I. Damascus Road

DAMASCUS ROAD

As he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”

A wing of batponies cuts through the night sky like a knife out of an alley: quick, silent, and with a savage grace. No theatrics. Just the sharp edge of a necessary reality. It takes years to learn how to fly in formation--pegasi spend a lot of time learning just how hard it can be as they grow--but to the eye it seems effortless.

They move as one, five ponies in lockstep high above the snow that clothes the sleeping earth. To any observer bound to walk in that snow, they would invisible. From the sky, it is even harder to see them. So few learn how to truly see.

But they are there. All but soundless aside from the tell-tale flap of wings, and even this they keep to a bare minimum, taking advantage of the howling winds as fortune lets them, flying in V that, if it were seen at all, would seem more sinister than one would expect. The leader adjusts, and like clockwork the wings move with him.

Even this is not dramatic in any sort of showy way. It is dramatic in a very harsh and real way--dramatic like a falling boulder falls to earth from a great distance, a mere working out of natural forces.

They hit the changeling scouts from above. Five against seven. It was never fair.

II.

My name is Midnight Aria, and I was never supposed to be here.

Ranger Initiates get left at home if there’s anything bigger than the average pony involved. Why? Because a ranger who isn’t ready is a liability. Also because the Rangers are different. Every single one of them is precious and hard to replace, and when you have a finite resource you guard it. So, usually, the kids stay home.

The others are checking bodies. I check a body. Mostly, this involves kicking once, grunting, and then moving on. I kick the changeling, and my hoof makes a strange grating sound against the chitin. It’s like a mug pulled along a counter. That’s the closest I can get.

The changeling does nothing. I didn’t really expect anything else from it, and I feel bad for kicking it. But we have to. Knight-Commander says that changelings are wily. They’ll try anything once, and that includes pretending to be dead until you turn your back and then… and then you learn what those fangs are for, and unlike ours, theirs are mildly lethal.

I’m alone among the bodies and notice only after a moment. The others moved away quickly. I do the same, and we all huddle together off to the side, where Knight Star Brand is talking in a low voice.

“You alright?” he asks me, where everyone can hear him. I don’t know why, but I’m horrified because of how genuine he is about it. I nod quickly. He nods back, and moves on, thank Luna.

“We came out more or less unscathed,” Lily says, and then sighs. “This time. I wouldn’t mind it always being this easy.”

Her voice is so calm. I wonder why it’s always so calm.

“It won’t, so there it is,” says Swift.

“Outfliers ride in two paired wings,” says Soft Fang thickly as he rubs his eyes. “Where’s the other one?”

“I was just wondering that myself, Fang,” Knight Star murmured, but we all heard him. It’s hard to whisper something past batponies. We have good hearing, if by good you mean that unicorns are kinda okay at magic and earth ponies sort of like apple trees. I mean, I assume that earth ponies like apple trees. There weren’t any in Shady Vale. Star Brand keeps going: “We’ll come up behind the vissir and then go home. Ruby Eyes is cooking.”

Everyone made little noises of relief at this. Lily could cook. Ruby could cook. Every other ranger in our wing was absolutely useless for it. Oh, they could prepare food, but it was the kind of food you made when you needed motivation to get back to civilization: the thought of eating it much longer would send even hardened warriors crawling back home.

It’s amazing what food will do for your spirits. You can forget all kinds of things. I try to forget most things.

III.

Star Brand gave up on the other wing after hours of searching. We were just covering the same ground and finding nothing. Maybe there had been only the one, we all told ourselves. Maybe.

I think the things I’ll never get used to the most is the feeling that starts in your hoof and shakes up your arm when you dive, and the way that ponies in the column look at me when I land.

I’m not scary. I’m not. I’m the least scary ranger there is who isn’t Ruby or Lily. Day-ponies used to think that we were vampires, but I look the least like a vampire of any batpony basically ever. I have small, stubby fangs and the only mare I’ve ever kissed said my ears were cute. I don’t even have red eyes. Just blue ones. I don’t have scary Lunar Guard armor, just my old Ranger duster. There’s no reason to be afraid of me.

But every time we land by the column, ponies scatter. At first, I thought they were just giving us landing room, and maybe they are. But they won’t look at you. They avert their eyes, like they’re afraid of you. Or maybe angry. Or maybe they don’t care. I wouldn’t know—I can’t see their eyes because they won’t show me.

We land. Everypony on the ground forms a ring around us, and just like every other time, I can’t help but think of quarantines.

Nopony says a word. We just walk. The column’s stopped, so our camp will be at the back like always. No need for directions or orders. Rangers prefer there to be as few orders as possible.

Our little fire is like another sun, but one that’s easier on the eyes. I’m still not used to living like a day-pony. Ruby is a day-pony, and she doesn’t mind, so it’s alright.

I see her rise and wave at us for a moment before turning back to whatever she was doing. There’s an extra pony at our fire, but after a moment, I know him. He’s the Pathfinder, the Solar, the pegasus with the weird manecut and the easy smile. I liked him. He ate with us at Ft. Geode too, before we went north.

I suppose that means that we’re eating fish tonight. I wonder dreamily if it’ll be Shady Vale style, all ullis spices and smoked and salty…

Knight-Commander is there as well, and he salutes us all as we approach the little sun in the center of our camp. “Hile,” he says, giving us all each a once-over sort of look. I don’t like mine.

“And you,” Knight Brand says.

“No injuries or losses, sir,” Lily says.

“I noticed,” Knight-Commander says with a little smile. “Glad to see it. Brand? I’d speak to thee a spell. Rest of you can sup with Ruby.”

They go off into the dark together. Knight-Commander isn’t from Shady Vale. He’s from the Old Colony, at the bottom of Ghastly Gorge. They speak strangely there, and they aren’t normal. Not that Knight-Commander is weird. He’s wonderful. He just… talks strange. And sometimes he says things that I don’t understand. And he’s more serious about… Luna.

Luna watches. She sees all. She protects. She redeems. We all say these things. We mouth them to ourselves before we go on patrol. We thank Luna for her mercies before we eat, even if we do it quietly. Luna knows all, feels all, understands all. But who believes it? And what would it be, to believe it?

I wonder sometimes if it counts as believing if you say something, and then laugh about it. But when no one is looking and the lights in your cave go out and you hear the scratch of rock snakes in your walls, you’ll say it again and this time you won’t laugh at all. Is that just covering the bases? I think it might be that when the rock snakes start crawling in your walls and they outnumber you, then what you really believe comes out. More and more, I think that.

Ruby smiles and gestures for me to join her and of course I do. We sit by side on her bedroll, spread out like a blanket. The snow has stopped falling, which is nice, and Ruby is offering me fish, which is better.

As I nibble (it’s hot) I wonder if maybe this is why they won’t look at us. One of the reasons I liked the pegasus across the fire, High Flight, is that pegasi don’t mind it when you eat something besides carrots. Not that carrots aren’t great. It’s just… we’re different. Very different.

I take a nice large bite.

But I’m not scary, I think again.

IV.

Lunar Rangers aren’t soldiers.

That should be clear. It’s not clear to most everyone. So, again: Lunar Rangers aren’t soldiers. Not really. I was never in the guard. Most of the others were. But I never was. I went straight to Ranger School and then straight to Ranger Station Nineteen, just south of the northern border.

I keep thinking that, over and over again, as the snow returns. It falls gently on my head, on my bedroll, on my pack. We aren’t. We aren’t and I’m not supposed to be here. Maybe I’ll go home tomorrow.

I liked Ranger Station Nineteen. I liked learning all of the paths and forests and hills. Ruby and Lily cooked, and Lily could do better with a kitchen around her. I had a cot, and it was good enough. Sometimes we trained with Knight-Commander Yuletide, and he was hard on Ruby and I. I liked it. Ruby did not. Soft Fang taught us to be patient and how to sit in a tree for hours, just waiting for the right moment. Lily taught us about herbs and how to handle two dozen injuries. Swift Dusk taught us how not to get bit in half by a timber wolf. Knight Brand taught us how to kick that timber wolf into splinters.

I even liked the day when they rolled us out of bed, threw us in a sack, and then dumped us out in the woods with a compass, a wineskin, and a few hearty “good luck”s as they sailed off in our flying chariot, laughing. That had been great! Ruby was pissed about it.

The snow has reached the station this time of year. It covers the evergreens and the hills and everything is beautiful. There’s no evergreens here for the snow to cover. Just… flatness. Rocks. There are hills, but they aren’t my hills.

But, the point is, Lunar Rangers aren’t soldiers.

Usually, Rangers are closer to a cross between park rangers and scouts. Our main job is keeping an eye on the frontier. You watch for timberwolves and ice drakes and the occasional bandit, things that cause trouble. We don’t usually even kill. You get taught how to make anything smaller than a Grand Dragon decide to go home without hurting it or getting eaten alive.

Rangers are the ones who dig you out of the snow when a blizzard catches you by surprise. During my initiate period at the station, Lily and Soft Fang rescued a little unicorn colt. He’d been with a colt scout camping trip and taken a few dozen wrong turns, but they found him.

I think about him sometimes, after dinner. I remember his face whenever the refugees refuse to meet my eyes, or when they shuffle in the darkness beyond our campfire light. Their eyes are so unlike his, their faces are masks compared to his. He smiled at us and his eyes were bright and blue like a cloudless sky. The shivering masses around us have eyes like little stars, catching the light. They look at fires like day-ponies do: right into the flame, and you can see the fire dancing in their looks. It’s about the only thing alive there.

Another morning. The third morning out from the smoldering town. What had its name been again? Something about rocks. Crystals. Everything here was one of the two. Shady Vale was a honeycomb of caves and dark passages, yes, but it was situated in a lush forest. There was a village of batponies in the trees a mile down the path who lived in the trees in houses bolted to ancient trunks. Our caves were full of greenery. Real greenery, not fungus or underground stuff. Flowers, all kinds of flowers, in little boxes and alcoves. Green spaces wherever we could fit them. Great caverns where you could fly above the miniature trees. All of it kept alive by old Western secrets. I don’t really understand how it works, but…

Rangers rise early and they rise quickly. I can’t lay in my bedroll thinking.

I get up and put my things in my pack and set it all with everyone else’s. We’ll decide how to divvy the weight later.

The others are already fully awake, but I’m not. Back at the station, I would have been, but here? It’s hard to sleep at night. Really hard. I do it anyway, because sleep comes easy after flying, but I’ll wake up a few hours later. Exhausted, back to sleep. Wake up. Sleep. Over and over, three or four or five times a night. My legs ache and my head hurts. My stomach rumbles. That’s not from the lack of good sleep, though.

Lily hears me. She’s sharp, and it’s the kind of detail she notices. She waves me over, and then throws me something over the ashes of our fire. I fumble at it with my hooves and then reach out and catch it between my teeth.

And it crumbles. Huh. Cornbread. Western-style, like from the old country. It’s made with peppers. Lily mouths something to herself. I know she doesn’t make sound because I would hear it. I know what she’s saying, though. Luna protects, Luna provides.

“Enjoy it,” she says while I do just that. “Ruby is out with the Knight-Commander for the day.”

“Same as last time,” I say between bites.

“Not quite,” she tells me. I look around, and see that Soft Fang and Swift are checking their hoofblades. I look away. Ruby is stretching her wings. She probably has the prettiest wings, and probably they’ll be the strongest eventually, too. Twice my potential when it comes to flying. Almost as much maneuverability as an above-average pegasus.

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Ruby’s on all day. Yuletide’s got you lying fallow,” Lily said, and I blinked at her.

“What did I do?”

“He said you would say that. It’s not punishment, child. You’re losing your day-sight and Ruby’s nightvision and sleep schedule has gone off-kilter. We can handle true deprivation, but you two are initiates.”

I frown. “But she’ll be on all day. Isn’t that worse?”

“I said that, didn’t I? Sorry.” She looked around us. The column was beginning to move. The word was moving through the camp. “We’re limiting you and our resident trueblood to only one patrol a day until we make it to Amethyst City.”

I’m not sure how to feel. Part of me is insulted. There’s a voice somewhere saying that it’s because I’m a mare, isn’t it, it always is—but Lily took two patrols yesterday and the Knight-Commander never treats her differently. The part of me that takes over whenever we find outfliers and I go away for awhile, it’s angry because it’s strong. But me, Midnight? I’m happy. I don’t have to go on patrol at all. No more going away or strong winds sapping my strength. I’ll still fly up and down the column, obviously, and I’m still on guard, but its better.

I hope Ruby’s patrol goes well. I ask Lily which patrol she’ll be on when Commander Yuletide comes by to collect his morning meal.

Yuletide, our Knight-Commander, is tall. That’s the first thing everypony notices. The second thing that they notice is that his ears aren’t tuffed and that he has high aristocratic cheekbones. You can see his Canterlonian heritage. Unicorn written all over him. I wonder what it was like, growing up in Old Colony with a unicorn mother?

“Thee’s been told, aye?” he sort of grumble-growls in my direction. I nod and he huffs. “Good. Don’t be dawdling. You need to make up the slack of a missing wing, you do.”

He stalks off, I guess to talk to Knight Brand about divvying up the patrol duties or something. I don’t know what officers do. I’m not even sure what Rangers do. Not all the way.

VI.

The column in the daytime is like a snake or a river. I think its more like a river than a snake, actually. Snakes move together. Rivers don’t. They look like they do, but they really don’t. Snakes have purpose. Rivers just keep going. The water, the rocks, the silt, all of it—it’ll go wherever it can whenever it can, as fast as it the water makes the rest of it go.

High up, between the refugees and the cloud cover, I can see the river swell its banks. Its hard to keep ponies in large groups moving together in snow. It was actually part of my training, getting ponies not used to long winter travel moving and warm. We talked about convincing nervous or frightened ponies that they just had to keep going—set goals, do whatever you can do immediately… there was one other. I struggle to think of it.

But a light shines up at me and I wince. I’ll remember it later. I think that’s the pathfinder calling me back down.

I dive.

I love to fly. I guess that’s pretty normal, for a pony with wings. If I didn’t like flying, they’d be pretty worthless—imagine a pegasus afraid of heights! Or a unicorn who didn’t like magic.

But I do. I love it. I love the feeling of falling right out of the sky of your own volition, folding your wings in. The wind runs over your coat and pulls at your mane. It’s what I imagine it might be like to have a unicorn brush you, except… faster. And better. Definitely better.

Midnight the Comet crash lands much like a comet does, which meant I threw some snow around and grinned like a fool when I landed next to Pathfinder Last Call. Just fast enough to look daring, not fast enough to hurt too bad. He didn’t seem to think it was funny. The refugees behind him didn’t give much of a response either. I tried not to sigh. I don’t know why that bothered me.

“You called?” I asked.

The pathfinders in the north wear iron masks with tiny eyeslits to limit the reflection off of the snow—its blinding. You’d think that it would be bad for night-sighters, and it is, but day-ponies don’t have the extra membrane that helps me handle extreme brightness. Day-ponies don’t have a lot of things.

A little behind him, I see the pegasus from last night. What was his name? I always forget. Gale. That’s it. Something Gale. Gale Something.

Last Call grunts at me. “I called you. I had a contact up ahead on the eyes-forward. Think one of you could check it out before it’s right on top of us?”

I nod. “If Gale can flag Soft Fang, then he can tell you who’ll go.”

“Right. Initiate.” He clicked his tongue. “Ocean Gale! Call down the other one.”

It only took a minute, and we continued without stopping. Soft landed a little ahead and matched our strides. “What’s wrong?” he said, his flat drawl warping the words. “Strays? Patrol?”

“Don’t know. Need eyes over there to see it,” Last Call said.

They talk. I listen, but mostly I watch around us.

The refugees huddle closer to the Pathfinders, but not to Last Call. At first, I wonder if he is like us, but as Soft Fang steps away, I realize that he is not like us. Not in this way, at least, for the eyes that watch are watching the one with fangs, aren’t they? The one who flies day and night keeping them from the wolf and the changeling, driving off the patrol and asking only for a few minutes of solace by the fire. Watching, always watching.

I try not to be angry about it. I try not to let it bother me. Perhaps it bothers me because it is easier to care about other things when the alternative is…

“Rook, you’re up,” he says to me. His voice is always a little slow, as if weighing each word. “Fly ahead and see what there is to see. Make a few sweeps. Thorough but don’t take too long, got it? It’s just me and the featherbrain here.”

I nod. “Yes sir.”

He smiles at me. “Well, off you go,” he says lightly, and heads back into the air. Rangers aren’t much for formalities. Of course, we’re not supposed to be ones for campaigning, either, and yet here I am. And here I go, up into the air. At least in the air it is easier to forget what I am doing.

II. Giants in the Land

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Giants in the Land

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that...

A pegasus on the wing is a cloud. He is speed and excitement, the wind that pushes the great mountains of the sky to new lands. She is the lightning. The biting cold winter wind that pushes you back and steals your hat with a laugh.

But a batpony is only a great shadow. She is the way that the dark thunderheads cover the sun. She is the thunder and the dirty rain. He is the gale and the tornado, and the stillness in winter which creeps into your bones bit by bit.

A pegasus flies because it is free. A batpony flies because it wants to be free. In the paper, you will see beautiful pictures of pegasi in flight, racing and rescuing and showing off. On ancient ironbark scrolls, all but indestructible now, you will find the scrawled myths of batponies who served the Ancient Father, before Luna came to them and gave them a new world. Pegasi have bright cities in the sun. Batponies live in the depths of the earth and under safe forest canopies, in clearings which lie always in shadow and whose comforts are rarely disturbed by the presumption of the arrogant sun.

A pegasi is like a great exclamation mark after Watch This! But a batpony who is watched feels only a gentle dismay, and would say, Please look away.

II.

I banked and got another good look. Yeah, definitely something. It was hard to get a good guess at size this up, but it was moving. Slowly. It was like watching an ant on the snow, a little black spot.

Let’s see what you are, spot. Diving right down would usually be the plan, but the world’s not like it was before, so instead I dip down and glide about a hundred meters away. Long enough to avoid an ambush, close enough to pursue.

Back on the ground, I find myself thankful for the brief break in the cloud cover. The sun is the best cover when you’re in the sky. If this thing is what I think it may be, the light will be even more help.

I edge forward, ignoring the snow clinging to my eartufts and woolen Ranger coat. I wish I had one of those ushanka hats like they made in Lunangrad. It would keep my tufts warm and not snowy. But I didn’t have enough bits to buy it and as much food as I wanted, and so I chose gluttony over warmth. Typical. But I hadn’t expected to be on campaign then, had I?

I take a deep breath and keep low, coming from behind whatever it is. It’s probably a pony. I’m mostly sure. Wolves, timberwolves or normal ones, don’t move like that. It moves with too much purpose, one leg in front of the other.

About fifty meters away, I stop and cling to the earth. I push sow in front of me so it can’t look back and see my gray coat and I pull my ears back so they don’t stick straight up. Then the binoculars come out of my coat. They’re small, but they’re good enough. I look.

Changeling. Or what is probably something new, because these aren’t really changelings anymore. Not like the ones we know. I haven’t seen any use another form but this one.

Normal changelings bother ponies a little, or at least they bother other ponies. Weird eyes, weird skin, weird wings, weird teeth… But we don’t care about that. Sometimes batponies have eyes like a cat’s in the Old Colony, so they say. We have weird wings and weird teeth. I think ponies dislike everything that isn’t all curves and blunt ends.

But this new changeling bothers even us. I would call it a new breed, but it doesn’t get the point across.

Take a normal changeling and add on twice the mass. Its spines don’t just jut out: they look like they ripped themselves free. Its wings and body seemed in poor repair before, but now it looks as if it tried to eat itself, and yet still it looks like it could destroy the old changelings. Its eyes are black voids. Fangs that protrude almost impossibly—they can barely keep them behind lips. The chitin is cracked and misshapen, like something burrowed inside and kept kicking from the inside. There are changelings living in peace in the empire now. We have a few of them in the column. Those are small and compared to this thing, they’re adorable. Harmless. Scared.

I grimace at the changeling as it walks slowly.

There are a few things that I have learned can be counted on. One of them is that changelings are never alone if they can help it. New changelings are never alone period.

II.

What madness stirred in the hoary heads of the mages who built the castle of Winter’s Grip? The old Empire had called them barbarians. But they were useful barbarians, making baubles and lights that never went out, minor magical trickeries.

It was an imposing castle, all jutting towers and looming parapets. And inside a distressed monarch made her home to escape the howling winter.

Chrysalis, her name was, and she only wanted a place to sit in the dark and plot. Vain empires would race in her mind and fill the maps. A thousand thousand children with happy faces and full bellies, and the rest could burn. Forever and a day, all of them secure for at least as long. And one day they would live forever.

The cold does things. Some ponies break under the heavy hoof of winter. Some it bends, and not always in good ways. Some simply bear it like a package upon their back, like a sturdy earth pony courier on a long country road.

But Chrysalis was not a pony like these. Chrysalis was the choir director of a chorus that had fallen into disarray.

With her, of course, were the remains of Grand Hive. Every loyal changeling. Every changeling who still called her Mother, after the Mother of old. Sometimes, Chrysalis thought of herself that way too. More and more, she did. Had not the Mother endured before the Ancient Father? Had she not preserved the First Hive? Even when those monsters and their hellish Father had struck her down, even then she had done what no other could and wounded Eternity. Or as close as anything with flesh came.

Some ponies would have been content in Winter’s Grip. The Imperial Outriders kept it stocked with emergency rations and a modest supply of medical treasures that she had eagerly taken advantage of, and nopony would ever come and check on this place. Some years, the Outriders forgot it even existed. It was just an old ruin still in one piece, a convenient excuse not to build another waystation in the mountains. It was not important.

Perhaps it should have been.

Ponies often make the mistake of thinking that what they do and think and say is new. Of course, by necessity, sometimes they are right. But mostly they are wrong. The world is old now. Dig long enough and hard enough in one direction, and it reveals mute secrets which few will comprehend. Mostly, this involves fragments of strange and troubling things, bits of art and scraps of old cities that delight. Sometimes, if you look deep enough, you find half-made wonders.

In the bowls of Winter’s Grip there is an alchemical laboratory preserved for millennia. It has a magic that hums only to those who would continue its dark works. Chrysalis, restless and unhappy, longing for an answer to the puzzle of life, heard the humming.

Had she always heard it? Perhaps that is what led her to flee into the mountains when the Hive had shattered.

Her heart had been heavy, for though she was cruel, she was not without heart. She was monstrous, but not a monster. Not yet. She had brought the hives into a lasting peace, fed and sustained the weak and humbled the proud. Her laws had governed their greedy, short-sighted broodmothers and her love had gentled and tamed a savage, fearful race.

But it had not been enough. New lands. New food. Destiny. She had let them worm into her ears and heart, those princes and princesses of diminished Hives. She had listened. Quick, before the Imperials return, they said. You can make a land for us. No need to carve it out slowly and smartly. We can take it all. You could do for us what Mother did.

And she had listened, for in her heart of hearts she was The Mother herself. Or would be.

And now they had left her and the Grand Hive was only the pained memory of dreaming. They had gone back to their savagery and their cunning and their in-fighting. They bit and hurt one another. If she could destroy the world she might have done so just to spite it, such was the bitterness that swelled in her.

