than you care to rememberrrr, I will bet!”

        “But you've got flippin' diamonds in your teeth, for crying out loud.”

        “Well, er, yes, but--”

        “And seriously...'Dirigible'?  You live in a giant metal suppository held in the air by propellers!  That hardly qualifies as--”

        “E-NOUGH!” Gilliam whined, his one ear sagging as he waved his diamond cane overhead.  “Yeesh—What would it take to gettttt you to show some respectttt?”

        “Strips,” the pony frowned.  “Lots of them, given to me, as agreed to.”

        Gilliam exhaled through two snorting nostrils.  He glanced at one of his closest advisers, and then nodded.  A return nod, and the taller canine produced a leather sack from a belt satchel and tossed it the pony's way.  She caught it, and with even less effort tossed the glowing jar straight at Gilliam.  The lead dog gasped and dropped his cane in order to catch the imprisoned phoenix in two floundering paws.  Panting slightly, he shook the slobber off his double chin and frowned the pony's way.

        “Always keeping things a centimeterrrr above unbearable, girrrrrl?”

        “You wouldn't keep hiring me if I didn't,” she retorted, counting the many silver bars inside the pouch.

        “Hmmmm—Or perhaps I just won't hire you from now on at all,” he said, picking his cane back up in one paw.

        “Keep trying to make me laugh, Gilliam,” she droned back.  “I need more things to keep my journal entries interesting.”  There was no response this time—only dead silence.  She was so engrossed in counting the strips in her pouch, that she didn't notice until the last second that several sharp glistening polearms were being raised towards the nape of her neck.  She squinted through her goggles at them, then glared cooly Gilliam's way.  “A double-cross, Gilliam?  After all we've been through??”

        Flanked by his smirking peers, Gilliam grinned within the purple haze of the jar's runed cap.  “Oh, no double-cross, pony girrrrrrrl.  We agreed that I would hand you the money for your job—And I didddd!”  He gestured with a slight chuckle.  “I did not, howeverrrr, guarantee that you would leave with the money.”

        The guard dogs surrounded the pony on all sides now, ensnaring the mare in a forest of sharp blades.  A deep breath, and she gazed over them at her sudden ex-client.  “Who was it?  The harpy pirates from Manehattan?  The Golden Gang?  It wasn't Gilda, was it?”

        “Mmm—Like you, I am also a dedicatedddd worker—And never give out the name of the wealthy mutt who paysssss me.”  He inspected the glowing jar up close and shook the frothing red thing besides his one good ear, chuckling.  “But, suffice to say—When I show up at their mountainside roost with both the red flame and the last tender side of horsemeat on Earth—well—maybe I'll have twice the richesssss to make us worthy of being called 'Dirigible Dogs' after all.”  He nodded his head towards the distant image of the Harmony hovering over the runway of the bow.  “Along with other fringe benefitsssss.  Eheheheh.”

        The pony glanced over her shoulder, then back towards the group of leering canines.  “Of course, I only have one word to say to all this.”

        “And what would that be—?”

        Hooves taut against the metal bulkheads, the pony bent her legs and grunted forth: “W'lynmh!”

        “What in the heck is that supposed to—Wait.”  Gilliam's eyes narrowed as he pointed with his cane.  “Did you just spout out one of your—?”

        The bracelet of horns on the pony's front right leg glittered, and a rune flickered responsively on the side of her armored leather.  In a sudden hiss, four metal studs popped loose from her saddle and a thick green gas filled the room from the uncorked vents in her armor.  As the surrounding guard dogs gasped and stumbled breathlessly away from her, she flicked her neck to the side—activating a trigger in her neckpiece.  In a series of metal clanking noises, a mouthguard extended downward from her pilot's cap and covered her lips—filtering oxygen through a series of tubes attached to a bottle at the top of her leathered neck.  With a blurring of hooves, she disappeared effortlessly into the rapidly expanding smoke.

        Hobbling back and falling into his seat under a storm of hacking breaths, Gilliam shook his cane in one paw and the glowing bottle in the other.  “St-Stop herrrr!  Kill herrrrr!  Skin herrrr!  But most importantly—Get me my silver backkkk!”

        Several guard dogs and military advisers held their breaths and stormed bravely into the thick of the haze.  Gilliam watched dizzily from his swiveling seat as a cacophony of metallic clanging sounds emanated from the chaotic emerald cloud bubbling before him.  A few shrill cries of pain later, and three guard dogs fell before his pawed feet in a groaning heap.  Another pair of snarling canines tackled themselves stupidly to the floor, mistaking each other for the rogue equine.

        “Curse you stupid mutts!  She's the only one of us with hooves!  Attackkkkk the one with hoovesssss,” Gilliam hyperventilated.

        “I see herrrrrr!”  A guard dog charged up from the side and aimed his spear at a shimmering glint of light from deep within the cloud.  A pair of goggles and a mouthguard hovered a few meters ahead of the nearest pack of clamoring dogs.  “Have at you, rockinghorse!”

        Gilliam's eyes twitched.  He realized what was happening and leaned forward on his cane.  “No!  Wait--!”

        The guard dog went charging in and slammed blindly at the goggles-and-mask with the full length of his polearm.  A few resounding thuds ricocheted off a helpless skull, followed by a groan.  Still hacking and wheezing from the smoke, a frustrated and perplexed Gilliam finally resorted to swiveling towards his 'war table' and slamming a paw over a yellow switch.  Suddenly, the many windows flanking the bridge pivoted open.  The low pressure of the high altitude outside forced the green smoke to billow out of the cabin and clear the room back to its usual gray gleam.  As the smoke  dissipated, the victorious guard dog stood with his battered polearm waving over the thoroughly bruised figure of one of Gilliam's most trusted advisers.  The goggles and mouthpiece had been slapped over the misfortunate canine's head amidst the blinding confusion.

        “What in the—?”

        “If that's nottttt the pony, then where did she go?”

        “Lookkkk!”

        “Over there!”

        “Woof!”

        Gilliam spun and looked.  At the far end of the bridge, towards the bow, the mare in question was in full gallop, abandoning a pile of freshly throttled and dizzy-eyed canines.  Sneering, the metal-plated ship's captain grinded his studded teeth until a diamond popped loose.  “NO.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The pony dove clear through the window, sending glass shards flying in cadence with the fluttering ash and snow of the great gray sky surrounding the Dirigible Dogs' cloud-ship.  Skidding down a few lengthy bulkheads, she kicked to the side, performed a half-flip, and landed squarely on the flat runway of the ship's bow.  In full gallop then, she burned a straight path towards the spot where the Harmony was last moored.  Her scarlet eyes were exposed, along with a slender neck with a completely shaved mane, all the way down to its stubble.  Gripping the leather pouch of silver in her teeth, she glanced breathlessly from side to side as several metal hatches and trap doors lining the cloud-ship's hull opened.  Angry frothing guard dogs poured out with spears raised overhead.

        “Stop her!  Stab her!  Guttttt herrrrrr!”  Gilliam's voice crackled horrendously loud over the battle-cruiser's blasting speakers.  “Do not let the pony gettttt away!”

        Barks lit the air.  Foaming snouts howled against the wind.  Spears flew.  The brave filly dodged and skirted past them all.  Two bladed weapons barely missed her, shredding at her brown coat.  She galloped faster, eyes tearing into the cold winds of the high altitude as she spotted several mutts leaping out from behind piles of supply crates lining the flat runway.  She ducked two diving bodies, leaped over another, kicked two more charging from the side, and jumped high to dodge yet another cluster of spears.  Still airborne, she found herself sailing towards a ridiculously muscular guard dual-wielding a pair of axes.

        “I have you now, horse-meatttttt!”  He droolingly grinned and raised both weapons.

        In mid plummet, the frowning pony clapped her hooves together.  In a metallic ring, all four of her horeshoes extended razor sharp cleats.

        The guard gasped and dropped his axes, flailing.  “No-no-no-no-I didn't mean itttt—AAH!”  He let loose a blood curdling yipping noise as she landed square on his chest with the full force of her agile body. Retracting the pointed cleats, she kicked off him and barreled down the last half of the runway.

        “Cast it off!  Cast it off!  Don't let herrrrrr get back to her shipppp!”

        Glancing up in mid-gallop, the pony's scarlet eyes twitched.  She couldn't afford to gasp or else she'd drop the precious silver dangling from her mouth.  Several meters ahead at the end of the runway, half a dozen work dogs had pried loose the mooring clamps of the Harmony.  Now her zeppelin-and-home was drifting off into the great gray expanse ... without her.

        “Yes!  Yessss—Hahahaha! Stupid girrrrrl!  You are stuck with us now!  Hahahah!”

        Spurred on, she galloped even faster.  She skirted past three guard dogs, shoved another off his feet with a swinging snout, and side-bucked two more before zooming towards the very edge of the runway.  Squinting, she shuddered to see the aimless body of the Harmony floating further and further away.  Three meters' distance... four... seven... nine.  Before her scarlet eyes could blink, her body jolted hard from a thrown spear grazing her closely—slicing at one of the straps that held her leather-armored saddle in place.  Briefly stumbling, she bolted back into full gallop, chased by the roaring echo of over a hundred angry blade-wielding canines hot on her hooves.

        “Nnnnngh—Confounddddd it!  Stick her already!  Gut her ---Wait, where in the heck does she think she's—?”

        The Harmony was at an impossible leaping distance, but the pony still rocketed towards it.  The saddle sagged loosely from her flank, and with a few well-timed jumps, she effortlessly flung it off her, and then in an explosion of mighty brown feathers, she spread two wings majestically to her sides and caught a gust of wind.  Kicking off the last sloping length of the bow, she leaped gracefully into the air and coasted like a shimmering kite through the naked gray sky and towards the yawning entrance of the Harmony.  With two words shouted, she opened the aperture as it swallowed her hurdling body safely inside.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “She's a pegasus...”

        Inside the airship's bridge, Gilliam's voice sneered, though the burning expression on his face didn't appear to register the finality of his own statement.  His snarl turned into a growl and he slammed his fist into the nearest metal bulkhead he could find.

        “The lasttttttt pony on the face of the earth and it's a god-forsaken Pegasusssss!  Rrrrrrrrgh!  Somedog!  Anydog—Arm the harpoons!  Shoot that miserable, silver-swipinggggg piece of filth out of my skies!”

        A guard dog coughed and wheezed as the last of the green smog dissipated from the lengths of the bridge.  “Y-Yes, sir!  Rightttt away, sir!”  He hobbled up to a harpoon gun and pivoted until he had the distant copper-red image of the Harmony in his sights.  “A bit hard to see through all this—KAFF!  KAFF!—sm-smoke though—”

        “I don't want excuses!  Now skewer her with a harpoon or I will make a collar out of your tail!”

        “Aye sir!  Consider her glue!”  The harpoon's barbed tip glistened in the twilight while every other dog ran to his post under a warbling chaos of battle-station alarms.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Scrambling up into her cockpit seat, the pony yanked at several levers at once.  Not even bothering with the seat harness, she raised her snout and pulled two chain-linked handles, one after another.  The boiler towards the rear of the cabin surged hotly as a rush of gas was filtered through the pipes and into the zeppelin balloon over her shaved mane.

        The entire gondola shook.  Even through the metal bulkheads and reinforced hull of the tiny Harmony, she could hear the alarms from the nearby airship.  Glancing out the cockpit windshields, she spotted the huge hulking bow of the Dirigible Dogs' battle-cruiser pivoting to face her, its six looming propellers kicking the air into a heated frenzy.

        It was only a matter of seconds before any one of the ship's innumerable guns fired a single zeppelin-dooming projectile straight at her vessel.  She could very easily outrun the mutts' battleship, but not any of their merciless harpoons.

        So it was with a breath of finality that the glaring pony lowered her brown face towards the bracelet of horns on her right limb and muttered into their mystical haze:

        “Y'hnyrr.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Back on the dogs' bridge...

        “Have you got a fix on her yet?” Gilliam growled.

        “Aye sir!  Just a matter of measuring for wind resistance--”

        “Less mumbo jumbo and morrrrrre blood!” the diamond-studded leader snarled, waving the glowing red jar in his paw.  “Bounty be cursedddd!  I want to smear the skiesssss with the the last pony's unholy juicessss—”  No sooner was this uttered, but the flickering rune on the cap of the bottle suddenly died, its glow fading in a blink.

        The tall cabinet of military advisers glanced fixedly at their leader.  The guard dogs shifted nervously, whining.  Suddenly, the jar began to vibrate as the red flame inside—no longer magically contained—began to buckle and expand.

        “Hmmmm.”  Gilliam blinked closely at it.  Then, an exhale.  “Oh.  Well ain't thattttt cute—?”  His voice was supremely cut short by a huge flaming explosion erupting point blank in his studded face.  Several howling voices barked but were just as quickly snuffed out as giant wings of lava-hot plasma expanded throughout the entire space of the bridge and melted the rivets off the black bulkheads and everything else in between.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        From her cockpit seat in the Harmony, the filly watched as a great winged beast of insufferable flame burst outward from the top half of the cloud-ship.  The ship lurched severely, then veered hard to its starboard side as three of its six propellers suddenly stopped working.  A series of heavy explosions ripped through the belly of the great black vessel in muffled chain reactions.  The hulking thing slanted northward towards an inevitable wall of granite mountains beyond the blinding mist that enveloped the plummeting carnage and all of its howling occupants within.

        Soon, she was once more awash in the gentle puttering rhythm of her steam-powered cabin interior.  A deep breath, and the brown filly juggled the pouch of silver in her hoof, gazing at it closely for a few emotionless seconds before tossing it expertly into a dangling hammock two meters behind her.

        “Hmmph... Should have just named yourselves 'Dead Dogs'....”

        That muttered, she pulled a handle down and shoved two levers forward, kicking the zeppelin into an accelerated gear, coasting her gently southward into the yawning void of the gray Equestrian Wastes.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Two – Of Hope and Harmony

        A brown hoof dusted off the glossy surface of the record picked up from the Royal Throneroom at Canterlot.  As the disc flipped over in the Harmony's cabin lantern-light, the white round label came into focus, and the name that was on it read:  'Octavia – Suites for a Princess – Sessions I thru IV'.  Gently, the fragile object was hoisted over the center spindle of a record player.  A cranking sound, and the glossy thing spun liquidly as a needle was lowered into place.  A pair of rusted speakers crackled and hissed for a brief moment, then a sweet melody of low bass cello strings bled through, dancing in the musty air of the swaying gondola.

        Under the softly lulling rhythms that kissed the bulkheads, the last pony hopped up to a hammock and layed herself down, rocking gently along the starboard side of the lonesome cabin.  She tilted one ear towards the music while another kept a diligent check on the hissing sounds coming from the boiler located towards the rear of the craft.  A prolonged exhale, and the filly's scarlet eyes poured over the curved ceiling of her floating home.  The mare let her gaze dance around metal beams and iron rivets in a synchronized waltz with the rise and fall of the age-old cello recording.  Finally, as the melancholic air around her succumbed to the peaceful melody, she permitted her eyes to shut and her body to drift with the sway of her own tiny world, her hooves resting behind her back and her hairless tail drooping over the side of the hammock.

        Outside, the great gray wasteland howled and spun its endless cyclone of mist and ash.  The Harmony hovered bravely in place, a lone copper ballast in a sea of oblivion and snow.  The stars above lingered on the edge of perpetual dying, and the black empty Earth below yawned for hundreds upon thousands of worthless kilometers.

        The world of nothing: Equestria, population one.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Journal Entry # 2,345

        I love music.  I don't care how many times I've written it down.  I don't care that I will be the only one to read it.  I love music; I love its sound, I love its tempo, I love its movements.  I love it when it begins, I love it when it ends.  I love knowing that there were ponies behind the strings who made this music; I love knowing that they recorded it solely for the sake of sharing their souls, their hopes and their dreams, their fears and their sorrows.  I love knowing that—in some way or another—these gifted and masterful ponies are sharing all that they know and love with me, even if it means that I am only having a conversation with the dead.

        A conversation with the dead is better than no conversation at all.  And the reason I think I love it the most is because—in a world where there's nothing left to lose—I can remember once more what it means to feel... sad.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        One night, the last pony marched up a snowy hilltop.  Behind her—through a sea of flurrying ash—the Harmony could be seen, moored to a trio of burnt-out oak trees.  Ahead of her, a mound of crumpled earth buckled under her hooves as she ascended it.  Panting, her breath fogging through the misty air, the leather-clad mare came to the top of the crest and gazed down.

        Her amber goggles reflected a wide graveyard of collapsed buildings and hollowed-out hovels of earth pony architecture.  In the center of the landscape was a clock tower, its circular face spilling rustedly out of the tallest point.  The minute and hour hands had fallen to the doughy gray earth countless years ago, forming two stabbing obelisks into the flesh of the dead world.  Taking little time to sight-see, the pegasus pony gently hovered down the slope on cold brown feathers.  Landing, she trotted her lonesome way through the ruins of yet another ram-shackled village.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Her name was Octavia.  She was the most gifted cello player in all of Equestria.  She performed her masterpieces live, before dukes and duchesses, queens and kings, even Princess Celestia herself in the Canterlot Concert Hall.  Her symphonies were recorded in mass—and to my delight, I have found discs of her exceptional talent almost everywhere: from the ruins of Cloudsdale to the sunken depths of Manehattan.  I have hoarded all of her stuff that I can find.  And when I listen to them, pricking my ear to hear beyond even the heavenly layers of her masterful strings, I think I can detect the breaths of the audience in attendance.  And when they applaud, and when they cheer—I am there.  I am with them.  I am in a concert hall surrounded by thousands of living, breathing, happy ponies.  And for a brief moment, I am alive as well.  And then the record player stops.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Inside a collapsed building, she poked through a pile of debris, overturning kitchen utensils, saucers, plates and other assorted dishes.  She briefly plowed a shovel through a pile of papery scraps and unearthed a soup can featuring the image of two smiling illustrated foals.  Several cockroaches scurried out of the hollow container and fled towards the ash-splotched walls that were still standing.  Ignoring them, she knocked the can upside down with the shovel until three lone beans spilled out.  A flaring of her nostrils, and she retracted the shovel back to her cylindrical hoof piece and extended a pair of metal claws in its place.  Grasping gently onto the beans, she lifted and deposited each of them into a leather satchel on her saddlebag.

        Tying it shut, she paced around and marched out of the dilapidated house, trotting slowly down the snow-laden stretch of the small city's main street.  The last pony's horseshoes made lonesome omega symbols in the snow as she padded her way towards a half-crumbled library.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        When I go hunting, I hear Octavia's strings.  Her music accompanies me on every trip that I make, on every scavenge that I do, on every deep dive into the darkest catacombs of Equestria.  Her majestic cello cries and sighs against the pale stone walls of my regular sojourn.  And sometimes, in my head at least, I do not feel like I am simply a ghost—the last haunting spectre of Equestria that this holy land has somehow forgotten to exorcise.  The world has forsaken me, and so I forsake it—with music.

        This, of course, is extremely helpful ... until I remember that the world doesn't care.  The only one who cares—or at least pretends to care—is me.  And that doesn't count for much.  It doesn't at all.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Another night, the pegasus pony sat on the port side of the Harmony's cabin, her hoof bearing a cylindrical copper sleeve on the end of which rested a freshly inked pen.  Bending over her workbench, she proceeded to write her journal entry on the blank page of a dusty leather-bound book that she had found during one fateful trip to a half-collapsed book store in the ruined City of Torontrot.

        Halfway through her writing, she stretched her shaved mane and upper legs.  A long sigh, and she gazed with bored scarlet eyes out the front windshields of the gondola.  The world lingered in gray eternity, staring emotionlessly back at her.  Another breath, and she returned liquidly to her entry.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        I know that I have written enough about Octavia—about music, about the only thing that actually has any significance to me.  But today, nothing happened.  And when I write on the topic of 'nothing', I inevitably comment on yesterday while simultaneously predicting tomorrow.

        And yet I still write.  I'm sure there was a noble reason for why I began making journal entries in the first place.  Quite possibly, when I was still rather new to this whole routine—I had the naive hope that everything I put to pen would someday be read by other ponies.  But I know that's utter bologna; because I'm a pony and I can't bring myself to read the older entries I have made.  Still, I am what I am, and that necessitates that I produce something ... anything ... to prove that I exist.  It's the least and yet the most I can do with my presence here on this world, or so I try to tell myself.

        Thus, as always, here goes:

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        She trotted swiftly down a field of petrified trees, all bent backwards in the fossilized signature of a blast wave having seared them all to ash long ago.  A fine blue mist lingered coldly a few centimeters off the once-forested floor as the goggled filly shone a pair of glowing lanterns ahead of her.  She focused the hazy beams of gold past the gray husks of wood until she narrowed the light onto a pale chunk of stone embedded deep in the sandy black earth.  All of the trees leaned away from the alien rock as if it was something venomous.  Without a moment's hesitation, the pony galloped up to the thing, knelt down, produced a pick-axe from her saddlebag, and began chipping away until the cold white stone bled forth random nodes of muddied colors.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        I found several moonrocks this week.  Seven, to be exact.  From them, I was able to mine three more emeralds, two more sapphires, one topaz, and a ruby.  This fills my spectral stone quota for the signal over the next several stormfronts—with the exception of a flamestone.  The one I've got right now is almost out of mana, and I though I'm sure I've got plenty of reliable suppliers, payment is going to be something of an issue—considering that I've just recently lost one of my biggest clients, Gilliam.  Though, it is probably more accurate to say that he lost me... and most likely his life in the ensuing altercation.

        Finding creatures willing to pay me in silver strips for random tasks is going to be a bit difficult if I can no longer trust in Diamond Dogs to hire me.  I can only hope that many of the canines unaffiliated with Gilliam's 'Dirigible' crew are still willing to do business.  But I fear that the damage is done.  Tick off one dog, and you've likely petted the entire pack the wrong way.  That's what I get for trying to survive, at Gilliam's behest.  They say that history is made by the victors.  But, triumphant as I may have been as of late, I am still only one pony.  History only pays attention to those who survive by their seed, and on that front I am doubly screwed.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Minding the cockpit of the Harmony, the pony squinted hard at a leather pull-down map of Equestria, scribbled and painted over in several dozen places with apocalyptic alterations.  After gazing at a circle that had been scribbled next to an eastern mountain range, she snapped the map back up into its holster and lowered her amber goggles.  Shoving a pair of levers forward, she accelerated the zeppelin and watched as the mist beyond the windshields parted, timely revealing a horizon of shattered skyscrapers looming before her.

        Carefully, the filly pilot navigated the ghostly spires of Fillydelphia.  The copper-colored airship dipped low, passing between enormous building after building of the abandoned maretropolis, swooping briefly under a pair of crumbling towers that had collapsed into each other to form a quivering arch of steel and concrete.  Landing in a cobblestone town square filled with randomly overturned stagecoaches, the pony moored the Harmony and stepped out on hoof, holstering a rifle before exploring the ruins to her immediate north.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        I am always hunting, always scavenging, always clawing at the tomb of Equestria for things that I need.  I can't remember a time when I was not searching, fishing, or scrounging.  In this Wasteland, being still means being useless; and if there's anything I hate more than being alone, it's being useless.  I've broken into homes, kicked in the doors to shrines, broken into banks, smash urns apart, and even pilfered the storage lockers of hospitals.  Nothing can be overlooked.  Nothing must be wasted.

        I have to remember that there is one important thing, something that is more important than one's pride, something that is more important than one's ethics, something that is more important than learning to love or hate oneself when trying in vain to fall into the bitter arms of sleep.  And that something is my life.  Be it long or be it short, it is the only life that will ever mean anything to me.  It is the only life that matters in Equestria, period.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        A pair of lantern-lights shimmered over a brass pony statue, blindfolded, rearing its hooves and carrying a rusted pair of iron scales.  The leather-armored filly trotted slowly down an abandoned courtroom.  Her goggled eyes glanced back and forth.  She spotted a door behind the judge's seat.  The shadows of the courtroom seats bobbed and weaved as she strolled towards the far end of the room, nudged her way through the collapsed doorframe, and stumbled upon a musty office full of dust and sediment.  A gentle flurry of snow, and the pony was graced with a pair of shattered windows overlooking the dead lengths of Fillydelphian skyscrapers looming several stories below.  But that wasn't what caught her attention; the pony made a straight line for a pile of collapsed books lying beneath an overturned set of wooden shelves.  Flipping through the pages with a metal-laced hoof, she raised her goggles, squinted at the words, and proceeded to store a good chunk of the literature into her saddlebag.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Books.  Books are the hardest thing to salvage.  A part of me knows that I must do something—anything—to preserve as many written words as I can.  I'm not the only scavenging creature in the Wastes of Equestria, and I know that any literature of ponydom will be utter garbage to dog, goblin, or monkey-kind.  But I only have so much room in my saddlebags, and even less weight for the Harmony to handle.  On top of that, there is something that I know I need more than words, and that's warmth.  Tragically, many pages serve better use in the boiler.

        But the ones that are special—or at least the ones that I feel are most important to the history of the Equestrian Spirit—I keep.  That's a tough thing to think about.  All of our history, all of our lives, all that we've ever done or accomplished shall have its merit determined through the filter of my lonesome approval.  That's one thing that I never expected to have on my shoulders.  Then again, I never expected to have any of this on my shoulders.

        What I haven't gotten from experience, I have gotten from books.  How to keep a fire going, how to keep a healthy diet, how to maintain the structural integrity of a zeppelin, how to filter steam through a steady pipeline, how to do anything to keep oneself alive without anyone to tell me by ear—I have learned to teach myself by eye.  Books have been my greatest teachers in a world without mentors.  The writings of Aristrotle, Camule, Neightszche, Descanter—I have devoured all of their words, made many of them my own, developed a writing style so as to have dissertations with long dead phantoms.

        It's funny, because I was never too keen on reading or learning when I was a little filly—and then when I was thrown into the world beyond the Cataclysm, it was a titanic struggle to teach myself the vocabulary that I did not yet understand.  I accomplished most of this by reading simple books and jumping immediately to the more complicated ones, so that the meanings of things bled their way to my mind between the cracks of definition.   Many things in my life like this I had to overcome by learning them on my lonesome.  In so many ways, it has always been like this, even before the Cataclysm.  Perhaps I was the most fortunate pony in all of Equestria to end up being so unfortunate.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “H'jem,” she uttered.  A runestone dimmed, unlocking a sealed bookshelf lying against the Harmony's starboard side.  The compartment opened, revealing half a dozen rows of thick leather-bound books.  Still shaking the fresh ash and snow off her armored flanks, she reached into her saddlebag, grabbed a few new volumes in her snout, and shelved them with the rest.  Taking a breath, she stepped back and gazed forlornly at the quiet rows of tomes, until her goggled eyes rested on two large books—the largest of the library by far—resting at the toprightmost shelf.  Two crests were emblazoned across their spines, plastered in gold and silver respectively:  the Sun and the Moon.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Two books in particular, I know I will preserve with every fiber of my existence.  The sacred words of the Equestrian Princesses, journals kept by Celestia herself and a much similar diary maintained by Luna.  I found the two of them on my second trip to Canterlot.  Enough time had passed for me to embrace the present darkness, and I took it upon myself to commit the unthinkable; I looted the Royal Palace.

        What I once thought was a crime turned out to be the most noble thing I had ever done, because where is there a better place for the Exalted Family's Legacy to reside ... but in the safely flying hovel of their last royal subject ever?  Luna's book is barely filled—mostly blank pages, on account that she was bequeathed the journal shortly after returning from her imprisonment in the Mare in the Moon, which was ironically just before the Cataclysm.  But Princess Celestia's book—it is an indescribable masterpiece of poetry.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        As another record of Octavia's strings sang to the lantern-lit air, the pony squatted in her swaying hammock upon folded legs.  Celestia's golden book was carefully layed out before her.  With her goggles pulled up, the last pony's scarlet eyes liquidly melted over the finely woven starlit calligraphy.  A lump formed in her throat as she inhaled sharply and turned a page, a thick and focused pulse stretching visibly beneath her brown coat.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        She writes of joy.  She writes of hope.  She writes of royal subjects and their daily lives, of magical apprentices and their friendships.  Most of all, she writes of her sister, of the hole left in her life during Luna's thousand-year absence, and subsequently the immeasurable rapture of embracing her beloved sister's return.  In almost every entry that Princess Celestia had ever made, she was full of optimism, of anticipating the joy and prosperity that the next Sun-Raising would bring.  When I first read her works, I was hoping to find a sign—any sign—that would suggest that Celestia at least expected the coming Cataclysm that would end all of ponydom in Equestria—including the lives of her and her sister.

        What I found instead were a few entries of the deepest most overwhelming sorrow I could come to expect from anypony, much less the Goddess of the Sun.  I had always known that Princess Celestia was immortal; but what I didn't know was the repercussions that came with her long life, of loved ones beneath her protective wings who would die in waves over the passing centuries, of friendships and alliances that started, blossomed, and withered away in as little a time as it took the Royal Princess to blink.  I've read those entries of hers—the sad ones—thousands of times more than her happy ones, because I soon came to realize that I was the only pegasus pony in the history of existence who could, in some fashion or another, relate to her.  The only difference is, of course, nopony is going to read about my losses, like I have faithfully read all about hers.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Transcending the cloudy overcast of the world, above the ashen snowfall, the last pony clung to the outside of the Harmony.  Angling her wings back to steady herself in the high winds, she hissed through clenched teeth that tightly gripped a welding tool.  She expertly climbed the outer rungs encasing the copper leather body of the zeppelin's starboard side.  Finally, the pegasus zeroed in on the source of a loud rattling noise that had been bothering her for several days.  Tightening her goggles and tinting the lenses, she aimed the welding torch at the bulkhead and fused a new cluster of rivets into place.  Sparks fell through the bone cold grayness and fluttered past the swaying gondola of the Harmony below.  After the welding task was done, she re-gripped the welding tool and waved her wings into the air.

        Swiftly, she darted up to the very top of the zeppelin and hovered down onto the center of the balloon's chassis, where a pair of criss-crossing bulkheads had rattled loose.  Griping to herself, she grabbed a few more rivets from her saddlebag and welded them into the right places, tightening the outer framework of the copper airship and silencing the rattling noises for the time being.  A deep breath, and the pony briefly sat down on the 'roof' of her lone, hovering vessel.

        She had no reason to stay there—but something possessed her to delay flying back to the aperture entrance of her hangar bay below.  Gazing straight up, she briefly raised her goggles and gazed with naked scarlet eyes, watching as twinkling specks of sickly-pale light hovered far above the miasma of the dead globe.  A breath escaped the pony's nostrils, but try as she might—she could not tear her lonely gaze away from the horrendous abyss that perpetually engulfed her.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        There is no Sun.  There is no Moon.  There is only ash and perpetual twilight.  It isn't day.  It isn't night either.  The roof of the world remains lit, but fails to snuff itself completely out.  It's as if the distant stars are half-heartedly attempting to make up for the celestial bodies that the Princesses used to maintain over Equestria, bodies that are gone forever.

        In the end, the result is a constant and unending haze of dimness, as if to gaze towards the sky is to look out through the eyes of an elderly mare on her death bed.  Any second, any heartbeat, and everything should go dark.  And yet it doesn't.  Sometimes when I sleep—or try to sleep—and the great gray glow continues its pale dance beyond the portholes of the Harmony—I beg for the darkness, I beg for the end of all things.  But I stop myself every time.  To ask for the end is to give up, and that is not a luxury that I can afford.  The darkness will come, some way or another, some time or another.  But until then, I can't even pretend to know the time nor the place.

        I can't even track time efficiently.  All I remember is that I was young when the Cataclysm happened.  Since then, there has been no Sun to rise or Moon to fall.  Hours are your only friend—everything else is just an imaginative figure.  In the land of Twilight, you have no definition of age.

        At some point, when I realized that lightning storms over the Wasteland transpired at regular intervals, it occurred to me that I should try and measure the passage of time.  After finding several miraculously preserved hourglasses in an abandoned Whinniepeg laboratory, I timed the number of occasions I had to rotate them between the regular lightning storms.  I found out that the time between these weather patterns averaged out to approximately one hundred and twenty hours.  If the average Equestrian day was as I read it was: twenty four hours—then that meant there were five days in between regular storms, almost enough to fashion a new 'week' by.  And if there were three hundred sixty five days in an Equestrian year, then that meant approximately seventy-five storms marked out a year.

        Since I began this experiment, I have counted a total of one thousand three hundred and fifty-eight storms.  Ultimately, that means that I have been living in the Wasteland for well over eighteen years.  I am certainly not a young filly anymore.  But, then again, I hardly remember how long I was 'young' for.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        After mooring the Harmony to a jutting spire of rock, the pegasus descended and trotted through a grand forest at the bottom of a snow-laden plain.  But the large gray bodies that drifted past either side of her weren't trees; they were mushrooms.  Giant six-meter-tall stalks of fungae swayed and bowed in the cold wind.  The last pony marched until she was within hoof's length of a knee-high mushroom.  After depositing her saddlebags onto a gray patch of earth and mulch, she produced a long blade from her pack, slapped it hard into the neck of the gigantic mushroom, and began viciously sawing through the body of the thing.

        After the structure fell loose, she quickly produced a sharp brass claw and approached the hollow of the thing.  Positioning a gas lantern to shine its golden glow into the cylindrical body of the mushroom's stalk, she dug her snout in—teeth gripping the claw—and began carving loose several rubbery flanks of fungal material.  These she stuck into a leather pouch, tied it shut, and dragged the sawblade towards yet another knee-high mushroom to repeat the entire procedure, all the while under a gentle rain of powdery snow.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        No Sun means no light.  No light means no plants.  No plants means I have to bend myself backwards to find the nutrients I need to stay alive.  As almost everything that was living before the Cataclysm turned into a grand heap of 'dying' afterward, the fungal population exploded through the roof.  The same cold winds that kicked the snow and ash around also gave lift to spores, and mystically large mushrooms spread thickly outward from the deepest caves of Equestria—no longer food for subterranean beasts and with no forested walls to impede their progress.

        If, when I was younger, I knew that some day I would be flying over an endless wasteland subsisting entirely on a diet of mold and mushrooms, I would have gagged myself to death.  In many ways, I still do—but it's what I have to do to acquire the energy I need to live.  But energy isn't everything.  In a green world vibrant with life, ponies could afford to grow beans, potatoes, carrots, and all sorts of plentiful plants that a healthy diet required.  Here—in the realm of oblivion—I've had to do away with conventional pony agriculture.  And also, as I would soon discover, I would have to do away with conventional pony ethics...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Marching back towards the Harmony with saddlebags full of mushroom bits, the pegasus froze.  There was a vicious stirring of movement up ahead.  Crouching low, the last pony crawled her way through a field of fungal stalks and peered over a mound of flaking dirt.  She reached a hoof up and adjusted the lenses of her goggles.  Several meters ahead, blurring into focus, was a full adult cougar with tattered fur.  It snarled and hissed, digging its jaws into the scrumptious tendrils of a dead vampire bat caught in its maw.  Tearing the wing off its prey to expose more tender muscles, it was briefly oblivious to the four-hoofed survivor spying on it from several snow flurries away.

        A deep breath, and the pony shook her flank sideways.  Her brass rifle slid loose from its sheath and she caught it.  With gentle and silent precision, the pony extended the long shiny barrel, pulled the levers out, and loaded in a cold magazine of dimly glowing runestones.  She breathed against them, and the furthest stone in the magazine shone with a purple brilliance.  Cocking the wooden stock of the thing against her shoulder, she aimed the barrel icily across the hilltop until the sight of the weapon landed square over the image of the distracted feline.  A creasing of her brow, and with no hesitance whatsoever, the weathered mare whispered into the mystical aura of the runestone: “H'rhnum”.  The bracelet of horns on her right arm flickered.  Thunder roared across the dead landscape as the manabullet flew solidly, and the cougar's body fell flat into a crater of snow, moving no longer.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        I have eaten meat.  I have killed animals and consumed their flesh.  I know that these teeth of mine were not granted me by the Goddesses for partaking in anything other than plants and herbs.  I know that I was born with hooves instead of claws.  I know that every book of law ever written by any society in the history of ponydom can now brand me a savage and an outlaw.

        But I also know that I do what I do because the only Goddesses that have ever existed are now dead, and I am not.  And being alive has always meant—and shall always mean—doing so at the behest of other things that try to be alive.  In the past, I could afford to overlook what I now know to be a gritty reality.  Because resources were in abundance, civilization afforded me the ability to exist above the ranks of a common animal.  But I also know that—to preserve any scant trace of that same civilization—I must preserve myself by any means necessary.  To climb so high, I must fall so low.

        These are paradoxes that only I have to contend with.  Though it makes me wonder, if everypony who died could magically come back to life and see me eating meat in desperation for protein, would they be proud of me on account of all of my logical excuses?  Would they grant me pardon, even when they discovered that eating meat has been the least of my transgressions...?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        She covered the last few centimeters with a burning sweep of her blow torch.  Finally, after slicing the last sliver in a metal door, she cut the torch and pressed her entire weight into the entrance frame of a large marble building in the center of ruined Stalliongrad.  Grunting and sweating with her effort, she finally succeeded, her lithe muscles managing to rip the door off its foundation.  A large clanging noise, and a heap of ash lifted and spewed forth across the atrium of the unsealed building.  Not expecting that much dust, she coughed and raised a leather mask over her snout, just in time to shield herself against a rustic stench rising dreadfully from the interior.  Sparking the light on in her yoked lanterns, she trotted slowly into the domed building and was only briefly overcome by the melancholic discovery of what lay inside.

        The pegasus counted ten... fifteen... twenty five... at least thirty-five bodies.  It was a veritable pile of corpses, most of adult stature, some the sizes of young foals, and they all formed a circle around a bronze altar in the shape of Princess Celestia.  This was Stalliongrad's Temple of the Sun, and a good chunk of the neighboring populace had apparently flocked there in desperate prayer the very moment that the Cataclysm had hit.  The bodies were well preserved, right down to their dresspieces and horseshoes.  But it wasn't the metal of the shoes that the last pony had interest in, it was the unicorns themselves.

        A sighing breath, and she sauntered towards the closest body towards her, the first of two dozen salvageable skeletons just like it.  Flicking the metal band on her left hoof, she produced a tiny razor-toothed blade, and began sawing with expert precision at the top of the skull, severing the dead unicorn's horn from its cranium.

        An hour or so later, the pegasus trotted out of the Temple of the Sun and towards the center of Stalliongrad where the Harmony was parked.  She had hanging from her neck a bag filled to the brim with severed horns.  Stepping on board her airship, she went immediately to her workbench.  She produced a strip of tanned cougar leather; then she emptied the contents of the bag before her and began stitching together a brand new bracelet of unicorn horns.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        When the Sun and Moon disappeared, so did everypony—everypony but me.  What rendered all of my species to ash and dust—yet spared myself—I still to this day cannot fathom.  But whatever it was, it too brought about the end of Princess Celestia and Luna.  Somehow, that meant the magic that bonded them to the galactic elements was severed, and as a result I now hover above a dead carcass of a world, starved of the pools of mana that once animated it.

        But magic is a lot like normal mass and energy.  It cannot come from nothing, and likewise it cannot become nothing.  The magic had to go somewhere, and with everypony in Equestria dead, the world's magic had to collect around the one equine who was an exception: me.  Long ago, I learned that I could perform very minor magic spells—like the ones I learned in the books I collected.  But I could not perform the spells very well, no matter how hard I concentrated.  Even with all of the magic in the known universe, I wouldn't be able to do much.  It's because I am a pegasus, and much like an earth pony, my body is mostly inert in the realm of sorcery.

        But the unicorns; they were naturally gifted with being living magic batteries.  They could master all forms of enchantment, and when they called upon the holy power of Celestia and other Goddesses like her, they could even perform supernatural feats that rivaled the Creation of Equestria itself.  The matter in their horns was the substance of their mystical talent, and even beyond death the cyclical bone structure still acts as a conduit for magical energies.  My guess is that when the unicorns died during the Cataclysm, a piece of their life essence—the magical part—was retained in their horns.

        Though I am a pegasus, fashioning a bracelet out of unicorn horns has provided me a way to cheat the rules of magic, so long as I am the last pony left to act as a gateway between the physical realm and beyond.  With so many horns contained in one place, I can focus a magic spell through them, and perform all sorts of helpful tricks to assist me in my sojourns through the Wastes.  Though I cannot harness enough energy to levitate or transmogrify matter, the power granted me by these scavenged buffers have been immeasurably useful in finding, hoarding, and killing whatever the Wasteland randomly tosses my way.  But as grim a necessity as the bracelets are, I do not rely on dead bones alone.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        In the hangar of the Harmony, the pony leaned over an alchemy table full of bubbling glass jars and glowing vials of smoking liquid.  Wearing a chemist's pair of wide-lensed glasses, the last pony finished carving a chunk of white moonstone into an arcane shape.  Filing away the last jagged chips from the edges of the stone, she lifted the thing in a pair of forceps and dipped them into one steaming beaker after another.  Smoke of various shades filled the hangar in a mystic smog as she then cooled the stone off into a trough of water and sprinkled herbs over it.  Gazing into a tome, the pony chanted a few archaic words in deep monotone.  A glittering aura shone from a bracelet of horns over her right hoof, and the stone within the trough began glowing.

        After several minutes, the filly removed the cooled stone from its trough.  Staring at the glowing shard closely, she raised an eyebrow and experimentally stuck the letter-shaped chunk of enchanted moonrock into a matching hole in a square black tablet.  She then stuck the tablet into the toppiece of a magazine filled with identically crafted stones before finally loading the whole ensemble into her copper rifle.  Cocking the weapon, she removed her glasses and marched over towards the circular aperture of the Harmony and manually opened it.  A flurry of cold wind, and the pony aimed the glowing rifle out into the snowy overcast of the Equestrian sky.

        Her lips moved icily:  “M'wynhrm!”  Her bracelet strobed yet again.  The freshly crafted runestone burst in a crimson glow, and a bright red manabullet rocketed down the length of the brass barrel and flew deep into a cloudbank.  Half a second later, and a gigantic explosion of burning red plasma consumed one half square kilometer of misty sky, briefly lighting the dead twilight in a frothing haze, until all was once more ash and soot.  The pony steadied herself as the entire two-level gondola of the Harmony rocked and swayed from the explosion.  A whistle escaped her lips, and she patted the rifle with meager affection before returning back to her alchemy table.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Runestones: they are the centerpiece of a long-forgotten art of magic, with emphasis on mineral infusion and verbal enchantment.  The school of sorcery is almost as old as Celestial Alchemy, though it has always served far less benevolent functions.  The last time runestones were used—much less crafted—was in wartime, long ago, towards the end of the Second Age, when Nightmare Moon turned traitorous and led the armies of the Lunar Republic in a violent attempt to overthrow her sister Celestia. Warhorses marched into battle holstering explosives and ballistics armed with runestones as their triggers.  It was a strange and archaic time when focused mysticism was used almost entirely for bloodshed, unlike the subtler schools of Canterlotlian mysticism taught during the peaceful millennium that followed the war: otherwise known as the Third Age, the Age I was born in.

        This was to be the Fourth Age, the Age of Princess Luna's Redemption.  This was to be the Age when the Twin Goddesses oversaw the revolutions of the Sun and Moon, as they were naturally born to do.  The Fourth Age barely lasted one pathetic year—or so I assume.  I vaguely remember one Winter Wrap-Up, maybe two, before the Cataclysm happened.  Everything that made up the Fourth Age, including the inane necessity to chronicle the Fourth Age to begin with, was consumed in fire.

        How ironic it is, then, that I was fated to stumble upon a book in the ruins of the Royal Palace, explaining the intricacies of the forbidden art of Runestones; and that I adopted its practice for my own use—archaic words of the Lunar Tongue and all—with an abundance of moonrock strewn across the Wastes at my very disposal.  Perhaps there is a prophecy that foretells this, that speaks of an era when one pony resurrects the elements of a Great War that threatened to kill all ponies, only to use them in an Age meant to bless all ponies.  But in all of the books that I have scrounged up and read, I have found no scripture that hints of this apocalypse, of this lonely twilight, of this gray forever-after that dwarfs the brief and anticlimactic return of Princess Luna.

        The fact is, I don't need prophecy to explain this dead world to me.  I only need to open my eyes, to breathe through my own nostrils, and make do with what I have given to me, in flesh or in text.  I am the end of ponies; I am the Fourth Age.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Under the cadence of Octavia's strings, the pegasus sat at her workbench where she polished several multicolored stones, one after another.  There were seven stones total, magnificent translucent gems that shimmered from the distant boiler's burning light refracting prismatically through them: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.  They gleamed after each polish the pony gave them, rubbing them with a felt cloth made out of shaved mane hair.

        After making each of the immaculate stones sparkling clean, the mare turned her attention towards a lead box lying securely in a shelf just above the corner of the work bench.  Placing her cloth down, she reached a hoof over and dragged the lead box towards her.  Narrowing her eyes cautiously, she opened the container, bathing herself and the rest of the cabin with a bright red glow.  A crimson flamestone shimmered from its holding inside the box.  As bright as the thing was, it could have been brighter; the aging mare knew this, and she frowned.

        Still, she sighed away her disconcerted thoughts and closed the box before swiveling from her workbench and leaping towards the cockpit.  Climbing into the seat, she lowered her goggles and disengaged the autopilot.  Eyeing the puttering steam-powered gauges of her dashboard, she made an instinctual judgment of her location and pulled several levers and chain-linked handles, dropping the Harmony into a deep descent and angling her towards a wide plateau stretching beyond the gray mists below.  In the center of the plateau there was a pony-made structure: a circle of iron-wrought barricades.  And in the apex of the circle there rested a thick metal brace ... for the signal ...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        What is my purpose?  I ask myself that in every journal entry I make—which is likely why I rarely go back and re-read them.  Because there is no answer—only the question, otherwise why would I still be here?  Why did the Cataclysm kill off everypony and yet I was spared?  Why were the beautiful equine of this world destroyed, and yet the uglier and more despicable creatures allowed to fester onward into eternity?  Why am I struggling so hard to stay alive day by day?  Why has anything ever lived, against all the odds of doing so, day after day in the great history of the world?

        Why do I kill creatures and turn their hides in for profit?  Why do I chop mushrooms to make stew and slay animals to cook meat?  Why do I hunt down sacred phoenixes and sell them to double-crossing Dirigible Dogs?  Why do I pilfer from Fillydelphian skyscrapers and rob from Stalliongrad tombs?  Why do I harness magic that isn't mine to toy with or fashion deadly weapons to carry with me into the ruthless abyss every waking moment?  How is it that I came to teach myself to read and write, to appreciate Octavia's music, or to build myself an airship when there was nopony to tell me how to weld steel, or to harness steam, or to even fly with my own naked wings?—For I was that young when this all started...

        Is it enough that I struggle to exist for existence's sake?  There are times when I have believed so.  But I've come to label such moments as 'defeats'.  It can't possibly be called a victory when I give into the nihilism that mirrors the opaque cloudscape that has constantly surrounded me these last two decades.  I wrote before that, on some level, I can relate to Princess Celestia.  And for all of her many reasons to lament the lonely immortality of her existence, Celestia was somehow convinced to see the silver lining in things, so much so that it constituted the majority of her own personal journal entries.  If Princess Celestia—the one and only pony responsible for bringing the Sun to this  world—could find a reason to be optimistic, then that means I, the last pony of Equestria, must also discover her reason to be hopeful and to focus on it.  Who knows?  I too may find my silver lining.  There certainly are enough friggin' clouds for that, at least.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The Harmony was moored to the circle of rusted iron barricades—but at a ten meter distance.  Tethered by several thick chains hammered hard into the stony floor of the wide gray plateau, the airship drifted gently over the pony's shaved mane as the mare slid a heavy metal lattice into position, locking it into the thick iron brace at the center of the barricades.  Not wasting a sweating second, the brown filly reached into her saddle bag and produced all seven of the multi-colored stones.  Pulling a canvass tarp off the metal lattice, she exposed seven large spotlights to the gray ashen air.  One by one, she slid open the lenses to the spotlights and dropped the colored stones in—from Red to Green to Violet and everything in between.  Finally, she slid open a brass compartment at the base of the metal lattice.  Into this, she deposited the glowing red flamestone, shutting it tight with a metal clang.  On the outside of the compartment was the space for a runestone—which she aptly filled with a shimmering moonrock.

        The mare next paced around the lattice and rotated it until the lights were aimed directly skyward.  After a few precise tilts—with the ease of rotating valves and gear meters—she achieved the precise angle she traditionally desired.  She lowered her lips towards the compartment with the glowing rune, and raised her braceleted hoof at the ready.  For a moment she lingered, as if in solemn contemplation of an ongoing habit that was suddenly clouded by the gently falling snow settling around her.  But she shook this off, lowered her goggles protectively over her scarlet eyes, and throated authoritatively into the runestone:  “Y'hnyrr.”

        The rune's glow dissipated, and a bright ghostly fire billowed from within the embroiled compartment of the lattice.  The pegasus wrapped a hoof around a rusted metal lever and yanked at it.  The lights flickered and sputtered and died.  Cursing under her breath, the pony yanked and yanked and yanked again, grunting harder with each effort, until the last swing of the lever connected.  The enchanted flamestone burst through a series of built-in prisms until they connected with the lens compartments.  The seven multicolored rocks sparked, glittered, and lit up.  In a frothing hiss, the seven colors of the rainbow surged upwards and pierced the gray soupy sky, burning through the clouds, and impaling the twilight ceiling of Equestria with miraculous color and life—a prismatic beacon—the signal.  Everypony's signal.  Her signal.

        She took a deep breath, gazing up at the solid beam of artificial spectrum.  It was dimmer than the last two times she had ignited the signal, as the flamestone was jaded and needed to be replaced with one containing a stronger enchantment.  But somehow, less bright or not, the signal was worth the trip, worth the fuel to get there, worth the silver strips earned through scavenging to supply it, worth the restless lonely nights of self-doubt... just to see it.  The last pony took a deep breath, stared at the grand burning lengths of the conjured rainbow, and then closed her eyes in order to savor the frozen image as she stood there half-naked against the cold wasteland winds.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        There was a time when I used to dream in color.  I've read books where literary ponies philosophized over the nature of dreams—and that they were all 'in black in white'.  Perhaps, in another lifetime, that would be true.  But that's not the case for me.  My life is in black and white; it has been for forever.  But when I dream, I live the past; and the past was something of color, of warmth, of so many amazing and interesting shades that most of them are now eternally lost to me.

        That was a time of rainbows, when magic was a nature unto the world, not a resource for a scavenger to exploit.  Rainbows existed in a time of prosperity, when there would be a promise of another day with similar blessings, and even more to be had.  Rainbows were a sign of hope, of delightful and optimistic expectations for the good things in life granted naturally to everypony.  If it weren't for hope, why would ponies dream to begin with?

        In this world of ash and twilight, there are no rainbows.  There is no hope.  Perhaps that is why ages ago I concocted the idea of this signal: the artificial rainbow.  It was because I believed that the only place left for rainbows to go was in the world of dreams.  And if I could mimic that, if I could capture an essence of that in a bottle, with the best of intentions, I could provide a shining beacon for every living soul in Equestria to see.  And if there is even one single pony besides me left in the world; that would have to be a pony that dreams, like I dream—every day—that this is not all that there is, that there is a reason for why my fitful slumbers conjure up shades that contrast the endless gray of this nightmare land, that there is more to life than a single piece of meat with four hooves trying to scrape up a pitiful existence, that I am not the end of ponies.

        This is why I do what I do everyday.  This is why I exist to do more than existing; it's to produce this signal, to fire this beacon into the dead sky, to constantly beckon and wait for another Equestrian soul besides mine to come and find me, even if beyond the grave, for death has been defeated before during multiple miracles of the First, Second, and Third Age.  And maybe—just maybe—somepony, anypony, can come join me, and we can all be the Fourth Age, we can begin things again.  We can... begin things again.

        We can...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Several hours passed, during which the lonely beacon of rainbow light started to dim and flicker into a dull pale beam.  The pony sat, hunched over, in a chair positioned atop a six meter tall tower that flanked the circle of metal barricades and the glowing lattices in the center of them.  The copper body of the dirigible Harmony hovered overhead, aglow in the dying rainbow's penumbra.  Snow fluttered through the soft air, insulating everything in a deathly silence.

        The pegasus lingered upon the precipice of consciousness, her hooves kicked up over the railed edge of the tower.  Her brown coated body rose and fell in gentle breaths as her head bowed towards her chest, the goggles fogged over with lazy condensation.  Moisture beaded off the barrel of the brass rifle propped to her side; the magazine full of glowing runes twinkled restlessly.

        After yet another long stretch of silence, a ringing noise filled the naked air.  Silence—then another shrill ringing, and the pegasus started, nearly pratfalling out of her seat.  Snorting to blinking wakefulness, she wiped the sheen from her goggles and leaned forward, peering across the gray lengths of the plateau.

        A dangling string was bouncing from where it stretched out from a rusted stake pounded into the rocky ground.  Ages ago, the pony had erected a complex web of cords and yarn in a spiraling formation from the epicenter of the barricaded signal location.  Those cords were equipped with custom-made cowbells at every three-meter intervals, all built to alert the pony of any incoming body on four limbs.  Right before her, the one ringing noise was joined by several identical clanging sounds, so that she was swiftly engulfed in a cacophony of bedlam zeroing in on her location.

        Her pulse raced.  With shaking hooves, she raised her goggles, reached back, grabbed a spyglass from her saddlebag, and peered down the extended length of it.  Through the dim porthole of light, the pony stared across the mist-laden horizon of the stony plateau.  The projected image bobbed and bounced with each throb of her lonely heartbeat.  Then—out from the shadows—she saw them.  Shapes, bodies—But not colorfully maned and hooved; instead leathery and sharp fanged... bounding towards her on all fours by the dozen.  A whooping noise filled the air as a pack of mangy, ink-dark creatures stampeded homicidally towards her elevated location.

        “Crud!” she hissed.  Grabbing her rifle, she pounced off the tower, grabbed a dangling chain tethering the Harmony to the earth, and slid agilely down the length of it.  Yanking hard on all the chains, she unhooked them from the airship's clasps above, then scampered over to the lattice where she hastily retrieved the seven colored rocks and the now-dim flamestone.  The earthen plateau beneath her shook fiercely, the rusted iron barricades rattling from the angry feet of the blood-thirsty marauders.

        Wasting no time, the pony mightily shouldered the weight of the hulking metal lattice on her back, clasped the rifle in a pair of angry teeth, and stretched her wings out, beating them ferociously against the combination of snowy air and ruthless gravity.  She somehow managed to lift the entire ensemble, herself included.  The pegasus levitated upwards just as the howling and drooling bodies hurdled their way over the first barricades and pounced at her.  Fanged teeth and razor sharp maws snapped just centimeters beneath her dangling hooves as she desperately hovered her aching body upwards, climbed the last few meters between her and the airship, and finally collapsed—sprawling—at the aperture entranceway of the Harmony's hangar.

        From there she cocked her rifle and aimed it cautiously down at the leaping, braying creatures.  They leered and spat up at her, their eyes like beady soulless specks that reflected the gray twilight.  As they watched their crafty prey rise ever so far away from the stone face of the plateau, they spun back into a slithering mass of herding leather and thundered, howling, back into the blanketing mists where they joined the ghostly hum of the dead Equestrian Wastes.  The pegasus took a long, long breath and leaned back against the round entrance of her airship, shutting her eyes and struggling to fight an impervious frown chiseled into her disappointed face.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Trolls.  Goddess, I hate them.  It figures that when all ponies disappeared from the face of the earth, these soulless beasts crawled out from the woodwork—no longer forced to hide under bridges and dank cave roofs, waiting for unsuspecting victims or passerbys.  More times in the Wasteland than I can count, I've had to deal with them.  They track one's scent from miles away; so I did away with the most fragrant part of an exposed pony, her hair.  They're attracted to wood-kindled flame; so I switched to using gas lanterns in all of my flashlights.  They stampede at cheetah's speed; so I never wear extra armor when I'm trotting across the Equestrian plains, so that I can fly away at the drop of a hat.

        But what I hate about them the most; what makes me wish that the Cataclysm had wiped them off the face of the earth instead, is that the last three consecutive times that I had lit the signal, it was them who I attracted, and for the briefest of moments every time my naive heart had leaped at the thought that the herd I had called was the one herd I was always looking for.  And every one of those times, I was severely disappointed, and rightfully so.

        What more can I expect?  There are so many ghostly creatures left haunting this world—from dogs to goblins to trolls to harpies—and almost every one of them has wanted me dead at one time or another.  Many of them blame ponydom for the great blight that has befallen the land, never mind the fact that it took the whole of ponydom with it in the process.  Many see me as a delicacy—an exotic edible or a future museum curiosity at best.  The closest thing I have for allies are soulless mercenaries who only need me for my talents, or begrudgingly register my existence at an exchange of silver strips over a bargaining table stained with dirty blood.

        It's when I go through the process of disembarking from the signal that my faith is the lowest, that the artificial rainbow dies away and I wake up once more to the monochromatic singularity of my existence.  What is there to hope for in a world where I am the only source of that hope?  There's a name for living within the repetitious prison of your own making: and that's 'insanity'.  These slobbering trolls—these creatures of the night that seek to rend me to ribbons; they are the sane ones.  Only a monster who embraces the savage wilderness of eternal twilight has any reason to hope for things in this world.  They will last longer, they will leave a deeper imprint, not by shining fake rainbows into the cloudy air, but by raking the earth with the claws of their nefarious passion, and soaking it with the blood of their enemies... as every civilization has done, including my own in Ages passed.

        I've been raised—delightfully sprinkled and polluted—with notions of peace, of tolerance, of friendship.  All of those values would have worked once, in a lifetime before I had to kill things to survive and make excuses for it afterward.  Maybe some day—maybe in a future journal entry—I will realize the one burning truth of who and what I am; that I cannot pretend to be friendly or hopeful in a world where everypony is gone.

        Just look at what I'm writing: 'everypony'.  Over two thousand journal entries into this nonsense, and I really shouldn't bother to write that anymore.  From now on, I think I should just chicken-scratch the term 'everybody'.  For that is all there is left in the graveyard of Equestria: bodies.  And I am their grave keeper, for as long as I live to absurdly shine rainbows into the Abyss.

        -End of entry.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Three – Creatures of the Overworld

        “Don't fret!  I'll be back in—like—half an hour, tops!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed from outside the arcane vault.  “I just gotta find Harmony!  She'll know how to fix all of this!  She has to!”

        “Rainbow Dash, don't leave me!” The young filly heard herself sob under the rumbling of Cloudsdale's demise.

        “Seriously, kid—Would I let the world be any less cool by disappearing?”  And then the blue pegasus was gone.

        In her absence, the young pony cried out her name, and then Fluttershy's, and then Apple Jack's, and then:  “H-Harmony ... ?!”

        The roof of Equestria exploded, reverberating a million times in the gasping pony's throttled head.  The royal transport she was in shuddered as the balloons deflated and the gondola began its hurdling descent towards the burning world below.  Outside the windows of the arcane vault, thousands of pegasi could be seen, screaming towards oblivion, until a wave of energy singed them to dust and pelted the collapsing airship with the mist of their combined effluence.

        Then there was an explosive jolt, a thunderous crash as the gondola hit the boiling skin of the earth.  The pony shrieked, her body surging forward as the arcane vault toppled and rolled and skidded to an ugly stop outside the torn iron belly of the collapsed airship.  The bitter cold silence that followed was haunting, leading the shocked filly to believe momentarily that she was actually dead.  Upon opening her twitching eyes, she wished she had been.

        The landscape of Equestria was a barren hovel of burnt trees and copper-brown grass.  The riverbeds had dried up, the hilltops had sunken, and the roadways had been entirely evaporated—all in a flash.  There was a crack in the arcane vault's door, where streams of purple magic hotly hissed off the bent surfaces exposed to the Cataclysm.  With a great deal of effort, the little pony nudged and nudged and finally broke the warped door open.  She was immediately pelted with a cold breath of ash and snowy soot.  Trotting out, she found the world slowly blanketed with an endless flurry of white powder, building up and up towards infinity.  The wheels in her young head turned faster than they ever had before, and she realized to her utter horror that the snow was none other than the petrified remains of every pegasus that had fallen out of Cloudsdale.

        And then... sparks lit the air.  Tiny hot pinstreaks of light bulleted downwards from the heavens.  In utter dread, the pony forced herself to look straight up.  She saw the twilight for the first time, its milky white grayness coalescing into an eternal miasma of dying stars.  In the foreground of it all was a shadowy mass, spreading, thinning, growing into a hot crimson as it burned into the atmosphere.

        The last pegasus gasped.  The moon had exploded, and its smaller parts were falling earthward.  The red-hot pinstreaks doubled, quadrupled—and suddenly the dead sky was bathed from east to west with shooting stars.  A murderous thunder rolled through the neck of the world as hot frothing meteorites of molten moondust soared towards the Earth by the hundreds, thousands, millions.

        A seething missile of rock soared past the pony, exploding a tree to her right flank.  Another slammed into the ground ahead of her, dousing her coat in lifeless gray soil.  She turned—shrieking—and flew back towards the collapsed airship as burning rocks leveled the world to shattering craters of glass all around her.  The shaking breast of Equestria knocked her off her hooves, so that she had to crawl—sobbing hysterically—towards a meager iron shell for cover.  Once inside, she huddled beneath one of the battered arcane vaults, still laced with the scent of Rainbow Dash, and screamed as a gigantic shadow encased her, and a kilometer-wide husk of moonrock hurled its way towards ground zero.

        A ringing noise...

        The last pony woke up, gasping in a cold sweat.  Octavia's record was looping with the needle bouncing repeatedly off the end of the disc.  The lantern light and the boiler of the Harmony's cabin exchanged pulses of gentle flame.  And through it all, a ringing noise permeated, rattling the windows to the gray expanse beyond the cockpit.  With twitching eyes, the adult pegasus glanced over to see a metal spoke vibrating offensively against the surface of a homemade cowbell.  Besides the alarm, a pair of teslacoils flickered and sparkled incessantly.  It was the zeppelin's proximity alarm; she was not alone in the clouds.

        Kicking out of the hammock, the filly limped towards the cockpit and checked the gauges.  Autopilot was still activated and the airship was set to the same steady hover as it had been when she went to sleep.  The young mare then hopped over to the port side, deactivated the signal, and flipped open the nearest porthole.  Peering outside into the ashen flurry, she spotted a floating black mass—the unmistakable outline of a sextuple-ballooned dirigible floating perpendicular towards her own.

        Frowning, she rushed over to her metal cabinet, diffused the runestone with a grunted word, holstered her rifle, and dashed over to her port side speaker system.  Cranking the valve, she sparked the device to life, pulled the spout closer to the porthole, and cocked the rifle out the window, aiming it at the offensive vessel.  In an air of menacing authority, she uttered:  “You had best turn around if you know what's good for you!  This is my cloud!  And if you don't agree, I'll be more than happy to reintroduce you to sea level!”

        Her broadcasted voice crackled like thunder across the snowy gray clouds.  For a second there, she wondered if perhaps her threat had been diffused amidst the blisteringly loud winds, or perhaps the strange pilot didn't pay her words any respect.  But soon, a pleasantly nuanced thunder returned, and she realized in the haze of her own pitiful grogginess that it was none other than a very familiar voice.

        “Ha-HA!  I knew I vould find you in dis neck of veather, pony!  It is I, Brucie!  You should fear nothing of kind friend who vants only to do business, da?”

        The brown pegasus rolled her scarlet eyes.  “Nnnngh...Bruce.”  She retracted the rifle and leaned an apathetic face back into the microphone.  “Bruce, this isn't exactly a good time.  I just finished a really tough job, and I need to make clear of the Northern Reaches.”

        “All better to make exchange of goods, then!  You are clever pony!  Best not to turn avay opportunity!  Vhat is old expression: 'Do not look in mouth of gift horse' ... ?  Ha!  Get it?”

        She took a long breath, her nostrils flaring slowly.  She glanced over towards her workbench.  The seven colored gems were locked safely away in their drawers.  But the red flamestone; she had left it exposed in its open lead container.  All the glimmer of the disenchanted rock was gone.  The signal, the ever important beacon, was currently a dead matter.

        Grinding her teeth slightly, she leaned her mouth with finality towards the spout.  “Alright, Brucie.  Bring her around, just like last time.”

        “There is good pony!  Smart pony!  I vill try and not drag mud across your carpet, da?  Bringing my port side to your bow!”

        Verily, the black silhouette of Bruce's airship pivoted to the right and descended so that a hatch on its port-side was level to the front of the Harmony's hangar bay.  With an inward groan, the pegasus strolled back to her cabinet and donned a jacket of leather armor.  She hoisted a khaki cap over her shaved mane and slid a pair of goggles over her eyes.  Just as the Harmony jolted from the flying merchant's ship docking with it, she retracted her gun and slung it over her shoulders, making sure it would be in open sight of her guest.  She descended the revolving metal staircase, trotted across the hangar deck, and spoke towards the runes lining the copper aperture entrance:  “Y'hnyrr.  H'jem.”

        Cold white sleet pelted inward as the catseye doorway slid wide, revealing a slick oblong ship of green bulkheads covered with an ageless mildew.  Six conjoined balloons bobbed and rattled above the awkwardly hammered-together zeppelin, sickly contrasting the degree of professionalism that embodied the Harmony.  A metal walkway extended from a square-shaped doorhatch in the merchant's ship and formed a bridge with the Harmony's entrance.  The doorhatch of the opposing vessel slid open with a rusted squeak, and a wave of smoke billowed out, partially shrouding a tiny furball of a figure that climbed out of the hatch upside down before fearlessly backflipping onto the center of the precarious plank.  With a bushy tail and gray skin flaps that waved like a flag in the high winds, a half-meter-high flying squirrel swaggered his way towards the hangar of the Harmony.  Clasped in his mouth was a cigar, which he absent absentmindedly flicked before exhaling a wave of putrid fumes that further fogged up his copper-green pilot's goggles.

        “Harmony!  As I live and die—hopefully quicker than you, my friend, for you are more priceless, da?  Heheh!”

        “Bruce, when am I going to get it through your thick skull?” the pony droned coolly, “'Harmony' is the name of my ship.  It has nothing to do with me.”

        “Comrade is much like ship!”  Bruce chomped on his cigar and patted the clanking bulkheads of the hangar entrance with a smile.  “She is unlucky without name!  You vould do vell to take advantage of dis!  Big reputation you have!  Rumor has it pony's client Gilliam had huge cloudship go down in flames!  BOOM!  Dogs dying in sky!  Vhat dogs vere doing in sky, Brucie vill never know!  Perhaps pony does?”

        She merely glared at him.  “No smoking near my ship.  Surely you learned that the last time.”

        “Vhat?  You mean dis cancer stick?”  He flicked the cigar again and leaned suavely against the edge of the aperture.  “Let Brucie worry about Brucie's own cancer.  Are squirrels extinct in Equestria?  Nyet, I think not!  So vhy should pony fret?  Heh!”

        Her goggled eyes narrowed.  In one motion, she flung her wings forward.  The resulting gust of air tore the cigar from Bruce's incisors, sending the nicotine cylinder sailing down into the endless clouds beneath their conjoined vessels.

        “Bah...” he waved an apathetic paw.  “Plenty more cancer vhere dat comes from!  Pffft!  Vhy so serious, pony?  Live some before you die, maybe?”  He nonetheless smiled and motioned with his webbed limbs as he sauntered back towards his ship.  “Come!  Come!  Look at my vares before you toss Brucie down as vell!  You obviously know vhat you vant and Brucie know vhat to give you!”

        She followed him, trotting across the metal bridge until she was inside the rodent merchant's foggy vessel.  Sickly green lights beamed through the nicotine-filled haze as she politefully held her breath and gazed closely at several racks of metal knick-knacks, gun stocks, ammo deposits, leather strips, holsters, kitchen utensils, rusted tools, sharp blades, chemistry sets, an array of expensive seedlings, salvaged artifacts, and handfuls of other assorted junks pilfered from the Equestrian Wastes.

        The flying squirrel scampered effortlessly around the cramped cylindrical hollow like it was the inside of a fallen oak tree.  “I have recently come across most exceptional scrap from Eastern Shores!  Not all of Ocean is dead.  You'd be surprised at vhat your seahorse cousins leave behind!”  He turned on a record player to give the sudden store a pleasant ambiance—but had to gruntingly kick the thing two or three times before the crumbling speakers half-heartedly played what sounded like a military funeral dirge in a thickly foreign tongue.  “My latest pride and joy is seedlings—From fresh patch of trees still thriving in squirrel motherland!”  He proudly waved his paws before an electrically illuminated array of vegetation, his bushy tail flapping in emphasis. “Da, the world may be in ashes but City of St Petersbrittle still stands!  You still vasting your harvest on bitter mushrooms, pony?  Don't lie to friend Brucie!  I can smell it on your flanks, and pony is only friend Brucie knows that still bathes!  Hah!”

        “I've found some beans recently.  I think I'm covered on that front.”  The pony's goggled gaze skimmed across the smoky interior, looking for the one thing she absolutely needed.  In the meantime, she nodded her head towards several brown bands hanging from a rack.  “How much for the leather?  I've need of some new armor and I don't have much time to go about crafting it.”

        “For you, pony, discount of friendship.” He leaned back against the waves of marching music hissing out of the bobbing vessel's speakers and made a figure with his paws.  “Twenty-strips per band.  Never let fine mare go naked in vilderness; a lesson from Brucie's mother, may god rest her fur.”

        “Always a charmer, Bruce,” she murmured.  She trotted over towards a hammer and chisel dangling off the corner of a metal rack.  “I see you have ramcraft.  Did you get these tools from the Western Peaks?”

        “It depends.  Does pony vant them?”

        “It's a simple question, Bruce,” she glared his way, “where'd you scavenge these from?”

        “Mmmm...”  He wrung his paws and gestured with an innocent smile.  “Lonely outpost along eastern slopes, below snow line.  Vas dirty run-down hovel, nothing sacred like mountain ram temple, if pony must know.”  He pointed knowingly.  “Though pony is no stranger to borrowing from Goddess' house, da?”

        She stared at him, but as the seconds ticked away, she realized she had no response.  So, sighing, she nodded her hairless mane.  “I'll take them too.”

        “Undoubtedly for chiseling pony's amazing runestones, da?”

        “Nothing amazing about what I do, Bruce.  But I'll buy them nonetheless.”

        “How many?  Brucie has spares in trunk below digging tools.  Harmony pony can make lots of vicked stones with ramcraft like dat.”

        “I can't go all out, because there's one thing I need more than ever.”

        “Name it!” The squirrel folded his arms and smirked, his green goggles glinting.  “Let Brucie be cursed first day I let down favorite Equestrian customer!”

        “Flamestones.”  She glanced at him with an arched eyebrow.  “Any and all that you may have.”

        “Flamestones—I ... erm ...”  He suddenly sweated, wringing his paws and chewing on his lower lip with a jagged incisor.  Finally, he cleared his throat with a surprise show of strength and changed his expression.  “Nyet!  Impossible!  Pony asks for impossible!  I am completely out of flamestones!”

        The pony stared boredly at him.  In one movement, she produced a leather pouch full of silver strips from her saddlebag and held it in front of the squirrel.

        He blinked and raised a pointed paw.  “I am not completely out of flamestones!”  Smiling sweatily, Bruce scampered over towards his pilot's chair, lifted the seat, and unraveled a tarp full of bright red rubies that filled the smoky corridor with a glittering kaleidoscope of crimson.  “Ta-daaaa!  Brucie delivers just in time, da?”

        “I'll always be impressed, Bruce,” the pony muttered as she trotted over to get a closer look over the much treasured gems, “so long as your stock of flamestones outlasts your honesty.”

        “Pony, you vound me,” he smiled while planting a melodramatic paw over his heart.  “Ve all have reasons for silver tongues.  Mine is because I bite it so much!”

        “Who's putting the pressure on you this time, Bruce?”  She raised one of the seven shimmering stones and refocused her lenses to study its enchantment closely.  “Harpy pirates?  The Dirigible Dogs?”

        “Bah!”  He spat into the floor, frowning.  “Golden Gang!  Vicked feather bullies badger and threaten Brucie within inch of incisors!  Vhat ever happened to friendly skies of death and gloom?  Now ve only have regular skies of death and gloom.”

        “I know all about the Golden Gang,” she grumbled.  Her goggled eyes thinned as the next words came in an otherwordly voice, “Almost too well...”

        “They may be bullies, but they give pony protection, da?”

        “My brown butt, they do!” she frowned suddenly, but shrugged it off in time to sigh, “these stones all look great, Bruce.  How about ... two hundred strips per rock?  I'll get them off your paws—Just like last time?”

        He shook with a shuddering hesitance.  “I vould be glad to—normally—pony, but dis Golden Gang; with flame are they obsessed.  Be it flamestone, flamespheres, red flame, yellow flame—Bah!  I vould imagine they have enough flame to burn Equestria three times more than than Cataclysm did!”  He suddenly blushed and smiled nervously in her presence.  “No offense does Brucie intend, of course.”

        “None taken,” she murmured.  She glanced at him, stared lingeringly at all of his clattering wears, at his pathetically warped record as it tried to spin on the player.  The chanting music came in ghostly howls that shook her soul, and soon she surrendered in a sigh.  “Fine, Bruce.  Gimme just two of them.”

        “Deal is most certainly done, pony!”  He grinned with a sudden euphoria as they exchanged silver bars and flamestones.  “Your grace exceeds you!  Fitting, perhaps; you are last and yet most polite of your hoofed kind!”

        “Don't rub it in, roadkill,” she grunted and tucked the stones safely into her saddlebag before marching over towards the leather bands that she had also purchased.  “You're my finest source of getting flamestones.  It'd be a shame to have you ripped apart by the Golden Gang before I have a chance to do business with you again.”

        “In speaking of flames, pony,” he remarked, pointing an excited paw from across the hazy cabin.  “Since you are so... erm...  invested in flaming stones, Brucie may have tip for vhere pony can get new contract!”

        “And lemme guess; this tip costs how much?”

        “No, pony.”  He shook his head solemnly.  “Consider it gift from old merchant's thankful heart.  You have made much profit from hunting and collecting magical flame, da?”

        “Yes, yes,” she groaned boredly as she picked out the leather bands she desired.  “Gold flame.  Red flame.  Blue flame—We've been through all of this, Bruce.  It's how I earn the strips that you keep gobbling out of my hooves.  Get to the point--”

        “Has Harmony pony in her travels ever stumbled upon green flame?”

        The pegasus paused.  She glanced back over her shoulder, her goggles curiously reflecting the double image of the grinning squirrel.  “Green flame?”  Her lips lingered, then creased into a frown.  “Green flame is a myth.”

        “Is only myth because it existed once!”  He scurried over and hung on the ceiling above her, gesturing.  “In pony land of Equestria, no less.”

        “Equestria is dead—and all that was magic died with it.”

        “Then vhat has pony harvested all this time?  And vhat makes runestones glow with such brilliance?”

        “Bruce, are you trying to tell me that you've gotten word of green flame somewhere in the wastelands?”  She stared cockeyed at him.

        “Brucie hears vhat Brucie hears.  And there is truth to rumors in sky, because no survivors are happy enough to bother inventing stories these days!  Funny tragedy, da?”  He touched down on the rack of leather and perched proudly before her, smirking.  “Vord is dat there is not only green flame in  vastelands, but it is salvageable!  And Brucie knows of spectacular hunter pony who can bottle it!”

        “Bottling green flame—if it exists—is nowhere near as easy as ensnaring a phoenix,” she sighed.  “And the latter isn't all it's cracked up to be either.”

        “I cannot pretend to know how it vorks, but Brucie can imagine filthy rewards of being successful--!”

        “There are creatures beyond the wasteland who would pay the souls of their mothers—Yes, I get it.”  She squinted at him.  “Where are you leading me with all this, anyways?”

        “Brucie cannot show direction, but even pony can suspect who does.”  He waggled his eyebrows above his green goggles in emphasis.

        The pony blinked, searched the fields of her mind, and all but sank at the prospect.  “Pitt.”  Her voice came out like a bloody bullet of spittle.  “I really, really don't want to go to the M.O.D.D. right now.”

        “Vell, good luck to pony's quest for strips!”  The squirrel shrugged, grabbed a fresh cigar from an overhead rack, and lit it casually, adding to the steam of the lonesome merchant's dirigible.  “But do not say that friend Brucie failed to lend vord of advice!”  He puffed a few times, and exhaled with grinning incisors.  “Plenty more flames in Equestria for Brucie's cancer stick, da?  Heh—Heheheheh!”  He laughed merrily, coughing and hacking briefly as he scampered past the last pony's flank.

        The filly stared into space for a short span in comprehension.  The sickly green haze of the smoky interior coalesced into a preciously impossible fire against the blackboard of her mind.  She found herself feeling with resounding disappointment the unwittingly light weight of the two meager flamestones hanging in her saddlebag.  Outside, she knew the gray world floated and flurried endlessly, and there were only so few phenomena in the wastes of Equestria capable of piercing it.  Somehow, one way or another—one chunk of the soul sliced off after the previous—it all transformed into the only substance worth anything anymore:  silver, and all of it in strips or bars.

        The filly sighed.  “Thanks, Brucie.”  And she sauntered back towards the bridge between their ships with her new purchases in tow.  “I'll have a talk with Pitt.”

        “Best of luck to you, Harmony pony.”

        “I'll need it,” she grunted.

        The neon sign spelled out 'M.O.D.D.' brilliantly, like a bright green beacon, shimmering outward from the mountaintop upon which a ramshackle three-story tall building precariously roosted, just at the peak of the clouds.  The structure was a bent and splintery wooden thing, sagging towards the east as if it could plunge off the jagged mountainside at any moment.  The bowing edges of the structure were supported by several forty-five degree angled struts that had been haphazardly hammered and re-hammered into place over the crumbling years.  But this easily noticeable structural mishap waiting to happen was hardly a deterrent, as several flocks of airships and hovercraft continuously hovered around the highrise rest stop, mooring and depositing pilots who came from all corners of the cloudy wasteland to eat, barter, trade... and maybe get into a 'negotiation' or two:

        With a resounding crash, a green goblin was kicked out of the swinging doors of the 'M.O.D.D.' labeled bar-in-the-sky.  Before he could scamper to his feet, four primates in blue fatigues leaped out after him and clamored all over the squealing figure, pinning him to the slick wet rock with their odorous weight.

        “Drink six pints and refuse to pay, will you?” one ape howled.

        Another whooped, “Since when did goblins bum around without money in their pockets?  Heheheheh!  What's the blown-up world coming to?”

        “Pl-Please!” the goblin stammered and struggled, his cold sweat reflecting the pale twilight above the mountainside.  “I was just a p-passenger on board the Diamond Dogs' skytanker, the 'Cloudfang'!  They robbed me blind and ditched me here an hour ago!  I-I didn't realize my m-money was g-gone until just a few seconds ago—”

        “You know what you are?” one of the primates hissed, grinning devilishly.  “You are Equestrian filth!  And we here at the 'Monkey O'Dozen Den' know just how to treat Equestrian filth!  The same way they always used to treat each other!  Heheheh!”

        Right on cue, a fifth monkey marched out the doors of the Den, wielding a red-hot branding iron in the shape of a horseshoe.  “Hot off the grill!  Where's the rum-guzzling punk, boys?”

        “Over here, brother!  Eheheheh!  Let's teach him a lesson he won't forget, or anyone else he meets, for that matter!”

        “No!  No!”  The goblin paled and struggled to scamper away.  The primates held him tighter, their whoops and hollers rising to a crescendo as their brother zeroed in with the steaming hot metal.  “Pl-Please!  Don't do this to me!  I'll never last a night in the wastelands if anyone sees me with—”

        “Shut up and take what's coming to ya, cheapscape!”  The monkey's eyes flickered red as he swooped low and swung the brand square into the goblin's exposed flank.

        Steam and burning skin kissed the air as the lowly creature howled in torment.  The primates huddled around him laughed victoriously while several patrons hung out the window of the 'M.O.D.D.', sipping their foamed drinks and pointing amused fingers at the tortured brandee's plight.  Once the horseshoe image was permanently fused to the goblin's smoking flesh, the five monkeys flung him like a sack of garbage into a splashing puddle on the far side of the mountain plateau.

        “Now go forth and gallop free, Equestrian filth! Hahaha!  Soon you'll be dead like the rest of the--”  The monkey holding the brand stopped in mid sentence, his mangy eyes dilating upon the sight of who was trotting past the dramatic scene.

        With the Harmony quietly moored to a lateral wooden strut of the 'M.O.D.D.' behind her, the last pony made her way towards the front steps of the building.  She glanced boredly at the whimpering figure of the still-steaming goblin while moving past him.  As she coasted by the monkeys, however, she gave her saddlebags a little shake, rattling her brass rifle for good measure.  Half of them gulped, the other half of them snickered, until the fifth raised his branding iron, threatening to smack the group into silence.  Gradually, the five watched with quiet amusement as the pegasus stepped past the gaze of the flanking patrons, and into the bright lantern light of the 'Monkey O'Dozen Den' interior.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Inside, the air had a sour smell to it; like fermented juices laced with buzzing flies, running down the walls and into the splintery corners of the gas-lit hovel.  Under lantern-laced chandeliers made from retired and rusted propeller blades, several round tables rattled with the clamoring rum jugs of dozens upon dozens of slobbering, rain-faced pilots at rest.  Diamond Dogs, ogres, goblins, wooly rodents, and other hunch-backed leathernecks of post-apocalyptic quasi-sentience muttered, hissed, sneered, and laughed at one another, filling the careening wooden bar with the infinite sway of drunken bedlam.

        Deep beneath the lackadaisical bodies of the many tipsy patrons, a fine cold mist had seeped in from the Equestrian miasma beyond the walls, so that every other lost soul inside the place ever so briefly hung his eyes in a stupor that betrayed the alcoholic reverie of the moment.  It was if someone had arranged an orgy on top of a mountainous grave, and already half of the bacchanalia had succumbed to the endless dirge that would soon call them lurching back towards the merciless twilight outside.

        By the time the pony had trotted only halfway into the Monkey O'Dozen Den, three fights had already broken out.  One was between two diamond dogs in the far corner of the room.  Another was between two goblins and a reptilian creature over a moth-eaten pouch of strips.  As for the third—

        “Glue Stick!”  A fisted paw slammed across the pony's face.

        She spat blood, briefly stumbled, then glared straight ahead of her.

        “Hrggh!”  A mangy raccoon—a bum—with one metal right foreleg and a body covered in sooted rags; he  balanced on the edge of a table in front of the pegasus, shuddering, nearly foaming at the mouth.  With clattering teeth and eyes wide as bloodshot saucers, he seethed and roared:  “You!  Nnngh!  Filth!  Glue stick!  Back to Sun Goddess womb! With glue stick!  Nnngh!  Filth!”  He snarled and swung a trembling paw at her again.

        She dodged this time, glaring at him as a series of chuckles rose in the air around the scene.  Brow creasing, she faked walking away—instead pivoting at the last second to swing her flank roughly into him.  The raccoon purposefully took the whole brunt of the blow, bouncing over two rum-filled tables before slamming upside down into an iron stove that singed his fur.  The half-sane varmint scrambled on the ground, fighting to put his tail out, before crawling pathetically towards a table full of battle-scarred ogres who laughed mightily at the scene, gave the pony several thumbs' up, and proceeded to pay up the bum for living up to their dare.  As the chuckles subsided, the raccoon-thing drooled at the fresh strips of silver lying in his paws, hyperventilated joyfully, and scrambled on all fours towards the bar counter for a much 'needed' pint.

        Swishing the collected copper fluid in her mouth, the pony exhaled hard and resumed her beeline towards the far end of the Den.  She felt countless bodies eyeing her, murmuring strange and presumably malicious things under their breath as the last pony trotted past them, having once again graced the filthy interior of the forsaken bar in the sky.

        On a shelf behind the Den's bar, a tight jar rested on a counter, inside which a spherical pastel-colored insect slept soundly.  A gnarled leather hand suddenly lifted the bottle, shaking it and forcing the four-winged creature to open its glistening eyes.  Forlornly, the lone parasprite gazed upwards as the lid of the jar unscrewed and the gnarled hand stuck a spoon in and savagely poked its bright exoskeleton.  “Come on.  Spit it up, ya little turd,” a voice raspily hissed, forming condensation on the jar.  The parasprite wilted, shuddered, wretched—vomiting up a large globule of brown matter.  Half a breath later, and the brown shell of the cocoon shattered with a brand new parasprite joyfully emerging—wings a'flutter.  This nubile infant reveled as it was raised by the spoon and introduced to a bright toasty world outside the jar.  “Therrrrrre we go, little one,” the hoarse voice briefly chirped.  Just then, a crunching noise, and the newborn insect's eyes crossed as the petite thing was skewered down the length of its body with a toothpick, which was promptly planted into the top bun of a toasted meat sandwich being slid across the bar counter towards a Diamond Dog.

        “There ya go, Fido,” grunted the gnarled bartender, a gray-haired baboon with a ratty tail and spreading bald spot.  “Try not to choke on it.”

        “Hmmmm—Delish, Delissssssh!”  The canine drooled and raised the sandwich for a first bite.  He hesitated at the last second, and glared the primate's way with an arched eyebrow.  “Hey, justttttt what kind of meat is this anywaysssss?”

        “It's nobody you know,”  the baboon throated, his red nose crests flaring.  As the diamond dog  proceeded to chomp away at the sloppy meal, the owner of the Monkey O'Dozen Den returned to polishing rum mugs and swatting random flies that landed on the shelves of exposed foodstuffs.  A petite shadow hoisted itself up to the counter.  Without looking, the baboon sniffed the air with his giftedly ugly nose and smirked into the bottom of a mug.  “I'm afraid we're fresh out of daisies, Harmony.  Though I could fill a trough out back with distilled bat sweat.  I've heard a few goblins tell me it tastes almost like Equestrian apple cider did, before the goblins keeled over and died, that is.”

        “We've been over this, Pitt,” the pony grumbled.  “'Harmony' is the name of—”

        “'Your ship'.  I know.  By the gods,” the mangy primate rolled his sickly eyes and spat into a mug before wiping it 'clean'.  “You're a galloping golden goose, and yet you keep your call sign anonymous!  I swear, that zeppelin is the only interesting thing about you, which is a crime; don't you think?  Harumph... I would have reckoned the last pony on the planet would be a heavy drinker.  But, alas, you've surprised me there!”  He put the mug up, hung the rag over his shoulder, and leaned against the bar towards her.  A smirk:  “Well, 'glue stick', if it isn't daisy sandwiches that you've come here for, then what?”

        At his pointed address, she glanced over her shoulder at the voraciously drinking raccoon several tables behind; she tongued her freshly bruised cheek from the inside.  “I never ask for the trouble this Den brings to the table each time I come here.  Trouble just comes to me.  All I've ever wanted to do is business.”

        “Ol' Bruce sent you again, didn't he?”  The aptly named Pitt smiled a row of yellow teeth.  “He's a sucker for charity cases, that bushy-tailed numb-tongued fruitcake!  Hahah—”  He blinked sunkenly at the glare she was giving him.  “—Erm, not that you're one to deserve pity.  You'd rather be paid in strips, I'm guessing.”

        “Running low on them.  As well as on luck,” she sighed, leaning sideways against the bar so that her sheathed rifle was furthest from the rest of the interior.  She eyed every guzzling patron one at a time, keeping an instinctual air of caution since the very moment she strolled in through the swinging doors of the Den.  “Bruce sold me a few things I needed, but perhaps the best thing he gave me was a tip.  Or at least he suggested you may have a tip.”

        “Keep saying the word 'tip' and I am liable to eat my tail in frustration,” Pitt chuckled, grabbing a customer's empty mug and refilling it.  “You know, you've never taken me up on the offer to start your own tab.”

        “I don't drink,” she grunted.

        “Why not?  The whole world's miserable!”  He winked at a droopy-eyed drunkard as he slid him a tall refill.  “Granted, it's always been miserable.  Only now it's miserable and in ashes.  That's a good combination for getting some joy juice down your gullet, if I ever heard one.”

        “Pitt.”  She raised her goggles and gazed coldly at him with twin scarlet marbles.  “A good third of your patrons are so drunk off their butts that they crash into the rocks the first second they undock their dirigibles from your little 'joy juice' stand.”

        His red-crested nostrils flared indignantly.  “That is an unfounded and seditious lie!”

        She gestured blindly with a hoof towards the Den's rattling floorboards.  “There's a pile of two dozen burnt-out zeppelins at the base of this mountain alone!”

        He shrugged.  “So?  What better way to attract new customers than to give them something to loot before dropping by?”

        “Nnnngh,” she groaned, facehoofing briefly.  “This is when I wonder why I'm the one who's endangered.”

        “That's the luck of the draw for ya, Harmo—er—'Miss Temperance',” he smiled, leaning over once more and whispering in a private voice between the two.  “Lots of these punks here; they read a little too much into that crud, if you ask me.”

        “What crud?”

        “Karma crud,” he whispered.  “Some of them think that Equestria bought it because your kind bought it.  Eheheh.”  He chuckled, walking his gnarled monkey fingers across the bar counter and soccer-kicking dead flies one after another.  “Now, I'm not the sort of baboon to suggest that ponies were in fact responsible for the mayhem that befell us all.  Heck, if it was—I sure ain't complaining!  When pegasi, unicorns, and the more boring horses fell off the face of the earth, my kind got the upper arm on the branch!  Granted, we've always bred like monkeys—heheh—but this was a new frontier!  I don't put much thought into who or what is to blame for... for... for all of this.  But if it wasn't for fate, my eleven younger brothers and I wouldn't possess the booming enterprise we have today!”

        She glared at him.  “I'm glad, Pitt, that the utter extinction of my flesh and blood has paved the way for you to poison deranged pilots to their death from your festering water hole in the sky.”

        “See!”  He clapped his hairy palms, grinning yellowishly.  “Even when you try to be angry, you sound like loose change at the bottom of the well.  Heheheh!  Why not just crucify yourself to the bow of your ship and make poetry out of your dull-as-nails life already?”

        She smiled icily.  “I couldn't give you the satisfaction.”

        “I kid you, pony.  I kid,” Pitt murmured.  With a wink, he planted a gnarled hand over his 'heart'.  “You should know by now that I'm a good monkey underneath this surly fur.”  Just then, the lights overhead dimmed and flickered.  Several of the patrons mumbled and growled their complaints.  Cursing, Pitt pounded the bar with his fist.  “Why, that insufferable useless limb!”  He turned, took three bold steps towards a door, flung it open, and shouted into the steamy corridor beyond.  “Willis!  Pssst—Willis!  What gives, ya melon fudge?!?”

        Inside the smoking claustrophobic room, a frighteningly emaciated chimpanzee was pumping his limbs on a rickety bicycle rigged in place to an elaborate gear system that powered several pumps aimed at a triad of boilers.  He sweated and strained and stammered through a permanently red face:  “I-I'm so sorry, brother!  It's the third time today that I've nearly passed out!  Can I-I please have some water, now??”

        “The only water you should care for is the type you make the moment I beat you within an inch of your life, ya good-for-nothing sissy!  Pedal faster or you don't eat tonight!”

        “N-No, Pitt!  Please, brother, don't leave me alone here another minute--!”

        The baboon slammed the door shut, dusted his hands off, and grabbed a glass on the way back towards the bar across from the pony.  “I swear, I only keep him alive because 'Monkey O'Eleven Den' doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.”  Clearing his throat, he polished the glass and smirked the pegasus' way.  “So, enough monkey talk.  Eheheheh—Business?”

        “Green flame,” she murmured.

        Pitt dropped the glass, shattering it.  He sweated nervously under the brief gaze of a few half-curious patrons, and swiftly leaned over the counter to whisper back at the mare.  “Uhm ... Who told you and under what kind of duress?”

        “Ol' Brucie,” she said, “and he told me to come seek you without asking for anything in return.  Sucker for charity, remember?”

        “Obviously.”

        “So, is it true?”

        “Is what true?”

        Her brow furrowed.  “Is there actually any green flame in the Wastes?”  She motioned towards the thickly populated bar behind her.  “Every creature that has enough intelligence to speak swaggers through your Den at some time or another.  If anyone would have heard word about green flame, it'd have to be you.”

        “Perhaps that's true.  But you know as well as I do, pony, that rumors stay rumors until one pilot actually has the coconuts to scrounge up something concrete.  Until then, it stays in the bag.”

        “Well, I'm here,” she said, staring at him fixedly.  “Mix and pour.”

        He squinted at her, gradually bearing a liquid smirk.  His red nose crests flared momentarily as he throated, “You're really not afraid of anything, are you, pony?  I wonder if that makes you desperate or if that makes you stupid.”

        “I'm hoping it will make me rich.”  She reached back into her saddlebag, produced an empty glass jar, and rotated it until the dull runed cap faced the leaning primate.  “You know how I do things, Pitt.  I find elements and essences of things. I capture them; then I seal them in something like this.  Everything I transport is protected by runestones: unbreakable, save for the sound of a word that only I have mastered uttering.  You remember—of course—the time I extracted orange flame from the hydra fossils of Froggy Bottom Bog.  That burning energy has been the sole source of the Iron Goblin Brothers' shipping barge for the last five years and running—”

        “You don't need to convince me of your professionalism, sweetheart,” Pitt muttered.  “I have full faith that you could put a cork over a floating fart of green flame,” he said, but then hesitated, “if you wanted to.”

        She raised an eyebrow.  “What do you mean if I wanted to?”

        He raised a finger, smirking.  “Here, I'll show ya.”  That uttered, the baboon sashayed back to the far side of the backcounter and rummaged through a wooden trunk full of cloth maps and leather atlases.

        The pegasus sighed, slumped against the counter.  She was only vaguely aware of a swaggering shadow scraping its obese way towards her side until a breath full of rum finally wheezed into her nostrils, slurring, “Well, if it isn't the last—HIC—manure factory in Equestria!  You've got some nerve—HIC—prancin' your frilly flank around these parts!”

        Bored, she gazed over at what turned out to be a rotund ogre with a mixture of alcohol, slobber, and dried-up vomit lacing his double chins.

        He gazed dizzily at her with a half-practiced sneer before planting a jar onto the counter and snapping his finger at a passing monkey.  “Double vodka!  Keep it comin'!”  Struggling to stay standing in one place, he balanced himself through the act of whipping out a cigar from his moldy pants' pocket and lighting it smokily in her face.  He hissed smokily in the pony's direction, “Didja hear me, Equestrian filth?  Or is there too much magic clogged up between yer ears?  Heheh—HICCC!”  He wretched and barely contained the energy to take a fresh puff of his cigar.

        The pony cooly glanced from him towards his table of stupidly drunk buddies laughing and swaying in the distance.  The raccoon bum was lying still and plastered between them as they made lewd gestures her way and goaded on their fat buddy's intoxicated ramblings.  She glanced stonily back at the fat creature who was presently belching smoke rings.  “Can I help you?”

        “Ssssshure ya can!”  He leered, teetered, all the while pointing with a flick of his cigar.  “Ya can start by telling me how the ponies—HIC—got off hogging the Sun and Moon all to themselves for—URP—thousandsssssh of years, and then taking it all away in a flash like it was garrrr-bage!  Heh—Hehhehehehhhh—Snrkkkt!”  He spat a nicotined loogey into the floor and waited on her reply with bloodshot eyes.

        “Look,” she sighed, “I'm just here to do business with Pitt.  If you have a problem with me, take it to him.  Cuz I'm sure he'd be as angry as I am that a random oaf who's too wasted to smell his own pee bothered to interrupt a lucrative deal in the making.”

        “Angry?  HIC—You think you'rrrrrrrrre angry?”

        “I didn't say—”

        “Before everythinnnnnng—ULP—blew up across the world, I was a resssssssshpected citizen of Mount Ogreton!”  The obese cretin slobbered.  A marmoset waiter flew by, dropping the requested glass of vodka down onto the bar counter beneath him.  He half-pawed it while poking the cigar into the pony's personal space.  “And then you magical froo-froo horsiessssh just up and drop the ball!  Hrckkkt—Ptooie!”

        “Nnngh... I don't have time for this,” she muttered into an exhausted hoof.

        “What wassssh th-that?  H-Huh?”

        In belated timing, Pitt returned with a leather map in his gnarled hands.  “Here we go.  Let's have a look, shall we... ?”

        “Hey Pitt!” the drunk ogre slurred at him, “I was talking to this hoofed freak!”

        “Can't you see we're in the middle of something?  Try preaching to your mug, bright eyes!”  The Den owner spread the map out before the pegasus, displaying a broad series of brown hash-marks that not-so-artistically represented the crumbled state of modern Equestria.  He murmured, “Okay, so here's the word.  A total of five groups of pilots showed up over the past week, claiming to have seen puffs of green flame.”  His gnarled finger drew invisible lines across the center of the leather map. “They were all flying identical routes at low altitudes.  Most of my patrons, of course, aren't brave enough to scavenge deep into the heart of the Equestrian Wastes like you, pony, but some of them can't resist a good flyby if they could chance upon something profitable, mostly natural gas reserves and the like.”

        “Can you get to the point, Pitt?  I think I'm suddenly in a hurry,” she said, shiftily casting a side glance towards the smoking ogre who hovered two spits away.

        “Right.  All five groups gave me nearly identical coordinates of the green flame sighting.  They described the sensation as 'bright plumes of emerald', large enough to see from half a kilometer.  Pretty brilliant stuff, if you ask me.  I think they were too frightened to check it out.  But then again, none of them are all that proficient in runestones.”

        “HIC—What're runesssshhtones?”  The ogre half-heartedly gripped his tall glass of vodka.  “Morrrrre pony hocussssh pocussssh?”

        The pegasus rolled her eyes and leaned forward.  “Just tell me the coordinates already.”

        Pitt stared steadily at her, closely studying her expression as his blistered tongue dripped forth the numbers:  “One Hundred and Five, Thirty-Two, Ten.”

        The pony's face paled.  She stared anxiously at the leather map as if it had suddenly transformed into a viper ready to leap at her snout.  She scooted back from the counter, cleared her throat, and in a shaky voice uttered, “You're right.  No deal.  I'm not going.”

        “But Harmony!”  Pitt hissed, suddenly desperate.  “Green flame--!”

        “I don't care!” she snarled back.  “I said I'm not gonna do it and I'm not gonna do it!”

        “Oooooh!” the ogre slobbered, grinning mockingly.  “Tough fillllly—”

        “Yo!  Can it, sardine breath!” Pitt briefly frowned at him and spun back the pony's way in a desperate bid to salvage the deal.  “Girl, there are clients who would pay out the butt for this stuff!  I ... would pay out the butt for green flame!  And that's coming from a red butt!  That's the exact kind of butt honest deals are made of!”

        “Save it—”

        “With green flame, my brothers and I could raise this business to new heights!  Why, we could magically teleport goods across kilometers!  We could banish thugs and harpy pirates with a flick of the wand!”  He smiled a yellow smile and rubbed his fingers together.  “You're just what we need, pony girl.  How does nine hundred strips sound?”

        “No.”

        “Eleven hundred bars—I'm desperate here!”

        “I am never—ever—going to those coordinates,” she seethed, her scarlet eyes burning like hot coals.  “Not for green flame, red flame, yellow flame, your mother's flame—Or anything else for that matter!”

        “Isn't it just like any of your other jobs?”

        “No, it's not.”

        “Why not?”

        “Because some things are still sacred in this world!” she shouted suddenly, shaking the air around their half of the bar and causing patrons' heads to turn.  “I can't expect a money grabbing, brother slapping, venom blooded simian like you to understand that!  Or any of these soulless vermin you call 'customers' for that matter!”

        “Live and learn, sweetflanks!” Pitt chuckled helplessly, shrugging towards the map.  “That's the kind of world we live in—”

        “Well maybe it shouldn't be!” she roared.  At the crest of her echoing voice was a sudden dip in silence, permeated briefly by a random cough or two from the rear of the bar.  She exhaled, fuming, glancing shakily at all the glaring eyes that were suddenly plastered on her figure.

        “Hmmmm-hmmm-hmmm... ,” the ogre chuckled breathily.  He took a wide puff on his cigar and breathed offensively into her snout.  “Ssssshoulda thought really hard about how much you loved your world—HIC—before ya trasssshed it, huh, Equestrian filth?”

        “Lay off, bucko,” Pitt defeatedly groaned.

        “Why shhhhould I?”  The ogre breathed into her again.  “She's the reason for all thissssh mess!  It's all her kind's fault!  HIC!—Why, if ssssshe had any real respect for the world, she'd just hang herself right here and now!”

        She thinned her eyes through the waves of the ogre's cigar smoke.  An artery pulsed at the edge of her cap and goggles.  A hissing voice bubbled up through her lips, “Do you know how much I hate smoking... ?”

        “Hmmmm-Eheheh.”  The ogre smirked drunkenly back at his distant companions and then sputtered her way, “Mmm-No.  Why don'tcha tell me?”

        She smiled, “Gladly.”  With one hard swat, she slammed her hoof into the ogre's blubbery backside.  The fat patron instantly spat the lit cigar straight into his glass of vodka.  Flames burst out from the alcoholic beverage, which the pony viciously flung straight into the ogre's girth, dousing his torso with burning quaff.  The ogre howled, twirling and tossing his limbs as the flames covered him from head to toe.  With a silent sneer, the last pony pivoted her hindquarters, reared her hooves, and bucked him burningly across the bar.

        Patrons gasped and dashed out of their seats as the ogre's hulking, flaming body sailed across the Monkey O'Dozen Den and landed hard through a splintering table of wood and mugs.  The singed drunkard's companions and a dozen other angry pilots jumped up to their feet with a flurry of various blades and knives kissing the Den's air.  In one savage line, they marched forward to converge on the pony.

        Eyes aflame, the furious mare flung her rifle free from her sheathe.  Against Pitt's panicked protests, she slapped it full of glowing runestones and cocked the copper barrel ceilingward as she snarled at the entire room, “What of it?!?”

        Before anything exploded, the double-doors flew wide with a flurry of white snow... and feathers.  Golden beaks, glinting goggles, and razor-sharp talons lit the room, followed by a cackling voice:  “Whoahhhh-ho-ho-ho!  What's all the commotion about?  Is there some trouble in my favorite watering hole?  H-Huh?  Huh?  Pitt, what gives?”

        Pitt, sweating bullets, gave the pony a sideways glance before murmuring under his breath, “'Trouble always comes to you', h-huh?”  Clearing his throat, he leaped over the bar and spread his monkey arms wide with a voice of forced cheerfulness, “Welllll—If it isn't the Golden Gang!  My favorite customers ever—WHOOP!”  He wheezed as he was forced into a half-nelson in one of the griffons' feathery grasp.  “Eh-heh-heh-heh-Why, we're all one happy family today, aren't w-we?!”

        “Abso-positiv-olutely, Pitt ol' pal!  Cuz if we weren't a happy family, I might have to clean shop!  You wouldn't like me doing that, wouldja?  I mean, it is your shop, after all!”

        “I-I would certainly hope so... Eh heh heh... Oh, and my brothers' too.  The smart ones, at l-least.”

        “Right—Like I said.  It's your shop.  Heheh!  Everyone calm down!  Take it easy!”  The head griffon ruffled the hair around Pitt's bald spot and grinned at the group as she waved her majestic wings and sauntered across the hazy interior on all fours.  “It's been a long and crazy week of navigating the wastelands!  Take a chill pill and enjoy your drinks!  The Golden Gang's here to party like it's the Third Age all over again!  Don't stop the rum, barkeep!”

        By this time, the pony had retracted her rifle, sheathed it, and slumped herself lethargically back against the bar.  The angry fire in her eyes had long sizzled out.  She watched with a forlorn breath as the burnt and wincing ogre struggled to get up.  His friends lifted their buddy from the pile of sparkling splinters, leading him—limping—towards the Den's half-hearted excuse for a lavatory.  They glanced back over their thick shoulders and frowned at the pegasus, muttering a crazy assortment of obscenities her way.  The other patrons were likewise glaring at her, but under the sudden beaks of the Golden Gang, they reluctantly returned to their tables.

        A long breath escaped the mare's lips.  She glanced down at the bar counter, at the leather map that Pitt had rolled out.  There was still a scratchy impression in the dead center of the illustrated brown Wastes from where the baboon had excitedly marked out the infamous coordinates of the Green Flame—

        A crown of feathers blocked the image of the map.  Looking up, the pony found herself staring into the grinning beak of a tall, muscular griffon.  Like her six other companions, the half-avarian creature sported a leather brown bomber jacket splayed over with the totems of her fallen enemies, bounties that she and her loyal gang of feathered kin had expertly chased down.  Nobody dared question their skill or their tactful mercilessness.  They were the esteemed bounty hunters of the Equestrian wastes, the mavericks of the twilight.  They were the Golden Gang, and this towering figure lurching in front of the pony with a swagger and a grin was the squadron's self-appointed leader.

        “Well – Well – Well,” she chuckled, a pair of silver goggles glinting in the lantern light.  “If you ain't the last pony on Earth!  Why's it that I'm always stumbling in on you when you're about to have your head ripped off by all things that live and breathe?”

        The pony exhaled long and hard, suddenly staring at the floor as she muttered, “Then maybe you shouldn't bother with 'stumbling', Gilda.”

        “Ohhh ho ho ho—A little spitefire tonight, aren't we?”  The adult griffon grabbed a random mug from a dizzied patron, back-handed him to the floor the moment he protested, and took a big swig.  Gulping, Gilda exhaled, wiped her beak, and leaned with her back against the bar beside the pony.  “I've known you to take on trolls, harpy pirates, and gawd knows how many stormfronts to get what you need for your clients—But tossing around ogres three times your size in a bar crowded with drunken scallywags?  Now that's just silly, Harmony!”

        “My name's not—” The pony began, remembered who she was talking to, and deflatedly murmured, “Whatever.”

        “Why so glum, kiddo?”  With a single serrated talon, Gilda raised her silver goggles up to her headcrest.  An amused pair of amber eyes winked down at the last pony.  “You're alive, ain't you?”

        “If you could call it that.”

        “Well, that's all that matters, isn't it?”  She suddenly leaned in, forcing the blinking pony's torso into an iron-wrought sidehug.  “For you, that is.  Heck, if I died, the 'Golden' mantle would just go to Stowe.  But who would the mantle go to if you bit the oats?—Whoops, sorry.  Old expression.  Tough thing to kick.  But, hey, you get the idea.”

        “I... think...?”

        “Hehehe—” Gilda pinched the brown filly's cheek, her claws nearly breaking the mare's skin.  “You're so adorable when you're all confused in the head!  That's always been one of my guilty pleasures about your kind.  Y'all could be so gosh darn cute at the wrong moments, especially when you got angry.”  She cleared her feathery throat.  “If Equestria hadn't gotten the burn, I think all ponies would have gone extinct by always shoving their hooves into their mouths!”

        “I just came here to do business, Gilda.”

        “And look where it got you!  Seriously, Harmony, at this rate you'll be skinned and mounted in an exhibit by the next stormfront!  You gotta learn how to chill and know your role, girl!  In the meantime,” she murmured, nochalantly turning her gaze to scan the ceiling.  Her 'hug' of the pony tightened suggestively.  “I should remind you how important it is that you've always got good 'ol Gilda to cover your flank.  This place is filled to the brim with nasty no-goods who have all these cockamamie reasons to detest the existence of a sweet, innocent pony like you.  Y'know I can't always barge in at moments like just now.  But, you can still have the Gang's protection at all other times...” Gilda's voice oozed; meanwhile a prehensile lion's tail roped up from behind the pegasus and tightened mercilessly at the back of the mare's neck.  “... if you're smart.”

        The pony's scarlet eyes darted towards the living noose ensnaring her.  Caught between the bar, Gilda's tail, Gilda's talon, and Gilda's cold shoulder, the pony wilted from deep inside herself.  Unenthusiastically, she reached into her saddlebag and produced her pouch of silver, all the strips that she still had left from Gilliam's payment for the Phoenix fire.  She cast a look up at her griffon 'friend', and the amber glint that returned was colder than an iceberg.  Without a word, the pegasus dropped the strips into Gilda's other talon, turning her head to erase the silver bars from her mental sight.

        The Golden Gang leader brightened immediately.  “Clever girl,” she beamed.  Then, a shrill whistle, and another griffon around Gilda's height flapped serratedly over.  “Hey, Stowe—Be true to your name and stow these away into the vault on board the Raptor, will ya?”

        Stowe was a stone-gray feathered griffon whose beak resembled a perpetually grimacing mask.  A scar ran over her left eye, and her jacket was laced with fingerbones belonging to several questionable species.  Taking the silver, she launched a glare past Gilda and hissed at the pony, “You better not be holding out on us, blank flank!  Or I'll gut you in places you never knew you had—”

        “Stowe!  Shove off or shove it!”  Gilda snapped, kicking a lower talon hard into her second-in-command's gut.  “This is my good friend you're barking at, ya overgrown cockatoo!”

        “I don't see why you waste your frickin' time,” Stowe spat, gave the pony a lasting snarl, and stomped off.  “If ya love the glue stick so much, boss—Just marry it already.”

        “Yeah, and we'll mount the wedding cake with your gizzard—Ya loudmouth!  Take a hike!”  Gilda frowned, then chuckled helplessly as she patted the pony's shoulder.  “Pfft—'Blank Flank'.  Beats the heck out of me where that psychopath gets her insults.  Shoot, she couldn't have gotten it from me!  I had loads of fun hanging out with ponies back in the day!  But you know that, Harmony.  And you know that I'd never insult the hoofed pipsqueaks, even if they were friggin' lame-os from time to time.  But hey, that's the checks and balances, right?”

        “Right,” the pony sighed, stretching her saddlebags wider over her unmarked brown coat in an absent-minded gesture of yesteryear.  “Whatever you say, Gilda.”

        “Hey Barkeep!”  Gilda raised a talon as she swiveled around towards the counter.  “Two rum-and-coconuts!  On the double!”

        The pony droned, “I don't drink.”

        “Kiss my tail-feathers!”  Gilda stuck a tongue out.  “With me, you will!”

        “If you're so concerned with my protection,” the pony sneered at her, “you will let me pilot the Harmony sober.”

        “Fine—Fine.  You win.  Who am I to argue, huh?”  Gilda snickered, rhythmically clapping her talon fingers against the bar while smirking at her 'friend'.  “These are your last days, not mine.  Guess you're entitled to live out your life the way you want to, huh?”

        “I guess...”

        “Well, better get it straight, girl!  I mean, it's in your blood, right?”  She smirked and pointed.  “One of the things I always found quirky about ponies is that they constantly pigeon-holed themselves into doing one particular thing in life.  Seriously, I never understood your society, even when it was still standing.  It was like a frickin' caste system!  Remind me; what were those tattoo-thingies on your butts that y'all got so bent out of shape over?”

        “Mmmmmmngh...,” the pony snorted, “...cutie marks.”

        “Ha—Bwaaaaaa ha ha ha ha!”  Gilda pounded the counter with her fist and covered her cackling face until a tear or two shed from her squinting amber eyes.  “Haah haah haah haah—Whewwww—Oh wait, you're serious?”

        “Why wouldn't I be?”

        “You ponies actually bent your entire civilization around a social strata called 'cutie marks'?  Pfft—I've heard some pretty sissy things back in my day, but that takes the cake!  Heck, no wonder your kingdom friggin' exploded.”

        Two mugs were deposited in front of the griffon; Gilda gladly swooped one up, took a swig, belched, and smiled warmly.

        “But not all of you were so namby pamby.  Why, a better part of my spritely days were spent flying with the best of y'all.”  The Gold Gang Leader exhaled in a sudden softness, choosing strategically to lower her pilot's goggles over her eyes.  “If it isn't the darndest thing that you're a pegasus.  Cuz those were always my favorites, the winged ponies.  While the unicorns were all sewing dresses and the earth ponies shoving plows, it was the pegasi who really showed Equestria a thing or two about being awesome.  They burned paths in the sky that mark the mists of twilight even to this day.  If ya squint at the swirling ashes just right after a stormfront's cleared, you can see their wingtrails still there.  Hmmmmph—Frickin' sky ponies; they would have made a good home in this upside down life we call the Wastes.”  She took another guzzling sip, breathed, and squinted the pony's way.  “Maybe that's why you've fought the grim reaper for as long as you have, eh kiddo?”

        “Don't be silly,” the pony murmured, then gave the griffon a postcard smile.  “It's all because of your expert protection.”

        “And don't ya forget it!”  The Gold Gang Leader pointed a talon, downed the last of her mug, belched, and clasped the second one.  This time, Gilda lingered with the drink at the edge of her break, her silver goggles fogging briefly in the Den's hazy light.  “You were young, kid.  Too dang young, if you ask me.  But—heck—those are the cards fate dealt.  I knew a pegasus or two who would have done even better than you if they were in your place, who wouldn't have needed protection, who would have done just fine... without m-me.”  Her feathers ruffled as she gulped hard, this time at the air.  “Just one—I remember just one pegasus, c-come to think of it...”

        The pony's brow withered as she breathed towards the floor, “I remember her too, Gilda.”  It took several seconds of silence before she realized how identically frozen the both of them were.  The haze settled between their cold bodies like mist in the twilight air outside.  Clearing her throat, the pony lowered her goggles over moist eyes and stepped away from the bar.  “Well, thanks for everything.  I've bothered Pitt enough.  It's time that I headed out.”  She trotted off.  For a moment there, she imagined she was in the clear—but then Gilda's voice called out—

        “Hey, Harmony.  Before you walk out on the Gang and I...”

        The pony stopped in her hooves.  She turned and glanced over her flank.

        Gilda smirked, her avarian head cocked to the side.  “I thought I'd mention that Stowe, the girls, and I ran into a friend of yours recently.”

        “A friend?  You do remember who you're talking to, right?”

        “Heheh.  Some toxic-lunged chipmunk named 'Bruce'.  Talks like there're marshmallows in his mouth.  We did a little... er... business with him the other day; did he mention that?”

        The pony stared fixedly at her.  She replied, “I haven't heard anything of the sort.”

        “Yeah, well, the little scamp gets around.  Not as much as you, of course; but when Stowe's scarred face freaked him out, he suddenly went on and on about some crazy nonsense.”

        “What kind of nonsense?”

        Gilda sipped from her mug, gulped, then uttered, “Something about a green flame.  Plumes of it, shooting up in random places across the wastelands.  From what I hear, the crud's really valuable.  Like, you might as well have a leprechaun pee gold right into a jar for ya!  Hah!”  Another sip, then a raising of her feather crest.  “You wouldn't happen to have seen this sort of stuff in your travels, huh?  Seems like something that would be right up your alley!”

        The pegasus looked Gilda's way.  Her goggles shielded the griffon from seeing her eyes dart from the Gold Gang Leader to the leather map left on the bar counter and back.  “I... will let you know if I hear anything, Gilda.”  She smiled briefly and waved a hoof.  “It's the least I can do for my best protector.”

        Gilda saluted back.  “Dang straight, kiddo.  Have a safe flight—And don't be picking fights with ogres, ya hear?”

        “Right...”  The pony turned around, trotted out, and muttered under her breath, “Ogres...”

        The pony pulled the lever once, twice, thrice—Finally, in a deep hum, the signal lit up.  The fresh flamestone burned prismatically into the seven lenses as the artificial rainbow surged high into the twilight, ten times brighter than before.

        It was several hours since her venture to the M.O.D.D.  The pony had returned to the plateau for her regular lighting of the spectrum.  But as she trotted back from the sight, breathing pantingly from the physical effort of forcing life into the machine, her expression waned into a wilting grimace.  As amazingly bright as the well-paid-for effect was, it somehow seemed dimmer.

        Perhaps it was the creaking noise of the chains moored to the hovering Harmony overhead.  Perhaps it was the harsh flurry of snow that dipped surprisingly low for that moment of time between stormfronts.  Perhaps it was the taste of blood that resurfaced in the pegasus' bruised mouth; but something was distracting her, so that after ten minutes of staring, she realized that her gaze was fixed on one color of the spectrum and one color only:  the green band.

        She exhaled in a gust of frustration; the multiple mishaps of her brief visit to the M.O.D.D. bled down through a curtain of numbness to pinprick her all over.  She kicked at the stony earth, and a few clumps of powder splashed unexcitingly across a rusted metal barricade or two, mocking her lonely ire.  The permeating silence of the abandoned plateau prophecied to her yet another fruitless night of guarding an unseen spotlight, so that she wondered if the only thing a rainbow dared to dance for was the creature that conjured the spectral band in the first place.

        Everything the pony struggled and suffered for—the strips and the flamestones and the lighting rig—all paled to a bone-white malaise, all except for one color.  It was the one color that she suddenly refused to look at, the one color that she hated, because she knew beneath all her pathetically collapsible layers of skin that she was afraid of it.

        “It's not worth it,” the last pony spoke directly to herself, something she hadn't done in years.  “The green flame isn't worth going back there.”  She clutched the rifle to her chest in what briefly looked like an infantile hug, before she rolled her scarlet eyes, slid her goggles down, and climbed lethargically up the guard tower where she knew she would sit for several hours, waiting for nothing.

        Long after, in the gently swaying haze of the Harmony's cabin, the pegasus was lying on her hammock, chest first, her head swimming in the rhythmic lulls of Octavia's strings.  Before her, bathed in golden lamplight, the pages of Princess Celestia's Diary spread wide, their ivory surfaces lilting under mighty golden penstrokes of a Goddess long gone.  The last pony dutifully read and re-read the same silkily scribed words as she had so many times before, committing the holy paragraphs to memory, turning them over in her mind, allowing the eloquent passages to sweep her away from the flurrying gray mist outside the airship's portholes.

        Halfway through the habitual read, a rough gust of turbulence struck the Harmony.  The vessel harmlessly buckled for the briefest of seconds, and in the ensuing jolt Octavia's record momentarily skipped with an offensive scratching sound.

        It was enough to snap the filly out of her umpteenth perusal of the Princess' journal, so that her eyes blinked and refocused squarely on one particular passage that suddenly stood out from the rest.  It was an entry dated from halfway through the middle of the Third Age, describing the death of the last noble member of the Honeytail Clan, an aristocratic family of unicorns whose great ancestors several generations before were loyalists to the Lunar Republic, having been given pardon by Princess Celestia following the banishment of Nightmare Moon.

        For several centuries, the Honeytail household had lived within the sacred protection of the Celestial Estate, barred off from the rest of the Equestrian population, many of whom were descendants of brave soldiers who died wastefully at the hands of the Lunar Republic, and who wanted nothing more than to strike vengeance at the Honeytail Clan for so much bad blood built up over the years.  The Honeytails were satisfied to stay within the confines of Princess Celestia's domain, and on account of their fear and hesitance, they died out as a hemophiliac strain of inbreds, fading into nothingness with little more than a passive epithet from their forgiving queen in a journal that only one lone pegasus would read after an apocalypse had long come and gone.

        The pony's scarlet eyes wandered across the ever-familiar bulkheads of the Harmony, across the windows stained with repetitious cyclones of snow, like her countless days were repetitious, bouncing back and forth between scavenging jobs while dodging murderers and monsters and only randomly communing with a flying squirrel that leeched off her, a monkey that swindled her, and a griffon that drove an invisible knife into her heart and twisted it.  Everything about her existence was like a flake of ash, lost in the twirling winds, disguising itself with the faux self-importance of a steam-powered zeppelin armed to the teeth with sacrilegious runestones.

        She was the last pony, and if this was living, she wasn't doing a very good job of it.  The filly briefly remembered what it meant to take chances before chances took her, what it meant to go for the gold before succumbing to a life that settled for silver, what it meant to fight gravity long before her wings ever paid heed to her audacity.  She never asked for Princess Celestia's protection before the cataclysm, and she sure as blazes didn't ask for Gilda's after it.

        The young mare clasped the Royal Book closed.  Bolting out of the hammock, she slapped the record player off, yanked a scroll from her workbench, and practically leaped into the cockpit seat.  Unfurling the map, she clasped a compass in her teeth and charted the distance between her present location, and the dead center of the Equestrian Wastelands, chiefly the coordinates: '105, 32, 10.'

        As soon as she mentally prepared the bearings in her head, she snapped the map scroll closed, spat the compass out, and sneered into the stuffy air, “Nopony lives forever.  Isn't that right, Princess?”  She grasped her goggles, slid them over her eyes, and yanked hard on the levers—banking the Harmony portside and veering the craft swiftly southward.

        It was several dozens of hours later when the Harmony touched down, and when it had finished mooring, the landscape beneath it couldn't have been a ghostlier sight.  Here, in the deepest valley of Equestria, the snow flurries blew savagely across the landscape like an ivory sandstorm.  Black stalks of petrified glass shot forth from the scorched earth in obsidian daggers, making it a tough feat in and of itself for the pegasus to land.

        Still, she descended bravely, and with a final flap of her wings the pony set hoof down on holy ground.  As soon as she landed, a deep shudder left her, as if she was giving up the ghost in her shell to rejoin this deathly graveyard.  She stared with chattering teeth, her snout bravely piercing the howling winds.  Try as she might to eye the northern horizon, nothing could be seen beyond five meters' distance.  All she knew was that this was the last hilltop before the northern dip where Pitt's coordinates pointed her.  Beyond the sloping terrain was foreboding obscurity, and it was about to brush bleeding elbows with the horrible shadows of her long forsaken memories.

        With a strong gulp, the pony stood straight and tall, feeling the weight of her leather armor, saddlebags, rifle, runestone magazines, and two pairs of rune-capped jars.  All of the defensive materials somehow didn't make the next few trots any easier.  She had her yoke of lanterns with her, but couldn't persuade herself to light them, not yet.  The filly knew that she wouldn't need them to find her way here.

        As the mare slowly trudged down the hilltop from the tethered Harmony, the flurrying wind spread the snow before her, revealing a pair of dried up riverbeds converging before a series of multicolored houses, collapsed buildings with their thatched roofs long blown off.  The skeletons of various oak trees lurched into view; and finally a deathly slumbering village bled forth from the gray expanse.

        One lone sign by a snow-laden path—bent at an odd angle—shuddered from the proximity of the pegasus' treading hooves; the powdery ash that had collected on its surface fell off, revealing the lonesome words:

        'Welcome to Ponyville.  Sanctum of Earth Ponies.  Population: 1,056'

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Four – The Refoaling

        A crusted white glacier of frigid ice covered the glossy surface.  Under the constant howl of bitter winds, a hoof rose up and planted its metal sole against it.  A light scraping, a harder scraping, and the hoof carved a clear path across the surface; it was a curved line, a rainbow arch.  After a few more scrapes the glacier broke away and the last of the frost fell loose from the surface of the glass.  The reflection of a brown mare's face emerged, her goggles glinting unemotionally as she suddenly regarded herself.  Leaning in closely, the pegasus stared tightly past the window's reflection in an attempt to gaze inside, but she could only make out the vaguest shape of tattered velvet heaps piled up in the center of the building's sealed atrium.  With a fogging breath, the last pony stepped back and stared up at the crumbling height of the Carousel Boutique.

        The boutique's top spire had collapsed in on itself, and from the resulting implosion there lay a scattered ring of debris around the cylindrical clothing shop.  Both mahogany pony figures that had once graced the third story of the structure were miraculously intact; only now they were lying flank-deep in the snow by the building's foundation, several icicles hanging off their lifeless snouts as their wooden hooves struggled endlessly with decades' worth of piling ash.

        The mare took a deep breath.  Turning away from the building of former extravagance, she padded across a powdery wind-blown field towards the heart of Ponyville.  On either side of her, long-collapsed tents and storage huts lingered in the frosted mire, their canvass bodies forever flapping in the wind like war flags left behind a hasty retreat.

        In mid trot, the pegasus briefly raised a hoof to her goggles and refocused the lenses to a specific tint in order to highlight any hue of green that might show up across the barren landscape.  Part of her felt immensely silly; she had rarely used that specific lens setting before, and many times she wondered why she even bothered to possess it.  In the world of the Equestrian Wastes, the only green thing was the greed that bled out of the eyes of sky pirates and swindlers.  The only time she ever saw plants was in the miraculous cargo that Bruce somehow scrounged up from time to time.  In nature, the last time she saw vegetation was the first week immediately following the Cataclysm, and it all turned to the color of her coat faster than she could comprehend starving without it.

        Green flame, on the other hoof, was a whole different matter.  She knew that it existed, along with all of the other elemental fires that dotted the Wasteland.  Acquiring it was no easy task, not so much because of the danger involved but the scarcity of finding it.  Even if it did exist anywhere in the Wastes with salvageable deposits, it would be a miracle if such a source hadn't been tapped into already by any and all of the mercantalist factions that spun their zeppelins under the twilight.  The reason Pitt was willing to pay so much for it—she knew—was that even the tiniest fume of green flame would put the mangy baboon ahead of the pack when it came to economic competition.  Some things in the ruined world were actually capable of turning murder and bribery into a work of art, so long as the treasure was valued highly enough.  The one consolation the pony gave herself—aside from the incalculably grand score it would be to land herself some green flame—was the fact that she wouldn't have to be slaying or imprisoning anything to extract the substance this time.  In the history of Equestria, green flame was something akin to a magical essence, not a natural phenomenon.  So long as Canterlotlian magic existed, green flame did as well.  So when Pitt made it clear to her that green flame had been sighted—and in Ponyville of all places—it shook the ghosts in her attic twice as hard.

        She was prepared, doubly this time.  She wore two fresh bracelets of unicorn horns, one on each hoof.  If there was any green flame to be had in Ponyville, the magical bones tied to her limbs would find it, especially if her lenses failed her, which they very likely would.  The filly was prepared for a light, any light—be it from the horns or from the horizon—to alert her when she was near her goal.  Until then...

        Until then she had nothing but sacred ground to cover.  And with each hoofing step she took, she felt like she was driving a knife further down her own chest.  Gazing left and right, she shuddered to find the rows of houses doubling, tripling.  She knew that she was now deep into the thick of Ponyville, deep into the frosted mane of yesterday's shadow.  The wind settled suddenly in a calm gasp of irony, so that the bitter howling gave way to gently fluttering snow that punctuated the melancholy of the last pony's long delayed return to the land of her foaling—and dying.

        The pony softly pattered to a stop on the edge of Ponyville's former town square, now a scattered bed of random wooden shards sticking out of piled-high snow.  Bits and pieces of carts and wagons and merchant stands were splayed all around her, as if a vomit of petrified splinters had rained down from the sky.  She squinted her eyes through her goggles and made out what looked to be a bent metal arch.  Stepping slowly towards it, she realized it was the town's flagpole, a memorial established to the settling of the village by Earth Ponies twelve decades before the beginning of the Fourth Age.  At the base of the lewdly bent flagpole was a concrete slab, and in haunting legibility the pony could spot writing carved long ago into the dried surface with a haystalk: 'Faustmare and daughter'.  Alongside the cursive words of the village's founder were two hoofprints: that of an old mare, and a tiny mark belonging to a little foal.  The lone pegasus reached forward through the drifting snow, and instinctually placed her hoof over that of the foal's imprint first, quite visibly dwarfing it.  But that didn't induce her to sigh as much as when she next raised her hoof over the founding mare's imprint and found that her hoof was larger even still.

        Gulping, she shuddered to look up across the panoramic desolation of her former home, buried in time and ashes.  The post office had shattered in half, its eastern side crumbling and exposing a skeleton of ramshackled cabinets and billowing seas of papery scraps deep inside.  The town's central fountain with its life-sized statue of Princess Celestia had been bent savagely by age, so that the Royal Effigy leaned precariously towards the side, its perforated alicorn wings frozen in mildew and acidic deterioration.  Along a brick wall flanking a garden there fluttered a tattered poster featuring the ghosts of three goggled ponies garbed in blue, a discolored squadron of pegasi soaring impressionistically past their proud profiles.  The two-story bed and breakfast that sat, hunched and bowed, at the corner of main street still maintained an iconographic silhouette in the pony's mind.  She stared at it, up past it, and briefly blinked her eyes.  In that sharp blink, the sapphiric haze of Cloudsdale hovered in a sunny blue sky, just a nose's tilt above the roof of the inn and the lush trees waving gently beyond it.  Then the blink ended, and the northern sky was once more a gray madness, howling coldly over the frozen holocaust.

        A whining howl—like foals giggling;  the pegasus gasped sharply and flashed a look to her right.  A guild sign was hanging by one last rusted chain from the front entrance to a hollowed-out store.  The hinge upon which the sign dangled creaked and whined in the cold wind, piercing the pony's ears from afar.

        She exhaled long and hard, feeling a heartbeat ricochet up her armored chest and thrash against the sore lump in the scavenger's throat.  The filly paced her breaths, trying mentally to stitch herself back together.  She was here for the green flame, nothing more.  There was no point to this... to this lingering.  But as she padded down the abandoned alleyways and torn streets and shattered courtyards of her place of birth, her hooves slowed and slowed, as if the white fields she was wading across were really pools of ivory tar, weighing her down, forcing her to convulse and twitch until her neck craned about and fed her eyes more, more, more...

        The town library.  The tall and twisted tree was, miraculously, the most intact structure in the entirety of Ponyville.  In perfect irony, the only things devastated about the treehouse was everything pony-made about it.  The front door had long fallen off the thing.  The windows had been shattered.  The miniature observatory platform constructed at the apex of the tree had completely vanished.  The only thing in relatively good shape was a lower balcony ledge, now a gaggle of haphazardly angled planks struggling to stay aloft a widely stretching branch that stretched further than the pony remembered it.  It was almost as if the tree had still grown past the Cataclysm.  But no single leaf could be seen upon the gnarled burnt-black limbs of the thing.  And from a distant glance, the treehouse was about as hollow as the pony felt at that very moment of melancholic sightseeing.

        Sugarcube Corner.  Nestled in the thick of Ponyville, just north of downtown, was a jaded spectre of its former self.  All of the bright paint had been stripped from the building's siding, as if a giant hoof took a blow torch to the entire structure.  The ground beneath it was positively scorched, suggesting a horrible fire that had consumed the building, along with the rest of Equestria from the ground up.  The higher story windows had caved in, positively melted; and in place of shades of pink were instead brown fluffs of matter as several bits of tattered furniture leaked out from the second floor like a bursting bud of rusted cotton.

        The Toy Store.  The pony's heart started, for she had completely and utterly forgotten about the place up until that very naked moment of awestruck gazing.  Brief flashes of recollection pelted her mind, of a merry structure built into the absurd shape of a jester's cap with bright colors merrily criss-crossing the surface of the building.  It was now a tangled mess of exposed concrete and steel supports.  Trotting up close, the pegasus could spot a veritable sea of tin shrapnel, the remains of several hand-crafted wind-up toys that used to line the shelves of a musically enchanting store that toasted a young filly's coat as she once beat her infantile wings to get a bouncing look at the place's fantastic wares surrounding her.

        By the time another hour had passed, the pony found herself haplessly wandering the halls of collapsed hotels, navigating the run-down corridors of empty apartment buildings, shuffling through the gray-misted kitchens of darklit restaurants, infested with hives of pests and vermin.  She saw paintings, photographs, portraits of dead ponies from an Age forever gone.  And then, the very first moment those faces started to become familiar, she buckled under a sudden nausea and swiftly galloped her way back out into the blinding snow.

        Leaning against a collapsed wagon, its wheels still hauntingly spinning in the wind, the pony fought to catch her breath.  She knew that this was going to be an unpleasant sojourn, but the last pegasus in no way expected this degree of collapse, of the sensation of twenty-thousand atmospheres hammering into her lungs from all sides, of how torturously cold the world suddenly felt, even at sea level.  She was there in search of green flame—true—but unlike any other trip into the ruins of Equestria, she couldn't bring herself to pilfer anything, not even scavenging one speck of debris.  She could have sworn she strolled by a record disc or two in one of the apartments, but even that she refused to indulge herself in.  This was Ponyville; her saddlebags were empty.

        Glancing up from the wagon, the pony finally caught her breath, only to lose it again as she realized that she was no longer staring at Ponyville anymore.  The entire north side of the village, which should have been at least five blocks thick with buildings, was nowhere to be seen.  Trotting cautiously forward, the pegasus squinted through her goggles and glanced down past her hooves.  Indeed, as she discovered at the end of one last crumbling hoof-step, the landscape dipped down suddenly below the edge of a vicious drop.  The mist cleared momentarily in a harsh breeze of cold wasteland wind, revealing a gigantic ravine at least one hundred meters deep; and at the bottom of this inexplicable canyon was a splattering of demolished buildings that looked as if they had been thrown viciously straight into one another.

        The pony remembered, as she so often did, that the Cataclysm which consumed Equestria was not only a vanquisher of pegasi but of earth ponies and unicorns as well.  While Cloudsdale fell in crumbling chaos and ruin, the world buckled underhoof everyone else, so that whenever she swung the Harmony low enough to see the naked bosom of the Wastes she would occasionally stumble upon these terrestrial scars, these savage dips and breaks in the crust of the world.  And one such tremor had happened right there, in the heart of Ponyville, right under her nose.  There was no telling what the moonfalls did to the rest of the village that she had yet to see...

        But this wasn't bringing her anywhere.  She was losing her focus.  She lost her focus the moment she had set flight coordinates to these 'sacred grounds'.  What was worst—or perhaps best—was that she knew it.  Of all the unprofessional mistakes the last pony could possibly have made, coming to that nightmare afterimage of a life long gone was quite possibly her worst choice.  At that point, she told herself, actually spotting and getting green flame would be a consolation prize.  Walking out of Ponyville with her sanity would be the only true victory.

        With a hardened resolve, the mare turned completely around, her flank to the ravine, and trotted swiftly back in the direction from which she woefully came.  She would have made good distance between downtown Ponyville and the Harmony; only a bright strobe of light emanated suddenly from both of her hooves.  Gasping, she stopped in time to gape down at both of her front limbs.  The necklaces of horns were frothing with a fine purple mist, the brightest she had ever seen them glow in all her days of tomb raiding.  Something in Ponyville was emitting a magical surge so strong that almost every unicorn bone on the pegasus' articles overloaded at once.  The energy was of such intensity that twin ovals of snow melted beneath where her horseshoes had been planted.

        “What in the hay... ?” she obligatorily murmured.  “That can't be right!  The ravine must have ruptured and exposed a leyline--”

        Her exclamation was cut prematurely short at the sight of a winged shadow suddenly sweeping over the white snowbank within which she was stumbling.  A sharp gasp; she thrust her saddlebags forward, clasped her rifle while it was airborne, and extended it with a clak-a-clak and a glare.  Her goggled eyes scanned the snow-pelted horizon of Ponyville's ghostly buildings towards the south.  Squinting, she adjusted the lenses with one hoof while leaning against the rifle with her other.  Every possible shade and tint flickered across her gaze, bathing the Ponyvillean wastes in several different colors, until an aura appeared, faintly, then disappeared.  With a frustrated grunt, the mare all but tore her goggles off and blinked her naked scarlets at the source of the brief aura...

        The bold round structure of City Hall, the tallest building in Ponyville, stood straight before her.  It was amazingly intact, with only random sections of the uppermost stories crumbling off towards its west end.  Less than half of the windows were shattered, and the outer doors still hung perfectly in their frames.  With a steady breath, the pony lowered her goggles once more, keeping her eyes locked on the sight of the building.  She flicked one last time through the different lenses, and again she caught it, like a shadow of a hide-and-seeker peaking in and out from behind a huge tree stump.  An aura had faded from view, a green aura, and all was once again dull and clear, with City Hall at the epicenter of the passing phenomenon.

        The pony's brow furrowed.  In direct opposition with her throbbing pulse, she padded bravely forward, her rifle slung over her shoulder.  She shuffled up to the front steps of the City Hall building, stopping briefly to gaze from its dilapidated outer railings up to its grand height of half-shingled overhangs and peeling paint.  If there was a source of green flame inside this structure, she could detect no hint from that proximity.  But in the graveyard of a city where she didn't want to be, she didn't know any other place to go.  So, with a grunt of determination, she marched up to the double doors, protruded a golden blade from her left horseshoe, and pried into the space between the hinges, pulling with all of her might.

        After a strain, the doors flung open into a chasm of darkness.  Ash and dust scattered like a curtain, briefly blanketing her goggles.  She wiped them clean with the side of her hoof, glanced inside—and immediately wished she hadn't.  A painful wince ripped across the pony's features as she wrenched her gaze groundward.  A few shuddering breaths, and she bravely looked ahead, trotting forward as she approached a veritable heap of dead bodies—skeletons and husks and grainy piles of former Ponyvilleans, stretched across the floor like a necropolitan carpet.  She had seen sights like this in so many ruined cities: the Temple of the Sun in Stalliongrad, the University at Fillydelphia, even some of the fallen structures of Clousdale.  Dozens if not hundreds of ponies had run for cover under the roof of a large interior building where their remains would be petrified en masse by the blast wave of the Cataclysm.  But every one of those sights were mere curiosities, things to glance upon and then unemotionally rummage through for resources.  None of those sights, however grim, viciously gutted her—none like this.

        The air was filled with a perpetually sterile rust, and yet as she marched deeper into the cornacopia of bodies, so many haunting scents came to her, riding the flanks of hundreds of cheerfully giggling voices in the vestiges of her mind, recalling ponies going about their business in the warm afternoon breeze, of foals playing games with each other along the beaten path, of loved ones nuzzling in the park and families picnicking on the hillsides.  Against her better judgment, the pony found herself gazing down at the forms, her heart pulsing sharply with each successive body she glanced at, possibly seeing or possibly not seeing one tell-tale hint after another of somepony or something that she would recognize:  a hairbow, a lock of sapphires, a cowgirl hat, a mailbag, party streamers, or anything whatsoever.  None of these appeared to her, but the filly was too miserable to be relieved.  If anything, she felt a pang of shame wash over her because of her anticipation.

        There were several unicorn skeletons amongst the pile, more than she had ever expected for the likes of Ponyville.  In the cold pale light wafting into the dark cavern of the Town Hall, several fresh horns glinted before her goggled gaze.  She knew that the magical channeling of her two bracelets had almost entirely worn out, but she couldn't goad herself into sawing off new horns, not this time.  She trotted into the center of the room, above a peculiar pair of skeletons.  The body of a middle-aged pegasus—its skull still splotched with a faded mat of blonde straws—was cradling the husk of a tiny unicorn filly, barely past its foal years.  It had been so long since the lone survivor first began exploring the graveyards of Equestria, but it never ceased to amaze her how the landscape still provided snapshots of the Cataclysmic Horror.

        Gazing up, the pony stared into the tall stretching shadows of the Town Hall building, its balconies and upper floors reaching at least a dozen meters high.  She remembered another moment with another Horror: when Nightmare Moon returned to this very spot, promising an Age of endless night.  She remembered seeing the event with her naked eyes, and how her tiny body trembled upon the echoing cackles of the unholy harbinger of doom.  And yet it was a brief horror, an event that was resolved by the Elements of Harmony within the space of a day.  If there was a lesson in life that the last pony could etch into the annals of irony, it's that the true apocalypse is always, always unannounced.  Nopony could have foreseen the endless twilight, and in a matter of time nopony would ever know it happened.

        She sighed heavily.  All that the Town Hall building offered was memories and darkness.  There was no green flame.  Ever exact, the pegasus nevertheless reached a hoof up to her goggles and re-scanned the shadowy interior.  She looked for all possible flickering shades of her elusive target.  From the ceiling beams down to the floorboards and the platforms in between, she gazed at everything, but found nothing.  She was just about to turn and leave with a disgruntled breath when a rustling noise pricked her ear from the side.

        Jerking to her left, she blinked at a pile of bodies along the wall.  Everything was still, and then the rustling resurfaced.  Cautiously, the filly trotted towards the shadowy corner.  The rustling stopped, but there was definitely something ahoof.  The last pony's sight zeroed in on one skeleton in particular, an earth pony of elder years—judging from the brittle bone structure.  Aside from the usual ash and skin flakes, the skeleton was sporting what turned out to be a pair of eyeglasses and a faded white collar with a tattered green ascot.  Before she could reflect on the finer details of this corpse, the pegasus narrowed her goggled eyes and bent low to inspect it closer.

        The skull jumped out at her, and in place of its jaws was a foaming mouth brimming with razor sharp teeth.  A grand snarling, and a black creature exploded from beneath the skeleton and chomped its maw straight at the pegasus' unguarded figure.  By sheer reflexes alone, the last pony managed to jerk her body to the side, so that the teeth of the pouncing creature shredded its way into her goggles and not into her flesh.  The filly slid back, yanking her neck so as to uncoil herself from the goggles that were now in an inky shadow's claws.  She gazed with bright scarlet eyes as the four-legged cretin thrashed the article in its jaws, crunched them solidly, and hissed towards her.

        A troll.  She gnashed her teeth and reached back towards her rifle, only to experience a thick leathery weight diving into her from behind.  Several clawed limbs stabbed and groped at her.  In a gasp, she bucked and kicked the thing off into a crashing pile of splinters.  She spun a sweating face over her flank and saw three more shadows darting out from hiding and charging straight at her across the carpet of bodies.

        Trolls.  She yanked her neck down, grabbed the first legbone she could find in her teeth, and unceremoniously flung the entire half of a molding corpse at the advancing trio.  They collapsed in a pile of bones and soot as another scream filled the air behind the pegasus.  She blindly somersaulted in time to avoid the pounce of another attacker.  Rolling into the edge of the City Hall's front pulpit, she unsheathed her rifle and took aim, only to be staring down the sight at no less than four dozen trolls bursting darkly out of the woodwork, hissing and slithering hungrily towards their lonesome prey.

        An ambush.  They had waited for her.  In an age without ponies, they took claim of the homeliest village in Equestria and turned it into a death trap.  The earth belonged to the trolls, and Town Hall was their biggest snare.

        “By Celestia's mane, I've been gone for too long.”  Snarling, she breathed into the glowing runestones and cocked the weapon.  “H'rhnum!”  The first manabullet sailed into the chest of one of the advancing trolls.  As the one inky creature's body fell down with a splat, its uncountable rows of brethren scampered forward at full speed, claws raking the floor.  She barely got a second shot out when they were leaping upon her, beady eyes forming murderous starlight against the canvass of their leather black flesh.  She kicked up to two hooves and waved the butt of her rifle out, smacking two of the attackers with one throw.  Three more clamped their jaws over and wrestled with the brass body of the rifle.  The pony struggled and wrestled with them before hissing into the festering pile of sweat:  “H'rhnum!”  The rifle fired directly into the mouth of one of the creatures.  Warm musky liquid splashed through the shadowy air.  The pegasus roared and kicked back against the pulpit, shoving her entire weight through the rifle and plowing her way through a pile of shrieking and flailing bodies.

        She was crawling pathetically back to her hooves, her panicked eyes spotting the gray rectangular silhouette of the door.  Her entire mind and body were now pressed on escape.  But as soon as she started galloping over the bodies, something came down from the ceiling and impaled her.  The last pony screamed.  Her body throbbed under the most intense agony she had experienced in years.  A glint of twilight; and she snarled to see a troll squatting on top of her, having driven a meter-long beam of steel straight into the brown flesh just beneath her left wing.

        The hissing creature snarled and twisted its grip on the 'spear' for added torture.  Howling, the pegasus angrily leaped to the side, throwing the creature off so that it fell through a suffocating banner of tattered velvet.  She tried galloping away, but the impalement screamed into her flesh, melting her wings and legs into putty.  She groaned and slithered—one knee after another—towards the doorway, her breath coming out in awkward squeaks.

        Then the clawprints behind her increased to a deafening degree.  She spun to see four sets of glinting sharp teeth.  The trolls were dogpiling on her—impaled spear and all.  She thrashed and kicked and fought through waves of numbing agony to buck them off.  Only after four or five blinks of adrenalized horror did she realize that she was successful, and on ghostly limbs she summoned the strength to get back up and bolt out the door.

        The dull light of the snowy wasteland was like a cosmic blast.  Without her goggles, her twitching eyes had to deal with blinding snow and salty ash pelting her from all angles.  She didn't bother looking where she was going—so long as she was gone, limping at the fastest possible canter, putting as much distance between her and the Town Hall death trap behind.  Just as her breaths grew to their most ragged wheezes yet, she fell flat on her face, exploding through a snowbank as the intense burning of her torn flesh returned to her in a muffled scream.  Wincing, she glanced towards her left, eyes twitching over the glint of the metal beam lodged under her wing.  She heard the slobbering howls of the murderous trolls; she felt the powdery earth vibrating from their incoming stampede.  She had no time to hesitate.  Eyes shedding snowflake tears, she yanked her jaw back and clamped her teeth over the stalk of the beam.  After a few concentrated grunts under her throat, she pulled and pulled and yanked until the invasive object was ripped out from her coat, revealing to her dazed eyes a trail of crimson leaking through the white earth behind her... and then an inbound figure charging on four clawed legs.

        A muffled scream, and the filly rolled over onto her throbbing backside, spat out the beam, and lifted it with her front-hooves to take the charge of the first troll head-on.  The creature lurched, its eyes bulging as the beam found its way into its throat and came out through the top of its skull.  No sooner was this horrifying image burned into the filly's retinae; then two more bodies were upon her, snarling and whooping and snapping at any limb that presented itself.  She panted, and struggled, and kicked at her attackers before finally offsetting one's balance with her right wing outstretched, biting its front paw, and flinging it into the other.  Once they were tossed aside, she rolled back onto her hooves, literally bled into a full gallop, ascended the top of a snowbank, and leaped high, stretching out both wings.  She shrieked in mid-air, and fell stupidly back to the earth.  The pony whimpered; her left wing was on fire.  She could feel the blood pumping out of it, draining her, pinning her helplessly to the breast of the cold wasteland.

        She couldn't fly.  Gasping and wincing, she limped back up to her feet and stared ahead through the blinding mist.  The bulbous copper body of the Harmony lingered ahead, like a phantom in the fog, at the top of a hill that suddenly seemed pathetically impossible for any sane pony to scale.  She crawled and hobbled towards it, wheezing for breath, her leather armor feeling like lead weights that squeezed more and more of the blood out from her, forming a scarlet trail that even the dumbest troll could track.  The creatures' ravenous cries echoed like banshees, filling the barren alleyways and courtyards of Ponyville with a grim chorus of bedlam as they gained the distance and closed in behind her.

        “Stupid stupid stupid!”  She choked back sobs and gnashed her teeth with each limping bound.  “Should never have come!  Should never—”  Her voice was silenced when her face was suddenly shoved into a half-meter of powdery snow.  She felt a leather body pressed down on top of her.  The attacker's weight shifted, and the pony took a chanced and dashed her neck directly to the right.  The snow next to her face exploded as the jaws of the pouncing troll missed her by a few millimeters.  She twisted her face, bit into his ear, and—with the awful sound of snapping cartilage—flung his entire weight by it and off of her.  She rolled sideways in time to dodge another pounce, jumped to her hooves, rear-kicked the first body she could find and bucked away another, only to have two more from the impossibly large pack of monsters grab her by the legs.

        Synapses fired like they had never fired before in her mind.  The first thought was a realization that she had dropped her rifle several oozing seconds back at the Town Hall when she was stabbed.  The next thought was that she wasn't entirely defenseless.  Hooking her hooves with the attackers' limbs in order to offset their balance, she took the moment to reach back into her saddlebag and grab her second magazine of runestones.  Clamping them in her teeth, she roared mightily from beneath her ruptured gut and flung the entire purple-glowing ensemble behind her head, and as she did so she screamed mightily skyward:  “M'wynhrm!”

        The magazine flew directly into the meatwall of leather bodies, and as it did so the magical command caused the entirety of the runes to flicker, dim, then explode as one.  Bodies and shrapnel went flying under an explosion of white ash, and as the blast wave reached the pony's form she lunged mightily out from the grasp of her attackers.  Spreading both pained wings out, she rode the hot current of air and flew for a heart-stopping five seconds, only to slam hard into the crumbling face of central Ponyville's water fountain.

        “Unngh!”  She slumped down to her hooves, only to find that her two front legs were on fire.  The magic in the bracelets had overloaded and the horns had literally burst into flame.  Shrieking, the filly bravely flung the two articles off her steaming hooves.  She struggled on shaking legs to stand up, and at the sound of several whooping voices she looked up and paled to realize that she was surrounded.  The entire village's worth of ambushing trolls had formed a solid wall around the circumference of the fountain, and were slowly and menacingly closing in from all sides of the pegasus.

        Her left wing was a quivering mess.  Even if she could take to the skies right then and there, she might never fly again, and that would spell doom for whatever short life she intended to live in the twilight of the Equestrian Wastes.  But this was her home town, her place of birth, her only place of significance in a dead and lonely kingdom, and she was not about to let her existence end there under the fangs of these leathery freaks of the underworld.

        Frowning, she gazed up from the shrinking circle of foes.  With a hissing breath, she climbed up the alicorn statue, her body leaking red all over the stone wings of Princess Celestia.  With her teeth, she clasped onto the weathered horn and pulled... pulled... pulled.  With a snap, the alicorn's spike broke clear from its crown, and the pegasus hung off the Princess' effigy while raising the razor-sharp horn high and proud in her grasp.

        “You want the last horse flesh in all Equestria?  Huh?  Do ya?”  She shouted and spat blood at the surrounding creatures, her eyes aflame with scarlet fury.  “Come and get it!”

        They leered and hissed at her.  Smiling fangs and lashing teeth.  Beady eyes and snow-raking claws.  They clamored up towards the edges of the fountain, skittering and snickering and leaping towards her.

        “Come on!!!” She roared and raised the horn bloodily to strike...

        Then, straight from the zenith, a scaled foot the size of a tree trunk flattened four of the beasts in a blink.  Pulp and teeth clattered across the exposed cobblestone of the courtyard as a monstrous thunder resounded from the blow.  The pegasus gasped.  The trolls turned and shrieked as yet another foot—immaculate claws glistening—roared its way down and reduced several more leathery bodies to paste.

        The pony looked up, her eyes twitching at the sight of a hulking form blotting out the twilight.  From the dangling mists above, a thick armored torso bowed and a long neck hovered low to reveal a rigid jaw structure, titanium-solid crests that glistened from beyond the shadows, two slitted emerald eyes, and a pair of nostrils brimming with smoke.

        “Oh Goddess...” the last pony murmured.  “A dragon.”

        The aptly labeled monstrosity roared, rattling the buildings of ruined Ponyville off their hinges as the great winged beast reared up on its hind quarters, spun about, and flung its mighty lashing tail through the entire length of the courtyard.  The bodies of trolls went flying, shrieking, before they were clasped mercilessly in midair by draconian claws and flung earthward like shattered pebbles.  The leathery bodies ran and clamored each way, only to be pummeled and knocked aside one by one from the muscular limbs of the thrashing creature.

        The pony panicked.  Her bleeding flank was now an afterthought as she leaped off the fountain and ran for her life.  Trolls dashed left and right in front of her, being pounded and knocked aside by the fitful wrath of the sudden dragon.  The pegasus veered in a serpentine fashion, begging that her agile maneuvers could somehow save her from the menacing creature's mighty limbs.  To her utter shock and beating heart, she made it far enough to escape into the side alleyways of Ponyville.  With childish fright, she glanced behind her in time to see the dragon squat down beneath the mists, spread its leathery wings outwards, and spout forth a great plume of billowing flame—green flame—across the lengths of Town Square, roasting several of the squealing trolls in one horrendous breath.

        Looking ahead, the galloping pony cursed under her breath.  “Green flame!”  she hissed.  “Of course!  When it's not elementally occurring in Equestria, Green Flame comes from the organs of several species of dragons—Idiot!”  She barely had time to snap at herself when the air around her burst with gail winds, searing hot winds.  She looked up, and once again her scampering form was briefly covered by the darkening shadow of beating wings.  “Oh n-no...” she squeaked forth in foalish fright.

        Several hissing noises.  She glanced down and skidded to a powdery stop as she found her alleyway blocked by a line of razor-fanged trolls.  They leered at her and made to leap when—fatefully—the winged shadow swallowed up the entire alleyway, and four legs of iron-thick scales landed in the midst of them, smashing two rows of buildings into rubble.  The trolls collapsed in a blood-curdling pile of debris as the dragon lowered its sulfuric maw and finished off the last few screeching imps.  After the violence settled, the creature angled its draconian maw towards the young mare with a strong gust of exhaled smoke.

        She didn't dare look the noble monster directly in the eye.  She flung herself to the right and immediately burst into a run-down apartment building.  Panting and bleeding, she clamored over furniture and chairs and cabinets as the entire structure rattled around her with the rampaging footsteps from the dragon outside.  It was baiting her, keeping up with her, looming just beyond the rattling window panes.  It was a smart thing, and her life was in its hands—unless she moved, and she moved now.

        Shrieking, she burst out of a door and ran across a garden overrun with snow and thorn bushes.  Limping through several brambles, she stampeded her bleeding way through the kitchen door of a tiny cottage just as the dragon's footsteps smashed into the yard behind her.  With half of the building's foyer collapsed with clumps of debris, she numbly propelled herself up a stairway and bounded down a long hall upon the second floor. She was halfway towards the far side when a window right in front of her smashed open; a giant scaled hand reached in, grabbing for her.  The claws were retracted and the palm delicately felt around for any sign of the pony.  The last pegasus paid these details little heed, bounding over the hand and bolting towards a window on the far side which she promptly cannonballed her body through.

        With a shower of glass, the pony landed in the middle of Main Street, rolled forwards, and limped onto her hooves once again, just as the earth shook with the utter demolishing of the cottage behind her.  The dragon marched effortlessly through the building and stomped steadily, patiently, after the flightless pegasus, its four limbs sending great tremors through the bowels of Ponyville for the first time since the Cataclysm.

        The pegasus limped and crawled away from the creature with all her might.  As her scarlet eyes searched in vain for the sight of the Harmony, her heart sank under the numbing reality of her situation.  There was no way out of this.  This was a dragon chasing her.  She was dead—as good as dead; it would be a horribly bitter lesson learned for the inane stupidity and impulsiveness that brought her to those coordinates in the first place.  But as long as there was blood left in her coursing veins, she outran her destiny and bolted straight towards a ghostly familiar three-story building looming directly in sight.

        “Nnngh!”  She grunted as she rammed hard into the front door of Sugarcube Corner.  The frame barely budged.  The world shook and screamed as the dragon stormed on top of her.  “C-Come on!” she howled and shoved again; the doorframe gave way and she barreled inside, tumbling into a bloody heap against a shattered stand of petrified crumbs and bread flakes.  Waterlogged wooden architecture in the shape of candied sweets bowed on either side of the last pony as she shuffled towards the far corner on her knees, hyperventilating.  Then—in mid crawl—she froze, her scarlet eyes blinking under a matted coat of frost and bulbous sweat.  The rumbling had stopped.  The thunder was replaced with a deathly silence.  The dragon was nowhere to be found.  Had it gone away... ?

        A vicious tear; Cold gray twilight billowed into the room as a good half of the Sugarcube Corner's rooftop was literally torn from its foundation.  The filly gasped and covered her armored self as flakes of ash and splinters rained down on her.  She looked up—twitching—to see the iron claws of the dragon pulling the walls apart as its razor-sharp snout gazed down at her.  Smoke, glistening emerald eyes; and the dragon lowered its maw.

        The girl stifled a sob and flung her wing muscles outward in one last attempt to fly.  Her left feathers tore on their sockets, sending waves of paralyzing agony through her.  She reared up on her hooves, only to fall over pathetically and curl up against the corner, shivering and scrunching away from the reach of the leering dragon.  She wasn't ready for this—Wasn't ready for this utter failure that her life had become.  It wasn't supposed to end this way.  Not like this.  The legacy of ponydom, the last blossoming soul of Equestria, all of the Celestial Family's history and accomplishments; it was about to be snuffed away in the strangling jaws of draconian happenstance.  It was all her fault, and she shuddered and sputtered forth the most pitiable of voices, begging.  She begged:

        “Please.  Pl-Please don't do this!” the last pony sobbed through her last sweat and drops of blood.  “Have mercy!  You don't know what I am—What my life means!  I beg you; I'll do anything!  My fortune, my airship, my runestones—They'll all be yours if you just... let me live... please--!”

        The dragon paid no heed.  With a vicious slam, his left  hand clamped over her twitching body, pressing her against the tile floor of the Sugarcube Corner like a vice.  She gasped and struggled against his claws, watching in confused horror as he grasped a vial suddenly in his other hand, popped it open, and shook the jar over her.  In a sudden deluge, the pony was covered from tail to snout in a fine ivory dust, like soot from the bottom of a crematorium.

        She coughed and sputtered through the mess with horrified eyes.  “Wh-What are you doing--?”  She then buckled under his gaze as his jaws came down to encompass her.  “No....”

        His mouth opened, and the room's temperature increased as vaporous gases began expelling from deep within his glowing throat.

        “No no no no no--!”

        Green flame erupted, out over his tongue, through the gaps in his unbreakable teeth, and enveloped her.

        The last pony screamed.  The last pony burned.  Through billowing waves of emerald plasma, she felt her skin melt away and her bones dissolving with it.  But then something happened in the death-blink of utter howling that she did not expect; the pain underneath her left wing disappeared as well.  All pain disappeared.  A numbness cascaded over her limbs and she was surprised to blink and see a grand, winding tunnel of jade hues, dancing and vibrating like a birth canal stretching into infinity.  The only sensation was that of a centripetal force pulling at her extremities, like she was being flung backwards at impossible speeds along the tongues of emerald ashes.  The world was a rubber band, stretching and buckling at a fever pitch from beyond the forested miasma of flickering lights; and just as quickly as the whole confusing kaleidoscope began, it ended with a jolt.  The pegasus' body was flung towards the earth core at a million kilometers an hour, and yet she was lying perfectly still.  Under clenched eyelids she heard the miraculous sound of her heartbeat... alive and well.

        The first thing the pony felt was the warmth.  Soft, oozing, real warmth.  It kissed her from all sides, gently softening her already moist coat as she murmured into a forest of springy blades and stirred from where she sat.  A pair of eyes opened—groggily—and flashed a thousand reflections off shiny bulbs of dew strewn across a sea of harvest green grass.  Something fluttered across her peripherals.  She blinked wearily at it, then widened her eyes to regard a dangling insect of black and gold wings—petal soft—settling onto her nose, beating its plumage softly, then fluttering off into the golden aura beyond.  The pegasus marveled at the thing, until the dark recesses of her mind finally recollected the appropriate name for it: 'butterfly'.

        A chorus of happily mewling voices pricked at her ears.  She gazed across the forest of dew-laden grass as several bounding forms came into focus: with glistening bright coats and pastel colored manes, bright eyes and giggling wide mouths, hooves trotting gaily and tails a-swishing in a toasty warm breeze.  Ponies.  Dozens of tiny, bounding, laughing, living ponies.  They were foals, barely past the age of cutie marks, and they were chasing each other and cavorting, playing games in an open field that bordered a playground full of swingsets, slides, and climbing bars.  A scarlet red schoolhouse stood in the distance, and as the breathless pegasus tilted her snout up--

        She was blinded.  She exhaled sharply and shaded her eyes with an outstretched hoof.  She was ever so briefly stunned by the queer sensation of a long flowing mane billowing from her scalp—but she ignored it, instead sitting up on wobbly hunches to gaze dumbstruck at the horizon before her.  The twilight was gone, the fog was gone, the ash and snow had all vanished.  And there, in its burning glory, climbing majestically skyward, was a Sun.  The Sun.  Celestia's gift of life to all of Equestria.

        Equestria... with its brilliant white mountains cascading into a glittering lake of pure sapphiric blue that shimmered in the Sunrise.  Mist hovered gently over the placid waters at a meter's length, as flocks of geese cruised overhead and a random fish or two plopped playfully out of the mirroring surface.  The sky was a golden haze of crisp platinum hues, all melting together and forming a sheen of vanilla richness that breathed life into the throbbing, glistening world.

        The pegasus' lips quivered.  Her heart started as she heard a shrill bell ringing.  She tilted her gaze away from the blissful sunlight as she watched a fuchsia-haired mare sashay out of the entrance of the school, smiling and chirping pleasantly towards all of the foals gathered in the yard.  “Alright, students!  Time for class!  Hurry on, now!  There'll be plenty of time for play at recess!”

        “Ms. Cheerilee ...” the pegasus exhaled before she could stop the strange voice coming out of her.  She watched as the giggling children all lined up—tail to snout—forming a single file of bouncy souls that scampered joyfully into the rich atrium of the school building.  “Snails ... Silver Spoon ... Snips ... Twist ...”  Her eyes narrowed, and then a breath sharply escaped her shuddering jaw.  “...Apple Bl-Bloom?”

        Something sparkled in her eyes.  She looked up, and all of the years of nightmares left her in a single jolt.  The mist over the waters had cleared, evaporating into the crystal blue sky from the rising Sun's rays, and there, arched from the purple mountain tops to the rows upon rows of crisp emerald forests beyond, was a beautiful rainbow, lighting the golden morning hour with every color of the spectrum, reflecting off the lake's waters in prismatic glory.

        The pegasus hiccuped, her hooves covering her face as every feature she had melted into a tearful sob.  Between each sharp breath, her muscles forged a deeper and deeper smile, crackling around the edges as every bit of weight ever stacked on her shoulders shattered through her skin in an instant.  “Oh Goddess... Oh Goddess alive, it's so real.  I can't believe I forgot... I forgot how beautiful...”  She shuddered, sniffled, and ran her hooves through her flowing mane as her eyes remained locked on the rainbow, the wind blowing the Sun's kiss over her trembling body once more.  “It's real.  It is real.  Oh thank Celestia above... Thank—”

        Just then, everything flickered.  The playground buckled, the schoolhouse spread under a ripple of distorted light, and the cascading mountains peeled away, along with the glistening waters.  Finally, the rainbow itself shattered as bright green flames burned through the entire landscape—from horizon to sky—with the sizzling fury of a melting photograph in front of her.

        She gasped, her brimming eyes wide and ghostly.  “N-No...”  Then the erupting world burst through her as the fingers of emerald flame cradled her once more and throttled her forward along the dancing tunnel of green tongues.  “Nnnnngh--!”  Her mane disappeared, her coat bled, and a torturous pain knifed its way back into the muscles beneath her left wing as she was flung once again onto the cold ash-laden floor of Sugarcube corner.  “--NO!!!”  She slumped down onto the ground, twitching and hyperventilating, as the gray haze of the world snowed in everywhere from the dead Wastes of Ponyville.

        For what felt like an eternity, her pain-wracked body convulsed against the frigid tile, as every ounce of warmth that had ever so briefly kissed her body sunk away with each choked sob.  As she curled up into a fetal position, a gentle limb of purple scales reached down and stroked her, then palmed the stab wound under her wing.  A deep murmuring voice, and a cloud of green smoke billowed down and covered the injury.  An enchanted fume filled the room, and suddenly the knifing pain in the pegasus' flank dissipated.

        Shivering, she opened her eyes and gazed forlornly at her left wing.  She blinked in disbelief to see the wound slowly and magically closing up on its own, leaving dried blood and a pure brown coat in its wake.  The pegasus' breath slowed as her senses attempted to process all that was going on, and then a rumbling voice from above thunderously reminded her that she was not alone:

        “It's been a long time since you've been... home, hasn't it?

        The filly gasped.  Taking advantage of the healed wound, she leaped back onto all fours and looked up.  She immediately shrunk back, trembling from the towering sight of the dragon.  But before she could think of any way to escape, the hulking beast lowered its snout gently, revealing purple scales in the dim twilight, and a violet pendant hanging from a gold chain around his neck.  Green crests shook as his heavy bass voice drifted warmly into the hollow of the room.

        “Then again, did you ever really allow yourself a home to begin with?”

        She gulped and murmured confusedly towards the noble creature “Wh-What...?”

        The dragon cocked his iron head to the side and spoke knowingly, “It's time that you stopped running, Scootaloo.”

        The last pony gasped, her scarlet eyes wide and moist.  Her jaw hung in disbelief as she gazed over the length of the dragon's hulking presence and shuddered:  “What... Wh-What did you just call...?”

        His jaws locked into a soft grin; his razor sharp teeth were suddenly harmless and friendly.  “Simply a name, a piece of time forgotten, something that makes us both real, that makes us old friends, nothing less.”

        Her eyes darted back and forth.  Her wings wilted as a pitiable warmth washed up to her cheeks.  She gazed up at him and murmured:  “Sp-Spike?

        Smoke billowed from the purple dragon's nostrils as he raised a gentlemanly hand to his torso and half-bowed.  “Your ever-handsome devil, in the flesh.”

        She gulped.  Trembling, she made a few meager trots towards him, her neck tilted up to take in his impossible height.  She planted a hoof against his front hand, which was twice the size of her meager form.  The moment one of his claws welcomingly folded over her grip, she lost all composure.  Eyes brimming with tears, she tossed herself forward and hugged his chest, her lonesome body wracked with sobs as she buried her face into his warm scales.  He knelt down and wrapped his tail around, engulfing the two of them gently about her collapsing figure as his other hand stroked the small of her shaved mane.

        Her voice came out in indecipherable words beneath a cascade of much belated wailing.  She shook her face against him, struggling to smile as her tears coated his scales with a glistening purple shine.  “I never stopped hoping—I never... never never never...” She broke down once more, overcome with hiccuping convulsions.

        The elder dragon nudged her gently with the green crest of his chin and hummed:  “And your presence here is a testament to that, Scootaloo.  Be at ease.”

        For several minutes, they huddled together, in the gnarled sarcophagus of yesterday's memories, christened with the ashes of all their long dead friends.  After a heavenly blissful release, she sniffled, wiped her face with a foreleg, and gazed up in numbed amazement.  “But h-how...? Wh-Where was I?  Where did you just send me?”

        Spike's emerald eyeslits softly reflected her.  “To the past, child.”

        Her face curved in disbelief.  “To the past?”

        “Yes.”

        “But...”  Scootaloo gazed out into the snow-drenched ruins of Ponyville beyond.  Her moist eyes tried in vain to recreate the sunrise and rainbow that still burned blissfully at the edges of her soul.  “I-I don't understand.”

        “You will,” he smiled and patted her lovingly.  “You will.”  Uncoiling his tail and taking a bold step out of the hovel of Sugarcube Corner, Spike effortlessly lifted the breathless pegasus onto his back and spread his wings wide.  “Come with me, my little pony, and I shall give you healing.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Five – Immutable

        It was a winter's night, or maybe a spring evening.  There were several nameless ponies gathered at the top of a hill under purple starlight.  Word had spread through town about a natural lightshow—an amazing meteor shower of sorts.  But Scootaloo could care less.  All that mattered was one pony and one pony alone.

        “Wow, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash smirked between bites of an apple picked up from a picnic spread.  “You're lucky to have such a rad assistant.  I wish I had someone to do whatever I told them.”

        It was right there and then that the orange foal strolled up, and at the sound of the blue pegasus' exclamation, the little filly ecstatically jump in place.  “Oh!  Oh!  Me!  Me!  Me!” she smiled warmly.  “I'll do whatever you want, Rainbow Dash!”

        “Oh yeah, pipsqueak?” the prismatically maned pony smirked the kid's way.  “How about taking out the trash?”  She tossed an apple core onto the grass.

        Scootaloo scooped it up gently as if it were made of gold.  “Yes, ma'am!”  She flurried over to a garbage can on the very edge of the park and hurriedly rejoined the party.

        Minutes bled into an hour as Scootaloo hummed pleasantly in the shadow of Rainbow Dash.  A hushed murmur hung over the crowd of Ponyvillean stargazers as the meteor shower began, lighting up the purple night with gentle pinstreaks of white and gold.  Conversations drifted back and forth, wavering from Twilight Sparkle's expert recital of trivial astronomical facts to Lady Rarity's sudden inspirations for 'star-studded' pageant-wear.  The only thing Scootaloo listened to in earnest was a certain pegasus' fanatical ponderings on the latest Wonderbolts airshow.

        When the orange foal attempted joining the conversation, she was inevitably drowned out.  But she didn't mind, so long as she was seated within the blue aura of the pony whose wings dwarfed her own.  With a deep inhale, she was only vaguely aware of a petite purple shape crawling over to a nearby picnic basket, curling his exhausted scaled self into the hollow of an empty punch bowl...

        And sleeping like an infant.

        “Reverse-time,” a ten meter tall Spike explained.  “It's the means by which I can send things into the past.  It's how I was able to transport you back to Ms. Cheerilee's schoolhouse.  And it is also the sole reason for all of my years of bold experimentation, deep introspection, and loneliness.  Until now.”  His snout melted forth a smile.  “Welcome, Scootaloo, to my laboratory.”

        The last pony's ears heard the elder dragon's words, but her eyes were still exploring the mesmerizing sights around her.  She rested, mending, on a granite laboratory besides the grown dragon in the belly of a cavernous hovel.  Under the gnarled roots of the late Twilight Sparkle's treehouse library, the basement had been expanded enormously into a subterranean dragon's roost.  Above a sparkling array of multi-colored gemstones was an elaborate assortment of alchemy tables, shelves upon shelves of  magical ingredients in glass jars, sparkling crystal balls, electrified tesla coils, elaborate brass-constructed rotating models of the Equestrian solar system, and then a rhythmic howbeit noisy assortment of dozens upon dozens of clocks—clocks of all shapes and sizes, of various copper instruments clicking and clanking and spinning with infinitely complex precision across the sparkling lengths of the cave.  A deep purple haze twinkled throughout the earthen interior beneath the heart of Ponyville, breathing a resurrected spirit of Equestrian sorcery into the air, making the wide-eyed pegasus' heart leap for the millionth time that eventful afternoon.

        “When the Cataclysm befell Equestria, I was a tiny dragon whelp, hardly possessing any more years than the foal that you once were, old friend.” The purple-scaled elder was applying the last of several bandages across Scootaloo's left side, patching the parts of her brown coat that were still sore, even after Spike's miraculous healing inside Sugarcube Corner.  “Just like you, I had to deal with a world deprived of everything and everypony I had ever loved.  Ponyville was a wasteland.  Canterlot was a ghost town.  Princess Celestia and Princess Luna fell into the same oblivion as did their Sun and Moon.  I was alone.  I needed help, I needed guidance, I needed wisdom; but when I cried out her name, drowning in the nubile fits of infinite sorrow, I heard no response.  My beloved mentor Twilight Sparkle was dead.”

        At the end of his last exhalation, a green fume wafted through the subterranean hideout.  Spike's emerald eyeslits faded slightly as a twirling violet pendant reflected the manalight that shimmered off of the hundreds upon hundreds of salvaged clockfaces.  The cacophony of the multiple antique time-keepers floated him back to the present, and he once again smiled softly at the last pony, all the while gently helping her down from the granite lab table.

        “My sole inspiration for living may have disappeared, but I would rather have been cursed than let Twilight's spirit die.  My desperate mind suddenly remembered an experiment that she and I had embarked upon barely six months before the Cataclysm.  The brilliant young unicorn had speculated that it was possible to send items through time via my green flame as we had always been able to send things through space, such as Twilight's letters to Princess Celestia.  Our exercises in chronological manipulation proved unfruitful, but like a good scientist I realized that they could be repeated.  My young self embarked upon a noble crusade; to see if it was possible to send messages—and perhaps even myself—back through time to before the Cataclysm happened.  I locked myself deep within the caverns of the Canterlotlian Mountains, and for years I wracked my draconian brain over every mathematical and magical formula that could make this dream come true.”

        Scootaloo limped aside, giving the large adult dragon room to saunter past the last pony and towards a granite stretch of wall.  With swift precision, Spike breathed hot green flame onto his finger's claw, rendering it to a literal firebrand which he proceeded to etch from left-to-right across the stone.  Upon finishing a crude diagram, the elder dragon gestured towards the smoldering illustration.  There was a straight horizontal line titled 'Past-Ponydom', and carved to the right of it was a crude 'X' labeled 'Cataclysm'.  To the right of this was a zig-zagged line which Spike simply marked 'Wastelands-Fourth Age'.

        “Decades passed since the Cataclysm, and finally I made a breakthrough.  I discovered reverse-time, a way in which the currents of chronology sink backwards via the same fluidity of forward motion, like waves upon the beach.  Excited and enthused beyond measure, I proceeded with great courage to perform the first trip back through time ever committed in this world.”

        Spike proceeded to draw a curved line leftwards from a point in the zig-zagged future all the way back to the 'X'.  There, his burning claw stopped, and he uttered in a cold breath:

        “Imagine my horrendous disappointment when I discovered that I could only go as far back as the first day after the Cataclysm.  The day that Princess Luna and Princess Celestia died had become an impermeable barrier.  The sundering of magic that marked the moment of their perishing acted as a solid wall against which my draconian self could not pierce through, no matter how much green flame I conjured.  Still, I refused to believe that all of my experimentation was for nothing.”

        Spike's finger curved back towards the first time-jump at the right of the zig-zagging diagram, so that his etchings formed double ellipses between the 'Cataclysm' and the jump.

        “So, after several years of planning and calculation—all the while spent re-living the same lifetime in the hollow of the Canterlotlian Mountains—I again made a voyage back along the pathway of reverse-time, and again I struck the barrier.”

        Scootaloo's eyes watched dizzily as Spike's finger formed the loopty-loop course, an infinity symbol, always starting in the future and yet always stopping just to the right of the hash-mark labeled 'Cataclysm' in the center of his grimly etched diagram.

        “I repeated this desperate attempt over and over again,” Spike murmured, “everytime growing smarter yet every time growing more and more despondent in my endeavors.  After more than fifteen trips back into the past, I had to finally accept the grim truth: there was no going back to warn my loved ones of the horror that ended them all.”  He boldly circled the 'X' at the point of the diagrammed 'Cataclysm' and lowered his sizzling claw with bitter finality.  “Equestria was doomed to stay dead forever.”

        “Fifteen trips?”  Scootaloo finally spoke up, stammering.  “Spike—Just how old are you?”

        He took a weathered breath.  “Taking into account my rate of growth, cross-analyzed by a relativistic calendar that I manufactured for myself long ago, I would say that I am something close to three hundred and seventy-two.”

        “Spike!”  Her face grimaced.  “That's a long time...”

        “To ponder the fate of the only world I've ever loved,” he gazed deeply at her, “it's not been long enough.”  Spike's woe-some face aged one reflection at a time across a panorama of ticking clockfaces that flanked his reclining figure.  “Funny... My life as a whelp, frolicking side by side with close friends in the living green of Equestria, was a scant nine years.  And I've spent the better part of three centuries constructing a desperate appendix to what's ultimately been a very trite chapter in my exhausting life.  But it's the only chapter that holds any merit, that still makes my heart leap to remember the sound of Twilight's voice when she called for quill and ink from across the library, when she patted me on the back for an assistant's job well done, when she tucked me in at night as I gave into nubile draconian slumber, dreaming of the magical morning to follow.”

        Spike sighed thoughtfully, green fumes kicking into the air and brushing past a rotating array of brass planetoids.  A beat; and he turned to smile archaically in the last pony's direction.

        “I think that's the real reason why I locked myself inside the sarcophagus of the Eastern Mountains to do my experiments.  I refused to stare at the gray sky until I could somehow bring myself to see the Sun once more.  It's been over three hundred years, and yet I still hear her voice... and dream of the golden dawn.”

        Scootaloo gulped.  “Spike?”  She trotted limpingly up towards his towering figure and gazed forlornly into his eyeslits.  “Do you know how old I am?”

        He squinted at her, rearing his green crested neck back in thought.  “If my memory still serves me right, you had to have been eight years old at the time of the Cataclysm.  And at your chronological level, it has been twenty-five and a half Equestrian revolutions since the end of pony civilization.  So that makes you—”

        “Thirty-Three,” Scootaloo exhaled.  She blinked as the words left her in a misty sigh.  “I am thirty-three years of age.”  Her voice wilted as she avoided the gaze of the clockfaces.  She stumbled like a blind ghost towards the dead roots sticking out of the rooftop along the opposite side of the cavern.  “I-I remember when I was a little foal, and Apple Bloom's teacher—Ms. Cheerilee—told us how old she was: 'Thirty-Three'.  And I thought to myself how... how strange it must be, to be over three times as old as I was, to be three decades old, to be an adult.”  She paused to glance at the many chips and dents in her hooves.  “And here I am.  And those years have v-vanished in a gray bl-blink.”  She gulped, blushed, and gazed apologetically at the purple dragon looming behind her.  “I-I'm sorry, Spike.  I know th-that can't possibly compare to three hundred years.”

        “You would be surprised, child,” he nodded at her.  “Centuries all blink the same.”

        “And in all those centuries, in all of that time,” Scootaloo murmured, avoiding his face like she knew she was avoiding his coming response.  “You never saw another pony?  You never found another soul besides myself?”

        Slowly, the elder dragon shook his head.  His voice came out like a funeral dirge, “When I wasn't time traveling or experimenting, Scootaloo, I was searching.  Searching for Celestia, searching for Luna, searching for... Twilight.  In all of my excursions, in all of my cold and lonely flights across this barren world, the only essence of ponydom I ever found was dead essence, until I found you.  The fact that you're alive is as much a joy as it is a puzzle, for what shattered the world wasn't a Cataclysm of physical means, but of magical means.  The ponies—earthen, unicorn, and pegasus—were all turned to dust by the sheer annihilation of their essence.  I am so sorry, Scootaloo, but you shall be the last friend I will have the grace to speak with again.  The day that you die will be the true end of ponies.”

        The last pony shuddered.  She clenched her scarlet eyes shut and bowed towards the ground, as if all of the years that had leeched the brightness from her body had suddenly crumbled all over her at once.  She fought the tears, but the sudden and gentle stroke of Spike's hand against her shaved mane told her there was no point in the struggle.  She sobbed quietly, shortly, under his soothing shadow, until she finally rediscovered the strength to speak:

        “Somehow I knew.  I knew it.  All these years, alone with my fears and my hopes, I knew the truth.  This lifeless world t-told it to me, with heartless gray eyes that flurried on forever.  Right now, I c-can't even begin to think of what it was that kept me going—that kept me living.  I think, in a lot of ways, I wanted a m-moment like this to come, a reunion with anypony, with anybody, even if it was a dead friend.  And as h-happy as I should be to see you alive and well, Spike, I can't be.  I want this reunion to matter.  It's something th-that I have always dreamed of, in the scant moments in my life when I've actually been able to friggin' dream.  And yet I can't hardly feel a th-thing.  It's all so much, Spike.  What this Wasteland has taken from us; it's so m-much that I can h-hardly feel anymore.  I hate it.  I hate it so dang much.”

        “I do too, child,” he murmured towards her.  The violet pendant dangled from his neck as he lowered his snout to gaze her lovingly in the eyes.  “If there's one philosophy that I've held strong to, that has kept me working so hard all of those time jumps in pursuit of the same impossible goal, it's that it is not always important to feel.  Sometimes you only have to be.”

        She inhaled sharply, gazing at him with brimming tears.  “That's just it, Spike.  That is my dilemma.  I'm the last pony—All I'll ever do is be, and someday that too will come to an end.”

        He squinted his eyeslits at her, bearing a brave and knowing smirk.  “You are more than just the last pony.  If I assume correctly, you are a scavenger, a hunter, and ultimately a preserver.  As you have traveled the skies from east to west, I have traveled the last two and a half decades from future to past.  And I too have learned a thing or two about preserving.  There's something quaint and amusing about time; if you know how to play with the streams just right, you can make a moment last forever.  Suddenly—having no choice but to be can provide an eternal practice, even for you, Scootaloo.”

        That uttered, the dragon gestured his clawed hand towards the far side of the laboratory.  Scootaloo's scarlet eyes dried in time to gaze clearly across the cave.  Hobbling over, she stood gazing in wonderment at a series of bright shapes resting beautifully in an array of glass jars.

        “Flowers,” the filly murmured disbelieving as she raised a hoof to gently brush the petals of the yellow and gold things blooming before her.  They were soft to the touch, just like the wings of a butterfly that danced before her during a phantom sojourn to Ms. Cheerilee's schoolyard.  “But—How did you find these?  They should be dead!”

        “All things should be dead,” Spike said, sauntering over onto a pile of rattling gemstones beside her.  He perched majestically and folded his wings about his purple self as he said, “But all things that have ever been—even the dead things—are alive forever in memories.  That's what's so wonderful about the past.  All things considered, history is nothing more than a pile of eternal memories.  To visit the past along the streams of reverse-time is simply a way to relive memories from the inside out, instead of from the outside looking in.”

        “But you can't go back into the past, Spike,” Scootaloo murmured aloud as she gently cradled a jar of daisies in her hooves.  “At least—You can't go past the Cataclysm.  You just told me that...”  Her voice trailed off in mid-speech.  A pair of wide scarlet eyes blinked at her from the sheen in the glass.  She spun around and nearly dropped the flowers as she gazed at Spike with a sudden breathlessness.  “But you can send me??  How, Spike?”  Her gaze darted nervously towards the burned diagram on the cavern wall.  The swirling infinity symbol brushed up against the 'Cataclysm' as it brushed up against her soul.  “How was I able to go visit Ms. Cheerilee when you couldn't?”

        “How is a pony capable of living so long in the absence of the Sun and Moon?”  Spike socratically returned.  “Why would a dark and dismal world, forever angry at the legacy of ponydom, fail in every aspect to slay its last living target?”  He smiled gently.  “It's all for the same reason that I have been enamored with equines since the day I was hatched.  It's your spirit.”

        “Spirit...” Scootaloo droned, gazing defeatedly at the flowers as they rattled in her cold shadow.  “Do I really have a spirit, Spike?”

        He reached over and planted a hand on her shoulder, smiling.  “I'll show you.”

        It used to be the Ponyville Skating Rink, a large warehouse of a building where weekend ponies would spend laughable hours rotating the elliptical arena on wheeled hooves in each others merry company.  Beyond the Cataclysm, under the careful alterations of a purple draconian steward, the place had transformed into something else entirely, something beautiful.

        Scootaloo stood in a gaping stupor, her eyes reflecting a veritable labyrinth of hanging plants, flower beds, blooming vines, fragrant wreathes, and bowing fruit trees.  The luscious vegetation grew joyfully in a naturalistic splash of life across the retrofitted interior of the warehouse.  In place of infinitely looping skating platforms there were now gigantic basins of granite that housed soil, moisture, and enough room for several hundred species of flora to flourish.

        The fragrant dew-laden Eden shimmered with green and pastel colors, all the while shimmering beneath one single light source: a gigantic mirror that hung on suspended chains along the ceiling.  The vertically hung sheet of glass was framed with gold and crested all along its circumference with ornamented bands of solar swirls.  To her heart's stuttering amazement, the last pony instantly recognized the looking-glass from an illustration she had seen in a book scavenged from the Royal Palace of Canterlot.  It was none other than—

        “Princess Celestia's chamber mirror,” Spike murmured as he strolled mightily past Scootaloo and raised his upper body to once more reignite the manatorches flanking the dangling artifact.  “For countless millennia, it served as the sole means by which a retiring Goddess could regard her blinding visage.  After so many Ages of basking in the aura of the Bringer of the Sun, it's only natural that some of her glory still resides in it.  And, when properly stimulated, it still resonates with her majestic glow—like an immaculate seashell having captured the heart of an ocean.”

        The dragon lowered and took a deep breath, gazing proudly as his indoor preserve basked in the gentle golden rays emanating from the spotless mirror.

        “It took several breathless moments—on multiple occasions between my time-jumps—to capture bits of the dying world on the day after the Cataclysm.  But everything I managed to salvage I brought here, and the mirror in turn.  It took the combined effort of over ten of my past selves to construct this terrarium, piece by piece, but I do believe the labor was worth it.  So long as I am alive, I shall look after this living monument to the past.  It's the least I can do; and I'm sure you can relate, Scootaloo, when I say that the least we can do for the Wastelands is ironically the most we can do.”

        “It's amazing, Spike,” she murmured breathlessly.  Her brown coat and scarlet eyes stood out like a pale shadow against the screaming colors suddenly engulfing her as she trotted across green ground and red mulch.  “Half of these things I've already forgotten about.”  She squinted as a bizarre insect surged past her, filling the air with a raspy buzz.  She squinted long and hard in confusion until she witnessed the thing nestle itself within the crimson bud of a rose.  “Bees,” she half-giggled in a queer breath.  “I've forgotten about bees...”

        “Don't agitate them, child, or else you'll learn that they've not forgotten you.”  Spike suddenly darted his snout every which way, looking desperately for something.  “Oh, blast, did I forget to bring a mana-prysm?  Where is my mind, these days?”  Suddenly, the elder dragon lurched.  In a wretching motion, he belched forth a plume of green smoke—and out from the flames there dropped a glass container magically into his palm.  “Ah!  Heheh—Well, that was awfully thoughtful of myself.”

        Scootaloo blinked.  “Uhm...”

        “I brought you here, old friend, to test something,” he strolled over towards her with the tiny jar in his scaled hand.  “Though I suppose one could say that the sudden trip I sent you on at Sugarcube Corner was a necessary test in and of itself—But right now I desire to perform an experiment that will hopefully illuminate our situation to a desired degree of clarity and... and...”  He blinked suddenly at his lone pony companion.  “Scootaloo?  Do you see something of interest?”

        “As a matter of fact, I friggin' do,” the Wasteland wanderer stumbled up to something that stood out against the pristine oasis.  In the center of the transformed skating rink there rested a meter-high hourglass positioned atop a silver platform.  Inside the top and bottom glass cases of the thing a bizarre phenomenon was transpiring.  At one moment, there was a brilliant plume of violet-blue flowers in the bottom glass.  Then, in a blink, the flowers withered and faded to ash—while an identical pile of ashes in the top glass coalesced oppositely into another bouquet of violet flowers.  Another beat, and the top bouquet withered into dead matter as the ashes in the bottom half of the hourglass grew back at fast-forward.  This revolution would proceed infinitely, with opposite jars of the hourglass possessing interchangeably dying and growing flowers in a timely crafted cycle.

        “Do you like them?” Spike was suddenly standing above and behind her on his haunches.

        She jumped slightly, locking a trembling gaze on the hourglassed cycle.  “I'd pay a hundred thousand bars of silver to understand it before I even contemplated freaking out.”

        He smiled.  “I melted the glass out of Green Flame—the two halves at alternating frequencies.  The result is that both are balanced in a flux of time and reverse-time, acting off each other like opposite swings of a pendulum.”  The dragon pointed astutely with a glistening claw.  “The flowers in each jar are experiencing quantum shifts—forward and reverse—kept in flux by the equal energy of its sibling.  I could never have possibly conceived of manufacturing this thing when I first set upon my experimentations.  But by the ninth occasion that I rode reverse-time back to the Cataclysm, I felt it was appropriate to artistically express just how far I had come along in my research.  I frankly never expected to show it to anyone.”  A warm smile.  “But then you came along.”

        “And, what, this garden wasn't artistic enough?”  She laughed nervously, her eyes still locked on the immortal back-and-forth of the flowers and ashes before her.  A soft breath escaped her.  “They're... Th-They're beautiful, Spike.  Uhm...”  She bit her lip ashamedly.  “What are they?  The fl-flowers, that is.”

        “Lavenders,” Spike said.  “Very fragrant—As sweet smelling as they are for gazing at.”

        “Everything in this place is gorgeous, Spike.  But why frame lavenders?  What's so special about them?”

        “Oh...” The immense dragon's jaws curved into a gentle, iron smile.  “They were the favorite of one delightful pony I knew.  She was the most resplendent and elegant unicorn in all of Equestria, a filly who set this young whelp's heart a'flutter, long-long ago.”  His aged eyeslits narrowed on the dying-and-sprouting twin bouquets as they cast a faded blue hue across his scales.  “Having them here, in limbo like this, means that I can appreciate them forever, as I will appreciate her forever.  And, one day, when I am long gone, my ashes will dissolve; but these flowers will outlast me, and perhaps her memory will in turn.”

        Something long neglected inside the mare's iron-wrought heart fractured briefly, and she let forth a bursting sigh.  Making up for it, she smiled bravely up at him and murmured in a wavering voice:  “I am most certain she would appreciate that, Spike.”

        “Hmmm—She was always an avid appraiser of all things beautiful.”  A long breath, and he smirked down towards the pony.  “And she would thrash you within an inch of your life for so savagely curtailing your own gifts, child!”

        “My what-now?”  Scootaloo briefly blinked, then blushed.  “Oh.”  She ran a foreleg over the violet stubble lingering on the back of her mane.  “There aren't many frickin' beauty pageants in the Wastelands, not like I was ever into keeping my looks up when I was a little foal anyways.  Besides...”  She sighed.  “My hair has made far better use as insulators and filaments for chemical runecrafting.”

        “I completely understand,” Spike nodded.  “Though it makes my test here that much harder.”  He cleared his smoking throat and smiled politely.  “Would it be much of a bother if I asked you to part with one your eyelashes?”

        “I beg your pardon?”  Scootaloo made a face.

        “I promise it won't hurt,” the elder dragon bowed.  “And you've suffered enough lately for me to ever bother asking for a blood sample.”

        “Eyelash it is.”  Scootaloo stood up towards him and softly closed her eyes.  “Just be careful where you point those claws of yours.”

        “I always am, child,” his voice came closer as a pair of claws lit up under a green exhale.  Effortlessly, the gentle dragon plucked a hair from her face and dropped it into the jar.

        Scootaloo fluttered her eyes open in time to see the dragon breathe a plume of emerald fire into the glass container.  The bright green tongues billowed around the near-indiscernible eyelash as she swiftly closed the jar, twisted it shut, and raised the glowing thing up towards the center of Princess Celestia's mirror.  The glass at the top of the ceiling projected a beam of light through the jar—shining through the combined essences of dragon and pony—and out the other side of the prism there refracted a dazzling array of moving pictures framed by billowing green waves of magic.

        The last pony watched with mesmerizing disbelief as several memories of her life were being replayed before her in a spinning array of images.  A grand gray kaleidoscope of twenty-five years of Wasteland exile flickered before the two of them.  She saw a playback of a drunken ogre harassing her in front of Pitt at the Monkey O'Dozen Den, a goggled rodent smiling from across the hazy interior of Bruce's airship, even a lonely pony reading Princess Celestia's Journal in a swaying hammock under lanternlight.

        “Ah—So I was right!”  Spike suddenly beamed as he pointed his free finger towards the floating image of a pony lighting up a lattice of prismatic light beams.  “You were the source of that rainbow beacon!  What other creature in the Wasteland besides a pony would produce something so magnificent?”  He smiled and winked her way.  “It was in good faith, you see, that I erupted random bits of green flame over the rooftops of Ponyville, figuring that it would attract you in turn.”

        “Dang right it did...” Scootaloo numbly droned, still overwhelmed by the spinning kaleidoscope of her memories that were still rotating behind her.  There were so many moments, so many lonely scavenger hunts, so many gray trips into desolation, so many brushes with death—and yet they all looked the same, were colored with the same lifeless hue.  A lump formed slowly in her throat.

        “Hello...”  Spike's eyes narrowed on the cackling face of Gilliam.  The Dirigible Dog's metal-plated skull floated translucently between the two of them.  “Who's this handsome creature?”

        “More like who was that handsome creature,” Scootaloo spat.  A clearing of her throat.  “Uhm, Spike—Do you mind?  I'm not entirely enthused about looking at all of these... again.”

        “Oh, by all means,” he nodded and gave the jar a little shake as he lowered it from the shimmering face of Celestia's mirror above.  The images were replaced with memories from nearly twenty years ago.  A pony with a brighter coat and softer eyes was seen hammering together the pieces of the Harmony, crafting moonrocks, constructing the signal lattice, shaving the hair off her tail.  Another shake, and Spike lowered the jar further from the preserved Sunlight.  The spinning images flickered, flickered—then briefly roared with a red flame as Scootaloo's essence leaped the Cataclysmic bridge.  “Yes—There we are.”  Suddenly, all the images shone with vibrant color.  An orange filly with bright violet eyes rocketed across the shimmering lengths of Ponyville atop a scooter.  Dozens of colorful faces smiled into view, of crusaders, of mentors, of friendly strangers and bright smiles.  There were rivers, there were mountains, there were clouds—and there was a sky, a blue sky.  Finally there flickered forth the laughing and grinning faces of ponies, of foals and blank flanks, of a forest and a clubhouse, of blue feathers and a rainbow mane—

        In a flash, the lights all vanished.  Scootaloo sharply inhaled the vacuum left behind them, and her eyes twitched moistly to see the green oasis coalesce back into view, buckling slightly from the very real and gray world lurching outside.  She was almost too numb to register the words coming from Spike next:

        “It is as I thought.  The images conjured are brighter with you than they are with all the rest.”

        Scootaloo gulped, rubbed her face with a foreleg, and gazed at him.  “Th-The rest of what, Spike?”

        “The samples—The remains of all the ponies who have died before you, child,” Spike said.  He handed the smoking jar to Scootaloo, who merely gazed at the smoldering ashen bits of her eyelash inside the container.  “Using my green flame as a telescope, I've been able to look into the past beyond the day of the Cataclysm which I cannot time travel through.  To do this, I've required the essences and ashes of dead ponies as a reagent.  But your essence—that of a living pony—transcends the Cataclysmic blockade even further.  The memories you project are of a color and vibrancy that make the other ponies' images pale in comparison.  As of now, I have no doubt whatsoever.”

        Scootaloo gazed confusedly at him as he walked across the lengths of the garden.  “N-No doubt of what, Spike?”

        “That you can go where I cannot,” he stated matter-of-factly as he strolled over towards a crate full of gardening tools and other supplies on the broad side of the overgrown warehouse.  “Because you are the last living pony, I can send you back to a time before the Cataclysm by anchoring the essence of your soul—your soul-self—to the ponies that were just as alive then as you are now.  Granted, even that will have limits.”  He effortlessly opened a heavy crate with his massive limbs and rummaged through it.  “For instance, I will only be able to send you back to the years when I was alive, and within range of the ponies whose souls I was in constant contact with.  Ms. Cheerilee is one such example.  Because you're alive now, and she was alive then—your common pony essence can make contact, bridging the gap in magic that the Cataclysm sliced when it ended the lives of Celestia and Luna.”  He smiled victoriously as he produced a familiar looking glass jar from the crate.  With a hot breath, he covered the container in green flame, sending it back to five minutes ago.  “It's only fitting, Scootaloo, that you can venture back to a time where I can't.”

        The last pony glanced at the identical jar in her grasp.  In a nervous jolt, she dropped it to the garden floor like it was the plague and gazed shakily at the dragon before her.  “M-Me?  Spike, I-I don't know.  This is all too... t-too... Nnngh!”  She clasped her head in two hooves, fought away the urge to hyperventilate, and all but snarled:  “I mean, what the hay, Spike?!?  Suddenly I can go into the past?!?  Just like that?”

        “It's hardly a development that happened overnight, Scootaloo,” he gazed calmly at her as he strolled back on aging haunches.  “To come to this point of epiphany, I had to undergo countless years of magical and mathematical calculations.  You are quite simply the missing key I needed to make the journey complete.  How ironic is it that the last pony alive would fit into such a puzzle?”

        “Ironic?”  Scootaloo balked at him.  “Maybe it all fits together just fine for you!  You, who have spent eons lurking about in caves and laboratories trying to piece this whole mess together!  But I've spent barely a fraction of those years trying to deal with just how everypony I've ever cared for died, knowing full well that there was not a single dang thing I could do about it!”  She sighed heavily and rested a pair of hooves on one of his arms.  “Spike, you can't possibly ask me to do this!  Haven't I had enough weight on my shoulders?”

        “And what do you think it is that I'm asking of you, child?”

        She gulped and gave him a hollow expression, something of mix horror and excitement.  “Y-You want me to go back into the past... and change all that has happened, somehow, don't you?”

        The last pony was surprised to see how swiftly and solemnly he shook his head.  “No, old friend.  That is not what I am asking of you.”

        “It's n-not?”

        “Because the past cannot be changed, Scootaloo.  The Cataclysm—in all of its monumental horror and dread—must happen, no matter what you or I do.”

        The air of the garden collapsed instantly.  Not even the insects buzzed overhead.  Celestia's mirror seemed a lot dimmer as Scootaloo's tired scarlet eyes wandered the room in an aimless lurch.  Soon, her gaze fell back onto Spike and she murmured in a foalish whine:  “But why?”

        “Because time is immutable, child.”

        “Immutable?  How do you mean?”

        Spike inhaled deeply.  A gentle breath, and he clasped a hand softly over her shoulders.  “Here.  Walk with me.”

        Once more, the soft snow and ash of the wasteland fell coldly on Scootaloo's coat, christening her.  She sat her bandaged self atop Spike's broad backside, resting as he gently strolled through the decaying ruins and wounded vistas of Ponyville.  Shattered buildings and splintered trees drifted softly past them as the purple dragon carried the lone pony over the fossils of yesteryear.

        “Tell me, Scootaloo, with the knowledge from your years of roaming the skies and reading—Who are the Six Goddess Sisters?”

        “Seriously?”  She raised a humored eyebrow and smirked at his green neckcrests.  “You want me to recite that kindergarten lesson?”

        “Humor me, if you would,” he half-chuckled.

        The brown-coated mare took a deep breath.  Her scarlet eyes scanned an invisible book as she recited emotionlessly to the ashen air, “The Six Goddess Sisters—as everypony knows—are the divine Alicorn daughters of the Goddess Epona, who ascended to the stars in the Cosmic Exodus which brought about the end of the First Age.”

        “And who were these Alicorns specifically...?”

        Scootaloo stirred, then laid herself down atop Spike's bobbing shoulders and monotonously went on:  “The Goddesses of Revolution:  Princess Celestia and Princess Luna stayed on earth to oversee the rising of the Sun and Moon over the land of Equestria.  The other Four Sisters would leave halfway through the Second Age much like their Cosmic Mother Queen Epona, though their essences remained in the physical world.  The first two were the Goddesses of Elements:  Princess Elektra, the Goddess of the Land, and Princess Nebula, the Goddess of the Firmaments.  The other two were the Goddesses of Law:  Princess Gultophine, the Goddess of Life...”

        “And who else?”

        The last pony blinked, her brown ears twitching in sudden interest as she heard herself murmur:  “Princess Entropa, the Goddess of Time.”

        “Ah, so you do recollect her,” Spike's snout flexed as the result of a hidden smile.  “I'm proud of all the knowledge you've retained, child.  You're far from the upstart little foal that used to forsake trips to the library for zip-lining her way through the Everfree Forest.”

        Scootaloo produced a bitter smirk as she gently rested her cheek against his back.  “You're not the only one who's changed, Spike.”

        “Still—It is quite important that you understand the part Princess Entropa plays in the fabric of time,” the dragon spoke as he strolled the two of them across the shattered womb of Ponyville.  “She may be a Goddess in perpetual Exodus, like her mother Queen Epona.  But she is far from utterly detached.  Her essence still animates the flow of time, maintaining it as a law, but not just any law.  It is an immutable law.  Time cannot be changed.  It can be traversed, much like a sailor crosses an ocean.  But you cannot convert that ocean into something else.  Even when traveling the currents of reverse-time as I have mastered, there is no alteration to time itself.  As a consequence, there is no way to change the cause-and-effect of events as managed by time.  We cannot go back and prevent the Cataclysm from happening, for it was the tragedy of the Cataclysm itself that gave anyone impetus to time travel in the first place.  Changing the Cataclysm would not only be a paradox of logic, but it would be an abomination of Princess Entropa's sacred law.  What has transpired—no matter how tragic—must remain immutable.”

        “But if Princess Entropa's law is so sacred, why would she let something so horrible happen—And to her sisters of all ponies?!”  Scootaloo suddenly moaned.  “Wouldn't she want living things like us to—I dunno—intervene on behalf of Equestria and stop the Cataclysm from ever happening to begin with?”

        “That's a very noble question, child,” Spike's neck bowed.  His shoulders briefly stopped lurching as his body came to a stop.  “Scootaloo, take a look before us.  Do you see where we are?”

        Blinking curiously, Scootaloo crawled up to her hooves and trotted a few meters along his neck.  As soon as her vision rounded the green crests of his skull, she froze.  The mare saw before the two of them an array of dull white stones splotched across a thick black mound of earth in the center of Ponyville.  For all of the cataclysmic horrors that shook the terrain of her home, she was almost as amazed as she was heart-broken to be presently staring at a remarkably well-preserved cemetery, a place that she had rarely ventured to in her foalish years.

        “There's always been death in Equestria,” she murmured educatedly into the misty air.  “I think I see where you're going with this, Spike.  Why didn't Entropa intervene on their behalf?”

        “Perhaps because it was Gultophine's job to monitor the passage of souls into the great beyond,” Spike somberly nodded.  “Or perhaps because Entropa—as a Goddess of Law—necessitated being a princess of neutrality.  Whatever the case, our mutual need to question her motive only highlights our mortal nature.  Earth ponies gifted in the knowledge of medicine and unicorns employing various talents in mysticism had struggled for millennia to construct countermeasures for death, but they could never in any fashion prevent it.  Otherwise, all of these stones here would have been replaced with immortals to this very day.”  He turned and gazed over his shoulder at Scootaloo with dim green eyeslits.  “Similarly have I—in three hundred years of optimistic searching—attempted to find a way to change the sway of time.  And like so many other Equestrian physicians before me, I have failed.”

        “But did you at least even try, Spike?”  Scootaloo gazed back at him.  “Granted, I know you couldn't go back far enough to experiment before the Cataclysm—But in this timeline?  In the Fourth Age, surely you had to have tried to change history!”

        “An astute assumption on your part,” he nodded.  He turned away from the cemetery and marched back into the depths of Ponyville while the pony settled once more onto the square of his back.  “I did experiment, Scootaloo.  After my sixth and seventh trips on reverse-time, I performed many acts of blind sabotage on my past selves to see if my interference could alter my present condition in any fashion.  What I discovered was that on every single occasion some coincidental event would either catastrophically undo all of my manipulations or else ironically link my affectations to real circumstances that my past selves had chronicled as having happened.”

        “Were they all blind experiments?”  Scootaloo asked, all the while rubbing her aching head.  “Did you ever—Oh, I dunno—try talking to your past self?”

        “As a matter of fact, I did.”

        The pony blinked.  She nervously chirped:  “H-How did that go?”

        “Boringly, considering I remembered everything that was asked or answered.  A deep discourse with time's doppelgangers doesn't afford any deviance from the immutable truth that confounds us today, Scootaloo.  Though, I must admit,” he smiled as a whelpish shade of yesteryear bubbled briefly to the surface of his adult purple scales.  “You've never lived until you've played a game of hide-and-seek with your chronological double.”

        “So then, that proves it??” Scootaloo murmured defeatedly.  “After so many repeated experiments—This is what we have to work with??  Could... uhh... could the Cataclysm be somehow different, Spike?  Or could I be somehow different?—Because my pony essence allows me to go into the past further than yourself?  Maybe time won't be unchangeable for me!!  Maybe—”  Her voice cut off at the sight of him briefly twisting his neck about to gaze sadly at her with a shaking head.

        “What I calculated, what I tested, and what I experienced, Scootaloo, is something that can be explained, but never shared.  Not directly, at least,” he murmured and faced ahead once more.  “But, suffice it to say, it laid in concrete a truth that I could no longer deny.  The past can be visited, it can be witnessed, and it can even be supported—But no, child, it cannot be changed.  What dies must remain dead.  What lives must remain living.  It has been that way since the twilight years before the First Age, in the blossoming days of creation, when all that was One split into the forces of Harmony and Discord, and everything has remained necessarily dichotomous since.”

        “It's just so... so unfair,” the brown-haired mare murmured.  Spike brought the two of them into the skeletal hovel of an old garden behind a hollowed-out restaurant.  He let her down with a gentle arm as she trotted forlornly past a cluster of large mushrooms and gazed into a statue of merry foals frozen in mid-gallop.  “Why would we be granted the ability to move back and forth in time when we can't even make a difference from it?”

        “Why do things live to dream and desire—But only to have death as their ultimate fate?”  Spike socratically replied as he settled down against a wall overgrown with burnt brambles.  “These are the tests of mortals—We can only question them as we live them.”

        “Like I said,” she sighed and squatted down onto a cracked marble bench.  “It's unfair.”  Her nostrils flared as her scarlet eyes fluttered over the snowy ground.  “All I have from the past, Spike, are happy memories and regrets.  The memories are happy because they remind me that I used to be something that mattered in a living world.  The regrets are always there because I know that the memories will only ever be just that—memories.  But now that you and I have reunited, you're telling me that I can relive those memories?  Just why in the heck I would want to do that, Spike?  At least when I had the tiniest bit of hope that I might not have been the last pony, memories had meaning to them.  Now they're just the same dead end as the future is to me.  The past is meaningless now.”

        “I wouldn't go so far as to say that, child,” he smiled gently towards her.  His face and breath surged with a bizarre enchantment of pride and admiration, shaking her to her core.  “Something cannot be meaningless and yet hold so many answers.”

        “Like what answers?”

        “Answers to questions that are as lost to my three hundred years of contemplation as they are to your twenty-five years of courage.”  His eyes narrowed and his deep bass voice rumbled:  “What caused the Cataclysm?  What consumed the lives of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna?  Did anypony foresee the holocaust to come?  Why is it that all the ponies died, but there are still living creatures meandering across the shadows of the Equestrian kingdom?”

        “You had a good guess earlier, Spike,” Scootaloo murmured.  “If something attacked the essence of ponies, then maybe that's why they turned to ash.  But it doesn't explain why I'm here.”

        “You may yet be able to find out,” Spike said with a smile.  “We may both be able to find out.  But it involves a brave experiment, with journeys that I am not capable of taking—You are.  In the past, Scootaloo, there are more than memories and regrets.  If I may dare say so, there are answers.  But, most of all, there could be healing.”

        “Healing?”  Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.  With a bitter raspberry she shook her head and gazed up towards the dim twilight hanging like an ancient ghost above the dead world.  “Do I look like an expert on healing?”

        “There's always a place to start, child,” Spike said.  “If not for you, then for Equestria.”

        Her ears pricked at that.  She glanced aside.  “For Equestria?  How do you mean, Spike?”

        “If we can ascertain what it was that caused the Cataclysm—what it was that ended the Goddesses of Revolution—then we may be able in our time to find a way to reverse the damage that has been done.  Though ponydom is gone forever, Scootaloo, we may yet find a way to bring light back into this land of death and darkness, much like I was able to construct that fabulous garden that mesmerized your earlier.”

        “You mean there might be a way to bring the Sun and Moon back,” Scootaloo thought aloud, her eyes blankly wandering the garden around them.  “It would be a bright Equestria... only no Equestrians.”  She gulped.  “Is that really the best outlook we can afford ourselves here, Spike?”

        “I did say you could do with some healing, old friend,” he chuckled.

        She groaned.  “Spike, please—It's not my place,” she slumped forward on the marble bench and sighed.  “Not now, not then, not ever.”

        “Isn't it?”  He leaned his snout to the side and gazed at her sharply.  “You are an intelligent, crafty, responsible, and tender-hearted individual, Scootaloo.  Even underneath that rough, shaved exterior, you are everything your race has ever endeared itself through the Ages to be.  Do not let two and a half decades of tragedy and pain disguise the legend that you have become.  You are not only the end of ponies, but the epitome of them.”  A gentle exhale, and his face turned melancholic.  “Do I honestly, truly think that sending you back will absolutely grant us the ability to undo the curse that has robbed night-and-day from the wastes of Equestria?”  He slowly shook his snout.  “No, Scootaloo.  I do not.  But I do know this—You are the last pony.  And before you die—and you will someday die, like all of your friends and kin have done before you—would any other soul deserve no less a chance to revisit that which gave her breath, that which gave her purpose, that which gave her the memories of hope—and not regret—to become this amazing creature which you so mightily are right now?”

        “I can't say, Spike,” her voice choked as she struggled for an answer.  “What you're asking of me is to attend a funeral for which there will never be a eulogy—Even if I was the one to write it.  Because no matter what I do, it all ends with me.”

        “Which is why I advise this of you instead.”  He stood up on his haunches and paced across the garden.  “Leave Ponyville.”

        She blinked wildly.  “Wh-What?”

        “Leave,” he said, gazing softly back at her.  “Take off in your splendid airship, spend time inside the womb of Harmony, do what you normally do in the clouds above the wastes.  Live out your life like you've always lived it out these last two decades.  But most of all, do not return until the end of the next coming stormfront.  And then... you may come back to me, and—if you wish and only if you wish—I will send you back to the days before dying, and we can write that eulogy together, Scootaloo.”  He grinned warmly.  “What do you say... ?”

        The last pony stared back up at her old friend, at the purple shades of the past standing like a surreal ghost before her.  And for the briefest of moments, the snow cleared, and in his emerald eyeslits she saw the reflection of a tiny filly, its violet eyes bright and its pink mane fluttering in a draconian twinkle.  Something akin to a foalish smile, and Scootaloo breathed:  “I'm liking this idea.”

        Several  hours later, somewhere in the bubbling gray clouds of the Central Heights, the Harmony vibrated with the wilting chords of Octavia's melancholic strings.  The last pony sat at her work bench with her back to the crackling record player.  With her hooves entwined in cylindrical tool braces, she proceeded to fix and tinker the battered copper rifle that she had retrieved from the depths of Ponyville's Town Hall.  As one cello suite bled beautifully into another, she briefly looked up from her diligent engineering and spotted a blurred mirror hanging from a nob below the shelves where she kept her multicolored gems.

        Only the barest upper-left hoofed corner of the mirror provided a decent reflection.  From beyond a rusted fog, a thirty-three year old mare with a brown coat and tired scarlet eyes shyly came out from hiding.  She blinked at her weathered self, noticing the lines beneath her eyes, the nicked and bruised skin that flanked her ears.  Finally, she tilted her snout to the side and studied her neck, squinting at a thin forest of violet stubble that came out coarsely to kiss the lantern-lit air of the airship's cabin.  She ran a tool-braced hoof over the mane, feeling the tiny stalks, briefly imagining them giving birth to a long dead curtain of pink threads waving gracefully out from her slender form.

        But in a final blink, the shadow of Scootaloo disappeared, replaced once more with the last pony, her fine orange coat having bristled into brown ruggedness, her violet eyes having paled to a bitter scarlet.  The rusted air encompassed her like a dried butterfly in a specimen jar.  She sighed, and as Octavia's record began skipping at the end of its instrumental, she hung her head towards her half-built weapon and lingered on the images fluttering across her mind.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Journal Entry # 2,352

        Today... something happened.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Scootaloo grunted and swung the axe in her teeth's grip one last time.  With a mighty crunching noise, the two-meter tall mushroom fell down into a flurry of powdery ash.  She dropped to her knees to scrape the edible material out of the hollow of the gigantic fungus, when a flurry of tiny insects swarmed over her in a skittering black blanket.  Yelping, she fell back and swung her hooves wildly, fighting a legion of shadowy trolls in her mind.  A gasp; her eyes opened wide to see once more a harmless forest of gigantic mushrooms waiting to be cut down.  The insects had all scattered, and she was once more alone... forever alone.  Sighing, she gazed into the hollow of the fungus, disdainfully observing the colony of paper husks that had long filled the spoiled stalk.  With a woeful groan, the pony dragged her axe towards the next giant mushroom, and in the shadow of the tethered Harmony she proceeded to hack away at the next structure.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        I have been made an offer.  I have been given an opportunity to literally go into the past, to venture into a warm and colorful world that my mind has preserved but my heart has forgotten over these many gray years.  And yet, there is no hope for changing anything with this 'gift' .  There is only the past, the damnable dying past.

        The best that all of this potential experimentation can do is end the twilight that hangs above the lengths and widths of Equestria.  The worst it can do is probably the only thing it can do—and that's reopen so many festering wounds hiding deep underneath my coat that I shudder to even contemplate them.

        What would it be like to see Fluttershy again?  Or Apple Jack?  Or Sweetie Bell or Apple Bloom or ... Rainbow Dash ...?

        In the days after ponies died, I've had my life saved twice  Once by Rainbow, and a second time just now by Spike—as he royally trashed the trolls that had ambushed me in Ponyville.  In many ways, my whole life—twenty-five years in the Wastes, so I've discovered—has been one gigantic service to the one blue pegasus who saved me, the one pony I have always believed in, and in some ways still do.  Does this mean that I owe Spike all the same?  I know he obviously doesn't mean to obligate me in such a manner—But how far is he willing to go compared to how far I am able to go?  Assuming, of course, I am going anywhere at all.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        One day, Scootaloo tore her way through a splintering door.  She pierced the center of an abandoned apartment complex along the downtown stretch of Whinniepeg.  As gray filtered light seeped in through the mildewed windows, she spotted several equine corpses lying in a tight circle in the center of a living room.  Trotting over to them, she nudged a few bones with her hoof until she finally found what she needed—a unicorn skull.

        Squatting down besides the skeleton, she extended a blade from her horseshoe and planted it at the base of the body's horn.  It wasn't until half a minute later that Scootaloo realized she hadn't yet begun carving the dead stub off.  A deep pale glow washed over her, and she swallowed a lump down her throat.

        With a shuddering sigh, she lifted her goggles off her head and ran a hoof over her moistening eyes.  She stared miserably past the bodies and at a heap of belongings that had fallen out of a trunk, spilling onto the floor.  She saw scattered utensils, toys, Equestrian stationary, and—finally—a pile of faded photographs with several smiling and living faces poised eternally, staring back at her as she lingered over the same family's discarded husks a few meters away.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The legacy of ponydom has given me so much that I have used over the decades.  It is only right that I find a way to give back to it.  But how does that stack up when all that could possibly change is the bright face of Equestria itself, an Equestrian future with no ponies in it?

        I only wished to be a survivor, and perhaps to reunite with some other stray members of my own kind.  Now that I know—thanks to Spike—that I am indeed the last pony that will ever breathe; what point is there in trying to bring light to a world with no pure eyes remaining to judge it?  It's like a tree that falls alone in the forest—But how selfish of a presumption is that on my part?  What right do I have—or Spike for that matter—to determine how we memorialize this world, when we've done so much to pilfer from it?  Does the fact that we're the last living things to care about it all excuse us being the last souls to make something of it all?—Even if for the sake of making something?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Scootaloo yanked on the lever and her signal fired its prismatic beams into the air above the stony plateau.  The multicolored spectrum pierced the cloudy overcast in a burning swath, but the lingering twilight above remained unphased.  The snow and ash was still falling, the mist still covering the  circle of metal barricades in an infinite rust.  Under the shadow of the Harmony, a disenchanted Scootaloo marched up towards the signal, propped herself onto two hooves with her shoulder leaning against her rifle, and stuck her left limb into the burning beams of light.

        The sky briefly strobed as her hoof floated lazily from red to green to indigo and softly back.  She watched with momentary fascination as the lights bumped and wavered with each other, but ultimately remained rigidly divided into the seven artificial hues, as directed by Scootaloo's flamestone that shot illuminescence into the strategically placed gems.

        The last pony tilted her snout up and watched with a sudden boredom, observing the glistening heights of her once-treasured beacon.  It was exactly what it always had been, a message to dead ponies.  Being the only one to read what the signal had to say made Scootaloo feel dead as well; because she knew where this rainbow began, and could spot with her naked eyes the lingering twilight above where it ultimately ended.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        I was sent back in time.  Ever so briefly, I tasted of the past.  I saw a rainbow—And it was real.  I could not see where it began, and I could not see where it ended.  I didn't care.  It gave me hope, like I always knew it would.  But only now do I really understand where that hope stems from.

        Hope is a disease, an affliction to all living beings.  The only thing sentient creatures such as ponies had ever accomplished was die, and yet we had always clung to hope.  This perhaps made sense in an Age when Goddesses walked the fields of Equestria—But now?  Princess Celestia's eternal life ran out.  When she and Luna vanished, all that was left was the decaying wasteland of mortality, forever festering in the unburied penumbra of her shadow.

        Perhaps that's the way it has always been, and what brought about the explosive end to the Goddesses of Revolution was not an unknown curse—like Spike suggest—but a self-destructing realization that the Goddesses themselves discovered when it was too late; that life is absurd, that it's always been absurd, even for them.

        And as much as I rationalize to myself the pointlessness of it all—painting a far bleaker picture than I had ever imagined in all of my most bitter of dark-lit scavengings—why is it that I cannot shake the rainbow out of my head, the real rainbow, the real rainbow that I saw with my own eyes?  If hope is a disease, and all it will ever lead me to is misery and self-annihilation, when why do I cling to it so?  Why does it make me excited, like I am starved.  Why does it always plant me steadily upon this knifing precipice of—dare I say it—joy?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Why so emoquine, Harmony?”

        Scootaloo stared listlessly through a green haze of smoke, her scarlet eyes unwavering.  There was a shuffling movement besides her, and a furred paw waved obligatorily before her face.

        “Hello??  Customer of most esteemed appreciation??  Is old Equestrian joke, da?  Vhy so glum, pony friend?”

        She snapped out of it.  She pivoted to glance across the merchant vessel and threw a faded smile the flying squirrel's way.  “S-Sorry, Bruce.  I've just got a lot on my mind, that's all.  What were you offering again?”

        “Is more than pony's mind.  Brucie thinks it is stomach—Or another organ close to it.  Hopefully not part of pony sensitive to cancer stick, nyet?”  He chuckled under green goggles, flicked his cigar some, and continued showing off a pair of leather bands as their dual ships bobbed in the air, docked to one another.  “Forty strips each—Dual reinforced dragonskin!  Finest from vhat remains of Zebraharan mountains—”

        “No—No!”  The mare briefly snarled, shook a shuddering breath off her, and paced across the racks of wares.  “Thanks, Bruce.  I know that I need new armor, but... anything but dragon leather, if you don't mind.”

        “Pray tell Brucie why?  Date with sky serpent, pony plans?  Bah!”  He tossed the thick bands into a pile of collapsing metal knick-knacks while snapping his tiny paws.  “Brucie can do something better!”  He kicked off a bulkhead, glided over to a coat of armor, and gruntingly lifted a breastplate in his quivering limbs.  “Nnnghh—Best in ramcraft!  Fashioned out of tempered titanium!  Brucie promises—hckk—no fire breathing snakes harmed in process of metallurgy—Ach!  Nyet, you overgrowned rust heap—Ugh!  Only takes getting used to hauling around!  Like you sporting pretty mane made out of iron, da?”

        “I know you're doing your best to help me out, Bruce.  But—seriously—all I need to do is browse quietly for a bit, and then I'm sure I'll find the... armor that I need,” she murmured, her eyes once again gazing into a grand nothingness beyond the shelves of rattling miscellany.

        The green-goggled squirrel saw it.  Scratching his forehead, he scampered up a metal shelf and perched above her.  “Kind of armor pony needs is something no strips could buy, Brucie thinks.

        She did not reply.

        He rubbed his chin some, then brightened.  “Perhaps you are nervous about stormfront?”  He smirked and gestured nonchalantly out a nearby porthole.  The gray clouds were darkening as several deep flashes of lightning started to bubble from within the wispy clusters herding punctually their way.  “Vell, pony should only fear for money bag, because Brucie has greatest lightning rod from motherland—Guaranteed to protect against any storm, but sure is not cheap!”

        “It's not that, Bruce.  It's...”  She bit her lip, shifted uncomfortably, and finally looked at him, naked eyes to fogged goggles.  “Bruce, let me ask you something—Pilot to pilot.”

        “To pony's question, Brucie has answer, possibly, maybe—If Harmony needs it.”

        She ignored the address and squinted, murmuring:  “Do you enjoy what you do?”

        “Selling to favorite customer?  Absolutely!  Brucie is always—”

        “No no no—I mean what you do,” Scootaloo emphasized.  “Your life, Bruce.  Do you...—Is this life all that you are willing to accept?  Would you be ready to... to change it into something happier, something brighter—If you had the ability to do so?”

        “Hrmm...” the overgrown rodent merchant rubbed his chin, puffing on his cigar.  “Philosophy is not one of Brucie's strengths; does not earn silver, only headaches, da?”  He smirked wryly and flicked his cigar with emphasis.  “If life vas so terrible, perhaps is reason Brucie smokes it away?  HaHA!”

        She sighed heavily.  “But if you could change this—All of this.  Would you be willing to do so?”

        “Life is life.  Sometimes life is too much life, sometimes too little,” he uttered as he squatted in his pilot's seat and propped a leg up, leaning back casually in the green haze of his cramped vessel.  “But rather than think of things dat need changing, Brucie likes to focus on things he is glad for and be thankful for them.”  A warm smile under his reflective emerald lenses.  “Like pony friend!  If dis life vas changed, vould not have you to look forward to, da?”

        She stared sadly at him.  “That's just it, Brucie.  The only thing you're guaranteed to run out of in life is friends.”  She swallowed sorely.  “The reason I know this is because there's so much magic lost from this world.  And eventually that too will be gone.”

        “Hmm...” he leaned further back and puffed.  “All better reason pony has to spend time vith friends...”  He smirked.  “Or make new ones...”

        “...or old ones,” she added in a low breath.

        “Vhat vas that, Harmony?”  No sooner had he asked, but a loud rumble filled the roof of the world, forcing the two ships to rock and weave from the thunderous vibrations.  “Mother Rushnut!  Is getting vorse, the storm!”  He kicked out of the seat and rushed up to a porthole, gazing out with a frown.  “Brucie is afraid that he and pony friend must cut transaction short!  You cannot outrun storm anymore than time itself!”

        “Perhaps somepony can,” she once again murmured, then nodded her snout towards a series of brown leather bands along the far end of the gondola.  “I'll take five of those over there.”

        “Twenty strips each.”

        “That works for me.”

        “Then done is deal, Harmony!”

        After the exchange of silver for goods, the mare trotted towards the metal bridge between his ship and hers.  She lingered in his windblown doorway.  “Again, Brucie, my name is not Harmony.”

        “Da, da!  Ve have been over dis!  Pony is anonymous!  Hilarious irony ensues—!”

        “'Scootaloo'.”

        He spun around and squinted at her through cockeyed goggles.  “Vhat vas dat?”

        “My name is Scootaloo,” she said, fidgeting.  “And... I am glad to have you as a friend too, Brucie.”

        The squirrel stared at her.  After a spell, he smirked, then grinded his cigar to death against a bulkhead.  “Another day vorth living, da?”  He waved her off.  “Off vith you, Scootaloo!  Storms of twilight have no friends!”

        She took a deep breath as the warmness left her cheeks and she marched outward to her hangar on the other side of the bridge.  “Don't I know it...?”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        It has been several invisible gray days since I last saw Spike, and I am no closer to an answer for his proposition than I was the first minute I flew myself away from the strangely inviting sights of Ponyville's ruins.  That place is once more a potential home to me, and yet it pains me to see it the way it is.  I'm reminded of something Bruce said without quite meaning to put much effort into it:  that life is sometimes 'too much life', sometimes 'too little life'.  But when I look out the portholes of my airship, and when I see the desolation all around, I realize that any creature that attempts to neutrally philosophize like that is only attempting to protect my feelings.  There is no life out here—only ashes.

        The fact is—when Equestria exploded, it had to have been ponydom's fault, in some fashion or another.  What Gilda hinted of and what most of the patrons who frequent the Monkey O'Dozen Den believe is at least partially true.  The Sun and Moon would still be here today if something horrible hadn't happened to Princess Celestia and Princess Luna.  Equestria was never a land that belonged to only ponies, and the fact that I'm the last living pegasus means that I, in some fashion, owe it to the world to get a second chance at seeing light once more, so that these perpetual shadows will no longer force otherwise harmless creatures into believing that 'life' is simply quantifiable.

        A month before now, the same pony who's writing this would never give this blighted world a second thought.  But as of a few days ago, I now know that I can potentially leave a mark, a very warm, golden, and glowing mark upon what would otherwise remain a world as grave if not even graver than what I now see before me.  For years, I gave my all to maintain a rainbow symbol to spark hope into the souls of ponies who I always hoped were alive... but secretly knew really weren't.  Now that I know what I can do and whom I can do it for—creatures like Bruce, Gilda, and even Pitt—could that change Equestria for the better?  Could it give hope—however absurd—to a new society that might transform it into something beautiful, as opposed to its present ugliness?  Can existence transcend essence, even when the likes of Spike and myself are long gone from this potential future kingdom?

        It's always been tough being the end of ponies.  And it's even tougher now.  If this stormfront I'm flying in doesn't kill me, I think my confusion will.  If there should be another entry, it will be by another pony, one who has transcended doubt, as Spike has transcended time.  This I promise—this I hope.

        -End of entryyyyyyyyyy---

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Scootaloo's last penstroke smudged across the page of her journal as the Harmony experienced another jolt.  The boiler at the back of the room flickered as it tried to maintain autopilot in the surmounting turbulence surging all around the craft.  A warning bell clamored as a couple of sparks flew from a tesla coil on the port side of the cabin.

        Cursing mutely, Scootaloo slapped the journal shut, swiveled away from her workbench, and all but pratfalled across the careening gondola, landing awkwardly in the cockpit's seat.  As she harnessed herself into place, a wide panorama of bubbling clouds and random bits of lightning surged from beyond the stretched array of windshields.  The world had punctually become an obsidian mesh of inky fog as a fresh stormfront rumbled across the rooftop of Equestria on the latest of its regular intervals.

        Yanking at a few levers to re-orient the bobbing vessel, Scootaloo flashed an angry glare towards her instrument panel.  A red light was flickering as a tiny brass pipe of steam blew through an alarm whistle.  Her elaborate warning system was attempting to convey that part of the zeppelin's lateral support struts had loosened dangerously.

        “Frickin' figures.  Can't ride a storm these days without it turning into a drunken Wonderbolts performance,” she snarled, then silenced herself by clamping her teeth over a hanging chainlinked handle.  She pulled hard and the boiler towards the rear billowed, pumping steam into the balloons over the gondola.  Slowly, the Harmony lifted above the crashing black promontory of the advancing stormfront, aimed towards the highest point it could go above the dark lightning-ruptured overcast.  A wayward cloudfront thundered angrily at Scootaloo.  She snarled back:  “Yeah, well, you look fat and ugly too!”

        An hour later, safely above the rumbling overcast of stormclouds, the grunting and griping pegasus struggled with a loose set of rivets that she was presently attempting to tighten back into place along the starboard side of the Harmony's zeppelin chassis.  The black roof to the Equestrian Wastes groaned and roared beneath her, briefly flickering phantom illuminations of silver lightning hues across her blank flanks as she struggled to finish her task.  At one point, the wrench she was twisting flew loose; she inadvertently struck herself in the small of her left forearm.  A loud groan—something that mutated into a furious snarl—and she banged the rivets with an opposite hoof, half-shocked to hear them rattling back into stubborn looseness.

        With a huge deflating sigh, Scootaloo leaned her snout against the copper body of the zeppelin and hung there, brown wings fluttering in the brief winds, as the thunderous world gargled beneath her.  She clung to the bosom of the Harmony in a gentle and lonesome sway, for what had to have been the better part of an hour, until she finally opened her scarlet eyes to the ever-lingering twilight overhead.  Distant gloomy stars half-blinked down at her, never living and never dying.  There was no real light in this world, only the half hearted imitation of brightness, like Celestia's mirror in Spike's garden.  It almost looked pretty, but it was hardly the real thing.  Scootaloo was tired of staring, and yet a strange peace was wafting through her with as much electricity as the stormfronts boiled with far below.

        Hooking her wrench and other tools along the lateral struts of the airship, Scootaloo took wing, hovering down several dozens of naked meters below her hovering vessel.  She then did something that she hadn't done since she was a little foal; she touched down with pegasus hooves onto the wispy surface of the overcast cloudbanks.  Her legs made contact.  She was standing upon the dark beds of cloud cover.  What had been nothing more than a permeable mist of disgust for two-and-a-half decades was suddenly a grand wafting plain of opaque fog—like a phantom shadow of the Ponyvillean valley—and the twilight above impersonated a childhood sky.

        Peacefully—in a tranquil pose—Scootaloo slowly trotted forward across the blackened clouds.  With each shuffling hoof, a patch of dark mist brightened strobingly from the deep lightning below, illuminating Scootaloo randomly during her 'walk'.  She didn't notice, for she had her eyes shut and her snout tilted skyward.  With her brown wings meditatively outstretched, the last pony took several deep breaths, and opened an invisible third eye.

        She saw Ms. Cheerilee's schoolhouse—or at least an effluent crimson shade of it.  And beyond the schoolhouse was a misty lake of crystal blue water flanked by ivory mountains.  The world blossomed with green beauty, like hair that had been shaved for years but was suddenly given the chance to grow again; and it bloomed all around her, kissing her with soft blades that swayed in a deep earthen wind.  There were living things in this shady dreamscape, things that fluttered and danced in the breeze instead of slicing mercenary paths through it.  And the children—the foals flocked to her, smiling, inviting Scootaloo across the playground into a game of Red Rover.  Sweetie Bell's horn glistened in the morning mist, and Apple Bloom's drawling laughter filled the schoolyard with an undercurrent of static excitement, like being at the edge of a waterfall, or prancing along the fringes of the Everfree Forest, or gazing through the window of Sugarcube Corner while the sounds of streetside musicians reverberated off the freshly varnished wood of surrounding storefronts--

        --and the thunder swallowed it all once more, with misty black teeth that lurched and hummed dreadfully beneath the twilight expanse.  Scootaloo's scarlet eyes opened, and when they did they were not brimming with tears, but instead boiling with a steam of a different sort, a frothing burst of burning air that no amount of pressure forced upon the Harmony's boiler could ever hope to produce, a hissing outburst of blood-throttling menace that two and a half decades of levitating imprisonment had forged ever so demoniacally in the iron-wrought heart of one solitary hoofed creature doomed to aimlessly skim the gray leprous flesh of the planet.

        And she screamed.  All of her hate and all of her pain and all of her regret she screamed into the gray-on-gray horizons lingering before her, until her wailing voice outroared the great thunder booming from below and scared the strobes of lightning off into hiding, until all of the Equestrian Wasteland finally knew what it had taken from her, and that she was the only living being in the history of time that was capable of giving anything back.

        And when the scream was done, and her wings were still heaving as she stood shakily on the womb of the buckling cloudbeds, it was not a sob that graced her face, it was not even a sneer; it was a smirk.

        Spike was busying himself with a series of chemical vials in the center of his laboratory when the trap door to Twilight's former treehouse slammed wide open above him.  He turned calmly to see a breathless brown pegasus soaring down and hovering wide-eyed in front of the dragon.

        “Send me back, Spike!”  Scootaloo panted.  “Send me back in time!”

        “Now Scootaloo,” the sagely dragon pointed with a clawed finger.  “Have you adequately thought about what you're—?”

        “There is no thinking,” she glared at him.  “There is only now.  And I am sick to death of now.”

        He raised an eyecrest at that.

        She frowned and growlingly reiterated:  “I'm ready, Spike.  I'm ready to do this.  Send me to the past.”

        Gradually, he smiled.  A gentle nodding of his headcrests.  “As you wish, old friend.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Six – Where You Lay Your Head

        “You will be sent to four months before the Cataclysm.  It's important, Scootaloo, that you get a lay of the land in advance of the destruction of Equestria, so that we may both in the present compile all of the things that you have observed, so as to determine what was the cause of the horror.”

        “But why bind me to Ms. Cheerilee?”  The last pony asked.  She stepped back and watched as her purple dragon companion moved several large bits of equipment with his iron-wrought limbs, making an open space across the floor of his cavernous laboratory.  “She's sweet and all—But wouldn't she be the least likely pony in Equestria's past to have an answer to what happened?  Why not just bind me to Princess Celestia so that I could talk directly to her and get this whole thing over with?”

        “That would be an extremely solid solution,” Spike nodded, his violet neck pendant dangling, “if it was possible.”  He brushed the rocky floor clean with a green-crested tail before producing a crystal vial of ashes from a nearby cabinet.  Using nimble fingers, he started drawing an alchemic circle across the floor with the powdery dust.  “Alas, though contacting Princess Celestia would certainly give us the best possible perspective on the eve of the Cataclysm, I cannot send you back in time bound directly to her soul.”

        “Why not?”  Scootaloo made a face as she watched the mystical designs take form under the dragon's careful motions.  “I thought you said that the ponies you could bind me to were friends of yours!  Didn't you brush tails with the Princess on multiple occasions as she mentored Twilight Sparkle back in Canterlot?”

        “To think of Princess Celestia as a friend of mine is most humbling,” he smiled.  “And undeniably true.  But no matter how attuned I may have been with the Royal Alicorns of Canterlot, I would be a fool to think that I could in any way target the essence of a Goddess' soul.  Even if I was the most powerful dragon that had ever lived, I would never be capable of binding any time-traveling creature to the life force of Celestia or Luna.  Once a mortal, always a mortal; three hundred years of experience is but a pindrop, you see.”

        “If you say so,” Scootaloo mumbled.  She gulped and glanced briefly about the colorful instruments and chemicals that sparkled across the laboratory, feeling suddenly like she was stumbling before the plank of a very intimidating launchpad aimed into a sea of green fire.  “But—still—Ms. Cheerilee?  How do I expect a lone school teacher to help us out after I tell her that her whole world is going to die?”

        “You don't.”

        Scootaloo's scarlet eyes bugged.  “I don't?”

        “Scootaloo, you are going back to be an observer.  It is you who must find out about the future, not them.”

        “You're joking!”  Her face contorted as she backtrotted in disbelief.  “Spike, if you and I are gonna be serious about unearthing the mystery of the Cataclysm, we're gonna need all the help we can get!  And I can't do diddly squat if I pretend like nothing is going to happen to all the ponies who I meet in the past!”

        “The fact that you know what is going to happen is certainly sufficient enough for you to accomplish your tasks, child,” Spike said, finishing the circle and sprinkling the remaining dust back into his crystal vial.  “But where your knowledge is an asset to you, I am afraid it will only be a deterrent to them.  If you arrive back in time as a harbinger of doom, you will not scrounge up information.  You will only arouse panic.”

        “But maybe that's the key!”  Scootaloo's eyes glistened as she leaned up towards him.  “Spike, if we tell everyone what happens, maybe we could—”

        “—stop something that will transpire anyways, as is in accordance with the immutable flow of time?”  He stared deeply at her, his eyes hanging like cold emeralds.

        She deflated, scruffing at the rocky floor with a wayward hoof.  “But... Something has to be done, Spike.  This... This just doesn't feel right.  There's so much pretense about what you're sending me in the past to do.  You know, I've done a lot of harsh things in the Wasteland to survive.  I've lied to many soulless creatures and I've cheated several mercenaries who I knew would only swindle me in the future.  But in the the living land of Equestria, all I will find are ponies.  And to me, any pony is a friend.  I don't think I can lie to friends like I've attempted to manipulate everything else within hoof of these Wastes.”

        “I'm sending you back in the past, Scootaloo, because I know that you are resourceful, intelligent, and brave.  But more than any of those attributes, there is one quality that you must master in order to succeed in your newest endeavor.”

        “And what is that, pray tell?”

        “Subtlety.”

        She frowned at him.  “I don't do subtle.”

        “Hrmmm...What a surprise,” he half-chuckled, nostrils fuming playfully.  “Well, I suggest you stretch yourself in that area, old friend.  Because where you are about to go, subtlety is richer than oxygen.  Once you've landed, I suggest you take many long even breaths before you so much as talk to a single pony.”

        “Just h-how long am I going to be there?”  She asked with a brief bout of nervousness.

        “I've stored up enough green flame in my enchanted fire glands to send you back for a period of five to seven days,” Spike counted his clawed fingers for emphasis.  “Remember, because you'll be bound to Cheerilee, it is important that you do not leave more than forty meters from her position—Or else your soul will no longer be anchored to its source in the past.”

        “What happens either way?”  Scootaloo blinked.  “If the five days run out or if I walk 'out of bounds' of the teacher?”  She gulped, “D-Do I die in a puff of smoke?”

        “If you call speedily returning to this laboratory in the presence of my wholesome company 'deadly', then certainly!” the elder dragon chuckled.  “Fear not, Scootaloo.  As you are not truly your physical self in the past, you will be oblivious to pain, hunger, and even exhaustion.  Your manifested soul-self will be akin to a projection of your essence—The only ones who will think that you are real are those in the past who observe you.  So try and make a good first impression.”

        “B-But what if they recognize me?”  She suddenly winced.

        “I seriously doubt you'll have to worry about that,” Spike stated matter-of-factly.  “You'll hardly resemble your past self.  For that matter, you'll hardly resemble anypony at all—Heheh—Ahem...”  His face glinted at her in a sudden sheen of melancholy.  “And in speaking of your past self...”

        The mare stared up at him forlornly.

        He said, “Though we both know that bumping into your foalish copy will hardly have an effect on the immutable passage of time, I would still advise against it.  Meeting a doppleganger from the past is... existentially exhausting, to say the least.”

        “I-I'll take your word for it,” she said in a dry voice.  “I really have no intention of doing that anyways,” she murmured, turned, and trotted firmly into the circle.  “Now send my butt back already!”

        “Very well,” he nodded his green crested head, bounded around her, and perched on a mound of gemstones flanking the alchemic circles.  “Remember, Scootaloo, subtlety,” he gestured as his shadow stood over her.  “Subtlety is the key to success—”

        “Yeah yeah—I get the picture—”

        “And patience, Scootaloo.  If you expect to be there as long as my flames permit, then you will make no progress by rushing things.  Once you've arrived back in time, try not to make any harsh decisions.  Be calm, be serene, be friendly, or just be silent if you wish.  Most of all, watch, listen, observe; and once you've made contact with Cheerilee or any of our other acquaintances, be discreet with them, be courteous, and after you have won their trust—Then and only then may you attempt to proceed higher among the Equestrian strata, and hopefully even contact Princess Celestia herself.  You will do well expecting this to be a gradual, systematic, and even relaxing process.  Who knows?  Perhaps you may even enjoy yourself,” he finished with a smile.

        “Enjoy myself?”  Scootaloo let loose a girlish laugh.  She stood boldly in the center of the circles as she balked at him.  “Now I know you're fooling with me, Spike.”

        “Hardly, child.  I do so sincerely wish for our 'experiment' here to succeed, for the sake of Equestria's future.  But, more importantly, I hope that you will earn from this something that will bring you both peace and contentment.”

        “Spike, I'll worry about closure when I'm dead.”

        He nodded.  “I was afraid of that.”  He pointed.  “Close your eyes, Scootaloo.”

        She squinted at him in brief perplexity, but ultimately obeyed.  With a shuddering breath, she allowed the world to turn dark around her.  Her coat's hairs stood on end as she felt the sterile cold air around her, expecting all of it to start burning off her body in the simple flash of a green torch.  Just as she began settling her trembling limbs, she sensed a dim aura spilling through her eyelids.  A high pitched vibration filled the suddenly static air.  Her heart started racing, and she clenched her teeth tight, preparing to plummet at any moment.  Instead, she was struck with a far more alien sensation, a wave of frosted powder billowing over her figure.

        Scootaloo couldn't help it.  Her scarlet eyes flew open, and she gasped to see a layer of dust blanketing her mane, forehead, and hooves.  The coarse gray filament matched the material that formed the now-green-glowing alchemic circles beneath her.  Jaw quivering, she gazed up at Spike.  “Wh-Whose ashes are th-these...?”

        His body was a somber shadow with cold marble eyes.  “Cheerilee's,” he said, closing a jar once more in his grasp.

        “Wh-What?” she stammered.

        “I'm sorry, Scootaloo.  It's the only way.”  He leaned forward, opened his mouth, and covered half of the room in vaporous emerald light.

        “Spike—!” she started, but suddenly saw his image slide away from her at two million kilometers a second.  She was screaming backwards down a quivering snake skin of hundreds of refracting lenses, eating away at her flesh and bone with acidic clouds of forest-green chaos.  The ivory band of Cheerilee's powdery ashes wafted off of her and coalesced around the pegasus' echoing heartbeat like a porcelain cocoon; and at the bottom of the typhoonesque collapse, the ashen egg broke away and deposited a grunting pony into a warm basin of color, smells, and life.  “Nngh—Wait!” Scootaloo shouted, but her voice wasn't hers.

        Her eyes flickered under the curtain of a gasp, then squinted, for a very foreign beacon of light was once more slicing its way up an alien sky, cradling her in its solar arms.  Hissing, sputtering for breath, the mare wobbled up to her knees and stared up into the Sun, a thing she hadn't done in so many years that she briefly forgot what a danger it was.  And yet, as long as she stared, her eyes weren't burning, as if they were made of queerly stronger stuff than granite.

        She needed focus, so Scootaloo finally ripped her gaze from the Sun and looked around her.  She saw the porcelain Southern Mountains, the crystal-blue lake at the base of the hills, the billowing edges of the Everfree Forest, and—coasting over the edge of a warm and sizzling eastern horizon—the first of many gold thatched rooftops that prophesied the edge of downtown Ponyville.

        “Oh Spike...” she murmured in a whimpering voice, once more a breath that sounded alien to her, but she hardly cared.  “You didn't send me into the past, you sent me to heaven.”  She bit her lip and tried to steady herself as the emotions flooded back in a single overwhelming heap.  Scootaloo felt her lungs quivering, her pants coming out in tiny hyperventilating chirps.  She tried to remember something that the purple dragon had taught her, about taking steady breaths, about being serene, about blending in with her surroundings.  But as her eyes watered and her limbs quivered, she couldn't take into account any of those things, instead searching, gazing, piercing the sky for the one thing.  “The r-rainbow, wh-where is it...?”

        She looked once more above the crystalline reflective surface of the lake.  The prismatic band was gone.  There was a lot less fog and decidedly more heat than the last time Spike had sent her to this spot.  It took a few dumbfounded moments for Scootaloo to realize why; this was the afternoon, not the morning.  In two and a half decades of Equestrian grayscape, the mare had forgotten that there used to be a time cycle within the span of a day.  And yet, her heart rejoiced at the revelation; it was like riding her scooter again.

        Her scooter... her childhood... Equestria.  “Praise Celestia, it's all so magnificent,” the voice inside her half-sobbed.  She limped forward on stoned legs, nearly drooling.  “Now where's that dang schoolhouse?  I'm liable to kiss Cheerilee when I see—ACK!”

        She shrieked as she suddenly slid down a long incline of red wooden shingles.  Uncontrollably, she smacked into the belltower on the schoolhouse's roof, toppled over twice, and fell like an anvil off the side of the building where she had materialized back in time.

        “Ummmfff!”  She plunged into a wide drinking trough standing aside the playground, snout first.  “Blbllblllb—”  Scootaloo tossed herself out in a sputtering spray of water and plopped hard into the dirt, gasping for air.  Fully soaked, she instinctually shook her coat into a flimsy facsimile of dryness and shuddered:  “Wh-What did Spike say about taking deep breaths?  Oh yeah, duh.”

        She tilted her snout up to glance across the playground, and in so doing she peripherally noticed a wet mat of mane-hair curling over the side of her neck.  Blinking, she raised a hoof to push some of the threads into closer view.  What she saw was a soaked cluster of black threads, with the faintest hint of amber.  Her face scrunched as she glanced every which way, then ultimately turned to face the water trough.

        Trotting over and peering in, she watched as the liquid surface settled from her brief collapse into the basin.  As the water smoothed, the reflection of a strange pegasus came into being, a young filly with a rusted copper coat, like the color of earthen clay, from her hooves to her feathery wings, shining far brighter and richer than the dull brown coat of future Scootaloo, or even the orange sheen that she had as a foal.  And instead of violet or aged-scarlet eyes, there reflected twin marbles of bright amber, as if sculpted out of the vein of a tree in spring.  Finally, her mane flowed with an elegant sheen of black silken threads—with a thin streak of amber running down the middle that matched the color of her blinking eyes.

        “Well, hello there,” she murmured with drunken amusement into the bobbing reflection.  “Who are you?”  She finally took a moment to recognize the strange voice coming out of her.  Just like everything else about her 'projection', the voice was different, younger than her future self, but still laced with the same inflection and murmuring qualities of her experienced soul.  She judged that, whoever she looked like, she appeared no older than twenty-two winters, which—for the time—placed her about the same age as Fluttershy, Twilight Sparkle, and many of the older ponies whom Scootaloo looked up to in her youthful days.  It all seemed strangely, even fatefully appropriate; all fears about anypony recognizing her flew out an invisible window.  If she could somehow come back to the future looking and sounding like this, she was certain even Spike himself would scratch a scaled head in confusion.

        The transplanted mare ran a hoof one more time through her obsidian threads, before a sudden movement in front of her grabbed her attention.  Glancing up, she realized that she was standing in front of a window to the schoolhouse.  A veil of curtains hung over the pane, but there was a ruby shadow shuffling from within, followed by a muffled feminine voice and several young murmurs replying in cadence.  Twenty-five-and-a-quarter years into the past, school was in session; Scootaloo's heart skipped a beat.  She glanced at the warm landscape buzzing around her, she smelled the crisp spring air, she heard the singing of birds and the murmur of cicadas.  Spike's Ponyvillean terrarium was a pathetic pindrop in the great throbbing basin of life now encompassing her, hugging her.  She had every reason to stand right there and soak in that moment forever.

        She didn't.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Can anyone tell me what a harpy is?”  Several hooves lifted into the classroom air with mixed levels of enthusiasm.  A mare sporting a joyful mane of fuchsia looked over her students and picked out the most eager of the bunch.  “Yes, Snips?  Do you know?”

        “Oh—!  Uhm—A harpy is like that cutie mark on the lady who owns the music store downtown!”  A chorus of giggles lit the room.  The turquoise-coated unicorn in the center of the laughing circle sunk shamefully in his desk seat.

        The ruby-coated schoolteacher chuckled sweetly.  “No no, Snips—And for clarification, Ms. Lyra's cutie mark is aptly named a 'lyre', not a 'harp'.”  Cheerilee cleared her throat and smiled at all of the students.  “A harpy is a sentient creature that resembles a falcon.  It has the body of a bird of prey, including sharp talons and broad wings, but its upper half consists of the head of a simian.”  She trotted over towards a picture stand and unveiled a poster of the avarian monstrosity.  Half of the class gasped, the other half murmured 'ooohs' and stared forward with tilting interest.  “Over ninety percent of their population is female.  They feast mostly on the meat of rodents and smaller birds, and they live in nocturnal clusters along the bluffs of the Eastern Ocean Shore.”

        “Ewwww,” a pink coated pony with a tiara for a cutie mark made a wretching face.  “Like—Who in their right mind would actually eat meat?”

        “Yeah, that's so gross!”  A silver filly mirrored her friend's nauseated voice from one desk over.  “They'd might as well just chomp on each other!”

        “Hmmm... An understandable reaction,” Cheerilee nodded.  “Eating meat is very taboo in pony culture.  But, as a matter of fact, there are many sentient creatures in Equestria who eat meat on a regular basis, such as our allies, the Griffons to the North.  And they live out their lives in relative peace and tranquility.”  She motioned once more to the beastly picture propped before the class.  “Even many harpies today live a pacifist existence.  But that hasn't always been the case.  Equestria used to be swarming with violent flocks of the creatures, ruthless pirates who ravaged the countryside during the Chaos Wars that preceded the Second Age.  And—”  Cheerilee's gaze glanced up at the clopping sound of hooves, and her green eyes twitched.  Something of a grimace graced her figure, but she suppressed it at the last second, clearing her throat and smiling presently in the company of the little foals.  “Ahem—Erm... Why, h-hello there!  Is there—uhm—something I can help you with?”

        The faces of three dozen foals twisted confusedly.  With the creaking of wooden desk seats, they gradually turned around to see a curious sight at the back of the classroom.  A young adult pegasus stood, her long black mane a wet and tangled mess, her copper coat dripping a puddle of moisture over the floorboards.  The open doors basked her in a platinum aura, like a golden visitor from beyond.  Nopony knew any wiser.

        Scootaloo gulped, dumbly gazing at the forty-odd young sets of eyes blinking up at her, the first time in years that any ponies had stared at her ever.  Her heart was beating so hard, she had a difficult time standing.  To keep her legs from wobbling, she stepped a hoof forward, but jumped the first moment she saw the foals' bright eyes moving along with her.  Clenching her teeth, she leaned back into a row of bookshelves and gulped, exhaling in a wheeze:  “H-Hi...”

        “Hello.”  “Hiya.”  “Hi there.”  “Hello, ma'am.”  “Hello'm.”  “Hi.”

        “Hoboy,” Scootaloo shuddered, a sore lump forming in her throat.  So many eyes.  So many ashes.  A wave of gray overcast washed over her vision until her last blink ended, and the schoolroom was staring at her once again, the many young faces scrunching in confusion.  There was not a single frightened expression amongst them.  The last pony suddenly felt like hugging every single one—

        “Did you have a delivery of school supplies to make?”  Cheerilee's chirpy voice rocked Scootaloo back onto her hooves.  “The deposit box is out in the back.  I happen to... uh... to be teaching class at the moment.”  She cleared her voice and added with a wink.  “Unless you want to take a seat and learn about the carnivorous habit of harpies!”

        Rows of seats giggled amusedly.

        “N-No, I... I-I...”  Scootaloo murmured, trotting slowly around the circumference of the one-room class as the many heads swiveled innocently to follow her.  “Er—I m-mean yes.  I'm... a delivery pony... Or something like that... Y-Yes...”  Her voice deflated under a raspy air of nervous choking.  She coughed, shook her wet black mane a bit drier, and stumbled into a pole bearing the flag of the Celestial Crest.  She winced, jitteringly set the rocking banner still, and stood back on four hooves.  “J-Just, passing through... and... uhm...”

        “Who sent you?”  Cheerilee spoke in a suddenly hushed voice that was meant for the two of them alone.  She trotted over slightly.  “Do you have a working permit?”

        “I... uhm...”  Scootaloo turned and instinctively tilted her head up, until she realized she had to lower her face to stare Cheerilee eye-to-eye.  “Jeez, you're shorter than I remembered!”

        The schoolteacher's green eyes blinked crookedly at that.

        Suddenly, a filly gasped girlishly from the front row and pointed an excited hoof.  “Oooooh!  Look at her cutie mark!”

        “Wowwww!”  “That's so awesome!”  “Coool!”  “I've never seen one like that!”  “Pretttttty!”

        Cheerilee seized the moment, her face brightening as she stood aside the visitor's flank.  “Oh, yes!  It is a most splendid cutie mark, isn't it!”

        “Huh?” Scootaloo blinked at the teacher.  She glanced back at her hindquarters and did a double-take, her amber eyes exploding.  “Holy manure castles!”  Emblazoned across her copper coat was an elaborate masterpiece of magical branding.  A celestial ring of black and amber sunflares encircled an obsidian pair of loops, like a stretched-out figure '8'.  Judging from its sideways angle, it had to have been some natural version of the 'infinity' symbol, complete with what could be best described as an abstract mimic of the Celestial Crest.  Scootaloo performed a few dashing glances back and forth from her sudden mark to the flag in the corner of the schoolroom just to be sure, and there was no doubt about it.  “Well, if that isn't the most awesome thing ever that ever awesome'd...”

        “Class—Remember our lessons on the cutie mark last month?  Can anyone tell me what that crest on her flank means?”  A few hooves rose up.  Cheerilee pointed towards the center of the room.  “Yes, Twist?”

        “It means that she's in the Royal Service of Canterlot Court!”

        “Royal Service of What-Now?”  Scootaloo made a sweating face.

        “Absolutely, Twist!”  Cheerilee grinned, standing boldly next to the immeasurably confused visitor.  “All ponies born with that crest are lucky enough to become servants in Princess Celestia's Court!  It means they get to live out their lives as overseers and watchhorses, spreading the Sun Goddess' influence far and wide and maintaining order across Equestria!  We're very lucky to have this special guest here with us, today!”

        The teacher spun and grinned in Scootaloo's face with a sudden foalish giddiness as she hopped in place, whispering:

        “IsthisabouttherequestforthefieldtriptovisittheCanterlotlianGardens?”

        Scootaloo's copper temples lost grip of a sizable sweatdrop.  “I-I... Actually, I-I just wanted to—”

        “Most esteemed servant to her Highness, Princess Celestia...!”  Cheerilee proudly swept her erect snout towards the classroom, her voice like a sugar-coated megaphone.  “...why don't you grace the students with what exactly it is that you do for our Keeper of the Sun!”

        The copper mare's eyes bulged.  She glanced nervously across the rows upon rows of pastel colored eyes staring felicitously at her.  It was a veritable sea of infant lungs holding a giant breath in anticipation of Scootaloo's next charming words...

        “I... I-I deliver... P-Packages for the... Royal... R-Royal Office of... uhm...,” She blinked.  “Fl-Flamestones.”  She winced, but brightened slightly as the class murmured in awe at her fabrication.

        “What's a Flamestone?” a spritely redhead with thick eyeglasses gaped.

        “A flamestone...” Scootaloo exhaled, speaking suddenly with natural ease:  “Ahem.  It's a type of gem that has been enchanted with elemental red flame as a result of severe compression brought upon by the collapsing chunks of the moon that collided with the face of the Equestrian Wasteland immediately after the Caaaaaat-aaaaa-clyyyyyysmmmmm—”  Her face twisted into an endless wince as she swiftly registered the words that had been spat out of her mouth.

        The class stared prolongly at her, a mosaic of blank faces.  A long necked unicorn, his brown face scrunched, throated:  “Derr—What's a cat of clysm?”

        “It m-means a destructive event that forever changes the face of the Earth—Excuse me, class,” Cheerilee nervously spun around and looked worriedly in Scootaloo's face.  “Ma'am, is everything alright?  No offense, but you don't look or sound too well.  Are you feeling ill?”  Cheerilee's green eyes blinked.  “Ma'am?”

        Scootaloo was staring at the children, face after face, snout after snout, horns and ears and manes—But no hairbows.  “Wh-Where is Apple Bloom...?”  She murmured in a childish voice.

        “Erm—The Apple Family's daughter is home sick for the day.  Ahem—May I have a word with you in the atrium for a quick moment—?”

        “They're all going to die...” Scootaloo slurred, her eyes quivering at all of the happy, innocent faces.  “Every single one of them.”  She hissed through clenched teeth and tilted her wincing snout ceilingward in a maddening stupor.  “This building—I've seen it from the clouds.  Not one stone is lying on top of another...”

        “M-Ma'am!”  Cheerilee gasped, nervously glancing from the class to the pegasus and back.  She leaned into her, nudging a little.  “Please—Let's take this into the other room.  You'll scare the children—”

        At the word 'scare', Scootaloo's eyes flashed open.  Trailing on her lashes were scores of lantern-lit memories, of ink-leathery trolls thrashing at her through the darkness, of billowing stormfronts that threatened to tear her zeppelin apart, of lonely nights spent lying in a swaying hammock and reading about the immortal sorrows of a dead Princess.  A pained breath surfaced at the base of her lungs and came out in the form of a menacing snarl.  She had seen the world consumed in fire, and she had ridden the tongues of flames back to this shuddering moment in time.  The holocaust had to end somewhere.

        “I'm sorry, Spike.  But screw it.”  She spun and stared daggers into Cheerilee's eyes.  “You.  You need to contact Princess Celestia now.”

        “M-Me...?”  The ruby-coated teacher wilted backwards.  She chuckled nervously, “B-But I'm not the Royal Servant to the Court of Canterlot!  You're the one qualified to—”

        “Will you stuff it with this 'Royal Servant' nonsense?!” Scootaloo barked, eliciting several foalish gasps from the classroom.  She took a few vicious hoofsteps towards the teacher.  “The only business I'm here for is to send a message.  And it's a message that has to be sent to Princess Celestia!  Nobody else!  And I don't have much time—”

        “I-I can't be expected to leave th-this classroom now to deliver anything!”  Cheerilee briefly frowned.  “Even if I could contact the Princess—”

        “This is not a joke!”  Scootaloo snarled, her voice echoing across the schoolroom as she leered above Cheerilee.  “Something horrible is going to happen!  Something really bad!  Ponies are going to die—Not just some ponies, but everypony—”

        “Please—You're making a scene—”

        “Dang right I am!  Now let's stop beating around the bush and go see the Princess!  I'm not going to be here forever—Time is of the essence!  And, girl, you have no idea how true that statement is!”

        “Uhm...I don't know what you're—”

        “The end of ponies!” Scootaloo's amber eyes flared as she breathed in desperate heaves.  “A burning wave of magic that will render all of equine life to ash!  You have no idea—No clue what kind of devastation I'm talking about!  The Sun and the Moon—They will be gone!  Vanished!  Leaving nothing but endless twilight—”

        Scootaloo's voice stopped, her ear pricking for having heard something like a whimper.  She gazed aside and twitched to see the four-eyed redhead cowering behind her desk, her glasses fogged.  To her sides and behind her, several more students were trembling, scrunched away from the sight of the rambling stranger.  There were tears, tears...

        “No no no—It's... It's not so bad—I mean, yes, it is bad—” Scootaloo smiled crookedly, trying to straighten her frazzled black threads as she trotted towards the desks.  The entire classroom shrugged away from her in one fluid jolt.  She stopped in her tracks and gulped.  “Okay—So it's terrible.  But m-most of you are still young, so—Uh—You should be enjoying all of this while it lasts!  Everypony dies at some point, but it's just the nature of—”  A few more confused sobs filled the air.  Scootaloo snarled:  “Look, it's not like I brought the end of the world, okay?  So don't be scared of me!”  They still trembled and shivered.  She barked:  “I said don't be scared!”

        The foals winced, covering their eyes to avoid her snarling gaze.  She blinked at them, starting to hyperventilate as the impossible situation crumbled more and more.  There was a whispering sound towards the rear of the room.  She spun around to see that Cheerilee was no longer by her side; instead the jittery teacher was squatting besides the long-necked unicorn, murmuring into the colt's ear.

        “Snails, go to the corner of Fifth and McCracken, and fetch Officer Silvertrot.”

        “Y-Yes, Ms. Cheerilee,” the boy nervously jolted, bounded out of his seat, and galloped out of the school entrance.

        “Wh-What are you doing—?”  Scootaloo blinked wildly.

        Cheerilee motioned towards the doors, trotting over to shut them.  “Why don't you just calm down and have a seat—”

        “NO!”  Scootaloo rushed over, forcing Cheerilee to jump.  “Don't leave!  Don't—”  She nudged Cheerilee away from the door and smiled in a frazzled mess.  “G-Good.  Don't leave me—If you walk away too far, I-I might vanish and go back to the future—”

        “Th-The future?” Cheerilee gazed at her, dumbfounded.

        “It's a long story.  But that's not for you to hear,” Scootaloo patted the teacher's wincing shoulder.  “That's for the Princess.  She'll understand—Or at least she'd better.  She can't prevent the world from ending, but maybe she can help me figure out how it happened—”  She grunted at the sound of several sobs and flashed a frown over her shoulder.  “Stop crying!  It'll all be fine!  I just gotta talk to the Princess—”

        “Maybe you should just sit down and I'll prepare a letter—”

        “Not a stupid letter, girl!  I need to talk to Princess Celestia personally!”  Scootaloo exclaimed.  She suddenly started at a sight over Cheerilee's flank.  Through a sunny window, she could see the unicorn colt galloping back with two blue uniformed adult ponies in tow.  “Y-You fetched the police on me?”

        “I-I...” Cheerilee shivered, staring forlornly at the distraught classroom and then back at the raving pegasus.  “P-Please, just t-try to stay calm, Ma'am—”

        “No, that's good!”  Scootaloo beamed, clasping Cheerilee's wide-eyed face with a pair of hooves.  “Go on and call the police!  Fetch the Royal Guard while you're at it!  I need Princess Celestia's attention!  She's gotta know one way or another—Nnnngh!—Oh Goddess, this sunlight feels so good!” she briefly panted as she gazed out the window to happily watch the arrival of the police.  “It's like I'm on fire—but in a good way.  I wonder if I'll see the sunset?!  It's been ages since I've seen a sunset!  The world is so cold and dead and lifeless—I've forgotten just how... just how... Nnngh!”  She spat over her shoulder again.  “Stop crying already!  I thought ponies were stronger than this—!”

        “I-I got 'em, Mrs. Cheerilee!”  Snails panted suddenly from the back of the room.  He bowed out of the way as two tall colts marched in, gazing sternly in Scootaloo's direction.

        “Ma'am, is there a problem?”

        “Stallions!... Ha HA!”  Cheerilee guffawed and clapped her hooves, wide-eyed.  “Dang it to blazes—Where were you after I hit puberty?!”  She cleared her throat, straightened her lips, and strongly orated, “I need to see Princess Celestia right away.”

        One uniformed colt raised his eyebrow.  “Is that a fact?”

        “Absolutely.  I don't care if you need to arrest me or whatever—Just take me to her.  This can't wait.”

        “And what exactly is it that can't wait, ma'am?”  The two colts marched towards her.

        She eyed them warily, her wings flexing.  “How many times am I going to have to spell it out and to how many ponies?”  She furrowed her brow.  “Four months from now, the world is going to end in fire!  Every living pony is going to turn to ash while the Sun and Moon die!  I need to talk to the Princess and figure out how this is going to happen so I can undo the damage that will be done!”

        The officers glanced at the wilting sight of the classroom, then back at the pegasus.  “How about you just come with us—?”

        “Yes.  Fine.  Take me—But as long as we talk to the Princess!”

        “Th-Thank you, officers,” Cheerilee murmured, backtrotting towards the classroom.  “I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't—”

        Scootaloo gasped at her.  “Don't you stay here!”  She shouted and leaped towards her.  “We have to stay together!  Or else I'll be zapped forward in time—”  She jolted as the two police ponies suddenly grabbed her by the flank and tail.  “Nnngh—Let go!”

        “Easy now—!”  The colts struggled and applied their weight.  “You've done quite enough—!”

        “Didn't you hear me?”  Scootaloo wrangled her wings under one of the colts with veteran tenacity and easily flung the surprised officer across the room so that he crashed into a filing cabinet, forcing the room full of foals to shriek.  “We have to stay together!  I'm not even going to pretend to argue with you!”

        “Ma'am!  If you don't calm down, we'll be forced to—!”

        “The world is going to die in flames and you're telling me to 'calm down'?”  Scootaloo snarled and lowered on her haunches, her copper wings pointed threateningly at the two officers as they stumbled back onto their hooves and circled her.  “I'm not going to ask this again, you good-for-nothing punks!  Take me to the Princess or I will—”

        “It's alright!”  Cheerilee suddenly ran in the officers' way, blocking the space between them and the menacing pegasus.  “Please—It's okay.  Th-There's no need for a struggle.”  She gulped.  “I'll go with her to see the Princess.”  She turned from the blinking stallions and smiled gently at Scootaloo.  Her coat was a ruby glaze of cold sweat.  “We're not going to get separated, okay?  Just stick with me—We'll go see the Princess together.”

        Scootaloo breathed easier.  She stood up straight and rode the cresting descent of adrenaline in her bloodstream.  “Whew... That's more like it!  Looks like at least one pony in Equestria gives a crap about the future!”  She trotted towards the schoolhouse entrance, pausing to look back and make sure Cheerilee was walking with her as well.  She smiled as the teacher strolled up.  “I'm so sorry to be such a bother, but you g-gotta understand how important this is...”

        “Oh, absolutely!”  Cheerilee grinned back.  “You've obviously been through an awful lot, and it's so very noble of you to give us this warning.  I'm sure Princess Celestia will be in your debt—Not to mention all of Ponyville.”

        “I'm not doing all of this for glory or fame—I just want to find a way to make my world sunny again.  You like sunsets, don't you?”

        “Indubitably!”  Cheerilee nodded, briefly glancing back and squinting at the two colts.  The officers followed as the four of them marched away from the schoolyard and towards the fringes of Ponyville.  “If you would follow me, ma'am, I know a place where we can send a telegram to Princess Celestia—”

        “I thought I frickin' told you I needed to speak to her face to face!”

        “Oh, but of course!  But the telegrams are sent by pegasi like you—This will be the fastest we can get her to come see us!”

        “Oh, well that's just fine.  Yes, just fine—Nnnngh—Gawd, this grass is so amazing!  Isn't the grass amazing?  There's no grass in the future, y'know...”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “And the birds?  Nope.  All dead.  Isn't that a shame?  Though, to be frank, I never cared much for chickens.  But that's a story that I won't get into.”

        “Uh huh,” Cheerilee nodded as the two ducked into the rear door of a two-story cinderblocked building on the edge of Ponyville.  The sounds of theirs and the officers' hooves echoed across brightly lit corridors as they took a left, a right, and descended a series of steps into a dimly lit basement.  “You certainly miss a lot of things where you come from.”

        “Pfft—I'm just rambling off a list of random crud that I see.  Do forgive me,” Scootaloo chuckled against her shadows on the walls.  “It's just been so long since I talked to another pony—What with them all being dead and stuff.  I'm amazed that I didn't take to talking to myself after so many years of being alone.  I used to always think that's what bums did.  But wait—Did Ponyville have bums?  I must be getting my memories mixed up with that one summer I spent at a foster home in Manehattan.  Boy did I laugh when I found that place flooded with sea water after the Cataclysm.”

        “Wow—That does sound funny!”  Cheerilee droned, her smile a plastic one as she finally stopped in her tracks, glancing over Scootaloo's shoulders and towards the officers.

        “Pfft—Why would you find that funny?”  Scootaloo smirked, blinked, then glanced stupidly around the basement.  There were several barred rooms lining the corridor.  “Wait, where in the hay are we—?”

        Suddenly, both colts gave her a vicious shove.  She stumbled—gasping—into one of the jail cells, collapsing onto the floor as the metal barred door was slammed shut behind her.  She sputtered, gasped, and clamored up to her hooves.

        “No—NO!”  She ran up and rammed the door with her full weight.  The bars clanged and rattled, filling the basement with a thunderous echo.  Even the officers jumped back at her unnatural strength, but breathed easier as the doors held.  “Don't do this!” Scootaloo shouted.  “I'm so close to contacting the Princess!  If you just allow me to speak with her—”  She blinked, and her eyes narrowed on the quivering face of Cheerilee.  “You lied to me, didn't you?”

        “Th-Thank you, officers,” the ruby-haired schoolteacher finally broke down, collapsing into the hug of one of the uniformed colts as he gently patted her shoulder.  “I-I didn't know what else to do.  She was sc-scaring the ch-children.  I... I-I was afraid that she was going to do worse!”

        “You did the right thing, Ms. Cheerilee,” the colt said, settling her trembling form.  “Bluestone,” he motioned towards the other officer.  “Go and fetch Nurse Red Heart.  See if she can use her fancy schmancy degree in psychiatry to sort this poor soul out.”

        “Roger.  On it.”  The other trotted away.

        “You... Y-You think I'm crazy?” Scootaloo murmured.  She frowned, then snarled—Banging against the bars.  “Well maybe there's a reason to be crazy!  Did you ever think of that?  What if you were the last living pony stuck in a world full of endless destruction and blood?!  You'd go crazy too!  But—dang it—I'm trying to do something good here!  We can save Equestria!  We can figure out why all this death and destruction happened—If you would just let me talk to the Princess!”

        “You'll talk to someone alright,” the officer nodded towards her, his face emotionless and cool.  “Now calm down or Nurse Heart's gonna have to replace these bars with something more padded!”  He moved Cheerilee away from the raving pegasus.  “You, have a seat.  I'll get you something to drink.  I already sent Officer Haybreeze to watch over your class.  Everything's gonna be fine.  Your kids are okay.”

        “H-How could anyone j-just walk up to a classroom of foals and d-disturb the peace like that?”  Cheerilee shuddered and sniffled as the two walked towards a couch just around the corner from Scootaloo's vision.  “In all my years of teaching, nothing like that ever happened?  What c-could that poor soul have gone through to be so lost...?”

        “I don't pretend to understand the mind of a pony, Ms. Cheerilee.  My only interest is to keep the peace.”

        The word 'peace' rang through Scootaloo's ears, laced with the distant gasps of Cheerilee's sobbing voice.  The breaths mutated into an invisible schoolroom full of frightened, quivering foals, their eyes brimming with tears, their eyes wide and horrified, their eyes staring at her.

        “Why is everyone so easily scared?”  She slumped down to her haunches and plowed her hooves through her flustered black mane.  “They have to know.  They have to know what's going to happen,” she stammered and quivered, rocking back and forth in the center of the dimly lit jail cell.  “We're all going to die.  We're all going to die.  I just want to tell them all.  I just want...”  She clenched her eyes shut as the images of the foals' frightened faces flashed once more across her mind in a spinning kaleidoscope.  “Nnnngh—No-No-No!  You do not know the horror!  Not like I do!  Stop crying—Stop it... Stop it... Stop--!”

        Suddenly, the cell lit up in a green aura.  Scootaloo gasped.  For a moment, she thought that one of the police ponies had trotted back with a lantern in his grasp.  But Cheerilee and Officer Silvertrot were seated well beyond sight.  And then the emerald glow flickered again, burning from the barren cot to the floorboards to the cinderblock foundation of the place.  The copper-coated Pegasus stood up, shivering, and watched as a sea of jade flames curtained across the room, billowed around her legs, and wafted over her.  A sudden rising sensation, like riding the Harmony up through a cloudbed, and Scootaloo's copper body burned to brown, her mane melted down into tiny violet stubble, and her eyes blinked from amber to scarlet.  She was standing numbly in the burnt out alchemic circles drawn into the stone floor of a cavernous laboratory, under the the shadow of a calmly gazing, unamused Spike.

        “I...” the last pony blinked.  “I-I'm back?  Already?”  She gazed up at the purple dragon, her face pale.  “B-But... But I thought I was supposed to be in the past for no less than five days!”

        He stared at her, his green-crested chin propped on a hand of serrated claws.  “I distinctly remember saying that I had stored enough green flame to send you back for a week.  However, I did not state that I was indeed going to give you that much.”

        “But... B-But why, Spike?” Scootaloo gulped, trying to make her voice sound strong.  It came out in a whimper, “I thought you were sending me back to get information.”

        There was a knowing glint to Spike's emerald eyes as the elder dragon murmured:  “You said it yourself, Scootaloo.  You 'don't do subtle'.”  He planted both hands down and bent over to stare deep into her soul.  “You didn't follow an ounce of my advice, now did you?”

        She wilted from his gaze, her eyes wavering like so many images of frightened foals still burned into her vision.  Guiltily, she hung her snout towards the dull circles and muttered:  “How did you know?”

        “Because I know you, Scootaloo,” the noble dragon paced around her and came to a stop in the center of the laboratory.  He reached over and rested a gentle hand on her shaved mane.  “And though you've learned countless things in your years, read innumerable books, survived hundreds of horrors, outrun packs of bloodthirsty monstrosities—You are still, underneath all of that, the same dashing, bold, courageous, howbeit impulsive little foal that nearly ran over fellow Ponyvilleans in the road with her scooter.”  His lips curved slightly.  “Underneath all of your hardened exterior, you are still that spunky little filly who once beat up a pair of colts for making fun of me, even though you didn't know that we were just joking around one rainy afternoon in April.  And that little dragon, though honored by the way you tried to defend me, couldn't help but wish that she had thought a little more with her senses, at least as much as she did with her heart.”

        She gnashed her teeth.  She gazed up at him with moist eyes.  “I told them, Spike.”

        “Told who, Scootaloo?”

        “Ms. Cheerilee.  These two police officers.  The... The f-foals...” she shuddered painfully.  “Th-They all heard me talking about the end of the world.  They thought I was rambling...”  A wince.  “And I was.  Dang it, I was.  But... But...”  She shivered and buckled.

        “Don't hold back, child—”

        “Do you really realize what you're asking me to do, Spike?!”  She shouted up at him, a tear or two trickling down her cheeks.  “You want me to keep this awful truth built up like a raging boiler inside of me!  And yet, I'm somehow supposed get these ponies to help me figure out why the world dies?  I have to tell someone, Spike!  How else am I going to learn anything?”

        “And surely you can share the truth, but you have to do it tactfully,” Spike said, stroking her mane and leaning down so his large snout was even with hers.  “Subtlety, Scootaloo.  I cannot emphasize it enough.  These ponies have not been through all the turmoils and struggles that you have.  If you go prancing through the streets, screaming that the world is going to end, what else can you expect from them but disbelief or utter shock?”

        “I was standing in the warmth of the Sun...” Scootaloo hiccuped, wiping her tears away with a trembling hoof.  “And there was grass, and birds, and the children—Oh Goddess—the children!  I scared them, Spike—I shouted at them.”  She clenched her eyes shut and trembled.  “I don't know why!  It was like... It was like—”

        “You were angry at them.”

        Her eyes flashed open.  She gazed sickly up at her old friend.  “How horrible is that?”  She breathed.  “What did they ever do for me to envy them so much?”

        “They died, Scootaloo.  All of them died, as you and I will someday die,” he said.  “Whatever the disaster, whatever the Cataclysm, it is still our greatest commonality.  There will always be time for pity and envy, as they are often two halves of the same misguided coin.  But that doesn't mean you should announce their doom while they're standing right in front of you.  Epithets are meant to be engraved on ponies' stones, not on their faces.”

        She paced over limply towards a lone laboratory table and slumped down against it.  She nuzzled her snout tiredly into a pair of folded hooves.  “What use is any of that now?”  She gazed up pathetically at the burnt diagram of the past and future on the cave wall, jaded lines plastered to an encircled 'X'.  “I blew it, Spike.  The first trip back in time, and I've blown my cover.  I've made a mess of everything.”

        “I wouldn't be so certain of that,” he said in a slight smile, shuffling across the room.  “Yes, a mess you indeed made.  But you've hardly ruined things.”

        “Oh really?!”  She tilted her gaze up at him, frowning.  “So terrorizing a classroom full of young children doesn't qualify as 'ruining things'?  You've spent waaaaay too many centuries inside a mountain, Spike.”

        “Like a good lab assistant, I've done my homework,” the elder dragon remarked as he thumbed his clawed fingers through a shelf of parchments.  Finally, he pulled out a rolled-up scroll that resembled a flake of scrap paper in his monstrous palm.  Marching back on scaled legs, he knelt down and placed the document before her.  “While all things living have died in the hovels of Ponyville, the legacy they have left behind remains remarkably in tact, including the most inane bits of data that one with enough free time can scrounge up from the ruins of—oh, say—the Ponyvillean Police Department Records.”

        She raised an eyebrow at him.  Curiously, she slid the scroll towards herself, unsealed it, and stretched the quarter-century-old document open.  Her scarlet eyes sashayed down the rows of neatly scribbled words, and her optics brightened at the end of the perusal.  Her jaw dropped as she murmured:  “The report talks about a 'deranged pegasus' that was escorted to the jail cell for immediate psychiatric evaluation following an incident at Ms. Cheerilee's schoolhouse.  But as soon as the officers sent for the village nurse—The suspect disappeared...”  She blinked into the stone extremities of the cavernous lair.  “Spike, that 'deranged suspect' was me.”

        “An apt description, I would imagine,” he chuckled softly.

        “You... You knew about this?”  She squinted up at him.

        He innocently smoothed his green neckcrests back.  “I suspected it.  It wouldn't be the first occasion that I've witnessed time perform a perfect full circle before my eyes.  So it's hardly of any surprise to me.  If anything, it should be something of consolation for the two of us.”  He pointed with a clawed finger.  “Does it say anything about the fate of that certain pegasus?  Hmm?”

        Scootaloo glanced once more at the document, her scarlet eyes narrowing.  She murmured aloud:  “'Cheerilee and a few students were interviewed to compile a list of details to describe the suspect, but no matches were found in the immediate search.  Within two weeks, Sheriff Goldmane decided the case did not warrant wanted posters--',” she made a face.  “The heck—I thought I traumatized those kids!”

        “Do not be so quick to demonize yourself, child,” Spike said.  “If I recall correctly, Cheerilee's schoolhouse was no stranger to bizarre incidents.  In one winter month alone, the windows had to be replaced on three separate occasions from a single wayward postal deliverer flying far too low for pegasus standards.  You must realize, what made life in Ponyville exciting is far different from what makes existence in the Wastes exciting,” he smiled slyly.

        “Do...uh...” she gulped, sliding the scroll back towards him.  “Do you have any more written evidences of my time traveling self in your 'library', Spike?”

        He took the scroll, shaking his scaled snout with a dangle of his violet pendant.  “Negative.  But, if you ask me, that can only be a marvelous thing.”

        “Why's that?”

        “Because it means you'll be following my advice!” he grinned serratedly, shelving the scroll away and closing the cabinet drawers.  “And the next time you go to the past, you will try to do things with subtlety.”

        She blinked, eyes wide.  “Y-You're sending me back?  Right now?  Right after I just made a mule out of myself?”

        “Oh, I could very well send you soon,” Spike nodded.  “But it won't be so soon in the past.”  He marched over towards another cabinet and picked up a lead metal box in his clawed hands.  “For the sake of caution, I plan to send you a month after your—mmm—'Cheerilee incident'.”

        “So it will be three months before the Cataclysm,” Scootaloo remarked.  Her eyes narrowed knowingly on the purple dragon.  “You planned this from the beginning, didn't you?  Ms. Cheerilee was a test!”

        “Indeed,” he nodded, shuffling over on iron haunches with the box in his grasp.  He placed it down onto the lab table just above Scootaloo.  “And where you'll be going next, you'll be facing another test, a test of your tenacity for blending in with the world, a test of your ability to adopt a face and a name—and even a backstory.  Because where you'll be going, your strength in finding truth will inevitably go through the crucible of bending it.”

        “Something tells me you're not stressing where you'll be sending me as much as who you'll sending me to,” she muttered, standing up alongside him and glancing briefly at the box.  “Is this someone's elses ashes?”

        “No, Scootaloo.  I do not have the ashes for whom we both seek.”

        “Y-You don't?”  Scootaloo blinked.  “H-How come?”

        “Though I may be the master of time travel,” he spoke as he undid the lock to the lead box and opened it with a rusted creak.  “I am anything but the Wasteland's chief scavenger.”  He reached into the box and pulled out several necklaces tied to tiny white shards of calcium.  “If you are truly committed to this experiment, Scootaloo, and if you are willing to go the lengths required to avoid an incident like what happened with Ms. Cheerilee from henceforth, then it will be up to you to find the lasting ingredients.”

        “How come everything is a test with you?” she smirked briefly up at him.  The pegasus then motioned her snout towards the shards dangling in the dragon's grasp.  “What are these?”

        “Baby dragon teeth, renown for their sensitivity to enchantment.”

        “Whose dragon teeth?”  Scootaloo blinked, then rolled her scarlet eyes.  “Lemme guess...”

        “Mine, of course,” he smiled, then melted his expression into a neutral sigh as he uttered, “I've stored them centuries ago for such a time when they could be of supreme use, and—alas—that moment has come.”  He danced the dangling tooths between his scaled fingers as they glistened in the purple mana lanterns lining the cavern.  “Each of them is attuned to a different soul, the soul of a pony who I knew in the past, and who I can anchor your soul essence to.  With these enchanted teeth, you can find the remains of our former friends among the Wastes of Equestria.  And once you do...”

        “...I'll have their ashes,” Scootaloo gulped.  “The ashes we need to perform the binding.”  She looked sadly up at the dragon.  “Spike—Why didn't you warn me about Cheerilee's remains before you sent me back?”

        His nostrils fumed somberly.  “I suspected it may have made you reticent to make the necessary first step.”

        “You can't protect me forever, Spike.”

        “A truth that I acknowledge whole-heartedly,” he nodded, then handed her a single dragon's tooth on an orange string.  “Which is why I believe you are completely and fully ready for performing this search; as it will prepare you for the next chronal leap at hoof.”

        She hung the orange-tinted tooth before her eyes, squinting at it.  “How do you know it'll work with me—The tooth that is?”

        “The same way I'm able to send you into the past beyond the Cataclysm while I myself cannot go that far,” he said with a faint, knowing smirk.  “The soul essence of ponies is the heart of the enchantment.  The dragon tooth will be able to take you straight to the target's remains, while it will be completely dull to me, even if the fang itself came from my whelpish body.”

        She stared intently at tooth, sweating.  “I... I-I'm not sensing a thing, Spike.”

        “Shhhh,” he exhaled calmly.  “Relax, child.  Do not stress—Only feel.”

        She took a deep breath.  She held the dangling tooth close to her heart and closed her eyes.  Through solid inhales, she tried to form a picture in her mind.  What she got instead was a scent—The fragrance of dry barn hay, of rich soil and dirt, of rusted plows and wooden yokes and rows upon rows of delicious red fruit—And then a panorama of luscious green trees flickered through her shut eyelids, and when she snapped her scarlet optics open, they were dilating under the persistent weight of truth.

        “Applejack.”

        Waves of gnarled skeletons swam out of the gray mist in droves, hundreds upon hundreds of gnarled black branches, charred into soot and cinders by the flames of the Cataclysm.  The leathery flakes of dead fruit hung off them as they came closer into view, their trunks hollowed out by the decay in time.  The soil between the lifeless trees had been blasted away to barren rock, with black powder randomly cycloning above the sterile landscape like brief spurts of volcanic ash, and then settling once more into the perpetual silence of the dead acres.

        Scootaloo leveled her descent and pushed at her cockpit levers, keeping the Harmony at a steady altitude as she skimmed the surface of the singed groves.  Her goggled gaze narrowed in on an opening in the wasteland where the gnarled branches parted ways for a few dozen meters.  Deciding it was the best location, she slowed the airship's speed and drifted the craft until it was nearly touching one large tree standing darkly above the rest.  When she attempted to extend the port-side claw towards it, however, the petrified stalk crumbled to ashes.  Sighing, she engaged the stabilizers, put the vessel into a permanent hover, and exited through the hangar's aperture.

        After twenty minutes of prolonged effort, she managed to moor the levitating vessel with four chains stabbed into separate black stumps.  Meekly satisfied with the anchorage, she gathered the rest of her equipment and stepped forward from the parked craft, heading southwest.  In mid trot, the last pegasus raised the baby dragon's tooth up to her goggles.  It hung from her neck by an orange string, and as her face stared closely at it, she felt a gentle aura pointing her forward and slightly toward the left.

        She marched appropriately, following the enchanted shard's cue.  On either side of her, petrified apple trees slunched over like rows of bound corpses, their limbs flaking off into ash even as she passed underneath them.  The stony earth was splotched every now and then with feathery-white scrapes, the quarter-century old effigies of fallen songbirds.  There was a sterile smell about this part of the wasteland, something deader than dead that permeated the shifting white mists that twirled tornadically through the hollow groves.  Even the giant mushrooms refused to leech off the petrified acres.

        At last, the ground gave way beneath her in a clawed slope, as if a huge canyon had been gouged suddenly through the belly of Equestria.  Scootaloo swiftly discovered the reason for the parting in the trees that allowed her to moor the Harmony so close to her destination; the mists cleared briefly to reveal that a gigantic sinkhole had consumed the heart of Sweet Apple Acres, reducing the land into a gaping hole full of gravel and shifting soot.  The upended bodies of long-dead fruit trees blanketed the open grave, their twisted roots scratching eternally at the gray fog.

        With a somber breath, Scootaloo took wing, her pegasus feathers flying her through the bitter cold winds as she hovered steadily over the inexplicable ravine yawning beneath her.  On either side of the trench petrified apple trees leaned inward at awkward angles, some of them looking as though they could fall into the jaws of the earth at any second, others having done just that over the past two decades.  Below her, bits and pieces of a faded red barn rested in splintery bits like a smashed coffin.  In the center of it all, a lone and rusted weather-vane spun its rooster crests squeakily in the endless gusts.

        In mid-flight, Scootaloo glanced once more at her toothy necklace.  The infantile dragon-matter was pointing her forwards, filling her senses with a nauseatingly sweet aroma of yesteryear.  Fighting a sudden chill, she glanced up and adjusted her goggles in time to spot a break in the mist.  The southern end of the sinkhole appeared in a sudden bluff, and hanging off its edges—barely intact—was the rickety wooden shell of the Apple Family's farmhouse.  It leaned sickly on its haunches, the upper floors having sagged several meters into its lower foundation as the whole thing leaned crunchingly northward.  A few paces to the east, a gazebo leaned precariously on the edge of the sinkhole, half of its floorboards having long fallen into the abyss.  A brown wooden fence dangled like an exposed bone in a similar fashion, and the hollow ribcages of pigs formed a pile beside a line of troughs overflowing with ashes.

        The last pegasus touched down on even ground.  She gasped to feel a chunk of black soil crumbling behind her and rolling its way down the cliffside of the ravine.  Recovering her senses, she slowly trotted around the edge of the house, her eyes peering through amber goggles for the one thing she did not want to see.  The dragon tooth urged her on, riding the pulsating throbs of her heartbeat, angling her hooves so that she rounded the last corner of the crumpled house—And stopped in a vibrating hum.

        A breath left Scootaloo.  Before her was the double-doored entrance to the Apple Family's storm shelter.  The entrance was closed with rickety wooden panels; and lying broadly across the foundation—its broad girth adding weight to the flimsy barrier—was the hulking skeleton of an enormous, broad-shouldered stallion.  Braced around the corpse's neckline was a mold-strewn wooden yoke, with rusted iron spikes penetrating the body of the mechanism.  The entirety of the colt's body was pressed to the door, its jaws turned aside with teeth forever biting into the finish.  Judging from closer inspection, the metal hinges of the storm cellar's door appeared to have been shattered loose.  The pony must have done all it could to keep the door shut, right up to the bitter burning end.

        With a somber exhale, Scootaloo trotted over and began nudging the body with her snout.  It wouldn't move.  She snarled, struggled, and strained with all of her experienced might, but even then it took her several minutes to finally disentangle the stallion's skeleton from its diligent post.  With the bones free, she effortlessly opened one door, only to watch both brittle panels crumble from their hinges.  A loud echo of splinters emanated from the pitch-black cellar stairway below, and then all was once more silence and mist.

        Slowly, Scootaloo descended the steps, lighting the yoke of lanterns around her shaved mane.  The cellar turned into a hollow tube of bouncing shadows as she scaled the steps.  Trotting down onto even floors, the pegasus navigated a forest of cobwebs and skittering little creatures.  She slowed to a shuffle, shining her halo of light left and right across the claustrophobic chamber of dust.  In one corner, a pile of decayed foodstuffs lingered in a mountain of soot and rat droppings.  In the opposite corner, a wave of earth had broken through the brick-laid walls and filled the room with the black dust of the sinkhole.  And in yet another corner—

        The dragon's tooth strobed once and was dead.  Scootaloo's eyes twitched, perhaps in an attempt to erase the image in her mind before it could be committed to memory.  Bravely, she stepped forward and knelt down besides a pile of three bodies, three separate skeletons of completely different make, all huddled together in an embrace of crooked limbs and ratty hooves.  One body was a mare of exceeding age with jagged joints and brittle marrow.  A second was a tiny foal with next to no muscle mass.  And the third...

        The skull was obscured by a circular halo of tattered brown felt, moth-eaten along the brim and laced with spiderwebs.  It took Scootaloo a few shivering seconds to move the hat before she was staring into the spaces of two hollow sockets that suddenly seemed livelier than her own.  In a strange breath of courage, she gulped and murmured:  “Hey, AJ.”  A brief beat; the sterile air of the room closed in around her, and she fought back the last drop of hesitance.  “N-No hard feelings.”

        That uttered, she produced a brass blade from her saddlebag, aimed it at the skeleton's spine, and began sawing.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Scootaloo marched back up the rows of dead orchards, her face blank, her saddlebag hanging a little heavier from her flanks.  The mist cleared as she reached the Harmony.  But just as she flew up to the aperture entrance of its hangar bay, murmuring to the runestones to unlock—She froze.  Her gaze was aimed westward, just beyond a line of dead trees that curved in a direction opposite of the rest of the singed Acres.  Her heart was pounding anew, but this time the dragon tooth was no longer strobing, for she had already acquired what she had come there for.  Or at least, she almost had, Scootaloo suddenly realized.

        Removing the saddlebag completely from her brown backside, she slid the thing a few meters into the safety of the hangar bay, floated back out, and commanded the runes in the door to seal the ship tight.  She soared through the mists and touched down swiftly, trotting west from the moored Harmony, and piercing the line of awkward trees.

        A few branches hung low, along with thorny brambles that dipped at eye-level.  She pushed these clusters of dead vines away with medium effort, ducking low past a couple of gnarled limbs, and climbing over a heap of charred earth, until she finally came upon a clearing... and saw it.

        Immediately, she raised her goggles and exposed two pained scarlet eyes, staring in disbelief at the sight before her.  In a ghostlike trance, Scootaloo trotted forward into the company of a blistered wooden building, propped precariously two and a half meters from the ground in the cradled limbs of a burnt apple tree.  The clubhouse was remarkably intact, a feat it had rarely ever accomplished even in the years before the Cataclysm.  Its shingles were peeling and its windowpane had long fallen off in a heap; but the four walls were still carrying the weight of the tiny building, and the roof provided a dark shade from the blinking gray twilight above.

        With a lump in her throat, Scootaloo numbly approached the careening plank that formed a walkway up to the balcony of the clubhouse.  But with so much as one hoof placed down onto the wooden beam, the entire platform crunched into a belated pile of splinters.  She didn't gasp, as her somberness greatly outweighed her shock.  An exhale, and with wings that wouldn't possibly have lifted her when she was a foal, the pegasus effortlessly levitated herself to the balcony in a single bound.  The floorboards creaked and wheezed dustily under her weight as she sauntered into the hollow of the shack.

        The interior was nightmarishly quiet, like being inside a concrete block drowned in the center of the earth.  She couldn't have asked for anything more; she gazed silently as her eyes traveled the lengths of the room, observing tattered brown flakes of paper plastered to the walls, indecipherable illustrations of  crusaders from an age long gone, of dreams long woken up from, of friends long dead.  The floor was a sea of dust, with her fresh hoof prints looking bizarrely large to the scale of her wheezing recollection.  The place had a smell to it that brought Scootaloo instantly back to nights of songs, crickets, and fireflies dancing in the moonlight.  She ever so briefly wanted to scream.

        She was about to turn around when a glint of twilight shimmered off of something in the corner.  Turning in a blink, the adult pegasus narrowed her eyes and trotted over until something took form in the penumbra of gray dimness wafting in from the crumbled windowpanes.  The breath that left her was a wilting one, and she all but collapsed to her knees, her lower hooves folding numbly under her weight.  She shuffled two forelegs and shifted something out of a pile of dust, something long and weighted, something glisteningly sublime.  Its handlebars shone like polished cherries in the deep miasma of the doubly-dead world; its bent wheels squeaked like confused newborns that reflected her aged face.

        Scootaloo could no longer contain it.  She buckled, silently cradling the object in her lap, as she hung her head to the cadence of a haunting chorus in her lonesome ears.

        A young pegasus twisted the wrench around the spokes of her scooter's wheels, finally tightening them with expert craftsponyship.  Scootaloo tossed the wrench into a saddlebag resting against the log she was sitting on and spun the wheels for good measure.  They practically sung on their axes, a tell-tale sign that they would glide right for her over the next week of speeding across Ponyville.  Smirking, the winged foal gazed up across the flickering campfire as an orange-coated mare finished her exciting tale before the attendance of four other sets of ears.

        “And it was right at that moment, when the elements of Harmony were lyin' all shattered on the stone floor of the abandoned temple, that Nightmare Moon was fixin' to make true to her threat of Eternal Night.  When what would happen; but the five girls and I reunited with Twilight, and in her eyes there was a spark—a magical spark!  And wouldn't y'all know it?  She taught us right there and then that the true Elements of Harmony were restin' inside of us the whole time!  And all we really needed to defeat Nightmare Moon was our companionship, a joinin' of hooves if yer will.  In a heapin' flash of colors, these purdy sparklin' jewels formed on our necks, and a solid beam'o'rainbow light soared straight at Nightmare Moon, lassoin' her up like a startled hog, and purged Princess Luna of all the nastiness that had clouded the poor Alicorn's soul for a thousand long years!”

        “Coooooool,” Sweetie Bell and Apple Bloom cooed as one.  They squatted side by side with sparkling eyes lit alive by the night-laced electricity of Applejack's story.  A campfire crackled in the center of a crater of wooden logs, nestled in the front yard of the Apple Family's farmhouse under a purple curtain of twinkling stars.

        “I had no idea Nightmare Moon was defeated like that!”  Sweetie Bell beamed, balancing a roasted marshmallow on the end of a stick.  “I always thought that night was a whole lot scarier!”

        “Oh darling, of course it was a dreadful event up until that penultimate moment of victory!”  Rarity's operatic voice announced her presence.  The fashionista sat on a velvet pillow that she had hauled over to Sweet Apple Acres.  The ivory unicorn nibbled delicately on a silver platter of marshmallow bits, all the while regaling her younger sibling, “There were phantom pegasi, ghoulish trees, a raging manticore, and a most horribly distraught lake serpent!  If Twilight Sparkle hadn't had her mystical moment of sudden epiphany, I'm afraid your older sister and all of her companions would be rotting away in some unsavory dungeon made of moonrocks!”

        “Hey!”  Applejack briefly frowned.  “Were you tellin' this here story or was I?”

        “Please, Applejack,” Rarity smiled with fluttering blue eyes across the embers.  “Far be it from me to detract from your rightful place in the limelight, but your recollection of that night's events could surely use a bit more dramatic flare and suspension of disbelief!”

        “I reckon I told it just fine!  It's getting' late; so shoot me for not wantin' to scare the fillies something fierce!”  She upturned her snout, juggled a few marshmallows into her mouth, and downed them in a gulp.  “Mmmm—Besides, if I handed the reins of the story to you, the whole lotta of us woulda been put to sleep by you gabbin' forever about how plum dumbstruck yer were by them necklaces we were sportin'!”

        “But they were the most splendid pieces of jewelry, as if they were carved in the dawn of the First Age itself!—(Sweetie Bell, chew with your mouth closed, dear.  There's a good lady.)—Ahem.  But you were quite accurate towards the end, Applejack.  I'll give you that much merit.”

        “Did a rainbow really lasso up that nasty Nightmare Moon, sis?”  Apple Bloom blinked over twin sticks of marshmallows.

        “Heh heh!  That's right!  Slapped the gloominess square off her noggin'!”

        Young Scootaloo raspberried.  “How in the heck can a rainbow smack around a pony?”  She spun the wheels on the scooter she was examining and smirked.  “Much less a friggin' dark moon goddess come to enslave us all?”

        “It's not so much that the rainbow throttled Nightmare Moon within an inch of her life, but rather—”  Rarity began, but at the sound of an orange mare's throat viciously clearing, she shifted nervously on her pillow and smiled.  “R-Right.  Do carry on, Applejack.”

        “Ahem.  Much obliged,” she turned and gazed with soft green eyes Scootaloo's way.  “Y'all must realize that a rainbow means a lot more than just a fancy blendin' of lights—or whatever it is that they're teachin' you in them textbooks these days.  Nah, Rainbows are symbols of hope, of when good friends come together and make magic happen.  That's exactly what took place when the elements of Harmony came together with the six of us.  The fact that it produced a rainbow was just... just... erm—”

        “A matter of ironic theatrics,” Rarity said, smiling between marshmallow nibbles.

        Applejack grumbled into a mouthful of sugary dough.  “Mmmf... Showoff...”

        “Well, I think it's a great story!”  Apple Bloom positively squealed.  “Y'all were so brave, especially you, Sis!”

        “Awww, shucks, Apple Bloom.  Yer makin' me blush.”

        “Pffft—Of course she'd root for her sister the whole time!”  Sweetie Bell rolled her eyes.

        Apple Bloom stuck her tongue out at the unicorn.  “So what if I did!  Yer just bummed cuz AJ saved Twilight Sparkle from fallin' off a cliff and all yer sister did was dress up a giant snake!”

        “Hey!  She was showing generosity!  Go choke on a marshmallow!”

        “I would if I could somehow swallow ya!”

        “Girls—Girls!” Rarity tsk'd-tsk'd.  “Now what's so 'harmonious' about this kind of an attitude?  Why—Applejack, myself, and the rest of us would never have defeated Nightmare Moon if we carried on with such awful bickering!”

        “You're riiiiight,” Sweetie Bell sighed, shifted where she sat on her log and mumbled, “I'm sorryyyyy, Apple Bloom.”

        “Me too, Sweetie Bell,” Apple Bloom smiled sweetly at her.  “I think we both should be happy that we have such brave sisters.”

        “And such delicious marshmallows!”  Sweetie Bell's eyes twinkled as she beamed across the campfire at Scootaloo.  “Thanks for fetching these, Scootaloo!”

        “Yeah, thanks, girl!” Apple Bloom giggled.  “They really make a bonfire worth gatherin' wood for!”

        “Hey—It's my pleasure,” Scootaloo smirked rosily.  “Figured it'd be a crime to listen to an awesome story over a fire without something to snack on!”

        “Well I whole-heartedly agree; they are a finer delicacy than I normally give them credit for,” Rarity winked.  “Wherever did you purchase them from?”

        “Ohhh—Sugarcube Corner.  Mr. Cake makes them himself.  Not even the candy stores in Canterlot make 'em as tasty, I'm willing to bet.”

        “Ain't you gonna have a bite yerself, kiddo?” Applejack murmured through a mouthful.

        “Y-Yeah, Scootaloo!”  Apple Bloom guiltily frowned.  “We don't wanna be hoggin' them all!”

        “Pffft—I got them all for you to enjoy, so enjoy them!”  She leaned her scooter on the log next to her bag and reclined back.  “Besides, I get all the marshmallows I could ever want.”

        “Really?”

        “My parents give me this craaaaaazy awesome allowance,” Scootaloo rolled her violet eyes.  “Seriously—With all the nights my dad works to bring home the bits, I'm spoiled rotten!”

        “That makes the four of us,” Rarity hummed after another bite and cleaned her empty plate off daintily.  “Mmm—That reminds me.  Applejack, did you hear that Twilight Sparkle has begun a book of memoirs?”

        “A book of what-now?”

        “A collection of all her experiences in Ponyville as written from a first-pony perspective!”  Rarity smiled.  “It's been almost six months since she arrived in town, and she's already been inspired to write a personal summary of all her letters to Princess Celestia.  She regaled me about it this afternoon over brunch.  I think it's a positively splendid idea.”

        “Yer don't say.  What's she fixin' to name this thang?”

        “The Harmony Chronicles.  It has a nice ring to it, don't you think?”

        “Ugh—!”  Scootaloo clopped her hooves briefly against her forehead and cackled, “Seriously—What's the whole big deal about 'harmony'?  Not that your stories aren't awesome or what-not, but everyone uses that word like a social disease!”

        Applejack spat and choked briefly on a chunk of marshmallows as Apple Bloom blinked innocently.

        Sweetie Bell glanced crookedly up at her sister.  “Rare?  What's a 'social disease'?”

        “Erm—(I-I'll tell you when it's time to buy you a bridle, dear),” Rarity stammered and smiled nervously Scootaloo's way.  “Ahem—Colorful metaphors aside, Scootaloo, 'harmony' is the essence of friendship, at least when it comes to Applejack, myself, and our little circle of fillies.”

        “So that's all it is?”  Scootaloo raised a vexed eyebrow.  “Just a bunch of racket about 'friendship'?”

        “It's more than that, sugarcube,” Applejack remarked.  She cleared her throat with a gulp of apple cider, exhaled, and smiled the filly pegasus' way.  “'Harmony' means bein' at peace with yerself, as well as with those around you.  It's about finding that magical place in yer heart where you're no longer afraid of the little things—or the big things in life, cuz you've got everythang all together-like.”

        “So only when you have friends do you get to experience 'harmony'?”  Scootaloo made a face.

        “Mmm—Not necessarily, I suppose,” Applejack thought aloud, then smiled.  “I reckon even solitary ponies can be at peace with themselves.  Every soul floats through life a slightly different way, but the difference between those who are harmonious and those who are not is that the ones with harmony feel like they don't have to stress the weight of the world, because they can manage things just fine.  I reckon you could say 'harmony' is like a state of being.  It's like... It's like...”

        “It's like never being lost!”  Sweetie Bell hopped in her seat.  “It's like being at home, no matter where you are!”

        Scootaloo blinked jerkedly the young unicorn's way.  Her breath left her under a faltering heartbeat as her violet eyes wilted briefly towards the firelit earth.

        “Y'know what—That's a plum good way of puttin' it,” Applejack smiled.  “Kudos to you, Rarity, for polishin' your little sister's head up just right with them homeschool courses!”

        “H-Hey!” Apple Bloom barked, “I'm bright too!”

        “Of course yer are, darlin'.  Just don't be shocked when yer my age and you discover that bein' literate don't get no apples down from the trees!”

        “Pffft—Maybe I'll just move in with Aunt and Uncle Orange!”

        “Ha!  The day you do that is the day I grow a mule out my left ear!”

        Sweetie Bell and Rarity giggled at that.  Apple Bloom helplessly joined their cadence as the campfire crackled to a sudden dimness, so that the blue-maned fashionista suddenly sauntered up to her hooves and exclaimed, “Well, it has gotten exceedingly late, and I have many silk supplies to pick up from the next Trottingham shipment in the morning.  Sweetie Bell, honey, it is high time that we headed our way back home.”

        “Awwwwww—But can't we stay just a little bit longer?”

        “It's been fun, Sweetie Bell, but we have a strict lesson plan tomorrow and I shan't fail at my responsibilities to your future!”

        “What's so great about my future?  The next research assignment is about some dumb old fossils!”

        “Those aren't just dumb fossils!  They're the excavated remains of the Second Age's Lunar Dynasty—only the most influential designers of earth pony wear in millennia—Nnngh--Ahem, we shall talk about it in the morning.”

        “Yessssss, sissss,” Sweetie Bell sighed, finished the last of her marshmallows, and smiled Apple Bloom's way.  “Thanks so much for inviting us over!  I do hope we get to do it again sometime!”

        “I would love that!  So long as my sister and I still have wood to burn!”

        “Heh,” Applejack stood up and stretched.  “I'm kinda fancyin' this sort of communion myself, to be perfectly honest.”

        “And you always are honest, dear,” Rarity winked at her, then glanced Scootaloo's way.  “Scootaloo, darling, would you like us to walk you home?”

        The orange-coated pegasus snapped out of her stupor.  She looked up with a practiced grin.  “Hmm—Ohhh, nah.  That's awfully nice of you, Lady Rarity, but I'll be fine.”

        “Are you sure?  How in heaven's name do you manage to get around on that device at such dark hours of the evening?”

        Scootaloo stood up and kicked the edge of her scooter so that it dramatically bounced up, unfolded, and propped itself under her hoof.  “It's nature!  All pegasi have a built-in radar they use to navigate the world like homing pigeons.  'Wing sense'.”  She winked.  “Look it up!”

        “Well, if you insist, but the offer still remains.”  Rarity shouldered her pillow like a saddle and trotted off with her foalish sibling.  “Come along, Sweetie Bell.  Stay by my side.”

        “So long, Apple Bloom!  Scootaloo!  AJ!”

        “Bye Bye, Sweetie Bell!”

        “Y'all stay safe!  Don't walk into the Everfree Forest or nothin' goofy-like!”

        “Applejack!—What do you take me for, a plowhorse?  I certainly know my way home!”

        “Just don't get yer horn rammed into a tree!”

        “Oh puh-leeeease!”

        “Heh heh heh.”

        Scootaloo watched with a forlorn muteness as the party dissipated.  She liquidly mounted her scooter, wincing slightly as a deep bass sound obscenely emanated from her belly.  She hid it with a loud clearing of her throat.  A shadow before the campfire wafted over her.  She glanced up, blinking.

        Applejack smiled down at her.  “Yer sure we can't walk ya home?  I hate to think your parents fancy the Apple family to be irresponsible with their guests!”

        “Believe me—They rather not bother anypony this time of night,” Scootaloo grinned slyly.  “Besides, Mom's probably trying to sleep, and Dad's reading his latest issue of Equestria Daily.  They know I can look after myself.”  She bit her lip, her eyes glancing over a barrel just a few meters beyond the penumbra of the crackling fire.  A sparkling horde of delicious apples lingered from the latest harvest.  Scootaloo swiftly wrenched her gaze off and resumed smirking.  “It's the pegasus way, y'know.”

        “Mmmm... I reckon,” Applejack muttered, but she tactfully followed the line of Scootaloo's sight.  “But the leash I can do is offer a token of Apple Family hospitality.”  She then trotted over to the barrel, lowered her hat, grabbed three whole apples, and deposited the three of them into the little pegasus' bag.  “There ya go—Something for yer family to munch on.”

        Scootaloo gasped, “Oh AJ—I couldn't!  Besides, I spent all of my allowance on those marshmallows and—”

        “Oh go soak yer head!”  Applejack rolled her eyes and stuck her cowgirl hat back on.  “It's a gift, sugarcube!  Compliments of a family that appreciates yer good manners and friendship.”

        “Yeah!  Besides, those marshmallows were delicious!”  Apple Bloom trotted up, beaming.

        Scootaloo gulped, her face hidden in the shadows of the dying fire, so that the weakness of her smile was barely noticeable.  “Well... uh... I guess I could convince Mom and Dad to have these as dessert tomorrow night.”  She sealed the bag of apples and tools and slung it all over her shoulder.  “Th-Thank you.  Thank you very much.”

        “Mmmm--'Dessert',” Applejack thought aloud as she sauntered over towards the other end of the yard.  “Now there's a lick of sense—Focus more on advertising Apple Fritters and less on Apple Cider.  Especially with the holidays comin' around, that would positively roll in the bits!”

        Apple Bloom shook her head with a smile and trotted over, momentarily nuzzling Scootaloo.  “Stay safe, Scoots.  I'll see ya tomorrow, ya hear?”

        “Y-Yeah...” the filly pegasus strapped her helmet on and gripped her scooter.  She smirked at the hairbowed earth pony.  “Try not to wet your bed, Miss Cider!”

        “Try not to lay an egg, chicken!”

        “Ba-COCCK!—Eat my feathers!”  Scootaloo winked and blazed a trail down the stretch of night-kissed orchards, her wings beating her forward atop the scooter.  She rounded the hills overlooking Sweet Apple Acres, then took a sudden east turn and ascended a rise in earth bordering the Southern Forest.  There—she paused, and glanced down breathlessly towards the distant farmhouse of the Apple Family.

        The campfire sputtered and sparkled for a few lingering minutes, until the shadow of an orange pony finally extinguished it in a puff of gray mist that floated towards the heavens, dissipating against the purple haze of the Milky Way.  Two sisterly shapes sauntered up to the front door of the farmhouse, and in a matter of minutes every light in the building turned black.

        Scootaloo lingered there, leaning her upper body over the handles of her scooter in a melancholic slump.  Her curved eyes focused long and hard on the dark outline of the humble home, until the crickets hovering about the line of trees behind her dragged her back to the dark heartbeat of the moment.  She exhaled a weathered breath, spun about, and pushed her scooter into the forest, piercing the trees with the sluggish charm of a flightless bird.

        Less than an hour later, she arrived at a dark shape that lay in a heap at the center of a forested clearing.  It was the structure of a barn, constructed uncountable years before the colony that would become Ponyville spread north into the open riverbed beyond the trees.  The wooden beams and support struts of the barn were in decent shape—decent enough not to collapse at any given moment.  Scootaloo pedaled her way inside, skidded to an unenthusiastic stop, and propped her scooter up against an abandoned stable.  With flickering orange wings, she climbed a wooden ladder up to the loft of the splintery-roofed barn, where a month-old spread of crinkled hay and a tattered canvass sheet served as a bed.  She reached into a cluster of straw and uncovered a hidden suitcase, inside which were several basic necessities and mechanical tools, mostly crafted by the filly herself.  She opened her bag and produced the three apples, watching as they glistened in the purple starlight filtering down from the cosmos, unsurprised at a pair of reflected violets that watered half as much as her mouth did that very moment.

        She stuck two of the apples safely into the suitcase.  The third apple, she eagerly devoured, savoring her first meal in nearly two days.  The other fruits would have to be conserved over the course of the week, long after the lonely night had taken its course, long after she had tossed and turned in the straw under a futile search for sleep, long after the tears had redoubled—as they always did under the moonlight—but this time pondering a new question, a question that ached her head with enough pain to rival the perpetual pit in her stomach.

        Was this 'harmony'?

        “I'm sorry, Scootaloo,” Spike turned and glanced up from where he was reading an old journal of self-scribbled math equations.  “What did you say?”

        “You have a nice home,” the last pegasus remarked.  She sauntered down a series of worn steps from the first level of Twilight's old treehouse and removed her saddlebag.  “It's cozy, it's got everything you need, and it's so nicely decorated.”

        The purple dragon lowered a pair of large crystalline spectacles from his emerald eyes and smiled sagely.  “It is a gaping hole in the ground that I only carved wider with my bare claws a few scant years ago.”

        “Still—It counts for something,” she said, her eyes falling emotionlessly over the shelves of mystical ingredients.  “A long time ago, I came to believe that 'home' is wherever you lay your head.  But even that is a stretch.  I think the only time you're ever home is when you die.”

        Spike shrugged his aged arms.  “You've done well for yourself all these years, if I may say so.  You've always had the Harmony, yes?”

        “Who hasn't?”

        “Indeed.”  A deep fuming breath; he leaned forward with a sincere gaze, his violet pendant twinkling earnestly in the manalight.  “Did you find what you were searching for, Scootaloo?”

        The brown pegasus slumped the dull weight of the saddlebag onto a granite tabletop with a flurry of dust.  “She's here, Spike,” she throated.

        He slowly nodded.  Putting aside his journal, he slithered over and delicately opened the bag before examining its contents.  The pegasus strutted across the laboratory, gazing up at the lengths of the purple-hazed interior as more and more details revealed themselves to her with each passing visit.

        “It wasn't easy at first to sleep in my airship,” she rambled.  “What, with the gray world outside always being the same constant shade of ugliness, no day and no night.  There's no need for a cycle, because everything is so static.  So eventually, you're staying awake all the time, and when you sleep—it's only for pathetically short thirty-minute spurts every eight hours or so.  But then it's not really sleep, is it?  It's more like you're half alive, half awake, half dreaming—I dunno how to describe it.  But when you lie down, you know you're just fooling yourself.  All that matters is your next task, your next tomb raiding, your next run-in with a monster—thinking about all the ways you gotta keep yourself alive to keep yourself alive another dayless day... Heck, even now, I'm not even sure if I'm dreaming or if I'm thinking of dreaming.”

        “Which do you think it is, Scootaloo?”  Spike spoke in an absent minded voice.

        “I'll let you know the soonest I open my eyes,” she said with a bitter smirk.  She turned around.  “Hey, mister Triple Centenarian, do you still bother with sleep?”  Silence.  She blinked.  “Sp-Spike—?”

        “Please, Scootaloo,” the scaled friend murmured in a low voice.  “A moment, if you will.”

        She squinted curiously at him, momentarily numb to his solemnity, until she saw him hoist the hollow pony skull out of the saddlebag and place it gently onto the table.  She clenched her jaw and gazed towards the stone floor, drowning herself in a pool of silence for Spike's sake, and for the sake of another ghost that lingered dustily in the suddenly grave hole that surrounded them all.

        Minutes into the muteness, Spike's clawed finger was gently stroking the hollow at the base of the skull's nostrils.  Scootaloo trotted over as the dragon gulped his scaled throat and murmured, “I do not envy the task that I have set before you, Scootaloo.  It is one thing to know that the necessary ingredients for the green flame's binding are the ashes of our loved ones, but it's another thing altogether to dig them up, something that has been forced upon you no matter how many ways I wish to paint the truth otherwise.”

        “Jee, Spike,” she muttered.  “You're speaking as if I haven't done things as bad if not worse already.”  She pulled her goggles completely off and set them on the table besides the skull whose hollow she was being absorbed in.  “I've pulled things off of bodies.  I've pried teeth loose, sliced horns off of unicorns, carved rings off of fingers—”  She paused in mid confession, her face caught upon the precipice of a wretch as she dove deeper and deeper into the hollow, finding it incredibly hard to flutter her way back.  “...I-I've eaten meat, Spike.  I've murdered creatures in cold blood.  I've robbed from the halls of Princess Celestia and the graves of the innocent.”  She snapped her eyes in a concrete blink and cleared her throat.  “You shouldn't feel bad about sending me to do the unthinkable.  I've lived all my life with the intention that the ends justify the means.  Why should this moment be any different, when we've come this far, when we have an entire Equestria to bring beauty back to... s-somehow...?”

        “Because this isn't just our moment,” the dragon said, gently cradling the equine skull as his tired green eyes studied it like a lost limb.  “This is an entire sunken well of moments, strung together from eternity to eternity—moments that belong to all that has died, and all that will die again, no matter how many times we dive down into the warm currents of the past—Their past.”  He glanced aside at Scootaloo and motioned with his head towards the skull.  “She was having a family reunion when I first saw her.  There were nearly a hundred ponies in the Apple Family, and they treated me, a perfect stranger, like royalty the first moment Twilight and I set hoof on her property.  There was so much bounty—So much pie.  Heheh—Twilight's belly practically bowed from her obligatory indulgence.  I tell you, Scootaloo, there is no earth pony who absolutely loved, took care of, and relished in the fruits of the earth than Applejack.  And what should rightfully be buried in that earth, we must now disturb so that we might ascertain the truth of those last burning moments that only residually belonged to us in the first place.  Believe me when I say this, Scootaloo: this is a brutal irony that I had long hoped to share with myself alone.”

        “Save your apologies for when you've wet the bed, Spike,” Scootaloo blurted.  “Let's just do what needs to be done.”

        “Your impulsiveness for once has a twinge of wisdom to it, old friend,” Spike bowed his head and reached into a cabinet, from which he produced a tool that he proceeded to scrape edges of the skull with, forming a fine dust that he then shuffled into the hollow of a crystal vial.  “I've already prepared the alchemic circles.  You may take your place when you are ready.”

        Scootaloo nodded, stripping off her armor and gear as she sauntered over towards the space of stone floor in question.  “I promise that things will go much better this time, Spike, if not for our sake then for Applejack's.”

        “Of that I have no doubt.”

        “Though—There's one major detail that I'm curious about,” she remarked.

        “Hmmm?”  He finished gathering the necessary dust and planted the skull safely back down onto the tabletop. “And what is that?”

        She made a face, her brown snout scrunching.  “You said my appearance would look different when my soul essence manifested itself in the past....”

        “And did it?”

        “Yes.  I had a completely different coat.  It was—like—a rusted shade of copper.  And then my eyes resembled the colors of my goggles.  And then my hair—”

        “—was a black flowing mane with an amber streak to match the eyes?”  He smiled over his scaled shoulder at her.

        “Er—Yes.”

        “And I imagine, then, that you were also rather surprised to find the most remarkable emblem on your flank,” Spike strolled over towards the threshhold of the next time jump.  He suddenly coughed, hacking up a cloud of fumes that he nonchalantly batted away before stating, “A rather belated cutie mark, if I must say so.”

        “It's like nothing I've ever seen before!” Scootaloo breathlessly stammered.  “And I wasn't the only pony to think that!  Ms. Cheerilee's entire class was gasping at it.  And then she went on and on about how I'm some sort of 'royal member of Canterlot Court' or what-crap.”

        “Well, if I recall—It's a rather pristine solar crest that you are bearing.  And in the center of which is—”

        “—an infinity symbol,” she nodded, glancing once more at the etched cave wall before squinting at him.  “Just how in the heck do you know what it looks like?”

        “Because it isn't just any royal cutie mark,” Spike smiled.  “It is the very same mark worn by Princess Entropa.”

        “The Goddess of Time?”  Scootaloo's eyes twitched.  “But... B-But how is that possible?”

        “Simple—I am threading you back through time via a current of the Goddess' very own essence, yes?”

        “I... guess...?”

        “The way you look, and the way you appear to others, is the result of the fact that your projected self has become an extension of Princess Entropa's glory.  You are, in every sense of the term, made manifest in her image,” he said, then chuckled briefly.  “Though, I imagine, you are hardly an Alicorn.  You still are your own soul, pegasus guile and all.”

        “Huh... That's kind of nifty,” Scootaloo murmured, gazing down at the circles framing her.  “But with the crest and all, it’s like everyone assumes that I'm a servant or clerk of Princess Celestia...”

        “Something that you can take advantage of, no doubt.”

        “How do you mean, Spike?”

        “Simple—Our greatest goal here is for you to make contact with the Goddess of the Sun, yes?”  Spike smirked sideways.  “What better way to do that than to convince the ponies you meet that you are an ambassador visiting abroad on her behalf?”

        “Spike—You should know me by now,” Scootaloo boredly glared.  “The only thing royal about me is the way I burp after a broth of mushroom stew.”

        “Then perhaps you should perfect your fine art of belching,” he leaned broadly over her with the jar.  “You are going to a farmstead where there is much to eat.”

        She gulped.  “I hope to be doing much more than that, Spike.”

        The dragon nodded.  In a solemn tone, he murmured:  “Take care, Scootaloo.  Remember my words of wisdom—But more importantly, latch onto those of your own.”

        “The moment I think them up, I'll consider it,” she said with a lasting smile.  Then she sighed and shut her eyes.  “I-I'm ready.”

        “Very well, child.”  The dragon leaned over, anointing Scootaloo's forehead with the ashes of Applejack.  After the frozen pony's upper coat was succinctly doused, he took a step back, inhaled sharply, and managed in a fuming green breath, “Keep your hooves on the earth.”

        Scootaloo burned while all gravity spun around her.  As she felt her mane grow long and her eyes flicker from scarlet to amber under their lids, she nodded her head and deliriously murmured back to her friend, “I'll do my best.”

        She opened her eyes—and the blue horizon was upside down.

        “WHOAH—”

        She flailed, gasped, and clamored over a bouncing forest of brown branches and bobbing apples.  Green leaves and stems flickered past her lopsided vision, providing a crimson kaleidoscope of hundreds of thousands of dangling fruit across glistening orchards.  Another jolt, and she surged towards the ground for another meter before wedging her body obscenely through two scissoring branches, suspended like an awkward pendulum above a dirt path just beyond hooves' reach.

        “Oh yeah... This is fun,” she hissed, waved her hooves madly, and flailed wild copper wings in the leaf-littered air.  “Nnnnnngh—Ugh!”  She dangled, her amber-streaked hair forming a black flag beneath her twitching ears.  “Hoboy—Well, this couldn't get any worse.

        “There ya are!  I'm gonna rip yer gullet out, yer mangy varmint!”

        “Huh—?”  Scootaloo's dangling head spun and her amber eyes pulsed wide as a trio of serrated metal teeth sliced its way through the air and straight at her snout.  “GAHHH!”

