June 14, 6:12 AM

You Aren’t Alone Anymore 68%

Wayfinder was on a journey.

She did not know where she was, how she’d gotten there, or how long she’d been walking. But she was traveling somewhere important, and she could not stop until she arrived there.

Great billowing fog rose up around Way as she walked, curling where her legs lifted then dissolving again as she continued. It split and reformed around her, obscuring anything more than a few feet in any direction. What she could see were enormous trees, each one on a scale with the largest redwoods.

There was no trail for her to walk, yet she knew precisely where she was going with a certainty as deep as her genetic material. She had somewhere to be, and so she walked. The chill didn’t penetrate her coat, and her long legs lifted her high enough to avoid the worst scraps from any of the briars along the route.

As her journey stretched onward, Way noticed others joining her along the route. None ever emerged completely from the mist. One moment a filly with a limp hobbled along beside her, always one tree’s distance away. The next, an elderly couple who had given up fighting settled onto the dirt and looked up as she passed. Yet in both cases, when Way tried to call out, they ignored her. When she approached, the mist always revealed the ground where they had sat was empty.

The loneliness of her long journey began to ache after a while. One moment the crowd seemed to look to her with affection, but when she called out to ask who they were or what they were all doing there, no one answered.

“I’m not going to hurt you!” she yelled, frustration building as the seconds passed. “Won’t someone walk with me? I’m going a very long way!”

The mist closed in around her in reply. Even the trees seemed to flee, leaving only swirling white on either side. There was only a faint wind, and the quiet rustling of the leaves. For a while that was all there was, silence and diffuse white. She nearly abandoned her walk completely in that place. Maybe her journey didn’t really matter.

Then something else broke the silence: a single set of irregular footsteps. Four of them, but not in the configuration she expected. Not hooves on soft soil. Her ears flicked towards it, and her horn lit up. That worked, though she couldn’t say how. The fog billowed around her, streaming rapidly away in a sphere that extended perhaps a hundred feet in every direction. Several nearby trees appeared there, heavy bushes of berries, a little stream flowing down. And from lower on the mountain, a creature watching her.

All her time administrating the Zone had done nothing to prepare her for a being like this. Zebras, yaks, griffins—this was nothing like any of them. A being built vaguely like a dragon of Eastern lore, with a spindly body of dark and light purple. She had one pony leg on her right side, and perhaps a bird’s talon on the left. Her front legs were a similar mix, one muscular and another covered in shiny golden scales like a dragon. Mismatched horns protruded from her head, and even her wings along her back were wrong: one taken from a bird, the other a bat.

Huge yellow eyes stared up at Way, noticing the opening in the fog. “I wondered how long it would take someone to rescue me from this place.” She didn’t walk over so much as float, her wings not moving and her legs dragging little divots in the grass as she moved. Gravity was obviously more of an annoyance for her than anything she actually needed to worry about. Which meant she’d only been walking to make sure Way heard her coming. “He said I might be here for centuries, maybe longer. Equestrian history didn’t keep good records before the first Alicorn appeared. It might be ten thousand years. But you…”

Way rose to her hooves again as the stranger approached, keeping that steady glow on her horn. She didn’t know exactly what she intended to do to this alien, of course. She knew a few basic attacks thanks to Sunburst’s training, but nothing seemed appropriate for something like this. Her magical senses revealed a being much stranger within than her initial appearance might’ve suggested. She radiated like nothing Way had ever encountered. No spell ever felt quite like that. If she’d been a little weaker with her magic, her senses probably would’ve slid right off her, like some permission-denied error on a computer.

Instead, she started walking again. She was heading up, which meant retreating from the creature. She turned her back to her, though kept glancing back as she walked. She had asked for company. “You know where we are?” she asked. “Why I’m walking?”

“To a reasonable approximation, and yes,” the creature said. She caught in the air beside Way, hovered there for a few seconds, then shifted to float alongside her while she walked. “I can tell you what he told me when he sent me here. Called it Backstage. Though I think in magical terms, he meant kinda—aside. Like walking down a hallway you didn’t see in your house and finding an identical version of it there, except it smells like every meal you ever cooked at once and every time you came home from the gym and the incense you burned and—” she shrugged her mismatched shoulders. “Like that, but for non-causal events. I could be more specific, but it’s rather unpleasant. I’m sure you’d rather I didn’t.”

She continued her walk. Her new companion floated along at her pace, only occasionally brushing on the ground with one of those odd limbs. “I’ve had quite a few unpleasant things in my life lately,” she said. “Part of me thinks I must be partially responsible for spreading NEM10 to Denver. Even if I wasn’t the asshole who initially broke it out. I could’ve turned myself in and maybe that would’ve made a difference. Maybe I shouldn’t have run after. Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered with the way the Isolation Zone was governed. I didn’t have to study magic, I could’ve kept my head down. Maybe I made things worse.”

The creature beside her didn’t say anything for a time. The fog closed back in around them, but at least she remained close enough that Wayfinder could always see her.

It did help not to feel so completely alone out here. She wasn’t the only one lost in these woods.

