Fallout Equestria: Begin Again

Chapters

Chapter 3: Sinnerman
Chapter 4: Frontier Psychiatrist
Chapter 5: No Church in the Wild
Chapter 6: Beggar in the Morning
Chapter 7: Gravedigger
Chapter 8: April Showers
Chapter 9: Overnight Celebrity
Chapter 10: So Much for Everyone
BOOK III: LEVITICUS
Chapter 11: Chant Down Babylon
Chapter 12: Atomic Cocktail
Chapter 13: The Last Stop
Chapter 14: When Doves Cry
BOOK IV: THE IDLER WHEEL
Chapter 15: Poetic Justice
Chapter 16: Paper Planes
Chapter 17: Flutterwonder
Last One Out, Get the Lights
Chapter 18: Flight Dream
Fallout... With Ponies!
The Dawn
Chapter 1: Grace is Gone
Chapter 2: The Dead Flag Blues
BOOK II: EXODUS

Chapter 3: Sinnerman

Chapter 3: Sinnerman

“If you aren’t getting your hands dirty, you aren’t making a difference. Welcome to the World.”

|*| Blaspheme Quarantine |*|

Terrible sounds came spilling out of the spaces between their misshapen teeth, as the creatures sang a song of chewed words and swallowed harmonies, like a choir with its mouth full. I hadn’t taken a dozen steps into the seamy underbelly of Equestria before stumbling onto these overgrown maggots, and the sight of them would have been enough to send me running back into the arms of the night, had the fleshy, naked denizens of the subway paid me any attention. But they could only eat, all pushing up against the corpse like surgeons around a body turned inside out, making a meal of it under the same sterile light.

After staring for a while, watching as the dirty corpse was carved into so many pieces between them, I couldn't help thinking that it might still be saved. The dead buck had clearly tried to fight these small, mammalian beasts away, as a bloody baseball bat rocked itself from side to side within a broken circle of limp, pink mounds. As if I had to finish his fight, as if he could still win, I swept up the hickory cudgel, and stepped into the ring with a cry that was more likely to have come from a baby than a barbarian.

My first swing caught one of the rats from the belly up, and even as the little horror started to tear at the bat in a mad panic, I dashed it against the metro wall, and a left a stain over the face of an otherwise gleeful filly, stealing away the joy that she had found in her freshly opened box of Fancy Foal's Snack Cakes. My Pipbuck had counted them off with white bars, but its screen was soon streaked as if I had been crushing berries underhoof, as an octet of beady eyes turned to glare at me over gaping, wet lips.

Their little claws dug into a carpeting of flyers, metro tickets and worn out advertisements, and a trail of blood followed them in wild splotches, as if paper faces could bleed.

The closest of them, who might have passed for a grub, had me skipping over my hooves in a girlish panic. I arced the bat down ahead of me, already cringing, and followed the sound of the rodent's hissing more than I did the sight of its nearly hairless body. As I shut my eyes, and lifted a hoof daintily across my chest, there was a wet splat, and I knew that it had burst: its hide broken like the mantle of a mollusk.

Soon enough, I felt something cold pressing into my flank, and looked back to see a bin set between two bathrooms, over which a mare and a buck stood like a faceless king and his silhouette queen. I let the steel silo of bunched up newspaper and ticket stubs topple to its side, as I batted the third rodent away with limp swings. I was shivering - as I imagined rounded red teeth pressing into me, as filthy, fat bellies rubbed up against my legs - and the baseball bat bobbed in my magic, like ice in children’s champagne.

After dancing back into the ladies' room, I swung the buck’s weapon forward like a battering ram, and slammed the emerald door shut, hoping to hammer in their already blunted snouts. It caught the fourth creature when it closed, and split its body in two like it was a stick of warm butter, leaving me to watch as stubby front legs clawed at the air, and a naked heart painted the tiles red.

I could hear the last rodent clawing at the steel frame between us, and after shutting the squealing foal inside me into her own little filly's room, I helped her turn our panic on its head, and threw myself towards the door, like a mare charging into the orange mouth of a burning building.

The rat seemed a little startled, but I wasted no time before lining up my third strike. The bat came plowing through the mote-dappled air with all the violence that I could cast into it, only to turn up under the neck of our hapless victim. It struck the life out of that naked rodent, and sent a carcass whirling off towards the far wall, which it met with a satisfyingly wet slap, like a trophy fish against a dock.

When my breaths became even, and the walls stopped bleeding, I turned to the bathroom and ducked back into it in search of water, with the baseball bat quivering at my side like a divining rod.

I couldn't hope to wash away all their thick, stagnant blood, but I could tear down the posters that I had spoiled, and bunch them up into crumpled red balls. I could run irradiated water over my inherited cudgel, as if that would make up for the ruin that was left of its old master.

I tore down the cleanest sheet of paper I could find, and used it to cover his swollen, and still so hollow, face. I couldn't make him clean, or put him back together again, unless I were to burn his scattered pieces and sweep them into a single pile of ash. But that too, was beyond me. As even though my magic would hunch over me, with the weight of the darkness of its back, I'd never taught it to play with fire.

*** *** ***

After one last light, which enflamed all my colors as I passed through it, the passage opened out to a tunnel that might have been left behind by an immense worm, burrowing between either pole of a concrete planet. A crosshatched pattern ran along the ceiling, though it was broken up by more than a few pillars of moonlight, which looked to have punched their way through both soil and storm.

Escalators, which had been demoted to stairs by some irreparable motor malfunction, tied the platform that had taken me in to a dissected terminal below. Cluttered railway lines broke apart its fields of cement, and a round wound – a hole in the middle of the terminal - showed off even deeper spaces below.

The southern wall was hidden behind a pastoral mural, whose star was the white silhouette of an alicorn, skipping across a plane of sunrise gold. Her mane was streaked in the colors of a candy store, and a line of smaller figures followed, looking like children for the size of their leader. They waddled along like baby ducks, far clumsier than their mother, and though they had no faces: I knew that they were smiling.

There was no writing on the wall, and even though the air and its silvery dust had left their stains, I found myself feeling very grateful for this masterwork in undiluted patriotism. I was even tempted to salute its featureless Celestia, but instead, I hurried down the steps of the nearest dead machine, as if treating her as a Princess, so much as a Goddess, would be to forever check the box after history of mental illness?

The reason behind the chamber’s atmosphere of discord, had to be the train that lay like the skin of great snake, folded over itself along the terminal’s northern banks. I came to walk alongside it, and searched for what was left of each carriage’s colors, picking flowers after a wildfire.

I could only imagine the train in all its glory, as it rode the country’s untamed landscapes, passing by as a streak of color and steam. It might’ve visited Equestria’s greatest cities - from the capital to those bold installations that straddled the frontier – or bridged settlements like Ponyville and Appleloosa, to see the stiches of a family drawn tighter by the season, all while carrying a market and a circus on its back.

Our six most legendary heroes might even have used it to visit in with the north, to explore the empty relics of that first civilization, now hidden away behind so many masks of stone and pine.

The other set of tracks, which had been buried under a wave of pale rubble, was bare, unfilled by the noisy bustle of cars and their conductor's engines. Still, if I'd wanted to, I could have followed it north, to find the crater into which the sun had tucked itself for the night. I decided that I would walk that way, after paging through all the tunnels and terminals below me, if only so that I might catch up to the day.

There was a map, built into a fat obelisk that pierced the middle of the platform, and it shone out in different colors for every branch of the subway, for each wire across the heart of our country. It didn't make much sense to me, but I found myself easily enough, though it was mostly thanks to a bright, if overexcited, arrow that said: You are here!

Strangely enough, the blue vein that ran from east to west, only met my circuit at the next station up - where it made a cross, as if to say that this was where some great treasure could be found. And I had to wonder what, if not more railway lines, were waiting at the bottom of that second set of frozen staircases.

What might they have buried there, under in this lonely station, whose crown was made of wood, and whose hair was full of worms? Maybe this silent atlas had been wrong to so proudly have declared You are here! Maybe, despite how loudly and how brightly it had said it, I was somewhere else entirely.

*** *** ***

Beams of light, through which stellar clouds were stirred as sugar into a drink, cut down into the dark, bursting out in blossoms of mesh, to which rubble clung like autumn leaves to a branch, though they did little but put a shine to the rubble, making white diamonds out of concrete. Silvery, electric eyes stared down at me from the walls and the pillars that shaped these low and quiet places, almost as if winter itself had followed me like some immense animal, whose steps made no sound and left no paw prints.

I lit my horn, wishing for some heat behind the light, and made out rows of uncomfortable looking benches, some of which had buckled under the weight of concrete boulders. Another skeleton, which looked far happier than that old king in the mountains, made me jump back, startled, as my ring of gold lapped over its hollow face. More of them appeared over the edge of my light, and I crept away as if they were passengers who had fallen asleep, and would only wake for the whistle of a train.

Suitcases lay scattered around them, bleeding old country clothes across the floor, as if the Stable's vultures had taken to sticking their beaks so far under the earth, to pick at Equestria’s gut.

The southern wall was dotted by a parade of bars and newsstands, promising everything from foreign coffee to local gossip. Instead of looking for food, to fuel a body that I had almost forgotten, I followed a trail of words, as if they could be eaten clean off their pages. The world before the war might have been trying to share its secrets from beyond the veil of balefire, for the feast it had laid out for me.

Scrappy blockades of woodwork and wire broke up the terminal, all spreading out from a single restaurant that leaned against the far wall. And I wove around these brief stretched of yellowwood and barbed fencing, making my way towards a colorful magazine stand. But, to my disappointment, there was little that could be learned from the ranks of outrageous headlines, pulp magazines and soft pornography.

Princess Incest: The Bluebloods' Illicit Origins Revealed!

Shining Armor Pregnant: Magical Boosters in the Bedroom Go Awry!

King Sombra Voted Sexiest Monarch: Celestia Outraged!

The flocks of mares who, despite the lascivious names they all straddled, wore more than your average pony on their average day, were really very pretty. And I found myself wanting a mirror, if only to see if, when thrown onto a runway after the old world, I could keep the beat of the crowd’s hooves going. I was sure that I could get my mane like the Mareheat! covergirl’s, if I really put my back into it.

I was surprised, though, to see such a large number of effeminately sprawled bucks, and counted more copies of Inches than any other backshelf magazine. Homosexuality was sometimes discouraged in the Stable, though it might even be called heroic, for how often it had kept us steady. For example, it had never been more popular with the Commissary than after Niagara Foals, the great population explosion whose bulge in the birthrate had set down the groundwork for my parent's bloated generation.

I didn't know the story by heart, but from what I could remember, some kids down in maintenance had started up their own homemade birth control stand - calling it Family Depreciation Day, I think - which boasted: Contraception Guaranteed! When they were caught, it was discovered that they had simply stolen some sugar pills from the hospital, making ashes of their tickets to the new Equestria.

After making sure that there was truly nothing to gain from the other stands, I made my way over to the impoverished estate around which this near industrial hedge maze had been raised.

Circular tables lay scatted around the heart of the terminal, like so many primitive wheels, and I looked over the patched up bar, only to discover that it had once sold milkshakes. There were some cases of ammunition on one of the tables, but after sweeping up a box of shotgun shells, and counting three rounds that were already loaded into my automatic pistol, I left the rest of them be.

It was hard enough for me to imagine pulling the trigger of my pistol so many times, but with the baseball bat, the grenades and the sky devil's laser pistol, I was starting to feel like a walking armory.

A pattern of syringes had been strewn across a nearby counter, as if the ponies of this later day era would come to settle down on the tall, spinning stools and corrupt their bodies with something far more dangerous, and far harder to escape, than sugar. My Pipbuck named two of them Stimpacks, after their insignia of pink butterflies convinced me to take a closer look at them.

The liquid inside them looked so much like healing potion, that I packed them into my saddlebags, but not before making sure that I was alone, as if some tabloid journalist might have been crouching behind the counter since the before war, waiting for some poor pony that he could slap the label Junkie! over.

Over the counter of the milkshake bar, a bear trap had closed up tight around the chocolate, and now shapeless, body of a radroach, and a fine green fluid had come to stain its teeth.

After climbing over the counter, I froze up, as my light fell over the stains across the small structure's farthest wall. As they started to shine, the petals of crimson became tongues of fire; a red mushroom clouds that licked at the bar's ceiling, and stained a glossy menu and a frozen clock as it rose. Like an autumn tree, it took root, though it was not in the earth, but a crater at the end of a corpse's neck.

I felt my stomach churn, and I started to back away towards the counter. The buck lay against a checkered wall, whose pattern of black and white squares had been ruined, with a short, and crudely shorn, shotgun resting along his belly. It was aimed right at the space where - in a time that was any less cruel than this darkest hour before the dawn - his head would have been, and a string had been laced around the weapon's stock, levering the trigger to the buck's hoof in two hastily tied knots.

I threw myself out of the milkshake bar, and retched over the metro terminal's grimy floor. But this sickness hadn't only come for the gaping hole, which was red and wet and bottomless, that had stared me down in the place of a buck. It came from knowing what he had done to himself, knowing that somepony could have thought to throw it all away.

And though shallow tears came to my eyes, for the sharp smell of my own sickness: I couldn't defend him; I couldn't fight for this khaki buck as I had for that feast before the rats. He had done this to himself. And there was nothing I could do to make up for it, to put things right, or pay his debts. And knowing that almost made me bitter, almost made me blame this headless buck for taking the easy way out.

I took his weapon. And even as my Pipbuck named it Sawed-Off Shotgun, I felt no guilt for having it cradled in my magic. I had to take it, as if it wasn't too late to stop him. As if I had to fill his body with buckshot, to punish it just as I had those pink, naked rats, as if some devil might still be pulling its strings, and had to be chased out - exorcised - in a storm of shrapnel over whispered prayers of deliverance.

Just when I had run out of places to hide, of demons to blame, I caught the light of a terminal tucked into the far corner milkshake bar. And seeing it almost made me want to laugh, like a mare stranded on a maddening island watching a spotlight roll towards her over the sea, if only because I had found my chance to justify this, to build a story behind the buck's painting on the wall.

*** *** ***

I met a girl today. Over by the big machines. She was {~}nice to me. She {~} so beautiful.

She was blue. Her mane, her coat {~} eyes. Pale like the stars up north. Where the sky is naked.

I think I'm in love. How long has it been [love] Since any of us wiped the dust off that old word [world]?

I am. [ really am] But I'm afraid of it. What if she won't feel the same way?

I go to her {~} every day. Sometimes more. The clock has stopped. So I can't tell for sure.

By the time the light is flushed down to this place. I know the sun is rolling over us. And I go to her.

But {~} never changes. Not even in the dark. If anything, the night makes her brighter. [starlight]

I need to see her. I always do. I can't remember {~} food. It's like I don't need it anymore.

She is my water [my wine]. And I'm drowning in her. I'm choking on her.

But it scares me. [don't tell her]

She got angry {~} can't go back.

She's still so close. If it weren't for the escalator, I could still watch her. I can't sleep without seeing her.

I should tear it down. [blow it up] . Trap us here. [together] .

Can one prisoner refuse {~} forgive another?

I broke away from the stilted words - which would have fit the frayed edges of a threadbare scroll far better than they did the uniform of a keyboard: the marches of this whispering terminal - and looked back to their writer's corpse. I almost wanted to apologize for blaming him, for thinking he was selfish, as if he'd killed himself just to spite the world. The mind written on the wall was damaged, obsessed, it was sick.

And I could blame a sickness.

She's going to forgive me. [of course]

Everything {~} back to the way it was. [perfect] . I know what I did.

She has her own machines. [friends] . And I upset them. I brought violence {~} their doorstep.

The lights started spinning. She was yelling at me {~} I ran.

Home again, home again. Like the little coward that I am.

I don't deserve a mare like her.

But I won't let her go.

Something's wrong. The siren called them. It [You] brought them here [there].

I watched {~}. Limping, dragging themselves around her machines. I was so angry. [afraid]

They didn't find me. And they didn't find her. Thank {~}, they didn't find her. [yet]

I think I'll leave my {~} here. Maybe she'll show me around the glass [kingdom] places.

She might be angry. But we're running out of time. [the walls are folding in on themselves]

No! [yes] NO! [YES!] nonononooo{~}ooooo...

They found her. They took her. Oh {~}, I think they [ate] took her.

I have to go back. [ north north north ] . To the circles.

But it wasn't my fault. I didn't have my gun. What was I supposed to do?

How could they expect me to save her? She wouldn't {~} with me! She wouldn't listen!

They [You] have to understand! She wouldn't run!

What if {~}? What if they change her? What if they peel off her skin and pull out her hair?

What if they blow out the starlight in her eyes? [like candles]

They could [they will] make her like them... [ dead dead dead ]

I am a coward.

She was {~} good to me. She was so innocent [clean].

But I can't [won't] go after her. This whole installation is sick. Except for her.

I can't go there. Not without [keys to the kingdom] a gun. And that would make her angry {~}.

Even if I saved her. She might not want me.

But it won't be {~} long now.

I don't know what to do.

But I know what I am.

[Coward]

Coward.

I've been here for days [years]. I think I'm dying. {~}, I [know] think I'm really dying.

