It was stuck to the inside of the report’s binding, which meant Twilight found it by dismantling a century-old book before breakfast.
I watched the first strip of leather peel away from the spine and tried not to look like I was enjoying myself.
“Is that safe?” I asked.
“No,” Twilight said.
“Excellent. I wanted the investigation to have stakes.”
Spike sat cross-legged on the floor beside us, sorting loose pages into careful piles. Shining Shield stood near the library door, watching the windows and occasionally watching me. He had spent enough time escorting me that I was beginning to recognize the difference between his professional suspicion and his personal suspicion. The first was steady. The second appeared whenever my horn sparked.
This morning, neither had happened yet.
Twilight slid a thin blade under the report’s inner cover. “The original text refers to an appendix, but the appendix wasn’t included in the archive copy. That suggests it was removed before binding.”
“Or eaten by a very literate goat.”
Spike glanced at the book. “There are no goat marks.”
“I respect the thoroughness of your forensic process.”
Twilight gave me a look over her shoulder. “You’re avoiding helping.”
“I’m avoiding putting my horn near a knife while tired. There’s a distinction.”
That earned me a small smile, which was becoming an increasingly dangerous reward. I reached for the stack of survey records instead, using my magic to lift each one from the table. The spell settled more easily than it had yesterday. Not easily, exactly. The aura still trembled at the edges, and my concentration frayed whenever I tried to move too quickly, but the papers came when I asked and stopped when I asked.
My body remained an unfamiliar instrument. At least the instrument was beginning to obey the conductor.
Twilight worked the last section of leather loose. A folded sheet slid out of the spine and fluttered toward the floor.
I caught it.
The spell took more effort than it should have. The page dipped, wobbled, and nearly smacked into my face before I managed to steady it. Shining’s horn flashed in response, ready to intercept. I brought the paper down onto the table with a breath that came out much too loudly.
“Good catch,” Spike said.
“Thank you. I trained extensively by dropping things in increasingly embarrassing directions.”
Next
While Twilight seeks authorization for the mountain expedition, David will run Spike’s game—and may discover that telling a story in Equestria reveals more about the kind of companion he wants to be.
Twilight leaned over the page. “That’s the appendix.”
The writing was cramped and faded, but legible. At the top, in a different hoof than the main report, someone had written: PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF SURVEYOR HOLLEN VARR. NOT FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION.
“Not for general circulation,” I read. “Always a promising label.”
Twilight’s expression sharpened. “Read the first paragraph.”
I lowered my head over the page.
“‘On the third evening beneath the western escarpment, I described the house in which I was born. I did so in response to a question from my companions, having no intention of invoking any phenomenon. Upon naming the green shutters and the cracked bell over the front door, the air before me split along a vertical line.’”
The foreign resonance stirred beneath my horn.
Not strongly. Just enough to make the page glow at its edges.
Twilight stopped breathing for half a second. “Keep reading.”
“‘The split revealed no landscape known to us. There was darkness beyond, and a pressure in the ears like descending too rapidly. I heard a voice call my childhood name. I did not recognize the voice, though it spoke in my mother’s manner.’”
Spike’s claws tightened around the report pages. “That’s creepy.”
“Correct,” I said. “The official technical term is apparently ‘foreign seam.’”
I read on.
Hollen Varr had not crossed the seam. He had approached it, and the opening had widened when he continued describing his home. The report said the effect faded when he stopped speaking. It returned briefly when he held a household object: a brass latch-key recovered from his expedition chest. The key had not been enchanted, but the seam had turned toward it “as iron turns toward a lodestone.”
My own brass key sat beside the inkpot.
I didn’t touch it.
Twilight noticed. “David?”
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
I looked at the key, then at the page. The resemblance had stopped being an interesting pattern and become something with teeth.
“I’m not testing it,” I said. “Not here. Not without knowing what happens if the seam opens.”
Twilight’s shoulders eased. “Good.”