“Well, I wasn’t going to tell you. But you did call me an asshole, so—” she grinned, exposing teeth as mismatched and strange as the rest of her. “Your constituent matter dissolved when you appeared here. Or—translated might be the better description. I didn’t exactly have my equipment to take measurements when you appeared. Your original self no longer exists: you’re a collection of the intent, intellect, and other non-causal phenomena that compose the totality of your physical existence. I think.”

Way stumbled, and one of her hooves slipped on the damp soil, splashing into the water there. It washed up around her, cool and refreshing against the skin beneath. “That sounds an awful lot like you’re saying I’m dead,” she pulled her hoof out of the water, then shook it. When she lifted it, a muddy footprint remained on the ground. “I don’t feel like a ghost.”

The creature laughed. “Yes, of course. Because you’ve been dead so many times before, you know precisely what to expect.” Her tail moved sharply to either side, its leonine end snapping loudly at the end of each movement. “I suppose I had fewer reasons to doubt my own mortality when I arrived here. Your arrival had—considerably fewer bullets. But that’s why you’re my ride out. Fortunate for both of us.”

She held one claw out towards her, grinning. “Rude of me not to introduce myself. I’m Zen. Needed something new, and it felt aspirational. He said I’ll have plenty of time, so I might as well pick something for the life I want.”

Wayfinder held out her hoof, then took the nearby limb. “Wayfinder,” she replied. “Way for short. But you can call me anything that isn’t princess blue.“

With actual claws, Zen could grab her leg in a far more human way. “Princess Blue? Oh, I won’t call you that. As for others…”

She felt eyes on her again. Figures approached from all around, more subtle shapes shifting in the fog. Ponies and other creatures of all ages, watching. Expectant, maybe even impatient.

She tugged her leg free and began to climb again. Her journey had to reach its end. If it did not—the outcome was too terrible to even contemplate. So she started walking again. “You keep mentioning someone else,” she said, conversationally. “Someone else I’m going to run into while I’m here? Even more fun than you are.”

The trail became steeper as they went. Her companion didn’t feel it, or slow down. It must be nice to float off the ground and not get her hooves dirty everywhere she went. But they were nearing the end, and whatever waited for them there.

“I don’t think he’s here. He didn’t want to—honestly I don’t know. Maybe his culture had some equivalent of a prime directive. Maybe he’s just lazy and the easiest path was to dump me here and call it good. Not that I’m complaining—I’d be a cooling pile of blood and bullet holes if it wasn’t for his involvement. I’m very grateful to continue existing, don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a complaint.”

Zen floated past her shoulder, tail dragging through the dirt. “When you open the door, I’ll follow. It would be unscientific to seek out the ones who killed me for appropriate retribution, entirely irrational to hold such a grudge. If I do find them, I’ll not do anything life-threatening. And that isn’t the reason I’m going back with you. I care about the outcome the same as you. I want humanity to survive. I want the thing we’ve become to survive. At least so far, our former relatives around the globe appear to share this view. No nuclear weapons rained down on the US after the outbreak. They’ve attacked and killed those trying to flee into clean areas, but not those who remain in isolation. Which I suppose is the same pattern of behavior that ended in my death.”

Even with the fog, Wayfinder saw the trees ahead had become sparse, trailing away as she approached an area of the mountain kept clear for skiers. There were none here now, or any snow. This was still too early in the year. The fog was clearing too as she walked. Patches of black sky appeared where the fog grew thinnest. Yet the house itself was nowhere to be seen, or any of the other trail markers. No lift stretched above her either, just an occasional flicker of starlight.

“You sound like someone connected to this more deeply than I was,” Wayfinder said. “Someone shot you, probably while escaping from this. And you said—noncasual event isn’t a term I’ve heard outside of the base originally researching this infection. Regular people just call it magic. Don’t really need to dress up and pretend we know what’s going on with academic language. And you—” her eyes went wide, and her tail fell abruptly limp. “I called you an asshole. Like you were the one who—were you the one who stopped at the diner? Dr. Zalenka?”

“Zen fit better than Zal. Better not to butcher my language, yes? Abandoned, like so many other truths about myself.” That confident smile finally faltered. “You do not have to call me a coward. I already know. I should’ve stayed in that building and left them to do whatever they planned to me. I might not have died, even. Do I regret it? Yes. Do I believe this outbreak was inevitable? Also yes. We had no effective means to contain it. When I fled, many of my colleagues were already showing early symptoms. Someone would’ve found a way to hide it long enough to escape, or developed abilities that made them impossible to contain.” She hesitated, one ear flicking to the side. “I’m rationalizing my actions, I realize this. I will continue, you can’t stop me.”

Zen nudged her forward with her foreleg. “The locals appear to be growing somewhat—restless. I believe it would be in your best interests to reach the summit in a judicious fashion.”

Wayfinder started forward again, nearly tripping over her own hooves before accelerating. Zen was right; a persistent pressure was building. Even if none of her audience were willing to close in on her through the fog, she still felt them watching.