She was the only thing keeping it away. But I ran {~} and never went back.

I left her. Because I was afraid of the dead.

Soon {~} I'll be just like them. But I'm not afraid of that.

I'm not too much of a coward to die.

[Prove it]

*** *** ***

I set a course for the sunset, as if I could see it through all that rock and metal and ash. It was past time that I threw myself into the mud, to be challenged with all that this headless and heartbroken buck had faced, and win. I had to do better, for his sake, her sake, and my own.

I could make things right. I could save her. I could fight the devil and the sickness that was Death, even though its bony fingers were bent around every trigger, and had never coiled tighter than they did around the gun pointed at the head of the world.

A tall highway, which almost looked like a beacon for the white light spilling out of it, had been cut into the northern wall of the metro terminal, far beyond the benches and boutiques alike. And, no matter how feverishly I insisted that the Stable was fading to a blur behind me, stepping into that world of cleanliness and order, and out of Equestria's quiet anarchy, felt like coming home.

A maze of velvet ropes slowed me down, as I was forced to weave around the borders at my shoulder. Just ahead, was a cabal of breathing, untarnished machines. One promised to swallow up anything placed on its long, black tongue, while another took on the shape of a hollow doorway, though it offered no invitations, and blinked down at me with red-eyed derision.

Beyond these two royal guards, built into the hallway's far wall, wearing a clear visor that caught the ceiling's lights in an alien blue sheen, was some kind of reception booth. And between us, there ran a river of glassy tile, with benches at its banks and a narrow islet - which might once have had bouquets of flowers tucked in between its stones - carved out of its middle.

Every surface was firm, and wore steel where others might have their faults to bear, as if the promised kingdom beyond this blockade was a place left unshaken, even as the world spun out of control.

I hurried along, skipping around the velvet, as the need to discover what these guardians might be hiding made my heart dance to a faster beat. A new light came to life at the end of the line, though it only managed to stay my hooves by taking on the shape of a mare. She wore the silvery blue coat of a galaxy, and looked as if she might be a closer cousin to an Ursa Minor than she was to the Crystal Empire.

A hologram.

"Hello, and welcome to the Installation.” I shook my head, like a dog trying to dry itself off, as the digital mare went on. "Ma'am." She added, after staring me down through sparkling eyes.

"As this is your -" I almost shrank away from the two stars that pierced her face, as they spun over me again. "First visit. I will need to escort you through the necessary security protocols before you move on."

All the life in her voice was wasted, for the hollow in the heart of her eyes, and the smile that had been carved so deeply across her face. "If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to raise them at any time during your visit, and I’ll be there: Whenever you need me." But, for a moment, I stared up at the digital mare in wonder, as if I was trying to remember her name. I met a girl today.

But this wasn't her. It couldn't be. This was a program; a million lines of code molded into our image, and could inspire no more love than a toy soldier or a ragged old doll. But to a child, or even a buck lost in the throes of some delirium... couldn't that be enough?

No. I decided. Nopony could throw themselves into the dark, and lose so much, for the love of a machine.

“Please place your wallets, belts, horseshoes, electronics, hair clips, hoof trimmers and spare bits in one or more of the allocated bins.” Her eyes flickered back to one of the machines, telling me to let it swallow away every piece of Equestria that I'd picked up on my way here. "Alert. You may be chosen to embark on an intensive cavity search with one of our security officers." She added, as if it would be an adventure, or at least a chance to make a friend. "They can be very gentle. Or not. It really depends on you."

I frowned right through her big, covergirl smile, and then stripped myself of everything that might anger this syndicate of machines, as if I was planning to cooperate. Instead, I floated a parade of silver over the security gate, making sure to keep it well out of the sightlines of the machine's cavalier eyes.

*** *** ***

“Please don’t fire live rounds inside the Installation.” She said, without losing the sugar in her voice. It seemed like all the world's wealth might be hidden behind these grandiose blast doors, and I had been trying to break through the blue-shifted glass of the reception booth beside them, as if the keys to this kingdom might still be hanging from a hook somewhere. My baseball bat, turned battering ram, hadn't left so much as a scratch, and now I fired the penultimate round left to my father's automatic pistol.

"Please don't fire live rounds inside the Installation." She said, wringing all of the magic out of that magic word. "It's not that we don't trust you, of course. It's really just the bullets that we have a problem with." She let out a nervous laugh, and, for a moment, had me believing that she was real. "This wouldn't be the safest facility in all of Equestria if we let those angry little things have the run of the place."

I had to imagine that, before the bombs, I would have been buried under a few heavily armored guards by now, as even the digital mare seemed to be tapping her hooves together, waiting for someone big and strong and less concerned about good manners to come and grab me by the collar. I turned to her, with the automatic's barrel pointed up to the ceiling, and asked: "Program, is this glass bulletproof?"

"Security!" She hissed, through the corner of her smile. She had done a good job of making me feel like I wasn't breaking any laws, but as the lights began to spin and an alarm came blaring out to match them, a little surge of guilt kept me from firing the last automatic round. As if to break the window now would leave a sad title branded just after my name, to christen me Grace: A Disappointing Equestrian.

The western wall suddenly started to sing, but only managed to string together a melody of clunky, metallic notes, which sank towards me as if some clumsy windup toy was marching through the ventilation shafts. There was a terrible crunch, as steel met concrete, and the payload that had been so violently launched into the hallway from some discreet hole in the wall finally came to rest.

"Monitor unit unresponsive." I had almost forgotten for how easily the hologram came and went, like a magician leaving behind a trail of starlight instead of smoke. "Monitor unit unresponsive!" She bleated, as if I were a barbarian horde, and not just a mare who'd tried to make a key of her father's pistol.

I hurried over to the battered little thing, which the facility had spit out like the seed of a grape, thinking that I could treat it no differently to something of flesh and blood. A small pool of blue glass shards were all that remained of what, before shattering in the impact, might have been called wings. Now, an array of needlelike antennae poked out of the sphere's back, naked as a plucked bird, and bent out of shape for passing through the Installation's innards. They almost made the thing look like some kind of satellite.

A strange kind of compassion, usually reserved to medical wings rather than garages, came over me as I looked at the machine as a subject of triage. Its body was covered in what might have been called armor, from framework plating to a small satellite poking out like a shield over its brow.

I had taken the wide gap across its front to be some sort of eye, though there was nothing to see in the cavity but an empty heart, as steel rings encircled its lifeless core.

"Unit call sign - Okavango Delta - has suffered a complete loss of motor function." Her voice lost all its character as she gave the little thing a name, and I was almost surprised by how little she seemed to care for it, as if all machines were supposed to get along. "Please dispatch another unit if hostilities continue."

As far as vital signs went: the machine was dead. But as far as machine's went: death was relative. So I fished around in my saddlebags, hoping to make some kind of medicine out of all the parts I'd picked from Acheron's supermarket. "Would you like to talk through these feelings of aggression you're having?" The projected mare asked, as I jammed my screwdriver into something that resembled the hood on a jalopy.

"Please remember that this is not a government facility, and if you are looking to work out any issues you may have with the state of Equestria, or would like to protest the war, you may be in the wrong place." I made out a name through the wires and scavenged battery ports of my patient, even as she spoke it out loud. "Cerberus should not be held responsible for: recent breakups, the deaths of any beloved animals, houseplants and family members, or the decisions of Princess Luna. If you are waiting for your train, I should also remind you that we do not have anything to do with the trains. Please stop asking."

I slid the sensor module and fission battery into place as best I could, and patched everything over with the scrap electronics, treating the procedure exactly like Doctor Cross had her surgeries. I had no particular skill for mechanics - or experience with organ transplants, for that matter - but with no blood, so much as an electric current, pumping through Okavango Delta's system, the operation turned out to be clean, even therapeutic, work: More like solving a puzzle than saving a life.

There was a hum, and the same galactic light that had stitched itself into a mare began to shine out from the sphere, like the fire of a rum lantern. I rolled the little machine around in my hooves, searching for some kind of output, so that I could tap into the spritebot, and change its mind about me. After all, it wouldn't do to have it treating me like some window-hating gunslinger.

After I'd hooked it up to the back console, just as I had to the terminal in my quarters, the screen on my Pipbuck changed, and a long scroll of angry, electric blue runes flashed by like headlights along a highway, or a thousand falling stars after some intergalactic apocalypse.

I saw the word Cerberus blink by a few times, and thanks to what I knew of old mythology, I made sure to count the name in pairs of three.

Call Sign: Okavango Delta

Protocol: Monitor

Operation Permissions: Skeleton Key, Selective Incapacitating, Flightpaths I-VII, Recording

Directive: Suppress Hostilities using Nonlethal Force Self-Preservation: Optional

Known Transgressors: Female, Repeat Offender, Otherwise Undocumented *Database Offline*

Reset Local Data? Tempted by the thought that I might earn myself a monitor, a watcher at my side, I dialed over the option, and washed all of my sins out of the spritebot's databanks. I was expecting to find the servants of death somewhere ahead, all crowded around the crush, the stolen princess, of a headless buck, and I felt a sudden, desperate need to tame Okavango Delta, to have him hanging over me, like a mobile over a crib, as I stayed the trigger finger of Death.

With a jolt, it lifted itself out of my hooves, despite broken wings. From between the broken circles that spun around it, as if in orbit around a pale sun, the machine's starlit heart rolled over to me, and I lit my horn to greet it. The alarms stopped, and suddenly, I knew that I had been forgiven. "Hostiles neutralized." The mare chirped, before breaking up into a storm of windswept constellations.

I stepped away from the floating orb, and it followed, with its light washing over me in waves. "So... did you two ever... hang out?" It tilted over to one side, examining me. "Oh right!" I cried, if only to send a ripple through the spritebot's undivided focus on me. "I'm Grace." I said, as if I'd only just remembered. "From the Stable... The Last Light of Equestria."

Okavango Delta let out a burst of static, and then broke into a song of bold horns and swirling orchestras. I nearly started skipping in place once I'd realized what it was. "That's a Circle of Friends!" There were no voices, but the melody was the very same that had once bound together a nation. "You're a patriot too, huh?" I giggled, as it let out a quick sentence of agreeable beeps.

The gleam of its eye turned away from me, and the spritebot bobbed its way over to those stern-faced castle doors. Suddenly, one of the antenna running across its southern pole cast a beam between them, which fell over itself as if made of sand. "Wait... can you get that open?" I asked, even as Okavango's lion colored light followed the fault between the doors, and parted them like a silver sea.

A corridor of glass opened out before us, and I couldn't help feeling enormously small, as the way ahead had been carved into the shape of a keyhole. And we came into the kingdom as if it were wonderland.

*** *** ***

Are you lonesome tonight?

After a few streams of static, which passed me by like the very trains that had once roared their way through the tunnels above, Okavango Delta stumbled onto Galaxy News Radio, which even my Pipbuck had given up for lost in this deep, guarded place.

Do you miss me tonight?

The wordless croons of so many backups singers and violins echoed around the corners ahead, and I noticed the spritebot swaying, bobbing through the air as if it were water.

Are you sorry, we drifted, apart?

He was taking me to The Circles. Or, at least that's what I had to hope. The old, and somehow babyish, security officer didn't seem all that worried about the mare, and even as I'd tried to tell him her story, he had only gone on digging through the static, looking for this song. If anything, I felt a little jealous of GNR, as it had driven Okavango into the arms of swing music, and away from any interest he'd had in me.

The floor had a thick vein of glass running through its middle, and until the spritebot had dipped down to graze its surface, I had mistaken it for some kind of mirror, though it could only catch the thin lines of light that ran along the walls. Now, as if to make me feel even smaller, I saw another of these magnificent hallways stretching on below us. The two were almost identical, but for the mare and the machine, who were so loud and so bright, that they might have been mistaken for the pathfinders of an astral parade.

After we'd come to a small, circular room, which seemed to have come out of nowhere as another set of blast doors parted before us, the digital mare appeared as a beacon that pierced even the chambers below, like a star to all those trapped inside this labyrinthine place.

"Hello again." Even her voice shone, as if we'd never been anything but the best of friends. "We'd like to perform one last scan before moving on to The Circles. If you would please move to the center of the room, and try to keep at least one of your hooves beneath you at all times." She laughed, and though I had no idea why, as her body stayed eerily still, I caught myself laughing right along with her.

The walls here were often braced by thick bulwarks of steel, but now, the four pillars that had divided this circular room into quarters began to spin around me. And as the mare thanked me, I saw that they were bound together far above us, like the petals of a gilded flower. I held Okavango Delta to my chest, as the roar died down, and the lights fell over us just as they might through the windows of a passing train.

"Congratulations!" The mare cheered, though she'd been blended into strips of code only moments ago. "You are extraordinarily fertile." Okavango wriggled loose, but I let a hoof linger over my stomach, feeling as if I'd just been invaded. "And appear to be in an - acceptable - physical condition."

"...Thank you." I murmured, as the panels behind her slid away, and started to pull her apart.

"Please step out of the Diagnostician. There may be other Cerberus employees waiting to be processed." I did as she asked, though my hooves had become numb for what waited ahead: A chamber, far greater than I had ever seen. A cavity, more hollow than the open sky. "Thank you." She said, even as the walls came hissing down behind me, as if to make a full circle of this place. "And have a great night!"

I didn't see her go, as my eyes couldn't escape the distant circle of glass that looked to be all that remained of a ceiling, for the shadows that lapped over all else. Light, which was threadbare and gold, drew three scars along its face, all laced with what could easily have been scripture, cut into the glass.

To either side, were two bowing giants that might have passed for subterranean mountains, were it not for the geometric designs followed by some ancient architect, the pulsing lines of lights that ran around their feet like discarded crowns, and a voice in my ear that was somehow sure they had been cut out of a primordial metal. Another pair of them sat, far apart from one another, across the chamber, though the distance between us might as well have draped a black curtain across their shoulders.

In truth, the figures looked more like buckled pillars than they did the bodies of any animal; any ancient civilization's entombed kings, but something about the way they had been posed - even through the simplicity of it - Had me seeing giants in a place where even a mouse could not have come.

I froze up again, as I saw everything fall away at the center of the chamber, as if these four colossi had gathered around a firepit, long since stamped out. Remembering the hallways that had run below our own, I looked up to that ring of glass, wondering what could be hidden behind it. "How many circles are there?" I asked, though Okavango had taken to roaming the open meadows of glass and gray.

I heard him beep once, and shivered for every one that followed, until the spritebot had counted to nine. "Celestia..." I said, after realizing that I might as well have remained still, for how far my hoofsteps could take me. To walk into this place, was to paddle into the ocean. "We couldn't possibly have built this."

While staring up at the ring, and feeling only a little reassured to know that, if brought out into the open world, it could not hope to pass over the mountains, I felt movement at my side. “Hey!” I shouted, at first only in panic, but then to call after the closest thing I had to a guide: to an anchor. “Where are you going?”

He had taken off towards the great figure, built from a metal that was not unlike either stone or steel, to our left, and was rising away from the ground as if he planned to fly over its stooped form. “Come back!” I shouted, even as his silvery blue light was washed out. “Don’t leave me here…”

And then, it all came falling in on me, as a thousand devils crept through the shadows, and those four giants looked down on us through scattered eyes, to see the blackness closing in around me, like ants swarming over something sweet - too sweet - something chewed up and spat out.

But, even as I closed my eyes - wishing for sirens and bells to roll through this glass kingdom, and wash away all the brittle insects that I'd imagined - I didn't think of Celestia, or Luna, or the country they had once fought for the love of. I didn't pretend that my mother could be there, about to rock me back to sleep after some misremembered nightmare. All I wanted: was her. I met a girl today.

Pale like the stars up north. Where the sky is naked.

It was her. She is my water [my wine]. And I'm drowning in her. I'm choking on her.

It had always been her. But it scares me.

A crush that could never be crushed. That could never be spoken, one that could never be heard. They would have gone on like that forever, with one loving, and the other caught in a loop. And I had to wonder if It wasn't the finger of death that had killed him, but love: a sickness, a consumption. What if it was Love, smothering him like a hospital pillow under familiar hooves, hooves that he had held, that he had kissed?

And, for being buried in this place, in the lonely underbelly of Equestria, could I really blame him? Be it for painting the wall red, or for throwing his heart before her starlight hooves. How long might it take me? To see this creature - She was {~} good to me. She was so innocent [clean] - as something real?

I don't deserve a mare like her.

But I won't let her go.

I was starting to feel so much like him, as if the weight of Acheron had molded us into the same shape. But there was one thing that still set us apart.

What if {~}? What if they change her? What if they peel off her skin and pull out her hair?

What if they blow out the starlight in her eyes? [like candles]

They could [they will] make her like them... [ dead dead dead ]

The dead, the only hole in his story, in history, that had yet to be filled. The villain of the piece.

How long would it be - before it all fell together - how long would it be.... before they came?

Soon {~} I'll be just like them.

But I was afraid. I was terrified. And my knees buckled, like those of a King, whose cape was torn and whose crown was broken, as a crippled and alien army built a circle of spears around him, all pointed down from a pedestal of trampled bodies: quiet and still as his favorite toy soldiers.

