June 13, 5:30 AM

Bring Them Along (98%)

After so long trapped within the boundaries of the Isolation Zone, Wayfinder found every fresh mile beyond its gates a fresh, frightening step out into parts unknown. Some part of her remained tense every second, in case the impotent federal authorities decided that her brief departure from the boundaries was enough cause to kill her. Would she hear whatever missile they sent for her before it struck?

The question went unanswered, because there was no attack. The greatest danger they encountered on their trip up the mountains were roads clogged with empty vehicles, or sections of highway blocked by abandoned National Guard checkpoints. Usually they could just go around, but once or twice the strongest members of the group had to get out and haul debris away to open a path. She didn’t help with the levitation, even though most of the objects in their way would’ve been trivial for her.

Wayfinder would soon need every drop of her magic—those she’d trained would have to be able to handle it.

There were no large cities out that way—that was the entire point of the choice, one that would impact the smallest number of people once the Overgrowth expanded. She did see an occasional pony or small group of infected, sheltering in gas stations or old infrastructure. But their mission was too urgent to do anything other than slow and use the megaphone to warn them to evacuate.

The largest of these: a little settlement formed where several gas stations and fast food restaurants clustered near a river, showed no reaction when their convoy passed. She suspected the pegasus with a rifle on their roof would’ve flipped them off if he still had the hands to do so.

Their expedition reached the end of the highway near the Loveland Ski Area, but Sunburst insisted that wouldn’t be good enough. “The spell’s ability to capture global wild magic increases with altitude and decreases with obstruction. Using it within a valley like this would have very poor results.” He pointed up towards the slopes, snowless and windswept on the mountains above. “The maps I found suggested a lodge near the summit. We should be able to hike there in a few days.”

Their driver, a canine who uniquely still fit in the seat, though his meaty arms sometimes swallowed the steering wheel completely, looked back into the truck as though he’d just been insulted. “Hike? What the hell did you invite us for? Captain, we can get you there. If the runs are level enough for skiers, we’ll handle them.”

Sunburst made a sound that wasn’t any word, a high nervous humming. He glanced past Wayfinder to the trunk, where several crystals rested under their straps in thick foam. “If you’re wrong, we— you should consider the cargo highly volatile. No one within this vehicle will survive if we crash. Half the mountain might go with us.”

That made him stop. “In that case… maybe driving it up wouldn’t be the best idea.” He lowered his head to Wayfinder, ears folded back. “Captain. But if you order it, we’ll still—”

“There should be a fire road taking us to a lift. That road is a lot safer than the one going all the way to the top. My team is going to get the emergency generator running with the fuel we brought. Then you’ll take us to the lift, and we’ll take that to the summit.”

There was at least one small mercy: by choosing somewhere so remote, Sunburst made it much more likely that they’d discover intact facilities, rather than those looted or otherwise salvaged by previous survivors. Some of the lodge and restaurant was missing, all the food was gone and plenty of other things. But the industrial generators were still there, and still came to life after an hour of careful tending by their mechanic.

Transport to the lift took as long as the rest of the drive combined. They didn’t just pile into the trucks and pray: first they sent a truck with the mechanics and a few soldiers, but none of the cargo. Once radio confirmed they’d made it, they got to hold their breath while a nearly-empty SUV and a single driver rolled their way to the top at far less than top speed, then made its careful way back to pick up Wayfinder, Sunburst, Hazel, Ruby, and Blazing for the actual trip up.

Wayfinder left the remainder of their limited escort and support staff at the lodge, with a charm prepared for each and simple instructions. “You will see something strange happening outside. Don’t leave to investigate, or leave the lodge. Don’t remove the charms we’ve given you. We’ll signal by radio when it’s time to turn the generator back on and let us ride back down.”

“Or I’ll fly down to tell you,” Blazing said, flexing both wings. “It doesn’t seem like a long trip from the top. Pop down for a few, and we’re gold.”

“Either way,” Wayfinder agreed. “Stay indoors and don’t remove the charms, and you’ll be safe. If you disregard those instructions… I have no idea what might happen.”

Her small escort shared a look that told her they thought she’d lost her mind. One officer nodded, the other managed a halfhearted salute. “Don’t remove our… charms.”

