Chapters
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“She’s been waiting in there for an hour,” Honed Edge whispered, peeking into the open doorway again. Evening Star followed his eyes, taking in the scene as quickly as she could. A representative from the Crown, come all the way from Harmony to inspect Hayden and her work in protecting Equestria.They hadn’t received any letters from the capital—or from anywhere else, for that matter. Aside from the messengers they sent (instructed to lie about their origin), they had been completely isolated from…-
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Hayden stared down at Fort Polestar from the bridge of her army’s only airship, frowning slightly to herself at the distinct lack of battle damage. The Sirius had once been Lord Snow Storm’s pleasure yacht, before they got their hooves on it. Needless to say, the ship had changed a little in the last few months.Her eyes narrowed as she looked down, searching for what should have been obvious signs of battle. Burned buildings, chunks of the wall torn away, something.But she couldn’t see anything like…
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“There’s probably somewhere more important for you to be,” Honed Edge said behind her, a little reproving. “Big important generals should be doing big important things.”Hayden wore a stiff uniform coat against the chill, which always seemed to find a way to leak into Icefalls these days. Their weather team just didn’t have enough pegasi to keep the farms and the city warm, and so they focused on the farms. “And what should I be doing, Edge?”The carriage rolled swiftly out of the city, its…
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Hayden stood on a mountain of torn paper. The torn wreckage of dead plans was broken at her hooves like the soldiers of the invading army. They had so little time. Three months until the soonest the enemy could arrive, with twice that as the most optimistic estimate.She had solved so much. Outside, Icefalls was changing. She wasn’t alone—she had most of the soldiers of Defiance, many of which were already trained in her strange methods. The city already had a sewer—in a few weeks, its frozen fields…
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The strange transport ship might’ve looked like a zeppelin, but it didn’t move like one. Hayden stood on the bridge, watching clouds whip past the window beyond with such speed that they blurred away to nothing. However these clouds might feel under her hooves, they did no better against their ship than Earth clouds.“You didn’t think I could do it,” Hayden said, glancing over her shoulder at Star Swirl.The pony sat at a little table against one wall that didn’t have any controls for him to…
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Hayden wasn’t sure how much time had passed by the time she finally woke. Hours? Days?She wasn’t in the workshop, but somewhere else. It looked like a warehouse, its plain white walls rising high above her. She could hear the whir of wheeled robots as they moved around, each one an odd pillar of stacked crates. She’d seen pictures of this kind of thing in Amazon fulfillment centers. Some of the drones even looked similar.Familiar, yet more somehow. The future really did seem like the most plausible…
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Hayden followed the ancient human into his workshop, her mind buzzing with questions. She wanted to know how he had come to Equestria—more importantly, how he had been able to bring all this. The machinery she saw all around her bore the same look as that outside, more like the interior of a starship than a bunker. There were airlocks at regular junctions, and emergency respirators in marked cases along the walls.The workshop itself was massive, stretching away from them. Only the area nearest where they…
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Hayden swayed a little after the teleport, struggling not to fall over. She felt little chunks of ice flake off away from her face, and her breath still clouded the air in front of her for a few seconds. “Damn,” she whispered, shaking her head. “That was awful.”Star Swirl looked far more intact than she did, standing on the edge of a bluff. The air around them had transformed—no longer trying to rip the heat from her chest, but instead pressing down on them, heavy with moisture. The smells and…
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There was silence in the war-room as Hayden finally finished presenting her plan. The space was no longer mostly vacant, but packed with ponies—many were soldiers, those of the highest ranks who had decided to stay. But plenty more were just prominent citizens of Icefalls.Including its new city-lord. They didn’t have fancy robes for Nightbreeze, didn’t even have a crown for her yet. She sat on the raised chair at the center of the room looking like somepony who had just been struck in the face with…
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Hayden had no idea what she was doing. In some ways, that had been true since she arrived in Equestria, and had realized she wasn’t even welcome there. But compared to her preparations for dealing with nobility, or convincing the ponies of Defiance to help her, the size of the difficulties arrayed against her seemed insurmountable.She was not a great general, as Lodestone had already pointed out. She was the sort of leader who managed coordination in the background, not who could lead the charge at the…
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