We were, all of us, cowards. And as a single, ivory bar came to spoil the face of my Pipbuck, I started to cry, and had never wanted anything more than to bury my tears in the chest of our digital mare.

But it won't be {~} long now.

I don't know what to do.

But I know what I am.

We were, all of us, cowards. But I was different. I was afraid to die.

"Get up." The words came out flayed, carrying a hundred years of violence and pain with them, as if the body that spoke them had been beaten, abused until even its voice was left with deep, incurable wounds.

I had to look up, for this was not the voice of a demon, or even a machine, this was the voice of a stubborn patient, so proud that he would hoard up his pain as if it were a precious and personal treasure.

But, for seeing what had come to stand over me, I might have let the sickness of the mad dig itself a little deeper into the back of my neck. The body that had spoken could not be fixed, and would find no place in any medical wing or operating table, unless as the subject of an autopsy, as a tool to reinvent our understanding of physical trauma. It was a patchwork pony, a long and sordid medical history flooding a single page, a thousand ugly words made into a picture.

And, like a machine stripped of its casing, it was almost impossible to look away from, as ragged canopies of skin covered its toiling anatomy like torn curtains over the greatest show on earth.

Leather armor, bandoliers and holsters stained in washed out colors, kept me from watching lungs swelling inside its chest. And, if I was any less disgusted, if my vision hadn't begun to blur before the bilious waves of nausea, I might have asked the thing to show me its beating heart.

But its face, its terrible, naked face, was enough to dry my eyes as if by drought. One side of its muzzle was entirely skinless, and a skeleton's smile, covered over by rippling red tendons, wore down on me. What remained of a copper colored mane did little to hide the space between its raw and unchaste temples, where a skull looked to have been excavated like the ruins of some precedent civilization.

Worst of all, were its eyes. Pupil and iris had washed over one another, and a black lake was spoiled by irascible clouds of dirty green, as if the iris had been pierced, left to spill its sickly and radioactive waste into the water. But I still knew this: There was life somewhere under the surface, and it was drowning.

I wanted to run. But my hooves might as well have been sinking into the steel meadow, as if those four giants spit new life into the firepit between them, to bring an incredible heat to The Circles. I was shivering like a sick dog, knowing that all my weapons were useless now, as none could do more damage than had so clearly been done before. I wished it was dead, truly, but the sour light in its eyes took even that from me, and as it stepped in a little closer, I could only will the bones in its leg to snap.

The Faith had their demons on the hide of damnation, their monsters on the dark side of the moon, and a thought started to gather strength, and fought through the confusion from the back of my mind: They were right. I shut my eyes, as if I could block out these dungeons to a glass kingdom, this library to our sins.

My hunger, my fear and the sickness began to circle around one another, like three predators envying all that they saw in the others, or three caustic tribes planting their stakes into my heart. They pooled inside of me, and all their colors mixed together - to gray. As if to aid in my escape. I was going to faint, and I couldn't shake the feeling, even as consciousness fell into a shambles, that I had found the easy way out.

*** *** ***

"Talk to Damascus." I opened my eyes even as I was dropped, and saw the world fall away beneath us. With a swift kick, as if to fight off the panic that this great height sent screaming through me, I realized that I had been thrown onto a glass surface, and almost found a sense of calm in the rings of scripture that laced its far edge. The pain in my hoof had already started to fade, but I found myself clutching on to the only solid thing that I could find: a disfigured leg. "Talk. To. Damascus."

I couldn't be sure whether the voice's master had shaken me off, as if I were some overloyal pet, or if I had pulled myself away in a fit of girlish disgust. I knew better than to look up - than to submit myself to the sight of that living cadaver - and so lay still until the scent of death had left the air.

The weight of that tricephalic sickness didn't leave me so easily, but I managed to climb onto uncertain hooves, and found my place in the middle vein of three, like rivers of ice that were clear enough to reveal the impossible depths below. I recognized the strikingly wide ring of glass then, as the very face that I'd looked up to from that nameless underworld, and as I rose, I saw another beast of the same blood.

An enormous window had been cut out of the ringroom's plated walls. It was wounded, and let in a tide of rich, primordial light, as deep scars ran around its edge and caught the colors of whatever bygone world had been shut away behind it. And even on my hooves, with my head held high, I felt like a beggar.

"Hell doesn't offer welcome to its visitors with any kindness. But the time for introductions, so much as kindness, is already running out. Yours is not a position that I would wish on anyone, as even on escaping this place, you will carry precious little in the way of answers. But for now... here you are."

His voice took root somewhere deep within the Stable, and every deliberate word it spoke didn't seem to fit with the leering threats and fearful cries, the wild gunfire and the howling cities, of this great Equestrian storm. It sounded so collected, so controlled, so unlike them.

I found the buck, standing near the edge of both windows, beyond that which opened out to the darkness below, and before that which held a flood of light at bay. His stance was firm, and I followed wounds that rose to coil around his body, as if sprouting from the seeds of damnation beneath us.

Much of his coat had been peeled away, almost as if the buck was more scars than he was skin. They ruled him, taking everything but the remains of his sandy, and now discolored, coat, to leave him standing before me as something long since burned away: A desert put to the torch, buckling before a season of plagues, stripped bare by a hundred passing locusts, trampled under a thousand hooves in exodus.

The shadows falling over his body only seemed to hide what little he had left, but, despite it all, I felt safe before his blue, atmospheric eyes. Flecks of that all too familiar starlight shone out of his irises like scattered diamonds, though even beside that digital mare, they might seem alien, as if plucked from the empty spaces beyond the edge of the sky.

"If I could give you anything: it would be time. But with the Slavers bound for this very station, and how close we've come to the end of our peace with them, I cannot even offer you that. We need to begin." This kingdom, for all its lies and labyrinths, was his. And, as I listened to his firm, familiar voice, I knew that he had tamed it. "Dies Irae venient, per verbum Deae."

"You're from the Stable." I said, as if our steel door had been the only thing to keep that dead language from being stamped out. "The days of wrath are coming, by the word of the Goddess." I couldn't make anything of the old words alone, as I knew them in pieces, but that phrase had left its mark on history.

"Very good." I might have felt like a filly again, standing in front of the class or before the pages of a hymnbook, if it weren't so hard to leave this place, to imagine myself away from him. "You still wear that place across your chest, over your heart. But I didn't think it could be found so easily in me." He lifted his hoof without flourish or flair, and I saw that he wore no Pipbuck. It didn't take me long to understand why.

The symbol on his flank looked like a brand, as it was black and burnt, and it was possible that it had been seared into his skin. It was a cross. The same cross that lay tilted across my father's coat, that the Faith would piece together out of scrap so that it might bear witness to their sermons. And then, a thought injected itself into my mind: A terrible, mad thought. And it left me so hollow, so afraid, that the buck, this sinner who could have beaten the path to my own exile, saw it, gathering like a storm around me.

"How long has it been?" He asked coolly. "How many years have passed since he was damned?" Damascus tilted his head, leaving me little to see but for the microcosms in his eyes. "Unless you're following old hoofsteps, unless they still remember me in there: I'm not the one you're looking for."

"My father." The words slipped out of my mouth, like pieces of hard candy, and I felt a desperate need to gather them up: to get them out of sight. "He stitched your cutie mark, the cross, into the side of his coat." But in truth, it had been Faith that left the mark on both of them.

"You aren't interested in finding him." I could feel him reading me and, for a moment, wished that the light might turn, like sunset to sunrise, so that it could be my face that was hidden, and his that lay bare. "That's good. History will leave more than its share of dirt on your hooves. Better to keep them clean..."

"For now." He added, as the window's light met the shine of his eyes, falling over a cheek that had been left shallow and purple by an unevenly stacked cairn of scars. "The Stable has already left us to this dead valley, forgotten our names as they have with all the damned. But, for you, to become a killer before the eye of the world, in the name of the Goddesses, is something that remains to be done. To them, your soul is white. And for them, it must be stained." I almost took a step back, as if frightened by the turn he'd taken. "This country will be clean again. Even if we must carry the weight of its filth on our own bodies."

It almost sounded like he was talking about the dawn, about Equestria's new beginning, though I had to work through the Faith that wove around his words, as if they were all drawn from that dead lexicon.

"There is too much that you need to know, things that you might not find out in time." I saw him glance back at the window, as if it had begun to groan for the weight of the light. "There is an evil that is pressing its teeth into the earth. And we have no choice but to face it. That your arrival so closely matches their own should not be ignored. You were meant to be used against them."

I could see his mane now, as the window lit up a neat wave of gray, whose breakers had lost their color. It might even have been combed, and I had to hope that my own hair looked half as well put together. After seeing so much of his face, I couldn't help thinking that Damascus was the old world, dragged through the new. The buck would have been very handsome, with the good looks that had become timeless when time stopped, just as Equestria would have been very beautiful.

Neither had lost their charm. It had just been changed, reshaped by the hands of Fallout.

"I wouldn't have left without trying to help." I said, like a mare poking fun at herself. "What can I do?"

"There is a train, the Coltilde, that runs a ring from here to Equestria's heart." To hear him call the country by its name, to hear it spoken in this glass kingdom, almost made me feel homesick. "It crosses the hinterlands of the North, carrying ponies, stolen from every settlement that is subject to its cycles. Those who fall victim to the disease and abuse that have poisoned the train's belly, are thrown from it, left to litter the earth along the rails. The rest are taken to a place called The Pens, in the west, and are hoarded in flea-ridden barracks and chain-link hostels. Kept as animals in the shadow of a crippled machine."

Slavery was an industry now, as if some sovereign had thrown our trains from the tracks, only to replace them with beasts of metal and chain and smoke. I didn't know what I felt then. If it was anger, I couldn't harness it. If it was despair, it wouldn't slow me down. But both sides agreed: this train, this Coltilde could not be left to leech of our country, like a dark haired monkey picking food off the bodies of its sleeping parents, stealing ponies to satisfy its ugly hunger.

"There are secrets buried here," He ran a hoof around the great, glass ring - almost lovingly - tracing the scripture. "Secrets that I have only kept safe with hired guns and scavenged power, that I must stop them from discovering. We came to a shallow sort of peace, the Slavers and I. We made a deal. But the time to put an end to their rule over the North, to take back the reins, has come." I shivered, thinking myself lucky for stumbling onto this young revolution. "And no tools are too foul to aid in paving our way to the dawn."

But for now, as the Faith so often said, luck looked to have very little power in the world. "Tools?" I found myself ready to take orders from Damascus, ready to look at this great chamber as a throne room. As one thing was clear: He was not the King bending his knee in that circle of spears. "You mean... killing?"

"When the Goddesses can be so dejected, when they can have fallen so far, as to need our help... we must be ready to do everything, and anything, just as they once did for us. The coming train would have sown its evil without me, but to house it, to feed it.... to use it: That takes another kind of strength." The light behind him seemed to grow brighter, and colder, as if its gold was wearing away.

"When the dawn comes, and it will come, it will not be as it was in the beginning. When a new sun rises as the carriage to a returning Goddess, it's face will not be white. The light at the end of this will be as the bodies and the hearts that it is cast over, as the country it will wake. Even the light - will be dirty."

The Kingdom of Glass came full circle then, as I followed the patterns of naked flesh, of lavender bruises, along Damascus' body like burnt sand. This place was not only his throne room, but his prison. And it occurred to me that, in the eyes of any doctor, his was a frame that would wear bandages in the place of skin, that could not be left so bare, except in a place like this.

Except in a place whose air was sterile, and whose architects might have built a thousand other holy cities in rehearsal: A place whose gates were guarded by machines and the standing dead, and whose light was galactic. “Just point me in the right direction.”

“I wonder if I am.” He came to where he had begun, where I imagined a throne might stand. "We all go through periods of darkness. In such times we can always turn to the Goddesses, but it is good to have friends.” He recited, turning away from the aureate wall of glass. “Friendship... There is a tool that can tend the soil, that can steer storms and pull the constellations across the sky, a tool that might truly be clean. And for that, to see us wielding that sword and that shield of a thing, you will serve."

I heard it then, like a panting animal, a sound that fell over itself as if it were a river swollen with debris. And over it, came the scream of a whistle, which might have shattered all these ancient faces of glass, to bring the kingdom tumbling down, like a castle made of sand.

"Charon will guide you to the surface." And then, all at once, I knew the sound, and felt it pressing against his window like a palm. I could only imagine the Coltilde as that enormous worm, tearing through the planet like an apple, following the tunnels that it had carved so many years ago. The train was coming. "When he leaves you, make your way along the highway. Follow it East. There is a gateway across the road. Go there. And, though it is a wild and unwelcoming place, it will be your Temple of Trials."

The turn of its wheels grew louder in swells, as if a narrow army were marching through the tunnel, with every soldier chanting the name of their King, raising their voices together, so that the sound of the front line hit us first, even as the others came rolling after it.

"But wars aren't won by diplomacy." At a gesture from Damascus, I felt death come to plant itself beside me, to prove that it would not pass like any other nightmare. "There is a church on the far side of Hell, and in it are all that I have to call allies: though they are only with me for their own avarice. Speak to the Quartermaster. He can prepare you for what must be done."

“Follow me.” Its voice said, bringing a threadbare muzzle close enough to send shivers down my spine.

“Wait." I managed, though I couldn't know if I had spoken only so that Damascus wouldn't turn his back, leaving me to the servant that I had named Death. "What's down there?" I asked, with one hoof tapping at the scriptured glass, and the chamber that it revealed below us.

"I don't know anymore." The damned of some primeval generation answered. "The Circles are too irradiated for anyone but the ghouls, and even they will only venture there when the path has been paved with gold. You barely made it out with your life, and had not yet strayed from its rim." I couldn't remember if my Pipbuck had been ticking, and if the majesty of it all was enough to leave me deaf to its warnings. "But the Goddesses would not have left it to us, they would not have steered us here, if its gates weren't meant to be guarded. This place cannot be surrendered: it cannot be lost."

With another, desperate scream, which sounded eerily like an animal trying to speak, a mist began to rise around the window's edges, and cast great, billowing shadows across the glass throne room.

The howl of the whistle, with its chorus of metallic chugging, spun down into silence. It almost felt like this bestial machine had brought all the cold and the dark of the night with it, as if it carried a part of that great storm on its back, and an inconsolable sense of dread took root somewhere deep inside of me.

The Coltilde was unlike any other Equestrian machine, any other Equestrian animal, and though I couldn't see it: I knew that it was black, as it drained the color in the air, and left us with white lights and choleric pillars of smoke. I found myself stepping back into the palm of death, and looking at him like a friend.

“We’re out of time.”

Footnote: Level Up!

Perk Added: My Little Leaguer: +5 Melee Weapons, +5 Explosives, +10 Damage when using Equestrian Baseball Bats

Chapter 4: Frontier Psychiatrist

Fallout Equestria: Begin Again

Chapter 4: Frontier Psychiatrist

“Shh… We’re hunting shitheads.”

|*| The Rook |*|

“Does it hurt?” I had to ask, though his body looked like a shipwreck, hauled up onto the shore. “I mean, can I help you somehow?” The ghoul’s attention stayed locked on the door, and even in spite of that, the door stayed locked. The glass kingdom was far behind us now, as our escape had taken us out of the shadow of the night train, and that strange world of sanitation and insanity: radiation and ancient magic. "You can trust me: I'm a doctor." I barely got the words out without giggling. I'd always wanted to say that.

Whenever I got too close to Charon, my Pipbuck was quick to scold me- You should know better than to hang around with boys like him - and now that, through one word answers, I had learned a little more about what he called ghouls, I knew why. Still, it felt wrong to stand by, without casting so much as an anesthetic spell, and watch him go about saving me with his insides out.

The Slavers were somewhere above us now, as the utility tunnels were like arteries branching out from a heart, and only led us farther from Damascus and the devils before the eye of his window. My fear had left me, as the lights changed to match those of Acheron's Supermarket, and my company treated me more like a stranger than a victim, even as the diagnostic playhouse that was his body distracted me.

"There's a scar on your hind leg that I could probably fix up for you." I said, after skirting around the pale of his gut. He was like some troubled child's oldest plush animal, and would be hemorrhaging stuffing were it not for the age of his wounds. "Or not." Another of his bobby pins had broken, and I heard him mutter an unfamiliar word to himself. I didn't think it could be found in any hymn or holy book.

I got the slightest impression that I was annoying him, but the buck seemed reluctant to express himself much farther than a passing scowl or a curse word uttered under his breath. He might have been called a consummate professional, a hired gun who never questioned his orders, but to me; there was something unsettling about Charon's loyalty to that all powerful Contract. He almost seemed... brainwashed.

The lock clicked, and even then he didn’t smile, but only peered into the hallways ahead, with no expression but for those that had been carved across his face. "There will be ferals here." He said. "Keep that shotgun ready. They might pick up your scent." I floated out the fourth of my inherited weapons, and bent it apart to check the chamber's load. It sounded like some kind of animal tribe had overrun this place, turning it into a wilderness outside the Kingdom's walls. "They're faster than they look."

I didn't think to ask why they might only be interested in me. As I’d already come up with my own, slightly immodest, reason: If I was to come upon an apple orchard, would I really go to a tree whose branches were stricken but for a few, shriveled and discolored fruit? "You have a weapon too, right?"