“That’s right,” she repeated. “It’s a very simple instruction. You don’t need them this moment, but as soon as the spell begins—they’ll save your life. Since you can’t know how long it will take us to prepare on the peak, it’s my order that no one leave this building or remove them until you hear back. We’ll have our radios, and we’ll signal if we expect to be here more than a few days.”

Actually transporting the crystals to the peak was far less stressful than getting them to the first lift: tiedowns, with Blazing to fly ahead and operate the controls going up. Wayfinder rode the last lift up, sitting awkwardly in a seat not designed for a creature her size, riding over mountains nowhere close to ready for the start of ski season.

Hazel was the only other creature on the lift with her—Sunburst and Ruby had both gone up before the crystals, so they could be unloaded safely. Hazel reached towards her, leaving her hoof on Wayfinder’s leg as they went up, shaking whenever the wind caught them. “Never really was… much for heights. Flying low to the ground is one thing, but—if this falls…”

Wayfinder held on as best she could, though of course pony anatomy didn’t have quite the same capacity for holding much of anything. “This was never going to be safe, Haz. It’s… incredibly dangerous. Trying to cast this could kill me. It could make the mountains so dangerous that none of us can make it back out again. The lift is the safest thing we’ll do today.”

“I’ll be better on the ground,” Hazel said. “And you won’t die. Sunburst likes you, and he gave you the job anyway. I don’t think he would make you do this if he thought you might not come back.”

She looked out over the mountains for a few seconds. So much green, trees and grasses and wildflowers without any sign of the chaos in the world below. Nothing else in the world cared about humanity’s problems. “He thinks I can make it. But that isn’t the same thing as thinking it’s safe. Even if I can somehow… survive this, it’s going to change me. All that magic flowing through one pony…”

Her tail flicked to either side, her eyes going unfocused. The summit station was visible now, with the padded crystals all waiting on flat ground, while Ruby’s bright yellow and orange remained clear from the edge of the cliff. “Sunburst said that I have to guide the wild magic, to give it… emotional context. It’s made of all the rage and pain and suffering from every person that died. I have to give them all peace.”

Hazel went absolutely still after that. She stopped shivering, and didn’t even look at Wayfinder for so long the automated “Prepare to raise your lap bar” notice played over crackling speakers. Then she spoke, looking up into Way’s face. “Does that mean my parents too, Way? Will you see them?”

She couldn’t look away, no matter how badly she wanted to retreat and cower from this child. “If they died from the infection, then I think so. But Hazel—I don’t think it will be something where I get to talk to everyone. There could be millions of people by now.”

“I know,” Hazel said, suggesting she very much didn’t know, or didn’t want to believe her. “Just—it would be good if you kept an eye out. And if you get the chance, tell them goodbye for me. Promise?”

The lift jerked to a stop at the top of the hill, sending the two of them swinging gently in place over a drop too high for a pony, but no trouble at all for a human being with their legs already dangling over the edge of the seat.

“Welcome to Ptarmigan Roost,” Sam said, emerging from the tiny sheltered booth with wings half-splayed and a smile across his beak. “Home of overpriced food and not a lot of anything else.”

Wayfinder ignored him, her eyes still on Hazel. She nodded. “I promise.”

It took the rest of the day to prepare the spell, so long that they were still working by electric lantern long after the sun went down and everyone but Sunburst and Wayfinder herself had found somewhere soft to curl up inside the lodge.

But neither of them stopped for anything: not to eat, not to stretch, not to catch their breath, not to watch the sunset over the mountains. Nothing mattered more than completing the spell. So they drew, they arranged each of the six charged crystals, they ran coils of thin wire between each one and along the precisely-designed spell diagram, and they checked every rune and every mark against their notes. Wayfinder even found herself checking Sunburst’s work.

But then it was done. A wooden deck once covered with metal racks for skis and snowboards now held a diagram written in black ink, describing what might be the future of their planet’s magical structure.

Or if they were wrong, Wayfinder’s own brief magical future.