        An orange mare in the glare of the noonday Sun froze in mid lunge, her pitchfork stopping a bare centimeter from the dangling pony's eyeballs.  “What in tarnation—?”  She glanced cockeyed as a red stallion marched up beside her, brandishing a likewise threatening spade in his strong teeth.  “Oh for cryin' out loud!  I thought yer were something else!”

        “You m-mean something other than a crucified pony?” Scootaloo hissed, caught her tongue—then rolled her eyes at herself.  “Ahem—I'm sorry.  My manners—You see, I kinda got stuck here—”

        A loud metallic ring, and the bladed pitchfork was once more vibrating point blank in Scootaloo's face.  “Which would never have happened if you weren't so dag blame'd beant on trespassin' like a freeloadin' mule!  I swear—pegasi think they own the skies!  Well, these here skies happen to be the roof of this land—Our land!  And if ya'll wanna come out of this with slightly less holes poked in ya—Ya better start singin' or Big Macintosh here will really give you something to write home about!”

        The red workhorse nodded, spat out the spade in his teeth, and opened his mouth to say—

        “Don't you worry, Macky.  I've got this,” Apple Jack frowned and poked the winged pony threateningly in the chest.  “Now spit it out!  What were you doin' in our trees?”

        “Yeesh—I don't ever remember you guys being this psycho!”  Scootaloo frowned.  “What gives?  What was this 'something else' you thought I was?”

        “You ain't knowin' nothin' about us because we ain't never met before, smart aleck!”  Applejack scowled.  “Now what's yer name?”

        “Uhhhh...” Scootaloo blinked, helplessly dangling.  “M-My name??”

        “You heard me!  Don't you know it's impolite to ignore a question when it's aimed at y'all?”

        “I... I'm... Uh...” the copper pegasus bit her lip.  She glanced past Applejack's glistening image in the noonlight.  She saw a hauntingly familiar ring of wooden logs lying in front of an upside down farmhouse.  Her amber eyes caught the distant bobbing figure of Granny Smith in a rockingchair.  Besides the deliriously smiling elder was a table, atop of which was a record player—playing faint music, like cello strings, like a lullaby, a hammock, a bobbing homeless home in the gray twilight...

        “Well...?”

        “Harmony...” the last pegasus smiled nervously and stammered the cowgirl's way.  “M-My name is H-Harmony.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Seven – Give to the Earth

Special Thanks to Vimbert - Pre-Reader and Gentlecolt

        “That's a mighty purdy name you've got there, Harmony, but it doesn't do a lick of good excusin' you for poking yer wings through these here apple trees!”

        “H-Hey!  You asked me who I was, didn't you?”  Scootaloo hissed and wiggled, the faces of her two interrogators frowning upside down before her as she dangled from the upper branches of the apple tree.  “Whatever happened to country hospitality anyways?”

        “Y'all must be thinkin' about another country—a country full of hay-brained idiots!”  The orange mare leaned obstinately on her pitch-fork in front of the topsy-turvy pegasus and spat into the ground before slurring, “You think we're stupid?  In these parts, we don't take kindly to wayward leaf rummaging!”

        The time traveler's amber eyes narrowed.  “Did it ever occur to you that I might simply be a visitor?”

        “Front door's thattaway.”  Applejack lethargically pointed a hoof towards the Apple Family farmhouse beyond the red barn.  “But y'all can forget about droppin' in for a cup of tea.  Big Macintosh here and I have lots of work to do and we ain't gonna be makin' no progress on account of random ponies usin' our orchards for landing pads!”

        “I swear, this whole thing was an accident,” Scootaloo confessed in total honesty.  She tongued the inside of her mouth and shot her eyes towards the corners of her sockets in an attempt to scoop up something meatier, yet not nearly as honest.  “I-I'm not all that used to flying around this part of Ponyville!”  Then something half-true, at least:  “I'm a stranger to these parts, you see.”

        The farmfilly's eyes focused on the outsider's face with emerald squinting suspicion.  “I've never known a pegasus this far from Cloudsdale to have so much trouble navigatin' the treetops of Ponyville.  Don't y'all get grilled on a daily basis at them fancy schmancy flight schools of yers?  How could they let a winged pony as loopy as you get herself a diploma?”

        “Jee, I dunno,” Scootaloo frowned, reaching into the back of her blood-pumping mind and producing:  “They've let even loopier ones deliver the mail, haven't they?”

        A deep bass chuckling; the red colt aptly named Big Macintosh snickered before producing a smile and an “Eeeyup.”

        Applejack frowned at him, then gave Scootaloo a haughty glance.  “I swear, even when y'all are on the ground, you pegasi still have yer head in the clouds.”

        “Better than having our heads up something else,” Scootaloo grunted, flailed one last time, and sweated with a dull glare.  “Can somepony let me down now?”

        Applejack rolled her eyes, then whistled at Big Mac.  The colt nodded, marched up, and nudged half of the pegasus' body upwards with the back of his neck.  He then stretched a mighty leg out to half-buck the tree trunk.  The resulting impact expertly shook the black-maned visitor from the forking branches.  She spun in the air with a girlish shriek before being caught effortlessly across Big Mac's backside.  The colt lowered gently to his knees, and she stumbled off of him, reeling with dizzied amber eyes.

        “Ughhh... I've eaten mushrooms all my life, and now I'm seeing stars,” she muttered quietly to herself, shook the cobwebs out of her head, and gazed up at the stallion.  “Thank you very much, Mister—”  Scootaloo stopped in mid-sentence, for she realized that she was... gazing up at a stallion.  Not just any stallion, but a tall and concrete-built workhorse whom the chronologically displaced pony remembered, only none of those memories belonged to a grown mare.  Now, all of her foalish recollections of a softly-spoken, hay-chewing, freckle-faced farmcolt suddenly and frothingly melted under the reality of this razor-chiseled, earth-scented, blonde thoroughbred who was presently towering like a great crimson mountain of masculinity before her.  He blinked at her with quizzical green eyes that melted her to the lonesome core of her suddenly fluttering heart.  “—Mister Big... Mac,” she exhaled, her copper cheeks burning suddenly with an extra rust.

        The stallion's blonde sister rose into view, her frowning freckles occupying the entirety of Scootaloo's flustered eyesight.  “Had yer fill, yet?”

        “I... er... uhm...” Scootaloo gulped, shrinking back slightly towards the trunk of the tree she had been hanging from.  “Please, listen—There was a reason why I came here.”  The filly listened to herself begin, but winced at the thought of finishing it.

        “I reckon ya do—But ain't nothin' to it!  I've said it before and I'll say it again—There's work to be done around here, and the longer we have to deal with ya, the longer it's wastin' our valuable time!”

        “Care to be a little bit more specific?”  Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.  “Maybe if you gave me a chance, I could make it up to you for—y'know—committing the crime of flying into your precious apple orchards.  Or do you wanna keep treating me like a sack of manure?”

        “Don't tempt me!”

        “Why are you so off your rocker to begin with, Applejack?” Scootaloo exclaimed—but suddenly wanted to bite her own tongue off.

        “None of yer beeswax—!”  The orange mare began, then went cockeyed.  “Wait—How'd you know my name?”

        “Uhhh—”

        “Is this one of Rainbow's and Pinkie's pranks?”  She stomped her hooves.  “Gul-durn it!—I don't have time for this horse hockey!”

        Big Macintosh suddenly and explosively cleared his throat.  Catching his irascible sister's attention, the suddenly sweating stallion pointed a nervous hoof towards the edge of Scootaloo's flank.  Applejack took one glance, saw the celestially crested infinity symbol, and instantly covered her gasping mouth with two shaking hooves.

        “Mountains of Elektra!” the blonde mare sputtered, her knees suddenly shaking.  “A servant of the Royal Court of Canterlot ...!”

        “Huh?  Where?”  Scootaloo glanced stupidly around, blinked, then brightened.  “Yes!”  She caught herself, cleared her throat, and struck a haughty pose with her copper neck tilted upwards regally.  “Yes—That's right.  I'm here on official business of Her Majesty, Princess Celestia.  It's an honor to meet you, Applejack and Macintosh.  Your work here at Sweet Apple Acres is...”  She bit her lip momentarily.  “...uhh—Renowned over half of Equestria!”

        “I'm so sorry, Miss Harmony!  I had no idea!”  Applejack all but collapsed in her breathless attempt to placate the still-frazzled pegasus with the fabulous cutie mark.  “All this time, I thought yer were just a fence-hoppin' tramp!  We've had our fair share of monkey business lately around these here parts; it was a total misunderstandin', honest!”

        “And I believe you, Applejack,” Scootaloo smiled warmly, breathing slightly easier as she finally managed to get a hoofhold of the conversation.  “It's obvious that you—uhhh—hold so much pride and responsibility in your family farm.  It's not only natural that you defend it so rigorously, but it's also commendable.”

        Big Mac leaned in and whispered into his sister's ear.  Applejack nodded, gulping.  “Yer right, Macky.  She even talks like one of them fancy Canterlot folks.”  She cleared her throat and adjusted the brim of her hat, smiling nervously.  “What can we do yer for, Miss Harmony, representative of Her Highness?”

        “Well, you can—”  Scootaloo started speaking, but fell off the proverbial cliff of her brain.  She saw the immensity of the wide-stretching apple trees around her, blanketing the horizon.  Her skin sang under the bright glistening sunlight; her amber eyes wilted under the deep blue sky.  Everything around her was so overwhelmingly alive, and there she was under the gun of Applejack's trust, and she suddenly had nothing to deliver.  She floated with a sudden numbness, tangled in the gray webs of her ash-laden mind, and it took several seconds for her to plunge back to the blistering moment, struggling to bring her hooves back down to the earth.  She fell a few centimeters short and hovered in an invisible cloud that ultimately tripped her.  “Actually,” she coughed up the words and chased them awkwardly like a foal prancing after a rubber ball.  “I'm here for a check-up.”

        Macintosh and Applejack exchanged glances.  They squinted as one in the pegasus' direction.  “Ch-Check-up?”

        “You are the prime supplier of Canterlotlian apple goods, yes?”

        “Right as rain, we are!”

        Scootaloo exhaled victoriously at her memory and dove off the platform of it, “Well, the seasons are changing.”  In mid speech, she glanced her amber eyes around at the lushness of the Earth.  It was spring.  “The Summer Sun Celebration will be in three months.”  She looked into their eyes for an adverse reaction; there was none.  So she finished with, “And Her Highness Princess Celestia wants to be sure that there'll be plenty of fruit to go around for the annual event!”

        At this point, however, Applejack's vicious frown was resurfacing.  “Miss Harmony—correct me if I'm wrong—but the Summer Sun Celebration is at Stalliongrad this year, ain't it?”

        Scootaloo blinked, for she had suddenly remembered that.  With the warm breeze and fragrant senses of Sweet Apple Acres wafting around her, the mare's foalish memories bloomed at the surface of her brain.  She recalled several things in order:  a chilling autumn, the village's first successful Winter Wrap-Up, a warm spring, a strange creature falling into the Everfree Forest, sick foals visiting from a nearby rock farm, a horrible storm in the east, the curious absence of Sweetie Bell and her sister Rarity, a Summer Sun Celebration at Ponyville—without Celestia—and then ... Cataclysm.  For the first time in a quarter-of-a-century of navigating the perpetual gray twilight of a dead Equestria, the last living events of the Fourth Age came to her in bitterly blissful clarity.  The Cataclysm had immediately followed the Summer Sun Celebration, almost an exact year after the return of Nightmare Moon.  And here she was, three months until the Apocalypse, and she was stammering to make any sense of herself while a certain blonde farmfilly stared her down.

        “Yes—uhm—the Summer Sun Celebration is in Stalliongrad this year,” Scootaloo struggled to recollect her authoritarian airs.  “But since the marvelous turnout of last year's Celebration in Ponyville, Her Highness Princess Celestia desires to spread the wealth of her most beloved town of earth ponies to the far ends of Equestria.  In short, she would like to take a marvelous bounty of Sweet Apple Acres' fruit with her to Stalliongrad.  But before she can so much as propose that sort of an endeavor, she needs to... uhh ...give your farm a check-up!”

        Applejack raised an irate eyebrow.  “Don'tcha mean 'inspection'?”

        “Sure why not?”  Scootaloo muttered, winced, then said in a stronger voice:  “Y-Yes.  I am... here for the inspection, Her Majesty Princess Celestia's inspection.  So... let's inspect away, shall we?”  She smiled a plastic grin.  “How about them apples, huh?”

        Applejack's eyes were like emerald daggers.  She spat once more into the dirt and grunted her older brother's way.  “Macky, I reckon we have ourselves here a fibber.”

        “Eeyup,” he chirped throatedly with a disbelieving look cast the pegasus' way.

        Scootaloo blinked nervously between the two apple farmers.  “H-Huh...?”

        Applejack trotted towards her with a slow menace.  “This ain't about no cotton-pickin' Summer Sun Celebration, is it?”

        “Uhhh...” the copper-coated visitor stumbled back from her, wincing sheepishly.  “I... guess not...?”

        “It's about why me and Big Macintosh here have been settin' forth on collectin' apples so much sooner than traditional Apple Buck Season....”

        “Uhh... Y-Yes...?”

        “It's about all the commotion that's been botherin' the other farmers who border our Acres at night...”

        “Yes...?”

        “And it's about how last year's Apple Buck Season was a complete ramshackled mess on account of Macky bein' all hurt and me doin' my darnedest to buck all the apples on my lonesome, and how it was a hasty decision on my part that may or may not have led to a bunny rabbit stampede and several counts of food poisonin' in the heart of Ponyville!”

        Scootaloo backed up into a tree, her body scrunching up like a copper accordion as she sweated under Applejack's point-blank glare.  “Uhhh—Eheheh—Yeah.  About all that—”

        “I knew it!”  The orange mare stomped backwards, all but tossing her hat down onto the dirt path being kicked up beneath her.  “You ain't no freeloadin' pegasus!  You're a dang bureaucrat!  And of all the rotten timing—Y'all just have to come snoopin' around my farm this week of all weeks!”

        “I'm not here to snoop, Ms. Applejack!”  Scootaloo blinked and stood up straight, shaking the sweat off her black mane.  “This is just a cordial visit from the Royal Court of Canterlot!”

        “Cordial visit my flank!” Applejack hissed.  “I should expect more trust from the Princess!  Yes, I made a lot mistakes last year, but I turned a new leaf!  And with the help of all my friends—including her faithful student Twilight—I got all of the fruit harvested in time for the end of Apple Buck season!  So I rightly don't see why anypony at Canterlot has to be ridin' my tail this year!  Especially if I'm gettin' stuff done ahead of time!”

        “Miss Applejack, it's an investigation,” Scootaloo exclaimed.  “Not an inquisition.  And if I may be so bold, you two realllllly seem on edge.”  She smiled hopefully.  “Look at this whole thing as an opportunity to get an upper hoof on Apple Buck Season, aside from starting early.  I've only been sent here to help.”

        “If you wanna help,” Applejack spun and leered in front of Scootaloo, “Then get out of our mane!”  A long, deep breath, and Applejack took her hat off and fanned herself.  In a calmer voice:  “Look—Miss Harmony—I mean no direspect to the Princess.  But this is completely unlike her.  For the better part of five years, our farm has supplied Canterlot with all the apples y'all could ever need.  But to suddenly find out that I'm under some investigation—well, it sure don't float my boat nothin' proper.  If the Princess is so gul-durn worried about how I run my farm—then I politefully expect her to send me a written letter through Twilight—like she normally does!  But all of this 'Royal Court of Canterlot' investigation hogwash is angerin' me something fierce!  I don't have time for it, and I don't have time for you.  Now make like an apple tree and buck off!”

        As Applejack marched away in a huff, Scootaloo frowned at her backside.  “Hey!  I may not be Princess Celestia herself—But that doesn't mean you gotta treat me like some pitchfork you accidentally rolled onto this morning!”

        The orange mare paused to blink back at her.  “Like some pitchfork I what-now?”

        “I flew all of this way to help you and that's final!”  Scootaloo slammed her hoof down for emphasis, but to her misfortune her limb caught the open end of Big Mac's discarded spade.  The tool's wooden handle flew mechanically into the copper pegasus' snout, sending stars spinning around her skull.  “Unnnngh.”  Scootaloo teetered, the numbness of her projected self vibrating in and out of focus, and yet she wasn't feeling pain.  She should have been hurt, but she wasn't.  Only the flimsy, green-fuming facsimile of pain briefly jolted her otherwise bright Entropan senses.

        Applejack laughed pathetically, her eyes rolling back.  She waved a lazy hoof towards the visitor.  “Ohhhh, sugarcube.  Take a look at yerself, why don't ya?  Yer a clerk of the Court of Canterlot.  You ain't no workhorse!  So don't go writin' checks that yer flank can't catch!”

        “Blblbllb—” Scootaloo shook the cosmic rays of dizziness away and frowned bruisedly in the earth pony's direction.  “Are you suggesting that I don't have what it takes to work on a farm?”

        “Girl, you'd be lucky if you could work on a dinner plate!”

        An untested kernel of pride nestled deep in the icy heart of the last pony popped to the surface as she shook her mane and trotted furiously up towards Applejack.  “I'll have you know that I can handle anything and everything that apple bucking could toss at me!  The Royal Court of Canterlot doesn't hire ponies just for their good charm, y'know.”

        “I reckon that much is obvious.”

        “You got a test in mind?”

        “As a matter of fact, I do!”  Applejack trotted over towards a tree and bucked it lightly, forcing only two glistening fruits to fall out.  These she caught in nimble hooves before bearing a jester's smirk.  “I call this here the 'test of preservation'!”

        Big Macintosh instantly muttered something, rolled his eyes, and marched away with a humored expression.  Scootaloo blinked at him confusedly, but then found herself staring at a green and red reflection of herself.

        “The first and most important thing one needs to know about apple bucking,” Applejack glared at the pegasus from over the two fruit stems, “is that yer product is more important than anything else.  You can kick trees until the cows come home, but if you let a single one of these here apples bite the dust, then that translates to bits flyin' straight out of yer pocket!  T'ain't a good thing, ya hear?”

        “Is there a point to this brilliant platitude?”  Scootaloo squinted nervously at her.

        “The point, Miss Harmony, is that if y'all wanna help me buck apples, y'all gotta be prepared to preserve 'em!”  She juggled the green and red fruits in her hooves, winking slyly.  “If yer fast on them wings of yours, it should be no trouble performin' this here first test!”

        “Yeah...?”

        “I'll buck both apples high into the sky.  All ya gotta do is catch 'em.  So long as neither of them get smashed into little seedlings, then I'll employ your royal help, ya hear?”

        “Nnnngh...” Scootaloo rubbed her head as an artery pulsed at her frustrated temple.

        “Somethin' wrong, copper-bottom?”

        “This is silly and pointless!”  The black-maned mare frowned.  “Now you're wasting my time!  Let's just get to the point.  Do you want my help or not?”

        “Now yer soundin' like another stubborn pegasus I know.”  She smirked.  “Granted, she woulda been mighty fine at meetin' my challenge.  Lord knows what's chompin' at yer bits, Miss Harmony.”  She finished juggling the two apples and balanced them expertly on top of each other upon one hoof.  “What's the matter?  Yer chicken?”

        The time traveler's eyes narrowed.  In a hissing voice, she throated:  “Nopony—And I mean nopony calls me 'chicken'.”

        “That's a right mighty fine inspiration if I ever did hear it!”

        “You gonna toss your fruit or what?” Scootaloo struck her copper wings out with emphasis.

        “Go get'em, hot shot!” Applejack grunted and tossed both apples skyward.  Pivoting on her front limbs, the orange filly stuck her rear hooves up and knocked each apple towards opposite ends of the shimmering horizon.

        Scootaloo was airborne in a flash, forcing the green leaves of several bordering orchards to flail in the sudden breeze of her flapping wings.  Squinting through the flashing sunlight, she spun like a barreling rocket towards the first target as it reached the peak of its red arc.  “Gotcha!”  She effortlessly caught the thing in between two hooves, banked around, and throttled towards the second object that was already plummeting like a green meteor.  “Let's see a side of poultry do this!”  She smirked, twisted her dive at the last second, and clamped her jaws over the stem, so that the second fruit dangled victoriously in her grinning teeth.  “Hah-Hah!  Dhid youff thee dat, Mithh Applejag?”

        There was the brief sound of clopping hooves—growing faint—then dissipating into the green haze of springtime drowning beneath her.  The pegasus glanced down past her flapping wings and immediately dropped both fruits in a stupid gasp.  Applejack was nowhere to be found.  Even the pitchfork and spade left at Scootaloo's brief scene of awkward dangling had vanished.

        “She... Sh-She ditched me!”  Scootaloo gasped.  Then blinked, then yelped in sudden horror.  “Oh no—Oh no Oh no Oh no—I'm still bound to her!”  She panicked and flew circles down towards the green treetops, glancing through rows upon rows of reflective red apples, gazing desperately for any sign of the blonde soul whom she was anchored to.  “Applejack?  M-Miss Applejack?”  She flew, she zig-zagged around orchards, she circumnavigated wooden fences and water wells.  “Hey!  Prized Pony of Ponyville Award winner!—Grrr—Show yourself, you Celestia-forsaken corn-shucker!”

        Scootaloo's exclamations were cut short as she once again absent-mindedly hurt herself, this time colliding straightway into a tree trunk.  Her body swam through a soupy thick numbness, hauntingly devoid of any cyclonic currents of pain.  She was woken from this stupid lapse in comprehension by a half-dozen apples pelting her from above.  Instinctually, she rubbed her skull with a groan, gazing towards the red barn on the far side of the farm.  She saw an old-old mare, a lime-colored ghost of the past whom her foalish mind ambivalently labeled as “Granny Smith”.  The aged pony could be seen from a distance, sitting on the edge of her rocker, listening to a record player—But she wasn't alone.  In the mare's company, pleasantly sharing a conversation ... was a copper-coated pegasus.

        “H-Huh?”  Scootaloo awkwardly blinked through her dizziness.  But before she could even make sense of that unsightly sight, her amber eyes pivoted towards the side and saw the distant image of two siblings—an orange pony and a red pony—marching away at twenty meters... thirty meters... forty—

        Green tongues of flame started eating away at Scootaloo's peripheral.  She gasped and flailed her hooves through a curtain of emerald fire.  “N-No!  Not yet!”  She shrieked and tore through the air towards the terminally distant sight of Applejack.  “Gotta catch up!  Gotta—”  The entire green expanse of Sweet Apple Acres melted under a tunneling blaze.  “No-No-No-No-No!”  The filly hissed, rocketed forward, and broke through the flames...

        ...only to sail smack-dab into a granite laboratory table under purple manalight.  A resounding thunder filled the cavern.  A purple dragon stood up from closely monitoring a chemical experiment.  Turning his snout about, Spike narrowed his spectacled gaze on the collapsed time traveler.

        “Well, that was most certainly quick.”

        “Gnnnnghhh!” Scootaloo stood up, ignoring her suddenly throbbing bruises as she paced angrily around the stone floor of the bone-chillingly painful present.  “I swear to Epona!  It's like trying to talk a zebra into speaking out of rhyme!”

        “I can see that you're frustrated, child, but must we resort to stigmatic hyperboles?”

        “Spike—What gives?”  The adrenalized pegasus unceremoniously hopped up onto the edge of a lab table and frowned into his green-crested snout.  “I remember Applejack being the element of honesty.  Not stubbornness!”

        “When you or I  know what is truth, do we defend it with any less fervor?”

        “Only she's not telling me what that truth is!”  Scootaloo scowled.  “I dropped in on her and Big Macintosh, and out of nowhere they were pointing farm tools at me!”

        “Scootaloo...”

        “I didn't spout out anything about the end of the world this time!  I swear it!”  She crossed her heart and poked her left eyelid with separate hooves.  “Something's obviously rubbing them the wrong way, and it's so bad that it's making them tackle Apple Buck Season early!  Now they think that I'm some sort of nosy goody-goody-two-horseshoes sent from Canterlot to spy on them!”

        “Did you find this out before or after you flew out of the limit of the soul binding?”  Spike raised an eye-crest.

        “Huh?  OH!  Pffft—That was... UNGH!”  Scootaloo ran her forelimbs frustratingly through her mane hair, only to remember that she didn't have a mane.  She sighed and muttered in embarrassment:  “I was saying anything I could think of to get Applejack to let me stick around her longer.  She told me that she would let me help her on the farm if I could catch two of her apples from midair—”

        “Snkkkt—She did the 'test of preservation' trick with you?!”  Spike grinned wide.  “With the double-apple tossing, yes?!”  He yanked his crystal glasses off and laughed fumingly, filling the air with a green haze that betrayed the otherwise solemn complexion of the elder dragon.  The violet pendant twirled and spun from his cackling neck.  “Ohhh, that is most exceedingly rich!”

        Scootaloo slumped down on the edge of the table, folding her front hooves with a frown.  “I don't see what's so friggin' hilarious.”

        “Oh, child...” Spike wiped a tear, exhaled, and slid his spectacles back on as he lowered to her level.  “That's an old disappearing act that Applejack performed on anypony she deemed trespassing on her family's property.  She did it with Rainbow Dash quite a few times.  It almost became a game between the two of them.  You may not have the capacity to believe this in the midst of your current ire, but I would count what she did as a very subtle sign of your having won her respect.”

        “Well, the girl needs to work on her signs, or someone's liable to kick them over in the dirt,” Scootaloo muttered and rubbed her face with a hoof.  “I'm so sorry, Spike.  I blew it again.  You might as well send me back to Ms. Cheerilee, or let me find another pony.  Because, I swear, Applejack is a literal brick wall.”

        “Now, with that sort of attitude, you'll never get any information,” Spike said as he strolled across the laboratory.

        “What information?!?” Scootaloo cackled, waving her front limbs dramatically.  “Spike—She's obviously in a very bad mood!  I don't see how in the name of all that's holy I might possibly be capable of getting her to connect me with Princess Celestia, much less anypony else for that matter!”

        “I do believe the key here, old friend, is not to think of how these ponies can help us,” Spike said.  He coughed briefly, hacking up a cloud of fumes and waving them clear with a scaled hand.  The dragon grabbed the crystal jar of Applejack's ashes once more and sauntered back towards his tiny companion.  “But rather we must focus on how we can help them.”

        “I don't see how that's going to get us anywhere in our little 'experiment', Spike,” the pegasus grunted.  “Besides, the last thing in the world Applejack wants right now is help.”

        “It wouldn't be the first time she's refused any and all assistance.”  The dragon smirked at her.  “When Twilight Sparkle first came to town, Applejack had to tackle Apple Buck Season all on her lonesome.  That means she tried to harvest every single fruit from the entirety of Sweet Apple Acres without anypony else to lend her a hoof.  It was a severely impossible task, given her self-appointed deadline.  But she convinced herself and other ponies that it had to be done, at least until Twilight convinced her otherwise.”

        “Yes, I think I remember Apple Bloom telling me about that”  Scootaloo nodded, then squinted up at the purple dragon.  “Just how did Twilight succeed anyways?”

        “Persistence, my good friend,” Spike smiled.  “You'll find that it's an avid companion to subtlety.”

        “Ughhhh...” Scootaloo slumped down onto the floor, gripping her skull dramatically.  “Somepony, anypony, gag me with rusted stirrups...”

        “Right.  Let's send you back—”

        “What?!” she glanced up at him, bug-eyed.  “You're sending me back to Applejack?”

        “But of course.”  The dragon uncorked the vial and motioned her towards the alchemic circles.  “Applejack's penchant for honesty is easily masked by her stubbornness, both grayer shades of her immaculate sense of self-righteousness.  But all of those robust surfaces can be broken; all it takes is a kind and humble heart, and she will open up to you.  Of this, I can promise.”

        “I wish I had the faith in Applejack that you have in me, Spike,” Scootaloo murmured.

        “That too you can expose to yourself.”  He smiled.  “But do make it a commitment to not leave your anchorage to her this time.  There is only so much green flame I have available to give at a moment's notice.  Also, I cannot send you back to a single pony's soul too many times in a row without losing cohesion.”

        “Losing cohesion?”  Scootaloo blinked queerly at him as she trotted back over the circles.  “What does that mean?”

        “Simply that I would have to junction you to a completely different soul for a while before I could possibly send you back to Applejack again,” Spike explained as his shadow spread over her.  “So it would behoove you to make the most of this trip back.  Stick to Applejack like sawdust.  Be subtle—also persistent.  You are built of hardened stuff, Scootaloo, more than our late apple-bucking friend can possibly imagine.  The moment your own stubbornness exceeds hers—and I have every faith that it will—you'll find the task ahead of you to be a lot easier.  Then and only then will the floodbanks of her honesty open up, and mayhaps she can help us in the way that you'll help her.”

        “Assuming I survive the whole thing,” Scootaloo sighed.  She stood up straight and closed her eyes.  “I'm ready, Spike.  You're sending me back a day later or something—Right?”

        “Mmmm...” he dashed a sneeze of ashes into his scaled palm.  “I was thinking more along the lines of two minutes earlier.”

        Scootaloo's eyes reopened confusedly.  “Earlier?  But Spike, wouldn't I run into myself?”

        “Somehow, I doubt it.”  He anointed her with the ashes and lowered his fuming jaws.  “Think of it this way; Applejack just got through tricking you.  I think it's only appropriate that we get the jump on her.”

        “How so?”

        He answered her with a gust of green flames.  Scootaloo winced as she rode back on billowing emerald currents.  The flickering tongues solidified behind her scalp in the form of black mane hair, settling to her suddenly copper shoulders as she stood smokily besides the red barn of Sweet Apple Acres, serenaded by the sweet melody of a melancholic violin.

        “Mmmm...” she murmured aloud.  “Early Third Age... Stallionivarius?”  She spun a glance to her side, and was pleasantly amused to see a rustic record player crackling forth beautiful strings into the hay-scented air.  “I knew it!”

        A voice snorted to life beside her.  Scootaloo was suddenly made aware of a gray-haired, brittle-limbed mare squatting on the edge of a rocking chair, her clouded eyes flickering to life as she woke from a midday slumber.

        “H-Huh?  Whazzit—Who goes there?  Apple Bl-Bloom?”

        Scootaloo's heart jumped.  Following a foalish instinct, she curtsied politely with a bending of hooves.  “Granny Smith, I'm sorry to have woken you.”

        The lime-coated pony elder squinted the visitor's way.  “Eh???  D-Do I know you...?”

        “I... Er...” Scootaloo glanced over the horizon of orchards.

        She blinked suddenly to see two farmhorses marching towards her: a red stallion and an orange mare.  Far behind them, a copper-equine figure was surging through the air, only to be consumed in a puff of green smoke that nobody saw but the pegasus.  The sight sent synapses firing pleasantly in Scootaloo's mind, so that she managed a gentle smile and hummed Granny Smith's way.

        “Simply a fellow aficionado of good music, ma'am.”

        “Aficionado of what-now?” the senior pony shivered to say.

        Scootaloo gestured towards the crackling record player.  “Stallionivarius' Adagio for Princess Luna, if I'm not mistaken.”  She breathed the spring air with deep tranquility, feeling her projected body filled with a sudden easiness that sharply contrasted the bitter frustration of earlier.  It was a beautiful day, the greatest of days.  The trees sang around her.  “It's a classic piece,” she continued, “evocative of the Artistic Elegy of Mourning that predominated so many musical symphonies memorializing Princess Luna after Nightmare Moon's banishment at the start of the Third Age.”

        “Eh?  Eh heh heh—Now if that isn't somethin'!”  Granny Smith smiled with tired eyes.  “A filly your age, appreciatin' such fine tastes; now I've truly seen everything!  You've ever heard this rendition before?”

        “Erm...heh heh... No, to be honest.”  Scootaloo blushed slightly as she paced about and stood besides the gray mare's rocking chair.  “But I am familiar with Stallionivarius.  He pioneered the Canterlotlian violin for centuries of musicians to come.  I've got to say, as much as I love Octavia's composition, Stallionivarius' version of Adagio for Princess Luna sounds far more appropriately mournful.  I wish I had heard it sooner.”

        “Ah, yes, Octavia.  Heheh.”  The Apple family grandmother coughed briefly, then sat tall and proud at the edge of her rocking chair.  “She is all the rage with the nobility of Canterlot, these days.  However, like all young musicians, she has talent but the substance is plum missin'!  Bah!  Give me Stallionivarius any day!”

        “There's a lot to be said about Octavia's revolutionizing of the cello,” Scootaloo remarked.  “But it certainly can't replace the traditional strings of this version of Adagio.  But, then again,” she giggled in a sudden flighty breath at hearing herself say this, “with Princess Luna having just returned to her formal glory, what need is there for Equestria to keep mourning?”

        “Mmmm... How times have changed.”  The old mare gazed off into an invisible horizon beyond the red barn.  “I remember when I was a little filly, and Nightmare Moon was a name that invoked fear in the hearts of children everywhere.  I grew up, married, foaled, and retired under the shadow of the same blemished moon that haunted the entirety of the Third Age for centuries.  To think that in my time I would see things changin' so dramatic-like.  It is a wonder to be alive, young one.”

        Scootaloo took a deep breath, gazing at the spinning black gloss of the record.  “I wish everypony would live long enough to witness such wonders.”

        “Mmmm—Eheh—A most laudable desire, young'n.  But only reserved for the few.”

        The copper pegasus gulped and produced a bitter smile.  “Or the one.”

        “I'm sorry; do pardon an old farmer for makin' a necessary inquisition, but...”  The aptly named Granny Smith shuffled in her seat and squinted earnestly in the time traveler's direction.  “Have we met before?”

        Something that felt like a heart jumped in the center of Scootaloo's Entropan body.  The crystal clean joy of the moment briefly quivered, like a curtain of rain water dancing between the two ponies and their years upon years of distance and obscurity.  Two orange dots that resembled a bouncy foal shimmered in the graying eyes of the elder.  The ghostly scents of baked pies, tattered aprons, and wrinkled skin christened the air above them, and it hurt—for the first time since descending to the apple-kissed land of green it hurt to lie.  Scootaloo thought briefly of Spike's garden, of how his flowers and trees choked one limping stormfront after another under a siphoned sunlight.  The future was a barren graveyard that this glistening past—for all of its children and saints—could not comprehend.  For the first of many desperate occasions, Scootaloo gladly took the numbness of her Entropan body, wrapped it about her neck like a shawl, and danced a silver tongue directly in the elder's face.

        “No, ma'am.”  Her face was a concrete wall and the smile was still drying.  “We've never met before.  Why do you ask?”

        “Oh, it's probably just yer taste in music; but I could have sworn I've seen you before.  You have a shine to ya, darlin'.  Your coat is like a bright gold from yesteryear that this day and age rarely sees.”

        “Where I come from, Ms. Smith, my coat doesn't have a reason to shine,” Scootaloo said in a brief breath of honesty that she felt purified the moment.  A cheerful murmur, and her teeth mimicked the sudden twinkle in Granny's eyes.  “But I imagine your delightful farm here is giving it a good enough reason to as we speak.”

        “Heheh—You got that right, child.  Heheheh.”

        Scootaloo briefly couldn't tell what sounded more heavenly, the record player or the chuckling equine who was suddenly outshining it.  She smiled all the same, a chronological prisoner to the warmth of it all.

        Just then, the clopping hoofsteps of Big Macintosh and Applejack crossed over into the penumbra of the beautifully crackling strings.  “Heheh—Boy, Macky!  I'm tellin' ya!  You shoulda seen the look on that goofy pegasus' face when—”  She took one glance at Scootaloo, and in mid-laugh suffered a melting expression of her own.  “Now how in blazes did you get here so darn quick-like?”

        “Yeah—Uh—One moment, if you will,” Scootaloo waved the farmfilly off and smirked back towards Granny Smith.  “Have you ever listened to the compositions of Marezart?”

        “Hah!  Who hasn't, child?  But she is so supremely overrated.”

        “Yes—But one can argue that she paved the way towards the dynamic phase of Mid-Third Age Canterlotlian chamber music.  Without her, we wouldn't have the 'Celestial Medleys I – IX'.”

        “Oh those old ditties!  Why, those made great background music for tea ceremonies, at least before the Big Band phase that inundated Equestria during the Second Zebraharan Conflict.”

        “I didn't know that the Big Band phenomenon transpired simultaneous to wartime!”

        (“H-Hey!”)  Applejack noisily barked in the background, flailing a cowgirl hat in her hoof.

        “If you live long enough to notice it, dear, you'll find that the sweetest of music is enjoyed during times of great duress.”

        “Heheh—Don't I know it, Ms Smith.”

        “Hello?!  Uhhhh—Howdy?!?”  Applejack frowned and stood in between the pegasus, the grandmother, and the warbling record player.  She glared into the copper-coated visitor's face.  “I do believe I was callin' out to ya!”

        “Applejack!”  Granny Smith hissed, shaking a wrinkly lime forearm.  “Be polite!  I was just talkin' to our guest here!”

        Applejack did a double-take.  “Our 'guest'?”

        “Yes!  This fine filly by the name of... name of... Ehhh...” the mare squinted at the pegasus.  “I rightly apologize—What was yer name again?”

        “Allow me to introduce myself,” Scootaloo smiled gently and re-curtseyed.  “My name is Harmony.  And I am positively enraptured to meet someone who appreciates classical music like I do, if not moreso.”

        “She knows who Stallionivarius is, Applejack!”  Granny Smith beamed, her limbs creaking as she stood up from her rocking chair and waddled about the record player.  “I can't count how many times I've tried to get these here whippersnappers to listen to the greats.”  She winked Scootaloo's way.

        “Heheh—They sure don't know what they're missing.”  The visitor smirked back.

        “Granny, this ain't no simple guest!”  Applejack flung an accusatory hoof and sneered.  “This here's a nosy bothersome clerk sent straight from the—”

        “—Royal Court of Canterlot!”  Granny Smith suddenly gasped, holding a hoof over her heart as she regarded 'Harmony's' cutie mark with widening eyes.  “Now it all makes sense!  Why, I would recognize that celestial crest anywhere!”  She smiled warmly the pegasus' way.  “You know, it was a finely-trimmed pegasus much like you who came to do a census on Sweet Apple Acres several decades ago when I foaled these here seedlings' papa, Apple Shine; Goddess Gultophine rest his soul.  I was always entranced by just how polite and downright neighborly Princess Celestia's servants could be.  That same pegasus even came back for Apple Shine's first foalday!”

        “Well, isn't that quaint?” Scootaloo smiled and was subtly gazing Applejack's way as she added, “It's too bad politeness isn't as rich today as it was in the Third Age.”

        The orange mare fumed, a fountain of steam building beneath her twitching ears.

        “Why, whatever do you mean by that, child?”  Granny Smith blinked, then squinted confusedly Applejack's way.  “AJ, what's goin' on?”

        “Nothin', Granny,” she snarled.  “Just a simple matter of miscommunication—”

        “Out with it, girl!” Granny Smith stomped a hoof, bearing a wrinkled frown.  “I know when the apple has fallen far from the tree—Now do I?”

        Before Applejack so much as opened her mouth, Scootaloo strolled into view and smiled placidly the elder's way.  “I believe the fault is entirely my own, Ms. Smith.  I was clumsy and I flew awkwardly into one of your family's exceptional apple trees while on a mission for the Princess.  One rightfully can't blame your two strong grandfoals for getting the wrong idea about me from the start.  But I assure all of you—” She paced about and took in the three ponies with a smiling face.  “—I only wish to lend a helping hoof.  The Princess isn't so much concerned about this Apple Buck Season's bounty as she is about the morale of the equine tilling the land that so dedicatedly provides Canterlot with such delicious apples.”  She smiled with the barest hint of a regal sparkle to her teeth.

        Applejack's frown was venomous.  Macintosh was rolling his green eyes.  Granny Smith was electrified:  “Well, if that ain't just divine!  Any occasion we have to treat a guest visitin' on behalf of the Royal Family is a fine day to be alive, if I ever did see one!  On behalf of the Apple Family, I whole-heartedly welcome any assistance you have to give us!  After all, we did start out Apple Buck Season early, and it would be a shame not to use an extra pair of hooves, especially if it means that the Princess is smilin' on the whole lot of us in approval!”

        “But Granny Smith!”  Applejack began, her orange face paling with each centimeter of the situation slipping loose from her grip.  “Things have been hectic enough at it is at night!  At this rate, we can't afford t'humor her with—!”

        “Did I or did I not just welcome her on behalf of the Apple Family?  Hmm?  Carnsarnit!”  Smith shook a wrinkly hoof and all but trampled the obstinate mare at a bone-rattling twenty millimeters per hour.  “Now go out into them there orchards and find some work for her t'do!  Time's a'wastin', y'know!  Don't make me force Big Mac into talkin' some sense into ya!”

        Applejack glanced at Macintosh.  Macintosh glanced boredly back at her, shrugging.  A groan, and Applejack sauntered past Scootaloo.  “Nnnngh—Fine.  Get along, little doggies...”  The last exclamation came out like a dying cat.

        “Fantastic!”  Scootaloo hummed, trotted after the farmfilly, and called back to Granny Smith.  “The Princess will be most pleased at your limitless hospitality!  Oh—And don't forget to let me hear more of your records, Ms. Smith!  I'd love to know what your opinion is on Sebastian Buck or Prancerecki!”

        “Eheheh—A pleasure I hold most dear, child!”

        Scootaloo smiled and gazed towards the many rows of orchards as the three strolled along.  “An old copy of Stallionivarius!  Who'd a thunk it?”  Her pleasant expression was swiftly smacked away by a full blond tail swatting angrily across her face.  She shook her snout and glanced aside with a wary eyebrow.

        Applejack hissed at her, “I don't take kindly to yer sneakin' around the barn and persuadin' my own family against me!  It's downright dirty-like!”

        “You can't get stuff done without getting a little dirty,” Scootaloo winked back.  “Or is that not one of the traditional earth pony proverbs?”

        “Don't you mish-mash my own words on me!” the orange mare sneered.  “You took advantage of a frail old pony in order to get yer silly bureaucratic job done against our better wishes!”

        “Excuse me, Miss Applejack.”  Scootaloo spoke with narrow eyes.  “But that 'frail old pony', if I'm not mistaken, is as much a living-breathing member of your marvelous family as you and your handsome brother here.  She obviously knows that this farm needs some extra help during the Apple Buck Season, and if you had half the respect for her that you're so eagerly defending at the moment, then you would do well to emulate her natural gumption for generosity!”

        “This is why I hate havin' to deal with you red tape runnin' Canterlot clerks!”  Applejack snarled.  “Dang politics!  One way or another y'all are always spinnin' the argument around to yer favor!  Rest assured, I'm only lettin' you lend a hoof because Granny Smith told me to, and from the way I was raised; it's always the elders who have their say.”

        “You have a golden conscience, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo grinned.  “Even if it is buried underneath the rigid exterior of an obstinate mule.”

        “Eeeyup.”  Macintosh strolled ahead of them with a sly smirk.

        “Don't you encourage her!”  Applejack barked at him and pointed a hoof at the infecting pegasus.  “As soon as it's sundown and Granny Smith is asleep, I'm bucking her clear out of Sweet Apple Acres!”

        “You make it sound like I'm a plague.”

        Applejack turned her nose up at the visitor.  “Say what ya fancy sayin'.  But I ain't lettin' you out of my sights for one second!  Heck, y'all will be lucky if I so much as allow you to buck one single tree!”

        “Pffft—Under those circumstances, nopony will get any work done!  All it takes is a leap of faith, Miss Applejack.”  Scootaloo then added with a mischievous smirk, “Or are you chicken?”

        Applejack stared back like a blank wall of stone.  She marched icily ahead, grumbling under her breath:  “Y'all just follow me.”

        “Heheh,” Scootaloo chuckled proudly and trotted after her.  “We'all intend to.”

        Along the east side of the acres, under a glisteningly warm Sun, Applejack finished nudging the last of many apple baskets beneath a tree full of glistening red fruit.  She took a deep breath of the rich earthy environment, smiled at the neatly arranged halos of baskets around every nearby orchard, and strolled halfway towards a dirt path cutting straight through the fields.

        “Alright.  Y'all listen up,” she spoke without looking at the 'Servant of Canterlot'.  “True apple buckin' takes several days, so it's important to plan out just right which field to tackle first.  A month and a half ago we had to gather a few bushels of apples early, on account of havin' to cater to the Ponyvillean Anniversary in April and all.  We took what we could from the west fields, but we spared these here trees in the east.  Reason bein' we wanted to give 'em a longer time to freshen up and bask in the glow of the late Spring Season.  And now that that the time has come for a total harvest, we thin out these here groves first and work our way west.  That way the youngest of fruit get all the time we reckon they need to bud up and become harvest-worthy by the time we buck'em down.”

        Applejack trotted around the tree and motioned towards it with a proud hoof while further delivering her speech.

        “Now when it comes to the buckin' itself, the key is not to sweat givin' it a might bit more force than you'd imagine was necessary for a tree.  The bark on these things is made out of stern stuff, as if Princess Elektra herself carved them out of the strongest iron.  I reckon you could trot all across Ponyville—or the entirety of Equestria for that matter—and still you wouldn't find a tree as versatile as what the Apple Family grows right here.  So, don't be afraid to kick the trees hard.  If they could talk, they'd just think we were lovin' on them, is all!  Now watch and learn—”

        Applejack snarled her teeth in a fierce grin, pivoted on her front limbs, expertly swiveled her rear legs, and catapulted her hooves murderously into the side of the tree.  The entirety of the trunk shook like a gigantic wooden tuning fork, and in a magical exploit of gravity every single apple from the branches fell expertly into the soft wicker baskets waiting for them below.

        Applejack let loose a satisfied sigh, dusted her hooves off, and trotted proudly around the containers now brimming with red fruit.  “The key is to make the orchards shake so much that the stems plum give up holdin' the apples in the air.  Mother Nature does the rest.  It takes a lot of effort and practice to get just the right aim and kickin' pose down pat.  But the most important thing is to put yer back into it and be firm with the tree!  Think of it like yer chastisin' the thang for making a mess on the porch.  Eheheh—”  She blushed and rubbed her head underneath her brown hat.  “—I reckon that sounds a bit silly—ahem.  But when you've lived your whole life around these here trees, you almost start treatin' yer crops like part of the family, especially figurin' that they've been around for more generations than most Ponyvillean citizens can count.”  She cleared her throat and glanced aside at a red stallion who was setting up the last of many baskets around another tree.  “Macky—Care to give it a go yerself?”

        He smirked at her, winked, and spun with a mighty arc of his kicking legs.  A thunderous clap filled the east end of the Acres, and the apples literally hovered above the branches—spinning—before falling like plummeting red and green gyroscopes into the wicker containers below.  Macintosh twisted the haystalk in his mouth and proudly bowed with a gesture towards the expertly filled baskets.

        Applejack whistled.  “That's my big brother, alright; always makin' me look bad.  Heaven help Apple Bloom when she gets to buckin' age.  She may just give up and resort to pie bakin' like her grandma.”  She turned and faced the visitor again.  “But you did see how Big Macintosh didn't hesitate none when he took a swing at the tree?  We ain't dealin' with stalks of celery here.  Apple Buck Season is like an endless Iron Pony Competition; you gotta give it yer all, through and through.  So, then, are y'all still bent on gettin' yer hooves dirty or what?”  There was no response.  Applejack squinted and tilted the brim of her hat up to get a better look...

        Scootaloo was basking in the warm sunlight, smiling drunkenly as she marveled at the feel of the green earth underneath her squirming hooves.  “Epona Alive!  I forgot how... how springy grass felt!  Heeheehee—Oooh!” She raised her hoof as several darting green insects waltzed across her limb.  “Aphids!  I found aphids!  Would you imagine that—?!”  She glanced at the two blanching farm ponies, blushed, and cleared her throat.  “Ahem—So, y-yeah.  Apple bucking; it's just like loving on a tree... r-really hard?”

        Big Macintosh murmured something in Applejack's ear.  The orange mare nodded numbly and gave the pegasus a cockeyed loot.  “Why do we get the feelin' that y'all burn more than mana-torches over at Canterlot Court?”

        “I'm very sorry for being distracted.  It's been... er... a long week of flying around to random farms and being given the third degree by obstinate horses wearing hats.”

        “Hardy har.” Applejack rolled her eyes and backtrotted with a hoof pointed at an apple tree surrounded by empty baskets.  “Step up to the plate, sugarcube.  You've talked yer way this far.  Reckon we should see if yer hooves can dance as well as ya sing.”

        “Pfft—Why not?”  Scootaloo walked up and stared at the looming tree before her.  “I mean, how hard can it be?”

        Macintosh and Applejack exchanged amused smirks.  “Well, Celestia forbid that one of her ever respectful, ever dainty royal clerks should get her limbs dirty!”  The orange mare snickered.  “I bet y'all think that kickin' apples out of trees is just as easy as writin' letters and settin' up appointments!”

        “You really don't think Princess Celestia would have sent me to get a good idea of how you run this farm without expecting me to go all the way, do you?”

        “I may not be the charming country pony that you expected to gab with today, but I'd be lying if I said I actually wanted to see ya get hurt!”  She stretched a hoof out cautiously.  “Just tap it a bit, why don't ya?”

        “B-But I thought you said that true Apple Bucking required being forceful with the tree—”

        “I'd rather you not break anything, sugarcube!”  She smirked.  “Especially if yer expected to return to Canterlot in one piece!  Those are some pretty fragile lookin' wings yer sportin' there, after all!”  Big Macintosh snickered behind her and Applejack snorted to avoid breaking into giggles herself.

        Scootaloo rolled her eyes, spun her flank towards the tree, and raised her hooves.  “Right—Just a tap.”  With a girlish grunt, she slapped just one leg against the tree.  Suddenly, her ears popped, as if she was piercing the gray overcast of the Wastelands in the Harmony.  She blinked in sudden dizziness and let her gaze fall to the earth, spotting several apples rolling dirtily through the grass.  “Whoops—Dang it.”  She blushed under her copper skin and gazed up at the two farm ponies.  “I'm sorry.  Looks like I totally missed the baskets—”  She stopped in mid speech, squinting curiously at the two siblings.

        They were gazing up above Scootaloo's black mane with wide eyes and open jaws.  Macintosh's haystalk fell loose from his lips.

        “Wh-What?”  Scootaloo blinked up at the tree—and jumped back at the sight of it leaning forty-five degrees off its foundation and away from her.  “WAAAAH!”  She winced as the hulking trunk literally fell over with a thud, its exposed roots dangling nakedly in the air as the shaking ground loosened even more apples from the rattlings baskets surrounding the gruesome catastrophe.  She bit her lip, sweatdropping as she gazed back and forth from the tumbled tree and the gawking farm ponies.

        Macintosh's eyes were still wide.  Meanwhile, the sister swung her hat off, clenched her eyes shut, and slapped her skull with a right hoof a few times before shaking her entire snout and glancing once more at the sight with twitching eyes.  Slowly, the two swiveled their necks until they were gazing mutely at 'Harmony' with a blank plea for an explanation.

        The amber-eyed pegasus was no less confused.  “Eh heh heh... G-Guess that was a weak one.  My bad.  Uhm...”  She glanced left, right, behind her—“Oh, here we go!”  She marched over towards another tree she spotted and aimed her hind quarters at it.  “Ahem—Maybe if I just aim a little bit higher.”  She bucked it, once more with a 'tap'.  “Nnngh!”

        An explosion.  With a sound that mimicked several fireworks rocketing skyward, two dozen apples simultaneously lifted off the tossed branches of the kicked tree and soared clear across the east orchards, landing in a chicken coop behind the barn.  This ended with several thunderous claps, followed by a chorus of blood-curdling clucks that filled the otherwise tranquil air.

        Scootaloo bit her lip and glanced across the horizons of her mind.  She briefly remembered something Spike had told her about the durability of her projected self, that while her time displaced soul was wearing this “avatar” of the Goddess of Time—complete with a coat and mane painted in the image of Princess Entropa—she would be impervious to hunger, exhaustion, and thirst.  It suddenly occurred to the crafty survivalist inside that numb shell of a body that another 'benefit' to her chronological visitation was an unearthly strength that was variably related to her imperviousness.

        “So... Yeah!”  Scootaloo wasted no more mute seconds and hopped up to all fours, a bright smile plastered desperately across her face.  “Apple Bucking!  Maybe I should just... uhm... Do it the 'dainty' Canterlotlian way...”  She smiled sheepishly and marched off towards the next tree.  “I'll... Uhm... buck in the direction opposite of the chicken coop from now on...”

        Applejack gulped and slapped her hat back onto her mane.  “Macky, do yer little sister a favor; Next time I'm lucky to be invited to the Grand Galloping Gala, remind me to look into a Canterlotlian gymnasium.”

        “Eeeyup.”

        The warm afternoon carried on stunningly—or so Scootaloo felt.  The Sun sang overhead as the three ponies carried on with the dutiful task of apple bucking.  Their task hummingly floated from one cluster of trees to another, filling the air with falling fruit and the rich scent of settling green leaves.  With each bunch of baskets filled, there were more empty ones to replace them.  Scootaloo's head spun with the process, as her body itself spun, glancing back at one second to see so many trees picked of apples, but then glancing forward to see four, eight, sixteen times as many trees across the orchards that still needed to be bucked clean.  Applejack and Big Macintosh sweated and breathed evenly with the severe ritual of exercise.  It was more than obvious to the time-travelling pegasus that they were born and raised in this tradition of apple-lopping, which is why she felt all the more awkward and even guilty that she had barely broken a sweat since the beginning of the whole process.

        Scootaloo had found her 'tap'; she discovered the right force and pressure with which to kick the trees so as to make the apples fall off naturally without any unforeseen consequences.  This, of course, kept her preoccupied with getting as much apple bucking done as possible, for she was ever instilled with Spike's insistence that she 'help' the Apple family of ponies while she was there in the past.  But with each passing glance that she gave Applejack and her crimson-coated older brother, she took into account the severity of their exhaustion.  Solely for the sake of evading their suspicion, she slowed her effort of apple bucking, and even sullied her own attempts in order to maintain the airs of being a novice to farmwork.

        In reality, Scootaloo never expected herself to be a natural farmhoof.  She chalked up her ease of apple bucking to the rather unnatural state that she was in; as a projection of her soul self, she was merely a physical manifestation of her own essence from the future.  She wondered briefly what would happen if she had been impaled by a pitchfork when Applejack first met her—Would she even bleed?  More to the point—Would it even hurt?  The past was a place of color, of warmth, of life everlasting... until the Cataclysm would one day pull the earth out from underneath it all.  It was a struggle for the time traveler to feel like anything but a walking blemish from beyond, casting a gray shadow on the green land through the mere miracle of some purple dragon's transcendent research.  Spike undoubtedly thought that Scootaloo was “helping” the Apple Family by being there.  The last pony could only hope to be that enthusiastic.  As the day wore on and the farm ponies wore down, there was Scootaloo looking onwards, standing blissful and cool in the shade of her Entropan shell; yet in her heart of hearts she felt like a cheater.

        A legitimate challenge constantly hounding Scootaloo was the ever throbbing need to stay within “range” of Applejack.  The time traveler was constantly afraid of focusing too hard on the apple trees, only to look over her shoulder and see that her “anchor” had trotted off towards the barn to get supplies or take a break—and then the whole burning green world would melt hopelessly around the pegasus.  If worst came to worst, what would Scootaloo say to convince Applejack to stay within twenty-to-thirty meters of her copper self?

        It didn't help that Applejack had been relatively hostile to her presence since the first moment she arrived from the future.  So much of what the pegasus was witnessing didn't make sense to her.  Scootaloo's memories of Applejack consisted of a smiling, endearing, sisterly mare with a heart of gold and a voluntary desire to defend everypony she deemed a friend.  It was perhaps true that the politeness that Applejack exercised was reserved only for her loved ones, but even that Scootaloo doubted.  The Apple Family had built their legacy on the foundation of neighborly hospitality and generosity; strangers were no less embraced with tender-hearted kindness than close companions.  So why was it that Applejack's attitude all but threatened to tear “Harmony's” wings from her spine?

        Scootaloo imagined that there were ponies alive in Ponyville who legitimately had a problem with Princess Celestia or just Canterlot in general, but that didn't explain it to the last pony any better.  No—There had to have been a severe problem ahoof in Sweet Apple Acres, and the only thing Scootaloo could guess was that Applejack—the element of honesty—was hiding something.  She could imagine no better explanation for a respectable pony tripping over herself in such a bizarre fashion.

        If Scootaloo's presence could disturb Applejack so much, then she figured that it was only a matter of time before she unearthed exactly what the hidden truth was.  Suddenly, Spike's advice on persistence began to make sense, and as the thick afternoon of heated farmwork continued, Scootaloo began sharply observing everything around her.  But instead of focusing entirely on the expressions on Applejack's and Macintosh's sweating figures, she gazed about the orchards with the expert eyes of a Wasteland scavenger, taking notice of little details and bits of information that bled forth from the earth itself.

        It suddenly occurred to her that the apple trees weren't nearly as perfect and immaculate as Applejack had touted them as being.  As a matter of fact, there were several scars on the barks, scrapes and nicks and scratches that almost looked like claw marks.  What was more, Scootaloo noticed apples lying besides a few trees that hadn't been bucked, and a good many of the fruit had burst open as if obviously bitten into.  Then there were random bits of splintered wood besides the fences, shattered clumps of farm tools underneath the shade of orchards, and even more evidence of debris—all leading in a disturbed path towards a line of forested trees that bordered the far southeast side of the farmland.

        During the time it took Scootaloo to observe these things, it occurred to her that Applejack and Macintosh were acting stranger and stranger.  For instance, upon every moment Scootaloo took subtle notice of the half-eaten fruit, Applejack swiftly galloped over and scurried the ruined apples away into the high grass.  When the pegasus took a prolonged time staring at a scratched bark of wood, the two farm ponies would usher her towards the next row of trees to be bucked, even if the last job hadn't been thoroughly completed.  Finally, Scootaloo could have sworn she saw—from far across the orchards as she pretended to be engrossed in kicking apples loose—the sight of Big Macintosh setting up a metal caged structure or two alongside the fences bordering the farmland.  But as soon as her amber eyes narrowed in on the distant spectacle, Applejack's frowning face trotted into view, all the while the orange mare gabbed on and on about “lost time” and forced the two towards the next line of unbucked trees.

        Though the last pegasus was obviously occupied with this developing mystery, she couldn't help but get caught up in the mesmerizing hum of the moment.  As the minutes crept into hours,

her copper body sang with the thrilling sensations of sunlight, the intoxicating smell of grass, the fresh and pliable apples that bounced about the baskets she shoved from tree to tree.  A part of her almost wished that her projection was susceptible to wear and tear, if only for the feeling of sweating her muscles to a trembling lull, hunched under a sky that kissed her with warm rays instead of blanketing her with snowy ash.  Not even the brightest lit lantern or the hottest setting of the Harmony's boiler could make her feel as toasty as she did under those sky cooked apple trees.  If she could have Granny Smith's record playing within earshot of the dirt path alongside the orchards, Scootaloo would have been in absolute heaven.

        What was it that Spike had said?  Something about 'enjoying herself'?  She swiftly shook her head loose of that cobwebbed possibility and glanced over at Applejack once more.  The farmfilly was a sweaty mess, obviously urging herself to keep up with the “dainty Canterlotlian Clerk's” energy.  Scootaloo was almost tempted to slow her apple bucking down further, if only to give the orange mare some relief.  But—out of necessity more than cruelty—she kept her pace constant.  What mattered most was that she was wearing Applejack down in some way or another.  Hopefully, it would only be a matter of time before the Element of Honesty lived up to her title and treated the pegasus like the one friend she only ever meant to be.

        Some way or another, it always boiled down to time.  Scootaloo let the irony of that contemplation sink in as she rotated herself to another tree, lopping the redness off of the branches of Sweet Apple Acres slowly—from the inside out—like a healing salve that knew nothing of reluctance, but embodied everything about persistence...

        The Sun was starting to melt into a golden haze above the western horizon when Scootaloo first heard Granny Smith's sing-songy voice swishing through the green leaves.  She kicked the last of many vibrating trees and glanced over her shoulder to see the elderly pony cresting the top of a hill, pushing a wooden cart decorated with a pitcher of water and three tall glasses.

        “Break time, kiddies!” she chirped, a wrinkled grin plastered firmly across her lime snout.  “Hard-working earth ponies deserve a hard-worker's glass of water!  Pegasi too!”  She giggled with a bizarre youth, even for the rest of them.  “Get it while it's cold!”

        Macintosh hummed pleasantly, batting the sweat off his ears as he trotted eagerly towards the wooden cart.  Applejack stumbled less gracefully behind him.  “Th-Thanks, Granny...” the orange mare began, then did a double-take.  “Granny Smith!  You came all this way without yer walker?  What in tarnation were you thinkin'?”

        “I'm feelin' right as rain, girl!” the elder pony flexed a forearm, nevertheless wobbling slightly.  She chuckled:  “There's just somethin' so inspirin' about watchin' the whole lot of you gettin' so much accomplished.  I admit, I had my own reservations about the success of this year's Apple Buck Season.  But ever since Miss Harmony showed up, I'm startin' to have hope again.  Thank you once again for coming, dearie.”

        “Don't mention it,” Scootaloo smiled.  “I'm happy to help.  And I'm sure that—when it comes time for me to write Princess Celestia—I'll only have good things to say about how diligent your grandfoals are in their attention to the farm that you've so humbly helped raise.”

        “Unngh... Drag me to the woodshed,” Applejack muttered with rolling eyes.

        “What was that, AJ?”

        “Nothin', Granny.  Thanks for the water.”

        “Plenty more where that came from!”  Granny Smith made to walk back to the farmhouse, but took a second-glance at Scootaloo.  “Why, good heavens!”  She blinked.  “You hardly have a drop of sweat on you, darlin'!”

        “Uhm...” Scootaloo gulped and smiled nervously.  “It's a pegasus thing—On account of our feathers and all.  The oil we secrete hides our perspiration.”

        “Well, I'll be...”Granny Smith shook her head and chuckled as she sauntered slowly, slowly back to her rocking-chair on jittery haunches.  “Even in so many years, Canterlotlian Pegasi still amaze me.  Y'all are like gifts from the goddesses.  I'll be thinkin' of ya when I listen to Stallionivarius!”

        Scootaloo breathed easier as she watched the elder pony trot gently away.  She had been called many things in life: “last pony” by Dirigible Dogs, “loyal customer” by Bruce, “glue stick” by M.O.D.D. Patrons.  The irony poisoned her as much as it tickled her; that it would take a twenty-five year backflip through time for any living thing to call her a “gift”.  The last pony would have felt special, if only this was her brown and weathered body bearing the warmth of the notion—and not some copper chronological carpet flimsily enshrouding her.

        “Yer still a rotten fibber,” Applejack muttered between heavy gulps of water.

        The stark, loveless honesty of the accusation carried a gray stale taste, like mushroom stew in the lonely sway of the Harmony.  The black maned pegasus glanced her way.  “I beg your pardon?”

        The orange mare drank heartily, swallowed, and exhaled, “Two of my best friends happen to be pegasi.  I've seen enough drops of sweat between the two of them to fill the Eastern Seaboard.”  She squinted in trademark suspicion.  “Just how come you ain't fazed none by all them apple trees you've hit so hard?”

        “Well, y'know—I do what you do!”  Scootaloo shrugged her shoulders and chuckled.  “I drink lots of water.” Her vision dripped aside and ricocheted off the chiseled muscles of Big Macintosh standing across the wooden cart from her, his sweat-stained crimson coat glistening over every veiny contour of his broad shoulders as he eagerly drank from a cup.  “Ahem—Lots of cold, cold, freezing-cold water.”  She clamped her hoof around the entire pitcher, doused her neck, tossed her black mane back, and exhaled loudly.  “Mmmm—Yeeeeha!  Heheheh...”

        “That refreshin' enough for y'all?”  Applejack bitterly smirked.

        Scootaloo instinctually wanted to explain that it tasted a great deal better than recycled urine.  “Oh, yes.  Absolutely—I thank you very much for... y'know... the cold water.  Eheheh...”

        Applejack took a last few sips herself, placed her glass down, and sauntered around the cart towards her.  “So, humor me, Miss Harmony.  What exactly have you gotten from this whole buckin' afternoon that is gonna make yer job for the Princess worth all the messin' around with our farm in the first place?”

        “Well... Uhm...” Scootaloo gulped and rummaged through the dirty alleyways of her synapses.  “You and Macintosh have to cover so much acreage, and yet the two of you alone make more progress in less time than an entire—uhm—commune of Canterlotlian sharecroppers!”

        “That's because the most Canterlotlian farmers ever worry about is potted petunias.”

        “Well, okay.  You got me there.”  Scootaloo cleared her throat and smiled hopefully.  “But still, you two are like a well-oiled machine.  A machine that feels, of course.  I was almost scared that I would be slowing you down for a moment there when I joined in.”

        “Well, to be perfectly frank—No, you haven't slown us down at all.”

        Scootaloo exhaled joyfully.  “See?  Was there really such a need to give me the third degree when I offered my assistance in the first place—?”

        “But it still doesn't mean that you have any business prancin' about on our lands!  You said it yerself—Big Mac and I are like a well-oiled machine.  And though I can't pretend to know half as much about mechanical engineerin' as unicorns and pegasi, I reckon yer words should speak for the whole of Sweet Apple Acres.  We're meetin' the schedule of Apple Buck Season just fine and dandy.”

        “Now, about that,” Scootaloo glanced sideways at the earth pony.  “Apple Buck Season normally happens later in the year, doesn't it?”

        “Actually, Apple Buck Season stretches from spring into early fall,” Applejack explained, trotting over and steadying a few baskets full of apples.  “The actual harvestin' is relative from farm to farm, as contractually arranged between producers and clients.”

        “Really?  In that case, when are you and Big Mac contracted to finish harvesting all of these apples, Miss Applejack?”

        The farmfilly's features sagged.  She stared down pitifully into a basket full of apples.  She murmured something underneath her breath.

        “What was that?” Scootaloo leaned in, curious.

        A furious sigh.  The blonde mare glared up at her with a shake of her hat.  “In two days.”

        “Snkkkt—In two days?!”  Scootaloo's amber eyes nearly bugged out.

        “Shhh—Hush, will ya?”

        “AJ—hrkk--Miss Applejack!”  Scootaloo nearly pratfalled as she rebounded from that blow of information.  “Well-oiled machine or not; the two of you have poured your hearts over the Eastern fields all afternoon, with my help to boot, and still not even half of this side of the Acres has been harvested!”  She took a deep breath, her wings fluttering in and out to assist her lungs in recovery.  “How in Celestia's sparkling mane do you expect to finish gathering the rest of the apples in two days—no—a day and a half at this rate?!?”

        She frowned back at her, “It's not like I didn't make it clear that we had no time to waste when y'all first dropped in on us!”

        “I don't see how I could have any impact on this situation whatsoever!  It's just that—nngh—if Princess Celestia knew this was the case, she would have sent a frickin' squadron of pegasi!  I may be a 'fibber' in your book, but even the both of us know that's true.”

        “Thanks for makin' my case for me!”Applejack growled and leaned against a tree, fanning her forlorn self with a hat.  “The last thing I wanted was for anypony to make a huge fuss about this.  But I assure you,” she looked up with a burning emerald gaze, “my brother and I will get the job done!”

        “How?—If I may ask?”  Scootaloo gawked as she paced around the earth pony.  “I've... er... studied up on Ponyvillean history.  You aren't adverse to requesting the help of your friends, Miss Applejack.  Why is this situation any different?  I mean—It's not like your brother is injured this year.  Surely history should teach you that--”

        “This has nothin' to do about history!  It's about tradition!  It's about land!”

        Scootaloo made a face.  “Land?”  She blinked confusedly at the pony.  “Sorry for sounding like a dense piece of wood, but what's that got to do with anything?”

        “Pfft—Everythang!”  Applejack gestured towards the wide expanse of red-glinted orchards.  “It's always about the land!  What it yields is equal to what a pony puts into it!  It's more than just karma—It's about treatin' the land responsibly, and takin' into account everythang you've contributed to the trees even long before the harvest comes!”

        “And this is something you guys can only do alone?”  Scootaloo squinted.  “Where's the logic in that?”

        “Unngh...Logic, Logic, Logic,” Applejack rubbed her head beneath her brown hat and muttered.  “Dang you one-track-minded Canterlotlians...”  She paused, glanced up at the tree, then over at Scootaloo.  She put her hat back on and approached the tree.  “Miss Harmony, sugarcube, I wantcha to do somethin' for me.”

        “Anything!”  Scootaloo nodded emphatically.

        Applejack reached her snout up towards a low-hanging branch and snapped an apple loose from its stem.  She caught it in her tail, juggled it over her rump, and elbowed it expertly in mid-air so that it flew and landed in the pegasus' jittery grasp.  “Take a bite out of that if yer would.”

        “Uhm...”Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.  “Not that I'm against the idea of a generous refreshment, but what for?”

        “Y'all supposed to be conductin' an investigation of Sweet Apple Acres!  Well, ain't ya?  Then investigate with yer full senses, girl!  Don't just calculate like a clerk—feel like a pony.  Take a bite!”

        Scootaloo stared at Applejack long and hard.  But under her stubborn gaze, she naturally relented.  It wasn't until her teeth were halfway through piercing the soft skin of the apple that the last pony finally took into account exactly what she was doing.  The next moment she knew it, she was being overwhelmed by a deluge of taste that nearly made her stagger from sheer shock.  Years of subsisting off of mushroom stew, reclaimed water, and bland Wasteland meats hadn't prepared her for this.  Taste buds that had been long retired in the back of her mouth exploded to life, throttling her brain back to the days when a pink haired foal shared cookies, cupcakes, and soda with two other blank flanks under a pink roofed Sugarcube Corner.  A fluttering of eyelashes, and she was also brought back to the hay-strewn loft of an abandoned barn in the middle of a forest, experiencing the week's first leap of euphoria under a starry night sky.  It was a sparkling sensation, the joy of filling a starved stomach.  It was the shimmering expectation of living for another scooter gliding day in Ponyville, of sharing the earth with so many colorful and friendly ponies, of pretending so much to be something that was loved that the little foal almost believed it was true.

        “Well?  Does it match yer royal seal of approval?” some strange voice drawled from beyond the nether.

        “It's... the absolute best thing I've ever tasted.” Scootaloo's voice came in a bizarre whimper.  She felt the moist apple bits sliding down her esophagus, warming her stomach like an inside-out hug.  A breath left her nostrils, and it was several seconds before she realized that Applejack was staring at her.  With a strange sensation alighting her cheek, the copper coated pegasus realized why Applejack was staring.  Scootaloo rubbed the left side of her face dry before uttering in a voice of forced composure:  “Most acceptable.  Ahem.  It's fresh, it's delicious—Undeniably healthy.  Princess Celestia would be pleased.”

        “There's a reason why it tastes so magnificently,” Applejack said, strolling from tree to tree as Scootaloo watched her, apple in hoof.  “The Apple Family has been workin' these here orchards for generations.  As a matter of fact, we colonized here barely a decade after Faustmare's caravan first arrived in the Great Equestrian Valley.  What we've put into the trees is more than just hard work—It's tradition.  It's heart.  All of our lives, we've poured into this land.  It's what we breathe for, dream for, and aspire to do—and nothin' else.  If that wasn't the case, a single cutie mark would have broken the line of dedicated Apple Family members a century ago.  And in all that time, nopony's branched off.  Not even one.”

        She took a deep breath, spun with a twirling of blonde threads and gazed at Scootaloo with a sweet face that rivaled the rich fruit still lacing the pegasus' twitching taste buds.

        “My Pa had a sayin', something that was hoofed down to him from his Papa and his Papa's Papa before him.” Applejack trotted gently towards “Harmony” and quoted:  “'Give to the Earth, and the Earth gives back'.”  She breathed in the air of the land and exhaled.  “This has been our family's motto for generations.  It's in our blood.  I don't rightfully expect you to understand the importance of it—what, with you bein' a pegasus and all.  And that's fine, but you have to trust me when I tell you it means everything to an earth pony.  We don't mind sharin' our produce.  We don't mind dusting off our front doorstep for visitors.  But when it comes to treatin' our land right and makin' do with what the land gives us back, it is our business and nopony else's.  We're responsible for givin' to the Earth, and we're accountable for what the Earth returns.  And when the time comes that our labors our finished and we have no breaths left in our bodies, we return ourselves to the Earth, as it gives us everythang for us to live off of to begin with.”

        “That's very noble, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo gently replied.  “But if you respect the Earth so much, then you'll know that this land will mean nothing if something horrible was to happen that would cause you to lose claim to it.”  She motioned towards the rows upon rows of unbucked trees.  “So maybe you and Macintosh try to do all of this alone.  And maybe, Celestia forbid, you fail to get the Apple Buck Harvest done in two days' time.  I'm not sure what the immediate repercussions will be exactly, but I certainly can imagine.  It won't bode well for your farm—or any harvests you attempt in the future—if word gets around Equestria that you can't deliver on time!  And why?—Because you refused the help that was given you at the most opportune time?”

        Applejack sighed, hanging her head.  “Ain't nothin' to it.”

        “Why?  Could you at least explain to me why?”

        “Yes, Big Mac and I made a contract with our clients...” Applejack gazed up at her.  “But first and foremost we made a contract with the Earth.  There are... mistakes that have been made.  And we've got to own up to it.  Nopony else.”

        “Mistakes?”  Scootaloo made a face.  “Is that why you started the Apple Bucking so early?  You're trying to make up for something that happened with the orchards that you feel responsible for?”  She glanced briefly over Applejack's shoulder.  Along a distant crest of a hill, she once again caught sight of a glinting metal cage, intended to be hidden alongside the wooden fence of the Acres.  “Miss Applejack, I'll buy that working the land has its own style of karma, but there are some things that even the Earth itself can't take into account.”  She gulped and murmured in a low voice.  “Cataclysmic things.”

        “In the end, all that matters is that we answer to the land.  The Apple Family.” Applejack trotted with sudden briskness towards the opposite rows of trees.  “To drag anypony else in—especially from Canterlot—is just muddyin' the issue.  Now come on.  If y'all ain't finished with yer hooves-on investigation, there's still plenty of apple trees to buck.  After all, the afternoon isn't dead until it's dead!”

        Scootaloo gazed after her, all of her pent-up frustration crumbling suddenly under a cascade of confusion and sympathy.  Helpless, she regarded the fruit in her hoof, and took another bite.  It somehow tasted less sweet, but she knew better.

        “Nothing ever dies enough,” she mumbled with a mouthful, then trotted off to join the rest of the day's work.

        The world no longer sang.  To perceive otherwise would be a travesty, or so Scootaloo felt.  The bright colors and springy warmth of the green land around her suddenly paled as what was once a task of joy had crumbled into a quagmire of desperation, squeezed between the jaws of a schedule that had broken the copper pegasus' brain as hard as it was currently breaking Applejack's and Macintosh's backsides.

        The time traveler couldn't even write a novel on this laughable irony.  She and Spike possessed thirty-odd years of reverse-time to work with and enough green flame to dance merrily across the lengths of them, and here she was—thrust into this infinitesimal moment of all moments—and there were barely forty-eight hours at hoof for her to salvage anything from the Apple Family, before an apple-flavored train wreck encompassed the entirety of their livelihood, before there would be nothing at all left to be salvaged.

        Scootaloo's brain swam circles, mimicking the hard black lines of her cutie mark's infinity symbol as she blurringly bucked away under the melting red Sun.  She pondered over what possessed a full-grown pony like Applejack—in a world replete of color and happiness—to do something so self-destructive, to make a contract that was as impossible as it was daring, to risk her entire family's hard-earned work on a delivery that was too soon to be feasibly met.

        Absurdly desperate gambles belonged to creatures of the Wasteland.  Last time Scootaloo checked, Applejack was an organism of Equestrian splendor.  She couldn't possibly have been influenced by the future's gray psychosis, unless the time traveler's presence there had somehow tainted the sanity of that age, transmogrifying the “gift” that Granny Smith perceived into the “curse” that Scootaloo very somberly knew she herself was.

        No.  Scootaloo sighed and bucked on.  Applejack had been digging this grave for a long time.  Glancing across the lines of orchards, the last pony could see it in her eyes.  The farm filly and her brother were like ghosts, pale shades of themselves as they limped from tree to tree.  There was something that bled from their twitching irises, something that refused to reflect the rich red gloss of the apples, something alien that they must have seen which drained the love from their earthen passion.  In all of her foalish years, Scootaloo couldn't recall the Apple Family siblings having ever appeared so... hollow.

        Perhaps something horrible had happened recently.  In a sudden serrated backflip of the heart, Scootaloo realized that she hadn't even seen a blink of Apple Bloom since she had first arrived there.  A brief panic bubbled within her, like the rising crest of a Wasteland stormfront.  She swiftly calmed herself, panting between trees, realizing that if something truly terrible had happened to her childhood friend, then Applejack—the element of Honesty—would have definitely said something.

        Still, there was a true paradox transpiring on that farm.  Applejack was hiding something.  She had to have been.  Everything in her body chemistry spelled it out and spilled it out; from the breathless limping between trees to the surly grumbles in the penumbra of the copper pegasus, Applejack was losing her sensible qualities like the trees were losing fruit all around her.  Of course, Scootaloo knew that it would be an utter apocalypse before Applejack would admit to anything.  In a shuddering breath, Scootaloo hoped that such a presumption wouldn't translate literally.

        The melting Sun glittered orange between the trees in a bright flash that held foalish hues.  Scootaloo's twitching mind jolted back and forth, and she suddenly and forlornly remembered a storm cellar on the edge of a cliff that yawned into the ashen madness of tomorrow.  The last pony had the unfortunate curse of knowing that the Apple Family had died, and yet she had the fortunate blessing of knowing how.  In three months' time, the farm ponies—Applejack, Macintosh, Granny Smith, and Apple Bloom—would all be corpses.  It was the Cataclysm that finished them off, as their skeletal husks were just as lifelessly intact as the rest of the Wasteland fossils that the last pony had ever encountered.

        Were their lives filled with such anxiety as what clouded them now?  Even until the end of their beating hearts, did they breathe the air of their farm with pride?  Was it the same pride that struggled so hard to drive “Harmony” away?  Or was it something righteous, something that they were yet to find, something that Scootaloo was destined to help them find?

        It never occurred to the last pony before that there could have been a purpose to her presence there.  Lurching between trees in the suspended shell of Princess Entropa, the visitor expected only to be a witness.  She had plummeted there on the green flaming waves of reverse-time to find out what happened to Equestria.  Instead, she was learning a depressing truth about one tiny farm on a speck of land that dotted the incomprehensibly vast bosom of a doomed world, and she suddenly didn't know what was worrying her more.

        This past was too fragile, too alive, too perfect.  She couldn't be a mere witness any longer, at least not so much as she had simplistically assumed time travelers to be pariahs.  Nopony was ever foaled to be untouchable; Scootaloo had only survived her many years in the gray skies of desolation because she had known there was something better, something warmer, something hopeful into which she was originally born and out from which she forever bled.

        But here—damnably here—where the smells of childhood cradled the sobbing void of all she had ever lost or dreamed of, there was no desolation, there was no grayness, there was no pain.  With numb Entropan limbs, she punished hardened trunks of fruit plastered trees, fighting with every centimeter of her soul to preserve that painlessness, to impossibly salvage the soil from Applejack's grave, to scoop from the land whatever absurd principle the farm filly believed in, so that Scootaloo might cradle it, examine it, and scavenge forth what it was that Applejack held dear, so that she may understand it too—and endeavor to find a way to save her.

        Equestria would someday die.  There was a Sun and Moon somewhere to bring back to a sullen husk of a world.  The time traveler knew that she may have been failing Spike, she may have been failing the future, and she may have been failing herself; but she suddenly and inexplicably couldn't bring herself to fail Applejack.  Falling short of that would just be... painful.  So with a firm jaw and a quiet disposition, she bucked on.

        It would take the soft shuffling of lime hooves to briefly shake her from this suddenly noble exercise.  “Your stamina is inspiring, Miss Harmony.  It's nice to know that Canterlot is still made of stern stuff these days.”

        Scootaloo breathlessly glanced up in time to witness the silhouette of an elderly mare in the sun's collapsing glow.  “When was it not?” she mused with nonchalance.  “I heard Miss Applejack say that you use a walker.”

        “I use a lot of things.”  The gray-haired pony smiled.  With a wincing wheeze, she bravely lowered her body down onto folded hooves and sat upon the crest of gathering shadows before the time traveler.  “I just do my darndest to not let them use me.”

        “What's on your mind, Ms. Smith?” Scootaloo asked, casting a nervous glance over her shoulder at the mare's two laboring grandchildren.  The farm ponies were swiftly bucking down the line of trees.  If Scootaloo remained in one place for too long, the green flames could hoist her away from her anchor at any second.  “I k-kind of promised that I wouldn't rest until I've helped your granddaughter with all of these trees.”

        “Even if you bucked with the might of a thousand war horses, child, you wouldn't accomplish the task with any greater swiftness—at least not the swiftness that we desperately need at the moment.”

        Scootaloo bit her lip and peered up with soft amber eyes.  “So you know all about the crazy schedule, huh?”

        “I know everythang there is to know about this here farm,” Granny Smith said with a weathered expression that clung on the precipice of wakefulness.  “At least, I know more than them whippersnappers give me credit for.  Harumph.”  She briefly glared gray daggers the two ponies' way, but punctuated it with the softest of surrendering smiles.  “I couldn't love them for better gumption.  When I was their age, I reckon I assumed nopony else knew the ins-and-outs of the orchards but me.”

        “What do you think, Ms. Smith?”

        “I think that Octavia's music deserves a second chance under the needle.  There's a certain richness to her cello pluckin' that's missin' from the classics.  It's the vitality of youth, I reckon.”

        Scootaloo managed a chuckle, something that had been robbed from her for the past hour or so.  “That's nice to hear, Ms. Smith.  But what I meant to ask was—what do you think of the situation?”  She gulped.  “Have Miss Applejack and Big Macintosh really doomed this farm?”

        “Fillies these days; they are all about doom and gloom.  Please don't remind me of Miss Lily from the village.  If so much as an acorn hits the cobblestone, that sheepish pony screams bloody murder to the townsfolk—as if the world is coming to an end.”

        “When... or if that happens, Ms. Smith,” Scootaloo winced even as the sardonic words instinctually dripped out from her lips, “I assure you it won't be through an acorn.”

        “Hmm-hmm-hmm...”  The elder breathily chuckled.  Thin sweet eyes wafted over Scootaloo in a gray baptism.  “I have lived too long and seen too many things to focus on 'doom', child.  When you've gained as many years as I have... and lost as many close to you, you come to realize that things come and go.  Sometimes it's all for a reason; sometimes it's not.  But the coming and the going is just a matter of living and someday not living.  Being too desperately affixed to a worrisome dot in the whole confusin' length of it all is just not worth the sweat, in my books.”

        The last pony swam through the thick of Granny Smith's words, too terribly humble to bother vocalizing the familiarity of them all.  She cast a nervous glance in the direction of the two young ponies and caught them gazing with less enthusiasm back at the “Canterlotlian visitor”.

        “Well, your flesh and blood over there is focused on something,” Scootaloo said with a nod of her amber-streaked mane.  “I really wish I knew what it was.”  A beat; she glanced squintingly down at the seated elder.  “I don't suppose you could fill me in, any?”

        “That wouldn't be my place,” Granny Smith replied with a knowing smirk.  “I may be able to pull Applejack's ear from time to time, but it's AJ who runs this farm—not me.  I'm not always approving of her judgment, but I sure as heck respect it.  It was Apple Shine's wish, after all.”

        “What wish is that?”  Scootaloo asked.

        Either Granny Smith ignored that or she was too desperately sailing towards a distant thought.  She said, “You shouldn't be so hungry for facts, Miss Harmony.  You can't rightly be blamed for a code of conduct taught by them Canterlotlian nobles that makes you so bent on uncoverin' the truth in all of its raw numbers.  Instead, look towards the land.  Bear witness to the fruit that we've brought to blossomin' all healthy-like.  Isn't the quality of my grandchildren's work enough to impress Her Highness?”

        “I... Nnngh...” Scootaloo ran a tired hoof over her features, sighing.  “Ms. Smith, in all due respect, I need facts.  I need to know exactly what it is that's making Applejack push this farm downhill on a crashing wagon with only one wheel!  Otherwise, how am I... h-how am I going to be able to help her?”

        “Mmmm...” Granny Smith smiled placidly.  “I knew it.”

        Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.  “You knew what?”

        “Yer the selfless type, Miss Harmony.  That's a once-in-a-lifetime thang.  Well, twice-in-a-lifetime, I reckon.  H-Heh.  If I actually believed in reincarnation, then maybe I wouldn't feel so plum crazy,” the old country mare mused.  “But with each passing second, you remind me of that darlin' pegasus who visited me after Apple Shine was born.  She was so genteel and graceful in every respect.  Why—if Princess Celestia or one of her divine Alicorn Sisters had come to visit this here ranch, I would have been none the wiser.  In some ways, I used to think that all Canterlotlian clerks bore at least an ounce of royal blood, in that they performed their tasks in an gorgeous air that mimicked the Goddesses themselves.  Bein' around the farm during that year's census just gave the land that much more shine, that much more hope.  I couldn't have asked for a finer guest—and here I am again, blessed to be in the gifted presence of one of y'all.  Like I said, child, it's a wonder to be alive.”

        Scootaloo tried to smile.  It came across more like a wound.  Gazing at Granny Smith's gentle face, she somehow wouldn't be shocked if the lime wrinkles and gray hair were suddenly replaced by purple scales and green crests.  For yet another uncountable moment, the last pony felt loved and lonely at the same time.

        “You say that I'm a 'gift', Ms. Smith,” Scootaloo finally spoke.  “And I respect that.  I find it flattering—but I only wish it was true.”  A deflated breath, and she gazed across the labored lengths of the ill-fated apple bucking.  “A real gift wouldn't feel so useless.”

        “Real gifts take time to make themselves useful, and even more time for some lucky ponies to recognize what's fallen into their laps,” Granny Smith chuckled as her eyes regarded her descendants, bucking their way across the immutable lengths of orchards like so many generational shadows before them.  Her gray eyes turned grayer for a brief moment.  “Elektra built this earth out of her own hooves, and Gultophine gave it life with her own breath.  But it took time to make it grow into somethang as pristine and beautiful as the land I've been blessed to live on today... and to be buried in tomorrow.”  A deep breath, and the twinkle returned to her in double copper hues.  “I don't know where exactly you hail from, Miss Harmony, and can't rightly pretend to be understandin' how or why you're here, but all I can say is that you bein' here... is timely.”

        Scootaloo shivered on the edge Smith's words.  Something funneled through her, something cold, like the rancid teeth of yesterday's snowy rockfaces.  So she hid deeper beneath her Entropan skin and fled from the pain, reveling in the toasty mirage of the past that danced around the wrinkled elder's meditative pose.  Perhaps that far down, that deep into the moment, she might come to understand the living pony's words.

        “I can only hope you're right, Miss Smith.  For Miss Applejack's sake, for your family's sake, for—”  She jolted suddenly, her amber eyes twitching up as she was suddenly overcome with a great red hue.  The sky was bleeding, and for a feverish breath the last pony thought the Cataclysm was happening three months early.  “By Celestia's m-mane!  What's that?!?”

        Granny Smith blinked.  She stared up, her gray hairs fluttering in the wind.  A deep snort rose from her nostrils and bulleted through her lungs as she wobbled up on thin limbs.  “Good heavens, child!  Surely yer pullin' an old lady's tail!”  She winked and sashayed away.  “Why, that's the sunset!  What else could it be?”

        Two hours and hundreds of trees later, a good two-thirds of the Eastern Orchards had been bucked clean.  A veritable mountain of baskets bulged with apples, most of which were presently being loaded up into the back of a large wooden cart.  Big Macintosh harnessed himself to the wheels and marched firmly downhill towards the big red barn in the center of the Acres.  Along the path beside him, Applejack finished stacking several baskets aside for the brother's next trip back.  Wiping her matted blonde bangs with a foreleg, she glanced over her shoulder and saw a dark silhouette atop the nearby hill.

        Scootaloo stood frozen on a mound of black soil and bent grass, staring breathlessly into a great burning sight before her.  The sun was setting in the west—the first sunset the last pony had seen in decades.  It was a molten gold sensation, like being set ablaze from the inside out—hooves to mane—with liquid red fire.  The pegasus breathed bravely into the gentle crimson inferno, and as a brisk wind billowed over the hilltop, she shut her amber eyes and drank it in, settling down on her haunches in order to free her upper limbs.  She stretched them outward as if they were secondary wings, riding the heated breeze as it kicked through her black mane and dashed her amber streaks like hidden streamers.  The smells that wafted off the land were spiced with fluttering leaves and blossoming seeds, so that she felt like she was flying for once without her wings, navigating a bizarrely warm world that had somehow evaded her for years, hidden behind cold ash and even colder memories.

        “I reckon y'all Canterlot clerks don't get outside much.” Applejack's hoofsteps crunched up from behind.  “Surely there're sunsets that are purdy enough in yer neck of the woods.”

        The pegasus breathed shudderingly, opening her moist eyes into the melting horizon.  “The only truly pretty things are what you capture by accident.  They're the things that you'll forever fly away from, only to think back on how you'll miss them forever.”  Her wings shifted involuntarily.  Another breath, and she slowly spun a bitter sweet smile back at Applejack.  “I think I finally have a reason to envy earth ponies like you.  You know an awesome thing when you see it, and then you stick to it.”

        “If I might make a lil confession,” Applejack smirked slightly and winked Scootaloo's way.  “I've always dreamed that I could fly with some fancy pegasus wings of my own someday.”  A slight, girlish giggle.  “Just a foalish daydream I used to have.”

        “Keep it a daydream,” Scootaloo said in a droning voice, gazing once more as the horizon ate up the last of the glistening golden Sun.  “The only reason anypony has wings is to escape things.”  She gulped.  “I wish I'd never have to escape this.”

        Applejack's green eyes softened slightly.  But—with a firm exhale—she nudged Scootaloo's mane and motioned southward with her snout.  “Come along, Miss Harmony.  There's somethin' I gots'ta show y'all.”  She trotted off.

        Scootaloo obediently followed, breaking into a slight canter to keep up with her orange host.  Applejack led her past the last edge of the orchards, through a metal arch enshrouded in vines, and straight into a lush grove of bright white flowerbeds.  The rolling expanse of Equestria lingered beyond a distant line of fences, the horizon turning purple under the advent of a cooly falling evening.  The copper pegasus was so engrossed in this equally mesmerizing sight that she barely noticed that Applejack had stopped softly in her tracks.  Glancing down in front of the earth pony, Scootaloo somberly realized why.

        There were gravestones.  Many of them.  Eight.. twelve... twenty... At least thirty that Scootaloo could immediately count.  They were bleached-white immaculate marble heads, with only slight aging noticeable in the stones that dotted the furthest distance.  Each row, Scootaloo realized, stood for a subsequent generation of the Apple Family, with far too many names than she could discern, except for the freshest stones that lingered directly in front of Applejack and the pegasus in turn.

        'Apple Shine – Devoted Father – Most Dependable Earth Pony'

        'Orange Blossom – Loving Mother – Ponyville's Pride and Joy'

        Scootaloo gazed quietly.  Her amber eyes fell over the fresh lilies that had been placed recently before the two graves.  In front of the mother's stone in particular she could spot a few foal-sized hoofprints that had been left in the soft earth.  There was so much beauty surrounding the place, from the lulling unplucked fruit trees to the shadowed beds of white flowers that fluttered in the settling evening's breeze.  For once, death actually looked peaceful to the last pony.  A part of her was almost envious.

        “I brought y'all here to show that I wasn't just blowin' hot steam with what I said earlier,” Applejack spoke in a hushed tone.  She knelt briefly before the two stones and brushed an orange hoof betwixt them, murmuring a few sweet words with her mouth closed.  She brought the same hoof to her lips, kissed it, and gently tapped both stones in turn.  Once finished, she gazed across the many white faces reflecting her from across the grove.  “We really do give everythang to the Earth—includin' ourselves in the end.  This land of ours is more than just soil and appleseeds.  It's flesh and bone.  Every piece of fruit we pick is a piece of us.  And—to be perfectly honest—I wouldn't have it any other way.”

        The earth pony stood up, trotted around, and paced towards Scootaloo.

        “When my Pa died, he managed to tell me somethin'.  He said: 'Always remember to be strong, Applejack'.”  She gazed at the breeze-blown apple trees in the distance.  “Celestia knows, after all these years, I've taken him up on his word.  I've been strong for him, for the family, for this here land.  I've been so strong for so long that I rightly don't remember what use it is to cry anymore; it's a waste of time as far as I'm concerned.  The rest of the family; they can afford it.  That's just the way things happened to be.  Apple Bloom was far too young and precious to be the strong one.  Granny Smith—Epona bless her heart—she's always been the spirit of the Apple Family, but she no longer has the bones for the job.  Big Macintosh has the muscle, but he's so sweet and soft-spoken.  He may not look it, but he ain't the one to bear the weight.  It all came down to me—And that's quite alright.  I'm happy to be spearheadin' the family.  It's my job and I'm stickin' to it.  These days, it means more than just livin' up to what Pa wanted of me.  I've seen what I can do for this land, and what it can do for me.  And I'm startin' to realize just what it must have felt like for Pa when he had to leave this world so soon, when everythang he ever cared about was snatched away from him and Ma in a blink.  I love this family with all my heart—but, just like Pa felt—I love this land all the same.  Because it's all the same, ya see?  The life, the legacy, the land—it all comes full circle.  And in my humble eyes, that's a finer poetry than even your finest writers nestled in Canterlot could ever hope to put to paper.”

        Scootaloo listened intently.  Even her heartbeat quieted to give air to Applejack's words.  Gradually, the orange mare turned her face to stare the pegasus straight in her amber eyes.

        “Miss Harmony, when mornin' comes, and the Sun rises once more over this land, you will be gone.  You will be back in Canterlot, deliverin' everythang yer reckon you've learned from today and today alone.”  She slowly shook her head.  “I'm sorry if this sounds all intimidating-like.  But what I'm stating is a fact; because if Big Macintosh and I wake up to do the rest of our apple buckin'—and we see you there waitin' at the front gate to inspect us some more—it will be I who will be writing a letter to Princess Celestia.  And I promise you—on the very graves that lie before us—it will not be a pretty letter.  The Goddess of the Sun may control the sky, but she sure as hay doesn't control the Earth.  Sweet Apple Acres business is our business, and that's the way it's gonna be, even until the end of time.”

        Scootaloo nodded, waited for several seconds of silence to ensue, then bravely replied, “That's the funny thing about time, Miss Applejack—the end of it, at least.  Nopony can know when it happens.  It could...” she fidgeted.  “It could be a lot sooner than you think.”

        “My statement is still final,” Applejack said.  “Even if the world ended tonight, I stand by my word—and my word is my flesh and blood.  I'm sorry to have treated ya so viciously earlier.  There is no hard work that isn't stressful work, and y'all caught us at a bad time.  You may leave now, Miss Harmony.  And if ever I see you in the future, that will be a future when all will be made right between the Apple Family and the Earth.  Maybe then you'll be lucky enough to see my friendlier side, and I can show you the gratitude that you deserve.”  She smiled sweetly.  “I don't fancy you a bad pony, just not entirely an honest one.  And that don't sit right with me.”

        “Naturally, it wouldn't,” Scootaloo defeatedly murmured.  She extended her wings and prepared to soar away—but paused briefly to glance back and utter, “But even you should realize, Miss Applejack, that a lie of omission is still a lie.”

        Applejack fidgeted, digging the edge of her hoof into the ground.  It was a gesture that appeared... anything but strong.  Rather than allow the awkwardness to go on for any longer, Scootaloo immediately took to the air and flew majestically towards the darkening horizon, disappearing behind a purple line of trees.

        The orange mare exhaled the entire afternoon's weight out her mouth.  Paying the graves one last bit of respect, she turned around and slowly trotted out of the grove.  She walked back towards the orchards alone... or so she thought.

        From behind a row of trees, unseen in the settling curtain of night, the silhouette of a pegasus stealthily danced across the blossoming stars.  With a pair of reflective amber eyes locked on Applejack, she hovered quietly over the treetops and kept within distance of the soul's anchor.

        “You might be strong—But you've got a lot to learn about persistence, girl.”

        The Apple Family had retired for the night.  After trucking in the last of the day's harvested apples and shutting them inside various woodsheds, Applejack and Big Macintosh tended to the last livestock chores before sauntering lethargically into the family farmhouse.  A few lights lingered pitifully through several windows of the humble abode until they too blinked away to match the sleepy darkness that had settled over the land.  For several hours afterwards, a tranquil peace wafted over the farmstead in a purple haze, accompanied by the chirping of crickets and distant hoots of owls.

        All of this, Scootaloo witnessed—of course—because she was stealthily perched atop the roof of the red barn sitting straight across from the Apple Family's house, stretching her soul to the furthest reach of her projection's binding to Applejack's sleeping form.

        “Hey, I just realized.  There is a bum living in Ponyville.  And it's me.”

        The copper-coated pegasus sighed and slumped down so that she was lying with her chin rested aside a rusted weathervane in the shape of a rooster.  Her legs were unenthusiastically folded underneath herself as she waited... and waited... and waited.

        She couldn't succumb to slumber.  It wasn't because of the nearly nonexistent sleeping schedule that she had developed from gray years of piloting the Harmony.  It wasn't because of some deep-rooted tingling of excitement billowing through her veins from being displaced in time.  It was simply because she... couldn't sleep.  She was incapable of it—so long as she was in this form, this materialized projection of her soul self.  She had briefly figured—from Spike's description—that this would be a blessing.  But suddenly, in the wake of having failed to pierce through Applejack's stubborn defenses, it appeared to be nothing more than a curse.  Scootaloo could just as well have been a ghost, an age old insomniac poltergeist forced to forever haunt the grounds of Sweet Apple Acres, beset with ponies who would very gladly ignore her existence.  It was a very surreal flip of the coin from her very real, very lonesome life in the Wastelands.

        “And just what is that smell?”  She sniffed the air while murmuring hushedly towards herself.  “I sure as heck don't remember that from visiting Apple Bloom!”

        The girl sighed.  Her head spun with all of the many things she would have to deal with in the morning.  There were still days left to her time travel, she figured.  Of course she couldn't quit on Applejack.  When the sun rose, she would have to plop herself down onto the earth in front of a startled pair of farm ponies and somehow convince them not to skewer her to death with pitchforks for having the audacity to betray their exceedingly solemn request for her to leave.

        And why shouldn't she leave?  Scootaloo wasn't entirely convinced that she knew what she was there to do in the first place.  All she wanted was to bridge a simple communication gap, to get Applejack to open up to her, to get her to trust her.  Then and only then she might proceed to come out with the truth, that she was there for reasons that exceeded the historically superficial issues of Apple Buck Season, that soon there would no longer be a season for anything, because all manner of measuring time and harvesting would utterly vanish along with the Sun, the Moon... and civilization.

        “Who am I kidding?”  The pegasus girlishly toyed with her alien mane of long black hair and gazed forlornly into the starlit haze of the Earth.  “So long as I'm not honest with the Element of Honesty, the Element of Honesty can't possibly be expected to 'fess up to me.”

        Perhaps that was the key.  Applejack was no Ms. Cheerilee.  She was strong, she had her faculties centered upon the rigid spokes of reality.  If Scootaloo dove in on Applejack and divulged her the horrible fate of Equestria, the wheels turning in the orange mare's head would be absolutely well-greased to spin true.  She would gladly do what she could to contact Princess Celestia.  She may even open up enough to Scootaloo to accept her help with the farm--

        Scootaloo went crosseyed.  She facehoofed with a groan.  “Dang it—That's not my concern!  It shouldn't be my concern!”

        The only reason Scootaloo came back in time to begin with was to find an answer to what caused the Cataclysm and the deaths of Princess Celestia and Luna.  That should have been on the forefront of her troubled mind—not all of this business with Applejack's stubbornness, her family's legacy, an impossible harvest that needed to be completed in less than two days, a farm's future that could be put in jeopardy if the two farm ponies didn't just give up and accept much needed help...

        Scootaloo sat up on her haunches, exhaling hard through her Entropan nostrils.  No matter how hard she tried to make herself think of something more important, the issue with Applejack and her Apple Buck Season fiasco constantly bubbled to the surface.  Even then and there, none of what she was doing made any sense.  How would helping the Apple Family with one measly harvest shed any light on the End of Equestria—or how to reverse the damage done in a wasted future to boot?

        A fit of anger reverberated through the time traveler.  Where there was anger, there was pain.  Where there was pain, there was ash.  Where there was ash, there was home, a forever after of forever afters—alone.

        Scootaloo didn't realize what she had done until a loud metallic ringing noise echoed across the lengths of the barn.  She blinked briefly, watching as the metal rooster that formed the weather vane spun offensively before her.  The pegasus glanced down at her hoof.  She had struck the metal figurine at full force, and she hadn't felt a thing.  It was a heavy weathervane—at least parts of her had to have stung from the contact.  Alas, everything was a numb cocoon of bewilderment.

        The last pony bit her lip.  Out of curious experimentation—as opposed to somber angst—she once more raised a copper limb and aimed the soft part of it against the serrated beak of the rusted rooster rotating to a stop.  She pressed her coat to the sharpest point; she pressed harder, until the skin bent and sunk under the menacing beak.  It should have hurt.  It should have broken blood.  But try as she might, Scootaloo could not pierce the outer shell of her Entropan form.

        So much of this projection was still new to her, from the amber streak in her black mane to the immaculate curves of her hooves.  Scootaloo felt like she had been encased in a reverse time capsule, a copper glistening thing that Spike had randomly shot backwards in time via a green sneeze.  If Scootaloo stuck herself inside a cannon and aimed it at the heart of the planet, she had no doubt whatsoever that the discharge would send her living brick of a body flying out the crust on the other side.  It all seemed too terribly convenient, and yet inconvenient.  Sent back to an era doomed to die, Scootaloo was temporarily immortal.  But could she feel?

        That day had been a warm day.  The grass had been green grass, the apples had been red apples, the fruit that had slid down Scootaloo's throat sent her on waves of bitter sweet euphoria the likes of which she had never experienced and would very likely not come close to relishing again.  Every succulent morsel that had clamored together to paint the luxurious canvass of Sweet Apple Acres had not been lost to Scootaloo's senses, such heavenly living senses that the ghostly gray future would stifle for so long.

        Here, atop the red barn's roof, in a settling splash of momentary anger, Scootaloo reached once more into the nebulous past dancing all around her on cricket-song, and she couldn't feel pain.  Or at least... she wouldn't.  After a day's worth of effortless, sweatless, tireless apple bucking; she had suddenly become the pariah she imagined time travelers to be.  Only, it was a different untouchableness, a cold and arrogant immutability, like time itself.  Beyond the dull bass hum of the night, Scootaloo imagined a voice—sounding mystically like Princess Entropa's—and it was laughing, hooting like an owl.

        A shuddering breath; and the pegasus gazed up at the stars in a desperate bid to distract herself.  She had been engrossed in such an act for the last three hours straight; as soon as the lights went out in the Apple Family's farmhouse, she had begun stargazing.  This was a far different sky than the twilight that infected the gray roof of the future.  It was dark—deathly dark—but the stars that twinkled beyond the curtain of oblivion were alive, blissful, and resplendent with the trailing Exodus of Goddess Epona.

        And in the center of such a gorgeous canvass, their hung the brightest jewel of all, the moon.  It wasn't just any moon, but the most precious of satellites, something that sat unblemished in the sky for no longer than a solitary year, when the shadow of Nightmare Moon had faded from its ivory body as a beautifully unassuming harbinger of the disastrous Cataclysm to come.  And here Scootaloo was, a detached soul from the future, the only lucky (or unlucky) pegasus in the whole of existence to be granted the chance to visit such an abridged page in history, the last page, the bitterly brief appendix of all things that would ever be.

        “I wonder... When Luna was up there for a thousand years, could she give to the Earth?”  Scootaloo murmured allowed.  A lump formed in her throat as her eyes melted away from the mesmerizing orb in the sky, and she uttered, “Spike, what kind of Earth will we have to give to when all is said and done?”

        There was no answer.  Instead, there was a noisy pattering of paws.  Scootaloo's heart jumped—for the only thing that the last pony expected to witness after that sort of sound was a flurry of glisteningly sharp polearms.  In a breath, she instinctually bounded up to her hooves and spun to face the other side of the barn, snarling.

        She was confronted with the gloriously stupid grin of a farm dog panting up at her, its tail wagging.  It was a rough collie, with gorgeous flowing calico fur and nimble limbs.  Scootaloo's perplexed eyes briefly followed a series of crates, outhouse rooftops, and rain gutters—until her mind explained to her exactly how the tiny mutt had managed to clamor onto the top of the barn without wings.  The cleverness of the creature struck her funny, until a foalish corner of her brain mumbled forth a name that had long been in hibernation:  “W... Wi-... Winona?”

        The dog barked once, grinned even more stupidly, and all but pounced on the copper-coated pegasus, giving her several slobbering tongue-lashes across her face and mane.  The pegasus hissed, growled—giggled once—and all but shoved the canine off her like she was a skunk.

        “Okay—OKAY!  I get it!  Not all of the Apple Family is angry to see a 'Canterlotlian Servant'!”  She settled back down on folded hooves as she amusedly watched the excitable collie jog four-legged circles around her.  “Just don't drool all over me.  Sweetie Bell's the one who tasted like marshmallows, not me—Remember?”

        Winona barked and sat before her, panting steadily as if attempting to relay some joyous secret code in tongued dribbles.

        “Heh, silly little fuzzball,” Scootaloo managed a slight smirk.  “It's an awful shame that your distant cousins will take to flying giant metal behemoths in the future and try to kill me.”

        Winona tilted her calico head to the side.

        “Meh—Gilliam was kind of cute, in his own disheveled, nauseating, predictably homicidal way.  But he didn't have your eyes though.”  She winked.

        The collie nodded stupidly—but then her head shot up and her ears perked.  A blink; and she snarled and faced southeast, glaring off the edge of the barn.

        “Hmmm...?”  The last pony raised an eyebrow.  “Now what's gotten you all spooked?”

        Winona barked loudly, snarled once more, and bounded fearlessly off the side of the barn.  Rolling down a mound of hay, the farm dog broke into a full sprint, rocketing towards the distant edges of night-drenched orchards.

        “What I wouldn't give to have a companion like that in the Wastes.”  Scootaloo strolled up to the edge of the barn, blinking.  “Eh, who am I frickin' kidding?  I'd probably eat her—Wait a minute.”  She squinted hard, nearly teetering over the edge of the rooftop.

        Two large shadows were galloping from the front door of the family farmhouse and darting their way southeast.  Moonlight glinted off a pitchfork in one of the ponies' grasp.  As they pierced the obscurity of the apple trees, a shrill ringing noise could be heard off in the distance.

        “Kind of late to be bucking apples, huh, girlfriend?”  Scootaloo's face was caught between a smirk and a frown.  She didn't think much of it; she took off and glided gently after the shadows, staying silently within the range of her anchor to Applejack, but most importantly staying silent.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Just a few more meters, Macky,” Applejack murmured in a hushed tone.  She strolled hatless under several waving branches of apple trees as she snuck over a darklit hill with her pitchfork aimed serratedly ahead of her.  “I toldja that trap would be loud enough to wake a dragon from its slumber!  We got 'em this time!”

        The red stallion merely glared through the darkness as he shuffled alongside his younger sister.  He tried his hardest to pierce through the veil of night with his vision, but was only faintly aware of a glinting shape rattling due east of where they were presently sneaking.

        “You did wire that thing to snap shut at a feather's touch, right, Big Mac?”

        “Eeeyup,” he hushedly managed, suddenly stopping his sister's trot with a mighty forearm.  A tiny shadow had just darted straight past them.

        “What in tarnation—?” she gasped, then wilted in the moonlight at the sound of a loud chorus of barking noises.  “Awww shoot!  Winona!  We plum forgot to shut her in the barn!  C'mon!  Let's hurry it there before one of 'em hurts her bad!”

        The two rushed over rustling high grass and bushes until they were out in the open.  In the ivory glow of the waxing moon, the silhouette of Winona pranced and bounced viciously around a rattling cage lying just before the line of wooden fences that marked the edge of Sweet Apple Acres.  A series of bells suspended on strings rung loudly from the sides of the metal container that they were attached to—until the cage itself stopped shaking altogether.

        “Shhh!  Hold yer hooves!” Applejack hissed.

        She and her brother skidded to a stop, gazing with sudden trepidation at the stone-still cage.  The ringing noise had stopped.  The southeast end of the orchards was still, eerily cold and quiet.  Sitting inside the metal contraption, a black shape sat—sporting two beady white eyes that stared back at them.  Its body rose and fell slowly in dark leathery breaths.

        “What in the hay is it just staring at us for?” Applejack gulped.  Suddenly, Winona's barking stopped.  The collie paced nervously over towards the two ponies, her voice reduced to a deep whine as her ears deflated.  Applejack whispered:  “Macky, I don't like this—”

        Two shrieking figures dove in from a cluster of bushes and slammed Applejack to the ground.  Spinning, Big Macintosh gasped and galloped over to rescue her—but four more bodies jumped out of a nearby apple tree and wrestled with the stallion, weathering his snarling kicks and bucks as he struggled to shake them off.

        Applejack grunted and headbutted the first of the two leathery creatures clawing at her before reverse-kicking the second.  She limped up onto three hooves with the aid of her pitchfork.  “Darn Celestia-forsaken varmints!—They sprung a trap with our trap!”

        Macintosh shouted and backtrotted hard into an apple tree.  The entire thing shook, dropping heavy fruit down onto the heads of the various creatures clinging to him.  He managed to shake off three of them with his mighty limbs, but four more shadows scampered in from the underbrush and tackled him with a gasp.  They shoved him across the orchards until he spilled violently through the wooden fences bordering the farm.  Under the combined weight of the whooping leathery monstrosities and the collapsed beams, he was helpless to get back up to his hooves.  The creatures clamored all over Macintosh, bearing razor sharp claws and pointed fangs.

        “I'm a'coming, Big Mac!” Applejack fearlessly plowed her way through three creatures, leaped over a leathery sea of more ambushers, and galloped the last heartstopping lengths separating her from her encumbered sibling.  But before she could so much as get within a hair's length, the one creature inside the cage effortlessly snapped the bars open and pounced on her with a scream.  “Unnggh!”  She cried out as she was slammed hard to the splashing dirt.

        Her pitchfork tumbled uselessly to the side as she gazed up in horror to see a drooling face full of fanged teeth leering above her.  Winona suddenly dove into the scene with a growl, biting hard into the creature's shoulder.  The monster hissed, flicked its limb, and smacked Winona off of him.  The collie ricocheted across the earth's floor with a yelping cry as more leathery forms closed in from all sides.  Applejack and Macintosh were suddenly awash in a sea of mangy carnivores, and the air sang as all the abominations extended their claws as one and made to slash flesh from bone—

        A copper blur soared through the moonlight, and suddenly the monster straddling Applejack was gone.  “H-Huh?!”  The frazzled blonde mare blinked, rolled up to her haunches, and glanced breathlessly aside.

        A winged figure was stamping her hooves down into the side of the shrieking creature, filling the night air with the sickly crunch of bones.  Two more monsters leaped at the pegasus' backside, only to be effortlessly bucked hard through a row of exploding wooden fences.  With amber eyes flickering, the shadow of “Harmony” burned across the inky black earth and bowled through the pile of bodies that had clamored over Macintosh.  Several thrashing hooves met hard leather skulls, and half of the creatures were already bolting off under a cadence of pained shrieks.  The other half closed in, spurred on by the sudden heroine's audacious attack.

        “Y-You again!”  Applejack gasped, scampering immediately over towards a dazed Macintosh's side.  “Nnngh—Carnsarnit, Miss Harmony!  Why can't I quit you?”

        “You're welcome,” Scootaloo blindly snarled.  Frowning, she spun about—eyed all of the surrounding creatures—and then flashed a look to the earth.  She saw the pitchfork lying dormant.  Scootaloo slammed a hoof down and spun the thing upwards until she clasped its wooden handle in her teeth.  In one roaring charge, the monsters converged on her, but the last pony was more than ready.  She swung her snout in a wide swath—her black mane flowing with an amber streak—and she mercilessly slashed the serrated length of the pitchfork's teeth across an advancing row of leather flesh.  Wet black juice splashed hotly through the night.  Several creatures retreated in a howl of pain and defeat; a last trio stupidly rushed Scootaloo from behind.

        The pegasus breathlessly kicked one creature, twirled on one hoof, smacked another monster skyward with the pitchfork, tossed the farming utensil onto her back, twirled it over outstretched wings, and kicked the base of the midair handle with one well-aimed buck.  The thing sang through the air before it sliced across the silhouette of a gasping monster's skull.  With a wooden thud, the pitchfork embedded into a tree trunk across the clearing—with a severed ear spinning to a stop on the leftmost tooth of the bloodied tool.  The last creature wailed, clutching its leaking head and hobbling off to join its scampering brethren just beyond the line of fences and into the pitch-black forest beyond.  A dizzied Winona limped up to her feet, shook her head clear, and ran up just to the edge of the fenceline, barking canine obscenities into the great beyond.

        Applejack panted, exhausted simply from watching the entire fight unfold.  She shook Macintosh's shoulders, gazing at him with mute concern.  He winced slightly but was moderately bruised, nothing more.  The stallion clamored halfway out from the pile of wooden fence lumber and paused to pat Applejack's arm with a reassuring hoof.  Gulping, the blond mare helped him to all fours and gazed forlornly Scootaloo's way.

        “Th-Thank you.  I m-mean it in all sincerity, Miss Harmony.  Thank you for saving our lives.  We've had all we can take from them nasty varmints over the past few weeks—”

        “Trolls.”

        “I beg yer pardon?” Applejack blinked in the suddenly blinding moonlight.

        “They're called 'trolls',” Scootaloo spat, facing off into the forest beyond Winona's furious barkings.  “And they're not gone.”

        “Th-They're not?!?” Applejack gasped.  Her and her brother's teeth clattered suddenly.

        Scootaloo shook her head and motioned towards the woods with her snout.  “They're still out there, in between the trees, watching us.  No doubt they want to stage another attack before sunrise—The Sun is their bane you see.  Uh uh—There's no getting rid of trolls, not easily at least.”

        “H-How do you know all of this?”

        “Because I know trolls, among other things,” Scootaloo said, turning to gaze down at the stumbling sight of the exhausted siblings.  She raised an eyebrow.  “All this time—That was it?  You've been dealing with trolls?”

        “It's n-not as bad as it looks—”

        “Miss Applejack, it's worse than it looks!  Trolls shouldn't be this deep in Equestria in this time period—er—in Spring, I mean!  Why haven't you asked for any help with them up until now?!”

        “Didn't y'all learn anythang from what I told you earlier?”  Applejack murmured melancholically.  She and Macintosh gazed sickly at the line of trees and the many pairs of pale eyes staring hauntingly back at them.  “We have to deal with them alone—It's our land.”

        “But why, Miss Applejack?”  Scootaloo exclaimed, but somehow she already knew the answer.

        “Because... Because we're the reason they're on our land to begin with.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Eight – To Touch the Ground

Special Thanks to Vimbert - Pre-Reader and Gentlecolt

        Scootaloo was seventeen years old, but she didn't know it.  All that the last pony knew was pain.

        On three panicked limbs and a bloodstained hoof she limped madly towards the cliffside.  Through gnashing teeth she hissed, her tortured breaths billowing out in frantic vapors that joined the gray mist wafting through central Whinniepeg.  The canyon loomed ahead, and within the foreground of her bobbing vision there danced a bulbous copper shape in and out of focus.  The Harmony was a mere seventy meters away.  As she limped and panted towards it, she could have sworn it was anchored to another continent.

        Their howls; they split the streets of Whinniepeg like the savage ravine that had cataclysmically carved straight through the urbanscape.  Stupidly, the orange-brown filly glanced back over her quivering flank.  Through crooked goggles, she saw them, a wave of pale leather shapes that bounded after her, shaking the snow loose from the cobblestone with their ravenous stampede.

        “Hnnghh!—Snkkt...” Scootaloo's breath shrieked against the cocoon of pain engulfing her.  She hobbled and hobbled, every bone-crunching lurch spitting redder and redder blood against the monochromatic streets blurring underneath.  A bright glint of steel laughed in the pale twilight; a crude metal weapon had been lodged into her left forelimb, and with each meter she traveled it bit and bit deeper at her muscles with rusted teeth.  The leg would snap off at any moment.  Scootaloo only galloped faster.

        The Harmony tilted and spun gently on its anchored sway.  Its copper frame blurred once more as the blood reached her scarlet eyes.  The world crackled like a billowing stove beyond the veil of Scootaloo's throbbing skull, and she ran through it—she ran through the pain, her best and only friend in the Wasteland.  And her friend caught her; in thorny gloves it hoisted her by the wings and yanked her off the cliffside, just as the leather bodies leaped screamily towards her hooves.

        “H'jem!” the filly shouted in the death throes of weightlessness.  The catseye aperture of the Harmony blindly flew open, and Scootaloo went crashing through, collapsing inside a womb of darkness.  The last pony slammed against a workbench on the port side of the hangar bay.  Runescaping tools and scraps of moonstone rained all over her as she sat up, eyes exploding through the veil to see the edge of the Whinniepeg ravine looming outside, and a solid wall of toad-skinned bodies flailing and rearing upon the precipice, their forest of beady white eyes locked on her.  In their anger and hunger, several of the monstrosities jumped towards the Harmony—screaming—only to stupidly fall into the heart of a dead Equestria looming blackly below.  The rest of them cursed and sneered at her, their fanged maws drooling, hissing, grinning.

        The last pony swallowed down a rising geyser of bile.  Spitting, sputtering, she finally managed a hoarse and whimpering “M'rhlym” into her quivering bracelet of horns.  A purple glow, and the magic incantation triggered a rune fastened to the Harmony's controls.  With one simple directive, the airship magically lifted up, up, up towards the ashen gray miasma.  Scootaloo pivoted forward—collapsed to her agonized chest with a yelp—and desperately crawled towards the entrance of the hangar.  The trolls whooped and cackled at her struggling from a distance.  Before the airship could reach the length of its chains, Scootaloo stifled a howl and flung her one good forelimb towards the emergency release, severing all four anchor bolts with a hiss of steam.  The gray snow outside billowed furiously as the ship's ascension reached a fever pitch, taking her away from the bifurcated graveyard of Whinniepeg and up into the cold embrace of the clouds.

        “Hnnngh...” Scootaloo quivered, cemented to the ground in the coalescing frost of her pulsating nerves.  There was a fire inside her left front leg, eating her from the inside out.  She didn't want to—she knew she didn't want to—but she had to see how bad it was.  She prayed it didn't look nearly as massacred as it felt.  “Mmmmnngh-Y-Y-Y-Y'lynwyn!”

        Runes flickered on opposite sides of the hangar bay.  Lanterns burned to life, casting a mournful glow over the swaying metal bulkheads littered with her tools... stained with her blood, hot blood, warm blood, pulsing blood.  She no longer had a leg; it was a fountain.  The fact that it still had the audacity to remain attached to her torso made the filly finally vomit into her mouth.

        Spitting a green soup into the far corner, she then rolled over with another shriek and took a quivering look at the invading metal shard.  The trollish weapon sang a funeral dirge into the meat just above her knee, and the chorus was a crimson-soaked sea of copper barbs.  No killing machine fashioned by trolls was ever meant to just break the flesh; the thing was undoubtedly brimming with some horrible poison or another, dredged up from the bowels of sundered Whinniepeg.  The fact that it was hanging off Scootaloo's limb was not nearly as horrifying as the fact that it had to come out, and it had to come out now.

        The sobs came sooner than she had expected them.  She was stronger than this; she had prepared for this.  She fought the tears as she fought to strip the leather saddlebag off of her.  Pliable brown armor clattered apathetically towards the floor.  Something rolled out—glowing sapphirically—a bottle of rune-capped blue flame that Gilliam had sent her there for, that he hadn't anticipated might kill her, that he probably didn't care about in the least.  Soon she was naked, save for the sliver of unsightly metal violating her body.  She towed it as she towed her other quivering limbs—scuffling—towards a rack of runestones.  She fumbled with one good hoof until she knocked a white-and-red painted moonrock off its shelf and into her lap.  Reaching next to a metal first aid box, she produced a tight leather bag of medicinal herbs that she had bought off of a strange flying squirrel she had just met a few weeks ago.  The thought of his smoke-stained incisors briefly distracted her from the hellish task at hoof; she never understood why some creatures of this Wasteland would willfully destroy themselves from the inside out... not until now.

        Eyes tearing, she yanked the pouch of herbs open with her snout and spread them in a cinnamon shower over the pulsating sinkhole gouged in her limb.  It scorched her like acid rain.  She hissed and whimpered like she was foaling death itself straight out of her torn flesh.  This was just the start of the flames.  As the teetering Harmony surged her upwards to the heavens, she slowed her hyperventilation until her body became a wind instrument, hissing in tune with the gray ash outside.  She had to do this quick, quick like the Cataclysm.  She was strong enough.  She was strong enough.  She was--

        “Hmrmfff--” the girl whimpered as she clamped her teeth over the wooden handle of the weapon, gripping to it like a rudder.  Her brown ears flicked numbly back.  Cold eyes shut hard to a colder world and dove slowly, hellishly into the burning crimson heart beyond it.  “Snkkt-Nnnghhhh!”

        She pulled it out.  She tore it out.  Her soul splashed inside-out after it.  Her eyes screamed open, and she wished that they hadn't.  Strands of meat, a flash of bone—white horror, and it filled her insides like a million ghosts bleeding thunderously out her neck.  The last pony had every sound in the world to scream, but she forced her knife-licking tongue to let loose one word and one word alone:

        “W'rhynnym!”

        Instantly, the white and red moonrock burned in a violet glow.  The rune seared red-hot, and the pony slammed the tool straight into the sopping hole excavated from her leg.  The unicorn bracelet burst in manalight, and the inflamed stone began cauterizing the wound.  With a gust of steam, Scootaloo instantly smelled her flesh burning.  She would have choked, were it not for the unearthly howl bursting up the opposite end of her trachea.

        She spat the weapon onto the floor with an offending clatter, and followed it up with an encore of noise, deathly noise, the only noise she had ever grown to know—her noise.  She twisted her maneless neck.  She slammed and slammed the bulkheads with her one good forelimb.  Her hooves clomped and formed scarlet-stained dents in the floor as she tossed and turned underneath the cloud of her cooked flesh.  Tears rolled down her orange-brown snout, outracing the blood trickling from her bit lips as she curled up into the torture, sputtering and hiccuping like the little orange foal that had suddenly bubbled to the brown surface.

        “Mmmmfff... Nnnnghh... D-D-Dghh... D-Dash... Dashieeee...nnnghhhh-Dashiiiiee...”

        She screamed and murmured through the searing hot length of her healing, her words lost to the lifeless clouds billowing outside, the embrace of an empty world, the trolls' home, her home, the only home.

        Scootaloo's eyes remained locked on the bloody metal teeth of the pitchfork.  She briefly licked her lips—only to remember that they weren't her own.  The Entropan flesh tasted numb, devoid of all copper juices.  There was a warmth that was once again cascading over the filly's flesh.  The alien kiss of distant morning sunlight cradled her to the surreal moment at hand.  She wrapped herself inside the spaces between her breaths and glanced numbly towards the rest of the Apple Family.

        “It all started a little over a month ago,” Applejack murmured.  She leaned back against the wooden railings of the Apple Family's household porch beside Scootaloo.  A few hooftrots away, Granny Smith sat on the edge of a wooden crate, wrapping a white bandage around one of Macintosh's bruised legs.  The cold curtain of night had long melted, filling the air with a dew-laden haze that magnified the exhausted tone of the orange mare's voice.  “Big Mac and I were fixin' to dig ourselves a new well along the north side of the acres.  That plot of land always gets dry this time of year, ya see.  We figured that if we built a new ditch to hold moisture, we could make waterin' trips to the northern orchards a might less tedious.”

        Macintosh sighed, wincing slightly as Granny Smith closed one bandage, sliced the slack of the gauze off with a green cutting knife, and then proceeded to wrap another strip around the opposite limb of the crimson stallion.  She too listened intently as her graying eyes reflected the distant glow of morning haze coming up over the starry horizon.

        “Well, wouldn't you know it?” Applejack continued.  “We dug and we dug and we dug—And suddenly the earth gave way all muddy-like, and we found this deep cavern hidden beneath the roots of our apple orchards.  It was no ordinary cave, mind you.  I roped myself down and gave it a little look-see.  I was startled to find a bunch of gray statues of these creepy bug-eyed creatures lyin' in the depths of the hole-in-the-ground.  It scared me something fierce, but Big Macintosh thought differently.  He said that we had stumbled upon an Ancient Wonder of the First Age or some nonsense.  I seriously don't know where he gets those silly ideas of his.  I mean, you let 'em open his mouth just once and he takes off!”

        The red-coated colt in question cleared his throat with a slight frown, motioning his blonde head towards Scootaloo.

        Applejack smiled sheepishly.  “R-Right.  Sorry, Macky,” she murmured, kicking her hooves against the wooden floorboards of the porch.  “So we figured we'd call in Twilight to take a look at what we found, and see if she could put that noggin' of hers to good use and figure out just what we found.  We slept on it.  But when morning came, we visited the hole once again—and all of the statues were gone from the cave!  At first, we reckoned it was magic.  Them were some pretty strange statues, to say the least.  Who knows why they were left so deep in the earth to begin with—or just what they were capable of doing.”

        The orange mare shot her green eyes emphatically at Scootaloo, her lips quivering in the fright that was aroused by the following memories:

        “But as the nights went by, we found out pretty darn quick what happened to the statues.  They had become those creatures that you saw attack us!  At first, though, it wasn't all that bad.  We had little bits of property damage here and there across the farm.  We figured it was a bunch of foals pullin' pranks on us.  But as the weeks went on, things got worse.  Them thick-skinned varmints came prancin' out of the forest, whoopin' and a'hollerin', smashin' into our granary, runnin' off with our work tools, and even spookin' the livestock.  Then, one day, they began gettin' into their thick skulls just what it was that meant the most to our family, and they started eatin' at the apple trees, desecrating the fruit, even settin' fire to an orchard or two.  It was positively dreadful.”

        With a sigh, Applejack clopped down on all fours and strolled lethargically towards Macintosh and Granny Smith.

        “So, we took to comin' out at night—formin' a tiny little militia: Macky and myself—and we tried scarin' em away.  That didn't work.  So we resorted to chasin' them back into the woods every night.  They were merely playin' games with us.  Finally, we sharpened our pitchforks and shovels and plotted to get the stomp on them mangy creatures once and for all.  They only laughed at us, and started attackin' in twice the numbers, even vandalizin' our farmhouse when we were too plum scared out of our wits to come out and face them.  Poor Macintosh here almost got bitten on three different occasions before y'all dropped in.”

        Applejack sweetly nuzzled Big Macintosh's mane.  The large stallion smiled gently at her, exhaling as the last of his bandages were applied by the elderly mare seated aside him.  Applejack turned around, standing next to her kin as she gazed with a twinge of shame Scootaloo's way.

        “I've never had to deal with a pest of this sort in all my years of managin' Sweet Apple Acres.  Well, true, the parasprite swarm was pretty bad, but at least them critters were forgiveably cute.  These... These 'trolls', however—there's no doubt that they're after our blood.  It only figures; they've done everythang else that is in their ability to make us miserable.  But we soon realized it wasn't just the four of us livin' on the farm that they wanted to upset.  They wanted to get us through our apples.  At the rate at which we were battlin' them, it was only a matter of time before they stripped our orchards of everythang we held dear.  So, between Macky and me, we made the decision to perform the Apple Buck Season harvest as early as possible.  We even contracted ourselves to deliver on the date that happens to be a day and a half from now.  We thought we could get a jump on them varmints by shippin' the apples out early, as if that would make 'em bored and they'd just go away.  But... we were wrong.”

        Scootaloo slowly nodded as she digested all of this.  In a firm voice, she replied, “Miss Applejack, it was brave of you to do what you did.  Obviously your family has undergone a great deal of hardship with these trolls.  But did it ever occur to you that it might become an issue for Ponyville as well?  About a year ago, Canterlotlian... uh... records—yes, Canterlotlian records—chronicled an incident in your village's downtown where an Ursa Minor went on an inexplicable rampage and caused several cases of property damage.  It goes without saying that this sort of a thing can instantly collect the attention of Princess Celestia—especially if it could have been stifled long before it became a threat.”

        “Applejack, dearie,” Granny Smith placed the green cutting knife down onto a wooden crate before shakily swiveling her lime snout the orange mare's way.  “You told me that you and Macintosh had a hoofhold of this situation!  And look at you now!  You've sparked the attention of the Canterlotlian Agricultural Committee or what-not!”

        “And I thought that Macintosh and I had everythang under control!  Honest, I did!”  She gulped and wrenched her shuddering gaze from Granny Smith and onto Scootaloo.  “Miss Harmony, please believe me.  We never meant to begin some sort of horrible incident.  Truth is, we found them creatures when they were nothin' but harmless stone statues in the dirt.  The next thing we knew, we were dealing with some mangy punks comin' out of the forest!  We never realized they would be so blood-thirsty and dangerous!  By the time we had gotten knee-deep in tusslin' with them, it became apparent just what kind of a mess we were in.  But we had every intention of dealin' with it ourselves!  We figured that once we got the apples away, they'd be gone!  But... But obviously they don't fancy us getting' that far.”

        “Even if you can get the harvest done on time, all that's going to do is save the apples,” Scootaloo said.  “I know how much your fruit means to you, Miss Applejack, but I also know that your family and your land means so much more.  And I hate to say it—but the trolls aren't interested in your land.  They're interested in you.”

        “Us?” Applejack, Granny Smith, and Macintosh blinked as one.

        “Your misery, your suffering, and your sorrow,” 'Harmony' spoke as she paced before them on steadily clopping hooves.  “There's a reason why trolls naturally live underground, under bridges, or in the shadows of forests.  They were such a murderous blight upon the infantile landscape of Equestria, that Princess Celestia cursed them long ago, even before the First Age had ended.  At the first exposure to sunlight, they turn instantly to stone.  This is the sort of curse that can only be countered by exposure to twilight, which history can thank Discord for.”

        “D-Discord?”  Applejack blinked innocently.  Macintosh was similarly scratching his mane with a confused hoof.  Granny Smith sat gravely still.

        Scootaloo blinked, briefly seeing the many golden words of Princess Celestia threading across immaculate ivory pages that shimmered in the Harmony's lanternlight.  The copper-coated pegasus swiftly explained, “Discord was a malevolent entity that poisoned the earth shortly before Epona's Exodus into the Cosmos.  Canterlotlian History Books blame him for the Chaos wars, during which time trolls murderously skittered across the nubile landscape, doing his bidding, biting into and shredding asunder every living thing that they could see.  Miss Applejack, when you dug up the hole with the buried statues inside, you incidentally gave the trolls a chance to be exposed to twilight once again.  They must have risen out of the well overnight and made a home in the forest.  All they know is that earth ponies gave them freedom once more, and they will stop at nothing until they have caused those same ponies—until they have caused you—as much misery and suffering as possible.”

        “But... But why?”  Applejack exclaimed with a disgusted expression.

        “Just because, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo throated.  “They're trolls.”

        “Your knowledge on the topic of these creatures is impeccable,” Granny Smith stammered.  “They really do teach ya a lot in the Royal Court of Canterlot.”

        Scootaloo briefly smiled, but with subtlety.  “Many things I have simply taught myself, ma'am.  You'll be surprised how much a good grasp of history can help you...” Her lips trailed and her eyes briefly darted towards the dawn's horizon.  “...in the future.”

        “I just feel so plum horrible,” Applejack exclaimed.  A slight sniffling, and she reached over to nuzzle Macintosh once more, half-hugging him.  “If I had known that Macintosh here would nearly have bitten the proverbial poison apple, I would never have considered trappin' those varmints from the get-go!”

        “Don't be so hard on yourself, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo walked over and gently smiled at her.  “Nopony this side of Equestria has dealt with a band of trolls like this in centuries—millennia, even.  I don't think any citizen—farmer, magician, or flier—could have dealt with what your family has gone through all this time.”

        “And it would have killed us too,” Applejack gulped.  “But then you showed up.  Because of you, Macintosh and I are still alive.  Miss Harmony, I... I don't rightly know how I can thank you enough.”

        “I didn't come here to make anyone indebted to me—To be perfectly frank, I'm just as surprised as you are,” Scootaloo said with a sigh as she rubbed her chin with a hoof and murmured into the quiet air surrounding herself:  “Why are they here, Spike?  Why now?”  A deep gulp, and she added.  “Why am I here...?”

        “You...” Applejack bit her lip.  “You reckon that you'll be flyin' back to Canterlot and callin' in the Royal Guard?  I mean—on account of the mess we've made and all?”

        Scootaloo looked up at her to say something, but her mouth lingered in a numbing gape.  She gazed briefly past the three sets of eyes being thrown her way.  All of that strength and earth pony pride  crumbled in an instant, like famined horses shrinking into a deep corner for fear of a great hammer being thrown down upon them.  It was such a sickly pathetic sight that Scootaloo almost wished that the green flames would yank her back to the future right then and there.

        Beyond them was another sickly sight, one that still reverberated across the hollowed-out spirit of the thirty-three year old time traveler.  She saw a lone filly bleeding against metal bulkheads, curling into a pathetic fetus under cauterizing steam.  Somepony's named was called out, a whimper that was as immutable as time; but everything was all too quickly crumbling under the emotionless hiss of a gray world enshrouding her.

        Right there, on the front porch of the Apple Family, twenty-five years before a pegasus would stand bleeding atop a fountain in the middle of a Ponyvillean graveyard surrounded by her eternal enemies, that same grayness was spreading—like a cancer—and its pale leathery roots were twisting about the eye sockets of all three ponies staring her way.  The trolls were invaders from the past, but Scootaloo knew better.  They brought with their teeth and claws the bitter poisons of an unbearable Wasteland beyond.  Their sheer presence on the farm was too timely, too sadistically and maliciously appropriate for the last pony's infinitely unpredictable arrival then and there.

        The Apple Family had become victims of a battlefield drawn up in a limbo of irony before the dawn of time.  This farm was now the unwitting site for a clash between the chaos of the past and the misery of future.  The sinister presence of those creatures had infected the farm ponies, had leeched their souls of their Elektran spirit.  Scootaloo could see their faces awash in hopelessness, like dried-up bone, and before ghostly black hollows threatened to burrow outward from the centers of their skulls, Scootaloo prayed for something—anything—that might cosmically salvage that pitiful moment, as she in all her Entropan charisma had utterly failed to do thus far.

        Before Scootaloo could formulate a much-needed response to Applejack's statement, there was a creaking noise just behind her.  The heads of the Apple Family turned, and the copper-coated pegasus swiveled as well.  She froze in place, as if a burning hand had clasped firmly over her heart.

        A tiny pale foal with a fountain of red hair stood, blinking dazedly in the frame of the half-opened screen door of the porch.  Her hooves were clad in dainty pink socks to keep her limbs warm.  Her mane was a tussled, crimson mess.  “Mac?  AJ?  Granny?  What's goin' on out here?  Have the scary things come back t'haunt us tonight?”

        “Nothin' that your brother and sister can't tackle, Apple Bloom.  Go back to bed—It ain't mornin' yet.”

        “But you guys are makin' such a racket—”  The blank-flanked filly yawned her petite mouth and teetered where she dazedly stood.  “I was havin' a dream that I got my cutie mark.”

        “Then go lie down and you just might get it:  A big fluffy pillow laced with sparkles—Now git!”

        “Mmmm—alright,” the child was about to slink back into the house when her thinned eyes caught hold of Scootaloo's frame.  She looked up at her.  “Wh-Who are you?”

        Scootaloo's chest thundered.  She stood frozen in place like she was a statue herself, and she was too far gone from the twilight of the Wasteland to melt back.  All she had was this burning naked now, and it terrified her as much as it enraptured her.

        “This here's Harmony, Apple Bloom—darlin',” Granny Smith interjected with a shivering smile.  “She's here to help us with the farm.  Everything's alright, though.  Just adult pony business; that's why we're all up so early.”

        “Oh, okay,” Apple Bloom smiled tiredly.  “Hello, Miss Harmony.”

        Scootaloo's lips gently parted, a soft smile melting forth as she forced her head to tilt down towards her old, old friend.  “H-Hello there, Apple Bloom.”  She swallowed something sore down her throat and breathed, “You have r-really gorgeous hair, sw-sweetie.”

        “Mmmm...” the yellow-coated foal blushed slightly and reached a hoof up to her cowlicked mane.  “If y'all say so.”  A slight smile.  “You should see me when I'm wearin' a pink bow in it.”

        “I... I-I imagine that would be quite a sight.”  Scootaloo nearly choked, keeping her hooves steady.  They felt like they were three meters off the ground, and numb.

        “Well, so long, Miss Harmony,” Apple Bloom adorably yawned yet again, sauntered around, and padded her way into the shadowed depths of the house towards her bedroom.

        Scootaloo gazed into the varnished foundation of the farmhouse, her brow cascading weakly over her eyes as several memories of treehouse escapades, musical rehearsals, and mid-afternoon wagon rides flickered across her weathered mind like so much ash and snow.  The thoughts sunk away at the speed of light, only to bounce back to the mind's surface with all of the combined smells, sights, and sounds of that thickly real farmland surrounding her—and suddenly her time traveling soul self trembled, as if suddenly aware of a thousand razor-toothed bodies closing in from all sides.

        The trolls would rip and tear Sweet Apple Acres to the ground, and Apple Bloom along with it.  No amount of metal traps, no multitude of stampeding hooves, no army of warhorses in all of Equestria could stop this bright green earth from suffering the molestation that was coming to it.  The spilling of blood and the sundering of the land; these heartless monstrosities had already set it all in motion long before the time traveler had even arrived there.

        The Cataclysm could not be avoided.  Scootaloo knew this.  The trolls, however—they did not belong to this world.  They belonged to the Wasteland; they would inherit it.  Everything about their presence in Applejack's warm and lovely time felt wrong, just like Scootaloo in the numb shell of her Entropan projection felt wrong, though she hesitated to stop savoring the warm breath of the fleeting moment to admit such nausea.

        Scootaloo had suddenly and unwittingly acquired the means to contact Princess Celestia, but such a victory could only come about after riding the crest of a bloody melee that would take several horses' blood, if not their lives.  The trolls were none of Scootaloo's concern; they shouldn't have been her concern.  Still, they were there; and she was there.  A coincidental juncture of several souls possessed with violence and one shadow of a soul tempered by violence was too miraculous to overlook, too significant to ignore, and too shameful to toss frivolously into the authoritarian hooves of a long-dead Princess, even if for the sake of scrubbing clean a future that only one pony could ever see, even if for a fleeting few years of lonely misery that mimicked the poison that dripped off the fangs of those sick and viral beasts.

        The Apple Family had given all of their lives to the earth.  In just one day, Scootaloo had arrived, and all she had managed to give the land was a fleeting respect that rode the coattails of a desperate experiment that wouldn't be concocted until twenty-five years from then, where a purple dragon stood side by side with the last pony—swimming helplessly in the all-encompassing hollow of a farm filly's skull—pondering over the depths to which this green flamed scavenger might dip into the  golden moments of Equestrian innocence, but never once anticipating to what degree she might pollute it.

        “What good would Celestia do us now, Spike?” she murmured silently to the air.  He didn't answer her, but her voice came back to whisper above any hint of the notion.  “What good could I do now?”

        A veritable eon of contemplation was really just a naked seven seconds, at the end of which Granny Smith's voice could be heard gently shaking the silence.  “There's only one thing that should be done at this point,” she said in perfect somberness aimed Applejack's way.  “We should let Miss Harmony here contact them guardshorses from Canterlot.  They can certainly take care of the trolls.”

        “But Granny!”  Applejack's voice hissed.  “What would become of the farm?!  The Canterlotlian Court would slap our name onto a list of Equestrian laughing stocks!  Nopony would want to buy from our harvest next year!  Heck—if it turns out that we just plum resurrected the chaotic army of some nasty feller named Discord, I rightly wouldn't blame Celestia for wanting to banish every single one of us to the moon!”

        “AJ, darlin'—I've been living on this farm a long time.  And I know more than anypony how important it is to give to the earth.  But it so happens that this very same land gave me you, Macintosh, and lil' Apple Bloom.  And I'd be plum sore if I went to my dyin' stable knowin' that I allowed the three of you to suffer from these horrible creatures because you were so gul-durn concerned about making sure the apples were delivered.  We need to seek Canterlot's help!”

        “No.”

        They all looked Scootaloo's way.  “M-Miss Harmony...?”

        “Ahem...” Scootaloo cleared her throat, blinked her eyes dry, and spun around to gaze at them firmly.  “What I mean to say is: No, seeking Canterlot's help isn't the best option right now, at least if you want to keep your farm—and your lives in check.”

        “Are ya serious?”  Applejack squinted through the haze of the coming dawn.  “Ya mean to say that after all this time of badgerin' me and Macky here to play along with yer chivalrous routine—You've got the gall to say we shouldn't contact yer Royal Court over this troll nonsense?”

        “It's because there's an extent of truth to your concerns here, Miss Applejack.”

        The farm filly blinked nervously.  “Th-There is?”

        Scootaloo took a deep breath.  The sunrise was blossoming behind her.  She knew it; she could feel it, but for this suddenly brave and shamefully dashing moment she refused her Entropan self the chance to turn around and bask in it.  A daring breath was bubbling up through her, and if this coming slight of hoof did not pass the lucid scrutiny of the Element of Honesty before her, she might as well have returned to the future and told Spike to suck in the rest of his green breath, for there would be no more use of time traveling after this.

        Navigating the thorny labyrinth of a split second gambit, “Harmony” authoritatively spouted forth:  “Trolls are as old as Equestrian Civilization.  As a result, there has been... litigation that has lasted as long as Equestrian Civilization.”  Scootaloo eyed the curves in Applejack's face like she navigated the crumbling fjords of her conscience, speaking,  “Namely, if anypony or ponies are discovered to have been harboring the living refuse of the Chaos Wars—in any fashion—they and all of their assets will be immediately seized by the Royal Court of Canterlot... indefinitely.”

        Applejack and Macintosh immediately paled, as if having stared down the incoming kiss of a deathly locomotive.

        Granny Smith suddenly and solidly spoke up with a quizzical squint aimed the pegasus' way.  “What is the name of this here fancy litigation?”

        Scootaloo fearlessly stared back at the graying mare.  “It's called the 'Act of Accord', and it's as harsh a regulation at it is ancient, though no less impermeable.  In her long life of ruling over Equestria, Princess Celestia has seen to it that no mercy is granted to the proliferation or preservation of yesterday's weapons of war.  The penalties for crimes committed under the 'Act of Accord' are far too devastating to imagine befalling a quaint and well-to-do farm as what your family have grown here at Sweet Apple Acres.”

        “But... I've met Princess Celestia!” Applejack briefly removed her hat and murmured from a deepening shadow.  “Surely Her Majesty has it in her to see that what's happened here has been purely an accident!”

        Scootaloo shook her head with carefully constructed moroseness.  “I wish that were true, Miss Applejack, but it's not.  When it comes to the 'Act of Accord', even the Princess must work against her typical spirit of mercy.  The last time she had shown leniency to transgressors was just prior to the Third Age, and it resulted in Nightmare Moon suddenly acquiring new legions to the Lunar Republic's Army.  There is no feasible way that the Canterlotlian Court will simply overlook the waking of the trolls that has happened here.  To so much as breathe a word to my superiors about this would mean the utter end of this farm, and everything you've ever worked for.”

        The silence that followed Scootaloo's brash proclamation was deafening.  She watched with muted anxiety as the wheels turned in the orange mare's mind from afar.  To her somber relief, the heinous weight of a week's load of bucking apples and battling trolls had softened the hardened edges of Applejack's suspicion, so that the intravenous fabrication fluttered down and enshrouded the farm filly like a gentle melancholic cloak.

        Scootaloo's words had circumnavigated the fortress of the Element of Honesty.  It deserved no celebration, especially as she saw a pair of gray eyes—suddenly piercing—hovering from behind the hung heads of the two younger farm ponies.  Granny Smith was staring decidedly at Scootaloo, and Scootaloo stared back.  In a pale and naked breath, the two souls shared a common gaze, and strategically kept the bridge silent in the advent of the morning sun.

        “Then...”  Applejack murmured like the helpless foal she suddenly was.  “Wh-What do you mean to propose, Miss H-Harmony?”

        A gentle breath.  A copper smile returned placidly to the time traveler's face as she flung her eyes back towards Applejack by the simple grace of Granny Smith's silence.  “What I mean to say is a simple reinforcement of what you told me earlier, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo said as she paced over towards the three of them.  She stared decidedly at the two younger ponies as she spoke, “You have all done nothing but give to the earth.  And it wasn't the Earth that gave you these trolls.  Cataclysmic things happen in an unfair world.  But, for once, I'm not going to buy it.  Not this time.  I'm not about to let strong and honorable ponies like yourselves be defeated so easily.  What happens on your land stays on your land—but you can't do it all on your own like you've tried so far.  You're going to need my help.  And for once, it's time that I stated a fact.  And that fact is that I am not—and I repeat—not going to take 'no' for an answer.  You're going to let me help you, and together we will get the apples harvested in time for your client's delivery.  ALL of the apples.”

        Applejack gazed back at Macintosh and Granny Smith.  Macintosh nodded helplessly, Granny Smith knowingly and solemnly.  Gulping, the farmfilly nevertheless looked towards Scootaloo with a nervous expression.  “B-But... What do you reckon about them varmints?  We're helpless without the assistance of Canterlot, and yet we're doomed with them knowin' about it!  Just what does that leave us with, Miss Harmony?”

        “Let me worry about the trolls.  I...”  Scootaloo sighed and rubbed a hoof over an aching temple.  “I-I'll think of something.  Trust me, if there's one thing I've learned in my life,” she breathed with a gentle, weathered smile,  “it's that I do my best thinking when I'm working hard to survive.  And believe you me—I intend to do a lot of hard work, as soon as Her Majesty's Sun rises up over the horizon there.  The question is, are you going to let me?”

        Applejack swallowed, dusted off a lock of her blonde mane and flung it over her neck.  Stamping her hooves down, she smirked Scootaloo's way.  “Well, what are y'all waitin' for?  Time to get them dainty wings of yers dirty, copper-bottom!”

        Scootaloo's first breath of relief in hours came like an autumn wind.  She smiled briefly at Applejack, but once more returned her gaze to the piercing gray eyes of an elder mare.  With a polite nod, she murmured, “You and your brother should get prepared.  I will join you briefly.  There's a lot to be done.  I should probably... uhm... m-meditate... or something first.”

        “Suit yerself.  I personally tend to meditate over a steamin' bowl of oatmeal.”  Applejack swiftly trotted past the copper pegasus and whistled over her shoulder.  “Big Mac!  Let's get 'er done!  Time's a-waistin'!”

        The red stallion marched after her.  The clopping sounds of the farm ponies danced in the echo of the nearby barn, followed by a rattling cadence of wicker baskets, wagon wheels, and farm tools.  Scootaloo glanced over her shoulder, briefly worrying that her anchor might incidentally canter too far off.  This anxiety was all too appropriately curtailed by a gray shadow that swallowed the golden rays of an invisible sunrise; Granny Smith had waddled up and was gazing at the time traveler with a stern softness.

        “Miss Harmony, there ain't no such thing as an 'Act of Accord'.”

        Scootaloo took a deep breath, cowardly avoiding the elderly mare's gaze.  “I know.”

        “I've been around long enough to know what's what in the Court of Canterlot.  Not only are you outright lyin' to my flesh and blood, but by deciding to take on these horrible varmints on yer own, you're riskin' the lives of everypony I've ever held dear.”

        “I-I know...”

        “Miss Harmony, look at me.”

        The pegasus bit her lip.  She glanced up from underneath a mat of black mane hair and obediently made eye contact.

        Granny Smith's pupils were like twin pools of acid, but a placid heart bubbled patiently underneath.  Nevertheless, she silkily grilled the visitor.  “What makes you think that you and you alone could somehow possibly... feasibly be the solution to this here troll problem?”

        “An even better question,” Scootaloo bravely throated, “is what inspires you to not raise a peep about this in front of your grandfoals, since you're obviously so concerned?”

        “Faith, child,” Granny Smith murmured in a stale voice.  “I still have faith in a gift, a gift that was given me by this ever-surprisin' world.  It was a gift that saw me through the first winter of raisin' young Apple Shine.  It was a gift that gave me hope and joy on his first foalday.  And it was a gift that gave me rhyme and reason to walk today—unassisted by newfangled gadgetry—so that I strolled around the farm with an energy that I didn't reckon I still had.  It was all because I saw you, and was overjoyed and inspired by you.  But now I need to know—and you need to help this frail old lady know—whether or not her faith deserves to be where it is.  Are you a gift, or are you a curse, Miss Harmony?”

        Scootaloo took a deep breath.  The shadows shifted before Granny Smith's endless gaze, so that the pegasus briefly imagined a brown coat and a shaved mane flickering beneath a pathetic spectrum.  She glanced once more over her shoulder, towards the reddening barn in the sunrise, towards the two young farm ponies beneath, and towards the rusted metal weathervane above it all... a sharp weathervane.

        The time traveler blinked.  The simplicity of what had to follow next was like the roof to Sugarcube Corner being raised over a bleeding scavenger.  She sauntered past the lime-coated elder and immediately swiped the green cutting knife from atop the wooden crate.

        Granny Smith blinked at her with sudden and unnerving fright.  “Miss Harmony, what in tarnation are you—?”

        “Be calm, Ms. Smith,” Scootaloo breathed in a low voice, “And watch.”

        That uttered, the copper pegasus held the glintingly sharp blade high and fearlessly slammed it into the soft flesh of her left knee.  The shattering noise that followed could have pierced eardrums; Granny Smith was too numb to even flinch.  Anchored by bright eyes, she watched incredulously as the solid metal blade bent and broke into several indiscernible shards.  As for the “Canterlotlian Clerks's” foreleg...

        There was not a scratch on her.

        “Ms. Smith,” a gentle voice throated.

        The lime-coated pony shuddered.

        “Ms. Smith,” she repeated, approaching her with gently clopping hooves.

        “Oh G-Goddess,” Smith stumbled back and sunk deflatedly to her haunches.  “Oh Goddess, Oh Goddess, Oh Goddess!”  The shuddering gesture pathetically bled into something resembling a deep and frightened bow.  “Epona, forgive me—!”

        “Ms. Smith!”  Scootaloo squatted down and grasped her hooves around the elder's.  “Breathe with me.  Just breathe.  It's okay.  Don't be scared.”  She stared deep into the old mare's gray eyes, like navigating an ashen fog of tomorrow.  Effortlessly, the last pony said, “I don't know who you think I am, or what you think I am.  But let me assure you, I'm none of those things.  I'm something different.”  She took a brave breath and then gently uttered, “And yet I'm something more.”

        The old mare trembled, struggling to stay still in the visitor's calm grasp.  She rattled like a bag of half-buried bones, barely keeping within the gaze of those amber eyes reflecting her.  “B-But how... But how... Wh-What are you made of, child?  Your leg... Oh Elektra alive, your leg!”

        “I have some of the answers, but not enough of them.  That's more or less why I'm here, Ms. Smith.  I can't pretend to tell you more, because I rightly don't know more.  But I do know this—Something which you yourself know, because you yourself have told me.”  She swallowed deeply and summoned the hardest smile of her young life in order to pacify the shuddering soul before her.  “I may or may not be a gift.  I may or may not be a curse.  But if there's one thing that I definitely am—it's timely.  The trolls are here, and I am here, and it's too good an opportunity for me to pass up.  I must take care of this; and it must be me alone.  To let this go into any other pony's hooves—royal or not—would desecrate the opportunity here.”

        “What opportunity?”  Granny Smith stammered, though her shivers were fading meltingly in Scootaloo's immutable embrace.  “Why tell me about this and not my grandchildren?  Why show me and not Canterlot, child?”

        “Because we have something in common, Ms. Smith, even if you cannot immediately fathom it.  You and I—we both know what it means to lose things.  We both understand the irredeemable agonies that the tragic lengths of life can unfold upon a pony.  But your children, this land, this beautiful and spotless world—it's not ready for the pain the likes of which these trolls bring.  And while I have it within my power to put a stop to them, it would be a crime to fall short of that contingency.”

        “But do you have the power to do such a thing, child?”  Ms. Smith swallowed and murmured, “Your body is like the spirit of an Alicorn, but your voice echoes loneliness and despair.  I can hear it now; it's like a dusty bell tower that hasn't been rung in forever.  Can I have faith in... in something that doesn't have faith in itself?”

        Scootaloo's amber eyes moistened slightly.  She choked back something bitter and gently stroked the calming mare's cheek.  “I'm starting to,” she painfully smiled.  “Because a pony like you—however briefly—had faith in the first place.  Where I come from, Ms. Smith, a living pony's faith like that could light my path for years.”  The pegasus took a deep breath, blinked her eyes towards the ceiling of the porch until they were once more dry.  She desperately murmured, “Please... please continue to trust me, Ms. Smith.  I will make things work out.  I may not know how yet, but time is on my side—on our side, in ways that neither of us can begin to guess, much less need to.”  She cleared her throat and smiled with sudden bravery.  “Your family has given so much to the Earth.  Could it be possible that the Earth has given you me?”

        Granny Smith had suddenly been drawn to the moist pools blinking before her.  She reached a hoof out and stroked the unblemished coat of the pegasus' foreleg.  “I had always dreamt of a gift... but never in such heavenly packaging.”  She smiled like the proud mother she once was—and forever would be.  “It's a wonder to be alive, child.”

        The last pony blinked away the flames of the future and whispered, “I'll make sure of it.”        

        The morning Sun was songfully bright.  The world bloomed one orchard at a time as the radiant dawn spread its rays over the treetops and across the manes of three ponies in the throes of deep labor.  On one row of apples, a red stallion and an orange mare bucked trunk after trunk with well-hardened precision.  Across another flank of trees, within a soul's anchorage, a black-maned pegasus filled basket after basket with red and green fruit, fighting steadily to ooze her way across the grand expanse of Sweet Apple Acres in a heroic race against time.

        In such mechanical precision, the allied equines completed the last of the East Orchards.  They stumbled breathlessly towards the Southern fields—or at least Macintosh and Applejack were breathless.  Scootaloo cringed to see the siblings' natural bodies wearing down under the persistent hurdles that they were scaling to get the impossible job done.  The morning's length of work had no effect whatsoever on the time traveler's projected limbs, and what she saw the previous day as an advantage in getting Applejack to open up had instead transformed into an obligatory crutch.

        She briefly considered coming out with the truth—not just the truth about the “Act of Accord”—but the total truth, something three hundred thousand times more palpable than the confidence she had constructed so belatedly between herself and Ms. Smith.  She imagined taking Applejack and Macintosh over into the shade and telling them all about the future, about the Cataclysm, about being the last pony, about how everything that the farmhooves saw and felt would someday end up in flames.  It would certainly dwarf everything that they were struggling to accomplish then and there.  But would it help them?

        The horrified faces of Ms. Cheerilee and her many foalish students flickered across Scootaloo's shuddering mind.  Somehow, her guilt over that circumstance had severely degraded over the last several hours of scavenging and time traveling.  But the prospect of seeing those same terrified faces plastered across Macintosh and Applejack—ponies whom Scootaloo especially knew—was something she never wanted to conceive.  And just what would knowledge of the future do for them?  The curse of the trolls had sapped enough color from them as it was.

        Applejack's farm was under attack by horrible monstrosities, and she was barely a day away from the biggest failure in apple bucking.  Scootaloo realized that the family of earth ponies presently had enough truth to worry about.  The gruesome future suddenly seemed like a very flimsy appendix to an ever prevalent, ever bleeding now.  Perhaps that is the way it had always been, Scootaloo wiltingly pondered, Lives are best lived without the knowledge of Death, and yet within Death.  Was that what Spike was trying to convince her?

        Scootaloo shook the shadowed clouds of doubt off her shoulders and bucked her worries away—forcing apple cluster after apple cluster to fall succinctly into the baskets.  It was such a simple, mechanical, yet trying exercise.  She could suspend herself into that task forever, and she knew very well that her two friends across the field could and would.  There might come a time when the visitor from the future would tell the Apple Family the worst news they could ever hear.  But right then—Celestia forgive her—her job was to help them, in the only way she was capable of, in the only way she was ever capable of helping them, though she knew not yet what that way was exactly.

        The memory of her “Act of Accord” fabrication was an ever present, ever guilty spur in her flanks, making her vibrate over the green landscape with a quickening pace of fear, panic, and desperation.  The colors and charisma of a living Equestria hummed about her.  She reveled in it; she had no choice.  It was in her pony nature to breathe and sing from the inside out with that magnificent garden of delight.  Yet, there was a numbness, a garrote wire of remorse that strung her—dangling—bare centimeters above the glistening grass that formed a springy soft floor beneath.

        Scootaloo was there in body and spirit—though they were a fake body and a courageously dishonest spirit—but try as she might, she could never truly get her hooves on the ground.  She didn't need wings to stay aloft the way she was; this farm... this home was not meant for her.  It was never meant for her.  Even as a filly, cradling a scooter along the fringes of a campfire, she refused herself relaxation like she refused herself the marshmallows that she herself had bought for all her friends.

        Applejack's strength had kept her from crying all these years.  In a dark-lit parallel, Scootaloo's foalish determination had kept her from sleeping, so that the childish filly had settled for nocturnal shivers of loneliness in the random vacant hovels that her nomadic scavengings could afford.  Scootaloo never needed a Cataclysm to be the last pony.  For as long as she could remember, the filly's years were carved by the cold claws of isolation, a self-imposed crusade that superseded cutie marks or even prismatic idol-worship.

        She never settled, never relented, never caved in to the invitation of another pony's bed to lie down in, for a dinner table to eat at, for a home to live, laugh, grow, and eventually die in.  There were, of course, exceptions: Cutie Mark Crusader sleepovers, rainy days spent at Fluttershy's place, a trip to Twilight Sparkle's library; but all of those were mere childish excursions through the nether of juvenile whimsy, and nothing permanent, nothing she could ever handsomely afford herself.  This was because—in all of her years of running and searching—Scootaloo could never be strong enough, or at least not so much that she figured she deserved any of those sweet and permanently endearing things.  As a result, she had always been on the go, a scooter-shoving blur of audacious delinquency.

        Even now—a dizzied and hapless time traveler who was rubber banded back and forth through the ages—she couldn't allow her hooves to touch down to the earth, to embrace something that was so warmly and invitingly offered to her.  In tiny samples, she tasted of it, only to fall back into the numb limbo that this Entropan body was temptingly granting her: a safe and relaxingly static flux.

        Spike had seen that in her, had plucked the thorns out from her frazzled brown body with those illuminating and wisened green eyeslits of his.  He had told her in the ruins of Sugarcube Corner that it was time that she stopped running, and yet here she was; having been thrown down a quarter-century's length of reverse-time, and the same creatures that had punctured her life to tatters—that had run all of her strength down into a paltry fetal sob against blood-stained bulkheads—were waiting for her once again.  Spike was right, she never had a home.  Until she could be sure that the Apple Family would, she couldn't pretend to make sense out of her being there, she couldn't tell Applejack and Macintosh the truth about the bleakness of it all, she couldn't touch her hooves down to the earth.

        As the Sun crept to a high noon and the heat rose in vapors off the thick green leaves of the orchards, the three ponies trudged their strained hooves across the trees, and yet they barely made it past one third of the Southern Field.  At that rate, success was not only difficult, it was inconceivable.  Sweet Apple Acres leaned on the precipice of a veritable Cataclysm of its own.  A lonely copper pariah found herself gazing forlornly at their home from a billion sighs away.  It wouldn't have been her first time.

        “I never thought I'd hear myself say this,” Applejack sweated through a damp mat of blonde hair as she slapped three stacks of burgeoning fruit baskets atop a wooden crate resting on a dirt path between apple orchards.  “But this is startin' to look plum impossible.”  She leaned against the cart and fanned her scalp with the whole of her brown hat.  “What in the hay was I thinkin' when I made this contract?”

        “You were thinking that your family needed to be rid of those horrible trolls once and for all, and in your desperation, this was your only option,” Scootaloo uttered as she stacked up a column of baskets herself.  “But regretting the past only drags time, and we don't have much to thank time for right now.”  She glanced briefly at the noonday Sun, then squinted her way across the horizon to where a thoroughly sweating Macintosh was slaving away at another row of trees with his kicking hooves.  “I don't know about you, but I've always held the past in high regard.  I think it makes for a healthier lifestyle.”

        “Yer philosophy is just as inspirin' as yer physique, Miss Harmony,” she winced against the fanning of her hat but nevertheless managed a gentle smirk.  “I swear—I wish I knew yer secret.  If I had bucked nearly as many trees as you, I would have died of heat stroke by now.”

        “Hey, I eat my oats.  So sue me,” Scootaloo mumbled as her amber eyes scanned the horizon.  An invisible line of leather bodies scoffed at her.  She shook it off and returned to the skin she was donning.  “Applejack, I might be a bureaucratic clerk of Canterlot, but I consider myself to be... an engineer by trade.”  She blinked at those words coming out of her mouth, but stammered on regardless:  “I really wish I could... I dunno... hammer together some device that could mechanize this whole operation and make it work a billion times faster for you.”

        “Nuh uh.  Nothin' to it,” Applejack upturned her nose and slapped her hat back onto her head.  “It's a trademark of the Sweet Apple Acres harvest that everythang is hoof-picked.  We never cater to none of them factory contraptions the likes of which you see all over cities like Stalliongrad or Fillydelphia.  With the way of progress and all, you witness less and less homely businesses like the Apple Family's farmstead across Equestria these days.”

        “Still, there's got to be a way to make this process faster!  If we could just do something grandiose yet organized—to fill all of these baskets with apples!”

        “Well...” Applejack rubbed her chin with an orange hoof.  “Hmmmm... nahhh.”

        Scootaloo squinted hard at her.  “Miss Applejack, I have more ears than you have corn.”

        “Well,” Applejack fidgeted, then nervously smiled.  “I was just recollectin' this one time my friends and I paid my cousin Braeburn a visit over yonder in his pioneerin' town of Appleloosa.  They grow apple orchards out in the desert and—to this very day—they cut harvest time in half by allowin' the local tribes of buffalo to perform their ritualistic stampede down the dirt roads between the rows of fruit trees.  The shakin' of the earth made by all them mighty buffalo's hooves cause the apples to fall off all proper-like.  Then the buffalo get a free share of the bounty!  The whole thang is what paved the way towards happy Appleloosan coexistence!”  She smiled proudly.

        Scootaloo stared at her with bored amber eyes.  She droned, “That is by far the stupidest thing I ever heard of.”

        Applejack cleared her throat and shrugged.  “Well, t'ain't like I thought of it or nothin'.”

        Scootaloo ran a hoof over her amber-streaked mane and scrunched her forehead in thought.  “But...”  She tongued her lips, blinked, then brightened with a goofy grin.  The wall of midnight trolls disappeared before the suddenly blossoming fields of her mind.  “I think I know of something stupider.”  She giggled.  “And it just might work!  Come on!”  She galloped towards a row of trees beyond Macintosh.

        Applejack stumbled to follow her in a swift canter.  “Whatcha got in mind, copper-bottom?”

        “Grab a bunch of baskets and I'll show you—And for the love of flamestones, stop calling me that!”

        Under the glittering afternoon Sun, Scootaloo finished setting down the last of many baskets up against two parallel rows of apple trees.  She stepped back besides a blinking pair of siblings and smiled at her own hoofwork.

        “Right—So here's the idea.”  She spun about and smirked at them.  “You guys know that I have this freakish stamina; am I right?”

        “Eeeyup.”

        “Right—Well, I think I can make use of it,” she twirled again and pointed a hoof at the trees.  “Rather then buck all of these trees one at a time, I'm going to shoot for hitting them all at once—or, well—close to it.”

        “And how in tarnation to you plan to do that?”  Applejack asked with a righteous lift of her eyebrow.  “I've seen you tackle trolls in the dark like nopony's business, but apple trees are a delicate matter!”

        “Are not!  You said so yourself yesterday, did you not?”

        “I... Er... Uhhh...”

        “Right—so, let's see if I can put these things,” she said while flexing her wings, “to use.  Applejack, I'm gonna be flying fast and low across these tree; so I need you to gallop quickly in order to keep up with me.”

        “To keep up with you?  Sugarcube, what in the hay do you need me runnin' along with yer for?”

        Scootaloo glanced at her.  She wanted to say she needed Applejack close by because she only had so much range to her soul's anchorage.  She wanted to say that she was awfully afraid that this stunt might accidentally fling her back into the future on green tongues of flame.  She said, “I need someone to spot me as I strike the trees, and I also wanna make sure that I'm not hurting the orchards any.  Deal?”

        “Mmm...Fine,” Applejack eventually grunted to Scootaloo's satisfaction.  “Let's just see how this goes.”

        “You do the sight-seeing,” Scootaloo smirked and hovered up into midair on copper wings.  “I'll do the rest.”

        “You've got my attention already.”  Applejack broke into a light trot.  Beside her, Macintosh stared with sweat-stained curiosity.

        Scootaloo took a deep breath.  “Here goes,” she gulped.  She reached her hooves up for her goggles, realized she didn't have any in this timeline, and rolled her eyes.  Regaining her composure, she flew towards the edge of the orchards, banked around, waited for Applejack to break into a full gallop, and then—“Nnnnngh!”—Scootaloo rocketed into a high speed glide down the 'trench' of apple trees.  She curved her wings, flexed her legs, and immediately veered to the left.  At high speed, she slammed hard into one wooden trunk hooves-first, flexed her knees, and bounced off at a seventy-five degree angle.  Spinning in mid lunge, she brought her hooves around and landed against the tree on the opposite side.  Another thud, and she bounded off, spun, flew across the “trench”, and landed against the next opposite tree.  This whole interchange of tree-bouncing proceeded at an alarming speed, so that in alarmingly swift measure, the copper coated pegasus had ricocheted against two rows of apple trees in a blazing pinball fashion, all the while the galloping Applejack on the ground gazed in blinking amazement.

        Her dizzying task done, Scootaloo landed, skidding across two and a half meters of splashing soil.  She exhaled hard, spun around, and inspected her work from afar.  To her dazzling joy, every single one of the trees that she had collided with had magically lost its supply of fruit—dropping them like an audience's roses into all of the neatly arranged baskets resting against the trunks.

        Macintosh whistled shrilly.  Applejack came to a sliding stop and marveled, “Son of a bridlemaid!  That's the fastest I've ever seen a non-magical pony pluck an orchard of its fruit!  I swear, y'all pegasi never cease to amaze me!”

        “To be honest,” Scootaloo dusted herself off and smirked through a frazzled spray of settling black mane hair.  “I wasn't all that sure it was gonna work until I tried it.  Pretty cool, huh?”  She blew an amber streak out from her brow and smiled the earth pony's way.

        “Miraculous is what it is!  Macky, what do you think?”

        The red stallion nodded in earnest, grinning.

        Scootaloo breathed momentarily as if she had come to the surface of a very numb lake for the first time in hours.  The world glittered around her with sudden dazzlement; the trolls ever so briefly returned to the gray malaise of yesterday and tomorrow, and all that stood before the last pony was the joyously vibrant now.  There was no better feeling than being useful, and for the briefest moment it excused every vicious lie she had forced herself to construct in front of Applejack.  Soon, though, that moment ended, and the time traveler was thrown back into the sweat-stained situation under the desperate ring in Applejack's voice.

        “Any chance y'all might be able to pull that trick off a few more times?”  Applejack stammered.  She gulped, “And when I say 'a few more times', I mean—like—a hundred more times?  Perhaps across the rest of the southern fields?  That is—if you're able.”

        “Does Bruce talk like he's got marshmallows in his mouth?”

        “The hay is that supposed t'mean?”

        “It means, simply, that I'm liking this idea.”  Scootaloo gave a trademark smirk.

        The rest of the afternoon blistered by with insanely mechanical precision.  Applejack and Macintosh would line up the baskets, '”Harmony” would concoct a flight path, the orange mare would get a galloping start—and together they roared down the rows of orchards, two columns at a time, with the copper pegasus breathlessly pinballing her way from tree to tree so as to drop the apples by the hundreds.

        The result was akin to mowing a large yard of all its red spots, so that the entire Southern Fields were harvested clean of fruit within the span of four hours.  As the Sun sloped its way down towards a darkening horizon, the hope within the hearts of the three equines brightened immeasurably.  There were still two whole quarters of the whole Acres left to cover, but if that day's unfolding held any legitimate prophecy of the next morning to come, the last day of Apple Bucking could prove to be a miraculous day.

        Scootaloo felt it, with the crisp golden hues of the coming sunset her projected self's eyes glazed to witness a day's work phenomenally accomplished.  She was a dizzy, loopy-brained, frazzled-winged pony from the twirling effort of it all, but somehow the numbness almost equated sore muscles, so that the time traveler nearly sensed—to her reverie—the signs of having done a fine day's job indeed.

        Applejack and Macintosh—of course—were at their limit.  This was no more evident than around the twentieth time of stacking baskets onto the back of a wooden cart.  Scootaloo hummed to herself and was ready to soar off towards another row of apples when Applejack all but collapsed directly in front of her path.

        “Sugarcube—Seriously—for all that is holy in this heapin' crazy world, let's take a moment's breather, ya reckon?”

        Scootaloo giggled foalishly, cleared her throat, and murmured in a more adult voice:  “Y-Yes.  Sure thing, Miss Applejack.  I'm... I-I'm really sorry.  I guess I just got carried away—”

        “Oh, heavens to betsy!”  Applejack slumped down onto a rich emerald hillside of green grass.  “Please, by all means, get carried away more often!  I haven't seen that much fancy flyin' and laborin' since Twilight Sparkle became All Team Organizer of last year's Winter Wrap-Up!”

        On a whim, Scootaloo feigned ignorance:  “This Twilight Sparkle must be some pegasus!”

        “Oh, shucks, no.”  Applejack laughed.  “She's just a fancy bookworm of a unicorn who really knows how to organize stuff.  But I do love her to death.”  She took a deep breath and gazed across the glistening, fruitless trees of the Southern Acres that remained from a long day's work.  “And just like you, she helped me when I needed it most.”  A soft, drunken smile and she rested her sweaty snout down over folded hooves.  “Mmm... This last year or two has been a true sight, to think that I would make such wonderfully fine friends.”

        “You're a lucky filly, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo said, a touch of somberness returning to the last pony's voice.

        “Most of the time, I reckon,” the orange mare murmured.  She glanced the copper pegasus' way with a forlorn pair of eyes.  “I don't suppose the same brain noodle of yers that thought up that ricochet-apple-buckin' trick has also come up with a dazzlin' solution to our troll problem by now?”

        Scootaloo sighed long and hard.  The numbness returned and with it came a phantom sea of bright beady eyes.  The waning day was a living time bomb, and the shorter and shorter fuse sparkled with green flame.  “I'm very sorry, Miss Applejack,” the pegasus coldly murmured.  “I like to think that I'm pretty good at multi-tasking, but I've been so absorbed in getting all of those apples down—I can't say that I've managed to come up with a good plan.”  She squatted down in the grass besides Applejack as a lulling evening breeze drifted pleasantly across their manes.  “And even if I could headbutt my one-track-mind against it, I'm not sure I could come upon an epiphany any faster.”

        “Y'all have done some mighty fine work on our trees, Miss Harmony.  But in all seriousness,” she muttered in a sad face, “I cannot ask you to use yer same pegasus skills against those varmints after nightfall.  It just ain't proper.  Nopony is invincible.  Not even you.”

        Scootaloo thought of a rusted weathervane, a shattered green cutting knife, and Granny Smith's shuddering breaths.  Applejack was as lucky as she was thoughtful to have worried about Scootaloo's projected safety.  When Scootaloo briefly considered arguing against her, the frigid catacombs of her mind reminded her of a weeping teenage filly bleeding in the womb of the Harmony.  “Thinking I'm invincible wouldn't have kept me alive all these years,” Scootaloo murmured without thinking.

        “I beg yer pardon?”

        Scootaloo sighed into the breezy afternoon.  “Nothing.”  She smirked the earth pony's way.  “If Twilight Sparkle was here, what would the 'All Team Organizer' do to solve your troll problem, you think?”

        “Mmm—Twilight has a lot of talent, I reckon.  She's dispensed with an Ursa Major, a hydra, and a handful of parasprites.  But where she shines in craftiness, she loses out a tad bit in courage.  Not to pop her balloon or nothin', but if that Canterlotlian unicorn saw them beady-eyed trolls in the dark, she'd run straight back home to Spike.”

        Scootaloo squinted the orange mare's way.  “I'm from Canterlot.  Aren't I brave?”

        “Nah, yer just freakishly convenient.”  Applejack smirked.

        Scootaloo giggled, her laughter joined by the earth pony's.  Silence once more calmly permeated the hilltop as the two basked under the shade of a passing cloud.  The sun's rays burst through the wispy beds like golden harpstrings.  It was the second setting sun in so few hours, and Scootaloo's breath left her in no less swiftness as she drank it all in.  Briefly parting the curtains of Entropan numbness, she closed her eyes and rode an invisible green slide down past twenty-five years of nightmares, so that she sailed beyond it and landed on the same springy hilltop, only with tiny orange hooves, a flowing pink mane, and happy violet eyes that drank in the same memories that had suddenly melted into reality before the time traveling pegasus.  The surreality of it all gave her a runner's high, as if she was galloping at forty kilometers an hour inside the glass shell of her projected soul self.  Any second, she felt as if that glass would break—and she would be back in the land of ashen emptiness.  Upon opening her amber eyes, the same warm world blossomed gracefully around her, so that the last pony was divinely tempted to curl it all up like a blanket and sleep there forever...

        But this world—this past was not hers.  It belonged to the orange pony resting beside her, the same pony who was presently murmuring:  “I reckon my folks would be ashamed of me.”

        Scootaloo jolted, her mental hooves a scant centimeter away from having touched the ground.  She flashed Applejack a bizarre look.  “What gives you that infernal idea?”

        The farmfilly had taken her hat off and was absentmindedly bending the brim of it in a spinning circle as she solemnly gazed beyond the blades of grass beneath her.  “It's one thang to be strong—and I've always committed myself to that.  But I also know that the Apple family has had an age-old tradition of being dependable, of being honest.  Heck...” She glanced apologetically at 'Harmony'.  “...I was even fused to the Element of Honesty.  Did y'all know that?”

        Scootaloo opened her mouth to answer—blinked forth an image of a scoffing foal seated before a campfire—and eventually uttered:  “I don't get out of Canterlot much, Miss Applejack.  Maybe you could... fill me in?”

        “Hmmm—It's actually a very long and boring story for those who weren't involved.  I reckon I only recite it to my friends and their little siblings because it means so much to them.”  She took a deep breath and gazed off towards the goldening horizon.  “But let's just say that my honesty was once put to the test, not just as a piece of my character, but as a piece of something so amazingly magical that it shaped my very own destiny, a destiny that would unite me with the best friends anypony could ever have in the whole wide world.”  A strong, happy breath—and yet it faded as she dusted the hat off and planted it once more atop her blonde mane.  “Well, I sure as heck haven't been all that honest lately, what with me tryin' to drive you off my farm the very moment you showed up to help Macky and me and the rest of us.  I think my problem is that I get so wrapped up in the duty I have to Ma and Pa's legacy that I sometimes betray the gritty things about myself that makes me so valued among my friends.  Bein' truthful is a major part of that, and when I hide the truth, I just crumble in on myself.  Trolls are horrible things, but they're hardly an excuse for me to lose the one thing that makes me truly strong.”

        “Your commitment?”  Scootaloo asked.

        Applejack looked back.  “My character.”

        The pegasus smirked.  “Oh, Miss Applejack, I don't think you'll ever have to fear losing that.”

        “Everypony stands to lose somethin', Miss Harmony.  It's the facts of life.  At least when I'm honest, all I have to lose is all I have to give.  Truth works in a circle like that, ya reckon?”

        The time traveler held her breath.  A blistering opaque divide stood between her and this earth pony, an obstruction that she had fabricated to make this entire day possible.  Twelve hours into the exercise, and Scootaloo was nowhere closer to piecing together a solution to the Apple Family's troll problem.  It made simply sitting there an atrocious sin, and listening to Applejack's confessions a triply festering wound.  Scootaloo summoned the strength to speak from the one pit in her soul that could still shine; the part of her that respected, admired, and even loved this blonde shade of the past sitting before her.

        “If there's any 'truth' that's obvious to me right now, Applejack,” Scootaloo nudged her and smiled.  “It's that your parents would be proud of you, in spite of any glaring errors you think your character may have.”  She motioned towards the distant sight of Macintosh strongly drawing a wooden cart full of apples down a path and into the red barn.  “You've looked after your siblings with loving tenderness—Your brother is one of the finest specimens in all of Ponyville—”

        “You would think that, copper-bottom!”

        “Hehehe—I mean he's a strong and resourceful pony, an example to all other farmers and citizens who share this land with him.  You've also got an adorable younger sister, who's obviously well-mannered and well-to-do; which is another sign of your responsible care and attention.  And then your grandmother—such a wonderful soul—she's healthy, happy, and certainly very proud to be living on a farm that you have shouldered for all these years.”

        “Shoot, darlin',” Applejack lowered the brim of her hat some.  “Yer makin' me blush.”

        “What I'm trying to say, Miss Applejack, is that you should be happy and proud.  If not for your parents' sake, then for your own.”  Scootaloo smiled and waved a hoof across the green expanse of the Acres.  “You have a family.  You have a home.  You have...”  Her lips trailed as she blinked at her own words floating off in the golden breeze.  “...you have harmony.”

        “Heheheh—” The orange mare raised her hat back up to blink.  “I reckon we most definitely do have you in our company, sugarcube.”

        “That's not what I meant—”  The time traveler began, but felt her heart stop.  Somewhere in the nightlit recesses of her mind, a homeless foal shivered in the loft of an abandoned barn, blanketed with warm tears.  “...huh.”

        “I just want my folks to look down from Gultophine's bosom and see that I've done the right thang with this here farm.”  Applejack let loose a sigh and slid her hooves back and forth in lazy circles across the grass.  “But, I suppose if I stress that wishin' a mighty bit too hard, I'll never enjoy this life, this home, this... harmony.  That would be a mistake... an honest mistake.”

        Scootaloo gulped a lump down her throat and glanced curiously the earth pony's way.  “How...Erm—If you don't mind me asking—How did...uhm...”  She winced at her own audacity.  “I-I'm sorry—”

        “Hmm?  What?”  Applejack blinked innocently at her.  “Ya mean to ask how my folks died?”

        Scootaloo bit her lip.  “Look, seriously, I don't mean to pry—”

        “No, it's quite alright.  History is history, ain't it?”  Applejack smiled softly.  “I do my best only to sweat the future.”

        “A wise precaution.”

        “Ahem,” Applejack sat up straight, cracking the joints in her spine as she exhaled forth a story laced with years of repetition:  “Ma and Pa weren't just yer average farmhoofs; they were important members of Ponyvillean society.  Pa was the head planner of many local sharecroppers, and he also rounded up the Apple Family Reunions single-hoofedly every other year.  And Ma...” She smiled proudly.  “Ma was 'Ponyville's Pride and Joy'.  She didn't get that purdy title by pickin' daisies.  No, she was an important member of the town's cabinet.  Barely two years after marryin' into the Apple Family, she got elected to Head of Ponyville's Community Council.  For nearly a decade and a half, she overlooked every Winter-Wrap-Up and Summer Sun Celebration, as well as leadin' fundraisers for many local charities.”

        “Really?”  Scootaloo beamed, her face awash in joyous revelation.  “I had no idea.”

        “Of course you didn't—she was a celebrity by Ponyvillean standards.  She never did set hoof in Canterlot.”

        “Er... R-Right,” Scootaloo blushed.  She gulped and remarked, “I saw the dates on their graves.  They m-must have died around the same time.”

        “Mmm...Yup,” Applejack somberly nodded.  “It was a horrible accident.  So many ponies in town were affected.  Have ya ever heard of the Everclear Mine?”

        Scootaloo's breath left her in a gasp, all the while the pegasus grimaced as if a knife had been sliced down the center of her invulnerable copper chest.  Her eyes instantly rounded and she wiltingly murmured, “Y-Your parents were in the Everclear mine collapse?”  She swallowed something dry down her throat and gazed groundward.  Her heartbeat was nearly bursting through her neck as she shuddered to say, “Oh Miss Applejack, I-I'm so sorry.”

        “Oh, they weren't in the mine when it caved-in,” Applejack clarified, momentarily ignorant of her companion's sudden lapse in breath.  “That tragedy was reserved for several dozens of unfortunate workers—as everypony who's lived around here knows.  But my folks?”  She hesitated briefly, before summoning a courageous smile of pride from deep within her orange-coated frame.  “They were the first to arrive on scene the moment they caught word of the disaster.  Ma drew the relief wagon while Pa tried to clamor his way down into the ruined shaft in search of survivors.  Together, they managed to get at least eight workers out before more help came.  Of course, nopony quite realized that a huge underground node of infernite had been pierced in the depths of the Everclear Mine.  Nearly every worker pulled from the site died within a week from polluted lungs.”  A deep breath.  “Includin' Ma and Pa—Gultophine rest their souls.  Nopony could ever say they weren't the dependable types, down to the bitter end.  It's inspirin', really, even if it is dang tragic.  Later, they built a memorial at the site of the collapsed mine, and Ma and Pa are the first listed among the names of brave but ill-fated rescue workers.  The Apple Family visits it at every reunion, and our hearts have always gone out to everypony involved in the tragedy.”

        Scootaloo was hearing Applejack's account, and yet her mind was in another world, a very cold and lonely world that permeated her memories long before any single fleck of ash dotted the Wastes of Equestria.

        Applejack took one glance at her and raised a concerned eyebrow.  “Harmony?  You didn't... You didn't know anypony who was taken by the Everclear Mine, did you?”

        Scootaloo cleared her throat and bravely stammered, “In a manner of speaking, y-yes.  Yes I did.”  She inhaled sharply and smiled the best she could the farmfilly's way.  “But, like you said, Applejack.  It's only worth sweating the future, yes?”

        The orange mare smiled and stole a new friend's phrase:  “A wise precaution.”

        Scootaloo nodded.  A somber bowing of her snout, and then she remarked, “Now I understand everything.  Dependability, courage, and strength—It runs in your blood, doesn't it?  Somehow I wouldn't doubt that if a supply of infernite exploded underneath the very foundation of your barn, you too would be on the scene to help anypony out.  I know this may seem like a stretch, Miss Applejack, but I believe you can extend that same quality to the fervor with which you've tackled these trolls.”

        “Or attempted to,” Applejack remarked.  “Ma and Pa were courageous and selfless, but they never went in over their heads.  Nopony knew about the infernite.  But these here trolls...” she sighed, “I should have gotten the hint that they weren't ordinary varmints from the first day I layed eyes on them scary leather flanks of theirs.  Oh Celestia, what have I gotten my family into...?”  She briefly collapsed in a groaning heap.

        “Hey,” Scootaloo rested a hoof on her shoulder.  “Don't fret.  Neither of us may have an answer, but focus on the apple bucking at hoof, and I'm certain that a solution will come to us.”

        “Ya'll Canterlotlians must have faith that can move mountains.”

        “When we're inspired, you bet!”  Scootaloo smirked.  She rose to her knees and offered the earth pony a hoof.  “You said that your character of honesty fitted the destiny you have with your friends, right?  Well, I think the qualities of your life fall into a similar cadence.  You've got family, you've got a home...”  She smiled bravely.  “...and you've got yourself some Harmony—What's the worst that could happen?”

        Applejack gently grasped onto Scootaloo's limb and lurched up onto all fours.  “I reckon you plan to show me?”

        “If it's nearly as much as you've shown me, I would be happy to oblige,” Scootaloo said, then motioned with her mane towards the red-tainted fields under golden sunset.  “C'mon.  If we work together, I'm sure we could knock out a few more orchards.”

        Applejack trotted enthusiastically after her.  “Think y'all might do me a favor and knock my exhausted flank out in the meantime?”

        “Nah.  I might damage your hat.”

        “Pffft.”

        Barely half an hour later, Scootaloo was out of breath.  It was not her own exhaustion that spurred forth this lapse in energy, but rather the infectious weariness that had wafted off of Applejack and Big Macintosh had overwhelmed her.  She sat, slumped against a tree, watching and waiting as the two earth ponies set up another line of baskets beneath two rows of trees.  In a matter of minutes, the game of orchard pinball would resume.  Scootaloo expected it to be a numb and frivolous exercise, like the entirety of that day had become.  Still, even if she worked with the heated frenzy of the Harmony's boiling steam, the apple bucking would not go fast enough, and the howling night would not come slow enough.

        The copper pegasus shut her amber eyes, and as soon as she did the gray ash returned.  The twilight of the future had followed her back in time, limping, reminding her with every blink that she was just as much a creature of misery as the beasts that had so haunted the Apple Family's pristine home.  There was no fitting word to describe the irony of this bitter sandwich, of two groups of adversaries converging upon a single point in finite history that didn't deserve either one of them.  For the briefest of moments, Scootaloo wondered if Princess Entropa had planned this, had plotted and designed it from her lonely cosmic cloud of exile.  Perhaps this was revenge for the pegasus having so brazenly stolen her coat, for believing—even for a green-flaming millisecond—that she actually earned the chance to canter back and forth along the streams of reverse-time.

        But if the last pony in all of Equestria didn't earn this, if she didn't deserve the chance to transcend however briefly the chronological barriers that had imprisoned her forever under the cascading twilight coffin of isolation, then who did?

        Scootaloo tiredly opened her eyes.  Once she had done so, one image stood in the foreground of the glistening Acres.  Fatefully, it was none other than—

        “You don't look half as exhausted as you should be, child,” Granny Smith uttered.  “I've seen you makin yer fancy hoofwork across them trees.  It's by far the most amazing thing I've ever seen.”

        “I find that hard to believe,” Scootaloo said with a gently prodding smile.  “You've lived a long life, Ms. Smith.  I hardly deserved to be flattered that much.”

        “But y'all deserve it, nonetheless,” the lime-coated mare murmured.  On wobbling legs she strolled around the tree to which the time traveler was slumped.  “If we had yer lickety-split flyin' talents two days ago—or even yesterday for that matter—we may actually have had a legitimate reason to contract the apple delivery so dag-blamed early.”

        “It's easy to mourn the lengths of time we've failed to do proper things with,” Scootaloo philosophized out loud, “but all that will do is waste more time.  I like to deal with the situation in front of me as it comes into fruition.  Equestrian history was built by ageless ponies doing the exact same thing.”

        “You wear 'time' like a second skin, don't ya, Miss Harmony?”

        Scootaloo's copper nostrils flared.  “You have no idea,” she groaned.

        “Yer right.  I reckon I don't.”  Ms. Smith pivoted her gray head to gaze down at the filly.  “Tell me, if you would, Miss Harmony; do you enjoy Stallionivarius because his strings speak to yer soul, or is it because they speak to yer heartbeat?”

        “Where I come from, Ms. Smith, a heartbeat is something I force myself to imagine.”

        “Think you'll ever tell my family just where you do come from, darlin'?”

        “I...” Scootaloo's face wretched like a filly who had been stabbed in the leg.  The shattered image of Granny Smith's green carving knife appeared in a bodiless cloud, easing her spirit ever so slightly.  “I hope that I'll never have to.”

        “I reckon that's just up to us to discover,” Ms. Smith remarked.  The utterance was just as dry to hear as it was to produce.  “Hmmmph,” she smirked slightly.  “How goddess-like, to leave the likes of us to our own devices.”

        “Ms. Smith,” Scootaloo viciously sighed, shaking her copper head.  “I am not a—”

        “Of course not,” Granny Smith squatted down with a breath besides Scootaloo, eyeing Applejack and Big Macintosh from afar.  “But my family's future is cradled in yer hooves no less, hmm?”  Her gray eyes were half as piercing as they were warm, suddenly.  She said, “If time has afforded you any less wounds than it has thoughtlessly deposited on my lap, then heaven help us if you're any less respectful of the gifts you have to wield.”

        “Ms. Smith, even the greatest of gifts goes only so far,” Scootaloo said.  Once more, her mind's eye was assaulted by the gnashing teeth of a sea of pale leather.  She clenched her eyes shut and ran a hoof over her face.  “And so deep,” she added in a shudder.

        “It makes me wonder, Miss Harmony.”  Granny Smith's voice was like a gray cloudbed that hovered majestically over a jutting mountain.  “Just what depths have you gone?  What dark and winding chasms have you navigated to be here, and to be here so solemnly—that it makes an old lady such as myself amazed to hear it in yer voice.”  She gulped.  “You can't be this young filly sitting before me.  You just can't.  You're something different, something grander, something darker—my family doesn't have the gumption to comprehend it, and I suddenly think that all of the scholars of Canterlot thrown in a grand heap together certainly couldn't wrap their noggins around it either.”

        “What are you trying to say, Ms. Smith?”  Scootaloo finally surrendered with a wilted breath.

        “What I'm sayin', Miss Harmony, is that I forgive you.”

        Scootaloo blinked her eyes open at that.  She gazed at the lime-coated elder.  “You... f-forgive me...?”

        “AJ, my granddaughter, is an angel.  And most of that comes to her cuz of her natural well of honesty.  Honest creatures know how to take hold of this world's glorious light and shine it for all the gatherin' ponies to see it and marvel.  But you—you're a different kind of a creature.  You can see this world for its darkness, and you can see a whole lot deeper into them shadows than even my eyes can venture, and I've seen my fair share of darkness in this life.  Miss Harmony, I can't pretend to know what horrible shadows are haunting this farm, but deep in my heart I am glad—thankful and blessed—that you're here to do yer dangest to stifle it from us.  That's an amazin' strength—a separate strength, the likes of which even Applejack could respect, though I'm starting to reckon she won't ever have the grace to—nor I for that matter.”

        “Ms. Smith, please believe me,” Scootaloo stood up as the farm siblings trotted towards her from a distance.  The baskets were ready, the trees were ready, the ever dying afternoon was ready.  She only wished that she was ready.  “It is never, ever about grace.”  She gulped.  “It has always and shall always be about desperation.”

        “I reckon even a goddess wouldn't know about that.”

        “They don't have to know about it.  We do.”

        Another hour and a half of frenzied apple rattling, and the swathing band of harvested trees ended clockwise at the crest of the dipping western acres.  The three courageous farm ponies strained and struggled to the bitter end, only stopping their relentless pursuit of the hanging apples the very moment that they could no longer see the fruit, for the Sun had sunk below the crest of the amber horizon.  A sleepy darkness was falling over every contour of the orchards; bright green leaves dulled to gray foliage as “Harmony” finished her last sideways dance across a line of swaying wooden trunks, with Applejack breathlessly sprinting beneath her to provide a line of sight.  Granny Smith had wandered out of the farmhouse, shuffling westward on brittle bones in order to light several lanterns flanking the dirt path leading to the barn.  The final harvest wagon was being filled to the brim with baskets upon baskets of juicy bounty.  Big Macintosh took a swig of water from a nearby trough, tightened his muscles for one last daylit haul, and pulled the large wagon across the farm towards a woodshed where he had earlier crafted a complex locking mechanism to thwart trollish fingers overnight.

        The trolls...

        Even as Scootaloo fluttered wordlessly towards the wilting grass underhoof, she grimaced at the darkening sky, at the cooling breeze, at the spreading shadows from the forest wall beyond the fence, but most of all she shuddered at the grand void in her projected brain where she had long hoped a solution to the Apple Family's plight would present itself, a solution that she had fought for, bucked for, and outright lied for.

        The last pony had struggled long and hard with trolls over the years.  She had brushed elbows with the demons of the mist, had learned how to discern their cries from the generic howls of the wasteland, had earned several scars—on her flank and on her spirit—for having underestimated the violent and riotous abominations that infected the bosom of future Equestria.  For surviving trolls beyond the Cataclysm, Scootaloo's solution was—as a matter of fact—the utter lack of a solution.  The only way to deal with the creatures was to avoid them; which is why she ultimately took to airship.  The monstrosities had utterly robbed her of any semblance of a native land, long after horrific circumstance had utterly blasted that same earth under her hooves to ashes.  Trolls were undeniably stupid creatures, and yet they could thrive in lifeless oblivion; they would ultimately inherit the future.

        Before Scootaloo's curved eyes stretched the finest sample of land she had ever seen—in either lifetime, both joyous and joyless.  There was no other spot in Equestria that matched the lushness and purile beauty of Sweet Apple Acres.  It was the finest example of the juxtaposition of natural beauty and earth pony spirit.  While the rest of Equestria died under flame and ash, it would take a veritable sinkhole to wipe out the breath of life forever imprinted on that part of the world.  To see it all fall so mercilessly under the chaotic teeth of tomorrow's monsters was a travesty.  Fighting for the rainbow symbol or scavenging a ruined city for magic flame were the only excuses Scootaloo ever had to go to blows with these creatures, and on every occasion she had only survived by galloping cowardly away from the fiends.  But here, in the fertile crescent of Princess Celestia's homeland, upon the gracious land sweated, bled, and died for by generations upon generations of Applejack's family, where would Scootaloo find the excuse to run?

        “There's so many of them,” the copper-coated pegasus murmured.

        “What was that, sugarcube?” Applejack trotted around the shadowed edge of the wagon as Macintosh pulled it away.  She panted from a day's worth of galloping after the flying apple-bucker and straightened her hat while gazing at her curiously.  “You finally got an idea in that fancy noggin of yers?”

        Scootaloo wanted to tell Applejack that it was impossible.  She wanted to embrace a pony whom she trusted, sobbing to her all of her pain, agony, and sorrows of having to deal with those creatures, of having to shudder at their bounding steps when she was trying to signal kindred spirits with an artificial rainbow, of having been stabbed and skewered to a bloody mess in the center of a demolished Ponyville.  In the depths of her hardened soul, Scootaloo could not deny that her only salvation ever against the drooling menaces was none other than a miraculously rampaging dragon out of nowhere.  But this was not the Wasteland; this was the past, Sweet Apple Acres, and it was the end of the evening and the prelude to a sea of leathery bodies weaving their way out of the woodwork.  And Scootaloo was not the last pony; she was 'Miss Harmony', and Applejack was waiting for an answer.

        “To be honest, Miss Applejack, I think we've done all that we can possibly do,” she murmured, gazing aside with stone amber eyes.  “We've collected as many apples as we can.  I think the next step is to seal up the woodsheds, batten down the hatches, and keep a guard on what your family has harvested up until now.  So long as everypony's eyes are in the same place, the bounty just may survive the night.”

        “And what of the west and north fields?”  Applejack gulped.

        Scootaloo exhaled coldly.  “That will have to be tomorrow's concern...”

        Applejack rubbed her chin with a muddied hoof.  She paced a bit, smirked, and glanced up with a glint of hope in her green eyes.  “Them creatures' weakness is the Sun, ain't it?  Y'all reckon that lightin' a whole heap of torches might drive them off all scaredy-cat-like?”

        Scootaloo's vision twitched.  She remembered a lonely pink-haired filly in the moon craters of post-Cataclysm Equestria.  The last pony had made the same assumption as Applejack.  After lighting over fifty torches, she had created a burning perimeter around her shelter while starting work on her first zeppelin.  The long and short of it; she never finished that airship.

        “No, Miss Applejack.  Torches only serve as toys to trolls.  The next moment you know, they'll have your entire homestead burned to the ground in a blink.”

        “Shoot.  Yer sure about that?”

        “Trust me.”

        “Well...” Applejack took a deep breath and snapped a few cricks in her neck.  Her lips hardened into a rocky frown.  “Macintosh and I never rightly expected them traps of ours to work.  In fact, we knew it would come down to fistihooves at some point or another.”

        “Meaning?”

        “We've already been plannin' to come to blows with them varmints,” Applejack said with a tired smile.  “I reckon tonight may be the night we just try eliminatin' the dang creatures.”

        Scootaloo's eyes narrowed on the farmfilly.  “Define 'eliminating'.”

        “I'm sorry...?”

        “What do you and your brother plan to do with the trolls when you have them in your sights?”

        “Well, y'know—We'd thrash 'em mighty fierce!”

        “Just that?  You'd 'thrash' them?”

        “Erm...”

        “Would that be it?  You would smack them upside the head and expect them to walk away?  You'd expect all of them to walk away because they just got a bunch of bruises?”

        “Well, uh, no, I guess we would... you know...” Applejack shifted where she stood on all fours.  “...we'd have to put'em all out to pasture.  Literally.”

        “Miss Applejack, have you ever killed something before?”

        “K-Killed... something?”

        Scootaloo somberly nodded.

        “Well, shucks—Sweet Apple Acres has had a long history of dealin' with all sorts of pesky annoyances:  snakes, fruit flies, worms, possums, even a lone wolf here or there.  As a matter of fact, some of my earliest memories are of diggin' up these bothersome moles from the ground with my Pa.  Now there was a pony who knew how to work decently with indecent thangs.”

        “That's not the same, Miss Applejack.”

        “It ain't?” she blinked nervously.

        Scootaloo paced around the orange mare, icily staring her down.  “Would you be willing to kill something, Miss Applejack?  And I don't mean just anything—but thinking, breathing, crafty things—Things that know your fears and weaknesses, just as they have fears and weaknesses of their own.  I'm talking about things that, to eliminate them, you have to stare down the eye-twitch of their souls and witness as every waking breath of hate and desire is sucked from their memories, because you are taking it all from them against their will.  It takes more than a sharpened pitchfork or a heavy shovel to kill something that has sentience, Miss Applejack, because no matter how much you flatten a monster into pulp, you cannot deny—even in the most hidden part of your Epona-granted heart—that even that very monster had a home, had a mother, and that it was birthed into this world by the same breath of nature that gave ponies their song and dance.”

        Applejack bit her lip and gazed defeatedly into the shadowed soil of the land.  “N-No.  No, I reckon I-I couldn't do that, nor Macky for that m-matter...”

        Scootaloo smiled painfully.  “No pony should ever feel like they could.  We are creatures of life, Miss Applejack.  We thrive on peace, on friendship, on all the things that make this world good and magical.  The last major war of ponydom was one thousand years ago.  And there's a reason for that—It's taken Equestria that long to recover from the senseless wounds carved out of our civilization when the Lunar Republic took up arms against its brothers and sisters.”  She gulped hard and stared towards the last scant lines of golden light gleaming over the western horizon.  “It would be a dark day indeed when ponies could kill without remorse.  Something... Something earth-changing would have to happen...”  Her breath lingered in a bitter murmur.  Her nostrils briefly smelled a tinge of copper, and were normal once again.

        “Then if we can't wait them out, and we can't throttle 'em for good..” Applejack dusted her hat off and sighed, “...then just what in the hay do we do?!?”

        Scootaloo silently prayed—Not so much for an answer to Applejack's question, but instead for a reason—any reason—to not have to answer her right then and there.  The supernatural result was a pattering of foalish feet, and then a chirping voice that lit up the otherwise darkening air.

        “Wow!  You got all them apples bucked in one afternoon?  That's so amazin'!”

        “Apple Bloom!”  Applejack hissed.  “What have I been tellin' you all month about comin' out of the house on your lonesome—Especially after dark?!”

        “But I'm not alone!”  The crimson-maned filly shook her snout.  A girlishly bright hairbow adorned her head, brightening the scene like a newborn comet as her giggling voice carried on, “You and Miss Harmony are here with me!”  She winked at the visiting laborer and exclaimed:  “I saw all them fancy tricks yer were performin' in the fields, Miss Harmony!  Bouncin' around between trees like the livin' spooks; That was so cool!!”

        “Apple Bloom...” Applejack grumbled, rubbing her own face with a weary hoof.  “We're a tad bit busy here, sugarcube--”

        “Granny Smith says that you like her kind of music too!  I always thought everypony but her was far too young to enjoy all them wailin' strings,” Apple Bloom made a wretching face, then smirked, her bright amber eyes matching the pupils of the stranger whom she was staring at with amazement.  “Y'all ever heard of Vinyl Scratch?”

        Scootaloo fidgeted, making a great show of not noticing Apple Bloom's existence.  She shivered slightly.

        “Miss Harmony?”  The tiny filly raised an eyebrow.  “Are you feelin' okay?”

        “Come on, darlin',” Applejack half-trotted over and nudged the foal with her snout.  “Back into the house.  Git!”

        “But Sis!  I was just askin' her about music—”

        “Don't you 'But Sis' me!  It's high time for supper, bath, and bed!  There's still a lot of apple buckin' to be done tomorrow, so Macky and I gotta hit the hay early.  And when we sleep early, that means you sleep earlier!”

        “Awww—But, AJ—!”

        Scootaloo cleared her voice.  The two siblings froze and glanced over as the pegasus bravely, bravely pivoted her face to look young Apple Bloom in the eye.  She smiled nervously—but steadily—and said, “Apple Bloom, you're never too young to appreciate a good symphony when you hear it.  Your Granny not only has good tastes, but she's got good memories to go along with it.  She only wants to share that kind of stuff with you and your brother and sister because it's like sharing a part of her as well.”

        “But it's all so boring and stiff-like!”  Apple Bloom wretched.  “Gimme a fast beat and something cool to dance to, ya reckon?”

        “You'd be surprised how 'boring and stiff' music could be a pleasant thing to dance to as well,” 'Harmony' grinned softly.  “Especially if it reminds of you good times...”  She gulped slightly but overcame it with a wink.  “...and good friends.”

        “Wow—Yer purdy deep, Miss Harmony,” Apple Bloom blinked, then grinned girlishly.  “Is that how you got yer cutie mark?”

        “M-My cutie mark?”  Scootaloo blinked at the tiny crusader in a brief bout of amnesia.

        “Don't mind her,”  Applejack sighed and nudged her little sister again.  “She's in that call of the cutie phase.  I bet even Canterlotlian pegasi can relate.”

        “Don't I know it,” Scootaloo smiled and trotted over before lowering her snout before the blinking foal.  “If you must know, Apple Bloom,” her mind hovered over the hoofsteps of Ms. Cheerilee's ghostly words as she uttered, “this mark of mine means that I am a Servant in the Royal Court of Canterlot.  I perform communicative and ambassadorial tasks for Princess Celestia.  Sometimes I even act as her direct messenger, flying across the lengths of Equestria, maintaining peace and order among all ponydom.”

        “Wowwwwwww...” the girl cooed.  A dreamy grin, near drooling, and she asked, “And just what is that dark loopy shape in the middle of the black crest?”

        “It's an infinity symbol,” Scootaloo breathed, blinked dumbly, and muttered, “It stands for... uh... infinity?”

        “How'd you earn that?  By talkin' around in circles?”

        “Apple Bloom!”  Applejack hissed again.  “In the house!  That's quite enough!”

        “But maybe if I started talkin' up a storm of fancy thangs, then I could get a cutie mark as amazin' as hers!”

        “Believe me, sugarcube.  If that was the case, you'd be covered from hoof to mane in tons of them black loopty-loops by now.  Now get along, little doggy!”

        “But I only meant to pay a respectful visit!”

        “Don't you have school to get rest for tomorrow, kid?”  Scootaloo smirked.

        “Pffft—As if!  It's a Saturday!”

        “Oh,” Scootaloo blinked.  The last pony narrowed her eyes and accidentally murmured aloud:  “What comes before 'Saturday' again...?”

        “Heeheehee!  Silly Miss Harmony!  Everypony knows that!”

        “Apple Bloom—”

        “I'm a'gettin'!  I'm a'gettin'!  Don't get yer hat in a twirl, sis!”  The foal scampered off, giggling.

        Applejack shook her blonde head and trotted back towards the pegasus.  “Don't mind her.  What—with her two bubbly 'crusader' friends and all—she's a regular hoof-ful.”

        “She's awfully sweet, though,” Scootaloo said in a melancholic breath that she tried to hide.  “I already see in her the same friendliness as her grandmother.”

        “And the same stubbornness,” Applejack rolled her eyes.  “But who am I to say?  Heheheh...”

        “Heehee—Gotcha,” Scootaloo breathed.  A scrunching of her brow, and she uttered:  “By the way, who's Vinyl Scratch?”

        “Beats me; one of them record scratchin' music banger-uppers that all the foals have gone plum loco for these days.  Don't care much for the tunes myself.  Only popular song these days I've come close to fancyin' is Buck to December by Trotter Swiftly.”

        “Yeah, okay, sure.”

        Applejack inhaled the grand darkening evening around them as she watched the distant form of Big Macintosh load the crates full of apples into a woodshed before barricading it up.  “Heavens to Betsy,” she groaned.  “I've about galloped myself to the bone with all of the day's apple buckin'.  Macky may not look it, but he's bound to collapse any moment too.  And yet—though I know we're both tuckered out like hungry snakes in a mice stampede—it'd be a sure-fire miracle if we get a single wink of sleep between the two of us.  Every night, it's the same dang thing.  Even if them trolls didn't want our blood, they whoop up something fierce.  I'm surprised downtown Ponyville hasn't heard all the hollerin' and racket these last few weeks.  There's no sense in hidin' it, Miss Harmony; I'm severely missin' any hope of the rest of them apples surviving by the time we try buckin' 'em loose tomorrow.”

        “Don't give up, Miss Applejack,” 'Harmony' said, gazing at the darkening treetops to the west and north.  “I'll keep an eye out.”

        “I beg yer pardon?”

        “It's the least I can do until we meet again in the morning,” the pegasus said.  “Somepony has to stand guard.”  Scootaloo dizzily teetered as she thought of so many pale bodies in the shadowed clusters of endless apple orchards.  It would be a long, long night indeed.  “I can't even begin to fathom the shame of leaving your family here on your lonesome.”

        “You ain't goin' back to Ponyville or nothin'?”

        “Ponyville?”  Scootaloo made a face.  “What do you mean...?”

        “I figured yer was stayin' in a hotel or something while you paid us a visit on behalf of the Court.”

        “Oh—Pfft,” Scootaloo smirked.  “I never went to a hotel—”  She caught herself in the middle of that, winced, then reiterated:  “That is, I'm fine, Miss Applejack.  I came here to Sweet Apple Acres to help you, and I'm not leaving until the jobs are done—Both of them: the apples and the trolls.”

        Applejack stared at her long and hard.  Slowly, a sweet smile crept over her orange features.  “My sweet suntanned flank!  I won't let you go floatin' around all night like some headless horse!  Come on, copper-bottom—”  She tugged at the pegasus' tail hairs.

        Scootaloo gave her a double-glance.  “Excuse me?”

        “Excuse yerself.  You're stayin' indoors.”

        “Indoors where?”

        “In the Apple Family Household, ya strawhead!”

        Scootaloo's heart skipped a beat.  The green world spun loops beneath her dangling hooves.  Instinctually, she barked:  “Oh no, AJ—er—Miss Applejack.  I can't.  Besides, somepony's gotta keep an eye out on the forest for when the trolls come out—”

        “Fat lick of good that'll do when you fall out of the sky in a dead slumber from overworkin' yerself!  You may have a talent at airborne apple buckin'—but every filly has her limits.  I'd never live right with myself if I left you out here in the cold to fend off them varmints on your lonesome.  Yer gettin' a proper meal and a bed to sleep in—”

        “Miss Applejack, I'm fine--”

        “Yer the one thing that's standing in the way between tomorrow and my family's farm goin' up in flames!”  Applejack snapped back.  Then, she blushed slightly, and added “Metaphorically speakin', of course.”  She cleared her throat and gazed at the black maned pony in earnest.  “I spent the better part of yesterday tryin' to shoo you away, not knowin' a gift horse when I looked her in the sweet face.  And yet, you stuck it out with us, Miss Harmony.  You saved Macky's life.  You saved my life.  My Ma and Pa would be rollin' in their graves if I didn't pay yer back with the best thang we've always had to give: sweet tastin' apples and a place to lay yer head.  Now are you our guest or ain't ya?!?”

        Scootaloo stared breathlessly at her.  In a hazed blink—under the phantom scents of crackling embers and melted marshmallows—she briefly saw a sisterly face gazing at her over an upside down hat bouncing with three juicy apples.  In an age long dead, the simplest of gifts had helped the foal last another shivering week on her own, spent liquidly in the warmth of delightful dreams, of having someponies to call a family, of having someplace to call a home, of the simple harmony of the fleeting thought, as her moments were always fleeting, as this moment right here was fleeting.

        The last pony bravely cut it off at the head.  She may not have been strong enough, but she certainly wasn't stupid.  “I would be honored to be your guest, Miss Applejack.”  She smiled savoringly, as if she knew she could never smile again.

        “Alrighty then!”  Applejack smirked and proudly nudged the stumbling pegasus towards the farmhouse.  “And if y'all don't mind me sayin' so, sugarcube, the first order of business is givin' you a bath!”

        Scootaloo blinked crookedly.  “Uhm... O-kaaay...”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Nine – A Place That Isn't Empty

        Special Thanks to Vimbert - Pre-Reader and Gentlecolt

Scootaloo immediately regretted every sin she had ever committed the very moment the pitcher of ice cold water came cascading over her backside.  An shriek from deep within—her face contorting like she was giving birth to an iceberg—and she clutched her shivering self in the sloshing waves of the ivory bathtub surrounding her.  Applejack paced across the second story bathroom of her house and placed the empty pitcher besides a gently flickering lantern.

        “Now don't go makin' faces like a frog left out in a snowstorm!”  Applejack chuckled under her breath.  “You ain't gonna suffer none.  Just relax, and let the cold waters drag the heat of the day clear off ya!  Nothin' finishes a long sore day of apple buckin' like a traditional Apple Family dip in the tub!  Cleans yer pores right out!  Bet you were wonderin' how come I've worked in the Sun all these here years and yet I don't look like a raisin-coated mule!”

        “A-A-Actually I-I-I was wondering if bl-bl-blood freezes at the s-s-same temperature as w-w-water,” Scootaloo hissed through clattering teeth.

        “Pfft—Go soak yer head—”  Applejack blinked at her own words.  “Uh... Eh, y'all know what I mean.”  She winked and motioned with an orange hoof.  “Soap's over yonder.  And I got some of the finest shampoo from Aloe and Lotus' Day Spa in downtown Ponyville.  Normally I don't subscribe to none of them froo-froo mane conditioners, but it was donated by Lady Rarity—now there's a pony who knows how to come out of a day's work lookin' as sparkly as Princess Celestia's lookin' glass!”

        “Th-Th-Thanks, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo shivered to produce a smile.  “S-Sincerely... Y-Y-You are t-t-too kind.”

        “Call me 'AJ',” the farmfilly smirked and backtrotted out of the bathroom door.  “Just be sure to dry yer hooves after yer done.  And if you smell somethin' a wee bit spicy, that's just Granny Smith makin' her one-of-a-kind daffodil alfredo!  She only fixes it up once in a blue moon—on account of havin' a special guest and all.”  She smiled.

        “That... uhm...”  Scootaloo blushed to the core of her projected self's being.  “That's r-really sweet.”

        “No it ain't!”  Applejack blinked.  “It's spicy—”  She caught herself.  “Oh, heeheehee—Right.  Enjoy!”  She closed the door behind her, the mare's hoofsteps creaking straight through the wooden foundations of the old farmhouse.

        The copper-coated pegasus sloshed back in the tub, her shivers waning to a stillness under the gentle lull of the amber lanternlight.  She brushed a few slick black strands from her forehead and gazed at her own hoof up close.  Scootaloo knew that she was merely occupying the projection of her soul self.  Those were not her limbs dripping with moisture and those were not her senses shivering under the frantic thrill of the cold liquid.  And yet, she couldn't remember feeling more at ease, more royally pampered, more in tune with herself than she did at that moment—and it was nothing more than a humble bath.

        Scootaloo knew that in her lonely days before her lonelier days, she would have reveled in experiencing something half as wholesome as this.  In all the twilight days of navigating the Wastelands, she would never have foreseen a moment when she would feel this... clean.  It only took her a twenty-five-year ride on the back of reverse-time to experience it.  The surreality of the moment should have been suffocating, but with each centimeter that she allowed her soaking self to descend into the waters, she suddenly didn't care.

        The last pony closed her eyes, her body floating suddenly in a weightless pool of lucid cold.  Like always when her eyelids were shut, she saw the gray ash and snow stretching on into the horizon of her bitter consciousness.  But as her Entropan body settled warmly into the waters, the freezing mists faded away, and there bubbled to her mind's surface the wispy vistas of Cloudsdale, its blue beds and ivory buildings glistening under the gold bands of a lively Sun.  Hundreds upon hundreds of pegasi floated gaily in the electric air, their eyes as bright as their souls, and they all parted ways as Scootaloo floated through them, gently hovering to a stop before a wide bed of fog.  There was laughter, a deep chant of daily joy, and out from the blue-on-blue there soared a figure into crisp clarity, her mane and tail shimmering with every shade of the rainbow as she gazed down at the young foal and gave a devil-may-care grin.  But just as Rainbow Dash turned to fly away—a spicy smell filled the air, like a great valley of trees burning far below.  Thick iron bars  suddenly obscured the flight of the prismatic pegasus, and then the great ashen explosion roared through the sky on burning moonrocks that slammed into Scootaloo's face with the force of millions of screaming ponies.

        A loud splash.  The filly was clasping hard to the side of the tub, hyperventilating.  The flickering light around her wasn't Equestria in flames—but the gentle dance of a lantern in the corner.  The spicy smell in the air wasn't ash, but a delicious meal waiting for her and the Apple Family downstairs.  She was in the past, and the past was the here and now—but it all seemed so fake to her once again.  In the fading trails of a reborn epiphany, Scootaloo reminded herself that the only real things in this world were those that left fossils behind.

        It didn't mean that she couldn't enjoy the moment—like the fleeting phantom that she was—soaked from head to tail in an exiled Goddess' skin.  A mute curse floated towards the ceiling, seeking the forehead of a three hundred year old Spike.  Then there was the softest of smiles.  With a gentleness and grace that she only knew from reading books, Scootaloo reached for the soap and conditioner and bathed like a princess.

        Scootaloo couldn't take her eyes off the portraits.  There were dozens of them—black silhouettes of rural ponies, framed in dark ovals that swarmed gently past her one generation at a time as she sauntered slowly, pensively down the creaking stairs of the Apple Family residence.  She emerged upon a warm toasty world.  A fireplace crackled lazily at the far end of a den furnished with plush love seats and afghans.  As a blurred Apple Bloom scampered across the living room—giggling in a fit over one thing or another—Scootaloo glanced around the corner to see a brightly lit dining room, flanked by a kitchen where Granny Smith was currently growling at Apple Bloom to settle down.  The old mare wobblingly navigated her lime, wrinkled self around an eating table before placing down a steamy plate full of straw and daffodils, sprinkled deliciously with peppery oats.

        A barking nose.  The last pony briefly jolted, but relaxed as she saw Winona scampering up and running circles around her, a gleeful Apple Bloom hot on the collie's fluffy tail.  The two went cantering off towards another section of the house as Scootaloo's attention was drawn towards a wide portrait lining a distant hearth.  Within the wooden frame the happy image of six ponies stood in a familial pose.  Granny Smith was seated in the center, flanked by a red coated stallion with sharp green eyes and a mare of silken orange complexion.  The mare was cradling an infant foal with a light bush of red hair, while two adorable ponies—one crimson and the other orange—hugged her legs and faced the invisible portraitist.

        Scootaloo stood there, numbly suspended in the facade of “Harmony”.  Like the airship of the same name, she dangled loosely, a shameful puppet suspended into the deep well of the past via green flaming marionette strings.  This was a warm and toasty world that sang with a chorus that should have been forever lost after the Cataclysm, and yet there the last pony was, dragging her hooves a bare sneeze above the rock hard surface of it all, struggling to drag anchor but never quite touching down to do just that.  She didn't deserve to be there, not with her invulnerable skin and her scavenger's wit and her nefarious lies.  She couldn't possibly have been righteous enough to be as blessed as she was.  She wasn't respectful enough, she wasn't... strong enough.

        The cloud cleared just as thickly as it had coalesced.  The pegasus barely registered a porch door opening and slamming shut.  A hulking red form clopped on tired limbs as a sisterly shadow called in from the adjacent hallway:

        “Macky, didja finish barricadin' the kitchen door?  That's where they're likely to go bangin' them bony heads of theirs first!”

        “Eeeyup,” Macintosh strolled past Scootaloo.  He politely nodded his head—then jolted with a double-take at her mane.  A blink, and he suppressed a snickering smirk as he swaggered his way into the dining room.

        Scootaloo blushed slightly, her face awash in copper confusion.  Just in time, Applejack pattered up, tossing her hat onto a nearby wrack.

        “Whew-Wee!  I swear, sometimes I feel like Epona invented 'work' first and 'ponies' second to make an excuse for the former—”  She took one glance at Scootaloo.  “Oh, you're done, Copper-Bottom—”  She too jolted.  “Whoah Nelly!  Eheheh—Ya do know, sugarcube, that we've got a mirror in the bathroom, don'tcha?”

        “I-I don't read you, Miss Appleja—er—AJ,” Scootaloo's eyes narrowed.  “I almost passed out in the tub.  Did the trolls beat me with an ugly stick before I came down here or something?”

        “Nothin' of the sort,” Applejack pointed with an amused hoof.  “Didn't yer Momma ever teach ya how to brush yer mane proper?”

        “H-Huh?”  Scootaloo stupidly blinked and ran a hoof over her neck, only to feel a certifiable mountain of fuzzy tangles spreading upwards towards the ceiling.  “Holy cow!  Eheh—Oh yeah, th-that's right...”

        “There's a brush over yonder on the table.  Be my guest.”

        “Hmmm?”  Scootaloo only barely registered Applejack's offering.  “Oh—Uhm—To be perfectly frank, I've never... uh... Eheh.... How do I put this...?”  She bit her lip.  The only time the last pony had ever toyed with her hair after the Cataclysm was when she weaved the shaved pink strands into various rags, bindings, and insulators for use on board the Harmony.  There was a time, in her Ponyvillean childhood, when she once experimented with a rainbow assortment of dye... which ended with relatively hilarious results, not that she had anypony to share it with.

        “Pfft!”  Applejack rolled her eyes.  “What's this world comin' to?  I bet yer Canterlotlian citizens would just die without one of them servants waitin' on yer manes night and day!  C'mere—” She gently tugged on the pegasus' shoulder and planted her on a plush stool in the center of the den.  Seating herself on the edge of a couch, the earth pony snatched the brush from the table and proceeded diving into Scootaloo's forest of amber-streaked black threads.  “Now sit tight.  With the way y'all left it, this might smart a bit.”

        “This might what?—Gaaughh!”  Scootaloo winced, one eye tightly shut as several tangles were yanked clear, tugging at her roots.  She felt like a hundred thousand nooses were pulling at every inch of her neck.  “Snkkt—Y-You mistaking my skull for a tree you forgot to buck, AJ?”

        “Quit yer whinin', Harmony,” the farmfilly murmured, squinting at her work as she straightened the curls out into long onyx threads.  “I'm only doin' this cuz you got some really fine hair, if I do say so myself.  It's an utter shame to see it all in shambles like this.  The only other pegasus pony I've seen with a 'do this long is my good friend Fluttershy.  It perplexes me why she never flies.  She practically trips on her bangs everytime she so much as breaks into a canter—Tilt yer head down.”

        Scootaloo obeyed, her bobbing vision scanning the plush rugs of the den under the flickering fireplace.  “You seem to have a close knit group of friends,” the pegasus spoke through the lips of “Harmony”.    “So far I've heard about Twilight Sparkle, Lady Rarity, and now Fluttershy?”

        “Oh, we're a tight bunch—Us gals,” Harmony smirked as she threaded the amber streaks together and then shifted her concentration on Scootaloo's ends.  “Anypony who knows a thang or two about our brush-in with Nightmare Moon will say it's all on account of the Elements of Harmony—heh, now there's a smatterin' of irony for ya.  But I always liked to think that it was a great deal more heartfelt than that.  I was always well acquainted with Pinkie Pie and the Cake families over at Sugarcube Corner before fate flung the whole lot of us together.  And everypony in Ponyville knew about Fluttershy—well, relatively speakin'.  The pegasus has always lived in a lonely cottage outside of town.  She never really showed her face much until she became part of our little circle of friends—the 'Mane Six' as some gabberin' townsfolk like to call our little pow-wow.”

        “'Mane Six',” Scootaloo chuckled—wincing a bit as another tangle bit the dust.  “That's original.”

        “Nah.  Not really,” Applejack briefly droned.  “But still, there's something about my friends and I that is just so...”  She paused for a moment and chuckled.  “Oh shucks, I do sound like a braggin' fool, don't I?”

        “No, it's alright.”  Scootaloo gulped, suddenly feeling her heartbeat.  “Do go on.”

        “Well,” Applejack spoke and resumed brushing from behind.  “We all found out one day that we had a special connection.  As a matter of fact, we were destined to all find each other at some point or another—On account that when we were all little foals, one single event echoed across the whole of Equestria.  In some manner or another, it was responsible for all of us gettin' our cutie marks at precisely the same time.  Now what are the odds of that happenin'?”

        Scootaloo tried to steady her breath.  A warm sensation was blossoming deep inside her gut as she sat upon the precipice of a legendary story that the pegasus knew all too well.  Over several lonesome years spent in an ashen sky, the last pony often did all she could to bury the bitterly ironic implications of the memory.  But she wasn't sitting there in the past and having her hair brushed for her own benefit.  She tilted hear ears back towards Applejack as she dutifully asked:  “What was it?  What caused all of your cutie marks?”

        “You ever heard of a Sonic Rainboom?”

        “Educate me.”

        “Yer a pegasus and you don't know about the—?”

        “What's in a name?”  Scootaloo retorted.  She tried not to sound short; she was slightly successful.  “It's all in the experience, isn't it?”

        “Darn tootin'.  This Sonic Rainboom was what resulted in all of us gettin' our cutie marks.  And on top of that, we learned that it was caused by none other than one of us gals in the first place!”

        “Who?”  Scootaloo secretly smiled.  “Fluttershy?”

        “Snkkkt—Hahaha—Heavens, no!  But a certain blue pegasus by the name of Rainbow Dash.  You better memorize that name, cuz I swear it's gonna be a legend someday.”

        “Yes,” Scootaloo murmured, her hooves kneading the rug beneath her.  “I-I'm sure it will be...”

        “Y'know, in a lot of ways—You kind of remind me of her.”

        Scootaloo's eyes dilated.  She hadn't expected to hear that.  Ever.  She bit her lip and nearly whimpered, “R-Really...?”

        “In less than two days, I've considered you to be both a pest and a blessing.  No two words better describe Rainbow Dash in a heartbeat.”  A slight drawlish chuckle, and she playfully nudged the copper pony's shoulder.  “I'm joshin', of course.  Yer sweet as candy rain in my book, Harmony, which is the least I can say about Rainbow Dash.  That tomcolt can be a regular thorn in the hoof from time to time, but I love her all the same.”

        “I...” Scootaloo exhaled, smiled warmly into the shadows, and said, “I'm sure she loves us too.”  A blink, and she winced slightly at how that came out.

        “Heh—If you say so, copper-bottom.  Maybe once we get this Apple Harvest taken care of, I could introduce you to the gals.  I like celebratin' with my friends after a long week of apple buckin'.  Yer free to come with!”

        “I-I'll think about it,” Scootaloo said.  Gazing forward, she fidgeted slightly—fought to scale the opportunity of the moment—and eventually seized it.  “Hey, AJ?”

        “Yes, Harmony?”

        “What...” she cleared her throat.  “Wh-What would it take, d-do you think, for a pony to seek audience with Princess Celestia?”

        “You mean the Princess Celestia?”  Scootaloo could positively feel the weight of Applejack's dumb blink from behind.  “Yer a Servant of the Court of Canterlot and yer askin' me about meetin' up with the Princess?”

        Scootaloo winced at that—all of that.  She should have seen it coming from twenty-five years of reverse-time away.  Still, she painted her tongue silver and persisted, “I know how much you dislike bureaucracy, Miss Applejack.  It's only natural to hate the process of red tape.  Even a pony of my stature and service has to go through several layers of offices before I can so much as submit a letter to Her Highness.”

        “Like when you plan on reportin' on this Sweet Apple Acres?”

        “Yes—NO,”  Scootaloo tugged briefly on the end of her hairs and sat up straight.  “Ahem—This isn't about my inspection of the farm.  Not this.”

        “Then what is it about, Harmony?”

        “It's... It's...” Scootaloo bit her lip.  A thousand dying faces flicked in and out of a blink.  She calmed herself and managed, “It's a personal matter.  That's all.  I-I know it's rather foolhardy for a pony—anypony—to think that she can easily make contact with the Princess, somehow circumnavigating the waiting list of so many other concerned citizens who write to her on a daily basis.  But... B-But in my service to Her Highness—in all of my travels—I have... how can I say this... I've uncovered some findings about the lands of Equestria that I think need a close review, and there're no offices in my Court that can properly filter—uhm—what I have to report on.”

        “I see.  And you call that a personal matter?”

        “I... Er...” Scootaloo inhaled.  Then a brief smile.  “What's more personal than the safety and future of Equestria?  You may hold a great deal of faith in this land, Miss Applejack.  And that's all well and fine for you.  You're an earth pony.  You live here.  But me?  I don't live entirely in Canterlot—Not like you think.”

        “Just where do you live, Harmony?”

        Scootaloo lingered.  She closed her eyes, returning briefly to the ashes.  “I live in the skies, AJ.  It's not just a part of my pegasus nature.  It's all about what I do, what I believe in, and who I am.”  She reopened her amber orbs, and the rich warm flicker of the den seemed muted suddenly.  It brought a chill up her invulnerable spine.  “Someday—maybe eons from now—the skies will be all that's left of Equestria.  Those who have spent so many years traveling—those like me—can see things that other ponies can't, all ponies except Her Highness.  Princess Celestia sees all.”  A gulp, then a murmur:  “Or at least I certainly hope she does...”

        “I can't pretend to know the texture of yer words as much as yer tryin' to paint them to me.  But you've been awfully polite to my words.  With the way the days have unfolded, I see every reason to respect yers all the same.”  There was a gentle clapping sound of the brush being placed onto a table top.  Two hooves rested on Scootaloo's shoulders.  “There ya go.  It ain't no prima donna hogwash—but I reckon you look mighty elegant.”

        Scootaloo shuffled, standing up from her stool.  She trotted across the room and glanced into the reflective surface of a grandfather clock.  The reflection sported a gorgeous black mane blossoming from her scalp, and the one amber streak swam steadily down the centerpiece of the thickly forested threads.

        “It looks... pretty.”  The pegasus blushed slightly.

        An orange reflection sauntered up next to her, smirking.  “Yes, you do.”  Applejack patted her shoulder as the two's complexion hovered numbly against the rotating hands of time.  “Don't sell yerself short, girl.  All them wisecracks I made yesterday about you bein' dainty and all; they're true in a way.  But it's a darlin' truth.  I'm sure you'd drive the colts back at Canterlot into a faintin' spell if you ever took the moment to come down from them skies you love.”

        Scootaloo exhaled, her breath incidentally fogging the clockface briefly as her eyes fell down the sloping length of the hour hand.  “I'm not sure if I can ever afford to come down...”

        “Good thang we stumbled into each other.”  Applejack winked.  “I reckon it gave you a chance to get better acquainted with the Earth.  I'm sure the Earth was missin' you mighty fierce too.”

        “Y-Yeah.  Maybe so...”

        Applejack rubbed her own chin with a hoof.  “Y'know, it ain't that much of a stretch to get in contact with the Princess—Now that I think of it.”

        Scootaloo flashed a hyper glance Applejack's way.  “It 'ain't'?”  She blinked.

        “Well, on account of my friend Twilight,” the orange mare mused.  “She's always writin' letters on friendship and Ponyvillean life to Celestia.  She's her magical apprentice, you see.”

        Scootaloo shifted where she stood.  “You don't say...?”

        “At first I was a bit miffed that every little thang I did or said around Twilight could very well have made it onto the pages of a letter that her lil dragon friend sent to Her Highness.  But then I came to trust Twilight Sparkle for whom she really is—a gentle, endearing, and good-mannered pony.  And—heck!—I'm all about tellin' the truth, most of the time at least.  So I figured—'What the hay's the big deal'?  And it's never bothered me since.”  She smiled proudly.  “I have no doubt yer helpin' my family out could make it to the Princess' attention, thanks to Twilight—assumin' we leave out the whole issue with the trolls of Discord and all,” she finished with a nervous chuckle.

        “And th-then the Princess would want to sp-speak with me?”  Scootaloo stammered, her wings briefly fluttering.

        “Pfft—One hoof at a time, sugarcube.  But it's certainly a start, isn't it?”

        “Where in tarnation is everyone?—AJ!  Miss Harmony!”  Granny Smith wobbled out from the brightly lit kitchen and gawked at the two ponies.  “There you are—Elektra Alive, ladies!  Food's-a-gettin' cold!  Bring yer flanks in here and take a bite before them nasty critters stop hidin' in the forest!”  She hobbled back under the gathering shadows of Macintosh and Apple Bloom at the table.

        Scootaloo winced slightly.  “Where are my m-manners?  I'm not used to a regular eating schedule.  I didn't mean to hold up supper, honest.”

        “Don't worry yer sweet head about it.”  Applejack winked and motioned with her snout as she trotted over to join her family.  “How about you put that mouth of yers into munchin' instead of mopin'?” she said with a chuckle.

        The copper pegasus nervously trotted after her, dipping her head humbly into the warm aura wafting off of the dinner table.  Granny Smith was already serving heaps of the steamy daffodil alfredo onto each of the five plates while Macintosh, Apple Bloom, and Applejack were shuffling padded stools into place and taking their seats.  Scootaloo was so mesmerized by the scents of the well-cooked meal that she took little notice of the seat she was shuffling up towards.  She heard someone's throat clearing.  Glancing up, she saw Macintosh gazing deadpan at her, shaking his head, and waving a hoof negatively.  With a blink, Scootaloo took a second look at the spot that she was about to sit in.  Its place at the table was dusty, plain, with the only thing adorning it being a vase full of well preserved orange blossoms.  The spot directly next to the seat had a pair of antique colt's horseshoes criss-crossing in memory.  She blushed deeply and winced apologetically Macintosh's way, watching as the crimson stallion gladly motioned her towards a guest stool on the other side of the table, which she quickly took—shuffling up until she was suddenly at chest level within the conjoined breath of the family and with no means of escape.

        She had felt this cramped and caged before.  The Harmony's cabin left little room for anypony to shuffle around.  Inside her airship Scootaloo was either piloting, runecrafting, reading journals, or lying in the hammock.  There was nothing necessarily uncomfortable about the claustrophobic lifestyle; she was the only living thing who would ever need to use the cabin.  But this—this dinner table full of breaths and smells—this was like being cornered by vicious harpies from all sides, only they wanted to bless her rather than eviscerate her.  The last pony was not accustomed to being the recipient of anything other than her own cold shoulder throughout the years.  It was positively suffocating.

        She also wasn't accustomed to traditional eating habits.  With forlorn eyes, Scootaloo watched as the family exchanged smiles and polite phrases of gratitude before offensively dipping the entire weight of their snouts directly into the spiced plates of straw and flowers.  Scrumptious oats and delicious white petals dribbled off their delighted maws as they treated their table like one large trough.  If Scootaloo had lost all of her faint memories from foalhood, she might even have been disgusted.  She realized that she was the source of her own confusion.  For decades, her diet consisted entirely of mushroom stew and meat broth, and very early into her zeppelin lifestyle the pegasus had crafted for herself metal braces attached with eating utensils so that she could fish her meals out of a collapsible container that could be discarded in a heartbeat for if she needed to jump into her cockpit and steer clear of a sudden obstacle or air pirate attack.  Scootaloo had been alone for so long, she had forgotten what it meant to eat like a pony.  Strangely enough, it was the first incongruity that didn't make her feel shameful.

        She cleared her throat, wrenched her eyes off of the ungainly eating habits of her hosts, and gazed at the food on the plate before her.  She knew the daffodil alfredo had to be delicious; her senses told her that it smelled delicious, but there was no convincing the supposed 'gut' of her projected soul self that she needed to be hungry for it.  Her need to eat was the same as her need to sleep, and it was all related to the unnatural stamina that aided “Harmony” so well in her endless apple bucking that day.  In fact, the only reason she took a bath was because Applejack insisted.

        She didn't want to wait until the four blessed ponies in front of her insisted that she join in the meal.  So, leaning her snout down awkwardly, she opened her lips like a giant copper crane and snapped a rattling bite of the heap of flowers and straw.

        The soonest that the daffodil petals entered her mouth—they melted around the crunching contours of the flower stalks until a grand cornucopia of home-brewed tastes gathered into a frothing ball against her tongue and exploded endorphins directly into her brain.  Her eyes almost rolled back in her head.  This wasn't quite like the apple she had bitten into the day before; there were no bitter sweet emotions attached to this.  This was quite simply an onslaught of pleasure, something she hadn't gotten from food in a while.  She remembered suddenly what it meant to consume something simply for the sake of the experience and not for the sake of survival.  It was a joyously awkward shimmer that danced up and down her spine, like having waltzed in on a muffin buffet at Sugarcube Corner.  She pondered a little too heavily on this, so that she was blind to her avid devouring until she blinked her eyes up with a mouthful to see four amused faces staring at her.

        “My my, they certainly starve you in the Royal Court of Canterlot, don't they?”  the lime-coated mare snickered, bearing a knowing wink that only Scootaloo could see.

        “Don't go pickin' on her, Granny,” Applejack winked between munches.  “She done deserved a good scarfin'.  Besides—Who can resist yer wonderful alfredo?”

        “Yeah!  Can Miss Harmony visit us some more?”  Apple Bloom stifled a belch and beamed.  “I wouldn't mind chowin' down on this every week!”

        “Oh Sugarcube.  What would make this a special occasion if we did that, then?”

        “We should let ponies visit us more often, AJ!  When's all yer apple buckin' gonna be finished, huh?  I feel like we've been a bunch of lonely rock farmers, what with all this work and no play!”

        “The soonest we get this here harvest done, I reckon we're in for a heapin' load of celebration.  I mean it; this year's been a real doozy.”

        “You can say that again, child.”

        “Eeeyup.”

        “Why—If I had a bit for every basket of apples I've filled this year alone, I'd fancy myself being nearly as rich as Rarity.”

        “That reminds me, AJ.  Where has that most resplendent pony been lately?  It seems like Lady Rarity is a no-show everytime I go to visit the Ponyvillean Market.”

        “Oh, she's just bein' her normal fabric fussin' self, Granny.  No doubt she's workin' on the latest task for that fabulous fashion critic from Canterlot, Hoity Toity.”

        “Now AJ—if yer don't know a pony's name, it ain't polite to go on fillin' the blank, now is it?”

        “No, Granny.  I mean that is his name.  He's 'Hoity Toity'.”

        “A name like that in the Canterlotlian elite?  Preposterous!  Next thing y'know, Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Ponies will be passin' out doctorates to colts named 'Mister Whooves'!”

        “Er... Ahem... So, Harmony,” Applejack took another bite of alfredo and smiled down the family table.  “Tell us a little bit about the sorts of things that a Royal Servant of Canterlot gets to see in her travels, why don't ya?”

        “Oh, uhm...” Scootaloo fidgeted, swallowing down another scrumptious lump of oats and smiling nervously.  “It's not necessarily good dinner conversation.”  She glanced briefly at a wrinkled, lime-coated face across the table.  A quiet grayness hovered above the otherwise warm hovel.

        “Are you kiddin'?”  Apple Bloom nearly bounced out of her stool, her hairbow twitching atop a grinning head.  “I've never met a pegasus working for the Princess before!  I bet you see all kinds of cool and amazin' things in yer line of work!”

        “Where I go isn't nearly as important as what I do,” Scootaloo said.  A clearing of the throat and she half-murmured aside:  “Or whom I do it for.”

        “Do you ever see any sea serpents?”

        “Uhh,” Scootaloo blinked.  “I beg your pardon, kid?”

        “Sweetie Bell says that there are tons of sea serpents out beyond the mountains bordering the Equestrian Valley!  She says they're called 'leviathans', on account that they're so big that they can't fit their big 'ol selves into normal lakes and rivers!”

        Scootaloo didn't bother stifling a knowing smirk.  “This 'Sweetie Bell' sounds like a walking dictionary.”

        “Nah, she just tries really hard to impress other ponies.  I think it's because she's tryin' to look as classy as her sister, Lady Rarity.  She's not nearly as confident about thangs as my other friend—”

        Scootaloo's heart briefly dropped when Applejack interrupted her little sister:  “That's quite enough jabberin' about yer Crusaders, Apple Bloom.  Y'all can talk about that another day.”

        “Awww—But Sis!  The whole point of being a Cutie Mark Crusader is wantin' to go out into the world and do everythang to get a cutie mark!  I bet Miss Harmony here has done just that!”

        Before Applejack could interject again, the copper pegasus spoke, “It's true.  I've been to many places.  And it sounds like you've got a noble thing going with these 'crusader' friends of your, Apple Bloom.  But I don't think you should be so obsessed with the outside world, kid.  Especially when you've got so much that's awesome right here.”

        “What do ya mean, Miss Harmony?”  Apple Bloom blinked widely at her.  Applejack raised an eyebrow.  A mute Macintosh and Granny Smith gazed over half-munched alfredo.

        Under the spotlight of so many warm pairs of eyes, Scootaloo crossed her hooves atop the table and breathed soundly.  “I've seen many things in my flight,” she said, plucking the words from the gray fields of her mind with caution.  “I've seen deep granite chasms etched into the earth from millennia ago, when things that were done to this world were performed by the whim of a Goddess with absolute permanence in mind.  I've flown under the shadows of mountains too high for any Canterlotlian chronicler to measure; they are natural monstrosities so large that to simply comprehend them reminds a pony of just how tiny a speck she is in the mere twinkle of Epona's eyes.  I have seen... I have seen wastelands, Apple Bloom—wastelands that stretch on for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers, where the only sign of life that could possibly exist is the indestructible spirit of ponydom.  The world is a huge place, and when it's stripped bare of all of the pretty things that make it recognizable, it becomes clear really quick that the only hoofprint you can ever hope to make is the sort of mark you can etch upon the souls of each other, of the ones that you love, and the ones that you would forever... forever miss if they were to fly off along the wild winds of what lies beyond the mountains and never ever return.  The world is huge, and it is amazing—But, personally, I have found so much of it to be...to be empty.”

        Scootaloo's lips lingered.  She gazed up with a brief fear.  The warmth in the eyes of the living ponies had faded slightly.  As they regarded her, their faces seemed a little... paler, as if cornered by trolls.  She knew exactly how to change that.

        With a painful smile, the pegasus finished, “But here—No, there is no emptiness here.  You can dream and wonder about the outside world all you want, Apple Bloom.  But let me save you the trouble when I say that there's nothing better than a home.  You can go on a thousand exoduses and cover a million miles—by land or by air—but having a home is all that matters.  And this home, Apple Bloom, this gorgeous and beautiful home where your family lives; it is a good home.  And I am willing to bet that if you too were to see the many sights of Equestria and beyond, only here would you feel complete.  Anywhere else would just be empty.”  She glanced up at a sisterly orange mare.  “Where else would the Earth so generously give back for you simply being you?”

        Applejack smiled sweetly.  From across the table, an old mare bore a grin that was half as enthusiastic, but twice as understanding.

        “Well, I hope I get to see some leviathans someday!”

        “Apple Bloom!  Heavens to Betsy!”  Granny Smith rolled her eyes and then smiled at the guest.  “Would you like seconds, dear?”

        Scootaloo blushed under the gaze of the elder.  “I would love some, Ms. Smith.”

        “I rightly share Apple Bloom's melancholy over the vittles,” Applejack mused while the lime-colored pony scooped Scootaloo another heap of straw and daffodils.  “Tomorrow night, we're likely back to me cookin' the same old boring meals like I do every week.  It's nothin' for you to fancy, Harmony.  I don't quite have Granny's gift of spicin' here.  But I reckon my meals are decently healthy!”

        “And borin'!”  Apple Bloom made a wretching face.

        “Oh hush!”  Applejack briefly frowned, folding her hooves in a pout.  “So what's wrong with a little bit of spinach and celery here and there?”

        “'A pony does not live on apples alone',” Scootaloo mused while shifting through the contents of her plate.  “I'm sure I stole that from somewhere, but I'm too tired to quote it,” she lied again.

        “It's only fittin' that we each get a wink of shuteye before the night calls on our bodies twice as hard as this day has.”

        “Maybe I could play us some Stallionivarius,” Granny Smith said in a gentle breath; only Scootaloo could detect the mournful tone to it.  “That should ease us gentle-like into the dark.”

        “Nah, Granny.  That's sweet of you, but we don't want to get too much sleep.  You-know-what could come prancin' about the orchards at any second.”

        “We expectin' visitors, AJ?” Apple Bloom spoke up above a thinning stack of alfredo.

        Scootaloo spoke suddenly above the warm flicker of the room before any of the older ponies could betray their honest qualities.  “That reminds me, Miss Applejack, what exactly is your taste in music?”

        “Hmmmph... I reckon I haven't thought too much of it.  Twilight and Rarity are always gabbin' on and on about some record or another.  I suppose it's just the unicorn way to appreciate a fine symphony, what with them tuning forks they got stickin' out of their heads.  What about yerself, Miss Harmony?  What flavor caters to y'all?”

        “Strings.  Sometimes violins—But mostly the cello,”  Scootaloo smirked.  She briefly glanced at Ms. Smith as she spoke.  “It's so beautiful.  It's a little mournful, and yet jubilant in its own rights.”

        “Yer don't say?  Come to think of it, I like me some expert twangin' of the dulcimer myself.”

        “Imagine that!”

        “And Big Macintosh here fancies himself a lyre when he pays the village a visit from time to time, ain't that right, Macky?”

        “Heh heh heh,” the stallion blushed deeply in between munches.  “Eeeyup.”

        The Apple sisters giggled gaily, their young and old chuckles forming a cohesive hum in the center of the kitchen.  Macintosh munched silently into the warm breath of the moment.  Granny Smith hovered upon the precipice of the scene.  Scootaloo—the last pony, with her stab wounds stifled in the past and her loneliness stored in the future—sat and drank it all in, expecting at any breath and at any jolt for the chaotic legions of horror to bring the entire house crashing down on its innocent hearts.  She let the length of the occasion linger as long as the trolls cared to, as long as the Cataclysm dared to, as long as Princess Entropa herself willed to, until she rediscovered the courage to admit that she still wasn't strong enough to be seated, and she hovered above the dinner table just as helplessly as she had first stumbled upon it, a nomadic foal looking for a home.

        An hour later, most of the lights in the house had been put out—save for the blaze in the fireplace, which was still crackling and sparking with a heated sigh over the soft shapes of embroidered furniture.  Nestled in the sofa upon Granny Smith's lap, washed up and socked-up and ready for bed, Apple Bloom blinked and smiled as the lime-coated elder embraced her with a book in her hooves, rattling off a bedtime story to the dancing shadows of the room.

        “'But the baby yellow birdie didn't mind none when the other songbirds tried to make fun of him.  'I'll get my own tree!' he said.  'Then I can sing big and strong just like the others!'  So he flew and he flew and he flew and he flew, but all of the large trees were all filled with birdies already.  He knew it was impolite to hop into another family's nest, besides it wouldn't help his singing none to share the branches with other birdies.  He needed to practice on his own!  Finally—one cool and crisp mornin'—the baby yellow birdie found a tinnnnnnny sprout of an apple tree just over the hill yonder where the rising Sun first appeared.  She was such a teeny tiny thing that none of the other songbirds wanted to nest in her—but for the little yellow birdie, she was just right.  'Finally, I have a tree and she's just the size that I can learn to sing in!'  So he made his nest and practiced every mornin', but his singin' wasn't gettin' any prettier.  He wanted nothin' else but to sing big and strong—But it wasn't comin' out right!  Finally, one mornin', he left the tiny sprout of a tree, but not without saying, 'Don't fret, Miss Apple Tree!  I know just the thing that will make you grow.  All of the other birdies live in big trees because they have families!  Maybe if I had a family of my own, then you would become big too'!”

        From the bottom of the farmhouse's stairs, Scootaloo listened in on the tale.  She sat on the bottom step, covered in shadows, as her ears pricked foalishly to take in Granny Smith's recital.  From the toasty look across Apple Bloom's firelit features, the pegasus could tell that she was well familiar with this bedtime story.  It was Scootaloo's first.

        As Granny Smith continued her gentle tale, the copper time traveler glanced aside to see Big Macintosh propped up on a stool before the screened porch door.  With hard green eyes, he stared out into the darkness shrouding the orchards, watching for any sign of the nightmarish creatures that were lurking beyond.  He had a spade balanced across his forelegs, and if he was teetering on the brink of exhaustion, he heroically didn't show any sign of such.

        A shuffling of hooves, and Applejack sauntered down from the top of the stairs and sat down next to Scootaloo with a groaning sigh.  “Any sign of them varmints?”

        Scootaloo slowly shook her head.  “No.  By the way, I thought it was Macintosh's turn to keep watch first.  Shouldn't you be asleep?”  Her voice was stealthily hushed beyond the ranges of Apple Bloom's hearing.

        Applejack's was too:  “I would say the same about you, but looks like I'm not the only restless one.”  Nevertheless she yawned and leaned against the nearby wall with bloodshot green eyes.  “Here's my family, havin' a gentle moment, and yet there are such horribly nasty creatures just beyond the fences.”

        “And what a nice moment it is,” Scootaloo murmured towards the cozy fireplace and the old and young bodies curled before it.  “What I wouldn't give for a whole lifetime of moments like this...”

        Applejack turned towards her, and a soft voice came out of her that soothed the pegasus ears.  “All of those thangs that yer were goin' on about at the dinner table, about you seein' so many sights in the world and it all bein' so incredibly empty...”  She leaned her head to the side.  “Is that how you feel about life in general, Harmony?”

        Scootaloo tried to reassure her with a smile.  The result was akin to handling balloons with rusted gauntlets.  “Life is never empty, AJ.  It's the stuff that life tries to fill.”

        “I reckon yer one of them trough-is-half-empty kind of ponies.”

        “Not really.  I like to drink out of a canteen.”

        “Pfft—Cop out!”

        “Heheheh,” Scootaloo giggled lightly.  Then, with a returning sigh, she hugged her forelegs to herself and lowered her head, gazing at the firelight and the unraveling bedtime story beyond.

        “The years went by, but the yellow birdie didn't notice,” Granny Smith went on as Apple Bloom yawned and curled tighter against her.  “Because he was so enamored with the family he made.  He had no idea that he would be so happy to have a wife and two little chickies.  He found he practiced his singin' simply by treatin' his kids to some lullabies.  He forgot all about little Miss Apple tree back home, because his whole life had become one big beautiful song, and his family had become the chorus.  And without even knowing it, he had become big and strong, just the kind of daddy that his chickies needed.  It was a total surprise to him when one day they moved back to the west side of the orchards, and there the yellow birdie found himself stumbling on an enormous apple tree that was just the right size for his family!  But he was scared at first, because every other bird who tried to live inside her branches was thrown out—as if the tree had come alive and refused to be nested in!  'That tree!  She ain't no good!' the other songbirds said.  'She doesn't like no birds no-how!'  But the yellow birdie wasn't scared.  He needed a tree for his family, and she was just the right size.  'Please let me build a nest in you, Miss Apple Tree!'  He begged with folded wings.  'I swear that I'm big and strong and my family needs the room!'.”

        Scootaloo's wings absent-mindedly flexed and unflexed.  A pit formed in her stomach as she thought about all of the skies she had flown in during her life; and none of them were golden.  A dismal hum broke the tranquility of the room, so that she finally forced herself to glance aside and murmur Applejack's way:

        “Hey, AJ...”

        “Mmm—Yes, Harmony?”  Applejack leaned away from the precipice of drowsiness.

        “Have you—That is...” the pegasus fidgeted, fumbled, then proceeded, “as an earth pony, have you noticed anything strange about the land?”

        “You mean other than nasty little trolls poppin' out of it and wantin' to kill all of us?”

        “Ahem.  Yes, besides that,” Scootaloo bit her lip, but continued uttering, “Have you felt... I don't know... any tremors or strange earthquakes or... or just about anything that would seem really out of place in the land of Equestria?”

        “Can't reckon I have.  This here is pretty sound land.  Only tremors we get is when cattle stampede from time to time.  I had to save Ponyville all by myself from such a mess one time.  Well, heheh, Winona helped, but that's besides the point.”

        “You haven't noticed any bizarre things in the sky?  Any... er... eclipses or other strange phenomena happening for no reason?”

        Applejack squinted sideways at the pegasus.  “Does this have anythang to do with that report you've been dyin' to share with the Princess?”

        Scootaloo instantly blushed, glancing away.  “Guess nothing gets past you, AJ.”

        “Guilty.”  She smirked.  “Sugarcube, my family and I are very grateful for all the things you've done for us over the last day and a half.  It was because of your foresight that Mac and I didn't get chomped to bits by trolls.  And it was because of your smarts that we've gotten so much apple buckin' done at a record rate.  But I'm beginning to think that you're awful worrisome about a lot of things.”

        “I-I guess it is in my nature,” Scootaloo smiled nervously.  A gulp.  “But—There are strange things ahoof in Equestria.  I really, really must get in contact with the Princess somehow.”

        “Like what kind of strange things?”

        “I-I really don't want to cloud your head with it, Applejack,” Scootaloo smiled plastically.  “Let's just say that there are... th-there are worse things in this world than trolls.”

        “Whew—If you say so.”  Applejack ran a hoof through some night-tosseled threads and shrugged.  “Cuz I can't imagine anything worse than creatures who just wanna hate on a humble family of farm ponies.  It's almost as if they want to bring out the worst in us.  Those traps that Macky and I made?—Plus them farm tools we were fixin' to smack against them varmints' heads...?”  A chill ran down the mare's spine as she shamefully glanced into the shadows.  “I shudder to think how downright dirty we were plannin' on gettin'.  You were right with what you said at sundown, Miss Harmony.  Ponies are creatures of life.  We should know nothin' about bouncin' back the misery of monsters.  I almost reckon that the 'Act of Accord' is something Canterlot made to protect us from a shade of ourselves we're never meant to wake up to.”

        “R-Right.” Scootaloo gulped.  “All my Court has ever w-wanted to do,” she shuddered as she lied yet again, “is protect you.”  She fought down the shivers as Applejack did the opposite alongside her.  The orange mare drifted off into a stone-still slumber.  Scootaloo felt suddenly alone.  At any second, the trolls could come smashing in through the windows, and every last shred of goodness in that farmhouse would be torn asunder.  With foalish fright, she distracted herself with the glistening hum of Granny Smith's settling story.

        “And the moment he built a nest inside her branches, the leaves started shakin' something fierce.  At first the yellow birdie thought he was gonna be thrown out like all the others.  But then he realized that there was somethin' musical to the way them leaves were rustling.  And sure enough, he started singin' to the beat, and what came out of him was the most beautiful song that there ever was sung in all of the orchards.  To his joy, he realized that she was the same apple tree that he had tried to build a nest in so many years ago, before he flew away to find himself such a happy family.  She had waited for him all that time, so that she was big enough for the whole family and all of their happy songs.  And that's when the yellow birdie thought to himself, 'Hmm, my favorite little tree isn't such a little tree anymore'.  So she sang her song, big and strong, and they all lived in that great big tree happily ever after.  The end.”

        Granny Smith very, very quietly folded the book shut, for the little foal nestled in her lap had fallen into a soft slumber, her tiny form rising and falling with gentle breaths.  The lime coated elder smiled and lovingly nuzzled the child's crimson mane as the firelight dwindled into shadows across their warm embrace.  The elder spoke liquidly, but when she did her words were aimed at a different child altogether:  “It's almost as if you've never been read a bedtime story before.  Why does that not surprise me?”

        Scootaloo jolted.  She glanced at the briefly slumbering Applejack beside her, then at the distant sentry in the form of Macintosh.  On soft legs, she padded over towards the fireplace and murmured back through an air of conjoined silence.  “It was a nice story, even if a tad bit idyllic.”

        “It has to be idyllic, Miss Harmony,” Granny Smith smiled anciently, softly stroking the mane hair of the slumbering Apple Bloom.  “It's meant for a foal.  No Equestrian bedtime story ever rings with the true, true dread of this world's shadows.  There are many dark truths that a young pony must discover for herself.  To do anything but plant seeds of hope would be a crime.  You've done well to inspire Applejack and Macintosh the way you have.  I rightly don't think any of us are prepared for the horrors that are about to stalk us this dark, dark night.  The hope that you've brought is the best bedtime story this farm could ask for.”

        “I didn't come here to bring hope, Ms. Smith,” Scootaloo throated with a bitter face.

        A pair of gray eyes lurched her way over Apple Bloom.  “You reckon you've finally figured out what it is you're here to provide?”

        “In a matter of minutes, all of us will know,” Scootaloo murmured, her eyes twitching on the end of green flames flickering.  “Or none of us will know.”

        “Miss Harmony,” the old mare murmured in a liquid haze that mirrored the fireplace before her tired eyes.  “I've gone over in my head the things that you have told me, the things that you have shown me.  You are built out of unfathomably strong stuff, but even you had to know that our staying here would be something dangerous, suicidal even.”  She gazed across the silent shadows towards Macintosh, towards the useless spade stretched across his limbs as he sat and stared into the billowing depths of the night.  “We had an entire day at our disposal.  Even without the help of Princess Celestia, we could have easily relocated ourselves to Ponyville, to safety from the creatures that must now be surroundin' us even as we speak.  Whatever it is that strengthens you, Miss Harmony, it's left us vulnerable.  We're slim for the trolls' pickin's now, and for what?”

        “Are you trying to tell me that you've lost faith in your 'gift', Ms. Smith?”

        “Not so much as I've gained a new thing to want more than the gift itself,” she murmured.  “I want a reason—an explanation—for why it's taken a gift, instead of plan happenstance, for all of us to be teeterin' on the brink of both death and exhaustion.  What is there at stake here, Miss Harmony?  I'm startin' to think that it's more than just the Apple Family.  What yer battlin' here is more than trolls, and whatever it is—you've dragged it here from the same emptiness that your lonely sky-wanderin' has evidently bestowed you.  What are you tryin' to prove with this lonely crusade you've pigeon-holed yourself in—or all of us in for that matter?  Do you wish to find some invisible strength that's somehow been lost to you?”

        “You want to know what strengthens me, Miss Smith?” Scootaloo suddenly flared—something that almost tasted of anger.  She burned amber spotlights into the mare's graying mane.  “Look around you.  See your family, bask in their warmth, cherish it.  You'll find you've always had the strength that's eluded me forever.  It's a strength that those trolls out there have never known, even though they think they can rip it all asunder in a single charge.  I'm sorry I can't satisfy you in one crazed speech, Ms Smith.  I apologize for not being able to dissuade your fears.  But what you are—in smiles and in frowns, in bedtime stories and in dinner conversation—is enough to help me do the task that lies before me.  Someway, somehow—I promise—I will not compromise your family's safety.  I won't... I won't...”

        “I never once recall sayin' that I had fears for you to dissuade, child.”  Granny Smith glanced at her sideways.  “Only sympathy.  Only sympathy, darlin'.  If yer so bent on savin' this here family—and this here land—you've got to learn to come out of the skies that have been burnin' empty around you.  You've got to come down and touch the ground, ya reckon?”

        Scootaloo numbly hung off the edges of those words, like a scooter-clinging foal staring down at a farmhouse from a lone hilltop as all the lights in the world went out.  Even if she would have said something before the haunting noises kicked in, it would have been something hollow, something empty, as she suddenly saw the legacy of her whole scavenging life.

        The howling noises came from the southeast.  In frightening swiftness, they curved around and galloped in warbling throngs along the west end of the Orchards.  Halfway into the frosted night of waiting, the terror had finally descended.  Winona's barks lit the room.  Macintosh leaned lurchingly forward, his ears pricking as he gazed with sudden nervousness into the heart of darkness.  Another warbling chant, and the two granddaughters in the den shot up as separate halves of the same gasping soul.

        “M-Macky?!?” Applejack blinked the last blissful threads of slumber away as she numbly trotted across the shuddering shadows.  “Is it them?  Is it really them?”

        “Eeeyup,” the stallion shakingly managed.  The metal of his spade clamored against his hooves as a pulsing heartbeat ricocheted across the room.

        “Oh heavens,” Applejack stifled a whimper under the crashing waves of the yelping madness beyond.  “Oh Epona, protect us...”

        “Wh-What's the matter?”  Apple Bloom trembled, nakedly awake in the wrinkled forelegs of her grandmother.  “Is it them?  Is it them creatures?”

        “Be still, Apple Bloom, darlin',” Granny Smith murmured with iron resolve.  In a blink, she snuffed out the fireplace, casting the house into doubly thick shadows as the window panes rattled with the banshee screams from beyond.  “Listen to what yer sister tells ya, ya hear?”

        “Oh Granny,” Apple Bloom whimpered as her yellow face deflated under a cascade of fresh tears.  “I'm scared... They sound absolutely horrible!  I-I'm so scared...”

        “I know, dear.  Stay with us, darlin'.  Stay close—AJ.”

        “Y-Yes, Granny?”

        “Are all of the other doors to the house locked?”

        “I... I-I think so.  Big Mac?”

        “Eeeyup.”

        “Th-Then all I reckon that's left t-to do is barricade the p-porch and wait them out--”

        “AJ, listen to them.  There're four times as many as last time, darlin'.  I don't think the doors can hold.”

        “W-We could... Uhm... We could h-hold out in the kitchen.  If we move all of the furniture into the circle—”

        “AJ...”

        “And if w-we just... j-just try to keep low and all quiet-like—”

        “AJ, you've been strong for this family for so long,” Granny Smith spoke lovingly under the deathly screams collapsing in on that place like a cyclone.  Everypony's ears rang between the punctuations of her gentle voice.  Winona's barking dwindled to a whimpering dirge.  “But this is somethin' for once yer honest tenacity ain't built for.  It really should be another pony makin' the next decision.”

        Applejack gulped.  Clinging tremblingly to a likewise shuddering brother, she gazed across the room and bore into Scootaloo with vulnerable green eyes that no amount of bleeding in the Wasteland had prepared the time traveler for.  “Miss Harmony... Please, sp-speak to us.  What sh-should we do, sugarcube?”  The floorboards shook.  The portraits dangled and danced along the walls.  The air reverberated with the demonic chants of several invisible shadows shuffling closer, closer, closer.  “T-Tell me how I can save m-my family, please.”

        Scootaloo was standing at the far end of their gaze, and yet she wasn't there.  She was floating on brown wings twenty-five years later, navigating a gigantic sinkhole that had consumed the lengths of the family's entire legacy.  She was walking around to the far side of a miraculously preserved house.  She rounded a corner.  She saw bodies.  She saw bodies.

        “The storm cellar,” the last pony murmured, inviting the gray ghost back into her numb lungs under the crumbling awakening to what she had to do next, to what the rest of them had to not do.  “The storm cellar is... is your last bet.”

        “The cellar?” Applejack gulped.  Another wail of bloodlusting throats.  Another jolt.  Apple Bloom was sobbing now.  “But Miss Harmony—”

        “These creatures are not of this world—Not of this time,” Scootaloo snarled.  “I cannot emphasize enough how much the Court of Canterlot rebukes them.  But unlike the Court, I'm not about to let this family suffer for their incidental presence here.  You are all ponies of the earth, Miss Applejack.  So give yourselves to the earth.  Let us go into the cellar, let us go into the depths of your land.  The trolls will want to follow us, but we won't let them.  They don't deserve it—they've never worked for it.  They can only envy it.  It's the one thing they cannot fight for, but we can.  Let's move now, Miss Applejack—before they kill us for our hesitance.  And they will kill us, AJ.  They will.”

        Apple Bloom hiccuped, her face nuzzled into Granny Smith's embrace.  The elder mare was staring at her two older grandchildren more than she was paying attention to the pegasus.  As the world throttled to a maddening cacophony of hate around them, it would take the simplest of sputtering voices to open the door to a new chapter of desperation.

        “V-Very well, Miss Harmony.”  Applejack found the strength to say.  “You've done us all right this far.”

        “Now do yourselves some more right,” Scootaloo firmly stared in her direction and motioned towards the blunt weapon in Macintosh's trembling grasp.  “Give me the shovel.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Applejack led the charge.  The caravan was a floundering caterpillar of stumbling hooves; the whole family lurched and tripped over starlit grass, the entire earth shuddering beneath them from the waves upon waves of lurching leather feet closing in from all shadowed sides.  The pale doors to the storm cellar lingered just beyond several stacks of impregnable hay, like an impromptu fortress built by  several weeks of desperate sweat and anxiety.

        “What's yer pl-plan?” Applejack gulped.  “We keep Granny Smith and Apple Bloom inside while the rest of us form a defensive circle?”

        “Something like that, sure,” Scootaloo murmured, her eyes pressed to the black orchards echoing horrifically beyond.

        “Yer words have stuck to me like icicles, Miss Harmony,” the orange mare briefly whimpered as Macintosh jumped ahead of the pack and fumbled with the cellar's doorhandles.  “I never saw myself as the type to spill blood, to kill for the sake of stayin' alive.  And I secretly hoped I never would.”  She gulped and gazed at the “clerk” with trembling lips.  “Please tell me it'll have been worth it—That it'll have been worth savin' this farm and its reputation for.”

        “I can't pretend to tell you anything, AJ,” Scootaloo somberly said.  She glanced over at a tear-stained Apple Bloom perched atop the wobbling Smith.  The child's crimson mane floundered and flew as she twisted her panicked face every which way to ascertain the locations of those incoming nightmares.  “I never wanted the ruination of your farm.  But I didn't want this blood bath all the same.  Whatever happens—you and Big Macintosh must do what I say.  Do you understand?”

        “Y-Yes, I d-do, Harmony,” Applejack surrendered to the gray shadows wafting off of her, jumping as another siren of sadistic screams warbled their way.  “I-I trust you, sugarcube.  Oh Goddess help me, I trust you.”

        Scootaloo said nothing.

        With a gust of dead grass, the cellar doors finally yanked open.  After a breath, Macintosh whistled shrilly towards the rest of his family.  He gently held Granny Smith's hoof as she limped down the dark, dark steps after a briskly jogging Apple Bloom.  A whimpering Winona scampered into the safe crevice of darkness as the little foal stopped halfway down the stairs and hissed desperately for the elder to follow her, to hold her—so she could hold her back under those rising tremors that only intensified once they had billowed down into the claustrophobic chamber of the earth.

        “Applejack!”  Granny Smith called up from beneath the deafening bedlam.  “It's darker than sin down here!  Do you remember where the lanterns are hangin'?”

        “Oh blast it all!”  Applejack sneered under a panicked breath.  “Miss Harmony, this will only take a second.”  She literally flew down the steps and into the cold blackness below.  “Wait up, Granny!  I'll light it in a jiffy!”

        The time traveler's answer to this was a spastic lurch, upon the end of which the rusted spade in her grip inexplicably fell down the shadowed cellar steps after her.  “Whoops—Dang it.  Hey, Mister Macintosh—would you be a gentlecolt and fetch that for me?”

        The red stallion glanced nervously at Scootaloo, at the shuddering shadows hellishly blanketing the horizon, then down the cold cellar steps.  With a polite nod of his blonde mane, he swiftly trotted down, bent low, and picked the handle of the spade up in strong teeth.  The slamming noise that emanated above and behind him stabbed his green eyes wide, just in time for him to stare stupidly into the sudden glow of the cellar's orange light.

        Applejack stood, frozen, her forelimbs having just lit the dangling lanterns besides Granny Smith and Apple Bloom.  “M-Macky?” she stammered, blinking icily.  “What gives?  Where is...”  She gasped, her orange face exploding as she suddenly darted up the steps.  “Miss Harmony!”

        Macintosh breathlessly spun as Applejack soared up past him, slamming her hooves, her snout, the full muscled brunt of her neck into the solid wooden door suddenly burying the hapless quartet of the Apple Family.

        “Nnngh!  Miss Harmony, no!  Ya can't do this on yer lonesome, darlin'!  Ya just can't!  You'll die!  For the love of Elektra, let me and Macintosh out!”

        She pounded and pounded until her limbs stung with the same ferocity as her lungs.  In a paralyzing shudder, she glanced her brother's way and motioned with her blonde head.  Macintosh nodded back.  Dropping the shovel with a loud clatter, he charged thunderously up the steps and slammed the full brunt of his muscular red body into the flimsy wooden door.  To everypony's horrified gasps, it still didn't budge.  Macintosh tried again and again, but soon he stopped—gazing along with his sister as the starlit cracks in the cellar lid's frame were suddenly and scrapingly blocked with massive objects from beyond.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        With a breathless grunt, Scootaloo finished tossing the last of several heavy haystacks onto the body of the sealed door.  Her Entropan body allowed her to construct a blockade that no normal pony—much less four of them—could ever hope to dislodge.  Under the cresendo of the bleeding night, she backtrotted and shouted towards the frame:

        “Stay in there, Miss Applejack!  This is not your war!  This bloodshed is not meant for you!  It never has been!”

        “Let us help you!” A muffled voice drawled desperately from the womb of the earth.  “They'll rip you apart, Harmony!  You can't do it on yer own!”

        “It's not a matter of what I can or can't do!”  Scootaloo shouted back.  The rumbling world shook, so that she danced numbly a half-meter above the ground, unworthy of coming down.  “It's a matter of what I must!  Stay with your family, stay with—”

        The rumbling suddenly stopped.  A gray vapor cooled the throbbing void of the night, cascading around her with the haunting grace of Wasteland snow.  Scootaloo spun about, and she froze.  Leather bodies, dozens upon dozens of leather bodies; over a hundred trolls stood in a stone-still crescent moon of deadly glares all around the cellar's entrance, bearing splintery weapons and flickering red torches, gazing and drooling at the chronologically displaced meat suddenly plopped down in the ravenous midst of them.  The monsters stared—all of the monsters stared into her amber eyes, reflecting a kaleidoscope of so many years of running and fleeing from these bloodmongering seeds of chaos.

        For once in an ashen eternity, the last pony stayed put.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Applejack...” Apple Bloom whimpered and sauntered up to the orange pony, tugging on her legs.  “Wh-What's Miss Harmony doing?  Is she going to be alright?”

        Macintosh shuddered, his face stuck in a permanent wretch.  Winona cowered in the corner, her canine eyes dilated as her tail swished-swished in sad arcs across the dusty floor.  Granny Smith fell into a shroud of silence, her gray eyes locked onto a shadowed truth beyond the tremblings heads of her inferiors.

        “Is M-Miss Harmony going to be okay?”  Apple Bloom repeated with a helpless sniffle.

        “I... I-I don't know,” Applejack spoke.  Trotting back from the dark cellar door and the horrible sounds suddenly sirening from beyond, she fell down to her knees and scooped the sobbing foal into her forelimbs.  For the first time in her young adult life, she couldn't tell if she was being honest or not.  “I just d-don't know.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Ten – And the Earth Gives Back

Special Thanks to Vimbert - Pre-Reader and Gentlecolt

        “Do you know who I am?”

        It was an honest question, even if from a dishonest pony.  There, staring into the mouths of gleeful death—mouths that lusted after her and drooled for her—Scootaloo remembered that the only honest sound in the whole history of existence was a scream.  She didn't yell; she murmured before the bent wall of wooden blades, torches, teeth, and pale beady eyes, eyes, eyes.  If they feared her, they would hear her.  If they didn't fear her, they would soon.  She knew what they didn't know, cherished what they didn't know, and preached what they didn't know.  She was a copper torpedo that had been slipped beneath the blankets of reverse-time to suddenly and splashedly explode this moment of Entropan clarity before the quivering limbs of them.  For the first time in eons, the last pony hadn't run from those cretins, and so it was with a ghastly breath that she finally came to realize just how incredibly stupid those harbingers of chaos were.  They were weapons of the past; she was a wound of the future; and her twenty-five years of ash-tempered weight suddenly and numbingly outscored their millennia of stone imprisoned slumber.  So, it was an honest question, and as she crackled under the sound of it, she found herself repeating it—or else it repeated itself; either way the divine interrogation rumbled righteously through the torchlit air, harnessed by her calm features as she slowly trotted towards the abominations, her thick legs guarding the barricaded cellar door and the quivering family hidden beneath—and her anchor.

        “Do you know who I am?”

        They shook and quivered with spring tight muscles of leathery hatred.  At any moment's spit, they would be upon her—thrashing and impaling her, or so they thought.  They leaned on this festering crutch, and Scootaloo brazenly kicked it out from beneath them with the ever patient hum of her cold voice.

        “I am the end of ponies.  I have no name, for I don't need one.  You may not know my face, but you will.  Someday you will chase me and you will hunt me and you will hate me as much as I hate you now.  You will stab me, you will make me bleed, and maybe—one fateful stormfront—you will finally kill me.  But this is not that day.  This is now, this is beautiful, and you are ruining it.”

        Her eyes glistened like amber firebrands.  A tremor ran up her spine and billowed a threatening mange through her copper coat as the next few words came out in an ashen hiss.

        “This land is not your land, this earth is not your earth, and I am not going to let you have this family's home.  But you can have me.  You can have a whole lot of me.  But I promise you that you're not going to like the taste.  After so many years of outrunning you little turds, the only home I have is in pain.”

        Before a phalanx of blinking pale eyes, the last pony's reflection melted in the center of them.  Her wings stretched limply as she slunk down to her haunches and raised both hooves outward as if she was in free fall.  With the rattling breath of an extinct species, she effortlessly beckoned the army of trolls gathered before her.

        “So come at me; let's go home together.”

        For the first time, they wrenched their eyes off her.  They exchanged briefly confused faces.  Dull and brutish minds had surfaced suddenly to the bloodthirsty shells that flimsily covered them.

        “Come at me,” she repeated.  Her tongue was like a dagger.

        That did it.  The fangs returned to the starlit air.  With torches flailing and claws glistening, the trolls marched, bounded, and throttled as one surging missile of muscle towards her petite form.

        Her frown was a titanium shield.  “Come at m—”  The first fist flew diagonally across her face.  The second pounded mercilessly into her shoulder.  The third yanked her black mane like it was a flag and flung her helpless snout into a blistered bone-hard knee.  Two clawed swipes ricocheted off her belly.  A pair of legs thundered into her lungs.  A torch slammed hotly into her face, followed by the full splintering length of an oaken club—and then three whole bodies of leather plowed straight into her, so that she bounded and tumbled and finally slammed weightedly into a collapsing crate of oats across the  yard.

        At the end of the pummeling, the gang of leathery creatures whooped and howled victoriously, kicking cold dirt in a circle upon her lifeless corpse.  Several monsters beat the quivering earth with their clubs—and their companions as well—as a drunken array of grins filled the festering aura between their clamoring torchlit bodies.  In a solid train of leather, they then lurched hungrily towards the hay-stack covered sight of the cellar door.

        It was with an icy grimness that all one hundred of them lurched to a halt, their scrappy ears pricked by a shuffling sound behind them.  The torchlight pivoted as their blinking faces did, gazing in stupid breathlessness as the earth suddenly stirred from underneath them.

        Scootaloo was hobbling back onto her limbs, gaining the feeling back into her extremities with each throbbing second.  She was dizzy, she was groaning, she was disheveled—she was alive, and there wasn't a single scrape or bruise on the entirety of her copper body.

        The last pony shuddered, her copper eyes returning to the flickering twitch of reality.  Just as she expected, not a single solitary blow from the trolls had broken her Entropan skin.  But what she did not expect—what she hadn't planned to happen, what she was suddenly and joyously reveling in—were the waves of pain surging through her projected soul self, regardless.

        The trolls didn't give her another solitary second to quietly contemplate this.  At the instant that she stood up on four hooves, they were on her again.  Sharp blades of splintery wood flew.  What should have hewn her shoulder in half merely sent her stumbling to her belly.  Three rows of trolls pounced on her back, digging their serrated fangs into her flank—only to feel their teeth jutting bloodily back into their quivering mouths.  A fountain of yelps, and two more rows of trolls rushed in to replace the first wave.  They kicked and stabbed and pelted the ragdolling pegasus with every poisoned inch of muscle granted them by a heartless warmonger forever lost to stone.  When the brutal melee pounded and lashed the last pony into its third maniacal minute, the tallest of the gang marched firmly into the violent circle, raised a torch up high into the farm's air, and shoved it deep into her twitching gut.  The blaze that ensued was blinding, and several stupid bystanders shrieked as their own limbs were caught ablaze by the ringleader's audacity.  They rolled and howled in the dirt while the rest of the creatures stood in a circle of filth, chanting mumbled curses into the blaze between them.

        Then something happened that could even make a demon gasp.  A shadow stood up from within the tongues of fire.  The trolls stumbled back—mesmerized—as the copper pegasus effortlessly stepped out of the dancing plasma.  She flickered cold wings, trailing briefly with green plumes.  Scootaloo breathed and breathed and breathed again.  A deep swallow, and she waited until the green haze flickered back to nothingness.  When she opened her eyes, she was still there, she was still suspended in the past, and she still hurt.

        She hurt.  After two days of hovering above the gorgeous garden of Equestrian yesteryear—juggling the shameful indulgences of a land far too fresh and green to ever belong to her—the last pony had unraveled the numb blanket of Entropan glory covering her body, and she opened herself once more to pain.  The clamoring army in front of her could just as well have been a sea of rusted weathervanes, an ocean of green cutting knives.  They bounced off her all the same—only now she could feel the ice cold kiss of deadly claws that were raking against her immutable flesh.  She allowed herself to feel it.  She needed to feel the pain, because it reminded her of all those gray years when only her fear saved her from death, but not from the wounds.  She remembered all of those weak moments of the bleeding and the sobbing when the best she ever could do was run from the things that hated her.  She recalled a stormfront—a billowing strobe of lights that danced beneath her hooves as she stood upon the ceiling of the world and screamed all of her hatred into that eternal twilight.

        For the first time since she arrived there, the last pony felt pain and she remembered... she remembered what it meant to feel angry.  And the smirk that it summoned back to her copper lips was something that could shatter diamonds.

        “Princess Entropa,” she murmured in the deadly silence of the exultation.  Her wings retracted—both physically and spiritually—so that she lowered her hooves righteously to that living, loving earth.  “Princess Entropa, bless you, I am finally strong enough.”

        The trolls doubled around her, tripled.  Their anger was endless, their stupidity and pride reinforced like iron spokes.

        In a timeless grin, the smoldering pegasus breathed all of them in before breathing out, “You want blood?”  Her face solidified in a divine snarl as she rocketed towards the leathery mass of them.  “I shall give you blood!”

        The trolls exploded.  They exploded, billowing outwards in a spray of flailing bodies as the pony flew mercilessly through them, raining the pristine farmland with a shower of screaming shadows.  In a single breath, they pounced on her once more, carving invisible lines into a body that refused them, but sang with their pain and their hatred all the same.  Scootaloo's screams were like Octavia's strings, echoing torturously with the thousands upon thousands of dead equine souls whom she had never had the grace to meet—until now.  She sang back into their leathery skulls with the iron-hoofed rage of thirty-three Goddess-forsaken years, and the eight lonely winters of foalhood before that had so painfully prepped her for this—for this dance, for this righteous earthquake against the mound of chaotic weaponry that the apathetic slings of fate had flung at the Apple Family, not knowing that it would instead be taunting her.

        All of that pain, she shoved back into the trolls' drooling maws, breaking jaws and shattering bone to make a new music that gave meaning to the hapless murmur of the quivering night.  Scootaloo had become a creature of destruction herself.  She was worse than the trolls, she was a troll.  She was the time-forgotten and cataclysmically crowned queen of trolls, a heretic from the future come down to earth to corral the sins of the past into the gray misery of tomorrow, where a new magic would be born unto horror and darkness.  There, beyond the ashen curtains of fate, she and she alone would wield control over the veil of twilight, and spring the warming curse of light back onto the damnable peons of chaos forevermore.

        Somewhere in the hellish melee, a line of leathery muscle flung her—barreling—through a splintery wall of the Apple family's barn.  She stumbled briefly in a fountain of red splinters, her body bobbing up and down through a baptismal pool of agony.  Her Entropan nerve endings sputtered green flame and retracted with a phantom laughter.  “Hah hah hah—You call that 'barn-storming'?”  She chuckled and she spit into the advancing waves of hatred.  “Give me a reason to be impressed.”

        Her wings flung her forward at the end of her words, soaring her across the acreage of her anchor to Honesty.  She didn't realize she had hit anything until a splash of living leather cascaded around her and the crumbling face of an abandoned brown silo that lurched overhead.  She screamed out loud—something that hung off of the collarbone of masochistic hilarity—and she wore their clamping jaws like earrings as she spiraled, flung her hooves across a sea of bleeding faces, and rammed her spotless copper snout into another throng of fools.  Immutable.

        “Nnnnghh—Hahahaha!  So... nnngh... so one day—” She uppercutted a wave of monsters and plowed through another floundering mass of screeching victims.  “—you got up off your mangy butts, grabbed a bunch of sticks and decided to become the legions of chaos!  Pffft!  Give me a break.  Hnnnkkt!”  She bucked two trolls into a crashing wagon behind her and laughed as the crumbling splinters snuffed out the last of the torch blazes, flinging the heated bloodbath into the cold shroud of night where only her eyes burned brightly.  Immutable.  “You couldn't even scare a foal into hiding,” she lied and divulged truth all the same.  She was everything and nothing but heartache.  The pony let them hear the agonized breath of it at the end of her cackling, “Discord was only kidding when he enlisted you.  How pathetic; to be the biggest joke in the history of the world.”  She laughed at them.  She laughed at them.

        The dark world melted twice over.  They came at her at full force.  They rebounded, redoubled—then rebounded and redoubled again at the crest of each of her blood-curdling taunts, curdling with their blood.  But they did not care, they did not think.  They piled on her and piled on her again and recircled and restrategized and re-charged every single time that she flung them back onto their sorry hindquarters.  So long as they bled—and she didn't—the trolls did not let up, though at any stuttering moment she could very well have righteously snuffed the entirety of them out.

        No, she would not kill them.  They did not deserve death.  That kind of peace would be reserved solely for ponies.  She knew this, and with every screaming blow, she preserved this.  She was the end of ponies; death stopped at her.  In a cyclone of screams and breaking bones, the only thing she gave them room for was hope, something that they had never been gracious enough to allow her, and whether they knew it or not... they would suffer for that transgression, a transgression of the future.

        Screaming like the Harmony's boiler into the madness of the night, Scootaloo would not grant them any penance.

        The Apple family shuddered and quaked under the endless tumult of the screaming world above—all but one of them.

        Granny Smith clung to a metal rack beneath a teetering lantern.  She gazed with quiet gray eyes into the roof of the cellar, her face calmly locked to the sightless soul fighting for the safety of all four ponies.  There was a righteousness to those banshee screams, something that glued together the cracks between her wrinkles, something that she had somehow been waiting for all of these last few lingering years of fitful decay.

        In a calm breath, the lime-coated elder gazed at the rest of her family.  Macintosh was pacing endlessly across the far end of the cellar, nearly tripping over a murmuring Winona as his crimson muscles twitched and bulged at the end of each punctuated thud from above.  With pent up masculine anger, he randomly kicked at a wall or a teetering barrel, shooting iron daggers at the terminally shut cellar door located at the stairs above them.  His teeth were grinding as his heart was palpitating through his fine coat, and neither of those anxious habits could bring this holocaustal situation to a righteous halt.

        Apple Bloom was a quivering mess.  In various fitful bits of shivers, she nearly trembled herself into exhausted unconsciousness.  Everytime, either the loud noises from the shaking earth above or the pounding heartbeat of her older sister would wake her once again to the naked misery of that endless wait.  She clung all the more to the orange limbs enshrouding her, her pained amber eyes locked onto the flakes of dust and ash falling forlornly from the shuddering ceiling of the cellar.

        And Applejack—she murmured and murmured endlessly.  Breathless prayers lit the cold lengths of the lantern-lit room.  From a billion miles away, her orange lips kissed the white headstones that had long reflected her blanching face, that had beckoned her on the flimsy tails of bitter memories to be strong, be strong, be strong.  Sitting there, her flesh and blood but a cramped horse-trot away, she could do nothing but wait... and be helpless.  She could have been stripped of all her skin and muscle, and still she wouldn't feel half as vulnerable as she did then—huddled around herself and Apple Bloom like twin fetuses awash in the womb of the earth, and she couldn't tell if that would come to her aid either.

        Then, several agonized minutes into the madness—or several breathless hours—the noise and bedlam finally, finally came to a stop.  The silence was like an avalanche; it numbed the claustrophobic subterranean room as much as it blessed it with tranquility.

        Apple Bloom was the first to stir, lifting her reddened face from a sister's damped forelimb to gaze bitterly at the cellar door.  Big Macintosh's pacing game to a scraping stop, his lips agape in mute wonderment.  Granny Smith said nothing; she was still waiting, though this time her gaze was on her older granddaughter and not on a certain visitor from Canterlot.

        Setting Apple Bloom down, Applejack breathlessly sauntered up to the base of the cellar steps. She spoke with all the words of the frightened family, in that she said absolutely nothing.  Strolling up the flight of stone hoof-holds, she squinted at the creases between the solid doorframe.  She could barely make it out, but there was a faint golden glow from beyond the wooden boards.  At first she thought it was torchlight, except that the glow suddenly quadrupled after a large object suddenly and noisily slid out of the way from weightedly blocking the fissures in the door.  Then, there was nothing, no movement, no noise, nothing but the glow.

        Applejack gulped.  She glanced back over her shoulder.  The farm filly looked at Apple Bloom's frightened face, at Macintosh's confused expression, then at Granny Smith's calm gray eyes.  There was a nodding of a wrinkled head, and that was just the excuse Applejack needed to do what was next.

        With a slight grunting breath, the orange mare effortlessly pushed the cellar doors open.  She was instantly blinded by a familiarly warming sight.  As her green eyes focused, she stepped out into a glistening sunlight.  Several things came into focus, several twisted, ugly, white things.  She gasped in a rediscovered horror to be standing in the center of a sea of stone bodies—murderous bug-eyed trolls frozen forever in a helpless flight from the Celestial orb rising over the far reaches of the eastern green orchards.  As the seconds peeled into a flustered minute, Applejack realized that the stones weren't moving, and so long as there was a Sun in the sky—they never would.

        She stepped out, blinking dazedly, her heart pulsing sharply with each dart of her eyes as Macintosh, Granny Smith, and a trembling Apple Bloom nervously rose to the earth's surface behind her.  Winona scampered out and trotted breathlessly across the violent swirls in the earth beneath the granite objects.  Every troll statue was covered in bruises, in cuts, in burns, even one or two of them with granite parts spilling out of their flesh.  But all of them had their eyes open.  All of them were in one piece.  All of them were alive up until the moment of fateful freezing.  But there was no sign of—

        “Miss Harmony?!?” Apple Bloom was the first to call out—a mewling sound.

        Applejack spun and hissed at her.  “Sugarcube!  Can it!  There could still be—”  She froze from witnessing a copper shadow seated in her peripheral.  With a gasp, she spun about and saw the messenger from Canterlot.  She ran up on numb legs, her hooves kicking up splinters of shattered weapons and burnt ashes.  “Miss Harmony... Miss Harmony, are you—... D-Did they...  Y-You...”  Her voice came to a stop as her legs did.  She stood suddenly upon the edge of disbelief.

        Scootaloo took a deep breath, squatting meditatively with a slight flicker of her black tail as she gazed deeply into the welcoming kiss of the Eastern sunrise.  “This is beautiful too.  I only forgotten because I chose to.  Pleasure is a lot like pain, really.  They're both words—but when you turn them into screams, they suddenly become powerful.”  A shudder, and something on the edges of her cheeks curved, like a copper smile.  “Oh dear Celestia—I wish I would never have to fly from this either.”

        “You... You...” Applejack half stumbled.  She reached a hoof out, but was too afraid to touch the pegasus' shoulder, as if the world might implode if she did.  “You t-took them all on?  And yet y-you didn't k-kill them?”

        “I thought of it.”  Something like a chuckle.  Scootaloo sighed, basking, basking.  “But then I realized that if I started weeding out their numbers, they would split up—and many of them would run back into the woods.”  A sharp exhale.  “Nnnngh—No.  I couldn't give them that satisfaction.  So, I ticked them off.  And like all trolls, they're either all in or all out.  I made sure it was the former, all the way to dawn.  Celestia's glorious light did all the real work.”  Another soft smile.  “Just like it was supposed to all along.”

        “You...” Applejack flung her hat off as her features started to melt with a sensation that had been lost to her since the day she last buried somepony she loved.  “Th-There's not even a sc-scratch on you.  Good heavens, H-Harmony, h-how could that b-be...?”

        “Persistence, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo finally turned around.  A placid expression, like white stone reflecting white stone.  “It's something that trolls are good at—so much so that they are blind to when a pony happens to use it against them.  And now look at them.”  She gazed boredly at the dozens upon dozens of stone shapes littering the otherwise immaculate farmland around her.  “They're as useful as they'll ever be.  It's a fitting end for creatures who have never given to the earth.”  A sparkling grin, soft on the edges.  “Don't you think?”

        “Oh darlin'...” Applejack finally collapsed.  She draped herself over Scootaloo's shoulders like a shroud and shook fresh tears into her, the mare's first tears in years of stubborn strength and fight, all dammed up for a moment of glorious relief, a moment like this... a warm moment.  “I thought I had lost y'all.  Oh thank Gultophine, I-I th-thought I h-h-had lost y'all...”

        Scootaloo calmly raised a hoof to the farm filly's face.  “Shhhh... Miss Applejack...” She smiled.  Two days of telling lies melted under the weight of this divinely honest exhale, weathering a pain for once that was not her own.  “A wise pony once told me that there was no use in crying.  There is still much work that needs to be done.  That's what I'm here for... and that's what you're here for.  Now that the night is over, what do you say...?”

        Applejack sniffled.  She looked bravely into the copper pegasus' face, and after several shuddering breaths she shouldered her emotions and bravely uttered:  “Y... Y-Y... Y-Yeeeeha...”  A crackling grimace of a grin, a lasting pair of tears, and she cuddled her face briefly against the curve of Scootaloo's hoof for the final few breaths of healing that she so desperately needed.

        Scootaloo took the fleeting moment to glance past Applejack's shoulder.  She spotted Apple Bloom giggling under tears of her own.  She saw a confused but elated Macintosh sporting a lopsided smirk.  She even spotted a barking Winona and her stupid grin.  And then she saw Granny Smith; and Granny Smith saw her.  The two mares—lives separated by eons—joined their curved lips into one nebulous smile, so that the merit of the moment shined on the elder pony just as it shined on the last pony in turn.

        “So then, you are a gift.”  The uttered breath was as quiet as a prayer.

        Scootaloo didn't even need to hear it from that distance.  On iron-wrought legs, she stood up and hoisted Applejack along with her into the orange-blossoming sunrise.  “It's a wonder to be alive.”

        “Here's... nnngh... the l-last one, Macky!”  Applejack hissed as she and the copper pegasus jointly hoisted a final stone troll into a giant wooden crate piled to the brim with the ghastly white figures.  “Don't leave a single crack in the lid!”

        “Eeeyup.”  The red stallion nodded.  He slid a wooden top over the grand box.  Drawing from a few nails stuck between his lips, the muscular colt proceeded to hammer shut the crown of the lid, shrouding the horrid contents inside into perpetual darkness.  As he did so, Apple Bloom and Granny Smith marched up—towing a thick black tarp in their mouths.  When the box was finally sealed, the two ponies hoisted the dark canvass over the container, blocking all possible light in identical fashion to four previous crates that lingered beside the red barn behind them.

        Applejack rubbed a mat of sweat from her brow and stood back from the assembly line of boxed trolls.  She fanned herself with her hat in the dim morning light and breathily managed, “What do ya reckon we do with 'em now?  The soonest some idiot even thinks of takin' em out of these here boxes is the soonest chance they get to be exposed to twilight again.  Nopony deserves the nightmare we've all just been through.”

        “There's only one thing to do,” Scootaloo said.  In a gentle sway, she strolled down the line of blanketed boxes, brushing them with a copper hoof.  “We politely gain the attention of Ponyville's police, we tell them exactly what we've got here, and we send these frozen trolls on their merry way to Canterlot.”

        Apple Bloom and Macintosh shared a violent gasp.  Granny Smith merely squinted thoughtfully.  Applejack—naturally—was a frazzled, spitting mess.

        “Are y'all out of yer mind?!?  Celestia will take one look at them things and she'll slam the 'Act of Accord' mumbo jumbo on top of us!”

        “Miss Applejack—”

        “We'll be ruined!  We'll have our land ripped out from under us!  We'll—”

        “AJ.”  Scootaloo smiled sweetly at the silenced farm filly.  “The 'Act of Accord' only holds merit over the harboring of living weapons of chaos.  As you well know, these things are hardly in any condition to do anypony harm.  They are just as helplessly lifeless as you first found them when you dug your well.  My superiors at the Royal Court of Canterlot will be overjoyed to learn that you discovered several specimens and stopped them from becoming a threat to future civilizations.”

        Applejack's face hung between a frown and a smirk.  “They only got all stiff and harmless because you gave 'em a lickin' they would never forget.”

        “Then, if it pleases you, tell the Canterlotlian guard all about that when they come to transport these to the Chaos Dungeons,” Scootaloo said.  In a warm and blossoming breath, the time traveler fought the joyful tears to say:  “And then, mayhaps, Princess Celestia would... w-would care to have audience with the one clerk responsible for giving such a 'lickin'.”  Her smile was porcelain in the suddenly silken simplicity of that moment.

        Applejack smiled knowingly back.  “Yes, Miss Harmony.  Yes, I reckon she would want that.”

        “When do we get the guards to come here and truck all these nasty critters away?” Apple Bloom suddenly spoke up.

        “When else?”  Scootaloo trotted over and ruffled the foal's fountain of red hair.  “The same time as when your clients come to cart away all your apples!”

        “All... our apples...?”  Applejack murmured, blinking, as if the weight of the day was joyously finding its way back into her eye sockets.

        Scootaloo spun and grinned at her.  “And we will have apples to deliver by that time... won't we?”

        Applejack blinked dazedly at her whole family, until one face—a gray face—was the first to nod encouragingly back.  Straightening the cowgirl hat on her blonde head, the filly smirked the pegasus' way.  “So, Harmony, expert on trolls,” Applejack smirked.  “Think you have enough of that there gumption in you to be an expert on apple buckin' once more?”

        Scootaloo grinned wide.  “So long as I have my galloping marker on the ground.”

        “Yer sure do!”  Applejack motioned authoritatively with her snout.  “Macky, grab a wagon!  Granny, Apple Bloom—get some baskets!  We're gonna need the whole family on this one!”

        The morning was electric.

        Under buzzing cicadas and melodic birdsong, five ponies threaded the apple orchards with agile precision akin to a steam engine.  Big Macintosh pulled a large wooden cart full of empty baskets.  On a pattering of hooves, Apple Bloom moved the light containers off the wagon and onto the grass where she and Granny Smith gently laid them underneath the branches of multiple fruit trees.  Then, once all of the baskets were lined up, Applejack spotted them and gave “Harmony” a whistle.  The copper pegasus extended her wings, galloped, and took to the air.  With a sharp inhale, she twisted sideways and bounced from tree trunk to tree trunk as Applejack ran beneath her, calling out whenever she missed a few apples in one or two of the targets.  Even when Scootaloo did have to make a return flight, the entire process was lightning quick.  Before the noonday Sun rose, a good half of the western orchards had already been shaken free of fruit.

        The whole procedure was a rapid exercise—but no single pony bore an unnatural brunt of legwork.  Applejack, of course, sweated a great deal from having to guide the pegasus in mid gallop, but she had plenty of time to rest in between apple bucking.  The process of loading and unloading baskets between rows of trees consumed enough moments for breathing, and when it was time for another row of fruit to be shaken, Applejack was clearly as energized and unstoppable as her helpful pegasus companion.

        Scootaloo reveled in the process.  The weight of two days' pretense and anguish flew off her like leathery bodies rolling against her wings.  With the rising of the sun came a rising of her spirit, as if for a brief and undeniable moment in time she belonged somewhere.  A foalish sensation fluttered in her heart, and she felt for a brief moment as if she had just launched the Harmony on its maiden voyage all over again.  With every blink and every gasp of her twisted flight against the rows upon rows of trees, it was easy to forget that there was a horrible future awaiting everything that was.  It was easy to forget that she was a citizen of twilight, and not of the glorious rays of the Sun glinting off her copper feathers.  It was easy to forget that though the immutable hooves of time consoled her, strengthened her, told her during the trollish melee that the Apple Family would not perish while all of their bodies were inside the cellar—including Macintosh's—they still would someday meet their end in that forsaken ditch all the same.  And yet, simultaneously, the last pony realized that as much as she could not salvage the future, she could very easily salvage this... and savor it.

        This day, this moment, this heated breath amongst ponies in the gentle green sway of leaves and grass; it wasn't just a memory that festered in an unsavory corner of Scootaloo's lonesome mind.  It wasn't some fabrication, a dream that the last pony had concocted for herself in an effort to lend credence to the lighting of a rainbow signal after every other stormfront.  This moment was dynamic; this moment was new.  This was a moment filled with sweat and hope and joy, and for once the pegasus could find an excuse to live in it—as the earth ponies did so naturally.  For the first and only episode in the history of time, the fossils of the past and a ghost of the future were sharing an event, and there was no need for shame, not even a whiff of it.  Between apple bucking, when her hooves touched the ground—she squirmed in the delightful thick of it.

        As the farming family got more and more acquainted with the unorthodox apple bucking process, they decided to try something more ambitious.  With Scootaloo's approval, they doubled the number of baskets and fashioned a runway of apple tree rows three times as long as what the pegasus had been ricocheting her hooves against previously.  Applejack took a deep breath and got an extra running start.  When Scootaloo took off this time, she mentally counted an entire three minutes before landing back on the ground—upon which her projected self teetered in monumental dizziness.  Applejack was quick to catch her, and in a shared glance both fillies giggled ridiculously.  Gazing back at Scootaloo's handiwork, she was mesmerized to find a previous half-an-hour's work done in a single stride.  After they gathered the apple baskets, they returned with an even greater vigor, and soon Scootaloo would be sky-bucking longer and longer distances, spilling the air with the cascade of glistening apples.

        The noonday Sun burned like a hot rock skipping across a green lake.  For a brief respite, Granny Smith wheeled out a cart covered in glasses filled with apple juice.  Applejack and Macintosh were relieved to have something to quench their thirsts.  Apple Bloom sipped happily in between childish ramblings about one crusade or another.  Scootaloo... was positively intoxicated with her first sampling of fruit drink in a quarter of a century.  It took several chuckling sets of hooves to wrench her away from the table so as to start the next row of apple bucking.

        The five ponies' harvest stampeded clockwise into the hilly northern section of the Acres.  Scootaloo bounced so hard against the wobbling apple trees that she almost feared hurdling herself into a tunnel of green flames without warning.  She kept her ears and eyes on Applejack.  The orange mare was her center, the fulcrum upon which her entire day hinged.  And every time she looked at her—even in a passing blurred glance from branch level—the orange pony was always smiling, always supportive, always faithful... and strong.

        Scootaloo started to understand why the Apple Family never crumbled immediately after the tragic loss of Apple Shine and Orange Blossom.  The freckle-faced farmfilly—the one outstanding middle child that could—was the very epitome of earth ponydom.  She lived in complete service to the world, and to those who lived on the face of Elektra's hoofcarving.  It no longer bothered Scootaloo that Applejack had been so viciously spiteful to her when she first landed upside down in one of the apple trees two days' prior.  A self-righteous pony could easily be forgiven, so long as her heart had been hardened by pure sincerity rather than bitter pride.

        When the hundreds of rows of orchards whittled down to dozens of rows of orchards, Applejack insisted that Scootaloo “take a breather”.  The three divided the work as they proceeded to buck the trees in a more conventional style.  As an afternoon Sun began its melting slide towards the western horizon, Granny Smith wheeled something else out.  But instead of glasses of apple juice, the lime-coated elder provided a record player.  With a liberal cranking, the sounds of Stallionivarius warbled through the air, lathering a cushion of melodic softness on an already cooling day.  Scootaloo beamed, feeling her projected self become more energized—if that was even possible.  Applejack for once found herself humming to her grandmother's “old-fashioned” tunes, using it as a cadence for every tree she shot her rear hooves into.  Macintosh shoved aside the large baskets being filled by the minute, smirking amusedly as a giggling Apple Bloom stood on his backside and attempted an awkward dance to the darting strings coming from the record.

        The Sun drifted further West, and the five roaming ponies dwindled to three.  The blue sky turned into a copper haze, matching the dirt-flecked coat of the pegasus as she soared her way down one last row of trees, kicking them methodically and watching as the last of several apples fell.  By then, even her projection's “invulnerable” lungs were panting.  The joys and jolts of the long hard working day had pulled at all the corners of her mind, so that everytime she closed her eyes she was seeing blurring orchards instead of blinding ash.  For what it was worth, she counted that as her greatest blessing yet, her greatest gift.

        She promised herself to thank the earth once the heavenly hours had run out.

        “Nnngh!”  Scootaloo breathlessly rammed her rear hooves up into the millionth green apple tree.  Several familiar thuds kissed the air as the baskets beneath her were filled.  She took a long, meditative breath, and backtrotted to take a look at her work.  Her flank bumped into a large wooden object.  Without thinking, the pegasus instinctually spun and kicked the “bark” behind her.  A dull, hollow noise rang into the air, and Scootaloo blinked to see the crumpled side of an abandoned silo wobbling torturously behind her, its structure already dented by several trollish shapes that had been flung into it the morning prior.

        “Watch it, copper-bottom!”  Applejack chirped as she and Macintosh were suddenly trotting up over a hill in the crimson sunset.  Sauntering down to the barnside, they balanced a large basket full of bright apples between them.  “No sense in yer kickin' an old building that's done nothing to you!”

        Scootaloo exhausted cock-eyed glances between Applejack and the ten meter tall silo.  “Does this dang thing even serve a purpose?”

        “Aside from bein' the oldest structure still standin' on the far?”  Applejack shrugged, then motioned towards the precariously leaning silo.  “I reckon most outsiders think it should have been razed long ago.  And they might be a touch right about that—But that silo's been around for a lot longer than the whole lot of us combined.  Livin' on a farm has its fair share of sentiment; it gallops hoof-in-hoof with tradition.  But, ever since yer righteous troll thrashin' gave it a new cutie mark—eheheh—I reckon we just might put the thing out of its misery, but not today.”

        “Do all earth ponies hold value in old things?”  Scootaloo smirked.

        “So long as they have character, darn tootin'!”  Applejack winked.  She nudged her brother, and the two of them coordinatedly lowered the large basket of red fruit.  “Say, Harmony, why don't ya have a look-see beyond that hill over yonder?”

        “What?  Do we finally get to buck the last of the orchards?”

        “Did I or did I not tell yer to take a gander?”

        Scootaloo gulped.  She pattered lightly up the hill and glanced over the huge expanse of Sweet Apple Acres stretching beyond the crest of the northernmost rise.  Her amber eyes twitched to see an entire field full of green leaves, brown bark... and not a single red flash of fruity skin to be had.  A hot breath filled her lungs, and she exhaled all her doubt into the scarlet bands of the bowing Sun.

        “Well, I guess that means I can stop being a living pinball.”

        “It means you can stop, period!  We all can stop!”  Applejack leaned against the basket of apples, smirking.  “We did it, Harmony.  Another crazy year, another crazy harvest, and another crazy last-second miracle.  I swear by all that is holy, I am not going to let next year's Apple Buck Season go to the dogs again!”

        “Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo looked at her, smiling.  But after a few blinks, something cold and deathly pulled the edges of her lips down.  “I-I'm sure you won't have to... to w-worry about Apple Buck Season next year...”

        “No reason to be lookin' all glum, girl!”  Applejack smirked.  “If you wanna show up for the next harvest—I seriously doubt that any of us would turn down yer assistance.”  She cleared her throat.  “And that is by no means a proposal, ya hear?”

        “R-Right...” Scootaloo gulped.  Chasing away the melancholy breath, she glanced at the baskets.  Her eyes narrowed.  “Say—What's going on with the fruit you've got there?”

        Applejack and Macintosh exchanged amused glances.  “Oh, this?  We done finished the harvest in time for the delivery, didn't we?  We here Apple Family ponies have a tradition which we save the last basket of bucked apples for.”

        “And that is—?”  Scootaloo shrieked girlishly as two hoof-fulls of fruit were suddenly bulleted her way like a swarm of sweet tasting comets.

        “Apple fight!”  Applejack laughed and giggled mischievously as she and her brother flung a cornucopia of apples, filling the air with a red blur that surged in Scootaloo's direction.  The pegasus gasped, shielded herself with copper wings while chuckling profusely.  With a daring glint in her eyes, the pony survivor pivoted her body and reverse kicked a few of the collapsed apples back, forcing Macintosh and the orange mare to duck low and hide behind the basket from the expertly aimed bucks.  After two long minutes of flung apples, the air sang with a fruity sweetness, corralled by the panting breaths of laughing ponies.

        “Pfftt!”  Scootaloo raspberried through a face splashed with applebits.  “So much for the 'test of preservation'!”

        “Oh, that hogwash?”  Applejack wiped a few laughing tears from her face and finally rose up from hiding behind the basket.  “Darlin', I only conjured that so-called preservation rule just to see if I could rid my farm of one persistent bureaucrat—”  An apple slammed the orange mare directly in the face, splattering fruit mash and seedlings all across her snout.

        “HAH!”  Scootaloo shouted at the end of her throw.  “Who's 'chicken' now, sassafras?!?”

        Macintosh laughed heartily at his messied sister and trotted away to catch his breath.  Shaking her face to fling off the top layer of apple bits, the farmfilly smirked sloppily at the pegasus and sighed in gentle defeat.

        “Yes, yes.  I reckon you got me.  Ya happy now?”

        “Heeheehee—Oh, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo wandered over and extended a wing of bristled feathers.  “Here, allow me.”  She gently scraped the mush clean from the orange mare's freckled face.

        “I done told you—Call me 'AJ',” the hatted pony replied, gazing at her companion with sudden clarity.  “Yer a blessin' from heaven above, y'know that, right?”

        “Hmmmmm,” Scootaloo smirked lightly as she then brushed her wing clean on the grass.  “Depends on how you define 'heaven'.  I'm just doing my job—for the Court n'all.”

        “Now who's shovelin' around hogwash??”

        Scootaloo blinked awkwardly at Applejack.  “H-Huh?”

        The farm pony was staring at the pegasus with gentle yet firm eyes, eyes that dragged Scootaloo's soul in like a haunting black hollow from a gray future.  “There's no more need in pretendin', sugarcube.  I know why yer really here.  I know why y'all have been stickin' to my stubborn hide like a frog to a lily pad.”

        “Uhm...” Scootaloo bit her lip nervously, feeling a rise in trembles.  “Y-You do?”

        “Mmmhmmm,” Applejack gently nodded.  Her gaze was piercing, but a loving glint cascaded across her emerald pupils.  “This was never about doin' some investigation for the Princess, was it?  Nopony ever does as much as you have—with such inspirin' selflessness—out of duty.  No Royal messenger in her right mind would buck apples, tackle trolls, and forego implementin' some infernally old 'Act of Accord' just for our humble selves.  Yer kind of generosity can only come from the heart, especially when there's so much more important things yer kind can be doin', I reckon.”

        Scootaloo gulped and glanced towards the floor.  “You're r-right about one thing, AJ.  There... is so much more stuff I can be doing.  There's always a bigger picture—and it's not necessarily a bright one.  But when I-I came here, and I saw you and your brother about to crumble to bits over your stressed selves, and I envisioned this beautiful farm stumbling into one gigantic hole or another—be it with trolls or with a missed harvest date—I just couldn't let all of that awful stuff happen.  Even if I flew off somewhere far far away where there's nothing colorful or lively to match the warmth of this place, I know that I could never rip the gorgeous green land you've got here from my eyelids.  I was compelled, AJ.  But I don't think that's something that comes from the heart.”

        “Sure it is, Sugarcube.”  Applejack trotted over and nudged her face to look into hers.  She smiled sweetly.  “You're obviously a very brave pegasus.  I know it may not be my place, but I reckon you have seen none too many pretty things in yer life.  A lot of ponies pass by Sweet Apple Acres, and I'm quick to take a decent survey of them.  Some of them ponies—their coats are laced with happy memories, others with a lifetime of trials, and even others with a dark shade of ignorance.  You, darlin'?  I see a lot of sadness cloudin' you.  Ain't nothin' to be ashamed of.  We all take to our own kinds of moods—like blankets that you switch with the season.  I only hope that you take a deep look at the world around you and realize that maybe it's high time yer season changed as well, into somethin' brighter mayhaps?  Because yer heart is most certainly one of the brightest I've seen in years.”

        “That's just it, AJ,” Scootaloo murmured, gulping a lump down her throat and gazing past her.  “Where I come from... the season never changes.  It's a lot easier to say that there are no seasons at all.  There's only... me.”

        “You say that as if it's an empty prison, Harmony.  I only wish you would take a gander at yerself and realize that you have so much to be proud for... and happy, even.”  Applejack grinned.  “Yer bright, yer resourceful, you don't take horse hockey from no-pony—especially me—and you can buck trees like there's no tomorrow.”  A chuckling breath, then a wink.  “Why, if I had all of yer qualities—even if the only season I had to look forward to was colored with the shades of myself—well, I reckon I'd feel right at home.”

        Scootaloo sharply inhaled.  As her eyes cascaded over the horizon, she cursed herself a thousand times over.  She cursed herself because she had every impulse right then and there to tell Applejack the truth: that Equestria was ending and there was nothing anypony could do about it.  She cursed herself because with one simple breath she could very easily explain that the only season left to the world would be one covered in endless ash and twilight.  She cursed herself... because suddenly all of those horrible things didn't scale in importance to what she was about to say.  She cursed Spike too, fought the tears, and smiled Applejack's way, saying, “Thank you, Applejack, from the bottom of my heart; for it's taken you to show me that it's still there.”

        “My pleasure, sugarcube,” Applejack nodded with a smile.  She then read further into Scootaloo's moist eyes and added, “And I promise—on my family's honor—that I'll do what I can to get Princess Celestia's attention for you with all that's happened here.  If the heap of frozen trolls don't do it, then perhaps Twilight Sparkle can make herself useful for more than just makin' sweet love to books.”

        “Oh, Applejack, that is most appreciated—”  Scootaloo began, but her ears pricked at the sound of a happily giggling voice cresting up the southside of the hill.

        “AJ!  Miss Harmony!”  Apple Bloom pattered up into view, her crimson sprout of hair matching the burning horizon as she trucked a saddlebag full of records and beamed.  “Look at what Granny Smith found in the attic!  It's a bunch of songs that Lady Rarity lent us months ago!  Somethin' about a cello player that Miss Harmony fancies!”

        “Octavia?”  Scootaloo grinned wide.  “This day just keeps getting better and better already!”

        “Apple Bloom, darlin', watch where yer trottin'—”  Applejack called out.

        “Watch where I what-now?”  Apple Bloom balked too late, for her hoof had caught in hole in the earth.  The little foal fell sideways, colliding noisily into the broad face of the dented wooden silo.  As she then collapsed flat on her chest with a grunt, the tiny vibrations from her collapse was just enough to add insult to Harmony's injuries from the night previous.  With a groan of somber fate, the entirety of the rustic silo wobbled, teetered, and fell directly over Apple Bloom.  “Aaahh—!”

        “Apple Bloom!”  Applejack shouted, her eyes wide as emerald saucers.

        Something scarlet billowed underneath Scootaloo's projected amber eyes.  Not even the coldest winds of the dying world could snuff out her snarling voice.  “NO.”  In a copper blur, she soared on bright wings and rocketed towards the falling building.  Blades of grass and flakes of apple skin lifted into the air as she converged on the hapless foal.

        A thunderous crash vapored outward from the scene.  Applejack flinched against the blast wave, blinking in horror to discern the outcome of the debacle.  As the dust and earthen bits settled, an equine form was lying on its side next to the collapsed silo.  After half-a-second of stirring... Apple Bloom rose up to her tiny legs, reeling dizzily.  “Nnnngh...  Wh-What happened?”

        In a galloping roar, the older sister skidded over to the tiny filly's side.  “Darlin'!  Are you okay?  Oh thank goodness!  Let me hold you!”  Applejack squatted down and nuzzled the foal dear to her.  “Apple Bloom, sugarcube—Watch where yer canterin' next time!  I almost lost you, girl!”

        “My saddlebag!”  Apple Bloom dazedly glanced at the fallen baggage that was still rattling to an ill-fated stop.  “All of Lady Rarity's records are probably shattered now!  I don't get it!  What happened?  Where's—”  The foal glanced aside, and her amber eyes exploded.  “—Miss Harmony!”

        Applejack blurredly looked down.  She gasped.  The heavy weight of the fallen building had formed a veritable crater in the soft earth.  Where a brave pegasus had flown herself to shove Apple Bloom heroically out of the way... there was now only gnarled splinters and rusted metal.

        “Oh Dear Celestia alive!”  Applejack cried and shoved, shoved, shoved at the hulking body of the collapsed silo.  As her every muscle strained and heaved, the wooden monstrosity refused to budge.  “No no no no!”  She tilted her snout towards the rows of orchards and shouted:  “Macky!  Macky, for the love of Elektra, get yer flank over here and help me!”

        The red stallion was already galloping towards them, spurred on by the desperate shouts of his distressed sister.  With wide eyes, he regarded the visiting pegasus' horrific fate.

        “We can't waste any time!  We gotta get this mess off of her!  Grab some rope!  Hurry!”

        Apple Bloom was a sobbing mess, the reality of the situation cascading from her eyes in silver tears.  “Oh sis—I'm so sorry!  I'm so, so very sorry!  This is all my fault—”

        “None of that, y'hear?!?”  Applejack snarled, forcefully shoving against the wooden rubble from all angles while Macintosh galloped towards the barn.  Winona's distant barks formed a maddening chorus to the bleeding moment.  “You did nothin' wrong, Apple Bloom!  But t'ain't the issue right now!  Run yer hooves into town and fetch Nurse Red Heart!  Tell her it's an emergency, and while yer at it we could use all the extra ponies we can get!”

        “R-Right away, sis!”  Apple Bloom scampered off on pale yellow hooves, panting breathlessly.

        “Oh dear Epona, give me strength!”  Applejack hissed as she put her entire back into pushing the length of the hulking silo.  It barely budged.  There was nothing but dead silence from beneath its gigantic weight.  She bit her lips in the strain until blood flowed.

        Then Macintosh returned.  With mute coordination, the two siblings fixed the rope around the largest chunk of debris sticking out the top of the collapsed pile and harnessed it to the wooden yoke on Macintosh's back.  With a combined effort, they pulled and tugged and hoisted with all of their combined might.  Finally, under the bleeding red kiss of the sunset, they cracked open the hollow ribcage of the smashed structure, tossing it aside so that it joined Octavia's records with a somber series of muffled thuds.  Macintosh tossed his yoke off and galloped up onto the edge of the silo, peering directly into the cylindrical mess.  Applejack likewise hopped breathlessly beside him.

        Both ponies gasped—frozen in mid lurch.

        There was nopony in the hollow of the collapsed silo, not even the outline of one.  The smashed ground beneath the building was completely and utterly blank.

        “Wh-What in tarnation...?”  Applejack quietly murmured.  She gulped into this sudden abyss of confusion.  “M-Miss Harmony...?  Macky, wh-where did she go...?”

        From behind the barn, Granny Smith—roused by the sudden noise and excitement of that blistering situation—hobbled over on lime-coated limbs.  She blinked dazedly at the collapsed silo, at the utter void left in the wake of their copper-coated visitor.  As the evening gave in to tears of confusion, Ms. Smith stood quietly on the sidelines, at peace with the lonely hum of the moment.  The many warm shades of a lifetime full of gifts and losses flickered across her gray eyes, but for some reason she no longer dwelled on the darker colors.  The sun bled earthward in a copper aura, like a spirit that could bend knives backwards and chase trolls into the future.

        She smiled.

        A mane of short violet stubble fluttered in purple manalight.  Muscles stirred liquidly under a brown coat as a pair of scarlet eyes fluttered moistly open.  Her snout resting on the stone floor, Scootaloo gazed shakily upwards, blinking.

        Spike was lying on his mountain of gemstones, gazing calmly down at her.  A fuming breath, and his emerald eyeslits twinkled at the sight of pegasus.  “Welcome back to the future, child.  The green flame has ended.”

        The last pony gulped, shuddered:  “It's so cold...”

        “I know, old friend,” he reached a scaled hand out and stroked the back of her shaved mane.  “I know.”

        Her limbs achingly shuffled against the stone floor of the cavernous laboratory.  She wobbled and struggled to sit up, her face wretching at the gray staleness around her.  “I was th-there for over two days.  We bucked apples.  I ate daffodil alfredo.  There were trolls.”

        Spike raised an eyecrest curiously.  “Trolls?”

        “G-Granny Smith—She loves Stallionivarius.  She tells a beautiful bedtime story.  And Apple Bloom—”  Scootaloo's scarlet eyes widened.  With a gasp, she jumped up onto all fours and nearly collapsed into a table.  “Apple Bloom!  She's... She's...”

        “Calm down, Scootaloo—You've just been through your first lengthy trip.  Take a deep breath.”

        Scootaloo conceded, but not on Spike's behalf.  She gazed shakily into the bright green effigy of the past that was dissipating before her once-violet eyes.  Her brown ears flickered and she said in a stronger tone, “She's alive.  I-I saved her.  Apple Bloom's alive.  And then the silo... This large silo fell on me, Spike.  But... I-I don't get it.”  She looked at her ordinary brown self with her ordinary hooves and the worn metal shoes nailed into them.  “I could do so many amazing things in my Entropan body, could take so much punishment.  I could kick trees off their roots.  I could fly loops around the orchards without breaking a sweat!  I swam through trolls like a fish skims a lake's surface.”  She spun and gazed confusedly up at Spike.  “I-I thought I was invulnerable!  Why am I here?!?”

        “Nopony is invulnerable, Scootaloo.  Especially one who is so bravely projected into the past by the mere sails of her soul essence.  With enough calamity and duress, your Entropan body will surely buckle—and the result is identical to leaving the range of your anchorage.  You're inevitably drawn back to the present.”

        “Then that's what happened...” Scootaloo gulped.  “The silo slammed into me, crushing me with no outlet of escape, and I was sent back here.”  She gritted her teeth, hissed, and jolted.  “Spike!  You gotta send me back!  I-I had about two or three days left to that green flame, didn't I?  There's still so much to do!  I only barely scratched the surface of accomplishing our task!  Applejack was only starting to suggest we get Twilight to contact Princess Celestia for me and—... Spike?”

        The dragon was slowly shaking his head.  “No, Scootaloo.  I cannot send you back.  Not right now.  Not after I've concentrated so much of the green flame on Applejack—”

        “—you've lost your magical cohesion, and you must bind me to another pony instead,” Scootaloo finished somberly for him.  She gazed forlornly into the floor and sighed.  “Will I ever be able to go back to Applejack again?”

        “On another occasion?”  Spike nodded his scaled head.  “Absolutely—if it permits.”

        “You mean if there's hope for me coming closer to finding an answer to the Cataclysm, which there isn't,” Scootaloo trotted lonesomely towards the rows upon rows of clockfaces.  “Not with Applejack, there isn't.”

        “You are certain of that?”

        “I did nothing, Spike!”  The last pony spun and frowned bitterly.  “I didn't see a single eclipse, didn't smell one burning cinder, didn't feel any tremors—I found nothing to point me in any direction that might paint a picture of what killed Celestia and Luna and all of the ponies in turn!  Two days of bucking apples, mooching off the Apple Family's bathtub and kitchen and I didn't learn diddly squat!  Don't you see?  I've wasted your green flame!  And for what?!  Nnngh... I swear... You should have just left me to the danged trolls in Ponyville's town square.”

        “I see,” Spike nodded regally.  A slight cough, and the violet pendant around his neck spun as the dragon slowly marched on iron haunches around the pony.  “So, you mean to suggest that in all of that time spent in the past on Applejack's humble farm, you accomplished nothing whatsoever?”

        “Well, I—!”  Scootaloo started, blinked, and then sank down onto folded hooves.  Her nostrils flared one last time as she gave up the fight, then softly murmured, “I saved them from suffering a tragic Apple Buck Season.  I discovered a way to help them get rid of ancient trolls that had been resurrected on their land.  I got Granny Smith to share her music, so that she began happily trotting around without her walker in a renewed spirit.  I... saved Apple Bloom from being crushed to an adorable pulp.  I got licked by a dog.  Heh—I think I even got Big Macintosh to laugh a few times.”  The brown pegasus blushed slightly at the last recollection.

        “That certainly doesn't seem like nothing.”  His iron jaws curved.

        “Spike, in less than three months from then, the whole Apple Family will be dead,” she suddenly spat.

        “And those are three months that, thanks to you, they shall now experience alive—and if I may dare say so, they shall do it happily.”  Spike stood up on his lower legs and gestured his sharp arms wide.  “Death surrounds us for endless fathoms, Scootaloo.  That can never be changed about the Wasteland, even if you and I succeed in bringing the Sun and Moon back.”  He pointed with a clawed finger.  “But in a time of life—in an era of peace that only you, the last pony, can visit—you have gone out of your element and maintained equilibrium.  I remember seeing Applejack in the last days of Equestria.  I remember how stressed she was, keeping to herself during an Apple Buck Season during which her friends rarely saw her.  But then I also remember—in the blink of a single weekend—her returning to Ponyville with a smile.  And now, thanks to you, Scootaloo, I know why that is the case.  I can't tell you how immensely happy it makes me to know that she and her family were capable of smiling—Up until the end of all smiles.”