"I'll keep you alive."

"What if I get injured?" I wondered aloud, worried for what bedlam the green motes that lingered in the air might wreak if swallowed up into a flesh wound. Not to mention the diseases that these ferals might carry.

"That shouldn’t be a problem: You’re a doctor.” So the wheels of our friendship were a little slow to start spinning, there had never been a rusted wheel that the oils of my charisma could not get unstuck!

... Despite thoughts like that, it was nice to have that old electricity coursing through me again, just as it had for every mail delivery to the Overmare, every odd job that I'd made into a mission. And it was no wonder that my fear had been so cleanly cut away. While I had once played the part of a nurse, and more often of a nuisance, now: I was a soldier in Equestria’s army, feeding the fires of her dawn.

Damascus would not be afraid of these wild things in the darkness, he had stayed behind even as that train had come, carrying winter on its back. He would not even think to flee in the face of the devil. "Charon..." I began, worried that I wasn't saying it right. "Can you tell me more about these ferals?"

He didn't answer at first, but then raised his voice until it sounded like it was hurting him, as if throwing his words down the hallway as bait to some hungry, crouching beast. "They've been down here since the war. All this radiation came from a balefire bomb. Set off inside the Installation. Wouldn't be surprised if they were the ones who pushed the button." Wait... ferals were - "Get ready."

A long, rasping sound came pushing through the shadows, and was soon followed by a rhythm of wet, keyed up hoofsteps, as if water that had become heavy with filth was dripping from a broken valve. They carried a figure into the light, and I looked on it as one might a miracle, and the fingers of death seemed to loosen around the world, as if his long and uncontested reign was finally slipping away.

As my eyes followed so many naked tendons - the long, wormy things that made up its body - waves of sickness came over me, though they were sluggish and meek, and only made me sway on my hooves.

There was no character left in this abomination's face, no sense that he had ever been more than a corpse, and unlike Charon: there was no color in its eyes, no life that could be seen drowning.

Without thinking, I swung the shotgun around, and felt the cradle of my magic shatter as it fired. It hurt me, as something like an intense heat shot through my horn, and I watched a hundred pieces of gold melt into the air. The feral stood for a while longer, though the top of its skull had been cracked open before a red smear, and its eyes were dancing around one another, like a pair of dice at its hooves.

It fell like a statue, lifted from its pedestal by a crowd of revolutionaries, and then lay still. “Is it dead?”

I had to ask, as all medical law seemed to have been thrown out of the window long ago.

Tic, Tic, Tic. “I feel nauseous.” I added, as if translating for my Pipbuck, and Charon began walking down the very hallway whose shadows had birthed that awful thing. He kicked one of its hooves out of the way, but walked through the blood as if it were water. “We should try to find something for radiation sickness.”

“Radiation heals ghouls.” … Out the window, off the rock, and into the bonfire. Nothing but junk science. “Speak to the Quartermaster in the church outside of town. He’ll sell you some RadAway.”

We passed an open doorway and, for the light that came flickering through it, I could make out shelves running across almost every wall. "Couldn't we just dig around for a minute?" The smell of blood, coupled with the irritable ticking of my Pipbuck, had made the sickness inside me all too clear. It felt like I'd swallowed a balefire bomb, only to have it detonate, balloon out my middle, and leave me smoking from the ears like in the comic books. "Please." I added, borrowing a cup of sugar from that digital mare.

"I'll go on ahead and clear out any ghouls between us and the stairwell." He bowed his head, as if I were a princess to the Glass Kingdom, and had to be served the world on a silver plate. I wanted very badly to hug him then, though the hallway had almost started to spin. "I was ordered to escort you out of Hell. A corpse cannot be escorted. Follow your compass south, and come find me when you are done."

"Thank you, Charon. Thank you thank you thank you." He barely nodded before marching off into the whispering dark, but I knew that we were going to be the best of friends one day.

The room was more than a little underwhelming, compared to everything else I'd seen tonight, but I counted on a medley of cases, from medical to military, and plenty of overthrown lockers to root around in. A scream went tearing through the hallway behind me, and though it had come from the mouth of a warm gun, I pulled myself out of the steel cabinet in a flight of paper and dust, as if to watch it passing by.

Charon might as well have been in a slaughterhouse, with the ferals playing the part of so many hapless animals. They would stand idly by, as he brought the barrel of his shotgun near, like the edge of an ax. They looked at him as family, or at least as tribe, though he was a wolf wearing their costume of death.

Ignoring the shotgun, like some abrasive house guest in the other room, I struggled to get open a bottle of Rad-x, which I had to hope was better than too little too late. As my magic gathered like a storm around the pill bottle, I began to think that, in the years before the war, our best scientists had not been working on the development of superweapons and megaspells, but childproof lids.

I took more of the pills than I should have, and one dissolved before I could swallow it, leaving the taste of something bitter spread across my tongue. Then, I moved on to a large, black safe on the other side of the room. Its door had been twisted clear of one of its hinges, and lay at its side like a battered shield. If nothing else, it was nice to see that I wasn't the only doing things the indelicate way.

Holy Smokes! I thought, as I poked my head into the safe. Money! Lots and lots of money!

There were entire rolls of those famous golden coins, like pillars of gold in some dragon's cavernous lair. After floating out one of the bits, and saluting the face encircled within it, I hit the coin against my teeth. I didn't know what this was supposed to accomplish. And it hurt. But I knew that it had to be done.

I built a city in my saddlebags, which shone as if waking to the light of its first sunrise, and I even put in a district especially for Charon. I was sad to see it collapse, to see it melt down into an ocean of gold. But, as the cold groped at my neck, I knew that this was not the place to play Princess.

Something stirred in the hallway, and my nose was caught under the lid of a metal case, for fear of the noise it would make as it slammed shut. I put out my horn, and willed the fluorescent lights above me to stop blinking. Something was breathing. I heard a hoofstep, colored by the same moistness that brought images of stripped bone and softened muscle, of lumbering, to mind. I closed the box with my magic, and then crept over to the room's farthest corner. But the hoofsteps didn't wait for me to find a place to hide.

They carried It to the doorway: a lurching figure whose head hung low and from whose flesh burst broken bones, to give it the silhouette of something brittle and disfigured whenever the lights cut out. Its face was caught in a smile that could never be flattened, and as it slid up against the hallway’s wall, and let the blood that I'd painted there leave its mark, I might have thought the ghoul was laughing.

An unfinished suit of cloth and metal armor held the thing together, and I couldn't say whether the green underneath it came from old strips of skin, or simply poisoned flesh. The ghoul's eyes had been corrupted into a beautiful and absolute blue, like the surface of some sacred water. And, with a snarl that might once have been a word, they tripped over me – as if over toys in a dark room - and I was found.

I swept up the box's lid in my telekinesis, and flung it at the hollow face of this ancient Equestrian, like a square discus. It smashed the things empty expression into pieces, and brought a lilt to its smile.

As if I'd knocked what was left of its mind loose, the ghoul rocked back onto its hooves: stunned.

I threw myself towards it, and had the shotgun pressed up under its front leg as I turned towards the south, charting a course to Charon. I felt its ribs break as I fired, and the weapon dug its way a little deeper into the abomination's chest, pushing past ruined bones and untethered flesh like a hammer.

Finally, the feral began to bat at my weapon, even as it bobbed along behind me, with one side of its arcane cradle wearing thin as I sank deeper into the station's utilitarian belly. The shotgun was a crude thing, difficult to rearm and slow to follow one roar with another, and I quickly decided that it was worth less to me than my tail. I thrust it back in one final blowout of telekinesis, hoping to knock the ghoul's jaw clean off. I only heard it groan, and let its warped voice grow soft for the distance growing between us.

A hallway barreled through the passage ahead, and I drew my father's automatic pistol, as if expecting to find more of death's disharmonic instruments around the corner. Even with three rounds left to the gun, I came to a stairway at the end of my chosen path, and turned to fire a light into the darkness that was biting at my flanks. The ghoul came tearing past the pipelines and meshwork floor, throwing its weight from wall to wall like a cripple without his crutch, or a drunk without a friend in the world.

The first round buried itself into the creature's shoulder, and the second passed right through one of its knees. My Pipbuck had nothing to say, though I'd expected it to congratulate me for breaking a bone, or cutting through some vital muscle. Anything that might mean this tireless thing could be slowed down.

I was down to my last bullet, but knew that it was too precious, too perfect, to do anything but put an end to this. I backed towards the well-lit stairwell, not bothering to dance around the stains that spoiled the concrete, and felt nausea pushing its ugly hooves into the folds of my magic, making the pistol sway. The feral pounced, far too late, and I saw it stumble, to crush the spot that I'd only just escaped under its weight.

I swung the automatic in a little closer, and fired into its neck.

I tried, and failed, to backpedal up the stairs, and only managed to bruise and batter my tired, irradiated body even farther. I had started to fight for even the shortest breath, beginning to realize that I was going to die, and tears swelled up to warp my killer into something soft and formless. The feral's voice had been left in ruins, and the raspy howl that came then was almost pathetic, as it climbed its way out of a pierced throat. The hole I'd left was larger than the unraveled flesh around it, and I had to think: This isn't fair.

This unendable beast of peeling skin and broken bones reared up the stairs, and struck me across the stomach, imparting the terrible force of a hundred-year hunger. With all four hooves off the ground, I was smashed into the wall of wire and layered steel, and I imagined my spine snapping at its touch.

Another feeble rasp spread itself thin across the hallway, but the hot, fetid breath that I'd expected to beat down on my senses did not come. The hoof that still pressed into my belly seemed to have lost all of its violence, like a cudgel that had slipped loose of arcane fingers, and I soon realized that the ghoul's limb had broken apart at the joint, leaving only a severed foreleg, going limp on top of me.

I began writhing like a filly with a spider creeping down her collar, and threw the broken stilt down the stairwell, where its cripple of a master lay waiting, as if it might put itself together again.

The ghoul was slumped over a thin railing that followed the walls, trying to pull itself up, as the rest of its severed leg pumped beneath it. I cycled weapons, without thinking to dam up the tears that were still running down my face, and finally defaulted to the baseball bat.

I stood up, as something like fear flickered into its bloated blue eyes. We both knew that this was over.

After bringing the weapon to bear, as if it were an enormous axe, I swung it down across the feral's already hollowed out neck, letting myself slip into the role of executioner, though a country in the throes of war and so many years of poison had already tried, and failed, to do the same to this corrupted thing.

The light left its eyes, and that was enough to make me feel like I'd killed him... like I'd murdered a pony, who had for so long been kept a prisoner inside a husk of his old self. And, for that, I let myself cry.

I don't know how long I stayed like that, hugging the baseball bat as I curled up against the stairs, but with mangled words and a rough shake, I was pulled back into the dank of Equestria's underbelly. "Shut up." Charon hissed. And I tried to obey, if only for the uncut emotion in his voice. "Shut. Up." It wasn't anger: For anger, I might have gone on crying. This was fear. "Reaver... We need to leave. Now!"

*** *** ***

The world was sick. And I'd never seen its affliction so clearly painted, as it was across the skies of Hell. The storm still wore its bruises over streams of moonlight, the mountains and the night behind them stood like walls around the valley, the streetlamps drowning out in the East were white and feeble, and there was a perfect, but broken, circle scratched into the earth, though nothing looked quite as sick as the town inside the lines. We stood at the edge of it, on one of the ridges that had drawn this ring into the valley.

I watched Hell in its insomnia, watched it from our perch outside the ruins of the outskirts, from the stone collar that had kept the settlement below from spreading. The stone line poking out of the hillside almost seemed like a blessing now, a savior for the quarantine that it had enforced on this malignant tumor.

We had come up out of the earth as if it were water, escaping a name that was no less forbidding than Leviathan, and now stood halfway up the hill that wore a church as its crown. At the center of the suburban wreckage before us, were great plateaus of concrete, foundations that broke through soil and stone to cradle the secrets of Cerberus and its underworld. Crowding these stages, all separated by empty roads and staircases, were more buildings than I’d ever expect to find in a place so unwelcoming. And to see them was to look upon the homeless, loitering before the mouth of a sewer, like pastry crumbs around lips.

Apart from the collapsing houses that surrounded it, I could not see this place as a city or a settlement, but only as something military or penitential. A great fence surrounded the concrete fields, guarded by brittle watchtowers, barricade walls and countless warning signs. To Charon, whatever Hell had once been meant very little now, but he was nice enough to explain this new, and far more anarchic state.

"Damascus owns the Installation. But he’s the only one who wants it." The ghoul began. "The South side of town, everything under the white lights, is Raider territory. The North side, where the air is green, is infested with Ferals. But when the coin’s tossed, and lands wrong side up: it all goes to the Slavers.”

The north side leaked, as every one of its whitest lights had been buried under a film of sickly smoke, like stars in a stellar nursery. Crimson shone out from the south, as alarms whirled on in silence, to make silhouettes out of strung up corpses and crucified skeletons. It was all so far away, but I could almost count their ribs for the glare of the floodlights behind them. The wind hummed over this heart of darkness, loading the corruption onto its back, smuggling Hell’s sickness out into the country beyond the ring.

“Where are all the ponies?” I asked, fencing out Raiders and the hostile dead.

"On the Coltilde." He turned, as if he could just leave it at that, and stepped out into the middle of the street. It would lead us up to the church, whose golden blood made it seem like the only unspoiled place in this valley of gutted ruins and crowded hostels of violence. "Come on." He called back to me, like a buck leading his daughter away from something that only she, like all children, was still enraptured by.

Before we got close enough for me to get a better look at either the crumpled church or the Hell stretching out below it, Charon swerved to the left, circling the outskirts of this bastion with me in tow. We hopped over a broken wall that served as the lot's outermost boundary, though it was little more than blasted brick and jagged fencing. As I glanced over my shoulder, I could make out a distant whale's mouth coming up towards the East, and saw it lapping at the flatlands with the steel tongues that were its railways.

I soon caught on to what we were walking across, and my path became broken and complicated for all the graves that I had to avoid treading on. The ghoul didn’t seem to care, and ploughed over the sacred ground as if tilling it in preparation for the next season's harvest. It was a little strange, to see a walking corpse being so callous to those who slept below, as if he was mocking them for giving up so easily.

With my eyes climbing steeples and counting wooden bones, I nearly fell into a hole in the earth. Charon had pulled opened a cellar door, and now waved me into it, as if we hadn't just come up from under the soil. The passage into the church had been built of cobblestone, and I kept my tail brushing up against one of the walls, just to make sure I had something to follow. "Lot of ghouls up there." Charon said, plainly. "More bucks..." He looked me over. "No point trying not to draw attention."

He touched me, almost exactly as my tail lost the wall, and we stepped out into a broad space whose ceiling was crossed by fissures of light, from which their voices fell like gravel. With a hoof tucked behind my forearm, Charon walked me across the room, as if I was the earthy bride to a subterranean wedding. "Get what you need. And get it all. You don't want to come back here alone."

We began on our way up the stairs. "I guess we're gonna have to go our separate ways after this." I said, with a sad smile. "I know we got off to a... rough start." The buck grunted, and I couldn't help letting a little bit of laughter trickle over my voice. "But I'm glad I met you, Charon."

Without a sound, he let me go, and pushed his shoulder up against the door that lay slanted over our heads. I felt nervous. As if I were stepping out into the spotlights of a stage, and not the fires of a holy place turned barracks. I heard rifle's clicking like cameras, and lifted a hoof over my eyes as if to shield them from a thousand blinding flashes. But then, Charon muttered something, and pulled me out into the disarray of pews and crude barricades that divided the church's once spacious antechamber.

Ashen banners had been slung over both sides of the patchwork wall, and I mistook the pale animal rearing along the length of them for a three-headed lion, penned up inside the lines and gilded laurels of a broken circle. Both of the weary looking flags had been pinned down under the weight of the ramparts, which were built of everything from the limbs of disassembled Securitrons to a statue of a Princess, whose name could not be guessed for a coat of paint that had long since melted to gray.

There were heads along the wall, and before I caught their clogged-up ghoul’s eyes following us through the gateless barricade, I saw them as trophies on the tips of spears. There were more of them on the other side - where the pews had been swept up into the corners, like pieces of driftwood from a shore, and now sat on pillars of scripture, as if a thoroughfare of heretic bonfires were about to be lit.

It became difficult to remember that these ponies were not on the side of death: but had only cheated it.

They wore barding that was equal parts cloth and plate armor, though the two became hard to tell apart for the weight of an innumerable concert of war. Some had the white lion standing proud on their shoulder and chest guards, or warped along the folds of a cowl, caparison or even a makeshift pattern of gauze. While others, had the name Cerberus stamped along the corners of gas masks, the pockets of satchels or the bandages that coiled around crooked limbs, skinless necks, and even cleaved faces.

But, as if in place of any distinct uniform, they all looked to be covered by more clips of ammunition and holsters, by more bandoliers and belts and bucklers, than the soldiers in the posters and the knights in the storybooks combined. Some had rifles that matched the length of a sword and its scabbard, while others tucked their halved shotguns or heavy pistols away like daggers in the folds of their barding.