She scampered ahead a few steps, and found the mountain no longer looked the way she remembered. Rather than a gradual slope to the missing cabin with a flat plain for skiers to disembark the lift and stow their gear, or glide to their runs, she found—the geography made no sense. Only her spell diagram remained on the ground, with several smoldering chunks she guessed were the charged crystals.

Just like that, everything came rushing back. What she’d been doing that brought her here was blindingly obvious: Sunburst’s spell for the overgrowth. An entire planet’s worth of wild magic, who knew how many dead. The complex diagram remained more like an afterimage on the ground, many of its lines blurred together, taking the clarity of their runes with them. But she didn’t need to be able to read any of it to remember.

She stepped past the diagram, onto a stretch of ground that extended past it, up into open air. Fog thinned to either side, spiraling around it and exposing the stars above. “You’ll see me again soon enough, Wayfinder. When you barge through the door, I’ll find a way to slip through before it shuts. No need to look for me, I’ll find you.” She stopped right there by the spell diagram, her four legs landing awkwardly and unevenly in the dirt. No wonder she floated around everywhere, she’d never be able to walk comfortably with that body plan. She’d be tripping over herself before she even realized what was happening.

“Shame no one will be there waiting for you, but maybe that’s an advantage here. I’ve always been fond of the clockmaker. If God was waiting here—I would probably be on my way to hell. I’m sure I am regardless.” Zen dissolved, her body breaking apart into wisps of multicolored fog. It left no debris, no bones, nothing at all in fact. Just Wayfinder atop a mountain, with more questions than answers.

She continued. The stone and soil transformed beneath her as she walked, stretching. She knew she had to keep going, because this was where she belonged. She had nearly reached it now. She knew as the mountain fell away into a sea of swirling fog, with a scattering of stars growing into a sky that surrounded her on three sides. No mountain on earth could ever look like this, or produce such a view.

Until at long last, the road ended. A narrow path grew into a vast courtyard, where numberless figures seen only when she wasn’t looking all watched with anticipation. Somehow, there were millions of them, attention one mind could scarcely even comprehend.

“I told you I would stay,” she told them. “I don’t know… quite what that means yet. I’m figuring this out as I go.”

At the end of the path, a thin line split in open air, expanding until it made a doorway. And on the other side: a spell diagram, the blur of flashlights, panicked voices distant and out of focus. Her own name carried on the wind, as Sunburst and others yelled for her.

The space beyond pulled at her, as though the world had tilted sharply and she were now sliding towards it. She stumbled a step, two, three. “I hope you don’t mean in this place,” she said. Her hooves slipped on the ground, until she used her own magic to press herself in place. “Because I don’t think I can. I’m not supposed to be here.”

The assembled figures didn’t react. Ponies and other beings must be satisfied with her leaving through that door, because the pressure wasn’t there. Just expectation, and a little frustration as she held herself there.

“Alright, alright! I’m… whatever this is. Sunburst didn’t tell me. Just that it was going to change me. I have to believe he didn’t know it would do this, though. This is… oh.”

Her failing magic couldn’t hold her there any longer. Wayfinder Wisp tumbled sideways through the opening.

It burned going through. Every tissue, every hair on her mane and tuft on her coat. Yet that or any description failed to capture what happened to her. Wayfinder yanked herself through, dragging flesh and bones and sinew out of nothing as though teleporting without an origin. She was ready for it—every long-distance teleport worked more or less the same way.

Yet never before had she ever felt as though her body was resisting her. Familiar coral and blue fur, silver eyes, a long horn—and more. She wasn’t finished.

It was as though the body knew what she didn’t. More muscles and tendons anchored more bones, extending from her back in ways where before there had been nothing. Vessels flooded in, and tissue flattened into repeating broad patterns, incredibly lightweight. They fanned out around her, the new limb opening to catch the wind in a way that she’d never before been able. Her hooves didn’t touch the ground, but that was somehow fine. She could linger in the air for a little while.

Finally the magic released her. Only one final failure remained: a pressure on her mane, lingering near the tips. She pressed back, as though holding on to her old shape with fingers she’d long-since lost. The result was somewhere between her previous layers of different blue-greens and a faint visual shimmer of magic, as though reflecting blue firelight without an original source.

The pain ended, and breath filled her lungs for the first time in—she didn’t even know. Wayfinder’s wings spread to slow her fall, but she didn’t actually know how to use them. She landed with a harsh thump on the grass, then toppled sideways and rolled, tearing through ferns and other vibrant green shrubs along the way. None of them had been there before. But that was hardly the first thing on her mind. She dug in her hooves, pulling back her wings instinctively so they wouldn’t sprain or snap as she rolled. Finally she came to a stop, her mane glowing in the dirt beside her head.

“Wayfinder!” Sunburst’s voice, though he was very far away. “She teleported, I think! Over there!”

Someone landed on the soft earth beside her, accompanied with the high buzzing of insect wings. Faceted eyes looked down on her from above, and one black hoof prodded at her shoulder. “Way? Are you… what happened to you?”