        “She...” Scootaloo stammered, her eyes growing concave.  “A-After I was done helping her with the apple bucking, Applejack told me she knew I wasn't working for the Royal Court of Canterlot.  She told me I did everything from the heart.”

        Spike reached down and gently tilted the pegasus' chin up.  “When you're projected into the past, Scootaloo, you are merely an extension of your soul self.  All things considered, you are all heart.”

        Scootaloo bit her lip.  She choked to say:  “That's hardly s-something invulnerable, Sp-Spike.”

        “But it's something special,” he smiled back down at her.  “And I'm glad Applejack was capable of showing you that.”

        “B-But I'm not going back into the past for myself,” Scootaloo murmured, then planted her hooves emphatically around Spike's clawed hand.  “Am I, Spike?”

        He stood back up, nostrils fuming in emerald thought.  “You may have given Applejack and her family smiles, Scootaloo.  But we have the one thing in our quest for the Cataclysmic truth that none of our pony friends will ever receive more of—and that's time.  I suspect that soon, in your journeys, you will find the answers we both seek.  That is...if you are willing to continue your journeys?”

        Scootaloo exhaled long and hard, gazing at the far end of the laboratory.  “Your green flame isn't the only thing that needs to maintain cohesion, Spike.”

        “Perfectly understood.  I will only send you when you're ready, child,” he smiled with an emerald wink.

        Scootaloo barely registered it.  She was sauntering over towards a lab table, atop which a very familiar skull rested.  The scarlet in her eyes grayed a little as she navigated the hollow in the bony center—no longer afraid of the vacuum within.  “Spike, tell me something.”

        “Anything, old friend,” he stood behind her.

        She raised a hand towards the dusty skull, eyeing several scars where the three hundred year old dragon had flaked off necessary samples.  “Have you collected enough of Applejack's ashes for any future occasions of binding me to her?”

        “Absolutely.  More than enough, as a matter of fact.  We no longer have any use for her brittle remains—I suspect.  Why, Scootaloo?  What are you thinking of?”

        “A gift, Spike,” she smiled gently, brushing her hoof across where Applejack's soft freckles would have been.  “I'm thinking of a g-gift.”

        Below the shadow of the moored Harmony, a barren plot of Sweet Apple Acres miraculously remained unswallowed by the Cataclysmic sinkhole that lingered just beyond the ash-laden trees.  A bent rusted arch flanked a plateau of gray soil that was bespeckled with white stones, stained by acid rain and soot over the past twenty-five years.  Towards the front of this arrangement of rocks, just beyond a glistening pair that marked the previous generation, the last pony finished piling the last bit of dirt atop four fresh graves, atop of which she had erected brilliant obelisks of moonrock—the type of stone that could never stain.

        With a sagging breath, Scootaloo stabbed a self-crafted spade into the ground and slumped down to her curled legs; she was a sweaty and dirty mess, and she reveled in the pain of it.  She hoisted a hoof up and peeled a pair of amber goggles off her forehead, so that she stared naked down at the four mounds of earth covering the skeletal remains she had gracefully carried—one after another from the ruins of the storm cellar—into their respected resting places.

        A few flakes of ash fell to her fluttering ears.  She ignored them, engrossing herself in the reflective sheen of her scarlet eyes against the four moonrocks—like four equine spirits staring up at her from the earth.  A gentle smile, and then she shut her eyes and lowered her snout until she was a few centimeters away from kissing the ground.

        She spoke into the shattered bosom of the world, “I know it has been forever since anypony returned to you.  But, I suppose it's better late than never—because I've never met anyponies that deserved to be put to rest anymore then these four right here.  And though I don't expect you to give me anything, I hope that you give them peace.  For they have given so generously and lovingly to you, up until the end of time—All of them.”  She shuddered as she tilted her face up and gazed at the stones upon stones upon stones.  And though she almost forced herself to, she couldn't cry.  She was too intensely serene, too strong.  “And it is a good thing, a beautiful thing—this land.  Because now it is anything but empty.  A home forevermore.  Perfect h-harmony.”

        Scootaloo's brown face forged a painful smile, reminding herself—like a ghostly pair of green eyes once did—that she had a heart to produce it with.  Shutting her lids, she raised her hoof to her lips, kissed it, and pressed it to Applejack's moonrock tombstone before getting up, flexing her wings, and returning to her airship.

        Hours later, in the growling mists of the snowy Wasteland skies, Scootaloo sat calmly at her workbench along the Harmony's port side.  A flickering lantern illuminated a disc spinning on the record player, but it was not Octavia's name that spun around the spindle, but rather a lone disc that Scootaloo was able to scrounge from the den room of the Apple Family's dilapidated farmhouse.  And like so many other miracles that graced the pegasus' soul in so many projected days, Stallionivarius still played perfectly.

        Several metal instruments graced the cramped cabin's air, instruments which Scootaloo hadn't used since she was a little foal.  Before getting to work on her latest tinkering, she squinted through goggled eyes at the waves of ash billowing outside the cockpit windows.  The last pony was a shivering waif of a body, with a shaved mane and gangly brown limbs that resembled a pathetic insect rattling inside a rusted iron jar.  But as cramped and claustrophobic as the womb of the Harmony always was—it suddenly seemed different to her, a little less cold, and a little less... empty.

        “Maybe I can't fix all of dead Equestria overnight,” she murmured to an orange farmfilly who wasn't there, and yet was.  She breathed gently to herself amidst the rocking of the cabin.  “But small things... I've always been able to tinker small things.  One thing at a time, I guess.”

        That said, she delightfully returned her attention to a tiny banged-up scooter resting on the workbench before her.  She replaced parts, polished parts, and restored parts—anything and everything that was directly in front of her, all the while relishing in the warm moment.

        She maybe even smiled.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Eleven – Everclear

Special Thanks to Chobit-389 for Cover Art

        Scootaloo grew deaf from the sounds of her endless panting.  The nine-year-old foal floundered across the hollow of a fresh cave formed in the torn womb of Equestria.  Piles of freshly scavenged junk were thrown into a panicked, rattling corner.  There was no order about it, no semblance of a proper pattern—merely speed and desperation as the girl raced against time, practically tripping on her hooves with the last-second scramble.  Under flickering torchlight, Scootaloo dragged in the last of the myriad of things that she had scavenged from the crashed royal zeppelin upon the outskirts of fallen Cloudsdale.

        From beyond the open grave of the rock cleft, the gray world billowed and roared.  There was a rumbling thunder—building—like white noise riding upon the mangy necks of unseen nightmares, marching and marching and marching closer towards where the tiny filly was presently struggling to seal herself from the ravenous Wasteland outside.  With a grunting breath, she pulled at one of half-a-dozen black barricades, the shells of the charred and singed arcane vaults.  A final scraping noise, and she successfully dragged closed the solid wall of obsidian metal, beyond which a canvass tarp covered in white snow and soot hopefully... hopefully camouflaged the entrance to her pathetic little hovel.

        Hyperventilating, the last little pony scooted wiltingly towards the rear of the cave and away from the rising waves of noise.  She shivered; she sputtered.  Her bright orange coat was bruised and splotched over with dust and dried blood.  Her bright pink locks hung in frayed tatters over pulsing violet eyes as she remained locked in a death-gaze upon the rattling rows of arcane vaults acting as her only barrier to the abominations beyond.

        Their clawsteps grew louder and louder; the air melted with their rancid breaths.  Every now and then, the perpetual roar of chaos was permeated by a random shriek, whoop, or holler from their bloodthirsty maws.

        In a muted yelp, Scootaloo scrambled to clasp onto her torch.  She stuck its burning end into a puddle of melted snow, plunging the frigid cave into dead darkness.  The pegasus did it to hide herself; she wasn't prepared for the horrific sensations to follow.  With all light extinguished from within, a dim gray haze filtered in from outside, and dozens upon dozens of very real shadows swam across her, paralyzing her.  They were the shadows of dreadful things, horrible things, leather skinned and pale-eyed ravenous things that passed like thunderclouds before the bands of twilight that twinkled in through the cracks of the arcane vaults.  These creatures blanketed the Wasteland, and the last pony was all alone... all alone in the sea of their hunger.

        Scootaloo whimpered.  Curling into a fetal position, she breathed past the scent of her own fluids and shuddered to find a golden voice—a voice she once knew—a gentle and loving voice that caressed her like silk, long ago, when nightmares were things that could be hugged away, as she struggled right then and there to embrace the gentle warm breath that used to lull her.  She couldn't find that golden voice, but she found somepony else's, and hers was close enough, soft enough, loving enough.

        The stammering breath that tried to emulate it squeaked like a dying songbird from deep within Scootaloo, choking on sobs and fears as she shivered into the core of her own self.

        “Hush now, quiet n-now, it's time to lay your sl-sleepy head.  H-Hush now, quiet now, it's time to go to bed...”

        Scootaloo's voice rang dully off the cold cavern walls.  It struggled to drown out the rising cacophony of the Wasteland horrors shuffling closer from all around the sparsely hidden burrow.  It failed, but she whimpered and half-sang anyways.

        “Drift, drift off to sleep.  Leave the exciting day b-behind you.  Drift, drift off t-to sleep. Let the golden dreams find y-you...”

        “You've grown, Scootaloo.”

        The last pony blinked from where she sat on an emerald patch of garden grass.  Garbed in a saddlebag with a pair of goggles dangling from her neck, the last pony broke free from the cloud of yesterday's shivers.  Her scarlet eyes refocused on a tall purple shape looming above her.  “I beg your pardon, Spike?”

        “Your mane, child,” the dragon throated with an iron smirk.  Fuming, he stretched his limbs high and brightened the manatorches around Princess Celestia's shimmering looking-glass before falling back on all fours and marching towards a nearby pair of fruit trees.  “You've grown it out some, if I'm not mistaken.”

        “Oh... Oh that.”  The pegasus blushed slightly as she raised a foreleg and felt with slight awkwardness a thin rug of bristly pink threads fanning out from the seam of her upper spine.  “I guess I have, haven't I?  Not out of habit, mind you.”  She cleared her throat and gazed across the former Ponyville Skating Rink with a melancholic exhale, her eyes once more returning to distant thoughts.  “I suppose you could say that I have been... well... I have been distracted lately, Spike.”

        “Understatements suit you like a Galloping Gala dress, old friend,” the elderly dragon murmured as the violet pendant dangled shimmeringly beneath his nodding snout.  He reached into a nearby wooden crate and produced a pair of metal sheers large enough to fit his claws.  He began pruning at the leaves of an orange tree while murmuring, “You know, I could be of assistance in that area, if you so desire.  The same talent I have for manipulating reverse-time affords me the ability to cast a chronotonic acceleration spell that could multiply the speed of your hair-growth by tenfold.  You'd turn into a diva overnight, if you so wished.”

        “There are many things I plan to be before the end of time, Spike.”  Scootaloo exhaled with a caustic smile.  “Dying, dead, and dust.  But I most certainly will never become a diva.”

        “Don't say I never tried to broaden your horizons.”

        “Out of curiosity, Spike, is that chronotonic acceleration spell the same thing you used on me when we first reunited?”

        “I assume you're referring to the speed with which I sealed the wound that the trolls had dealt you?”

        “Yeah, y'know, that little gem of a trick.”

        “Affirmative.”  Spike clipped a few more offensive leaves off and twisted a branch to get a good look at a luscious orange or two.  The hanging garden glistened around the dragon in Celestia's siphoned glow.  “All it did was essentially trick your body into thinking that time was passing faster than normal.  Your natural healing processes performed in seconds what it would normally accomplish in weeks.”

        “That's... uh... That's pretty amazing, Spike.”  Scootaloo gently smiled.

        “Only when it's used in moderation, child.”

        “How do you mean?”

        “I mean that if you use the spell too much, you'll age the body past its own self-recognition, reducing yourself to a veritable invalid,” he said, pausing briefly to cough with a spreading of green fumes.  He waved the smoke away with a scaled hand and glanced over his purple shoulder towards her.  “That's an amusing thing about the legacy of magic, you see.  Every healing spell comes at a price.  It is entirely possible to mend a living creature so much that it dies.  It's almost like overfeeding, I suppose.  The rocks and shoals of Equestria may shimmer with ash for a million years, yet still any philosopher could make sensible analogies using goldfish.”

        “You've been reading old scrolls for far too long, Spike,” was all a chuckling Scootaloo had to say on that.

        “Scoff if you must, Scootaloo.  But, suffice it to say, a simple dash of time-differentiation here and there isn't too terribly dangerous.  Why, there was a time in my youth when I would gladly have utilized the spell to my own advantage.”

        “What?  You wanted to grow wings early?”  Scootaloo smirked.

        “A mustache actually.”

        “A—Snkkt—A what, Spike?”  Her scarlet eyes bugged noticeably.

        “Oh yes.  I had wished to be a true charmer with the ladies—well—'lady', singular, I do suppose.”  He smiled gently as he fished through the branches and felt each subsequent orange with gentle-giant fingers.  “You have told me that your past is filled with memories and regret, Scootaloo.  I think it would help you for once to look back and see the simple things, and how blessedly therapeutic it was to abide by the nonsensical whims thereof.”

        The pegasus briefly glanced aside and muttered, “There's hardly anything sensible about cold fear.”

        “Heh!” the dragon suddenly cackled, his violent pendant dangling.  “We need to do something about that!”

        Scootaloo sighed.  “Don't push it, Spike.  Let me come to terms with stuff on my own—”

        “No, I mean this succulent morsel!”  Spike tugged at the orange until it was plucked cleanly from its branch.  “It is far too plump to remain hanging here much longer!  Hmmm... Why is this so familiar?—Ah-Ha!”  He grinned, raised the piece of citrus to his snout, and breathed a plume of green flames over it.  The orange disappeared in a puff, leaving just a few specks of ash which the dragon leisurely flicked off the ends of his claws.  “I had a sweet tooth yesterday morning.  Glad to have that taken care of.  Heh-heh-heh.”

        “Y'know, Spike...” Scootaloo stood up and trotted gently over by his side.  “I've been wondering.”

        “Hmm?”

        “All of those timeless months in Ponyville that you spent doting on Lady Rarity—what with the mustache and the gemstones and the lavenders and all—Did you ever once switch gears?”

        “Switch gears?  Scootaloo, I do hope you know that you're talking to an elder!”

        “Heeheehee—No, Spike.”  She gently smiled.  “I mean, did you ever hit on any dragon girls?”

        “You mean to ask if I ever went about courting young ladies of draconian stature?” Spike glanced down at her and sauntered over towards a bush of roses which he promptly watered with the aid of a rusted pitcher.  “In truth, Scootaloo, I never did reach that age before the Cataclysm hit.  I was a young whelp, in every sense of the term.  My feelings for Lady Rarity were sweet, but naturally misguided.  I shall always remember her fondly, regardless.  It's the nonsensical things of youth that are the most memorable.  Are you willing to guess why?”

        “Because they're stupid?”

        “Because they're simple,” he said with a winking eyecrest.  “I'm hoping that you may find such simplicity in your ventures, or that simplicity may find you.  Now there's a reunion that would be utterly replete with healing.”  He chuckled to himself.

        “Yeah, well.”  Scootaloo cleared her throat as her voice remarried a somberness to the emerald air of the terrarium.  “About my next venture...”

        “Oh!  Yes!”  He immediately stopped watering the flower garden and swiveled his hulking scales around to regard her.  “You brought what I requested, I do hope?”

        “That I did.”  She nodded and squatted briefly on her haunches.  Reaching back, she yanked a pouch to her saddlebag open and produced a glass jar with a runed cap.  “Ta daaaa... Is it everything you ever dreamed of?”

        “Child, my dreams are filled with the faces of friends.  I reserve shapes and mechanisms to the wheels of imagination.”  He took the glass container in a gentle palm and held it up to his emerald eyeslits.  “Hmmm... Yes, Late Second Age Lunar Republican Runecrafting.  It's amazing the extent to which you have perfected such an art.  You should be proud—if not for your ingenuity, then at least for your audacity.”

        “Righto.”  She nodded.  “It's easy to be a heretic when there's no burnable wood left in the world.  I suppose the only living things left in Equestria that protest the sacrilegious enchantment of moonrocks are the cockroaches that scatter everytime I brightly ignite an alchemy trough.”  She then pointed a hoof towards the contours of the runed jar in Spike's grasp.  “The lid houses a spatial distortion spell.  I can compress all sorts of thermal essences into a confined space through magical suppression via vocal command.  That's how I've been able to safely contain all sorts of highly volatile substances like red flame, orange flame, yellow flame—”

        “—and now, with my help, the great Scavenger of the Wastes can carry in her hoof green flame.  Ahem.  Shall I?”  He glanced at her brightly while unscrewing the runed cap from the jar.

        She gulped and stepped back with a few shaking limbs.  “Be my guest, casanova.  It's your ballgame; I just came for the peanuts.”

        “How poetically trite.”  He smirked at her, then turned to narrow his gaze on the jar.  His neck crests warbled and his upper torso billowed with steam as the elder dragon summoned a huge breath from deep within his burning glands.  A deep bass roar, and nearby blades of grass danced from the rising heat vapors as he aimed his razor-tooth maw straight into the body of the tiny glass jar.  A surging cyclone of emerald flames frothed its way over the container's lid before spilling dramatically into the tiny glass space under Spike's manipulative exhale.  After several seconds, his vomit of flame lurched in a dry heave, and he swiftly slapped the cap over the steaming glass jar.

        On cue, Scootaloo galloped up.  Spike lowered the buckling glass just in time for the last pony to bravely tilt her lips towards the bubbling container and—sweating profusely—firmly growl:  “W'nyhhm.”  The rune lit up in a flash of purple.  The green jar briefly shook and wobbled loudly as if ten thousand whirlpools were buckling deep inside of it, and then the jar rattled to a stop and rested quietly in Spike's grasp, awash in a perpetual emerald glow.

        “And there you have it.”  The dragon beamed within the penumbra of Celestial rays.  “Time in a bottle.”

        “Heh, fancy schmancy,” Scootaloo droned.  Her scarlet eyes twinkled green like a kaleidoscope as she took the jar from the dragon's grasp and turned it over a few times in her hooves.  “Green Flame under glass.  Do you have any idea how much silver this could get me in the Wastelands?”

        “Scootaloo...”

        “Just thinking aloud, Spike.”  She half-heartedly chuckled, her face awash in the beautiful emerald haze as the pegasus gazed beyond the soup of reverse-time.  “There's no silver that's worth buying this, that's worth purchasing the past, that can deliver the Sun and Moon to one's doorstep within a blink.”  She gulped, her lips suddenly dry.  “All it costs is ashes, one dead friend at a time.”

        “Not even an entire world of ashes can purchase one life, Scootaloo.  Remember: you are a visitor of the past, not its creditor.”

        “Still... heh.” Scootaloo snickered as she twirled the green jar recklessly atop the edge of a hoof.  “Feels like highway robbery, one way or another.”

        Two of Spike's claws suddenly clamped over the jar, stopping it in mid-spin.  He lowered his snout and gazed intently into her blinking scarlets.  “The only robbery I foresee here, child, is laying waste to the one commodity we have to work with besides our sanity.”  He picked the jar up and waited for Scootaloo to dutifully present an open pouch of her saddlebag before he deposited it safely inside.  “Please do take extra care of the green flame.  It takes far more than mere philosophy to conjure it.  It will be a good few days before I can produce another breath for you.”

        Scootaloo whistled shrilly as she tied the pouch and tightened it.  “It's that potent, huh?  I had no idea.”

        “Well, now you do, old friend.”  Spike shuffled down the far side of the terrarium with a sudden lethargy.  The elder dragon spoke over his scaled shoulder as he examined several flower beds blossoming across the edges of the royal light.  “Whomever you choose to anchor yourself to next, I advise you do so only after careful meditation.  The concentration of my green flame, coupled by the potential release of your disenchanted rune seal, will send you back in time faster and with far greater efficiency than ever a raw exhalation could hope to achieve.  You won't even need an alchemic circle for the reverse-time to take effect, so long as you aim the expulsion of flames at yourself once you're junctioned.”

        “I'll... still need the remains of your... of our friends to send myself back, won't I?”

        “Absolutely, only now you will not have to expend the time and resources needed to pilot your marvelous aircraft back and forth across such great distances,” Spike said with a tired smile.

        “I get it.  So, basically, now I've got the advantage of drive-thru time travel?”

        Spike sighed into a row of dandelions.  “Is it not enough that we're three centuries apart; you have to confound my mind even further with such verbal delinquency?”

        “Face it, Spike.”  Scootaloo smiled gently.  “You were bored up until I showed up, weren't you?”

        “I'm the only living thing whom you'll ever know that has managed to entertain himself by watching a pot boil backwards,” he mused, then pointed a finger towards her saddlebags.  “You still have the baby dragon teeth that I gave you?”

        “Of course, Spike.”  She patted the bulge in her side pocket for emphasis.

        “Then you have everything you need to truly make this venture entirely yours—as it has been from the beginning.”  He tiredly blinked his emerald eyeslits and stifled a yawn tempered by the ages piled inside of his scaled frame.  “Now, if you would dearly pardon me, old friend.  Expelling that much green flame has taken a great deal of energy from me.  I would do well to retire upon a bed of soft pliable quartz.”

        “Spike,” Scootaloo started, but faltered slightly as she bit at the corner of her lip.  “Erm, I know that you are headed to bed and all, but...”

        “There shall always be a bed for dragons, even beyond death, for we shall never outlast the earth.”  He smiled tranquilly her way.  “Do tell me what is on your mind, child.”

        “You were... You were in Canterlot when the Cataclysm hit, weren't you?  I mean, that's the kind of the idea I've gotten from everything you've ever shared with me.”

        “Affirmative.  It was upon the Mount of Canterlot that I awoke to a dead world, and it was within the Bowels of Canterlot where I carefully studied on how to perform an autopsy on it.”

        “So many years in caves—both in forward time and in reverse time—and all you ever had as company was scientific formulae... and boiling pots,” she nervously finished with a chuckle, then fell into a melancholic gaze as she murmured towards him.  “I really don't think that's a loneliness that I can come close to fathoming, Spike.  Even in all of my gray, gray years.”

        “Mmm... 'Loneliness', such a common affliction, in spite of its ironic isolation.”  The dragon coldly smiled.  A slight cough, and fumes lifted, dissipated, and he murmured strongly, “Everything that lives is alone, and yet, we are all not.  Even in a dull world where all ponies have died, there is an Encompassing, Scootaloo.  I do not consider this optimistic naivete on my part.  I really do wish you could sense it like I can.  Perhaps what it takes is age, for the slouching centuries to calm a vibrating world around you to a hum so that you can feel the finer mystical points beyond the opaque surfaces of what surrounds us.  We are all driven to Death, and yet we are all empowered to surpass it.  Somewhere in the midst of that, there exists a connection, a purpose.  Whatever the truth is, it is wordless—yes—but far from perpetually 'lonely'.  How could it be?  Hmm?”

        “I don't know, Spike.”  Scootaloo softly exhaled, gazing at the dark shadows beyond the green lengths of the garden.  “I've spent twenty-five years gazing at Death from beyond the portholes of my ship.  I see it for what it is, an enemy—and yet a sibling.  But our friends, Spike...”  She gazed up with a hollow expression.  “Applejack, Apple Bloom, Macintosh, Granny Smith, even Winona—none of them could see Death coming.  And I didn't do a single thing to help them see it.  I frankly can't believe I'll ever make any of our friends see Death.  Do you really, really think that gives me a connection to them?”

        “Your connection is far deeper and more intimate than a mystical Encompassing, dear friend.”  Scootaloo tiredly smiled.  “In the company of your fellow ponies, I can only envision harmony.”

        Scootaloo chuckled dryly at that word.

        Spike raised an emerald eyecrest.  “Have I struck a funny bone, old friend?”

        “Maybe we both have, Spike.”  Scootaloo's chortles fell into a rising sigh as she gazed up at the shimmering looking glass above them.  “Life really is one giant slap on the knee.”

        “Which is precisely what I will need in order to wake up in several hours.”  He yawned once more.  “I really must be venturing to sleep, as you also have a venture of your own to make.”

        “One of these days, Spike, we should take a venture together.”  She smirked.  “We could fire up the Harmony and go cruising the Northern Heights for dragon chicks.  We'd find you someone to really boil a pot with.”  She winked playfully.

        “Hmmm, an impossible expenditure, I assure you,” he spoke in a frivolous monotone.  “As I have searched the Wastelands of Equestria for ponies, I have likewise endeavored to find like blood.  But alas, as you are the end of ponies, I can only conclude that I am the last of dragons.”

        The brown-coated filly suddenly blanched at that, her lips parting.

        He stretched his purple joints nonchalantly and snapped a few cricks in his long neck.  “Some of the friendly faces I see in my dreams are fictitious.  It's not too terrible a reality to comprehend—for someone as old as me.  Be relieved that I will never again have a reason to sport a ridiculous mustache.”  He briefly chuckled, but suddenly blinked as his sleepy form was encumbered by a warm quartet of limbs wrapped about his lower thigh.

        Scootaloo was suddenly and unashamedly nuzzling him, her clenched eyes christened with moisture.

        The dragon smiled and gently lowered a claw to stroke her bristled pink neck.  “Have we warmly embraced enough in the space of three weeks, old friend?”

        “No,” she murmured, rubbing her wet cheek against his knee as she gazed up with sparkling scarlets.  “All those times, you were hugging me.  I just felt like hugging you for once, Spike.”

        “And a fine gesture it is, child.”  He briefly nudged her skull with the edge of his chin's green crests, patted her, and strolled off.  “I shall carry it with me to slumber, as I do all treasures that grace my life.  Safe travels, old friend.”

        She watched, standing in the deep shadows of his voice, as Spike strolled alone through the side of the terrarium and out into the cold, gray graveyard of Ponyville.  Every ticking second in his absence suddenly felt like another layer of her skin being peeled off.  There was suddenly one thing that could cover those wounds:  the flesh of an exiled Goddess.

        Opening the nearest bag in her saddle, the last pony pulled out several dangling dragon teeth on an array of multi-colored strings.  A deep breath, and Scootaloo gently, cautiously hoofed through one artifact after another, her senses boiling at different pitches with each calcium shard she came into contact with.  Her brain spun in every cardinal direction as her soul endeavored to focus on the location of every obscured corpse lingering beyond a gentle touch.

        Then her heart stopped.  Dangling suddenly in front of her was a blue string, upon which a cold tooth unassumingly hung, but her heart was suddenly being throttled towards the tiny white object at seven hundred kilometers per hour.  The blood in her veins boiled and her organs shifted as if she was being flung across the globe under the howl of comet-hot friction.  Then, before her sparkling vision, a wide horizon of rainbow patterns streaked around one thousand and eighty degrees before reaching for her with the serrated tooth of a lightning bolt—

        Ears popped in a cold hiss.  Scootaloo wrenched her brown skull from the tooth's throbbing gaze.  She was panting profusely, her heart palpitating like a pathetic little foal with her hooves scratching against the walls of an arcane vault.  She winced, winced, then relaxed as the earth recollected under her legs, and she realized her wings had been flapping involuntarily.  Retracting the brown feathers to herself, she gulped hard and flung the blue-stringed tooth towards the back end of her dangling collection.

        A murmur escaped the last pony's lips as she sought the next tooth—any tooth—so long as it wasn't that last one.  To her surprise, it was almost as if the next tooth was reaching for her.  Upon a yellow string, it shimmered invitingly.  She shuddered as a soft silken touch circled her soul with song, so that she was being lifted like a shivering bird through the feather-soft kiss of leaves, past the coarse veil of gray confusion, and into the velvety womb of gentle kind words, melodic and cherishing, dancing her tired limbs into a cushion of slumber.

        “Oh goddess...” Scootaloo almost sobbed.  “I have to find her next.”

        Twenty-five years of going deaf, and hers still sounded like the golden voice.

        Rows upon rows of dead trees surged below like dark gray seafoam as the last pony piloted the Harmony ever westward beyond the lengths of Ponyville.  Scootaloo craned her goggled face, blinking downwards.  She was balanced on the very edge of the cockpit seat which she had tilted forward to allow her a view of the dead foliage wafting beneath the curved windows of the airship.  With one hoof on a lever and another clinging to a chainlink handle, she scanned the decaying horizon, observing as the gray ashen tree trunks bled into an obsidian abyss that formed the apocalyptic husk of the once Everfree Forest.

        In place of green tree canopies and misty knolls there spread a cancerous, ink-black, neverending quagmire of gnarled thorns—humongous twisting vines of iron thick onyx wood.  The sharp pointed barbs that protruded from these unnatural briars were like giant glistening daggers of indestructible slade, hewn from the blackest heart of a ravaged earth.  In an Age where all that was green was dead, far darker and malevolent things grew from the festering pits of the earth, sucking the juice and blood from all that dared to mimic the throbbing warmth of yesteryear.  In two and a half short decades, the gorgeous Everfree Forest had been completely replaced with a briarpatch labyrinth of chaos, and anything that lurked within the pitch black shadow of that hellish maze could only be an abomination that fed on smaller horrors.

        And the tooth was leading her straight there.

        Scootaloo exhaled sharply.  Goggled eyes glanced up at the tiny white bone hanging on its yellow string where she had suspended it from a copper bulkhead.  With the barest of breaths, the Harmony's pilot could feel a gentle pull to her soul essence, like pink silken threads brushing her, coaxing her, urging her to fly deeper, deeper, deeper into the black heart of that nightmarish briar patch.  When the last pony concentrated hard, she grew increasingly aware—and more and more despondent—of just how entrenched into the mire of that obsidian sea of brambles her anchor truly was.  It horrified her as much as it confused her.  The flicker of the bobbing cabin's lanternlights was of a sudden yet brief comfort to her beating heart.

        “Meh.  Enjoying your sleep, Spike?” the filly momentarily grumbled.

        The horizon turned blacker and blacker as the Everfree Briar consumed everything from east to west beyond the cockpit, and yet she knew that she was just hitting upon the bare crest of Equestria's oceanic tumor.  The hardened survivor's heart faltered, not so much with trepidation as with the sheer weight of the plunge that she was about to take.  In truth, she looked for an excuse—any excuse—to delay her fateful dive for the briefest of moments.

        However, it was for a far more somber reason that she urged herself to decelerate the Harmony.  She had spotted something upon the edge of the Wasteland's blackest-of-black skins.  It was a patch of stony soil just like many other millions of barren splotches across Equestria.  For some pathetic reason, this patch and this patch alone stood out, occupying a singed spot within the twitching retinae of the last pony's aged eyes, so that she even memorized it from the air.

        The entire cabin of the Harmony surged as Scootaloo compelled herself to pull at the braking levers, coasting the zeppelin to a complete stop.  She took a deep breath and reached a hoof up to the handle that would send the craft into descent, but she merely gripped the thing and hung her suddenly flimsy weight from it.  A nervous pit had formed in her stomach, and she bit her lip as she gazed at the dangling white tooth and the black expanse refocusing beyond its flimsy white shape.

        Once again, she felt gentle feather-touches of silken softness pulling her lovingly towards the black abyss of that thorn-brambled hell lingering beyond the cockpit windows.  With a surrendering sigh, she reminded herself that the same placid heart that animated that silken touch also possessed a voice that lulled her tired mind towards the familiar patch of land just edging the brink of madness below.

        Scootaloo reasoned with herself that this was not a delay, but a precursor, a necessary prelude to a purgatorial plunge, as this one spot in Equestria had always served every lonely moment in her young life ever.

        One final breath—not so much for strength as for relief—and the last pony gave in.  She put her weight into the chainlink handle's grip.  The Harmony descended rapidly towards the tiny barren patch among patches, and she found a sufficiently strong tree among its dead brothers and sisters to moor the aircraft to before trotting swiftly out, unarmored.

        She left the tooth behind.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Her metal-laced hooves plodded across dead stone.  All grass had been evaporated.  Any remaining soil had been vulcanized to obsidian glass.  She trotted forward, her shadow but a black facsimile of herself in the lingering twilight.  Out there, on the dead edge of the black sea of thorns, the world was quiet enough for her to hear the flakes of ash kissing the ground.

        Metal horseshoes scraped bits of gravel off of the earth's exposed bosom as Scootaloo strolled forward, retracted her brown wings, and stood still before a sudden array of effigies.  There were headstones, over sixty of them, sick white things stained with the green mildew of goddess-forsaken time.

        Beyond this neatly arranged phalanx of rocks there rested the entrance to something.  It was a crumpled, ugly, fluke of a hole, with several offensively heavy boulders having half-heartedly filled its gaping mouth.  Criss-crossing the three meter rock-stuffed entrance was a splintery web of wooden planks, nailed into place by ghostly equine hooves three decades ago.  The flimsy barricade had shuddered, bowed, and crumbled over time, barely managing to hold tight the bouldery plug they once so bravely guarded for countless years.

        But Scootaloo's gaze wasn't fixed on the haphazard hole in the wall of granite.  She wasn't even remotely interested in the five dozen white rocks lingering before her.  Instead, she shuffled lethargically—knowingly—straight towards a tall gray obelisk standing in front of her.  The thing was twice her height, a dull ghost of its once pointed glory.  After decades of pelting snow and acidic blight, the thing had melted into a lump of porous rock, but something still shimmered halfway up the front face of it.

        The last pony raised her goggles.  A flaring of nostrils, and she squinted naked scarlet eyes while she diligently raised a hoof towards the front of the obelisk and wiped a layer of dust off, revealing several words chiseled in the Celestial Language.

        “The Everclear Seventy.”

        The words engraved in the monolith glistened in the noonday Sun.

        “In Memory of the Hard-Working Souls Who Lost Their Lives to Tragedy Deep in the Heart of the Everclear Mine.”

        As the words bled in and out of focus, Scootaloo's orange face drooped in the polish of the reflective granite.  Two violet eyes blinked painfully, like lost twins.  It hurt her gaze—pinpricks burning—and she suddenly shuddered to wrench her gaze away from the monolith, staring breathlessly as she leaned half of her body atop the body of her scooter.  The eight-year-old foal blinked as she took in the many, many white rocks lingering between soft blades of grass and fluttering flower petals.

        The memorial stretched gracefully across the meadow with the headstones forming neat little rows, wide enough for two visiting earth ponies to trot side by side in silent reverence.  It was twice as quiet that day; Scootaloo was utterly alone.  Otherwise, she would never have shown up there to begin with.

        A pathetic gulping of the throat, and the filly pulled her helmet off and freed a tossed mane of pink hair that billowed in the soothing warm wind.  She fought the Sun with cold shoulders, gazing with a shuddering sickness as her eyes traveled bravely up, up, up across the walls of the granite mound beyond the memorial ... towards where the deathly mouth of the abandoned mine lingered.  Several fresh wreathes of  lilies crowned the wooden barricaded entrance, like garlands sacrificed before the gagged mouth of a giant serpent.  Scootaloo's childish eyes blinked, and the site was once more an ordinarily barricaded mine shaft, innocent and barren of all the souls that had ever been consumed within.

        The foal bit her lip.  She knew what was coming next.  She planned for it, sickly dreamed of it during lonely nights spent under tear-stained stars.  Pensively, she clutched her helmet to her chest—tighter and tighter to the point of breaking—as she bravely forced her violet eyes back towards the glossy black body of the obelisk, traveling down a chiseled sea of names, names, names.