We didn't stop moving, and I sometimes had to skip to stay in formation at Charon's side, even as I tried my best not to meet the fog of overcast eyes that had gathered around us as we walked through the church. The entire aisle smelt of ethanol and smoke, of fermented fruit and fermented bodies, of ash and sawdust, and the narrow carpet was like a red sandbank, with tides of playing cards, bullet casings, hymnbook pages and, strangely enough, Bottlecaps lapping up at every side.

Still, Charon might as well have been pushing us through the room on a raft, as even the mercenaries shied away from him, and parted together like ripples over the discolored face of a lake.

I couldn't even imagine how the Confessor might react on seeing this: the first of Equestria's churches, turned into something both militant and debauched. "Charon." A voice like liquid copper said, as we reached the place where ponies might once have lowered their bodies before the Celestial cross, to whisper some plea to the mares that turned the world. I peeked around the pierced shield that was Charon's body, and followed trails of smoke to find a fat cigar and the face that it hung, burning, from.

The buck looked remarkably smooth, and wore a security helmet, whose visor had been pushed back to show off bruised, glimmering eyes, and forced the smoke to pool against its tilted glass face like the clouds of a gathering storm. "You made a friend." Yep. "Careful now. Someone might think you bought her... seeing as the train's come in tonight." With one hoof, he tipped his visor to me, and two pillars of smoke rose as if from his ears. "No offense, little miss. ’Tis the season."

The Quartermaster - whose role was made clear by the armory laid out before the gaping altar -chewed on his cigar with something like hunger, and rolled his eyes at Charon through the haze. "Not interested in talking, huh?" He shifted his weight, as if to make a point of choosing me over my escort. "Evening sweetheart." I should say, I felt safe enough for his slovenly charm to step out of cover, and put some distance between Charon and I, even if it was only a hoofstep or two. "What can I help you with?"

"I'd like to know about your shop, actually." I admitted, not yet realizing how thrilled I was to be having something not unlike a normal conversation. "What did you do to end up behind the counter?"

"Risked my hide rootin' around Raider town." He smiled around his cigar. "Set up a neat little operation from out of a footlocker. Made a bundle off all the whiskey and Jet that the townsfolk, if you can call 'em that, were flying too high to keep track of." Charon had become a statue at my side, and I almost thought to try and lure him out of it, to help him make some friends. "Soon enough, the boss had his eyes set on my handsome scheme, and figured he could turn it around - Like he did Hell."

He waved back at the munitions. "Got made Quartermaster for life... Which I figure is like being made one fourth of a King, if you think about it." I giggled, thinking about it.

"Say, you seem too sweet to be herded into a place like this." The buck tilted his head at Charon, as if he couldn't hear us. "What were you thinking: following Smiley around on a night like tonight?"

"Damascus has plans for her." Charon said, and I imagined his words in the plain and punched-down print of a typewriter. He had become a watchful chaperone, a divot between me and the Quartermaster, as if we were teenagers on a date.

"So he threw you into the machine, huh?" I shrugged, as if to say: What can you do? "Well then... you'll be needing a few clips for that 45, and a stack or two of energy cells." He pointed a hoof at each of my pistols, and let it hang in the air, as if waiting for me to reveal an armory tucked under my belly. "Better tag on some RadAway, by the look of it: You're practically glowing."

Pushing him to fish through an array of colorful little boxes, Charon stared the Quartermaster down, and almost knocked the laughter out of his eyes. "Radioactive Mama." The buck began singing to himself, over the rattle of pistol rounds. "Hold me tight. Radioactive - Mama. Treat me right... Radioactive Mama!" He pushed the ammunition over his counter, like a cashier. "We'll reach critical mass... tonight."

Even as I floated out the first roll of coins, I counted three full clips for the laser pistol, and four for the automatic. "Will this be enough for -" I had underestimated Equestria's hunger for lead before, but now knew that ammunition could be burned away like fortunes in a city of casinos. "All of these."

Out of the corner of his eye, the Quartermaster glanced at the tower I'd built, but disappeared behind the counter soon after, leaving a trail of smoke. "That'll be at least two stacks, sweetheart." Jeez, somepony forgot to tell inflation about the war. "And that's a bargain.... Days like these: Ammo doesn't come cheap."

I begrudgingly dug out another roll, and felt Charon's hoof on my shoulder. The buck was staring down at the coins with something that almost looked like horror. And it suddenly occurred to me that I might be getting ripped off. "Excuse me, sir, but Charon doesn't seem to think your prices are-"

There was a howl from behind the counter, and I looked up into a smoky tempest, that was being swashed and spun by the rolling Quartermaster. At first, I thought he was having a sudden and terrible stomach ache, but soon realized that he was laughing. "What happened?" I demanded, with the corners of my lips turning up at the sight of him. "What is it?" Charon covered his face with a hoof, as if in shame.

"You!" The buck pointed, after rolling up onto folded limbs. I blinked dumbly, but felt my face trying to decide if it should blush. "You're serious?" He clicked his hooves together, cackling. "You're serious!"

"Bottlecaps are currency." Charon muttered from behind his hoof. "Those old coins are worthless."

Wait… Bottlecaps!?

*** *** ***

It must have been midnight, and the sky could have almost been called bright, though that great storm had yet to pass. And now, there was a fear, swirling through the hollows of my mind, that it never would. That, like so many things in this state of anarchy, the weather had been left without its Gods and Masters.

“I think it’s got modified focuses optics!” I said, as I practiced pulling the pistol out of its new holster, with just enough sense not to fire it into the air, and put on a lightshow for all the Hell that hummed below.

The RadAway had left a fuzzy, orange feeling in my mouth, and I was almost afraid to stick out my tongue, and show Charon its new coat of paint. He had actually paid the buck with Bottlecaps. As if they'd all been drinking Sparkle Cola by the case, to leave their own tongues coated in neon.

"Stay away from the rails. Head east until you see a toll booth." Charon was walking in circles around me, making sure that every saddlebag, every holster, was strapped down tight. "Don’t get too close. Not until you find the mercenary posted nearby." He repeated, as he broke out of his orbit and began to drift off along the highway. I watched him for a while, puzzled, thinking that he was only wandering as a rampant windup toy might, and would soon turn back to shake my hoof or pat me on the head.

"I take it that's your way of saying: Goodbye Grace: my friend, my comrade... my sister. Boy am I going to miss that face of yours." I said, in a voice that coasted along, just softly enough so that he might not hear me. "Keep safe!" At that, he looked back, and gave me a curt, noncommittal nod.

I clicked my hooves together, and let out a little giggle, delighted by how military it all seemed. I was getting orders, like a soldier under the leonine banner of Equestria's dawn, drafted to teach evil a thing or two about old world law. I watched Charon walk away, and saw him steering towards the war camp that spilled out from under the church - which my Pipbuck had named The Light at the Edge of the World. It was a gathering of tents, as if for a circus or market, though each had been drained of its complexion, its polka dots and checkers, leaving only the color of that bloodless lion, its golden ring, and the night.

After seeing tall, bowbacked figures - who walked on misshapen legs, and looked to be carrying great weights at the end of each arm - ambling through the camp, I turned away from it, if only to pretend that they had been imagined. Instead, I looked to my Pipbuck's map, as if begging it for a way out.

The valley, which had been named The Middle Passage, deserved its title, as it now ran clear as the middlemost channel of three. Another clearly waited to the north, at the foot of that star-scraping black mountain, and to the south, which was little more to me than stern, gray faces and sashes of moonlight, my Pipbuck promised another strip of this sedated earth. But, for now, I could only go East.

I took to the broken road, and hummed to myself as I went. Dark was the night, Cold was the ground. Streetlights, like fireflies in the distance and plump stars hovering over my head, kept me company against an otherwise empty world. They came to warp my perception of the night, leaving the sky as something still and lightless, and everything apart from the highway as a black, opaque mass.

It was an eerie kind of loneliness, as only the unusual strip of rock or the whispering bough of a tree could be seen on either side, as if the valley was dipping its fingers into this last river of white light. The heavens tore into one another, putting on a show for the moon, as if it couldn't be allowed to know that, when its back was turned, they would come together as friends, and darken the dawn.

Time marched on, leaving a trail of white steps along the road ahead of me. But I didn't feel any need to catch it, and walked to the slow rhythm of my own song. I heard the pluck of raw and impressible strings come to join my wordless hums, and our two voices shared the song, to tell of a lonely night where even language was lost. Only after it was over, did I start to wonder why it had faded, not to silence, but static.

I spun around one leg, and found a star bobbing along my freshly beaten path, as if it had never left me. "Okavango?" I held a hoof over my eyes, as the youngest of all Cerberus' salvaged machines blinded me under its stare, and turned loose a parade of cheery, multilingual beeps. "How were you doing that? GNR doesn't go east of Hell." The spritebot replied with a symphonic fanfare, and I had to shush him.

"Why did you come back?" I didn't know whether I should accuse him of abandoning me, leaving me to Charon and Damascus and all that was good in the Kingdom of Glass, or thank him for coming all this way to play me a song. He made the guns on his southern pole whir, and coated the sound with a short section of heroic, Equestrian music: Leaving me happy to see him. "Do you think you can handle yourself out here?" He tried to nod, and nearly tilted off of some predestined axis, adorably enough.

"Okay, you can come." He was a Cerberus security officer, after all. "But I'm supposed to meet someone near the toll booth a little farther along... to get our orders." He was clearly impressed, and ooed by way of a long, sweeping beep. "I know, right?"

Even without a voice of his own, Okavango could not have been any less like Charon, and might have cheered the ghoul to madness if the two of them ever met. If we were going to be best friends, I would have to get them to like each other. And I started wondering how best to trick them into a slumber party.

"Don't float too far away." I said, after looking out over the road’s black banks, with the cold pushing its hands into my shirt. "And try not to play anymore music until we know what's out here."

After a while, I caught myself skipping along the highway and, almost at once, realized that Okavango had put on another record. I let it play, and only turned as the song began to sway into a calm. "Belay that order." I whispered, as if cheating some nearby commander. "Do you know anything by Sweetie Belle?"

*** *** ***

If our objective hadn't been built across the highway, like a bridge, I might have wandered by, bobbing in a stream of crotchets and quavers, of words like moonbeam and stardust, all crossing the decades from gossamer lips. But I couldn't miss it. That, after all, is the nature of a toll booth: it's unavoidable.

Weighed down with lights of many colors, from blinking pinpricks of red and yellow to the usual white flood, it stood out as a gateway into the East, cut out of the darkness no differently than the rifts in the clouds. A tall, mesh fence rose up at either side of the highway, herding travelers into its bejeweled mouth, and I stopped myself well before coming into it, like a bird before the jaws of a crocodile.

Instead, I steered us off the edge of the highway, to stumble into some rocky badland, rising and falling around it. "Stay close to me." I whispered, and got a quiet and conspirative little beep in return.

The lights along the road made it a great deal easier to find my way, and soon enough, I had come to the bottom of a crease in the earth, which pressed into the skin of Equestria’s belly like the tip of a spear. It rose at a mollifying, but steady, angle, and eventually had me looking down on the highway to my right. I tripped over the rocks, and might have been wearing bells for how they clicked against my hooves. But then, I heard a soft, steely click that spoke clearer than any proclamation of war.

“You for me?" I nodded, without thinking, and her sigh sent a city coasting through the night air. "I ask for a spotter, so they send me a pinup girl and her floating music box." The mare's voice was silver, to match the luster of a long-barreled and ladylike revolver, though it had a growl running under it, like the babble of a faraway river. "Cerberus never gets my order right."

"Are you going to shoot me?" I asked, at a whisper, wishing that I had some kind of passcode to give her, to let her know that, in the light, we stood under the same colors. "Will saying Damascus help?" She didn't answer, and I looked down, as if to make sure that my hooves were still there. "Damascus."

What I thought I heard then almost sounded like a giggle, but was quickly changed into the kind of noise that somepony would only make if they were trying to get a giggle to sound tough.

She couldn't quite shake the smile out of her voice though. "Well, welcome aboard, Lamplight. Come on over and bundle up. We might as well get cozy." If anything, she seemed to be enjoying how crudely this operation was coming together. "Just drop the curtain on that magic act, alright?"

"Oh..." My horn let out a fit of embers, as it dammed up the light. "Sorry. I'm not really used to... black."

"Must be nice." She patted the earth beside her. "Way I hear it: you're fresh out of the box. No more than a few hours old." I made my way over to her, making sure to skirt my hooves around every stone. "Turns out your first big adventure in the Equestrian Wasteland is gonna be a good old-fashioned stakeout."

"A Stakeout?" I sounded it out, though familiar with the word. "Like in True Police Stories?" I slumped onto my belly, and slid over to the end of the ridge. Everything above my neck was lit up by the toll booth's floodlights, and I couldn't bring myself to go any lower, as if the darkness might drown me.

A shadow lay beside me, and even as I saw it for the curled up pony that it was, it began to move. "Can that thing sit?" She pointed up at Okavango, who now hovered just above the surface of the black water. "Sit." She whispered, making him out to be some kind of domesticated animal.

I reached out, and took Okavango in my hooves. He was only about the size of a filly's head, and it wasn't all that difficult for me to cradle him at my chest, letting all four spindly needles branch out behind me.

"Are we going to be partners?" I asked, after the spritebot was tucked in.

"Sure." I saw her shrug, as if she didn't know how much that answer meant to me. "Charon isn't really the type to get jealous." The mare straightened herself out, and sat on her haunches. Her posture was soft, but I could tell that, shoulder to shoulder, she'd still be taller than me. "But for now, all that means is we'll be watching this horrorshow together." She waved down at the toll. "Damascus figures that, if there's something going on between the Raiders and that train, this's our last chance to find out about it."

"Is that important?" I furrowed my brow, wondering how mutilated corpses, strung up as if they were works of art, and ponies harvested like apples in apple-bucking season, wasn't damning enough.

"Just because they're both... what d'you Stable ponies call them? ... Sinners?" I nodded eagerly, as if I wouldn't have understood any other word. "Doesn't mean they're sinnering together." I opened my mouth to correct her, but thought better of it. "Raiders are dangerous enough, but they could get a lot worse with a Slaver holding their reins, whipping 'em into a frenzy. If the Coltilde rounds them up, they could have 'em running at Hell like a stampede, or tearing along behind the night train like a pack of hyenas."

"So we're looking out for some kind of messenger..." I nodded. "An ambassador from the Coltilde: As evidence that the Slavers are trying to rally up the tribes?"

"Right. But I've never seen a tribal eat a pony's beating heart clean out from inside them." She said coolly, leaving the picture that I had of the Raiders smeared in a far more unsettling shade of red. "The Slavers know as well as we do: These de-generates aren't getting trussed up into an army. You might be able to put a leash on a wild dog and walk it, but strap it to another and you'll still end up with just one dog. More likely their doing business: buying the ponies they've gotten bored with, and haven't strung up yet."

I was suddenly shaken, as if everything she'd been saying had only just hit me, coming in a single wave of that Raider red. Okavango beeped, looking up at me with his big, starlit eye as I squeezed him a little closer. "You treat that thing like a baby." She said, without any scorn in her smile. "I'll bet you even went ahead and gave that little lightbulb a name." Names! I thought, and hurried to stamp out the fire.

"I'm sorry! We all forgot to introduce ourselves." From the look on the mare’s face, she wasn’t buying into the calamity. "This is Mister Okavango Delta: Acting Chief of Security over all Cerberus facilities." A roar of applause sounded out from his speakers, and I could only try to speak over a smile, instead of scolding him. "And I am Grace... from the Stable." I needed to get some titles under my belt.

"Oka-van-go." She sounded out his name, like she did with most of the longer words. It wasn't as if she was struggling to pronounce them, but more that she enjoyed feeling them roll off her tongue. "That sounds more like a military call sign than a name..." We both stared at her, with flat brows. "Hell, alright: I'm Caliber, glad to meet you." She took my hoof in hers, and shook me by it.

Caliber's coat hinted at a sober, yellow-beige bale of straw, and just above her nose, was a constellation of white freckles, like scattered stars. If I were to look at her face as a romantic, a poet drunk on spiced wine, then I might have compared it to the pale and starry horizon of the sunrise that had rolled over so many farms in the Equestrian heartland, if only for how the floodlights set a fire in her barn-red mane.

Her hair looked to have been shorn off sometime in the last few months, as it had grown up into a surf of alpaca wool, turning at its tips like the mane of a teenage rebel. My mother might have called it puffy and, turning around with her nose in the air and her skirts in a flurry, declared it a hopeless case.

It curled around her ears - one of which wore what could easily be a permanent burn at its tip. As if to outdo this injury, an old bandage covered her left temple, and it was small enough to hint at a severe precision wound, left by anything from a bullet, to an ice pick.

Her eyes were brown.

“Likewise” I felt Okavango trying to do a little bow, though she hadn't noticed. “So… Partners?”

“You got it." Our hooves parted. “We might not be Cerberus girls, but a contract's a contract, right?" Caliber wouldn't have fit into the church any better than I had, and I wondered why, apart from their dejected bodies and feudal countenance, the ghouls were the only ones who got to wear that old name. "One condition, though: Damascus threw the word Dawn at me more times than I could count. So, if you feel a lecture on The Last Light or The Reclamation coming down the pike, try to get me out of earshot."