And then she found it. The Darkest Forge of Aulu’ii.

III.

I have to take this thing down. I know that. Never let the enemy find you. We don’t know how the new changelings work, but the old ones were all… it’s complicated. They all shared the same Dream, the same Gestalt. That’s what the little scared changelings in the column told us. It’s weird, but what we understood was this: if one finds you, all find you.

I swallow and try not to breath too loudly.

How to do this? If it runs, I’ll be hardpressed. These things are faster than they used to be. But they fight as a group. But I was also trained to fight as a group. I was never a guard. I’ve never even been in a schoolyard fight that was just me and one pony. There was never a reason.

I can’t just creep up on it. I have to take it quickly. I have to… I have to…

I have to go away.

When we fight, we fight in wings. And when that happens, I go away. My body is there, but I’m not. And it’s okay. It’s okay because it’s not me. But I can do what I have to do. I can do the job in front of me. That’s what Grizzlebrand would say. Do the work in front of ye, just like that. Breathe. Breathe. Okay. I’m going now.

The changeling doesn’t notice but Midnight springs up out of the snow behind him. She is level, building speed as much as she can with a bad start. She doesn’t need to go too fast or she’ll lose her balance if she hits. Just fast enough.

It turns when she’s halfway, catching the sound of her leathery wings beating furiously in the still frozen air. Its mouth opens in something like dull surprise. Its blank black eyes gawk.

Midnight hits it hard, one hoof in its neck and the other against the shoulder, and she hears chitin crack. It doesn’t manage to get a hoof up to try and stall her rush and they roll into the snow.

The changeling hisses. Its fangs are massive but there is no more room in Midnight’s head for fear because the whole thing is shivering nerves and fear already, and she stamps down hard on its face. Once. Twice. Again. Again. It pushes her off and she stumbles back, and then it is on her, trying to bite her. Anywhere. Everywhere. It punches through her duster easily but gets stuck in the padded shirt underneath.

She tries to shake the thing off, but its stuck on something underneath the duster. She throws it down, using its face as a sort of fulcrum, and she kicks viciously, quickly, at its softer belly. It screams in its strange alien way. Midnight has no time for screaming. She kicks it in the face as hard as she can, rearing up to let both hooves fall down with their cold iron horsehoes right on—

IV.

Chrysalis was not evil.

She was cruel. She was violent, and violent often. In another world, they would have called her a Machiavelli. In this world they simply feared her, pony and changeling alike. Chrysalis was the one changeling queen who was willing to sacrifice. She would do the hard things, the impossible things, and above all else, the painful things.

Those who think they understand what sacrifice is are perhaps the most frightening creatures of all.

So in her aimless brooding walks she came at last to the dark depths of Winter’s Grip, and found the laboratory. And what did she make of it?

Let it be said that, to her credit, she was horrified. Chrysalis was not evil, or not what some think of as Evil, all maniacal laughs and ushering in the doom of all life. She certainly did not revel in death and perversion. She was an artist of deceit, but so was any pony who lived as a beggar in the streets of Canterlot, and one hesitated to call the poor evil. She could lie, she could steal, she could spy upon intimate moments, she hurt those who deserved it with pleasure and she could kill those who did not deserve it with grim necessity. If she had to. It was the necessity that was the thing. The damnable thing. It was the last little string that had kept her from perdition.

What a dangerous thing to cling to.

Her disgust at the air in that vile place was unimaginable, and yet she walked through all of it. Even when she knew exactly what the hoary heads and crazed eyes had done in the darkest places, she still walked them. Not because of any evil plot or vile secret wish, but because like all living things with some soul left in them, she was curious even in the face of the forbidden. More so, then.

What had they done, you might ask. It is hard to be exhaustive. Some of their works were simple and innocent: enchanted measuring instruments, the most beautiful colored glass, scrying stones, and lights that would not go out for years and years. That was the first floor: the simple and the innocent, and even there she felt a sense of dismay. But she pressed forward.

Another floor. Here they had tried the old forbidden arts and found them dull. Blood magic. Amniomorphically-powered magic. The twisting of the mind by thaumaturgical means. The dark magicians of Winter’s Edge had practiced every ancient method of using others for selfish ends. Chrysalis was repulsed. A changeling does not kill to experiment. She feeds, but she will not do so with cruelty simply to be cruel. Cruelty must be pretexted by need, and she knew no need that would have inspired the torture chambers she found. Feeling sick, she had continued.

Then the more modern methods. Non-magical tortures and techniques. Here, as they grew dissatisfied with mere perversion they moved on to new and exciting realms. How to so injure a pony that he or she would live even as their body was wracked with the absolute greatest pain. She found notes preserved by alchemical paper, written with the sort of precision she would have expected from that damnable Twilight Sparkle, detailing the exact methodologies and the pushing of the frontiers of agony. How much pain could a pony even endure? Well, in Winter’s Grip, they pretended to be hermits and deep below they endeavored to unlock the mystery. They did things with water and acid. Retrained the mind with clever tricks and sometimes merely with repeated pain until it could be anything they wanted. These things, too, they recorded. What so and so had managed to program into some lost soul: eating vile things, hurting captured loved ones, intimate perversions, self-inflicted death. At the drop of a hat. At the tiniest clop of a hoof on cold stone. And Chyrsalis felt something like fear. Changelings could tear and rend and manipulate, but not like this. Never like this. What sort of monster did this, she thought with horror (for even the monstrous have monsters) but she continued.

When she found the preserved remnants of their experiments below she destroyed them. Wordlessly at first. With tears at last. Again and again, she burned the horrible shapes of ponies twisted into nameless things away. She broke their containments glasses and burned them, each and every one long dead. Here the sages of darkness had achieved their penultimate glory: they had twisted raw soul and flesh into new and—to their eyes—dazzling shapes. Ponies bonded with metal and wood and in one case, ice. Living ice, with visible veins and innerworkings. Ponies with jaws bigger than their shriveled heads, filled with row on row of sharp, unnatural teeth—she found with a shudder that they were steel, and it did not take long for her to realize that every single one of these creations was so artlessly made that they had suffered for years, their whole existence one great suffering. Above, they had been craftsponies and artisans. Here, they threw aside all of their art and focused instead on wild experimentation. Here they began to lose their minds.

Chrysalis stopped destroying only because she could not bear to do anything. She covered her eyes. She hated ponies. She hated most of those things that thought and felt and were not changelings… but no pony alive deserved this. She would not have done these things even to Celestia or that damnable pink… She couldn’t even bare to think about other creatures in this place. And for the first time in her life, Chrysalis felt a selfless impulse for something other than her children. This place must be ended. For every life it had claimed, she would do what no other monarch on earth had done: she would avenge, she would purge as the First Mother had sent the Destroyers away before ponies had kingdoms. She would save those who could not have been saved.

But then she noticed the final door. And her heroic fire began to glow weaker in the face of the horrified need to know. And she opened the door. She discovered the Mitou, the ultimate triumph of the Sages of Winter’s Grip.

They had resurrected the Mountain Gods.

Trembling, I lay in the snow. I’m back again, but not totally. I think something is wrong with me.

Okay, Midnight. Think. Focus.

Shortness of breath. Elevated heartrate. Adrenaline? Aches—those I can understand. It got me in the stomach once. Nausea. Oh. Oh, I can smell it now. It’s all over the snow, all of what was inside—Oh, Luna, please not—

I throw up and then roll away, heaving, trying to stay on my side so I don’t swallow any if more comes. My whole body shakes.

Please not another. Please not again.

He’s dead. I know he is. It, not he. It. Or she. It. It’s dead, very dead, I saw it die and I’m not checking. Dammit. Fuck checking. I can’t.

I don’t know how long I lay on my side, facing away from it. Eventually, my breathing normalizes. I don’t feel like my skin is trying to leave my body, and my heart beats normally. I listen to it beat like a little drum. I want it to remind me of the storyteller’s drum in Shady Vale when I was a filly but mostly it reminds me of the sound that chitin makes when you kic—

I shiver. It’s cold, and we don’t have the same resistances to the elements that pegasi do. We handle snow and rain better than unicorns do, but so does almost everything. I rise and stand firmly on my hooves. I’m fine now. I’m fine.

I’ve never killed anything before. Not anything with a face that had eyes that thought and could talk.

When we fly in formation, I’m on the edge. So maybe I have killed something. I don’t know. My job is to plow through whatever we hit and then make sure nothing gets away. But nothing ever gets away from the Rangers, so if I kill things I don’t see them die. They die over there, and I can say—Lily got that one, or Soft Fang got that one. Or Knight-Commander. Anyone else. Maybe Ruby. But never Midnight. Never Midnight.

I can’t stay here. I have to go. I fly back to the column.

VI.

The Mitou were the last triumph of Winter’s Grip for a reason. That reason is that the now deranged and dangerous old stallions of that place had forgotten a very important lesson that every little unicorn learns: Magic is dangerous. Another foal’s lesson: Magic is not tame.

Magic is both physical and not. It creates a form, but simply because every other apple is one way does not mean one summoned from the air will obey the same laws. And in fact, it is not the same. An apple summoned from the air without anything else, like a bit of wishful thinking, will not nourish you. It will taste nice, but it will leave you hungry. One must let loose of some of the expectations of mundane experience.

And so, the Sages created with their hoary heads and dulled horns the forms of the Mountain Gods, and it did not occur to them to ask if they might also have built a home for…

Well, it is more simple to say that Spirit wants Form. Build the Form with magic, and if the magic is great enough, Form becomes a fire and Spirit becomes a wandering mosquito.

And the Spirits of the Mountain Gods were as close to raw malice as could be found. And she beheld them.

Let us be honest. They did not control her. They did not warp an untainted mind into evil. Let no one guardedly say that she was tricked and cajoled and manipulated into what came next. Potential only had to waltz out in front of her, and declare itself with a little smile. Hand over a card, and say: I’ll be here when you change your mind.

If you could create something that did not suffer forever… or if you could change a living thing into something better…

Well.

And it would be different, wouldn’t it? If it was done in love, with hope for the future? Wasn’t that what parents did, really? Help their children grow? And sometimes growing looked painful and scary from the outside, didn’t it?

Chrysalis, let us give her this small grace, did not quite believe it. But she stopped her destruction. She had time to think. The evils of Winter’s Grip could be destroyed later, after all. When she had really thought about what she had seen. Understood it.

And when she closed the door to where the Mitou waited in martial readiness, every single horrible giant shared a joint smile. Every face the absolute same, with blank eyes and great toothy grins big enough to swallow a pony whole. A month, maybe two, and then they would march again.

III. The Dark Forest Where the Path Gives Out

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When I had journeyed half of our life's way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

The ragged column of evacuees had a destination.

Of course, you’ll say. It’s obvious. But it is amazing what obvious things one can forget in panic. We say—don’t go that way, it will just corner you!—but fail to remember that a mind pushed far enough thinks nothing but denials. It sees but doesn’t see. It only wants to run.

Celestia’s Pathfinders are the sort of ponies who never panic. They are implacable and unmovable as boulders. These are the ponies that mapped half the world and braved a thousand dark corners of creation. They are the pioneers. The first wave. And so, as always, they lead the way.

But they aren’t soldiers. They don’t know how to defend or take a position. In fact, beyond the ability to hold their own in a fight, they know nothing of war and never have.

So why are they here? For the same reason as the Rangers of Station Nineteen.

When the Crystal Empire reappeared, there were a lot of questions. Beyond the obvious (how? Why?) were the more practical—what happens when you cut a whole swath of land from the fabric of creation, cities and roads and ponies, and then deposit it all at once a thousand years later? Is it the same? Does the old overwrite the new or does the ancient find itself yielding to the modern? And more importantly, questions of maps.

And so, when the furor around Sombra and the Empire had died down, Celestia and Luna made a formal visit of State to their niece and her husband. They discussed the usual things—trade, agreements, stances, family—and then came at last to the troubling matter of the uselessness of maps. The diarchs of Equestria, wanting to communicate to the gun-shy crystal ponies that they wanted only the best for their new neighbors, offered their individual frontier agencies to aid the legions in the arduous but vital task of reconnoitering.

And thus it was that when the Mitou came down from the mountains, with horribly mutated and changed Changelings on all sides, they found a few hardy explorers and cartographers thoroughly unprepared for the onslaught of hell.

But Pathfinders, like Rangers, do what they can where and when they can. Soldiers they might not be, but it could not be said that they were cowards. And a pony in need was a call no true servant of Celestia could ignore.

II.

I tried not to make a big deal out of it. I told them about the lone changeling and swore up and down that it was alone. If there had been another, it would have been on me when I was puking in the snow. But nothing got me, so there was nothing there. I didn’t know why it was alone. I don’t know why the wing yesterday was alone. I didn’t have answers. The one thing about being an initiate that is good is that eventually people stop asking you questions after the third “I don’t know”.

Last Call seemed irritable, but not at me. I just nodded, thanked me gruffly, and then called Gale down and told him that we’d spotted changelings up ahead. He whispered it, but my ears caught it. They catch a lot.

They catch the things that the refugees say sometimes, but I try not to listen because sometimes it hurts. I don’t want to hear about how cold they are, or how hungry they are, or how the little ones wish they could go home. I don’t want to hear the sad little changelings chittering to each other. Even if it sounds pretty. Like birds.

When the patrol gets back a few minutes after noon, the column has stopped for its midday break and I’m poking the fire with a long stick. You’d be amazed what you find in the snow, sometimes. I guess before the big fax, when there wasn’t an empire here, there used to be some trees. I would have liked there to be more trees. There were trees a few days ago, and Swift said there might be some nearer to Amethyst City. I hope he’s right. The maps say there’s a forest, but who knows anymore?

I think that Lily knows something is wrong with me. She looked at me when she gave me my bread and I mumbled to myself. “Luna…” it sounds like Protects. But it isn’t. It’s just a mumble. She nods at me as if I had said grace sufficiently and normally. Yet I feel her eyes on my back.

Ruby grins at me tiredly. “Nothing to see,” she says. I sit by her. We are battle sisters. You eat with your battle sisters if you can. It helps. Grizlebrand told me that.

We lean against each other, back to back. I keep her from falling and she keeps me from the same. We keep our heads off the endless snow together. There’s not much conversation. Just eating. Cornbread again. Cold cornbread, western style, a little spicy. I wonder if the batponies in the West, the ones who didn’t follow Luna, eat this stuff as much as we do. Maybe they don’t, and it was just like, one thing that anypony could make, and when we came here we were so homesick that we picked the easiest thing on the menu and ate it forever.

Maybe.

I sure am homesick enough to think it’s probably true. I wonder, if I told Ruby, would she think it was true? Does she miss home? I am about to ask, but then I remember…

Her eyes are red. They say that batponies in the west all have red eyes just like that. I find it hard to believe—everypony having the same eye color? That’s weird. But it is true that it is super rare with us, on this side of the ocean. The ones that followed Luna changed. She told me in Ranger School that when she was a filly, they teased her about her mother having gone back and… yeah, you can figure it out. So I don’t ask about the lost tribes. (Or are we the Lost Tribes?) Because it might be a sore subject. But her eyes are pretty. I never understood why it was a sore subject for anyone. Red like—

I try not to think about what they remind me of suddenly because I would rather not be ill.

III.

Ruby stays with me and Lily when the second patrol moves out. Gale goes with them. He volunteered, which explains why Knight-Commander was so okay with letting Ruby and I have days off the patrol route.

I still think we could do it. I know I can. Flying that far for that long… I have the endurance. If I hadn’t had the endurance, they would have punted me like a hoofball right out of Ranger School. But its not the flying that’s the problem, and I get that. It’s a mental thing. It’s a fighting thing.

It’s pretty damn painful, knowing you’re a liability. I don’t want to be useful, in one way. But I don’t want to be deadweight. Because these are my friends and comrades. My battle-siblings, if you want to call them that. I shouldn’t put them in danger. It’s just… it’s wrong. So I don’t complain. Anything to keep them flying strong.

Ruby takes the front half and I take the rear watch. I haven’t seen her in hours. I saw Lily a few times. I still felt like she was watching me. I hate it. Not her. Just the watching. I don’t know what it means and I’m afraid she sees right through me.

I didn’t ask to be here. I didn’t want to do any of this. This isn’t… it’s not what we do! Even I know that. We’re not supposed to be the front lines. Where are all the guardponies? Where the Lunars with their scary armor or the Solars with their shiny gold? Where are the fucking Crystal legions?

More and more, I think that we’re all alone out here. It’s hard to hold out hope that anypony is coming to help us. What if we’re the only ones?

It’s… not that hard to imagine. Those things out there, the big ones. They could have swooped down and crushed anything in their path. Or, just the changelings. Twice as strong as they used to be, and in the thousands. We can easily take a squad apart (they can, anyway) but against three or four, there would be no chance. We’d die like… like, I don’t know. We would just die, what’s the point of comparison? Dead is dead is dead. And there are thousands of them, I think. A whole army. A cloud of them, like locusts in the old stories.

It reminds me of the storyteller. Only this time he’s talking about when Luna came and freed us from the Father. The great plagues he sent upon us. I think it’s all bullshit. Or I did. Except for that one part, with the locusts and the running away. Because I saw the swarm for a few seconds two weeks ago, when we all burrowed in the snow and even Swift was whimpering about Luna. I heard him. We all did.

The fact that he didn’t care. I remember that. I remember it making me more scared than before, as if that was worse somehow. Because Swift always cares what you think about him. Always.

I look down at the little bodies below. Ants on snow. I imagine that this is what they would look like to that huge swarm of changelings. I can almost hear the buzzing wings now, all around me in the sky. This must be what it would look like to be a part of that swarm before it swoops down and eats a whole Imperial legion alive.

IV.

Soup. Broth, really. But it’s warm, and I don’t care. We eat quietly again.

The night patrol found nothing. I was the only one who killed anything today. Anypony. Knight-Commander got me to tell him everything I saw, but I lied to him and I didn’t say anything about how I was sick, or about how suddenly it was just me and I couldn’t pretend that he had done it. I didn’t tell him what it smelled like or what chitin sounds like when you crack it open.

I think he already knows.

Lily didn’t say anything out of the ordinary. When she gave me dinner, I thanked her and she smiled at me. When she left, I looked down at it and mumbled, “Luna provides,” and then that was it for me the rest of the night.

We never say grace at home. I mean, we do when it’s a holiday or something. But in the Rangers, you always do. Even if you never did at home, and I guess it’s because you really do feel like she’s watching you. Maybe because you really hope she does protect, provide, whatever. Or maybe it’s just something you do. Like tradition.

Ruby Eyes tries to talk, but I just don’t feel like it. I try not to be rude, but she looks so lonely. I don’t know what to say. How do you say—I’m lonely too, but there’s nothing we can do—or—I killed a pony today even if it was one of those messed up changelings and I can’t stop thinking about how it smelled and felt and—

I’ll go away again, next time. There will be a next time. I know there will be. I won’t always have the wing with me. I won’t always be able to shrug off what I’m doing onto them. Next time I’ll just go away and maybe I’ll stay away for awhile and just wait it all out.

It’s hard to go to sleep. I can see the refugees and their little fires and their ragged little circles everywhere. I can hear them talk sometimes, and I can smell their bread and… and…

Screaming.

It takes me five seconds too long to untangle myself from the bedroll. By then, they’re among us, and the screaming gets louder. I roll into the snow, looking for my duster with padded armor, and—

He hits me from the side, and I feel something sharp poking between my ribs and I scream. We go end over end into the snow. I can smell him—it—on me, trying to get better leverage to stab me again with his hoofblades. I throw the changeling off but he just comes back again. I kick at him with my hindlegs, trying to push myself back with my forelegs. Kick. Kick. Kick. He avoids the first two. He keeps hissing and hissing and then the last kick catches him square on the nose and I know my horseshoes hit because I can’t take them off. The sound it makes is unreal. Everything is unreal. The sky is dark but its red like Ruby’s eyes all around me and I think I can smell blood—I do smell it, everywhere, all over me and the snow and—the changeling gets back up. It’s face is ruined. One eye stares at me like blindness and its mouth opens and it doesn’t just have fangs, it has row upon row of teeth and I try to say something but I can’t. It just keeps coming and then it’s everywhere and it’s so big—

My eyes open.

I don’t jump and scream. I just lay there in the darkness. My first thought is that the cloud cover thinned enough to see stars. My second is that I’m still alive. My third thought is that I feel sick.

I roll over on my side, but thankfully hold on to dinner.

It’s hard to get back to sleep. It is so quiet now.

VI.

The forest is still there, at least. But more and more I think that might not be a good thing. That’s kind of been the theme of this whole mess, really. The more I think, the worse it seems. The logical thing to do would be to stop thinking. But I can’t. Sometimes, I try to stop thinking and I can handle it for a little while. Thirty minutes to an hour at the absolute most. And then I start feeling like somepony is watching me. Or I feel just how alone you are high up in the air. Or I close my eyes and I see… how awful the snow was. Changelings bleed green, they’re supposed to bleed green but these monsters bleed black. It’s not like normal blood. When you scrape your leg and you bleed a bit, it kind of oozes, right? But it’s not like it’s thick. That stuff is so thick, like syrup. Or honey. And then I just can’t help but think about it, more and more, until I feel sick or afraid or just restless or nervous.

We stopped the column long enough for Knight-Commander Yuletide and Star Brand to have a short conference of whispers with the Pathfinders about the woods. We’re all nervous about it, and for good reason.

Rangers aren’t soldiers, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know a few things about war. After all, most Rangers were guards once. The ones like me who never went past basic training (and then, I only did that so I could qualify for Ranger School) are rare. Knight-Commander and Star Brand and Soft Fang all fought Zebraharan pirates when Equestria and the Khalifa of Tabir teamed up to one-two knockout buck those bastards. Lily and Swift were actually in Canterlot when Chrysalis attacked. The Ranger who retired a month after Ruby and I arrived at Station Nineteen was named Meadow. He told us about how he and a bunch of starved, water-crazy Zebra soldiers got stranded after a battle with bandits in the desert and had to fight and sneak their way hundreds of miles to the Zebraharan capitol. At first, I thought he was just bullshitting us because we were rookies, but the others seemed to treat his stories like they were true, every bit.

So, we aren’t soldiers but in some ways we are. And even I know that forests can be great… or they can be death traps. If you’re fast-moving, light, flexible, and—above all—smart, then you can use heavy wooded areas as the perfect cover. Every tree and bush becomes a hiding place and potential avenue of attack. Everything can work in your favor.

But if you aren’t those things, and if you’re a flier, forests can be a nightmare. They say that Celestia was almost captured by Nightmare Moon early on in the Schism when she risked a short route, going by forest roads with a large army. Nightmare Moon’s batpony raiders began their attacks as soon as the sun started going down and they didn’t let up for hours. Every few minutes, there would be another scream, another dead guardspony. The stories also say that Nightmare Moon’s loyal batponies shrieked and made all sorts of outlandish noises and probably drank blood and worshipped dark gods, but whatever. The noises part is true, but ponies never seem to understand that its all about echolocation. Maybe if they lived in caves they would get it. Probably not. Dayponies are kind of slow, honestly.