        Most of the names were of earth ponies, nearly all of them as a matter of fact.  This was subtly conveyed with chiseled white illustrations of trees that flanked the corresponding titles.  However, there were a few names accompanied by the shapes of starlit horns, and even fewer names—no more than five—accompanied with ivory white wings.  And at the very bottom of this last list, centered with starkingpeculiarity, were two names joined in stone as they had been joined in life:

~~~^~ Thunder Dawn ~^~~                  ~~~^~ Cloudskip ~^~~~

        The second name in particular, Scootaloo's vision haloed about.  Something that had been stowed away in the dusty corners of her eyes bled hotly with every hungry second spent pouring over it.  She raised a shaking hoof towards the white winged engraving, and her ears pricked to hear her golden voice, like something that the foal hoped had been following her over the kissing leaves of every nightly howl, a dream that she could never let go of.

        What she heard instead wasn't nearly as golden, but upon a silken breath of feminine grace and endearment it very delicately resembled it.  Still, the tiniest of contrasts cut her brain like a knife upon the precipice of its utterance, under a peripheral fluttering of pegasus wings:  “Oh!  Hello, Scootaloo.”

        The foal immediately jerked back from the obelisk.  She cleared her throat, straightened the orange face in the granite reflection, and gazed with dried eyes towards the yellow shade having suddenly touched down behind her.

        “Ahem.  Fluttershy, hey there.  Uhm...” Bearing a brave smirk, Scootaloo spun about and casually leaned on her scooter.  “What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

        “I was about to ask the same of you,” returned a melodic voice along the gossamer threads of the warm spring breeze.  A pink-maned pegasus with soft blue eyes stood with a pair of wicker baskets saddled over her flanks.  Several white flowers danced on either side of her as she sauntered up on pale yellow hooves and proceeded to lay the lilies one at a time across the rows of white stones.  “Somepony said that I might find you here.”

        The orange foal blinked awkwardly.  “Really?”  A frigid cloud fell over the suddenly naked air of that place, and her teeth chattered.  “I'm not in trouble or anything, am I?”

        “Heeheehee... Good heavens, no.”  Fluttershy giggled.  It was a flighty sound, as if smiles could sing.  “Hmmm... Quite the opposite, actually.”

        Scootaloo squinted quizzically at her suddenly joyous acquaintance.  “What's gotten you in such a cheerful mood today?”  She sported a helpless smirk, however briefly.

        “Ohhhh...” Fluttershy paused in the midst of laying flowers down and smiled towards the Sun.  The noonday breeze played with her hair like the teasing hands of a doting mother.  “I just had the most cheerful thought, of circles within circles.  Kindness is like a dance, and everypony is sharing the floor with each other... mmmm... whether they know it or not.”  The yellow pegasus blushed slightly.  A warm breath, and she gazed sweetly the foal's way.  “It is a joy to see you, dear Scootaloo.  It always is.”

        Scootaloo's cheeks flamed from within.  In an uncomfortable shiver of warmth, she fluttered her wings and shrunk within herself, murmuring aside:  “You've been sniffing those flowers a bit too much, ya think, Fluttershy?”

        “Heeheehee... Perhaps.”  Fluttershy took a deep breath.  Steeling herself, she sashayed further in her task of flower-depositing and murmured in a more somber voice:  “Do you know what this place is?”

        “Beats the heck out of me.”  Scootaloo offensively rubbed the inside of her front forelimb and scrunched a tomcoltish face towards the obelisk, the headstones, and the abandoned mine shaft beyond.  “Looks like a bunch of ordinary rocks.  Seems like a really silly idea to put all of this out here where somepony could trip over them.”

        Fluttershy gasped at that last utterance.  “Oh, it is far more than just a bunch of rocks, Scootaloo.  This is a memorial erected in dedication to ponies who died in a horrible tragedy that happened at this very site less than a decade ago.”

        “Ya don't say?”  Scootaloo smirked slightly.  There was a deep twitch to her lips, but she hid it professionally.  “Seems like an awfully peaceful place for something bad to happen.”

        “It's only peaceful because the citizens of Ponyville have done everything they can to keep the grounds nice and organized,” Fluttershy said between breaths as she laid flower after flower down before the white stones with clenched teeth.  “Many ponies around here have lost loved ones to the mine collapse, or else they knew friends who lost family to it.  It's common for them to come and pay their respects.  So it's only fair for the grounds to be maintained in good order, in respect of those who died, if nothing else.”

        “Is that... uhhh... what you're doing, Fluttershy?”  Scootaloo blinked her pink eyes as she watched the yellow pegasus stroll past her in her dutiful flower-laying.  “Are you paying respects?”

        “Mmm... In a manner of speaking, yes.”  The filly stood up, bearing a porcelain smile.  “I... erm... I'm chief groundskeeper of the Everclear Memorial.”

        It took Scootaloo several seconds before she realized that she had lost a breath to that.  “You are?”  She gulped.  “Since when?”

        “Since I volunteered years ago.”  Fluttershy paused briefly in her service, standing in the sea of white stones as Celestia's Sun rained down golden light on the living and the dead alike.  “Do you remember my story about how I got my cutie mark?”

        “Nnnngh, yes.”  Scootaloo briefly rubbed her temple with an exhausted hoof.  “I'm pretty sure I can still hear you reciting your song whenever I duck my head underwater.”

        The young adult pegasus' skin turned briefly rosy as she hid behind a lock of pink hair and murmured forth her memories.  “Well, the night after I landed on earth and discovered my talent with animals, I slept beneath the monolith here.  The memorial had just been constructed and I didn't know any better.  When morning came, a family of farm ponies had come to pay their respects.  At first they were angry at me for using the sacred site as a bed.  But when I explained what had happened and how I got there, they quickly forgave me and let me stay at their house until my mom and dad could come down from Cloudsdale to get me.  That's how I first met Applejack and her family:  when I stayed at their farm for the first time.”

        “Heh.”  Scootaloo smirked with a bizarre shade of pride.  “Guess you had a thing or two to learn about finding a place out in the open to sleep.”

        Fluttershy innocently responded, “Actually, I felt horrible.  My first day on the ground of this lovely world, and I thought I had ruined a very special place to earth ponies!  So, the first moment I could, I volunteered to return here and assist with the groundskeeping.  As years went by, the Ponyville Department of Wildlife Affairs realized I was good at tending to animals as well, and I was soon generously given a place on the edge of the Everfree Forest to move into.”

        “Oh, so is that how you got your cottage?”

        “Mmm, yes.  I felt so lucky and blessed.  I haven't missed an opportunity yet to pay my respects to this wonderful land,” she said, suddenly wilting into a sighing somberness as she gazed sadly at the stones upon stones.  “Such a wonderful land, and yet such a horrible tragedy.  My heart goes out to every one of the souls these monuments are dedicated to.”

        “Why?”  Scootaloo squinted.  “Sounds like you didn't know a single one of 'em, Fluttershy.”

        “Does it matter?”   She blinked steadily at the foal.  “All life is precious, both breathing and not breathing.  In a way, the world's been sharing the same single breath since the beginning of time.  Who would we be without those ponies before us who have been there to set the foundation of what we now are?”

        “I...”  The little orange pegasus squirmed atop her scooter.  When Fluttershy wasn't looking, she stole a bitter glance at the bottom of the monolith's granite face, at the last two names flanked with white wings.  “I can't pretend to be that deep, Fluttershy.”

        “It doesn't have to be a matter of pretending, Scootaloo.”  Fluttershy effortlessly smiled at her, laid down a few more flowers, and practically chirped into the lively wind.  “If you're calm enough, patient enough, and polite enough, the world makes everything clear to you.  Life has always been built on nice things, even in spite of the occasional ugliness.  If that wasn't true, how could something so beautiful as this place—as this moment—exist where there was once so much pain?”

        Scootaloo gulped and replied with a swiftness that startled even her foalish mind.  “And what of sadness, Fluttershy?”

        “Sadness has a niceness to it too,” the yellow pegasus gently said as she padded softly towards the front of the monument and lowered herself on folded hooves.  “Insomuch that it reminds us that there are precious things left in this world for us to hold onto, so long as we're able—and that they're worth every second of cherishing.”

        “Pfftt!”  Scootaloo couldn't help but launch a pathetic raspberry at that.  Her childish face smirked.  “But Fluttershy—!”

        “Shhh, Scootaloo.  Please, if you don't mind,” the pink maned filly ever so softly chided.

        Scootaloo silenced herself as if she had been stabbed with a red hot poker.  She stared stonily at Fluttershy's winged backside.  The orange foal's lips were locked in equal confusion and curiosity as she watched the Ponyvillean animal tamer shut her eyes, crane her skull towards her yellow reflection in the granite, and murmur a ritualistic prayer along the warm threads of the noonday wind.  It was a natural chant, as if the mumbled words had been etched into Fluttershy's vocal cords, waiting for this very naked moment of release.  But they were sacred words, and—try as she might—Scootaloo could barely hear the phrases that were uttered.  She suddenly realized that she was never meant to hear them.  The white rocks rang with the echoes of Fluttershy's intimate tongue, the only discernible utterance being the holy name of “Gultophine” every other breath or so.  Towards the end of the prayer, Scootaloo blinked to see the one white name on the obelisk standing out in a sudden vanilla aura which she soon realized was Fluttershy's reflection.  In a brief heartbeat of comprehension, the engraving swam in a sheen of gold, much like her voice, almost like—

        “Thank you, Scootaloo,” Fluttershy dripped as she stood back up, her baskets empty.  “I'm very sorry if I put a damper in your afternoon reverie.  It's just that this place is very special to so many ponies.  I think it's encouraging to see you get so much exercise on that scooter of yours, but you should be careful where you ride that thing.  I would hate to see you make the same mistake I did when I was your age.”

        “Hey.”  Scootaloo shrugged with a smirk.  “That's what I've got older ponies like you for, eh Fluttershy?”

        “Hmm-hmm-hmm...”  She chuckled softly beneath sealed lips and drifted towards the foal.  “You're all alone this afternoon?”

        “Huh?”

        “Oh!  Mmm... I... I didn't mean anything nosy by that.  It's just that I'm not used to seeing you without the company of your delightful friends, Scootaloo.”

        “Meh.  Apple Bloom's been battling this nasty cold lately,” Scootaloo said, then rolled her eyes as she added, “And Sweetie Belle is swimming in a huge freakin' pile of homeschool lessons, as always.  I swear:  I hope Rarity someday lets her sister live a little before the day she dies.”

        “That's no way to talk!”  Fluttershy gasped with a look of pale horror on her face, as if a plague had suddenly swept over the landscape at that last utterance.  She leaned forward with earnest blue eyes glimmering.  “Rarity is only caring for Sweetie Belle's future!  You know very well that the foal is constantly traveling back and forth between Ponyville and her grandparents' place in Trottingham, and she's lucky to get as many lessons done in between trips if she wants to have something that even remotely matches Ms. Cheerilee's curriculum!”

        “Alright—Alright!  I get it!  Yeesh!”  Scootaloo rolled her eyes and smirked.  “I thought you were the expert on animals, not schooling!”

        “Oh... uhm... I'm sorry.  I... I didn't mean to be outstepping my boundaries.” Fluttershy wilted slightly and brushed one foreleg with a nervous hoof.  “I really do care for the whole three of you, and I just hope you understand that Sweetie Belle is constantly busy for a reason.  I just hope that you don't make the horrible mistake of blaming her for getting the necessary lessons that she's constantly dealing with.  Erm... Not that I wish to insinuate that you're shallow or anything, Scootaloo, I... uhm... oh dear...”

        “Heheheh—Fluttershy, it's okay.”  Scootaloo leaned from her scooter and rested a hoof gently on one of the pegasus' front legs.  It felt velvety soft to the touch.  “I'm not angry at either of my friends.  I bought Apple Bloom a get-well card from Sugarcube Corner, and I briefly visited Sweetie Belle just to bug her.  I know it's only natural that the Crusaders can't hang out all the time.  I guess I was just... meh, I dunno... friggin' bored, I guess.”

        “What are your parents up to?” Fluttershy asked.

        “My parents?”  Scootaloo bravely breathed.  For a brief moment, her eyes bobbed over the sea of stones.  “They're gone...” She blinked, then jerked a glance up at Fluttershy.  “On vacation.”  She smiled.  “Would you believe it?  The one day in the year that there's a Wonderbolt Performance in Fillydelphia and they leave me behind to house-sit.  Like I really need to be watering the frickin' plants while they're off watching Spitfire and Soarin' do loopty loops.  It's on account of the 'Fillydelphian Cider' that they said I couldn't come.  What a load of horse... well, y'know.  Like I'd ever drink the stuff!  Worst thing I ever poured down my throat was a bottle of prune juice, and that was on a dare from Apple Bloom.  I swear, I dunno how Granny Smith stomachs that crap.”

        “It's a good quaff for the digestive system.”  Fluttershy smiled.

        “Er—Huh?”

        “Prune juice.  It helps ponies and other living things when they need to... to... erm...”  She blushed suddenly like a beet.

        “Ohhhhh—I gotcha.”  Scootaloo winked.  “When they gotta literally make a 'load of horse y'know'.”

        “Eeep!”  Fluttershy winced.  “Scootaloo, I never made jokes like that at your age!”

        “Something tells me you'll never make jokes like that when you're one hundred.”  Scootaloo smirked and placed the helmet back on her head.  “Well, it's been awfully nice shooting the breeze with you, Fluttershy.  But I best be off.  I've got a few errands to run before I check on mom's ferns and see if they've croaked yet.”

        “Oh really?  I—erm... that is... Hmmm.”  Fluttershy brightened, dulled, then kicked limply at the dirt.

        Scootaloo blinked at her with violet curiosity.  “Something the matter?”

        “Oh, no.”  The yellow pegasus snickered softly.  “There is nothing wrong.  I was just momentarily thinking—erm—since you were out and about, and I was also doing a few random tasks, if you might want to join me, Scootaloo, in feeding some of the little animals around the nearby pond?  That is, of course, if you were maybe looking forward to... uhm... some company.”

        Scootaloo giggled.  “No offense, Fluttershy.  You may be all about taking care of cute fluffy creatures, but sitting around by a lake and feeding ducks isn't exactly my idea of an... exciting... afternoon...”  The orange foal's voice limped off in a similar fashion to her fading smile.  She found herself blinking helplessly at the sight before her.

        Fluttershy—ever patient, ever kind—was doing her tranquil best to smile.  But at the crest of Scootaloo's muttered excuse, there was a wilting to the adult pegasus' limbs, blossoming outward from two blue eyes that fluttered groundward painfully, like lost twins.  The young pegasus instantly recognized that abysmal expression of loneliness: pinpricks burning.

        Like an exploding thundercloud, Scootaloo's lungs shifted and she megaphoned through a bright smile, “You know what?  I love ducks!  They're like daredevil seagulls who dive underwater and don't afraid of anything!”

        “Huh?”

        The foal shrugged and re-gripped her scooter's handles.  “My afternoon's clear.  I'm sure Mom's silly ferns can live for another few hours without me.  So are we going to the pond or do I have to race ya?”

        “Oh, that's wonderful!”  Fluttershy shuddered to produce half a giggle, her yellow coat shining suddenly with a golden sheen that matched her silken voice.  “Erm... But I'm afraid I've never been all that good at racing other ponies, so I doubt it would be a worthy challenge.”

        “I was just teasing.  Jeez!” Scootaloo rolled her violet eyes and tightened her helmet.  “Show me the way, Fluttershy.  The last time I went to a pond I thought I could earn a cutie mark for alligator wrestling.  Needless to say, I never frickin' went back.”

        “It's due east,” Fluttershy said, effortlessly taking wing with a breath and a smile.  She gazed down as she kept a low altitude so as not to leave earshot of the scooter-gliding foal.  “While we're at it, maybe you'll let me teach you how to tell the difference between local water fowl?”

        “Heeeeeey,” Scootaloo cooed with a sway of her shoulders as her tiny wings throttled her forward over the grassy fields.  “Who am I to turn down the Stare Master?”

        “Heeheehee.”

        After several redundant hours of circling, the last pony had come to a decision.  She moored the Harmony—employing both hydraulic claws and four sets of chains—to the granite face of a steep mountain looming several hundred feet above the edge of the black Everfree Briar.  This was not an easy task; it took several sweating attempts at steambolting the clamps to the rockface and over fifty minutes of fiddling with the chains to make sure the airship was perfectly anchored, but it had to be done.  To position the Harmony at sea level within reach of the giant black thorns of Everfree was tantamount to reckless suicide, as any unforeseen monstrosity could very easily shred Scootaloo's pride and joy to copper ribbons.

        “At least I'll remember where I parked,” she murmured briefly to herself with a nonsensical smile.

        Her voice was a brief comfort to her in the ghostly twilight winds of high altitude.  From high above, she stared forlornly into the black-against-black sea of thorns looming below her.  Squatting on the edge of the hangar deck's aperture entrance, her lower hooves dangling, she sipped long and hard from a canteen of water and shuddered forth a wilted sigh.  On either of her shivering flanks were piled tall stacks of equipment, three times the size of a normal sojourn's payload.

        This was not a simple trip into the hollow mausoleum of Canterlot.  Nor was this a venture into the abandoned hovels of Ponyvillean buildings.  This was a neck-deep plunge into ravaged Mother Nature, a landscape dictated by wilderness run amok with the fleeting limbs of chaos and unrest, a dark and gnarled world dragged up to the surface of the earth by a sundering apocalypse in the bitter absence of Celestial Light.  Sunken in the depths of those tangled obsidian vines were things that did not sleep, forever outracing the perpetual gray twilight in their sheer audacity to exist.

        And as Scootaloo once again produced the dragon tooth, dangling it before her dull scarlets from its yellow string, she felt the soft tendrils of a golden voice drawing her down, down, down towards the obsidian pits below her.

        “How in Celestia's name did she friggin' end up there when it all ended?” she drunkenly slurred, or at least she wished she was drunk.  It might have more fittingly excused the stupidity she was about to exercise.  A groan, and Scootaloo stood up straight, hoisting her thrice-thick bundle of gear onto heaving shoulders.  “H'jnor.  W'nyhhm.”

        The catseye aperture sliced shut behind her, glowing with purple runes of protection, all of which she promptly abandoned in a steep dive as she flung herself like a brown comet towards the thorn-pierced womb of Everfree below.  The Harmony hung behind, like a copper moon, longing for its fragile winged satellite.  Scootaloo pondered—as she always briefly did on these excursions—that it could very well be the last time she saw her “home”.  To not contemplate that would have been unhealthy.  The last pony faced forward for the rest of the trip.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        She decided to approach the Everfree Briar from its border, trotting carefully at sea-level.  Flying directly down through the ceiling of the thorny forest was hardly a novel idea, considering the many shadowed things with jaws that might be lurking just beneath the brambles.  Trucking her equipment over lurching shoulders, Scootaloo navigated clusters of dead tree husks, petrified piles of scorched foliage, and segmented rows of sedimentary deposits.  All that was robbed of life morphed into all that was devoid of it; the perpetual grayness gave way to a deep earthen black-on-black that blinded Scootaloo in every haphazard blink.

        The twilight haze from above bled through the miasma of thicker and thicker clustering thorns, illuminating the last silent hill of doughy snow before a slanted sea of obsidian slade and rock stretched into the depths of infinitude.  Scootaloo sauntered down a dried-up river bed, dipping into the raked flesh of the earth where the Cataclysm's blast waves had pulverized all dust away from the rocky bone of the world.

        A roof of pale white roots formed a cylindrical tunnel that dug into the darkness.  The last pony sauntered like a lone insect down this natural half-pipe, until she suddenly realized they weren't natural white roots at all, but instead she was actually navigating the discarded ribcage of a large serpentine corpse.  At the crooked neck joint, she exited, glancing back to see where the long spine ended at a reptilian skull adorned with twin tufts of flaking facial hair—one half bright-orange and the other half a grayish blue.

        “Heh.  Guess Sweetie Belle was right after all, Apple Bloom,” the brown pony briefly murmured to the air, and then steeled herself into silence, for that was the last time she could afford herself the luxury of speech.  Just beyond the giant skeleton were the true shadows of Everfree, as well as the nightmarish plunge to come.  Only scavengers who desperately wished to die would dare make a sound from henceforth.

        Scootaloo sat down on her haunches and rummaged through her things.  She produced a thick coat of leather armor, varnished solid black to match the darkest shadows imaginable.  The armor was of such tanklike thickness that it would cover her wings entirely.  It was a necessary precaution for the upcoming sojourn, as she had no reason to fly blindly through the looming abyss before her.  Adorning this, she proceeded to sheathe her copper rifle and magazines, both of which had been camouflaged with black tarps to cover the glow of the runestone ammo.  She equipped a black leather mask, accompanied by an oral mouthpiece custom-built to diffuse the noise of her breathing while also filtering invisible streams of dust from the bitterly cold air.

        Aptly shrouded for the shadows ahead, Scootaloo then rummaged through the far side of her saddlebag.  She briefly afforded herself one last look at light—an emerald light—as she glanced at the runed jar of green flame resting in a safely padded pocket on her flank.  Spike's breath lingered anxiously within, bubbling and frothing in anticipation for the first enchanted murmur of a dutiful time traveler.  Scootaloo resealed the bag tightly, affording no escape of green light from its hidden housing.  Indeed, there could be no light afforded for this descent, not even her usual yoke of lanterns.

        Verily, she rummaged through another pocket and produced a pair of goggles that she hadn't used in a long time.  The frames of the eyepiece were wide, clear, and contained a thin hollow between both lenses.  The copper frames of each eyepiece were studded in four cardinal positions with tiny runestones.  With practiced precision, the last pony reached into her saddle, retrieved a tiny leather pouch, opened it, and poured two liberal spurts of powdery white moondust into the twin hollows of the goggles.  Once the lenses were aptly filled with the lunar sediment, the scavenger snapped the copper frame shut and brought the crafted article to her lips.

        “Y'lynwyn.”

        A stifled purple haze: Scootaloo's bracelet of unicorn horns had also been covered with a thick leather band of black, obscuring the magical strobe.  There was a very brief flash of vanilla light emanating from the twin hollows of the goggles, and the eyepiece briefly vibrated with lunar enchantment as the last pony raised the thing to her brown skull and slid the article over her scarlet eyes.  Her vision fluctuated as she was suddenly assaulted with squirming trails of black-lines-on-white-snow.  It had been several months to a year since she last used the moonvision spell; she could forgive herself for needing a few minutes to readjust.  Every contour and shape of the Everfree Briar danced and billowed before her like obsidian hash marks against ivory bone.  A dancing static of white miasma surged beyond the magical foreground, and as Scootaloo turned her gaze left and right she could make out black highlights that conveyed obstructions from the rest of the lifeless world.  It was all thanks to the runed refraction of energy bending through the enchanted powder fluctuating between the runed lenses.

        Finally, she was ready.  She felt the tiny, stabbing weight of a dragon tooth resting between the double layers of leather armor and her brown coat.  A velvety soft kiss was tugging her forward into the deepening maw.  With an iron breath, the flightless pegasus marched like a silent tank, piercing the blind world through binocular moonvision.  The great Briar stretched before her like jagged black barbs against an all-white world, and with careful precision she descended into the sundered belly of the planet... hopping down one giant onyx vine after another.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Scootaloo could see, and yet she couldn't see.

        It was of little consequence; the Everfree Briar was not a jungle destined for mortal eyes.  There were things—strange, skittering, mindless shapes of things—that lingered and throbbed there, basking in the deadblink of infinite shadows, parting in a mute swath on either side of the last pony's advancing hoofsteps.  Scootaloo saw them all as mere black scrapes against the white froth of her billowing moonvision.  All she heard was the sound of her own breath being filtered from the air and deep into her own ears and her ears alone.  In such a claustrophobic bubble, she shuffled zombily forward, downward, trespassing deeper into the thorn-infested womb of Equestria one shuddering heartbeat after another.

        The trip was frighteningly vertical, with the weighted pegasus having to bound down one gnarled slope of a thick black vine, and then another, and then yet another.  She was at a total loss to stretch forth her wings, or even her wits for that matter.  The last pony kept a desperate mental note of every hop, every shuffle, every side-step that took her down the depths of that harrowing hollow in the ground, for she would have to eventually double-back with four times as much effort after getting what she came for.

        What she came for; it spoke to her with gentle silken stabs of the yellow-strung dragon's tooth planted firmly against her breast.  With each brave drop she took, leaping down one thick stalk of thorns after another, Scootaloo felt the soft velvety tug all the stronger, like a quiet song lulling her through this nightmare.  It had a wilting voice, soft and golden against the cacophony of the last pony's hissing breaths that were constantly thundering through the leather mask.

        One last descent, and the ground evened out, marking the bottom basin of where all the soil that had ever existed in Everfree once lingered before the Cataclysm evaporated it all.  All that rooted there now were hellish stalks of iron-thick thorns, forming a forest of sword-sharp barbs that danced like coarse black swirls in the moonvision of Scootaloo's hobbling sojourn.  Through this sea of white static, the last pony marched her leathered flanks bravely, glancing left and right to map out the pitch-black hazards that lie before her.  Carefully, she navigated bowed brambles that threatened to decapitate her with low-hanging errant thorns.  She marked out finite fissures in the stone floor, hopping over them while briefly retching into her mask from the barest scents of sulfur and brimstone billowing up from the bleeding heart of Equestria.

        Beyond the hollow of her claustrophobic breaths, the silence was murderous, so that the great emptiness of that forsaken Briar coalesced into one endless imaginary scream that dared the last pony to rip her mask off and submit to the utterly black sarcophagus that she had witlessly buried herself in.  With a brave breath, Scootaloo once more felt the feather-light stabs of the dragon tooth tugging her forward.  As the dream of a golden voice ever lingered, she carried herself forward in an icy trot, and bravely challenged the inky depths of Everfree.

        A solid hour into the grave voyage, and the black shadows in front of Scootaloo doubled, tripled, quadrupled.  At first, it was merely a thickening of thorns, forming an acidic labyrinth of porous dips, twists, turns, and tunnels, all of which the last pony agilely traversed with barely a sweat.  But then the shadows came alive, animated by something far paler and colder than life, and they moved even when she stood still.  Under a billowing air of caution, Scootaloo shuffled towards the perimeter and scuffled her silent body against the wooden surface of several vines.

        Her canter bled down to an oozing limp, barely advancing more than ten centimeters per minute as she cautiously eyed the skittering shadows through her goggles' moonvision, and those shadows were many.  There were thin shapes, hollow shapes, breathless and bloodless shapes that rolled like paper leaves against the white blemish of the obscured Briar before suddenly producing hundreds of squirming fingers and shooting off into the penumbra of madness at the speed of light.  Coiling intestinal shadows that resembled seas of snakes solidified into solid hulks too gargantuan to possibly be that soundless, and yet they lingered just beyond Scootaloo's masked snout upon forests of twitching spindle-legs, shuffling about with the cold cadence of cobwebs against rust.

        Another hour, and Scootaloo had to completely halt her advance.  The last pony sat, hunched against a fork of crumbling vines, watching as a quivering puddle of black splotches limped and thrashed before her like dead fish atop a concrete surface.  The reason she waited was because a thin circle of hairy black filaments was presently circling the wounded creature, pattering on clawed toes as it narrowed its orbit and converged upon the center of her static moonvision.  It thrusted itself upon the thrashing splotches with dagger-black mandibles, tearing the quivering shape to obsidian ribbons with a frigid silence that permeated the very fabric of nightmares.  Scootaloo stared at this scene for so long and with such concentration that the thing's exoskeleton nearly came into focus beyond the limits of moonvision, revealing ever so briefly a twitching mass of hundreds upon hundreds of souless black eyes, framed by curling feelers.  The ash-less air grew thick with a copper humidity, and soon the shadows faded into the white haze of the moonvision, but Scootaloo didn't move.  She knew that the creature was still there, just as it knew that she was there.  The last pony could feel it pulsing in an opposite rhythm to her claustrophobic breaths.

        Scootaloo was barely halfway towards her goal; she couldn't let this deathly moment drive her into doing something fleeting, stupid, or impulsive.  With a coolness that could freeze fire to ice, she stealthily reached back to her saddlebag and pulled her tarp-covered rifle free.  There was a slight shuffling from beyond; the black shapes briefly resurfaced and were once more reburied in the white moonvision.  She pretended to be as indifferent to them as the nameless things were to her.  Extending the brass barrel of the gun, she held the thing outward like a fifth limb, her lips close enough to make love to the concealed magazine of runestones as she waited, waited, waited, daring to outlast the darkness.

        A heartbeat: she ever so briefly remembered a foalish shade of herself  that had cowered in the corner of a cave, weeping fractured lullabies under the marching cadence of Wasteland trolls.  Here, bordering the skittering claws of many faceless Everfree abominations, an adult Scootaloo barely winced.  The world was a lot less scary on the thicker end of a long life tempered by murder.  She clung to her rifle and her rifle clung to her, brass twins suspended in a darkness framed with gnarled thorns.

        She would wait them out.  All she had to do was wait them out.  Survival in the Wastelands only meant outlasting the patience of all things that drooled, until Death itself forgot how to salivate.  She felt her heartbeat again; the dragon tooth was reassuring her, a suddenly soft companion, a devoted witness to this sightless spectacle.

        In the darkest abyss of the universe, Scootaloo closed her eyes to the moonvision and relaxed, for once again the golden song came to her upon gossamer strands of gentleness.  She was pulled in two directions at once, several fathoms forward and two and a half decades back.  As the many-eyed husks shuffled away into the sea of thorns beyond, the last pony took the time to split in half, her mind levitating briefly upon the witless gap that her memories allowed her to bask in.

        “Are they... uhm...”  The orange foal nervously sweated.  “Are th-they gonna bite me?”

        Fluttershy lightly giggled as she squatted down at a pond's rippling edge besides Scootaloo and nudged the tiny pegasus forward.  “Do not worry.  Even if they did, it would merely feel like a love pinch.”

        “Y-Yeah, okay.”  The filly bit her lip and stretched both hooves out, cupping a sprinkling of bread crumbs.  “Just warn me before they 'love pinch' my eyes out.”

        A pair of pink-feathered cranes tip-toed through the water's edge, regarding Scootaloo with sideways beady eyes.  A tilting of their necks, a flutter of feathers, and the two birds stretched their beaks and lightly tap-tap-tapped the inner edges of the foal's forelimbs, snatching up the tender morsels of bread before shaking the food down their elongated esophaguses and fluttering off into the depths of the crystal blue lake.

        “See?”  Fluttershy smiled proudly and gathered more edibles from where her wicker basket was lying beside a line of fronds and cattails.  “With enough patience and tenderness, you can wait any creature out.  The soul of a pony is such that our calmness can outlast the impulsive instincts of wildlife.  It's very beautiful, in a way.  It's as if we were built solely for being the caretakers of all walks of life.”

        “Is that so?”  Scootaloo jolted slightly as a duck waddled up from out of nowhere and selfishly pecked the last of the crumbs from her grasp.  It flew away over the waters like a skipping stone, sending ripples across a placid lake that was utterly blanketed with a mesmerizing bustle of activity, from swans to otters to tortoises to dragonflies.  “I gotta admit, Fluttershy.  You're like a frickin' magnet to all of these critters.  You don't suppose you feed them too much, do you?”

        “Mmm... Well...”  The yellow pony's cheeks blushed slightly as she busied herself with treating a surfacing turtle to a leaf of crisp green lettuce.  “I admit that I sometimes do give a little too generously to the local animals.  But I cannot help it.  They're so peaceful to look at, and the more of them that are around the more the air just has this... I can't explain it.  It's like there's suddenly a delightful hum to the world.  I've noticed this since the first day I landed on solid ground.  There's a separate peace in the company of wildlife, something that you could never find in Cloudsdale, or in downtown Ponyville... mmm...  for that matter.”

        “Yeah.  Besides, the day I have a bird walk up and eat stuff out of my hooves at Sugarcube Corner is the day Mrs. and Mr. Cake call for the exterminator.” Scootaloo reached for more bread crumbs and blinked suddenly at a pair of squirrels sauntering bravely up from a nearby tree trunk flanking the pond.  With a smirk, she tossed the bits onto the ground before them and watched as they drew closer with shifty black eyes before desperately snatching the crumbs and scampering off with a victorious wave of their bushy tails.  “Y'know, according to Sweetie Belle, there are some rodents on the far edges of Equestria who can actually talk.  You ever heard of that?”

        “Oh, the world is a vast and strange place, Scootaloo.  There are many wonders to behold.  And... er... Y-Yes, what to you and I may appear to be a normal member of wild fauna could very well have a distant cousin with enough intelligence to rival ponydom.  Any animal is capable of amazing thinking skills.  I bet it would surprise even you.  Mmm... Take for example Princess Celestia's prize pet, Philomena.  On the surface, a phoenix appears as simple-minded as any partridge or songbird.  But it is in fact a very noble and smart creature.  It understands our language very well; ponies are just not advanced enough to understand the likes of its beautiful, fiery melodies.  Hmm-hmm-hmm...”  The yellow pegasus ended with a breathy chuckle.

        “Phoenix... Phoenix... Phoenix...” Scootaloo thought aloud, her orange face scrunching under a wind-kissed mane of pink.  “Remind me:  is that the really scary thing with a chicken's head that—”  She gulped.  “—turns innocent ponies to st-stone?”

        “Oh, no, Scootaloo.”  Fluttershy gently shook her head as she patted the munching turtle and turned to face the foal.  “That's a cockatrice.  They're not nearly as intelligent as phoenixes, and they're far more irascible.”

        “Far more irasci—Huh?”

        “Meaning that they get angry a lot more easily.”  Fluttershy explained with a bashful smile.  “Phoenixes may look scary, with their flaming wings and all, but they're very peaceful creatures, if not a teeeeny bit mischievous.”  Another giggle, flanked with an embarrassed blush that Scootaloo could barely comprehend.  “Still, it's not a good idea to... erm... to anger a Phoenix.”

        “Heh, I'll be sure never to do that,” Scootaloo said.

        There was a sudden crackle in the air, like the peaceful earth was being split in two.  The animals thinned in half, a good chunk of them flocking on flustered feathers towards the sky.  Fluttershy too was spooked, briefly yelping with a girlish octave before calming down and murmuring towards the local wildlife:  “It's okay!  It's okay!  No need to be frightened!”  She nevertheless gulped and braved a more solid breath.  “It's just thunder!  The storm's still far away, my pretties!”

        Scootaloo eyed the horizon, spotting the dark clouds in question as they thickened more and more meatily over the western edge of the Equestrian Valley.  “Seriously—Today of all days?  I thought the weather fliers had already scheduled a storm last week!”

        “Winter Wrap-Up is long gone,” Fluttershy said as she tossed more crumbs onto the pond's surface for a gaggle of geese that had courageously returned to the sound of her solacing voice.  “Now that summer's almost upon us, there's a very busy quota to fill if we're to buffer the coming heat.  I'm not... erm... exactly an expert on climate control.  Rainbow Dash tried explaining it to me one time.  She mentioned that if enough storms aren't made early enough, then the moisture could build up into a cyclone by mid-July, and nopony w-wants that sort of a dreadful thing...”

        “Heh—I wouldn't mind a little bit of excitement like that!”

        Fluttershy gulped.  “Scootaloo, have you ever been in a cyclone?”

        “Not yet.”  The orange filly yawned, eyeing the darkening horizon.

        “Well, I have, and it's anything but a pleasurable experience!  Equestria can be a scary place when weather goes unchecked.”

        “But then you've got hurricane parties!”

        “Erm... Hurricane parties?”  Fluttershy's blue eyes blinked obtusely.

        “Yeah!”  Scootaloo beamed.  “Apple Bloom told me all about them!  Three years ago, this really nasty cyclone struck Ponyville—because Winter Wrap Up was finished late that spring or some crap, what-the-heck-ever—but the Apple Family made a whole thing with it, and when they waited the storm out in their cellar they played music and had caramel apples and told scary stories and stuff.”

        “That sounds most delightful.”  Fluttershy smiled bashfully.  “But, Scootaloo, you hardly need a terrible storm to enjoy tranquil moments.”

        “Why not?”  Scootaloo hunched down over folded hooves and smirked devilishly at her reflection in the rippling water.  “The world can be a really stiff and boring place sometimes.  Fluttershy, have you ever wondered just how—I dunno—relaxing it'd be if things just shut down for once?”

        “Shut down?”

        “Y'know—Ponies going to their daily jobs, the same newspaper delivering the same boring stories, the delivery pegasi flying the same mundane routes; if all of that just stopped—like all of the sudden—well, I think that could be a very fun day.  With nothing to do, you'd have everything to do.  Do you see where I'm going with this?”

        “It almost sounds like you want the world to end, Scootaloo.”

        “Pfft!  Don't be silly, Fluttershy.”  She smirked once more.  “So much of what goes on in Ponyville is so... so boring.”

        “I... erm... I dunno.”  Fluttershy tossed a light pink mane over her fidgeting features and muttered:  “I-I don't really go into town too much.  Well.. erm... except f-for when Rarity invites me over for tea or something delightful like that.”  She managed the barest hint of a smile.

        “You of all ponies should know where I'm coming from, Fluttershy, even if I can't exactly spell it out.”  Scootaloo gestured with a hoof.  “You hang out with animals all the time, right?  Animals don't have the same curse of boredom that ponies do, right?  I mean, they just come and go as they please, eating out of your hoof when you let them, or stealing out of your basket when you don't.”  That uttered, she winked pointedly over Fluttershy's shoulder.

        “Hmmm?”  The yellow pegasus did a double-take at her belongings and gasped breathlessly at a pair of squirrels that were presently dipping their greedy paws directly into her bag of bread crumbs.  “Oh no no no no!  Don't be rude—Please!”  She made a start to close the bag; the rodents shrieked at her with a chorus of shrill barks and scampered angrily towards a distant oak tree.  “Ohhhh—That's the third time those two have done that this week!”

        Scootaloo blinked.  “You memorize every squirrel?”

        “Only the mean ones,” Fluttershy murmured, staring with sudden mastery towards the tree branches and forcing the two bushy-tailed scavengers to flee.  “Rest assured... uhm... it's a short list.  Eh heh heh... Hmm...”

        “Maybe you and Sweetie Belle could fetch their distant cousins to talk some sense into them.”

        “Mmmm... Then I would be out of a job, would I not?”  Fluttershy braved a wink.

        “Heaven forbid!”  Scootaloo chuckled.  Resting her snout against her forelimbs in a sudden sigh, she gazed up at the blistering noonday sky in question.  Against the solidifying wall of dark distant thunderclouds there hovered a wispy pair of beds that contrasted sharply, like two pale rocks against a dull earth.  White granite names flickered across her violet eyes and were gone in a decaying shadow, like yesterday's scent.  A deflated murmur, and Scootaloo spoke up.  “Fluttershy?”

        “Mmm?”  Fluttershy cooed, glancing over from where she was tying her bag of crumbs shut.  “Yes, Scootaloo?”

        “I... I was just curious,” Scootaloo muttered as she dug a hoof lethargically into the moist edge of the pond, kneading the horizon between the dry earth and the anchorless firmaments.  “I know that you're the head groundskeeper and all, but... did you know anypony, specifically, who died in... uhm... who died in the Everclear Mine?”

        Fluttershy immediately shook a somber head.  “No, Scootaloo.  Though I have met and talked with many ponies who have dealt with that tragedy: Caramel, Carrot Top, Pinkie Pie—”

        A painful twitch of her orange ears, and Scootaloo sat up with a near jolt.  “Pinkie Pie lost somepony she knew to Everclear?!?”

        Fluttershy bit her lip pensively.  “Erm... N-Not exactly.  But her hometown of Dredgemane has dealt with an ongoing tragedy that's rather similar.  The same horrible substance that poisoned so many Ponyvillean miners—infernite—has been known to pollute the rock quarries and the farms where Pinkie's family is from.  Even to this day, many orphaned foals struggle to survive, battling lung disease on account of the infernite that was horribly given to them by their parents before they too passed.”

        “That...” Scootaloo gulped a lump down her throat, feeling guilty for reasons she struggled to explain to her own quivering mind.  “That sounds awful, Fluttershy.”

        “Yes.  It is.  Terribly awful.” Fluttershy nodded somberly.  “Lately, Zecora has been making several trips to Dredgemane to see if Zebraharan medicine might produce a remedy.  But many ponies believe that it's too late, even if most of those polluted mines have since been cleaned up.  There's just so much damage.  And Pinkie's mother...”  The yellow pegasus found her blue eyes staring after the trailing edges of her last utterance.  She wilted instantly.

        Scootaloo narrowed her eyes at her.  “What about Pinkie Pie's mommy?”

        Fluttershy cleared her throat and not so stealthily changed the subject.  “But there's no sign of infernite left in Everclear.  All of that was scooped out years ago by teams of Canterlotlian unicorns specialized in the field of metallurgy.”  She smiled placidly.  “So, there's no chance of any groundskeeper you know getting infected anytime soon.”  She winked at the end of that... as if it was necessary.

        “I'm not worried about that, Fluttershy, I guess I'm just...”  Scootaloo tongued the inside of her mouth, exhaled through bursting cheeks, and gazed once more at the forlorn thunderclouds.  “I'm just wondering what made ponies want to work in a deep dark place that dangerous to begin with.”

        “Some did it for bits,” Fluttershy straightforwardly explained, nuzzling a train of ducklings as they passed by the pegasus and sauntered into the rippling surface of the pond, skimming after their mother.  “Others did it because they knew the work was dangerous, but they were skilled enough to prevent other less expert ponies from putting themselves into harm's way.”

        “Do you suppose that... that...” Scootaloo shrugged, cleared her throat, and gazed decidedly away from Fluttershy.  “...that some of them did it for their families?”

        “Oh, most definitely.”  Fluttershy smiled, her voice like a golden song.  “Ponies do not live on bits alone; they work to provide for the ones they love.  You know that, Scootaloo.”

        “But if ponies worked in the mines for the sake of their families, isn't that kind of selfish?”

        “I... Uhm... I don't think I understand, Scootaloo.”

        “So many ponies at Everclear died because the stuff that they were working with was dangerous.”  The foal stared with iron violets aimed the yellow pegasus' way.  “And they knew it was dangerous.  I'm not trying to be... uhm... insulting to the Monument I stumbled upon today, Fluttershy, but can't you see how a lot of those ponies—and their families—were kind of asking for what happened to them?”

        “Life asks for much from all of us, Scootaloo,” Fluttershy responded with a swiftness that surprised the blinking foal.  “But we ponies answer the call of our marks bravely, because to back away from what we're talented in would be an even greater insult to what we mean to our families... Erm...” She deflated with a suddenly rosy breath, but it was hardly a warm one.  She glanced away with a pale sigh.  “At least... uhm... that's what I-I have always believed: that our talents are all about honoring our... uhm... honoring our families.  You're welcome to make your own judgments of course, Scootaloo...”

        Scootaloo raised an eyebrow at Fluttershy's sudden digression.  She glanced suddenly at the pegasus' flank.  The three pink butterflies that made up the filly's cutie mark were as beautiful and striking as always, but they paled suddenly in an inexplicable shade.  They appeared lonelier somehow; the yellow-coated spaces between them stretched towards infinity.

        The foal wrenched her eyes back towards Fluttershy while braving a smile.  “What you do here, Fluttershy—taking care of the animals and the cottage and the Memorial and all—is it something that you do because it means a lot to your family as well?”

        Scootaloo's smile was not so easily reflected in Fluttershy's face, at least not immediately.  The adult pegasus limpingly replied, “Uhm... I don't exactly see my family much, Scootaloo.”  A gulp, then a nervous smile.  “But I do visit them from time to time in Cloudsdale, when the schedule permits.”  After a deep and tranquil breath, Fluttershy basked in the moist air as the sound of fur and feathers flapped breezily around the two of them.  “On any given day, the animals are my family.  What I do honors them.  I think that's the way it should be for all ponies; in some way or another we are all working to impress Mother Nature.”

        “Heh... I can't say I've made her happy,” Scootaloo groaned.  “I track dirt across Mother Nature all the time with my scooter.”

        “Ohhh, do not feel bad for something so trivial.”  Fluttershy gracefully nuzzled Scootaloo's pink mane.  “You should be happy... and proud, Scootaloo, that you have loving parents who entrust you with such a respectable degree of freedom.”

        Scootaloo wanted to smile, inhaling the warmth of Fluttershy's gentle contact, but for the life of her, she couldn't, not on the crest of those last few words.  Still, a golden tone in the yellow pegasus' voice lifted a tiny dead weight from the orange foal's stomach, so that she levitated off the precipice of sadness, enriched by a hope that lingered beyond a curtain of memories that was once just as platinum as the filly's silken voice.

        When the next roll of thunder hit, it was Scootaloo's turn to gasp.  Before she knew it, she was being pelted with hard wet daggers of rain from a suddenly overcast sky.

        “Oh dear!” Fluttershy gasped.  She hopped up onto frail limbs and gazed with twitching blue eyes towards the horizon.  “I was not paying attention!  The storm is happening already!”  She squeaked through clenched teeth and flashed Scootaloo a sad gaze as the animals beyond them thinned out and flocked away towards dry cover.  “I'm so, so terribly sorry, Scootaloo.  How irresponsible of me!  I should have been paying attention to the weather, but instead I was... I was...”

        “Fluttershy, it's fine.”  Scootaloo stood up straight, stretching her limbs lazily in spite of the thickening rain that was starting to suffocate them both.  “I'm not a frickin' infant anymore!”  She kicked her scooter up with an expert hoof and gripped its suddenly extended handles.  “I know my way home.  I won't get too drenched.”  She put on a poker face.  “I promise.”

        “Perish the thought!”  Fluttershy practically hissed, leering over Scootaloo with a sympathetic gaze.  “The last thing I want to do while your parents are away is cause you to get a cold or—” She gasped.  “Even worse!  Pneumonia!  You must wait out the storm with me!  My cottage is just over the hillside.”

        “Uhhhh... Eh heh heh.” Scootaloo gulped and sweated profusely under the cover of wet precipitation.  She shuddered, her limbs instinctually melting, feeling ten thousand times weaker than Fluttershy's, or so a beating crimson core inside her preached emphatically.  “Fluttershy, I'm fine.  If I get a little wet behind the ears, it's no big deal.  There's no need to—”

        “I do not only have a duty to the animals and the land, but to all living things.”  Fluttershy picked up her wicker basket, saddled it over her flank, and gazed lovingly at the foal as her golden voice hummed:  “As far as I am concerned, Scootaloo, you are my family too.  Please let me give you shelter.  Let me honor you and your parents.”

        Scootaloo's eyes went concave, for she saw in Fluttershy's blue pupils a reflection that suddenly matched the yellow pegasus' expression, that of a sudden wilting, a mirrored tunnel of burning pinpricks, two lost twins to the pitifully soiled moment.  It wasn't even the stare, and still Scootaloo knew she couldn't say “no”, especially when every concealed and starving centimeter of her shivering soul had begged for years to say “yes” to this golden hue of an invitation.  For a gorgeously paradoxical moment, it was honor—and not strength—that urged her forward.

        “But...” Scootaloo nevertheless murmured in a sudden wave of apprehension, “...you do remember the last time I stayed at your place, right?”

        “That depends.”  Fluttershy smiled with a suddenly bold hoofhold of the situation.  “Do you?”

        Scootaloo bit her lip.  “Right.  I promise not to break any tables this time.”

        “Do you now?”  Fluttershy stifled a knowing giggle.

        The orange foal raised a confused eyebrow at that.

        “Okay, then.”  Fluttershy's voice magically hummed with a bottled jolt of subtle exultation, as if she was an Alicorn daughter discovering her sibling for the first time ever.  “Follow me; I know the way home.”

        “Sure thing, Fluttershy.”  Scootaloo numbly followed the pink swish of the filly's tail on a glistening scooter as the rain chased them hungrily.  “I'm sure you do...”

        Scootaloo stumbled, lost in darkness, following the silk kisses of the dragon tooth as she navigated the white moonvision forward.  In the deepest depths of the Everfree Briar, a solid web of thorned vines blanketed the white static ahead of her like a sheet of black foil.  Here, the skittering shadows of unlife dissipated, so that she proceeded forward in a confident breath, crouching and threading her way through a thin cleft of barbed stalks.

        She pierced a spacious vacuum on the other side, startled to experience a sudden break in the brambles.  Her moonvision paled into snowy blankness, and for a space in time she shuffled herself on three hooves, one forelimb outstretched to feel for any sudden obstruction as she blindly limped forward.  She felt the leathered layers of armor shifting on her shoulders as she lurched to the sound of her masked breaths.  The air felt colder than cold, numbing her with the drip-drop of condensation off her holstered rifle's brass barrel.

        The blindness of this furthest venture naturally worried her, and were it not for the increasingly fervent pulses of her dragon tooth, Scootaloo wouldn't have been risking this sojourn.  Something about this open space in the Briar felt unnatural, as if it had been carved out of the thick forest of barbed vines by something with greater audacity than the meager black shapes that had skittered out of the range of her moonvision upon first arriving there.  Still, the last pony knew that she had no intention of lingering in that remote hovel.  As soon as she acquired what she had descended for, Scootaloo intended to gallop back the loathsome way which she came.  The phantom image of the Harmony's toastily lit cabin suddenly throbbed with a heavenly intensity in the back of the lone scavenger's mind.

        The dragon tooth was positively burning now, like a paradoxical string of silk-soft firecrackers licking up and down her sternum.  Her heart fluttered faster and faster as she trudged along her velvety path, and suddenly a great black wave of matter was lurching before her upon the horizon of her goggles' moonvision.  With a mute gasp, she glanced up through the bubble of claustrophobic breathing to finally grace the image of her target.

        And that's when everything went utterly black, a black so damnably dark and pitiful that even Death had to have been brighter.  It was with a low grumbling curse that the last pony realized the enchantment had dwindled from the runes in her goggles.  Her moonvision had run out.

        As horrible a situation as this was, Scootaloo had very easily planned for it.  She wouldn't be alive after so many years of Wasteland trips if it wasn't for such veteran foresight.  With a calming breath, she slowly knelt down onto the cold stone earth and reached blind hooves back to her saddlebag.  She produced the leather pouch of moondust from its pocket and gently laid it down on firm ground ahead of her.  She then removed her leather breathing mask, shuddering as a wave of exhaled vapor wafted up to her nostrils in the frigid air.  With steady hooves, she slid her goggles off, or so she mentally told herself; her naked eyes couldn't tell if she was unmasking or not.  With expert practice, she numbly refilled the goggles with moondust, like a surgeon operating on an infant in the dark.  All the while, the tooth against her chest pulsed and pulsed, liquidly tugging her soul towards an inexplicable wall lingering, unseen, ahead of her.  Scootaloo knew that her target was just within a ghostly lunge, and all she needed was to find a way to see what was directly in front of her.

        Finally, she finished refilling the goggles.  Snapping the frames shut, she raised the article to her unmasked face, squeezed them firmly against her sockets, and daringly uttered her first vocalization since diving into the ravenous depths of that abysmal place.

        “Y'lynwyn.”

        The dead world exploded in white moonvision.  Immediately in the snow-billowing midst of it there stretched a black stalk of jagged streaks, framed with what looked like angel wings.  A mute shriek immediately escaped Scootaloo as the tooth pressed to her chest melted in a silken slosh of pain and comfort all at once, for stretched before her against a wall of granite—like a hollow crucifix—was the skeleton of a pegasus, strung up and suspended by hundreds upon hundreds of wire-thin thorns that wrapped in and about the spaces of the long dead pegasus' rib cage and vertebrae.  Fluttershy's skull was tilted to the side, devoid of all of its pink threads, and the flaky wisps of feathery impressions haloed her as a pair of anorexic wings sharply flanked her propped remains.  She resembled a soft butterfly preserved against a wall of impenetrable slade.

        She wasn't alone either.  Scootaloo gaped to see several other skeletons plastered to the solid black wall alongside Fluttershy:  the brittle bodies of deers, songbirds, snakes, owls, and several other scrumptious things that used to fill the green depths of the Everfree Forest.  Whatever strung these skeletons up wasn't a graceful creature. The wall was cracked and impacted in several places by frustrated craters, crunched in the shape of gigantic pawprints.

        But what mesmerized Scootaloo the most was the skeletonous form that was positioned closest to Fluttershy's corpse.  It was mounted on the wall remarkably near to the deceased pegasus, an act that seemed far too deliberate to be accidental.  There was no single word to describe the creature.  A large skull with a slender snout—twice the size of Fluttershy's—was dangling precariously from a cluster of thorns that had snapped halfway loose over the resounding decades.  A pair of goat horns stretched out from the cranium of this teetering beast.  Two large cloven hooves extended from strong forelimbs, but directly below the torso the creature's body transformed into a severely segmented spine that ended in a vertical fin.  Whatever this mammalian skeleton was, it had the lower half of a marine animal, more appropriately a gigantic river fish.  What was more:  surrounding the dangling body of this battered specimen was a charred imprint in the rock, and it looked decidedly like mana burns.

        “What in blazes...?”  Scootaloo bravely, stupidly muttered aloud in the frigid tomb of the Everfree Briar.  She gulped and gazed sickly at the bizarre chimaera that stretched before her.  “What was she doing when the Cataclysm hit?  And with this freak of all things?”

        Scootaloo hummed curiously to herself, but in truth she was delaying what came next.  With a resettling melancholy, she shudderingly gazed back up at the crucified shape of her former friend.  A wilted breath, and she trotted up towards the blackness before her moonvision and stood up on her hind-quarters, bracing herself with forelimbs that clasped the hard granite on either side of Fluttershy's pinned figure.

        “I can only hope it was peaceful.”  She pretended to be talking to herself.  “Just like your life was.”  She gulped.  A part of her—something colored with the faint shades of Spike—believed that this moment needed a prolonged pause.  However, she was still the same scavenger who unceremoniously fished Applejack's skull out of a run-down storm cellar; she attempted to take what she needed here with no less brevity.  Twisting her left horseshoe counter-clockwise, Scootaloo extended a curved blade from the copper material and aimed it at the ancient thorns anchoring Fluttershy's cold spine to the wall.  “I'll find a place for you—just like Applejack.  I promise—”

        She was answered midway through her utterance by a sudden field of white utterly blanketing her goggles' enchanted vision.  All discernible shadows faded into the ivory miasma with a flash.  Grunting, Scootaloo fumed to think that the enchantment of her runes had died out again.  But this was somehow different; everything hadn't faded to black.  The moonvision was simply betraying her, refusing to display the spatial distortions that she knew were obviously there with every lingering touch her hoof and blade made to Fluttershy's hapless skeleton.

        In a desperate grumble, Scootaloo once more throated, “Y'lynwyn.”  Nothing happened.  “Y'lynwyn.”  Again, nothing: the same pale infinity encompassed the entirety of her monochromatic vision.  It was then that Scootaloo gave into baser instincts... and slid her goggles up from her eyes entirely.

        The pain that burned into her scarlet optics was excruciating.  For a moment there, she believed that she had literally been stabbed in the face by some randomly flying creature of the underworld.  Scootaloo could only wish she was that lucky.  The wheels turned in the last pony's head, and soon the black world bled into nightmarish focus.  For the first time in several solid hours of exploring the Briar via moonvision, Scootaloo was being exposed to actual light.  She briefly speculated that her saddlebag had fallen open and the jar of Spike's green flame had dripped out to overwhelm her enchanted goggles.  But as the pain in her eyes settled, Scootaloo finally managed to identify the color of the strange alien glow.  It wasn't green; it was blue.

        This, in addition to a low bass rumbling that suddenly vibrated the very foundation of that stony hovel, and Scootaloo was forced to turn icily around.  From beyond the wall of porous brambles, the last pony was perplexed to be staring at starlight.  She blinked... blinked again, but there indeed still lingered a blazing carpet of twinkling blue cosmos—only it wasn't a carpet; it was a coat.  It was fur, and out from this magically glowing flank of flesh there extended titanic claws over four meters in serrated length.  Scootaloo's wincing scarlets followed the billowing limb up, up, up, up—until she found herself staring at a mammoth titan of a creature, shimmering blue from feral head to tail with living constellations, looming beyond the web of thick briars that allowed the last pony enough space to see a thick muscular skull with glistening twin fangs and a bristled blue forehead crowned with an eight-pointed sapphire star.

        Scootaloo gulped, standing suddenly in the center of a starlit den, fully understanding exactly what it was that had mounted the stone wall with so many trophies of its prey... and cratering paw prints.

        “Yeah, okay.  I'm dead.”

        In an ear-splitting roar, casting a thorned kaleidoscope of blue-and-black bands across the stony floor, the towering Ursa Major raised a muscular paw and smashed through the iron thick wall of brambles before charging the tiny pony on all fours.  The basement of the world shook under a hail of razor sharp wooden scythes.  The flightless pegasus gasped and stumbled across the rumbling rock floor, struggling to avoid the deadly projectiles—until she floundered helplessly into the path of the Ursa's stomping forelimbs.  A ravenous growl, the gigantic starlit bear slammed both paws down at the ill-fated pony.

        With a grunt, Scootaloo nipped up and barely flipped out of the way.  The sheer impact of the gigantic beast's weight knocked her five meters through the air so that she landed through a dusty pile of bones and dried up fecal matter in the corner of the lair.  Coughing in a haze of filthy blue dust, she looked up in time to see a forest of glinting claws flinging her way.  In a brave gasp, Scootaloo breathlessly leaped forward, bounded off the Ursa's hairy wrist, and dove past its monumental lunge.  The blacker-than-black world rumbled once more as the beast's claws raked the dry earth.  The creature lurched to keep up with the tiny equine shadow as Scootaloo galloped suicidally between its legs and then dodged a swish of the monster's cedar-thick tail.

        “Nnngh!”  Scootaloo dove, tumbled, and slid until she collapsed into a crumpled heap against the wall beneath Fluttershy's skeleton.  Panting, her goggles bent and cracked, she flashed a look at her old companion's remains, at the Ursa Major turning menacingly around, then back up at the angelic spread once more.  “OhcrudOhcrudOhcrud—So sorry about this!”  She leaped high, clasped all four hooves over Fluttershy's neck, and pulled at it with all her weight.  “Nnnngh!”

        The Ursa Major roared.  Red-on-yellow eyes brimming with hate, the celestial beast thunderously charged.

        “Hckkkt—Scrkkk!”  Scootaloo hissed through sweat and pain.  The dead pegasus' spine started to bend and crack.

        A cataclysmic thunder: the gigantic bear's serrated paw flew down at full force.

        With a cry, Scootaloo jerked her torso back.  “Ungh!”  Fluttershy's skull gave way with a snap.  Scootaloo fell to the lair's floor just in time; the Ursa Major's fist instantly pulverized Fluttershy's headless corpse to dust.  The wall cracked with a thousand rivulets, shaking loose several dozen sets of pinned skeletons that rained down on Scootaloo's panting figure as she hooked the pegasus' skull under a sweating forelimb and limpingly scampered on three hooves towards the shuddering wall of thorns stretching wide ahead of her.

        The roaring Ursa swiveled about and instantly chased the last pony's pink tail hairs.  A chorus of deathly percussions exploded nearer and nearer.  Scootaloo was practically limping; she needed all four limbs.  With a grunt, she flung Fluttershy's skull up and through a random space in the briars before galloping at full speed, leaping, and sliding herself under a tiny sliver of split thorns.  The serrated wooden teeth knicked her brown coat as she stood up on the other side—

        The briars exploded behind her.  Scootaloo yelled, blinded in the cyclonic toss as she flew with a rain of wooden splinters and thorny shrapnel.  A century later, she slammed into a stone outcropping and slid down to the dust-littered floor.  Wincing, she tearfully flashed a panicked gaze, helplessly looking for a sign of where Fluttershy's tossed skull landed amidst the blinding sea of briar bits and shards.

        Her breath vapors lit up with a bright blue horror.  Scootaloo gasped, glanced up briefly, and pounced out of the way of a lunging paw.  Another swing, then another:  each furious throw of the Ursa's limbs formed huge craters in the dead womb of Everfree beneath her.  The titanic bear howled in frustration and dumbly belly-flopped, as if the whole bulk of its weight would be enough to finally squash the elusive equine.

        Through absolute sheer luck, the flightless pegasus slid beyond the crook of the glowing beast's upper armpit.  The monster's collapsing weight flung her yet again across the black subterranean expanse, only this time she tumbled into something that knocked into her forehead with a silky kiss of powdery dust.

        “Unnngh—”  Scootaloo blinked—then gasped with psychotic euphoria.  “Yes!”  She grasped the miraculous skull of her old friend in two hooves and kissed its pale surface.  “I love you!”

        The crooked shadows of the deep place shifted as the Ursa lurched, slowly hoisting its hulking weight upwards.  Scootaloo's twitching eyes spotted a direct path towards an ascending bridge of criss-crossing vines... and freedom, but there was one gigantic dumb blue thing in the way.  Something snapped inside the frazzled survivor's synapses, and with dilated pupils she stood up, grinded her hooves, and clamped her teeth over the jawbone of Fluttershy's skull, holding it.  “Nnnnnnngh—Aaaaaaughhh!”  With a savage suicidal roar into the muffling bone, Scootaloo blitzed the rear-end of the lumbering titan.

        The Ursa Major flinched in shock as it felt the desperate pegasus'shooves scamper up its tailbone, over its rump, across its spine, and finally kicking off the starry crown of its forehead with a gallant leap.  Scootaloo propelled her body through the air and towards the bridge of thorns.  She landed with a victorious, echoing clop and charged up the length of twisting vines.

        No sooner had the last pony begun this precarious gallop than the Ursa Major was murderously pursuing with a rampage of flinging paws, reducing the iron-wrought length of the vines at Scootaloo's tail to sundered twigs.  Scootaloo panted and hissed into her toothed grip of Fluttershy's skull, horrified and elated at the same time to have the blue aura lighting her desperate sprint the entire time.  The bloodthirsty Ursa Major illuminated up the bowels of the Everfree Briar with sapphiric menace as it angrily chased the hapless equine.  Scootaloo's adrenalized mind briefly scoffed at the death-blink of the situation; she was hardly anything that could fill the Ursa Major's stomach... nor was Fluttershy's meager flesh, so many years ago, when the lone cosmic bear had to have been a mere cub.  Why was this monster hiding in the darkest, most abandoned spot in all of Equestria?  Why was it so angry?

        Another thunderous impact shook Scootaloo out of her twenty-kilometer-per-hour ponderings.  A muffled shriek, and she flew forward upon the sheer propulsion of her thorny bridge having exploded from underneath her.  She soared in the direction of the Ursa's last flung fist, until she suddenly slammed into a hanging fork of thorns that squeezed her dangling body in place from above.

        “Nnngh—Ptooiee!”  Scootaloo gasped as she found herself helplessly spitting Fluttershy's skull out from her jaws.  She watched as the remains of her friend coldly rattled to a stop across a plateau of slade-black stone beneath her.  The last pony's limbs weightlessly flailed from where she dangled, helplessly pinned in between the two hanging thorns compressed into either side of her thick armor.  “Come on—Come on!!”  She tried spreading her wings to shake herself free from the saddlebag encompassing her, but her gear was tied too tightly about her brown-coated form.  Suddenly, the ceiling of the Briar shook violently as the blue haze intensified brighter... brighter... brighter.  Scootaloo panted, blinked, then in a sudden epiphany she exhaled every bit of breath out from her lungs.

        Her body deflated; her ribs shrank.  She slid victoriously down from the squeezing thorns—and then the Ursa's jaws were upon her.  The world turned hotly dark, and all four of Scootaloo's hooves splashed into a spongy puddle.  She didn't even need to look; the last pony bounded forward, breathlessly leaping off of the Ursa Major's tongue a bare millisecond before the beast's teeth clamped down.  The concussive blast of the snapping jaws flung the pegasus forward like a missile.  She ricocheted over the rocky plateau like a skipping stone across an obsidian lake.  Her saddlebag tore open and her bruised face winced before a flash of emerald light.  Gasping, she spotted the fragile glass jar of Spike's green flame rolling free towards the edge of the cliff.  With a grunting lunge, she flung her body forward and clamped two front hooves over the runed container before it could plunge into the deep blackness below—

        The Ursa's blue face surged immediately into view.  With a spitting roar, the giant bear gave the stone cliff a massive uppercut.  The plateau sundered in two, with the shattered floor beneath the pegasus upending so that she slid back, back, back towards a pitted hollow of gnarled thorns below.  She tumbled and cascaded in reverse, gasping at the sight of a brittle white skull sliding several meters parallel to her and towards a deep and inescapable crevice.

        With a hissing breath, Scootaloo kicked against a crumbling chunk of earth, cartwheeled over towards the skeleton in mid-slide, and juggled it along with the green glowing jar in two hooves as she reached the end of her glide, tumbled upside down, and ragdolled across a space of rocky floor.

        “Mmmf!!”

        The thorny roof to the claustrophobic hollow shook and shuddered above with each blue step of the menace beyond the encompassing vines.  Scootaloo hugged the skull and jar to herself, flashing a panting glance every which way for an exit from her current prison of serrated barbs.  The only way out was the exact way she rockily slid in, and suddenly occupying that deathly exit was the gaping maw of a murderously giant bear.  Scootaloo had nowhere to go, nowhere to run, nowhere to flee... but backwards.  Her scarlet eyes blinked at the only avenue of freedom available to her.  She gulped, glancing forlornly at the precious skull that shook in her hooves with each thunderous paw-step.

        The Ursa Major roared and lunged its cosmic neck through the crumbling frame of the hollow's opening.  Starry arteries under its translucent skin twinkled with bloodthirsty constellations as it snapped its jaws further and further towards the cornered pegasus, closing the gasping centimeters with each toothed snarl.

        Scootaloo's spine was pressed straight back into a wooden wall.  With a brave growl summoned from deep within, the last pony shut her eyes, gripped the skull tight in two hooves, and viciously slammed it over her forehead.  Fluttershy's bones dissolved to dust, blanketing the scavenger from snout to torso in white snow.  Bathed in the reagent, Scootaloo juggled the jar up past the slicing swish-a-swish of the Ursa's drooling fangs, and she screamed into the runed cap as she simultaneously shouted down the bear's echoing throat:

        “Y'hnyrr!”

        The jar unsealed.  The cap flew off like a bullet.  Spike's emerald breath wafted over her in a wave of chronometric heat.

        The Ursa Major's jaws flew shut over her.

        Scootaloo shrieked—only to have the ashes of Fluttershy tightly lasso around her bruised and twitching figure.  With a metaphysical tug, she was pulled backwards on gossamer strings, her hooves kicking away from the Ursa Major's chin as the creature's snarling face flew away at a million kilometers per second.  The last pony's vision was overtaken by the billowing emerald tunnel she was being forcibly ferried down.  Her eyes teared and flamed from scarlet to amber.  Her pink stubble billowed blackly outward like a kite's tail as she twirled on the length of Fluttershy's ashes, her body spiraling down the dancing corridor between Ages.  Instinctually, she flung her copper wings out and dragged friction through the suddenly blossoming air before landing in a smoking heap on a soft mound of grass besides a babbling brook... and a soft pegasus' familiar, tranquil cottage.

        Silence.

        Then there was a gasping voice, that of a startled foal just a few meters to Scootaloo's blind peripheral.

        Wincing, the time traveler tilted her head up from her smoking crater in the grassy yard.  She squinted weakly towards the sight of a petite gray-coated unicorn blinking wide-eyed at her from across a tiny teaset replete with glistening pitchers, saucers, teacups, and various stuffed animals seated around a pink table beside her.

        Several seconds of silence fluttered between Scootaloo and the blonde blinking foal, until the last pony hissed a dry chuckle, her smiling lips simmering with a few last trails of green smoke.  “Mind if I h-have a s-sip, please...?”

        The mark-less foal nod-nod-nodded, gulping and wordlessly passing a full pitcher of mint tea across the petite table in a pair of shaking hooves.

        Scootaloo lurched over, grasped the utensil in a shuddering grasp, and drank for all of her life's worth.  The tangy quaff that rolled down her throat was electrifying, and it shook away the horrific shadows of the Briar's bruises as Scootaloo squinted at the cottage in a glistening noonday Sun before exhaling with a mighty:  “Hoboyyyyyy.”  The last pony slapped the pitcher down onto the table, heaved for a few breathless seconds, and finally... finally stood up on all four hooves.

        “Did you just fall from the sky, Miss—?”  The foalish unicorn murmured in a strangely intelligent tone; she had to have been no older than four, maybe five winters, though she sounded practically twelve.

        “'Harmony',” the time traveler obligatorily throated.  “And—Yeah, sure.  I fell from the sky, kid.”  She flexed her copper wings and muttered dizzily, “Where is she...?”

        “My name is 'Dinky'.”  The kid matter-of-factly nodded her tiny stub of a gray horn.  “I'm going to be a scientist when I grow up.”

        “Uh huh.  That's cute.  Where is she...?”  Scootaloo fiercely resumed scanning the horizon with frustrated amber eyes.

        “Are you looking for my baby-sitter?”

        “I...”  Scootaloo paused.  The scent of pondwater flew phantom paths through her nostrils, the sensation of kicking a scooter through an afternoon downpour.  She glanced down at the foal as if she was regarding the kid's existence for the first time ever.  “....Yes.  Where is your babysitter, Dinky?”

        The unicorn child twirled about and pointed a petite hoof towards the cottage.  “She's in there, talking to a stiff, mean, unhappy lady who just flew in from the Cloudsdale Animal Commission.  I don't think you want to bother them.”

        “Yeah, well, we'll see about that.”

        “Did you know that the average pony eats about four live spiders in a lifetime of sleep?”

        “Wow.  That's amazing.  Look, I gotta go... uhm... talk to your babysitter.”  Scootaloo stumbled dazedly towards the front yard of the beautifully flowered cottage, traversing a babbling brook.  She flippantly called back over her shoulder.  “And I'm telling your mommy, by the way.”

        “What for?”  The foal calmly blinked.

        “You really shouldn't be talking to strangers, kid.”

        The gray foal shook her horned head.  “I'm not scared.”

        “You should be.  It's a dangerous world.”

        “What makes you say that?”

        “Because I exist.”  Scootaloo swallowed a brave lump down her throat as she made her way over a tiny bridge and slowly approached the golden doorstep of another long dead friend.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Twelve – Evershy

Special Thanks to Chobit-389 for Cover Art

        It was a red robin that made Scootaloo pause in mid-trot.  Upon scarlet wings, it shot away from her in a tail-burst of fright.  The copper-coated pegasus froze a bare meter from the door to Fluttershy's cottage, glancing about with a sudden blink as several more squirming things viciously fled her peripheral.  These, however, were not the horrific indiscernible shadows of a moonvisioned Briar, but very warm, very colorful, very frightened animals spurred on by a four-hooved stranger steeled in her mastery of fear.  Several sets of beady eyes—mammalian, avarian, amphibian—peered out from an array of sun-glistening hiding spots all along the worn stone path leading up to the cottage door.

        Scootaloo stood, suddenly aware of the warm and breathing heaven that took a thorn-brambled hell to get there.  With a bloodrush of guilt and awkwardness, she remembered that she was an invulnerable shell, an alien projection of her soul self in the skin of an exiled Alicorn.  Though she came from a twilight Wasteland that knew no sleep, it didn't excuse thrusting the otherwordly shadows of the future upon the emerald glen that quivered under her every impatient hoofstep.

        Twitching amber eyes remembered a sea of frightened foals, Cheerilee's wincing face, the pale blinks of the entire Apple Family from across a dinner table.  With a deep breath, the last pony ushered the blistering bubbles out from her arteries.  Calmly, Scootaloo once again became Harmony, and with a swish of her black mane she smiled at the animals and softly sashayed the rest of the way towards the cottage door, limping and leaning desperately towards the one golden voice that lulled her there through the shimmering dragon's tooth.

        The front door alarmed the adult pegasus with its tiny size.  The cottage seemed an impossible dwarf to her decaying memories.  Piercing such trembling realizations, Harmony raised a hoof and knocked three polite times against the entrance's red wooden finish.  There was no response, no silken voice, no smiling face or glistening blue eyes, none of the soft colors that had rarely flickered through the last pony's gray-glossed dreams.

        Harmony sighed; she knocked again.  Still, there was no response.  Tiny fluffy animals stirred out of hiding behind her.  A small nose-twitching thing furriedly bounced bravely past the strange equine's leg.  Harmony glanced down, her brain taking three times as long as her stomach did to categorize the forgotten specimen: “chipmunk”.  Somehow, the true archaic name sounded a heck of a lot more ridiculous than “airship food”.

        The pegasus knocked a third time.  As she did so, she finally heard a voice, but it wasn't the golden voice of her anchor, but rather a blunt and flavorless voice, a biting and chewing voice, a voice that was as related to “Fluttershy” as a cold chunk of moonstone was to a daisy.  Harmony briefly remembered something that a gray markless foal had said several million years ago when she first landed outside the cottage from the green flames of reverse-time.  It was a breath of curiosity—not ignorance—that urged the pegasus forward.  With squinting amber eyes, Harmony realized that the cottage door had been left slightly ajar.  Shuffling over, she pressed a hoof against it...

        ...and gently pushed open the squeaking entrance to Fluttershy's warm and dry home.  The orange foal shivered in a wet pile before the hearth.  She gave a deep, shuddering breath before leaning her scooter against the outside of the cottage.  In a sudden air of politeness, she then pushed the door all the way and trotted aside to give the yellow pegasus room.  Fluttershy hurried in, her mane reduced to a damp pink towel from the thick afternoon downpour.  She set her empty basket down on the wooden green floorboards and stifled an inbound sneeze before smiling sweetly towards the dry depths of her antique dwelling.

        “It's alright!  You can come out!  Mommy's home!  And she brought a guest!”

        On cue, several squirrels, songbirds, ferrets, and various whiskery members of rodentia pitter-pattered out of an elaborate assortment of holes, wooden lattices, and pet doors all throughout the homely interior.  With adorably programmed trust, they all scampered to Fluttershy's flank and took turns stroking up against her legs and wet tail.  The Ponyvillean animal tamer smiled and nuzzled them back, her tongue and lips clicking in some hidden code of fauna.  Fluttershy was utterly soaked to the bone, but that didn't stop her from making a bee-line towards a large wooden cabinet from which she dutifully produced one bag of feed after another, treating each gathered animal to a pre-evening snack before letting them scamper off to their luxurious hiding spots.

        All of this, an eight-year-old Scootaloo observed blinkedly from the entrance to the cottage.  Under the echo of rain drops, she shuffled inside, grinning wide.  “Wow, Fluttershy.  It's like you've got a whole frickin' army of furry things at your beck and call!”

        “Oh no.  I would never think of sending my precious little animals off to battle anypony!”

        “Heheh—Come on, Fluttershy.  It was a joke.  I just think it's pretty awesome how they all trust you and stuff.”

        “I only ever mean to give them shelter from the elements, such as what we're experiencing today.”  Fluttershy gently motioned with a soaked head out a nearby window.  A sudden thunder rattled the panes.  She yelped, wide eyed and shivering, then sighed with relief.  “Ahem.”  A nervous, blushing smile.  “Any affection they give me is merely a fringe benefit, you see.”

        “Yeah, sure.”  Scootaloo winked back.  She took a deep breath, overcome by the soothing fragrance of the place.  True, there was the predominant odor of animal fur, the dusty fumes of dozens upon dozens of bags of bird seed, and even the offensive hint of rabbit droppings in the distant background.  Through it all though, a sweet aroma permeated the dwelling, as if the fluid of Fluttershy's heart that had given her voice its song and her eyes their twinkle had marked an immortal perfume upon the grainy skin of the place.  The effluent shades of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle clung to the memory of a giddy night once spent there, and it made the orange foal feel toasty inside.  For a briefly blissful second, there was no such thing as empty barns, or tears for that matter.

        “I will get a fire going shortly,” Fluttershy murmured.  She lowered her head so that her front hooves had access to her damp mane.  Squeezing puddles of rainwater out of the soggied threads, she shook her snout and looked up.  “Then we can wait out the storm.  If Rainbow Dash is leading the weather team, then it should hopefully not last all too long—”  Fluttershy suddenly stopped in mid-sentence to bite her lip.  She gazed pensively at the young guest's legs with an awkward shudder of distaste.  “Oh... Erm... Oh dear...”

        “Huh?” Scootaloo blinked crookedly at her.  She looked down.  Her hooves were utterly caked in dirt, and a fresh pile of mud had been tracked into the house, soiling the immaculate emerald finish of Fluttershy's wooden floor.  “Awwwwww shoot.”  She winced, her breath hissing out through a clenched forest of teeth as she wobbled upon the offensive tripod that her soiled limbs had suddenly become.  A palpitating throb boiled from deep beneath her orange coat, piercing her with guiltier and guiltier vibrations as she took into account every serrated centimeter of that pathetic situation.  She should have known better than to have come there; she wasn't smart enough, strong enough to have anticipated such foolishness.  In the rainsoaked joy of the moment, Scootaloo had squandered Fluttershy's extreme generosity.  She knew it, but she would only collapse further if she showed that she knew it.  “You think... uh... there's a talent for cutie mark crusader mud wrestling?”  A nervous giggle, and she immediately rolled her eyes at her pathetic self.

        “I wouldn't know.  Eheh... Uhm...”  Fluttershy looked the foal's way with a frazzled yet reassuring smile.  “Do not worry, Scootaloo.  I'll take care of it—”

        “Heck no!”  There was a shrieking voice.  It wasn't until after Scootaloo's eyes dilated into pinpricks that she realized it was her own.  “What I mean is... erm... Allow me!”  She glanced every which way until she saw a bucket and mop lying in an abandoned corner.  “It'll only be a moment!”  She scampered splotchingly towards it like a monorail of mud.  “I'll mop it clean in a jiffy!”

        “No no—Please!”  Fluttershy extended a hoof, hissing.  The foal froze wide-eyed, balanced in mid-lunge on a single hoof as the adult pegasus sashayed over.  “Just... Just don't trot another meter.  Stay put.  I'll clean it up.”

        “But Fluttershy, it's my fault for giving your floor the diamond dog treatment!”  Scootaloo said, wincing.  Her eyes quivered, as if this delightfully warm, heavenly dry, and impossibly dreamy place would be flung out from under her at any second, and she would be thrown back out into the rain and her lonely life beyond it.  “I wanna clean it up!  It's only the second time I've been to your house and already I'm making a friggin' mess of things!”

        “Scootaloo, dear, it's alright.”  Fluttershy bore a soft smile that could melt the ice caps off of mountains.  She eased Scootaloo down to her haunches with a gentle hoof before stepping behind the bucket-and-mop and nudging them over towards the mud-splotches.  “Everypony makes mistakes.  Besides, I know my way around my own floor.”

        “But I made the mess.  I should do it.” Scootaloo frowned.  In her peripheral, she observed a blank space in the living den's corner where an ill-fated blue table had once stood.  She gulped.  “Besides, don't you have more animals to feed?  I can't imagine where they all would have run off to in this storm!”

        “Oh, uhm, well—Yes, I do have quite a few precious things to tend to,” Fluttershy absent-mindedly murmured aloud as she pumped a well of water into the bucket and added a liberal dash of soap.  “The manger out back behind my cottage acts as a shelter for most of the animals too shy to come inside, but I'll get to them in a moment.”

        “Fluttershy, why not get to them now?”  Scootaloo glanced up at her between shameful examinations of her own muddied hooves.  “There's no need to keep them waiting all because of me.  I can do the mopping!”

        “You're my guest, Scootaloo.”  Fluttershy exhaled calmly, reaching onto a nearby shelf and clasping a clean rag which she tossed towards the foal.  “I'm not bothered for having to clean up.”  She smiled gently as she carried the sloshing bucket over to the mess.  “It's worth it for such delightful company.”

        The foal forced herself to briefly ignore the warmness of those last few words.  “I don't just want to be delightful company; I wanna be polite!”  She swiftly wiped the muck off her limbs with the rag before standing back up and stubbornly grasping the mop's handle from the yellow host with two hooves.  “I promise—Pinkie Pie Swear—that I won't do anything but mop this little piece of floorboard here!  I'm not gonna go on a crazy crusade that would tear your awesome cottage down to its foundation!  Please, Fluttershy?”

        “My, my.”  The yellow filly throated forth a chuckle under her breath.  “You are most certainly adamant about this, Scootaloo.  But haven't I already said that I can take care of it?”

        “Fluttershy, I don't have a cutie mark,” Scootaloo woefully murmured.  “But you do—So that means one pony in here knows what her talent is.  Now, there are animals out back that need you.  Isn't it the honorable thing to see to them?”

        Fluttershy gazed prolongedly at the young foal.  She glanced out the open door and towards the scooter that was glistening in rainwater, its metallic body reflecting the emptiness of the rumbling gray world outside.  If there was something in the caretaker's vision that grasped a separate truth, Scootaloo couldn't tell, nor could she care.  At that moment, all the foal wanted to do was undo a wrong... and clean up the past.

        With a gentle smile, and a gleeful breath that sounded like the yellow pegasus who flew down unannounced at the Everclear Memorial, Fluttershy suddenly granted that chance.  “Very well, Scootaloo.  But promise me you won't try to fix or clean anything else.”

        Scootaloo smirked and gave a campy salute with a stiff hoof.  “Yes, Stare Master!”  She started dousing the mop in the bucket before wiping concentric sudsy circles across the stained floorboards.  “Maybe afterwards—with your permission—I could help you with the animals in the manger too!  I've volunteered to help Apple Bloom at Sweet Apple Acres from time to time.  I'm willing to bet that your livestock is a lot less likely to trip me into a feeding trough.”

        “Hmmm...”  Fluttershy trotted towards the front door, pausing to look back.  “It amazes me that your parents didn't bother taking you to a Wonderbolts show.  With a daughter as responsible as you, it would be a shame not to reward her!”

        Scootaloo smirked devilishly, for she already had a dashing rebuttal:  “The best reward, Fluttershy, is being given such a rad place to take shelter!”

        “Eheheh...”  Fluttershy blushed slightly.  “I didn't think I was capable of doing 'rad'.”  She gulped and faced the outside world.  “I will be out back.  If you need help with something, feel free to wake up Angel Bunny.  She always knows how and where to find me.”  With a squeaking grin, the yellow pegasus bravely galloped back out into the rain.  A muffled yelp, and she was gone.

        Scootaloo blinked in mid-mop.  “'Angel Bunny'?”  She glanced every which way until her violet eyes finally found the snuggled patch of white fur in question.  “Oh, right.  You.”

        An ivory bunny rabbit was curled up in a tiny bed beside the cottage's staircase.  A twitch of its ears, and it flickered open a beady eye before frowning demonically the orange visitor's way.

        “Don't worry, I don't bite.”  Scootaloo winked.  “But I have been known to peck.”  She fitfully giggled.

        As she mopped the last of the mud away—bringing a shine to the floor as she brought ease to her conscience—the steady downpour outside lulled her mind to a warm hush, so that she briefly leaned against the wooden handle and sighed several lone weeks of anxiety out through her lips.  The world was a wet and lonely place, and the filly's stomach was a constant hollow of pain and anguish.  But none of that mattered, because she was there... and her nubile ears still rang with the golden hum of an angelic voice.  A joyful aura filled the lengths of the cottage, including the empty space where a blue table once sat.

        “I don't think I could ever live in a place like this,” the young flightless filly mused.  She mopped and mopped before smirking the slumbering bunny's way.  “Or else I'd be coaxed into dreamland every waking minute, just like you!”

        A malevolent pillow was thrown across the room, slamming brutally into Scootaloo's face.

        “Ow!  Sonuva--!”

        When her dazed amber eyes refocused, Harmony caught sight of an alarmingly claustrophobic front room, its labyrinth of pet walkways and wooden lattices forcing the copper pegasus to duck as she trotted her adult body nervously inside.  With a haunted breath, she glanced past her flank and saw a series of steps leading towards a seat of emerald cushions.  There was nothing remotely striking about the sight, until an orange shadow suddenly descended within the blinking frame of it.  With a sudden wince, Harmony had to look away for some reason.  As her heartbeat returned to normal, she shuffled slowly forward, glancing every which way for the source of the grumbling voice that had permeated the otherwise angelic cottage.

        Something smelled rotten.  It wasn't so much the combined scents of all of the cottage's animal occupants that burrowed an inflammable itch into the last pony's nose, but rather it was the stale musk wafting off of a bizarre, nameless, joyless elder pegasus suddenly clopping across the widths of the wooden house, her snout upturned haughtily as she dictated in a morose voice to a familiar yellow figure wilting pathetically in the corner from her sharp shadow.

        “It's bad enough that there's been no check on the surplus population of localized rabbits, but now I find out that you've been altering the diet of local foxes?  Surely you must realize that as Ponyville's chief animal tamer your job is to keep local carnivores from being unnecessarily domesticated!”

        “Yes, Captain Redgale.”

        “We also can't afford to have canines of the upper food chain lose their taste in meat!  Otherwise the borders of the Everfree Forest will run rampant with rodents and marsupials!  Need I remind you of that one horrible rabbit stampede that destroyed so many priceless gardens in Ponyville last year?!”

        “No, Captain Redgale.”

        “Shouldn't I?!  Young lady, in barely five years of being given responsibility for the local wildlife, Ponyville has been attacked by an Ursa Minor, encumbered by the smoke of a hibernating dragon, haunted by a hydra from a local bog, and almost utterly demolished by a rampaging swarm of ungodly parasprites!  All of these things could very easily have been avoided well in advance if somepony had been more attentive to her job—which, might I remind you, has been funded almost exclusively by my fellow cabinet members at the Cloudsdale Animal Commission with enough bags of golden bits to break two-thirds of the First Canterlotlian Bank!”

        “Yes, Captain Redgale.”

        “And for the love of Nebula, Miss Fluttershy!”  A sneering mare stopped pacing in circles long enough to glare at the filly in the corner.  A pair of off-ruby wings matched a graying mane of scarlet as the blue-eyed Cloudsdalian elder regarded the humble pony like a fecal blemish on the green floorboards.  “Do you have anything more to say than just 'Yes' or 'No'?  You're Head Animal Tamer of Ponyville, for Celestia's sake!  Shouldn't you be acting like it?”

        “Yes, Captain Re—erm...I mean...That is an affirmative—That is... erm... mmmmmmm...”  The nervous pegasus resorted to a pathetic whimper, cornered by the elder's looming ire.

        “Nnngh...”  The weathered Cloudsdalian briefly facehoofed.  “I cannot fathom how this same cowering creature before me was capable of allegedly pacifying a manticore on the evening of Nightmare Moon's return.”  She stamped her hooves down and frowned at the girl, moreover out of exhaustion than frustration.  “Miss Fluttershy, we have a crisis on our hooves.  The Cloudsdale Animal Commission has nopony else to turn to but you in this time of need.  Please understand that it troubles me to have to remind you of all the mistakes that have been made at this post before laying out this new task ahead of you.  I've had to literally fly through hoops of flame to defend your position here in Ponyville.  Believe me, I want to give you this chance to prove your worth, but you have to show me that you have what it takes to find the missing creature spotted falling towards Everfree or else we'll have to resort to sending in a team of weather fliers instead!”

        “I have searched all over the eastern stretches of Everfree that were detailed in the reconnaissance, Captain Redgale.”  There was a ladylike toss of a pink mane, enshrouding the filly's submissive features.  “I've seen deer, possums, several lizards, a wayward flock of geese—even a rather perturbed peacock.  But none of them fit the description of what was seen falling into the forest canopy.  The largest animal I saw was a wayward emu.”

        “We're talking about a Capricorn, Miss Fluttershy.”  The aptly titled Captain Redgale snorted.  “It's hard to miss.”  She resumed pacing across the cottage, her aged hooves threatening to stomp holes through the tranquil interior.  “The creature was sighted three days ago, and since then none of the regular Cloudsdalian flight patrols have seen it return to the heavens.  It has to be in the forest still!  So long as that cosmic creature is unaccounted for, it serves as a threat to all magically sensitive creatures who make a natural home in the Everfree Forest!”

        “But Captain!” the filly remarked, blue eyes blinking.  “That is so utterly unlike a typical Capricorn!  Zoological reports have never chronicled their kind as acting so selfishly harmful to the rest of the environment!”

        “You think I don't know that, young lady?!”  The off-ruby pegasus frowned.  “This is why you must find it sooner than later!  The sooner you retrieve this creature from Ponyville's backyard, the closer the Commission will come to finding a solution to this mystery!  I do trust you are up to the challenge?”

        “Oh, of course, Captain Redgale!  But I regret to inform you that my search so far has been unfruitful—”

        “Then search harder, child!  I don't care if the reports claim the Capricorn as being in the eastern half of the forest!  It could very easily have wandered deeper into the foliage!  A creature that big can't just disappear!  Either search harder or I'll be forced to find another pegasus more competent!”

        “Ahem.” Harmony cleared her throat in a timely fashion.  She steadied the strangely adrenalized blood coursing through her veins and strolled bravely into the midst of the two.  “A pegasus more competent than Ponyville's Famous Animal Tamer?” she murmured with a plastic, programmed grin.  “I highly doubt it!”

        “Oh truly?”  Redgale squinted her blue eyes Harmony's way.  Her lips pursed with a dubious breath.  “And you are...?”

        It was with suddenly remarkable ease that the last pony introduced herself.  “'Harmony'.  Or 'Harmony' for short.”  A flippant giggle.  “And I hereby uphold the competence of the lady who owns this house, or else why would Princess Celestia have sent me her to observe her much lauded duties first-hoof?”

        “Hmmmm...”  Redgale regarded Harmony's cutie mark like she was examining a dam for leaking holes.  “Canterlot Court, I see.  Well, Celestia's elite stands to be corrected already on one account; Miss Fluttershy does not own this cottage.  It's been lent to her over the years by the Ponyville Department of Wildlife Affairs, which—if I may remind Her Majesty's Court—gets funded directly through my association, the Cloudsdale Animal Commission.”

        “I take it that this is an introduction, madame?”  Harmony slyly smirked.

        “Ahem.”  The elder put on airs and stood up straight.  “Captain Redgale of the Cloudsdale Animal Division, at your service.”

        “Whew!  Now there's a bit-ful!  It's an honor to meet you.”  Harmony extended a hoof.

        The Captain muttered under her breath and begrudgingly stretched forth her own hoof to shake it—

        “OH!”  Harmony suddenly raised her hoof out of the Captain's reach and banged her own skull.  “Where is my brain today?!”  She chuckled throatily and smirked with eye-twinkling innocence.  “Princess Celestia ordered that I provide a very important message. Ahem—There's been a report of a parasprite sighting in the forests bordering the western city limits of Trottingham.  She needs somepony in high connections with Cloudsdale's animal control to get a close look right away.”

        “A parasprite sighting?”  A yellow pegasus un-wilted with tightly coiled wings.  “How terrible—!”

        “Yes, yes, Miss Fluttershy.”  The Captain silenced the filly with a wave and turned to face Harmony again, squinting.  “If there was such a horrible development, I surely would have been warned of it well ahead of time.”

        “And you are.”  Harmony's iron brow briefly furrowed.  “I'm telling you.”  She smirked once more towards the corners of the place and dusted her hoof off an opposite leg.  “But if you're too busy here with your... authoritative redundancies, then I'm sure that I can write the Princess a cover story to explain why you weren't there to save Trottingham from pastel-colored horrors.”  A chirpish giggle.  “We pegasi gotta look out after each other, eh?  Ehh?”  She leaned over and nudged the elder mare in the shoulder with a brutish wink.

        Captain Redgale frowned and brushed her coat off as if it had just been littered with asbestos.  “If you're suggesting we deceive the Royal Court—perish the thought!  Unlike some ponies, a Captain such as myself knows how to balance her responsibilities.”  She cleared her throat and marched proudly out of the den and towards the yawning cottage door.  “Miss Fluttershy, I do hope you'll put more effort into performing your search than humoring this... most studious Canterlotlian clerk.  Ahem.  I'll come back to check on your progress in finding the Capricorn.  As for now, I have a potentially ravenous swarm of infernal insects to hunt down.”

        Harmony grinned steely at her.  “Break a leg.”

        Captain Redgale gave her a double-take, blinked, smiled nervously, then tossed away the sight of the invasive messenger with a twirl of her scarlet mane.  Off-ruby wings stretched out majestically, and the Cloudsdalian officer took towards the skies beyond.

        The last pony stared after her, bitterly swallowing a wad of spit down her cold throat.  “Friggin' sky maid.  What crawled up her womb and died?”  A shrug of her copper-coated shoulders, and she spun with a pleasant smile towards the corner.  “I do apologize for showing up so unannounced, Miss Fluttershy.  As I said, my name is Harmony, and I've come to—”  She stopped in mid speech, blinking, for the corner was empty:  no table and no pegasus.  She twitched and turned about until she noticed the sight of the yellow pony trotting briskly towards a rack of food containers.  “Uhm, Miss Fluttershy...”

        “Mmmm-Yes.  Miss Harmony, I presume?” the frazzled filly managed while yanking three different jars down from the shelf, juggling them, and opening the containers one after another before filling various empty dishes with the outpouring feed.  “I must beg your forgiveness.  That meeting with Captain Redgale took far too terribly long.  Ohhhh...”  A yellow face scrunched in pitiable stress.  “Mmphh—I haven't had a chance to feed my precious animals in over three hours!  Erm... I can tell from your cutie mark and pleasant manners that you've come from the Court of Canterlot, and I am m-most honored by your visitation, but you must understand that I have obligations here to attend to...”

        “Yes!  Yes—!” Harmony beamed, scampering back and forth across the cramped cottage in a desperate attempt to keep up with the floundering caretaker.  “That's exactly right!  And—uhm—you tend to your duties so well, Miss Fluttershy.  That's why her Highness Princess Celestia had sent me to—Whoah!” 

        The dainty Fluttershy nearly barreled Harmony over as she breathlessly shoved a food dish over towards a throng of stomach-rumbling ferrets.  “I do beg your pardon.  Much thanks.”  Her pink hair was a  fuzzy mess as she fluttered over the animals and dropped several scoops of birdfeed into a pair of hanging parrot cages below the cottage's ceiling beams.  Her voice came out in petite porcelain murmurs.  “Feedthebirds.  Checkthepond.  Cleanthetrays.  Mmm... Rosemouse, Elizabeak, Nutkins—Ohhhh poor Nutkins!  What will I ever do about your tummy ache??”

        “Ahem—The Princess has sent me to see how well you do your job and—”

        “Angel Bunny!  Angel Bunny—Ohhhh—Where are you?”

        “—and also hopefully get you to answer a few desperate questions that the Court—”

        “Oh there you are, Angel!”  Fluttershy managed her first smile since the time traveler got there.  She knelt down besides a familiar white ball of fur that was presently shoving a large carrot down its hungry throat.  “Remember what I told you, Angel?  Hmm?  Slowly.  Chew slowlyyyyyyy.”

        “—questions that the Court has... Erm...” Harmony lost a drop of sweat as she jumped out of the way to make room for Fluttershy's next desperate canter towards a cluster of hungrily squeaking mice.  The smell of cheese lit the rustic den.  “...about the state of creatures in the forest and Equestrian livelihood in general—Ahem—Miss Fluttershy, could you use some help?”  The copper pegasus bit her lip nervously.

        “Help... Help?  No.  No-No, no help.  I have to... Erm... What I mean is that I must do these things on my own.  Especially with the task ahead of me and—”

        “Yeah, about that.” Harmony nervously shifted and gave Fluttershy a sideways glance.  “What's all of this hubub about a fallen Capricorn?”

        “You mean you haven't heard?”  Fluttershy looked breathlessly up from a ring of happily chewing rodents.  “That isn't the purpose of your visit?”

        “I-I thought I made it clear that I was dropping by on behalf of the Princess who merely wants to check up on you and learn about—”

        “Wait—You arrived just now?”  Fluttershy absent-mindedly blinked.  She tossed her pink mane back to smoothness and glanced at the open cottage door, the bright sunlight glistening outside.  “And I didn't notice?”

        “You didn't?”  Harmony twitched, then cleared her throat.  “Right, you didn't!  Maybe I got off on the wrong hoof.  Let me introduce myself again.  My name is—”

        “Dinky!” Fluttershy breathlessly squeaked, her blue pupils dilating to pinpricks.

        “No, not 'Dinky'.  It's 'Harmony'—”  A yellow blur surged past the last pony, forcing her black mane to billow.  “Where are you going?”

        “Dinky!  Dinky!  Oh dear Oh dear Oh dear—I'm such a bad, bad babysitter!”  Fluttershy's hoofsteps pattered into faint obscurity beyond the walls and windows of the cottage.

        “Uhhh...” Harmony worriedly gazed at the door and then flashed a glance over at a tiny little fuzzball.  “Do you have any idea what's eating her?”

        A half-eaten carrot flew violently into her skull.

        “OW!  Sonuva—!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Dinky!”  Fluttershy came to a grinding stop before the tiny teaset.  Panting, she smiled with relief as she knelt before the tiny gray foal.  “Oh, thank heavens!  I am so, so sorry to have neglected you!  That meeting distracted me too, too much!”

        “But I'm doing just fine, Miss Fluttershy.”  The blonde unicorn smiled up at her beside her stuffed animal companions.  “Did you know that a cardinal chirps thirty-three times before moving to another branch of a tree?”

        “As a matter of fact, I did not know that!”

        “I counted.  I think it's testing the acoustics of the oak tree to make sure its voice is being carried furthest to a potential mate.”  The child computed out loud with educated clarity.  “One of the books mommy bought me said that cardinals can spend an entire hour chirping nonstop before giving up.  But I think the authors didn't know what they were talking about.  They don't watch things like I do.”

        “Sometimes birdsong is just birdsong, Dinky.”  Fluttershy bit her lip with pensiveness that humbled herself before the petite child.  “But it certainly is pretty to listen to, yes?”

        “If I was a female cardinal, I would be less interested in how pretty a boy sounded and more interested if his voice sounded healthy or not.”

        “Erm... Yes, well, I suppose that would be the natural response.”

        “But when an owl hoots in the middle of the night, it's strictly territorial.  It's because owls are birds of prey and they're more concerned about gathering food than mating—”

        “Dinky!”  Fluttershy gasped suddenly at the sight of the empty pitcher in the center of the tiny table.  “You drank all of the tea so quickly!”

        “No I didn't!  It was—”

        “Are you dehydrated?  Are you running a fever?”  The yellow pegasus practically lunged across the teaset and felt the unicorn's horn with a forelimb.  “Oh darling, you're positively baking!”

        “I have a dark coat, Miss Fluttershy.  It absorbs most of the colors of the visible spectrum.  Since I've been sitting in the sunlight all this time, it feel as if I'm hotter than I actually am—”

        “I know!  I'll fill this up with water!  Then you can come inside and enjoy the niiiiice coooool shade!”

        “But it wasn't me, Miss Fluttershy!”  Dinky blinked her yellow eyes.  “It was the pony that fell from the sky!”

        The yellow pegasus made an awkward face, unaware of the pony-shaped impression in the grass directly beneath her.  “The pony that fell from what now?”

        “Harmony!” Dinky pointed over yellow wings.

        “Pegasi will do that,” Harmony said suddenly from behind Fluttershy.

        The caretaker shrieked, flopping embarrassingly onto the ground.  A deep rosy blush, and she scrambled up on all fours and scooted away from copper visitor.  “Mmm... Uhm... Hello...”

        “It's me, remember?”  Harmony smiled placidly, though her amber eyes hardened.  “From earlier?  In the cottage?  Ninety seconds ago?”

        “Oh, uhm, yes.”  Fluttershy wiltingly curtseyed.  “Pleased to do business with a servant to Her Majesty.”

        “Assuming we're doing business at all!”  Harmony smirked.  “I can see that you're obviously in the middle of a lot of things here—”

        “Is that an infinity symbol on your flank?”  Dinky asked over Fluttershy's shoulder.

        Harmony's lips trailed numbly in the air.  She blinked.  She smiled icily at the tiny unicorn.  “Err... Yes.  Yes, it is.”  She coughed and spoke once more to Fluttershy.  “I don't mean to get in the way of things.  I'm merely here to observe and ask questions so that the Court will understand how you do your job so well and—”

        Dinky droned, “Why would a servant of the Royal Court have an infinity symbol?”

        Harmony's eyes squinted at her.  “Because that's how long I intend to live before I decide to foal any kids of my own.”  She wrenched her gaze back towards Fluttershy.  “And if you wouldn't mind telling me first off what this whole 'Capricorn' nonsense is—”

        Again, a youthful murmur:  “Because it doesn't make sense for a solar crest to be framing an infinity symbol.”

        Harmony cast another icy grin.  “Maybe we like tossing small creatures into the Sun.”

        “That would take some massive limb strength.”

        “Kid—Uhm, are you plugged into something?”

        “Do you know how much energy it would take to launch a small dog or cat outside of the planet's atmosphere—much less to collide with Princess Celestia's rising Sun?”

        “Uhhh—”

        “Even if you empowered the entire catapult artillery of the Celestial Defense Corps, it would not be enough to hurdle a small mammal any further than several kilometers in a single toss, and that's assuming you could muster the mammoth force of several hundred weighted ballasts in a single burst of energy.”

        “Look, I really don't think that it's—”

        “Not to mention that it would take an astronomical effort to get any thrown object to exit the planet's gravity at the precise ninety degree angle required to maintain a full orbit at half the moon's length, much less to extend that revolution by such a length so as to collide forthwith with the burning corona of the Sun—”

        “Right—I get it!  You're from Space Equestria!  That's cute, kid.  Ahem.”  Harmony limpingly turned to face Fluttershy once more.  “Miss Fluttershy, all I wish is to have a few minutes of your attention—”  She went bugeyed, for the pegasus was again gone.  “Uhhh—What the heck?”

        “Mmmm?”  The animal caretaker's head rose from inside the windowframe to her cottage several trots away.  She was juggling a stack of dead fish in twin baskets as she panickedly managed, “I'm so sorry!  I'm behind schedule!  Do excuse me!”  She disappeared, and the sound of the cottage's rear door squeaking open announced that she was sauntering over towards the babbling brook besides the building.

        “Though I suppose it would be possible to use the Elements of Harmony to trans-locate small animals beyond the planet's orbit and avoid such a gravity-defying feat of long distance propulsion altogether, but that would have to involve a severe magical transgression worthy of the Princess' banishment to the moon.”

        “Mmmmmm.”  Harmony grit her teeth and mowed several clumps of grass with dragging hooves as she lurched away from the scene.  “Keep at it, kid.  You'll be a marshmallow in no time.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Harmony secretly fumed.  Fluttershy's wayward movements resembled a certain crusader whose foalish annoyance didn't fully blossom before the last pony's comprehension until that very thundering second.  It was a miracle that she hadn't disappeared in a puff of green flame from the self-imploding irony of the moment.  Trotting—more like stomping around the house—she rejoined Fluttershy just in time to see her tossing the piscean food into the waiting maws of several weasels crawling hungrily out of a waterside burrow.

        “Miss Fluttershy—”

        “I have to feed the ducklings and transport the frogs and check on the butterfly cocoons along the gardens and—”

        “Miss Fluttershy.” Harmony flew down directly in front of the pegasus and planted a reassuring hoof on the filly's quivering shoulder.  “Could you slow down for a second?  What's the harm in just letting the formal introductions get out of the way?”

        “Erm...” Fluttershy shifted nervously where she stood, half of her face hiding in a pink lock of hair.  “How formal?”

        She suddenly looked so frail and tiny.  Harmony didn't realize it at first, but she wasn't used to staring at the yellow pegasus at eye-level.  With Applejack, it was different; the farm filly was big and strong no matter what angle the last pony remembered staring at her from.  But Fluttershy—a silken-voiced caretaker from years of foalish wonderment—was suddenly a veritable porcelain twig bending in a hurricane breeze; she always was.  Harmony found her suddenly endearing in a different yet equal way than the last pony dreamily recalled.

        “Oh, uhm...” Harmony realized Fluttershy was awaiting an answer.  “Not formal at all!  Princess Celestia has heard a lot from you, and so she's scheduled that I act as an observer and see for myself how you manage to—”

        “Oh dear, is this because I insulted Princess Celestia when I took Philomena under my wing and attempted to nurse her back to health?”

        “Huh?  No!  This has nothing to do with—”

        “Mmmmm—Oh goodness.” Fluttershy bit her lip and sagged deaftedly towards the earth, dropping the basket of dead fish onto the grass besides the pond.  Her eyes hung towards her hooves in a souless slump.  “Is... Mmmmm... Is this about the one time I drove a stampede of garden animals into the Grand Galloping Gala?”

        “You drove a stampede into the Gala?!” Harmony balked, wide-eyed.

        Fluttershy recoiled as if she had taken a bullet to the chest.

        Harmony blinked, gulped, then cleared her voice.  “Er...I mean yes!  You drove a stampede into the Gala!  Ahem.  But Princess Celestia has forgiven you for that!”  She glanced briefly aside. “Somehow...”  A chewing of the lip, but she smiled bravely towards the yellow pegasus and murmured:  “But your noble actions in the name of... uhm... peaceful coexistence between fauna and ponydom have done wonders for Ponyville over the years.”

        “I-I see...” Fluttershy squirmed where she sat and picked her basket back up, holstering it on her backside.  “I only wish the Cloudsdalian Committee shared the same enthusiasm as the Canterlotlian Court.”

        “Yeah, well, ponies of a feather—y'know?”  Harmony chuckled with her eyes shut.  When she reopened her gaze, Fluttershy was gone.  She flashed her skull every which way, stifled a deep groan, and quickly trotted after the distant figure towards the front of the cottage.  “Miss Fluttershy, I swear, I was sent without the knowledge of 'Commander Spinsterwind' or whoever you were butting bridles with just a moment ago.”

        “Captain Redgale.”  Fluttershy corrected, and in a suddenly dry voice she throated:  “And it's not nice to call ponies names behind their flanks.  I find it rather rude.”

        Harmony's heart jumped, as if to be even remotely chided with the golden voice of this pony meant being stabbed by invisible broken glass all over from mane to hoof.  It felt somehow worse than a troll's stab wound to her leg or a Phoenix's burn across her chest.  She fought to maintain her adult composure.  “I meant no disrespect, Miss Fluttershy, which is the least I could say about her.  I'm merely a servant of the court, not an expert on psychology, but something is seriously barking up her tree.  And when I say 'tree', I mean the stick that she refuses to take out.”

        “Eeep!”  Fluttershy's cheeks burned rosily as she darted in through the back door of the cottage with the copper pegasus following.  “Are all servants of Princess Celestia so... 'poetic'?”

        “Only the awesome ones.”  Harmony smirked.  “Seriously, though, what's her deal?”

        “Oh...” Fluttershy sighed long and hard, briefly pausing before returning the basket to a stack of several wicker containers just like it.  She wandered across shelf after shelf of foodstuffs in a breathless canter.  “She's my chief supervisor in Animal Caretaking and Taming.  I've answered to her ever since I was a young filly volunteering in Ponyville.”

        “If she's been around you that long, one would think she'd be a bit more supportive—Cuz she's seen you do a more than competent job.  Otherwise, why would Ponyville still let you take care of the precious creatures around here?”  Harmony smiled proudly.  “Am I right?”

        Fluttershy's upper body was flushed at hearing that.  She failed to hide it, instead busying herself in the rummaging at hoof.  “You are... mmm... as kind as your name is pretty, Miss Harmony.  But you must understand, Captain Redgale has a much... stricter method of appraisal.”

        “Yeah, no crap.”

        “Assuredly no fecal matter—Oh—That was another poetic expression, wasn't it?”

        “Yeah, I'm full of it,” Harmony chuckled, then blinked at what she just said.  “Of poetry.  Wh-What I meant was—”

        Fluttershy went on, “She may appear harsh on the outer surface, but I've been working for her long enough to realize that she has very subtle ways of letting a pony know if she's doing her job right.”  A pause for an exhale.  “On some occasions, at least...”

        Harmony glanced at her sideways.

        Fluttershy cleared her throat and spoke over a hanging basket of feeding jars dangling from her neck.  “Mmmff—Ahem.  She came just now to inform me of a most deplorable situation.”

        “Something about a Capricorn, right?”

        “Mmmhmm.  Are you familiar with Capricorns, Miss Harmony?”

        Harmony opened her mouth to reply.  She lingered in mid-gape, her mind floundering over several gray horizons, throngs upon throngs of dark clouds, scores of indiscernible dead creatures, too many fossils to have ever righteously accounted for the many varied things—both graceful and despicable—that once “lived” on the sun-kissed bosom of Equestria.

        Fluttershy didn't waste a second.  “It's a celestial creature, living most of its adult years in the cosmos, much like Ursas and Scorpios.  They hail from Equestria, originally, though.  Instead of blood, they have pure unfiltered mana filtering through their veins.  They are brought into this world in a beam of pure magic channeled through a mother's horns.  That energy then solidifies into the graceful creature we come to known as Capricorns, and then they migrate into the heavens, coming down every now and then only to regenerate their health via mana crystals or when it comes time for them to magically foal new young.”

        “Yeah, okay.  Now I kind of regret never seeing one.”

        “Most living ponies aren't lucky enough to see a naturally appearing Capricorn.”  Fluttershy knelt before a gathering cluster of squirrels at a windowsill.  She fed them several bread crumbs from the basket and gently nuzzled a furred head or two before continuing.  “But just recently, one was seen falling from the night sky and into the thick of the Everfree Forest.  I'm the closest and most... mmm... qualified pony to immediately investigate.  You see, in the last few years, I've been promoted to chief ranger of the Everfree Forest.  With the help of Zecora, a Zebra from the Northeastern desertsmI've begun keeping a record of all the creatures that are discovered in the woods.  Several scholars and taxonomists in Cloudsdale are expecting me to deliver a solid report every month, as well as to handle... mmmm... unforeseen emergencies that happen along the forested border.”

        “Like... this emergency.”  Harmony nodded slowly.  “That's what has gotten your beloved Captain's tail tied in a knot.”

        “She's right to be so distraught.”  Fluttershy sighed, staring forlornly past the circle of bushy tails swishing in front of her.  “The Capricorns are an endangered species.  If one was to die in the Everfree Forest, so close to Ponyville, and under my watch, well I... I-I...”  She bit her lip and her eyes started to water uncontrollably.

        Harmony blinked.  “Uhhhh.... Uhm...  Miss Fluttershy?”

        The yellow pegasus shook and shivered.

        “Are you... Are you gonna cry?”  Harmony's heart began beating harder and harder.  “Oh crapola—You are, aren't you?”

        “Is it n-not enough that... that such a beautiful and precious creature is going to d-die so needlessly that I-I also have to c-come this close to losing the gr-greatest j-job in all of Equestria??”

        But before the yellow pegasus could so much as drop a tear, a copper pony was rushing up and planting both hooves on her shoulders.

        “I'll help you!”  Harmony panted, eyes twitching like a madpony.  The future was in flames.  The Wasteland beyond it was forever gray ash and snow.  She was going to die, the end of ponies, and this was her one and only opportunity in the entire history of time to find a way to bring the Sun and Moon back.  But she was not about to let Fluttershy cry.  “I'll... uhh... I'll help you find this Coppertone!”

        “Capricorn.”

        “Whatever.  I mean, how hard can it be?”

        “Even if I did accept your kind generosity...”  Fluttershy sniffed and trotted out of her grasp, sidling up to a reading seat's window and gazing forlornly out towards the lengths of the Everfree Forest stretching beyond a nearby chicken coup.  “It wouldn't be right.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow.  “Why not?”

        “You heard the Captain,” Fluttershy sighed.  “I need to prove myself.  If it looks like I accepted another pony's help, in any capacity, then it could look dis-favorably on my record.  I am being tested here.  That much is obvious.”

        “Hey—Do you want this Capricorn thingy to live or not?”

        “I...” Fluttershy fidgeted and kneaded the windowsill anxiously with yellow hooves.  “Of course I do...”

        “As a Royal Canterlotlian Clerk, it is my duty to make sure that all creatures in Equestria live long and prosper!”  Harmony processed the words through her mind a bare fraction of a second before bravely uttering them.  “I'm here to observe the way you do your job, Miss Fluttershy—if you let me.  I'm not here to tell you how it's done.  If your—ahem—all-knowing Captain can't see that, then she can sure as heck take it up with the Princess!”

        Fluttershy sniffled one last time.  When she glanced back over her shoulder at this sudden, blessed stranger, it was with a soft yet solid smile that poured gold into the pores of Harmony's soul self.  “I must admit.  I do find your proposal to be... erm....”

        “Awesome?” Harmony winked.

        “Very sweet.” Fluttershy grinned gently, her voice like a bedsheet falling through an afternoon's haze and spreading silkily across the lengths of the room.  “Please do forgive my distractedness, Miss Harmony.  I really didn't mean to be rude.  It is not often that a stranger like you shows up so... punctually.”  Her soft eyes narrowed earnestly on the strange pegasus.  “I must ask, though—Have we met before?”

        Harmony's heart froze.  “Uhm... Huh?”

        “Oh, I know it's awfully silly of me to ask.  But I could swear that you're familiar somehow.  It would be a shame not to remember somepony with such gorgeous hair—Heehee—But, it's something else...”

        “Oh, I don't get around Ponyville much.  All I've known about you I've... uhm... I've read in Twilight Sparkle's letters and... and...”  Harmony's gaze had fallen numbly towards the side.  She fell into a zombified silence.

        In the far corner of the adjacent kitchen, isolated and forgotten in the dusty shadows of the rustic cottage, was a bucket.  Lying in this bucket was a mop, dried and unused for an unknowable time.  The longer Harmony stared into the bristled white threads of the thing, the deeper she drowned, trapped in that ivory forest of filament, like a deep descent via moonvision.  A breath left the last pony, for she had just mopped that very same floor weeks ago, in that she had mopped it up twenty-five years ago.  But this was twenty-five years ago.  This was the past, and yet it wasn't the past.  All of this was really just a projection, a billowing cloud of happenstance that was anchored to a dead ghost of a pegasus, and the only reality that was awaiting Harmony's beating Entropan heart was a dark dank hovel in the center of a dead world where there stalked a giant cosmic bear inside a gigantic thorny sarcophagus of stone, waiting for its scrumptious morsel to reappear any startling second on a vomit of green flames coughed up by a purple dragon that had lived three hundred years back and forth across the same twenty-five years.

        The last pony did not expect so soon to be retracing her own paths, though they were taken with different hooves, legs that were hers and yet weren't hers.  She suddenly felt very sick, very alone, and very naked.  An infantile breath inside of her whimpered for the gently swaying embrace of the Harmony's hammock.  Before she could even comprehend the irony of that impulsive desire, a golden voice drifted silkily across the room, so that she instinctually curled towards it, as if willing herself into an unfoaling.

        She gasped at having been grasped by a pair of yellow forelimbs, as soft and warm as she had ever remembered them.  Incapable of sweating, her projected soul self trembled to glance into the pegasus bracing her.  She gulped and muttered:  “Fl-Fluttershy...?”

        “Are you okay, Miss Harmony?” the filly worriedly breathed, weathering the visitor's sudden trembles.

        The last pony very swiftly, very quickly smoothed her rough edges out and stood up straight, shaking her black mane back over her neck.  “Ahem.  Sorry.  I've been... uhm... flying all day.  I guess I didn't realize how tired I was.”

        “Maybe you should lie down.  I'll have Dinky fetch you some water while I fix a soothing broth—”

        “N-No need, Miss Fluttershy.”  The copper pegasus recited the reassurances of a foalish guest, blinked the dancing shadows of yesterday away from the all-too-familiar room, and spoke with greater ease.  “N-Now, what were you asking me just before I had my dizzy spell?”

        “Erm...” Fluttershy bore a slightly suspicious squint.  “How could you know what Twilight Sparkle has written about me to the Princess?”

        “Erm—Huh?”

        “You said that you knew about me from Twilight's letters.”

        “Oh, I did say that, didn't I?”  Harmony grimaced.  “I... It... Erm...”  She brightened, then smiled hopefully.  “Her Majesty tends to read her letters out loud!  Yes!  And, well, the palace walls of Canterlot are... uhm... they're kind of thin... I guess.”  She cleared her throat as she navigated the pathetic dead end that she had trotted her tongue into.  “Her... uhm... Her younger sister has the same problem.  Especially with all the letters Princess Luna... gets... from...” A stupid blink.  “...the Wonderbolts.”  She bit her lip for a few prolonged seconds.  “They write about flying n'stuff.”

        “I... see...” Fluttershy swam through a confused breath of air directly in front of her.

        “So!”  Harmony leaned back brightly and clapped her front hooves together.  “When do we go hunting for Capricorns?”

        “Not quite so soon, Miss Harmony.”

        “Oh.  Okay.  Ahem—Why not?”

        “If you are still generously willing to observe me in such a procedure, I'm afraid you have to wait until later this afternoon.”

        “Lemme guess.  You've got more animals to feed.”

        “Well, in addition to that I have to babysit for Dinky until her mother gets here.”

        “Why not just—I dunno—bring her with us?”

        “—into the Everfree Forest?!?!”  Fluttershy explosively gasped as if a stick of dynamite had ignited in the base of her lungs.  “Miss Harmony, have you ever ventured into that place?”

        “As a matter of fact, I have,” Harmony said.  Thorns, brambles, and squirming black shadows flickered across her aged mind.  Then she took one stupid glance outside a nearby window and suddenly remembered that this was a green world.  “Oh, wait.  Nevermind, it's been a while.  Eheheh—”

        “You and I may be aptly capable of looking after ourselves,” Fluttershy murmured as she sauntered up towards a window, gazing forlornly out at the tiny unicorn and her teaset.  “But I would rather be banished to the moon than put a little foal's life in danger!”

        “Okay, what's with ponies of this time period and this rampant phobia about moon-banishing?”

        “Miss Harmony...?” Fluttershy confusedly blinked.

        Harmony sighed and returned to the subject at hoof.  “Would it please you to let me assist in your next search for the Capricorn this afternoon?”

        “Oh, I would most definitely be blessed by anypony's assistance.”  Fluttershy rosily nodded.  “But I do not think it will be an easy feat.”

        “Hey, we're pegasi.”  Harmony trotted up and smirked.  “Since when did we do anything easy?”

        “I would say that is Captain Redgale's philosophy.”

        “Then I already feel like cutting off my own tongue.”

        “Oh heavens!  Do not think of such a thing!”  Fluttershy sputteringly gasped.

        “Miss Fluttershy, it was a joke—!”  Harmony blinked.  Deja vu throttled her brain, an orange foal briefly balanced on her long copper legs like stilts, then flickered away in a rain-soaked gasp.  Fluttershy suddenly looked like a tiny porcelain doll gazing up at her.  The last pony had to fight the bleeding urge to cry.  With a brave chuckle, she exhaled then said, “In the meantime, how can I best observe you at your work?”

        “Uhm... Hmmm...” Fluttershy breathed as she cast soft blue eyes towards the edge of the cottage.  “I suppose you could assist me in the manger.  I still have my regular rounds to go through.”

        “Just how many animals do you have in this place, Miss Fluttershy?”

        “Two hundred and thirty-three, not including the fish and insects.”

        Harmony blinked.  “Oh.  Wow.  I... uhm... didn't realize you actually kept count.”

        “Oh, but of course!”  Fluttershy smiled brightly for once.  “I would absolutely hate myself if I lost track of any of my precious little friends.  I keep a constant head count every morning just to be absolutely sure that none have gone missing or... or worse.”

        “Do you name them all too?”

        “Mmm, no.”  Fluttershy ran a forelimb across her pink mane while glancing back out to check on Dinky.  “Only a few whom I've come to adopt.”

        Harmony smirked and motioned over her flank towards a certain white fuzzball.  “Like Little Miss Sunshine over there?”  A clattering food dish ricocheted off the back of her copper skull.  “Ow!  Dang your eyes!”

        “Angel Bunny!  Bad!  Very naughty!”

        “Well, why don't you just train her not to throw stuff at guests?” an orange foal mumbled while plucking a few pillow feathers from her wet violet mane.

        “Oh, I try and I try and I try.”  Fluttershy paused in filling a trough full of food.  She trotted over and plucked the last traces of Angel's wrath out of the disheveled pony's hair.  In the center of the hay-strewn manger, the two pegasi stood surrounded by a halo of various tiny livestock.  The thick afternoon rain pelted the wooden rooftop and cascaded in droves off several rusted gutters flanking the open enclosure.  “Angel Bunny came from a neglectful home, you see.  Her previous owners were known to shout at their animals and utterly forget feeding time.”

        “Sounds like you're just making excuses for the world's next treacherous dictator.”  Scootaloo stuck a tongue out.  “I think you need to tan her hide some, Fluttershy.”

        “Tan her hide?!” Fluttershy blanched as if a plague had just filled the air.

        “Yeah!  Y'know; roll up an issue of Equestria Daily and give Angel's fanny a taste of the Nightly Roundup, if y'know what I mean.”  She gave a proud and mischievous chuckle.

        “Scootaloo, if that's how your parents deliver punishment, then I am not one to judge you.”  Fluttershy tossed a pink mane and stepped back towards the trough, grabbing a bag and refilling it as a half-dozen pigs hoofed up to mince through the sudden bounty.  “But I prefer to use positive reinforcement when fostering such animals as Angel.  When she does something I approve of, I give her a carrot.  When she does something inappropriate, I take her aside and explain heart-to-heart what she must do to improve herself.”

        “Are we talking about a bunny rabbit or a mayoral candidate?”  Scootaloo briefly frowned.  “Fluttershy, she's a walking disaster area!  I know you're good with animals, but there are some things in this world that are smart enough to... to take advantage of somepony who's as nice and kind as you.”  She bit her lip and shuffled a bit where she was leaning against a wooden crossbeam of the manger.  “I hate to think of anything treating you wrong, Fluttershy.”

        “Awwwww...”  The yellow pegasus grinned softly while pouring a jar of milk into a saucer.  Several domestic cats scampered in from the far corners of the rain-pelted manger and lapped at the white substance, purring mutually.  “I'm glad that you care about me so, Scootaloo.  But you need not worry.  I rightfully know that Angel Bunny is a hoof-ful.  You see, I've dealt with far moodier creatures before.  Take Rarity's... erm... remarkable specimen, Opalescence, for example.  The first day I houseat the pet, she nearly tore my mane to shreds.  But with enough patience and gentle persuasion, I was able to temper her mood into something more agreeable.”

        “And if all else failed, you gave her the stare, right?” Scootaloo grinned a crescent moon while widening her left eye with emphasis.

        “Oh!  No!”  Fluttershy nearly tripped over the head of lettuce she was nudging towards a stable of bleating goats.  “I would never use that on Opalescence!  Or Angel Bunny for that matter!”

        “But it's sooooo awesommme!”  Scootaloo grinned, her voice chirping above the distant rumbles of thunder that shook the wet edges of the Everfree Forest.  “Why don't you use it more often?  It gets the job done, right?”

        “I... I'm not very proud of the stare.” Fluttershy hid deflatedly behind a pink lock as she shuffled mournfully towards a far edge of the manger.  “In all honesty, I wish I had never discovered it.”

        “You use it on the chickens all the time.”

        “Yes, but chickens are incredibly difficult to corral.”

        “Tell me about it.”  Scootaloo leaned up against a wooden pillar and gazed at the sheets of rain billowing down across the bent grass and glistening bushes of the landscape surrounding the quaint cottage.  The world danced and shook through a refracted haze of moisture, baptising the scene with a cool mist that forced gasping breaths from the ponies' lungs.  The orange foal ran a foreleg through her wet hair, then paused briefly to blink at her hoof, remembering the mud that had briefly stained the offensive limb several minutes ago.  A brief surge of guilt wafted through her, and her violet eyes flickered from a cottage atrium to a field of white stones to an abandoned barn under starlight.  “Fluttershy?” the foal whimpered.

        “Mmm?  Yes, Scootaloo?”

        “When you found your cutie mark...”  Scootaloo swallowed hard.  “Were you alone?”

        “Alone?” Fluttershy glanced up from where she was pouring a bag of feed before a wide array of sheltered birdhouses.  “Well, no, not quite.  I was surrounded by all sorts of adorable animals.  If it weren't for them, I would never have discovered my talent for speaking with them.”

        “You can talk to all animals?”

        “Hmmm-hmmm-hmmm...” Fluttershy chuckled breathily.  “Most of them.  In reality, all animals are capable of understanding Celestial Speech.  I think it's on account of Gultophine's breath providing animation to all living things, regardless of species.  If you just stop, stay calm, and reach out to any animal, even the most remarkable of connections can be made.  You could talk to birds, to butterflies, to owls—You could even talk to manticores and Ursa Majors—”

        “You could talk to an Ursa Major?!” Scootaloo balked.

        “Hmmm...” Fluttershy blushed, biting her lip.  “I wouldn't suggest trying it.  That takes an advanced degree of zoological connection.”

        “Like what you've got, right?” Scootaloo briefly winked.

        “I wouldn't go that far.”

        “Still, your talent is so awesome, Fluttershy.”  Scootaloo smiled gently.  But slowly, the smile faded.  “You should be proud.  Really, you should.”

        Fluttershy raised an eyebrow at that.  She smiled knowingly and put down the last bag of seed before slowly trotting over and standing before the foal.  “I'm sure you too will be proud to find your talent when your cutie mark comes to you.”

        “I don't know.” Scootaloo shifted her lower hooves into the dirt and straw of the manger.  “Can cutie marks come to you when you're alone?”

        “Why do you think you'll be alone, Scootaloo?”

        “Isn't everypony alone, when you really think about it?”

        Fluttershy giggled curiously.  “What gives you that idea?  I told you that I discovered my talent when I was surrounded by such adorable animals, yes?  I hardly call that lonely, Scootaloo.”

        “But... But...” Scootaloo sighed, her eyes falling shut.  A beat, and she gazed up sadly at the adult filly.  “When was the last time you invited a pony over to visit you, Fluttershy?”

        “Well, just yesterday, I finished conducting business with—”

        “A pony you know.  One of your friends.”

        The yellow pegasus blinked at that.  “Uhm... I... I suppose sometime two weeks ago I had Twilight Sparkle over for tea...”

        “Two weeks?”  Scootaloo made a face.  “Fluttershy, you hardly see anypony ever!”

        “I... I see my friends...”  Fluttershy stirred nervously all of the sudden, avoiding Scootaloo's solid gaze.  “When I can, I meet up with them... from time to time...”

        “Fluttershy, am I the only pony who notices this?” the foal murmured, swallowing a lump down her throat.  “You're a very, very talented pony.  Sure, Applejack is good at farming apples n'stuff, but that's something that runs in her family.  Rarity is always makin' dresses and other frilly things, but she and Sweetie Belle live in a fancy boutique that has all they need.  Twilight Sparkle is really good at magic, but she's also seeing the Princess an awful lot—”

        “Where are you... uhm... Where are you going with this, Scootaloo?”

        “You are talented just because, Fluttershy.  But... you're so alone.”  Scootaloo chewed briefly on the corner of her lips.  “Everytime I see you, you're by yourself.  And it's made me wonder... will I have to be alone in order to be really talented at what I get a cutie mark for?”

        “Oh Scootaloo,” Fluttershy gave a painted smile and swiftly bent down to nuzzle her.  “You worry too much—”

        “I mean it, Fluttershy!”  Scootaloo jerked away from her with a frown.  She hated doing it, like ripping her flesh from a sheet of silk.  “It's really bugging me lately!  I... I...” She took a deep breath and shuddered against the echo of the surrounding rain.  “I am beginning to think that I don't want to get a cutie mark.  Ever.”

        Fluttershy's blue eyes dilated at that.  “You don't?”  Another blink.  “You don't?”

        “I know, I know,” Scootaloo grumbled, frowning her foalish face towards the far reaches of the manger as she folded her upper hooves.  “I, Scootaloo, Cutie Mark Crusader and lead singer at the Ponyville School Talent Show, don't know if I want one anymore.”

        “That... That's certainly interesting.”  Fluttershy squinted her eyes.  She cleared her throat and murmured:  “Have you... erm... have you shared this with the rest of your... with the rest of your—”

        “Crusaders?”  Scootaloo grunted.  A sigh.  “No... No, Fluttershy.  But... well...”  She bit her lip, shuffled up, and paced across the straw of the manger.  “I haven't... uhm... actually seen them all that much lately.  And it's more than the fact that Apple Bloom's sick or at school, or that Sweetie Belle is always doing lessons with Rarity.  The Crusaders just... just aren't what they used to be.  Nopony but us three would be the wiser, and even then I don't think Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle see it as I do.  We hardly ever hang out at the Sweet Apple Acres clubhouse anymore.”

        “Well, I suppose some of that can be understandable—”  Fluttershy started.

        Scootaloo spun, suddenly exclaiming, “And it's not like we've given up hope on finding ourselves n'stuff!  We still have fun when we get together!  We still meet up at Sugarcube Corner and whatnot!  But... But...”

        “But what, Scootaloo?”

        The orange foal sighed and slumped down on folded hooves once more.  She dug her snout towards the earth, murmuring, “I don't think Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle realize this, but we're not going to find our cutie marks.  Not together.”

        “And what makes you say that?”

        “Because...” Scootaloo shuddered.  “A cutie mark is something special between a pony and her talent.  That's just not something you can share.  I think a pony has to—I dunno—be quiet and look at herself against the rest of the world and figure it all out from there.  You can't do any of that in a group.  The only time a pony realizes who she is—is when she's alone.”

        “If that's true, Scootaloo, then why did you join the Cutie Mark Crusaders in the first place?”

        “I...”  The orange foal murmured.  She gazed weakly out into the rain, wishing it could drench her, camouflage her for what was coming next.  A stifled whimper broke through, “I-I don't like being alone, Fluttershy.”  She wrenched her face away from the heavens—away from Fluttershy, as the gray world beyond the rain refracted twice over, encompassing her moist vision.  “I really don't.”  A dry gulp.  “But... But now I'm thinking that... that I have to be alone, if I wanna find myself.  I really do.”  It took every ounce of blood ever pumped through her young system not to allow a sniffle to alight the drowning air of the manger.

        A soft padding of hooves; a silken warmth huddled down besides the tiny foal as a voice of haunting gold tonality settled down onto her twitching ears.  “Scootaloo, you are a very... very mature filly.”

        The orange foal gasped.  She braved a twinkling look up at the pegasus, her face caught between being hurt and proud at the same time.  “I am?”

        “Mmmmhmmm.” Fluttershy gently nodded.  Her face was like a platinum halo in the wet center of Scootaloo's vision.  She smiled.  “I've always thought so.  I've seen it everytime I've witnessed the three of you together, under Rarity's care or my own.”

        “But...” Scootaloo bit her lip, her mind reflecting a shattered blue table and a muddied floor.  “I'm always doing practical jokes and breaking stuff.  Oh Fluttershy, please don't just say things to make me feel better—”

        “I only ever say that which I believe.”  Fluttershy flung a pink strand of hair aside so she could look at the little foal more clearly.  “The silly things you do—you do them to make the other Crusaders happy.  Why is that, Scootaloo?  I know why.  It's because you're the ringleader of the group.”

        The foal blinked.  “I am?” she repeated cutely.

        “Heeheehee...”  Fluttershy shut her eyes briefly in a giggle.  “Mmm... Yes.  Don't look so surprised.  Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle may not admit it, but ever since the three of you met at Diamond Tiara's party at Sugarcube Corner, it's you who has been leading the pack.  Everypony sees you with the wagon, carrying your two friends all across Ponyville and the Acres beyond.  I'm quite convinced there would be no Crusaders if there was no Scootaloo to give it energy and joy.”

        “But... But the Crusaders' name was Apple Bloom's idea!”

        “A name is a name, but substance is something else entirely.”  Fluttershy gently laid a hoof over Scootaloo's front forelegs.  “The other girls see the Crusaders as a means to an end.  But I think you've always seen it as something else, something that it truly is.  And that's another outlet for their needs, Scootaloo.  Apple Bloom has always depended on Applejack and Sweetie Belle has always depended on Rarity.  With the Crusaders, they've found somepony else that they can depend on, and have fun with at the same time.  It's a delightful niche you've filled, if I may say so.”

        “Fluttershy...” Scootaloo gulped anxiously.  “Who do I depend on?”

        “Isn't it obvious?”

        Scootaloo wasn't ready for that response.  She wilted slightly, as if expecting a great spotlight to burn her soul out from under her skin.  To her relief, Fluttershy's smile was just as soft and innocent as ever.  She sighed and slipped out from under the drenched weight of the moment while murmuring towards the corners of the manger, “I don't look forward to the day when Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle realize that the Crusaders will find what they've always wanted... by no longer being crusaders.”

        “I agree that everypony must be alone with her talent to properly understand it,” Fluttershy said.  “But that doesn't mean everypony must be alone completely.”  She tilted her head softly aside and narrowed her blue eyes.  “Talent is not all there is to being a pony, Scootaloo.  There is joy, friendship, and magic too.  But most of all...”  She smiled angelically.  “...there is kindness, or at least that is what I'm convinced of.  And you have a lot more of that than I bet you're willing to give credit to.  Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle are blessed to have you in their lives, and they will continue to be blessed, even if you must stop being crusaders.”

        “When you found your cutie mark, you stopped being a Cloudsdalian citizen, right, Fluttershy?”

        “Mmmm... In a manner of speaking, yes.”

        Scootaloo's eyes curved.  “Do you feel, blessed?”

        Fluttershy lingered.  She looked into Scootaloo's face, saw past it, and ultimately resorted to saying, “I'm not nearly as alone as you think I am, Scootaloo.”

        “But Fluttershy, it looks like you always are!”

        “I know what things look like,” the yellow pegasus murmured.  She gazed aside into the shadows.  “And I also know what it feels like.”  A gentle smile slowly, slowly blossomed.  “But... I would never change my life for an instant.”  Her voice was like a golden brook, rippling around the lengths of Scootaloo's ears.  “I am so... so very happy.  I truly am.  That's the thing about ponies:  every one of us is different, and we each use our talents to honor the ones we care about in our own ways.  It's just like how you use your talents to honor the Crusaders; I use mine to honor all of my animal friends.”

        Scootaloo squinted.  “But earlier today at the pond, I thought you said that you believed honoring our talents was all about what it means to our families.”

        Fluttershy opened her mouth to retort—but stopped short with a blinking expression.  “Mmmm.  Oh... I guess I did infer that, didn't I?”  She gazed in a dizzy haze towards the manger floor.  “Oh dear...”

        The two pegasi sat in folded silence, surrounded by rain, lost to their suddenly mutual shadows.  It was Scootaloo who broke the silence, shuffling over to nuzzle Fluttershy in such a warm way that it startled the adult filly.

        “I'll visit you, Fluttershy,” Scootaloo murmured into her silken coat.  “I'll make sure you're not so alone, even if you think you're not.”  She gazed up with glistening violet eyes.  “That is... if you'll let me?”

        A warmness lit Fluttershy's face that hadn't been there for days.  She couldn't even begin to hide it.  Instead, she smiled, and in a vulnerably quiet voice she nuzzled the foal back and said, “I would love that, Scootaloo.  Truly, I would.”

        “Hmmm...”  Scootaloo basked in the golden warmth dripping from Fluttershy's vocal cords.  And then she said, “Until this friggin' rain stops trying to flush us out, anyway.”

        “Heeheehee... Indeed.”

        Scootaloo smiled happily.  There was a sound at the back of the manger.  She turned around...

        ...and squinted quizzically at the little gray unicorn.  “What the heck are you yapping on about this time, kid?”  She raised a curious eyebrow above her amber eyes.

        “Ivory Nematoads,” Dinky chirped.  She sat on a wooden beam flanking the manger, her lower legs dangling while Fluttershy and Harmony were busily pouring bags of feed into nearby troughs.  “They're very sensitive to bright lights, which is why they always stay underground in moist piles of dirt.  A lot of ponies think that quicksand happens incidentally throughout the lengths of the Everfree Forest, when, as a matter of fact, the loose earth is a result of gigantic amphibian creatures burrowing through so much groundsoil.”

        “She is mostly accurate.”  Fluttershy smiled gently while tossing seed towards a clucking cluster of chickens.  “Howbeit, some nematoads aren't so much sensitive to light as they are outright vulnerable to epidermal burns on account of their pale pigmentation.”

        “As much as I love getting this biology lesson in stereo...” Harmony tossed her amber-streaked mane and shook more feed into a trough before nearly tripping over a stampede of swine.  “Nnngh... Ahem... I came here to learn more about your job, Miss Fluttershy.  I'm sure the live almanac dictation can wait for a spell.”

        “But there have been eleven recorded run-ins with giant Ivory Nematoads in the past decade alone!”  Dinky leaned her blonde-and-horned head to the side, kicking her lower legs as she educatedly murmured:  “And two of those instances resulted in severe skin poisoning from direct contact with the creature's mucous glands—”

        “Kid—Has anypony ever told you that ponydom invented books in order to keep long and boring factoids on paper?”

        “On the contrary, Miss Harmony, I invite you to encourage young Miss Dinky.  She's something of a prodigy in Ponyville.”

        “Jee, I had no idea.”

        “No doubt she would outscore every other foal in Ms. Cheerilee's class if she was enrolled there.”

        Harmony squinted at Fluttershy's statement, then gazed over at the nubile unicorn, studying her at an angle.  “You mean to say she's not at school?”

        “No.  I'm not.”  Dinky suddenly frowned, her petite horn waving like a distant dagger above furrowed eyebrows.  “And Mother says it's not nice to talk about others in the third pony.  There are more living things in this world who can't see well than those who can't hear well.”

        “Yeesh.  No offense intended!”  Harmony rolled her amber eyes before helping Fluttershy fill another trough above a cacophony of clucks and squeals.  “I just meant to say that you seem old enough, not to mention smart enough to be attending school already.”

        “I'm tutored by lesson plans,” the blonde child matter-of-factly explained in a droning voice.  “When I'm not being babysat by Fluttershy or studying at home, Mother takes me to the library.  The Ponyville Education System has a literature program for young learning foals.  I'm about two volumes ahead.”

        “Your mom isn't working you too hard, is she?”

        “No'm.  I was just bored, so I read my way to the higher levels.”  Dinky blinked then smiled.  “Did you know that the distant town of Dredgemane has the highest known count of petrified elemental stones found in Equestria?  For every hundred kilograms of rock excavated from Dredgemane quarries, there are approximately ten to fifteen separate nodes enchanted with magical essence.  The only other known place to contain so much elemental concentration is the moon.”

        “Heh...” Harmony smirked helplessly.  “If this is what homeschool does to young fillies these days, no wonder Sweetie Belle is such a friggin' dictionary.”

        Fluttershy glanced over.  “Oh?  You're familiar with Rarity's family?”

        Harmony blinked.  A red glint blistered beneath her copper cheeks as she expected the green world of the past to shatter right then and there.  “I... erm... I suppose you could say that I've delivered a shipment or two to the Carousel Boutique, yes.”

        “How recently?”  Fluttershy stood up and stared Harmony in the face with sudden earnesty.  “Do you know if Rarity is doing well?”

        Harmony's eyes twitched.  “I... uhm... I haven't been issued a delivery order from Canterlot in a while.  I can't say that I've seen them recently.”  She cleared her throat and reflected an amber sincerity back at the yellow pegasus.  “Why?  Is there something wrong with Ponyville's famed seamstress?”

        “I... I wouldn't know.”  Fluttershy deflated with a dull sigh and returned to feeding a pair of bleating goats.  “I have not heard from her in a while.  For an entire year, we did absolutely everything together.  She is... my very best friend.”  A rosy blush, a briefly happy thought, and then the caretaker's yellow coat paled once again.  “But it is almost as if she suddenly does not exist.”

        “You mean she's gone everytime you venture into Ponyville?”

        “Erm, not quite.”  Fluttershy smiled sheepishly.  “In actuality, it has always been Rarity who initiated our visitations.  She just... uhm... she hasn't invited me in a long while...”

        “Then why don't you go and visit her for a change, Miss Fluttershy?”  The time traveler helplessly smiled.  “I'm sure she'd be positively ecstatic to have her best friend pay her a visit.”

        “Oh, no.  I couldn't do that.”

        “Pfft!  Why not?”

        “It would seem awfully intrusive.”

        “Not when you're friends!  Isn't that the whole point of being companions, Miss Fluttershy?”

        “In a recent survey at the end of the Third Age,” Dinky stated, “It was calculated that the average Equestrian pony has approximately four separate and unrelated acquaintances, with the lower percentile falling into the affluent ranks of the upper Canterlotlian Elite.”

        Harmony rolled her eyes, ignored the child, and further murmured towards Fluttershy, “Everypony lives a busy life.  But it's not so bad to have a soul from outside drop in from time to time, even if it is intrusive.  Without unexpectedly nice things like that, what would be the point in living to begin with?”

        “Even if I wanted to,” Fluttershy throated under a wilted breath of gold, “I am far too exceedingly busy with the task Captain Redgale has laid before me, much less the regular tasks of the day.”  She paused to briefly steal a glance towards the tiny unicorn in the back of the manger.  She smiled sweetly and looked at the copper pegasus.  “Besides, some delightful things are worth being busy for.”

        “I'll take your word for it,” Harmony muttered, pacing past the caretaker's flank.  “You gotta realize that I'm making this observation for a report to Princess Celestia.  If there's anypony in Equestria who neverceasingly argues for friendship over labor, Her Majesty's the one.”

        “Have you met Princess Celestia, Miss Harmony?”

        “I... erm...” Harmony briefly blinked.  Her gray mind flickered with the golden threads of thousands upon thousands of words, pages upon pages of gorgeous royal calligraphy under flickering lanternlight, and yet she never actually knew the divine voice with which to read all of them in.

        “I must say that I have.”  Fluttershy finished for her.  “Yes, she is always a firm believer in friendship, but the day that she insists that labor be put aside for other necessities is the day I lock my doors, because it will mean that Nightmare Moon or something else horrible has returned to put a spell on her.”

        “I think you've been barked at by this Captain Redgale a little too much.”  Harmony looked at her with an amused smirk.  “To your discredit, Miss Fluttershy, you sound horribly adorable when you try to be morose.”

        “Oh dear, I truly do not know how to respond to that.” Fluttershy pensively shuffled away and reached for a glass jar of milk.  She struggled with weak limbs to twist the cap loose.  “Nnnngh... Hnnnghh... Ohhh—This bothersome jar!”

        “Here, let me,” Harmony said.  Her soul self's projection lurched over, took the jar from Fluttershy, and effortlessly opened it.  The very moment the cap came off, she heard meowing noises, and she froze.  Her heart was beat-beat-beating hard.

        “Do you know what to do with that, Miss Harmony?”

        “Yes.”  The visitor's eyes blinked and a black mane hung in an amber-streaked slump.  “I believe I do.”  In a zombified lurch, Harmony walked across the manger and poured the white liquid into a tiny saucer.  A haunting array of twitching tails announced a cluster of domestic cats that had formed a furry ring around the plate, mewling and lapping greedily.  A ring of purs; and Harmony felt her chest about to burst.  In a blink of green flame, she saw a misty haze crossing over the world.  There was distant thunder, like a steady downpour of afternoon rain drenching the landscape in a refracted gloom that echoed the voice of a little orange foal, unsure of herself, until a silken warmth suddenly nuzzled her—

        Harmony snapped out of it, eyes twitching wide.

        Fluttershy bounced back, startled.  Nevertheless, she bravely gulped and murmured, “Miss Harmony, are you okay?  It looked like you were blacking out again, just like you did in the kitchen earlier.”

        “I... I...” Scootaloo took a shuddering breath, tried smiling, but only grimaced.  She glanced at the half-filled empty milk bottle, at her trembling hooves, then at Fluttershy.  A pleading wag of her eyebrows.

        Fluttershy gently nodded.

        A cough, a nod, and Harmony took a swig of the milk.  Gulping, she exhaled hard, and calmed her rattling knees to a molasses slouch.  “Whew... Does a pony good, y'know?”

        “Are you sure you're fit to be of assistance to me, Miss Harmony?  I doubt Princess Celestia would be too harsh on you if you took some rest before accomplishing your mission.  I know Captain Redgale only wants me at the best of my abilities.”

        “Oh, Miss Fluttershy,” Harmony chuckled helplessly, planted the milk jar on a nearby wooden beam, and stood with a confident swagger.  “I was born ready to be your faithful observer this week!  And if I'm lying, may Princess Nebula strike me from the heavens!”

        “D-D-D-D-Dinky, I'm here!”  A voice stuttered from beyond the nether.

        Harmony blinked skyward.  “H-Huh—?”  Her voice left her like a four-course meal hovering above a tablecloth that had been viciously yanked out from underneath.  In a catastrophic blink, a gray winged body slammed into her, plowed her through two bails of hay, and sent her sprawling into several bags of spilled oats piled under a settling sneeze of manger dust.  Harmony winced and struggled to get up, only there was an offensively heavy weight—a living weight—seated on top of her.  Painfully, she craned her black mane to see who it was, but all she saw were bubbles, gray coat, and more bubbles.

        “Huhhh... The manger feels a lot squishier than I remember!”

        “Hello, Mother!”  The upside-down image of the horned foal beamed and squatted on the edge of her wooden beam.  “We were just talking about Pale Nematoads and Friendship!”

        “Oh really?  Funny, those are t-t-t-t-two things that I know nothing about!  C'mere, Muffin!”

        “Heeee!” Dinky happily flew, and suddenly the weight atop Harmony doubled.  The copper pegasus wheezed, her amber eyes bulging.  “Did you have a good workday, mother?”

        “I delivered enough letters to give Equestria a paper bath!  At least I hope so; my bag is empty!”

        “Snkkkt—Hello, anypony?”  Harmony hissed and squirmed.  “I seem to have been squashed by a skipping record made of lead.  Care to lend a hoof?”

        “Whoah!  Muffin, listen!  T-T-T-T-Talking oats!”

        “Uhm...”  The upside down silken face of Fluttershy entered into view.  “Miss Doo?  If you don't mind, you're sitting on my guest.  She... mmmm... Sh-She's from the Royal Court of Canterlot, and she's not a chair.”

        “Oh!”  The body gasped and shifted atop Harmony.  The bubbles disappeared and the copper pegasus could suddenly breathe again.  “My bad!  Sorry, Mister Squirrel!”

        “'Squirrel'?” the time traveler flicked her black tail and sat up, frowning.  Then a firmer frown.  “'Mister'?”

        “Mother, the Latter Third Age Zoological Report states that Tropical Island Capybaras are the largest known form of rodentia, and we're too far away from the sentient populace of St. Petersbrittle.”

        “Hah!  St. Petersbrittle!  I have a sister there!”

        “No, Mother.  Aunt Scrappie lives in Marescow.”

        “Oh right!  Heheh... So she does.”  A gray hoof rubbed the unicorn's blonde mane.  “Have I mentioned I love that horned br-br-br-br-brain of yours?”

        “All the time, Mother.  Heeheehee!” Dinky turned rosy in a sudden, toasty jubilation.

        Fluttershy sashayed over and helped a dizzy Harmony to her feet.  “Miss Harmony, I believe you have just met a good friend of mine: Miss Doo.”

        “Yeah, uh, did she get that name from her first foalday or a diving board competition?”  Harmony shook her snout, tossed the invisible cobwebs out her ringing ears, and exhaled painfully.  In a forced breath of politeness, she smiled calmly the stranger's way.  “Whatever.  It's a pleasure meeting a fellow friend of Fluttershyyyyyyy-Yaaak!”  Harmony recoiled, hissing through her teeth.

        Cradling Dinky and seated awkwardly on her haunches was a gray pegasus with a cockeyed grin.  She wasn't looking at Harmony, but rather she was looking towards the roof of the manger... or she was looking at the floor of the manger... or she was looking at the sky and looking at the ground... or... or...

        Harmony blinked wide.  She tilted her head up and tried centering her reflection in the mare's eyes, only to experience her body suddenly swimming figure eights until she too fell back dizzily on her rump.  “Uhmmm...”

        “Don't worry, they won't g-g-g-g-go off.”  The wall-eyed pegasus' smile was an ambient thing, swimming around the room in a wide beam to rise the hairs on the back of Harmony's Entropan neck.  “Though they sometimes point me in the wrong flight pattern.  I apologize again, Mister Squirrel.”  She stuck her hoof out half a meter to Harmony's left.

        Harmony squinted, bit her lip, and slowly, awkwardly stretched to the side to shake the misguided limb.  “Well, nopony's hurt.  Maybe next time you could give a proper warning before—”

        “Oh! I just remembered, Dinky!”  Miss Doo suddenly gasped, yanking her hoof away so hard that Harmony pratfalled once more to the manger floor.  The jubilant gray pegasus held Dinky out in front of her and chirped, “Miss Sparkle gave me another book that you will just love!”

        “Did she?!?”

        “Mmmmhmm!  Feast your horn!”  The pegasus planted Dinky onto a bale of hay and rummaged through a leather mailbag hanging from her gray flank.  She produced a thick leather-bound book and hung the thing upside-down.  “Ta-daaaaa!  My dear-dear Muffin, it's full of stars!”

        “Oh Mother.” Dinky rolled her eyes with a smile.  With blonde hair flailing, she spun until she was lying upside down with her head hanging off the bail of hay.  From there, she effortlessly read the title with joyous little foal eyes.  “Oooooh!  A Young Unicorn's Guide for Astronomy!”

        “M-M-M-M-Miss Sparkle says that it's not a a children's book!  She says it's made for older, smarter fillies!  She says it's for the interm-m-m... for the interm-m-m-m-m...  for the intermmmmmm—”

        “'Intermediary Classes', Mother.”  Dinky smiled.  “And it's just perfect!  I've been wanting to know more about the heavenly bodies.”

        “You're my little heavenly body, Muffin!”  The gray pegasus shut her wayward eyes and hid an ecstatic smile behind the upside-down book.  “Hehehehe—Your Mommy made a funny!”

        “You sure did!  Heeheehee!” Dinky smiled, reverse-somersaulted off the bale of hay, and nuzzled her mother's thighs.  “Thank you very much, Mother.  I'll read it as soon as I can.”

        Harmony once more stood up with the gently guiding hoof of Fluttershy.  “For the love of Celestia, did I just wake up to the Concussion Convention?”

        “Mmmm...” Fluttershy murmured, smiling softly at the two gray ponies, young and old.  “You may call it what you wish.  But I think it is precious.”

        “You think a lot of things are precious, Miss Fluttershy,” Harmony briefly grumbled as she stood evenly on four hooves once again.  “Does half of them have to hurt my head so much?”

        “Angel Bunny is the product of my own strengths and weaknesses,” Fluttershy spoke aside, then motioned towards the two ponies.  “But, like you, I am only an observer to this.”

        “Wait...” Harmony blinked.  With amber eyes, she squinted at Dinky's horn, then at Miss Doo's wings, then at Miss Doo's solid forehead, then at Dinky's horn again.  “Did Dinky just call her 'Mother'—like—a billion times just now?”

        “Mmmmhmmm... Yes.  Yes she did.”

        Harmony's eyes went briefly in the direction opposite of the mailpony's.  “I think something in my brain just broke.”

        “Oh really?  Do you need to see Nurse Red Heart?”

        “Jokes, Miss Fluttershy.  They exist, remember?”

        “I want to thank you again for t-t-t-t-taking care of Dinky, Fluttershy.”  The gray pegasus trotted over.  The tiny foal was sitting on her back, already hoofing through the pages of the astronomy book and gazing with wide yellow eyes at the bounty of contents flowing into her bobbing cranium.  “I wouldn't be able to make my routes if I always had to worry about her wher... her wh-wh-wh-wherea...”

        “'Whereabouts', Mother.”

        “Yes.  Those.  Heeheehee...I wish all ponies were as kind as you.”

        Fluttershy smiled sweetly.  She stood placidly in the warm immediacy between the mare's wandering eyes.  “Kindness goes around in a circle, Ditzy.  Your daughter is a joy to be around.  I couldn't be happier taking care of anypony else.”

        “Wait.” Harmony pointed with a shuddering hoof.  “You mean this is Ditzy?!  This is Ponyville's mailpony?!”

        “You've heard of me?”  The filly smiled towards the floor and ceiling around Harmony.

        The copper coated pegasus sweated.  “I... uhm... I've heard of the several holes you made in Ms. Cheerilee's schoolhouse.”

        “Oh... Uhm... Eheheh.”  Ditzy bowed her blonde head and dug a hoof shyly in the straw-laden floor of the manger.  “Yes.  I sure do feel awfully bad about that.  If it pleases the Royal Court of Canterlot, I've done a g-g-g-good share of community service over the years to make up for it.”

        Harmony chuckled dryly and was about to say something—when Fluttershy was suddenly standing in the obstructed path of the time traveler's scoffing voice.  “And we're sure that Princess Celestia is most pleased with your excessive remediations, Ditzy.”  The yellow pegasus cast a glance over her pink mane and emphatically caught Harmony's gaze as she continued, “Especially since you improved on the schoolbuilding's architecture in the long run.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow.  She gazed past Fluttershy and stared once more at Ditzy and Dinky, studying their identically gray coats and yellow pupils, colors that fused the young and old pony impossibly together while they were still so vastly different, like a certain mailpony's eyes, drawing an imperceivable wedge between the young horn and aged wings.

        “All we can ever hope to do is learn and get smarter, isn't that right, Muffin?”

        “According to this, Mother,” Dinky was already quoting from an article in the center of the book, “Ponymonium was the reason for the dark shadow that formed the Mare-in-the-Moon, on account of the corruptible art of runescaping that was used to forge the lunar fortress several hundred years ago!”

        “Heeheehee...” Ditzy's gray cheeks turned rozy as she looked at, past, and around Fluttershy.  “She will be up all night if I let her.”

        “We've talked about this, Miss Doo.” Fluttershy smiled.  “'Early to bed, early to rise--'”

        “'—makes a mare healthy, wealthy, and wise'!”  Ditzy beamed.  “How I d-d-d-do love me some Ben Flankless!”

        “Flanklin, Mother.”

        “Hehehe—There she goes again!  Same time tomorrow, Fluttershy?”

        “Absolutely, Miss Doo.”

        “You sure it's not a bother?  You look like you have company...”

        “It's something we'll be working on overnight.” Fluttershy smiled.  “I'm never too busy to look after your darling daughter.”

        Harmony blinked.  With a stifled grunt, she made to protest—but Fluttershy's pink tail was in her way.

        “Super!” Ditzy turned and winked diagonally towards the foal.  “Okay, muffin!  We gotta g-g-g-g-go home.  Say bye to Miss Fluttershy!”

        “So long, Miss Fluttershy!  Thanks for taking care of me today!”

        “So long, Dinky.”  Fluttershy trotted over and gently nuzzled the horned foal.  “Be kind to the world and the world will be kind to you.”

        “I promise!”

        “Hop into the happy seat, Muffin!”

        Instinctually, the foal leaped, slid into the leftmost leatherpocket of Miss Doo's mailbag, and produced a petite helmet from the other pocket.  Fastening the headpiece to her skull, her tiny horn sticking out of an upper cleft, she zipped the lip of the bag tight around her and tapped her mother's flank with a tiny hoof.  “Ready for takeoff!”

        “P-P-P-Pilot to navigator!”

        “Contact!”

        “Up up and away—Whoah!  Hello, there ceiling, ahem—There we go!  Wooo!” Ditzy soared away from the manger as the helmeted foal waved from above.

        “Heeheehee!  So long!”

        “So long, Miss Doo!”

        “Have a good evening Miss Fluttershy, Mister Squirrel!”

        In the echoing ring of their absence, a thoroughly headachy Harmony stumbled up to the edge of the manger and gazed skyward.  Her eyes narrowed on the distant gray shadow of the conjoined ponies soaring eastward... and towards the multicolored haze of Ponyville beyond.

        “You think they'll make it home safely without crashing into other squirrels?”

        “She's careful to avoid rodents when Dinky's riding with her.”

        Harmony bit her lip. “Why does that not make me any less freaked out?”

        “Our concerns aren't at the center of the issue.”  Fluttershy shrugged and went about straightening the spilled bags of oats from the gray pegasus' entrance.  “A mother's love is the best gauge for any pilot, I think.”

        “Heh, if you say so.” The last pony smirked as the lonely dashboard of the Harmony briefly flickered before her.  She turned around and motioned with her shoulder towards the horizon.  “How old was Dinky when she was adopted?”

        “Oh, she's not adopted.”

        Harmony's eyes were concrete stones.  Her eyelids slid pathetically over them once, twice.  “She's not?”

        “Mmm-mmm.” Fluttershy shook her head.  “They're of flesh and blood.”

        “But..” Harmony squinted once more eastward.  “I thought it was impossible for a pegasus to... to foal an unicorn.”

        “Improbable, perhaps.” Fluttershy stacked a last sack of oats, forming a neat tower in the corner of the repaired manger.  “Life knows no impossibilities, especially when it means making such precious things as Dinky possible.”

        “Oh, I see.” Harmony nonchalantly nodded.  “So she's a half-wing.”

        The Cataclysm happened all over again, or so the last pony thought.  The world was exploding—in violent heat—until she realized that she was twitching down the frowning, burning, and decidedly sneering face of an angry Fluttershy:  “How dare you?!  Dinky Doo is most certifiably more than the sum of such paltry, heartless words!  You should be ashamed of yourself, a clerk of the Royal Court who resorts to inpony stigmas!”

        Harmony felt the ghost leave her Entropan body.  She could have pathetically crumbled in green flames at any second.  The filly positively stumbled as she found her throbbing soul quivering under the stare of Fluttershy's righteous wrath.  Every breathy hiss that fell upon her was a shower of hot coals, every glint of silken gold replaced with divinely searing brimstone.

        “I-I-I'm sorry, Fl-Fluttershy!”  The copper pegasus paled, foalishly stammering.  She backed into a sudden wooden beam and gulped before barely managing, “I-I didn't mean anything bad by it!  Where I was raised, ” she briefly paused in the gray sludge of her own words but guiltily limped onward, “That's what we called foals who were born from—”

        “That's what you insulted ponies with!  And it does not excuse you if others around you say it too!  It's still wrong!  It's anything but kind.” Fluttershy fumed, her breath calming steadily but icily as she leaned back from Harmony, her pink hair settling in heated curls about her bristled snout.  “Cruelty is a cancer that has infected ponydom for far too long, and the fact that it's reached the servants of Celestia's Royal Court depresses me to no end.”  She fought sudden tears as she shook her soft head towards the manger's floor, murmuring:  “Dinky is a treasure, a genius little foal filled from mane to hooves with joy and respect for all things living.  Her mother is an angelic being who spreads happiness wherever she goes, and she loves her child with every breath that she has to give.”  She looked at Harmony, this time with a sad grimace as opposed to a harsh frown.  “Does the substance of the blood that went into that relationship mean more than the endearment that fills it?”

        “I never meant to say that they weren't special, Fluttershy!  I just meant...I-I just...” Scootaloo sighed from within the numb frame of Harmony.  She hung her head in a sudden cloud, slumping her body against the wooden beam of the manger.  “I meant nothing.  And if they were both still around to hear what I said, it would hurt them... it would hurt them for no reason.”  Her amber eyes briefly reopened.  Beyond the straw and sawdust the last pony saw wasteland after wasteland of bodies—salvageable horns and lootable corpses, and none of them had the decency to hear the numb anger and sorrow of a despicable survivor.  The future was full of ashes, but only one set of ears.  They wilted then and there, in the warm past, before Fluttershy's blue-eyed gaze.  “I wasn't thinking, I wasn't considerate.  Please... Please forgive me.”

        Fluttershy took a long, deep breath.  She wandered bravely over and nudged Harmony with a sudden strength, pushing the blinking pegasus back up to her feet.  In a gentle voice that was slowly resembling the silken gold of the last pony's memories, the yellow pegasus said, “The term 'half-wing' is a word used by the ignorant.  But, evidently, that does not describe you, Miss Harmony.  Your apology is accepted.  I trust that you know why what you said was wrong.”

        “I... I...” Harmony bit her lip, suddenly imprisoned in a foalish shadow before the looming figure of the caretaker before her.  She hated—absolutely loathed being the target of Fluttershy's ire, which startlingly only included this one naked moment in her whole bleeding life.  She was so desperate to make amends, that the lesson was suddenly lost to her, until an adrenalized pulse of the brain dredged it up from beneath the surface of her self-doubt.  “I know that stigmas only alienate ponies, when instead they could be living natural lives, lives of loving and caring for one another.”  A brief knifing thought coarsed through her soul-self, of a lone pony killing things, eating things, and robbing things that would forever blemish her with a heresy that dwarfed that conversation's topic.  She selflessly ignored the guilt and instead said, “We shouldn't be letting superstition get in the way of accepting other ponies for who they are.”

        “There's a reason why Dinky is homeschooled,” Fluttershy spoke, her body jolting with each word confessed aloud in her melancholy voice.  “It's not that Ms. Cheerilee doesn't want her in the classroom.  She's fought for it endlessly, but everypony knows that the poor little foal would never hear the end of ridicule—be it from peers or parents or random passer-bys.  She's far too young to make a brave crusade out of such a potential situation, so Ditzy decided to put her through a tutoring program.  Ms. Cheerilee, Twilight Sparkle, and various other members of the Ponyville Education Board have volunteered lesson plans—”

        “And you've volunteered your time in babysitting the kid.”  Harmony nodded.  “I guess it makes sense.  If there're so many other ponies giving the cold flank, leave it to the kindest caretaker in Equestria to have pity.”

        “It's not pity.”  Fluttershy shot another rebuking glare, then softened.  “It's love.  That's something that can't be tempered by sympathy, but only by commitment.  It's sad: so many ponies in our day and age are too blinded by taboos to adore something precious that's right in front of them.”

        “I guess so...” Harmony murmured.  She felt slightly nauseous; the future suddenly seemed a little less gray.  She chased that thought away with a wayward inquiry:  “Does anypony... Does anypony know what happened to Dinky's father?”

        Fluttershy was as silent as a grave.

        Harmony gulped her way past that.  She tried another question:  “What does Princess Celestia have to say about all this?”

        “You are most welcome to write her, Miss Harmony.  But do not hope for much.”

        “No... ?”

        “Her Majesty is a divine Goddess,” Fluttershy remarked with briefly sparkling eyes.  “She can raise the Sun with power that rivals the long lost glory of the First Age.  But it takes far more than a single Goddess to raise the clouds of ignorance from our world.  That takes everypony—including you and me—everyday, thinking with our hearts and not with our fears.”  A somber breath, and she sauntered past Harmony.  “That takes a great deal longer than a morning sunrise to accomplish.  Come, Miss Harmony.  If we're to find the Capricorn, we cannot wait here making discussions that we already know the ends of.”

        The copper bottom pegasus blinked after her, battling a lump in her throat.  Her heart was beating hard, but no longer with guilt.  After twenty-five inside-out years, Fluttershy's golden voice still surprised her.  The exploding end of the world felt like a whimper against the lulling melody of her truth.  She couldn't have a steadier anchor than in those weak and dainty yellow wings fluttering before her, away from her, and towards the forest.

        Like a good disciple, the last pony turned away from the frazzled mistakes of the past, and followed her.

The body of the Everfree Forest stretched before the two pegasi like a tattered courtyard of overgrown, calamitous life.  Here, things grew in chaotic circles, and yet they formed a beautiful mosaic of green leaves, brown hues, copper vines, and red sand.  The place rusted, not with decay, but with a regal age that scared the artistic marvels of Canterlot and Cloudsdale into shameful hiding.

        “I forgot how wonderful it all smelled,” Harmony murmured, smiling softly as the grand emerald canopy formed a gentle shade over the broken path weeding its courageous way into the bosom of the earthen labyrinth.  Squinting towards the towering branches on either side of them, the last pony half expected to see a glowing looking glass orbited by manatorches and an elder purple dragon standing tall and proud while he watered bush after bush of priceless flowers.  There wasn't a single bramble or thorned vine to be seen in the forested mesh looming just a canter's distance away.  “If I find Pitt's grandmother in all of this crud, I'm eating a horeshoe the soonest I get back.”

        Harmony's mind briefly flickered back to reality, a reality laced with a black abyss, a shattered pair of goggles, dozens of faceless squirming shadows, and a very ticked-off Ursa Major.  She gulped, fought the shivers of the situation away, and focused on the very warm moment throbbing about her.

        “Okaa-aay.”  She slapped her front hooves together and rubbed them.  “First order of business, I prescribe, is that we thread our way into the heart of the forest, then travel in clockwise patterns, all the while heading northeast towards the last reported location of the Capricorn.  And then, if we have as little luck as you've had lately, we'll take advantage of our double numbers and have one pony take to the air while the other one stays on the ground.  By communicating with each other at different altitudes, we could get three times as much acreage visually scanned than we could otherwise.  We'll find that star-creature in no time!  What do you think of that plan, Miss Fluttershy?”

        Dead silence.  Utterly dead silence.

        Harmony's heart skipped a beat.  She suddenly imagined the warm world disappearing in a green plume of flame.  “M-Miss Fluttershy?!”  She breathlessly panted, glancing all around.  She froze suddenly, her gaze stuck on the sight of a pink tail sticking out from behind a low boulder.  Raising an eyebrow, she sauntered over and knelt her snout towards the far side of the stony obstruction.  “Uhm... Hello?”

        “Eeep!”  The squatting pegasus jolted, nearly banging her head on a low lying branch.  “Oh... H-Hello, Miss Harmony.”

        “Hi.  How are you doing?  Uhm—You do remember our scheduled search for the Capricorn, right?”

        “Mmm... yes...” she shivered.

        “Aaaaaand you do know that the thing was sighted in the Everfree Forest, correct?”

        “Mmmhmmm, affirmative...”

        “And you know that the Everfree Forest is—like—over there, don't you?”

        “Nnnngh!” Fluttershy trembled all over, covering her face with quivering hooves.  “Don't remind me!”

        “Nnnngh,” Harmony facehoofed as a suddenly pathetic reality of yesteryear flew upwards from her foalish memories.  “You've gotta be friggin' kidding me.”  Her voice had the ironically raspy twinge of rainbow hues to it.

        “I beg your pardon?”

        “You're kidding me, Miss Fluttershy!  You practically live on the welcome mat of the Everfree Forest for Celestia's sake!  And yet you can't bring yourself to go in there?”

        “Oh... I have gone in there... several times.”  The yellow pegasus smiled nervously, then shivered even harder, struggling to avert her blue eyes from the forested wall.  “But on many of those occasions, I had my friends with me...”

        “Wait just a second, though!”  Harmony leaned down and squinted directly into the caretaker's face.  “Didn't you tell that female dog you call a Captain that you physically searched the forest just recently like she asked you to?”

        “And I did!”  Fluttershy said.  It was her turn to look guilty as she gulped and cast a glance aside.  “Mostly.”

        “How do you mean, 'mostly'?”

        “Well, I... Mrmm... I walked around the sides of the forest, and... Mmm... I stuck my head in a few places.  And... And I practiced my Capricorn call a few times, and I figured it was loud enough for the creature to hear it.  Capricorns have good hearing, you know—”

        “Nnnnngh... Fluttershy, Fluttershy, Fluttershy.”  Harmony all but pratfalled, groaning.  “Tell me, how far does a dog run into a forest?”

        “Uhhhh—”

        “It's a trick question!  A dog only runs halfway 'into' a forest!  Miss Fluttershy, correct me if I'm wrong, but your frickin' job is on the line!  Captain Redgale is chomping at the bit to have your head on a silver platter over this stupid Capricorn crud, and you're telling me you haven't properly explored Everfree for the elusive target?”

        “I've explored!  In my own way...”

        “Fluttershy, your 'own way' is fantastic when it comes to feeding animals.  Your 'own way' is great for babysitting a friend's kid.  Your 'own way' is marvelous for showing me when I've been an ignorant moron, but you gotta go the distance if you want to keep your cottage, and keep being able to do all of the good stuff you do... in your 'own way'!  How am I going to get the information I need for Princess Celestia when Ponyville's lead animal caretaker no longer has a daily itinerary to observe?”

        “I...” Fluttershy shivered and sadly squeaked, curled up in a yellow ball behind the rock.  “I've never been a good pegasus at going the distance.  I'm not as courageous as you, Miss Harmony.  I don't even have to know you to say that.  That's just me.”

        “So you think you don't have courage?”  Harmony knelt beside her on folded hooves and spoke softly, endearingly.  “I read an extensive report before coming here, Miss Fluttershy.  You've tamed a raging Manticore, talked down a fire-breathing dragon, outrun a menacing hydra...”  A deep, gentle breath, and a proud foal smiled through Entropan lips.  “...you even out-stared a good-for-nothing Cockatrice, single-hoofedly saving several young kids.”

        Fluttershy's lips parted in shock.  She gazed up with twitching blue eyes.  “How did you know about that?  I never told anypony, except for maybe Twilight Sparkle.”  She gulped. “The p-palace's thin walls... ?”

        “Let's just say that when a pony does brave things, word travels fast.”  Harmony smiled.  “Haven't any of your friends ever encouraged you in this manner?”

        “Mmmm... M-My friend Pinkie Pie helped me with my fear of heights.”

        The copper pegasus blinked at that, her eyes floundering over the filly's folded wings.  “Your fear of what-now?”

        “She taught me that, with a hop, a skip, and a jump—I can overcome anything.”

        “Like this silly forest here?”  Harmony pointed.

        Fluttershy followed the direction of the copper hoof and wilted further behind the rock, squeaking and... squeaking.

        Harmony took a deep breath.  Still, she smiled.  “Miss Fluttershy, you are a living element of kindness.  Don't pretend that I'm wrong when I say that.  And, y'know, kindness is a courage all on its own, especially when...” she paused, shuddered, and finished.  “When we live in a world that's so easily blinded by fear and half-truths.  It takes courage to be kind in the midst of that, and to take care of ponies that other equines are too ignorant to respect.  You should be proud of that quality you have, because it makes you do even more things to be proud of, like saving a Capricorn from falling into extinction.”

        “I... I just can't...” Fluttershy stammered, fighting to hide her gaze from the forest.  “I just know that Captain Redgale will have my neck.  But I cannot help it.  I'm so helpless when I'm alone...”

        Harmony's eyes rounded upon hearing that.  A rush of blood to the head, like an afternoon downpour, and the last pony reached over and nuzzled the pegasus' velvety coat.  “I tell you what.  You bring the kindness, and I'll bring the courage.  And maybe, just maybe, Miss Fluttershy, we'll learn from each other along the way.  I know that I will learn something.  At least I'm willing to.  Can you say the same?”

        Fluttershy gazed up at her.  A gulp, and her petite wings flexed with sudden hope as she murmured, “Yes.  I do suppose.”

        “So then...” Harmony grasped Fluttershy's shoulders and stood up, yanking the twitching pegasus to her hooves.  “It's just a hop, skip, and a jump.  And maybe add a 'wink' to that.”  She finished with a smile.

        “Okay... Okay... Okay... We can do this...” Fluttershy stammered and trotted ahead of the time traveler.  “For the Capricorn.”

        “And while we're at it, we can talk about stuff!  Like the sky!  The animals!  Ahem—Anystrangechangesinthelocalfloraorfaunathatyoumayhavenoticedlately—Aaaaand maybe even gossip about—Oh, I dunno—Hot stallions!  For instance, there's this total hunk at Sweet Apple Acres with the disposition of an angel but the well-toned body of a crimson thoroughbred—”

        “Eeeeeek!  A demon!  I see a demon!!!”

        “Miss Fluttershy?  Uh... That's a tumbleweed.”

        “Oh... Oh.  Erm... Very well then.  Uhm... What were you saying about a crimson thoroughbred?”

        “Nnnngh... On second thought, let's just talk about oats instead.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Thirteen – Everfree

Special Thanks to Chobit-389 for Cover Art

        “Uhm... Fluttershy?”

        “Yes, Scootaloo?”

        “How did the Everfree Forest get its name?”

        “Oh.  Ohhh... Now there is a good question.”

        The two pegasi—older and younger, yellow and orange—sat side by side on the reading seat of Fluttershy's front room.  Together, on folded hooves, they stared serenely out into the doubly-open windows of the animal caretaker's cottage and watched as the wet-wet world sloshed and billowed under an endless curtain of afternoon rain.  There was a blue haze to it all, as if Princess Celestia had decided to bounce her sunlight off of a dozen giant mirrors before finally casting its lazy dimness over the thundering landscape.  The dense green earth all around the quaint home squeaked and hissed with the energy of a billion leaves applauding to this righteous downpour.

        “Is it such a good question that it's not worth answering?”  Scootaloo smirked after several soft seconds had drifted silently by.

        “Hmmm?  Oh!  My apologies, Scootaloo.  Mmmm... I guess I was just distracted...”

        “Nothing wrong with that, Fluttershy.”  The orange foal smiled.  Behind the two of them, the cottage's fireplace crackled warmly, bathing their dry bodies in a happy heat as they stared leisurely out into the monsoon.  “I know a lot of ponies really dig rainy weather.  Sweetie Belle says it puts her to sleep sometimes.  And Pinkie Pie likes to get her mane wet.”

        “Pinkie Pie likes to get a lot of things wet,” Fluttershy said, blushed, then helplessly giggled at herself.  Her flighty chorus was briefly joined by Scootaloo.  Then the yellow pegasus smiled and said, “Are you a fan of rain, Scootaloo?”

        A pair of violet eyes blinked.  The flightless filly imagined several barn crossbeams rotting away while a drizzle of rainwater somehow always, always found its way down to Scootaloo's one and only blanket in the middle of yet another shivering night.

        “My mom and dad are always telling me to stay out of the rain,” she murmured with knee-jerking instinct.  “Leave it to older pegasi to be aquaphobic.  What's up with that?”

        “I... uhm... I am slightly aquaphobic,” Fluttershy said and blushed into her pink locks.  “Among other things...”

        “I mean, it's not like my wings are gonna fall off because I just happened to splash into a puddle or two!  Pffft!”  She raspberried and rolled to her side, playfully kicking at the air with orange hooves as she squirmed further into the plush reading seat.  Scootaloo winked in Fluttershy's direction.  “I have this theory that pegasi evolved from ponies that were made for living underwater.  It'd certainly explain a lot of redundant organs we have in our chest cavity.”

        “I... uhm... I wouldn't know about that, Scootaloo.”

        “You don't believe in seahorses?”

        “I'm... I'm not sure that I would want to...”

        “Heeheehee!” Scootaloo's grin was wide.  “Sometimes you can be a real hoot, Fluttershy.”

        “Oh.  I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to be—”

        “That's a compliment, Fluttershy, yeesh!”  The foal rolled her violet eyes.  “I thought you grew up with Rainbow Dash!”

        “Oh, but I did.”

        “How come you can't recognize when somepony's playfully teasing you?”

        “Because when I was your age, I was teased an awful lot.  And—uhm—it was not a very pleasant thing.”  The adult filly shrunk into herself, biting a lip.

        Scootaloo blinked.  She rolled upright and sat—slumped—on her hunches.  A guilty breath.  “I'm sorry, Fluttershy.  That's... That's really sad.  I had no idea—”

        “There is nothing sad about a life that has seen me come so far...”  Fluttershy looked up, smiling sweetly.  “...and that has given me so much to be grateful for.  Such as your company, Scootaloo.  I'm glad to have you here to talk to.  If I could go back into my past, somehow, and change things from the way they were, it would affect what I do now, and furthermore what I enjoy.  So don't be sorry, Scootaloo.  Sad things only happen to make us stronger, and they carry a grace all of their own.”

        “If you say so,” Scootaloo murmured, her tiny wings drooping slightly.  She gazed at the several leaves of a nearby bush glistening in the pelting rain.  Moisture dripped off of two white roses, flickering to her like a pair of white names, white rocks, white spaces lost to her life.  The rain suddenly had a low hum to it, like a bass violin that Scootaloo had heard on Granny Smith's record player one day while the pegasus was visiting Apple Bloom.  There was something divine and powerful about melancholic strings in the hooves of an equine artist.  Scootaloo would never admit it to her fellow crusaders, but she had often daydreamed about having a record player of her own someday, so that she could listen to what her close friends could only call “boring and stiff” music.  Sitting down and drowning in violin music was a stone's hurdle away from the likes of riding a scooter, zip-lining, or wrestling alligators, but there were times—gray shadowed lonely times—when there was nothing else that Scootaloo wanted to do more.  Even at age eight, the foal wondered if all things in nature simply wanted to stay put and release from time to time, much like the stationary raincloud enshrouding her and her golden-voiced acquaintance before the window.

        “Would you still like to know, Scootaloo?”

        “Uhm...” The foal blinked, then glanced aside.  “Huh?”

        Fluttershy's face smiled like living platinum in the dancing kiss of the warm fireplace.  “About how Everfree got its name—”

        “Oh!  Sure!  Ahem...”  The young pegasus smiled bashfully and gestured with a hoof.  “Fire away!”

        “Fire?  Why would I-I want to fire someth—?”

        “Flutterrrrrrshyyyyyyyy...”

        “Oh.  Eh-heh-heh-heh.  Ahem.  Everfree was named when pony explorers surveyed the land in advance of the Faustmare caravan that settled in Ponyville.”

        “I know.”  Harmony nodded her black mane.

        Fluttershy blinked, creeping pensively through the densely shadowed forest that loomed hazily on either side of their sluggish trek.  “You know?”

        The copper pegasus smiled sweetly.  “I've heard the story of Everfree's discovery before.  I have to say, it was told to me remarkably well.”

        “Oh.  Then I can't presume to tell it any better.” Fluttershy's hooves dragged limply in the rich black soil.

        Harmony chuckled.  “On the contrary, I'm all ears.”

        “But, Miss Harmony, I thought you said—”

        “What matters most about this place is what it means to you, Miss Fluttershy.  That will make itself obvious to me in the telling.  And if I'm to collect all of my information for Her Highness Princess Celestia, then the 'how' is just as important as the 'what', especially when it comes to the things you know about this place and all that it means to you.”  She gazed aside and winked pleasantly at the yellow pegasus.  “So, please, tell me a story, Fluttershy.”  A slight gulp, but she maintained professional airs.  “I like hearing your voice.”

        The caretaker's yellow coat bled rosily from underneath.  For whatever the time traveler's words were worth, they ushered a gentle current of energy into Fluttershy's spine, so that she strolled with an evidently firmer gait alongside the “Canterlotlian clerk” as the two ponies made their way into the sprawling heart of Everfree, on the lookout for an elusive Capricorn.

        “Well... Mmmm... Like I said, the land needed to be surveyed before Faustmare and her pioneers even set hoof here.  After all, there could have been several unforeseen dangers to ponies, especially when the richest farmland was located so close to an unchecked cluster of forest...”

        “...and in those days, nearly halfway through the Third Age, wildlife were not quite as capably stewarded as they are in the present.  Cloudsdale wasn't formed until about two hundred years ago.  The closest place to find pegasi like you and me was in Stratopolis, and that was located over the Eastern Ocean, and not north of Stalliongrad like it is today.  So you see, Scootaloo, the earth ponies were on their own when they founded Ponyville; they did not have the flight advantage to tame the skies as well as the land.”

        “Well, didn't they have unicorns to at least cast protection spells?”

        “Hmmm... That's just it.  There weren't as many unicorns willing or able to live outside of major cities in that time period.  You see a lot of that today, of course, but several hundred years ago was a different matter altogether.  Aside from places like Canterlot and Whinniepeg, you'd be lucky if you could even find more than one unicorn out of a thousand random ponies!  It's on account of the huge number of unicorns who... who died during the war with the Lunar Republic... mmm... you see...”

        “Yeah.  I think I remember Twilight Sparkle mentioning something about that.”

        “Without unicorns and without pegasi, earth ponies couldn't use magic or flight to tame the landscape.  They had to rely on sheer willpower and courage alone.  That means that they had to plan ahead.  So, long before Faustmare dared to bring her many traveling families into the center of the Great Equestrian Valley, she sent a brave band of ponies to investigate the land and determine what earth ponies could take advantage of and what they had to look out for.  It were these courageous surveyors who came upon the forest just beyond this cottage here.”

        “And then they named it Everfree, right?”

        “Mmm... Well, no, not at first,” Fluttershy murmured as she nervously inched her way down a series of steep steps made out of exposed tree roots.

        Harmony had hopped down beneath her.  Trotting a circle in the suddenly wet earth, the time traveler spun about and leaned up on her rear limbs to offer a strong hoof to the lady.  “Well, they had to do it sometime, right?  I mean, it's not like they took one step past the treeline and settled for 'Evermuddy'.”

        “M-Most certainly not.”  The caretaker's yellow limbs wobbled, quivered, and slid.  “At first, they didn't even dare to trot near the place.  It's written that the untouched landscape of the Equestrian Valley was brimming with enough manticores, hydras, and wolves to put today's wildlife to shame—Eeeep!”  She completely missed a root and plummeted—

        —straight into a copper pegasus' grasp.  Harmony awkwardly but professionally caught her.  She gently lowered the twitching caretaker to the rich earth.  “Y'know, you have wings.” She winked.

        Fluttershy blushed deeply, fidgeting with her iron-tight coiled appendages on either side of her.  “You may have better luck convincing them that they're there.”

        “Heheh...”  Harmony motioned eagerly with her skull and led the duo's trot down a deep ravine bustling with shrubbery, butterflies, and various scampering amphibians.  “So, the Faustmare surveyors ran into a lot of danger?  Or were they smart enough to avoid it?”

        “At first it didn't matter.  Many of the creatures attacked their campsites while they were still several hundred meters from the treeline.”

        “Yeesh!  Talk about cranky history!”

        “They sustained several injuries.  Many ponies in the group wanted their chief explorer to write back to Faustmare and declare the land untameable.  One writer in particular crafted a very popular note where he wrote that—let me see if I remember it... Oh!  Ahem.  He wrote, 'Though Her Highness' esteemed decree of Manifest Destiny is divine, there is very little chance that ponydom will ever be free from the forest's presence while in the bold act of colonizing the Equestrian Valley, for the landscape is perpetually malevolent at best.'”

        “Wow.  Ponies wrote really stiffly back then.”

        “It was a simpler time, Scootaloo.  There weren't nearly as many distractions for the settlers as there are today.  Literary eloquence was a matter of habit.”

        “So that's how the forest got it's name?  Cuz it was—uh—'Ever-Malevolent'?”

        “Mmmm... The truth is far more encouraging.”

        “Do tell.”

        “The Royal Court of Canterlot forwarded the letter to Faustmare herself.  She was... mmm... put off by her own ponies' fear and reticence, to say the least.  In a potentially suicidal act, she herself traveled to the unsettled Equestrian Valley.  She brought along her foal, a daughter, a brave act which has been poetically discussed in several books written since.  Unfazed by the treacherous landscape ahead of her, she made sure that the camp was rebuilt from the animals' attack first-hoof.  And then, along with a few of her most trusted pioneers, she marched into the depths of the Everfree Forest.  She led the first expedition into that foreboding landscape.  Under her courageous lead, the first earth ponies of Ponyville made careful written observations of everything they saw.  Several hundred unknown species of animals were discovered in that week-long expedition alone.  There were trees that nopony had ever seen before—rock formations and weather phenomena too.  By the time Faustmare and her troupe had come back, she had gathered enough data to produce a book, which is famous to this day, named—”

        “Lemme guess:  Faustmare's Home for Imaginary Wildlife.”

        “Heeheehee—No, Scootaloo.  It was far more appropriately called A Pioneer Pony's Journal of the Ever Free Forest of Equestria.  You see, Faustmare had found a way to turn around the rather negative words of her dismayed associate who had first written about the woes of the colonization to Canterlot.  The point she made in her book was that the forest bordering the Equestrian Valley was innately special, for it was—and still is—a free landscape where wildlife runs unchecked and yet remains perpetually self-sufficient.  The grass grows, the animals eat, the weather does as it pleases, and if any pony attempts to tame this landscape, he or she would ultimately be harming it instead of preserving all of the amazing things that dwelled within.”

        “Sounds like Faustmare was a tree-hugger.”

        “Miss Harmony!” Fluttershy flashed her a bothersome look as they strolled under a low ceiling of green canopies beside a glistening waterfall.

        “Heheheh—I'm just saying.”  The time traveler smirked.  “She brings a kid no older than three winters to the edge of Equestrian civilization and she ends up writing a five hundred page book about grass?  Sounds like earth ponies of that day and age were more than simple; they were friggin' bored.”

        “Faustmare was an exceptional example of earth ponydom, and if it weren't for her courage, tenacity, and leadership, then Ponyville would never have come into existence, much less have survived for a single season!  It was her genius and her genius alone that transcended fear and ignorance while revolutionizing the way ponies would forever admire and respect the wildlife in their backyards.”

        “I like listening to you talk so favorably of this 'Faustmare',” Harmony said with a knowing smirk as she bent a few branches out of the way for Fluttershy to pass through unharmed.  “It fills your voice with a strength that's sorely lacking, if I may be so bold as to say, Miss Fluttershy.”

        “Oh... uhm...” The yellow pegasus bit her lip.  “I only meant to defend Ponyville's founder and her legacy.”

        “And there's no need to.  I know what awesome things Faustmare did.  I... uhh...” Harmony squinted slightly, then brightened with:  “I read up on her right after I was assigned to this... uhm... this fact-finding visit.”

        “Then why are you asking that I share everything that you already know?”

        “Didn't I already tell you, Miss Fluttershy—?”

        “Uhm... Why do I feel like there's another reason for why you've asked me to talk during the whole duration of our sojourn?”

        “Well...”  Harmony took a brave gulp and smiled her way.  A few stray hairs escaped the mahogany cascade of her amber-streaked mane as she bravely uttered in a flippant voice:  “All of this discussion has gotten you to forget the fact that we're about two kilometers deep into a forest full of crazy animals who would like nothing better than to eat us.”

        “Eeep!  OhdearOhdearOhdear!”  Fluttershy instantly scrunched up against the copper pegasus, shivering as if a million earthquakes were bubbling down the fault-lines of her buried face and clenched eyes.  “I had no idea we were this far into Everfree  Eeek!  That log—that log—it has a wolf's claw marks all over it!  And that smell!  We're being stalked by a cougar!  I know it!  I could smell that from across a room full of sk-skunks!”

        “Actually, cougars smell muskier than that.”

        “How could you possibly know that, Miss Harmony?”

        “Well, I... uhm...” Harmony blinked into the green canopy.  Her eyes fell wincingly upon the dangling webs of a copper spider, bouncing like lanternlight over a steamy broth of meaty soup.  It took a dinosauric amount of will-power to resist the shamefully habitual growl of an Entropan stomach.  “Let's just say that I'm well fed—er—read... I'm well-read in 'cougar'.”

        “Ohhhhhh!” Fluttershy practically hung off of Harmony's flank like a tattered yellow cape.  “It will take us too, too terribly long to make our way back now that we've come this far!  Oh... whatever shall we do...?”

        “Uhm... Since when were you named 'Lilyshy'?”

        “I beg your pardon?”

        “Miss Fluttershy...” Harmony smiled sweetly and knelt down on her haunches.  She clasped with the caretaker's trembling forelimbs with her own steady hooves and gazed into the filly's twitching blue eyes.  “You were doing so well until you realized that you were doing so well.  So what's to stop you from—y'know—doing so frickin' well?”

        “But it's just that we're so deep into this forest and by the time we went back to the cottage—even if we turned around now—darkness will have fallen!  Nopony wants to be in Everfree at night!  It's suicide!”

        “Wasn't it also suicide for Faustmare to march straight into this same dang forest hundreds of years ago with no prior knowledge of the place and—might I add—no wings, no magic, and certainly no talent for short book titles?”

        “Erm...”

        “Miss Fluttershy...”  Harmony stifled a chuckle and made sure that the yellow pegasus got the full blast of her beaming grin.  “Don't you get it?  Your admiration for Faustmare and other pioneering ponies isn't just a vicarious thing, it's indicative of who you are.  You are strong, you are knowledgeable, and you are gifted in all the right ways to do the sort of stuff you think you have to be scared of!  Don't you see?  When you put your mind to it, you're brave!  Heck, you're braver than brave!”

        “Mmmmm....” Fluttershy curled up against Harmony, gazing past her pink tail-hairs and regarding the surrounding shadows with concave blue eyes.  “But you're here!  I wouldn't have gotten this far without you!”

        “Feel free to shudder all you want from this, Miss Fluttershy, but—Bullcrap!”

        The yellow pegasus demurely convulsed just as the time traveler had prophesied.

        Harmony didn't pause for a single breath:  “All I've done is tag along and listen to your awesome dictations.  You've been doing all of the navigating and searching and... uhhh... Capricorning.”

        “And we still haven't found it.”

        “But we will, Miss Fluttershy!  Have faith, like I do in you!  You think I have a clue about how to find this giant cosmic question mark?  Heck, no!  For all I know about this Forest, we're practically lost!”  She chuckled, tilted her head up, and gazed about the green landscape.  A blink, and her brow furrowed.  “Well, shoot, I think we are lost... Now... nngh... dang it, where did we...?”

        “Mmmmmm!  I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!  Oh Miss Harmony, I am so sorry—”

        “Pfft.  Just a minor setback.”

        “Minor...?”

        “In a worst case scenario, I'll just fly us both out of here.  That is the extent of my assistance here, ya see?”  She patted Fluttershy's shoulder and smiled again.  “Think of it this way, now we have no excuse but to come back with the Capricorn.  We're in here so deep: what else is there to do but accomplish the task that the Cloudsdalian Commission Board Thingy has laid out for you?”

        “But what if I panic?”  Fluttershy gulped and quivered.  “What if I just lift off, leave you, and fly all the way back to the cottage?”

        Harmony stared at Fluttershy.  She cast a bored glance at the pegasus' tight yellow wings.  Then she stared at Fluttershy again, unblinking.

        Fluttershy blushed deeply.  “Right.  Uhm... Let's go find the Capricorn, I suppose...”  On trembling legs, she bravely sauntered forward.  It was a fifty-centimeter-per-minute waddle, but it was enough to bring a brave smile back to the time traveler's face.

        “Don't worry, Fluttershy.  If you must know, I can and will protect us if need-be.  But I really don't think I have to.  You've sooooo got this, girl!”

        “Your words of encouragement are as charming as they are... mmm... misguided.”

        “Why are you so frickin' hard on yourself?”  Harmony cackled.  “For crying out loud!  All I wanna see you do is get your job done so that you can rightfully shove the fruit of your talents right into Corporal Rosefart's face!”

        “Captain Redgale.”

        “Whatever—Don't you want to show her off?”  Harmony winked as she trotted slowly to keep within the caretaker's “courageous” gait.  “That uptight basket of gray feathers treats you as if you're weak and helpless.”

        “But I am weak and helpless.”

        Harmony never wanted to choke and hug something more than she did right then.  With a groaning breath, she traversed the palpitations of her Entropan heart and managed, “Miss Fluttershy, if you just let ponies treat you like crap—and I don't care if they're hired by Cloudsdale, Canterlot, or Her Majesty herself—then that's all you're ever going to get in life: crap!  You owe it to yourself to have more faith in who and what you are, not to mention in all of the amazing things that you're obviously more than capable of!”

        “I... uhm... I've always believed that it is never my place to owe... But rather to earn.”

        “Same thing, isn't it?”

        “N-Not exactly, Miss Harmony.  Like I've said, I am very weak and helpless.”

        “Nnnngh...M-Miss Fluttershy—”

        “Hear me out.”

        It was a command, very rigid at that, almost like a certain elder pegasus' off-ruby glare.  The last pony was instantly silenced by the suddenly rough edges of that voice as Fluttershy next throated:

        “I have my faults and my shortcomings.  There is nothing I can do about them; it is an essentialist thing.  But... uhm... who I am and what I do is a result of the fact that I have... I have tried so hard and so long to become something useful in spite of my weaknesses.  And do believe me when I say that I have weaknesses, Miss Harmony.  It's even a factual thing; you can look into the Cloudsdalian Medical Records... uhm... if you have any doubts.  I was foaled over a month earlier than I should have been.  I grew from infancy with very brittle limbs.  My wings took an extra year to stretch out, and even then I couldn't pass flight school at the same time as all my peers.  On top of that, I'm very susceptible to the side effects of magical resonance and I have too many clinical phobias to even bother listing out loud.  These are all very real, very true things that I know exist in my life.  To deny them is to deny what I am and the long way I've ascended to become Ponyville's lead animal tamer.”

        “And you should be proud that you've come that far.“

        “As far as I've come, Miss Harmony, I still have my weaknesses.  They are things that will never go away, even if I make enough accomplishments to put the legacy of Faustmare herself to shame.  No matter what I do, or where I go, those weaknesses come back to haunt me.  They're the reason why I can't get anywhere near an adult dragon, or why it's so hard to even think about buying a home in downtown Ponyville, or why my family never... never...”

        It was after three successive cracking sounds of broken branches underneath her hooves that Harmony realized Fluttershy had ended in mid-speech on purpose.  With a squinting expression, she gazed curiously back at her anchor of Kindness.  The yellow pegasus' face was hung, a posture that was flanked by drooping sighs.  Her hooves padded the earth steadily, shuffling bare inches away from nearly tripping on her silken mane hairs.  It was a practiced type of trotting that the caretaker had obviously mastered, a pitiable talent.  Her platinum wings remained locked in porcelain imprisonment, an unnatural stranger to clouds.

        All of the sudden, that deep and dangerous trek into Everfree didn't seem worth it, not even for an endangered Capricorn.  Harmony felt the same as she imagined Fluttershy did—for all of her life, staring into a mirror and only seeing the flaws.  It was such a natural conclusion to the wilted creature limping before her that the copper-coated pegasus shuddered to think of how easily she could have come to believe it; she sank all the more at the thought that so many other ponies could and did.

        Fluttershy was an angel, camped out on the edge of a demonic forest that threatened to lash out at her at anytime, simply for the carnivorous impulse of the bleeding moment.  While Ponyville hustled and bustled a cantering dance away from the cottage in leisure habit, the villagers all had one softest-of-soft souls standing as the thankless bulwark between civilization and a tree-laced cluster of naturally clandestine madness.  The same blatant stigmas that forged that horrible dichotomy had equally forced Fluttershy to make the same blasé conclusions about herself that an apathetic hovel of ponydom had flippantly and lazily stapled upon the hapless filly.

        The time traveler sighed.  She was two-and-a-half months away from the most horrible Cataclysm that could ever transpire, and yet here—knee-deep in the unassumingly somber fountains of yesteryear—she was constantly discovering more and more tragedies that rocked her heart harder than she could ever remember the waves of fire and ash doing.  Harmony briefly wished she could hug Fluttershy, just wrap her strong Entropan forelimbs around her soft shell forever, and yank her impossibly back to the blistering gray skies just to have her there, to smile with her, and to teach her that weakness is an animal of a different color that too can be tamed by a life dedicated to preserving all of the good things about ponydom, the very things that Fluttershy reveled in as much as she epitomized, though she apparently lacked the grace—or perhaps the permission—to tilt her head up from the ground that she had forever descended to and simply acknowledge it.

        Still, the last pony knew better.  If the Everfree Forest merely terrorized Fluttershy, then the likes of the Wasteland would utterly destroy her.  Precious things lived in a precious world, and Fluttershy's caution sang with an ever-present wisdom that preserved her as much as it preserved her faults.  Tragedies existed because happy things did, and Harmony suddenly felt too tired and too sick to continue beating her charm over the yellow pegasus' skull like so many teasing bludgeons of innately caustic pony grit had before the Entropan avatar even arrived there on green flame.

        Searching for Fluttershy's spirit would have to be like searching for the Capricorn; it would take time, and time was the least of Harmony's weaknesses, while it was the only true one of Fluttershy's.

        “Tell me more about Everfree, Miss Fluttershy,” she uttered with a meditative smile while trotting alongside the caretaker.

        “Uhm...” It was Fluttershy's turn to raise a quizzical eyebrow.  “What more is there for you to hear about?”  She blinked, then nodded her snout towards the grim foliage surrounding them.  “Or to see?”

        “How about 'to think'?”  Harmony smirked the yellow pegasus' way.  “There's gotta be more than a history lesson that got you to live so close to this creepy place.”

        “I... uh...” Fluttershy trembled one last time from the shadows, took a deep breath, and remarked, “I guess that the Everfree Forest... uhm... r-reflects a certain philosophy of mine.”

        “Fluttershy's Philosophy?” Harmony grinned wide.  “Now this I gotta hear.”

        “Miss Harmony, wouldn't you rather deliver to the Princess the facts that I know about local plant life or how to keep parasprites from spreading beyond the tree-line or—?“

        “We can talk about that sort of stuff after we find the Capricorn.  Speak to me, Miss Fluttershy.  You know you want to.”

        “I do?”

        “It's only because you sound so fond of the place.  I mean—before I knew about Cockatrices, I thought it was just some ordinary forest.  Now I understand why you think it's so friggin' scary.”

        “Scary things have a nobility to them, Scootaloo.  I know that must sound rather... uhm... silly, coming from a pony who is so often frightened...”

        “I think you're one of the bravest ponies I know, Miss Fluttershy.”

        “Heeheehee—Aren't you forgetting a certain weather flier?”

        “Well... I did say one of the bravest.”

        “Mmmhmmm.”

        “Seriously, though, that one time you totally outstared that ugly Cockatrice was soooo cool!”

        “I only did it to protect such precious things as you and your friends.  But, really, the Everfree forest means more than just being a place full of scary things.  It represents something that is inherent to life—that nature works cyclically.  There's a reason why living things are self-sustaining, in Everfree as much as elsewhere.  I believe that it's all because of a spirit, a spirit that exists solely to maintain that everything takes care of itself.  In a way, you could say that there aren't really living things—plural.  But, we are all the... the multiple parts of just one living thing.  We all have a purpose, and it's to ultimately support each other, rather than compete with one another, though sometimes the way in which we support each other can... erm... can be interpreted as cruel... and even scary competition.”

        “You really believe that?”

        “Is it so strange that I do, Scootaloo?  I assure you, there is a spirit of kindness that embodies all things that are.”

        Through emerald glades cobwebbed with the shadows of ageless trees, the two pegasi marched in search of the Capricorn.  Wingless, they climbed hills of mulch, navigated the uprooted intestines of ancient cedars, and pierced the mossy curtains of row after row of gnarled foliage.  The labyrinthine bowels of Everfree quivered about them, as if the great green body of Equestrian nature would expel the two foreign objects at a moment's tremor.

        The shadows of furred and leathery things stirred from the overhanging branches.  Harmony was quick to spot them before a fleeting Fluttershy could, all the while ushering the yellow-coated caretaker forward and forward, keeping the filly's eyes locked on the grassy spaces within which an elusive cosmic creature could be—hopefully would be—but inevitably did not happen to be residing.

        As the brisk forest stroll steamrolled into an interminable limp of lethargic proportions, Harmony resorted to far more drastic methods of surveillance.  With Fluttershy's permission, she took to the air, spreading the distance between the two ponies by a tense twenty meters, thirty meters, forty; all the while she tested the lengths of her green-flaming anchor.  Wordlessly, Harmony hovered at the level of the ginormous tree canopy, peering her amber gaze for any sign—a cosmic silhouette or a flickering aura against the expansive green sea of the forest—that might point out the Capricorn to the last pony's elevated sight and render this search to a successful finish.  She found it hard to concentrate, though, as the ever-gnawing fear of being whisked away on green tongues to a dark thorny world pierced her inner pony soul with the snarling fangs of a feral blue monstrosity.

        The sky above—or what scant golden shred of it that could be seen through the living ceiling—melted from a gentle blue to an autumnal yellow as the day began its ritualistic slide into the cascading afternoon.  It never ceased to surprise the time traveler how fast an actual Equestrian day went by.  The rise and fall of Princess Celestia's orb, no doubt the most beautiful of beautiful things, was a disastrously short poem compared to the epic lengths of a gray Wasteland Dirge.  Harmony wondered if there might come a time when she could anchor herself to a pony or to a point or to a moment in the past where she might simply lie down and allow the full length of a spinning day to tattoo her with the crawling ant feet of time, one delightfully sluggish minute after another.  The last pony had to remind herself that it was reverse-time that she and Spike had at their disposal, not everlasting-time.

        Touching back down to the springy Everfree floor after a solid hour of elevated hovering, Harmony had to apologize to Fluttershy with a helpless shrug of twice-helpless shoulders.  The copper-coated pegasus had personally urged the caretaker to make this sojourn into the forest, and despite all of her emphatic assistance, she could not get Fluttershy any centimeter closer to finding the source of Captain Redgale's imperative.  She wondered for a moment there if Fluttershy would have had any luck even if she had ventured into the forest on her own before Harmony's arrival.  Somehow it didn't seem like this creature wanted to be found by anypony, even if an entire legion of warhorses had been sent to track the star-fallen Capricorn down.

        For the next hour and a half of hiking, it hurt Harmony to look at Fluttershy.  It hadn't taken long, but the bitter shame of somehow failing the pegasus had impaled Harmony's Entropan soul more than a million trolls could ever hope to achieve.  Finally, when she did manage to give the Ponyvillean animal tamer a solid look, what she saw was an image that brought all of the gray ash of the future shooting out of her in a single breath.

        Fluttershy could best be described as a dainty mountain of a pony.  A touch of melancholy hung off her face with the grace of wilting flower petals laid before a field of white stones.  However, the speed at which she was suddenly and fluidly charging this stoic expression forward through the mist-laden froth of Everfree gave her the presence and the inertia of an iron battleship plowing its way through a soupy cloudbank.  Somewhere in that silky platinum heart, wrapped placidly in a yellow coat, was the burning determination of adoration—like a mother's love—that drew Fluttershy to puncture the depths of Everfree in search for an unknown, mysterious creature as if it was the one and only thing chiseled into the insides of her lonely eyelids.

        Harmony had—once or twice—imagined herself a courageous pony, as if she could somehow have brazenly imitated some prismatic shadow from her past. It occurred to her then, as it had occurred to a rain-watching orange foal several eons ago, that the one true hero of her childhood was not a filly that could shape the weather with her wings, but one that could selflessly console a trembling soul when the weather itself refused to bend.  In Harmony's adult lifetime, she had tackled hydras, outrun trolls, battled harpy pirates, and infiltrated crumbling ruins.  Still, the last pony had never—in all of her years of angst and struggle—ever once taken the brunt of a merciless world's blow for another and far more naïve creature, nor had she ever ventured headlong into a life-threatening miasma when her only weapon was the utterly absurd refusal to use weapons altogether.

        With one single afternoon stride into the Everfree depths, Fluttershy had suddenly shown more courage than the last pony had exhibited in a lifetime of torture.  Harmony's brain ached over this realization, until she realized that her heart wasn't aching, and she realized the difference between herself and Fluttershy.  Harmony scavenged out of the sheer will to survive.  Fluttershy marched into the gaping green maw of that forested landscape to look for a creature that she—or any other pony for that matter—barely had a common concept of.  Fluttershy's pursuit was not a task of survival; it was a task of love.  The last pony felt equally honored and shameful to be within the same breath as this peaceful anchor of anchors.

        She clung to her, like a foalish shadow, and she held her smiles as she held her secrets, close to her Entropan chest, until the occasional moment when a certain golden voice would spark the heart beneath the copper coat to beat.  Such breaths suddenly made her feel far safer than any copper rifle or weighted runestone magazine ever could.

        “Kindness is more than just a word, more than just an Element of Harmony.  It's a gift that keeps on giving for lives that keep on living.  When you do something kind for a pony, you're doing something good for another pony you may not even know about.  It's because the first pony whom you've blessed is likely to be inspired by your generosity and be moved to do something kind or nice as well.  In Everfree, in a forest where such amazing examples of life brush up with each other like an endless sea of nutritious roots, you can see how the natural things of this world are perfectly and infinitely connected.  And what's so amazing is that this intricate labyrinth of interrelationship was not forced upon the environment by individual minds of logic, but rather it all happened because of the essential motivations of Mother Nature.”

        “I was always taught that Princess Gultophine breathed life into the world that Elektra and Nebula had built.”

        “Mmmm... A very divine truth that is, Scootaloo.  But have you ever wondered why Gultophine was motivated to instill purpose and animation into the many things of this world?”

        “Because her Alicorn Sisters made her do it?”

        “Heeheehee—Kindness is eternal, Scootaloo.  Of this, I am convinced.  Kindness has forever been, will forever be, and very presently is the inspiration behind all things that are alive.  The goal of all living things is to help each other; don't let a hoof-full of horrible monsters and other bad eggs in this life make you think otherwise.  This world is a kind world; it wants to be.  The only proof you need for this is the world that we live in:  Equestria.  Equestria is a result of the spirit of kindness having nearly achieved its one noble goal throughout the history of existence.”

        “And what goal is that, Fluttershy?”

        “Harmony.”

        The shadows of the dying afternoon devoured the kaleidoscopic mosaics of Everfree leaves that had infrequently bathed the grassy floor over which the two ponies had been treading.  A soft girlish gasp filled the echoing spaces between branches; Harmony realized that Fluttershy was yawning.  When she gave the yellow pegasus a concerned look, the “Canterlotlian Clerk” merely received a velvety soft smile as a response.

        The last pony's mind limped over a distant mirage of sensations, of apple trees and daffodil alfredo and leather bodies collapsing in the moonlight.  The time traveler briefly thought that she had actually mastered persistence when visiting Applejack, that she had become the epitome of patient hard work and strength rolled up into one Entropan sandwich.  As the minutes of Everfree bled into hours, and she witnessed a once-trembling Fluttershy marching ceaselessly across the lengths of a Capricorn-less forest, she realized that there were still some creatures of ponydom that could put even the most superheroic feats to shame, for they were the very things that gave the world before the Wasteland its toasty joy and glow, the magical spark between painful breaths that made the briefest of lonesome dreams in the ashen clouds worth crying over afterward.

        Harmony found that the role of “helper” that she had silver-tongued her way into becoming for the yellow-coated caretaker was as literal as it was necessary.  When Fluttershy needed a boost up onto an earthen cleft in the forest floor, Harmony hoisted her spine to lift the trembling pony to her platform.  When there was a muddied space of sloshing earth that needed traversing, Harmony was quick to carry the yelping pegasus over in a conjoined leap.  Any and all malevolent shadows that briefly flanked the thin paths available to the two wandering souls: the last pony was quick to spot them with her scavenger's eyes and tactfully steer Fluttershy away from such dangers.

        With each means of assistance, Fluttershy's blushes grew hotter and hotter in a boiling humility.  If the engineer inside Harmony could somehow string together a steam-operated meter for scaling Fluttershy's adorableness, the last pony had no doubt that the resulting explosion of such a device would render half of Equestria to ashes two months in advance.  Being so close to such a dreamily beautiful soul should have made her sad, Harmony speculated, but the proximity of the yellow pegasus' aura tamed the crumbling beast that was her countenance, so that she was forced to remember a certain platitude that was spoken to her in golden breaths, that sadness was something that possessed a certain grace of its own.  Harmony somehow couldn't feel the normally venomous fangs of desolation in lieu of that.

        The green haze of the world died away, and there bled through the canopy a deep bright red that ushered an ever pervasive throng of crickets and several more unnameable choirs out of hiding.  The impulsive trembling briefly returned to Fluttershy's shoulders, but the pegasus with the royal cutie mark was quick to console her with a nudge of her snout... and a following smile that reflected twice in the caretaker's pearlescent gaze.

        The forest may not yet have yielded a Capricorn, but as Harmony served an ever loyal caboose to Fluttershy's brave sojourn, there were many happy breaths hanging from the branches above them, and the lingering dark trees ahead.

        “We live in a harmonious world.  It's beautiful, it's rich, it's vibrant.  It sings beneath our hooves and it gives weightlessness to our wings.  Just talking about it right now almost makes me want to burst into a chorus.”

        “Oh s-seriously, Fluttershy.  Uhm... There's no need.”

        “Hehehe—No, I suppose not.  There's a hum to everything as it is.  If you're quiet enough, soft enough, and patient enough, you can feel it in your heart.  You can feel the soft silken threads of the spirit of kindness pulling at you, tugging you, urging you to do that which you were foaled for, urging you to make all things that live enjoy being all things that live, to the best of yours and their ability, until the one sad day that they can no longer be.  This is our purpose; this is our golden rule.  We exist together, so it is only natural that we help each other.  To this end, kindness works like a circle.  When you look hard enough, you can see such a spinning pattern of self-sustaining wonders.  And in the Everfree forest, the truth of it all is... well... it's positively dizzying.”

        For a brief moment of adorable absurdity, Harmony stood on her hindquarters, leaning back against the wooden bark of a tree as she apathetically  watched a  quaint scene unfolding right in front of her.  Fluttershy had paused in the midst of their Capricorn quest to usher half a dozen hapless frogs from the bone-dry center of the forest clearing and into the delightfully moist edge of a pond just beyond a throng of bushes.  She murmured lovingly and clicked her tongue against dainty lips as she urged each amphibian into their new watery homes.  As each wart-laced creature plopped one after another into the muddy depths, the yellow pegasus sighed with increasingly warm breaths of relief.

        Harmony raised an eyebrow.  She tried not to grin, but it was like fighting a mountainous avalanche one-hoofed with nothing more than a dustpan.  This soft, joyful reverie briefly distracted the last pony, so that she was almost oblivious to a multicolored string of scales suddenly drifting down from an errant tree branch located directly above the caretaker's hand.  With bulging eyes, Harmony gasped and sprung into action.  She lunged forward at a dangling coral snake and heroically batted it away with an Entropan hoof before its flicking tongue got within a centimeter's length of Fluttershy's mane.

        The Ponyvillean animal tamer glanced up in time to blink at a nervously grinning Harmony, her forelimb innocently scratching the back of her amber-streaked head.  None-the-wiser, Fluttershy flashed a cheekish grin, cleared her throat, and trotted with an exhausted gait towards the last unexplored lengths of Everfree's eastern fringe.

        Exhaling sharply, Harmony followed after her in a depressed slump.  She cast a lonely, forlorn gaze towards the dimming forest canopy above.  Beyond the wind-blown leaves of Everfree, the stars were twinkling into existence.  Though the sight of the blossoming constellations should have overcome the apocalyptic time traveler with joy, she shuddered with an immediate wave of helpless shame, for the only cosmic sight that she deserved to track down had eluded the two of them completely that day.  As the last legs of the trek fell into the foreboding thick of the black night, Harmony fought a lump in her throat.  Her mind fought the skin prickling visions of ink-dark brambles suddenly thorning their way into her memories with each fruitless hoofstep she made herself take... and made Fluttershy take in turn...

        “If Everfree's such a big example of this 'spirit of kindness' fluff, then why are you so scared to go in there all the time, Fluttershy?”

        “That's a good question, Scootaloo.  As beautiful as Equestria is, we still live in an imperfect world.  I do whole-heartedly believe that living things naturally want to help other living things.  But I never pretend to believe that the world accomplishes this perfectly.  There are... mmm... there are weaknesses, Scootaloo.”

        “Weaknesses?”

        “You cannot have strong things without weak things.  This is the sad but real split in reality that has existed since before the Chaos Wars, when even Goddess Epona was forced out of sorrow and heartache to make flight and take her exodus to the stars.  But just because the world's weaknesses still plague us with the same violent monsters, diseases, and bad luck that ended the First Age, it does not mean that we have to give up hope.  We can be strong—we can be so strong, Scootaloo, so long as we fill in the gaps of our weaknesses with love... and with kindness.”

        “Do you really think it's that simple, Fluttershy?”

        “Scootaloo, I am very happy that you are here.”

        “Uhm... eheheh—What does that have to do with anything?”

        “Quite simply that you are filling a gap right now, though you may not truly know it.  And... And I thank you.  I thank you for it, Scootaloo.”

        “It's very kind...”

        An exhausted Fluttershy glanced over towards Harmony at the tail-end of the copper pegasus' utterance.  “Yes...?”

        Harmony blurredly shook her head.  “Ahem.  Don't mind me.  I was just...”  She looked across the dim foliage and blinked concernedly at the yellow pegasus.  “Erm... Miss Fluttershy, did you need a breather?”

        The frail pegasus nodded with a wilted shudder.  “I think that would be a most comforting prospect, Miss Harmony...”

        Harmony smiled gently and guided the two of them over to a soft mound of grass alongside the beaten path.  The lengths and breadths of the Everfree Forest croaked, chirped, and billowed about them.  Scant bursts of starlight flickered directly overhead between the waving clusters of tree branches.  There was an eerie tranquility to the place, far from resembling the utterly obsidian nightmare of the future Briar.  Not a single drop of fear had alighted the time traveler's mind.  Perhaps it was on account of her durable Entropan body, but Harmony hardly feared for her life.  During the entire fruitless trek, she had kept her sights on Fluttershy.  So long as Ponyville's animal tamer was safe, the last pony didn't fret the freakish shadows of the dense wilderness.  At the same time, she was undeniably proud—not to mention inspired—by the firm degree to which Fluttershy was unwaveringly pursuing the lengths of their suddenly nocturnal search.

        “I gotta hoof it to ya, Fluttershy,” Harmony mused in a humming voice as the two reclined over folded legs.  “You hardly resemble the freaked-out filly that I had to practically shove into the forest when we first set out this afternoon.  What changed?”

        “Erm... Nothing changed.”  Fluttershy gulped and scrunched low beside her “assistant”.  “This is still quite a dangerous and foreboding environment.”

        “You hardly seemed fazed.  As a matter of fact, you were trotting even faster than I was.”

        “Only because, as frightened as I may be, the Capricorn has even greater reasons to be scared.”  Fluttershy bit her lip and gazed with twitchingly sad eyes towards the far corners of the green, star-kissed place.  “It is a creature of the heavens.  To be lying here on the earth for so long can't be healthy for it.  I'm more frightened for the Capricorn's health than I am for our well-being.  Each second we lose in our attempt to find it, the bleaker the whole situation becomes.”

        “I'm sure Her Highness will find that trait of yours admirable.”

        “What trait?”

        Harmony smiled.  “In the end, Miss Fluttershy, you think more about the creatures you're in charge with caretaking than you worry about yourself.  Princess Celestia is a sucker for selflessness.  Erm...”  The time displaced pony blushed slightly at her choice of words and flounderingly punctuated with:  “A r-royal sucker.”  She gave an awkward grin.

        Fluttershy stifled a yawn and pressed her sad snout towards the soft earth.  “No offense intended, Miss Harmony, but I am far more concerned with what the Captain will think of my failure than the Princess.”

        “Who says this is a failure?”

        “Please, I do find your enthusiasm encouraging, H-Harmony.  But...” Moist blue eye scanned the slivers of purple starlight above the branches.  “This situation would be all the more rapturous if we had actually succeeded in finding the poor creature.”

        “How come it's so hard to find, you think?”

        “Honestly?”

        “Honestly, Miss Fluttershy.”

        “Mmmm...” Fluttershy narrowed her eyes, her yellow face scrunching in thought.  She murmured finally, “It is a cosmic creature.  Like a fish or an amphibian, a Capricorn can drown outside of its element.  But instead of water, the Capricorn's element is the stars.”

        “I imagine it'd be rather difficult to fill a tank up with stardust and just—uhm—dump the Capricorn inside of it.”

        “Most definitely.  Still, it feeds off of starlight.  With the trees of the forest blocking the night's sky so intensely, it's no wonder that we haven't just stumbled upon the animal along these shadowed paths.”

        “You... uh... You think that the Capricorn would have wandered beyond the lengths of the Everfree Forest so as to bask in uninterrupted starlight?”

        “I highly doubt that.  Capricorns are as shy as they are endangered.”

        “Heh.  Who'd a thunk it?”

        “If we only had enough starlight of our own to work with... we might... we just might...”  Fluttershy began but her tongue tripped over a thick valley of sighs and she slumped once more to the earth.

        Harmony raised an eyebrow and pivoted her copper snout towards her.  “You think there might be a way to coax the thing out of hiding?”

        “So long as these shadows are bathing us—and it—I hardly imagine there could be a way, Miss Harmony.”  A stifled groan, and Fluttershy gazed towards the far ends of the forest in a melancholic breath.  “I am so very sorry.  You are here to help me and to report back to the Princess, and so far you've only been rewarded with boredom and frivolity.”

        “Uhhhh.... I beg your pardon?”

        “It's not enough that your kind and proper assistance has been wasted, but I haven't been able to help you in any fashion whatsoever.”

        “Miss Fluttershy, assisting you is hardly what I call a waste.  I've learned new and nifty things about the Everfree Forest, I've been refreshed in my Faustmare history lessons, and I've seen first-hoof how you... uhm... corral frogs.”

        “You had all of these questions that you wished to ask me about the local wildlife, and I hadn't even addressed a single one of them.”

        Harmony gulped.  Her amber eyes traced the ceilings of her skull.  “Well...”  She mentally tap-danced around the chirping lengths of the night-drenched forest until she fell once more into the center of Fluttershy's soft gaze.  “We could always tackle them anytime, y'know.”  She smiled innocently.

        “Mmm... Well, what did you want to know?”

        “Oh... Oh... Hmmm... For instance...” Harmony kneaded her hooves into the soft pliable grass beneath them.  This was the last pony's moment, hopefully the first of many occasions in which she could grill an expert observer of the past on the red dawn that would precede an unimaginably horrible storm.  “Have you... Miss Fluttershy, have you noticed any bizarre actions on behalf of the local wildlife as a whole?”

        “Is there something specific that Her Majesty may be concerned about?”

        “Oh, I dunno...” Harmony cleared her throat and attempted to smile her way through the next few hurdles of inquisition.  “Mass migrations, disruptions in the food change, unnaturally nomadic habits, indications of... uhm... instinctual panic?”

        “What kind of panic?”  Fluttershy blinked steadily.  “And for what reason?”

        Harmony hissed under her breath.  This was becoming a constant game of plate-spinning, in which she had to find the appropriate degree to which she could press a holocaustal issue without so much as describing it.  She realized that there were very rare occasions when she could actually make use of her resilient Entropan body.  Time traveling was more delicate a process than stitching together silk, and there she was plopped down in the middle of a forest with the titanium shell of a compacted elephant.

        “Do you... Uhm...” Harmony squinted off into the starry purple slivers dancing flimsily above them.  Tactfully, she reached a hoof into an ancient afternoon hanging somewhere beside a pond full of ducks, cranes, squirrels, and turtles.  In an energized breath, she quivered in a briefly foalish voice:  “Fluttershy, do you remember the cyclone that struck Ponyville approximately three years ago?”

        “Oh, absolutely!  I had to ask several local ponies to help me in building a shelter for all of my animals to take cover in!  It was absolutely frightening!”

        “Before that storm hit, did you notice any changes in the local wildlife that may have forecasted it?”

        “As a matter of fact, I did.  But it wasn't until later that it suddenly all made sense to me.”

        “Like—What kinds of things did you notice?”

        “The rodents had hid themselves away in burrows.  The birds had all flocked south.  The larger creatures—bears and coyotes and manticores—had foraged for food and fled to their lairs.  It was quite the elaborate bustle of activity, but it wasn't observable until the very last second.”

        “Are we talking about days in advance of the cyclone?”

        “More like hours, Miss Harmony.”

        “Oh.  Oh... Uhm... Okay...”

        “It is far easier to foresee a coming season in the behavior of animals than it is to predict a single frightening event of inexplicable weather.  Animals possess a great deal of far-reaching senses, but they aren't all magically enabled to foresee more than the average equine.  We mustn't forget, Miss Harmony, that ponies are animals too; we are simply of a blessedly complex variety.”  Fluttershy finished with a stifled yawn and a soft smile.

        “So... uhh... I guess that you haven't witnessed any strange or frightened behaviors of the local wildlife lately?”

        “I can't say that I have, Miss Harmony.”  The yellow pegasus shook her head and tiredly blinked.  “Why?  Is the Royal Court of Canterlot expecting a terrible storm?”

        “In a manner of speaking...” Harmony began, blinked, and felt the weight of the gray future bubbling like a distant cold front on the back of her neck-hairs.  “...No.  Not really.”  She deflated in a porcelain fashion akin to her weak-mannered companion beside her.  The words that came out of her next felt numb, defeated, stale.  “But if there ever was to be a terribly large and incalculably damaging... weather pattern, the Canterlot Court thinks that animals could be a far better form of prediction than—say—transitory leylines.  Unicorn magic isn't all it's cracked up to be lately... or something.  Meh, I dunno...”

        “I'm... I'm sorry to have let you down with my lack of answers.“

        “You haven't let anypony down.” Harmony smiled gently over at her.  “I swear, I'll never understand why you're always so quick to blame yourself, Miss Fluttershy.”

        “You needn't try to understand, Harmony.”  Fluttershy blinked tiredly and sat with wilting yellow ears.  “Even my friends have a hard time withstanding my personal habits.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow.  “Really?”

        “Mmmm... I think so, sometimes.”  A half-yawn, and Fluttershy's gaze fell into the soft grass as she played through the springy earth with demure hooves.  “So many of them are nice and supportive of me.  But I can't help but think sometimes that I'm more of a chore than a joy to be around.  I'm just not as brave nor as outgoing as the rest of the girls I've come to know over the past year-and-a-half.  It's because I'm so—”

        “If you say 'weak and helpless' again, I swear, I'm gonna toss you so hard into the sky that we'll put the 'Flutter' in your name to the test.”

        “Eeep!” The yellow pegasus shrunk into the shadows of herself.  “But it's so true, Miss Harmony!  If only you knew how much my friends have had to sacrifice, how much they've had to slow their exciting days down, how much they've had to give up just for the sake of floating down to my level...”

        “Has it ever occurred to you that they've done all of those things because they love you?” Harmony bravely smiled.  “And that they find it a joy to do those things, if it means that they could be around you?”

        “I can't see what could possibly inspire them to do that besides pity.” Fluttershy sadly shuddered.

        Harmony loaded the runestone, cocked the rifle, and fired.  “Kindness?”

        Fluttershy blinked.  Her cheeks instantly turned rosy as she lifted a tired gaze to inhale the trailing scent of that word.

        Harmony smiled again, ever so softly.  “I've been around quite a bit, Miss Fluttershy.  On account of working for the Court and all, I've seen...”  A bitter gulp, but she continued.  “I've witnessed the legacy of ponies.  We're not creatures of obligation.  We follow an unbreakable spirit.  There's something about each of us that loves and adores our kin, not because we're obligated to, but because we want to.  I think a lot of this has something to do with your favorite element, Miss Fluttershy.  Kindness flows through all of us like electricity through a ring of batteries, getting stronger and stronger with each revolution.  When something gives way or something shorts out, we replace that dying part with love and devotion just to keep that spark alive.  This is because we know what a happy and wonderful thing it is to live in this glorious world, and the best way to live is to...”  She closed her eyes, inhaled, and punctured the thick wall of irony.  “...is to do so in perfect harmony.”  She reopened her amber eyes and managed:  “Kindness is what makes that possible.  And your kindness, Miss Fluttershy, is positively infectious.”

        “I... I do try...” The caretaker tiredly blushed.  She avoided Harmony's gaze briefly.  “I just want all of my friends to be happy...”

        “I'm quite sure they know that.”  Harmony nodded.  “And that is what keeps them coming back to see you.  You're not a chore, Miss Fluttershy.  You're a treasure.”

        “Isn't everypony?”

        “Thanks for making my case for me.”  Harmony helplessly giggled.

        Fluttershy laughed lightly—only because the time traveler was.  After a deep breath, she murmured past the curtains of her own exhaustion:  “You must have many friends, Harmony.”

        Harmony froze at that.  She gazed aside in a sudden cascade of shadows and stifled a sigh from rising in her lungs.  “I have many memories...”  She winced at having uttered that, but bravely recovered with:  “Happy memories.  They grant me wisdom occasionally, though I'm always on the lookout for other ponies to share things with.”  She gulped.  “Ponies new and old.”

        “But surely...” Fluttershy suffered another yawn and curled up next to the time traveler.  “Surely you have close companions now... hmmm?”

        “I... I have... I had...”

        Harmony gazed off into the green haze of Everfree.  She blinked, and between the snow-gray picture frames of her adult mind she saw, or thought she saw, two foals prancing across the purple starlight.  Their blank flanks shimmered with crimson and gold silk capes, emblazoned cutely with blue and yellow patches of an immutable crusade that drew the bouncy souls within them across the growing lengths of time, long before a great red flame fell to consume their faces.  Before the end of galloping days, they turned around to call back to last pony:  green and amber eyes, yellow and white coats, red and lavender hair, smiles and smiles and smiles... and ash.

        “I had a foalhood...” Harmony's dead words fluttered through the cricket-crackling air of the naked night.  “It was full of fear, it was full of tears, and it was full of hunger.”  She gulped and murmured.  “But... because of them... it was full of smiles as well, so that all of the rest really wasn't all that bad.  No... No, it wasn't that bad at all.”  The world blurred out of focus.  A pair of amber pools trembled in the middle of a copper face, stone still, like an obelisk outside of Everclear.  “I'm not an expert on kindness, M-Miss Fluttershy, but I know all the things in my life that have kept me... that have kept me living for hope of invisible things that were once as real to me as raindrops.  And it wasn't just because of them.”  She smiled painfully into the everlasting echo of a golden voice.  Pivoting, she smiled with naked bravery and spoke towards the heavenly source of it.  “But it was because of you—“

        Fluttershy was asleep.  In soft cloudy waves, her yellow coat inflated and deflated, preserving a warm porcelain breath that only her soft shell of a body could ever feasibly house in the great Equestrian void.  Her pink tail hairs had entwined foalishly with the curves of Harmony's hooves.  Her cutie mark's butterflies shimmered suddenly like a nightlight, casting a permanent halo on her immaculate soul.

        With a deep breath, Harmony smiled.  In the blind gap of her companion's unconsciousness, she finally granted the tears freedom to pierce the night.  Swiftly drying her cheek with a forelimb, she gazed sideways at the yellow pegasus, feeling the glen light up with the phantom glow of an invisible fireplace.  Before her beating heart, the forested hovel magically illuminated with a toasty aura indicative of a cottage atrium blossoming suddenly in the starved corner of the last pony's mind.  Before she could confusedly blink the sensations away, she heard—or thought she heard—a creaking of stairs.  Gazing aside, she saw a series of wooden steps, and there shuffled down them an orange foal with no room for tears and even less strength to afford them.  The ghostly image trotted quietly towards Fluttershy, and the world threatened to explode upon their forbidden contact—

        “Hnnnkkt!” Harmony immediately buried her face into shuddering hooves.  A sweaty palpitation, and she reopened her twitching amber eyes into the dark folds of the Everfree forest.  Her friends were gone.  The fireplace was gone.  The stairs were gone.  Her orange childhood was gone.  All that was left was shadows...

        ...and Fluttershy, in immortal slumber, her limbs heavenly devoid of thorns or ash.  It would not be this beautiful forever.

        “It doesn't have to be,” the last pony said in a somberly wise voice.

        She regained her smile by staring at Fluttershy.  With a motherly ease that haunted her, the copper-coated pegasus got up on all fours, trotted over, and effortlessly nudged Fluttershy until she had planted the whole of her dainty weight atop her Entropan shoulders.

        “Hmm... Light as a feather.  Frickin' figures.”

        Her voice was punctuated with a grin and a sigh at the same time.  With greater caution than she had ever afforded the brass instruments of the Harmony, the last pony balanced the anchor of Kindness safely on her spine, sprouted her wings, and flew the two of them up through the forest canopy of Everfree, and safely towards the caretaker's home.

        It was on a green velvety chair in the front room of Fluttershy's cottage that Harmony laid the yellow pegasus down.  The adult filly barely stirred, mumbling a day's worth of Capricorn searching.  The last pony had no doubt then and there that Fluttershy was capable of sleeping through a sonic rainboom.

        “Bet her parents had it easy,” Harmony dryly murmured.

        In an insomniac gait, the time traveler trotted her Entropan body towards the reading seat beside a pair of double windows.  With a gentle hoof, she lightly tapped one of the window panes.  The thing swung open on a squeaking hinge, bathing half of the room in the soft chirps of eternal crickets.  The purple night twinkled in starry bedazzlement beyond.

        The last pony's amber eyes narrowed.  The soonest she inhaled the cold night air wafting in, she found her body riddled with the queer sensation that something was wrong.  The stillness wasn't right.  She was waiting for something:  what, she didn't know.  A throng of ghostly pelting noises flickered through her ears.  Instantly, Harmony flashed a look towards the bushes outside the window.  The dark leaves glistened and danced, reflecting a gray sky of an afternoon's thunderstorm.  In a panicked breath, she glanced down at the plush velvet of the reading seat and saw orange hooves toying in the shadows of rainwater misting inward from the refracting haze outside.

        Hissing, Harmony stumbled back, almost knocking into the chair that her anchor was sleeping in.  With a toss of a black mane, Harmony squinted fearfully at the window once more.  The starry night had fallen back into place.  There was no hint of rainwater anywhere.  The cottage was a lonely wooden cave looking out into the dense treeline of Everfree.  Everything was painted with the hues of the past, and yet it wasn't the past... and yet it was.

        “Get a hold of yourself.  What frickin' gives?”  Harmony breathlessly murmured.

        She glanced halfway towards the kitchen, where she knew a bucket and a mop waited beyond sight with all of the haunting gravity of ten million campfire stories clawing at her eardrums.  This was a hovel of happy memories, of warm golden conversations piled up on top of each other like silken bedsheets.  Still, for yet another heart-stopping moment in a great blistering sea of shivers, Harmony stumbled to find peace here.  It was, without a doubt, the most quaint and innocent setting from her foalhood, and yet it was piercing her more coldly than the bone-chilling hollow of an Everfree Briar full of monsters ever could.  The thorn-encrusted future awaited her green-flaming self at the end of all this pointless floundering, and yet she somehow looked forward to it more than this.  A part of her begged for the red-glistening trees of Sweet Apple Acres once again; that place had a certain alien enchantment to her foalish memories.  But here, in the warm and toasty womb of Fluttershy's cottage, Harmony could barely stand straight all of the sudden, as if a good chunk of her had been mysteriously and secretly foaled there.

        Biting her lip, Harmony glanced over her copper shoulder.  With great hesitance, the time traveler looked at the wooden staircase for the first time since she arrived.  She imagined, against her better judgment, an orange shadow slowly creaking its way down the stairs, and with each hooftrot the shade made towards the velvet chair upon which Fluttershy slumbered, Scootaloo felt her heart about to explode in cold ice.

        With a pale shudder, the last pony flung herself back towards the windows, drowning herself once more in the starry haze, trying to imagine the twinkling cosmos being replaced with endless twilight... as if it could paradoxically ease the survivor's trembling soul.

        “Like a fish out of water,” Harmony mumbled.  For a brief moment, she couldn't decide if she was talking about herself or a certain Capricorn that the two pegasi had failed to find.  She settled for the latter, wracking her brain over the infinite reasons for why the cosmic creature had remained annoyingly elusive.  “Maybe it died,” she grunted.  “And then space ants carried it away in a million pieces.”

        With a sighing slump, she rested her Entropan body across the lengths of the reading seat and stared with greater intensity at the stars.  She briefly wondered if the cosmic trails of Epona's Exodus would ever give up trying to pierce the ashen horizons of future Equestria.  The last pony had only made three and a half trips back into the past, and somehow the staleness of a world where most of the Goddesses had left for the stars felt just as cold as the Age where two of them had died.

        “Maybe this Capricorn is a frickin' pet of Epona,” the cynic inside her projected soul self murmured.  “It explains why it's nowhere to be found.”

        A brief cloud of guilt suddenly settled around Harmony, reminding her of a certain “Canterlotlian Clerk” that had shriveled under the explosive ire of Fluttershy after Dinky and Ditzy Doo's departure that afternoon.  She gazed over at Fluttershy with a deathly exhale of sudden worry.  In a sickly sensation, she imagined an off-ruby Cloudsdalian Captain leering over the sleeping pegasus, impaling the angelic filly with phalanx after phalanx of razor-speared words—deplorable words—all of which were punctuated by sarcasm and sighs.  For the life of her, Harmony couldn't imagine the gall of a pony—anypony—that could actually get a winged rise out of grilling Fluttershy like some worthless piece of meat.

        “If she wants the Capricorn that badly, she should have just speared it out of the sky—“ Harmony blinked, stopping in mid-monologue.  She glanced a curious gaze up to the stars once more.  Her lips murmured:  “'If we only had enough starlight',” she quoted a golden voice, not even trying to emulate the satin tone of it.  “Starlight...”  The last pony scrunched her copper brow.  Suddenly, on a rising current of spontaneous euphoria, a thought blossomed forth forth from the deep soul of the runescaping, moonrock forging, and flame-bottling scavenger.  “Of course!”

        A giggle—foalishly energized with a sudden crusade—and the copper-coated pegasus found herself excitedly pacing counter-clockwise circles around the room like an inverse Redgale.

        “I just need two mana stones and a telescope.  But where could I get them?  This is Fluttershy's home, not Twilight Sparkle's... or Rarity's for that matter.”  She paused.  She tapped a copper hoof to her chin.  She gazed, gazed, gazed, then froze as her face fell upon a simple wooden writing desk standing against the wall across a space of wooden floorboards where a blue table once resided.  “Ah-Ha!”

        Scampering on light hooves, Harmony shuffled up to the table and opened its wooden lid.  Immediately there lay before her a plethora of parchment, scroll bindings, envelopes, and ornate Cloudsdalian stationary.

        “Hmmm... Lemme see... Lemme see... Lemme see...”

        Tonguing the corners of her mouth, the last pony went to work.  She unrolled a scroll of parchment, clasped a pen in her jaws, and neatly wrote with the aid of years upon years of calligraphy practice inside the Harmony's lonely cabin.  After a very proper letter was written, she held the document up to her squinting perusal and muttered to herself:  “Hmmm... Something's missing.  This is coming clear out of the blue, and I need a silver bullet.”  Her amber eyes brightened.  She glanced down at the cutie mark on her flank, then at one of her hooves.  “It's so stupid, it has to work.”

        With a grin, she slid out a pad of ink, glanced over her shoulder at the slumbering Fluttershy, then quietly lowered the lid of the desk shut.  As she did so, a frowning white face with pointed ears stared fluffily into her vision.

        Harmony did a double-take.  With a raised eyebrow, she smirked at the disapproving rabbit.  “Look, it's not stealing.  It's for a good cause.  Besides, if she needs more parchment that bad, I'm sure I can buy her more.... Mmmm... S-Somehow.”

        The ivory bunny rabbit folded its arms.  The glaring frown intensified.

        “Oh, like you're such a saint.”  Harmony rolled her eyes.  She placed the ink pad and paper side by side on the desktop.  “If I find your ashes in the future, I'm giving them to Spike so that he can clear his sinuses.”

        Angel Bunny upturned a haughty chin and raised its left arm towards the pegasus at an offensive angle.

        “Yeah... uh... I think you need five paw pads for that gesture to work.  Now scram, furball.”  Harmony concentrated hard as she lightly planted the whole of her hoof against the blackening pad of ink.  Afterward, she carefully... carefully pressed the end of her limb to the parchment.  With gentle pressure, she was able to create a faint circle.  Gracefully, she brought the pen back to her lips and drew a solid “infinity” symbol in the center of this crest.  Smirking at her efforts, she added the finishing touches with several “celestial” squiggly lines emblazoned around the circumference of the hoofmark...

        “Well, it m-m-m-m-most definitely looks like a Royal Seal!” Ditzy Doo blinked, both of her yellow eyes aimed decidedly away from the scroll being held directly in front of her.

        Harmony grumbled.  It was the next morning, the sun was shining, and she was practically shoving the letter into the mailpony's grasp.  “That's because it is a royal seal, Miss Doo!”  She stood in the grassy front yard of Fluttershy's cottage under the dew-laden haze of the sunrise.  “It's imperative that you deliver this parchment immediately!  The Royal Court of Canterlot depends on the speed and swiftness of this order!”

        “And the Royal Court wants it sent to the Novelty Shop of downtown Ponyville?”  The wall-eyed pegasus briefly chuckled as she snatched the scroll from the time traveler's hoof and shoved it with more or less grace into her cluttered mailbag.  “Well, who am I to question Her Majesty's servants?”

        “Who indeed?” Harmony's amber eyes flared over a plastic smile.

        “I thought you and Miss Fluttershy were looking for a C-C-C-C-Capricot.”

        “'Capricorn', Miss Doo.  And, no, we haven't found it yet.”  Harmony pointed with a copper hoof.  “But what I've requested in this letter should help us.  If you care at all for the well-being of Fluttershy's job here as Ponyville's lead animal trainer, you'll make sure the items I've requested get here as soon as possible!”

        “You can count on me!”  Ditzy's hoof saluted half a meter away from her forehead as she stood on wobbly hindquarters.  “Anything for Miss Fluttershy!  Dinky would hate me forever if I let her babysitter lose her job!”

        “Glad that we're seeing eye to eye—” Harmony's smile fell under a self-imposed grimace halfway through that train wreck of an utterance.  “Erm... Eheh... Y'know what I mean.”

        “I sure don't!”  Ditzy grinned gleefully.  “Good luck, Mister Squirrel!”  She flew away in an upside down gray blur.

        Harmony blinked.  She glanced sideways into her reflection in the cottage windows, shuffled up to examine her profile, flicked her amber-streaked tail, but ultimately gave up with a groaning sigh and a rolling of her amber eyes.  She trotted around and waltzed in through the front doorway of the cottage, instantly assaulted with the delightful aroma of vegetable soup wafting over from the far kitchen of the place.

        “Do you need help with that, Miss Fluttershy?” Dinky called across the cottage, her horned-head hovering over a splayed-open astronomy book twice the size of the petite foal's body.

        “Oh no!”  A golden voice rang from beyond the nearby door-frame.  “It is far too messy in here!  I would rather nopony see my kitchen unless it was an absolute emergency!”

        “Don't take it personally, kid,” Harmony said with a devilish smirk.  “Miss Fluttershy just doesn't want you to see what she puts into her cupcake mix.”  She made a melodramatic expression with two hooves pressing her facial muscles into a goblinesque grimace as she leered above the little child.  “Or who!  OoOoOoOoooh!”

        Dinky stared up at the copper pegasus with dull yellow eyes.  “Your joke escapes me.”

        “Yeah, well, that's why I'm a clerk and not a bard.”

        “Are you attempting more humor, Miss Harmony, or should I be legitimately concerned?”

        “'Yes' and 'no' to both questions,” Harmony's voice returned to the kitchen.  “Miss Doo just left, by the way.  Wanna bet twenty silver strips she'll knock loose a few bird's nests on the way to Ponyville?”

        “Silver strips?” Dinky blinked up at the time traveler yet again.  “I didn't know that Canterlot was acquainted with the economic system of Mount Oggreton!”

        The time traveler faltered in mid-step.  “Er... Yeah.  Well, I wouldn't—uh—bet golden bits against your mom, kid.  That'd just turn a tease into an insult.”

        “I'll have you know that my mother flies at an altitude that completely avoids any and all bird's nests.”

        “Oh yeah?  Since when?”

        “Since the summer that she had to stay at home because a quintuplet of severely endangered Equestrian Falcon chicks had imprinted upon her forehead.  The Doo Family's hereditary mane hair is coarse enough to resemble the tail feathers of most birds of prey.”

        “Guess that explains why your head always looks windblown, kid.” Harmony winked.  “I figured it was just because of your brain flying around at four hundred kilometers per hour.”

        “Did you know that the average Equestrian Falcon ingests enough meat in the course of a year to reconstruct an entire herd of buffalo?”

        “I rest my case.”

        “As a matter of fact, if you disemboweled no more than ten falcons and stretched their unraveled intestines from end to end you could easily surround the circumference of the Great Wall of Stalliongrad—“

        “Did I or did I not just say I rest my case?”

        Fluttershy suddenly trotted in from the kitchen with a tray of smoking soup bowls balanced on her dainty yellow head.  “Brunch is served!  I... uhm... I do hope you are fans of tomato broth.”

        “Finally.  It's about time something more than statistics filled this kid's mouth.”

        “Your labors are much appreciated, Miss Fluttershy,” Dinky said with a cute smile.  “It smells good.”

        “Does it?  I'm rather proud of it myself.  Oh, I know that I sound positively boastful... But I cannot help it.  I feel so well-rested this morning for some reason.”

        “Heh...” Harmony smirked towards a white fluffy shape in the corner of the room.  “I wonder why that could be?”  Her skull vibrated upon impact with a thrown sofa cushion.  Her frown was ever so briefly outshone by a raspberry retort.

        “Dinky, how are you enjoying that new book that your mother got you?” Fluttershy asked, laying the tray down on a nearby stool in the center of the atrium.

        “Oh, I finished it already.”

        Harmony and Fluttershy blinked simultaneously.

        “You did?” the animal caretaker murmured towards the tiny unicorn.  “That's... erm... That is most—”

        “Freaky?” Harmony filled in the blank, only to have her copper face filled with a strategically silencing fan of pink tail hairs.

        “It is exceptionally laudable for a foal of your age to have digested so much text in such little time.”  The yellow pegasus smiled sweetly as her silken voice continued, “Would you care to share with us some of the things that you learned?”

        The time traveler stifled a moan and smiled plastically upon the crest of the incoming dictation.

        “Actually, it's all stuff that I've learned before—mostly—either from what Miss Sparkle has shared with me or some of the things I perused at the astronomy section of the library.  Are you familiar with the Soul Sundering of Consus?”

        “Oh, who isn't familiar with that age-old tale, Dinky?  For better or for worse, it's what absolutely defines ponydom.”

        “Well, A Young Unicorn's Guide for Astronomy suggests that the constellations as we know them today are shaped entirely by Epona's exodus to the stars when she flew to the heavens immediately after the Sundering.”

        “Mmmmhmmm.  That's right, my little pony. When the world experienced its first death with the passing of Consus, life as we know it was forever changed.  Even the Great Goddess Herself couldn't reverse the damage that had been done.  Her grief was so great that there was no room on the planet for her tears.  So, for fear of flooding all creation, she flew to the heavens where her sobs formed the stardust that would ultimately become the stars that twinkle at us at night.”

        “Didn't she know that she would be abandoning her Six Alicorn Daughters?”

        “Five.”

        “Hmmm?”

        “There were only Five Alicorn Daughters at the time, Dinky.  And there have been many scholarly ponies throughout the history of Equestrian civilization who have endeavored to answer your question.  Quite frankly, Consus' and Epona's daughters were centuries old at the time of the Soul Sundering.  It wasn't... Mmmm... it wasn't like the Great Goddess had left infants alone to deal with the weight of Creation.  The Alicorns' Mother had taught them well, and they were ready for the tasks at hand.  The Soul Sundering, for all of its tragedy, had hardened them, so that they were more than well-equipped to defend the elements of harmony during the Chaos Wars that followed.”

        “Is that what you believe, Miss Fluttershy?” Dinky asked as she shuffled up to her bowl of soup, inhaling its rich smell.  “Do you really think it was Epona's sorrow that made her leave Equestria?”

        “I think what she did was brave,” Fluttershy said with a tranquil smile.  Settling down on silken haunches, she leaned forward and murmured across the warmth of the room, “A mother's love is everlasting, even if her presence isn't.  She loved her daughters so much that she didn't dare think of endangering their lives on Earth by staying.  Epona knew that the same taint that sundered Consus' soul could eventually infect her, and for the sake of her children—and all of Creation—she made her exodus.  You see, a mother really is willing to give up all for the ones she loves.  The innate devotion that exists inside ponies today owes itself to the spirit of the Goddess who made everything to begin with.”

        Dinky sipped briefly from the crimson broth, hummed at the deliciousness, and smiled up at the “Canterlotlian Clerk”.  She said, “What about you, Miss Harmony?  What do you think on the subject?”

        Harmony blinked, jerked out of a lonesome bubble of thought.  “Uhm... Eheh—Seriously, kid, you don't wanna know what I think about that subject.”

        “Oh please, Miss Harmony, you are as much a guest as Ditzy's brilliant offspring here.”  Fluttershy winked in the buzzing spirit of company.  “Your thoughts are just as significant as ours; we would enjoy hearing them!”

        “Really... Eh heh... I-I've got nothing to add to the conversation.  At least nothing fruitful.”

        “It's quite alright, Miss Harmony,” Dinky said with a creepily knowing smile.  “Lots of ponies these days are agnostic, even the ones who serve in Canterlot.”

        “What—?”  Harmony blinked until she suddenly had Ditzy's eyes.  “Snkkt—No!  That's not... !  Kid, have you ever thought of lending your horn to the Equestrian Energy Commission?  I'm pretty sure it alone could provide power to all of Manehattan for a month.”

        “Don't press the issue, Dinky.” Fluttershy gently chided the foal.  “Not everypony is comfortable discussing topics of Creation and the Sundering so intimately.”

        “It's not that... It's just...” Harmony stumbled upon a knot in her tongue.  A sigh, and she shuffled down unhungrily on Entropan knees, tapping her own bowl of soup with eternal indifference.  A cloud of gray apathy wafted over her copper features as she stared into the blood-colored broth that reflected a future of endless chaos and destruction.  “What I think—what I really believe—is that everything has an end, even long before all matter was ever purposed into beginning.  I'm sure even Epona and Consus knew that the divine nature of their union—simply by existing—invited the possibility of someday not existing.  Everypony talks about the Sundering being the reason for death first tainting the Creation of Equestria, but I think reality is a lot colder than that.”  She stumbled briefly upon the deep bass voice of a purple dragon haunting her from twenty-five years in the future.  “Death encompasses life.  The Goddess and her mate were as wise as they were audacious to think that their breaths could outlast the absolute zero within which the first flame was ever kindled.  Sometimes, kid, the things we love leave us—by death or by Exodus—not because it's noble, but because it's natural.  Don't be surprised if, in the future, the world follows this natural instinct, something that transcends immortal Creators, so that even the Sun and Moon will get tired of the whole frickin' race.  I mean... I mean it's just as if we're all waiting for something to—”  She glanced up from the soup bowl and froze, her expression immediately wincing.

        Ms. Cheerilee's students had blanched in horror, and it was a pale thing.  The Apple Family dinner table had frozen in perplexity, and it was also cold and pallid.  But this, this pair of uncomfortably shifting bodies, this featherlight frame of crumbling spirits that deflated across the cottage atrium before her, it sunk deeper than any black briar in the womb of a bitterly familiar world, so that Harmony wondered if she was the one—and not the Cataclysm—to have blasted all fertile soil from the face of the planet, to have dredged all that was good from the world as she had once again, with such bitter repetition, sucked all the life from the room simply by being herself, simply by being honest, simply by being the end of ponies.

        Spike's words once again spun around the infinite swirls of time to bite her through her immutable copper skin.  She more deeply dreaded seeing his purple scaled face than she did the blue glistening maw of a ravenous Ursa Major that undoubtedly awaited her green flaming return.  The last pony wondered if she had purposefully ignored all of Fluttershy's cyclical dissertations on Kindness, or if perhaps there was a naturally invisible fishnet of titanium encapsulating her soul and preventing all manner of good fruit from entering her system.

        Perhaps she was the last pony by habit as much as by incident.  Upon again remembering so many self-imposed foaldays of starving across the shadowed hovels of Ponyville with nothing more than a scooter for a friend, the pegasus solidly believed that to be the case.

        She muttered something unintelligble to the dried-up corners of the room and leaned over to take a brave sip of her soup, hoping that possibly the warm texture of the past could wake her back up to the noble venture at hoof.  However, as soon as the vegetable broth entered her mouth, a haunting shadow reclaimed the breadths of the room, so that her amber eyes twitched frightfully towards the wooden stairs in the far corner of the place.  Instead of a petite orange shadow, there descended a golden voice.

        “Is there something wrong with the taste?”

        She turned her head...

        ...and tilted her chin up, blinking.  “Huh?”

        “It's not bitter or sour, is it?.”  Fluttershy bit her lip pensively as she stood above the young foal in the gray shadows of a rainy afternoon drizzling just beyond the windows.  “I'm out of practice when it comes to using herbs in a soup, on account that I'm almost always making food just for my animals.  Ohhhhh I do hope it doesn't taste stale!”

        Scootaloo's stomach was a pit that grumbled at the merest sight of discarded crumbs on the grass bordering many a Ponyvillean outdoors restaurant.  Her violet eyes had retained their pigment from staring whole-heartedly—night after night—into the darklit windows of Sugarcube Corner after it had been closed for business.  So many ravishing feasts had clattered uselessly against the glass walls of her soul, and for once in as many moons as the foal could count, she was ingesting something that wasn't unsavorably fished out of the refuse of a world that was barred from her nomadic loneliness.  The foal didn't have the strength to infer that she deserved it, but she did have the polite breath to be thankful for it.  She made swift with her reply, so that the fire in her belly might overcome any tears in her eyes.

        “It's the best soup I've ever tasted.”  Scootaloo grinned a crescent moon.  “I only wished you had let me into the kitchen to lend a hoof!”

        “Oh no.  It's too terribly dirty in there.  Mmmm... There are some things even I'm too embarrassed to share with my friends.”

        “I don't see why.  Your bathroom is cleaner than the one in Carousel Boutique.  And that's saying a lot.”

        “But the soup isn't too cold?”

        “It's just fine, Miss Fluttershy.”

        “The vegetables aren't clumping it up terribly?”

        “It's fine, Fluttershy.”

        “What about the herbs?  Did I sprinkle too many or—?”

        “Hold on one second!”  Scootaloo took a deep breath.  Like a deep sea diver, or a living cannonball, the hungry foal scarfed the entirety of the bowl's crimson broth with one sputtering swoop.  Gulping massively, she smiled with a dribble of the stuff down her chin and playfully winked.  “It's good enough for seconds... assuming you made more than enough for the two of us to enjoy.”

        Fluttershy blinked.  With a suddenly joyful breath, she giggled gleefully and dashed back into the kitchen.  “Just a moment!” she sing-songed and made a wispy canter for the opposite room.

        Scootaloo smiled, but as soon as the yellow pegasus had disappeared, she habitually lurched towards the floorboard with a nervous hoof clamped over her tummy.  Half-a-wretch, and she boldly stomached the enriching broth back down her bubbling esophagus.  A proud breath at having lived up to her audacious gulping, and Scootaloo sat with an easier breath, watching the endless curtain of rain beyond the windowpanes.

        She wondered if this was how Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle regularly lived out their daily lies.  The rainy afternoon hadn't been luxurious half as much as it had been simply clean.  Life didn't have to have frills or flashing lights.  So long as there was a roof, a floor, and soup, Scootaloo couldn't imagine a homelier heaven.  In the many fitful nights of trying to pretend she was a normal filly during random Cutie Mark Crusader sleepovers, Scootaloo had been too frazzled to take notice of all the blessing commodities briefly donated to her.  But here, in the placid tranquility of Fluttershy's lone hovel, time slowed down to a meditative glide, so that she could spot for once the crystal clean joy that the usually icy world brought a shine to in the absence of her bitter pangs of desperation.

        The orange foal decided that this was all a preview, a sign of all the things that could be made available to her for when the bright day would come that she would earn such fabulous and wholesome benefits not through the lure of friendship but through the fruits of strong and hard work.  Her tiny wings twitched uselessly in the toasty air, reminding her of the whole weight of the atmosphere that still pressed down on her, so much height to climb with so few years left to scale it.  For the briefest of seconds, the future didn't look so lonesome.  Scootaloo had to remind herself that it was all because the present, however transiently, had been filled for once by a voice that wasn't her shriveling own.  Something golden had touched her fitful ears again, and on silk-striding feet that voice came drifting back with two more bowls of soup in tow.

        “I added a touch of cinnamon this time.  Pinkie Pie says that a pony should engage the sweet-tooth as much as the stomach.  She hasn't done me wrong yet...”

        “You're... uhm... You're going to eat too, right, Fluttershy?”

        “Mmmmm-But of course.  If you're so eager to devour what I've prepared, then it would be a crime not to taste some of it myself.”

        “Now that's what I like to hear!” Scootaloo winked and gladly shuffled up to a second bowl being laid down in front of her.  “Ponyville's chief animal tamer is proud of herself for once!”

        Fluttershy blushed rosily, but she amazingly didn't silence herself, instead exclaiming, “Maybe after the meal, you would care to play a game of 'Go Filly'?  I bought a new deck the last time I visited the toy shop in downtown Ponyville.”

        “Erm... Apple Bloom's the one who's good at card games, not me.”  Scootaloo took barely a quarter of a glance at Fluttershy's joyous features and in a fitful breath sought to immortally preserve them.  “But I'm willing to learn!  I wouldn't mind showing her a trick or two the next time we hang out!”

        “Hehehe—I don't know many tricks, necessarily...” Fluttershy nervously tip-toed the bubbly recesses of her soul.  “But I would be glad to share some of my expertise.  Angel Bunny isn't exactly a cheerful opponent to bounce strategies against.”

        “Heh, I imagine not—Whoah!”  The orange foal ducked yet another miscellaneous projectile and barked, “Not now!  Your mommy's made soup, ya fuzzhead!”

        “And then maybe we could—” Fluttershy paused in mid-grin.  Her yellow features suddenly and frighteningly sunk into a wretch of dismay.  With flicking ears, she spun a worried look over her shoulder and gazed into the gray miasma of rain outside the cottage.

        “Mmmm?”  Scootaloo throated while sipping more broth.  She gulped and sat up straight.  “Miss Fluttershy? What's the matter?”

        “I thought I heard... I thought...”  A flurry of hooves: Fluttershy shuffled up to the windowpanes, squinting out into the downpour with hard blue eyes.

        “Fluttershy... ?”

        A gasp.  The windows were slammed shut in a blink.  Spinning about, the pegasus caretaker throated in a suddenly thick voice:  “Scootaloo, stay inside.  Do not come out until I tell you to.”

        “Why?  What's the matter?”  Scootaloo hopped breathlessly up on all fours, blinking rapidly.  “Is it a flood or something?  A tornado?”

        “No.  None of those.  I... I just need to go check on my woodshed really quick.”

        “You have a woodshed?”  Scootaloo started to trot forward—

        “Stay put, Scootaloo!”  Fluttershy half-hissed, a shade of the “Stare Master” bubbling up through her vocal cords.  “I assure you that this is no joke.  I... Mmmm... I will be back shortly.  Wait for me.”

        “But Fluttershy—?!”

        “Wait for me.”  Fluttershy flung the door open.  A deep breath, and she scampered into the wetness of the darkening afternoon.  The door floated shut with an eerie creak, and suddenly the soaked world beyond crackled with an infernal gaggle of curious sounds, all of which had been a harmless hum just a few naked minutes before the yellow pegasus ran out with sudden and alarming fright.

        Scootaloo became aware of a sudden pounding to the world.  It took her a few hobbling seconds to realize it was her lonesome heartbeat.  A sour smell filled the quiet reaches of the cottage, like a rotting barn in the middle of a forest.  With a forlorn gaze that became clearer the closer Scootaloo trotted towards a reflective windowpane, the little filly stared out into the billowing world, searching for a single golden shade of her temporary guardian.  All she was awarded with was emptiness, like something hollow in the earth, begging for white stone.

        “Please...”  Something eight years old but eight thousand years true murmured out from her inexplicably shuddering lips.  “Don't leave me.”  A gulp.  “Not you too.”

        It was then that a gurgling thunder filled the air surrounding the cottage.  Scootaloo explosively shrieked—violet eyes twitching—for she knew that it wasn't the storm that had erupted just then.  It was a growl.

        She mewled with a pathetic weakness that stabbed herself deeply to hear it. “Fl-Fluttershy?!”

        She spun around.  “Yes, Harmony?”  She blinked and looked down at what was being held before her.  “Uhm... What is that?”

        The time traveler beamed, grasping a telescope and two crystalline rocks in her grasp.  “This is our Capricorn, Miss Fluttershy.”

        “Erm... It... It doesn't exactly look like a Capricorn, Miss Harmony.”

        The copper pegasus blushed slightly with a proud smile.  “I guess what I mean to say is that it's our ticket to finding the Capricorn.  Tonight is not going to be another fruitless night of searching, Miss Fluttershy; I can promise you that.  I can promise Colonel Rutgut that too, if she weren't so frickin' busy getting high off the sound of her own voice.”

        “'Captain Redgale',” Fluttershy meekly corrected for the infinitieth time.  “J-Just how did you come upon acquiring these... erm... contraptions?  I haven't seen you leave the cottage all day.”

        “Glad to be of service, M-M-M-Miss Fluttershy!”  Ditzy Doo's voice chimed to the roof and floor of the afternoon-lit cottage.  She smiled as she teetered to a stop before the caretaker while shouldering an emptied mailbag.  “And you don't have to sweat anything!  Miss Bon Bon was more than happy to get these things off her hooves the soonest I told her it was for a Royal Rescue Mission!”

        “Rescue Mission?” Fluttershy's face twisted and twisted.  She turned and looked helplessly at the copper pegasus.  “I don't remember ever ordering anything from Bon Bon's store.  Will the Canterlotlian Clerk reimburse her for these things?”

        “Yeah, sure, why not.”  Harmony was busily adjusting the metallic sliders of the telescope, disassembling it with a flurry of expert engineering hooves.  The last pony tongued the corner of her lips as she tinkered, fumbled, and mercilessly manipulated the equipment in her lone corner of the cottage.  “I just gotta put the finishing touches on all this stuff, and then we'll have our key to finding the friggin' star creature that's been hiding from us—Come on, you dang little—”  She smacked the telescope until a glassy lens fell offensively to the floor.  “Ha!  There ya go.  Now to shove you in there...” She stiffly crammed one of the crystal rocks into the hollow of the copper mechanism.

        Fluttershy bit her lip under half-a-dozen forming sweat bulbs.  A pale hoof patted her on her shoulder.

        “You're lucky to g-g-g-g-get such regal assistance from Her Majesty!  Why, if I had a Canterlotlian squirrel of my own to follow me around, I'd get my deliveries to Trottingham done in half the time!”

        “Yes, well, I suppose some of us are blessed half of the time—”  Fluttershy paused in mid-speech, blinking.  “A Canterlotlian what, M-Miss Doo?”

        “Muffin!” Ditzy suddenly beamed as she trotted across the homely interior towards a little unicorn on the plush reading seat.  “Why is it everytime I so much as look at my pride and joy, she's got her nose stuck in a b-b-b-book?  It's like the pages will sprout flowers any second!  Heeheehee!  Mommy made another funny!”

        “Yes, Mother,” Dinky murmured with a thinly shadowed gaze.  A sudden sigh, and she further droned, “You made another funny.”

        “If you would excuse me, Miss Doo, I'm late with chopping Angel Bunny some fresh carrots.”  Fluttershy excused herself and sashayed into the nearby kitchen.  “I'll be right back.”

        Even if the mailpony's eyes could look at the caretaker straight, she didn't bother aiming them her way.  With a half-hearted nod, she sunk down on blistered knees beside the reading seat and placed a gentle hoof on her daughter's shoulder.  “What's eating at my Muffin, today?  Just last night, you were so excited to get Twilight Sparkle's new book.  What's the matter?  Is it full of astro... astron-n-n...full of space stuff you already know?  I swear, your Mommy's always making that mistake.  I'd buy you a whole library if I could make things easier.  Heheheh...”

        “I love the book, Mother,” Dinky said with a passing smile.  Another cold breath, and she gazed into the golden afternoon as if it could die under a wall of rain any second.  “It's a very helpful almanac of all things celestial, and it serves as a good history primer to boot.”

        “Then perhaps my Muffin has a fever?”  Ditzy exclaimed with a mock gasp.  Eyeing opposite edges of the window frame, she sat up and felt the unicorn's blunt horn.  A pivoting smile, and she throated, “Certainly feels like the compass needle is pointed north!  Drink a glass of milk and call Doctor Ditzy when it p-p-p-p-points south.  Heeheehee!”

        Dinky's lips curved slightly, but a stone weight was pulling the edges of them down.  “Did you know that, since the initial Celestial Exodus at the end of the First Age, the cosmic trail of Epona's spirit has spun the constellations around the Equestrian Solar System an estimated five hundred times over the last several millennia?”

        “I... Erm... Eheh... Wow!  For once, something is flying over Mommy's head and not the other way around!”

        “Some scientists say that at least two dozen stars have died out in the last three hundred years alone.  In a bold astronomical study started in Canterlot, several ponies are claiming that they can predict the lifespans of the stars that make up the trailing end of the Northern Eponal Band.  For the first time in recorded histories, scholars of pondyom are claiming to track the death of a Goddess.”

        “That's... Erm... Huh... That's awfully d-d-d-d-depressing stuff for a book about stars and planets.  You mean to say that this is the stuff Twilight gave you to read?”

        “So many ponies in the scientific community were quick to angrily discount these scientists,” the little foal rambled on in a learned voice, mumbling.  “It's amazing that, even to this day, an equine's instinct is to defend Goddess Epona, even though she left the planet; she left all of us.  Do you think that's why it's always the mothers in a household that feel compelled to take care of the family...” She gazed up with twin yellow eyes suddenly quivering in an undiscovered childishness.  “...while it's always the fathers who leave?”

        Harmony immediately looked up from the suddenly unimportant task in her hooves.  Her lips parted as a gray-hued monologue from earlier sparked a fiery guilt that compelled her to watch and listen, listen, listen...

        Ditzy's eyes pivoted further away from each other under sickly lids.  The suddenly pale mare bit her lip, gulped, and tried smiling as she said, “Oh, Muffin, it isn't always the d-d-d-daddies, it's—”  She winced, hissed, and shut her eyes.  A grumbling hum was missiled into her insides.  The gray pegasus smacked the dense skin of her own forehead with a frustrated hoof before forcefully summoning clearer words from her desperate lungs:  “I give you those books to learn, Dinky, to get smart... to be a smart pony.  And I know you can be smart, Muffin, in so many ways that your Mommy c-c-c-can't.  But...Nnngh...”  A hint of a snarl: the mailpony clamped her hooves briefly over her forehead, hissed through the next few half-thoughts painfully, then calmly produced:  “But even being the smartest pony can't give you all the answers.  Mommy knows that...”

        “Sometimes, Mother, I wouldn't mind being dumb, if only it would mean I could know those things,” Dinky murmured.

        “Who told you that?  Who—nnghh—who told you to think someth-th-th-thing like that?”

        “Nopony!  Mother, I was just—”

        “Oh Muffin... My Muffin...” The gray pegasus hooked a forelimb around the petite unicorn's body and nuzzled her cheek against her side.  “There are so many mean ponies in this world that will say bad things, because they don't know who you are.  They don't know how precious and special you can be.  That's why I bought you all those books, so you can show the likes of them that you're b-b-b-better than what they think of you, what they think of us.”

        “And I appreciate that, Mother!  What I meant was that I only wished to—”

        “You're so precious to me.  You're my precious M-M-M-Muffin.  When you're my age, I don't want you to be like me.  I don't want you to feel like you're lonely and d-d-d-dumb, just because the world makes you think that.  You deserve so much more, Dinky.  You're the target of my ador... adora... adora-ra-ra...”

        “'Adoration', Mother.”  Dinky murmured in a soft, melancholic smile.  She softly nuzzled the space between the pegasus' eyes with a dainty horn.  “It's 'adoration'.”

        “Mmm... Yes,” Ditzy murmured.  She kissed the unicorn's forehead and nestled her child in the crook of her shoulder as she gazed off into infinite shadows.  “Yes it is...”  Her eyes were crooked, but a pair of blossoming tears aimed true towards the ground.

        The two ponies formed a heart-shaped splotch of gray against the warmth of the cottage atrium, like a bubble of ashen clouds.  Briefly, Harmony's gaze flew through the horizons of the two, until all too swiftly Ditzy coughed away the billowing mists of somberness and hoisted the blonde unicorn in her forelimbs.

        “What say Mommy flies us both to Sugarcube Corner?  Let's see what Auntie Pinkie Pie has baked today!  You can't get sweets from books, can you, Muffin?”

        “Heeheehee...”  Dinky dangled and smiled placidly.  Her voice was a placating song at the end of a nameless funeral.  “Okay, mother.  Okay.”

        “Heeeeeheee...” Ditzy inhaled a deep giggle and planted the little foal into her mailbag before prancing out of the cottage with the unicorn in tow.  “Good luck with the Capricorn, Mister Squirrel!”  She nodded towards the last pony.  “See you bright and early in the m-m-m-m-morning!”

        “Yeah,” Harmony murmured after them.  “Sure thing.”  She watched forlornly as Dinky's dangling eyes passed beyond view of the cottage door, like blistering yellow headlights of a gray airship passing through the fog, and then was swallowed up into dismal thought.  For a moment, she wondered if Capricorns were the only unlucky creatures to have fallen from the night's sky.

        It took Fluttershy's porcelain presence to once more summon warmth into the empty room.  “Ohhh...” She wiltingly breathed.  “Did they leave already?  Oh, how I do hate missing good-byes.”

        “You can say 'hello' to somepony forever and still never get to know them.”

        “What do you mean by that, Miss Harmony?”

        “Nnngh... Nothing.  Just briefly... briefly distracted,” Harmony said with a cough.  Shuffling on re-energized limbs, she motioned towards the manual construction of the telescope-to-rock abomination in her lap.  “I'll have this thing whipped together in a jiffy.  Then we can see about accomplishing the task that last night lost to us.”

        “Uhhm... Okay...” Fluttershy gulped.  “Might I be so bold to ask just what this 'thing' is, and how a 'jiffy' will inspire us to find the Capricorn?”

        “It was something you said that gave me an epiphany, Miss Fluttershy.”

        The caretaker's blue eyes blinked.  “It was?”

        “The creature feeds off of starlight, right?”

        “Yes, I do suppose I conveyed that.”

        “Then I've got just the thing to lure the creature out of hiding.”

        “If you insist.”  Fluttershy limped towards the doorframe.  “I suppose we must make haste, then—”

        “No ma'am.”

        Fluttershy nearly tripped on her pink mane.  “No?”

        “We wait...” Harmony glanced up with sharp amber eyes as she slapped the finishing touches onto the stonily augmented telescope.  “...until dark.”

        Fluttershy's yellow coat paled.  She hissed through chattering teeth:  “D-Dark?”

        “What?  You thought stars come out in the daytime now?”  Harmony slung the telescope over her shoulder and stood up on four limbs.  “I mean—where have you been, girl?”

        “I... uhm... I just had to go and check on something.”  Fluttershy smiled sheepishly, all the while dripping a fresh puddle of rainwater as she stood in the cottage door.  “Please forgive me for the brief interlude.”

        “Brief?!”  Scootaloo cackled, her violet eyes bright and her features incredulous.  “You were gone for half-an-hour!  I was almost scared you drowned in all that rain or something!”

        “Nonsense!”  Fluttershy summoned a contrived giggle.  “I most certainly would not have... h-have... haaa-haaaa—”  She sneezed like a wet firecracker into the muted air half a centimeter before her.  A shuddering breath, a sniffle, and she once more bore a plastic grin as she slogged her way towards the warming fireplace.  “I was in no danger of drowning, Scootaloo, I assure you—”

        “Then just what were you doing?” Scootaloo scampered breathlessly across the cottage after her.  “One second you ran out into the storm, and then I hear this growling noise, and then it's like the world is ending cuz I haven't heard a peep from you and I dunno if I have to call the weather flier team to come clear the stormfront just so Ponyville can conduct a search for their suddenly missing animal tamer and—and—and—“

        “Oh Scootaloo, your concern is most endearing, but I was fine.”  Fluttershy tried in vain to stifle her shivers as she held her hooves before the fire, breathing deeper and deeper into the warm penumbra of the hearth.  “I simply had to go check on the woodshed.  I thought there might be—”

        “What?  What's so important about the shed that you had to go give yourself a Mule's Shower?”

        “Scootaloo, what have we talked about rude stereotypes?”

        Scootaloo sighed.  “You worried me, is all, Fluttershy.  Could you at least... I dunno... explain what's so important about the shed?”

        “Mmmm...” The yellow pegasus took a deep breath and glanced forlornly across the amber blazes before her.  “It's not just the cute creatures that I take care of here, Scootaloo.  A lot of Cloudsdalian Animal Tamers rely on my services for when they need special materials for wildlife taming across the rest of the Equestrian Valley.  To that extent, I've had a wooden shed built here that acts as a supply house for oats, animal feed, frozen fish, and several other things other animal tamers come for from far and wide to acquire at random moments.  Lately... uhm... I've had something or some things exiting the edge of the Everfree forest that... well... that are taking a severe interest in the contents of my storehouse.  It's nothing dangerous, really—I just would hate myself if I let anything unnecessary happen to the stuff that the other local animal tamers so desperately need.”

        “If it's nothing dangerous, how come you had me promise to stay inside like some horrible tornado was about to hit us!”

        “Just a precaution, Scootaloo.  I take babysitting as seriously as I take the feeding and care of my precious animal friends.”

        “So that's what this afternoon has been?” Scootaloo blinked with sudden haughtiness.  “An exercise in babysitting?”

        “Uhm... Er...” Fluttershy bit her lip with a slight blush.  “I would like to think that after all of these months, I've grown beyond the need of 'exercising' in that department.”  Her eyes flickered.  “Eeep!  But I didn't mean to insist that—”

        It was too late; the damage had been done.  In a fuming gait, Scootaloo marched firmly towards the rain-drenched doorway of the cottage where her scooter was lying, glistening, waiting for its homeless soul to take arms again.

        “It's okay, Miss Fluttershy.  I get it.  I'm tiny and frail.  I don't have the strength to look out after myself, never mind the fact that I can burn circles across Ponyville faster than any other pegasus my age, flightless or not, under rain or shine!”

        “Oh Scootaloo!  Please, don't go!  I didn't mean to suggest that—”

        “Don't get me wrong, Fluttershy.  I'm more than thankful for having had a shelter from the rain and your delicious soup.  But if this is all because you think I'm not able to handle the storm on my own, then don't let me burden you and take advantage of your kindness.”

        “It's no burden at all, Scootaloo!” Fluttershy left the delightful warmth of the fireplace to scampered wetly after the foal.  “Please—I just wanted to give you a warm and pleasant afternoon!  I mean, with your parents gone for the weekend, it was the least I could do—”

        The orange foal's wings coiled tight.  Scootaloo didn't entirely mean to snarl.  Regardless, the front half of the cottage rattled from her voice as she spun and said, “Miss Fluttershy, I would have been fine on my own!  I'm sure my parents know that!  Don't you see, not everypony is weak and helpless!”

        The rattling stopped, and once more the rain's hissing roar drifted into the cottage, filling the empty home with a wave of shadows that the foal hadn't realized were always there until now... now that Fluttershy's face had melted, now that her pink mane fell around her like a veil, now that her body pivoted about in a sullen trot that dragged her back towards the suddenly dim fireplace.

        “Oh... Well... I understand that, I do suppose,” Fluttershy murmured in a voice that had somehow lost its gold.  “You're right, Scootaloo.  You're not weak and helpless.  You've very strong, and I should have known better than to question that.  I... I'm sorry...”

        Scootaloo stood halfway out the door to a very cold place, familiar in its destitution.  She lifted a pair of shivering hooves from the frigid surface of her scooter's handles, staring at her forelimbs as if they had been stained in blood.  She bit her lip and glanced at her anorexic reflection in the rain-slicked metal body of the mechanism, the one thing she afforded herself to hug in the dank dark nights of her foalhood, until her body secretly wished she could fold the wheeled thing inside her orange self and become one with the strong yet mindless machine that could effortlessly whisk her flightless wings away from every setting sun that bit her with lonely, starving shadows.  Suddenly, being strong didn't seem so rewarding, not in a world that also paid sweet and fragile souls with the same degree of apathy and desolation.

        Fluttershy had descended into a porcelain slump beside the fireplace.  She was navigating the fathoms of her third or fourth sigh by the time that a tiny orange shell sauntered up and plopped down beside her.  Blinking, the caretaker glanced over with curious blue eyes.  “Scootaloo...?”

        “Meh...” The girl folded her limbs and frowned into the ashen corners of the hearth.  “It's too friggin' wet out there.  I don't want to get mud on my scooter.”

        Fluttershy's porcelain smile was crooked in all the right places.  “You've been dirtied before.”

        “Yeah, well, I don't feel like being dirty tonight.”

        “You're more than welcome to wait the storm out until morning, Scootaloo.”

        “I know, Fluttershy,” Scootaloo choked on something.  Whatever it was, she didn't pretend to know.  There was the sound of something sniffling, and she gazed further away from the caretaker.  “I know.”

        Fluttershy smiled.  Over the few next minutes when she briefly nuzzled Scootaloo, the orange foal didn't budge.  The yellow pegasus couldn't have been more thankful.

        “Miss Harmony, may I ask you something?”

        “Have at it.”

        Fluttershy gazed demurely upwards from the dark floor of Everfree as the two traversed the bowels of the forest under nightfall.  “Why are you going so far to help me?”

        “Uhhh...” The time traveler carried the telescope and rocks over her shoulders.  She playfully navigated the crest of a wry smirk and simply replied, “Because it's my duty?”

        The caretaker's hooves dug into the earth as they sauntered forward into the dark foliage.  “I've never known the Court to care this much for the welfare of a mere animal tamer.  The Princess is a fabulous pony, but even she can't afford to pay so much attention to an individual citizen at the extent to which you've been assisting me.”

        “Yeah, well, last time I checked, the Princess wasn't here.  You and I are here.  And you know what else isn't here?—The Capricorn, that's what.  But I think we're about to solve that little conundrum, huh?”

        “Miss Harmony...”

        “Just need a break in the trees. C'monnnnn Starlight!”

        “Miss Harmony, please, do tell me why you are doing this.”

        “There once was a pony who told me something...” Harmony tongued the insides of her cheek as she scanned, scanned, scanned the forested ceiling with twitching amber eyes.  “It had to do with the spirit of something that worked in a circle...”

        “Uhhm... Mmmmm... Wait, are you insisting that—?”

        “There we go!”  Harmony grinned devilishly and squatted beneath a purplish splotch of Equestrian starlight shining on the grassy floor.  “Time to make or break this night.”  She rolled the telescope over her neck and tossed it Fluttershy's way.  “Here, hold this.”

        “Eeep!”  The yellow pegasus nervously flinched, juggled the instrument, and then held it in shaking hooves.  Before she could so much as spot her reflection in the metallic finish, a crystalline rock was being held directly in front of her face, similar to the one that had been lodged in the fat end of the telescope.

        “Ever seen one of these before?”  Harmony asked, waving the twinkling gem before the caretaker's face.

        “It's a star prism,” Fluttershy said with a nod.  “According to legend, they're constructed from nothing else but the actual tears of Goddess Epona.”

        “Mmmmhmmmm.” Harmony nodded.  “Brave pegasi explorers forged these from crystalline dust found floating at the distant north pole of the earth, close towards the cloudless break in the atmosphere which Canterlotlians like to call the 'Point of Exodus'.  It's believed that Epona's essence left these behind when she departed from Equestria—and the whole world for that matter—after the Sundering of Consus.”

        “So it was a star prism that you had Miss Doo procure from Bon Bon's novelty shop?”

        “Yup,” Harmony nodded.  “I dunno about you, but I can't help but stop and marvel at the beautiful silliness of it all.  The world is covered with the remnants and fossils of Gods and Goddesses that once walked among us.”  She turned the rock around in her grasp.  “There may come a time in the future when all that was once sacred in this world will be gone.”  A deep breath.  “But no.  That's not this time...a time when you can pick a piece of the magic of Creation up off a shelf and carry it in your hoof like a loaf of bread.  A wise pony once told me 'It's a wonder to be alive'.  With each passing minute in this place, I can't help but believe her.”  She turned and smiled at Fluttershy.  “So do forgive me if I'm so bent on helping you, Miss Fluttershy.  It's all I can do to keep myself from screaming in delightful hysterics.”

        “If that is a star prism in your grasp, Miss Harmony, then suddenly I think we have the edge we need in our search,” Fluttershy said with a gentle smile.  An optimistic hope was already rising toastily through her yellow cheeks.  “If I am not mistaken.”

        “You bet your silken mane, girl!  Watch in awe!”

        The scavenger from the future flew up to the fractured edge of the Everfree forest canopy.  She raised the gem into the purple haze from Epona's shimmering Exodus beyond.  For a dozen seconds, it appeared as if nothing was happening.  Then—in an exponential increase of bedazzlement—the gemstone fluctuated from deep within.  Sparkling bolts of energy danced all around it, as if the distant stars had fired a volley of fireflies downward from the heavens, all of them collecting within this tiny jewel in the pegasus' hovering grasp.  Soon enough, the thing pulsed like a living lantern, strobing softly and casting kaleidoscopic bands of multi-colored light across the many tree trunks and leaves of the otherwise darkly shrouded Everfree.

        “It's... It's beautiful...” Fluttershy obligatorily murmured.

        “I would hope so,” Harmony wryly returned, twirling the now-glowing prism in her grasp.

        “Now that you have captured the starlight, what is your plan?”

        Harmony floated down and gestured with her black mane.  “Hold the telescope out if you will.”

        Fluttershy obliged, positioning the cosmic spyglass horizontally.

        “Mmmmm... Andddddd... Now to line it up just riiiiiight...” Harmony pivoted the small end of the instrument towards her and slowly... slowly brought the pulsating rock towards it.  “Eh... Eh-yeah... aaaand...”

        The star prism flickered suddenly, and a beam of light was sucked through the telescope and drawn into the identical rock wedged into the fatter side.  The thing suddenly became an illuminated spyglass, casting a wide swathing beam of stardust across the black lengths of the Everfree Forest.

        “Voila!” Harmony grinned proudly.  “We have ourselves portable starlight!”  A girlish giggle.  “Ohhhhh Nebula, I love stupid things that work!”

        “It's... It's certainly quite the spectacle,” Fluttershy murmured, watching with mesmerized blue eyes as a purple halo of light danced across the forest, turning the black shrubbery into cosmic radiance with a divine contrast that rivaled day and night.  “Could this really be enough concentrated starlight to coax the Capricorn out of hiding?“

        “There's only one way to find out, Miss Ponyvillean Animal Tamer,” Harmony said with a proud wink.

        Fluttershy stared back at her.  Instead of wilting or blushing or demurely deflating in any fashion whatsoever, she stood up straight and took charge of the situation.  Her yellow features furrowed into a concentrated squint.  “Follow me.”

        Harmony obeyed the caretaker, pivoting her end of the glowing ensemble as Fluttershy navigated the womb of Everfree with a renewed determination.  The two pegasi lit the forest floor up before them, forcing various dark and chirping things to scurry away as they burned a cosmic path deeper and deeper, tracking Fluttershy's professional instinct.  All fears and trepidation about the dark and misty place melted under their firm hoofsteps as they fought to outrun the limited illumination available to their rock-laden instrument.

        Soon, even the crickets' song dissipated as all things daring to live through the night bowed down to their mutual crusade.  With Fluttershy leading, the two waved the effluent shades of Epona across the untouched wilderness, rejoining the breath of a Goddess with a landscape left to the devices forever and cyclically emulating her.

        It was barely a naked thirty minutes into this trek when Fluttershy suddenly halted the progression.  “Wait!”

        Harmony breathlessly skidded to a halt on copper hooves.  She blinked over the twinkling aura in their grasp.  “What is it?”

        “Do... Do you see it?” Fluttershy murmured in a hoarse voice.

        “See what?”

        “Right in front of us, Harmony.”  The yellow pegasus pointed to a dark impression alongside a beaten path of bent grass blades.  “Besides the bushes and the hollow log.”

        “But... Miss Fluttershy, I'm pretty sure we passed by that place two or three times yesterday.”

        “Nevertheless...” The caretaker's blue eyes narrowed.  She motioned back with her pink mane.  “Harmony, let us aim the light this way.”

        The last pony nodded.  Rotating the rock and the looking-end of the telescope, she hinged sideways from behind Fluttershy's flank.

        The silken filly stayed put, allowing the illuminated part of the spyglass to swivel towards the left.  The grass turned purple as the swath of starlight burned over it.  As soon as the dusty, cosmic aura settled upon the dark impression in the earth, a twitching thing materialized into view.  Like an inside-out effigy burning into existence, a skeletal structure illuminated via frothing red bands, then ballooned outward into translucent flesh before finally coalescing into a weakly breathing hide made of fur, scales, and an endless fountain of bleeding stardust.  With a sickly bleating sound, the Capricorn's snout came into view.  A pair of pearlescent teeth gnashed in the night, then fell under a weighted snout towards the ground, kicking up dead leaves as a pair of ivory-bright eyes teared with lonely nausea and agony.

        In a burst of magic, the two rocks on either end of the telescope shattered.  All of the starlight that had been pulsing through them had shot like a bullet into the hungry frame of the limply sprawled creature.  A pale blue glow fell about the landscape as Harmony nervously brushed the ashes and chunks of prism pieces off of her.

        Fluttershy, however, did anything but stand gawking in one place.  “Oh my... Oh my Oh my Oh my Oh my!”  She galloped forward and slid to a stop on her knees, cradling the twitching neck of the limp creature.  The cosmic entity groaned and bleated deathily as the pegasus turned its pale head gently about, her expert eyes examining the shredded ends of its white coat and the two twinkling horns upon its crown.  A pair of cloven hooves—bleeding like comet trails—painfully kneaded at the ground beside Fluttershy as the specimen stirred pitifully under her featherlight ministrations.  “This is so horrible!  You poor thing!  You have suffered for so long!  If only we had found you sooner!  Don't worry, we're going to take care of you!  We're going to make sure you get the rest and nourishment that you deserve!”

        The creature bleated again.  Its glowing eyes blinked slowly like burning bubbles of lava.  Every other second, the creature's brow furrowed painfully as bolts of energy did a lightning dance its two pristine horns.  With a pained groan, the thing's lower half thrashed and slapped at the loose soil in the form of one thickly scaled tail.

        Fluttershy couldn't help it.  Her eyes watered.  With a sniffling shudder, she pressed her forehead to the end of the creature's snout.  Somehow, the gesture temporarily soothed the convulsions of the groaning beast, far more than any Celestial Speech could.  With a stronger breath, Fluttershy stood up and murmured across the blue haze of the forest clearing.  “Miss Harmony, we must be quick.  This noble animal must be taken back to the edge of Everfree now, while it's still nighttime.”

        Silence.

        Fluttershy blinked.  She turned about, gulping.  “M-Miss Harmony?”

        Harmony was staring.  She thought that this would be the first time she'd be staring at a Capricon.  She was wrong; she had seen it before, this cosmic and starlit creature—brimming with magic—that possessed the upper torso of a goat and the lower body of a fish.  She had seen this before, in the deepest and blackest pit of the Wastelands, where black vines of horrifically barbed thorns had crucified it to a granite wall... along with the corpse of Fluttershy.  Fluttershy's dead body was strung up next to this pathetically absurd thing, and here the time traveler had just helped the innocent caretaker of Ponyville waltz right into the forest and find it.  The blue aura dancing around the whimpering creature even mimicked the pallid light wafting out from the gaping maw of a giant angry bear...

        “Harmony!”

        Harmony jumped in place, breathlessly glancing across the suddenly frightening forest with the amber imitation of a nerve-wracked foal.

        The ghost of a stare master was in her face, pleading:  “We must make haste!  We have to save this creature's life!”

        “Save... Save its life...” Harmony gulped, and under Fluttershy's direction, she grabbed the opposite end of the creature and began hoisting it southward with Entropan limbs.  “Save it... Save it all...” The last pony murmured listlessly, her body bathing in the blood of stars.

        The Capricorn stirred and squirmed under the lanternlight of Fluttershy's manger where it lay in a disheveled bed of hay.  Several various foodstuffs rested in an array of dishes before its snout, but the endangered animal refused a single bite.  Its ivory eyes glossed over as it panted wiltingly into the night, where the dangling stars above did little to re-energize its heavy limbs and tail.

        A hardened pair of blue eyes scrutinized the torturous lengths of this creature, until finally—with a toss of her gray-scarlet mane—Captain Redgale stood up and muttered towards the cold night air, “It's dying.”

        “You would say that,” Harmony droned, glaring from where she stood in a copper-coated lean against a wooden stable behind the elder pegasus.  “Is that your best diagnosis?”

        “I doubt that Miss Fluttershy here could provide a more encouraging second opinion, without the risk of forcing inaccuracies.”  The off-ruby Cloudsdalian half-snorted.  “Isn't that right, child?”

        “Yes, Captain Redgale,” Fluttershy predictably murmured in a deflated voice from where she sat on folded hooves beside the groaning creature.  “It is severely dehydrated.  Its system has been starved of cosmic starlight for so long that even the night sky isn't feeding it.  We... uhm... We'll be lucky if it lasts until morning after all that it has been through.”

        “This is just like the one case twenty years ago with the Scorpius that was discovered having fallen onto the rooftops of Fillydelphia,” Redgale muttered, trotting around the Capricorn while giving it disinterested looks.  “The apartment tenants who discovered the creature thought that it was a monstrosity; so they wounded it and left it—abandoned—inside the deep, dark alleyways of the city.  Lo and behold, once the city council had discovered the unfortunate beast, it was too late to nurse it back to health.  Oh, how I hate to see history repeat itself—”

        “Oh come on!”  Harmony barked with a frown aimed the Captain's way.  “Don't compare Ponyville's Chief Animal Tamer to the likes of a bunch of impoverished thugs with arachnophobia!  Fluttershy here did her darnedest over the course of several days to find this creature, and with no help from you, much less any dang City Council!”

        “What surprises me, Miss Harmony of Her Majesty's Esteemed Service, is that it took her so long to do just that!  These are hardly the grimy back alleys of Fillydelphia!  Miss Fluttershy here has had several years to make herself acquainted with the lengths of the Everfree Forest.  For once, an endangered creature falls into the her backyard—of all ponies—and the best she can do is deliver it to its grave!”

        “And what surprises me,” Harmony spoke with a poisonous smirk, “Is that you obviously have a record of something like this happening before.  So maybe it was in Fillydelphia where a cosmic creature once fell to its death.  So what?  I bet it took the entire city council days to figure out that focused starlight was the means to finding it, huh?”

        Captain Redgale said nothing.  Her lips clenched tighter and tighter as the seconds after the copper pegasus' bold inquiry burned away.

        “Well?!”  The time traveler hissed.  “Did you ever think to share that tidbit with Fluttershy any?  Or maybe you just wanted her to fail from day one!”

        “Harmony...” Fluttershy murmured—

        “Was that it?!” Harmony further growled.

        “Any of the devices that the Cloudsdalian Commission has at its disposal, so does Miss Fluttershy.”  The Captain gazed cooly across the lantern-lit manger at the “Canterlotlian Clerk”.  “The Ponyvillean Caretaker's competence has been fully tested, Miss Harmony.  When and if you report your observation of this to Her Majesty, I'm sure you'll find that she will be in perfectly logical agreement with me.”

        “Oh, sure.”  Harmony scoffed with a bitter chuckle.  “And all that test took was the blood of one near-extinct creature.”

        “Everything that lives eventually bleeds, Miss Harmony,” the Captain spoke in an off-ruby glaze.  “Our sole job is to maintain this equilibrium, not to change it.”

        “Why you smug, arrogant, heartless—!” The last pony marched the length of her sneer towards the elder pegasus.

        Fluttershy stood in the way, staring.  “Your assistance has been most appreciated, Miss Harmony.”

        Harmony blinked, her lips parting.  “But... B-But Miss Fluttershy—“

        The filly twirled with a silken swish of her pink tail and stared painfully up at the elder.  “Captain, as always, I defer to your expertise, and to the authority of the Cloudsdalian Council.  Uhm... What would you have me do with this poor creature?”

        Redgale stared boredly at the anguished shape occupying a good half of the hay-strewn manger.  “Your facilities here are replete with medicinal herbs and natural anesthesia, I presume, child?”

        Fluttershy blinked.  She breathily made to utter something sharply, but soon deflated upon the serrated point of contemplating it.  With a wilting golden voice, she hung her head obediently.  “Yes, Captain Redgale.”

        “Then you already know what needs to be done.”

        “Yes, Captain...”  She shuddered.  A brave breath, and she gazed sadly at the slow rise and fall of the creature's starry ribcage.  “I shall see to its... to its ease of passing.”

        “Very good, child.”  The off-ruby mare brushed a few straws of hay off her hooves and trotted indifferently towards the edge of the manger.  “I will admit: you do have a gift in aiding weak things.  As for the nature of this latest... example of your 'talents at work', we shall discuss it on a much firmer date—Sooner than later.”

        “That's it?”  Harmony blinked in disbelief.  “After all that work, we're just going to let this thing croak—?”

        “And you.”  Redgale glared directly into the pegasus' amber eyes.  “I expected more from the likes of Canterlot's elite!  You should have been a stronger example to the filly you were charged with observing.  This field of work she's in—it takes more than compassion.  It takes tenacity, without which...” She pointed at the lifeless Capricorn decaying dustily before them.  “Things like this can happen.  Alas, these are the lessons we must all learn with age.  Maybe someday you'll grasp this, but I can't presume to hope.  As for now, farewell.”

        With a burst of hot air, the Captain took to the skies, and returned north towards the star-shaded haze of Cloudsdale.  The two ponies were left with the shadows of death, festering beneath them in intermittent bleating sounds that shook the shells of their souls.

        Harmony shut her eyes.  For once, the perpetual snow and ash inside her mind was a welcome reprieve from the muted tragedy bleeding before her.  When her vision returned, she blinked to see Fluttershy having padded over towards the horned cranium of the stirring beast.  With a soft breath, the yellow pegasus laid herself down beside the neck of the Capricorn and gently nuzzled it, murmuring golden words of comfort that vibrated with the strings of somepony's twenty-five years of empty dreams.

        It drew the breath out from the last pony's lungs like a low, whimpering scream.  “What... What are you going to do now, Miss Fluttershy?”

        “I'm going to be here.”

        Silence.  Harmony finally realized that Fluttershy had answered her.  The copper pegasus cleared her throat and prodded further.  “For how long?”

        “As long as it takes,” Fluttershy murmured.  Her blue eyes were like opposite ends of a rainy horizon as she stared into the cloud of the creature's cosmic effluence.  “I have all the ingredients to make the process painless for it... But nothing to make it swift.”

        The last pony glared into the shadows with a sigh.  “Isn't that always the way it is?”

        Either Fluttershy didn't hear her, or she was too busy formulating a proper way to say:  “When you write to Princess Celestia, I do hope you have the grace to mention that Captain Redgale has only ever meant to inspire me to greatness.  I know that you have your own convictions, Miss Harmony, but despite the way it looks, this creature's life was completely an incidental tragedy.  There was no sabotage involved.”

        “What are you getting at?”  Harmony squinted at her.

        “You have done so very much to help me, and I am exceedingly grateful, Miss Harmony.  But you need not stay any longer.  Your work is done; mine is just beginning.”

        Harmony stared into the abyss that was the hazy blue space between Fluttershy and the death that she was cradling in her hooves.  The golden lengths of the caretaker's voice yet again adhered to the last pony's beating heart, so that she mewled in a foalish breath that resembled an orange shadow trotting down a ghostly set of stairs somewhere.

        “I don't want to leave you, Fluttershy.”

        A pair of sad blue eyes darted her way.

        Harmony gulped and reiterated, “I do not want you to be alone in this.  I mean it.”  A painful smile, a voice that could mold glass.  “Not after your Captain has abandoned you, not after Cloudsdale has ignored you, not while...”  A biting of the lip, and then a wilted breath:  “Not while you're so alone.”

        “I'm not alone, not really.  I'm just—”  Fluttershy stopped in mid-sentence, gazing with a suddenly solid pair of stony blue eyes towards the sparkling bolts shimmering between the Capricorn's twin horns.  “Hmmm...”

        Harmony blinked.  “What?”  She blinked harder, shuffling towards the animal caretaker.  “What is it, Miss Fluttershy?”

        Fluttershy continued studying the creature.  Her yellow hooves gently stroked the rigid contours of the electrically brimming horns.  A blue-violet aura lingered just a few anguished centimeters from the bleating creature's face.  Nevertheless, the hulking cosmic entity breathed slightly easier under the porcelain touch of the graceful animal tamer.

        Fluttershy's voice was a pindrop, and yet it shattered the silence like the bow of a battlecruiser.  “Do you truly wish to assist me, Miss Harmony?”

        “Anything, Fluttershy!  Name it.”

        “If you would be so kind as to gallop quickly into my cottage.  There is a desk positioned against the wall opposite to my reading seat.  Please do me a favor and grab a book entitled A Third Age Study in Cosmic Zoology and bring it back here, if you would.”

        Harmony saluted like an age-old rainbow soldier and dashed off.  It was halfway through her night-lit canter that she faltered briefly, assaulted with the brief fear that she might incidentally trot her way beyond the limits of Fluttershy's anchor.  Her venture, however, took her harmlessly into the depths of the caretaker's house beyond the manger.  There was no risk of green flames as she swiftly lifted the aptly titled book from its wooden shelf and rushed back.  She wondered if perhaps the size of Fluttershy's heart allowed the bound time traveler to fly loops around the moon and not be thrown back to the Everfree Briar of tomorrow.  Harmony knew better than to bother testing that notion.

        When she returned and hoofed the book over to Fluttershy, the animal tamer immediately flung the dense tome open to a chapter located halfway through the dusty forest of pages.  Her blue eyes swept through paragraph after paragraph as she suddenly exercised the skills of an avid scholar.  All the while, she held one hoof up to her side and gently stroked the twitching cranium of the terminal creature to her side.

        Minutes went by, consuming half-an-hour from the quiet misery of the dimly lit manger.  Harmony began to stir uncomfortably, expecting something to melt to dust at any moment.  She couldn't tell which would crumble first, the Capricorn or the discovery that Fluttershy was evidently about to make.

        It was finally with a fractured breath that the yellow pegasus deflated from her hard-skimming of the book.  “It is as I feared,” she stonily murmured.

        “What, Miss Fluttershy?”

        “I had my suspicions, but I wasn't entirely sure of myself until you brought this book to me.”  She sadly gazed the Capricorn's way, staring pointedly at the thing's glowing horns.  “Thank you very much for your help, Miss Harmony.  But... But I really think you would do yourself well to leave.”  A sad sigh and she nuzzled the edge of the stirring creature's neck.  “Dear Gultophine, have grace and mercy...”

        “I don't get it!” Harmony cackled.  “What's going on, Fluttershy?  Can't you at least give me an idea?  What could possibly be worse than this thing dying?”

        “You are a very sympathetic pony, Miss Harmony, though sometimes you do not possess the grace to express it.  You needn't worry about my task at hoof.”

        “It can be our task if you just let me, Fluttershy!”

        “This was never your burden to share,” Fluttershy droned in a somber tone.  “It's hard enough to bear the brunt of two deaths, much less one.”

        “But you're going to need somepony to—” Harmony dropped off in mid-sentence.  She blinked, and her eyes burned suddenly with hardened amber.  “Wait... What do you mean 'two deaths'?”

        Fluttershy stroked the goat-like mane of the whimpering, glowing Capricorn with silken hooves.  “Captain Redgale was right.  This creature won't make it past the following day.  But the Captain's years of working as an intermediary for the Cloudsdalian Commission has made her forget the finer details of animal caretaking.  It is important to take into account any and all details of the lives under our observation.”  She gently brushed a hoof towards the sparkling pair of horns atop the creature's head.  “See its crown?  See the blue sparkling energy dancing between the bone structure?”

        “Uhh... Y-Yeah?”  Harmony blinked.

        Fluttershy stared back.  “She's pregnant.  Her body's fluctuating with the need to discharge her infant in the form of energy.  She came back to earth to go into labor.  But someway—somehow—something intervened, and she fell.”

        Harmony didn't realize she had fallen down to her haunches until she felt a crater of hay fluttering to a stop around her legs.  “She... Sh-She's foaling?!”

        “Was foaling, Miss Harmony,” Fluttershy melancholically explained.  “The book you fetched for me provides a detailed explanation.  This creature's propagation is nothing at all akin to the process that ponies go through.  Capricorns—much like Ursas and Scorpia—reproduce by replicating their body patterns in the form of energy.  Since they were all created on earth, they must migrate back to the planet's surface and find terrestrial mana crystals that can reflect the energy of their offspring long enough for them to materialize in the flesh.  After months of development, their flesh grows with cosmic energy, and they can join their families in the stars, completing the natural cycle.”

        “Then... It... It needs these mana crystals...” Harmony thought aloud, her head painfully swimming through her thoughts left-and-right.  “They're in Everfree, I'm guessing!  That's why the Capricorn landed here of all places?”

        “Mmmhmmm...”

        “Then... Then let's go fetch some crystals!  We can—I dunno—get it to zap its baby into the things and save it from—“

        “It's far too late for that, Miss Harmony.  Look...” Fluttershy gently turned over a lengthy flank of the stirring creature's fish-tail, revealing a wide swath of scales that had been seared brown as if with a giant hot iron.  “At some point during its trip to earth, a cosmic anomaly of unknown proportions mortally wounded the creature.  It cannot deliver its child naturally anymore.”

        “What do you mean by 'cosmic anomaly'?” Harmony blinked.

        Fluttershy went on:  “And even if it could deliver its young, just a hoof-full of mana crystals would not do the trick.”  The yellow pegasus sadly shook her head.  “It would require an entire cave lined with the magically attuned material to allow for a naturally energized foaling.”

        “And Everfree has caves like this?”

        “It's long been assumed so.”

        “Then what if we—I dunno—dragged the fishgoat to one of those places and let nature run its course?”

        “You mean move her now?  In this condition?”

        “Isn't it worth a try, Miss Fluttershy?”

        “No, Harmony.  It's not.”

        “But—”

        “This heavenly creature was doomed to die—its child in tow—long before it even touched the ground from its fall,” Fluttershy gravely said with finality.  “Do not let its immense size fool you.  The book here describes Capricorns as terribly fragile creatures.  I'm amazed that it has stayed alive as long as it has.  If we had found it three days earlier, there still would have been nothing we could have done.”

        Harmony winced, gnashing her teeth as she suddenly avoided looking at the moaning beast.  A shuddering breath, and she muttered:  “All this time that your beloved Captain Redgale was here, you knew this, didn't you?”

        “I... I had my suspicions, yes,” Fluttershy somberly admitted.  “I almost dismissed the idea, until I saw the creature's horns up close.  There is no denying it now.”

        “Okay, so you had your suspicions,” Harmony groaned inwardly, buckling under a brief twinge of anger.  “You suspected that there was more tragedy here than the old bag-of-wind could possibly see, and yet you said nothing to her?”

        “This is a very dismal scene that we have been granted the solemn grace to witness, Miss Harmony.  I... I had no intention of making it more hectic than it already is.”

        “Even if the truth could have excused you in Redgale's eyes?”

        “It's not that simple—” Fluttershy bit her lip, then re-uttered:  “It's never been that simple with the Captain.  I cannot expect her to see what I see, not all the time.  It... erm... It doesn't matter.  All that matters is that I must see to it that this life here comes to an end peacefully, and not drowning in the sorrow that this poor creature is undoubtedly comprehending.  To lose a child is the worst pain I could ever imagine—and to multiply that by the loss of one's own life before being able to grieve such a tragedy...”

        Fluttershy inhaled painfully.  Her eyes glistened as she came down the crest of that liquid breath.  She gave Harmony a forlorn glance..

        “So, as you can see, your presence as an observer is no longer required.  This... This is hardly the dazzling side of my job as Ponyville's Animal Tamer.  But... But it is so terribly real, nonetheless.  I... I'm sure that Princess Celestia knows all she needs to about death and loss.”

        “Maybe so.”  Harmony nodded, then in a breath that superseded her Entropan voice, she remembered just how old she was.  “But I need to know about it.”  She walked over softly and sat down on the other side of the creature opposite of the caretaker.  “I'm staying with you, Fluttershy.  And with them... Both of them.”  Her hand gently stroked the white mane of the twitching creature.  For a brief moment she forgot the dark thorns of the future that anchored a chimeric skeleton to a stone wall of desolation.

        Fluttershy's gentle smile was appropriately haunting.

        Even the most epic of good acts was easier said than done.

        Accompanying the throes of a pitifully dying creature was a job fit for a Goddess, much less two mortal ponies landlocked by the endangered specimen's constant, rattling moans.  As the night bled slowly onward, Fluttershy murmured various words of comfort into the beast's shimmering hide.  The two fillies could only imagine that the Celestial Speech held merit in the animal's twitching ears, while they were both helpless to measure the hollow significance of its own bleating cries.

        Minutes stretched on to hours; hours stretched on to blinking eons.  The lantern of the manger had to be replaced several times.  Under Fluttershy's directives, Harmony made several more trips into the inside of the cottage to acquire medicines, herbs, and various tools.  The liquid miles of the anguished evening would ever so randomly be punctuated by the thrashes and kicks of the creature's hooves or fishtail—and then everything smoothed once more into a quiet hum of lingering pain and confusion.

        When Spike had first reunited with Scootaloo and offered his “gift” of green flame, the last pony didn't quite know what to expect.  She had lived a life of death—of witnessing a gigantic landscape turned into a virtual cemetery of ashen fossils—but actually being seated in the past along the front row of death's rattling dance was one thing she hadn't anticipated, for all of its bleakishly messy textures, like this disheveled hunk of stardusting meat that lingered before her and failed, failed, failed to go quickly into the black curtain of the night.

        It wasn't that Harmony pitied this shell of an animal.  As the droning hours limped by, she shuddered to so much as look at the thing.  The closer Fluttershy got to it, and the more she nuzzled and murmured to it like a distant kin, the clearer and clearer the last pony saw a sea of thorns encapsulating the two of them, like dead twins strapped to the same umbilical threads of the future, where all fates shared one womb and one womb alone... and there was no sign of Epona's brilliance to be found anywhere in the pitch black reality of it all.

        Just what did this creature mean—in the manger, or in the Everfree Briar?  If Fluttershy and this Capricorn were together at the moment the Cataclysm hit, did that mean that the creature would actually live past this long and fitful night?  Would an Ursa Major find them both in each other's hooves—like an owner and its pet—and drag them both to the same unmarked grave in the festering abyss of tomorrow?

        Harmony's breathing suddenly sharpened, for she knew that she was thinking too hard.  She was forcing logic down avenues where it did not belong.  As Fluttershy's breaths slowed to an oozing pattern that slumberingly matched the terminal wheezes of the creature against which she was cuddling, the last pony could only see one plausibility burning its way towards her like a constellational creature hurdling towards the earth.

        Perhaps it was not the Cataclysm that ended Fluttershy.  Perhaps it was the immutable will of time for the Capricorn to die—and the yellow pegasus as well—right here and now.

        With stabbing pinpricks of spear-laden thoughts, Harmony instantly dove back into the dammed up pools of her painfully clogged memories, and all she saw was a curtain of gray afternoon rainwater surrounding her last memories of Fluttershy like some infernally thick prison.  She hadn't realized she was hyperventilating until she saw the straws on the manger floor dancing from her heaving breaths.

        On stumbling Entropan hooves, the last pony limped numbly around the full length of the cottage and all but collapsed inside.  Under candlelight, the filly's knees and joints wobbled.  Her wings weighed a million kilograms.  Ignoring the burning sight of a wooden stairway to her left, she lurched through a space of floorboards still kissed with the blue haze of a phantom table and flung a hoof into  a thin wooden door...

        ...that opened to the first floor bathroom.

        “I'll be out in a sec!”  The orange foal called over her shoulder.

        “Take your t-time, Scootaloo.”  The yellow shade of Fluttershy could be seen adding more logs to the fireplace.  Then the door shut on her like a passing dream.

        Alone, the young pegasus slumped in darkness.  A guilty cloud coalesced over her shoulder, colored with the frowns of a violet-haired foal that had nearly taken off on a scooter twice as cold as the rain pelting the bathroom windows behind her.

        The dim refracted light of the dying afternoon danced across the pony, so that she was suddenly swimming in a sea of dull ivory shadows, like bleached white stones in front of a barricaded mine shaft.

        The young soul winced all the harder.  Stifling a weak breath, she dipped her hooves...

        ...into the sink before her, splashing cold water over the gasping lengths of her copper features.  A breath shuddered, like so many groans that had bled out of the lips of a dying Capricorn, the chimeric harbinger of Fluttershy's crucified remains.  Black thorns encrusted the the peripheral of the last pony's eyelids, so that she instinctually reached up to push away goggles that weren't there, and a tiny bright shadow mimicked her.

        Amber eyes bulging, Harmony looked straight ahead.  Her hooves parted a slick wet black mane, and soon she was staring into the face of an exiled Goddess.  In place of an Alicorn's horn was an amber streak of hair.  It shimmered in the mirror...

        ...like a hollow reflection off of a granite obelisk, dancing with names-names-names that flickered off the black surface of it along with so many shadows of the refracted raindrops blanketing the shadowed bathroom walls.

        Scootaloo stammered, her heart palpitating as she swam down the etched names, searching for the ivory-winged pair that still spurred her stubby legs into a blazing gallop, even when she was standing still.  But beyond her reflection was a darker aura, something that scared the rain shadows into hiding like shrouded lightning strobes beneath an eternally black cloudbank.

        With a trembling breath, she stretched a tiny orange forelimb...

        ...and raised it to the numb shell standing beyond the glass.  For the first time in three decades, another pony was actually looking at her, and not this foreign shell encasing it.  Harmony shuddered under the sensation, her knees buckling as her hoof closed the gap between her projected soul-self and the cold kiss of the reflection that scoffed at her with each clock-ticking-second wasted in the hovel of some learned purple dragon that was waiting for her in the past, in that Spike was waiting in the future, but the future was just as predictable as the past—and yet the past was something of color and spontaneity and mystery that stuck the last pony with pins and needles much like this moment of...

        ...breathless confusion that drowned the foal, that froze her—with every centimeter of her hoof contacting the glass wall that barred her from her every dream ever, encapsulated so weakly in this banal ghost of a pony that she was trying so terribly hard to outrun, outgrow, outlast.  And yet this shadow followed her, echoed her on every shadowed sojourn into the abandoned hovels of Ponyville where she thought—and wished—that her sobs would be heard by her and her alone, and not by this stranger from beyond that was leaving a large ringed smudge...

        ...from where her Entropan hoof had pressed thoughtlessly against the mirror.  Harmony blinked and pulled her forelimb back, gazing at the ghostly familiarity of the solid ring within which a foal's grasp could easily fit.

        Her heart was beating ten thousand kilometers per minute when the ice first started creeping down her copper temples.  In a panicked breath—her lungs full of black thorns—she spun back towards the door.  Her copper wings bumped into a shelf along the wall, knocking something over.  There was a dainty crashing sound.

        The last pony looked down—panting—to see that a porcelain rabbit had shattered across the bathroom tile.  A breathless whimper escaped...

        ...the foal's lips as she spun from the circular smudge in the mirror and stepped in something.  Glancing down, she saw the ivory fragments of a snow-white bunny figurine spread across the floor.  She all but collapsed back into the front room on teetering limbs, summoning a curious gasp from...

        ...across the atrium.  A furiously sweating Harmony flashed wide-amber eyes upwards.  In her bobbing vision, she saw a yellow ghost of a pegasus lying on a green chair in deathly slumber.  An orange shadow was burning down the wooden stairs towards it, one thunderous hoof at a time.

        Squealing, the last pony blinded herself from the sight with Entropan hooves, hobbling on two back legs until she fell fatefully through the front door of the cottage and rolled—sprawling—onto the lawn's springy grass, dancing with invisible monarch butterflies in the warmth of Cheerilee's schoolyard.  Her ears roared beyond a Goddess' heartbeat with the frozen rain of an undying golden afternoon, so that she forced herself to fly an airship past the gray ashen shadows—like a screen of moonvision—and beyond them the briar thorns stretched bloodily and blackly, tying the past and the future together like a dead Sun and Moon, and no matter how loud she wanted to scream and pound against the hard metal surface, she knew that Rainbow Dash was never going to hear her from the flames beyond the arcane vault.

        In a hissing breath, the last pony rediscovered her center and hugged it—like she hugged a cold scooter to her bosom on so many fitfully freezing nights—and the snarl that came out of her scared the leathery bodies away from her mind just long enough to reopen her twitching eyes once more to an alien night sky that lingered in purple surreality above her.

        “Keep it together... Friggin' keep it together!  I've battled hydras... I've hunted down Goddess-forsaken phoenixes... I'm stronger than this... Stronger!”  Her wheezes had no merit, like a dying mother giving birth to an unsung eulogy under cold and apathetic lanternlight.  “Dang you, Spike.  You should have told me that there would have been side effects... You should have friggin' told me that there'd be danged side effects to all this... this... this!”

        She shivered, all alone—always alone.  The past and the future made no difference, spread no different a shade on her endless sojourns.  She had floated down into the blackest Briar of the Wasteland alone.  This frolic through the past was no different.  Even if she danced rings around Fluttershy's lamentable form, she would leave no imprint on her immutable fate.  When the yellow pegasus' body would finally be unhinged from a dead wall of stone, it would be by decapitation and pulverization in the presence of an Ursa Major, like a big blue exclamation point at the end of the biggest joke in Equestria, and the last pony would never... never give it the grace of being laughed at.

        “Nnnngh... And you did tell me, Spike.”  Harmony hugged herself tighter and shivered under the piercing starlight, as if her soul was being pulled inside out from the forest's shadows, the harbinger to a dreadfully heavy remembrance.  “Somehow... You did... You told me everything.”

        She was suddenly too tired to cry.

        With her legs still wobbling, she stood up with a sigh and slowly, slowly trotted back towards the manger.  She decided on a whim to go around the side of the cottage opposite of the direction from which she stumbled, as if the only way to solve a paradox was to obstinately circumnavigate it counter-clockwise like an infant's hoof stubbornly pushing back the minute hand of time.

        And then—in yet more pins and needles of fate—Harmony stumbled upon something.  Beside a hauntingly familiar woodshed there rested a pile of lumber, within which a few planks of wood stabbed the soft meaty parts of her soul with curiosity, like a golden inquisition.  With amber eyes narrowing, the last pony numbly strolled forward for a closer look.  There was a reason for why those lonesome planks of wood looked familiar.  As her gaze fell deeper and deeper upon the blue finish still painted over them, she remembered a warm night—a night of guilt and a night of glory—that perpetually sang across the hollow edges of her soul, reminding her she still had one.

        “Hmmmph...”  She smiled a pale smile.  “Fluttershy: pack rat or saint?”  Blinking, she turned towards the manger and limped over to find out which was the truth.  After gazing at the soundly sleeping form of Fluttershy—draped silkily against the wincing shape of the Capricorn in an angelic embrace—Harmony got her answer.

        It was a golden enough sight to solace her.  Soon, her head was spinning in a new circle—a softer circle—and it rolled with the locomotive words of comfort, the one Celestial Speech that could usher a mythological beast peacefully into the great beyond.  On whisper-quiet hooves, Harmony rummaged through a wooden trunk in the corner of the manger.  She acquired a few basic carpentry tools, blanketed in dust and cobwebs from years of feminine reticence and neglect.

        Shuffling back to the woodshed, Harmony carefully pulled out every blue piece of lumber she could find.  Then she laid each fragment side by side in the star-kissed dew of the grass aside Fluttershy's cottage.  Seating meditatively before it, Harmony focused on her golden anchor, and—with a little help from a lonesome shadow seated in a claustrophobic airship's cabin somewhere—she set herself to work, tool-in-hoof.

        “Small things.  One at a time.  Thattagirl...”

        Fluttershy's eyes twitched open.  When they did, the dim kiss of sunlight stabbed her deeply.  She shot up with a gasp—only to have a pair of copper hooves gently embrace her shoulders from behind.

        “Whoah... Whoah, easy, Miss Fluttershy.  It's okay...”

        “But, I fell asleep!  Oh dear—The Capricon—!”

        “It's okay,” Harmony said, then bit her lip.  “Erm... Well, what I mean is... you haven't missed anything.” She gestured towards the still-stirring form of the starry creature occupying the haybed of the manger.  “You haven't slept on the job, so to speak, Miss Fluttershy.”

        Fluttershy scooted over, wincing through a throng of stiff muscles, and gently stroked the frothing white mane of the beast.  “Has it been experiencing any pain?  Does it need more medicine—?”

        The “Canterlotlian Clerk” slowly shook her head.  She sat solemnly in the fading shadows of the other two bodies in the waxing kiss of dew-laden day.  “If that was the case, I would have woken you sooner, Miss Fluttershy.”

        “I... I see...” Fluttershy murmured.  She continued gently stroking the wheezing creature as she tossed a tangled curtain of pink hair out from her brow.  “I hadn't expected it to last this long.  It's such a brave... brave creature.”

        “It's had very delightful hospice up to the end,” Harmony said with a fragile smile.

        “I don't think it's that, necessarily,” Fluttershy ever so humbly remarked.  A painful gulp.  “Let nopony ever underestimate the power of a mother's will.”

        Harmony shifted uncomfortably.  She brushed aside an amber-streak of her mane and murmured, “Miss Fluttershy, you said it yourself; the creature was doomed before it hit the earth.  It has to give up sometime.”

        “I know, Harmony.”

        “We... We cannot pretend to give it hope.”

        “I know.  But... But I suppose it's not her hope that I am thinking about.  I just...”  She bit her yellow-coated lips.  A shuddering sigh, and she gazed beyond the creature's bleeding stardust to say, “I... I have always dreamed of someday becoming a mother.”

        Harmony gently smiled.  “How come that doesn't surprise me one bit?”

        “It's always been a deep, deep wish of mine.”  The caretaker breathed.  In a soft voice that cradled the creature's twitching ears, she said, “Nothing fills me with more joy than to look after precious and fragile things, to bring them into this world, to bestow them with all of the things I have learned, to bless them with all of the hopes and aspirations that I could expect them to live up to.”  A painful swallowing, and she gazed briefly over her shoulder at the copper pegasus.  “I... I really think that is why I have such a talent with taking care of animals... and occasionally Miss Doo's delightful little foal.”  A passing smile, then she gazed off into the shadows.  “It's all just an extension of the same dream... of perpetual motherhood.”

        Harmony wasn't thinking.  After all, the last pony didn't believe she needed to think for what she said next:  “Why don't you do it, then?”  A hopeful grin.  “Why don't you become a mother, Fluttershy?”

        The caretaker's ears deflated.  She drowned herself once more with the sight of the dying Capricorn's starry essence.

        Harmony's eyebrow raised quizzically.  She leaned her head to the side, as if a sharper angle of the yellow-coated pony could somehow render an explanation.

        Fluttershy's voice had a hollow echo to it when she finally said, “Let's just say... it takes more than a fall from the cosmos to shatter a dream, Miss Harmony, no matter how heavenly.”

        The last pony wilted from that.  She wanted to pierce the issue, to dig deeper just like she was so darkly burrowed into that moment.  Try as she might, she couldn't.  The hush of the blossoming morning stretched her eyelids to the extreme, and all she could feel was... weak and helpless.

        Just then, there was a monumental roar.  The manger shook and shuddered as the Capricorn suddenly thrashed, kicking hay about while its ivory-white eyes exploded in a blistering new vitality.

        “Good heavens!”  Fluttershy gasped, clasping her limbs over the creature's hide in a desperate attempt to anchor it down to the floor.

        “Whoah—What gives?”  Harmony gasped, her gaze dashing left and right in a sudden panic that mimicked Fluttershy's reaction.  “Is it dying?  Are these its death throes?”

        “I can't explain it!  It's like she's suddenly got a new surge of energy!”  Fluttershy leaned down and hissed and cooed whispery sounds into the spasmatic creature's ears; it did not pacify it.

        Harmony bit her lip.  Black thorns flickered across her amber eyes like ghostly shadows through moondust.  “What if... What if...”  She gave the creature's goat-head a fitful glance, taking notice suddenly of several blue sparks dancing between its porcelain horns.  “Miss Fluttershy, what if it's giving birth?!?”

        “Impossible!”  Fluttershy sputtered.  “There would have to be an object nearby capable of being enchanted!  If you do not believe me, consult the book!”

        “What about that mana-crystal stuff you were talking about last night?  Maybe she found it?”

        “From this distance?  Dozens of kilometers away from the central caves of Everfree?  I'm telling you, Miss Harmony, it simply is not possible!”

        “Then what the heck's gotten her thrashing about?!”  Harmony pointed a shaking hoof towards the increasing storm of energy sparks between the creature's horns.  “I'm no zoologist, but that sure has heck looks like cosmic labor to me!”

        “If that was the case, then she's using her every last ounce of strength to discharge her infant's unborn spirit into a nearby mana battery!  But that would mean—” Fluttershy froze, her blue eyes dilating into sapphiric pinpricks.  Clasping the Capricorn's shivering fishtail, she flashed a sweating expression up towards the copper pegasus.  “Harmony!  What time is it?!”

        “I... I don't know...” Harmony wracked her brain, pacing in circles.  “The Sun rose up two hours ago.  I was watching you and I lost track.  Why, what are you thi—?”

        “Good M-M-M-M-Morning, Miss Fluttershy!  We brought breakfast!”

        Fluttershy gasped as if the ghost had left her.  The Capricorn stumbled onto its front cloven hooves, its jaw lurching in a shuddering wail.  “H-Harmony!”  She pointed a hoof out beyond the walls of the manger towards where the chirping voice had emanated from.  “Fly out there!  Stop them!  Make them turn around!”

        “The heck?!  Fluttershy, I don't get it!  What's—?”

        “Dinky!”  The yellow pegasus actually snarled.  “Get Dinky away from—!!”

        All sound in the room suddenly drowned beneath the crackling roar of the Capricorn's skull lighting up in a blue cyclone.  Harmony's amber eyes reflected it as she burst forth a knowing gasp:  “Oh hoarseapples!”  In a copper blur, she soared out of the manger, wings slicing the morning air.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Hey look, Muffin!”  Ditzy Doo grinned wide as she trotted up the beaten path towards Fluttershy's cottage.  “A welcoming p-p-p-p-party!”

        “Oh?” A tiny helmeted unicorn cutely yawned from where she was perched in the mare's mailbag.

        “Miss Doo!  Miss Doo—!” An airborne pegasus shouted, flailing her copper legs as she hurdled murderously towards the pair.

        “Hi, Mister Squirrel!”  The wall-eyed pegasus cheerfully waved back.  “Do you like doughnuts?”

        Dinky suddenly squinted, her educated eyes reflecting a bright blue glow from beyond the grassy knoll.  “Uhhhm...” She shrunk nervously into the leather folds of the bag.  “M-Mother...?”

        “Dang it, Ditzy!” Harmony snarled against the beating wind of her flight.  “Turn around!  Go back!  Get her away from—”

        An explosion.  A bright blue beam of magic energy shot directly through the side of the manger.

        Harmony spun around, eyes wide.  In a heroic breath, she lunged her Entropan body directly into the path of the cosmic discharge.  A crackle of star-laden thunder, and she was suddenly being plowed seven meters through the exploding earth, for the Capricorn's beam had knocked her aside.  Her vision briefly blurred in emerald tongues of madness, and once the hazy horizons of the past had miraculously coalesced back into existence around her, she found her world rocked by a perpetual wailing sound, haunting enough to drive a world of gray ash into hiding.

        Hissing, Harmony struggled to rise to her haunches.  She was rubbing a green-smoking forehead just as a series of galloping hooves arrived at her peripheral.

        “Miss Harmony, are you all right?” A golden voice dripped into her ear, followed by soft forelimbs that grasped her shoulders.

        “I'll live to die another day.”  The scavenger from the future grumbled.  In a dizzy spell, she glanced aside.  “The Capricorn...?”

        Fluttershy exhaled.  “Deceased.  As soon as that energy billowed out from her, she gave up the ghost.  Her body is now a pile of cosmic dust in the manger.”

        “Dust, you say?”  Harmony's numb soul was no stranger to a sudden elation, though it would be short-lived.  “But... But what about—?”

        The yellow pegasus' gasping shriek was the firmest answer the last pony could hear.  “Oh, dear Celestia, no!”  She shot forward.

        A tired pair of amber eyes followed her, then widened at the sight of a burnt crater, to the side of which a tiny helmet rested—smoking—with a great hole having been magically blown in the center of it.  The last pony's twitching gaze rose up the lengths of a shivering gray pegasus, cradling in her forelimbs the quivering body of a unicorn foal, her tiny horn shimmering brighter than the Sun as Dinky's mother desperately held her.  The child's eyes were blisteringly bright, shimmering from within, carrying more heat than ten thousand Harmony boilers could ever fathom emulating.  Steam kissed the air as the foal's tears instantly evaporated, and her lips mumbled an indecipherable constellation of words as she convulsed and shivered in endless spasms.

        “M-M-M-Muffin?  Oh, my darling Muffin, speak to me!  Please!”  Ditzy glanced up, blanching breathlessly as the winged mare grayed even further, stammering:  “Miss Fluttershy, what in Nebula's name is wrong with her?  What was that bl-bl-bl-blue flash of light?!?”

        “Oh no no no no no!”  Fluttershy fought back her sobs as she clasped the unicorn's cranium in two twitching hooves.  She had to squint to so much as look at the faint edges of the foal's strobing horn.  “It's just as I feared!  Worse than I feared!”

        Harmony stumbled up, panting.  “You mean to say that the creature's friggin' unborn child is inside her horn?!?”

        “What?!”  Ditzy nearly wretched.  “What creature?  What unborn child?!  Miss Fluttershy, what's wrong with my daughter?!”

        “All of the energy has stored itself in her horn.  But it's not enough to contain the Capricorn essence!”  Fluttershy gulped and shivered to speak.  “Not even an adult unicorn could maintain such pressure!  A pony's nervous system isn't equipped for it!  It'll collapse in on itself with the force of a hundred shattering leylines!”

        “What... Nnngh... Miss Fluttershy, what does that mean, exactly?” The last pony's gaze hardened against the shimmering spectacle between all three worried pegasi.  “Is Dinky's horn going to explode?”

        “No, Harmony.”  The caretaker's voice dripped under a horrified face.  “Dinky is going to die.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Fourteen – Everkind

Special Thanks to Chobit-389 for Cover Art

        “Scootaloo, are you feeling alright?”

        “Hmm...?  What?”

        “I was asking if you were feeling alr—”

        “Oh!  Oh, yeah.  Ahem.  I'm just fine, Fluttershy,” Scootaloo murmured as she fought a brief dizziness and sat on folded hooves before the fireplace of the yellow pegasus' living room.  Outside, the world grew dimmer and dimmer beneath the cascading hush of the rainstorm's silk screen.  “Is there a reason why you ask?”

        “You looked a little dizzy as you were coming out of the washroom.”

        “Oh—Pffft.  It's nothing.”  The orange foal waved with a smirk.  “I'm just not used to being inside.”  She took a breath, winced, and jerkingly added, “Inside of such a long rainstorm.  It's almost like the weather fliers are dumping an entire frickin' ocean on top of us.”

        “I was beginning t-to think that it was quite the deluge myself.”  Fluttershy nodded.  “The last time I... erhm... remember the other pegasi arranging such a surprisingly intense thunderstorm was a little over a year ago when Twilight Sparkle first came to Ponyville.”

        “Hey, I think I remember Apple Bloom telling me about that one.”  Scootaloo managed a tiny smirk.  “Something to do with Applejack, Lady Rarity, Twilight Sparkle, and a tree stuck inside a tree.”

        “Uhmm... Perhaps you're right.  In all honesty, the finer details are rather lost to me.”

        “Could you imagine a tree standing inside a tree?  That'd be like—I dunno—'tree squared' or something.”

        “I wouldn't want to be that tree.”

        “Heeheehee...” Scootaloo smirked and gazed towards the flickering orange tongues within the fireplace.  “A storm like this could wash away all of the dirt and grime from Ponyville.”

        “I wasn't aware that Ponyville had much dirt and grime.  I thought the mayor had done a decent job of keeping it clean.”

        “Believe me,” Scootaloo murmured into the death of shadows before her.  “There're filthy places in this town.”

        “Oh... Uhm... Okay...”  Fluttershy fidgeted.

        Scootaloo bit her lip.  A chunk of firewood sizzled brightly before her, splitting and collapsing into hot white clumps of ash, like brittle charcoal, or two ivory stones.  “Fluttershy?”

        “Yes, Scootaloo?”

        “You don't think the rainstorm would wash away the memorial, do you?”

        “Hmmm?”  The caretaker's blue eyes blinked.  Then she raised her eyebrows.  “Oh, do you mean the site at Everclear?”

        Scootaloo slowly nodded, her pink mane facing the yellow pegasus.

        “I highly doubt it,” Fluttershy said.  With a gentle smile she spoke, “That place was built to stand the test of time.  It is a site that's dedicated towards the preservation of memories, as well as the honor that's forever connected to them.  Nopony in their right mind would let such a location fall to ruin just because of a day or two's inclement weather.”

        “Is that what a memorial is, then, Fluttershy?”

        “Hmm?  What is that?”

        Scootaloo gulped.  “Something that lasts forever...?”

        The answer that followed was cold enough to snuff out the flames, but somehow the orange filly wasn't disheartened.  The entire time, her violet eyes were locked onto the ashes.

        “Nothing lasts forever, Scootaloo.  But so long as everypony is committed to a memory, the treasures that make life special will last as long as we do.  Could we ever ask for more?”

        Scootaloo exhaled through her nostrils.  “Yeah.  We could ask for more.”  A deep gulp and she propped her chin down onto her hooves.  “But I think most of us know better.”

        “I've always believed that the key to happiness is to give more than to ask.”

        “Does this have something to do with the element of 'Kindness' which you believe so much in?”

        “I was going to say that it's the reason why I volunteer at the Memorial, Scootaloo.”

        “But if nothing lasts forever, what's the point?”

        “Because kindness is like a memory.  If we sit and do nothing, all that is good and honorable about us will fade away.  So, as you can see, Scootaloo, forever is always 'now'.  If we just work on what's before us 'now', in faith and in kindness, then—indeed—what point is there in fretting about the end of all things?”

        Scootaloo took a deep breath.  For the life of her, the flightless pegasus couldn't summon an answer, because...

        ...she was too busy staring at Dinky's writhing form.  The petite unicorn's eyes glowed a bright ivory that rivaled the pulsating madness centered in her quivering horn.  She was being laid down on a plush green seat located towards the far end of the living room.  A series of wooden steps stretched behind her, and with ghostly quiet creaks a shade of orange was wafting hazily down.

        The last pony hissed and clenched her eyes shut.  Rubbing a hoof over her copper face, Harmony blinked and refocused in time to see a shivering gray pegasus wrapping a blanket over the unicorn's body, struggling to hold the foal's convulsing limbs still.

        “Mmmnghh... Amber rivers meandering!”  Dinky rambled madly, hissing through clenched teeth as her brow furrowed like it was being fed through a vice.  “Rotating sparrow upon the precipice!  I cannot... c-cannot touch the spectral eyes, alertedly!”

        “My poor poor Muffin,” Ditzy shuddered, tears forming in her offset yellow eyes as she nuzzled the girl's mane, risking blindness from the unicorn's bright hot bone structure.  “What is she tr-tr-tr-tr-trying to tell us?”

        “I don't believe she even knows what she's trying to tell us, Miss Doo,” Fluttershy said in a forlorn breath as she rushed back and forth across the cottage.  Her hair danced like a billowing pink flag as she scooped several herbs from a multitude of jars and poured a medicinal quaff out of the combined ingredients.  “She's suffering from aphasia.”

        “What's aph-ph-ph-ph... What's aphas-s-s-s-s—?”

        “It means that she cannot properly process her words into decipherable speech,” Fluttershy said in a pitying grimace as she concentrated on the mixture in front of her.  “Right now, her mind is scrambling with the force of several hundreds—if not thousands—of leylines converging on her cranium.  Her horn has become a receptacle for countless magical auras, from this world and beyond.  Nopony's mind is built to handle the sheer amount of information that is coursing through her.”

        “And this is all because a space baby was shot into her?” Ditzy asked with a quivering look of horror.

        “Miss Harmony and I were taking care of a dying Capricorn.  The creature was with child, and with its dying breath the mother discharged the essence of its infant in the form of energy.  Dinky's horn was the only thing within range that the late Capricorn sensed was capable of housing magic.  Ohhhhh...”  Fluttershy slumped in the middle of her medicine gathering and hung her pink head.  Wells of tears formed in her eyes as she shuddered to say, “It's all my fault!  I was so preoccupied with caring for that poor suffering creature!  I completely forgot that you and your daughter would be coming so early this morning!  And now, because I was weak and narrow-minded, Dinky is going to... She's going to—”

        “Miss Fluttershy,” the time traveler suddenly spoke as she planted two strong forelimbs on the yellow pegasus' shoulder.  “Just work on what's before us now.  Finish making the medicine that Dinky needs.  Let's all approach these issues one at a time—“

        “One at a time?”  Ditzy gasped.  “My poor Muffin is dying!”

        “Miss Doo, your kid is not dying—”

        “But earlier!  Outside the manger!  Miss Fluttershy said—!”

        “I'm sure we all know what Miss Fluttershy said!”  Harmony growled, reeling on her haunches as if she was piloting the center of a hurricane laced with a unicorn's anguished cries.  “But one thing at a time, alright?  You want us to fix this, then let us fix this—Nebula dang it!—Just let me think!”

        The cottage briefly rang with the rattling concussion of Harmony's shouting voice.  Ditzy shivered.  Fluttershy silently finished the broth.  All the while, Dinky's moans and mumbling tongue filled the rustic place with a deep undercurrent of agony.

        Harmony exhaled strongly through her nostrils.  She dug two copper hooves through the length of her amber-streaked black mane until her anguished breath was finished and she mechanically groaned, “Okay.  Okay... Okay, so here we've got a unicorn with a giant cosmic fish-goat baby thingy trapped inside her horn.  Yes, that sucks, but if it got into her, then it can get out of her.  This is Equestria, land of an Alicorn Princess who raises the Sun by the mere whim of her hooves.  Not a single one of us can swing a dead cat without running into something magical of some sort or another in this land.  So—nopony panic!  There's gotta be a solution to this, through sheer statistical probability if nothing else what-so-frickin'-ever.”

        “The m-medicine's ready,” Fluttershy quietly said.

        Harmony nodded.  “Good.  Give it to the kid.”

        Ditzy shuffled aside as Fluttershy rushed forward on sliding hooves, squatting directly in front of the green bed upon which the unicorn twitched and stirred.  “Okay, Dinky.  Listen to your babysitter, Fluttershy.”  She held out a sloshing wooden dish of soupy liquid.  “This will help you to—”

        “Nnnngh!  Habit trail!  The comets of eternity!”  Dinky shrieked, her unicorn splashing hot white bursts of plasma across the room.  “Hncnkkt—Bleeding away, mesmerize!”

        Fluttershy jumped, nearly dropping the rattling dish as she simultaneously fought to contain her tears.  After a stifled whimper, she flashed a desperate look at the mailpony.  “If you would hold her down...”

        Ditzy blurredly nodded.  With two motherly limbs, the gray pegasus steadied Dinky's shoulders while the caretaker leaned in and poured a liberal amount of the herb-laden juice down the unicorn's mouth.  Dinky's muttering lips paused long enough for her to swallow two or three gulps of the broth.  Then, with a painful grimace, she coughed and sputtered, but ultimately squirmed with slightly less violent spasms.

        “That's enough for now,” Fluttershy exhaled in a soft, golden voice.  She stood up and planted the half-empty jar onto a nearby stool.  “It should ease some of the pain that she's experiencing in her head right now.”

        “Ease her p-p-p-p-pain?”  Ditzy stammered.  “Miss Fluttershy, we gotta get my Muffin healed!”

        “There is no tool nor remedy in my cottage that can do that, Miss Doo—”

        “Then we need to take her somewhere else so she can get better!”

        “I know, but there's no—”

        “She's suffering and I hate to see her suffer!”

        “Listen!” Harmony growled with her hooves raised.  An errant beam of plasma danced across the cottage, glinting in the copper pegasus' amber eyes.  She squinted and dodged her head to avoid the glare from Dinky's horn.  “Fluttershy has a point.  This is out of our hooves.  Thank you, by the way, for the medicine.  She's looking better already.”

        “I can only hope—”

        “But she's st-st-st-st-still squirming and—”

        “Now...”  Harmony's voice once more consumed the volume of the room.  She spoke slowly and steadily over the distant moans of the glowing foal.  “We've got a town full of ponies just a brisk trot away who might be able to help us.  A unicorn, perhaps?  How about Twilight Sparkle?  I hear she's the frickin' star pupil to a Goddess, is she not?  Right there, beyond the hill, is Ponyville's and Princess Celestia's chief apprentice in the magic arts.  Sounds like the best expert on freaky-glowy horns, in my book.”

        “B-But Miss Harmony!”  Fluttershy wincingly hissed.  “I don't think—”

        “But that's just one smart pony in an entire town!”  Ditzy breathlessly exclaimed.  “Why can't we fly my Muffin to Cloudsdale?  I know there are hundreds of doctors and medical experts in the City Council at any given time of day!”

        “That's not going to—” Fluttershy squeaked to say something.

        “I've got a better idea!”  Harmony pointed with a hoof.  “We're all pegasi.  Between the three of us—”  Her amber eyes were stabbed once more with a random beam of plasma from Dinky's horn.  Growling, she shifted where she stood and continued speaking, “We can fly Dinky all the way to Canterlot in a blink!  It doesn't take a Court's Clerk like me to tell you that there's no better place in all of Equestria to solve a magical crisis!”

        “Please!  If you both would just—!”

        “No way!”  Ditzy gasped.  “I fly routes to Canterlot regularly!  Even at m-m-m-m-mailpony speeds, it takes over an hour to get there!”

        “Then we go into Ponyville and find a pegasus faster than the three of us combined and have her take Dinky to proper care!”  Harmony dryly gulped and shivered upon the sudden blood-rushing thought.  “Do I even need to say her name?”

        “And just how do we know that Canterlot can give proper care?  I'm telling you, we should take my Muffin to Cloudsdale!”

        “Fat lot of good Cloudsdale will do!  They've already let a friggin' Capricorn die in a manger!  You think they're gonna lend a hoof to help your kid anymore?”

        “No more than those bur... those b-b-b-b-burea... those dumb-heads in Canterlot—!”

        “Ladies!”

        Ditzy and Harmony both jolted.  With one and a half pairs of twitching eyes, they glanced the yellow pegasus' way.  Fluttershy blushed immediately under their gaze.  After a brave gulp, she spoke up:

        “There is no solution to Dinky's problem that any magical ponies in Ponyville, Cloudsdale, or Canterlot can find!”  She bit her lip.  “At least, not in time.  And the last thing that Dinky can afford right now is time.”

        “And how do you know this, Miss Fluttershy?” Harmony asked with narrow amber eyes.

        Fluttershy nervously squirmed.  “Because I already know the solution.”

        “What?  What is it?”  Ditzy rushed over on twitching wings and grasped Fluttershy's shoulders.  She stared desperately towards either side of the animal tamer's yellow ears.  “Tell me how to save my Muffin, please!”

        “Miss Doo, your child's problem isn't a simple enchantment or affliction that can be undone with the mere application of a spell.”  The caretaker's blue eyes next wandered over towards the time traveler.  “Twilight Sparkle is a very gifted pony, and there are many like her in Canterlot.  Furthermore, yes, there are many doctors in Cloudsdale well-versed in Equestrian medicine.  However, even the most powerful Equestrian practitioner in magic or smartest surgeon in the land can't remove this creature from Dinky's horn.  We're talking about the cosmic essence of a creature that has been inserted into the same junction of leylines to which Dinky's magical horn has been fused since birth.  The nature of a Capricorn's soul is unearthly; not even Princess Celestia herself is properly equipped to handle any heavenly body other than the Sun and Moon.”

        Harmony immediately balked at that with a knee-jerk cackle:  “C'mon!  Our Princess is practically a goddess amongst ponies!  There's absolutely nothing that she can't do!”

        “If that is true, then why would she need the Elements of Harmony to defeat Nightmare Moon, or the changing seasons to balance out the amount of sunlight she's allowed to bestow a given day?”

        Harmony opened her mouth to respond, stumbled at the tip of her tongue, rubbed her copper skull with a thinking-hoof, then eventually remarked, “Still, Celestia's old enough, wise enough, and magical enough to deal with one little foal and a possessed horn, don't you think, Miss Fluttershy?”

        “Our faith in the Princess is righteous, and I do not condemn your suggestions in any way.  But what if we spend the time and effort to bring Dinky before her Majesty and it turns out that we are wrong to have assumed that the child's life would be saved thusly?”

        “So what if the world ends?”  Harmony randomly spat.  She winced rightfully at herself, cleared her throat, and added, “What if anything happens that we can't predict?  So?  That's life!  Taking Dinky to the Princess of the Sun is the best bet here!”

        “I would agree with you,” Fluttershy firmly nodded and even more firmly stated, “Except that—as I said before—I already know the solution here, and it isn't Princess Celestia.”

        Ditzy leaned in, shuddering in desperation.  “Then if it's not the Princess' place to help Dinky, whose is?”

        “Mmhhhm...”  Fluttershy wilted slightly.  “Uhmm... Mother Nature's.”

        “M-M-M-Mother Nature?”

        Fluttershy gulped and gazed forlornly at the twitching foal on the green seat.  “There are natural essences—instincts and forces—that have been at work in this world long before Faustmare's caravan or the rest of Equestrian civilization has ever been competent enough to chronicle them.  True, the Alicorn Sisters were the ones to give nature its energy, its animation, and its law.  Nowhere in Equestria is this self-sufficient drive more evident than in Everfree, and it towards Everfree that the Capricorn was initially headed with the purpose towards foaling its infant.  However, due to unforeseen cosmic circumstances, the creature could not reach its destination.  Ironically, the same natural instinct that would have allowed the late mother to give birth was what made her deposit her offspring into Dinky's horn.”

        “Miss Fluttershy...” Harmony trotted a few meters forward, squinting at the caretaker.  “Are you talking about those caves of mana-crystals that are hidden somewhere in the forest?”  She blinked her amber eyes.  “Do you think that, in its death throes, the Capricorn mistook the magical essence of Dinky's horn for those rocks?”

        “Mana crystals?” Ditzy remarked, jittery.  “What are you two talking abo—?”

        “It was only following nature's way!”  Fluttershy exclaimed in a helplessly defensive breath.  “It did not mean to do Dinky any harm!  The poor creature had spent days lying in the forest, starved of stardust, and the closest thing it ever came to that could remotely be enchanted with its infant was Ditzy's child—!”

        “So what are you saying?” Harmony made a sick face and shrugged with her hooves.  “The Capricorn thought that Miss Doo's kid here was a frickin' cave of mana crystals?”

        “What I'm saying is that nature is still at work here!” Fluttershy exclaimed fitfully.  “The same impulse that drove the energy into Dinky's horn could still drive the energy into the mana crystals that the Capricorn was searching for to begin with!  Don't you see, Miss Harmony?  Mother Nature has had a solution to this; it always has!  If we take Dinky to Cloudsdale, Canterlot, Twilight Sparkle, or even Princess Celestia, they will ultimately come to the same solution, and we will have wasted valuable time, during which Dinky will have suffered horrible brain damage or... or... mmm—even worse...”

        “Miss Fluttershy,” Harmony said with a sigh, running a tired hoof over her face as Dinky moaned in the background.  “You told me yourself that those caves of mana crystals were deep in Everfree, so deep that a thorough search couldn't find them in time to save the Capricorn.”  She helplessly frowned into the cottage air.  “What makes you think we can find those stupid caves any faster to help—”  In absurdly proper timing, Harmony's amber eyes were once more stabbed with an errant beam of bright plasma.  “Nnnngh!  Could somepony—I dunno—put a sock over her horn or something—?”

        Ditzy frowned towards the ceiling and roof.  “I do not think my Muffin c-c-c-c-can help it, Mister Squirrel.”

        “Okay, first off—I apologize.”  Harmony once more fought to dodge the shimmering beam.  She snarled:  “Secondly, it's high friggin' time you and I had a discussion about my lack of a bushy tail and other questionable organs.”

        “Wait!”  Fluttershy gasped.

        Ditzy and Harmony froze in the midst of glaring at each other.  The yellow pegasus sauntered past them softly.  They watched as the caretaker strolled up towards Dinky and slowly, gently pivoted her head.  The little foal murmured and stirred under the movement, but all the while the same tiny beam of bright plasma that had randomly blinded the time traveler was persistently aiming at the same wall of the cottage, regardless of what angle the unicorn's cranium was being tilted.

        “Do you both see that?”  Fluttershy stammered.

        “Uhhh... Yeah,” Harmony nervously nodded.  “Yeah, I do.”

        “Even I see that!” Ditzy uttered.

        “The life essence inside her horn is being drawn towards something,” Fluttershy thought out loud in a cool murmur.  She blinked her blue eyes as her vision trailed the errant beam of plasma.  “I can only guess that there is something outside the cottage that is a greater potential receptacle for the Capricorn infant than Dinky's bone structure.”

        “Like another unicorn?” Ditzy breathed.

        “Mana-crystals...” Harmony exclaimed.  In a dry voice, she flashed a glance over her shoulder and pointed towards the randomly lit side of the cottage.  “Miss Fluttershy, what—roughly—is beyond that wall?”

        “Mmm... That's the northwest side of the cottage.  And beyond that, where the beam of light is pointing, is Everfree.”

        “And those caves that you were talking about, Miss Fluttershy?”  Ditzy excitedly panted.  “With the cr-cr-cr-crystals that can save my Muffin?”

        “Whoah-Whoah-Whoah-Whoah!” Harmony raised her hooves and frowned.  “Nopony said that the crystals would save Dinky—”

        “But Miss Fluttershy just said that Mother Nature—”

        “I don't care if she was talking about Father Winter, Uncle Solstice, or Aunt Menopause!  Miss Fluttershy, we've got boatloads of unicorns from here to Stalliongrad who can examine Dinky before it's noon and give an expert opinion—”

        “Miss Harmony...” Fluttershy trotted around and gazed up at the time traveler with an earnest expression.  “I am Ponyville's Chief Animal Tamer, the longest and most dedicated observer to the sights and sounds of the Everfree Forest. and I am telling you... that the only way to rid Dinky of the Capricorn's essence is to go about it naturally, by bringing her to the mana-crystal caves so that Mother Nature can run its course!  To attempt any other solution is noble, but dangerous, for we would be risking Dinky's life when there already is a solution, and if I may be so bold as to say it—her horn is indeed already pointing the way.”

        “But—”

        “As a matter of fact, since the cosmic life-form inside Dinky's horn is attracted a magical receptacle inside the Everfree Forest, any attempt we make to take her elsewhere—like to Cloudsdale, Canterlot, or even Ponyville—may be potentially fatal!”

        “Why, Miss Fluttershy?” Ditzy breathily asked.

        “So long as we know where the essence inside of her horn is wishing to go, taking it in a direction opposite to that would drive the life-form deeper into Dinky's nervous system.  The leylines that Dinky's magical bone is fused to would bottle up and crush her senses with it!  The only healthy move we should make is to bring Dinky towards the mana battery that the Capricorn infant seeks.  That way, Miss Doo's child will ultimately suffer less!”

        “Then what are we waiting for?”  Ditzy glanced over at the “Canterlotlian Clerk”.  “Every second we waste here only m-m-m-m-makes the situation worse!”

        “This... This is nuts!”  Harmony squeaked like the disbelieving foal she suddenly was again.  Her eyes twitched in a beam of plasma, dotting the windows briefly with rainwater before they flickered back to the bright haze of a deathly clear morning.  She fought a dizzy spell, gasped, and exhaled, “Just the afternoon before yesterday, Miss Fluttershy, you could barely even stand to look at the depths of Everfree!  And... snkkkt—Now you're suggesting that we march straight in there with a foal being possessed by a cosmic migraine in hopes that somewhere and somehow we'll stumble upon caves that nopony knows about full of mana-crystals that nopony has seen and then just expect for the magical curse to undo it self like nopony's ever experienced?!?”

        “What matters is that it is a firm and solid direction to a singular and ample solution, Miss Harmony,” Fluttershy said.  A wilting breath, and in an off-color voice of gold she added, “I know that I have my weaknesses, and I know that I am helpless to save Dinky in any other fashion.  But I also know things, deep and complex things about animals.  This is my knowledge to possess simply by the sheer experience that I have accumulated throughout the years.  I do not suggest this course of action out of pride or to protect some silly ego.  All I ask is that you trust me, Miss Harmony.  I... Mmm... I-I most certainly do not blame you for your reticence.  Captain Redgale surely would not believe in my strengths in this matter.  But... But I had come to hope that... that you would believe in me, Miss Harmony, and that you would know that my idea is the best and only way to save Miss Doo's precious child, before it is too late.”

        Harmony stared at Fluttershy, her mouth agape.  She blinked her amber eyes hard and ran a hoof over her face.  Temporarily blinded, she saw a field of white stones, and soft yellow hooves landing in the springy grass suspended between them.  The last pony forced her eyes brightly open again, only to see a breathless wall-eyed pegasus occupying the whole of her vision.

        “Miss Harmony, please, I will do anything for my child!  Whatever it takes to g-g-g-g-g-get this thing out of her!  My life, my health, my job, I'll gladly consider it all f-f-f-or... for-f-f-f-f-f... for”

        “'Forfeit',” the scavenger from the future grunted, then blinked from the sight of the gray pegasus to the distant caretaker.  She shuddered from their combined gaze.  “And now why is everypony looking at me?”

        “Uhm...” Fluttershy bit her lip and scratched the floor with her hoof.  “Because... uhm... you're a Clerk of the Canterlotlian Clerk.  Technically and legally that... mmm... that means that you have the royal authority to hold sway over this decision—”

        The last pony blinked and turned cross-eyed.  Her next breath came out in a cackle:  “Oh you've got to be frickin' kidding me!”  Frowning, she shoved a pointing hoof the spasmatic foal's way.  “I did not come here to play guardian angel or grim reaper over a child's life!  I came here to observe Ponyville's Animal Tamer and hopefully learn more about the forest for Princess Celestia!  This is totally not what I signed up for!”

        “Nevertheless, Miss Harmony...” Fluttershy trotted across the room just as Ditzy was on the verge of a breakdown.  She lovingly nuzzled the gray pegasus' neck and shouldered the mailpony's quivering, muted sobs as she gazed with soft blue eyes the visitor's way.  “It is your authority that determines what happens next.  I... We will understand if you must fall back upon protocol.  I too must deign to do the same when it comes to answering to Captain Redgale and the Cloudsdalian Commission.  But there is a life on the line here: Dinky's life.  I implore you to think of not just the right thing to do, but the kind thing to do... for the child and for her mother.”

        Harmony opened her mouth to speak... but faltered.  With a savage groan, she fell back to her haunches and ran two hooves over her clenched amber eyes.  Dinky's distant moans melted into a hum, so that she was once again piloting the Harmony over the dead Wastelands to the roar of a solitary boiler at her rear.  The cemetery of the future was an easy place for the scavenger to live out a lonely misery, with nopony's suffering to care about but her own.

        Dinky would die.  Ditzy would die.  Fluttershy, Twilight Sparkle, Ponyville, and the green vistas of Everfree, in all of its mystery and all of its transcendent self-sustaining wonder, would likewise succumb to the deadly and all-consuming flames of the Cataclysm.  It would just be a matter of months, and everything would be the simple and monochromatic gloom that the last pony had learned to sleep to.

        This was the past.  To these wounded pegasi, it was a stark naked reality.  To the time traveler, it was also real, but a good portion of it was also like a dream, a fantasy afforded her through the numbing distance of two and a half burnt, charred decades.  With a single wave of green flames, Harmony could easily “wake up” from it all.  The wilting Fluttershy, the sobbing Ditzy, and the moaning unicorn child would equally return to the lifeless, pointless corpses that they would forever be—for all that the last pony could or couldn't possibly care.

        After all, the last pony wasn't there, not really.  Neither was she lying in front of a warm fireplace, under a cascade of rippling rainwater that kissed the windows along with so many other pathetically worthless memories that danced like refracted ghosts beyond a foal's eyes that had long, long lost their violet youth and joy.  There were no warm bodies, no hugging forelimbs.  There were only white rocks and white names and white wings etched into a dead field of soot before the hellish mouth to a mine shaft.  There was only barren stone before life, and there would only be another stone obelisk after death.  Once the last pony had breathed her last breath, the only living memorial to the legacy of Equestria would be gone.  Restoring the Sun and Moon would mean nothing to a future without spirit, without honor.

        The only thing eternal, at least to Harmony, was that voice, that golden voice that the dragon tooth in the Ever Briar grave had reminded her of.  It sounded like something else that was priceless, that sang with more immutable strength than the threads of time, cradling the last pony more warmly than any hammock or fireplace could.  Everytime Harmony tried to feel it, to touch it, the orange shadow started hobbling down the creaking wooden steps and the lingering green seat beyond—

        Harmony's eyes reopened, twitching, and—instead of a yellow shade—Dinky was lying on the emerald seat.  The little foal stirred, ached, and cried.  Misty tears turned to steam as her glowing eyes strobed in opposite rhythm with her pulsating horn.  She murmured pointless and unintelligible things, like the worthless and unheard lyrics to a golden lullaby quoted by a sobbing little foal in a deep mooncrater of the Wastelands, surrounded by monsters, starved of all nourishment and love forevermore.

        All of life was a dream, Harmony suddenly pondered, including the monochromatic absurdities of the future.  She briefly wondered if a phantom from beyond, wearing the skin of yet another unnamed goddess, might happen to crawl back on otherworldly-colored flames to visit her and Spike in the ruins of Ponyville.  Would she want such a suspended pariah to turn her world of death into a happy ending, even if it was just a dream, and if the only way to wake up was to turn to ashes by a wave of Goddess-forsaken fire?

        “Miss Harmony...” Once again, the golden voice cradled her, cherished her, stabbed her.  “We must have a decision, and we must have it soon.”  Fluttershy gulped.  “For Dinky's sake.”

        Harmony wanted to wake up, to become Scootaloo once more.  She wanted to tear the damnable wooden steps in front of her apart, fashion an impossible airship out of it, drag it through a curtain of green flames, and outfly an Ursa Major just for the sake of returning to her comfortably simple hammock once again.  But, as she had to remind herself, this was not her past, at least it was not hers to live.  This past was a warm reality to the deep and forever lost well of history, and she was the nightmare, dangling amongst the confused souls before her, dressed to look like a copper-coated lure, a savior.

        The last pony could not save these souls, and yet she could: a bitterly brief salvation.  She shouldn't have been thinking so hard about this.  She shouldn't have been debating the situation; she shouldn't have even been considering it.  Harmony should have dragged both ponies and the child out of there, taken them to Twilight Sparkle, grabbed the attention of Princess Celestia, confessed every detail about the end of the world, and gotten what she needed before returning in a green belch to the future with no intention of returning.

        In one fatal swoop, she and Spike would have crossed the gap of the dead future's mystery, achieved audience with the Princess of the Sun, discovered the curse that doomed the world, and finally brought an end to an eternity of ash and snow.  And as for Dinky... as for one pathetically insignificant half-wing of an egghead pony in the quietest town of Equestria... as for one expendable and tiny soul balanced against the legacy of an entire race, an entire kingdom, an entire Fourth Age gone to ruin....

        The last pony huffed and puffed.  “Okay, here's the plan....”

        Harmony fought an interminable groan as she hurriedly marched with iron hooves towards the edge of the Everfree Forest.  The morning Sun glistened haplessly onto the flanks of Fluttershy and Ditzy Doo as they followed her in a breathless canter.  Dinky was nestled in one of the pouches of the mailpony's saddlebag.  The child's pitiful moans echoed against the thickening sea of green-hazed tree trunks that lit up with her horned aura.

        “I'm the strongest pony here.  Trust me, don't ask.  I'll take point and look out for any hazards along the way.  Miss Fluttershy, you're the animal expert.  We'll need your expertise when encountering any nasty creatures that might sneak up on us and... uh... show us exactly how nasty they are.”

        “Yes, Miss Harmony.  I shall do my best.”

        “If the random light shining from Dinky's horn is leading the way to the nearest cave of mana-crystals, then we're going to have to use her as a compass, so to speak.  Once we've gotten a fix, we'll fly high and triangulate a position towards which we can take wing—”

        “I... uhm... I wouldn't advise that.”

        Harmony blinked widely.  “Why not?”

        Fluttershy bit her lip.  “Uhm... The essence of the Capricorn is only showing us the direction towards the nearest cluster of mana-crystals because Dinky's horn has intercepted a terrestrial leyline, among other signals.  If... uhm.. if we take to the sky, we risk flying outside of the range of that one mana-stream.  We could lose the horn's focus on the cave's location... maybe even permanently.”

        “Then what?”

        “Assuming Dinky's horn fails to relocate the mana receptacle that it's currently locked onto in Everfree, the Capricorn infant will take a fatally long period of time to rediscover the mana crystals, or it may never find the receptacle again whatsoever.  Then... uhm... Dinky's mind will surely collapse.”

        “Fan-freaking-tastic,” Harmony hissed.  “Fine.  Looks like we're doing this the hard way.  Miss Doo?”

        “Yes?”

        “Obviously your daughter's... uhm... horn-light is the key here.  Why don't you make it your job to keep your eyes on where it's shining so that we can—” Harmony stopped in mid-speech.  She took a glance back, took one good look at the mailpony's not-so-good optics, and glanced forward.  “Scratch that.  Just keep close to your kid while Fluttershy and I examine the beacon and judge where we need to go.”

        “Is there anything else I should do?”  The gray mare shivered.  “You two are d-d-d-d-doing so much for my Muffin, and I want to help the best way I can.”

        “Just try not to fly through any schoolhouse windows on the way to the cave.”

        “Miss Harmony...” Fluttershy quietly chided, blinking with a brief dizziness.

        “Fluttershy...”  Harmony looked at her.  “I need you to tell me something.”  She gulped firmly, then murmured, “In the best case scenario, what can we expect once or if we get Dinky to a cave full of the mana crystals?”

        “Uhmm... The life force of the infant which the Capricorn Mother shot into Dinky's horn would exit the foal's bone structure via the same level of discharge.  The mana-crystals would absorb the energy, after which the life essence would sustain itself, coalesce, and then effortlessly materialize in the physical form of the Capricorn offspring, thus finishing the cosmic foaling process.”

        “And my Muffin?” Ditzy whimpered with soft, lopsided eyes.

        Fluttershy gulped with a sad expression.  She teetered momentarily on four hooves, then breathed, then said, “If and only if we're swift enough, there will hopefully be little to no brain damage.... Mmm... If it is—as Miss Harmony puts it—the 'best case scenario'.”

        “L-Lightning!” Dinky murmured, wincing, hissing under glowing eyes as she reeled in the gray pegasus' saddlebag.  “Half and nebulous!  Fire without sky pressure in the glass!”

        Ditzy's face instantly wretched.  She tried to nuzzle the foal in her midst, but shuddered and nearly fell on collapsing hooves.  Fluttershy quickly padded over and supported the sniffling mother's weight with her silk-soft frame.

        Harmony paused in mid-trot, her mind stabbed with a sudden numbness.  The edges of her projected soul-self tingled with green fuming embers and dissipated.  She shook the bizarre sensation off, gulped, and murmured in a low voice over her shoulder.  “Miss Fluttershy... Are you saying that... That when all of this is said and done, then we... we could have a brand new Capricorn materialized before us?  Like... in the flesh?”

        “Hopefully... Indeed so...” The caretaker managed to say while gently embracing Ditzy.  She glanced over with calm, sleepy eyes.  “The infant may actually be healthy enough to ween itself off the crystals in the caves before taking to the heavens several months from now.  But, again, we must be swift.”

        The last few words were lost to the time traveler, for once again the shades of the Forest's edge were melting, blending, frothing into a blacker-than-black sea of thorns, in the middle of which—strung up by brambles and fate—were two corpses: Fluttershy's and a capricorn's.  There was suddenly a third corpse gazing at the first two, far more guilty and far more infernal than a million ages' worth of Ursa Majors combined.

        “Oh Spike...” Harmony hissed under her breath.  With twitching amber eyes, she faced forward, throttled by a new and frightening numbness.  “Please, for once, send me someplace that doesn't burn.”  And she marched straight into the thickening darkness like a weed, dragging her hapless anchor along with her.

        Into the green basin of the Everfree Forest, the three pegasi marched with a possessed unicorn in tow.  Keeping low to the grass-strewn earth, they navigated ravines, scaled earthen hills, traversed a sea of fallen tree trunks, and ducked beneath row after row of gnarled branches.  The deeper they went, the denser the forest canopy became, so that a Sun-filtered miasma of green haze was gradually replaced with a deep emerald shadow that positively blinded them.  By the sheer glow of Dinky's horn alone, they managed to pierce the darkness, and with studious eyes they made sure to capture every pitch and angle of the plasma beams randomly shooting from the child's shimmering cranium.  They followed the magical streams, tracing the sporadic bursts as far they could into the thick intestines of the forest.  The vegetation grew messier and messier, narrowing around them in veritable tunnels of vine-encrusted opaqueness, so that the heat and humidity of the cooking afternoon formed a sheen of loose sweat and exhaustion off of their panting bodies.

        As the bush-laden paths were suddenly replaced with labyrinthine drops that plowed deep into the roots of the Everfree's enormity, the three ponies were deafened by the claustrophobic echoes of Dinky's rambling voice.  The tortured foal lectured about cosmic abstractions, unnameable horrors, and faceless shadows beyond the veil of limited vocabulary.  Harmony shuddered to imagine that the child's inexplicably soulless tongue was the one thing painting the canvass of the green world black, so that festering vines of thick black thorns would sprout from the dark splattering paint of her words alone.

        The world indeed grew bleaker the deeper that the three dropped, one after another, sliding and hopping down half-dead root structures as they punctured a forested basement that lingered coldly below sea level.  It was no longer a mystery to the last pony how the Everfree Briar of the future could occupy an absurdly deep basin of soil-less rock.  She briefly imagined that the Forest was an accident, a random hole in the ground where Elektra's hooves had stabbed the planet in a brief tantrum of frustration.  Gultophine's breath had merely lingered there before swimming the surface of the rest of the world while on its crusade to bring life to bodiless stone.

        Harmony's mind wandered over memories, some twenty-five years old, others twenty-five hours old, and she briefly pondered as to why the Alicorn Sisters would construct a forest where so much had to die before anything could live.  She was positive, from every lesson ever taught to her since foalhood, that the Sisters aided in their mother's Creation long before the Sundering of Consus—their father—when the elements of death and discord were introduced to the world.

        Fluttershy had placed Mother Nature on a pedestal, had exalted it like a deity as much as an abstraction.  Perhaps Fluttershy was right about nature.  Perhaps nature was eternal, an essence that inspired the Alicorns in their act of Creation as opposed to being a direct product of their divine hooves.  Did that mean—then—that nature was immutable, like time?  And if that was true, then did that make time—like nature—something that was eternal, something that could never have been manipulated or altered by any god or goddess even long before Princess Entropa was ever foaled in the purpose of becoming time's everlasting avatar?  If that was true—if any of that was true—then maybe Princess Entropa was eternally helpless to change the course of things, like the last pony was, before and after the Cataclysm happened on its very own.

        Harmony felt sick.  She couldn't understand the purpose of nature, the reasoning for a force that animated all things mercilessly down the burning funnel into apocalyptic flame.  It didn't take a Cataclysm to make nature absurd.  Things were born only to die.  In a world without sentience, this would hardly have been a crime.  But there Harmony was, followed by a paling Ditzy, a rambling Dinky, and a limping Fluttershy.  She knew that she was leading all three ponies to their deaths.  Even if there was no Capricorn factor involved in the matter.  Everypony in that forest, or in all Equestria for that matter, was destined to be crucified by the thorn-encrusted vines of fate, and it was all because of a series of events that had been thrown into motion by time and Mother Nature, eons before any purple dragon would discover the means by which he could hurdle a hapless soul deep into the throbbing heart of the holocaust to watch it unfold from the bleeding inside out.

        Harmony shouldn't have been there.  She shouldn't have been doing this.  There was no point, no sense, no significance to this facade of selflessness and heroism that motivated her to hike a possessed unicorn foal in the fruitless chase of a paper moon.  She was fighting time, she was fighting nature, and she knew that she could not win.

        However, when Harmony looked at the mother and child, when she looked at Fluttershy, when she saw their sweating features, their blistering pains, their desperate faces with each shuddering breath that lunged them into the depths of Everfree, she knew that nopony would win by doing anything else either.  Death and doom was their fate.  Nature would see to that, but Harmony's presence there was anything but natural.  She trotted through the forest on Entropan hooves, the same hooves that stood firmly on the ground between a storm cellar and a pale sea of trolls.  Two and a half months before an infernal Cataclysm, and there was a chance—one damnably absurd chance—that these innocent ponies could experience it in peace.  Nature wouldn't see to that, but Harmony could.

        It was a hope, a faith, but it was a very thin veil of faith, like the refracted air between a warm cottage and a cold window looking out on a blistering cold rainstorm.  The orange foal walked forever towards the afternoon glow, her hooves slipping on an ocean of pale white rocks.  A golden voice beckoned her from below, and she saw stairs... wooden stairs just a collapse away via an orange streak laced with tears—

        Harmony hissed and shut her eyes.  She skidded to a stop on numb hooves and furiously shook her snout.  A warm body nudged her in concern.  A parting cloud of green fumes, and she blinked her vision back to the dark depths of Everfree, spotting a breathless pair of crooked yellow irises blinking like oppositely swinging lanterns before her.  Glancing briefly at the shimmering horn atop Dinky's crown, Harmony took a deep breath and solaced Ditzy with a pat on the mare's shoulder.  Ditzy nodded, gulped, and trotted onwards, briefly taking point.

        Harmony bit her lip and glanced back behind her.  She squinted to see Fluttershy trailing behind, her dainty yellow legs moving with a sudden sluggishness that worried the last pony.  When the time traveler and the caretaker finally made eye contact, the Ponyvillean Animal Tamer took a deep breath and decidedly quickened her pace, strolling past the copper pegasus with a summoned strength that forced the nearby shrubbery to bow towards her grace.

        A gray cloud wafted over the last pony's vision, so that the wandering form of Fluttershy's frail silhouette became enshrouded by black lines, like faceless monstrosities worming out from the peripheral of a scavenger's enchanted moonvision.  Harmony could not help but think that the further they descended into the cavernous bowels of Everfree, the closer she was dragging Fluttershy's soft silken limbs to where they would fatefully form a snow angel against a granite wall beyond the goggles of a Wasteland survivor standing soul-deep in the pit of an enormous Briar.

        Ditzy was horror-stricken, Dinky was crumbling under the weight of madness, and a certain caretaker's job was on the line.  In spite of all of those crises, in spite of all those things that could very well perish, the immutability of time ended this desperate scenario with two exclamation points in the shape of two corpses: Fluttershy's and a Capricorn's.  Harmony knew very well that the very second she returned to the present, an Ursa Major would likely be devouring the last pony from a dinner plate of green flames.  Regardless, she could only think of the two bodies that she had found, that she was already digging a grave for with each hoofstep she was making, with each breathless excuse that she was forging to legitimize the already indomitable length of this absurd descent.

        The fact that Fluttershy was visibly growing weaker with each blistering hour of the journey was of absolutely no consolation to the last pony.  Then, as the three pegasi crested a sudden rise in the earth, after so many fitful drops taken down a quivering basin of soot, soil, and branches, the entire group shuddered upon a horrifically bright green sight before them.

        They had stumbled upon a horizon, overlooking an enormous valley of green trees, dense foliage, and sprawling vegetation.  The afternoon glisten of the world stretched from east to west with this veritable eternity of Everfree life.  Even from the height of an airship traversing the stale cold skies of the Wastelands, the Briar never revealed this incalculable size to the last pony.  What had originally appeared to Harmony as a sea of trees from the outside had suddenly blossomed into a daunting ocean of unbridled nature.  She suddenly couldn't fathom second-guessing the courage and legacy of Faustmare, nor did she care to.

        It didn't help that the glances she received from Ditzy and Fluttershy were utterly lacking the same surprise that was blanching across her own face.  These two warm souls of the past obviously knew a lot more about what they were getting into than Harmony did, and it dunked the time traveler's black mane into a bubbling trough of shame, so that she took a deep breath and nudged Dinky briefly, encouraging another errant beam of plasma to billow from the foal's tiny, sun-bright horn.

        Of course, the beam pointed downward, straight into the ocean of bone-thick trees, and hopefully towards unseen caves of mana-crystals beyond.  Harmony gave Ditzy a firm nod, and the gray pegasus descended first, flapping her wings briefly to balance herself as she skidded down exposed root after exposed root, scaling the earthen wall before the inevitable plunge into the endless basin of green, green, green.

        “They're so huge.  They could swallow us in a single b-b-b-b-bite!”

        “Miss Doo, it is imperative that we keep our voices down,” Fluttershy said hushedly as the three pegasi and the one unicorn hid low behind a thick cluster of branches.  Bright crimson and blue fountains of light danced across their shadowed coats.  “I may even be so bold to suggest we not speak at all.”

        “I've only seen the blue one before,” Ditzy exhaled in a deep whisper.  “It could crush an entire Ponyvillean house to dust.  It almost did!  I was there a year ago; I thought Equestria was coming to an end!”

        “I remember that,” Fluttershy breathlessly said.  Her tired eyes blinked in and out of a curtain of sweat as she nevertheless gulped and fought to stay focused on the scene unfolding several hundred meters beyond them.  “Twilight Sparkle was brave enough to solace the creature, but this is the first time I've ever seen it in nature, along with its mother, no less.”  She glanced aside with a nervous shudder.  “Miss Harmony, in all of your Equestria-wide errands for the Canterlotlian Court, have you ever come across such a sight?”

        Harmony stared and stared, her amber eyes frozen like petrified stones.  Her nod was icy cold as she murmured:  “Yes, I have.”

        From beyond the clearing, the gigantic earth-rumbling presence of an Ursa Major made its presence known with deep bass growls as it clawed at the earth with titanium-thick claws.  It was a pulsating red hulk of a beast, its crimson jaws lined with glistening fangs as it persisted in its digging task, sending flakes of dirt and rock sailing every which way like a foal tossing sand across a beach.  Hobbling around this scarlet menace, bleating and mewling with the docile height of a mere twenty meters, was a blue dwarf to the gigantic bear.  The twinkling of its sapphiric coat of constellations stabbed at the last pony's eyes with a haunting familiarity.

        “I've seen it all before,” Harmony absent-mindedly drawled.

        Fluttershy mumbled to say, “Mmmm... The Ursa Minor has certainly grown since the last time anypony has seen it, but it hasn't yet reached maturity.  Hmmmm... Very strange...”

        “What's strange?” Harmony hissed.  “I mean, besides three adult ponies standing this close to an instant decapitation waiting to happen?”

        “It's not like an Ursa Major to keep its cub on earth for this long...” Fluttershy thought aloud, her eyelids sleepily dancing up and down her soft yellow brow.  “Typically speaking, they should have migrated back up to the heavens months ago.”

        “You mean like a Capricorn?” Harmony replied, giving Dinky's horn a brief, nervous glance.

        “It makes me wonder...” Fluttershy squinted.  “The same cosmic anomaly that wounded the mother Capricorn, that seared the burn mark across its tail—perhaps it's affecting other heavenly creatures as well.  It would certainly explain why Cloudsdale hasn't chronicled the appearance of a Scorpius in years.”

        “I thought we all had Fillydelphia to thank for that golden nugget.”

        “The symbol will fall and the moon will watch her die,” Dinky suddenly shrieked in a loud pitch.

        Fluttershy yelped.  Harmony hissed over a copper shoulder: “Miss Doo!  Dinner table voices, pronto!”

        Ditzy nervously clamped a hoof over her daughter's twitching mouth.  She winced and scrunched down even lower with the unicorn in tow.  “I am so sorry!  She cannot help it!  The longer we wait here, the m-m-m-more she might—!”

        “Let's all just make like mules and shove oats into our holes for a spell!” Harmony sneered as she yanked herself and Fluttershy behind the thickest row of bushes.

        Briefly, the crimson Ursa Major paused in its digging.  Its gigantic nostrils flared as it took a  whiff of the tree-covered air.  Several seconds passed, full of blinking, glancing, and sniffling.  A deep grunt: it returned to its digging.  The Ursa Minor beside the larger beast playfully pawed at the thick clumps of earth that its mother was piling up.

        Harmony parted a few branches of shrubbery, shook loose a random centipede, and squinted clearly through the hole she had made in the foliage.  The last pony watched as the giant bear plowed its serrated maw through the earth, clamped over something, and finally emerged with a deathly necklace of dangling bodies—dears, coyotes, cougars, and a few unknown creatures strung along a tripled loop of thorny vines—before standing up, growling at its offspring, and marching firmly towards the blossoming depths of Everfree.  The blue “cub” waddled eagerly after its mother.  With the majestic beasts' shimmering departure, the shadows of the tree-laden grove collected with a cold breath shared by all three pegasi.

        “Finally, I couldn't stand another minute of watching those scary things,” Ditzy remarked while hugging her quivering foal dearly.

        “They are mostly harmless, so long as they are not challenged,” Fluttershy said.

        Harmony nodded her copper snout towards the fading glow of the distant pair.  “Tell that to the unlucky creatures dangling from Mommy's teeth.”

        “Oh, those—I seriously doubt that they were victims of the Ursas.  The bears likely scavenged the creatures after they died of other causes.”

        Harmony blinked.  “You're joking, right?”

        Fluttershy bit her lip.  “Uhmm... I'm not saying that the cosmic bears don't kill creatures to eat of their meat.  But they mostly consume the flesh of heavenly game that never touch down to earth.  Besides, those specimens hanging from her jaws were far too small to serve as a proper diet.”

        “Then...” Harmony gulped, her amber eyes navigating a blacker-than-black lair full of crucified skeletons.  “Then just what possesses them to collect all of those corpses and crud?  Are they trophies?”

        “Nopony knows.  Only once or twice in history has an Equestrian explorer survived walking in and out of an Ursa's lair.  While it's been written that Ursas keep the bodies of deceased terrestrial animals around the walls of their caves, it's still nothing but a pile of rumors.  I... erm... I've long had a theory, though...”

        “What's that, Fluttershy?”  Harmony asked.  In a hoarse breath, she murmured, “I really want to know.”

        Fluttershy gave her a sideways glance of blinking blue eyes.  Looking aside, she pensively uttered, “I believe that the dead trophies are a sign of... of frustration.”

        “Frustration?”

        “Anger, despair, even pain.  Like I said, the Ursa Major shouldn't be here still.  For all things considered, she should have taken her cub with her back into the heavens long ago.  It's quite possible that something is preventing her.  If that was the case, then I'm certain that her frustration would be most understandable.”

        “Like what is preventing them from not being here in the future?”  Harmony asked, then winced.  “I mean in the not too distant future?”

        Fluttershy helplessly shook her head.  She reeled suddenly, as if about to collapse, but dizzily regained her balance.  “I... I do not know, Miss Harmony.”

        A beam of hot white plasma shot across the glade.  Cradling Dinky, Ditzy looked up, gulped, and breathlessly said, “Can we please keep on moving?  My little Muffin is b-b-b-b-burning up.  We've waited here long enough as it is.”

        Harmony glanced at the gray pegasus, at the burning afternoon sky peaking down through the treetops, then at the infinite depths of Everfree stretching green-and-brown before them.  With sigh, she shuffled back up onto all fours.  “Miss Doo's right.  The Ursas are gone.  We have no time to rest—at least not yet.  For the kid's sake, let's make some friggin' ground already.”

        “Your courage is poetic, Mister Squirrel,” Ditzy eagerly galloped ahead with Dinky's glowing horn streaking behind her.

        “For the last time—!” Harmony made to snarl, but was suddenly shocked by a crumpling sound beside her.  She glanced over with wide eyes to spot a yellow pegasus having collapsed on her knees.  “Miss Fluttershy!  Are you all right...?”

        “Mmmm... Y-Yes, I am fine.  I... erhm... I've just been squatting for far too long and—”

        “You've been out of it since we began this crazy trip.  Are you sure you got enough sleep last night?  You were looking after that Capricorn for an awful long time—”

        “I am not too tired to do what needs to be done,” Fluttershy said.  She shook her pink mane back and looked ahead with a hardened stare that briefly mimicked her off-ruby mentor.  “Every second we waste is a second taken from Dinky's precious life.  Come, Miss Harmony.  We cannot stay another moment here.”

        Harmony gazed after her.  A deep breath, and she trotted after her anchor, briefly glancing aside to look at the deep earth dug up by the red Ursa's claws—almost drowning in the blacker-than-black meat of it all, like a future wound festering twenty-five years in advance...

        “And then all the girls will say that your chain pipe is so fashionable,” Dinky hissed against a wave of misty water coldly billowing about her.

        “Lemme know the moment she picks up a Wonderbolts Airshow,” Harmony grumbled as she balanced herself across a weathered log stretched before a waterfall.  “Then I'll be all ears.”

        “It would m-m-m-m-make me very happy not to hear you joke about my daughter's suffering.”  Ditzy frowned over her shoulder as she crossed the last few meters of the log and landed atop the rock cropping on the other side.  “It's not her fault that she's giving us random magical soli... soli-li-li-li... solilo-o-o-o—“

        “'Soliloquies',” Harmony uttered from halfway across the log.  The waterfall roared and billowed in bright ivory steam behind her.  “And I do care about Dinky, Miss Doo.  But forgive me for trying to preserve my sanity.  It's hard to make a joke about a joke—like this whole situation frickin' is.  We've been following that glowing horn's beam for hours.  At this rate, what's to hope that the mana-crystal caves are any closer than the Goddess-forsaken center of the earth?”

        “I have to have hope!”  Ditzy exclaimed, glancing back to briefly nuzzle the breathless child's glowing crown.  “She's my daughter.  She's all I can hope for.”

        “I'll start hoping the soonest I see a point to this crazy trip,” the last pony grumbled aloud, as if mistaking the walls of the forest for the rustic inside of the Harmony's cabin.  “I still friggin' think we should have gone to Twilight Sparkle or some other magician in Ponyville over this!”

        “You know as well as I do what's at stake!”  Ditzy half-sneered, her yellow eyes angrily orbiting wrong ends of the copper shadow hobbling towards her.  “I know you royal clerks are trained to follow duty and logic, but what have you to say about k-k-k-k-kindness?”

        “I'll tell you what I think about kindness.”  The last pony frowned.  She glanced back over her shoulder.  “Why if you knew half as much as—”  She paused, her mouth agape.  “Miss Fluttershy...?”

        “I... erhm...” The yellow pegasus was barely two trots' length over the far edge of the log.  The waterfall's mist and froth pelted her mercilessly as she stumbled to get a hoofhold of the flimsy bridge.  “It's awfully hard... to... to keep my eyes... m-m-my eyes... Mmmm.. Ohhhhh—” Her blue pupils rolled back in her skull.  A toss of her pink mane, and she fell like a discarded flower towards the razor-sharp rapids roaring below.

        “Fluttershy!” The mailpony gasped.

        “Mule muffins!” Harmony gnashed her teeth and dove like a copper bullet after her anchor.  The white froth of the waterfall knifed her Entropan wings in a sea of tiny ivory daggers.  She squinted glossy eyes through the foggy haze of it all, hurdling her invulnerable body towards the obscure yellow shade that dotted the edge of her twitching vision.  In a breathless scream, the last pony timed her dive just right, flung her hooves forward, and scooped blindly into the wet explosions of chaos.  A silken body landed in her grasp, and she swiftly burst out of the tumultuous cloud of water with a quivering Fluttershy cradled beneath her.

        At the end of the heroic flight, Harmony's lungs were hyperventilating, like an orange foal stung with the cold raindrops of a gray afternoon.  The yellow pegasus' voice had suddenly been reduced to sputtering coughs and choking noises against her copper bosom.  She landed with a graceful stretch of her wings and planted the caretaker's body softly onto a riverbed bordering with water-soaked oak trees.  The gray blur of Ditzy Doo hovered down beside them.

        “Is she... Is she d-d-d-d-dead?”

        Harmony instantly snarled:  “Look, will you just shut up for a second and let me hear if she's breathing?!”  The frazzled time traveler crouched over the yellow pegasus' twitching figure, her mind blazing over a million lantern-lit hours of reading all sorts of ancient texts of survivalism scavenged from the Wasteland's ruins.  “Just—please, Miss Doo—give me room to think!”

        “I'm just concerned for Fluttershy, is all—”

        “Yeah, yeah, that makes the one and a half of us!  Just—Nnngh!”  She pressed her copper ear to the caretaker's chest and blanched considerably.  “I don't get it!  She's not choking on anything!  It's like there's no water in her breathing tubes, and yet she's out like a—”

        “Hckkkt—Augh!” Fluttershy suddenly shot up with a gasp, her blue eyes blinking wide.

        Harmony fell back on her haunches, panting.  “Fluttershy...?”

        “I... the log... I was trying to walk across and...” The yellow pegasus bit her lip.  “Oh... Oh dear...”

        “Oh Fluttershy,” Ditzy slumped down—Dinky in tow—and scooped the Ponyvillean animal tamer up in a deep, deep hug.  “You had me so worried!  What's g-g-g-g-gotten into you!  Your legs have been like rubber all afternoon!”

        “I... I don't... It's so hot and heavy today... And...” Fluttershy's blue eyes started rolling back once more.  “Unnngh... D-Dear Celestia, so m-many stars...”

        “Miss Fluttershy?  What's wrong...?” Ditzy breathlessly gazed at her.

        All the while, Harmony was staring with rock-hard amber eyes.  She looked at Fluttershy's wilting figure, at Dinky's glowing horn, at Fluttershy's moaning lips, at Dinky's bright strobing forehead again—

        “Dang it!” Harmony suddenly dove forward and viciously shoved Ditzy off of Fluttershy.  “Back off!”

        “Augh!” Ditzy stumbled back, cradling Dinky and sneering the “clerk's” way.  “What is your problem?!  I was only—”

        “It's not you, Miss Doo!” Harmony desperately slid Fluttershy's body away from the mailpony and pointed over the gray mare's shoulder.  “It's Dinky.  It's her horn!  Can't you see?”

        “H-Huh?”  Ditzy's yellow eyes worthlessly rolled like competing clockwork in their sockets.  However, she heard Fluttershy's pained groans, and her peripheral vision caught the residual pulses of Dinky's horn in response.  “Oh dearest Nebula... I had no idea...”

        “Fluttershy!”  Harmony propped the wilted caretaker up against a tree and gently slapped the far corners of her yellow face.  “Miss Fluttershy—Come back to us.  Snap out of it!  Open those pretty eyes of yours, do you hear me?”

        “Mmmf... Moth-... M-Mother...?”  The caretaker slurred, her eyes thinly reopening to gaze at the time traveler.

        The last pony's soul immediately buckled upon that utterance.  The copper filly wanted to collapse, wanted to sob, wanted to watch the orange shade march down those wooden steps and... and... and—“It's me, Miss Harmony,” she uttered, hiding her soul beneath the alien tone of her Entropan voice.  “You fainted just now—Twice.  I think... I think it has something to do with the energy coming out of Dinky's horn.”

        “I...” Fluttershy winced, hissed, and struggled weakly to lift her body up from the tree trunk.  “I just need to—”

        “Don't pretend that you're not suffering from some sort of goddess-forsaken affliction!”  Harmony frowned.  “Cuz you are!  You've been nothing but rattling knees and shoulders since we so much as set hoof into Everfree!  You didn't show this sort of collapse the last two days when we ventured into the forest to find the Capricorn.  There's a difference this time, and I think it's Dinky's horn.”

        “I... I told you before, Miss Harmony,” Fluttershy struggled and panted to say.  “I am very much weak and helpless—”

        The last pony fought to stifle a snarl.  “Would you can it already with the over-emphatic humility?!  This is not a matter of—”

        “I am most exceedingly sorry to have to argue with you, dearest Harmony, but it is.”  The yellow pegasus gulped and murmured with a quivering lip, “If you may recall my mentioning it, I... erm... I have an innate susceptibility to magical resonance.”  She paused briefly to weather a dizzy spell and shiveringly resumed, “Around unicorns and magicians like Twilight Sparkle or Rarity, it doesn't show.  But when I'm exposed to raw and unfiltered mana batteries like Alicorn Artifacts, or alchemic stones, or... or...”  She cast a forlorn glance towards Dinky's shimmering forehead.  “... well... erhm... I start to lose control of my faculties.”

        “Since when?!” Harmony scoffed.

        “Since I was foaled.  I was born a month in advance, remember?  That alone has affected my body in so many ways all throughout my life.  I never asked to be so frail...”

        “It's tr-tr-tr-tr-true.”

        Harmony glanced over and frowned at the mailpony.  “What do you mean 'it's true'?!”

        Ditzy gazed on either side of her.  “I was there when Miss Fluttershy was being clinically treated.  We used to share the same wing in the Cloudsdalian hospital.”  The gray mare smiled bitterly as she gently stroked Dinky's glowing head from a safer distance.  “You think my eyes are bad now?  There were days in my foalhood when I could hardly even stand up.”

        Harmony took a deep breath.  She shut her eyelids, pointed her snout towards the heaven, and—after a vicious exhale—she came down with an embroiled snarl, reopening two amber slits to burn viciously into Fluttershy's silken forehead.

        “You knew about this.  You knew about all of this, before we even made this frickin' journey into the bowels of the biggest, nastiest, and meanest forest in all of Equestria, and yet you said nothing, Miss Fluttershy?!”

        “Harmony, Dinky's life is at risk.  I cannot allow such a precious child's warmth to be extinguished by a freakish happenstance, especially if I am partially to blame for it.  As far as I am concerned, my health... my well-being is of no consequence—”

        “Well maybe it is to me!” Harmony exclaimed.  “Did you ever think of that?!  Huh?!”  She dug a hoof into the pathetic earth and growled, “Miss Fluttershy, it sure has heck isn't kind to throw somepony for a loop when she only cares for you!”

        Fluttershy gulped and murmured under a rosy blush.  “Miss Harmony, I think it's wonderfully noble that you would worry over me, but—”