She rested back on the worn wooden platform, fighting the urge to reread and recheck anything they’d already drawn. But after staring at it for as long as she had, Way had long since passed the threshold where she saw what any of it meant, and into the realm of abstract shapes. Rather like saying the same word over and over, it lost all meaning.

Sunburst seemed to be thinking the same thing, because he settled down beside her, radiating the smell of sweat and exhaustion. “Hard to imagine we’re going to get any better than this. At this point, either we got it right, or—we’re about to make all your planet’s problems a lot worse when we get ourselves killed up here.”

She stiffened, turning sharply sideways to face him. “You trust your work that much, huh? You could always go back down the mountain, get as far away from here as you can. If you can’t help me cast it anyway, then… maybe you should run. That way if I fumble this and get myself killed, you’ll survive. That way you can help rebuild again somewhere else. Teach everyone from my world how to be ponies, keep us from going extinct…”

To his credit, Sunburst barely even twitched. One glance back at the spell, and his eyes were on her again. “I’ve already taught what I could. Passed on the books, tried to help you with a government. What ponies do with that is their decision now. But given their resilience I’ve seen since arriving on this planet, I have a feeling they’ll find a way. Sooner or later, a pony has to stand behind his work. Sunrise would be the best time to cast the spell: the symbolic connection should give it an extra measure of stability.”

Before she could open her mouth to object, Sunburst leaned over for a kiss, his lips finding hers there in the dark. Wayfinder had no desire to escape after that—she relaxed against him, and the warmth between their bodies became the only truth in the universe.

She was in no hurry to head inside.

But she did sleep, eventually; on several large blankets under the stars beside their spell diagram. Pony fur and Sunburst’s body heat was enough to keep her warm through that night, even when they only had a few blankets to work with.

When the first orange light of dawn stirred over the mountains, Wayfinder rose from the bed. She ate a few dried granola bars she’d brought along, gave Sunburst one last hug, and made her way to the center of the diagram, staring down at its many intricate lines until she found the beginning of the invocation. Sunburst stood just outside the diagram, a step behind one of the crystals and on the edge of the balcony. The first purple light of dawn glowed behind him, forming a fuzzy halo around his face.

Something shifted through the glass of the lodge, and a tiny face appeared there: Hazel, hooves pressed to the glass and eyes huge. Despite the early hour, she’d woken for Wayfinder’s work.

Way still remembered being someone else. However distant, however remote—months ago, she’d been working the night shift at a diner, when Dr. Zelenka stumbled in half-infected and spread the infection. But would the disease have already spread without that? Would she still be Ruby’s girlfriend, still living that simple life? They’d be back from their trip to Japan by now, with Ruby starting her final undergrad semester.

“Something wrong?” Sunburst asked, the first hint of anxiety in his voice. “Do we need to go over it one last time?”

She shook her head once. “Not the spell. Just… I’m not sure I’m the right pony for this. One way or another, this is gonna change things forever. Are you sure I’m the right one to—”

“Yes!” Sunburst exclaimed, his voice carrying over the mountains. “One of the most important ponies in Equestria’s recent history was a librarian, Wayfinder. If she can become a princess, you can cast this spell. I can’t do it—it’s your planet, not mine. You’re the mare who decided to save a city she saw was dying instead of saving herself. Who set the unjust captives free when she didn’t have to. Who could trust changelings. You’re the only pony who can do this.”

Wayfinder waved once to where Hazel watched from the window. The changeling was looking like her again, coming close to her colors.

Every complex spell Wayfinder ever cast exposed her own human bias. She expected some incomprehensible mess spoke in the language of the arcane, never understood. But nearly none of the pony spells were like that. The smaller, less ambitious spells read like poems. But for a working of this complexity, it was more like a story. She began to read, her horn glowing as she went through the words.

“A mare stood where every river starts above a valley dry, and old. Below her lay a village with every door shut fast. The flood came down from places she had known from cities turned to mud. It carried more than timber, more than stone, it carried voices before the flood.”

At first she felt very little from the spell other than the gentle pressure of magic. Not that different in its way from when she levitated, or lit up her horn to illuminate some dark space. Magic that was entirely her own lit the spell, making the entire diagram radiant, with herself at the center of the elaborate diagram.