So, forests are dangerous. If it was just the Rangers and maybe the Pathfinders, we would probably be fine. We can see in the dark and hear danger coming, and they can keep us from getting lost without having to risk breaking the canopy cover. We would make a great team. The problem is the refugees. These ponies and changelings aren’t Rangers, Pathfinders, or Soldiers. They’re just civilians. Just townsfolk who watched their homes burning not that long ago. They are slow, afraid, tired, cold, and hungry. We’ll have a hard time hearing threats with them around, muddying up the sound, and we won’t be able to move through the rougher terrain fast enough. Refugees means we have to stick to the road, and that means ambushes.

But there’s nothing for it, and that’s why they don’t talk very long. We can’t go around. Once again, Rangers could outrun the twelve wings—and that’s counting pairs as one wing—behind us, but we can’t get these poor ponies to outrun anything if we aren’t making good time in a single direction. Trying to go around the forest and approach Amethyst City from the north will add a whole extra day. Except it won’t because we’ll all be dead. We’ve taken down two and a half wings of changeling mutants in the last two weeks. Every single one we isolated into halfwings and then demolished by surprise. In a drawn out fight, we’ll lose at least one pony if there’s more than a wing, and that's if we bail when it gets too rough. And we can’t afford to lose any. They can throw away a hundred ponies and still destroy us. The Pathfinders can’t help us in the air aside from their one pegasus, and even he’s not much of a brawler. Too light.

So we’re basically sort of fucked.

But at least there’s a change in scenery.

VII.

Lily and I walk together on the snowy road. It’s dark now—only about four in the evening, maybe five, but even with no leaves the trees above are thick. They soak up light, it seems like. I swear some of them actually look like they’re made of crystals. It makes me nostalgic for when this was just a surveying trip.

I had really been looking forward to it. Mapping new territory! Discovering new things and meeting new ponies. Helping Luna and also helping the Empire. If none of this had happened, I would have come to this forest and found these trees. I would have been excited, if they are actually made of some sort of magic crystal. And, yes, I think they are. But I don’t feel excited. I’m just… sad, I guess. We would have had a great day or two here, seeing how wide this patch of forest land stretched. Maybe Last Call and Ocean Gale could have worked with us. Together, we would have found the paths and the road and added them to the new maps.

A little behind us, I hear a chittering. It sends a shiver down my spine, but I don’t turn. I try not to feel so freaked out, also. It’s just the changelings—the normal ones, the ones who got their homes destroyed.

Some of them were in the Empire, just trying to live normal lives. Some are from smaller hives that Chrysalis wiped out on her way down from the mountains out of nothing but spite. Knight-Commander Yuletide called them together and asked if any were willing to help us in the woods. Changelings can see in the dark, though not as great as we can, and they have hearing that rivals our own. He promised we wouldn’t force them to fight, and that they were free to run if we were attacked. Made all of us promise we would protect them. I think we all meant it. Maybe even Swift, even if he looked a little frustrated. Swift hates Changelings, but even he wouldn’t leave these poor little lost souls for the likes of the monsters that are chasing us. Swift is a jerk and an ass, but he’s not cruel. He and Lily just handled Canterlot differently.

Lily apparently handled it by just being unshakeable. She never seems to bend. She’s always calm, always ready. She can go from mothering you to calmly talking about how many mutants we’ve killed and then remind you to say grace in about five seconds. It used to unnerve me a little, how collected and smiley she could be, but now it’s a comfort. Lily never falters.

The changelings fall silent. We keep walking.

Lily hasn’t said anything to me yet. About what I know she knows. Can she see my dreams in my face? Do they peek out of my eyes, perhaps? Hell if I know. I just know that I can’t fool her.

Five of us here. Lily is the sharpest pair of eyes in our wing, and I’m a good woodspony, so we’re here where we can see what’s ahead. We have three changelings with us. I don’t like calling them drones, so I don’t. I’m not sure what else to call them. I don’t know how they, you know. If they’re he or she. I guess it doesn’t matter. They seem nervous. It’s probably a good idea to be nervous. I’m nervous, and I’m the big tough Ranger pony.

Swift and ‘Fang are in the back, with two changelings. Knight-Commander and Star Brand are with the actual column. It’s even more spread out now. It’s really insane that we expect to be able to protect this many ponies with such a small wing.

The best part is that we’re under strength. That’s what really gets me, as we breach the forest’s heart. Even if you count Ruby Eyes and myself as full-fledged Rangers (which we aren’t) Station Nineteen’s wing is still down at least one pony. They hadn’t gotten around to replacing old Meadow yet. At the time, I figured that one of us would stay on and the other would go to a station that needed another Ranger. If you want a wing really at full strength, still counting us as something other than miserable rookies, then you would need two more ponies in the air. So, counting us, we’re two down. Not counting us, we’re four down. And we have to defend two hundred ponies and changelings. One other flier. Two earth ponies. That’s it. That’s all we have.

“Bit for your thoughts,” Lily says quietly, just loud enough for my ears to hear. They twitch on their own. Damn, but she’s perceptive, isn’t she?

“Numbers,” I say before I think better of it.

“Oh? Sounds like a grim subject.”

She has a beautiful voice. It’s prettier than Ruby’s. It reminds me of my mom. “It is, I guess.”

“What sort of numbers, hm?”

“You. Me. Ruby. Star Brand. Kn… Yuletide. Soft. Swift. Shadow Flier.” I say each name carefully, deliberately. “Eight. Full strength is ten. It’s only eight if you count Ruby and me.”

She hums. “I would.”

I smile, but I don’t really feel like smiling. “If you add in Gale, it’s nine… if you add the two rank amateurs.”

I glance over and see her nod. “Yes. And you’re thinking about the odds.”

“No, I already know the odds. I’m just thinking about… numbers. This is really messed up.”

“A bit,” she allowed. “Do you know what I’m thinking about?”

“Sure,” I say, hoping it’s something good. Or at least something not about how we are all almost certainly going to die.

“Snow.”

“Snow,” I repeat.

“Yes,” she says calmly, as if that is normal. “Snow. You know, when I was a filly, I loved snow. I still love it. I even like this snow,” she says, sweeping her wing. “Snow is nice. Cold, yes, but in a… pleasant way. It has potential. You can walk in and see where you’ve been. Or, if you’re a bit younger and have a fire in your belly—which you certainly do—you can make snowponies out of it.”

“Used to try and use branches for wings,” I mumble, half to myself.

But she hears me, of course. “I did too, when I was a foal.”

“That’s a weird thing to think about.”

“Is it? I thought it was a rather natural thing to think about just south of the artic. Surrounded as we are by snow. In fact, the most natural thing to think about.” She smiled as if this were funny, which it wasn’t. Not really. “But, in general, I don’t think much of numbers or most of the things you are thinking about. It’s not going to help. I think you’re a smart enough mare to know that.”

“I guess.”

“Grizlebrand still teaching the School?”

“Aye,” I say, mimicking that over the top accent he has. “Yar, he be there.”

She chuckles. “He would kick you into next week if he was here. You remember what he says, right?”

I sigh. “Do the job in front of you.”

“Yes,” she says, as if it was some sort of benediction. It’s more like a sigh. “Do the job in front of you. And don’t overeact when I say this, because I would like to not worry our already nervous tagalongs: there is something up ahead.”

She says it without ever changing her tone. I just sort of blink at her, slow on the uptake. When I figure it out, I put my head on swivel. It doesn’t take more than a second. There is something up ahead. Way, way up ahead. I squint.

“Ugh. It’s either small or its far away.”

“Far,” she said, simply.

“Alive? Moving?” I ask, feeling an itch in my hooves. It was the itch I had the first time I crashed while flying. Like, really crashed, blood and sniffling and mom worried to death.

“No,” she said. “No to both. If it’s alive, it isn’t terribly so. But I don’t think whatever it is lives. It’s awfully still. Good job, by the way. You’re staying calm. It’s the most important thing—it’s vital to being a Ranger. Never panic. Always remain in control. It’s impossible, but do try regardless.”

It takes us another ten minutes before we can really make it out.

Up ahead, the road sort of bends around a little frozen creek. The changelings chitter, and Lily tells them that nothing is moving, but that they should still be careful. “Stay back,” she says softly. “It’ll be alright. If something is up there and still breathing, it’ll be us they’re after.”

That doesn’t make me feel any better.

And I could use something to make me feel better because it becomes readily apparent that we’ve wandered into what’s left of a skirmish. The smell of death lingers slightly even in the cold. It’s… it’s hard to describe. Not that I want to describe it.

Most of the dead are in full metal armor: Legions, then. Most are Crystal ponies. A few earth ponies, one unicorn, no pegasi. Half of them are more or less still pony-shaped, which I find myself faintly surprised over. When we get to the bodies, Lily sends one of the changelings back with a message for Last Call. The other two stay with us, but don’t hang back like Lily told them to. They’re practically clinging to us.

It’s sick and it’s wrong but as I walk through the avenue of the dead, that simple fearful trust makes it worth seeing and smelling and imagining how they died. I’m so tired of ponies not wanting to be near me or look at me.

“You can go back,” I say to the one on my left. She (he? It?) is just a step behind me. “It’s okay, really. This isn’t pretty.”

It chitters at me. I look back at it for a moment to see the little changeling grimace for a moment, and then sigh. It looks at me as if it’s asking a question, and I shrug helplessly.

That seems to be enough of an answer. It vanishes in a blur of green fire which startles me but doesn’t melt the snow, and then it isn’t a changeling at all but a batpony stallion. Handsome, by all accounts, but not in a dramatic way. He sighs.

“Changeling throats don’t work well with pony words,” he explains, looking pained. “I’m sorry. May I remain like this until we are clear of this place?”

I just sort of blink at him for a second. “Uh. Yeah, yeah sure. If it helps.”

“It helps.” He pauses. I realize now that Lily and the other changeling have moved on ahead aways. She’s inspecting one of the bodies, Luna only knows why. The stallion speaks again. “When ponies see us, it makes us…”

“Nervous,” I finish, my voice sounding strange in my own ears. “It makes you nervous. You don’t like how they look at you.”

“Yes.” He (she?) looks at me strangely.

We keep walking. More dead. I catch up to Lily, who seems more solemn than calm now. She’s been waiting.

In the snow is… I recognize it. It’s a coat. I swallow.

“What… what wing?” I ask.

“Station Seven,” she says.

“Did you know anypony in that station?” I ask, feeling helpless.

“Yes,” she answers. “We can’t afford to take him,” she continues, more for herself than me, I think. “We can’t. The body will slow us down, what if it has…” She swallows. “I can’t identify him. He’s been out here for too long. Frozen solid. We’re going to stop for a moment, alright? We need to know if other Rangers died here.”

She reaches down and plucks something from the corpse. Most of the poor Ranger is obscured in snow, which I’m grateful for. She shows me what she’s collected: a tiny lunar emblem on a chain. I’ll have my own when I finish my training. If I finish my training.

“If you find another… take this. It has a name carved on the back,” she says. “Just in case. It’s all we can do, but we need to do it.”

I understand. I nod at her, because there’s nothing I can say that wouldn’t be monumentally stupid or really, really pointless.

The changeling-batpony and I began digging in the snow. Never very deep. Just a few centimeters at a time and then you move on. We find another body, and I almost lose it, but…

He comes up alongside me and gently pushes me away. I feel better. Calmer. He just looks kind of sick.

“You did something to me,” I say. My voice sounds flat.

“I am sorry. You were in distress and it was like someone shouting in my ears.”

“It’s okay,” I say, and it is okay. Everything sort of is. “I think you might have overdone it.”

“Perhaps.”

We keep looking. We find a ranger and I blink at her body. What’s left of it. Head’s gone. I don’t feel anything but… No, I really don’t feel anything.

“Could you stop doing it?” I ask him. “Just for a little while. Not all the way. I just… I shouldn’t stare at dead bodies and be okay with it.”

“I understand,” he said.

It comes back, but not all at once. I feel disgust again first. Then an ache, between my stomach and my heart. I wonder what her name was. I bend down and with a grimace search for her emblem.

It’s not hard to find. She had it safe in her duster’s inner pocket and I withdraw with it cradled between my hooves.

“What is it?” the changeling asks.

“Luna gives us these,” I say, looking down at it. The name is on the other side. I don’t look. “The Princess, I mean,” I continue, feeling strange. “When you become a real Ranger, you go to Canterlot and she gives you your emblem and talks to you personally. For like, a long time. She interviews every single Ranger. It’s the last point you can bail. If you decide that you aren’t up for it, she still gives you the medal and you can go home or back to the guard or wherever with no hard feelings. She even still talks to you.”

He hums. It’s not like a normal hum. It’s the song the changelings sing to each other sometimes at night.

“What’s your name?” I ask without looking up. I look at the little moon. It’s silver on a black circle. Onyx, I think. Heavy. Ornate. Beautiful.

“Hard to say. As in, hard to pronounce,” he adds when I don’t respond. “The closest I can come is Mozxil.”

“That’s not so hard.” I turn the emblem over. Her name was Primrose.

“I certainly do not think so, but when I am a changeling, I can add the undertones that make my full name.”

We keep looking. I don’t find another Ranger. Thank Luna.

Instead I end up finding a hat and a very, very dead giant.

The hat is a ushanka. It’s wooly and warm, perfect for cold weather. It has ear flaps that remind me of a donkey. I pick it up and look at it numbly.

The mitou is dead. Very dead. Something gouged out its eyes, probably. I look at the hat, and then I look at the giant. Huge. Covered in coarse white fur. It’s hands are big enough to fit around my body and crush me like a grape. I look at the hat. I look at its hands. I think about how black they are—you couldn’t even tell how much blood was on something like that, could you? Maybe it belonged to a Ranger. Or a legionnaire. Or just a traveler in the woods. Anypony. I know it got them. Sometimes they pick a pony up and just bite it in two. Because they can. They don’t even need to eat, I don’t think. They don’t seem to need much food. They travel light. A club or an old field gun that they carry like a rifle.

“I wanted to buy one of these when I was on leave,” I say to nopony. But Mozxil listens. “But I didn’t because I only had so many bits, and I was hungry. So I got food instead. When I heard we were shipping out for the Empire to make maps and explore, I thought to myself, ‘Midnight, you really should have bought that hat,’ and you know what? I really should have. It was a great hat. This is just like it. You can eat anywhere but you won’t find a nice wooly hat with floppy ears anywhere but north of Vanhoover. I thought, since we were coming back and I had a stipend, I could spend the day off I was bound to get in Imperial Center buying a nice warm hat. Maybe a scarf. One with nice blues. Something pretty. It really looks just like that hat. Except that one had a little Sun on it and this one has a Crystal Heart, see?” And I know that I’m crying because I feel the cold wetness on my cheeks. “Mozxil, can you do me a favor?”

“Yes.”

“Can you please, please, please for the love of Luna make me feel better again?”

“Of course.”

VIII.

It’s night now, and I’m thinking about the snow.

My ears are warm. I took the hat. I didn’t want to let go of it, and I was too humiliated to explain. I just wanted Lily to stop looking at me. She’s always looking at me. She sees right through me.

Mozxil was nice. I found out that changelings prefer “she” and they can be whichever. I wasn’t really paying that much attention. I just asked her to tell me things and then asked appropriate questions to keep her talking. I asked her if she would show me how she shapeshifted on the road. Didn’t seem to mind. Even did a pretty good version of Star Brand and Knight-Commander Yuletide. She doesn’t have his voice down, though. Doesn’t talk enough, I guess.

I asked her if she got tired of dayponies being afraid of her all the time. She didn’t know what a daypony was, but I think she understood. She said that you get used to it. It’s okay. Figure out a way around it. I can’t shapeshift though. I’ll always just be me. She said that the changelings weren’t afraid of us, really. They just were afraid, period. It made me feel better. I still was afraid of how I would be when she wasn’t actively sapping all my bullshit away.

When Lily wasn’t looking I hugged her and it was incredibly stupid. But I was never in the Guard, and I felt like a child, and she was okay with it. I said I was sorry, and that I probably tasted gross, and she laughed and said that it was okay, and then we parted ways and then I got first watch and then I sat here in the snow. I found a nice sturdy tree and leaned on it. I’m still leaning against it. It really is a nice tree. I mean, it’s dead and ugly, but it’s big enough for my back and it’s comfortable, and really that’s all I care about.

Snow, I’ve decided, is potential. Lily was right about that. She’s usually right. But I’m not thinking about snowponies and snowballs and tracks.

Mostly, I’m thinking about how things freeze.

Water freezes. Trees freeze, I guess. Bodies freeze, when they stop moving. Snow and ice really could be the opposite of potential that way because nothing happens anymore after they come. But then there’s ponies like me, digging away. You could find anything under there. Looking at all of this snow, I can’t help but think that all sorts of things might be under it. And eventually, the ice melts and the snow melts and it all ends up naked in the sun.

I shiver. It’s cold. Even a pegasus would be cold in this weather. I pull the hat’s ears around my cheeks tightly, like that helps at all. My duster’s buttoned up and I probably look like a little hill of wool with a head on top. It’s a really stupid image. I would laugh. In fact, I do laugh and it doesn’t sound crazy at all. Probably.

In the distance, I hear something like a song. I flinch, but I don’t get up because I recognize it. It’s an old, old tune, one my grandmother said came from over the sea when we followed Luna. It’s called “Do Not Destroy” which is a really morbid name for a song, but old stuff is morbid sometimes. It’s a kind of signal in the Rangers, and they taught it to us in Ranger School. A catchy little melody, and you tell ponies who are in the know that everything is A-Okay. Shadow Flier told me and Ruby one night, after we’d cleaned the mess, about how he’d been captured by two thugs looking to get ransom after he got wasted on leave. When he knew there were Rangers looking, he started singing it just softly enough. Those bastards never stood a chance, and they were probably still in jail.

Lily trots through the snow. I know its her because she sings some of the words—

Do not destroy
The towers that I’ve built
The lovely spires of sweet Ulthar
My dear city
Where the cat is royal blood
Where the moon sings to me, sweet Ulthar.

I don’t call out to her. No real reason to, and it would be stupid.

But she does call out to me when she’s closer. “Midnight, and all is well,” she says in a sing-song voice, trying to fit it to the tune. When she fails, I smile and continue shivering.

“Har-dee-har,” I say, or try to say, but it comes out all chattery. “It’s cold as balls, as my older brother used to say so cheerfully.”

“That does sound like something a stallion would say,” she replies like a diplomat being told that they used Celestia’s portrait for toilet paper.

I giggled. Mostly because I was nervous and miserable and when you are nervous and miserable and want to go to bed, everything is a little funny. “Is it time to go home yet?”

“Of course,” she says, so smoothly.

“Great. I was thinking I would tell Luna that being a Ranger isn’t for me and then ask for a goodbye kiss and haul my floofy ass out to somewhere with sandy beaches and a bright sun. I’ll become a slow, dumb daypony and learn how to surf.”

“Sounds wonderful. Though I would adivse caution regarding Our Lady.”

“It was just a joke,” I said.

“Oh, I know.” I look at her and see the dour expression I expected. And then it splits into a grin. “Rumor has it, and I do advise you to take this with a grain of salt, that she is a rather passionate lover. You might never escape the palace.”

She surprises me into open laughter which I stifle only with difficulty, and then sits beside me.

“Welcome to my tree. It’s sturdy, solid, cold, and also conveniently if you need to hide and wait to die, it’s just big enough to ward off death for about three seconds,” I say conversationally.

“Hm. Good to know. You seem to have taken to mimicking Shadow Flier.”

“The little nest I built? No, I was doing that in Shady Vale. I went out and sat at the edge of the neighborhood once, at the mouth of the cavern. It was snowing, and I got a little cold, so I came back with a blanket and watched the snow fall.”

“Sounds lovely.”

“It was,” I say.

“You aren’t sleeping,” she says. Finally.

“No.”

“Nightmares.” Not a question.

“Yes.”

“I have them too, sometimes.”

I look over at her, but she isn’t looking at me.

“About what?”

“Canterlot,” she says. “And about the Zebrahara. And about pirates. A bad scrape with a manticore near Ponyville. That time I almost hurled on Grizlebrand’s hooves.”

I smile. “Nice.”

“I try,” she says. “Do you need something to sleep? It won’t make you insensate, if you’re worried.”

“What?”

“If you need to wake up, you will,” she explains. “It’s not anything magical. It’s just an old recipe.”

“Everything we do is some sort of old recipe,” I say. “Does it taste bad?”

“Traditionally? It tastes like rancid butter, or at least I thought so. I experimented a bit after Canterlot. It tastes sort of like tea, if you forgot to take the tea bag out and it went cold.”

“Delightful. I’d like some.” But then I hesitate. “May I sit with you?”

“For a little while. You should go to bed.”

“I’m not a child.”

“You are not,” she affirms. She looks me over. “How old are you? Nineteen?”

“Yes.”

“How fitting.” She smiles at me and it is a warm smile. “You think this is a test. Even if you haven’t thought about it just that way, it’s in the back of your mind.”

“I know I’m not cut out for this.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to say. You killed one of them all on your lonesome. It was well done, for a pony who was never in the guard.”

“I keep seeing it come back. I puked.”

“Not surprising. On either count.” She was fishing in her duster for a moment, and when she found a little vial and held it out to me, I took it. “Here you are. Aunt Lily’s Special Nightcap. Minus the alcohol. I would love some, personally. It feels nice and warm in the belly.”

“Should I take it now or wait?”

“Take it now.”

I did. It tasted bitter, but not unbearably so. “Thank you,” I said quietly, and gave the bottle back. “I was thinking about Luna’s interview and what I would say if I were ever going to have one.”

“So quick to see the future. What would you say?”

“I don’t know. I think I might say that I’m sorry I wasted her time.”

“Anything that isn’t self-effacing?”

“I think she’s beautiful and I would ask if she was happy we were here for her return.”

She looks at me and doesn’t say anything for a moment. I feel like I’m being sized up and look away.

“That’s interesting of you. I’m sure she was happy,” Lily says after a moment.

“What did you say to her?”

I know she won’t tell me before she answers. “I’m afraid that tends to be a private affair. Though some will say. I won’t,” she adds. “But not because it’s you, pup. One day, you’ll understand. When, and not if, you go to her yourself. I think that she will like you.” And with that, she prodded me and I knew my time was up. I was glad. “Off you go.”

IX.

I wake again. It’s early, but not as early as the night before. I had nightmares. I remember them, but not very well. Mostly I remember the feeling of being afraid, but its not intense. I’m sure it was at the time. But now its only hazy and indistinct. I didn’t wake up in the night.

But my head feels sort of fuzzy. I blink up at the pale sky between the thick branches.

I wonder what time it is. Five? Maybe. I’ve been waking up early ever since the second day of basic when they levitated me out the window with magic and dumped me in ice cold water while I slept.

No reason to get up quite yet. I know that I’ll hear the others move when its time to get going for the day, and in my hazy state, I think that it’s nice to just enjoy my warm bedroll. Lazy mornings are so rare. And if I lay here long enough… I lose track of that thought.

I’m so busy enjoying the warmth and my own hazy drugged state that I almost miss it.

