Prologue

They say that war, war never changes, and that is true.

For a given value of true.

It is true that war has led us here. Or rather, our hatred and tears has. It has reduced the most intelligent and inspirational ponies to mindless monsters. And has taken the small and weak to nothingness.

Great minds wrapped in chains of slavery. Cowardice and avarice become virtues of freedom. Lives full of promise ended with a single bullet, while others with no promise force themselves into power at the expense of all.

In the wastelands, herds of brain dead feral ghouls roam and consume anypony they cross, raiders steal and destroy, irradiated mutated beasts feast on the unprepared, and small empires spring from the death of the empire before them.

And yet we hope. We pray to whomever may listen that we may survive, and we fight and we die.

And sometimes, just sometimes, hope finds us.

The mindless, the slave, the dead, and the living. The cruel and the kind, the natural and the artificial. They come together. And perhaps, just perhaps, out of the evil, something good will happen.

For a given value of good.