Chapters
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Where once the deer had risen up in rage around Jackie, fighting even as they died by the thousands—the death of Ankaa brought a near-instantaneous end. She listened to the veritable stampede of animals away from her, entire tents trampled as they fled.There were many other warriors in many other camps, and it would take a long time for news of her victory to spread. But these at least would be fighting no longer. They didn’t know yet, but if they ran far enough, their children would thank her.In…-
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Jackie’s memories of the Supernal did not prepare her to return to it. It was a land of strange laws, a realm that wasn’t quite physical and not quite simulated either.But she perceived it much as the other Alicorns described it—as an ancient city, ruins in a desert of white sand that cascaded down into an endless abyss. There on the edge of infinity, annihilation was always within reach, while the power to redefine reality itself was also close enough to grasp.Others had reached it beyond the…
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Athena landed in the center of the stage with a thump, staring up at Alex with eyes wide with pain and betrayal. Her sword winked out.For an instant, Jackie let herself dare to hope—no matter how resigned to death she’d become, no matter how many ponies she’d filled with fear and pain with her goodbyes, some part of her still hoped. This would be it. Lonely Day had been so desperate to keep one of her old friends alive that she had found a way to do the impossible and destroy Athena without the…
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Liz stared down at the blade, where it sat on the edge of the little table in her quarters. Most objects from the surface did quite poorly when you brought them into a seapony settlement—metal rusted, silicone rotted, electronics short-circuited. But this knife appeared to be an exception, its metallic construction wasn’t steel and didn’t seem to be corroding.Much like Liz’s faith in Jackie. The bat was still out there somewhere—the Dreamknife had survived so much, how could she be dead now?…
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Jackie felt blood dribbling slowly down one of her wings. It wasn’t hers—she hadn’t been injured, at least not that she could tell. But just because it didn’t hurt didn’t mean that she hadn’t been damaged.She could still hear the gunfire, accelerator rifles firing straight into an unprotected crowd. You have crowd control weapons, you asshole. You already closed the portal. You didn’t need to hurt anyone.She longed for the days of Confluence, the great Central Compiler of the Enduring Ones.…
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The field outside City Hall was completely packed with bodies. Jackie herself had returned to looking like a pony, and wasn’t bothering to hide who she was.They had been prepared to rescue a large number of ponies. Booths were set up around the base of the tree, with housing assignment packets and supplies and everything else their new population would need.There was just one problem: the rescue had gone too well. Some part of Jackie had dreamed that they might, if they were very lucky, double their…
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99.8 K •
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It was positively insane—Jackie knew it shouldn’t have worked. Knew it in the same way that she knew that comfort was good and pain was bad. Yet incredibly, inexplicably, she was discovering she was wrong.“So much of how we live is built on unquestioned assumptions,” Hat Trick explained. “Assumptions about where the world ends, about how power ought to be used, about what can be achieved and what can’t. But the end of one assumption is the beginning of the next great invention. Or the next…
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Things didn’t go nearly so smoothly with all the other dreamcrafters. They had far less experience—in some cases no more than a single night’s accelerated time. But Jackie didn’t have much of a choice, they needed everyone’s work to build before the whole city collapsed.That left a great deal for her and Hat Trick to do, moving between identical sections of city and fixing similar problems. It was the same stuff she was used to with novice dreamcrafters—doors that were just walls, machines that…
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Jackie had preserved Meliora from being completely overwhelmed with refugees… at least until somepony found out they were living in a dream. But she could do nothing to prevent that, nothing besides making sure that the vast population of Meliora received good instruction into the mechanics of their bat pony powers. They would learn the truth, eventually. The circumstances of that revelation would decide whether her attempt to give them somewhere safe to live ended in terrible failure or audacious…
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Jackie had traveled beyond physical space—up above the Dreamlands into the astral, and across distant shores to the supernal. The trip had not made her into one of the semi-divine Alicorns as it transformed so many others who took it, but that didn’t mean she had been unaffected.As she had done during her trip out to the seapony colony, Jackie could change her form. It was simple enough magic—making herself into different characters was one of the most basic lessons of dreamcrafting. All she really…
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