But I don’t miss it. A sound to my right, out of the woods. Awareness cuts through the drugged draught as best it can. Originates from left of where I was on watch. Moving towards me, definitely moving fast. What is it? Continuous noise, like—

Wings. I’m already trying to escape my bedroll when I hear Shadow on last watch raising the alarm through the woods. My hooves are shaking—the medicine has me so off balance I can’t open—there! I stumble onto the snow, thankful I slept with my duster wrapped around me, armor and all.

And as I put a hoof up to hold my hat to my head and look around for the foe, they are among us.

Before I can say anything or do anything, a changeling hits me in the side. I feel it biting down through my duster, just like the last one did. Panicking, I kick at its underbelly, my horsehoes cracking the chitin there. We fall apart, and before he can press the attack I rush him, hooves high—

I can’t look, there’s not enough time. You move on. You find the next one. You deal with it.

And I feel myself going away again, but that’s okay. I already feel like shit. Just go away, Midnight. Go away. It’ll be alright.

This is not stealth. It’s raw speed. None of the Rangers have seen changelings move this fast, but none of them have seen changelings quite like this. These are new, freshly converted in Winter’s Grip. Chrysalis the Forge-Queen has bestowed a new gift upon her fastest children.

Their eyes glow green and red in turn, and their doubled wings hum constantly. They have fangs, but in the back of their throat is a stinger that almost none of them know how to use yet. But they will. Oh, they will.

Midnight takes to the air, yelling warnings in a voice not quite her own. She draws their attention, and another comes. When it rises to meet her, she beats it back down to earth in seconds. There is no technique here, no cleverness. It is just raw strength and adrenaline. It tries to use its stinger on her and grazes her leg, but the Initiate gets lucky. She screams so loud and so high that briefly she dips into the ultrasonic that both of them hear. She catches its exposed stinger by the fleshy connection to his mouth. It pulls, and she pulls back. It is almost comic. Until she bites it off and screams again like a blind mare in a cave finding her way home with echoes.

Midnight is attacked again. She tries to overpower this one and it sees her coming a mile off. It does not use its stinger. It hits her on the back and she fumbles through the air before crashing in the snow, and then it is on her—biting at her duster. She tries to shake the changeling off, but it clings, hissing. She hisses and screams back. It abandons the duster and does what its bretheren could not: it finds a spot on the back of her neck and its sharp fangs pierce her skin and inject its toxin into her blood.

Midnight falls like a dead mare and lies uncomprehending, staring at the dark wood ahead.

IV. Unreal City

View Online

It’s a lot like a hangover.

When I was on leave in Stalliongrad, the day I almost bought that hat, our class went and partied pretty hard. It’s tradition, and like most traditions, it is at least a little stupid. I threw up everything that night on the street and then my friends threw me onto a couch and propped my head up. The next morning, I felt like I had died, been dragged back to life… and then like I wanted to die again. Dying sounded awesome.

This is a little worse. Being hungover feels like every little bit of moisture has been wrung out of you. Your head hurts, your throat is raw. You feel weak, like you haven’t eaten in days. But when I open my eyes again, I feel less like I’ve been dried out and more like someone has slowly been peeling my skin off. It burns. It being everything. My veins feel like they carry little blades that stab underneath my skin.

I groan.

That’s when I see something over me. My sight is… strange. Wrong. Like what I imagine ponies who need glasses must see like. The world is fuzzy.

“Lily, she’s awake!” Oh. Ruby. Hello Ruby.

Another shape. “Thank Luna. She protects.” That would be Lily.

“She protects,” softer, a little afraid. Ruby.

“You are lucky, pup,” Lily says. I feel… I think she’s touching my face. It hurts. I whine. “You’re very lucky. It seems that the bitch goddess has not changed her children’s venom. You will recover.”

“Wha hap’n?” I say. Even in my awful state, I know it sounds stupid as hell.

“One of them jumped you and bit you,” Ruby says. “I… I thought you were dead. But Lily helped me pull you back towards the fire.”

“Go and tell the Commander,” Lily told her. I wanted her to stay. I tried to say so, but my words were all big and strange. “In a few hours you will be fine. Some of the refugees are going to help us move you until the venom wears off. You are more lucky than I said before: if Yuletide hadn’t found you and pulled the monster off, it would have gotten you with a double dose. You wouldn’t have woken up for another few days.”

I groan again, trying to talk. She makes shushing noises. “No. It’s alright. Just go back to sleep. You’ll sleep it off. It’s fine.”

And I do what she says. I can feel myself going. Not like when I fight. It’s gentler. It’s quieter. Like sinking into bed. I can almost feel the covers moving, and—

II.

The forward base of the Equestrian Guard in Manehattan is a place of blinding activity.

It’s to be expected—this is a momentous occasion. If tragedy can be called that without shame, at least. Equestria has not seen an actual war for well over a century. Pirates, bandits, the occasional monster… but not a war of maneuver. Her tacticians are at wit’s end. Her quartermasters are both the happiest and the most frustrated they have ever been and perhaps shall ever be, and her soldiers are nervous at best. Frightened, at worse.

But let it not be said that nothing is accomplished in the panic, for much is indeed done. Orders carried from one tent to another carry with them the force of thousands of hooves. Already, eight companies are crossing the border. Another four wait in Lunangrad for Luna and Celestia to lead personally. The combined levies of seven noble houses muster just north of Canterlot, late as always. A whole nation is moved to war. Or, in their hearts, is moved to the aid of a new friend.

In one of those tents, a small crowd is huddled around an outlaid map of the Crystal Empire. They are as one: furrowed brows, lines grim slashes, bodies still. None of them want to get right to the point, partially because they all already know the point. They know what’s going to be said and what it will mean. Instead, they talk about everything else.

“If her highness is sure of moving the Third Army group towards the Expanse,” began the one who was nominally leading this meeting, “than she… er, they, will need to maintain a rather tenuous line of supply. It’ll be easily cut. I have informed their Majesties of this, and have been told in no uncertain terms that we have days to figure it out.”

A general wave of discontent.

“I know,” said the first. He rubbed his temples. He could feel a headache beginning right under the root of his horn. He hadn’t slept in two days. Too busy crunching the numbers. How much bread and water feeds how many guardsponies? What is the correct amount of weight for a guard pony to carry when moving across unfamiliar but flat terrain in winter, possible snow becoming definite snow, so that he or she will be effective in combat several hundred miles after starting? It was all in the numbers, he’d been trained to believe. It’s all in the give and take of ratios. Sacrifice a sliver of combat readiness for speed or the weight of supply, sacrifice some speed or equipment for a fresher force. It was all in the numbers and in the charts.

“That’s not enough time—” one of the faceless crowd said, and the unicorn with a raging headache now continued to rub his temples. His name was Balanced Check and he had the absurd thought for perhaps the hundredth time that his name was incredibly stupid. Especially in light of the circumstances, wherein nothing was going to add up.

“I know,” he said again.

“If we had Rangers…”

“But the Rangers are in the theater already,” Check said. “Yes. Let’s just… skip the parts everyone knows because they are obvious, alright? Let’s skip to the part where we make it work.”

Carefully but swiftly, he began to mark the map. “Alright. We have nine ranger stations in the north. Six were deployed to the survey mission. That leaves us three, hypothetically, that would be perfect to keep marauders off of any resupply.”

“That’s an insanely small force.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He sighed. “Look, I get that. Trust me, I’m aware. But the Rangers aren’t guards. They know this terrain. Rangers can cover ten times the ground with a tiny fraction of the ponypower. They’ve done it before. It’s what they do. I’m not saying its ideal. I’m saying it’s a start.”

One of the logistics staff pushed back his eyeglasses and leaned in. “Where are the currently deployed wings? You’re right, sir, that the Rangers are ideal for the situation at hoof…”

“But three wings isn’t enough, yes.” Check marked the positions of the remaining wings. He knew them all by heart. Most of this was going to be merely a rehearsal. “Stations Nine, Eleven, and Fourteen are our reserves. Stations Five, Seven, and Eighteen are here, currently attached to the Fourth Legion. Empire will hate to see them go, but I think the prospect of a few thousand Equestrian guards will make the loss more palatable. It’ll also be more up their alley. That would bring us to…” he blinked and desperately wished for an apothecary. “I believe it’s forty-six? That is assuming only the two casualties we’ve been informed of, obviously. That’s forty-six rangers covering a hundred miles of ground.”

“It’s a lot,” murmured one of the faceless officers, leaning in.

Check knew he wouldn’t find anything. “Yes, but there’s more to it than that. I’ve done some calculations regarding the Fifth and Seventh. Station Five has a unicorn whose dowsing ability is unreal and even with conservative estimates, worth an additional thirty ponies. Station Seven has another unicorn. Not as good, obviously, but still numerically their ability to lay out dowsing and detection spells should bolster the effective force estimate…” Is that even a term? He wonders. He is so tired. He had spent the last ten hours working the math, using formulas he hadn’t thought about at all in years. “It evens out a bit. A bit,” he stressed. Essentially, we end up with forty-six rangers who can do the work of eighty-five or more airborne batpony rangers. They can see in the dark, hear changelings coming long before anypony else can, and frankly they are frighteningly good at surviving. Now, if we can position them correctly, I believe we can keep the route from Lunangrad into the Expanse open long enough to move in elements of the First Army Group’s pegasus…”

And then a question he had not anticipated: “What about Station Nineteen? They seem close enough that they might be able to move back towards the border.”

Check hesitated.

“We… we aren’t sure if…” he coughed. “We aren’t sure if they’re even alive,” he admitted.

“You’re right about the survival bit, sir,” said the one who had spoken. Check honestly didn’t remember his name. “Surely they might have? We could at least try to contact them.”

“No go. No unicorn for communication. If they had a scrying globe at all it it's long gone—I was told in no uncertain terms that for all intents and purposes they are dead. I’m inclined to agree with you. They’re close to the initial invasion route, hell, right on top of it! But…” he shrugged and pointed. “See that? Amethyst City? It’s the only place in miles they could go. I want to believe that they rounded up some survivors from the border towns and moved their asses. Wouldn’t that be something? But the only place to go is Amethyst City, and if they go there… well. They’ll be in for a rude awakening.”

III.

In Lunangrad, a near-immortal returns to the city which hailed her in Rebellion, and which was the last to surrender her cause. She finds her return to be… Strange. Like a half-remembered dream, the kind you aren't sure of when you wake. Had you dreamed something pleasant? Was it a nightmare? And your feelings are mixed and your brain is hazy so you like back down again, but Luna could not shrug her feeling off so easily.

Luna blinked wearily at the sun. Already she was tired, and no fighting had been done. She was almost tempted to think—Ah, but I am old now—but knew better. It wasn’t age. When she had been a vagrant warrior, she and Celestia had roamed and quested and fought and she had not been weary. But that was before Ascension. It was before the Moon.

She had liked night before. Now she was Night.

Twilight Sparkle, horns and wings and all, accompanied her as she walked through the camp that had been set up in the city park. It was ad hoc. Faintly, Luna found it horrifying—Equestrian arms had rusted in her absence, it seemed. But at the same time, it was understandable. The arts of war had grown less needful. She supposed it was better this way. Maybe. The guards themselves were no lesser than the ones who she had fought in the long ago Schism.

“I’ve already checked our stores and the quartermaster says that the army’s last shipment of cold weather gear came in this morning from Vanhoover,” Twilight said, trotting beside her. Luna glanced over to see her levitating a checklist. How surreal. Checklists.

Checklists should not have a place in war, and Luna was certain of this. She found this new time strange at best, and wrongheaded at worst. As if the fury of the clash of arms could be made into a machine! How horrid.

“It is good to hear,” she said, solemnly. “Has thou—ah, forgive me. Celestia, is she here? I would speak to her if she has arrived.”

“I’m not sure that she’s here yet, Princess,” Twilight said. “She was supposed to be, but the schedules for everything are just…” she made the most adorable little sound of frustration. Luna wished she were in the mood to appreciate it.

“It is not your fault, and is not urgent,” Luna said, shaking her head. “Later will be as good as sooner. As for now… I would advise you, Twilight, on the eve of battle.”

“Y-you would… I mean, what?”

“Firstly, between us, let there be names and not titles,” Luna said. “I will not march into battle with a newlyborn sister alicorn who calls me princess and not my name!” She chuckled. “ ‘T would be ill-luck, I think.”

Twilight smiled. “Of course. I’m sorry, I’m a little on edge. This is… this is big.”

“Aye.” Luna looked about again. “I believe quarters were prepared for all three of us. Leave the checklist behind and let us retire for now. Celestia is the general here, not you or I. Let her be the one who is seen to take command.”

Luna had seen a hundred battles. She had fought in five times that many skirmishes. She knew just as her sister knew what war looked like. It could not change. Not really. She ignored the hollow feeling in her gut.

Twilight nodded reluctantly. “Alright… I mean, if you’re certain it would be better. The quartermaster was pretty organized, I suppose.”

“Let the good stallion do his job,” Luna said gently. “I am sure that he is capable, else he would not be assigned to the work.”

They left the camp behind slowly, and not for lack of progress. It was simply massive, and much like a maze.

But it did eventually end, and the city was all around it. Lunagrad had been a solemn city in her own time, and she found that it had not changed in that regard. Sadly, she thought it shone less brightly than it had. But perhaps at night it still was like a living sea of stars. She hoped so. Another thing that you killed or left crippled in your wake, she thought, but masked her disgust from Twilight. Twilight would not understand.

The Governor of Lunangrad had practically prostrated himself before Luna when he had offered accomodations. Frankly, she would have preferred to stay in a tent. But Celestia had suggested she accept—being cautious not to overstep, but implying that it would go a long way to restoring her old bond with the ponies of the Valley of the Moon.

The servants bowed deeply and formally as they passed. Luna acknowledged each with a nod. It was hard not to ogle at the old tapestries—she wondered if they had kept the old ones… no, surely not. But they looked as if they came from her old world. She saw herself in many of them. Her old self. The Luna before the nightmare of despair. The Luna who deserved their love.

As if from the Aether where she walked at night came unbidden an old, old bit of doggerel: Luna protects. Luna provides. Luna sees all. She snorted. What nonsense. She certainly did not see all. She had failed to protect. She had failed even more dramatically to provide.

IV.

Lily was right. By the time I woke, I was ready to be on my own hooves again.

Two of our civilians had offered to carry me between them. It was surprising, to say the least. When I woke up, I about near gave them a heart attack. Which was fair, because I was pretty freaked out at first too. But I thanked them profusely, and they didn’t seem afraid of me. Maybe seeing me completely fail at being useful took all of that away. Or maybe its just harder to avoid looking at the scary evil batpony when she’s right in front of you thanking you for carrying her.

I still feel a little woozy, but not enough to really be a problem. I can walk in a straight line and fly in a straight line, and as far as I’m concerned, that means I’m fine.

We’ve almost cleared the forest, or so the Pathfinders think. I’m glad to be rid of it.

As for the attack… Knight-Commander Yuletide himself filled me in. We lost Shadow. When he told me I just… sat. My legs simply gave out. Stopped taking orders. He never changed the tone of his voice. He simply continued. Shadow dead. Twenty-six civilians killed. Fourteen injured severely. A few dozen more with wounds minor enough to ignore. The fast movers got Shadow as he raised the alarm—he told me that they’re damn well near silent, and that’s bad for us. Changelings are hard to see in the dark, and we’ve been relying on our hearing to compensate for the difficulty. The ones with the stingers are the silent ones. Fucking monsters.

I walk alongside ‘Fang. We’re the rearguard now. Knight-Commander wanted me with somepony who had a level head, I guess. Because I’m a fuckup. I know I am. I went down after what, thirty seconds? Maybe? Damn near instantly.

What if somepony else had died? What if I had been able to get up and help Shadow? I was the closest. I know I was. Lily and Ruby and Swift all bunked on the other side of the column last night. Yuletide was on watch. Star Brand was on watch. I was the one who was supposed to be there for him. And I was just laying there, enjoying my warmth like a foal.

I haven’t seen Lily since I woke up. Or Ruby. Only Knight-Commander and ‘Fang. I wish I could have seen them, but I’m also afraid to. What if they blame me? They would be right, but I don’t want them to.

‘Fang says nothing, which doesn’t tell me much. He doesn’t usually say much unless there’s a need.

I just want to go home, now more than ever.

Amethyst City, on our maps, is noted as being a walled settlement of moderate size. Estimates of the local population were tentative, but placed those within the walls at around six thousand. Our first breath of air after we’d put distance between the invasion force and ourselves, we had huddled around his flimsy parchment map, sheltering it and him from the cold, cutting winds, as he laid out our options. Or, well, option. Because we only had one.

Amethyst City was supposed to be our “base”, if you will. It was a nominal staging point where we could resupply when needed and rest or convalesce in the event of an accident or an unfortunate encounter with wildlife. It wasn’t because the place was special so much as it was the only place. There were small villages and towns, of course, but they were isolated and mostly consisted of subsistence farmers who had little to spare for a bunch of exploring Rangers.

This is the Expanse. Between the highlands around the capital city of the empire and the frozen eastern shore and another mountain range, you have a flat nothing. During the short but productive warmer months, the Expanse is a vast prairie full of flowers and grass and all that nice stuff. In the long cold months, the Expanse is a frozen wasteland that can and will kill you without having even noticed you were there to kill. There is nothing to eat, and its almost impossible to live off the land in what we would call Fall or Winter. Here it’s all winter.

So Amethyst City is the only place in our survey zone with food and shelter to spare that we won’t have to risk dying horribly in the snow to get to. And now it will be the same for the civilians we’ve picked up along the way. I hope.

Our first view of the city itself wasn’t promising, but wasn’t exactly damning. No movement, but with the way things are outside the walls, it makes sense. Don’t draw attention. Keep indoors and keep watchful. Yuletide’s ordered us all to keep visible from the ramparts when we leave the treeline, but to be ready for anything. We have to show we’re not a threat, but if they’re panicky… panicky guards are stupid guards.

We press on. I still haven’t see Lily or Ruby, but ‘Fang traded me off to Star Brand, and I moved up to the front again. We went ahead to spy out the city. So far, this has mostly entailed Knight Brand staring through his binoculars and grimacing while I scan the trees, feeling anxious.

“See anything?” I whisper, just loud enough for him to hear.

“No,” he says. “And I don’t like it. No guards on the walls that I can see.”

“They might just be hidden behind the crenulations,” I reply, but now I’m even more worried.

He grunts, as if to acknowledge that and simultaneously express what he feels the chances of that being true are. “Or they might all be dead,” he said simply.

“Do you think the city’s been taken?”

“It’s possible,” he allows.

“What would we even do? It’s the only place we can take them,” I say, a little louder now.

“We’ll just dislodge them.”

“You… wait, what?”

“Squeeze in and dislodge any occupiers,” he said and then glanced back at me. “Fight anything inside that isn’t friendly. I’m not sure how to say it more simply, Initiate.”

“Er, sorry, I just… if it was a force big enough to take the city, what can we do against it?”

“Sound thinking under other circumstances. But wrong in this one. There is no great army waiting for us inside. Amethyst City had at most perhaps two hundred guards, constabulary, and other auxiliaries. Perhaps at the utmost it could have fielded a force of a thousand, with a quarter of those being warm bodies more apt to soil themselves and run than anything else. They would not need a horde to take this place if the mind controlling it was competent. And I’m beginning to suspect that the mind controlling them is, in fact, a genius”

“I’m still not sure why there won’t be an army in there,” I grumble.

“A few things. Think of it as a lesson. Firstly, there would be patrols if it were a sizeable force. Secondly, so far the tactic of the invasion has been lightning fast maneuver across the length of the Expanse. Stopping in a city so west would bog down a significant portion of the overall force that could best be used to attack the flanks of the responding legions. Lastly, if there were a full army in there…” and now he looks back at me and grins so that bears his fangs. “They would have killed us all already.”

VI.

I’ve not been in many cities. Stalliongrad on leave. Vanhoover, once, on vacation. Manehattan on a school trip. That’s three, and only Vanhoover was more than a day or two. I know just enough to have a feel for how a city should be—namely, alive and full of ponies. There’s a constant background white noise humming in your ears. At first, it bothers you, but then you just… well, ignore it. It’s normal. I imagine that if you live long enough in a place with so much noise, you start to think that its comforting, being able to hear all that, all the time. Conversations on the street, the rolling of carts and carriages, the occasional slight thrumming of magic as some unicorn lifts something. The endless array of smells that is so maddening might one day become something to wake up to and smile, like my mother’s cooking wafting through my open bedroom door.

Amethyst City was absolutely none of the things that those cities were.

It was dead. There’s no other way to describe it. I could talk about the feeling of absolute stillness. I could describe the way the windows seemed like dull staring eyes with no ponies behind them. Empty streets where there should be crowds. Abandoned carriages with no ponies to ride them. Some broken windows. Dark patterns on snow-filled streets that are almost certainly old blood. The snow-filled streets themselves reinforce the death of this place. There isn’t anypony left to clear the way.

It’s like a whole city of that feeling I had when I saw the changeling die.

Soft Fang, Swift, and myself land on an old hotel, or what looks like an old hotel. From here, you can see all the way to the walls.

“If there are changelings, there can’t be that many of them,” I say, because talking is better than a dead city screaming silently at you about how fucking dead it is.

“Maybe,” Soft Fang says.

“Girl’s right,” said Swift. He spat. “Midnight, you see bodies?”

I swallow. “I saw a few.”

“Right. But not many.”

“No.”

“Yeah, I was wonderin’ about it to,” he says.

“Evacuation,” Soft Fang murmurs, looking over the side. “Coulda moved them.”

“Or maybe the mutated changeling fucktards eat ponies now. I mean, hell, they have stingers that shoot out of their mouths and shit.”

I shy away from Swift almost without noticing. He’s angry. I can feel how angry he is and there’s a part of me that is sure that any moment now he is going to turn all of that on me.

“I… I don’t know,” I say, sounding stupid. Feeling stupid.

He turns on me, and blinks, and then sighs and sits. I stare at him.

“Sorry,” he says. “Shadow.”

I look down. “I’m…”

“We’ll talk about it later, all of us,” he says. “We’ll remember him and we’ll say the words. I need to be calm.” He gives me a smirk like he did at the station. “Gotta show you the ropes, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. Well, we can’t rule out pony-eating changelings, but I doubt it. I’m not seeing as much in the way of signs of struggle as you’d expect from that sort of thing anyway.”

“Is it safe? Will they be okay here? I mean…” I take a deep breath. “We could hide them, right? Or find food or something. Anything.”

“We’ll know soon,” Swift says, but the look on his face isn’t promising. “Sit for a bit and rest your hooves and wings. Back in the air in ten. Oh, and drink, kid.”

I nod and lie flat on my belly after retrieving my little canteen from beneath my duster. I gulp greedily at the water—when I filled up after waking, the water skin seemed uncomfortably light, and it made me even thirstier. My back aches and my wings feel heavy, but I can keep going for a few more hours without another break.

Absurdly, as I lie there, I can’t help but think about Ranger School. Grizlebrand was ruthless. He would fly right behind us, that hook-for-a-hoof watching you on long flights, just waiting for you to lag behind. You didn’t even have to stop and he didn’t have to actually catch you. You just saw that thing and shivered and knew you were definitely not going to slow down. Ever.