        “You thought nothing!” Harmony snarled.  “Nothing!”  A hissing breath.  “Excuse yourself all you want, Fluttershy, but I sure as heck am not going to let you die from poisonous magical resonance or what-the-crap-ever has been possessing Dinky!  And if I hear you blame yourself one more time for what's happened, I'm liable to toss you back into that waterfall!  Nebula strike me down if I'm lying!”

        “Every second that we waste debating this is another moment better spent in tracking down the caves.”

        “Yeah, well, you can contemplate that all you want from the warmth and safety of your cottage!”  Harmony proceeded to scoop Fluttershy's torso up and spread her copper wings.  “I'm taking you back this instant!  I'm pretty sure Miss Doo here can fly her skull into a cave and save Dinky on her lonesome.”

        “You c-c-c-can't be serious!”  The gray pegasus balked.  “I don't even know these woods, and what will I do even once I get to the crystals?  You can't just leave me and Dinky—”

        “Oh hush!” Harmony flashed her a frown.  “For all you care, I should be stuffing my cheeks with acorns.  Fluttershy and I are out of here like Winter Wrap-Up!”

        “Miss Harmony, we can't!” Fluttershy barked—an ear splitting thing—so that it stunned the time traveler's Entropan body long enough for her to hear the caretaker's next earnest words.  “Miss Doo is right; she and Dinky need me.  If I wasn't with you three earlier, what would have prevented you from stumbling upon the Ursas before I had the wherewithal to detect their presence?”

        Before Harmony could speak, Ditzy added:  “There are tons of scary and dangerous things out there that would want to eat my Muffin!”  The gray pegasus gulped.  “And it's not even dark yet.”

        “They both need me, Miss Harmony.”  Fluttershy's face visibly sweated and strained from the proximity of Dinky's enchanted horn.  Nevertheless, she bravely murmured to the “Canterlotlian Clerk” embracing her.  “And we all need you.  Your strength is priceless, and so far you have guided us with amazing resourcefulness through this forest.”  She gulped and added, “These past two days, you have helped me with a spirit of kindness that is unbelievably endearing.  I implore you: complete the circle.  Show the same kindness to Miss Doo and her poor, precious child.  I promise that you will feel blessed for it the rest of your life... as I have faith that I too shall live and feel blessed...”

        “Miss Fluttershy...” Harmony gazed deeply at her, drowning in those blue pearlescent eyes.  “Every second you're around Dinky, you fall apart.  I... I don't want you to leave us.... permanently.”

        A porcelain smile delivered a soothing voice—soft and frail, yet bold and strong.  “I am willing to comply, so long as you don't leave us.  Do not fear so much about tomorrow.  Focus on the moment, as crazy as it may seem.  Kindness shall forever be your greatest guide in times like this.  So far, it hasn't let me down.  I have faith that it won't let you down—or Dinky for that matter.”

        Harmony breathed unevenly.  Her eyes twitched within the space between her and Fluttershy, a glistening fireplace, the phantom blue aura of a long-dead table.  Rainwater had once cocooned them both in an isolated prism of truth and tears, or perhaps it had yet to.  The last pony could no longer tell what was past or future, what was a dream or what was reality, what was green flame and what was gray ash.  All she could hold onto, all she could embrace, was the voice, the golden voice, and it was ever so desperately glistening before her now, like a rain-slicked metal scooter molded into a key that would open something that the winged filly had long denied herself, like gravity, like shuffling down creaking stairs...

        Ditzy's Doo's stuttering voice was a brief and interrupting thunder:  “I'm very sorry to poke my head in, but whatever we're going to do, we need to d-d-d-d-do it now.  Please.  It's still your royal authority at hoof.”

        Harmony briefly clenched her eyes shut.  A seething breath, and she fought the moisture from her eyes as she firmly held Fluttershy up and murmured into her ear:  “Lean on me.  Okay?  Lean on me and I'll keep you safe.”

        Fluttershy weakly, weakly smiled.  “Why is it that I have no doubt of that?”

        “Because my poker face stinks,” Scootaloo grumbled, frowning at her cards.

        “I didn't think we were playing poker.”  Fluttershy smiled across the rug, sitting on folded hooves while staring at her own fan of playing cards.

        “Figure of speech.  Sweetie Bell says it all the time when she's describing how her sister looks when she meets with Hoity Toity.”

        “She certainly sounds more and more like an almanac, if I may say so,” the caretaker said with a slight giggle.

        “Wrong type of book.”  Scootaloo smirked.  She shuffled through her cards.  “Do you have any eights?”

        “Go filly,” Fluttershy throated.

        Scootaloo reached back into a sea of cards lying between them.  “That wooden shed that you have outside: is it really really important?”

        “I'm afraid so,” the caretaker spoke above the rain pelting the now-black windows surrounding the cottage.  Evening had fallen, so that the fireplace had become a veritable nightly sun that illuminated them as much as it warmed them.  Angel Bunny was lying snuggled on a tiny bed in the corner, her soft body rising up and down in deceptively peaceful breaths.  “I have at least two separate locks on it.  So far, it has withstood several nightly creatures attempting to scavenge from it without my knowledge.  Still, it could stand to have better reinforcement, I do suppose.  It's not yet been tested against really large wildlife.”

        “Don't the ponies lending you their supplies worry about all the stuff going to waste?”

        “Mmmm—Of course they do.  But I think a lot of them underestimate just how close this cottage is positioned to the Everfree Forest.  Ahem—Do you have any fours?”

        Scootaloo sighed and slid two cards across the rug and into Fluttershy's grasp.  “Y'know,” she said with a blossoming smirk.  “I bet I could design a really killer lock for your shed.”

        “Killer?  Good heavens, Scootaloo, no!”

        “Heeheehee—C'mon, Fluttershy...”

        “Oh.  Uhm... Right.  You mean to say 'a really good lock'...”

        Scootaloo nodded.  “I don't mean to brag,” she said with a wink, “But I'm pretty snazzy when it comes to tinkering stuff together.”

        “Hmmm-hmmm-hmmm...” Fluttershy breathily chuckled, glancing past Scootaloo towards the kitchen of the cottage for some reason.  “I know that for a fact.”

        Scootaloo blinked awkwardly with thin violet eyes.  “You do?”

        “Erm...” Fluttershy suddenly blushed.  “Do you have any fives?” she asked.

        “Go filly...”

        Fluttershy reached into the pile, grabbed another card, and shuffled through her new fan.  “Uhm... Any improvements you might be willing to give the shed would be greatly appreciated.  But, in all seriousness, I do not think that would be necessary.  Aside from a brief scare here or there, I've not really had to contend with many creatures wanting to get at the precious supplies inside.  This side of the country is very calm, in spite of what everpony thinks of the wilderness.”

        “If you say so.”  Scootaloo shrugged and hoofed through her cards.  “You're the only pony who lives here.”

        “Mmmm... For the most part.”

        “Do you have any nines?”

        Fluttershy slid a card over and Scootaloo took it.

        “Do you... Uhm...” The orange filly bit her lip and glanced up nervously.  “Do you ever get tired of that?”

        “Mmm?  Of losing my cards to you?”  Fluttershy briefly giggled.  “It doesn't seem as though I have a choice—”

        “No, Fluttershy.  I... uhm... I mean being alone.”

        “I've told you before, Scootaloo, that I'm not nearly as alone as you think—”

        “Please, Fluttershy.  We've been together for so long this afternoon.  I don't think I've seen you as happy as you appear right now,” Scootaloo said, shuffling nervously where she was squatting as she navigated the minefield of her own statement.  “Everytime you stop by Ponyville, it's for very brief spurts, as if you have to dash in and out for fear of turning to ash or some crud.  I don't see what there is to be scared of.  You're a delightful pony, and so talented.  What's so horrible about showing your face around that you have to remain cooped up in this house all the time?”

        “I... I'm not exactly a social type,” the yellow pegasus fidgetingly murmured, eying the fireplace.

        “But what about your best friends?”  Scootaloo gazed at her with sincerity.  “Don't tell me you don't enjoy hanging out with them!  There's gotta be more to your clique than the Elements of Harmony or what-crap!”

        “I'm... I'm not sure I understand the point of your inquiry, Miss Harmony...”

        “I want you to talk to me, Fluttershy,” the last pony uttered under her breaths, bracing the stumbling and limp figure of the Ponyvillean animal tamer as they followed Ditzy's slow hooftrots up a winding mountain face that curved into a higher plateau of thick green foliage.  “I don't know just how bad you're body is biting it on behalf of Dinky's horn and all, so I need you to stay awake and talk to me.  Tell me about your friends.”

        “I... I don't have a whole lot of friends...”

        “You're joking, right?”  Harmony smirked breathily as she shoved a few random branches out of the path of Fluttershy's cranium and carried the two of them—shuffling—up the mountainside, keeping wary of the steep drop to their immediate right.  “Give me a number.”

        “A number?”

        “Yeah.  Let's get all quantifiable over this conversation!”

        “Fives?”

        “Go filly.”

        “Mmmmm...” Fluttershy reached into the pile, her ears drooped as her eyes wandered over a different matter altogether.  “Six, though, if you count Ditzy... I suppose...”

        “'Ditzy'?”

        “Miss Doo.  The local mailpony.”

        The orange foal shook her head.  “Doesn't ring a bell.”

        “Sometimes she does, when she flies too low.”  Fluttershy blushed furiously and planted a hoof over her snout as she stifled a furious round of giggles.  “Ohhhhhh... That was rather rude of me.”

        “On the contrary,” Scootaloo spoke with a smile...

        “I'd say it's worth it just to hear you laugh,” the time traveler breathlessly said as she hoisted Fluttershy up a steep bank and helped her onto a level ground of compact soil.  The two pegasi stumbled slowly after Ditzy and Dinky, two gray spots along the crest of a hill dotted with moss and shrubbery.  “Did this 'Pinkie Pie' really make that joke in front of a zebra?”

        “Mmmm... Zecora wasn't offended, if that is what you mean to insinuate.  She was just as curious to know what was black-and-white-and-red-all-over as I was.”

        “Yeah, uhuh.  You want to hear another joke?”

        “You mean one that Pinkie Pie has somehow not told me?” Fluttershy breathlessly managed to say.

        “A horse walked into a bar and said 'Ouch'.”

        “.... I... I erm... I'm not quite sure that I get it...”

        “Think about it,” Harmony said.  She held Fluttershy up on her hooves and gazed at her with a tired-yet-glinting smirk.  “Think about ittttt—”

        “Oh... Oh!  Eheheh-nnngh—Ohhhh,” Fluttershy hissed as if assaulted with a vicious migraine.  She rubbed her aching head with a yellow hoof and lurched alongside Harmony.

        The last pony bit her lip.  With a clearing of her throat, she uttered, “You know what?  Forget about Pinkie Pie.  Already, I can tell she's my least favorite.  Tell me more about this Applejack you know.”

        “Well, I told you before, Scootaloo, that she was the first earth pony I had the grace to meet here in Ponyville.  Her family found me sleeping at Everclear, and without a single moment's hesitation, they brought me over to their house to eat, sleep, bathe, and have a warm place to briefly call my own.”

        “Jee, that sounds really, really sweet, Fluttershy.”

        “Mmm... It was most definitely kind.  Applejack will label it as 'country hospitality', but I know it for what it was.  The Apple Family has been doing kind things in Ponyville for generations, long before anypony in my family even knew about the colony that Faustmare had settled here.  You cannot meet a single member of Applejack's tree and not somehow feel happy to simply stand amongst them.  I think they've lived off the land for so long that they've become a part of it.  They are much sweeter fruits than the bounty they harvest every year.”

        “I bet Applejack would be tickled pink if you invited her for a sleepover one of these days—just to... I dunno... repay her for what she and her family did for you when you first landed from Cloudsdale!”

        “Oh... I dunno.  That was an awful long time ago.  I think she would just find it silly...”

        “Fluttershyyyy!  She would love to hang out with you!  Or Twilight for that matter!”

        “Twilight Sparkle is always busy these days,” Fluttershy stammered.  She swallowed a lump down her throat and leaned sickly against the copper pegasus' hide as they strolled together, lethargically, in distant pursuit of Ditzy and Dinky.  The forest grew dimmer with crimson bands of the setting sun as a cold wind flanked their evening trek.  “If she isn't writing to Her Majesty, working on her memoirs, or chaperoning the Summer Magic Camp—then she's performing one experiment or another with her adorable apprentice.”

        “Adorable apprentice, you say?”  Harmony remarked.  She eyed the growing shadows of the ominous forest around them, but even then she couldn't help but bear the slightest hint of a smirk.  “Does Miss Sparkle have—ahem—a handsome colt at her beck and call?”

        “Mmmm... No.  Not quite.”  Fluttershy's lips curved slightly.  “She's a Cantertlotlian student from Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns.  As part of her entrance exam, she had to hatch and tame an infant purple dragon.  But... mmmm... Of course you would know all of that already, Miss Harmony.”

        “I wasn't aware that many of the students actually kept their dragon as a pet.”

        “Oh no!”  Fluttershy woke briefly from her exhausted slump.  To Harmony's mute joy, she spoke with a renewed vigor... if not ire.  “Spike is anything but a pet!  He's an intelligent, caring, selfless, resourceful bundle of joy!”

        “'Spike...'”  Harmony rolled her eyes and hid her smirk from the yellow pegasus leaning against her.  “Boy is that a creative name for a dragon.”

        “For instance, just this last week he was helping Twilight with an experiment to... uhm... to teleport objects through time.”

        “Huh...” The copper pegasus gulped.  “Imagine that...”

        “I doubt it was successful, but it doesn't matter.  The relationship that Spike and Twilight have to each other is adorable.  Almost like siblings... Or... Or even mother and... and...” Fluttershy's voice trailed off her lips as her blue eyes sadly rediscovered the gray dots of Miss Doo and her glowing offspring far ahead.

        Harmony blinked.  Shifting nervously in their shared gait, she bravely cleared her throat.  “You and Miss Sparkle... uhm... go far back?”

        “Oh, hardly.  She's a very new addition to my life—A blessed addition, but still quite new.”

        “Well, which of your friends have you known the longest?”

        “Mmmm...” Fluttershy smiled sweetly, ignoring the card game altogether as her blue eyes found a hazy shade of blue beyond the visual spectrum of the windows.  “Rainbow Dash and I go back as far as I can remember.”

        Scootaloo's violet eyes sparkled as her entire body lit up like an orange lightbulb.  “You do?”

        “I... Uhm... I met her at Flight Camp.  I took far too many years to pass, compared to the average pegasus.  And yet, even though she graduated two winters before I did, she would always come back to the campus just to visit me.  I... uhm... I was the target of much teasing and practical jokes when I was young.  I'm sure I've told you that.  But Rainbow Dash... she never ceased to defend me, to come to my rescue... hmmm... so to speak.”

        “That's awfully cool of her.”  Scootaloo smiled, leaning her chin on perky orange hooves.

        “To this day...” Fluttershy kneaded the rug with silken soft forelimbs.  “I've never quite understood what motivated somepony as cool and as brave and as fearless as R-Rainbow to look after me and me alone.  I once thought I figured it out... but... uhm, no, that wasn't the reason.  Nor was it the other reason... ehm...”

        Scootaloo raised a curious eyebrow.

        Fluttershy sighed, but still smiled gently.  “I know we hardly see each other these days, and there are times when Rainbow Dash appears outright frustrated with me because of my frequent fear and cowardice.  But I know—I daresay, more than any other pony, I know—that she is the most loyal pegasus you can ever find.  And even now, if I was to find myself in a horrible situation or bind, she would come to my rescue, even after all these years.”

        “Y-Yeah... Rainbow Dash is awesome like that.”  Scootaloo beamed.

        “I would rather say that she's kind,” Fluttershy remarked.  “Even if she doesn't always show it, or would admit to it.  Rainbow Dash is really one of the kindest ponies in all of Equestria.  Our days—our memories that we have from Cloudsdale—they are all the proof that I need, and I cling to them like I would to my last breaths.”

        “Maybe you should hang out with her again.”  Scootaloo smiled gently.  “You could tell her yourself how much she means to you.”

        “I wouldn't presume to interrupt her these days,” Fluttershy said deflatedly.  “She's so awfully busy with the local weather flier team and all...” She gestured out a rain-soaked window.  “And... uhm... of course, there are the tryouts that she's so fixated on.”

        “What tryouts?”  Scootaloo stupidly blinked, then brightened euphorically.  “Oh, those tryouts!”

        “She's been working so hard, and I know that there's an upcoming event that she's been dying to prepare herself for.”

        “Well, if you can't invite Twilight or Rainbow Dash to visit you for a spell—”

        “Scootaloo, you needn't be so persistent.  I respect the fact that my friends live busy lives and I—”

        “—maybe you could get together with Rarity again!”

        Fluttershy took a sharp, wounded breath.

        Harmony gazed at her from where she was tugging her lightly across a bridge of rocks that spanned a tiny river.  “M-Miss Fluttershy, are you okay?”

        The caretaker exhaled—however—with the gentlest of smiles, something that could melt straight through the earth.  “Rarity...” Her voice was like a song and the air a throng of flutes.  “She is a delightful soul, if there ever was one.”

        “You speak as if she's a relic and not a friend,” Harmony breathlessly hoisted Fluttershy towards her.

        The yellow pegasus shuddered slightly, leaning her weight over the copper visitor's flank as she was practically carried over the river to join a breathless mother-and-child on the other side.  “We haven't seen each other in too terribly long a time.”  Her face hung in a pale stoniness.  “Oh Nebula, I do pray she's okay...”

        “Has she disappeared off the face of Equestria, or something?”  Harmony murmured, briefly remembering an ancient conversation over daffodil alfredo somewhere.

        “It is hard to tell, nor is it my place to find out—”

        “Well, why the hay not?  She's your friend, isn't she?”

        “My very best friend in the whole world,” Fluttershy wiltingly murmured, eying the rippling waters sickly as Dinky's horn pulsated from just a horseshoe's toss away.  “Ever since I had met her, she had taken an instant appreciation of me.  As to why, I cannot fathom.  But she's only ever treated me like a precious jewel—not patronizing me, but rather indulging me in all of her life's little intricacies, trusting in me the wealth of her knowledge, her vulnerabilities, her fears and joys, her love and hate.  Before I met her, I had acquaintances, and occasionally companions.  Rarity has become my one trusted confidant in this world, my B.F.F., as she puts it...”

        “BonaFideFilly?”

        “Heeheehe—Mmm... No.  'Best Friend Forever'.”  Fluttershy confessed with a rosy blush.

        “Sounds like you stumbled upon a gem.”

        “Only that she values me like one, and yet she's a well-to-do and artistically gifted unicorn who's surrounded by wealth.  Not once does she let that get to her head.  She's generous, she's compassionate, she's sympathetic, and she gives so much... so very much to both Trottingham and Ponyville.  If ever the mayor needs a new cabinet member to fill in the vacant spot for Ponyville's Head of Community Council, Lady Rarity already gets my vote... Mmmm... for what it is worth.”

        “As lead animal tamer of Ponyville...” Harmony smirked back.  “...I'm sure that your opinion would be greatly valued.”

        “I can only hope,” Fluttershy exhaled, winced slightly, and recovered from the latest surge of magical resonance.  “Just thinking of Rarity, and all the times she's ever talked to me, I respect all the things she's shared.  Other ponies might think she does nothing but give me an earful whenever we are together.  But I like it... I love it.  I'm never too comfortable talking about myself.  But hearing somepony like her go on about her life, and being so confident in me that she can share it: it makes me feel so special.  And it makes me feel so... so...”

        “So what, Fluttershy?”

        The yellow pegasus sighed, shutting her eyes before the fireplace.  “So normal...” She said.

        Scootaloo blinked.  Her orange jaw fell agape as she leaned her head to the side.  “But... Miss Fluttershy, you are n-normal!”

        “Oh Scootaloo, dear sweet Scootaloo...” The caretaker sighed and looked at the foal with tired blue eyes.  “No normal pony lives the way I do, spends more time with animals than other equine, deals with the random happenstance of a madly growing forest instead of a gentle and quiet town.”

        “We... We all have our talents, Miss Fluttershy.  Or... erm...” She blushed and twitched her blank flank.  “We all find them.  And... sure... we may be alone when we find them, but why do you insist that you have to stay around this place by yourself now that you have everything together?”

        “It's... far too complicated to explain—”

        “Ugh!  I'm sick to death of adults using that on me!”  Scootaloo briefly snarled.  “Don't you do it too, Miss Fluttershy!  You are so... so special, and you've got awesome talents, and... and...”

        “Scootaloo—”

        “If I had everything understood about who I was or what I could do like you, I'd not be wallowing around all by my lonesome!  I'd find as many ponies as I could and I would frickin' party!  Like Rainbow Dash does!  I don't see why you have to treat yourself like you're the last pony on earth!  I know I never plan to!”

        “You've got so many discoveries left to make in life, Scootaloo.  And... And I do not wish to discourage you with the things I have to share about myself—”

        “I don't think you have any idea how hard it is for me to be discouraged, Fluttershy,” Scootaloo said with a jittery gulp.  Bravely, she stared directly into the yellow pegasus' face from across the pile of cards.  “Please... Tell me.  Tell me what it is that keeps you here alone all these years.”

        “Sometimes... Sometimes it takes a very long time—if not forever—to earn your way out of the faults that are indicative to you... and the faults that you were born in.”

        “Does this have anything to do with how come you don't invite any of your friends over?”

        Fluttershy was silent.

        Scootaloo blinked.  Pale bleached stones pierced her heart.  She bit her lip from the icy sensation, as if gravity skewered a measuring tape through her soul and reminded her of the sheer distance between the ground and the clouds... and the white wings etched forever beyond.  “Fluttershy, when... when was the last time you saw your family?”

        “My family...” Fluttershy murmured breathily against Harmony's black mane, dragging alongside her as the three pegasi marched liquidly through a grassy knoll where the tree canopy broke to reveal purple stars twinkling above.  “My family and I have... uhm... we haven't talked or seen each other in a very, very long time...”

        “Ehrm... Why the heck not?”  Harmony asked.  “If you don't mind me asking.”

        “Well, first off, I come from quite a large household.”

        “Lemme guess, two brothers?  Two sisters?”

        “I have nine siblings.”

        “Whoah... Uhm... Okay...”

        “All older than me.”

        “Uhh... Really?”  Harmony squinted at the yellow pegasus' frail form.  “Okay, I guess I can see that now.”

        “I know what you're likely thinking,” Fluttershy gently spoke.  “And it's quite true.  I was... mmm... I was a rather unexpected addition to my family.  I do believe that was the start of many things.”

        “How do you mean?”

        “Well, coupled with the fact that I was born relatively early, I easily paled in comparison to how strong my six brothers and three sisters were... and still are.  Many of them are weather fliers.  Two of them work in the busiest department of the Cloudsdale Rainbow Factory.  One is a backup member of the Wonderbolts.”

        “Wow.”

        “Mmmm... I know.  As you can imagine, my weaker and gentler qualities have made me look all the less special compared to them.  While they excelled in every class of flight school, I failed miserably.  While they became outstanding members of Cloudsdalian society, I... uhm... I drifted out of the spotlight and settled for a lifestyle centered around the care and taming of woodland creatures.  All of my extended family members live in the clouds from here to Stratopolis.  In the meantime, I've settled for a quiet and unassuming life on solid ground, ever since that one fateful day when I fell down here.  So... as pegasus lifestyle goes, I... uhm... I've always been far from normal...”

        Harmony took a deep breath, all the while her amber eyes flickered through garbage strewn alleyways, abandoned barns, night-shrouded forests, Ponyvillean street corners, and the undersides of country bridges.  Every single one of those sights blurred by from the back of a scooter, and yet they were burned far hotter into the last pony's mind than any single cloudy hearth or silver-lined bed of wisps.

        “There's nothing wrong with a pegasus' life spent on the ground,” the time traveler gently said to Fluttershy.  “And if you ask me, the fact that you have chosen a way of living that is so different from the rest of your family makes you unique.  You are special for what you do, Miss Fluttershy.  Residents of Ponyville respect you.  Obviously Her Majesty respects you, otherwise she wouldn't have sent me!”

        “Your attempts to placate me are noble, and I do appreciate where you are coming from, Miss Harmony.”  Fluttershy attempted a gentle smile.  Against the resonating magic of Dinky's nearby horn, her expression came out like a grimace.  “But sometimes I would gladly give up all of Ponyville's compliments... all of my friends' respect... if it means that I could win my family's confidence back, that I could talk to my mother for the first time in years, that I could see my father for the first time in years.  But... But that is not the case, sadly.  Unless something amazingly dramatic is to happen, I'm not sure I will ever be accepted as one with my family.  I-I've disappointed them for far too long...”

        “Miss Fluttershy...”  Harmony gulped dryly.  “That sounds absolutely terrible.  And I shudder to think that you blame yourself for the selfish reasons that your family doesn't accept you.”

        “Is it selfish for an esteemed clan of Cloudsdalian wingbearers to look deplorably on such an odd member of its family whose weaknesses clash unnaturally with the rest of her litter?  Miss Harmony, I may have innumerable qualities in the eyes of my peers here in Ponyville, but until I can make amends with the failures I have made in my natural standing, I... I just cannot feel right with myself...”  With a deep sigh, she wiltingly murmured:  “...nor with my friends.”

        Harmony was suddenly mute; her brain and tongue had been tied about a bitter knot forming at the base of her throat.  There were so many things to say, and yet not enough reasons to say them.  She suddenly realized that she was carrying Fluttershy towards two graves: one built by an Ursa Major, and one that the yellow pegasus had been building for herself for a very long time now.  It was a grave that her family would likely never visit.  What an ironic ending it would be, then, for a selfless soul who so avidly paid respects to an entire sea of white stones memorializing ponies she never had the grace to know.

        By this point in the trip, Fluttershy's hooves were beginning to drag in the earth.  Glancing ahead, Harmony could see a limping gait overwhelming Ditzy's canter.  The night hummed around them, and the two pegasi of the past were starting to collapse in on themselves.  There really was only one thing to do.

        “Miss Doo?!”  Harmony called out with strong Entropan lungs.  “Ditzy, I think we should take a breather.”

        “The caves could be just b-b-b-b-beyond that hill, for all we know!”

        “I can make it, Miss Harmony,” Fluttershy said, but her words were painful squeaks shoved between wincing expressions.  “Dinky is the one pony we should be worried about right now.”

        “Fat lot of good it will do to worry or labor over a pony when half of us are too dead on our hooves to do anything once we do reach the caves!”  Harmony loudly said, “Let us rest.  I'm not saying we have a friggin' sleepover or something, Miss Doo.  But Fluttershy's nearly fainted and you too look like a mess, if you don't mind me saying so.  You're both welcome to argue with me, but Nebula help you if you so much as wish to succeed.”

        “Mmmm... The grass does look most inviting...” Fluttershy managed in a hissing whisper.

        “Do you hear me, Miss Doo?  We're resting,” Harmony managed to say, all the while dragging Fluttershy softly towards a bed of springy foliage and laying her gently down.

        The yellow pegasus murmured something, fought a rampaging migraine, and curled away from the pulsating location of Dinky and her horn.  “Not... Not for too long, Miss Harmony, okay?”  Her voice was a silken gold whimper, and in a hazy blink the last pony thought she saw an orange shadow marching down invisible stairs to touch her—

        Harmony clenched her green flaming eyes shut.  She fought a numbing cloud of agony, then blinked her amber orbs back to see Fluttershy lying down alone, breathing soundly as her wings twitched and folded into a placid stillness.  Ten meters beyond the half-conscious caretaker, Ditzy Doo slumped down to her haunches against a lone rock on the edge of a nearby treeline.  She disentangled herself with her mailbag, the straps of which had formed hard creases into her gray coat.  With gentle forelimbs, she slid the quivering little unicorn out of one of the pouches and cradled her in the grass between her spread hooves.

        “Nnngh... Four mares and a quasar... Alone like wolves in the night!  Hmmnngh... Do not look into the ravine, children of the rancid eyes under glass... Nnnngh... Snkkkt...”

        Ditzy's face contorted into a painful sigh.  She clenched her lopsided eyes shut and held the rambling little foal tight.  The corner of her skin sizzled slightly as it made contact with the blindingly bright horn.  She ignored the painful sensation.

        Sitting above a half-slumbering Fluttershy, Harmony painfully forced herself to stare at the mother-and-daughter.  It took all of her Entropan strength to wrench even a pindrop of sympathy away from her anchor to righteously address the other tragedy unfolding before her.

        “How... uhm...” The last pony bit her lip nervously.  “How are you holding up, Miss Doo?”

        “I am not.”  Ditzy shuddered and reopened her diagonal eyes.  Even from a sobbing breath's distance, the mother could barely center her gaze on her suffering offspring.  “I am falling apart.”  A hard gulp.  “I've always been falling apart.  Only... with my Muffin, I thought I could p-p-p-p-put the pieces back together.”

        “Miss Doo, don't—” Harmony paused to headbutt an aching dam of hypocrisy lodged in her skull, then continued, “Don't speak in the past tense like that, please.”

        “Forgive me,” Ditzy shuddered to say.  “I am not my normal self right now.  Even when I am, I know it's very hard for anypony to speak to me... when anypony bothers to speak to me.”  A deep breath, she cradled the stirring Dinky to her and gazed off towards both ends of the night's sky.  “I know what you must be thinking, and I don't blame you.  In Canterlot, I imagine there are rule books that would have forced the city to t-t-t-t-t-take my Muffin from me years ago.  So it's only natural for you to think that I got my just desserts.  After all, she was foaled as a half-wing...”

        “Miss Doo...” Harmony woundedly breathed.  A sad swallowing, and she murmured:  “I never said... I mean I didn't mean to suggest that—”

        “It's okay.  I know what she is.  And I know what I am.”  Ditzy breathed harder, her taut lips steeling suddenly.  After a flaring of her gray nostrils, she murmured, “And it doesn't matter, not to me.  If I had t-t-t-t-t-to go through every humil... humi-li-li-li-li-li... through every bad moment of my past again, I would—if only it would mean that she would still come into my life.”

        “She loves you, Miss Doo,” Harmony said.  “And she respects you so much.”

        A quivering breath floated back in response.  “I know,” Ditzy squeaked.  She gulped hard and ran a hoof over the foal's burning forehead.  “I know it... But I hardly deserve it...”

        “She respects you...” Harmony firmly repeated as she shuffled a few steps towards the mare.  A firmer, braver voice:  “But she also deserves respect back.”

        “But I do respect her!”

        “Miss Doo,” the last pony's amber eyes narrowed.  “Everypony in town knows she's not stupid.  She wants to know about her father.  She needs to know about her father.”

        Ditzy's face leaned until one of her sad eyes angled appropriately with Harmony.  A ring of starlit moisture formed pathetically around its yellow edge as the mare's voice stammered, “I need to know about him too...”

        Harmony stood still, biting on her lip nervously.  She couldn't say anything to shed light on that.

        Ditzy could:  “All of my life, I've only had other p-p-p-p-ponies laughing at me, joking about me, saying rude things behind my back.  I may not see well, but I can hear well.  I've never really blamed other ponies, but I always desired something different... something more.  Honestly, who in this world doesn't want to be loved, normal or not?”

        At the word 'normal', Harmony briefly glanced over her shoulder at the softly slumbering form of Fluttershy.  In a pit of nausea, the last pony realized that this yawning moment in time was embracing the company of three Cloudsdalian rejects.  Part of her wanted to go extinct right then and there.

        Ditzy continued speaking, “One summer, five years ago, I met this handsome colt, a dashing unicorn.”  Her face swam briefly through a sea of bitter-sweet smiles, like tattered ships on a gray horizon.  “He talked to me when so many other ponies didn't; he said things to me that I never dr-dr-dr-dr-dreamt anypony would.”  A sharp breath, like her lungs were being knifed from the inside out.  In a shameful stammer, she throated, “I don't know if you can ever relate, and I hope that you wouldn't.  A lonely life lived in the company of laughs and sneers can make you do some really st-st-st-st-st-stupid things.”

        “I... I know loneliness, Miss Doo,” Harmony said with a quiet nod.  “Call it what you want, but I imagine desperation makes fools of all of us in our own time.”  She deflated, remembering suddenly the taste and smell of blood in the ashen air.

        “Well...” Ditzy ran a hoof gently through Dinky's blonde threads.  “One day, this handsome stallion in my life was gone, along with all of his sweet words, his gentle smiles... his pretty lies.”  A dry gulp morphed into a painful smile.  “But I was not alone.  No... No... Because in place of a shameful hole in my life, my Muffin came to fill it up.  She would not come easily.  The hospitals in Cloudsdale rejected me.  My family would not speak to me.  But I was not about to give up on this life that was gr-gr-gr-gr-growing inside of me.  All of my life, the world had ignored me.  I was not about to ignore it.  Finally... finally... I received help.  Miss Red Heart in Ponyville's hospital oversaw the foaling.  I didn't realize just how painful it was going to be.  A pegasus is not built to deliver a unicorn.  I was out for days after Dinky was born; I dreamt that I had died.  But I wasn't dead.  One morning, I woke up, and they laid my Muffin in m-m-m-m-my hooves.... and when I looked at her... when I looked at her... she... she...”

        Ditzy's eyelids clenched shut.  Her shoulders shuddered once, twice.  A hiccup, a low breathy inhale, and she reopened them and gazed everywhere through a sudden cascade of yellow tears.

        “She looked at m-m-m-me.  She saw me.  After a life of nopony looking me in the eyes, my Muffin did.  She looked at me.  She looked at her mother, me, her mother.”  She hissed through her teeth and tilted two streaming eyes towards the stars as she held the quivering child tightly to her shuddering gray coat.  “And I finally knew... Praise Gultophine... I finally knew that there were kind and precious things in this world.”  A deep, wincing breath.  “And every p-p-p-p-painful length I went through to see that she came into my life was suddenly worth it, because I had proof that there could be something beautiful enough to love even me... and I could love it back.”

        Harmony stood silent as a stone, weathering the quivering air of the mailpony's sniffling voice as the mare shuddered, laid Dinky gently down in the grass, and caressed the foal's quivering face.

        “A few weeks ago... Dinky woke up in the middle of the night with a gasp.  I went to see if she was alright.  She said she had a nightmare.  I asked if she wanted me to sleep with her, to protect her.  Do you know what my Muffin said?”  She glanced up with two wet eyes pointing away from a painful smile.  “She said that nightmares were merely the brain's way of process... pr-pr-pr-pr-pro... of cleaning up information during sleep.  She knew the scary things in her nightmare weren't real.  All those years of buying her books and making her into the smart p-p-p-p-p-pony that I wasn't had worked.  I had done my Muffin right.”

        Ditzy closed her eyes and took a deep, torturous breath.  She came down the crest of her lungs with a wince as she whimpered:

        “But it didn't feel right.”  She squeaked.  “It should be M-M-M-M-Mommy's job to scare away the nightmares, but Dinky didn't need me to.  It was then that I realized how selfish I had become.  I need my Muffin... I love her and I need her so much.  Everyday, I do my deliveries in an upside down world full of laughter and sneers and... mmmfffmm—and she is the one thing in the center of my eyes.  My Muffin is what keeps me flying back to solid ground; her and her alone.”

        “Hmmnngghh... Fields of comets.  Horseshoe tributary of orange clouds, obligatory!” The possessed foal sobbed and quivered.  “Femurs happening... Femurs happening...”

        Ditzy bowed her face and touched her forehead to the crest of Dinky's burning horn.  The mother's tears steamed in the heat of her daughter's magical affliction.  She tossed her blonde mane as she shook her head left and right and shudderingly said:

        “I don't know how Mommy's going to drive these nightmares away.  Nebula, help me.  Without my Muffin I am nothing, nothing.  All I'll ever have to go b-b-b-b-back to is a blind world that notices me even less than I could ever possibly see it.  I couldn't live in that world; there would be no kindness in it.  Not anymore.”  She stroked a hoof over her daughter's ailing face, sniffled, and murmured:  “Not anym-m-m-m-m-more...”

        Harmony stirred uncomfortably.  Every tense muscle of the future scavenger's pained soul wormed through the numb Entropan limbs, until she finally managed to rest a hoof on the gray pegasus' shoulder.  “I may not speak for a kind world, Miss Doo, but I like to think I know something precious when I see it.  The birth of your child—the one miracle that you experienced in your life is but a preview to another miracle, one that could very well happen tonight.”

        “What miracle is that, Mister Squirrel?”

        Harmony smiled bravely past Ditzy's words.  “Your child's survival.  I have every intent to make sure nobody's kid dies tonight.  Yours... or the Capricorn's.”

        “I wish there were more clerks from Canterlot that were as sympa... sympa-pa-pa-pa-pa...”

        “I may not be an expert on sympathy,” the last pony said, “But I know a thing or two about survival.”  She smirked with a shade of pride.  Just then, there was a snapping sound—like a branch being stepped on in the forest.  She and she alone spun around...

        ...and glanced breathlessly towards the window.  “Did... Did you hear that?” the orange foal stammered.

        Fluttershy was already bounding up to her hooves.  In a surprisingly strong burst of wings, the caretaker floated up over the card game and pressed herself to the double windows stretched before the rain drenched night beyond the reading seat.  Hardened blue eyes squinted through the obsidian glass, meandering every knifing drop of liquid that pierced the edges of the Everfree Forest.

        Scootaloo bounded up onto quivering hooves, her violet eyes bright.  “It's the shed again, isn't it?  Something wants to get the stuff!”

        “That... That remains to be seen,” Fluttershy said in a deep, contemplative voice.  She was more confused than frightened, a steely complexion that the orange foal hardly recognized, but instantly respected.  “I am not used to this prolonged amount of rain; I could simply be imagining things...”

        “What if we went out together and scared whatever it is off once and for all?”

        “No.”  Fluttershy shook her head.  She spun around.  “I want you staying inside.”

        “Pfft—Again?  I can look after myself, Fluttershy.  Helping you scare these critters away is the least I can do for you letting me stay here!”

        “Until I know exactly what we are dealing with—if we are dealing with anything—I want you to stay inside.”

        “But what if there's something out there that you can't deal with?”

        Fluttershy strolled past and cast a desperate smile.  “You would doubt the Stare Master, Scootaloo?”

        The little foal wasn't buying it.  With a stony expression, she grumbled, “Don't pretend you're not half as freaked out by those noises than I am.”

        “Erhm...” Fluttershy bit her lip in a trademark pensiveness.  “We both do well to be frightened, but when it comes to the two of us, Scootaloo, it is my place and my place alone to investigate this.”

        “But why?  Can't you at least let me help?”

        “Scootaloo, you've been so very polite to me all afternoon.  It would be a shame... erhm... for that to stop now.”

        The foal merely raised an eyebrow to that mechanic of guilt.

        Fluttershy nevertheless swung the front door open and stared resolutely out into the rain.  After a slight shudder, she said, “Unless you specifically hear me call out for you, do not leave this cottage.  Do you understand me?”

        “But Fluttershy—”

        “The shed is my responsibility.  It falls to me to earn my keep.  I shall return shortly...”  She bounded out, letting the door swing shut to the dark, wet world beyond.

        “Hmmmmph...” Scootaloo folded her front hooves with a frown.  “You're not the only pony who needs to earn something, Fluttershy.”  With a huff, she marched up to the reading seat and all-but-planted her orange nostrils to the glass, squinting out into the obsidian monsoon that enshrouded the quaint little house.  All she could make out were the mere phantoms of shadows, of distorted air dancing around errant drops of rain, kissing their way in and out of the penumbra of pale starlight.

        Just then, Scootaloo's heart skipped a beat.  She was hearing noises—or the echoes of noises.  She couldn't be entirely sure, but she thought she could make out a pounding.  Something had scampered from the left side of the blackened yard... over to the right and blacker side of the rain-soaked horizon.  There was a sloshing sound... a deep and low bass noise... and then the continual hiss of endless rain.

        “Wooooh... Freaky...” Half of her shuddered and the other half smirked in a fitful spell of excitement.  Her ears twitched as she glanced left and right, attempting to adjust her violet eyes against the glass' dim reflection of the fireplace that crackled behind her.  Several minutes into the witless gazing, she heard more sloshing, more shuffling, another bass hum, and then the ever-present hiss of rain shrouded it all once more.

        In the tranquil nightlit space between breaths, Scootaloo thought of Everclear.  She thought of a mineshaft that consumed the souls of ponies like so many barren rocks that forever plugged the mouth of the terrestrial serpent.  She thought of Fluttershy, she thought of flowers, and she thought of shadows—like the outline of darkness that had so phantasmagorically haloed her when she stood before the bathroom mirror with her hoof raised, feeling for the soul of the pony that stood beyond it, only to make contact with the cold kiss of nothing that was reserved for the mystery that was tomorrow.   In so many years of homeless scavenging, Scootaloo had only stolen things; she had never earned them.  She could be the loneliest soul on the face of Equestria, and she would never get a cutie mark—so long as she allowed herself to be swallowed by that opaque shadow in the mirror.

        For once, the foal had tried to do things differently.  Fluttershy had let her, but Fluttershy could barely let herself do things differently, the hard way, the brave way, the humble way—by giving up what was precious to her—her gentility—by rushing out impulsively into that dark wet night full of noises.  Scootaloo was afraid to give up something as well, and yet Fluttershy had dragged it out of her.  She had found a piece of Scootaloo that was willing to receive, and it left the orange foal feeling just as blessed as she felt nauseous.

        For her sake—and for her host's sake—Scootaloo felt compelled to practice the one talent she had always denied herself, but felt the need to exercise then, even if it could end in more blood than cutie marks.  Scootaloo had to stretch the invisible wings of her courage, the one bulwark that had kept her safe from all the elements that had hounded a foal's lonely life of survival, but had also blocked her from indulging in the softer shades of life, the shades lent her via a golden voice on that drenched afternoon, the things that she was still never, ever strong enough to earn.

        “Pffft-Yeah.  Screw this.”  She half-smiled, half-sneered, fully-pushed a hoof forward and opened the windows with a rain-soaked creak.  Summoning a deep breath, she dove out into the pouring world and landed in a splash upon flooded grass.

        The orange foal immediately shivered.  She wasn't prepared for just how cold it would be outside.  She had slept through worse storms before, but this evening was somehow different.  A warm fireplace and a pile of playing cards flew away from her flank like a distant star as she scampered dauntless into that thundering night.

        With squinting violet eyes, she peered left and right.  Her pink mane was already curtaining around her neck in a slick mat of surrender, but she didn't dare turn around.  She listened for plodding sounds that weren't her own—that may or may not have been Fluttershy's either.  All she heard was thunder—distant and grumbling—as her sloshing path briefly lit up in random strobes that revealed a deep black forest of wooden teeth stretching beyond, forming the gnarled ribcage of a suddenly soulless Everfree.

        All was madness and obscurity.  The foal was infinitely more frustrated than she was scared.  In a determined breath, she pivoted against the cold rain and marched north—around the far end of the house—where she at least knew where one important thing was.

        The woodshed: it stood before her like a pale wooden igloo in the penumbra of the cottage's windowlit haze.  From the bobbing vision of the wet foal's scampering approach, it appeared in one piece.  Scootaloo managed a smirk, for this entire situation appeared completely and utterly absurd.  It was most likely just the sound of a falling tree branch that had ushered Fluttershy outside, and the sloshing noises that the window-gazing foal had listened to were likely nothing more than the hoofsteps of a rain-soaked yellow pegasus running silly circles in the darkness.  When all of this muddied chaos was said and done, the two ponies would have a long laugh—

        Scootaloo skidded to a splattering stop.  In a suddenly breathless stance, she squinted at the wooden door to the shed.  Against the pale bark of the frame were several slashes—clawmarks—and the deep splintery ravines collected rainwater like a wound would collect blood.

        It wasn't fear that made Scootaloo's heart race quicken; it was shame, the sensation of a stupid mistake bringing a stupid survivor to a stupid end.  The hairs on her back rose against the raindrops as—just then—a deep bass hum rose from behind, shaking rivulets in the puddles all around her.  Scootaloo spun around in a voiceless exclamation.

        At first, she saw nothing.  And then, there was a strobe of lightning, and she saw it.  More specifically, she saw her reflection.  Her blanching face flickered a dozen ivory times—glistening off of a row of razor sharp teeth pointed straight at her.  Then the lightning's strobe ended, and she was cast into darkness, shivering at the serrated end of a deep and prolonged growling noise...

        With an instinctual gasp, the last pony's amber eyes twitched open.  She blinked to see purple starlight twinkling down upon the same grassy knoll she had meditatively shut her eyes to ten minutes ago.  Fluttershy was still slumbering, her yellow body twitching fitfully in the throes of aching spasms.  Propped up against a pale rock, Ditzy sat with her eyes shut and her body slowly rising and falling in a bitterly brief sleeping spell.  Dinky sat in her mother's lap, and she was anything but unconscious.

        “Mmmffft... Red Aviary.  Once more, the broken stone sobs for a drop of liquid.  There is nothing left but stars.  Nnngh...”

        Harmony took a deep breath, rubbing her eyes with a copper hoof as the mental barrier of gray ash and snow dutifully washed away a rain-slicked evening to return her to the present... which was the past.

        “Gotta hand it to ya, kiddo,” she murmured across the thick Everfree air.  “You've landed yourself in one motley crew.  I'd say you're the only pony in this forest that's making sense.  I could write a book to your words.”

        “Alabaster fingers that know no heat.  Banisters and banisters.  For the sky to turn red the earth must bleed.”

        “I rest my case.”  Harmony tiredly, bitterly smiled.  With a deep breath, she gazed over at Fluttershy, at her silken and wilted figures, at the invalidic limbs that once charged bravely into an obsidian night drowning in rain... and tears.  “I could write so many books... with the things that I've seen.  With all that I am... with all that I've become.”  She sighed heavily out her nostrils, her brow furrowed with a renewed ache.  “But a eulogy, Spike?  It's all so much... It's all so... so much.  I can't.  I simply can't do this anymore—”

        “Seriously, kid—Would I let the world be any less cool by disappearing?”

        Harmony froze.  Slowly, icily, her copper head pivoted to stare dazedly at the glowing unicorn.  Her amber eyes were twin suns, sudden phantoms that could light up the Wasteland for an eternity.

        “I'll be darned if I let you die!” Dinky's lips moved under a pair of glowing ivory eyes.  A cool and wind-throttling voice was lurching out from her throat.  “Don't fret!  I'll be back in—like—half an hour, tops!”

        Ten seconds later, the last pony's heart finally beat again.  On quivering, foalish limbs she hobbled up and slowly shuffled across the grass, her eyes locked like titanium staples on the child's pulsating horn that throbbed with each of her hoofsteps.

        “What... What did you just say...?” She stammered in a pitiful whisper.

        “Nnnngh...Orphan of love, orphan of time...” Dinky stirred and twitched as a shimmering voice wafted through her, out of her.  “That is not your skin to be wearing...”

        Harmony stood like a teetering statue over her.  A dry gulp.  “Who are you...?”

        “Snnkkkt...” A wicked sneer, a suddenly cold and raspy voice.  “A silver strip for your thoughts, blank flank?”

        “What...” Harmony frowned.  “...are you?  What do you want with Dinky?”

        “There's a good angel, Harmony.”  A rich, affluent accent, tainted with sorrow and joy.  “That I haven't cried before...”

        Harmony didn't know why, but she was hyperventilating.  The closer and further she stared into the shimmering horn of the possessed foal, the more she felt green bands of fire eating at the edges of her peripheral.  She hissed suddenly, as if the world was about to spin out from underneath her and explode in black briars and thorns, thorns, thorns, thorns...

        “Hcckttttt-t-t-t-t-the Onyx Eclipse.  The Onyx Eclipse is coming, through a dead keyhole of heartless stars...”

        Harmony paled.  With quivering lips, she flashed a gaze upwards at the purple haze of endless Equestrian constellations.  She then threw the child a horrified look.  “What?!”

        “It will suck all of the light out of her children...” Dinky's horn pulsed into the black of night.  “...and bathe their cradles in chaos' flames.”

        “Who are you?!”  She gazed once more at the stars, then slid up and all but bit the glowing unicorn's face as she barked:  “What is the Onyx Eclipse?!?”

        “What is there to change?”  A deep voice, suddenly.  Evaporating tears.  “Don't you see?  I killed my mother.”

        A ravenous troll leaped out of Harmony's flesh.  In a vicious snarl, she grabbed Dinky with two shivering hooves and dangled her by the shoulders.  “Celestia dang it, talk to me!  Who are you?!  What do you see in the friggin' stars?!”

        Dinky gasped.  With her bright eyes rolling back, she once more mewled absurdly:  “Paper windows.  Dogs upon the shoreline.  Some oranges hate killing art hats—”

        “Why is Equestria going to burn up in flames?!”  Harmony shouted, her amber eyes burning.  Something yellow and porcelain stirred fitfully behind her.  “Why am I still here?!  Why is everypony dead but me?!  Why, dang it, why?!”

        Dinky gasped.  In a wave of gray ash, her yellow mane billowed into marshmallowy white and lavender strands.  “With our cutie marks, we'll rock Equestria.” Sweetie Belle sputtered.  “We use our stomachs to digestia?”

        Harmony shivered in a green bubble.  Her eyes blinked from amber to violet to—

        “Miss Harmony?”

        She turned and flashed a look across a carpet littered with playing cards.  Fluttershy gazed down from above the fireplace, crucified to the stone wall with black thorns.  “Is everything all right?”  Her golden voice was drowned out as the rainwater beyond the windows exploded like Cloudsdalian corpses.  The moon shattered as a wave of fire swam over Everfree and barreled against the black bars of the arcane vault.  From behind, there was a gray shadow flying—shrieking—towards the orange foal.

        Blinking, the last pony turned to look, only to be impaled by a thunderous hoof to the face.  The world flashed white like moonvision, and she somersaulted backwards until she was lying—sprawled out—in a grassy knoll beneath purple starlight.  Following the thrown punch, a panting Ditzy cradled her shivering, possessed foal close to her chest while frowning the time traveler's way.

        “What's the m-m-m-m-matter with you?!”  The mother hissed.  Her frowning eyes swam yellow meteors around the copper pegasus.  “Stay away from my Muffin, do you understand me?!”

        “Did you hear her?”  Harmony hopped up to numb feet, panting and sweating through a pale sheet of horror.  “Did you?!  Please—somepony, anypony—tell me you friggin' heard her!”

        “My daughter is sick!  And none of this shouting is helping her get any better!”

        There was a deep rumbling sound—like thunder.  The green world shook under the thick voices blanketing the air.  “Uhm... Ladies...?”  Fluttershy demurely stammered from the background.

        “Please—Just let me talk to her again!”  Harmony twitched and twitched but tried to calm the situation with an outstretched limb.  “She's picking up something!  I don't know what it is, but I-I gotta hear more!”

        “You've done enough!  I can't believe I trusted you, even for a second!”

        “Trusted me?!  Miss Doo, I'm trying to save your kid!  Just like Miss Fluttershy!  I know the two of you are going through a lot of crud right now.  But please—for my sake—for... uhm... for Canterlot's sake!  Let me just—”

        The rumbling was intensifying.  The blades of grass shook.  Fluttershy stirred up to four wobbling hooves and murmured once more:  “Ladies, please, if you could just—”

        “I don't care if it's for Celestia's sake!” Ditzy frowned.  “Stay away!  I mean it!  I thought you were a kind pony!  Guess I was just st-st-st-st-st-stupid!  I'm always stupid!”

        “Ditzy, for crying out loud, get a friggin' clue!  I'm on your side!”

        “Oh no!  I've fallen for that before!  Not again, Mister Squirrel—”

        “Pony!  P. O. N. Y.!”  Harmony fiercely barked in Ditzy's reeling face.  She flailed her upper limbs before the gray mare's clockwork eyes.  “Do you not see the hooves!  These were not made for gathering nuts, ya Luna-forsaken optometrist jigsaw puzzle!  Look at the frickin' hooves!  Miss Fluttershy, tell her!  Tell her you see the frickin' hooves!”

        “Uhm... I most assuredly see the freaking hooves.”

        “There!  Ya hear that?”

        “But... uhm... if you two would please stop arguing just for one—”

        Ditzy retorted above the loud rumbling.  “I swear, the only reason you're here is because you're scared for Fluttershy!  You d-d-d-d-don't even care if my Muffin lives or dies!”

        “Miss Doo,” Harmony snarled.  “Did you or did you not hear me promise earlier that—?”

        “You were just trying to make a stupid pony feel better!”

        “I was trying to be kind, you envelope-sniffing little—”

        “Ladies!”  Fluttershy shrieked, suddenly hobbling between the two and pointing with a yellow hoof.  “The ground—”

        Harmony glanced.  “What about the ground—Ho boy!!”

        The earth exploded beneath them with an ear-splitting snarl.  All three pegasi went flying.  Dinky's shrieks split the Everfree night until they were drowned out by a thunderous roar as a great white mass slithered upwards from the depths.  With a lashing tail that ripped flanks of grass from their roots, a giant leathery creature stared ravenously at the floundering ponies with milky-white sideways eyes.

        “What is that thing?!”  Ditzy stammered.

        Fluttershy gasped and squeaked, “Oh my!  Oh my—We were on marked territory!”  She gulped and struggled against her magically impaired limbs to point at the monstrosity.  “It's an ivory nematode!”

        “Well of course it is!”  Harmony snarled.  On a wave of bubbling anger, the copper pegasus flew mercilessly through the air with an Entropan hoof outstretched.  “I'll be danged if I'm in the mood to hug the friggin' thing!”

        “No!”  Fluttershy gasped.  “It's too big—”

        The gigantic lizard let loose a banshee cry, spun one hundred and eighty degrees, and struck the airborne time-traveler with the cedar-thick bulk of its tail.  In a breathless grunt, Harmony's Entropan body was knocked back like a rubber ball.  She slammed into the earth and cut a deep ravine, sliding to a stop besides a gasping gray pegasus.

        “Dear Nebula!  Are you okay?!”

        “Yeah...”  Harmony hissed through a fluctuating vision of green plumes.  “Thankfully I landed on my bushy tail!”  The last pony hopped back to her hooves.  “Just tell me where the dang salamander went!  I'll show him a new position he can bend that tail of his in—”

        “Fluttershy!”  Ditzy suddenly shrieked.

        Harmony blinked at her, then flashed a pale look across the knoll.  She paled.  “Oh dear Epona...”

        Fluttershy scuffled up against a lone rock, panting.  With wide blue eyes she watched helplessly as the full weight of the ivory nematode sailed towards her—shrieking—its pale leathery skin flickering like a bolt of lightning...

        ...that punctured the dead thick of the night, revealing the glistening jaws once more to a young Scootaloo.  The deep bass hum belonged to a leering maw, and the drooling snout belonged to a dark shadow with glinting eyes that stood across from Scootaloo.

        The orange foal remained frozen in place, drenched by the evening's deluge.  Her back was to the claw-scratched woodshed full of priceless bundles of Fluttershy's supplies.  Scootaloo knew this.  It was the single reason why she wasn't moving.

        There were few things in her young life that the little pony could afford, and even fewer things that she felt like she deserved.  All that was empty was normal—was just—like all the gaping spaces that had been left, like the spaces that had been yanked from her.  They lingered and decayed like dead holes in the earth, or empty mine shafts.  They sung blank verse with the hollows between white-winged names, or the breathless sobs between a sleeping foal's heartbeats.

        The teeth parted slightly—yawning black gaps of heated breath.  Scootaloo stared into the abyss.  It felt like staring into a darklit mirror.  She wasn't surprised at what she did next, at how slowly and steadily she picked up a random branch that she had spotted lying in a puddle before her.  She gripped the flimsy bludgeon in gnashing teeth.  The wood was thick, rich, like a blue table that she was responsible for breaking, something that was once again an infinitely more important piece of life than what she was about to break next.

        She thought of the golden voice one last time, and then she shut it out and allowed the nightmares to fall in place of it as she growled a low growl... and charged her way towards the beast beyond the blackness.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Fifteen – Everlove

Special Thanks to Chobit-389 for Cover Art

        “Girls!”  Fluttershy viciously throated.  She quivered into the crook of her forelimb as the menacing cockatrice flew towards her.  Nevertheless, her voice was as solid as a mountain as she tossed the words over her shoulder.  “Behind me, now!”

        Three shuddering foals obeyed her in a blink.  With a billowing of their red-and-gold crusader capes, they stood in a solid line behind the yellow pegasus.  One gasping soul out of the bunch—a violet-eyed pegasus—stared in a perpetual grimace while the adult pony stood as the last barrier between the children and an eternity in stone.

        The cockatrice's shrill cries reverberated off of the dark wooden bodies of the Everfree Forest.  The ground shook from the sheer majesty of its scaled wings.  As the monstrosity stared off with Fluttershy, there was a shuddering sensation from behind.

        Scootaloo realized—without looking—that her two best friends weren't just hiding behind Fluttershy, they were hiding behind her.  In fitful crouching stances, they desperately huddled in the flimsy shadows of the young pegasus' tiny wings.  Scootaloo was standing in the absolute pit of horror, but in that frozen moment, realizing that Apple Bloom and Sweetie Bell were hiding behind her standing form...

        Something bloomed in Scootaloo, something like a furnace.  And when Fluttershy briefly glanced back from the cockatrice in a desperate squint of pearlescent blue, their gazes connected, a bridge was built, the Everfree Forest melted beyond the event horizon of a burning righteousness, and it was with suddenly steely determination that Fluttershy flung her face forward into the screaming beak of the cockatrice and stared the creature down under the merciless volley of an animal tamer's lecture, embroiled with Celestial Speech:

        “You!  Just who do you think you are, running around and turning others into stone?”

        Scootaloo watched as Fluttershy saved all of them.  She watched—and in spite of every brave and lonely thing she had ever done—she wished... she wished that... she wished that she—

        —was flinging her copper body through the air like a breathless missile.  With miraculous precision, she knifed her way thinly beneath the pouncing body of the ivory nematoad while shoving the yellow pegasus out of the way.

        A gigantic roll of thunder announced the beast's collision with the floor of the grassy knoll.  Fluttershy squeaked in fright as she and Harmony landed in the dirt and rolled to a stop on the other side.  Harmony dropped the Ponyvillean animal tamer and immediately spun on her haunches to glare at the gigantic thrashing amphibian.

        “Shove off, you festering pile of tadpole crap!”

        “Is M-M-M-Miss Fluttershy okay?”

        “Thanks for your concern, Miss Doo.  I'm fine as well!”  Harmony marched icily towards the pale-eyed creature.  “You!  Yes you, handsome!  You picked the wrong night to mess with ponies!”

        “No!  Miss Harmony, don't—” Fluttershy winced and weakly stirred on the ground.  “Let me talk to it!  It's only trying to—”

        “—get us killed?”  The last pony snarled.  “Not on my watch.”

        The gigantic nematoad stood up on iron-thick haunches and roared viciously towards the copper-coated time traveler.  Its rows upon rows of teeth glistened with rancid saliva.

        “Bring it, pond scum!”  Harmony ground a hoof into the soil.  “I've fought an entire army of trolls and won!  You're nothing but roadkill—Daah!”  The last utterance was a grunting affair, forced out of her lungs as one single swipe of a claw sent her body flying across the knoll and slamming full-force through a sundering tree trunk.  She collapsed on the ground in a froth of green smoke and fluttering leaves.  “Nnngh...Sonuva—”

        The giant squirming menace let loose another banshee scream before stomping towards Fluttershy's prone figure once more.

        Harmony spat into the ground.  Glancing aside, she saw an enormous chunk of the shattered tree trunk lying on the grass beside her.  Picking up the massive thing in two Entropan forelimbs, the time traveler coiled her wings, held her breath, and rocketed towards the pale lizard in a copper blur.  As the monster leered over Fluttershy, Harmony zeroed in on the beast's closing maw just in time.  The monster's sideways eyes twitched as it found its jaws stuck in mid-bite.  The fat mass of the heavy tree trunk had frozen its mouth like a wooden brace.

        “Choke on it, you walking handbag!”  Harmony spun in mid-hover and viciously bucked the middle of the trunk.  The large wooden thing shattered into a throng of splinters that flew mercilessly down the beast's quivering throat.  The lizard stumbled backwards, coughing and sputtering on the contaminating debris.  It shook its snout—bore something resembling a frown—and tilted its neck up towards the “Canterlotlian Clerk” with a flaring of bulbous neck muscles.

        “Harmony!”  Fluttershy gulped and managed to squeak forth:  “Caustic mucous!  Get away from its—”

        Harmony blinked.  She briefly revisited the flimsy memory of a gray unicorn foal balanced on the wooden beam of a manger, lecturing about some frivolous factoid or another.  This brief remembrance was burningly interrupted by several globs of translucent phlegm being launched the copper pegasus' way.  The time traveler gasped and dodged, glancing over her shoulder in time to see the nematoad's nostril fluids landing in the grass and instantly burning the soil to charcoal black.

        “Oh no—You did not just shoot death boogers at me!” Harmony cackled.

        Dauntless, the giant pale monster pivoted its neck and launched additional streams of the acidic material.  For a moment there, Harmony hovered perfectly still, fully expecting to weather the brunt of the burning fluids.  At the distant sound of Fluttershy's frightened gasps, she hesitated, her mind instantly being crushed by a collapsing wooden silo that sent her back to the future on green fumes after saving Apple Bloom.  In a cautious jolt of her muscles, she ducked the mucous blobs at the last second.  A random clump of exposed rock sizzled and smoked behind her.  The nematoad fired more globs of fluid.  The mid-air pegasus spun, spiraled, and ducked under the burning volleys in a copper streak.  Twirling around a final stream of acid, Harmony barreled towards the monster's chest and struck it full force with an Entropan elbow.  “Haaaugh!”

        Together, the pony-and-lizard went bounding, rolling, and sliding until they landed against a collapsing wall of trees.  Leaves and branches rained down on the thrashing beast as Harmony came up from behind and viciously locked her forelimbs around its neck muscles, struggling to hold the thing down.

        “Snkkkt... After twenty-five frickin' years, I'm finally wrestling an alligator!” Harmony spit and hissed through gnashing teeth as she weathered the creature's bucking and jolting movements from behind.  “Give up, dang it!  Or I'm sending you back to the outhouse where you belong—Whoah!”  She shrieked as the monster roared deafeningly, its neck crests bulging under her desperate grip.

        From a distance, Ditzy Doo could be seen planting Dinky down safely beside Fluttershy.  After a few breathless pants, she shouted:  “Hang on!”  With a twitch of gray wings, she bravely flew over.  “I'll help you, Mister Squirrel!”

        “Nnngh—No!” Harmony's amber eyes twitched as she rode the shoulders of the squirming beast.  “Don't help me, Miss Doo!  Don't help me!  Don't help me!  Don't help me!”

        “Yaaaaaugh!”  The mailpony flew in under a crown of googly eyes and flung a heavy fist.  “Have at you, big nasty thing!”

        “Miss Doo—Ooof!”  Harmony winced and hissed from a direct hoof strike to her nose.  “Miss Doo, you're—Aaugh!”  She grunted again, cross-eyed.  “Will you at least hit the friggin' nematoad?”

        “B-B-B-B-But I am hitting it!” A hovering Ditzy snarled and punched, punched, punched, punched Harmony in the face.  “Take that and that and—!”

        “Aim left!  Hit its skull!  Ooof!  Dang it, aim left, you flying bag of marbles—Augh!”  After the last punch, Harmony frowned, gritted her Entropan teeth, and wrenched the nematoad's entire snout aside so that Ditzy's hooves finally made contact.  After just two hits, the lizard snarled and snapped its jaws down in a gaping roar.

        “Gaah!”  Ditzy gasped.  She jerked her head aside just in time for the iron teeth of the creature to clamp harmlessly over the length of the pegasus' blonde mane.  She winced as the creature made to throw her.  “Ohhhhhh sh-sh-sh-sh-sh—”  The mailpony's scream flew across the night as her body pinwheeled far away from the monster's vicious fling.

        In the next breath, the lizard slammed the full weight of its body back into the crushed pile of wood.  Harmony wheezed, her copper body quivering in brief spurts of magical green fumes.  It didn't help that the monster repeated this brutish pummeling once, twice, thrice—every time with Harmony grunting and looking more and more cross-eyed.  Finally, a vicious hiss, and the monster spun in a circle, flung Scootaloo off of its hide, and struck her body in mid-air with a thick tail.

        “Giyaa-aa-aa-aa-aagh!”  Harmony's shriek echoed through the air like a rainbow-maned phantom.  Her Entropan body crashed hard through a shattering rock, behind which Fluttershy was desperately cradling a helpless unicorn foal.  Fluttershy immediately shrieked from the time traveler's landing.

        “Miss Harmony!  This madness has to stop!”

        “You kidding?!”  Harmony sputtered, spat pebbles and dirt from her mouth, and struggled onto fuming hooves.  “I do this kind of crud for breakfast!”

        “Really?”

        “No.”  Harmony frowned.  She looked up at her sudden adversary.

        The ivory nematoad was marching at a full gallop, its pale claws raking at the earth as it snarled upon the peak of its approach.  With pale eyes that reflected Fluttershy and the copper pegasus, it advanced on the helpless ponies.

        “Just let me talk to it!”  Fluttershy murmured and trembled into the raging cacophony.  “Just let me—!”

        Suddenly, the nematoad winced in mid-charge.  It faltered for the briefest of seconds, re-blinked its sideways eyes, and resumed its murderous sprint.  For a moment, Harmony was helpless to understand why, until she spotted an errant beam of plasma briefly dotting the pale leathery complexion of the beast.

        Breathlessly, Harmony flashed Dinky a look.  Her amber eyes widened.  As the ground literally exploded from the incoming monster's charge, she rolled to the side, snatched the gasping unicorn up, and held her directly in front of the leering monster's snow-white maw.

        The foal's horn pulsed blisteringly bright through the night's air and flared against the forehead of the gigantic amphibian.  With a suddenly vulnerable shriek, the monster collapsed backwards, tripping on its own legs and tail.  It whimpered pathetically, twitching away from the light as its pale skin practically sizzled from the proximity of the shimmering horn.

        “Hah!”  Harmony spat, grinning like a demon as she trotted icily towards the monster, balanced on her rear hooves with the dangling child in her grasp.  “The night's suddenly a lot less fun when you can't see worth crap, huh, ya albino bucket of backsweat?!  I hope you enjoy hunting flies with a walking stick for the rest of your friggin' life!”

        “Th-That's quite enough, Miss Harmony.”  Fluttershy suddenly brushed the time traveler aside with a gentle-but-firm swish of her pink tail hairs.  She shuffled weakly but determinedly towards the large, quivering creature.  “Let me take over...”

        “Huh?”  Harmony blinked, still clutching a murmuring and quivering Dinky.  “Miss Fluttershy, I've got a drop on it!  Let me deal with the bloodthirsty thing—”

        “There is no deal to be made.  The poor thing was just angry and confused.”  The caretaker gently slumped down before the creature's thrashing head and gulped.  “I only need to talk some sense into him.”

        “Nnnngh...” Harmony slumped down to her haunches, cradling Dinky.  “You've gotta be frickin' kidding me...”

        “Assuredly, I am not.”  Fluttershy raised a silken hoof and stroked the snout of the quivering white beast.  “There-There-There... I know it burns.  But it's not like you gave us much of a choice, is it?”

        The humongous amphibian mewled and hummed painfully.  Its sideways eyes slid open in a sickly fashion.

        Fluttershy managed an honest—albeit weak smile.  “We all do desperate things to protect what we care about.  My friend shone a light in your face because she was afraid for me.  And you?  This is your territory and we were trespassing on it, weren't we?”

        The nematoad exhaled hotly, wincing.  In response to the animal tamer's Celestial Speech, the sorry beast nodded its quivering head.

        “I'm very, very sorry for that.  But you must understand... the three of us are out here because we're on a desperate quest to save a mother's child.  Even you must understand how important it is to protect one's offspring.  It's the same reason for why this soil is so important for you to burrow a home in, isn't it?”

        The creature hissed and let loose a throng of unintelligible squeaking noises.  Its tail wagged briefly in a pitiable slump.

        Fluttershy squeaked back before gently speaking, “It's noble that you would protect this land for the ones that you love.  But we're only passing through, and you're so much bigger than we are.  Was this ever a fair fight to begin with?”  She stroked the thing's pale nose and navigated a maze of her own wincing pains before finishing with:  “If you just return back to the warm moist earth where you're comfortable and safe, I promise that all of us will be on our way.  There: now where was the harm in just talking this over?”

        A deep, rumbling hum, and the beast's jaws curved, resembling a twisted smile.  It briefly nuzzled Fluttershy's featherlight skull with an iron maw before clamoring on liquid limbs towards the deep hole in the ground from which the monster had originally sprung.  Just before the final plunge, it squinted past Dinky's glowing horn, frowned at Harmony, and raspberried a two-meter-long tongue.  A flurry of earth, a rumbling explosion of topsoil, and the ivory nematoad was gone.

        “Hmmmph...” Harmony managed a dry smirk as she held Dinky.  “In three decades, he will make for some good zeppelin weave.”  A gray blur: Harmony blinked, because there was suddenly no Dinky in her grasp.  She glanced up—only to have a rear hoof shove her viciously in the sternum.  “Augh!”  She fell back in a flurry of dead grass and frowned up at the mailpony.  “Hey, wh-what gives?”

        Ditzy Doo stood, her mane and body covered in sticky sap, branches, and flakes of pine cones.  She cradled a murmuring unicorn to her chest and glared lopsided daggers all around the time traveler's figure.  “How dare you put my Muffin's life in d-d-d-d-danger like that!  First you yell at her, then you shake her, and then you toss her like a torch into the mouth of that beast?!?”

        “Look, first off—” Harmony hobbled up to her hooves and dusted herself off.  “I didn't toss nopony nowhere!  Though Nebula-knows I wanted to!”  She glared decidedly at the gray pegasus.  “Secondly, I wouldn't have shoved your kid's horn in the monster's face if I didn't think it would work!  As a matter of fact, you should be thanking her!  It was Dinky's lecture about ivory nem-a-turds the other day that reminded me that they were sensitive to light—”

        “Just shut up!  Just—Nnnngh!”  The mare's forehead burned red between googly eyes as she spat and hissed.  “You're a meanie!  A big fat meanie squirrel!  You're just as bad as everyone else!  I don't care what you think you're here for, I don't want you anywhere near my Muffin again!  Or else, help me Celestia, I'll p-p-p-p-punch you so hard your head will suffer hemorrh... hem-m-m-m-m.... hemorrh-rrh-rrh-rrh...”  The mailpony shook her snout, growled, then leaned forward to howl in the last pony's face.  “Crap out your teeth!”  With a toss of her leaf-splattered mane, she marched off carrying a dazed Dinky in tow.

        Harmony shrugged her shoulders with a crazy, cock-eyed expression.  “What is the deal here?!  I'm not the friggin' bad guy!  I just saved us all—including your precious muffin, you ungrateful—”

        “Miss Harmony...” Fluttershy squeaked and struggled to trot over on rubber-band limbs.  In a panting fever, she sweated to say, “Please, let it rest.”

        “Oh come on—Not you too!”  Harmony barked.  She spun to face Fluttershy.  A wooden flight of stairs stretched above a green seat through rain-refracted firelight.  She squinted her eyes, then briefly hissed past a dizzy spell.  “I swear, Dinky was perfectly safe!  I knew exactly what I was doing!  I've taken crazier risks and survived before—”

        “That may be all well and fine for you, Miss Harmony,” Fluttershy struggled to say.  “But you must understand, there is more at stake here.  Miss Doo and her daughter... they're going through so much, and when you heartlessly put her into danger's way—”

        “Heartless?” The last pony blinked at Fluttershy in disbelief.  Something inside of her melted coldly.  “But Fluttershy... I...” She bit her lip.  “I'm only trying to be a good pony, I swear it...”

        “And I know that.”  Fluttershy slumped briefly on the ground, wincing through waves of magical resonance.  She fought hyperventilation and finally said:  “But you have to understand... Being kind is a great deal more difficult when you have other ponies to look out for other than just yourself.”

        A curtain of numbness instantly washed over the survivor from the future, cascading coldly over her lungs like a sheet of evening rain.  She bit her lip, paralyzed by that undeniable truth.  For yet another time in her life, she couldn't look into the optics of that bringer of painfully kind words.  She couldn't last against the stare master.  She slumped back down to her haunches like the pitiful little foal she was and stared into the upturned grass, the signs of a vicious battle that only residually needed to be fought to begin with.

        There were no words.

        Until Fluttershy spoke them:  “We... We have rested long enough.  Miss Harmony, I... I can't make it on my own.”  The yellow pegasus gulped and breathed against the dancing grass around her.  “I want to help Ditzy and her child so much... But the magic is too much for my weak body.  I'm going to need your help some more...”  A quivering pair of lips.  “If you're willing to give it, Miss Harmony...”

        Harmony's Entropan nostrils sniffled, like an iron tower leaking in all the exposed places, and she was too scared to question why.  “Always, Fluttershy.”  She leaned over and kindly hoisted the wincing caretaker towards her flank.  “Always willing to help you, Miss Fluttershy...”

        The pained animal tamer whimpered and leaned over the weight of the time traveler like a shivering infant.  A brave breath, and she shuffled her lower hooves, moving in rhythmic timing with Harmony's trotting body as the two limped slowly after the distant gray dots of Ditzy and her child, piercing deeper into the great green grave of Everfree.

        Harmony gnashed her teeth, dragging the flimsy threads of Fluttershy's body alongside the infinite weight of her copper hooves.  Fluttershy's words shook her then as they had stabbed her twenty-five years ago.  The bobbing forest before her blurred suddenly in a moist blanket of confusion and sorrow, refracting, like icy cold raindrops...

        ...that stabbed every square centimeter of the charging foal's orange face.  She growled into her toothy grip of the flimsy stick as she galloped towards the shadowy creature from beyond.  The woodshed disappeared into the storm behind her.  The distant firelight from the cottage bobbed and weaved.  Thunder shook the puddles like rocks skipping off of a lake's surface as the lightning strobed.

        Dozens of razor sharp teeth:  the four-legged beast reared in front of her, its beady eyes reflecting the woodshed that it was about to rip its way through Scootaloo for.  But just before flesh could meet sundering flesh, there was an angelic fluttering of wings.  A golden voice raked the scene in two, stringing the would-be combatants apart with invisible reins like black thorns...

        “Stop!” Fluttershy shouted.  The words were flung towards the foal, but the stare was stabbing into the maw of the lumbering beast ahead.

        Scootaloo gasped, spitting the stick from her mouth as she stood in a wet mat of violet mane hair.  She craned her neck to cast a shivering glance over the yellow pegasus' flank.  “Fluttershy!  I'm about to save the—!”

        “You're very brave, Scootaloo.  But neither of us is a match for a chupacabra.”

        “We'll see about that!”  Scootaloo snarled and re-enaged the monster on galloping hooves.  Her entire world jolted suddenly as she found herself unable to finish the charge.  Glancing back, she saw Fluttershy's hooves clamped over the foal's tail hairs in the damp earth.  The yellow pegasus anchored Scootaloo in place with a surprising amount of strength and authority.  “Fluttershy, what gives?!  Let me go—!”

        “Shhh!”  Fluttershy flicked a wet pink tail over Scootaloo's petite neck, like a motherly limb brushing her to the side, paralyzing her.  She forced the shivering foal behind and stood protectively between the orange pony and the shadowed chupacabra in front of the two of them.  “I know what you want,” she murmured towards the deeply humming beast and its fangs, fangs, fangs.  “If you need it so bad that you're willing to threaten harmless ponies for it, then I will not stop you.”

        Scootaloo gasped.  With wide twitching eyes, she stared at Fluttershy in disbelief, not to mention a brief foalish contempt.

        But the yellow pegasus stood her ground just as her words did, glaring at the undaunted monstrosity.  “You may have the woodshed.  You may do with it as you please—But you will leave us alone.  Your selfishness is too petty to deserve the blood of the innocent.”  She strongly shoved a shivering Scootaloo along with her as she shuffled sideways from the jaws of the beast, opening a clear and muddy path to the rainslicked wooden structure.  “But if you so much as approach the cottage... if you make any move to threaten me or my guest here...”  She glared—staring daggers at the vicious beast.  “...it will be a mistake that you will not remember pleasantly.  I have more friends in the forest than there are stars in the sky.  Enjoy your victory here for what it is, a triviality.  I only hope that the one day that you realize how mean you've been, a stronger creature will show you the same mercy you're refusing us.”

        The creature merely hissed, watching and drooling as the twin pegasi weakly shuffled away from its muscular presence.  Once there was no room left for sentient debate, the ravenous creature charged on clawed feet and slammed effortlessly through the door of the woodshed, screaming unintelligible obscenities into the bloody shadows of the night.

        Scootaloo gasped—a face grimaced between fear and anger.  With one last jolt of her petite muscles, she attempted to run across the wet scene and ram the pillaging beast.  Before she could so much as move, the calamitous sight of the woodshed was flung from her vision as Fluttershy hoisted the foal by her violet mane hair with surprisingly effortlessness.  With an aggravated grunt, she was dragged around the far side of the cottage...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ... and into the dry air of the thatch-roofed manger behind the home, far away from the thunderous noise of the beast's triumphant ransacking.  Fluttershy let go of Scootaloo and pressed herself against a wooden beam, staring over the shuddering shadows of dozens of half-slumbering animals to see if they had been followed.  To her relief, there was no sign of a mad chupacabra's pursuit.

        “Oh thank goodness!  Celestia be praised, that was too terribly close!  Oh Scootaloo, I did tell you to stay inside.  Please, tell me...”  She turned about and raised a hoof to the trembling foal's face.  “Are you hurt anywhere?”

        “Nnnngh!”  Scootaloo spat and shook herself free of the caretaker's touch.  Sliding across an inexplicable pile of ashes, she snarled angrily at the weak yellow pegasus standing in front of her.  “What was that?!  What was all of that?!”

        “Scootaloo, please.  Remain calm.  I know that was quite scary, but—”

        “But nothing!”  Scootaloo hissed.  “I wasn't scared!  I wasn't scared in the least!  Dang it, Fluttershy, that thing is tearing away at all your stuff!  I was the one thing standing in between the shed and that creature, and then you drop in and let it ruin all of those supplies just to save me?!  All of the animal tamers in the Equestrian Valley are counting on you to keep an eye on that stuff, and now it's all smashed to crap—and all because of me?!  How could you?!”

        “Scootaloo...” Fluttershy gulped.  She braved a jittery smile as she flew her voice across the rain-echoing air of the darklit manger.  “An entire royal surplus of supplies could crumble to dust, for all I care, so long as no harm befalls you.”

        “No!  No!” The foal roared.  “You're wrong!  I could have saved the stuff!  Fluttershy, after an entire afternoon of feeding and sheltering me, couldn't you have just let me earn my friggin' keep?!”

        “I...” Fluttershy stammered, wilting suddenly from the hot-orange storm of anger that outshone the lightning around them.  “I only wanted you to be safe, Scootaloo.  You're sweet and precious to me—”

        “Nnnngh!  Stop it!  Be quiet—Nnnngh!”  Scootaloo dug her face into the hay-strewn ground.  Her teeth gnashed.  When her eyes reopened, they were burning violet coals.  “Your kindness stinks!”

        Fluttershy gasped, recoiling as if from a cannonball.

        “I hate it!  Your kindness stinks, and you stink!” The orange pegasus foal heaved and shouted into the thunder.  “It makes you weak!  It makes you weak and helpless!  Now look!  Look at what it's doing to everything you were ever good at!  I want none of it!  I want none of your stinkin' kindness!”

        “Scootaloo... You're—”

        “I'm nothing!  I sure as heck ain't weak like you!”  Scootaloo's mouth snarled, but her limbs were shaking.  The trembling crept up to her torso on blood ice.  “All kindness does is run out on you!  That's all it ever does!  I don't need it!  I don't need you, and I don't need them!”  Her eyes were twitching, bouncing off green grass and granite shoals before a great serpent somewhere.  “I'm strong!  I'm stronger than you!  I'm stronger than they... than they ever were....”  A crumbling, like a scooter shattering down its center.  Her violet eyes pulsated into twin white ghosts.  Her lungs heaved in and out of the manger's ashes, like a bubbling gray future haloed in darkness, and she caved in on herself with a thorn-induced grimace before bursting with one last fitful snarl:  “They're... Th-Th-They're just rocks!  Dumb, stupid rocks!”  She hiccuped and heaved, heaved, wretched:  “That's all they are!  Wh-Why can't I stop friggin' thinking about them?!  Why can't I just get them out of my head?!”  She hissed and bowed to the ground, covering her shivering head with a pair of muddied hooves, the bane of every warm and happy home ever.  “D-Dumb rocks... J-Just stupid, dumb r-rocks...”

        The world was spinning, a heated maelstrom of vomitous sobs starved for release.  Out from the billowing cyclone, a silken snout emerged to gently nuzzle her, followed by a golden voice—almost as crystal clean as hers—warming like a womb.

        “It's okay, Scootaloo.  Let it come...”

        “I... I can't... I-I can't!  I'm n-not strong enough!  I don't understand, Fluttershy, I d-don't understand why it hurts so much...”

        “Shhhh...” The caretaker's neck enshrouded her, along with a pair of satin limbs.  Celestial Speech cradled her beyond the evening's tears, gradually melting through the veil.  “The world is a strange and confusing place.  It's okay to cry about it.”

        Scootaloo did.  Diving into Fluttershy's embrace, she did.  Flinging herself into the lonely death throes of all of her shivering memories, she did.  She did until she was too dry to do it anymore, and still Fluttershy held her, Fluttershy rocked her, Fluttershy loved her—as Scootaloo secretly wished anypony would, but as nopony ever did, and yet Fluttershy did, because she was there.  More than that, she was kind.  Strength and courage melted to that golden voice, a velvety tone that branded Scootaloo far more permanently than any talent ever could—or would.

        She didn't even need to be alone for it.

        The silhouettes of three pegasi marched in a limping line across the purple backdrop of stars as they stole their way into the dark green bowels of Everfree, their shadowed forms intermittently lit by hovering lantern bugs.  Yellow haloes danced across the panting figures of Ditzy, Harmony, and Fluttershy as they shuffled deeper and deeper into the bushy hovel of nature, following the random bolts of a stammering foal's possessed horn.

        “I'll see you in Equestrian dreams.  Nnnngh... Weeping Autumn, post rapture's never returning.  Hckkkt!”

        Harmony cast a twitching amber glance at the foal hanging from a pouch in Ditzy's saddlebag.  The time traveler's Entropan skin shouldn't have been sweating, but it was, it damnably was.  The unicorn's horn strobed brightly, and just then all the trees in the forest resembled burning green flame.  Harmony clenched her eyes shut briefly and hissed, when she reopened them she saw a field of white rocks.  Every pale stone floated up towards the burning sky in the reverse explosion of a gigantic moon that swallowed a melting sun.  Onyx Eclipse.  Onyx Eclipse.  Onyx Eclipse.

        The last pony stumbled.  She felt her saddlebag shifting in the pelting snow.  Fearing that her copper rifle would slide out, she reached a hoof up—only to feel the gentle touch of a weak hoof.  There was no saddlebag; Fluttershy's very real and barely breathing body was slumped against her backside, struggling to trot straight.

        Harmony gasped.  Shifting the yellow pegasus' weight, she paused to sit down and cradle Fluttershy's body to her.  “Miss Fluttershy...” She stammered desperately, like a foal that had outrun trolls over a million kilometers in a single breath.  “Fluttershy, speak to me!”

        The caretaker murmured tiredly, her clenched eyelids tensing under a dancing glitter of lightning bugs that danced over her like so many, many burning thorns.  “Mmmmff... Just... Just so exhausted... Mmmnngh... The... Mana crystals... Are we...?”

        Harmony heaved and heaved.  The smell of rain and ash-laden hay rose with each breath.  She flashed a look across the forested trail and whimpered:  “Ditzy... Nnngh... Miss Doo, please!  For Celestia's sake, just one friggin' moment!  I beg you...!”

        Ditzy glanced back confusedly in midtrot.  Behind her, Dinky shuddered and hissed.  A glowing horn... a foglight pierced the gray clouds as the last pony's airship flew head-on into Gilliam's leering battlecruiser.

        Harmony wrenched her eyes away, howling a desperate voice into the center of her spinning self.  The entire bowels of Everfree were twirling around her.  She was a copper ballast in free-fall.  The time traveler seethed, flung her eyes open, and clung to Fluttershy... shaking her... trying desperately to wake her.

        “Miss Fluttershy... Stay awake... Please... Stay with me!”  She gulped dryly and hissed beyond the caretaker's pink mane.  “I'm... I think I'm losing cohesion.”  The world danced in brief plumes of emerald madness.  She hissed into the crook of her Entropan limb and blindly seethed at the apathetic Exile to whom the flesh belonged.  “Curse you!  I have an anchor, isn't that enough?!  Isn't that enough, you selfish cowardly Princess...?!”

        “Come with me, my little pony...” A phantom voice sputtered from the foalish quasar floating amidst the three.  “And I shall give you healing.”

        “You're one to talk, Spike...” Harmony sneered through gnashing teeth as her burning eyes fought through the lightning bugs, the airships, the carcasses and carcasses falling out of Cloudsdale.  “You run your iron mouth off like a college professor—And yet you never tell me enough!  This is all your fault, dang it!  It was too little a smoking breath, or not enough of your flame, or whatever.  When I get back, Spike, I am so tearing you a new gem-hole!”

        A pair of googly yellow eyes blinked in confusion.  A yellow head rose into frame, stirring painfully as a pair of blue pearls returned to the land of the living.  “Nnnngh... Miss Harmony?  What's all this about Twilight's assistant—?”

        “Just tell him to shut up...” Harmony ran a hoof over her copper skull and winced.  The forest buckled under green vapors between every other heart beat.  A schoolroom full of giggling voices speared her from all sides.  “Tell them all to shut up... They didn't come all the way back here like I did.  They don't understand...”

        “Our special talent is not arguing!” a sing-songy voice beside Ditzy chirped.  “Besides, what would the cutie mark of somepony who's talent is arguing even look like?”

        “Nnnngh!  Go roast your head you stupid dictionary!”  Harmony barked.  She spun and frowned across the fuming stretch of forested dreamland.  “Why don't you marry her if you love her friggin' mane so dang much?!”

        “Miss Fluttershy...?” Ditzy backed away with a suddenly strange unicorn at her flank.

        The caretaker in question grasped the time traveler with solid hooves.  “Harmony, you're not making any sense...” She weakly gulped and braved the aches and pains of the magical resonance.  “What's wrong?  Talk to us.”

        “I... I can't... Can't...”

        “Can't what?”

        Harmony gulped and hung her head towards the ground.  Orange hooves and wet hay—A blink—Blood soaked snow and ashes.  “Can't... Can't think... Can hardly breathe.  These lungs should be... invulnerable...”

        “Invulnerable?”

        “Immutable...” Harmony hissed and pointed her nauseous head towards the swirling forest canopy.  “But I can't... I feel... I feel...”

        “You're just chicken!” Apple Bloom pointed with a smirk.  A red and gold cape swished as the yellow foal trotted into the corner of the storm cellar.  “Scootaloo-oo-oo!  Scoot-Scootaloo-oo-oo!”  She exploded into ash and bone.

        With a foalish shriek, Harmony flung her limbs forward and clamped her hooves over Fluttershy's.

        The yellow pegasus glanced up with quivering lips of confusion.  “Miss Harmony...?!”

        “Just hold my wrists...” The last pony squeaked.  There were so many gray skies and not enough golden sunsets.  “Just hold them for a second, please.  I...”  She gulped and heaved.  A homeless foal was storing two apples away to last a weekend.  All that was real was pain.  “I... I can't tell anymore what was then... or what is later.  All I can feel is now.  Maybe...”  She gave a bitter smile, something that could grow under a Celestial mirror, even if it was only half-alive.  “Maybe it's always only ever been now, and the rest is a dream... just a bad nightmare.  Like the one Dinky is having.”  She glanced up at the nervously shivering mother-and-child.  “If I could have twice as many headaches, and half as many tears.  Nnnnghhh—Epona!  I could eat a mountain of cougar meat!”

        “Miss Harmony...” Fluttershy weakly wheezed but fought to brush a gentle hoof across the trembling pegasus' copper face.  “Could it be possible that the same magical resonance that's paralyzing me could be affecting your h-head somehow?”

        Harmony winced, staring painfully into the pulsating glow.  All of the dead world's twilight had gathered into one gray nub of haunting enchantment.  She hated it all the same, but she couldn't bring herself to call it truth.  That would have been too easy.

        “I only wish that were true...” She whimpered.  “But that would ruin this moment.  I know that it's horrible—It's a pathetic, frightening, and terrifying moment that's threatening Dinky's life.”  A raspy hiss, half saturated with a sob.  “But I need to know that it is real.”  She clasped tighter to Fluttershy's hooves, weathering the sea of lightning bugs, the glinting lanternlight off of a cackling Gilda's goggles as she took swig after swig of mind numbing joy juice.  “I need this moment to be as real if not more so than anything that I've ever thought has happened in my lopsided life, or else this whole thing... this whole trip is meaningless!”  She grunted and weathered fountains of green flames under her eyelids: Onyx Eclipse, Onyx Eclipse, Onyx Eclipse.  “Worthless.”

        “But it is all real!  I assure you...” A hoof rested on her shoulders.  “What makes you think that it isn't, Miss Harmony—?”

        The last pony shook her head and hissed, “Stop calling me that!  Stop saying it!  It isn't real either!  Nothing is anymore!”

        “Then... Then what do you want me to call you?”

        The time traveler blanched, staring down a rainbow symbol of refracting memories, unraveling into scattered filament like the disheveled thread of her narrow and singed life.  The thinnest strand—the one colored orange with the amber-lit fog of yesteryear—it knew the answer to Fluttershy's question.  It knew what it always wanted to be called.  In a rain-slick bubble of haze, the shadow of the orange strand shuffled down towards a green seat and beckoned a yellow cloud beyond, but Harmony stopped it there, she always did.

        “I'm not strong enough for that.”  Harmony dryly gulped with moist amber eyes.  “Nopony could earn that.  She can't... She just can't say it.  She can't walk down those steps.”

        “What steps, dear friend?”

        “'Friend?!'”  Harmony's eyes twitched like daggers into Fluttershy.  “You... would call me friend?  You, the cleanest and most angelic pony in Equestria, who cannot earn herself the company that she so righteously deserves, would call me that?”  It was an anger, a sorrowful anger, that flew through her lips on bitter wings.  “Miss Fluttershy, I have lived that life that you think you are destined for.  I have lived that cold, gray, friendless life.  There is nothing noble about it.  There never will be.  You deserve more... Both you and Miss Doo deserve more.  Look at me, look at the horrible mess I am.  You do not want this.  Do you understand me?  Run to your friends.  Pierce the iron curtain that separates you from your family, your father, your mother, and do not end up like this.”

        “Just stay calm, Miss Harmony.  We... We're almost to the caves of mana crystals.  We have to be.” Fluttershy threw Ditzy a nervous glance and gulped.  “Then we all can be whole again, especially Dinky.”

        “Do not ignore my words—Please... I...”  Harmony heaved and leaned her trembling weight against the caretaker for a spell.  After a shuddering breath, she regained the strength to say:  “I am not mad.  I am simply not worthy... not worthy of this moment, no matter how real I want it to be.”  She gazed sickly at Ditzy, the streams of her souls following her yellow eyes as she crumbled every which way.  “I am not a kind pony, Miss Fluttershy.  What I do—for Dinky or for the Capricorn's infant—I do out of fear.  I don't want you to die, Miss Fluttershy...”  She whimpered and clung to her tighter, tossing her black amber-streaked mane.  “And... And yet here I am... dragging you deeper into darkness.  It's all my fault that you're in the shape you're in.  I'm the end of you.”  She gazed off beyond the lanternlight into a deep crown of black thorns.  Her pupils dilated as she shivered upon the precipice of bitter truth.  “I'm the end of everything.”

        Out from the darkness, a warm silken touch embraced her, like so many eons ago in a collapsing manger.  The softest of blue eyes, the softest of smiles, and a golden voice converged once more upon the orphan of time.

        “There is no end so long as there is kindness, Harmony.  Kindness reaches to all ponies everywhere.  It circles back from the deepest shadows and blesses all of us in sequence.  Everything that a pony does for another, in gentleness or in desperation, comes around to bless them back.  That is the key to life; it's what differentiates things that bleed from things that gather dust.  There is much kindness in you, Harmony, and there is also much confusion.  But it's the kindness that I feel the most, that I know has circled around your less graceful flaws, that has made me glad to be here, even when all shadows struggle to strangle me.  I can see a light in your eyes.”

        Harmony stared back.  Dinky's glowing horn was still piercing.  The green chaos in her peripheral was still there, but something settled her breathing nonetheless.  She didn't have to understand it.  She only had to relax.

        “I... I can't see that light, Fluttershy...”

        “Maybe you can't see it.  But it doesn't mean you can't share it, Harmony...”

        Harmony took a shuddering breath.  Glancing up, she stared at Ditzy.   “Miss Doo... I can see better than you.  But... for some reason, I can't entirely trust what I see.  Miss Fluttershy is too weak right now to keep her eyes opened for a long time.  I know that you have reasons to not like me... or trust me.  But if we're to find the caves, we're going to have to combine our imperfect sights, together.”

        It was with a remarkable swiftness that Ditzy nodded back.  “Sure thing, Mister Squirrel.  I think we c-c-c-c-can do that for my Muffin.”

        “I think we can do it for Fluttershy too.” Harmony weakly smiled.  With a wince, she fought the dizziness and hoisted Fluttershy up.  The yellow pegasus merely shrieked and slumped down harder to the ground.  “What's the matter?”

        “So... So much pain...” Fluttershy whimpered.  “I... I'm sorry, Harmony.  I... I just can't walk anymore.”

        Harmony hissed past a billowing field of burnt-out houses.  She clenched and unclenched the green heat in her eyes.  “Then get on my back.  I will carry you.”

        “Oh Harmony, I couldn't!  It's too much...”

        “I will carry you,” Harmony nearly snarled.  “Trust me.  I... I am strong enough.”  The last pony ventured a frowning breath.  “I am strong enough to carry you, Fluttershy.  Thanks to you, I can believe that again.  Now get on.”

        Fluttershy obeyed with a tremble.  She flung her invalidic self over Harmony's weight and dangled there.  On quivering hooves, Harmony trudged forward.  Ditzy waited for her, and once the two were neck and neck, they sauntered down a suddenly steep slope in the forest.

        In such an aching precision, the four ponies descended into the grave of Everfree.  One was possessed, one was blind, one was paralyzed, and one was mad.  Leaning on each other like crutches, they stumbled bravely, carrying the souls of two dying children into the womb of Mother Nature on six wings and a prayer.

        “I've never been taught to say Eponal prayers before sleep...” A pitifully exhausted Scootaloo murmured as she found herself lying under the covers of a bed—not just any bed, but a hauntingly familiar bed, Fluttershy's second floor sleeping arrangement.  “My parents... mmm... They're not very traditional.  They hardly even give thanks to Princess Nebula for the firmaments.”

        “Well, I'm not going to judge anypony unfairly.  Especially you,” Fluttershy said with a gentle smile as she tucked the multicolored quilt duvet of the bed over the breathless foal's body.  The rain had dwindled to a soft patter outside the cottage's window, bathing the warm bedroom in a dancing mosaic of purple hues that kissed the shadows away.  “If I may say so myself, Nebula's tenacity shines through you.  You're a pegasus of many surprises, Scootaloo.  If nightly prayers aren't to your fancy... how about a lullaby?”

        “You... You would sing to me?”  The foal weakly gulped.  “Fluttershy... I...” She kneaded the folds of the blankets warming her as a shameful moisture returned to her violet eyes.  “I said so many horrible things to you earlier.  I was so stupid and mad.  I insulted you... I made you feel bad...”

        “You did not make me feel anything but special, Scootaloo,” Fluttershy said with an immaculate, immutable smile.  “Maybe you don't understand it, and that's okay with me.  But I know that things needed to be said—ugly or not—and it's all a good thing, because in spite of it all... you're still with me now, and there're no more frowns to be had.  Now are there?”

        Scootaloo sniffled.  She clenched her eyes shut all the same.  “No...” It was a half whimper, laced with a painful smile that limped from several blackened kilometers away.  “No, there aren't.”

        “Then what shame is there in rejoicing, Scootaloo?”  Fluttershy nuzzled the foal briefly as her soft voice brought a calmness to the air.  “And what shame is there in singing?  Life should be joyous.  It was built through the kindness and the generosity of generations of ponies long before our time to be this way.”

        “Uhm... Where are you going to sleep if I'm stealing your bed?”

        “Hmmm-hmm-hmm...” Fluttershy chuckled under her breath.  “You're not stealing anything, Scootaloo.  And as for me, anywhere I sleep is a happy place, so long as I know that the ones I care for are at peace.”

        “You...” Scootaloo shuddered, but there was no reason to fight the simplicity of the matter.  “You are too sweet to me, Fluttershy.”  It was as honest as it was painful to admit.  “You've done so much... almost too much...”

        “Shhh... I only do that which I love doing.”  Fluttershy stroked the child's cheek one last time.  She drifted back, and her soul oozed out into a golden cloud that gently rocked the cradle of the room into euphoric slumber.  “Hush now, quiet now, it's time to lay your sleepy head.  Hush now, quiet now, it's time to go to bed.  Drift drift off to sleep...”

        Scootaloo's eyes shut, and when they did they were not full of a chupacabra's razor sharp teeth,  a field of lifeless stones, an empty barn devoid of food or laughter, or any of the other gray things that had formed the patchwork craziness of the foal's young life.  Her head drifted in a golden cloud, her infant coat being licked clean by a motherly tongue.  She tilted her head up and saw in the noonlight the silhouette of a sunset-colored pegasus with ruby eyes smiling down at her.  But sometime into the liquid hours of that nearly forgotten moment, the smile faded—and the mare disappeared in a cold mute scream, swallowed by the bottomless throat of a serpentine mineshaft.

        When Scootaloo's eyes opened, the rain had stopped.  Half of the night had died in a happy sigh.  Fluttershy was nowhere to be seen, but the orange foal knew better.  With suddenly awake, shivering limbs, she knew where that golden warmth was, and where the silhouette that it resembled wasn't.  With a heartbeat that could suck the moisture out of the rain-slicked earth, she stirred and slipped out from under the covers... padding on soft hooves towards a set of descending wooden stairs...

        The last pony winced, shaking the orange shadow from her amber eyes and refocusing on the boulder-strewn landscape in front of her.  The green vines and leaves of Everfree had bled into this sudden pit of rocky earth and jagged stone.  Ditzy hovered a few meters across the ground, avoiding the uneven ground for Dinky's sake, making sure not to fly so high that she might lose the captured leyline of beaming plasma that the horn was pointing towards their goal.

        “What... What did you j-just say, Harmony?” Fluttershy whimpered as she was lying limp as a platinum noodle across the copper pegasus' lurching spine.  She resumed a conversation that had fitfully begun several numb seconds ago.  “I... I can hardly hear...”

        “I said go to your family, Fluttershy!  Speak to them.  Tell them that you love them as much as you love everypony else in this crazy world.”

        “I... I can't even stand right now.  How can I possibly go see my family?”

        “Not now!  Nnngh—!” Harmony hissed and shuddered through a wave of green haze.  A ring of trolls surrounded her as she brandished a blood soaked alicorn's marble horn.  She felt the light weight of Fluttershy on her shoulders and sunk back to the here-and-now.  “When we're done.  When we get back!  You go to your parents—dang it—and you talk to them!  You hug them!  You spend as much time with them as well as your friends.  Do it, Fluttershy.  Do it while you still friggin' can.”  She stumbled briefly over a stone.  A wheezing lurch; and she steadied herself and Fluttershy before a fountain of rising dust, of ashes, of corpses, of “Onyx Eclipse”, “Onyx Eclipse”.  “Pr-Promise me...”

        “You... You speak as if...” Fluttershy's wilted voice matched the exhaustion of all three pegasi's limbs.  “... as if you're going to leave me.”

        “Eyes in the darkness.  One moon circles...”

        Harmony ignored the unicorn's pained mewling.  “I am always leaving... Always flying away!”  Harmony snarled against the waves of madness and followed the source of it, hobbling after Dinky's strobing horn, pathetically racing on numb legs to kiss the burning future before the others would have to.  “It's all that I can afford to do.  That's my lot in life.  But you—you still have a chance, Fl-Fluttershy.  Take it for what it's worth!  Don't be alone any longer.  If nothing else, this is the reason for my visit!  To tell you this.”

        “I... I thought you were... Thought you were sent here on behalf of the Court... and to gather information for Her Majesty...”

        “I was...”  Harmony whimpered.  “A million eons ago, I was.  But none of that matters now.”  She glanced up at the sharp rock walls surrounding the three.  Her heart murmured.  She saw vines, rows upon rows of thorny vines.  There was a place for a Capricorn and a yellow pegasus.  She hoped that there was a place for her as well.  “All that matters is this moment... and what becomes of it.”

        Prophetically, upon a pulse of distant green, Dinky's entire body lurched.  Her horn strobed brightly enough to create a second moon.  As the world around them flashed in the magical illumination, the motherly mailpony carrying the foal collapsed in a yelping heap.

        “Miss Doo!” Harmony shouted.  Setting down Fluttershy, she broke into a canter Ditzy's way, ultimately tripping over a rock that landed her once more on the pulsing canyon floor.  “Ooof!”

        “What... What's happening?” Fluttershy called out from where she painfully stirred.  “Did Ditzy just collapse...?!”

        “It's the horn!”  Harmony crawled over towards Ditzy, hissing as the world billowed beyond the edges of her amber eyes with green waves upon every pulse of the unicorn's horns.  She reached forward into the madness surging through her brain and clamped her hooves over one of the gray pegasus' legs.  “It's finally gotten to her as well!”  She pulled and pulled, yanking a corpse out from under a pile of dried-out unicorns inside a Stalliongrad temple.  “Nnnnngh—Come onnnn—Haaaugh!”  She slumped down, limply embracing the wall-eyed mare that she had just dragged from Dinky's spasming body.

        “No... No... Let g-g-g-g-go of me!”  The pegasus' sobs echoed off of the surrounding walls of rock.  “My Muffin!  She's dying!  Oh Gultophine, please—Spare her!  I beg you!”

        “Dang it, she's not dying!”  Harmony hissed.  She waved the fumes of Bruce's cigar smoke out of her face and woke herself up with a yell:  “She's responding to something!  Her horn is shooting a friggin' huge beam due west!  Fluttershy—” She glanced back.  “What could it mean?”

        “We must be close!” the caretaker's voice desperately squeaked.  “If her horn is pulsing even brighter than before, then that could only mean there are mana crystals nearby!”

        “Then you mean that we're near the cave?!”

        “Yes, Miss Harmony—Why are you shouting?”

        Harmony felt like mentioning the shrieking beak of the phoenix right next to her, or the murderous roar of the Dirigible Dogs' iron propellers just a few meters away.  She tossed her mane until the shaved violet stubble flew back out in black, amber-streaked threads.  “Never mind that!  Let's frickin' finish this already!  Miss Doo, do you see a cave nearby?”

        “I... I can't see!”  The mailpony whimpered and clutched nervously to the last pony as her neck yanked all around.  “The walls of this canyon are too thick!  Oh Nebula, I can never ever see!  Where is Dinky?!  Where is my Muffin?!”

        “Nnnngh!” Harmony hissed and shook the winged mare.  “Dang it, Miss Doo!  Close one of your friggin' eyes if you have to!  I can't see anything, period!  We all need you to spot the cave!  Dinky needs you to spot the cave!”

        “I... I c-c-c-c-can't!”

        “Yes you can!  If you can't spot it, Dinky dies!  Take it from 'Mister Squirrel'!  If you can't look for me, look for her!”

        “I...” Ditzy hissed and heaved.  Her head rolled as her eyes rolled.  “I...”  She froze upon a sudden angle, her body jolting.  “Oh thank Goddess Nebula—There!”

        “Where 'there', Miss Doo?”  Harmony tried to look; a drunken raccoon was screaming in her face.  “Nnngh!” She winced.

        “Due southwest!  About thirty tr-tr-tr-tr-trots!”  Ditzy hissed painfully and struggled to pick her limbs up.  “I'm taking her in!”

        The last pony suddenly thought of a pony, a very old pony.  With lime-colored wrinkles and a gentle breath, this pony spoke words of comfort to her, not knowing that she was the last equestrian soul to ever enjoy being alive.  “Like heck you are!”  Harmony suddenly shoved the gray mare aside.  She hobbled up on pinpricked hooves and stumbled towards the pulsating horn.  “You've carried her long enough!”

        “Daah!”  Ditzy reeled amidst the rocks.  She shook a dizzied head and gasped:  “What are you doing?!”

        “Miss Harmony—” Fluttershy squeaked from beyond.

        Harmony stumbled.  Harmony shuffled.  Harmony limped her way into Dinky's cosmic aura.  “Neither of you two have the strength left to so much as hold her!  At least you can't touch her without risk of losing your life!”

        “And what about your mind, Miss Harmony?!”  Fluttershy desperately yelped across the blistering canyon of lights, lights, lights.  “What will be left of you afterwards?”

        “Nothing that will matter nearly as much!”  Harmony slumped on the ground, reaching achingly with one hoof towards the source of the billowing mana.  “Nnnngh... This girl is the light of your lives, especially yours, Miss Doo!  All I have to go back to is darkness!”  She blinked through a shadowed gasp in the stars, an onyx eclipse.  “No matter how much I tell myself that something can be done about it!”

        “She's my Muffin!  She's mine to take care of!”  The mailpony fought in vain to crawl across the agonizing scene.  “I told you not to touch her—”

        “Miss Doo, I know how much you love your child!” Harmony slurred against the waves of mana.  Her eyelids flickered green.  She opened her amber pupils and stared—tears streaming—into the core of madness.  Rainbow Dash winked from beyond the black bars and flew away, leaving her behind.  A burning strength returned to her copper limbs.  “But I promise you, I will not harm her!  I may not be a k-kind pony... but I am a strong one.  For what it's worth!”

        “But... But...” Ditzy stirred, only to feel a golden voice wafting up from behind.

        “Let her do it, Miss Doo,” Fluttershy had managed to crawl painfully over to the mailpony.  “Let her save your darling daughter...”

        “Why must I?”  Ditzy sniffled and shivered.  “Why do you trust her so much?!”

        “Because she's trying...” Fluttershy smiled painfully.  “Don't you see?”  She pointed so that even the blind pegasus could witness.  “She's trying to change.  It's a beautiful thing... like completing a circle.”

        The mailpony could only watch in breathless fear.  Her eyes burned and bled to rotate together as one.

        Hyperventilating, Harmony squirmed over and reached for the bright unicorn foal.  Celestial bands shot everywhere in vaporous waves, burning the girl's blonde mane to white and lavender and back.

        “I'm sorry for every mean thing I've said, Sweetie Belle.”  The last pony afforded herself a brief, absurd chuckle and flung her hooves into the fire.  Dinky's coat burned at the mere touch, singeing magically through the Entropan flesh.  “Nnnngh—Haaugh!”  Harmony found a muscular ball of fury inside her numb self and let it boil to the surface in a furious shout.  She lifted herself up, then hoisted the unicorn and her smoldering horn onto her shoulders.  She proceeded to trot a burning kilometer, every hoofstep torturing her like a dance through green lava.  The last pony pointed her amber orbs forward—piercing the darkness to see a mineshaft stapled shut with wooden boards and desperate boulders.

        A yellow pegasus murmured from far behind, clutching to a frightful mother.  “This world is a kind world; it wants to be...”

        “...the only proof you need for this is the world that we live in—Equestria.”

        Fluttershy had once spoken, smiling, as she and Scootaloo stared out from the reading seat and watched the rain-slick world melt around them in a liquid circle.

        “Equestria is a result of the spirit of kindness having nearly achieved its one noble goal throughout the history of existence.”

        The orange foal's pink tail flicked as she leaned forward and asked.  “And what goal is that, Fluttershy?”

        The last pony's amber eyes reopened.  The serpentine mouth of the mineshaft was replaced with a yawning cave full of glistening quartz—all enchanted with a magical purple hue.

        A snarling smirk, and the last pony answered herself.  “Harmony.”

        She followed the golden voice on silken threads that out-throbbed the burning of the unicorn's horn above her.  It carried her, lovingly, deep into the dead womb of Everfree, treading over the holy paths of Faustmare and her daughter, kissing her softer than any yellow-stringed dragon's tooth, clearing the madness like a pair of angelic wings might part the clouding mists of moonvision.  Suddenly, there were no thorns, there were no Ursas, there were no fossils—there was only the here and now, and Dinky's life in the last pony's hooves.

        The copper pegasus' pained breaths were echoing now as she stood in the middle of the crucible of mana crystals.  Her glistening body reflected a million times off the jagged walls, populating the gray shadows of her mind with the infinite shadows of herself, the only future she could ever salvage.  It suddenly didn't seem nearly as important as that naked moment, as she slumped down to her haunches, reached her hooves up to grasp the quivering unicorn's coat, and raised Dinky's burning figure up towards the roof of the magical hovel.

        “Haaugh... Forest children!  The murder of emerald blood!  A figure in denim who speaks to nopony!”

        “Easy for you to say, kiddo!”  Harmony hissed and strained under the tiny supernova exploding above her.  “Nnnngh—Dang it, come on!”  Her entire body quivered and shook under the sheer force of the magical emanations, capable of ending any one pony... but not all ponies... or the end of ponies.  “Hnnngh—Get out of her, you stupid mangy space goat!  I mean it!  Her skin is not yours—Do you hear me in that stubby little horn?!”  She snarled with the combined madness of a night full of dying stars.  “It is not your skin to wear!”

        As the thunderous seconds melted on, Dinky merely hung there, her hooves dangling helplessly in the last pony's copper grasp as her horn pulsed, and pulsed, and pulsed.  The glow never left her eyes—as a matter of fact, the ivory essence of the Capricorn's infernal gift intensified.

        Soon enough, the blank horizons of Harmony's vision gathered with frothing emerald flame—persistent in heat—dancing a green tunnel from the distance that swam for her, that hungered for her, that lurched downwards from the skies of Creation with the cold serrated teeth of reverse-time.

        The last pony crumbled helplessly under the hellish power of the cosmic force wafting all over her.  “No...No-No-No-No-No!”  She whimpered against the gathering, blistering clouds of green flame.  “Not now, Spike!  Please, Princess Entropa—Not now!”  She glanced breathlessly up, staring at the shimmering crown of the poor foalish spirit, the soul that knew no peace, that had never known peace—so long as all of her many educated guesses were left unanswered—

        A shrill gasp filled the earthen room.

        “Th-That's it!”  Harmony knew what she was afraid to ask for, what she was afraid to see, what she begged and denied of the golden voice for so long.  Dinky needed the same.  She needed—“Miss Doo!”  The last pony shouted above the cyclonic tumult of mana and cosmic chaos.  “Miss Doo—Come closer to the mouth of the cave!”

        In the burning green penumbra of the future survivor's peripheral, two shadows—one gray and one yellow—limped weakly up just outside of range of the nightmarish energy vortex.

        “M-M-M-Mister Squirrel—?!”

        “Talk to her!”  Harmony shrieked above the maelstrom that she was holding up with two flimsy hooves.  “Nnnngh—Talk to your daughter!  She needs to hear from you... She needs to make a connection!  She needs to hear the truth!”

        “What?!  How?!”  The mailpony stared with horror into the madness encapsulated by the tomb of mana-crystals.  “H-How can she even hear me?!  What am I supposed to say?!”

        “I think you know as well as we do what you're supposed to say, Ditzy,” Fluttershy painfully squeaked, leaning against the gray pegasus' side.  “Everyday, you come so close to saying it.  You even go so far as to show it with the books you give her and your trips to Sugarcube Corner.  But Miss Harmony is right.  I can see that now; you need to talk to her!  Help her bring your daughter back—”

        “It's no use!  I'm not smart enough!  I'm not st-st-st-st-strong enough!”  Ditzy choked on a sob, half of her eyes locked on the burning anomaly that was crowning her daughter.  “It's always been her!  It's always been my Muffin that I've leaned upon!”

        “Dang it—It's not about being smart and it's not about being strong!”  Harmony howled backwards across the illuminated insanity.  “It's about being kind!  So be a mother!  Be kind!  Speak to her—or so help me Celestia, I'll march right right over there and—nghhh—kick those googly eyes straight down your friggin' throat!”

        Ditzy gasped, shuddering.  She gave Fluttershy a forlorn glance.  The sickly caretaker managed a gentle nod.  With a drastic gulp, Ditzy leaned against the serrated mouth of the rocky cave and howled into the opening:

        “Dinky—My darling Muffin, I know what you have always wanted to be told—that, yes, you came into this world by accident.  I never pl-pl-pl-pl-planned for you, Dinky.”

        She bit her lip with an anguished toss of her blonde mane and braved the glowing speck that was her one and only child.

        “Your father was a horrible stallion whose love lasted as long as his g-g-g-g-good humor allowed him.  For years, I suffered because of ponies like him who thought I wasn't worth the dust that kicked off their hooves.  All those long sad days I thought I was lonely...I... I... I-I....”

        She gnashed her teeth.  Her yellow eyes spun concentric burning circles into the ceiling as her tears fell like pendulums to the earth.

        “But I was only waiting, Dinky.  I was waiting for you.  The world was graciously preparing me for you to enter my life.  I would gladly go through every p-p-p-p-painful moment and every bad decision if it means that you can be in my hooves once again.  Come back to me, Dinky!”

        The hapless mailpony sobbed.  A morose inhale, and she then wailed into the cave with a painfully proud smile.

        “Come back to me, my Muffin.  Your mother loves you m-m-m-m-more than any tears can say!”

        Harmony panted, feeling wisps of green flame wafting down to her clenched teeth—like a briar-vomited visitor from the future being flung towards a lawn of grass.  She tilted her head up for one last glance, and was blessed to see a pair of tears rolling down the unicorn's face, and they weren't evaporating...

        “Mother...?” A foalish voice spoke beneath the leylines of the cosmos.  “Is... Is that you...?”

        Fluttershy's quivering lips smiled.  She clasped firmly onto Ditzy's shoulder.  The mailpony buckled under a grimacing, tear-stained smile.  “Yes!  Yes, Dinky!  It's—”

        “Hckkt—Mother!” Dinky tilted her skull back with a shriek.  Her horn blackened as all of the light along the ceiling of the cave was violently sucked out.  Then, in a mute flash, a bolt of light shimmered into the crystalline walls.  The thunder returned, and Harmony rolled back with a quivering gasp.  She clutched the smoking foal in one forelimb as she swiftly outscampered a blistering dome of electrical energy.  The claustrophobic sphere of mana batteries exploded behind them, and Harmony found herself being hurtled weightedly into a sea of green flame and stone.

        Then... black.

        It was so dark.  Harmony thought it was the Briar.  In fact, she knew it was the Briar... until a pair of voices pierced the last pony's twitching ears.

        “Oh Dinky—Oh m-m-m-m-my darling Muffin, speak to me!  Speak to me, please!”

        “Mother... Mother, where am I?”

        “Oh darling—You are in my arms.  Praise Gultophine, you are in my arms.  Where else do you need to be?”

        “I heard so many voices... so many confused and lost voices.  They floated like ghosts among the stars.  I was thinking of writing a book about them.  But then I realized you weren't there, and I was scared.”

        “You don't have to be scared anymore.  The nightmare is over.  Mommy's here, and she loves you.  I love you so, so very m-m-m-m-much, Dinky.  Stay in my arms—Oh please—Stay in my arms forever.”

        “Mother, the odds of a pony actually lying in a mare's arms for an eternity is highly impossible, considering the statistical degradation of muscles and body weight over a mere decade, much less an eon's worth of entropy and decay—”

        “Ohhhhhh I love my sweet, darling, sm-sm-sm-sm-smart Muffin!  You're so smart, I love my Muffin!”

        “Heeheehee—Mother!  Heeheehee... Mother?  Uhm, Mother, why are you crying...?”

        Rainwater and hay filled her nostrils.  With a sharp gasp, Harmony's amber eyes exploded open.  She scuffled, lying on her back and kicking at the stony floor as if trying to escape the waves of a frothing seashore—but she only fell into the comforting embrace of a warm lap and pair of limbs behind her.  Hyperventilating, she flung a numb hoof up and grasped onto that softness, clinging to it as if she was dangling a million kilometers above the gray abyss of the Wasteland.

        “Shhh... It's okay, Miss Harmony.  You did it.  You helped save Ditzy's child.”

        “And... And... And you...?”  The last pony managed pathetically between panting breaths.

        “Mmmm... I feel better already.  The magical fluctuations are gone.  And look—look at what the circle of life has brought us.”

        Twitching, Harmony managed a panicked glance past the heart-shaped cloud of a gray pegasus cradling a gray unicorn.  In the gentle glisten of warm morning haze that bled through the depths of Everfree, a cave lingered in a harmless glow of mana.  Beyond the crystalline mouth of the structure, a gray shadow shifted, bleating curiously as it blindly explored the lengths of the sparkling interior.  A thick fishtail thrashed while two infantile hooves wandered every nook and cranny that could be found.  A pair of pulsing horns “spoke” to the still-charged rocks that surrounded the nubile creature.

        “It's alive... And what's more, it's perfectly safe,” the golden voice said.  Harmony didn't even need to see the yellow pegasus' smile.  She registered it with every quivering square centimeter of her heaving body.  “There was enough mana encased in Dinky's horn to not only complete the Capricorn's foaling—but it's left the cave energized long enough to ween the cosmic child until it's ready for flight.”  A warm breath, like the sunshine before an afternoon shower.  “The world will go through many shades, many colors before the end of time.  A mother's love will always be as divine as ever.”

        Harmony exhaled in a wounded breath.  She could barely look at the future fossil lurching before her.  “I see it, Fluttershy.”  She next produced her words in a whimper:  “But I just wish I was able to believe it...”

        “Maybe that's not the issue, Harmony,” Fluttershy gently kneaded the time traveler's shoulder.  “Maybe... Maybe it's that you believed in it once.”

        Harmony hissed through her teeth.  Her frightened eyes fell upon Dinky.  The unicorn was finally sharing her mother's tears, confusedly weathering the gray mare's shaking sobs as she nestled her horned head in the crook of the mailpony's shoulder.

        “I was scared... So scared...” Harmony reached blindly back for those silken hooves as she rested like a feather against Fluttershy's embrace.

        “Scared of what, Harmony?”

        The last pony gulped.  “I thought I would go away in a blink.”

        “Wherever would you have gone??”

        The past and the present collided across her face like a wall-eyed grimace.  A trickle of tears roped down her Entropan cheek.  “I don't know anymore.”

        “It's all right, Miss Harmony.” The caretaker's arms softly engulfed her, warmed her from behind.  “You're okay...”

        “I'm just so glad you're here, Miss Fluttershy...” Harmony weakly and helplessly mewled.  “I'm just so glad you're alive...”

        “In the end, we show our true qualities when it comes to being kind, when it comes to preserving precious things.”

        “I...” Harmony hissed in a sudden re-blossoming pain.  She shivered and she hid into Fluttershy's embrace.  She saw the stairs.  She saw the green seat and the yellow shade atop of it.  Everything was falling, collapsing.  She wasn't strong enough.  “I can't bear to think of it...”  The orange shadow appeared, the wooden steps cried one by one into the morning light.  “I-I can't...”  She scrunched her face in a divine grimace, like giving birth.  “I-I just c-can't see it!”

        “Shhhh...” Fluttershy softly nuzzled the last pony from behind.  “It's okay, Harmony.  Let it come.”

        Harmony heaved and heaved.  Every breath was a plummet, every sob was a shriveling descent into this moment, this burning glory that no amount of green flames could ever sail her to.  The past and the future died in droves on either side of her as she closed her eyes and hissed into the echoes of her sundered soul.  And when she finally opened her lids...

        ...the little foal marched down the wooden steps to Fluttershy's cottage.  She was an orange splotch against the rain-kissed haze of early morning.  Her steps were quiet, humble, cautious—and yet the wood creaked with every tiny hooftrot.  Biting her lip, the tiny pegasus gazed forlornly at the slumbering figure beneath her.

        Fluttershy was sleeping soundly, a yellow cloud against the plush contours of her velvety green seat.  In a mystery of joy that only the caretaker could comprehend, a gentle smile graced her face, weathering each feathery breath that carried the pegasus—dreaming—on into the night.

        Scootaloo breathed a bit more bravely.  Shuffling with a softness that rivaled cloudbeds, the orange foal walked over and propped herself up so that her petite frame was hoisted over the wooden back of the seat, leaning over to take in the full tranquil sight of the sleeping beauty.

        Upon this sudden horizon, the trembles began.  Scootaloo weathered each shake.  She may not have known it yet, but she had waited her entire young life for this shuddering moment.  In the quietest voice that the little pegasus had ever mustered, she whispered into the penumbra of the caretaker's liquid breaths.

        “Uhm... Miss Fluttershy?  Since you're having such sweet dreams...  And I do hope that they are sweet dreams... I was wondering... uhm... if you could do me a favor?”

        Fluttershy slept, stirred slightly, and slept some more.  Her body was a sea of gold, as immaculate as her voice... almost as real as another's voice.

        Scootaloo gulped hard.  Her soul came forth in a squeak:  “C-Can I call you 'Mommy'?  Just f-for one night?”

        The yellow pegasus' nostrils gently twitched.  Something stirred underneath her cheeks, but the smile was still there, an immortal porcelain.

        It was enough.  Scootaloo smiled, her face crackling with the effort.  Shutting her violet eyes, she leaned over the chair and warmly nuzzled the small of Fluttershy's silken neck.  “I l-love you, Mommy...”

        Something was born that may never have been before.  The world was still the same, but she felt like she would never melt this hotly again.

        “I love you so m-much,” the foal sobbed, a tear falling down her wincing cheek along with the weight from her wings.  The orphan buckled and hiccuped into the golden aura of that beauty, long before she would ever become an orphan to time.

        The same weak legs that stumbled her down the steps strongly carried Scootaloo back up, so that when morning rose and dried the tearstains away, Fluttershy would wake up alone, not knowing what had given her dreams their joyous chorus.

        A migraine of green flames parted ways.  When Harmony's eyes reopened, it was morning.  The calm lengths of Fluttershy's cottage den stretched before her.  For the thirteenth or fourteenth time since returning from the Everfree Forest, the future's chronotonic tug on her Entropan coat briefly dissipated, and she could breathe easier again.  She rediscovered the weight of her copper hooves and anchored herself once more to the past as she stared across the way and regarded an off-ruby shade with dull emotion.

        “So then...” Captain Redgale sighed more than she rejoiced, leaning against the cold hearth inside Fluttershy's living room.  The aged Cloudsdalian washed the lengths of the rustic cottage with a pair of bored blue eyes.  “It's alive.”

        “Alive, well, ticking, and really dang ugly.” Harmony nodded.  After receiving a sideways glare from Fluttershy, she nervously sweated and remarked:  “As baby Capricorns go, that is.  I really wouldn't want to keep one as a pet.  Seriously, who'd want to put a leash on a goat-fish?”

        Angel Bunny leaped down from her perch atop Fluttershy's shoulders as the Ponyvillean animal tamer demurely brushed a hoof against the green wooden finish of the floor.  “Uhm... It's most assuredly healthy.  You don't need to worry about the infant.”  She gazed up at the Captain with rosy cheeks that bashfully hid the caretaker's inner pride.  “It has enough mana from the crystal in that cave to survive for another season at least.  On top of that, I'll be sure to visit it every week, Captain Redgale.  I... uhm... I was quite responsible for bringing it into this world in the way that it was so hectically brought, and it's only fitting with my job description that I see to it that the Capricorn makes it back into the heavens.”

        “As well as you should.”  Captain Redgale nodded.  Her gray-red tail hairs flicked left and right like a mechanized clock.  “It boggles my mind to no end how the essence of that late mother's infant got deposited into that poor mailpony's foal to begin with!”

        “What matters is that it got out, right?”  Harmony smiled cheekishly.  “And the kid's name is 'Dinky'—by the way.  She's as fit as a fiddle, if you must know.  A really smart, cute-as-the-dickens, page flippin' egghead of a fiddle.”

        “Hrmmph...” Redgale narrowed her eyes once more onto the yellow pegasus.  “And it never occurred to you once to mention that the Capricorn was pregnant... Much less that it could still finish its foaling?”

        “Uhm... I... uhm...” Fluttershy wilted under the Cloudsalian officer's stare.  She bit her lip and glanced aside at Harmony.

        Harmony motioned the jittery pegasus “onward” with flailing hooves.

        “Ahem...” Fluttershy bravely stared back at the Captain.  “I did not think it was my place to question your judgment when it came to what had to be done with the terminal Capricorn.  And when... uhm... when it turned out that she was foaling and I realized that only the Everfree mana crystals could solve the situation, I took matters into my own hooves... mmm... by employing all of the many talents that I have accumulated over the years.”  She gulped and stared suddenly at something firmer and richer locked away behind the officer's cold blue eyes.  “I figured that it would have been the strong thing for me to have done... rather than have troubled you, Ponyville, or the Cloudsdalian Commission... uhm... since I already knew the solution to the problem myself.”

        Redgale took a deep, deadpan breath.  “Hmmm... Not bad, for a start.”

        Harmony shook loose a fuming cloud of emerald in her head before coughing from the sidelines.  “'For a start'?”

        The Captain briefly tossed the “clerk” a sarcastic look, then paced across the length of the cottage's front room.  “It shows initiative,” she uttered.  “Enough intiative that the Commission is likely to approve of your continuance here as lead animal tamer of Ponyville.”

        “Oh... Oh thank goodness!”  Fluttershy giggled.  A tiny yelp, and she hid once more behind a lock of pink hairs that matched her blushing coat.  “I mean... that is very nice to hear, Captain Redgale, and I am most honored by the prospect of furthering my career here.”

        “Don't relish it too much, Miss Fluttershy.”  Redgale tilted her nose up.  “It merely shows that you're competent.  Nothing else.  I'll be watching you closely as you tend to this Capricorn...” She gazed lethargically at a fluffy white bunny seated before the dead fireplace.  “...and your other...lesser impressive subjects.”  She turned away.  “Just one more question, though.”

        “Ask away, Captain—”  Fluttershy glanced over the mare's shoulder, her eyes twitching with a sudden horror.

        Harmony followed the caretaker's frantic glance.  Wincing, she leaped over in time to grab a flung kettle just millimeters before it would have collided heavily with the rear of Redgale's skull.  The Cloudsdalian glanced over her shoulder.  The last pony hid the kettle behind her back and smiled nervously.

        “Ahem.”  Redgale swiveled her haughty glance back towards the yellow pegasus.  “If this had not turned out as well as it did, and it had fallen upon the Commission to revoke your wildlife license...”  Her blue eyes narrowed icily.  “...where would you have gone, child?”

        “I...”  Fluttershy bit her lip.  She glanced at the floor, at the ceiling, then at an invisible cloud of happy thoughts.  A renewed warmth floated into her limbs, as if she was being carried kindly across this cold conversation on the copper wings of a helpful soul.  “I suppose I would have gone to Rarity...”

        “Gone to who?”

        “Mmm... My friend.  One of my many friends...” Fluttershy smiled gently.  “If I had failed—I'm almost more than certain that they would have supported me.  I don't know how long it would have taken, but I would very likely have been ushered into a new phase in my life.”

        Harmony smiled, placing the kettle down to the floor as she waited for the officer's response.

        It would not be a warm one.  “Friends...” Redgale stared at her as if she was merely a dark spot against a field of random clouds.  “Mmm... Yes, I do suppose enough time has passed that even you could make some.  Regardless...”  With a cold swish of her tail, the Captain marched towards the door.  “I expect a full written report on what has transpired these last few nights.  Divulge as much as you wish to your beloved Canterlotlian Clerk.  Celestia knows, she's the only exciting thing to have happened here in months, Capricorns or not.”

        Fluttershy was suddenly shivering.  She stared forlornly at the flank of the exiting officer.  She cast one nervous glance—almost pleading—towards Harmony.

        The time traveler glanced back in a sudden haze of confusion.  She merely blinked at the caretaker.

        As if that was all the response she needed, Fluttershy bit her lip and called after the off-ruby mare.  “Uhm... Captain Redgale?  Captain Redgale, if I could have a moment to talk with you... before you leave?  And... uhm... I mean to really talk to you...”

        “What's been said has been said, child.”  The Captain pulled the front door open with a creak, bathing herself in an off-white gold of morning haze.  A rusted breath throated mechanically:  “There is no more business left to conduct today.”

        “Captain...”  Fluttershy gulped, then leaned forward in a dripping breath.  “Mother, please...”

        Harmony blinked, her lips parting.

        The officer had frozen in her gait.  A still breath locked her in place, so that she stared blindly into the burning world outside the two of them, outside the entirety of the glacier that the cottage had become so very long ago.

        Fluttershy took a daring half-trot forward.  “It's.. It's been so long, Mother.  So very long.  I... I know this isn't what you want to hear.  I know that this isn't the family way, especially where I am involved, but I do so very much wish to speak to you... like mother and daughter.  So much has happened lately.  These past few nights—I've remembered things, and I've remembered the many gaps in things because... because they don't exist between us.  So please... Please... Can we talk?  If even for a few minutes?  I...I just want to be your daughter again... If even for one day...”

        The silence that followed could drown out the Cataclysm.  Harmony found herself gazing helplessly from one pegasus to another.  A sour pit had formed in her Entropan throat.  Not even a thorny crucifixion could outlast the agony of what she was about to hear, and it horrified the last pony to realize that she had predicted it:

        “I don't know why you bother,” Redgale said in a blistering breath, like a cold wind that pulled her head down into a somber bow.  “I don't know why I would even bother.”  She didn't look at the yellow pegasus.  She didn't even try.  A flaring of her nostrils, and she tilted her head back up to stare into the blemished burning gold beyond.  “You're a shame to me, Fluttershy.  Always have been, always will be.  And so long as you stick around on this paltry patch of land you call 'home', anchored by your fears and your weaknesses, nothing will ever change.”  A heaving of her gray ruby shoulders.  “I thought that if you lost your job... that if you found yourself for once without all of the pathetic little vices that keep you so far from Cloudsdale, you might for once be roused from your pitiful slumber and summon the strength to be a real pegasus like the rest of your family and fly back to where you'd be useful.  But... as always.  I was right.  Nebula help me, I was right all along.”

        The door creaked closed before either of the young pegasi standing behind could notice that the Captain had gone, or could even care.  With a soulless shudder, Harmony finally wrenched her eyes away from the front of the cottage.  The sight before her stabbed the survivor's quivering heart from across twenty-five years of green flame.

        Fluttershy was buckling, stumbling limply into the corner, surrounded forever by her shadows.  Harmony could not see her wilting face from the tosseled mane of pink threads that had ensnared her like a noose.  That didn't stop the time traveler from softly padding over towards the caretaker's flank.

        “Fluttershy...”  She dryly throated.  “Fluttershy... I'm... I-'m so sorry.  I didn't—”

        “Please...” The voice that came from the golden ghost was a whimper, laced in sniffling breaths.  “Just leave me alone.  Th-That's all I ask...”

        Harmony smiled painfully.  “Oh Fluttershy...”

        “All I-I want is to be alone... D-Don't you see?”  Fluttershy stumbled so that she quivered in a kneeling position on two melting legs.  Her back shuddered to Harmony's vision.  “Doesn't anypony see?  Just... J-Just leave me alone—”

        “Fluttershy...” Harmony bravely sashayed over and gripped the yellow pegasus' slouching shoulders from behind.  “...your entire life is a terribly long time to be alone.”

        The morning sunrise had formed an immutable mirror in the great wedge of time, so that it was now this pony—falling into the embrace of the copper visitor behind her—who was collapsing with a bursting dam of sobs.  Harmony effortlessly cradled the yellow pegasus as the filly navigated a deep, deep well of pain, accumulated by years upon countless years of isolation and shame.

        “I-I don't understand...”  Fluttershy hiccuped and shivered, her face forever obscured by her mane.  “I j-just don't understand!”  She sobbed and sobbed, melting into Harmony's strong arms.  “Wh-Why doesn't she love me?!  Why can't she stand the s-sight of me?!  I've done everything... Everything.  All I w-wanted was... w-was just some k-kindness.  Is th-that asking t-too much?!  Oh dear Nebula, I'm not good enough... I'm never good enough f-for her...”

        “And you n-never will be...” Harmony bravely breathed.  “Not with the heartless likes of her.  You're a kind, beautiful, angel of a pony, Fluttershy.  Stop hating yourself... Stop hiding yourself from your friends.  Not every mother can be as understanding—or as loving—as Mother Earth.”

        “I just don't understand.... Ohhhhh Eponaaaa... Why Why Why Why Why...?”

        “Shhh...” Harmony smiled painfully and nuzzled her like a secret foal.  “The world is a strange and confusing place.  It's okay...”  She seethed and began to buckle herself, a delightfully easy thing.  “It's okay to cr-cry about it.”

        The two lingered there in the lonesome cottage, leaning on each other like orphan crutches, a tranquil calm in the endless rainstorm of life.

        “I better be heading back.” An orange foal was fastening her helmet back over her pink head of hair.  The bright morning Sun glowed happily off her scooter, matching the glisten that sung across every blade of grass, growing and stretching warmly into the moist morning air after a nightlong baptism.  “My parents will kill me if they find out I ditched Mom's ferns for so long.”

        “Somehow I seriously doubt that.”  Fluttershy smiled gently from where she stood in the doorway to her pretty little cottage.  “A foal raised to be as sweet as you couldn't possibly have parents that are so violent.”

        Scootaloo inhaled with a painfully sweet smile as she gripped both handles of the scooter in relaxed orange hooves.  “I... I really enjoyed our time together, Fluttershy.”

        “As did I, Scootaloo.”

        “I...” Scootaloo shifted nervously from where she leaned against the flimsy vehicle, her longest friend.  “I'm sorry that... that it got a little tense at times.  It seems like I can never just be a guest without—”

        “Let joyous memories be joyous memories, Scootaloo.”  Fluttershy gave a glowing smile in the morning light.  “Nothing less.  You may be surprised how far they will carry your hooves... or your wings.”

        “When... Uhm...” Scootaloo bit her lip and flicked her violet tail skittishly.  “When I get my cutie mark... Whenever that's going to be—I want you to be the first to see it, Fluttershy.”

        “Hmmm-Hmmm-Hmmm... I would be flattered, Scootaloo.”  A playful wink.  “But I thought we each had to be alone when we found our talents.”

        Scootaloo shook her head softly.  She swallowed a painful lump down her throat.  “Not when there are so many sweeter things to find.”

        The air glistened briefly with the clearing of the sunrise's last foggy mists.  Birds sang in the air; squirrels stirred and scampered across tree branches.  The bosom of Everfree was as alive as it ever was... as it ever would be.  This was all suddenly a peninsula before a rippling sea of paradise, the orange foal thought.

        “Miss Fluttershy?”

        “Yes, Scootaloo?”

        Scootaloo bit her lip and bravely throated:  “Be bold.  Invite your friends over.  Don't wait for an invitation.  Bring them here... Let them share all of this—all of your beauty with somepony you care about.”

        A light giggle, and with a toss of her pink mane Fluttershy effortlessly smirked.  “I already have.”

        Scootaloo exhaled.  Try as she might, she could not stifle the deep burning in her heart.

        “Say hello to your parents for me, Scootaloo,” Fluttershy spoke with a soft wave.

        Scootaloo nodded.  With one painful breath, she peeled her eyes away from the angelic source of that golden voice and beat her wings until her scooter coasted her back into a colder, darker world.  “Oh how I wish you could have met them,”  the foal quietly said to the whipping morning wind.  Twenty five years later...

        ...she still wished she could say more.

        Harmony took several wincing breaths.  She clutched her hooves to the invulnerable skull underneath her black mane.  With tense muscles, she weathered wave after wave of green fumes roaring down towards her from the high cloud of the future.  Ever since she carried the possessed Dinky into the mana-cave, it had been like this.  Something about the entire brush with the Capricorn's magical resonance had sucked Spike's breath from her Entropan soul.

        It was only a matter of time, and she would be gone.  She would vanish.  She knew this as if it was a natural thing.  Like an infant tossed into a deep lake, she knew how to swim in less than a minute of drowning within these effluent green bubbles.  At anytime, at any moment, she would be whisked away from this land of soft sighs, smiles, and sobs—three warm things that the last pony in her decades of isolation had pitifully forgotten were blissfully related with one another.  Her mission was in jeopardy; everything was about to be cut short.  She still hadn't even gotten close to contacting Princess Celestia.  But was it a failure?

        Clearing her way through another migraine, she tilted her head up from where she stood.  The copper pegasus had been hunched over in Fluttershy's washroom, her exhausted face slumped over the sink, but now she was facing forward so that she gazed nose-to-nose with an alien reflection in the mirror.  The gentle light of the mid-morning sun kissed every angle of that copper complexion, revealing deeper pores and sadder winkles in the flesh of the Goddess of Time than Harmony had ever noticed before.

        Twenty-five years ago, the last time she ever had a solid reason to gaze into that mirror, the image that looked back was a dark shadow obscured by the refracted kiss of drizzling afternoon rain.  To her mixed relief, everything shone now in a great copper clarity.  It was not her skin to be wearing; she was an orphan to life and to time.

        She was no longer an orphan to herself.

        Something lit up, something like a smile, and then another wave of agonizing green fumes washed over Harmony.  The last pony hissed, clutching her skull once more and fighting the tears as she fought the fangs of the future sailing down to pierce her, to impale her, to drag her back to the Briar of black thorns like a cocktail treat.

        Fighting back a piercing lump in her throat, Harmony aimed a seething breath towards the washroom ceiling.  She could try to spend what scant few minutes were left of her projected soul self's visitation towards contacting the Princess.  She could kick the walls down, throw herself before Fluttershy's hooves, and outright beg the anchor to tow her all the way to Canterlot.  What good would it be if she was to disappear in a green puff of smoke right there before Her Majesty?  Would she have any luck lasting the infernal trip to the Royal Palace itself?

        “About as much luck as Dinky would have had,” the copper pegasus murmured to herself in a droning monotone.

        If she had come to this realization earlier, on a prior trip, while visiting Applejack or Cheerilee—she would very likely have broken into sobs.  Instead, she maintained her composure.  Only a few things in the world deserved a good cry.  After seventy-two hours in the arms of Everfree's finest, she was spent.

        It was not a failure.  She told herself this with a sad gaze drifting down from her glossy reflection in the mirror until she stumbled upon a familiar stain.  The smudge of a hoofprint was still there from where she reached out for herself the night before last.  Something about it pierced the last pony's eyes from all angles, because the hoofprint was complete, it was a circle.

        Her lips parted.  Swirling her pupils around the lengths of the mirror's smudge like clockhands, she spun and flashed a glance towards the tile floor.  The porcelain fragments of a shattered bunny figurine still littered the space before the door.  The air was dry, but Harmony could suddenly smell rain from beyond the walls, from beyond time itself.

        She couldn't possibly explain why, but she smiled.  She smiled so much that she hardly felt the next wave of green talons smokily clamoring for her.  With an even breath, she stumbled out into the hallway beyond the washroom, leaving the mirror's smudge and the shattered porcelain bits immortally undisturbed.

        Harmony paused and gazed into the cottage's den where two pegasi sat nose-to-nose.  Fluttershy was there, her body was calm, her eyes were dry, and she was chatting quietly and serenely with her friend, Ditzy Doo.  The mailmare nodded and talked back, carrying forth a conversation that was only meant for the two Ponyvillean friends suspended in this warm and pristine past.  It was almost as if the last pony had never come there to begin with.  Soon, nopony would be the wiser.

        Harmony knew what she wanted to do next... what she needed to do.  After another cloud of green claws assailed her, she set forth on her final task.  Sauntering out of the cottage, exiting out of a side door, navigating the borders of the manger out back, she came upon a pile of tools lying besides a project that she had started on the night before last.  Grasping the blue surfaces of the wooden structure, she held her breath and shoved the thing counter-clockwise around the lengths of the cottage and towards the kitchen.  For the last time, she struggled to beat back the immutable walls of the future.  It was a difficult exercise; her Entropan lungs nearly failed against the chronotonic waves of emerald rippling through her.  With a deep concentration, she succeeded.  She shoved the thing inside the cottage, pushed it into the kitchen, and propped it up against a lone corner where the only pony who would see it would do so under the guidance of destiny.

        Dusting her hooves off, she gazed one final time towards the den beyond.  The muffled words of Ditzy and Fluttershy stroked the twitching lengths of her ears.  She smiled the soonest she heard the golden voice between the two, turned her copper wings against the warmth, and marched out of the household altogether.  Another breath of green fumes, and she stumbled—realizing that she was standing suddenly in a grassy yard besides a babbling brook.  The familiarity of the scenery stabbed her with a foal's droning voice from the side:

        “I still saw you fall from the sky, y'know.”

        The time traveler froze in place, blinking.  She glanced down at the grass beneath her, realizing it was the exact same spot where she had landed from the invisible tunnel of reverse-time three days ago.  A wry smirk, and she glanced toward her immediate left.

        Dinky squatted at the tiny teaset inside an even tinier chair.  Her bobbing head waved an immaculate stub of a horn as she gazed up at the last pony and spoke, “Do you ever care to explain that to me?”

        “Your mom may explain her love to you,” Harmony said as she trotted over and squatted before the circle of saucers and stuffed animals.  “Fluttershy may share the feeding and care of animals to you.  But me?  I'm a whole 'nother ballgame, kid.”  She reached forward and ruffled the foal's blonde mat of hair.  “I hope you do realize, you cannot learn everything.  Some stuff in life has to remain unexplained—otherwise, where would all the fun be?”

        Dinky giggled, then bore a brief, sarcastic frown.  “But learning is fun.”

        “Then I know a little unicorn twice your age who must be having the time of her life.  But that's okay—I'd rather not poke a stick through your hide and roast ya before a campfire.”

        The unicorn made a raspberry with her tongue.

        “Watch it, kid.  That's addictive.  Trust me.”

        “Mother says that she watched you single-hoofedly save my life last night.”

        “I dunno if anybody's ever told you, kid.  But... uhhh... Your mother doesn't exactly see very well.”

        “Is extreme sarcasm a trademark of every clerk from Canterlot?”

        “No, just smarty-smarty-pants McNoponies who fall from the sky.”

        “Heeheehee...”

        Harmony took a deep breath, but her Entropan smile lingered as the copper pegasus carefully navigated a mental minefield, then bravely took a leap before the little foal.  “Hey... uh... kid.  I know that you went through a heck of an awful lot of crud last night...”

        “I don't think so!  I think I did just fine!”

        “Heh, cute.  Ahem...”  She squinted with amber specks.  “You don't... Uhh... You don't possibly remember any of the crazy things you were rambling on about while that Capricorn essence was turning your horn into a cosmic radio antenna, do you?”

        “Mmmm... Mother says that I said a lot of weird and scary things.  It's... It's all a very crazy blur.  I find it a rather remarkable experience.  But I know that's only a cruel thing to say, since I had scared you all so badly while I was... possessed.”

        “You... You don't happen to remember anything about the stuff you may or may not have said?”  Harmony bit her lip and dryly swallowed.  “You... You don't remember saying anything about an 'Onyx Eclipse'?”

        Dinky slowly shook her head.  “No, ma'am.”  A brief dizzy spell, but she swiftly snapped out of it like nothing had happened.  “It's all such a hazy ball of stuffy memories, I don't think I could remember a thing.  I'm very sorry, I wish I could tell you what it all meant.”

        “Don't be sorry.  It's... Uhm... It's not important, I... I'll deal.”  She planted a hoof on the kid's shoulder.  She tried, but she couldn't look into the foal's bright yellow eyes, not with what she struggled to say next.  “You, uhhh...”  Her voice cracked slightly, but she hid it with a tight smile.  “You have a healthy l-long life, kid.  I-I mean it.”

        “I'll try, Miss Harmony.”  She sweetly and politely smirked.  She raised a pitcher.  “Tea?”

        “Not where I'm going.”  Harmony stood up, reeling briefly in a kiss of green wind.  Snapping out of it, she heard the creak of the cottage door.  Glancing up, she saw Ditzy Doo marching slowly out of the house, tying the mailbag to her flank.  A deep breath, and she gazed bravely towards opposite horizons of the late morning.  Her face was tranquil, at ease.  It was positively infectious—

        “She admired you.”

        Harmony blinked.  She glanced down at the blonde unicorn.  “Huh?”

        “When she went out of her way to put you in the arcane vault...” She murmured through lingering lips.  “...it was because she cared for you too.”

        The last pony's jolted.  Her eyes instantly went concave.  “D-Dinky...?”

        The foal dizzily reeled and caught herself with two hooves planted atop the table.  “Nnnngh... Yes?”

        “Who cared for me?”

        “Somepony cared for who?”  She squinted tiredly up at the copper pegasus.  A weak, embarrassed smile.  “Oh, I do apologize, Miss Harmony.  I... I'm still wiping clean the cobwebs.  Did I just say something silly?”

        The last pony blinked a few times, but managed a steely smile as her whole body warmed up, warmed hotter than the morning sun.  “No.  As a matter of fact...”  A shuddering breath.  “It was very kind...”

        “Mmmm... If you say so.”  The little pony plopped down from the teaset, scampered over, gave Harmony's front leg a gentle hug, then scampered off.  “Bye!”

        “So long...” Harmony waved a limp hoof, gazing as the child trotted gaily up to her mother.

        Upon sight, Ditzy immediately bent down low and nuzzled her child.  A few murmured words were exchanged between them.  Ditzy flashed Harmony a slightly distant look, then nodded to the unicorn while motioning towards the cottage.  The little gray foal excitedly cantered inside the building to say good-bye to Fluttershy while the mailpony sauntered slowly towards the “Canterlotlian Clerk” standing in the middle of the yard.

        Harmony gulped, then smiled.  “H-Hey there.”

        “Hello to you t-t-t-t-t-t-too...” Ditzy stood, fidgeting.  One of her eyes was resting on the visitor, which must have meant she was trying not to look in her face.

        “So... Uhhh... 'Neither rain, sleet, snow, nor hail'—But you can certainly rip 'crazy-Capricorn-infant-energy-possessions' off the list, huh?”  Harmony smiled nervously.

        “I will be fine at my job, if that was your way of expressing concern,” Ditzy dryly replied.  A nervous gulp and a shuddering, crooked smile.  “Especially with these circumstances, the Equestrian Postal Service will understand.  Believe me, they've forgiven this loopy p-p-p-p-pony for much, much worse.”

        “Well, you may be loopy, Miss Doo,” Harmony said while brushing at a few blades of grass with a lone copper hoof.  “But you're sure as heck loyal.  Dinky is... She is lucky to have a mother who...”  Harmony glanced briefly towards the front end of the cottage, towards a golden shadow that she had once cradled inside.  “....who cares so much for something so... so sweet and precious...”

        “I think I know why Miss Fluttershy instantly takes a liking to you.”  Ditzy smirked slightly.  “You really are a quick learner.”  She bit her lip in a painful exhale.  “I... I thought you were just like so many other ponies in my life.  I thought that you didn't c-c-c-c-care.  But I was wrong.  You do care.  You just do your caring really harshly.”

        Harmony blinked.  An awkward blush.  “Eh-heheheh... To each her own, r-right?”  She brushed the back of her black mane, fought a shuddering current of green leaves, and bit the edge of her lips.  “Mmmm... I... I just want to say thank you, Miss Doo.”

        “You're thanking me?”  Her twirling eyes rattled.  “Whatever for?”

        “For showing me that I've got so many crooked parts of myself that I still have to smoothe straight.”  She winced briefly, but managed a smile.  “Thanks for... for giving me somepony to be kind to.”

        “We're not half as kind as we are lucky, Miss Harmony,” Ditzy Doo firmly said.

        “Yeah, well, I—”  Harmony paused in mid-speech.  She blinked hard.  “Wait, what did you just call me?”

        The door to the cottage opened yet again.  This time Fluttershy poured out with Dinky in tow.  “Miss Doo!  Ohhhh—Don't leave without me getting to say goodbye!”

        “Heheheheh...” The gray mare turned from the visibly gaping Harmony with a swish of her mailbags and smiled her way into Fluttershy's company.  “You'll see us in a few days!  How c-c-c-c-could I turn down our favorite babysitter, isn't that right, my M-M-M-M-Muffin?”

        “Mmmhmmm!  Fluttershy says she'll teach me how to play 'Go Filly'!”

        “Oooh!  I love ballgames!”

        “Motherrrrrrr.”

        “Heheheh.”

        “Heeheehee!”

        Harmony blinked.  Her dropped jaw morphed into a gentle smile as she tongued the corners of her cheeks, but found no incisors.  “Huh... Guess I just have to give up the flying merchant business, eh Brucie?”  A mute chuckle.

        Fluttershy could be seen nuzzling Dinky's soft head.  “You keep reading your books, Dinky.  But don't be afraid to stop now and then to enjoy your youth while you can.  And best of all—make friends!”

        “Mother says that nopony can be too careful with friends!”

        “Yes, well, your mother and I talked long and hard about that.  We both think it's time for a few changes.”

        “Changes?”  Dinky blinked.  “Will I be listening to books on tape now?”

        “Ohhhh joy.”  Ditzy tossed her already rolling eyes and grabbed hold of the unicorn foal with a smile.  “We'd best be off, Muffin.”  She stuffed the kid effortlessly into a pocket of her maibag.  “It's looking like a lot of rain this afternoon!”

        “Just be sure to fly away from the clouds this time, Mother!”  Dinky winked while strapping on her helmet.

        “With your help—Mother always flies straight!  Pilot to navigator!”

        “Contact!”

        The wind kicked up heatedly with the mother and daughter's flight, carrying them like two gray hearts into the golden shine above.

        “So long, Miss Harmony!  Miss Fluttershy!  Thanks for getting the cosmic creature of epic proportions out of my extra-temporal neurological system!”

        “Uhm... Anytime, Dinky!”  Fluttershy waved up.  She sighed and gazed lovingly as the two melted away into the morning horizon.

        With a soft padding of hooves, Harmony strolled over and stood beside the yellow-coated caretaker in front of the unassuming cottage.  “It's true.  I believe it whole-heartedly.”

        “Hmmmm?”  Fluttershy blinked her soft blue eyes in the copper pegasus' direction.

        Harmony murmured as she stared off over the obscured rooftops of Ponyville beyond, bathed in platinum blindness from the rising crest of time.  “You would make such a great mother, Fluttershy.  More than you...”  A deep gulp.  “More than you will ever know.”

        Fluttershy glanced down past the dangling tresses of her silken pink hair.  “How could a decent mother spring forth from such a lackluster example?”

        “It's only natural.”  Harmony glanced over in a calm gaze.  The claws of reverse-time threatened to pull her apart in green strings at any moment, but she maintained enough cohesion to say:  “You do all the things that were never done for you.  You figure out all the secrets that the gaps in time divulge to you.”  Her gaze skated off towards the distant dew-laden fields separating the cottage from the Everfree bosom, like a glinting scooter gliding beneath a lone foal.  “You figure out all the things you've ever loved or regretted in life, and you decide on which of those things are worth passing on and which are not.”  She smiled sweetly over her shoulder.  “What is Mother Nature if not a constant, immutable checklist of all the things that should be done right?  It's perfect—as if it was made for... as if it was made for ponies like you... ponies like us.”

        Fluttershy glanced at Harmony with a renewed breath of concern.  “Miss Harmony... Where does somepony like you come from... That would so randomly and selflessly bless my life... Beyond duty and beyond sanity and beyond fear?”  Her blue eyes narrowed.  “It has been three days, and yet I still cannot shake the feeling that I have seen you before.”

        “That's the thing about kindness, right?”  Harmony smirked and waved opposite loopty-loops with her hooves on either side of her cranium.  “It all works in a circle, doesn't it?”

        “So I have always believed... for so, so long...” Fluttershy breathed warmly and her blue eyes moistened.  “And now...I feel so rewarded.”

        “You've been tossing treats before ducklings for so long, maybe karma's stopped being a female dog for once.”

        “Heeheehee... If you say so, Harmony.”

        “I do.”  Harmony spoke, but paused with her tongue against her teeth as she hissed painfully at the thought of this gentle moment ending like so many others she had the audacity to dive greenly down to... and would yet still.  “I... I will never forget you, Miss Fluttershy.  Not as long as there are ponies... Not as long as I exist.”

        “Nor will I forget your strength, your courage...”  Fluttershy drifted over and nuzzled the copper pegasus with feather-silk-softness.  Her golden voice hummed dearly, “...or your kindness.”

        “Yeah... Some circles don't know when to quit...” Harmony gulped and smiled awkwardly through the tense green waves at her.  “Do they?”

        “Mmmm... I guess not.”  Fluttershy tilted her head about and squinted into the burning sunrise.  “Those clouds... Ditzy Doo was right; it looks like a terribly huge stormfront is being planned for this afternoon.”

        “Yeah,” Harmony dryly throated, once more reaching for goggles that weren't there.  She only smirked at the sudden silliness of the habit.  “Who'd a thunk it, huh?”  She cleared her throat, glanced at the cottage, and motioned over her shoulder with a hoof.  “Hey, look—While you and Ditzy were chatting, somepony dropped something off.”

        “Oh?”  Fluttershy blinked quizzically.  “I was talking with the town's mailpony and some other pony dropped something off at my cottage?”

        Harmony smirked with a slight wince.  “Yeah, well—It was a kid.”  The world was bubbling now.  She could already make out a throng of black vines pouring in through a great emerald tunnel stretching above her, about to swallow her shuddering self at any second.  She bravely coughed.  “I'd describe her as a 'lil scamp of a foal, some young orange punk on a scooter that she was driving way too fast.  You have any idea who I'm talking about?”

        Fluttershy blinked.  A soft, bemused smile crossed her yellow lips.  “Yes.  Yes as a matter of fact, I believe I do.”

        “Yeah, well.  She... uhm...” It wasn't a lie, it wasn't a truth, it was simply righteous.  “She left something for you.  She claims it's something she built with her own hooves.  But I dunno how the heck that's possible.  The little girl looked too scrawny to carry so much as a mallet.”

        “You would be surprised at how strong precious things can be.”

        “Not really.  Not anymore.”  Harmony smirked.  “Anyways—I did you the favor of rolling the heavy thing into the kitchen for you.”

        Fluttershy blinked awkwardly.  “Heavy?”

        “Yeah.  I figured that you could do with it whatever you like—But if I were you, I wouldn't let any guests into that kitchen.  That place is filthy, girl!”

        “Erhm... Yes, I suppose.” Fluttershy blushed deeply.  “It's hard to remind oneself to be cleanly when most of the time you're only feeding animals.”

        “Then feed something that can talk back.”  Harmony said.  “Give that friend of yours, Rarity, a holler.  Get her to come out of hiding and just be with her.”

        “Rarity...” Fluttershy murmured in a suddenly warm breath.  Her features washed over with a rosy hue as she sailed the crest of a happy, happy thought.  “I... would very dearly enjoy her company once again...”

        “Nopony's stopping you.”  Harmony squeaked to say.  The green fumes were positively blinding.  She hoped—the little foal in her daringly prayed that Fluttershy couldn't see the same chaos that the last pony was drowning in.  “Seize the moment... Fluttershy...”

        “Out of curiosity” Fluttershy innocently gazed at her and asked, “This little foal, the orange visitor:  where did she go?”

        Harmony was briefly silent.  Numbly, she repeated, “Where did she go?”

        Fluttershy nodded slowly.

        Harmony eventually smiled, eventually answered:  “Southwest of here.  Towards that lonely memorial, I'm guessing.”

        “You mean Everclear?”  Fluttershy blinked curiously towards the southern horizon.  “What brought her there?”

        “What brings anypony anywhere?”  Harmony gave a cryptic wink.  Then the past disappeared in a puff of green.

        Fluttershy flashed a look back.  Her pearl blue eyes narrowed, for her friend, the Canterlotlian Clerk, was no longer there.  The world was lonely once more, and it suddenly stabbed the silence of the cottage far more severely than the Ponyvillean animal tamer had grown accustomed to over the years.  She distracted herself with a pivoting of her hooves, a flick of her tail, and a firm march into the depths of her cottage—following a curious whim.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        When Fluttershy walked into the kitchen, she almost immediately stumbled into it.  With a helpless shriek, she hobbled back, blinking, waiting as the image of what was before her swam back into focus.  A few meandering blinks, and a breath finally escaped her lips.

        It was a table.  It was the table.  On a golden night—several months ago—three souls had blessed her cottage with their joyous presence.  On that evening, the thing had shattered... but here it was, standing before her as good as new, with each of its blue furnished planks sticking tried and true to one another.  It almost looked in a better condition than it was before, perfected in a way, immutable.

        A slight giggle escaped the filly's porcelain lips.  She thought of a pink-haired foal with a bucket on her head.  That image blurred with all of the crazy moments of the past forty-eight hours, and suddenly Fluttershy's wings were being unfolded as if an invisible wind was pushing her forward.  There was a righteous cyclone billowing in the yellow pegasus' heart, and she could do nothing but smile.

        In a sudden breath, Fluttershy glanced all around—then set to work gathering a wicker basket, several bags of bread crumbs, and a throng of lilies that crowded an array of flowerpots resting daintily in the kitchen window....

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Even from the level of the clouds, Fluttershy could see her—like an orange dot against a white sea of stones.  Something leaped in the yellow pegasus' heart, something curious, yet something delighted at the two ends of the day coming together to kiss the sight beneath her in the heated stare of the noonday sun.  When she pulled her wings in and landed swiftly behind the foal, it was with an excited breath, rather than a startled one, that produced the resulting chirp:

        “Oh!  Hello, Scootaloo.”

        “Ahem.  Fluttershy, hey there.”  The surprised foal spun about as if she was found in the middle of an impossible crime.  “Uhm...What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

        “I was about to ask the same of you.”  Fluttershy smiled and began her task of laying the flowers down upon the stones—sweet and precious things for sweet and precious souls.  “Somepony said that I might find you here.”

        “Really?  I'm not in trouble or anything, am I?”

        “Heeheehee... Good heavens, no.  Hmmm... Quite the opposite, actually.”

        The orange foal squinted curiously.  “What's gotten you in such a cheerful mood today?”

        “Ohhhh...” Fluttershy swallowed the warm breaths of mother nature, savoring it like a lullaby that was never sung to her.  She could do nothing but smile.  “I just had the most cheerful thought, of circles within circles.  Kindness is like a dance, and everypony is sharing the floor with each other... mmmm... whether they know it or not.  It is a joy to see you, dear Scootaloo.  It always is.”

        In a cascading curtain of emerald flames, a thin brown waif of a creature appeared in the darkest-of-dark pits.  Her short pink hair fluttered with Entropan fumes.  Her nicked and scarred hooves rested placidly against the stone floor beside an empty glass jar and shredded bits of leather-armored saddlebags.  The blossoming appearance ended as soon as it began, and with a fading green gasp the last pony melted once more into the dark tomb of the Wasteland.

        A long, frigid exhale.  She opened her scarlet eyes... only to realize that she could see her own breath vapors.  It was not pitch black in the sunken sea of the Briar.  That could only mean...

        A deep rumble rose in the distance.  The shivering pony jolted, the tiny pink hairs rising on her bony neck as she gazed in a resurrected fright across the subterranean landscape.  She had returned... She had returned to this nightmare hovel, and the blue light was coming to greet her, thundering on titanium paws at the merest hint of her equine scent.

        In a flurry, the last pony gathered her things, hoisted her armor over her flank, pocketed the bottle, and trotted through the calcified bits of Fluttershy as she made for the break in the brambles.  She ducked under the vines and vines and vines of thorns and squeezed her shuddering form onto barren stone in time to break into a full-speed gallop.

        The bowels of the Everfree Briar bled bright and blue behind her as the hulking predator thundered murderously, angrily after its prey.

        Scootaloo fled instinctually from it... until she suddenly and nakedly understood that anger, shuddered at the copper taste of it.  Her gallop pattered off into a shuffling gait, and soon she had stopped completely, panting into the horizon of what she was about to do next.

        The blue aura was blinding now.  Parting several crumbling branches of black thorns aside, the hulking Ursa Major leered back into existence, drooling and growling down at the foolish speck of a hoofed creature that had suddenly stopped in the direct path of its charge.

        The last pony slowly turned around.  With soft-sad eyes, she gazed up at the lumbering beast.

        Its forefangs glinted cosmically.  The bear brimmed with hateful constellations and reared its fist up to smash the pegasus into a pulp.

        Scootaloo spoke.  She breathed in a voice that oozed effortlessly, like a shade of gold.  “You've lost your mother.”

        The bear's bloodshot eyes twitched.  In a fitful hiss, it froze confusedly in place.  Its starlit coat dulled slightly as the tightness in its muscles suddenly and inexplicably melted upon the crest of those spoken words.

        “She died—She couldn't swim back to the heavens because of the anomaly that threatened to burn her... To b-burn both of you...”  Scootaloo murmured gently.  “The Onyx Eclipse.”

        The Ursa Major blinked, its shimmering pupils dilating as a pitifully warm forest of living green bubbled up out of the silken softness of the pony's Celestial Speech, at the brazen kindness the measly prey had the audacity to use in the face of the beast's lonesome confusion and anger.

        “You've been alone ever since then.  Well that's okay.”  A painful smile.  Scootaloo squeaked like the foal she somehow couldn't stop being, not even for a single ashen day.  “I've lost my mother too.”  A hideously torturous breath.  “Twice.”

        The Ursa lowered its paw.  With wilting eyes that lost all its cosmic fire, it heaved and stared pitifully into some razor-sharp cloud of agony beyond the tiny pony's figure.

        Scootaloo gently trotted over towards the hulking weight of the blue beast, her body bathed in its tear-colored breaths.  “We... We are more than just orphans to time.  We are all that has ever been and all that will be.”  With a sniffle, she spoke the words of a wise draconian soul.  “Everything that lives is alone.  And yet... And yet we are all not.  Maybe you can sense it, Celestia knows I'm starting to.  We all lose our mothers... It's what we're born to do.  The only thing that holds us together, that solidifies the disheveled parts of our mosaic souls... is kindness.”  A whimpering shudder, and she knelt before the enormous jaws of the beast.  “I only want to be kind to you.”

        Those jaws did not clamp down over the last pony.  Instead, they quivered—stifling a high-pitched growl as a forsaken cub bled to the surface of the cosmic accident its life had become, stuck on a world with no Sun or Moon to help it find its way home, with only the crucified corpses of the upper world's fossils to preach its endless rage to.  Melting under the caretaker's Celestial Speech, the savage beast bowed to her golden song.  Its tears formed a sea that washed the littered thorns away.

        “Shhh...” Scootaloo smiled her way through the wounds of her brown coat and raised a gentle hoof to the starry crest of the Ursa's writhing forehead.  “The world is a strange and confusing place.  It's okay to cry about it.”

        The titanic bear did just that, blanketing the abandoned womb of Everfree with as many wails as its blue body could ever hope to illuminate.  Scootaloo weathered every shaking sob, her tears spilling out over a blessedly grinning face as she shut her eyes to the sapphiric miasma and sung Mother Nature's circle back across the ashes of time.  She soothed a lonely shivering foal that—after so many lonely pains and unanswered prayers—that would blissfully become this.

        “Hush now, quiet now, it's time to lay your sleepy head.  Hush now, quiet now, it's time to go to bed...”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Sixteen – For the Moon is Hollow and I Have Touched the Pie

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        Scootaloo was alive, for what it was worth. Lying on her back in the gentle sway of her beloved hammock, she let her scarlet eyes wander over the rust-red ribcage of the Harmony's cabin. There was a tranquility about her expression; it was neither joyous nor melancholic.

        Octavia's strings were long concluded, replaced by a crackling static as the record player a few trots away from the hammock skipped and skipped at the end of the needle's cyclonic sojourn. Scootaloo had been too lazy to change it, but there was something else too, something cold and contemplative, something dim and glistening that illuminated the pale eggshell lengths of her insides just as the lantern-light above her kissed the bowels of the airship cabin. The last pony was lying still as a tombstone, but her mind was flying at a million kilometers per hour inside her skull. It wasn't the first time her brain had done this to itself. Only, on this occasion, there was no leaking of tears.

        Something else begged to be squeezed out of her, to be bled forth upon the blank canvas of her lonesome life. So it was with a breath of finality, tugging at all the threadbare bits of her, that she finally rolled herself out of the hammock and marched her numb self towards her workbench... towards where a hoof-brace, pen, and ink pad resided.

        Gathering the necessary utensils, Scootaloo dragged her journal down from a dusty shelf and swung the leather spine open until the ivory pages of the tome spun dustily to the earliest unmarked page. With a sharp inhale, the brown filly tossed a short mane of violet hair over her neck and, squinting in the light shimmering from the aircraft's boiler to the rear, she slid the brace over her hoof, stuck the pen in it, and began to write. She tongued the insides of her mouth, tasting the faint effluence of sugar, peppermint, and other assorted remnants of overabundant sweetness that laced her soul self as the granite memories were still clouding her mind, all of which she promptly spread on paper like butter over a loaf of cinnamon bread.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Journal Entry # 2,357

        There are many words, and yet there are no words. Having lived an entire life in the Wasteland, opening my mouth has lead to sobbing. After what I've just now been through, I only want to laugh, a delightfully mad thing. Over the years, the decades, I've grown used to doing the impossible, the crazy, and the stupid. But madness? That is a whole new ballgame. You'd think that the last pony would have more sense, but I know you better just as you know me better.

        Yes, I realize that it's been a long time since I wrote to you, much less talked to you. You couldn't possibly have missed me, though I haven't paid much attention to you. You're always circling around me, orbiting me, treating me with as much respect as a spider might hunger for an ensnared moth. I can never consider myself lonely, can never consider myself forsaken—not so long as you're around. You've been with me longer than all of my doubts, fears, hopes, and tears. You're an older companion to me than Spike, and even his green flame—as I've discovered—couldn't separate me from you, from the smell of your blacker-than-black coat, from the residue that you leave behind while flying concentric loops around me.

        In these Wastelands, you have been my constant companion, my dear and dreadful shadow, the one to hear my unanswered prayers and the sole witness to my bleeding wounds. There was a time when I used to think that you enjoyed my suffering, but then I came to realize it was impossible. I mean, how could you? You wouldn't know what suffering is, you wouldn't know what to do with the many disparate pieces of the machine that is “pain”, even though you thrive off of its locomotion. You're like a child, in a way, and children are just as stupid as they are cruel.

        I met another child several days ago—or should I say “several years” ago? Twenty-five hours and twenty-five years serve the same blink to me now as three centuries have come to produce a twinkle in Spike's emerald eyeslits. I don't think the dragon means to mold me into a numb pariah to the transience of time like he's become. There are a lot of things Spike simply cannot understand, though he sends me embarking upon the chronological fathoms courtesy of his own breath. It is ultimately I who must take the plunge into the warm abyss of yesteryear. A part of me wonders if he is envious that I get to be the sole scavenger of time after all of his personal research, but then I realize that I'm actually doing him a favor. I'm bearing a burden that I seriously doubt his draconian soul—as aged as it is—would be capable of shouldering. A spirit can be as wise as the most regal of Equestrian sages, but it takes a life tempered by hardship to wear that wisdom like a suit of armor.

        Nevertheless, I met a child several days ago, and unlike you she does not coldly watch the lonely souls of existence form afar, but rather she sails straight through them with her mouth wide open as if they were made of syrup. She's a sunrise that refuses to reach high noon, for to go any further would risk killing the glory of a beautiful day. She laughs when ponies should be sobbing; she giggles when all other souls should be dying. For a while there, I had thought she was a rude soul who enjoyed laughing at misery, until I realized that she is only laughing her way through misery. She is colored with so many shades of happiness that my Wasteland-tempered eyes can barely register her; Celestia knows she's snuck up on me enough times to make me jump out of even Princess Entropa's skin. When I first bumped flanks with her, I wanted nothing more than to kill the filly on sight. Even now, a large part of me still wants to, but that hasn't happened. I am here; I am alive. I have come back to live, to muse, and to write, carrying as much restraint as I have sanity or something vaguely resembling it.

        Sanity is my curse, a far more venomous and discouraging thing than “hope”. I didn't realize how much I've clung to sanity until I met her—this child—until she taught me that some things don't have to be comprehended before you can boldly launch a pie pan at it. In the Wasteland, sanity appealed to me. It shone like a great golden beacon, so that my naturally inverse response was to reflect the same light skyward in a prismatic facsimile. Sanity bred insane acts of desperation, so that I maintained an equilibrium while dealing with the horrors of this dead and decaying world.

        So imagine my confusion when I found myself submerged in a realm of insanity, and I discovered that the only proper solution was to react with ten times the craziness, until the world itself crumbled felicitously under the psychotic pressure of it all. A single soul can be audacious enough to produce a rainbow out of pure darkness with no light to inspire it. I wonder how well this child would have done in my place, in these Wastelands. She might have become Queen of the Wastes; she could have turned fossils into garlands and taught monsters to sing and dance.

        But what has amazed me the most, what has brought me back here to pen and paper, the fulcrum of my lonesome soul, is that she knew about more than insanity, she knew about more than song and dance, she knew about more than finding a light in the darkness. She knew about you—Yes, you. She knew about you long before I ever did, or would ever admit to knowing. And though she was gifted with this knowledge, she never boasted about it. She never preached it to the ponies around her. She never once gave a sign that her tangled webs with you ever dotted the sugar-coated recesses of her soul. She didn't have to show or to tell anything, for she had long learned to overcome you, which is something that I have never learned, and probably never will.

        So, for the first time as I can ever remember, I dedicate this journal entry to you. It is as important for you to read this as it is for myself to write this. Because if I don't write this, if I don't share this with someone or something, I will go insane. I do not have that child's tenacity nor her lucidity. To taste of her madness is to urge a monarch butterfly out of its cocoon even when all the flowers are dead.

        I need sanity like I need water, and every now and then I release it all the same. Only this time, you have no choice but to hear me out. After all, I listen to you all the time, and I don't care if the legacy you've left makes you “fair” or “unfair”. You're going to digest all of this like the good healthy child that you are. You will need to grow big and strong for the future to come, for someday I will no longer be around for you to share the darkness with.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        A grandiose sea of gray stone blurred underneath the throttling airship. Then, upon a glint in Scootaloo's amber goggles, there was a break. Twin reflections showed a steep canyon slicing its way through an expansive plateau of rock lingering beneath the lone pilot's gaze. Her brow furrowed and she pulled at a series of levers flanking the cockpit, slowing the Harmony to a gentle hover. With a soft breath, she flung a brown hoof to her face and slid the goggles up. Via naked scarlets, she squinted at the furrowed landscape beneath her.

        Through the yawning windshields of the zeppelin's gondola, the first of many serpentine trenches could be seen threading deeply across the body of the rocky continent. The plateau above these sudden and labyrinthine dips was flat, flatter than the surface of a pond and just as placid. There was a bizarre and almost divine pattern to the breaks in the ground. From a bird's eye view—nestled in the Harmony—the last pony almost imagined the canyons forming a spiderweb silhouette, or the wireframes of an enormous bird's wings.

        There were structures inside the canyons. Ruins rested in clusters beneath the shadows of the sharp rocky walls, hidden from the twilight that shimmered above, almost blanketed from the forever-falling snow and ash that flaked the plateau. It was as though this bizarre and gray-laden town had decided to bury a grave for itself long before the Cataclysm had ever pondered searing to dust the bodies that dwelt unassumingly within.

        Scootaloo took a deep breath and leaned back. She gazed out the port and starboard side portholes, checking the stony horizons for anything to anchor the airship to. She saw random clusters of dead trees, distant specks that spelled of fire-blasted farmsteads, and the occasional, fossilized remnant of a boggy oasis. The barren nature of the landscape was of little surprise to the pegasus. To arrive here, she had flown a three-day trip straight from the ruins of Ponyville. She didn't come here just to sight-see. She had been here before, when she was wearing a different skin.

        Finally, the last pony settled for a sharp “hook” in a rock formation overlooking a run-down cathedral built inside the crook of a nearby canyon. Slowly drifting the Harmony towards it, she slid her goggles back on, hopped out of the cockpit, and trotted towards her workbench where—among her usual equipment—a thickly bundled cylinder of white leather rested beside a knife of brittle charcoal.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        When I first ever started scavenging—when I was still barely past my foal years—I was merely looking for survivors. I was searching the wreckage of Cloudsdale for other ponies that may hopefully have survived the catastrophe. When that naivete faded, I scavenged in desperation for the basic things I needed to survive. As I grew older and my coat bled into a dark brown, I rummaged and looted for things that I could sell for silver strips and another bite to eat.

        These days, I've come back full circle. It's not like I'm looking for survivors once more—but rather, I am looking for the precious treasures that all the world's dead ponies have left behind. I seek them not for what their value is in the greedy eyes of the mangy beasts of the Wasteland that fool themselves into thinking that they're sentient. Much rather, I seek them for a worth that surpasses even myself, that will outlast myself, that will see to a world that could hopefully—once again—experience a sunlight that surpasses it, even if I won't be included.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Four copper horseshoes touched down in the atrium of a hollowed-out cathedral. Scootaloo folded her wings beside her armored saddlebags and trotted slowly down the rubble-strewn space between aisles of half-collapsed pews. Lone echoing hoofsteps sang off the rooftop of the large building, which had been reduced to a ribcage of barren stone arches stripped clean of a ceiling. A few flakes of snow floated down through the exposed body of the sanctum, blanketing the last pony as she made her solitary way to the altar and came to a stop. With goggled eyes, she gazed at a tall pane of stained glass art behind the pulpit. Half of the multicolored plates were missing, so that the splendid image of an ethereal alicorn and her majestic wingspan was obscured by jigsaw gaps that revealed the lingering stone gray walls of the canyon beyond the edge of the building.

        Gazing left and right, Scootaloo's goggles glinted as she scanned the sepulcher interior for any signs of life. There were no bodies here, deceased or otherwise. A trail of waxy white puddles led her curiously towards the edge of a massive organ, where several candles once rested in copper holders. Her breath briefly left her as she stumbled upon a scrap of brown cloth, the remnants of a robe that had found its way somewhere in the middle of the cathedral's desolation. She stood over the stretch of fabric and briefly shifted it with a serrated horseshoe. At the sight of the clerical garment, a lonesome gulp briefly hollowed the dimples in her brown features, but she soon shook it off with a shrug.

        Turning about, Scootaloo trotted slowly out a gash in the cathedral's east wall. Before her there suddenly yawned a street of snow-drenched cobblestone. Each and every brick that filled the pathways was unique, in that it had been engraved with the name of a separate equine soul, along with a haunting allotment of dates. The darkly etched characters beneath the last pony's hooves only magnified the filly's isolation as she trotted through a cloud of echoes to get to her eventual destination.

        The tight walls of the canyon led to an even tighter barricade of buildings that hugged either side of the steep trench. No square centimeter of the burrowed landscape had been wasted; the ruins filled every nook and cranny of the winding ravine, so that it was twice as difficult to see where the serpentine city began or where it ended.

        Scootaloo slowly trotted down the twisted “main street” of the dwelling, gazing up and shuddering at the sensation of the building faces and the stone walls above them threatening to collapse over her at any second. The colonized hovel was dark, not quite Everfree-Briar-Dark, but the sheer depth of the trench dimmed the urbanscape so that it had become a worming shadow. From deep within the spine of this twirling passage the dwindling twilight appeared a hundred times as bright, so that the Wasteland glistened with an alien brilliance that briefly made Scootaloo glance at her own hooves to make sure they were presently brown and not copper.

        The rows upon rows of black obelisks—dead torches drained of oil—mocked the last pony as she stumbled ever onwards into shadow. She would have lit the lantern yokes about her neck, had she not felt keenly aware of where things were in this place. After another fifty meters, she came to a stop and glanced to her left. The run-down shell of a saloon stretched before her, just off to the side of a convergence of four trenches where a massive town square lingered in the snowy haze. Hollow and dilapidated market stands bordered the granite expanse. A half-collapsed clock-face dotted a building front looming above. Off to the side was a blacksmith's shop, the front entrance of which had been shattered with brutal finality. Finally, in the center of this courtyard was a dried-out fountain that framed an alicorn effigy. Unlike the statue of Celestia in Ponyville, this town's equine figure embodied a different kind of divinity. The alicorn's horn was shorter, and yet its wings stretched wider than Celestia's, matching the glory of the half-missing mosaic that Scootaloo had seen in the cathedral.

        The last pony sauntered into the snowy center of this echoing cobblestone expanse. Hundreds of phantom hoofsteps shuddered through her soul like so many dead names engraved into the rocky street below. Glancing past the alicorn figure, she spotted a curious blight upon the otherwise immaculate landscape. A large pile of decaying refuse was lying in the center of the plaza. Flakes of wood and crumbling bits of debris had formed a haphazard mountain of charred bric-a-brac before her. It was not the signature of the Cataclysm that had marred the rubble, but rather burn marks of a different sort that stood the test of nearly three decades. Scootaloo was hardly surprised, for she knew exactly what it was and why it was there.

There was something that fatefully caught her eye within the rubble. Marching towards it, she was surprised to see a shape that glinted in the dim twilight wafting down from above. She reached a hoof in and knocked aside shattered bits of furniture, a melted photo album, singed sewing equipment, and other miscellaneous samples of burnt junk until she could see the reflective object in greater clarity. It was a silver flask, a drinking canteen that had melted in on itself like a deflated balloon, its ivory edges stained brown with soot. In a sad breath, the last pony raised the hollow of the desecrated item in her hoof, observing the distorted letter “V” emblazoned across the side of the utensil in Celestial font. Against all odds, the last pony did a mad thing in that abandoned grave. She smiled, and in a warm voice she murmured towards the ashen lengths of the place:

        “And so it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end.”

        Upon a sudden pang of remembrance, Scootaloo was forced to turn around so that she faced the lone and decrepit saloon resting across the courtyard. She marched straight towards the building with a somber speed. Once there, she slowly pushed her brown figure through the dilapidated entrance. One half of a swinging door teetered creakily behind her as the last pony trotted over a sea of broken bottles, splintered chairs, and fallen oil lamps. She peered momentarily towards the far end of the run-down drinking hole. A stage lingered under a shredded web of purple curtains, moth-eaten and shriveled after years of neglect. After navigating the length of the dimly lit bar, she sauntered down a series of steps and found her way into the cellar of the abandoned saloon. A crack had formed in the wooden floorboards between the theater area and the basement, allowing a meager patch of light to waft through a sea of scattered spiderwebs. The last pony navigated a forest of wooden support beams. On instinct, she sniffed the air for a rancid scent. Her ears twitched, as if she heard a distant braying laughter that was there and gone again.

        In the far corner of the place, a large wooden trunk took up one half of a brick-laid wall. With remarkable purpose, the last pony marched directly towards the object and opened the dusty lid up with a creaking noise. Inside of the trunk was a tinier wooden box, fitted with a single padlock that had been blighted by rust over the decades. Scootaloo yanked the smaller trunk up into the dusty air of the rubble-strewn room. Planting her right horseshoe against the nearby wall, she rotated the copper circle of it counter-clockwise until a thick blade popped out. Next, she aimed at the rusted lock and effortlessly shattered it to bits with one swing of the horseshoe's blade. Retracting the tiny cleaver, she gently opened the trunk and peered inside. Her scarlet eyes reflected the colors of the rainbow.

        In a soft breath, Scootaloo reached into the trunk and produced a grand cloak that was dyed prismatically with every color of the spectrum. From the deep dark hood of the article all the way to its flaring coattails, the mysterious outfit sang brightly from red to green to blue and all of the many colors in between that the brown pegasus knew by heart. The thing was as beautiful as it was curiously garish, and the merest hint of a curve to her lips was undeniable.

        Turning the thing further around in her grasp, she produced a black velvet mask that had been hidden deep within the fabric, complete with a pair of cracked ruby goggles that glinted in the tiny streams of twilight. With a curious shuffle, Scootaloo turned the gown upside down so that she had access to the flaring rainbow coattails of the thing. She studied it at multiple angles, then backtrotted half a step and jerked the outfit like a whip into the dusty air of the cellar. With a metallic ring, the coattails extended a fan of rusted, multi-colored daggers. The last pony whistled, not so much in surprise but in a bizarre rush of pride.

        The lonesomeness of the moment refilled the air; Scootaloo stuffed the body of the dense rainbow cloak into her saddlebag and tossed the empty trunk into its larger counterpart. She bounded up a series of steps leading to a cellar door and knocked the panels loose so that she emerged once more onto the deep canals of the city. Marching past the alicorn statue situated in the center of the town square, she followed one lone trench out of many, a corridor that led westward from the heart of the buried town. This was a barren and lifeless passage, missing all of the structures that so densely filled the rest of the trenches previous. Eventually, the passage came to a dead end, and stretched before the deathly thick wall of stone beyond was a four-story bricklaid structure surrounded by a forlorn fence of thick rusted bars.

        Shuffling up to the massive steps of the place, Scootaloo paused briefly to glance to her side. A small wooden shack resided behind the massive cornerstone of the building, almost hidden from view. Adjusting her copper goggles, the last pony magnified her perspective, so that many scattered bits of debris made themselves known in the collapsed doorway of the hut. She saw wooden bottles, scraps of Zebraharan leather, and small felt containers spilling loose, petrified bits of grainy herbs. The last pony briefly hummed to herself, feeling her tongue spin lyrical circles inside her hollow mouth.

        Facing ahead, Scootaloo effortlessly marched up the steep incline of granite steps and made her way into the double-doors of the gigantic facility. A checkerboard floor clattered beneath her metal hooves as she sauntered past the front desk of the atrium and fearlessly marched her way up a winding concrete stairwell beyond.

        She paused briefly on the third floor. Her amber goggles glinted in the hazy streams of twilight that shimmered through the barred windows across the building's front face. With a shuffling of hooves, she peered into a wide room full of white dust-laden tables and collapsed chairs. Several long stretches of glass separated the room from the adjacent hallways. Many of the windows had shattered ages ago, blanketing the black-and-white floors with all sorts of brittle debris that crunched under her copper hooftrots. There were no bodies to be seen in this building either. For the first time since the scavenger could recall, this pleased her.

        With another shuffling of hooves, Scootaloo doubled back and ascended up the stairwell once more. She walked effortlessly onto the fourth floor and strolled down a long, dark hallway at the end of which was a shimmering glow: the floor's only outlet to the outside Wasteland and the dim twilight beyond. She squinted under her goggles as she finally entered the heavily-windowed room. The last pony was graced with two dozen empty beds lying against the walls of the once-sterile hospital dwelling. A pair of wooden desks flanked a series of medical cabinets. The checkerboard floor was awash in little metal nick-nacks, little horse dolls, deflated rubber balls, and various other tiny things that once resembled toys. Tattered canvas dividers leaned against each other and a pile of rusted contraptions: iron lungs, heart monitors, and other mechanical devices that were now as useless as the stone landscape that lingered beyond.

        Scootaloo took a deep breath. The scavenger was a different pony; there was no denying that. She had no legitimate reason to be here. This place didn't have what she had flown the Harmony to the half-buried town for. And yet—standing there in the top floor of the hospital, in the barren absence of both life and death—she could think of no better place to be. Her memories still hummed with the sugary echoes that lingered in those dust-laden halls.

        Meditatively, the time traveler closed her scarlet eyes. Her body was still, and she could almost hear—in a breathless pause—the innumerable giggles of young souls. Their voices swirled and swayed, briefly dancing for a melodic spell. And then—as always—there lurched something darker beyond the rest, something that pierced the last pony's heart like a sick pair of sapphire eyes from across the room, something that laughed, lingered, then rattled.

        And another voice—a voice from the past and future all the same—hissed back with enough clarity to burst her eardrums: “I hate you. I hate you so friggin' much.”

        Scootaloo's scarlet eyes flashed open beneath her amber lenses. Her heart was beating, her neck was sweating, but she was alone. Everything was silent, and the only thing that moved was the alien muscle inside her mouth that briefly dreamed of mimicking the bitterness that still clung to those phantom words.

        Something crinkled under her horseshoe suddenly. Blinking, the last pony glanced down. Through her goggles' refracted vision, she saw a sheet of paper, wrinkled in innumerable spots. No, not wrinkled: it was folded. In a gasping breath, she immediately knelt down and scooped the miraculous relic in her hooves. It was none other than a paper airplane. The edges were tattered, but the bulk of it was still fantastically white. What was more, it wasn't always a paper airplane. As Scootaloo slowly and carefully unfolded the length of it, the brittle remains of a wax drawing exposed itself to her scarlet eyes. The illustration depicted a tiny yellow filly prancing outside of a hospital building with two larger equines of a similar hue. The unmistakable style and characteristics of the art piece danced its way murderously into the pegasus' heart.

        “Suntrot,” she muttered. It was a bittersweet name, like a ray of sunshine across a granite headstone, and the pain of it shot through her body until her goggles fogged from the inside. She slid her lenses up to her violet bangs and wiped her eyes with a forelimb. Sniffling, the scavenger stared up into the granite recesses of the ceiling for the full three or four minutes it took for her to compose her agonized self. Finally, resurrecting a strength that she had built over a quarter of a century, she stood up, slid the sheet of paper into her nearest saddle pocket, and lowered her copper goggles once more.

        With a flick of short pink tail hairs, Scootaloo sauntered towards the nearest broken window and stretched forth her wings to take off towards the looming plateau. She paused suddenly, glancing through the peripheral of her goggles to see a board hanging from the broad wall of the room. Several tattered strips of paper—much like the airplane—had scattered to dusty bits in the endless pelting winds that burrowed through the canyon's dead end. But one or two muddy-white sheets remained on the board. They were splashed all over with more foalish scribbles, of charcoal equine images joined hoof-and-hoof. In the center of each—grinning a crescent moon—was a figure dotted three times over with a pink hue.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        I have this creepy sensation come over me every time I return from a time jump. After each venture, I feel as if a part of myself is left behind, and I feel the shadows of where I just was following me like pinpricks against an amputee's phantom limb. A part of me is in this world, and a part of me still remains in the world that once was. I know that I can't be in two places at once, but it's not so easy convincing my soul... which constantly goes through the conveyor belt of becoming and un-becoming Goddess Entropa's avatar.

        It's been three days since I returned from my last jump, since I spoke with Spike, since I reignited the furnace in the heart of the Harmony and set course for the distant corpse of a remarkably grim city that I once had the dismal grace of witnessing first-hoof. And yet, I am still there. I am still floundering behind the tail of my anchor. I am still making horrible mistakes in the name of sanity. I am still refusing to laugh at what Entropa's immutable grace has landed in my lap.

        In truth, I am hardly bothered by this sensation. With such a split nature, I achieve a unique clarity, so that it helps me write entries like this, even when they're not dedicated to you. I have to capture the feeling—the heart of the sensations that I have just experienced—so long as they are still fresh within me. It is so dang easy to believe that the many frightening moments of my time jumps have never happened. It is so easy to perceive everything I've ever gone through as dreams, as fleeting moments of strange visions strung together on translucent dragon flame.

        There is no going back to the way things were. Even if Spike and I never succeed in restoring the Sun and Moon to this dead land—even if all of these crazy trips into the past are for nothing—there simply is no returning to the life that I used to live. The Wasteland to me is no longer a giant treasure trove of yesterday's pointless spoils. There are fossils here now that breathe to me, that speak to me in voices of warm things that I've had both the blessing and curse to once know and then meet again.

        I'm not sure I can succinctly convey exactly what this means to me, what this means to any living thing that has ever existed. I'm sure you yourself have known a soul or two that has encountered a crisis of this magnitude somewhere in this lopsided universe of ours. But I know that you're never telling me your secrets. Why should you? You like to keep things interesting by playing silent.

        I thought I could play silent too. For decades, I thought that sobbing was a refuge of the weak, that the last tears I would ever be allowed to wail forth upon this world were through the breaths of a lone foal in the company of Fluttershy, or else in the simple shadows of a once-starved loneliness.

        And then I met Spike, and the shell that was around me collapsed. There's yet another skin I wear these days that is neither my own nor Princess Entropa's. I cannot for the life of me paint the colors of this filly's new coat, of this exoskeleton she's suddenly fit herself with, that draws the ash of this world inward suddenly like a sponge, so that every hoof-trot taken into the graves all around her are suddenly worth more pauses, worth more silent moments, worth more breaths of contemplation than could fill twenty million lifetimes of extinct ponies put together.

        Scavenging was another angle of exploring. These days, I'm suddenly venturing out into the Wastes for another reason. I'm retracing my paths. I'm finding the fossils of not only dead memories, but of my own memories. It makes me nauseous just to contemplate it; I bet you think it's downright funny. I wonder what you might actually say, even if it means breaking your vow of silence, to witness the moment when I discover a lone fossil and I find out that fossil is me. Perhaps you will let me live that long, just for the sheer curiosity of the paradox. That is, of course, assuming you believe in immutability half as much as Spike does. It seems to be right up your friggin' alley, doesn't it?

        Grunting, Scootaloo slid her leather mask over her snout and marched shoulder-first into the flurrying winds that skimmed the topside of the stony gray plateau. Her amber goggles frosted against the random blankets of snow that billowed over her as she bravely trotted across the endless horizon of rock that stood tall above the entrenched city. The dead hollows of many soil-stripped tree trunks lingered on either side of her as she pressed onward, undaunted by the wind chill, her short violet threads rustling in the gales.

        She squinted briefly to her side as she trotted beyond the remnants of an age-old bog. The muddy contents of a deep basin had been vulcanized to dense brown rock. Half-submerged in this baked quagmire was a behemoth skeleton, a reptilian thing with four long necks that stretched out from the solidified mud in the anguished pose of a suffocating death throe. To this, Scootaloo bore a brief and unsaintly smirk under her mask as she passed the unsightly creature's multiple skulls.

        Glancing far north—beyond the haze of the ashen winds—the last pony saw a deep ravine, far deeper than the trenches within which the town had been built. This new drop was an unnatural thing; a gigantic quarry had been dredged from the rocky bosom of the world by several generations of earth ponies with archaic knowledge of reshaping the land. In the present, the quarry had acquired so much snow and sediment that it had become a virtual lake of shifting debris. It would be utter suicide to fly—much less trot—near that deep and drowning basin. The very thought of it filled the scavenger's heart with trepidation, like being offered before a serpent's mouth on a plate of white stones. Scootaloo pressed onward.

        As her daring march lingered upon the precipice of an hour, the lone pony passed by a hut constructed out of piled rocks. She gazed briefly inside, reaching a hoof up to her goggles to readjust the lenses momentarily. Piled inside the igloo of jagged stones was a series of blacksmith tools. A furnace and several anvils formed a cold circle beneath the structure, and beyond them, shadowed in ash, was an even colder heap of of dried-up skeletons—the first bodies she had witnessed since coming there. They were hardly the fossils of ponies. Stocky frames dangled forth cloven hooves, and each stunted cranium bore a majestic pair of spiraling horns. The bodies were as sagely in death as they were in life. The deep hum of their chanting voices still haunted the time traveler's ears. She breathed silence to allow them one last acoustic blessing, and then she trudged forth.

        Finally—an hour and a half since she flew from the hospital window—Scootaloo stumbled upon her destination. It was a farmstead, one out of many that blanketed the stony plateau some half-kilometer apart from one another, like distant boils upon the rocky bosom of a dead gray beast. A rickety outline of wooden fencing surrounded the crumbled frame of a two-story farmhouse. The frame of an overturned silo had decayed into a sea of splinters. Finally, the shattered spindle of a grand windmill leaned precariously against a pile of wagon remains. A half-fan of wooden shingles spun back and forth creakily on a hollow axis lined with the brittle shells of decade-old mushrooms.

        Scootaloo took a somber detour through the house, marching through the rubble left from the second story's cold collapse. The tables, benches, and shelves of the place were dotted with hundreds of wax puddles, the tell-tale remnants of ancient candles. A paper box rested on the floor beside several sheets of paper, each of which had remarkably complex landscapes illustrated with crayon. The family dining area had melted together with a filly's bedroom from above, and spilling out from a shattered wardrobe was a surprising array of miscellaneous colors that broke the endless gray of that dead landscape. Deflated pink balloons, tattered red streamers, scattered blue confetti, and bright yellow party hats had long vomited out of the contents of the cabinet, filling the ruins with a nauseating degree of half-buried joy.

        That wasn't all that spilled out of the crumbled wardrobe. Upon closer inspection, Scootaloo discovered a hauntingly familiar array of clothing. She spotted a bright blue shirt be-speckled with tropical palm trees and seaspray patterns. She saw a long black coat with a white vest. There was a pair of khaki pants, an orange sweaterjacket, and two hats—one a black top hat, and the other a scrappy thing made of straw. Then, Scootaloo jolted upon the sight of a bright turquoise shape. She immediately reached a hoof down, but the fabric in question merely dissolved upon impact. However, she discovered something more solid underneath. When her hoof retracted, she was holding up a faded green article, a thick canvas beret with the markings of Zebraharan military duty inscribed across the brim. A sick curve alighted her face, and the scavenger could not help herself—neither could the warm soul sharing the same shell of a body. She packed the thing away in her saddlebag, claiming her third “souvenir” since she jumped out of the Harmony.

        As somber as this site was, it was merely a distraction, like a sullen memory. There was still one thing and one thing alone that the last pony had truly come here for. On swift legs, she trotted out of the ruined farmhouse and back once more into the cold winds of the farmstead. She made straightway across a field splashed randomly with multicolored rocks and headed directly towards a flat wall of mountainous stone that shadowed the far side of the soil-less “field”.

        Her heart beat faster and faster with each step that brought her closer to the wall. Hope battled with despair as she saw a thick bramble of dark green vines having long blanketed the naked surface of the stone face.

        “Come on... Come on... Don't frickin' tell me it's gone. Don't tell me...” The scavenger hissed as she desperately leaped towards the curtain of vines and yanked viciously at them, tearing them to brittle shreds as she exposed the pale rockface to the yawning gray world. With a deep lasting gasp—and she froze, her jaws agape as she formed a slow and methodical smirk. “Whew... Well hello there, Harmony. How have you been?”

        Before her, the wall had been carved deeply—etched in many innumerable spots—with deep holes, shattered impressions, wide swathing beams of curved lines, and several chiseled characters that outlasted both the Cataclysm and the drooping wings of time. Among the illustrated array of madness, only a few characters structurally stood out from the rest, and those had been sketched in the words of the Lunar tongue—the one language that no random local or visitor could possibly have understood upon seeing the haphazard mural... except for her.

        “Now we're friggin' getting somewhere.” The last pony smirked to herself. Her heart raced as she laid out a pouch before her and produced the broad white cloth of leather that she had brought from her airship. Using rusted metal stakes, she impaled the far corners of this tarp to the rock until it was pressed clean to the etched mural along the naked stone wall. Then—with expert precision—she hovered on brown wings and rubbed a knife of brittle charcoal over the entire length of the cloth, transferring the image from the rock onto the sheet, preserving a message that was twenty-five years old.

        Each time I go diving into the past, each time I go plunging my shivering body into the currents of Spike's green flame, I lose greater and greater cohesive chunks of myself, so that I feel with each trip a greater sense of hopelessness and dismay. And yet, every time I return from such a descent, I come back refreshed, as if I've just stapled together a great rift in the world that had been torn loose ever since the Sundering of Consus. Do the feelings I have after my returns overwhelm the apprehensions I suffer when I first embark upon my chronological leaps? So far, I cannot say. The life of a scavenger is all about learning to hold your breath and hope for the best. I could descend into the deepest and darkest hole, search for days, and come back up to the twilight of the surface having caught nothing. Yes, that may mean that I'm empty-hoofed, but the fact that I've made it back with the greater whole of myself intact should be a victory on its own, right? Heck, why am I asking you this?

        I shouldn't lie. For a while there, I thought Spike's experiment was going nowhere. A part of me still feels that; it's only natural to doubt. Visiting Cheerilee didn't teach me a thing about what caused the Cataclysm; it only showed me how paranoid and disastrously impulsive I can be. Defending the Apple Family's farm from trolls didn't bring me any closer to figuring out how Equestria ended, but I did bring peace to the earth ponies' lives while I learned the limits of my Entropan abilities. Being with Fluttershy showed me more vulnerable wounds within the fabric of myself than I had ever been willing to admit, but Celestia help me if I so much as lifted my and Spike's understanding of the Cataclysm by a single centimeter.

        But now—so beautifully now—I think I'm starting to get a grasp on things. It may be nothing, it may be a wild goose chase—but it is certainly hopeful, and that's done a number on my other curse of “sanity”. I need to know that there is more to my trips into yesterday than a mere excursion in past and present memories. I need to feel that I'm accomplishing more than just blessing a few meager ponies' lives who—though they may once have been my friends—are mere pindrops in the great echoing well of history. A time traveler can't afford to be selfish, and in spite of all of Spike's subjective and philosophical assurances to the contrary, I need to be moving away from my anchors and deeper into the sea of understanding the past. I'm starting to think that I've begun that. Ironically, only time will tell if my efforts are fruitful, but it will be my time to tell and no longer simply the naked moments stolen from history's ghosts.

        Reunited with the toasty interior of the Harmony's cabin, Scootaloo slapped the last of her leather armor and equipment onto the workbench. She reached into her saddlebag and gently—very gently—produced the paper airplane with the golden figures drawn upon it. This she plastered to the wall above the surface of the workbench so that it caught the gentle kiss of the lanternlight at just the right angle. She breathed easier, as if discovering a third lung inside herself.

        As the Harmony climbed high above the cold winds kissing the plateau, the last pony placed the vessel into a steady hover and marched down the spiraling copper staircase with the rolled-up cloth of white leather in her grasp. Once descended into the hangar level of the Harmony, Scootaloo shoved aside a tiny metal scooter, approached a worktable littered with runeforging tools, and spoke to the runes in the lanterns above her. The dark metal bulkheads glowed with pale moonlight.

        She proceeded then to stretch the tarp across a wall until the entire folds of it stood majestically before her peering scarlet eyes. The charcoal etchings bled into a semblance of a pattern. The many white lines and dots and curves formed a broad constellation, a naked and lucid map of the Equestrian night sky from twenty-five years ago. In the center of this natural clustering of stars, planets, and galactic streams there blossomed a great thick miasma of conjoining dots, a tumorous array that was seemingly harmless to anypony alive in that time... but not to the last pony.

        With a smirking breath of discovery, Scootaloo sat on her haunches, produced her journal, and began re-redrawing the constellations before her in a penciled sketch across a series of blank pages.

        My days with Fluttershy gave me many memories that I will never forget—and all of them for personal reasons... except one. I had heard something beyond the layers of Everfree madness that pierced me harder than anything I had ever heard before. I've never truly been a pony of faith, but the sensation I felt in the Forest had to be believed. I feel... as though a voice came to me, where a voice wouldn't have come to anypony else—time traveler or not. It spoke to Entropan ears and Entropan eyes, knowing fully well that they were camouflaging an infectious splinter lodged into the flesh of that very time and place.

        My close draconian friend is a huge fan of immutability, so it would only be just to speak for him when I write that “nothing happens without a reason.” In Everfree, I was a lone spirit detached from her rightful timeline. I was in the absolute most random and inappropriate spot for my soul-self to have been projected. And yet—then and there—something spoke to me. I cannot take this as a mere coincidence, as a mere whim of madness. There is something driving me, aiming me towards unraveling the mystery of the Cataclysm. And if I was to make such a daring guess, I wasn't the only spirit who was willing this into fruition.

        Maybe the Goddesses know something about it. Maybe you know something about it. All that matters is that I'm learning more about it with each passing second, with each paragraph I place down to somehow frame and preserve it.

        It all started two weeks ago, several days before I set course to the northeast province of Equestria, before I set out to find the twenty-five year old star map, before I began writing to you, before I found a reason to laugh, before I learned that there were more things in the Wasteland meant spending breaths on than sobs....

        With a grunt, Scootaloo gave the obelisk of moonrock one last pound. The metal kiss of the scavenger's hammer echoed across the stony landscape until it vibrated off a forest of briars that formed an impenetrable wall less than fifty meters ahead of the freshly-made grave. Pocketing her tools away, the last pony settled down the crest of her aching lungs and stood before the stone that marked Fluttershy's final resting place. A hollow cubicle of petrified wood and straw outlined the spot where a rustic cottage once stood in the glittering rays of the Sun. Here, under the shadow of endless twilight, the owner of a golden voice finally found peace.

        Scootaloo exhaled, her short pink mane billowing with a brief gust of ash-laden wind. She settled down on her haunches and bowed her head before the tiny obelisk, like a foal paying reverence to an eternal memorial. After a flaring of her nostrils, she glanced back up and bravely murmured to the lonesome air of the site:

        “You were always at peace here. Whether you were by yourself, or whether you were treating guests, it was this place that brought you comfort. I can't pretend to know whether or not you took my advice and sought the company of those who cared for you, but I do know what a true home is. After so many years, I know what a true home is. So long as you're here, Fluttershy, it'll never be empty. Your spirit shall endure, and it shall do so far longer than any Sun or Moon ever could over this land, resurrected or not.”

        She tilted her head aside until her scarlet eyes fell upon a tiny dirt mound lying besides the larger grave.

        “I couldn't help it, Fluttershy. I hate for you to be by yourself forever. So, I buried Angel Bunny right next to you. At least, I think it's Angel. I found the rabbit's bones right at the threshold to the cottage. It was as if... it was as if she was w-waiting for you to come home from the Everfree Forest. Now, she doesn't have to... wait any longer...”

        Scootaloo bit her lip. A shaking overcame her. She clenched her scarlet eyes tightly shut to weather the next few breaths, and when she reopened them a pair of tears squeezed loose.

        “Fluttershy, I can only do so little for Equestria. I can only come back and hug bits and pieces of you in green bursts of craziness. No matter what Spike or I may accomplish, nothing will ever change the fact that each and every one of the ponies I have ever cared about died horrible deaths on their lonesome. I will never know how you and the Capricorn ended up in the clutches of an Ursa Major. I'll never imagine what went through Big Macintosh's head when he turned his own body into a doorstop for the Apple Family's cellar. All I know is that I am only able to witness a blissfully short and bittersweet portrait of all of your lives, and just what am I to make out of such a glorious image? Do I add more color to the brushstrokes? Do I scratch off the rough edges? What does it matter when the masterpiece is going to be burned in a raging, Cataclysmic fire when all is said and done?”

        The last pony sniffled. She raised a brown forelimb up to her cheek and dried her face. Several shuddering breaths later, she resumed speaking.

        “You have taught me so much about the circle of kindness, but what good is kindness if I am all that there is to share it with? I have spent my whole entire life giving to myself, and not even two and a half decades combined can match the glory of spending a few short days with you. This has always been a dark and dismal world, Fluttershy. I may yet be able to bring the Sunlight back, but what's the point if you're not there for the light to shine on?”

        She swallowed a heavy lump down her throat. After a few shuddering moments, she finally gained control over her pained breaths. She brought her hoof to her lips, kissed it, and planted it on the lunar surface of the obelisk. Upon making contact, however, she rested her limb there, leaning the whole of her weight against the stone like a yellow pegasus had once leaned against her for support.

        “I never once dreamt of burying my parents, Fluttershy. That is because, since I was a kid, I had long committed myself to making them proud by carrying their strength with me. Now that I've laid you to rest, I commit myself to honoring you all the same. I may not know how yet, but I promise you—kindness will shine in this land, even if it's doomed to last no longer than I do. I thank you and bless you for teaching me what you know. This earth may be your grave, but I will be your vessel, as I am for Applejack. Starting with kindness and honesty, I will bring more than Sunlight back to the Wasteland. I will bring structure. I will restore... harmony.”

        As soon as she released her hoof, she released her breath like a sorrowful ghost. It was a heaving thing, and it almost tripped her as she struggled back onto all four limbs. Slinging a bag of tools over her blank flank, the last pony departed from the remains of Fluttershy and made for the bulbous copper shape of an airship lingering above a pair of dead trees, all the while murmuring a breathy trio of words to the dead air of the wastes...

        “The Onyx Eclipse.”

        A puff of bright green flame erupted across the ceiling of a cavernous laboratory. A pair of green-clawed hands tightly shut the runed cap over the glass jar of billowing emerald. After a coughing spell, the fuming purple dragon squinted down at his little equine friend.

        “What, dear child, is an Onyx Eclipse?” he repeated awkwardly to the stone walls.

        Scootaloo leaned up into his grasp. “W'nyhhm,” she boldly hummed. The rune seal lit up in a purple glow and the green flame inside settled to a cool cloud of thick wisps. “Careful with those iron palms of yours, Spike.” She took the jar from him and rolled it into a saddlebag on her flank. “You've got a grip that could decapitate a baboon with one squeeze. I've gotta open the jar on my lonesome, y'know.”

        “I do believe you're ignoring the subject at hand.”

        “What's wrong? I happen to know a baboon or two who's a prime candidate for being beheaded.”

        “What—” Spike paused to cough, wheeze, cough again, and then finally breathe easily. He waved the green smoke from his nostrils and sauntered past a wall of clockfaces towards his bed of gemstones. “What is this Onyx Eclipse balderdash that you speak of?”

        “I wouldn't exactly call it balderdash,” Scootaloo muttered. Her brown brow furrowed under a tiny, fuzzy forest of pink mane hair. “I'm telling you, when Ditzy Doo's kid was possessed by that goatfish whatchamacallit, she started picking up things.”

        “Define 'things', child.”

        “Trippy, spacey, constellationy things. Uhm...” She rubbed a shaking hoof through a suddenly aching forehead and lisped forth, “The kid rambled on and on in an out-of-this-world voice about a 'dead keyhole of heartless stars' through which the 'Onyx Eclipse' would 'suck out all light' and crud. And then this voice mentioned something about 'chaos flames'. Uhm... 'Hello, Cataclysm.' Am I right?”

        “If I recall correctly from your recollection of the events surrounding the delivery of the Capricorn foal...” Spike slumped his tired self down onto the gemstone pile and rested his green fuming lungs. “You were under quite a deal of duress, both mentally and physically. I am apt to emphasize the former above the latter.”

        “Yeah, sure, I had some magical resonance screwing with my projected soul self—”

        “Scootaloo, you were exposed for several hours to the direct aura of a celestial creature's energy essence. It is the sole reason for why you returned to the present as early as you did. Your Entropan body is anything but invulnerable, especially when it comes to severe trauma—both magical and physical. I truly thought that we had both gone over this—”

        “Okay, so it was a bucketload of magical resonance!” Scootaloo exclaimed. “But that's besides the point. Dinky was saying a heck of a lot of weird stuff, but for a brief spell it was like she was talking directly to me. She called me an 'Orphan of time', Spike. She knew all about Princess Entropa's avatar serving as my projection's shell and stuff!”

        “Ponies and dragons are both intelligent creatures,” Spike spoke through an educated smirk as he stroked his green chin crests with purple fingers. “But we commonly make the fallacy of overexercising our mental tools of pattern recognition. It's quite likely that—out of the myriad of nonsensical things that Miss Doo's child spat out—you simply chose to focus on a few key words, because they somehow constructed a structure of familiarity to your beleaguered mind.”

        “Ugh!” Scootaloo tossed her head back with a rolling of scarlet eyes. “For the love of Celestia, Spike! How come every time I've come back from these time jumps, you've been quick to commend me on performing the simple yet historically inconsequential acts for my past friends, but the one time I bring to you a potential sign of progress towards unraveling the Cataclysm, you toss it out the window like a rusted pail of stale quartz?”

        “I'll have you know I happen to like quartz. It goes well as an entree with garnets.”

        “Don't make me hit you in places Gultophine was too drunk to bother armoring with scales.”

        Spike chuckled smokily. After another coughing breath, his violet pendant dangled with a manalit sparkle as he summoned the strength to wheezily say, “Assuming there is a truth to this 'Onyx Eclipse' that you're so vibrantly obsessed with, what exactly could it possibly mean?”

        “Well, it's too dang early to know that for sure. And—pfft!—I'm not stupid, Spike. If anything, Dinky was just picking up on a celestial vision. What she said and the way she said it was likely the best way she could process what she saw into words. If I scoured the caved-in libraries of the wasteland searching for 'Onyx Eclipse', I wouldn't end up with crap. I'm sure what Dinky saw—or whatever the voice through her was trying to explain—can't adequately be summed up in words. What I'm looking for is... is a phenomenon that can likely be exposed for all its technical qualities.”

        “Like what, pray tell?”

        Scootaloo shrugged mightily. A brief floundering, and she finally sputtered forth, “A big, gigantic, scary, black thing falling down from space?”

        “Quite mesmerizing,” Spike murmured with wagging eyecrests and a sarcastic smirk that betrayed his age. “You have just put to shame my three hundred years of scientific methodology.”

        “Oh, shut your burnhole.” Scootaloo stuck her tongue out and hoisted herself up so that she sat on the edge of a lab table, her back legs dangling as she faced directly across her draconian companion. “Let me ask you something, oh learned hermit of the Canterlotlian Mountains.”

        “I'm all scales.”

        “Do you know when was the last time that the Royal Court of Canterlot issued the Astronomy Council to publish a star chart of the modern Equestrian Cosmos?”

        “Sadly, that knowledge escapes me, but I have full faith that my beloved 'Canterlotlian Clerk' can fill me in.”

        “Thirty-five years ago,” Scootaloo answered. She smirked and leaned her head playfully to the side. “That means the last astronomical almanac was produced ten years before the Cataclysm. In all of that time, there was no adequate mapping of the stars, at least as far as Royal Publication was concerned.”

        “Hmmm, that would explain why Twilight was always so enthusiastic to graduate swiftly from Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns.” Spike exhaled a few green fumes and rested his chin down on the edge of the gemstone bed beneath him. “She always said that the first thing she wanted to do once she had received her diploma from the Tertiary Magical Academy was produce an accurate and up-to-date map of the night's sky. Naturally...” He let loose a somber exhalation. “...that never came about.”

        “I've had a long time to think about it.” Scootaloo raised a hoof as she thought aloud. “The space of time between the end of the Third Age and the beginning of the Fourth was a time of great anxiety and even superstition throughout Equestria. I've stumbled upon many discarded periodicals in my years of scavenging. The papers spoke of entire clans and even cities full of ponies who huddled together at various Alicorn Temples upon the thousandth year in deep prayer, for fear of what the Return of Nightmare Moon would bring to the face of Equestria.”

        “Many of them had a good reason to be afraid,” Spike said with a blinking of his emerald eyeslits. “My beloved mentor was among such righteously concerned ponies.”

        “And do you remember the nature of Twilight Sparkle's concerns, Spike?” Scootaloo leaned forward in her precarious seat. Her face grinned wickedly. “If I'm not mistaken, Princess Celestia's most gifted student came to Ponyville under a cloud of dread because she knew—Spike—she knew that on the longest day of the thousandth year since Nightmare Moon's banishment, the dreaded Alicorn would return.”

        “Twilight Sparkle had a knack for seeing things that other ponies didn't.”

        “She had prophecy, Spike. The old pony legend had been exposed to her—by word of mouth or tome of text—and it had prepared her for one of the most epic events in Equestria's history.” Scootaloo gazed aside at the now-dusty diagram which Spike had branded into the wall of the underground cavern several weeks prior. “I used to believe that prophecy was a bunch of crapola. But you've shown me otherwise, Spike.”

        “Oh have I, now?”

        “Your green flame,” Scootaloo murmured and gazed back at him with a soft smile. “It's thrown me past the seemingly impervious barriers of time. It's sent me in circles so dizzying that I've nearly lost cohesion trying to comprehend them. Thanks to you, this pony now fully believes that it is possible to see things beyond the limits of normal existence. Maybe the first equine souls who put pen to paper were able to see things that modern ponies aren't naturally inclined to. Maybe prophecies have always existed for a reason. And if prophecy could foretell the Four Stars—”

        “The Four Daughters in exodus...”

        “Right—If prophecy could foretell them aiding in Nightmare Moon's escape, then what's to say that there isn't a way to see or predict the stars' relation to the Cataclysm?”

        “And you believe the ambiguously named 'Onyx Eclipse' could be the center of such a pattern of prediction?”

        “Dinky could see things that were incomprehensible to most terrestrial creatures. You and I and our brains slammed together wouldn't be able to interpret what that poor foal must have seen, what galactic truths swam through her skull with such immensity that it nearly drove her to death and drove me insane.” A deep breath, and Scootaloo leaned her head down onto a pair of cradling forelimbs. “If only I knew where to look next...”

        “The sky?”

        Scootaloo smirked bitterly. “Fat lot of good that will do us now, Spike.” Scootaloo ran a single hoof playfully through her short pink threads. “The answer is still in the past. If there's any stargazing to be done, it's then.”

        “I would have imagined that you were much more inclined towards princess-gazing.”

        “Say what?”

        “I'm anything but an impatient dragon, Scootaloo, especially when it comes to this conjoined venture of ours,” he said. After a fuming of dark green smoke he coughed once or twice before uttering, “But I can't help but notice that you have had many occasions during these time trips to contact Princess Celestia directly, and yet you failed to directly pursue such avenues of opportunity.”

        “I-I have?”

        The purple dragon's eyeslits narrowed. “From the first moment you set hoof into the past, you've dealt with a murderous band of trolls, an apple farm in jeopardy, a dying celestial creature, and an unfortunate unicorn foal who was on the verge of perishing from a magical overload to her cranium. It's been three hundred years since I was a whelp, old friend, but if I remember my youth succinctly enough, our beloved Ponyville existed in a time and age when it was not uncouth for Princess Celestia—Goddess of the Sun—to come down from her exalted palace for something as trivial as a tea party at Sugarcube Corner. Now, you have dealt with crazy and unpredictable situations in your time travels which you have solved quite expertly on your own, but it stands to reason that they would all have been ample excuses for capturing the attention of Equestria's ruler and patron deity. Still, with all of these opportunistic moments literally being thrown upon your saddle, you refused each and every time to march or fly with your anchor to the royal Throne room of Canterlot. Pray tell, why is that?”

        “Do I need to spell it out for you, Spike?” Scootaloo murmured, gazing down at her dangling lower limbs. “I'm not the same moronic pony who you sent to Cheerilee's schoolhouse.”

        “By no means. You have not only practiced the fine art of subtlety, dear child. I daresay you have mastered it.” His iron lips curved as he tiredly smiled. “But it's one thing to be subtle; it's another to be an absolute stonewall.”

        “You make it sound so easy, Spike.” She briefly frowned and glanced up at him. “You try going back in time. You try staring Applejack in the face and telling her that her entire farm has to be trudged to a pulp under the hooves of an entire Celestial Army because it was forced to go into a bloody melee with trolls! You try and explain to Ditzy Doo that Fluttershy's obvious solution to her kid's problem should be brushed aside for a risky, cross-country trip to Canterlot!”

        “I'm not condemning the decisions you've made, Scootaloo. Far from it. I'm just intrigued by them, is all.”

        “I know what we're both doing this 'experiment' for, Spike. I know what Equestria has lost, and I know what we're both wanting to light up the future with. But when I'm down there in the past—and it so totally does feel like taking a dive—it's no longer a matter of dealing with cause and effect and speculative variables. Right now, I feel like a doofus for not contacting a nearby pony militia about the trolls. Right now, I cringe to think of what an opportunity I almost had to get in contact with Canterlot when instead I threw my Entropan cohesion into jeopardy by exposing myself to Dinky's horn. But that's because, right now, I'm here in this cavern with you. When you're surrounded by other equine souls, when you're no longer the end of ponies, it isn't quite so simple to keep a straight head.”

        “But you've kept a straight heart, hmm?”

        Scootaloo sighed. “When I'm time traveling, it's a lot like scavenging. The best way to get anything done—I've discovered—is to focus on the moment. If I put too much thought into anything but the moment, I risk panicking and screwing up big time. The pathetic side effect of that is that I lose sight of the big picture.”

        “Do you?” Spike leaned his green-crested face to the side from where he reclined. “Our mission—above all, Scootaloo—is one of compassion and closure for the entire legacy of the Equestrian race. Would you be any greater a shining example of ponydom if you ignored the immediate concerns of Applejack and Fluttershy and Ditzy Doo?”

        “'Shining example'...” Scootaloo smirked bitterly. “The one closest thing Equestria has to a savior, and it's a friggin' blockhead.”

        “Your head resembles a fine pink brush far more than a block, old friend.”

        “Jee, thanks, Spike.”

        “Anytime.”

        “But—if I may add to this already depressing conversation...” She leaned forward and exasperatingly rubbed her hooves over the contours of her face. After stifled groan she continued, “I think I'm going about this all the wrong way.”

        “Do tell.”

        “Yes, we both know that contacting Princess Celestia is potentially the best and quickest way to getting a firm perspective on the Cataclysm. But let's pretend I did get to acquire an audience with Her Majesty while visiting either Applejack or Fluttershy. What then? What would I have to show for myself? What case would I have to present her? I can just imagine it: 'Uhm, Hello, Your Majesty. It's awfully swell of you to have sent a legion of your finest soldiers to risk their lives against an army of trolls, and I'm really friggin' happy that you have Canterlot's most gifted doctors working around the clock on Ditzy Doo's tortured little girl. But, while we wait for all of that crud to sort itself out, let me tell you about how I've come from the future and I need to find a way to bring back magic to the Equestrian Wasteland long after you and your beloved sister frickin' bite the dust!'”

        “Ah, now there's the heretic of subtlety that I know and love.”

        “At your service.”

        “In all seriousness, I'm sure you would adequately stumble upon a tactful way of explaining your presence in the past to Her Majesty.”

        “Would I?” Scootaloo blinked. “Even if she would have been willing to hear me out, what would I have to go on?”

        “You know the time when the Cataclysm happened. You know what it did to Cloudsdale. You obviously know what it did to the Sun and Moon—”

        “But can I expect the Princess to fill in the rest all on her lonesome?”

        “I would imagine that you would help her, Scootaloo.”

        “Right. I would help her.” The last pony nodded. “But so far I haven't been doing a very good job of it.”

        “How do you mean, child?”

        She groaned and dropped back down to her hooves, pacing about the lengths of the cavern. “I need to know more, Spike! I need to get a solid grasp on what's coming to blast Equestria to ribbons. I need to narrow my gaze on just what's looming over the starry horizon. I need to gather my bearings on the what before I can so much as deliver it all wrapped-up-and-pretty to the Princess so that she can help me on figuring out the why.”

        Spike took a deep and tiresome breath. “And we are back to your ever-cryptic 'Onyx Eclipse' fixation, aren't we?”

        “I know that my Entropan ears were being graced with a truth, Spike. You can't believe it because you weren't there—not like I was. I have to start figuring out what was wrong with the heavens, what was killing Capricorns and Ursas and what was giving celestial voices the liberty to speak through Dinky to the 'orphan of time'.”

        “That's all good and fine, but how do you intend to create a starchart?”

        “I beg your pardon?”

        “That is the logical next step to take, yes?” Spike narrowed his eyeslits on her. “If this is the path you're wishing to take, old friend, then I'm all for it. But if you're so inclined to investigate the constellations' relationship to the Cataclysm, then I must say you'll likely wish to produce a map that all the ponies of modern Equestria failed to construct within a decade to disaster.”

        “I... uhm...” She bit her lip and sweated nervously. “I-I can't very well bring a pen and paper back and forth through time, can I?”

        “Sadly no, child,” Spike said with a shaking of his purple-scaled neck. A fuming cough, and he added, “You could, however, consider a way in which to permanently grant our present selves a solid piece of celestial evidence.”

        “Like how?”

        “You're resourceful, old friend. I'm sure that the solution will come to you when necessary. The first order of business—I perceive—is choosing your next anchor by merit of her providing you with the most accessible view of the Equestrian sky, twenty-five years ago.”

        Scootaloo instantly shuddered. Her body had turned into a glacier with the pathetic audacity to wear a brown coat of hair. She bit her lip and instantly avoided Spike's gaze. “I... I-I don't think I like where this is going...”

        “On the contrary, child.” Spike breathed in a low bass hum of understanding. There was a slight curve to his iron lips. “I think you quite well relish the thought of where this could be taking you.”

        An hour later, the last pony sat on one of three scant remaining planks that formed the dilapidated balcony of Twilight Sparkle's burnt treehouse. Spike had fallen into a draconian slumber, his nostrils expelling a snoring flurry of green fumes that drove the coughing pegasus out into the bitter cold of Ponyville's ruins.

        It had been a long while since the cold snow and ash of the Wastes made the brown pony's limbs shiver. Right then and there, fumbling through a dangling forest of baby dragon teeth, there was no peace to be had in Scootaloo's squirming limbs.

        Wearing her goggles like a headband, the filly nervously gulped and fished her hoof from tooth to tooth until she once again braced the ivory bone structure hanging from a haunting blue string. She gazed long at it, devouring the sight of it like a separate sky against the gray expanse of her existence.

        Spike was a wise dragon, but with each passing visit that Scootaloo paid her elder friend, she became increasingly aware of his centenarian senility—or at least that was what she was so staunchly willing to label it. He had every optimistic bit of confidence in her, every grain of faith. There were times when she could swear he saw her not as the tortured soul that the Wasteland had tempered her to become, but rather he still believed her to be the rambunctious little foal that skirted the lengths of the town on a scooter, carrying a smirk and shrug of the shoulders wherever she went. Little did Spike know just how powerful Scootaloo's facade was, how strong it would forever be, how successfully and how effortlessly it had fooled the living world into leaving the self-sacrificial filly alone—until quite ironically that very same world died around her and granted the girl her every introverted wish.

        Spike didn't know that the happy things of the foal's memories were like steaming cups of arsenic to the last pony now. Everytime he breathed her into the past, it was in faith that she would find closure. Spike could hardly realize that the very wounds that required such attention took more than a simple chronotonic acceleration spell to seal up; it took pain, patience, and paranoia. It took battling with trolls, carrying possessed unicorns, and staring down a phalanx of frightened children's faces. It took every square centimeter of Scootaloo's brain that could go mad, and every deep vacuole inside both her natural and projected selves that could hold tears.

        Perhaps Spike was right in the long run; Scootaloo was over all benefiting from these trips. The excursions were far from simple—which was the only way a three hundred year old experimenter with time could envision it from where he sat on a bed full of multicolored gemstones. To Spike, the chains of time were iron-wrought and immutable reins that only the Alicorns could wield power over. To Scootaloo, the mad pony diver, those chains broke down into innumerably complex and unpredictable filaments that—when examined from the inside out—exposed the last pony to far more horrors and sorrows than any confident scientist in the grand history of existence could ever bother to postulate.

        So it was beyond Scootaloo to hate Spike—though she could very easily discount him—when she took into account his meager suggestion, his playful inference, his good-natured advice that she take the ever-fateful plunge, that she grasp ahold of the blue string, that she finally open the black barred door to the arcane vault and speak face to face with that haunting prismatic shade, something so joyfully pristine in the foal's path that it would crucify the thirty-three-year-old mare right then and there to her very screams.

        So much as looking at the tooth hurtled the last pony suddenly forward in a sputtering breath, so that she felt her lungs bunching up inside the hollow of her rattled brown torso. Her soul was plunging a million kilometers an hour past the wreckage of Cloudsdale and into the deep hollows of the earth where a wailing voice shielded her from the greatest and most awesome soul that had ever danced her colorful life under the yawning sky of living Equestria.

        “Nnngh—NO!” Scootaloo jolted back, nearly teetering off the creaking wooden balcony of Twilight's treehouse. She panted and panted, her pink mane settling from a magical centripetal force that had ever so briefly empowered her, excited her, terrorized her. The next voice came in a whimper, echoing with phantom waterfalls of Cloudsdalian rain water. “N-No... Not now... Not y-yet...”

        The stars could wait, for all she was concerned. And yet, words that Spike had said—truly wise words—prodded the numbed edges of Scootaloo's soul. The time had long come for the equine survivor to stop running. In a firm breath, she briefly convinced herself that she wasn't running from that tooth; she was simply charging towards it in a curved fashion. There were plenty of yesterday's stars to be charted, and other separate truths to be told with other anchors, until the reality of the twenty-five-year old apocalypse would unveil itself. This, Scootaloo had no choice but to believe. She may not have been as old as Spike, but she could grant herself at least a measure of faith.

        Gulping her dread down her throat like so much mushroom broth, the last pony shuffled to the next tooth, and then the next, and then—her mouth sputtered. The girl cringed briefly, remembering in a vomitous fit of euphoria a saintly fruit that she had once bitten into under the shade of glistening apple orchards. But this sweetness was different, more potent, more forced.

        She realized that a fitful tooth had been dangling in front of her, lazily suspended from a pink string. As soon as her hoof so much as grazed it again, her insides bubbled with syrupy sarsaparilla. Her tongue lapped at an effluent cloud of cotton candy lodged in the hollow of her skull, and every breath she took was laced with cinnamon, licorice, vanilla, and all the many taste-bud-entrancing spices of joy, joy, joy...

        It made her positively sick to her stomach. “Heh...” She chuckled to herself with several inexplicable cavities across a crescent moon of teeth. “Do I really hate myself that much?”

        A ghostly stream of peppermint tugged her forward into a rosy heat that burned against the darkness of her imprisoning eyelids. With a scarlet flutter, Scootaloo opened her eyes to see where she had steered the Harmony in pursuit of the pink-stringed dragon tooth's directions. The gray world splashed evenly ahead of her through the broad windows of her airship. Glancing left and right beyond the haze, the last pony could hardly make out where the ground began and the horizon ended.

        A brief look at her altimeter did not help things. She judged that she was barely half a kilometer from the floor of the Wasteland, and yet the honey-lapping leylines of the dragon tooth were aiming her down, so that she felt that a suicidal nose-dive into the depths of Equestria was in order.

        Scootaloo slowed the forward movement of the aircraft and tilted her seat so that she was perpetually gazing down through the windshield at a forty-five degree angle. Slipping her goggles over her eyes and adjusting them to compensate for the dimming fluctuations in the twilight, she scanned the snow-laden floor beneath the hovering zeppelin and felt for any “soul-centric” changes in the dragon tooth's invisible tugging.

        Her tongue pulsed and her cheeks fluctuated. With every other league of forward drifting, she felt rivers of cinnamon-sweet euphoria spilling down through the bulkheads that held her body in place. Her heartbeat picked up at random occasions, as if she was being assaulted by random sugar highs that fought the very gravity seating her to the cockpit. Then—as the Harmony dipped dangerously close to the alabaster-white surface of the Wasteland—she felt as if she was going to suffer an inexplicable heart attack. Her veins filled with swarming lightning bugs, like gallons of bubbly soda gurgling through her. She licked her teeth instinctually, expecting to feel a sudden plethora of cavities at the perpetual sweetness assaulting her senses.

        This was nothing like the simple pull of Applejack's tooth or the gentle, silk-soft tugging of Fluttershy's. On both of those occasions, Scootaloo could easily tell exactly where she was going. Even though Fluttershy's remains were located in the hazardous depths of the Everfree Briar, Scootaloo at least knew that it was the Briar she was being tugged towards. Here—following the vanilla gasps that filled her body with a falling sensation—there was no real clue as to exactly where her next anchor was residing. The tooth was determined to aim the last pony straight into the bosom of the blasted world.

        Admittedly, Scootaloo had never flown this close to that particular splotch of Equestrian ground. She had spent an entire adulthood avoiding the site of Ponyville and the Wasteland immediately surrounding it. Here she was, barely five kilometers north of the spot where destiny reunited her with a purple dragon, and nothing about the barren fields looked remotely familiar to her. As a foal, she remembered a lonesome trip she had made, by hoof, to the grand valley beneath the shadow of Cloudsdale. Gently rolling fields and endless green hills composed the bulk of the Equestrian landscape that resided between Ponyville to the south and the hovering pegasus city in the north. All of that had been sundered by the Cataclysm, with many of the lush beds of grass replaced with jagged ravines and sinkholes and pale white exposed rock as far as her goggled eyes could see between there and Petra, the distant city of goblins.

        For the umpteenth time in her exhausted mind, Scootaloo was helpless to contemplate exactly what it was that compelled each of her and Spike's friends to have been located at such bizarre distances from one another the exact moment that the Cataclysm had happened. A part of her wondered if it was more than the physical landscape that the apocalypse had torn apart. Perhaps there had been a spiritual sundering, or an emotional catastrophe. From the confessions of the different anchors she had spoken to, it seemed as though Applejack was too busy working to be with friends. Fluttershy was too busy battling self-doubt to seek companionship. Rarity was an utter stranger and no-show to the rest of Ponyville. Twilight Sparkle was writing a book. As for Rainbow Dash—

        Scootaloo took a sharp breath, her hooves clasping harder to the levers of the airship as she momentarily floated in a dead hover. She closed her goggled eyes and exhaled long and hard. She knew very well what Rainbow Dash had been up to when the end came.

        As for this anchor, this soul that tugged at her with invisible straws channeling chocolate and licorice ghosts, Scootaloo could hardly figure out what was worth exploring about her. As the seconds ticked into tongue-tickling minutes, the cynic inside her overwhelmed any sweet-tooth left alive in her battered soul. A star-map could just as easily have been found through any other pony.

        “Celestia help me—I'd might as well just skip her,” the last pony droned.

        She was about to pull at the chains dangling over her pink mane and hoist herself far from the landscape—when a curvature in the nearby horizon caught her eye. Squinting through her goggles, she practically lunged out of her seat to gaze forward through the wide windshields. She could make out a sudden and bold contrast in the body of the Equestrian Wastes beneath her. The floor of the world was still the same exposed alabaster paleness as before, but there was a hauntingly unnatural contour to it. More specifically, the large and bulging hill looming directly beneath her somehow stood apart from the rest of the landscape. As she orbited the bone-white promontory, she realized that the substance of the rock was different from the rest of the singed earth. The matter appeared deader, colder, more porous, something that matched the ashen grayness of the snow settling down on top of it. If she didn't know better, her gut instinct would have surmised that the rock had fallen directly out of the—

        “Oh no.” Scootaloo grunted. She pulled sharply to starboard and banked back around so that she was spinning a steady, counter-clockwise circle around what was suddenly a bold half-sphere of deader-than-dead rock impaling the stone bosom of Equestria. “Oh no no no no no.” Her face was flung far between a dry retch and a bitter frown. “You've gotta be friggin' kidding me!”

        The moon rock was four hundred and fifty meters in diameter. Scootaloo measured it herself, flying nakedly over the alien dome of rock and spotting every curve of it from a low altitude. It was by far the largest single chunk of lunar material that the last pony had ever set her eyes upon. With a firmer understanding of the nature of what she was witnessing, she took greater pains to observe the landscape around her. She realized that the rising crests of mountains surrounding her at three-hundred-and-sixty degrees were actually the edges of a gigantic impact crater that had formed around this colossal mammoth of a meteorite.

        The fact that she had never heard of this structure—from any traveling merchant or from any random patron at the M.O.D.D.—surprised her to no end. It seemed absolutely absurd that she was the first and only scavenger to have realized this thing was no ordinary hill. It was simply impossible in life to be this lucky. The sheer possibilities of the innumerable raw materials that could be harvested from within the dome—rubies, runestones, flamestones, enchanted dust—completely boggled her mind. This was a gold mine of post-apocalyptic proportions. With the right amount of time and resources, one scavenger could salvage enough from this single find to make millionaires out of hundreds of silver-strip-starved souls.

        How ironic—then—that the first and only thought that graced the last pony's mind was not earning money, was not mining rocks, was not finding fortunes, but was determining where her anchor was inside that infernal thing and how to get to her. Had she changed so much that she could no longer look a dead gift horse in the mouth, simply for the sake of looking a living pony in the face?

        “And just how in the heck can anypony survive this dang thing falling on her fuzzy head?!”

        Scootaloo's voice was a muffled insanity against the cold winds that kicked at her beneath the shadow of the moored Harmony. On stiff legs, she marched towards the edge of the big dumb object. She eyed where the jagged dome of moonrock met with the smooth blasted “skin” of the scorched earth. It looked like a bone-pale tumor had bubbled out from a plateau of dead flesh, and she was a tiny brown flea standing helplessly before the impervious girth of it.

        “Maybe her pink hair cushioned her.” She groaned inwardly. With bored scarlet eyes, she squinted at the uneven surface of the dome. She pressed a hoof to it; she lightly smacked it with a vibrating horseshoe. On a hare-brained whim, she knelt down low and tugged up at the edges of the thing with two forelimbs. Rightfully so, the lunar mountain didn't budge. “Well, so much for picking it up.” She stifled a dull chuckle while dusting her hooves off, then sighed. “Pffft... Dumb rock.”

        Falling down to her haunches, the girl sighed into the gentle curtain of snow littering the landscape around her. She slumped forward and leaned her snout within a crook of her foreleg, all the while rubbing the edge of her hoof into the fresh mane of pink hair and the brain matter roasting achingly underneath it. One eye squinted tighter than the other as she gazed deep into the ivory thickness of the rock and thought, thought, thought...

        The pink-stringed dragon's tooth had not let up. It tugged and it tugged at her, trying to convince the last pony that the giant stone structure in front of her was really just a sweet and spicy jaw-breaker waiting to be licked at. There was no telling how long it would take to pierce the surface of that lunar monstrosity. The pony could consume weeks, months, even years to find the remains of her anchor, assuming the bones survived the gargantuan impact at all. Those were not numbers that even the most daring of time travelers could afford.

        Still, as much as every centimeter of Scootaloo's soul was telling her to quit the task before she even started, a daring part of her—the part of her that was secretly proud to have survived all these gray desolate years—was telling her to go forward, to press forward, to dive forward as if it was a sea of cotton candy and not a wall of lunar rock resting a few meager meters from her pink forehead.

        “Hrmmfff...” She grunted to herself and gazed briefly upwards at the soupy overcast sky lingering high above the drifting, copper shadow of the Harmony. Her soul bounced and her vision briefly turned Ditzy-eyed, so that she envisioned that she was diving down like a meteor rock from the twilight and staring at the top of a thunderous wisp of clouds, spotting a lone pony walking over the strobing lengths of darkness and scaring the lightning into hiding with an angry smirk.

        The very thought forced her brown wings to stretch out. With a sudden brightening of scarlet eyes, she stretched her limbs, stood up, and immediately flew up towards the bobbing ballast that was her airship.

        After several minutes of rummaging through the hangar level of the Harmony—littering the black bulkheads with several clattering assortments of tools—she finally found what she was looking for. In a dry breath, she heaved a thick copper cylinder out from a pile of dusty metal scrap. A flurry of dust and rusted sediment kicked through the rune-lit air. She coughed, fanned the fumes away with a brown hoof, and stared nakedly at the mechanism that she had just reunited herself with.

        The thing was old—to be sure—and it sang from copper head to copper tail with the tell-tale signs of a lone pony's sophomoric engineering skills. A few conductive wires spilled loosely from the joints like tiny intestines, and several coils had decayed into brittle facsimiles of their former glory, but the device as a whole was remarkably intact for its age. The extent of its usefulness was yet to be tested—just as the last pony's resolve would be.

        With an inexplicably joyous humming sound, the mare hoisted the thing to her back, clambered up the spiral staircase to the pilot's cabin of the Harmony, and made a bee-line towards her workbench where a beautifully repaired scooter was presently dangling.

        This may surprise you, but I've long considered myself a lucky pony. Yes, I've suffered many misfortunes. Being the last living member of my species is rarely something to be proud of or thankful for—and rightfully so.

        But when I look back at all of the chaotic circumstances of my life, I cannot help but feel that my existence has been bolstered over the years by freakishly amazing coincidences. I was lucky to have had so many Cloudsdalian tools deposited near me immediately following the Cataclysm. I was lucky to have had a rough childhood that prepared me for the scavenger's lifestyle that was to follow. I was lucky to have been born a pegasus so that I could fly far away from the many vicious residents of the Wasteland that would have ended an earth pony or a unicorn in a blink. And, yes, I was lucky that Rainbow Dash had chosen me—out of millions of other Cloudsdalian souls—to have been locked safely away in that one arcane vault when the end of Equestria came.

        On top of all that, I was born with a talent. As you well know, this talent has not been enough to earn me a cutie mark. I've long assumed that I shall forever remain a blank flank because of the magic that was drained from Equestria along with the ashes of the Alicorn sisters themselves. I've long learned to ignore any bitterness over that irony. My talent manifests itself in my survival, which is a far more meaningful thing than wearing a magical tattoo on my butt.

        I am an engineer. I am a dang good engineer. I can build a zeppelin out of scrap, a rifle out of shrapnel, and a runestone out of celestial rock. With months and months of preparation, I can create a vehicle that will fly me to far-off places for years. Within a panicked breath of adrenalized necessity, I can slap together something to burn, burrow, explode, or kill my way to safety. I cannot count all of the miraculous moments—in the present Wasteland as well as beneath the green-flaming depths of the past—when a split second firing of my synapses has helped me concoct something that has saved the day.

        I'm not writing this as a boast. After all, I should know better than to show off to you. I just mean to confess that oftentimes it is pure dumb luck that has been my salvation as opposed to true intelligence, grit, or tenacity. The Cataclysm has shaped the veritable coffin that has surrounded my life, and it was never my right to choose or comprehend what has landed me in this grave; it has all been mere fortune.

        But sometimes—yes, sometimes—there is something even greater than luck that makes or breaks the latest endeavor that I put my soul to...

        Above a stone plateau pockmarked with a ring of rusted metal barricades, the colors of the rainbow strobed brightly through the snowy air. The rainbow signal shimmered in a slight dimness; the flamestone within the body of the lattice was starting to lose its enchantment.

        The substance of the signal no longer mattered to the last pony. She sat leisurely in the nest of the watchtower beside the lightshow, using the bright intensity of the beams to light the task before her.

        With tools extended from a series of braces slid over her hooves, Scootaloo tweaked and tinkered with the filaments of the copper cylinder in her lap. Using expert precision, she bolted a long stalk of metal to the “neck” of the cylinder, successfully attaching the rusted antenna to a complex rig consisting of springs, levers, and the skeletal structure of a pulley system.

        Resting against the railings of the watchtower that the pony had hammered together over a decade ago, several more tools waited to be fused to this bizarre machine she was rigging together. Through the prismatic aura of the signal behind her, she reached for what looked like a small leather kite fashioned in such a shape as to mimic bat-wings. She collapsed the flimsy fan of lightweight materials and notched it within the hollow of the “neck” she had attached to the cylinder. Then, with patience and careful precision, she spooled a long copper wire through the pulley system and fused it to the spine of the kite.

        From up above, a faint melody drifted through the flaking bits of snow. Scootaloo's record player was resting precariously at the aperture entrance of the Harmony, and Octavia's strings were gently piercing the air surrounding the once-sacred site of the rainbow signal. The rhythm lulled the last pony's aching mind as she obsessed harder and harder over the task at hoof, enraptured by the depths to which she descended into her reborn contraption.

        The things that work best in life, the things that save me in a real disaster, the tools that keep me alive when everything else wants me dead—are all utterly ridiculous. I shudder to think what would happen if my entire life was somehow miraculously documented for all of living ponydom to read about. Equestrian civilization would think me to be a moron for the many crazy things I have done to accomplish my goals. They would be right.

        Sometimes in life, what works the most are the stupid things.

        “Three... Two... One... Liftoff!” 

        After chanting into the lonesome winds, Scootaloo yanked at a lever along the neck of the contraption. A metallic ring sounded through the air from where she stood atop the floating Harmony's balloon. The leather kite shot out of the chamber of her contraption and flew straight up towards the twilight. The serrated sound of a copper wire sliced through the air as the flimsy craft soared its way up from the machine's spring-loaded launch. Finally—once the flung object had reached the end of the copper cord's length—the kite jolted and immediately spread its leather wings out.

        The lightweight craft danced in the high winds above the Harmony, staying aloft at the end of its metallic reins. A throng of conductive metal needles stuck out like barbs along the top and sides of the winged object. From where Scootaloo stood above the aircraft's balloon, she had her hooves tightly ensnared with black rubber goulashes. These likewise clutched non-conductive grip handles which could half-steer the soaring kite as well as the nose of the pointed copper antenna.

        Smirking at the effortless flight of the launched kite, Scootaloo's goggled eyes traced down the length of the copper wire attached to it and followed the cord as it ran into the neck of the launcher, then into a bundle of tesla coils that wormed their way through the body of the cylindrical antenna. Several stalks of copper filament swam around a circular assortment of empty chambers. Three of the chambers housed freshly carved runestones of the last pony's own hoofwork. But one last chamber was empty, missing one final and important ingredient...

        “Enchanted thunder pearl?” Bruce hacked, coughed, and spat out the fumes of his latest cigar as he teetered against the doorframe to his airship while adjusting incredulous green goggles. “Pony must think dat Brucie's bushy tail is made out of silver, da?”

        “Don't tell me you've never stumbled upon it, Bruce.” Scootaloo stood across from him. Beyond the bridges joining their two airships together, the gray Wasteland silhouetted her wind-kicked mane hair as she further murmured, “It's the most essential of ramcraft. You're always stumbling upon ramcraft.”

        “Only because ramcraft lacks good sense to not be stumbled upon. Vhy did dead civilization insist on living atop cold mountains and not bundle up anything? Is no vonder they didn't die earlier, yes?” Bruce shrugged his shoulders with a sigh and proceeded to scamper over the rattling heaps of miscellaneous goods filling the lengths of his smoke-stained gondola. “Is only funny to Brucie dat not all living things bury precious valuables in dirt like nuts. Perhaps that's vhy Brucie is still alive and rams' skulls are dotting valls of M.O.D.D., da?”

        “Do you or do you not have a thunder pearl?” Scootaloo throated as she trotted lightly after the flying squirrel. Her ungoggled eyes forlonly glanced at the darkening clouds far beyond the portholes. “I'm kind of in a hurry here, Bruce.”

        “Always paying last second visit before stormfront!” Bruce chuckled as he scurried over to a pile of metal crates and rummaged madly through them. “Brucie thinks pony must be infected with new kind of Vasteland madness! Surely you do not intend to capture lightning in bottle like so much dazzling flame!”

        “And what if I was?” Scootaloo replied.

        Bruce glanced up in mid-rummaging. His green lenses flickered as he briefly took the cigar out from his incisors to say, “Last pony is amazing specimen. Vhy so insistent lately on suicidal adventures? Nyet, it doesn't make sense...”

        “Nothing suicidal about it, Bruce,” Scootaloo murmured as she strolled apathetically past a dangling array of artificially-lit seedlings and well-preserved leaves. “Let's just say that I've... uh... been working for a well-paying client as of late.”

        “Bruce vould certainly hope client is well-paying. Thunder pearl is not cheap! If only Brucie could find vhere...” He fumbled briefly through the pockets along his leather belt, glanced left, glanced right, then glanced up at a metal compartment hanging above his cockpit. With a grunt, the smoking squirrel backflipped, clung to the ceiling, and gave it a good smack with his bushy tail. The compartment flew open and a glowing sphere of translucent rock fell into his paws. “Ha Ha! As beautiful as it is conductive! One strike of lightning and ramcraft jewel can light up airship's batteries for next twelve stormfronts.” He then leaned his upside-down head to the side and squinted curiously Scootaloo's way. “But Brucie thought friend pony's ship was steam-powered...”

        “It's not for my ship,” Scootaloo raised her goggles and exposed her scarlet eyes. “It's for a lightning gun.”

        Bruce whistled shrilly. A flick of his tail, and he flipped down onto all fours before Scootaloo and slowly stood up with the shimmering pearl in his grasp. “Brucie must confess, is awfully big bite to vallet for something dat takes less than two breaths to fire. BOOM!—Silver strips all gone in bright flash. Pony expects no less, da?”

        “I know what I came here for, Bruce. And I assure you I brought payment.”

        “Then either friend pony brought six hundred silver strips or trip vas for nothing. Brucie may be jovial fellow—heh heh heh—but certainly not stupid squirrel.”

        Scootaloo was already pulling the leather pouch out. With a briefly sluggish motion, she paused to contemplate the depths of the wound that she was about to make in herself. Ever since she met Spike, she had been functioning under a one-track mind. Everything she had done, everything she had set her heart to over the past few weeks—she had done for the sake of her time jumps. She hadn't taken up any clients on a scavenging contract in ages; she hadn't done anything worth being paid for recently. Bruce was right to warn her of the financial plummet she was about to take, and the last pony wasn't entirely certain if she could convince him anymore than she could convince herself that her life had changed, for a whole new horizon of priceless things had been thrown before her dashboard.

        “It's amazing how stupid things can be worth all the risk,” she murmured aloud. She handed the pile of silver strips to him and attempted to ignore how pathetically lightweight the leather pouch felt immediately following the transaction. “Don't worry about me, Bruce. I'm not killing myself half as much as I'm discovering myself.”

        “Does pony friend think Brucie is blind?” He smirked. Bruce tossed her the pearl which the last pony effortlessly caught. The squirrel then pointed at her mane. “Is like blossoming bed of flowers, da? Not even grand gardens of St. Petersbrittle can outmatch dis beauty.”

        “Hmmm... Oh, r-right.” Scootaloo ran a hoof over her pink neck and smirked the squirrel's way. “Never figured you to be quite the charmer, Bruce.”

        “If it vasn't for ridiculously huge incisors, Brucie would be casanova of clouds, da? Mmmm... I think so!”

        Scootaloo smiled impishly. “Don't give up, dude. I'm sure there's a winged sorority of sexy chipmunks floating around out there with your name on 'em.”

        “Now Brucie knows vhat happened to Sun and Moon. They became opposite ends of dis strange smile Brucie sees before him.” He smirked cheekishly, flicked the end of his cigar, and reclined back against a dirty bulkhead. “Perhaps after pony friend has captured lightning in bottle, she might share other ensnared secrets so dat rest of Wasteland can smile as well?”

        “That's kind of the whole point, Bruce,” Scootaloo said in a deflating exhale as she pocketed the incredibly small pearl of expensive quality. She trotted her way back towards the entrance of the dirigible. “But first thing's first; I gotta go take a wild stab at the moon.”

        “Hmmph! Pony is crazy! Beautiful, but crazy!”

        “You can bet your nuts.”

        Am I becoming a happier pony? I certainly don't feel like it. Perhaps it can be said that I'm livelier than I used to be. It's hard to not live my life with a greater degree of energy than what was once afforded me. Traveling back and forth across green flames has opened my eyes to so many hues and shades that I had long thought were dead to me. I suppose that makes me more sensitive, more aware, and to some extent more jittery than the spirit that once filled this frail brown frame. In a lot of ways, I'm a lot more alive than I was a mere month or two ago. But does that make me happier?

        Spike would like to think that I'm pursuing joy. With the way I've changed, Bruce probably thinks that I'm sniffing something. I shudder to imagine what Pitt or Gilda might think I've been up to the soonest they witness me flying around with my head cut off, trying to dive into the Everfree Briar or carve my way into a giant mountain made of moonrock.

        Perhaps I have gone crazy. Only an insane soul would venture back to a haunted past full of dead spirits with the meager hope of capturing the seeds of what gave them life and attempt planting them into the dead soil of an eternal wasteland. To grasp this—to comprehend and understand the moronic audacity of this—is to whole-heartedly admit to a tremendous insanity. The only happiness to be had in that is the flippant desperation of a mad pony.

        Perhaps that was why I didn't give up on the anchor that I had just spent six hundred silver strips and a prayer on salvaging. I think a big piece of me wanted to understand her, just as much as I shuddered to navigate the sickeningly sweet clouds of her. I wanted to understand what made a mad pony's heart and soul tick. I wanted to inject myself with her hysteria and see just what would vomit out the other end.

        You've known me long enough to tell that I don't do desperate things for no reason. It so happens that I was determined and soul-bound to carve my way into the heart of the moon and find her waiting for me beneath it. Sometimes, it's liberating to indulge in a little bit of looniness.

“A lightning gun, very impressive,” Spike said with a nodding of his scaled head. He adjusted a pair of crystal spectacles over his green eyes and glanced across the laboratory. “How noble it is that you so swiftly acquired the thunder pearl for it. But I daresay it is missing one major ingredient.” He cleared his fuming, draconian throat. “Chiefly, the lightning.”

        Scootaloo finished sliding the folded copper cylinder and neck into a bulky saddlebag before pointing a hoof towards the rocky ceiling. “Do you hear that?”

        Spike tilted his neck under a cascading roar of booming thunder that rumbled through the bowels of Twilight Sparkle's treehouse above. “I most certainly do hear it, regularly, every one hundred and twenty hours, as you should rightfully know, my little pony.”

        “Well, those are all the ingredients that I need.”

        “How poetic, though it leaves me wondering why you are with me here and not in the cabin of your most maneuverable airship.”

        “I parked her in the shell of Ponyville's Downtown warehouse,” Scootaloo said with a smirk. “You remember the one: Applejack used to rent it for storing her family's apples before being delivered all the way to Canterlot.”

        “It's enough of a feat for the Harmony to fit inside that, dear child. But do you think it can withstand the pressures of a passing stormfront?”

        “It has so far, hasn't it?” Scootaloo smirked. The world boomed above them as a few flakes of dust scattered down from the teeth of random stalactites. “Normally, I just wait out a storm with the Harmony hovering high above the thundering clouds. Still, there comes a time when I have to anchor it somewhere closer to earth, but don't worry your purple head about my airship, Spike. I've parked the dang thing in even riskier places and it came out just fine. Besides...” She pulled the leather straps tight around the bundled lightning gun and hoisted it with a grunting breath over her flank. “Nnnghh... where I intend to go—ugh, whew—there would be no chance of the Harmony coming out in one piece.”

        “I assume that you speak once more about this alarmingly huge moonrock that you just recently stumbled upon,” the elder dragon surmised, watching with calm emerald eyeslits as the pony gathered a few more necessities—hammer, chisel, bottle of green flame, bracelet of horns, and lanterns—before sliding them into their respective pouches along her heavily garbed figure. “Though I am quite certain that there is a method to your sudden madness, old friend, I think it would only be polite for you to explain it to this old dragon.”

        “I built this thing ages ago.” Scootaloo excitedly pointed towards the bulky contraption strapped to her back. “When scavenging the wasteland, I discovered that moonrock was exceptionally sensitive to high yield blasts of electrical energy. Do you have any idea how much time it takes to mine your way into a chunk of moonstone?”

        “I've only ever eaten a moonrock once. It's akin to swallowing chalk. I assure you, dragons do not enjoy chalk.”

        “Yeah, well, even if you fashioned a pickaxe out of dragon's teeth, it takes a heck of a long time!” Scootaloo smirked wryly. “One day, before I even built the Harmony, I watched as one of the many regular stormfronts of the Wasteland shattered a gigantic chunk of rock to bits from a single lightning strike. When the stormfront was over and the snow returned in its place, I trotted over to find that not only had the moonrock utterly exploded, but all sorts of precious multicolored gemstones had been exposed from the shattered core. I collected them, enchanted them, bartered and traded with them, and soon I had enough silver strips to buy myself the last few supplies I needed to start building my own airship.”

        “Sounds like it was a most fortunate break for you.”

        “Dang straight. But I realized that I couldn't just ask for lightning to strike any moonrock that I wanted it to. So, once I discovered thunder pearls and their amazing abilities to focus electrical conductivity, I set about constructing this sucker you see on my backside.” She shook her leather-clad shoulders with emphasis. “Using an airborne kite to draw in a lightning strike, I can lure natural surges of electrical energy into the heart of the antenna, funnel it through the thunder pearl, and then release the electricity forward in a single charge via a magical command to the runestone breakers built within. Cha-ching! Lightning gun!”

        “I assume you use such a beautifully-crafted machine of violence to perform autopsies on moon rocks?”

        “In that I make them explode horribly from the inside out and save myself a week-long job.” Scootaloo smirked. “Absolutely!”

        “I shudder to think what exploding a rock the size of two small towns might bring upon the Wasteland.”

        “Pffft!” Scootaloo foalishly raspberried. “Even one hundred lightning guns wouldn't be able to make something the size of this friggin' dome explode. But, if I seize the thunderous moment we have here and get enough lightning bolts to strike my machine, I just might be able to bore a hole deep enough inside the porous rock to give myself a better starting point for hammering my way towards the next anchor.”

        “You're convinced that there's anything left of the anchor to be found?”

        “I figure that if the ashes of my target were completely pulverized, what would this dragon tooth be guiding me towards?”

        “A decent assessment. I imagine the reason why you've waited until this stormfront to embark upon this endeavor is because—”

        “—I need a fresh lightning strike to power my gun.” Scootaloo nodded. “And even then, it will only be good for a few seconds of discharge. It may not be pretty, but the worst that the Wasteland has to throw at me is the best tool I have to work with at the moment. If I waste so much as a dozen hours, my opportunity will have come and gone. I'd have to wait several days before I can attempt zapping my way into the moonrock again.”

        “Dare I ask how you intend to traverse the five kilometers between here and there in the middle of a Wasteland stormfront with little to no protection?”

        “I figured that's where you come in.” She pointed at him with a wink.

        “Do I, now?”

        “Tell me, Spike,” she murmured beneath the rolling waves of thunderous noise cascading above them. The clockfaces and gemstones along the fringes of the room rattled from the vibrations of the storm. “All of the voluminous amount of green flame that you must summon to send me back in time...”

        “Yes...?”

        “....just what fraction of that is needed to send somepony somewhere through space?”

        “Mmmm... Not much breath at all—” Spike paused in mid speech. His aged pupils dilated as he gazed sickly down at her. “Oh, dear friend, surely you do not mean to insinuate that—?”

        “Heck, yeah, I mean to insinuate that!” Scootaloo smirked devilishly. “Surely somewhere deep inside that large, scaled beast of a dragon there still exists a whelp who can send mere parcels across half of Equestria with a flick of the tongue!”

        “Your optimistic opinion of my stamina is flattering, but hardly laudable, Scootaloo. It frightens me to think that you have suddenly hinged the entirety of your next venture on my ill-practiced ability to mimic the teleportations of the past.”

        “Pffft—As if!” She smirked and pulled a leather strap just wide enough to expose the glowing thunder pearl nestled in its socket within the antenna of the lightning gun. “The entirety of my next venture hinges on the likelihood of this dang thing to work as well as your ability to blow me across the Wasteland... erm... Y'know what I mean.”

        “Scootaloo, if I may express my concern...”

        “You may try.”

        “Since the beginning of our experiments in time travel, I have always made it my goal to hold your welfare and safety above all else. It burdens my three hundred-year-old heart that I cannot join you in your trips to the somber landscape of the past. I have been amazed several times over by the durable lengths of your tenacity and intelligence. It would be an utter shame if all of that was thrown to waste on a single gamble, on a single whim—”

        “Well, good thing it isn't your gamble to make, eh, Spike?”

        “I refuse to be an accessory to your self-destruction.”

        “Spike...”

        “You are the last pony. You are immeasurably priceless, and it would be a terrible tragedy if something so trite as a daredevilish scavenging mission sundered you to a million electrocuted pieces—”

        “Spike, I have breathed tragedy in and out of my nostrils all my friggin' life,” Scootaloo said firmly, gazing at him with stone scarlets. “Let me suck in some triumph for a change.”

        The elder dragon stared at her in a gray haze of helpless surrender. “Very well, old friend.” He briefly coughed a curtain of green fumes and managed a soft smirk. “Far be it from me to dictate what is or what is not the length to which you should excavate the past.”

        “Much appreciated, Spike,” she said with a smile.

        “As a matter of fact, I think it is noble—not to mention endearing—that you would take such risks to find Rainbow Dash's remains—”

        “Pinkie Pie.”

        Spike blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

        “Pinkie Pie's body is under the giant moonrock,” Scootaloo mumbled as she readjusted the bulging saddlebag on her back. “Not Rainbow Dash's. Now, are you gonna teleport me across the Wastelands or not?”

        “I... Y-You... It...” The elder dragon briefly fumbled like an infant. He stood back on his haunches, pulled the spectacles off his snout, and rubbed a pair of painfully clenching eyecrests before gesturing with a blind wrist, all the while murmuring, “You're asking me to send you halfway across Equestria in the middle of a stormfront to summon a charge of lighting into a copper ray gun that will drill your way into a gigantic moonrock all for Pinkie's remains?”

        “Spike, tell me, have you ever once in your life more succinctly answered yourself with a single breath?”

        Spike's tired eyes blinked sickly. “Harumph...” He slid his spectacles back on and smirked in a lazy exhale. “Suit yourself, child. Perhaps a good injection of Miss Pie is the first step in building a vaccination for your daring mania.”

        “Exactly what I was thinking!” Scootaloo managed a crooked grin. “The way I see it, she's in Ponyville all the time. Our favorite village is as succinct a ground zero to the Cataclysm as any place. What better a place to spot the night's sky from?”

        “Oh, I have no doubt that you will be seeing stars, Scootaloo,” Spike said, failing to hide a wincing expression behind his scales. “Though, I doubt that you'll procure them in the manner which you seek.”

        “The heck is that supposed to mean?”

        “Applejack and Fluttershy were undoubtedly soothing souls for you to have been reunited with. But... hmmm... Oh bother...”

        “Speak up. Cat got your flame?”

        “Scootaloo, do you even remember Pinkie Pie?”

        “Pffft—Of course I do! 'Auntie Pinkie Pie': always happy, always throwing a party, constantly giving out samples of the finest desserts from Sugarcube Corner...”

        “Do you not see the dilemma here, old friend?” Spike stifled an elderly chuckle under the rumbling of the stormfront above them both.

        Scootaloo squinted curiously at him. “Dilemma...?”

        “Your memories of Miss Pie were memories that belonged to a foal.”

        “Your point?”

        “Hmmm...” Spike scratched his green-crested chin and squinted towards the far reaches of the cave. “To somepony of adult age—as you will be when you are once more in her presence—you may find that 'Auntie Pinkie Pie' is... hmmm... a different shade of pink than you felicitously recall.”

        “Spike, my childhood was filled with enough stress to make any adult pony faint on sight,” Scootaloo said in a dry voice. “I think my memories are solid enough.”

        He shrugged with a helpless smirk. “Again, I cannot argue with you, old friend. Suffice to say, I am no longer worried about what the lightning may do to you.”

        Scootaloo blinked curiously at that.

        Spike marched his iron limbs over towards her. “Now, then—In what direction am I to teleport your brave body, Scootaloo?”

        “I measured the coordinates after I spotted the moonrock a couple of days ago.” Scootaloo unrolled a leather parchment from a forward pocket in her saddle bag and read off of it. “'107, 37, 8'. With the storm and all, you may wish to compensate for barometric pressure and—”

        “That won't do.”

        Scootaloo went cross-eyed. She glanced confusedly up at the dragon. “Spike...?”

        “I need a direction, old friend. If you... erm... wouldn't mind pointing.”

        The last pony twitched. She mentally measured her and her draconian friend's relation to the body of the treehouse above and the invisible compass arrows stretching beyond it. Finally, she pivoted, then pointed a hoof past the wall stretching above the bed of gemstones.

        “Uhm... That direction,” she murmured. “Northeast, about five kilometers out and eight hundred meters above sea level.”

        “Wonderful! Much better,” the dragon said with a smirk and proceeded to beat his fist against his chest as he summoned a flaming breath from deep within.

        “Wait wait wait wait wait!” Scootaloo sneered, waving two forelimbs in front of the hulking dragon elder. “Are you meaning to tell me that inside that brilliant three-hundred-year-old skull of yours, you can't teleport me based on simple coordinates?”

        “I may have mastered transporting an equine soul through time, Scootaloo,” he spoke to her with a bashful smile. Something rosy blossomed under his neck's purple scales. “But even in those situations, I still need a chronological allotment of years and reagents by which to tie your soul to a once-living anchor. Otherwise, I am shooting blind, quite frankly.”

        “H-How come you never told me this kind of crap before?!”

        “Quite simple—You never had the audacity to ask me until now.”

        “And all of those times in your youth when you farted buttloads of Twilight's letters to Princess Celestia...?!”

        “I was much younger and much sharper then. Still, it was all mostly a matter of memorizing vaguely where to 'toss' the constant plethora of documents. You'd be surprised; for a few months there, much of the parchment ended in Her Majesty's fireplace, toasted to useless embers. Heh heh heh heh—” A sudden attack of hacking, fuming coughs. “Ahhhhhhh—Good times.” He gulped, licked his burning lips, and smiled placidly the filly's way. “So then, shall we do this?”

        “Just a second!” Scootaloo half-shrieked. With a shaking hoof, she reached down and hoisted a canteen that was attached to her saddlebag. She took a long and refreshing swig of reclaimed water, exhaled, slapped the cap back on, and replaced the canteen with a pink-stringed dragon's tooth that she tightly wrapped about her neck like a noose before a hanging. “Okay. Do me.”

        “You are prepared, then?”

        “No.” She grunted. “But send me off before I think twice about it.” The dragon's tooth shimmered invisibly about her neck like a fragrant slice of cinnamon toast. “The best bravery is random.”

        “That hardly sounds like your philosophy, dear friend.” Spike's neck reared back as his breathing tubes boiled hotly in the claustrophobic air of the place. “Though somehow I'm willing to predict that you may soon adapt it.”

        “The sooner you teleport me the better,” Scootaloo muttered, standing straight and tall as if before a firing squad. She lowered the goggles over her eyes symbolically. “I only need this stormfront for its lightning. As soon as its gone—and I've found Pinkie's remains—I'm coming back to you and the Harmony.”

        “Your confidence is reassuring.” He belched one last time before flinging his iron-thick maw towards the filly. “I'll try not to materialize you inside a mountain.”

        Scootaloo's scarlet eyes twitched. “H-Huh?”

        Too late. The flames fountained over her. She briefly roasted in a shrieking gasp, for she was not being flung down the hauntingly familiar tunnel of cylindrical emerald mirrors that the time traveler had gotten used to. Instead, a queer sensation of a different sort wafted over the last pony—as if the world was really just a watercolor facsimile of something that the Goddesses' had once imagined, and it was changing before her, melting before her, surging and bulging and vomiting all over itself until it became a completely unique mosaic, a gray mosaic, a dark mosaic—and out from the canvas of its wind-howling depth there flickered an epileptic phalanx of impossibly bright flashes.

        The last pony blinked, breathing solid air again. “Well, that wasn't so bad—Gaaah!”

        She shrieked, for the hulking weight of the copper lightning gun strapped to her back was suddenly flinging her upwards, in that it was flinging her earthwards, in that she had materialized upside down in the dreaded thick of the air, and now a screaming storm boiled all around the last pony as she plunged, plunged, plunged down the length of an incalculable altitude through the obsidian clouds of utter chaos.

        “Oh, friggin' A!”

        Her growling screams were muted under the blistering thunder that boomed all around her. The world was a spinning cyclone of madness, and she was hurtling towards the heart of it it—weighted by a stupidly expensive gun and lured via a dragon's tooth to one absurd kernel of candy-coated frivolity buried somewhere beyond the hellish miasma through which she helplessly flailed.

        No number of years spent in an airship could have prepared her for this, for this deafening nightmare. She fought to straighten her back against the weight of the lightning gun spinning her like a top. After an infinite struggle, she finally freed her wings and shot them out. Immediately, she wished she hadn't; a strong gust of wind caught her brown feathers and hurled her like a missile straight into a giant anvil of dense electricity.

        With a hissing breath, the filly curved her wings and banked around the burning black monolith. Errant snow-bright branches of electricity shimmered out above and beneath her, blinding her blinking scarlets beneath their copper-lensed prison. A thick condensation formed on her goggles as she panted and panted and navigated her flimsy self in a spiraling descent through the violently shaking world.

        Another row of murderously huge stormclouds lingered before her. With bulging black wisps that would dwarf even Gilliam's battle-cruiser, the giant frothing body boiled and surged in front of the tiny equine before hurtling a random spray of hell-hot lightning bolts in her direction.

        “Nnngh!”

        Scootaloo bravely dove straight down, miraculously avoiding a burning river of charged electricity that blasted its way past her collapsing flank. Her heart stopped, pulsed, and stopped again as she dropped like a spiraling comet straight down a funnel cloud dancing from neck to neck with vertical screams of bright sapphiric sparks. She gasped and struggled to hoist her suicidal plunge away from the nightmarish whirlpool, but the sheer mass of her re-engineered contraption was acting as a weighted ballast, leaning her into a perpetual spin. She fought and strained to even out the body of the device against her spine as she plummeted ever closer towards the cloudy esophagus of dancing stormbolts below.

        The hair on her neck stood on end. She gasped as a bright aura shimmered in her peripheral. The last pony realized that the thunder pearl inside the neck of the antenna was pulsating intensely. Even as she was plummeting, the enchanted stone was being excited by the cyclonic forest of electricity frothing around it. The bolts of lightning from the cacophonous swirl of nearby clouds danced closer and closer and closer—

        “Oh crud... Oh crud oh crud oh crud!”

        In a desperate gamble, Scootaloo hoisted her hooves down towards the leather straps fastening the hulking metal contraption to her vulnerable body. She fumbled and fumbled over the belt buckles. The lightning bolts drew closer. She could smell the roasting of air molecules sailing to greet her. Finally—with a jolt—she unhooked the bulky saddlebag from her body. Screaming into the deafening chaos, she tightened her muscles and kicked viciously against the free-falling body of the backpack, propelling the lightning gun and the rest of her equipment mercilessly down the vertical tunnel of electricity without her. The impact of her kicking hooves shoved her away from the mouth of the cloud just in the nick of time. With a grunting breath, she angled her wings and flew herself down alongside the outer crest of the cloud.

        She gnashed her teeth against the whipping winds, her ears practically bleeding from the apocalyptic booms of thunder all around her. Squinting through her shaking goggles, she watched as the black shadow of the equipment bag flew down the randomly strobing body of the lightning funnel beside her. With each bloodrushing second, she murmured and prayed that it would come out in one piece out the other end.

        A final flash of lightning, and the bag emerged. The leather straps had been singed to ribbons, but the bulk of the saddle remained intact, along with the copper contraption inside. Before Scootaloo could let forth a yell of victory, she took notice of a looming white body illuminated by the lightning strobes beneath her. She gasped; the moonrock dome was just below...

        Twirling her body past an insanely close lightning strike, she clasped onto the middle of the free-falling saddlebag with her forelimbs and dragged her wings skyward. Her bones tore at her skin and she lost several feathers as she forcibly dragged at the currents of the burning air. The strain was too much; at any moment her brown wings would tear clean off.

        “Nnnnghh—Gaah!”

        Scootaloo shrieked and finally gave slack, pulling her wings inward. She plummeted—hard as a rock—towards the white mountain of bone-breaking moonstone lingering beneath her in the strobing madness. A hulking breath, a torturous stretch of her naked muscles; she successfully flung her wings outwards at an angle, tilting her body up at the last second so as to skim the top of the lunar dome. Her back legs dangled and her copper horseshoes dragged against the white porous rock, spitting sparks and ashes on either side as she scraped her way over the summit and plunged down the far side of it like a bungie jumper.

        “Oh no no no no no—Jeez!”

        She yelped as she twirled, somersaulted, and flip-flopped down the height of the mountain of moonrock. A final pathetic flapping of her wings, and she managed to slow herself to the slightly less suicidal twenty-kilometers-per hour plunge that finally plowed her into the sputtering gravel of the earth. Bruised, wincing, but very stupidly alive, the last pony came to a grinding stop. She lay on the ground, clutching her huge saddlebag to her chest like an enormous doll, while the ashen world howled and burned with electrical devastation all around and above her.

        “Ughhhhhh—I think I would have settled for the friggin' mountain, Spike.”

        The ground exploded thirty thunderous meters from her.

        She sat up in a yelp, her goggled eyes twitching to see a scorch mark within spitting distance. The thunder pearl nestled deep inside her saddlebag flickered and pulsed. Once more, a crack—the world flashed white as another subsequent fang of lightning struck even closer than the last splotch of scorched stone. The last pony hissed through the pin-needling static electricity in the air and scuffled backwards on her flank, scooting and scooting and scooting away from a second, third, and fourth blast of ravenous lightning. Each strike burned closer towards her, filling the air with a bloody chaos as she finally backed her shivering spine into the cold body of the moon dome.

        In a trembling breath, the last pony hopped up to her hooves and practically tore open the saddlebag. The lightning gun fell ineffectually to the stony earth in a dull clang. She cursed under her hyperventilation and proceeded to unhinge the joints of the half-rusted contraption. She stood the stalk of the launcher up on flimsy tripods and bolted its feet to the stony floor. Another flash of lightning: the pegasus flung the rubber goulashes over her front limbs and gripped the handles of the copper antenna tightly.

        Aiming the cylinder full of runestones and pearlescent light at the great white body of moonrock, the last pony raised a lower hoof over a lever attached to the launcher. “Okay! H-Here goes! Three, two, one—Liftoff!” She kicked the lever down. There was no noise. The kite and its spool of copper wiring stayed put within the contraption. In a breathless lurch, Scootaloo helplessly looked at the machine. “I said—Liftoff!” She kicked the lever again. Once more, the kite refused to budge. More thunder. She snarled this time and peered down the neck of the thing. “What the heck is wrong with this—?”

        The kite spontaneously launched, slamming the bulk of its leathery body straight into Scootaloo's reeling face. The brain-rattled filly fell to the ground, encumbered with flailing leather wings, metal spikes, and an intestinal maze of copper string, all spooled on top of her. She growled and hissed into the cacophonous air as she fumbled to re-coil and re-spool the obnoxious equipment back into the chamber of the metal launcher.

        “Epona forsaken piece of—” Lightning. “—you back to your mother's—” Thunder. “—good for nothing son of a—” Exploding stone.

        Scootaloo shrieked. A veritable crater had been blown out of the ground a mere four meters away from her by the last lightning strike. The air was being sucked out from all around. Her pink mane had become a fluttering mohawk, stretching skyward as tiny bolts of sparkling energy danced between her lower limbs' horseshoes.

        With a grunt, she finished reloading the kite into the launcher. “I swear to all that breathes, her candy-flossed plot better be worth this!” She growled and practically hugged the body of the spring-loaded cannon as she slammed both lower hooves down onto the trigger. “Eat it, sky!”

        With the victorious sound of uncoiling springs, the kite soared into the churning maze of thunderclouds high above. The leather wings unflexed and the tiny craft was fluttering through the tormented wind within a second blink.

        Scootaloo practically dove into the copper lightning gun. With two rubber-enshrouded hooves, she cocked the cylinder and aimed it at the white face of the dome before her. Sweating profusely, she tossed worried looks back and forth between the flickering image of the kite and the thunder pearl dwindling inside the metal neck of the antenna.

        “Come on... Come on... Light up, you sadistic piece of junk! Get some juice—!”

        Lightning torched the air thunderously above her, barely missing the kite and screaming a blue string of energy past Scootaloo's mane and into the crumbling heights of the electrically sensitive moonrock. The last pony flinched and sputtered in a sudden spray of lunar dust and burning powder.

        “Yeah, that's fine! That's okay! Just keep doing that! Friggin' thunderstorm—Aim a little higher, or do I have to fly up there and crap out some lightning myself?!”

        Prophetically, a new fork of lightning shimmered down. This time, it struck the kite with full force. A charged beam of bright blue energy shot down the length of the dangling copper cord in a flash. The tiny pearl in the heart of the gun lit up and hummed with a magical brilliance.

        “Woo! Happy New Year!” The goggled pony cackled psychotically into the chaotic thunder all around. She braced her lower limbs and gripped the sparkling antenna harder as she then shouted, “Almost there! Just a few more love pecks for Mommy! Come on—”

        Another surging bolt. And then another. Two new flickering streams of energy murderously throttled down the burning length of metal cable. The cylinder in Scootaloo's rubber grasp practically vibrated in pent-up electrical energy. A hissing sound filled the air as the oxygen around her ears began to roast.

        “G-Good enough for me!” She hissed and then firmly throated: “Y'hnyrr!”

        All three runestones dimmed instantly. The antenna nearly exploded as the thunder pearl inside unleashed a bursting dam of electrical madness down the throat of the lightning gun. A horizontal cyclone of shimmering bolts splashed outward and drilled into the side of the dome of moonrock at a bizarre angle, sending clouds of white dust screaming high into the air.

        “Whoops! CrapCrapCrapCrap—!” Scootaloo seethed as she pushed the full weight of her body into the violently throbbing gun. With great effort, she pulled the violent kiss of the lightning bolts down, down, down—until she was finally making a solid incision deep into the heart of the cosmic mountain. “Whew! Thattaboy! Keep drilling until you hit Neighjing!”

        The fresh tunnel carved into the body of the moonrock grew wider and wider. Soon, a perfectly cylindrical passageway had been made, and as the shimmering bolts of blue began to fade, there was no telling how immensely deep inside the dome the hole ended.

        Soon, the thunder pearl burnt out. As soon as the lightning gun stopped vibrating, Scootaloo dropped the thing unceremoniously and made a dash for her saddlebag. Strapping it over herself, she galloped awkwardly on half-rubbered hooves and practically slid into the safety of the moonrock's fresh cave. No sooner was she inside the shadowed hollow of the rock—

        There was a violent explosion. Scootaloo spun about, blinking under amber goggles. The discarded metal lightning gun—the device of her own personal genius—had exploded into copper shrapnel.

        “Yeah. Whatever.” She eagerly turned her flank against the Wasteland stormfront and trotted slowly down the length of the endless tunnel, her clopping hooves accompanied with the infinite echo of surging thunder.

        I wish I could explain the nature of the enthusiasm that so greatly motivates me these days. The fact that I can refer to this time in my life by the measure of “days” and not “stormfronts” is a testament to the fact that things have changed.

        It's not so much that I do things recklessly as it is that I do them eagerly. That wasn't always the case. Surrounded by the Wasteland, encircled by monsters, and encumbered with a lack of resources, I used to live my life in a steady but lethargic grind that was animated by the sheer necessity of the given situation.

        These time jumps—these bold and dazzling trips into the past afforded me by Spike—have given me something entirely different to live for. Still, my present life here in the ashes of desolation hasn't necessarily become inconsequential. I always know what I need to do in order to survive, and I make every effort to preserve myself—my real self—no matter how “invulnerable” my Entropan ghost of a body can be in these regular, chronological escapades.

        I think the key is that I've lived my life so long for the future. Now that I have the past to look forward to, I spend my time in the present with much speedier momentum. I'm not half the daredevil that Spike thinks I've become. Much rather, I do what I've always done—only I do it with greater ease, greater concentration, and even greater confidence. I wish he could see that, instead of worrying over my “impulsiveness”. I've learned what impatience can do to hurt ponies in the past; I have no doubt that it's only harmful to me in the present.

        In the end, I can only wonder what you think of all this. Have I abandoned you—or the notion of you, now that I've been blessed and cursed all the same to swim in the basin of my warm memories again? I've never known you to be a jealous thing, albeit you are certainly a possessive one. I don't think I've ever asked anything of you, and Celestia help me if someday I ever fall so low that I might.

        But if I was to make a request of you, I think it would be something akin to a test. I would like to see what might happen if you looked for once upon the past, if you saw the gravity of everything that you've ever done, if you tasted of the great emptiness that you personally helped carve, and then maybe—just maybe—you might, like me, learn to let go of all the heaviness.

        But I doubt it. I doubt you.

        With a flick-flick-flicking sound; the flints in Scootaloo's lantern yokes sparked true, and soon the shouldered jars burned with an amber dimness. The last pony raised her goggles and squinted with naked scarlets down the faintly lit lengths of the deep tunnel that she had just carved with billowing fingers of electricity. She blinked up close at the curved white wall enshrouding her. Raising an exposed hoof, she brushed a few flakes of lunar powder and studied it up close.

        “Hrmmm...” A shrugging of her limbs, and she trudged slowly onward—following the bouncing halo of her yoke's spotlights. “At least I'll have plenty of ingredients if I need to fall back on moonvision.”

        Into the heart of the dislodged mountain of moonrock, Scootaloo spelunked. The hulking body of the ivory material hummed and hissed dully above her, telegraphing the pressure from the immense stormfront surging all over the exterior of the dome. To describe the air as stale would have been an understatement; the last pony's breaths stretched thinly as she found herself summoning great strength to make the simplest of hooftrots down the stuffy depths of the gigantic, dense structure. She briefly considered wearing her breathing mask for this sojourn, but instantly decided against it as soon as the pink-stringed dragon's tooth throbbed beneath her neck.

        While her mouth may have been starved of oxygen, it was not starved of sweetness. Invisible trails of taste spun like candy canes, tugging her deeper and deeper into the body of that celestial stone. The deeper she traversed into the cylindrical tunnel, the lower and lower the tooth yanked at her, until she felt as if the cotton candy fumes of her anchor's pull were becoming one with gravity. She couldn't fathom just how much further the lateral cave extended from her lightning gun's blast, but soon it wouldn't be important. At some point, she would have to dig her way straight down. She couldn't pretend to explain why, but with each cinnamon burst of heart-beating excitement, she obeyed the dragon's tooth and trotted further, further, further—

        Then suddenly, her entire body jolted. With a muffled shriek, she leaned over to see that half of her front left horseshoe had cracked open a flimsy hole in the bottom of the freshly-made tunnel. The carved corridor had evidently skirted the ceiling of a hollow cavern inside the porous rock. This was of little to no consequence to the scavenger. She had come to expect such natural perforations to be found at random spots in a chunk of moonrock this large. She was about to hop over the hole and keep trotting forward... when she suddenly felt air filtering out from the jagged opening.

        Curiously, she leaned her snout down towards the crumbling gap. Her brown coat formed goosebumps of pleasure upon an instant kiss of a cool breeze, like a fan had been aimed at the ceiling of the cavern beneath her. With a pair of flaring nostrils, she was even further surprised to be receiving a delightful burst of oxygen. She breathed her first easy breath since ten minutes beyond marching into the flesh of the large rock. The nature of this sudden air movement briefly concerned her; the taste of hot chocolate wafting off the dragon's tooth erased her fears.

        Gripping the upper walls of the tunnel with her forelimbs, Scootaloo dangled her lower body over the hole and kicked at it with a pair of copper horseshoes. After a few well-placed bucks, the tiny hole shattered into a bulging mouth. A mere three meter drop yawned beneath her. Shining her yoke lanterns into the fresh abyss, she saw a convergence of three tunnels—one of which was leading deeper into the moonrock, towards where the dragon tooth was tugging her.

        Holding her breath, Scootaloo dropped down. Clouds of lunar powder briefly lifted and fell as she abandoned the cylinder she had burrowed for this sudden, natural formation of corridors. She flashed her bright amber beams down each neck until her snout was pointed at the direction towards which the dragon tooth pulsed the most. In a brave flexing of her muscles, she trotted onwards, navigating the labyrinthine arteries of an alien mountain.

~*~*~*~*~*~

        It was a slow process; it always was a slow process for the scavenger. Exploring a landscape—both terrestrial and alien—meant a trot of icy precision, where the lone pegasus would glance over every nook, cranny, and corner with veteran scarlet eyes. In an existence where she had nopony but herself to watch over her well-being, Scootaloo had long learned to see a danger in everything. Even now—as an infrequent time traveler—she couldn't allow her excitement to drown out her caution.

        The one tunnel had bled into two, then three, then five and seven more sporadic branches. What was currently a simple descent would inevitably turn into a mind-numbing maze upon her return trip, and Scootaloo had every intention of making a successful and safe return trip. For this measure, she had packed an extra quantity of runestones—tiny ones—which she drove into every branching path of tunnels behind her, breathing into them with the appropriate lunar tongue so that they would glow and light the path leading out of the hollow dome upon the last pony's return trip.

        The winding corridors were awkward, worming things. With every meter navigated, Scootaloo mutely pondered how they could have come into being. She knew a great deal about how to exploit the magical qualities of moonrock, but she knew very little about how they came to be in the shape that they were in. Whatever it was about the Cataclysm that brought the moon to its destruction, it was hardly a natural thing. The lunar body was meant to be as alien to the planet as the stars themselves; such had been the case since the Sundering of Consus. She had no way to guess what would have caused a maze of jagged tunnels to form in the heart of the pearl to the past's night's sky. In a dizzying nausea, she remembered how she had once sat on the rooftop to the Apple Family's barn, gazing up at the very same moon from which this chunk of rock had dislodged. Through time and space, the last pony had leaped the gap between the earth and its sacred satellite. She was suddenly too exhausted to digest the marvel of that contemplation.

        Something peculiar marked the lengths of her diligent spelunking. With curious eyes, she gazed upon the walls and was amazed to see that the jagged nature of the lunar stone was smoothing out into solid lines. What was previously a random wormhole of porous rock was graciously—even deliberately—morphing into perfectly geometric molds. She blinked several times during her canter, wondering if perhaps the same hallucinations that had plagued her in Fluttershy's Everfree Forest had somehow found their way to her natural brain stem in the present. There would be no better place than in the heart of the moon to suffer a bout of lunacy, Scootaloo briefly mused. It was a passing thought—more absurd than bitter—that she processed for the sole sake of distracting herself from just how disconcerting the smoothness of the tunnel was appearing before her.

        “Just what gives?” Scootaloo finally murmured aloud, her voice a dull echo against the suddenly concrete walls flanking her. “Did I just stumble upon the gift shop—?”

        She flinched, her scarlet eyes squinting at the presence of two dim lights resting at a distance ahead of her. In a startled heartbeat, she pondered if she had somehow marched in a full circle, for she had apparently stumbled upon a pair of runestones that she had hammered into the wall to mark her previous passage. But there was something off about them; she never once hammered two runestones so closely together. What was more—upon a slightly more focused inspection—she realized that they couldn't have been the same runestones. There was something different about them, as if they were carved out of a different rock, as if they were hewn forth into existence with different tools—with a greater precision than the last pony had ever mastered in all of her years of runescaping.

        This time it was her curiosity—and not the dragon's tooth—that tugged her forward. In a breathless gait, she drifted closer and closer to the pair of runestones. She was struck by how rigid and immaculate the embedded rocks appeared, as if they had been chiseled into being with the sharpest axes in all of Equestria. They were incredibly bright too, so bright that she swiftly extinguished the lanterns in her yoke and found that she could still see every contour of the surrounding corridor with perfect ease.

        It was with belated contemplation that Scootaloo then realized the meaning behind the configuration of the stones. Both runes were as much words in the lunar tongue as they were constructions, though for some bizarre reason they were positioned upside-down to what the last pony had memorized from the history books. Her heart skipped a beat as the lines started connecting dots in her throbbing mind.

        “Oh dear Epona... Can... C-Can it be...?”

        She stared once more at the runestones lodged at a solid space apart from each other along the white wall. The one on the left spelled out “H'juulm”, which stood for “door”. The glowing rock on the right spelled “H'Luun”, which was a word that the last pony had seen far too many glorious times in every royal tome that she had ever stumbled upon. It was a holy word, a sacred word, an immortal name. It meant “Luna”.

        A deep gulp, a final gaze at the seemingly impenetrable wall, and with a faithful breath the last pony stood up straight and boldly uttered out loud: “H'jem!”

        There was a bright flash—like a crescent sliver of light being born out of darkness—and the wall disappeared in a cascade of purple magic. A huge gust of pent-up air billowed violently against the pony, kicking at her short pink mane as she weathered the exploding gale. After a few wind-blown seconds, a stillness returned to the corridor, and the breathless scavenger found herself staring suddenly into a great black cavernous expanse... and it was lined with pony-made pillars of concrete.

        Stepping slowly—numbly—into the echoing chamber, Scootaloo stretched her brown neck into the dead black thickness of that mysterious interior. She gazed with twitching eyes left and right, noticing a phalanx of dull runestones built into each pillar that ate into the shadows. Barely discernible shapes of wooden things, porcelain things, and silken things lingered just beyond visual comprehension. Her heart was racing a kilometer-per-second. She could barely register the taste of the dragon's tooth anymore from the sheer gravity of what she had just stumbled upon.

        Below her, a piece of fabric was lying on the smooth white stone of the floor. It was the tattered piece of an ancient flag. Kneeling down, she turned the thing over with a hoof. A series of silver threads were exposed, woven into the purple fabric to form the unmistakable image of the Mare in the Moon. It was the banner of the Lunar Empire.

        “I-I don't believe it...” She murmured and stared up in gaping awe. “...Ponymonium?”

        Dead silence. There were too many shadows and not enough truth.

        The last pony bravely gave the dimmed runestones a lasting glance and all-but-shouted: “Y'lynwyn!”

        One by one, the pillars lit up, exposing before the tiny shivering equine figure an enormous royal chamber bathed in lunar manalight. The lengths and breadths of Nightmare Moon's forsaken throne room billowed with a regal brightness, filled to the brim with the stone-wrought effigies of a battle-hardened Alicorn and her dozens upon dozens of military advisers. The ghostly spaces of the purgatorial fortress shimmered with tapestries and illustrated pottery exalting the beautiful fury of the once-glorious despot of the night. It was a place built by a millennium of despair, tears, and magical fury.

        The last pony couldn't remember a time when she felt so small and yet so lucky all at once. She trembled there, a shivering soul drowning in the dead-silent divinity of it all.

        I have been bizarrely blessed to have seen many an amazing sight in my lonely years of wandering the Wasteland. I've trotted the Great Wall of Stalliongrad. I've traversed the lengths of the Ghastly Gorge. I've walked through Princess Celestia's Throne room and the impenetrable silver vaults of Whinniepeg. I've seen the great Ivory Bluffs of the Eastern Seaboard, the blackened depths of the Everfree Briar, and the enormous mountainous hollow that was once the rams' capitol city of Skyhorn. All of these places I've had the grace to visit by the sheer fact that I am the last pony ever to witness them.

        Never in my life—never in a trillion years—would I have ever imagined myself fortunate enough to have stumbled into a random chunk of moonstone to find—right before my eyes—a surviving piece of Ponymonium, the forsaken bulwark that Nightmare Moon had built centuries upon centuries ago after she and her closest subjects had been banished to the lunar structure by the Elements of Harmony, which had put an end to the Celestial Civil War a dreadful millennium ago. For centuries, Equestrian scholars had studied the Mare in the Moon from afar and had made scant guesses about the lunar city of legend, and after Princess Luna had returned as a cleansed and redeemed Alicorn, her sacred silence only tossed more fuel upon the flames of intense rumor and speculation.

        Now I know that the presumptions were true. This scavenger has trotted the halls of Princess Luna's melancholic glory; she has seen up close the chambers and rooms carved out of rock by an exiled army whose numbers dwindled to death and dust as the thousand years of banishment consumed all that had once made Nightmare Moon powerful, until the malevolent entity herself would no longer be fit to possess the throne which she had so fitfully desired. One day, she would no longer be strong enough to possess Princess Luna either.

        There has always been death and desolation in this universe. The Cataclysm was merely a dull punctuation to an epic and colorful history. The fact that this last pony is a time traveler is blissfully ironic. All that is good and marvelous is in the past; it's only fitting that I spend my life honoring that, an appendix to all things awesome.

        As for the future, I won't expect to leave a mark even remotely as special as what I have been born in the shadow of. Restoring the Sun and Moon is a fantastic notion; but there will never be another Ponymonium. I can't even pretend to be worth that much.

        Scootaloo marched like a lone brown shadow down the pale rows of gigantic concrete columns. The piles of discarded and shattered craftwork doubled and tripled the further that she strolled along. Then, as she randomly had to hurdle over gigantic horizontal crossbeams of archaic stone, it occurred to her just what was odd about the place.

        Everything was upside down. The banners, the runes, the doorways, the marble stairs that were on the “ceiling”; they showed the undeniable signs that this surviving chunk of Ponymonium—as miraculous as it was—had landed roof-first when it slammed into the heart of the earth. It certainly explained to the last pony why everything was in disarray. A part of her had deeply wished that many of the ceramic pieces of art and fragile bits of armor had been much better preserved, but she knew better than to expect such. It was a miracle in and of itself that this throne room would be in any cohesive shape, especially following the cosmic plunge when the Cataclysm had thrown it from the heavens. Scootaloo theorized that the same runic construction that magically preserved the throne room in all its glory also gave the chunk of moonrock a bizarre invulnerability that not even a violent collision with the Equestrian surface could upset. The engineer inside of her couldn't help but admire the legacy of Nightmare Moon for such tenacity. Being the end of ponies meant observing the wonders of the past—both dazzling and malevolent—with an unwavering angle of objectivity. It was one of Scootaloo's few true gifts at her disposal.

        There were no bodies along her humble sojourn through Nightmare Moon's lair. She didn't expect to see any unicorn remains, quite frankly. Scholars had long guessed that the many soldiers and families of Lunar Empire sympathizers that had joined Nightmare Moon's fate wouldn't even have lasted a fraction of the thousand-year banishment. Even if they had learned how to transmogrify barren moonrock into consumable resources, the only soul that could have lasted the entirety of the thousand years had to have been an immortal one. Scootaloo speculated—more like hoped—that the Princess lodged inside Nightmare Moon's essence had given the bodies of her long-deceased subjects a proper burial. The Goddess of the Night had once been a creature of terror, but never in the grand history of her legacy—possessed or not—had she ever been stripped of honor.

        Even Scootaloo knew that she lingered there far longer than she needed to. There was simply no diffusing the mesmerizing waves of awe that were cycling through her trotting body. As she passed room after room and chamber after chamber, she briefly closed her eyes and imagined the hallways filled with subjects of the Lunar Empire. She envisioned unicorns, soldiers, equine souls hustling and bustling with activity, maintaining the glory of the one Alicorn they had sacrificed their entire lives and titles for.

        Perhaps it was the spirit of history that invigorated her, but she could not personally bring herself to detest the legacy of the Lunar Empire. A great part of her pitied them, even respected them. They saw their fascist regime as a “Republic”, and they would have followed Nightmare Moon until the bitter end of Equestrian Civilization, even if it could have been the tainted Alicorn's ambition that snuffed out all of ponydom instead of the Cataclysm. In the heart of the moon, they built Ponymonium, hoping that it would be the center of a magical new democracy long promised to them under a curtain of demented lies. Instead, they had fashioned themselves a grave, one that would also have consumed Luna as well, hadn't the Elements of Harmony purged the Goddess of her ongoing affliction.

        It was easy for the last pony to sympathize with an entire army of ponies who built a city out of nothing, knowing that their only fate was death, for they were the last of their kind. If those doomed souls pledged everything to Princess Luna, who was the last pony's patron deity—Entropa?

        It took an eon before the pegasus became aware once more of a vanilla warmth fluttering across her taste buds. She batted a hoof at the dangling, pink-stringed dragon's tooth around her neck. To her pleasant surprise, the spirit of sweetness was aiming her down a nearby corridor. Hanging a left, Scootaloo navigated her way down a descending stairwell. She marched slowly, careful not to let her hooves slide on the smooth and stairless “roof” to the winding corridor she was presently navigating. The haze of the throne room's lit runestones disappeared behind her, and she was once again cast into the bitter darkness of the giant moonrock's heart. Outside, she knew a grand storm endlessly pelted the walls of the dome. How many years had passed—she wondered—with lone and destitute souls passing over this pale mountain of white stone, not knowing the historical relic that lingered deep inside... until she and she alone discovered it?

        The stairwell finally opened to a wide corridor, beyond which a soupy blackness consumed all sight. Scootaloo dutifully re-lit her lanterns. In a bobbing amber halo, she swung forth her light to reveal several large basins above her. Scraggly bits of roots and branches still clung—dangling—to the ivory surfaces of the plaza above. The “ceiling” below her was littered with petrified bits of leaves and foliage. Scootaloo pleasantly realized that an Equestrian garden had existed directly above Princess Luna's throne room in the heart of Ponymonium. The fact that, in all of those centuries, a piece of Nightmare Moon's essence valued nature and antiquity gave solace to the pony's soul. Whatever part of her ever questioned Princess Celestia for showing her sister mercy following the thousandth year reunion faded in an instant.

        As the last pony walked under the remnants of the lunar gardens above, the dragon tooth throbbed with a greater and greater intensity. She felt stabbed on all sides by peppermint daggers, and as she approached the center of the wide corridor she could have sworn that a burning sea of licorice was boiling beneath her. She slowed her gait, squatting and pressing her ear to a crackling square of concrete beneath a dangling hollow of a dead fruit tree. The dragon's tooth baked, filling her throat with the aftertaste of banana bread and sugar.

        “She's nearby...” Scootaloo murmured. A part of her almost entirely forgot about her anchor. As amazing as Ponymonium was, she had to remind herself exactly what she had come there for.

        Unstrapping her saddlebag and planting it down on the layer of concrete, Scootaloo produced a pickaxe from a pouch on the broad side of her leather belongings. She brushed her hooves over the patch of floor, feeling for the quickening throbs of the dragon tooth. Finally, she settled for a lone piece of fragile rock and began hammering away at it with the bladed tool. She sweated and panted with the effort, briefly wondering just how long she would have to be chiseling her way towards a blind goal. She knew that, with the lightning gun spent, she would have to perform methodical labor somewhere within the hollow of this rock. Even with the unexpected framework of Ponymonium giving her a firm starting point, she had no idea just what length of time would be consumed by—

        An enormous cracking sound: Scootaloo shrieked and plunged. At the last second, she dropped the pickaxe and clasped two front limbs to the rocky floor. The last pony dangled in a sudden hole, her body pelted by flakes of white moondust billowing down past her. Breathless, she glanced down and saw an abyss of utter blackness gaping beneath her lower limbs. With a gulp, she pulled herself up via two flapping wings. She shuffled about and reached for her belongings, dragging the lantern yokes over and shining them down through the fresh hole.

        With thin scarlet eyes, she watched as the halo of lanternlight pierced a sudden gap between the body of Ponymonium and a great splotch of petrified Equestrian landscape encapsulated below. It occurred to Scootaloo that the giant dome of moonrock had a concave edge to it, and when it had slammed hard into the body of the Cataclysmic Equestria, the curved structure of moonrock had preserved a chunk of the cratered environment instead of utterly pulverizing it.

        “Well, sonuvawonderbolt.” Scootaloo sweatily smirked. “Perhaps she is in one piece.”

        Scootaloo got up and rummaged through her things. She produced three of her own runes and stabbed them into the lid of the fresh hole she had made in the concrete. This formed a halo of light marking the edge of the opening that could easily be seen from the desolate landscape below. Carrying the lanterns, a few metal scraping tools, and an airtight leather satchel, Scootaloo took a dive, gliding her way down toward the sheltered patch of earth on brown wings.

        After a gentle descent, Scootaloo soon landed with four hooves atop a soft bed of soil. Blinking, she glanced down to see very real—but very dead—flakes of grass and flowers beneath her hooves. She was standing in a one hundred square meter splotch of miraculously preserved Equestrian landscape, where the soil and bits of dead vegetation had not been blown to ash like everything else in the thundering Wasteland outside the dome. The moonrock's impact was rather obvious from the way in which the topography had been devastated. At the same time, however, there was nowhere for the debris to have gone, and there was certainly no Wasteland winds to shift it around. Everything lingered in a perpetual stillness, unblemished by any dust or ash. It was as if the flames of the Cataclysm had just died hours ago, and the last pony found it positively haunting.

        Shining her light across the enclosed hovel, she spotted the bodies of blown dead tree trunks flickering like amber ghosts before her shuddering vision. She slowly pressed forward along the pulsing tug of her dragon's tooth; it felt like a vanilla bath stinging all over her.

        The last pony paused briefly, for she had stumbled upon an amazingly intact wooden sign having fallen to the ground. Several painted arrows, charred from the Cataclysm flame, pointed in opposite cardinal directions. South was “Ponyville”. East was “Trottingham” and “Canterlot”. North was “Cloudsdale” and Northeast was “Skybreak Point”. The last name stabbed at her heart briefly, and her mind wafted over the glistening shapes of metallic cutting tools and the caustic smell of metallurgy fluids. For the umpteenth time during her lonely, dark-lit sojourns across the Wastes, Scootaloo remembered the heart-quickening pitch in Rainbow Dash's raspy voice. It saddened her as much as it spurred her on.

        She didn't see the wagon until she nearly tripped over it. Gasping, she shuffled to a stop and bore witness to an overturned cart complete with wagon wheels and leather reins. The thing was lying on its side, and splashed over the dead brown grass was a pile of skeletons, their limbs frozen in infinite pain and horror. They were earth ponies—every one of them—and not only that, but they were foals.

        There was no mistaking it, the entire spillage of the wagon consisted of very young bodies. Scootaloo imagined that they were no older than six or seven winters each. There was something unique about their bone structures, something discouraging. There was a brittleness to their calcium framework, as if something had eaten them alive from the inside out during their pathetically abridged lives. What so many frail and obviously unhealthy foals were doing together in the back of a wagon mid-country when the Cataclysm hit, the last pony was at a loss to guess.

        Then there were three more bodies lying just a few meters away from the overturned wagon. These were adult skeletons. Marching over, Scootaloo studied them closely. Two were adult earth ponies, only a few years apart. One skeleton—however—was far different from the other two. It had a thicker frame to its ribs, a longer snout, and far stronger hooves. For a moment there, Scootaloo couldn't guess where she had seen the likes of those bones before, until she suddenly remembered her first trip in the Harmony to the desolate remains of the Northeast Deserts.

        “A zebra?” She murmured out loud in perfect confusion. “What in Epona's name was a zebra doing here—?”

        The dragon's tooth around her neck exploded in sarsaparilla suds. She felt like her jaws would fall apart in a sugar coated apocalypse. She winced and stumbled forward until she was staring face-first into the joyless hollow of one of the earth pony's skulls. To the floundering of her swiftly beating heart, her scarlet eyes took notice of a few flimsy tufts of mane hair still clinging to the skeletal cranium... and they were all a grayish pink.

        “Oh...” She murmured in a return of somber breath. “So there you are, Auntie.”

        Standing up straight, the last pony inhaled long and hard as she took in the entirety of the lifeless old friend beneath her. She had been through these motions before. She had juggled Applejack's skull and bathed herself in the pulverized ashes of Fluttershy. But no amount of brittle horror and no amount of Ponymonium wonderment could ever distill the solemnity of what she had to do next, what she always had to do. Hopping from dead world to dead world would have been a great deal less exasperating if she didn't have to treat the fossils of friends like pool water.

        “Good thing I learned how to breast-stroke.”

        With a harlequin smirk, Scootaloo fought the waves of bitterness away as she knelt down, gathered her metal tools, and started dismantling the pieces of Pinkie Pie one by one.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        When Scootaloo marched back up into the rune-lit throne room of Nightmare Moon, she had a great deal of extra weight in her saddlebags. The rear pockets of her belongings bulged with tightly packed bones as she sauntered into the light and squinted across the immensity of the Ponymonium interior. Far off into the forest of ivory pillars, rooms upon rooms of endless wonders stretched beyond sight.

        There was a long way to trek back to the carved tunnel that Scootaloo had made into the body of the lunar mountain. She knew that it would be a matter of hours before the stormfront outside the dome ended, and then she had a long, arduous march back to Ponyville to look forward to. If she was wise—if she knew any better—she would find a quiet place to squat, lay her head down, and rest before the exhausting distances she had yet to cover.

        But as she stared further and further at the sights before her... a pathetically helpless smirk graced her features.

        “Oh Celestia help me.” She grinned and trotted off towards the nearest rocky alcove. “I'm such a frickin' scavenger.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        In under two hours, Scootaloo had covered nearly two dozen rooms. She had wandered into every chamber and compartment she could find. There, she stumbled upon ten times as many relics as she knew what to do with. There were suits of Lunar Imperial armor, banners bearing the image of the Mare in the Moon, bladed weapons armed with vicious runes that had dulled with age and neglect, and mountains upon mountains of tragically useless ivory bits—the lunar currency. She found scrolls rolled up with papery parchment, detailing hundreds of military engagements that were never executed because the lunar banishment had promptly ended the Celestial Civil War. There were commissaries full of eating utensils, bunkers full of sleeping mats, and—to Scootaloo's awestruck yet humble surprise—nurseries for the infantile descendants of the Lunar Empire.

        Then there were books. These and these alone were what Scootaloo salvaged. She nearly soiled herself at the sight of them, at the mere thought that she had the grace and dumb luck to have found several solid tomes, priceless chunks of text, all brimming with thousands upon thousands of pages of literary history that had been lost for an eon from the annals of Equestrian lore. She nearly sobbed to find—at the end of her librarian escapade—a cluster of musical sheets, all labeled with a name that she never knew, for the composer had been born on the moon.

        “Sweet tap-dancing Nebula—I think I finally discovered my foalday!”

        Scootaloo nearly drooled as she sashayed down a thin concrete hallway lined with portraits. The canvas images clung upside-down to the ivory walls. With a tilt of her pink-haired head, the last pony could make out propaganda art detailing the impressionistic triumph of Nightmare Moon over Celestial adversity. Several illustrated phalanxes of hard-working, hard-fighting unicorns followed the shadow of their lunar savior... even unto cosmic death.

        The last pony was so engulfed in her historical imaginings that she barely realized she had trotted onto a part of the throne room that she hadn't stumbled upon before. Glancing up at the “floor” to the compartment, she was slightly surprised to see a velvet-carpeted platform stretching down like an inverted ziggurat. At the very peak of the construction was a square piece of concrete that stood before a sharp incline in steps.

        The wheels turned in Scootaloo's brown skull, and she transposed the upside-down image of Celestia's throne room over what she was presently witnessing, and everything looked the same. In a phoenix-flaming blink, she eagerly looked for one object and one object alone. After a few darting glances, she found it. It had fallen from the overturned floor of the grandiose interior countless years ago. Shuffling over, she pressed her entire body into the mahogany structure of the piece. It took some straining and a vigorous flapping of her wings, but she finally managed to push the thing upright.

        Standing back in a breathless stance, Scootaloo proudly stared at the very wooden throne of Princess Luna. It had a deep blue finish, something that likely matched the dark hue of the Alicorn's starlit mane. Carved in the surface of the thing was a gorgeous engraving of dozens upon dozens of sequences, events that depicted the rise of Nightmare Moon and the glorious foundation of the Lunar Empire. Nothing—of course—illustrated that same Empire's long and dwindling death in the bowels of a celestial rock.

        A gleeful surge of foalish impulse bubbled through Scootaloo's soul, with more sugary absurdity than ever a dragon's tooth could usher. Clearing her throat and battling a goofy grin, the lonesome pegasus shuffled up, turned around, and slowly... slowly squatted into the royal chair. The last pony briefly sat upon the throne of ages, staring out at an upside-down grave of Equestrian legacy, with all the ghosts of the past bowing before her in endless death and silence.

        “And as my first royal decree, I declare all talent shows to be officially forbidden!”

        Silence.

        “Ahem. Yeah, that was lame.”

        She smirked to herself and kicked off the throne. The wooden seat rattled, and suddenly something that she had barely noticed—something that had been mounted at the top of the throne's frame—fell off with a metallic rattle and rolled across the concrete “ceiling” beside her. She glanced over, blinking, and suddenly marveled at the round clattering object.

        “Oh no way...” She trotted numbly over, her mouth agape. “No friggin' way.” Scootaloo smiled stupidly.

        It was a helmet—but just not any helmet; it was one of Nightmare Moon's helmets. The perfectly round, perfectly obsidian cranial piece was made to fit the shaved skull of the dreaded Alicorn menace. A hollow, cylindrical sheathe stood in place of where a sharp rigid horn would fit through.

        In trembling hooves, the last pony picked the armor piece up. She turned it over several times before her squinting scarlet eyes, marveling at the surface of the metal that was still polished and unblemished after so many years. The last time it could ever have been worn was no less than twenty-five years ago.

        “Whew.” Scootaloo whistled shrilly to herself as she further examined the large object. “She certainly did have a big friggin' head, now did she?” A pause. She bit her lip and glanced gaily aside, left-to-right. In a deep breath, she squatted on her haunches and slowly lifted the helmet up over her cranium. When she finally released her grip, the celestial relic broadly swallowed her skull and rocked back and forth over it like a bobble-head. She hissed under her breath and bravely stifled a foalish giggle before it could rise to her throat. “Pfft... Oh yeah. Get a load of this, Ponymonium. Bow in fear for your new Mistress, Princess Scootalooney.”

        She briefly pondered taking this with her along with the scavenged books. She undoubtedly planned to make return trips to this amazing place, but in the meantime it couldn't hurt to have a fear-inducing helmet marking the bow of the Harmony. If not for scaring off trolls and harpies, it could give Bruce something to choke on his cigar over.

        Scootaloo was about to take it off when—in a blinding flash—her vision was violently and magically assaulted with the image of a pair of purple eyeslits, emblazoned in cosmic fury.

        “Nnnghh-Augh!”

        She shrieked painfully and tossed the helmet off of her. She reeled back against the wooden frame of the throne, blinking, seeing stars. All the while, the cranial armor piece rattled and rolled to an echoing stop in the center of the room. Scootaloo sat in a sweaty slump, panting and panting as if a chunk of her soul had been ripped out through her eye sockets by celestial teeth. She glanced forlornly and saw—ever so briefly—a dim glow pulsating from the empty horn-socket of Nightmare Moon's helmet. As soon as the light died, several rows of runestones along the ivory pillars of the grand room fluctuated in sequence. There was a brief but very real rumbling through the depths of Ponymonium, and all was silent once more.

        “Uhhhm...” She gulped and bit her lower lip. “Th-That can't be good.”

        A hissing noise. The smell of steaming runestones lit the room. Nervously, Scootaloo glanced left and right and was startled to see shapes surging from the thick ivory walls of the throne room. With a flurry of lunar powder and ash, white crusty things lurched out onto the floor, their joints snapping craggily in the stale air. Soon, to Scootaloo's confused horror, several dozens if not hundreds of living statues were shuffling mindlessly towards her. In the center of each pony-shaped chunk of rock, a buried runestone shimmered. From several different angles, the last pony could make out the word that each runestone was emulating: “Guardian.”

        You're laughing at me. I know that you're laughing at me. Even as I write this and think back on the occasion, I can feel the Harmony bobbing from the infinite waves of your blatant hysteria piercing the clouds.

        You must understand—though I somehow doubt you will try—that I can hardly ever afford myself peace or joy in the Wasteland. And whenever I almost do, whenever I stumble upon the crest of inane self-indulgence and happiness, this sort of crud happens.

        I would write “Go drown yourself in a ditch”, but even that would be inviting more calamity. If there's any enjoyment I can safely cling to, it's that there is no event in life so stupid that I can't survive it just to experience something even stupider.

        Scootaloo stood up on nervous haunches and slowly backed away from an ever-thickening circle of craggy equine statues shuffling towards her. The last pony suddenly knew what had happened to every dying soul that breathed its last breath under allegiance to the exiled Nightmare Moon. The last generation of royal subjects had been spiritually transferred into these rooks, a last bastion of defense that the possessed Alicorn had built within Ponymonium. When Princess Luna returned to Equestria on the thousandth year and was cleansed of the Nightmarish spirit, she never bothered to diffuse the black magic that was left deep in the celestial object, for there was never any expectation of another equine soul planting her hooves on lunar ground again—ever.

        Scootaloo was very “lucky” that day indeed...

        “Of course there'd be friggin' moon golems,” she hissed to herself, flicking her gaze back and forth as the circle of menacing statues shuffled closer and closer on jagged white limbs. “You can't have a purgatorial city of lunar rock without moon golems. That just wouldn't be proper! Frickin' luck of a drunken ogre, I swear to Epona.” She gnashed her teeth. After a clearing of her throat, she bravely exclaimed, “Look, the Celestial Civil War is over! There's no need to fight anymore! Go back to... uhm... your eternal slumber, good and faithful servants of Nightmare Moon!”

        The golems marched towards her undaunted. The runestones in their featureless white craniums strobed like cycloptic eyes as their necks unnaturally jerked and their limbs dustily stretched towards her.

        Scootaloo scrunched herself up against the throne. In a panicked breath, she switched gears and thunderously roared, “Stand down, thou insolent foals! Uhhh... For it is we, Scootaloo, immortal niece to Nightmare Moon and rightful heir to the throne of Ponymonium! Thou dare approacheth us?! Halt thy petulant hooves, we commandeth thee!”

        Glancing down at the cursed helmet, she kicked it with a hoof so that it rolled lifelessly towards the clambering limbs of the golem army.

        “Doth thou not see our armor so righteously discarded?! We have verily taken ourselves to another kingdom to harken upon a new era! Thy allegiance is no longer required! Get... uhh... Get thee to a lunar quarry and... uhh... l-layeth thine heads down in immortal slumber! So proclaimeth your new and most awesome liege!”

        The golems stood briefly in a lurching pause before the helmet. After a few mindless seconds, they stomped forward in a furious gait, viciously crushing the discarded armor to shrapnel as they murderously made their way towards the last pony.

        Scootaloo winced. “Yeah, I didn't think so.” In a flash, she flung her entire weight against the wooden throne and shoved it towards the wall of advancing statues. “Nnnngh-Haaugh!”

        The priceless seat slammed through a row of white figures before exploding into mahogany splinters. The split flanks of guardians pounced at Scootaloo.

        She immediately took to the air and vaulted with twitching hooves over the necks of the lunging monstrosities. She struggled with the weight of lunar tomes and Pinkie's ashes that bulged in her saddlebags as she flapped her brown wings and aimed her body towards the far end of the throne room. With a shriek, she felt her scant pink tailhairs being yanked down by stony limbs. She kicked and bucked down at the lunging sea of possessed lunar rocks. Clumps of white powder and ivory dust filled the room as row upon row of statues piled up and clambered all over her.

        The corridors of Ponymonium that had been deathly quiet for a quarter of a century were now suddenly and violently filled with the cacophony of this murderous struggle. Scootaloo kicked and thrashed and wrestled with the rocky limbs converging on her. Finally, she grasped a forelimb of moonrock in her teeth and brutally twisted her neck. The leg snapped loose with a crackling of brittle dust, and she proceeded to smack the remaining bulk of the thing across three more faceless heads glistening in front of her.

        In her desperation, the last pony successfully smashed a hole loose in the ranks of the possessed golems. With one massive kick to the statue clasping her tail, she broke free and flew violently towards a series of pillars. She slid and rolled to a stop—wincing—and hobbled up just in time to hear a stampede of stone hooves clattering up behind her. Looking down on the concrete “ceiling”, she found a discarded breastplate of Lunar Imperial armor. Clasping it in a pair of rattling teeth, she spun and flung the thing like a disc into the advancing waves of golems. The metal plate sliced through the air and severed three golems’ “skulls” in one expert throw. The runestones flickered to dim death and the lumbering bodies dissipated in dust as several hundred more golems advanced in wake of the meager three's demise.

        Hissing under her breath, Scootaloo scampered helplessly away from the stampede of rocky creatures. Their speed and maneuverability doubled as their spirits re-acclimated to the timeless shapes of the upside-down lunar city. In a matter of seconds, they were rushing up alongside her flanks, flinging stone fists and violent headbutts at her desperately galloping hooves. The last pony hopped over heaps of dust, chunks of broken pottery, and bits of overturned armor as she fought the futility of outrunning these mindless abominations that filled the hallways with thunderous chaos.

        Glancing from afar, she could barely make out the rune-lit entranceway that bled into the dark tunnels through which she initially entered. Before she could stretch her wings into action, the inviting sight of her one and only exit was blocked by a fresh resurgence of moon golems leaping directly in her path.

        “Oh come on—Augh!” She yelped as two statues pounced on her. She viciously bucked them off, ducked another's dive, and leapt straight up in a desperate breath. Her twitching eyes caught sight of a hanging strap of velvet carpet that had half-peeled from the “floor” of the throne room above her. She clasped her teeth onto it and fluttered her wings like a foal adding propulsion to an invisible scooter. With such an effort, she magically flung herself over a leaping mountain of clambering golems beneath her. Then the carpet snapped down its fragile length.

        Scootaloo shrieked, somersaulted, and flew through a pile of clattering armor bits. She tumbled to a stop against the partially crumbled doorway to a darkened chamber built in the side of the throne room.

        “Unnngh...” She stirred and sat up, wincing through foggy vision to see a solid line of pale shapes advancing on her, trapping her against the wall and barricading her from her one and only exit. “Okay, that's it!”

        She snarled and flung her saddlebag forward so that her rifle flew out. With a righteous clak-a-clak of copper, she aimed the extended weapon at the thick phalanx of zombified stone.

        “Playtime's over, you walking sacks of moon crap! Let's do this the hard way!” She spat: “H'rhnum!”

        The magazine of runestones in her rifle lit with a purple glow to match her bracelet of horns. A lifetime's mastery of lunar magic ironically flung its fury back at its own kind as the last pony launched manabullet after manabullet into the advancing army of stone guardians. She aimed for the heads, severing several flickering runelit skulls at once with each blast. The air filled thicker and thicker with a bloody white powder as she whittled the militia of golems away one by one. But as the shots rang out and the squadron of advancing statues greatly outnumbered the quantity of runestones that Scootaloo knew she had left in her rifle's magazines, the pegasus was breathlessly quick to take count of the hopeless situation.

        “Gotta clear a path!” She panted to herself as she cocked the rifle and spat loose the empty, smoking magazine. “All I need is a path!” She loaded the second magazine—this time full of explosive runes lit with a dim purple haze. Scootaloo snapped the levers of the rifle, aimed, and growled: “M'wynhrm!”

        A manabullet flew into the pale crowd, lodged itself into an unlucky golem, and exploded. Chunks of moonrock and sundered white limbs flew in a frothing cloud. The army still advanced on her. She backed up, constantly shuffling towards the dark-lit chamber beyond the doorframe to her flank.

        “M'wynhrm!” She launched another exploding manabullet. She cocked and reloaded the rifle, shouting again: “M'wynhrm!” The statues shattered and splashed all over her. She hissed for a solid breath under the constant rain of powder, still desperate to carve a clear path in the army before her. Panting and heaving, she backed up further and again hissed: “M'wynhrm!”

        Another explosion, but at the tail-end of it there was an unsettling sizzling noise. The air filled with a burning, acrid smoke. A heated wind kicked up from behind Scootaloo, like a sudden and inexplicable backdraft from a forest fire. Blinking quizzically, the last pony tossed a forlorn glance over her shoulder. There was suddenly an entire throng of blinking lights shimmering from deep within the dark-lit chamber that she had backed into. To the last pony's undeniable horror, she realized that she had stumbled upon an armory... and stockpiled to the brim inside that suddenly enormous hovel was a veritable mountain of bulbous black bombs. The sea of explosions were rigged with ancient runes... runes that were suddenly shimmering—everyone of them—because some stupid pony had uttered the lunar trigger word within magical earshot of the entire cache.

        “Awwwwwww buffalo biscuits.” In a flash, the last pony snarled and recklessly plunged herself forward. She flew within a meter's reach of the lumbering moon golems' limbs. Sure enough, they all violently reached for her, but just as they did—

        Ponymonium exploded. A frothing bubble of flame and plasma erupted behind Scootaloo's desperately flapping wings. The clambering army of pony-shaped statues helplessly flailed and lost their grip of her as their pulsing ivory forms were swallowed by an advancing wave of magical, rune-lit fire. The entire throne room baked and quaked as the burning wave of chaos swam through it, chasing a lone pegasus' dangling limbs.

        “Aaaaaaugh!” The witless survivor screamed for every ounce of mindless strength as she fought to outfly the searing tongues of flame eating at her tail. Before her, the walls and ceiling of Ponymonium collapsed unceremoniously, tossing dozens of frightening projectiles into her bobbing vision. She sneered through clenched teeth as she focused her flight, barreling up and over falling debris like a prismatic savior had once carried a shivering orange foal through the collapsing chaos of Cloudsdale a holocaustal twenty-five years ago. Before her twitching scarlets, row after row of ivory pillars fell towards her. She dipped under them and breathlessly arced her flight to bank past several more as she hurdled her twirling way towards the suddenly collapsing exit in the distance.

        With a grunt, Scootaloo angled her wings back and dove through the mercilessly imploding chamber that the once-pristine throne room had become. With centimeters to spare, she ducked through the crumbling door-frame and surged her blind way through the porous tunnels of the moon rock. She dared not slow down, not even here. To her mixed relief, the tunnels suddenly lit up in a bright amber glow as the flames plowed through the crumbling ivory behind her and fountained through the claustrophobic tunnels in a murderous pursuit of her sweating body.

        In dizzying precision, the scavenger navigated the worming gray tunnels, her scarlet eyes scraping the dull white walls in search of the dimly glowing runestones that she had innocently hammered into the crumbling moonrock hours ago. She barely saw them above the glowing gold of the frothing flames at her flank, and with crazy speed she navigated the path she had illustrated for herself through the shuddering maze. Dust and ash kissed her as she twirled through the collapsing labyrinth. In the shaking cacophony of it all, she could no longer tell what was “up” or “down” anymore. There was only forward, and she surged towards it, dipping up and down and left and right through the rune-lit tunnels as the explosive flames screamed threateningly to outrace her, to cook her.

        Finally, she saw a tiny sliver of twilight. Chunks of heavy moonrock collapsed, exposing the unnaturally cylindrical tunnel she had carved above. She ducked the first falling chunk, sideswiped a second, and pulled herself up with a mighty flap of her wings. Reuniting with the long ,smooth tunnel, she breathlessly bulleted herself down, down, down the length of it, her eyes straining to stay focused on the bright window to the storming wastelands beyond. The random flashes of thunder fought the bright aura behind her as the flame began singeing the frayed ends of her violet tail hair.

        Squealing, she broke into the blinding gray world beyond. An explosion—matching the enormity of thunder all around—and she was thrown mercilessly into the stony ground by the concussive blast of the flames erupting from the lightning carved tunnel immediately behind her. A deep rumbling filled the earth, shaking Scootaloo to her very core. She winced and shook the cobwebs out from her windblown skull in time to see the entirety of the white dome collapsing in on itself. The huge chunk of moonstone imploded as explosion after explosion rocked the bowels of it. What was left of Ponymonium was soon no more; the hulking alabaster mountain sunk into the wounded crater that it had forged in the earth two and a half decades ago. Soon, all that remained was bathed in a thick cloud of white ashen debris.

        Scootaloo took a few panting breaths as she rested there on her haunches. As the rolling thunder further blanketed the Wasteland landscape around her, whatever strength she had left in her equine body manifested itself in a snarl, and soon a like-hearted growl.

        “Aaaah—Aaaaah!” She hopped up to her hooves and roared into the destruction left behind her. “I swear to all that is holy in this cockeyed universe, why can't it ever be... frickin'... simple?!”

        The deafening world was indifferent to her angry outburst. The thunder challenged her, mocked her, laughed at her.

        “You know what? Screw it! I have better places to be!” She angrily flung her saddlebag to the ground and flung two pouches open. She simultaneously produced an earth pony's femur and Spike's green flame in one furious motion. “Screw you!” She spat at the rusted remains of an exploded lightning gun. “Screw you!” She hissed at the femur before smashing it over herself and bathing her body in Pinkie's ashes.

        The sky shouted in violent thunder.

        “And most of all, screw you!” She roared back to the stormfront while clasping the jar of green flames in two angry hooves. “I don't need your incessant crap! I'm going stargazing and nopony can stop me!” After a hysterical wheeze, she screamed into the rune, “Y'hnyrr!!!”

        In a green glow of Entropan glory, the flames erupted from the jar and clasped all over the last pony's brown body. She was yanked forcibly down a very familiar tunnel, a tunnel bouncing in eternally refracted hues of pulsing emerald. Scootaloo took a meditative breath as her angry body molded into a calm copper shell, with an amber-streaked black mane that fluttered in the absence of any explosions or thunderous noises that ever existed ever. Soon she stood—still as a lunar statue—in the haze of a sun-kissed morning.

        When she opened her amber eyes, a pair of blue irises was immediately bouncing up against her nose.

        “You!” A pink face desperately gasped.

        “M-Me?!” A startled time-traveler nervously blinked.

        “Yes you!” The candy-coated filly nodded furiously. “I've been looking all over for you!”

        “You h-have?” Harmony balked. She blinked, and in that blink she made out several gold-thatched roofs and bright equine bodies. The smell of cooked food and blooming flower gardens hit her nose. “Ponyville... ?”

        “You're just the pony I need!” The blue-eyed anchor was suddenly shoving Harmony like a wheelbarrow up the steep steps leading to a majestic five-story cylindrical building. She planted the copper pegasus like a potted plant right in front of a pair of wooden double doors. “Quick! Ring the bell, and when she comes out, ask 'What goes up white but comes down yellow, gray, and white?'”

        “Uhhhhh—Wh-When who comes out?”

        “Heeheehee—Quick! Before anypony sees you!” She was gone in a pink blur.

        Harmony numbly, dumbly rang the bell along the building-front. In the span of four or five confused heartbeats, a series of hoofsteps trotted up to the doors and opened it from the other side. A hauntingly familiar face peered through, an image that the foalish shade inside the time traveler instantly recognized from many a celebratory speech in the annals of Ponyvillean history.

        “Yes?” A gray-haired pony squinted through a pair of bifocals. She was bearing a white collar with a green cravat as she leaned her head curiously to the side. “Is this official business?”

        “Uhhh...” Harmony gulped and fell back on programmed words: “Ms. Mayor, 'What goes up white but comes down yellow, gray, and white'?”

        “I... I-I hardly even know...” The elder squinted.

        Harmony was suddenly aware of a yanking string in the peripheral of her vision. She glanced up then watched in slow-motion horror as a mounted bucket swiveled at the end of a cord and dumped a fountain of white objects splashingly over the hapless earth pony's skull. The mayor gasped and sputtered, her entire neck drenched in ivory shell fragments and yellow yolk.

        Pinkie Pie victoriously slid into frame with a crescent moon of a smile. “'Egg in your mane'!” She gleefully solved the riddle. “Heeheeheeheeheeeeeee!”

        Ponyville's mayor fumed, her gray-brown coat burning hot and red. She cast a murderous glare at the candy-colored pony, a hateful glance that the time traveler was witlessly sharing the dreadful spotlight of. “Grrrrr—Miss Pie...!”

        Harmony gulped with a deep shiver. “Hoboy.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Seventeen – Pinkamena Pie's Defunct

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        “Of all the insolent, inane, irredeemable acts of juvenile delinquency!” The mayor steamed as she stood in a puddle of gunk made viscous by the yolk that was oozing over her gray mane and aging features.

        “I wouldn't know beans about delinquency, but you sure do look like you've got egg on your face!” Pinkie Pie fell back and clutched her tummy as she kicked at the air with an endless bout of giggles. “Heeheeheehee!”

        “Grrrr!” The soiled pony fumbled in futility to wipe the yellow slime off of her spectacles with her ruined cravat. A gaggle of wandering equine souls trotted to a stop along the circumference of Ponyville Town Hall and watched with startled amusement. “That's the third time this month, Miss Pie! To imagine, a filly of your age acting like an anarchist degenerate!”

        “Heeheehee! Then I'm happy to be a degenerate!” The blue-eyed filly beamed. “And if you're not down with that, we've got two words for ya—Ulp!” Her voice was muffled by a copper hoof being flung into her pink face.

        Harmony sweated invisible bullets as the time traveler flung the elder a frightful look. “Ms. Mayor, I am so... so terribly sorry about this. I-I had no idea that—”

        “That what? That you just happened to be a random and innocent accomplice to the latest mischievous escapade of Sugarcube Corner's neighborhood rabble-rouser?! Just stay where you are, young lady! We'll see what Officer Silvertrot has to say about this!”

        “Officer Silver... trot?” Harmony's amber eyes blinked. Her mind flashed to a million years ago, a school room full of frightened children, Cheerilee's gasping voice, then a pair of officers who had arrested a psychotic pony rambling about the “Cataclysm”. The infinity symbols on Spike's cavern wall burned into her, and she suddenly didn't fear the trembling aftershocks of any lightning, thunder, or collapsing dome of moonrock. “Oh horseapples—Yaak!”

        The copper coated pegasus shrieked because she was being yanked across the villagescape by a pink hoof. A bouncing Pinkie Pie rapidly dragged her away from the scene of the crime. The mayor roared in the duo's absence, “Where do you think you two are going?! I am not through with you yet, Miss Pie! Haymane never tolerated such shenanigans where you came from, so why should I?! Do you hear me?—Whoah!” The elder pony slipped on a puddle of egg yoke and fell to her haunches. The surrounding villagers helplessly snickered as the mayor snarled and shook an angry hoof their way. “It's not funny! It's not funny, confound it!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Pinkie Pie flung herself and the copper pegasus into the shadowed crook of a lone alleyway and pressed against the wall, panting. “Whew! I almost got her to laugh that time! You'd think a politician wouldn't mind getting messy every once and a while.”

        “Almost got her to laugh?!” Harmony was slumped to the ground, wheezing for breath. With amber eyes as wide as saucers, she gazed incredulously up at her brand new, candy-colored anchor. “Have you lost all decency?!”

        “What?” Pinkie blinked her eyes innocently. “My two words for her were gonna be 'buck it'!”

        “No, not that! You just doused the mayor of Ponyville with raw eggs!”

        “Well, if I used watermelons, I would have needed a bigger bucket, don'tcha think?”

        “What were you thinking?!” Harmony exclaimed.

        “That I'd spend the afternoon pranking ponies!” She smiled wide, her mane of pink curls bouncing like the bright stalk of an exclamation point high above her beaming skull. “But now that you're finally here, we can actually get stuff done!”

        “What are you talking about—?”

        “Here!” Pinkie Pie reached blindly into the ether, grabbed a white sandwich sign, and slapped it firmly over Harmony's copper flanks. “Wear this!”

        “Wear what?” Harmony blinked at the white boards dangling suddenly on either side of her. “Where did you get this from—?”

        “Mmmf-Mmmffff!” Pinkie Pie mumbled over the handle of a wicker basket full of colorful pamphlets. She spat it up into the air so that it landed atop her head. “Ptooie! Salt Lick City! Ever been there?”

        “Uhhhh...”

        “Bunch of swell ponies!” Pinkie Pie shoved Harmony like a bale of hay out into the street. “Though this one time I invited them to a wine tasting party, they weren't too happy. So I thought I'd make it up to them. Quick! Before lunchtime!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        A bell rang. A wooden door covered with horseshoe art opened creakily. A tired-looking earth pony poked her head out with sleepy eyes. “Nnnngh... Uhh... C-Can I help you?”

        “Good afternoon, sir or madame!” Pinkie Pie grinned from where she stood next to a copper pegasus on the front steps of the tired pony's house. “It's so great to see a living and healthy citizen on this most super-duper of beautiful afternoons!”

        “It's seven thirty in the m-morning.”

        “But it's still super-duper, isn't it?”

        Harmony blinked. She finally glanced down at the sandwich sign hanging off her Entropan body. For the moment, she could only make out the bold letters spelling out “Whinnietower”. “Uhm... Miss Pie—?”

        “Shh!” Pinkie briefly hissed and smiled back the earth pony's way. “My friend and I are visiting door to door, and we have one genuine question for you!” She tossed her mane. A pamphlet slid loose from the basket-hat which she promptly snatched in the edge of her teeth and held generously before the exhausted resident. “Do you consider yourself a happy pony?”

        The door slammed shut in their faces.

        “Hmmm. Oh well!” Pinkie shrugged and in one fluid motion tossed the entirety of her pamphlets into a nearby garbage pale flanking the subdivision's dirt sidewalk. “Can't win 'em all, I guess.”

        “Uhhh...” Harmony pointed with a hoof. “That was just one house—”

        “Pfft! The best thing to come out of Salt Lick City was John Stocktrot. I think we're done for the day.”

        “What do I do with this sign—?”

        “Oh! I almost forgot!” Pinkie Pie beamed and yanked Harmony's upper body. “The paper route!”

        “The Paper what?—Daah!” She shrieked as she was pulled off-screen in a copper blur. The sandwich sign spun in mid-air like a Dirigible Dog's propeller blade in her absence before rattling to the ground.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Extra! Extra!” Pinkie cried out towards the rows upon rows of golden-thatched houses. “Get your copies of Equestria Daily!” The wind billowed through her mane as she loaded a thick roll of newspaper into a potato cannon and aimed it at the nearest building with a devilish grin. “Hot off the press!”

        After a resounding explosion, several trotting pedestrians gasped and ducked as a wadded-up periodical soared like a missile over their manes and slammed violently into the shattering brickwork of a Ponyvillean residence.

        “Faster! Faster!” Pinkie Pie eagerly tapped the copper shoulder of the pegasus in front of her as the scenery blurred past them both. She loaded another newspaper roll into her cannon. “We've gotta beat the Whinniestreet Journal delivery or we won't get our free funny papers!”

        “You mean to tell me we're doing this for comics?!” Harmony hissed from where she was hunched-over and pedaling furiously in the front seat of a two-pony bicycle. “Miss Pie, we still have a royally ticked-off mayor to worry about! We gotta get out of town!”

        “No we don't, you silly filly!” With a thunderous gunshot, Pinkie Pie cannonballed another wad of ink-stained paper at a household, denting the frame of its door violently from the shredding impact. “She'll head right on over to Aloe and Lotus' Day Spa like she always does after a messy prank, and there the mayor will find the thirty-bit gift certificate from yours truly! Now if only she could learn to laugh like she loves to lather up—Extra! Extra!” Two more resounding explosions.

        Harmony winced, her black mane billowing from the proximity of the potato-cannoning newspapers. “Miss Pie, I didn't come here to douse mayors in egg yolk or go door to door! And I certainly had no intention of being a paperfilly, besides—” She briefly raised her hooves from the bike handles and pointed in hideous disbelief at her pedaling limbs. “Look at this! We're two ponies on a bicycle! How is this even possible?”

        “Sugarcube Corner has a sponsorship with Equestria Daily! That's how!” Pinkie Pie reloaded, aimed, and chirped at the scenery, “Good Afternoon, Ace, Sir!”

        Just as they breezed by, a white stallion with a brown mane and matching facial hair marched out of his front door. “Oh good, the sports report is here—!”

        “Read it!” The cannon fired.

        “Ooof!” The bearded pony took it in the snout and ragdolled back into his living room.

        Harmony winced and glanced towards the rear seat. “Uhm, Miss Pie? Just how come these newspaper rolls are hitting things so hard, as if they're stuffed with rocks?”

        “Because they are stuffed with rocks!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “But when I say 'rocks', of course I mean 'fruitcakes'.”

        “Fruitcakes?! Wh-What the heck for?!”

        “Pffft! Duh! I told you Sugarcube Corner had a sponsorship, girl!” Pinkie Pie reloaded, squinted one eye, and aimed carefully with a liberal licking of her lower lip. “Thought I might spread a sample of Mr. and Mrs. Cake's merchandise!” She fired. The latest newspaper shattered a window, eliciting a screaming cat noise from deep inside the victimized house. “What's wrong with a little smidgen of free enterprise!”

        “And what if the newspaper company finds out that you've been turning their publication into a friggin' blitzkrieg?!”

        “Heeheehee! What's to be so frazzled about? Equestria Daily and fruitcakes go hoof-in-hoof. Extra!”

        A mailbox shattered. Its little red flag flew loose, sailing dangerously low over Harmony's trembling forehead. “M-Miss Pie, if we don't stop this insanity, I'm going to faint—”

        “Oh we can't have that!” Pinkie Pie gasped and hugged Harmony desperately from behind. The bicycle weaved precariously in and out of flinching, shrieking pedestrians. “If you collapse, how are you going to help me with pressure-washing!”

        Harmony's amber orbs did a Ditzy impression. “Help you with what now?”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Now make sure to keep the nozzles really close to the sidewalk! And I mean—like—super duper sneezey wheezey close! Pretend as if you're about to back-scratch a ladybug, but you don't wanna squish it because that would be mean!”

        “This is... uhm...” Harmony bit her lip as she found herself cradling a pair of metal spouts attached to two different coils of hose running from twin, gas-powered generators. A filthy sidewalk covered in mildew lingered before the exterior of a hauntingly familiar skating rink in the midday sun. “Why am I even doing this?”

        Pinkie Pie gasped dramatically from where she stood on the lawn next to her. “You mean you'd want to squish a ladybug?”

        “No, I mean, what's the point of—?”

        “What did a ladybug ever do to you?!”

        “Miss Pie, I am not trying to kill a ladybug!“

        The pink pony leaned suspiciously into the pegasus with wide blue eyes. “Was your village attacked by a rampaging tribe of ladybugs and you've since lived your entire life vowing revenge?!”

        “I wanna know why I am standing in the middle of Ponyville with a pair of pressure washing nozzles in my hooves!” Harmony blinked violently and shook her face. “I don't even think it's safe to operate two pressure hoses at the same time!”

        “They key is not to cross the streams!” Pinkie Pie grinned. In a single hop, she bounced over to the generators and cranked them with a jerk of her jaws. The twin motors roared to life. “Besides, with both of them tied together, I figure we'll earn twice the bits in half the time!”

        “I still think this is really dangerous.”

        “Yup! Probably is!” Pinkie Pie smiled and flipped both levers on the base of the hoses. “Okie dokie lokie, here we go!”

        “Gaaaaah!” Harmony shrieked and held on for dear life as the twin nozzles rocketed up from the ground beneath her on a spray of violent water. She rode the dancing hoses like the serpentine necks of twin sea serpents thrashing against her.

        “Remember: aim really close and do tiny side-to-side motions until you see the sidewalk panel start to turn gray again!” Pinkie Pie yelled firmly above the cacophonous engines and roaring deluge, forcing many a distant villager to glance over. “If you start to smell something reallllly stinky, that means you're doing it right and the mildew's going away! Thatta girl, you almost got it!”

        There was a bellowing scream; the hoses finally flung the time traveler through the air so that she landed violently in a thick cluster of rattling bushes several meters away. “Ooof!”

        Pinkie Pie blinked. Smiling, she cut the engines to the generator and pointed through the settling spray of sun-glittering mist. “You missed a spot!”

        “Mmmfff!” Harmony flailed and clambered through a suffocating mountain of twigs and leaves beside the skating rink. “I shouldfff junnfff shuff the hoffeff umpff your ammff...”

        Pinkie Pie gasped. “Of course! My aspirations to be a poet!”

        “Pfftooie!” Harmony's head finally emerged from the bushes, her mane covered in squirrel droppings. “I beg your pardon?—Whoah!” She was whisked away yet again via pink hooves.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The nearby speakers whined annoyingly as Pinkie Pie finished propping the microphone up in front of Harmony. The copper pegasus stood on a broad stage at the back end of a dimly lit cellar cafe full of smoky haze, jazzy music, and a cornucopia of leering faces. She bit her Entropan lips as she found herself under the indifferent gaze of dozens upon dozens of patrons seated at round coffee tables.

        “Here!” Pinkie Pie hissed whisperingly as she slapped a sheet of paper into the time traveler's hoof. “Try not to read it too quickly! It'll ruin the meter!”

        “Uhhh...” Harmony blinked at the sheet, then over at the candy-colored earth pony. “If you wrote this, then why am I reading this?”

        “All good poets start out anonymously!” Pinkie squatted down on the edge of a folding chair next to the stage. “Besides, I'm willing to bet I haven't got the speaking voice that you do. I try to say a haiku, and it comes out sounding like a cement mixer!”

        Harmony's eyes ran over the sheet like an amber typewriter. “In the heart of my heart, where a fire is burning, where my dreams are yearning, nopony is ever learning—” She finished murmuring, gulped, and planted a hoof over the edge of the microphone as she leaned worriedly the bright filly's way. “Miss Pie, I hate to say it, but this isn't exactly T. S. Eliotrot.”

        “Pfft! Of course not! I wrote it in high school!”

        “High School?—Snkkt—Why are you sampling that?”

        “Heehee! I figure it's best to start out small! I don't wanna have too big a head on my shoulders!”

        A series of coughs and clearing throats emanated from the impatient crowd. Harmony shifted nervously from where she stood on the dimly lit stage. “I dunno about this...”

        “Go on! What's the worst that could happen? You've got an audience of happy, receptive artists!”

        “All I see are a bunch of hoodies, scarves, and square-framed glasses.”

        “Cuz it's dark and chilly down here in the basement!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “Just relax, and maybe afterwards I'll let you join me in arts and crafts!”

        “Oh joy...” Harmony muttered to herself. She glanced at the crowd. Clearing her throat, the last pony stepped up to the crackling microphone. “This is... uhm... a special reading of Equestrian Dreams by Pinkamena Diane Pie.” A deep breath. “On a dark and stormy night, alone with every pony fright, I think and I think about kites, like I used to fly in the sky so bright—”

        “Booooo!”

        “You're a travesty of the Celestial Tongue!”

        “Get off the stage! We wanna hear more e. e. coltings!”

        A rock-hard bagel flew through the hazy cellar air and ricocheted off Harmony's cranium. “Ow! Sonuva—!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Inside a lonely wooden cabin, Harmony sat at a worktable, squinting as she grasped a pair of screwdrivers in the crooks of her copper hooves and went to work disassembling the intricate pieces of a rusted bear trap.

        Pinkie Pie sat beside her, snapping an armadillo cage to shrapnel bits with a pair of iron bolt cutters. “And so I said, 'I don't care if the Royal Court of Canterlot declares them as a tax exempt organization! I don't think they have the right to declare a holiday!' And she says back to me, 'You're just ignorant and mean and don't know what you're talking about!' And then I said, 'Have you seen Battlefield Equestria? I think this conversation is over!' And then she left the party in a huff like it was my fault! Pfft—Her loss! And to think I planned on sharing all of those cupcakes—”

        “Enough!” Harmony snarled, tore the bear trap apart, and slammed her Entropan forelimbs angrily down onto the table. “Look!” Lungs heaving, she hoisted her flank up and all but thrust her emblazoned rear end in the earth pony's face. “Do you see that? Do you?”

        “Jee, I dunno. Looks like a plot hole to me.” Pinkie Pie hissed, snorted, and broke into insane giggles as she slapped the tabletop multiple times. “Hahahaha! Get it?!”

        “Look at the cutie mark! Look at it! I'm a frickin' clerk from the frickin' Court of frickin' Canterlot!” Harmony seethed, her barking voice echoing across the wooden beams of the claustrophobic cabin. “I came here all the way from Her Majesty's palace specifically to see you about an important scientific assignment! Why I chose to see you—nnngh—I mean, why Princess Celestia chose for me to see you is beyond me, only that I... she figured that you were the most popular pony in Ponyville and if there was any soul who would know how to help me get what I needed in this town, you would be the one!”

        “Jee, that sounds really fantastic!” Pinkie Pie smiled brightly, yanked the shattered bits of the cage off her side of the table and planted a rusted deer trap in its place. “But what does any of that have to do with arts and crafts?”

        “Nothing!” Harmony shouted. “It has nothing to do with anything! Just like this has nothing to do with anything!” The last pony slumped back down onto her chair. She faced the candy-colored filly and motioned wildly with her hooves, all the while lecturing, “I did not come here to dump eggs on the mayor, or go knocking on random ponies' doors, or deliver fruitcake grenades disguised as newspapers, or do death-defying pressure-washing, or read horribly written poetry—”

        “I kinda thought that last stanza was good up until the bagel hit you.”

        “It stank!” Harmony hissed. “I'm sorry, Miss Pie, but it stank! Just like this stinks!” The pegasus pointed towards the pile of tossed and dismantled hunter's tools. “And for your information, this is not 'arts and crafts'! This is disassembling very sharp and very dangerous weapons! Why in your cotton-stuffed head you have the ridiculous notion to call it 'arts and crafts' is beyond me!”

        “Hmmm...” Pinkie Pie's face scrunched up towards the ceiling as she rubbed her chin with an errant hoof. “Well, that's what the esteemed Hoity Toity called this when he paid me to help clear his newly bought land of all the stuff the griffon colonists had left behind!”

        “Who did what now?” Harmony gave Pinkie a double take. She frowned, her nostrils flaring. “Miss Pie, I think that rich floozy is attempting to take advantage of your good nature.”

        “Come to think of it, you're right!” Pinkie Pie's brow furrowed briefly. “Just who in their right mind pays a grown filly in cough drops? I don't care if they're all lemon flavored. Bleachkk—Or like my Granny used to say, 'Bleachkk, oy!'”

        “You see? This is all pointless. Can we please trot back into Ponyville and just—I dunno—talk sensibly for a little while?”

        “You're righttttt...” Pinkie Pie sighed exasperatingly. No less than a millisecond had passed, and she was once more grinning brightly as if witnessing the birth of the universe. “Right after we take care of this bad boy right here!” With superpony strength, she clasped an enormous metal spheroid from the corner and slapped it onto the tabletop with a humongous clang. “Seems awfully rude to abandon a job when it's so close to being finished, don'tcha think?” She grinned as she patted an array of rusted metal spokes sticking out of the object from all angles. “You ever see an ogre football before?”

        “Miss... uhh... M-Miss Pie..?.” Harmony stared, her mouth agape, her eyes dilating into amber pinpricks. With a shaking hoof, she nervously pointed at the weighted monstrosity. “That's a sea mine.”

        “No way!” Pinkie Pie smirked. “Mr. Toity told me that this was something ogres kick around for sport and it was perfectly safe to take it apart with a normal wrench!” She blinked her blue eyes and then face-hoofed. “Awww poopsicles, I forgot the wrench!”

        “It's a friggin' sea mine,” Harmony said. She stepped out of her chair and gestured with wildly waving hooves at every angle of the infernal thing. “It... That... But... How?!” She stared at Pinkie's face with a pale grimace. “How?! That's all I want to know, Miss Pie. Just how?”

        “I've got a joke for that. It either involves brown cows or insulting the language of the Buffalo culture.”

        “This is no laughing matter! That thing could go off any second—!” Harmony blinked in a sudden, cold realization. She squinted the pink pony's way. “Lemme guess, Hoity Toity owns this lone and abandoned cabin out in the middle of Everfree too, doesn't he?”

        “Why yes! Why do you ask?”

        “We gotta get out of here...”

        “Heehee!” Pinkie leaned her bright elbow into the rusted hulk of metal. “Stop being so glum, chum! Er... chumette? Chumpina? Pfft—Now that last one just makes you sound fat—” A creaking noise, and finally the flimsy table beneath the sea mine gave way. “Ackies!” Pinkie collapsed out of sight.

        An enormous thud echoed through the cabin. Harmony jerked, her entire body flinching. The dust settled over a pile of splinters. The sea mine was as still as a menacing mountain.

        “Whew...” After a wave of silence, Harmony exhaled, all her hooves touching back to the floor in relief. “Okay. Now if we can just—”

        “Oh hey!” Pinkie Pie's face flew back up into frame, wearing a shattered table leg for a hat. She brandished a glinting metal tool in her hoof. “I didn't forget the wrench after all! Woohoo!” She pumped her upper limbs in victory; the result was the wrench being flung murderously into the spokes of the giant rusted sphere. After a ringing noise, a dull and menacing ticking filled the dusty air.

        Harmony's ears went limp.

        Pinkie Pie blinked curiously at the noisy ball of death. She glanced over her shoulder with a raised eyebrow pointed the pegasus' way. “Now that's just silly! Why would ogres want to kick around a giant alarm clock?”

        “Move it!” Harmony grasped Pinkie's shoulders, stretched her copper wings out, and flew the two of them out the nearest window of the cabin.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Glass flew as the two soared into the outer lengths of the Everfree Forest. Barely two breaths after the escape, and the calm and quaint log cabin behind them flew heavenward in a blistering explosion. The concussive blast sent both ponies sailing into the underbrush, grunting, as the afternoon sky rained down a blizzard of wooden debris and bear trap springs.

        Harmony coughed and wheezed from where her Entropan body had landed in a smoldering heap. Hobbling up onto four numb hooves, she groaned inwardly and shook her snout in a blurred fashion. “Yeah, this was so much better than picking Rainbow Dash...”

        “Ughh... Why is the world leaning sideways?”

        “Nnngh, Miss Pie, we almost died.” Harmony lethargically glanced across the forest towards the earth pony. “What could possibly be so much more interesting than what we just—OhDearEpona!” She howled, flinching behind an upraised hoof.

        “What?” Pinkie Pie's blue eyes blinked, one above the other, for her entire skull was unnaturally twisted ninety-degrees from the center of her neck. “Did I land in something?”

        “Uhhhh...” Harmony hissed through a grimace of clenched teeth. She gulped as she saw several bony contours sticking out at disgusting angles through the pony's pink coat. “Maaaaaaybe.”

        “Hmm?” Pinkie Pie shook her snout. There was a rattling sound, as if a poisonous snake was hidden behind her throat. “Oooh!” She rattled her joints again. “Heeheehee! Listen to me! I'm like a newborn foal's favorite toy!”

        “Uhm, Miss Pie, I don't think you should be doing that—”

        “This reminds me of that one time I swallowed a pair of maracas and my sisters kept hitting me with broomsticks because they thought I had been possessed by a hive full of ghost bees!” Pinkie Pie trotted precarious figure-eights through the underbrush and positively reveled in the teetering pull of gravity. “Hey! Heeheehee! Lookit, lookit!” She tilted her body forty-five degrees from the earth and trotted with her crooked skull almost even to the horizon. “I was foaled on the side of a hill! I was foaled on the side of a hill! Hahaha!”

        “Look, let me just get you to whatshername at the Ponyville Hospital... Uhhh...” The time traveler wracked her brain as the rattling pony orbited her gigglingly. “Nurse Red Heart! Yeah! Maybe she can—er—fix you!”

        “Fix what?” Pinkie Pie twirled and twirled noisily. “It's like I've got my own percussion instrument! Now all I need is a wind section and I'll be two-sevenths of the way to a full orchestra! Like this—Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!”

        “Miss Pie—”

        “Whoo! Whoo! Whoo—!”

        “Your head is in a bad—” Harmony scrunched her face, shook, and frowned. “...worse condition than usual! Will you just stop and—?”

        “Aack!” Pinkie Pie tripped over a random root and slammed her spine straight into a tree trunk with a sickening crunch.

        Harmony winced once more.

        The earth pony stood up, blinking, her eyes at an even level again. She turned her neck a few times; there was no more rattling. “Hmmm.” She shrugged. “So much for that.” The filly spun and smiled at the dumbfounded pegasus. “Whaddya wanna do now?”

        “I was about to tell you!” Harmony's eyes were thin as dagger blades. “I'm a clerk from the Royal Court of Canterlot. I'm here for astronomical research—stargazing—and Princess Celestia heard about you being a famous community organizer in Ponyville and she thought that you might know a good place for me to perform my operation—”

        “Stars?!” Pinkie Pie gasped joyfully and bounced across the forest to grin in the pegasus' face. “I can make you see stars!”

        Harmony's exhalation was like a pent-up hurricane billowing out from her frazzled chest. “Okay, now we're getting someplace!”

        “Just follow my fluffy tail to glory, girl!” Pinkie Pie bounded towards Ponyville.

        “Heh...” Harmony smirked and murmured under her breath. “And you thought I couldn't handle 'Auntie Pinkie Pie', Spike.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        A tall and pink bottle was slapped onto the counter in front of Harmony's bored eyes. The time traveler gazed apathetically at the glistening contours of the glass-encased soda while leaning her chin on a slumped hoof. Her amber eyes dripped over to a grinning pony's bright face.

        “Miss Pie... What is this?”

        “It's my new invention!” Pinkie Pie beamed. She and Harmony were huddled around a counter in the rear kitchen of Sugarcube Corner. “I call it 'Supernova Sarsaparilla'! It'll make you see stars!” She leaned forward and fluttered her blue eyes innocently.

        “Nnnnghhhh...” Harmony buried her snout into the crook of her forelimb.

        Pinkie Pie paced around the colorful bakery, monologuing dramatically, “All of these years that Mrs. and Mr. Cake have let me live here, I figured I'd return them the favor by making a brand new beverage that'll wow the crowd and fill their saddlebags with a fountain of golden bits! I know it may seem a bit bold, but it's all with good intentions! I need taste testers who are willing to humor a young and ambitious entre... entrepre... entreprenuuuuuuuur—”

        “Mmmf... 'entrepreneur'.”

        “Gesundheit! Heeheehee!”

        Harmony stared up with icy ambers. “This is not what I had in mind at all.”

        “That's what should make it extra special! It's a surprise drink! I like to call it assassin soda!” Pinkie Pie hooked her upper limbs like a praying mantis and made a wicked face. “Hisssssssssssssssss!”

        “What I came here for—”

        “Hisssssssss! Hiss! Hiss! Hiss!”

        “What I came here for was to see stars—You know, burning gas giants left in the effluent wake of Goddess Epona's cosmic exodus! I didn't mean taste-testing! How in the wide world of all things equine could you think that I meant—?”

        “Just have a sip.” Pinkie Pie grinned devilishly with a not-so-subtle wink while sliding the cold glass across the counter to the pegasus. “You seem to have your senses together! Maybe those wicked awesome Canterlotlian tastebuds can give me a detailed survey to send to the Ponyville Food Council!”

        “Y'know what?” Harmony stood up straight and tall. With the brave flexing muscles of a hardened scavenger, the last pony gripped the bottle, bit the cap off with mighty teeth, spat it out, and viciously growled, “If it'll make you so friggin' happy, I'll taste your Saturday Sappernocky!”

        “'Supernova Sarsaparilla'.”

        “Whatever. I just want us to move on from this infernal chapter in our goddess-forsaken lives!” Harmony flung her neck back and took a liberal chug of the bubbling beverage. No sooner than three seconds into guzzling the mysterious quaff, her eyes bulged towards the ceiling. She flung her body forward and wheezed violently. Her copper coat flashed and flickered across seven different prismatic hues. This was soon followed by an immolating breath of fire that briefly but nightmarishly vomited out of her mouth before dissipating like the fumes from an elder dragon's purple snout. She slumped like a dead weight, her snout melting into the contours of the counter as she hyperventilated for an even breath.

        “So?” Pinkie Pie grinned, watching calmly and happily. “How's it taste?”

        “Snkkkt!” Harmony winced to utter.

        “'Snkkkt'?” Pinkie blinked quizzically towards the kitchen walls. “What does 'Snkkkt' mean? I can't put that on a survey!”

        “Miss Pie, what in Celestia's name did you put in this crap?”

        “I might know a pony who might know a pony who might possibly have borrowed a secret bucketful of solid rainbow from a Cloudsdalian factory.” Pinkie Pie stifled a giggle and rolled her eyes innocently towards the ceiling of the kitchen. “Dashie says that rainbows aren't known for their flavor. I think the world's just waiting for taste buds to evolve to a new level of appreciating spiciness.”

        Harmony hacked, coughed, and wheezed. “'Dashie'?”

        “No, 'spicy'!” Pinkie leaned across the counter with a beaming smile. “What do you think? Does it need more bubbles?”

        “By bubbles, do you mean 'arsenic'?” Harmony hissed.

        “Oh, that reminds me!” Pinkie Pie brightened, reached once more into the mysterious ether surrounding the unwitting room, and produced a rattling cardboard box. “While we're here, wanna help me do a favor for my friend?”

        “Friend? Wh-What friend?”

        “Fluttershy. She's too busy dealing with some infant 'Candy Corn' or whatnot in the Everfree Forest today. She asked that I look after some of her pets. Wanna help me feed them?”

        “Fluttershy?” Harmony finally regained her breath. The time traveler smoothed back the frazzled length of her black, amber-streaked mane and managed half-a-smile. “Sure! Anything for Fluttershy!”

        “Great! But we gotta de-sting them first.” Pinkie tore the box open.

        Harmony blinked. “De-sting? De-sting what?—Aaaah!” The last pony shrieked as a dozen scorpions leaped out of the box and clambered all over her. She fell hard to the floor, wrestling with the sudden sea of skittering arachnids. “Getthemoff! Getthemoff! Getthemoff!”

        “Heeheehee! That means they like you!” The bright filly next gasped. “Oooh! In speaking of liking stuff... !”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Pinkie Pie finished strapping a lavender helmet over her head before revving engines through the handles before her. “Anypony who doesn't like jet skis should sell their house and move to Mexicolt before sundown! Heehee! I like to get a lot of things wet, don't you?!”

        “Dang it, Miss Pie!” Harmony snarled from where she limply squatted, mounted on a second watercraft identical to Pinkie's. The two bobbed up and down along the flanks of a majestic lake south of Ponyville. “We really need to talk!” She shook her mane, tossing loose a few severed scorpion stingers that had been lodged in her follicles. “I mean really talk!”

        “It isn't exactly safe to have a conversation while riding jet skis at fifty kilometers per hour around a shallow lake!”

        “It isn't safe to ride jet skis at fifty miles per kilometer around a shallow lake, period!”

        “Exclamation mark!”

        “What?”

        “What I meant to say was, 'I take your period and raise you an exclamation mark'!”

        “Dang it, Miss Pie, I'm serious!”

        “And so am I!” Pinkie Pie grinned and flashed a look over her shoulder. “And so's Dr. Whooves! Hey-ya, Doc! Ready to take your measurements?”

        “Right on!” A brown earth pony sat at the shoreline and waved before scribbling onto a clipboard full of spreadsheets “Anytime, Pinkie!”

        “What the heck is he even doing here?” Harmony blinked.

        “Lots of ponies in town are trying to outlaw jet skis because they think it's poisoning the ecosystem.”

        “Could they be right?”

        “I'll let you know once they get out of the hospital for water poisoning.” Pinkie Pie revved her engines. “Come on, Mon-Mon! Let's do this! For science!”

        “What did you just call me?”

        “'Mon-Mon', because you're colored like a monarch butterfly! It's very pretty!”

        “My name happens to be 'Harmony'.”

        “Pffft—Hahahaha!”

        Harmony steamed. “Now what's so friggin' funny?”

        “'Mon-Mon' is also griffonese for what a pony does in the outhouse. Heeheehee!”

        “Miss Pie—”

        “Which is why I kind of always giggle whenever I shop at Miss Bon Bon's novelty shop. That filly's name is one dyslexic beak away from sounding like something stinky! Heeheehee!”

        “Miss Pie!”

        “Oh, I'm sorry, are you part griffon?”

        “I'm two parts ticked off and one third homicidal at this point.”

        “That still won't get you a free scholarship at University of Fillydelphia.”

        “Tell Dr. Whooves to get ready to scribble down some data. He's about to find out how much a jet ski can pollute an earth pony's rectum.”

        “Hey Dr. Whooves—!”

        “I was being sarcastic!”

        Pinkie Pie gasped. “You mean you were actually telling a joke?”

        Harmony shrugged wildly. “Why is it so goddess-danged important to you if ponies are laughing or not?!”

        “Because you're obsessed with seeing stars!”

        “Uhm... I... huh... ?”

        “I was being sarcastic! Heeheehee!”

        “Grrrrrrr...”

        “Are you ladies going to start your engines or not?”

        “We're not really going to keep Dr. Whooves waiting, are we?” Pinkie Pie asked with glistening blue eyes. “The last time the water-smooth stallion tried this experiment on his own, a pigeon died. Or was it one pigeon? Two? Threefourfive... just like that?”

        “Nnnngh... Fine.” Harmony frowned and looked forward. She gently braced the handles of the jet ski beneath her hooves. “Uhmm...” She fidgeted.

        “Need help?”

        “No thank you. This is just like a scooter, only it goes over water. How hard can it be—?” A single flick of the hoof, and the jet ski violently shot forward, dragging a flailing Harmony along with it. “Aaaaaaaaaiiieeee!”

        “Careful, Mon-Mon!” Pinkie Pie shouted through a pair of hooves bracing her lips while Dr. Whooves scribbled and scribbled beyond her shoulder. “We're trying to study the effects on the lake! Not the effects on the—” She winced as a thunderous crash rippled across the surface of the waters. “—wooden piers.”

        “My word, is she okay?”

        “She'd better be, Doc. I need somepony to spot me later while I fall a tree!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “At least answer me one question.” Harmony grumbled as she wrung out her soaking wet, amber-streaked hair in the golden glow of the sunset. “Are you actually following a schedule, or do you seriously intend to be so friggin' random?”

        “Pfft!” Pinkie Pie rolled her eyes. “I swear! Heehee! Why does everypony insist that I'm random? Everything I do is totally normal! Ahem—Now stand back.” She pushed Harmony aside, raised a pair of goggles over her eyes, and proceeded to crank the handle to a gigantic chainsaw. Once the engine roared to life, Pinkie angled the rotating, razor-sharp teeth of the machine so that it began slicing its way through the thick trunk of a dying tree besides Sugarcube corner. The grinning pony spoke over the loud buzzing noise and spillage of wooden chips, “Most ponies live out their their lives taking one hoofstep at a time! I enjoy living at one thousand and eighty degree angles all at once! Is that a crime?!”

        “No, I suppose it's not a crime—”

        “What?”

        “I said, I suppose it's not—”

        “What?!”

        “Will you turn that dang thing off?!”

        “I can't hear you! I'm trying to cut down a tree!”

        “And I'm trying to talk to you!” Harmony shouted, shielding herself from the flying fountain of wooden bits. “I've been trying to talk to you all day! I've just about had it! If you won't help me find a spot to conduct the astronomical research on behalf of the Canterlotlian Court, then I'll find another pony who will!”

        “Like who?! Dr. Whooves is taken!”

        “It probably wouldn't be Dr. Whooves, unless of course he ever tutored a dragon named Spike for more than a semester.”

        “Heh! He should be so lucky! The poor doc is attempting to finish a scientific study in ecological research and all of his peers give him flak cuz he's got a silly hourglass on his butt! What would you do if you had an hourglass for a cutie mark, Mon-Mon?!”

        “Jee, I dunno. I'd probably kill myself.”

        “That's the worst punchline I ever heard!” Pinkie cut the engine to the chainsaw and stood back. “Fore!” she shouted.

        “Miss Pie.” Harmony glared at her. “'Fore' is what ponies shout at a golf course. I believe the appropriate term you're looking for is—” Her eyesight flickered a bright, billowing green and then was normal once again. At first, the time traveler wasn't sure why, until she glanced down to see that the hulking body of the dying tree trunk had landed around her. As the sawdust cleared, the last pony became aware of an equine-shaped hole in the cylindrical wood, and her hooves were standing in the middle of the collapsed spectacle. “—'timber.'”

        Pinkie Pie raised her goggles. She blinked at Harmony, then at the severed tree trunk. Her blue eyes squinted at the miraculous, Entropan spectacle. The wheels in her fluffy head were obviously turning as she performed a complex mathmatical equation through her brain matter. “Really giant, heavy tree plus gravity plus living, breathing pegasus...” She stuck a tongue out, tapped the edge of her chin with a hoof, then shrugged. “Oh well!” She flung the chainsaw over her head so that it embedded into a vibrating street sign that wobbled to a stop. “Do you have the same itch for baking that I do right now?”

        “No!” Harmony hissed, frowning. With a flap of her wings, she pounced on Pinkie Pie and grasped her shoulders between two heavy hooves. “No baking! No random scientific tests! No volunteer jobs for goddess-knows-what! And—most of all—no jokes! Give me one good reason to give you the breath of the day or I am so outta here!”

        “Erm... Uhm...” Pinkie Pie's smile was a sweat-stained thing, but no less fervent than a day's worth of grins that preceded it earlier. “Would you like to join me in catering Rarity's fundraiser for Ponyvillean orphans, Mon-Mon?”

        “For the last time, it's 'Harmony', not—” Harmony stopped in mid-sentence, blinking hard. “Uhh... Lady Rarity's doing a fundraiser for Ponyvillean orphans?” she asked in a suddenly wilting breath.

        “Heeheehee! Why do you call her 'Lady Rarity'? Pfft—Everypony knows she's a lady!”

        “It's... It's a habit I picked up from a friend of mine,” Harmony murmured. “Someone who admires her greatly.” Again, she gulped. “But... She did fundraisers for orphans here in Ponyville? How come I never knew that...?”

        “She did and she is still doing them! And I volunteered to pass out dessert for everypony who attends! I mean, where have you been?—Well, I guess you are a Royal Clerk from Canterlot who's trying to perform an astronomical study here in town on behalf of Her Majesty.”

        “Wait, you mean to tell me you heard me all those times I tried explaining myself?”

        “So I'm gonna finish making pastries for the event tonight and time's-a-wasting!” Pinkie Pie giggled, then in a deep low voice she melodramatically chirped: “'I have a rendezvous with doughnuts, at some disputed bakery'. Heeheehee! Wanna come with?! Orphans and doughnuts always make for a great combination!”

        “Miss Pie... I...” Harmony ran a hoof over her face.

        She thought of six hundred strips of silver that she had practically vomited into Bruce's wallet. She thought of a one-of-a-kind lightning gun that had exploded after drilling her a hole into a gigantic dome of moonrock. She thought of having outrun both an army of lunar golems and a gigantic wave of runic flame. She thought of the Equestrian Wasteland and the endless gray twilight and how—with each second wasted in both forward and reverse—nothing was becoming any brighter, or prettier, or happier. Then and there, in that moment, in a normal field surrounded by such bright colors belonging to a world so devoid of desolation that it could easily afford whimsy, she thought of a shivering little foal in a cold barn shadowed with painful memories, and she then thought of a wilting time traveler confessing all of her sins before a purple dragon. There simply was no crystal clear way to restore glory to Equestria when a pony's heart was sympathetic to the souls of Equestria at the same time. So, with a crumbling, groaning breath, she sinned again.

        “Yeah. I'll come with.”

        “Great!” Pinkie Pie hugged Harmony until their cheeks rubbed against each other. Her dimples were like lavender explosions in the dimming sunset. “I'll bring the ingredients, you'll bring the sarcasm, question marks will bring question marks, then profit!” She bounced gleefully towards the far side of Sugarcube Corner. “Once more unto the baking soda! Heehee!”

        Harmony sighed, slumping within the shadow of herself. “Sometimes, I swear, the only reason Entropa hasn't asked for her skin back is because she's watching me from afar while preparing a grand lawsuit.”

        “I'd hurry if I were you!” Pinkie Pie smiled in mid-stride. She spoke over her shoulder, “Before the squirrels get back!”

        “What squirrels?” Harmony glanced over and witnessed half-a-dozen bushy-tailed rodents clambering about the hollow of the fallen tree. “Oh. Uh... sorry about the tree. Life has its ups and downs, am I right?”

        All six creatures spun from the trunk, spotted the sawdust guiltily blanketing the copper pegasus' figure, and leaped at her with a bloody roar cry of vengeance.

        “Gaaah!” Harmony tumbled across the face of Sugarcube corner as she wrestled the tree rats with pounding hooves. “Nnngh!—For the love of Celestia! At least Bruce is a habitual smoker! What's your friggin' excuse?! Raaaugh!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut,” Harmony murmured from an unfolded table propped up in front of the Ponyville Town Hall building under the shroud of night. A starry sky scoffed down at the last pony, its twinkling glow highlighting the various splotches of sawdust and squirrel prints that adorned her Entropan features like a chaotic patchwork. As body after body of Equestrian visitors strolled into the bright doorway of the bustling event, the exhausted pegasus hoofed them a chocolate-colored treat, entreating them with a dull-ringing monotone. “Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut. Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut.”

        A few confused ponies blinked worriedly at her disheveled coat, shrugged, and marched towards the crowded fundraiser inside the building. During a space in the arriving guests, Pinkie Pie sauntered up from a crate of Sugarcube Corner supplies a few meters away and slapped another plateful of fresh doughnuts onto the edge of the table.

        “Okie dokie lokie! Thanks for keeping an eye on the table, Mon-Mon. I had to go and pay elemental tribute to Princess Nebula.”

        “You what?”

        “I had to make water. Heeheehee!”

        “Oh.” Harmony blinked boredly. “Okay.”

        “Here's hoping just as many ponies show up as we have doughnuts to give out!”

        “Your enthusiasm is overwhelming, Miss Pie.”

        “So is your sarcasm.” Pinkie Pie stuck a tongue out and let forth a trademark giggle. “That might get a few laughs in a place like Quebuck, but here in Ponyville you gotta be a little less edgy.”

        “I'm not here to practice being a comedian!” Harmony growled. “I'm here to... to...” She sighed. She gazed up at the stars, her amber eyes searching for an invisible flaming passageway in the heavens through which the secrets of all things terminal might somehow land upon her past or future mind. “Maybe I should just map it all out with doughnut sprinkles. Given a quarter of a century, that'll be hard as a rock.”

        “Why bother mapping the stars?” Pinkie Pie chirped. “They don't donate a bit to orphans!”

        “Yeah, well—” Harmony blinked. “Huh.”

        “You okay? Did the sawdust fumes get to ya?”

        “No, that just... That just sounded strangely deep. Of course, that's coming from you.”

        “My ex-boyfriend called me 'deep' once,” Pinkie Pie said, blinking towards the starlit rooftops of Ponyville. “Or maybe it was another 'd'-word. Something that rhymes with 'tense'.”

        “You... You had a boyfriend?”

        “Yupperrooni! For three months, he and I were the talk of the town! We danced, we sang, we went out for dinner, all that warm fuzzy stuff! Our every day was merry and gay! But then one afternoon we had a long talk and I realized that he wanted to be both of those things with somepony else. That reminds me, you ever been to San Fransiscolt?”

        “Uhhhm...”

        “Jumping jelly beans! What was I thinking!” Pinkie Pie leaned down low and pointed a beady-blue-eye point blank at the pile of doughnuts. “Chocolate? Pfft... An 'orphan fundraiser' is soooo powdered sugar!”

        “I don't suppose I've been the most agreeable... volunteer to have lent you a hoof all day, Miss Pie,” Harmony said. “But, for what it's worth, I think it's a very fantastic thing that you're doing here.”

        “Heeheehee. Everypony has a sweet spot, Mon-Mon. The key is to keep drilling until you hit a cavity.”

        “Er... Yeah... I guess...” Harmony sighed and leaned her sawdust-soiled chin once more against a hoof as several more ponies strolled by. “Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut. Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut.” She sighed long and hard, staring into the shadows of the collapsed night. Dozens upon dozens of hauntingly familiar pony faces had graced her vision, but not a single one of them was a snow-white unicorn with a silken purple mane. “Not even attending her own fundraiser, huh? I can't tell if that's either cold or just plain ironic.”

        “Nah, irony isn't anything like Rarity not showing up at an event that she planned tonight.” Pinkie Pie smirked as she opened up a large box of powdered doughnuts and carried it to the table. “Irony is more like a bunch of water balloons falling from the sky and soaking us to the bone! Heeheehee!”

        “Miss Pie, what are you going on about?”

        “It's not my fault!” Pinkie Pie spun to show off her violently twitching tail. “I can't ever explain it! Irony just happens!”

        Harmony blinked crookedly at Pinkie's quivering appendage. “Uh...”

        “Look!” The time traveler's anchor pointed up towards the starry sky. “Here come the water balloons now!” Her smile was brief, for as Pinkie squinted heavenward, the falling object in question increased dramatically in both size and momentum. “Wait, come to think of it, that's not a bunch of water balloons at all. It looks more like a runaway Cloudsdalian chariot.”

        “A runaway what-now?” Harmony tilted her head up and gasped to see a flailing pegasus figure entangled with a falling chariot that was hurtling their way. “Holy—!” In a heroic blur, she shoved Pinkie Pie and two other gasping doughnut patrons away from the front of the Town Hall building—

        A tremendous crash echoed across the heart of Downtown Ponyville. The time traveler's body was reduced to a living bowling pin. Taking the brunt of the collapsing chariot, she flew backwards through two successive tables full of doughnuts and was instantly blanketed in a curtain of powdered sugar. She coughed and sputtered, finding her entire vision blotted out by the fine, white substance.

        “Sweet tap-dancing hydras...” Harmony hissed, fighting to shake the blinding sediment from her face. “What in the hay?!”

        Amidst a rising cacophony of startled voices and scampering hooves, Pinkie Pie could be heard. “Yeesh! That wasn't ironic at all! That was just spontaneously violent! Hehehehe—Okay, so maybe it was ironic!”

        Another voice rose from the Ponyvillean bedlam. It stabbed Harmony's twitching ears with its hauntingly familiar eloquence. “Good heavens! What caught our fall?! I was positively certain we were going to perish! Oh, dearest Anastasia, are you all right?!”

        “Hey Rarity! Nice landing! Say, who's Anastasia?”

        “Never you mind! Is your friend terribly hurt, Pinkie? I swear, this catastrophe was most unexpected!”

        “Hey! You wanna make an entrance, you make one heck of an entrance, girl! Heeheehee! Hey Mon-Mon, stay calm. I'll get a bucket of water to clean you off!”

        “Dang it, Miss Pie—” Harmony seethed.

        “I'll be right back!” Pinkie's hooves could be heard bouncing away from the noisy scene.

        “N-No!” Harmony growled and hissed, clawing at her face with desperate hooves to scrape the blinding powder away. “For crying out loud—Pinkie, come back!”

        It took a frenzied effort, but she managed to peel the stuff away from her eyelids. When her vision returned, she was faintly aware of a dozen startled Ponyvillean citizens clambering about the crash site of a Cloudsdalian chariot a few hooftrots away. There was a white blur of a unicorn being helped out of the overturned vehicle's seat. Before any excited cell in the time traveler's Entropan body could register that image, she spun about in search of her anchor's bright form. She was utterly unsuccessful.

        “Crud crud crud crud crud crud crud!” Harmony hissed. She twirled about and growled at the nearest pony she could see. “You! Miss...?”

        “Erm...” An orange-haired mare fidgeted nervously. “C-Carrot Top...”

        “Whatever. Where did she go?!”

        “Where did who go?” The earth pony blinked at the chariot, then at the mess of spilled doughnuts. “Are you okay, ma'am?”

        “Just tell me where the friggin' pink pony went bouncing off to!”

        The mare winced and pointed a trembling hoof to the Town Hall building. “Over there! I think I saw her go into the fundraiser!”

        “Thank you!” Harmony galloped immediately into the building, her hooves leaving white powdery trails across the wooden floorboards.

        Once inside, the scavenger from the future briefly shuddered through a troll-infested flashback. With another blink, she was partially relieved to see the place brimming with ponies of every pastel shade imaginable. As a record player broadcasted elegant chamber music under several brightly-lit banners displaying “Support Ponyville's Orphans”, the last pony peered her eyes desperately for a bright pink coat. Finally, she saw such a figure and cantered up to it in a flash.

        “Miss Pie! Praise Celestia!” The sawdust and sugar-stained pegasus breathed with relief as she slumped against a wall, panting. “Don't run off like that! I can't even begin to explain why, but it's important that you and I stay within shouting distance of each other if I'm to successfully perform my duties for the Court of Canterlot—” She paused in mid-speech, blinking hard. Instead of three balloons, Pinkie's cutie mark suddenly consisted of a cluster of grapes and a strawberry. Upon an even closer examination, the pony's coat was a deep magenta and not a bright pink. “You're...” Harmony's amber eyes twitched. “...You're not Pinkie Pie.”

        The filly turned around and smiled under bloodshot eyes. “Hmmm... Pie?” She slurred and raised a cocktail glass in the crook of her hoof. “Hic! I'd love some! I sure hope it isn't—Hic!—sawdust and powder flavored, though.”

        “If Pinkie didn't come in here for a bucket of water...” Harmony thought out loud. She gulped. “Then she must have gone the opposite way—”

        There was a green flash. The drunk pony was gone. The music and banners were gone. The entire town hall building was gone. Scootaloo stood numbly on four brown hooves, her body forming an infinitesimal dot upon a bed of cold dry stone. Eyes twitching with a sudden scarlet color, the waif of a scavenger glanced up and saw an overcast sky raining down snow and ash. She flashed a look to her left and saw a collapsed dome of pulverized moonrock. A leather saddlebag and the shattered remains of a lightning gun rested next to her.

        A long dead silence kissed the contours of her short pink mane. She breathlessly lingered there, covered with the brutal apathy of the endless Wastelands.

        “I... I...” She blinked, she seethed, she barked: “I did nothing! I did absolutely friggin' nothing! It... That... She... It... P-Pinkie... Snkkt—Aaaaugh!”

        The last pony jumped up to her hooves and let loose a bestial roar of blood-thick frustration into the twilight yawning above her. Her short pink hairs danced and billowed as she spun circles like an angry little dog. Finally, she slid onto her knees and clasped her skull in shivering brown hooves.

        “Nnngh—What was that?! I mean—What the heck was that?! I didn't get to do a single dang thing! Oh, for the love of Epona!”

        She snarled. She flashed a frown to her side. The powdery mountain of crushed moon dust laughed at her.

        “What are you looking at? Dumb rock!” She dashed over, grunted, and slammed a rear hoof into the great bulk of the thing. A shot of pain rocketed up her spine. “Ow! Ow ow ow!” She limped away, clutching her bruised limb and hissing. “Nnngh... Dumb rock! Dumber pony! Oh goddess, dumber pony!”

        “She's impossible!” Scootaloo spat. Hours after arriving in Ponyville from a day-long trek, the last pony paced mad circles in the center of Spike's celestial gardens. She tossed a random hoof into the air as she stomped and twirled and rambled in bitter frustration. “You can't have a single reasonable conversation with her! And when you come close to doing so, she somehow bleeds the subject into an excuse to whisk you away to one absurdity after another! And her voice—I swear to Epona—I can't figure out half the time if she's singing, chirping, talking, or impersonating a flight of bumblebees! I think all that was once a solid, noodly mass of logic bled out from her skull and coalesced into that infernal plume of pink craziness she calls a mane!”

        Spike listened calmly from where he stood on iron purple haunches, watering a bush full of roses. He raised an eyecrest the filly's way as the pony's rumbling voice scared the surviving insects and amphibians away into hiding.

        “One moment I was pedaling a bicycle for her paper route, and then I was reading amateur poetry to a room full of parasprites reincarnated in the form of art critics, and then I was disarming a sea mine with a wrench...”

        “Did she ever take you hot air ballooning? Now there's a riveting experience.”

        “I almost wish!” Scootaloo snarled. She stomped over a patch of grass bending in the light from Princess Celestia's looking glass. “Spike, I think I finally know why all of the ogres, monkeys, and goblins of the Wasteland call me 'glue stick'. At some point or another, their parents ran into Pinkie Pie, and the only way to rid themselves of the memories of her was to sniff adhesive chemicals! Ugh! She made me drink a bottle of rainbow matter that she was deluded enough to pass off as a beverage! I'm lucky I didn't die from interior corrosion of the spleen!”

        A dull roar filled the lengths of the flora-filled hovel. For a moment there, it sounded as if a fresh new stormfront had unnaturally arrived on the thunderous heels of the previous one. Scootaloo soon realized that it was just the result of a grand purple dragon laughing a few meters away from her.

        Scootaloo frowned, sat on her haunches, and folded her front hooves. “It's not funny!”

        “Oh dear child.” Spike shook his snout, chuckled a few more rumbling times, and put away his watering pitcher. “Do forgive me. There are so many memories, so many wonderful, sugar-coated, whimsical moments that this whole discussion is returning to this old dragon’s mind.” A cough, he sputtered forth a few clouds of smoke and waved them away before smiling softly her way. “Pinkamena Diane Pie was many things. She was a volunteer, a taste-tester, an entrepreneur, a community leader, a craftspony, a baker, a foalsitter, a singer, and a comedian all rolled into one. But if there is one single word that could ever describe her—then and now—it is 'random'. She was the most random soul to have ever blessed Ponyville with her felicitous presence, and—dare I say—she was the most random choice you could have made for an anchor in your newfound crusade to map the night's sky of the past.”

