Fragments of memory flooded her mind. A visit to the palace with a group of other new students, now a decade or more past. Hide-and-seek in the corridors. Wriggling behind the self-same wall hanging with muffled giggles. Canterlot burning so much more recently, the white towers and wings of the palace glimpsed through shreds of smoke. Thick blue-gray haze over a town littered with bodies. An innocent filly dead of her wounds and a rough journey away from her ruined home, laid alone and bereft under a pile of stones beside the railroad tracks.