Soft Fang sees me, grins slowly, and lies flat on his stomach. I repress a grin. It’s not actually funny. We’re just tired and nervous.

“Think the others found anything?” I ask.

“Honestly? No,” Swift said, even though I didn’t specify who I was talking to. He’s always the first to talk. “And they’ll be going back before us, so they probably aren’t going to find anything after we get going again.”

I cross my hooves and lay my head across them. The snow is cold, but I’m starting to not notice as much. Either I have hypothermia, which I doubt, or I just… don’t care.

A few minutes later, we’re on the move again.

The three of us sweep over the empty, abandoned streets. All of those neighborhoods, bereft of children and old ponies and mothers and fathers and…

I couldn’t imagine the difference. I can’t see the ponies there. I try to imagine what Shady Vale would be like with just me and its just a darkness that goes on and on underground without any lights to show you the way. None of it means anything because there aren’t in ponies to name it and say what it means. This isn’t a city.

VII.

Swift is on the roof in front of me. Soft Fang is in the alley, ready to come howling into the courtyard. I am flat on my belly trying to be as small a batpony as possible.

I hear it again—we all hear it again. The faint scratching coming from inside. It sounds like chitin but Luna forgive me, how do you tell? You’d think I would know by now but I don’t.

We were right over this place when we all heard it, like nails on a chalkboard. We scattered, assuming they would come up from behind us and knock any close formation out of the sky, but nothing came. Just more scratching noises from the rectangular set of builds around a courtyard with a broken fountain.

My heart is racing. I can hear it beating wildly in my ears. I can feel it in my throat. Luna knows all. Then she can tell me what the hell is in there before I—

A changeling emerges. And then two more. Mutated. If it’s not small and normal looking it dies.

We don’t stop to see what they drag behind them. Swift falls on the one closest to him from his rooftop perch with a cry. I’m off my roof before I see Fang come out of the entranceway. No plan. I have no plan. I’m just in the air, wings flapping, mouth open. I’m screaming—it starts out normal and ascends to higher than ponies can hear and suddenly I’m even more aware of how wrong they are as the echo comes back, how wrong and awful and twisted and out of proportion. So close. The one in front of me turns and bears his fangs and I see the stinger beginning to rise in his throat. I don’t have time to go away. I don’t have—

I hit him with both forehooves right in the face and don’t follow him down. It’s like skipping. I just spring right off his face while I hear his chitin cracking and then I’m on the other side and I’m still screaming. I touch down but the snow trips me up, wasting precious seconds. I turn.

There’s more of them. Two more were behind the ones we hit. Fuck! Soft Fang is ducking under a darting stinger. Swift is in the air, trying to throw off a normal one. I charge on hooves, wishing I had hoofblades or anything at all but horsehoes.

The newcomer I head for meets me halfway and throws me back. I land on my hooves—Luna, I have to, if I stumble I’m dead I’m dead—and when he presses the attack I’m ready. I put both of my forehooves down, like I’m trying to drill them right through the stone, and then pivot my whole body, just like I was taught. I buck both hindlegs into its unholy, ugly body and send it literally flying. For once, I’m glad we’re heavier than pegasi. I’m going to enjoy having the advantage of weight.

Suddenly, everything shifts. Everything is just as frantic as before, just as awful, but I am no longer a quivering mass of reaction. My mind clicks, like a wheel find a groove, like teeth slicing through warm meat. I start grinning. Three of them are down. Two are up. No, four are down. All three of us are still up. The changelings use the fallen forms of their comrades as a barrier, hissing as they retreat back towards the door.

I don’t want them to leave. I want to see them cracked and broken against the stones. I bare my fangs at them almost out of blind instinct, copying them, mocking them, I see yours but here are mine, step off.

“Midnight! Go low!” Swift.

I don’t think. I act. I am all muscle and no heart, and so I think nothing of diving at the left one’s hooves, right over the body of its bleeding-out companion. I try to knock them aside but the thing is kicking at me. It’s hooves beat my back, the base of my wing. I flair my wings out so it can’t hit all of one of them at once, and then I just wrap my legs around its legs and cling and pull. It makes an unholy scratchy noise of panic, and then I feel one of the others hit the monster up high and I hear the crack. It falls and I fall with it, finishing it off with a hoof-ful of blows to its head and chest, my cold iron against unprotected chitin. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

I jump off and turn quickly to find the next, but there is no next. There are just three panting batponies looking at each other in a quiet courtyard, blood pooling around them.

VIII.

Changelings feed in many ways. It’s not so hard to believe, really. Ponies eat and drink, but they have invented so many ways to do both of those things. In a crisis, you can even pump nutrients in through a needle, they tell me. I remember shuddering about that when I was little. I’ve always been afraid of needles.

Changelings feed on emotion, that’s the basic part. Some will say they feed on love, and that’s right. They do. But its emotional energy that they need in general. They can absorb and find some sustenance in a variety of feelings—romantic or filial love, lust, friendship, happiness—and you’ll be puzzled now and this is where ponies always ask the ultimate question: then why do what they do?

There are a lot of reasons. Love is like… it’s like steak for a lion. It’s fish for a pegasus or a batpony. It’s the pinnacle, full of life and rich in nutrients. It will keep them going. Lust is like chocolate, friendship and happiness and general communal feeling like bread or daisies for smiling dayponies. But the kinds of emotions we tend to call negative can also feed them. Anger, sadness, panic… after all, ponies can still eat grass if they really, really have to, so why couldn’t changelings do something similar? And they can live off of memories like we might live off of dried half-rations on a long road.

What ponies don’t understand about food is that it is scarce. They’re so used to everything being given them on a golden platter—the sun makes the flowers grow, the trees always have at least some apples, the wheat and corn are as high as a stallion’s eye, and all’s right under heaven.

But I understand it. We get it. We do.

When you live mostly below-ground, you become more aware of how precarious existence is. Cave-ins are rare these days, but every few years one happens and ponies get hurt. Or die. But not as often. The underground apple orchards work well, and are doing better all the time as our few unicorns get better at the magic that makes it all possible… but it wasn’t always that way. And sometimes there are kinks in the spell and the apples aren’t any good and you lose a quarter of the harvest and suddenly there are a lot less apples to go around and still the same number of ponies to feed. You have to get by sometimes on lichen-paste soup, fish stock and mushrooms and what’s left of the wheat from the daypony farms on the praries.

Now imagine that your daily bread was dependent on the mood of those around you.

So they lived in fear of the fear of others. They hid and fed in secret, and then I guess it was just never enough and they couldn’t take it anymore. They started to kidnap ponies, and like a chef stumbling on a miracle, they discovered something new: they didn’t feed on emotions exactly, but on the very spirit of a pony. When they skimmed off the surface, not taking the emotion they “fed” on, they merely touched and fondled and were warmed for a day. When they grabbed and took, they found purchase on the soul in an emotion and tore at it and devoured a part of it whole. And what if they could keep that pony in one place? Well, eventually, you would have all the pieces, wouldn’t you? And then what comes after? Isn’t it obvious? Do you have to spell it out? Shouldn’t you just… don’t you just see what it looks like? Isn’t it… I…

So I won’t think anymore about the pods and the body in the courtyard that wasn’t a changeling or the civilians with empty eyes in the bottom floor of the forum that I know Swift put out of their misery after he sent me topside.

I only know these things because when we were done and had brought them into the city I found Mozxil and I shook her until she told me why and how and she couldn’t hold on to her disguise and she cried and I know I scared her but I had to know. I had to. I said I was sorry and I don’t know if she believed me and I know a little bit of what the others feel when they see my fangs and think--you eat living things--and I felt it when she cowered before me and I thought--you eat the souls of the living--and I know it wasn’t true but I couldn’t see around the pods to see her I saw was them cutting open in the semi-darkness. I just kept seeing how the green oozed out and the bodies in stasis slumped to the floor and blinked at us and if you didn’t turn them over they suffocated to death, just blinking.

V. The Gates of Hell Shall Not Stand Against

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We found the legionnaires eating cold pasta and cold cheese in a little dugout trench they had made in front of the Governor-Generals’ compound. They just sort of blinked at us.

They looked awful. So did we, but they just looked pathetic. All dirt and grime, all cuts and bruises, helmets askew or missing, plumes ruffled or gone. There were eight of them and they had enough shootsticks to outfit a regiment stashed in the compound and about three dozen with them in the little hole they made. They called it a trench. Trenches have to be big enough for a pony to actually hide in. It was a hole.

We got the story out of them, and traded food. They didn’t want any of our jerky, but they took the bread in Swift’s pack in return for some of their cheese, which was actually pretty great, even if it was cold. Swift got a pouch of tobacco for something that Lily probably mixed for him. One, his helmet gone, said he would give me an honest to Luna apple for my hat. My mouth watered but I just sort of shook my head at him.

Later, I asked Swift why this just sort of… happened. He laughed and said that it was like a tradition, but one you didn’t have rules about. Soldiers meet in strange lands, all of them on uneven ground, and trade little comforts. It’s just what you do. And then he blew smoke in my face and laughed when I scowled at him.

Amethyst City was too close to the initial invasion. It couldn’t be defended with the local guard and garrison, and there was really no hope of reinforcing it in time. It was doomed and everypony inside knew it as soon as the word got out. There was panic and anxiety of course it did, obviously, what else is there to do for a civilian or soldier in the face of death but to panic and die out of breath?

But the old Governor-General was a holdover from the days of Sombra. To call him crazy would be to sell the stallion short—he wasn’t just crazy. He was batshit crazy, and he was good at it.

II.

Imagine a city on the edge of revolution. An empire boiling over with discontent. Imagine ponies in the street casting dark glance up at you through the darkened windows of your home. The servants you pay—some you’ve known for a decade or more—won’t meet your eyes, won’t be anywhere near you. Is it fear? Is it worry? Or do they know that any moment knives will spring out of the dark and stab you to death and they simply don’t want to be collateral?

That is what being Governor-General of Amethyst City was like. For two years, he found what had been a more or less easy, rewarding position in a minor city turning into a life-threatening morass of frontier intrigue and resentment. He had spent the first decade at his post chortling over the blindness of his fellow nobility, thinking they had it made in bigger cities, only to be deposed within a year or three for a minor fault in currying Imperial favor. They wore themselves out. Their revels were fringed ‘round the edges with worry. But in Amethyst City, there was no great need to grovel before Imperial delegates. He had a single visit every year, and the beauracrats that came were always the new ones, bottom of the barrel, easily flattered and always impressed when they left. Minimal work, and he had no need for repression and control—the city controlled itself and he lived off of the cream on top.

Maybe he had always been a little unbalanced, and a decade of ease had only hidden it. Or maybe the suddenness with which Sombra’s reign turned dark (for those who had not been paying enough attention) had left him high and dry, struggling to reconcile a breezy spirit with the cruelties he must now officially support. Or maybe the Governor-General had always been warped. Who knew? There wasn’t much chance of asking him, now.

III.

The column is no longer a column because it is now a crowd. It piled into the Governor-General’s mansion and gawked. Hell, I gawked. It’s a pretty fancy place. Crystal chandeliers and beautiful tapestries… stained glass… gold and silver and rugs so soft you could sleep on them and it would be like sleeping on a cloud, and I’d know.

We moved the crowd deeper in and asked them to find rooms and stay put for now. The legionnaires helped us board up the windows, which was sad. Ruby and I rounded up all the food we could find.

Not that we found much. Larder was almost empty. Anything that would keep for a journey, gone, which fits with the story the Imperials told us. We found some wine in the cellars, which was poor comfort.

Mostly because when Ruby suggested looking, just in case… I feel my skin crawl. I try not to show it. “Alright,” I say, not looking at her. “Go on first.”

“Sure.” She shrugged and stepped down. Stairs. Stairs leading down into the dark, only this time it was totally dark. I can see in there, I tell myself. I can see. It’s just like home. But I keep thinking…

I follow.

Inside, wine, like I said.

Ruby and I sit in the corner, behind a rack. The bottle sits between us. “I kind of want to drink it,” I say, feeling ridiculous. Feeling, also, nervous. Do changelings hide in wine cellars? Stars, I hope not.

“Me too,” she admits.

“What the hell, there’s tons. It’ll never be missed.” I pick it up and work the top off. I drink a swig—it’s sweet, rich, not dry. I taste… I think I’m going crazy because I taste it like it’s chocolate and strawberries. I giggle, which is absurdity on top of absurdity. “Taste it,” I say and offer. She takes it and reads the label.

“Crystalberry wine,” she says. I smile at her. “Well, never had that before.”

She goes. Then me. Then her. Then me.

I feel warm all over. I’m not that much of a light weight, and I’m not tipsy. I’m just… warm. It’s nice. I kind of forgot what being warm was like. “This stuff is pretty different,” I say.

“Yeah. I like it.”

“Me too. Guess we should stash it and go up.”

She nods. We leave.

Up topside, we return to a sullen waiting. What else is there to do? Truthfully… it’s not like we could really push these poor ponies much farther. Crystal ponies said that the Governor had some sort of communication line to the Imperial palace, but… well, no buts. It’s really our only choice. Nowhere else to go, and nowhere we can hide this many ponies.

No fire tonight, but we won’t need one. That’s alright. When we meet up, all of our wing on the grand stairs with their red carpeting and their marble grace, I feel warm enough to go without one.

“I think I can skip some of the basics,” Star Brand says. “Like, we’re fucked, et cetra, et cetra.” He chuckled. “I think tonight we’ll sleep together like it’s the station again, and then we’ll have to start spreading out to cover as many weaknesses as possible. We need to be able to see anything coming before it even knows its over a city.”

“Any more of those legionaries?” Swift asks.

“They say no. Or at least, they doubt it. If there are any others left behind, we are unlikely to find them. They’ll be buried deep trying to keep out of sight, and honestly I don’t blame them. Not in the slightest. One of those Imperials is a unicorn. That’ll come in handy,” he says the last to himself.

“So. Any plan?” Swift asks again, with a smile.

“Aye,” Knight-Commander Yuletide says. We all turn to him. I was about to wonder why he hadn’t spoken first… but his face. His strange look, his hard eyes filled with something I don’t think I want to understand. “It is a plan worthy of us, methinks. Luna provide, of course. You will be hardpressed to find one more… explosive.”

IV.

So a worried and harried mind turned to questioning. Revolutions are tricky and messy affairs. Ponies get killed in revolutions, after all, worried the fat old crystal pony who they called the Governor-General. That wouldn’t do. Especially when he was sure to be one of them.

Irony: the pony who had spent his whole life avoiding having a heavy hoof, who had done as little as possible to get by, the slow and calculating one in the back of the room—he was the one who understood what his peers had not. Idiots think they murder a few malcontents and everything stabilizes. Ponies aren’t machines. They aren’t a math problem to be solved. You line up those malcontents, and soon you’ve proven them right. Yesterday, they were overreacting and made their landladies nervous. Today they were perfect and holy martyrs murdered in the name of truth.

So he did not send the garrison of the frontier town out to intimidate the populace. He did not execute anyone (except for a murderer that not a pony missed) and imprisoned nopony (except for thieves and those who deserved it by the consensus of sense) and he upped the guard presence… but only slightly. Not enough for anypony at all to notice but those who were going to notice regardless.

And so grumbles stayed grumbles. But he kept hearing them. And so his order and decency slipped slowly toward a kind of dark genius.

Two plans came out of this. The first? Tunnels. Miles of them probably, some even beyond his remembering. Every government building, every popular landmark. Four dozen boltholes that led down and down into a single great vault of stores. They called it the Den. The Governor figured it would be called Home soon, when the tide came in. He would ride it out deep beneath the streets while they raged without aim or purpose to strike down a figurehead that could not be found. And then? Listen and wait. If the revolution prospered, which he highly doubted it would, then the last loyal ponies of Amethyst City would take one or many of the tunnels that loud out onto the plain and be gone along with food and as much treasure as they could ever wish for. But if Sombra crushed every spark as was the most likely outcome? Then the Governor’s loyal guards would be thorns in the sides of rebellion, striking from the boltholes and shadows, harassing and harrying, keeping them from sleep or even from rest, and when Sombra came he would find a city waiting to be taken with ease from within. And Sombra would reward him.

Every plan needs a failsafe, of course.

He thought long and hard about it. What would ensure that in the worst case possible, he would not have been foiled without some last revenge?

The best answer lies in the one and only thing approaching crisis during his long tenure.

The Empire had had a bit of trouble with a ravening band of Griffons six years before. It was the start of the troubles, it was. Barbarians, dirty and uncultured, but they knew their bloody business well. Laden with treasures, they lumbered past Amethyst City, pursued through the ever-colder winter by (so the story was!) the Iron Bitch herself, Opal that was, Sombra’s personal favorite and her Ninth legion.

There had been talk that the griffons might try and take the city to winter there and hold the Ninth at bay, make them sit out in the cold. The idea had horrified the Governor. He could barely comprehend it. And so he had prepared as best he could. For a coward and an innocent in the ways of war, he did not do such a bad job of it. The guard was on watch, the garrison prepared and stocked, the civilians organized, and above all, the cannons of the garrison well-maintained and her unicorn mages well-fed and warm and ready.

The cannons had been a sticking point. In his restless worry, he had discovered a new thing to angst over: black power has a problem of… exploding. Violently. All you have to do is set a light. He imagined griffons swooping over and finding the armory.

So he some of it stored elsewhere, and had the building fireproofed by strong magic. And then forgot.

Until revolution was in the air, and then he remembered that nightmare and grinned in the darkness of his bedroom. Of course. Of course. Fire! Fire and explosions and above all, victory. Tunnels. Spells. Fuses.

It took him hours. He worked through the morning with bloodshot eyes, running the numbers, giggling about it all. It was, frankly, beautiful. Many evil things are. An even distribution of black powder would keep the rebels from seizing it, keep them from using it against him… but it would also be his last laugh. If he was cut off or found or killed, then he would activate the trap. Fires would start in the ordained places, set by waiting magical circles, spreading along short fuses to barrels lying in wait. Chain reactions. Combine them with careful alchemical charges, the kind they use in mining, underneath the streets… yes. Yes, it would work.

Only a pony who loved a city could destroy it in a day.

“So you are going to use the failsafe the Imperials mentioned,” Soft Fang says quietly.

“Luna have mercy,” Lily whispers.

“Aye, ye say it true, Soft. Thee and Lily seem to be aggrieved.”

“It’s… they’ll all die,” Lily said, horrified. You could read it on her like a newspaper headline.

“No. There’s still stores in yon Den, below us, and we’ll send them on their way with Last Call. There must be a legion close enough for them to make it to. Perhaps even one of Our Lady’s armies,” he added, and then sighed. “We cannot outrun yon monstrous throng, and ye know it.”

“Yeah,” Swift says, and swallows. “Yeah, they would mess us over, all right.”

“So they shall leave, and we shall stay.” He pauses. No one says anything. I can hear the gentle echoes of ponies finding places to rest in the distance. “I do not need to say what this means.”

No one says anything.

No “there’s a chance!” or “we might make it out.” Just… silence.

“Go. The Imperials will take the day watching. I will make sure their unicorn sets wards and a detection spell. Then, I shall be figuring out the former ruler of this place and his means of communication. Magical, I’ll guess. It will be hard going,” he says with a mirthless grin. “Lily, thee and our initiates should see to our charges. See if any of your cures are needed. Swift and Fang, you shall find us a place to lodge for the night. I would prefer some comfort. It would be fitting.”

“Yeah,” Swift breathes.

“Go. Luna provides,” he says.

We all return the blessing with strange inflection. It sounds hollow.

VI.

It’s amazing.

Not the palace, though it is wonderful. It’s amazing how you can be told something and it just… kind of wash off of you. “Tomorrow you are going to die.” “Oh, alright,” you’ll say and blink, like they had just said, instead, “Lemons are ripe the sky,” and you don’t know what to make of it because it is nonsense. No I’m not. Death is something that happens to other ponies.

It is also kind of amazing how quickly the mind will defend itself before the danger even comes. Because of course there is rescue in the wings, waiting. Always. That is how stories go and life is a story, isn’t it?

There were lots of candidates for a daring rescue. An Imperial legion crashing the gates. Or a division of the Equestrian guard overrunning startled changelings, scattering them. Maybe Celestia coming with the sun on the third day to save a few beleaguered nightponies. I’d live in the daylight forever if she did. Maybe the new one, that Twilight, coming with that adorkable manecut to save us all from madness.

Maybe Luna in the core of the night with her hammer high beating the funeral beat, not to save but to avenge. Isn’t that how she comes in the tales, sometimes? To take the sinner and to smite the murderer? Out of the light of the moon, on a moonbeam, whatever, eyes like silvery fire? Isn’t that what she is? Isn’t that what she’s supposed to do? But who cares about what comes after the murderer’s knife is done? Or when the sinner has soiled his neighbor? Who cares? What’s there left to… to… fuck.

I swallow.

Lily chats quietly with a weary looking crystal pony mare. Ruby smiles down at her foal.

“Your eyes are funny,” says the kid.

Ruby chuckles. “Well, your mane is funny.”

The colt finds this hilarious. I kind of just look at him.

If those Imperials stay we’ll have… For some reason the number doesn’t come. Like twice as many ponies. And a whole armory full of shootsticks, and that unicorn can load them and we can just find something hard and cut holes in the side and just live there until help arrives. Maybe that’s the plan. Because there is a plan. The Knight-Commander hasn’t told us, but he will. He has something planned tonight, probably some… I don’t know. Maybe it’s some Ranger tradition. But then there will be plans and I can do plans. Plans help. We can keep them away from us, shoot them out of the sky. Shootsticks suck. They can’t hit anything past a hundred paces except in thick volleys and they smell awful and I’m bad at them. But if we just keep shooting them over and over we have to hit something, right?

“What’s your name, little one?” Ruby asks.

“My name is Flourite,” says the colt. “What’s yours?”

“Ruby,” she says.

“But you’re not a crystal pony. That’s a rock,” he says with infinite wisdom.

“No, I am not. See?” She flashes her fangs at him and he cries out in delighted terror.

“Oh wow! That’s scary!”

She chuckles. “Yes, aren’t they? I use them to scare off the things in the dark.”

“The changelings?”

“Only the bad ones.”

“Hm. Why do changelings make those weird noises?”

Black powder stores still in the palace… He kept enough here just in case they got to him before he could get to his hideaway, enough to break out if they got lazy, probably. If we gather any of the other stores, we throw off the whole failsafe but I don’t like the failsafe and anyway we don’t need to blow up a whole city to kill like less than two hundred monsters. Just one big explosion could do it, right? If we could get them buzzing around us, unable to get in… maybe put barrels outside? No. But it could work, anyway, holing up in here. We could set up lines of defense, barricades, maybe even get a few volunteers from the refugees to help us board stuff up. Plot out a few routes of escape so we draw them in after us into this place where they can’t fly and then pow! Pow! Pow! Black powder and smoke and we just make it impossible to get through the door. There’s tons of chairs in this place.

“Hm? Strange noise?”