        “But I don't remember her being so... so... kaizo!”

        “Hmmm?”

        “Crazy! Spastic! Unpredictable! Unearthly!”

        “Ahh... 'kaizo'.” Spike nodded, but still blinked confusedly.

        “Did you know that the first thing she made me do was douse the mayor of Ponyville?!” Scootaloo exclaimed incredulously.

        Spike leaned his snout to the side. “Douse her with what, pray tell?”

        “A bucket full of eggs. And then she had the audacity to make me ask the old lady—”

        “'What goes up white but comes down gray and yellow and white?'”

        The last pony squinted suspiciously. “Uhhh... Yeah?”

        The ground momentarily shook as a rumbling laughter once more filled the lengths of the building, followed by a ritualistic pounding of a dragon's clawed hand against the earthen floor. “Ohhh... how exceedingly rich! That is most definitely the oldest trick in the book! She assailed me with that prank once, as a matter of fact.”

        “Spike!” Scootaloo exhaled with a blanching expression. “How could you possibly find that funny?”

        “Hmmm—Heheh...” Spike rubbed the edges of his green eyeslits dry with a scaled finger. “And how could you not, child?”

        “It was downright disrespectful and rude!”

        “It was a brazen act that nopony else would do. The sheer fact that Pinkie Pie alone was absurdly drawn towards such pranks is what made the whole debacle humorous beyond belief. Oh Scootaloo, surely a part of you was laughing inside.”

        “No.” The last pony folded her upper limbs. “Most definitely not! She made a fool of me!” She sneered. “And why is everything in the universe suddenly wanting to see me laugh?! You're almost worse than Pinkie Pie!”

        “Old friend...” Spike calmed down long enough to give her a placid smile. “I know for a fact that you are not adverse to a giggle or two. There is a part of you that enjoys... enjoyment. If Pinkie Pie can't bring it out of you, then something tells me that you're trying too hard.”

        “Trying too hard to do what?” Scootaloo frowned. “Believe it or not, Spike, I'm on a mission! It's a very serious mission, remember? Uhmm... Dead ponies, endless twilight, a barren landscape full of monsters who can't appreciate the magic of friendship... ?”

        “Did she really drop an entire bucket of eggs? Because the last time I remember seeing her prank the mayor, she used a coffee pitcher.”

        “Ugh! Don't you get what I'm trying to say?!” Scootaloo tossed her front hooves and cackled. “Pinkie Pie is nothing but an incorrigible ball of unpredictable craziness! I don't know what makes me feel more stupid: the fact that I didn't remember her being that way or that I actually thought she could be made to stay in one place! When I was a little filly, Spike, Pinkie Pie could always be found in Sugarcube Corner at any time of the day to entertain the likes of me, Apple Bloom, and Sweetie Belle! She never took us on crazy escapades where all sorts of random and potentially life-threatening things would happen!”

        “That's because you were a foal, Scootaloo.” Spike smiled sweetly as he leaned down besides a cluster of fruit trees and gazed more evenly at her. “And as random and quirky as Miss Pie may have been in her antics, she knew when to draw the line.”

        “Oh really...?”

        “She never did anything to hurt Fluttershy's feelings, she never leeched off of her close friends' resources, and she most definitely did not wish ill-will upon her fellow ponies. You simply were not around her long enough and consistently enough in your childhood to get a proper assessment of Miss Pie, Scootaloo.” A humored smirk. “Something tells me that, so far, 'Harmony' has been even less lucky in grasping the big picture when it comes to Pinkie.”

        “I didn't go into the past to get the 'big picture' about Pinkie, Spike,” Scootaloo groaned. “For once, this was supposed to be all about the experiment. This was supposed to be about mapping the night's sky of the past so that I could pursue this 'Onyx Eclipse' crap. I had thought that Pinkie Pie would have been the best choice, since she hung around Ponyville all the time and... and... well, quite frankly, with all the sugar that she guzzled down constantly, I figured there would come a point during the night when such a potential anchor would crash.”

        “That is a most esteemed and logical assumption, my friend, worthy of all your years of learned experience and veteran tenacity.” Spike nodded. “You were wrong.”

        “Nnnngh...” Scootaloo slumped back against the bark of a fruit tree and ran a hoof over her face under the shimmering mirror-light. “Six hundred strips of silver, a busted lightning gun, a shattered moonrock, and a throbbing migraine... all for what?”

        “Do not give up hope, child.” Spike coughed, his violet neck pendant shaking with the motions of his fuming neck. “Our experiment is far from over. There is always plenty of reverse-time to ride into the past. Within the span of a day, I will have more green flame for you.”

        “Uh huh...”

        “Perhaps it would be prudent that you next anchor yourself to a far less rambunctious pony. Perhaps we can send you to Applejack again. Or maybe even... hmmm... Lady Rarity...”

        “'Everypony knows she's a lady',” Scootaloo quoted a peppermint voice.

        “What was that?”

        Scootaloo glanced up, trembling slightly. “Spike, is it true that Rarity ran fundraisers for local orphans in Ponyville?”

        “She ran fundraisers for just about everything, old friend,” the elder dragon said with a proud smile. “She was more than just a fashionista, she was an outstanding member of the Ponyvillean community, a philanthropist, an organizer, everything that embodied the element of generosity. If the end of the world hadn't come, I have no doubt that she would have ascended the ranks of Ponyville's council. Now there was a fantastic lady, tried and true.”

        Scootaloo gently smiled. “Is this Spike the scholar speaking, or Spike the whelpish casanova?”

        “A little of both, I do suppose.” Spike took a deep breath. “Though my memories of her up until the Cataclysm are sketchy. She was not around Ponyville much those last months. It was quite disconcerting.”

        The last pony squinted at Spike sideways. “You don't say...?”

        Spike took a weathered breath, the age returning grayly to his dim purple features before he fought it all off with a gentle smile. “What is it you plan to do next, dear friend?”

        Scootaloo sighed. “I have no earthly clue, Spike. I still can't get the spicy taste of rainbow out of my mouth.”

        “One would imagine that a blessing in this day and age, child.”

        “Yeah, well, one may be an idiot.”

        “Heheheheh—Then might I suggest you retire to your wondrous airship and rest your senses until your emotions are slightly less... kaizo?”

        Scootaloo gave him a double-take, then rolled her scarlet eyes. “Yeah, whatever.” She stood up and marched sluggishly out of the converted skating rink. “By the way, your teleportation aim stinks.”

        “Why? Did I land you inside or outside of Princess Celestia's fireplace?”

        “Kiss my blank flank.”

        “Heheheh.”

        With a loud clattering noise, Scootaloo swung open the large and dilapidated doors to a wooden warehouse in central Ponyville. The parked body of the Harmony was exposed to the snowy air. The craft's rust-red hull filled the entirety of the wooden building within which it had been claustrophobically docked. Wasting no time, the last pony trudged up to the copper aperture, opened it with a lunar word, entered the airship with a shake of ash off her brown wings, and marched up the spiraling staircase until she was once more inside the warm and familiar womb of her cabin.

        Tossing her saddlebag in a slump against her workbench, she all-but-flung herself into the hammock. With an enormous sigh, she dangled there, staring at the whalebone bulkheads of the cabin ceiling above her. The phantom images of pressure washers, scorpions, jet skis, and sprinkled doughnuts clashed through the time traveler's cluttered mind before being gently exorcised away by the settling silence of the walls around her.

        A deep exhale flew through nostrils. As calm as she was, a great emptiness permeated the restful moment. Having docked the aircraft there days ago before the stormfront hit, the last pony had extinguished the boiler towards the rear of the cabin. The giant metal stove was inert, dead, devoid of all the bright flames that normally licked its vibrant insides. Every steam pipe was empty and every twitching gear was still. For the first time in as many years as the last pony could remember, the Harmony was silent as a stone, and it haunted her. It almost felt like her entire life had come to a stand-still.

        And for what? She thought. For Rainbow Dash? For Twilight Sparkle? For Princess Celestia or Princess Luna?

        “Pinkie Pie,” she murmured to the dreadfully still and dim air of the mute cabin. “What makes you tick?”

        It wasn't the question that frightened Scootaloo; it was the fact that she was actually in the presence of the pony whom she was interrogating, or at least her remains. In a collapsing air of stupidity, she realized exactly what... or who she had dragged into the airship with her.

        Turning over in the hammock like an insomniac lover, the last pony gazed with thin scarlets towards the saddlebag, towards where she had slumped it so thoughtlessly against the wooden edge of her workbench, towards where the airtight pouches in the sides of the thing bulged with their somber and brittle contents. She couldn't see an inch of bone from where Pinkie Pie's skeletal remains resided, but that didn't change the fact that they were there, that they hadn't been pulverized, that they had survived the Cataclysm, a meteor of moonrock, and a charging phalanx of lunar golems... all to be found, to be found by her.

        “What makes me tick?”

        That question received just as many answers as the one before it. In a sighing slump, Scootaloo hung her head off the hammock and shut her eyes to the deafeningly quiet air.

        There's a reason why I do not laugh much. There's a reason for why I would much rather be pulled apart at the seams by trolls than to laugh like there's no tomorrow. Perhaps it's because I know that there is no tomorrow—for me. And if there's no tomorrow for me, there's no tomorrow for ponies... period.

        I went to the Harmony to rest, but I couldn't. Spike was onto me. I realized Pinkie Pie was onto me too. If I hadn't known better, I'd have said that the whole dang world had been onto me since the beginning... before and after the Cataclysm. Why they all had to insist that I took things lightly, I couldn't tell. Maybe you knew, maybe you still know, but I could hardly care about your opinion.

        Yes, I do laugh, sometimes. But if I could have my way, I'd take every laugh I've ever let loose from my lips and transmogrify them into explosive runes that could fit inside my rifle on a regular scavenging trip. Laughter is a lot like sobbing; it's mostly a useless thing. Unlike sobbing, though, uselessness is essential to laughter. Uselessness is what gives comedy its absurd fuel and momentum. Sobbing is merely the natural exhaust that a soul gives off on the cruising path towards annihilation, but there's a noble edge to it, as Fluttershy had reminded me. Laughter, however, can just shoot itself in the head, for all I care—such a worthless sensation.

        There. I wrote it down. Laughter is utterly useless. You happy now?

        It really is, though. Laughter would have never built the Harmony. Laughter has never gotten me the silver strips I needed for rebuilding my rainbow signal. When I nearly died at the talons of harpy pirates or from the polearms of Dirigible Dogs, it certainly wasn't laughter that saved my flank. Crying, at least, had been therapeutic, a way to ease my senses into embracing the next day's pain and ugliness with greater strength and vigor. But laughter? There has never been a benefit to indulging it. I think I know why that is. Laughter works when there are other ponies around. That, of course, has never been a luxury that I could enjoy.

        And as for the trips that I'd been making into the past, it was about time that I realized I was just as alone then as I was in the Wasteland. Laughter couldn't and still can't help me in the midst of figuring out—first hoof—what brought about the Cataclysm.

        Does it really satisfy you to know that my loneliness is complete, whether I'm Scootaloo or “Harmony”? I'm beginning to think that I'm more “alone” in the past than I am in the present. After all, every other word that comes out of my Entropan lips is a lie. Everything I do—or pretend to do—is accomplished not for the immediate anchor's needs, but towards the goal of figuring out just what the heck made Celestia and Luna bite the proverbial poison apple.

        At least, that should be the goal. The better part of me believes it now, and I certainly believed it then. Spike was right when he said that I'd been skirting the big issue every time I decided to work on the immediate problem of the past rather than bring my anchor to Princess Celestia's palace doorstep. Every time that I went into the past, I suddenly had to treat any issue I ran into like I always dealt with crap—as the last pony, the only pony, a soul that has had to take things into her own hooves in an attempt to piece them back together like a tiny metal scooter.

        I tossed and turned over this in the hammock of the Harmony for hours. I was too aware of the pitiable pieces of myself that refused to let me sleep, as if I was being poked and prodded by a billion new phantom limbs that I had grown during each trip back and forth across reverse-time. It didn't matter how many tunnels of green flame I'd been blown down. All I was doing was running away from the same dang thing. I wished that I knew what that thing was. If you had known what it was, I would have wanted you to tell me, though even now I know you wouldn't have.

        It was a crucial time in my time travels, and this airship pony suddenly couldn't plot her course straight. Before the dragon tooth pulled me to Pinkie Pie, I was just starting to shift gears, I was telling myself that I had to chase after the “Onyx Eclipse” more than anything else in my chronological ventures. And yet I floundered. I tripped over my own hooves because I realized that I was still being a coward, that I was just running more and more from something that was so much bigger than myself that even an Entropan body couldn't brace me against it.

        It was so much easier to work on the small things, on the tiny problems that lay before me, on the simple problems that I knew I was capable of fixing, of putting back together, of hammering out the flaws and quirks of. I knew I was good at such things, but I realized I could be good at so much more... I should have been good at so much more. I needed to become something greater than myself, something even greater than the legacy of all things Equestrian that had witlessly plopped me down onto the bosom of this dead world.

        I needed to be able to figure out what caused the Cataclysm. And for the sake of that infinitely weighted goal, Pinkie Pie could have waited. Rainbow Dash could have waited, for that matter. Twilight Sparkle and Rarity and Apple Bloom and Sweetie Bell and Tom and Dick and Harry could all have taken a back seat to figuring out what the Onyx Eclipse was, to figuring out what the stars had to say about the only home I ever had, about how it was stripped from me by claws of everlasting flame, about why I was spared while everything else had its breath and magic and life stripped from it.

        Pinkie Pie could have waited. Dang it all, Pinkie Pie should have waited. I needed to go back in time to stargaze, not to play guardian angels to ponies, and sure as heck not to do both at the same time. I knew that. I could feel that in my blood. My brain throbbed and glistened with the mesmerizing and undeniable truth of that.

        And yet, I couldn't stop thinking about the hollow bowels beneath the once-solid chunk of Ponymonium. I couldn't stop thinking about the dark-lit patch of richly preserved Equestrian countryside, and of the wagon full of foalish skeletons, and of three more bodies, one of which was Pinkie Pie, a body that had followed me all the way to the Harmony because I had dragged it there and hardly even noticed that I did.

        And I started to realize that I was more than just an unfortunate soul blessed—or cursed—with the task of solving the one Cataclysmic Mystery of the Ages. I was there, while all of my dead friends were not. All of my life I had been an appendix to not just Equestria, but to an entire thread of beautiful and magical lives that were all cut short by a holocaustal happenstance that abruptly and unfairly ended them... while sparing me. No other pony in the grand history of existence could do what I was then doing, what I'm still doing. Because of me, the Apple Family had survived an army of trolls. Because of me, Ditzy Doo's child lived to see as many days as a healthy young Capricorn could.

        And because of me, Pinkie Pie's remains had survived the crushing collapse of a gigantic dome of moonrock filled to the brim with the fossils of the Lunar Republic. A piece of her was still intact, and it was all because of me. Could it have been possible—with the unwavering immutability of time—that she and the foals were exactly where they were because of me as well? Applejack kept her farm, Fluttershy released her tears, and Ditzy Doo regained her child all because of what I had done. What did I do for Pinkie Pie? What was I about to do for her?

        Could you tell me? Could you stop me? Could you have told me what was I about to do?

        “Have you decided what you wish to do, old friend?” Spike asked gently from across the lengths of the cavernous laboratory.

        Scootaloo somberly nodded. “I have.”

        “Very well.” He replied and marched on iron haunches towards the marble cabinets flanking the far side of the place. “Then I'll be procuring Applejack's ashes again...”

        “No, Spike.” The last pony slumped her saddlebag up onto the nearest lab table and untied it. She produced a long pale legbone and placed it against the cold surface. “All the ingredients we need are right here.”

        The purple dragon froze. His green eyeslits narrowed as he slowly and thoughtfully turned to face her in a shuffling of aged limbs. “Scootaloo, surely you must be—”

        “What? Joking?” She leaned her head to the side with a slightly bitter smirk. “Both you and I know that's beyond me, Spike.”

        “I too am serious this time, old friend.” He wandered over and gently placed a solemn finger against the piece of Pinkie Pie's remains. “I know how terribly much this latest campaign into the past means to you. If your most recent debacle has proven anything to the both of us, being sent once more back to her will be the least likely way to help you accomplish your goal of mapping the night's sky.”

        “The only concern I want to hear from you, Spike, is the risk of losing cohesion to my anchor,” Scootaloo said with a hoof pointed decidedly at the pale bone. “And, barring any run-ins with magically resonating unicorn horns, I know you have enough juice in your breath to anchor me one more time without having to switch to another pony. So, make with the burning, and send me back to Pinkie Pie like you did with Applejack. You had faith in me then, Spike. I'd hate to see you losing it now.”

        “It's not a matter of faith, Scootaloo. I'd argue that it's a matter of understanding,” he said softly. He craned his snout down towards her, squinting. “Just what is it that you're attempting to accomplish, child?”

        “I don't know, Spike,” she said in a bursting exhale. After a frustrated shrug of her shoulders, she spoke forth, “Real science is performed under a null hypothesis, right? Who knows what I'm going to find? Who knows if I will find anything? You've once described me as tenacious and resourceful. I've put that to the test before; it's time I did that again.”

        “Is this an endeavor you wish to fulfill for yourself or for the sake of the experiment?”

        “Have you ever paused to wonder that maybe it's for the sake of Pinkie Pie?” Scootaloo leaned forward with an earnest twinkle in her sad scarlets. “What would have happened with Fluttershy or Applejack if I hadn't gone back to them too?”

        “Scootaloo, the immutable nature of time had sealed their fates long before you or I ever contemplated sending you back physically to provide the stitches.”

        “Spike...”

        “Hear me out,” he said. “Miss Pie was the epitome of joy. There was nothing she encountered in life that she didn't treat with utmost felicitation and good humor and love. Twilight Sparkle told me of how she would laugh in the face of utter horror itself and come out unscathed. The Cataclysm, however terrible, would have rendered her no less a bravely ecstatic individual in death as she was in life. Of this, I am most assuredly convinced.”

        “No offense, Spike, but you don't know that!” Scootaloo practically hissed. “What's more, you're never going to be able to know that! You can't possibly know that! But I can!” She planted her hooves against Spike's scaled wrist as the two of them briefly shared contact with the white bone. “For the first time since we started this whole pageantry of time travel, I'm starting to see it as a gift. It may not be a gift that I'll enjoy unwrapping, but somepony's got to be reaping the benefit, even if not in the years that I have to return to, or to live beyond for that matter. Spike, when I shuffled through the dragon teeth, Pinkie Pie's spirit spoke to me. You know as well as I do that I cannot explain how it all happens; the enchantment works with me and not you. But she spoke to me, Spike, and I simply cannot abandon the girl... not after all the lengths I've taken to submerge myself in her. Imagine if I had turned my back on Applejack in the middle of defending her home against the trolls! Or what if I had abandoned Fluttershy and Ditzy when Dinky was about to die?!”

        “Those are very noble observations, Scootaloo. But do not pretend to tell me that you have observed Pinkie Pie experiencing a crisis of her own. The only certifiable doom that has claimed her health is the same agony that has befalled all of our friends. You have the power within you to bring retribution to all ponies by pursuing a solution to the inescapable Cataclysm, and Pinkie Pie will surely be among those whom you've brought closure to.”

        “I have it within my power to be an observer, nothing else, Spike.” Scootaloo slowly shook her head. “That goes for our friends as much as for all of ponydom. Just because I haven't seen anything wrong in Pinkie Pie's last days doesn't mean there was nothing. Her body ended up under the giant chunk of moonrock in the middle of the countryside besides a wagon full of brittle-boned foals. Something was going on; I just haven't discovered it yet. I knew nothing of the 'Onyx Eclipse' before my initial trips to the past, but like a good observer I stuck to my guns, and lo and behold, something came to me.”

        “You must know by now how I truly feel about this 'Onyx Eclipse' theory of yours...”

        “About the same way you feel about what I'm about to do now,” Scootaloo said with a genuine but brief smile. “Spike, I know you question why I can't laugh at any of the crazy things Pinkie Pie did the last time I visited her. That's because, in all of my years, I've dealt with the random horrors of the world at face value. There is nothing to laugh at in the Wasteland; there is only death. For once in my life, I have a thing to do—I have two things to do—and it's all a matter of faith. It was an act of faith that inspired you to pursue friggin' time travel when all of your experiments with Twilight failed beforehand, wasn't it? Don't tell me that all of your lonely years of banging your head against rocks in the hollow mountains of Canterlot blossomed on science alone, you big purple lug.”

        Spike sighed and rubbed his scaled brow with a pair of claws. “I foresee that there is no conceivable way to talk you out of making this stubbornly headstrong sojourn.”

        “Don't worry, Spike,” Scootaloo said with a wink. “I'll visit your precious 'Lady Rarity' eventually.”

        “That's not the heart of the issue, Scootaloo.” He glanced down at her tiredly. “You do realize that if you come back just as soon as you did last time, it will be a solid week before I can conjure adequate enough flame for another jump.”

        “And I promise—one way or another—the pink chapter of our lives will then be officially concluded.”

        “I'm quite sure, three hundred years ago, I could very easily have crafted a lewd joke as a retort to that.”

        “Hey, it's me, remember?”

        “Oh, most assuredly,” Spike said with a mock grin as he grasped the legbone and began scraping the calcium bits into a glass jar. “Then let us proceed with bulleting you back to pony comedy central, shall we?”

        “I would have thought that three centuries spent alone would have improved one's sarcasm. Thanks for proving me wrong, Spike.”

        “At least I can prove you wrong about one thing, child. With all due respect, I truly wish you the best with this next trip. You have my eternal support, even if you do not have my complete and clear understanding.”

        “I bet you talk to your flower bushes when I'm gone.”

        “You might be right, old friend.”

        “Then I've got just the thing to help you pass the time—or reverse time, so to speak.” Scootaloo rummaged through her saddlebag and produced a stack of ten random books as old as history and twice as dusty. “There ya go. Great dragon reading material. Just do me a favor and don't sneeze on them. I'd hate for them to end up possibly inside/outside Princess Celestia's fireplace. It's a heck of a long flight to Canterlot's ruins through the gray clouds of the Wasteland.”

        Spike finished filling the glass jar before grasping one of the books and raising it up to his squinting eyeslits. His iron lips parted slightly. “Hmmm... The Lunar Chronicles of Her Majesty's Glorious Kingdom.” He blinked and picked up another. “The Natural Principles of Eponal Effluence.” Then another. “A Study of the Holy Remains of Consus.” His jaw fell agape as he suddenly understood the gravity of the tomes resting before him. “Good heavens! These... These are lost relics! These are the time-forgotten masterpieces of the Lunar Republic! No living soul has laid eyes on these for more centuries than even I can count!” He lowered his snout towards her in shock. “Wherever did you get these, old friend?”

        Scootaloo stared back firmly. “I am a scavenger, Spike. I go deep into places—full of doubt—and I find things. Now I'm about to go into the past, into Pinkie Pie's life, and I am going to find something. I don't know what yet, but I can only hope. All I ask is for your help, as you are willing to give it.”

        Spike stared at her. After a breathless silence, he inhaled slowly and bore a soft smile. “Always willing, old friend.” A brief, hacking cough, and he then carried his heavy self towards a clear patch of stone in front of his bed of rubies. “And always able.”

        “Thank you, Spike.”

        “Don't thank me until you're back,” he uttered while stifling a distant snicker. He drew alchemic circles into the stone floor with a single finger of loose bone dust. “Not to mention until after your headache clears.” He smirked and tipped the jar over Scootaloo's short pink mane—

        “No.” She said suddenly, her hoof raised. “Let me, please.”

        The dragon nodded solemnly and handed the jar to the last pony.

        Scootaloo grasped onto it and paused briefly, seeing her brown face reflected against the curved glass containing the ashes, containing the pieces of everything she had ever come close to loving in a world that had burned to embers beneath her, that had orphaned her, that had brought her here to this moment, a cold moment, but a real moment. She could make a million warm dives into the bubbling memories of the past, but she would always have this moment, this anchor, herself.

        She wasn't afraid to take the plunge anymore.

        With a priest-like grace, she anointed herself with Pinkie's ashes, placed the jar down onto a table, and marched into the center of the alchemic circles.

        “No laughing matter, eh Spike?”

        “Eh.” Spike blew green flame onto her.

        Scootaloo took a deep breath, and when Harmony exhaled it came out in a vaporous cloud of high altitude mist. Her amber eyes flickered open to a gray sky hovering over a gray world with gray trees. All was pale desolation as far as the bitter horizon could project. “Uhm... Is this the past?”

        “There you are!” A bright voice chirped beside her with the scent of peppermint. “Where have you been?”

        “H-Huh?” The last pony blinked. A bright white paper airplane flew across her vision and sailed off into the obscurity of Harmony's peripheral. She glanced to her left.

        “Here, hold this!” Pinkie Pie shoved a basket into the time traveler's grasp.

        “Nngh!” The last pony's breath left her lungs sharply. She winced. “Is this another prank—?” Her voice was cut off as she glanced down and saw a rattling assortment of wrapped presents, blanketed goods, and foodstuffs filling the package in her hooves. “Huh.”

        “Just in time, Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie beamed and marched past her so that she stood in front of the door to a farmhouse that the time traveller suddenly realized was standing in front of them. “You won't believe how much I sweated carrying all of those little goodies on my flank the whole way here without you!”

        “Uhhh...” Harmony glanced every which way, squinting. A barren farmland stretched around her, though to label it as “farmland” was just about as absurd as the bubbly little soul beside the copper pegasus. There were no crops; there were no plants. There were only rocks. A crumbling fence lethargically surrounded the stone-hard plot of land, and a rickety wooden windmill spun lazily beyond the frame of the two-story house and the dilapidated silo standing next to it. “Where... uhm... Where are we?” A blink. “And what did you just call me?”

        “Heeheehee. 'Har-Har'!”

        “I thought I was 'Mon-Mon'.”

        “That was also cute. Then you told me how your real name was 'Harmony', and I thought to myself that such a name is way too long to try saying in between tasty mouthfuls of butter popcorn, so I decided to call you 'Har-Har'! Heehee! Get it? Because you laugh so much!”

        “But... I-I hardly ever laugh—”

        “That's what makes it so funnnnnnny! Hehehe—Ahem. I want you to meet someponies.”

        “Meet someponies? Miss Pie, I can't even tell where we are! Besides, you and I hardly even know each other—”

        “Birds of a feather!” Pinkie Pie knocked on the door loudly with the base of her skull. “And by 'birds', I mean 'ponies'. And by 'feather', I mean 'hoof'. And by 'of a', I really mean 'cheese crackers' because CELESTIA I am hungry enough to eat a house of parrots homeless!”

        Just then, the door to the farmhouse opened creakily. From a deep dark interior, a ghostly gray filly with an even ghostlier gray mane emerged. She bore silk-straight hair and a cutie mark in the image of a granite medical cross encrusted with vines. After a ritualistic blink of deep violet eyes, she broke the ice of the deeply morose landscape with a strange thing... a smile.

        “Lemme guess...” The voice was a droning tone, coldly pitched but warmly reinforced. It sounded like somepony was rubbing a tight balloon against an infant foal's fuzzy mane. If the filly's lips weren't curved, Harmony would have guessed the pony was attempting to sound sarcastic. “You're selling basketcases? I'm sorry, but the last one we bought moved to Ponyville years ago. We're not interested.”

        “Wakka-Wakka-Wakka! How-do-you-do, Inkie-Poo?!” The pink pony leaned in, grinning a crescent moon. “I love what you've done with your mane!”

        “But I haven't done anything with my mane.”

        “That's why I love it! Hee hee hee!”

        The gray-haired, young filly chuckled breathily. She opened the front door to the farmhouse all the way and trotted out with two forelimbs ensnaring Pinkie's upper body with a dear hug. “It's great to see you, Sis.”

        “If you hug me any closer, you'll find it's great to smell me too!”

        “Mmmmm...Vanilla and sherbert; you're still using Mrs. Cake's shampoo?”

        “Actually I just roll around in cupcake mix every morning before I get up for work.”

        “Ahhhh sis.” The filly trotted back and stood in the doorway, smiling calmly. “How I've missed having you around. I can never tell when you're joking or just being you.”

        “There's a difference?” Pinkie blinked confusedly.

        “Ahem.” Harmony cleared her throat. “I... erhm... I hate to interrupt, but—”

        “Oh, hello there.” The filly's violet eyes swiveled to meet the time traveler. “You're Pinkie's latest victim from Ponyville, I'm guessing.”

        “Yeah. Can anypony help me?”

        “Absolutely!” A candy-colored face re-filled the last pony's sight. Pinkie swung a hoof around the gray filly's neck and nuzzled her, cheek-to-cheek, while excitedly chirping, “This is Inkie, my one and only sis! Well, she's not my one and only sis, but she's my one and only sis named 'Inkie'.”

        The aptly named earth pony reached out a hoof with a smirk. “'Inkessa Ruth Pie' if you want to get in touch with the formalities of these parts.”

        “'Miss Jockeyson' if you're nasty!” Pinkie added with a gunshot of high-pitched giggles.

        The last pony shook Inkie's hoof. “Yeah, uh, about 'these parts',” Harmony inquired with a not-so-subtle wag of her eyebrows. But before she could so much as speak further—

        “Sis, this is 'Har-Har'!”

        “'Har-Har'?”

        “Not to be confused with the Mare Wars character.” Pinkie Pie winked. “Hey, what's that delightful smell coming from the kitchen?”

        “You can smell it from this distance? I could have sworn years spent in Ponyville would have spoiled your nose.”

        “Don't be silly! I'm always happy to come back to the stale, soot-infested, overcast wasteland of rock that is our delightful place of birth! Where else would the aroma of freshly baked banana bread stand out so well?”

        “Right you are.” Inkie motioned with her straight gray mane into the dark cave that was the family house. “It's a fresh delivery from Marble Cake's bakery. Daddy brought it home just now, before you showed up.”

        “Squeeee!” Pinkie Pie's dimples showed as she shivered from mane to tail with joy. “What splenderifically awesomesaucical timing! Har-Har, we gotta get inside and chow down before our stomachs rebel and stick our heads on pikes!”

        “Now wait just a minute—!” Harmony began to snarl.

        “Hey!” Pinkie Pie barked and swiveled on her front hooves. “Banana bread! Get inside!” She quite viciously bucked the pegasus straight into the farmhouse like a copper beach ball.

        “Dah!” Harmony shouted, more in surprise at the sheer force of Pinkie's sudden punt rather than the horror of it. Her shrieking voice was curtailed by a thunderous crash of her Entropan limbs with a wooden dining table lying inside the dark-lit building. She stood up in a pile of tumbled gift baskets, wincing, and when she opened her eyes...

        A pair of platinum optics were staring at her, past her, like icy gems fused inside the skull of a bored-looking filly, younger than the other two trotting in after the pinballed pegasus. Harmony stood up, observing a petite pony with a pale coat that was even grayer than Inkie's. Her mane hair was a glacier of smooth white threads. She sat on a bench before the table with a pair of candles lighting a half-finished drawing of dully colored trees and mountains.

        The two candles atop the table were mimicked by a grand plethora of dozens upon dozens of identically burning wicks situated all throughout the farmhouse. Harmony glanced around the place to witness a total count of fifty-two dimly-lit candles casting a deep amber haze of dull, sickly pale light across the interior of the two-story building. She briefly pondered over the reason for this flickering array, until she realized that every panel and every shutter and every blind to the windows of that place was shut, opaquely clouding out any and all slivers of sunlight that ever dared to enter the household from the gray expanse that surrounded the already grimly-shadowed farm.

        “Creepy senses tingling...” The scavenger from the future briefly murmured to herself with a gulp.

        “Winky, Winky: I see Blinkie!” The pink earth pony scuffled up to the stone-still filly seated at the table. “Ooooh! What are you drawing this time?” She gleamed as she glanced over the gray pony's shoulder and looked at the obvious landscape art. “A pride of lions! Cool!” A glinting grin, and she added, “Your sis got you a gift from Bon-Bon's novelty shop in Ponyville!” She shuffled past Harmony, stuck her face nose-deep into a basket of miscellaneous things, and came out with her teeth clenched over a paper box which she spat with such expert force onto the top of the table that it opened to reveal four dozen multicolored wax pens. “Ptoooie! There ya go, Blinx! New crayons! Forty-eight completely different colors, arranged in order of lesser to greater number of letters in their names, just the way you like it!”

        The gray-gray filly stared deadpan at the box of crayons. With the speed of a drugged turtle, she reached an icy hoof and gently slid the box of crayons closer to her face in the candlelight. Her expression was stone-frozen, but Harmony could have sworn she spotted her platinum irises dilating in an obscure telegraph of excitement.

        “And for you, sis!” Pinkie Pie spun towards Inkie, slapped her hoof down over the edge of a basket, and launched a wrapped package the older filly’s way. “Something else to fill that noggin' of yours besides that gravel-smelling hair conditioner you're so in love with.”

        Inkie effortlessly snatched the present in mid-air and squinted slyly across the candlelight. “If this is another rubber chicken, I swear, you're sleeping in the silo all week.”

        “But I thought you liked the rubber chicken!”

        Inkie spoke over the tearing noises as she opened her present. “Pinkamena, it exploded in my face.”

        “So I forgot what the high altitude of this place can do! Be glad I didn't get you a rubber hippopotamus.”

        “Yeah, right.” Inkie finished tearing the last of the gift wrapping off. She blinked, then smiled at what turned out to be a hard-back book in her grasp. “Awwwww. A History of Canterlotlian Nurses. I've checked this out from the library Elektra knows how many times. Sis, how did you know I was totally into this?”

        Pinkie Pie's blue eyes spun innocently in their sockets. “I know you're gonna work your way out of Stonehaven at some point or another! What better place to look up to than Canterlot General Hospital? You're on your way to better things, filly!”

        “Hmmm... This must be a new edition of the print.” Inkie hoofed to the first dozen pages and scanned a page. She squinted suspiciously Pinkie's way. “'Forward by Canner West'?”

        Pinkie smiled sheepishly. “So maybe it was in the bargain section. I had to save up a bunch of bits to get past customs on the way here!” She glanced at Harmony. “You ever been subjected to a full-bridle search?”

        Harmony opened her copper lips to speak—

        “And don't think I forgot about you!” She stuck her nose into the baskets once more.

        “What?” The time traveler made a face. “I get a gift too?”

        “You can try to take Gummy home, but I seriously doubt he's easy to unwrap, unless you make a wallet out of him.”

        “Gummy?” Harmony blinked. “What's a 'Gummy'?” Pinkie Pie pulled her snout out of the baskets and flung a green shadow at the pegasus. The last pony suddenly felt something dull and wet clamping over the length of her black tail. “Huh?” She glanced back and gasped to see a stunted abomination of a wall-eyed reptile hanging off her with its jaws firmly fitted over her flicking hairs. “Accck! What-What-What-What-What-What?!” She spun stupid, panicked circles like an infant puppy chasing its tail before ultimately slamming into a wooden support beam. Harmony and Gummy fell flat on the floorboards, littered with an avalanche of random family portraits and framed landscape art.

        Inkie winced, sighed, and flung bored eyes Pinkie's way. “Pinkamena...”

        “What? It's not my fault ponies these days can't catch an alligator to save their lives!” Pinkie chortled, then bouncily cantered towards the kitchen. “Why don't you get to know each other? Talk to her! I'm gonna go talk to banana bread! La la la la laaaa!” She sing-songed her way from the dark dining room into the equally dark chamber beyond it.

        Harmony winced, tossing framed pictures off her as she stumbled to her hooves and flicked, flicked, flicked her tail in a vain attempt to fling the drooling reptile off her. “Nnngh! Make like a baboon bartender and get bent, you pimple-eyed stump of a suitcase!”

        “Here, allow me.” Inkie calmly trotted over. She held Harmony still with an outstretched hoof, leaned over, and nuzzled a soft spot underneath the tiny reptile's left forelimb.

        Gummy blinked, blinked again, then let loose a snort through its green nostrils that could best be described as a ticklish “chuckle”. The thing's gaping maw opened with a quack-like chirp. Inkie was quick to catch its fall in the small of her snout. In absurdly practiced skill, Pinkie's sister tossed the weight of the alligator across the room so that it landed smack-dab in the cushioned center of a patchwork pet bed monogrammed with the letter “G”. The blinking alligator spun three circles like a lapdog and settled down for a much-belated snooze.

        “Every time I tell myself that I've seen everything,” Harmony breathily exclaimed, dusting herself off, “The threads of fate fly up my nose like celestial gauze and I'm choking on my own words once again.”

        “Hmmm... poetic.” Inkie placed her book on the edge of the table besides the younger, quieter member of the Pie family. She cast a deadpan look the pegasus' way. “So, what's your real name?”

        “Huh?”

        Again, the slightest hint of curved lips. “Both you and I know that 'Har-Har' is far from the title you were born with, even though I'm inclined to doubt that you're still the same pony you were before the day you fatefully ran into my sister.” Inkessa raised an eyebrow for emphasis.

        That broke the ice well enough. In a relaxed exhale, Harmony spoke firmly for the first time since landing there on green fumes. “Harmony. My name is Harmony. All things considered—and maybe even ignored—it's a pleasure to meet you, Inkessa.”

        “Please, just call me 'Inkie',” the aptly named filly said, gesturing with a gray hoof. “'Inkessa' is reserved for when I'm being talked to by my parents or—ugghh—Bishop Breathstar.”

        “Bishop Who?”

        “And that highly talkative soul at the table over there is my and Pinkie's younger sister,” Inkie said while pointing at the grayer pony seated mutely at the table. “Blinkie—Or Blinkaphine Esther Pie, if you're a tax collector.”

        “I'm not a tax collector.”

        “But you do work for Her Majesty's Court, yes?” Inkie rubbed her chin while trotting around Harmony's flank, observing her emblazoned cutie mark. “Sis has always told me about her crazy adventures with the Elements of Harmony and foiling Nightmare Moon's evil return. For the longest time, everypony in the family thought she was just pulling our legs, and then one day a year ago we got a Canterlotlian Certificate of Heroism in the mail. Heh... who'd ’a thunk it? I still have a hard time believing that Pinkie could save a bakery full of muffins, much less the fate of Equestria.”

        “Well, if you ask me, there's room for believing in something when it comes to Miss Pie,” Harmony spoke, nervously eyeing the candlelit lengths of the creepily dark farmhouse. “Considering someone as sane as you shares her bloodline.”

        “I wouldn't be too harsh on my sis. She's not crazy. She's just...” Inkie paused to tongue the inner walls of her mouth before finishing with, “...a phantom belly button.”

        The last pony went cross-eyed. She shook her head and blinked. “She's what?”

        “She's an outtie while everypony else in Equestria is an innie. Does that make sense?”

        “I... guess. Does that make you proud of her?”

        “It makes me envy her for the lack of lint.”

        “Yeah... Uhm...” Harmony cleared her throat, eyed the sea of lit candles, glanced at the catatonic Blinkie, looked at the sleeping and purring alligator, and glanced back towards the kitchen. “...so what was this about banana bread?”

        “Banana nut bread!” Pinkie Pie galloped back into the room, balancing a tray of various sugary goodies atop her fluffy mane. “Inkie, how come you never send any of these fabulous munchables my way anymore?”

        “Customs, remember?”

        “Hey, if I could get Gummy past them guys, you should be able to send anything!” Pinkie planted the tray on the tabletop opposite to Blinkie and swallowed an entire slice of delicious banana bread in one bite. “Mmmmmm! Hey, Har-Har, want a bite? Come to think of it, you never did tell me if you're allergic to nuts or not.”

        “I don't recall telling you anything at all, Miss Pie.” Harmony briefly frowned. “As a matter of fact—”

        It was suddenly the blood sibling's turn to interrupt her sister's “companion”. “Pinkie, since when were you affiliated with Canterlot? First you get that book for me, and then I find out you have a Clerk in Her Majesty's service tailing you?”

        “You work for Princess Celestia?!” Pinkie gulped another bite of banana bread while gasping at the last pony.

        “I—Nnngh!” Harmony hissed. “Miss Pie, haven't we been through this?” She spun her flank about and pointed a copper hoof viciously at the infinity symbol encircled with celestial bands. “Haven't you ever wondered what this means?”

        Pinkie Pie blinked. “'Don't touch hourglasses hot out of the oven'?”

        “It means—Wait, what?”

        “Lemme guess.” Inkie smiled and tossed her straight gray hair before remarking, “You're here on behalf of Pinkie's friend—the literary unicorn who's always writing to the princess—to observe my sis as she spends a week's vacation at her hometown, so you can find out how she's come to be the lead caterer and party arranger of Ponyville.”

        The time traveler raised a hoof and was about to speak. She paused, though, and blinked as she processed the last slew of words to come from the gray filly. With a shrug, she muttered, “You know what, that works for me. I'll go with that.”

        “Mmmf—Bud I thoud...” Pinkie managed through scarfing bread-bites. “I thoud youff said thadd youff were here to dooff Stargazingfff!”

        “I said it works for me.” Harmony slumped to her copper haunches with a sigh. “Really, though, what I wouldn't give for somepony—anypony—to just tell me where I am.”

        “Open your eyes, silly filly!” Pinkie Pie winked. “You're on the Pie Family Rock Farm!”

        Harmony blinked at the candle-lit lengths of the rustic farmhouse, at a loss to find any single open window that might grant her a snapshot to confirm Pinkie's absurd declaration. “A rock farm?”

        “Yupperooni! Though, it's not to be confused with a Stone Farm. You only find those in Mexicolt.”

        “And just what—pray tell—do you make with the rock harvest?”

        Pinkie Pie paused in mid bite, yellow crumbs dotting her pink chin. “Uhhh...” She smiled brightly. “Bigger rocks?”

        “We happen to be a major contributor to the local market in town,” Inkie said as she paced across the room, cleaning up after Pinkie Pie's things and stacking the baskets up onto an endtable in the far corner of the dim place. “The Pie family has been managing these stone fields for some time. A lot more profit comes out of it than you'd think.”

        “Yeah! And besides, it all becomes useful around here all the same!” Pinkie grinned, pranced out from behind the table and carried a tray of sweets over to Harmony. “Maybe you have to look closely to notice it, but we put rocks into everything! Doorstops, picture frames, ceiling beams, coffee coasters, pet dishes, fountain bases, statuary, umbrella stands, candleholders—you name it! There's absolutely nothing on this farm that isn't—in some way or another—put together with harvested rocks!” A winking grin, and she raised a frosted dessert item in the candlelight. “Cupcake?”

        Harmony blinked at the treat, then at her. She glared with icily bored eyes. “No, Miss Pie. I most assuredly do not want any of your cupcakes.”

        “Your loss!” Pinkie tossed the treat up towards the ceiling and gobbled it down in one bite. “Mmmm!” She hummed as the luscious dessert crunched in her mouth. “Mmmmfff—hehehe! The gravely bits are good for brightening a filly's teeth!”

        “Uh huh...” Harmony nervously eyed Pinkie as she marched back into the dark hovel of the kitchen. The last pony cast a glance over her copper shoulder at Inkie. “Would you happen to know exactly why your sister is back home for a week?”

        “You mean you don't know?”

        “I... uh...” The time traveler once again found herself having to roll her synapses through the heart-stopping moment like a series of tight copper clockgears. “The Court is asking me to... uhhh... to perform my observational duties organically. Her Majesty ordered me to ask around once I was in the midst of Miss Pie's like kin.” She winced briefly as a loud crunching sound came from the kitchen.

        “Oh hey, good news! I found the new garbage disposal you wrote about, sis! You're right, it does look like a dish washer! Heeheehee—Oh wait... Ooops.”

        Harmony smiled painfully. “Perhaps... uhm... you can see why Princess Celestia didn't give me a thorough briefing on her unicorn apprentice's friend...”

        “Hmmm. Perhaps.” Inkie then called over Harmony's shoulder. “It's alright, Pinkie! I'll take care of the mess!”

        “What mess? Nothing that a little rubber cement can't fix!”

        “Do they even allow her around rubber cement?” Harmony asked.

        “Why do you think she got sent to Ponyville?”

        Harmony blinked. “Never mind. I don't think Her Majesty needs me to observe that nugget of joy.”

        “Speaking of nuggets...” Pinkie Pie frolicked back in and stood beside her sketching little sister. “We've got a lot of stuff to do around the quarry this week! Is Marble Cake ready with all of the handouts?”

        “Waiting on you, Sis. As a matter of fact, so was I. I figured I'd trot into town with you.”

        “Great! Hey Har-Har, you game?”

        “I... I'm sorry, my brain broke on 'stuff to do around the quarry'. What's everypony talking about?”

        “Oooh! I'm such a dense dolt-a-mare!” Pinkie suddenly seethed and smacked a pair of pink hooves into her candy-colored skull. “I almost forgot!” She glanced guiltily Inkie's way. “Where's Mommy? I'd better say 'hey' before anything else.”

        “She's upstairs, Sis,” Inkie said, smiling softly. “She's usually awake this early in the morning. Why don't you go see her?”

        “Yes, why don't I?” Pinkie Pie smiled. She reached into one of the gift baskets stacked atop the endtable in the corner and produced a sheet of paper. “I've got a bunch of stuff to give her, but I'm sure that can all wait until later.” She started folding the paper in multiple places. “From what you wrote last time, Inkie, it sounds like she can only receive excitement in teensy-weensy doses.”

        “Hey, there's the sister I'm proud of.” Inkie said in a firm smirk. “You really have matured since the time you met that apprentice to Princess Celestia.”

        “Heeheehee! You think?!” Pinkie Pie finished constructing a paper airplane and flung it across the lengths of the room. “Weeee! Zooooom! Zooooom!”

        Inkie sighed exasperatingly and briefly ducked the soaring aircraft as she sauntered across the house towards a double bedroom down the hall. “While you go visit Momma, I'm going to dress up for Stonehaven.”

        “You do that!” Pinkie Pie galloped up a flight of wooden steps. The nearby candles bounced from the vibrations of her felicitous ascent. “Har-Har, be a good filly and make sure the rock spiders don't suck the blood out of Blinkie's veins!”

        “Rock spiders?!” The scavenger from the future gasped and reached back for a phantom runescape rifle. “Where?!”

        “Hahahaha—'Rock spiders'! What are you, a toddler? La la la la laaa...”

        Harmony sighed, her body slumping as she gazed at the descending arc of the paper airplane that was still miraculously airborne. “If only all things had the liberty of flying away from this anchor. Seriously, where in Epona's name am I?” Her gaze followed the white glider as it soared out through the bright gray rectangle that was the front door to the farmhouse. There was a grim shadow suddenly standing in the immediate view of the frame, with glaring yellow eyes that burned the pegasus to her Entropan core.

        “Whoahhhhhh—Nnghhhh-Hiiii there...” Harmony not-so-tactfully recovered from a recoiling expression. Gulping a nervous lump down her throat, she politely stood straight and tall in front of an aged stallion that was now positioned before her. “I... Er... Y-You might be Mister Pie, I presume?”

        The elder pony squinted down at her lethargically, like she was one of the many banana bread crumbs littered pointlessly on the gnarled wooden floorboards of the dimly lit hovel. He had a sandy-yellow coat to match the emotionlessness of his eyes. The stallion wore a dark gray fedora over a wispy pair of white sideburns. This article was complimented by the civility of a white collar and gray necktie that hung off him like a noose. Add to that a pick-axe for a cutie mark, and every angle of this tall and granite pony was sharp and rigid like the many rocks farmed off of the seemly infertile landscape that Harmony had ever so briefly spotted before being shoved inside this house of candles and shadows.

        “Mmmm...” he muttered, limply chewing on a stalk of hay that was suddenly hanging from his ivory molars. “You presume right, child. 'Quarrington Edward Pie', to be exact.” His voice had a scratchy edge to it, like a hollow rainstick being fed through a wood chipper. “And the fact that I have a pegasus with a royal cutie mark standing unannounced in my very home can only mean one thing.” He said the next part with a pitiful sigh, as if he had just discovered a fresh chip in his hoof. “My second daughter's arrived for her visit.”

        “Err... Yeah. About that—”

        “One second if you will, ma'am.” Quarrington frowned suddenly. “Inkessa!” His voice rumbled loudly through the wooden frame of the house like a cannon shell. “How many times have I told you, we are never to leave any windows or doors open in this house, ever?!” He slammed the offending doorframe shut, encasing the house in an even greater darkness than Harmony ever anticipated. “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?”

        A muffled voice rang from the door to the lower bedroom. “Pinkamena has just arrived, father! And she brought a guest! I didn't want to startle anypony!”

        “So long as you're in this house, Inkessa, you think of your parents' wishes first and all others' second! You hear me? Or do I have to explain to your mother why you're too lazy to close the door when you should?”

        “No need, father! I do apologize. I'm in a hurry to get to my shift at Stonehaven, you see.”

        “Excuses, excuses.” Quarrington sighed. Trotting over, he paused to glare down through the dimness at the copper pegasus. “So, what did she do this time?”

        “I beg your pardon, Mister Pie?” Harmony blinked.

        “Is this about all the ruckus she caused at that confounded Canterlotlian Gala?” he droned lethargically. “Or perhaps it has something to do with that Winter Wrap-Up she nearly botched up with her incompetent ice melting team. Or maybe you're here because of all of the countless juvenile pranks my darling daughter has assailed that unsuspecting town she cavorts in.”

        “I'm not sure I know what you think I am, Mister Pie...”

        “That makes the two of us, child. But, quite frankly, it's of no concern to me. Take a lesson from Pinkamena; don't do what she does. So long as you're not in the way of business here on the farm—or in town—then you're welcome to do... whatever it is that you do.”

        “Uhhh... Thanks.” Harmony cracked an awkward smile. “Your hospitality is... much appreciated.”

        Quarrington stared at her through bitterly squinting eyelids. For a second there, Harmony couldn't guess what the Cataclysm would explode first—him or the moon. Soon, he coughed his way through an apathetic shrug and sauntered past Blinkie. “Hmmm... I see you got new coloring pens, Blinkaphine.” He took one glance at her landscape-in-progress. “A bowl of fruit: how nice.” He made his way towards a study located in the corner of the house.

        Harmony blinked. She stared at the lonely shadows left after Quarrington's hooves, then at the empty hallway leading to Inkie's bedroom, then at the dim flicker of candlelight bathing Blinkie at the table, then at the slumbering baby alligator in the corner. The whole dark household was more silent than the bowels of the Everfree Briar, and she suddenly couldn't think which of the two locations was more disquieting.

        With a shuffling of limbs that broke the stillness like an avalanche, she trotted over towards the table where Blinkie sat, mutely coloring her masterpiece-in-progress. “So, you're an artist, huh?”

        The grayer-than-gray filly said nothing. Her deadpan face was engrossed in the sketch before her.

        Harmony blinked. She craned her neck to the side for a good look at the sister's flank. The cutie mark on the petite pony displayed a red hot cylinder riding a plume of flames. It took the future scavenger inside the copper pegasus to realize that it was supposed to be a “rocket ship”.

        She raised her eyebrow curiously at that. Nevertheless, she put forth a courageous smile. “With all of these windows shut for some confounded reason, who can blame you for wanting to illustrate the outside world, huh?”

        Once more, there was no reply. Blinkie continued illustrating the brown earthy hue of a rock outcropping in her landscape. She filled in the sketched lines with insane accuracy and attention to spectral detail.

        Harmony exhaled. She could have easily walked away right then and there, but something urged her to make one last attempt to bridge communication. Grinning, she grasped a crayon from Pinkie's paper box labeled “emerald”. “Y'know, if you add a dash of green to a few spots on the far side, you could liven up the scenery a bit. A little bit of life never hurt a landscape, huh?”

        Suddenly, Blinkie began shaking. Her lips quivered as a pale sheen of sweat cascaded down her trembling gray body. Her platinum irises shrunk to horrified pinpricks as she eyed the empty space in the stack of crayons like it was a bomb about to go off.

        The last pony panicked. She quivered to match Blinkie's shaking and swiftly shoved the crayon back into the box. It accomplished nothing; Blinkie was still convulsing. Rethinking her actions, Harmony swiftly pulled the green crayon back out, counted the number of letters in “emerald”, and swiftly stuck it right in between two pens labeled “orange” and “lavender”.

        That did it. Blinkie exhaled long and hard. Her shaking stopped and a warmth of life returned to her calm eyes.

        “All better?” Harmony nervously smirked. “I'm sorry. I guess I should have known better than to—”

        Blinkie apathetically returned to her sketching, coloring in the lines as if nothing had just transpired whatsoever.

        Harmony stared numbly. She hissed through wincing teeth and slowly backed away from the mute pony at the table. “Okaaaaaay.” A shudder, and she glared stonily into the far corners of the shadowy place. “You laughing yet, Spike?” she whispered.

        The candles danced before her breath. The pegasus' amber eyes were drawn towards the wooden stairs leading up to the second floor. She furrowed her brow in a sudden curiosity. She had flown back on twenty-five years of flaming reverse-time, and yet she felt as abandoned and alone as when she was the last pony clambering through the ruins of Equestrian towns long crumbled. The scavenger in her knew never to leave a moment of gifted inactivity untapped, and since she was more confused than ever an army of trolls or a dying Capricorn could render her, she decided it was time to take some hoofsteps that were hers—and not Pinkie's.

        With a slow gait, she shuffled up the stairs, leaving the morose candlelight of the strange house's first floor behind her.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        As soon as she made it to the top of the staircase, she became aware of a muffled conversation from behind her shoulder. Pausing at the second floor and glancing over her mane, she spotted a thin hallway flanked with several mahogany doors. All of the windows there were just as barred there as on the ground floor. Not a single blink of daylight made its way through the wooden sarcophagus that the farmhouse had unnaturally been reduced to. The “Canterlotlian Clerk” observed quite well that the building couldn't possibly have been built to shut out the world like it was currently accomplishing. She suspected that the truth would make itself evident to her with more exposure. Everything would make itself known with exposure; it was what Harmony believed. It was what she had to have faith in. If not, then she could very well have been hunting for more moonrocks twenty-five years from that dimly-lit second, spending time doing something far more useful while she summoned the strength to anchor herself to somepony else. The “where” and “what” of her surroundings suddenly didn't matter nearly as much as the “why”. Harmony realized—for better or for worse—that such was the way her time jumps had always been.

        The conversation was still proceeding. Stealthily, assisted by a single lantern lit behind her, Harmony shuffled her way down half of the hallway's length until she noticed one of the doors cracked open. In a house that was already “dark” by an apocalyptic survivor's standard, this one room was quite feasibly the blackest thing she had ever witnessed. From the whisper-light sounds of life stirring within, there was no doubt that something important was transpiring. For the life of her, though, Harmony couldn't fathom anypony wanting to—or having to dwell within. A piece of the candle-lit picture was ever so slowly starting to make sense to the last pony, but—much like Blinkie was doing downstairs—she had to take her sweet time in coloring between the lines.

        The colors came in the form of voices—two voices—a mother and daughter in gentle sweet reunion, their breaths coming gleefully from within. One voice was sugary and sweet, the other was affectionate... but hollow, as if the lungs it belonged to had been viciously excavated with the sharp point of a rusted spade. Harmony winced slightly as she craned her copper ears to hear:

        “And then she actually came into the doughnut shop and sat down and talked to all of us right there in the middle of Canterlot! It was so totally cool! Could you imagine having coffee and pastries with an actual Goddess? Who'd have thought that Princess Celestia liked sprinkles! Well, of course she likes sprinkles. With a mane like that, would she be a fan of pretzels? Uh uh! I don't think so!”

        “Hmmm... That sounds so blessedly delightful, Pinkamena.” A hacking cough, a shuddering breath, then a murmuring voice continued, “I recall you writing your father and sisters and I about that, but hearing you talk about it face to face really captures how much that night must have meant to you.”

        “And it didn't end there! It turns out that the building that the Royal Court used to lease out to Twilight Sparkle hadn't been renovated yet! So, since the Gala ended in such a crazy super-lame mess, we all went to Twi's old place for a slumber party and spent the next two nights in Canterlot shopping and checking out the local eateries! It was the bestests most splendid time I had in my life!—Er, away from home, that is! I'm always so happy and bubbly inside to be talking to you and Inkie and Blinkie Nod!”

        “What about...” A cough, a stifled wheeze. “What about your father?”

        “I did say 'Nod', didn't I? Heeheehee...”

        “Ohhhh Pinkamena. Your youthful exuberance is something sorely missed in this household these days.”

        “Really? Blinkie looked in good spirits for once.”

        “She's got her hobbies lately, but it's not enough to make her happy—as in truly happy. Your sisters positively light up when you show your face around here. I wish you visited more.”

        “Speaking of light-up, what's the dealio with the veilio? Are we farming mushrooms now too? Oooh! Or better yet, is daddy taking up photography like he's always wanted to? I'm guessing that's why we've got all the dark rooms.”

        “Your father is up to what he's always been up to. This farm is his life, and so is the Council, Pinkamena. You know that.”

        “Mmmmmm—But what about you? Closing all the windows doesn't do much for the rock harvest or the town. Even he can't pretend to tell me that's true.”

        “These windows...” A hacking cough, a sputtering, and the voice resumed. “...are closed for a reason. They have been the last two times you visited, and they need to remain so even on your next visits.”

        “For how long, Mommy?”

        “As long as it takes, Pinkamena. As long as I... I...” A heavy fit of coughs. Something choked and squeaked, like a whimper.

        “The refrigerator still works downstairs, right? I brought the makings for orange sherbert. I know how much you love that, Mommy. Especially lately. I promise I'll go light on the sugar! Just the way you like it!”

        “Oh, Pinkamena. A little sugar never hurt nopony.”

        “Wow! I've been gone a long time! Listen to you! Soon you'll be talking just like Ms. Cake!”

        “Like your father's sister? Gultophine help me, then I'd surely be losing it!”

        “Heeheeheee... I love you, Mommy. Even when your jokes fall flat.”

        “You're the best judge of that. I learned a long time ago not to question it.”

        “Works for me. Hey, when is Inkie ever gonna get a better place to practice her career? I swear, it's like she's been at Stonehaven for a billion boring dusty years.”

        “I think it's a matter of Inkessa's personal choice.” More coughing. More. Then: “Even if she wanted to relocate, it wouldn't be easy. Haymane isn't exactly giving the sanitarium enough funds to afford replacements, much less renovations.” A long wheezing breath. “I've gotten on your father's flank time and time again about talking to the council about it, but... I can only do so much these days.”

        “Awwwwww... Nopony's asking you to jump through flaming hoops, Mommy. I've seen Rainbow Dash do that. There's a reason her mane looks like it's just come out of a blow drier everyday.”

        “Heh... Mmmmm—I just wish I could do more, Pinkamena. It's been... It's been so long since I could so much as even walk to town, much less help the way things are going... and they are most certainly going somewhere dark, far darker than this room.”

        “Well, when I get back tonight from helping out Marble Cake and others around town, why don't you tell me all about it? You know I'm all ears, Mommy, even when they're flopping. Who doesn't love a good mud-bath?”

        “Mmmm... If I'm awake, dear, perhaps. Perhaps...”

        Harmony figured she could listen more. She suddenly wasn't sure if she should. With a shuffle of four hooves, she turned to walk back down the length of the second story hallway, when the tiniest shred of color found itself into her peripheral and stabbed her from beyond the blackness of the abysmal house. Squinting curiously, she turned to see another cracked door. She nudged it open on creaking hinges and boldly peered in.

        It was Pinkie Pie's room; it had to have been. Even in the darkest shadows of that interior, the scavenger from the future could tell that the curtains, bedsheets, wallpaper, and carpeting was an undeniable pink. What was more, the bedside table featured a rotating lampshade fixed around an electrified nightlight. Its base was sculpted to look like a clown pony holding a pie pan. A dim kaleidoscope of colored prancing circus equine floated around the walls of the room from the one flickering bulb.

        The sight was so startling—like a paint factory had exploded in the middle of a deep and dark chasm. Suddenly, every annoying and migraine-inducing thing that Pinkie Pie had ever done in the time traveler's presence melted into a syrupy draught of bubbly goodness. For a brief moment, there was a sense... a pinkie sense to the madness that energized the earth pony, and it only made sense here—in the absence of life—where the only other things that pretended to live under that roof were gray and glacier-coated shadows.

        Before Harmony's epiphany could complete itself, of course, who would interrupt but—

        “Har-Har! What are you doing in my room?!”

        “Gah!” The pegasus jumped, her copper feathers ruffled. “I didn't mean to be snooping, I swear—”

        “What are you doing in here without me?” The candy-colored pony clarified with a giddy grin. She slapped the door shut behind her with a rear hoof and bounced-bounced-bounced her way towards a wardrobe. “You can't be expected to get dressed all on your own!”

        “Get... dressed...?” Harmony blinked numbly.

        “Pfft—Duh! We are going into town, aren't we?”

        “We are?” Harmony droned. Her brow furrowed. “And just what town is this?”

        Pinkie Pie flung the wardrobe open with a flurry of dust and neglect. She sneezed, sniffled, and smiled over her shoulder like her teeth would protrude out of her bright lips any second. “Why, we're off to see the sea ponies!”

        The time traveler went bug-eyed. “You're kidding.”

        “Pfff! Well, duh, of course I am!”

        Harmony snarled. “Dang it, Pinkie—!”

        “Just trying to get you to laugh and live up to your name, 'Har Har'!”

        “For the last time, my name is not—”

        “Here.” Pinkie flung an article of clothing Harmony's way. “Wear that! I know it's not much, but it's about the only thing I have here that will fit you. Er... Eh heh heh.” She blushed slightly and waved a flippant hoof. “Don't take that the wrong way. I actually mean it as a compliment. I was packing some love handles last spring.” She patted her ample tummy with unabashed emphasis and a winking smile. “I don't exactly get paid by commission at Sugarcube Corner.”

        “Uhhh...” Harmony squinted through the dim light of the clown lamp to see a turquoise vest in her grasp. A blue crest with a yellow sun lingered in the corner of the sewn material. “Why am I putting on a Winter Wrap-Up Ice Melting Team's vest?”

        “Becausssssse,” Pinkie sing-songed as she hopped her lower hooves through a pair of pants and fished through the wardrobe for a shirt. “You don't wanna be caught naked the first moment we gallop down main street.”

        Harmony blinked. “Naked.”

        “Mmmmhmmm.”

        “Naked.”

        “Yuh huh.”

        “Uhm, Miss Pie?” Harmony squinted across the dim room of pink shadows. “Correct me if I'm in the wrong century, but wouldn't that have made us indecent all the times that we've talked to each other thus far? Even the highest elite ponies in Canterlot Court wouldn't bother to put on so much as a scarf during any given time of the day, much less pants or... or...” She made a face. “Are you wearing a straw hat?”

        “Well I sure hope I'm not wearing an elephant!” Pinkie grinned from beneath a brim of shredded white spokes. “Mayor Haymane will have our necks on a silver platter if we don't dress appropriately! I mean, where have you been girl?”

        “Oh, so it's that kind of a town. Boy oh boy.” Harmony murmured her way through the vest, ultimately struggling with it as if she had stumbled into a complex, harpy death trap. “Uhm... and just who is Haymane?”

        “Here's hoping you never find out. Here, allow me.” Pinkie reached over with double hooves.

        “No thanks, Miss Pie. I got it—Igotit! Igotit!” She hissed and went cross-eyed as Pinkie Pie practically yanked the turquoise article over Harmony's upper limbs and torso, squeezing the pegasus' wings to her constricted chest like a vice. “Hckkkkk... Snkkkt...”

        “And you'd better not be making those kinds of noises around town either, or else Bishop Breathstar's gonna think you do questionable things in your basement.” Pinkie stuck her tongue out and winked. “Though what Canterlotlians do in their free time is none of my business. If nothing else, it'll make me giggle next time I see Twilight. Heeheehee!”

        The time traveler hissed, tearing up slightly as she got used to the way in which her wings were being squished against her hide. At least the armor she built for herself in the future allowed room to breathe. “Are you just gonna come out and tell me what town this is or are we gonna keep it a guessing game?”

        “Do you like berets?”

        Harmony gnawed on her lip. “Should I...?”

        With priceless timing, the earth pony slapped a small green cap over the time traveler's amber-streaked mane. “It used to belong to Daddy when he served in the Zebraharan Conflict for the Celestial Defense Corps. Trust me: just like him, you'll learn to like it.” She then blinked her blue eyes towards the ceiling. “Or wait, maybe that was vodka.”

        Harmony shook her head so that her eyes could see beneath the brim of the beret. A sly hiss through clenched teeth: “Oh, I do like a challenge...”

        As you can tell, I didn't know where I was, and it bothered me to no end. I faintly remembered—from my foalhood—a fateful ride through Ponyville on my scooter with Sweetie Belle, Apple Bloom, and Pinkie Pie trailing behind in the wagon. Miss Pie had spent the better part of the flighty afternoon regaling us with how “Equestria was made”. Don't ask.

        In short, she had mentioned something about a rock farm and two sisters and a mother and a father and a sonic rainboom. She made no mention of the town she lived in, or the providence of Equestria, or the friggin' continent for that matter. From the first moment I heard her father's voice, I knew that her family had to have been northerners to some degree, but even that was very little to go on.

        It goes without saying that utter confusion is anything but an alien feeling when one jumps backwards in time. A pony can never really tell when or where she might end up. It's not like how it's written in literature; a time traveler can't just reach out and grab a random issue of Equestria Daily from a streetside waste basket and suddenly know the exact time she's at, the exact place she's at, the kind of weather to expect, whether or not the Canterlotlian Sunspots are winning the pennant, who's being elected as new mayor of Ponyville, what eligible bachelor Sapphire Shores is flashing goo-goo eyes at, or any of that crud.

        It's fitting that I've constantly been able to use and re-use my guise as a “Canterlotlian Clerk”—because my pretend job is almost as concrete as my real job. I'm an observer and I go into the past to observe things. When I visited Sweet Apple Acres, I observed what was going on before I knew that there were trolls to deal with. When I dropped in on Fluttershy, I observed her mother mentioning the fallen Capricorn from the stars before I figured out what I had to do next.

        I was no less an observer in Pinkie Pie's situation. My biggest mistake was forgetting that. I certainly couldn't have been blamed; being dragged around by Pinkie Pie can easily make anypony forget the task at hoof, whether or not it's the last pony. Being zapped back to the present via green flames was definitely an eye-opener, so I made it my goal on the second trip—before I could possibly lose my anchor's cohesion—that I was going to take things slowly, even if Pinkie Pie wasn't one to do “slowly”.

        Oddly enough, it was something of a blessing that my second time jump brought me to where Pinkie Pie was: in the presence of her family. As dark and as dismal and as disconcerting as it was—I could handle it. I'm used to dark and dismal and disconcerting. The very landscape that I saw around her farmhouse felt like a home-away-from home to me. Wonderfully enough, that sensation wasn't depressing. Quite the opposite: it brought me back in touch with my calmer side, my rational side, my cooler side.

        I had gone about it all wrong when I let Pinkie Pie's rambunctiousness get the best (or worst) of my temper. If I was to observe anything, to ascertain an iota of sense from her landscape, to so much as find a niche for my anchor as well as find a launch pad for my Onyx Eclipse stargazing, I had to practice something that I had almost forgotten I was good at, something that had helped me immensely when I also had to make a second trip to Applejack's life. I had to re-acquaint myself with persistence. It was undoubtedly going to be a monumental challenge, but I've encountered crazy things before and came out alive. Have I ever written you about the Ursa Major?

        Another mistake I realized I had made was a selfish one. The first time I jumped into Pinkie Pie's presence, I was far too concerned with myself. I acted as if every giddy and joyful thing she did was an affront to my plans and my aspirations in time travel or stargazing to begin with. I needed to remind myself that this whole experiment with Spike was not—and still isn't—about me. After all, what was the worst that could possibly have happened to me? A collapsing farm silo and a resonating unicorn horn had taught me a thing or two about worst case scenarios.

        Alas, my venture into the past was an existential one. If I did anything to let myself get tossed back through the laughing tunnels of flaming green magic, my mission was a failure. Any time I spent cohesively in the past—just for the sake of being able to spend it—would have been a victory. Even if I never got to chart the stars the way I wanted to, there could only be success for me there alongside Pinkie. Why? Because no other pony in the history of existence has ever had or ever will have the opportunity I do to make this trip in the first place, to be someplace where no one—not even Spike—is allowed to go.

        But you were there, of course. You were always there, just like you're here now. You are forever and yet you are never. It should be you writing this journal, and not me. But, if that was the case, where would the challenge be? I'm happy—scratch that, I am proud to be able to write this, to experience it as a challenge, whereas for you it is a meaningless and frivolous thing that you couldn't possibly understand. I know that this gives me an actual edge over you. If I have Pinkie Pie to thank for this, then it's a dang good thing that I didn't quit on her after all. But it would be a long time—a friggin' long and arduous time—before I would have the audacity to give in completely, before I would have the grace to laugh.

        Harmony shuffled nervously, her every step an awkward thing as she found herself sporting a turquoise vest, a pair of black trunks, and a green beret in broad daylight. Under an overcast sky, a humming Pinkie Pie bouncily trotted alongside her, wearing white shorts, a white straw hat, and a garishly colored shirt replete with illustrations of palm trees, tropical flowers, and pineapples. Offsetting the absurd end of this picture was Inkie, who simply wore a very modest nurse's coat with a matching white cap.

        Tossing a saddlebag full of medical supplies over her garbed shoulder, Inkie managed a wry smirk in the pegasus' direction. “I see Pinkamena found you something that could fit. I suppose it would have been better if somepony had warned you about the local town's code for public attire.”

        “Oh no... no...” Harmony returned with a plastic smile as she hobbled, hobbled, and finally trotted in an even pace. The three fillies marched away from the lone farm residing on the bosom of a grand and desolate stony plateau. “I love feeling like a walking sardine can who's just come back from the service.”

        Inkie flashed Pinkie a scathing look. “Sis, could you at least have cut some holes in the sides of that vest for Harmony? Besides, haven't you not worn it since the Winter Wrap-Up before last?”

        “Don't be silly! Ponies breathe through their nostrils, not their ribcages! You should know that! You're a registered nurse!”

        “Of course,” Inkie nodded and managed a breathy giggle. “It's so good to have you back, Pinkamena. Just try not to run Harmony here ragged. Not everypony grew up with your knack for giggles.”

        “A little late on the draw there, Inkessa—er—Inkie,” Harmony said.

        “Oh?”

        Harmony tiredly squinted the gray filly's way. “Ever had to inexpicably dismantle a sea mine before?”

        “Can't say that I have. Pinkie, did you force this representative from Canterlot here to take apart explosive ordinance?”

        “Huh... I can't remember!” Blue eyes blinked in the pegasus' direction. “Tell me, Har-Har, was that before or after I showed you the ogre football?”

        “Ughhh... Never mind.” Harmony sighed and glanced up at the constant soup of overcast skies. “Epona help me, how can I see stars through that?” she muttered to the air.

        “You fancy yourself a stargazer, huh?” Inkie remarked.

        The time traveler's Entropan Heart ever so briefly leaped. “How'd you guess?”

        “Well, you are from Canterlot, right? Why else would you be sporting such a fancy cutie mark?” She readjusted her nurse's cap and continued trotting with the other two down a long, long beaten path descending towards what looked like a canyon beyond. “I always figured that ponies from Canterlot were all about 'stars' and 'celestial this' and 'celestial that'. There're shrines in the royal study halls built in honor of magicians and astronomers from all corners of history... from Starswirl the Bearded to Cantercomet the Many Colored...”

        “Is this all because of the reading you've done about Canterlot General Hospital?” Harmony questioned with genuine interest.

        “Mmmhmmm. Assuming I ever get out of this place,” Inkie said. “But still, there's a lot of work to be done here. Even if opportunity knocks on my door, I can't leave until I'm ready.”

        “What's stopping you?”

        Inkie took a deep breath, her expression matching the solemn gray hues she was born with. “Lives. Many, precious lives.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow to the brim of her beret..

        Several distant farms dotted the horizon. As the gravel path that the three traversed dipped lower and lower towards a looming ravine beyond, Harmony became aware of a thickening stream of traffic joining them. Trotting in from all walks of life, from various farmsteads and rock quarries, dozens upon dozens of gray-weathered ponies joined what turned out to be a steady and ritualistic surge of life. The citizens were serious-faced, deadpan equine solemnly dressed in muted colors with monochromatic headgear. The fillies wore plain and unassuming dresses, and the stallions bore dull brown work duds. This burgeoning line of traffic poured as one into a lone town densely packed into what turned out to be a labyrinthine series of thin stone trenches carved into the surface of the granite world yawning beyond.

        “Uhm...” Harmony spoke up in a voice that sounded more like an introspective airship pilot than a frustrated “Canterlotlian Clerk” anchored to Pinkie Pie. “I couldn't help but notice that Mrs. Pie isn't exactly in the best of health.” A gentle blue pond lingered under a fresh afternoon thundershower in her foalish mind. “If it's not too forward of me to ask, what is her affliction?”

        “It's not too much to ask,” Inkie said, seizing the call to address a serious question with a serious answer. “The whole town knows about it, because there are many other ponies suffering from the same thing.” She shuffled aside with Harmony and Pinkie in tow, making room for a series of drawn wagons carrying various barrels of rocks into the heart of the burrowed town. “Our mother's got an acute case of Upper Respiratory Metallurgic Decay, otherwise known as 'Immolatia'.”

        “Immolatia...” Harmony took a deep breath. A pair of white stones flickered across her amber eyes. “Why, isn't the lead cause of that—?”

        “—exposure to infernite.” The nurse nodded. Inkie glanced aside as several families of farmponies joined their march down into the abysmal streets. “This is a mining town, after all.”

        “It... is?” Harmony glanced up suddenly at a rusted sign riveted to a stretch of granite wall that rose above their descent.

        The sign read: “City of Dredgemane: Gultophine's Refuge.”

        “Ah... So it is.” The last pony gulped, sucking in a breath. “Hoboy.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Eighteen – Rosenscoots and Guildenpie Are Dead

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        The town of Dredgemane was a bitter assortment of gnarled wood and weathered brickwork, being threaded thickly through serpentine trenches of lifeless rock that cast the winding streets-within-streets under perpetual shadow. Even with the Sun stretching towards the noon hour beyond the jagged cliffs above, the storefronts and market stands barely received more than a lantern's glow, so that the air of the various alleys and avenues veritably resembled the somber twilight that the last pony was eerily used to. To aid regular citizens with the day-and-night shuffle under this perpetual darkness, several torches were lit across a steady array of tall, black lamps that dotted the twisting and turning corridors which linked the various districts of the town.

        With the exception of one or two junctions of intertwining canyons, it was next to impossible to stand in one place and look straight down an alleyway without a curve in the rock obscuring one's view of what the rest of the sunken town had to offer. Dredgemane was quite literally a brittle assortment of ram-shackled buildings that filled the mildew-strewn pits of what otherwise should have been an abandoned series of ditches dug deep into the lifeless earth.

        Regardless, this excavated hovel in the stony landscape was anything but desolate. Building upon crammed building filled every breathing space of the claustrophobic ravines. Many of them were two stories tall, some three stories with several balconies and acid-etched lattices attaching the rustic constructions to neighborly structures. No square meter of urbanscape was wasted in the steep recesses of this inexplicable metropolis. Where there was room for a wagon, a citizen had set up shop. Where there was an excuse to hold weight, a market vendor or a blacksmith had established themselves.

        There was an elaborate cross-section of history in the architecture of the place. Many of the buildings spoke of Third Age and even Second Age architecture, with many cornerstones hewn out of rock through means of construction that predated the Celestial Civil Wars and even the Neo-Equestrian Era. Several buildings had obviously been expanded throughout the years, with second and third story levels featuring more sophisticated construction methods than the older groundwork.

        There was nothing impermanent about the town's construction; there were no pliable tents, thatched roofs, or wooden paneling indicative of a quaint setting like Ponyville. Everything about Dredgemane was built to last, as if the earth ponies who founded the colony so many centuries ago had anticipated their great-great-grandfoals communing with the same goddess that inspired the construction of the place to begin with. The inexplicable result of this was a town that was sharp, with every built corner a brutal juncture of fiercely reinforced metal and stone. Every building looked like an ocean breaker, as if they could pierce straight through the center of the planet if they were to accidentally fall over to the ground.

        As immense and striking as the buildings were that blanketed the claustrophobic narrows of that place, it was a feat in and of itself to distinguish them from the dark gray walls that surrounded everything. There were no colors, nothing bright, nothing that remotely tickled the retinae of a pony's eye that was naturally built to receive the gifts of the sun. If it weren't for the many black torch-bearing lampposts that dotted the winding streets, one might have walked straight into a four-story post office and not have been able tell the difference between its gnarled surfaces and the soot-stained stretch of granite beyond.

        There was a deep haze that permeated the place. If it wasn't smog from the many billowing smokestacks that punctuated the rusted rooftops, it was a cold and foggy mist that practically blackened in the absence of direct sunlight. The streets had been bathed in the shadows of the surrounding plateau for so long, for so many countless centuries, that it was conceptually feasible that they had developed a sentience, a chameleon instinct that absorbed every dark hue of the visual spectrum and emulated it under the constant shuffling hooftrots of pale-coated ponies.

        The citizens of Dredgemane were a meandering, granite-eyed, breathless lot of lurching souls, imprisoned in monochromatic threads that sucked the color out of their lives. Colts and stallions in dull brown threads drew rickety wooden wagons across dead cobblestone. Fillies and mares wearing gray gowns carried towering arrays of baskets over their flanks. Droves of workhooves labored in tandem to drag hulking carriages full of rocks from the nearby quarry across town, their grunting voices heaving across the echoing corridors of stone around them. There was little room for smiles; the citizens instead filled the void with sweat, blood, and grit.

        What these earth ponies lacked in flavor, they easily made up for in purpose, so that their hooftrots were no less animated than the hustling/bustling populace of a major city like Fillydelphia or Manehattan. Dredgemaners were evidently creatures of diligence as much as they were victims to conformity, and with each passing herd of citizens that Harmony observed, she became aware more and more of a mutual energy that lent a concealed excitement to their canter. She saw rock farmers making bee-lines for the blacksmiths, traders swiftly setting up shop in the marketplaces, merchants engaging in the fitful first stages of late morning auctions, and several more townsfolk delivering goods from building to building, street to street, canyon to canyon with such regimental speed that allowed them and them alone the gift of memorizing the labyrinthine maze of the torchlit place.

        With each subsequent block that Harmony traversed—flank to flank with the trotting shadows of Pinkie and Inkessa—deeper and deeper pits of Dredgemane opened up to her, so that the number of hustling and bustling pony bodies doubled, tripled, even quadrupled. There was soon a roar—immeasurably full of sounds but hauntingly devoid of voices—that filled the suffocating chambers of that piece of ponydom. Underscoring the perpetual hum of gray-shadowed life was a deeper thunder, a never-ending percussion of dozens upon hundreds upon unseen thousands of hooves clamoring over the same cobblestone that filled the entire blind lengths of the town's streets, so that all of the twisting ends of Dredgemane were linked with each other in one auditory heartbeat that gave the serpentine city its solidarity.

        Harmony was trembling, practically shivering. The last pony quivered and shook the more she was surrounded by these meandering, criss-crossing, swiftly trotting bodies of life. It took every gram of strength in her body to keep her green beret atop her amber-streak mane. Any moment, and she might even shiver her way out of the garish Winter Wrap-Up vest that Pinkie had so absurdly slapped over her wing-bound torso.

        It never occurred to the last pony—amidst her sudden and helpless convulsions—that such a town might have this effect on her. She wasn't bothered by the obvious grimness of the architecture or lighting; the scavenger from the future was more than used to morose landscapes, to everlasting graveyards dotted with the refuse of ponydom. However, all of the dark and horrid sites that the last pony had visited in the future were empty, completely devoid of all life. None of them were populated with living souls, much less this many living souls, and in a claustrophobic vacuum like Dredgemane no less.

        When Scootaloo traveled back in time and became “Harmony” for the Apple Family, she was graced with a quaint house surrounded by the isolation of beautiful apple orchards. When she had gone to visit Fluttershy, most of her hours were either spent inside a lonesome rustic cottage or in the enshrouding folds of the Everfree Forest. Her ventures into the past were—for the most part—simple and near-lonesome excursions into a world that was far warmer than the future, but almost as empty and unpopulated.

        Dredgemane was different. Dredgemane was Cheerilee's schoolroom multiplied a thousand times, sprinkled with misery and wrapped up in ribbons of shadow and smog. The sounds of all these living ponies surrounded Harmony, deafened her, closed in around her like a rumbling stormfront or a marching phalanx of trolls. The last pony had spent nearly two decades alone in the clouds, with only the sweet tones of Octavia's records through which to filter every dreamy perception she ever had about the populace of ponydom. Here she was—stumbling down the echoing cobblestones of a city dug into a stony grave—and a very real and very quivering Equestria was being shoved down her throat in heated, muffled breaths. She could barely stand upright. Not even a blind, naked gallop straight through harpy territory could fill the scavenger with this much fright.

        She had to focus, she needed to focus. Gazing down at her trampling hooves, she attempted to find a semblance of balance in the hazy vision of the cobblestones blurring underneath her. Suddenly, an individual pattern emerged with each passing rock. Harmony squinted her amber eyes and realized that there was a name engraved on each and every cobblestone. They were the names of ponies, fitted with numbers. She soon realized that the Dredgemaners had taken it upon themselves to inscribe not only the names of their citizens on the foundation of their streets, but the dates of their births and deaths as well. The last pony was presently marching upon the passing legacy of hundreds upon thousands of deceased equine, and the Cataclysm hadn't even happened yet.

        Harmony was starting to feel faint. With each trip she had taken into the past, her insufferable future became less and less gray. The past should have been a welcome retreat, and yet it packed the same punch—if not a worse one—than the bitter cold that the Wastelands dealt her. Dredgemane was already threatening to slam her skull with dark jaws that swallowed the entire shadows of a foreboding Everfree Forest, with a menacing glare that outshone wave upon wave of beady-eyed trolls. The engraved cobblestones were suddenly bright-faced things, like schoolfoals that watched her every move as she floundered at the front of a phantom classroom in an exiled goddess' skin. Everything that ever once had meaning was pierced by those innocent, curious, and very much dead eyes.

        She didn't want to be there anymore. Once again, the last pony mentally stabbed herself to unearth the reason for why she was there to begin with. A comedic scene danced briefly before her twitching eyes, of a brown scarecrow of a filly attempting to explain to a giant purple dragon that she had to go and visit Pinkie Pie when there were seemingly no fruits to such a daring prospect.

        Was this all about stargazing, or the Onyx Eclipse? What was there to fear in a gaping hole in the heavens when this festering wound in the earth was fitting enough to drown in? Perhaps the Onyx Eclipse—or whatever it was truly named—was simply the cosmic response to every pit of misery ever dug out of the earth in the name of prosperity. History was nothing more than a festering pile of Dredgemanes, of all lifeless shapes and shades that Equestria had ever produced. Perhaps the Cataclysm was merely the answer to some wordless, unintelligible question too frightening for ponydom to courageously spell out.

        Harmony briefly forgot her anchor as she leaned against a tall black lamppost, catching her breath as her wings flexed and stretched under the constricting turquoise fabric of her vest. She shut her eyes and filled her mind meditatively with the strings of Octavia, a habit that she had picked up over countless hours of scavenging the bowels of dead Equestria. Only, this time, she was not envisioning herself seated in a concert hall along with countless heads of living, breathing ponies. In an ironic reversal, she was summoning the sights and sounds of desolation, of a dead world that had secretly become her home over decades of lonely introspection. She wasn't in Dredgemane, she was in the singed and hollowed-out hovels of the Wasteland. She was surrounded by nothing, blanketed in snow, baptized in the ash of calm and predictable death. Octavia's strings flew gently through the air, a lullaby that sang an endless cemetery to sleep, and Scootaloo was its lone and faithful groundskeeper once again.

        Then the dream ended; Pinkie Pie had spoken up. “We're here! Time to buy some lingerie!”

        Harmony's amber eyes flew open. “Say what?” A paper airplane ricocheted off her copper nose. “Dah! Sonuva—”

        “Heeheehee!” Pinkie Pie giggled, her straw hat bobbing on her cotton-candy mane as she lowered her hoof from the expert throw. “Just kidding! But it was worth it to get your eyes to open! It looked for a moment there like you were gonna faint or something. Don't worry: the high altitude does that to everypony who visits this place.”

        “Uhh... ” Harmony adjusted the green beret on her head and watched as the paper airplane glided its way over dozens of citizens' heads and flew off beyond the edges of a twisting alleyway. “You do remember that I'm a pegasus, right?”

        “Not all pegasi are used to thin air, y'know. Take my good friend Fluttershy, for example. I happen to know that it's been a very long time since she last got high.”

        Harmony slowly, slowly swiveled her skull to stare blinklessly at Pinkie Pie.

        The candy-colored earth pony stared back with an immaculate smile.

        Harmony squinted. “Do you even know what comes out of your mouth half of the time?”

        “Uhm, moisture and carbon dioxide?” Pinkie’s teeth glinted. “Sometimes sunflower seeds when I'm visiting Applejack's farm.”

        “Here's an idea: why doesn't somepony tell me why we stopped just now?”

        Pinkie Pie motioned over her shoulder towards a general goods store with a creakily-swinging sign hanging over their manes in the torchlight. “Sis just went inside to grab a few necessities before she goes in for her shift at Stonehaven.”

        “Just what exactly is Stonehaven, a nursing school?”

        “Hey, you ever wonder why stores are always selling 'necessities' but never 'desirables'?” Pinkie Pie adjusted the hem of her colorful shirt of illustrated pineapples, palm trees, and other tropical abominations. “Rarity says that in Trottingham they have places that are famous for selling 'unmentionables'. Have you ever heard of something so silly?”

        “Miss Pie... ”

        “Ahem—'Uh, hi. I came all the way from Canterlot to buy something, but I can't tell you what it is because it's unmentionable. '”

        “Seriously, Miss Pie—”

        “'Hey Mom! Hey dad! I didn't bother wrapping my present up for you! But I thought you needed more of these because, according to Uncle Rubble, the last time you ever used the likes of them was on your honeymoon—whatever that means. '”

        “Has anypony ever told you that you have the social grace of a diseased centipede?”

        “Oooooh!” Pinkie hopped in place, grinning ear to ear. “Har-Har, was that a joke you just said?!”

        “Pfft—No.”

        “Awwww... Because it sounded awfully close to a joke.”

        “Why is it so dang important for you that I experiment in comedy?”

        “Why is it so important for you to do some boring peeping-tom work on the night's sky?”

        “Because I've been charged by Her Majesty to conduct some astronomical research!” Harmony hissed, gazing forlornly at a solid train of soot-smudged workers randomly trudging by, dragging wooden wagons full of coal and charcoal. “When was the last time you had Princess Celestia's permission to act so... so... ”

        “Sexy?”

        “Random? —” Harmony's breath was cut short with a bug-eyed double-take. “See?!” She pointed a hoof between the earth pony's crossed blue eyes. “Like that! Where in Epona's name does something like that come from?”

        “What, my face?” Pinkie blinked. “From my mom's womb, silly filly! Though Inkessa tells me all the time that I was a breached foaling. She says I bounced the moment I hit the manger floor. Heeheehee.” A clearing of the throat, and she briefly bore cold, soulless eyes. “Not every town has as much hay as Ponyville.”

        “Erm... You don't say?”

        “It's kind of hard to enjoy a crib made out of gravel. But oh well!” She giggled and bounced in a bright pink circle around the dazed time traveler. “I was never short on rattles as a little kid! Heeheehee!”

        “Slap me for saying so, but... ” Harmony sweated nervously. “... you still are a little kid.”

        “That's what I always say when I try to go down the kiddy waterslide in Lake Oatario, but none of the lifeguards let me. So one night, me and Dashie snuck onto the lakefront after sundown and went down the slide ourselves. It was so fun and totally worth the amoebic dysentery!”

        Harmony was about to say something when a passing series of shadows shouted from behind, “Hey! Pinkamena! You're back!”

        “Wooo! Yeah!” Pinkie leaped up and gripped the side of the black lamppost, hanging off it as she saluted with a loose hoof. “I came to Dredgemane to bake cupcakes and chew the fat, and I'm all out of clichés—well, almost! Heeheehee!”

        Harmony glanced over to see a trio of colts, roughly Pinkie's age, glancing over from where they briefly slowed their wagon-drawing gait down the street to glance the earth pony's way. “Does Brevis know you're here?”

        “Celestia, I hope he does! Because I don't even know I'm here! What are the chances I might surprise myself? I get the hiccups waaaaay too easily!”

        Something strange emanated from the splotch of gray ponies amidst the surging gray sea. At first, Harmony thought that they were coughing... perhaps even choking. But then she realized she was hearing something she hadn't witnessed since she and the two Pie sisters first set hoof into the canyon dwelling of Dredgemane. The colts were chuckling.

        “Well, you'd better run into him soon! He's been off his rocker since last night!”

        “You mean more than usual? Heeheehee—What happened last night?”

        “The Biv struck again! Third time in a row this week!”

        Pinkie Pie gasped wide, her eyes like twin blue supernovas. “You don't say?! What was it this time?”

        “The main water supply to the Town Square fountain! But you gotta let Brevis tell you about it! Anypony else wouldn't do it justice!”

        “I'm tingling so much with anticipation I just might hug the wrong end of a stegosaurus!” Pinkie Pie made airplane motor noises as she spun once, twice, and a third time around the lamppost and then stopped with a gasping breath. “Oh hey! About tonight: same time and place?”

        “If you're back in town, Pinkamena, we wouldn't miss it for the world!”

        “How could you miss the world? Just tilt your neck down and spit!”

        “Heheheh—See ya later, Pinkamena!”

        The colts sauntered off, gathering a few dejected looks from droves of older ponies. No sooner had they departed than two fillies marched up and glanced brightly Pinkie's way. “Pinkamena, we had no idea you were visiting.”

        “Heya girls!” Pinkie Pie hopped down to the cobblestone, tilted her skull, and caught the belated descent of her staw hat falling after her. “How's the laundromat?”

        “Doing fine ever since you last came and cross-promoted us with Ms. Marble Cake's bakery.”

        “Heehee! Isn't it the truth? From the first moment I trotted inside that warehouse full of washing machines, I told myself, 'What this place needs is a freezer full of sarsaparilla and maybe some balloons'. I'm glad your Mommy agreed on one of those two things. Soda and laundry detergent are perfect bedfellows. Either one of them ends with a happy customer breathing out bubbles.”

        “You'd be surprised how many ponies go there just to hang out now because of the refreshments,” one of the fillies remarked, balancing a basket full of linens on her dully clothed flank. The air around the lamppost was suddenly a minute pocket of alien smiles suspended in the depths of a city of infinite shadow. “We know that Bishop Breathstar is against gossiping and whatnot, but it's amazing the sort of things you can hear without trying.”

        The other filly leaned towards Pinkie with bright eyes. “Did you know that Canterlot's own Hoity Toity bought out the supply depot on Slade Street?”

        “Really?” Pinkie beamed. “Dredgemane is getting its own arts and crafts store?”

        Harmony cleared her throat.

        The fillies both glanced nervously at the copper equine. “Friend of yours, Pinkamena?”

        “You mean this perfect stranger standing on a street corner and eyeing all of the town's handsome colts?”

        Harmony did a double-take and instantly frowned. “Excuse me?”

        “Heeheehee—Watch this. Oh dear Elektra!” Pinkie Pie pointed with a mock gasp. “Is that Rudolph Valentintrot?”

        Harmony blinked dazedly into the gray crowd of the town street. “H-Huh?” There was a dull thud, and suddenly the turquoise vest on the pegasus' torso had slid up to her shoulders. At first, she didn't know why, until she glanced back and realized that her copper wings were sticking straight up... and Pinkie's hoof was resting from where she had just slapped Harmony in some magical spot mid-flank. “Gah!” She hissed through gnashing teeth, blushed like a beet, and slid her vest back down over coiling wings. “M-Miss Pie!”

        The two fillies giggled helplessly, their cheeks burning at the naughty spectacle.

        “Oh Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie rolled her blue eyes back and mocked a fainting spell with an errant hoof to her chin. “How unbecoming of a Canterlotlian lady!”

        “What on earth were you thinking—?” Harmony briefly interrupted her own hyperventilating anger to hiss, “How did you even friggin' do that?”

        “It's an old trick I learned with Dashie. Works every time with you silly pegasi.”

        “I don't believe you.”

        “Oh yeah? Did you hear about the one time a Zebraharan exchange student got lost in the Wonderbolts' locker room after a sweaty day of practice?”

        “Uhh, no, not that I can recall—” Another thud. Harmony's vest hoisted up again. She growled and lowered her wings and shirt once more. “Stop doing that!”

        Pinkie Pie lowered her hoof and hugged her chest, giggling and leaning back against the lamppost. “Control yourself, girl! What would Bishop Breathstar say if his congregation saw you doing that in public?”

        The two fillies giggled fitfully. They marched off before they could lose too much oxygen. “You're a hoot as always, Pinkamena. Nice to see you around town. Stay classy.”

        “You know I won't!” The bright earth pony winked. A frowning pegasus was suddenly in her face.

        Harmony glared. “You are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, an immature, uncouth, direspectful piece of—”

        “Shoot, girl!” A bearded black stallion suddenly shoved the pegasus out of the way to grin down at the straw-hatted filly. “Quarrington's problem child, as I live and breathe! How's life treating you in the shadow of Princess Celestia's sparkling palace in the sky?”

        “Just peachy keen, Mister Irontail!” Pinkie smiled. “How's the blacksmithing going? Is it just as black and smithy as usual?”

        “There's never any shortage of rocks, kiddo. You know that about this town.” The soot-covered elder winked, his many muscles tightly compacted under an inky coat made twice as black by the dim shadows around them. He adjusted a grimy apron around his aged haunches and spoke, “But business won't pick up until a few days from now.”

        “Oh right!” Pinkie Pie stood up on her lower hooves and playfully bounced her spine up against the lamppost as she thought aloud. “The boring old bonfire is this week, isn't it?”

        “Boring old what?” Harmony muttered, dusting herself off as she stood back upon all four hooves. “Doesn't this place have enough torches and smoke as it is?”

        “HaHA!” The blacksmith boomed, his mighty lungs filtering a heated breath through a dirty-toothed grin as he glanced down at the jittery pegasus. “How like an outsider! Dredgemane must be all misery and grime to a visitor such as you!”

        “No offense, Mister... uhm... Irontail, but isn't it?”

        “Not so long as this bright little ray of sunshine is around!” He reached a dirty hoof and ruffled Pinkie's mane through the straw hat. “I don't know what Quarrington was thinking by letting her gallop off to Ponyville. This town could use a good shot of Pinkamena Diane Pie from time to time!”

        “Heeheehee!” Pinkie grinned. “Just don't forget the alcohol swab before you stick me in!”

        “What's this about alcohol?” Inkie remarked, sauntering finally out of the general goods store with a basket of various goods balanced on her white-coated flank. “Oh hi, Mister Irontail,” she droned with a slightly curved smile. “You ready for Gultophine's Harvest? I'm sure everypony in town will be lining up at your store for the next month asking to have all sorts of stuff re-forged for them.”

        “Gultophine's Harvest?” Harmony remarked with a squinting expression. “That's an ancient tradition that hasn't been practiced since halfway through the Second Age. You mean to say that Dredgemane has its own variant of the ritual?”

        “Wow, get a load of the thinking cap on this gal.” Irontail motioned with his hairy skull. He leaned forward briefly and gave the blinking pegasus a rather uncivil sniff. “If I didn't know better, I'd say you've got the scent of Canterlot all over you, Miss. Not everything has to be explained through a history lesson, y'know. Still, I mean no disrespect. I admire anypony who's given time to Her Majesty's Military.”

        “Huh?” Harmony blinked. With a sudden wince, she adjusted the green beret on her head. “Oh no, you don't understand. This belongs to—”

        “She asked a legitimate question, Mister Irontail,” Inkie interrupted in her monotone voice. She glanced her violet eyes Harmony's way. “Yes, as a matter of fact, Mayor Haymane resurrected the bonfire ritual of Gultophine's Harvest several years ago, before Blinkie was born, when Pinkie and I were just little foals. Every four months, the entire town gathers in the central square to burn things... ”

        “... things that I eventually get to replace.” Irontail smiled devilishly and rubbed two of his front hooves together. “And that's when the bits roll in.”

        “Honestly, Mr. Irontail.” Inkie rolled her eyes and smirked helplessly. “That's totally contrary to the spirit of Gultophine's Harvest.”

        “Yeah!” Pinkie spun fresh circles with an upper and lower hoof wrapped around the lamppost. “Besides, bits can't roll in! Not unless you glue a pencil between two of them and push the thing off a desk!” She grinned. “At least that's the most I ever learned out of rock kindergarten!”

        “Long story short, Harmony,” Inkie spoke to the pegasus. “This town has a long history of respecting and revering the memory of Goddess Gultophine.”

        “'Rock kindergarten'... ”

        “Hmm?”

        “Ahem.” Harmony snapped out of it and stared steadily at Inkie. “I find that very interesting. I think I might actually want to... watch such a bonfire in progress,” the last pony said in a genuinely honest breath.

        “Mmmm... You might want to think twice about that,” the nurse pony sister to Pinkie remarked with a far off, flinching expression.

        Harmony raised an eyebrow to that.

        Irontail's booming voice once more filled the air of the street corner. “So! When will my workers and I be graced with more of your dazzling cupcakes, Pinkamena?”

        “Heeheee—They're never my cupcakes, Mister Irontail! They're all courtesy of Ms. Marble Cake!”

        “But they're extra special when you're in town to make them, kiddo! Don't tell me you'll be holding out on us! That would be a crime!”

        As the conversation carried on beside her, the time traveler found her amber eyes wandering over the lengths of the city street. The various caravans of dull colored citizens trudged forth with as much uneventful speed as ever, but several blinking faces were glancing in their direction, the twitching eyes settling on the one bright color—a bizarrely natural color—of a pink earth pony infecting the bowels of Dredgemane. Where there once was a gray miasma of nothing, there briefly but very truly sprouted random comet streaks of white teeth... in the shape of smiles.

        Harmony raised an eyebrow. It suddenly occurred to her that Ponyville was not the only place to be graced with the infamy of a certain “Pinkamena Diane Pie” . While Scootaloo's home town occasionally suffered from and buckled under the burning enthusiasm of that infamy, it was quite possible that another spot in Equestria—a far more blighted spot—occasionally lit up from it.

        “Don't you worry your big bushy beard about cupcakes! Good things come to those who wait!” Pinkie Pie winked as she spun one or two more revolutions around the lamppost. “That's something a friend of mine named Twilight Sparkle taught me! So I dunked her head in a sundae one afternoon at Sugarcube Corner! Have you ever seen a unicorn chase somepony across town with a banana split for a helmet?”

        Inkessa muttered, “Pinkie... I don't think you should be playing on the lamppost like that—”

        “Nonsense!” Pinkie grunted and leaped from the lamppost with a gymnastic leap. “I'm not hurting the torch's feelings any!” A blink, and suddenly her face contorted in a ghastly grimace. “Uh oh.”

        Inkie and Irontail suddenly shared Pinkie's concern. Harmony was utterly confused. She craned her neck for a better look, and noticed that Pinkie's tail was twitching as if with an epileptic seizure.

        “Uhm... Miss Pie? Is something wrong with your—?”

        With a thunderous crash, the entire black metal length of the lamppost fell. The blazing top of it landed in a wagon full of dry hay. The entire thing went up in a flash of smoke, rendering the wooden wheels and spokes to a pile of black ash.

        Pinkie Pie winced heavily, biting her lip. She smiled nervously in the other ponies' direction. “How about we go to Marble Cake's now?”

        “That sounds like a good idea,” Irontail nodded. “I'll pretend I got cursed by a zebra and started spitting fire. Get a move on, kid.”

        “OkaythanksMisterIrontailbyebye!” Pinkie Pie darted off in a bright bolt of candy-streaking panic. Inkie swiftly joined her.

        Harmony nearly blinked in time to miss it. “Hey—Whoah!” She galloped hurriedly after her anchor. “For the love of Celestia, slow down!”

        Irontail stroked his beard and watched the three fillies weaving their frenzied way through the winding corridors of Dredgemane. His eyes settled on the copper pony taking up the rear. “Hmmm... They keep enlisting younger and younger, don't they?”

        “No... Uhm... I didn't serve in any campaign,” Harmony explained. She stood across from an aproned old mare and gave a deadpan expression in the middle of a cramped, steamy kitchen. “I'm borrowing this hat from Miss Pie's family and—”

        A pink streak soared in from the pegasus' peripheral vision. “There you are! Here, hold these!”

        “Ooomf!” The time traveler grunted as she suddenly teetered under the weight of several heavy piles of boxed treats having been planted on her vested spine.

        Pinkie Pie dusted her hooves off and kicked a nearby table, knocking loose a huge basket of doughnuts and bagels that landed atop her expertly poised flank. “Aaaaaand we're ready for the rounds, Ms. Marble Cake!”

        “Excellent, young ladies!” A rather rotund pony with gray-blue hair smiled with bulbous dimples as she stirred a vat of icing along one of the many rows of worktables in the heated room. Half a dozen Dredgemane ponies her age—dressed in identically unassuming garments—worked rapidly on piles of dough and baking mixes behind her, forming a veritable assembly line of the entrepreneur's own design. “Oh, how I wished I had more workhooves your age to help with business around here!” A brief frown. “Then again, it isn't always that we get to deliver locally. So much of the income has been coming from abroad as of late.” The dimples returned, rosily. “But everytime you visit town, Pinkamena, it's like Dredgemane rediscovers its sweet tooth!”

        “Someone should fire the tooth fairy by now!” Pinkie's blue eyes glinted. “That sweetooth has gotta be dusty and grimy by now from being lost and found so much! Bleachk!”

        “Miss Pie, I wonder if you're half as random as you are literal,” Harmony wheezed under the weighted bulk of stacked treats on her back. The same Entropan body that battled trolls and an ivory nematoad was suddenly a helpless victim to an inexplicable mountain of dessert items, so that half of her absurdly wondered if it was possible to bake cookies out of dark matter. “I've imagined many a death in my life, but never by baked goods shattering my spine... ”

        “Oh, tough it up, girl!” Marble Cake boomed. Her body housed a living bathtub of a lung cavity. “I would never have gotten as far with my personal business as I did by deflating under a mere stack of cookies! Just pretend that these deliveries are what your basic training prepared you for!”

        “Basic what?” Harmony quivered and wobbled until the brim of her green beret fell over her eyes. She blew it back up to the top of her mane and said, “I mean it! This belongs to Miss Pie's father, who—might I add—is apparently your brother-in-law!”

        “Since he went on a sugar diet, he's been no relative of mine!” The bloated mare was almost convincing with the seriousness of her tone. This all melted as soon as she leaned over to nuzzle Pinkie through her straw hat. “But you'll always be my favorite pink niece! I swear, Gultophine sculpted you to be a walking cotton candy advertisement! You're nothing but good news for business!”

        “Is now a bad time to tell you that I threw up in your cactus garden after running across town to get here?”

        “What was that?”

        “Nothing!” Pinkie Pie grinned innocently, then shoved Harmony, forcing the teetering pegasus to stumble out the back door to Marble Cake's Bakery and Delivery Store. “Come on, Har-Har! Let's do the rounds before the cookies go stale!”

        “Cookies?! You mean these aren't bricks balancing on my butt?”

        “Bricks only wished that they tasted as good!” Pinkie said as they once more emerged unto the misty streets of Dredgemane where her sister was waiting. “Hey Inkie, do cacti stain easily?”

        “Medical school never prepared me for that question. Why do you ask?”

        “Oh, no reason. Say, did you and your fellow students ever have recess at medical school?”

        “Can't say that we did, Sis.”

        “Awwww... No schoolyard games of stethoscope dodgeball?”

        “Heheheh... ” Inkie chuckled, then glanced the last pony's way. “How're you holding up, Harmony?”

        “I'm holding up a lot!” the pegasus wheezed, buckling under the teetering stack of white boxes. “What in Epona's name did Ms. Marble Cake put in these cookies? Iron and lead?”

        “Something that rusts a bit less, I'm sure,” Inkie said as the three trotted—or hobbled—down the street full of hustling and bustling Dredgemaners. “Wow, this brings back memories of when Pinkie first began working for father's siblings. She carried stacks of baked goods twice as high as what you're braving, Harmony. Ponies in town used to call her the 'Leaning Tower of Pinkie'.”

        “Should I bother to ask if I'm being paid for the same job that was thrust upon her?” Harmony managed through a sheen of sweat.

        “Marble Cake never pays me in bits, not like my other Aunt and Uncle in Ponyville,” Pinkie Pie said. “If it's any consolation, you'll have the same share of a lifetime supply of jelly beans!”

        “Oh yeah?” Harmony gulped and lurched onward. “What flavor?”

        “Licorice.”

        “Then I quit.”

        “I'd wait a few hours if I were you!” Pinkie smiled. “If you toss your hat in before we make at least half a dozen deliveries, we might have a riot on our hooves!” She glanced as they passed a street sign pointing towards a distant dead end. “Oh hey, Inkie!”

        “I see it. This is where I bid you both adieu.” Inkie began trotting west down a winding canyon that led towards an even grayer corner of Dredgemane. “Pinkie Pie, try not to set anything else on fire. Harmony, try not to die if she sets something else on fire anyways.”

        “You've been a reassuring spirit of hope until now, Inkessa.”

        “That's the best compliment I've had in days.” The droning nurse curtsied and spun about on her hooves, marching off. “Come visit Stonehaven if you can, Pinkamena. They're bursting at the seams to see you.”

        “Will do, Inky-Winky!” Pinkie Pie bounced merrily down the street with her rattling basket of doughnuts.

        Harmony trudged after her. “Who're 'they'?”

        “An even better question!” Pinkie Pie grinned with sparkling eyes as the two suddenly weaved their way into a bizarrely large, open space. “Who's the Royal Grand Biv!”

        “The Royal Grand What-now?”

        Pinkie bounced ahead and made her way towards a large concrete fountain in the center of what turned out to be Dredgemane's Town Square. Five conjoining roads morphed into a remarkably wide expanse of cobblestone, so that for once in the grand rocky forest of the town the Sun shone with a modicum of brightness, as could be afforded by the pea-soup overcast above. The fountain had as its centerpiece a grand alicorn effigy, with wings that stretched far wider than any conventional depiction of Princess Celestia. A group of city workers in gray fatigues were clambering all over the fountain as the populace of Dredgemane surged and circled around them. A chunk of stone had been removed from the fountain's side so that a plumber or two could reach the intricate pipework that fed into the granite display.

        “Hey! What's she done now? Huh? Huh?” Pinkie bounced towards the workers, her blue eyes reflecting the gray sunlight three times as brightly. “Has the Biv struck again?”

        “Oh, hello there, Pinkamena.” One of the workers nonchalantly nodded his snout towards her while sweatily fiddling with a mess of pipes. “I see you're back in town. And, yes, the Biv was here sometime last night.”

        “What did she do this time?!” Pinkie beamed, bouncing circles around the fountain. “Did she perfume the statue with lavender? Dump a bunch of fruit in the basin? Leave a monogram in glitter ink?”

        “None of the above,” the worker replied. “But, I daresay, the Biv is getting creative. How he or she got into the water supply is beyond us.”

        “Ooooh! Show me! Come onnnnn! Show me show me show me!” Pinkie leaned forward in emphasis.

        The worker stared back at her, shrugged, and whistled to one of his assistants. With a wrench, he grasped onto one of the pipes and twisted it, letting the water flow into the fountain once more. Harmony and Pinkie watched as every pointed wing of the alicorn statue trickled forth a stream of water that collected in the basin below the prancing figure's hooves. Only, it was not normal water. It was a sudsy display of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. A compound mixture had forced the fountain to spout forth a rainbow collage of color, so that the center of Dredgemane briefly shimmered in a bold display of excitement and vibrancy.

        Pinkie Pie instantly giggled. “Ohhhh, that is priceless! How long was the fountain spitting this stuff out before anypony noticed it?”

        The worker chuckled helplessly as he twisted the wrench back and shrugged alongside his fellow workers. “It was halfway through the night at least before one of the militia ponies took notice of it and reported it to Haymane. All morning, my boys and I have been trying to find the source of the tainted water. The Biv hid his or her tracks good. At this rate, we might have to redirect the entire plumbing system until we can find out the source of the colorization.”

        “She's an expert! I'm telling you, she's the cat's meow of practical jokes!” Pinkie Pie almost dropped her basket of doughnuts in her fit of giggling.

        Harmony was still squinting at the statue. Something about it was catching her off guard. As the water pressure was turned off by the workers and the trickling stream of rainbow colored liquid turned into a dwindling drip, she finally realized whom the statue was attempting to depict.

        “Goddess Gultophine... ”

        She remembered what the sign in front of the town entrance had said, of how Dredgemane was 'Gultophine's Refuge'. All of that suddenly made little sense to her. Gultophine was the Goddess of Life; she would forever be credited for animating the many plants and creatures that filled the landscape which Epona and Consus had willed into being. She was the embodiment of warmth, impulse, and spontaneity. Harmony had to suddenly wrap her head around the concept that all of those Dredgemaners, in their colorless clothes and their emotionless canter, could ever imagine that they were in fact honoring the essence of their patron Alicorn with their unenthusiastic conformity. Right there, as Harmony stared at the fountain, she once again witnessed the Gultophine that she remembered. As the liquid dried up and the gray plainness of the statue returned, she recalled that the Goddess of Life was also the Goddess of rainbows...

        “She saw the bright shinies!” a voice shouted over the urbanscape in a braying echo.

        Harmony jolted. She glanced every which way across the grimy rooftops. “Huh?”

        “Oh great, not him... ” The one worker fiddling with the pipes groaned.

        “Who's him?”

        “She saw the bright shinies... ” Harmony caught a dark-blue figure leaping off of a Dredgemane balcony in her peripheral. He bounded through a crowd of delivery ponies, flipped agilely over a wagon full of hay, and slid four meters before coming to a ballet spin in front of the statue. “And the brightness shined through her!”

        “It did?!” Pinkie Pie gasped melodramatically as she stared at the hooded figure. “Could she have survived such an experience?”

        “Survived it—Yes!” The cloaked shadow raised a grimy hoof. The smell of backsweat and back alleys wafted off of the rambling bum as he shuffled and sashayed through the thick of the working crowd around the fountain. “In fact, she would be more alive than she ever was before! Born unto a new and glorious madness of shining, shining, shining! Until she flew away on candy wings to shine on before all Equestria, spreading the madness like strawberry preserves over a loaf of cinnamon bread! BraHa! Oh, don't the seeds positively stick to her molars? When will she ever plant them?!”

        “Who? Who is she?” Pinkie Pie breathlessly twirled and spun every way alongside him. “Who saw the bright shinies?”

        “That is the mystery of mysteries!” The figure's coattails flapped and flailed as he spun about and pointed his hooves dramatically at the crowd. “Maybe it was them!” He pointed at Harmony. “Maybe it was her!” He pointed at the workers. “Maybe it was their mistresses!” He fell down to his haunches in a weeping voice. “Nopony knows! Nopony but me, the penniless prophet of cackles!” He hoisted his hood down and jumped in Pinkie's face. A blistered and squinty-eyed mule was suddenly bearing down on the candy-colored earth pony. “She was you!”

        “Eeeeeeeep!” Pinkie Pie began to fall back underneath him—

        “Miss Pie!” Harmony gasped. With a snarling expression, she planted her heavy load of baked goods onto the cobblestone with a thud and prepared to pounce on the assaulting mule—

        “Hee hee hee hee haa haa haa!” Pinkie Pie giggled incessantly in the forelimbs of the mule who was presently rubbing the hard edge of a playful hoof into her strawhatted mane. “Ohhhhh how I missed you and your Brevisness, Brevis!”

        Harmony stopped in her tracks, blinking confusedly.

        “Ho ho! So I was missed, then?” “Brevis” grinned through an offensive ensemble of yellow and jagged teeth. His pointed blue ears twitched in the misty air as the mule performed an impossible backflip and perched on the edge of the fountain beside the noticeably bothered workers. “Oh, how I wish the rest of your kin missed goodly Brevis! They are all too busy attempting to lock him up somewhere! My good pony friends, you cannot bar a soul with locks who does not understand the concept of doors, much less a house! For it is you who imprison yourselves with your so-called luxuries!”

        “You belong in Stonehaven, Brevis,” one of the workers droned boredly. “Haymane will have your neck yet.”

        “He may have every centimeter of me!” The mule gave a yellow grin. “If it means him coming out of his clouded office of misery to smell more than mere dust and broken dreams! Let Brevis tell you this, every soul is a deep and dark cave and only a seldom few of us has dared to trot boldly into the bright mouth of it to kiss the shiny madness beyond. It is the same madness that has rocked us since infancy, that has fed us colorful nightmares that we all secretly wish to relive as a semblance of peace from this clear and ever-present mundanity!”

        “Hey Brevis!” Pinkie grinned wide at the sight of him. “I dream in lollipops! What does that mean?”

        “It means that you're still a young mother to the shivering foal that is your future, Pinkie Pie!” The mule forward-dismounted from the fountain and slid to a graceful stop beside the earth pony with a hoof around her shoulder. “It is a foal born from the conception of joy and impulse, destined for all the gloriously exciting and gloriously dangerous things that dwindle in wait beyond the granite walls of every town ever, and as its mother it is your job to lick, lick, lick the child's coat clean so that it can stand for the first time on four legs and know what it means to live.”

        “I just thought it meant I like lollipops!”

        “Sometimes a lollipop is just a lollipop, my friend!” Brevis grinned and raised her chin with a grimy hoof. “Stress not, for we both know the answer. You stopped needing to dream since the bright shinies kissed you, child. Ever since, you've been living the dream. Sleep is just a means to remember the dark puddles that you cast off just like you lost your gills, sweet seapony!”

        “Heeheehee!” Pinkie Pie nuzzled the smelly creature and turned to wink Harmony's way. “Brevis, this is Har-Har. Don't bother making her live up to her name. If I can't, I'm sure you don't have a snowflake's chance in a hayloft.”

        “What boasting!” Brevis's eyes lit up like a pair of train engines cutting through a fog. “That must make her a legend amongst ponies! A legendary bore, that is!” He reached a hoof out. “Hello, Har Har, I am known by many names and I have the good fortune of forgetting them all.”

        “Uh huh... ” Harmony nervously reached a hoof out to grasp his. “At least you don't forget your manners—” She suddenly hissed as a loud buzzing sound filled her ears, accompanied by an electric jolt that ricocheted through her Entropan system. She feared for a brief moment that she would see green clouds of smoke enveloping her. She stumbled back on shaky hooves.

        Pinkie Pie stifled a snorting laugh as Brevis suddenly brandished a buzzer wrapped around the end of his appendage. “Oh, I just remembered, my name is 'Hey you, get out of my flower garden; this is no place to sleep. '”

        “Heeheehee!” Pinkie Pie slapped her knee and grinned. “He's taught me everything I know!”

        “Yeah... ” Harmony coughed and shuffled back over to her infernal stack of bakery items. “I didn't catch the first clue.”

        “At least she's sarcastic,” Pinkie said with a shrug and smirked up at Brevis. “Though she can work on the delivery.”

        “You cannot force the joy of madness onto an equine soul, child.” Brevis scuffled backwards, reached stealthily aside, and switched the hats of two ponies deeply engrossed in their plumbing work. “Insanity is a happy science that every soul must embark upon individually, because to be an individual is the finest madness of all, which is why goodly Brevis is happy that you have decided to take showers and eat off of plates instead of emulating him!” He tapped on another worker's shoulder and grabbed his wrench while he looked the other way. Brevis balanced the tool playfully on the tip of his snout while grinning. “There is only room in Equestria for one King of Bums; I have built my throne out of the laughter of all of Dredgemane, which is precisely why my throne is invisible! BraHaHa!”

        The worker glanced for his wrench, blinked, looked at Brevis, frowned, and snatched the metal tool back. “Buck off, Brevis. You're almost as bad as the Biv.”

        “Oooh! Did you see that she struck again?” Pinkie bounced.

        “Ah yes, the Royal Grand Biv!” Brevis spoke with a grin as he suddenly moontrotted over to Harmony's flank and squinted at her. “Has anypony told you about the Royal Grand Biv?”

        “Can't say that I've been told about this character,” Harmony managed while once more bearing the weight of the infernal cookies. She hissed through clenched teeth. “Though, something tells me that I'm about to get an earful.”

        “He is no less than an artist, a spinner of webs that would put every arachnid out of a job! He alights the rooftops of Dredgemane like a phantom. But this is no ordinary phantom! Oh no, my good Equestrians, this is a playful haunt that daringly stabs the air with every color that this town pretends not to know! It is not enough that he exists, but he must plant a lightning bolt in each of our eyeballs, summoning our sights towards the roof of the world to see what might fall next! It is he who falls—Yes—it is he who collapses every other day, in a selfless stunt that reminds us that we too may fall, that falling is another way of rising up and breaking invisible shackles that force us to surrender to the sighs, sighs, and sighs of this town's daily dreamlessness! We all could very gladly, very easily, very adverbily—BraHaHa—be as dangerous and brash as him. But therein lies the tragedy. If we all broke down, broke up, broke the cloudy mirror of this confounded soup, he would be out of a job! Then where would the invasive colors be? I daresay, they would be in our hearts, our brains, our loins! We would cease being ponies and mules; we would become the colors themselves. Maybe then and there we will realize why Epona left this rock of a world; she too had to fall upwards, a very delightfully mad thing.”

        Brevis stopped—not because he was anywhere near remotely finished with his ravings, but because a pair of darkly armored guards were being pointed in the direction of the fountain. The two millitia ponies swiftly galloped that way.

        “You there! Halt!”

        “'You there? '” Brevis blinked. “That is not my name! Or—if it is—it would explain why I've forgotten it, because it is repeated so terribly often! BraHaHa! Zoop!” He leaped upwards with surreal athleticism and bucked the broadside of a lantern, propelling his body towards a second-story balcony which he promptly alighted and ran down the length of, making a glorious exit. “Chase the madness all you like, oh Dredgemaners!” His voice echoed cacophonously across the gnarled houses, houses, houses that he scaled in his distant flight. “The only way you'll ever catch it is if you sit down, breathe, and realize that it is inside yourselves already, just like the Biv did!”

        “Biv did” echoed across the granite walls surrounding the courtyard, until it was drowned out once more by the apathetic crowds of Dredgemane clomping across the sea of cobblestone. The two guards muttered under their breaths and galloped in futility down the street in rapid pursuit of the runaway mule. Harmony and Pinkie were left alone once more... alone in the center of gray and uninteresting life.

        “What exactly is he called again?” Harmony numbly remarked.

        “'Brevis'.”

        “He certainly doesn't live up to that monicker, now does he?”

        “Heeheehee!” Pinkie Pie giggled and trotted down one of the adjoining streets. “Oh Har-Har, you're such a clinic.”

        “I think you mean 'cynic',” Harmony mumbled and strolled after her. “I can't believe your parents ever let you hang out with a homeless cretin like that.”

        “They didn't let me do anything.” Pinkie Pie gently hummed with a happy bounce to her trot. “Which is why I had to sneak out of the farmhouse and gallop into town on my lonesome.”

        “All to hang out with that 'Brevis' character?”

        “Pfft. No. He might think the world revolves around him, but I had a whole new world to spin for myself. Did you know that, by the age of seven, I had never eaten candy, petted a dog, danced to music, played a trombone, smelled flowers, or ridden a barge?”

        “I always thought—” Harmony did a brief double-take at the last description. Once again, she shrugged it off and resumed, “I always thought that one's life shouldn't be measured by indulgences.”

        “But don't you get it?” Pinkie Pie grinned wide. “I once was a pony who thought that life was something boring and stuffy, where to do stuff—so long as it was different stuff than what you were used to doing—would be a crime!” She lifted her snout up towards the misty air of Dredgemane and bounced proudly. “That is why, from age eight and onwards, I told myself that I would not see the next sun set until I had done something new that day that I had never done before. And I've been living that life ever since!”

        “What changed?” Harmony asked, glancing over with genuine curiosity. “What changed to make you live so experimentally from then on?”

        “Heeheeheee... ” Pinkie's blue eyes rolled around in her head. “'She saw the bright shinies! 'Hee hee hee haa haa haa! La la la la laaa... ” She strolled ahead of Harmony like a pink cloud.

        The last pony raised an eyebrow. She wasn't smiling, but she wasn't frowning either. She followed along as Miss Pie led them on the first leg of Marble Cake's delivery rounds. For a brief moment, the infernal stack of baked items had lost their weight atop Harmony's Entropan back. Perhaps it was all in her head that whole time.

        The afternoon of dessert deliveries was an educating thing for Harmony, insomuch that it repetitiously revealed to her a truth that she had been observing ever since she and Pinkie Pie had marched into Dredgemane to begin with. The town was a gray, ancient, and relatively soulless hovel of unenthusiastic ponies caught in the iron grip of their daily routines, but when Pinkie so much as stepped one hoof into the room, that single solitary chamber of bodies lit up like a tiny lightbulb. Frowning faces bore brief-but-real grins as Pinkie Pie sauntered in and spread her chirping voice as she likewise spread cookies and doughnuts for Ms. Marble Cake. Factory workers, carpenters, cleaning fillies, clerks, and various merchants briefly paused whatever it was they were doing to hear what absurd things the candy-colored pony had to say, or tried to say. It was as if Pinkie's visitation to the place of her foaling was a cosmic thing of destiny, and everypony within a breath's toss had to stop everything altogether and pay reverence to a secret queen once more parading through the streets she grew up in. What was more, the Dredgemaners did not appear to be obligated in any fashion to put their lives on pause for the sake of greeting Pinkie. They talked to her with an enthusiasm that came from the bottom of their hearts, proving that they still had hearts to begin with.

        Harmony observed all of this from a numb cloud that followed Pinkie's bouncing motions like a copper caboose to a peppermint train. She understood all of the smiling faces and random bursts of laughter, but she couldn't bring herself to feel it. It wasn't so much that she was trying to be a stick in the mud; the last pony simply wasn't capable of sharing in the reverie that Pinkie Pie waved around like a billowing flag.

        Perhaps the reason was because the scavenger from the future saw deeper into the whole spectacle than even Miss Pie could ever bother observing. Indeed, the earth pony's passing visitations brought smiles to the faces of random Dredgemaners, but Harmony had the audacity to glance back at those same ponies when she and her anchor were leaving. As soon as the passing pink bubble of euphoria surged through the room, those blessed smiles and grins left. The citizens of that town were once more suspended in the same gray miasma within which they had been drowning before Pinkie Pie ever cantered through their colorless and regimental lives.

        Harmony knew very little about this “Brevis” character to whom she had been briefly introduced, and she understood even less about what impact he may have had on Pinkie Pie. Were they master and apprentice? Were they teacher and protege?

        Whatever the case, Harmony instantly saw a common connection between Pinkie and the town's bum mule. They were both enthusiastic souls who, however absurd, fancied themselves cures to a grand ailment that supposedly blanketed the depressed world within which they lived. Yet, as the grayer and grayer extremities of Dredgemane made themselves evident to Harmony during the length of hers and Pinkie's delivery route, the last pony realized that Brevis and Pinkie were nothing more than brief and pointless healing salves that addressed the symptoms of the beleaguered town but could do nothing to root out the cause of Dredgemane's gloom, assuming there was ever a “cause” to begin with.

        As for the “Royal Grand Biv” —be it a he or a she—Harmony figured the phantom character was no more successful a character than either Pinkie Pie or Brevis. Dredgemane was a dark town in a dark world in a dark universe that would swallow into oblivion any and all lights that ever dared to pierce the black clouds of eternity. It was that way in the past, and it would be that way in the future—only tomorrow's Wasteland possessed two different mad souls: one was Spike and the other was Scootaloo. There was essentially no difference between filling a stone statue with rainbow water and resurrecting a dead Sun to a world of scorched rock.

        Harmony knew that, and that was why she couldn't smile... or laugh.

        After all, you're the only one who's ever been eternal. Jumping twenty-five years back and forth across your obsidian legacy can only grant me a tiny piece of the picture that you have undoubtedly fitted the outlines to. I like to think that, ages ago, I realized fighting you was a futility that no soul could ever hope to succeed at, much less the last soul of all ponydom.

        What is it about you that inspires so many living things to strive so hard to be that which they can never be? Have you taunted us? Have you ridiculed us? Have you dangled before our hungry faces a glittering jewel of fake promises, of things that we want but can never have?

        You could very easily have been the end to all of us centuries ago, much less two and a half decades ago. It surprises me, with all of the ambitious calamities of Equestrian history, from the Chaos Wars to the Lunar Republican Uprising, that we hadn't brought about the end to our legacy much sooner than the Cataclysm.

        I keep wondering what I will find when I map the truth in the Onyx Eclipse, assuming there is even a truth in it at all. Will I find out that the Cataclysm was something designed by hooves? Was it the result of a horribly ambitious magical experiment, when somepony or some spirit made a dark pact with the stars? Was the Cataclysm something that could have been avoided if we simply stopped trying and learned to respect you as much as we feared you?

        Dredgemane was more than just an accidental escapade on my behalf; I realize that now. I needed to be in Dredgemane more than Pinkie Pie needed me to be there. I needed to understand the barriers that stood in the path of my and Spike's goal to rebirth the Sun and Moon. I needed to understand what it was that made this entire experiment just as absurd as it appeared to be before I ever daringly took that first leap through green flame.

        I needed to understand you, and how you were fitting into everything. The eternal legacy of Equestria was at stake, and you are essentially eternity itself. How would my and Spike's accomplishments measure up to you? Was it pathetically bold of us to have forgotten about you up until then?

        It is so very tragically easy to forget about you. Everything that has ever lived has made a habit out of doing it. How ironic, then, that all creatures with an ounce of sentience has only ever wanted to be remembered, the one thing that they have constantly been denied?

        I've never bothered forgetting you. Well, perhaps there was a time in my foalish years when I did, but that was because I was so incredibly mad at you. In ways, I still am, but that comes and goes like the ritualistic thunder of a passing stormfront. I have lived so many years in full awareness of what your very real presence means in this world, in a land devoid of all the souls that had brazenly tried to ignore you in the way that I no longer can.

        Perhaps that makes me the sacrificial lamb of all ponies that ever came before me. I'm suffering on a daily basis for the ignorance of my own blood, boiling down through the arteries of time to fill me with a perpetual and unworldly numbness that trumps any and all Entropan limbs. How fitting, then, that I'm tossed like a fishing lure into the blind epilogue of the past, presenting myself like a prisoner before an execution, exposing the softer parts of my soul-self to the stabbing truth that only I witness with apocalyptic clarity.

        That truth is that Equestria never saw it coming. Even if the Cataclysm was to happen a thousand years from my day of birth, we never would have suspected a thing. We were too busy disrespecting you, believing whole-heartedly that our tiny and paltry concerns were far more worthwhile in the weight of all things everlasting.

        Dredgemane, I suspect, was the closest thing that came to embracing the truth. But even then, it never took the plunge into the bright exorcism of shiny clarity beyond. Instead, the town was complacent enough to wallow in the misty fringes of your perpetual darkness. There is a calm security in that gray cloud. I know it, because I have lived so many years there myself, within you. The only reason I haven't embraced the “bright shinies” myself is because I know that there is no point to it. Life, for the most part, is an exercise in patience, in waiting for a magical purpose to announce itself to an equine soul eventually, though it fatefully takes an entire lifetime to illuminate that awareness, in that there may never be an awareness at all.

        I told Spike that I was going back to Pinkie Pie's past to be an observer. That was still true, even as I followed her through the streets of her dismal town, passing out desserts like so many trivial hopes in a world about to die. I had stars to map, an Onyx Eclipse to unravel, and a doomed Equestria to piece together in my mind. Still, there was another puzzle that had constantly been vexxing me—not just during the experiment but throughout my entire life, and I had to figure it out... I had to figure you out as I had to figure the Cataclysm out. Otherwise, I would never truly grasp if my ventures into the past had any purpose to begin with. If you can't be overcome, then what is the point?

        “As a matter of fact, I am from Canterlot.” Harmony adjusted her beret as she sat on the bar stool. “My name's Harmony, and I work for Her Majesty's Court. I'm here with Miss Pie to conduct an astronomical study of—”

        “Really? That's very fascinating!” An orange unicorn with a black jacket nodded. He bore a bush of brown mane hair framing a shattered horn. “Say, Miss Harmony, could you excuse me for one moment?” That uttered, he swiveled around on his stool, snarled through angry teeth, and smashed a wine bottle straight through a patron's cranium next to him.

        “Holy—!” The hapless earth pony bloodily gurgled.

        “Haaugh!” The unicorn pounced on him in an orange blur, shoving the flailing equine to the floor of a crowded and cacophonous saloon in the center of Dredgemane. “Hold out on me for the third week in a row, will you?!” He repeatedly slammed the pony's bleeding skull against the soot-stained tile, forming cracks in the surface. “Give me my friggin' bits back, you spineless piece of drunken meat, or I'll rip your kidneys out and feed them to parasprites!”

        Harmony's twitching eyes were wrenched from this bar-brawl by the sound of a high-pitched shriek. She looked up to see a satin-dressed dancer on the brightly-lit stage of the place kicking the hoof loose of a tipsy customer below. “No touching unless you plan to pay, you pig!” She removed her feathery headdress and slammed it down the throat of the colt, gagging the pony as he fell back through a crashing table surrounded by laughing onlookers. “Choke on that, ya mangy freak!”

        Another crashing sound. Harmony glanced to her right peripheral to see a bouncer slamming a splintering chair across the backside of a yelping, rosy-cheeked pony before tossing the offending soul out through a pair of swinging doors into the gray cobblestone of Dredgemane beyond. The muscular stallion dusted his hooves off and decidedly sauntered past the orange unicorn beating a patron to a bloody pulp. The bouncer merely rolled his eyes, grabbed a half-empty glass from a sleeping patron's table, and wandered off into the back with a flick of an indifferent tail.

        Another crashing sound. The nearby brawl had traveled its way through a stack of serving pitchers along the bar counter, dousing Harmony's Entropan and noticeably shivering limbs with errant sprays of shattered glass. She stirred uncomfortably in the stool where she was seated, utterly smothered by the smelly, cackling, drunken lengths of this den of drink and vice.

        “I mean it! Give me back the bits you owe me!” The unicorn hoisted his quivering victim up and snarled into his face. “Or do I have to get ugly?”

        Other patrons lingered in the background, murmuring to one another:

        “Pfft—Where's Bruno gone when you need him?”

        “Off to the back to drink, what else? What's going on?”

        “Oh, it's 'ol Professor Vimbert. He's at it again.”

        “Hah! Who can blame him?! Third week in a row that the Quagmire Brothers have held out on the sap. No-good cheapskates: they deserve what's coming to them!”

        “Still, can somepony stop this bedlam? Miss Plots' number is up next. I don't need to listen to all this crap.”

        “Very well. Hey guys, wanna lend a hoof?”

        “Sure.”

        “Fine.”

        “You grab Vimbert from the front, that broken horn of his scares me.”

        On cue, a cloud of equine souls hobbled up and pulled the raving orange unicorn off the twitching victim. “Vimbert” growled and thrashed, ultimately being hoisted away in the other drinkers' hooves. “This isn't over, Celestia-dang-it!” He snarled and spat down at the earth pony. “I'm getting my bits back from you and your brothers even if I have to do something that lands me on the chopping block! I mean it! None of you are safe!”

        “Calm down, Vimbert, eh?” one pony grabbing him hissed.

        “Yeah.” Another nodded. “It ain't worth this bloody hooplah! You should know better!”

        “Yeah, you're a civil pony—Or at least you once were! Pfft—Hahaha!”

        “Hah hah hah!”

        “Nnnngh!” Vimbert bucked two of the ponies off him with a remarkable show of strength.

        “Whoah—!” The two stallions barely managed a breath as they slammed into the rattling bar counter on either side of a flinching Harmony.

        Vimbert wrestled the last clambering pony off him and stood in place, staring and dragging his hooves through the stained tile in a threatening manner. “Fat load of good you ignoramuses are doing! I came here to drown in my sorrows, not to be mocked by cheapskates or scoffed at by beer-guzzling morons who wouldn't know what a death wish was if it galloped up and bit them!”

        “Jeez! Calm down, will ya?!” The ponies stood up, straightening their tousled manes. “Don't get your horn bent out of shape—Whoops! Too late, eh pal? Snkkt—Hahahaha!”

        Harmony sweated, glancing from figure to figure. The orange unicorn looked ready to tear a new trench through the bowels of Dredgemane. She pondered briefly if she and her Entropan limbs should intervene—

        Then Pinkie Pie suddenly bounced into the picture, having returned from delivering the second-to-last of Ms. Marble Cake's goods to the bartender. One final box of baked cookies rattled atop her flank as she stood with remarkable bravery directly between Vimbert and the laughing ponies he was staring down.

        “Oooh! What did I miss? Huh? Huh? Tug of war? Y'know, a game of tug of war is a lot more entertaining with a rope.” A bright gasp. “Hey! Want me to be the rope? I promise I won't burn your hoofsies!”

        “Shove off, kid.” Vimbert snarled and made to march past her towards the smirking patrons at the bar counter. “You don't owe me any bits or apologies, so there's no need for your skull getting in the way of my wrath.”

        “Awwww, come on, Bert!” Pinkie smiled unabashedly in his orange face. “Must you be so angry all of the time?”

        “Only because life has to suck all of the time!” He grumbled and motioned with his hollowed-out horn. “Now move—”

        “Doctor Pinkie thinks she knows exactly what your problem is!” She continued bouncing in front of his path. “You came here to drink and get your bits back when, all the while, you really only want to hit something! So, since I'm here, why don't you go on ahead and hit something! Get it out of your system!”

        “Uhhmm... M-Miss Pie... ?” Harmony wincingly hissed her way.

        Vimbert glared at Pinkie Pie. Pinkie Pie grinned back. “Nnnngh!” With one firm swing, Vimbert's hoof flew violently across Pinkie's cheek. The impact crackled like a gunshot. Pinkie spun twice from the blow and landed in a candy-colored slump on the tile floor.

        All noise drowned out from the room. Every conscious drinker who was inside the saloon craned their frazzled manes to glance over. Harmony was beside herself with a deafening, Entropan heartbeat. “Pinkie Pie!” She gasped and slumped down to her knees beside the limp filly. “Are you okay—?”

        “Woo!” Pinkie rolled up to her haunches, grinning and rubbing a fresh bruise on her left cheek. “That was a good one, Bert! That could have knocked the helmet off of Nightmare Moon! Hey!” She bounced up to her feet before a dazedly blinking Harmony and giggled. “Wanna try it again? I bet if you hit me hard enough, my head would become a helmet for Nightmare Moon! She'd be a lot less scary with a pink noggin', don'tcha think?”

        Vimbert blinked at her. Then a strange thing happened; he chuckled. After a deep-throated fit of laughter, the transformed equine wrapped a hoof around Pinkie's shoulder and smirked. “You're something else, Miss Pie. Somehow I wouldn't doubt it if a whimsical mind like yours was capable of deducing the great mysteries of ages long gone.”

        “You mean like who built the Great Pyramares?”

        “Yeah, sure, whatever.” Vimbert nodded towards a local bartender. “Two drinks:one for me and Quarrington's zany kid here. Double vodka.”

        “Cherry Sarsaparilla!” Pinkie smiled through her bruise. The saloon briefly cascaded down a series of chuckling voices and stomping hooves before returning to the usual hum of drunken reverie and random whistles directed towards the stage. Miss Pie sat down in time to receive a bubbly bottle of pink soda sliding against the crook of her hoof. “Hmmmm... Hee hee. What I wouldn't give for a beach sunset to sip this to. I suppose I could press my hooves to my eyelids until it felt like I was watching a sunset. You don't suppose that's dangerous to my vision, eh, Har-Har?” Pinkie Pie blinked, smiling. “Har-Har, how are you holding up?”

        “Oh!” Harmony jolted. “I'm fine.” She knelt, picked up the white box of cookies, and sat nervously between the pink pony and the suddenly pacified unicorn. “Just fine.” She gulped and glanced with a frazzled black mane towards the lengths of the bustling place. “I'm doing... doing okay. Yup, nothing new to report from my end.”

        “Awwwww... ” Pinkie Pie made a pouty face. “Poor Har-Har! All of this time I took talking with Mr. Stonewheat at the back of the bar, I hadn't even considered how you might be faring.”

        Harmony exhaled calmly. “Oh, it's quite fine, Miss Pie. I've seen much worse than this place.”

        “You must be dying for a drink!” Pinkie beamed and waved a hoof across the counter. “Hey, barkeep—”

        “What? No!” Harmony snorted. “That's not what I meant at all!”

        “Silly filly, I know you're a representative of the Royal Court! I was only gonna suggest a soda.”

        “I'm fine,” the last pony snarled. “I'm not thirsty. All I need is to keep my hooves on the floor.”

        “Try a bottle of late Third Century cognac,” Vimbert said, pouring the volume of his double-vodka into a silver flask branded with the letter “V” '. “Then you'd become the floor.”

        “Who asked you?!” Harmony flashed him a frown, then instantly deflated from his return glance with a nervous smile. “... M-most esteemed unicorn, s-sir.”

        “Pfft. Whatever.” He took a ridiculously long swig from his flask.

        Harmony blinked. She swiveled on the stool to face Pinkie. “Tell me that we're done with this place.”

        “Why should we be?” Pinkie was busy spinning several giggling revolutions on her own stool. “Don't you find this place fun?”

        “Fun?!” Harmony nearly wretched. She glanced across the lengths of the saloon. In a blink, she saw ogres and goblins and dirigible dogs leering beneath a sick halo of Wasteland lanternlight. Another blink, and once the Dredgemane drinking hole had returned, she wasn't sure where she'd rather not be the most. “Miss Pie, this place is miserable. The ponies who come here have nothing else to turn to. Can't you see that?”

        “I see lots of rosy cheeks and laughing faces.” Pinkie took a mighty sip of her sarsaparilla, gulped, burped, then paused to tongue the inside of her bruised cheek in thought. “Well, I also see spilled blood and chipped hooves. But mostly the rosiness and the laughingness.”

        “Doesn't this place bother you in the slightest?”

        “If you like, we can go back out into the street! I bet that would cheer you up, Har-Har!” Pinkie drank again.

        Harmony opened her lips to respond to that, but stumbled briefly on a potential layer of meaning in Pinkie's words. “And you call me sarcastic?”

        Pinkie Pie was rather oblivious to that statement, for she was busily raising the drinking end of the sarsaparilla bottle to her squinting eye and tilting her gaze towards the ceiling. “Hey! Look at me! I'm a Canterlotlian Clerk and I'm looking for stars! Oooooh! Aaaaah!” She gasped and sputtered as a sloshing curtain of sudsy drink splashed all over her face. She spit, gargled, then gasped. “Dear Princess Celestia, I have seen the heavens and they are full of bubbles!”

        “Grrrr... ” Harmony's copper features boiled scarlet from beneath. “Miss Pie... ”

        “Oh come on, Har-Har! You have to give it up for that one!” Pinkie Pie grinned.

        The air suddenly filled with a pungent perfume of cherry blossoms and jasmine. A deep-voiced filly was clearing her throat, and Pinkie Pie swiveled to find herself under the gaze of a saucily dressed dance mare.

        “Do you have an ID, young lady?” The pony asked with a waggle of painted eyelashes.

        Pinkie Pie gasped wide, shook the soda dry from her mane, and leaped off the stool to hug the mare with joyous forelimbs. “Pepper! It's so super terrifically awesome to see you! I thought you had moved to Fillydelphia!”

        “Pffft—Me?” The mare smirked. “Would I depart for the lap of luxury while abandoning this dump?” She stood back and fluffed a feather-stabbed mane of flowing scarlet hair. “What do you take me for, sugah? My heart belongs to Dredgemane now and forever, along with other body parts. Heheheheh.”

        “Heeheeheehee!”

        “Ehhhh... ” Harmony gulped and nervously leaned forward. “And you are?”

        “Pepper Plots, the hottest slice of oats that this side of Equestria ever did see.” The mare mocked a curtsy and winked the last pony's way. “Getting your R&R all good and fine, soldier girl?”

        “Huh?” Harmony blinked, then rolled her eyes as she nearly tossed the infernal beret to the floor. “Look, I'm just your average filly.”

        “That's what they all say... at first. Heheheh.”

        “Heeheehee—Oh Pepper, you so funny, girrrrrl!” Pinkie Pie waved a feminine hoof and smirked.

        “Laugh on your own time.” Harmony grumbled. She grabbed the beret and held it out before the noisy saloon. “Anypony want a free hat? It's on the house—Celestia knows it's the only dang thing in this place that is.”

        “Silly Har-Har.” Pinkie smiled pleasantly. “Don't gamble with Daddy's hat!”

        “I'm not gambling! I'm throwing it away—”

        “I said.” Pinkie's blue eyes suddenly swam with a dreadful glistening, like a sea of serrated knives breaking the surface of a hissing soul. “Do not gamble with the holy beret.”

        Something deep inside the time traveler trembled. She slapped the thing back on her skull and huddled on the edge of her bar-stool, clutching her lower limbs with a foalish trembling.

        Pinkie's grin returned just as brightly as it had vanished. She turned to Pepper and chirped pleasantly as if the proverbial shark fins of her glare had never surfaced. “Y'know, I never did thank you enough for lending me that dress of yours when my friends and I stopped by on the way to Appleloosa!”

        “Heck, I've got plenty more where that came from,” Pepper chirped. “There isn't a seamstress in town who's not at my beck and call when the need comes. If there's one thing I never run out of in this place, it's bits—golden or naughty. Heheh. Still, I can't refuse a chance to say 'hello' to my favorite farmer's daughter.”

        “Ahem.” Harmony cleared her throat and faked a smile in the mare's direction. “So, you and Miss Pie here go way back?”

        “Sugah, I knew 'Miss Pie' here since she was in a training bridle. I'd have taught her everything I knew if Goodly Brevis hadn't gotten to her first.”

        “I... see... ” Harmony couldn't resist a noticeable wince.

        “In a day and age where ponies are too afraid to so much as talk to each other, Pinkamena knows just the right way to get in your face. Isn't that right, darling?”

        “Heeheehee! Yupparooni! A lonely world is a boring world!”

        “Which is the least I can say about these poor, love-starved saps who waltz through Dredgemane from far and wide.” Pepper Plots smirked the orange unicorn's way. “How about you, Vimbert? Are you a lonely pony?”

        “Choke on a garter belt, ya tart.”

        “Hmm, charming as always.”

        Suddenly, another painted filly hollered from the far side of the saloon. “There you are, Pepper! You've got a visitor!”

        “I've got nothing!” Pepper barked back over the heads of the many patrons. “I'm on stage in less than ten minutes!”

        “He said he only wanted to see you for a quick chat! He's some passer-by who you know well!”

        “Oh yeah?” Pepper squinted. “Where's he at?”

        “He said he'd be waiting in the green room!”

        “Green room... Green room... ” Pepper thought out loud. Then a bright spark lit up in her emerald eyes. “Ooooh... Nick. Hubba hubba.” She professionally stifled a giggle, adjusted her dress, and sashayed away, attracting the swiveling heads of many a gazing customer. “Talk to ya later, Pinkie. Be a good girl; Celestia knows I won't.”

        “Heehee... Whatever you say, Pepper!”

        “Uhm... ” Harmony gulped and leaned in close to Pinkie to whisper. “Miss Pie?”

        “Yes, Miss Har?”

        “Did you notice something just now?”

        “Uhhh, duh!” Pinkie Pie shook the empty sarsaparilla bottle, eyeing the insides of it for remaining drops of soda. “What stallion in his right mind names himself 'Nick'?”

        “Er, no... ”

        “Cuz that's no way to get popular if you ask me!”

        “Your friend! Pepper! She's... ” Harmony chewed on her lower lip. “If I didn't know any better, I'd say she was a working filly.”

        “Pfft! Of course she is! A pony's gotta earn bits in this economy somehow!”

        “No, I mean... ” Harmony winced at her own words. “I think she's a filly of the night.”

        “Well, if she was a filly of the day, she'd get a sunburn, don'tcha think?”

        “Ughh.” Harmony slumped her chin against the bar counter. “I give up.”

        “Always a salvageable option,” Vimbert muttered from aside.

        Harmony glared at the orange unicorn. “Why are you still here?”

        “Vodka.”

        “Yeah, okay.”

        Just then, the swinging doors to the front burst open and four ponies marched into the atrium of the saloon, followed by a booming voice: “Listen verily, you sinners and spreaders of iniquity!”

        “Oh great, just what my evening needed,” Vimbert moaned and took another grand swig of his silver flask.

        “Hey! The robes have arrived!” Pinkie grinned.

        “The what?” Harmony squinted.

        “At least that's what Brevis calls them! Look!” The earth pony pointed.

        Harmony swiveled on the stool to look. The entire saloon groaningly slowed to a silent lurch in response to these four newcomers. A pair of black-armored guardsponies stood, flanking two equine figures dressed in regal, flowing attire. One was an aged stallion, a tall and rigidly framed unicorn who briefly reminded Harmony of Pinkie's father, only that his hair was blacker than night and hung about his long neck like a funeral veil. He wore the purple velvety threads of an Equestrian cleric, of what church Harmony didn't know, but the last pony was educated enough to guess. Situated beside this tall and imposing figure was a younger, frailer unicorn slightly older than Inkessa's. He wore a modest brown robe that complemented the equally unassuming bowl of sharply cut mane hair that framed his forlorn expression as the colt stood wiltingly beside his frowning mentor.

        “Hear my words of warning, or else fear the wrath of Sacred Gultophine Herself!”

        “'Wrath of Gultophine'?” Harmony murmured, her face contorting sickly.

        “Not too terribly dramatic for the likes of Bishop Breathstar,” Vimbert muttered.

        “Yeah, sure. But seriously, those words—”

        “Pssst!” Pinkie Pie leaned in and whispered into Harmony's copper ear. “That's young Deacon Dawnhoof standing beside him. Isn't he handsome? I mean, for a priest-in-training?”

        “Uhh... . I guess?” Thud. Harmony's wings stuck up. She hoisted the turquoise vest down over them and snarled over her shoulder. “Dang it, Pinkie!”

        “Heeheeheee!”

        Bishop Breathstar cleared his throat. With an impervious frown, the aged, milk-colored unicorn boomed his voice throughout the lengths of the paralyzed saloon. “Our blessed town of earth pony tradition and faithfulness to the spirit of Gultophine has been assaulted once more with banal malevolence of an unpardonable nature! Undoubtedly, those of you sober enough to have taken notice of the Alicorn statue in Town Square has found the effigy dry of its usual, fountainous display! This is because, last night, our resident phantom miscreant made the atrocious decision to poison the water supply to the fountain with an unsightly chemical! Alas, despite the rigorous lengths to which our beloved Mayor Haymane has attempted to remedy the situation, the shadowy figure known as the Biv has struck again!”

        At the end of this mighty speech, it was a series of slurring cheers—instead of gasps—that the priest managed to elicit from the uncivil crowd. Several laughing faces scoffed at the Gultophine cleric, stomping their hooves at the merest hint of the criminal name uttered to the soot-stained walls of the place.

        Bishop Breathstar recoiled as if an invisible catapult had launched a cow into his chest. He gasped and frowned, shaking his white horn like a vicious spear towards the many rolling faces he furiously addressed:“It is no laughing matter! This incorrigible Royal Grand Biv is a blight upon our good town! He has no respect to order, to dignity, to the blessed wheels of commerce and industry! Everything that this town thrives on, everything that the mighty town of Dredgemane has accomplished, everything that provides your drunken souls with the luxuries that you so frivolously squander like the fools that you are—it is all because of the ethic of hard work and cooperation that the good Mayor Haymane has instilled in everypony here! Now, this Biv seeks to undermine everything that has been so mightily established over the past two decades! This town was founded long ago—out of the grave of Consus—to be a living monument to the spirit of Gultophine who has given all things a chance to live and thrive in a world turned black by the horror of the Sundering! The least you could all do is show an iota of concern over the inane forces that seek to suck Dredgemane dry of its essential divinity!”

        “Hey! Speaking of 'suck dry', put a horseshoe in it!”

        “Yeah! This ain't no chapel! Either have a drink or go back to a monastery, ya quack!”

        The guardponies shifted nervously. The young deacon winced. Bishop Breathstar merely frowned. “Scoff if you like! But travail upon mocking me no longer, for Mayor Haymane himself has sent me to this pit of sin for one purpose and one purpose alone! He has come to suspect that the true identity of the Royal Grand Biv couldn't possibly belong to any of the good, respecting, and civil ponies of the upper streets! There is every reason to believe that the true villain sits here, right in this very room! The Biv is among you wretched lot of disrespectful waifs and whoremongerers, and it is my official job—as both a speaker for Gultophine and an ear for the City Council—to search each and every one of you for colorful possessions indicative of the Biv's trademark tools of desecration!”

        As the entire saloon groaned in agonized disapproval, Pinkie Pie sat up straight in her stool. “Oooh! Oooh! Just like customs!” She grinned at Harmony and gestured with her forelimbs. “They make you do this one silly thing where you plant your hooves up against a wall and do squat-thrusts—”

        “I don't want to know.”

        “Deacon Dawnhoof!” Breathstar glared down at his inferior.

        The younger unicorn colt cleared his throat. Nervously reaching into a pouch of his brown robe, the sandy-colored pony magically levitated a scroll before his nervous face, unrolled it, and read the proclamation before the agitated crowd:“'On behalf of the Dredgemane City Council, and Commissioned by Mayor Haymane himself, all citizens located amidst the buildings of Carver Street must—without hesitation—submit to a thorough search by the town militia for signs of being accessories to the criminal vandalism as perpetrated by the mysterious figure publically labeled as the Royal Grand Biv. '”

        A cacophonous array of hisses and boos lit the air. In spite of it all, Bishop Breathstar stood tall and proud, as if he had just speared a pond full of helplessly flapping fish.

        “Your protests are heard,” the elder said. “Save them for the prayers to Goddess Gultophine. If any of you are to be found guilty of being an accomplice of the Biv's, only true retribution between your souls and the Giver of Life can bring forgiveness for your childish actions. As I so happen to be the town's first and foremost bridge between ponydom and our patron Alicorn, I take it upon myself to see this search accomplished, as I shall also see it upon myself to be a loyal ear to your confessions, should the following events bring your festering sins to clarity.”

        “Yeah, enough of this crap.” Vimbert spun about in his stool and spoke over a silver flask. “You want sins? I've got a heap of 'em. I confess: I'm the Royal Grand Biv.”

        Bishop Breathstar's eyes narrowed. “You, Mr. Vimbert?”

        “Sure, why not.”

        The elder unicorn frowned. “But the Biv has not been known to possess a horn, much less a shattered one.”

        Vimbert shrugged a pair of bored shoulders. “So? I'm sitting here in this bar, aren't I? You seemed sure of yourself when you told us that anypony in this saloon could be the Biv. What happened since forty-five seconds ago? Did you lose your priesthood in a fart?”

        “Oooh! Oooh!” Pinkie bounced in place. “Can I be the Biv? Can I? She's so awesome!”

        More laughter filled the saloon. Deacon Dawnhoof shifted uncomfortably. Breathstar rolled his eyes and groaned:“Quarrington's daughter. Just what I needed... ”

        “Hey! Can I be the Biv too?”

        “Yeah! Does the Biv get free drinks!”

        “If it means a free ticket out of the mineshafts, I wanna be the Biv!”

        “This is not a joking matter!” Breathstar frowned, his eyes lighting up briefly with hellfire. “This search shall be conducted as planned! No more delays! Haymane has sent me forth on this task, and I will not stop until I ascertain which one of you amoral cretins is—”

        “The Royal Grand Biv!” A third guard suddenly burst in through the saloon doors behind the clerics. Breathless, he continued shouting:“It's him! Or her! Or it! On the rooftops!”

        “Wh-What?!” Breathstar gasped, spinning so hard his robe almost flew off.

        “Right now! We need every able-bodied member of the militia! On the double!”

        “Rghhh... ” A rosy-cheeked colt disentangled himself from two dancing fillies and hobbled up from his chair. “I... rmmm... am a member of the—HIC—militia.” A slurring breath, and he collapsed through a clattering table of empty bottles.

        The guard winced, glanced at the first two, and nodded. All three galloped out into the gray streets of Dredgemane, and they weren't alone. A suddenly enthused crowd of patrons was swiftly stampeding out of the saloon, almost plowing over the two clerics as the pair gasped and stumbled through the surging flow of onlookers.

        “No! Wait! Stop! Desist!” Bishop Breathstar rambled in futility. “You are all still subject to a search! Nnngh—Not only do you disrespect the will of Haymane in this manner, but you are defying your spiritual intercessor to Goddess Gultophine!”

        “This is... getting really out of hoof... ” Harmony gulped. She glanced aside. “Miss Pie, everypony keeps talking about your dad. Maybe he can help sort things out—” She blinked, for all she saw at the bar counter was Pinkie's empty sarsaparilla bottle. The last pony flashed a look towards the front of the saloon.

        Pinkie Pie's bright body bounced up and down repeatedly through the surface of the surging sea of exiting patrons. “Wooo! Woohoo! Lemme see lemme see lemme see!”

        “Oh, for the love of oats!” Harmony hissed through clenched teeth, held onto her beret, and dashed out to catch up with her anchor.

        As the saloon emptied entirely, only a few unconscious or depressed souls remained. One of them was an orange unicorn in a black jacket, leaning over his flask alongside a bar counter.

        “Hmmph.” Vimbert took a swig, exhaled, and muttered. “'And so it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end. '”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        In the middle of a gray day submerged in an even grayer eternity, Dredgemane suddenly was alive. A roar of clopping hooves unleashed a hurricane of noise through the Town Square as several citizens galloped out from their various working establishments, donning black armor and helmets. A frenzied militia came into existence, weeding their way into the deepest nooks and crannies of the entrenched town. They came back into view, wheeling large cylindrical searchlights onto the cobblestone streets. Forcing onlookers to trot aside, they anchored the searchlights to the ground, lit the torches inside them, and proceeded to project wide swaths of platinum light towards the gnarled rooftops lingering above.

        Several hatted manes tilted skyward. The village's ponies squinted through the slivers of overcast light afforded to the thin ravines within which the whole of Dredgemane had been squeezed. The faces of brightly blinking foals stuck out of rusted windowpanes. Merchants trotted out from behind their shop stands to look upwards. Traders and delivery ponies paused in dragging their wagons. The cobblestone inscriptions of dead equines were briefly forgotten as every eye in the downtown canyon peered for a phantom streak of color above.

        Harmony panted and stumbled through the thick sea of bodies. She sweated profusely through to her Entropan skin. Nothing had prepared the last pony for the sensation of being smothered in a surging crowd of her own flesh and blood. It wasn't nearly as joyous an experience as she could have dreamed of. She bumped into several brown-garbed bodies before she remembered the common decency of excusing herself. Eventually, she slumped against a lamppost, shivering with a renewed panic as she found no solitary sign of her anchor.

        “Great... ” She grumbled to herself, straightening her amber-streaked bangs beneath a green beret. Halfway across the Equestrian continent, a proverbial Cloudsdalian chariot had slammed into her once again. “Whatever. Not like I was accomplishing anything with her anyways. You were right, Spike.”

        “Spike was right about what?” A pink hoof handed Harmony some popcorn.

        “Just about everything.” Harmony took the white kernels and shrugged. “I keep forgetting he's got three centuries ahead of me—” She stopped, bug-eyed. The last pony flung the kernels over her shoulder as she spun a glare towards a pink pony standing on the other side of the lamppost, munching on a bag of puffy treats. “You... It... That... ” She hissed. “How?!”

        “Mmmmf!” Pinkie Pie nearly choked, but grinned through her popcorn with a hoof outstretched towards the high walls of the ravine. “Theff Royaff Grammff Bifff!”

        Harmony glanced up, amber eyes squinting. The local militia tilted the searchlights so that they all converged on a clock tower just above the Dredgemane post office. As the face of the large steeple lit up, everypony in the thick crowd gasped and murmured. The clock hands had been painted in bright rainbow colors, and the numbers had all been turned sideways, outlined in similarly rambunctious pastel hues.

        However, that ludicrous urban defacing wasn't what elicited the audible response so much as the figure responsible for it. In an overtly dramatic stance, a pony-shaped perpetrator stood balanced on the edge of the minute hand like a proud rooster perched on the jutting crossbeam of a barn. As the converging searchlights swathed over it, a shimmering kaleidoscope of bright colors lit the air of Dredgemane. The Royal Grand Biv was briefly no longer a phantom. He, she, or it was garbed in a fantastic cloak of rainbow stripes, covering the perpetrator's entire body, billowing down from mane to flank. No single inch of the figure's true coat was exposed; not a single hair lit the misty ceiling of Dredgemane. A pair of ruby goggles flickered before briefly reflecting an entire scene of breathless, jaw-gaping gray souls staring up at it like it was a lost prophet dropped to the earth.

        Pinkie Pie gulped down a lump of popcorn and grinned wide. “Isn't she the most fantastic thing you've ever seen?”

        “It... She... ” Harmony's eyes twitched. Her heart was beating quickly, because every single shade of that being's colorful cloak stabbed her far more than any spectral signal she had ever built in her years of piercing the Wasteland. For a moment—a very warm and gasping moment—Scootaloo was a little foal again, and she was watching an immortal pegasus soul about to take wing and slice through the blue heavens with no care for rules, no notion of subtlety, and no fear of—

        “There he is!” A blue mule's voice cackled from where he hung off the length of a second story flagpole behind the shimmering scene. Brevis smiled upside down, his coattails dangling as he pointed a grimy hoof and howled, “Watch as he falls! The madpony summons a secret gravity with him! Who among you will be born tonight?! Who among you will fall with him! BraHaHa!”

        “Don't just stand there!” Bishop Breathstar stumbled out of the saloon finally, nearly tripping on his robe as he motioned with an ivory horn. “Apprehend that fiend!”

        A pair of militia ponies rushed up and operated separate ends of a net gun. “Ready! Aim! Fire!” There was a crackle of gun powder; a flowing net flew towards the clockface.

        The Royal Grand Biv spun like a rainbow tornado. Something glinted—a furious lightning. When the net soared onto the figure, it was met with a metallic ring. The canvas web exploded on the other side of the canyon in shredded ribbons. As gasps fluttered hotly into the air, the Biv galloped with a pitter-pattering sea of metallic clops across the rooftops and leapt toward an adjacent building.

        “He's getting away!” Bishop Breathstar shouted, following the swiveling sea of heads glued to the phantom's third story flight. “Net him already—”

        “He is not away! He is here! He always has been!” The bum mule sing-songed in the distance, his voice a meter-less percussion set to a throng of exploding net guns sending waves of flailing traps skyward. “It is we who are away, away from ourselves, away from our minds in this eternal exile from decency and deliverance!”

        The Biv leaped over one net, ducked another, and grasped onto the top of a lamppost. It swiveled—goggles glinting—and mutely flung a hoof at the militia ponies below. A dozen sparklers fell towards the cobblestone and exploded in prismatic confetti. Through the shower of spectral paper, the Biv dove over hundreds of Dredgemaners' gasping manes.

        Harmony flinched. Pinkie giggled. Both spun to see the Biv bouncing off the street and forcing two black-armored guards to collapse into each other, sprawling in a vain attempt to pounce on the fleeing daredevil.

        “It is not vandalism for which he is guilty!” Brevis danced gaily in circles, his eyes rolling back in his head under the roar of a dozen militia ponies galloping desperately after the runaway miscreant into the cold streets beyond. “It is knowledge! For he understands the brave truth of madness that keeps him alive and us only halfway there! And yet it is our fault for not listening, for even right now—he preaches to us! Yes he does! Yes he does! BraHaHa!”

        Bishop Breathstar panted, stumbling through the settling cloud of multi-colored streamers. A layer of confetti fluttered down and draped over his horn. He blinked cross-eyed at it, summoned a deep snarl from the essence of his ivory being, and flung the offensive piece of litter to the cobblestone below. “Confound this Biv! I have reached new levels of anger!”

        With a shuffling of hooves, Deacon Dawnhoof walked up through the thinning crowd of murmuring onlookers. “Teacher, it is written in the Chronicles of Gultophine: 'Anger is a crucible through which we know our truer self'.”

        “Do I not know that, child?!” Breathstar hissed. He suddenly flung his entire body down a calm, soothing inhale. In a matter of seconds, his entire complexion morphed into one of practiced tranquility. “Never mind. Let us return to the chapel to meditate and plan accordingly for the next chance we have to apprehend the sinner before the sin.”

        “Y-Yes, Bishop.” Dawnhoof bowed on bending legs and followed after his robed superior.

        Harmony stood numbly as the thick crowd of Dredgemaners shuffled off towards their usual routine. The heavy and surging sea of bodies had dissipated just as quickly as it had formed, and yet the last pony felt no elation as she was once more alone with her own quivering breaths. The town had ever so briefly come alive, and now it was back to the gray miasma it was when she, Inkessa, and Pinkie first strolled in there. She wasn't entirely sure what had nearly blossomed there in the shadow of the Biv's dramatic flight, but she knew all too well what continued to die in the absence of such a rainbow. It was something she was very much used to in her life.

        “Wooo!” Pinkie Pie nevertheless cheered jubilantly at the culmination of the haphazardly brief fiasco. “Everytime, without fail! Goosebumps!” She grinned wide and munched on the last of her popcorn before dumping the bag into a garbage can along the sidewalk behind her. “Still, nothing beats the first time that I saw her in action! Then it was positively Albatrossbumps! Those are like twenty Goosebumps apiece!”

        “Uh huh... ” Harmony squinted across the urbanscape, watching as several guards stumbled up to their hooves, helping each other recover from the Biv's exit that had shattered many of their nets and thrown armored ponies to the cobblestone. She narrowed her attention on one pair of guards in particular who were busying themselves with the mundane task of extinguishing a searchlight between them:

        “Dang it all! It's going to take forever to requisition a new net! At this rate, I'll have better luck throwing pebbles at the dang Biv!”

        “Did you hear how Bishop Breathstar was shouting at us like it was our fault?”

        “Well, if his buddy, Mayor Haymane, got his flank in gear, we wouldn't be having this problem!”

        “He has tried, y'know. The Council sent in a request to the Court of Canterlot for assistance.”

        “What kind of assistance?”

        “For all I know: the winged kind. These past few months, we've been stupidly chasing this punk from the streets for what little good it would do us!”

        “So when is Canterlot going to send us some better net guns?”

        “Net guns? Pffft! Screw that! What we're overdue on is a squadron of pegasus guards!”

        Harmony blinked. She chewed on her lip, glancing towards the offensively paint-splattered clockface stretching above the Town Square. The rainbow minute and hour hands spun backward in her mind, teleporting her to a lone cavern with a purple dragon where she struggled for a reason behind this lonely sojourn to an anchor of pink hilarity.

        The last pony was at the Applejack farm in time to confront an army of trolls. The “Canterlotlian Clerk” had shown up in time to help Fluttershy with a dying Capricorn. What if this Royal Grand Biv was about to meet its match?

        “But if you measure Albatrossbumps in Hummingbirdbumps... ” Pinkie continued in the background. “... then you have to break a Goosebump in half, because the exchange rate can't account for Hummingbirdbumps, especially in Mexicolt where they just scale every silly thing via Cockbumps—”

        “Yeah, that's cool. Hang on for a second if you would, Miss Pie.” Harmony trotted over towards the two guards. “Ahem. Excuse me, gentlecolts, but I couldn't help but overhear your situation.”

        “H-Hey!” One of them brightened and adjusted his black helmet, smirking at the beret on her mane. “I've got a cousin in the service! I've always wanted to enlist. Small world, huh?”

        “Ya-Huh. Look, the Mayor of this town made a request for Canterlotlian assistance, if I'm not mistaken?”

        “You could say that again. This Royal Grand Biv nonsense is making everypony's head on the Council spin! I can hardly do my delivery routes while having to jump into militia gear all the time to chase this rainbow moron.”

        “Well, it looks like your prayers have been answered.”

        The two guards blinked. They stared past Harmony, at Pinkie, at the rows upon rows of lampposts beyond—

        Harmony briefly frowned. “Me, you friggin' bucket heads.”

        “Oh! Uhm... R-Really?”

        “Yup. You want proof?”

        “Erm... ” They shifted nervously.

        At first, Harmony didn't know why they looked so pensive, but then it dawned upon her. With a clearing of her throat, she raised her turquoise vest just enough to show her copper wings. From their deadpan expressions, she realized that wasn't enough. So, she swiveled about and reached a hoof towards her flank. A pause, and she throated, “Try not to get a nosebleed, kiddos.”

        The Dredgemane guards politely said nothing.

        She slid her black trunks down just enough to show her emblazoned cutie mark. Once the royal crest had graced the torchlight sufficiently, she slid the hem of her pants back up and faced them directly. “Well? Is somepony going to point a Canterlot girl in the right direction?”

        The guards stared blankly. A deep rosy blush was shared between the two of them.

        Harmony rolled her amber eyes and cleared her throat for emphasis.

        The young militia ponies snapped out of it. With a deep breath, and they both nodded towards her. “Come with me,” one said and trotted firmly north towards the far end of the town's winding canyons.

        “Well then... ” Harmony smirked slightly to herself. “This certainly beats tossing cookies around.”

        “What does? Tossing cookies usually means I had a great party the night before!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “Eeep!” She yelped as she found herself being dragged away for once.

        The first moment I realized that trolls were infecting Applejack's farm, a part of me died inside. Her family lived in an era of warmth and peace; they did not deserve creatures of the Wasteland polluting everything that was beautiful about Sweet Apple Acres. When I ultimately battled those invasive miscreants above the family's cellar, my Entropan soul-self protected me from being seriously harmed. If I had to repeat my time traveling experiences with a far more vulnerable body, I would have fought the trolls with no less vigor. The Apple Family's tranquility was a sacred thing, and I was willing to do anything to maintain it, even if it risked the very fabric of my health or sanity.

        When the dying Capricorn projected the essence of its offspring into Dinky's horn, I must confess that I was far more concerned for Fluttershy than I was for Ditzy Doo's kid. I know that's a horribly selfish thing to admit, but it's true. I was overcome with shock and horror that something so tragic and disturbing could have disrupted the placid essence of Fluttershy's life. The yellow pegasus was so distraught and traumatized by the chaotic circumstance that I gladly did everything in my power to bring her back to a place of peace and structure.

        When I walked through the streets of Dredgemane, and I saw the Royal Grand Biv defacing public buildings, the citizens all around me gasped in awe. I could not share their brief and instinctual wonderment. As a matter of fact, I refused to.

        Dredgemane was a city of shadows. It was a dismal town of somber ponies making somber rounds for somber tasks. The place was anything but a bright and cheerful vacation spot, but it was alive.

        Dredgemane was alive and real and warm beneath the cold mists that wafted over the deep, winding trenches. That was because it was full of ponies—living and breathing ponies—and so long as the essence of Equestria existed, free of the consuming flames of the Cataclysm, then that was an Equestria that held meaning and purpose. That was an Equestria that breathed magic.

        There is no warmth in the Wasteland, none whatsoever. I know that. I am used to that. I have come to accept and deal with that. However, not a single bleeding piece of me could look at the whole of Dredgemane and see the Royal Grand Biv as anything but a blight. What was warm to Dredgemane was its structure, its regiment of labor and commerce, and its sacred respect for all that the Alicorn Sisters had given ponydom. To see a single solitary soul brazenly blemishing the simplicity of such a crutch that Dredgemane leaned on was worse than any troll army or Capricorn mishap, for the vandal's pranks held significance—it was willed into existence by an anarchist and malevolent sentience. I wouldn't stand for it.

        It was a while ago that I realized that the purpose of the experiment that Spike and I started was not just to bring light back to the Wasteland, but it was also to bring structure back to the world before the Cataclysm. Everytime I landed in the past, there was something for me to deal with. If I hadn't time traveled at all, then so many horrible things would have run their course without my interjecting hooves to have brought order to the chaos I encountered. Perhaps this was my role as the avatar of Princess Entropa; I was the fully functioning agent of time's immutability itself.

        Applejack was the element of honesty. Through dishonesty, I won her confidence and saved her farm. Fluttershy was the element of kindness. Through assertive and aggressive means, I led her and Ditzy through the heart of the Everfree Forest to save Dinky. Pinkie Pie was the element of laughter. In Dredgemane, I was the last pony to laugh at the Royal Grand Biv's antics, and that made me the right soul at the right time to put a stop to them and restore structure to that beleaguered city.

        It's rather funny, don't you think? By being a direct opposite to so many important elements, I nevertheless endeavored to bring harmony back to the lives of my hapless anchors. I didn't expect them to understand why I went about it the way I did. I couldn't even expect them to thank me. All I expected—all I wanted—was for them to be at peace... to experience harmony.

        I figured that I knew what was best for Pinkie Pie's hometown. Whether or not she was willing to assist me in the process of rooting out this “Biv” didn't matter. Being a pariah to my own quest for harmony was hardly a laughing matter.

        Bordering the northeast edge of the town's basin of meandering ravines was a steep cliff that rose significantly higher than the rest of the stony plateau that formed the gray landscape around Dredgemane. Beyond a double layer of thick cedar pikes, a series of long and winding wooden steps swam up the vertical cliff-face and led to a daring wooden structure fused to the granite surface of the rock wall. The building reminded Harmony of the M. O. D. D. in its architectural hilarity, and just like Pitt's future bar in the sky the structure was supported by several thick wooden lattices propped at forty-five degree angles between the gnarled floorboards of the building and the great chunk of mountain holding it up. There was hardly anything aesthetically pleasing about this audacious shelf of a building, but the manner in which it daringly defied gravity while so many other Dredgemane buildings were forced to cower in the deep, dark ravines below gave it a gravitas that assured nopony else but the mayor himself dwelled within.

        This gray-lit sight was briefly pierced by the image of a paper airplane slicing past Harmony's vision. She blinked and wrenched her amber eyes away from the gray overcast, away from the cliffside building, away from the one guard leading them up towards the steps, and towards a pink prancing pony at her side.

        “You know, that might land you in trouble for littering.”

        “It's only littering once it lands on the ground!” Pinkie Pie grinned wide.

        “Everything has to fall eventually.”

        “Heeheehee! That's what Brevis says!”

        Harmony went cross-eyed, then shook her snout viciously. “Not what I meant.” She frowned. “Seriously, how can a town as stiff and regimental as Dredgemane tolerate that bum mule?”

        “How can they not?” Pinkie smiled and bounced, bounced, bounced along. “Every town needs a Brevis.”

        Harmony managed the subtlest of smirks. “Is that why you moved to Ponyville? To 'spread the love', as it were?”

        “Nah. I was sent away after the Noodle Incident.”

        “After the what-now?”

        “Did you see how the Royal Grand Biv outran all of those guards?!” Pinkie Pie's voice galloped down a different subject's avenue. She and Harmony sashayed past a phalanx of Dredgemane militia and followed the one guard up the long, winding steps towards the Mayor's office above. “Isn't she just amazing? If she showed up in Ponyville for so much as a day, she'd become the Iron Pony overnight!”

        “How come you call the Biv a 'she' and Brevis calls it a 'he'?”

        “That's the thing about the Biv, Har Har. She's more of an idea than an actual pony.”

        “Oh horse hockey!” Harmony spat. “I just saw it with my own eyes! The Biv is nothing more than a law-breaking vagabond with a lot of tricks up its bridle!”

        “But the Biv still means more to you than you're already willing to admit!” Pinkie proudly smirked. “For instance, while she's a 'she' to me, and a 'he' to Brevis, she's still an 'it' to you! You can judge a pony's character by how they talk about the Biv.”

        “Since when were you a judge of character, Miss Pie?”

        “Since becoming a judge of pie gave me a tummy ache. I had to broaden my horizons. And speaking of which!” Pinkie pointed beyond the wooden railings of the steps they were ascending. “Check out the view! Don'tcha love it?”

        “It's just your village,” Harmony slurred and glanced south. “What's to see—?” She stopped in mid-utterance, blinking. Her amber eyes squinted and her hooves slowed, so that it actually took Pinkie's momentum for once to urge her along the ascending stairs.

        The winding canyons of Dredgemane were about as unassumingly dull from a towering perspective as the copper pegasus could ever have imagined. It was the manner in which the ravines were arranged that caught her by surprise. While the thin slivers of sundered rock criss-crossed at a few random intervals, the closer they dragged towards the east edge of town, the more and more the ravines converged into one thick and all-encompassing trench, like spokes adjoining to form a limb. If Harmony didn't know any better, she'd say that the thick web of coalescing canyons carved into the body of the stone plateau almost resembled—

        “Wingprints,” the last pony murmured, staring out towards the gray horizon and seeing more and more canyons carved out in the hollow impression of an enormous and positively equine shape. “Is this... Could this be the Grave of Consus?”

        “No, silly filly!” Pinkie smiled as the guard and two ponies finally made it to the entrance of the highly-placed building. “It's Mayor Haymane's place!”

        “No, Miss Pie, I meant—” Harmony suddenly stopped in her tracks as she saw Pinkie undergoing an inexplicable spasm. Her ears flopped, her eyelids twitched, and her knees wobbled. “Are... Uhm... Are you okay?”

        At the end of this inquisition, a door suddenly flew open—slamming into Harmony's Entropan snout. The copper pegasus grunted, seeing a spurt of green flame briefly, then a series of sparks lighting up her dizzied vision.

        “Unngh... ”

        “Dude!” The young guard frowned at the militia pony who had just opened the door. “Watch it! Do you have any idea where this filly's from?”

        “M-My bad.” The guard winced in the doorframe. “Overseer Sladeburn's visiting the Mayor inside. With the Biv out and about, you can't be too safe. I heard your clopping hoofsteps and panicked a little.”

        “A little? Just step aside, amateur.”

        “Why's your armor rattling so much? Did you see the Biv?”

        “I don't want to talk about it. I came here to escort the Canterlotlian to Haymane.”

        “A pony from Canterlot? Oh, praise Gultophine!” The guard stepped out of the doorway and smiled Harmony's way. “You! Have you actually come to... ” He paused and blinked at the sight of Pinkie Pie behind the time traveler. “... help us?”

        “Do we get our own net guns?” Pinkie beamed.

        “Miss Pie,” Harmony hissed and motioned with her beret as the guard from downtown led them inside. “Your indoor voice, please.”

        “Oooh, goodie! I haven't sang since I was last at Sugarcube Corner!”

        “Then invent a new indoor voice! One that involves a lot less singing and a whole lot more silence!”

        The two fillies were suddenly rocked to the core as a loud booming noise greeted them upon entering the front foyer of the building's dust-laden interior. Beyond the curtained double-doors that separated a rustic, miniature library from the Mayor's office, a grown stallion's voice could be heard rattling the nails of the wooden beams that held the high-altitude structure in place.

        “I'm telling you, Haymane, I've had it up to here with this Biv character! The militia you've set up is consuming far too many of my laborers! I have ponies who should be working the mines, and instead they're chasing after the tail of that rainbow lunatic you've let run the show in this town!”

        “Hmmph... ” Pinkie Pie briefly frowned and squatted beside a frazzled receptionist's desk. “A singing voice like that wouldn't last a week at Sugarcube Corner.”

        “Shhh!” Harmony hissed. She craned her neck and listened intently on the conversation transpiring beyond...

        “I assure you, Sladeburn, we're doing what it takes to bury the legacy of the Biv for good. Whoever this miscreant is, it's only one pony. One pony means one problem. Once that one problem is solved, things in Dredgemane will get back on track.”

        “Dredgemane will have nothing to go on if we starve the quarry of able-hoofed workers any longer!”

        “Starve? Overseer, you have four times the number of laborers in those mines than you did last year! If the estimates from the Equestrian Census are correct, then Dredgemane is making a substantial profit ahead of schedule this season!”

        “The Census is a weighted tool used by Her Majesty's loyal hoof-kissers! What do they know of the schedule I run here?! There's still an impossible quota for our facilities to meet. The Canterlot Industry Commission needs five more shipments of Arcanium by next Winter-Wrap Up in order to supply the new pegasus colony overseas. They're counting on the ingenuity of Dredgemane miners to provide them with this much-needed resource! Imagine the laughing-stock we would become if we fell short of delivery! Canterlot might switch gears and pay Stalliongrad for their exports instead!”

        “Your frustrations are greatly understood, dear friend, and they most certainly do not go unnoticed. I'll speak with the Council about coordinating a new routine with the militia. We may very well be able to spare you more workers if we acquire more volunteers from the tradesponies and local farmers. It's just that your laborers are so strong and capable at chasing down and tackling a figure as elusive as the Biv.”

        “Harumph! If that was the case, the Biv would have been taken down by now!” The double doors burst open and a dark-brown, frowning stallion in thick black workgear marched out, flanked by two muscular associates stained with similar soot. “Do all of Dredgemane a favor, Haymane,” Overseer Sladeburn growled, “And have that rainbow-colored waste of flesh torched alive!” He stomped out towards the entrance of the building, his every clopping step shaking the floorboards upon their suspended foundation.

        Harmony watched with silent attention. She glanced back towards the doors to see the one guard that had led them there murmuring something to the receptionist. The receptionist nodded, shuffled out from behind her desk, and trotted lightly into the gray-lit Mayor's office beyond.

        “Y'know, Overseer Sladeburn's not really a bad pony,” Pinkie chirped from aside. “He's just sniffed one too many tunnels full of coal.”

        “Who said he was a bad pony?”

        “Mmmm... Just about every miner I've ever met.” Pinkie hummed. “The ones who are still alive, at least.”

        Harmony glanced aside with a raised eyebrow.

        A voice cleared. Both fillies looked ahead. The receptionist stood before them, bowing her mane. “The Mayor will see you now.”

        “What?” Pinkie grinned. “He had blinders on all this time? —Whoah!”

        Harmony was shoving Pinkie forward by her flank. Soon, the two shuffled to a stop before a broad wooden desk. The office was an ornate assortment of bookcases, Equestrian antiques, and other archaic curiosities of Earth Pony design. Just like the streets of Dredgemane, there was nothing remotely colorful about the place. A deep dimness filled the room, mimicking the torch-lit ravines of the town that this stallion was officially responsible for. Beams of light, serenaded by dancing dust before a row of milky-curtained windows, illuminated the frail shoulders of an elder pony who stood across from the two visitors with a gigantic desk separating them like a barge in a sea of sighs.

        “I heard that you are from Canterlot,” the figure said from beyond the dust. His voice was about as thin as his silhouette, and twice as starved of something warm. “Could it be that this is an answer to my summons... from several months ago?”

        “Do forgive Her Majesty's Court,” Harmony spoke, carrying forth a vocal confidence she hadn't mastered since another time-jump centuries ago when she landed in the presence of Fluttershy and Captain Redgale. “Ahem. There have been many instances of great importance all across Equestria. The Royal Court respects Dredgemane and wishes to address its problems—”

        “With one pegasus?” Mayor Haymane leaned forward. His face came into the light, and it was a fragile looking thing, like a sad face carved out of golden ice. A thin yellow coat bled under bony cheekbones and a sharp blonde splotch of straw-like mane hair. “You are a pegasus, I gather.”

        “A bonafide cloud kicker!” Pinkie Pie suddenly chirped for the copper interviewee. “The wingest bonafide! Check it!” She kicked her hoof into Harmony's magical spot.

        The last pony jolted, and then her eyes shut exasperatedly. A groaning sigh, and she slowly lowered her feathers and turquoise vest. “I do hope that answers the question for everypony in attendance.” She reopened her eyes with a polite smile. “My name is Harmony, and I came as soon as I heard the word from Canterlot.”

        “Hey, Haymane!” Pinkie Pie waved with an electric grin. “How's it rolling?”

        At the word “rolling” , the Mayor groaned inwardly. His blue eyes darted between Harmony and the candy-colored soul. “Quarrington's daughter. What, pray tell, is she doing in your presence?” The Mayor squinted suspiciously at the last pony. “Not only does Canterlot tease our funny bones by sending only one Pegasus per our request, but they hire Miss Pie as a chaperone?”

        “Like I said... ” Harmony finished straightening her vest. “Equestria has had its share of problems lately. The Court's Guards are thinned out enough as it is. Either they sent me now, or they would have sent nopony for a good few weeks until they could summon the legion your heart desires. Alas, I am here, and I'm willing to help in anyway I can. As for... Miss Pie... ” Harmony shifted nervously. Every time she came to this moment of lucid lie-crafting, it became increasingly difficult to paint a convincing picture. Nevertheless, her amber orbs thoughtfully navigated the asteroid field of dust bits in the gray light ahead of her as she murmured, “She was already in Ponyville at the time that I was summoned to come to Dredgemane, and since she was planning on returning to her home town to visit her family—”

        Mayor Haymane saw straight through it. “You mean to tell me that the Court couldn't afford to send a pegasus already familiar with the landscape of our age-old town? They had to rely on this town's most notoriously uncouth filly to act as a guide?”

        Harmony winced. “It's n-not that. What I m-meant to say was—”

        “I'm on probation!” Pinkie Pie bounced and sang.

        The last pony blinked rapidly at that.

        Haymane glanced over. “Miss Pie... ?”

        “The Court has hired Har-Har here to be my probation officer!” The earth pony's blue eyes narrowed coolly. “I'm not allowed to leave her sight for even a second, or it's too the mooooooooooon with me!”

        “What, pray tell, were you finally punished for?”

        “Remember the Noodle Incident?”

        The Mayor visibly winced. “What Dredgemaner doesn't, child?”

        “Well, multiply that doozy by—like—over nine thousand doozies, and all of them scaring children.” Pinkie Pie giggled and blushed. “Not my proudest moment, but a filly's gotta learn, right?” She bounced in place with no less gaiety. “No big dealio! I've just gotta stick around this pegasus, do community service, and Bob's your uncle—like they say in Trottingham.” Pinkie Pie's face scrunched briefly. “Bob must get around to be the uncle to so many ponies... ”

        Haymane stared silently at the bright soul. He slowly gazed Harmony's way. “You have my pity.”

        “Uh huh. Yeah. Excuse us one second.” Harmony yanked Pinkie over by her straw hat and brought her snout-to-snout. “Pssst... Miss Pie? What are you trying to do?”

        “Pffft—Duh! I'm saving your skin, silly filly! You gotta admit, it's a way better explanation than 'I'm here to do a stargazing experiment in astronomy'!”

        “But I am here to do stargazing!”

        “Yeah—Snkkkt!” Pinkie Pie snorted a giggle. “And I'm Kim Coltdashian!”

        “Ladies... ?”

        Harmony took a deep breath and stuck her head out of the momentary huddle with a bright smirk. “Yes! I'm Miss Pie's... probation officer. Ahem.” She marched towards the desk. “But that doesn't mean I can't lend my skills to this needy town.”

        “And helping out is the best kind of volunteering I can possibly do!” Pinkie added. “It beats being homestuck!”

        The last pony sighed, her eyes closed. “She means 'under house arrest', not like it matters.”

        “Like I said,” the Mayor said with the slightest hint of a smirk. “You have my sympathy. But I imagine you also deserve my thanks.” He shuffled out from behind the desk in a sudden gliding movement. A strange series of squeaking noises filled the air. When he came into the full penumbra of the gray light, Harmony realized why. Mayor Haymane's rear legs were missing. Strapped to the elder pony's neatly suited body was a wooden rig with three wheels, so that he was balanced evenly between the rolling apparatus and his two natural forelimbs, one of which he stretched towards the pegasus in a polite gesture. “Welcome to Gultophine's Refuge. Do forgive my suspicious inquisition; I have been under a great deal of stress as of late. I assure you that I am most exceedingly pleased to have you come in this time of crisis.”

        Harmony did her best not to stare at the paraplegic pony's mechanism. She extended her own hoof and shook the Mayor's ritualistically. “I've seen the Biv in action. Now there's a pony that could put any town's militia in a bind, no matter how well-trained.”

        “It's more than just the mischievous antics of the Biv,” Mayor Haymane said, wheeling a few centimeters back as he re-steadied his two front limbs and stared up at her. “That miscreant has spun a web of confusion and chaos that has mired the straight-and-narrow vision of all faithful, hard-working ponies who give breath to this town's industry. In the last few months alone, fewer Dredgemaners have been attending Bishop Breathstar's sermons. Dozens—if not hundreds—of misguided youths are ignoring curfew. The mines are emptying of workhooves and the saloons are filling with drunkards. I fear dearly for the moral fiber of this town, Miss Harmony. The Biv is merely a physical manifestation of a trouble that haunts the holy Grave of Consus, and—like all symbols—the longer this phantom is tolerated, the more it will siphon all that is good and decent from the one place in Equestria that thrives on Gultophine's blessing alone.”

        “Then the key is to find and arrest this Biv?” Harmony asked. “Gultophine's law holds sway over not just life, but society as well, if I recall my readings of the Chronicles.”

        “Pffft—Fat chance of catching the Biv!” Pinkie Pie smirked. “She's—like—faster than the rainbow! And even if we did manage to chase her down, it wouldn't be a pot of gold at the end of everything! Instead, it'd be a swift hoof up our—”

        “Ahem.” Haymane motioned towards a set of gray-lit doors. “Miss Harmony, if you wouldn't mind the two of us speaking in private?”

        “Uhm... ” Harmony nervously shifted, glancing at her anchor, worrying over the scant forty or fifty meters that was afforded her Entropan attachment. “I'm not so sure if I'm legally allowed to let Miss Pie that far from my sight... ”

        Haymane wheeled over and opened the doors to a small balcony hanging off the side of the lofty building.

        “Oh. Well, okay then.” Harmony smirked slightly and trotted over. “Miss Pie, try not to... uhh... do any more 'Noodle Incidents' while I'm talking to the Mayor.”

        “Okie dokie lokie!” The candy-colored filly sat on her haunches and busied herself with another paper airplane scooped out of a pocket from her tropical shirt. She sat there in the office, humming to herself.

        Once outside on the balcony, Haymane shut the doors behind them. In the suddenly blinding overcast, the disabled stallion wheeled towards a stretch of railing and stared out across a sight that calmed him just as much as it suddenly awed the last pony.

        The winding canyons of Dredgemane lingered under a constant cloud of rising coal smoke and soot. Beyond the gray labyrinth, towards the west, a jagged quarry cycloned its way deep into the stony earth. The tiny specks of work ponies and digging equipment could be seen from this vantage point. Beyond the quarry, several rock farms dotted the monochromatic stretch of granite earth as far as the eye could see. Between the plots of land, a few marshy splotches of vegetation cropped up, dotting the otherwise immaculate geography with festering bogs of timeless antiquity.

        “Are you familiar with this landscape, Miss Harmony?” Haymane asked.

        The last pony took a deep breath. Years of reading priceless books from the cabin of the Harmony had prepared her mind for this suddenly irreplaceable vista. Several historical tomes, geological reports, and tear-stained entries in the very journal of Princess Celestia had described the continent within which Dredgemane had been settled with remarkable detail.

        “This is where Consus fell,” Harmony murmured, thinking aloud, feeling every word coming out of her like a holy breath. “After the Sundering fractured him, this is where he gave his last breath.”

        “Countless millenia ago... ” Haymane nodded, leaning up from his wheeled support to grip the railing and stare out onto the wing-shaped canyons in the bosom of the world. “Our Alicorn Father suffered the same fate of mortality that abridges all of our meager lives today. The first death in all of Equestria felled him here, in a land that was once beautiful and flourishing with vegetation. His flesh blanketed the landscape. His wing feathers bled into the rock. When Goddess Epona made her Exodus for the stars, her wings carried his hollow body into the heavens, but the grave of his collapse was permanently carved into the landscape.”

        “I'm quite familiar with the tale,” the last pony said, gazing up at the overcast sky and envisioning briefly a deader world of eternal twilight. “The ashes of his flesh fused with Epona's tears, and his bones coalesced together, forming the moon.”

        “The mournful task of monitoring Consus' bones eventually fell upon Princess Luna.” Haymane turned his face to gaze emphatically upon Harmony. “But it was Goddess Gultophine's job to bring life to the world that had been blighted by the Sundering. Without hesitance, she came upon the wound formed by Consus' falling and breathed a new life upon the landscape. Not once in her many centuries of stewarding did she abandon this task. Even through the demanding trials of the Chaos Wars, Gultophine held true to her commitment. What was once a world of desolation became a new garden within which ponies could thrive, embracing a new and courageous industry, a spirit of prosperity that Gultophine's holy wings inspired us to follow.”

        “You are right to be proud of this town, Mayor,” Harmony said. “I can see now what it stands for.”

        “Can you?” The blonde elder squinted his blue eyes up at her. “No offense, Miss Harmony, but being an agent of Her Majesty's Court necessitates that you remain aloof in some fashion or another. Do not think that I belittle you for such a quality. As a matter of fact, I applaud it. To maintain a respectful distance from the target of your assistance is the key to being a proper mediator. Nevertheless, I hope I'm able to convey to you the importance of this land, and what it means to so many earth ponies who still hold a divine respect in its significance, both historical and spiritual.”

        “Spiritual?” Harmony raised a curious eyebrow.

        “It goes without saying that—when Gultophine joined her sisters in exile—she left Equestria to its own devices. Regardless, her spirit has remained, and this is no more relevant than in Dredgemane, the shadow of her deceased father. The moment Gultophine's spirit dissipates from this landscape, all hope for life and prosperity in the Grave of Consus will vanish as well, and this will once more be a world of death and utter desolation.”

        The last pony gulped. “That... That does not sound like a pleasant future... ”

        “Gultophine's Harvest is coming up,” Haymane said, wheeling over towards the far stretch of the balcony as he gazed out upon his urbanscape. “You are familiar with the ritual, yes?”

        “I imagine so.” Harmony smiled gently. “It's a time when Equestrian ponydom remembers all the things we have to be thankful for with the life granted to us by the Alicorn of Rainbows.”

        “The townsfolk burn that which is most precious to them.”

        Harmony did a double-take. “I beg your pardon?”

        Haymane's hoof grazed the railing. His blue eyes were distant, cold specks. “Every three months, the town gathers for a bonfire, and we toss into it our most valued possessions. We watch as the material things that bind us to this world go up in smoke.”

        “Uhm... ” Harmony shifted uncomfortably. “Is that a fact?”

        “It's easy to lose sight of what makes us so blessed in this world,” he murmured. “Life, labor, grit: it's what Dredgemane prospers with, it's what we've always prospered with. The Biv, the rainbow pranks, the colorful nonsense of this frivolous modern world that distract us... ” He gave a long sigh. “They are nothing but impediments in a life made righteous by hard work and dutiful respect of Gultophine's legacy. The Harvest bonfire is a necessary crucible that reminds us on a regular basis of the true goal every Dredgemaner should hold tight to. It is a goal that supersedes the trivial selfishness of the self, all the while maintaining the glorious harmony of the many... if you do forgive the irony of that one word.”

        “I... f-forgive you... ” Harmony blinked numbly. Her brow furrowed. “This... uh... this 'bonfire' thing must be a fairly new ritual, relatively speaking.”

        “More or less. You appear not much older than two decades, child. To you, it would be a life-long affair.” He swiveled about and gazed up at her. “If you must know, Bishop Breathstar and I implemented the ritual soon after I rose to office.”

        “You don't say?”

        “Since then, it has bolstered the lives of Dredgemaners all across the plateau,” he said, gesturing a hoof towards the gray horizon beyond the balcony. “Our town's industry has since ridden to the top of Equestrian mineral exports. Dredgemaners are respected far and wide for not only being faithful children of Gultophine, but for being the top suppliers of Arcanium and other important minerals to all of Equestria. It is our town alone that has made possible the last dozen spires of your glorious city of Canterlot, child. Many a Manehattan skyscraper also owes its construction to the resources that we have harvested from the earth.”

        “Well, if Goddess Gultophine was to return from the heavens, she'd undoubtedly be very proud of your... rock hammering,” Harmony nervously ventured.

        Haymane was hardly affected. “It was not an easy road to traverse, getting to where we are now.” He took a deep breath and pointed his eyes towards the balcony doors behind him. “There is a reason why I didn't have Miss Pie thrown out of my office the very moment she showed up.”

        “No?”

        “Are you familiar with her father?”

        “Quarrington is obviously very popular around town. I hear he's a member of the City Council.”

        “He and I go far back,” Haymane said with the slightest hint of a smile. “We grew up together as young colts. We ran through the streets together, back when... when I had the youthful limbs to spare.” A deep, shuddering breath. The Mayor glanced off into the gray overcast. “One day, years ago, there was a horrible mudslide that consumed several rock farms. I had a rich plot of land at the time, but it succumbed to the inexplicable avalanche. Quarrington was the first earth pony to arrive at the scene of horror. He personally dragged my broken body from the scene of collapse. He was... not able to save my wife... and three foals.” His nostrils flared slowly. “Nopony could have been fast enough to save my family.”

        There was a pit of abysmal silence. Harmony chewed on an Entropan lip and waited for the next breath to come from the Mayor.

        When it did, it was suspiciously warm and hopeful. “But I emerged from that sorrowful disaster with an invigorated, firmer strength. I had a new lease on life, and I was refoaled in the spirit of Gultophine. Bishop Breathstar—with his infinite wisdom and grace—nurtured my soul, and together the two of us transformed this town into something of prosperity and purpose. With my faithful companion Quarrington on the Council and Sladeburn in charge of the mining operations, we have more than recovered from the inexplicable losses of the past. We have assured this city a glorious future. Every day lived in the breath of Gultophine is a blessed day indeed.”

        He swiveled again and wheeled squeakily towards Harmony.

        “Perhaps now you can understand what is at stake, what the Biv unwittingly threatens to malign with each childish prank that it blemishes this beautiful city with. The moment you—with your Canterlotlian talents of flight and finesse—apprehend that perpetrator, this City will once more find its hooves planted on the path towards purpose. There is more than material trivialities to be exorcised in the crucible of Gultophine's glory; we must burn away all distractions that keep us from making our lives better, firmer, and more righteous. Quarrington's daughter, Pinkamena, I weep for her, Miss Harmony. It is only fitting that you keep her within your sight at all time. Let her be a sign to you of how horribly lost and purposeless a soul can become when her hooves become detached from the straight-and-narrow path that this town long ago forged for her, and for all of us.”

        “I... ” Harmony gulped and managed a brave smirk. “I shall do my best, Mayor. Rest assured... ” Her teeth briefly clicked together. “... I will not forget a word of what you've told me here today.”

        “Very good, child.” Haymane nodded with a smile. “Gultophine's Harvest is in just a few days. If it takes you a long time to apprehend the Biv, I can very well understand. But it would be exceedingly marvelous if Canterlot's gift was to silence that cretin before the bonfire. I hope that isn't asking too terribly much from you.”

        “Hardly, Mayor.” Harmony said as the two of them sauntered back towards the double-doors of the balcony. “If there's anything I've learned from you, it's that you're not one to ask for much.” The gray-lit office once again opened to view, and a paper airplane immediately flew out and conked the copper pegasus in the skull. “Dah! Sonuva—”

        “And so the walrus says to the marmoset, 'I'm kosher, not vegan! 'Heeheeheehee!”

        “Miss Pie... ” Harmony groaned as the two strolled alone down a thin gray canyon leading to the westernmost edge of the sunken town. “Is there ever a moment when you stop to breathe?”

        “No can do, Har Har!” Pinkie grinned, balancing a final white box of cookies on her flank. “If I don't get at least ten jokes per gallon, my engine will burn out!”

        “Miss Pie, you're not a machine. You're a pony. You've got standards that go beyond spitting out jokes like flak above a Zebraharan warzone.”

        “Uh oh!” Pinkie gasped. “Did emoquine Mayor Haymaker fill your already cynical head with a bunch of gray thunderclouds?”

        “Haymane. And don't be ridiculous.” Harmony glanced her way. “Yeah, he's a bit inside-out when it comes to some of his interpretations of Gultophine's legacy, in my humble opinion. But still, he obviously wants the best for this town, and he's been through a lot. I think it's remarkable that he would overcome all adversity to become a leader who's so invested in Dredgemane's progress.”

        “Yeah, well, if he's such a smart and forward thinking pony, how come a Mayor who depends so much on wheels builds his house up someplace that takes a dozen flights of stairs to get to?”

        “I... er... ” Harmony blinked stupidly.

        “Heeheehee! It's okay to admire Mayor Sadmane, Har-Har. But you gotta realize, I know him. He's been buddy-buddy with Daddy for a long time.” She bounced merrily, chirping. “Some ponies like him, ponies who've been around Dredgemane long enough, kind of want to stay exactly where they are and never budge, wheels or no wheels.”

        “How could you say that?” Harmony squinted at her. “During his candidacy, he's improved the exports and industry of this town by leaps and bounds!”

        “Now there's a funny thing about Equestrian statistics!” Pinkie grinned brightly over a candy-colored shoulder. “Can any of those fancy schmancy numbers measure the history of Dredgemane in smiles?”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow at that, but eventually frowned. “Miss Pie, life is not all about giggles and smiles.”

        “Then where do giggles and smiles have left to go?”

        “What does it matter? Why do you care so much—Snkkt—Where are we going?” Harmony glanced all around the thinning walls of the lone canyon. They were the only two souls stumbling down that lone path as it winded around a corner splotched with dead, jagged trees. “I've never seen this part of town before.”

        “That's because most ponies don't come down here anymore.” Pinkie winked. “But we aren't most ponies, are we, probation officer? Heeheehee... ”

        Harmony sighed. “I still can't believe you did that... ”

        “Did what? Came up with a totally awesome cover on the spot?”

        “You lied directly to the mayor.”

        “And just what were you about to do, Har-Har?”

        “I... I... ” Harmony growled. “Just how would you know what I was about to do?”

        “You're a very smart and pretty pony, Har-Har.” Pinkie giggled. “But you're also very predictable. Once you've gotten that last part straightened out, the stallions will be falling at your hooves for sure!”

        Harmony wryly smirked. “If that was the case, shouldn't you be drowning in colts as we speak, Miss Random?”

        “I still haven't told you what I did for spring break.” Pinkie Pie hummed. “Or more appropriately who.”

        “Uhhhh... ” The last pony stammered nervously.

        “Here we arrrrrre!” Pinkie gestured with a hoof as the canyon suddenly opened up to a wide gray space that formed a dead end. A giant four-story building stood forlornly against the tall granite walls that dwarfed its gray brick body. A thick black fence of iron stretched around the site, flanked with dead trees. A single sign coldly labeled the deathly place upon the duo's lonesome arrival.

        “'Stonehaven Sanitarium'” Harmony read as she and Pinkie trotted by. Her amber eyes wandered from the grim gate to a pair of run-down shacks residing next to the granite structure. A gulp. “So, uh, I'm guessing Inkie's here.”

        “Heeheehee! Yup! She works here everyday!” Pinkie bounded towards the grand array of marble steps that stretched before the wide entrance of the hospital. “Come on! We're late enough as it is!”

        “Uhm... Miss Pie, forgive me if this sounds like beating a dead horse, but why are you so excited this time?”

        “Duh! Because they're expecting their Auntie Pinkie Pie!”

        “They are?” Harmony blinked confusedly and trotted after the bouncing pink cloud. “Who're they?”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Inside, the hospital was an eerily sterile and quiet beast. Harmony's hooftrots—drowned out by the roar of Dredgemane activity outside—were a gatling gun of noisy explosions against the black-and-white tile floor of Stonehaven. She tried to keep as respectfully silent as possible, an improbable task as she had to keep up with Pinkie's unhindered swiftness. The last pony glanced nervously every which way, the sight of so many other equine souls still sending shivers up her Entropan spine, only here there was the creepily stale element of oozing silence and lifeless lethargy. White-garbed patients shuffled in the hallways like lost ghosts, their eyes glued to the monochromatic floor as they sauntered endlessly towards unseen graves. Ponies sat on benches, their eyes glazed with a deep depression that was lost even unto the last living soul of Equestria. The nurses, doctors, and orderlies also had a frozen gait about them. For a brief moment, Harmony gladly followed Pinkie's singular bouncing motions with a sincere enthusiasm.

        Pinkie bounded her way up a flight of granite stairs until the two of them landed upon the fourth floor. Immediately, the earth pony made a bee-line towards a dimly lit door at the end of a grand hallway. Harmony was hard-pressed to keep up with her. Once she had barely caught up, Pinkie Pie flung the door open to the ward with a huge burst of sugary breath.

        “Am I too late?!” The daughter of Quarrington melodramatically exhaled, her eyes bright blue saucers that lit the white walls with a sapphiric mania. “I was told that cookies had to be delivered here, pronto! Oh woe is me if I failed yet another delivery on behalf of the karma of sweets!”

        Harmony's soul was briefly rocked by the sound of several high-pitched voices stabbing the air in response to Pinkie's unorthodox entrance into the hospital room:

        “Auntie Pinkie Pie!”

        “Heeee! Auntie Pinkie Pie is here!”

        “Yaaay!”

        “Did you bring us cookies? Really?”

        “Heeheehee!”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow curiously. Adjusting her beret, she stuck her copper face into the room. She blinked at what she saw.

        Half a dozen beds stretched across the bright space of the heavily windowed room. Lying in them or else hobbling between them were several young foals, none older than seven or eight winters. They beamed and smiled and hobbled happily towards the sight of Pinkie Pie's entrance. Beyond that, there was one major commonality between the whole lot of them.

        They were sick, pale, emaciated... yet surviving. Several had whole patches of their bright coats missing in random spots along their flanks. Others' manes were missing, or else threadbare. The limbs and knees of the children—the ones who could still trot about—were reduced to thin, bony spindles that barely kept their weight up. Many others remained under the covers of their beds, managing only to swivel their heads over and grin in Pinkie's direction. When the room wasn't filled with their excited murmurs or giggles, a dozen coughing voices randomly punctuated the air. Harmony could make out, on the far side of the room, four or five beds housing still bodies that were far too sickly to stir awake, much less open their blackened eyes.

        What was more, there was a familiar paleness to each of the foals' expression—happy or otherwise. It was a pitiable hue that haunted Scootaloo from a moment in her life that she had thought she had forgotten, of tears that filled the indefinable gap left behind the very first gray morning she awoke to check on her parents, and discovered that they weren't moving. There was a thin haze of yellow colorization around the children's eyes and lips, like the unmistakable stain of deathly jaundice.

        “Infernite... ” Harmony murmured aloud. No second later after the last pony had pronounced this seemingly forbidden word, a brown-coated filly in plain nurse's gear sauntered up with a smile as bright as her blue mane.

        “They've been talking about you all day, Pinkamena.” The nurse giggled the candy-colored pony's way. “Ever since Inkessa showed up and spilled the good news.”

        “Good news?” Pinkie blinked and grinned. “You mean you no longer have to give shots! Cuz Auntie Pinkie is scared to the dickens of needles!”

        The foals all giggled in a programmed cadence. This room had obviously been through the motions before. One little filly hobbled up and tugged at Pinkie's tropical shirt with a jittery hoof.

        “But Auntie Pinkie Pie, you said that we should just laugh away scary stuff!”

        “Yes—But needles?!” Pinkie Pie held a hoof over her chest and flailed back on her rear limbs, teetering. “Please—Somepony, anypony, whisk this shuddering damsel from this torture chamber! Not everypony can be as brave as these kids! What is the world coming to?!” With a wilted groan, Pinkie collapsed to the floor. Half a dozen foals clambered all over her, tugging and poking at her cockroach-curled legs with a sea of giggles.

        “Awwww... Come on, Auntie Pinkie... ”

        “Shots aren't too bad!”

        “You're a brave pony! We all know you are!”

        “You're just saying that to get cookies!” Pinkie sobbed like an overacting fashionista. “That's all you waaaaaaant!”

        “Heeheehee!”

        “We've missed you, Pinkie!”

        “Yeah, we wished you visited us more often!”

        “Awwww—” Pinkie hugged and nuzzled the cheek of the closest kid to her, then the next, and the next. “Auntie Pinkie missed you all too.” Her face lit up for the millionth time in front of them. “I know! Let's have a pop quiz!”

        “A pop quiz?”

        “Yeah!” Pinkie Pie bounced up to her hooves. Two foals climbed onto her back and she effortlessly gave them a ride around the room as she proudly cantered about. “I brought more than enough cookies for all of you, but I'm not giving them away that easily! The quiz is this:let's see if each of you can tell me something that made you smile this week, and I'll give you a cookie. If you can't think of anything that made you smile, we'll discover something! Then we can have cookies together!”

        “Heehee, alright!”

        “Inkessa brought this bright bouncy pink ball that Suntrot and I played with all afternoon!”

        “I just beat Blue Bolt at checkers this morning!”

        “I saw a bright songbird outside the window when I woke up!”

        “Nurse Angel Cake told us this exciting tale about the Goblins of Mount Oggreton!”

        “Hey Hey HEY!” Pinkie Pie barked with a mock frown, engulfed in youngsters. “One at a time! You can chop me up into tiny pieces and serve them to one another, but it won't get you cookies any faster!”

        “What if we don't want cookies, Auntie Pinkie?”

        “What if we just want to tickle you and hear those funny sounds you make!”

        “Oh no!” Pinkie gasped, her face stricken with a panicked horror. “Not the tickle army! Not the tickle army! I'd rather face Nightmare Moon—Noooooo!”

        The foals gathered around her in a gauntlet of feathery hooves. Pinkie collapsed in the sea of them, giggling insanely until she broke into a helpless fit of hiccups. “Oh noes! Now—HIC—you've gone and—HIC—done it! How can your Auntie—HIC—Pinkie Pie hand out cookies—HIC—if she's too busy exploding from the inside—HIC—out with—HIC-HIC-HIC!”

        As the scene of giggle-strewn bedlam continued, Harmony trotted towards a lonesome corner of the room... decidedly away from the sickly foals enjoying their brief reverie. Those who weren't clambering over their pink visitor were giggling with weak but genuine earnest from where they lay in bed. The room was as pale and foreboding as ever, but there was a bizarre warmth that lit the stale hub within.

        “Lemme guess... ” The blue-maned nurse trotted towards the copper pegasus. “You're not from around here.”

        “How... uhm... astute of you.” Harmony chewed on her lip nervously.

        “Have you seen many M*A*S*H units while in the service?”

        The last pony rolled her eyes towards the infernal beret. “Not exactly. Why do you ask?”

        “I've seen that expression on your face before.” The nurse smirked. “You're wondering if—”

        “—the infernite poisoning may be contagious?” Harmony took a deep breath. A pair of white stones flickered across her amber eyes. “I realize I should know better, but a part of me can't help but feel... concerned. I do apologize.”

        The nurse giggled slightly. “Nothing to be sorry for. You brought Pinkamena here. We couldn't be more grateful. Inkessa told me that you might be occupying her sister's attention throughout the course of the day.”

        “Quite the opposite.” Harmony said in a distance voice. “So... uh... are they—?”

        “The children aren't contagious. At this stage in Immolatia, the poisoning is only a danger to themselves. If that wasn't the case, Haymane wouldn't have erected this ward on the fourth floor of Stonehaven.”

        Harmony glanced over. “Haymane, you say?”

        The nurse nodded. “All part of his campaign to provide services and shelter to the remaining victims of infernite outbreaks in the mines.”

        “Seems rather noble of him.”

        “Hmmm... To a fault.”

        Harmony tilted her neck aside curiously. “Oh?”

        “There wouldn't be so many outbreaks of Immolatia if Dredgemane hadn't increased mining in the quarry twenty-odd years ago and increased the exposure to pockets of infernite.” A deep breath, and the nurse managed a weak but courageous smile. “Every ambition has its cost, even here in Gultophine's refuge.”

        “I... wouldn't mind learning more.”

        “In time. Right now, this moment is for the children. They've waited an awful long time for Pinkamena to visit again. They do look forward to her so much.” The nurse's eyes glazed over slightly. “A few of them... didn't make it to see her this time.”

        Harmony stirred quietly upon hearing that.

        “But, alas. No more frowns, at least not today.” The nurse glanced over and curtsied. “I'm Nurse Angel Cake. I manage this ward of Stonehaven.”

        “Pleased to meet you.” Harmony squinted briefly. “Any relation to... ?”

        “Auntie Pinkie Pie's Auntie? Heehee—Absolutely. You think these kids are excited, Mother is positively beside herself with excitement everytime Pinkamena shows up. It's good for business, because Pinkie's the only pony who can sell desserts inside Dredgemane's borders. Otherwise, the Cake Business is having to ship far and wide.”

        “As far as Ponyville; I gotcha,” Harmony remarked. “Funny how the world keeps getting smaller and smaller with each pony you meet.”

        “It's still a huge world, as far as these foals are concerned,” spoke Inkie, suddenly trotting in from the hallway with a basket of fresh white linens balanced on her back. “Oh great,” she droned at the sight of the hiccuping pink soul in the sea of children. “Tell me she hasn't made them do the foxtrot, yet.”

        “You're here just in time to keep her in check.” Nurse Angel Cake walked over and took the basket from the gray-maned filly. “I don't mind her spreading sunshine on these little ones' days, so long as she isn't making them dizzier than they need to be.”

        “Understood, Nurse Cake. I'll do my best.” Inkie trotted over and glanced aside. “Harmony, hey there. It's good to see you're in one piece.”

        “Why shouldn't I be?”

        “You did spend the day with Sis, did you not?”

        “I saw a bum mule, a middle-aged prostitute, a rainbow colored spectre, and Mayor Haymane.”

        “Ooooh... You saw Haymane?” Inkie hissed through clenched teeth. “Really?”

        “It intrigues me to no end that he's the one and only element from my entire response that concerned you.”

        “In all seriousness,” Inkie spoke above the background of giggles while wandering from bed to bed and checking on the vitals of gently stirring foals. “There are seldom colorful souls in Dredgemane, and it only makes sense that Pinkie—of all ponies—would drag you into butting heads with them. But Mayor Haymane? The only reason I can think of your having to meet him is that Pinkamena repeated the Noodle Incident.”

        “It begs the question.”

        “I bet it does.”

        “Anywho... ” Harmony glanced over as Pinkie Pie charaded a goggle-wearing cloaked figure while bouncing across invisible rooftops before applauding children. “Apparently I've been tasked with chasing down the Royal Grand Biv.”

        “Pfft. Good luck with that.”

        “Boy, did that sound confident.”

        “Surest way towards getting a concussion, is what you have ahead of you.” Inkie smirked after examining one last patient and trotting towards Harmony. “Take it from a nurse. You're in for a world of pain.”

        “Where I come from, that's like a hearty morning breakfast.”

        “Since when were you suddenly Mayor Haymane's lackey? I had no idea you came to town to chase down a vandal dressed like a bad yard sale.”

        “I had no idea either. But apparently it's my job now.”

        “Just like that?”

        “Let's say that—no matter how wise this pegasus may get in her years—she will always be a creature of impulse.” A crashing noise. Harmony glanced over to see Pinkie suddenly hobbling about with a glass jar of cotton swabs tightly clamped over her head. The foals giggled madly around her stumbling antics. “I could be worse off, I guess.”

        “You and me both, Harmony. Excuse me if you will.” Inkie sighed and bore a weathered smile as she trotted over to her sister's rescue and yanked the jar off her pink skull. “Would you just give them the cookies already?”

        “Inkie!” Pinkie frowned and yanked her straw hat out of the jar, planting it on her skull upside down. “You'll ruin my movement!”

        “You want help with your movement? Nurse Angel Cake's got an enema for that.”

        “Hey! Hey! Pssst—Rock Kindergarten humor! Keep it simple!” The room giggled regardless; several foals were content to just walk up and hug Pinkie's limbs, smiling.

        “Rats... ” Harmony sighed and leaned back against a whitewashed wall of brick. “And to think that was almost funny.”

        Even in the driest pit of my goddess-forsaken soul, I cannot deny it; watching Pinkie entertain the young foals was a charming thing. One second she was giving little fillies and colts a galloping ride around the room, then the next second she was playing board games with half a dozen of them at once. I watched her tell them stories, sketch drawings with them, and sing songs that I had forgotten since I was a little Crusader.

        It's an easy thing—in the life that I live—to forget how important foalhood is, especially one that is maintained within the safe buffers of innocence. It occurred to me that, after an entire day of waltzing helplessly around town and witnessing Pinkie do one horribly embarrassing thing after another, I had finally stumbled upon the one place where she could be in her element, where she could be the big kid that she always was. I have no doubt that if Pinkie Pie had discovered reverse-time and had somehow extended her life by the same three hundred years that define Spike, she'd be no more mature than she was that very moment—before me, Nurse Angel Cake, and Inkessa—dancing around the ward with stethoscopes plugged into her ears.

        It was obvious to me that everypony in town knew who Pinkamena Diane Pie was. In Stonehaven, the children of the Immolatia Ward practically worshipped her. At first, it was hard for me to comprehend that one single pony soul could ever light up an entire room full of kids, but then I remembered somepony who was once the light of my life, and how every lonely day lived on my own would have been pointless if I didn't have her prismatic beacon of awesomeness leading me faithfully into the next day of blind opportunity and hope.

        None of what I witnessed, though, was enough to make me laugh. I couldn't revel in the sweet sights before me, because I knew—more than any other pony in the ward was willing to admit—that you were there, that you kissed the children to sleep every night, that you were more loyal to them than Pinkie Pie ever could have been.

        There was a time when I had once blamed the Cataclysm on you. Looking back, I realized that such a presumption was too easy to make on my behalf. It doesn't take a single incident to define you. It takes a whole eternity to paint you with the black colors that illustrate your hidden movements. You were a constant shadow, deeper than the grave of Consus, and I saw you everytime in a pitiful blink each moment a foal jumped or a little kid waved a hoof or a coughing patient shuddered in the cold lanternlight that permeated that room.

        I am the end of ponies. I know what all things that ever lived hoped for. What's more, I know that all of their hopes—no matter how joyous or charming—were all for naught. Pieces of the puzzle were starting to fit together for me right then. Pinkie Pie and the giggling foals: I suddenly saw their bony skeletons lying beside an overturned wooden cart buried deep in a crevice of Equestrian earth beneath a fallen moonrock. Whatever future they had dreamed of—like the grand legacy of Ponymonium—would be utterly curtailed by the bitter talons of destiny.

        So that was it. I had discovered the missing piece that I had convinced Spike I needed to go back to my pink anchor for. It brought me no solace whatsoever.

        “Do you really work for the Court of Canterlot?” A yellow-coated foal with hollow eyes and a frazzled half-mane blinked.

        Harmony glanced down from where she was leaning against her lonesome corner of the ward. “That depends.” She glanced at the filly's moth-eaten cutie mark of a horseshoe silhouetted against a brilliant sun. “Do you like dancing in the afternoon sunlight, Miss... ?”

        “Heehee... 'Suntrot',” the little girl introduced herself with a brief, hacking cough. A brave smile, complete with sparkling green eyes:“And I've lived in Dredgemane all my life. There isn't much sunlight here to dance in.”

        “Yeah... Well... Erm... ” Harmony smiled awkwardly. “Maybe... uh... that just means your talent will be found someplace where there's plenty of sunlight!”

        “That's what my parents always told me.” The little filly wheezed and nodded. “As soon as I get better, I wanna go someplace really bright! Like Fillydelphia! I heard it's always sunny there.”

        “Where are your parents, Suntrot?” It wasn't until she had finished that inquistion that the last pony obligatorily winced at herself.

        “They're in another part of Stonehaven.”

        Harmony blinked, not expecting that. “They are?”

        “Mmmhmmm. Nurse Angel Cake says that they're sick too, but it's a different kind of sick. I miss them terribly,” Suntrot muttered, but followed with another courageous smile. “I look forward to seeing them again. Auntie Pinkie Pie says that there's nothing more rewarding than partying with your parents. When we're together again, I plan to party all night long... ” She added with a mischievous whisper. “Even past curfew!”

        Harmony nodded. “Pinkie Pie has a lot of things to say to you kids, doesn't she?”

        “Mmmhmmm. It's nice to listen to her, even if she doesn't make much sense. Which is a lot of the time. Heeheehee-Hckkk!” Suntrot coughed hard, nearly collapsing.

        Nurse Angel Cake sashayed tactfully over and guided the little foal towards her bed on the far side of the ward. “There there, Suntrot. You've been on your hooves long enough today. Pinkie Pie will visit again later this week. It's time you got some rest.”

        “But... ” Suntrot coughed and tried to giggle. “I was just saying 'hi' to the lady from Canterlot.”

        “Maybe she'll visit again too.”

        Harmony watched with placid amber eyes. Her vision fell from Nurse Angel Cake's white coat to a bed atop which Pinkie Pie was seated, cradling a tiny blue colt who shivered in her grasp but lovingly clung to her all the same as the filly finished the trailing end of a fanciful tale.

        “And so the buffalo agreed to stampede down a narrow stretch of land between the apple orchards, so that way they could enjoy their time-honored tradition while at the same time helping the Appleloosans with their seasonal fruit harvest!”

        The little blue colt coughed, then chuckled. “Auntie Pinkie Pie, that's the stupidest story I ever heard.”

        Several more fillies and colts gathered around the bed giggled.

        “Pfft!” Pinkie Pie rolled her eyes and smirked. “Well, it's not like I wrote it, Ice Song! That's what really happened! Would you rather it have ended with the buffalos ballet-dancing in tutus?”

        Ice Song smiled, his deep blue eyes thin. “Did you really dance like that in front of the stampeding herd of buffalo?”

        “You're darn tootin', I did!” Pinkie grinned. “I never felt freer in my life!” She scrunched her brow in thought. “Except for that one time when I was a little filly visiting my Auntie Marble Cake and I learned the hard way that 'watering the cacti' actually involved a water hose.”

        “You must have looked silly being charged by buffalo in that dress.”

        “No sillier than the buffalo were who charged me! I can't imagine what was in their big bulky heads! 'Grrrrr! I'm going to trample that filly and her dress to the ground because I'm blinded by pain and rage... also tumbleweeds'. Snkkt—Heeheehee! You ever wonder where a buffalo goes to the bathroom? Anyplace where there's not a rattlesnake! Hiyooo!”

        The obligatory giggles erupted at that. Inkessa cleared her throat as she wandered by with a tray of medicine. “Seriously, Pinkamena. Must you?”

        “I must, Inkie! For whenever these kids go to visit the desert, they gotta check the outhouses for rattlesnakes! Do you hear that, children? Don't let the snakes get ya where Gultophine split ya!”

        “Heeheehee... ” Ice Song giggled, then navigated a forest of coughs before smiling and nuzzling Pinkie's shoulder. “Tell us more about the Appleloosan train ride, Auntie Pinkie Pie... ”

        “Ooooh! That's a fun one! I'll start it off with a riddle! 'How many ponies and baby dragons does it take to shove an apple tree into a caboose? 'I'll give you a hint, the answer doesn't include a certain lazy namby-pamby unicorn who talks like a vampire!”

        More giggles. Inkessa rolled her violet eyes with a helpless smile and rolled along. The room's shadows doubled as the overcast gray light outside drowned under a gathering darkness of evening. Harmony wasn't entirely sure how long this visitation was yet to last, but she suddenly lacked the energy to find out.

        With the stealthy grace of a future scavenger, the last pony shuffled out of the room and quietly... quietly exited into to the dim hallway beyond.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Just one floor, Harmony reasoned to herself.

        The hospital was a large place, but her anchorage to Pinkie Pie was feasibly larger. Still, she didn't want to take any unnecessary risks. Harmony wanted time alone. She just needed some time alone. The time traveler was short of breath, as if that dense room full of briefly ecstatic children had starved her of all Entropan strength.

        She sighed as she sauntered down a series of concrete stairs and leveled onto the third floor of the Stonehaven Sanitarium. It was here that the hospital's name made itself obvious to her blinking amber eyes. Lining a long, long hallway was a solid sheet of glass that looked into an enclosed waiting room. Several chairs, tables, and benches were set up inside the sterile place, and there were many barred windows flanking the bright, white-washed walls. Inside, several lifeless ponies shuffled, garbed in gray fatigues from head to hooves. Their faces had distant looks, as if they were born on different planets along Epona's sorrowful exodus. They belonged there in body, but hardly in spirit. Not even in the eyes of trolls did the last pony remember seeing such soulless ennui.

        Trotting up to the glass barrier, Harmony squinted. From beyond the pane, she watched as ponies shuffled in aimless circles around concrete support pillars. Others sat with slumped hooves over benches and chairs. A few even stood still as statues, staring blindly into a bricklaid corner. One pony with a purple mane shuffled her hooves in a numb charade, as if flipping through the pages of an invisible book before her dilated eyes. All the while, orderlies in blue fatigues guarded the far doors of the place, looking just as apathetic and cold as the many militia ponies whom Harmony had spotted lining the ascending steps to Haymane's office.

        One pair of patients in particular caught her eye. Both ponies—a mare and a stallion—were of yellow-coated hue, and their eyes hung in emerald orbs of lethargy as they stared at the same invisible spot of a polished white table in between them. The longer she stared at them, the clearer a little filly's voice coughed into the shallow recesses of the last pony's ear, so that it echoed off of the pair's identical faces with a haunting air of familiarity.

        “Suntrot?” Harmony murmured to herself and squinted harder. “No way. Could they be her—?”

        A door squeaked open behind the last pony. An orange unicorn with a shattered horn and wearing a black jacket walked into a broom closet and came out a moment later in blue fatigues. “Good evening,” he muttered in a cold snort of a breath.

        “Hey there—” Harmony blindly nodded. An explosive blink, and she spun to gawk at him. “Mr. Vimbert?”

        “That's my name. Don't wear it out, or I'll wear your face out.”

        “What in the holy heck are you doing here?”

        “What does it look like I'm doing?” He briefly grumbled at her with an incredulous frown. The brown-maned unicorn pulled a cart full of cleaning equipment out from the closet and rolled it into the hallway. “I work here. What productive crap have you done with your day, Miss Harmony?”

        “You remember my name?”

        “Don't stress your words unless there's a good reason.” He whipped out a bucket full of sudsy water and dipped a mop into it with two hooking forelimbs. “Anyways, it's hard to forget somepony who's hanging out with a soul like Miss Pie voluntarily.”

        “Er... I guess that makes sense.” Harmony glanced from the unicorn janitor's mopping and back towards the patients lingering beyond the glass barrier. “Still, I didn't expect to see a gentlecolt like you here.”

        “Why?” Vimbert muttered lifelessly while polishing the black-and-white tile. “Because my idea of a good time is spent wasted in a bar, drowning in alcohol and misery? Trust me, lady, this is the absolute perfect place for a pony like me. Give it a few years, and I may even be on the other side of the glass.”

        “What are they doing in there?” A little foal inside of the last pony murmured aloud.

        “What's anypony doing here? Something is rotten in Dredgemane. This place isn't just a grave for a deceased god; it has swallowed up more lives than an Equestrian census can count. It goes without saying that a lot of those deaths are acted out alive. Those are the souls that you see beyond you right now, Miss Harmony. This city is full of poor afflicted waifs who don't have the good sense to roll over and call it quits. When wise 'ol Haymane discovers the likes of such poor saps who have 'fallen from the grace of Gultophine', they end up here. Pity them all you like, it won't do them any good.”

        “Are they... ” Harmony gulped. “Are they actually diseased?”

        “Sure as heck looks like it to me. I suppose nopony but them could tell you for sure.” He dunked the mop again and worked over another patch of tile floor. “Alas, there's the crutch of the equine mind. Who are we to bore into it? Perish the thought!” The unicorn's voice took a bitter, caustic pitch. “Let's just imprison the bodies that those minds are attached to inside brick walls as impervious as the skulls that resist reason!” Vimbert took a deep breath through a painfully grinning pair of jaws. “Ohhhhhh yes, no need to drink whatsoever... ”

        “I gather you've been in this town for a long time.”

        “You think? If I had any lick of sense, I'd just leave. If those ponies inside were lucky, they'd have left before this town got to them as well.”

        “Then why don't you?”

        “And what?” A squeaking sound. Harmony glanced back to witness Vimbert stealthily dragging a silver flask out of a pocket in his fatigues, taking a swig, and hiding it back where it came from. “Should I rid this city of my good charm?” He burped and mopped. “Not everypony is as stupidly excited about living in the moment as your bubbly friend upstairs.”

        Harmony glanced at the ceiling, then blinked back towards the orange unicorn. “What do you know about Pinkamena?”

        “I know that she's the daughter to Mayor Haymane's lifelong buddy, which is the only thing giving that brat a license to do whatever the heck she wants during the infrequent, manic visits she pays this town. They should build an entire new Stonehaven. One wing will be for her, the other for that smelly cretin she nonsensically idolizes.”

        “Who, you mean Brevis?”

        “No, I meant Stone Colt Steve Oatsten—Who do you think?”

        “Jeez, sorry. I guess I failed 'Homeless Donkey 101'.”

        “He's a mule,” Vimbert said. “And—heh—you're more right than you think.”

        “About what?”

        “I used to teach ponies more than just how to dodge a left hook,” Vimbert muttered, a slight twinkle briefly alighting his blue eyes. It was all too swiftly replaced by a trademark, bloodshot mosaic. “Fat lot of good that would do in this town. If there's anything I'll give Quarrington's kid credit for, it's that she knows the only progress in this world is outside this place, no matter what Haymane thinks. Alas... ” In a cold breath, he then slurred, “'So it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end. '”

        Harmony smirked. “Whatever you said would be ten times more poignant if you didn't quote it so boredly.”

        “Wrong.”

        “Hmm?”

        “'Boredly' isn't a proper adverb.”

        Harmony blinked. “Yeah, so... ?”

        “So clean out your mouth, Celestia-dang it!” The shattered horn shook on the end of his head. “You're a servant of Canterlot, aren't you? Learn to talk in the royal voice!”

        “Should I be taking notes, or is this just the vodka talking?”

        “No, ma'am. The vodka would talk you straight through the nearest window if you let it.”

        “Weeeee!” Pinkie slid down the banister of the stairwell and suddenly plopped down onto the tile floor between the two. “Whoop! Hey, Bert! My my, you smell like a bottle of bleach!”

        “Screw you too, creampuff.”

        “Heehee! Ohhhh, I love you, candle-stick head!” Pinkie turned to smile at Harmony. “All done here! It's the kids' bedtime. Inkie will be home in about three hours. So, where to, Har-Har?”

        “Yeah—Uh—One second, Pinkie.” Harmony briefly pushed her anchor aside and trotted half-a-step towards the unicorn. “Mister Vimbert, in all seriousness, are the ponies in this Sanitarium actually crazy?”

        He looked up with a sigh, blue eyes blinking lethargically like so many souls beyond the glass. “One of us is an alcoholic janitor, another is a giggling diabetes explosion waiting to happen, and the third is a clueless, royal freeloader in a Winter-Wrap Up vest. Tell me, Miss Harmony, who isn't crazy?”

        “But who deserves to be locked up and who's in here against his or her will?”

        “Who ever asks to be born into this maniacal claptrap we call a world?” Vimbert shelved the bucket and mop onto the cart and wheeled it down towards the far end of the hallway. “Ladies, let madness render unto madness what it can, regardless of what it will. Me? I've got bits to earn. That's the only thing keeping me 'sane' while floozies like Brevis should be shackled. If you'll excuse me, there’s an asylum that needs to be kept sparkly clean. Celestia knows, somepony in Equestria has to mop up after this 'masterpiece'.”

        Harmony gazed worriedly after the orange figure. “I think I'm starting to figure it out. This town is full of two kinds of ponies. Some, like sunshine over there, are righteously indignant. While those of Breathstar's and Haymane's ilk are indignantly righteous.”

        “Where does a 'floozie' like my mentor Brevis fit in?”

        The last pony glanced at Pinkie. With a plastic grin, she dripped forth:“Miss Pie, the two of you should write your own dictionary and then let me know.”

        “Woohoo! I'm naming my dictionary 'Demetrius'!”

        “Yeah, you do that.” Harmony sighed and stared at the coldly lit lengths of the sterile building. “This place just doesn't feel right at all.”

        “What's not right about a place that's built to help ponies get better?”

        “Miss Pie... ” Harmony spun back to frown at her anchor. “This hospital is a prison! Just take a look! Who knows what's wrong with those ponies? Maybe nothing's wrong! Whatever the case, it's obvious to me that this building was only meant for housing them somewhere away from the general populace of Dredgemane!”

        “For whose safety?”

        “Does it matter? The same goes for your beloved kids!” The last pony pointed a hoof straight up towards the floor above them. “There's no known cure for infernite poisoning!”

        “Pfft—Everypony knows that!”

        “Do they?” A pained orphan wretched to the surface of the pegasus' Entropan face. “Miss Pie, those kids aren't likely to get any better! As a matter of fact, all they're doing is waiting!”

        “Waiting? Like waiting for their parents? Because Suntrot says all the time that—”

        “You've got be a naïve jerk to not understand the implication here! Miss Pie, they're going to die young and they're gonna die miserable!”

        “Hmmm... ” Pinkie Pie rubbed her chin with a tapping hoof. “Poor, sick kids... an incurable disease... lots of waiting... misery... ” She glanced up with a bizarrely placid expression. “Guess I can't argue with you on the 'dying' part.”

        “Exactly—”

        “But the 'miserable' part... ” Pinkie's smile silkily resurfaced. “Seems like there are ponies around who can do stuff that matters with the one curable thing those kids have got! It'd be a crime to do nothing there, don'tcha think, Har-Har?”

        Harmony stared past that, twitching, as if a part of her brain broke while trying to send a message to her heart.

        “Woe is the future of Dredgemane!” Pinkie trotted a shuffling circle around Harmony. She sighed a deep fuchsia breath into the lengths of the sterile, checkerboard tile. “So much icky depression and death and infernite and Immolatia and grumpy janitors surround our lives!”

        “Exactly... ” Harmony grimaced. “I think we need to—”

        “I know!” The candy-colored pony beamed in the pegasus' face. “How about a party?!”

        The last pony spastically blinked. “I... er... what... huh... derp?”

        “Wooo! Wooo! Uhh! Yeah! Shake your plots like you've got the trots! Dig it! Ungh!”

        These immortal words emanated from a pink earth pony as she danced wildly beside a record player. The device blasted forth a rhythmically repetitive dance beat across the lengths of a barren, lantern-lit barn situated on the far northwest end of Dredgemane. Several scores of ponies Pinkie's age and younger were gathered there. Despite the relatively dull nature of their garments, the young citizens exercised a remarkably natural spirit of revelry as they found themselves mimicking the fluffy-maned pony's enthusiasm.

        “Woo! Hi, and welcome to Pinkie's Superterrific Magical Sonic Hyper Turbo Dance Beat!” Pinkie waved enthusiastically while another group of equine teenagers sauntered nervously into the loudly throbbing domain. “Feel free to add more adjectives and smiles to the occasion, ya party animals!”

        “We... Uhm... ” One of the fillies in the shivering group pensively murmured, “This... This is a party?”

        “Well, it certainly isn't a Tuppawhinnie Convention!” Pinkie giggled, then gasped wildly into the filly's wilting expression. “You mean to tell me that you've never been to a party before?!”

        “You're in luck!” An older teenage colt in brown work duds waved from a punch table at the far end of the barn. A table of Marble Cake's finest treats had been set up, and several youthful visitors orbited the assortment of plates happily. “When Pinkamena Pie's in town, it's like the Dawn of the First Age all over again!”

        “Make yourselves at home!” Pinkie shoved the jittery young souls into the fray. A brief deadpan:“Don't eat the yellow hay; I'll explain later.” She spun and cartwheeled back over towards the record player. “Woohoo! The fun don't stop 'til the Sun and Moon drop!” The filly turned the volume up on the blasting speakers.

        The last pony winced. The apocalyptic wallflower bravely trotted her way towards the warbling noise-makers and roared into the midst of sound waves. “Miss Pie! Can I have a word with you?!”

        “What?”

        “I said, can I have a word with you?!”

        “What?!”

        “I said—Oh, for the love of oats.” She grasped her teeth over Pinkie's tail and drag-drag-dragged her beneath the drowning mass of a hayloft. “Can I have a word with you?”

        “What?”

        “I—Miss Pie!”

        “Heeheehee! You're such a sap, Har-Har! I have a mind to drain you and make syrup.”

        “Miss Pie, do you ever turn off?”

        “Hmmmm... Dress me in a monk's robe and bathe me in manure. Then I'm bound to be a turn-off to somepony!”

        “Dang it, I'm serious!”

        “Heeheehee! So am I! Seriously groovy, girl!”

        “Heeeeey! Pinkamena!” A passing bunch of colts—the same who were dragging a wagon earlier past the general goods store—waved at Pinkie before making their way towards the punch table. “Crazy party, girl! Happens only once a year, all cuz of you!”

        “Heehee! Yeah!” Pinkie grinned and waved back. “I'm like the flu season! Only I make you cough up gumdrops instead of phlegm!”

        “Does... Uhm... ” Harmony shuffled with immense uncomfortableness as she gazed across the sea of strange youngsters in Dredgemane gear enjoying un-Dredgemane euphoria. “Does the City Council know about this?”

        “About what? Flu season? Yeesh, you should have seen the line my sister and Angel Cake had to single-hoofedly manage last winter!”

        “You know what I mean. I've seen enough of what this city has to offer to know that you're treading a very dangerous line.”

        “Is that like a conga line? Cuz I've actually written down an itinerary for once.”

        “If Mayor Haymane discovers that you're having this party, I swear, he's gonna lose another leg.”

        “Really, Har-Har. Who made you president of his fan club?”

        “Searching for the Royal Grand Biv would be a heck of a lot more productive than... than... than whatever the heck we're doing right now.”

        “But I thought, no less than twelve hours ago, stargazing was important!”

        “Well... Uhm... It is... ”

        “Make up your mind, girl!” Pinkie spun up and shuffled a few two-legged dance moves in place before leaning smoothly against a wooden support beam. “Everypony in Ponyville calls me 'random', and I used to believe them! But you—Woo! You take the cake, Har-Har! You're—like—the super sparkling queen of random!”

        “What? I... I... ” The last pony seethed. “I so am not random!”

        “Heeheehee—Oh really?”

        “I have my priorities straight! Can you say the same about yourself?”

        “One pony's priorities are another pony's whimsy! Sometimes, a pony's priorities are that same pony's whimsy!” Pinkie's face lit up as she cartwheeled over towards a table of party favors and served a dish of cupcakes towards a passing group of young fillies. “At least some of us are willing to admit it about ourselves! Heeheehee! What have you got to say?”

        “I take my priorities seriously! Do you take yours?”

        “Mmmm—And what priorities may I have, Har-Har?”

        “Is that rhetorical or are you actually asking me?”

        “Do I look like I have a broken horn on my head? Hehehe!”

        “Well, okay then,” the last pony spoke above the warbling music beat. “What about those kids earlier?”

        “Heee... Such darling little angels, don't you think? Woo! Listen to me! I was channeling Fluttershy for a moment there! I swear, sometimes it's like we share the same voice!”

        “You care for the patients in the ward where your sister works, right?” Harmony pointed. “Is it just because you have a soft spot for suffering children?”

        “Of course I wanna ease their suffering! Isn't that the whole point? Ever since I first visited my sister's place of practice, my heart went out to those little scamps. I haven't missed a chance to visit them since!”

        “And obviously they adore their 'Auntie Pinkie Pie'. But that's not the heart of the matter. It's been my experience, Miss Pie, that nopony does something out of complete, blind altruism.” The last pony took a breath. When she blinked, a gray Wasteland briefly lit up with a new Sun and then was dark again. Harmony's amber eyes reopened to the banal party before her. “There must be a special satisfaction that you get from helping those kids see through their bouts with Immolatia.”

        “What are you now, a psycho?”

        “Er... Don't you mean a 'psychiatrist'?”

        “Just what are you getting at, Har-Har?”

        “Your mother, Miss Pie,” Harmony said in a flat voice. “She's got it. Inkie said it earlier; your mother's suffering from infernite poisoning. Somehow, I'm willing to bet she's no better off than those kids. Only... ” She leaned her head forward in earnest. “Does your dad let you visit your mom as much as Stonehaven lets you visit the children?”

        Pinkie quietly placed the plate of treats down. She glanced over at Harmony, and when she did so the same smile was there, only it was glistening with a lower tone than the music that pulsed loudly around them like a Goddess' summoned heartbeat.

        “There are many crimes that can be committed in this town, Har-Har,” Pinkie said in a brief calmness. If Harmony squinted, she could have imagined the filly's hair smoothly framing her face like a pink puddlestain against the Dredgemane grayness. “But I'd be a sour-grapes-suckling grumpy-pants if I let the shadows of this place keep me from wanting to share what ponies are born to spread.”

        “What's that? Sensibility?”

        “Pfft! As if!” Pinkie backflipped, bent backwards, and grinned upside-down into Harmony's face. “Joy, ya loon! Heeheehee!”

        Harmony was hardly amused. “There's joy, Miss Pie,” she muttered coldly. “And then there's ignorance.”

        “And which do you think Inkie's kids deserve more of? Or Mommy for that matter?” Pinkie Pie spun around and frolicked into the center of the barn, rejoining the thick of the fanfare. “Or all of Dredgemane's craziest and most eligible youngsters?! Woo! Yeah! Shake it!”

        “The horribly tragic thing about 'joy and ignorance'... ” The last pony shouted into the cacophonous nether of living equine souls. “... is that they're sometimes one and the same!” Several Dredgemane youngsters booed and hissed at her. Harmony frowned, her ears drooping.

        “Take a chill pill, Har-Har!” Pinkie giggled. “We're just taking one night in a year to party like it's the night of the Thousandth Year! Live a little! It's not like Dredgemane's finest is gonna come busting down the barn door at any second!” That uttered, Pinkie suddenly froze as her ears flopped, her eyelids flapped, and her knees shook. “Oh poo.”

        A slamming thunder: the doors busted open. The entire dancing crowd gasped as the record scratched and the air was filled with a deathly silencing following four guardsponies marching into the place. The quartet of Dredgemane militia glanced at the scene, but when they saw nothing but teenage and young adult citizens frozen in mid-prance, they removed their helmets and blinked incredulously.

        “Really? I mean, really?”

        “Pinkamena,” another groaned. “Should have known.”

        “Oh dear Elektra... ” a colt whimpered as he peeled himself from the shivering arms of a rosy-cheeked filly. He wobbled into the center of the scared-stiff crowd. “My Pa's gonna kill me.”

        “Your Pa's going to kill you?” another youngster mewled. “My Pa's going to kill me; my Ma's going to chop me up into little pieces!”

        “OhdearCelestiaOhdearCelestiaOhdeadCelestia!” a random filly hyperventilated.

        The entire barn filled with a quivering crescendo of horrified murmurs and panicked whispers.

        “Alright, Alright!” one guard groaned, waving a hoof. “All of you, calm down. We had a complaint about the noise. You had us scared that a rampant group of Diamond Dogs were trying to blow the place up or something. The good news? Nopony's going to get blown up. The bad news? Yes—All of your Ma's and Pa's are going to kill you.”

        A deep groan fell through the wilted crowd.

        “First thing's first.” The guard whipped out a scroll and pen. “All of you have severely broken curfew. So, on behalf of Haymane's regulations, we have to get your names. Don't everypony volunteer at once—”

        “Curfew?” Harmony stepped up, blinking.

        “You?!” One guard balked at the last pony. The officer was a very familiar figure, none other than the pony that had escorted the time traveler to Haymane's lofty office several hours earlier. “What the heck gives?! The Mayor hires you to chase down the Biv, and you're here partying past curfew like a lunatic?”

        “Help me out, somepony! I'm new to town!” Harmony glanced through the crowd. “Just when is Dredgemane's curfew?”

        “Uhm—Like—Nine o'clock?” A filly off to the side stirred in her gown, digging a shy hoof into the hay. “T-Two hours ago?”

        “Two hours ago?!” Harmony flung a snarl into Pinkie's face.

        “Eheheheh! Ooops?” The candy-colored filly sweated with a nervous grin.

        “Have you ever wondered, Miss Pie, what an exploding zeppelin sounds like?!” The time traveler raised an Entropan hoof. “How about we educate all of these youngsters with your spleen as an example!”

        “Now come on... ” the lead guard grumbled, waving the pen in his hoof. “Let's not add 'aggravated assault' to my laundry list tonight—”

        “Silverstone?” a colt muttered from a cluster of his friends in disbelief.

        The guard glanced through the corner of his eyes, blinking. “Harpstrings?”

        “Dude—What gives?”

        “Dude—I'm doing my job! I volunteered for the militia weeks ago!”

        “Cut us a break here! Come on, I helped you with your algebra homework, didn't I?”

        “I can't! You think I don't stand to have my Ma and Pa kill me too?”

        “Look, pal, you're making things awkward!”

        “Me?! Dude, you guys are the ones signing a death warrant by partying all night with Miss Prissy Dialysis here!”

        “And if you didn't have all of that spiffy armor that Sladeburn tossed your way, you'd be doing the same!”

        “Oh please, I've got better things to do. By the way, nice job getting to first stable with Mister Leafcanter's daughter over there, Mister Casano-luck.”

        “Nnnngh!” The colt from the crowd leaped at the guard. The militia pony let loose a foalish shriek and helplessly crumbled under the weight of the pouncing ruffian. The two young stallions tossed and turned in the throes of each other's violent limbs. The crowd watched in stupefied amazement, including the other three guards.

        Harmony blinked crookedly at the scene. Her gaze wandered from the fight, to the crowd, back to the fight, then finally onto Pinkie Pie. The brightly colored pony shrugged, grinned, and held up a snack bowl. “Popcorn, anypony?”

        “Knock it off!” The copper pegasus dove into the fight and split apart the two teenagers with strong Entropan limbs. “I mean it! This isn't worth it! None of this is! First off, I'm sorry that I let this all happen! I had no idea about the curfew!”

        “Yeah, I bet you didn't!” a bruised and frazzled guard hissed at her.

        “Dude, I'd not mess with her. She's been in the army,” a random pony chirped.

        “The next pony who comments on the beret gets to eat it!” the last pony snarled, her black bangs a frazzled mess. “Secondly... ” She frowned at the young colt leaning into his friends. “Whether or not you respect your parents or Haymane or the Dredgemane Council or Goddess Gultophine herself—I don't friggin' care—but let's not act like animals! And thirdly.” She glanced over towards the ruffled guard, let out a weathered exhale, and raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Seriously? I mean... Seriously? How old are you, kid?”

        The guard nervously shifted, attempting in vain to straighten out his crumpled scroll. “I'll be getting my net gun this Friday.”

        “How young is Haymane enlisting for the militia these days? Is he that desperate?”

        “Well, fat load of good you're doing to catch the Biv!” The guard frowned.

        “Yeah!” another shouted.

        Harmony hissed through wincing teeth, shuffling uncomfortably. “I guess you deserve an explanation. I... erm... I-I was just about to—”

        “We were drawing the Royal Grand Biv out!” Pinkie Pie popped up into view, grinning wide. “Isn't Har-Har sneaky?!”

        “You were doing what now?” The guard stared wildly at the pink filly.

        “Isn't this pegasus from Canterlot brilliant?!” Pinkie side-hugged her and patted the time traveler's amber-streaked mane. “How like a total brainiac from Celestia's palace to figure that a bright and raving party is just the thing needed to summon the Royal Grand Biv out of rainbow-colored hiding!” She blinked her blue eyes towards the night's sky beyond the open barn doors and suddenly brightened. “Oooooh!” She pointed straight out. “There she is now!”

        “Oh yeah right.” Harmony rolled her eyes. She gazed numbly over the guards' manes. “Like the Biv would just happen to show up right when you're—Whoah!” She gasped, her copper jaw dropping towards the floor.

        There, in perfect sight, was a multi-colored streak of an equine figure scampering from rooftop-to-rooftop over the buildings outside. A great roar of excitement and wonder hummed over the heads of all the young souls in attendance.

        “Holy horseshoes!” One of the guards rattled in his armor, his young eyes twitching. “Like—What do we do?”

        “Are you kidding me?” Harmony hissed and jolted towards the doors. “We catch the frickin' punk! Pinkie!”

        “Coming, Har-Har!” Pinkie impossibly galloped backwards. She paused to wave, standing in the frame of the barn doors. “Sorry to cut the party short, my Dredgies! But—I mean, come on! Chasing the Grand Biv?! Heeheee! This night is so unbelievably fun—” A copper hoof reached back and yanked her away by the neck. “Yeep!”

        A quartet of bumbling guards followed suit. A curtain of silence fell in their wake. Every remaining pony exchanged glances, then fled for what was left of their fragile social lives.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        A breathless Harmony galloped through the cobblestone streets of Dredgemane, her hooves clattering over the endless names of dead ponies. She gazed up into the overcast night sky and was briefly stabbed by the sight of twinkling stars and a half-lit moon. She was ever so briefly torn apart between two goals, until one in particular swept violently overhead with a trail of prismatic madness.

        “Wow, she's fast!” Pinkie Pie bounced athletically beside the copper pegasus. “Gonna be hard to get her from way down here!” In mid-gallop, she blinked her blue eyes Harmony's way. “I hate to be a back-saddle driver, Har-Har, but are you gonna use your wings at some point?!”

        “Not if I can use my brains first,” Harmony murmured aloud, glancing at each building that lingered in the roof-hopping figure's path. “Miss Pie,” she managed between pants, “You've seen the Biv in action before. Would you guess that it's galloping towards or away from downtown?”

        “Well, right now, she's looking really-really sure of herself, so I'm guessing she's heading into the center of town to do something insanely awesome!”

        “Then what's the best building that will take her there?!”

        “Oooh! I know! The Dredgemane Town Hall! Dead ahead!” Pinkie pointed with her fluffy mane towards a three-story building about four rooftops away from where the Biv was presently scampering, piercing the night with flowing bands of multi-colored pomp.

        “Town Hall... Town Hall... Town Hall... ” Harmony murmured, her amber eyes squinting over the courtyard lying before the granite structure in question. She saw claustrophobic, night-shrouded streets almost entirely devoid of citizens. Then, in the flickering blaze of several lampposts, she spotted an abandoned cart full of rocks positioned beside a very familiar statue with its sparkling fountain fixed. “It's so stupid.” She smirked to herself. “Of course it has to work!”

        “How do I have to work?”

        “Not you—Nnngh.” Harmony shook her snout, skidded to a stop, and pointed at the cart. “Point that towards the alleyway to the left of the Town Hall building!”

        “Okie dokie lokie!” Pinkie shuffled over and pushed the entirety of her weight into the upturned drawbeams of the wagon.

        In the meantime, Harmony leaped high and clambered halfway up the granite figure of Gultophine.

        “Hnnngh... So... Many... Rocks... ” Pinkie hissed and sweated as she slowly swiveled the wagon so that the front of it faced the alleyway. “Positively rockalicious... !”

        “Tell me when the Biv is about to make its leap for the town hall!” Harmony shouted down, breathlessly climbing up to the mane of Gultophine.

        Pinkie glanced up, blue eyes twitching. The distant rainbow figure flickered against the cloudy Dredgemane night. It was three roofs away from the Town Hall. Two. One—

        “Well?” Harmony grunted forth, hanging off of the alicorn's stone horn.

        “Now, Har Har!”

        “Alley—” Harmony fell down and landed with the full weight of her Entropan body over the wagon's drawbeams. “—Oop!” She roared as the entire volume of rocks in the back of the wagon flew like a catapult's volley towards the air above the alleyway.

        Just at that moment, the Biv was springing through the night, its cloak flailing behind it like rainbow wings. In slow motion hilarity, it turned its glinting goggles aside at the last second to greet a billowing shrapnel of rocks overtaking it. In a cacophonous clatter of stones and limbs, the vandal was knocked out of the air and tossed violently into the dimly-lit street below.

        “Ooooh... ” Pinkie Pie blinked as Harmony dismounted the upended wagon beside her. “Can a pony actually taste her own rainbow?”

        “If by 'rainbow' you mean 'just desserts', then sure!” Harmony smirked proudly as a wave of guards emptied from the far corners of the city canyons and caught up with the scene, gathering about the two. She marched with Pinkie towards the sudden pile of rocks lying in the middle of the alleyway. “Now, let's get this lovely chapter in our lives done so I can map some friggin' stars already.”

        “What were you saying earlier about priorities?”

        “Oh hush.”

        The two ponies and the many guards formed a thick circle around the unassuming pile of rocks. Several young ponies in armor rattled nervously.

        “Ohhhhh jeez Oh jeez Oh jeez.”

        “Is... Is he dead?”

        “Of course she is! Did you see how she totally bit that wave of tossed rocks?”

        “Who launched those by the way? It sure as heck wasn't me!”

        “I think it was the Canterlotlian Pegasus that Haymane hired—”

        “Could everypony just put a cork in it for one second?” Harmony grumbled as she cautiously approached the pile of rocks like it was the ashes of a defeated phoenix. “I gotta listen for any signs of—”

        A volcanic burst: the Royal Grand Biv exploded out of the pile of heavy rocks and shook its entire body from masked snout to coatails. The torchlight reflected a prismatic kaleidoscope of madness from the mysterious figure's multicolored coat. Several guards jolted backwards, raising pikes and net-guns in apprehension as the equine figure snorted and exhaled misty vapors into the cold air of the canyon night.

        “Woooo! So awesome!” Pinkie beamed. “What did I tell ya?! She's full of tricks! Just like Rainbow Dash!”

        Harmony held her back and fearlessly frowned the cretin's way. “Royal Grand Biv? On behalf of the authority granted me by Celestia's Court of Canterlot, you're under arrest for vandalism and disturbing the peace of Dredgemane. Now that that's out of the way, are we gonna do this the easy way, or—”

        The Biv glared at the last pony, ruby goggles glinting soullessly. A flicking movement, and the figure's rainbow cloak straightened into two waves of serrated blades that glinted in the torchlight.

        “—the hard way?” Harmony gulped. “Hoboy.”

        “Uhhhh... ” Pinkie Pie made a pouty face. “I don't remember Dashie doing that trick.”

        “Get down!” Harmony shoved her yelping anchor to the cobblestone as the Royal Grand Biv flew at them, slicing a fan of blades madly through the Dredgemane night.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Nineteen – Slaughterpink Five

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        “Eeep!” Pinkie Pie squirmed in Harmony's grasp as the last pony flung the two of them to the street. The air of Dredgemane's Town Square sang with metal madness. The Royal Grand Biv flung its rainbow colored cloak-blades down at the two ponies. Harmony gnashed her teeth and rolled from side-to-side with her anchor in tow. After each subsequent dodge, the figure's weapons spat sparks across the cobblestone.

        “I hate sharp pointy things!” Pinkie squeaked and clung all the tighter to Harmony. “Ihatethem! Ihatethem! Ihatethem!”

        The copper pegasus hissed, exhaling through the filly's candy-colored forelimbs. “Miss Pie... Hckkt... You're choking me...” Her grimacing face reflected off the Biv's ruby goggles as the fan of prismatic blades soared towards her skull. “Will you friggin' let go?!” She side-bucked a shrieking Pinkie towards the fountain. The two ponies split apart just milliseconds before the figure's cape embedded into the cobblestone between them. Harmony kipped up to her hooves, climbed up the metal-laced cape in a blink, and jumped off with a front limb slamming across the Biv's mask. The phantom vandal stumbled back from the impact. As Harmony vigorously charged it, the figure swiftly sheathed its blades and lowered its snout. It caught the full brunt of the copper pegasus' charge and flung her over its flank.

        The time traveler yelped, spun in the air, and slammed through a wooden cart beside the Gultophine statue. In her place, over two dozen Dredgemane guards rushed up and aimed a flurry of pikes the Biv's way. With acrobatic finesse, the rainbow-cloaked miscreant dodged the young militia ponies' stabs, grasped the lengths of two separate spears with the crooks of its limbs, and flung the yelping owners into each other. Several guards collapsed over the two, forming a furious dogpile, their armor-rattled cries echoing across the starlit canyons of Dredgemane.

        Harmony stood up from a sea of wooden splinters. Hissing, she glared over and watched a new pair of guards rush up to the Biv's side, armed with net guns. Just as the stallions were about to launch the contraptions, the figure unsheathed its blades once more and deflected the cannons away with a rain of sparks. Before the burning embers could so much as touch the cobblestone, the lightning-quick figure hoisted two guards by their breastplates and flung them violently into a crowd of reinforcements. More iron-clad Dredgemaners stormed up, surrounding the Biv. The vandal glared at them through glinting goggles and once more raised its “wings” of multicolored blades—

        —which Harmony's Entropan hoof suddenly sailed through, sundering the sharp fans to rainbow dust. The crowd of recovering guards gasped at the “Canterlotlian Agent's” hoofwork as she stood in the shadow of the stumbling Biv and smirked. “Hah! You're not so tough without your cloak's teeth, now are you?”

        A blast of gunpowder emanated from deep within the Royal Grand Biv's robes. A cluster of bright ribbon flew towards Harmony's face and wrapped tightly around her snout.

        “Mmmff—Mmmmff!” Harmony's amber eyes crossed as she struggled with frustrated hooves to yank the bindings off her mouth. “Mmmfff!

        Two large guards took the moment to dive at the Biv. The figure backflipped mightily into the air, dodging them and sailing over the sea of swiveling heads. With unearthly finesse, the vandal landed in front of a closed blacksmith shop, spun around, and broke into a fierce gallop—

        “Rrrrghhh!” A muzzled pegasus flew into the Biv's side, bull-tackling it through the front face of the building.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Navigating a sea of shards, both figures tumbled into the darkened blacksmith's shop. There was a brief but weighted scuffle, with both Harmony and the cloaked pony exchanging vicious blows. Finally, the Biv kicked the time traveler off. Harmony stumbled backwards into an extinguished furnace. With a muted snarl, she forced her Entropan hooves once more to her lips and finally wrenched the rainbow ribbons off her snout. “Nnngh!” She glared across the blanketing shadows of the first floor interior. “Show yourself, ya fruity bucket of vomit!”

        The blacksmith shop suddenly exploded with light. Harmony winced, squinting to see a familiar, bushy-bearded stallion marching down a flight of steps with a trembling mare carrying a lantern by his side.

        “What in Elektra's mane?!” Mister Irontail snarled under the brim of a nightcap. He shook the rusted end of a firepoker in Harmony's direction. “Explain yourself, girl, or I add another wound to your Zebraharan battle scars!”

        Harmony straightened her green beret and panted. “The Royal Grand Biv is here! Did you see where it went?!” Irontail's wife shrieked, because four rainbow-colored limbs were suddenly ensnaring the last pony's body from behind, lifting her back so that she teetered on two hooves. “Oh buck me with a lightning gun!” She snarled and flew herself backwards, slamming both her and her tangling foe through several clattering rows of iron tools. “Aaaaugh!” The two of them finally collapsed through the door to the blacksmith's shop—

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        —and back out onto the cobblestone of Town Square. Harmony and the Biv slammed through a wooden fence and crashed against a water trough, spilling muddied liquid all over the street. The sounds of gasping guards and rattling armor lit the misty night air. While the Biv ran away, Harmony fell with a splash. Wincing, she glanced up to see the bottoms of the Biv's scampering hooves.

        In a sharp breath, Harmony jolted onto four hooves to gallop after her. Her limbs slipped over the wet cobblestone. She growled and cursed under her breath as she scuffled absurdly in place for a few seconds before ultimately diving straight for the Biv's dangling tail hairs. Her teeth clamped over the fibers and she yanked her neck back... only to find her entire weight falling down on her haunches.

        “Ooof!” Harmony exhaled into the tail. She blinked, and realized that the tail had not only detached from the escaping Biv's figure, but it wasn't even a tail at all. As a matter of fact, judging from the lit fuse that was sparkling on the other side of it—

        An explosion of prismatic sediment went off in the time traveler's face. She and several guards around her coughed and sputtered as a rainbow-colored cloud filled the immediate space of the Dredgemane street. Harmony stumbled forward, blinking through a fresh stain of soot covering her twitching, copper features. As soon as she opened her eyes—

        A paper airplane hit her on the nose.

        “Ow! Sonuva—!” Harmony shook her snout and snarled towards a pink shape. “Seriously, Miss Pie?! Now of all times?!”

        Pinkie innocently shrugged amidst a sea of stumbling guards. “I had to do something while you were gone!”

        “Pinkie, it was—like—sixty seconds!”

        “Did the Biv get away?”

        “You tell me!”

        “Oooh!” Pinkie pointed up towards the rooftops. “Lookie!”

        Harmony spun; her amber eyes twitched. As the rainbow-colored smoke cleared, the unmistakable shadow of the Royal Grand Biv could be seen galloping up towards a row of closed market stands and scaling the wooden shingles above them.

        “Yeah, okay, time to take this to a new level!” Harmony growled while hoisting her turquoise vest up to expose her wings—

        “Eeep!”

        “Oh my Goddess!”

        “Gultophine have mercy!”

        Harmony blinked, pausing in mid-strip. She glanced over towards the source of the outcries and saw a trio of filly onlookers standing in the doorway to an apartment in their nightgowns. They recoiled in absolute terror upon the sight of the pegasus.

        “What's wrong?!” the last pony barked.

        “Ma'am! You're... You're indecent!” one of the guards explained, shading his eyes with a hoof.

        “Oh you gotta be freaking kidding me!”

        “But Bishop Breathstar says—”

        “Close your friggin' eyes then, hot shot!” Harmony flung the vest off her copper torso and flexed a pair of wings. “Miss Pie!”

        “Yes, Har Har?” Pinkie suddenly gasped as her half-naked companion hoisted her skyward. “Eeeeeeeek!” The two soared towards the rooftops of the canyon-weaving buildings in pursuit of the colorful figure.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The Royal Grand Biv scaled market stand after market stand, its hooves clopping thunderously over the wooden cubicles. It approached a solid line of two-story stone buildings and leaped high. Multicolored comet-tails surged vibrantly after the figure's cloak as it sliced through the night's air. In a breath, it landed silently on a plate of rusted metal roofing and galloped eastward through the lengths of town.

        No less than five seconds later, a pair of copper hooves loudly slammed down onto the same metal plane. Harmony dropped Pinkie beside her and sped into a full canter.

        “Weeeeee!” Pinkie Pie giggled and bounced leisurely through the heated pursuit. “Let's do that again! That was fun!”

        “This is not the time for fun!” Harmony gnashed through her teeth, keeping the distant shade of the Biv in the center of her bobbing vision. “We gotta catch this freak!”

        “Rainbow Dash never takes me for pegasus rides! Even when I keep asking her!”

        “Miss Pie...”

        “She keeps telling me I'll fall and land on my head! Silly filly! I would just bounce right back up, like when I was foaled!”

        “Miss Pie—Where does this street lead?”

        “Hmmmm...” Pinkie squinted ahead as the two galloped within two roofs' lengths of the fleeing Biv. “Soon it's gonna branch into two trenches. The Biv could go either left or right. I'm gonna guess left—because all genius ponies are southhooves. Heehee!”

        “You've got a good shouting voice!” Harmony panted as she and Pinkie leaped to the next rooftop and continued chasing. “As soon as I pounce the creep, you raise heck and try to alert the guards to where we are!”

        “I've got a better idea, Har Har! Why don't you just fly ahead and tackle her like you did earlier and I'll come around from the other side and grab her hooves?”

        “No!” Harmony hissed and plowed her way through a curtain of chimney smoke. She coughed, sputtered, then shouted to her anchor. “We can't split up! I... uh... I need you here with me!”

        “Pffft! Whatever for?” The party girl's blue eyes briefly sparkled. “Have you come to love me that much already?”

        “Knock it off! I need you to tell me the street layout, that's all!”

        “Suuuuuure, whatever you say, Queen Random! Hee hee hee!”

        “Grrr—Stop calling me that—”

        “Look!” Pinkie pointed with her mane.

        Harmony blinked in time to see the Biv leaping left, clasping the length of a lamppost in its upper limbs, swiveling twice, and flinging itself toward a wooden array of densely stacked apartment complexes across the street from where the two were presently galloping.

        “Cooooool!” Pinkie nearly drooled. “Isn't it amazing what ponies these days can do? Of course, if Twilight was here, she'd just scream 'Horse Tranquilizers—'”

        “Across the street!” Harmony grasped Pinkie's mane hair in her teeth. “Mmmmf—Now!” She flung the breathless pink anchor—twirling—into the naked air above the trench of Dredgemane. In a swooping dive, the last pony flew underneath Pinkie, caught her weight, and sailed the two of them murderously towards the Royal Grand Biv just as the figure was climbing up an apartment's window balcony.

        “Woooohoo!” Pinkie's voice wound its way to a climax as all three bodies converged as one in the cacophonous night. “This is the best—”

        The ponies slammed hard into the Biv. All three went crashing through the window...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...and straight into the candlelit apartment with a spray of glass. An elder stallion gasped and fell out of his chair with the book he was reading. Harmony, Pinkie, and the Royal Grand Biv went tumbling across the floor of the debris-littered living room.

        “—night ever!” Pinkie was the first to jump up. “Yeah! Thank you for flying Har-Har airlines! Heeheehee!”

        “Nnngh!” Harmony grunted as the Biv was suddenly pouncing its full weight atop the copper pegasus. “You're not helping...”

        “Ooops, sorry. Uhm...” Pinkie looked all around the room for a blunt object, but eventually settled for the hapless Dredgemaner's book. She picked the thick tome up and read it upside down. “Suis tsbd?” The filly shrugged. “Guess it'll have to do.” A concussive thunder lit the air. The Biv's goggles rattled as its skull was violently slammed from behind with the book. “Hey there, Biv!” Pinkie grinned wide. “I'm a big fan!”

        Harmony took the moment to shove the cloaked figure off of her. She kicked up to her feet and wrapped her upper limbs around the vandal's mane, struggling to wrestle the miscreant to the ground. “Give up, darn you! In the name of Canterlot—Augh!” She shrieked as the Biv murderously flung the two of them into a bookcase. Scrolls and heavily-bound encyclopedias rained down on them. Harmony growled and vengefully dragged the Biv across the room with Entropan limbs. The shivering elder stallion shrieked and rolled aside as the pegasus flung the weight of the Biv into a rattling dish cabinet, repeatedly slamming the goggled stranger's face into shattering plates and dinnerware. “Don't... Make... Me... Enjoy... This!”

        “Go for the sleeper hold, Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie marched up, book in tow. “It always works for Chris Jericolt!”

        “Dang it, Pinkie, get back—” Too late: the Royal Grand Biv blindly kicked its rear hooves up, bucking Pinkie Pie clear across the apartment.

        “Whoahhhh!” Pinkie flew through a shattering doorframe and landed deep inside a dimly-lit bedroom. The frightened shriek of an old mare emanated from within. “Sorry, lady! Hey, that's a pretty bridle!” A slapping noise, and Pinkie's body ragdolled back just as viciously as she had flown in, this time plowing through the lower limbs of the two wrestling ponies.

        “Gaah!” Harmony grunted. She and her adversary pratfalled. In the heat of the tumble, the Biv tried galloping away. Harmony dove and clasped—snarling—onto the figure's coattails, holding on for dear life.

        “What are you Goddess-forsaken rabble-rousers doing in my home?!” The stallion finally stammered. In punctuation, a glare was thrown the pegasus' way. “And why are you naked?”

        “You want us out?!” The last pony viciously snarled. “Okay! Haaugh!” With a violent flap of her wings, she propelled herself and the Biv straight up—

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        —and slammed through the ceiling. In a rain of wood and brick, the two landed, sprawling chaotically across the apartment's starlit rooftop. Harmony was the first to stir to life, her vision dancing through brief green tongues of flame under copper eyelids. Shaking the dust and soot off of her, she stumbled to her hooves and marched towards the prone figure of the Biv, lying numbly like a wilted flower of rainbow petals.

        “Face it. Your nights of painting clockfaces and tainting holy fountains are over. I'm not your average pony, bucko. You may be swift and clever, but I can outlast you in ways you can never know. As far as the two of us are concerned, you're just a one-trick-pony.”

        Suddenly, the Biv shot up on its haunches and flung a quartet of lit explosives at the last pony's hooves.

        Harmony blinked. “Okay, make that two-trick—”

        Fountains of colorful confetti streamers blew up in the pegasus' face. She stumbled back, instinctively shielding herself with a pair of outstretched wings. Through the thick cloud of streamers, a pair of hooves reached towards Harmony's wings and strapped a rainbow-colored noose around the ends of her feathers. The last pony saw it and gasped, but she was too late to fling her appendages back. Tightening the noose, the Biv bound the pegasus' wings tightly together and stood across the roof at the end of a sudden lasso, tugging hard at the end of it.

        A smirk briefly lit Harmony's copper lips. With a grunt, she flung both of her bound wings back. The Biv's goggles nearly flew off into the night's sky as the cloaked figure was flung towards her by sheer Entropan strength. Harmony ducked the figure's hurled body and kicked her legs up in time to buck the airborne vandal into a smoking chimney behind her. The Biv pinballed off it and crumpled loosely to the ground, struggling to get up.

        “Nnnnnngh!” Harmony struggled to pull her wings apart. With a loud snap, the Entropan appendages broke the lasso's hold apart. She twirled around, ground her hooves into the rooftop, and galloped with cosmic speed towards the sight of the vulnerable figure. “Time to finish this—”

        No sooner was this uttered than Pinkie Pie's upper torso popped up from the fresh hole in the ceiling. “Whew! What a doozie!” She grinned wide, inexplicably blocking the galloping path of the pegasus' legs. “What are you made of, Har-Har? Arcanium?-Aaaackies!”

        The last pony yelped as she plowed into Pinkie Pie. The two collapsed like dominos, ultimately rolling their way towards the edge of the apartment rooftop. The brick ledge lining the structure shattered instantly, and Harmony plummeted over the side. With a breathless grunt, she flung a hoof up and clasped onto the edge of the building. Panting, she glanced down to see her lower body dangling three whole stories above a rotting pile of rubbish inside an abandoned garbage wagon. “Oh, well that's cute.”

        With one swift flap of her wings, Harmony shot herself up and hovered above the rooftop. Squinting, she saw the Royal Grand Biv galloping away towards the far end of the apartment building. With a snarl, the copper pegasus prepared to give chase in full flight.

        “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie's voice suddenly shrieked.

        The last pony stopped in mid-air, blinking. She spun around to see that her anchor had been thrown over the roof's edge as well, and was presently hanging from the side of the building, her limbs dangling high above the garbage wagon.

        “I don't think gravity likes me very much tonight!” the candy-colored filly struggled to say as her hooves began slipping.

        “Celestia, give me patience!” Harmony hissed and flew down to the building's edge. She grasped Pinkie's hooves with her own. “I got you. Just be calm and—

        “Oooooh!” Pinkie Pie cooed out of nowhere, her blue eyes sparkling. “Pretty fireworks!”

        “Miss Pie, will you friggin' pay attention to the situation?! There are no fireworks!”

        “Erm...” Pinkie bit her lip. “If you insist.” Her eyes reflected a bright glowing stream of light.

        “Huh?” Harmony glanced over her shoulder. For the last few milliseconds that afforded the copper pegasus comprehension, she saw the distant image of the Royal Grand Biv firing a sparkling red rocket straight at the two of them. “Awwwww dragon turds.”

        The projectile exploded directly over their manes, assaulting them with a flowery burst of rainbow-colored chaos. The sheer proximity of the fireworks display sent the pair of equines sprawling into each other and over the side of the building. The two fillies plummeted—screaming like shrill comets—down all three stories and into the exploding sea of garbage beneath them.

        Later that night, the door to the Pie Family's farmhouse creaked slowly open. Standing side-by-side in the penumbra of the eerie candlelight were two fillies splotched from head to toe with slime, mud, scraps, litter, and slop. The air was filled with a buzzing of random flies as a copper pegasus glared amber daggers into the dark spaces ahead of her. Her pink companion snuck her multiple, blinking glances complemented by a nervous titter every now and then.

        Harmony was as dull and emotionless as stone. She removed the beret from her crown and turned it upside down above the edge of the farmhouse's front porch. An extraordinary volume of refuse poured out in a green fountain of sludge. With a long, anguished sigh, the copper pegasus stepped inside. Pinkie Pie shuffled guiltily behind her, stifling a foalish hum in the back of her blushing throat.

        Seated in the foyer of the farmhouse, Quarrington Edward Pie flipped through an issue of Equestria Daily. His bored gold eyes scanned down the page of the Politics section. After a few seconds, his brow furrowed. His nostrils flared. He began sniffing the air offensively, raising an eyebrow as he slowly turned around and flung a deadpan look over his shoulder.

        Pinkie Pie smiled, her pink mane crowned with a brown banana peel for a tiara. She waved at her father and motioned to herself and Harmony. “We just ran into the Royal Grand Biv!”

        Quarrington stared. After a delayed flutter of his eyelids, he nodded. “I imagine that you did.” The bored stallion straightened the newspaper with a firm slap and returned to his article. “There's fresh coal under the stairs, Pinkamena.”

        “Thanks, Daddy.” Pinkie spun and winked at Harmony. “He means so that our bath will be warm.”

        “Really?” Harmony droned unemotionally. “I was kinda hoping to be burned at the stake tonight.”

        “Heehee! Are you loco in the coco?!” Pinkie Pie smiled and blew a swarm of flies away through the corner of her bright lips. “How can you attend Gultophine's Summons tomorrow morning in the chapel with my family if you're burned to a crisp?!”

        Harmony squinted. “I'm attending Gultophine's Summons tomorrow morning?”

        “You have to! It's Dredgemane tradition!”

        “Miss Pie, I...” Harmony groaned and stared down at her slime-coated body. “I'm... not exactly what you would call a religious pony.”

        “Well, you are most certainly a smelly pony! So I'll get a bath started for us!” Pinkie Pie bounced her way across the candle-lit dining room, passing a table littered all over with dozens of Blinkaphine's freshly drawn landscapes. “Besides, you're gonna need a lot of prayer if you want any better luck catching the Biv tomorrow than you had tonight!”

        “Tonight's screw-up had nothing to do with prayer.” Harmony gritted her teeth hard enough to almost form fractures in the Entropan enamel. “Unless, of course, Gultophine left you on fire at your parent's doorsteps and rang the bell.”

        “Heehee! There's hope for you yet, Har-Har!” Pinkie lifted a banana peel off her head and dropped it on the floor in a wet splat. A petite, wall-eyed alligator scampered up out of nowhere, sniffed the peel once, and gobbled it in one breath. “After a good bath, we can both sleep away our misfortunes and greet the morning with a smile!”

        “Uhhh... yeah...” A grimacing Harmony stared after the scampering Gummy... at least until something Pinkie had just said forced her to give the coal-dragging filly a double-take. “Wait, what do you mean we?”

        “So I needed to borrow a gyrocopter from the pegasi at Skybreak Point in order to fly myself up into the clouds and see what Rainbow Dash and her grumpy friend Gilda were up to. And the pilot I talked to said 'Well, I'm not done lubricating the tail rotors!' And I said, 'That's okay, will just any oil do?' But then he said, 'Nah, that's too expensive; I just use oatmeal!' And then I said, 'Oatmeal?! Are you crazy?!'”

        “Pinkie...” Harmony grumbled, stirring stiffly under the covers. “Isn't there a guest room where I could be sleeping, or something?”

        “Nope!” Pinkie Pie smiled. The two fillies were lying—bunched up—shoulder to shoulder in an impossibly small twin bed surrounded by the pink walls of the earth pony's second story room. “Unless you wanna sleep in the bathtub! But that whole room's icky-smelling from all the gunk we washed off us! Bleachk!”

        “I think I'd rather take my chances.” The cramped last pony groaned.

        “Besides, it gets cold here on the plateau! We Dredgemaners have long learned how to stay warm when the bitter kiss of night falls!”

        “In what way, as if I wanted to know?”

        “Here, I'll bend my upper body this way and you move your hoofsies that way—”

        “Uhhh... What are you doing?”

        “I'm showing you how to—”

        “No! Goddess, no! No spooning!”

        “Heehee—What's the big dealio, filly-o?”

        “I'm not spooning with you, Miss Pie! Not for warmth! Not for comfort! Not for all tea in Chyneigh!”

        “You don't want those pretty copper feathers of yours to get all mottled and fall off! You should have seen what happened to Dashie that one night she slept in late before Winter-Wrap Up three years ago! I swear, she looked like a cave bat who hadn't eaten for a week!”

        “Miss Pie...”

        “Of course, she knew that I hated bats in my face, so she spent the next week stalking me all across Ponyville and jumping out at from behind vending machines! Boy, did she scare me something fierce! Not even hiccups could contain me!”

        “Miss Pie...”

        “By the way, do you have a problem with bed-wetting?”

        “No, Miss Pie, I am most certainly not incontinent.”

        “Erm... I didn't mean to ask if you were...”

        “H-Huh?” Harmony blinked, then made a horrified expression. “Oh, Goddess! Don't even pretend to insinuate that you have the tendency to—”

        “Don't worry. Hehe! I gave up the habit of drinking three bottles of Sarsaparilla before bed years ago. You see, my sister always wanted to be a nurse, so she constantly had these medical books lying around, and that's how I learned about kidney stones. Of course, I thought they would be just like any other rocks that we harvest around the fields, so I had this bright idea of growing up to start my own kidney stone farm, and drinking bottles of sarsaparilla everyday was my first step towards starting my new enterprise.”

        “Miss Pie, I think the right hemisphere of your brain should be declared a lethal weapon.”

        “That was the whole point! Kidney stones are brittle and shatter on impact. So, I figured that if I fashioned them into arrowheads, then they could be used to drive away the hydras next time those nasty monsters charged the farms from their bogs to the north.”

        “Look...” The time traveler was at a loss to feign exhaustion with her Entropan body, but she wasn't about to let the night carry on so noisily. She propped herself up with a hoof and frowned down at the duvet-covered filly. “All I want to do is just rest and relax in utter silence. We had an entire absurdity-filled day, during which you had and exploited every opportunity that came upon you to fill my skull with new and cosmic definitions of the word 'migraine'. Tomorrow, you will once again have a chance to naively exercise such blindly sadistic energies upon my equine soul all you want. But for right now, while your family is asleep, while night is upon us, while every pony in Dredgemane is as silent and distant as the Exiled Goddesses themselves, is it too much to ask for you to be still, tranquil, and above all quiet?!”

        Pinkie jolted upon the voluminous exhalation of that last word. She blinked her blue eyes upon the precipice of a glassy pout.

        Harmony shoved it out of sight as she likewise shoved her body aside, pointing her spine towards Pinkie as she fluffed her pillow and practically slammed the side of her copper head into it with a frown. She projected an insomniac glare into the clown-lamp-lit recesses of the pink bedroom.

        Something very queer proceeded over the next ten seconds. Harmony blinked, wondering if she had somehow gotten detached from her anchor and ended up back in Spike's cave. She realized that what she had asked for had miraculously been delivered; the world had grown silent for ten blissful seconds. The last pony suddenly remembered what her mind's voice sounded like, and it brought her comfort like a long-lost lover's nuzzling embrace. It took the pegasus no longer than the tenth second to breathe this peace in, for as soon as the eleventh second hit:

        “Kidney stone arrowheads couldn't pierce hydra flesh, could they? I don't know what I was thinking.”

        “Princess Celestia on a pogo-stick.” Harmony groaned. “The world doesn't end quickly enough.”

        “Now there's an image I wouldn't mind seeing!”

        “Which one?”

        “Erm... The one that's slightly cuter than the other.”

        “Pinkie...” Harmony turned over and squinted at the pink pony. “Let me ask you something.”

        “If you want more of the blanket, Har-Har, I think we should play 'Rocks, Papers, Saddles' for it.”

        “Do you expect to live forever?”

        “Not as much as I forever live to expect!” Pinkie Pie giggled foalishly.

        “We live in a very cold, dark, frightening universe,” the last pony said. “Horrible things happen to ponies everywhere and all the time. How in the face of all that can somepony like you afford to smile all the time?”

        “Very easily! Here, I'll show you!” Pinkie reached across the covers and planted a hoof against each of Harmony's copper dimples. The last pony's lips stretched limply in the pink filly's grip, replete with a pair of deadpan eyes. “See? Heeheehee! Tell me, did the 'horrible things' of the universe stop that from happening?”

        “Dey wuden stoff meh frumff gibbieeg yuuf uh concuthion eiffer.”

        “What was that, Har-Har?” Pinkie retrieved her hooves.

        “Ptooie! Ahem, did you ever hear about the Goldtrot Dynasty?”

        “Oooh, is this some joke that ends in the punchline 'And that's why you always blood test your boyfriend'?”

        “The Goldtrot Dynasty ended in the middle of the Celestial Civil War,” Harmony spoke, summoning knowledge from lonely hours of reading historical records in the cabin of her airship. “The last family was run by a matronly duchess named Yellowfleece who took a stance of isolationism when the Lunar Republic rose up against the Celestial Estate. Yellowfleece governed a province populated by no less than five thousand earth pony citizens. When the army of the Lunar Republic surrounded the capital city of the Goldtrot territory, Yellowfleece's subjects were starved with a sanction imposed upon them by Nightmare Moon's generals. The Lunar Republic was trying to force the province's ponies to join their cause against Princess Celestia. Yellowfleece refused, and forced her kingdom to become a neutral state. Decades passed, and without contact with merchants in the outside world, the province suffered a terrible famine and drought. While Yellowfleece maintained that everything was peachie-keen in the world, her subjects were experiencing a very real misery. Eventually, they rose up against her and murdered the last duchess of the Goldtrot Dynasty in her very own throneroom.”

        “This is the worst bedtime story I've ever been told.”

        “Pinkie...” Harmony exhaled firmly. “The Goldtrot Family Dynasty—an aristocratic lineage that had existed since the mid-Second Age—died out because their last noble representative refused to believe that there was a truly horrible and miserable situation surrounding her kingdom. Written records document that she spent the last few years of her life having parties, enjoying luxuries, and entertaining a small band of exiled nobles who had taken refuge in her palace. She never opened her eyes to the reality of having to deal with the Lunar Republic, and in pitifully bitter irony it was at the hooves of her very own people that Yellowfleece eventually died.”

        “Perhaps her fault was throwing the wrong kind of parties.”

        “Her fault was thinking everything was all happy-go-lucky when it really wasn't! She lived during the time of the Celestial Civil War, a period in Neo-Equestrian History that saw nearly as many deaths as the Chaos Wars themselves. The entire race of unicorns almost went extinct during a period of four decades alone.”

        “So, what, are unicorns about to kill each other in Dredgemane? Unless Bishop Breathstar and Bert the Janitor decide to go dueling with crossbows, I don't think we have anything to worry about.”

        “Pinkie!” Harmony hissed sharply, her face contorting in pain and worry. “This town is miserable! Even you can't be blind to it! There are children dying in one side of the hospital while a hooffull of their parents linger in a mindless existence on the other side! Infernite sickness haunts hundreds if not thousands of workers who have spent generations hammering their way into the quarry up north! When ponies aren't shuffling about in their day-to-day labors with absolute gloom etched into their faces, they're either drowning themselves in drink at the saloon or breaking curfew just to experiment with impulsive madness! Bums roam the streets, rambling forth absurdities. The mayor himself is a morose soul whose spiritual wounds mirror the lengths of flesh torn from his life!”

        “That's so not true!” Pinkie frowned. “There's only one bum! And he rocks!”

        “Open your eyes!” the last pony exclaimed. “This town needs more than cookies, smiles, and jokes! It needs a cure to what ails it!” A sigh came out through her nostrils. “Just like those kids you love so much...”

        “But you can tell when you've made a foal happy or not, Har Har.” Pinkie grinned warmly. “It's a lot harder to tell what an entire town wants. I mean, I'm no Haymane. Could you say the same? Hmm?”

        Harmony looked briefly sad, her amber eyes reflecting something gray from beyond the opaque lengths of that room. “Is it so bad that I would want—with all my heart—to stop so many ponies from suffering?”

        “Heeheehee!”

        Harmony frowned. “What's so Luna-darned funny now?”

        “Just you, Har-Har. For a girl who can't get a joke, you sure make me giggle a lot.”

        “I don't get it...”

        “Of course you wouldn't. Hehehe...” Pinkie squirmed into her pillow, her lips a sideways crescent moon before Harmony's vision. “First, you go on and on about stargazing. Then, you pretend to my sister that you're following me to make a report to Princess Celestia. Next, you sign yourself up for chasing down the Royal Grand Biv. And now you wanna stop all the suffering in all the world?”

        “I didn't exactly say that, now did I?”

        “You didn't have to, silly filly!” Pinkie stuck her tongue out. “Every time you finally open enough to say something serious, you get closer and closer to what's locked inside that stuffy head of yours. It's a painfully cute thing, like watching Applejack's grandmother limp across the room and struggle to yank a window open on a hot day. I don't know about you, but I'm riveted just waiting to see your hooves touch the window pane.”

        Harmony suddenly grew limp. Her limbs instinctively curled towards herself beneath the covers as she gulped down a lump in her throat and murmured towards the bright shade before her. “What am I looking for, Pinkie Pie?” She could just have well been talking to a purple shade with green crests. “What am I still doing here?”

        “If I didn't know better, I'd say you're here to get a good night's sleep so we can all be wide awake when we attend Bishop Breathstar's sermon for Gultophine's Summons tomorrow morning!”

        The last pony rolled her amber eyes. “Do you expect me to think that you—of all ponies—has it somewhere in you to fall asleep? Like—'go unconscious' asleep?”

        “Pffft! I'm a living creature like you, aren't I?” Pinkie grinned. “Still, if you would rather talk, I'm all ears! I think it's absolutely rude to suddenly go snoozing on a slumber party buddy—Because that's what this is, y’know! It may be last-minute and boring, but it's still a slumber party! And there's no better slumber party than one spent talking about all the things that are meaningful to us and—Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow.

        Pinkie Pie was suddenly drooling, her eyelids shut like smooth concrete as her snoring body slowly rose and fell beneath the covers. “Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....”

        Harmony blinked a few times. She glanced toward the far end of the room and stirred her limbs. With gentle, stealthy grace, the scavenger from the future slid out of the bed and padded to a standstill on the floor. Alone and undaunted, Pinkamena Diane Pie slept like a rock. Her snores filled the childish bedroom like the vibrating engine to a Griffon hovercraft.

        “Short of death or a coma, it actually makes her look graceful,” the last pony droned.

        Finally freed from the insanity, she shuffled away from her anchor, opened the door, and hobbled out into the dimly lit hallway of the Pie family residence. Pinkie was left alone, sleeping placidly. Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty. In a rush of hoofsteps, Harmony suddenly charged back in and viciously kicked Pinkie's bed with a grunt.

        “Snortttt-Zzzzz-Mmmfmmm-Hmmm-Zzzzzz...” Pinkie Pie briefly stirred, then fell into slumber once more.

        “Whew. Just checking on the 'death or a coma' part.” A slightly frazzled pegasus let forth a breath of relief and sauntered back out of the room.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Harmony stepped out of the front door of the candle-lit farmhouse. The night was bitterly cold, so that a thin cloud of mist wafted out of the quivering pegasus' lips. She reveled in it.

        Standing alone—a copper speck against the eternal grayness of the stone plateau—the last pony slumped against the southern wall to the farmhouse and stared out upon a wasteland that reminded her of home. However, there was no ash or snow to blanket this landscape like she was used to. In a bizarre fashion, the untouched rock only made the desolation of the Grave of Consus that much more noticeable. Harmony briefly wondered if she would suffer a nervous collapse if the white powder that blanketed Equestria after the Cataclysm was to suddenly vanish. The refuse of the moon and all of her dead species was a horrible thing, yet it all worked to obscure the horror of the landscape she flew over time and time again.

        The last pony had lived a long life enclosed by walls of misery. It was quite possible that she had grown accustomed to that pain, that she had come to respect it more than any other element in her existence. Pinkie Pie clung to joy and humor like they were second and third skins. Was Harmony any less guilty of playing favoritism to an all-encompassing emotion? She pondered what would happen if Pinkie was to somehow time-travel forward into the Wastelands, with Scootaloo as her anchor. Would Pinkie be floundering as much as the last pony currently was to make sense out of the time period? Would her optimistic convictions be enough to sustain her, to fend off the waves of pain that the flurrying blizzards and stormfronts would have tossed her way? Or would she give in to a brand new madness—something Scootaloo had long learned to inhale and exhale—and would Pinkie then fall like she had never fallen into something deep and dark before?

        These were all distractions, Harmony thought to herself. Everything she had encountered since the first chronotonic dive towards Pinkie—much less the second—had been an interminable cascade of one distraction after another. It only then dawned upon her that she had briefly set hoof upon the holy ground of Ponyville, for the swift way in which Pinkamena had dragged her from place to place within the span of twelve hours had forced Harmony to forget that she was ever anywhere but in a land of mysterious, blurring lights.

        Yes, Harmony had been encumbered with nothing but distractions, but distractions from what? The last pony's soul-self burned from the inside out, not so much from the fact that every action that she had attempted seriously during the time jump had been impeded, but that she had actually felt her pride hurt when Pinkie Pie ever so simplistically hypothesized—from one blanketed filly to another—that Harmony hadn't even come to a point of confessing, much less understanding, what she was there in the past to do. What was most infernal about the situation was that Pinkie Pie was right.

        “The clown becomes a cleric,” the pegasus mused aloud, “And the scavenger is once more a scamp.” A sigh, and she tilted her head towards the sky.

        However, she found her new edge... or else an old one. The perpetual overcast of the Dredgemane sky had dissipated, and in a miraculous canvas of pinpricks there stretched countless blinking stars above. A dimming quarter moon hung towards the edge of the cosmos, and aside from an errant wisp or two of gray mist, the constellations were crystal clear.

        Harmony breathed in the suddenly delightful chill of the thick night. Ponies were suffering in the present, burning in the Cataclysm, and forever dead in the future. Suddenly, all that existed—all that mattered—was a glittering and perfect “now,” illuminated by lights that were older than time, lights that sung history a poetic eulogy ahead of its funeral. One pony and one pony alone might have the power to rebroadcast such a poem to a starved Wasteland. Something that was so sadly impossible was once again a bitter feasibility, and Harmony knew just what to do with bitter things.

        “Be a scavenger,” she murmured to herself with a curve to her lips. “Scrape loose the stars.”

        The wheels in her head turned faster than any Dredgemane wagon. With a sudden purpose, Harmony turned around and trotted back into the house. Once inside, she made a bee-line for the dining table, where she knew that she would definitely find at least one sheet of drawing paper... and any number of colored crayons.

        I wonder if you can appreciate beauty. I wonder if you can see what is so precious about being a single vulnerable thing engulfed in a grand immensity of incomprehensible mystery. After all, nothing is mysterious to you. What would you know of inspiration? What is there for you to map, to chart, to illustrate, or to make sense of?

        Being in the past—being in Dredgemane—felt like being at the bottom of a deep, deep well of blackness. For a brief moment, I stared up and I could see stars. It's a moment like that, in all of its heartstopping potency, that reminds me that I'm not simply dreaming when I time-travel. Life itself is a dream, an infinitely small drop of happenstance in the grand sea of the universe. When opportunity presents itself for a pony like me to hold anchor to the essence from which I've been born—be it stardust or Cataclysmic ash—then I rediscover something. I grasp once more onto the lever of a great machine, bigger than the Harmony, bigger than myself, bigger than the sum of all things I'll ever do or accidentally bring into being.

        To think that the constellations that I saw then—a relic of the past—could be the same lasting hoofprint I have to leave upon an eternal Wasteland future...

        It is not excitement that I feel. It's something much closer to fear, and yet not the same. Fear strengthens us, yes—but it doesn't motivate us forward. Progress takes something far darker than fear, far stronger than the divine motivations that Haymane and Breathstar evidently fed the hard-working populace of Dredgemane.

        True progress takes faith—not the sort of faith that involves bending knees and folded hooves, but a faith that ensures that the goal of my labors will come into fruition, even if I do not know the goal at the start of the exercise.

        As a time traveler, I've had the immutability of time to ensure that an effect answered any of my causes. As a future scavenger—as the last pony—I don't have the same assurance. Equestria's future may have been a solid thing, but mine still isn't. With each brave (or stupid) leap I've taken into the past, I've grown more and more attached to the idea that anything I do will come around to a solution at some point or another. Can I really apply this addicting philosophy to the life I have left to live once my and Spike's experiment is done?

        That's a new and unfathomable courage, at least to me. As the last pony, I only lived in the day-to-day moment. As a time traveler, I lived warm moments for the sake of the past. As something more than either of those, I'm going to have to learn to live for the future, even though I will not see the entirety of that land of a new Sun and Moon.

        I'm starting to understand now that such a lifestyle is what every pony that's ever lived had set for them. A horrible Cataclysm is all that's stood in the way of me affording to live like such brave, lonely souls. If someday I'm to be as courageous as them, then maybe I'll have something to be proud of, for I'll have then lived my life through three spectrums: reverse-time, instant-time, and forward-time.

        Maybe that's what destiny has intended for me to become in the long run. I'm not just the end of ponies, I'm the encompassing of them.

        It had been a long, long time since Harmony ever sketched anything by mouth. With the timeless grace of a creative foal, the last pony clenched yet another crayon in her teeth and pockmarked a white sheet of paper with speck after colored speck, drafting a rough approximation of yet another grand constellation looming above her. She paused after mapping a set of stars and took a look at her mouthwork. Three sheets of paper were lying side by side, conjoining to form a triangular array of interconnected dots.

        With a deep breath, Harmony removed the crayon from her mouth and gazed up from where the pegasus leisurely sat—hooves folded—atop the roof of the Pie family farmhouse. An invisible outline sectioned off the center of the night sky overhead. The last pony's amber eyes dilated, and she took in the enormity of the entire celestial canvas once more, reminding herself just how incredibly small of a chunk she had cut from the glittering assortment above.

        “Like capturing the entire ocean in a spoon,” she groaned to herself.

        Nevertheless, there was a steely determination to her limbs, so that not a single centimeter of her Entropan self shivered even in the most brutal chill of the Dredgemane night. No less than two hours into the improbable act of charting the sky, the last pony digested the sheer size of her task and decided to start over from the beginning. She had ventured back into the house to get twice as many sheets of paper from what Blinkaphine had left behind. With a new plan, Harmony decided to map only the bright stars, the ones that stood out intensely from the rest. Once she had set upon this new order of mapping, she found that the shapes and arrangements of constellations came forth to her almost naturally.

        It helped that the orange foal inside her suddenly remembered faint lessons learned from a “magic summer camp” she had attended with Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom a few painfully blissful weeks right up to the eve of the Cataclysm. Twilight Sparkle, along with another mare from out of town, had been the prime instructors and chaperones of the event. It was the closest Scootaloo had ever come to bonding with Spike's mentor. Though the last pony's memories consisted mostly of all the conniving ways she managed to turn the educational seminar into a series of juvenile antics, a few of the golden facts of astronomy suddenly shimmered to her, so that she tenaciously scavenged forth from the dim recesses of her mind the shapes of Orion, Canis Major and Minor, Sagittarius, and the broad, sweeping band of Epona's Galactic Exodus.

        The forest of stars blinked into solidarity across her paper as her memories coalesced in her head. Soon, she had a very rough but very real sketch of the cosmos on the rooftop before her. Making sense out of the time-forsaken sky, however, was an entirely different matter.

        “Onyxxxx Eclipssssse,” she slurred aloud, “Come out and plaaaaaay.”

        The last pony sighed. After so many hours of seriously looking at the stars for the first time since the Cataclysm ripped them away, she could only depend on the whimsy of her imagination to provide a visual clue to the words she had heard spilled through the lips of a possessed unicorn foal. The things Dinky had said burned into her mind across the green flaming walls of time, and she would rather be cursed than to discount what the universal ether had spoken to her. She was, however, at a loss to prove the validity of those words.

        The constellations that she was drawing forth appeared completely and utterly normal. If there was a “burning keyhole” through which some “Onyx Eclipse” would make itself manifest, she couldn't tell yet from her sketches. When she looked directly up, all she saw was a solid blanket of stars. It could just as well have been a brick ceiling.

        “Maybe that's all the Onyx Eclipse is,” Harmony muttered to herself. “A cosmic attic.”

        “Looks more like a baby ducky with a crown on its head to me,” Pinkie Pie said.

        Harmony nodded. “If you look at it upside down, I suppose you could say that—Gah!” The last pony jumped in place and scrambled with her hooves to keep the pockmarked sheets from fluttering away. “M-Miss Pie?”

        “No, not a 'Miss Pie'. A 'baby ducky'!”

        “Not that!” Harmony blinked incredulously over her shoulder. “How the heck did you get up here—” She gnashed her teeth, shook her head, and instead uttered: “Never mind that, why aren't you sleeping right now?”

        “Meh.” Pinkie shrugged her candy-colored shoulders. “I got bored.”

        Harmony blinked at that. “O-kaaaaay... Uhm...”

        “Are you planning to buy real estate on the moon?” Pinkie Pie grinned and bounced over to Harmony's side. “Cuz with Princess Luna back in Equestria, I'm sure the rates have gone up. You might want to jump on it while you still have the chance!”

        “I'm stargazing, remember?”

        “Was it all that it was cracked up to be?” Pinkie Pie hummed and squatted down on folded limbs beside the copper pegasus. “The last time I ever tried stargazing, I got dizzy and threw up an entire day's worth of funnel cakes! And that's when they finally threw me out of the planetarium.”

        “Miss Pie...” Harmony seethed, shuddered, then exhaled in a slump. There was no point in sharing. There was no point in sharing. There was no point. “So far, I'm not finding what I'm looking for,” she ultimately said, giving up. “But, then again, I just started mapping things out. I shouldn't get ahead of myself...”

        “You mean you shouldn't count your eggs before they've hatched!”

        “Miss Pie, I know that I may already strike you as an incredibly irascible pegasus, but if there's anything you need to know about keeping me in a good temper, it's that I don't take kindly to poultry analogies.”

        “If you ask me, it looks like you've got some skill there in dot-making,” Pinkie Pie said, staring over Harmony's black mane. “Uhm... dot-dotting? Dot-dottery? Dotaliciousoso?”

        “I have something of a skill in map-making,” Harmony said, stifling a smirk that swam back through twenty-five years of gray stormclouds. “Being a flier and all, I have to keep a solid image in my head of the landscape I'm soaring over, or else I'll get lost.” She gazed up at the heavens and breathed inward. “I imagine keeping track of the stars is the same thing, but only in reverse... more or less.”

        “I've always wondered what it's like to be a pegasus!” Pinkie Pie sing-songed. “Of course, Dashie never lets me in on it. She keeps pretending that a pegasus' lifestyle is something completely beyond a 'boring earth pony' such as myself. But I can't help it! I have so many questions that I wanna have answered!”

        Harmony briefly felt generous. “Like what kind of questions?”

        “Like: when you're up in the clouds and you have to go to the bathroom, do you have to shout 'Geronimo' through a bullhorn?”

        Harmony was no longer generous. “I think Dashie is right about a lot of things.”

        “Pffft! Come on, Har-Har! Don't be more of a brittle-bridler than you already are!”

        “I can't help it!” She groaned and gazed once more towards the night's sky. “No matter what I do lately, I just keep getting... getting...”

        “Milk?”

        “Frustrated,” Harmony said, momentarily glaring. “I keep getting frustrated, Miss Pie.”

        “It doesn't take a brain squeegie to figure that out, Har-Har! Maybe I can help you!”

        “Or maybe you can give me rabies. What's your point?”

        “Well, do you know what you're looking for in them twinkle-twinkles?” Pinkie smiled and pointed towards the cosmos. “It's not like the Court has sent you to discover the stars, right? I'm pretty sure Equestrian civilization first noticed the night sky—like—decades ago!”

        “It's not that easy to—” Harmony paused to blink obtusely at Pinkie's last words, then shook her head and continued. “It's not that easy to explain.” She shuddered inwardly, pondering over how to describe the Onyx Eclipse to herself, much less to Pinkie Pie. “The Science Commission of Canterlot Court has... a reason to hypothesize... th-that...” She chewed on the edge of her lip. Then she remembered just who she was talking to and suddenly decided to run with it. “...that there may be an astronomical phenomenon that suggests the approach of a cosmic anomaly, the tell-tale signs of which can only be found in a sudden and inexplicable change in the regularity of the galactic constellations surrounding our planet.”

        “Cooooool.” Pinkie hummed with her blue eyes sparkling. “Any chance you may be able to de-Twilight-Sparklefy that entire sentence and explain it in ways that can be spelled out in alphabet soup?”

        A slumping Harmony let loose a groan that sounded like a beached whale. “Why do I even bother?”

        “Are you trying to say that the Court of Canterlot thinks that something is headed towards Equestria from beyond the stars?”

        “Uh, yes? Maybe? I dunno...” Harmony muttered into the crooks of her forelimbs, hardly sounding like a refined agent of Princess Celestia. “I was speculating that I would see a break in the stars, some sort of gap that may be forming in the normally solid line of constellations.”

        “Hmmm... Like a big hole being punched through the sky?”

        “Sure, why not?”

        Pinkie Pie scratched her bright chin, gazing up at the many twinkling specks with a tense look that could only be equated with “deep thought”. “Well, I dunno much about how Epona's sparkly mane hair dotted the universe with stars and all, but I've always imagined that the stars surround us like a swarm of tadpoles surrounds Gummy when he takes a swim in the pond outside of Rarity's Carousel Boutique. When time's up and he needs to stop swimming, I reach in and grab him—and I notice that all of the tadpoles bunch up right where my hooves dip down to touch him.”

        “Mmmf... What are you getting at exactly with this wonderfully colorful analogy, Miss Pie?”

        “Heeheehee...” She smiled brightly. “Only, if I was something headed towards Equestria from beyond the stars, I don't think I'd be making a hole in the night's sky. I think those stars would be bunching up around my hooves, kind of like those tadpoles when I reach into the pond to grab Gummy!”

        Harmony's brow creased. She slowly tilted her gaze back up towards the stars, and the many thick and supremely bright clusters of constellations suddenly and eerily stood out before her.

        Pinkie Pie leaned in and whispered hoarsely: “Pssst... Don't tell anypony, but sometimes I let Gummy eat the tadpoles. There're just so many of them, and Rarity hates frogs. If Fluttershy knew, she'd cry a new river to Ponyville, and then we'd have even more tadpoles to deal with!”

        “Yes, I... I read you loud and clear...” Harmony murmured from a million kilometers away, and yet atop the same roof.

        “Wow! Suddenly I'm hungry for popcorn!” Pinkie bounced towards the edge of the roof. “Y'know what I haven't had in a long time? Frozen popcorn drenched in chocolate milk! I bet Gummy would love that! Hehehe—Wee!” And she disappeared off the edge of the roof like a pink comet.

        The last pony was left staring up at the night's sky, confounded by a sudden new brilliance that stabbed down at her retinae at any number of possible angles. She briefly felt like a fish at the surface to a lake, and a falcon could soar down at any time through the surface of stardust to end her... to end all ponies. She only had to see where the waters frothed from the grand avian entrance.

        “This is going to take several more nights to capture,” she muttered aloud to the air. With a forlorn glance, she regarded the flimsy state of the crayoned papers on the roof beneath her. “But it'll only take a few measly years after the Cataclysm to render all of these sketches to dust.” The scavenger from the future sighed. “There's got to be a way to preserve these drawings long enough for me to extract them twenty-five years from now.”

        “A family safe?” Inkessa raised an eyebrow as she strolled across the house with a tray of steamy broth balanced on her flank. “We've never had a reason to possess one. Dredgemane is a town with many problems, but burglary is hardly at the top of that list.”

         The next morning, Harmony was strolling after Pinkie's sister as the gray filly lowered the hot breakfast down onto the various places of the dining table. Quarrington and Blinkaphine were already seated. Pinkie's humming voice could be heard upstairs in the candle-lit domain.

        “Well, is there any place inside this house that's well fortified?” the last pony asked. “A place that could outlast—I dunno—a storm or an earthquake, even?”

        “I could have sworn you were following my daughter Pinkamena around for the sole purpose of a Canterlotlian report,” Quarrington's raspy voice muttered while Inkessa poured him a bowl of broth. He raised a gray eyebrow suspiciously in Harmony's direction. “Now, you're speaking about safes, storms, and earthquakes. If you're performing an experiment that involves the structural integrity of this farm, I would very much wish to know all about it.”

        “Miss Harmony is a soul from Canterlot, father,” Inkie calmly said with a placating smile. She leaned over and poured a bowl for Blinkaphine. The white-haired young filly said nothing, sitting as still as a statue. “One cannot blame her for having a scientific curiosity about... anything.”

        “This house has no tolerance for scientific curiosity or scientific anything else, for that matter,” Quarrington said in a dull, dry voice as he briefly grasped a spice shaker in his teeth, sprinkled a pinch of the tiny minerals into his broth, and placed the item back down. “Our farm, just like all of Dredgemane, runs on the progress of Gultophine's indomitable spirit, not on the weak and feeble minds of mortal pony philosophers. You, ma'am, are our guest, so long as you're bound by whatever obligations Ponyville has attached you to our Pinkamena. However, I won't have you bringing none of your newfangled Canterlotlian hocus pocus to my dinner table.”

        “Don't worry, Mister Pie,” Harmony droned. “I'll do my best not to hurt your family with... science.” She cleared her throat and smiled nervously. “And thanks, but no thanks; I'm not all that hungry.”

        “Nonsense.” Quarrington's immutable deadpan was briefly punctured by the slightest hint of a stubborn frown. “You followed my daughter doing Marble Cake's bidding all day, yesterday. Anypony who insists that didn't build her an appetite is quite frankly not of this earth.”

        Harmony momentarily blushed. “Erm...”

        “Have a seat. I wouldn't be a proper Dredgemaner if I didn't extend a sincere hospitality.” Quarrington's words were warm, but the tongue that flicked them forth was colder than a metal flagpole in winter.

        The time traveler's Entropan limbs suddenly shivered. She made her way towards a chair and was about to sit down when a sudden jolt startled her more than any exploding airship engine. It took Harmony a few seconds to register that Blinkaphine had actually moved. With a swift jerk, her hoof had blocked Harmony from sitting down next to her. Despite the vicious gesture, Blinkie's head didn't so much as tilt up.

        “Uhm... I-I don't get it,” the last pony stammered. “Did I do something wrong?”

        “You were about to,” Inkie calmly said. “Don't sit there.”

        “Why not? Bad luck?”

        “It's Clyde's seat,” Inkie said, pouring her own bowl. Nothing more was added to that blunt statement.

        Harmony raised an eyebrow. She glanced down once more. Blinkie sat still, staring straight ahead of her while one hoof protectively clamped onto the back of a chair in front of a square section of the dining table covered permanently in dust. The last pony blinked her eyes, and she briefly remembered another eating table in another dreamlike visit in another part of the Equestrian past... and a red stallion who was gently ushering her elsewhere.

        “Clyde?” she nevertheless repeated. It was a stupid thing. If the dining room wasn't silent already, it most certainly was then. Quarrington drowned any further grumblings by occupying himself with his helping of the soup. Inkessa had sat down and was already taking liberal sips. Even Blinkie was beginning to fiddle with her breakfast.

        Harmony slowly, slowly sat down. She stared deep into the surface of the broth that Inkie had just poured for her. The candle-lit surfaces of the murky mixture colored her reflection brown, so that she thought she was staring out through a looking glass that showed an airship pilot dipping into mushroom stew between stormfronts. On either side of the watery miasma, the last pony felt alone.

        Perhaps it was beautiful timing—or pitiful timing—that Pinkie Pie bounded down the stairs with a sing-songy breath. “Wooo! Hehehe! Good to see the whole family up! Mom's awake. Can I bring her some soup now?”

        “Eat something yourself first,” Quarrington muttered between sips. “It's high time you put something in your belly that wasn't layered with frosting.”

        “Awwwww daddy, you're so you.” Pinkie Pie winked. “But how can you keep track of what I'm eating when I'm so far away in Ponyville all the time?”

        “I shudder to think, child.”

        “Heeheehee. Ooooh!” Pinkie leaned in and squinted at the table of steamy bowls. “Is that your trademark gravel-spiced vegetable surprise?”

        “Mmmhmmm.” Inkie smiled gently. “Thought I'd make it since we had such lovely company joining us for Gultophine's Summons, this morning.” She nodded her dark-gray mane in Harmony's direction. “Breathstar's sermons are always best taken on a full stomach. We can better digest the words he shoves down our throats.”

        Quarrington grunted.

        “Uhm, about the service this morning.” Harmony bit her lip nervously, still ignoring her meal. “I'm not sure if I'm the best pony to—”

        “Save it for confessionals!” Pinkie Pie slapped the pegasus on the back and leaped into her seat besides Inkie. “Hey Sis!” She smiled over at the still pony. “Hey Blinkie!” She smiled next at the empty seat. “Hey Clyde!” She rubbed her hooves together and proceeded to pour herself a bowl. “So, what were you all talking about before I hopped in?”

        “Absolutely nothing,” Quarrington said. “I would very much like to meditate before we go in to hear Bishop Breathstar's wise platitudes.”

        “With all due respect, father,” Inkie spoke, “Harmony was asking a pointed question about the farm, and it would be rude to not answer her.” Inkie glanced over with a soft smile. “As a matter of fact, we have a fairly sturdy cellar where we store some of our older rocks over the years. What the Court of Canterlot would find of interest in it is beyond me. Are you doing a geological survey while you follow Pinkie around?”

        “Astronomical, actually.”

        “Mmmph...” Quarrington grumbled as he finished his soup. “What point is there in mapping the stars when all of the world's troubles are right here—in Equestria—where we can deal with them before our eyes? That's the trouble with you Canterlotlians; your heads are constantly stuck in the heavens—both literally and metaphorically—though the heavens belong only to the Holy Alicorn Sisters, not to mortal ponydom.”

        Harmony calmly weathered that, cleared her throat, and spoke across the way to Inkessa. “Nevertheless, permitting that the Court of Canterlot and Dredgemane agree on the matter, Celestia may be sending agents like myself to do research here in the future.”

        “Woohoo!” Pinkie bullhorned across the table. “That would be fantastic! We could have a royal unicorn slumber party!”

        “After I'm dead and buried, perhaps,” Quarrington grumbled.

        “I don't necessarily mean on the farm, but around the Grave of Consus in general.” Harmony glanced aside while speaking. Her eyes briefly fell upon Blinkie's part of the table. The white-haired filly was removing the vegetable bits out of her broth and slowly laying them down around the bowl so that they made a geometrically perfect square frame. Harmony remembered that she was saying something and belatedly finished with “If that turns out to be the case, I would require a... a safe place around town to store notes that could be reacquired months, years, or even decades from now.”

        “The manner in which you Canterlotlian agents keep things organized is astounding,” Inkie said, briefly leaning her chin to her hoof as she gazed across the table at Harmony. “That's why I've always been so interested in pursuing a medical field in the Equestrian Capital. If there's any hope for new cures to horrible diseases, the answer's to be found in the shadow of Princess Celestia's palace—nowhere else.”

        “Any particular disease you have on the agenda?” Harmony asked, then immediately wished that she hadn't. The silence that suddenly permeated the dinner table even closed Pinkie's mouth for a good half a minute.

        Quarrington finished the last of his soup in silent repose. Inkessa lethargically picked at her bowl. Pinkie hummed at random intervals while trying to entertain herself with the sloshing volume of soup before her. Blinkie was the only one eating regularly, though she still sat in a petrified frame, as if mirroring a ghostly shadow in the empty space beside her.

        Harmony exhaled and leaned towards her bowl to take her first sip. She wondered if it was this hard to digest anything at a Dredgemane dinner table, how better would she manage in a Gultophine chapel?

        Half an hour later, Harmony strolled limply out of Pinkie Pie's bedroom. She was garbed yet again in the freshly-washed but familiarly pathetic turquoise vest and black trunks. Lingering in the hallway, she grasped a green beret in one hoof. The image of Pinkie's briefly serrated blue eyes in the saloon light stabbed the time traveler's mind, quickening her heartbeat. With a deep groan, she slapped the infernal article back onto her head and prepared for another day's unpredictability.

        Just then, A voice roared up through the stairwell on gravelly octaves: “Pinkamena Diane Pie! Are you dressed yet for Summons?!”

        Harmony responded for Pinkie. “I think she's just about ready, Mister Pie! One second!” The last pony squinted down the hallway and shuffled cautiously towards the cracked bedroom door to an infinite blackness. From within, Pinkie and Mrs. Pie were whispering:

        “But you admire that character so much. Why would you endeavor to chase the Royal Grand Biv down and deliver him to Haymane's clutches?”

        “Because it's my one and only chance to get close to such an awesome and mysterious pony! Still, you should see how Har-Har makes her moves! Running side-by-side with her in chase of the Biv is like being in the Running of the Leaves, only with more explosions!”

        “Oh darling...” There were a series of hacking coughs. “I do hope you aren't going to hurt yourself! Especially all because of some pegasus from Canterlot...”

        “Har-Har's no ordinary pegasus. She's like the walking, talking, interrobang of pegasi!”

        “But you just met her, darling.”

        “I think she's just about to meet herself too!”

        “Why, whatever do you mean by that?”

        “Heeheeheeheeheee!”

        “Oh. Oh, but of course, dear.” There were more coughs, then a wheezing sound. “I know you're onto something when your eyes light up like that.”

        “Speaking of light, how long is Daddy going to—?”

        “Just like I said last time, Pinkamena. As long as it takes.”

        “It's taken a long time as it is, Mommy. When even Inkie won't talk about it, I know something's icky.”

        “Most of the precious things in life take a long time to happen. Hmmm... Like you, for instance.”

        “Well, good things come to those who wait... to party!”

        “Heh heh heh...” A heavy cough. “Perhaps so. Perhaps so, dear.”

        “Mmmmm-muah! I'll say a prayer to Gultophine for you!”

        “So long as you're not too busy asking for that chicken-suit like you always are.”

        “Hey! Chicken-suits are in this year! Just don't tell Har-Har!”

        “Why not?”

        “It's a long story. See ya!” Pinkie was suddenly out in the hallway. “Say, what's an 'interrobang' anyways?”

        “I have no idea what you're talking about,” Harmony replied.

        “Heeheehee.” Pinkie winked. “Sure ya don't, Har-Har. Ready to go to chapel?”

        “Uhm...” Harmony blinked, staring Pinkie Pie up and down. “Are you... Are you seriously going out in that?”

        The candy-colored pony posed in a white vest, black coat with matching coattails, and a black top-hat with a purple band that matched her bow tie. “Why wouldn't I? There isn't a verse in the Gultophine Chronicles that states that Summons shouldn't be a magical experience, am I right?”

        Harmony squinted, then turned around with a shuffle of hooves. “Whatever. It's your father's shame to deal with, not mine.”

        “Heehee! Cheer up or throw up, Har-Har! It's just a normal morning stroll with the family into Dredgemane! This is your chance to relax and calmly meditate and all that other cool, serene stuff!”

        “I ask you this! What profits a race of corpses to suppress the liberating will of madness for yet another day spent lumbering inside the sarcophagus of a dead god?!” Brevis shouted from his perch atop a lamppost as several mist-laden streams of ponies trudged somberly into the stony recesses of a grand cathedral below him. “You are told to shun all of the dazzling colors of this world, as if to indulge in them is an immediate avarice that summons the plagues of misery and immorality! Oh you poor, poor herd!” The cloaked mule pointed towards the cold surface of the cathedral with a dangling hoof. “It is they who invented misery and immorality when they set upon a campaign throughout the world to find misery and immorality!”

        Harmony glanced up at the cackling bum of a mule, her eyebrow arched like a serrated dagger. She briefly looked back at the Pie family. Quarrington trotted proud and tall, dressed from mane to tail in a finely pressed suit. Inkessa and Blinkaphine were garbed in plain brown gowns, with the younger sister staring blankly at the cobblestone ground passing by. Only Pinkie was prancing along in a joyous gait, her blue eyes darting about excitedly from under the brim of her top hat. Every other member of the earth pony's family—and every single one of the hundreds upon hundreds of surging Dredgemaners—were silent as the rocks that were harvested from that bitter, pale earth. Nopony made a sudden move; nopony said a single word. As the deep bass hum of organ music wafted out of the cathedral's tall oaken doors to greet the shuffling crowds, the insane mule continued his ramblings, his echoing voice dancing over the heads of far too many Dredgemane souls who had the noble restraint to not respond to him. Brevis may just have well been the only breathing creature in those deep, foggy trenches.

        “What is 'faith'? All too terribly often, it is a crutch, a far simpler and safer alternative to the madness that is 'will'! But 'faith' itself was once 'will', until the rippling waters of the herd tempered it into something that fit like an old winter's coat while we good Equestrians have all too fatefully plunged mane-first into a brand new blistering summer of discovery! There is no need to suffocate here! Epona and her daughters cast off the fetters of yesterday's tranquility and flung themselves naked into the grand abyss instead of tap-dancing cowardly around their father's grave in an infinite conga line! BraHaHa! Alas, goodly Brevis wants to know: what will it take for us to make our mad exodus?! When will a new 'will' marry 'faith' once more, forming a union created not in the crowded darkness of the herd but in the dazzling kaleidoscope that lingers beyond the veil of our convenient habits? I would so want to see the photographs taken from that honeymoon-to-be! BraHa!”

        “Uhm...” Harmony's ears twitched as she murmured aside to the top-hatted Pinkie. “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

        “That my daddy sounds like Renee Auberjoneigh?

        Harmony rolled her amber eyes and pointed towards the dangling Brevis several paces away. “We're not even inside the chapel and already we're receiving a sermon.”

        “Oh, pfft. That's just Brevis. Nopony here listens to him.”

        “Yeah, I gathered that.” Harmony squinted. “But do you hear him, Miss Pie?”

        “'Hearing' and 'listening' aren't the same thing. There's a difference, isn't there, Har-Har?”

        “That's too deep, especially for you.”

        “It was?” Pinkie blinked. She raised a hoof to her voice box. “Mi-Mi-Mi-Mi-Miiiiii... Nope! No Flutterguy Effect! Besides, silly filly, poison joke is half-a-continent away in the Everfree Forest!”

        “What in Epona's name are you talking about?”

        “She saw the bright shinies!”

        “Heeeeey!” Pinkie waved back to Brevis over the crowd. “Yes, she sure did!”

        “BraHa! I'm here all week!”

        “Everypony knows that, Brevis! Heeheehee!”

        Several Dredgemaners shifted uncomfortably in their gait. Harmony found herself among them. As the Pie family approached the grand stone entrance of the chapel, the last pony became aware of a calm and collected voice reaching out towards the crowd of faithfully attending equines. She recognized the sound precisely because it sounded opposite to the highly vicious tone with which it was confronting a mass of tipsy patrons inside the dismal saloon the day before. Glancing up, Harmony made out the image of Bishop Breathstar standing in a shiny white robe beside the chapel entrance. He bowed his horned head and briefly shook hooves with random members of the herd—including Quarrington—as each respective citizen passed by. To Harmony's lukewarm delight, the priestly unicorn's eyes lit up at the sight of her, and she was firmly addressed:

        “Ah, if it isn't our visiting pegasus from Canterlot. Mayor Haymane has told me all about you.”

        “Oh really?”

        “I heard that you were assigned the rather arduous task of tracking down the Royal Grand Biv.”

        “Oh... really... ?”

        “It is a most noble goal, and though you apparently had a setback last night, I have no doubt, child, that Gultophine's spirit will empower you even further on your next attempt to bring that disturber of the peace to justice.”

        “You mean we get to chase after the Biv again?!” Pinkie Pie leaned over Harmony's turquoise vest and beamed. “That's so cool!” The beret-capped pegasus groaned beneath her.

        Bishop Breathstar glanced over at Pinkie. His bright eyes briefly twitched, but he maintained a placid smile. “Quarrington's lovely daughter, what an... intriguing outfit you have chosen to wear to my service this morning.”

        “Hiya, Padre! How're the kids? Oh, wait, that's right. Uhm—Oh! Read any good magazines lately?”

        Harmony gave the filly a buck. Pinkie fell in a gasping slump between Inkessa and Blinkaphine. Quarrington merely rolled his eyes and marched on through the doors like he was childless.

        “Ahem.” Harmony stood evenly before Bishop Breathstar's grace. “I didn't realize that you and the Mayor conferred so quickly about the happenings of this town.”

        “We are both allies in Gultophine's spirit, Haymane and I. He and his Council supervise the town's functions while my order and I watch over Dredgemane's souls.”

        As he spoke, Harmony became aware of a humble, petite figure standing off to the side. She glanced over to once again spot Deacon Dawnhoof. The young unicorn stood in his usual brown frock while his horn remained lowered in reverence before the sound of his superior's voice. There was a deep solemnity that reached beyond the colt's drooping expressions. Harmony was just about to visually map it, when Breathstar's tone once more lured her eyes his way.

        “The two of us are thrilled as much as we are blessed to have your pegasus tenacity here in our time of great need. You are truly a blessing from Gultophine, child. I have every faith that the Biv will face retribution sooner than later.”

        Harmony tilted her head to the side as she educatedly said, “I recall from my readings of Gultophine's Chronicles that 'diversity yields unimaginable riches'.” She motioned towards the distant figure of the cackling mule perched above the swarming crowd. “Is that why you tolerate that moron spitting out all sorts of random stuff over the heads of your congregation while they show up?”

        Breathstar took a deep, calming breath. His smile was laced with invisible iron bulkheads, like the rusted plates that seared the buildings to the canyon walls of that place. “The mule of whom you speak is merely a lost soul whose stubborness has refused him a chance to retire peacefully within the confines of Stonehaven like the Dredgemane Council would wish for him.”

        “Stonehaven, huh?” Harmony practiced a tactful smile as she said, “I'm guessing a lot of ponies 'retire' there.”

        Breathstar remained unhindered, as did his smile. “Aside from progress, the ponies of Dredgemane desire peace. In the struggle that is life, it was peace that Gultophine ultimately maintained through her glory. The poor souls who must live in Stonehaven are fighting the last battles of a war that plagues us all. Listen closely to my words in this morning's sermon, child. Maybe then it will become clear to you why tragedies persist in a world that still owes its gift of animation to the long lost alicorn of life.”

        “I... uh... l-look forward to it,” Harmony said with a grin. As she sashayed past the two clerics and into the chapel alongside Pinkie, that grin fell to the ground like a shattering champagne glass. “Like I look forward to pinkeye.”

        “Oooh!” The filly in a top hat bounced. “I had that once!”

        “Yeah, I bet you did.”

        “Don't be so sour, Miss Harmony,” Inkessa said over her shoulder with a soft smile. She had to speak up over the glaring organ music that throttled through the granite archways of the spacious cathedral. “Brush your cynicism aside for an hour or two. I think you'll find Gultophine's Summons philosophically enriching. I know I do.”

        “Inkessa, correct me if I'm wrong, but you work in the medical field,” Harmony droned. “You have to get philosophical at some point or another.”

        “What? And agents to Princess Celestia—a living goddess—cannot afford to be?” Inkie stifled a chuckle. “Come along. I'll show you where our family always sits.”

        “My seat is the part of the pew that smells permanently like peppermint!” Pinkie squealed.

        Harmony's smile was bitter. “At least that way, Gultophine can always sniff you out from the crowd, huh?”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Beyond the pulpit, an enormous array of stained glass windows stretched across the height of the cathedral's altar. The gray-filtered light of the Dredgemane morning breached the edge of the canyon and was further refracted through the many translucent plates that formed the monochromatic image of a gorgeous alicorn goddess with wings outstretched.

        Harmony stared at the broad visage of Gultophine curiously from where she sat while a thickening crowd of hundreds upon hundreds of Dredgemaners settled down in the pews around her. She distracted herself by studying the curiously colorless nature of the stained glass windows which were just as gray and unimaginative as the dull granite of the town square statue which the Biv had allegedly vandalized the previous morning.

        Gultophine was—among many things—the patron Goddess of the Rainbow, but the last pony wouldn't have been able to tell from the sights of the enormous chapel's interior. The same gray miasma that filled the cobblestone streets of Dredgemane had poured identically into the granite contours of the grand chapel. If Harmony blinked, she wouldn't have been able to discern if she was inside or outside. The somber organ music did very little to dissuade this dismal perception.

        As the body heat between the bleakly garbed masses thickened around her, Harmony shifted uncomfortably, once more assailed with the unsettling sensation of being crowded by countless droves of undeniably living souls. The timid scavenger from the future glanced left and right, seeing beyond the straight-faced expressions of the Pie family many dozens of families with very similar visages, sitting straight and proper as they awaited the punctuation of their plain and gray existences.

        From the cabin of the Harmony, the last pony had dreamed of being in a position like this, of sharing an audience with so many living souls whose warmth and life drowned out the cold of the Wasteland. Only, instead of the effluent shade of a cello-playing pony, there lingered a wooden pulpit before her, and as the organ music dwindled to a dying hum, it was Bishop Breathstar—and not Octavia—marching up to the epicenter of so many gazing eyes.

        Harmony took a deep breath and tried to relax. Half of a dream realized was better than no dream whatsoever, or so she tried to convince herself. At the sound of giggling, she glanced aside to see Pinkie Pie lowering her hat and smirking the copper pegasus' way.

        “Watch his eyes. They're gonna look like lightning bolts beneath a white steeple, I swear to Epona.”

        Harmony squinted. “What the heck does that mean?”

        “Shhh!” Quarrington hissed.

        A great hush was just then wafting over the already still crowd. Harmony nervously yanked the green beret off her black mane and stared politely forward as Bishop Breathstar rose to the pulpit. He stood tall and majestic, his smile just as placid and graceful as when he greeted the “Canterlotlian Agent” at the mouth to the cathedral. With glittering telekinesis, he raised a scroll of holy text and lowered it to the pedestal in front of him.

        “Today's sermon is a divine reflection of the second chapter of Gultophine's Chronicles,” he said in a gentle and calming voice that trickled across the lengths of the dead silent congregation like a babbling brook.

        Harmony took a deep breath and leaned back into the contours of the pew. In an imaginative flicker of airship lanternlight, she searched through her mind to vaguely recollect her personal perusal of the holy texts. For a brief moment, she actually looked forward to a priestly pony's recitation of the poetically poignant material. Suddenly, this seemed to be a halfway rewarding experience; the last pony eagerly awaited the sermon inside the chapel of Gultophine, the Goddess of Life.

        Breathstar cleared his throat. He smiled. He stared out at the crowd. He promptly slammed his hoof over the wooden edge of the pulpit as his eyes lit up like a pair of exploding runestones. “Death!” he shouted.

        Harmony blinked.

        “Death is what awaits each and everyone of you sinful, wandering souls who pollute the river of animation that Gultophine has so dutifully forged in the ashes of her suffering father! Woe to those among you who are here not by faith, not by love, but by fear and cowardice for your eternal soul! For it is not the weaklings of this mortal coil that are awarded passage beyond the prismatic barrier that Gultophine's spirit acts as sentry over! No, only the strong and unwavering equines who shun the paltry frivolities of this superficial world will see the glory of our most gracious alicorn! All the rest of you—you phantoms of false promises and broken dreams—death and suffering awaits, for if you are not in the blessed presence of Gultophine's life, you are utterly drowning in the bleak absence of it! Oh yes, I have seen it! As I see it now! Death becomes so many of you!”

        Bishop Breathstar's words were an array of vomitous barks strung together in a thunderous gunshot that pelted the ears and skulls of every pony in attendance. The pews veritably rattled with his voice as he boomed mercilessly from his lofty pulpit.

        “You go about your lives, clinging to your routine, in the false assumption that you are perfectly safe, when your perpetual proclivities to laughter, to drink, to lechery, to dance, to all things juvenile and inane in this short and exceedingly trivial romp on the physical plane bind you to the very cursed essence that has likewise shackled the blind and ignorant heretics of Equestria outside of Gultophine's glory since the very day that Consus was Sundered, when all that was once good and singular in the universe became many, colorful, and confusing! Even now, as I speak to you my heavy-hearted words of warning, many of you are already trapped in the infernal jaws of your ignorant attachments to that which would have you turn away from what makes you good ponies, good Dredgemaners, good Equestrians! Your eyes should be aimed at the one monolithic nub of purpose, the great and glorious soul of our Goddess Gultophine, without whom you are drowning, you are struggling, you are hopeless and purposeless and dying! Each and every one of you are, unless you seek retribution now—or else remain starving foals in the horrifying abyss that is the absence of Gultophine's divine love!”

        Harmony remained frozen in place, but her amber eyes had become sharp daggers digging brightly into the very meat of her Entropan brain. She slowly swiveled her head to the left. Quarrington, Inkessa, and Blinkaphine stood still as stone, their deadpan faces calmly receiving every stabbing sentence that bulleted out of Breathstar's roaring mouth. Harmony slowly swiveled her head to the right. Beyond Pinkie's bright figure, row after row after row of countless Dredgemaners stared with identical emotionlessness, peacefully receiving this blitzkrieg of brimstone like they would weather a gentle cool breeze through their manes. The gloss in their eyes was just as dull and colorless as the oddly muted colors of Gultophine in the stained glass window behind Bishop's furiously trembling figure.

        In the echoing epicenter of that heart-stopping cacophony, Harmony once more felt like the last pony, except for a different reason for which she was helpless to ascertain.

        “Let me tell you what is in store for you in the grave that you are all digging for yourselves! Ponies unblessed by Gultophine are like prisoners of war, their eyes gouged out, who are then corralled into a cemetery and forced to stumble amidst the stones of their ancestors, who were elder ponies consumed quickly by death due to the same ignorance that affords their children such darkness and agony! When our Goddess forged the river of life through the endless night of existence, she allowed all ponies brave enough to swim in the channel and follow her to an ocean of warmth! But that is a very thin and narrow channel, my children! And it is so very easy to linger on the shores of it, clinging to the paltry shoals that each of you is foolish enough to think is worth a speck of merit in the continentally large mosaic of eternity that Epona herself has stretched before our bleak existence!”

        As Breathstar roared on for minutes, an hour, two hours—not for one single moment losing the tempered severity in his tongue—Harmony slumped deeper and deeper into her seat, drowned not so much by the depths of his infernal words but moreso by the fact that no other pony was wilting in the same manner that she was. She glanced aside at Pinkie and was further stabbed to see her bouncing in her seat, glancing back at the copper pegasus, and winking with a stifled giggle.

        Fighting down a deep-throated groan, Harmony brought a limb to her face and hid her eyes in an interminable facehoof for the rest of the blaring sermon...

        “Whew! Wasn't that exciting?” Pinkie Pie grinned as she and Harmony walked down the far flanking edge of pews while the congregation dissipated slowly throughout the lengths of the chapel. “I especially liked the part where he shouted and stuff!”

        The last pony glared icily at her. “Do you think you could be just a tad bit more specific than that?”

        “Though, in all honesty, he's given better sermons. You should hear him on his better days. Like, the last time I visited home—four months ago—he gave this really riveting speech on 'suffering and damnation'. And then the winter before that, I remember him giving this one great sermon about 'death and suffering'... or no, wait, maybe that was 'death and damnation'. Ah! Hehe—Of course! The sermon before the sermon before this one was about 'sin and death and damnation' while the one after that was just about 'death', though he did add in a little speech about 'prosperity'.”

        “Prosperity?”

        “Y’know, in the absence of deathhhhhh. Heeheehee—It's so awesome! Just like listening to one of Dashie's heavy metal albums!”

        “But, Miss Pie, this isn't the recital of some music record.” Harmony glanced forlornly at the many gray shapes of ponies shuffling out the doors to the chapel in muttering conversation. “This is a weekly service performed by a cleric who's the sole source of spiritual guidance to the ponies of your hometown!” She squinted nervously, planting her green beret back onto her head. “Does Bishop Breathstar seriously have nothing to say to the congregation but sermons on 'doom and gloom'?”

        “Pffft! Didn't you hear me, Har-Har? Today was 'death' and 'sin', before that was just 'death' with a touch of 'prosperity', before that was 'sin and death and damnation'...”

        “Yeah, I get it. That's the point. Gultophine is the Goddess of life and rainbows and... and...” Harmony blinked. “I can't believe I'm even having this conversation.”

        “Yeah, a good sermon will stun you like that.”

        “That's just it, Miss Pie. I know it's hardly my place, but it didn't at all seem very... well... 'good' to me.”

        “That reminds me of something that Bishop Breathstar once said to me before I left for Ponyville. Ahem... 'Remember, my child, hearing something good can feel bad when you're willing yourself to be ignorant'.” She blinked her blue eyes, then scrunched her face. “I wonder if that's why I always feel funny when Rarity compliments me on my dress size.”

        “Uh huh...” Harmony numbly murmured, staring off towards the far side of the chapel where a sandy-colored young unicorn was levitating metal ladles over the many lit candles flanking the organ, extinguishing the flames one by one. “Say, Miss Pie, could you excuse me?”

        “Why? Did you break Gultophine's breath? Teeheehee!”

        “Sure, whatever.” Harmony saw where the unicorn was standing, judged that it was well within thirty meters from her anchor—much less forty—and wandered over with a gentle shuffle of hooves. “Ahem. So, that was an... interesting sermon.”

        “Hmm?” Deacon Dawnhoof glanced over from snuffing out the candles. He gently smiled. “Oh, yes, well... when Bishop Breathstar delivers, he delivers. I've never served under a more aptly-voiced priest than my mentor here in Dredgemane. He may have the energy of Goddess Gultophine, but he has the poignancy and literary skills of Celestia herself.”

        “Uhhh...” Harmony winced through the trailing exhaust of that suggestion. “Sure. Listen... uhm... if I may be so bold, I couldn't help but notice some interesting things about this place...”

        “Oh! I know you!” Dawnhoof's chestnut eyes briefly lit up. “You're the pegasus who Haymane hired to track down the Royal Grand Biv!”

        “Er... Yeah. Word gets around town fairly quickly, doesn't it?”

        “Some ponies say that it's on account of the thin canyons and all.” Dawnhoof pointed out the nearby window. His brown horn shimmered as he extinguished the last of the candles, lowered the ladle over the edge of the organ, and shuffled humbly to a stop before the last pony. “The acoustics afford easy listening to any uttered word.” He smirked slightly. “Of course, that's merely a plebeian excuse for the rather sinful indulgence of gossip, but nopony is perfect, especially in Dredgemane.”

        “As Bishop Breathstar was apt to remind us,” Harmony said in a lingering breath, her eyes floating limply over the tall lengths of the granite interior. “For two ear-splitting hours.”

        Dawnhoof winced slightly, his hooves stirring. “Yes, my teacher is... renowned for his passion. It's written in the Chronicles: 'A boisterous servant is a blessed servant'.”

        “Funny thing about scripture.” Harmony pointed. “For opening his entire sermon with a reference to Chapter Two of the Chronicles, he really didn't refer to it much after that.”

        “My... uhm... my teacher has the good habit of paraphrasing the teachings of the Gultophine Saints. I've practiced putting together sermons myself. I'm all too often relying on direct quotations, as I am afraid of misconstruing the words of the Saints, and I do believe that makes me a great deal more stiff in my delivery than Breathstar is.”

        “Somehow I bet you're not giving yourself enough credit,” Harmony said. “Excessive humility never made anyone the worst writer.”

        “Heh, if you insist, Miss...”

        “'Harmony.'” The pegasus glanced up at the monochromatic stained glass window. “I noticed that—well, to be frank—Gultophine is colorless here.”

        “An astute observation, Miss Harmony,” Dawnhoof said with a nod. “But, as you may have heard in the good Bishop's sermon, the world was once whole and harmonious in a grand and indefinable one-ness before the Sundering of Consus split everything into chaos and color and distraction. It is often healthy to meditate on the simplicity of what Gultophine had so diligently struggled to restore upon the aftermath of her father's perishing. A life replete with prismatic distractions can shake us loose from the straight and narrow stream of her glorious path.”

        “Yeah, I guess I'll buy that,” Harmony murmured, but as she stared further at the dull panes of the stained glass window, standing closer to it now than ever before, the future scavenger in her took notice of many tiny hash-marks against the translucent surface. It was quite obvious to the last pony that the window was not originally built colorless, but rather that the rainbow hues had sometime in the past been chiseled away to a dull shade. She made no mention of it, but instead she gazed Dawnhoof's way with a smirk. “And you? What do you buy?”

        “I beg your pardon?”

        “I know you're a priest-in-training and all that jazz, but you're a Dredgemaner all the same.” She shuffled towards him and smirked. “'All things that breathe are siblings of Gultophine, under any law or life'.”

        “Chapter Five, Verse Twelve,” Dawnhoof remarked with a proud nod. “You are quite remarkably gifted in the knowledge of the Chronicles...”

        “What, for a Canterlotlian?” Harmony winked. “Not all science freaks are—y'know—science freaks, despite what some ponies who may or may not be residents of Dredgemane might say.”

        “I... see...” Dawnhoof nodded with a squinting gaze tossed over the turquoise-vested pegasus' shoulder. “I have noticed you in the presence of Pinkamena Pie. No doubt you have encountered Quarrington Pie of the City Council and his many staunch opinions on outsiders.”

        “You ever slept in somepony's farmhouse while feeling like an unwanted tumor?”

        “I cannot say that I have, Miss Harmony.”

        “It's an easy uncomfortableness to experience, especially in this town.” She sighed and glanced with a sincere squint in Dawnhoof's direction. “Seriously, Deacon, don't you think that the ponies of Dredgemane are miserable enough as it is without Breathstar having to kick them all in the ribs like—well—like a dead horse?”

        The young cleric briefly blushed at the audacity of Harmony's words. “Erhm... I find that to be a rather colorful analogy. Though, my only contention would be with its hyperbolic nature.”

        “Hyperbolic? Deacon Dawnhoof, these ponies of Dredgemane slave their days away trying to live up to Mayor Haymane's work ethic. Then, on their one morning of respite, they come here and get their ears filled to the brim with... well... brimstone.”

        “Breathstar's congregation is quite well acquainted with his methodology.”

        “Yeah, I can kinda see that. I think they're too used to it, if you ask me.”

        “I struggle to see the argument that you are attempting to make, Miss Harmony.”

        “It shouldn't even have to be an argument. Deacon, as a learned student in the Chronicles, surely you must agree that Gultophine's Spirit is indicative of life, of the love of life, and of the proliferation of the love of life.”

        “And it most certainly is, Miss Harmony. Those equine spirits who are instilled with the Spirit of Gultophine know this well. It is Breathstar's task as this city's spiritual leader to remind them of the consequences of falling outside of the glory that Gultophine breathed into this landscape starting so very long ago.”

        “You don't get out of the chapel much, do you?”

        “Erhm...” Dawnhoof nervously shifted where he stood. “I am... quick to volunteer in escorting Breathstar to various places, and I am the official crier for the announcements of chapel services all throughout the streets of Dredgemane...”

        “You've seen the exhaustion on ponies' faces, haven't you? You've seen how this place still looks and feels like the Grave of Consus. I imagine you've visited Stonehaven and learned of the young foals dying there and the mindless mares and stallions 'retired' there who wish that they were dead.” Harmony's face hung in a sad sigh. “Don't you think Dredgemaners are reminded enough of the misery that exists beyond Gultophine's glory?”

        “I... I cannot speak for what everypony feels, Miss Harmony. But I can speak for what they all need. Gultophine is indeed a Goddess of prosperity and strength in the face of endless desolation, otherwise she would be a patron of death instead of life.”

        “Then why are the sermons so centered upon death?”

        Dawnhoof's chestnut eyes had fallen into a far corner of the chapel. His voice was suddenly in a different tone, a much more honest and somber tone. “Because death is far more real to the children of Epona here than life. To attempt relating to the latter would only confuse them...”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow at that. She couldn't rebuke that last statement for some reason; something sympathetic had lodged a lump in her throat.

        Dawnhoof filled the silence for once. With a gentle smile, he glanced Harmony's way. “You are quite a weaver of logic and intelligent speech, Miss Harmony. Perhaps that is the talent that won you favor in the eyes of the Canterlotlian Clerk.”

        “Me? Smart? Pffft... if I was smart, why would I be stuck with Miss Pie?”

        “Heheheh...”

        “What about you?” Harmony pointed. “What cutie mark do you have hidden under that brown rug you call a robe? I can't imagine a pony with a steeple on his flank.”

        “Oh... Ahem...” His sandy cheeks briefly flushed at the inquisition. “For once, you show a lack of knowledge, Miss Harmony. Anypony who knows a thing or two about the Gultophine Order can testify that cutie marks are removed upon the path to being ordained.”

        “They are?” Harmony blinked.

        “It is anything but a pleasant experience, physically speaking. But what kind of priests would we be if we weren't reminded of the impermanence of flesh in its attachment to the Spirit of Gultophine?”

        “Well, then, what was your talent before you decided to snuff out candles and orate chapel schedules for a living?” Harmony smirked. “And don't tell me that's confidential. Priests can't be that boring.”

        “I...” Dawnhoof took a deep breath, his face adrift in thought. “I was once a metallurgist in Whinniepeg.”

        “Oh yeah? No kidding.”

        “It was hardly an exciting lifestyle. I wandered across plots of land and used my horn to find strange minerals for local ponies to harness into jewelcrafting. I did it for money, but I had no family to support. When I found my calling, I joined the order, and since then the Spirit of Gultophine has blessedly filled what I discovered to be a great void in my life. I do hope you understand, what was once a talent to me is now merely one method among a plethora of means I have to bring glory to my beloved Alicorn.”

        “I'm glad that you found your niche in the end,” Harmony said with a nod. With an exhale, she said, “I for one know what it means to realize that... a single talent isn't all there is to life.”

        “Maybe you too could join the order.”

        “And give up amazingly sinful stuff like chocolate? No thank you.”

        “Heh heh heh... Your humor is subtle enough for the walls of this place of worship, I'm inclined to think.”

        “Humor, huh? Well, I know one pony who'd be crazy to hear that,” Harmony muttered. A paper airplane suddenly flitted past her vision.

        “Hear what? Did Har-Har make a funny? Huh? Did she?”

        “Miss Pie, how are you this morning?” Dawnhoof briefly bowed. “That is... a remarkable outfit you have chosen to grace us with today.”

        “Yeah, if it wouldn't sag on Harmony, I'd make her wear it instead. It'd make her attempts at flirting a lot more entertaining.”

        Harmony suddenly made a face. “My attempts at what?”

        “Hey Har-Har, what color is Deacon Hubba-Hubba's eyes?”

        “What does that have to do with—?” Thud. “Dang you, Miss Pie!” She snarled and tugged her vest back down over her outstretched wings. “You ever played the organ with your face before?”

        “Wuh oh! Hey Deacon, can I make a confession?”

        “Miss Pie, you know that I do not yet have the authority to grant—”

        “I once ate an entire package of cream cheese when I visited Twilight Sparkle's parents' house.” Pinkie leaned in with a wink and a whisper. “But I still didn't end up as stuck up as Har-Har here. Heeheehee!”

        Harmony face-hoofed with a groan.

        “Erhm...” The cleric-in-training squinted. “I beg your pardon?”

        “Hey, you missed some candles.” The last pony pointed across the chapel.

        “Oh! S-So I did!” Dawnhoof levitated the ladle back up and all-too-quickly made leave of that particular spot of the cathedral. “It was a pleasant conversation, and also stimulating. If you would excuse me, fellow sisters.” He shuffled off.

        “Heeheehee! Did you hear that?” Pinkie cooed in Harmony's direction. “You just stimulated a priest!”

        “I did no such thing.”

        “Heeeee-HeeHeeHee!”

        Harmony frowned heavily. “What?!”

        “You sooooooo look like a sunburned monarch butterfly right now!”

        “That's it.” Harmony trotted angrily towards the chapel exit. “We're going home.”

        “No we're not.”

        Harmony skidded to a stop and blinked over her shoulders. “We're not?”

        “Nope. It's off to Marble Cake's to deliver more baked goods! Or have you suddenly stopped being my Canterlotlian Observer slash astronomer slash Royal Grand Biv hunter slash humorless stick in the mud?”

        “I... uh...” Harmony narrowed her gaze on Pinkie Pie's black suit and top hat. “I sort of thought that the day of Gultophine's Summons was a day of rest from labors and stuff.”

        “Hah! Wouldn't that be a laugh, even for me! Hehehe—You must be getting this confused with some other obscure religion. Now come with! We've got doughnuts to evangelize!”

        Perhaps the reason why I stayed in that town for so long, attached to Pinkie, is because I wanted to be a part of something. For so many decades, I've held the legacy of ponydom up on my shoulders and my shoulders alone. It was a refreshing sensation to, for once, not be the only member of my own species. All of Dredgemane, for as miserable as the city felt, was carrying the load of Equestrian existence with me. From Pinkie to Inkessa to Quarrington to Vimbert to Dawnhoof to Mayor Haymane himself: we were all a collective, and I was quietly and secretly excited to have been a member of that order.

        That has to be why I did what I did: why I donned the monicker of the “Canterlotlian Clerk”, this time to act as an agent that promised to bring down the Royal Grand Biv and bring back order to that blissful slice of civilization. I wanted to feel as though I was doing something helpful for ponykind, something that didn't serve a purpose no more concrete than a mournful eulogy for all the things I could never before lend a hoof to.

        But as the days slugged by—gray, torchlit, incomprehensibly morose days—the essence of who and what I was bled through the walls of time to once again engulf me. The end of ponies has been and shall always be centered upon me, and being alive and kicking in the trenches of Dredgemane didn't make me any less of the pariah I was immutably destined to be since birth.

        I only had to decide if my state of being there was a weakness or an asset.

        Licking her lips, Harmony concentrated on the task at hoof. With the expert precision of a Wasteland engineer, the last pony finished slicing the second of two holes in the opposite sides of her winter wrap-up vest. Satisfied with her job, she placed a carving knife down onto the edge of a kitchen counter and slid her naked torso up through the turquoise article. Her wings easily slid through the two openings she had just cut into the fabric of the material. She flexed the copper appendages with a breath of relief, though it wouldn't last long.

        Just then, Pinkie Pie bounced across the lengths of the bakery and unloaded the last of several teetering white boxes of baked goods onto Harmony's Entropan spine. Doughnuts, muffins, cookies, rings of taffy, and cupcakes filled the packages to the brim. The copper pegasus wobbled briefly under the towering array upon her shoulders, but straightened her stance in time to throw a plastic smile Marble Cake's way. Pinkie's rotund aunt grinned proudly at the two, murmured something to her niece, and patted the earth pony atop her fluffy head. After a brief giggle, Pinkie whistled at her “Canterlotlian” assistant and bounced merrily out of the steaming kitchen. A sighing Harmony followed on lurching limbs.

        Through the streets of Dredgemane, the two trotted like a two-pony parade. The many faces of equine laborers were just as deadpan and unemotional after Gultophine's Summons as they appeared before. Harmony breathlessly glanced across the many stumbling souls as she too joined in the agonized lurch that had come to embody the entrenched city's animation. Breathstar and Dawnhoof had spoken of Gultophine forging a river of life from the point of the Sundering. Looking around the pallid, smoky lengths of the Alicorn's namely refuge, Harmony couldn't help but see a prison. The one bright thing—the single shade of excitement and glory in the dreadful cesspool of that place—was the bouncing figure of Pinkie Pie ahead of her. The pegasus bakery slave helplessly followed the earth pony, for she finally understood that she had no choice.

        Pinkie Pie giggled and resumed telling a joke before the bushy beard of the towering Mr. Irontail. The hulking blacksmith was sweeping away the last mound of debris from the front of his shop, but he seemed hardly perturbed at the sight of Harmony standing behind the earth pony. As soon as Pinkie and the last pony had arrived, Irontail had proudly displayed a shredded piece of the Royal Grand Biv's rainbow cloak. The blacksmith called it a “souvenir”, and judging from his smile and booming enthusiasm, he was most certain it would drive further business in the future, even beyond Gultophine's Harvest.

        While the old stallion and the candy-colored filly chatted onwards, Harmony stood off to the side, leaning against the part of the blacksmith's shop that was still in one piece. She had the impossibly heavy tower of desserts standing next to her, giving her a moment's respite. With dull amber eyes, she scanned a reflectively mundane urbanscape. The cobblestone acreage of Dredgemane's spacious town square hummed with the collective bass of hundreds of clopping hooves. Aside from the chirping sound of Pinkie Pie beside her, Harmony could make out no signs of life from the crowded intersection beyond. There were no conversations, no laughter, no tittering, no voices whatsoever. The same quiet solemnity that had ushered the congregation out of Breathstar's cathedral hung over the mute manes of so many equine souls, so that Harmony could at last ascertain what gave the machine of Dredgemane lifestyle its perpetual motion.

        She was about to distract herself with an obligatory absorption of Pinkie's conversation beside her, when a very haunting melody suddenly stabbed her ears. Her heart pulsed with a sudden rapidity, as if an alarm was going off inside the gondola of her airship. However, this was not the cabin of the Harmony, no matter how much it suddenly felt like it was. The last pony flashed her gaze across the courtyard of central Dredgemane and spotted four ponies standing beneath a street sign, their bodies obscured into ghostly shades across the dismal mists, and they were performing a melancholic movement with four separate antique violins.

        The scavenger from the future immediately recognized the tune. It was none other than 'Suites for a Princess', more specifically the first section. She had heard this instrumental countless times, but never in this pathetically morose and mournful tone. The wailing pitch of the strings was a wilted thing, like the features of the four ponies, for Harmony then realized that they were way past their pasture years. Long, moth-eaten gray beards fluttered from their features like moss. Their eyes were jaded, like rock chiseled loose of all its shine, like so many a fog-coated sheet of stone in that gray graveyard of a town. Even when Dredgemaners wanted to express themselves, their art forms were a eulogy reserved for the detached or the dying. These stallions obviously knew that their years would be over soon, and they expressed their woes in ways the other Dredgemaners couldn't, and it filled the air with a ghastly howl like so many spirits of those who perished in identical ennui before them.

        Harmony exhaled long and hard, her copper features deflating as her body slid halfway down the storefront in a slump that mimicked those around her. Soon, the bubbly pitch in Pinkie's voice was drowned out, and it didn't even take a thunderous sermon to fill the pegasus' ears with that sudden underwater deafness.

        I heard Octavia's strings. Even then, in the depths of a world turned into myth by the permanent flames of the Cataclysm, my muse had followed me. For Octavia has always been simply that: my muse, my one inspiration to keep living my lonesome life in the wastes with the belief that there once existed ponies who would find my courageous existence beyond extinction something of value.

        What could the ponies of Dredgemane possibly appreciate? Music to them was a eulogy to a funeral that they had to plan for years in advance of its patron soul dying. To party or to laugh or to smile would be a sin unto death, so the only chance in life they could have to enjoy a respite would be right upon the eve of that same life being extinguished.

        I have never been too proud of myself over the last twenty-five years. You should know that. It has never, ever filled my soul with joy to know that I am the last pony and I have spent my life scavenging from the graves and homes of all the equine spirits who have gone before me. My one way of excusing myself for my necessary sins of existence was to dream of what life was like in Equestria before the Cataclysm. Naturally, I had lived out some of those civilized years, but they were brief and subjectively trite memories at best. I was a foal when disaster struck; I never got the chance to grow up and really know ponies for who and what they were. So, in my lonely mind's eye, I saw ponies as happy and magically enchanted souls. While trotting through the streets of dead Equestria, I closed my eyes and saw, instead, sunlit streets with giggling children and chatting mares and sturdy stallions working hoof-in-hoof to maintain the beauty of some bright, glistening world that was forever lost to me.

        And then I went to Dredgemane, and I saw a piece of Equestria that was not bright and glistening. I saw ponies who were better off dead, who would have been freed from a life of ritualistic imprisonment if their mortality was to run out. I was mane-deep in the grave of Consus, the site of the first death Equestria had ever witnessed, and I realized first-hoof that what gave birth to the First Age also spawned a fountaining cascade of endless, identical deaths, spread out across the backs of mortal equine like a scythe singing its way atop a field of wheat.

        My bright and glistening dream didn't die the first moment I saw the gray ravines of Dredgemane. After all, you should know that my spirit is far too strong for that. Instead, my dream crashed and burned the instant I perceived that there was not only one Dredgemane, but that there were many, and there always have been. Equestrian history was full of countless, innumerable Dredgemanes, of wars fought for paltry reasons, of famines that stripped ponydom of their hope and felicity, of diseases and plagues and pestilences that made life just as miserable for ponies in the past as it is for creatures of the future Wasteland. When the Cataclysm occurred, it wasn't some horribly incomprehensible event of annihilation that Equestria never saw coming. As a matter of fact, it was the embodiment of every horrible thing that had ever happened in Equestria ever, all rolled into one.

        Octavia's beautiful music used to be—for me—an audio time capsule, a dip into a glorious world that was without marring imperfections. Dredgemane taught me that was not the case. If I had known what I know now about ponydom, I wonder if I would ever have built the rainbow signal to begin with. I used to think that I was the only equine soul missing the pulsating spirit of enchantment in her heart. I used to think that I was the only pony whose life was painted by the colors of misery. I was wrong, for Dredgemaners appeared dreamless to me. I found nothing that a rainbow signal could possibly have elicited from their slumber, for by sleeping they were all merely practicing for death. If nothing else, I imagined the Cataclysm merely put them out of their misery.

        I wondered if that was the Cataclysm's divine purpose for all of Equestria.

        Pinkie Pie galloped in circles before the front steps of a school building submerged in a crooked corner of looming stone. She excitedly charaded a mesmerizing fight with the Royal Grand Biv, using her top hat to symbolize a smoke bomb and her flailing coattails to represent dual fans of colored knives. Her pink mane bounced with her bobbing motions, and her blue eyes were practically electrified.

        Several teenage students in simple brown garb marveled at her tale, congregating around an opened box of half-eaten cookies. Harmony recognized many of them from the curfew-defying party that Pinkie had thrown the evening previous. The youngsters murmured in awe as the candy-colored pony's tale took off on a magnificent new tangent, and when Pinkie briefly charaded a pair of outstretched wings, they collectively giggled and winked the copper pegasus' way.

        The time traveler rolled her eyes, leaning against a bench and craning her neck towards the twisting lengths of the urban trenches beyond. The violin strings were faint now, like the rattle of dying songbirds from the far end of an abandoned tunnel. She wondered briefly what it would feel like to be foaled, to be raised, to be civilized, and then to be buried in this town. Harmony may have been the last pony, but at least she had the luxury of seeing many fantastic—albeit decrepit sights.

        To live and to die as a Dredgemaner, however, carried with it a new and paralyzing horror for the last pony. The copper pegasus didn't even want to comprehend that sort of existence. Even Spike, with his three centuries of self-imposed imprisonment within the suffocating rock of the Canterlotlian Mountains, had lived a rosy life by comparison. Harmony pondered then that—perhaps—every equine soul was the end of ponies, in that they were the end and beginning of themselves, a pitifully abbreviated snapshot of all that they could ever be, but never would be afforded the opportunity.

        As Pinkie's tale further enraptured the young teenagers, Harmony watched as their faces lit up. She realized that she knew the exact time and day when all of the light in those youngsters' eyes would be snuffed out forever. The last pony didn’t know if she felt sad or relieved.

        Later that day, when Pinkie Pie and Harmony trotted out of the massive, stone-reinforced structure of the Dredgemane Public Library, the pegasus glanced over to see two clerics-in-training standing at the street corner. Squinting her eyes, the last pony made out the image of Deacon Dawnhoof. The young unicorn was in the process of levitating a white rectangular banner against the gray face of a supply warehouse. His companion raised a series of sharp stakes and magically drilled them into place so that the banner could remain stretched before the passing gaze of Dredgemane citizens.

        As Pinkie and Harmony trotted by, the last pegasus craned her neck to read the banner. The words shone forth boldly: “Gultophine's Harvest – Prepare to Bring Your Chosen Possessions to the Bonfires in Town Square”.

        Blinking, Harmony flashed a glance over her shoulder. Many equine faces saw the banner's reminder. Hardly a single Dredgemaner registered anything that could have resembled a positive or negative emotion. One way or another, they trotted towards the inevitable crucible waiting for them. It was just as unavoidable an event as the Cataclysm.

        Ice Song coughed, his blue face turning bluer as he wheezed for a clear breath. Pinkie Pie raised a glass of water and gently tilted it for the young colt to take a deep sip. When he was finished, he breathed a bit easier and murmured his thanks. Pinkie Pie giggled and allowed Ice Song to settle his infirmed body deeper into the crook of her forelimbs as she handed the empty glass to a smiling Nurse Angel Cake.

        Inside the Immolatia Ward, a bustling circle of excited young foals watched as Pinkie set forth creating the latest of many paper airplanes on the edge of the hospital bed. With expert hooves she creased the sheet of medical charts at appropriate angles, all the while murmuring to Ice Song and the others a bubbly dissertation on proper aeronautics. Once the latest winged invention was finished, she passed it to Ice Song with a bright grin. The tiny, shivering pony picked the aircraft up lightly and flung it off the bed... so that it crashed pathetically into the monochromatic tile floor. The surrounding young fillies and colts giggled while Ice Song wilted shamefully. Pinkie Pie merely pinched his shoulder, winked, and guided his hooves as she helped him make a new aircraft.

        Harmony stood, watching this from the side. She sighed and gave a deadpan glance in Inkessa's direction. The gray nurse glanced back, rolled her eyes, and smiled helplessly while shuffling through a clipboard of daily examination notes.

        The last pegasus glanced back at the scene, only to have her vision interrupted by the bright sight of a gold-coated little filly hobbling up to her. It was Suntrot, and the ailing child had something in her mouth. Curious, Harmony reached down and grasped the offering in two hooves. Before her blinking amber eyes was a rather adorable sketch of a copper-winged figure dancing in the sunlight along with a golden sprite at least a third her size.

        Harmony gulped and smiled nervously down at the little filly, only to see that she had disappeared. Suddenly, there was a gentle, feather-soft weight against the time traveler's hind legs. She glanced back to see Suntrot lovingly nuzzling her lower limbs with a contented smile, an expression that was briefly interrupted by a cough or two before the tiny filly resumed the joyful embrace.

        The last pony sweated nervously. Before any warm blood could rise to the surface of her coat, she wrenched her eyes away from the sweet sight in time to have a paper airplane slam between her eyes. She winced with a grunt, being further assaulted by a flurry of giggles as Pinkie Pie proudly patted the shoulder of a blushing Ice Song. With a hoof outstretched, the blue colt stifled a cough and smiled demurely.

        In the flickering lantern-light of the Stonehaven third floor beneath the Immolatia Ward, Suntrot's drawing took on a brighter tone. Harmony studied the rays of amber light shining down from a golden orb crayoned into the white sky of the paper sheet. She exhaled somberly before folding the sketch and pocketing it away into her turquoise vest. Even with the best of intentions, Suntrot's gift wouldn't allow the last pony to bring sunlight back to the future Wasteland.

        The last pony glanced up and resumed staring through the wide stretch of glass before her. On the other side, surrounded by the catatonic and shuffling patients of Stonehaven, Pinkie Pie sat at a white table with white chairs in the center of the white room guarded by orderlies in white fatigues. Across the table from her, a lethargic patient flipped through the pages of an invisible book. Pinkie Pie had her chin propped up on a pair of hooves. She was grinning nonstop—a perpetual smile, but a subtle one. With a sudden softness, she reached over and gently tapped the surface of the table before the purple-maned patient.

        The emaciated equine glanced over, blinking. Pinkie Pie grinned and motioned towards herself, her blue eyes highlighting the empty air between the patient's hooves. The pony blinked at the invisible pages, then back at Pinkie. With sluggish, reluctant speed, the purple-maned mare held the nonexistent article over towards Harmony's anchor. Pinkie reached her hooves out. She “grabbed” the invisible book. With suddenly studious, squinting eyes she stared at the wordless nothing in front of her. She tilted her hooves to the left, to the right, then finally flipped the book upside down before letting loose a melodramatic gasp before slapping the book shut and blushing like a beet. She fanned herself, then winked slyly at the mare... as if from girlfriend to girlfriend.

        It was then that something... crazy happened. The patient smiled. She may have even giggled once or twice. Harmony watched as Pinkie shared the grin. The candy-colored filly next reached up to her head, removed her top hat, and impossibly dug her hoof elbow-deep into the contents of the black article. Dragging her hoof back out, she “magically” produced a brand new invisible book. With a cooing expression, she flipped the “pages” before the mare, then slid the phantom pamphlet the patient's way.

        The purple-maned pony picked it up, opened the unseen literature, and proceeded to delve into this new material with a deep and rosy-cheeked smile. In the meantime, Pinkie's eyes wandered sideways and broke another invisible thing: a wall of glass. Beyond that, Harmony practically jolted from the filly's stare, and she almost shivered when Pinkie winked at the end of the visual exchange. She wasn't entirely sure who belonged on which side anymore.

        Pinkie raised a hoof to her smiling face and hissed: “Shhhh!” With a melodramatically stealthy crawl, she proceeded into the hollow of a dark, dark building. A spacious meeting room lingered under dimly-lit lanterns above. The collective shadows of the place almost reminded Harmony of the candlelit recesses of the Pie Family Farmhouse. When she gazed into the lengths of the room, she suddenly understood why that was.

        Quarrington Pie sat quiet and still at the center of a grand wooden table along with five other ponies. Together, the six elders faced a thick series of benches populated by dozens upon dozens of city representatives. The Council of Dredgemane was in session, and ponies from every walk of life—from traders to blacksmiths to store owners to miners to deliverers to farmers—were gathered together, listening intently as one proclamation after another was formally read to the densely seated crowd.

        As the latest in several boring speeches about city ordinance was monotonously broadcast over the heads of those in attendance, Pinkie Pie snuck her way down the rows of seats, dipping her hooves into the towering boxes atop Harmony's backside and hoofing out samples of dessert to the bored-stiff audience members. A low murmur drifted through the thick of the crowd, briefly parting the dark opaqueness of the place with a twinge of excitement.

        This ended swiftly, of course, upon the precipice of one Council Member's raspy cough. Pinkie shot up with a gasp. Quarrington was glaring at his daughter from his lofty seat at the table. All it took was a sharp twitch of his eyebrow, and Pinkamena Diane Pie backed away with a nervous giggle, nudging Harmony so that she followed suit.

        As the two fillies trotted swiftly out of the Council Chamber, Harmony lingered long enough to give the six elders one last look. Quarrington's golden eyes were affixed to some invisible sphere beyond the black shadows of the floor, as if his soul was in another place... as if it hadn't ever entered his chair to begin with.

        Here's something you should know, though I'd be amazed if you did. When a pony dies, is it only because the body is consumed? Does there come a point in any equine's life when she or he becomes ready for death, when she or he gives up, when she or he is ever so properly defeated in the grand competition that is life?

        I still believe that life is a competition. Even after Dredgemane, I believe that. There are things that I have been taught—things which I forever credit Rainbow Dash for—that even the most morose of feelings cannot drown out.

        Dredgemaners had it within themselves to be more than they were. They lived in a very dismal world—yes—but what legitimate reason was there for them to curtail their own lives by tossing away all joy, all color, all hope for relief beyond the regimental restraint of perpetual labor?

        At some point, something had to have happened. Something imposed a self-deprecating order that paralyzed Dredgemane when so many other towns—like Ponyville—were positively dancing. Was it Bishop Breathstar? Was it Mayor Haymane? Was it Sladeburn or the demands of the quarry? What was it that took Pinkie Pie's home town and made it not only live up to its name, but plunge itself so deep beyond it that it had to believe that there was no such thing as a sunrise, that there was a reason for scraping away the rainbow paint from the stained glass windows of Gultophine's cathedral?

        This town was to be the Alicorn of Life's refuge, a symbol of victory and triumph in the wake of what destroyed Consus and made Epona flee to the stars. We ponies have all been the product of love, independent of the slings and arrows of misery. But in Dredgemane, nopony was capable of perceiving what I did, perhaps because I was a blissfully ignorant outsider. To think that an apocalyptic Wasteland is the source of my bliss tickles me in a place that I don't particularly like.

        What was it that made Dredgemane tick, in that it refused to tick? The village's model citizens were those who moved like a river of molasses down the cobblestone streets with rocks in tow. The only ponies who came close to being happy were those who had gone mad—like Brevis—or had gone to the bottle—just like...

        Pinkie Pie suddenly stopped in her tracks and held a hoof aside to force Harmony into identically putting on the brakes. Not even a millisecond later, two brawling drunks slammed through a table in front of them, filling the air with splinters and bottlecaps. Pinkie giggled with a helpless shrug, stepped over the two snarling colts, and frolicked her way across the saloon until she was shuffling a white box of chocolate-colored pretzels towards the establishment's bartender. She and the tall stallion carried on a pleasant conversation while a shivering Harmony glanced around and yet again bore forlorn witness to the chaotic place.

        The hazy air of the saloon quivered from random coughs and retching noises. As the last of many random fights rolled its way into a stack of chairs across the room, Harmony's eyes roamed from tables of half-conscious drinkers to clusters of laughing, rosy-cheeked equines to a grand stage where a scarlet-maned Pepper Plots led a coordinatedly raunchy dance above a line of mesmerized patrons. For one stabbing second, the fancily garbed mare made eye contact with the time traveler and punctuated the connection with a suggestive wink.

        Harmony instantly winced, adjusting the brim of her green beret in a futile effort to hide behind the tiny article. With a sigh, she glanced her way once more towards the bar counter—only to see that her anchor was gone. With a brief jump in her heart rate, she flashed her gaze around until she heard a cheering whoop from the stage. With a groan, she finally gazed up and witnessed Pinkie Pie joining Pepper in an energetic can-can. The scarlet mare laughed with a sudden flightiness as she joined herself with Pinkie, shoulder-to-shoulder. The two ponies continued the leg-lifting romp to a sudden roar of hysterical laughter from the saloon. Pinkie giggled and tossed her black top hat merrily into the air.

        Sighing, Harmony gazed back to the bar counter. She caught an orange shade in her peripheral and swiftly glanced over. Vimbert returned the glance briefly. He cast his blue eyes towards the stage, and immediately rolled them, choosing instead to focus all of his energies into swallowing the contents a silver flask in his hoof.

        Harmony stared solidly at the shattered contours of the unicorn's curiously hollow horn... at least until Pinkie's top hat came down, fatefully landing over the copper pegasus' face and blocking out her vision.

        The two fillies marched out of the saloon and into the thinning streets of Dredgemane. Afternoon was falling, but Harmony could hardly tell from the endless gray of the misty skies peeking through the canyon above. It was a strangely familiar feeling, like drifting in an airship and waiting for a stormfront to measure the time.

        Harmony took a bold step towards the center of town, assuming that the next leg of their delivery would be somewhere beyond the courthouse. She blinked in surprise when Pinkie suddenly tugged on her amber-streaked tail. Stopping to glance back at the candy-coated pony, Harmony witnessed the filly shaking her head and pointing a hoof... straight up.

        The copper pegasus followed the gaze. She suddenly made out a winding set of stone steps snaking up the steep granite face of the canyon wall. A roughly hewn path had been chiseled out years ago, and it led directly to the surface of the plateau that hovered above the sunken city.

        Pinkie grinned wide, motioned with her mane, and galloped toward the sharply ascending stairs. Harmony took a deep breath, shrugged, and reluctantly followed her.

        The grand plateau that surrounded the Grave of Consus was flatter than anything Harmony had seen in her entire, blistering life. All occasions the time traveler had previously to glance at the pale gray horizon were interrupted by conversations with Inkessa or Pinkie. That afternoon, trailing a bouncing, top-hatted filly under the milky overcast, she finally paid the landscape some deep attention. She had no doubt that the various dots along the thin gray line stretching in all directions were several kilometers away. Next to nothing obscured the sight of a distant farmhouse, watchtower, or dying tree. She momentarily mourned the lack of such gorgeous clarity in the future, a time when snow and ash would dominate all vision and make a soul wish that she was blind.

        Pinkie trotted gaily forward for the better part of an hour. Harmony was briefly worried, until she saw the dome-like shape of a structure dead ahead of them, with a column of billowing smoke rising high above the distant construction as if signaling some delightfully hidden purpose.

        While marching towards this faraway sight, the two ponies passed by a smelly oasis. A bog had suddenly appeared in their path. Harmony remembered spotting such inexplicable marshes from her view atop Mayor Haymane's balcony, but seeing one up close was a startling thing. The flatness of the landscape almost afforded them both a plunge into the bubbling pond of mud; it had come upon them so suddenly.

        As the two trotted by, a deep bass rumble emanated through the stony plateau. Harmony realized that the dull noise was coming from deep within the muddy waters that they were strolling past. She trotted sideways to glance up close at the bog, squinting her eyes to make sense out of the errant bubbles in the brown surface.

        Pinkie Pie suddenly tugged on her. The last pony looked at the filly, and the candy-colored pony slowly shook her head. She trotted onwards with greater momentum, and Harmony was helpless to do anything other than keep up the pace. She glanced back over her tower of white bakery boxes, and for a brief second, she thought she spotted a hulk of scaled flesh appearing and disappearing beneath the currents. Then everything was just as placidly muddy as before.

        I had briefly imagined that ponies were the only creatures in Dredgemane. I was wrong, of course. I think it's always been a selective sin of my species to assume that Equestria was a land that held resources only for... Equestrians.

        A few sordid memories from my foalhood stick out, regarding cities full of monkeys, ogres, and other unsightly organisms that had once lived outside the boundaries of Princess Celestia's glorious kingdom. As a matter of fact, a township founded by goblins came into being shortly before the Cataclysm hit. I remember this now as I write because I recall a horrible cyclone afflicting the landscape. A goblin colony was nearly rendered to dust from the tornadic chaos. To this day, I still don't know how so many of those creatures were spared at the last second. The goblin city of Petra wouldn't exist as a bright pearl in the middle of the Wasteland if it wasn't for such a miraculous circumstance.

        But I do know this, Dredgemane was a place of darkness and misery. It was a bitterly ironic thing, then, that the one hub of peace that broke the dismal clouds of that pony town... didn't owe itself to ponies at all.

        “The rams are intrigued by the outer voice's inquisition, but the rams must also maintain the noble truth that to question something is to invent the very need to understand it.”

        Harmony sat on her haunches. Across from her, three white and wooly individuals sat in meditative poses upon a triad of velvety cushions. Behind them, an igloo of stacked rocks framed a dozen more spiral-horned creatures who were mutually operating a makeshift forge, complete with a furnace, a pump, several anvils, and an array of blacksmithing equipment. Before the future scavenger's amber eyes, a commune of mountain rams produced the latest of priceless ironcrafting.

        “I only asked what you thought of the Dredgemaners who live below you,” the last pony remarked. Beside her, Pinkie crunched her way through a bag of chocolate candy bites. A box of bright pink taffy rested between the guests and the three meditative speakers. “You seem to be hard workers, just like them.”

        “The rams' labors are merely a passive exercise through which the rams expend the energy binding them to their mortal frames.” This time, it was another of the three individuals who had spoken. As he and his companions spoke, they barely opened their eyes. They held a serene pose between the three of them as the cold winds of the plateau blew tufts of their white hair against their spiraling horns. “The true labor to come is in a transcendence beyond the rams themselves. The outer voice's curiosity carries a humility that is indicative of a hunger for enlightenment.”

        “'Outer... voice...'?” Harmony blinked, then flashed her anchor a helpless glance.

        Pinkie gulped a chocolate bite down and pointed with a smile. “He means you or me, or just anypony.”

        “Ah.”

        One of the three murmured further, “Have you come to meditate with the rams?”

        “And by 'the rams', he means the rams.”

        “Uh, yeah, Miss Pie, I gathered.” Harmony cleared her voice and smiled quaintly the three horned creatures' way. “No, I haven't come to meditate. I'm a... guest on behalf of Pinkamena here. We were doing our deliveries, and I can't help but notice that you're the first souls I've seen who aren't stepping to Bishop Breathstar's beat.”

        “There are no souls, for there is only one soul, and the rams are but an extension of it, as are all voices—inner and outer.” The three carried the conversation randomly between them as the forges burned and billowed brightly behind their horns. “The oneness was, is, and shall forever be. The rams flock to the superficial imprint of the oneness, where the many began and split the voice into that which is here and that which is not here. Through careful meditation upon the imprint, the rams realize that they too are but the same blemish that they were spoken into being upon the canvas of this grand obscurity. To realize that the rams are one with the imprint is to leave the imprint behind, and seek the inner voice beyond transcendence.”

        “So, if I understand you right...” Harmony leaned forward with genuine interest, squinting. “You guys came to the Grave of Consus to meditate on what it means to your search for inner enlightenment.” She blinked. “Funny: you and the Dredgemaners value the same thing, but your way of looking upon it involves a lot less frowns, I take it.”

        “The rams comprehend the outer voice's logic, but the rams fail to find what is 'funny' about it.”

        “Heeheehee! Well, who can blame you boneheads?” Pinkie giggled. “Har-Har wouldn't know how to telegraph a joke if it came up and rammed her, if you pardon the pun.”

        “The rams fail to comprehend the outer voice's pun.”

        Harmony briefly frowned at Pinkie, then returned a placid gaze towards the three. “Don't mind her. The closest Miss Pie has ever come to meditating is in mastering the art of paper airplanes...” Her voice trailed off as she spotted a sudden project being undertaken in the “hut” of stacked rocks behind the three's shoulders.

        Several deadpan rams were pulling at a pair of copper cranks, raising two metal needles into the sky above the commune. The twin stalks stretched high, piercing the darkening overcast. A deep hum filled the plateau. Harmony squinted to see a generator being rotated at the base of the twin metal stalks. The air briefly filled with static electricity, and in a sudden jolt of thunder a lightning bolt was summoned from the thick of the clouds. Currents of bright blue energy shimmered down the twin stalks and billowed into a black chamber of rusted metal. The dark sarcophagus lit up from the inside like a hot-blue stove, and then shimmered with a hissing puff of sneeze. The rams minding the machine slapped a lever; the twin stalks retracted loudly. One ram wearing protective gear walked up to the black chamber while another opened the lid. With a pair of forceps, the ram reached into the sarcophagus and produced a tiny sphere of sparkling energy.

        “Thunder pearls...” Harmony murmured. The scavenger from the future hopelessly smiled, a subtly drunken thing. “You guys are making enchanted thunder pearls! That's—like—the most valuable of Equestrian ramcrafting! Do you have any idea what one of those things are worth?”

        “The rams commend the outer voice's knowledge, but fail to grasp her enthusiasm. The elements of this obscurity are just as superficial as the obscurity itself. To harness the elements is to allow the rams to understand the triviality of the imprint, as the elements are imprints in and of themselves.”

        “Yeah, but...” The time traveler lurched in mid-speech. She gulped. “They... They will be valuable, some day, in the future.”

        “There is no future. There is only now. The rams are both forever and never. Time is an imprint within the obscurity, and without it there is no meaning to the word.”

        “Yeah, well, time hurts, okay?”

        “The rams postulate that the outer voice has a grasp of the outer voice's imprint.”

        “Heh, you may be right.” Harmony leaned back with a smirk. “I gotta ask, though...” She briefly flashed Pinkie a look and glanced fixedly once more at the trio before them. “If you guys are so heck-bent on meditation and transcendence and whatnot, why are all of you on Marble Cake's delivery route?”

        A smile suddenly floated like a ghost between the three of them.

        “The answer should be simple enough for the outer voice. The rams appreciate taffy.”

That night, the door to the Pie family farmhouse kicked open. Pinkamena Diane Pie danced in, calling loudly towards the far reaches of the candlelit interior. She flung her top hat onto the branch of a coat-rack and moontrotted over towards the dinner table, where Blinkaphine was sketching her millionth landscape since the time traveler arrived there. Pinkie murmured something into the light gray filly's ear, nuzzled her gently, and spun about—only to have a stumpy alligator leap up and clamp its jaws over the candy-colored pony's gasping face. She giggled into Gummy's drooling maw and scampered her way happily into the kitchen to fetch some reptile treats.

        Harmony slowly stumbled in, removing her green beret with a dwindling sigh. Another day in the depths of the past, and the hauntingly familiar array of flickering candles only reminded the copper pegasus that nothing was different. After forty-eight hours spent in the past, she actually screamed for a change in scenery. The grayness of the Grave of Consus was burned into her retinae, and the ringing tone of Pinkie's voice simultaneously did a number on her ear drums. She could hardly tell who was an anchor to who anymore.

        Standing blissfully alone for a space in time, Pinkie gazed at Blinkaphine, at the unsightly 'rocket ship' that formed the catatonic filly's cutie mark, then at the wooden opaqueness of the ceiling above them both... and what inevitably twinkled beyond.

        With careful movements, Harmony clasped the crayon in her teeth and steered a constellation branch across the sea of specks that she had just sketched onto the latest sheet of paper. Spitting the pen out for a breath, she glanced up to compare the night's sky to her roughly illustrated mouthwork.

        With each white sheet that Harmony covered, the sphere of lights dancing above grew more and more familiar, like long lost siblings to the last pony's quivering eyes. After several hours of mapping the cosmos, patterns began emerging, like re-reading a journal of Princess Celestia for the hundredth time since she scavenged the holy tome. The stars were like words written on an obsidian canvas, and the pegasus struggled to see where the phrases split apart—or else where they tripped over each other.

        She may not have gotten a grasp of the Onyx Eclipse yet, but she was beginning to understand the forest within which such an elusive creature was roaming, even if Harmony barely had a means of permanently preserving the map with which she was making her observations.

        One thing at a time, just like fixing a scooter. Harmony's breaths were calm things for once, because she realized that as important as this astronomical task was, she was suddenly at a race with her daily self to accomplish some other goal, even if she didn't quite know what that other goal was. However, like a forest full of starblazing trees, she suspected that everything would become clear remarkably soon. She just didn't know if she could map this other project with the same skill that kept her perched upon that nightlit rooftop.

        After loading up with the latest of Marble Cake's batches, Harmony limpingly followed Pinkie Pie, the latter of whom was dressed rather anticlimactically like a safari hunter in a white shirt and khaki shorts—as she strolled out through the northwest side of town, where a rising slope in granite bled up out of the deep trenches and wound its way towards a flat highway of crushed gravel stretching westward, upon which several phalanxes of wagon-trailing Dredgemaners trudged and marched.

        Harmony glanced from side to side—studying the soot-stained faces of the many citizens lethargically sharing the same path as she and Pinkie. The ponies here looked more consistently dismal and depressed than in any other part of the sunken town. Gazing ahead, she saw why, as a plume of endless smoke rose from a great wound in the stony plateau, its dull black clouds matching the lifeless and lightless faces of those equine bodies stumbling beside her.

        After ascending the last crest in the gravel hallway, Harmony observed as she and Pinkie stumbled upon the precipice of a great hellish pit. The Dredgemane Quarry was a monumentally huge thing, stretching two and a half kilometers across at its highest point. Dipping down low beneath the top layer of the stony plateau, the landscape resembled an inverse beehive that cyclonically ate into the bosom of the world. Hundreds upon thousands of hard-working ponies dotted the multi-layered highways of rock-dragging wagons like a bed of dully clothed ants. Deep black pits were splattered across the innermost circle of the cylindrical plunge, marking the location of several mineshaft entrances that unbelievably dug even deeper into the planet—beyond view of the naked eye.