The appendix contained the detail the main report lacked: a partial route. The expedition had camped beneath a split ridge called Needleback, three days west of a mining settlement named Brindlehook. From there, the surveyors had followed an old royal road toward a valley marked on newer maps as abandoned after a rockslide.
There was also a warning.
“‘The seam does not behave as a door,’” I read. “‘It behaves as an ear.’”
No one spoke.
I thought of the sound from my old apartment—the traffic, the radiator, the refrigerator clicking on in the kitchen. I had not heard a voice calling my name. I had heard home, and then I had crossed into a world where home had become impossible.
Maybe the seam had not brought me here.
Maybe something on the other side had listened.
Twilight took the page with her magic, but carefully, asking with her eyes first. I let her. “This is the strongest evidence we have,” she said. “The memory response, the household object, the foreign resonance. It is more than coincidence.”
“More than coincidence isn’t the same as a route.”
“No. It isn’t.”
She turned the page over. The back held a rough sketch of the ridge and a note written in red ink: RETURNING TO SITE NOT AUTHORIZED.
“Why not?” Shining asked.
Twilight read the final lines. “Two expedition members reported hearing familiar voices after the seam closed. One walked west during the night and was found three miles from camp. The other refused to speak about what he saw.”
Shining’s gaze settled on me. “Then this trip requires more than supplies.”
“Agreed,” Twilight said. “A larger escort. A way to communicate with Ponyville. Medical provisions. And a return plan if the seam reacts.”
“And permission,” Shining added.
I glanced at him. “From whom?”
“Princess Celestia’s regional office, at minimum. An unexplained cross-border phenomenon in the western mountains is not something we investigate because a library has an exciting afternoon.”
Twilight’s ears dipped. “I know.”
The words landed harder than they should have. The route existed. The report existed. My key had a documented cousin. I could almost feel the story arranging itself into a quest with a destination and a group of companions who had agreed to come along.
But this was not a campaign where the game master had to provide a balanced encounter. It was my life, and the mountain had already swallowed one expedition’s answers.
“I want to go,” I said.
Twilight met my eyes. “I know.”
“I’m not saying tomorrow. I’m saying I want the chance to make the decision with all the information available.”
“That’s reasonable.”
“Please stop agreeing with me when I’m trying to be dramatic.”
“I’ll record it as a procedural request.”
Spike gathered the loose pages and stacked them against his knee. “We’ll need copies.”
“Several,” Twilight said. “One for the royal office, one for us, and one in case something happens to the first two.”
That afternoon, while Twilight drafted the request and Shining argued with the wording of the travel provisions, Spike brought me a slim book from a shelf near the back of the library.
The cover showed a band of ponies standing before a castle made of blue fire. One held a sword. Another held a lute. A third appeared to be a wizard who had made several poor decisions involving his beard.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Roleplaying,” Spike said. “You mentioned games yesterday. I found the books we use for them.”
I nudged his cheek with my snout before I could overthink it. He blinked, then laughed and bumped me back with one claw.
“Hey,” I said. “So, when I wasn’t writing those books, sometimes I ran those games. I wouldn’t mind trying. If you bring me the books you play, I can give them a look. Telling a story isn’t a skill I’d lose just because I’m a pony.”
I snorted, and my tail swayed behind me. “May even help.”
Spike’s eyes brightened. “You’d run one?”
“If the rules aren’t terrible.”
“They’re a little terrible.”
“Then I’m qualified.”
Twilight looked up from her letter. “What are you two planning?”
“An educational exercise,” I said.
Spike hugged the book to his chest. “A game.”
Twilight considered us, then sighed in the particular way of someone realizing her carefully organized day had acquired a new category of problem. “After dinner. No magic experiments during the game.”
“Deal.”
The page from Hollen Varr’s account lay beneath a glass weight on the table. Needleback. Brindlehook. An abandoned valley. A seam that listened when someone spoke of home.
I had wanted a direction. Now I had one, along with a warning, a permission request, and a dragon waiting for me to invent a story.
For the first time since waking in Equestria, the future did not feel like something happening to me.
It felt like a campaign I had chosen to join.
That did not make it safe. It did make the next move mine.