“Yeah! It goes like this,” says the colt and he demonstrates. It is a very poor impression, and the look of utter concentration on his childish face makes Ruby chuckle again.

“Very good,” she lies shamelessly. “I can tell you practiced.”

The colt, who almost certainly had not practiced, was just old enough to look bashful about it. “Y-yeah.”

“Well, to answer your question, Flourite, I do not know why. But I think that it is how they talk.”

“But those aren’t words!”

“Ah, but they are words to the changelings. Have you heard of a tri’knor?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“It is an old batpony word, and it means ‘cave’. Specifically, it means a very tiny cave where you keep things you think are precious. It doesn’t sound much like a word to you, probably, but it is a word. Does that make sense?”

“I don’t know! Maybe you made it up,” he says suspiciously, his little eyes narrowing.

Ruby, who has always loved children since she was old enough not be one herself, sticks her tongue out at him. “I did not. Maybe you’re just not smart enough!”

I have to catch myself before I growl at them to shut the hell up. Because I need to think. But I don’t, because instead, Lily tsks and we move on and Ruby gives the kid a little wave. What was his name again?

VII.

The room is nice. It has a painting. Our house in the cavern had a painting in the den. It was of sunflowers. I always thought that was the funniest thing ever and to be perfectly honest I still think that.

I choose my bed. Ruby chooses the bed next to me. Lily is the one on the other side. Swift at my head, Yuletide at my tail, Star Brand north of Lily, Soft Fang next to Swift. Shadow in the snow. Meadow enjoying his retirement. Luna is in the moon.

Gale came by wondering if he could eat with us, but Swift talked to him for a moment and he left, looking… weird. He looked at me for a moment like you look at foal about to be in a lot of trouble.

Rangers pick beds. It’s like we’re all eight again. We laugh. It’s almost like we aren’t all about to be horribly killed or something.

Ruby and I notice that everypony is acting strangely, but when I looked at her with a question she just sort of shrugged, and we haven’t had any time to talk about it since it became really obvious.

Dinner is probably the best we’ve had this whole time. Swift saved an apple in one of those fancy stasis boxes, and he let Ruby and I share it. Lily makes tea and it tastes earthy and its warm, the mug’s big handle fitting around my hoof and warming the frog, spreading its cheer up my foreleg. Ruby and I share a blanket and I know I look like a lovesick filly but it’s nice. I can’t forget, but its nice. And its weird. Soft Fang gives us the last of his jerky and I don’t want to take it but he insists. Star Brand plays his harmonica. He hasn’t done that in weeks. He plays “Do Not Destroy” and Lily dances a dance that to be honest is kind of not foal-friendly because it belongs on a table and Swift laughs at her and sings a different set of words and they’re awful.

Ruby hums, and then when the song is over, she reaches into her saddle bags and pulls out one of the Crystalberry wine bottles. She holds it out. “We found some… I liked it. But we can have a little, right?”

They all gawk. “Well I’ll be,” Swift says.

“Think it’s alright?” Soft Fang asks.

Lily: “Oh child, that is a find. If you offer it, I think we will all take some and be honored.”

Yuletide chuckles in his deep, booming voice and then nods. “Yes. Pass it around, child, thee does well. It is a fine gift you give, when none is asked for—that is a Ranger’s spirit, true.” He stops, and seems to consider. “May I see it first, lass?”

She holds it up for him and Yuletide stands, shakes his wings, and takes it.

“It is time,” he says. “Before I offer you this, I would have your answer.”

He stands in front of Knight Brand. “Brand, your kenning?”

“Without hesitation.”

“Then drink.”

He does so, swallows, grins, and then smiles at us. Ruby and I look at each other, and then back at them all, confused.

“Soft?”

“Yes. Both.”

He drinks. Swift: “Don’t see a reason not to, honestly.” Drink. Lily: “With all my heart.” She drinks.

Yuletide sighs a deep sigh. “I accept all of your words, and add my own: I wish that it had not happened this way.” He takes a drink and then gently sets the bottle down. “It is a fine vintage, young Ruby. Now, would the two of you come here? Stand before me, at attention.”

Numbly, we obey.

He smiles at us, but it is not a happy smile. “Sometimes Rangers know that they may not have their talk with Our Lady, and so they take our oaths and our name before, to live and die as one of us. Will you be Rangers? The company accepts this.”

I just sort of stare at him.

“What?” is all I can manage. “But…”

“Yes,” Ruby says. “Yes, sir.”

“Y-yeah,” I get out, choking. “Yes.”

He takes Ruby’s cheeks and bends her head down as he pulls her in, and I watch with blank shock as he kisses her forehead. “Ruby Eyes, Ranger of Station Nineteen, Luna Redeems, but what do Rangers do?”

“Rangers fly,” she says. No, she intones. Like a chant, like a worshipful moment.

He comes to me and I reflect on the fact that I am about to feel the lips of a male anywhere on my body that is not my father and it is the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. He takes my head. He kisses my forehead after he removes my hat with a chuckle. “Midnight Aria, Ranger of Station Nineteen, Luna redeems, what do Rangers do?”

I swallow. My throat seems like it will close up and stay that way forever. I don’t… I…

“Rangers fly,” I whisper and then I think I cry.

VI. Luna in Sulvam est, all's Right with the World.

View Online

Check was not a pony without a heart. Often, others assumed so. Ponies often assume this about those whose heads are full of numbers. They see a trend and make it a characteristic—head full of numbers, head full of straw, no heart and no tears. Accountants don’t cry (they say, though perhaps in the back of their minds they remember that they do tend to hang themselves from whatever will do in miserable apartments). But he had never understood this thought. Why should numbers and graphs seal his heart away? If anything, he found that they fed one another. He could weep over the invalid and the injured and would just as well as any poet, but while the poet described, he would count. He would know how many there were—how much medicine could be spread—how long it would take—how far he could take it. He could not described very well with words, but he could speak a language free from the pitfalls of words.

He couldn’t sleep. His eyes felt heavy, sunken. His teeth ached from grinding, his greatest nervous habit. He kept thinking about the numbers. Food. Blankets. Marching hooves—ponies numbered in fours—distance. Inches of snow. A station lost in the night. Nineteen.

They were packed up. Tomorrow they would head north and meet the army on the border… not that far from Nineteen. He had noted this solemnly a few hours ago and whispered soft pleas for forgiveness. Sometimes you arrived too late even to make the decision to abandon.

He wandered HQ. The city slept and did not sleep around him. The streets were not empty but not full. There was life in this city, but for a moment, in the depths of his insomnia… it felt unreal. Like the city was a dream. Or a nightmare. No, not a nightmare. Maybe another…

So it was that he wandered by the Comm Office and stopped. And peered. And thought. He entered.

II.

Luna did not always dreamwalk. She, too, could dream exactly as her subjects dreamed—insensate yet full of life, mind gone wild and heart casting a long shadow over desire. But tonight she dreamwalked, and beheld the tiny lights in a great roiling and misty ocean of night. How many thousands of points against the great blue and black and purple? How many tiny globes? Even she did not know, and she was their keeper. They shone and twinkled, now like stars, now almost like fruit that she could pluck. Or flowers to be admired, perhaps.

Luna enjoyed basking in their glow.

As always, she felt the disparate lights both as a single chorus and as a dozen fractured choirs. She saw the ones that glowed dimly—the old and the far too young for dreaming. The intense and chaotic dreams of the weary. The sweet, alluring, hypnotic dreams of lovers and desire. The bright dreams of foals and the darker dreams of their sometimes worried parents, the bold colors and the subtle ones, the imaginative and the dull. And nightmares. She felt the nightmares also.

She had once remarked to Celestia over dinner on some ancient highway that every happy or merely strange dream was unique. It was the nightmares that were all the same. Angry reds and cancerous black, she saw them.

And so Luna finished her strolling and began to steel her mind.

Long ago, she had sworn to do this. When she had returned from the shadows of Sulva, she had sworn that her dreamwalking would be a weapon to shepherd the ponies of Earth and protect them from unneeded pain.

And so it was that while she stood in the vast void, breathing calmly with shut eyes, readying herself to do battle… so it was that Luna heard a voice cry her name more loudly than the others did, and calling for her where all others simply cried out for release. She jumped, startled. Her eyes flew open and she turned astonished to find the sound. Had Celestia come? No, it was not her voice… Twilight was just beginning to Dreamwalk, it could not be her… The only alicorns left who could enter the Aether at all were…

She heard it again. Luna!

And then: Luna Protects!

And she stiffened. A terrible self-loathing crept its way into her heart. Luna protects. She growled wordlessly and took off after the call. Her name again and again.

It should not be so hard to explain why these words hurt her so. Luna protects, Luna provides, Luna redeems. But she had not done these things. She had tried and then she had undermined all of her work with the malaise that brought schism. She had returned, but what could a decade of work do? Not much. Almost nothing. Luna protects. Luna provides. It was like claws scratching on a blackboard. Luna redeems.

And then she found it, a tiny dream wrapped in the fires of nightmare, and Luna seized it and with a wrathful eye gazed within to find darkness. No, not quite—some light. It was deep into the heart of the night, and something stirred in every shadow. She saw a tiny figure—a pony, she surmised—sprinting in the shadow. She felt the presence of monsters but did not know their shapes. Perhaps they had no shapes. She tasted… blood. Smelled it. A shiver ran down her spine. The little pony cried out for her again.

Luna entered the dream.

She did not enter as herself. She never did, at first, unless something truly evil had taken over the dreams of somepony weak and hapless. There were such things left in the world that fed on madness, things she had not yet slain. But this was a normal nightmare, and so she grabbed ahold of the first form her dreamer gave her.

Luna found herself in the body of a mare. Batpony. Wearing… the bottom fell out of her stomach. A duster. This was a Ranger. One of her precious Rangers, her companions. Could this dreamer be… yes, it must be a Ranger, she knew immediately. She felt the truth of it echo back out of the dreamer’s panic. This was a Ranger.

Her anger was gone, replaced by concern. Luna cherished the little ponies who watched the frontiers for her. They had made up for the loss of her companions, and now one of them was in trouble.

Well, she would not be for long.

III.

Sprinting. Stars. Luna!

They were dead.

I just keep running. I don’t know where I am or how I haven’t run out of room to run. Somehow I know I’m all alone. They’ve killed the others. They can’t have but they have. Everything is gone. The refugees are all little bloody shreds. They murdered my friends. Ruby gone, Lily dead, Swift, Knight-Commander, Soft, Star Brand.

I’m crying and I think I’m bleeding. I can’t let them catch up. God if they come any closer I’m dead I’m fucking dead.

And then there’s a wall.

I turn and now I see them all. Chittering in the dark, their eyes lighting up. Gods how many? Too many. Dozens. My legs feels weak. Like at any moment, they’ll just… snap. I’m going to die. They’ll eat me alive. I whimper because what else is there to do? This is it, I—

“Stand your ground!”

And from above me comes Lily. Alive. Lily, standing beside me in a fighting stance. “We shall take them together, Ranger. Stay beside me. What do Rangers do?”

It’s like a kick to the face and a shock to the heart all at once. Suddenly, my legs are solid, my eyes dry. Something in the air has altered. “They fly!” I yell, and we jump as one.

I take the first one with ease, and find out of nowhere that I have hoofblades. I grin at them, and when another jumps at me I take him out of the air with a kick that stabs the blades right up into him. Kick. Kick. Dozens of them. I get kicked in the chest, in the stomach, once in the head. A stinger goes by my eyes and misses by an inch at most—fangs bite at my coat but I’m too fast for them—hoofs try to bear me down but I am a whirlwind. I am the storms that blew over the tree tops, howling down off the snowy mountains north of Canterlot towards the treehomes of Hollow Shades until they blew over the entrances of to our neighborhoods. Once I feared the roaring that shattered our nights but now I am that storm, all hooves and blades and a high, keening cry.

Lily and I stand panting as the red falls from the world around me. We are back to back now, wings open and limbs both sore and ready.

And then… nothing. Nothing comes. Nothing is left, I think.

I sink down to the ground. “Thank Luna… Lily, I thought you were dead. How did you survive?”

When I turn to look at her, she is looking at me strangely. She is hesitating… and suddenly I feel nervous again.

“Luck, perhaps,” Lily says. She smiles. “I could ask you the same. How did you?”

My chest is still heaving as I try to remember, but I can’t. “I have no idea,” I say, blinking in the dark. “But…” I take a step forward, my nervousness gone. I wrap Lily up in a hug and she stiffens with surprise. “But I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you’re alive. At least… at least it’s just… I…” I try to catch my breath but it dances away from me. “Oh Luna… Luna, Stars, Ruby’s gone. And all the others, and…”

Lily hugs me back, rocking me. “It’s alright. It’s alright, Midnight…”

IV.

Luna retreated from the changing dream to collect herself.

Who was this pony? Luna had felt her beating heart in the dream’s living thrum. How had she called so strongly?

She still felt the little pony clinging to her, even outside of the bubble. She often comforted ponies in their nightmares, both as herself and as others, and some had hugged her, yes. She had done other things… but something about that hug bothered her.

Perhaps because it was a pony who dreamt she was a Ranger whom Luna had not met. That should be impossible… well, almost. There were situations where a pony might not become a ranger through the normal methods. Only one thing necessitated this: the threat of almost certain death.

Luna, deciding she would need to dive again, steeled herself. But the nightmare was gone. The dream was quieter now.

Luna walked invisibly. She was in a cave, she knew it immediately. It was a curious sort, though. Dry, with smooth floors and the occasional support. Here and there you found a lamp or hanging enchanted lights, glowing out of crystals. But in general, it was rather dark, and Luna struggled to see ahead of her. But she found that there was no reason to fear. They had more or less paved away the sharp rocky floor here.

Luna began to notice the chill that was slowly, quietly creeping into her bones. The magic that kept pegasi from the icy grip of blizzards burned also in her heart, so whilst awake she would not have felt it, but in the dream? In the dream she felt as the dreamer might, and this dreamer felt cold.

Luna finally found her at the mouth of the cave. Or, at least, she thought so. It felt like the dreamer, yet her form was so different that it was hard to accept.

A little filly sat underneath a blanket at the mouth of the cave, facing outwards. Luna looked up to see what it was that she saw, and was surprised to find snow falling down. Snow covered everything—the grass, the trees, the bushes—and she thought to herself that she must be somewhere near Hollow Shades. Unless there were other woods batponies hid in, these days.

The little filly was so still. Luna reached in her mind and found it the same—

And was assaulted by words and actions and deeds. The smell of blood and the—

Luna shut off all but what she needed and then cleared her mind of shock. It was a learned habit, here in the Aether.

She felt herself become another batpony. This one was plumper, softer than the one before. Certainly no ranger. She wore a scarf and her mane was almost frighteningly long. Luna pushed it out of the way and then conjured hot chocolate out of the air.

“Midnight, honey?” she called in another voice. “What are you doing over here?”

The filly turned and blinked at her mother disguise with confusion. “Snow,” she said, and then pointed. “I got cold, so I brought a blanket.” When she said this, she used her hooves to spread her little mantle like a great cape.

It was strange, traveling through dreams. One moment, this had been a grown mare capable of surprising violence. The next, she was an adorable filly with little fluffy ears watching the snow fall with a little blanket cape.

“I see that,” Luna said. “I brought you hot chocolate. Would you like some?”

“Is it the gross spicy kind that grampa makes?”

Luna rolled her eyes. She had tried to get them to abandon the worst of Western cuisine, but even the rebels had been stubborn about some things. A race of recalcitrants. “Of course not,” she said smoothly. “I made it the way you like it. Creamy and chocolately,” she added, and knew she was quoting as the dream supplied the words.

The filly’s little face lit up. “Awesome! Yes, I would love some.”

Luna sat next to the filly and gave her the warm mug and watched with a smile as she drank. It tugged at sad memories, ones so old they no longer hurt her, but still ached. Celestia was not the only alicorn who had wanted to have children the way that mortals did. She had simply… no, she would not lie in dreams.

Little Midnight leaned against her mother and offered her cape wordlessly, but her mother refused to be covered with a smile. “You keep it. It’s your cape.”

“Mhm.” Midnight continued drinking.

Luna regarded the filly. It was not unheard of for dreaming ponies to don different shapes to reflect the things they dream. But sometimes it could be a sign of something very different. Luna felt at the boundaries of the dreamer’s soul.

Midnight jumped, but didn’t spill. She looked down at the mug, looked up at Luna, looked around her… and shivered. “I’m dreaming.”

Luna, a little shocked, blinked. “What?”

“I’m dreaming… this… Thank Luna it’s not a nightmare,” she said, the same filly’s voice and body playing host to an adult mind. “A dream… mother. Are you my mom? It’s okay if you’re just a dream… Because I miss you and this was a good dream. I think I might just stay here.”

Luna just stared. Awake. She Awake. “But all I did was…” She took a deep breath. “What do you mean? That this is a dream?” she tried to keep her voice calm, probing. She touched this Midnight’s aura again, and the little filly jumped shivered.

“I don’t know…” the little filly frowned. “But I just… I know this is a dream. I can’t remember where I was earlier and how I got here… I know I’m not a child anymore. This memory is old… I’m a Ranger now.”

Ponies lucid-dreamed sometimes, but when they did, they could not feel the aether. Luna prodded, her heart quickening within her sleeping breast in response to her swelling hope. “Do you feel strange?”

“Everything feels weird. I… you aren’t my mother. You’re shining.”

Luna let go of her disguise in shock.

The little filly stared at her blankly for a few moments. She promptly screamed, then cut that scream off with her hoof in her mouth, tried to back up, tripped into the snow, and then rolled over on her belly to lie prostrate. “Oh Lu—stars, oh stars starstarstars fuck I mean—”

“My little pony,” Luna said gently. The filly cowered. With a sigh, Luna set her upright with her magic, which only seemed to make her panic even more. “Midnight, please be still.”

Midnight stopped moving immediately. She went limp. “H-how do you know my name, Princess?”

“Because this is a dream, and you have perplexed me greatly.” Luna levitated the little pony back inside and dried her coat, which only seemed to humiliate the little Midnight. Luna sighed. She took a deep breath, and put the slightest iron into her voice. “Impersonating a ranger is an offense, little pony. What is your name, rank, and station?”

The filly stood at attention and saluted.

“Midnight Aria, Ranger, Nineteen.”

An arrow through her heart. “Nineteen? You… oh, my child, we thought you had all died.”

Midnight’s salute wilted. She sat. “I… no,” she said. Her voice began to drift. “No, we’re… I mean Shadow’s dead. But I’m still here, and so are the others. For a while.”

“I must ask you a question, but I think I already know… why is it I do not remember you, when I remember every other ranger?”

“I’m an initiate. I mean, I was. I’ve only seen you twice. Once when you visited Hollow Shades when I was little and my momma put me on her head so I could see. The other time when I graduated from Ranger School and you spoke right after Grizlebrand did.”

Luna closed her eyes. “I feared that. And if they have elevated you without my word, that means…”

“We’re in Amethyst City, your highness,” Midnight said. Luna opened her eyes and what she saw almost broke her composure. This little filly looked up at her with such mixed hope and despair, her eyes watery and watching, her teeth biting her lip as she settled on what to say. Nothing seemed enough, so she just sagged and said: “We know nopony can get to us. It’s o-okay. It’s okay. But there are ponies with us. Like two hundred, probably. Knight-Commander Yuletide would know for sure. There are tunnels we can send them in, and they’ll go east or south, but… Please, princess. You have to help them. Please. I don’t want to stay here if I don’t know they won’t make it.”

“My little… Ranger,” she corrected. “I swear to you that I shall find them myself if I have to ensure their safety. I swear this on the moon and the stars.” On an impulse, unbidden, the old language of Midnight’s tribe sprang to her lips as she continued, “On the Mother of Sarnath and the Shining Caves, I swear it to you, or may I be struck down.”

Midnight’s eyes went wide, but Luna wasn’t sure that she had understood any of the last bit. Some knew and some did not, but it did not matter. What mattered was that she meant it.

“You… you have a gift. Maybe,” Luna began. “You are dreamwalking now, as I do. It may be simply an accident of time and place. You are, after all, in my service, and so perhaps I was simply attuned to hear you… but that is unlikely. Some have gained dreamwalking when I tested them under great stress, but never for long. It is most likely temporary. It may not be, but now is to early to say if you truly have the natural spark. What is important is for you to know that you can trust what you remember of this. Is there one pony you can trust?”

“Yes.”

“Nineteen… is Meadow still there? A mare named Lily, perhaps?”

“Lily.”

“Go to Lily and tell her this, word for word: Luna is in Sulva, and all’s right in the world. Do not be concerned with what it means. It is simply something that will ensure she knows that you speak truly. Tell her that I will do my best to find and protect the refugees under your care. Tell her that I am coming.”

“Princess…”

Luna had been looking slightly above her with her face set in fierce lines. She looked down, surprised.

“Yes?”

“I… I never had my audience.”

Luna blinked. And then she smiled. She sat.

“No, no you hadn’t. Will you have it now?”

“Yes.”

VII. Precious In the Sight Of Our Lady, The Suffering of Her Loved Ones

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How do you prepare for battle?

There have been many answers to that question through uncountable years and uncountable words. Everything from grooming, polite company, light music… to an orgy of mead and drunkenness sometimes spiced with hallucinogenic. But neither of these are quite the Ranger’s style. He is no aristocrat with disarming smiles, nor is he a barbarian fit to roll under the table nuzzling an empty tankard. He is something in between.

Which is fitting, really, isn’t it? Not a soldier but not a civilian. Neither nightponies or dayponies but both. Rangers are like the twilight, the in-between. They carry few weapons, but train with them all. They aren’t trained to fortify a position, but they know how to create shelter and sometimes it is the same thing.

Perhaps it would be more fair to say it this way: Guards defend, Luna’s Nightshades attack out of the shadows, but Rangers simply do whatever they can when they can.

II.

I followed in a daze, my eyes unfocused and my mind blank as it could be, given the circumstances.

The unicorn we had borrowed hummed as he worked. I felt him removing things from the heavy saddlebags I wore, but I didn’t see what he was doing anymore. I was just a mobile toolbox and lumber source, really. I was alright with this.

When I was younger, I used to really envy unicorns their magic. It seemed so amazing, so fun. It still does, really, but it was nice to be able to fly, and flying took the edge off of that envy. For the first hour, I watched everything the legionary did with a sort of awe. But even miracles grow dull if repeated a thousand times. You can only watch the same pony bang on boards with magic and hammer so many times—and when you’ve seen one beautiful boarded-up window you’ve seen them all, really.

I told Lily what the princess said and she went white as a sheet. I don’t know why… but when I told her my nightmares were still going, she quickly got over it. She started bombarding me with questions. I told her the truth—yeah, I felt like I was gonna hurl because I was nervous, yes my nightmares were getting worse, so on and so forth. She made me something and told me to drink it after lunch. It’s after lunch, but I haven’t had a chance to do much about it because the fortification is the important thing, isn’t it?