I tilted my head, as if she had started speaking in another language. "It's a nice idea, but you two can keep it - Deal me out. The wasteland’s not a dance you want to try cutting into. I'm just happy to be taking orders from someone who’s deluded, instead of absolutely fucked-up... for a change."

I didn't really know what to make of that, and a silence fell as the mare leveled her rifle over the lip of the ridge, and dipped into the shadows to peer through its blue-eyed scope. "Caliber..." I waved my hoof around in the black, searching for her shoulder, and only found it after she had pulled away from her gun.

"Why do I feel like you just climbed up onto a soapbox?" She asked, cutting me short with a crooked smile. "We had a deal: You keep your hooves nice and dirty around me."

"But-"

"Nuh-uh."

"But Equestria-"

"Quit it."

"At least-"

"I think your thing's asleep." Her eyes had darted to the rough and tumble sphere, which I still held, cradled against my chest. I looked down at Okavango, and saw that his galactic light was pulsing, slowly fading on and off, reminding me more of a deep breath than a heartbeat.

“Whoa." I said, forgetting Caliber's blocked ears as quickly as I had the toll. "Do you think he can dream?”

“Not many of us can anymore.” She frowned, staring into the void from which the tide of his light came. “I gotta say: that’s not the first thing I’d think of, hearing the name Cerberus.” She leaned into the pulse, and I watched the starlight come and go, buried somewhere deep beneath the soil of her eyes.

"Listen, Lamplight... you can just ignore what I said before." She looked up at me, breaking the constellation of blue eyes in brown eyes in gold. "Don't let me sweep my dust over your dawn. I was talking out of turn: went and forgot that it's only been a few hours since you came stumbling into the world, with those stars in your eyes... You must be feeling pretty tender."

"Yeah." I looked out over the toll, where the Raiders might have been mistaken for children in a playground. "I mean... I'm out... I'm gone." I swung out a hoof, theatrically. "Forever."

"Tell me about it." She reeled in her rifle, and pressed it into her chest just as I had done to Okavango.

"What do you mean?" I asked, needlessly; a little flustered at the chance to lay it all bare. "About what?"

"Everything, honey." She let out a giggle, but quickly tried to swallow it away. "We've got nowhere to be until morning. And even a Slaver knows better than to come out East when the moonlight's been bottled up like it is." And yet, there we were: Out East. "So go for it. Shoot. Take a load off - Hell, make it a bedtime story. Burn through the letters, 'til there's nothing left but Z. I'll wake you when the show starts."

"The storyteller isn't usually the one being put to sleep." I argued, fairly sure about this.

"Hey, I got my hours in last night. And the most exciting thing I've done today was hang around the church, trying to get my damn battle saddle fixed. Besides, sitting on this ridge isn't exactly hard work." She kicked up some dust, as if to prove her point. "Once you realize how long that story of yours is, you'll see how much you need the rest." I tried to convince myself that she was wrong. But too much of me wanted to flush the last day out, to get it someplace other than my mind.

So I told her. Absolutely Everything. And it almost felt... good, like taking off a yoke, or breathing out.

As I was talking, with the floodgates pulling apart for Shady Sands and that throne in the mountains, breaking down for Saber and the mare-merchant, Caliber picked something out of her satchel, lit it, and put it in her mouth. Soon, another light began to pulse, as she breathed in a pinprick of fire, and colored the night air with smoke. I watched the cinders, as they rose and fell, and felt the weight of it all rolling off my back. Her breath became warm, draconic, even as my own words sang me to sleep.

Day One had been long and dark, like twilight in the polar circle, and I’d become tired for so much less.

Our forefathers left us this place. They carved themselves so many thrones, so many empires, and were still washed away as if taken by a flood of holy water and wrath. Now, they stand before the gates, guarding the Kingdom in the Skies, keeping it for all who prove themselves worthy, who prove themselves strong. Just as they did in the beginning, in the darkness before the first dawn. Just as we will, in the darkness before the last. Every sin, every life we end - by word, or by fire - will pave the way. And if we cannot, if you cannot, learn to judge, to become an instrument of the Goddesses, your light will *go out.You saved the Stable. Did you know that? Of course you didn't. You and that child of an Overmare. You would have thrown us all into the howling dark, you would have wiped us out. If I hadn't tipped the scales, and made you heroes, martyrs, instead. You killed her. Did you know that? Of course. We all knew that. We have both made sacrifices that weren’t ours to make. We are both murderers. And we are both heroes. But, in their eyes, there can only be two sides to the coin. Only one of us can wear their crown of thorns, and be shut out into the long night. I should hope you already know which one of us that is.* My little Gracie. I do like the sound of that. Grace Marie. How do you think that one fits her, darling? *giggles* I suppose it does sound a little fancy. It came from your side of the family, after all. Some ancestor, a grandmother, yes? Her name was Marie too. Please tell me you like it, darling. Oh, thank you. She's got your eyes, and your hair. She should have that name, too. Look at her, our little golden lion. This is our chance to start over, to leave all that *darkness** behind. You can show them that they were wrong. You can be a father. A good man... Everything is going to get better. You'll see.* …Can I hold her?They aren't all worth saving. Remember that. Sometimes, there is no price to pay, no penitence. Sometimes, blood can be spilled as if it were water, and it will sink into the ash, leaving no mark on the earth. I am not Celestia. I am not Luna. And, if I were given the key to the Kingdom's gates, I would lock them, and leave this *wasteland** to collapse into the sea. But I have no such key. And the Goddesses would hold the gates open, and have their country saved. So be it. Who am I to question them?* Equestria is dead. And there is nothing we can do to bring it back. I wonder, how long will it take you to see that? How many times will you let it chew you up, and spit you out, before you see it like I do? Celestia is dead. Luna is dead. But we... we are alive. And that damn *War** will not be the end of us.* Hush now, Quiet now, it’s time to lay your sleepy head. Hush now, Quiet now it’s time to go to bed… Hush now quiet now may Luna guide you through the *night. Hush now, Quiet now, until the morning light. Goodnight Gracie… Honey… Oh, come see… I think she’s dreaming…Honey?Forgive me...*

Forget me.

*** *** ***

I opened my eyes, and found the valley blanketed in white, as if the storm had not passed, but burst. The clouds had become an unshaped and colorless veil, draped over the tallest mountains' peaks, as those ships of gray, those black seas and reefs of moonlight, had turned into a great, white surf. It was day.

"Mornin'." Caliber still had an eye pressed to her rifle, as if nothing had changed for the setting of the moon. "I would have made us some breakfast, but Raiders in the light don't do much for the appetite."

Misshapen silhouettes now became mutilated bodies, and even the vague and faceless nightmares of the eventide began to seem preferable to these ugly savages: ponies that lived like a roving collection of animals both wild and rabid, from dogs fighting over meat, to pigs rolling up in their own filth.

"I had a hell of a time keeping your robot quiet." She went on, as I twisted my neck, in search of so much as a shrunken, pale disc to remind that the sun was still out there somewhere. "Finally got it to go play lookout over the metro tunnel, to give us some warning if the Slavers come." I patted at my chest, as one might the pillow of some escaped lover. "Not before it got that damn song stuck in my head, though."

Caliber wore a rumpled, beaten-blue vest over a white shirt, whose sleeves looked to have been torn off like those of a mare stranded in some merciless and uncharted desert. Her collar was dark, and came in around a thick, once-white scarf that hung low under her neck. Its knot was round, and reminded me of a heart, but served as the roost to some kind of dust mask. Her front legs had been wrapped in straps, and cloths of rusty colors, breaking apart only to reveal a small device on her right, and a pistol on her left.

“Good Mornin’, Good Mornin’.” She stared grumbling through the song. And, strangely enough, made sure to hit all the right notes. "All of a sudden he just jumped right up from under ya - started spinning around like he's the entire valley's alarm clock - telling us all how: Nothing could be finer than to be in Canterlina... We'd have been cooked if the raiders weren't all fucked out of their minds." With a lazy kind of flair, she mimed getting punched in the head. "No way they didn't hear. But it only got ‘em blaring GNR static from the toll's speakers. And I sure didn't need any help staying awake after that."

“Would they really be doing this to themselves,” I poked my head out over the ridge, to watch the circus tearing on before us. “if they knew they had a meeting with the Slavers this morning?”

“Are you kidding? There isn't one Raider less than an hour away from a shot, be it by glass or needle or pistol. That’s what makes them so dangerous; in a fight, you might be run down by a buck with more Dash in his system than blood, or gunned down by an expert marksman who decided that life as a town guard was getting too boring. If you're lucky: you get one of the drunks.”

I realized that, being an earth pony, Caliber couldn't actually use the terrible, black rifle whose scope had been her eye over the toll. Pieces of a disassembled battle saddle rig poked out of her satchel, and I wondered if she could have resisted taking shots at the wild things below if it were whole. The symbol, smeared above her rifle's clip, matched the mercenary's cutie mark, to leave them both with what, at first, appeared to be a simple black crosshairs aimed into a field of white.

“Caliber..." I began to ask, gingerly. "What are we going to do if nopony comes?”

She looked up at me, and I saw that there was a path of dust running from her belly to her neck, where her body had been laid down against the ridge. "We make sure nopony goes."

Just as the silence dug a pit between us, Okavango returned, and brought a fanfare with him, which got no more than a twitch out of Caliber, and a muffled yelp from me. "Looks like we've got inbound assholes." The mare said, after straightening out her rough and tumble vest. I couldn't be sure, but it looked like Caliber was only just holding back a smile. "Slavers? ...How many?"

He beeped three times, just as he had done to make a count of The Circles. "That's enough for a roundup... Hell, considering the kind of firepower they've got tucked up in the Coltilde, that's enough to wipe this place off the face of the valley." And, to my own surprise, I found myself hoping to see it happen, to see this malignant toll put to the torch of an even greater evil.

"Fuck eggshells." She said, as if a sudden and violent hatred for eggshells had overcome her. "We'll be walking on a damn minefield." She poked a hoof up at Okavango. "And I want radio silence from you, pal. With my battle saddle wrecked, I can't say whether I'd stand up to a Slaver. And both of you just got spat out of the underground. So no singing. We can't let this play out wrong."

She pulled her rifle away from the ridge, as if pulling a friend to safety from the edge of a cliff, and began to holster it at her side. It could, quite easily, have been as long as her spine. "The Quartermaster had a lot of weapons lying around. Couldn't you have traded that one in for something... smaller?"

"Are you crazy!? I would never do that!" I might as well have plucked an open nerve. "This rifle is the only reason I made more of myself than a corpse bleeding out on some snow bank, or a whore putting out on some street corner." Her frustration, like little beads of spit, flew past me: directed more at whatever cruel twist of fate had left her beloved weapon no better than a sword stuck in its sheath.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know…” I said, trying to settle her down, even though I had no idea how any mare might become so loyal to a gun. “Isn’t there somepony in Hell who can fix your battle saddle?”

She sighed, venting the last strains of her temper. "Not a one. And it figures: Right when I land the contract of my life, I have to stick around a place where even the merchants moonlight as mercenaries. Don't get me wrong. Damascus sure knows how to make some good out of a hired hoof - He always has us doing stuff like this: Raider Wrap-ups and the odd cartography run: Good work. But the buck doesn't get that mercs need to be maintained, just like any other tool. I mean, we don't even have a medic."

“You guys should start a union.” I said, trying to cheer her up.

"Yeah right." She giggled, as if to tell me that I’d won her over. "It can't be ethical to mark radiation down as a health benefit." Her rifle might have purred then, as Caliber ran a hoof along its barrel. "And none of those damn ghouls could patch together a decent battle rig to save the skin they have left."

It was really a shame that everypony couldn't be a unicorn. "Tell you what..." I began, already loosening the holster on my leg. "Why don't we share?" I floated out my father's automatic pistol.

“Whoa…” Her eyes widened, becoming almost childlike as the word rolled on. Okavango came up beside her, and stretched a beep out as far as it would go, turning the two of them into wolves: howling at the moon. I swung the passover weapon from side to side, to let its silver barrel catch all the light that had been left to us. The two of them followed, and bobbed together like apples in a basin.

As I coiled my magic around her rifle, Caliber broke through the hypnotics. "Hold on there!" She started. "You aren't gonna... hit anybody are you?" Hit... or pistol-whip? "I've seen a couple unicorns do that."

"I promise not to hit anypony with your rifle." I swore, even as I filled the space between us with a thoroughfare of ammunition, and holstered the pistol behind her shoulder. "I have a baseball bat... see?"

"Y'know, you're actually pretty good at this, Lamplight." Caliber swung a hoof out around us, as if she was trying to point at the world. "And thanks, by the way." Even if I hadn't taken her rifle, the look in the mare's eyes then would have been more than enough to pay the balance on some old exile's pistol.

We settled back into the dust, and watched the new world circus play out below us. Wire bags of cramped, glistening meat lay against the toll booths, and defamed bodies looked to have been strung up, or nailed down, all across the gates. Skulls, and even fleshy clumps that were only just recognizable for what was left of their faces, stuck out of the gaps on pikes, as if to warn off any eastbound travelers.

The road had been streaked in red, and I imagined some poor pony being dragged into the slaughterhouse that had been constructed, if only in the minds of the animals, here. I could only bear to watch the ungodly toll for how far away it was, and for how little the wind carried its scent.

“How much longer will it be?” It was a long way to the metro tunnel's open mouth, but the wait was whittling away at my nerves, and the beasts - who fought and fornicated before us - weren't helping.

"Can't say." She shrugged. "This mist will be slowing 'em down some."

“Mist?”

She scratched her chin, rooting around for a way to explain. "... So it's like we're inside a cloud, right? Well, that’s the valleys funneling in moist, night air. Turns everything this far East to soup most mornings."

As if to prove her point, Okavango wandered off towards the north, and soon became little more than a black smudge, like an old cigarette burn on a bleached tablecloth. "Anything else you wanna ask? We're coming up over the brink now."

"Actually... I'd like to know more about you." She tilted her head, as if blindsided by a filly half her size.

"Of all the cool shit you've seen out here -" I nodded. "Not Damascus or Charon or Cerberus -" Another nod. "Why?"

I shrugged. "I think you're pretty neat."

"Celestia, what a compliment." She threw up her hooves, as if I was a hopeless case, and hadn't changed for all my time on her long, dusty chaise couch. "Can I get that in writing?"

All of a sudden, an orchestra came tumbling over itself from the north, and in the throes of its music, I recognized the beeping and blustering of Okavango Delta. "Looks like you'll have to unravel this enigma some other time." She said, with her eyes narrowing as a train whistle rose to drown out the spritebot.

"Their window's closing... it has to be now." The Slavers were coming, to make their deal with lesser devils, to ready the stage that would see me take my first life.

Footnote: Level Up!

Perk Added: Red Lightning: The power of your personality inspires die-hard loyalty from your followers. When you drop below 50% health, your companions temporarily gain much greater resistance to damage.

Chapter 5: No Church in the Wild

Fallout Equestria: Begin Again

Chapter 5: No Church in the Wild

“Ha! Now that’s what this wasteland needs! More women with spunk, and explosives!”

|*| Cast the First Stone |*|

As if some holy and uncorrupted city in the mountains was burning, to spill its smoke into the valleys below, tides of mist came to pool over the Equestrian north, and flooded the sky. We watched as three figures pushed through the white curtains at the wings of the toll and its stage, with guns strapped to their sides and belts of ammunition hanging out of their saddlebags, all ready to survive a sour deal.

They were dressed in coats of thick, tanned leather, with their soft spots covered by armor hauled from the Equestrian wreckage and shades of dust that told of a wasteland wandered. But it was not their clothes, or their stone faces, that made them seem so dangerous, that named them: it was the chains.

Equestria was quiet now, as even the flies that crowded its roads had become still for hearing the toll of link against steel link, and of hooves churning up the dust. As the three Slavers crossed from earth to asphalt, having steered themselves around the toll’s tall fence, the natives became wild, as if roused by the beating of a war drum, or the chanting of a naked priestess.

They were dogs, growling and pacing circles, drawing runes into the road, with daggers and spears clenched between teeth or strapped at side. Though one party of devils remained unafraid of the other, as they stood before the toll, like a wall of clear shields before a mob, unshaken by the jeers of nervous animals, but wise enough not to step into the fence: into the mouth that swallowed the road.

Caliber poked out over the ridge’s lip, getting as close as she possibly could to the scene below, like a filly pressing her face against a television screen. I lowered myself into the dirt beside her, with Okavango caught between my belly and the earth, and watched those two latter-day evils meet.

The toll booths stretched out before a small office, which sat at the highway’s southern bank. We hadn’t been able to see behind its faces of ashen cement and scratched windows, but now watched its doors burst open. A buck stepped out, and the office seemed to lurch, as if his weight had been pushing it into the soil. I might have called him a giant, as he towered over the congregation of animals around him, all in uniform, for the red insignias that bloodied what cloth could be found under their spikes and scrap.