“The villagers had built their walls of slate and packed the sandbags high against the flow. They said: ‘We’ll hold the river at the gate and turn it back the way it has to go.'”

Then she felt it: rage, boiling from nowhere, pouring down through the air towards her. The cloudless sky shifted overhead, and featureless gray turned to silver, swallowing the first purple-orange of dawn. Without her horn, Wayfinder would’ve been plunged into sudden darkness. Yet the glow persisted, and so did she.

Yet for every second she kept reading, that anger grew stronger. Confusion, loss, and fury. How dare you forget us, they seemed to say. Not one voice at all, a maelstrom, a flood!

“But she had heard the water in the night. A hundred towns were drowning out of sight, and every one of them was in that sound.”

The sky rumbled and shook. Clouds gathered from nothing, then thick droplets of rain poured. They rocketed down, threatening to wash away the diagram. Before the drops could land, something stopped them, a faint shimmer that she hadn’t noticed until that second. A glow that hadn’t been there moments before, diffuse white, radiating from five points around the diagram. Lifeless crystals sprung to motion and began to spin, filling the air with a powerful hum and rush of air as they accelerated.

New strength poured from each one, enough that Way’s back straightened again, her shoulders going rigid. She could do this!

“She cut a channel with her hooves and told the river: “Bring your load. If you don’t go where hearthfires burn, I’ll give you somewhere better than the stone.””

The crystal nearest to her head accelerated, spinning so fast that she couldn’t see its facets anymore. It poured everything it had into her, sustaining her as long as it could. Then it cracked, scattering chunks all around her. Wayfinder kept reading, spinning to face the next section of the spell. The pain was still there, not storm clouds but eyes now, uncountable thousands of them in the sky above. Wind whipped on the mountains, forcing Sunburst to wrap his hooves around the deck to hold on. Shingles ripped off the lodge nearby and vanished into the blue sky.

You don’t have to feel this way, she thought. Though she couldn’t say who she expected to hear. The words to her spell should be long lost against the maelstrom.

“And where the water settled in the vale, where mud and sorrow pooled against the clay, a pale sapling rose, and another by break of day. No mare planted them, no hoof had sown. The orchard grew from what the river bore, each tree was wild, and every branch had fruit unknown before.”

Lightning split the sky, so brilliant that it briefly blinded her. It flew directly towards her, a deadly bolt aimed for her heart. Wayfinder kept her hooves rooted to the spot through sheer force of will—and the bolt struck against the same barrier that blocked the rain. It deflected into the mountainside, ripping up chunks of stone larger than a truck and scattering them scorched and smoking.

“The orchard spread across the valley floor. Its roots drank deep of everything that passed. Each season it was stranger, wilder than before. It was as free as the villages that had once stood there, and it carried every sorrow they had known, and every joy. Many birds and animals made their homes there, and filled it with joy.”

Brilliant orange sunshine cut through the storm overhead, directly to the east. Where it touched, the fury of the storm finally turned aside. Instead, each drop of rain brought grass spreading across the mountains, as though she were watching time-lapse photography of an entire season. She wasn’t finished.

“A traveler came walking through the trees, and drank the water running clear. He took no axe, he broke no branch; and left no scar behind. The orchard gave him shade, and fruit, and room to stay. But when the stallions came bringing axes down, the branches closed and turned their blades away.”

Another crystal shattered. Those few that remained now spun rapidly, filling the diagram with a light so bright the sunlight itself seemed pale. But Wayfinder didn’t see the diagram anymore, or feel her own body. Instead she saw—faces, figures, silhouettes against a billowing fog speckled with stars. All watched her, expectant.

It was fortunate that she had spent enough time writing the spell to memorize it, or she might’ve failed then.

“The mare knelt beside the river’s edge. She’d given it a path, and set a hedge between the village and what grief had sown. The valley was no longer dry, the river was no longer dark with pain. Where once the dead were screaming, now she hears them sing.”

They reached out for her—hands, not hooves. There were so many, uncountable thousands, fingers that stretched until they turned hard like bark, with fingers like leaves. “Stay,” they seemed to say. “Please.”

Wayfinder chose.

1. You are Not Alone Anymore
2. REFUSE