        Harmony breathlessly gazed into the vacuum of hot air that swirled before the mouth of the giant pit. Even for a pegasus, the sheer height of the drop was alarming. She marveled that there was no manner of safety rails or protective barriers to keep the countless droves of earth ponies from plunging to a horrible death. She glanced over her shoulder towards the plateau's edge and spotted one of three huge foundries—built out of iron—with gigantic brick smokestacks that vomited soot and ash forever into the gray soup of the sky. Twin rivers of laboring ponies marched in opposite directions to and fro, half of them leaving the factories in a shuffling gait, the other half filling up the empty shifts with no greater enthusiasm. Their faces were like gravestones, or lifeless cogs in a grand machine that Dredgemane refused to shut off, if even for one minute.

        At the sound of a bark, Harmony glanced to her left. Standing atop a wooden podium was the dark brown image of Overseer Sladeburn. The black-garbed stallion was engaged in a heated dispute with several red-faced engineers and architects. They shouted and argued over several topographical maps and subterranean blueprints while the traffic of living laborers surged by undaunted beneath them. All the while, the thick soot of industry billowed through the air and rained ash down like so many a blighted day in the Wastelands.

        One speck of dust fell on the last pony's vested shoulder. The lone soul from the future picked the dark flake off her shoulder and paused to hold it before her in one hoof. The way in which the speck had singled her out from the surging crowd struck her curiously. She wondered briefly if the desolation of the Cataclysm had followed her all the way there, but Harmony knew better than to hope for such a fanciful thing. The Wasteland was becoming more and more—with each passing Dredgemane day—the heartless appendix to an even more bitter legacy. The quarry was just like the Grave of Consus; it was a second grave. Its mouth opened wide to swallow the bodies of so many ponies as it also swallowed the colors of so many dying dreams that the last pony once held in admiration.

        A chirping sound lit the air, like a drop of sugar in a grand bowl of acid. Harmony glanced up to see Pinkie's bright blue eyes. The filly smiled like it was everypony's foalday at once, and motioned with her bright mane as she boldly and happily marched straight down into that hellish abyss, going somewhere that for once paralyzed the nerves within the Entropan frame of the future scavenger, for deep within the innermost bowels of that quarry there stretched an array of dark mineshaft entrances, and every single one of them looked like a serpent's gaping mouth beyond a sea of white stones.

        Harmony shuddered. She clung to a metal handle against the side of the rattling elevator car as they dropped down, down, down an impermeable esophagus of rock. Several fissures in the deep stony flesh of the world blurred past her. Like a frightened foal, she clenched her eyes shut during brief intervals, her nose becoming reacquainted with soot-stained scents that she hadn't been graced with since she was too young to bend her wings. Memories of voices, sights, and faces flickered across the blackness of her limbs. They all drew a grand mosaic that melted together to form the glistening glare of a ghostly noon day, and dipping into view was the loving face of a sunset-colored pegasus, and in her ruby eyes there reflected an orange shape that was surprised to see itself, and as soon as those two orange hooves rose towards the mare, a golden voice reached for her from beyond the white stone...

        Something was slapped heavily over the filly's head. Scootaloo opened her eyes and was once more Harmony. She glanced up to see a hard hat resting over her cranium. The last pony looked across the rattling descent of the elevator to spot Pinkie Pie—smiling—as she planted a hard hat onto her own fluffy mane and lit the bright light in the center of it. She pointed at the electrified illumination with a giggle and picked up a pile of white boxes that was resting on the elevator floor.

        In the meantime, Harmony nervously glanced at the other bodies inside the falling car. Half a dozen miners shared the plunge with them. Their bodies were like black clouds that contrasted sharply with the bright yellow hats atop their craniums. Dazed eyes gazed beyond the blurring bowels of the earth just outside the wire-frame mesh of the elevator car. Harmony marveled how souls forced to work under the skin of the earth could lose their center of gravity, and yet these ponies looked ready to fall into a million screaming pieces at any second, even though it would be a nightmarishly mute thing.

        With a hiss of hydraulics: the elevator car came to a lurching stop. The pony miners all jolted up to their hooves in a sudden, mechanical movement. The gates rattled open, and they all filed out into a gigantic cavern echoing with the roar of drills, hammers, pickaxes, and slurring pony breaths. A torchlit haze wafted throughout the subterranean hovel, like fuming breath pouring through a sleeping dragon's trachea.

        Pinkie Pie sauntered out with a humming voice. She stopped suddenly, realizing she was alone. Gazing back, she gave Harmony a sharp smirk, complimented with an angelic wink as she reached a hoof into the car for her.

        With foalish skittishness, the last pony gulped, nodded, and slowly shuffled out upon gripping Pinkie's hoof. Sticking close to the candy-colored pony's flank, the pegasus walked with her down the claustrophobic alleyway filled to the brim with wandering workers and flickering lights. Together, both fillies trudged deep into the meat of Dredgemane progress, their bodies vibrating along with the meter-less tune of the endless and death-defying enterprise.

        I didn't want to be there, and yet I needed to be. Perhaps Pinkie Pie knew that, or perhaps she didn't. All that mattered is that I knew for once what I wasn't comfortable with. After years of staring the Wasteland in the face, I was in a place that I didn't want anything to do with, because I was no longer facing my own end. I was staring at my parents' demise.

        This was the sort of infernal place that took them from me. This was the same damnable labyrinth of hazards that poisoned them, that filled their lungs with so much infernite that they couldn't see me reach my fourth winter. I hated this place and every other place like it. I hated it for what it took from me, several years before the Cataclysm would come to take even more from me than I could even pretend to angst about.

        I have seen some horrible things in my lifetime, but all of those traumatizing experiences in the Wasteland were manageable precisely because they were unpredictable. All of my life—both young and old—I've had one horrible thing define me, a thing that made me an orphan long before I could ever disguise myself in Princess Entropa's skin. Twenty-five years into the past, flung into the gaping Grave of Consus, drowning in the helpless souls of Dredgemane, and plunged hundreds upon hundreds of meters down into solid rock... I was forced to face what I have always truly feared, what has always brought out the best and worst in me, what has categorized all of the lifeless and starved aspects of my struggling battle through this escapade I call life.

        I was forced to face you.

        The winding intestines of the mines were like a subterranean copy of the serpentine streets of Dredgemane. The only difference was that the ponies here didn't pretend to not be miserable. In grunting breaths and pained expressions, they fought for dominance against the jagged marble and rock, stabbing their way into the pliable walls with innumerable tools of earth pony design. Soot-swimming workers worked in circles to hack away at outcroppings of rock, their pickaxes slicing serratedly through the cacophonous air of metallic ringing.

        Randomly, workers would shout across the claustrophobic spaces to one another, asking workhooves to toss the them the appropriate tool for the next task at hoof. Mining cars roared up and down rusted metal tracks, delivering wave after wave of metal instruments to meet the necessary demand. The stuffy air roared with a deathly electricity as several Dredgemaners joined together to drive a large power drill into one stretch of seemingly impenetrable wall. As fountains of hot, steaming water spurted from the machine's hydraulics, Harmony and Pinkie carefully sashayed aside, making their way further into the winding throat of beaten rock. Random lanterns and torches illuminated the craggy hallways of stone for them as they descended deeper and deeper on some inexplicable mission to hoof out doughnuts to a suffocated populace.

        Harmony breathed shallowly, squinting along the beam of light emanating from her hard hat. She saw through her bobbing vision a hazy cloud of faces, some glancing at her, some staring into the rock beyond their hammering tools. Every pair of eyes was something painful, like she was navigating a sea of Celestial Civil War torture victims. This was not just some random mine sunken deep in the bowels of Equestria; this was a Lunar Republican Inquisition chamber. Stumbling around her were the victims of war, awaiting the chance to be gutted for their sins of being alive in the wrong place at the wrong time.

        The time traveler winced at a passing thought as she struggled to follow the pink shade bouncing along the fringes of her peripheral. This was an age before the apocalypse, and all she could see was pain. It was always and forever the “wrong time”.

        I have always felt a certain disassociation when I time-travel. I know that I am a soul from the future, and I know that I do not belong in the warm depths of the past to which I descend. What's more, I feel like an entirely different creature than the ponies that I visit. This was obviously the case when I stumbled upon the Apple Family, when I decided to reveal to Applejack's Granny Smith the nature to which I was different from her.

        But was I better than her? Was I better—a more “special” pony than any of those miners of Dredgemane for that matter? Walking amongst them, I knew that—with one flick of my wings—I could fly away from my anchor and disappear from that cold pit in the belly of the earth forever. I had something that all of those ritualistically enslaved souls couldn't comprehend, not even Pinkie. It was more than Entropan skin that acted as a barrier between me and them. I was separated from those souls by decades... by a veritable age of relation. What obligation did I have to care about a single one of them?

        That's a good question to ask myself even now. It's very likely a question that you have been attempting to formulate for me all this time. I can't imagine that you've been very pleased so far to just stand by and watch me and Spike perform this experiment with very little regards to how you would feel about the subject.

        What do I owe those souls I visited in the past? I don't just mean Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Applejack, Cheerilee, and all the other familiar souls I've yet to haunt. What do I owe all of ponydom? What do I owe Princess Celestia or Princess Luna? What do I owe every army that has ever shed blood in the name of peace? What do I owe every Equestrian soul that has performed innumerable sins since the Sundering of Consus?

        It is so very easy to be the end of ponies. It isn't exactly comfortable to be the essence of them.

        Yes, I felt special. I felt alive, magical even. It briefly distracted me from the trepidation of being in a mine full of possible pockets of infernite. As I walked past each worker, as I gazed at them in the throes of exhausting labor, I pondered what they thought of me, of what they must have imagined when they saw me.

        Did anypony know who I was?—I mean who I really was? Could they have possibly imagined that I was not just any ordinary pegasus from Equestria, but I was in fact a time traveler from the future, that I was a relic that they didn't yet know their ill-fated world was going to leave behind, that I was inevitably going to be the last shred of evidence that their entire species would show for the fact that it ever once existed on this blighted planet which Epona so long ago sculpted without so much as a second thought?

        Did they know that this one lone pegasus, this one orphan soul strung like a marionette in the midst of their dismal stage, was actually the last pony, the last hope Equestria would ever have to see the Sun and Moon once again?

        Of course they didn't know, because I didn't even know. Was I their hope? I certainly didn't feel like it. If anything, I was a curse, a sign that no matter how miserable their lives of labor and darkness were, things could only get worse.

        I did not belong there. I was a blemish upon the realm of Dredgemane, far more poisonous than any errant pocket of untapped infernite. I brought with myself a horror that nopony should have been allowed to comprehend. There was nothing that I could have salvaged from the depths of that place. There were no stars there, no constellations. All that I needed I was just starting to scrape from the rooftop of the Pie Family's farmhouse. Nopony needed me to be there. Equestria didn't need me to be there.

        But Pinkie needed me to be there, and maybe I needed myself to be there too. If nothing else, the visit was beginning to chip away at my numb Entropan skin like so many pickaxes against the rocky womb of that place. I needed to know exactly who it was I've been making these time jumps for. I needed to know who I was capable of eulogizing, but far too helpless to bring salvation to.

        I needed to know what they knew; I needed to suffer as they did.

        In a juncture of commingling tunnels, several Dredgemaners sat in groups, catching their breaths, drinking from mugs of water being carried about on trays by underground suppliers. It was here that Pinkie Pie had been leading Harmony, where she finally stopped to pass out the desserts they had carried all the way down from Marble Cake's bakery a perceptual light-year above where the two were now currently buried.

        Harmony stood beside an abandoned mine cart, leaning against the rusted body of the vehicle with shuddering copper limbs. Her gaze flittered from face to weathered face, studying with pitiable attention the degree to which the workcolts were aged and weakened by the sunken claws of time. Beards bespeckled with ash and manes drenched in soot sat in a dizzying array of zombified silence before her. If Dredgemane had one unforbidden art, it was the mimicking of gravestones well ahead of the ponies' last breaths.

        A strangely heavenly thing suddenly pierced the hellish basement. Harmony swiveled her lit helmet about to spot Pinkie Pie standing... in the center of a halo of chuckling faces. She giggled and resumed telling one iconic joke after another, to which she summoned several smiling faces from the dirtied workers standing immediately around her.

        Harmony watched as the candy-colored caterer proceeded to spread this impermanent but very real warmth. As she scampered down the rows of workers enjoying a brief respite, she passed out treats and was passed back grins, chuckles, smirks, and thankful expressions. Every now and then the daughter of Quarrington Pie paused to engage in one blissful conversation after another, filling the otherwise mute corridor with a rolling cadence of excited murmurs and relieved laughter.

        The last pony's brow furrowed as she witnessed this. Something curious bubbled up to the surface of her chest as she watched Pinkie Pie do her rounds. She wasn't entirely sure what to label this new feeling that trailed after the heels of her infinitely annoying anchor, but it was something alarmingly close to “pride”.

        Those were not ponies before me. They were all individual Cataclysms, each and every one of them. Every soul was a different crisis, a different life with different pains and with different aspirations and with different anxieties. It has always been that way. If I could somehow bond with the creatures of the Wasteland, I'm sure I could rediscover that it's the same way now.

        There was never just one Cataclysm, far from it. Every soul in Equestria was an island in a grand archipelago of completely unrelateable experiences. I could look at a single face of a single miner in a single spot of the cavern, and that one pony in a thousand held shut an inexplicably huge book of untellable memories, fears, joys, and agonies. It's amazing that my species—a race of disastrously intelligent beings—could have lived for so many grandiose Ages with such impermeable boundaries flung up between each other.

        Even in my youth, I bore witness to this. Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle were creatures of untellable secrets, as were the families their siblings belonged to, and the clans that they hailed from, and the nations that they dwelled in.

        History has forever been a heterogenous thing, of so many completely random and unlike souls flung together like gravel in a rattling glass jar to make up the cornucopia we liked to call “civilization”. Not all of us could have been mountain rams; there was never a single “one-ness” of ponydom. Or else, if there was, it was in a time before Consus fell and produced reality as we know it within the wounded grave of his passing.

        What hope had I to bring glory to an entire race of Equestrians who lived as disconnectedly amongst each other as I was when I visited them? Bringing the Sun and Moon to the former land of the whole of ponydom would mean nothing if there was no merit to that “whole” from the get-go.

        Epona bless Spike for being such an optimistic dreamer, but the Wasteland could not benefit from a silver bullet. As a matter of fact, it deserved no silver bullet. The everlasting wounds of this world have always been things that no Goddess could salvage, that no stretch of time could possibly make sense of, and that no time traveler could certainly ever dream of sewing back together.

        Then if even my ardent stargazing couldn't bring about a solution to the pain that I witnessed on a regular basis, why was I still mapping the sky of a dead world? Why was I searching for the Onyx Eclipse like it was somehow the nameless and bodiless architect of all the Cataclysm had ever brought about?

        Why was I still in Dredgemane? The truth, I feel, is pitifully ironic, and I suddenly felt it could only be paraphrased from the bottom of a silver flask of alcohol. After all, why was anypony still in Dredgemane?

        The light was blinding when the elevator reached the top of the shaft. In a squinting fashion, the last pony stumbled towards the final mouth of the mine. A pink shadow hopped alongside her, and soon the two were stumbling up the spiraling path leading towards the top of the cyclonic quarry. Hundreds upon hundreds of laboring ponies filled the air around their ascent with the clamoring of rocks and metal tools as the populace of Dredgemane sought to drag the fruits of mining back to the surface of the plateau.

        “'You gotta stand up tall, learn to face your fears.'”

        Harmony blinked. She glanced aside at her brightly-coated anchor. “I beg your pardon?”

        “Something my grandma used to say to me.” The earthy pony paused to fluff her hat-messied hair and winked the pegasus' way. “'You'll see that they can't hurt you, just laugh to make them disappear.'”

        “Make what disappear?”

        “Your fears, ya silly filly! Heeheehee!”

        “Oh,” Harmony grumbled and continued climbing the ascending spiral. “But of course.”

        “It's helped me all my life when things got scary. I told it to my friends and it's helped them too! My grandma was a wise mare, ya see.”

        “And I'm guessing you want to toss her advice my way now.”

        “Nah.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow. “No?”

        “What, you jealous?”

        “Hardly. Just confused.”

        “Something down there in the mines gave you the willies, Har-Har! For a moment there, I was kinda worried about you. I wanted to give you Granny Pie's advice, but then I realized—well—you hate laughing. How could you giggle at the ghosties?!”

        “I don't hate laughing,” Harmony said, her gait slumping with a momentary sigh. “I just don't see the point in it.”

        “That's right! There is no point in laughing! But ponies are creatures who do it naturally!” Pinkie Pie bounced backwards in front of Harmony, smiling at her. “Why do you think the Goddesses would give us something pointless if we weren't meant to enjoy it?”

        “The Goddesses also gave us a redundant organ attached to our pancreas.” Harmony gave a bitter smirk. “I happen to remember many a pony who's done anything but enjoy having that little useless joy removed from their bodies upon inflammation.”

        “Yeah, but you can't do standup with a redundant organ, now can you? 'Why did the redundant organ cross the road?' See? It doesn't have the same ring to it.”

        Harmony groaned.

        “Oh! I know! Lemme try this: Ahem... 'What is the deal with redundant organ food'?”

        “That's quite enough...”

        “'Two redundant organs walk into a bar—'”

        “Miss Pie—Stop while you're ahead, though for somepony to call that 'ahead' would mean that there's a lot of empty alcohol bottles around.”

        “Oooh! And that would lead to a rotten pancreas!”

        “You mean the 'liver', but whatever.”

        “Just what is it that you have against laughter? Did a clown run over your pet turtle when you were a kid or something?”

        “Miss Pie, when I was a kid, I already knew how awful this world was and what little could possibly be done to change it!”

        “Why would you wanna change the world?” Pinkie Pie asked with a raised eyebrow. She trotted alongside Harmony once more, the cloudy sunlight glinting off her khaki shirt and shorts. “I dunno about you, but I would much rather care for the ponies who live in it.”

        “Same difference. Take all of these hard workers around us, for instance.” Harmony pointed towards the hustle and bustle of Dredgemane laborers clambering about the two's ascent. “Here they're doing really tiring and painful stuff—the same tiring and painful stuff that they've likely tackled the entirety of their lives—and they can't stop, because how else are they going to get paid to support their families in a town that barely sees the sunrise?”

        “I always figured that was where the likes of me came in! When I got my cutie mark, I realized that what everypony needs is a good party!”

        “Miss Pie, a party might make a very small amount of these ponies feel good for a very small amount of time... but it won't change their lives, not like your life was very obviously changed.”

        “Hehehe! All it takes is a gentle push!”

        “To what end? Only two Dredgemaners in the whole of this pea-soup city dare to go against the flow, to smile when everypony else is too busy groaning. You and Brevis are in a league of your own, Miss Pie. Every other citizen who hears your words or witnesses your smile: they can't become you. And even if they could, would that really help them? The world isn't exactly sunshine and gumdrops. The one thing Dredgemane is guilty of is being lucid.”

        “The miners down below seemed really happy to see us.”

        “And how long will that happiness last? Until their shift is over? Or just their break? Miss Pie, you can taint the mouths of the world with your sweet flavor, but soon every bitter throat's gotta swallow and gear up for the next breath. You could be Gultophine's gift to ponies, for all we know, but you're still only one pony. Even if you were the last pony...” She exhaled and stared off into the sea of gray rock surging by their canter. “...you can only be so much.”

        “I think I've figured out why you don't like laughing, Har-Har.”

        “Oh yeah? Enlighten me.”

        “A joke is best enjoyed when you're not alone.” Pinkie smiled pleasantly, albeit gently. “Why does Auntie Pinkie get the feeling that you've long been a party of one?”

        Harmony avoided the filly's gaze. In a few cold blinks, she saw the dead interior of her powered-down airship. A frustrated brown pegasus was lying restless in a hammock while staring across the cabin at a limp bag of bones. Rather than allow a flaring hole in her soul to welcome Pinkie's inquisition in, she bitterly blew out, “I'm not one of your precious kids at Stonehaven, Miss Pie. So don't pretend to be my 'Auntie'. Besides, I'm sure I'm a few months older than you at least.”

        “Heehee! But I love my kids! You should hear one of my bedtime stories when I read to them!”

        “I was there the other night—”

        “No, I mean really listen in! I don't mean being a wallflower and looking at the clock to see if it's time for stargazing or not! Heehee! I bet somewhere beneath that stuffy shell around you, there's a kid just waiting to be amazed at the pretty little things of life once again! I've seen you talking to Suntrot! I think you've got her giggle somewhere in your chest. Or maybe even Ice Song's smile, Gultophine bless his soul!”

        “Oh yeah?” Harmony droned. “And what of Clyde's voice?”

        Pinkie didn't respond.

        Harmony's Entropan heart skipped a beat. She glanced over. For the first five ensuing seconds of silence, she couldn't even see Pinkie Pie's expression from that angle. There was a bitter exhaust of pride coming out the end of Harmony's last utterance, but upon the precipice of discovering what Pinkie's lips gave out—assuming it was anything but the usual grin—she was suddenly too afraid to find out. It was a fear that rivaled the skittishness that paralyzed her earlier in the mines.

        Thankfully, a voice was shouting in their direction as the two rounded up the last few meters of the spiral path rising up from the bottom of the quarry. “But somepony saw them go down here! Please, Overseer, on behalf of Mayor Haymane, allow me to send a messenger after them!”

        “Did you not hear me the first time, you dolt?! Nopony gets through without a thorough check! I run a tight ship down here! I can't allow for any flexibility in the comings and goings of laborers! The progress of Dredgemane depends on it!”

        “For crying out loud—I have no time! The Royal Grand Biv has been spotted and—”

        “The Royal Grand Biv?!” Pinkie Pie joyfully rediscovered a hollering strength. Harmony was quietly relieved, and she hated herself for it.

        “There you are!” A familiar young guard from two days ago jumped down from the platform where an irate Sladeburn was standing and glaring. “The Biv's vandalized the water tower to the east side of town!”

        “Where is it now—?!” Harmony began to ask but was viciously shoved to the side by a pink hoof.

        “What did she do to the water tower?!” Pinkie Pie leaned in with pointed blue eyes.

        The guard shook nervously. “Uhm... She or he or it dumped a bunch of soap into the tower. The thing is a sudsy, bubbly mess of rainbow color!”

        “Heeheehee! Well, she most certainly cleaned house this time! Haha! Get it?!” Pinkie Pie doubled over, clutching her tummy through a cascade of furious laughter.

        Harmony groaned, rolled her eyes, and gazed at the guard once more. “Did anypony witness where the Biv went?”

        “From what I understand, they're still chasing that creep!” The guard straightened his rattling black helmet and breathlessly exclaimed, “Four separate bands of militia have circled the cretin around the Eastern Shopping District—”

        “Miss Pie!” Harmony spun and exclaimed, “Any idea what street that is?”

        “Heehee... Hmmmm-hahaha... Ahem.” She wiped a tear away and stilled her smiling lips in time to exclaim, “Yeah, that's Geode Street. I used to go there all the time as a filly to toss sarsaparilla bottles at a brick wall. That was before I fluffed my hair out, you see.”

        “Good. Then you're telling me what the street looks like.” Harmony suddenly grabbed Pinkie's shoulders from behind. “We're not wasting a single breath, this time.”

        “You want I should fetch a bunch of sarsaparilla bottles for ammo?—Eeep!” The candy-colored filly let loose a shriek as Harmony spread her broad copper wings and carried the two of them away from the quarry, over several gasping heads, and towards the steep arteries of Dredgemane beyond. “Weeee! This is just like that one time in that adventure book with the pony and the things that do stuff!”

        The guard galloped back to Dredgemane on his lonesome while Overseer Sladeburn sighed and returned to a clipboard documenting that week's mined resources. “I hope to Elektra that Haymane knows what he's doing.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Don't worry! I know what I'm doing!” Harmony shouted against the whipping wind.

        “Who said I was worried?!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed, glancing down past her dangling feet at the yawning beds of hard rock blanketed with bone-shattering buildings below. “I never get airsick until after my head starts to leak!” Just then, a river of blood spurted out of the filly's nose. She sniffed and twitched her nostrils. “Ah, there we go. Okay... Time to be worried.”

        “What's the matter, Miss Pie?” Harmony braved a smirk as she slowly descended towards the east end of town. Her green beret threatened to blow off her skull at any second. “All you need to do is laugh at your trepidation and it will fly away, or some crap like that, right?”

        “It's one thing to giggle at the ghosties... But I've never tried chortling at—URP—the gag reflex.” Her face turned grave as a breath of bile lurched out of her pained lips.

        “Don't fret! We're almost there! That is Geode Street below us, right?” Harmony pointed towards a long stretch of concrete shops. A colorful figure was running halfway across the island of two-story rooftops. Filling the cobblestone sea of the streets below, hundreds of armored militia pony rattled about and surrounded the vandal's every avenue of escape. “Looks like we're joining the party just in time!”

        “I... erm...” Pinkie's face imploded in a worrisome pout.

        “What's the matter?! I thought you liked parties!”

        “If I didn't know better, I'd say she sees us, Har-Har!” Pinkie pointed a bright hoof towards where the figure had paused, its ruby goggles glinting skyward.

        “Pffft!” The foalish Scootaloo inside Harmony's skin raspberried. “What's the worst it could do to us from here?! It's not like the Royal Grand Biv is resourceful enough to pack anti-air weapons—”

        With an explosion: a puff of rainbow smoke erupted below. Propelled along the streams of screaming fireworks, a missile of prismatic flames soared straight up towards the two.

        “Whoah crap!” Harmony wheezed and spiraled around, barely avoiding the barreling rocket. The projectile soared up past her and exploded far too close for comfort. The sheer force of the blast's proximity slammed into Harmony from behind. In a breathless grunt, she lurched forward and dropped two things: the green beret... and Pinkie Pie.

        “Aaaaaiiiieeee!” Pinkie flailed, her bright tail hairs billowing as she cannonballed towards the stony city below with a force that could shatter elephants.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Twenty – The Eternal Piecurrence

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        “Ohhhhhhh crudcrudcrudcrudcrudcrudcrud!” Harmony hissed as she dove down towards the falling pink target with her front hooves outstretched. As the wind whistled past the last pony's twitching ears, she squinted her tearing eyes into the maddening mists of Dredgemane and fought to outrace gravity before Pinkie would become a splattered Pie all over her hometown. Just as Pinkie's cutie mark reflected off the glinting lids of metal chimneys—“Gotcha!”

        Harmony caught the girl, spun upside down, and took the brunt of the rooftop with her Entropan spine. The pegasus' wings grinded over the top of the building, sending rusted shingles flying every which way as the fillies' combined momentum sent them skimming the structure like a stone over a pond. Tilting her head up, Harmony saw the upside-down image of the Royal Grand Biv standing perfectly still, waiting for their approach with a razor-sharp fan of knives.

        The pegasus caught her breath, angled her shoulders into the grinding rooftop, and backflipped with Pinkie Pie. After a mid-air somersault, she landed in place beside a metal chimney and bucked the black thing in half with a shattering hoof. The time traveler bravely gripped the lid of the metal cylinder in Entropan teeth and flung it over her shoulder at the Biv.

        The Biv swung her blades and snapped the airborne chimney down the center, but in doing so it covered itself—and its entire section of the chimney—in an opaque cloud of black smoke.

        “Stay here!” Harmony dropped Pinkie Pie and galloped towards the far end of the building. “And try not to get in the way this time!”

        “Whew...” Pinkie Pie shook the cobwebs out of her head. She briefly smiled. “Say, that wasn't so bad—” Her eyes bulged in mid-speech, as did her cheeks. With a pale-green expression wafting through her flesh, she bent directly over the edge of the roof and wretched into the yawning streets of Dredgemane. “Bleachkkkk!” This, of course, was punctuated by half-a-dozen voices of guards groaning in disgust below.

        In the meantime, Harmony was charging through the cloud of black soot. She squinted left. She squinted right. The colorful miscreant was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, there was a pitter-patter of hoofsteps. Harmony spun a glance over her left shoulder. Through the sea of smoke, she caught a length of rainbow cloak.

        “You're mine!” Harmony flung a hoof straight into the bright shape. There was a snapping sound. Blinking, she pulled her hoof back into view... only to see a noose of tight rainbow rope having ensnared the end of her limb. “Awwwww frig.” In a breathless jolt, she was pulled forward through the smoke and directly into an uppercutting horseshoe. Harmony's body flew back, barrel-rolled across the roof, and landed outside of the smoke cloud with her back up against another chimney. Wincing, she glanced up and blinked... blinked...

        The soot cleared. The Royal Grand Biv stood, its many billowing folds glinting sharply in the midday overcast. It coiled away its lasso and—with a metallic clack—outstretched its razor sharp fans into a dramatic stance.

        Harmony frowned. Something fluttered down from the high altitude above and fatefully plopped onto her black mane. Blinking, she raised a hoof and found that the green beret had reunited with its owner. For some reason, that was enough to summon a smirk from her copper features.

        “So then...” She stood up on four hooves, popped the joints in her neck, and glared the Biv's way. She uttered, “Round Two?” A paper airplane flew by in the cloud-speckled rays of the sun. With a glint of teeth, and Harmony surged forward across the rooftop on pounding hooves.

        The Royal Grand Biv was ready. It spun and spiraled away from the attacking pegasus, all the while flinging razor-sharp coattails down at the time traveler's hooves. The last pony swiftly jumped and side-stepped the attacks. She twirled around and bucked the Biv straight in the chest.

        With a muffled grunt, the masked equine flew back. It flung a hoof out in the nick of time to catch a chimney. Swinging around the black length of the cylinder, the Biv came about and dove low towards Harmony's feet.

        Harmony leapt over it—

        The Biv rolled onto its back, produced a tiny boomstick from beneath its robe, and fired straight up at Harmony's airborne belly. The air above the rooftop thundered as an explosive kaleidoscope of multicolored confetti densely burst against Harmony's torso.

        “Unngh!” the last pony winced, blinking. When her amber eyes reopened, she realized that the streets of Dredgemane were spinning madly before her vision. Hissing through clenched teeth, Harmony effortlessly sprung her wings out, caught air, and angled back up before she could so much as plow into the ducking helmets of the sea of guards. The air whipped as she soared skyward, came about, and spun into the Biv just as the figure was standing up. “Aaaagh!” Harmony gave a battle cry and hovered steadily into the Biv, bucking and kicking and thrashing with all four of her murderous hooves.

        The Biv backed up, blocking and absorbing every vicious limb with a clattering shield of retracted blades. Harmony's relentless, bucking onslaught forced the rainbow-colored vandal to back up into a sickly pink figure.

        “Ughhh... Whew! It's a good thing that Inkie's soup goes up as quickly as it goes down. What'd I miss?”

        Without so much as a breath, the Biv reverse-somersaulted over Pinkie, hoisted her up like a firelog, and tossed her straight at Harmony.

        “Eeeep!”

        Harmony gasped, caught the weight of Pinkie Pie, and hobbled back on two rear legs precariously close towards the rooftop's edge. She had to jolt and duck and swing both Pinkie and herself as the next volley of the Biv's attack stabbed towards the two of them. Finally, Harmony flung both of her wings viciously forward, windily knocking the Biv off-balance. The pegasus took that opportunity to drop Pinkie, vault over her pink body, and dive into the Biv with a vicious tackle. “Rrgggh!”

        “Ugggh... I thought the war was over...” A dizzied Pinkie meanwhile hiccuped, lurched, and retched once more over the rooftop's edge, eliciting a second chorus of groaning guards down below.

        “Haaugh!” Harmony victoriously slammed her weight down onto the Royal Grand Biv's chest, pressing the masked pony's body to the rattling shingles of the roof. “Enough! This fight's over! You don't have any tricks left up your—”

        The Biv snuck loose an automatic crossbow from beneath its robe, armed with prismatic sparklers.

        “—oh Celestia dang it!” Harmony kicked against the roof and took off for the air.

        The Biv sat up and fired a stream of air-crackling sparklers towards the copper pegasus above.

        Harmony spun about the columns of chimney smoke, dodging the rainbow-lit explosives, twirling to avoid their burning streamers. “That's it!” With a snarl, she hissed and sailed her entire body down with a drop-kicking hoof. “From Princess Entropa with love, ya sorry sack of suck!”

        The Biv tried scampering away, but spasmed like a breathless ragdoll as Harmony's impaling limb slammed the two of them through the roof...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...and down through the second story of the building, so that they landed in the middle of a Dredgemane drug store. Debris rained down all across a collapsed isle of tonic jars. Several frightened citizens and employees shrieked and ran to the far side of the room as Harmony dizzily stood, brushing the dust and crumbs off her flank with a green beret. She slapped the article back onto her head, sighed, and marched through the raining ash towards the mound of debris that signified where the Biv had collapsed.

        “Can't say that I enjoyed that... Even though I did. But enough is enough. Maybe Haymane will go easy on you on account of how badly hurt you are—”

        A wave of pill bottles were bucked directly into Harmony's face. The pegasus reeled back and uncrossed her rattled eyes. “Oh, come on!”

        The Biv lurched up to its hooves in a puddle of spilled alcohol bottles.

        “The heck are you made out of?!” Harmony sneered. “I hope they put something into the record books once they dissect you, because I'm this close to—” She paused in mid speech, blinking with sudden forlornness towards the liquid gathered around the Biv's hooves.

        The Biv saw it too. The many shattered bottles around the figure were labeled with 'XXX'. With a glinting of ruby goggles, the masked vandal once more extended fans of razor sharp rainbow daggers.

        “Oh no—” Harmony pointed an angry hoof. “Don't you dare!”

        The Biv ran straight towards the pegasus, all the while scraping its blades against the concrete floor. Sparks flew, lit up the puddles of alcohol, and burned into the rest of the littered stockpile.

        A bright wall of flame briefly surged forward, knocking Harmony off her balance as the smoke-trailing figure of the Biv leaped over her and bulleted out through the front door of the drugstore. The clamoring of guards could be heard outside.

        Cursing under her breath, Harmony lurched to her hooves, kicked loose a wave of sparks, and shoved her way through breathless onlookers before...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ....bursting out onto the cobblestone street beyond. Panting, she witnessed as the mad figure of color plowed through several rattling guards, deflecting their weapons out of their hooves as they came near to it.

        “Back off!” Harmony shouted and ran into a full gallop towards the scene. “The Biv can hurt you! Just let me handle that moron—”

        “No! Wait!” Several guards along the flank gasped and reached out to stop her. “Don't gallop through the street there! That's where—”

        “Whoahhh!” Harmony suddenly slipped on something wet. She slid across the street and plowed stupidly into half-a-dozen guards attempting to tackle the Royal Grand Biv. The time traveler and the yelping Dredgemaners flew snout-first into a fruit stand. Meanwhile, the Biv—suddenly undaunted—took off in an unfathomably fast gallop, disappearing beyond the street corner.

        “—That's where Quarrington's daughter threw up.” The guards winced at the scene, hanging their black helmets in embarrassment and shame as a somber dust fell over Geode Street.

        Less than forty meters above, a brightly-maned figure peered down once again. “I'm all better now! So! Did we get her?”

“You didn't get him.” Mayor Haymane sighed in exasperation.

        Harmony and Pinkie Pie stood across the desk from the blonde elder stallion in his office. The last pony was still in the process of straightening out her mane hair from the clumsy collision with the militia guards of Geode Street.

        “Oh, we got the Biv, alright.” The copper pegasus sighed, then planted the beret back on her frazzled crown. “But then it got us back.”

        “Do forgive me if I feel a tiny sense of elation that you have encountered such a grand struggle in apprehending this creature.” The Mayor of Dredgemane said as he shifted back on his wheeled tripod. “If an agent from Canterlot has failed twice to apprehend the Royal Grand Biv, it almost legitimizes the lengths to which my entire militia has purposelessly extended its resources these last few months.”

        “Well, good,” Harmony said with a nervous smirk. “Because for a moment there, I thought you'd be deathly ashamed of me and my total catastrophe of a job.”

        “Oh, I am ashamed, alright.”

        Harmony winced.

        Haymane calmly breathed. “But that is hardly a new feeling, where this particular mayor is concerned. The truth is, you have gotten closer to the Biv than any of my loyal servants before have ever managed.”

        “Yeah, about your loyal servants...” Harmony bit her lip and paused to tactfully formulate her next few words. In the meantime, an abysmally bored Pinkie Pie glanced over towards a series of staplers on a work table and trotted out of sight. “They're loyal and all,” the last pony said, “But I'd suspect that their hearts could be a tad bit more invested in the job that they have ahead of them.”

        “Do explain,” Haymane said, squinting curiously across the dim office towards her.

        The last pony gestured with a hoof while speaking, “No offense, Mayor, but the millitia you have hired here are a bunch of basket cases, not to mention young as sin. Seriously, shouldn't the age limit for guard duty be raised a tad bit higher? I swear, I saw acne underneath one or two of those black helmets.”

        “The younger a soul learns discipline, the better a contribution he or she will eventually lend to the community of Dredgemane. Quarrington Pie, the Council, and I won't be around forever to assure this town of a healthy future.”

        “Right, I'll buy that. But still...” Harmony leaned forward, gazing at the elder in earnest. “A bunch of those guards are very young, not to mention impressionable. They canter around the cobblestone streets of Dredgemane with utmost pride and confidence, but as soon as the Royal Grand Biv shows its masked face, they start to tremble and freak out like a bunch of foals. If I didn't know better, I'd say that they could use a tad bit more inspiration, then they'd be competent enough to pose an actual threat to this city's vandal. Perhaps then, with my help, we'd actually get somewhere in this ponyhunt.”

        “What sort of inspiration do you feel they're lacking?”

        “Well—heck—it wouldn't hurt if they'd be told to believe in themselves for once! Those guards have a pretty boring job, and yet so much is required from them at such random and infinitesimally short spurts of time. It's rather alarming how quick a soul can lose her or his nerve in a pinch, y'know?”

        “This city is the Refuge of Gultophine. Surely the guards have the inspiration that they need.”

        Harmony was about to respond to that when a pink shadow bumped into a wooden globe off to the side of the office. She glared over at Pinkie. “Miss Pie, must you...?”

        The candy-colored filly was teetering back and forth, balancing a stapler on her nose. “It's all I can do to keep it from falling!” She hissed through clenched teeth and struggled to keep the office tool upright.

        “Leave that stuff alone, seriously.” Harmony sighed and smiled back the Mayor's way. “Far be it from me to question the spirit of Gultophine, Haymane, sir. But when the Royal Grand Biv is breathing down their necks—with dozens of frightening and scary tricks up its sleeve—the exiled Goddess of Life is likely the last thing on the guards' minds. It'd be helpful for them to rely on themselves for a change, don't you think?”

        “I would have hoped that Breathstar's sermons would have been the adequate crucible through which they could temper their uncertainties.”

        “Er... Yeah... I've been to one of the Bishop's services. His words are good for... conviction. But inspiration? Maybe if he toned down the furnace in his lungs, he'd give ponies a reason to sigh a bit less.”

        “Now, Miss Harmony...” Haymane rolled out from behind the table. His front legs pulled him with a shuffling grace towards her as he looked up with a gentle smile. “I will sincerely confess my ignorance when it comes to Canterlotlian philosophy, but you have to realize that the ethics of Dredgemane have not only been consistent over the past three decades, but they have come to be the spiritual masonry upon which our town's prosperity and moral fiber are built. Bishop Breathstar's platitudes are very much the cornerstone of this versatile establishment, and I have long grown to trust in the potency of his words, no matter how harsh they may appear to an outsider.”

        “But Mayor, with all due respect—”

        “If you respect me—in wisdom as much as in authority—then be still and meditate on this: we are all Gultophine's siblings. Each and every one of us share the flesh that was granted us by Epona's celestial power. However, it was Gultophine who breathed a spirit of animation into us all. Each Dredgemaner—each Equestrian, for that matter—is inherently born with a love and respect for life, something that can help us overcome any and all adversities. Because this is a natural thing, it does us no good to over-saturate an already blessed essence. Bishop Breathstar realized this, and he taught me this, that a true believer in Gultophine can weather any hazard, and not only that—but a true believer should, because only in labor and commitment is the resilience of Gultophine's spirit put to the test, no matter the degree to which that exercise may exhaust us. It is all for the best.”

        Harmony exhaled and was about to reply to that, when she heard a tumbling noise to her right. She turned about and frowned tiredly at a wildly hobbling Pinkie. “I told you, Miss Pie! I told you about those staplers, girl!”

        “It keeps happening!” The filly whimpered, suddenly balancing four staplers across a nose, a forehead, and two front hooves. “Whoahhh—Whoahhh—WhoahWhoahWhoah!” She veered left, right, and eventually tumbled into a corner of the dusty office. “Ooomf!”

        Harmony sighed.

        “Do you understand, my little pony?”

        The time traveler turned and smiled politely the Mayor's way. “Yes, sir. I understand.”

        Haymane gently reached a hoof up and patted her shoulder. “Keep your efforts concentrated on capturing the Royal Grand Biv. In the meantime, leave the spiritual health of the town to Breathstar, and the moral health to myself.” He wheeled his way back towards his side of the desk. “Most of all, do not regret the subsequent setbacks in the Biv's arrest. You are new to this town, regardless of your talent. I am aware of this, and I am far more understanding and forgiving a stallion than the likes of others.”

        “Like Overseer Sladeburn?”

        “Hmph... To say the least.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow. “I have to ask, Mayor Haymane. Do you attend his duties with the same vigor that you attend Bishop Breathstar's sermons?”

        “Why? Should I?”

        “I would hope that you do.” Harmony gestured a hoof blindly towards the west edge of town beyond the gray-hued windows. “I just paid the mines a visit today. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he's working the citizens of your city to the bone. The ponies in those mines are practically dead on their hooves!”

        “Working the quarry has hardly been a glamorous job.”

        “Uncomfortableness is fine,” Harmony said. “It's expected, even. Still, I'd venture to say that Sladeburn could afford a slightly better organization, or at least he should draft a schedule in which there aren't so many ponies crammed in one place for so long. Dredgemaners are many things, but I suspect they're not machines... or at least they shouldn't be.”

        “Am I to interpret this as the first sign of an official report being sent to Princess Celestia and the Labor Commission of Canterlot?”

        “Uhm... No...”

        “Because Dredgemane's Quarry has been reviewed constantly over the past thirty years, at regular intervals, and nothing was discovered to be wicked or awry.”

        “I didn't say it was wicked—”

        “Dredgemaners are hardened earth ponies. For generations, we have taught our children and our children's children secrets that make us far more capable of managing that which outsiders would instantly assume is physical duress.”

        “But I can't see why such a stressful working environment needs to be the way it is! Everypony in those tunnels is miserable. Wouldn't it be more profitable to slow down the process, to not flood the bowels of that place, to be more careful of the hazards, pressures, and innumerable pockets of infernite—?”

        “Child, if there's anypony in this room who understands the hazards of the earth, it is I.” The Mayor spoke with a sudden, fiery passion alighting his otherwise calm eyes. It would likely have paralyzed any natural pony standing before him. “My entire family was consumed by the whim of the land. Can you say the same?”

        The time traveler held her tongue. She always held her tongue.

        Haymane went on. “We may be Gultophine's Refuge, but this is still the Grave of Consus.” He took a deep breath. “Death surrounds us. That cannot be avoided. We cannot pretend that our lives here are anything but short and bleak things in the grand legacy of Epona's creation. Dredgemaners work so hard and suffer because we know that life is veritably defined by labor and suffering. What makes us stand apart from the rest of Celestia's kingdom is that we embrace that which limits us, and we fashion it into something useful, something that outshines the industry of all other provinces between here and Stalliongrad. Perhaps now you can see why I've been so desperate for a pony such as yourself to bring an end to the banal splinter that is the Royal Grand Biv. Distractions are an insult unto life. We are here on this world to accomplish something, and we have such little time to do it. To spend all of those precious moments debating the very will that pushes us forward would be a waste, don't you think?”

        “I...” Harmony shifted nervously where she stood, but eventually let forth a shuddering breath. “Yes, I do suppose it is a waste.” She gulped. “Like laughing at a joke that isn't funny.”

        Haymane raised a deadpan eyebrow at that.

        She produced an awkward smile. “Do forgive me, Haymane, sir. This town's been turning the wheels in my head like crazy.”

        “You are most easily forgiven, child.”

        That night, Harmony squatted once again atop the roof of the Pie Family residence. Her map of the constellation had stretched beyond ten sheets now, but she was hardly engrossed. Instead, she gazed up at the stars with a different measure of interest. The last pony squinted her amber eyes, looking beyond the Onyx Eclipse, looking beyond the future, looking to find a band of mane-flurrying sparkles that stretched clear across the galactic sphere of her lonely contemplation.

        “What did you fly away for, Goddess Epona?”

        A cold wind blew over the stony wasteland. The future was merely a shuddering hiccup of all the desolate inhales of the past.

        “Did you know that Consus was only the start of something?”

        The shadows of the air danced. Black and amber mane hair belonging to the Matron Alicorn's daughter flickered briefly in the stardust.

        “Should I fly away from Dredgemane as well?” Scootaloo's breath found its way back through twenty-five wilting years. “Should I just fly away from Equestria...?”

        A shuffling sound. Blinking, Harmony craned her neck to look at the rock fields to the west.

        A lone and lanky figure was pushing a rickety wooden cart across the gray plateau between the fences. With ritualistic movements, Quarrington Pie picked one of many dozens of stones up and dropped them into the wagon. Shuffling tiredly, the elder Council Member proceeded with the redundant task of moving the harvest of rocks from the west field to the south field... in the dead thick of night.

        At some point during this age-old task, the Dredgemaner paused, his body leaning limply against the wooden surface of the cart. His shoulders slumped and his lungs hung with a sudden, immeasurable weight. He adjusted the brim of his dark hat and stared numbly towards the second-story window of the farmhouse beneath Harmony... where a coughing voice lingered in absolute pitch-blackness inside.

        Harmony took a deep breath, wrenching her eyes away from the suddenly painful sight. Once more aimed at the stars, she felt a pounding in her heart and bravely dove off the edge of it.

        “No, Spike,” she murmured. “I can't fly away. I stopped running when you found me, didn't I?”

        “So there's a storm, you see. There's this horrible flash flood!” Pinkie Pie uttered with a grin.

        The next morning, she was dressed in a bulky orange sweaterjacket with brown slacks. Along with Inkessa and Harmony, she trotted down the sloping entrance that bled the stony plateau into the trenches of Dredgemane along with so many other cantering citizens.

        “And while everypony's evacuating the town, there's this one stallion standing in the middle of his front lawn. The floodwaters have risen up to his knees. A boat full of ponies come to rescue him, but he says 'Oh no, don't bother! Goddess Gultophine will take care of me!' Well, hours later, the flood has risen even higher. The stallion is standing on top of his porch. The water is up to his flank. Another boat of rescuers comes. But he waves them off, saying 'Oh no! Goddess Gultophine will take care of me!' Well, even more hours pass by. The flash flood has almost completely buried his house. He's standing on top of his roof and the waters are up to his neck! A hot air balloon flies down to toss him a rope. Once more, the stallion shouts, 'Don't worry! Goddess Gultophine will take care of me!' Well, the stallion dies. When his spirit ascends to the cosmos, he meets up with Goddess Gultophine in exile, and he asks her 'What happened? Why didn't you take care of me?' And Goddess Gultophine—heeheehee—she says 'Well, I don't know what happened! I sent two boats and a hot air balloon for you!' Snkkkt—Hahahahaha!”

        Harmony was deadpan.

        “Classic. Makes me smile every time.” Inkessa smirked, trotting in full nurse's gear. “That's a good joke for Gultophine's Summons, come to think of it. It's innocent enough, but I seriously doubt Bishop Breathstar's going to bother quoting it before a sermon.”

        “Heeheehee! Yeah! He probably wouldn't understand what the stallion did wrong!”

        “I don't get it,” Harmony muttered.

        “Awwww,” Inkie cooed.

        “You don't get it, or you don't want to get it, Har-Har?”

        “Do I have to pick?”

        “There's gotta be a joke somewhere in my brain noodle that will make you at least titter!”

        “Give it up, Pinkamena,” Inkie said with a helpless chuckle. “Someponies reserve the right to waive the need to laugh, even if it would be their best medicine.”

        “Oh no, not you too.” Harmony gave the gray mare an exasperated look.

        “Well, I am a nurse, after all. I only want what's healthy for other ponies.”

        “I fail to see what makes breaking out into random bits of laughter so necessary, given the situation.”

        “What situation is that, Miss Harmony?”

        “I've got a Royal Grand Biv to find. You go to a daily shift looking after dying children. The town is filled to the brim with frowns, sighs, and cold sweat.” Harmony groaned. “Must I go on?”

        “Let me cut you off at the head!” Pinkie Pie bounced backwards in front of Harmony briefly, grinning ear-to-ear. “This one's a doozy.”

        “Ugh...”

        “This, I gotta hear,” Inkie said, smiling.

        “Ahem.” Pinkie Pie trotted and uttered, “So there's this pony visiting from out of town, and he's checked into this hotel. Now, on account of a really nasty storm, there's a blackout. He walks into the hotel and he can't see a single thing. His room is on the first floor, so it shouldn't be that hard for him to find his way there to get a good night's sleep, right? However, along the way to his door, he stumbles blindly across this passed-out drunk beside the stairwell. The drunk pony tells him 'Yeah, I'm checked in somewhere on the third floor, but I'm so tipsy that I don't think I can make it on my own.' So, being a good neighborly pony, the out-of-towner picks the drunk up, carries him up three flights of stairs, opens a door, throws the pony in, and walks back down to the first floor. Once he's down there, he stumbles into a second drunk in the dark. This drunk is even more wasted than the first pony! When he asks the drunk what's wrong, and the drunk says the same thing as the first: 'I'm supposed to be on the third floor somewhere, but I don't think I can make it.' So the pony picks the second drunk up, carries him up three flights of stairs, opens a door, throws him in, and walks back down to the first floor. He runs into yet another drunk! Sure enough, this pony says the same thing as the first two. But just as the out-of-towner is lifting the drunkard up to his shoulders, the tipsy stallion shouts, 'Help! Help! Police!' A local police officer trots up and asks, 'What's the matter?' The drunkard cackles, 'What's the matter? What's the matter? I'll tell you what's the matter! This stranger keeps hauling me up three flights of stairs and throwing me down the elevator shaft!' Heeheeheehee!”

        Inkie stifled a girlish chortle. The air shook under the siblings' combined giggles.

        “I don't get it,” Harmony droned.

        “Awwwww, come on, Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “Now you're just being stubborn! Cuz I know you're not stupid!”

        “It's the joke that was stupid. Not me.”

        “I'd like to hear you come up with something better,” Inkie said.

        “Ooooh! Yes! You tell us a joke, Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie beamed in mid-bounce. “Maybe that will help you crack your shell!”

        “I... I don't think that's possible.” Harmony made an uncomfortable face. “If I can't so much as enjoy your jokes, what makes you think I have one to dish out?”

        “Surely sometime in your life you were exposed to a doozy of a joke that you could have at least respected for its structure!” Pinkie Pie grinned.

        Inkessa added: “I find that the funniest things we have to tell other ponies come from personal experiences.”

        “Personal... experiences...” Harmony slurred in mid-trot.

        “Mmmmmhmmmmm.”

        Harmony's copper brow furrowed. As the three of them lurched into the claustrophobic hovels of Dredgemane, she straightened her green beret and muttered: “Okay... Uhm... I-I think I have one...”

        “See?” Inkie grinned.

        “Lay it on us, girl!”

        Harmony took a deep breath, and eventually orated: “So, there was once this ugly talking baboon named 'Pitt', who had a bunch of monkey brothers who he treated like crap. One day he got the bright idea to build a rest stop at the top of really tall mountain. So he and twelve brothers constructed a giant wooden shack on the top of this friggin' thing. But they built it too close to the edge, you see. Next thing Pitt knew, he and his brothers' building was starting to fall one meter at a time over the mountain's cliff. So they built all of these vertical support beams nailed into the mountain's side to keep the thing from plunging into the abyss beneath the clouds. But it was still a horrible location. Every zeppelin pilot or griffon who flew by the 'Thirteen Monkeys' Den' drank themselves silly and fell to their deaths in a drunken stupor. Pitt was losing customers faster than he could earn them. Well, it turned out that it was all the fault of Pitt's oldest brother. The orangutan was color-blind, you see, and he thought that in Pitt's sketch of the 'Thirteen Monkeys' Den' the baboon wanted the thing built on the edge of a lake. So, all that time, he had designed the rest stop to have a pier on its side, hence why it was built too close to the edge of the mountain. Well, in the end, Pitt gutted his younger brother, ripped the scalp off his cranium, and kicked him off the mountain. He then renamed the place the 'Monkey O'Dozen Den', which was a bit more marketable and increased the living patrons over the dying ones just enough for the establishment to stay in business.”

        Silence. The naked and undisturbed mists of the air announced that Harmony had suddenly finished with the anecdote. She glanced curiously aside at her two companions, but found Inkessa and even Pinkie to be deathly silent. The last pony bit her lip and glanced down at the passing cobblestones.

        “That... Uhm...” Inkessa readjusted her nurse's cap in mid-gait. “That was... Most certainly colorful...”

        “It had monkeys in it!” Pinkie grinned in a pale shade of pink, her blue eyes sparkling nevertheless. “M-Monkeys are funny!”

        “But... It's missing something...” Inkessa gulped. “Almost like the pit of my heart just now.”

        Harmony cleared her throat and put on a brave smile. “Did I mention that the gutted and scalped corpse of Pitt's brother landed in an ogre cesspool at the bottom of the mountain?” Harmony wagged her eyebrows hopefully.

        Pinkie bit her tongue. Inkessa looked about ready to lose her breakfast.

        Harmony lost a sweatdrop. “The... The st-stench of the rotting skeleton warded off bands of harpies for a year...?”

        Before that conversation could crash and burn any hotter, a rising commotion ahead of the three stole their attention. The three fillies craned their necks to see a solid crescent of tightly gathered Dredgemane citizens nervously eyeing a strange figure in the middle of Town Square. Mares murmured and gossiped with each other. Stallions stared with thick-browed suspicion. Youngsters clustered in chatty droves, their twitching eyes brightly contrasting their dull garb as they gawked at what turned out to be a cloaked shape shuffling beside the fountain.

        “What is it?” Harmony suddenly jolted. “The Biv? Is the Biv out in the open?”

        “Hardly.” Inkessa squinted her violet eyes, tilting up to see better. “It doesn't look a thing like the Biv. If I didn't know better, I'd say it looked like—”

        “Zecchy!” Pinkie Pie brightly gasped. Her orange hoodie flailing, she bounced like a rolling pink bomb straight through the crowd and all but tackled the cloaked figure. “You're here! You're here! You're here! Heeheehee!” She hugged the stranger in a suffocating pair of forelimbs. “Welcome to Dredgemane, girl!”

        “'Zecchy'?” Harmony made a face.

        Inkessa was sporting a knowing grin. “Ah, but of course. After all this time of sending letters, we've gotten a response. Stonehaven's help has arrived. I really can't thank Pinkamena enough.”

        “Thank her enough for what?”

        “Not for what, but for whom,” a deep voice emanated from deep within the cloak. A pair of striped limbs rose up and tossed the hood back, revealing a stiff mohawk of a monochromatic mane. “Inkessa Ruth Pie, I do presume.” A meditatively smiling zebra bowed her head Inkie's way.

        “Pleased to meet you for once, Zecora,” Inkie said with a pleasant smile and curtsey. “Sis has told me a lot about you.”

        “I trust she's done so accurately, and with very little hyperbole.”

        “Who, Pinkamena?” Inkie rolled her eyes. “You can take the Pie out of the Pinkie, but not the Pinkie out of the Pie.”

        “I've only said really nice things!” Pinkie said, practically hanging off of Zecora's neck with a melodramatic hug. “Like how you're super crazy smart when it comes to herbal remedies and stuff!” Pinkie Pie made a puppy dog face with glistening eyes. “Also, I'm oh so sorry to have ever written a nasty song full of nasty nastiness that suggested you were anything but nice and anti-nasty!”

        “Hmm-Hmm-Hmm.” Zecora chuckled breathily. “Dear Miss Pie, please do not fret. I have long forgiven you of that which you regret.” However, the ear-pierced zebra glanced forlornly over her shoulder towards the many thick lines of Dredgemane onlookers who were just then starting to dissipate. “My zebra sense suggests to me, though, that the openness of your neighbors has a long way to go.”

        “Don't pay them any mind,” Inkessa said. “Dredgemaners simply aren't used to any equines beside earth ponies or the occasional unicorn passing through their town.” She motioned with her head towards the copper pegasus beside her. “It's taken them days to get used to her majestic wings, much less another stranger's beautiful stripes.”

        Zecora smiled and trotted up to Harmony with a hoof outstretched. “And with whom may I have the pleasure of sharing this most ambitious endeavor?”

        “Uhh...” The time traveler gently shook the zebra's hoof. “My name is Harmony.” She squinted at her, attempting to dredge forth from her memory the reason for why this one particular zebra filly was so hauntingly familiar to her weathered mind. “And, uhm, what 'ambitious endeavor' might we be sharing?”

        “You mean that you are not here for the foals?” Zecora blinked and glanced back at the two siblings. “I was most certain that we all knew our roles!”

        “She's something of an observer—” Inkessa began.

        Pinkie Pie jumped in. “She's a stargazer, Princess Celestia reporter, Royal Grand Biv Hunter, and joker ruiner all rolled into one!”

        “Why don't you add Pie-eater to the list,” Harmony grumbled.

        “Heeheehee!”

        “An entrepreneurial spirit! Quite delightful!” Zecora smiled while adjusting the lengths of her cloak. “Perhaps you too could make yourself useful.”

        “I don't get it.” The last pony blinked quizzically. “What's going on? What am I missing?”

        “You silly filly! Dredgemane has been waiting for Zecchy for months!” Pinkie Pie bounced and giggled. “She's been a long time coming!”

        “How come you didn't tell me?”

        “You didn't ask!”

        Harmony face-hoofed. She stared the zebra's way with tired eyes. “Got a miraculously impromptu rhyme that might explain this poetically, Miss Zecora?”

        “It is quite simple, my winged maiden. I've been asked to assist with Stonehaven.”

        “You mean the kids that Inkie looks over?”

        “Such poor young souls suffer without end.” Zecora motioned towards a large, bulging net of potions and Zebraharan remedies hanging off her cloaked flank. “A proper remedy I will attempt to blend. With careful examination of their ills and aches, I'll seek a cure to Immolatia's wake.”

        “That's... That's certainly a nifty prospect,” Harmony foalishly murmured.

        “Then what are we waiting for?” Inkessa fashioned a smile that was remarkably bright, even for her. “Let's get going! My shift's about to start and I can't wait!”

        “Hold up! Not so fast!” Pinkie Pie leaned into Zecora's ear. “While there're still so many Dredgemaners around, think you could chant forth a slogan to get ponies to hunger for Marble Cake's new batch of licorice strudel?”

        “Pinkamena!”

        “What?! I'm sorry, sis! But if anypony can make a rhyme with 'licorice', Zecora can!”

        “Let's go!”

        “What is so important about licorice? Certainly there are many things more delicious!”

        “Ha! See?! Isn't she the bees knees?—Wait, that won't sell any strudle at all...”

        Since first stumbling into that town, Harmony managed something that almost resembled a legitimate smile. She galloped swiftly after her excited anchor and the two companions as they navigated the ghostly trenches towards Stonehaven.

        Zecora: I remember her now, though I was briefly at a loss to summon a memory of her at the time. Apple Bloom was a close companion to her; the zebra was almost like a mentor to the young filly. I also recall Twilight Sparkle being relatively fond of the lone and mysterious occupant of the Everfree Forest.

        It's interesting how my random leaps into the past have reunited me with so many estranged phantoms of yesteryear. Miss Doo was a soul I did not even remotely expect to see at Fluttershy's cottage. I had expected to talk to nopony else but Applejack when I visited Sweet Apple Acres, and yet Granny Smith was a startlingly warm confidant in this time traveler's time of need. It boggles my mind that—hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers away from Ponyville, deep inside the grave of Consus—I would meet yet another shadow of my foalhood, and it would be a wise and cryptic zebra of all individuals. I almost wonder if a bizarre fate beyond the emerald hues of Spike's flames has been working to reunite me with such disparate spirits.

        I knew that Zecora was there for reasons that exceeded whatever frivolous excuse I had to make up. After all, she was centered. She had a goal. What did I have to say for myself? Even Pinkie Pie was capable of seeing past my “Canterlotlian” facade, though what she saw beneath that copper coat still evades me. It probably even evaded her.

        Rather selfishly, I was glad for Zecora's presence—not so much in what she would do for the children, but what she would have to show me. We were both strange souls having arrived in an alien world of stone and blight, seeking to do the impossible. I wanted to resurrect a dead Sun and Moon. She wished to put an end to a horrible disease that was as incurable as it was deadly. Infernite poisoning had crushed more than hopes and dreams, it had ended my parents' lives, and thusly it had ruined any chance of me properly enjoying a life of my own. If Zecora could find something bright in the middle of that city of darkness, I was more than willing to be the “observer” that Princess Entropa's projected shell had afforded me.

        But a part of me knew better than to expect anything golden to illuminate that situation. This time traveler was aware of Zecora's fate, just as you were. No matter what she would do for the children, no matter what remedy she might concoct, no matter how successful or unsuccessful her endeavors, she would still end up a battered skeleton lying in a ditch beside a wooden wagon underneath a mountain of moonrock.

        Was this what one was to expect of Dredgemane: that the city would devour the livelihood of all who entered it? Quarrington, Haymane, Vimbert, and even Brevis—they were all victims of a great abyss that sucked the life or sanity out of them. Would Zecora and myself become victims too? Did Zecora ever have a shred of hope that she might come out of Dredgemane alive?

        And for that matter, did I even come out of Dredgemane alive?

        Inside a tiny, dusty wooden hut built alongside the flank of the bricklaid Stonehaven building, Zecora had set up shop. There was a table upon which she was presently pouring several different mixtures, utilizing a plethora of herbs brought all the way from the Everfree Forest.

        “I do hope you forgive my garments for being so crude,” the cloaked zebra filly said in the middle of preparing a medicinal brew. “I'm not used to being in a town where it's a crime to be nude.”

        Harmony smirked from across the hut. “You and me both, Zelda.”

        “Zecora,” Pinkie corrected.

        “Whatever. If you think Ponyville is full of fraidy-cat, stiff-necked, oversensitive equine, then boy is Dredgemane gonna give you a run for the money.”

        “Such stoic tradition! I am truly amazed! I had thought ponydom was much happier in this Fourth Age.”

        “Well, not every town is like Pinkie's home,” Harmony said with a shrug. “It's ironic, I know. The ponies of this hovel seem a lot more invested in banging rocks than baking cakes. You have Mayor Haymane and a few of his bosom buddies to thank for that.”

        “My perception of this town is still quite bleak. Tell me, what cabal is this of which you speak?”

        “Namely Bishop Breathstar of the local Church of Gultophine and Overseer Sladeburn of the quarry operations,” the last pony slurred. “It's as if Dredgemane isn't a miserable enough place. They had to march in on Haymane's domain and turn this city into a giant frown factory.”

        “Surely, copper friend, you must be joking, or else this is a bizarre way of sulking!”

        “First thing you gotta learn about me, Zecora, is that I don't joke around much. At all.”

        “Besides! She's totally, totally right on the dot-a-rooni!” Pinkie Pie danced her way through the conversation. Zecora had to hold out an obstinate hoof to keep the bright filly from prat-falling through her table of brewmaking. “It's totally like how Har-Har describes it! One day, Breathstar and Sladeburn were pulling their wagons full of depressing stuff across an intersection, when suddenly they collided!” Pinkie Pie smirked at Zecora. “And Breathstar said 'Hey, heretic, you got some dark on my grim!'” Pinkie Pie smiled at Harmony. “And Sladeburn said 'Hey, numbskull, you got some grim on my dark!' But then Mayor Haymane rolled up on his wheels and said...” Pinkie Pie grinned at us. “'Boys! Boys! They're both so good!'”

        Harmony blinked. She glanced in the last direction Pinkie Pie had, but only saw a solid wall of wood. She shrugged and faced Zecora again. “Long story short, this town could use a miracle. I heard you're good at brewing miracles.”

        “My brews are hardly quaffs of mystique. A cure to physical ills is all that I seek.” Zecora reached into her bag of items, produced a vial of bright green liquid, and poured a drop of it into one of her jars. A vaporous puff of illuminated emerald smoke belched ceiling-ward. “It is merely science of a different feather. It can't turn wood to gold or predict the weather.”

        “Well, at least you're trying to help those kids out in some fashion. Mayor Haymane is the one personally responsible for funding the sanitarium, and somehow I think you can tell that he still influences it. Nothing about the place changes: not in presentation and most certainly not in methodology. Those foals in the Immolatia ward are there to stay, at least until the day when they can no longer summon the breath to stay anywhere.”

        “You would think a village of such industrial progress would prevent its youth from experiencing such duress.”

        “If only they made half the effort in exploring themselves as they did in exploring the mines, then sure, that could have been a possibility.”

        “Still they dig into the mines with all their might?!” Zecora balked incredulously. “Do they not know that is where they will run into more Infernite?!”

        “The Grave of Consus has room for a lot more, it would seem.” Harmony sighed. “It looks crazy to the likes of you or me, Zecora, but for everypony who lives here, making a change for the better appears to be a criminal offense.”

        “Pffft! Isn't it the world over?” Pinkie suddenly interjected. She had produced a soda bottle out of some mystical ether and was currently in the process of prying the cap off of it. “From here to Ponyville, Equestria is full of dumb-dumbs who are too afraid to stop in their boring tracks and try to live life to its fullest! Even if that life is surrounded by the dusty bookstops made out of scary sermons and Immolatia victims.” She took a swig of the bottle, gulped, and belched. “Whew! Not everypony has it in them to become a superequine. But maybe that's just my personal philosophy! Heeheehee!” In a deep, ghostlike voice she cradled the soda bottle to her skull and made a face. “Thus spoke Sarsaparilla. Hahahaha!”

        There was a knock on the wooden door. Harmony glanced toward it. “With our luck, that's Goddess Gultophine herself asking for her dignity back.” She waltzed over to it and opened the entrance to the hut. “What are you selling, good sir? We have no need for new livers around here.”

        “Love you to, ya fruity wench,” Vimbert grunted. In blue fatigues, he hoisted a large canvas satchel through the door and laid it beside Zecora's table with a thud. “Here you go, ma'am. Enjoy your laundry list of questionably potent tonics ordered months in advance from the Dredgemane Pharmaceutical Warehouse. I hate to sound like an equinist blowhard, but having a zebra and so many random chemicals crammed together under one hut might raise the eyebrows of a few local guards.”

        “I applaud you for your concern, handsome unicorn. I know many Dredgemaners are wary about where I was born.”

        “Heh, well if this isn't righteously fantastical.” The pony with a hollow horn slyly smirked. “From the way you're talking, I gather you're a wandering Zebraharan shaman.”

        “I take it that the mohawk and the various vats of green liquid weren't good enough clues,” Harmony remarked.

        “Go suck on the wrong end of a pineapple, simpleton.”

        Zecora cleared her throat. She glanced back from her work with a brief smirk. “Alas, I truly benefit from such forced rhyme. It is what allows my work to come out so sublime. For there is no greater zebra concentration than that which is achieved through lyrical meditation.”

        “In other words, she's gotta break it down to break things down!” Pinkie Pie added with a giggle. “And now she's using her genius to help my sister and the kids!”

        “Yeah, for what it's worth,” the unicorn muttered.

        “Vimbert...” Harmony squinted warily his way.

        “I've got something for her to meditate on. Hello, Ms. Zecora, complete this sentence for me if you will!” The orange unicorn cleared his throat, then uttered, “'There once was a brash copper pegasus, who lifted her skirt and flashed her—'”

        “Ahem.” Harmony grinned nervously the zebra's way while shoving a statuesque Vimbert along with her out the door to the hut. “Excuse us, if you will.”

        “My, what colorful ponies populate this place,” Zecora said. She glanced back briefly at Pinkie. “Is this really the site of Gultophine's Grace?”

        “You're asking me, silly? I'm the only character who isn't original anymore!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Outside the hut, in the gray-on-gray shadow of the four-story Stonehaven building, Harmony came to a stop alongside Vimbert. “Look, being cynical and abrasive is all fine and dandy in the saloon over a bottle of vodka or when you're assuming vindictive control over a pony who owes you bits, but would you mind toning it down a notch around Ms. Zsa Zsa while she's in town?”

        “Don't you mean Zecora, Einstallion?”

        “Whatever. Look—it's just that she's trying to do something awfully nice for those poor kids who are dying upstairs in that place where you occasionally mop and pretend to be more than just a wine cooler with hooves.”

        “Wow, look at the pair that grew on you overnight!” Vimbert smirked. He pulled out his silver flask, took a sip, and exhaled sharply before uttering, “And by 'pair', I mean the twin tumors that must be populating your frontal lobes, because only a mentally afflicted equine would ever try her hoof at incurring my wrath.”

        “May I ask you a civil question?”

        “You can try.”

        “Just what was it that crawled into your heart one day and defecated the world's worth of apathetic delusions into the core of your being?”

        “Ah, and immediately you have failed.”

        “Are you going to answer my question, or are we going to stand here and play rhetoric racquetball for an eternity? I'm quite literally going to be around until the end of time.”

        “You want to know what I really think about Pinkamena Pie's gorgeous zebra friend and her witch's brew of impossible cure-alls?” Vimbert juggled the flask in one hoof and muttered with a deadpan expression, “She is going to have the same success as every other good samaritrotter who's ever wandered into town with a bag full of witch doctor voodoo, vainly chasing the goal of curing Infernite Poisoning but with the same outcome of brutal failure and disappointment. I've been mopping the halls of Stonehaven a lot longer than I'd like to count, kiddo. There's a reason why so many of those sick foals are around while their parents are not. Immolatia works its way down the ladder, and that entire ward of youngsters is just Mother Nature's way of cleaning shop until fresh new families get the cosmic joke placed on them, and soon the whole bloody holocaust will repeat itself, all the while with Pinkamena Pie having to concoct a list of broken promises to a whole new slew of friendly young corpses-to-be.”

        Harmony's amber eyes narrowed on him. “How can a pony like you, who sees no hope for this place, have stuck around for so long as if you have?”

        “It's quite simple, really.” He took another swig from the flask, exhaled, and pocketed the bottle away in his fatigues. “I'm nuts, just like every other pony in this town, just like you and Ms. Zecora will be if you stay here any longer.” He brushed past her and proceeded to hook his flank up to a wagon full of medical supplies. “If you want my advice, take up drinking sooner than later. Being drunk is a lot better than being locked away in Stonehaven. I may have lost a lot of things in my life, but the least of them is the righteous authority of being the warden of my own personal prison.”

        Harmony's wings drooped as she sadly murmured, “There has to be a cure for this town. There's no logical sense in so many ponies depressingly sulking about when there's so much good that could be made of their lives.”

        “Wrong again, sunshine.”

        “Huh?”

        “'Depressedly' isn't a proper adverb.”

        “Grrr—I'll make your mother an adverb!”

        “Sure, why not? She made a comma splice out of me.” The unicorn waved his broken horn and trotted off with the wagon in tow. “Good luck with the Immolatia butt-kicking. A part of me that still feels goosebumps sincerely means it.”

        As he left, the last pony glanced in his direction, or more appropriately towards an effluent gray cloud beyond him. “Yeah, for what it's worth,” she muttered.

        “You mean to say that this will make me get better?” Ice Song nervously stammered.

        Nurse Angel Cake smiled and leaned over the young colt's hospital bed with a glass of herbal brew steaming in her hoofed grasp. “That is what we're hoping, darling. It's an exotic blend from the Zebraharan Deserts. According to Ms. Zecora, it's cured many children much like yourself of breathing problems brought upon by sandstorms. There are kids across the world who get sick just like you, and what helped them get better could very well help you and your friends get better. That's why Zecora is here! She's lending us a hoof, and you're the first on the list to receive this good medicine.”

        Another young colt leaned in with a moth-eaten mane. “Does... Does it taste icky?”

        Zecora trotted up, chuckling. “I assure you, my little ponies, I would not curse you with bitter remedies.”

        “Besides, with Zecora's permission, I added a dash of Auntie Pinkie Pie's happiness to the mix!” The aptly named filly smiled proudly. “A medicine full of sugar helps the spoon go down!” She grinned, blinked, then made a face. “No, wait...”

        A ring of chuckles lit the room. Angel Cake raised the broth once more to Ice Song's lips. The jittery young foal took a sip, weathered the taste in his mouth, and eventually braved a more liberal gulp. The other children watched with muted curiosity as he finished the last of the brew, leaned back into the folds of his bed, and trembled slightly less.

        “It m-makes me feel all t-tingly inside,” the young colt whispered.

        “That means it's working, Ice Song.” Inkessa leaned in beside her sister and stroked the tiny pony's pale forehead. “The medicine is searching around inside you for the infernite. It's trying to get the bad stuff out.”

        “Just like the other medicine I've taken?” he asked in a wilted murmur.

        Inkessa and Angel Cake exchanged glances, but calmly tossed a joined smile the foal's way. “In a different way, Ice Song. It's a new medicine, and that means new opportunities.”

        “I... I-I hope it works...” Ice Song painfully smiled under Inkessa's gentle touch. “Not just for me, but for everypony. I want us all to be able to walk again in time f-for my...” He let loose a hacking cough, then wheezed. “For my cute-ceañera.”

        Inkie Pie ushered herself past a somber breath and bravely smiled. “You won't just be able to walk, Ice Song. I'm willing to bet you'll be dancing...”

        “And Auntie Pinkie Pie will show up to give you lessons!” Pinkie randomly slipped on the glossy tile. “Whoah—!” She fell down to the floor in a slump. Several fillies and colts giggled and proceeded to tackle the ticklish earth pony.

        “Alright, everypony! We're going to hand out a cup of Zecora's brew to each soul in this place!” Angel Cake called out. “I want each and every one of you to drink the entire thing down! Pretend it's like your regular medicine! We promise it isn't going to taste bad...”

        “Are you really from the desert?” a random filly asked, blinking up at Zecora.

        The zebra smiled. “From a place most arid, I most certainly hail. My extensive travels make for an exciting tale!”

        “Oooh! Would you share it with us?”

        “Tell us, please!”

        “We wanna know more about the desert!”

        “Do the buffalo really wear tutus there?”

        Zecora chuckled. “I do not know what deserts you've heard about. A grand picture has been painted by Pinkie, no doubt.” The shaman motioned with her hoof as she leaned against the foot of Ice Song's bed. “Come close, little ones, and hear my words. I promise that, just like my brew, they are not for the birds!”

        As the zebra filly proceeded to marvel the young crowd with one mesmerizing Zebraharan account after another, Harmony observed quietly from the sidelines. A familiar haze of golden color trotted up to her peripheral. The last pegasus glanced down and murmured, “Aren't you going to take your medicine?”

        “I already did,” Suntrot murmured, wiping her cheek with a forelimb for emphasis. “I got it over with.”

        “Why, because the nurses lied and you knew it tasted like rust water?”

        “No, because I wanted to come and see you as quickly as possible.”

        Harmony raised a copper eyebrow. “Wouldn't you rather listen to Ms. Zulu and her stories of sandstorms and crap?”

        “'Zecora.'”

        “Whatever.”

        “And no, I'd rather see you.” Suntrot smiled.

        “You're cute, kid. Weird, but cute.”

        “Is it true that you really fought with the Royal Grand Biv?”

        “Hmmm...” Harmony stared off beyond the many young shapes of the Immolatia ward. “Nope. That isn't true at all.”

        Suntrot's yellow ears drooped. “It isn't?”

        Harmony grinned wickedly down at the tiny filly with the solar cutie mark. “I fought the Royal Grand Biv twice!”

        “Really?” Suntrot excitedly gasped, so much so that she fell under a quick cascade of coughs. She hissed, shook a tear loose, and braved a joyful smile. “That's s-so cool! I wish I was there to see you kick the Biv's rainbow butt.”

        “Yeah... Well... Uhm...”

        “Wait, if you fought the Biv twice...” Suntrot's face scrunched up in thought. “How come nopony's talked about the masked outlaw having been caught?”

        “Maybe...” Harmony blinked, then smirked. “Maybe because I scared it away.”

        “Awwww... I was hoping you threw that no-gooder into jail.”

        Harmony spoke before she could make sense out of the words coming out of her mouth. “Now come on, where would be the... fun in that?”

        “Heeheehee! You're right!” Suntrot smiled, coughed, and smiled again. “If you get to chase the Biv again, will you tell me?”

        The last pony was briefly distracted. She eventually snapped out of it and nodded. “Sure thing, kid. Chasing the Royal Grand Biv is... the one exciting thing that happens in this town. It'd be a crime for you to not hear about it.”

        “Heeee!” Pinkie Pie grinned as she bounced through the lone canyon lingering under the midday overcast. She smirked aside at the time traveler as the two sauntered slowly away from Stonehaven and the brew-testing going on within. “Well, that was most certainly promising! How much do you wanna bet that all of those kids will start exchanging their bedpans for fresh new horseshoes within a week?”

        “I'm not one for gambling, Miss Pie,” Harmony murmured, staring down as the granite ground morphed into cobblestone blanketed with the names of dead ponies. She gazed up into the coalescing gray miasma of Dredgemane urbanity. “Let's just let time decide who is or isn't healthy.”

        “I can't decide who's sillier.” Pinkie winked. “Dredgemaners for giving time too little credit, or you for taking time too seriously.”

        The last pony smiled bitterly. “Ever gave a thought to what time thinks of the measly little blinks that we call 'our lives'?”

        “Nah. I figure that time is smart enough to wear glasses.”

        “Ugh... Whatever. Let's talk about something else.”

        “I know!” The candy-colored earth pony grinned. “What are we going to do tonight, Har-Har?”

        “Same thing we try to do every night, Pinkie.” Harmony said—but in mid-breath she paused, blinked sideways at the walls, but shrugged those last few words off her shoulder. “Ahem. We chase down and stop the Royal Grand Biv.”

        “Wooohooo! Alright! Let's have some fun!”

        “Frickin' slime-sucking piece of dog crap waste of time, I swear to Celestia's reproductive organs!” Harmony angrily snarled, her eyes bloodshot in a violent rage as she hopped from rooftop to rooftop under the cloud-diffused starlight. “Miss Pie! Get your fluffy butt in gear before I rip you a new cupcake dispenser, Epona dang it!”

        “Whew!” Pinkie Pie breathlessly scrambled to keep up with her copper companion. “That last utterance deserves at least five 'Hail Gultophines' alone! You're on a roll, Har-Har!”

        “Will you just can it and pick up the pace, already?!” The time traveler spat as she scaled a row of metal-shingled warehouses, galloping angrily after a rainbow figure skimming the top of Dredgemane half-a-block ahead.

        In the meantime, down below, a blue-cloaked mule jumped past a gasping crowd of nervous onlookers, swung on the length of a torchpole, and hung off it while gesturing a wild hoof towards the figure after which the two ponies were furiously chasing. “Behold the mad pony! Behold he, who with so many colors and so little words stabs the herd into opening its eyes in wonderment of the great breathless cloud that is tomorrow, through which he sails like an impulsive comet with no regret!”

        Harmony grumbled, flicking the distant bum's crazy words off her ears as she angrily hopped over a wide gaping street and landed on a rooftop beyond. She almost caught up with the Biv when she heard a yelping voice from behind. Glancing back, she skidded to a stop with a muffled curse before running back to lend Pinkie Pie a helping hoof. Together, the two clambered back onto even shingles and resumed the pathetic pursuit.

        All the while, Brevis rambled from below. “What noble truth does this Royally Psychotic Biv know?! What balance gives his hooves their drunken grace and us our sober calamity as we witness him falling upwards, downwards, sidewards?! BraHa! For to truly see and feel is to fall, and what other way is there to shake oneself loose from the eternal circle of death and deathmongering?!”

        In the light of a quarter moon's dim glow, the Royal Grand Biv could be seen climbing the lengths of the Cathedral of Gultophine. With a rainbow-sleeved hoof, the miscreant finished spraying a cloud of multicolored paint across the structure's marble finish.

        Below, the grand wooden doors of the building opened wide. Bishop Breathstar stumbled numbly out, almost tripping over a velvet sleeping robe. He glared up at the front of his congregation's building, gasped at the sight of the Biv, and shook an angry hoof while spitting forth a barking chorus of threats. A frazzled Dawnhoof stumbled out and attempted to calm the elder cleric down.

        Above, the Biv continued its vandalism undaunted, at least until its masked ears pricked at the sound of a certain pegasus' copper wings slicing through the air. Swinging off the cathedral's marred face, the shrouded figure outstretched razor-sharp coattails and glided towards a stretch of rooftops across the way. Hot on the cretin's heels, Harmony touched down, let go of Pinkie, and joined her in a rapid pursuit while an aged unicorn with high blood pressure watched joylessly from the cold streets below.

        “Why is he mad?!” Brevis cackled and barked before crowds of confused Dredgemaners bathed in torchlight. “Because he knows that Consus is not only dead, but we have all killed him, and we have all killed him slowly! Even now, in the forever gray sepulcher of his fallen wings, we pass around his ashes like mementos! We have fashioned each and every one of our souls into the insufferable urns of a dead god! But we good Equestrians are not built with the unfathomable depths to house his incalculably huge and divine refuse! Not even the largest oceanic basin ever scaled could contain the decaying meat that once gave Consus his fabled glory and omnipotence! What could we—with such bright and blissfully short lives—ever hope to accomplish in this endless funeral of absurd proportions? For we will be nothing but shallow graves not even fit for ourselves, unless we fall further to find that there is something deeper within us than what gravity hides! After all, the Biv does not fear gravity! His madness is like a pair of wings and a looking glass all in one! And when we look into that glittering plumage, what will we find in the new depths of ourselves! Goodly Brevis tells you, it is far more space than the body of Consus could fill! Let us not make cemeteries out of the lengths of us left to discover! Let us—like the Biv, like the mad pony—bloom gardens! Yes!”

        “Nnnngh!” Harmony dove at the Biv once she had cornered it in a dead end of twisting canyon walls. Her shadow flew past a rainbow-defaced poster commemorating “Gultophine's Harvest” in the next few days.

        The Royal Grand Biv flipped over her body, fired a brightly colored grappling hook towards the edge of the cliff-face above, and soared up through the cold mists of Dredgemane.

        Sprawled out onto the cobblestone, the last pony spun around, snarled, and stretched her wings. She soared straight up into the air as a copper blur.

        The Biv was already turning around in mid-ascent, flinging a rainbow array of giant rubber bands down at the pegasus.

        With a vicious snap, the elastic binding ensnared the wings of the “Canterlotlian”. Harmony gasped and flailed as she fell like a dead weight towards the street below.

        Pinkie Pie caught up, and when she did she gasped and reared up on her hindquarters with her front limbs outstretched to gently catch Harmony. The last pony slammed into her like a missile and the two pratfalled directly through a wooden cart of loose pebbles while the Biv galloped away.

        Atop the Pie Family starlit rooftop at night, Harmony shuffled away her pile of illustrated constellations and busied herself with sketching forth the blueprint of a ridiculously complex wooden mechanism. Glancing aside and murmuring, she attempted to explain the finer intricacies of a giant, spring-loaded glaive tossing machine to Pinkie Pie.

        The candy-colored filly nodded numbly, tossing a random kernel of popcorn into her mouth as she listened to the pegasus rambling on. A few minutes into the dissertation, and she tossed a kernel up towards her skull. On cue, a wall-eyed baby alligator stuck its head out from her fluffy mane and snapped the popcorn from midair.

        The next day, in the center of Dredgemane Town Square, several guards finished the sweaty gruntwork of snapping the last of several wooden crossbeams into place. Under Harmony's guidance, a giant ballista came into being. The hideously large wooden construction was topped off with a massive metal glaive that was lowered into the tightly coiled rope of the hulking, wheeled device.

        Pinkie Pie whistled in awe from where she sat on the edge of a wooden fence, her lower legs dangling. She smiled and observed as Harmony circled the device and checked every angle of it for imperfections. Finding none, she smiled and shook hooves with half-a-dozen guards before giving them a very detailed plan for unleashing the new atrocity upon the unsuspecting Royal Grand Biv.

        During this exchange, Pinkie Pie blinked to see a swift shadow leaping down from a line of gray-misted rooftops. She winced, hopped down from the fence, and shuffled over towards Harmony, tapping the pegasus nervously on the shoulder.

        The last pony merely brushed her off and continued her coaching with the guards. Pinkie gulped and tapped her shoulder through the turquoise vest once again. Finally, Harmony let loose a groaning sigh and turned around; her copper eyes bulged.

        The Royal Grand Biv was sitting, fearlessly perched in the center of the loaded glaive. The guards gasped. Harmony shouted something. With copper wings flapping, she dove forward to strike the Biv across the face with a heavy hoof. The ruby-goggled vandal effortlessly forward-flipped over the pegasus' dive, spun through the air, and flung a fan of serrated daggers earthward.

        The guards and Pinkie Pie winced while Harmony fearlessly charged through the cloud of slicing weapons. A tearing sound halted the last pony in her tracks. With drooping earlobes, the last pony turned around to see one of the blades having sliced halfway through one of the many tightly coiled ropes of the ballista's wooden rig. Seething, she dove towards the machine.

        She was too late. The rope snapped free. With hulking menace, the giant metal glaive flew free from the device. It soared over the street, slicing violently through the air and forcing many shrieking Dredgemaners to duck at the last second or else risk decapitation.

        Far across Town Square, a dust-covered Irontail was just putting the finishing touches on a brand new windowpane for his storefront. The blacksmith trotted backwards and shook the soot from his mane with a proud smile. Then, in one blink, a giant circular disc of metal violently smashed into the depths of his store, sending chunks of glass and wood flying all over the nearby cobblestone. The bushy-bearded stallion stared in deadpan silence, before swiveling to glare daggers across the courtyard.

        Harmony winced so hard, she felt her jaw would fall through her body and come out her flank. Beside her, Pinkie Pie mutely picked up one of the many multicolored knives and held the “souvenir” up with a proud smile. Harmony fought every ounce of Entropan strength inside her body not to slap the blade out of the filly's grasp.

        “Is it lonesome to be mad?! Terribly so! Who gives the Royal Grand Biv any more respect than a passing laugh or scoff can afford?! Oh dear herd, there is nothing more insane than to be an individual in this world! Not even a million Royal Grand Bivs stacked on top of each other and arrayed with Hearth's Warming lights can match the madness of the individual, of the pony who prances upon this dark abyss we call 'comprehension' and dares to be alone, as we are all so terribly alone, but are swift to blind ourselves to it with the warm yet superficial shades of each other's coats! To be an individual is to be mad and to be mad is to fall and to fall is to live dangerously! But do not abandon the idea, for it is glorious! When all the gods and goddesses have either died or departed from this world, what choice do we have but to live dangerously, to become gods and goddesses ourselves?! BraHa! I tell you this, what makes Celestia so glorious is not that she can raise the Sun, but that she's endeavored to do it, faithfully, by herself, for a thousand years! Could you yourselves live so lonesomely, so dangerously, so courageously, so madly? Cast off the shadows of Consus, Dredgemaners, and go forth and find your own Suns to raise!”

        “Come on!” Harmony panted. “We almost got it this time!” She sweated her way up and over clotheslines, chimneys, ventilation units, and a dozen other obstructions littering the rooftops of a shanty town in the central Dredgemane ravines. “The Biv's bound to slow down! I know it!”

        “How can she be so awesome?!” Pinkie Pie breathlessly stammered from half a building behind the copper pegasus as the two chased the living rainbow. “It's like she's twenty Dashies all rolled into one!”

        Harmony grunted under her weathered breath. “The Biv certainly has the stamina of twenty ponies—” Before she could complete that thought, she fell through a loose panel of rusted shingles. “Whoah!” She fell through an abandoned apartment, rolled off a balcony, and plunged three stories down towards a dirty alleyway below.

        At street level, a snoring Vimbert sat reclined on a rickety lawn chair beside a tiny rusted shed surrounded by piles of urban nick-nacks and junk. The orange unicorn's rear hooves were propped up on a pink plastic flamingo while he sleepily cradled a silver flask in his lap. When Harmony's shrieking body missiled its way down into a crashing pile of metal bric-a-brac, he sat up with a snorting gasp before glaring angrily her way.

        “What in the wide world of vodka?!” He shook an angry hoof. “Get off my lawn!”

        “Nnngh!” Harmony's frowning face stuck out of a mountain of debris like a disgruntled groundhog. “Mr. Vimbert, you live in a friggin' landfill. How could anypony call this a 'lawn'?”

        “How can anypony say that your head is on your shoulders?”

        “But it is.”

        “Not when I'm through with it.”

        “Aaaaaaaaaaaaiiieeee—Ooof!” A pink meteor fell down beside Harmony and immediately hopped up, balancing a rusted cog wheel on her head. “Hey, Bert! Love what you did with your lawn! Heeheehee!”

        The snarling unicorn sat up and flung the plastic flamingo at the two shrieking girls. “Get out of here!”

        They both scampered off, one giggling and the other hyperventilating. In the wake of their flight, the pony with a broken horn grumbled and reclined back in his chair, only to have a falling sheet of rusted shingles from above slice through half of the seat and send him sprawling to the ground.

        “Dah! Luna dang it!”

        Much later, in the office of Mayor Haymane, the time traveler and her pink anchor stood side by side along with a phalanx of exhausted guards. The entire lot of them gazed nervously towards the wooden floorboards of the lofty structure while an elder blonde stallion berated them with harsh words from across his desk.

        “Four days. It has been at least four days since I put you in charge of spearheading this crusade against the Biv!” Haymane frowned. His voice was several decibels lower than the sort of fury that either Breathstar or Sladeburn could manage, yet he subtly carried the force of several boiling thunderclouds in his throat. “I have a great degree of patience, but even that is starting to wear thin. It boggles my mind how a representative of Canterlot could actually cause more damage than the Biv has in the entire process!”

        “Well, if you ask me, I think she should have just stuck to stargazing,” Pinkie Pie brightly said. Harmony kicked her in the shin. “Errr—I meant being my probation officer!” Harmony kicked her again. “I-I mean being an unassuming and totally innocent Mary Sue!”

        Harmony sighed and facehoofed.

        “We've gotten very close on several occasions, Mister Haymane! Mayor, sir!” one of the guards—the youngest of the young—optimistically stammered. He put forth a brave smile beneath his rattling helmet. “We wouldn't have had a hope of even coming into contact with the Royal Grand Biv if it wasn't for the Canterlotlian agent here!”

        “Yeah!” Another guard joined in. “And to think we all once believed that the crazy vandal was untouchable!”

        “But he still is—Don't you see?” Haymane glared. “He's baiting you! Making a fool out of every single one of you! He wants you all to think that you're getting the upper hoof, because by drawing you out, he's raising even more of a ruckus than he ever did on his own with random tools of rainbow-colored paint!” Haymane shuffled his front hooves and rolled out from behind his desk. “Well, if there's anything I've committed to in guiding Gultophine's Refuge to glory, it's that I would never be made a fool of! Either you ponies rethink your strategy, or you call in some reinforcements from Canterlot who can do the job right.”

        Harmony's amber eyes flared upon sight of Haymane's rear tripod. She bit her lip nervously. Pinkie Pie, in the meantime, was hardly as tactful. She snorted back a chuckle and covered her rosy cheeks with a hoof while the many young guards behind her similarly struggled to hold their laughter in.

        Haymane narrowed his glare in a confused breath. “What is the meaning of this insolence? I am attempting to speak of a very serious topic here, and you find an occasion for pointless levity?!”

        “Uhm... M-Mayor, sir?” Harmony nervously pointed with a copper hoof.

        Under the rising cadence of Pinkie's giggles, Haymane glanced back to see that his wheels—from the spokes to the rubber reinforcements—had been painted with every shade of the rainbow, so that a bizarre color lit up the otherwise gray and emotionless room. The guards were soon coughing up a storm of chuckles, punctuated by Pinkie's undammed guffaws.

        “Oh, for Gultophine's sake...” The Mayor slumped back on his legless haunches, only to roll back offensively into his own desk with a thud. “Augh!”

        The guards couldn't contain it anymore. The laughter almost shook the building from its anchor to the cliffside. Pinkie Pie lurched into view, wiping tears from her eyes. “Oh please, lighten up, Haymane! Why wouldn't you want to look fabulous the next time you attend one of your beloved Breathstar's sermons?”

        “Begone from here!” Haymane snarled and hissed as the guards, Pinkie, and the copper pegasus scrambled out of the double-doors to his office. He reached for the closest random thing and tossed a stapler at their hooves. “Go! Catch that infernal Biv!”

        “Raaaugh!” Harmony soared madly over the wooden platform flanking the edge of the Dredgemane Quarry.

        Overseer Sladeburn glanced up boredly—then gasped wide. His eyes bulged as he ducked low, dropping his clipboard with a snowy blizzard of falling mining reports. All the while, a furious pegasus in a turquoise Winter-Wrap Up vest sliced over his mane and the necks of fellow workers flinching alongside him. The dark-brown stallion breathlessly glanced up to see the time traveler spearing the body of a rainbow-garbed stranger in mid-air.

        Harmony and the Biv flew to the earth and tumbled through clumps of loose gravel. Several ponies gasped and jumped out of the way as Harmony confiscated several cans of multi-colored spray paint from the masked figure and proceeded to wrap her forelimbs around the figure's cloaked neck.

        “Seriously...” Harmony hissed, her beret sliding offensively over her amber eyes as she struggled and wrestled with the Biv. “You're making me thirst for your blood here!”

        The Biv bucked the copper pegasus off of itself. With a cry, Harmony tumbled backwards and slid through a splitting sea of loose stones. Coughing into a cloud of dust, she winced to see the Biv rising up to its rainbow-striped legs. Glancing down, the last pony saw a thick rock of carved granite. With Entropan strength, she soccer-kicked the thing so that it flew like a meteor into the Biv's ribcage.

        The Biv tumbled sideways before it had a chance to break into a gallop. Harmony was once more upon the cretin in one diving swoop of her wings. Face to goggled-face with the vandal, the last pony exchanged a dozen swinging hooves and close blows as the two continued their scuffle on the edge of the deep looming gash in the bitterly mined earth.

        “Woohoo!” Pinkie Pie ran up and skidded to a stop on loose rock, pumping her pink hoof into the air. “Give her what-for, Har-Har! Make the rainbow see stars!”

        “What on earth is the meaning of this escapade?!” Sladeburn snarled, standing up from his lofty wooden platform. “Did Haymane arrange this—?!” He stopped in mid utterance, blinking, for Pinkie Pie was not alone in her cheering.

        Several of the workhorses and laborers of Dredgemane had completely and utterly stopped what they were doing, shuffling up to the scene with a fresh breath of enthusiasm as they watched the latest in epic fights unfold. Soon many of the dully-clad ponies were brightly chanting, whooping, harmonizing along with Pinkie's ecstatic shrieks.

        “Elektra alive! This is amazing!”

        “She's going to capture the Biv!”

        “I never thought I'd see this...”

        “Go get him, Canterlotlian!”

        “Yeah! Get that vandal!”

        “What are you all doing?!” Sladeburn hissed disbelievingly from the wooden railing of his pedestal. “Get back to work! You're delaying our progress! We have a quota to meet!”

        The fight continued. The cheering continued. The rock farming... not quite so much.

        “Did you hear me?! If you want to keep your jobs, you'll resume your tasks this very instant!”

        “Pffft! Hahaha!” Pinkie Pie spun and grinned. “Are you loco in the coco?! This is the main event here!”

        “Somepony?! Anypony?!” Harmony snarled in the middle of blocking several punches and returning with some vicious hooves of her own. “It would be really friggin' fantastic if one of you actually lent me a hoof for once!”

        Right on cue, a dozen guards ran up with net guns. “We're here, Miss Harmony!” One of two up front breathlessly panted as he squatted down and aimed the black cannon with his partner. “We caught up! Just get the Biv to hold tight for one second—”

        “Remember what we planned!” Harmony glanced over her shoulder for a brief moment to bark, “Don't fire until I say—” The Biv caught her blind punch at an awkward angle and twisted her forelimb into a vicious legbar. “—Ow!”

        “There! She said 'now'!” One guard spat. “Fire!”

        “No! Wait! I said—” Harmony barely got her words out when the Biv reached over her wincing face and flung down a smoke grenade. A cloud of rainbow haze billowed up, covering them from head to hoof in prismatic obscurity.

        The guards fired the flailing net directly into the puff of smoke. They grinned with victory on their faces, but even Pinkie Pie was already wincing, because—

        With a glinting of dagger-sharp coattails, the Royal Grand Biv shot out of the cloud, dove high, landed, and galloped effortlessly east into the dipping chasms of Dredgemane, and far away from any living souls' reach.

        The cloud of smoke dissipated, and there remained Harmony—lying in a slump under a web of tight netting—glaring through the webbed material towards the blanching guards. The crowd of gathered onlookers let loose a collective groan of disappointment. Regardless, a loose cloud of joy and enthusiasm trailed off their lips as they slowly returned to their lethargic tasks, much to the belated joy of a grumbling Sladeburn.

        Pinkie Pie slowly sauntered up to the copper pegasus, grinning limply. “Well, here's the good news. We know she toss smoke grenades. That could possibly give us an edge in the future, right?”

        Harmony mumbled, “That's a blissfully sharp edge that I would like to take across the street, not down the block.”

        “Uhhhhhh...” Pinkie blinked. “...Huh?”

        “Drink twenty bottles of Sarsaparilla one night. Then maybe you'll understand.”

        “Silly filly!” Pinkie squatted and slowly began to untangle Harmony from the netting. “I first did that over ten years ago!”

        “So much for my hope that you could ever be capable of even an ounce of subtlety, Miss Pie.”

        She grinned. “Could I possibly be more proud of anything else?”

        “I'm sure I could dredge up a list of ideas, if you pardon the pun.”

        “A pun! See, Har-Har, there's hope for you yet!”

        “Oh please, Miss Pie...” Harmony stood up, finally freed from the netting. She slapped the beret back onto her head while flexing a pair of stiff wings. “We've been through this! What's the point in trying to give me a comedic edge if there's nothing that this... town has... to laugh about...” Her voice petered off. She craned her twitching ears towards a bizarre sound behind her.

        The guards were laughing, along with a close gaggle of smirking workers wandering right past them. It was a spirit that tasted of the same hilarity that alighted Mayor Haymane's office, though it was far more appropriately thick here.

        “Dang... Foiled again...” One of the guards said to the others as they retracted their net-gun cannon. “Y'know, if we just aimed that darn thing a little higher.”

        “We would have caught the sucker! Ghhh! We were so close!”

        One helped another to his hooves, patting him on the back. “Did you see what the Biv did before she or he came here? She somehow painted an entire warehouse full of stored gravel! That shipment is due to Trottingham in six days! Can you imagine some rich posh pony having his entire driveway paved in rainbow colors?”

        “Hahaha! Oh boy, I'd pay bits to see that. I wonder—once we catch the Biv, will somepony make a scrapbook of all the pathetically stupid stuff we finally put an end to?”

        One of the passing laborers shouted from his wagon with a grin. “Hey, give me a copy of that! I swear: all of my money! I need something to send my letters to my girlfriend with!”

        “Hah! You work the midnight shift down there, dude! Like you even have a girlfriend!”

        “Buck you!”

        “Hahahaha!”

        “Heh heh heh...”

        “Uhm...” Harmony blinked, her wings twitching nervously. She glanced Pinkie's way. “I give up. Is there something suddenly in the drinking water of Dredgemane that I haven't known about?”

        “What, in my town?” Pinkie Pie winked and finished a new paper airplane. She launched the thing gloriously towards the yawning chasm of the quarry beyond. “Nawwwwww.” She stifled a giggle and trotted off.

        Harmony slowly followed her, all the while gazing with forlorn curiosity over her shoulder and towards the gaggle of chuckling, murmuring, and decidedly happy guards.

        What was it that bled forth from the alleys and trenches of Dredgemane? Did it bloom out of nothing? Was it there from the beginning, but I was just too frenzied and angry to notice it until then? I can accept the fact that I've been blind to things before, but—come on—I'm the last pony, the Scavenger of Ages. Not all souls can be as tunnel-visioned as Haymane. The Royal Grand Biv may have been able to sneak up and paint the mayor's “other feet”, but I would have stomped such an errant gnat at the first beating of gossamer wings.

        I'd be lying if I said I wasn't, too, captured by the thrill of the hunt for the prismatic vagrant beyond the blood-pumping frustration of it all. But I've dealt with crap like that my whole life, while chasing down pirates for stealing my bottled flame or while going to blows with bounty hunters who decided to switch to a life of crime in open view of the Harmony's portholes. The citizens of Dregdemane: the most excitement they ever got was weathering the air-throttling octaves of Bishop Breathstar's voice. What to me was an exercise in persistence had to have been—to them—a dramatic spectacle that put Celestia's divine display at the Summer Sun Celebration to shame.

        I didn't want to admit it, but the Royal Grand Biv's strategy was becoming all too apparent. I could see through it, and I realized that it had been seeing through me all the while, much like Pinkie Pie could somehow see through me. I was not used to time traveling into a situation where I was as hollow and useless as a wisp of clouds, and suddenly I was being molded into a brand new vandalism that the rainbow-colored cretin wielded liked so many blobs of paint. All that time, I had been dancing to its tune, and to what end? By attempting to do everything that Haymane demanded of me, I was inexplicably undoing the frowns he had forged with his legacy, one street at a time, one band of militia at a time, one gasping crowd at a time.

        Perhaps this was what Dredgemane needed. This was what Brevis rambled about. Everypony in that town needed an opportunity to glance up from whatever it was they were doing and watch this frazzled moron in the middle of chasing a rainbow across their desolate dome of an existence.

        But even you knew that I had to ask myself—at some point or another—when I was going to stop? And when I did stop, who would be the victor? The last pony? Or the rainbow?

        “You mean you drew all the stars?” Pinkie Pie made a face. “Pffft—Har-Har, I'm trying to get you to tell a joke, not tell a lie!”

        “You know what I mean,” Harmony grunted. She and the candy-colored filly shuffled slowly down the thin winding canyon towards Stonehaven to catch up on Zecora's progress. “I mapped all I can get out of the constellations from your rooftops... or at least all that I care to map out.”

        “So, then you're done?” Pinkie Pie bounced as she glanced at the copper pegasus curiously. “You've dotted all of your i's, crossed all your t's, licked all your o's, and it's back off to Canter-Town?”

        “I...” Harmony squinted Pinkie's way and mouthed “Licked all your o's?” She shook her head. “Ahem. I can't leave... That is, I won't leave until I find a better way to preserve the starchart I've made.”

        “What's wrong with Blinkie's drawing paper?” Harmony grinned. “Just keep them away from Gummy's jaws and I'm sure they'll survive the trip back to Canterlot!”

        “I need something more permanent than paper. An engraving, perhaps. A metal stencil-work... I dunno...” Harmony sighed. “Her Majesty doesn't want just any normal sketch, she needs something that can be recreated! Something that can... stand the test of time...”

        “Like how long? Months? Years?”

        Harmony gulped. “A... A very long time.”

        “Then I'm sure you've got printing presses in Canterlot! That city's gotta somehow pump out all of the books that Twilight is in love with! Heeheehee! Head on back home, girl! You've done your duty—in my book, at least. Maybe not in Haymane's. I'm sure we can chat again another time—”

        “No!” Harmony hissed, then winced at her own utterance. She was suddenly at a loss to compose herself before this simple pink fuzzhead of a pony. “I can't leave,” she gave with a grumble. “Not... N-Not yet...”

        “Hmmmm? And why would that be?” Pinkie Pie's grin was a crescent moon, a nonexistent kiss of joy in the Wasteland future. “Face it! You saw the look on those guards' faces! And the workers too! The Royal Grand Biv is addicting! I bet her awesomeness has hooked you in too! Heeheehee!”

        Harmony squinted at her. “You do remember that the goal here is to capture and try the Biv for her many transgressions committed against Dredgemane. Why are you so willing to help me turn in your idol?”

        “Because I get to be close to her, silly!” Pinkie Pie was halfway through making a fresh new paper airplane. “But, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't enjoy chasing her with any other pony...” She winked at Harmony as she tossed the plane through the air above the tall canyon. “...more than I am enjoying it right now with you.”

        “Hmmph...” Harmony smirked slightly. “Littering is vandalism in its own right, Miss Pie. You aren't trying to get closer to your idol by landing yourself in prison along with her?”

        “Heeheehee! Oh, Har Har.” Pinkie paused to lean back against the canyon wall with a wink. “You say that as if 'littering' is as horrible a crime as 'stalking'!” Just then, she bumped directly into a disheveled pair of ponies dressed in black. “Eeeep!” Pinkie jumped back and clutched, trembling, to Harmony.

        The last pony winced, struggled, and finally disentangled herself from her petrified anchor. “Ahem.” She tossed a bored stare in the two strangers' direction. “Can we help you?”

        One of the cloaked figures murmured in a low voice. “Are you trying to capture the Biv?”

        Harmony squinted. “Excuse me?”

        “Are you attempting to capture the Royal Grand Biv?”

        The scavenger from the future glanced from one shadowed figure to another. She half-expected one of them to spontaneously pull out a dagger or a boomstick from beneath their robes. “Maybe... What's it to you?”

        The two figures exchanged solemn looks before once more looking the last pony's way. “Come with us. There's someone who would like to have a word with you.”

        Pinkie Pie let loose a tiny whimper. Harmony stood protectively in front of her. “Is this a demand or a request?”

        “Everypony in Dredgemane knows how strong you are,” one of the figures said. “You have it within yourself to refuse this simple invitation. If it helps, we promise that no harm will come to you, but you must follow us quietly and swiftly.”

        “I dunno about this, Har-Har.” Pinkie Pie clutched the pegasus by her vest and leaned towards her ear, whispering. “Rarity says this sort of stuff happens a lot in Trottingham, which is why she used to carry a can of mace with her everywhere.”

        “Don't fret your fluffy mane, Miss Pie,” Harmony winked over her shoulder. “If need be, I'll be your can of mace.”

        “Could you really fit on a keychain?”

        Harmony sighed and smiled in the two ponies' direction. “Are you gonna lead the way or not?”

        The two figures made like shadows and galloped quietly eastward through the dimly-lit trenches of Dredgemane. Harmony followed closely, pursued by Pinkie Pie in a decidedly pensive bounce.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Harmony almost had second doubts as soon as she saw the entrance to the tunnels. After a brief canter through town, the two cloaked figures had opened a circular, metal lid to a sewer passage. One jumped in while the other motioned for the time traveler and her anchor to follow. Harmony reluctantly complied, making sure that Pinkie Pie was at her side the entire time. She suddenly remembered that her Entropan invulnerability didn't extend to the candy-colored soul to which she was bound. What would she have to say to Spike if she lost cohesion because something violent and fatal had happened to her anchor? What would she have to say to herself for the rest of her life, for that matter?

        To state that Harmony's actions in the well of the past were impulsive would have been an understatement. Harmony knew this, and she also knew that this fearlessness strengthened her, helped her to accomplish her goals far more swiftly and daringly. At the same time, she had to remind herself that she wasn't in the past solely for herself. Each chronological endeavor, no matter how convoluted, had the safety, honor, and sanctity of deceased ponydom at its heart. If she forgot about Pinkie's well-being, even for a second, then all would be for naught.

        With each passing minute that Harmony and her earth pony companion traversed the subterranean tunnels of Dredgemane, she grew less and less apprehensive. Harmony had seen many a shady figure in her days as a Wasteland scavenger, and nothing about the motions of these two messengers conveyed the same malice or ill-will of the bounty hunters, pirates, or predators of the future. There was almost a discernible tremble to the way in which the pair of cloaked figures moved, as if they were four hundred times more afraid of the “Canterlotlian Clerk” than she or Pinkie could ever be of them.

        The sewer corridors twisted and turned in a manner that mimicked Dredgemane's serpentine array of streets above. The bricklaid walls of the tunnels glistened from randomly-placed torches that lit the way for the four spelunking equines. Soon, there was a rise in steps, which Harmony noticed were carved rather haphazardly into the ancient framework of the sewers. Sometime in the last few decades, an underground group of Dredgemaners had obviously fashioned a secret passageway that connected one leg of the brick corridors to some obscure location. The time traveler figured that she and her anchor were about to figure out exactly what that location was.

        “Here we are,” one of the cloaked figures uttered, the first word that had echoed beneath street level since that clandestine sojourn began. “He should be expecting you.”

        “Who?” Pinkie Pie asked, blinking. “I thought the Marquis de Saddle was dead!”

        Harmony rolled her eyes and stared at the two figures. “Can we just get this over with?”

        The ponies opened a tight wooden door to a dusty, lantern-lit basement. Harmony and Pinkie sauntered through, blinking about them. The room was filled with several vertical support beams, interspersed with large wooden barrels and supply crates. What was more, several equine figures—at least a dozen or more—stood in the shadows of the place, all watching the two visitors and waiting for what would happen next. Pinkie Pie trotted alongside Harmony as the two fillies were guided over towards an enormous wooden trunk and encouraged to take a seat. They did so, fidgeting.

        “Alright, I give.” Harmony ultimately groaned. “Unless this is some sort of whacky initiation, I would very much like to know what this is all about.”

        “We wouldn't know a thing about initiation, darling,” a sultry voice rang from the shadows. “The only one starting a cult is you with that rainbow-thirsty militia of yours.”

        Harmony squinted through the dusty air of that place. As a series of darkly-clad Dredgemaners parted ways, she saw a scarlet shade standing in the midst of the group.

        “You?”

        “Try to keep your pants on, sugah,” Pepper Plots said, clad as ritualistically as ever in frilly dancing attire. She stood, leaning saucily against a half-empty wine stand as the broad cellar stretched beside and beyond her. “This whole 'meeting' is for your own good. Let's not get all in a hissy fit while we still got our senses together.”

        “You call this a 'meeting'?” Harmony looked half as perturbed as she was unenthused. “I've read up on military summits during the Celestial Civil War that were more cheerful than this!”

        “Pepper! Heehee! Of course!!” Pinkie Pie giggled from where she sat on the edge of the big wooden trunk. She beamed at the sight of Miss Plots. “Only you would make a game of hide-and-seek this kaizo!”

        “Let me do the talking, Miss Pie—” Harmony jolted and blinked oddly Pinkie's way. “Wait, you know what that word means too?”

        “This may feel as silly as a game, P.D.P, my dear,” Pepper cooed Pinkie's way and sashayed across the dusty cellar. “But I assure you, it's pretty dang serious. And you should know me by now, sugah. I don't normally do 'serious'.”

        “Nope, normally you just do 'Nick'. Heeheeheehee!” Pinkie's hooves clomped the trunk as she flitted her way through another sea of giggles.

        Harmony sighed long and hard and gazed limply up at the showpony. “Just who are all of these friends of yours? Do they get a discount for fetching us?”

        “They're neither her friends nor yours,” a voice guffawed from the shadows of the place. A rank, homeless stench filled the lengths of the cellar. Harmony watched with very little surprise as a blue-coated mule swung his way into view from where he gripped to a wooden support beam. Brevis' smile was an icy thing that rolled to a stop like a deathly grinning cadaver on a gurney. “They're my friends, friends in the rancid delight of the mad tomorrow!”

        “Really?” Harmony raised an eyebrow from where the pegasus sat in boredom. “I mean really?” She blinked rapidly. “Mister Brevis, I—like so many other hapless pairs of ears in Dredgemane—couldn't help but hear some of your raving words in the streets over the past few days. You lambast Bishop Breathstar's congregation for being a 'herd', and yet you've got this little clique here to do your bidding? Pffft... I may be painted stupid, but at least I'm no bitless, smelly hypocrite.”

        “BraHa!” Brevis leaped and stood on his head, pointing at her with a rear limb. “See! See how polluted she is already with the same gray dust that Haymane exhales like so many a smokestack over the quarry?!” The mule spun and flipped back up to his hindlegs, freezing into a ridiculously poised ballet stance. “My darling Canterlotlian, hypocrites only exist within the terrarium that bloomed them for the simple fact that they weren't allowed to be bloomed! But myself? Goodly Brevis is no hypocrite! Alas, he is a hyper cricket, and these good Equestrians—” He stood shoulder to shoulder, limb and limb with Pepper Plots and another random pony. “—are the sinners and saints of tomorrow, my fellow grasshoppers of discovery! And you are our guest here in—Ahem...” The mule dramatically raised his grinning maw towards the roof of the cellar. “The Inferno of Madness!”

        Harmony blinked boredly at him. She tilted her neck up, caught a whiff of alcohol fumes and drunken laughter, and tilted her face back down. “We're in the saloon's cellar, aren't we?”

        “You maniacal trollop!” Brevis suddenly barked at Pepper. “I told you we should have gone to your grandmother's!”

        “That's all the way in Manehattan.” Pepper rolled her eyes and shrugged Brevis' shoulder off her with a wry smirk. “Besides, she probably has customers at the moment.”

        “A pox upon the Alicorn who invented the libido!” Brevis muttered and sauntered towards the witless duo. “Where was I... Oh yes! My fellow maniacs and I have noticed a disturbance in the spectrum, as if thousands of colors cried out at once and were then silenced.”

        “Wait...” Harmony pointed with an inquisitive grimace. “You mean to say that this is all about the Biv?!”

        “The Biv!” Brevis leaned forward at an impossible sixty-degree angle and leered in the pegasus' wincing face. “My dear wind-flailing dealer of death, it is always about the Biv! Do you not see that?”

        “I see that you need an individual bath for every tooth that's rotting in your jaws,” Harmony hissed. She then squinted. “Wait, did you just call me—?”

        “—a dealer of death?! Naturally, my unnatural equine! For that is what you've traveled all this great distance to deliver unto this shriveled nautilus shell of a town: death!”

        A frightened and trembling Scootaloo shuddered forth a breath through Harmony's lungs. “What... Wh-What do you know about me?”

        “Simply this!” Brevis hopped up and balanced himself atop a large wine barrel, planting a hoof over his chest in a mock pledge of allegiance. “You are a patriotic, honorable, law-abiding member of Equestrian Society.” A pause, and he flickered his eyes brightly before craning his neck at a bizarre angle to realign his vision with Harmony's again. “You are just what Haymane needs to kill Dredgemane's last remaining chance to fall! You are death incarnate, my dear!”

        Regardless of the last few words spoken, the time traveler let loose a breath of relief. “Oh... Well that's great.”

        “Great?!” Brevis frog-leaped over another pony's shoulder, tripped, spun, and slid on his knees before stopping dead center in front of the bound pegasus. His eyes sparkled like a mind-blown foal looking at a rainbow for the first time. “Don't you see?! In a town full of misery, mayhem, and miscarriages... that mad living kaleidoscope is the last thing to possibly give the soot-born organisms of this town a chance to breathe something other than theirs and their ancestor's sobs! I, goodly Brevis, am but a happy, gay scientist, Miss Canterlot! I study the science of the heart, of the many horizons that our pulsing strings have yet to carry us to, until the lines are cut before a great gasping brightness! I do not ask for a coup d'état or a revolution, for such things are only incited by narrow-minded hotheads—zealots and murderers alike—who worship the fallacious concept that the future is as permanent as the ever-bleeding-now. All I ask is that the Royal Grand Biv... that this marvelous and mad rainbow be allowed to shine on the whole of Dredgemane a little bit longer, and then—maybe then—we will all fall from this inane and heartless Ponymonium that the terrible triad of Haymane, Breathstar, and Sladeburn have fashioned out of the bones of dead divinity!”

        Harmony's lips parted in a cold breath. The future caught up to her on green flames, and she was once more a brown waif of an equine arguing with an aged dragon over the absurdity of making a second trip to her pink anchor, only everything was suddenly and pathetically clear, like the empty hollows of Princess Luna's upside-down purgatorial kingdom, where countless generations of Lunar Imperialists had flung themselves into dust and oblivion for a Goddess that was too far gone to reward them for an eternity of their foolish servitude.

        “What... Wh-What did you just call this town?” the last pony asked of the mad mule.

        “Hmmmph...” Brevis scratched a hoof to his scraggly mane. “I figured you were heartless, not tone-deaf.”

        “Actually, she's titter-deaf!” Pinkie Pie beamed.

        “Pinkamena! Child of the bright shinies!” Brevis grinned her way. “A pleasure as always!”

        “Heehee! Hey, Brevis! How's it hanging?”

        “Mmmm—Ever since I was run over by that infernal plow a decade ago, slightly to the left!”

        “Heeheehee!”

        “BraHahaHaha!”

        “Hah hah hah!” Pepper Plots and the entire cellar full of tipsy ponies laughed madly.

        Harmony snarled with a renewed frustration and kicked Brevis in the chest. “Listen, my little ass!” She maintained just enough patience and charm not to rip a new hole to the sewers then and there. “I'm only doing what I've been told because this town's been abandoned for so long! If this was Fillydelphia or Whinniepeg or some other glistening jewel on the bosom of Equestria, then letting some prankster like the Royal Grand Biv run amok wouldn't be that big of a deal! But have you stopped your incessant street preaching just long enough to look at the streets?! Ponies are miserable here! This city is... is...  the Wastelands itself!” She took a deep, heaving breath and attempted belatedly to amend that last utterance. “It's like a wasteland of pained and overworked souls! What would it hurt to bring a little structure back into the chaotic mess that the Biv's caused?! All... All I want...” The last pony gulped, then whimpered, “All I want is to bring back light to this place...”

        “Through structure?!” Brevis stood up and balked alongside his chuckling companions. “Oh sweet gentle filly! It was the structure of the council and the unholy trinity above them that built the bars around these Dredgemaners' hearts to begin with! So long as you support Haymane and his will, you hide the string to the grand curtain! You maintain both death and darkness!”

        Harmony frowned, fuming slightly. “So what, then? You're going to threaten me until I give in to your anarchist agenda?”

        “BraHa!” Brevis glanced at his compatriots and pointed a shaking hoof the pegasus' way. “She thinks that this is a threat! BraHahaHaha!”

        As the mule doubled over, laughing, Pepper Plots sashayed up to take his place. “Sugah, with severe work schedules, Overseer Sladeburn makes threats. With Gultophine's Spirit as his excuse, Bishop Breathstar makes demands. Caught between his fellow living crutches, the good Mayor makes impositions.”

        “But we—oh turquoise ping pong ball—are simply making a request, which you can just as easily refuse as a good Equestrian soul refuses the shadows imposed upon it while on a quest to divine madness.”

        “Then—Snkkt—What was all of this melodrama and cloak and shadows?!” Harmony barked. “Did you really need all of this pretense to get my attention, you incomprehensible bum?!”

        Brevis shrugged. “What? Would you have preferred a song and dance number?” He whistled at somepony behind Harmony's shoulder. The pegasus turned to see an equine figure opening a pair of wooden doors to the misty streets of Dredgemane above. She glanced back, only to see that Brevis and Pepper Plots were gone, along with the bulk of the cloaked group. Getting the message, the last pony stood up, motioned Pinkie to follow along, and trotted unethusiastically out the not-so-subtle exit.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The cellar doors to the saloon slammed shut, echoing a brief thunder across the far side of Dredgemane's Town Square before fading. Soon, Harmony and Pinkie Pie stood in the vast sea of etched cobblestones, alone with their shadows in the torchlight of leering lampposts above.

        “Well, that was fun!”

        Harmony slowly turned and glared at the candy-colored filly.

        “What?” Pinkie blinked.

        “I don't know where to begin with you.”

        “Perhaps right where you end with me?” Pinkie grinned.

        “Meh... Whatever.” Harmony trotted off towards the southwest, having memorized the way to Pinkie's house after so many days.

        Pinkie shuffled behind her in a sudden lethargy, digging the edge of her hooves into the cobblestone names of ponies, ponies, ponies with a childish pout. “I'm guessing, after all of that, you're gonna gallop up to Mayor Haymane and turn in Pepper and Brevis and all those other ponies of the saloon to the Council, huh?”

        “I should. They're obvious Biv sympathizers.” Harmony grunted, then gave a long, cascading sigh. “But... I just don't know...”

        “Don't know about what? Huh? About the Royal Grand Biv? About what Brevis asked for? About how bad his cavities are?”

        “I don't know—I just don't know, alright?!” The last pony briefly stopped in place to bark, “Just... Just let me friggin' think for a minute!”

        “Heeheehee—Maybe that's your problem right there, Har-Har!” Pinkie leaned in and playfully tapped the middle of Harmony's amber-streaked forehead. “You use your noodle too much when you should be using other organs. Erm... Not like Pepper, of course. More like Bert—wait, not like him either... Huh...”

        The pegasus brushed the filly's bright hoof away and stuck her nose up. “Believe it or not, Miss Pie, there are some sane ponies in this world. And despite what Brevis may have just told us or how much you may admire him, this great civilization of ours was built on intelligent and structured thinking.” She sighed and gazed off into the cold, misty streets of the abandoned Dredgemane night. “When or if someday civilization will end, madness will be a disease, not a remedy.”

        “Hmmm... Sounds sad,” Pinkie uttered with a moping expression. She meditated on that for a full two seconds before bouncing with a bursting chirp. “But I sure would have loved to have stayed down in that cellar long enough to have seen a song and dance number!”

        “Pffft...” The orange foal inside of Harmony raspberried out into the cold air. She resumed slowly trotting down the foggy lengths of the torchlit square. “The most we would have gotten out of that was a middle-aged mare stripteasing in front of a top-heavy, homeless mule. I can think of much more charming ways for me to lose my lunch, thank you very much.”

        “But you saw how Brevis moved about! He's such a natural dancer!” Pinkie Pie spun and twirled around the time traveler. “Ziiip! Zoooom! Hehehe! He'd be a natural on the stage of Canterlot.”

        “Yeah, if he didn't smell like the love child of a landfill and a sweaty hippopotamus.”

        “Don't tell me you hate dancing as much as you hate laughing!”

        “Miss Pie, I never said—!”

        “Surely you're no stranger to the foxtrot? The hoof shuffle? I can buy that you've never laughed, Har-Har, but never danced?! Were you ever once a foal?”

        “Of course I was once a kid!” Harmony snarled. She blinked as if gazing through clearing fogs from beyond an airship's dashboard. “And... Mmmm...” She shrugged, shrugged again. “I was... kind of a natural at it.”

        “You were?!” Pinkie paused in mid-twirl to lean towards Harmony with an ecstatic gasp. “I knew it! Of course a pegasus would be gifted at getting her groove on!”

        “Oh please. That's stupid and equinist and you know it—”

        “Watch me! Watch me!” Pinkie cartwheeled and performed a series of circular acrobatic tricks with more or less success around the pegasus. “Wooooo! I'm you as a little kid! I like looking at stars from my treehouse! I adore colts with bowl-cut manes! I am totally not the same, stiff stick-in-the-mud that I'll someday grow up to be!”

        “Oh please. Don't even pretend to impersonate—”

        “Ohhh-Weeee-Ohhhh, I look just like Harmonyyyy...”

        “Oh Celestia dang it...”

        “Uhhhh Ohhh and you're Marey Tyler M—”

        The last pony caught Pinkie's mouth with her hoof, stopping the filly in mid-cartwheel. She leaned in with a bored expression. “First off, don't ever do that again. Secondly...” Her brow furrowed. “You call that dancing? That's just flailing around like a friggin' lunatic.”

        “Mmmm-Meff!” Pinkie dislodged her lips from Harmony's hoof. “But I am a friggin' lunatic! Why not show me some awesome dance moves of your own?”

        “Not on your nelliest of nellies, girl.”

        “Whatsamatter?” Pinkie leaned over with a wicked grin, accompanied by an emphatic wag of her eyebrows. “Are ya chicken?”

        Harmony's amber eyes became burning pinpricks. She shoved Pinkie by with one effortless tap. “Check it.” That cooly uttered, the adult pegasus bent her whole body forward—balancing her entire weight onto her front right limb. With the grace that could melt the tongues of volcanic flame, she twirled and twirled and twirled. Soon she was spinning like a copper top, gradually sliding her rotating self backwards on one hoof until she ended beneath a lamppost, frozen in a lazy repose with all of her three other limbs outstretched. She smirked. “You jelly?”

        “Ooooooooooh!” Pinkie practically drooled. She clapped her hooves and hopped in place. “Do it again! Do it again!”

        “Nope.” Harmony proudly backflipped, twirled her wings once, and gently fluttered down to the ground. “First time's free. Second time, you gotta pay with the blood of a virgin.”

        “Then I guess the show's over.”

        “Well, that answers a question I never knew I had within me to ask.”

        “But lemme try what you did!” Pinkie Pie twirled, but as soon as her limbs moved, she got tangled with herself. “Whoah-Whoah-Whoah—”

        Harmony caught the filly's balance with an outstretched wing. She raised a hoof to the blinking earth pony's lip, then gestured to herself. With mute speed, she performed a very simple hoof-tapping number on the cobblestone. She stood still and stared at Pinkie.

        The fluffy-maned pony grinned and repeated the movement.

        Harmony did a deadpan shuffle, side-strut, twirl, and stopped.

        Pinkie hummed to herself, mimicking the cadence with more or less grace. Once finished, she smiled brightly—as much with herself as with Harmony.

        Harmony pretended to trot normally down the length of the town square, but when Pinkie Pie bounced to keep up, gazing at the pegasus with pleading blue eyes, the last pony smirked and did another smooth dance move. The pink anchor followed suit, this time trying to one-up the time traveler with an added shuffle or two. Harmony exhaled in mock shock and proceeded to let loose a flurry of hoof-tapping that put Pinkie to shame. The candy-colored filly nevertheless attempted to copy the movement, only to stumble into the nearby curb with a brief yelp. Harmony smirked and showed off again, but Pinkie was not far behind.

        Into the empty streets of Dredgemane, flanked by dim flickering torchlamps the two proceeded, half-dancing, half-smiling, entirely living... in a way that was alien to the gray shadows of that town, shadows that briefly and felicitously parted ways before the two bright souls. Then the mists swallowed them up, and all was once more cobblestone desolation, a precursor—if not a tribute—to the Wastelands.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Twenty-One – How Pink Was My Valley

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        “I think maybe we're going about it all the wrong way!” Pinkie chirped as she strolled across the kitchen of the Pie Family residence. She opened a roasting oven, clamped her teeth over a mouth-guard, and safely pulled a hot tray of blueberry muffins out from the humming appliance. She placed the metal sheet onto a nearby counter, spat the mouth-guard out, and grinned at the copper pegasus standing across from her. “Instead of trying to chase down the Royal Grand Biv, we should figure out a way to make her come to us!”

        “Lemme guess...” Harmony raised an unenthused eyebrow from where she was leaning against a dimly-lit doorframe. A thin forest of lit candles danced between the time traveler and her bubbly anchor. “You'd suggest we lure the Biv with muffins?”

        “Well, she sure isn't a biscuit-eater! I'll bet you my left knee!” She frowned briefly. “All that limb's good for is scaring me when it gets pinchy. Say, think I could get some swell wheels like Haymane if I donated my knee to the elderly?”

        “It's probably the only part of your body you can donate without tossing in a lifetime subscription of insulin.”

        “Huh?”

        Harmony sighed and leaned forward. “Let's face it, Miss Pie. The Mayor is right; the Royal Grand Biv has been doing nothing but baiting us.” She heard a rustling of paper sheets from beyond the kitchen. The pegasus briefly craned her copper neck to see Blinkaphine at the dining table in the next room, silently working on her next dull landscape. “It's almost as if the vandal knows where we're going to be at all times and then purposefully draws us into a calamitous chase.” Harmony glanced back at Pinkie. “All this time, we've been doing things predictably, and it falls right into the Biv's hooves. Just short of building a rifle and shooting the punk's head off, I don't know how to outhink the fiend.”

        “'We've been doing things predictably', huh?” Pinkie Pie suddenly beamed. “Then perhaps the key to winning a golden trophy in Biv-snatching is to be random!”

        “Feh.” Harmony folded her front hooves and tossed an amber-streaked lock over her neck in an indignant fashion. “And just what would be random enough to work in this case? I suppose we and the rest of the militia just sit down at a campfire and pretend to ignore the Biv until it hops down from the rooftops to join us in eating marshmallows. Then what? Would we smack it over the head with a club?”

        “Hmmmmmm...” Pinkie sighed dreamily. “Erm... I'm sorry. Heehee! All I got from that last part was 'marshmallows'.”

        “Has anypony told you that you've got the attention span of a tubeworm?”

        “Has anypony told me what, now?”

        “Ugh...”

        “Why can't we just talk to the Royal Grand Biv?” Pinkie Pie smiled as she a fresh batch of muffins into the oven and reset the timer. “If there's anything I've learned from hanging out with my friends in Ponyville, it's that there's no situation so horrible that you can't settle through a chat, a parley, or a party! I like to call it the 'CPP Maneuver'. Hehe! Kind of sounds like something you'd do with a battleship... a battleship of friendship.”

        “Have you ever been surrounded by blood-thirsty harpies who want nothing more than to rip you to shreds and hang your entrails as trophies across their hideout?”

        “Uhm... No.” Pinkie briefly blushed above rows of muffins. “Why? Should I have? Is that what all the young fillies are into these days?”

        “Let's just say, Miss Pie, that as noble as negotiation may appear to be, it is hardly a perfect solution to everything.” Harmony took a deep breath and paced across the candle-lit kitchen. “The Biv has made it more than obvious that she or he only wants to wreak chaos. That's not a pony whose ego can afford surrendering to any amount of reason, no matter how eloquently dictated. No, there is no chatting with the rainbow-colored rogue of Dredgemane. Neither would a parley or a party work on an equine who will go so far as to deface both the statue of Gultophine and a cathedral built in the goddess' name. You cannot ask for honor from something that is honorless.”

        “Well, maybe it's not honor that Biv wants!” Pinkie bounced. “Maybe... Hehehe—Yes! Maybe the Biv wants something that all the other Dredgemaners have always wanted, only they can never ask for it as colorfully as the Biv does!”

        “Yeah...?” Harmony squinted curiously the candy-colored pony's way. “And what's that?”

        “Isn't it obvious?” Pinkie winked, lifted one of the freshly baked muffin to her jaw, and took a bite. “Mmmmf...Something to smile about!” She suddenly exhaled in a hissing breath. “Whew, that's hot!”

        “Miss Pie...” The last pony sighed. She was thinking aloud when she numbly said, “If Dredgemaners are that heck-bent on smiling, then why don't we have dozens if not hundreds of Bivs running around?”

        Just then, there was a loud rumbling through the floorboards above the two ponies. At first, it sounded unearthly—like a dragon's roar. Soon, the shotgun synapses in Harmony's brain outpaced her beating heart, and she reasoned it was anything but a beastly snarl. Much rather, it was the disgruntled voice of Quarrington Edward Pie as the father of Pinkie came bounding thunderously down the stairs and marching like a sandy-coated grenade into the dim depths of the kitchen.

        “Pinkamena Diane Pie, I asked you a question, young lady!”

        “Sorry, Daddy. Could you repeat what you said? Heeheehee—uhm—the house was kind of sort of in the way.”

        “And I'd tear it all down to its very foundations if I had to! Especially over what I just learned!” The stallion's gray sideburns bristled like the serrated flanks of a murderous porcupine as he glared hard into his daughter's pastel-colored skull. “I just got done talking to your mother. Is it true, Pinkamena?! Did you open one of the bedroom windows early this morning?!”

        “Erm... Eheh...” She smiled nervously as she bent back at an awkward angle from beneath her father's leering frown. “I just may have a teeeeeensy bit. I was serving Mommy oatmeal in bed! Y’know, the kind that I like to sprinkle with cinnamon! But it was so awfully hard for anypony to spoon through the bowl in the dark, much less Mommy. So, I gave the shutters an itty-bitty little crack—”

        “Confound it, girl!” Quarrington howled. The muffins rattled in their tray. The entire metal sheet threatened to shake off the edge of the counter from the warbling sound waves being launched from the elder's snout. “How many times have I told you?! So long as you are in this house, under this roof, and with your mother suffering daily like she has been for years, you are not—under any circumstances whatsoever—to let in any light from the outside world!”

        “Come on, Daddy! Don't be such a sack of saddle sores! And Mommy's not suffering so much as we're around to give her company! Heeheehee! A little bit of light never hurt anypony!”

        “You insidious delinquent!” The stallion sneered, his face jerking forward. Pinkie Pie fell on her haunches with a surprised yelp as he practically spat down at her. “This isn't some inane Ponyvillean fundraiser that you are catering! Nor is this some flamboyant reception for Princess Celestia that you're playing hostess too! This is your mother's home! It is her one and only haven of healing, comfort, and solace! At this rate, it may very likely become her final resting place! Disturbing her rest or exposing her to the elements in any fashion whatsoever will only act as a deterrence to her well-being and ease! How many times have we been through this, child?!”

        “But I didn't open all the windows! What's the harm in letting a little sunshine in? I know not to overdo it when it comes to Mommy—”

        “You know nothing!” Quarrington's frown could cut trees in half, including the flimsy branches that Pinkie's namesake held onto. “Your spontaneous and immature actions may be excused under the watch of your Aunt and Uncle, but they will not be tolerated here! Pinkamena, when years ago you left for Ponyville, I gave you my blessing because I believed that someplace in Equestria could finally provide the niche for your outlandish behavior. But now I see that you've let your soul fester in that silly town for far too long! You've clearly forgotten what it means to be a Dredgemaner, to be mindful, to show respect!”

        “Daddy, I—”

        “Silence!” he barked, his blood pressure sending his limbs through fitful convulsions. “I swear on my Town Square cobblestone, you will pay this house, your mother, and your family respect for the rest of your visit here, or I have the very mind to cut it short!”

        Pinkie Pie blinked her blue eyes. The filly's face was blank, but bright—as if she had just taken a cannonshell to the cerebellum. The last pony even winced, weathering the daughter's nerves in a sudden curtain of sympathy. Harmony was about to trot over towards Pinkie's side when Quarrington was suddenly leering before her face.

        “And you!” The stallion snarled with an embroiled temper. “Always waving your Canterlotlian flag of modernist balderdash! Plaguing this house with your silly bureaucratic tasks! Constantly making unbearable hoof-noises on the rooftop of our very own home!” His golden eyes narrowed on her like twin suns burning. “If you have finished all that you came here to accomplish, then do us all a favor and leave! And take all of your higher-than-thou, scientific mumbo jumbo and choke Princess Celestia with it, for all I care! Bah!”

        Quarrington stormed off towards his study, filling the already humid hallways of the house with his grumbling sighs. A numb pegasus and a frazzled earth pony stood in the deafening silence of his departure.

        “I... Uh...” Harmony gulped. “If I'm going to actually capture the Biv, something tells me I'd better do it tonight.”

        “Uh huh...” Pinkie brushed herself off. “You have a point. My dad's angry at you, Mayor Haymane is losing his patience with you, and it's only a matter of time before the Biv does something really super crazy destructive and forces Breathstar or Sladeburn to demand both of our heads on a platter.” A brief, deflated sigh. Half a second later, and Pinkie smiled brightly while offering a baked treat before Harmony's eyes. “How about a muffin?!”

        Harmony merely squinted at her. She waved a hoof with a shaking of her head. While Pinkie bounced merrily across the kitchen to check on the second batch of muffins, the copper pegasus bravely strafed around the corner of the nearby doorframe and looked towards where Quarrington had stormed off. There was no sign of him, but instead the time traveler once again spotted the dining table where a lone Blinkaphine sat. Harmony narrowed her vision even harder. Through the gently dancing candlelight, she once more made out the empty seat besides the white-white pony... and the great halo of dust that blanketed the perpetually vacant spot in that shadowed house.

        “Why... uhm...” Inkessa paused in the middle of folding white bedsheets and gazed at the copper pegasus beneath the shade of her nurse's cap. “Why are you asking me this, Harmony?”

        “Because Pinkie Pie always finds a way to either change the subject or pretend like I've never even mentioned his name.” The last pony gazed across the Immolatia Ward, watching as Zecora and Angel Cake examined sick foal after sick foal in the gray haze of the Stonehaven afternoon. A candy-colored filly darted in and around them, randomly quipping a joke that brought a smile to the children being checked upon, chasing their nervous shivers away. “And you know as well as I do that there's no chance in heck of getting a word out of Blinkaphine.” The time traveler gulped and added in a morose tone, “Or your dad, for that matter.”

        Inkessa let loose a lethargic breath. She moved to the next sheet and folded it with a mechanical grace that was disassociated from the distant look in her violet eyes. “I don't see what good it will do for you to know about the matter. Why would Princess Celestia be interested in such a thing?”

        “Inkessa...” Harmony leaned forward and murmured in a gentle breath. “How long have I been Pinkie's guest? Your family's guest?” She swallowed and managed a gentle smile. “Don't you think that, for better or for worse, we've moved beyond formalities? I want to know because... because I need to understand. I promise you,” she said in a genuinely honest breath, “This has absolutely nothing to do with any official business on behalf of the Court.”

        Inkie folded her way through two more bedsheets in silence. Finally, she paused, and managed the courage to speak. “Clyde was in our family for no more than five months,” she said, “But none of us have ever forgotten him, though it may sometimes seem as if we have. Even my little sister—for all that she appears to be numb to in this world—remembers him as fondly as you or I could remember the last time either of us laughed at something merry.”

        Harmony winked. “I'll take your word for it.”

        That was enough to produce a weak smile across the nurse's lips. Pinkie's older sister regained a solemn breath and continued, “Clyde's legacy is something of joy and sorrow all rolled into one. It all started nearly twenty years ago, when Pinkamena got her cutie mark. Did she ever tell you about that, Harmony?”

        The copper pegasus folded her upper arms and leaned against a bulletin board plastered with foalish sketches. “Would you mind telling me yourself?” She smiled gently. “I want to understand what you understand, Inkessa.”

        “Well, if you insist...” The nurse murmured on. “Our household wasn't always as dark and dismal as what you've seen during your entire visit. We used to leave the windows wide open. We used to let the light in... used to let a gorgeous breeze waft straight through the dining room. That's when Blinkie started drawing, y'know. She'd gaze out the windows and see so many things that inspired her. The sheer budget of all the crayons we've bought her since is astronomical.”

        Inkessa briefly chuckled. As she came down the crest of that last breath, her smile melted into something serene, however melancholic.

        “Like I said, it all started with Pinkamena and her cutie mark. When she was a tiny filly, she was just like the rest of us, in that she was just like all the other Dredgemaners. Ever day for her and us was just another statistical hash mark in a schedule regimented around the harvesting of rocks. There was no room for smiles, laughter, partying, or all of the other ecstatic things that mark my sister's clownish antics to this day.”

        The gray filly paused. Her hooves folded over the basket of linens as she leaned forward with a sudden warmth to her expression.

        “But then, one night, my sister saw something, Pinkamena was a witness to an amazingly joyous phenomenon, something in the darkness of the endless plateau of rock that spoke to her, that taught her how to smile when so many other ponies of Dredgemane were blind and ignorant in the comfort of Consus' cemetery shadows. Pinkie wasn't exactly capable of explaining this boundless joy to us, but that didn't stop her from sharing it. She wanted everypony to smile forever with the same well of energy that empowered her to do just that.”

        Inkie leaned back and fiddled numbly with the half-folded bedsheets while Pinkie's giggles intermingled with the foals' chorus beyond.

        “For the better part of a year, Pinkie's discovery was a blessing that illuminated the lives of everyone in this little family of hours. She showed us what a 'party' was. She taught us all to dance—heehee—even our father. As a matter of fact, Daddy's life was so positively changed that he produced several new suggestions to the City Council during that time in his life. Almost magically, Dredgemane's legislature enacted several bold laws that extended curfew, allowed leisure time following Gultophine's Summons, and even inspired the local mine workers to unionize.”

        “Sounds like I visited two decades too late,” Harmony said with a smirk.

        “Hmm-hmm-hmm...” Inkessa chuckled breathily. “Perhaps. You should have seen us; we were like an entirely different family then, a smiling family, a warm family. I love Mommy and Daddy to bits, but sometimes it's hard to make out their expressions in such darkness as there is today, even though I know the purpose of it all. But—dear Gultophine—those years were, without a doubt, the best time in my life. It was a time when I woke up with a song in my heart instead of a sigh, when the Goddess of Life was more real to me than any sermon of Breathstar could persuade. In those days, I wore color. Mommy baked sweets. And Blinkaphine... my younger sister actually talked.” She stared suddenly into a great distance, and the smile in her gray features loosely peeled off.

        Harmony gulped somberly. “What... Wh-What changed...?”

        Inkessa took a brave breath. “That joy—that happiness that came out of pure darkness—was positively infectious. As it affected every iota of my life, it inspired every part of Mommy's and Daddy's. And... well...” Inkessa briefly flung forth a sly grin, then returned to a graceful deadpan. “Before long, me and Pinkamena and Blinkaphine had a little sibling along the way. Usually, where Dredgemaners are concerned, having a fourth child so late in a family's age is disconcerting. But none of us could have been any happier. It was like... It was like every horizon had a brilliant sunrise for us that year. Dredgemane was just as gloomy and miserable-looking then as it is now, but we could hardly have noticed a difference. The same light that Pinkamena saw alone in the darkness had illuminated the path into our future. We all thought we could smile forever...”

        Inkessa gazed across the ward, her violet eyes falling across the gently stirring bodies of the young and infected children. The slumbering invalids filled the lengths of the sterile room of haunting giggles like white stones.

        “When my mother went into labor, it was a matter of fateful timing. That very same day that she gave birth to our baby brother Clyde, the miners at the quarry had unwittingly pierced a cluster of petrified infernite. Hundreds of workers were immediately infected, and several of them overflowed from the triage that had been set up by paramedics on site...”

        “Dear Epona,” Harmony murmured with a sickening expression. “You don't mean to say that...?”

        Inkessa somberly nodded. “Many of the infernite victims were in the same hospital that my mother gave birth in. You must understand, Harmony, that Immolatia is still a relatively new and misunderstood condition, which is why we're relying so much on Zecora's assistance right here and now to help find a possible remedy to it. As few ponies in the Equestrian medical field can explain the condition now, even fewer were capable of recognizing it twenty years ago, much less its severely contagious qualities immediately following exposure to raw infernite.” She gulped hard. “Right after Clyde's foaling, both my mother and my baby brother were naturally vulnerable to such a rare and debilitating infection. Within days, we knew something was wrong... with both of them.”

        Harmony very quietly, very solemnly listened.

        Inkessa went on. “For the first two months, both Mother and Clyde were quarantined. It was the most unglamorous and depressing conditions you could possibly imagine. They shared crowded hospital wards with dozens upon dozens of slowly dying Dredgemaners. Father's life turned upside down; he fought tooth and hoof with the Council to relocate Mommy and our little brother to a completely different location. The Council wouldn't agree with him, as Immolatia was still new and frightening and they all had the safety of Dredgemane to uphold. When more months passed, Mayor Haymane 'made it up' to my father by allowing him to bring his wife and child back home, rather than leave them both to slowly rot away in a place like here, Stonehaven.”

        The filly folded one sheet after another in a slow weaving of icy limbs. Her gray coat suddenly matched the lifeless pale hue of her nurse's gown.

        “Clyde put up a fight. He may never have been capable of moving much, or making any sort of sound that extended beyond a cough or a sputtering groan, but we could all see the strength in his eyes. His was like Daddy's, bright and gold... until the jaundice took over. I could hardly even recognize him by the time that he... that he...” Inkessa took a deep breath. “Mother was older and stronger, of course, but she was nonetheless infected. Ever since Clyde passed, she's been bed-ridden. According to all of the so-called 'modern texts of medicine', a mare of her age has another five years to outlast the effects of Immolatia at best. Foals like Clyde... foals like these precious children here: their bodies aren't strong enough to battle the residue that has been spread to their lungs.”

        “This all happened—what—twenty years ago?”

        “Dear Elektra alive, has it been that long?” Inkessa's breath was a hollow thing. She swallowed her frailty back down before saying, “It seems like only yesterday when I could wake up to a beam of sunlight coming in through my window. It was just less than a year ago when father started his 'no windows open' rule, on account of an article he misread from one of the many medical journals that I brought home from the library. He thinks that the effects of Immolatia are quickened by exposure to direct sunlight. While that's somewhat true, he's taken it to a great extreme. It's not as pathetic as you might think. In a way, it's a sign that part of him still cares for this family beyond the lengths he is otherwise willing to openly express.”

        “But, Inkessa, surely he can't believe—”

        “Can't believe what? That mother might get better again because of his 'solution'? That this family could have what it once joyously had—however abysmally short it was?” Inkessa's violet eyes lethargically blinked. “We are Dredgemaners through and through. We were born unto death, and we will all render to death what it's due. What Pinkamena brought us, however fantastic, was but a vacation from what the rest of this town's residents deal with on a regular basis. Perhaps it made us ever so briefly selfish to have forgotten the way in which we were bred to be. Whatever the case, nothing promises to bring back the light that was once as common as dust in our household. Mother stopped walking, Father stopped dancing, Blinkaphine stopped talking, and I? I stopped believing in things and began studying them. After all that I've told you, could you possibly blame me for wanting to become a nurse? For wanting to make sure that never again would a hospital render unto another pony the same chaos and incompetence that was so rudely flung upon my mother?”

        “And what of Pinkie Pie?”

        “Pinkamena...” Inkessa's eyes floated over towards where the filly giggled and gave little foals pony-rides between Zecora and Nurse Angel Cake. “Pinkamena is the only exception. She saw the light that none of us did, and because of that, she was the one and only pony who decided to keep smiling forever, no matter what happened. But where she was once an inspiration to us before Clyde, she was only a piercing thorn afterwards. Nowhere is this more evident than with Daddy. Believe what you want from the rumors of Dredgemane; it was father's insistence, and not the result of some bizarre calamity, that landed Pinkamena in the laps of Aunt and Uncle Cake far away in Ponyville. I love my sister to death, but this family can only take so many doses of her. She means well... but twenty years ago she transformed into something beyond a simple Dredgemaner. My sister had become an idea, a very sweet and happy idea, but ideas are the quickest things to become jaded in a household that no longer has the light to show the brilliance in things.”

        “I think I can understand that now.” Harmony nodded. “Forgive me if I sound cold, but I've always seen Miss Pie's enthusiasm as a blindness.”

        “And you would be right, to a fault.” Inkie managed a weak smile. “It takes courage to be blind to what so many other ponies believe in. The light that Pinkamena saw that one night so many years ago: it takes a unique vision to not lose sight of it, a vision that nopony else in Dredgemane can share. That's the sort of blindness that Pinkamena has. It's more selective than ignorant, or so I've always believed.”

        “Still, she's got to see reality for all of its dark shades at some point or another.” Harmony gulped. “I mean... does Miss Pie ever bother to visit her brother's grave?”

        “There is none.”

        “I beg your pardon?” Harmony blinked.

        Inkessa slowly shook her head. “Clyde doesn't have a grave. Nopony in Dredgemane does. We're all cremated upon death. It's tradition.”

        “And...” Harmony gazed forlornly across the many young heads of the Immolatia Ward. “...all of these children?”

        “If they don't have parents to return to—and most of them don't—then they go to the same place that all who came and went before them did.” Inkessa brushed aside a lock of gray hair. “We Dredgemaners are all ashes and cobblestones in the Grave of Consus. The only thing that ever gave us purpose is Gultophine's Spirit...”

        “And Pinkamena's spirit...” Harmony remarked. “If I may be so bold.”

        Inkessa said nothing to that.

        Harmony leaned forward and spoke in a hushed tone. “Inkessa, has it ever occurred to you that the reason Pinkamena is so happy all of the time is that she's chosen to be? A pony's choice means a lot in this existence. It once meant a lot to you and your family...”

        “Suffering changes things, Harmony.” Inkessa said in a dull tone. “I don't know if you can understand that—”

        “I can,” the last pony curtly replied. “Life has always been suffering. It was suffering long before you came into this world, and it remained suffering long after Clyde was snatched from it. Your goofy sister has managed to live apart from the bleakness, whereas your father evidently gave in to it. I cannot even pretend to understand Blinkaphine's situation, but you? You have so much promise, Inkessa. You are so intelligent and so gifted—Why must you remain in this city? Why must you let a place defined by suffering also define you?”

        “And what would it benefit anypony if I was to leave for a dream position in a city such as yours, such as Canterlot?” Inkessa whispered with a frown, keeping her voice drowned out from the ears of the young foals. “These children need all the help that they can get. You know that. Why would you suddenly suggest that there's a reason for me to leave Dredgemane?”

        “Because I realize now that nopony else will have the chance to tell you the truth, that not a single one of these little kids is Clyde, or ever will be him. Inkessa, you're young yet. Dredgemane doesn't have to swallow you like it has your father, mother, and little sister. You may still be able to find your smile, though I doubt it will be here with these kids, with these foals whose lives were doomed from the start, regardless of what destiny you've painted for yourself in this town.”

        Inkessa took a deep breath. “You're right, Harmony. There is suffering in this world.” Her gaze slowly morphed into a frown that positively stabbed the copper pegasus across the silent space between them. “So long as there are ponies like you—and like Haymane or Sladeburn—who think with your heads and not with your hearts, there shall always be suffering. I'm inclined to think that you should use your intelligence to drown out what's left of Dredgemane's imagination and just execute the Royal Grand Biv already. But I grant you no authority in telling me what I should or should not do.”

        “Inkessa, I didn't mean anything bad by—”

        “Just who does, Harmony? Our town is all about 'progress' after all, though far be it from 'providence', hmm?” The nurse stood up with a grunting sigh. Regaining her serene demeanor, she nevertheless stared past the pegasus as she sauntered off with the basket of linens balanced on her flank. “If you would excuse me, I have my duties to perform. Some of us never run out of them.”

        Harmony motioned with her hooves, teetering on the precipice of a rebuttal, but ultimately gave up with an exasperated sigh. She ran a hoof over her face as she moaned into the numbing quiet of that corner of the room.

        “Way to frickin' go, Scootaloo, ya gabbin' little glue stick...”

        “I have utilized every possible herbal remedy,” Zecora murmured in a forlorn voice that echoed against the bricklaid walls of the sanitarium. “Alas, the children haven't gotten any more healthy.”

        “She's used cures for all sorts of respiratory ailments and infections from bronchitis to acute pneumonia,” Nurse Angel Cake added in a worrisome voice. She, Harmony, and the tireless zebra stood in a somber huddle outside the door to the Immolatia Ward. Their hushed voices were like infant breaths against the black-and-white tile of the claustrophobic hallway. “Ever since we've written Zecora and planned for this visit, we established a list of various medicinal concoctions which Zecora could provide the materials for.”

        “For each recipe, a potion was made. And to each child, a sample I gave.” The zebra adjusted the lengths of her gray robe and sighed like the shadow that Dredgemane had transformed her into. “Now I've reached the bottom of the list, and not a single patient has improved as we wished.”

        “What's missing, then?” Harmony inquired, gazing briefly into the room full of tiny, ailing ponies. “Is it a matter of us lacking resources? Do we need more ingredients than what was delivered by Vimbert the other day?”

        “It is not a matter of short supply. Our solution merely evades the mind's eye.” Zecora shook her head sadly. “I fear that Immolatia's only solution remains beyond the realm of intuition.”

        “Could... uh...” Harmony took a deep breath and scratched one front hoof with another. “Could one of you run the basic facts of Immolatia by me one more time?” The orphan of time knew fully well the horrifying results of infernite poisoning, but she was always undeniably in the dark as to its fundamental nature. “I'm as advanced in medical prowess as a teenage pony knows how to slap together a fast food daisy sandwich.”

        “Infernite is far more than random sediment found in mined rock,” Nurse Angel Cake explained. “It is nothing other than the petrified and enchanted remains of Alicorn blood spilled from the chaos wars so long ago. Like many flamestones condensed by the geological pressures of time, infernite almost magically emanates with an energy that is detrimental to any organic matter it comes into direct contact with. This isn't a problem for ponies who might be lifting or hauling around solid chunks of the material. However, when infernite is broken up—it stands the risk of filling the air like a fine powder. When infernite is inhaled into the lungs like a dust, it clings to the respiratory organs of a living equine and coalesces once more into a solid. At such a point, it becomes impossible to separate the congealed clumps of infernite from the natural lung structure. Even a precise surgical extraction cannot separate what's natural from what's unnatural anymore. Eventually, the infected pony's body becomes inflamed as the essence of the infernite is transferred into all bodily organs through regular respiration. For most adult equines, it takes several decades to end a life. For children—who are still in the developmental stages—death is swifter and far more painful.”

        “Since surgery is not a viable option, many have turned towards medicinal concoctions,” Zecora said. “By endeavoring to go an herbal route, I had hoped to clean the infernite from the inside out. But every attempt to cure Immolatia from within has only brought us back to where I came in. The metal filaments in the lungs of the foals remain in them like blistering hot coals. I'm inclined to believe that not even magic can prevent them from facing a fate so tragic.”

        “Then if it's not surgery and it's not a medicine, then it's gotta be something else that can get that crap out of those kids,” Harmony murmured. “Obviously you've done your best, Miss Zecora, but surely that doesn't mean all hope is lost—Right?”

        “Zecora's reputation precedes herself,” Angel Cake remarked with a bitter smile. “I doubt there's any other shaman in the Zebrahara with her level of expertise. I doubt there's anypony in all of Equestria with her gift in medicinal cures, period.”

        “Though I may so far have come short, perhaps we can all benefit from your report,” Zecora smiled at the pegasus.

        The last pony made a face. “My report?”

        Zecora blinked. “Correct me if I am incorrect, but a clerk of Canterlot, you are, I suspect.”

        “I... I think you misunderstand the purpose of my being here, Miss Zecora...” Harmony nervously chuckled.

        “It is certainly a good question.” Nurse Angel Cake suddenly squinted at the copper pegasus. “I could have sworn you were here to... to either watch over Pinkamena Pie or chase down the Royal Grand Biv. Which of those two, I'm no longer certain. Just why are you here, Miss Harmony?”

        “I...” The filly suddenly shivered through her Entropan limbs. “I'm here because...” She gazed beyond the doorframe and into the room. There were so many dying foals, just like there were so many white stones and so many lonely years lived atop a scooter. “I-I want to help.” She gulped and gazed into the shadows with a murmur. “Still, wanting to help and being able to help are two completely different animals...”

        A striped limb gently rested on the pegasus' shoulder. A smiling Zecora uttered, “In a town full of so many somber stallions and mares, it is a pleasant thing to see a soul who cares. Do not fret for that which is beyond your control, for we are all united in our glorious yet challenging goal.”

        “If anything, Zecora's potions have settled the foals' nerves quite a bit,” Angel Cake said with a gentle smile. “If only she had visited here several months sooner. She would have made...” The nurse stammered briefly, but eventually uttered, “She would have made things far more peaceful for those who have most recently passed.”

        “How... uhm...” Harmony chewed on a copper lip. “Just how do you know when it is finally a patient's time?”

        “Immolatia is different with everypony, but the results at the end are quite similar. First, a child's breath forms a distinct wheeze—almost like a shrill whistling sound at the end of each exhale. Then, a numbness creeps over the body as the infernite eliminates the last bastion of the immune system and begins to spread into every nerve and muscle. What happens next is as unpredictable as it is unpleasant. Someponies go into horrible convulsions. Others suffer a sudden and startling blindness. Then others—the ones who are most fortunate—go into a deep coma, a sleep from which they will never return. In those cases, Immolatia finally ends them while they are unconscious.”

        Harmony held a deep lump in her throat. She was quite sadly aware of that last description. “What about the jaundice that forms around the patient's eyes and orifices?”

        “That happens much earlier, during the intermediary stages.”

        “I see,” Harmony nodded. “Are... uhm... are any foals in this ward past the intermediary stages?”

        Angel Cake and Zecora exchanged numb glances. It was the zebra who finally spoke, “As you may obviously see, young Ice Song is the most afflicted pony.” The three mares glanced into the room towards where Pinkie Pie cuddled with the little blue colt in question. “I have given him the most medicine to assist in the fight, but it would be a miracle of the Shadows if he makes it past the night.”

        “The Shadows?” Harmony chose to repeat.

        “This town may be in honor of Gultophine's blessing, but zebras pray to spirits of a different dressing. By the Goddess or the Shadows, we all entreat that Ice Song may be spared by Immolatia's defeat.”

        Harmony stumbled through an inverse cloud of doubt and desperation to bitterly blurt forth: “Amen.”

        Just then, there was a tiny pitter-patter of hooves. A golden hue lit the shadows of the hallway stretching beyond the ward. Harmony glanced down and saw none other than Suntrot in the doorway.

        “What are you all talking about?” the golden foal with the bright cutie mark managed through a wheezing breath. “Why don't you come back inside? Auntie Pinkie Pie is gonna tell us all about the time she and her friends went to meet a scary, sleeping dragon!”

        “A scary, sleeping dragon—surely you jest!” Zecora balked. “There is nothing frightening about a beast with snores instead of flame in its chest!”

        Suntrot giggled, coughed, and managed to squeak forth: “Come inside and listen! Then you'll think different!” She tilted her head up and positively brightened at the sight of the copper pegasus. “Hi there, Miss Harmony!” Another cough. “Have you ever faced a sleeping dragon before?”

        “No...” Harmony managed in a voice that was softer than she had meant it. “But I've met one that's put me to sleep from time to time.” She added with an even softer smile.

        “Heeheehee... You're so random, Miss Harmony...”

        The time traveler raised an eyebrow at that.

        “Suntrot—Elektra alive, little one!” Inkessa suddenly sashayed out and nudged the little golden foal back into the depths of the ward. “Don't run off like that! Especially when you should be in bed with the way you've been feeling...”

        “Awww! But Nurse Inkie, they're gonna miss the story!”

        “They're having an important conversation—Nurse stuff.” Inkessa briefly glanced up and her violet optics locked emotionlessly with Harmony's. “Nothing for you to be concerned about...” She walked off with the limping child.

        Harmony gazed beyond with a flaring of her nostrils. There was a glisten to the extremities of Suntrot's molting coat... like the reflective surface of a scooter that didn't know that it was about to be abandoned for so many gray and lifeless years beyond the Cataclysm.

        What have you meant to me throughout all these years? I thought I was the last pony, but I've always had you to fall back on. In my darkest dreams and in my most painful sobs, you were there to embrace me, to fold your limbs around me with far thicker muscles than the darkest of shadows could afford.

        I suppose I can say with perfect honesty that I believed in you. In some ways, I even worshipped you. Inkessa and the rest of the Dredgemaners exalted Goddess Gultophine. Zecora believed in the Shadows. But you—I always had you to believe in. Come to think of it, I hardly had a choice. Is a faith of obligation a true faith? Does it even matter?

        I know that you would have it no other way. You are forever and ever, and yet with all of the universe's beginnings and endings at your disposal, you've never ceased being selfish... not even for one infinitesimal blink in time. You must have me, as you had to have every other pony that's ever existed in the great annals of time. Could you have spared me? Could you have left me alone instead of consuming me with obsidian jaws? Was I enough that my soul and my soul alone would somehow finally satiate your bottomless hunger?

        I'm inclined now to think that all this time you were just waiting for me. The Cataclysm was the main course, but I was your dessert tray. You waited for Spike to send me back into the meaty and succulent past via Green Flame, and into that delicious abyss you followed me so that you could consume all of these poor and helpless bodies once again with a renewed ferocity. Every anchor I tied myself to, every soul I communicated with, every little foal that limped across my way: they were appetizers to your infinite feast. I'd hate myself for being an accessory to your feeding if only I knew that nopony in the past had a chance of avoiding you, whether or not I was in the picture.

        I have done so many terrible and regretful things in my life, but your presence brings with it a bizarre solace. So long as you're around, I know that there are things worse than me. I know that there is a force in this existence that is more wretched and more pitiful than myself. I know that when I am finally gone from this world, it will truly be a black and dismal place that is left behind, because you'll be all that's left and the last thing you'll want is to finish this noble quest that Spike and I have started.

        Who knows, maybe resurrecting the Sun and Moon will be the ultimate insult to you, for as long as there are no ponies left to wander this world, the heavenly bodies will be things that even you can't consume. They will stab you in all the ways that will make you cringe and skitter in desperate search for the shadows that no longer exist. You will not be able to escape anything, not even yourself. That almost makes this whole pageantry of time travel friggin' worth it, for it will make you feel what I've felt, what I've been, and what you've made me out to be.

        Pinkie Pie beamed as a hard hat danced a golden beam of light ahead of her bouncing skull. “And Goddess Gultophine said, 'I don't know! I sent two boats and a hot air balloon after you'!”

        Several miners laughed between bites of fresh doughnuts deep in the hollow of the earth that echoed with dozens upon dozens of hammers and power tools.

        “That was cute. Tacky, but cute.”

        “You're a real hoot, Pinkamena. I haven't got a clue why Quarrington kicked you out so many years ago.”

        “He didn't kick her out, numskull! She went out of town to work for Marble Cake's brother-in-law!”

        “That fat mare? I thought she ate all her siblings!”

        “Then why's Quarrington still around?! Hahaha!”

        “Hey hey hey nowwwww...” Pinkie Pie giggled while strolling between the stallions with an emptying tray of doughnuts balanced on her flank. “No making fun of my Auntie Marble Cake!”

        “Awwwww...”

        “Hahaha—We didn't mean nothing bad by it...”

        “Not without making fun of her cactus garden first!” Pinkie mischievously blurted, summoning the laughter of many smoke-stained miners surrounding her. Her voice echoed brightly across the dark lengths of the twisting mine. “Did you know that she had the desert plants shipped all the way here from Appleloosa? I tell you, that was the last time she made that mistake! It took Auntie months to rid the kitchen of horned toad eggs!”

        Several of the stallions spontaneously spat out whatever bits of doughnuts they were presently chewing on and wiped their lips with shuddering forelimbs.

        “Yeesh! She's kidding, right?”

        “Haha! Don't you see? She's always kidding! That's why I love the little scamp.”

        “Sure could use more of ya down here during the graveyard shift, Pinkamena. Never mind the doughnuts...”

        “Yeah, but I don't taste nearly as nice with sprinkles!” Pinkie winked and giggled.

        The stallions all laughed in a merry circle. Several meters away from them, Harmony stood with her upper limbs folded. She leaned back against a harmless outcropping of rock and sighed, the light from her helmet bowing across the rails of a local mine cart track. After nearly an hour into that day's visit of the subterranean workplace, the last pony was just starting to get a firm grasp of her nerves. This blistering corridor of echoes and sweat wasn't necessarily a container of past memories, but a quaint capsule of brand new ones, and all she could summon the strength to do was stand back and watch the unthinkable unfold.

        Pinkie wandered from cluster to cluster of workers, her grin and giggles eliciting like-minded expressions from those who—just a few naked seconds previous—were entangled in an all-encompassing struggle with their power tools. Even the oldest and most emaciated of Dredgemaners managed a smile in the wake of her coming and going. It never ceased to amaze Harmony the lengths to which Pinkie could brighten the lives of ponies in the most destitute of locations. However, the time traveler was forever at a loss to be enthused by it.

        With each spark that flew from the chisels of the miners... with each flake of rock that snowed through the claustrophobic air, she saw through it all and only envisioned the faces of dozens of dying foals. They were nothing less than a classroom full of blinking eyes, drawn over with the veil of time. Dredgemane was more than a somber relic of the past; it was a snapshot of all the suffering that the Cataclysm had brought, of all the suffering that the last pony wasn't allowed to witness, for she was blissfully cursed with having experienced it all from the shadow of a falling arcane vault within the destruction of Cloudsdale.

        What did Scootaloo know of equine suffering? What did she know of all of the burning lives turned to ash when the end of Equestria came to consume them? She had always envisioned a grander portrait of what horrified her youthful vision: that all ponies in the Cataclysm tasted of death in an inexplicable blink when their essences were all reduced to petrified dust. She never before considered that a blink in life meant an eon of agony in death, when the crumbling synapses of a departing soul attempted to make sense out of all the senseless pain. There is no such thing as a mercy killing, Harmony deduced. The Cataclysm was a cruel sadist of abstract proportions, and the last pony was a fool to have ever perceived it as an instantaneous calamity.

        Groaning, Harmony wrenched her gaze away from Pinkie and her cloud of pathetically impermanent levity. She stared with mild interest into a nearby chunk of rock. The future scavenger inside that Entropan body immediately identified at least half-a-dozen different kinds of minerals in one blink. If this was the Grave of Consus into which the Dredgemaners were mining, then the last pony figured that there was a huge commonality between the subterranean rock before her and the pale dust of moon stones she had become acquainted with in the future. It made a great deal of sense that there'd be so much infernite deep in the flesh of the gray plateau that surrounded Pinkie's hometown. The essence of a dead god was literally absorbed into the earth all around the time traveler. With a flippant thought, she pondered over what delightful samples she might find if she were to visit this site via an airship twenty-five years from then.

        There were far easier ways to extract important minerals from rock, the time traveler knew. She almost pitied the heavily laboring workers all around her, for she knew that a simple rig of runestones and the utilization of unicorn horns could accomplish what they were all trying to do in barely one quarter of the time. In fact, it was orange flame—an easily acquirable substance in the future—that could in one blink extract the more valuable and enchanted minerals from the rock, such as flamestones or arcanium. Harmony briefly wondered what would happen if Spike was able to send more than just her soul-self back through time. If she had even a fraction of her future tools available to her, she could have done more work in a solid hour than these ponies must have accomplished in the last month alone. She almost smirked at contemplating how fast that might have made Overseer Sladeburn's head spin—

        There was an explosion. The entire body of the mine shook, snapping Harmony from the roots of her thought just as violently as the many surrounding Dredgemaners were thrown back from their varied tasks. She braced herself against a rumbling chunk of rock and breathlessly stared across the quivering interior as several equine shadows trembled and cried under the eerie dance of swaying lanternlight.

        Pinkie Pie had collapsed in a sea of crumbled doughnuts. By the time she lurched to her shaking hooves, the once-smiling stallions that had gathered around her had begun galloping in opposite directions, shouting and barking heart-stopping exclamations as they sought to bolster the framework of that shuddering tunnel with a plethora of emergency tools and support beams.

        Another muffled explosion. Something shook through the foundation of the labyrinth from below. Several more shouts echoed to and fro. An abandoned mine cart rolled past on its lonesome and rattled violently off the track. Several clumps of dust and debris showered dozens of glistening hard hats as Harmony stumbled into the center of the madness, gazing every which way for a plausible explanation.

        An overseer ran by, flanked by a pair of pale-faced associates. Harmony yelped his way: “Hey! What was it? Has there been a collapse?”

        “Two levels below!” The lead pony howled as he blazed by, haloed by flickering lanterns. “There were at least one hundred down there! They must have struck deep!”

        The last pony exclaimed, “Struck deep into what?”

        “What do you think?” The overseer paused at a junction of tunnels and shouted loud and clear. “Everypony to the shafts! Follow the routes that were designated to you! We're clearing out! Let's move it!”

        Harmony breathlessly lurched. She spun and glanced down a shuddering corridor in the direction from which the young overseer had just galloped. Before a long and dark tunnel, the mine had shrunk to form a tight frame bolstered by wooden beams. Several frazzled ponies were limping in desperation from the deep, deep passageway beyond. Yet, as they did so, grand fissures started to form in the foundation of the frame. The exit to that deep corridor was about to collapse at any second.

        With amber eyes flaring, the time traveler did the unthinkable. She flapped her wings and she flung herself forward. Just as the frame began to bowl and crackle, she flew her body up against it and braced the side of the chiseled “doorway” with her Entropan spine. She somehow thought that the heroic gesture would require effort, but she numbly fit the sundering cranny like a perfectly shaped peg. The avatar of the Goddess of Time was suddenly just as solid as any other chunk of rock in that swaying place. What was more, she was able to maintain her posture as if she was merely leaning up against the rockface. Harmony blissfully judged that any passerby wouldn't have a clue that she was actually the one thing keeping that corridor from crumbling in on itself and sealing so many souls off..

        “ComeonComeonComeon...” She hissed and trembled, attempting to remain as still and unassuming as possible while so many ponies helplessly floundered around her. “Let it be worth it, Epona. Let it be—Yes!”

        Harmony hissed through grinning teeth, for her actions had paid off. She counted three, five, seven ponies stumbling up through the corridor where otherwise—if it hadn't been for her—the passageway would have been blocked off. All of the ponies stared past her, their eyes nearly blinded by thick black soot that lent misery to their hacking lungs as they lurched towards the distant lanternlight of the evacuation route.

        “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie slid to a stop beside her. The filly's hard hat wobbled glowingly as she stammered, “W-We can't stay here!”

        “Yeah, you think?” Harmony grunted.

        “All of the workers are leaving for a reason! A horribly awful pocket of infernite may have been caught up in that explosion beneath us! If we don't make like a tree and leaf, we'll all get infected too!”

        “There're still ponies trapped down there!” Harmony managed to point with one Entropan limb. Loose dust from the flimsily supported frame littered her helmet from above. She made no mention of it. “See? Lots of them are still coming!”

        “I know!” Pinkie Pie gasped. “I'll go get the overseer and maybe we can send down a rescue team!” She made to bounce away towards the lit end of the mine—

        “No!” Harmony grasped her anchor's shoulder. She held the bright filly in place. The last pony gulped, shuddered, and stared forlornly down the tunnel as she said: “You were right the first time! There's too big a risk of infernite poisoning!”

        “But—”

        “Will you just friggin' listen?!” Harmony growled. “We gotta stay here! You have a loud voice, Miss Pie! Let the ponies know that this passageway hasn't collapsed yet! Show them the way to get to safety!”

        Pinkie Pie for once didn't waste a second with a felicitous rebuttal. She cupped two hooves over her pink lips and howled down the infinite tunnel of shadows. “Hey, everypony! This way! Follow my voice to sunshine and smiles!”

        “A little less melodramatic, perhaps?” Harmony hissed, sweating as the mine once more shook and rumbled above and beneath them.

        Several more soot-stained stallions stumbled past the two. The ponies gazed breathlessly at the two fillies like they were angels from above. One adult pony was being dragged to the surface by his upper limbs. He was sobbing like a foal, for his lower limbs had somehow been reduced to hoofless stubs. The minecart track glistened in his bright blood.

        Harmony's amber eyes flared at the sight. She immediately winced as Pinkie's voice thundered over the cacophonous collapse around and beyond them. “Come this way! Quickly, everypony! We're evacuating!”

        The frame quivered and shuddered further above Harmony's shoulders. She and she alone glanced up to see several nubile fissures forming in the crumbling structure. Swallowing a dry gulp, she looked past Pinkie's bright shape and barked at a pair of stumbling workers. “How many more are down there?!”

        “It's hard to say!” A stallion coughed and wheezed. He hung off the shoulder of his companion while bracing a mangled forelimb. “It's the midday shift!” He winced, sputtered. “There could be dozens... dozens...”

        Harmony's face blanched in horror. She squinted with quivering eyes down the deep shadows lingering beyond her and Pinkie. The tunnel stretched like the esophagus of a grand serpent. The phantom sobs of a lonely orange foal bled through her ears, but they were all too quickly replaced by a real and far more haunting noise, that of hundreds of screaming and panicked voices echoing up from the grand depths of that infernal hole. The voices pleaded for help, pleaded for Gultophine, pleaded for their mothers. Several limp shadows lurched from the deep echoing cavern. The shapes of maimed and half-butchered equines were struggling to climb the rest of the distance to freedom.

        “What are you two doing?!” The young overseer rushed up to the last pony's peripheral and howled at the fillies. “It's over for them! Get a move on, already! The longer you linger here, the sooner you'll risk exposure to infernite!”

        “We can't just leave so many ponies behind!” Pinkie Pie shouted, panting. “There are more coming! We c-can see them!”

        “Any remaining survivors who were in it that deep could only have been infected! For the good of yourselves and the rest of us—Move your dang flanks!” The overseer ran back towards the light. “Last call! To the shafts! Everypony, let's go!”

        “Har-Har?” Pinkie Pie gulped. “Did you hear him? Wh-What should we do?”

        The last pony stared. Everything was rumbling all around her. The arcane vault was an unbreakable bottle in a grand sea of suffering. The stars would last forever, and yet she could only stare at their bodies, could only listen to their agonized screams as the soot-stained faces came into bleeding focus. Cloudsdale had followed her there, and she was as powerless in Entropa's skin as she was in a dead foal's.

        “Har-Har?”

        The frame started to buckle. The world burned with a deep infernal chaos. Rainbow Dash was nowhere to be seen. The miners crawled and crawled on broken limbs, beckoning her, praying to the last pony.

        Harmony sneered. She grasped Pinkie Pie with two front hooves and very courageously lied. “Look out! The frame's collapsing!” She flung the two of them towards the light, dislodging her invulnerable self from the mouth of the corridor. The dark tunnel swallowed the limping shadows in permanent oblivion. A wall of rock had fallen where the two fillies once stood. All that lingered beyond was a muffled chorus of agonized screams, forever sealed off in the bottomless grave of Consus.

        Harmony trembled, her glazed eyes locked to the bloodied rails of the minecart track. She was only residually aware of Pinkie Pie helping her up to her hooves and shouting something into her face. Soon, her vision was following the bouncing image of a pink shadow all the way past the rattling lanterns and into the cluster of workers filing up to fill the rusted elevators of the mineshafts. The rumbling of the dead world beyond persisted, like an endless rain of moon meteorites. This time, Harmony didn't have the bitter blessing of being alone in her shivers.

        The elevator doors opened with a metallic ring. Burning sunlight blinded the last pony's vision. She shaded her amber eyes and limped out alongside with a filly whose bright coat was stained with black ash. No less than ten paces, and she slowed her trot to an icy crawl. Her face wretched in unfathomable horror as she found herself stumbling upon a solid sea of suffering.

        Across the gray bosom that formed the bottom of the Dredgemane quarry, the quivering bodies of injured miners were arrayed in a geometric pattern. Canvas mats had been laid about with hauntingly practiced precision, and dozens upon dozens of anguished souls bled into the soft contours of them. An impromptu triage had arranged the victims of the mine collapse in layers of progressively worse conditions long before Harmony and Pinkie had even ascended to the surface.

        The last pony could barely turn her head, because no matter how far her eyes scanned left or right, all she saw were more and more bodies. There were countless droves of injured ponies, some with deep gashes carved into their torsos, others with their limb-joints hanging at obtuse angles, countless more clutching crimson fountains that enveloped their skulls and gaping mouths.

        The air was filled to the brim with agonized moans, punctuated at every other blood-curdling interval with a ghostly scream or shriek. Voices pleaded for spirits that were twice as dead as they were about to become. Gultophine's name floated over the bodies as if her wings had brought the exiled Goddess back in the midst of that misery. The cyclonic hollow of the grand, gaping quarry allowed no echo to escape the ears of both survivors and rescue workers alike.

        Paramedics in white garb sauntered emotionlessly through the fields of the dying, working in tandem to lay more bodies down across the canvas mats that hadn't yet been filled. A pair of volunteers bumped into Harmony, so that she stumbled into Pinkie and clutched the filly's torso as she looked after them. The volunteers carried a gurney atop which a limp body rested beneath a black tarp. A dangling tail of soot-stained hair fluttered in the infernal breaths of the suffering as the gurney was carried over to a taped-off area where several more slumped shapes rested under a sea of black sheets.

        “Har-Har...” Pinkie squeaked from a million miles away. “Y-You're hurting me.”

        Harmony winced and stopped clutching her anchor so hard. “I'm sorry, Pinkie...” She gulped and gazed limply over the bodies, bodies, bodies. “I'm just... so, so sorry,” the last pony murmured. She heard anguished, high-pitched cries. Her gaze tilted up. At the brim of the smoking quarry high above, a thick line of fillies and mares were being held back by a darkly armored militia. The wives and daughters of several maimed workers sobbed and called out for their indistinguishable loved ones far below. Beyond them, a line of laboring Dredgemaners trudged from factory to factory as if no holocaust had transpired whatsoever.

        There was a vicious tug to Harmony's turquoise vest. She gasped and glanced down to see a bloody stub stabbing at her torso. The meaty limb belonged to a quivering pony who's eyes had been torn loose along with the flesh from his brow. “Snkkkt... J-Just a drop... Just a drop of w-water, I b-beg of you.” He hissed through rivulets of crimson that ran down into his hissing lips as he fell back into a moaning slump. “Ohhhhhhhh Gultophine, forgive meeeee... Have m-mercy... Aaaughhh!”

        Harmony was speechless. A paramedic rushed up and brushed her aside like an errant gnat before tending to the tortured stallion's convulsing body. The last pony stumbled backwards and gazed down at where a red stain had drenched her Winter-Wrap Up vest. Before she could even register that sight, her ears were pricked by a distant, chanting voice.

        Glancing across the bed of moaning bodies, she spotted Bishop Breathstar marching icily down the aisles like he was in the middle of a rowdy congregation. His pale white horn shimmered as he levitated a scroll of Gultophine's Chronicles before him and muttered a passing prayer towards each dying body like he was emotionlessly inspecting tray after tray of tenderized meat. He sauntered straight past her, perhaps not even seeing the copper pegasus... perhaps not caring.

        Harmony heard yet another chanting voice. It had half the strength of Breathstar's, but twice the emotion. She gazed aside and her vision fluttered down onto the soft contours of Dawnhoof's form. The young Deacon had barely started his rounds, and already he was kneeling beside a dying miner's body, grasping his limb with a pair of soft hooves as he murmured words of mixed scripture and encouragement. Halfway through the intimate session, his chestnut eyes rose across the landscape, stumbled over so many jagged, crimson sights, and fell fatefully upon the last pony's gaze. What was shared between the two was blank and placid, until his half of the union blurred with tears. The priest in training swiftly and professionally dried himself with a blinking of his lids. He stumbled on towards the next soul in the shuddering sea beneath him.

        The time traveler's breath left her through pursing lips. She no longer knew where her anchor was. She hardly cared. It would be a blessing to leave this place in a green scream. Before she could contemplate the unthinkable, a dark shadow nearly ran her over. She stumbled back and blinked at the sight of Overseer Sladeburn trotting side-by-side with a clerk through the casualties of his industry.

        “How many have been lost?” the stallion in black working gear murmured.

        “We're guessing over one hundred and twenty,” his assistant remarked, pausing between canvas beds of shivering bodies to glance at a clipboard before him. “It's... It's far less than last time.”

        “I see. Be sure to note that for my report to Haymane.” Sladeburn gazed with squinting eyes towards the mouths of the mineshafts. “What of the day's extraction?”

        “It was safely dragged to the surface before the volunteers brought the survivors up.”

        “Good. Make a tally. I want to know an estimate of the profit loss by sundown.”

        Sladeburn marched off in a cloud of dust past Harmony. The last pony gazed through him with numb amber eyes. The horrified screams behind her wings drowned in a deep bass hum...

The roar in her ears persisted as she sat on the edge of the Immolatia Ward that evening, slumped in a chair and staring at the remaining soot on her hooves like so much Wasteland ash. None of the snowflakes from the future spoke to the last pony, or ever screamed of the many meat-strings and memories ripped from their owners. The Cataclysm was a horror of indescribable volume, and Scootaloo had never truly tasted of it. She was a fool to have ever thought she understood it, until now.

        She realized—deeply entrenched in the gray gasps of Stonehaven—that she wasn't looking at the finer details like the future scavenger she had always pictured herself as being. She was looking for colors, looking for a prismatic beam of light in the middle of the great darkness. A deep pit formed in the last pony's stomach as Harmony realized she had only ever built the rainbow signal for herself, and upon the crest of such a heart-splitting epiphany, she was helpless to respond to it. To acknowledge the hues of joy was to make this moment real, and she wasn't yet ready to buckle under the weight of it all.

        She wasn't even ready for Suntrot when the little filly strolled up, bathing that darklit edge of the ward in a golden light of her own.

        “Miss Harmony?”

        “Hmm...?” The last pony gazed up. The Ward had quieted down. The giggles had subsided into muted breaths as Nurse Angel Cake, Zecora, and Inkessa tucked several yawning foals into their beds at the conclusion of the bleeding day. “Oh... Hey there, kid...” Visitation hours were long over, but that night—of all nights—she and Pinkie hadn't been turned away. The pink pony in question sat in Ice Song's bed, clutching the shivering young colt to her as she lovingly and quietly stroked the tiny pony's threadbare mane. “I... Uhm...” Harmony exhaled weakly into the quiet shadows of the children's sterile home. “I'm sorry if I haven't been up to chatting that much today...”

        “It's okay,” Suntrot said with a gentle, innocent smile. “I have to go to bed soon. But I didn't want to go to sleep without saying hello to you.”

        “I see.” The last pony gulped. “Uhm... 'Hello'. How's that?”

        “Heeheehee... I like your voice, Miss Harmony.” The filly briefly coughed. “I bet if you sang, you'd sound like those rock ballads Auntie Pinkie Pie sometimes likes to share with us.”

        Harmony's lips painfully curved for the briefest of moments. “I doubt it, kid.”

        “Oh?”

        “Let's just say there're worse things in this world than bitter medicine. Face it, squirt. Your voice is three times more sweet than both mine and Auntie Pinkie Pie's combined.”

        “Heeheehee...” Suntrot stammered, then broke into a series of wheezing coughs.

        Harmony was stabbed to hear a haunting pitch in the foal's shuddering exhales, like a shrill whistle was lodged deep in her infernite-stained lungs. A pit of sorrow re-blossomed back in her Entropan gut from earlier. She struggled to so much as look in the girl's general direction.

        “There's commotion all over t-town...” Suntrot hissed, wiped a painful tear dry, and braved a solid breath as she gazed up at the “Canterlotlian visitor”. “Did something bad happen at the mines today, Miss Harmony?”

        “It's uh...” Harmony gulped. Her copper ears flicked, but still they couldn't shake loose the screams. “It's n-nothing for you to be concerned with, kid.” She smiled painfully down at the little filly and was only half-surprised to see the girl shivering. “What's the matter, are you cold?”

        “I-I can't stop it...” The filly nervously chuckled, her hooves clattering against the tile floor of the ward. “The blankets help, but I can't seem to get t-toasty enough these nights.” She gulped, her sunken eyes staring off beyond the walls of Stonehaven. “My parents used to have this wonderful f-fireplace where we lived. I dream of it sometimes...”

        Harmony blinked. She gazed up at an incoming, gray shadow. Inkessa stopped in her tracks upon making eye contact. There was no longer any malice in the nurse's pale expression. She waited upon the precipice of Harmony's next words before the last pony was even aware she would say them.

        “Hey kiddo...” Harmony murmured and smiled down at Suntrot. “Why don't you stick around with me some tonight?” She added in a soft breath. “I'll keep you warm...”

        “You will?” Suntrot briefly beamed.

        Harmony reached down and motioned with a single hoof. Suntrot gingerly grasped her limb, and when she did so the child felt as light as a moth-eaten leaf. The last pony effortlessly lifted the foal into her lap and wrapped her copper limbs around her.

        “Th-Thank you, Miss Harmony...” The child sighed against the pegasus' turquoise vest, as if the blood stain wasn't ever there to begin with. “I feel better already.”

        “Yeah...” The last pony held the dying past dearly as it trembled in her embrace. “No problem, kiddo.” Her face scrunched up. A sniffle, and she clenched her amber eyes shut to lock the tears in. She murmured a mute prayer of thanks, for the child's convulsions were just what she needed to camouflage her own. They melted together into the dark stretch of night. “No problem whatsoever....”

        I hate you. I hate you so very much. I hate you with the burning passion of all of my infernal, lonely days of suffering thrown together into one heaping crucible where I seek to burn your putrid effigy.

        I hate you. I abhor you. I curse every loveless, lifeless, light-starving square centimeter of you. Upon your forehead, I plant all of my despair. In the meat of your heart, I stab all of my fears. Into your gut, I poison you with all of my broken dreams.

        You are the predator who knows no sleep. You are the mindless, thoughtless, and soulless virus that festers in all the sacred places lost to us because you stole each and every one of them. There is no tome large enough to chronicle your bloody parade, to measure the infinitely deep pit you are filling with all of yesterday's corpses and none of tomorrow's roses.

        You have taken more from me than my parents. You have devoured more than my sunny days of childhood. You have evacuated me of all hope and enchantment. You have stripped the world around me of all magic, so that I must navigate the ashes from your wake in a sterile cocoon of loneliness in a futile attempt to contemplate the desolation left by your genocidal whimsy.

        There is nothing in this world that hasn't been touched by you, that hasn't been petrified by your leeching claws. You are the gardener of annihilation, the sower of pestilence and misery.

        Life is nothing but an accidental appendix to you. Every breath is a startled scream as we've only ever sprouted up in a fitful spasm before floating back down to your freezing embrace. You are the only reason we've ever contemplated light, because illumination is merely a freakish accident that flounders beyond the obsidian penumbra of your absolute opaqueness.

        You must revel in what you are. There can only be a thrill that courses through your shadowy veins. What creature devours as much as you do, snuffs out as many lights as you do, swallows as many hopes and dreams as you do—and somehow doesn't feel a sense of pride and elation in being the abridgment of all that's ever been or ever tried to be?

        You have existed all this time just to spite me. It is me that you've always wanted after the grand tragic history of the universe has run its course. I can boldly claim this only because I am the last Equestrian soul left to claim anything. Monsters of the Wasteland do not know you like I know you. They may occasionally be allies of you, but they've never been nemeses to you. They cannot afford the high seat of infamy that you have so egotistically planted beneath me. You must think of me as your trophy, a final and fitful morsel to struggle her shrieking way down your throat.

        I will not give you the pleasure. You will not enjoy me. When you taste of my meat and when you finally eat from my heart, it will taste bitter in your mouth. It will make you regret that you ever decided to end it all by ending me. When all is finally gone, you will be full of all ponydom, but you will forever hunger for something that you never knew you would crave for. Because once you will have consumed me, it will be you who is alone. It will be you who is the last of your kind, as you have only ever been a singular accident, the omnipresent problem made divine in the shell of your own fitful self-awareness. You will find that you'll be just as empty after devouring me as you were when you first ever ate of Consus.

        When that darkest of days finally comes, I hope that you choke.

        The shadows of the Dredgemane night bathed the fourth floor ward of Stonehaven like the inside of a sepulcher. From where Harmony sat with the slumbering body of Suntrot in her embrace, she watched listlessly as Angel Cake shuffled from bed to bed, closely checking on the sleeping foals. To the last pony's immediate right, Inkessa squatted on a stool before a nurse's station, filling out the latest weekly report on the children's condition. In the far corner, Zecora sat beside a bulletin board full of juvenile sketches, pouring her blue eyes over mounds of scrolls in a desperate attempt to think up new and more promising elixirs for the infirmed equines of that place.

        The room was gravely silent; a cough would sound like thunder between those walls. Regardless, the invalid children slept with immeasurable peace, filling the otherwise noisy place with an eerie serenity.

        Beyond the penumbra of Inkessa's lone lantern light, Pinkie Pie reclined in bed with the fitful body of Ice Song in her grasp. The filly's usually bright face was strangely blank, like a pink shadow encased in a suddenly silken frame. She stroked the bony curves in the colt's tiny neck, weathering his every random shiver with her loving limbs. Then, out from the kiss of shadows, Pinkie's forehead began convulsing a centimeter above her right eye. A gasp escaped her lips, and she stared with wide sapphires across the dark-lit hovel towards where her sister sat. The expression on the earth pony's face was catastrophic, as if something infinitely worse than a collapsing mine was about to transpire.

        “Oh, blessed Gultophine, spare us...” Inkessa exhaled in a sad breath.

        “H-Huh?” Harmony remarked.

        Inkessa flashed her a wilted stare while shuffling up from her station. “Pinkamena's right eyebrow is quivering.”

        “Yeah, so?” Harmony squinted after her. “What does... that... mean...?” The last pony's voice muted itself as she watched Inkessa, Angel Cake, and even a lone zebra shuffling up towards the bed in a somber circle.

        Pinkie stared at them all, her blue eyes curving inward. The pink pony's nostrils flared as she summoned a deep breath, swallowed her way through a bitter cloud, and gently lowered her chin to nuzzle the mane of the colt in her lap. “Ice Song?” The candy-colored filly smiled ever so gently. “Are you awake, sweetie?”

        “Mmmff... Nnngh... Auntie P-Pinkie Pie... ?” The shivering foal hissed at an odd angle towards the far shadows of the room. “Are y-you there... ?”

        “I'm here, sweetie,” Pinkie Pie sing-songed as her sister and fellow cohorts huddled around his soft, shuddering breaths. “Auntie Pinkie Pie hasn't left you for a second. Tell us... how do you feel?”

        “I feel... I f-feel...” The blue-haired colt wheezed. He opened his eyes to the dim lantern light, and when he did they were glazed orbs, like marbles deeply set in an azure glacier. “Auntie Pinkie Pie?”

        “Shhh... Just like I told you. I'm right here.”

        “Why...” He gulped. The little pony's shivers doubled, tripled. “Wh-Why can't I see you?”

        “But I can see you. We are both here, Ice Song.”

        “We're all here, Ice Song,” Inkessa's voice joined in. Hers and the other fillies' breaths formed a warm halo around him. “Me, Angel Cake, Zecora, Miss Harmony... We're all here. You're not alone, darling.”

        “I... I-I can't see any of you...” His blue lips quivered in time with his shakes. “I can't see anything.” His shivers briefly paused. A paleness washed over his already frozen features. “I'm... I-I... It's like I'm cr-crawling somewhere b-but I can't feel my hoofsies...” A sharp breath flew into him. He weathered the jolting impact in his lungs, the last strong thing he was capable of doing. “Oh Auntie Pinkie...” A tear trickled down his face, stained with jaundice. “Wh-Where am I crawling to?”

        “Shhh... Ice Song...”

        “I'm sc-scared. I-I'm so scared, Auntie. There is nothing there. Th-There is n-nothing...”

        “You have nothing to be afraid of, Ice Song,” she suddenly said, cuddling his shivering skull into the crook of her neck, drowning the last vestiges of him in her warmth. “Do you remember the words of my Grandma? Do you remember what I used to sing to you whenever I visited?”

        “You... Y-You sang...” His tear-stained face glistened in the faint touch of a dim lantern beyond. He leaned slowly away from it in an icy free-fall. “You s-s-sang...”

        “Giggle at the ghosties,” Pinkie Pie chirped with a voice as bright as the Sun. “That's what I tell myself to do, and it always helps. Whenever I am scared, whenever I feel alone in the dark, I know that the best way to deal with what frightens me is to laugh at it.”

        “L-Laugh... Auntie P-P-Pinkie Pie...?”

        “Heeheehee... Mmmhmmm...” She nuzzled him and murmured lovingly into his ear. “You are a brave, brave stallion, Ice Song. So handsome and strong. The shadows don't even know who they're dealing with. If you laugh at them, they will disappear. It's that easy! Besides... hehehe... wh-what pony doesn't like a good laugh?”

        Ice Song's blanching face fought through several heaving breaths at the end of Pinkie's utterance. He was suddenly deaf to the sniffling sounds that came from Nurse Angel and Inkessa as both tearing fillies leaned into each other. Zecora stared with a deadpan tempered by years of wisdom. The zebra glanced over her cloaked shoulder to look at Harmony across the way.

        The last pony stared from the shadows. Her limbs clung tighter to the warm fossil that was Suntrot in her embrace. Nopony else noticed, but Ice Song's jaded eyes had pierced the shadows of the room to find her.

        “It's... th-that easy...?” The little foal sputtered.

        “Yes, darling.” Pinkie Pie cuddled and rocked him gently. Her breath was a candied whisper in the bitter cold of the night. “It always has been, and it always will be. Life is a party, Ice Song. So laugh. Laugh at what scares you. Show the shadows who is the boss.”

        “Boss... of th-the p-party...” Ice Song murmured. The edge of his pale lips twitched. “Streamers. So m-much cake and fr-frosting...” The twitching increased. A pair of copper shadows billowed briefly in his irises, and then the twitching transformed into a porcelain smile as he cackled at them. “Hahah... ha... ha...” The smile froze as his body froze. Ice Song's skull tilted towards the earth as his torso deflated into the hollow of Pinkie's embrace.

        Angel Cake shuddered. Inkessa sniffled and held her associate closely. Zecora somberly hung her head and trotted over to murmur something into a solemn Pinkie's ears.

        In a room full of bodies, only Harmony was alone. She festered in a frozen abyss that cocooned her, for the last pony saw something at the climax of Ice Song's life that nopony else was capable of seeing. The colt was not laughing at death when he was taken.

        He was laughing at her.

        An hour and a half later, the stars hung over the copper pegasus' head as she sat in a slump just outside the south face of Stonehaven Sanitarium. She did not stare at the constellations that she had traveled back twenty-five years to capture. Instead, Harmony was gazing deeply at the granite earth, the dead trees, the rusted iron gates, the steep canyon walls, all the endless desolation of a land that had decayed well before it's time of slaughter.

        There was no basin that could hold that single day's worth of dread, no record that could capture the moans, the sobs, and the death rattles of Dredgemane. The time traveler shuddered, for she realized that it was all but a pin drop in the legacy of the Grave of Consus, of the grand lecherous lengths of history itself.

        She briefly glanced down at her turquoise vest. In addition to a now-blackened bloodstain, a few stray strands of golden hair had stuck to her outfit. Harmony recognized them as the molting refuse of Suntrot's mane. In one evening, the last pony had communed with both the dead and the dying. Not even two and a half decades spent piercing the horrors of the Wasteland could have branded her with a fraction of the blemish that she had come to weather that day.

        “And so it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end.”

        Harmony twitched. She spun about and glanced mutely towards the front end of Stonehaven. Beyond the immense row of granite steps, an orange unicorn could be seen tying straight the last of many boxes atop a rickety wooden supply wagon.

        “Alas, the sun has set on Gultophine's Refuge,” Vimbert bitterly slurred with an off-color smirk as he tugged and tested his ropes. “And when Celestia raises the sun again, this will still ever faithfully be Dredgemane.” He exhaled long and hard, leaned against his wagon, and stared limply in the pegasus' direction. “If there's one thing that faith is good at in this life, it's keeping everything the way it is.”

        Harmony merely stared at him.

        “So you've seen the worst that the mines can spit out. So you've seen what this lovely institute of Haymane's has to offer to the future of poisoned foals.” He reached into a pocket of his black jacket and whipped out a silver flask. “And though you've come from the well-to-do but definitively posh circles of the Canterlotlian Elite, you gotta stand back and ask yourself, 'Is it really such an Epona-forsaken surprise?'” He squinted his blue eyes at her as he slowly unscrewed the cap to his alcoholic vessel. “Before there was Nightmare Moon, there was Discord. Before there was the Celestial Civil War, there were the Chaos Wars. Before there was Snow Ballad or whatever-the-heck the latest victim's name was... there was Consus.” He raised the flask so that its silver body glinted in the burning glare of stars. “Welcome to the Grave of all our yesterdays and tomorrows, for they're all so delightfully identical.”

        The orange unicorn took a liberal swig of his vodka. After a groaning exhale, he slumped further against the wooden body of his cart and slurred towards the shadows gathering between him and the time traveler.

        “Y'know, I wasn't always a liver-rotting, bitter-tongued, tactless janitor at some Epona-forsaken hole-in-the-wall excuse for a hospital. Heheh...” He grinned wickedly her way, but his eyes were as tired as a dying generation of grave diggers. “This is the part where you hand the rambling freeloader a modicum of bits and point him in the direction of the nearest drinking hole.” A stifled belch. He gazed beyond the granite reaches of Stonehaven and murmured further, “As a matter of fact, I used to be a teacher. A professor, mind you, with shining diplomas earned after graduating from both the University of Fillydelphia and the Manehattan Institute of Fine Learning.” His gaze thinned to match a placid curve to his lips. “I lectured to entire rooms full of hundreds of students, such bright and enthusiastic minds that desired everything golden and glistening in this world yet knowing nothing of its darker, far more tragic fossils.”

        The air between them thinned. The world turned colder, though there was no wind. Harmony's gaze fell from the unicorn's orange figure, but her ears were trained towards him the whole time.

        “One year, nearly a decade into my illustrious teaching career, I had a seat offered me in the honorary faculty of Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. But do you know what I did?” He swirled the flask in his hoof as his brow briefly furrowed. “I turned it down. And for what? I was young and brash then, and I wanted to travel abroad. I wanted to pass the torch of knowledge and education to the far corners of Equestria, to spread light where there was so much ignorance and ennui. So, I came here, and I partnered with the Dredgemane Academy of Arts and Sciences to offer a study course in Equestrian History. I wasn't alone either; I brought my wife and children with me.”

        Harmony glanced up at that. He saw it, and his smile was a pathetically sadistic thing.

        “Oh yes, I had a family: a wife whose eyes glistened like the firmaments of Princess Nebula, and two darling children—fillies—whose everyday laughter briefly turned the canyons of this place into melodic concert halls.” His eyes briefly dilated as he sought to chase down the whispery threads of his own voice. “They even used to sing to me when I came home from late-night grading. I could have gone for an entire day without eating or sleeping, so long as I had... as I had that to look forward to...”

        A brief silence. He drowned himself with another swig, cleared his throat, and exhaled the bitter exhaust of the vodka.

        “Well.” He grunted. “One day, there was a collapse in the quarry, a tragically horrible event that made what happened today look like a little foal kicking a sand castle over.” He motioned blindly towards the northwest edge of the continent with a waving hoof. “It was barely two years into my residency here, and I wanted to prove to Dredgemane that I was an able-bodied citizen. So, I volunteered for the rescue team. What followed was a week of sights and sounds that I never, ever could have predicted myself fathoming. But, like a good Equestrian... like a good Dredgemaner, I slugged through it. I went the long haul, and I can say without a drop of overinflated pride that I actually did manage to save a hoof-ful of lives that week. When I returned home to the comfort and loving support of my wife, it all suddenly seemed worthwhile.”

        He swallowed down something hard. His lower left limb began tapping rhythmically against the wooden wheel of his wagon.

        “I started noticing the symptoms in my family barely three weeks after I came back from volunteering at the quarry,” he slurred. “First, it was coughing. Then, it was a numbness in their limbs. Then my darling daughters—in a sight that I can't shake even to this day—were found lying on the floor between their beds, paralyzed, with horrible trails of jaundice lining their mouths. When I called the local doctor and brought him in to make a house call, his first move was to quarantine my entire apartment. What was more, he quarantined myself as well. I was just as confused as I was horrified, and it didn't help things anymore when he finally explained it all to me. You see, I knew residually about the realities of Immolatia, and I realized that it was impossible for members of my family to suddenly suffer the symptoms of it without any prior exposure to infernite. It was then that I learned that they had indeed been exposed to it, and that exposure was me.”

        Vimbert pointed at his shattered horn as his eyes took on a bitter hue.

        “I didn't get this wonderful keepsake by head-butting every drunken moron who owes me bits downtown. This is the result of what Dredgemane doctors called Interior Alcornia Inflammatory Decay. When a unicorn's system is assailed with a terrible infection, sometimes it is the final recourse of the body to expel the disease through the magical leylines in our nervous systems, hence the decaying horn. As it turns out, I was indeed infected by Infernite after one week of cleaning up at the quarry. The reason why I didn't develop symptoms is because for some pathetic, cosmic joke I was genetically immune to the fatal slings of Immolatia. I was a professor of history and literature, so I never quite possessed the mathematical skills to explain the absurdity of the situation to myself, but I once read in a scientific periodical that the odds of a pony simultaneously being immune and contagious in the wake of Immolatia is one out of one hundred million, and yet I was both of those very things... and my family died because of it, because of me.”

        Harmony was silent. She watched as the orange shadow of a pony sauntered over to the front of his cart.

        “But, alas, I've been through all the sobs. I've been through all the grief and doubt and self-hate and all that other wonderful fluff.” He pocketed his flask away and began slowly tying himself to the rig of the wagon full of supplies. “The reason I'm telling you all this, Miss Harmony, is so that maybe you can understand why I'm here, in that it's for a different reason than why everypony else is still here. You think that I don't give a flying crap about the children in this hospital where I work? Lady, that can't be further from the truth. I'm the one who has to wheel those poor little saps off to the crematorium when their time comes. Yes, I stayed in Dredgemane. After all these years, after I've lost my family, after I've lost my fortune, after I've lost my teaching career and jaded sense of pride—I'm still here because I have to watch and see. I have to stare as each one of those unlucky infants go up in smoke.  I have to witness for myself that this town is as miserably unchanging as I've ever cursed it to be in those dark days when I bathed in the ashes of my family's transient shadows. I used to be a teacher who shared with hundreds of young, yearning students the secrets of the ages, when in fact there's just one secret left that's been evading me, and that's the secret to what makes life so goddess-awfully absurd. You wanna know what the cherry on top is?” He finished with the rigging and smiled crookedly her way like an inverse mule. “It's consumed the last vestiges of my own life to realize that none of it was worth it. But it's too late for all that now. So long as the bar's open, and janitors can still be paid, I can pretend to be okay with it.”

        Harmony was no longer looking at him. He was aware of it. So he briefly leaned over from the wagon and whistled. Once he caught her gaze again, he spoke in a final, somber breath.

        “Leave, Miss Harmony. Leave Dredgemane before it devours you as it has me. There is no hope for you here. There is no hope for those dying children. And there is most certainly no hope for Canterlot or Celestia or who-the-heck ever to bring light to this corpsecape—be it by books or by bonfires.” Vimbert stared ahead towards the gray heart of town. “Haymane's right to be casting a dark shroud over this place. The best graves are the ones that are kept covered.” With that, the unicorn broke into a lurching canter, and was gone.

        Harmony was alone, like she always was, like everypony always was. The distant echoes against the canyon wall didn't break her from this brutally honest spell. Neither did the hooftrots of Pinkie Pie as she suddenly emerged from the granite entrance of Stonehaven, glanced every which way, and finally sauntered over to join the copper pegasus' side.

        “Har-Har, I've been looking all over for you. I'm not used to us not being in the same room together; are you alright?”

        The last pony was dead silent.

        “Inkessa's headed on home. She wanted to speak to you about something, but you weren't around. I told her I'd track you down. In the meantime, Zecora's off in the guest building, trying to fix together another brew. She sent Bert off to gather more stuff from the local pharmacy. Did you see him just now? Huh?”

        Harmony gazed numbly towards the thin canyon bleeding away from the dead end of Stonehaven.

        Pinkie Pie blinked. She suddenly grinned. “Well, whatever! Bert may be good at delivering stuff, but he sure is slow at it! Maybe you and I can stop by the pharmacy tomorrow after we do another of Marble Cake's rounds.”

        “So much cake and frosting...” the pegasus muttered at last.

        “Hmm? What was that?”

        Harmony dully glared the bright filly's way. “Is that all you ever think about? Sweets? Party favors? Gags and jokes and other trivial absurdities?”

        “Nuh uh! That isn't true! I also think about puppy dogs and rainbows and Sapphire Shores records and... uhmmm...” Pinkie tapped an errant hoof to her chin, scrunched her face, then smirked. “...this really handsome hunk of a stallion who lives at Sweet Apple Acres. I bet you know the onnnnnne...” She playfully nudged the copper pegasus turquoise vest—

        —until Harmony batted the filly's limb away. “Nnngh!” She suddenly grumbled. “Why is everything such a friggin' game to you?”

        “A game?” Pinkie's eyes twitched. “Who ever heard of 'Pin the Tail on the Everything'?”

        “Miss Pie, I'm serious—”

        “Pfft! Har-Har, you're always serious!”

        “Did this entire day just not even happen?!” Harmony exclaimed. “Were you not there when the mines collapsed and killed dozens of townsponies? Were you not... h-holding him in your limbs when h-he gave his last breath?”

        “Who?” Pinkie hummed. “Ice Song?”

        “Miss Pie, who else could I possibly be talking about?”

        “I know what happened tonight, Har-Har,” Pinkie Pie said in a low voice. Her smile this time was a slow and evolutionary thing. “And I know that it could have been so much worse. That's why I took it upon myself to be there when it happened, like I've always tried to be. In the end, Ice Song knew that he wasn't alone. I'd even say that he was happy when he left us. Heeheehee! You heard the way that he giggled, did you not?”

        Harmony stared at the candy-colored filly. Slowly, very slowly, she trotted over until she was face-to-face with her. Her eyes were firm but solid ambers as she opened her lips in a cold exhale. “Pinkie Pie... you cannot live your life through other ponies!”

        Harmony's sudden shouts were like gunshots against the granite walls of that place. Pinkie Pie shivered immensely.

        The last pony thunderously continued: “All day—all friggin' week—we've been surrounded by death and misery and you have the gall to excuse yourself for what you've done?! Pinkie, you lied to that little child! You stabbed your way into his suffering, confused mind and mixed his thoughts with your overinflated opinion just as he ran out of time to feel anything with the last vestiges of comprehension left to him! Of course Ice Song was alone! We are all alone!” The last pony waved frantically towards the suffocating walls of the entrenched world. “This cosmic... f-fiasco that we call life separates and alienates us! And yet that is exactly what makes us all unique and sacred! How dare you invade the mind of a child and steer it into oblivion like you did?!”

        “H-He was j-just scared, Har-Har!” Pinkie gulped and wilted from the pegasus' furious figure. “I-I didn't want his last thoughts to be full of f-fear and dread—”

        “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe that's what we all have coming to us?! That maybe actually dealing with that is what defines an equine soul when he or she passes beyond?! Well, Ice Song is never going to taste of that epiphany, because you frickin' robbed it of him!”

        Pinkie suddenly frowned at her companion. “Okay, now you're just not being fair—”

        “Fair?!” Harmony sputtered. “Fair?!” She snarled. “Grow up, you spineless, hare-brained child! At least you've had the chance to! That's another thing Ice Song or Suntrot or the rest of those doomed kids will never have the chance to frickin' do! What's your excuse?! Why won't you grow up and act your age for one measly moment in your life?! Maybe then, 'Auntie Pinkie Pie' will see the world for how hopeless it is and how pathetically stupid you look while tying balloons and confetti to the bleeding corners of it!”

        “If life is so horrible to you, Har-Har, then what's the harm in trying to make ponies smile?!”

        “Because one pony's ridiculous dream means nothing when it's stacked up against the fossils that history has left behind!” the time traveler barked. She stared into Pinkie's twitching blue pools and a brown shade was staring straight back. “What hope do you have, huh?! What hope does any one pony have in... in dr-dredging up what's left of this doomed world?! What could you possibly do to bring light to such pathetic darkness when all is dead and gone?! What... nnngh... What are you even frickin' doing here?! Don't you know that this pathetic experiment was over before it even started?!”

        The air filled with a hollow panting. It took the last pony the veritable space of three draconian centuries to realize the hyperventilating sounds belonged to her own lungs. She coasted down a river of sweat and quivered as the brown shapes disappeared in a blue-eyed blink, and suddenly her anchor was gazing worriedly at her.

        “Har-Har? Are you okay?”

        The last pony gulped. “I'm alive,” she murmured, then added in an even drier voice: “For what it's worth.”

        Pinkie Pie leaned forward and placed a sympathetic hoof on the pegasus' heaving shoulder. “Do you wanna talk about it—?”

        An explosion rocked the heart of town. Both ponies gasped with a jolt, the bitter memories of the quarry rocketing up to the quivering nub of each filly's cerebellum. They each flashed a look over the canyon walls, and were only partially relieved to see—instead of soot and flame—a plume of prismatic fireworks erupting somewhere beyond town square.

        “Oh, whew...” Pinkie Pie let loose a hot breath and giggled. “Hehehehe... The Biv always has the best timing.”

        “That's a matter of opinion.” Harmony spat. She coldly trotted off.

        “Har-Har?” Pinkie craned her neck after the pegasus. “Where are you going?”

        “I'm off to do the one thing that matters anymore in this town.” Harmony frowned and hissed over her shoulder. “Some dreams are more worth killing than others. You don't agree?—Then stay behind. You won't have to hear me ramble on ever again.” She broke into an angry gallop, burning her way through town and challenging the green flames to an immutable race.

        She would not win. “H-Hey!” Pinkie Pie swiftly bounced after her in a breathless scramble. “Wait up! Slow down, Har-Har! Come on!” The dead end of Stonehaven was a mute sarcophagus in the wake of their separate departures.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        In Downtown Dredgemane, chaos had reached a fever pitch. Beneath a crackling storm of rainbow-colored fireworks, guard ponies ran out from their various homes, furiously slapping on layers of dark armor as they filled the street with a progressively thick militia. The cobblestone sea of names rumbled under their trampling hooves. The clamoring of their armor filled the air and a sky-shattering array of swathing searchlights pierced the starry sky.

        Perched high above the town that was being angrily roused from its slumber, the Royal Grand Biv stood atop the City Council Building. The structure's rooftop had been drenched in prismatic paint, and it still leaked from the edge of its metal shingles. With a glinting of ruby goggles, the mute miscreant observed the direct result of its hoofwork, then galloped away just as an errant searchlight brushed past its multicolored coattails. Several guardponies barked and hollered from down below. Hooves pointed up high and several net guns fired in futility at the Biv's darting shadow as it hopped from rooftop to rooftop and made its way far from the rampaging defenders of Dredgemane.

        Undeterred, the Royal Grand Biv dodged two more blind volleys of net guns and leaped into the misty air. The figure eventually came to a stop in the middle of a long, thin alleyway lined on either side with abandoned market stalls. The shadows here tripled beneath several two-story buildings and the lurching canyon walls above them. The distant clamoring of the guards was now a harmless murmur.

        The Biv paused as if for a much-needed breath. The masked pony glanced back over its billowing cloak. Nothing but the shapes of several wooden stands lingered behind or beyond it. With a softer gait, the rainbow-colored vandal trotted towards the nearest intersection of thin streets—

        “Raaaugh!” Harmony suddenly spun around the corner, swinging a splintery plank of firewood.

        The Royal Grand Biv took the thunderous impact in the skull. Its goggles rattled as it literally backflipped from the bludgeoning, twirled to its hooves, and slid to an awkward stop against a wooden market stall.

        The last pony tossed the scant remaining shreds of lumber to the cobblestone and marched furiously towards the fiend. A breathless Pinkie Pie slid to a stop behind her. “Whew!” She panted. “It's a breath of fresh air to have a drop on the Biv for once!”

        “Unless you have anything useful to contribute, shut your trap,” Harmony grunted without looking. Her amber eyes were burning twin holes in the the Biv's mask from afar. “I'm beyond tired. This scuffle here is going to be our last.”

        The Biv did not back away. With a metallic ring, it extended its dual fans of prismatic daggers and charged the last pony. Its violent attack was frozen in place by a mighty, copper hoof pressed against the nape of its cowled neck.

        “You think this is a game?” Harmony snarled. If an equine could grow fangs, she'd be the first. “You've caught me on a bad day.” With a menacing roar, she hooked the Biv's neck in the crook of her upper limbs and body-slammed the two of them through a collapsing market stand. Wooden beams shattered and bits of miscellaneous goods rained across the cobblestone. The Biv actually lost a breath, a high-pitched and sputtering thing, as it struggled and finally bucked Harmony off of her.

        The last pony hobbled back against a pile of dilapidated wood. She flinched as the Biv swung its serrated cloak at her skull. Harmony reached up and grabbed a length of the rainbow-colored material. She yanked hard, hoisting the Biv's body into an Entropan hoof which she mercilessly flung into the masked pony's quivering gut. The vandal's limbs quivered twitchingly from the menacing blow.

        “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie called from the shadows. There was a naked, nervous pitch in her otherwise bubbly voice. “The idea is to capture the Biv! Please don't hurt her—!”

        “What's wrong?” Harmony hissed as she struggled and wrestled with the masked equine. “Is this not the happy ending that you wanted?!” As soon as that was uttered, the Biv kicked against the cobblestone with a renewed strength. The last pony let loose a muffled roar as the two ponies stampeded together across the rows of the empty marketplace. They smashed through several successive wooden stands before sprawling across the alleyway in a spray of splinters.

        The Biv could be heard wheezing underneath its mask. It scampered and struggled to break off into a gallop. Harmony hissed, forcing herself into a full-bodied lunge as she grasped onto the figure's coattails with twin hooves. The Biv quite desperately bucked her rear limbs back, incidentally kicking the last pony square in the face. The world briefly danced in a green-flaming blink, and any synapses inside Harmony's angry brain that hadn't snapped did so right then.

        “Nnnngh—Raugh!” She flung her wings and bull-tackled the Biv. She slammed the figure skull-first into the brick wall of a two-story building. Amber eyes twitching, she repeatedly slammed the figure's face against the impervious architecture, panting through the fine dust being kicked up between the two. Just as she grasped the Biv's shoulders—this time in two hooves—she sputtered as the vandal impacted the small of her throat with the back of its cowled skull.

        The Biv bucked her off of its body and spun with a flurry of rainbow-colored daggers. Harmony ducked, spun to the side, grabbed a wooden support beam to a market stand in her teeth, and swung the thing like a club across the Biv's chest. The Biv went teetering backwards into the alleyway where a gasping Pinkie Pie watched in a sudden panic.

        Harmony was already charging through another collapsing stall. Halfway through her sprint, the Biv unsheathed a bright confetti launcher from beneath its cape. Pinkie Pie saw the cannon and immediately gasped, “Har-Har! Look out—!”

        “Haaugh!” Harmony flew at the cretin. The Biv aimed at the copper pegasus' airborne dive, but was plowed to the ground right when it pulled the trigger. The cannon fired at an awkward angle, and the plume of rainbow colored confetti caught a flinching Pinkie Pie in the chest.

        “Ackies!” The candy-colored filly shrieked as she was propelled far across the alleyway. Pinkie Pie bounced off a wall with a grunt and fell harmlessly down into a splattering market wagon full of fruit. From within, she squirmed and struggled, her startled voice muffled as she was blind to the chaos unfolding beyond.

        Harmony and the Biv wrestled and struggled across the cobblestone. The figure whipped out a crossbow and fired a sparkler at the copper pegasus' skull. Harmony effortlessly dodged the blast, headbutted the Biv, spun, and kicked the weight of the cloaked figure off her so that it flew like a ragdoll into a second-story window. Fissures formed from the jolting vandal's impact. The Biv slumped down to the street. It briefly limped and struggled to trot away... until Harmony flew into it one last time with a merciless hoof to the gut. The Biv lurched, exhaled sputteringly, and slumped down to the ground in a wilting cascade of exhausted pants...

        The battle was over, and Harmony knew it. Still, there was no relief to her trembling, Entropan soul-self. There wouldn't be until after she did what she had to do next.

        “Don't you get it?!” The pegasus angrily straightened her green beret as she trotted over and leered above the cretin. “This was never some frickin' game. You are nothing but an insult to all the ponies who have died today, who have ever died in this miserable town. Gultophine help you, ya creep.” She knelt down and hissed. “Cuz it's high time you owned up to all you've ever done. All of us have to grow up eventually, no matter how painful.” She gripped her teeth over the edge of the figure's tattered cowl and flung it off, fatefully unmasking the Royal Grand Biv. “So grow up—!” Harmony looked down. Her lips froze in an incalculable wretch.

        A pair of golden eyes darted nervously away from the last pony's gaze. A gray shadow haunted the crumbled arteries of Dredgemane. As the distant thunder of militia ponies grew ever angrily closer, a mute and trembling Blinkaphine shriveled under Harmony's shadow.

        Harmony stumbled backwards, her eyes convulsing, her mouth navigating a forest of unpronounceable words. She listened for her own breath, but all she could hear was Ice Song's rattling laughter. All she could see were the twin copper shadows in the colt's glazed eyes. Haymane's wheels squeaked somewhere beyond the witless whimper of those bleeding seconds, and suddenly everything the Mayor had ever said suffocated her more than any collapsing mineshaft, for it was all so terribly cold. Dredgemane was a frozen reflection of the Wasteland in reverse-time, and the last of the world's colors had died, for she had killed it. Somewhere, a bum mule brayed with simultaneous sorrow and gaiety.

        The “Canterlotlian Clerk” had many things to do. She had to bind and shackle this miscreant who was cowering before her. She had to turn the Royal Grand Biv in to the Dredgemane militia. She had to do her duty for an equine civilization she had long lost her chance to bring structure and order to. The last pony had to do all of these things, but all she could think about was the smile of a golden little foal, and how her grandest accomplishment as a time traveler would only tear that sunny smile to ribbons. As Pinkie Pie's body stirred in the fruit cart behind, and as the guard ponies' hooves stomped ever closer, she finally understood just why her rainbow signal was useless in the future. There was nothing to dredge up from a grave of murdered dreams. The Cataclysm had turned the bodies of all ponies to ash. Harmony never knew what ended their souls, until now.

        “Go.”

        Blinkaphine jolted. Her silver lips pursed and her golden eyes quivered up towards the copper figure.

        “Did you hear me or didn't you?!” Harmony's whisper morphed into a snarl as she flung the mask and goggles down at the ghostly sibling of Pinkie. The last pony's breath was a panting, threadbare thing beneath the echoes of the incoming militia. “They'll be here any second! So take your crap and friggin' go!”

        Blinkaphine trembled, clutching the mask to herself. She glanced at Harmony, at the stirring form in the fruitcart, and then up towards the stars. Like a rocket ship, she bolted up from the floor and perched onto the top of a market stall. She flung her cowl back over her face, extended a pair of razor-sharp wings, and glided up towards a rooftop. She clambered, struggled, then galloped majestically away just as the guards arrived at the scene.

        “There! The Biv! I see her!”

        “She's getting away!”

        “Come on! We'll cut her off at Ember Street!”

        “Wow, will you take a look at the mess here! Must have been quite the slugfest—”

        “We can sight-see later! Move it! Haymane's counting on us!”

        Harmony slowly, icily slumped down to her haunches as the waves of furious guards surged past her. She stared with a perpetual numbness at the stars glittering beyond the rooftops and cliff-faces of that cemetery city. So engrossed was she in nothingness that she barely noticed when a fruit-stained Pinkie Pie finally climbed her way out of the cart and stumbled wetly to the copper pegasus' side.

        “Whew! Boy, was that embarrassing! Heeheehee—Ahem. So, did we get her this time?”

        “G-Get her...?” Harmony slurred. “No. No, we didn't. She...” She gulped. “It got away. The Royal Grand Biv r-rides again...” She hung her face defeatedly to the cobblestone, drowning herself in the names of the dead, pondering if they too were laughing at her.

        Harmony was still staring at the names as she marched in an icy trot through the abandoned trenches of Dredgemane night. Several posters announcing “Gultophine's Harvest” stretched across the granite walls on either side of her. The signs were colorless, unimaginative things, harkening all citizens to burn what was most precious to them. The last pony briefly pondered if the rainbow itself could burn. Would it produce the ash of the Wasteland?

        There was suddenly a bouncing pink clown beside the last pony. “Well, even if you did get a little hot-headed towards the end there, I think you've done a fantastic job! Haymane's gotta be nothing more than a King of Grumps to not see how awesomely close you got to capturing the Biv for him on sooooo many occasions! Heeheehee. Y'know, for the longest time, I thought Dredgemane never could afford a sports team. But you and the militia these past few days? Heck, I've not even seen that much excitement at a Wonderbolts show! I am so gonna tell Dashie and AJ and Twi and the others about this entire week! Heeheehee! I bet I could even make a novel out of it!”

        Harmony said nothing. She was suddenly thinking about trolls. In all of her years of piercing the twilight with an artificial rainbow, those murderous creatures were all she ever managed to summon. She used to think it was because they only wanted to devour her. But then she was beginning to ponder if they too used to be creatures that dreamed, that they had in the past transformed into the heartless monstrosities that the crucible of time had forged in them. Perhaps all life in Equestria was evolving to become the perfection that was the trolls' one-ness, their hive mind, something that was brutally structured but singularly beautiful, like Consus before the Sundering. There was something poetic in that essence, a glory that Haymane had to have seen, a magnificence that he had infected the time traveler's mind with, however briefly, until she witnessed her reflection in Blinkaphine's golden eyes and saw something pale, leathery, and colorless that would have chased a future scavenger into hiding.

        “What do you think, Har-Har? Could I write a book and somehow not have it shelved in the 'Home and Cooking' section? Though 'home-cooking' would be absolutely hilarious. Heeheehee... 'Do you want fries with your crawlspace? How about some salt on your water heater?’”

        “Miss Pie...” Harmony slurred. It was a weak, humble voice. All of the anger had been long hollowed out of her like a dying tree. “What if you found out that your...” She winced, gulped, and started over. “What would you do if you suddenly found out that you could no longer return to Dredgemane, not like you've always done these last few years of your life.”

        “You mean if I did something that was—like—the Noodle Incident to the Ninety-Ninth Power?”

        “Err.... Y-Yeah, sure.”

        “Well, that would make me a very sad pony.” Harmony briefly blinked above a dead expression. This was all too fatefully swallowed up by a bright grin. “I guess I would have to write my friends and family a lot, then! I'd get Twilight to lend me her dragon apprentice and together we'd send dozens if not hundreds of pamphlets to Stonehaven, signed by Auntie Pinkie Pie and perfumed with cinnamon! There's no mail like that which smells of muffins! Though, come to think of it, that counts for all the mail in Ponyville. Huh... I wonder why that is...”

        “What if... erm... What if you couldn't even do that?” Harmony gazed up finally at her pink anchor. “What if you got completely shut off from your hometown because something horrible happened, something that you couldn't possibly have known about to begin with?” She gulped. “And it wasn't your fault... it wasn't fair.”

        “Brrrrr... I shudder to think!”

        “Try and think, Miss Pie. For once—Try to imagine the most horrible, most terrible thing that could ever happen to you and try and perceive yourself past it.”

        “Heeheeheehee...” Pinkie very softly, very warmly chuckled.

        Harmony glanced at her with a thin pair of ambers.

        Pinkie smiled her way, a very gentle thing. “Silly Har-Har, do you really think I haven't ever done that? Do you think I've not been doing just that all of my adult life?” She blinked with a mischievous grin flung towards the stars. “Oh wait, that's right! 'I never grew up'! Nya nyaaaa—Hehehehe...”

        The last pony gulped painfully. She gave the dismal, gray walls of that town a wilted glance, then turned to look at Pinkie once again. “What is it that brings you back here, Miss Pie? You have Ponyville. Ponyville is warm, happy, and full of colors. Why do you love Dredgemane so much? Is it because you were foaled here?”

        “It's very simple, Har-Har.” Pinkie Pie playfully balanced herself on the edge of a street curb as her bright mane hair glistened in the flickering torchlamps above. “Some places in Equestria, places that the Sun has forgotten, just need to be loved. Just like those poor little squirts at Stonehaven need to be loved.” She hopped onto the sea of cobblestone names and winked the copper pegasus' way. “It's just like how I can't seem to shake you, ya think?”

        Harmony stared for many lurching seconds, but all she could see was Pinkie's smile. It was an eternal thing, far deeper than the shadow of Consus. Before she could brave a breath to reply, a flurry of hooves lit up the misty streets ahead of them.

        The two fillies glanced to see several citizens—elder council members and grimly garbed mares and stallions—hurrying their way towards the Town Square in the center of Dredgemane.

        “Hey!” Pinkie Pie bounced. “What's all the commotion?! Is there a parade we don't know about?”

        “Far from it, Miss Pie!” A graying pony called back through the night-drenched ravine as he shuffled along. “Your father, Quarrington, has ordered an emergency meeting of the Council per Haymane's request!”

        “Daddy and Mister Grumps?!” Pinkie blinked her blue eyes curiously. “What for?”

        “There's been a development! It seems as if we've had an outsider spreading some heretical voodoo through the halls of Stonehaven! Right now, the Council is investigating it!”

        “Wait Wait Wait—” Harmony cackled as she marched up and waved a copper hoof. “What the heck is all this about 'voodoo' and 'Stonehaven'?”

        “Haven't you heard?! Ol’ Vimbert, the former professor from Fillydelphia—he told the council the whole thing!” The elder pony huffed and puffed in an indignant breath. “Some zebra shaman's been messing with the poor, afflicted children of Dredgemane and the Mayor's grilling her as we speak!”

        “No way! B-Bert wouldn't do something like that to Zecchy!” Pinkie suddenly trembled. She gulped and glanced fitfully Harmony's way. “W-Would he?”

        Harmony's amber eyes narrowed. A color was finally returning to her vision, and all of it crimson. She suddenly snarled in an icy tone, “Where is Haymane?”

        When Harmony and Pinkie burst through the doors to the City Council, the commotion was deafening. The usually dark and dimly-lit place was electrified in a continuous, heated exchange of growling voices, deep-throated barks, glaring accusations, and angry hoof-pointing.

        At least one hundred equine figures were occupying the vibrating lengths of that place, from citizens to elder advisers to industrial representatives to shifty-eyed guards. Many big, important, and infinitely perturbed ponies of Dredgemane were there, including the big three: Bishop Breathstar, Overseer Sladeburn, and Mayor Haymane himself stood flanking the Council Table. Quarrington Pie and his fellow seat members were attempting to bring order to the ear-splitting chaos. Standing in the center of the broad room's shadows, flanked by guards, was an exasperated Vimbert trying his best to get his voice heard. A few paces to his right, flanked by an even thicker piece of the militia, was—

        “Zecchy!” Pinkie Pie gasped. She bounded brightly under lanternlight and jumped to embrace the gray-cloaked Zecora. “What happened?! Why is everypony looking at you all funny—?”

        A glinting of metal lit the air as several polearms and clubs extended from the guards who were standing in front of the zebra. With intimidating glares, they forced Pinkie Pie to stumble back in time for the last pony to rush up and grasp her.

        “Okay, just what in the name of Canterlot is going on around here?!” Harmony barked. She flashed her angry glares across the guards, the Council, and the Dredgmane Trinity all the same. Finally, her piercing amber eyes burned a hole in Haymane's sandy forehead. “Why are you treating Miss Zecora like a prisoner?!”

        “She is not a prisoner, Miss Harmony,” the mayor said in a voice that was disproportionately calmer than the rest of the room. It was difficult to hear the softly-spoken elder as he muttered above the echoing noise of Dredgemane hysteria, “Until we know more clearly what she has done—”

        “She's a menace!” Bishop Breathstar's glaring face positioned itself in front of the mayor as he glared down at the copper pegasus. His booming voice instantly swallowed the volume of the crowded hovel. “She's a blight upon our children! That zebra is a living vessel of heresy, carrying with her the ignorant and accursed philosophies of the outside world! She knows nothing of Gultophine's spirit nor her wisdom!”

        “Will you ponies allow me a chance to say my peace?!” Zecora frowned, standing helplessly behind the guards as if their lances were jail bars. “Then you'll know that I didn't harm those children in the least!”

        “You infected them!” Breathstar's ivory horn shook at her like a threatening bayonet. “You tainted their calm and tranquil lives with your voodoo and infernal sorcery!”

        “Oh aged unicorn of narrow mind, must you be so terribly blind?” Zecora calmly uttered. “The medicine I gave those poor foals is as natural as our very souls! If that was not the case, I would never have come to this dreadful place!”

        “They were merely herbal remedies!” Harmony added in a desperate voice. “Half of the stuff came from the pharmacies of this very town! There's nothing ‘hocus pocus’ about it—”

        “Then you confess that you were an accomplice to the zebra's incantations at Stonehaven?!” Breathstar hissed at the copper pegasus.

        “Yes! I-I mean, no... I mean, there were no incantations or what-crap! If you would just let us explain—”

        “Explain what?!” Breathstar paced through the cloud of commotion and swung his horn high in the dancing shadows of the Council Hall. “That you, a supposed representative of Her Majesty's Court, fully endorsed the utterly invasive and uncalled for manipulation of the Stonehaven Immolatia Ward?!”

        “What the heck have you been sniffing, you big robed bucket of wax?!” Harmony barked. “Since when was it a crime to introduce new and harmless treatment to kids needing a big break for once in their infernite-hounded lives?!”

        Breathstar reeled backwards as if Harmony had just filled the room with a horrible plague from the sheer notion of asking that question. “You, child, would dare challenge the sovereignty of Dredgemane medical tradition?! Stonehaven is a sanctum, my ignorant Canterlotlian! It is a place for lost and ill-stricken souls to find peace with the spirit of Gultophine, not to become experiments of inane, alchemic rituals!”

        Harmony blinked. She glanced stupidly at Zecora, blankly at Pinkie, then frowned the priestly unicorn's way. “Are you friggin' kidding me...?”

        But her voice was drowned out as more and more growling exclamations flew over the heads of the many Dredgemaners. Zecora spouted a few things in her tongue. Vimbert cackled and waved a desperate hoof. Citizens and guards and elders clambered from all ends of the Hall while Quarrington sighed and Haymane weathered a pulsating migraine—

        “Enough!” It was Overseer Sladeburn's thunderous voice that shattered the chaos of the room into brittle, paralyzed shards. “This is the City Council of Dredgemane, not an Epona-forsaken zoo! I've managed dynamite charges at the quarry that were quieter and more orderly than this mess! Everypony, if you respect the Mayor and his Council, listen to his words and wait your turn to speak or I'll personally throw you out myself!” The frowning, brown stallion shrugged his shoulders in a huff and nodded his mane in the Mayor's direction. “Haymane, the floor is yours.”

        “Thank you, Sladeburn.” The blonde elder said. With a shudder, he pivoted on his wheels and faced the crowd. “It has come to our attention that Dredgemane's most precious of souls—the orphaned and infected foals of Stonehaven's Immolatia Ward—have been the subject of a scientific experiment brought upon them by an outsider.”

        “Scientific experiment—?!” Harmony began, but at the combination of Sladeburn's glare and several glinting polearms, the time traveler held her tongue and decided to play witness.

        “The details of this... situation are still being unraveled.” Haymane pivoted again and glanced at the Council. “Now that the entire Council has gathered, I bring to your attention our resident Professor Vimbert—”

        “Former Professor,” the orange unicorn bitterly grumbled. His blue eyes were cast weightedly into the far corners of the dimly-lit Hall as Haymane continued.

        “Yes, former Professor. As you may or may not know, Council, Vimbert has been employing himself as a workhorse and deliverer for Stonehaven these past several years. His diligence alone has kept the Sanitarium stocked of much needed supplies as of late. It was he who brought the nature of this situation to light, though it would probably be more appropriate if you heard it from his own mouth. Vimbert... ?”

        “Thank you, Mister Mayor,” Vimbert droned as he shuffled to face Quarrington and the rest. “As I was trying to say before this infernal excuse for a Council Hall transformed into complete and utter lynch-hungry bedlam...” He shrugged the weight of his jacket on his shoulders and gestured with a hoof. “I was simply on the last leg of a delivery to the downtown warehouses. I stopped by Earthcanter's Pharmacy on Bedrock Street to gather some medical supplies which had been ordered for Stonehaven—ordered by Nurse Angel Cake and not Miss Zecora, might I add.” A deep breath, and he groaningly continued, “When suddenly two of Bishop Breathstuckup's robes—oh, jeez, I'm sorry—Bishop Breathstar's priests-in-training overheard me reading off the supply list. Suddenly they were interrogating me about the nature of my delivery as if this was the Celestial Civil War all over again, and I was being grilled to see if I was a Lunar Republican Spy. Well, heck, I've got nothing to hide, right? So I tell them exactly what I had come to get and just what Nurse Angel Cake and Miss Zecora were using it for. Naturally, I must have made the gravest error in the history of Equestria, for suddenly this innocent filly was being accosted as if she had committed a grand plethora of imaginative atrocities—”

        “A fine testimony, Mister Vimbert,” Haymane said with a nod. “The matter of the zebra's innocence, however, shall be determined eventually.”

        Vimbert shrugged with a rolling of his eyes. Harmony watched as he dug his hooves into the ground and absorbed himself once more in the shadows of that place.

        In the meantime, Haymane's wheels squeaked as he presently tilted towards the Council once more. “When questioned intimately, Nurse Angel Cake admitted that she partook in a series of written letters over the past several months, inviting the zebra filly from the fringes of Ponyville to arrive at Dredgemane and offer her medicinal services to the Stonehaven Ward for Immolatia victims.”

        “They were more than mere medicinal services!” Breathstar grumbled as he strolled up and audaciously took command of the room's air. “My fellow clerics described the concoctions they discovered first-hoof in extreme detail! They are nothing less than herbal abominations scraped up from the wild, unchecked bosom of the Everfree Forest!” Several civilized gasps filled the breath of the room as he roared on: “These bizarre and uncanny agents were then promptly fused together via enchantments from the land of the zebras, where nopony practices magic within the blessed knowledge and spirit of Goddess Gultophine!” More frenzied murmurs and shudders. “Then, to add insult to injury,” Breathstar spun and flung a hoof in the shaman's direction, “She proceeded to pour the quaff resulting from this undignified process down the throats of our poor, afflicted youth! Furthermore, this zebra did so without properly consulting the Council, your beloved Mayor, or myself—the counselor of all things spiritual and living in this blessed Refuge!”

        “It would do you well to respect that I have a name,” Zecora said with a frown. “It is 'Zecora', for not all zebras are the same.” She glanced across the Hall from Breathstar to the Council to the crowd beyond. “Friends and ponies alike, please do hear me out, for an assault upon your children is not what this is about! Stonehaven was built to be a place of healing, but the truth is tragically less than appealing! While victims of infernite go there to to be cured, there are not enough resources for that to be assured! Nurses, doctors, and surgeons combined have been operating so far like medics gone blind. The reason for this is remarkably simple, you see. Stonehaven need only broaden its medical library. Herbal remedies of a foreign description could very well solve the foal's affliction. Superstitious fear only holds back a chance to embrace a solution that Stonehaven lacks. If the doctors of Dredgemane forever stick to tradition, the children will only die in constant repetition. The Immolatia Ward needs treatment that's new, and it is for that reason alone that I've sampled my brew.”

        “So, if I understand your words correctly...” Breathstar leered at the monochromatic filly as he shuffled across the room. “Though you spun them so colorfully with your shamanistic tongue, young lady...” The Bishop pointed at her once again. “You, a complete and utter outsider to Dredgemane, the Refuge of Gultophine, took it upon yourself to make a solid conclusion about the condition of Stonehaven's health care, and upon making such a conclusion you—all by your lonesome—decided to transplant the Immolatia Ward's current system with your own pharmaceutical procedures, regardless of the impact it would have on the poor children within?”

        “Do not insult my intelligence!” Zecora briefly reared her front legs in anger, causing the guards around her to shudder. “I would never act without knowledge of consequence! Not a single broth would I make if I knew it would leave bodies in its wake!”

        Breathstar's growling lips only barely hid the shape of a predatory smirk. “Then how is it that I've come to learn that a young colt has died since you arrived at Stonehaven, 'Miss Zecora?'”

        The room billowed in shocked gasps and murmuring voices. Zecora exhaled long and hard, her frown hard enough to cut diamonds.

        “Nnnngh!” Harmony dashed four steps forward, effortlessly knocking aside a pair of gasping guards with her Entropan wings. “Oh get off it!” She grunted in Breathstar's direction. “You're making an argument of correlation, not causation! Ask Nurse Angel Cake herself! That poor kid had his days numbered ages before Zecora even set hoof in this upside-down town! At least she was doing her darnedest to save the foal, which is the least I can say about you and all of your overinflated pontificating from up high, you egotistical windbag!”

        A few mares in the audience positively fainted from the copper pegasus' audacity before the Bishop. Breathstar barely blinked as he smirked the “Canterlotlian's” way. “Such bold words,” he murmured, “Coming from a pony who's not only been an accomplice to this zebra's outlandish experimentations, but who's failed time and time again to follow the Mayor's humble request and rid Dredgemane of its constant, insufferable thorn, the Royal Grand Biv.”

        “Wh-What?!” Harmony did a double-take as several more murmurs alighted the air around her suddenly. “Just what the heck does that have to do with anything?”

        “I would say it's a most important matter,” Overseer Sladeburn suddenly stepped forward. “If you do forgive my own interjection, Council,” he nodded his mane in Quarrington's direction, then frowned once more at the time traveler. “Did you or did you not successfully track down the Biv?”

        “Isn't it rather obvious?” Harmony raised a copper eyebrow. “The moron keeps getting away—”

        “Keeps getting away, or keeps being let loose?” Sladeburn's brow furrowed.

        Harmony felt her Entropan heart pounding suddenly. “Uhm...”

        “No less than half-a-dozen members of the militia—ponies who happen to be dedicated workers of my quarry as well—have collectively testified that the Royal Grand Biv was spotted leaving the vicinity of your presence no less than two hours ago.” Sladeburn's teeth gnashed briefly in the middle of his speech. “Funny, you always engage in a grand scuffle with that miscreant, falling so terribly short of capturing the cretin and turning him in, only for a grand circumstance to intervene and force his escape at the last second. It's quite the show you've put on for the town, my little pony, quite the distracting show, as a matter of fact. And now—according to Breathstar—you're part of yet another distraction upon the eve of Gultophine's Harvest. You're poisoning the bodies of our young as you've poisoned the diligent souls of our workers with your farce of a crusade to capture the Biv.”

        Breathstar's barking matched that of Sladeburn's as he too grilled the pegasus. “Miss Harmony, do you or do you not respect Dredgemane's sovereignty as the Refuge of Goddess Gultophine?”

        Harmony blinked back and forth from the leering faces of the Bishop and the Overseer. She glanced down the middle and saw the frail form of Haymane, watching emotionlessly from his wheeled seat beyond the shadows of his hulking compatriots.

        “Oh no...” She shook her head with a caustic smirk. “Oh heck no. I see what this is.” She briefly glanced at Vimbert, then frowned once more at her interrogators. “I've read the history books, you stuck-up, inconsolable yahoos. You want a kangaroo trial? Have the Council set it up on its own friggin' time. This isn't about some innocent zebra shamanistic screw-up, and every single one of you knows it.”

        “Dear child, I asked you a question!” Bishop Breathstar growled. “Do you or do you not respect Dredgemane's sovereignty—?”

        “I respect my hoof up your pulpit-hole, you overdressed mountain of parasprites!” Harmony snarled, eliciting many a gasp from the crowd. “You couldn't give a flying fart about all those suffering kids in Stonehaven! Why should it really matter to you that a young colt has died in that sanitarium tonight?” She glared at Breathstar. “Because that's another beloved soul of Gultophine that's departed from this world?” She swiveled her angry gaze towards Sladeburn. “Because it was your dang, persistent industry that ever poisoned the kid or his parents?” She growled at the entire host of the Council. “No, this is all about power, power that is maintained through the status quo that you've got festering in this town like iron filaments contaminating a dying pony's lungs, power that you now feel threatened on the eve of your inane bastardization of Gultophine's Harvest which is really just your way of hammering another nail into this coffin you call a town.”

        “Miss Harmony, that's quite enough—”

        “You wanna talk about sovereignty?!” The copper pegasus leaned forward and brandished a wicked grin of her own as she boldly dealt her words like a fan of cards. “What say I write a happy, smiling letter to Princess Celestia detailing how delightfully backwards your health care system is at Stonehaven and then we'll see how the progress of Dredgemane holds itself under the wrath of a real and living Alicorn!”

        “The Court of Canterlot has no jurisdiction over this City, Miss Harmony.”

        The entire room hushed, the copper pegasus included. She craned her neck along with everypony else at the image of Mayor Haymane. After his words stopped echoing throughout the dimly-lit place, he lifted his tired features and further murmured:

        “The Act of Provincial Industry maintained that more than two decades ago,” the Mayor quietly but firmly said. “The article is quite clearly engraved into the records of present day legislature. If you were a real agent of Canterlot, you would immediately know that, but I'm beginning to have my doubts that you're anything that you say you are, child.”

        The last pony gulped. She suddenly shivered in the deep shadow of a hundred sets of eyes, leering on either side of her like granite walls to the trenched city. The Mayor navigated that ravine, staring at her with a cold, rock-hard gaze.

        “You, a single pony, arrives at this town, and personally elects herself to chase down our ever-elusive source of public defilement. Since then, not only have you failed in the process, but you have turned it into a pageantry that continues to lampoon the very effort to apprehend the Royal Grand Biv from the beginning. Now, I have been immeasurably patient with you, for unlike most public officials I find it important to practice faith, to give such enthusiastic souls like yourself the benefit of a doubt. After all, you bear the Royal Seal of Canterlot. You carry the air of Her Majesty's Service. And yet, you are always challenging Dredgemane's tradition. You talk back to the Bishop and Overseer Sladeburn like they are mere vagabonds of the street. You flap your wings against the flow of my loyal citizens with your selfish, individualistic attitude, as if your perception of this town's struggles are more important than the struggles themselves. Forgive me for answering Bishop Breathstar's inquisition for you, child, but—No, I do not believe you respect Dredgemane's Sovereignty as Gultophine's Refuge. As for Princess Celestia: she could respect it. That is what leads me to think you are far less than what you pretend to be. That is what makes me believe you are not an agent of Canterlot, but rather you are an imposter. I severely even doubt you have anything to do with Pinkamena Pie's supposed 'probation'. Alas, it is with a heavy heart that I must accept you as a worse and far more infernal practical jokester than the Royal Grand Biv.”

        A halo of angry and suspicious voices cycloned around Harmony. While for so many days she trembled in the cobblestone streets blanketed with pony souls, she suddenly had a renewed strength here. Her shivering ended as she very bravely rebounded from Haymane's words.

        “My biggest crime, Mayor, sir, is not being a practical jokester.” She spoke firmly, staring at him with a solid breath. “My fault is taking things way too seriously, like you take things far too seriously. You, Haymane, have been so serious and so hard-edged for so long that you've built this City in your image, and not Gultophine's.” She navigated her way past several more gasps to say in an even louder tone: “The Goddess of Life would not have this town snuffing out all color! The Goddess of Life would not expect ponies to build a bonfire and burn to ashes the few meager things that give them joy!”

        “How dare you preach to me what this town needs or doesn't need.” Mayor Haymane frowned venomously at her. “Dredgemane is more than another pointless speck across the body of Equestria! This is the Grave of Consus! We owe it to the Spirit of Gultophine to keep ourselves pressed to the path laid out before us! We cannot afford to distract ourselves with the trivialities of our short and superficial days!”

        “Is that what those kids at Stonehaven are?!” Harmony leaned forward and barked over the shoulders of guards. “Trivialities?! Mayor Haymane, I know you've lost your entire family to the Grave of Consus, but that doesn't mean you must make the ponies of this town as miserable and as unlucky as you!”

        “Do not bring my family into this!” Haymane suddenly roared, his eyes flaring up like a burning pair of meteors that not even he knew were there all along. “They rest peacefully within the bosom of Goddess Gultophine! They do not deserve to be insulted by the ignorant words of a common charlatan!” His voice was briefly a string of lit dynamite in the echoing hollows of that place. “The Blessed Alicorn's river of life is thin and narrow, for all that surrounds us is death and misery and I have done all I can to steer Dredgemane down the stream of absolute clarity! I will not have you usurp it!”

        “Mayor, you're only—”

        “I will have none of it!” Haymane growled, but at the final punctuation of his shouting breath his angry body jolted loose from his pedestal. He gasped and floundered briefly, his lower half dangling precariously off the edge of the wooden rig. The room numbly hung in the silence of that awkwardness, penetrated quietly by the random breaths of the red-faced Mayor, until Breathstar's hoofsteps followed the Bishop over towards the elder, where the unicorn telekinetically repositioned the Mayor onto his seat and leaned over to murmur words of encouragement to the aged pony. The priest's words were barely heard, though they were nevertheless answered by the calm utterances of Dredgemane's leader: “Yes. Yes, Bishop. Thank you as always, dear counselor...”

        Harmony fumed, submerged in her own bitter cloud. She glanced past the trembling pink shade of her anchor and found a pair of blue eyes fixed her way. Vimbert was staring steadily at the pegasus. The furthest angles of his orange face twisted. It was too exasperated an expression to register “pride”. The tired lengths of his jaded optics could drown a continent, and the copper pegasus finally understood why.

        A clearing throat reacquired the attention of the room. Everypony's eyes lifted up to see Breathstar pacing away from an exhausted and limp Haymane. The Bishop looked decidedly past Harmony as he addressed the gathered crowd:

        “On behalf of the good Mayor, I speak to you now. The matter of this Council Meeting was originally to discuss the appropriate response to the zebra's—to Miss Zecora's transgression. It goes without saying that the subject of the proceedings now extends to a certain 'Canterlotlian representative'.” The Bishop briefly gave Harmony a lofty glance before swiveling to face Quarrington and the other elders gathered at Mr. Pie's table. “Council, if you would deliberate on this matter and deliver unto us your most esteemed judgment, then we can deal accordingly with this banal yet hopefully brief disturbance of the peace.”

        “Thank you, Counselor,” Quarrington murmured in his ever-raspy voice. Without so much as gracing his pink progeny with a look, he sat down at the table and spoke in a hushed murmur with his fellow Council Members, mirroring the deep and whispery conversations that suddenly bled throughout the crowded, lantern-lit Hall.

        Harmony stood still, adjusting the green beret on her mane as she cast a mute glance in Zecora's direction. The shaman quietly mouthed a meditative chant to herself, all the while her neck and face stood straight in an air of bravery, undaunted by the intimidating proceedings that toyed with her rights all around her. The last pony very deeply pitied the monochromatic filly. Harmony at least knew she could disappear from any Dredgemane situation with a burst of green flame. Zecora's future was uncertain, even to the time traveler. The pegasus almost felt like she stayed in the Council Hall simply to find out the zebra's fate, regardless of her own.

        “Mesmerizing, is it not?” a dry voice muttered from the side. A dismally sober Vimbert shuffled sideways until his voice entered the vicinity of the last pony's ears. “Over a hundred miners died horrible, bloody deaths in Sladeburn's murder mill today, and the Holy Trinity of Dredgemane sees it fit to train the whip on a zebra and a pegasus.” The former teacher cracked a few bitter joints in his neck and exhaled like a broken punching bag. “After so many years, I'm due for a few extra stripes on my backside too, I imagine.”

        “Mr. Vimbert, did you really have to tell Breathstar's minions about the stuff you were acquiring for the Immolatia Ward?”

        “Oh! Oh this is rich!” The unicorn tilted his broken horn towards Harmony while smirking painfully. “So this is all my fault?! Like I said before, you deaf waste of wings, I had nothing to hide! It's Zecora and Nurse Dessert Tray at Haymane's Home for Doomed Kids who should have figured out what they were trotting into! So don't be heaving the weighted hilarity of destiny on my shoulders, you walking fecal stain! I've dealt with enough crap in this town to even remotely be shocked by what's happening now!”

        “This is all just so stupid,” Harmony groaned. “I wish we could have—I dunno—covered this all up, lied about it, hid the fact that we were helping the same foals that Haymane is too full of himself to ever bother improving the lives of.”

        “Believe me, even if I had lied to Breathstar's lackeys about what I was delivering, it's not like it would have made any more of a difference than you did on that little grand stage of yours just now. Congratulations, by the way, hotshot. You just won the 'Haymane Insulter of the Year' award. I hope you enjoy your all-expense-paid trip to the dungeon beneath the Dredgemane Militia Headquarters.”

        “Forget about me—What do you mean nothing would have made a difference? Mister Vimbert, if you and Nurse Angel Cake and the rest of us could have just kept mum about the whole thing, then those kids at Stonehaven—”

        “—would still be dying horrible deaths at the ravenous claws of Immolatia, yadda-yadda-yadda,” Vimbert groaned and fidgeted a hoof through his black jacket. “Cry me a river, ya incorrigible sap. Face it, what's happening here doesn't change a dang thing. Goddess Epona, I need a drink!”

        “Is that your answer to every horrible atrocity in this town?” Harmony frowned. “You drown it all away in that flask of yours? At least when Haymane lost his family, he tried doing something. It may have been stupid and misguided, but he attempted to counteract his loss instead of sulking in it.”

        “You wanna learn a thing or two about loss?” Vimbert hissed at her in a sudden vehemence. “Let's see how much you miss your teeth, sunshine.”

        “Punch me right here in front of everypony, Professor Inebriated,” Harmony hissed back with a venomous glare. “I dare you—”

        As soon as Vimbert jolted, a pink filly was suddenly standing breathlessly between the two. “Har-Har! Bert! Please! Haven't enough ponies been hurt very, very badly today?”

        Harmony's eyes twitched, surprised by the pulsating desperation in her anchor's blue eyes. Vimbert's reflection in them likewise wilted. The unicorn grumbled to himself and leaned back against a wooden railing as the Council members started to rise from their table.

        “A day when Pinkamena Diane Pie refuses me a chance to punch a pony...” He shook his head with a bitter chuckle. “Dear Celestia, I must be sober.”

        The last pony gulped and glanced painfully at Pinkie. “Miss Pie, this whole thing is just so—”

        “Shhh!” Pinky spun, her bright mane hanging about her with a sudden, somber weight. “Daddy's about to talk...”

        The large crowd inside the Hall stirred to a stop as Quarrington marched up and stood beside Haymane, Sladeburn, and Breathstar. He ran a hoof through his gray mane hair, sighed, and spoke with a lethargic yet solid tone:

        “It is the decision of the Council that Miss Zecora of the Everfree Forest be spared any severe punishments for her transgression here in Dredgemane.” The crowd broke briefly in tittering voices before again hushing itself for him to continue. “However, she will be required to remain at Stonehaven for a further stay, during which time she will abide by the statutes of the medical treatment already in place. Over the course of three full weeks, she will be asked to assist Nurse Angel Cake and the other members of the Immolatia Ward staff in treating the young foals as the Stonehaven system has seen fit over the past several decades. At the same time, all of Miss Zecora's herbal contrivances and medicinal ingredients brought here from the Everfree Forest shall be seized by the Dredgemane militia and promptly eradicated. The Council hopes that this will reinforce in her the proper respect for the health care that Dredgemane has ensured such poor and unfortunate victims of Infernite, so that she too will see the benefit of functioning within the Spirit of Gultophine, unblemished by the unnecessary and distracting influences of outside rituals.”

        The crowd exchanged glances and hushedly chattered. Several grim faces appeared ever so slightly miffed at the reasonably light verdict. Breathstar seemed disinterested, and Overseer Sladeburn was positively bored. Zecora took a deep breath, looking neither elated nor devastated.

        All the while, Pinkie Pie bit her lip, rubbing her two front hooves together in a sudden pensiveness that quietly disturbed the time traveler who was helplessly junctioned to her. Harmony glanced quietly from the filly to the orange unicorn as Vimbert muttered with a crooked grin, “Here's the wind-up, and the pitch...”

        “In regards to Miss Harmony, the 'Canterlotlian Agent' whose position in Mayor Haymane's employment has suddenly come into question...” Quarrington regarded his daughter's guest with a pitiable look. “It is the decision of the Council that she not only be stripped of her task of pursuing the Royal Grand Biv and all the authority over the militia granted her thereof, but that she be swiftly and immediately banished from the streets of Dredgemane and the Grave of Consus altogether.”

        Pinkie Pie gasped, as if what was just uttered was worse than a death sentence. Her face melted into a liquid pout as she leaned precariously forward on limp limbs.

        A far less distraught Harmony raised a copper eyebrow as she listened to Pinkie's father finish his speech.

        “If Miss Harmony is witnessed returning to Dredgemane as of tomorrow morning and beyond, it will be the function of the Dredgemane militia to imprison her immediately and without question, barring the intercession of a higher Equestrian authority, which the Council has unanimously agreed is pending a sincere investigation before properly recognizing.” Quarrington glanced over at Haymane. “Mayor, the Council positions into your hooves the task of appropriating a commissioner to replace Miss Harmony as supreme authority over the Dredgemane Militia in its task of arresting the Royal Grand Biv. Do you have a pony in mind, sir?”

        “That I do, old friend,” Haymane said, having finally regained the usual calmness in his breath. He glanced over towards a certain Bishop. “Breathstar, if you do believe that you are up to the challenge...”

        “I most certainly am, righteous Mayor Haymane.” Breathstar trotted proudly before the Council Hall until he stood above Harmony. “It is with a heavy heart that I now carry this grim yet undeniably important task, as it has been so disastrously managed by she who goes before me.” He narrowed his gaze icily down at her. “The Council has spoken, and I grant it Gultophine's blessing. On that note, child, I forgive you for your insolent insults. However, I must reinforce goodly Quarrington's proclamations. If you so much as show your face in this town again, may Gultophine have mercy on your soul, because I most certainly will not.” He let his glare simmer on her forehead before pacing regally out before the crowd. “I assure you, my little ponies, that the infernal blight of the Royal Grand Biv shall be brought to an end! Alas, your ever loyal counselor and ear to the Goddess is mournful of the tragic events that have transpired today, and though we will still properly respect the ill-fated miners of the quarry in our own time, it is my place to inform you that Gultophine's Harvest shall transpire uninterrupted in two days as planned. Go to your homes, sleep in peace, and tomorrow we shall begin a new day of progress here in Dredgemane, refuge of the most blessed Alicorn Sister.”

        “This meeting of the Council is adjourned,” Quarrington said with a stamping of his hoof against the wooden floorboards. “You may all take the good Counselor's advice.”

        The Hall thundered with hoofsteps as the crowd—once again a grim allotment of shadows—dissipated from the lantern-lit hollow of that place. Mayor Haymane wheeled himself away, strolling alongside his towering companion, Breathstar. Overseer Sladeburn brushed past Harmony, bearing an undeniably smug expression. Vimbert cast the pegasus a tired look before starting to shuffle out himself—

        Harmony suddenly blocked him with a foreleg. She murmured towards the stallion without looking. “One day, you're going to run out of bottles, and what will become of your search for meaning in this place?”

        He swiftly retorted, “One day, you're going to run out of sarcasm, and then you're going to look back on this day and realize that being kicked out of Dredgemane is the best thing that ever happened to you. You don't have to thank me, but it'd be nice to at least pretend you were lucky. Now if you'll excuse me...” He brushed her hoof aside and sauntered limply past her. “I'm off to cremate the last good thing to come out of this place.”

        She numbly watched him go, until a thick wall of darkly-armored guards suddenly loomed in her view. The faces beneath the helmets were terribly young, and even more terribly familiar. Half of her former comrades in Biv-chasing could barely look at her.

        “Come along, Miss Harmony. We're your escorts. Let's get this over with.”

        “Yeah...” The time traveler sighed and cast a glance across the emptying hollows of the Hall. “I guess it really is over with.”

        “No! Just wait!” Pinkie Pie breathlessly hopped through the stumbling guards and slid up to Quarrington's figure. “Daddy, talk to the Council again! There's no need to be a bunch of meanies—!”

        “My and the other elders' decision was swift and just, Pinkamena,” the pony grumbled as he gathered a few things from the table in question. “Believe me, I had to practically intercede on your insipid friend's behalf. She is most fortunate to be forced from this town and nothing more drastic.”

        “B-But she didn't deserve to be given the boot! Nopony today deserves to be given the boot! We were only trying to save those poor kids! We never did anything to hurt them! Zecchy sure didn't do anything to hurt them!”

        “I don't know what's worse, Pinkamena, the fact that you're defending these backwards souls or that you were just as much an accessory to their heretical experimentation as they were.”

        “H-Huh?!” Pinkie Pie blinked.

        Her father grumbled, still too engrossed with the table, the dust, and the shadows to so much as look at his daughter. “Nurse Angel is not the culprit behind the zebra's arrival here. Neither was Inkessa to blame. You were the one who sent all of those letters to the Everfree Forest. It's a miracle Breathstar isn't casting the blame on you...”

        “Then m-maybe he should! I’m those kids' Auntie Pinkie Pie, and I have done everything I can for them! It's only because I wanted others to do the same! Others like Zecchy! Others like Harmony! Even others like you—”

        “Enough, child!” Quarrington slammed his hoof down over the edge of the rattling table. He finally turned to face her, and when he did, it was with an enraged flaring of vicious, golden eyes. “I have tolerated your immature whimsy. I have tolerated your persistent delinquency! I have even tolerated the noise, the light, and the absurdity that you have dragged back into your mother's home! But I will not and cannot tolerate your insolence in the face of the Council's decision nor in my proper judgment on Dredgemane's behalf!”

        “But the Council is wrong! They're not thinking with their hearts! They're thinking with their skulls—And it's a bunch of numbskulls at best!”

        “The Council is Dredgemane!” Quarrington roared, forcing his daughter to flinch back. “It is the foundation upon which the Refuge of Gultophine stands! It is the one thing that's given us strength and integrity while wild and unsavory vagabonds like the Biv have sought to deter what's great and glorious in this Town!”

        “But...” Pinkie's lip quivered. “What about what's great and glorious in our home?”

        “You don't understand, Pinkamena. You never understood, and you never grew up. I tried to raise you to be a respectful daughter. I tried to inspire you like Inkessa or support you like Blinkaphine, but you would have none of it! You had to be a wildcard, an untameable individual who's too selfish to take responsibility for her own actions! I swear on the blessed wings of Gultophine herself—today is the last day I bend backwards to save your thankless hide from the wrath of Haymane and his City! So do me a favor and grow up or else I'll banish you as well, sending you back to Ponyville with your heathen Aunt and Uncle where you belong!”

        “Daddy...” Pinkie gulped. “Just because I was able to move on after Clyde doesn't mean I haven't grown up.”

        “Hnngh!” Quarrington slammed one of the chairs over and raised a hoof above her head.

        Pinkie flinched away from him with a squeaking noise.

        Her father froze there, slowly falling down an icy crest in his lungs that was as snow-white as his frazzled sideburns. His entire body deflated, so that his hoof fell limply to the floor while he gazed into a deep and painful pit past Pinkie's bright coat. He gulped hard and glanced across the desolate Council Hall. Harmony stared back, her amber eyes suddenly too dull to reflect an unnameable sadness in his gaze. Without a word, Quarrington steadied his limbs, hoisted his broad-brimmed hat off the table, and shuffled swiftly out of the Hall, his hoofsteps echoing across the wooden floorboards like a young colt's death rattle. Minutes later, when the militia escorted Harmony and Pinkie out of there, it was a quiet and somber thing, befitting a funeral.

        Harmony hung the Winter Wrap-Up vest inside the door of the wardrobe besides a pair of black trunks. In the hazy silhouette of prancing ponies, an obvious stain of crimson shimmered across the turquoise material. The last pony tactfully rearranged the vest so that its deathly blemish was hidden, but that didn't drown out the shadows of the room any better. With a sigh of ironic regret, she hung the green beret off a hook, and Harmony was finally naked. Her copper wings twitched freely in the glare of the clown-pony lamp in Pinkie Pie's bedroom.

        The last pony stepped back, staring at the many varied outfits stuffed inside the wardrobe, the numerous crazy things that her anchor had worn on so many a delivery for Ms. Marble Cake. A tropical shirt, an orange hoodie, and a black top hat immediately struck her eyesight. Beyond them, however, was something she didn't remember seeing... except that she did. It was a light-blue helmet with yellow stripes running across the surface.

        Not even in her foalish years did Scootaloo remember Pinkie Pie riding a scooter. With a furrowed brow, the last pony crossed the wires in her Entropan skull, until she remembered a wild afternoon of speeding through Ponyville with Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, a hunt to find Rainbow Dash, and a certain Auntie who hitched along for the ride. The entrance to Sugarcube Corner glistened over the horizon and...

        The bright foal stands alone in the middle of a granite expanse. She is surrounded by rocks. Her family leaves her. The darkness enshrouds her. She bends down to the Grave of Consus and sighs.

        Harmony shuddered. She raised a hoof to her skull and shook her head. With a flaring of nostrils, she gave the pink-colored room one last somber look and marched out into the adjacent hallway.

        As soon as she was outside, she heard the voices. They were ragged, whispery sounds—like twin ghosts on the verge of an exorcism. Beyond the penumbra of a single lantern, Harmony glanced towards the cracked door to a blacker-than-black bedroom and silently craned her ear.

        “—and the Harvest is coming soon. Haymane needs my support, more than ever. It is my job to keep the Council's eyes on the path to righteousness, Pearl. You know that.”

        “And you are good at your job. And you are a most—” A hacking cough. “—a most righteous pony, Quarrington. But Haymane, as much as you love him, isn't the only pony who needs your support.”

        “Pearl, if this town goes to ruin, if it loses sight of the spirit that makes it strong, then what will become of our lives? What would become of your life?”

        “I was born here and I was raised here.” Another wheeze, then a brave breath. “I know very well what has become of my life.”

        “Pearl... I can't do this without you. You have to keep fighting. You have to remain strong.”

        “Oh Quarrington, our strength ran out years ago. We need to let our daughters be strong now. They know how to do it...”

        “They are so helpless without my guidance—”

        “Your guidance has influenced them just fine. Now they're being strong in their own way, even if we like it or not.”

        “It's not their strength that I'm worried about, it's what will become of their lives, what progress they will make.”

        “Quarrington... beloved...” A lingering fit of coughs. “Look at us. Just look. Tell me what progress it is that you see...”

        There may or may not have been an answer to that. Harmony never found out. She had taken her leave down the stairs.

        Blinkaphine sat in her bed, across from its empty twin that belonged to Inkessa. Surrounded by half-finished sketches that lingered in the dark, she clutched her rear limbs with her forward hooves and rocked gently forward and backward while staring into the deepest of the shadows.

        Harmony stood there, watching her for the better part of five minutes, until she finally built the courage to trot over, sit down on the bed beside the white-white filly, and glance gently at her. The last pony's eyes narrowed on the slowly rocking sibling as she studied the ivory-gray complexion of her nearly immaculate coat.

        “There's not even a single bruise on you...” The copper pegasus murmured. “After all of those times we came to blows.” A gulp, and her brow furrowed. “And I do know we came to blows, Blinkaphine.”

        The filly was mute. Her golden orbs dipped and dipped forward in her icy rocking motions. She was just as stale and lifeless as the plethora of landscape art around her.

        Harmony glanced across the sparse bedroom and saw a wardrobe—far larger than Pinkie's. She wondered how much of the structure could hold Inkessa's clothes and how much of it could hold Blinkaphine's. Surely there could have been enough room for the Royal Grand Biv's.

        With a soft exhale, Harmony turned and glanced once more at the white-white filly. “Blinkaphine...” She paused, swallowed, and even more gently murmured, “Blinkie, I know just as well as you do what you are.”

        Blinkaphine suddenly paused in her rocking. It was a decidedly explosive movement, even if it was a lack of movement. Five heart-stopping seconds passed, and she resumed her rocking motions, staring infinitely forward.

        “I... I can only pretend to imagine what you think that you're accomplishing by being who you've been, by defacing so much of the town, by wreaking such havoc across the masterpiece that Mayor Haymane and his cohorts have established.” Harmony gulped and squeaked forth in addition, “But I can no longer blame you for it.” Her face stretched sadly. She raised a hoof to Blinkaphine's silken hair, but suddenly couldn't bring herself to so much as touch it, as if a bruise might finally reveal itself before the infinite shadows of that candle-lit house. “I can only hope that somewhere... someplace inside of all this...” She motioned towards the girl's pale cranium. “...you have it inside you to understand why I've fought you the way I did for so long.” A deep, painful breath. “Then maybe... maybe you can explain it to me.”

        Harmony tried smiling. It had no better effect on herself than it did on Pinkie's younger sister. Swiveling her lower hooves, Harmony faced away from the rocking filly and stared into the dull floorboards of that somber house.

        “I guess I've always been fighting you. Even... Even in the Wastelands...” She very openly murmured to the darkness between them, helpless to find the colors hidden beyond it, the colors that used to enrapture her, that used to inspire her. “Because... Because everytime you so much as entered my mind, it made me happy.” Her eyes were closed at this point, and the pit inside her throat was immeasurable. “And I didn't think I deserved that happiness in the middle of all that misery. It was a distraction. After all, you were gone, and you were never coming back. And... And it doesn't matter what Dinky said. It d-doesn't matter if you admired me or not. You were just a distraction, a light that didn't belong in a great, great darkness. And so I-I fought you. I fought you for so long and...”

        Harmony blanched. Her amber eyes opened. Beyond a great refracted kaleidoscope, she saw Ice Song and Suntrot drowning in an immensely bloody sea of mine soot and limbs, limbs limbs.

        “I'm sorry...” The last pony squeaked towards the unfeeling lengths of the Grave of Consus. She brought a hoof up to her quivering face. “I'm so, so sorry... for fighting you...” A deep, shuddering breath. “It's not... It's n-not your fault that you could never c-come back to me like you promised you would.” She cleared her throat to swallow the shakiness in those last few words and very quietly, very swiftly marched out of that room.

        Blinkaphine resumed her rocking motions, the same ghost that she was before Harmony entered the room, as if she never was there to begin with.

        Through the house's front doorway, she saw Pinkie Pie seated on the porch outside. The filly was a bright blemish against an otherwise pristine horizon of desolation, like a lone airship hanging in a bed of ashen clouds. Also like a zeppelin, she spurted forth her own puffs of steam in the form of numerous paper airplanes which she gracefully folded, creased, then rocketed effortlessly one after another into the misty air above the stony plateau. Within the fluff of her pink tail hairs, a dwarven alligator curled in lazy slumber, its emerald scales glistening with the condensation of early morning.

        Harmony slowly strolled out to stand behind her anchor. She had successfully regained the dryness in her amber orbs by the time she let forth, “You should work for air traffic control, maybe that's your special talent.”

        “Hmmm?” Pinkie blinked over her shoulder. One of her many airplanes circled back and crashed against her skull, poking her in the eye. “Ow! Heeheehee...” She rubbed her lids with a hoof and smiled brightly. “You're a real crack-up, Har-Har, even if there isn't a single dent to be seen on you. The closest I've ever come to conducting air traffic was this one time I accidentally frightened a flock of geese into Rainbow Dash's weather flying team.”

        The last pony noticeably winced at that. “Dare I ask what became of that?”

        “They were on their way to deliver backup rainclouds to Trottingham. But when the geese hit, they accidentally crashed through the upper windows of the Ponyville bowling alley.” Pinkie leaned her head goofily to the side. “Did you know that bowling pins could float?”

        “Erm... Not necessarily.”

        “Neither did I, but four months of community service made sure I never forgot.” Pinkie Pie folded another paper sheet and birthed it wings. “I find it very easy to entertain myself in Ponyville. All of the many simple things in life are a lot less boring after you've been forced to mop up twenty-four bowling lanes with a bucket and a bath sponge. Speaking of sponges, did I ever tell you about the time I sat in as a substitute teacher for Ms. Cheerilee?”

        “Miss Pie...”

        “I was so excited about having a bunch of kids absorb the things I had to share with them, that I immediately ditched Cheerilee's lesson plan and shouted 'Pop Field Trip!' Boy was that grand! Cuz when I was a little filly, I always thought that there should be more 'Pop things' than 'Pop quizzes', and a 'Pop Field Trip' suddenly made sense. It was totally a fun idea, and the kids were all for it, except for when we got to the landfill and it wasn't full of thrown-away bubble wrap like I had thought. Still, there was this really cool bathtub that someone threw out and it made for a great bob sled. After five or six trips down the hill of junk in that thing, and I'm sure none of those kids fretted all the tetanus shots they got afterwards!”

        “Miss Pie...”

        “I love kids. They're so cute and adorable.” She flung the paper airplane and watched as it dare-devilishly looped under one or two others still gliding from her previous throws earlier. “It's also so easy to make them laugh. And that's not a cheap thing: making children laugh, because children still hold onto that little pinch of giddiness inside of them that makes their cheeks rosy no matter where they were foaled...” Her smile was a briefly glossy thing, almost as slick as the condensation against the endless granite and rock beyond. “...no matter who or what they have to answer to, they'll always have that joy inside of them. Being their friend—being Auntie Pinkie Pie—simply means knowing how to find that silliness and remind them that it's there.” A strangely somber gulp. “Forever and ever...”

        “I'm... I'm sorry that things ended up the way that they did,” Harmony said in a low voice. “Honestly, I am. I... I hope that you can believe me.”

        Pinkie Pie glanced up at her with a quirky grin. “And just why wouldn't I believe you, Har-Har?”

        “Well...”

        “Hmmm?”

        “Because...” Harmony winced and leaned against a wooden support beam of the porch across from Pinkie. “Well, because I'm me, Miss Pie.”

        “Well, if you were me, then I'd been in the toaster oven for too long!” She slapped the stony earth with a hoof and giggled insanely. “Heeheeheehee! Ohhhhhh...” She smiled as her blue eyes flew loopty-loops with her slowly declining airplanes. “One of these days, Har-Har, you're going to laugh. And when you do, it'll feel like gravity is giving up on you, and you won't even need a big fluffy cloud to float to where the giggles take you.”

        “Is this something...” Harmony began murmuring but briefly paused as her eyes blinked across the gray landscape.

        The bright foal stands alone. Everything is desolation. In the eternal night, she shoves rocks forever uphill. There is a rumbling in the distance. Her blue eyes quiver in response.

        Harmony cleared her throat. “Is this something you've learned from experience?”

        “What, the giggles or the toaster oven?”

        “Does it really matter anymore?”

        “Good answer! Heeheehee!” Pinkie Pie flung a hoof up, blindly caught a paper craft in mid-air, re-creased its wings, and flung it back towards the heavens. “There's nothing for you to be sorry about, silly filly. Everypony is different, even if we all put our bridles on one ear at a time. We can't all be expected to prance the same way. Some of us don't even prance at all. It makes me feel sad, but I can cash those checks if life wants to make 'em.”

        “Is this it, then?” Harmony folded her front hooves and squinted down at the bright pony. “Is this you 'being sad'?”

        “Oh, far from it!” She began making another airplane. “Just because I can feel sad doesn't mean I have to be it. 'True living means feeling without feelers.' That's something goodly Brevis once taught me, the smelly sap! Heehehe... Ahem. If you only live by the way you think you should feel, all you ever are is a feeling, you feel me... filly? Heheheh...”

        “I... guess...” Harmony shrugged. “Still, all the things that happened today, all the horrible stuff that we witnessed, the crap with the council, your... uh... your father...” She gulped and bravely uttered, “Nopony would blame you for feeling very sad about all that.”

        “I used to be sad,” Pinkie said as she squinted one eye and aimed the latest airplane. “I used to be sad a lot, a whole heaping bucket of sad. But the way I see it...” She flung the paper thing very high this time, and watched as it performed daring corkscrews in the air. “...horrible things happen, and then they're over as quickly as they begin. Why should ponies try and be so sad for so long, as if they're writing some really boring and yucky sequels to the quick, nasty moments in their lives?”

        “Some ponies have no choice, Miss Pie. Sometimes sadness is all they know...” She murmured and glanced at the invisible, emerald flame beyond the reach of the paper airplanes. “Sometimes it's... all they have to go back to.”

        “If there's anything I'm truly sad about, it's that Zecora has to do boring community service at Stonehaven,” Pinkie murmured in a pout. “And that you have to leave before you finished all of your stargazing.”

        “Star... gazing... ?” Harmony numbly mouthed. She then hissed through her teeth and raised a hoof to her forehead. “Oh dear Epona... Stargazing!” The last pony wanted to slap herself. Suddenly, a thundering army of memories galloped to her across a billion stretched-out years between herself and a rooftop where a lone pegasus sketched the night sky across an endless sea of paper sheets. “Bullcrap on a bullcrap biscuit, I forgot about the stargazing.” She sighed through flaring nostrils, her weathered face torn to shreds by so many bleeding, shouting, intensely prevalent things that had roared across her soul self like so many trolls and capricorns. “Is there really no end to it, Spike?”

        “Spike?!” Pinkie Pie made a face. She flicked her tail, forcing a protesting chirp from the resident reptile. “I see an alligator, but no baby dragon! Heeheehee!”

        “I... I'm so tired, Miss Pie...” Harmony quite foalishly murmured, running a shameful hoof over the lengths of her copper face. She had drawn every constellation she needed to, and though she could still invent a way to convince her anchor to help her permanently preserve those stars before leaving for the future, it suddenly didn't seem anywhere near as important as the many bitter strings left unraveled all across the deep trenches of that town. It was like a possessed Dinky and a frightened Apple Family were being chased into a lonely corner by serrated clock hands, and the future scavenger wasn't even sure just how much of the green flame she had left to save all of these phantoms at once.  “Just... so tired... and so... so...”

        “Screwloosey?”

        Harmony's lips curved ever so slightly. “And to think you ever once called me the Queen of Random.”

        “You deserve to be the Queen of Something, Har-Har.” Pinkie hummed as she watched the planes. “That Council...” She gulped. “This city is a good city, just with some very grumpy ponies in it. Maybe someday, it will change for the good. It's just a shame that it didn't change for you...” Her blue eyes quietly danced towards the granite bosom of the world. “... or for the foals.”

        “Somehow, Miss Pie...” Harmony murmured into her hoof. “I don't think that's in your power.”

        “Hmmm... Funny...” Pinkie Pie said in a curiously emotionless drone.

        “Funny? Why don't you sound amused?”

        “Just, for a city that has—all my life—valued progress above anything else, Dredgemane never really wants to change, is all.”

        Harmony slowly lowered the hoof from her face, her amber eyes reflecting an orange shade from beyond the lengths of the misty horizon. In a deep voice, she quietly quoted, “'And so it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end.'”

        “Hmmm?” Pinkie Pie glanced over her shoulder. “What are you on about now, Har-Har?”

        “Miss Pie, do you...” The future scavenger swallowed deeply, then continued, “Do you know about Ponymonium?”

        “Sounds like a fungus that grew underneath the refrigerator at Sugarcube Corner.”

        “It's a place, Miss Pie. A place of legend, a kingdom that the Lunar Republican Army... s-supposedly built inside the moon—in honor of their Empress and Ruler, Nightmare Moon—after the army was banished along with the dreaded Pony of the Night over a thousand years ago.” Harmony squinted up towards the half-lit disc in question. “Scholars and experts say that the dark blemish—the Mare in the Moon that existed for so long across the lunar surface—was really just an extension of the architectural glory of Ponymonium.”

        “Oooooh... Sounds like a really happening place.”

        “That's just it, it couldn't have been, Miss Pie. The only ponies left in Ponymonium today are either corpses or lost spirits,” Harmony said in a low breath. “When Princess Luna returned to Equestria, and after she was subsequently cleansed of the taint of Nightmare Moon, she confessed that there had been no surviving members of the Lunar Republic for centuries. They all died out nearly four hundred years ago. Nightmare Moon had been living alone in the palace that her deceased subjects built for her. A ruler of dead ponies is hardly a ruler at all.”

        “What's with you and your horrible bedtime stories?”

        “Don't you see, Miss Pie?” Harmony shook her head and gazed fitfully across the landscape as she thought out loud. “This city... this town... this entrenched hovel built into the ashes of Consus—the same petrified bone matter that makes up the moon—is a deathly, purgatorial thing. It has no beginning and it has no end. Haymane and his associates have built Dredgemane into a Ponymonium on earth, for it is forever a dead and dying now, devoid of hope, devoid of life, and devoid of the much-lauded progress that they praise Gultophine for and... and...” She winced visibly, tilting her head up and hissing through clenched teeth “There is just so much darkness in what they're trying to build, because they have filled this place with that darkness, more darkness than there is even on the moon...”

        “Heeheehee... You say that as if you've been on the moon yourself, Har-Har! Who's loony now, huh?”

        Harmony said nothing. She was staring deep into the abyss once more, only this time she was piercing the opaque blackness in front of her with an ease she never grasped before.

        “Har-Har?” Pinkie asked.

        Harmony didn't reply to her. But she saw her. She saw...

        The bright foal stands alone. There is a rumbling in the distance. She stares beyond the fields of desolation and she greets it, she greets a brand new horizon, a horizon not of one color, but of many... a single one-ness of light that splits into the infinite, joyous screams of the spectrum.

        It does not take the Sundering of Consus to behold this sudden and multiplicitous chaos. It only takes a smile, a smile that goes on forever.

        “She saw the bright shinies,” Harmony awoke to say.

        Pinkie Pie raised an eyebrow beneath a mane of phenomenally blown hair.

        Harmony's amber eyes darted viciously across the horizon, because there was suddenly too much to absorb in such a felicitously short amount of time. “Miss Pie... Miss Pie, there's a reason why Haymane and Company have built so much darkness here. They're worshiping the wrong spirit...”

        “How do you mean, Har-Har?”

        The last pony sighed long and hard. It was the opposite of painful. “Perhaps Gultophine did bring life to this desolation. Perhaps the patron Goddess of Rainbows did honor Consus by instilling this land with her spirit of progress and cultivation. But Goddess Gultophine left, Miss Pie. She finished whatever it was that she started and she left Equestria, along with three of her sisters. Say what we want to say, write what we want to write, preach what we feel like—we cannot change the fact that Goddess Gultophine is gone. Though her spirit may remain, she left us. What's more, Gultophine never came back.”

        A shuddering gulp. Harmony's gaze fell, fell, and lovingly settled upon her anchor's pink face.

        “But you did, Pinkie. You came back to Dredgemane. And you kept coming back to Dredgemane, to shine a singular and joyous light in the midst of so much darkness. You came back.”

        “I... I...” Pinkie Pie innocently blinked, her lips pursed as she suddenly tilted her head to the side to study an awkward sight in front of her. “Har Har? Why are you crying?”

        Harmony sniffled, running a hoof across her face and grinning in a sudden sunlight that only she could bask in. “Because I just remembered...” A shuddering smile. “I-I came back too...” She closed her moist eyes and bravely stared down the gaze of an absent-minded, purple dragon. “I too came back.” A swallowing, and her voice was more solid than the rock of that land. “And it was for a reason.”

        “What reason...?”

        Harmony cleared her throat. In a gentle embrace, she clasped her hooves to Pinkie's shoulders. “Miss Pie, I... Dredgemane needs your help with something. Follow me.”

        In the far corner of town, where the dead shadows of the night met the insufferable haze of the morning, four elder ponies sauntered out of a warehouse and loaded several heavy crates of tools into the back of a rickety wooden wagon. The four of them grabbed opposite corners of the cart. In a lifeless canter, they tugged and pulled at the creaking vehicle, dragging it like a wheeled coffin across the misty lengths of Dredgemane dawn. In the far corner of the wagon, hidden in dust beyond the clattering of their tools, several beat-up violins rattled, just as devoid of sound as the four elders' beards were devoid of color.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        What kind of strength does it take to see light in the middle of a grand and infinite darkness? How much more strength does it take to make oneself into the source of that light?

        Pinkie Pie must have known, for she had done just that. At one time in her life—a very bright and explosive time—she had come to know colors where once there was just a one-ness of illumination, an illumination that was hidden from her, and yet she found it, and furthermore she found the courage to keep on shining it through a smile that never ended.

        What can you say to a courage like that? What, out of the many disparate and violent things that you have done, can possibly stack up against such boldness, such bravery, such gloriously absurd audacity?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Along the far side of Stonehaven's granite structure, a wooden pair of doors opened. Vimbert appeared to the gray haze of morning, his blue eyes overcome with a bloodshot dreariness. Casting the misty sky a despicable look, he shoved the double doors all the way open and cleared the path for Nurse Angel Cake and Inkessa.

        The two fillies in nurse's gear stared down at the ground, a motion that they had been through many times previously during this all-too-familiar task, a task that involved the two of them somberly carrying a tiny wooden casket across the side lawn of Stonehaven Sanitarium, where Vimbert's wagon waited for it. Once the casket was laid down in the rear of the cart, Vimbert trotted over and tied himself to the vehicle’s rigging. He gave the two nurses a deadpan nod, and quite steadily pulled the rickety thing out from the dead end and down the trench that led to the awakening, gray heart of Dredgemane.

        Nurse Angel Cake and Inkessa watched from afar. In a momentary breath, they leaned against each other and weathered the melancholic spasms jolting through each other's lungs.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Far above, from the fourth floor of Stonehaven, Suntrot had clambered up to the window pane. With twitching gold eyes, the tiny filly stared out upon the Grave of Consus. The gray morning mist wafted across her moth-eaten mane as she searched the desolate lawn in front of the Sanitarium and finally, finally spotted Vimbert and his wagon. As the orange unicorn departed with the casket in tow, Suntrot murmured something. Deep, glistening pools formed underneath her eyelids. She would have cried, if only she wasn't overcome with a wave of unstoppable coughs. They dragged her down from the roof and plastered her—trembling—to the black and white tile floor below.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        In the upstairs hallway of the Pie Family Household, Quarrington shuffled silently out of an infinitely black bedroom. He made a bee-line for the stairs, but stopped halfway. Frozen like a ghost in the pathetically dim lanternlight, the adult stallion slumped up against a wall. He slid down to his haunches and brought a pair of hooves up to the sides of his skull. Once so limply huddled, he found an infinitesimal spot on the floor, and burned his twitching eyesight into it in a desperate race to melt away the moisture.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        At the bottom of the quarry, where the shadows were still darkest in early morning, Deacon Dawnhoof stood under a single flickering torch. Before him there stretched a sea of unkempt, canvas beds. Half of them were still stained with blood, still smelled of a phantom rust. The young priestly unicorn had an unscrolled parchment in his hooves, opened to the middle of Gultophine's Chronicles. But the unicorn wasn't reading it. His chestnut eyes were too blurry. He sat there, alone, like he had for the previous hour, like he could for decades to come, waiting feverishly for an exiled spirit to anoint him.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        We are all alone in your great, horrible darkness. Each and every one of us is alone. I may be alive while the rest of ponydom is not, but that still doesn't stop us from having a commonality in our isolation, in our polynumerous dead end legacies, in our fitful flounderings in the bottomless pit of you.

        The wonderful irony—the hilarious joke that I now get but you must positively hate—is that as lonely as we've all been, as lonely as we'll all ever be, it still won't be as lonely as you.

        I wonder what it's like to be you, to be one and only, to be everything and nothing and both at once. Nopony can relate to you, not even the end of ponies. No wonder you've taken so much from us and continue to do so, even to your own detriment, for soon I will no longer be around to bear witness to you.

        Now there's a tragedy.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The four bearded ponies dragged the wagon across Dredgemane, across Town Square, beyond the saloon, past a pair of cloaked figures, and finally towards the edge of town, where a gravel road dragged down to meet the hollow trenches of Gultophine's Refuge. There, they stopped the wagon and dragged from the rear of the rickety cart an assortment of chisels and metal spikes. With ritualistic precision, they shuffled up to where the natural granite bosom of the Grave of Consus met with the brick-laid cobblestone of the City, and they began chiseling away at the rock until the solid gray sea below broke up into brittle gasps of black space.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        In a slow, sluggish trot, Vimbert finally reached his destination. He pulled his wagon to a stop in front of a giant, red brick building erected at the southeasternmost corner of the entrenched town. Four large smokestacks stretched up out of the building's three-story foundation, and there was a deep bass rumbling from within.

        After untying himself from the rig of his wooden cart, Vimbert strolled around to the rear of the wagon, unloaded the tiny brown casket, and carried it slowly towards the entrance to the Dredgemane crematorium.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        From the balcony to his office, overlooking the gray abyss of his city, Mayor Haymane “stood” in a slump, his upper body propped upon the wooden railing to the lofty structure. His lower body squirmed lethargically upon the teetering tripod of squeaky wheels beneath him. His eyes quietly searched the distant horizon, dancing across the many lone farmsteads in the continental distance of the plateau. As his city slowly came to life below, murmuring with a deep hum like a household full of excited foals, the mayor took a deep breath, and quivered as a helpless victim to the tear or two that strolled down his cheeks.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        I now know what it means to be stronger than you. I now know what it means to be courageous in areas that you never will be. It is simply impossible for you to be brave, as it is simply impossible for us not to be brave.

        After so many years—my years and my friends' years—spent in forward and reverse time, I can safely say that I've figured you out, as well as your lies, as well as the many black shades you've used to paint your mistakes over.

        And the biggest of your mistakes is thinking that somepony like me can simply be as miserable as you for the sake of being what I am. That's as fallacious as any argument can be. I am, in essence, an individual, for I stand apart from all others like me... and I stand apart from you.

        You... what do you have to stand apart from? For one thing, it saves you from the horrific terror that embodies the act of being an individual. For another thing, you are robbed of the euphoria, robbed of the blind but blissful act of running—head on—screaming into the blackness that you once thought you had made perfectly opaque, but in fact it was full of colorful and beautiful stars, full of the bright shinies.

        And, oh yes, it is so amazingly, fantastically mad.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        With hammers and pickaxes, the four elders chiseled large gaping holes in the rock. Once enough space was cleared, they each took turns reaching into the wooden crates in the back of their wagon and removing fresh new cobblestones. Each of the bricks bore a different name and a different set of dates, respectively matching the title and lifespan of a tortured miner who had passed away sometime through the dreadful hours of the night. Like a mechanical factory, they laid each brick—each name down into the granite spaces, and began pounding them into place with rusted mallets, adding to the cobblestone deaths of Dredgemane.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The tiny wooden casket slid open like a collapsible box. A foal-shaped shroud lay on a metal tray as it was rolled up to the iron mouth of a great furnace. A soot-stained worker nonchalantly flung the door open to a great, ravenous flame, briefly filling the bricklaid bowels of the crematorium with ash and embers.

        Across the basement of dancing crimson shadows, Vimbert stood. Leaning against the brickwork, the orange unicorn watched from afar, staring with blue eyes that once more—as always upon this next fragile moment—forgot how to blink. Blindly, he reached into a pocket of his black jacket and produced a flask. His sip was quick, bitter, and unsatisfying.

        The worker cranked an instrument on the outer belly of the furnace. With swift and emotionless precision, he reached a pair of limbs up and slid the metal tray in. The oven swallowed the foal-shaped shroud, and closed behind it with an echoing clang of the shutting iron lid.

        Vimbert exhaled long and hard. His body was still as ice, but the silver vessel in his hoof rattled and rattled and rattled and...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        One brick after another, the elders filled the cobblestone sea of ghosts, until one lonesome stone was added to the ocean, sliding hissingly into its frigid crevice like a pebble dropped into the black heart of space. And the name that was on that stone read “Ice Song”, a coldly etched pair of words that briefly glistened in the morning dew, until a rusted mallet slammed it like a rivet into the Grave of Consus, blanketing the street with a brief and pointless thunder before hundreds of dull hooves trampled blindly over it for eternity.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        No.

        No, I can no longer be mad at you.

        I can only pity you.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The misty morning of Dredgemane turned twice as thick as normal, as the fumes from the quarry's foundaries mixed with the smoke from the flanking crematorium. Fraternal smokestacks pierced the desolate air, billowing forth the pride and tears of a city built in the wing-shaped trenches of the continent.

        Mister Irontail was in the middle of lethargically sweeping debris from the front of his blacksmith shop when the first fleck of ash fell on him. He ignored it, of course, choosing instead to straighten his beard and sweep his way towards the opposite side of his shattered window.

        In the Town Square beyond his shop, hundreds upon hundreds of Dredgemaners strolled mutely along their routes. They hung their gaze directly forward, blinding themselves to the dead names beneath them while simultaneously ambivalent to the remains of their loved ones snowing down from above. In such a numb fashion, Mayor Haymane's good citizens pursued their progress, their shuffling limbs unaffected by the errant flakes of dark gray ash that they were too diligent to recognize as either a memorial or a prophecy.

        Against the flow of them, piercing the purgatorial miasma, were two cloaked figures. They made their way past the sea of earth ponies and trotted on an undisturbed path down the trench that led to Stonehaven.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        There was a knock on the door to the hut.

        Sitting alone in the desolate interior, robbed of all her belongings and tools, Zecora glanced over with a frown. “Bah! Is it not enough that you strip me of my possessions?! Can I not sleep without another Dredgemane intercession?!”

        In a grumbling breath, the zebra stood up, trotted over to the door, and flung it open.

        “Unless it is time for my forced laboring, could you at least leave me to my...” She blinked confusedly at a pair of cloaked figures standing outside of Stonehaven and facing her. “...slumbering?”

        “Heehee! Come on, Zecchy!” One figure lowered the hood of her cloak. A bright and shiny Pinkie Pie lit the air with her smile. “You call that a rhyme?”

        “Pinkamena Diane Pie...” Zecora's blue eyes squinted. “Are you not in as much trouble as I?”

        “And about to be in even worse!” Pinkie nudged the figure to her side, who promptly disrobed to reveal herself as a copper pegasus.

        The last pony spoke, “Zecora, there isn't much time, and I can't explain why, but we need your assistance.”

        “For what reason, pray tell, do you approach me?” The zebra nervously glanced over the two fillies' shoulders. “I assumed you were a legally banished pony.”

        “I am, and I don't care.” Harmony's eyes were like twin, amber daggers. “I'm here to make a cure to Immolatia.”

        “You... Y-You confuse me, Miss Harmony.” Zecora made a face. “Do you not mean 'a remedy'?”

        “Not a 'remedy', not a 'salve', but a cure,” Harmony said with a frown. “We're going to friggin' get rid of infernite poisoning once and for all, and we need your help.”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Twenty-Two – P for Pinketta

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        “Immolatia is a pollution, a metallurgical blight, and so far a solution has evaded modern medicine's sight. Even in my desert land where sand blows amok, no zebra can extract infernite with any better luck. I had hoped against hope that my remedies would suffice to clean the foals' lungs like a hot furnace melts ice. Alas, there is no quaff, you see, that can alleviate the children of their misery. Even a precise, surgical incision won't ease their lungs of their infernal condition. If infernite was not this difficult to remove, the three of us would be sharing a fate less crude. Alas, all of my medicinal practices were for naught, and a Dredgemane imprisonment for myself I have wrought.”

        “You did your super-duper best, Zecchy,” Pinkie Pie said, leaning over with her cloak's hood down to nuzzle the striped mare. “Nopony deserves to have been treated like you were, especially after all that you've done!” The bright earth pony pouted with glossy, blue eyes. “It makes me feel crazy-sad that, twice in our friendship, something I've done has caused you to be called a crazy witch.”

        “Your mistakes, Pinkamena, have been long forgiven, or else to your home town I would never have been driven.” Zecora gently smiled. “Your compassion for those children is infectious, and helping them is still the first thing on my check list.” The zebra sighed and frowned towards the shadowed corners of the barren hut. “I only wished the land of your family was populated with far greater chivalry.”

        “I just don't get why Haymane's and his buddies wanna squeeze out any opportunity Stonehaven has to see some good changes for once!”

        “It's not about opportunity or changes, Miss Pie,” Harmony murmured. The cloaked time traveler stared cautiously out a crack in the wooden window of the hut. She scanned the front lawn of the Sanitarium for equine figures, saw none, and swiveled to face the other two souls with a courageous face. “It's all about power. So long as Breathstar feels like he has a hoofhold over his congregation and Overseer Sladeburn controls every squeaky wheel of the quarry operation, they're not going to let any outside influence come in and try to fix a problem that they won't admit exists, for to let somepony do something positive would threaten same misery that lends their complex social machine its perpetual fuel.”

        Zecora and Pinkie Pie exchanged blinking glances. When they looked back at Harmony, the zebra spoke, “And what of Haymane, the city's mayor? Surely he is as much a pivotal player.”

        Harmony took a deep breath, her amber eyes dulling in a brief haze of sympathy. “Haymane is in love with power too, but it's a different kind of power, a strength that weighs complacency with misery, both of which can be terribly addictive crutches in a life tempered by deep, deep sadness.” The last pony gulped and in a somber voice added, “I understand his reasons, for I have leaned on those same crutches for far too long myself.”

        “But not anymore, right?!” Pinkie Pie bounced across the room with joyous blue eyes. “You're onto a plan to get rid of the infernite poisoning once and for all! Isn't that what you said?! Huh?!”

        “Once more I hate to dampen your excitement,” Zecora murmured, “but Immolatia is a permanent predicament. Miss Harmony, what makes you so absolutely sure that what all medical science has missed, you can somehow cure?”

        “Answer me this, oh monochromatic queen of sexy rhymes...” Harmony strolled across the hut, squinting at the two fillies before her. “In Equestria's history of medicinal recipes, in the Zebrahara's tradition of herbal enchantments, and even in all of Dredgemane's sad legacy of willful neglect...” She paused and smiled drunkenly. “...Did anypony ever think of trying something stupid?”

        Zecora blinked curiously at that. Pinkie Pie leaned in with a whisper. “Do you suppose that's why she brought me here?”

        “You said it yourself, Zecora.” Harmony motioned with her amber-streaked mane towards the general direction of Stonehaven beyond the opaque walls of the hut. “Immolatia is a metallurgical problem, which is why traditional medicine can't seem to cut it. If I recall what Nurse Angel Cake said to me yesterday morning, the condition is nothing more than clumps of infernite solidifying within an equine's set of lungs. So, tell me, if it is a metallurgical problem, has anypony in the history of science ever considered treating it like a metallurgical problem?”

        “Do you mean that instead of scalpels and stitches, we should be employing dynamite switches?”

        “Miss Pie.” Harmony stomped her hoof on the ground and motioned towards the pink filly. “Toss me one of Blinkaphine's sheets of paper, and a pen if you would...”

        The copper pegasus' anchor reached deep beneath her cloak and rummaged through a saddlebag of things that Harmony had insisted they bring. Having arrived minutes ago at the barren hut of Zecora's imprisonment, the two ponies had practically smuggled a mountain of random tools with them from the Pie Family's residence.

        “Scratch one last paper airplane...” Pinkie Pie smiled and passed the sheet and pen over to the pegasus. “...And tack on one brand new constellation!”

        “It isn't stars I'm sketching this time, girl.” Harmony shuffled over towards a table and laid the sheet down. She fumbled briefly with the drawing instrument, grumbling. “Ugh... my kingdom for a hoof-brace.”

        “What was that?”

        “Nothing.” Harmony clamped her teeth over the end of the pen and wrote across the white sheet with her mouth. “Diff widd onweef tagge un segondfff...”

        “Your pegasus friend is quick on her hooves,” Zecora murmured to the candy-colored filly. “Though I am somewhat confused by her random moves.”

        “You and me both, sister! Heehee! Now if only I could get her to laugh like I do!”

        “Why, Pinkamena, even to this day you manage to surprise me!” The zebra's teeth showed in a grin. “To think that there's a creature in the world whom you haven't converted so easily!”

        “Mmmfff-Mmmff-Mmmf!”

        “What was that, Har-Har? Not all of us speak 'Mumble', not when sober at least. Heeheehee!”

        “Ptooie!” Harmony wiped her chin with a forelimb and held the sheet out proudly in front of herself. “Well, I've got something that even the illiterate can appreciate.” She trotted over and squatted down next to the two equines, laying the sheet down onto the ground. “Ladies and pinker ladies, I present you the end of infernite.”

        “It...” Zecora squinted her eyes at the illustration. “It... erhm...”

        “It looks like a vacuum cleaner!” Pinkie Pie spat.

        “Keep thinking that, Miss Pie. In the meantime, Miss Zecora, let me explain it to you.”

        Harmony pointed at a charcoal-black “blueprint” depicting a metal contraption of elongated proportions. A slender, copper neck connected a bulbous, translucent jar on the heavy end of the machine to a cone-shaped spout rigged with tiny, rocky shapes on the tiny end. In the middle of the machine, closer to the heavy side with the jar, the device house a crankshaft rigged with a pull-string and a trigger. Beside these moveable parts was a deep hollow chamber within which a spherical object was housed.

        “Great, billowing Shadow spirit!” Zecora made a grimacing face. “You envisioned all this in under a minute?!”

        “If you will allow me to explain...” Harmony smirked and gestured towards the whole of the illustration. “This thing's not exactly brand new. It's really just an inverted redesign of something I had built once before. Something called...” The future scavenger took a deep breath and smiled in a serene breath of pride. “Something called a 'lightning gun'. Only, where that old device served its purpose in discharging energy, this one will accomplish the task of absorbing matter into it. It sucks whereas my original design blew...” The last pony blinked, then rubbed a hoof through her mane hair while blushing. “Uhm... Ehhh... if you take my meaning literally and not figuratively. Ahem.”

        “It is an intricate design, no doubt. But how will this cleanse a lung's clout?”

        “Will you stop thinking about the interior organs for once, ya talking newspaper?!” Harmony fluffed the mare's mohawk and all-but-shoved the blueprints into Zecora's twitching face. “Look closely! This...” The copper pegasus pointed at the translucent jar on the heavy end. “...is a sealed container that will house a substance known as orange flame. This...” She pointed at the spherical object inside the hollow chamber next to the trigger and draw-string. “...is the energy core for housing what powers the machine up. And this...” She gestured towards the long copper nozzle until it ended at the conical spout with rocky bolts. “...is the channel through which infernite can be drawn and deposited into a compartment with disposable cartridges.”

        “So it's like a vacuum cleaner!” Pinkie Pie beamed.

        Harmony opened her mouth to argue, sighed, and eventually muttered, “Yes, like a vacuum cleaner. Sure, why not?”

        “I like vacuum cleaners. Sometimes I chase Gummy around with one until he starts making little messes on the floor. Then I chase him around with a mop.”

        “What are these shapes, pray tell...” Zecora pointed towards the rocky dots along the spout. “...that adorn the neck in a circular spell?”

        “Those, my good friendly shaman, are runestones,” Harmony said in a breath.

        “Orange flame, energy cores, and runestones?” Zecora balked. “Miss Harmony, exactly how far has your mind flown?!”

        “Hear me out...” Harmony stood back up and paced frenzied circles across the hut, all the while excitedly rambling, “With the combination of all three of those things, a machine like what I have in mind could hone in on a petrified metal of enchantment and dredge it from just about any substance imaginable! In this case, the thing is tailor-made to suck the infernite out of an equine's body without damaging any of the vital organs. The orange flames are for attracting the metals. The energy core controls the dispersal of the flame. Finally, the runestones magically channels the extracted infernite from the specific target into a metallic repository!”

        “Whew!” Pinkie Pie whistled. “Fancy this sexy machina!”

        Harmony stuck a tongue out. “Don't even go there.”

        “What do you mean by a specific target?” Zecora blinked at Harmony. “You wish to have a foal placed at the end of it?”

        “If I can build this thing...” Harmony sat on her haunches and spread her arms out as if saying grace before a bountiful dinner table. “If I can slap this together just right, then we'll have a device that can filter a pony's lungs with a modicum of orange flame. The clusters of infernite will naturally be drawn towards the machine by means of the focused enchantment of runestones. So long as the energy source is regulated gently by the pony wielding the machine, the metal filaments will dissolve, travel up the lungs, exit the body, and leave the patient utterly devoid of Immolatia.”

        “Wow, Har-Har, you fuzzhead!” Pinkie Pie grinned wide. “When did you become such a gearhead?”

        “Miss Pie, the only reason my cutie mark is an infinity symbol surrounded by solar flares is because having a toaster oven on my butt would be really lame, no matter how stupidly honest that would be.”

        “The nature of this machine's construction only magnifies our current situation.” Zecora gulped and glanced up at the other two, but mostly focused on Harmony. “No matter how enthusiastic our creed, we hardly have the materials that we need.”

        “Don't we?” Harmony gestured beyond the walls of that claustrophobic prison. “Miss Zecora, did you miss that dreary placed called Dredgemane just outside your door? Y'know, the place that forced you into indentured servitude at Stonehaven for the better part of a month? I don't know if you or Miss Pie have noticed, but there are a heck of a lot of rocks just lying around everywhere. I'm sure we can all live up to this place's name and dredge up all that we need in the name of providence.”

        “This is a noble thing that you wish to accomplish for the foals. I seriously doubt, though, that Mayor Haymane will approve of your goals.”

        “Miss Zecora, the ponies of this town have danced to Mayor Haymane's empty melodies for far too long, and what progress has been made? I mean, what true progress?” Harmony gulped and pointed proudly at the blueprint. “This is more than just a crazy idea in the shape of some whacky vacuum cleaner. This is the key to a jailed dream that nopony in Dredgemane realizes they have the rights to reveling in. More than a Canterlotlian Clerk or a stargazer, I am an engineer, and a true engineer knows progress when she sees it. We're about to make history in this Gultophine-forsaken town, and I mean that with every breath put into the friggin' words, or else may Nebula strike me dead.”

        “Nnngh!” Pinkie Pie flinched, froze in place, glanced at the far corners of the ceiling, then sighed in a relaxed slump. “Whew. She must be wearing headphones today.”

        Zecora rolled her blue eyes, let loose an exhausted breath, and glanced at Harmony. “Unless these resources you wish to steal, perhaps you should start with a monetary appeal.”

        “I'd ask you to repeat that, Miss Zecora, if I only knew that wouldn't further complicate the paraphrase with yet another rhyme.”

        “I think she means that before we get the nuts and bolts, we need the clams and bucks!” Pinkie Pie said.

        Harmony merely glared at her.

        “Bits, ya silly filly! Bits!” The candy-coated pony winked. “I've visited my home town enough times to know that they never give away anything for free, unless it's pretzels, but Pepper stows them all away just for me.”

        The last pony leaned forward with a smirk. “Tell me, Miss Pie, is she the only pony stowing stuff away for you?”

        Ms. Marble Cake nearly spat into her cake mix. “Your allowance?!” She paused in stirring a large bowl atop a random table in her cramped bakery and glanced down at the bright filly. “I thought you were happy enough with just the jelly beans, child!”

        “Pffft—Oh please, Auntie Marble Cake!” Pinkie Pie not-so-slyly smirked while leaning against a metal sink. Behind her, droves of ponies slaved away at their baking tasks. “As much as I've enjoyed being your liberal repository for licorice throughout the years...” Pinkie Pie orated in the spirit of a Canterlotlian Clerk. “... it's high time I came to collect on a far more proper reward for all of my years of dutiful service!”

        “Did your sister Inkessa put you up to this?” The obese mare glared suspiciously. “You're using far too many big words for this to be your idea.”

        “Erm...” Pinkie Pie briefly blushed beneath her bright coat and adjusted the gray cloak she was wearing. She glanced back at an identically garbed shadow waiting at the back of the bakery and stammered, “It's just that... that... I-I was finally thinking of going into college! Heehee—Yes!” She turned around with a frazzled smile. “'Ponyville University for Dumb-Dumbs Wanting to Become Smart-Smarts!' And to cover tuition, well, I need a boost of bits to get me in through the door! A bits-boost, if you get my brift... er... drift! Heeheehe!”

        “Funny...” Marble Cake squinted past the fluffy-maned girl, spotting the shady equine figure at the back of the bakery. “...You never had collegiate aspirations before.”

        Pinkie Pie's face stretched to encompass the whole of her aunt's vision once more. “That was before I got to know my good friend Twilight and realized that being a egghead means more than trying to headbutt chickens.”

        The cloaked figure groaned in the distance.

        Pinkie Pie cleared her throat and tilted her head up in a haughty gesture. “Verily, I am ready to be an egghead myself, and maybe I too will be writing Princess Celestia letters on the magic of friendship, just as soon as I can teach Gummy how to magically burp paper scrolls halfway across Equestria.”

        “Darling, if any college has a scholarship befitting the likes of you, then I'm sure in the end you could afford to teach your baby alligator to perform open heart surgery.” Marble Cake smiled rosily and nodded. “As a matter of fact, I have been saving up a little something for you. Years ago, I made an agreement with Quarrington, your father, and since then it has stacked up to a small fortune that I think you will find—”

        “Sounds great, Auntie! I'll take it!”

        “Now Pinkamena, I need to clarify something. This was only a meager backup fund for if—”

        “Is it enough bits to afford me a random bunch of metal surplus materials?

        “Uhhhh... M-Maybe...?”

        “Heeheehee! Then I'll take it!” Pinkie Pie bounded away.

        “Wait! Stop right this instant!”

        The bright filly froze in her gait, nervously shuddering as the distant cloaked figure likewise stirred.

        Marble Cake smiled. “Don't you wanna know where the money is, first?”

        “Oh. Yes. Eheheh...” Pinkie Pie numbly sweated. “I suppose patience is one of the things they'll be teaching me at Smarts-Smarts Academy.”

        “There're at least two hundred and fifty bits inside a metal box, located atop the fourth shelf in the large wooden dresser next to my cactus garden.”

        “Cool beans! Say, which cactus garden is it? Is it the one with the coffee stains all over it?”

        “Uhhh...” The rotund mare suddenly frowned. “Since when was coffee spilled on my cacti—?”

        “Oh Auntiiiiiiieeeee...” Pinkie Pie was explosively hugging the large pony in the center of the bakery. A hiccuping wave of happy sobs wracked her body in melodramatic fashion as she nuzzled, nuzzled, nuzzled her bosom. “You've made me so h-h-happy! Every day that I sleep my way through socialism class, I'll be dreaming of youuuuu...”

        “Don't you mean 'sociology class'?”

        “Uh huh. Okaythanksbye!” Pinkie Pie stopped sobbing altogether and bounded towards the bakery owner's office.

        Ms. Marble Cake took a deep breath and returned to her cake mix. Halfway through stirring, she stopped in a slump. “Wait. Do colleges accept ponies without diplomas these days?” She glanced over her shoulder, but both cloaked figures were gone.

        “Even after the bits have been acquired, there's still the matter of the metals desired.” Zecora pointed at the long neck of the machine in the blueprint. “Even if you built it on your own, you'll need more than coins alone.”

        “Pinkie Pie?” Harmony glanced across the hut at the candy-coated filly. “Do you know any merchants in the commercial district who sell used refrigerator parts?”

        “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...”

        “Yeah, wild stab in the dark.” Harmony winced and scanned the dusty ceiling with amber eyes. “We need to speak to somepony with access to lots of raw metal. There's no way in heck we can waltz up to Sladeburn or any of his lackeys, or else the only metal I have to look forward to is in the shape of jail bars.” The last pony took a deep breath. “There's gotta be some soul in Dredgemane willing to give us a huge break in spite of what the Council's done.”

        “I don't know about a huge break!” Pinkie suddenly brightened. “But I know somepony with a big beard!”

        Zecora made a face.

        Harmony sighed. “Yeah... okay...”

        Mister Irontail paused in operating the pump to his shop's sparkling furnace. He turned and glared over his bushy facial hair. “You? Do you know how much trouble I could get in for so much as talking to you?”

        “Yeah, that's why I brought her here,” Harmony lowered her hood and motioned with an exposed mane towards her anchor. “She's my buffer.”

        “Hiya, Mister Irontail!” Pinkie bounced. “Pop open a cap and swallow two of me with a glass of water!”

        “I wish I could say I was in the mood today, Pinkamena, but even Princess Entropa couldn't have timed this week with even worse luck!” Mister Irontail pointed with a red hot poker towards the rubble still strewn across the front of his decimated shop. “I'm still having to clean up after this mess, a disaster compounded two times in a row on account of a debacle that you instigated!” He pointed the hot, sharp object into the nape of a gulping pegasus' neck. “Now Gultophine's Harvest is just around the corner, and I'm hardly in the position to cash in on the traffic to immediately follow it! So much of my equipment is busted; I barely have the means to meet the demand for new tools and ironcraft after the bonfires are over and done with!”

        “Oh, don't get all grumpy in your goatee!” Pinkie Pie smirked and produced a metal box from beneath her cloak. She flipped the lid open and displayed two hundred and fifty sparkling bits. “Cuz we have all the payment that you could possibly need, and it's not even Gultophine's Harvest yet!”

        “Just let us buy some raw metal supplies off of you,” Harmony said in a droning voice. “I promise: just one purchase and we'll be out of your hair.” She lingered on the edge of her tongue, glancing all over the contours of his thick black beard. “Literally...”

        “Hah! So you'll do what?! Build another ballista to aim at my storefront?! No thanks, ya Canterlotlian Klutz!” Irontail barked and sputtered. He shuffled his immense girth back towards the hissing furnace. “Why don't you be useful next time and rain down destruction on the front of the saloon for a change! Goddess knows why, but they seem to be way more insured than I am these days!”

        “This is hopeless...” Harmony grumbled and trotted towards the dilapidated entrance, hoisting the cloak's hood back over her head. “Come on, Pinkie Pie. Let's go, I dunno, rob a train or something. I seriously doubt it's any worse a crime than our being here now. The less ponies going to Appleloosa, the better.”

        “Hmmmmmph...” Pinkie Pie briefly pouted, her cheeks turning red. Suddenly, she gasped, and raised a hoof to the top of her skull. “Hey... Hey hey hey—What do we have here?!” Her limb dug deep into the fuzz of her pink mane and came out grasping a colorful dagger plucked from the cobblestone of Town Square days ago. “A rainbow-colored knife? If I didn't know better, I think this was dropped by the—”

        “—the Royal Grand Biv?!” Irontail nearly dropped his poker into the furnace from gasping so wildly. “You mean—you actually managed to grab one of that masked pony's amazing, fabulously sculpted blades?”

        “Pfft—You mean this thing?! I have hoof sharpeners that are far less boring than this butter knife! Really, I should just waltz straight out to the nearest garbage wagon and chuck the thing—”

        “No!” Irontail tripped over himself and then shuffled into place, nervously staring at the prismatically glinting thing. “Heavens no, child. Do you know what incredible craftponyship that souvenir is?”

        “Souvenir? Heeheehee—You mean like that scrap of the Biv's robe that you happily picked up from the first time Har-Har did the terrrrrrrrible thing of smashing in through your window with the vandal?”

        “Uhhh...”

        “You're right, Mister Irontail. This thing can only remind you of how much bad luck you've had. I should do what stuffy Bishop Breathstar wants and get rid of the distraction right away—!”

        “Say... Uhm... About th-those raw metals that you need...” The bushy-bearded stallion smiled nervously, shaking. His eyes were locked on the dagger the entire time. “H-How about I give you a discount? One hundred and eighty bits, and I'll give you enough plates to build a wagon to ram through a bank wall, for all I care!”

        Harmony suddenly marched up with a creased brow. “One hundred and fifty bits, and you throw in two hammers and a chisel.”

        “Two hammers?!” Irontail made a face. “I may be desperate, but I'm not stupid!”

        Harmony reached a hoof out to her anchor. “Miss Pie, would you mind?”

        “Not at all, Har-Har.” Pinkie lent the dagger to her.

        The copper pegasus raised the sharp object to the rear of her gaping mouth. “Augh... Ah-Ah... I have this annoying... aghh... stalk of hay stuck between two molars back here...”

        “Fine!” Irontail hissed, stretching two hooves forward in a begging motion. “It's a deal! I'll throw in a third hammer if you just stop breathing on it!”

        “And just what manner of jar is that?” Zecora pointed at the illustrated container towards the heavy end of the machine's blueprint. “Could Dredgemane provide such at the drop of a hat?”

        “Now there's a good question.” Harmony sat back with her flank against the hut's wall. “I've built a lot of crazy things in my day, but I'm no expert at forging glass.”

        “Out of all the really boring jobs a pony can find in Dredgemane...” Pinkie gulped. “Glass making isn't really one of them. Lots of ponies around here do a better job of breaking glass.”

        “Besides, forging glass takes time.” Harmony took a deep breath. “And I don't exactly have a lot of that.”

        “Why not, Har-Har?”

        “Because...” The time traveler paused, testing her blinking eyes for signs of green color. There wasn't any... for now. She ended up saying, “Because the longer this undertaking goes on, the more damage Immolatia could do to those poor kids.”

        “Then perhaps the best way to beat the clock,” Zecora said, “Is to find a place that has glass in stock.”

        “But where in Equestria are we going to find an empty bottle large enough for the likes of this machine?” Harmony muttered.

        Pinkie Pie cleared her throat. The other two fillies looked her way. She grinned in return before teetering back and forth playfully while mocking a heavy throated hiccup.

        Harmony blinked, then rolled her eyes. “Alas, where everypony knows your mane...”

        The bartender planted a gigantic dumbbell-shaped glass of thick purple drink atop the counter with a clank. “Finely Imported Late Third Age Griffonese Wine! There are no more than two hundred other samples of this in the known world of liquor markets.”

        “Yeah, uh huh, that's great.” Harmony glanced over her cloaked shoulder at the rest of the cacophonous saloon and leaned against the counter while holding up a pile of gold coins. “We've got eighty bits. Just give us the bottle already.”

        “Hah!” The mustached bartender practically barked at the two blinking fillies. “You're funny, lady. Eighty bits might get you the bottle cap, but you'd better have brought the entire royal fortune of Canterlot if you so much as want to get a sip of this stuff!”

        “Nnngh...” Harmony ran a hoof over her face and slumped even further forward. “I can't believe I'm saying this, but... ahem... humor me.” Her amber eyes narrowed. “How much for the entire thing?”

        “Six hundred bits, without a question.”

        “Six hundred—Snkkt—For a bottle of frickin' Griffonese grape juice?!”

        “Yeah!” Pinkie Pie practiced her own frown. “And I bet it tastes just like Mon-Mon too!”

        “Miss Pie, I've got this...”

        “You've got nothing!” The bartender frowned, cradling the big bulbous bottle as if they might reach over and grab it at any second. “I don't know what stunt you fillies are trying to pull here, but this place isn't some festering hole-in-the-wall the likes of Breathstar and Haymane are making it out to be! This may not be Manehattan, but we've got class in this saloon! And this extremely rare, finely imported wine is not to be wasted on youths off the street experimenting in a one night stand!”

        Harmony squinted. “Just what the hay are you on about?”

        “Come on, now...” The stallion's lips smirked beneath his mustache. “Two young ladies, coming to a place like this, dressed identically with linen to hide your faces from the town, in such a blasted hurry to get some juice and rush out the door?” He winked and leaned forward. “Eighty bits will get you three tall bottles of Appleloosan Whiskey, not to mention a room upstairs.”

        “A room for what?” Harmony exclaimed.

        The bartender groaned with a rolling of his eyes. He whispered before the perked ears of Harmony and Pinkie Pie.

        The copper pegasus recoiled. “What?!” Her amber eyes blinked in opposite directions. “No! Goddess, no! What's wrong with you?!”

        “'Fillyfooling?'” Pinkie Pie blinked, then giggled. “Hehehe! What's that? It sounds like fun!”

        “No it does not!” Harmony growled at Pinkie Pie. She turned once more to the bartender and waved her front hooves. “Look, just forget about the alcohol. All that my friend and I need is a large smooth bottle for—”

        The bartender raised his eyebrows.

        “Y'know what? Screw you!” Harmony barked loud enough for the whole saloon to glance at her and Pinkie Pie's cloaked figures. “When the world ends, I hope a moonrock lands on you when you're in the outhouse!”

        “Pssst! Hey! Har-Har...” Pinkie Pie suddenly clasped onto the trudging pegasus' cloak.

        “Come on, Miss Pie,” Harmony snarled as she marched angrily towards the saloon doors. “Let's go ask for ingredients in a prison full of criminals where we won't be harassed.”

        “Stop fretting over sour grapes and hold on a sec!”

        “Miss Pie, I can't even fret over griffon grapes. There's no hope in this bar.”

        “Pffft—Flippin' duh!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “You think I ever once visited this place because I liked the bar?”

        Harmony leaned her head curiously to the side. “Just what are you thinking of right now?”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “I'd tell you, sugah, but it'd make you blush.” Pepper Plots smirked and flung the fluffy ends of a pink boa around her neck. The fancily colored mare sat on a stool with her back against an abandoned piano at the edge of the saloon. “For example, just what was it that reduced you to rags? Did a bunch of marines gather around in a circle and...” She wagged her eyebrows. “...give you a court martial?”

        “I swear to Epona.” Harmony sighed and folded her forearms as she leaned against a poker table. “Everypony in the Fourth Age needs a cold bath.”

        “Your Canterlotlian friends speaks in riddles, P.D.P.” Pepper winked at the time traveler's anchor. “I bet she's a real tongue twister. Mmmmhmmmhmmm...”

        “Say Pepper, what's a 'filly-fooler'?”

        “Ahem.” Harmony glared Pinkie's way. “Miss Pie, if you wouldn't mind...”

        “Oh! Right!” Pinkie Pie bounced. “Har-Har and I really, really need this big bottle of Griffonese joy juice, but we don't have the bits to afford it.”

        “Why, Pinkamena!” Pepper Plots looked half as shocked as she was amused. “I'm almost proud of you! For a pony who never got a license to pull a wagon, you're sure quick to fall off it!”

        “She doesn't want to drink the stuff. Neither of us want to drink the stuff,” Harmony explained. “We just want the bottle.”

        “And just what will happen to the Griffonese Wine?” Pepper squinted suspiciously at the pegasus. “You're gonna trot your way to Breathstar's cathedral and let his chestnut-eyed young squire baptize you in it?”

        “Lady, what are you on about?” Thud. Harmony's cloak stretched towards the ceiling of the saloon. In a frenzy, she flung her wings back down and frowned over at her anchor. “Miss Pie! Neither the time nor the place!”

        “Heeheeheehee!” Pinkie's giggles were joined with Pepper's cackling voice. “I'm so sorry, Har-Har! It was just the perfect set-up that time! I promise I won't do it again...”

        “Nnngh...” Harmony rubbed a hoof over her cloaked face and glared tiredly in the mare's direction. “Look, the way I see it, you owe us.”

        “Do I, now, sugah?”

        “Not once did I mention to the Mayor a word about the little Anarchist Anonymous Club you've got formed in this place's cellar.” The copper pegasus swallowed. “And believe me, while being interrogated, insulted, and banished before an entire Council Hall of angry Dredgemaners, I had many an opportunity to. Thanks to me, you and your friend Brevis can keep doing what or who you're doing in this charming little vodka-hole you call a home.”

        “Two things, darling.” The saucily dressed pony raised a hoof. “One—Brevis is hardly a friend. He's more like a philosopher poet whom I happen to cross paths with from time to time.”

        “Uh huh. See this? This is me nodding my head and humoring you.”

        “Charming. And for another—the most that I could ever possibly owe you is a swift kick in the bridle, Miss Harmony. I don't know what sordid crusade you may think you're on as of right now, but—banished or not—you spent the entirety of your stay in this town trying to track down this city's one symbol of hope, the Royal Grand Biv, and that strikes me far closer to home than you can even possibly imagine, Canterlotlian.”

        Next, Pepper Plots stood up, straightened her dress, and sashayed over to the pink filly's side.

        “But P.D.P. here... I owe her. I always have.” She raised a hoof and tilted the chin of the earth pony up so that they could share a happy smile. “For too many years than this mare is willing to count sober, Pinkamena has been around to remind me that not all innocence is lost from the world. And if she wants this favor taken care of, then I'd feel like an absolute sinner to let her down. Heh—it doesn't take a sermon of Breathstar to convince me of that!”

        “You're such a sweetheart, Pepper!” Pinkie Pie hummed happily.

        “It's good to know that parts of me still have their flavor.” Pepper winked and glanced at Harmony. “You want the bottle that the Griffonese Wine is in? Well, alright, I'll get it for you. But I'd rather get my girdle tangled with the wheels of Mayor Haymane himself than let such fine ambrosia go to waste!”

        “So... Uh... Wh-What are you going to do, pray tell?” Harmony gulped. “You're going to... drink it all yourself?”

        “Heh—Being alone with a bottle may be a sullen Canterlotlian's idea of how to spend the weekend, but not this mare's!” Pepper smirked saucily and motioned with her head towards a tall stallion fatefully marching in through the saloon doors just then. “If there's anything my life has taught me, it's to make an art out of spoils. Why spend an entire fortune on a bottle of imported wine when you can spend somepony else's fortune?”

        “I don't get you.”

        “With that attitude, you won't get anything at all, princess.” Pepper craned her neck and called out to the patron who just entered. “Yooohooo! Nicky-wicky!”

        Harmony and Pinkie Pie slowly turned to glance towards the far end of the place.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Upstairs, a railed balcony stretched across the height of the saloon. Beyond a door obscured by a curtain of thick, rattling beads, a red-painted room echoed with an array of giggles from two tittering voices. The playful snickering was randomly interrupted by a stallion's drunken hiccup as the pair of whispers doubled in inebriated whimsy.

        No more than ten minutes in, a mare's hoof stuck out through the beads and kicked a large, empty, dumbbell shaped bottle to a rattling stop on the outside balcony. The limb retracted back into the room of hiccups and guffaws. In the meantime, Harmony and Pinkie Pie shuffled their way up to the edge of the doorframe. The copper pegasus knelt down, picked up the heavy, glass container, and smiled victoriously at her anchor. Without a second to waste, she bounded down the balcony and towards the stairs leading to the saloon's first floor.

        Pinkie Pie, however, lingered there. In a suddenly numb gaze, she trotted towards the curtain of beads and squinted into the giggling obscurity beyond with rosy cheeks.

        After a shuffling of hooves, a sighing Harmony waltzed back, latched onto Pinkie's fluffy tail with her teeth, and dragged the cloaked anchor away with a frightened yelp.

“You may be able to acquire a container for this machine,” Zecora said. “But orange flame, in this desolate land, I have hardly seen!”

        “Let me worry about the orange flame,” Harmony grumbled from across the hut as she squinted dazedly at her illustration. “I have to get everything else together before I can so much as attempt to track that stuff down.”

        “But for a substance that is such a rarity, would it not be prudent to make it the priority?”

        “I said I'll get to it!” Harmony exclaimed. “Just keep your stripes on! Right now, I'm worried about the runestones. It looks like we'll have the metals and the container in the bag, but this machine isn't going to work without minerals for runecrafting...”

        “Your insistence on runestones has thoroughly intrigued me,” Zecora remarked, squinting her blue eyes at the pegasus. “Have you taken a page out of Lunar Empirical History?”

        “As a matter of fact, I have.”

        “Quite fascinating, for a pegasus from Canterlot. Runeforging has become a taboo there, has it not?”

        “Yeah, well, it's one thing to learn from the history books,” Harmony said. “It's another to get obsessed with some unnecessarily superstitious principal because of reading them one too many times. I swear, Miss Zecora, I'm not some crazy psycho pony who's out to reinstate the rule of Nightmare Moon by crafting runestone weaponry. I just need a way to get a machine enchanted so that I can regulate it by a trigger word to drag infernite out of sick equines.”

        “Your sensibility of mind is refreshing.” Zecora nodded with a smile. “But one part of your head is sadly missing.”

        “Erm...” Harmony blinked confusedly.

        “A horn, ya copper quack!” Pinkie's hooves clasped onto the pegasus' skull from behind. “Hehehe! I may not be Twilight Sparkle, but even I know that you can't enchant stuff without a unicorn horn!”

        The last pony glanced fitfully down at her naked forelimbs. “Er... Right.” She gulped. “Stupid me, I guess. I was kind of hoping to find the rocks before I dealt with that.”

        “There is no reason to feel like a dunce. Perhaps you can deal with both at once.”

        “How do you mean?”

        “Go and find a pony with a horn in their head who can also grab the stones that we need from a rock bed.”

        “Oh! Oh!” Pinkie Pie bounced merrily. “How about Bert? He's a janitor! He should know all about grabbing rocks!”

        “Are you for real?” Harmony gave her a blanching look. “Just because Vimbert takes to drink doesn't mean he takes to dumb. That unicorn's seen me get my flank banished in front of the whole Council. He's not about to risk whatever could possibly be valuable in his so-called life to help me do something so audacious without telling Haymane.” She sighed deeply. “Besides, if he had the horn to do any magic with anymore, I seriously doubt he'd be a janitor in the first place.”

        “Then another unicorn we must find who's willing to be both helpful and kind.”

        “There are few unicorns in Dredgemane as it is, and I doubt just any random pony in town is going to help an exiled pegasus with this machine.”

        “Are you certain there is none who can assist you with this infernite gun?” Zecora craned her neck to the side while thinking aloud. “It has to be a unicorn with a metallurgic sense who is not afraid to keep these things in confidence.”

        “Yeah!” Pinkie Pie added with a bounce. “Somepony with Rarity's skill who'll do the Pinkie Pie Swear!”

        Harmony blinked. Her copper features blushed suddenly as she rolled her eyes and smirked at the two fillies. “I think I know someone saintly enough...”

        “Uhm... M-Miss Pie?” Deacon Dawnhoof stumbled over the rocky shoals of a landfill bordering the west edge of the Dredgemane trenches. The bowl-haired colt nervously struggled in his brown robe to not slip on the beds of shifting gravel beneath the howling winds of that place. “I know that you must be awfully distraught over the circumstances that transpired yesterday, what with the horrible mine collapse that you were a witness to just before having your close companion banished from Dredgemane...”

        “Yeah! Don't you miss her already?!”

        “Huh? Uhm... Sure, I suppose, b-but that's beside the point!” His soft voice attempted to raise itself above the volume of the dusty breeze. “You said that you needed counsel in a spiritual matter! While it is my function to lend you wisdom and advice in a time of need while I learn to be a better counselor in my order, I cannot help but feel a bit... p-put off by the unorthodox location you have chosen for us to partake in such a verbal exchange!”

        “Heeheehee! Listen to you, ya handsome devil! You're like if Fluttershy secretly had an infant brother who was rescued by monks off a battlefield! No wonder Har-Har has a crush on you!”

        “I don't have a crush on anypony!” The copper pegasus came out from the shadows behind Dawnhoof.

        “Oh my goodness!” Dawnhoof spun and stared at her with a hoof over his heart. “How long have you been following us?”

        “Long enough to formulate a new murder for Miss Pie over there.”

        “Heeheehee! Uh ohhhhhhh!”

        Harmony rolled her eyes and gazed at the young priest-in-training. “Don't worry. I'll wait until the blood has dried off my hooves before I confess it to you.”

        “Not a joke, Har-Har, but an incredible simulation!”

        “Miss Pie, will you let us talk?”

        “T-Talk?” Dawnhoof gulped and pointed a shaking hoof at the pegasus. “But the Good Bishop Breathstar said that you were b-banished from town for assisting the Royal Grand Biv!”

        “I hate to give you the proverbial slap in the horn, buddy, but the only thing Good about Bishop Breathstar is that he hasn't yet taken to randomly shackling innocent Dredgemaners in their sleep! Your wise and boisterous leader of the faith is also a leader of the forlorn. He preaches to the children of Gultophine—equines sculpted in the image of the Alicorn Goddess' spirit of life—and tries to convince them that they should adopt the image of misery, of a machine that he and Haymane and Sladeburn have cranked this entire pathetic town into becoming! And don't pretend after all of these years of studying under his tutelage, of crying announcements into the streets for abominable mutations of Gultophine's Harvest, that you haven't seen the lack of grace in Bishop's methodology... or the lack of life.”

        “Miss Harmony, you strike me as a very courageous soul.” He gazed at her with something more akin to a wince than a frown. “And yet right now I can't help but feel overcome by the same spiteful and vehement arrogance that has angered the Good Bishop and the entire City Council so terribly.”

        “Am I spiteful and arrogant?” Harmony smirked crookedly as her black bangs danced in the dusty breeze. “Heh, sure. But I have the good grace not to force an entire congregation of ponies to think in the same manner that I do just so I can have my way. Even right here, right now, I could care less if you think I'm a good pegasus or not. What Pinkie Pie and I brought you here for was to help make a new machine, one that isn't an infernal oven of lost souls like Dredgemane, a place that spits out so many ashes of loved ones that they rain down and only perpetuate the circle of death. I want to spread the spirit of Gultophine, Deacon Dawnhoof. I want to spread life. In a City that is named as Gultophine's refuge, isn't that more or less the appropriate thing to do?”

        “You say that you wish to spread life...” Dawnhoof narrowed his vision on her. “Is this the same excuse that you used when you assisted the zebra outsider with her heretical experiments on the Stonehaven children?”

        “'The decay of life is a necessary tragedy,'” Harmony quoted. “'Ignorance within the decay of life is an unnecessary crime.'”

        The chestnut eyed colt exhaled and glanced off into the distance of the landfill. “Chronicles of Gultophine, Chapter Three. Yet again, your versatility impresses me, Miss Harmony, but I still wish to ascertain your point.”

        “The point is that the greatest heresy in this town is not committed by those who point hooves of blame but by those who refuse to lend hooves of assistance.” Harmony's amber eyes narrowed. “Haymane, Breathstar, and the entire Council have had decades to do something more than just give those Stonehaven kids a place to fester and die. They know it in their heads that there exists the possibility of methods that may heal the equines suffering from Immolatia. However, Haymane and his cohorts don't have it in their hearts to do something about it, for they've grown within their souls a grand black pit so large and ravenous that it's a lot easier to just feign ignorance than to ever attempt bridging the horrible gaps that exist within themselves. Instead, they're comfortable with just extending this pathetic abyss into the rest of Dredgemane until it swallows up all spirits, including the Spirit of Gultophine.”

        “You still wish me to believe that you are not attempting to make your own congregation out of me like Breathstar does to Dredgemane?”

        “What I wish for you to believe, Deacon, is that I'm on a mission of healing,” Harmony said with a gentle smile that stood firmly against the breeze. “It's the same mission that you're on, a highly painful and improbable mission—but it still draws us on a path, a separate path from the straight and narrow dogma that Breathstar's tongue has built out of bellows and brimstone. Dawnhoof, I saw you yesterday. I saw you aiding the suffering miners, one by one, with a grace reserved for royalty, while Breathstar flippantly trounced past them like he was navigating a field of weeds. You too are on this same mission that I am, and if you help me and Miss Pie here—I promise—you will be helping the Spirit of Gultophine in ways this city has not had the grace to experience in years, for you will be blessing lives instead of branding heretics! Now, which of those two actions can be touched upon more in the Chronicles, you think?”

        Dawnhoof sighed long and hard, his straight-edged mane blowing in the breeze. He gulped and stared off towards the misty clouds beyond the Grave of Consus. “I should just report you. You have been banished by the Council of Dredgemane, and I have been summoned here by means of deceit into a verbal barrage of propaganda. Even Bishop Breathstar himself would exempt this conversation from the priestly code of confidence, for the social implications of entertaining your malformed philosophy are heinous to say the least.”

        Harmony smirked. “Then why aren't you presently scampering away with your robe hiked up like a good monk?”

        “Pssst!” Pinkie Pie leaned in. “Because he likes the streak in your mane!” A rock was expertly kicked into her skull. “Owie!” She rubbed her head and pouted.

        Harmony lowered her hoof, gulped, and nervously smiled the Deacon's way. “Erm... eheh... 'Hail Gultophine'.”

        “And she blesses you,” he ritualistically uttered with a nod of his bowl-cut mane. “Nnnngh... What...” He hissed and clenched his chestnut eyes briefly shut before quietly murmuring, “What is it that you need of my priestly talents, Miss Harmony?”

        “Nothing.”

        His eyes flickered back open. “Nothing?”

        “Absolutely nothing.” Harmony trotted over, placed a hoof on his shoulder, and gestured with another forelimb towards the rocky expanse around him. “However... I could do with a few stones, if you don't mind.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Just how many rocks, exactly?” Dawnhoof murmured as he strolled along with Harmony and Pinkie Pie through an immense, gravel-filled ditch beneath the howling winds.

        “I'm not all that concerned about quantity,” the last pony shouted above the whipping air. “I'm mostly interested in the composition!” She pointed towards a soft bed of crunched rocks and natural debris. “This is the Grave of Consus! When thousands of years ago, his body was interred amongst the stars by the Great Goddess during the Eponal Exodus, much of what made up the moon—”

        “—remained here in a residual degree!” Dawnhoof nodded, squinting against random waves of blown dust. “Like you, I am quite well-versed, Miss Harmony! Dredgemane, as a center of commerce, would not exist without the essence of the deceased god residing in enchanted pockets of the land into which Sladeburn's mines currently dig!”

        “What I need, is the oldest and most essential samples of this mineral enchantment!” Harmony stood in front of him and exclaimed. “Whatever dust remains of the bones of Consus, I need you to find it. I'm not talking about flamestones, rubies, gems, or any of that overvalued crap—er...” She blushed in front of the Deacon. “—stuff. Ahem, I just need you to find raw, ancient, petrified bone matter. You know as well as I do that the remains are all around us. Only, the earth ponies who populate this town can't tell the difference between the different types of rocks with their natural senses. That's where your supernatural skills come in.”

        “Miss Harmony, I gave up being a metallurgist unicorn in Whinniepeg years ago, and since I joined the order I have never looked back!” Dawnhoof gulped nervously. “My skills have been honed in the art of harnessing Gultophine's Spirit, and rightfully so. However, I fear that your faith in my magnetic abilities of the past is greatly misguided.”

        “Look, I'm a pegasus of many qualities, and a spiritual expert sure isn't one of them. But I know a talented pony when I see one.” She smiled at him. “You have it in you to do this thing for us. I mean—that's what Gultophine's Spirit is all about, right? She instills in all of us a strength, a talent, a means by which we all seek progress down the stream of life that she's granted all of ponydom!”

        “Have you not witnessed this thirst for progress in the actions of Bishop Breathstar and his order?”

        “I've witnessed a great deal of strength and authority in Breathstar, but very little room for change. A static philosophy is hardly conducive to progress, don't you think? I mean, sure, there's nothing wrong with being conservative, but for crying out loud—”

        “Say, Har-Har, I hate to be a stick in the mane...” Pinkie Pie shuffled up and poked the pegasus playfully in the cloaked flank. “But didn't you two already have the philosophical chat? Either make with the rocks or make out, girl! Heehee!”

        Harmony gulped and glanced sideways at Dawnhoof. “Would you mind making—?”

        “—with the rocks, got it.” The robed unicorn stood before a soft bed of collapsed stone. He took a deep breath. “I... still feel as if I'm taking a wild stab in the dark.”

        “Just think back to the days before you joined the order,” Harmony said, standing next to him. Her voice was suddenly at just the right tone and volume to reach his ears through the wind. “I'm not asking you to focus on all the parts of your life that you felt needed to be changed, I'm asking you to remember a talent—another talent that Gultophine blessed you with before you decided to bless others in her name.”

        “It's not that...” Dawnhoof made a face as his muscles tensed while he aimed his horn forward against the dusty breeze. “I... I have almost forgotten how to distinguish the composition of the rocks...”

        “Don't think so literally. You've got the talent inside you. Just...” Harmony gnawed on her lip, fumbled, but eventually let forth, “Just think of the moon.”

        “The m-moon...?”

        “Because that's what we're searching for here, after all,” the future scavenger said in a warm breath. “We're looking for moonrocks, or the next best thing to it. Consus once lived in this land, long before it became a grave, and it was a blessed thing, just as the moon has been a blessed thing... a somber reminder to all ponies of all that has been lost, and yet all that has been given to us since.”

        “Given... to us...” Dawnhoof murmured. His eyes closed calmly shut and his facial muscles relaxed. “B-By the grace of Gultophine...”

        A blue aura lit the landfill. Harmony and Pinkie Pie stepped back as the Deacon's horn began shimmering in a sapphiric glow. The wind shifted, taking on a cyclonic pattern as a supernatural breeze took over. The two fillies glanced about them in mixed curiosity and apprehension. Finally, Pinkie Pie murmured something in a chirping fashion and tugged on Harmony's cloak. The last pony turned to witness streams of blue-filtered dust rising up from the ground beneath them. They sauntered backwards on nervous hooves as several more columns of glowing sediment hovered thickly into the air.

        Soon, a billowing web of interconnected dirt limbs coalesced against the wind in front of a straining Dawnhoof. The unicorn gritted his teeth as his horn fluctuated with a brighter hue. The limbs melted into each other and formed one, two, four, half a dozen clumps of ash-white dust. The raw clusters of stone sparkled with a brilliance that magnified the otherwise gray and lifeless sunlight settling upon the plateau, as if the edge of a lunar eclipse was hovering just between the three equine figures.

        Harmony was engrossed in the sight, but at the first sign of Dawnhoof's horn starting to dim, she snapped out of it. With a shrill whistle, she likewise shook Pinkie Pie from her awestruck stupor. The candy-colored filly reached into her cloak and grabbed a canvas bag, lowering it beneath the six clumps of Consus' ancient dust just in time to catch them... for Dawnhoof had released his magical telekinesis and was slumping with a groan. Swiftly, the copper pegasus glided over and braced him. The young Deacon shook his head and stood up, leaning against her.

        “Now I truly remember why I joined the order...” he muttered as his eyes fluttered open. “I think it was to escape a life of migraines, much less sin.”

        She smirked at him. “All this time, I could have sworn it was for the free haircuts.”

        He smiled back at her.

        “Woohoo! Check it out, Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie suddenly said, waving the bag with a grin. “We got just what you need for your ancient art of magical runeforging!”

        “Ancient art of what?” Dawnhoof wildly blinked.

        “Uhhhhhhhhhh—Duhhhhh—Ancient Art of Hygiene!” Harmony flew over into Pinkie Pie and sternly stared the filly down. “Miss Pie! Shame on you! You should have taken care of that before we traveled all this way here!”

        “Taken care of what?—Ackies!” The pink pony was yanked the pegasus' way.

        Harmony practically galloped over the nearest crest in the landfill, hoisting her anchor in tow. “Gotta go, Deacon! Emergency girl stuff! Nothing for a male... celibate male like you to be concerned with! Thanks for the rocks! I'll fill you in on the most awesome and altruistic mission of healing and stuff later! Bye!”

        Deacon Dawnhoof was left alone with the wind and his blinks. “Hmmm... The day I become a Grand Bishop, I wonder if I should begin a mission in Canterlot...”

        “Once we've gotten the raw metals, the glass container, and the material for runestones...” Harmony thought aloud as she paced across the hut. “...Then it'll be up to me to build the machine. I'm a crazy awesome engineer, right? So how hard can it be?”

        “It should be a smooth undertaking, unless the orange flame you are forsaking.”

        “Nnngh—I know! I know, Miss Zecora! Let's just stop worrying about the orange flame for once!”

        The black-and-white filly raised an eyebrow. “For what reason do you delay? You'll only cause your own dismay.”

        “I assure you, I won't!” The time traveler ran a hoof through her amber-streaked bangs and let out a hard sigh, staring off into a worried cloud of thought. “Just trust me. I'll deal with the orange flame when I get to it.”

        “Once we've all bric-a-bracced the bric-a-brac, what then?” Pinkie Pie blinked. “Do we bring it all here and use the hammers Irontail gave us to slap the stuff together?”

        “Miss Pie, have you ever actually worked in a blacksmith's shop?”

        “One winter I worked at Wal-Mare and had a customer throw a hammer at me.”

        Harmony briefly face-hoofed, then murmured, “I need far more many tools than I can count to put this machine together. The walls and wooden table of this desolate hut aren't going to cut it. Unless Zecora's hiding an anvil or a forge in that snazzy mane of hers, we need to find an appropriate facility.”

        “Oooh! What about one of the many factories beside the quarry?”

        “And let Overseer Sladeburn see me? I kind of like having my wings attached to my body, thank you very much.”

        “The factories are always full of pony workers! Maybe we can sneak in!”

        “And do what? Would we borrow one of the many metal processing stations for an incalculable number of hours and hope that none of the hundreds of Dredgemaners figure out just who I am and who's helping me? Face it, Miss Pie. The construction of this thing is gonna take half-a-day at least. We can't afford to do it anywhere inside the City, or at the quarry for that matter.”

        “Then perhaps someplace outside is where your tools reside,” Zecora said with a wise grin. “On my way to Pinkamena's place of birth, I found there were more than ponies who shared this earth.”

        “Oh no, Zecchy! You didn't go by the bogs, did you?!” Pinkie Pie gulped with a pale expression. “You could have been gobbled whole by the—!”

        Harmony raised a hoof up. “I think she means something less freaky, Miss Pie.” The last pony smirked the zebra's way. “Am I right, Zecora?”

        “To them, you will only be an outer voice. Still, asking for their help would be the best choice.”

        “The rams recognize the outer voice, for it is the same imprint that seeks transcendence as much as it did the other day.”

        “Uh huh. Love ya too,” Harmony murmured as she and Pinkie Pie stood before the trio of meditating mountain rams. Several canvas bags covering raw metals, hammers, runestones, and a glass jar rested between their cloaked flanks as the last pony entreated the line of calmly posed figures. “Look, I came back because I needed a desperate favor,” she murmured, staring past them at the igloo of stones smoking from the ironworks billowing inside. “I promise you, it isn't a selfish thing! All of you have some really nifty blacksmithing equipment, and I need to use it to craft this machine of mine so that I can keep several young foals from dying!”

        “What is a single life within the obscurity?” The rams spoke one after another in turn. “It is neither long nor short. It is but a blemish, defined by the dust that coalesces and then scatters like parentheses to a trite and superficial word. The outer voice must not lament the passing of such blemishes, for a brief experience upon the imprint of this obscurity is far more liberating than a long spell spent under the weight of a blemish's suffering.”

        “Oh dear Epona, not them too...” Harmony groaned.

        “Has all of Equestria gone emo?” Pinkie Pie blinked aside at the copper pegasus. “I think I should start my own religion: Pientology. The more ponies I convert into becoming Auntie Pinkie Pie, the better.”

        “Look...” Harmony gestured with her hooves clasped together as she spoke to the rams. “Miss Pie and I respect your opinion on consciousness and subjectivity—”

        “Three times a day they'd have to bow east and face Sugarcube Corner! Heehehee—”

        Harmony whacked one of Pinkie's ankles with her hoof and continued. “We understand your beliefs and stuff, but this seriously has nothing to do with transcendence or inner voices or outer voices or what have you!”

        “The outer voice's desperation reflects the obscurity in the outer voice's blemish. The outer voice must not trust the light of the obscurity, for anything filtered through the obscurity is as much a product of as it is an addition to it.”

        “For crying out loud, this isn't about getting to know one's connection to a grander consciousness!” Harmony practically sneered. “This is all about helping foals who've been neglected ten times over by a hopeless town! I have a chance here to extend their lives! The longer they live, the greater a chance they'll... uh... have to achieve transcendence on their own! Y-Yeah! Wouldn't you like that?”

        “The rams neither desire nor refuse transcendence for all blemishes. Transcendence is a natural occurrence that supersedes the obscurity, perceivable only to the enlightened. The inner voice speaks to all blemishes the same. The duration spent within obscurity up until the threshhold of transcendence depends on the inner voice, not on the duration. All blemishes fall into place, whether enlightened or deceased.”

        “Once in their lifetime,” Pinkie Pie chirped while grinning, “They'd have to make a pilgrimage to Marble Cake's bakery and throw doughnuts at the cacti—Mmmppf!”

        Harmony had her hoof planted in Pinkie's mouth. She frowned in the rams' direction. “Fine—Fine! Forget about all living things that suffer and die before their time in this oh so superficial obscurity. What's the harm in just letting me use some of your blacksmith tools?”

        “The tools of the ram are for meditative purposes, to ascertain the nature of the obscurity's elemental trivialities while attempting to achieve perfect clarity of the inner voice.”

        “So does that mean you will or won't let me use the stuff?” Harmony narrowed her amber eyes. “It'll only be for an afternoon.”

        “If the outer voice seeks something other than transcendence, the tools will be of no use, and it would be a waste to lend them.”

        Harmony sighed long and hard. “Dang it, why couldn't a commune of flying squirrels have set up shop here instead?”

        “Mmmmf—Ptooie!” Pinkie Pie dislodged the copper pegasus' hoof from her mouth and grinned the rams' way. “Come onnnn! Pleeeeeease? Can't you let Har-Har go a'clangin' in your magical hut of stone wonders just this one time?”

        “The rams are at a loss to find an enlightened argument in the outer voice.”

        Pinkie raised her cloak and revealed a white box full of bright pink candy. “We've got taffy!”

        The three rams blinked in one accord. Without a moment's hesitation, they collectively murmured, “The rams agree to the outer voice's request.”

        Harmony did a double-take.

        “Woohoo!” Pinkie slid the box over to them across the gray stone plateau. “What are you waiting for, Har-Har? Get your engie-binge on!”

        Harmony stared at her pink anchor.

        “Heehee—What?!”

        “I don't know. I guess I'm just waiting for a halo to appear.”

        “Pffft! Silly Har-Har. It isn’t Halo Season until December.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        In the gray mists of the Grave of Consus, with calm and meditative rams by her side, the last pony guided several sheets of hot black metal over an anvil. Sliding the handle of a hammer into a ramcrafted brace over her hoof, she raised the tool high above her mane and slammed the bludgeon repeatedly over the molten edges of the raw material. The air reverberated with dull, majestic rings. As the bending strip of metal started to cool, Harmony glanced over at one of her assistants and nodded. The ram obediently operated a large pump, fueling the fires of the nearby furnace so that they burned hotter against the exposed edges of the structure being molded under the pegasus' grasp.

        From directly outside the igloo of stones, Pinkie Pie sat back on her haunches. She playfully wiggled and tapped her lower hooves together as her head tilted up to witness the rising column of smoke billowing from the rocky structure. She exhaled in a breath of foalish wonderment and smiled, randomly cheering Harmony on with a gasping breath and a pumping of her upper forelimb in the air. A few white shapes entered her peripheral vision. She smiled aside to see several rams sitting beside her, as if they were all penitently joining the pink pony in some new form of meditation. She motioned to them, and a few rams happily shared the pink taffy. Munching as one species of hooves, the rams and the pony alike watched with silent enthusiasm as Harmony continued with her project.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The time traveler squinted her amber eyes while a pair of dark black goggles slid down over her face. She reveled in the familiar sensation, grinning as sparks reflected off the borrowed lenses. A pair of rams opened a bright hot oven in front of her, giving the pony room to reach into the chamber with a long pair of glistening forceps. She pulled free a long stalk of slender black tubing which had been forcibly bent under the searing heat. With a firm march of copper hooves, she carried this sliver of metal over to a water trough and lowered it in.

        Bright white steam filled the recesses of the stone hut. Harmony tilted her head away from the billowing froth. As several bubbles rose to the surface of the boiling basin, she raised a hoof to her head and pulled the goggles free. She watched with naked ambers as the metal piece cooled, and after several minutes she pulled the object up via the forceps for a closer inspection.

        The last pony grinned with satisfaction and carried the piece to a flat granite table cluttered with many other, differently-shaped components, forming the complex building blocks of a magnificent skeleton begging to come to life.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Harmony sat at a workbench built out of stone pieces cemented together. A flat iron surface stretched beneath an assortment of ivory filaments as the last pony bent over and—with quiet, professional precision—chiseled delicately away at the stones that Dawnhoof had so effortlessly collected earlier that day. Her amber eyes squinted in her work, so that she was blind to all peripheral activity of the rams' hut. For all she cared, this wasn't a smoldering dot on the bosom of a gray granite continent. This was, for all intents and purposes, the hangar level of her airship, and she was diligently working on yet another project on her lonesome.

        Then a ram shuffled up. His horns gently brushed the pegasus' mane hair. She glanced up briefly to see him offer her a mug of water. Harmony smiled, nodded, and took the cup. After a gentle sip, she gulped and hunched herself over once again. She chiseled and clawed and filed away with the use of two braced-tools, carving the six stones into intricate words of the Lunar Tongue. Barely two months prior to the Cataclysm, and the art of runecrafting had been secretly resurrected.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Pinkie Pie passed Harmony a tiny metal crossbeam; the copper pegasus took it in two hooves. Leaning back on her haunches in the center of the stone hut's floor, Harmony propped the elongated part of a developing metal device between her lower hooves. Sweating from the heat of the rams' nearby forge, she fit the crossbeam into place and aligned the screw-holes carved into the separate metal structures. Then with her mouth, she reached over to a tray of screws sitting atop a nearby workbench. Picking up several of the screws between her teeth, she leaned back and expertly planted each metal object into a respective hole.

        With a gasp, Pinkie Pie punctually reached for a screwdriver attached to a forked handle. Under Harmony's direction, the earth pony raised the screwdriver to the first of many screws. She grabbed one of the forked handles while Harmony gripped another. In tandem, the two ponies spun the handles clockwise between them, tightening the screws one by one. Mirrored smiles were proudly shared during the mechanical process.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Harmony stood before a granite table, atop which the partially constructed apparatus stretched beneath the eyes of many rams standing in a circle. Harmony spoke and gestured before the rams, moving the machine briefly about in her hooves and showing where on the heavy end of the device the large glass jar would go. She then raised a hoof for emphasis and pointed at a hollow chamber near the unfinished trigger and crank-shaft compartments of the device. She made a pleading motion before the rams, her hooves held together.

        The horned figures murmured amongst each other, most of them shaking their heads in disagreement. Harmony pleaded and pleaded, gesturing once more towards the empty chamber before charading invisible lightning bolts over her amber-streaked mane. Once more, the rams were hesitant.

        Then Pinkie Pie galloped back in, humming a joyous tune. She unfurled her cloak once again to reveal—not one—but two new boxes of bright pink taffy. She grinned wide. Immediately, the rams all nodded in agreement. Harmony's wings fluttered as she performed a foalish cheer in the air of the stone hut.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Two rams cranked at opposite ends of a pair of valves. Outside the hut, twin needles of thick copper rose high into the mists of the air. Another ram trotted up to a generator and switched it on with a dance of sparks. A deep static kissed the wind as the two stalks stabbed the gray atmosphere overhead.

        Harmony and Pinkie Pie stood together several paces away, squinting up at the two lightning rods. As the generator hummed louder and louder, the clouds high above boiled, turning dark and ominous. Several tiny white sparks flickered and flashed across the heavens. Pinkie Pie gasped, and with wide eyes she suddenly clung to the copper pegasus. Harmony merely smirked and smirked and—

        The world exploded. The two ponies flinched while the rams stood still as statues. Thunder rolled across the Grave of Consus as a bright blue bolt of electrical fury surged down from the zenith and screamed into the twin metal stalks burning in front of them.

Had I learned to be happy? Had I finally learned to take the many black shades of your mosaic of desolate obscurity and shred it to ribbons so I could see the bright colors you had been constantly hiding behind the curtain all my life?

        Nopony transcends you so easily. I didn't care what the rams thought or believed in. I didn't care how easy or how hard Bishops like Breathstar might have painted the issue. True transcendence takes a lifetime. And if I was starting to pierce the veil then and there, I would not yet achieve perfect clarity. I would not yet be able to laugh at you.

        But I was no longer afraid of you. Being an engineer—in this age or in the one before it—has meant reacquainting myself with a purpose, with a drive, with a singular galloping path towards progress.

        For the only true progress that anypony makes is that which upholds life, which worships life, which values life above the many frightening shadows that seek to undermine it. True progress means working, blossoming, and reveling within the horrible abyss of you, and in spite of you.

        There is nothing quite as frighteningly dangerous as trying to live. You were successful for so many years, for you had almost succeeded in making me forget that. But Pinkie Pie had taught me differently. She reminded me that venturing to smile forever was infinitely more rewarding than giving up all hope before the absurdity of attempting such a thing.

        We attempted it there, together, before the fringes of a dead god's grave. If Gultophine was our witness, Dredgemane would have a shot at such a rapturous absurdity too.

        “Here is the source of energy that the outer voice requests,” a ram murmured calmly. He marched from the lowering pair of metal stalks while holding a sparkling sphere before Harmony in a pair of forceps. “May its elemental triviality be as much a reminder of the imprint as it is an aid to the blemish.”

        “Amen to that,” Harmony murmured, taking the forceps in two gentle hooves and raising the beautiful, puerile thunderpearl up to her amber eyes. The time traveler exhaled, her voice rising to join the haunting mists of crackling thunder overhead. “Well, if you aren't just the cutest thing?” She smirked hopelessly. “Epona knows, in two and a half decades, some flying squirrel may confuse you for a nut.” The last pony's eyes narrowed. “Of course the rams never bundled up their belongings, Bruce. They had nothing to hide.”

        In a brave breath, she dropped the naked thunderpearl into the small of her hoof and barely jolted from the tiny spark that ran through her body.

        “And neither have I.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        With several clanking strikes of her hammer, the last pony finished riveting the trigger compartment to the metal device. She placed the tool and brace down and took a step back from the granite workbench. The device stretched before her in its cold, industrial glory. A heavy black rig housed a glistening thunderpearl at its core. Beneath this was a lower lattice built to house the large glass container. A wooden handle dangled from a string attached to the crankshaft along the top of the machine. Opposite of the thunderpearl from this part was a brass trigger that was wired to the electrified chamber itself. Traveling like a frozen elephant's trunk from the chamber was a slender stalk of metal, at the end of which a conical spout rested, flanked all along its circumference with five identical ivory runestones.

        “Fillies and gentlecolts, we have ourselves a vacuum cleaner of healing,” Harmony droned with mixed pride.

        “We should name it something!” Pinkie Pie was suddenly leaning over her shoulder. “Y'know, for luck!”

        “Well, sure, if it makes you feel better.”

        “I vote for 'Alex'!”

        “Yeah, that's—” Harmony blinked and gave the filly a queer look.

        “The rams commend the outer voice on a task finished with as much diligence as swiftness,” one of the horned figures remarked from the shadows of the stone hut. “Though the rams cannot fathom the function of the device within the obscurity, the rams expect the blemish of the outer voice to dissolve upon conceptualizing the construction of the device in reverse.”

        “Yeah, maybe I'll write a journal entry to do just that for myself.”

        “You write a journal?!” Pinkie positively gasped.

        “Er... Maybe?”

        “Oooh! Oooh! Would you let me read it someday, Har-Har?”

        The last pony gave a wincing expression. “I... don't think you'd want to do that...”

        “What? There's nothing wrong with devoting twenty pages to Deacon Dawnhunk!”

        Harmony glared. Before she could respond—

        “The rams cannot help but observe an emptiness within the elemental composition of the device.”

        “Wh-What do you mean?” Harmony glanced over.

        The nearest white figure was pointing at the empty jar. “The outer voice appears to have not finished the whole of the meditative exercise...”

        “Oh yeah.” The last pony gulped.

        “There's no holding back now, Har-Har. If Zecora was here, she'd slap you across the face and bust out a mad rhyme about it.”

        “I know, I know...” Harmony picked the jar up in one hoof and snatched a canvas bag with the other. “Considering how wise Zecora is, she knows just as much as I do that this is gonna be the hardest part of all.”

        “Oh?” Pinkie Pie leaned her fuzzy head to the side. “And why's that?”

        Harmony slid the jar into the canvas bag and glanced forlornly at her anchor. “Because there's only one way in all of Equestria to acquire orange flame in its natural element, and it ain't pretty.” She motioned with her head as she carried the bulging bag out the stone hut. “Come along, Miss Pie. We're headed to one of the bogs beyond the farmland.”

        “The bogs?” The candy-coated filly made a face. “Since when could random marshes give off orange flame?”

        “It's not the bogs themselves. It's what's inside the bogs.”

        A thick oasis of muddy brown sludge briefly blanketed the granite plateau beyond the Grave of Consus. Flanked by an assortment of dead and dying tree husks, the pool of viscous slime stretched for nearly two hundred square meters. The shiny surface of the mud reflected the glaring squint of a fearless pegasus and the anxious blue-eyed blinks of a candy-colored filly as the two ponies marched up to the lone splotch across the otherwise immaculate landscape.

        “Just how many bogs like this are around this place?” Harmony asked, staring into the bubbly depths of the muddy basin.

        Pinkie Pie was silent. Though she tried standing still, she twitched in several dozen random places simultaneously. For once, the earth pony was mute to telegraphing what those many convulsions may have signified.

        Harmony glanced impatiently over the canvas-covered jar on her shoulder. “Miss Pie?”

        “Oh! Uhm...” The filly gulped. “Inkie's done a lot of reading. She says that all of the bogs may be connected and that there's a huge underwater cave of muddy ickiness beneath the place where we live. And it's in that nasty, scary place that you can find... that you can find...”

        “Well, unless you and I intend to go for a really deep swim, we'd better hope it finds us.”

        “Uhm, Har-Har? Are you sure this is the only way to get some orange glowy flamey stuff?”

        “What's the matter, Miss Pie?” The last pony raised an eyebrow parallel to the corner of her copper lips. “We're here on a mission for the foals, remember? Can't you just laugh your anxiety away or what-crap?”

        “It's not so easy when it comes to these nasty-nasties,” Pinkie Pie murmured with a shiver. “I had a not so happy run-in with one of them before. There are some things in Equestria who can never learn how to party... or to be nice... or to not hunger after ponies...”

        “Well, I guess each and every one of us can be forgiven one chink in our personal armor,” Harmony muttered as she paced across the edge of the muddy lake. “I'm not a fan of poultry jokes, and you're not a fan of giant, multiple-headed, carnivorous reptiles with a thirst for blood.” She shrugged and placed the canvas bag down before reaching a hoof towards a loose pile of pebbles. “It's one thing to laugh at your fears, Miss Pie. But at some point or another, you gotta face what freaks you out head-on, without cackling or chortling or what other synonyms for spastic exhalations you wish to poetically toss into a sentence.” She raised the pebbles and started tossing them, one by one, into the bog with violent splashes. “My experience with adversity is to interpret its intimidation as a challenge and rise above it... or limbo beneath it, whatever works at the time.”

        “Har-Har, what are you doing?” Pinkie Pie gasped at the errant splashes that the copper pegasus was making with the rocks.

        “What does it look like I'm doing?” Harmony licked the edges of her lips and tossed more and more stones, causing distant muddy explosions. The bubbles around the edge of the bog began multiplying at an exponential rate. “We came here for one purpose and one purpose alone. I'm making our presence known...”

        “Couldn't we go about this a slightly different way?” Pinkie Pie gulped. “Like, what if we had me go back to town and get together a huge posse of ponies carrying torches and pitchforks?” A deep rumbling rippled through the oasis. She twitched and scrunched down on her haunches. “OrmaybeIcouldjustgobacktotown!”

        “Miss Pie, chillax.” Harmony smirked over her shoulder as she juggled yet another pebble. “It's a big bog and these are small stones. It's going to take an hour at least to summon a creature of that magnitude!” She spun and flung the last pebble...

        The rock landed smack-dab between an angry pair of gigantic, green eyeslits.

        “Whoah! Whoahhhhh-Yeah... Hello...” Harmony stepped back several hooftrots, dragging the canvas bag with her.

        A giant reptilian cranium of golden scales and red, razor-sharp headcrests rose from the bog. Several bubbles burst and broke to reveal a second head, a third, and then a fourth. With serpentine grace, four quivering necks stretched high above the surface of the oasis and dwarfed the two tiny ponies in a quartet of wavering shadows. A thick methane scent pungently filled the gray air in accompaniment to an ambient, bass hiss as the four identical snouts of a menacing hydra stared down at the two equine morsels.

        “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh you're a lot bigger than I remembered your kind being.” The scavenger from the future cleared her throat. “Whew! Epona dang, I remember that smell,” she nervously rambled. “Couldn't get it out of the zeppelin for a week. Was totally worth selling the orange flame to the goblins, though...”

        “Zeppelin? Goblins?” Pinkie Pie scrunched herself low behind Harmony. “Har-Har, I r-really don't think this is worth it! At least not for Alex!”

        Harmony glanced over her shoulder. “Since when did we agree on naming the healing machine 'Alex'?”

        A loud thud echoed across the shore as a platinum-clawed foot slammed down in front of the two fillies. The last pony snapped out of it.

        “Yeah! Wow. Uhm. Okay. Hoooboy... Ahem.” Harmony began marching closer to the immense hydra. “Let's do this.”

        “Har-Har, why are you walking towards it?”

        The poles of insanity had obviously switched. The last pony approached the leering monster while the filly from Sugarcube Corner stayed behind. “Okay now... This isn't the Wasteland. No need to make this get all kaizo,” Harmony murmured to herself out of earshot of her anchor. “Let's... L-Let's take a page out of Fluttershy's book. Y-Yeah...” She gulped and smiled. “Kindness... Celestial Tongue... It's got to work... Right?”

        Harmony stared up. Her amber-streaked mane was billowing as if in an invisible wind. She glanced all around, and realized that the air was cycling from the sheer girth of the gigantic monster's lungs. The smell of the bog grew fouler and fouler as all four of the hydra's necks drew closer and stared as one at the copper pegasus. They took turns flicking forked tongues in her direction, smelling her, undoubtedly detecting every gram of succulent meat clinging to her bones. The four sets of emerald eyeslits blinked like demonic siblings to a draconian friend of the future.

        “Now...” The pegasus bravely smiled in their direction. It was a crooked accomplishment. Nevertheless, she further spoke in a soft, almost golden tone, “I know for a fact that hydras are not completely devoid of sentience. All of those heads combined have to produce some form of intelligent thought. So, if you will, hear me out.” She slid the canvas bag off of the body of the jar and held the container before her, complete with its runed cap that glistened in the golden aura of the creature's scales. “I've come to you asking a simple request. In your stomach and in your stomach alone is a rare element in the land of Equestria. Ponies like me call it 'orange flame', and it's important to ponydom for many reasons. Some ponies like to use it in steamship engines. Others have the opportunity of using it for mining purposes. But myself and my pink friend here—?”

        Harmony spun about, but did a double-take at the sight of Pinkie Pie's head buried in the ground like a hooved ostrich. She rolled her eyes, faced up at the hydra again, and reproduced a plastic grin.

        “We need it to finish building a machine that will cure many sick foals of a horrible infection that has been killing them off one by one for several decades. Now, I know that it's not too much trouble to get orange flame out of you. It's contained in the bile of your stomach and nowhere else in Equestria. All you need to do is regurgitate some of it so that I can collect it in this jar here...” She patted the translucent bottle with a copper hoof. “...I mean, seriously, with four frickin' heads, how hard can it be to barf up some of the stuff?” She smiled with glistening teeth.

        The hydra hissed louder. Its many heads exchanged confused, glaring looks with each other. Nostrils flared and tongues flicked indifferently.

        “Hmmm...” Harmony exhaled long and hard. “Okay. Maybe if I just calmed you with a song, just like I did the Ursa Major.” The last pony took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and liquidly exhaled. “Hush now, quiet now, lay your little sleepy head. Hush now—”

        With a murderous scream, one of the heads struck at her. The teeth of the giant snout clamped into the earth, shattering pebbles and dust across Harmony's hooves.

        “Friggin' A!” the copper pegasus sputtered, stumbling backwards with the bottle in two rattling hooves.

        Another scream. This time, the three remaining heads dove at the time traveler.

        The pegasus gasped, ducked a thunderous blow, scampered off the side of a slashing neck, side-jumped, and clutched the jar to her chest as she rolled off the red headcrests of a final snapping skull. She landed in a slide across the shore of the bog, awkwardly juggling the fragile jar in her grasp. She winced breathlessly as her amber orbs reflected the first head coming at her again. Leaning backwards, Harmony flattened her spine against the ground in time to avoid the jaws of the creature slicing through the air mere centimeters above her twitching chin.

        As a volley of angry, reptilian roars lit the air, the last pony rolled up to her hooves, balanced the jar on her flank, and galloped over towards Pinkie Pie. “Dangitall! Dangitall! Dangitall! Dangitall! Never friggin' simple, I swear to all things that clop! Miss Pie!” She side-bucked the pink pony.

        Pinkie Pie yanked her gasping face out of the ground. “Wh-What?!” She squeaked, her face covered in flakes of dirt. “Did you finish talking to it?”

        “What do you think?!” Harmony nudged her anchor hard and forced the two into a frenzied gallop towards the far end of the plateau. “Run! Move your friggin' plot—”

        The earth exploded beneath them from a giant, scaled foot of gold.

        “Dah!”

        “Waaaaiie!”

        Both ponies flew in a horizontal avalanche of dredged-up rock. They landed in separate thuds across the rumbling granite. Pinkie Pie toppled like a domino while the last pony fell on her spine. Harmony looked skyward, gasped, and shot her hooves up in time to catch the falling weight of the giant glass jar. Another thud, and she saw the second foot of the mud-drenched hydra slamming down onto the dry earth. The ravenous reptile had completely emerged from the bog, revealing its gargantuan size in full horror as a thick, platinum-spiked tail lashed violently in the air. All four heads shrieked in a blood-curdling chorus as the monster suddenly bore down on the pinker of the two equines.

        Harmony hissed through clenched teeth. As the earth rumbled and rumbled, she glanced nervously aside. In the shadow of the hungry reptile, Pinkie Pie was just getting up, oblivious to her doom as she shook the loose flecks and pebbles off her coat like a dog would dry itself from a bath.

        “Miss Pie!” Harmony tossed the jar high. “Catch!”

        “H-Huh?” Pinkie looked up and caught the container in her fuzzy head. “OW!” She toppled backwards, clasping the rattling jar in two twitching hooves.

        Harmony winced, but didn't waste any time. With a flapping of her wings, she rose to the air and hovered before the many heads of the beast. “Hey! Hey! Over here!”

        With confused grunts between them, the four heads turned away from Pinkie Pie and focused on a new, far more outrageous target.

        “Yeah, that's right, you walking flagella with eyes! Remember me?! I started this conversation! And I'm going to finish—” The reptile spun one hundred and eighty degrees with remarkable agility and swung the full weight of its spiked tail into the copper speck. “Augh! Sonuva—!”

        The last pony sailed in a copper blur over Pinkie Pie's head. The filly hugged the jar to her chest and shrieked after the pegasus. “Har-Har!”

        With a murderous crash, the time traveler's Entropan weight split a dead tree down the middle. “Unngh...” She sat up and rubbed her head in a sea of splinters. “Yeah, what, Miss Pie?”

        “Watch out for its tail!”

        “Thank you.” Harmony frowned, then promptly blanched.

        Pinkie Pie blinked and turned around, facing point blank into four sets of burning green eyes. The hydra's heads screamed violently into her, their stinky breaths condensing foggily against the glass jar in her grasp.

        “Eeep!” The filly crossed all four of her limbs. “I shouldn't have drank all of that Sarsaparilla!”

        The jaws of the beast hovered over her, at least until a copper equine flew like a missile into the rightmost one. “Buck off, handsome!”

        The one skull slammed into the second which ricocheted into the third which knocked into the fourth. In reverse order, the hydra's heads sneered and lunged violently upwards at the hovering time traveler. Harmony breathlessly flung her wings at an angle and banked her body around the hulking beast, circling and circling and circling it with a concentrated sneer against the wind beating at her face. All four necks spiraled and spiraled until the combined weight of them upset the monster's torso. The entire hydra performed an awkward forward-flip. A veritable earthquake rocked the plateau from its incidental, slow-motion somersault.

        “Yeah!” Harmony grinned wide. “Next time, you better think twice before writing checks that your tail can't—Aw dang it!” She suddenly growled at the sight below.

        The thick tail of the collapsing hydra was sailing murderously towards the stone earth, and in the shadow of it was a helplessly cowering earth pony. Harmony twirled through the air, backflipped, and performed an air-splitting swan dive. She outflew the falling tail, spun herself upside down, navigated the gap between the reptile's golden spikes, and snatched Pinkie Pie off the ground at the very last second.

        The concussive blast from the golden beast's tail impaling the earth knocked the winged pony off balance. She and Pinkie went sprawling towards the edge of the bog, skidding to a stop bare seconds before they could fall into the muddy oasis.

        “Whoah-whoah-whoah!” Pinkie Pie teetered before a bubbling pond. Harmony grasped her tail and pulled her to safety.

        “Okay, somehow I don't think it's gonna throw up some orange flame for us!” Harmony exclaimed, sweating.

        “Maybe if we got Applejack to bake it some muffins?”

        “Since when did Applejack bake muffins?”

        “You know AJ?”

        “Uhhh...” The time traveler lost a drop of sweat. “Hey! Miss Pie, where's the friggin' bottle?!”

        “You mean for Alex?”

        “Celestia dang it, we are not naming it 'Alex'!”

        The ground rumbled. Harmony glanced over and gasped. The hydra was getting up slowly, and its clambering legs were impaling the ground awfully close to a fragile glass container spinning in place.

        “But I like 'Alex'!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed above the monster's rumbling breaths as Harmony scampered away from her. “It wouldn't be right to name a vacuum cleaner of healing 'Susan', now would it?”

        The last pony hollered over her shoulder as she ran for the jar. “Miss Pie, will you just shut up about the vacuum cleaner—er—I mean Alex—I mean—Augh!”

        Harmony spat as she dove for the jar and swept it up in time to leap away from an earth-slamming, reptilian foot. She found herself bathed in several converging shadows. Glancing up, she grimaced; all four necks were surging down at her. At the last second, the pegasus daringly flew up towards the golden-scaled necks. All four roaring sets of jaws slammed into the earth beneath her. In the meantime, the pegasus flapped her wings, navigating a tunnel formed by the twisting stalks of the hydra's throats. The necks squeezed together, converging like a collapsing cave. Just as the air grew pitch-dark, Harmony twisted her wings and darted to her immediate left. She flew straight through two ribbons of golden scales just before she could be crushed to a pulp in the middle of the hydra's necks along with the precious bottle in her grasp.

        Harmony spun, spiraled, and landed to a skidding stop beside Pinkie Pie. She panted, panted, panted, and clung the jar to her chest. “Dang it, Scootaloo,” she whispered to herself underneath the deafening noise. “Think! Think! Think!”

        “Because if you walked into the Immolatia Ward and said 'Hey kids! Susan is going to suck the infernite out of all of you—'”

        “Tell me when I care!” Harmony snarled. “Dang it, this isn't going to work. I gotta get you to safety before—”

        “Wuh oh! I think he's angry!” Pinkie Pie winced, pointing up as the hydra came at them in a renewed charge.

        Harmony glanced at the fragile jar in her grasp, then at her anchor. She couldn't carry Pinkie or else risk dropping the container and shattering it. “Quick, Miss Pie!” She shouted to the jittery filly and waved her flank. “Grab my tail!”

        “Uhm...” Pinkie Pie nervously lurched over and clasped her teeth over the amber-streaked threads. “Nom?”

        Adventurously, the last pony flew herself skyward with a dangling Pinkie in tow. She clasped the jar to her chest as her copper wings soared the two of them over a dead forest of gnarled trees flanking the bog, hoping that the obstructions would act as a solid speed guard against the ravenous hydra snapping at their limbs with angry jaws that came closer and closer. The hulking reptile merely smashed through the wooden husks like gigantic twigs, its pounding legs crackling the earth as its speed only increased. Harmony couldn't tell what was more disconcerting, the monster's constant roars or the perpetual whining noise of Pinkie's mouth over her tail hairs.

        “Come on... Come on...” Harmony sneered as she banked around one tree trunk then another as she fought to out-fly the rampaging beast. “Buzz off, ya freak! Friggin' walking suitcase of death, I swear to—” She flew through the split branches of a tree and was suddenly weightless. “—Celestia?” She blinked and glanced behind her, realizing why she was flying faster. “Awwww crud!”

        “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie flailed and shrieked, her body wedged tightly in the fork of tree branches behind the copper pegasus. The giant golden body of the hydra marched through the crumbling, dead forest to engulf her. “Please! I don't wanna be a mare-on-a-stick!” As she yelped this, two of the heads dove down towards her with glistening jaws.