A stream of ponies followed him out onto the road, and injected some color into the country’s veins. They shrank away from the lights, and only kept in step for brutish orders, which were loud enough to be heard from our perch. Their bright bodies were withered and naked, stained with the same dark colors that ruined the tank’s armor, almost like it was their own blood. I counted two bucks and a colt, but even they could be forgotten for the mare that came stumbling out after them. I begged for her to be the last, but a filly, a little blue smudge, soon followed, as if this show's director wanted to press salt into my wounds.

The bucks might have been kept in a museum - polished and shut up in glass cases - for how scarcely their bodies had been spoiled, if only for the sake of longer price tags. But even the love of money hadn't been enough to see the mare and her filly spared. And so they had been used, again and again.

“Caliber, we can’t ignore this.” I checked my weapons, and might have leapt from the ridge, as if the earth below could not break a hero as it would anyone else. But the mercenary stayed quite, as her face was empty and unmoving, like that of a china doll. "Caliber," I whispered, thinking that she hadn't heard me.

“We can’t help them.” She didn’t look up at me. “Our orders-“

“Forget our orders!” I was fighting to keep my voice low, to hold it down, though a part of me almost wanted them all to hear me. It wouldn’t be long before those ponies were sold into chains, passed from savages to Slavers, like toys between children, or bread between the starving. “We have to help them.”

“They aren’t worth it.” I wouldn’t have believed my ears, had her words sounded any less forced: like she was reading someone else’s lines. “Damascus built his little empire on a balefire bomb, and I’m not about to set it off. If those messengers don’t make it back to the Coltilde - with their Slaves in tow - then the boss, and Charon, and every other merc in Hell who has enough honor left to dig in their hooves, is getting put down for it. There’s a gun pointed at Cerberus… and I am not about to pull the trigger.”

Those two kings of cardinal sin came together then, and I could almost see the deal, simple and crude as blunt force trauma, being struck between them. The piecemeal family was trapped, with wire walls rising at their sides, Raiders pacing behind them, and open shackles ahead. All gave salty looks to the little filly, who couldn’t have known who to fear most, and shook like a ballerina on a broken coronet.

“We kill them all," I said, as if I'd found a way to cheat, to step over the lines of some old but unwritten law. "Nopony has to know that Damascus had anything to do with it. The Coltilde - they'll think that something went wrong with the deal - They’ll blame the Raiders!” I said, in a rush of words.

“We couldn't win that fight. And odds are we only get that little girl stranded here at the toll, or bleeding out on the highway thanks to some stray bullet.” She looked me right in the eye now. “We aren’t going to do a thing: I'm not laying down any cards that we aren't holding. This is bigger than us… bigger than her.”

Like an army turned in on itself, my thoughts clashed, fighting for an answer: a champion. And my heart leapt as the beginnings of an idea were stirred up in the dust. "No it's not! I have a grenade!"

Her mouth edged open, like a bedroom door after curfew. "If we toss it over into the toll, we could start a fight!" This was beautiful! Ingenious, even! "We kick the thunderhead, and let those Slavers cut it to pieces. We just need to get the family clear, and ride out the storm. Then we're out of here! ... This is it! This is the plan!" I was frantic now, knowing that, if those chains drew taught, we could do nothing to save the family.

She stared at me, long enough to see me bouncing on the spot, as if skirting madness. "No survivors," she decided, finally. “We have to wipe them all out before this is over: even if they turn tail. And if they force us to, we’ll run ‘em right into the sea.” I was about to hug her, before she frowned, finding another flaw. “Those slaves are gonna get caught in the crossfire. As soon as the Raiders start shooting…”

“No, they can’t,” I said, as if anything but absolute victory was impossible. “You’ve been watching the toll all night: How many of those Raiders have anything more than a knife?”

“The big one… and maybe one more back behind the gate,” she answered slowly, as if the same idea was now running wild in her mind. This was happening; we were going to save them! “Fuck,” she sighed, cornering herself. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck… you’re right.”

“I know!” I cried, almost giggling, even in the face of the war that I'd just tipped us into. “We can't let this happen.” This passing of lambs between two petty Gods. “It’s simple.”

“It usually is,” she said, looking back at me as if I'd rewritten the laws of the world. “Get down behind those rocks over there.” She nodded towards a small parapet just beside the highway’s northern bank. “I’ll throw the grenade as far as I can. Try to hit it with your magic if it falls short.”

I nodded, glad that I would be going deeper into the belly of the battle, if only for the senseless feeling that I would be more likely to survive it: that I could stand firm as all the new world's violence pressed in around me, and make myself a savior to spite my Stable.

“Good, that’s the best we can do short of strapping some kind of explosive charge to your robot.”

Okavango made the kind of beep that had once acted as a mask over the dirty underbelly of language.

“Once it blows, wait for the den to come running: They’ll force the Slavers back into cover, and it won't be long before they're beating themselves blue against it. Get those prisoners out around the fence, then take ‘em North a ways before heading back.” She marked the same post as she had before. “Some of the Raiders are bound to get it in their heads that chasing Slaves is more fun than chasing Slavers…”

“I’ll handle them,” I interrupted, acting like I’d been born and bred for this. “What about you?"

“We might not have time to meet up before we need to start picking off runaways, but I’ll find you as soon as I can. Just make sure you convince those prisoners to wait for us. I’m not doing this for them to go drifting off into the wastes, and a morning like this is bound to swallow 'em up when our backs are turned. I’d ask you to stay with them… but I’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re answer would be.”

I managed to linger for a moment longer, and put my hoof on her shoulder. “Thank you for doing this.”

“You got me here, honey… I have a feeling that Damascus has big plans for you, and we’ll both by damned if you haven’t blown one hell of a loophole through my contract. Besides: I like you, Lamplight. There aren't enough mares crazy enough to go cutting into a slow dance between two devils, just to kick it up into a Charleston with Death himself.” She paused to brush my hoof off of her shoulder, though, from her, the gesture was almost affectionate. “Thank you.”

*** *** ***

For the mist that hung all around us, it seemed like this bubble of atmosphere was all that remained, with the toll, the rutting demons and me as the last of Equestria’s broken parts. And, after skipping between patches of grass on my way down the ridge, like a filly over a floor turned to lava, I took up my post.

Okavango bumped into my flanks, and I almost whinnied, as he was a like an ice cube against my skin. He beeped, as if picking up on some wordless conversation, as I mimicked a filly with a spider down the collar of her shirt. We were, of course, the masters of stealth. I grabbed the spritebot, and bunched us both up behind the stone, knowing that my nerves were anything but in my control. I was afraid. As those five, lonely white bars on my Pipbuck had no more hope than driftwood rafts caught in an angry, red sea.

As I whispered orders to what I could only hope was an obedient security officer, I saw Caliber's hoof touch the sky, lighting the fuse to this rescue. The grenade went sailing, looking to be guided up by the glare of the streetlights, and only began to quiver as gravity dipped its fingers into the mist, and plucked it out. I cast a ramshackle cradle around it, and then jerked my head towards the toll, as if steering a star.

It hit the toll like a meteorite, as if the galaxy itself had seen fit to punish the Raiders for all their moral squalor, and even past the stone, the banks of the highway and its fences, I saw the explosion, though it was more easily heard. Their howls shook more for anger than agony, and the Raiders charged out from the gates like thoroughbred runners in a track race, set off by something far more devastating than a gunshot. I kept my blinds up, and only listened as rifle fire and pounding hooves spilled into each other.

The red was drained from my Pipbuck like the color from an anemic body, as the highway ran dry.

I swung around the rocks, and saw the road, littered with bullet casings, ribbons and hoofprints, as if some military hero had just gone by, cradled at the heart of a parade. The prisoners stood, shivering like animals caught in a frenzy of headlights and air horns, and I skid into a hero’s pose beside them.

"Welcome to rescue!" They'd only just recovered from the shock of a passing battlefield, and I almost had to shout, raising my already giddy voice, to turn their heads. "Follow me!" Strangely enough, and instead of celebrating me for this sudden turn from their path into slavery, the family huddled closer into themselves, with colt and filly penned in by the bodies of their parents.

I thought to be a little more diplomatic then, as even in the fresh, white light of the dawn, there survived saplings of distrust and despair. "The Raiders won't be gone long." I nodded towards the warzone. "We need to leave." I wasn't exactly being played on by the horns that had broken down city walls, and it seemed that, if anything, this rescue's first roadblock came from a slowness to trust. "I'm here to help."

One of the bucks stepped forward, after whispering something to the sheltered children, and spoke. "Lead, and we will follow." He swung the colt onto his back, even as the mare did the same to her daughter. The second, childless buck nodded, and I guided them to the highway's northern bank.

As our runaway caravan tumbled free of the toll's fence, which was laden with corpses, I heard a shot ring out from behind me. Without breaking my gait, I looked over my shoulder, and tried to make a headcount. Four followed, while the buck unburdened by any cargo of children was sprawled on the lip of the asphalt, and had already begun to slide into the dirt, as if his own blood was lifting him like an army of fire ants. The mother spun on her hoof, with that little blue filly bouncing on her back, and ran to him.

Doing what I hadn't the heart to, the other buck took her tail in his mouth, and dragged her away. She fought him for a while, as their children jolted from side to side, but soon turned to follow, though the shine running down her cheeks made it seem as if she'd just been pulled from a river.

Okavango prodded my side, and steered me away from a pillar of stone that might otherwise have knocked in the head of our caravan. Behind us, there was only gunfire, and I looked forward, into the mouth of the valley's soft and welcoming East. I kept running, searching for a place to hide them, some fold in the earth that I might tuck them into, and felt as if my heart was being beaten like a drum.

Eventually, I had the family settling into an alcove between a hillside and its stripped bones of rock, thinking that the Raiders might already have torn everything on the highway to pieces. Now, I had to get back, before they pinned Caliber to the top of the ridge, and swatted at her like a bear under a beehive.

"Wait here: I'll be back." The mare was really starting to get to me, as her tears might have been coming from some sour and bottomless well. Still, I knew that the filly clinging onto the back of her trembling body, and the buck who stepped forward, as an ambassador to the family, would see her smiling again.

"Thank you, I know that you’ll find us here before the Raiders do... that is, if the Stars continue to be so kind." While my head was light and my eyes were lit, for how good it felt to know that these ponies would not come into the belly of the Coltilde, it was a little frustrating to have due credit stolen away by the stars, of all things. What did they need with my brownie points, anyway?

"Your friend is with them now," I said, forging a fake religion to staple onto their own. "He'll watch over you." That seemed to go over well, and I felt like a missionary making sense of some archaic and alien faith. "But, as guardians go..." I added, looking up at Okavango. "I think I can do you one better."

*** *** ***

With every hoofstep south, the gunfire grew louder, though their echoes rolled through the entire valley. The Slavers had done well to survive for so long, and though the Coltilde might be swelling with pride, I felt dread like a millstone around my heart. If there were scales measuring the strength of either side to this primordial war between us and them, it was beginning to seem like they’d be tilting any way but ours.

All of a sudden, I felt myself being knocked clear off of my hooves, and my body was sent sprawling through the field, only to settle under pillars of dust and colorless flocks of grass, like a statue falling from the walls of some abandoned city in the plains. It took me a while to stand, as if I had to pick up the pieces and put myself back together again, and only then did I come face to face with my attacker.

A Raider, whose eyes boiled over and whose body was a sickly shade of my own unpolished silver, walked in strange and erratic circles around me, ready to pounce. Her knife stood, buried halfway to its hilt, in the dirt between us, having missed whatever burrow it might have carved in me. My body ached for the impact of that amber clad savage, but I did my best to meet her eyes, ignoring the pain.

“Fuck it!” She screamed, though the joy in her voice made the cuss sound like a cheer. “I'm gonna eat your heart out!” She bared diseased gums, from which crooked teeth, cruder than prehistoric tools, jutted like the breakers of a black sea. Drawing any weapon would mean a race between her hooves against the earth and my magic on the trigger, and her body was already coiled, as if it needed to pounce.

I had to get that knife.

She caught me eyeing the weapon, and lunged, kicking up enough dust so be stirred into a small storm. Our bodies came together in another collision of wasteland sinew against Stable cushioning. I drew my pistol, and swatted her away with it, though she was quicker than the stench of so many untreated diseases had promised, and smashed into me, shattering the fledgling telekinesis no differently than she might have pushed a baby bird from the edge of its nest, before it was ready to fly.

"A little girl on girl, hoof to hoof..." Her eyes were mad: yellow and wide, their edges smeared in dark bruises like too much cheap mascara. "This is gonna be fun!" The knife meant nothing to her now, as the mare's hunger for brutality had taken the reins, and whipped a freewheeling love for violence into her.

I threw myself against her with all the strength I could gather, hoping that generations of malnutrition and wantonly transmitted infection might grant me some deep, unshakable advantage, as if we were, not only soldiers stepping out from the ranks of opposing armies, but the children of two different species.

She didn't step out of my way, and took on the weight of my body with a broad chest and gleeful eyes, as if we were lion cubs rolling in the grass. She slapped me across the scars of Acheron, as our hooves clicked together and our bodies locked. She snapped and spat, biting at my face and teasing my wounds with avian parcels of disease, to poison me just as the balefire bombs and their fallout had Equestria.

She pushed her muzzle into the curve of my neck, and bit down on the collar of my father's shirt. And, after nuzzling me into a state of desperate, girlish panic, she tilted her weight and dropped me over uncertain hooves. The ground hit me hard, like it was taking the side of this native and neighbor, and then threw up a cloud of pallid dirt in the place of confetti, as if to celebrate my fall.

She straddled me across the middle, pinning my front hooves down with her own, and rode me as I tried to wriggle loose. I saw what might have been the despoiled sister of romance in her eyes, and knew that she wanted to tear the skin from my face, to pull away my flesh with stolen and abhorrent kisses.

After getting a leg free, I wasted no time before guiding it into the mare's stomach, like a battering ram. She retched over me, and her breathe was like old meat and curdled dairy. But I hit her again, despite the smell, and managed to roll free for all the fetid air that had been beaten out of her.

I was back on my hooves before either of us had really recovered, and found myself standing perpendicular to the wheezing raider, with my face beside her mottled flank. Her cutie mark was a heart, vivid enough to have been pulled from some lawless organ vendor's shelves, with a fork sticking out of it.

I reared up onto my hind legs, kicking against the earth as if to scold it for the bruises coming to bloom on my side, and swung my Pipbuck down across the back of the Raider's head. There was an unpleasant crack, as her leather cap did nothing to stifle the blow, leaving metal and bone to touch but for the mare's scalp. Her limbs fell out from under her, and she collapsed.

As soon as she was still, I rolled the Raider onto her back, and pinned her down just as she had done me, with a little less of that barbaric romance. Now, my breath swept down at her in clean, smoky plumes.

Her mane lay sprawled about her head, like ink, and blood trickled through its strands, to flood over the unfilled spaces, and color them red. She was wheezing again, and her warm, ugly breath split the storm that spilled from my own mouth, making me shudder for its foulness.

We both knew what would have to happen now.

I looked to my Pipbuck, buying time so that she might absolve herself, and wondered if the cracking sound had come only from the mare's skull, as the device's metal casing was unspoiled but for a spattering of blood. Still, I wasn't about to beat her to death, and knew that, even though she needed to be put down, I couldn't go that far. I had to give her a little mercy, if only for my sake.

After reaching out with my magic, I found the laser pistol that she had beaten out of my grip. It had skittered through the dirt a ways, but I got a glow around it all the same. I floated it over, and looked the Raider straight in her urine colored eyes, hoping that some new world sickness could excuse this madness, could explain how an entire city's worth of ponies had become so lowbred and foul.

She began to giggle, to cackle maniacally in the face of death: before my face. I pressed the gun's square barrel to her forehead, but could do nothing to stop her from looking at me, as her eyes seemed unable to see the weapon that filled the space between them. They wouldn't leave me and, as if the Raider knew that her stare was burning itself into my mind like a brand, she wouldn't stop laughing.

Maybe if she had stopped, maybe if she had just talked to me.

Maybe then, I wouldn't have done it.

I pulled the trigger.

She died too quickly, and, like a light going out, and I couldn't say for sure if I had missed it.

The beam spread like wildfire though a field, and made a feast of her flesh, to leave little more than an empty plate. I cast the pistol aside, and watched as, from between her eyes, a red ring of light was pulled across her smiling face, boiling everything it crossed down to a dry, black pulp.

Her eyes boiled now, truly, as the hungry decay was drawn wider and wider, eating her away as if from the inside out. For a short and discomposing time, I could see a skull behind her melting face, whose eyes were red and whose curled mouth was far wider than even the Raider's, as she laughed circles around the brink of the end. Her voice was in the air, echoing on even as the fires died, and the last thing to be seen, buried under all that cinder and soot, was her collapsing smile.

Her mane had become a bed of brittle needles, as the red ring cooled around her neck, like an inflamed metal collar, to leave the rest of her body entirely unspoiled by this irreparable destruction. It almost looked like she had been decapitated, as if some passing thief had taken a liking to her head. The wound around her neck had cauterized, and so she could not bleed, and left no stains on the earth... only ashes.