An overview, as I blink at nothing in boredom:

The great doors have been bolted shut and then secured with chains brought up from the honestly rather creepy but blessedly small and empty dungeons. A few refugee unicorns helped us fortify the barricade with magic that will keep for another two days, making the chains twice as durable. Then, we shored it up with wood. To either side of the door, we boarded up the windows and left some small spaces to stick guns behind. Swift broke out some of the window panes, which hut our ears and hurt my heart, but it was needful. We have to see to shoot. That’s the first line. Two Rangers and a legionary to reload will be there.

The second line of defense is the great hall. If the changelings can break through the door or windows, which they will eventually, then they’ll find that we’ve brought in tables and turned the grand stairway into a kind of fortress of haphazard, repurposed furniture. Tables and chairs go along the bannisters, providing us some cover while Soft Fang and a legionary ensured that trying to fly into all of that mess is going to be nasty and sharp for the intruder. The rest of us will be here, waiting and shooting any stragglers that squeeze through until the first line can be abandoned.

When that inevitably gets too hot to handle, we move again. This is where things start breaking down. (I was right, by the way, because the Knight-Commander did in fact have a plan!) The lower rooms are wider and more spacious, but they have fewer windows. The upper rooms have tons of windows which have to be boarded up and defended, but tighter space. We’ll be heading upwards, vulnerable to attack from all sides as we flee the great hall barricade until we can get through the last barricade, which is really one of several. If we can lure them into the tight hallways, then we have a chance. They’ll come hurtling through, thinking they’ve beaten us and that we’re on the run, only to crash into each other and be easy targets. Enough confusion and we can inflict massive casualties very quickly from the “sandbags” which are really some of the old sheets and pillows that we filled with random crap and then shored up with the wood we had left.

After that…

Well, nowhere to go that’s planned or built up. Every time we fall back we come dangerously close to losing ponies and we don’t have many to lose.

I’ve been awake since around right before sunrise, talking and building and walking. The refugees are all gone down below now, on their way to the Den under the city and then I suppose… elsewhere. Back out into the snow, heading east for Imperial Center or south towards Equestria. To be honest, I was still getting over my dream at that point.

It’s real. The look on Lily’s face confirms it. But…

But who cares? And why now? I saw Luna. I met her. We talked. But what does that do me here and now? An interview, and audience with Luna herself cannot save me if fangs or hooves do me in. If by some dark miracle they find a Mitou to crash through those doors, no amount of goodwill from on high will whisk me out of the danger.

And I can’t even enjoy it, really. When I woke this morning, my head was spinning. I had talked to Luna! I had shared her dream! But hours and hours of sunlight slipping away in the business of preparing for death dampens any joy. The truth is, the sad truth, is that you can’t be excited forever, not even over dying. Eventually, it rubs away and you’re left with what’s left… and sometimes what’s left is nothing. If you’re lucky, you have the thing itself, the core of your excitement. If you aren’t? If you aren’t you end up staring ahead while a unicorn finishes putting boards up on another window on the second story, wondering how long it will be until this is finished with.

I hear somepony coming and turn my head to see… Ruby. I smile at her automatically, and she smiles at me.

“Hey,” I greet her warmly, and it isn’t hard and it isn’t a pretense because despite my general… whatever this is, seeing her does make me feel better.

“Why, hello there, Ranger,” she says and then salutes. I chuckle, and then she joins me.

“Doesn’t feel real,” I say. “Not really.”

She nods. “I understand… It’s rather strange for me, as well. Do you not feel that you’ve earned it? We’ve seen more warfare in a few weeks than some see in years.”

I press my tongue against the inside of my cheeks, and then: “Yeah, I guess. You’re right, Ruby, but… I mean, there’s more to Ranger-ing then just war. Hell, I think it’s the smallest part of it.”

She sits and then leans against the wall. She hums softly, and then speaks again. “That’s true. You’re a smart pony, Midnight. And I guess that… I don’t know. I feel like what we’ve done should count. And there are parts of being a Ranger that we’ve grown in because of all this that aren’t just fighting.”

“Like what?” I ask, but my voice is soft. I’m interested, but not really… feeling up to conversation. On the other hoof, this is Ruby, and I’m sort of always up to talk to Ruby. Especially with… well. With how things are.

“Well, survival,” she said, and then chuckled. I chuckle, and I’m surprised to hear the slightest laughter from the unicorn digging more nails out of my bags. “We’ve learned how to do a lot of work with light rations without falling out of the sky. We’ve covered a lot of ground. Saving ponies and saving refugees is kind of the same. And! And we’ve learned how to work together as a wing—“

“You kinda do that one in school,” I grumble.

She sticks her tongue out at me and its so ludicrous to see her do it over the Lunar emblem pinned to her duster that I laugh.

“Yeah, yeah. But you see what I mean, right?”

“I do.” I smile at her. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, Ruby. Thanks.”

“No problem, Midnight.” She sighs. “They’re figuring out who goes where downstairs.”

“Any good news?” I ask. I don’t like it when she isn’t smiling. I wonder, idly, if that’s selfish of me. Maybe her smiles are her own and her frowns are her own, and I can enjoy them but I shouldn’t push them into being. “I hope I’m not on the front door.”

“I think you might be,” she says. “Sorry. You have good eyes and you’re fast, so Star Brand says you have a better chance of doing good there than anypony else. Except maybe Swift.”

I cringe. “Yeah.”

I mean, I understand. He’s probably right. But…

I feel like its being signed up to die first.

III.

The day wanes. The Knight-Commander sends out Swift to fly over the compound twice before sunset, and he sends Soft once after it. Nothing stirs in the unreal city, Amethyst that was, a lost husk on a lost frontier.

The defenders of the compound are meager and haggard. There is no military polish in them, and that is just as well. Seven rangers, none of them initiates. Nine legionaries, hungry and cold. Two refugee unicorns with nowhere to go. One Pathfinder unlooked for—Last Call, ready to throw his weight, refusing to leave and sending Gale on ahead over his many protests. Nineteen. Midnight didn’t notice until the afternoon and she and Ruby laughed themselves hoarse over it. Oh, irony. How fitting. How awful.

The windows were boarded, the doors reinforced, the old city watch’s primitive shootsticks supplemented by slightly more slender Legion muskets. Hoofblades from the Governor-Generals’ private armory had been passed out. Barding small enough for Ruby and large enough for Last Call. Torches all along the streets. The walls treated by unicorn magic to make them resistant to flame both natural and magical. Dusters enchanted to resist puncture.

Star Brand and Swift huddled over cards, leaning against the door. Soft Fang talking slowly with the two refugee spellcasters, speaking comfortingly, speaking of them in glowing terms. Midnight and Ruby sharing a blanket and talking to legionaries. Legionaries and Last Call putting torches outside, wondering how useful they will actually be when night comes. Yuletide upstairs next to the scrying globe he can barely operate, weeping softly beneath it, his head in his hooves. Lily huddled in a corner, staring at receding with her skin in rebellion.

How do you prepare for death and what is it? Do those questions haunt you? Should they? That is the line of thought in every head that snakes around and around. And like a snake it bites anything that stays still long enough, or it chokes it if it struggles, every other thought or feeling.

If death is a door it is wide open.

IV.

Lily shook all over.

Today was the day she was going to die. Or, well, tonight was the night she was going to die. It didn’t really matter. She knew this not because the changelings would swarm down on them tonight, but because she had run out of supplies.

Supplies. She wanted to spit in fury. She loathed herself. Supplies. Call them what they are.

Ratios. Supplies fulfilled ratios, ratios fulfilled “needs” needs fulfilled days days fulfilled the term of her service her service fulfilled life her life fulfilled—

One part Lunar Amaranth—Selena Anthos—there are four dozen uses for it, it was the basis of all batpony medicine. They’d brought it over the sea. One part piper methysticum. This was a tropical plant, and she’d spent a lot of bits keeping in good supply. Together they made Lily.

But as soon as she’d seen Midnight, Lily had known this would be her last night on earth as herself. Or, really, her last morning, for she was slipping. Midnight had looked exhausted. Bags under her eyes, drooping ears, dull coat, everywhere signs of exhaustion and malady. She was young but that didn’t mean she was invincible. She needed the Anthos more than Lily did. She was so young and she wasn’t strung along. She could survive. The flower could be mixed with other things, and then… but as soon as she’d gone to work she had started shaking because she knew she only had enough left for one more dose for her and it was all gone now and she was sweating like she was in heat.

One part… one part amaranth from across the sea… one part…

She tasted her own bile in her throat. Another wave of shakes. She had to ride it out. She had to endure. Just a little longer. She couldn’t let them see her like this. They knew Lily, but they did not the one underneath and she would die as the right Lily if she could.

Swift paced. The night was coming with a vengeance and the changelings had not swooped down to tear and devour and he was very, very ready for that to change. Not because he wanted to die, because honestly he didn’t think much about death. He was just ready for anything that wasn’t waiting. Waiting is the worst thing. Waiting is boredom that continues. To not be useful, to not be in movement was not just sinful—it was boring, and ponies often underestimate the power of mere boredom to wear away at a perfectly good soul.

Soft Fang and Star Brand were on watch. He hadn’t seen Lily or the new Rangers in awhile. No, he took that back. He’d seen Ruby eating with some of the legionary fusiliers, chatting. She was really a charming young mare, and he wished fervently for a world where she could have space to learn to put steel in her spine without haste squeezing that gentle spirit into nothingness. A Ranger who could talk down a pony and comfort one in need of rescue was almost as important as one who could fly a crippled one to safety or take down a timberwolf with a well placed kick. Ponies like Ruby really could keep a whole station working and living and going strong.

Midnight. He liked her. She was a good kid—and he caught himself ruefully. Neither of them were foals, and he couldn’t think of them as being initiates anymore. They wore the emblem same as he did. Midnight in that weird hat she’d picked up Luna knew where and Ruby around a chain on her neck (or had she pinned it? He forgot now). They’d been admitted by unanimous vote. Midnight was born to stalk a mark, trail them with sharp eyes and sharper ears. She was a shadow in the darkness. He appreciated a pony who could do her work without being seen or heard.

Star Brand would be watching out some window, even if he wasn’t technically on watch. They understood each other—Brand wanted to be doing something, same as him.

He tried to hum as he walked the great hall, but it came out tuneless and a little soulless, so he stopped.

On a whim, he turned and walked away from the great hall, towards the armory. He was happy with the hoofblades that he had found, but he could always look for another set…

So it was that he came across Midnight slumped against a wall. He opened his mouth, about to greet her with a joke, but then stopped. Her body sagged, like she was asleep… or hurt. He was about to spring to her aid, but yet again he stopped. Swift’s eyes swept over her quickly and he recognized what he saw.

Staring into her eyes, her wide, dilated eyes, he knew. And he shook the startled Midnight. Before she could complain, Swift drug her into a side room and pushed her in as he slammed the door closed.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? How did you get into her stuff?”

Midnight stared at him. He truly saw her now. Not just the symptoms but the mare herself—confused, unknowing. “I don’t understand, she—“

“Lily needs this. Did you even know?” He was furious but more than that he was terrified. He always knew.

“What are you talking about?” she shook her head. “What did she give me? I feel all… all weird. I feel great but also kind of dizzy…”

“She… shit.” He sat and rubbed his temples. “Shit. Dammit, Lily. Luna… dammit.”

“What did I do?” Midnight is close now, trying to get him to look up. “What did I do? What did she give me? I’m sorry!”

“Lily’s been drugging herself since Canterlot,” he said dully. “She told me she was running low. Have you seen her?”

“N-no…”

“Probably because she’s out, now. You… there’s no way you could know. This is fucked. Just… what did it taste like? Did she say what she gave you?”

“It was… blue?”

“Eh. Probably… yeah. Just… Just walk it off. You’ll feel great, but it’s not what she gives herself. Gods, I’m glad she didn’t do that. I’m going to find her. Don’t tell anypony she gave you anything. Try to act normal… and for Luna’s sake, Midnight, don’t look anypony in the eye for a few hours.”

And he left her there, confused.

VI.

Night has fallen. Swift sits with Lily as the shaking stops. Yuletide with dry eyes turns one of the legionary muskets over and over. The others eat or wait.

The changelings have not come. Will they? In each heart burrows the tiny light of hope: “Maybe they won’t come at all!” But then that hope dies hard when the alternative is pondered. Where else would they go? Probably after the refugees they have chased for so long.

The Rangers are beginning to get worried that they have left the refugees to die and inadvertently saved themselves. There is no relief in that potential salvation.

Why do you choose to stay behind in the first place, after all? What is the motivation for sacrifice and self-immolation? Who chooses to die swarmed by changelings? They all ask themselves this.

Legionaries do what they must, what they promised, and besides—where would they go? Last Call’s reasons are his own. The refugees saw their families die before their eyes, victim’s to the excess of the conqueror’s joy. Yuletide and Star Brand live duty. Lily and Swift do not wish to be alone. Soft Fang believes in doing the job in front of him.

And the youngest?

A confused and worried Midnight waiting with a quiet Ruby, both thinking of what they almost hope is coming. And they are at peace with it, as much as they can be, because…

Midnight doesn’t know. She feels like there is a big reason, and it is convincing, but she doesn’t have the vocabulary for it. She doesn’t know how to put it in words. Maybe it’s just loving your neighbor as yourself. Maybe it’s just that Ruby is here.

Maybe it is because she’s always known that every single pony has a hill to die on and this one is hers forever.

VII.

Twilight understood and did not understand. She knew the panic of tardiness, of being too late, but when Twilight had been late in life, it meant a docked grade or a friend she could apologize to. Her brushes with death and ruin had always been in a group, and she had never truly lost. She couldn’t afford to. Celestia couldn’t afford to.

Apparently, it was all Luna could afford. She had flown all night without stopping—she had flown from practically the moment she had woken up, only pausing long enough for a startled Celestia to be told in monosyllabic exhalations that there was another duty she must attend to. The only things that followed her besides a wing of Nightshades was Celestia’s calls and a confused Twilight Sparkle.

Twilight struggled to keep up. Already, she had been helped along by Nightshades and eventually somewhat gruffly bullied into resting on Luna’s back. She lay there now.

She had pieced together only some of the story: the lost station she had heard about in passing (it had been a sad fate) was not lost at all. The situation was dire, and while they lured the enemy in with the promise of an easy victory, innocents fled towards safety. But she was confused why Luna was soaring through the air at a speed she had once thought impossible for anypony who was not Rainbow.

“Princess, I don’t understand. Why are we going? Couldn’t you send your nightshades?”

Luna grunted. “Because they are mine!” she shouted over the howling winds.

“So are the guards! I know you care for them, but why are you going? There’s an army to lead!”

And she got no answer.

Luna sped northwards towards an unreal city as the dawn begins slowly to shine.

VIII.

I sit by the windows, looking at the darkness outside. The stars shine overhead—the cloud cover has broken—and everything seems intense and beautiful. Everything. I feel like I’ve guzzled a gallon of coffee, except that only communicates a fraction of what I feel. Colors are on fire. My body is electric. I feel my heart so loudly in the quiet. The cold steel of the musket barrel makes me shiver and I love it. I feel like the quickest thing in a slow world. I am the quickest thing in a slow world and that is right there are only the quick and the dead.

Ruby is in the barricade by the stairs. Swift is with me and so is the legionary unicorn with his grim face set just so. Swift lights the last cigarette he bartered off of the legionaries and takes a drag. I flinch at the sound of his match against hard hoof and the tiny scream of his fire and the whisper of his breath over his teeth grating and sliding through his coat over his lips.

I shiver. He eyes me, but doesn’t seem angry anymore. He sighs. “Don’t think too hard,” he whispers for me to hear and for our reloader not to hear.

I don’t know what she gave me but I know this: I am not afraid anymore. For just right now I am not afraid. I am nervous but in a fighting way I want to do things. Restless. Restless, that’s the word.

I wish Ruby was here. I look back and see her staring at me. Lily is talking to her. She puts a calm, unshaking hoof on Ruby’s shoulder and smiles and Ruby laughs. I wish I was there making Ruby laugh but I am here. Lily looks up at me and salutes and I salute back. It is weird moving my hooves across my eyes.

More and more I wonder if maybe we’ve been passed over. What if they went home? What if the invasion is over and all of the Mitou are under the snow and Shining Armor has swept them away like a reaping blade for a full harvest? I saw him once during basic training and I know he could, his magic fierce his eyes full of steel his grin fearless and his body keen.

I shake my head. I feel the cold worse now but don’t want a blanket. My duster is enough. Ruby made me wear barding underneath and some leg-guards but they are stupid. But she seemed happier when I agreed and I wanted her to feel better so I did it.

Luna. Luna Luna Luna where are you? I wish I could sleep so I could talk to you. I wish that you would come flying down to save us. If they come can anything happen but death? Them and us, fire and then a lingering silence?

Luna, why do we say these things about you? Who are you? Who are we, who talk about you and trudge in snow for you and die for you? Or are we? Maybe Rangers aren’t dying for Luna at all. Maybe there is something else worth dying for and maybe there is nothing worth dying for and it is all stupid in the end. But when I think about that I see Ruby smiling at a foal while I can’t think of anything but myself and I know that to watch that be ripped out of the universe by anything is wrong. It’s wrong. Lily singing in the snowy woods or dancing. Yuletide gruff but proud. My changeling friend who worried about me and did not know my name.

I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of not being. I am not afraid of pain, only of silence. I am afraid of the silence of others. What if all the sound was blotted out? What if just some of it was? What if the sound of Ruby humming as she cooked was silenced?

I shiver again. The wind picks up outside. The torches flicker. The stars twinkle and we all pretend to be brave.

I think that we aren’t running away because there’s a reason not to. The reason isn’t Yuletide—he gave an order but only one we would have given for him. No one complained. Rangers don’t have the same attitude about the chain of command.

It isn’t glory because Rangers are all about staying alive and maybe glory later. You do your job and the real glory is that nopony can do what you do. Anypony can die.

It isn’t because we hate the changelings because I think I wish they would just go home. I don’t hate them. I can’t because it hurts to. I just want to be in a world where they didn’t do bad things and they weren’t all messed up and mutated and there weren’t any Mitou and hating them makes this world the only one because hating something is investing yourself into it.

It isn’t to be heroic because nopony will see us and they may never know. They will not stop looking at batponies with a little fear in the back of their minds. It isn’t about me and it isn’t about Ruby.

I just want to love my neighbor. I grip a musket built a thousand years ago in a foreign empire and I wish I could just love my neighbor. I wish we could all live on a single street that goes on forever, that we could share the same cave neighborhood, that we could let out children play in the common cavern and walk under the apple trees and the silver “daylight”. I wish I could show the dayponies how beautiful a deep dark pool can be, or how the blues and silvers of our lighting casts everything in dreamy shades. I wish I could know ten million names and ten million faces and love them all and I know I could. I know we could but it won’t happen and it can’t happen because it’s all gone wrong now. Everything is wrong and I never wanted to be here.

And I want to be angry about that. I want to be furious but I can’t be because of the fucking drink Lily made me all in my blood and brains and everything, making me feel warm and cool and like I’ve never felt anything but on the top of the world forever.

I want to go home. I want to learn how to make dreams do things with Luna. I want to kiss Ruby and look at her crimson eyes forever. I want to hear Lily sing and I want to show mom my hat and sleep in my cot at the station and be in Hollow Shades to see Luna’s arrival for Nightmare Night and… and…

I want to go home.

IX.

There’s something apocalyptic about the night. Not this night in particular but night as a whole, all of it, the universal night. The small things we call “night” are but pieces of it and they are all pointed towards the end of the world. Silence. Silence is the thing.

Silence… and then movement.

The changeling wings cover the rooftops like flies on rotted meat. They are waiting… waiting…

Until their mother, far away, tells them that now is the time.

VIII. Martyr

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Luna pushes through the night and into the morning. She is going faster than she has ever gone before.

Why?

Twilight is too exhausted to ask her anymore and Luna knows she will not like the answer.

Because I never arrive on time, Twilight Sparkle, she would have said. I never do. I try every time. I try and I try and I never get there in time. They always leave. Live long--oh and you will you’ll learn one day--you’ll know what its like to be left over and over and over. You’ll find out their names and then in a flash they are gone. Imagine it. Imagine the trauma of that. Play it out forever. Thousands of years. Imagine being stuck in the moon for a thousand years and then you know everyone is dead but your sister and you want to love each other and you do but there is always a gap.

Imagine if you will, bright new baby alicorn, darling on your “mother”’s lap, who knows nothing of the world you are stepping in to--imagine if you will that one day all of your friends are going to die. And you will know they are going to die but you won’t know when. Do you think you will make it in time to say goodbye? Do you think that you will be able to do that six times in a row? Twilight, I’ve found that it’s hard to do it even twice in a row.

I know her name, Twilight. I can’t pretend that I do not. Alicorns have exceedingly good memory, considering. You’ll find that out too, won’t you?

I can’t do it again. Even though I know there is no hope.

But I’m so tired of this.

Luna provides, but I didn’t. Luna protects, but I cannot. Luna watches, but I do not see until it is too late. Luna redeems but what have I redeemed?

I need to save one, Twilight. Can I not save just one? One brave little mare who could have asked of me anything and wished only to talk? Can I not save the only true Dreamer I have met in almost two thousand years? Can I not save one miserable bit of sand from the tides?

Midnight, in Amethyst City

I saw it burn but not away, the torch light steady against the wind as it began to blow hard on the streets. It blew and blew and burnt and burnt and my mind was strange and twisted still with Lily’s potion.

This is my battle so I must give it in as I feel it, in the dying.

Swift sees the first one. Or he sees the first ones, because they don’t come one or two at a time but in whole wings, swarming down like nightmares from the rooftops, filling the skies, maybe on the street. He yells and fumbles for the musket. Mine is up. It has been up for an hour and I have not moved.

Everything is focused. I catch sight of one as it lands, ready to take a running start at our barricades. Time is slow and so is the monster--I can see it flex its unnatural body, I can see its eyes as they move on its slow turning head--I am quick and it is dead. I fire the first shot and the ball catches the beast in the face and then there is no face and it falls out of the light.

I can tell you about the chittering that turns into a wall of clacking and the yelling and the cries--Reload! Reload for Luna’s sake give me a fucking weapon--Swift, up high!--There’s one coming through the top of the windows!.

I can tell you about how I didn’t even have to ask for a reload. As soon as I fire another musket is in in my hooves. I level it out the hole between the boards and I fire again. The smoke is in my eyes but I stare right through it. I feel nothing. I am not sure I feel pain anymore as I am. My teeth grind together and the percussion of the musket is like somepony stabbing me in the ears but it can’t hurt me because nothing can. I crow as I fire again. Again. Once more. Minutes have passed. I don’t know how many.

A changeling dies with his hooves and teeth tearing at the boards. A changeling dies ramming his body through the glass and into the boards, shredding him but breaking a hole near the top. Another dies when Ruby shoots it as the creature tries to enter through the breach that is just a little too small and its body lies in the gap. One manages to get one of its stingers through a gap and it grazes the reloading unicorn’s cheek.

Changelings divebomb the great doors. They shake the ancient portal. I hear some of them using magic to do… do whatever the hell they can but nothing works and the doors just shake and shake and shake like trees in a gale.