        Harmony's eyes twitched. She spun her body around twice and mightily tossed the jar high up into the sky above the hydra. “Nnnngh!” As the container went airborne, Harmony dove down low, aiming her body like a copper meteorite towards the bottom trunk of the tree Pinkie was stuck in. With her upper limbs free, she viciously smashed Entropan hooves through the petrified trunk. “Haaaaugh!”

        The tree snapped in two and fell. Pinkie shrieked in an elongated, high-pitched chirp as she sprawled out of the way of the snapping hydra's jaws. The tree slammed through the branches of another wooden husk, shaking Pinkie loose like a slingshot so that she fell into the splashing edge of the bog just beyond the forest.

        In the meantime, Harmony was skirting her way through the landscape of splintery wood, her breathless face gazing straight up. Through the kaleidoscopic flicker of branches she finally saw the translucent container falling down from the crest of her toss. It flew murderously towards the granite floor beside the bog.

        “Nnngh!” Harmony flung herself forward with a pair of outstretched limbs. She caught the jar in a pair of rattling hooves and skidded to a dusty stop. A breath of relief escaped her. “Whew.” Just then, a heavy reptilian foot slammed down over her amber-streaked tail hairs. “Gaah!” She looked up with twitching eyes.

        The four heads of the hydra smiled victoriously. Pressing the weight of its foot over the pegasus' Entropan fibers, it lowered one of its snouts with drooling jaws.

        Harmony grunted and struggled to yank herself loose from the monster's weight pinning her to the dead granite earth. Her hooves scraped and scraped against the bog's edge in desperation. Suddenly, there was a wet, whipping sound. The tongue of the one hydra head wrapped around her waist. The last pony gasped as her Entropan body was being retracted towards the monster's heated maw. The jar rolled out of her hooves. Harmony gasped and floundered her forelimbs as she was being dragged away from it. In a murderous lunge, she re-gripped the jar just in time to be lifted five, ten, twenty meters up into the air, dangling from the jaw of the reptilian beast.

        “Nnngh... Come on... Let go...!” Harmony fought and wrestled with the thick muscle of the tongue constricting around her.

        The one head of the hydra raised her hungrily into the cold mists of the plateau. The other three snouts gathered around and all howled their putrid, heated breaths straight into the wincing time traveler. Alas, that was the last straw, and the scavenger from the future summoned a furious snarl from the depths of her being.

        “Yeah, okay!” She growled. With a tight hoof, she unscrewed the runed cap from the lid of the large glass bottle. “You want a feast, ya sick lizard?!” Her amber eyes flared as she shouted, “Then take your friggin' medicine!” She clamped her teeth angrily over the cap, gripped the jar in two hooves... and dove her Entropan body deep into the monster's gaping mouth.

        The hydra head swallowed Harmony whole. Its green eyeslits blinked in a momentary breath of surprise. A subtle, pony-shaped lump slid down the golden contours of its scaled throat.

        “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie cried, her blue eyes wide, for she had just muddily emerged from the depths of the bog to witness her close companion being devoured.

        At the sound of the candy-colored filly's voice, the hydra immediately roared and spun around. The other three heads sneered viciously and hungrily as the creature stormed towards her. The pony gasped and struggled, sloshing her way through the viscous surface of the bog. The mud clung to her like molasses, so that she was stuck in mid-gallop as if in a bad dream, helpless to outrun the horrendously large creature bearing down on her.

        Wading knee-deep into the bog, the half-submerged hydra effortlessly coasted the clambering pony's way. Its many heads bore glinting jaws as it waded up to the mired equine and flexed its neck muscles to strike.

        However, just at that moment, the head that had swallowed Harmony twitched. Its green eyes bulged in sudden fright, and soon a matching emerald hue wafted over its scales as its tongue hung out of its mouth in a sickly expression. The other heads glanced confusedly at the one's plight, and then—in successive fashion—each of the remaining three likewise wretched in nauseous throes. A pitiful hacking, wheezing noise filled the air from the combined skulls' plight, followed by dreadful vibrations that rolled up all four necks, starting with the one that ate Harmony and rippling out throughout the rest of the reptilian body until the hydra was a quivering, spasming, groaning mess. In an agonized slump, the monster fell down to the muddy depths just meters away from Pinkie, so that a sloshing wave of muddied water tossed the shrieking filly out of the oasis.

        Pinkie rolled to a wet stop across the granite surface of the plateau. Quivering in a puddle of bog juices, she glanced over with a blanching expression. She watched as the body of the hydra bobbed up and down in the bubbling surface of the bog. Its four heads rested on the granite shore, each of them groaning and spitting loose drool and bile as they rode wave after nauseous wave of pain. Then, from behind the body of the paralyzed monstrosity, a wild storm of bubbles broke the surface of the bog, and out from the middle of it there emerged—

        “Nnngh—Augh!” Harmony sputtered for breath, her Entropan soul-self covered from head to toe in mud and slime.

        “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie beamed, her smile nearly breaking through her jaw. “You're okay!”

        “Mmmfff... That's a matter of opinion.” The copper pegasus waded to the surface of the bog. “Between you and me, I could care less about myself.”

        “Wh-What do you mean by that?!” The still-breathless filly rushed up to her with wide blue eyes.

        Shaking some of the slime off her copper features, the last pony held her forelimbs out in front of her. In two quivering hooves was the glass jar, and it was billowing from deep inside with a bright orange flame. A golden glow briefly shimmered across the otherwise gray and lifeless plateau.

        “Oooooooh... Pretty...” Pinkie Pie beamed. She tapped the edge of the mud-encrusted jar; it was cool to the touch. “How did you get this?”

        “Let's just say somewhere between point A and point Z.”

        “But I don't get it!” Pinkie Pie glanced over at the groaning, whimpering creature as it slid cowardly into the depths of the bog. “All four of that meanie-meanie's heads were up here on the surface! How did you get out of the hydra?”

        Harmony shuddered and shoved the glowing, rune-capped jar into her anchor's chest. “You don't wanna know.” She trotted away.

        “Hmmm... Okie Dokie Lokie!”

        Inside the stone hut of the rams, Pinkie Pie stood before the skeletal body of the healing device. With candy-colored hooves she gently slid the glass jar of billowing orange flame into place. With a slapping motion, the contours of the jar snapped firmly against the metal brace built for it.

        “Squee!” The filly grinned wide and glanced over her shoulder. “It was totally worth it, Har-Har! The jar fits Alex like a horseshoe!”

        “Yeah, well, that's good and all,” Harmony murmured from where she sat in a corner of the hut with a bucket of sudsy water. She wrung a wet rag and finished the task of mopping the muddy refuse off her coat. “But 'Alex' is still a long way from being finished.”

        “A long way?” Pinkie Pie pouted and glanced at the spout located on the far end of the machine's slender neck. “All you've got to do is get the runestones to turn all sparkly, right? That's just one last hooftrot before happiness, huh?”

        “That's an even bigger step than either of us is willing to imagine.” Harmony finished wiping her brow clean of sludge and trotted over towards her anchor. “I can't force moonrocks to just become enchanted on their own. That's not something you're capable of doing either, or the rams for that matter.” She took a deep breath. “We've gotta find somepony in Dredgemane and ask them to enchant the runestones for us.”

        “Well, how hard can that be?”

        “You're not half as dumb as you pretend to me, Miss Pie. So don't insult both of our intelligence with such an open-ended question like that.” Harmony's copper lips hardened into a crooked frown as she paced anxiously about the hut. “Of course it's going to be hard! Everypony knows how much of a taboo runeforging is in this day and age! It's tough enough as it is to get any unicorn in the whole of Equestria to pay runestones any mind, much less in this superstitious coffin of a town.” The last pony's hoof suddenly knocked into something. “What the hay...?”

        “Hmm?” Pinkie Pie glanced over.

        Harmony knelt down on her haunches before an opened trunk within which laid a curious, gray fabric. She raised the fibrous ramcraft up in a pair of copper hooves and squinted at it up close. “These horned-dudes never cease to amaze me. This... this is a metallic weave, is it?”

        “Uhhmm... Maybe...?”

        “Hmmm...” Harmony's lips curved ever so slightly in a bout of drunken, engineer's reverie. “Wow, Miss Pie, you know what this is? This is arcanium... but in textile form. The rams have taken the most precious mineral that your fellow Dredgemaners sweat and die for and have turned it into a fabric.” She turned the wavey, shiny material a few times over in her hooves. “Why, a cloth like this would have to be insanely durable. Gah! For the love of oats!” Harmony made a face. “If I had known this stuff was here, I'd have asked the rams if we could bring it to the bog earlier.”

        “Er... Wh-What for? We both know you're made of tough stuff, Har-Har!”

        “Not for me, Miss Pie. I mean for you. Yeesh... I wonder what other valuable materials could be found in this place—”

        “Pfft! So it's boring, stuffy, ram stuff!” Pinkie Pie had suddenly slid over and was slapping the trunk closed in front of Harmony, effectively snatching the metallic cloth from the pegasus' grasp. With a nervous smile flung the time traveler's way, the earth pony exclaimed, “Nothing important, right? Let's get back to the runestones and the sparkling and the stuff!”

        “Uhhh...” Harmony squinted curiously from Pinkie's sweating face, to the shut trunk, then back to Pinkie. “Okaaaaay...” She raised a copper eyebrow at the earth pony's forceful change of the subject. “Like I was saying, none of us can enchant the runestones.”

        “Then let's sneak into town and get Zecchy to do it! She's good at supernatural stuff!”

        “Miss Pie, Zecora's skills are in herbal mixes and potions—basic alchemy at best. As wise as she is, she can't enchant runestones any better than you or me. That's because none of us can wield true, unbridled magic. We just don't have it within us to 'turn on' the rocks inside the machine, and yet we need them to work if we want the orange flame to properly filter infernite out of living organs, much less anything.”

        “Then... Uhm...” Pinkie Pie gulped. “A unicorn?” She blinked, then squinted. “Waiiiiit.” A slow, vicious grin rose to her face. “Har-Harrrrrrr? Is it just me, or are you making excuses to see him at this point?”

        Harmony frowned, leaning a bored chin to her hoof. “It's just you.”

        “Har-Har and Dawnhoooooof, sitting in a steeeeeeeple...!”

        “I wanna see the arcanium weave again.” Harmony reached into the trunk—

        “Okay, time to go!” Immediately, Pinkie Pie hoisted the pegasus up to her hooves and bounced them both out the hut with the machine in tow. A vaguely amused Harmony glanced back at the trunk lying lonesomely in the shadows of the structure...

        “So is this the heart of your 'most awesome and altruistic mission of healing and stuff?'” Deacon Dawnhoof gestured towards the slender, metal machine lying across a flat stone. The young unicorn stood along with the two fillies in the shadow of three hollow, dead trees beyond the steep trenches of Dredgemane. The late afternoon haze paled over their manes in the cold gray mists of the Grave of Consus. “You needed the rocks for this device?” He pointed specifically at the multiple, pale runestones lining the spout at the contraption's slender end. “And all of this after lecturing me on the 'machine' that Haymane, Sladeburn and the good Bishop Breathstar have supposedly turned this town into?”

        “Eh... Y-Yeah...” Harmony smiled nervously. She reached out from her cloak and ran a hoof through her frazzled, amber-streaked mane. “You know how epiphanies go, right, Deacon? Inspiration leads to inspiration, even if half of that inspiration is nasty inspiration and... erm... Wh-What I mean to say is...”

        “She means to say that Alex is a labor of love and not ego!” Pinkie Pie lowered her cloak's hood and winked.

        “'Alex?'” Dawnhoof made a face.

        Harmony rolled her eyes and shoved Pinkie Pie aside. “Yes, it's a machine, Deacon. But not just any machine, it's a cure to infernite. That is, we're both hoping it will be. The whole process is rather simple, but it takes several sentences to explain it.” She cleared her throat and started gesturing toward the various pieces of the device with copper hooves. “You see: the glowing thunderpearl inside the central chamber powers the device while the orange flame attracts—”

        “I was thinking about what you said earlier, the last time we met,” Dawnhoof suddenly said. His voice hadn't distracted the last pony so much as his soft smile did. “You described the moon as a 'blessed thing,' for it is all that remains of our dead Forefather, Consus. I often thought of the light in the night's sky as a symbol of death and decay, of all that refuses the eternal blossoming of life in Equestria. But I couldn't get your words out of my mind, so I went back to the cathedral and poured over the first five chapters of Gultophine's Chronicles. What I found on a closer review reminded me of what you said the other day after Summons, Miss Harmony. Gultophine is indeed the patron Alicorn of rainbows. When Consus was Sundered, the elements of the world became varied, chaotic, and distracting. How remarkable it is, then, that Gultophine—our blessed sister—decided to channel the power of life back into the land while wearing a coat of all of those many, disparate hues. She took that which was unpredictable and distracting and fused it into a symbol of hope, much like the moon can be... or has been all this time...”

        Harmony stared long and hard at him. She gulped and dryly voiced, “Bright colors have... have always been a source of inspiration to me, Deacon Dawnhoof.” She blinked to see a cool, smiling face beyond the bars of an arcane vault somewhere. “That's why it bothers me that there's none to be seen in this town, in this Refuge of Gultophine.”

        The young unicorn shook his head and bore a meditative smile. “It intrigues me, is all. If Gultophine was to return, if she were to see the statue and cathedral built in her image, would she be proud of how respectful we've been of her divinity?” He gulped and glanced forlornly into the gray vistas of the distant horizon. “Or would she be dismayed that we have lost the color that she proudly wore while eulogizing her Father?”

        Harmony's eyes curved as she expelled a sympathetic breath from her copper lungs. She was blind to a pink filly sliding up to her and whispering, “Psst! Give him a huggggg—”

        “Knock it off!” The time traveler shoved her off with a snarl.

        “Huh?” Dawnhoof glanced over.

        Harmony bore a plastic grin. “Yeah! That's uh... really nifty, Deacon. But let's get this over with, shall we?”

        He raised a sandy eyebrow. “Get what over with?”

        “We can chat rainbows and churches another time. The fact is, for the 'mission' that Pinkie Pie and I are on, we've got one final and all-important step. We brought you here to do something for us.”

        “And what is that, pray tell?” He asked with a suspicious squint.

        “Don't look so scared, Dawnhoofsies!” Pinkie winked his way. “It's not like we're rehearsing 'Two Girls, One Cleric!'”

        “Miss Pie.” Harmony cleared her throat. “The paper, if you will.”

        “Oh, but of course!” Pinkie reached into her cloak, unfolded a paper airplane with a blushing smile, and held the sheet up in front of the unicorn. She blinked as the priest-in-training telekinetically “grabbed” the paper and levitated it in front of his chestnut eyes.

        He took an inordinately long space of seconds to read the one, simple word on the sheet, as if he needed to scan the letters a million times over before registering the weight of what was before him. When he finally glanced up at the nervously-shifting fillies, it was a piercing gaze that could slice the plateau into ribbons.

        “This... This is written in the lunar tongue.”

        “Erm...” Pinkie Pie stifled a foalish squeal and hid nervously behind Harmony.

        The copper pegasus stood tall and resolute. “Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, that it is.”

        “You...” Dawnhoof glanced at the machine, at the paper, then at the machine again. “You wish me to animate this infernal machine with the language of the same accursed empire that almost made unicorns extinct a thousand years ago?”

        “Actually, I want you to speak the word before the runestones while the leyline in your horn is meditatively focused so that the enchanted rocks will produce a field of metallurgical containment affixed down the throat of the machine.” Harmony bravely grinned. “As for Lunar Empires and genocide, I figured we would leave that to the history books.”

        “Miss Harmony, I...” He clenched his eyes shut, fought a wave of furious convulsions that ran the length of his brow, and reopened his optics in a burning glare. “What could possibly have possessed you to think that I'm capable of relenting to such a banal, damnable action? I agreed to find you the rocks earlier out of respect of your enthusiasm and sincerity, but I refuse to be a... a... a prop in some sacriligious stage play directed by a Dredgemane exile who wishes to spite the Grand Bishop!”

        “Well, he refuses to be your prop.” Pinkie Pie shrugged and glanced Harmony's way. “And to think that I had high hopes.”

        Harmony ignored her anchor. “How many times do I have to prove to you that this is not all about Breathstar?!” She glared Dawnhoof's way and gestured towards the machine. “This is about finding out a cure to what buries the innocence of this city in a perpetual grave!”

        “Would you at least tell me what you plan to do with this goddess-forsaken contraption?” Dawnhoof paced around the device, grumbling. “Do not hide behind vague generalities and poetic philosophizing. Tell me the truth, Miss Harmony. If you are so insistent that I help you with this inanity, I at least deserve an explanation. It may not seem much, but at least it's respectful.”

        Harmony sighed long and hard. “Look. It's simple. This thing is built to extract infernite from a living pony's lungs. We're just a bunch of enchanted moonrocks a way from firing the sucker... er... 'machine' up, Deacon. We then plan to take this thing to Stonehaven and fix what's poisoning those kids in the Immolatia Ward once and for all!”

        “Uhm... Har-Har?” Pinkie Pie sweated. “You're kinda-sorta telling him our whole plan.”

        “So what if I am?” Harmony stared Dawnhoof's way while patting Pinkie's shoulder. “He's right, he deserves to know. To hide the truth any longer is to suggest a malevolence that we hardly possess. We want to save children, Deacon. That's all we want to do. If that is such a big friggin' deal to the powers that be in Dredgemane, then the apple has truly fallen far from the Alicorn Family Tree.”

        “I shouldn't even pretend to humor what you intend to do here!” Dawnhoof exclaimed, his face suddenly wilting in a panicked helplessness. “Breathstar, Haymane, and Sladeburn will have none of it! You may have been exiled as of yesterday, but doing this will do even worse to you! I don't even want to fathom it! Can't you leave well enough alone?”

        “Is that what Gultophine did?” Harmony's amber eyes narrowed. “Deacon, when the beauty of Creation was blighted by the death of Consus, Gultophine did not give into death and gloom like Dredgemane obviously has! No, she took wing, bundled up the many colors of the world, and flew her spirit of life over the landscape, bringing progress to places where before there was just mayhem and discord. As siblings to the blessed sister, both you and I have it in ourselves to ask 'Can we be that brave? Can we spread light in a world of darkness? Can we be individual beams of courage that pierce the ether of uncertainty?'”

        “You'll be hard pressed to find anypony in the Council who will agree to your defense.”

        “And I don't care about what they have to say, for they're too blinded by their suffering. But you, Deacon, I care about what you have to say, because you're not blind like the rest of them. I see it in your face: you carry the spirit of Gultophine. You just don't know what proper surfaces to reflect off of. I don't need the Council's blessing, but I do need your blessing, Dawnhoof. Or else we can just call this whole thing quits right now!”

        “But Harmony!” Pinkie Pie gasped. “We worked so hard on this—”

        Harmony planted a hoof over her shuddering anchor's mouth, not for a second taking her eyes off of Dawnhoof. “We won't proceed without your blessing, Dawnhoof. I mean it. Dredgemane needs healing, but if we do this against its will, then that isn't healing at all. I just need to know that there is hope to doing what we plan to do. If somepony like you can't see how important this is, then nothing's going to change in this town, even if ten million sick foals suddenly could breathe normally again.”

        Dawnhoof took a deep breath. He telekinetically lifted the paper to his gaze once more. “But... But the lunar tongue?! Seriously?!”

        “And what of it?” Harmony finally smiled. Her glistening teeth showed, a knifing thing. “You used to believe all of your life that the moon was a symbol of death, right? But even that could be turned around by the infinite glory of Consus, couldn't it? Let us not judge symbols by their past sins, but rather embrace them for their future blessings.”

        Dawnhoof was gravely silent, his eyes frozen over the sheet floating in the air before him.

        Pinkie Pie shivered briefly under the touch of Harmony's hoof on her shoulder. The last pegasus stared long and hard at the unicorn cleric, studying the wheels that turned within his mind, pondering the wheels-within-wheels that must have been churning in his heart.

        After an interminable breath, the sandy-colored colt took a deep breath. He crumpled the sheet and tossed it to the stony earth.

        Pinkie and Harmony deflated...

        But then the pony marched firmly over to the machine. He leaned down and rested a glowing horn against the circular body of the spout. “M'shrynmh!”

        In a sparkling halo, all five stones lit up at once. A high-pitched whine briefly punctuated the gray atmosphere of the place. Soon, it died down to a low hum as the stones pulsated in a circular cadence. The orange flame inside the device glowed brighter in response to the lunar enchantment. The three dead trees around the ponies basked suddenly in a magical moonlight.

        “Oooooooh...” Pinkie Pie beamed, leaning over Harmony as she practically drooled at another form of “bright shinies”. “It's like Hearth's Warming in July!”

        “It certainly is pretty nifty, isn't it?” Harmony gently smiled, like a future scavenger gazing proudly at a freshly-engineered creation in the ashes of Wasteland clouds. She looked up at Dawnhoof. “Thank you. I mean it, Deacon. What we've all begun here—what you've just sparked to life—will change things in Dredgemane forever.”

        “Of that, I was afraid, and still am.” Dawnhoof sighed long and hard, crossing his robed chest with a hoof as he slumped back on numb haunches. “Dear Gultophine, give me strength.” He gulped and gazed at her. “But I wish to see this to the end. I need to be responsible for what I've given fuel to.”

        “And you will see it.” Harmony said. “You've been able to see so much already.”

        Dawnhoof's face struggled to register a response to that. It almost came out as a smile...

        Pinkie Pie spoke up. “Can we take Alex for a walk now?”

        “Miss Pie, we've discussed this.” Harmony spun and gestured towards her. “The bags, if you would...”

        “Oh right! Heehee! Silly me!” Pinkie Pie reached into her cloak and pulled out three different canvas sacks.

        “What... Wh-What are you two doing?” Dawnhoof squinted.

        “What any good engineer should do,” Harmony replied. She gathered several random rocks from where they were lying amidst the tree’s gnarled roots. “I'm testing this thing before I so much as aim it at a living pony.” As Pinkie Pie walked up with the bags, the last pony dropped a dozen rocks inside and helped her anchor wrap that bag into another sack, and both of them into yet another sack. “I don't know what you fear the most, Deacon, that I'm an imposter or that I'm a rabble-rouser. Hopefully this will convince you—and myself included—that I'm far too respectful and cautious to ever possibly be either one of those things.”

        “You don't scare me half as much as you intrigue me, Miss Harmony, or else I wouldn't be assisting you to such a degree that it threatens my clerical aspirations. What I do fear, however, is a repercussion that Gultophine herself may tragically be powerless to intercede upon.”

        “It's a good thing that the Alicorn sisters gave us the strength to fend for ourselves, then, huh?” Harmony winked his way, finished tying the sacks-within-sacks shut, and planted the multi-layered bags of rocks onto the top of a flat, gray stone. “Alright, Miss Pie, stand back.”

        “Eeep! This is me, standing back!”

        Before the other two ponies, Harmony walked over and hoisted the slender machine in two forelimbs. She propped the heavy end of it against the floor and motioned with her mane towards the bags before her. “Pretend that the bags are a pony's lungs and the stones inside are clumps of infernite—”

        “The analogy isn't lost to me, Miss Harmony.”

        “Gotta love a priest that uses his head as much as his horn.”

        “Heehee! Har-Har, you just said—”

        “Quiet, you!” Harmony clenched the wooden handle to the crankshaft in a pair of teeth and yanked away from the machine. The drawstring sped the gears inside the contraption to life. A low roar filled the air of the place as the thunderpearl and the jar of orange flame pulsed in opposite strobes. Hoisting the device over her body like the heavy mass of a lightning gun, the last pony affixed the conical spout of the machine directly in front of the bag of stones. “Okay... here goes progress.” She clenched her lips shut and pulled a hoof over the trigger of the machine.

        The hum intensified in the air. Pinkie Pie and Dawnhoof craned their necks to watch. Soon, they stirred with minor discomfort, as they felt the molars in their mouths vibrating from an invisible force billowing in the midst of them. Random strands of mane hair tilted towards the clouds in a brief wave of static.

        “Come on... Come on...” Harmony hissed and applied more pressure to the trigger. The thunderpearl shimmered. The orange flame churned and billowed. The runestones surrounding the spout flickered and flashed. “Take a drink, Alex. I know your friggin' thirsty...”

        “Who is this 'Alex'?”

        “Shhh!” Pinkie Pie silenced the priestly unicorn and leaned forward, grinning and grinning, because...

        Before the eyes of all three, a steady stream of dust and filament was pouring out through the porous membranes of all three bags. The sediment was the same color of the rocks... for it was the rocks. Under the gun of the rune-enchanted device, the rocks had dissolved into ash and were billowing out from the center of the bags without the sacks so much as moving a centimeter.

        “Yeah!” Harmony grinned wide and practically sneered as she saw the stream of filaments flowing unfettered through the center of the glowing spout and down the long, slender neck of the device. “How's this for surgery, Haymane?! You can harass a zebra and you can banish a pegasus, but nothing can stop true progress. If only you had the courage to solve more problems with the same simplicity that you replaced your legs with!”

        “By Gultophine's breath...” Dawnhoof trotted over and gazed at the magically floating stream of dust collecting slowly down the neck of the device. “Not even the most powerful unicorns in Breathstar's order can disassemble pure stone with this precision and delicacy!” He gulped and glanced at the last pony. “Could this truly work on the infernite crowding the lungs of afflicted Dredgemaners?”

        “That's why you're along for the ride, isn't it?!” Harmony beamed. She yanked the trigger in the opposite direction and cut off the engine. The thunderpearl dimmed slightly. The stream of dust still floating outside the device fell limply to the earth. She turned the machine sideways, reached a hoof to the bottom of the chassis, and yanked loose a black cartridge. She turned the container upside down and dumped a thick clump of re-coalesced rock so that it shattered against the granite beneath them. “The foals of Stonehaven never needed a doctor; they needed an engineer.” She winked. “And they're gonna have you to thank for going the length that Haymane was never willing to explore.”

        “Weee! Let's go!” Pinkie Pie jumped and bounced brightly. “Let's dive into the trenches of town and make with the healing already!”

        “In broad daylight?!” Dawnhoof suddenly exclaimed. He shook his horned head. “You stand too much of a risk if you went right now. Besides...” He winced as he forced himself to say what came out next. “A bag of rocks is one thing, but that's hardly conclusive. I'm not an engineer, but it would be a shame for you two to have infiltrated the depths of Stonehaven and get caught with having nothing to show for it.”

        “Huh?” Pinkie Pie blinked, cross-eyed. “What's that mean?”

        “He's right,” Harmony sighed suddenly, clutching the machine to herself like a metal blanket. “What we just saw right now is inspiring and all, but it's hardly a conclusive test. For all we know, this could drag the infernite out of those kids' lungs and leave them no better off.”

        “But there's no sense in not trying, right?!” Pinkie Pie stammered with a sudden breathlessness. “The foals' Auntie Pinkie Pie would hate herself forever if she gave up on them now!”

        “I'm not talking about giving up! Jeez!” Harmony gulped and glanced towards the horizon. “It's just that there could be many, many crazy factors that I haven't considered yet. The only way to know for sure, before we stick our heads into Dredgemane city limits and risk this whole venture crashing and burning, is to—”

        “You need to test this on a victim of infernite outside of Dredgemane,” Dawnhoof deduced out loud. It was an unemotional tone. “You need to know that this works to get rid of Immolatia before you so much as trot into town.”

        “Then let's do it!” Pinkie Pie grinned wide. “Let's ask around! Let's find a pony who—”

        “Miss Pie.”

        Pinkie glanced over. “Har-Har?”

        Harmony's eyes were placid, pleading ambers. “We... already know of a pony.”

        “We do?” Pinkie Pie blinked. As soon as she realized Dawnhoof was gazing at her as well, she suddenly deflated with a crossing of her forelimbs. For the first time since the last pony had anchored to her, the filly's face lost all of its color. “Oh.”

        “You do realize that by so much as talking to you, I'm risking more horrible things than either of you can possibly imagine,” Inkessa said. She stood in the front door-frame to the Pie family residence, looking just as dull and gray as the first day Harmony arrived there on waves of green flame. “Pinkamena may be in trouble, but it's nothing compared to the bounty on your head, Harmony. If Haymane learns that you've shown up again, he'll have this entire farmland evicted, a if my father finds out, he's liable to murder somepony—anypony.”

        “Inkie, I'm giving your family an opportunity to be free of suffering,” Harmony spoke as she and Pinkie stood in brown cloaks before the patio of the household. A soft, golden glow from the west bathed the two fillies' coats as the setting sun met the cold gray mists above the farmland. “For years, you've lived in darkness. If I can bring hope to your home, imagine what can be done for this City!”

        “You mean to say that if you can point a very experimental and unpredictable machine down the throat of my mother without killing her, you'll accomplish something.” The violet-eyed filly frowned. “Harmony, do you forget that I'm a nurse? If there's anything in this world that I hate, it's toying with a suffering pony's life.”

        “Inkie-Winkie...” Pinkie Pie leaned in and gently nuzzled the side of her sister's face. She gazed her blue eyes deeply into her. “I know that I do a lot of crazy and silly things, but please believe me. I would never do something to hurt Mommy.”

        “Then don't let Canterlotlian hot-heads talk you into being even crazier,” Inkessa said. In a deeper voice, she gulped and uttered, “You and I have done enough things to fling this town into chaos. What, with bringing Zecora to the Immolatia Ward and with... and w-with...”

        Pinkie stopped her right there. “Shhh... I know, Inkie.” The candy-colored filly murmured in a breath that she must have thought was unheard by Harmony. She giggled gently and ran a hoof across Inkessa's sighing face. “I know, but you have to trust me. This is what we've always asked for. Besides, it's super-duper cool and stuff!”

        “As much as I hate to argue with that blissful logic...” Inkessa droned and gazed at Harmony. “I'm going to need more than just sisterly love to convince me that this isn't the worst idea in the grand history of worst ideas.”

        Harmony cleared her throat and stepped aside to reveal Deacon Dawnhoof.

        Inkessa gasped, her violet eyes twitching.

        The unicorn marched softly over towards the doorframe. He looked at her, and gently smiled. “Dear Inkessa Pie, I cannot pretend to speak to you as a priest in this matter, but I tell you—as a fellow Dredgemaner, and as a fellow sibling to Goddess Gultophine herself—that there is hope to be had here. What these fillies are doing, I am willing to have faith in. I think that you'll find—like I have—that this is a matter of something far more natural than conviction. It simply requires opening one's eyes.”

        Inkessa fumbled for words. Her violets grew misty as she gazed at her sister. “Pinkamena... is... is th-this a joke...?”

        “Nosireepie!” Pinkie grinned wide. “I would never pull a prank like this. I would never pull a joke on... on Mommy.” It wasn't the candy-colored pony's words that properly answered her sister, but rather a sudden moisture in the edges of her sapphire eyes that startlingly mirrored Inkessa's own.

        The nurse saw it, and with a courageous breath she stepped back from the doorway. “Alright.”

        “Good!” Harmony made to carry the canvas-covered machine in. “Then let's get started—!”

        “Not so fast.” The gray filly held a hoof out. She stabbed Harmony's face with violet orbs. “I'm a nurse. It's my oath to abide by the consent of the patient... even if it is m-my mother. You will wait here, and once I've returned—and if and only if Mommy consents—then I will let you inside. Got it?”

        Before Harmony could respond—

        “Absolutely, Miss Pie.” Dawnhoof smiled. “We eagerly await her reply.”

        Inkessa nervously curtsied, slid the wooden door shut, and departed with a chorus of ghostly hoof-trots against the floorboards of the house's candle-lit interior. Harmony sighed long and hard, shifting the weight of the metal apparatus on her back like a scavenger staring before a mountain of moon rock.

        “Why are you so anxious?”

        Harmony glanced over.

        Deacon Dawnhoof's sandy eyebrow was raised. “You are practically breathless. Is there a reason you act as if there's more than the foals' health at stake, as if you're running out of time?”

        The last pony stared numbly at the colt. She swiveled about and murmured towards her anchor, “Miss Pie, are you nervous?”

        “Mmm-mmm!” Pinkie shook her head. If the filly was lying before a priest, she wasn't fazed by it in the least.

        “Well, there you go.” Harmony glanced Dawnhoof's way. “The sick pony's daughter isn't worried. That's all that matters.”

        “I hardly find that a proper answer,” the cleric-in-training remarked. His chestnut eyes squinted her way. “I once thought you a Canterlotlian Agent. Then I thought you to be an impostor...”

        “Don't you still think that?” The time traveler smirked.

        He smiled back, briefly. Then, in a low breath, Dawnhoof murmured, “But you are something more, something indefinable. I've seen all sorts of countless souls trotting in and out of Dredgemane. The ones who stay here have fallen into a deep shadow that the likes of me has to console them through. The visitors who leave this town make their exit swiftly without looking back, for their escape from the trenches is a frightened and speedy thing. But you? You've come back, and yet you don't share the same frown that I’ve seen on so many of the townsponies. I look in your face, and I cannot fathom what is bringing you here. What is making you sacrifice so much for the meager chance that what you’re doing here will succeed?”

        “Deacon Dawnhoof...” Harmony swallowed and leaned forward in an earnest breath. “Do you have any enemies?”

        He blinked. “Enemies?”

        “A nemesis. Do you have a nemesis?”

        “I... I f-follow the Spirit of Gultophine. I believe in enduring trials, not in battling equines.”

        “One day, maybe when you're a lot older, you're going to look at the wounded, gray-patched length of your years, and you're going to realize that—just like myself—you've had a nemesis all of your life, and the merit of your existence will be measured by how well you've come to succeed against such a foe.”

        Dawnhoof merely stared at her from atop a perplexed cloud. He made no attempt to argue with that. He very wisely, very silently digested those words...

        “Sweet!” Pinkie Pie chirped. “Can my nemesis be a cave of bats?! Huh?”

        The unicorn and the pegasus glanced at her.

        Just then, the wooden door to the house opened. All three turned and looked ahead. Inkessa slowly shuffled out, her face glued to the granite lengths of the farmland. Slowly, with painful hesitance, she raised her violet eyes to the three ponies' faces. With a gulp, she nodded.

        In a hushed train of dimly-lit coats, the four ponies shuffled up the stairs to the second-story of the Pie Family house. Inkessa led the way while Pinkie Pie and Harmony carried the hulking metal contraption between them. Flanked by the ever-perpetual dance of ghostly candlelight, they struggled with the ascent, and even faltered on the steps once or twice. A magical hum lit the air, and the two fillies were relieved to see an aura of telekinesis assisting them. Harmony quietly thanked Deacon Dawnhoof as the young cleric with a shimmering horn took up the rear.

        The candlelight disappeared as the four reached the second story. Inkessa shuffled ahead in a gray blur and knocked softly on the door to the group's destination. She ducked in, murmuring in a gentle voice to the occupant that lay beyond.

        Harmony swallowed a lump down her throat. For reasons she was briefly too distracted to ascertain, her heart was beating rapidly. This household was so dark, so grim; it was as if the world had guzzled an incalculable river of shadows down into this wooden abyss through which the last pony was presently stumbling. She never felt as much trepidation in the Pie home as she felt then, carrying a pretentious miracle-machine on her copper shoulders. Harmony was briefly helpless to imagine that she could dredge anything up from the opaque corners of that place.

        Then she saw Pinkie Pie's shape beside her. The anchor's movement was an unstoppable, bouncing phenomenon, unfettered by the shadows. Not even the essence of life itself could give an object that much animation. Harmony's heartbeat calmed suddenly, and in a dark blink she found herself standing dead-center before the bedroom doorway.

        It creaked open, slowly, courtesy of Inkessa's gray hoof. She shuffled backwards like a sad phantom, her violet eyes darting to the right. Harmony's vision followed the motion, and she became aware of a pit of equine-shaped blackness in the center of that obsidian hovel, as if one body and one body alone was sucking in all of the painfully bright bits of light that dared to grace that lifeless room.

        As the resounding hoofsteps of the party came to a dead stop, Harmony became aware of a shrill, repetitious whistling noise coming from the shadow-within-shadow to her right. She realized that the whistling was a pony's labored breaths, emanating from a bed-shaped cloud of darkness lingering in front of the pegasus. Then the torturous wheezes coalesced into a voice. It was a sound that Harmony had heard on several occasions from outside the bedroom door, only now it was with a ragged clarity that exposed the last pony to all the wretched, decaying threads of that lung-ful of misery.

        “My d-darling Inkessa... told me that you wished to see me...” A wheeze, a hissing froth, coughs, coughs, and a murmur floated across the shadows like a cloud of dying moths. “I... have heard so m-much about you, Miss Harmony, from Pinkamena...”

        “I'm here, Mommy!” A pink figure bounced to the far side of the dark hovel. Her voice was a sweet siren that echoed across a great, somber shell. “And we brought Deacon Dawnhoof from town!”

        “A priest...” The voice shuddered. There was suddenly a wet, sick sputtering. Harmony recognized it as a weathered attempt at laughter. Even on the verge of suffocating, Mrs. Pie reveled in her daughter’s whimsy. “That's for in case this d-doesn't work after all, huh?” More sputters.

        “I'm here to help in any capacity that I can, Mrs. Pie,” Dawnhoof's voice said with remarkable warmth across the infinite blackness. “Our intent is to bless you through healing, nothing else. Do not be frightened.”

        “Fr-Frightened?” The voice hissed as the shapes of the two daughters gathered closely around it. “Sh-Show me somepony that is far worse off than I am, young Deacon ...” Another hiss, a cough, and wheeze. “And then I-I might be frightened...”

        “Mrs. Pie,” Harmony spoke, clearing her throat. She gazed blindly towards the shadows as she uttered, “I don't know if Inkessa had told you or not, but you will be the first living pony to be exposed to this machine. If it works on you as we hope, then—”

        “—You will know that th-those poor children whom my daughters watch over m-may have a chance.” The voice had a strength that pierced its bondage of hacking coughs. “Miss Harmony, I am—above all things—a mother. Anything I can do t-to help young foals is a blessing that I am happy to... to...” There was a long, sputtering retch. “... t-to be alive for...”

        “I’m glad we have something to agree on.” Harmony smirked briefly into the darkness, then once more winced. “I... Uhm...” She turned her copper head blindly back and forth. “I'm sorry to say this, but I'm going to need to see what I'm doing. Is there... uhm... any chance that we could bring a little light into this room?”

        “Inkie?” Pinkie's voice resurfaced. It was a pleading thing.

        “I'll go downstairs and fetch some candles,” Inkessa warmly murmured, following a series of hooftrots—

        “Miss Pie, I think I can be of assistance in that area,” Dawnhoof's voice strongly uttered.

        “Yeah! Let Dawnhunk use his glowy-horny trick!”

        “I don't know...” The trembling was evident in Inkessa's tone. “We can't have it too bright.”

        “I promise, Miss Pie... and Mrs. Pie, that I shall keep it dim. It's the least that I can do.”

        “Well, alright. Mother?”

        “Th-That is quite fine, Inkessa...”

        Several shadowed necks swiveled Dawnhoof's way as the Deacon tilted his head forward. With a twinge of sparks, the tip of his horn illuminated like a dying candle in reverse. The glow cast a soft halo of amber across the room, then brightened no more. Dawnhoof relaxed and stared ahead of him, and then something in his eyes twitched to match a horrific curve forming beneath his lips.

        Harmony blinked curiously. She turned around to face a large gray bed lying in front of her, flanked by the shapes of Inkessa and Pinkie. The last pony tried and tried to find Mrs. Pie, but she couldn't see through a pile of moth-eaten blankets in the way. Then a sharp breath left her as she realized that the pile was Mrs. Pie, an emaciated lump of bone joints, brown sores, and leprous skin that pretended to be a living pony. The body rose and fell in trembling wheezes, like an ivory balloon that refused to completely deflate. A pair of glazed, blue eyes swam in a thick sheen of sweat beneath a threadbare mane of stone-gray stalks. The mattress was permanently soiled with a filmy residue of sickness and misery, outlining her like a dark grave in the middle of the room.

        “Dear, sweet Celestia...” the end of ponies murmured to herself. Nevertheless, Harmony bravely inhaled, flung the canvas off of the machine, and carried it forward to the side of the bed. Her heart jolted the instant that the jaded eyes became animated, twitching fitfully to follow the copper pegasus. In a foalish breath, Harmony saw two limp bodies instead of one, and Scootaloo was shaking them both with tiny orange hooves, begging them to wake up. Twenty five holocaustal years melted in an instant, for the last pony was now piercing a lifetime's cloud of misery with the dangling spout of the machine.

        “You have... You have a m-most ravishing mane, young lady...” Mrs. Pie managed through a forest of jaundice. It was a whimpering, glistening thing, and yet it was the most beautiful smile that Harmony had ever seen.

        The copper pegasus stifled a quiver in her voice as she bravely responded to it. “You should see me with a green beret.” She gulped and glanced aside at the young ponies flanking her. “I'm... uhm... I'm going to need somepony to steady this thing while I crank it on. It's not like it's heavy or whatnot; I just don't want to take any chances.”

        “I'll help!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed in a peppermint breath that reintroduced sweetness into the room. She grasped the middle of the long stalk while Harmony hung onto the heavy end. “You get that side of Alex, and I'll hold his tongue! Heehee!”

        “Alex?” Inkessa made a face from beyond the penumbra of the amber halo.

        “Can you see what you're doing, Miss Harmony?” Dawnhoof's voice interjected.

        “I can see it, feel it, hear it, and taste it.” Harmony murmured as she tightly gripped the upper and lower sides of the metal chassis in her grip. She knelt one lower limb against the edge of the bed and ushered Pinkie forward so that the entire device's weight was practically hanging over Mrs. Pie. “There's no going back now...”

        “I pray that your good work is fruitful, Miss Harmony...” The wheezing body beneath her trembled in the sudden shadow within shadows. The mare's limbs tightened into the dark-stained bedsheets as a few added flakes of hair fell from her splotched neck. “For the f-foals' sake...”

        “Mrs. Pie...” Harmony spoke while giving the runestones, the flaming jar, and the thunderpearl one last examination. “After you've had the opportunity to dance with those children, write me a letter, and then I can receive all the 'thank yous' I could ask for. Okay?”

        It took the better half of six hacking coughs before Mrs. Pie could respond. “Y-Yes, child.” She lowered her eyelids. “I am ready...”

        “Okay.”  Harmony gulped as she clasped a hoof over the trigger and lowered her mouth before the wooden handle of the crankshaft's drawstring. “Let's do this.”

        “Deacon Dawnhoof?” an undeniably trembling Inkessa managed above the developing operation. “Would a blessing do in this case?”

        The owner of the dim circle of light murmured to the thick corners of the room. “Blessed Gultophine, Sister of Life and Sower of our Equestrian Richness...”

        “Keep a firm hold, Miss Pie.”

        “Momma, keep your mouth open. That way Alex can do his magic.”

        “I'm gonna give it a crank.”

        “...grant us tranquility and calmness of mind as we seek the righteous path towards progress...”

        Harmony yanked at the wooden handle. The engine sparked, sputtered, and died. “Come on...”

        “What's the matter?”

        “Nothing. I just gotta give it a few more cranks.”

        “Is there something wrong with the machine?”

        “Inkessa, Pinkamena, seriously.” Harmony re-gripped the handle between her teeth. “Juffth howdd awn tiggtht!” She cranked and cranked.

        The machine roared, died, roared, and died...

        “...and give us Your aid and wisdom as we spread the warmth of Your spirit to all living things, as You have made it Your amiable task to bless us...”

        “Nnnngh—Ptooie!” Harmony turned the machine sideways again. “I think the thunderpearl shook loose on the way here.”

        “Oh no, Har-Har! Does that mean we have to go back to the rams?”

        “You got the rams involved in this?” Inkessa exclaimed.

        “Everypony just calm down. I only need to give it a few more tries is all...”

        “Mommy: just stay with us, Mommy.”

        “Just a little bit longer, Mother.”

        “Dang it all...” Harmony's other hoof was fiddling with the chamber within which the glowing pearl was housed. “If I could just shift it back into its place—”

        “Maybe if you gave Alex a whack?”

        “Who is Alex?”

        “...for we are all Your children in the world that our Celestial Parents have gifted us with to spread Your light, as You have illuminated the souls within each and every one of us through Your eternal Breath...”

        “Almost got it...” Harmony licked the edges of her copper lips as she fiddled and fiddled with the machine. “Almost—”

        “What in blazes...?”

        The last pony froze. Her amber eyes twitched and shot across the darkness of the room. Inkessa and Pinkie Pie both gasped as one. Dawnhoof's eyes widened; he kept his horn trained on the sight before him, for without turning his head he could tell just what had alighted the room from the looks of shock on everypony's face.

        Standing in the blinding silhouette of the bedroom door was the shape of a rigid stallion wearing a broad-rimmed hat against the outside lantern's glow. A pair of golden eyes quivered upon a beam of horror that fluttered back and forth between his gray mane and the four ghostly bodies surrounding his wife's bed like gravediggers.

        “What... What...” Quarrington rode the raging rapids of surging breaths pouring out from his throat until it formed into an icy snare focused almost entirely on the copper pegasus in the center of the scene. “What is the meaning of this... th-this... desecration?!”

        “F-Father...” Inkessa instantly wilted with a whimper.

        Pinkie Pie, in the meantime, completely let go of the machine and bounded swiftly towards him. “Daddy! Daddy, please, just let us explain—!”

        In one barreling lurch, Quarrington shoved his daughter to the floorboards and galloped across the room on thundering hooves. “You get away from her!”

        “Father—!” Inkessa yelped.

        “Nnngh!” Quarrington grasped one hoof onto the foot of the bed and raised another limb to slam the machine out of Harmony's grasp. “Curse you! Curse you and your heathen machinery—Begone, I say!”

        Before he could so much as land a blow, the amber halo had left the bed, plunging Harmony and Mrs. Pie into darkness, for Dawnhoof had suddenly dove into Quarrington. With a combination of forelimbs and firm telekinesis, the Deacon desperately pulled the raging pony away from the bed in that darkest of dark chambers.

        “Mr. Pie! Hold your anger! I beg of you!”

        “Unhoof me, you hypocrite! That's my wife she's poisoning!”

        “Daddy, it's not poisoning!”

        “Father, in Celestia's name—!”

        “Just let us explain!”

        Harmony panted as the bedlam exploded behind her copper shoulders. She swallowed and bravely stared ahead into the darkness, like a future scavenger piloting a beautiful machine through the obscurity beyond. She winced as her hoof dug deeper and deeper into the apparatus' chamber, brushing up against the sparkling bolts of the thunderpearl. With a painful grunt, she finally snapped the power source back into place...

        “Nnngh! Fools! Fools, all of you!” Quarrington's face hissed and snarled into the strobing beam of Dawnhoof's horn as the two stallions struggled and wrestled over the pounding floorboards. Something was knocked off a table and shattered to the floor as the two daughters floundered in hyperventilating breaths around the scene. “To think that my family would have descended this far! I will have none of it, you hear?!”

        “Daddy—”

        “Mister Pie—”

        “None of it!”

        Harmony was pulling and pulling at the wooden handle this entire time. The crankshaft roared to life. A low hum poured a bass undercurrent beneath the cacophony of the room. She pulled the trigger of the machine, and in several orange-lit strobes the emaciated skullface of Mrs. Pie slithered in and out of existence. The last pony aimed the five glittering shapes of the runestones just half-a-meter above the obscured figure in bed and pushed the trigger all the way.

        “Leave her alone! Confound it!”

        “Daddy, stop, you're only making things worse!”

        “Please, Father—!”

        “Mister Pie—Quarrington! I would not even be here if I didn't have faith in this undertaking!”

        “What would you know of faith, you backslidden waste of—?!”

        An explosion of orange flame flashed across the room.

        All of the ponies lurched against each other in a gasp. They glanced over—Quarrington included—and watched with trembling lungs as the jar of the machine dimmed and dimmed to a low glisten. The thunderpearl inside stopped wildly sparkling, and a breathless pegasus lurched back against the hoof-board of the furniture, clutching the machine to herself as the crankshaft inside whirred to a stand-still.

        There was nothing to be heard from the bed. Everything beyond the far end of the room was still, silent, icily enshrouded by the blackness.

        Quarrington's frowning face melted into something else. It was a whimper, and not a snarl, that came forth from his quivering limps. “You... You have killed her...”

        “No we have not!” Pinkie Pie suddenly, forcibly barked. Two seconds after uttering that, the filly gulped hard and glanced forlornly at her sister.

        Inkessa nervously turned around and murmured across the shadows to the copper pegasus. “Harmony? Did it work?”

        “You... k-killed your own mother...” Quarrington again whimpered.

        “Let us not draw conclusions so soon,” Dawnhoof exclaimed.

        Quarrington rediscovered his anger. With a pair of strong hooves, he shoved the young priest hard to the floor. “You! You pathetic, blind imbecile! I'll see you executed for this!”

        “Mr. Pie!” Harmony planted the machine down and leaped over the bed to stand in the way of the stallion and the collapsed Deacon. “Will you knock it off already?!”

        “I'll make sure you’re both punished! Severely! I'll see to it that the Council shows you no mercy!” Quarrington howled. “You have done nothing but bring blight and desolation to my home! And to think that I ever contemplated bestowing you with grace!”

        “You've contemplated nothing!” Harmony growled back, helping Dawnhoof up to his hooves, not once taking her angry gaze from locking with Quarrington's. “You suck the light from this home, you leech the joy from this town, and you blame me for bringing about blight and desolation?!”

        “Daddy! Har-Har! Just calm down—”

        “Breathstar was right about you! We will never show you mercy again! Not ever! Not after this massacre!”

        “The only massacre here is backwards ponies like you not knowing true healing if it came up and bucked them in the face!”

        “Preach to me all you want about healing, child. But after you've gone where I'm about to send you, all I'll expect to hear is you begging for your—”

        “Momma?”

        All of the ponies froze. The angry circle dwindled to an icy curve, for the five equine souls were strafing aside to glance towards the author of that hauntingly crisp voice. In the bedroom doorway stood a flaxen-maned filly with bright golden eyes of delicious horror. Blinkaphine wasn't looking at them; she was staring past them. Her pale lips quivered for the full length of time it took for her to repeat the unearthly sound from the back of her throat.

        “M-Momma...?”

        All five swiveled to look. A sixth shadow was standing at the far end of the room, occupying the sacred space where a ghost had once resided. Legs that were no longer limp carried a body that was no longer paralyzed. A mouth that was no longer trembling weathered breaths that were no longer wheezing. A pair of blue irises solidified, as if phantom cataracts were pealing off of them with each warm second that pierced the mesmerizing silence of that moment.

        Inkessa fell on her haunches, covering a mouth with trembling hooves beneath an explosive pair of violets. Dawnhoof murmured a sacred exclamation and held a forelimb to his chest. Harmony merely stood, frozen, her copper eyebrow arched as she beheld the sight. The only pony who moved was Pinkie Pie. For once, it wasn't a bouncing movement. She ever so gently sashayed up to the strange shape staring back at all of them.

        “Mommy?” Pinkie Pie murmured. Her blue sapphires reflected a pair of like-pearls twitching back at her, twice as mesmerized and four times as bright. “Are you...? Do you feel...? Is it all...” She gulped. “...Gone?”

        “Why...?” Mrs. Pie's nostrils flared. She stared icily about the veiled extremities of that hovel, as if suddenly and lucidly disgusted by the misery that dripped off every corner of the place. A concrete squint crossed her face, so that she resembled a freshly-foaled infant who was confused to find the real world just as dull and obscure as the womb itself. “Why... is it so dark?” Trembles rose once more to her limbs, but they were not convulsions of sickness. It was an entirely new form of quaking, an utterly exciting spasm that rocked her body so that she stumbled over the floorboards in a desperate lurch. “What has happened to my home?”

        “M-Mommy!” Pinkie gasped. She clutched her before Mrs. Pie could fall from one quivering step too many. “Talk to us! Tell us how you feel, pretty please?”

        “I feel...” Mrs. Pie gulped. She stood up straight with phenomenal strength. Harmony was surprised to see that she was just as tall as Pinkie Pie, just as tall as herself. “I feel,” Mrs. Pie concluded. It came out as a grumble, for a refreshing temper rose hotly through the mare’s haggard body as she marched out of Pinkie's grasp and dragged her suddenly bounding hooves towards the shutters at the darkest wall of the room. “This is not my home; there is no light. There should always... always be light in this household...” She struggled as she clasped her quivering hooves to the edges of the window. “...In this family.”

        Pinkie Pie swiftly rushed over and yanked at the shutters for her. They flew open, and everypony jolted, everypony squinted, everypony but Mrs. Pie. The pale-coated mare stared breathlessly into a great burning sky. The misty gray clouds were like a blaze of glorious flame that consumed every shuddering crevice of that room. Where shadows had once lingered, beautiful antique furniture and lace duvets bled into being. Crystal chests of glittering jewelry and rows of ornamental family heirlooms shimmered in a sudden brilliance. The dark stains of sickness that blemished the bed melted away in reverence to the radiant beams shining in through the open shutters.

        Inkessa stared with misty violet eyes. Blinkaphine stumbled over in a breathless lurch and the two sisters clutched tightly to each other, gazing at the living, breathing shadow against the golden silhouette. On numbly clopping hooves, Quarrington shuffled forward. He gulped and murmured through a sea of swimming dust specks that hovered in the platinum rays. “P-Pearl...?”

        “I had a horrible dream...” Mrs. Pie murmured. Her every tone was freer and freer of a deathly, shrill whistle as the mare’s throat cast off the last fetters of infernite before the healing sunset. “I was floating somewhere for so long... somewhere dark and cold. I heard voices, voices that I loved, voices that I used to hold, voices that I used to cradle. They were all swimming away from me. I knew that it was only a matter of time before they drifted away forever, and the darkness would be my only companion.” She gulped hard and ran a hoof through the scant remains of her mane. “Oh, how I longed for that dream to end. I have so many things to do, so many words to say, before I finally, finally lie down with the darkness.” Something outshone the blinding light, for Mrs. Pie was smiling, smiling brightly. She turned and murmured over her shoulder. “Let it in.” She gulped. “While we still can, let in the light!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Inkessa bounded breathlessly towards a set of shutters. “Open the windows!” She squeaked towards the dead and dying shadows of the house. “Open them all!” With a grunt, she flung her hooves to the pane and flung the shutters apart. A bright, golden glow pierced the second story of the Pie Family house, drowning out the meager lanternlight at the far end of the hallway. Dust and soot scattered as...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...Pinkie Pie bounced over her bed and nearly knocked loose her clown lamp before grasping the nearby window pane. She raised the thickly-painted glass so that every pink contour of her room exploded in pastel joy. Her wardrobe shimmered with every color of the spectrum. The bedsheets danced with bright balloons and illustrations of party streamers. She spun about and...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...mutely bucked the kitchen door open to the outside world. Blinkaphine's pale mane hair shimmered like snow as she glanced around, her twitching eyes reflecting bright red cupboards filled with glittering porcelain dishes and glinting silverware. She sped over to a pair of windows and slid them open as well. A colorfully illustrated calender hung over the sink, portraying vivid, orange, fall scenery several months' late. A copper clock in the shape of an alicorn hung on the wall, dangling an amber tail joyously as the white-haired filly excitedly scampered towards her father's office and...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...snapped loose several wooden boards from four first-floor windows with a glistening aura of magical telekinesis. Dawnhoof concentrated in the effort of removing the many wooden planks from the walls of the household, one nail at a time. At every angle, a golden glow permeated the house, illuminating the bright coats of prancing ponies as the daughters fled to the far reaches of the building, tearing loose the last of the family's opaque barriers.

        In the middle of all this, Harmony limply shuffled, hugging the metal machine to her chest like a loyal friend from the future. Her amber eyes twitched to comprehend the flood of so much glorious illumination. With each successive window that Pinkie, Inkessa, and Blinkaphine flung open, a warmer hue blossomed across the living area. Books bound with burgundy covers richly splashed across mahogany shelves. Family portraits full of smiling faces flickered before the atrium. A jade-green reptile awoke from a plush pet bed, blinking open its pair of glistening, ruby eyes. The dozens upon dozens of Blinkaphine's landscape sketches exploded suddenly with vibrant green hues and glistening shades that the copper pegasus had been far too blind to have discovered before. Finally, a bust of Goddess Gultophine hovered above the hearth, and her wings were just as the last pony remembered them, envisioned them, worshiped them: replete with every color of the rainbow.

        “My house...” Mrs. Pie's voice danced through the living room.

        Dawnhoof, Pinkie, Inkessa, and Blinkaphine all froze in mid-canter. They spun and looked towards the stairs. Harmony glanced over in time to see Mrs. Pie being helped down the last of the wooden steps by Quarrington. The stallion stood behind and watched in frozen amazement as Mrs. Pie limped forward on her own, gazing at the flood of light that was pouring over every suddenly-rich, suddenly-luscious contour of the domain.

        “This should be a warm house.” She gulped. She shuddered. “This is a warm house. I married here. I foaled here. This is a house of joy... a house of smiles... it is my house, for it is our house, and... and...” Her eyes suddenly melted. Her limping turned into a trotting which turned into a galloping. She sped a bee-line for the front door, the last obstruction of the dying prison, and she flung it open like the lid to an empty coffin. Her breath left her in an instant, for she had allowed it to happen.

        The sun was setting, and the infinite mists of the Grave of Consus had parted briefly enough, graciously enough, to allow a prismatic hue to kiss through the moist roof of the heavens. What bled warmly to the earth was a cornucopia of colors, joyfully complicated and mesmerizingly whimsical.

        Mrs. Pie ran out into the penumbra of this warmth, piercing the granite belly of the pale farmland, a naked Dredgemaner, a living pony. She fell to her haunches and slumped limply to the dust of the earth, baptizing herself in the fleeting rays of sunlight that fitfully challenged the infinite blackness of the universe. Her eyes were full of stars, and her face was full of—

        “Oh Praise Gultophine, I know this.” She smiled on forever. “I have seen this... I have felt it, like a blanket that held me in such cold slumber, that promised me that I would return to this... that I would return to you... all of you...”

        The mare glanced over her shoulder in time to see her three daughters shuffling breathlessly towards her. Harmony, Dawnhoof, and a mute Quarrington hung behind. The seven ponies dotting the gray plateau were beautiful accidents, the only living souls in Dredgemane that day.

        “Inkessa... The heart of my heart...” Mrs. Pie sniffled and lovingly reached a hoof up to cup her eldest daughter's cheek. The filly crouched down next to her, her smile framed by violet tears as she nuzzled her mother shakingly. “When you came into this world, I knew what true light was. Because you shine it, my darling, and I know that you will continue shining it. Your love is my love, and it blesses me to know that you share it with so many ponies who need it...”

        “I-I do, Mother...” Inkessa giggled through a cracking sob and buried her face into Mrs. Pie's neck. “And I will... Oh thank you, Gultophine, I will! I w-will...”

        “Blinkaphine...” Mrs. Pie lovingly motioned towards the pale-maned filly. As the shivering pony knelt down before her, the mare pulled her in close and rested her forehead against hers. “You used to sing, my precious. Your voice was so beautiful. And I don't care what you or other ponies think, but I can still hear your song.” She opened her eyes mistily and smiled into her daughter's face. “For I see it in your eyes, such golden lyrics, such whimsy and beauty. I prayed to Gultophine for you, Blinkaphine, before you were even born. I asked the Goddess for a gift and you came to me, and I have never... ever stopped being thankful, being happy...”

        The filly whimpered foalishly and clung to her. The smile on her face could cut diamonds.

        Mrs. Pie's face tilted upwards. She gulped hard and braved her way through a sob as a bright, pink shade reflected off her glistening eyes. “Pinkamena Diane Pie... my little spark... my little angel of warmth...”

        “I think I like all of those things!” Pinkie grinned as she squatted down in front of her mother in a fearless serenity.

        Mrs. Pie reached a hoof up and fluffed the earth pony's explosive forest of mane hair. “Before you, I dreamt about more than darkness. I dreamt of color. They were good dreams, happy dreams. But after you came along, I didn't have to dream anymore. For you had brought the color to our lives. Everyday was a dream come true, and I no longer feared the darkness.” Her voice cracked and she shuddered to say, “I want to live that dream again... and I want to live them again with you... with a smile that never ends...”

        Pinkie leaned forward and rubbed her nose whimsically against her mother's before cooing, “You're my smile that never ends, Mommy. I love you more than candy.”

        Mrs. Pie's teeth showed against the tears. “That is a love for all ages. Welcome back, Pinkamena...” She nuzzled the pink filly's neck and murmured past her ears. “Welcome back home.”

        “Back at ya, Mommy...” Pinkie sniffled, but remained ever jubilant as a cheekish grin framed their embrace. “Ya sleepyhead!”

        Mrs. Pie did something infectious, for it spread to Inkessa and Blinkaphine like the cutie pox. She laughed. As the circle of girlish giggles blossomed and faded in the valley of death, the mare turned and looked over her shoulder. Her eyes froze and her mouth fell agape as she met a pair of golden orbs reflecting her.

        Quarrington shuddered. The stallion was still navigating waves of disbelief and oblivion. He stood from her like a moon flung from its orbit.

        The mare murmured. “Where is Quarrington?” The rainbow hues of the misty sunset briefly shimmered, dwindled. “Where is my husband?”

        The Pie family elder gulped. As Harmony and Dawnhoof breathlessly watched on, the stallion marched over to his wife and knelt down in front of her. He removed his broad-rimmed hat with shaky limbs, exposing a splash of pale bangs before the crest of his family's warmth.

        She reached a hoof over and touched his shoulder, as if she was a blind pony looking for a lost scarf. “I wish to see him again... I wish it with every fiber of my being. Where has he gone to?”

        Quarrington stared at her, nervously gripping her hoof. His every joint quivered, reverberating a deep shudder up his spine so that his eyes emptied twin rivers of tears that cascaded down his sandstone face.

        “No.” Mrs. Pie's blue eyes narrowed. “This is not him. This is not my husband.”

        Her hoof found its way up to his moist cheeks. At the merest touch, something inside him broke, and the world witnessed a bizarre phenomenon, for Quarrington was suddenly, blissfully smiling.

        “Yes...” Mrs. Pie squeaked to say, mirroring him. “There he is. There is my beloved.”

        That was it. Quarrington collapsed. He flung himself into her embrace, sharing the warmth with his daughters as he sobbed, squeezing a joyful grin between himself and his wife as his muffled voice implored, “Oh Pearl. Praise Gultophine, you've come back to me.”

        “Shhh...” She kissed the top of his head and nuzzled him in the crook of her neck as she melted in the embrace of her entire family, rocking them all as one. “Praise life first; thank our Holy Sister for what remains.” She shut her eyes. “Oh Quarrington, I've been in the dark for so, so long.”

        “So have I, Pearl,” he wept and clung to her, exhaling long and hard. “S-So have I...”

        “Woohoo!” Pinkie Pie bounced several bright circles around the quartet. “The family's back together again! Yeah! Hug party! Hug party!” She then practically plowed into the four of them. They all shrieked briefly as they nearly collapsed into the ground. In a recoiling fit of tear-stained giggles, they dragged her into the embrace and blanketed the land with their laughter and sobs like so many discarded rocks.

        Harmony took a deep breath. There wasn't a centimeter inside of her that could relate to this moment, no matter how warming. Instead, she looked through them all and saw the refoaling of a lonely soul in the copper skin of an exiled goddess. The giggles of Cheerilee's schoolchildren hovered like angel wings over the bright, glistening bosom of Equestria, and it was this that finally dragged a tear from her eye.

        “Oh blessed daughter of Epona, your glory knows no limit,” Dawnhoof was presently stammering, crossing himself as he struggled to stand upright. The evidently nerve-wracked cleric gulped and glanced aside at the incidental miracle-maker beside him. “Wh-What happens now?”

        “Now?” The last pony sniffled. She smiled. She smiled infinitely. “Now, dear Deacon, we take this baby into town...” She grinned wickedly at him as she patted “Alex” in her hooves. “...And we make some smiles.”

        “Inkie says she'll sneak into town later to lend us a hoof,” Pinkie said as she dragged the hood of her brown cloak over her head. She and Harmony and Dawnhoof were practically galloping townward as night fell and enshrouded them. “She stayed behind with Blinkie for the time-being.”

        “Who can blame her?” Harmony smirked against the wind, balancing the bulky canvas shape of the machine over her flank as Dawnhoof steadied it with telekinetic balance. “I'd have stayed behind too if I didn't think that what we're about to do is a billion times more awesome.” She glanced aside in mid-canter. “What about you, Deacon?”

        “I said that I intend to see this through to the end and I meant it!” he exclaimed breathlessly, not used to this degree of physical exertion. “There are no words to describe what I've just witnessed, not even in the Chronicles. I almost regret that we have to perform this in such a clandestine fashion! Ponies need to see this for themselves.”

        “And they will see it,” Harmony said, staring ahead of her as the first of several dark trenches loomed under the misty starlight. “One way or another, they're going to see the light.” Her smile was as righteous as it was crooked. “You cannot stop progress.”

        “Say, once they see the light, do you think they'll need sunglasses?”

        “Sure, why not, Miss Pie?” Harmony glanced once more at Dawnhoof. “You're being awfully nice for lending us your magic, but once we get into city limits, we'll have to carry this thing the hard way. Your horn will only give us away in the darkness.”

        “I guess some light will have to wait,” he replied with a smirk.

        “See, Har-Har?! A priest can joke! Why can't you?”

        “I'm too excited to laugh right now.”

        “Heeheehee! Sure, I'll buy that! But just this once!”

        “Love it or leave it,” Harmony muttered, but cleared her throat in a serious breath as the rusted sign proclaiming “Gultophine's Refuge” lingered overhead. “Time to get this experiment over with.”

        One of many posters announcing “Gultophine's Harvest” stretched across a dull concrete wall illuminated by torchlight. Along the edge of an empty Town Square, the scavenger from the future stuck her head out of an adjacent alleyway. She glanced both ways, her amber eyes squinting, scanning for signs of movement. Once satisfied by the stillness of the urbanscape, she motioned with her hoof and crept out, carrying the bulk of the machine on her back.

        Pinkie Pie immediately followed, using her neck to balance the rest of the bagged device. She blinked nervously across the cobblestone expanse as her and Harmony's hooftrots echoed eerily beneath them. Dawnhoof trailed not far behind, adjusting his robe as he hopped down a curve and followed the two fillies under a halo of lamplight.

        “Pssst... Why aren't we going down Main Street?”

        “Are you joking, Miss Pie?” Harmony whispered back, but swiftly grunted. “Never mind, don't answer that. Ahem. We can't go anywhere that will draw attention. It's troubling enough that we have to take this route through Town Square to get to Stonehaven.”

        “But if we took Main Street, we'd get there faster!”

        “Miss Pie, if you wanna know a thing or two about stealth, you gotta learn to master persistence.”

        “Ladies...”

        “Don't you mean 'patience?'”

        “Who died and made you Sweetie Belle?”

        “Huh?”

        “Er... by 'Sweetie Belle' I meant a dictionary.”

        “Ladies...”

        “You know Rarity's little sister?” Pinkie Pie blinked.

        “Look, let's just forget I said anything—”

        “All this time, I could have made twice as many marshmallow jokes, and you would have gotten them?!”

        “Snkkt—I read up on Ponyville before I so much as... uhm... dr-dropped in on behalf of the Court of Canterlot! It was only field research, okay?”

        “Nuh uh! I'm not buying that for a bit! That's too far-fetched!”

        “Miss Pie, the day I have to explain a joke to you is the day that the world truly ends.”

        “Ladies, please...”

        “Oooh! You admit that you told a joke then, Har-Har?!”

        “Oh, for the love of oats...”

        “Ladies!” Dawnhoof finally resorted to hissing in their ears. He pointed desperately across the Town Square. “I...” He gulped. “I do believe that we have been spotted.”

        “Huh?” Harmony glanced across the cobblestone expanse. Her amber eyes dilated. “Ohhhhhhhhh Luna poop.”

        “Miss Harmony...!”

        “Hail Gultophine.”

        The three ponies watched nervously as two figures in armor shimmered under the various torches of the urbanscape. It was a pair of militia guards, and they were decidedly marching in the three interlopers' direction.

        “Crud! How could they have seen us across the entire frickin' courtyard?”

        “'How many marshmallows does it take to botch a Sisterhooves Social event?'”

        “Miss Pie, not now!”

        “I think they may have been following us...” Dawnhoof murmured aside to Harmony.

        “Yeah, for how long?”

        “No matter,” the Deacon said. Her cleared his throat and boldly stepped ahead. “Let me take care of this.”

        “You?”

        The robed unicorn briefly smirked over his shoulder. “Why not? You're not the only pony capable of impulsive puzzle-solving.”

        “It depends. You've got a brilliant fix to this problem?”

        “Uhm... Would it work if it's stupid?” the unicorn muttered shyly.

        The last pony blinked. She proudly, proudly smiled. “Of course it should.” She waved a hoof towards him. “Shine on, you crazy dogmatist.”

        Dawnhoof turned and faced ahead as soon as the guards arrived.

        “Halt!”

        “Where are you going with those two?”

        “Never you mind!” Dawnhoof quite explosively boomed in a voice befitting another, far more exalted priest. “I am conducting holy business on behalf of the Church of Gultophine! You humble souls would do well to not interfere on a spiritual matter!” He leaned forward with a sudden glare. “Or shall I spread word of your audaciousness to the ears of Breathstar himself?”

        However campy, it was apparently enough to work. The guard ponies—young souls, both of them—suddenly shook in their armor.

        “Whoah! Yeesh! D-Deacon Dawnhoof...!”

        “We had no idea it was you, g-good sir! It's just that... that...”

        “Just what?” Dawnhoof's brow furrowed. “I haven't got the time to waste being berated by two foals in rattling silverware!”

        “Easy...” Harmony hissed.

        “Heehee... I liked that last one,” Pinkie slipped in. The pegasus merely glared at her.

        The guards further murmured, “Well, it was Bishop Breathstar himself who told us to be on the lookout for two cloaked figures wandering the town. That's all.”

        Dawnhoof blinked. A youthful, wilted voice returned to his throat. “It was?” He briefly trembled. A copper hoof poked him in the robed flank. He coughed, cleared his throat, and stood tall. “Don't pretend to tell me what is or what is not my superior's business,” he once again boomed. “This is all... p-part of the plan, you see! Now go about your patrol and forget whatever it is you saw here! I shall deal with the Grand Bishop on my own!”

        That uttered, the young colt spun away from the two blinking guards, and bumped horn-first into a tall, frowning, white unicorn. “Oh, I'm sure you will, young one.” Breathstar glared down at him.

        “Eeep!” Pinkie Pie shrunk behind Harmony.

        The last pegasus gasped and hobbled left and right, fitfully juggling the entire weight of the bagged machine that was suddenly in her hooves. “Dang it, what the hay?!” She stared in disbelief as no less than two dozen militia ponies filled their end of the Town Square, flanking Breathstar and slowly, threateningly surrounding them.

        “Grand B-Bishop...” Dawnhoof gulped and bowed low. “If you would just let me explain—”

        “Explain what?!” the tall, pale unicorn hissed in a low voice. “That my star apprentice in the Order of Gultophine has become an accomplice to a pagan practice under my very own watch?!” He pointed an angry hoof in the direction of the two cloaked fillies. “I believed it when I heard word that the accursed pegasus and Quarrington's daughter were back to their no-good tricks! But to count you among them as well?! You've broken my heart, Dawnhoof. I shudder to think how hard you almost came close to shattering Dredgemane's...”

        “You heard word from who?!” Harmony spat.

        “Somepony ratted us out?!” Pinkie Pie trembled to exclaim.

        “You are in no position to ask any questions, you venomous delinquents! However, you are in the position to answer for the unrighteous crimes you were about to commit!” Breathstar's nostrils flared as he stepped back in his robes and motioned towards the whole of the militia. “Arrest them! Take them both to the Mayor! This foolishness ends tonight!”

        “Now wait a second! How did—Nnngh!” Harmony shrugged off the first of many sets of hooves to grasp at her. “Who could possibly have told you that the two of us were—?” Three times as many hooves reached for the pegasus. “Get off me!” She effortlessly batted them off with one Entropan forelimb, the other one grasping the machine to herself. “Dang it all, Breathstar! Have you no decency?! Have you a single clue in your head just what amazing things we're about to do for this town?!”

        “As a matter of fact, child, I know exactly what you were about to do,” Breathstar grumbled, and it was accompanied with a grin.

        The last pony's amber eyes caught aflame from that. “Oh, I bet you know... I bet you know all there is to—” A guard suddenly pounced on her and grabbed her aggressively from behind. “Celestia dang it—Buck off!” She was true to her words, and the guard was flung across the courtyard with a surprised shriek. As he landed through a wooden cart, five more guards rushed up and tackled Harmony from behind. She lurched in a gasping jolt from their weight, dropping the canvas bag.

        The machine rattled coldly to the cobblestone. Dozens of sets of hooves danced fitfully all around it. Harmony gasped and sputtered as she tried to find where her miracle-contraption had gone. She watched from a sea of limbs as one armored pony grasped it and ran behind the line of attackers. With a soul-shattering snarl, she flung her copper wings out from beneath her cloak. Four guards flew off of her in a startled cry. Others gasped as she spun with unearthly strength and flung two more so that they pinballed painfully off lampposts. The last pony was ready and willing to tear Dredgemane asunder. She knew it. With each pulse of the arteries in her neck, she felt it. A sick, dimly-lit part of her almost reveled in it.

        Another guard swung at her with a polearm. She effortlessly knocked the weapon aside, reached forward, and clamped the pony's neck with two hooves. “Do you have any idea who you're messing with?!” the scavenger from the future snarled, but that soon ended as she rode down a slope of pained breaths.

        The guard's helmet had fallen off. An alarmingly young colt was sputtering and gasping in her tight gasp. With one blurred blink, he transformed into a bleeding miner lying on a canvas mat, his eyes bloody as he grasped for the last pony and wailed the name of an exiled Life-Bringer.

        Harmony shuddered, the Entropan strength being wrung from her body. These were not trolls. They were not golems. They whimpered and groaned from every numb limb she threw at them. And what was more...

        “Nnngh—Augh! Har-Har! Fly away—Unngh!”

        It was a startling sound that came from Pinkie Pie, for it was the first time the last pony ever recalled the filly's voice registering pain. The time traveler spun around to realize that—during her scuffle—just as many guard ponies, if not more, had tackled the pink filly and were slamming her at an awkward angle to the ground. Not only that, but a very startled and desperate Dawnhoof had plowed his way through the fray to get to her, to help her, and as a reward he too was being wrestled to the street so that his horn scraped violently against the cobblestone under a wincing face—

        “No!” Harmony shouted. “No!” She dropped the gasping guard in her grasp and raised her forelimbs above her head. “Leave them alone! Don't hurt them!” The last pony breathlessly glanced up at Breathstar. Her heart tore from the inside-out as a porcelain grin blossomed across his pale face with each surrendering phrase that limped from her copper lips. “You can take me in... you can take us in! Just—please—leave them be. It's me you want!”

        To her dismay, Breathstar delayed his response, so that several agonized seconds passed that were punctuated with the painful exhales of Pinkie Pie and Deacon Dawnhoof in the vice-grips of the furious militia. Once he had seemingly had his fill, the tall and proud unicorn waved a pale hoof. The guard ponies violently hoisted Harmony's wincing companions up to their hooves.

        “Take Quarrington's daughter—along with Harmony—to the Mayor's office.” Breathstar spun and stared burning daggers through Dawnhoof's forehead. “As for my... former pride and joy, bring him to the cathedral and lock him in the foyer. I'll deal with him personally.”

        “Please, good Bishop!” Dawnhoof stammered as he was hauled off by several armored equines. “H-Have mercy, Bishop! At least let me explain what these two fillies have discovered—Augh!” He cried as he was being shoved hard by a grunting guard.

        In the meantime, Pinkie Pie was being shoved against Harmony. The two were jabbed by polearms and forced to canter briskly towards the north edge of town. They stumbled in a thick sea of rattling, black armor as the torches whizzed by them.

        “Har-Har...” Pinkie Pie navigated a series of fresh bruises to whimper, “You and I both know that you're tough enough to plow through these meanies like Winter Wrap-Up snow! So make with the barreling already!”

        “No!” Harmony hissed back, grumbled, then murmured in a quiet breath between the two, “Miss Pie, I came back to this town to heal it, not to rip it a new quarry-hole.”

        “B-But... But...!”

        “Will you just stick close to me and play it cool?!” Harmony hissed. “I'll... I-I'll think of something! But if I start thrashing about like a madfilly, I could get a lot of ponies hurt! The last thing I want to do is undermine the beauty that I brought to your family tonight!”

        “Har-Har,” Pinkie Pie clung to her as the two stumbled along the forced escort. “Sometimes it takes a little madness to do what's right...”

        “Maybe that will be true for me someday, but that'll be for me to decide.” Harmony hissed as they were shoved along, further and further northward. “The future is nothing but madness, Miss Pie.”

        “Wh-What do you mean by that?”

        “Shh... Just stay calm. Things will work out.” Harmony murmured towards the air as the giant cliff-face bearing Haymane's lofty shack loomed into view, breaking the stars like a black eclipse. “Please, Princess Entropa, make it all work out...”

        As soon as Harmony and her anchor were practically flung into the lantern-lit wooden hovel of the Mayor's building, the last pony knew how hopeless the situation had become. The reception room was filled to the brim with militia ponies. It was as if no single guard was on break that evening. The Dredgemane Trinity was audacious enough to hire the entire company of armored equines to see to the copper pegasus' arrest, as if a virtual army of Diamond Dogs had invaded the trenches of the city.

        No sooner had the two fillies stumbled into the lofty structure, when Pinkie Pie gasped. “Mister Irontail!” She bounced forward. “Oh no! They got you too—?!” A serrated pair of polearms blocked her path to her friend. “Eeep!” She backtrotted tremblingly into Harmony as the last pony looked on.

        The tall blacksmith with a bushy beard stood in a slump, guiltily staring into the wooden floorboards beneath him. Resting on the empty receptionist table to his side were two familiar, rainbow-colored “souvenirs”. One was a scrap of a prismatic cloak, the other was a beautifully crafted dagger.

        “I'm so sorry, Pinkie...” Irontail muttered, it was a wilted breath, unbefitting the muscular stallion. “I'm so sorry, darling...”

        “For what?” Pinkie Pie gulped. “I don't understand, Mister Irontail! What's going on?”

        “He's the one who told them,” Harmony suddenly murmured. Pinkie Pie glanced at her in shock as she unemotionally slurred, “He told them about the two of us, a pair of cloaked fillies on a mission to build something, and here we are.”

        “It was a difficult unveiling at first, mind you,” a deep voice droned. Walking into view from behind Irontail was a dark-brown stallion just as tall and twice as intimidating. With a haughty glare, Overseer Sladeburn regarded the blacksmith like an errant wisp of factory smoke and paced in front of his bearded image. “The soonest a group of my workers saw him showing off those ghastly acquisitions of his, bragging about them like a true traitor to the Dredgemane cause, I knew that I had to intervene. It's enough that the Royal Grand Biv vandalizes and dirties the immaculate architecture of our town, but must he corrupt the heart as well? Harumph... I've witness infernite poisoning many an unfortunate body in my day, but this willful infection is a slap in the face of the legacy of all hard-working ponies who have come and gone before us. Isn't that right, Mister Irontail?”

        Irontail was as tall as Sladeburn, as well-built as Sladeburn, and easily older than Sladeburn. The bearded stallion practically dwarfed the rest of the colts, fillies, and guards in the lantern-lit room, no matter how heavily they were armored. And yet, standing before them all, bathed in so many glaring eye, he quivered like an infant having been slapped on the hoof.

        “Y-Yes, Mister Sladeburn,” the blacksmith joylessly stammered, his head bowed towards the dim floorboards below. “I was wrong... I was wrong all along...”

        Harmony squinted hard, for she suddenly became aware of several deep bruises lining the exposed coat of the tall, muscular equine. Pinkie saw them too, and gasped shrilly while the copper pegasus glared up at Sladeburn. “What have you done to him?”

        “I merely exacted means to uncovering a hidden truth, dear Canterlotlian—or whatever you really are.” Sladeburn gave her a bored glanced as his thundering hooves carried him with icy precision towards her side. “Don't be so shocked. Because of your conspiratorial muddling with the affairs of our precious townsponies, the security of Dredgemane hangs in the balance. The needs of the many outweigh those of the few...” He glanced at Irontail. “Especially if the few is misguided and foolish.” He frowned back at Harmony. “But you couldn't possibly understand that, could you, girl?”

        The last pony sneered. “If that putrid philosophy helps you sleep at night when deep inside you know that you've forced thousands of ponies over the years to dig their way to a violent death, Mister Sladeburn, then I hope you choke on it.”

        “To each their own, little one.” Sladeburn's eyes narrowed. “Or should I presume to ask exactly how it is that you lived through the other day's mine collapse while every single pony hanging behind you and Quarrington's daughter perished?”

        Harmony was ashamed, for she had evidently blanched at that. She briefly and quite nakedly hoped Pinkie Pie hadn't noticed...

        Suddenly, the doors to Haymane's gray-gray office opened. “He's ready to see her.”

        “Very well. Take her in. Put the other one—oh, I dunno—someplace where she won't fill this place with her goddess-forsaken voice.”

        “Who? What? And where?” Harmony snarled as she was being hoisted towards the office... and away from Pinkie. “Wait! Miss Pie—Nnngh! Where are you taking us?”

        Before anypony could bother to answer her, one of the guards sauntered up to Sladeburn. The last pony was breathless to discover a very familiar, very scuffed-up machine balanced across the guard's armored flank. “Sir, I'm very sorry to interrupt, but my captain wants me to ask what is to be done with this... contraption.”

        “Hmmm, yes. I suppose it will need to be further examined before a hearing can be commissioned by the Council.” The Overseer waved a dark brown hoof. “Take that... piece of junk to the militia headquarters, along with that insufferable zebra. We'll let Breathstar deal with them both.”

        “Zebra?!” Pinkie Pie gasped, her eyes twitching. “Oh no! Zecchy! What have you done with Zecchy?!”

        “Nnngh! Elektra alive!—Take her away already!” Sladeburn snarled. “I'm sick and tired of looking at her!”

        “She asked you a friggin' question!” Harmony snarled as she was being dragged with far greater speed towards the mayor's office. “What have you done with Zecora?! She's innocent of all this crap!”

        “Yes, and I'm Princess Celestia's left wing. Cry me a river—She shares the same fate that the Council's bound to give you! Now quiet down before the Mayor or I'll personally come in there and snap your jaw off, you illegitimate, cloud-drip of an accident!”

        Harmony shook with anger—

        “Har-Har!”

        The time traveler looked over. “Miss Pie!” She blanched as the distance between her and her anchor doubled, tripled, quadrupled. “No no no no no no...!”

        “Har-Har! Please!” Pinkie Pie shrieked as her cloaked figure was being hauled off by two guards into a side room and beyond a dark-lit doorframe. “Don't let them do this!” In the meantime, three other armored ponies were carrying the machine out the door into the misty night. “Think about the foals! Think about Zecchy! Think about—!”

        And then everything was silenced beyond the wooden doors slamming Harmony shut inside Haymane's office. A pair of squeaking noises filled the deathly-quiet air. The fuming pegasus very slowly, very reluctantly spun around...

        For a moment there, I thought you had orchestrated this. I thought that your breath was at work, blowing a deep and dark pestilence into the mechanics of that fateful evening. But then I remembered how pathetically harmless and weak you had become in my eyes. I realized that I had a greater ally on my side, a life-long companion that had dwarfed the intimidating eternity you have always used to stalk me. That ally was time, and time is one thing that you've reveled in, but could never quite control, no more than myself.

        I am the avatar of time. I know that now.

        And since time is immutable—as you yourself are immutable—I've come to stand on an even playing field with you, so that everything is a stalemate, and yet everything is calm and placid and serene... as it should be.

It was never a war, it was never a fight, it was just as it always was and just as it always will be. I was elated to have realized it, and I deeply wondered how Spike had discovered it, if it had taken as many dying miners and as many rattling breaths of sick foals as it had for me.

        Perhaps it was this realization that stopped me from doing what was instinctual, from tearing my cloak off and flapping my copper wings with the power of an exiled Goddess. I could very well have become Scootaloo, have unleashed the wrath of the Wasteland on all of those imbeciles, have torn that wooden shack off the northern cliff-face like a wayward tick on a dog's coat.

        But I didn't, for I wasn't Scootaloo, I was Harmony. Time placed me there, and by the grace of Goddess Entropa, I was not about to turn an accursed landscape twice as bloody by waging war, even if I hadn't fired the first shot. I had to be the essence of ponies, where everything else in my existence has made me the end of them. I had to live up to the name that I once chose for my time-traveling self on an apple-tree-dangling whim, but suddenly was waking up to—with each successive trip—like a ram who knew its place amidst the obscurity, like a blemish that understood how to hide in the warm imprint of the past, and yet could stand apart from it.

        I had to live. Maybe... just maybe... somepony, anypony would follow suit in that town, would fall so madly along with me...

        “And so here we are,” Mayor Haymane said, his frail body a lantern-lit stalk against the gray balcony windows that stretched behind him. “We stand upon the eve of Gultophine's Harvest, the holiest of holy times in the year, and yet I deal now with the most dangerous, most infernal, most pathetic threat to this town's peace that has crossed the trenches of Dredgemane in years.”

        Harmony stood still, staring deep into his desk, not saying a thing.

        Haymane's eyes narrowed. With a squeaking sound, he rolled out from around the table. Several guards stood protectively between himself and the time traveler as he came as close as he could afford to and stopped in a lurch. He gazed up at her, his straw-hard mane hair framing his skull like a sickly halo.

        “What am I to do with you, Miss Harmony? I have given you patience. I have given you grace. I have even given you forgiveness in the face of all of your insulting actions by swaying the Council into banishing you instead of doing worse, and yet still you haunt this town, still you disrespect me, still you spit in the face of all Equestrian civility and goodness. Tell me, child, since you value your opinion so much and mine so little. What am I to do with you?”

        Harmony's eyes lowered. She took a deep breath, her limbs flexing gently under the folds of her brown cloak.

        Haymane sighed. He crossed his front hooves and leaned back against the wooden brace of his wheeled tripod. “I know you must think many horrible, negative things of me, Miss Harmony. I don't rightly blame you. In the name of progress, I've chased away all distractions from this town, no matter how colorful. It was never exactly an ecstatic decision of mine, but it was a necessary one. Surely you understand this. I've seen it in your eyes. You do not house the same bright and flippantly hysterical soul that fills the husk of Quarrington's daughter to the brim. There's a part of you that respects structure, that respects order, that sees chaos and all of the multiplicitous elements of the wilderness to be a waste upon the good integrity of ponydom. Child, with your inherent skill, with your remarkable talents, with all of the dazzling displays of ingenuity that I've had several citizens from the street testify of you legitimately employing in the pursuit of the Biv, I know there resides inside you an equine soul that could build us a better future, a proper tomorrow, and a key to infinite progress. So, please, enlighten me. Why do you use all that is within you to undermine the progress of this great and righteous refuge of Gultophine? And if you can’t enlighten me, child, then humor me. I deserve at least that much...”

        Harmony's nostrils flared. Finally, finally she spoke, and when she did it was with a deep-throated murmur. “Humor you? No pony can enjoy laughing when he or she is alone...”

        Haymane merely raised an eyebrow to that.

        Harmony glanced up at him. It was a look of pity. “Progress? Is that all that Dredgemane is supposedly about? Mayor Haymane, there are some days where I'm convinced that I don't have a single funny bone to be found in my body, and even I recognize that to be the biggest of all jokes.”

        “There is nothing that we live for more than progress, child. It's what defined Gultophine, and it's what defines us.”

        “Live? Live?! You just don't get it, do you?! Mayor, sir, real progress requires change. Change can be painful and it can be chaotic, but it heals, Mayor. It heals and it cleanses the blemishes from our lives! Equestrian civilization wouldn't have progressed anywhere if it wasn't for the shifts in our existence—be it painful or blissful—that have separated living, breathing ponies like us from the eternal rocks that blanket this landscape! But have you pursued such change, Mayor? Have you made any progress? No, not even in the slightest. You may think that you have, in honor of your family and of all the brave, diligent ponies of Dredgemane who have died before. But what you've done hasn't blessed their memories, Haymane. All you've accomplished for this city... for these... for these good Equestrians is a eulogy! Let the funeral be over, Haymane. It's time to stop eulogizing and instead start... start... I don't friggin know! Singing!”

        “You're one to speak, child,” Haymane frowned and wheeled back into his desk while folding his front hooves. “For as much as I care, if you've brought a song to the Refuge of Gultophine, it's merely been a funeral dirge. You have done nothing but crush what we have established here! You could have very easily been a shining young beacon, a sign of the times to come. But if this is all you have to answer for yourself, then I weep for our children's future!”

        “Mayor Haymane, I want to do so much for this town, for everypony and... and for everything! I want to do more than give all of this life and beauty one grand, somber eulogy but I can't! It's not something that I can afford to do!” Harmony winced as if she was giving birth, but all that came out of her was a whimper. “But you can! You have it within you to lead this city into great and glorious things! You have it within you to live, Haymane, and to give ponies the grace to live with you, and through you. If I could... If I c-could have what you have at your hooves, I would praise Gultophine every... single... day, instead of... instead of suffocating her! Instead of forsaking this place into becoming a desolate wasteland of broken dreams and disease!” She gulped and murmured while her amber eyes glistened in a sudden, haunting grayness. “Even if it isn't for a very long time, even if life is bitterly short, it is a very, very bright and sweet thing and you need to treasure it instead of smothering it in darkness!” She gulped hard and bled forth, “Because there is so, so much darkness, Haymane, even more than a pony as powerful as you could possibly know! And it will come upon this land like a stormfront and eclipse everything that even a miserable soul like yourself holds dear, and by then it will be too late to find true progress. It will be too late to embrace the warmth that is yours to have!”

        Haymane took a deep breath. “My dear child...” His voice lisped briefly, the tail end of a shattered family, far bloodier than two stubbed limbs. “...It is always, always too late for us. It's been that way since the Sundering of Consus. Everypony, every soul is but an appendix to a Golden First Age that shall never, ever repeat itself. We can only hope to exist for as long as we can, and then... there is nothing.” His lips hardened with the same rigidity as his deep, abysmal eyes while he said, “For we are nothing. Nothing. Every single one of us. If you had been a good pony, if you had respected the laws of this land, maybe you would have been free to experience Gultophine's Harvest tomorrow, and you would have discovered this clarity for yourself.”

        “Clarity...” Harmony let loose like a belch. She smirked bitterly as she said, “Mayor, what is transcendence worth if you don't respect the life that is given you to achieve it with? Even if there's nothing, Mayor, even if Gultophine only cursed us when she gave us animation towards progress, I'd rather be a victim of death than a slave to it. You can have your cursed 'clarity' if it means so much to you. It's a shame that it took bullies like Sladeburn and Breathstar to brainwash you into believing in such a lie, so much so that you think that it was your epiphany and yours alone.”

        “My allies in forging a path towards progress have only steered me the right way.”

        “Then make them let go of the reins for once, Mayor. Think for yourself instead of for them...” Harmony bravely gulped before adding. “And instead of for your family. You'll be surprised how thinking for yourself will make you act for the ponies who matter, the ones who are suffering in this town, the ones who need you the most as we speak, even on the Eve of Gultophine's Harvest.”

        To her mixed surprise, Haymane didn't explode like he had earlier in the Council Chamber. Rather, his face was placid—if not sad—as he calmly replied, “It's a shame that things had to end this way. You could have made a fine addition to this city.”

        Harmony was rather numb to this half-hearted compliment, for she was suddenly glancing at something surging past the balcony windows, something that none of the guards nor the mayor saw, something that unmistakably resembled a flying paper airplane.

        “With all due respect, mayor,” the time traveler murmured as her amber eyes followed the fragile aircraft's arc. “The only addition I could ever possibly make to this city is a cobblestone with my name and death on it.”

        There was a twinge of muttering regret in the mayor's next few words: “After your trial with the council, we will find out if that will be arranged or not.”

        The last pony blinked at that.

        As the paper airplane disappeared, a thunderous crash erupted through the building. The guards spun with their polearms held high. Mayor Haymane craned his neck.

        “What the devil...?!”

        Suddenly, the doors to the office burst open. A breathless militia pony rushed in. “Sorry to interrupt you, mayor! But... B-But we have a problem downtown!”

        Haymane could just as well have been telepathic. “The Royal Grand Biv?!” he stammered.

        The armored pony nodded. “He was just seen at the sight of tomorrow's bonfires, pouring rainbow paint all over the street! Many guards under the command of Breathstar chased him off, but none of us could fly, and he took off onto the rooftops before any of us could—”

        Suddenly, another pony ran into the office. His helmet rattled as he exclaimed, “Mayor Haymane, sir! The Royal Grand Biv was spotted outside of the quarry, having vandalized the north face of the upper foundry—”

        Fatefully, yet again, another pony stumbled in. “Sir! The Royal Grand Biv! We spotted her trying to... desecrate... the post office...” He glanced suddenly at the other two young militia equines next to him. “N-No way! You saw the Biv too?!”

        “He was just by the quarry!”

        “Impossible! Didn't I just say she was spotted at the post office?!”

        “You're both wrong! I was just informing the Mayor that the Royal Grand Biv was being chased at—”

        Suddenly, a splash of wooden splinters fell across the reception room. Everypony spun and gasped as the air danced with a prismatic kaleidoscope. A metallic ring filled the corners of the gray, dusty place, and soon the Royal Grand Biv—in full, rainbow glory—was standing in the middle of a heap of groaning, tossed guards.

        Harmony murmured to herself, her heart beating like an endless string of dynamite sticks against the hollow of her Entropan chest. “Bl-Blinkaphine...?” She stammered atop shivering hooves. “Why... Why are you—?”

        “Y-You!” Haymane growled. Then, with a cowardly sputter, he rolled in reverse until he shivered behind his desk. “Somepony, anypony! Take it out! Protect Dredgemane's leader—”

        “Get him!” One of the many guards charged with a full, swinging polearm.

        The Biv effortlessly knocked the weapon aside with a fan of razor sharp daggers. Another guard came at the masked pony's flank. With more glinting metal, the vandal reduced the militia pony's weapon to a bent stalk. It then mightily bucked a crowd of tackling guards away, whipped out a miniature cannon from beneath its cloak, and fired it down the line of guards rushing towards it. A violent explosion of confetti knocked all of the militia ponies off their hooves, so that Harmony herself twitched before a settling sea of multi-colored streamers just before her limbs.

        “Oh dear Gultophine...” was all Haymane could manage at this point. He gasped with joy, suddenly, for the entire structure shook as a rampaging company of reinforcements stormed up the wooden stairwell outside. Soon, the Biv would be completely and utterly engulfed by guard ponies inside the claustrophobic space of that lofty building.

        The Biv obviously knew it. It flashed ruby goggles towards the mayor's office. In a prismatic blur, the vandal dodged the first of several charging reinforcements and bounced-bounced-bounced straight towards the last pony.

        “No—No, wait!” The time traveler shrieked as she was being shoved violently towards the balcony windows, away from the reception area, away from the room beyond, and away from her anchor. “Blinkie, no! Pinkie is in there—!”

        Her desperate voice was cut short...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...as the air filled thunderously with the noise of shattering glass. The Biv shoved Harmony and itself through the windows, over the wooden edge of the balcony, and out into the cold, misty air of Dredgemane. The trenches of the city loomed below, and the two equine figures plummeted mercilessly towards the murderous, granite stretch of it.

        Harmony could no longer register her own screams. The faces of many awestruck, peering guards drifted far away, high against the cliff-face disappearing swiftly above her. She expected to see green flames at any second, to land in a helpless and frazzled heap before the scaled haunches of a tall purple dragon. Instead, she saw a bright puff of steam.

        The Royal Grand Biv had fired a multi-colored grappling hook. With insane luck, the projectile of the device embedded itself against the wall of rock surging alongside them. Like a mad pendulum, the Royal Grand Biv flung the two of them several blurring meters over the Grave of Consus, aiming them towards the brown shell of an antique carriage below, and a wooden-hatched sunroof that yawned open just in time...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...for the two of them to drop through and land inside the vehicle with a harmless thump.

        “Ooof!” Harmony bounced against a cushion of velvet seats. “Holy... Holy... Holy...” She messily brushed her amber-streaked mane with a shaking hoof. “What gives?! Why am I here?! Why haven't I lost cohesion—?!”

        “Cohesion? What are you going on about, Sugah?”

        The time traveler gasped again, for she and the Biv were not the only figures inside the stagecoach, and yet they were... in that Harmony glanced to her left and saw another Biv, and that Biv was saucily leaning one hoof to its hip while flicking the other against a lever that snapped the sunroof shut above their heads. With a jasmine-scented breath, the figure unmasked the ruby-goggled cowl. and smirked towards the frazzled pony.

        “Don't pegasi your age know the proper way to thank a lady?”

        “P-Pepper?!” Harmony dryly gulped. “Pepper Plots?! How in Celestia's name—”

        “—did I land in this fabulous attire? Oh please, copper-queenie, admit it. It makes my stage outfits look like rags.” The scarlet-haired mare winked a painted eyelid over the last pony's shoulder. “Besides, I know a good fad that's worth joining when I see it.”

        Harmony spun about... and saw a third Royal Grand Biv. This sight lasted for the space of five breathless seconds, until she too unmasked and blushed shyly under a pair of violet eyes.

        This time, Harmony glared. “Inkessa...?”

        “Is it really so surprising?”

        “What? That I haven't punched you in the face two seconds ago?”

        “Hmm-hmm-hmm...” Pinkie's older sister chuckled. “Haven't you punched us all enough this past week?”

        “Ermmm...”

        Inkessa smiled bashfully. “Not that we weren't equipped to handle it, of course, but still... uhhh... The j-joke's on you?”

        Harmony fumbled for words. “But... But... H-How...?”

        “Hold that thought.” Inkessa stood up, swiveled around, and slid open a small wooden window towards the front of the carriage. Outside, a dull-gray earth pony stood in an unassuming dress, rigged to the reins of the vehicle. “Pssst! Blinkaphine! You hear all that ruckus? The guards will be filling these streets any second! Let's get back to the hideout, P.D.Q!”

        A pair of golden eyes glanced her way as the disguised pony outside nodded, bore a nervous smile, and broke into a trot. The image of her disappeared as Inkessa swung the wooden slot shut, and soon the carriage rocked and heaved as it was pulled slowly and quietly through the streets of Dredgemane, camouflaged against the usual bric-a-brac of the night.

        “All... th-three of you...?” Harmony blinked. “This whole time, you three have been the Biv?”

        “Yeah, yeah...” Inkessa slumped back down in the seat to the right of the pegasus. “I know: it's hardly an original concept.” She smiled dryly. “But, hey, what can you expect? Chalk it all up to our all-inspiring architect and her secret love for pulp fiction novels.”

        “All... inspiring... architect?”

        As soon as these words dripped from Harmony's lips, a paper airplane landed in her grasp. She glanced down at it, then stretched it out in her hooves. She realized—upon the first ever close examination—that the seemingly weightless sheet of paper had an indescribable number of written notes, warnings, and instructions splashed all across it in desperate pen strokes. As the carriage rattled and rocked, a pile of white objects caught Harmony's peripheral. She glanced over to see a veritable mountain of paper airplanes, and all of them identically baring a barrage of written words in code.

        Icily, a vicious sneer burned across the pony's copper features, but it all too instinctually morphed into a smile just as soon as it began. “Oh, you've gotta be friggin' kidding me...” She stared directly forward.

        Across from her, the Royal Grand Biv who had shoved the last pony off the Mayor's balcony removed her goggles and cowl. A bright mane of fluffy pink hair lit up the carriage as Pinkie Pie rolled her blue eyes and happily spat, “Pffft! Flippin' duh!”

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Twenty-Three – Apinkalypse Now

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        The morning sunrise was a lifeless gray sliver as it fell through a tiny slit of a window and swam over Deacon Dawnhoof's bowed head. The young cleric sat on a stool behind a brown table in the middle of a barren chamber built into the bricklaid foundation of the cathedral. A lone candle dwindled in front of him, revealing a tiny cot in the corner of the room with a single, brown sheet. The bed was untouched, for the Deacon hadn't slept a wink since he had been locked up inside that place several hours ago.

        He took a deep breath, his horn hanging beneath the ceiling in a contemplative slump. As soon as a noise brushed against the entrance to the room, the young unicorn's chestnut eyes fluttered open. He gazed over as a bright beam of light briefly crossed him and then extinguished itself. With a series of loud hoofsteps, a tall white figure shuffled up to a stop and sat across from him.

        Bishop Breathstar's frown was a blunt, sterile thing. The aged stallion adjusted his robes and exhaled a lifeless sigh as he bore his gaze through Dawnhoof's numb figure. “I lent my ear to sinners and wretches from here to Stalliongrad. I have witnessed cowardly stallions sobbing along the warfronts of the Zebraharan Conflict. I have even heard murderers of ponydom confessing their traitorous allegiance to goblin and ogre sects.” His pale nostrils flared. “I have never been so ashamed of an Equestrian soul as I am of you right now.”

        Dawnhoof merely shuddered. His gaze fell to the candle in the middle of the table, growing dimmer and dimmer like his countenance.

        Breathstar slurred on, “When I found you, dear child, and when I gathered you into my flock, you were a confused and distraught waif of a pony, clinging to your hollow dreams of fortune and prosperity in the impoverished countryside bordering Whinniepeg. You were so talented, and yet so destitute. You were creative, and yet so creedless. Your mind was clear, and yet your heart was clouded. You desired all of the trivial and superficial things of this world, and you had your own egotistical self positioned in the middle of all of those sad, pathetic dreams. Tell me, child, who was it who freed you from the bondage of your festering trivialities and set you upon the path towards glory in Gultophine's Spirit?”

        Dawnhoof gnawed on his lower lip. His eyes were absorbed in the candlelight.

        Breathstar's eyes flared. “Who was it?!”

        The candle's flame danced from the loud clap of the Grand Bishop's lungs. Dawnhoof's shoulders shuddered. He swallowed and bled forth, “You, good Bishop. It was... y-you who set me on this path...”

        “You had been given a second chance at finding clarity and self-worth in this world. Your life—a short and infinitesimal thing in the legacy of Epona's creation—was finally allowed to blossom and grow. And in retribution, you ally yourself with those who would deface the Refuge of Consus' most faithful Daughter? As thanks for all that has been bestowed upon you, your recourse is to insult the church, insult Dredgemane, and insult me?” Breathstar's brow furrowed as he hissed forth, “The history of Equestria is full of tragedy and bitter betrayal, from the Rise of Discord to the Birth of Nightmare Moon. At least when Luna turned against all that she had promised to protect, it was under the influence of a malevolent spirit that consumed her. But you, child? You do not have a spirit of evil to blame. It pains me to realize that you have committed these sins out of your own choosing. Either you are willfully trying to undermine the power of the Church of Gultophine here, or you have been consumed by a great and blinding madness. Tell me, child, which is it? How must I chronicle the fall of my once-great and ever loyal pupil?”

        Dawnhoof took a deep breath. He tilted his horned head up and bravely uttered, “Good Bishop, we are both clear in our understanding of my inequities. I am more than adequately versed in the clerical tenants, as well as the consequences for breaking them. I know perfectly well the years of trials and penitent rituals ahead of me. I also realize that any chance I have to become a Grand Bishop has been dashed to oblivion by my actions and my actions alone. All of this is a reality that I stand upon the horizon of humbly and faithfully embracing, and I deeply respect your need to reinforce me for the challenges I've yet to face. However, even you must know, Grand Bishop, that to remind me of all of these things is an utter redundancy, unless of course you are here for a completely different reason than to admonish this humble unicorn for his countless sins.”

        Breathstar didn't respond. He dammed a furious breath behind a solid, burning frown.

        Dawnhoof blinked brightly. “Miss Harmony...” He raised an eyebrow. “She has evaded the militia's grasp, hasn't she?” His chestnut eyes turned darker in the dim candlelight of the cold cathedral chamber. “That mysterious, witty, resourceful pegasus has slipped away from Dredgemane's grasp with the same embarrassing ease and finesse that the Royal Grand Biv had so often escaped hers. Finally, after so many hours of silence and apathy, you have taken it upon yourself to come here and visit me... and it isn't on account of appealing to my spirit, is it, Grand Bishop? Miss Harmony is gone, and you want my help... you need my help.” He gulped and his eyes fell nervously from the elder as he added, “As you have always needed it...”

        The older pony's horn glistened sharply in the candle-light as he leaned forward with a growl. “She is an enemy of Haymane, an enemy of Dredgemane, and an enemy to the Spirit of Gultophine... to progress!”

        “Good Bishop, she may be unorthodox and even a heathen...” Dawnhoof's teeth showed as he spoke louder. “But I would be shaming the Spirit of Gultophine if I blinded myself to the blessings she is attempting to bestow upon the lives of those ponies who dwell within our town! Even the Chronicles state, 'Do not judge that which blooms life by how it sows, but by how selflessly it does so.'”

        “Do not twist the words of the Chronicles in my presence, you heretical traitor!” Breathstar's hoof slammed onto the table as he stood up straight, casting a menacing shadow over the young unicorn. “Do you think that I am an imbecile?! I am here to get the truth, you insipid child! You are fully aware of what the machine was that the pegasus menace built, and surely you were told what Harmony and her conspirators were going to do with it! Now, that cretin from Canterlot has sided with the Royal Grand Biv, and if we do not act quickly, she and her infernal ally will sabotage Dredgemane upon the holiest of holy days, Gultophine's Harvest! Would you like to see that, child?! Would you like to see all that is good and righteous in this City of Progress collapse like a house of cards, all because you were too arrogant and naïve to have clung to your true calling when this dastardly pegasus flippantly distracted you into a brand new world of perdition?! Well, is that what you would like to see?!”

        “Gr-Grand, Bishop, I-I...”

        “Answer me!”

        Dawnhoof stared up at him, his chestnut eyes wide and his mouth quivering. He dryly gulped and finally replied, “I... I would like to see the rainbow, Bishop...”

        Breathstar's pale eyebrow raised.

        The young unicorn spoke in rising volume, “I would like to see the moon, and smile, knowing that it is there for a glorious purpose, as each and every one of us is here for a glorious purpose, all courtesy of Goddess Gultophine's grace and blessing in the face of so much darkness and oblivion. I want to embrace the Spirit of our Alicorn Sister for the joy she has given us, when so much of this universe seeks to snuff out all warmth and love. Miss Harmony may never make a good addition to the order, but I am convinced that she is the best addition to ponydom that I've witnessed in years, for she exalts the preservation and praise of life above all else. Do you not think that such is the essence of what makes us good prophets in the path that Gultophine has flown before us, Grand Bishop? Don't you think that we, like her, should be trying to spread joy as much as we wish to spread structure?”

        The elder unicorn exhaled hard, his eyes squinting. “I think, child, that we should have removed more than just your cutie mark when you joined the order.” With a shuffle of hooves, he icily marched back towards the door to the barren chamber. “Until you are willing to help track down Dredgemane's enemies, until you tell us what you know about the pegasus' plans, until you renounce your paltry admiration of such a sociopathic sinner, you will stay in this room. You will stay here and fester in your own iniquity until the day you die, for all that I am concerned.” He proceeded to exit.

        “Grand Bishop...?”

        Breathstar sighed halfway through opening the door. He stared back with a cold, apathetic glance. “What, child?”

        Dawnhoof said, “A pony has to be alive to die.”

        The elder said nothing to that. With a furious sigh, he exited the chamber and slammed the wooden door shut behind him. The candlelight danced and flickered, but somehow remained lit. The young cleric absorbed himself in it once more, staring deeply and sitting still as a statue. It was as if he was incubating a deep and lonely warmth in the core of his heart.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        In the main hall of the Cathedral, an angry Breathstar trotted furiously down the many rows of pews. His robe billowed like a vengeful phantom's ectoplasm as he burned a path towards the church doors and the many aimless militia ponies waiting for him outside—

        “Counselor...?”

        Breathstar froze in his trot. Curiously, he spun around to see a lone, emaciated figure sitting at the altar, his hooves propped up on a wooden platform as he gazed up at the tall, colorless image of the Giver of Life in the stained glass windows beyond the pulpit.

        Stifling an exhausted sigh, Breathstar sauntered slowly over towards the lone equine figure. He cleared his throat and put on brave airs. “I apologize for my absence, Mayor. I assure you, I am committed to my duties at hoof. You can fully rely on this city's spiritual leader in our time of great need.”

        “Of that, I have no doubt,” Haymane murmured. His blonde visage was clouded by the gray haze of morning light being refracted through the lifeless glass panes above him. “I imagine that today's itinerary shall proceed without any interruption?”

        “You have my promise.” Breathstar suddenly smirked. He adjusted his robe and stood tall and proud. “I take yours and the Council's faith in me very seriously. With the authority granted me over the militia, I shall have the Biv and that contemptuous pegasus found in no time—!”

        “That is not the itinerary of which I speak, Counselor,” Haymane slurred. “Gultophine's Harvest. I wish to see that Gultophine's Harvest is not hindered in any way.”

        Breathstar blinked. “Oh. Oh y-yes, but of course, Mayor. Ahem.” He shuffled about and stared down at the leader of Dredgemane, resting a hoof on the small stallion's shoulder. “Today is the holiest of holy occasions in which we exorcise ourselves of the foolish trivialities of this world that we naturally let distract us. I assure you, once the Sun has set upon the Grave of Consus, each and every one of your citizens shall remember what it means to be faithful, and all that they will hold dear is the same glory that you and I believe in so much. Dredgemane will once more be set on the straight and narrow path towards progress.”

        “Such a blessed path...” Haymane murmured, his eyes falling one glass panel at a time to settle down upon the pulpit stretching above his lame figure like a wooden monolith. “I have walked it for as long as I can remember. It started nearly forty summers ago, when I was a young colt, hardly older than your gifted yet morally-vexed Dawnhoof.”

        “Yes, and about him, mayor, I'll make sure that he is properly disciplined—”

        Haymane spoke on, undaunted, “I remember this cathedral years before you rose to the top of the order, good Bishop. I remember when the image of Gultophine before us was full of color—of every shade of the rainbow. I remember when I was a young colt and I was attending Summons. It was not the practice of reverence, but instead something of habit. I was there simply because my family was there. All the while the sermon transpired, the bright and shiny window panes stole my attention. They excited me, and yet they blinded me. I spent hours staring at the many different shades when I should have been listening to the words of the Bishop at the time, when I should have been honoring Gultophine's Spirit and not her physicality. And then I grew up, and I had a family, and when they were taken from me so violently, I sobbed in anguish. I cried for Gultophine's grace and I begged for Her clarity, only to realize I was lost to her, for I had never paid attention to her glory before. I had never... truly honored her.”

        “I know, Mayor,” Breathstar gently said. “I was there. I heard your words. Your life needed direction, and I was happy to have born witness to your faithful path towards conviction and progress...”

        “Conviction and progress...” Haymane murmured. He swallowed dryly. “Good Bishop, I... I have endured enough for progress, have I not? I have... suffered. I have changed. I have... have...”

        “Mayor...?” Breathstar raised an eyebrow.

        The aged stallion sighed, the shadows to his cheekbones showing as he gazed up at the tall, colorless panels of glass once more. “Do you remember the first Gultophine's Harvest that I governed in Dredgemane? My first act was to have the colors removed from this window. I wanted to clear the House of Summons from the same distractions that used to vex me. Then, that very summer, we had the collapse in the upper chambers of the quarry. Sladeburn lost nearly three hundred ponies. I almost thought we had shamed Gultophine's Spirit somehow. Still, the next Harvest, I stripped the color from the statue in Town Square. Sure enough, there were no casualties that year. But then three winters later, there was the outbreak of Immolatia that took so many families. I gave up my house on the farm and moved to the office along the north cliff, so that I could focus more on guiding Dredgemane along the path that Gultophine would have for it...”

        “It was never written in the Chronicles, Mayor, that the Alicorn's path is an easy one.”

        “Don't I know it...” Haymane's nostrils flared slowly, bitterly. “Now, after so many decades and so many of Gultophine's blessings, I am approaching the end of my years, and I know that Her grace will eventually subside, and it will be my time to join Her in the star-strung wake of Epona's Exodus. I want to be as faithful as ever, good Bishop, but here we are on the crest of Gultophine's Harvest, when the bonfires burn bright like Her wings once did when She chased the blight out of the Grave of Consus. And I...” His exhalation was a painful thing. “...I have run out of things that are precious to me.” He swallowed. “I have run out of colors to burn.”

        “You have Dredgemane, Haymane.” Breathstar leaned in and spoke earnestly. “This City we've maintained is a glorious, precious thing. We should be proud for what we've done for the Refuge of Gultophine.”

        “That's just it, Counselor. I love this city more than I love my own life.” Haymane swallowed hard and finally looked up at the unicorn. “Must I burn it too?”

        “Alright! Listen up, you rosy-nosed keg-guzzlers!” one of many guards shouted before the swinging doors to the Dredgemane saloon as they beheld a foggy crowd of inebriated ponies. The gray haze of morning light framed their armored figures as they stood in an intimidating line with their helmets and polearms. “On behalf of Bishop Breathstar and the authority invested in him by both Mayor Haymane and the Dredgemane Council, this establishment must close its doors as scheduled! Those of you with families, return home as swiftly as your hooves can carry you! As for the rest of you, be mindful of where you lie in the street, for this is the day of Gultophine's Harvest and if we have to throw you in jail for upsetting the bonfires, we will!”

        A throng of grumbling, slurring voices returned with sullied enthusiasm.

        “Nnngh...”

        “Tell Breathstar to take a flying buck...”

        “Bonfires? I've got a freakin' furnace in my belly...”

        “I'll go home as soon as the saloon stops spinning...”

        The first of the many guards clapped the edge of his polearm loudly against the tile floor. “This isn't a joke, you vagabonds! You can continue your miserable reverie tomorrow morning. This is the most important Day of Reverence in the Refuge of Gultophine! The rest of Dredgemane is paying respects; the least you can do is be honorable for one measly day in your lives! Be thankful that Haymane hasn't sent us to throw you out of the trenches of this city permanently. Now out with you! All of you!”

        There were more grumbling voices, but in a haggard march, the many dizzy patrons of the place eventually complied. Ponies dragged their unconscious companions up from the floor and swaggered in pairs out the swinging doors of the establishment. Several depressed souls shuffled at a slower pace, their cloudy eyes watching with disinterest as the tile was replaced with granite and their heartless hooves took them to far-away crevices in the sunken grave of a town.

        As the saloon slowly emptied, the guards stood aside, watching and minding every equine soul shuffling past them. The young militia ponies muttered to one another:

        “So, this is it, then? The Harvest hasn't been called off?”

        “Pfft! Of course it hasn't been called off! Gultophine forbid if it ever would! Even last year when Luna had returned from the moon, Haymane had things continue as planned.”

        “I just figured that... well... y'know...”

        “What?”

        “I mean, the Biv is crazier than ever this year, and on top of him we've got the pegasus to track down now.”

        “Yeah. What a shame. You know, I was enjoying working for Miss Harmony the last few days. We may have had our flanks handed to us by the Biv, but we got so incredibly close to catching him... closer than ever. Seriously, that was the most excitement I had all year!”

        “Heh... Careful what you say. We may be in the militia, but we've still gotta bring something to burn at the bonfires.”

        “Yeah, just how do you burn your memories of working for a pegasus?”

        “Besides, she's done enough to burn all that away herself.”

        “Yeah—What's up with that? One moment she was working for Canterlot to help Haymane, and then she's trying to sneak some weapon into town?! I don't get it...”

        “It wasn't a weapon.”

        “I heard it was!”

        “No—It was some sort of machine. I saw it with my own eyes.”

        “Yeah? What did it look like?”

        “Well... Uhm... I don't know...”

        “Hah! I knew you were full of it.”

        “I did too see it! It's just... It was hard to describe.”

        “Are you talking about the machine that the pegasus was caught with? I saw it too.”

        “Oh?”

        “Yeah?”

        “It looked like a big black vacuum cleaner with a glass jar full of magic fire and also some sparkling ball of energy stuck inside the metal part of it.”

        “Pffft... Now I know you're just fooling with us.”

        “Honest! That's what it looked like! The thing's the most amazing piece of engineering I've ever seen, even if I can't understand it. I swear, the only reason Sladeburn had it confiscated is to study it for himself... heh...”

        “Dream on. The Council needs that thing as evidence.”

        “So where is it, then?”

        “Where's what?”

        “The machine, you moron.”

        “I said I was there, didn't I? Sladeburn had one of the guards take it to Militia Headquarters.”

        “He did? I was just there to check on the zebra witch doctor—How come I didn't see it?”

        “It's in the far side of the basement hold, though I don't know how long they're going to keep it there. If you ask me, it's a good thing that Sladeburn caught wind of what was going on. Who knows just what that machine could have done to the innocent citizens of this town?”

        “Yeah, pretty freaking scary. And to think that Harmony had a thing to do with it.”

        “I can't imagine what she was planning to do. Was she going to zap ponies to death or something?”

        “Does it matter? Look—I know that a lot of crap has gone down lately, but we gotta do our part, especially today of all days. Gultophine's Harvest is underway, and we can't let things get screwed up again, especially by the Biv.”

        “Right.”

        “Yeah, gotcha.”

        “Hey, maybe when all is said and done, they'll let us burn the machine in the bonfire. That's a distraction I'm a lot happier to get rid of than my subscription to Wonderbolts Yearly.”

        “Hahahaha....”

        “Heheheh... ohhhh... Elektra alive, this is going to be a long day.”

        “Yeah, I know. Frickin' pegasus, I swear...”

        As the guards continued murmuring, the saloon emptied completely. The lights were snuffed out inside the alcohol-stained place. One particular figure in a black jacket lingered at the swinging doors. He paused and glanced over his orange shoulder. A pair of blue eyes narrowed on the young, armored equines. A flaring of his nostrils, and he swung his shattered horn back into the gray haze of the morning before trotting out into the trenches. His hoofsteps...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...were dull thuds amidst the muffled thunder of so many retreating ponies above the hollow cellar of the saloon. Against a giant wooden barrel inside the lantern-lit basement, a copper pegasus leaned. The last pony pulled the hood to her cloak down, sighed, and gestured with waving hooves.

        “Okay...” Harmony swallowed dryly and bathed the dusty contours of the place with her amber orbs as she thought aloud before four clandestine souls. “I can buy the fact that each and every one of you were the Royal Grand Biv at separate times. I can buy the fact that you all worked in tandem behind my back to pretend that you were really just one masked pony. I can even buy the fact that you all have an insanely complex arsenal of weaponized party-favors at your disposal.” She gulped again, leaned her head forward, and glared. “But what in the ever-holy sack of Alicorn crap possessed you to think that keeping this secret from me during my entire visit here would somehow serve some magnificent purpose? Could one of you ponies at least explain that to me?”

        “Heeheehee! Oh Har-Har...” Pinkie Pie unraveled her rainbow cloak and aired it out across the lengths of the room while Inkessa, Blinkaphine, and Pepper Plots opened a large wooden trunk on the far end of the room, accessing a veritable armory of Biv tools and toys. “No wonder you have such a hard time getting a joke! You have to have it explained to you!”

        “See this face?” Harmony pointed towards a deadpan brow over a deadpan pair of eyes above a deadpan mouth. “This is what 'unamused' looks like.”

        “It's rather simple, really,” Inkessa murmured as she fished through the wooden trunk and dredged forth replacement parts to her battle-torn suit. “I described my sister as an architect, did I not? She's taught us that a practical joke only works when somepony least expects it.”

        “So, is that it, then?” Harmony briefly frowned, folding her forelimbs. “This has all been one vicious prank on yours truly?”

        “Oh darling, don't be so full of your sassy self,” Pepper Plots said with a wink as she paused to lean a hoof against her hip and smirked the pegasus' way. “We never meant to say that you were the brunt of the joke. Consider this whole thing like a comedy routine on stage, and you were an important participant in it.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?” She stared in an air of obliviousness.

        “See! Even now, you're such a natural, Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie giggled. “Here, I'll show you!” That uttered, she dropped what she was doing, grabbed a canvas bag, and cartwheeled over to the time traveler's side. She grinned wide with bright blue eyes blinking. “'Knock Knock!'”

        Harmony sighed. “Nnng... 'Who's there?'”

        “'Ain't you glad!'”

        “'Ain't you glad who?'”

        “'Ain't you glad he's toothless?!'” That delivered, she flung the canvas bag open and a bright green comet soared out and clamped its drooling jaws over Harmony's snout. A bored pegasus stared point-blank into a tiny green alligator dangling from her face like an emerald elephant's trunk. She pivoted her neck towards the other ponies across the cellar. Gummy's green body fluttered like a funeral veil.

        Inkessa giggled. Pepper Plots cackled. Blinkaphine managed a soft, gray smirk.

        “Hrmmmph...” Harmony muttered into the wet maw of the wall-eyed baby alligator. “I don't get it.”

        “Of course you don't!” Pinkie grinned and yanked her pet off Harmony's soiled face with a wet pop. “You're the queen of straight faces! You're the blank canvas upon which a great and hilarious joke is painted to make so many ponies smile! Before you came to town, Har-Har, the Royal Grand Biv was merely a curiosity! But now, thanks to you, she's a household name that can make so many Dredgemaners giggle and grin when before they could only sigh and cry! You're the biggest crack-up to ever do stand-up in the Grave of Consus and you didn't have to tell a single joke! Heeheehee! Isn't it just hilarious?!”

        “I... guess...?” Harmony rubbed a hoof over the back of her neck and winced towards the corner of her room. “Still, the timing is all... all...”

        “Hmmm? So what if I'm visiting the best family a filly could ever have?!” Pinkie bounced over to her sisters and interrupted their rummaging to nuzzle each in the cheek. “Heeeee—And so what if the most important ritual to Haymane and his bosom bullies is happening today?!” She gave Pepper Plots a high-hoof, placed Gummy down onto a wooden crate, and leaned against one of the cellar's support beams while winking Harmony's way. “So what if the mine is collapsing, children are dying, and the whole world is turning over in the grave? Can you think of a time in life when ponies needed to smile any more?”

        “This... this was all some elaborate plan?” Harmony gulped and glanced across the many ponies' faces. “You invented the Biv to create an atmosphere of chaos... just to somehow bring light to this sunken city?”

        Inkessa smiled and absorbed Harmony's view as she shuffled up and said, “Long ago, Harmony, my sister saw something that nopony else in her family did. It brought joy to our household, a joy that mother and father have just now reawakened to, thanks to you.” She took a shuddering breath, but smiled all the warmer as she continued, “For the better part of a year, our young lives were electrified. When Clyde came and died, it threatened to destroy everything that was warm about our existence. Father was already consumed by the sorrow and pain that fell upon us. But Pinkamena wouldn't let the light of the many colors that enthused us just die out, and neither would Blinkaphine and I. So, after her first fateful trip to Ponyville, she came back with a bagful of party favors. One night, when all of Dredgemane was asleep, we went out into the streets past curfew and vandalized parts of Town Square. We didn't spray-paint or illustrate any obscenities, mind you. We just felt like adding some color to this place. The next morning, Dredgemane was the same, only—for the first time in years—the ponies of this town had something to talk about, something to be excited about. It seemed so right at the time, that the three of us, sisters united in a secret spirit of joy and whimsy, committed ourselves to spreading the colors as best as we could, filling the streets of this town with every hue of the same rainbow phenomenon that Pinkie and Pinkie alone saw one bitter, cold night.”

        “One day, these gorgeous little rapscallions nearly got caught.” Pepper Plots hopped in with a devilish smirk. “On the run from the Dredgemane militia, they snuck into the saloon. I felt so bad for the little shivering darlings that I took it upon myself to lie to the guards and send them along their way. But there was a catch.” She smirked and waggled her painted eyelids. “I wanted in. They had a noble cause, but it needed more flair. It needed an identity to shake loose the suspicion of Haymane's followers, and I was just the pony who knew how to put a theatrical spin on things. So, together, we worked on something that was bigger than just a habitual practical joke. We made something that was daring, something that was cunning, something that was worth royal and grand attention the likes of which not even Canterlot could bestow!”

        “And so the Biv was born!” Pinkie Pie waved her hooves high with a beaming, proud grin. “Pepper Plots, like a good doctor, did the delivery! With the combined earnings of her work here, Inkessa's nurse position at Stonehaven, and whatever I scrounge up at Sugarcube Corner, we've kept the legend alive!”

        “But... But...” Harmony squinted over towards the trunk full of colorful nick-nacks. “Don't tell me you built all of that stuff by hoof, Miss Pie. You may be a good engineer of comedy, but it takes a real-life engineer to know that you haven't gotten the resources...”

        “Hmmm...” Pinkie Pie sing-songed and stared innocently towards the far reaches of the ceiling. “You ever been to Bon Bon's novelty shop in Ponyville?”

        The time traveler squinted her amber eyes. “I've... heard of it, yeah...”

        “Everypony thinks that the place stays open only because of the earnings they get every annual Nightmare Night.” She stuck her tongue out playfully and giggled. “They couldn't be more wrong.”

        “Since when did Bon Bon's shop sell multicolored daggers or goggles or... or...” Harmony stopped in mid-speech. She squinted at the fabric in the hooves of her anchor's accomplices. A deep breath furrowed out through her nostrils as she envisioned a wooden box full of arcanium weave lying in the shadows of an invisible stone hut. “Ramcraft...”

        “It's amazing, isn't it? Just a little bit of taffy goes a long way!” Pinkie Pie twirled over and grabbed a broad sheet of rainbow-colored cloak. “Boy, if I wasn't wearing this the first few nights I donned the Biv's cowl, I would have busted more than a gut after running from the angry guards!”

        “You're lucky is what you are,” Harmony said. “If Sladeburn got the bright idea to equip Breathstar's guards with that stuff, your whole charade would come crashing down in a burning heap.”

        “Well, it's a good thing Sulkburn and Company don't talk to the rams!” Pinkie Pie made a face. “Or eat taffy! Cuz this stuff is crazy cool! Here, I'll demonstrate!” She flung the arcanium weave over Gummy like a rainbow blanket, grabbed a wooden chair in two hooves, and mercilessly pummeled the alligator-shaped lump beneath it. “Die, die, you evil duckling-muncher! Raaugh!” She dropped the chair down and whisked the blanket up to show a blinking, unphased reptile. “Taa-daaa! See? No bruises!” The green alligator emitted a deep hiss and playfully bit its way up the length of the earth pony's body until it clung loosely to her mane hair. “Heeheee! He likes it when I give him a pile driver through the stuff!”

        “Uhh... Yeah, sure.” Harmony gulped. “I guess that explains how you were all safe when I let loose on you.” She stared briefly at Blinkaphine and reveled in a breath of guilt being expelled through her nostrils. “But... Uhm...” She winced. “You didn't really hold back when fighting me, did you?”

        “N-No. We didn't,” Inkessa blushed deeply, shifting nervously where she stood. “At first, I was against the idea of fighting you full-force. But Pinkamena had convinced Blinkaphine, Pepper, and myself that it would be okay. Besides, it wouldn't sell if the Royal Grand Biv didn't give you all she had.”

        “According to P.D.P., you're made of some strong stuff!” Pepper Plots smirked.

        “Yeah... er... well...” Harmony shrugged.

        “Oh, don't be so modest, Har-Har!” Pinkie set Gummy down and smiled at the other ponies. “I told you girls before this all started how tough she was, and was I wrong?! Huh? Ever since the day I kind of sort of fell a tree through her at Sugarcube Corner, I knew that she was more than meets the eye! Here, watch!” Pinkie Pie grabbed the chair again.

        “Okay, Miss Pie, you made your point—”

        “Have a seat!” Pinkie charged with the wooden furniture in full swing.

        “You made your point—!” Harmony's words were punctuated with a crash of splinters across her skull. As expected, she didn't budge a single centimeter. She sighed as several chips of wood cascaded down her cloaked figure. A bitter smirk washed over her otherwise straight face. “There. Are we done?”

        “Okie dokie lokie!” Pinkie Pie dusted her hooves off and stood with a proud grin. “Enough chairs have been sacrificed for the good of heroic ponies everywhere.” She glanced over her shoulder at the others. “That's how Mick Foaly won his first belt, y'know.”

        “Well, it sounds like you girls have had quite the legacy,” Harmony spoke as she began pacing slowly across the dimly-lit cellar. “For what it's worth, I'm sorry for coming to town and screwing it up.”

        “Did you not pay attention, Sugah?” Pepper Plots stifled a chuckle. “We said that your battling the Biv has been a spectacular benefit to our charade.”

        “Though, on behalf of Pinkamena, Blinkaphine, and myself, I apologize for the wall of deceit,” Inkessa said in a guilty murmur. “The fact of the matter is, if we came to you with the truth immediately... well... considering that you claim to be from Canterlot and all...”

        “I would have been in the mindset to... turn you all in,” Harmony said with a wincing hiss. “It pains me to think of it, but—yeah. That's probably what I would have done. All of that has changed, of course, and I thank you for your humble apology. I forgive you, for what it's worth. After all, it's not like I've been the most honest pony either, but none of that is the issue right now.”

        “Then what is?” Pepper remarked.

        “Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but the cat's kind of out of the bag, isn't it?” Harmony looked up. “What you all did to save me from the clutches of Haymane and his militia was brave and all, but by appearing in so many distracting places at once, you've obviously revealed that the Royal Grand Biv is more than one pony.”

        “I dunno! From what I've seen on our coach-ride here, everypony in the street seems too grumpy and Breathstarrific to have noticed!” Pinkie said with a giggle.

        “They may not notice it immediately, but once Gultophine's Harvest has taken place, they'll start to connect the dots and figure things out! It'll all start with the fact that you, Miss Pie, disappeared at the exact moment that the Biv scooped me out of Haymane's office.”

        Blinkaphine and Inkessa exchanged worried glances. Pinkie cleared her throat. “Yeah, well, all the more reason for us to be on the move right now!”

        “Be on the move?” Harmony's amber eyes narrowed. “Just what do you plan to do, exactly?”

        “You heard Sladeburn, didn't you?!” Pinkie briefly pouted, her eyes becoming sharp, rigid sapphires. “They've got Zecchy locked up in some dark, dank, dismal dungeon of darkness and dankness! We've got to get her out of there!”

        “I agree,” Harmony said with a nod. “And what I think we should do is—”

        “We'll rig up the coach for long distance, and then ride out to Canterlot!” Pinkie grinned wide.

        “Huh?” Harmony's jaw dropped.

        “And then we'll go personally to Princess Celestia and tell her exactly what's going on here!”

        “Huh?!” Harmony's jaw dropped even lower.

        “Y-Yes!” Inkessa marched up, nodding fervently. “Who cares about the Act of Provincial Industry? Haymane and the Council shouldn't be allowed to get away with what they're doing to innocent equines here in Dredgemane!”

        “If there's ever a time to put this horse hockey to a stop, it's now!” Pepper spat.

        Blinkie nodded in the corner, her golden eyes round.

        There was a bizarre noise from the far end of the cellar. The four female ponies turned and glanced, blinking. “Har-Har?” Pinkie Pie craned her neck. “What was that just now? Did you...” She briefly brightened. “Did you just laugh?”

        “No,” Harmony sputtered, regaining her voice. “I think I almost vomited.”

        “Awww, poor Har-Har. You're not bulimic, are you?”

        “As delightful as your random tangents are, Miss Pie, let us rewind just a bit.” Harmony took a deep, deep, wheezing inhale befitting a yellow-coated Ponyvillean Animal Tamer. She exhaled with, “Princess Celestia?! Really?! Okay, feel free to pull a Bishop Breathstar and flog me for being a 'heathen' or what-crap, but just what the heck is it with ponies of this Age having a problem and immediately wanting to take it to Princess Celestia?!”

        “Well, I personally know Twilight Sparkle, and that bookworm happens to be buddy-buddy with the Princess, so—”

        “No! Buck that! I seriously wanna know!” Harmony's face was like a twisted, copper fruit. “Everypony I've run into: it's the same thing. You've got trolls attacking the farm?! Call Princess Celestia! There's a foal possessed by a cosmic creature? It's Canterlot or bust! You just stubbed your hoof on a rock? Better call in the Royal Guard! The Wonderbolts canceled their latest airshow?! Let's all raid the palace!”

        “Sugah, just what are you going on about?”

        “J-Just listen to me.” Harmony stood before the four of them and gestured with a hoof. “Where I—You see—Where I come from, I have no choice but to look out for myself. If I make a decision that's bad and I end up in a deep well full of my own garbage, it is up to me and me alone to pull myself back out. I have to answer for both my mistakes and my shortcomings. Now, I could go on all day describing how crappy things have gotten in Dredgemane since I got here. I could pin all of the blame on Haymane, or on Sladeburn, or even on the Bivs. Whether they're to blame or I'm to blame doesn't matter. What does matter is that I'm here now, I've got my own four hooves, I've got my own wits about me, and I have so little time to get so much done. Yeah, maybe I could gallop all the way to Princess Celestia, nuzzle her bosom, and weep all of my troubles into her wise ears so that she could take care of everything in a single swoop, but would that really... really solve the problem that this Town has, even if we could do it swiftly enough to save Zecora's striped skin and ours as well? Huh?”

        “Erm...” Pinkie Pie fumbled.

        “That... certainly doesn't sound heroic, at least,” Inkessa added.

        “I'm sorry. You lost me at 'bosom,'” Pepper said.

        “I choose to go with Inkessa's response,” Harmony said. “You're right. It's not heroic. Don't you see what you've accomplished here, girls?” She smiled warmly. “You've taken something that has truly, awesomely made you happy and have turned it into a symbol of joy and color while the town's traditional icon—Goddess Gultophine—has been so pathetically maligned and bastardized by those who think they know what's best for this place. For so long, you four and you four alone have made a difference in this city. You had the power to be a pivotal force then, and you have the power to save the day now. Don't fall back on some cowardly impulse to let a higher force possibly or possibly not save the day when you know what you are all capable of doing yourselves. Goddess Gultophine blessed the Grave of Consus with her Spirit so that the living ponies left behind in her absence would shine forth on their lonesome. Where is that more beautifully exemplified then right here and now between the four of you?”

        “But what else can we do?” Inkessa murmured. “Sure, by being the Biv, we've become a force to be reckoned with. But we maintained the strategy of avoiding direct conflict with the militia on purpose. There're just too many of them. Even with the ramcraft at our disposal, charging in on the guards' headquarters in a brave attempt to free Zecora wouldn't end well. You saw what nearly happened to Blinkaphine! You and the guards almost caught her! In fact, you did catch her!”

        “Don't you see, though?” Pinkie Pie suddenly bounced. “Har-Har knows the truth! And she's on our side, right, Har-Har?!”

        “Of course I'm on your side, Miss Pie—”

        “And she's totally like four Royal Grand Bivs rolled into one! I'd say we five could take the Headquarters!”

        “No, Inkessa's right.”

        “Awwww—But I wanna smash stuff and... stuff!” Pinkie Pie frowned.

        “There's a time and a place for explosions, Miss Pie. Unfortunately, this isn't a party that we're talking about. This is a highly delicate situation that was birthed in providence and—Gultophine willing—will end in providence just the same.”

        “How do you mean?”

        “Do any of us forget what brought us here?” Harmony squinted at each of the ponies. “The machine that I built is a device meant to heal. Miss Pie, you and me and...” She took a deep, somber breath. “...and Deacon Dawnhoof came into town to drain infernite from the lungs of foals. I don't know about you, but I haven't abandoned that goal, at least not in my heart. I want to see justice served in Dredgemane just as much as you do, but we can't go about it with rifles blazing.”

        “So, what, then?” Inkessa remarked. “We negotiate a release for Zecora? Or Dawnhoof, for that matter?”

        “As much as I would love to do that, it's more than obvious that Haymane isn't going to reason with us.” Harmony winced slightly. “Though, I figure it's more accurate to say that his allies, Breathstar and Sladeburn, will have nothing of it.”

        “Then what are you thinking, Har-Har?”

        “I'm thinking...” Harmony smirked. “...that we celebrate Gultophine's Harvest.”

        The four girls all blinked as one. “Huh?”

“The headquarters is built out of steel-reinforced concrete, the only building of that sort on this side of town,” Inkessa said while pointing across the street. The five ponies crouched in the shadowed rooftop of a three-story building across from the Militia HQ in question. “But since we're obviously not going to blow our way into the place with dynamite, the structure doesn't matter. What does matter...” She pointed at the cobblestones beneath where several guards were currently pacing in the gray glow of midday. “...is that the basement has been sculpted a solid ten meters deep below the street level. That is where they've got Zecora.”

        “Along with Alex!” Pinkie Pie hissed, eliciting a hiss from a copper pegasus holding a pair of binoculars.

        “For the last time!” Inkessa made a face. “Who's Alex?”

        “They obviously expected someponies to be contemplating something like we are right now,” Harmony murmured as she briefly lowered the binoculars and studied the street with naked ambers. “Whether they're looking forward to the Grand Biv or myself, it doesn't matter. I suggest we give them something they don't expect. Something dazzling and yet invisible at the same time.”

        “I'm still waiting for you to explain how all of this connects to celebrating Gultophine's Harvest,” Pepper Plots slurred from where she stood with crossed hooves besides Blinkaphine.

        “Okay, so maybe we won't be celebrating the bonfires.” Harmony kept low as she glanced back and smirked at the others. “But we could at least give the Dredgemaners something to celebrate.”

        “Hmmm?” Pepper fluttered her painted eyelashes.

        Inkessa leaned in. “Are you inferring what I think you're inferring...?”

        Harmony pointed down a narrow trench towards where one of several piles of flammable wood was being built. “If we move now, while we still can, we can transform the entire ritual into something a lot more... a lot more kaizo than Haymane and Breathstar have planned!”

        “Huh?”

        “'Kaizo'?”

        “'Crazy!' 'Rambunctious!' 'Off-the-wall!' I dunno—A distraction.” Harmony smiled wickedly. “Inkessa, you and Blinkaphine and Pepper will be the Bivs. You'll do your thing, keep the militia's attention, and dazzle the crowd all at once. In the meantime, Miss Pie—er—Pinkie Pie and I will do our part and infiltrate the headquarters on our own.”

        “Why is it always you and Pinkamena?” Inkie Pie asked with a strange face.

        “Pssst!” Pinkie slid up to her sister and hissed, smiling. “Don't ask. It's our gimmick.”

        “We'll bust out Zecora. We'll grab the machine. We'll make our merry way to Stonehaven under the cover of darkness and mayhem. Then we'll do what we set out to accomplish. I swear, those poor children will be cured of Immolatia by sunup tomorrow morning or else Princess Nebula can have my wings back.”

        “Heh... Typical pegasus guile.” Pepper Plots smiled wickedly. “I approve of this mare.”

        “That idea sounds very righteous and all...” Inkessa winced and ran a hoof through her silken gray strands. “But it sounds a tad bit daunting.”

        “It's natural to be scared, Inkessa...”

        “No, it's not that. I have no problem following through with your plan, I just don't think it's all that feasible, even with three of us donning the Biv's gear at the same time.”

        “She's right, y'know,” Pepper Plots spoke up. Blinkie watched silently as the scarlet-haired pony sashayed across the shadowy rooftop to stand beside the time traveler. “Sabotaging a clock tower or Town Hall or an alicorn fountain statue is rather simple. But botching the entirety of Gultophine's Harvest?”

        “Yes, I know it seems impossible, but we have to figure out a way to—”

        “Sugah, I never did say it was impossible.” Pepper winked. “You should know better than to interrupt a lady. Ahem. What I was gonna suggest is that we seek out some help beyond just the tools and tricks of the Biv. We need some assistance at street-level, and it just so happens that PDP and I are rather fondly acquainted with an expert on the street.”

        “Just who, exactly?” Harmony asked. After a few blinks, she dropped the binoculars from her hooves and grimaced sharply. “Awwww jeez. Seriously?”

        “Seriously!” Brevis cackled upside down from where the blue-coated mule was balancing on his head in the dead-end of a rubble-strewn alleyway. “A chance to help the Royal Grand Biv?! Unless this is a most delicious prank you ladies are pulling, you can very easily count me in! My afternoon has been an unbloomed flower, waiting to provide sweet tangy release to such whimsical honeybees as yourselves—”

        “Right, so are you in or not?!” Harmony growled.

        “Shhh! Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie squeaked and glanced worriedly over her shoulder from where the two squatted on the edge of the side doors to their shadowed stagecoach. Pepper and Inkessa hid inside the vehicle while a blandly disguised Blinkaphine stood nervously at the reins. Beyond the adjoining cobblestone streets, several guards and workers could be heard, unexcitedly milling about while constructing and observing the first of many unlit wooden bonfires. “It's just like Pepper said! We need some help on the street if we're to follow your plan. You remember when her and Brevis' buddies took us on a trip to—ahem—The Inferno of Madness!”

        “Of course, I remember our little redundant romp through the saloon's basement!” The copper pegasus sighed exhaustedly. “I just wish we could get this part here done without all of the unnecessary pomp and philosophical tongue-work.”

        “A poetic notion if I ever did hear one!” Brevis somersaulted down, spun, and laid his stomach down on the cobblestone like a foal on a Saturday morning living room floor. “That is, assuming one is to lick up all the candy-coated excess of a day's sunshine! So tell me...” He propped his yellow-toothed chin up on a pair of hooves. “What are you five glistening stars proposing goodly Brevis do to assist the Biv?”

        “Well... heeheehee... You see... Uhm...” Pinkie Pie briefly hesitated.

        Harmony boldly stabbed her voice in. “Brevis, they are the Biv. All four of them.”

        Blinkaphine and Inkessa winced. Pepper Plots rolled her eyes.

        Brevis, in the meantime, replied with remarkable speed that literally surprised the copper pegasus. “Well, of course they are! You think I didn't know that?” He grinned and tilted Pinkie Pie's chin up with a dirtied hoof. “At least I knew she was! Such a charming girl who inhales and exhales dreams like the spirit of Nebula! She not only saw the bright shinies—she became them! After that, not once did she stop shimmering across the cosmos of our lives. She transcended the shinies. That is a light I wish to see shine across Dredgemane, and I shall assist in any way possible, for the bonfires are but a dim glow in the penumbra of such imaginative thrill!”

        Pinkie giggled and nuzzled the crook of his forelimb, despite the unkempt smell obviously wafting across the alleyway. “I always figured you would understand, Brevis, ya silly yoke-cracker!”

        “Do not remind me of the fields, dear child. I have many an unresolved feud with several gophers there.”

        “Quite frankly, I'm surprised you weren't the Royal Grand Biv also,” Harmony murmured.

        “BraHa! Perish the thought!” Brevis cackled her way. “My darling lady of the feather, the Biv means many things to me! I admire him! I envy him! I mimic, emulate, and even exalt him! But I, goodly Brevis, could never allow himself to become the Royal Grand Biv, for I would have sacrificed all of my dreams for the sake of a title, and then what would become of all my tomorrows?”

        Brevis forward-flipped, landed on all four legs, and pointed with a cloaked hoof into the body of the stagecoach.

        “Your fellow ladies of the rainbow have invented a persona, yes, but what goodly Brevis admires so much about the Biv is that, unlike Bishop Breathstar, there are no words to the creature! The phantasm is a living phenomenon, a messenger of color! He is to the streets of Dregdemane what an afternoon rainshower is to the lengths of Equestria. We are not preached to; we are merely illuminated by his presence. The Biv gives us a threshold upon which to walk the plank of our own fears and trepidations in want of the excitement that the next blink may bring us, be it full of colors or calamity. We never know, the Biv never knows, and together—or apart—we are explorers of the next screaming second to come, and it is glorious. Alas, I pray that the world ends the soonest that the Biv stops being an impetus and starts being a cure, for then we good Equestrians will have adopted the illusion of a collective illness in our embrace of the Biv, just like the spiritually-afflicted and philosophically-choked seek Gultophine like an anesthetic. She too was once a spectrum of color and imagination and glory. Now, however, she has been reduced to a dull beam of light, a single snap of bright consuming death within the throes of a bonfire.”

        “Great! Yeah. So... uhm...” Harmony raised her copper brow and leaned forward, nodding emphatically and wagging her eyes in want of a certifiable confirmation.

        Pepper buttered her gesture up by speaking from the coach. “Brevis, darling, it would help if your replies were as pungent as your odor, or at least I do believe that is what Miss Canterlot is trying to convey.”

        “Who am I to spoil such a magical moment?” Brevis grinned and dance-stepped over so that he leaned against the stagecoach. “Five ladies, waiting on a mule, and the only thing being exchanged is smiles. BraHA! If I was capable of fathering a child, I'd name my firstborn an amalgamation of all your combined giggles. Ahem—Yes, goodly Brevis is as acquainted with the streets as you courageous urchins are with hygiene, and if it serves the purpose of lending extra years to the lives of those foals whom you are so desperate to save, then I shall enlist the hooves of my impoverished allies in benefiting your cause. Life is a blissfully short adventure, and it would be a shame for those who hunger for discovery to have their juvenile palate starved further by the neglectful guiltmongerers who run this cemetery sepulcher we call a town.”

        “Whew!” Pinkie Pie grinned Harmony's way. “I'm so paying him to be shipped to Ponyville for Rarity's public roast next year!”

        “Praise Princess Entropa that I won't be around for that,” Harmony muttered, then glanced at the mule. “Just about how many Dredgemaners do you think you can... uhm... dredge up?”

        “It depends, oh once-cocooned phantom!” He grinned crazily at her. “What do you need them to do and with what degree of insanity?”

        It was one day, the first in three months, a cold and dreary day out of so many more just like it, when the city of Dredgemane lay silent, and the many shuffling souls entrenched within those granite walls did not work. Instead, they gravitated into clusters like clumps of dust, donning ornamental yet colorless suits and dresses reserved for this occasion and this occasion alone. In murmuring droves, families and neighbors and colleagues aplenty shuffled out of the front doors to their homes. They carried with them conversations. They carried with them gossips and rumors. They carried with them all of the collective sighs of three months of labor and twenty-four hours of mourning the loss at the quarry. Most of all, they carried with them—in baskets or in wagons or on the bare balance of their flanks—family heirlooms, books, porcelain figures, portraits, picture frames, albums, and all sorts of heterogeneous nick-nacks. In a solid line, like a funeral procession, the souls of Dredgemane poured out of their homes and surged toward the heart of Town Square, carrying their most valued possessions to be burned.

        The stallions carried many similar items: favorite novels, fishing rods, trophies, and old tools whose antiquity far exceeded their use. The mares dragged along objects of broader variety: fancy hats, illustrated periodicals, works of art, silken hoof-me-downs, photographic compilations, and even age-old letters preserved from days of secondary school. Between the somber hooftrots of their parents, young fillies and colts struggled to catch up, clutching a toy or a stuffed animal desperately to themselves, not understanding why they were bringing such an item out into the open or where they were headed.

        As the crowds gathered more and more thickly under the waning sunlight, several militia ponies—temporarily stripped of their armor—acted as additional workhooves, setting up the bonfires, piling up blocks of wood imported from forests that stretched beyond the granite expanse of the Grave of Consus. They worked with a solemnity that reflected the well-dressed and well-groomed citizens coming to participate in their quarterly sacrifice to the Alicorn Sister of Life and Progress. The hustle and bustle of the ponies setting up the bonfire was positively electric, so that it made the shuffling parade of Gultophine's Harvest participants look frozen by comparison. Dredgemane was a city built through labor and defined by it. To be doing anything but working, if even for a holiday, hardly resembled being alive.

        Amidst the shuffling murmur of hooves, a pair of ponies carried a heavy log and added it to the bonfire in the middle of Town Square. There was a suspicious, disheveled look to these two equines in particular. While they busied themselves with fixing the latest piece of tinder to the wooden array, they paused to glance up towards the rooftops. Unseen from the guards or citizens of the mist-laden afternoon, the blue silhouette of a mule briefly darted across the edge of a three-story building, caught the eyesight of the two ponies, and gave the hi sign.

        They nodded back. Something sparkling was shared between them: a smile. It was a bright and surprising thing. To erase any suspicion, they snuffed their enthusiasm in a sharp breath. Returning to a quiet shuffle, they knelt close to the base of the thick stack of bonfire wood and pretended to be shuffling several large beams around, when in fact they were each slipping loose a bright, rainbow-colored cylinder from their cloaks. The words “Bon Bon's Novelty Shop” flickered briefly before the faint gray sunlight, and were then lost to the shadows of the wooden pile. With stealthy precision, the two allies of Brevis stuck the fireworks deep into the base of the bonfire, and shuffled back out to resume piling on more innocent planks of wood.

        Several spaces down, in another street of Dredgemane, three more ponies paused in the midst of their labors about a bonfire pile. Upon the signal given by Pinkie Pie from a nearby rooftop, they likewise slid concealed fireworks into the base of the wooden pile before them.

        This was repeated at yet another pile of wood, and another, and another. A good third of the bonfires of Dredgemane were so stealthily rigged with colorful consumables, in accordance with the tactful signals communicated mutely from the lofty edges of the trenches, where so many a dismal citizen refused to tilt their eyes towards, lest they be blinded by the light.

        Through the scattered sunlight, a tiny white object flittered. A paper airplane was presently soaring over the streets of Dredgemane...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...until it drifted over the head of a young, off-duty guard, balanced on a ladder, who was tasked with changing the wicks of the torchlamps lining the streets of the sunken town. At first sight of the paper craft, the teenage colt bit his lip, glanced over his shoulder at the passing parade of shuffling equines, and swiftly snatched the plane from the air when nopony was looking. He quietly unfolded the thing, scanned his eyes over the hastily scribbled words thereupon, and stole a quick smile from the whimsy of the air.

        Clearing his throat, he swiftly crumpled the sheet, stuck it in his pocket, and leaned forward on the ladder. With smooth grace, the pony loosened a few colorful sparklers stashed away in a coat sleeve and stuck them halfway down the length of the wick, marking where the flame would burn its way down in a specific space of time. Whistling innocently to himself, he lit the top of the torch's wick, leaned back on the ladder, and planted the frame of the lantern back over the top of the post. Glancing up towards the rooftops, his eyes gazed the buildings until he found a copper shape. With a momentary blink of surprise, he then smiled and gave a tiny, subtle salute.

        From the rooftops, a cloaked pegasus smirked and saluted back. She glanced aside at her pink anchor and motioned towards the rooftops on the far side of the street, below which other workers secretly awaited a similar, non-verbal signal. Pinkie Pie bounced over and tightly clutched the last pony. Eyeing the crowd, Harmony waited for an opportune time. Finally, when no heads were aimed their way, she raised her wings out from the sides of her cloak and took to the air, carrying Pinkie Pie with her towards the next leg of the operation.

        What is the nature of light? What is the essence of that which shines beyond you, like so much twilight that lingers above the ashes of the Wasteland? Is it we who cast the light, or is light something that is given to us? Was it given to Gultophine as well?

        When I built the rainbow signal, I knew that the colors of the spectrum were things that I could only emulate. I could never be the author of them, even though I could very easily be an ally to them in the endless battle against you.

        No, light is something eternal, especially in its multiplicitous shades. The rainbow has always meant hope, and hope was something that was given to ponydom, just as much as Gultophine gave us the magic of the prism, just as much as she gave us life.

        By the fifth time in the last hour that Haymane calmly opened his eyes, they were finally dry. With a deep breath, he finished buttoning up the top of a neatly pressed, dark suit. He sat on the edge of a plain bed in a lone room, gracing his thin and aging visage in a dirtied mirror. The wheeled tripod rested—naked—a half-meter from the bed's wooden frame, its wooden straps dangling loosely. It waited for him, just like this day had been waiting for him—every three months—with a burning hunger that grew more and more ravenous.

        He brought a hoof up and attempted straightening his straw-hard mat of blonde hair. Halfway through the effort, he stopped, as if remembering a hoof of another shade that used to do the task for him, and with far more grace and love than he had come to bestow himself. His nostrils flared as he gazed away from the mirror and towards a wide stretch of mirrors filtering the gray afternoon through a sea of settling dust.

        There was a knock at the door. A servant on the other end of the lofty wooden building was calling for him, announcing the time to depart. Haymane replied with something of a mumble. He glanced to his side and noticed—within the barren lengths of his own bedroom—a lone table with one item on it. It was a picture frame, depicting five ponies. One was himself, a younger image. The other four, he had long robbed himself the grace of looking at. Bravely, he clasped the frame in the crook of his hoof for the first time in years.

        The day had come.

        Sliding the picture frame into the inside of his suit's vest, he slid over to the edge of the bed until he was within reach of the tripod. Wheeling it over with his front limbs, he grunted with the ritualistic effort it took to slide his front half off the bed and—with more or less grace—position his lower half onto the moving platform. It took the better part of ten minutes, but he tightened the leather straps all by himself. Not a day went by when the Mayor refused the labor of his own hooves.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The mighty doors to the Cathedral of Gultophine opened wide with a thunderous creak. Breathstar stepped out, and he was a dazzling sight. A white robe of resplendent silver reflected a ghostly sheen against the granite walls of the Grave of Consus around him. His black silken mane framed his rigid features like a melted, obsidian halo. With a deep breath, he focused a telekinetic charge through his horn and straightened the edges of his outfit. Two young priests, far less fantastically garbed, stood at his flanks. They waited on his word, on his movement, on his commandment.

        With a clearing of his throat, Breathstar stood tall and proud. He set out onto the cobblestone streets of Dredgemane, joining his congregation and urging them forward into a far more fluid gait as his sheer presence alone burned the ritual of Gultophine's Harvest brighter, even before a single bonfire was lit. Halfway through his trot into town, the Grand Bishop paused, casting a forlorn glance over his shoulder—towards the foundation of the stone cathedral.

        A lone window rested at the street level, framing the nearby names of so many cobblestone memorials. A tiny shred of candlelight billowed from inside, illuminating a soul unseen by so many “celebrators” surging past the body of the cathedral. In an obstinate snort, Breathstar tore a bothersome thought from his mind by wrenching his gaze from the window. He faced forward... towards the flames yet to be kindled.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Overseer Sladeburn grumbled. He sat at a workbench inside an iron-reinforced shack bordering the bizarrely empty depths of the Dredgemane Quarry beneath a melting sunset. With a hoof-brace, he wrote several statistical lines of profit loss over a quarterly report journal. He squinted his angry eyes at several arrays of memos and sheets drafted and delivered to him by his fellow administrators over the past two days.

        There was a loud knocking on the doorframe behind him. A servant marched in with a worried expression. Summoning Sladeburn's hard-edged gaze, the smaller pony gestured and pointed at a pocketwatch in his grasp.

        Sladeburn's response was a groan and a rolling of his eyes. Slapping his journal shut, he hopped out of his stool and stomped thunderously over to a coat rack. The extent of his Gultophine's Harvest preparation consisted of throwing a dark-brown suit over his already shadowy figure. Muttering words of a disgruntled nature under his breath, he slapped on a broad-rimmed hat and stormed out of the hut, trying his meager best to put on something slightly resembling a grin as he marched belatedly into town to join in the sacred festivities.

        I built the rainbow signal in the Wasteland because of hope. And it was hope that led me to spread the light throughout the darkness. Hope is what I wanted to give all ponies, even if I knew in my heart that I was the last one. It's because hope is the basic blueprint of a pony's soul—beneath magic and beneath friendship and beneath joy. Hope is what keeps our heart beating in spite of all the darkness, in spite of you.

        I was wrong to think that the Dredgemaners were without hope. It was inside them, shimmering, barely alive but flickering. It only needed to be kindled, and then ever so gloriously harvested.

        The light was and is a royally grand thing. The Bivs and I were about to remind Dredgemaners of what had been robbed from the essence of them. We were about to give them back the light.

        Night had fallen. The stars came out. The night sky was a glittering array of warmth through the briefly splitting clouds. Nopony's eyes tilted up, though. They gathered thickly in circles around the several different bonfires as guard ponies—twice as somber as they—trotted up with lit torches and ignited the blazes. The giant, feather-shaped scars in the earth burned from the inside out with bright, white plumes. Embers and flanks of wood crackled as Gultophine's Harvest went underway, reflecting off the eyes of so many hundreds upon thousands of silently gazing ponies like a conjoined, ivory spark. They stared into the flames like they stared into all of their yesterdays and tomorrows. The heat bathed them, sweated them, and engulfed them. The light did nothing to excite them.

        In the midst of this serpentine blaze that bled through the city, the Town Square of Dredgemane burned the brightest. Where a trio of bright bonfires billowed, a trinity of a different sort had gathered. Mayor Haymane rolled up to the dark shape of Overseer Sladeburn. Flanked by guards and members of the Council, the two leaders of Dredgemane stood tall and proud while their cohort—Bishop Breathstar—ascended a grand wooden scaffold facing the bonfires and the surging sea of ponies beyond the flames. Virtually the entire populace of Dredgemane had shown up—as they always did every three months—and there wasn't a single speck of cobblestone not covered by their patient, quiet limbs. There was not a single name of the dead exposed from beneath the joyless bodies of the dying.

        For a veritable sea brimming with equine souls, not a peep was heard, so that an eerie quiet allowed Breathstar's booming voice to ricochet off the flame-lit, granite walls of that hovel as he finally ascended the top of the scaffold and said, “Faithful children of Goddess Epona and loyal siblings to the Holy Alicorn of Life and Progress, we are gathered here to exorcise ourselves of the damnable distractions of this world that seek to undermine the glory of Goddess Gultophine's spirit. If your hearts are heavy, worry not. If your spirits are exhausted, fret not. For tonight you all shall once again cast off the fetters that have naturally collected around yourselves in this physical plane of inequity and sin. Tomorrow, you shall wake up as new ponies, as fresh new spirits freed from the weight of obscurity and remorse, for the straight and narrow path towards progress shall once again be made clear with the effigies of our failures burned to righteous oblivion!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        From across the city, in the bowels of Gultophine's Cathedral, young Deacon Dawnhoof knelt on his haunches before the bed. He murmured a quiet prayer, but was momentarily distracted by a flickering sensation against his eyelids. Ripped from meditation, he gazed out through the thin window lining the barren chamber he was in. The bright white flash of torchlight shimmered through and bathed his figure in a ghostly dance.

        It was not a sight that was foreign to him. The young cleric had seen it many times before, for nearly the past decade. However, this night, sunken in the tomb-like bowels of his own church, buried beneath the memories of the past twenty-four hours, he couldn't revel in the cleansing brightness of that light. It was too synthetic, too plain, too colorless.

        He fought a shuddering breath as he slumped against a far wall and stared into the flickering kaleidoscope, his ears pricking to hear the distant echoes of his superior, Bishop Breathstar. With haunting clarity, the words became more and more distinguishable across streets upon streets of paralyzed, dead-quiet Dredgemaners.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “It is by Gultophine's grace alone that we have a habitat, a garden of progress and peace in the middle of the very land where Consus fell!” Breathstar spoke firmly before the crowd with immeasurable grace. His eyes traveled across every silent face as the fires burned ravenously between him and his congregation. “We owe her not only our lives, but our spirits, our commitments, and our memories—all of which must go through the crucible of her glory, through the other side of which we will emerge either healthy or destitute, as will be determined by our faith to her!”

        As the City Counselor roared overhead, Haymane shifted on his wheeled haunches. He sighed, feeling the weight of a picture frame beneath his coat's jacket. He glanced aside, past Sladeburn, and studied the Council. The longer he stared, the more his eyes squinted, and a bizarre look of curiosity and surprise washed over him.

        Haymane's long-time friend and companion, Quarrington Edward Pie, was nowhere to be seen.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Flanking the far edge of the Town Square, Harmony stood with Pinkie Pie and Brevis as the three other “conspirators” finished donning the masks, capes, goggles, and tools of the Royal Grand Biv. She glanced over her shoulder in time to see Pepper Plots passing a few flirtatious words to the blue mule, winking, and turning into the Biv in a flash. She saluted the copper pegasus, turned away from the flames, and scampered north along the rooftops. Blinkaphine's golden eyes briefly darted Harmony's way, nervously twitched, and disappeared under a pair of goggles as she too made her flight, heading due west.

        Inkessa, however, was fumbling. She paused in the middle of her outfitting and stirred nervously, her lips quivering as she gazed a forlorn glance west, past Blinkaphine's rainbow shadow and towards the general direction of Stonehaven. As the flickering strobes of the bonfires settled upon her mane in tandem with Breathstar's booming voice, something came over the older daughter of Quarrington, and her violet eyes started to water.

        Immediately, Pinkie Pie bounced over to Inkessa, smiled in her face, and murmured a few humming words of sweetness that Harmony couldn't hear over the Bishop's grandiose speech down below. The time traveler's candy-colored anchor then leaned over and gently nuzzled her sister's neck, saying something to her, followed by a brief melody that drifted from her bright lips, like an Auntie singing a room full of foals to sleep.

        Whatever it was, it was enough to bring a smile to Inkessa's lips. The young nurse trembled briefly, hiccuped past a final smile, and dried her eyes before nodding to her young sister. With a shudder, she slid the cowl of arcanium weave over her face, and became the Biv as much as the previous two did. With a courageous leap, she glided off the rooftop and soared eastward.

        Harmony turned to watch, her amber-streaked mane billowing in the figure's breezy departure. For the first time since the time traveler was initially graced with the Biv's sight, a brief jolt of electricity ripped up her spine, so that she wasn't really standing on a rooftop overlooking Gultophine's Harvest in a City that knew no joy, but rather she was leaning breathlessly against a scooter and watching a rainbow figure spin loopty-loops in the bright blue sky.

        Something inside her melted yet again in so few hours. She felt like collapsing, until a pink anchor bounced up to her side like she had to Inkessa's. Pinkie Pie glanced over, winked, and poked Harmony in the center of her nose while making a face. A giggle lit the air, and naturally it only belonged to Pinkie, though Harmony would have been lying if she didn't feel something—for the first moment since arriving there—that was dangerously close to a tittering temptation.

        It is not an easy thing. It never was. I spent months, years, decades minding the rainbow signal that I had built. I fought trolls and monsters and pirates and stormfronts to keep the light alive. After an entire lifetime, was it worth it?

        I know what your answer will be. I deny it before you even utter it with your black tongue, with your hungry and ravenous maw. Nothing is that hopeless, not even for the end of ponies.

        Minding the rainbow signal was definitely worth it, because I had found Spike, and Princess Entropa's shell had found an avatar, and this pony had found Dredgemane.

        Then, one fateful night of falling, Dredgemane would find me.

        One by one, in mechanized, cog-wheel revolutions, the ponies of Dredgemane shuffled up to the bonfires and tossed what was most precious to them into the flames. Deadpan mothers and fathers threw their heirlooms—like their memories—into the consuming sparks. Misty-eyed teenagers and confused children tossed colorful bundles of joy into the everlasting white flame. Old, bearded ponies gave up their violins and submitted to the ashes with a shuddering slump of aged limbs.

        Wearing a dull gray dress, the obese frame of Marble Cake shuffled up to the edge of the crackling embers. She held in two hooves a beloved, potted cactus dredged from her office at the bakery. With a deflating sigh, she closed her eyes, meditated on a prayer, and fitfully tossed the adored plant into the center of the blaze. She sniffled as she waddled off beyond the surging crowd of obedient siblings to Gultophine.

        Approaching the bonfires, being escorted by the intimidating frame of Sladeburn, was Mister Irontail. The brief flashes of the sparkling flame illuminated the blacksmith pony's fresh bruises. The bearded stallion stood next to his trembling wife. The two of them collectively held an open blanket displaying the two “souvenirs” of the Royal Grand Biv. Irontail navigated a nervous sigh, and upon feeling the urging touch of Sladeburn's thick hoof on his shoulder, the burly pony joined his wife in bravely tossing both articles into the consuming fire, redeeming himself and his spouse in the eyes of the Council. Sladeburn smirked venomously, patted the blacksmith's back, and escorted the shuddering Dredgemaner off to the side.

        Haymane watched the entire proceeding, his eyes consuming the flames that turned brighter and brighter as Dredgemane exorcised itself of all distractions. As the ponies marched through their turns, the weight inside his suit's pocket grew heavier and heavier, as if it would pull his beating heart out and fall bloodily to the cobblestone grave of names, names, names below them all. The Mayor was, naturally, too focused on the moment to possibly register a bright white object floating sharply overhead.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

A paper airplane rose from the heat billowing off the bonfires below, arced towards the roofs, and came coasting to a stop at the northwest corner of Town Square. The airplane was snatched from the air by a rainbow-colored limb. The Royal Grand Biv leaned saucily against a chimney as it unfolded the paper sheet and scanned the instructions written thereupon. The vandal then reached under its razor-sharp cloak and produced a pocketwatch. After studying the time, the figure slid to the edge of the roof, glanced over the crowd, and found a colorful shadow gracing a rooftop clear across the Square.

        The Biv raised a hoof to its ruby goggles and flicked a switch, rotating the lenses of the article in such a way as to catch the glint off the blazing fires below. In such a manner, the Royal Grand Biv flashed a coded message to its partner across Dredgemane. The mute doppelganger from far away strobed something back, and both shadows shared a communal nod across the lengths of the burning town. Squatting so as to avoid the sight of so many ponies down below, the Royal Grand Bivs awaited their time to shine.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “I think they're all ready to dance!” Pinkie Pie's voice chirped as she lowered a pair of binoculars and smirked over at Harmony and Brevis. “Pepper's passed word on to Blinkaphine! That means Inkessa should be getting prepared as we speak!”

        “Dang, that was fast,” Harmony exclaimed. “So what now?”

        “You're asking me? You're the one who thought this all up, silly filly! Heeheehee!”

        “Pffft! Yeah, but you're the 'grand architect,' Miss Pie,” the last pony replied with a raspberry noise. “I may be the producer of this stage play, but you're the exemplary director here.”

        “Woohoo! I'm Queen of the World!” Pinkie Pie jubilantly giggled from the edge of the rooftop. She paused and squinted towards the starlight above as she rubbed a hoof across her chin. “Hmmm... Can I just hop up to the position of 'Queen' while Celestia remains a Princess? Do you think that Goddess Epona would mind?”

        “I think the universe deserves to be run by you for a day, Pinkie,” Harmony said, gazing into the burning ritual below the three of them. “That would have the making of a cosmic sugar high the likes of which the constellations would never recover from.”

        “Whatever. You're the star-gazer, not me.” Pinkie Pie juggled the binoculars in her grasp and hummed. “Anywho, so we wait for the bonfires to go 'ker-sparkle', and then we can go frolicking after Zecchy in superheroic fun-time. It's that simple, huh?”

        “Life is complex, Miss Pie. Only the dreams are simple.” Harmony sighed, sat down, and folded her legs beneath her as she enjoyed the last calm breaths that could be allowed her that night. “This town has forgotten what it means to be simple. All this time, they've confused it with being boring. It's amazing how a life of struggle and misery can make us think that all we deserve to have is boredom, when in fact it's the frightening and surprising things of day-to-day that enrich us to begin with.”

        The blue mule was suddenly laughing, chuckling, practically braying.

        Harmony squinted over towards Brevis, briefly worried that his cackling might alert the townsponies below. “And just what's gotten you so full of titters?”

        “BraHahaHa—Ohhh, you are truly a monarch butterfly, through and through, dear Canterlotlian.” Brevis smirked sideways at her. “It charms me to no end to think that the same soul that speaks your noble words was once just as dull and dreadful as the granite that swallows this town.”

        “If you're still mad at me for trying to stop the Royal Grand Biv for so long, quit while you're ahead. I know now that I was spreading a pestilence through Dredgemane instead of preventing one. Still, it's not like it matters in the long run. I know what I mean to this town when all is said and done, Brevis,” Harmony said firmly, though she fought to avoid his gaze. She gulped hard. “I-I know what I'm the end of...”

        “Mmm... Are we not all the end of things, darling one?” He smiled drunkenly. “Each and every one of us, with our separate and precious masterpieces being woven before us with every gasp—We are tragedies and romances all the same. How it ends is natural. How it persists is sublime. Hmmm...” He rocked back and forth on his haunches. “Ah, yes, goodly Brevis was once a perceiver of the end. Everything he thought or said or did was defined by the parentheses of mortality. Death still awaits me, whether I dance or whether I slither. Only, I am no longer bound by an essence that has been assigned to me. I fell because I chose to, despite the heart-splitting horror of the descent. I reveled in it, for I had chosen it. Now, my providence is no longer defined by what will be chiseled into my cobblestone. Hmmm-hmmm-hmmm...”

        Harmony squinted at him across the flickering bonfire light. “What changed... if I may ask...?”

        “Simply this.” He smirked sideways at her, one eye bulging brighter than the other above a frenzied grin. “I galloped forth upon the burning horizon of life. I saw rainbows. I saw slaughterhouses. I saw gigantic black abysses and fields of green mirth all the same. To each delightful and dreadful thing, to each catastrophe and chorus, I said 'yes'. I said 'yes' and I never stopped saying 'yes', with each passing day of my life, with each passing moment, for each moment was deliciously the same, the same gasp, the same shock, the same sob, the same laugh—and every single instant was a precipice upon which to discover more of what this island of life was warmly offering me, as well as the many more infinite things that I had yet to discover, and could never discover, but would pursue all the more fervently to comprehend, no matter how impossible, all the while saying, screaming, singing, laughing 'yes, yes, yes, yes!' BraHahaHaha!”

        He spun around, teetered, and rediscovered his seat. A pink shadow along the edge of the rooftop glanced his way and cast a warm giggle of her own, basking in his words in such a knowing manner that Harmony almost envied her.

        “We may be able to get this city to open its eyes, Brevis,” Harmony said. “It's another thing to get them to trot a new path with the use of that sight.”

        Brevis' smile was a strangely placid thing as he said, “Alas, the last test is the hardest test. It is a very black and bottomless barrier, laced in chaos and bathed in darkness. But only by falling through will anypony find providence, in that they'll find the path towards it, and it is a path that never ends, just like one can never split the rainbow apart perfectly. Colors are infinite; it is our eyes that fail to see well enough. But that is fine, for we do not prosper off of definition. We blossom by inspiration.” He motioned his hoof towards the streets below like a crazed prophet. “Behold... it begins, the mad fall of Dredgemane.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow. Glancing across the way at Pinkie Pie, she stirred her stiff limbs out from underneath her and slid over to the edge of the rooftop. She gazed down towards the trio of bright bonfires in the center of Town Square while a pink shadow joined her.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        As the last of the many citizens of Dredgemane sauntered past the bonfires, tossing their final treasures into the blazes, Mayor Haymane took a deep, weighted breath. He pulled the picture frame out from his jacket as he wheeled up to the edge of the flickering heat. Gazing with glistening eyes towards the image resting in the crook of his hoof, he saw the photographic souls of his wife, his three children, all surrounding his image, completing him, fulfilling him. He began and ended there, a cyclical shadow in the great gasping abyss of Dredgemane.

        With courage, he took a deep breath, drew the veil over the last bright corners of his soul, and reared his hoof up to toss the twice-dead family into the blazes...

        Then something glinted across their frozen faces, something with color—like their eyes once warmly possessed at the end of his loving breath. Haymane gasped at the sight of the sparkling prism. The Mayor of Dredgemane glanced from the reflection in the picture frame to the center of the burning bonfires before him.

        The rest of the Town Square citizens gasped, squinting and staring with frozen shock towards the depths of the flame. Each bright ember, each hot white tongue of fire, each ivory glint of heat was being replaced with spectral sparkles, rainbow spurts, and prismatic plumes. That night, in the middle of Gultophine's Harvest, the essence of the Patron Alicorn of Rainbows came to life in the Grave of Consus. The bonfires had melted through to the fireworks planted secretly inside the cores of the wooden effigies, and soon the entire trenches—blossoming outward from Town Square through the serpentine ravines—were a cornucopia of dancing and frothing color.

        Haymane's jaw hung agape. Sladeburn lethargically over and did a double-take, the stallion's dark eyes nearly exploding. Standing atop the wooden scaffold in the center of Town Square, Bishop Breathstar was in the middle of taking a dainty sip from a telekinetically floating canteen of water. The priest gazed over at the suddenly frothing array of colors, and the stars of the universe aligned for a perfectly-timed, holy spit take. Breathstar sputtered, wheezed, and nearly pratfalled off the edge of the scaffolding as he leaned forward to give the sight a gawking, incredulous stare.

        The bonfires sputtered and hissed, and then the fireworks inside the hearts of the burning piles exploded in a timely fashion. The colorful plumes of sparkles quadrupled, shooting forth into the shimmering air above Dredgemane, filling the Grave of Consus with prismatic streamers and howling comets of spectral madness. A dazzling constellation of beautiful chaos roared over the cobblestone vistas, bathing every square centimeter of the urbanscape with more color than it had seen in decades, centuries, eons...

        The ponies down below did not flee. The citizens of Dredgemane did not panic. As they saw the same fires that consumed what was most precious to them fill the sky with a pulsating light of many colors, they stood frozen in the Grave of Consus, being pulled upwards as if unified by one singular, mesmerized gaze. The sepulchers of that town lingered upon the brink of a new and unfathomable rapture.

        Up above, on the rooftops...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...the last pony proudly smiled. Her amber eyes lit up as she glanced aside and roared above the screaming air of the town. “It's time.” Her copper wings shot out.

        “Go forth!” Brevis shouted and cackled ecstatically through the noise, noise, noise. “Go forth and conquer, you beautiful, crazy fillies!”

        “Heeeheee—Yaay!” Pinkie Pie practically pounced onto Harmony's backside and pumped a bright hoof through the air. “Zecchy or bust!”

        “Hang tight!” Harmony sneered as she carried her anchor, galloped over the edge of the rooftop, and glided through the color-stabbed air of the town.

        “Live in the moment! Exalt the moment!” the blue mule howled after them, drowned joyously in the rainbow cacophony exploding everywhere. “Be daring! Be dangerous! But most of all...”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “...be alive!”

        Harmony gritted her teeth as she steered and spiraled and spun her way through the bright flashes of fireworks all around her heated glide over the lengths of Dredgemane. Frothing clouds of red and green and blue shimmered all around her, thundering and boiling. Hidden from the eyes of Dredgemaners below—both suspicious and enraptured—the last pony pierced the joyful chaos, threading her way through the prismatic miasma like she would navigate a Wasteland stormfront. Instead of a tracking down a dome of moonrock, Harmony coasted her way toward a three-story, steel-reinforced building in a deep trench down below. The Headquarters of the Dredgemane Militia lingered beyond sight.

        “Weeeeee!” Pinkie Pie clung to her with one hoof and flailed the other through the air like an ecstatic cowgirl. “Yeaaaaah! Ride 'em Har-Har! Heeheehee!” Her cheeks exploded from an everlasting grin that glistened in the rainbow splashes of joy all around them. “Best. Night. Everrrrrr!”

        “But Miss Pie!” Harmony snarled as she expertly dodged a bright explosion, twirled around a second, and skirted past a third. “I swear, every night to you is the 'best night ever!'”

        “Heehee! I know!” Pinkie Pie grinned and clung to her winged companion's backside, nuzzling her neck from behind like a trusting foal. “And they are... forever and ever...”

        Something burned inside the last pony, something hotter than the chaotic, dangerous flashes flanking her daredevil flight. She thought of many things. She thought of Spike's eternal lavender flowers. She thought of Bruce's wheezing laugh, of Pitt's bald spot, and of Gilda's ridiculous bomber jacket. Then she thought of a smiling face from beyond the bars of an arcane vault. That smile would have been proud of Scootaloo—the orphan of time realized—for building the rainbow signal, because even though none of the dead ponies saw it, the end of ponies did, and she deserved it. Soon, that smile filled her own lips, and it would have gone on forever... if only the scavenger from the future didn't have a task to accomplish, a zebra to save, and several sickly children to donate that same smile to.

        Harmony held her breath, and her flight became a dive, and her dive became a scream, carrying her and Pinkie, daring to pierce the madness of the night, daring to do the impossible, daring to fall...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        One guard saw them. Gazing up under a rattling helmet, the young Dredgemaner gasped to see the amber blur soaring through the mad fireworks of the night. Gasping, the militia pony nervously reached for his net gun and aimed towards the spectrally-assaulted sky.

        Right then, the lamppost above him exploded in a flurry of multicolored sparks. Blinded, he let out an anguished cry and stumbled into two guards standing next to him. The three members of the militia collapsed in a confused heap, eliciting spontaneous laughter from the crowd.

        The sound of cackling spread like hysterical wildfire—in tandem with row after row of suddenly sparkling lampposts—as every source of torchlight in the ravines of Dredgemane bled in a rainbow series of explosions towards the heart of Town Square...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...where a stupified Breathstar was stumbling down the wooden steps of his scaffold, nearly tripping on the silken edges of his robe. He spun about and stared with disbelief while rainbow-sparkling lampposts added to the chaos of the colorful fireworks shooting overhead. He was further stabbed to hear a roar of a different thunder filling the expanse of Town Square with a bizarre sound, an alien sound, a joyful sound.

        “Stop it!” The Counselor of Dredgemane snarled. “Stop it, you insufferable children! Stop laughing!” His commandments were drowned out by the rainbow bursts that boomed with five times as much ferocity as his own voice ever could manage, pulpit or no pulpit. “This is supposed to be a time of worshipping Gultophine, not madness! Cease your exclamations! You insult the Alicorn of life with your giggles and chortles and—!”

        A gigantic explosion—piercing the fireworks—lit up above him. The Bishop shrieked girlishly and covered his trembling, horned head as a fountain of brightly colored confetti fell over his dark mane. He glanced up, along with several gasping Dredgemaners, in time to see a cloaked figure atop the City Council building, reloading a cannon with another explosive ball of streamers.

        “Look!” One voice out of several lit the air.

        “The Royal Grand Biv!”

        “It is!”

        “No way!”

        “What's it doing here?”

        “I swear to Celestia! He's unstoppable!”

        “Mommy! Daddy! This is the best Gultophine's Harvest ever!”

        “Snkkkt—Hahahaha!”

        “Heeheehee!”

        Breathstar shook. Breathstar quivered. Breathstar fumed. “Everypony!” He spat through the air and pointed an angry fist towards the figure atop the City Council building while frowning in the militia ponies' direction. “Catch that Biv—!”

        He shrieked as another explosion of multi-colored party favors lit up above him. This time, it had been launched from another part of town far from the City Council building. Breathstar, Haymane, and Sladeburn spun to see the Royal Grand Biv standing miraculously across the Town Square in a blink, wielding a smoking cannon.

        “H-How...?” Sladeburn sputtered, glancing blankly from Haymane to Breathstar to the flabbergasted Council members. “Oh Elektra alive! There's more than one of them! There's an entire friggin' company of Bivs! Dang it all—”

        Another explosion interrupted this lucid statement, as yet another shadow launched a cannon of confetti from the south side of the Square. The bonfire-lit crowd surged and murmured excitedly as militia ponies stumbled their way through the bodies in a desperate attempt to reach all three lofty shadows at once. The Royal Grand Bivs merely played with them, toyed with them, hopping in cyclonic, counter-clockwork fashion from one rooftop to another, firing off their party cannons into the great chaotic night of fireworks, adding to the prismatic insanity as the Dredgemane trinity reeled in helpless shock.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        At this point, a young and mesmerized Deacon Dawnhoof was standing up on his rear limbs, propping himself breathlessly to the lid of the thin window, staring up from cobblestone level to witness the many colored explosions lighting the air of Dredgemane like a great, joyous battlefield. Sparks and fireworks and streamers flew through the air. The Grave of Consus had become a frenzied party, and the young cleric-in-training felt his heart pounding with a euphoria he had never felt before.

        The candle atop the table of the barren place had snuffed itself out. The unicorn hardly noticed. He glanced his warm chestnut eyes across the names of dead ponies in the cobblestone just beneath his gaze. The bright rainbow flashes lit the chiseled letters with a renewed vigor, like melting ice to sugar water, something that could dare ghosts into dancing.

        He couldn't help it. At the end of an exhaled prayer, he smiled... and he kept on smiling.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Harmony's copper hooves landed in a dark alley, echoing with the sudden thunder and laughter of a brightly painted Dredgemane. Panting, she relaxed her wings, set Pinkie down, and galloped over to the edge of the corridor. She squatted low and craned her neck around the edge of the nearby granite building. She squinted her amber eyes across the street and saw the steel-frame of the Militia Headquarters.

        Right then, the entire building's worth of reinforcements were presently scampering out of the structure. Three dozen militia ponies were nervously slapping on the last of their armor in mid-gallop as they struggled to answer the much-needed call in Town Square. The City was going up in rainbow-colored smoke. Every able-bodied guard pony was needed to combat the unfathomable waves of chaos assaulting the town, and that left the shell of the Headquarters...

        “Empty,” Harmony murmured. A devilish smile. “Well, it worked, Pinkie. If I had a catch-phrase, I'd sooooo be saying it with a smirk right now.”

        “Uhm...” Pinkie Pie blinked innocently. “'Narf?'”

        “Let's not waste any time,” Harmony hissed under the thunder of the strobing fireworks and yanked the hood of her brown cloak over her amber-streaked mane. “Scoot!” She darted out into the street. Pinkie Pie yanked her hood over her fluffy head and bounced after her. Together, the two fillies swiftly sneaked past a trio of guards desperately attempting to snuff out the sparkling mess of a torchlight. The pair flattened themselves against the front of the Headquarters, peered in through the crack of the entranceway, and slipped effortlessly inside.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Haymane watched, his body reduced to a numb slump as he witnessed his beloved city being transformed into a series of laughable rainbow explosions. The Mayor hung off the frame of his wheeled tripod while Bishop Breathstar paced breathlessly and ineffectually before him, spitting and shouting desperate commands to the floundering droves of the Dredgemane militia who were attempting to thread their armored flanks through the crowd to get a better aim at the Royal Grand Bivs above with their net guns.

        “Do not give them another chance to launch their vile, multicolored flak!” the pale unicorn shouted. “Is it enough that they've desecrated Gultophine's Harvest that we let them get away with this pathetic display?!”

        “But Bishop, sir!” one of the younger militia ponies shouted from where he monitored a pair of guards struggling to lean a thick net gun towards the three bounding shadows atop the surrounding rooftops. “They keep moving too fast! We can't afford to miss! Our supply of nets are running low!”

        A plume of screaming, rainbow fireworks blew up behind Breathstar's mane. The priestly stallion flinched as Sladeburn galloped up and replaced the explosion with his own, growling voice.

        “Counselor! You must get a hold of this situation! For the love of Elektra, your militia's letting utter chaos run amok!”

        “Do not remind me, Overseer!” the Bishop snarled and shook a hoof at the guards. “Just fire your blasted weapon, already! Send those vandals off running—”

        As he was shouting this, a cannon fired, but it hardly belonged to any of the militia ponies. A bright flash erupted on one of the rooftops, and a large glob of paint sailed down and exploded over a row of gasping, sputtering guards. Their armor was covered from mane to tail with every dripping color of the spectrum. Outside the range of the splashing liquid, the thickly gathered crowd of Dredgemane citizens broke into instinctual laughter. The guards glanced at each other and their rainbow mess, and a few of them helplessly chuckled as well.

        Bishop Breathstar would have none of it. “Stop laughing, you incompetent delinquents!” His eyes twitched as he roared at the flinching militia. “This night has become a veritable abomination, and I will not have you contribute to it—!”

        His speech was cut short by a second volley of paint that fired from the rooftops and landed directly across his flank. The priest gasped as his rich, silk robes were soiled through and through with viscous, prismatic fluid.

        Haymane's eyes twitched. Sladeburn winced. The crowd shuddered, snorted, and then broke into the loudest howls of laughter yet. Marble Cake's eyes dried in time to tear again, this time from the desperate shakes of her quivering giggles. Mister Irontail doubled over, wheezing forth a lurching breath as his entire body shuddered to produce a rumbling guffaw. The blacksmith's wife leaned against his side to stop from collapsing under her own cackles.

        Breathstar fumed. He roared indistinguishable words at the militia. In a panic, the guards obeyed by firing madly—and blindly—up into the air. A squadron of flailing nets splashed through the sea of fireworks and colors above. The Royal Grand Bivs outran everything—the lights and the ribbons and the sparks—sending the madness of Dredgemane into a brighter and brighter blur as they continued pulling the greatest prank to ever grace the Grave of Consus.

        Meanwhile...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...in the stairwell of the Militia Headquarters basement, Harmony and Pinkie Pie dashed down a winding flight of granite steps. The scavenger from the future slid to a quiet stop in front of a metal door and pressed her head up against it, cautiously and expertly pricking her ear to listen for any signs of movement from beyond the frame—

        Pinkie Pie gracelessly slammed into her.

        “Ooof!” Harmony burst through the door with a loud metal clang. She emerged into the body of the candle-lit basement. Thankfully, the immediate hallway was empty of any remaining guards. Sighing, she cast a brief glare at a nervously smiling Pinkie Pie, then snuck ahead on a soft shuffle of copper hooves.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        A pair of blue eyes fluttered open. Her pointed ears pricking, Zecora sat up in the barren cot of a tiny, metal-barred jail cell. She raised an eyebrow as she awoke to a deep, bass rumble that was coursing through the steel-reinforced body of the building within which she was imprisoned. It felt as though a gigantic storm had erupted beyond the surface of the streets above her. Concentrating hard, the zebra could detect explosions, stomping hooves, and—most haunting of all—an utterly alien sound to the likes of Dredgemane.

        “By the Shadows, is that laughter I hear?” She murmured obligatorily to the walls of the cell. “Is this something I should rejoice in or fear?”

        “Pffft!” A bright, pink face suddenly pressed itself up to the bars across from her. “Seriously, girl?! Are you wacky-doodle in the brain noodle?!”

        “Gaah!” Zecora shrieked and fell out of her cot. Lying on her back with her legs curled like a dead, black-and-white beetle, she seethed and frowned the earth filly's way. “Pinkamena, you gave me quite the start! One of these days you will be the end of my heart!”

        “That's no way to thank the ponies who've come to bust your sun-swirly flank out of the militia tank! Heeheehee!” Pinkie Pie bounced aside and motioned towards a copper pegasus walking up and lowering her cloak's hood. “You tell 'em, Har-Har!”

        “Well...” The last pony exhaled with a smile. “What we lack in punctuality we sure make up for with theatrics, don't you think?”

        “Harmony!” Zecora beamed as she stood up on wobbly limbs. “You are a most righteous blessing!” Her eyes narrowed in a shuddering wince. “The superstition of these Dredgemaners is most distressing! With threats and imprisonment, they've left me quite vexed. I shudder to think what they have in store for me next!”

        “Well, don't you fret a thing, Miss Zecora.” Harmony reached a hoof through the bars and gently patted the zebra's shoulder with a soft smile. “We'll have you out of here in a jiffy. As we speak, we've got all three Royal Grand Bivs distracting the entire city. That gives us an opportunity to—”

        “Hold on for just a second, dear friends.” Zecora blinked confusedly at both Pinkie and Harmony. “There is more than one Biv and with them you have made amends?”

        “Zecora, look...” Harmony sighed as her eyes briefly melted into bored marbles that reflected the prisoner's expression of disbelief. “It's a long enough story as it is without having to discuss it in detail with a rhyming zebra. Let's just bust you out of this cell and then get the hay out of Dodge.”

        “And don't forget Alex!” Pinkie Pie bounced while Harmony fumbled with the lock to the jail cell. She smiled Zecora's way. “Have you seen where Alex has gone?”

        “Forgive my memory for being bleak. I do not know this name of which you speak.”

        “The machine, Zecora,” Harmony said, glaring briefly aside at Pinkie. “Have you seen what became of the healing machine? Y'know, the thing that you, Miss Pie and I spent all of frickin’ yesterday putting together? We heard from Sladeburn's lackeys that the militia may have dumped it down here along with your unfortunate flank.”

        “But we so totally came to free you too, Zecchy!” Pinkie added with a nervous giggle. “Alex was just icing on the cake.”

        “Then this icing you will have to fast, I fear.” Zecora shook her head with a sad look. “I'm sorry, my friends, but the machine is no longer here.”

        Pinkie and Harmony simultaneously blanched at that. They exchanged pale glances, then looked hopelessly at their companion behind the bars.

        “You mean that Alex ran away?!”

        “If it's not here...” Harmony couldn't help but snarl. “Then where the heck is it?!”

        “Please do not fret, my copper salvation. The Dredgemaners merely took it to a new destination.” Zecora smiled proudly. “For I overheard in the middle of the night the guards' decision to move it to another site. It was on account of the Harvest, you see. They must have expected a daring robbery.”

        “The guards aren't half the dum-dums that we half-thought they half-were!” Pinkie exclaimed.

        “Did they say exactly where, Miss Zecora?” Harmony asked in earnest.

        “Yes, though the truth will induce you to frown. It would appear as though they moved the contraption clear across town.” Zecora rubbed a hoof through her mohawk and thought aloud. “The city warehouse on 'Marble End,' I do believe, is where you'll find that which you wish to retrieve.”

        “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie gave the pegasus a worried look. “That is at least twenty blocks away!”

        Harmony gulped. She stared up through the granite ceiling of the candle-lit basement and shuddered. “The rumbling is dying down. The fireworks will be done soon. If we still want the crazy lights and noise to act as cover, we better get friggin' moving—like—right away.”

        “Then leave me, and make haste!” Zecora exclaimed, planting her hooves up against the bars with emphasis. “For the foals' sake, the machine you mustn't waste!”

        “Did we or did we not say that we came here to bust you out?” Harmony frowned and returned to fiddling with the lock. “What the Dredgemaners did to you is cruel and pathetic, Miss Zecora. If anyone deserves a one-way-ticket out of the Grave of Consus, it's you.”

        “Your sympathy is most endearing, friend Harmony. But unless you can pick the lock, this whole plan was merely an absurdity.”

        “Yeah, keep saying that.” Harmony tensed her copper features. With Entropan strength, she snapped the lock clear off the bars and swung the jail cell door open. “There. Busted out. Can we go now?”

        Zecora blinked, her blue eyes twitching fitfully.

        “Heeheehee...” Pinkie Pie leaned in and nuzzled Zecora's cheek, winking at her. “I know what you're thinking, but the real question is 'Can she blend?'”

        “Miss Pie!” Harmony shouted over her flank as she made a brisk gallop for the stairwell. “No dilly-dallying! Let's make like a parasprite and split!”

        “I'll tell you the answer later!” Pinkie waved at the zebra and trotted off. “Come on, Zecchy!”

        Zecora exhaled long and hard and ran after them. “By the Shadows, after this insanity I am never again leaving Everfree....”

        The three equines bolted up the stairs and entered the front atrium of the Militia Headquarters. They galloped briskly towards the wide, double-doors of the building, their only exit.

        “Okay, Zecora, here's the plan. Halfway between here and 'Marble End,' we'll drop you off at one of the streets leading out of Dredgemane. Most of the crowd is located near Town Square, so you shouldn't run into anypony on your way out of the city. From there, head due west through the Grave of Consus, and you should be home free. It's a long journey back to Ponyville, I know, but at least you won't have to worry about Haymane or any of his cohorts treating you like a sack of manure anymore—”

        “I appreciate your words of warning. But I currently do not plan on departing.”

        Harmony stopped in her tracks and gave Zecora a double-take. “Say what?!”

        “But Zecchy, you've been through so much—!” Pinkie began.

        “I do not ask for your approval. Alas, this town cannot afford my removal.” Zecora stared emphatically at the other two. “I thank you kindly for setting me free. But I too wish to help the foals turn healthy. Until our business in Stonehaven is done, I shall not allow myself to be on the run.”

        “Awwwww...” Pinkie Pie's eyes glistened as she cooed, “Has anypony ever told you that you're like the super duper queen of super duper zebras?”

        “Just once, Pinkamena Diane Pie.” Zecora winked at her with a smile. “And suddenly I find it a great title to live by.”

        “Well, the more the merrier, I friggin' guess.” Harmony sighed as she sauntered up to the doors and opened them in a flash. “Let's just save the warm fuzzy compliments for later when we can all afford to give a—” Her amber eyes widened. “Shoot!' She slammed the door shut.

        “What?!” Pinkie Pie gasped. “Is it bats?!”

        “No, it's not friggin' bats!” Harmony hissed, sweating suddenly through to her brown cloak. She gulped and opened the door just a sneeze. Both her anchor and the zebra craned their necks to see through the crack as well. They gasped at the sight of a solid line of guards—numbering beyond two dozen—who were presently marching with brisk speed towards the front entrance of the Militia Headquarters. Harmony groaned, “Okay, just what in Celestia's flaming flank is going on here?!”

        “I thought the fireworks and the Bivs were distracting them!” Pinkie shrieked everypony's thoughts out loud.

        “They appear to be lacking in their weaponry!” Zecora hissed. “Perhaps they have come back to restock from this repository?”

        “Well that's just perfect.” Harmony grumbled under her breath. She flashed a look to her anchor. “Miss Pie, is there another way out of this building?”

        “This place has a jail, Har-Har. The only way out is the way in.” She gulped and gnawed on a pink lip. “You could... uhm... m-maybe make an exit?”

        At those words, Zecora glanced at Harmony's Entropan hooves, then at the pegasus' face. She raised an eyebrow.

        Harmony exhaled in a slump. “Yeah, perhaps. But not without them seeing us. We can't afford to let them follow us to the warehouse where Alex—I mean the machine is.”

        “We must make a decision immediately. They are approaching this vicinity!”

        Harmony bit her lip and sweated, staring out the crack in the door as the guards marched closer and closer, their faces becoming discernible underneath their rattling helmets. “Come on, think. Think...” She murmured to herself, then shut her eyes and hissed into the crucible of her firing synapses. “For the love of oats, Princess Entropa, help me out here—”

        Then, almost on cue, a loud braying noise could be heard immediately outside the building. Harmony's amber eyes flew open. She pushed the door slightly more ajar and was shocked to see a cloaked blue figure literally pouncing into the surging sea of armored militia ponies.

        “Holy crap on a crap zeppelin!” the last pony exclaimed.

        “Br-Brevis!” Pinkie squeaked.

        Sure enough, the mule was throwing himself into the armored flanks of the many clambering guards. He crowd-surfed them with dirty hooves and yellow teeth swaying beneath sparkling torchlight and firework flashes.

        “BraHahaHaha!” He yelped, bellowed, and laughed all the same. “The fates smile upon me! For I am finally taking a bath! And the water is made sudsy with the pathetic bubbles of a herd's army of pimply teenagers!”

        The guards shouted and thrashed about, struggling to contain the thrashing, bucking mule in the midst of them.

        “Oh what the hay?!”

        “First the Bivs, and now this?!”

        “It's that bum! Dang it all—Ow! My head!”

        “Stop kicking, you lousy freeloader!”

        “Freeloader?! Free of all loads of inane sacrament, you mean?!” Brevis shoved and bumped his way into the many armored shapes while laughing maniacally. “I'll have you know that I was raised on a freeloader farm! We planted seeds of whimsy and watched them sprout into dream-colored stalks that we ate off the plates of gods! But what worthless crumbs do you eat from and are they even worthy of a doggy bag, you hypocrites?! Verily, I baptize you with the holy water of ages. Ptooie!”

        “Augh! Ewww—That's it! We don't have time for this! Put him in shackles!”

        “We got you now, ya creep!”

        “Ughh—Elektra Alive, he smells!”

        “Just grab him! Just—Augh!”

        The guards reeled as he bucked them viciously while being engulfed in several dozen hooves at once. “Why do you fight true conviction, oh Dredgemaners! I am your secret Bishop come to administer grace! Ptooie! I baptize thee! Ptooie! Once more unto the bray! BraHa! Ooof!” His words were finally muffled as the entire company of guards piled on top of him.

        “Wh-What's he doing?!” a very nervous, very panicked Pinkie Pie stammered.

        Harmony's eyes twitched. In a solid breath, she said, “He's giving us a window of opportunity.” She glanced over her flank. “Let's move it! Come on!” She galloped out.

        Zecora galloped after her. Glancing back at a frozen Pinkie Pie, she paused, shuffled back, yanked the yelping filly by the hood of her cloak, and dragged her along with the leading pegasus.

        All three darted directly into the shadow of a nearby alleyway, beyond the sight of the guards who were too distracted in accosting the rampaging bum beneath them. Before the fillies could make a complete exit, Pinkie Pie lingered behind, her teeth clattering as she stared fitfully into the fray before the Headquarters.

        “Miss Pie! Let's move it!”

        “But... B-But...” The candy-colored pony gulped. “Th-They got Brevis...!”

        “He has made a noble sacrifice!” Zecora exclaimed. “But unless we hurry, it will not suffice!”

        “We can't just leave the poor sap—!”

        “Miss Pie, the foals, remember?” Harmony hissed under the lingering screams of fireworks. She clutched one hoof around her anchor's waist. “We gotta get the machine and we gotta heal them. Everything will change, so long as we get to the foals! Brevis knows what he's doing! We'll get to him later, I promise!”

        “But—”

        “No more delays!” Harmony wrapped her other limb over Zecora's flank. “Miss Zecora, are you scared of heights?”

        “My dear friend, why do you ask—?” Before she could even contemplate a rhyme, she and Miss Pie were being hoisted high over the streets of Dredgemane via copper wings. “Yaaaugh!” she helplessly shrieked into the sea of colorful explosions all around.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Dear Counselor...” Haymane uttered, his voice drowned out by the mayhem of the grand glowing vista that was Dredgemane Town Square. “Bishop Breathstar, I am speaking to you—”

        A soiled and furious unicorn stomped past the petite figure of his superior, too enraged by the taunting Bivs to pay the Mayor any heed. “Confound it! Captain, take your team up to one of the rooftops and get on an even hoof with those vandals!”

        “But Bishop, the fireworks are making it too dangerous to climb any structure—”

        “The Royal Grand Bivs are fearless! Why can't you be?! In the name of Gultophine's Spirit, I command you to climb up and take down those—”

        “Counselor, we must think up a different strategy—!” a frowning Haymane tried to speak.

        Sladeburn merely stomped up and drowned out the city leader's words. “Breathstar, if you don't put an end to this, I have the good mind to set dynamite to those blasted rooftops!”

        “I am trying my best, you insufferable rock-digger! Perhaps if you helped me clear the crowds some so that we may have greater room to navigate—”

        “Clear the crowds?! Breathstar, this was your insufferable ritual to begin with! Do I look like one of your ushers?!”

        Haymane wheeled himself up between the two towering stallions and attempted to grab their attention. “Gentlecolts! Please! If you would just calm yourselves—”

        “How dare you insult this most sacred of Harvests!” the unicorn sneered into the dark workhorse's brow. “You're almost as bad as the Bivs!”

        “You compare me to those pathetic vagabonds?! I think somepony's robe is on too tight!”

        “Do not incur my wrath, Overseer!”

        “Or what?! You'll preach me to death?!”

        Haymane snarled. He was about to shout, when a breathless guard pony ran up through the crowd of awestruck spectators under the flash of fireworks and confetti streamers. “B-Bishop Breathstar! Counselor, sir!”

        “What is it?!” The unicorn spun with a snarl.

        “It's the prison!” The guard panted and struggled to stand on four limbs as he spoke, “There has been a break-in! The zebra witch doctor is gone!”

        “Gone?!” Breathstar's horn shimmered furiously. His eyes rolled back and he ran a hoof over his paint-stained face. “Blessed Gultophine, give me strength...”

        “Who would have the audacity to help that zebra sideshow attraction escape?” Sladeburn remarked. His eyes dilated, and he growled, “The pegasus...”

        “This was inevitable,” Haymane said with a shudder. He stared down into the confetti-littered cobblestone. The gray sepulcher lengths of Dredgemane were stained with a mosaic of colors. “If we had been subtler in our chastisement of the Canterlotlian and her allies, we wouldn't have this swift and merciless vengeance being dealt us tonight. I think we should—”

        “Round up four companies of the militia!” Breathstar outright ignored Haymane's words. He stood angrily before the guard and grumbled, “Send them out into the streets! The Bivs are a mere distraction! We must find that insufferable pegasus and her heretical, zebra accomplice before they do something to threaten the security of this town!”

        “What security?!” Sladeburn exclaimed, waving a dark hoof towards the fireworks that were only then starting to sputter and die. “This is an utter laughing stock!”

        Haymane opened his mouth to say something—

        “We must not give in to the Bivs' wicked agenda!” Breathstar retorted. “Right now, this town is full of chaos but completely devoid of answers. We need to find out what that pegasus is up to!”

        “There's another development, Bishop,” the guard said. He gulped and remarked, “Somepony was found at the scene of the jailbreak. A possible accomplice.”

        “Somepony?”

        “Well... 'some mule' is more like it.”

        Breathstar stared into prismatic space. Then, with a blink, he slowly and icily frowned. “Bring me to the Militia Headquarters, without delay...”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Marble End” was a circular patch of cobblestone built into a granite pocket at the northern edge of town. The lofty wooden office of Haymane was within sight, basking above in the twin penumbra formed by the starlight and fading fireworks over Dredgemane.

        Touching down on copper hooves, Harmony planted her anchor and the zebra down before the broad doors of a giant wooden warehouse. Her two companions wobbled dizzily as the time traveler squinted her amber eyes up at the three-story structure.

        “Well, it's certainly broad enough to be a barn. I guess that'll make the next part easy.” She stepped back fifteen paces and grinded her hooves against the cobblestone.

        “Harmony, I am amazed at your invulnerable skin.” Zecora fought a vomitous sensation and steadied herself. She weakly murmured, “It is like you have a goddess built within.”

        “You couldn't be much further from the truth, desert dame.” Harmony briefly smirked and tensed her muscles. “Now stand back as I make things easier for the three of us.” With a snarl, she galloped murderously towards the building with a flurry of Entropan limbs.

        “Heehee! Hey, Har-Har! Look!” Pinkie Pie opened one of the doors loosely to the dark interior. “The silly thing's unlocked—”

        “Gaaaaaaah!” Harmony tried to stop. She skidded, stumbled, and flew like a bounding missile through the black opening her anchor had just made in the entrance. A loud, crashing noise emanated from deep inside the supply building.

        Pinkie Pie winced. “Oops. I guess I should have given you a warning.” Belatedly, her ears flopped, her eyes fluttered, and her knees twitched. “Oh hey! There it is! Heeheehee!”

        “Let us make haste!” Zecora shoved the candy-colored filly into the warehouse. “There is no time to waste!”

        Inside the building, a copper pegasus was struggling to disentangle herself from a wooden yoke that she had collapsed into. She tossed Pinkie a brief glare before ultimately snapping the structure to splinters and hobbling up onto even hooves. Along with her two companions, Harmony trotted down the lengths of several metal aisles. The rusted shelves were mostly barren, housing a random box or two every few paces.

        “Whew... This place is like a robbed tomb,” the time traveler murmured. “Just what gives?”

        “Dredgemane is in the middle of a rock harvest,” Pinkie Pie explained matter-of-factly. “Most of the city's commissioned tools are in the hooves of local farmers this time of year.”

        “If anything, it should make the machine easier to find,” Zecora said. “You keep your eyes peeled and I'll keep mine.”

        “Come on... Come on...” Harmony took wing and flew down the aisles at a swift pace, keeping within forty meters of Pinkie Pie as she dutifully checked every metal shelf and platform with twitching, anxious ambers. “We don't have time for a friggin' game of finders keepers. Where is the dang thing?!”

        “Alexxxx!” Pinkie Pie cupped a hoof to the side of her mouth. “Yooo hooo! Alexxxxx?!” She blinked. “Now, if I was a flaming vacuum cleaner, where would I be hiding?” She looked every which way, paused, then stood on her haunches. She clapped her hooves twice. Silence. “Nope. Guess that didn't work either.”

        “Ponies, look in this direction!” Zecora called from the far corner of the warehouse. “It appears to be a box of supreme construction!”

        “And it's empty...” Harmony said, squinting as she hovered down beside the zebra and beheld a giant metallic case stamped with the Dredgemane City Seal. “If I didn't know better, I'd say this was a lock box. Miss Pie? Is this the sort of thing Haymane would have important city materials secured in?”

        “Erm... Maaaaaaaaybe...” The bright-maned anchor winced as she sauntered up. “I've only been in this place once with Daddy. They sometimes put samples of freshly mined arcanium in this thing before sending them off on their merry way to Canterlot.”

        “Well, the machine's not here...” Harmony said with a growing snarl in her voice. “What's that mean, you think?!”

        “It's gone!” a voice gasped from behind the three of them.

        Zecora, Pinkie Pie, and the time traveler spun as one. Their eyes widened at the sight of four guards suddenly standing inside the warehouse, staring at them, their dark armor slumped over their limbs as they wilted in disbelief. For a brief moment, the militia ponies were more distraught by the fact that the lock box was empty than by the sheer presence of the three intruders.

        “Oh Goddess Gultophine, have mercy. They took it!” Another guard's voice squeaked.

        Harmony's brow furrowed. “Who took what?”

        “That no good pegasus freakjob from Canterlot took the machine and obviously ran off with it—” The guard stopped as his gaze centered on the last pony and her two companions. “Oh. Well, crud.”

        “Look,” Harmony raised her hooves. “Let's talk this over. A lot of crap is going down in this town tonight, and there's no need for us to get bent out of shape over—”

        “What did you do with the machine?!” Another guard squawked, raising a glinting polearm. “First we hear you bust out the zebra, and now we find you here retrieving your weapon to unleash mayhem on Dredgemane?!”

        “Does it look like we're retrieving anything?!” Harmony gestured madly towards the empty lock box. “If anypony should be explaining where the machine went, it's you guys!”

        “Hey, we were sent to check on the warehouse after the Bishop found out about the jailbreak! We're not the rotten apples here!”

        “Apples! Oooh... I could so go for some caramel right now!”

        “Miss Pie...”

        The lead guard gestured towards his comrades. All four aimed a phalanx of net guns and polearms at the intruders. “We've giving you on the count of three to tell us where you hid the weapon!”

        “Dang it all! It's not a weapon!”

        “One...”

        “She's right! Alex is more like a flaming vacuum cleaner with an elephant truck studded with moonrock noserings!”

        “Dear friends, I am deeply troubled. Explain to me this 'Alex' before my confusion is doubled.”

        “Two...”

        “Oh for the love of—We don't have the machine!” Harmony growled with her copper brow furrowed. “If we did, we'd be gone by now, don't you think?”

        “Three! Dredgemaners, attack—!” The guard thew a hoof forward—

        Pinkie Pie suddenly slid over to Zecora and forced the zebra's head forward in a deep bow. The candy-colored filly stuck her hooves into the equine's black-and-white mohawk. “Sandipedes!”

        The four guards froze in their tracks. Their armor rattled. “I beg your pardon?”

        “Sandipedes!” Pinkamena Diane Pie hissed, her eyes narrowing into icy sapphires that glared in a sinister fashion across the four militia ponies' faces. “They're like centipedes, only they live in the sand, and they're eeeeeevil!”

        “Pinkie Pie! What are you—?!” Zecora sputtered towards the ground. She tried to raise her head but the bright pony hoisted her neck back down and parted her mohawk some more.

        “In their Zebraharan homeland, zebras breed these creatures from the larvae, and then they give them a home in their mane so that they can launch them in a swarm at a hoof's drop!” Pinkie Pie slurred with dreadful menace. “Which of you vile Dredgemaners dare incur the wrath of the sandipedes?!”

        “Dear Elektra, I hate zebra hocus pocus...” One guard shivered, his polearm shaking fitfully at the end of his hooves. “J-Just tell us what you want, and we'll hear you out!”

        “Really?” Pinkie Pie smiled wide. “Hey, any of you got some munchies on you?! All of this running around and fireworks and stuff is working up an appetite!” The zebra in her grasp groaned and groaned.

        The lead guard snarled. “She's bluffing!”

        “Yeah, you think?” Harmony frowned. The time traveler pointed behind the guards' flank. “Why don't you ask Haymane's opinion?”

        “M-Mayor?” The young guards all turned—

        “Haaaugh!” Harmony bucked the nearest guard with a pair of Entropan hooves.

        “Waaaaaieee!” He flailed as he soared through the length of the warehouse and crashed through a pile of wooden boxes. The other three beneath him reeled, yelled a warcry, and charged ahead.

        Harmony spun, tossed her entire cloak off her “naked” body, and flung it over the face of one guard. The militia pony galloped blindly into a metal rack with a clang. In the meantime, Harmony twirled into another guard who was aiming a net gun at her. She swiftly stuck a copper wing out and slammed him in the chest. Bending over with a wheeze, he aimed his net gun point blank into the floor of the warehouse. Harmony reached her hoof in between his limbs and pulled the weapon's trigger. The cannon fired, and the expulsion of the net gun propelled its user backwards with a shriek so that he fell through a pile of rock harvesting equipment.

        The fourth pony had pounced upon Pinkie Pie, shoving her off of Zecora. Pinkie gasped as she was forced up against a concrete support pillar, the polearm jutting sharply into the nape of her cloaked neck.

        “Don't either of you move!” The young guard exclaimed, shivering as he held the time traveler's anchor hostage. He stared off against Harmony and Zecora as the second guard floundered under a blinding cloak in the background. “We're staying here until backup comes to arrest you! It's bad enough that we have the Royal Grand Bivs tripling in numbers and attacking this city without you having to—”

        “Uhm, can you let me go?!” Pinkie Pie asked from under his weight.

        “Shut it! You're not in control here!”

        “Well, it's just that you've woken up Gummy, and I was kind of hoping he'd be asleep for this...”

        “Gummy?” The guard looked up. From underneath Pinkie's hood, the pony's mane shook and parted ways. A wall-eyed reptile poked its head out sleepily, yawned, and fell forward so that its jaws clamped wetly over the guard's face. “Aaaaah!” The guard stumbled away from the candy-colored filly and reeled across the warehouse. “Getitoff! Getitoff! Getitoff!”

        Zecora stifled a snicker. Harmony rolled her eyes.

        “Help me! An alligator is trying to eat me!” The guard spat.

        “Pfft—Well duh!” Pinkie Pie spat. “You didn't think I needed the munchies for me, did you?”

        The guard gasped and flailed and tumbled his way into Harmony. The last pony effortlessly yanked the alligator off his face. The guard gasped, sputtered, and ran his hooves over his drool-stained but decidedly gator-less snout. “Oh... Oh praise Gultophine! Thank you! You are an angel—”

        Harmony punched him in the gut.

        “Ooof!” The guard lost wind and keeled over, unconscious, to the floor.

        “Here. I think you dropped something,” Harmony slurred as she tossed the tiny green reptile Pinkie's way.

The filly bounced and caught Gummy with her forehead. The alligator yawned and crawled back into her fluffy mane. “Heeheehee! Have alligator, will travel!”

        “Meh.”

        In the meantime, the second guard finally... finally disentangled himself from the copper pegasus' discarded cloak. He blinked fitfully through the lengths of the warehouse, turned, and found himself staring point-blank into the snout of a “Zebraharan witch doctor.”

        “Boo,” Zecora uttered.

        “Daah!” The guard spun and ran straight into a concrete pillar. He was out like a light.

        Silence fell. Harmony eventually cleared her throat. “Well, now that we've courageously wrestled with Dredgemane's Finest, what are we going to do about the machine?”

        “I could have sworn it would be in this place,” Zecora said with a frown. “The guards' words I did not misplace.”

        “Nopony's doubting you, Miss Zecora. But, if I didn't know better, I'd say some other burglar got to the machine before we did.”

        “But who would want to steal Alex?” Pinkie Pie pouted. She blinked, then blushed. “Erm... b-besides us, that is. Teehee.”

        Just then, a roar of approaching hoofsteps lingered from directly outside the warehouse. The three fillies stirred with unease.

        “I do believe we must relocate ourselves from hence!” Zecora murmured. “It sounds like too many for us to take advantage of their incompetence!”

        “Nnngh...” Harmony spun with a growing growl from deep inside her gut. She gave the large, empty Dredgemane container an exasperated look. “Brand me with a rusted horseshoe. I hate this crap! Why can't plans ever work out simply? This idea was certainly stupid enough to have worked!”

        “There is a time to mope and there is a time to fret.” Zecora nudged the pegasus towards a side door. “Let us move, for not all hope is lost yet.”

        “Yeah, but move where?!” Harmony snarled as she sauntered towards the door.

        “Anywhere but here!” Pinkie Pie gulped as the approaching hoofsteps grew in volume. “Gummy doesn't like crowded spaces! Believe me, you don't wanna be directly underneath a baby alligator when he's scared!” She rushed ahead and bucked the side door open. “Let's boogie!”

        Harmony followed her anchor with Zecora in tow. Just as the dimly-lit aisles of the warehouse filled with the echoes of invading guards' hooves...

~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...the three fillies burst out into a thin alley directly behind the building. There, they almost immediately pratfalled into—

        “A wagon?!” Harmony's jaw dropped. She and her two companions breathlessly stared at a four-wheeled, wooden cart lying in front of them. A grand, black tarp covered the entire rear of the vehicle. Judging from the trails in the dust below, the thing had just been pulled up to the rear of the building a few naked minutes ago. “Where did this thing come from?! Could it belong to the militia?”

        “Nuh huh!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed, nervously glancing down the end of the alleyway and towards the torchlit street dancing with the hoofsteps of several guards. “They don't haul anything around that they can't carry on their flanks. But does it matter? Har-Har, they're almost breathing down our necks! These aren't the good kind of goosebumps I'm having!”

        “Shhh!” Zecora hissed. “Ponies, I fear our fate is bleak! They're so close that they can hear us speak!”

        “We take to the streets!” Pinkie hoarsely whispered.

        “Fat chance!” Harmony snarled under her breath. “They'll see us at this rate!” Her eyes twitched and she regarded the wagon once more. “Here!” She reached in and raised the tarp up with a copper hoof. “Let's hide! Quick!”

        Zecora merely gawked at the idea. “Have you gone mad?!”

        The scavenger from the future nodded. “Like a bat out of—”

        “Eeek!” Pinkie Pie shrieked at the thought.

        “Shhh! Inside!” Harmony practically tossed her anchor into the rear of the wagon. Zecora gracefully climbed in, and just as the shadows of guards loomed into view beyond the alley's entrance, Harmony slid into...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        ...the back of the wagon and covered the three of them with the tarp. The burning aura of Gultophine's Harvest faded into a diffused glow as the opaque material obscured the madness of the night over the fillies' trembling manes. The fireworks had easily died, and the sudden absence of chaotic thunder made the naked hoofsteps of the shuffling guards beyond the wagon all the more loud and imposing.

        Pinkie Pie's teeth chattered. Gummy's wall-eyed face briefly poked out of her mane hair as she reached out and clung, shivering, to Zecora. The zebra held the earth pony tight as she stared quietly through the black material, her blue eyes darting within her deadpan face as she awaited the fate of the three equine souls. Harmony's Entropan wings coiled tightly—as did her copper limbs—as she prepared to spring her body violently outward at the first moment a random guard might happen to uncover them.

        For the longest time, however, no single militia pony did just that. The three heard guards' movement, heard their desperate shuffles, heard their stammering voices. Then, out from the midst of the muffled bedlam, one set of hoofsteps decidedly marched closer, heading towards the covered ears of the three outlaws.

        “Mmmmm...” Pinkie Pie began to whimper. A black-and-white striped hoof covered her mouth. Zecora and Harmony exchanged worried glances.

        The hoofsteps came to a stop right at the edge of the wagon. There was a pause. The clopping then resumed, orbiting the cart before coming to another stop, this time at the front of the vehicle. There was a tugging at the reins, and the wagon broke into a gentle roll, being dragged suddenly over the rattling cobblestones of the street lying blindly beyond sight of the tarp.

        The last pony blinked, her amber eyes narrowing. She squinted across the dark rear of the cart at her two companions. “The cart's moving,” she obligatorily whispered. “We're being taken somewhere...”

        “This certainly does not feel right,” Zecora murmured. “Who would make a delivery on such a hectic night?”

        From beyond the obscurity of the streets beyond, there was the shouting voice of a guard: “Hey, you there! Halt!” A series of loud clopping noises galloped up to the cart as the entire vehicle lurched to a stop.

        Harmony gulped. She muttered, “I think we're all about to find out.”

        The hoofsteps of two, possibly three guards stomped up to the side of the vehicle, their armor rattling just beyond the lengths of the flimsy tarp hiding the three girls. “Why are you making a delivery during Gultophine's Harvest?! Don't you know that Mayor Haymane and the Council forbids labor on this holy occasion?”

        The voice that retorted was a deep, slurring thing. “You call this 'Gultophine's Harvest'? You sorry sack of yahoos have let this day turn into a drunken rendition of a Wonderbolts Airshow. Trust me, I'm an expert on intoxicated absurdity.” The wagon-puller's voice took on an even more caustic tone. “As for my 'forbidden labor', I'm delivering much-needed medical supplies to Stonehaven, a place that can't afford to 'celebrate' Gultophine's Harvest. Now, need I remind you pimple-faced ignoramuses just whose idea it was to establish the sanctity of the city's sanitarium to begin with?!”

        “Ahem. No. No need. If Haymane's hospital needs its supplies, far be it from us to impale such a process.”

        “'Impede.'”

        “Huh?”

        “You meant to say 'impede such a process', not—Nnngh—You know what? Forget it. Go find yourselves a thesaurus, ya lousy teenagers. Celestia knows you'll have much better luck grabbing that than the Biv.”

        “Hrmmm... Be on the lookout, sir. There're foul miscreants about.”

        “Aren't there always?”

        The guards' hoofstops clopped away, and soon the wagon was rolling off down the cobblestone street once more. Zecora blinked across the dark recesses of the tarp-covered vehicle. “By the Shadows, unless my mind is sore, I do believe I've heard that voice before.”

        “Of course you have,” Harmony slurred. She navigated the intoxicating fumes of whimsy before blossoming forth a drunken smile. “Vimbert, you hollow-horned rascal, what are you up to?”

        Pinkie Pie suddenly gasped. “It's Alex!”

        Harmony blinked across the way and whispered to her, “Vimbert, Miss Pie. It's Vimbert.”

        “No!” Pinkie Pie grinned wildly, slid across the wooden bed of the cart, and pulled a canvas blanket off the unmistakable shape of a black metal healing device. “It's Alex, see?!”

        Zecora did a double-take, her blue eyes wide.

        Something twitched in the last pony's copper forehead. She reached across the wagon and ran her hoof across the familiar body of her own hoofcraft, from its bottle of glowing orange flame to its sparkling thunderpearl to its long, runestoned neck. She glanced with disbelief at Pinkie Pie and her anchor smiled cheekishly back, positively glowing pink.

        “What are the odds, Har-Har?! Huh? What are the odds?”

        “I don't know...” Harmony smirked. “But somehow I don't believe we have a mathematician to thank.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Through the black gates and before the gray granite steps of Stonehaven, an orange unicorn in a dark jacket pulled the wooden wagon to a stop. The rest of Dredgemane glowed brightly beyond the lengths of the serpentine trenches behind him. The air above the Grave of Consus had been joyously stained with a rainbow-colored mist on account of the combined smoke of the dying fireworks and sparkling lampposts.

        Mutely, the former college professor disentangled himself from the reins of the vehicle. He shuffled over towards the side doors along a stretch of the building's first floor and opened them wide. Suddenly pausing, he sighed long and hard. He then spun about to face the wagon and leaned back against the doorframe with his blue eyes hanging in a bored squint.

        “Are you ladies coming out or do I have to drag you out by your nostril hairs?”

        Silence.

        He folded his forelimbs and frowned. “Well?!”

        The tarp shuffled. One head poked out, then a second, then a third. An earth pony, a pegasus, and a zebra limply stumbled out of the wagon with the metal contraption in tow.

        “Mister Vimbert...” Harmony stared at him.

        “Who'd you expect?” He grunted. “Mystery Janitor X?”

        “Heehee! Oh Bert!” Pinkie Pie bounced up and smiled in his face. “I'd sooooo hug you right now if knew you wouldn't burn to the touch!”

        “I'm afraid I do not understand this turn of events.” Zecora trotted out in the open, glancing curiously at the orange unicorn. “Harmony, is this another one of your arrangements?”

        “I wish I could say it was...” Harmony spoke aside to her black-and-white friend. All the while, she stared quizzically at their brown-maned savior. “Mister Vimbert, do you realize that you just single-hoofedly saved the machine, my friends, the foals' lives, and perhaps all of Dredgemane's fate?”

        “Sure, why not?”

        “Uhhh...Don't take this the wrong way and crud...” The last pony leaned forward, squinting hard. “Can I ask why?”

        Vimbert ran a hoof through his bangs beneath the shattered horn. He sighed and produced a limp shrug. “Mmmf... Meh. The bar was closed today.”

        “The bar was closed today...”

        “You heard me.”

        “So, uh, is this what you do when you're sober?”

        “No.” He frowned. “This is what I do when I'm stupid.” He pointed a hoof towards the glowing reaches of Dredgemane's Town Square beyond the granite trenches. “Haymane's militia will come crashing down on whatever silly plan you've got going like the hoof of an angry Princess Celestia. Quite frankly, I think I just ended whatever peaceful existence I had going here.”

        Harmony raised an eyebrow as her lips curved. “And just what peaceful existence was that, pray tell?”

        “Aye, there's the rub,” he said with a yawn.

        “Uh huh, that's really cool,” Pinkie Pie unemotionally droned, then in one bounce she spun to face the last pony. “Let's introduce Alex to the foals already!”

        “Zecora...?” The last pegasus subtly pleaded.

        “But of course, Harmony. I shall assist gladly.” Zecora lifted one end of the machine and Pinkie lifted the other. Together, the two equines carried the healing device through the double doors of Stonehaven and into the basement of the sanitarium. Harmony and Vimbert followed suit.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The unicorn janitor carefully shut the wooden side entrance to the basement at their rear. He was in the middle of locking it when Harmony, lingering behind while the other two ascended a nearby stairwell, trotted up and stated, “As much as you've always admired the martyr, I don't think that's what you've become today.”

        The orange stallion grunted over his shoulder. “I beg your pardon? What martyr?”

        “'And so it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end.'”

        Vimbert blinked. He turned and glanced curiously at her.

        She smiled back. “I knew I recognized those words. It wasn't until the night before last, while talking to Miss Pie, that I suddenly remembered who had spoken them.” She leaned her head to the side as she gazed deeper into the jaded unicorn's blue eyes. “It's what Starswirl the Bearded said right before walking up to the firing squad of Lunar Republican soldiers. He was facing his execution.”

        “You know, I never did care for the term 'Lunar Republic.' It's a historical fallacy, to say the least.”

        “That's not the issue, Mister Vimbert,” Harmony said, shaking her head. “The fact is, Starswirl the Bearded, toward the end of his life, fought for Princess Celestia's cause so diligently and for so long. Still, even for a unicorn of his age and wisdom, he too succumbed to the overwhelming ennui brought about by the Celestial Civil War. He could have avoided his execution, but instead he allowed himself to be captured and killed. He allowed himself to become a martyr. Why? He no longer believed in progress, or providence for that matter. He felt that the world was summed up by its present as much as its past, that there'd be no hope for anything but death and bloodshed for all of Equestria. Though it was a noble death on his part—a sacrifice that swayed the Celestial Army into a swift, retaliatory victory at Whinniepeg—it's a wonder to imagine just what would happen if he had chosen to do another, far braver thing. Imagine if Starswirl the Bearded had chosen to live. What miracles could he still have accomplished in the name of science? What magical spells would he have woven for the Court of Canterlot? What... What a joyful and luscious world could such a legend as Starswirl have witnessed today?”

        “Jee, you're making me misty-eyed,” Vimbert droned. “Is there a point to all this?”

        “The point is, Mister Vimbert,” Harmony trotted around him with a smirk. “Is that for a unicorn with a broken horn, you've got a lot more gumption than even the legendary Starswirl ever did, because where he gave up, I think you just now flew beyond.”

        “Yeah, well...” The janitor sighed and dug a hoof lethargically into the dusty floor of the basement. “A soul gets tired of watching the ashes of this world weep for children when nopony else will. After hearing that you, of all ponies, came back after being banished by the Council, I guess I heroesquely decided to do something genuine for a change.”

        “Incorrect.”

        Vimbert blinked at her. “H-Huh?”

        “'Heroesquely' isn't a proper adverb.” She winked at him with a wicked smile, then cantered off towards the stairwell after Zecora and Pinkie Pie.

        Vimbert's brow furrowed, but then his face produced a glowing smirk. “I'll make your mother an adverb,” he said, and followed swiftly after the pegasus.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Brevis wheezed, sputtered, and chuckled through a fresh frame of bruises that hung across his blue features. He hung in a slump, dangling from a series of rusted metal shackles that anchored him to the steel-reinforced wall of the Militia Headquarters' basement jail. “It was a free and green world, full of curiosity and discovery,” he sing-songed with a crooked smirk of yellow teeth. He gazed up as his eyes reflected a pale figure lingering before him. “And then the robes came...”

        Bishop Breathstar frowned down at the cloaked creature. The rainbow paint against his immaculate silk and coat had hardened into crusty bits of bitter hues. At least three dozen guards filled the cramped basement alongside him, pointing their polearms at the haggard, hoof-cuffed mule as if the bum would explode at any second. With flaring nostrils, the tall cleric glanced aside at one of the militia ponies and uttered, “Has he breathed a word about the location of the zebra?”

        “No, Bishop. He's been rambling nonsense ever since we brought him down here. He put up quite the fight, even busted a nose or two. So, we had to chain him to the jail cell wall.”

        “There is no prison except for a life lived backwards,” Brevis slurred, grinning wickedly. “Like a horse who backtrots into the ocean. What do the sea ponies know of madness? You can only float in the waters; you cannot fall! BraHahaHaha—” His laughter dissipated into a series of wincing coughs.

        “We were... uhm...” The guard shifted nervously beside Breathstar. “We were hoping that your authority and conviction would inspire him to tell the truth with more vigor than he was willing to do before us.”

        “My words spark action amongst the righteous,” Breathstar murmured in a dull breath. He fought to maintain his temper as the madness of Dredgemane roared overhead to spite him, spurred on by the confusion and the cacophony produced by the undaunted Bivs. “In the ears of heathen outcasts, they mean nothing.” Nevertheless, the priestly unicorn strolled a few meters forward and leered above the battered mule. “My child, there is no pony...” He winced slightly at that last word, but tactfully continued, “...who is so lost that Gultophine's Grace cannot find him. If you tell me where your accomplices took the zebra, then I shall use the authority granted me by the Church to absolve you of a lifetime of horrible sins.”

        Brevis grinned. His eyes rolled back as his head rolled back and he fell against the slack of the chains. “Ohhhh to be a butterfly catcher on this night of short screams and explosions! I would spin my net before a fountain of fluttering sins, for I would not know what a transgression was until I caught it, until I kissed it deeply and told it how sorry I was for imprisoning an atrocity by the sheer fact that I willed it into being!” After a dry chuckle and a sputter, he hissed through smiling yellow molars. “There is nothing to absolve, for I would never pin such delicate, winged blemishes to any wall. Not yours, not mine, not Consus', for even he was too busying plotting his own death to ever plan living beyond it. A god of self-defeat is as much a mortal as you or I.”

        The Dredgemane guards instinctually reacted with shocked gasps and murmurs. Bishop Breathstar frowned harder. He gritted his teeth and practically snarled, “Listen verily, dear sir. If you do not tell me what I need to know—what this entire town's future depends on knowing—then I will have no choice but to—”

        Before he could so much as construct a threat, another guard suddenly rushed into the basement jail and trotted up up to the Bishop. He removed his helmet and bowed low. The multicolored battlescars of the street blemished his armor as he nervously rattled forth, “Counselor, sir. There's been an incident in the supply warehouse at Marble End.”

        Something in Breathstar's eyes twitched violently. “You mean where we relocated that infernal machine?!”

        “It's... It's gone, sir,” the guard stammered. With a gulp, he then added, “Four guards were found knocked unconscious at the scene. We managed to wake one of them up. He told us that the machine was taken by the pegasus, the zebra...” He winced before adding, “...and Quarrington Pie's daughter.”

        Breathstar took a deep breath. He glanced into the jail cell.

        Brevis merely grinned back.

        The Bishop's nostrils flared. “Captain...” he spoke to one of the nearby guards. “Go to Town Square, and summon Overseer Sladeburn.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Nurse Angel Cake was a trembling mess. Pacing nervously across the Immolatia Ward, she quietly and dutifully checked on each of the sleeping foals, making sure that they stayed blissfully locked in their bed-laden slumber as utter chaos spread across the lengths of Dredgemane like a rainbow blight. Her eyes nervously flickered across the glowing horizon of granite beyond the fourth-story windows of Stonehaven. Her heart raced wildly under her sanitarium gown as she trotted from one bed to the next, stifling a foalish whimper of her own.

        Suddenly, there was a shuffling noise from beyond the hallway door. Angel Cake spun with a gasp, staring across the ward. She worriedly trotted over to her nurse's bench, leaning against it with a tremble. Before she could utter anything, the door opened quietly. An orange unicorn shuffled inside, his calm blue eyes gazing across the shadows of sleeping children until he met the nurse's gaze.

        “V-Vimbert!” Nurse Angel Cake stammered. “What are you doing here at this hour?! What's going on in town?! Where is—?”

        “Shhhh...” Vimbert calmly trotted over and placed a hoof across her lips. Quietly, he smiled and said, “I bring you a gift.” He stepped aside, revealing Zecora and Pinkie Pie as they marched into the Ward with a black metal contraption balanced across their flanks. Following up the rear, a naked copper pegasus shuffled inside and closed the door to the dark hallway behind her.

        “Oh Dear Gultophine...” Nurse Angel Cake trembled and fell down to her haunches. Her eyes darted confusedly between the time traveler and the bizarre machine. “What is happening? I-I can hardly take this anymore...”

        “Oh Angel...” Pinkie Pie smiled sweetly. After helping Zecora place the machine down on the floor, she bounced over to the nurse's side. “There's no more need for being afraid. Remember what I always sing to the children?”

        “P-Pinkamena...” Angel Cake recoiled from her. The filly's eyes instantly filled with tears. “Please... Please forgive me. I'm so sorry. I-I told them everything. Breathstar's priests came and were asking all of these questions and... and I was scared! I was sc-scared for the children, and I don't even remember why anymore! H-How could you even look at me after all I've d-done...?”

        “Shhh... Shhh...” Pinkie hugged Angel Cake close to her. She smiled warmly over her shoulder and hummed into the pony's ear. “It's alright, ya silly filly. You did what you had to do. I'm not even remotely grumpy about it, and neither is Inkie! Let's be joyful tonight. Okie dokie lokie? This is going to be nothing but a happy evening, I promise you! Pinkie Pie Swear! Heeheehee!”

        “I... I-I don't understand...” Nurse Angel Cake shuddered and parted from the hug with a sniffle. She gazed at the machine while biting her lip. “What are you doing here? Just what is that thing?”

        “The stuff dreams are made of,” Vimbert said while lighting the first of several lanterns across the room.

        “Alas, there is no proper ritual for the history we are making,” Zecora spoke in Harmony's direction. “Shall we wake the children for this undertaking?”

        “Yeah.” The last pony nodded as she trotted over towards the machine. “Better make it quick. The Bivs are awesome, but they can't keep the town's attention forever.”

        “Alright, ya little squirts!” Pinkie Pie bounced loudly across the black-and-white tile floor. She stomped her hooves between the beds and chirped through the air, “You colts and queens of the ocean! Your Auntie Pinkie Pie is here! Time to wake up and smell the Alex! Heeheehee!”

        “Could she make this any less graceful?” Vimbert remarked with a raised eyebrow.

        “It's a charming grace,” Harmony said, hoisting the machine up in her front limbs as she braced her copper flank up against the wall. “It grows on you, sort of like the drunken-boxing of infinite altruism.” She took a deep, shuddering breath for courage and gripped the pull-string to the machine's crankshaft. “Now let's kick some major infernite butt—”

        The world suddenly jolted. A wave of bright light swam across the Immolatia Ward in a billowing explosion. At first, Harmony thought it was a belated firework having flown violently into the side of the Stonehaven Sanitarium. Judging from the unfliching bodies of the foals who were slowly stirring to wakefulness, she realized that she was the only pony in the room to have noticed the phenomenon.

        Then it happened again, and the emerald hue of the flickering flame was unmistakable. A piercing migraine briefly rocketed through the time traveler's skull and flew back down to a suddenly surging core deep within her Entropan chest. She gasped, and the voice that came out was a wavering thing, hanging off the flaming tongues of fatefully crumbling cohesion.

        “Oh no...”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “It is a hypnosis,” Brevis slurred. He hung off the wall of the jail cell as a dark and ominous shadow crossed his blue, cloaked figure. “Some ponies call it 'faith,' others call it 'ritual,' but goodly Brevis knows what it is. It puts our extremities to sleep when we should be dancing to our own beautiful music, a music we could have composed, a music we can still compose, for the wind that begs to fly through our wind instruments is a free wind, a gorgeous sphere of air donated liberally to both gods and ghouls alike. Who are we but good Equestrian minds lingering in between, hungering for knowledge, hungering for the escape from the shackles of such hypnotic bondage that keeps us from cantering beyond ourselves?”

        The shadow belonged to an ever darker shape, that of Overseer Sladeburn. The workpony shook his head and frowned at the sight before him. “By Elecktra's limbs, does he ever shut up?”

        “He has no respect for my authority nor my ministry,” Breathstar murmured into the stallion's ear from where they both stood in the basement of the Militia Headquarters. “I figured that he might... be more apt to respond to your style of persuasion.”

        “But of course, good Bishop,” Sladeburn said in a soulless tone. “When Gultophine wills that you must apply force, we Dredgemaners know where your words end and my hooves begin, do we not?”

        The priest suddenly shuffled where he stood, as if a grand piece of his pride had crumbled in an instant, or else it wasn't even there to begin with.

        Sladeburn took a deep breath. “No matter.” He glanced aside at his fellow administrators whom he had summoned from the flaming streets of the rainbow-tainted town above. “If you will, please?”

        One lackey nodded at him. With the assistance of another pony, he lifted a black iron box and unlatched it. Four horseshoes of obsidian steel rested in their wooden frames. The Overseer reached in and pulled out two of them. As he fastened the articles to his front limbs, several razor-sharp cleats glistened in the basement's lantern light. Each barb was easily eight centimeters in length, and they showed the chips and wear of age, of having been used over the decades to carve into innumerable burrows throughout the quarry, digging deeper the gaping wound into the Grave of Consus.

        The guard ponies surrounding the Overseer shifted uncomfortably. Many of them glanced forlornly in Brevis' direction. The mule visibly gulped, but his smile only beamed brighter. “What is a proponent of the herd if not an observer? Even as he sings the psalms of a dead god and pledges his heart to all that decays, he is not growing, he is not falling, he is only what he is, forever and ever, an eternally recurring accident made forever jaded, for he will not take advantage of the brilliant gasp of the rainbow-stabbed instant.”

        “Yeah, you keep talking.” Overseer flexed his limb and observed the mining cleats in his hooves. “I don't know what makes me more sick, that you never stop being an annoying bum, or that you decide to test our patience on a tragic night like this month's botched Harvest.” He trotted darkly into the cell and stood above Brevis, each hoofstep a metallically ringing horror that echoed against the bars of that suddenly claustrophobic coffin. “Everypony in Dredgemane knows that you don't have a job. So, since you're no fan of work and more accustomed to play, let's have ourselves a game. We're going to see what comes out of you first: all that you know about where your friends took the machine, or all of your teeth. Either way, following the rampant embarrassment of tonight...” Sladeburn's dark eyes narrowed. “I'm going to enjoy this.”

        “Hmmmm-Hmmm-Hahaha!” Brevis' eyes lit up as his head tilted from his fettered position against the wall. “You cannot see what she sees! You cannot see the bright shinies! What do you have to enjoy?! BraHahaHaha!”

        Overseer Sladeburn twisted his whole body back. He raised his hoof. The guards bit their lips. Bishop Breathstar looked away. The mule laughed and laughed. When Sladeburn uncoiled with a swing of his serrated horseshoe, the laughter turned into a splash of juices across the jail cell's wall, and all of them were red.

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Twenty-Four – Final Pinkasy

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

        The Gultophine's Harvest crowd of Dredgemane had become a veritable audience of gawking, blinking ponies as the Royal Grand Bivs ran from rooftop to rooftop above them, firing explosive confetti cannons and globs of rainbow-colored paint at the frustrated guards down below. The city militia responded with loud shouts as they fired net gun after net gun over the flickering, rainbow-tainted bonfires of the town's trenches. The three Bivs expertly dodged, jumped, and sliced the projectiles as they continued their cyclonic orbit of Town Square.

        Halfway through climbing an iron-framed clock tower, one Biv hung briefly off the hour hand and gave the western reaches of the city a breathless look. The distant image of Stonehaven Sanitarium hung just beyond the penumbra of the sunken town's glowing bonfires. Sweating, the masked pony murmured in Inkessa's voice, “Oh, sis, I hope you're making all of this worth it.”

        Another explosion: two fresh volleys of nets flew up at the clock face. The rainbow-cloaked vandal scampered up the tower, kicked off, and glided to another rooftop below, avoiding the guard's aim as she continued stirring more chaos above the heads of so many amused citizens.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        They weren't moving, no matter how much she shook them, pleaded with them, sobbed to them. They hung off the edges of the bed, forever split from one another, their tongues hanging out of their mouths amidst vomitous fountains of glistening yellow jaundice.

        Scootaloo's face melted with each passing second of deathly silence. She called their names, but only her own voice echoed back from the shadows of the dusty bedroom. She crawled onto the covers and clung to them, her foalish words blending into a high-pitched whine that subsequently melted to form an anguished wail. Seconds suddenly turned into months, and within a blink she was being dragged away from them, away from their home, away from the serpentine mouth of the mineshaft, away from so many white names and white wings and white souls etched against the black monolith of Everclear.

        She sobbed and cried for them, refusing to wrench her gaze away, even when the walls around her morphed into one foster home after another—from Fillydelphia to Manehattan—until she burst through the walls and chased after them. But it was too late; they had faded into white splotches. Those unfocused clouds became a pair of stones—like the pits in her stomach, the missing chunks of Scootaloo's lonely heart—until in a sudden flicker of green flame the stones bled from white to blue as the eyes of a candy-colored earth pony stared directly in her face, blinking as the filly brandished a worried expression.

        “Har-Har?”

        Harmony shuddered, her eyes twitching as chronotonic tongues of emerald flashed before her. A bursting migraine ripped through the last pony's skull. She flinched briefly upon the precipice of cohesion, then refocused her eyes as she found herself standing inside the Immolatia Ward of Stonehaven. She briefly recalled the entire chamber being filled with murmurs and coughs, the sputtering chaos of so many confused and sickly foals having been woken from the depths of their fitful slumber. However, all of those murmurs had died down to a mere hum, for all of those children were presently staring at her, just as Zecora and Nurse Angel Cake were staring at her, just as Vimbert and Pinkie Pie were staring at her as she stood there, shivering, with a ridiculous metal vacuum cleaner resting in her trembling hooves.

        “Har-Har, is everything okay?” Pinkie Pie murmured in an eerily soft voice, even for her. “We're all ready...”

        Harmony gulped. Her lips quivered as she clutched the hulking machine to her chest like a lost scooter. “Goddess Entropa help us, Spike. It never lasts long enough... Never never never...”

        Pinkie Pie raised an eyebrow. “H-Har-Har?” A baby alligator crawled up to the edge of the nurse's station and blinked in a wall-eyed fashion at the scene. Harmony glanced over. In a flash, she saw Dinky, then Rainbow Dash's smiling face beyond the bars, and so many looming stars beyond. A giant shadow lurched through the cosmos and screamed agony and flame across the sterile bosom of Equestria. A tiny orange pegasus was powerless to do anything about it.

        “Pinkie Pie...” Scootaloo whimpered. A gulping motion, and Harmony's voice deeply covered the shakes in the last pony's throat. “Miss Pie, will you do me a favor, please?”

        “Just ask, girlfriend.”

        “Will you... stay by my side...?” Harmony bit her lip. “As we do this, that is? Please? I-I don't want to be alone...”

        “Heeheehee... But Har-Har,” Pinkie Pie smiled in the pegasus' face, and as she did so she was briefly veiled by a green hue, like the pastel shade of the past that she always was. “But you are never alone!”

        Harmony exhaled. Her expression melted then and there. “Oh, if that were only true...” Before Pinkie could reply to that, the pegasus took a deep breath and bravely stepped forward through the spinning room, clinging to the machine like a second anchor. “Just stay with me, Pinkie. I fear that there isn't much time left.”

        “Whatever you say, Har-Har.”

        “Thatta girl.” Harmony cleared her throat. She spoke solidly, energetically towards the sea of foalish faces staring at her. “Hey, kids. We're going to play a game.” This was a brand new classroom, born through tears and the green fires of redemption. “We're going to see which of you can laugh the loudest, because after I zap you with this harmless little doohickey of mine, you're going to be able to shout like you've never shouted before.”

        “Har-Har's got a brand new toy she'd like to share with all of us!” Pinkie pranced gaily before the many blinking children. “Auntie Pinkie Pie has seen it in action! I promise you, it's nothing to be scared of! And even if it was scary, what do Auntie Pinkie Pie's kids know to do?”

        “Giggle at the ghosties,” a chorus of mixed coughs, sputters, and excited squeaks immediately returned.

        “That's right! Now, it may tickle a teeeeeeeeeeny bit as Har-Har's machine pulls some bad stuff out of your throats, but what's a good tickle if not for making you laugh more?”

        Several wheezy chuckles lit the room.

        “That's the spirit! Now who wants to make Har-Har's job easier and be the first pony to enter the laughing contest?”

        “Oooh! Oooh!” A young colt waved his hoof from the edge of the bed that he was sitting on. He coughed a few times and smiled through tearing eyes. “Me! I-I want to laugh louder than Silversprout here!”

        “Nuh uh!” The little kid's bed-mate frowned and shoved him, his sunken eyes glaring. “Not if I get to laugh first!”

        “I raised my hoof before you!”

        “Wuh oh! You know how much Auntie Pinkie Pie hates fighting!” Pinkie bounced over and rested a hoof on each of the colts' shoulders. “How about we let Auntie's friend decide who goes first!” She glanced over with a grin. “Har-Har?”

        “Whichever one squirms the least,” the copper pegasus managed in a wincing grunt.

        Pinkie covered for her, “Wow! Har-Har wants to tickle you something fierce! You wanna let her get away with that?”

        “I ain't scared!”

        “Heehee—I think you've got your first volunteer, Har-Har!”

        “Yeah...” Harmony trotted up to the bedside. She reeled—only to have Zecora rush over and steady her. Harmony leaned against the zebra, her eyes flickering through another wave of distorted green cohesion. Once she had her focus back, she mutely thanked the striped equine and clutched the wooden handle to the pull-string in Entropan teeth.

        “This is the part I love.” Pinkie Pie winked over her shoulder at the many foals craning their necks to watch. “Alex is a real show-off. Just watch.”

        Harmony grunted and pulled at the crankshaft. The engine spun to life. The jar of orange flame burned brightly and the thunderpearl sparkled. Many children cooed in awe. A few others trembled, until Nurse Angel Cake sashayed over and lovingly patted them on the shoulders. Everypony's eyes were on the time traveler as she cranked the machine one last time, pulled the trigger of its lower chassis and revved the device to a low hum.

        “Alright, kid...” Harmony gulped and raised the runestone-lined spout of the apparatus before his face. “Say 'ah'.”

        “Pretend like you're about to munch down on a really scrumptious slice of apple pie!” Pinkie grinned with glistening blue eyes. “But stop before you bite down, like you're inhaling the scent!”

        The little colt on the bed did just that, his eyes darting nervously from the machine to Pinkie to the machine again. He bravely gulped his throat beneath an open jaw and shut his eyes.

        The last pony lowered the spout just above the little pony's face. She pulled harder at the trigger. The flames inside the jar surged and spun cyclonically. The hum of the machine intensified, drowning out the sound of so many gasping breaths. A bright spark jumped from the thunderpearl, and in a slithering stream of yellow dust, the infernal contaminants in the child's lungs poured out and rivered directly through the strobing array of moonrocks. The infernite slithered down the neck of the machine and slid safely into the metal compartment built inside the thing. With a breath of finality, Harmony released the trigger and pulled the machine away, staring with bright ambers at the kid.

        “It is over, young fellow,” Zecora leaned in from Harmony's side. “Now, give us your best bellow.”

        The little colt shuddered. Slowly, he closed his mouth, gulped long and hard, and reopened his lips. “Heh... Heh-heh... Heh-heh-heh!” His eyes fluttered open, sparkling with a sudden brightness. A shimmering hue of disbelief washed over his features. He glanced up at Harmony, at Pinkie, and then suddenly lurched forward—

        Everypony gasped, even Vimbert. Nurse Angel Cake rushed forward to catch the child...

        But the colt was only leaping off the bed. He landed on the floor with a bounce, standing straight up on his four limbs as if there wasn't a single limp muscle in his body. “Heheheheh!” he exclaimed, overwhelmed at the sudden energy coursing through his twitching, humming, and undeniably healthy body. “It worked! It worked! I can... I-I can...” He smiled a crescent moon in the direction of several murmuring foals. “I-I can laugh! I mean really laugh! Ha-HA!”

        Angel Cake's face melted into yet another sob, only this time it was bequeathed with a smile. As the room lit up with excited whispers and cheers, she glanced aside at her nearby associate. The orange unicorn janitor stared, his mouth agape as he witnessed a doomed life being turned right-side-up before his blinking blue eyes.

        The colt, in the meantime, was bouncing circles in the style of a candy-colored filly. “Heeheeheehee! I feel great, Auntie Pinkie Pie! Who cares about laughing, I wanna dance!”

        “Oh, I bet you do, kiddo!” Pinkie rubbed his mane with a bright hoof and stared with proud, hypnotic eyes in Harmony's direction. “I bet you do...”

        Harmony gulped. Another wave of emerald pain shot through her, but she very easily weathered it. With a desperate smile blooming under frazzled mane hair, she spun a look across the bouncing Immolatia Ward and raised the machine high. “Okay, my little ponies! Who's next?!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Haaauckkkt!” Brevis flew on the end of his shackles and slammed hard into the wall of the jail cell. He heaved and spat clumps of bloodied bile out through a pair of bruised, ruptured lips. “Nnnnghkkkt—Hckkk... Mmmnngh... fuuu... fuuu...” He glanced up, his face shivering, shaking—

        The bum mule's look was immediately answered by a steel horseshoe of bladed cleats flying mercilessly across his cheekbone. He hunched over and vomited a crimson pile into the floor beneath his dangling limbs. The basement filled with his sputtering breaths as Overseer Sladeburn stood above the haggard figure. His dark brow furrowed as he dripped the next few words icily out his taut jaw, “Where is that infernal machine?!”

        “Nnnngh... Hrckkkk...” Brevis shuddered and heaved.

        Sladeburn's body spun, and so did the metallic blades at the end of a horseshoe. A bone-crunching thunder filled the air of the basement. Many of the watching guards shuddered and made retching faces. A copper smell filled the lantern-lit hovel as Brevis' blood painted the edges of his cell.

        “Where are your pegasus friend and that voodoo doctor taking the thing?!” Sladeburn marched up and slammed a hoof into Brevis' cloaked ribcage with a merciless buck. “Answer me! What is their plan to undermine Dredgemane?!”

        Brevis wheezed and wheezed before inhaling long and hard. His body rose up, his bruised face twitching in the flickering light as he fought to take as much air into his lungs as possible. Once filled, he emptied himself with, “Snkkkkt—They plan... They plan... Th-They plan to laugh at us!”

        Sladeburn frowned. “Who?”

        “The gods... sssnkkkt... BraHahaHahaHa!” The mule grinned with a jaw full of fresh, bleeding gaps. “Their funeral is long over, and we are cr-crying for nopony but ourselvessssnkkkt... Heheh—Hrkkk...” He spat into the nearby cot, twitching and heaving.

        The tall, dark stallion took a fuming breath and paced across the jail cell, his front hooves staining the floor red with the glistening cleats.

        Brevis dangled on the ends of his shackles, preaching to his own fluids. “The madpony c-comes out of the deep cave's mouth... for he is no longer a slave to the sh-sh-shadows. He knows that the m-m-madness woven in the darkness of a dusty grave is b-but a charade, a farce. Outside in the light... Ohhhh the gl-glorious lighttttt-snkkkt...” He spat and choked. “What immeasurable f-fountains of bliss can be discovered, n-not through whips or b-batons but through pen and ink and fearlessnessssnkkt—”

        “Nnnngh—Raaugh!” The stallion bucked Brevis upside the head before pinning him sharply to the wall with a cleated horseshoe biting its way into the mule's shoulder. “Do not speak unless you wish to answer my questions, or I'll rip your tongue out and shove it up a far more useful orifice, you street-smelling waste of your father's seed! Talk!” Sladeburn's eyes burned fiercely as he hissed, “Where are your friends and where have they taken that machine?! What does that machine even do?!”

        “I... I... I...” Brevis dangled bloodily from Sladeburn's grip. His lips painfully curved up into a scarlet smile. “I-I do not talkkkkk... Hckkkt... No... N-No, Goodly Brevis never t-talks. He only laughs... laughs at life... laughs at death... and laughs at you...” His eyes thinned as he hissed through a vomitous deluge of bile and managed a sputtering chuckle. “A d-dead horse beating a mule... Now that is hilarioussssnkktttt-BraHahaHauchkkkt...”

        Sladeburn exhaled through flaring nostrils. He glanced back over his dark-brown shoulder with a raised eyebrow.

        Bishop Breathstar was still in the process of holding his lunch in. At Sladeburn's glance, he shrugged, then motioned a limp limb “onward”.

        The Overseer sighed, raised a serrated metal hoof, and pummeled it once more into the gasping pile of meat dangling from his grasp. As several more subsequent punching sounds filled the room—and the guards flinched one after another—Bishop Breathstar gazed aside, covering half of his vision with a dainty hoof. He sighed long and hard, scanning the far reaches of the lantern-lit room with tired eyes as he sought a possible solution beyond the shuddering sea of Brevis' muffled cries.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The orange flame billowed. The thunderpearl sparkled. With a rotating strobe, the runestones threaded a magic serpent of yellow dust from the throat of another foal. The clusters of earthen matter filtered down the long neck of the machine and emptied into a dark, metal receptical. Harmony released her hold of the trigger, tilted the device back, and shouted over her shoulder. “Miss Zecora! Another change!”

        The zebra rushed over with a glass container lined with an air-tight bag. Carefully, she and the last pony emptied the receptacle full of the damnable infernite into its new hold. In the meantime, a bright-eyed little filly opened her eyes, closed her mouth, and gasped as a new path of air flew through her trachea. With a joyful giggle, she practically leaped into Harmony with an explosive hug.

        The pegasus gasped and reeled, nearly falling off the bed with her device in tow. Pinkie Pie sauntered over and lifted the filly off of Harmony's shoulders. The earth pony settled the little foal onto her back, saddled next to two other kids—just as clean and infernite-free. The three merrily rode their Auntie Pinkie Pie across the ward, their giggles and cheers filling the rest of the likewise jubilant room. A good half of the children had been cured in breathtaking speed. They giggled and danced in place. They performed cartwheels across the black-and-white tile. They chased each other and ran circles around a smiling Nurse Angel Cake and a gawking Vimbert. The paler half of the room, still afflicted with what was once a permanent ailment, brightened nonetheless as they gazed in amazement from their sick beds. They marveled at their best friends, healed of all lurching infirmity. With shuffling excitement they eagerly awaited their turn.

        Once Zecora and Harmony finished emptying the receptacle, they tied the bag safely up around the new container. The zebra carried it off with assistance from Angel Cake while the pegasus slapped the metal chamber back in place and re-cranked the machine to life. She winced briefly under a curtain of bright burning green but ultimately hissed, “Alright! Next!”

        What proceeded was a parade of miracles. Pinkie Pie would usher a child to one bed in the center of the room. With meager coaching and a donation of smiles, the foal would then be urged to lie back and open her or his mouth. Harmony would spin the machine to life. A hum would fill the room, followed by a bright spark and an orange flash, and suddenly a short life was transformed into a prospectively long one. Coughs turned to laughs. Sobs turned to giggles. Wheezes morphed into song.

        Angel Cake and Zecora ran themselves breathless. They were the conveyor belt upon which this heavenly machine spun. Trotting back and forth at Harmony's beck and call, they alternated between helping Harmony empty the machine of infernite and ushering the healthy children to one side of the room. The multitude of foals gradually became a gaping audience, watching the unfolding salvation of the rest of their friends. Vimbert took many trips in and out of the lantern-lit ward, storing the new collections of bagged infernite into a janitor's closet transformed into a quarantined chamber for safety.

        All the while, Pinkie Pie was the director, the joyous and bubbly overseer of this rapturous operation within the Grave of Consus. She told jokes to ease the fears of nervous foals lying before the machine. She carried freshly-healed children across the ward, giving them felicitous pony rides. She made promises that suddenly couldn't be broken, that were as breathtakingly real as the mists that used to condense against the cold, bitter glass of that deathly hovel's windows.

        All the while, the distant bonfires of Dredgemane lingered with a prismatic glow, kissing the horizon of granite with rainbow glory, a sign of hope that was spun mischievously by the Royal Grand Bivs in Town Square but was angelically complemented by the orphan of time in Stonehaven all the same.

        Harmony could hardly see. It wasn't due to tears as much as it was due to the head-puncturing waves of green flame that randomly pelted her, burned her, and threatened to melt her back twenty-five years of quivering reverse-time. She couldn't guess how long she had left—hours, minutes, seconds? She wouldn't stop to find out. She performed saintly miracles at a blazing pace, as if she was on an assembly line, practically yanking the infernite out of the shuddering foals' throats with as much grace as the goofy machine could barely afford her. Scootaloo had become the fateful engineer of Dredgemane's providence, but the Entropan shell around her shuddered, for the fading cohesion of Spike's breath could yank her back at any moment.

        In the midst of her fitful administration, the assaulting waves of green flame became briefly overwhelming. She shuddered at the end of dredging more infernite out of another foal. A weightless dizziness flew through her, and she fell back—her wings going limp. A pair of hooves caught her. At first, she expected the silken grasp of Fluttershy, but she awoke to a joyous bounce in those limbs. Reaching back, she clasped her hoof with Pinkie Pie's and exhaled with relief. Swallowing a lump down her throat, she smiled back at her anchor and thanked her with a nod. The candy-colored earth filly giggled brightly and bounced across the ward to carry the next patient to the bed of healing.

        In the meantime, Harmony examined her machine, adjusting the sparkling thunderpearl inside and checking on the flame within the glass jar. She paused halfway, stabbed briefly by a pair of blue eyes. She stared across the room to see an orange unicorn gazing calmly back at her. There was something cloudy in the stallion's optics, as if those sapphiric orbs were breaking apart like cold glaciers long avoided. In so many years of ushering the ashes of Dredgemane's orphans into the Grave of Consus, it had to have been a numbing experience to witness that same tomb dancing with life, sung by giggles that spun a delicious melody to the granite walls of Stonehaven's trench.

        The last pony briefly foresaw the former college professor collapsing from the painful acoustics of that foalish sound, so she lent the ill-fated father the only thing that made sense to her across the aching green strobes coming in from all sides. She gave him a smile that went on forever. The queen of grins bounced back into view with a fresh recruit and an “Okie dokie lokie, Harmonyyyy!”

        Then the miracles resumed.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Aaaaugh!” Brevis exhaled as his body hung on Sladeburn's front hoof after it had been slammed full-force into the small of his gut. The mule's eyes teared and his ears fell limply on either side of his blue skull. With a furious shove, he was slammed back against the steel-reinforced wall of his jail cell. “Nnngh—Gaah!” He dangled from the shackles in a bloody heap. Rivers of crimson ran down his blue snout as he panted under the shadow of the Overseer.

        Sladeburn knelt down and murmured in a cold tone, “All of this will stop. All of this pain, all of this anguish—it will cease if you just tell us what we need to know. You don't need to be a coward or an idiot to understand what's at stake here. So help me, Elektra, before the sun rises, you'll smell a whole lot better, because a rotting corpse has got to be more fragrant than a bit-less bum like you.” He raised his serrated horseshoe once more to the nape of Brevis' quivering, bloodstained neck. “Now, will you or will you not tell us what your friends are doing with that machine?”

        Brevis lurched. Brevis hissed. Brevis sputtered, “Y-Yes...”

        From afar, Breathstar craned his neck. The guards shifted curiously. Sladeburn's brow furrowed. He murmured, “Yes?”

        The mule gulped. With one good eye left to stare at his tormentor, Brevis navigated a fitful sea of hyperventilating heaves to stammer forth, “Yes... I-I only w-wish to say 'yes'. 'Yes' to everything and to every day and to... t-to...” He gulped and hissed. “Gckk... To every sunrise. I say 'yes' to f-fear and p-p-pain as well... for th-they are the breadcrumbs th-that lead me gaily th-through this forest of d-darkness—snkkkt—and into the light...” His eyes narrowed under a cascade of crimson tributaries. “B-But you... you... wh-what do you have to say 'yes' to, at least with f-f-full faith that another, far blinder p-pony than yourself hadn't simply t-told you that you had to...?”

        To that, Sladeburn sneered. He raised his hoof with heavy finality.

        Brevis grinned drunkenly at the impending blow. His one good eye lowered shut.

        Just before Sladeburn's limb could fall...

        “Overseer...”

        Sladeburn stopped. He glanced back out from the cell.

        Bishop Breathstar was shaking his head. He raised a hoof up, motioning Sladeburn to remain still. Quietly, peacefully, he glanced aside at a guard pony beside him. He smiled and said, “Captain, if you would do me the favor of running a hasty errand to the Cathedral?”

        “Y-You mean now, Bishop?” the visibly-shaken militia pony stammered.

        “Yes, most assuredly.” The priest's eyes burned even hotter than Sladeburn's. “Right. Now.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “I just can't believe this!” Angel Cake murmured, sniffled, and smiled wincingly. After so many years mired in death, her grin was agonizingly beautiful. “Praise Gultophine. I dreamed of a day like this...” She knelt down and nuzzled several giggling foals as the room filled to the brim with that which was once pale. “Thank you... Oh thank you, Goddess Gultophine...”

        “In all of my days of potion making,” Zecora murmured, wading across a sea of giggling and smiling children. “I have never witnessed something so breathtaking. Where so much has died, so many more have risen. This is no doubt a blessing that the Shadows have envisioned.”

        “I wouldn't know anything about shadows...” Vimbert patted the heads of a passing filly and colt. He shook his horned head across the warm lengths of the room and murmured, “...but I know a thing or two about modern medicine. And this crap? This crap you see here? This is nuts.” The janitor suddenly blushed, as if embarrassed by something he had said for the first time in ages. “Uhm... Those are good 'crap nuts,' I assure you.”

        Zecora and Angel Cake chuckled breathily. They stood in a circle of laughter as they glanced the copper pegasus' way. “Miss Harmony!” Angel Cake called out, adjusting her nurse's cap after being bumped into by several bubbly young souls at once. “Whoah there... heehee. How's it coming? Is that the last of the children?”

        “You're the nurse!” Harmony suddenly snarled, weathering an emerald migraine as she cranked at the device one more time. “You friggin' keep count!” She took a deep breath and put on a gentle smile before the trembling, pale foal in front of her. “Ahem. Don't sweat, kid. You'll be doing somersaults in no time.”

        “Ahhh... A-Ahhh...” The kid nervously nodded with her mouth hanging open. She watched steadily as the last pony held the spout before her jaws, pulled the trigger, and throttled the machine into a humming fury. With orange flashes and bright sparks, the device did its deed. A rather copious amount of infernite roped out of the child's breathing tubes, and with a gasping breath, she was healed. Tears welled up in the kid's eyes as she stirred with a strength she had never felt before. Nurse Angel sashayed over in time to cuddle her gently to her shoulder, gently patting and rocking the relieved foal.

        Harmony let the trigger hang loose. She winced through a blinding cloud of green flames and spun her amber eyes wide across the Ward, in breathless search of her anchor. “Miss Pie?!” She winced again, shuddered, and regained her bearings. “Nnngh... P-Pinkie! Pinkie Pie, where are you?” The last pony pivoted on the bed in the center of the room, clutching the machine tightly. “Is that it?! Are there any... more... kids...?” Her voice bled to a numb canter across the suddenly thick air of the place. All of the bouncing had stopped; all the giggling had stopped. Adults and children alike were deathly silent, returning the hospital room to its grave sterility.

        Sitting on her haunches before a bed in the far corner of the Ward, Pinkie Pie took a deep breath. When she turned around, her smile was as calm as it was disgustingly forced, like a bright pink balloon that refused to re-inflate.

        “Har-Har...” She said, gently, in a voice as smooth as silk. “I... I think it's time that you put Alex to rest.” As Pinkie Pie uttered this, a deep, somber quiver overcame her right eyebrow.

        “Why... Wh-What for...?” Harmony said, blinking. On numb limbs, she pulled herself off the bed and carried the machine over into the shadows, where the last pony could see better. Immediately, her amber eyes melted and her face contorted into a blistering grimace. “Oh, sweet Celestia, no...”

        Pinkie Pie hung her head. Nestled deep in the wrinkled sheets before her was the body of Suntrot, barely breathing, as still as so many Dredgemane rocks.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The stairwell door to the Militia Headquarters basement flew open. Flanked by four guard ponies, a nervous Deacon Dawnhoof was escorted across the lantern-lit cellar. The chestnut-eyed unicorn trembled briefly as he glanced at so many armored equines standing in formation throughout the room. They were all facing in one direction, towards a horrible beating sound, followed by a series of muffled yelps and cries from a tortured soul. The young cleric-in-training craned his neck, and was horrified at what he saw.

        Sladeburn was still pummeling a bleeding, bruised Brevis. The mule's right eye was swollen shut. His left ear twitched at an awkward, limp angle. A halo about the neck of his cloak was permanently stained in blood, and several of his teeth were missing as he jolted and shook on the end of his chains from each of the Overseer's merciless hoof-strikes.

        Dawnhoof breathlessly stammered, “Wh-What in Gultophine's name...?!”

        “Yes, it is quite despicable to look at, isn't it?”

        Dawnhoof gasped. He glanced up to see Bishop Breathstar—stained in dried rainbow paint—marching over to his side. The tall, pale unicorn stood straight, solemnly gazing with pitiable eyes into the jail cell of horror.

        “Sladeburn has been at it for quite a while now. You and I both know that the Overseer is as important to Mayor Haymane's trust as he is to Dredgemane's industry, and he must and will do what it takes to protect the securities of this most blessed Refuge of Gultophine.”

        “B-But...” Dawnhoof grimaced terribly at the bloody sight still ensuing in front of him. “This is atrocious! That poor soul is being beaten within an inch of his life! Good Bishop Breathstar, please! You must put an end to this unsightly violence! He...He... J-Just look at him! There's s-so much blood; the poor fellow will die!”

        “Mmmm... 'A casualty of circumstance is still a tragedy in the heart of Gultophine'. You're right to be so compassionate, young one. The Chronicles obviously supports such a concern. However...” The Bishop regally adjusted his stained robe and sighed long and hard. “My hooves are tied, for it is also written 'An Equestrian soul is the truest soul of all.' And this poor creature you see bleeding before us... well, he's contributing to the downfall of Dredgemane, just like the Royal Grand Bivs.” He stared coldly down at his trembling apprentice. “Those are hardly what I call 'good Equestrian souls.'”

        “But... B-But...” Dawnhoof's lip quivered as he bravely stared into the fray, wincing as Brevis bloodily weathered hoof after slamming hoof. “What, pray tell, has he possibly done to deserve this?!”

        “A lie of omission is still a lie, young one. This insufferable mule has the good fortune of knowing where that runaway pegasus and her zebra friend have gone to, but he also has the poor misfortune of choosing to hide that truth from us.” Breathstar ran a hoof through his jet-black mane. “Furthermore, there's been a development. That heretical machine that the pegasus built has been stolen from its place of storage. Undoubtedly the mule knows what his fellow conspirators are doing with it...”

        Overseer Sladeburn snarled and slammed Brevis so hard that the mule literally spun on the length of his shackles. He fell halfway across the brown cot, coughing and sputtering crimson blobs onto the canvas sheets.

        Breathstar's lips icily produced, “Every second he wastes hiding the truth is just another curse launched upon the lengths of Gultophine's Refuge. And a soul that is adverse to Gultophine's Spirit is hardly deserving of her grace.”

        Sladeburn rose above Brevis. With both serrated horseshoes, the dark stallion planted his forelimbs into the mule's sternum and applied the whole of his weight. He dug slowly, piercingly down into the pained equine, forcing the mule to shriek and twitch in agony, his shackles rattling.

        Dawnhoof sweated hard, his eyes wide and tearing.

        Breathstar lowered and spoke softly into his apprentice's ear. “But a spirit who functions within the breath of our Holy Alicorn Sister... well... that is a wise spirit, a soul who not only knows the proper respect to be paid to the Refuge of Gultophine, but knows how to administer grace when it is most needed. Tell me, my good apprentice, what is more gracious than the truth?”

        Dawnhoof froze, as did his trembles and his panting breath. His face melted painfully as he stared through the metal bars of the cell. The unicorn's gaze met Brevis, and Brevis' twitching gaze met his. The mule's anguished winces paused as his exhausted face navigated a series of heaves. He merely read Dawnhoof's expression with a knowing, deadpan pity.

        Bishop Breathstar whistled. Sladeburn looked up, glanced at Dawnhoof, then back at the older unicorn. With a bitter twist of his lips, he finally, finally stood back and released his weight from Brevis' quivering form. The mule gasped hard and fell under a spell of sputtering coughs and shudders.

        Breathstar trotted around until he stood in front of his inferior. “Well, wise one?” He stared icily into the younger unicorn's soul... and he smiled.

        Something deep inside Dawnhoof's moist eyes twitched.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Nurse Angel Cake trotted quietly over to Suntrot's bedside. In sudden somberness, the many foals of the Immolatia Ward watched quietly from a distance, standing beside a sullen unicorn onlooker. Everypony watched as the mare gently examined the comatose child. She pressed her hooves to Suntrot's tiny limbs, planted her head against the filly's chest, and then raised her ear over the child's nostrils. With each limping second, Angel Cake's face grew grimmer and grimmer. Sighing, she stared up apologetically at the last pony.

        “Suntrot's symptoms grew worse immediately after the night that Ice Song passed away,” the mare explained. “Either the infernite finally bled into her bloodstream, or sh-she just gave up the will to live. Whatever the case, the poor thing got worse with each passing hour. We had a little bit of hope today, because she was briefly stabilizing this afternoon, but now... n-now she's fallen into the final stages. Nopony could ever predict just how quickly Immolatia used to...” She grimaced at her own words, sighed defeatedly, and restated, “...Just how quickly Immolatia claims a life.”

        Harmony's every breath was a sea of knives piercing through to her Entropan skin. Any and all green flame had dissolved into a baking static in the back of her mind as she walked the serrated precipice of this new and heinous tragedy. She gazed over Suntrot's golden coat, over her yellow threadbare mane, across her lips stained with a mesmerizing froth of jaundice that practically blended in with the infirmed filly's body.

        “No triage could have foreseen this event,” Zecora said in a gentle tone from across the lantern-lit interior. “Suntrot's sudden collapse, we could not prevent. I am sorry, friend Harmony, that you had lose a pony you felt for dearly.”

        Just as Zecora's words dripped dreadfully across the black-and-white tile floor of the place, a sharp gasp escaped Pinkie Pie's lips. She and Nurse Angel jolted, for Suntrot's body had begun spasming all over, from mane to tail. Her limbs thrashed in lightning-quick jerks, as if being electrified from the inside out.

        “What... Wh-What...?” was all the last pony could stammer.

        “It's the last throes. I've seen it before,” Vimbert's voice murmured from across the room. The unicorn's throat was as hollow as his horn, carved with three souls' worth of suffering. “She's being consumed.”

        “Oh Goddess...” Nurse Angel Cake whimpered, a hoof resting over her face. Pinkie Pie leaned into her and hugged the mare with a gentle forelimb. There were suddenly no smiles. Sniffles and sorrowful murmurs rose above the bright heads of the healthy young bodies at the rear of the room. Lingering beside the teary-eyed foals, Vimbert's front forelimb started to shake. He reached defeatedly into his jacket's pocket for the silver flask.

        Harmony saw it. Something in her eyes flared. “Zecora.” She climbed onto the bed, dragging her half of the machine with her. “Help me raise this thing above her. Another pony, keep her still—”

        “Dear friend, I'm afraid you do not understand! There is no healing once Immolatia has had its hand—”

        “I don't remember making a friggin' request!” Harmony barked, glaring daggers in the striped equine's direction. “Now you get your checkerboard flank over here or I'll drag you by your mohawk!” She slapped a hoof across Pinkie's skull. “Miss Pie!”

        “Wh-What, Har-Har?”

        “Hold Suntrot steady.”

        “But—”

        “Hold her steady.” Harmony tilted her end of the machine while Zecora gave her leverage. She bravely mounted the bed above Suntrot while aiming the spout of the machine towards the convulsing filly's mouth. “I did not defy a city council, swim through the belly of a hydra, or butt heads with a billion bumbling guards just to give up on this girl at the last second! You can all be cowards if you want, but where I come from, that sort of life doesn't cut it!”

        “In what way, Harmony, can I help your machinery?”

        “When I tell you to, give the drawstring a good crank. Use your mouth if you have to. And for Celestia's sake, Zecora, keep it titled up!” Harmony sneered as she tilted the glowing runestones down to form a halo around the filly's mute, jaundice-stained lips. “Miss Pie—”

        “I-I got her, Har-Har,” Pinkie Pie nervously gulped while clamping her hooves over the filly's shaking shoulders. “But—”

        “But nothing.” Harmony gripped the trigger. “Zecora, the crank—!”

        “Even if Alex can drag anything out of her, there'll be nothing left but a shell, just like Clyde—”

        “Will you shut up?!—Zecora! The crank!”

        “Mmmmff!” The zebra bit onto the handle of the drawstring and pulled. The engine hummed loudly, rattling the nearby windows flanking the dying filly's bed.

        Harmony's eyes flickered from amber to green to amber. She fought back the emerald with every Entropan ounce donated her and pulled the trigger to the machine gently in her grasp. The orange flame surged and surged. The thunderpearl pulsed wildly, as if beckoning lightning from the sky above Stonehaven. A loud whir hummed through the metal stalk of the elephantine device as the runestones glowed and reached magically into the foal's trembling mouth.

        “Come on...” The future scavenger hissed, sweated. Her hooves reached across the metal weight like they reached back through time, pulling the trigger and scraping at the lungs of Suntrot with orange hooves of flame, attempting to dredge up from the withering body even a single ounce of the same warmth that the last pony had cradled gently to herself days before. “Come on, I built you to last. I built you with my own friggin' hooves. Don't fail on me now...” Suntrot's body started spasming less and less. In place of her convulsions came several gurgling noises.

        “The infernite is solidifying across her bronchial tubes,” Nurse Angel Cake educatedly murmured in a dull tone. Her eyelids hung low as she bathed in a pitiful sound that the mare was all too familiar with. “She's asphyxiating.”

        “She's going to cough it up...” Harmony exclaimed, eyes widening as her face shook. “The orange flame's going to pull it out. You'll see. Zecora! Another crank!”

        “Har-Har...”

        “I said another crank, you crazy, deaf shaman!”

        “Har-Har...” Pinkie Pie leaned in and pressed a hoof gently to the last pony's shoulder. “All Alex is gonna do is pull poor Suntrot's lungs inside out.”

        Harmony exhaled long and hard, the machine slumping in her grasp. She gulped, shivered, and nodded. “Okay. Okay-okay...” She dropped the device down on the edge of the bed, fighting hyperventilation. “We just... W-We just need to sh-shake up her lungs and loosen the infernite for being dragged loose is all. I've seen this sort of th-thing done before. Nurse Angel, tell me if I'm doing it wrong.”

        That said, Harmony straddled Suntrot, straightened her body, and raised a copper hoof. With a grunting breath, she slapped the girl's sternum. The filly jolted, convulsed, and was once again as still as the stone walls of the room. Harmony gritted her teeth and struck the filly's chest repeatedly. The child didn't so much as budge. Her eyelids twitched for one last time, and moved no more. Her yellow-stained lips hung open to the heavens in a breathless gape.

        Zecora gulped hard. She glanced sadly Angel Cake's and Pinkie Pie's way as even the zebra's blue eyes became misty. She raised a hoof up to Harmony's bobbing form. “Please, dear friend. Just let it end.”

        “Her parents are on the other s-side of this sanitarium,” Harmony sneered, striking and striking the golden corpse's lungs. “This is not the end of anything—”

        Pinkie Pie joined Zecora's struggle to hold down the fitful pegasus. “Har-Har, you need to stop—!”

        “Celestia-dang it, she's got two living and healthy parents friggin' waiting for her! Don't you see that?!”

        “Harmony—”

        “Nnngh!” Harmony thrashed both limbs off of her, but she finally stopped her pounding.

        She sat in a sea of hyperventilating breaths. Her nostrils flaring as she squatted above Suntrot, heaving and heaving. Her eyes closed like twin amber apertures to a lonely airship. When they reopened, they flew a piercing, demonic frown through the wispy clouds of desolation. She glared into the great black wall of all her lonely years, of all her dried tears, of all her floundering kilometers flown in the absence of a warmth that was owed her, that was once bestowed upon her, but that was robbed from her far too soon. Every decade lived afterwards, cataclysmic or not, was but a pitiful appendix to the golden and loving threads stripped clean from the fabric of the last pony's life, consumed swiftly as if by a great, eternal blackness that waited for Scootaloo at the end of every fitful blink, so that her entire life had become a veritable tomb in the anxious wait for the inevitable phantom to devour her as well.

        She glared into this abyss, and when she did, the end of ponies spoke with the same horrendous anger that, once again, could frighten lightning into hiding.

        “I hate you. I hate you so friggin' much.”

        Vimbert raised an eyebrow. Nurse Angel Cake and Zecora blinked confusedly. “Har-Har?” Pinkie's lips quivered as she gulped and murmured, “Wh-Who are you talking to...?”

        Harmony would have none of it. In a world of endless cemeteries where every god was either dead or distant, she had no recourse but to become a goddess herself. So she did just that. Shoving everypony off of her in an animalistic growl, she exhaled and exhaled until every ounce of breath was evacuated from her projected soul self. Then, she clamped her mouth over Suntrot's paralyzed lips, and with Entropan lungs as mighty as the sea, she breathed in. The last pony inhaled and inhaled, her copper wings twitching with the process, teaching herself how to fly in a world stripped of gravekeepers to watch over her when the pegasus' time itself would come.

        The three nearby equines watched fearfully. From the back of the room, the foals paused in their sobs to look. Vimbert gazed at the scene. His jaw dropped, and his flask dropped to the sterile floor...

        Because at that very moment. “Nnnkkt—Snkkkt!” Harmony lifted the lips of her soul self off of the little filly. She spat and sputtered pure infernite into the bedsheets. Her amber eyes blazed wide open as she hoisted the machine back up through a curtain of dancing green flame. “Z-Zecoraaa—” The last pony breathlessly wheezed.

        The striped equine was at the machine's crankshaft in a blur. She pulled the drawstring. The orange flame screamed. Thunder roared from the pearl deep inside. The time-forsaken magic of Princess Luna's army laughed in a mad circle, and a tiny string of yellow dust silently but persistently dribbled straight out of Suntrot's lips, at the tail end of which:

        “Snkkkk-Pffffftttt...” The filly's golden body began convulsing once again.

        Pinkie, Angel Cake, and Zecora clustered in a tight circle around the filly, grasping her limbs from all sides. Harmony stumbled numbly off the bed and trotted away from the scene. The bodies of the three mares blinded her from the quivering patient, but by this time the time traveler couldn't bear to look. She limped and fell until her body slumped against the bulletin board full of foalish drawings. Her eyes twitched and her mind swam with emerald fire as she planted her forehead against the wall and braced herself with trembling hooves.

        Behind the pegasus' copper wings, the mares desperately murmured in a frantic circle around the tiny bed.

        “Hold her down!”

        “Dear Epona, what's happening?”

        “She's shaking! B-But it's different this time!”

        “Come on, Suntrot!”

        “Come on, darling!”

        “I hear s-something! Did she just—?!”

        Harmony clenched her eyes shut. She shivered and clutched to the wall like a great black womb, like all of her dark sobs shared alone with the silence of a swaying hammock. She rode the wheezing hiss of a pained, pained breath...

        “Snkkkt—Hauuck! Unnghh-Mmmm-Momma... M-Momma?!”

        “Oh praise Gultophine—”

        “By the Shadows' blessing! She is breathing!”

        “She's alive! Oh thank Gultophine, she made it...”

        Harmony instantly melted. The green waves of flame parted in a flash, making way for a steaming hot cascade of tears. She tilted her head to the ceiling of the Ward, her amber eyes rolling back as she hiccuped, shuddered, and collapsed against the wall, her sobs bathing the many, many colored drawings of the bulletin board, melting the various waxen hues into tributaries of gorgeous rainbow mush. In the back of her twitching ears, Suntrot's sputtering cries wheezed like a infant battling the common cold. It was the most beautiful thing the last pony had ever heard in her life.

        “It's a miracle...” Nurse Angel Cake murmured as she held the twitching little filly close to herself. A smiling zebra cuddled them both as she too knelt down at the side of the bed. “I swear to Epona...” The mare sniffled as she devoured all of her faithful years of misery and bled them out through joyous tears. “...Gultophine's spirit is here, in this very room, on her most holy of Harvests...”

        The filly opened her golden eyes, her lips quivering as she stared up confusedly at the ring of ponies gathering around her. All of the children cheerfully closed in, chasing their tears away as a throng of happy chuckles and cheers lit the room.

        “I... I-I don't g-get it...” Suntrot murmured and sniffled. “Wh-Why's everypony looking at m-me...?” She gulped. “And wh-why do I feel so g-good...?”

        “Because you're healed, ya silly little goose!” Pinkie Pie jubilantly chirped. She cartwheeled a path of giggles across the Ward, ruffled a paralyzed Vimbert's brown mane, and literally backflipped over a pair of beds to land in a victorious stance beside the copper pegasus. “Woohoo! You did it, you crazy, joke-less klutzamundo! Heeheehee!” She hugged the last pony dearly from behind.

        Harmony swallowed her way through a choking sob and weakly smiled back at her anchor. A deep shudder ran through her system as her wet eye sockets curved, strung halfway between a grin and a grimace as her soul raged with a new and indiscernible flame, something that dulled the many bonfires of that night into mere twinkles, like so many stars she thought she had come back to map, only to be giving birth instead to a new cosmic wonder.

        Pinkie saw the flaming wheels-within-wheels turning in the future scavenger's soul. Perhaps she always did. With a soft smile, she hugged Harmony even tighter, even dearer, nuzzling the small of the pegasus' neck.

        Harmony effortlessly melted into her anchor's loving embrace, stretching her wings back to enfold with the candy-colored filly's limbs. The two stood there, against the wall of childish illustrations, against the many pink shades of joy that surrounded them, until the tears made like the rainbow smoke over Town's Square and drifted deeper into the Grave of Consus.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Angel Cake and Vimbert worked in tandem, their hooves unfastening the many locks to a pair of double doors. Once the task was finished, they pulled at the handles and opened the entrance to the glass-lined waiting room of Stonehaven's third floor. Nurse Angel Cake gestured authoritatively to the nervous orderlies standing in the corner as she and the janitor stepped back, making room in the open doorframe.

        Exposed to the flickering lantern-light of the lengthy hallway beyond, several dazed patients in white shuffled into view. They squinted into the sudden crowd of equine figures greeting them.

        A solid train of foals had been ushered down the stairwell from the Immolatia Ward above. Zecora and Pinkie Pie stood at the front of the line and held the children back while cautiously staring at the other half of Stonehaven's occupants. Through the bright sea of healed children, a black-maned pegasus slowly marched, carrying the nervous shape of Suntrot on her copper flank. She aimed her strong amber eyes ahead of her, scanning the crowd of patients in white garb.

        Suntrot saw the two of them first. Harmony realized this from the stiffening of the little filly's folded limbs atop of her. Pausing to kneel down, Harmony let Suntrot descend to the black-and-white tile floor. On quivering limbs, the foal wobbled and stumbled forward, as if having just been born. She gazed with bright golden eyes at a pair of ponies—a stallion and a mare with matching yellow coats—standing in the far corner of the waiting room, their heads hung in an eternal slump.

        Harmony trotted close behind the child, her Entropan wings acting as a potential buffer to the many dazed patients who had formed a limp circle around the scene. Pinkie Pie bounced up and stood at the time traveler's side. The last pony and her anchor watched quietly, anxiously as Suntrot came to a shuddering stop before the numb pair of Dredgemaners.

        “M-Mommy?” The tiny filly gulped, her threadbare tail flickering. “Daddy? It's me.” Her eyes narrowed. “Can... Can you hear me?”

        The two catatonic ponies said nothing. Slowly, as if weighted by necklaces of iron, they tilted their necks up and stared with bloodshot eyes past the golden girl. There were no words. There were hardly even breaths...

        Suntrot's lips quivered. A tear ran down her cheek as she sighed towards the black-and-white floor of the place. Her body shook from a sob running up her spine. Just then, her tear dried, for a yellow hoof was brushing up against her cheek.

        “Sun... S-Suntrot...?”

        The filly gasped. She gazed up.

        The mare had reached out to her. Something was slowly but decidedly melting the glaze away in her eyes. As the warm seconds blazed on, the stallion also awoke with a shuddering gasp.

        “Suntrot, darling? You're... Y-You're well...”

        “What... What happened...? They... They told us that y-you would be dead within the year...”

        “Oh Mommy! Daddy!” Suntrot's face exploded in a wailing sob that betrayed her burning smile. With a cosmic strength, she propelled herself into them with a foalish pounce, drowning herself in their clutching limbs. “They were wr-wrong! They were all wrong! I-I've never been th-this alive, ever!”

        The couple shuddered, rediscovering their lungs, panting as if having fallen down from a great, great height. The mare and stallion leaned into the weight of each other, locking their daughter in a warm embrace and refusing to let go. Smiles alighted upon their faces for the first time in a gray eon, and they buried their tears in her golden coat.

        “Oh Suntrot, our little sunrise. Praise Gultophine! We'll never let them separate us again!”

        “We love you, darling. We love you s-so much....”

        “I love you too...” Suntrot whimpered and bathed herself in the midst of their voices. “I love you, Mommy and Daddy...”

        Pinkie Pie grinned wide. She glanced over her shoulder and motioned with her fluffy mane. A good half of the foals rushed in, making bee-lines towards their respective targets. One by one, the once-dying reunited with the once-lifeless, and in the absence of Immolatia there was soon an absence of misery. Mothers and fathers, older sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts and grandparents awoke from their Dredgemane lives as their long-lost loved ones reentered their gaze. A breathless room morphed into a chamber of sobs, giggles, and gasps that almost rattled the bars clean off the windows. In the far corner of the place, a mare with a purple mane sat a table, continuing to stare at a phantom book in her hooves... that is, until a trembling foal with matching hair pounced up onto the tabletop and looked pleadingly into the patient's face. The mare blinked, her irises dilating as a fire was rekindled through the length of her body. Her arms parted from a dissolving nightmare and instead clutched the foal to her chest as the two of them were refoaled joyfully unto a baptism of smiles and tears.

        Standing at the far end of the room, Zecora and Nurse Angel leaned against each other, sharing a warm and toasty smile. The orderlies stared in breathless awe, helpless to comprehend the transformation happening before them but unwilling to protest it. To the side, Vimbert stood, his hoof planted against his mouth as if the former professor was frozen in deep, deep thought. As his gaze darted fervently across the many reunited families, his eyes locked onto something in the foggy distance of his mind, and a cleansing moisture laced his lids.

        Suntrot was laughing at this point, practically giggling as she charaded with her hands the bizarre machine that had brought her back to life. Her parents chuckled and rocked her in their limbs, nuzzling her as they nuzzled each other all the same.

        Pinkie Pie let out a jubilant shout and yanked Harmony's tail. The pegasus gasped and reeled helplessly as her pink anchor laughingly spun her in several circles then tackled her in a giggling hug. The last pony smirked and hugged her back, stealing several more glances at the room with a heart-pounding addiction. She almost completely forgot about the encroaching green flames... when a light of a different sort suddenly flickered across the room.

        Pinkie gasped. She and Harmony spun to look out the barred windows of the place. Beyond the translucent glass, a dancing pale aura burned brighter and brighter, threatening in a familiar, deathly kiss to drown out the fresh colors that had blossomed suddenly inside Stonehaven.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The Royal Grand Bivs saw the light too. With panting breaths, they froze atop their respective roofs and gazed westward from the Town Square of Dredgemane. A large chunk of the Harvest crowd had wandered off. It wasn't that the mesmerized Dredgemaners had grown tired of the Bivs. Something else of immense interest and fascination was presently threading them away from the thicker bonfires and towards the dead end of Stonehaven. A winding, granite trench that was normally abandoned at any given hour of the day suddenly burned from end to end with white-hot torches.

        The flames were being carried by several guard ponies who had flocked there from the Militia Headquarters just minutes ago. They were not alone: a wooden wagon was being drawn behind them, within which was a battered, blue figure. The trinity of Dredgemane had joined the procession, and soon the entire town followed closely behind with silent, festering curiosity on this bizarre night of nights.

        With ruby-goggles glinting across the Grave of Consus, the distant Bivs exchanged glances. After sharing several gestures and light signals, they swiftly navigated the rooftops towards the west end of town and joined each other in a singular gallop towards the granite shell of Stonehaven. They watched forlornly as the dead-end hospital lit up in white torchlight below them.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Deacon Dawnhoof trotted sullenly, his head hanging towards the cobblestone sea of names. As the deathly street gave way to pure granite, he tilted his gaze up to grace the iron gates of Stonehaven far ahead. The world brightened as guards carrying several bright torches clustered tighter around him. Dawnhoof bit his lip. He gazed pitifully towards his left.

        Brevis sat on his haunches in the back of a rattling wooden wagon being drawn by two guard ponies. The mule drooled blood in between fits of gurgling coughs. He writhed, his front limbs shackled in rusted irons as his head rolled and rolled with the shakes of the cart. For all of his wounds and bruises, the street preacher fought to stay upright, to stay awake.

        Dawnhoof fidgeted in mid-step. He hesitated, but finally turned and looked to his right.

        Bishop Breathstar trotted tall and proud, his face solidified into a concrete frown as he kept the image of Stonehaven locked in his sight. To his flank, a relatively apathetic Sladeburn marched just as firmly. The Overseer's nostrils flared, and with a miffed expression he glanced over his shoulder and past the surrounding cluster of guards to see hundreds if not thousands of ponies tightly filling up the trench directly behind them.

        The residents of the Grave of Consus were hardly stupid; they knew something was up. Virtually the entirety of Dredgemane's citizenship—from families to laborers to elders to teenagers to traders to drunkards—had all arrived, had all followed this sudden and fateful procession, had come to see what would transpire at the front steps of Stonehaven, as if it might draw a conclusion to the craziest and most unpredictable of Gultophine's Harvests in Equestrian history. The Royal Grand Bivs—in all of their mystery and majesty—were merely an appetizer for this upcoming, delicious showdown.

        Overseer Sladeburn shuddered for once in brief trepidation. It had never before occurred to him that the population of Dredgemane might become an impermeable barrier. Yet, as he stared back into the solid wall of murmuring ponies taking up the procession's rear, he realized that they had become just that. The lead of quarry operations was almost relieved to see Mayor Haymane galloping up from the thick of the crowd, nearly rattling his wheels off as the petite elder came to a breathless canter beside him and the Bishop.

        “Breathstar!” Haymane grunted. He was not a happy pony. “Counselor, what is the meaning of this?! Do you forget who has been granted executive authority over the official proceedings of this town?! Have you lost all respect for myself or the Council?! I have several seat members asking me what all of this bedlam and ruckus is about! It's difficult enough attempting to explain it to them all on my lonesome without you taking half the town hostage in this... this...” He shook his straw-hard mane and spat, “Just what is going on here, anyways?!”

        “You're right, dear Mayor,” Breathstar droned as his trot carried him onward, undaunted. He remained staring with vengeance at the shape of the sanitarium ahead as he uttered, “This town has been taken hostage. It's been taken hostage by the Bivs, by the pegasus, by the zebra, and now by a most heinous act of heresy taking place under the roof of your very own hospital.”

        “What do you mean by that?” Haymane's brow furrowed as he fought to roll in pace with the priest. “Could you not have shared this information with me earlier before creating... creating a mob?!”

        “This is hardly a mob, Mayor. It is a righteous army of Gultophine's wrath, for that is exactly what all of us need right now. You and the Council left me in charge of the militia, did you not?”

        “Y-Yes, but—!”

        “Then by the authority invested in me by the Town's confidence and by the Alicorn Sister's Spirit, I must do whatever I can to snuff out the evil that threatens to infect your precious town. Right now, as we speak, the pegasus and her allies are spreading heretical filth across the poor foals of Stonehaven with a machine built out of heathen industry. When our very children are polluted by outwordly paganism, would you have me stand by and do nothing?”

        “No! But Counselor, you must know that the ponies of this town have been roused enough by the hysteria of this night! If you turn this entire thing into a spectacle, then—” Haymane's words bled into nothingness, for his gaze had fallen upon Dawnhoof's face. He was paralyzed by the young unicorn's expression, by the somber guilt and disgust that dripped off of it. Haymane followed the trail of those invisible tears, and he saw Brevis for the first time. Gasping, he rolled up to the side of the wagon and squinted up close at the figure's bruised, bleeding form. “Bishop Breathstar...” The Mayor icily turned to frown at his spiritual companion. “What has been done to this mule...?”

        “He was an accessory to sin and deceit,” Breathstar droned matter-of-factly. “Now he is to be an accessory of a righteous sort, a reminder to all of these poor and impressionable souls that Gultophine's grace may be infinite, but it is also a thing of focus, and if we stray from the path, then there will be no providence for our souls and no progress for this town.”

        “Dear Bishop, I uphold progress with every fiber of my being, but I know torture when I see it.” Haymane frowned. “I would never have condoned physical torment, and even if this mule's crimes were heinous enough to deserve execution, a grave decision of that sort would be up to the Council—Not you.”

        “Good Mayor...” Sladeburn's rumbling voice filled the torchlit air, forcing the elder pony to turn around. “You've always trusted us throughout the years because we've upheld what's good for the many ponies of this town.” He nodded his dark head towards the looming gates of Stonehaven in mid-trot. “Trust us now. Not for one second have we abandoned the security of Dredgemane. Whatever it takes, I promise you, all of your beloved city's troubles end tonight.”

        Haymane took a deep breath. He gazed once more at Brevis, then at Dawnhoof.

        This time, the young Deacon glanced back at the Mayor. It was an empty look, as if his horned head had turned into a grave.

        “I hope you are right, Overseer,” Haymane murmured. He glanced over his wheeled flank into the faces and faces of his citizens, and not a single one of them belonged to Quarrington. “For all of our sakes.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “It's a mob,” Vimbert said.

        “Nuh uh! It's not a mob!” Pinkie Pie frowned back at him from where she and Zecora stood before an open window, looking out onto the solid line of torch-bearing ponies. “It's more like a big, lumbering crowd of restless ponies who could really use a massage!”

        “They've got torches. They've got wagons. They've got polearms.” Vimbert stood against the edge of a Stonehaven stairwell with his front limbs folded. “Did I mention that they've got torches? Please, this matches the pattern of every angry crowd who's ever marched up to a place of ill-repute before the eve of every civil war that's ever happened in Equestrian history. Believe me, it's a mob.”

        “Alright then, so we have ourselves a mob.” Zecora nodded. “It would seem that distracting them is no longer the Bivs' job.”

        “Pfft! Duh!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “That's why you should summon the sandipedes!” At the receiving end of a zebra's deadpan glare, the earth pony blinked. “Oh, that's right. I made that up. Drat!”

        “I don't care what happens to me,” Nurse Angel Cake said. “I've made our bed with what's transpired tonight, and if it's the end of my career as a medical practitioner, then I say 'So be it.'”

        The compassionate mare stood protectively beside the many orphaned young foals of Stonehaven. Despite having been healed, the children shifted in a nervous tremble as the roaring hoofsteps of the crowd shook through the granite structure of the sanitarium. The reunited families stood on the other side of the lantern-lit hallway. Parents clung to their children as they nervously awaited the impending confrontation that loomed outside.

        Angel Cake's voice resumed, “I just don't want anything bad happening to the foals or the families here. They've gone through so much... too terribly much to have it all be brought to a bitter end by Haymane's wrath or whatever's bringing the crowd to Stonehaven's doorstep.”

        “Maybe Haymane will understand!” Pinkie Pie bounced, her eyes bright and hopeful. “When he realizes that all of these children have been miraculously healed, he'll—”

        “—do what?” Vimbert muttered. “You think the Mayor will turn about-face and act in opposition to a cold and grave philosophy that has sustained his seat upon the throne of Dredgemane for several, miserable decades?” He motioned with an orange hoof while speaking, “I admit: I've been awe-struck by the amazing things that I've seen happen tonight. But unlike Haymane, I don't have anything to lose.” He sighed long and hard. “I've had my fall from grace long, long ago. No, my friends, Haymane is Haymane. When the sun rises over this town, Dredgemane will still be Dredgemane. Of that, I am sure, and it's not because I'm a cynic. It's because I have common sense.”

        Zecora swallowed bitterly. She gazed at Pinkie Pie. “Then all of our work these last two nights was for naught? I figured it was all for dramatic change that we had fought.”

        “Pfft—Then forget about Haymane!” Pinkie Pie stuck a bright hoof out the window. “What about the town, huh?! The town! It's always been Dredgemane that I've been concerned about! If that wasn't the case, my sisters and Pepper and I would never have made up something as super-duper royal as the Biv!”

        “Heh. I knew the Biv smelled funny.”

        “Heehee! That's because your nose isn't as broken as your horn, candlestick head!”

        “But I fail to see what you're going on about,” Vimbert murmured.

        “We shouldn't worry about Haymane or any of his grumpy guys!” Pinkie bounced around the hallway in mid-speech. “You see how the foals' parents came out of their funk as soon as we reunited them! Who's to say the children won't have the same effect on everypony else in Dredgemane?!”

        “A great deal of weight rides on the machine's proof,” Zecora exclaimed. “I suggest we send a messenger out into the crowd to relay the truth.”

        “Yeah, and then what?” Vimbert made a face. “The rest of us—including the children—hole ourselves up in this goddess-forsaken sepulcher of a hospital? That didn't go well for Luna's soldiers at the Siege of Whinniepeg.”

        “Please, will somepony come up with something?” Nurse Angel clung a trembling foal or two to her legs. “The crowd is practically here! What are we going to do?”

        “We meet them.”

        Everypony spun to look at the far corner of the hallway.

        Harmony winced, rubbing a hoof across her forehead. The pegasus stood beside her machine, leaning against a wall. She swam through a blinding sea of green flame and summoned the strength to speak, “We go out and we meet them. Whatever happens... happens. The rest...” She glanced at Vimbert. “... is up to history.”

        “Oh, Har-Har,” Pinkie rolled her eyes and smiled liquidly. “If you've finally come up with a joke, then I've got a thing or two to teach you about timing—”

        “It's no joke.” Harmony glared at her anchor, then at the crowd of families, foals, and nervous breaths. “And neither is this whole situation a joke. Even if it was, we just delivered the punchline.” She kicked the metal shell of the machine with a loose hoof for emphasis. “We just gave Dredgemane a dose of what it needs, of what it's always needed. If the townsponies can't see that, then they have no room for hope, and souls without hope can never see the light, no matter how many shades of it you shine in their faces or how brightly you do it.” She gazed at her anchor, gulped, and fought another migraine to say, “I know this, because for so many years I flew across the graves of yesteryear in search of what the darkness had to tell me. Let me tell you: life is too short and precious to waste on such a fruitless endeavor. If the ponies of Dredgemane don't want to see the light that we have to share with them, then that's their own fate. Every single one of us inside this building got a chance to live, if even for a very short span of time. That... That is all that matters tonight.” Harmony winced, shuddered, and sighed. “Nothing else.”

        Pinkie Pie bit her lip nervously. Zecora hung her head while Vimbert said nothing. A nervous Suntrot hid in the protective, loving limbs of her parents as the loud noise of the crowd reached a fever pitch beyond the window.

        Harmony took a deep breath. “Now...” The last pony spread her wings. She kicked the machine up so that it balanced across her Entropan flank. “Who's ready to shine?”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        “Miss Harmony, pegasus agent of the Canterlotlian Clerk, the City of Dredgemane demands that you come and answer for your criminal sins committed against the sovereignty of the Refuge of Gultophine!”

        Bishop Breathstar's voice boomed across the steep, granite walls surrounding Stonehaven. Several glinting polearms sliced the air as guards rushed up and formed a phalanx ahead of the towering priest. The wagon holding Brevis grinded to a halt. Deacon Dawnhoof rushed over and placed a gentle hoof on the retching, coughing mule's shoulder as the militia erected a solid line of torches before the stone steps of the sanitarium. Overseer Sladeburn and Mayor Haymane hung in the shadows that separated the burning head of the procession from the crowd of anxious, breathless onlookers forming a thick sea behind. An eerie hush wafted over the bustling masses, penetrated solely by the town priest's rumbling voice.

        “In the holy name of Gultophine—by the power of her Spirit that binds us along the providential stream of life—I command you to show your face, to surrender your tools of heathen construction, and to expose your wicked allies so that all of you may face your judgment with a modicum of grace before we have to resort to drastic action!”

        The shouting words echoed across the broad, stone steps of the sanitarium. When the noise cleared, the entrance remained barren. The flickering of torchlights did nothing to summon Breathstar's nemesis out from hiding. The Bishop merely frowned, casting an exasperated glance aside at a shrugging Sladeburn.

        In the meantime, Brevis coughed wildly, weathering a painful spasm through his bleeding body. Deacon Dawnhoof braced him with a pair of gentle hooves, not flinching for a second from the scarlet stains gracing him. “Dear soul...” the young unicorn murmured in a hushed breath beneath the twice-hushed crowd. “I am sorry.” He gulped and closed his twitching eyes to the impeding madness. “I am so, so sorry for all of this...”

        “Snkkkt... S-Sorry...?” Brevis hissed through broken teeth. He shakily lifted his bruised face until it was level with Dawnhoof's. “D-Don't... ever b-be sorry...”

        “Sir...?” Dawnhoof blinked confusedly.

        Brevis jerked a shivering hoof up and gripped the edge of Dawnhoof's robe. Sputtering, he produced a shattered smile. “Be a m-monarch butterfly... Hckkt-BraHa!”

        The young unicorn stared confusedly at him. He was shaken out of his contemplation once Breathstar's booming voice resumed:

        “I shall give you one last warning!” The priest paced icily before the rows of torches. The rainbow stains were beginning to melt away from his otherwise immaculate, pale coat. “If you do not remove yourself from that place of refuge, if you do not cease tainting the poor children with your pagan presence, then I shall be forced to send the entirety of Dredgemane's militia after you! One pegasus with an unearthly bag of tricks isn't enough to withstand the sheer volume of Gultophine's righteous anger! If you won't pay your respect to the spirit of this town, then you will pay with your life!”

        “Breathstar—!” Haymane rolled forward, hissing.

        The priest held a hoof up, squinting steadily towards the sanitarium. There was no movement, not even a stir. With a flaring of his nostrils, he growled, “Very well.” He turned towards the many guards standing beside him. “Be firm, be righteous, but above all else be swift.”

        “Yes, Bishop.” The captain of the guards slid a helmet over his mane and slapped his polearm against the Grave of Consus. “Soldiers of Dredgemane—!”

        “Bishop, cease this madness!” Haymane rolled around in front of the phalanx. “There must be another way! Stonehaven is full of weak and defenseless patients!”

        “—retrieve the pegasus and her zebra conspirator at all cost!”

        “Long ago, Mayor, you and I established the hospital as a refuge for the infirmed bodies of our citizens.” The Bishop cooly glanced down at the elder. “Right now, we should be rejoicing that their souls have been sanctified by Gultophine's Spirit, as I so nurtured yours long ago.”

        “Counselor, souls and bodies deserve rest all the same.” Haymane's eyes narrowed. “I can speak for myself in both respects, but when you send an army to raid that hospital, can you speak for them?”

        The Bishop barely inhaled before replying with a nod, “But of course. I am Gultophine's Intercessor.” He motioned towards the guards. “Carry forth!”

        Haymane stared in horror as the Mayor's own militia marched past him. With polearms sharply glinting, they approached the granite steps of Stonehaven. Just as they broke into an armor-rattling gallop...

        Three rainbow shadows glided down and landed at the base of the steps. A huge gasp flew through the crowd. The guards jerked back and formed a solid wall of defense, brandishing their many blades and net guns. From a distance, an enraged Sladeburn grinded his hoof against the earth while a twitching Breathstar stared disbelievingly.

        The three Royal Grand Bivs formed a flimsy line, acting as the last barrier between the entirety of Dredgemane and the lone granite hospital looming behind them. With ruby goggles glinting, they reflected a sea of torchlight and faces. Their stance was unwavering.

        “Well, sugahs,” one Biv slurred. She cracked the joints in her neck and tightened her forward limb muscles. “I never wanted to rope you into something like this. Still, it's best to end the dance show with a bang, if we have to.”

        “Blinkaphine...” another voice murmured as a second Biv glanced at the third. “Whatever happens, I just want you to know that I love you.”

        The third nodded, bracing a wave of trembles.

        “Think of Pinkamena...” The second flung her cloak out and produced a sea of multicolored throwing knives. “Think of her smile.”

        The other two Bivs followed suit. The three figures crouched in a serrated fashion before the torchlit guards, ready to spring at a moment's scream. Bishop Breathstar suddenly galloped up to the thick of the blood-pulsing standoff and shouted.

        “Now! While you have the chance! Strike the Bivs down and end this town's madness once and for all—!” But even as Breathstar said those words, his face melted. A pair of twitching eyes exploded across his pale frame and the priest stumbled backwards as if struck by a cannonball to the chest.

        Haymane squinted curiously at him. The Mayor saw the many guards of the forward line lowering their weapons in shock. A nervous murmur bled through the gathered masses of Dredgemaners with no less marvel. Wheeling about, Haymane feasted his eyes upon the entrance to Stonehaven in time to see a thick crowd of ponies, both the young and the old, filing out and standing at the top of the steep, granite steps.

        Dawnhoof slowly stood up straight, his horn glistening with new life in the shine of so many torches. Brevis glanced over and squinted one good eye. The mule easily bore a smile that could go on forever, even if it had to bleed forever.

        The three Royal Grand Bivs turned and glanced over their multicolored flanks as the entire contents of Stonehaven spilled out like ghosts emerging from a forsaken grave. Pinkie Pie carried three bright-eyed foals on her backside at once. Zecora stood, piercing the gathered crowd with hard blue eyes. Vimbert and Angel Cake stood along the sides of a thick stream of woken patients in white. Finally, the last pony appeared with the machine stretched across her wings, and gathered around her was a solid sea of very quiet, very scared, but very healthy children.

        The copper pegasus gulped. The green tongues of flames tickling her soul was suddenly the least of her concerns as she stared dead-center into the extinct forest of ponydom. For the first time since the lone time traveler had submerged herself into the past, she was no longer a trivial enigma. Every single Equestrian soul was staring at her. She wanted to throw up, but she couldn't afford to tremble at this divine exposure, not now.

        The world had become dead silent, as if the Sundering of Consus had just transpired and everypony was waiting for Gultophine to take wing. The eyes of the many foals flitted across the crowd and the crowd gazed back at them. The two tortured halves of Dredgemane came together across an abysmal distance. The torchlight was merely an illuminating frame to this delicious art-piece that was evolving before the whole of them.

        In the midst of this prolonged silence, it was Overseer Sladeburn's restlessness that took over. He stormed angrily to Breathstar's side and snarled at him. “I do not understand! What is going on?! Why haven't your ponies followed through with their orders?!”

        “I...” Breathstar stammered. He was not awestruck so much as he was panicking. “I-I told... th-them...”

        “Confound it, Breathstar! These ponies are your holy soldiers! Every single one of them is in your control, so control them—”

        “S-Silversprout?” one of the guards suddenly stammered.

        Sladeburn and Breathstar reeled about to witness one of the militia ponies completely dropping his polearm, netgun, and helmet. The young pony marched forward, directly out of line, and stared wide-eyed at the line of foals beside Harmony and her anchor.

        “Elektra alive! Little bro, is that you?!”

        One of the tiny coats atop Pinkie Pie gasped and hopped down with a beaming smile. “Bronzestar!” He scampered down the granite steps, ushered by a flock of giggles. “Bronzestar! Look at me! Look at me!”

        “Oh Silversprout...” The guard smiled painfully and lurched ahead with a hoof outstretched. “I thought you were a goner! Praise Gultophine—” A pale hoof slammed across the back of the guard's head, sending the grunting pony to the ground.

        Harmony jerked with a frown.

        The coat gasped, his little eyes wide. “Bronzestar! Brother—!” He made to dash over to him but one of the Bivs protectively held the child back.

        Bishop Breathstar seethed, standing above the groaning guard with a limb raised. He glared up at the line of Stonehaven life and pointed at them, spitting, “Witchcraft!”

        The air roared with an angry thunder once more. The guards and citizens of Dredgemane stirred nervously amidst a quagmire of murmurs as the Church of Gultophine's preacher continued:

        “The pegasus and her zebra cohort have infected the heart of Dredgemane's most precious lives with voodoo and witchcraft!” Breathstar paced before the torches and gestured wildly towards the granite steps of Stonehaven. His eyes effortlessly pierced the trembling countenance of the thousands of eyes gazing from afar. “It is not Gultophine's Spirit that has brought the shuffling bodies of our loved ones here! See how they cower and tremble in the night?! I tell you—they have exchanged the afflictions of Immolatia and insanity for a pestilence of the soul! For it was these outsiders, these damnable wolves in sheep's clothing who have used the very night of Gultophine's Harvest as a cover to usurp all that we hold dear!”

        Brevis winced while Dawnhoof breathlessly trembled. Overseer Sladeburn managed a smirk and folded his front forelimbs while Haymane calmly listened throughout the entire, impromptu sermon.

        “Do you not see how they have allied themselves with those who would don the sacrilegious and sociopathic image of the Royal Grand Biv?! Can you not fathom how they have turned the blessed exorcism of Gultophine's bonfire into a plebeian sideshow attraction to distract us from our true calling?! This entire night has been a molestation of all that has ever been sacred and holy in this Refuge of Gultophine, in this land carved out of the body of our fallen Forefather Consus! These are not saviors or practitioners of medicine, my dear children. No—they are heretics! And they have dirtied this town, dirtied this night, and dirtied the blessed souls of those infants who stand before us with the tools of heresy!”

        The crowd stirred into a louder, hotter cacophony of anxious voices as Breathstar spun about and passionately lifted the starry roof off the night like a reverse Onyx Eclipse.

        “My whole life I have dedicated myself to Gultophine's Spirit! But these interlopers exist outside of the stream of progress that makes our holy town so sublime! Behold, even now they seek to drag us out of the stream with them into a great and impenetrable darkness that knows nothing of the warm and blessing wings of our Alicorn Sister! It may look like they have given us life, but it is an illusion! It is a facade, a transient trick of smoke and mirrors afforded by the taint they wield with their pagan hooves! Do not give in to their deceit! They have already taken this town's children! If we let them, they will take away our lives, our decency, our progress!”

        The crowd's volume had risen to match that of Breathstar's booming words. A surging sea of confusion and fear splashed together to form anger. Soon the many Dredgemaners were shouting, growling, demanding answers.

        Nurse Angel shivered nervously along with the many families of Stonehaven. Vimbert merely closed his eyes in shame. Pinkie Pie tossed a nervous glance aside at Harmony.

        The pegasus was wincing. She fought a waterfall of flaming emerald to dredge forth a breath of deeply-seeded fury. When her eyes finally widened, they appeared to be scarlet, and not amber, if even for a second. “Do you want to know what this witchcraft is?!” she shouted.

        The crowd shouted back. The whole of Dredgemane had become a sea of trolls. Stonehaven was a tiny cellar in the middle of a desecrated Equestria, and the last pony landed her hooves to the wounded earth violently in between the torches.

        “I said, do you want to know what this is?!” She flipped her wings and tossed the machine into her grasp.

        “Har-Har, watch out with Alex—” Pinkie Pie reached over.

        Harmony viciously shrugged her off and held the machine up high before the gaping crowd. “I built this! I built this out of the same materials that you have spent your goddess-forsaken lives mining out of this murderous landscape! The very same metals your countless miners have died for went into this thing! The fluid of local hydras became its blood! The jewel of your neighbors sparked it to life! The very bones of Consus gave it animation! This is a miracle of engineering, as you are engineers, as all of us are engineers of life, employing the resources that the Goddesses granted us by their wisdom! By Celestia's intelligence, I designed this machine! By Elektra's ingenuity, I sculpted it into being! By Luna's tenacity, I gathered the last of the ingredients and by Gultophine's grace I wielded it to drag infernite out of the lungs of children who had been carelessly left to their somber fate by the likes of the same power-hungry moron who now struggles to keep a hoof-hold of all of you this very instant!”

        The crowd murmured. Bishop Breathstar frowned and opened his mouth to retort—

        Harmony wasn't finished. “These foals are healed! They are cured of Immolatia! There isn't a single gram of infernite left inside of them! What's more, those of them who have parents—their families are cured! They were never suffering from the supposed madness that imprisoned them here in Haymane's paranoid lockbox! They were victims of depression and defeat—Just like all of you!”

        The Dredgemaners rumbled in shock and disapproval.

        Harmony nevertheless continued. “Just like all of you! You had it in you to heal these children all along, just like you had it in you to heal yourselves! Where I come from, Gultophine's Spirit is an inspirational thing. But that's simply what it is! An inspiration! I can allow the thought of the Goddess of Life to motivate me, but I cannot expect her wings to carry me! I have long learned to teach myself how to fly, for the very wings on my body are as much a blessing of the gods as any other part of me!”

        The copper pegasus balanced the machine back onto her copper wings and gestured to the parallel granite walls of that town.

        “Is it so different here?! Huh?! Is it so different here, in the Grave of Consus, where so many things died in the First Age that even today we are stumbling to find ourselves in the shadows of the corpses left behind?! Dredgemaners, you and I have something in common! We are all alone! We have always been alone and always will be! We are as alone in all of our numbers as we will be when... when...” She hissed and fought the claws of Spike's breath. “...When there will only be one of us left to carry on the fragile breath of magic.” The last pony gulped painfully and continued. “I'm sorry if I upset the regimental balance and order of your amazing town. I want you to know that I did it for a reason. I saw suffering. I identified with it. Then I found it was my job—as a living and breathing pony—to find a way to end that suffering! Blessed by Gultophine or not, life is short and life is precious! The light that is granted us is a beautiful thing, for it is so fragile, and it will not last forever! Why...” She clenched her eyes shut and hissed. “Please, Entropa, Why...” She graced the crowd with her quivering ambers once again. “...Must we live as we die, forever sunken in shadow?”

        Breathstar finally stabbed his voice in before any of Harmony's words could hold sway. “Your subjective and ridiculous dogma is nothing but poetic nonsense! Dredgemane has progressed for centuries before you came along! Now you think to excuse your anarchist uprising by invoking the names of the Alicorn Sisters?! We should have spared the bonfires of Gultophine's Harvest and built a burning stake for you, blasphemous child!”

        The Bishop's passionate voice matched the fever pitch of the crowd far more expertly than the last pony's ever could. The roars became deafening as several thousand Dredgemaners flung their anger, their confusion, and their pain like stones at the orphan of time.

        The last pony twitched in the torchlight as she received the full brunt of their anguish. Deep down, she knew that she was a pariah, built out of the flames of the Cataclysm. In all of her lonely years, this truth only filled her with sadness. Now, she was being filled with something else. There was no longer a fragile shred left in her mind that could play Octavia's strings to this blistering ugliness, for these creatures could never fill the beautiful concert halls of her fitful dreams, for they were not ponies, they were hardly even honorable enough to be called trolls.

        They were a herd, and Scootaloo suddenly didn't want to be any part of it.

        “Fine...” She snarled, something that daringly pierced the volume of shouts spitting back at her. “If that's the way it's gonna be...” Her eyes flamed between green and amber as she raised the machine once more like an onyx silhouette against the starlight above. “You want to live your lives dead? So be it! Have your misery and your contempt and your superstitious excuses! But if you so much as want a solution...” Harmony slammed the device down into the Equestrian Earth, spilling it into a hundred shattering, flaming pieces. “...Build it yourselves!”

        The crowd hushed to a nervous murmur as the last pony heaved and shook venomously before them, fueled by an entire Fourth Age's worth of hate.

        “I thought ponydom was worth honoring. I thought that ponies were creatures of distinction who knew hope and how to preserve hope. I thought there was magic and love and contentment to be had in the grand, galloping sea of you, but I was wrong. I can't believe a part of me actually thought that I could save you—if even for a bleeding moment. No creature that lives life under the comfort of blindness deserves saving. So if you want to die? Then die! Each and every one of you can die! I don't friggin' care anymore, and I hate myself for ever having cared! But mark my words: when all is said and done, there won't be a funeral for the likes of you. There won't even be a friggin' eulogy! I'll see to it!”

        With that, Harmony spun from the stunned equines like so many flakes of ashes. She marched firmly, swiftly towards the far side of the Stonehaven steps.

        An orange hoof made a desperate grab for her. “Just where are you going—?”

        Harmony flung Vimbert's grip off with a snarl. “Away. Forever.” Scootaloo was done, done with the experiment, done with tears, done with her life and theirs. She was the end of ponies, nothing more. “I'm friggin' finished. It's all hopeless. It always was.” She had only to think of an excuse to give Spike, and then she would once again be a scavenger in the dim haze of eternal twilight, her only friend.

        She was just about to stretch her wings out and fly beyond the length of her green flaming anchorage... when a shrill sound warmly filled the air. The last pony couldn't help it. She turned around. She stared back. When she did, she felt just as perplexed as the very second she saw the Mayor of Ponyville doused in egg yolk.

        Pinkie Pie was laughing, laughing merrily. She stood on the edge of Stonehaven's steps, on the precipice of a great fall, as she doubled over with insane waves upon waves of giggles, slapping a pink knee and cackling even more.

        The entire town of Dredgemane witnessed Quarrington's daughter breathe her hysterical outburst. Brevis curiously craned his neck. Haymane furrowed his brow. An extremely exasperated Breathstar tapped, tapped, tapped his hoof to the ground and finally tossed his forelimbs. “My dear child, just what are you laughing at?”

        “Heeheeheehee!” She snorted, giggled, and pointed a bright pink hoof. She hiccuped and gasped and sputtered for a breath amidst her endless chortles, like trying to pierce a smile that was still going on forever and ever since the night that a little foal saw the bright shinies. “Heeheehee... Haa-Haa!” She finally opened her thin blue eyes, grinning wide. “Y-You! All of you! Snkkkt—Hahahahaha!”

        Harmony blinked. She glanced confusedly at Zecora and the Royal Grand Bivs and received stares that were just as blank.

        “Hahahahaha!” Pinkie Pie jostled and bounced in place, grinning wide as she digested the entirety of the Grave of Consus and all the bodies lying within. “You stand there and look a gift horse in the face and stomp all over it like bunch of nasty weeds?! And to think that Daddy sent me to Ponyville so he could have peace! Hahahaha! You are all clowns! Heeheehee... Clowns! Buffoons! All of you! You're all the best in entertainment! The world's biggest punchline! Heeheeheehee!”

        Breathstar groaned. He face-hoofed and glanced lethargically over his shoulder. “Has anypony seen Quarrington—?”

        “And you wanna know why?! Hahahaha!” Pinkie Pie slapped her knee again and doubled-over in her barreling waves of cackles. She took a deep breath and smiled wider and wider. “Because Dredgemane is a joke! It's the biggest joke! It's the jokiest jokeriffic king of jokes! It always has been! Heeheehee—” She briefly planted a hoof over her lips and waved her forelimbs in front of her. “Snkkkt—Okayokayokay! Wait until you hear this.” She took a gasping breath. “So there's this God, you see, the Father of all things! He takes a nasty kerplunk into the land that he and Epona built! Nyeaaaarrrrr—Splat! He dies, you see?! His daughter loves him so much that she blesses his grave with her spirit of life, and do you know what happened?! For thousands of years, ponies living in that same place have forgotten what it means to be happy! Hahahahaha—They can't even smile when—snkkt—when their very own kids are hoofed over to them, wiped clean of all their nasty sickness! Gaah-Hahaha! They can't even love their own kids, because they're so grumpy! Heeheehee!”

        Harmony's wings lowered limply to her side. With pursed lips, she turned softly about and gazed at her anchor in a new light.

        Pinkie was laughing, Pinkie was smiling, but her face was blanketed with tears, enough to fill the trenches twice over. She giggled and she cackled and she said, “Don't you get it?! You're all clowns! You have to be! Only a clown would extend a joke like this for so long! Only a clown would think that what the Bivs do are pranks when this whole town has been one for years! Hahahah—I wasn't sent to Ponyville because I was insane! I went there because you all were! Heeheehee! I wanted to live, and nopony who lives in Dredgemane is ever alive! You don't want to be!” She laughed and hiccuped and laughed and hiccuped again. Her smile was very slowly, very painfully starting to look more and more like a grimace. “You d-don't want to laugh and smile and d-dance in the light. You want to watch your children t-turn to ashes! You want to call rainbows ugly things and m-make singing illegal! You want to wear clothes th-that hide how beautiful you all are and wait for d-death to tie the ribbon. You are clowns! Clowns who d-don't know when it's time to walk offstage. I tr-tried to show you new tricks. For years, I c-came back over and over again and tried. Even... Even after Cl-Clyde went away, I tr-tried... Because a p-pony has t-to try. Why are we alive if n-not to try... to... t-to...” Her laughter had melted into a cold hyperventilation as she fell on her haunches, her face contorting exhaustedly like she was giving birth to a hidden sob that had always been there for countless years.

        Any warmth in the torchlit air had been sucked away by the immeasurably huge vacuum left by Pinkie Pie's faded smile. With sisterly grace, two of the Bivs sashayed up the steps. Unmasking, Inkessa shook her gray mane loose, smiled dearly, and nuzzled the small of Pinkie's neck. A mute Blinkaphine was close behind, clutching to the far side of the middle child with a gentle hug. Pinkie gulped, panted, and hung on the weight of her siblings, her moist eyes locked onto a gray, gray splotch of earth hovering beneath everypony, immersed in the Grave of Consus, the place that had foaled her—Dredgemane's reverse-joke.

        Brevis had been quiet the whole time, bravely bearing a smile amidst his blood as Pinkie bore a grimace amidst her tears. When he calmly opened his one good eye, he bore witness—as every soul in the trenches bore witness—to a striped equine marching halfway down the steps of Stonehaven.

        “My dear Mayor Haymane,” Zecora spoke to the leader of the town. Her blue eyes entreated him. “Do you know what is truly insane?”

        Haymane glanced up at her. His two remaining limbs were still quivering from the exclamations of Quarrington's daughter.

        Zecora uttered before the torchlight, “Goddesses and Shadows made us with their breaths. They did this knowing full well the time of our deaths. All of ponydom began through the progress of creation, and yet this town would rather drown itself in cremation. If you truly wish to abide by Gultophine's Spirit, is it not best that you take it... and live it?”

        “I have tried living it, dear child,” Haymane murmured, his body once more awash in the gray miasma of that town, hanging off his battered body like so many lonely years. “I respect Gultophine's Spirit for its purpose. I cannot pretend to expect any joy...”

        “You are wrong, old friend,” a raspy voice uttered from behind.

        Citizens, guards, and gasping ponies parted ways in a murmur of astonishment as Quarrington Pie walked up from the thick of the crowd. He led a frail equine figure by the hoof. Trotting into the torchlight, it turned out to be his wife, Pearl Fleece Pie. Her coat was still missing in several spots and her mane was a haggard mess. Still, she was very much alive, and her sea blue eyes glistened in a color that dared the nearby torches to extinguish themselves.

        “Where there is life...” Quarrington spoke. He spoke before Haymane, before the Council, and before the stars. “...There is opportunity. Opportunity is not all about progress. It is about joy...” The tall stallion smiled, and Haymane positively reeled from it. Quarrington’s snow-white sideburns fluttered in the night as he turned to gaze up at his three daughters atop the stone steps. “For life is short and sweet, so much so that all it can afford to be is joy. There simply is no room for anything else. For the longest time, I choked myself of joy. It was because I...” He shuddered, gulped, then exhaled. “I was punishing myself, Haymane, for things that were far beyond my control, for loved ones I had lost. And I think our delightful town has been doing that for so long. We've been punishing ourselves for not being able to rise beyond so much of our sorrow in the past, as if it's a crime to try and transcend ourselves. But so long as we're walking this earth that Elektra has carved for us, don't we owe it to ourselves to try? Pinkamena has tried. She has tried all her life, even when she had more than death trying to drown her out...” His smile took on a weak, shameful color. “She had us, and all of our embarrassingly trite baggage. And what became of my daughter's random antics?” Quarrington leaned over and stifled a crackle in his voice by nuzzling his wife's neck. “My family now has a second chance. We all can have second chances... and thirds... and fourths... and infinite... so long as we keep trying, like Pinkamena...”

        “Beloved...” Mrs. Pie murmured to her husband and kissed him on the cheek. On wobbly hooves, she stepped towards the Mayor. “Hello, Haymane. It's been a long time.”

        Haymane exhaled sharply, falling back on his squeaking wheels. “P-Pearl...?” He gulped. “After all this time, you are h-healed...?”

        “I was only sick on the outside, Haymane.” She smiled and stared deep into the eyes of a long-time companion. “I think it's finally time that you let yourself be healed on the inside, old friend.”

        The Mayor's jaw quivered. He gazed all around him, at the sea of lifelessly dressed villagers, at the teenage guards trembling under heavy strips of armor, at the bright and colorless torches, then at the many, many foals of Stonehaven staring under the glint of razor-sharp polearms. The Mayor brought a hoof up to his coat and felt the frame of a family picture in his pocket. It suddenly weighed more than an entire year's worth of dredged arcanium.

        “Hail Gultophine,” the stallion penitently murmured as a tear rolled down his aged cheek. “What have I done...?”

        “The better question, Haymane...” Pearl planted a hoof on the trembling elder's shoulder. “Is what can you do?” She smiled at her husband, then towards the sight of Stonehaven.

        Somewhere, between the warm embrace of her sisters and the loving gaze of her mother, a teary-eyed Pinkie Pie found her smile again. Several steps below, the last Biv unmasked. Pepper Plots smirked and patted the little colt beside her on his back. Breathless, the foal dashed over to the guard who was lying on the ground. He nuzzled him with a whimpering cry.

        The guard pony looked up, his young face wincing for the last time as he slowly stood on aching limbs. “H-Hey there, Silversprout. Heh... I got walloped pretty badly back there...”

        “I-I know...” The foal giggled. “I saw.” He bit his lip as his eyes watered. “Brother... Can we go home...?”

        “Yes.” The young pony knelt before the foal and scooped his sibling up in trembling forelimbs. “Yes, little bro. We can go finally go home...”

        A new murmur rose up through the thick crowd. This time, it was devoid of the angry passion and confusion that had tossed it into a mental stampede just minutes before. The sensation was like poison in Bishop Breathstar's ears. The panicky-eyed unicorn panted and seethed as he saw the town slipping away from underneath him like a filthy, silken robe.

        “No...” The priest snarled. He glanced all around until his gaze fell upon the polearm that the young guard had dropped. “No, this is all wrong!” He picked the glinting weapon up and raised it high above the two brothers' heads. “Gultophine's Spirit must not allow this absurdity to—”

        A bright golden glow suddenly encased the hulking weapon in his gasp. Breathstar gasped in shock as the polearm flew from his hooves, shattered into metallurgical bits, and slammed across his chest like a sea of shrapnel, knocking him like a punching bag to the ground.

        “Oooof!” Breathstar fell down before a series of hooves. He glanced up in fitful trembles.

        Deacon Dawnhoof stood, frowning, his horn glowing with bright fury. “That is not Gultophine's Spirit! That is not how we deal with our brothers and sisters in the stream of life! It never was!”

        “You...” Breathstar hissed and struggled to get back onto his hooves. “You worthless, thankless, childish imbecile! You dare talk to me like—?!”

        This time, it was the sheer force of Dawnhoof's shouting voice that flung Breathstar to the ground. “I don't care who you are or what I am! Gultophine's Spirit is something of love, of prosperity, of dedication to the prolonging of life in all of its many shapes and forms!”

        Overseer Sladeburn marched over with a frown. “Now see here, kid—” His dark eyes bulged as the very horseshoes on his feet flew out from under him in a wave of bright telekinesis.

        “And you!” Dawnhoof pointed with a righteous glare, pointing a glowing horn in the dark horse's direction. “You bring shame and malevolence to the Grave of Consus! This is a holy site, marked by as much triumph as tragedy! When you spill blood here, you spill the very essence of your soul for the vermin of this world to devour from underneath you! It is written in the Chronicles, 'To live in hatred is to live in shame!' We have all been ashamed of the Grave of Consus for far too long! This beautiful land should be a symbol of all that is great and wonderful in life, that which gives us purpose and merriment—like the full moon or a dazzling rainbow! I swear, by all of the strength that Gultophine has invested in me, I shall stand by and leave this City to your malevolence and destruction no further!”

        The crowd stirred to a new level of excitement. In spite of this, Sladeburn growled. “Oh what a dashing speech!” He spat. “Stupid brat! I'm the source of this blasted town's progress! It's because of me that the mines have pumped out enough raw materials to keep the Dredgemane treasury afloat! Do you seriously—seriously have any idea what I mean to this place—?!” His eyes twitched as he suddenly stumbled back from a dark shadow—darker than him—hanging over his trembling form.

        Mister Irontail leered intimidatingly before the Overseer. He was flanked by several other, burly workhorses, many of them bearing the old wounds of mine accidents as they now brandished frowns. The bushy-bearded blacksmith grinded his hoof into the granite floor of the trench and sneered, “I think we all have a good idea what you mean to this place. And I think we're about to remind you of all the ponies you let die to get your quota met.”

        “You think I haven't seen this coming?” Sladeburn growled, frowning up at them. “Do your worst, you filthy, thankless, bleeding hearts!”

        Mister Irontail snarled and raised a hoof to slam over Sladeburn's neck—

        “No!” A bruised, blue figure suddenly slid protectively in front of the Overseer. Waving blood-stained forelimbs bound in shackles, a heaving, wincing Brevis stared Irontail down with one good eye. He gulped then hissed, “Do not be animals! Do not be the same herd that he has marched you into being, only galloping at the same speed in a different direction!”

        Sladeburn blinked and snarled. “What's this stupid bum on about—?!” A ribbon of rainbow-colored confetti suddenly flew out of nowhere and wrapped over his hissing mouth. “Mmmff-Mmmff!”

        Over by the steps of Stonehaven, Pepper Plots blew the smoke clean from the barrel of a party cannon, twirled it, and smirked the mule's way. “Limelight's all yours, sugah.”

        “I know what you all need!” Brevis lurched on two limbs, waving his shackles underneath his cloak as he beheld the blossoming crowd. “I know what burns inside of you—You are all good Equestrians just like goodly Brevis and we all want the light. But more than that, we all wish to make the light! To pierce knowledge and joy into each other's souls, instead of blades or poison! If you must stampede... then stampede downhill! Fall free from the high throne of made-up diseases and made-up shame and go burn your own flames!” He hissed in a wave of pain and fell down.

        Dawnhoof rushed over to the street prophet's side and held him up. With a burst of light from his horn, he un-did the mule's shackles.

        Free once again, the blue-cloaked bum flung himself eastward, towards downtown. Dawnhoof was there to assist him in his hyperventilating limp. “Follow me! Enter as the herd and come out as a kaleidoscope! Split the solid, boring light that has dominated your souls and find the rainbow that entices us beyond ourselves! F-Follow me! Ditch the weight of our oppressors and the oppressors themselves and gallop towards a bright and blistering tomorrow that scares us into hiccuping laughter! It is a place that knows no shadows, and the only graves that exist there are for our decaying fetters and chains! Follow me!”

        Dawnhoof and Brevis sliced ecstatically through the crowd, infecting them far faster than Immolatia ever could. In a blood-pumping canter, citizens and guards alike dropped what they were doing, stopped saying what they were saying, stopped wasting what they were wasting and flung themselves away from the empty husk of Stonehaven without thought, without weight, without hesitation.

        Pinkie Pie suddenly bounded forward, as if a new life was breathed back into her at the tail-end of her mentor's haggard exclamations. Pepper Plots and the pink filly’s sisters were tight on her bouncing tail. It took Harmony a few blinking seconds to awake to the fact that she had to be as well. She ditched her impulse to fly away along with the faint fumes of green in her peripheral as she trotted swiftly and steadily after her anchor. A striped zebra and a shuffling janitor were not far behind, ushering along with them a sea of foals, families, and futures.

        Lingering behind, just as numb as Breathstar and Sladeburn but hardly as lifeless, a mesmerized Haymane hung in the torchlight. The lonely elder shifted on his wheeled haunches, until he realized he wasn't nearly as alone as he thought he was. Gazing aside, he realized that Quarrington and Pearl were still there, were still grinning, were still basking in the Mayor's presence.

        Haymane swallowed away the first of many bitter lumps into oblivion as he gently spoke, “I'm not used to seeing you smile, old friend.”

        Pearl looked at Quarrington as the stallion gently responded, “I'm not used to wanting to.” Together, the three old ponies stared beyond the granite walls of their town, as the bonfires burned with a sudden brightness, stoked by rainbow hues.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Dawnhoof carried a limping Brevis through the trenches, ravines, and feather-stalk avenues of the Grave of Consus. With a thick surge of Dredgemane life at their flanks, they reached the Town Square in record time. There, the mule practically tossed himself out of Dawnhoof's grasp and stumbled madly towards the bonfires, his body a putrid and battered silhouette against the prismatically tainted flames. It was beautiful and chaotic and ugly all at once. He reveled in it.

        “This is it! This what lingers beyond the cave of our fears!” He snarled and spat like a madpony as he fought his way through the bloodied cocoon of his cloak and tore it off of him, exposing his naked blue frame to the flickering hilarity of the night. “Did you hear?! Consus is dead! Not only is his funeral over, but the damnable eulogy has graced its final sentence! There are no more words and there are no more shackles!” He grunted and flung his body with the effort it took to toss his clothing into the bonfire. “There is only madness, a sweet liberating discovery upon this Harvest of good Equestrian souls! Behold, the Fall of Dredgemane!” He collapsed rapturously to the cobblestone, his bloody knees scraping the names of past ghosts as the fire flickered hotter before him. He stood there upon the baptism of heat, basking in it, as if he needed something to make him smile forever.

        Deacon Dawnhoof saw it. The invisible strings of yesterday held no more gravity. Bravely, the priest-in-training dragged his hooves over himself, peeled the robe off like an unwanted skin, and revealed a sandstone flank that had been scalded over long ago to hide the talent he was born with. With more strength than even the unicorn realized he had, he tossed the wrappings of his order into the flame while standing back, forever submerged in the substance of it.

        The citizens saw it. They saw the flame. They saw the light. In swift succession, they followed suit... by stripping off their suits. Casting off the finely woven apparel of Gultophine's Harvest, they stopped being Dredgemaners and started being ponies. Bright, colorful coats lit the stretches of Town Square, bathing it with more life and pastel glory than even a single firework of the Bivs could ever hope to produce. Mares and stallions, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers—they ripped themselves loose from the town's multiple decades of dreariness, depression, and darkness. They were Equestrians in blood as much as they were in breath, and in sudden, energetic waves of dancing limbs, limbs, limbs—they reveled in it—illuminated by the gasping flashes of the bonfires as it ate the baggage of the Grave of Consus, one article of clothing at a time.

        Young schoolponies stripped each other and tossed their belongings into the bonfire, finding something new and precious to them in a sea of hysterical giggles. Old, bearded equines effortlessly flung their rags off and fed it to the embers as they rediscovered smiling mouth muscles that had been long lost to them. As families and friends alike basked in the warmth bathing their Equestrian nakedness, siblings hugged each other, distant cousins shared tears of joyful confusion, and parents balanced cheering foals atop their spines. The fireworks had long died, but the air was alive with more sparks than ever.

        Through this gorgeous collapse, this entrenched hysteria on the eve of a horrible Cataclysm, the last pony numbly trotted. Harmony spun lazy circles, gazing with her copper jaw agape as she watched a purgatory transform into a paradise. Not even the imploding chunk of Ponymonium held the gravity of this righteous looniness engulfing her.

        Harmony witnessed as Stonehaven patients reunited with their families from the heart of town. They tossed their clothes into the bonfire along with all of their regrets and embraced each other through a shower of tears and laughter. Healed foals and reinvigorated parents trotted side by side down the bright cobblestone lengths of the town square. Children chased each other and danced under the snowing embers and rainbow-colored sparks. There was not a shadow left in the heart of Dredgemane. The bright shinies were everywhere.

        There was a loud giggling noise. Harmony glanced over to see several work-mares laughing up a storm as they yanked an apron off of a rotund, ticklish Marble Cake. The large pony fought them off, took control of her flimsy article, and flung it into the fire. Her huge frame teetered towards the blazes with a gasp, and all of her friends grabbed her and hoisted her to safety with a mutual giggle as the bakery ladies intoxicated themselves with a hitherto untasted sweetness.

        There was another round of giggles. Harmony looked the other way to see Irontail fumbling to get out of his blacksmith fatigues. Several soot-stained stallions on either side of him laughed and clamped their hooves onto the cobblestone as their bearded companion stumbled like a moron. Finally stripped of his work gear, they all saw his tail for the first time and utterly lost it when they saw that it was twice as bushy as his facial hair. He snarled and flung his work duds at them like a leather whip. They scampered away with snorting chuckles and watched as he flung the thing into the breath of fire with a pent-up growl.

        Through this delightful insanity, Zecora marched, blinking in wonderment, until several aged ponies whom Harmony recognized as Council members trotted up to the black-and-white equine and ushered her into a circular dance. The Zebraharan shaman blinked, surrendered with a helpless chuckle, and joined their cyclonic canter.

        Off to the side, Nurse Angel Cake sat on a curb with a sea of foals surrounding her. She smiled and murmured a series of words to them like an orating teacher, pointing at the various bright sights of the town square as she and the children shared a surging wave of giggles and sighs. She hugged the nearest children closest to her and stargazed with a thankful smile as she murmured words to an exiled goddess.

        Harmony gulped a hard lump down her throat as her face balanced itself between a cheer and a sob. She had stumbled upon a truth, something more certain and absolute than the constellations. Through twenty-five years of flame and chaos, her rainbow signal had finally found other ponies, had finally touched Equestrian lives, had finally united the last pony with those of her flesh and blood. The citizens of Dredgemane had discovered their hope; it was always inside of them. It only took a joyous embracing of their existence to open themselves up to their essence, when for so many years they—like Scootaloo—had stumbled blindly in the reverse of that blissful mechanic. Such glorious hope blossomed in the hearts of every single pony, so that it burst through their eyes and mouths, like magic. Death couldn't stifle what was burning inside of them, for the Cataclysm was not an omnipotent reaper. The apocalypse was a slave to time. The ponies of Dredgemane, for however many or few blissful weeks afforded them, had time as their benefactor.

        “Weeeeeeeee!” Harmony's bright pink anchor bounced by out of nowhere. “Best Gultophine's Harvest everrrrrrrrr!” Pinkie Pie giggled and chortled and flung her brown cloak into the flames, once more becoming the naked princess of Ponyville's Sugarcube Corner.

        Harmony glanced over her shoulder at the candy-colored filly, re-energized by her smile, daring to reflect it. A tiny hoof suddenly tugged at the future scavenger's tail hairs. Harmony looked forward, blinked, then looked down.

        Suntrot's little face beamed up at her. There were no coughs, there was no jaundice. There were only smiles. “For a moment there, it looked like you were gonna leave, Harmony. I wanted to thank you before you did...”

        “Thank me?”

        “This is an amazing night, and Dredgemane will never be the same,” a deep voice said. Harmony glanced up to see two ponies, Suntrot's parents, standing directly behind the girl and gazing with soft, golden grins in the pegasus' direction. The father continued, his voice rising in blissful octaves with each subsequent second that woke him further from a long, bitter sleep. “Many ponies will talk about what's happened here, but because of Suntrot we all know that it started with you.”

        “So thank you...” the mother added with moist eyes. She leaned against her husband and passed a porcelain smile Harmony's way. “Thank you so very much...”

        “Uhmmm...” The last pony nervously shifted, glancing behind her at the whooping, hollering, dancing, and clothes-burning citizens. She managed a crooked smile. “You're w-welcome...?”

        “Heeheehee!” Suntrot dove forward and nearly shoved Harmony down on her Entropan haunches. “You're the best, Harmony...” The little filly nuzzled the pegasus' chest lovingly. “I wish you could hug me forever...”

        Harmony's face broke. She gazed at the lights, the rainbow hues, the delightful madness of that flickering night. It was all far more melodic than any concert hall in the history of Equestria. Her copper hoof clutched the foal to her chest as a tear rolled down her face. “I wish I could too...” A painful shudder, and she closed her eyes to the moment, locking the immaculate shades of Suntrot's family under her ashen lids like white wings against a black monolith.

        From afar, an orange unicorn watched this scene. Inhaling a sudden warmth, fueled by a miraculously cleansing furnace forming within, Vimbert reached a hoof into his black jacket. The brown-maned stallion produced the silver flask. He stared closely at it, mesmerized by how the polished surface resembled so many cremated ashes. He closed his eyes and meditated. His brow furrowed, and with an off-color spark, a light was reborn in the shattered hollow of his horn. Buffered by a deep growl, the stallion dredged the wounds of his past outward in a miraculous burst of telekinesis, and along its trajectory there flew the white comet of his flask, so that it landed expertly in the middle of the nearest, blazing bonfire, amputating a long-worshiped tumor from his soul.

        He exhaled sharply, reopening his blue eyes to a new dawn, and all of it shimmering like an immortal rainbow stretching through the ages. Across this light show, a naked and bruised mule danced by, being chased by sparks and laughter. Brevis spun to a stop just in time to tap Vimbert's shattered horn like it was a bell.

        “Sound off to the school yard! Fill the streets with chaotic curriculum! Class is now in session, and today's pop quiz is a sunrise framed with song!” He grinned with the scant yellow remaining in his mouth and bounded away.

        “Heh...” Vimbert brushed himself off and smirked after the scampering mule. “Cheers, ya smelly bum.”

        The sunrise was indeed like a song, though Harmony was powerless to hear it. She sat at the dining table of the Pie Family household, clutching her head in two pained hooves, fighting yet another cloud of green flame like a fountain of acid surging through her Entropan frame. If she just stopped fighting, if she just gave in to the currents of reverse-time, she wouldn't be experiencing this agony. Still, she clung tightly to that blistering moment, hugging cohesion with as much fervor as she wished to be embracing a tiny golden filly etched forever into her bleeding memory.

        A bouncing of hooves awoke her to that wincing moment in time. She opened her eyes to a veritable sea of Blinkaphine's bright and colorful landscapes. A wall-eyed alligator was lying in the center of the table, curling into the crook of its stubby little tail. A bright pink shade was coming to a stop in front of Harmony, lying a tray full of sweets onto the table.

        “How would you like a cupcake, Har-Har?” Her anchor produced a bright, white smile. In just one blink, the time traveler could sum up the entire legacy of Pinkamena Diane Pie. “You must have built quite an appetite overnight! What, with all of that healing and speech-giving and tossing Alex into a burning pile of bits, but I totally forgive you for that last part! I think I'll get the rams to help me build a new Alex! Alex 2.0! This time, he’ll be backwards-compatible to yellow flame, that way I can roast marshmallows over him while healing ponies in the field! Heeheehee!”

        “Miss Pie...” Harmony glanced away from the cupcakes. Her copper ears twitched to hear a distant roar. The exultant night of Dredgemane had, as a matter of fact, never ended. Even with the advent of the bright morning, the citizens could still be heard celebrating the burning horizon of tomorrow, regardless of whether or not they knew what it was. They only knew what it wasn't. “Miss Pie, why do you always live in the present? Even now, you act as if... you act as if last night was just like any other night.”

        “Heeheehee! Isn't that the way it always is, Har-Har?” Pinkie smiled and smiled in jubilant intoxication. “Every day and every night is a blessed thing. All I've ever wanted to do, all Brevis has ever wanted, all the Bivs or Inkie or Blinkie or Mommy or Daddy or Gummy have ever wanted to do is wake up to just how happy and super another day spent alive is.”

        “Miss Pie...” Harmony fought the flames away to produce a somber face before her anchor. “You cried last night.”

        “And I laughed and I giggled and I danced—”

        “You...” The last pony softly reached a hoof across the table of bright drawings and rested it on her companion's limb. She gazed earnestly into her blue eyes. “You cried, Miss Pie. You cried like... like I've never seen anypony cry before, not even myself.”

        Pinkie Pie stared calmly at Harmony's hoof on hers. Something in the contact ushered a grave silence over her. Deep beneath it all, her smile never ended, though it certainly had become a soft, satin thing.

        “I...” Harmony bit her lip, tongued the inside of her copper cheek, and said, “I-I'm not going to give you some really depressing speech or something. I'm not saying that you should or shouldn't show sad emotions or what-crap. But... I-I was wondering if you could tell me...” She gulped and gazed painfully at the candy-colored filly. “C-Could you tell me what it felt like?”

        “Hmmm?” Pinkie's blue eyes blinked curiously.

        “Could you tell me what it felt like to cry?”

        “Heeheehee...” Pinkie Pie brought her other hoof up and patted the top of Harmony's limb. “Silly filly, of course you would know what it feels like.”

        “No.” Harmony shook her head. Her voice was a brief whimper in the blessed morning light that pierced the once-tomb of the Pie Family household. “No, I don't. I've done it so much for so long that I don't know what it feels like anymore. You and Brevis are always preaching about what it means to fall.” She shuddered. “I'm still waiting for my turn, Miss Pie, to transcend by descending, to madly open up the precious pieces of myself and let the doves fly out. It is something that I've yet to experience... and probably never will. But you? You have. So please, tell me. What was it like for you to cry?” She smiled painfully. “Because it must be just like laughing for me.”

        Pinkie's blue eyes fell back to the furthest recesses of her sockets. She gulped hard and murmured, “Well, Har-Har, I wish I could explain it. What's the reverse of a hiccup? What does it mean to sneeze with your eyes open? What's the sound of one hoof clapping...?” She paused after that last sentence, snorted, and broke into fresh giggles. “Snkkkt-hahaha.” She waved a pink hoof. “I'm... I-I'm sorry. I can't help myself.”

        Harmony exhaled long and hard. “No...” She smiled gently. “I suppose that you can't, Miss Pie.”

        “Could I... Uhm...” Pinkie Pie suddenly bit her lip and fidgeted where she stood in front of the table. “Could I ask you something, Har-Har? Though, I guess it really isn't a question. It's... Well...”

        “What is it?” Harmony leaned back, enjoying a brief spell from the mind-bending emerald flames. “I'm all ears.”

        “Well...” Pinkie gulped and gazed at her with glistening blue eyes. Her voice was suddenly a placid pond in the middle of the Grave of Consus. “Last night, when you were healing Suntrot...” She winced slightly. “Erm... when you almost lost her.” Another fidgeting, but then she bravely leaned forward. “You said something. You talked to someone.”

        Harmony stared back. She was silent as stone.

        “You said 'I friggin' hate you so much'. It... it kind of came out of nowhere, Har-Har. Even now, I can't get it out of my fluffy head...”

        The last pony looked away. Even if she wanted to clarify the previous night's outburst, she wasn't sure if her suddenly pounding heart would allow her.

        “You know... Uhm... I-I used to hate him too.”

        Harmony glanced up at that, her lips pursing.

        Pinkie Pie looked off into the far corners of the house and smiled bitter-sweetly, as if she was consoling a little foal immediately after chastising him. “But... But th-then I figured that he's... well, that's he's really lonely. He always has been. Lonely: that's all.” She looked up at Harmony, and when she did her eyes were piercing sapphires. “Death is the biggest invitation of all. Every pony receives the telegram, and we all have no choice but to RSVP.” She gently stroked the edges of the time traveler's hoof like a mother rubbing a bruise away. “I... I don't really know what is waiting for each and every one of us when it is our time to die, where it is that we go, or if we'll ever see the ones we love and make promises to again.” She took a brave breath as she glanced lovingly at the space where Clyde used to sit. In a bold move, she brushed her limb across it and wiped a swath of dust away forever. “But wherever it is that death takes us, whenever he decides to do it...” She tilted her head aside with the softest of smiles. “...I intend to go there partying.”

        The last pony stared back, exhaling sharply. Scootaloo briefly wondered how she could make a eulogy for a funeral consisting entirely of dancing.

        “Now...” Pinkie smirked and slid the tray of frosted treats across the table to the copper pegasus. “How about putting some sugar in you, Harmony?” Her teeth glistened at the trail end of that address. “It might not make you laugh, but I promise it'll keep you from frowning.”

        Harmony's voice squeaked beneath a feather-soft grin. “Yes, Pinkie Pie. I would very much like to have one of your cupcakes.”

        Pinkie very gladly gave her dear friend such a treat. It was halfway through biting into a cupcake when a shadow stretched over the last pony. She and her anchor glanced up from the dining room table of the farmhouse.

        Quarrington and Pearl Pie stood side by side, bathed in the light of morning. Their voices were laced with humble breaths as they spoke to the Canterlotlian in Entropan skin.

        “Miss Harmony, you have... you have been a dear blessing to this household, in ways that we can't even pretend to describe.”

        “We hardly know where you come from, or what brought you here to begin with. After all that's happened in Dredgemane, there's just as much confusion as there is joy.”

        “All we know, Miss Harmony, is that we owe you... This entire family owes you so much, and we forever offer our grace and love to you, if it can somehow properly thank you for entering our lives...”

        The time traveler took a deep breath. She fought a frothing wave of green flame to give the two parents the smile they deserved. “I don't think I can explain myself any more than you can guess...” She winced at her own words, shrugged, and murmured on, “But I'm glad that I somehow did something that helped you smile...” She glanced at her anchor. “Though I think you would have had no problem finding that smile on your own.”

        “Miss Harmony, I mean this with supreme conviction.” Quarrington shuffled over and rested a hoof on her copper shoulder. “I am dearly sorry for the words I said to you in my anger and blindness. If there is something—anything I can do, as a favor to you or the Court of Canterlot—I wish to do whatever it takes.”

        “That's quite nice of you, Mister Pie. But I wouldn't worry about it. Seriously—”

        A pink hoof suddenly kicked Harmony viciously from under the table.

        “Ow.” The avatar of Princess Entropa hissed through clenched teeth. “What the frig?” She frowned across the table.

        Pinkie Pie hissed, made a face, and charaded a “telescope” with two hooves stretched above one squinting eye.

        Harmony blinked. Her amber eyes fell to a series of crayon-dotted constellations lying on a pile of sheets in the corner of the table. A smile slowly crept across her features. “Ahem... Come to think of it...” She glanced up at the two adults. “There is a favor you can do for me. But... be warned, it's a tad bit kaizo.”

        “'Kaizo?'”

        Harmony fluttered in mid-air. Squinting through one eye, she held a “frame” before her vision with a pair of perpendicular hooves. “Hmmm... Alright!” She grinned wickedly and lowered herself to the rocky earth. “I think that's about perfect.”

        “Do you think we've gone too far?” Zecora asked, lowering a pair of dusty chisels in her grasp. “Or does it deserve at least one more star?”

        “It's the night's sky, Miss Zecora.” Harmony smirked in response. “Let the heavens decide what needs or doesn't need to be added.”

        She stood before a wide stretch of mountainous stone that rose above the northwestern reaches of the Pie Family's rock fields. With the utilization of a plethora of metal tools and several wooden lattices, Zecora, Pinkie, Inkessa, Blinkaphine, and Quarrington finished chiseling a basic layer of constellation designs across the smooth rock face, using the pegasus' many crayon star charts as one grand blueprint.

        “Whew...” Inkessa brushed the dust out of her mane as she stood back from the sculpted masterpiece. “Now I know why I really chose a nursing career. I'm not built with traditional Dredgemane mining blood.”

        “Where will you go now that Stonehaven is being mothballed?”

        “It isn't being mothballed.” Inkessa slyly smirked. “This town is always going to need a hospital. Besides, Nurse Angel Cake is still going to need my assistance with helping the foals you healed find new homes—the orphans, at least.”

        “I'm already writing a letter to Rarity back home in Ponyville! Heehee!” Pinkie Pie bounced cheerfully before the fresh granite mural of cosmic proportion. “She's good at all of that awesome foster home stuff!”

        “Y-Yeah...” Harmony briefly shuddered. “'Awesome...'”

        “I too intend to stay as long as I'm needed to assist in blooming what Harmony has seeded,” Zecora murmured with a bright smile. “Never before in my life has the laughter of foals endeared me to so many precious souls. Inkessa, with your permission, I wish to help Angel Cake's plan reach fruition.”

        “We would love to have your wisdom and tenacity at our side, Miss Zecora.” Inkessa smiled. “Hocus pocus or not.”

        The zebra chuckled, eliciting a giggle from the other fillies surrounding the site. Quarrington suddenly cleared his throat and motioned with a nervous hoof. “Uhm... About the big rock...”

        “Yes! The question of the Fourth Age!” Harmony spun and gestured at the grand array of dots, swirls, and cosmic bands etched with shallow ease before the wall. “'What to do with the big dumb rock.' Well, the fact of the matter is, it needs a finishing touch... Or in this case, Gultophine's blessing.” Clearing her throat, the copper pegasus turned about. “Dear Deacon...?”

        Dawnhoof sauntered into the group. “I was beginning to wonder when I would be needed.” He aimed his horn at the illustrations across the great wall. “You simply need me to make it all deeper?”

        “Yes, handsome,” Pinkie Pie whispered hoarsely as she leaned in. “Har-Har wants you to go deeper—” A copper hoof slapped across the back of her mane. “Owie! Heeheehee! Watch where you swing that hydra hammer of yours!”

        “The sooner the better, Deacon,” the scavenger from the future muttered through a brief migraine of green flame.

        “Stole the words right out of my mouth, Miss Harmony.” Dawnhoof tensed his features, concentrated, and channeled a stream of energy straight out his horn. A bright glow filled the many swirling lines and dots of the wall as the unicorn's metallurgical talent bore the shallow lines deeper, etching a permanent star map into the bosom of the granite plateau, forever blemishing the Grave of Consus.

        Quarrington whistled at the end of the shimmering job. “Well, I find it highly perplexing, but rather striking in its own right.” He smirked towards the young ponies around him. “It'll give us something interesting to look at as we harvest the west fields, at least. Somehow, I doubt that this is the last work of fancy art to dot the walls of Dredgemane these days.”

        “Do forgive me if I-I forsake such creative endeavors for a day of scriptural study,” a sweating, exhausted unicorn managed to say. He took a deep breath and spoke with a weathered smile. “If only writing a sermon was as strenuous as carving into a mountain, I might never run out of exercise.”

        “I guess in your case, dear Deacon...” Harmony winked. “...It's the thought that counts.”

        “I think it looks very pretty,” a voice said, aimed at the cosmic mural.

        “Why, thank you very much, Blinkaphine,” Harmony said. “Though, I was focusing more on scientific accuracy than aesthetic quality—” She went Ditzy-eyed in mid-sentence. She flashed a look over her shoulder.

        The quiet filly with a white-white mane was walking away with Inkessa and Zecora in tow. Quarrington smirked, shrugged, and trotted after them.

        “Hmmm...” Harmony exhaled through gently flaring nostrils. “Naturally a pony with a rocket on her butt would appreciate stars.”

        “That's something I'm going to have to get used to...”

        Harmony glanced over at the young unicorn. “What's that?”

        The Deacon blushed slightly and smirked. “As long as I've been in the order, it's been under the stern gaze of Breathstar. Living in a town that no longer enforces a dress code is going to be a brave new world, not to mention a slightly embarrassing one.” He fidgeted slightly, but bravely uttered, “All this time, I've relied on the Spirit of Gultophine to make intuitive judgments about ponies' souls. Now, with everypony's cutie mark exposed... I stand to be distracted. Erm... Wh-What I m-mean to say is, it's so very easy to hold weight in what is or what is not emblazoned across the coats that Gultophine gave us. I never wanted to be clouded by such superficiality.”

        “Trust me, I know a thing or two about obsessing over cutie marks, and you couldn't be any further from the truth.” She paused, glanced at him for a brief span of seconds, then softly smiled. “If I may be so bold, dear Deacon, I think you have the most spectacular cutie mark in all of Dredgemane.”

        “I do?” He gave her a crooked glance. He looked briefly at the seared skin of his flank and smirked pathetically back towards her. “Miss Harmony, is Pinkamena aware of your blatant sarcasm?”

        “No sarcasm at all!” Harmony grinned gently. “What it means to me is that you've lived through flames—self-imposed or not—and you made your destiny for yourself. You are talented beyond compare, Deacon Dawnhoof, because it is a talent that you discovered for yourself, all the while pursuing boundless altruism. That's an inspiration that... that I will certainly take with me wherever I happen to go...”

        Dawnhoof smiled. He gulped and glanced nervously aside as a part of him came out through his lips in an off-key murmur. “I am... enraptured that you would want to hold a piece of my spirit dear to you, M-Miss Harmony.”

        The copper pegasus sighed dreamily. Just then, her wings shot up. With an exasperated groan, she rolled her eyes. “Dang it, Miss Pie!” She spun around, snarling. “How many times have I told you to stop—?!” She froze, blinking.

        Pinkie Pie was twenty meters away, chatting with Zecora and Inkessa. She saw Harmony from afar and waved excitedly before pumping a victorious hoof through the air.

        Harmony very hideously, very deeply blushed before the priest-in-training. “Uhmmm...” She gnawed on her lip and slowly, stiffly coiled her wings back by her side. “Eh heh... I don't suppose you're ordained enough to hear confessionals, huh?”

        “In a decade or so...” Dawnhoof very sweetly smiled and nodded. “I'll be here, where Gultophine’s Spirit needs me.”

        “Yeah... Well... I only know so much about Gultophine's Spirit.” Harmony kicked limply at the earth, bathing it with the ashes of her mind. “I will... I-I will have you in my thoughts, good Deacon,” she murmured in a sullen, cold tone. “Where I will be going.”

        “As you will be in mine.” He reached over and patted her copper shoulder, leading her away from the mural and towards the Pie family house. “Would you like to join me for a snack and philosophical discussion? Pinkamena spoke something of sampling her 'Supernova Sarsaparilla.'”

        “Awww Celestia dang it.”

        “Miss Harmony...”

        “Ahem. Hail Gultophine.”

        I write to you not just because you're all I've ever had for a friend all these years. I write to you with faith—no—a hope, that you aren't nearly as cruel as I've envisioned you to be. Somewhere beyond the veil of your obsidian girth are all of my loved ones of the past. Though I've pierced the curtains of time to briefly visit them, it will be after piercing you that I finally join them. Maybe then they will tell me what happened after the fall of Dredgemane. Maybe then, in the warmth of all who've come and gone before me, my spirit will know of the legacy of smiles that filled the grave of that somber town where before there was nothing but shadow and darkness.

        Days after Harmony vanished from Dredgemane, the naked and bright townsponies were wasting no time. With buckets full of paint and mouths brimming with cheerful conversation, they scaled the glass panes behind the pulpit inside the Cathedral of Gultophine. One plate at a time, they re-stained the wings of the Alicorn Sister of life, returning the rainbow to her majesty.

        Far away, in the center of Town Square, Nurse Angel Cake smiled brightly and directed a gaggle of young foals as they climbed the wings of an alicorn statue and painted the granite lengths of it with no less an energetic ambition. They splotched their tiny faces and limbs with errant brushstrokes—sometimes by accident, at other times on purpose, accompanied by mischievous giggles, as hour by hour they returned a kaleidoscope of joy and warmth to the lengths of the town.

        The streets hustled and bustled not with cold clopping sounds, but instead with bright discussion, chortling gossip, and bright afternoon plans of levity and joy. Teenagers scampered down tight alleyways, the former guards having converted a net gun into a ball launcher as they played an outlandish rendition of “keepaway” through the many serpentine trenches and hiding places of the town.

        At streetsides and bricklaid corners, old bearded ponies communed with youthful equines as the elders taught the next generation how to play beautiful violin music—one string at a time—with an energetic tempo that chased away the melancholic ballads of yesteryear.

        At the far reaches of town, where the cobblestone met the granite stretches of the plateau, random citizens knelt down low with chisels and proceeded with removing the bricks, piece by piece, along with the names etched on them.

        One such brick was placed gently on the hearth of the Pie Family household. The name that was on it read “Clyde Sesame Pie”. Stepping back from lowering the scant memorial into place, Quarrington took a deep breath. The brick had a perceivable mahogany richness to it that complemented the cornucopia of colors that filled the light-drenched lengths of that room.

        Pearl Fleece Pie trotted up and nuzzled Quarrington. With a painful but toasty smile, Quarrington stroked her in return. After sharing a kiss, both parents stared lovingly at the name that had rejoined their home, basking in the warmth of the soul's memory and not in the bitter cold gap of its absence.

        What Dredgemane gave me was more than just a glimpse at the stars, more than just a way to close the chapter on my memories of Pinkie Pie. Dredgemane showed me what my existence means, for it brims with the essence of all of those ponies, including all of their imperfections, singing and screaming all their hopes and fears. There was no way that the legacy of ponydom could have been solely encompassed by my fitful and subjective little hammock-swaying dreams of the past. For several mesmerizing days, I trotted with them, frowned with them, smiled with them, suffered with them, and ultimately healed with them. Dredgemane has given me so much, and I can only hope—after I'm gone, in both the past and the future—that I have given them back as much as I could, for I will not be able to give all of Equestria the same extent of my blessings, no matter how much I try.

        Surrounded by a circle of deadpan rams in the center of a stone hut, Mister Irontail waved a complex blueprint. Gesturing toward his own tools, he began describing a magnificent obelisk made out of arcanium and affixed with a glistening jar of orange flame. He grinned long and hard, entreating the inner engineers within each and every one of them.

        The rams shared glances as they shared a unified voice. They murmured and ambivalently spun chanting circles of discourse upon the nature of Irontail's inquisition.

        Shuffling up in an obese wobble, Marble Cake suddenly stood at Irontail's bushy-tailed side. With a fluttering of her eyelashes, she not-so-shyly raised a gigantic white box full of bright pink taffy.

        In one fluid motion, the rams immediately snatched a chuckling Irontail's blueprint and set themselves to work.

        Deep in the mines of the Dredgemane quarry, a remarkable device had been embedded in the rocky flesh of a lantern-lit tunnel. It was a black obelisk fashioned out of arcanium. Two thunderpearls sparked at the top of its structure, and in the center was a grand fishbowl-shaped container of orange flame. Several miners worked and labored steadily around the device, piercing the earth deeper and deeper for valuable resources.

        Suddenly, the orange flame burned with a brighter strobe than normal. This triggered the two thunderpearls which immediately sparked life into a pair of rattling bells. At the sound of the shrill alarm, the ponies immediately stopped what they were doing. Infernite was nearby.

        Under the cries of a monitoring overseer, the workers filed off in an orderly fashion. Every single one of them made it to the elevator long before the deadly dust even breached the walls of the abandoned shaft.

        Above the quarry, there were no longer shuffling lines of lifeless, soot-stained workers. Where solid trains of ponies once slaved under heavy loads of dredged rock like swarming ants, off-duty laborers chatted and waited for their turn to enter the mines. The air above the wounded land coalesced into an atmosphere of levity, punctuated by random laughs and riveting stories while young teenagers hired by Marble Cake's bakery navigated the steep landscape, offering refreshments to the Dredgemaners in-between their breaks.

        Atop the scaffold overlooking the continuous industry, several overseers—instead of just one—unanimously directed the current leg of mining operations. As they flipped through the latest spreadsheets of profit earnings, their progress was dwarfed by the legacy of Sladeburn before them, but the casualties had reached an all-time low, in that there was nothing joyously lower than “zero”.

Several lanterns were lit brightly, filling the Council chamber with an illumination the likes of which the place had never witnessed in years. A former guard and his little brother shuffled from lantern to lantern, brightening the place even further as a nodding Quarrington mouthed his approval.

        Turning, bearing a grin, Pinkie's father sauntered over towards the table of fellow Council members. Taking his seat, Quarrington proceeded to carry the topic of the meeting into the latest of the town's many necessities. As the city’s representatives deliberated, they paused and swiveled to face the rest of the building's interior where a large audience of Dredgemaners from all walks of life had gathered. The townsponies asked to share their input, as well as their smiles.

        It is so daring, so brash, so fitfully frightening to be alive. It means smiling in the face of oblivion. It means galloping at full force when you know that a cliff is waiting for you at the end of of the next bend in the road. It takes a mad euphoria—an insane whimsy to be so courageous when all of the darkness around us begs that we accept defeat. To do anything but roll over is to be absurd, like chasing the rainbow, or performing the “running of the leaves” in July... in a town that has no living trees..

        “On your mark, get set, go!” Deacon Dawnhoof shouted, his horn telekinetically firing a confetti cannon at his side.

        Under an explosive wave of squealing giggles, dozens upon dozens of brightly-coated foals stampeded down the longest trench in Dredgemane, skirting past Town Square, curving around to brush past Marble End. On all sides of them, lining the curbs and street corners of town, happy parents and shouting teenagers cheered and whistled and urged the racing little children on.

        “Remember!” Dawnhoof chuckled and waved a hoof towards the stampeding herd of healed youth. “It's only a race! 'Competition is the spice of life, so long as it remains a spice.' So it is written in Gultophine's holy Chronicles!”

        A low, squeaking noise rolled up to the young cleric-in-training's mark-less flank. “G-Good Deacon...?”

        Dawnhoof spun about. He blinked his chestnut eyes and smiled while murmuring under the roar of cheering citizens. “I wouldn't exactly call myself a 'good Deacon', Mayor, sir. But, like everyone, I intend to improve myself.”

        Haymane smiled gently, gazing in a soft exhale towards the many bright and scampering youngsters filling the streets beyond. “Such is the aim of progress... of true progress. It's remarkable how easily one can forget what's important to him after every piece of his heart has convinced him that it's worth discarding like the ashes of yesterday.” His nostrils flared. “I am tired of living in yesterday...”

        “Mayor Haymane...?” Deacon Dawnhoof narrowed his eyes curiously.

        “I was wondering...” Haymane gulped hard and humbly murmured, “If you can help me learn to embrace tomorrow.” He stared up with glistening eyes. “If you could teach me something about... the joy of Gultophine's Spirit, dear Counselor...” The elder's lips curved with something resembling hope.

        The young unicorn smiled gently. “I would be honored, sir, to learn about joy with you.”

        Several hoots and whistles lit the air of the saloon as Pepper Plots emerged from behind the stage's velvet curtains, one saucy leg at a time. When she finally came out onto the naked lengths of the platform, she was covered in a burlap recreation of a pale unicorn's priestly robes. She wagged her eyebrows goofily.

        The room broke into roaring laughter, then into a playful meteor shower of boos and hisses. A mustached bartender briefly worked a piano at the edge of the establishment and rattled a series of high notes to punctuate the sight gag.

        “Did you handsome boys really think that this was Ravishing Pepper Plot's new summer fashion choice?” She bucked a gartered hoof backwards from under the burlap sack and winked. “Puhhhh-lease! I've been a Biv! I know a thing or two about flair!”

        She sashayed up to the edge of the stage in a dancing canter as the piano music accompanied her playful hoofsteps before the locked gazes of everypony in the crowd.

        “An adorable hunk of a stallion who may or may not be called Nicky-Wicky once asked me if I was going to leave for the City of Equestrian Love.” She giggled like a schoolfilly. “You wanna know what I told him? I said, 'Well, sugah, it may be sunny in Fillydelphia...'”

        With one shrug of her shoulders, the burlap bag unfurled, and she struck a saucy pose in a flamboyant gown laced from top to bottom with all the colors of the spectrum, accentuating enough curves to send several inebriated patrons fainting to the floor with smiles plastered across their drunken faces.

        In answer to many whistles and cat-calls, Pepper winked a painted eyelash as she stuck a hoof into her scarlet mane. “'...but Dredgemane is the one happening town where the rainbow both begins and ends.'”

        “That's right, young ones,” a strong voice echoed across the sun-kissed lengths of a concrete schoolyard. Several dozen teenage Dredgemaners sat out in the open with pen and parchment as an orange unicorn paced in front of them. Wearing three prismatic ribbons across the breast pocket of his black jacket—where an alcohol canteen had once rested—Vimbert shuffled to a stop and smirked sharply at them. “Today, we're going to learn about the Siege of Whinniepeg, one of my most favorite topics of the Celestial Civil War.”

        One filly raised her hand.

        “Yes, you in the fancy see-through dress.”

        Giggles lit the air. The filly blushed, her naked coat just as gloriously exposed as all the other young ponies around her. “Ahem, Mister Vimbert, sir—”

        “That's Professor Vimbert, young lady,” he said, pointing a hoof. His orange face brightened under a shattered horn as he smirked at her. “Don't worry, when you yourself finally go through eight years of doctorate courses, you can try to be as pretentiously awesome and handsome as me. I wish you luck with one of those more than the other.”

        More chuckles. The filly smiled and nodded. “Very well, Professor Vimbert. Ahem. But could we talk a bit about what just happened here a few weeks ago? I mean, Dredgemane is gonna make history too, right?” Several more teens around her murmured and nodded in enthusiastic agreement.

        “Mmm... But that's just the thing. The Siege of Whinniepeg was very similar to what happened in this very town. It was a night that tried the souls of ponies—both those swearing allegiance to Luna as well as those fighting for Celestia. Nopony was the same the day after the siege as they were the night before. It's amazing how swiftly a single event can transform an entire city—if not an entire nation, practically overnight.”

        “B-But didn't most if not all the Lunar Republicans die during the Siege of Whinniepeg?” a teenage colt exclaimed out of turn.

        “Yeesh, am I or am I not the teacher here?!” Vimbert shrugged. Under a cadence of chuckles, he paced, pointed, and spoke, “And it's 'Lunar Imperialists' from here on out, got it? Ahem. Yes, most of the defenders of Whinniepeg perished. But tell me, oh young and infinitely invincible youths... what pony soul doesn't perish in the end?” He paused and smiled warmly. “Who among them is lucky enough to be present, if even for a burning second, at an infinitesimally righteous and soul-cleansing moment in time, the likes of which history may reenact but can never exactly reproduce the beauty of? Written records exist to remind us of the glories of the past, but they also exist to remind us that...” A happy breath escaped the former janitor's lips. “...That even more glorious nights are to come and surprise us, like the Fall of Dredgemane, a song fit for the ages.”

        The teenagers murmured and smiled excitedly amongst one another. They leaned forward with sudden anticipation of the lecture about to transpire.

        “Yes... The Siege of Whinniepeg...” Vimbert leaned back and folded his forelimbs. “It all started with the execution of Starswirl the Bearded, Sorcerer of Equestrian Legend, who spouted the famous words...” He stared off into the colorful lengths of Dredgemane, like the prismatic refraction of tomorrow's horizon, and it was a beautiful thing. “'So it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end.'”

“Why?! Goodly Brevis will tell you why!”

        The naked blue mule limped and half-danced his way across a cobblestone expanse at the edge of town. This time, Brevis' rambling words weren't falling on deaf ears. A thick crowd of citizens had gathered before him—even in the middle of their wagon-pulling business—to grace him with curiosity and wonder.

        He reveled in the faces of the living and breathing audience.

        “She would not let it end! She smiled and smiled on forever! It was what she only ever tried to do! It was what she was born to do!”

        He jumped with his one good leg, grabbed a lamppost, spun around the length of it, and hung an upside-down grin full of yellow teeth and silver fillings.

        “And soon Dredgemane would be born again under the cadence of her giggles, rowing oars of blind and daring faith across the churning rapids of a frothy, frightening tomorrow! It was hope that brought us to such chaotic tributaries, hope that we too might transcend as she had! For she found the rainbow when it was but a speck in a power hungry miscreant's frown! She gave birth to the Royal Grand Biv when the militia planted armor on so many children like funeral veils! She was a mother to all smiles, a harbinger of all happiness, and I am not even fit to wear her horseshoes! Why?! The truth is simple, my good Equestrians!”

        He dismounted from the lamppost, backflipped, and landed with a slide before tossing a mad grin over his smelly shoulder.

        “She saw the bright shinies!”

        I was not the messiah of Dredgemane. Far from it. I was an observer, a chronicler. It is not Gultophine's scripture that I write, but the record of a pony who's too busy bouncing, too busy laughing, too busy enjoying life to slow it down by putting hoof to pen. I might be able to bring the Sun and Moon back to the Wasteland. I will never be lucky enough to bring back Pinkie Pie, like she had brought herself back to Dredgemane so many times on her lonesome, like she had raptured them all faithfully with the mere curve of her lips, rendering them numb and impressionable before an eternity of bright opportunity... and sugar...

        Two golden-coated ponies looked on, smiling, as Suntrot scampered up to her Auntie Pinkie Pie's side. The blue-eyed mare grinned and scooped the giggling child up in a pair of hugging forelimbs. She rested with the tiny filly in her embrace, sitting before a line of felicitous, healthy foals in the shadow of three sun-kissed trees resting several meters from the trenches of Dredgemane. The air was filled with life and laughter as the fluffy-maned pony proceeded to give the entire company of kids an outdoor lecture on the fine art of paper airplane folding. Sitting off to the side, Inkessa and Zecora shared a mutual snicker while helping a random colt or filly with the expert folding process.

        As several white projectiles flew majestically over the air of giggles, Pinkie Pie nuzzled the center of Suntrot's skull and proceeded with another one of her boundless jokes, bearing a grin that fought away the last hidden shadows of the Grave of Consus.

        Twenty-five years later, the darkness bowed to the glinting sheen of a moonrock obelisk planted in the Ponvyillean earth before the ruins of Sugarcube Corner. Seated besides a pile of digging tools, Scootaloo faced the fresh grave and stared beyond it.

        “Hmmmm-hmmm-hmmm... Heheheheheh...” The quivering equine ran a hoof through her pink mane and over a scrunched face as she broke the ashen air with a mad exhale. At first, it sounded like she was dying, but then it morphed into a braying outburst. “BraHahahahahaha! Ha ha ha... Ohhhh... “'What goes up white but comes down yellow, gray, and white?!'” Scootaloo hissed, snorted, and waved a helpless, brown forelimb. “Ohhhhhhhhhhh friggin' A. But of course, Pinkie Pie. But of course. Still, I liked it better that one time when I first met the Mayor and you were all 'Hey Haymane, how's it rolling?' Snkkkt-hahahahaha!”

        Scootaloo heaved. Scootaloo hyperventilated. There were tears running down her face, but they broke anchor at an odd thing that they hadn't encountered in decades: a runaway smile. If the last pony let it, that grin could have gone on forever. The last pony may have been one step closer to bringing harmony back to the world, but she couldn't find the time to stop laughing and find out.

        “Spike told me that you once danced in Pepper Plots' showpony outfit before an entire stampeding herd of buffalo. Yeesh, that had to have been the most exciting crap to have happened in Appleloosa in an entire century. I wonder if any of your jokes had as much luck in that sorry town. You should have told those buffalo the one about the blackout and the pony who met a drunk on the first floor of a hotel building—”

        Scootaloo suddenly gasped, her scarlet eyes wide. She waved a hoof and tried to cover her snickering face.

        “Snkkkt—Heeheehee! Oh! I know one! This one's a doozy! Ahem. So, like, there's this insane asylum and two mad ponies escape through the chimney. It's in the middle of pitch black night as they try to make a run for it, hopping from one rooftop to another. They need to get across to the next building, right? Well, one insane pony has a flashlight, and so he says to the other...” She paused and blinked, smiling crookedly. “Wait—heeheehee—have you heard this one before?”

        I am more than the end of ponies. I am more than that which can be determined by beginnings and endings, or even by you. I am an amazing, miraculous, and tragically precious phenomenon, like so many phenomena that pranced across the world on wings and hooves before me. The Cataclysm may have taken lives, but it couldn't touch Life itself. Even if all the written and spoken history of ponydom perishes along with me, the Wastelands cannot undo the fact that there ever once was an Equestrian civilization, that there ever once was a reason to smile and bask in the warmth of existence, that there ever once was a need to start something as delightfully mad as this experiment that I'm working on.

        And it is an experiment that I shall end, if not by Gultophine's Grace, than by my own. The most that I can afford is the best that I can afford, because I am more than the last pony.

        I am alive.

                -End of entry.