Swift knocks a changeling out of the sky. They crowd the doors now like flies, pulling at the boards, ripping at them with their fangs until they lose the fangs, pulling at them with tortured hooves until we stop them with a musketball. The unicorn work feverishly. I can hear his panting in my ear loud as a screaming baby. I can smell nothing but smoke and ash. One of them pulls at the boards at my firing spot and tries to worm in and it also falls, dead or alive, as I pivot and catch its face with both backlegs and then it is gone.

They rip more and more boards off. A dozen of them are in the air now. Ruby and Lily keep divebombers off me but I don’t know where. I only know what is front of me. Lily’s drug keeps my focus so sharp I could cut through solid steel with my eyes. Another one. I hold out a hoof. The next from the pile is passed me. It is still hot but I do not find it any discomfort. I look for another changeling. I fire--miss--again. Again. And then there isn’t another gun in my hoof and I just wave my leg around for the next--

One of them falls on me from above and it begins kicking madly against my barding, trying to get at my belly and bite and tear. I push it off, but it keeps coming.

So when it comes back my head meets its head and the thing’s horn misses me only barely and it falls back, holding its head. I am on it in a flash, beating, screaming. Another one knocks me off, and I am a whirlwind of blows.

I only remember my hoofblades for the third one. I kick them out and then do a half-kick that catches it midway and stops the bastard cold.

More pour through, dozens of them, jet black, cancerous, chittering and hissing, teeming with awful life. I turn to face the next one and find Swift running, his wing half-out, the air rife behind him. I follow, never having heard the call to fall back--

This is my battle, and so I tell it as I know it: I tell it by the deaths.

Swift

The first Ranger to die in Amethyst City is Swift. It was a lucky blow, a perfect juxtaposition of time and space. The reloader with us had been grazed by one of the stinging mutants and gotten enough venom to weaken him, and he was managing to push pre-loaded weapons into our hooves while also trying to reload the ones we shot, all while keeping himself out of the clutches of any of the enemy that broke through. It was too much. He got slower and slower and then he passed out. Swift caught him as he fell, and then yelled hoarsely for me to come back with him, that we needed to leave. The changelings were everywhere. The great doors were lost, and let them be. Everyone that broke through flew right into the firing zone. When I didn’t hear him, he kept calling and shrugged the unicorn onto his back.

Swift didn’t see me go under in the melee. He thought I was right behind him but I was not.

If he had known, he might have turned. He might have chosen the unicorn reloader over me, but he might have chosen me over him. If he had known… if he had known what things he could have done! But he did not know.

He also did not know what killed him. As I turned to see him, he was pushing back towards the barricade and a changeling fell on him. It’s stinger lashed out. Once. Twice. Three times. And he never moved again. It was a matter of seconds. First he moved and then he did not move and Lily was screaming and then the creature exploded and a barely conscious unicorn was crawling away, woken by the fall.

The unicorn from the Crystal legions was the second pony to die in the siege. I ran towards him but two changelings fell on him, picked him up, and threw him down. He missed the barricade by an inch, but he was dead and nopony retrieved him.

I pulled at Swift. I begged him to run but then I let go because his face was gone and caved in, the puncture wound in his chest… he wasn’t there. There wasn’t anything left of him now. I ran.

Ruby hopped over the side of the barricade and helped me climb over, my hooves frantically looking for purchase, my eyes wide, my heart beating in my chest. I felt like my whole body was on fire and I didn’t know if it was the drug anymore. The monsters swarm around us, diving and then pulling away, trying to get close enough to grab the groundpounders or hit the rest of us with a stinger. Some of them have hoofblades, long and serrated, and when they dive down only quick motion saves your head.

The attacks come in stages. There is a huge initial rush, perhaps thirty or more of them, all swarming the entrances and divebombing down at our barricade. At least one is caught on the spikes. We fire, a few fall, they swipe, we lay low, it begins again. They linger, diving in pairs and trios while the rest run interference, keeping up a steady pressure. And then they disperse. The mansion is full of them by now, at least the bottom floors. Everywhere is full of them.

How many die? Perhaps half a dozen every attack. Swift and I accounted for about nine by ourselves, but the lgeionary reloader lies flat on his back in the middle of the barricade, his eyes unfocused and glazed over, his limbs limp. The refugee unicorns are quivering, miserable ruins, pleading for their lives, hooves on their heads, as they do their best to keep up with how fast we fire. It takes the legionary unicorn twenty seconds to prepare one of their muskets and about three seconds to supply a shooter with a fresh one, pre-prepared or otherwise. It takes these two about forty seconds to load. They spill powder but not much.

A legioanry dies when one of the stingers shoots right through his barding and pierces his shoulder. He shakes, shocked, and tries to pull away, but by then it is too late and the poison is in him and he begins to scream only for his voice to die in gurgling as he falls convulsing to the floor as his killer returns to the sky with a hiss.

Three dead in Amethyst.

Yuletide

Another legionary dies before him on the fifth attack. An hour in, and the guns are hot and the smoke never fully clears and the great hall is littered with bodies but never enough.

A mutant grabs her right off the barricade as she leans over to balance her musket and get a better shot. She screams and screams, flailing like a fish torn from the water or a baby from it’s mother’s breast. Yuletide, Knight-Commander of the Nineteenth, jumps up after her, his wings opening. The changeling only rises long enough to throw her down and it meets Yuletide in midair.

The commander is distracted by the falling legionary, her legs useless in the night air, her back hurtling towards the floor. He reaches out--

And a hoof catches his face and twists his head around and he falls right after her. Two more dead in Amethyst. Five gone in the first hour.

The barricade is in ruins by hour two.

Last Call fights upon the torn remainder, roaring his invincible fury. He kills four of them before they bowl him over and a spike catches him. He tries to move but before he can they fall upon him with fangs and hooves, even as we try to pull them off.

They come in waves because it is how they avoid too many casualties. We can’t use a volley to break their swarm. We have to pick targets. More than half of our shots miss. We slow down to two a minute. We’ve exhausted the pre-loaded guns. The loaders are cut and bruised and whimpering.

One of the loaders dies during the third hour. He’s grabbed and carried off into the air, and nopony can grab him fast enough to stop him from going. He’s screams. He cries. He begs us to save him and then a hissing mutant throws him back down at us and his head lands first and there is an awful snap and blood pools out of his mouth and his eyes.

One dives for me in the third hour and I step to the side and watch its stinger shoot by me in slow motion, my strange intoxication making it all play out so slowly. Ponies dying in hours instead of minutes or seconds. They just linger on. They seem alive longer for me. I push one leg up and my hoofblade catches the changeling’s stomach as he flies overhead and that is another dead and the black, thick, syrupy blood runs down my… my…

How long does it continue? They come ess frequently now but more urgently. They’ve lost so many but so have we. Another legionary dies. How many are left? Only one reloader who isn’t reloading anymore because he’s too busy crying and the legion one finally passed on by hour three.

Soft Fang

We use a lull to gather up a few muskets and flee up the stairs to the turns and that is where Soft Fang dies.

Ruby first, then me, then Lily, then the legionaries that are left, then the last reloader, blubbering a shaking, then Star Brand and then Soft Fang.

Sprint up the steps, fast as you can. The lights all swimming around you, the sound like a parade in your head, some foreign force driving you to strange thoughts and unwelcome feeling. Time gets closer to normal flowing all around me and that I am glad because of what happens next.

We are safe until Soft and Brand are hurrying us through the hallways and trying to re-shut the door we had come through to buy a little more time. But as they push,, the changelings that had been waiting in the wings broke cover and swarm over the bannister.

We cannot go to them and they cannot come to us.

They begin their final battle. Soft Fang keeps three mutants from grabbing ahold of him, dancing out of their reach, ducking under their blows and their teeth, kicking them hard when he can. His blades come out--he catches one--the others dive in but he is ready. He pivots on his front hooves like I do--for who taught me it but he in the practice field of Station Nineteen?--and catches them both with his powerful backlegs. They go flying back over the bannister. One of them tries to fly and catch itself but ends up ramming its face into the chandelier and falls regardless.

We try to keep running but also to look. The Rangers lag behind as the others continue. We yell for Soft and Brand to run. Maybe they do not hear us but maybe they do--I like to think they do not, and I think it even as I yell, for if they heard my voice why would they not answer? What would keep them from breaking off and fleeing to the safety of our company?

And maybe they heard the song we would all hear soon, the very beginning of it.

Star Brand rolls out of sight, locked in battle with a changeling. Soft has taken down seven. The eighth is on his back as he bucks the seventh with his hoof, burying his hoofblades in the thing’s neck. He tries to shake the monster off and then it bites him. He falls and rolls and the thing hisses loudly as its chitin cracks under the weight and the force, and then Soft is kicking down at it. But he grows slower. He turns and seems to see us at last and he starts to walk, slowly and surely like his voice even measured, and then he is swept away by two, maybe three fast moving black shapes and we see him no more. Star Brand jumps through the doorway out of nowhere and then bucks it closed with a cry and rushes for us with wide-eyes and blood weeping from his face.

“For fuck’s sake!” He pushes Ruby and I onward.

The door behind us groans and buckles. The dark hallway fills with the sound of changelings.

Hour five finds us firing out of the barricades. The changelings begin to make themselves scarce and our reloader has the last of Lily’s other drugs, much milder. He mumbles to himself about the mad things he sees that are not there and loads slowly but deliberately.

Star Brand

Star Brand dies a little after the fifth hour, poisoned during his close encounter. Ruby holds him as he dies and sings a wordless tune over him as he tells us that he is tired.

The sixth hour and we are almost out of shot. One of the barricades was half-dismantled but I got to it in time and beat the attackers back down the hallway. We close in, pull back. Lily and Ruby and I are alive. Two legionaries by the sixth hour are alive. The reloader, crying and staring in turns, is left.

I can’t say anything. There isn’t anything to say.

The barricades are too hard to defend--too many angles, too few of us, no way to use our muskets effectively with hooves to load. We retreat through rooms, holding doors as long as we can. The sun is rising outside.

An image: Ruby and I, side by side, our backs holding a door from breaking. Lily with our last musket over our heads, waiting for a hoof, anything, to break through that door. It does--right above our heads--she fires, and the sound is like thunder and there is the soft yet frightening sound of connection and then the stench of their corrupted blood but the door does not stop shaking and bowing inward.

How many have we killed? Thirty? Forty? More? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m crashing. Lily knows it she sees it in my eyes I know she does. Ruby is fading. The refugee doesn’t cry anymore. We found a table to place over the door as we lie flat on our stomachs in a room of beautiful furniture and abandoned things.

No changelings. Not right now. They will return. Any moment now they’ll be back, hissing and pounding. We couldn’t hold the barricades in the hallways with how few we had left… and now there’s nothing but running.

I catch Ruby’s eyes and I crawl on my belly over to her. She reaches out a hoof with a smile and I touch it with my own, and then I bury my face in the rug. I’m not sure what happens. It’s a cross between a sob and dry heaving. She touches my mane with her other hoof.

I try to say something but words are beyond me and maybe that’s better. What am I going to say?

I just want to go home. I just want to go home.

Lily

Lily dies in the seventh hour, with morning bloom. We are on the run, moving from room to room. The civilian got seperated. He’s dead. The legionaries split from us half an hour ago--we went right and they went left, us deeper into the compound and them making a break for the back gate. I do not know if they survived but we heard changelings looking for us.

Lily dies when she pulls a changeling from Ruby’s back and the monster turns on her. They are locked in battle, rolling together and then she comes up--Lily, a fierce mother who would save her child from the precipice of hell, the potion maker, the healer, Lily with the the kind eyes--a changeling barrels into her and she loses her balance. She does not scream. It knocks the air out of her.

They tumble out of a tall, broken window and I do not see what happens.

Lily was the one with the trigger for the powder.

Ruby and I running back through the grand hall five minutes after Lily is gone. The remains of the attacking force chase after us, and we are alone except for them.

She never had my stamina. She lags behind by a step. I call for her to hurry, gods, please hurry, but she just can’t anymore. She just can’t.

One of them knocks her down and falls on her with a gleeful hiss. I turn and do my pivot-kick one last time.

Morning light streams through the windows like divine grace, and so now we all see each other without the night in the way, in a full array of color. I see their ugliness and their twisted wrongness, and they see my boneweary despair perhaps, or my anger, more likely. Or how alone we are.

Ruby

I bring Ruby to rest in the cellar. The swarm, what is left, is waiting outside. They’ve lost at least half of their number and they aren’t in any hurry, so why come in after me? Perhaps I could work some trap and still triumph. No, they’ll starve me out or wait until I try to escape.

Ruby mumbles as I carefully let her fall from my back.I try to ease her up against the wall, but she whimpers when I move her. Waiting for changelings to burst through, I stroke her mane.

“Ruby? Hey, Ruby?”

“Hey.”

Her voice is so soft.

“Ruby, he was all over you. I…”

She hums. She tries to look up at me.

“Ruby, I’m sorry. Ruby? Ruby, please say something. I love you, please say… say…”

Ruby dies quietly in the cellar.

I sit in front of the cellar door, waiting to die.

Soon, they’ll come to me. Or, alternatively, I will go to them.

Eventually, I think I doze for a moment, and I see Luna there before me. She is dark and lovely, and her eyes are alight.

“It’s okay,” I say.

“No… no it isn’t. You will not survive.”

“No one else didn’t either,” I say, feeling like I might fall over. “I’m coming down from something. Ruby is dead. She won’t move anymore.”

“Child… child, you are done. You cannot continue.”

“I can go a little longer.” She comes closer and I feel cold. I shiver. “Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe… I can’t keep going. Help me.”

“I could give you a final grace. You could fall asleep and fade into painlessness for when they come. You need not suffer. Please, please take it.”

I stare at her. “I was too awkward to say this but I think you might be the most beautiful mare in the world,” I say. “I don’t want to stop feeling. I don’t want to forget even for... for a few minutes.”

“You’re going to die. Please, I can’t--”

I open my eyes. I am lying flat on the cold cellar floor and only I am here. And Ruby.

Why are we here? Why am I alive, when all the others are dead? Am I faster or stronger? No, I think that I’m just lucky. Very lucky. I could have died so many times, and I didn’t. I could have died days ago when I went one on one with that changeling. I could have died from a freak accident in Ranger School. I could have died as a child. I could have died at any time and maybe that means that it is stupid to ask why I have to die now when I didn’t so many other times.

It’s so wrong. I never wanted to fight anyone. I didn’t want to kill anypony. I wanted to help… I wanted to save foals in snowdrifts and keep timberwolves away from villages.

But I did anyway. I hurt and killed. I killed with my hooves and a musket and blades but I think the most I killed with my heart. I killed, and not the things I held or wielded. They were only the how because the what was me, Midnight. Midnight Aria. I killed them.

I didn’t want to but I did. So maybe I did want to.

My friends are gone and I will be too and now I don’t even know why. Ruby is gone and I never said that I loved her until she was dying. Lily is gone and I can never thank her again.

Luna, Ruby… sweet, sweet Ruby.

Where are you, Luna? Why aren’t you here? Where is your protection? When do you provide? But maybe you don’t do these things always just like I couldn’t protect and I could not provide, even though I tried so hard to do so. You talked to me. I know that you can’t be indifferent to us.

Maybe you try just like we do. Maybe those words aren’t guarantees but rather promises of a slightly different sort. That you will try. That you will always try. Please, always try.

I just want this to mean something, and I’m also afraid that wanting it to mean something will make me force a meaning that is wrong. But it has to mean something.

Luna, please keep trying. If you cannot protect or provide this time, redeem. Redeem us in our solemn hour. I don’t want the gift you offered, if I really saw you at all. I don’t want to sleep away the last moments I’ll ever see. I want to be alive. So instead, redeem us. Please make something of what we have done. Make it mean something. Whether that is saving those civilians or something else, redeem our suffering.

Redeem us.

Midnight

In the ninth hour, as the sun blazed over the frozen plains and on an unreal city, a pony emerged from the cellar where the Governor-General had stored his finest wines.

Her duster and barding were torn and stained with blood. Her hat was askew and her mane was wild and soiled. Her face was… strange. Her eyes not quite focused. She wore no hoofblades. She wore no barding. Her emblem she wore around her neck, with another one which bore another pony’s name.

She walked quietly into the grand hall and was not disturbed.

There were changelings there. They lined the bannisters. They covered the floor, dead and alive. They surrounded her, buzzing and chittering. She stared at them.

They did not strike the first second. Or the second.

There were many dead. Perhaps more than half of them.Midnight thought she had killed at least seven herself, and the others? They looked almost afraid of her, as if she might take another ten at least when she finally went.

They may have noticed that she bore no weapons and feared this also and what it might mean.

Midnight looked out past all of them, towards the sun that shone through the broken glass. She thought to herself that it was lovely, wasn’t it? So beautiful, so bright. Everything was so much brighter up here.

She had feared the storms that came down from the mountains once. They had swept down from Canterlot and when the winds howled across the mouth of the caverns they were like a roaring dragon. She had feared that sound more than anything. She had feared the storm; she now became it. She smiled.

“Rangers Fly, you poor bastards.”

She flared her wings and flew for the sun.

And then without any warning, they fell upon her. But they could not keep her. Midnight sailed through the holes in the boards they had made. They followed, hissing at her heels, as she flew over an unreal city towards the sun that burned in her eyes. Was this what is was like to be a daypony?

They followed and she chased. Batponies aren’t as fast as pegasi, but what is? They were as fast as changelings easily. And she was a ranger.

And she began to scream wordlessly, full of anger and full of something worse than loss and then eventually they caught her and she went hurtling down, fighting them off the whole way, falling falling falling down towards the snowy plains, and then they were off of her and she pulled up or tried as the white raced up to meet her.

Epilogue: Redeem Us

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Luna would find their bodies one by one. Poisoned, crushed, cut. She would find the trigger and after a few hours have pieced the whole desperate plan together. She would cry when Twilight was not with her, after they had been collected and laid out together below the steps, dusters over them like funeral shrouds. She collected their emblems and kissed each one.

She found every Ranger and she gathered them under her wing like children, for weren’t they, in a way? Did she not know their names, each and every one?

Twilight and Luna sat amidst the dead. The changelings had been moved outside and burnt. Luna had wanted to dump them in a hole, but Twilight had insisted. Flames were traditional. It was a small mercy.

They said nothing for some time. Twilight felt sick and unhappy. Luna’s feelings were not describable.

“I wish I understood,” Twilight said at last.

“Understand what, Twilight?”

“Any of this… I mean... “ Twilight sighed. “Why are we fighting? Why would anyone hurt changelings and make them into these things? Why would they be okay with it? Why would ponies choose to die? Why would they kill? And even when the why makes sense, the how boggles the mind. I can’t imagine…”

Luna watched as she trailed off, her eyes unreadable.

“Twilight, you do not understand many things, and I know that. It is… it’s alright not to know,” she managed. “There are many things I wish you did not have to know. I have killed so many ponies in my long, weary life that I have lost track of them. The same can be said for the friends I have lost to age alone, not to mention accident, disease, famine, and war. I do not think it will ever make sense.”

“I thought we would be in time.”

Luna barked a laugh. “I never am, no matter how hard I try. I can only ever seem to save in part.”

“But…”

“And now there will be silence in this accursed city. After death comes a lingering silence for those who are left. You will think, at first, that it is a question, but it is not a question at all. The silence after death is as final and decided as it is unnerving. Like a corpse. What do you do after? You try not to think too much. You try to run on past death and not to think, because if you think then she will find you a few days early, perhaps. That is the feeling.”

Twilight shivered. “I’ve seen enough for a lifetime.”

“And this is only the beginning. A never ending cycle. The centuries of peace my sister has given you are not the real world, Twilight, or rather they are only a part of the realness. They are a sliver of creation.

“War is always with us in one way or another. I have seen the records--peace in Equestria, except. Except is always the operative word at the borders of history. The Pax Equus--Except. Pirates and brigands, monsters and invaders. Civil conflicts overseas and divisions at home. War and the rumor of war. Even when all is peace it is not well, and you will remember this and you’ll know that I am right.”

“So everything is ruined forever,” Twilight said sourly.

“No. Not at all. Not even I can say that.”

They looked at the fallen Rangers.

“They should make some sort of monument here,” Twilight said. “With their names. Somepony should remember them.”

Luna, repressing a growl: “Because you do not know, I will forgive you this thought. No monuments. No statues and no great memorial walls. Do you think that they do anything? They cannot honor the dead, for they are beyond our ability to help. They commemorate for a time and then they are either little more than a pretty rock or worse, a tool in the hands of calculation. You cannot do anything for these, Twilight Sparkle. Nopony can. They have done the thing that did not need doing, that the world would have gone on without, for no other reason than that it should be done. Let them speak often of the martyred station, but I spit upon the hubris of those who knew nothing of what this was. There are no survivors worthy to build the cairn.”

And then she looked down at Midnight, her eyes shut.

Luna stroked her soiled mane, wet from the snow and drenched in blood. Luna parted the mess to see her eyes. The hat she had laid upon the young mare’s stomach, her hooves resting on it. She looked asleep.

“I touched her mind, Twilight. Do you know… in a different world, what if I had found her first? I believe she could have been for me what you were for Celestia. I would have taught her the art of dreamwalking, and what her innate magics could do. In another world… but I live in this one. She thought about those ragged few we flew over, the ones I sent my nightshades to. She begged me to save them, and I have. Perhaps that is the meaning of this. Do you know what the meaning is?”

Twilight thought. She thought for a long time.

“No, I don’t,” she said quietly. “I want to say that it was to get the refugees to safety, but they couldn’t have known. I want that to be the answer, but now that I’ve actually seen them… It just…”

“It sounds hollow, even though you do not think it is.”

“I suppose, Luna. Why did you not go after the last few?”

Luna stroked Midnight’s mane again.

“Only mercy makes injustice just again,” she said woodenly. “Perhaps. Celestia said that once. Still seems foolish to me, but my heart reacts to it, so… Her meaning was that she wished to love her neighbor--the ponies she was with, the ponies she might yet meet. I want her meaning to be mine, because it is a thing I think even princesses could live or die for.”

She looked up at Twilight, who bit her lip.

Twilight said, “Will she make it?”

“Yes. But I do not know… I do not know how well she will recover. I have done what I can, but Celestia was the one who healed. I had too harsh a touch for it. I too wished to love my fellow pony. But how? I do not know, Twilight Sparkle. I hope that young Midnight knows, but I do not think so. Maybe we do not know and we try regardless. When I touched her mind during a moment of exhaustion I felt… I…” Luna took a shuddering breath and was silent.

Everything was silent. It lingered, like a crowd watching, waiting. Holding its breath for an answer but finding none presented. Only another question.

Or rather, everything was silent but for the slow and steady breathing of a scarred mare wrapped in the duster of her office, laid in state yet still alive, clutching two beautiful Lunar emblems beneath a furred cap.

Redeem Us In Our Solemn Hour

by Cynewulf

I. Damascus Road

II. Giants in the Land

III. The Dark Forest Where the Path Gives Out

IV. Unreal City

V. The Gates of Hell Shall Not Stand Against

VI. Luna in Sulvam est, all's Right with the World.

VII. Precious In the Sight Of Our Lady, The Suffering of Her Loved Ones

VIII. Martyr

Epilogue: Redeem Us