I climbed off of the body and holstered my laser pistol, already trying to shake away the images that, when knit together, remembered my first kill. The Raider's combat knife rose from the soil like a growth, and it took me some time to get it loose. Once I had it uprooted, I strapped the thing across my father's vest, and carried on towards the south, knowing that I was in a kind of quiet and mechanical shock.

Still, I had to finish this…

An incredible pressure came to prick my chest, as if I was to be picked up on the end of some divine needle, and lifted from this little war. But soon, even as a bruise came to warm the space between my shoulder and my heart, I knew that I'd been shot. There was a bullet, caught just beside the scripture that lined my father's vest, and I felt an odd need for a sharper, more distracting kind of pain.

This blunt aching only served to pull me partway back into the world, numb and colorless as it still seemed, and let the music of battle flood my ears once again. I was in another fight.

I threw myself behind the very pillar of stone that Okavango had steered me around, just as another bullet was swallowed up into the dust. With my laser pistol beside me, I brought myself to bear, and swung its iron sights over the body of a muddy red Raider, who shared the weight of a rifle between his hooves and his mouth. Counting on the luck that was lacing my Equestria expedition, I took a shot at the weapon.

The buck yelped as the pistol's beam colored his rifle, turning it into a brand of brilliant orange. And he forgot me for struggling to cool his scalded tongue, lapping at the winter as if it were more precious than purified water. I swept up his superheated gun in my telekinesis, and sent it soaring into the north, like a clumsy and lead-feathered bird. He had his fill of air, and looked to me with those same wild eyes, as if all Raiders found joy in being disarmed, so that they might fight like bulls locking their horns.

After deciding that the world would not wait for me to go through the same dance twice, I leveled my pistol, and emptied its clip into the buck. Some of the beams glanced off of his dull, metallic armor, but most set rings of fire that spread across leather and skin. By the time he had pounced, his body was limp, as muscles built from unholy labor relaxed, to leave him as little more than a great, dead weight.

I didn't even think to step out of the way, and so his body crashed into me, and I collapsed on hooves that might as well have been replaced by roller-skates.

We fell to the ground together, and I had to pull myself out from under him no differently than I might have from the rubble of a collapsing city, or the wreckage of an airship. When it was over, I limped back to investigate his rifle, thinking far less of the second soul that I had turned loose into this pale morning.

The rifle had softened into an almost malleable state and, as the gun cooled, it became welded to the stone, as if to leave a monument to the dead Raiders. I left it, and hurried on to the disquieting battle.

*** *** ***

There were no signs of Caliber beside my parapet or the ridge, and even the slave, whose emancipation had been so short and so bitter, hardly gave me reason to pause. I couldn't know what customs that star-struck family might have put in place to send off their dead, and knew better than to stick my hooves where they weren't welcome, and stir up the temper of the religious and their favorite translation of God.

The bodies strewn along the highway looked to be replicas of the two that littered my own dirt road, as if there were only a few models making up the army called Raider. It was almost quiet now, as the horde's roar slowly died beside it. And even the fallen chieftain, whose body rose above the massacred drones to lead them even in death, seemed peaceful, but for the bullet wounds that had left him looking like a termite hill. Even now, he frightened me, if only for knowing how much it took to bring him to his knees.

I counted two dead Slavers, drifting somewhere in the graveyard that had been turned on its tombstones, and emptied out along the highway. Scattered around them, there were well over a dozen corpses, and gunfire still lapped up against the toll every once in a while, like the horns and headlights of faraway cars.

The hollowed out raider encampment was almost eerie now, as every decorative corpse became that much harder to ignore, and bulging eyes stared down at me from their posts on chiming meat hooks and sagging fences. I followed the only voice that was left, though it was little more than a whimper, and went after it if only to forget the ponies that had neither my luck nor the family's astrological guardians.

My Pipbuck marked off two hostiles, which were unmoving and lonely, somewhere towards the gateway's southern mouths. I peeked around the side of the last toll booth: my laser pistol shaking at my side, with a fresh clip to feed on and a cradle pieced together from the scraps of nervous magic.

The first figure was a Raider, with a hammer breaking up her smile. She was beating nails into the hooves of the second, binding them to the candy striped toll bar. Her victim was naked, but as I looked at his cutie mark, I knew that he could only be the last surviving Slaver. Lines of red trickled down his drawn out body, though even they were not enough to disfigure the manacles that filled his flanks.

Just as I realized that, in the back of my mind, I had ranked Slavers, no matter how broken or how naked, far lower than the wild and widespread ponies that had defeated them here, I spotted a few familiar splotches of color coming to a blossom in the East. Caliber, who came onto the stage as a blur of red and blue and buttery yellow, was running at full tilt, and beat the broken road as if to cobble it together again.

She had my father's automatic in her mouth, and, even for how watery her colors had become, I could see her eyes growing cold, and locking onto the only other survivors of the toll booth war. The Raider turned, as the hammering of hooves came to drown out her torture, and was greeted by two narrow lines of ballistic gold, that drew margins in the air and faded before being filled.

The first bullet tore through her cheek, and left her face in ruin even before it burst out in a flurry of torn skin, while the second dug into something far more solid, and knocked her weight back against the toll bar, to leave her bent over it by the spine. The bar seesawed for the sake of her slumped corpse, and the pinned Slaver was hoisted into the air. He screamed as those tireless fingers of gravity fought the silver needles that had been pounded through his hooves, to treat his body as the rope in their tug-of-war.

For all the wrong that his sane, and yet counter-Equestrian faction, had sown, I had to do something to stop this animated definition of the word agony. I hurried out of cover, and pulled the mare's body to the ground, almost forgetting that it was anything more than a weight on the scale. Then, I lowered the bar and brought its prisoner to rest on the road, even as his howling boiled down to doglike yelps.

It was over. Both sides had been whittled down to their last heartless soldier, and now we stood, like puppet masters before a mess of unstitched limbs and tangled string.

"That bitch," he panted, even as Caliber caught up with her bullets. "I had her... I won. But then she did something with her legs, you know?" He was talking to the mercenary as if they knew each other: as if she cared enough to listen. "Knocked me clear off of her, had me stunned until the second nail was in."

"I'll get right to work on setting up a rematch." She turned and looked me over, if only to measure how much trouble I'd gotten into without her. I tried to do the same, but she wore her wounds no differently than she might a uniform. "You alright?" I nodded, a little awestruck for how collected she seemed.

The mare wasn't even out of breath! After running like that: I'd have been done, ready to retire.

Equestria would have had to reclaim itself.

"I had to hunt down a couple of runaways: started making tracks east almost as soon as the explosion went off," she said, with one hoof prodding the freshest corpse. "But with this mare dead, I figure there are only two left." The Slaver groaned. "Not counting Hang 'em High over here."

"I handled them," I said, not without a little smudge of pride marking my voice.

"Good work." I began to skip a little inside, though it was strange to be commended for taking a life, even after spending so much of my time learning to save them. Still, the unfilled hooks that swung from the toll, pleading to be filled, made it all too easy to justify what I'd done. "Let me know if you want to talk about it later." She added, likely watching my eyes as they bounced between swollen faces and headless horses around us. "For now, all I really want to hear is you." She punched his chest. "So start singing."

The buck only wheezed, as if she had already beaten the words out of him.

"You're going to die here." Her voice became flat and hard, as she set things straight for the buck and me, as she told the truth. "See, I can't let you leave. And unless you're willing to talk - even knowing that this is the last face that you're ever going to see - we aren't gonna be much help to each other." I had to wonder if she might have lied to him if I wasn't there: to have him chase after his life, like a carrot on a stick, even as she guided him off the side of a cliff.

"Now, I don't expect you're going to tell us anything, but for all I know you could have the element of honesty tucked up between that black heart and lily liver of yours." She punched his belly, as if searching for a pressure point, like the button on a talking doll. "So I'll give you a chance."

“W-wh-what do you mean?” His black and shivering eyes fell onto hers, and it was clear that he was suffering through his words. “Just turn me loose, and I… I’ll tell you whatever you wanna know.”

“And here I thought Raiders were disloyal.” I suddenly felt like a burden, as Caliber couldn't help letting her frustration over what we had done show. She wouldn't get the information that she'd come for, and I worried over what she and Damascus might think of me for having hijacked the mission, for steering it into fantastical heroics, and away from the paper-and-ink investigation that it was meant to be.

"Damascus isn't going to get what he wanted," I cut in, as if it had to be said out loud.

"No." She hit the Slaver across the face, and I had to wince for the sound it knocked out of him. "He's not. But it's just as much my fault as it is yours." Somehow, that didn't make me feel any better. "You couldn't let the Coltilde have its slaves, and I can't tell this son of a bitch what he wants to hear."

“Hey! Hey, listen to me, sweetheart…” The Slaver, who seemed no less confused, struggled to look up at me through his tangled limbs. “I have a family back home… this is just a job!”

“Where are your clothes?” Caliber asked coolly, barely giving me enough time to scrape up some pity.

“What does that matter?” He twisted away from her again, as there was nothing like mercy in her eyes. “You’re reasonable, right? Tell her to let me go!”

“Three of you against more than a dozen Raiders: two casualties for twelve.” She rounded herself in, pacing little circles around the strung-up pony-peddler. “Then you… lose against one.” She poked his slumped belly again. “You must have some story to tell me: Because that doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

"Hey! I didn't lose to that psycho! ... She took me by surprise," he insisted, too proud for fear now.

"Bullshit," She hissed. "Y'know what I think? I think you were a little torn up about your friends over there." She rolled a hoof out along the highway, though the Slaver couldn't have turned west to save his life. "So you had yourself a little tantrum, and figured you'd make the Raiders pay for turning this neighborly little swap meet - cup of sugar for a glass of milk kind of thing - into a bloodbath."

I couldn’t help playing with the idea that we could have let him live, for how firmly he believed that this was the Raiders fault. If he hadn't been nailed down, he might have served as a tattle to this dishonest tale. “Winning wasn't enough. You felt insulted, you were insulted. So you took it a little too far."

“What the hell are you talking about?” He squirmed over to me once again. “She’s crazy!”

“You wanted to Plant. Your. Stake.” Caliber prodded his chest for each word. “And instead of finishing this fight, instead of killing her and getting to Hell out of Dodge…” Her hoof waved at the west again, pointing towards both the corrupted installation and the mare spattered along the road. “You raped her. Because you were the big winner, and just had to stick it to the horde that ripped your friends to pieces."

The buck let his armor fall, and stared Caliber down through dark eyes. "So what if I did?"

"We both know she deserved it."

She looked up; as if to make sure that I was listening. "You don't deserve any better, jack." I nodded, slowly, letting it make sense to me. "But lucky for you: neither of us are equipped to deal it out." The Slaver’s pleas had been getting to me, if only for how much I wanted to heal his wounds, to pull out the nails. But now, I was ready to see him washed out with all the other wrongs that had been righted at this toll. I knew for sure that, of the two, Raiders were the lesser evil.

"Like you're so noble... What are you? A Merc? One of those Hounds of Hell, judging from that mask: Cerberus' own little bitch," he accused, though this only got me to notice the name hanging around Caliber's neck. "Looks like we're good and acquainted now... It sure was shitty meeting you."

Caliber had stopped pacing circles around him, and the two just stared at each other, dark eyes locked. “So why don’t we just get this over with, huh? Kill me and start running, because when the Coltilde catches you, they’ll make you wish you stayed a whore.”

I could tell that he'd hit a nerve, but the Slaver’s ugly words could do little beyond beating themselves sore against the steel in her eyes. "You need to die like this: From the wounds your little plaything left you. Got to make it look like they forgot you here, that those nails drained you like a fucking maple."

“The Coltilde will never know that we had our hooves in this,” I added, almost as a question, wanting to be answered by both sides. “What happens if they figure it out?”

"There's nothing to figure out. We just killed two birds with one stone. If the Coltilde had any bridges built with these crazies, then they'll be good and burnt soon enough. And I don't think they have the time to go chasing after escaped slaves or veteran psychopaths." We knew very well that the Raiders were dead, but to anyone else: the toll would seem like nothing more than a battlefield abandoned by its champions.

The Slaver choked on his own moist, red laughter. "That's what this is about? You thought we wanted these spearchucking sadists to do our hunting for us?" He became one of them then, laughing even as the fingers of death tightened, and choked the life out of him. "You idiots."

Caliber bristled, taking the bait. “You got something to say?”

“You shouldn’t be worried about who we can get working for us… You should be tucking your fucking tails between your legs - afraid of who we’re working for.” He seemed to settle in then, knowing that he had her hooked. "I wonder who has you out here, digging for gold so far from where it's buried." His eyes seemed to shine a little brighter then. "Why don't we talk about a different kind of gold? The kind that really glitters... I think we might grow quite fond of one another for it."

"Grace." I flinched, thinking that she was going to hit him again. "Go ahead and gather up those slaves. Watching this piece of shit die is gonna be like watching paint dry."

"An honest mercenary? Who would have thought..." Even though the Slaver was running out of options, he did well to keep the panic out of eyes. "Maybe I can bait your Curiosity, then. There are a lot of things you don't know: that I do. And there are certainly a few things that I could keep to myself. Let's talk."

"Lets." Something still didn't fit between them, and I hesitated before leaving them alone together.

"What are you going to-"

"Can't leave any more marks on him... But those nails might have gone in a little crooked. I really should straighten 'em out." I couldn't bring myself to argue, to climb up onto my soapbox: not after everything she had already done for me. "We'll round up back at the ridge.”

I nodded, and felt as if I was giving in, that I was letting some small sin go slipping through the net. "And Grace," she repeated, even as I took to the highway, to obey her and block out the buck's last pleas. "I saw that Slave's corpse." Caliber looked up at me. "It needs to stay where it is: You can't bury it."

I felt very sick then, as if the world had spun in a thousand circles under my hooves, to muss up my hair and bring a green blush to my cheeks. But, even as the hammer started clicking and the Slaver thrust his voice up to the heavens, I started to run, blindly into the north, as if to look back at the toll would be to turn myself into a pillar of salt.

*** *** ***

"It's me." My chest was hollow by the time I came to them, and I had to speak over sharp inhales, as the air irritated my lungs. "Is everypony alright?"

The father led them out of their hideaway, and I saw that they were all so dirty that their coats and manes wore bastardizations of their original colors, like the wine-stained rags of a drunk. And, as if to make them a family for more than this uniform of filth, their eyes were all downcast and dark, and I was careful not to stare for too long. I knew the touch of lingering eyes, and had always been tender to it.

Okavango floated along behind them, with his speakers blaring some kind of carnival music, and I jumped to see the little colt clinging on to his satellite, laughing as if on a carousel. Even the filly smiled a little as they bobbed past her, and my panic fell to pieces to see her father looking so grateful.

"What you did for them..." He started, stepping in close so that we might speak alone, to let the children revel in that era-crossing entertainer. "It's still hard to believe this is really happening."

"We're the only ones left to look out for each other, sir." I saluted him, as all of Equestria was watching.

We’ll have your country up and running within a working week. There are a couple of parts we have to make an order for - That'll probably run up the bill a little - But she’ll be good as new in no time!

"You did more than that. You saved our lives." I didn't know how best to take his gratitude, and so stood at attention, as if he was about to pin a medal to my chest. For acts of singular daring and devotion...

"I don't know if it's anything more than luck and a gun that makes a hero: but you've definitely got it."

"Thank you, sir." I came out of my soldier's stance, for wanting to look him the eye. I felt very comfortable in the folds of the family's attention, as if it was velvet, though I wasn't used to much more than the sandpaper of suspicious and leering eyes. I couldn't measure the difference, but for how good it felt. "We should head back to the highway. My partner - Caliber - will be waiting."

The colt let out a little cry as Okavango wove around me. "Daddy!" I wove the spritebot down, as if guiding a deflating airship down to earth, and was relieved to the see the colt make it back to his father's side unbroken. "They're taking us back to the monsters!"

"No, baby: they’re gone now. The Guardians killed them -" I coughed, as if to cover up his choice of verb. “- for what they did to Uncle." He held his children close and, as the mare let out a bloated sob from beside them, I knew which side of the family the dead buck had belonged to.

Okavango, the Father and I lead the way, as his children fell behind, to spin around their mother's tired hooves, as if dancing through the pillars of the Canterlot gardens. "If you don't mind me asking - " I began, after deciding that they might be able to put another marker on my map, and scribble some more color inside the lines of Equestria's border. "Where were you all taken from?"

"They picked us up while we were crossing the highway further East, before the mouth of the valley." As if stepping onto the road was no different to treading across the tongue of some enormous beast. "We were heading for Calvary, following a path that would steer us clear of all the Locust camps and Buffalo trails, but you can't chart a course around the Raiders: They cross the wasteland like meteor fields."

“What’s a Calvary?”

“Biggest damn city in the country.” He chuckled, and I even caught the mare smiling a little, though their children looked no more dialed in. “They say it’s towers cut right into the clouds, and its sprawl covers every bit of land from the Plains to the ocean. What have you been living under a rock your whole life?”

“A mountain,” I said, not realizing that it had been a rhetorical question, and missing the words behind the look that passed between them then: this girl’s just shy of the other side of sanity.

"We heard it was safe there," the mare, whose voice matched the dirtied cream of her coat, began. "Safer, at least. And, after the rumors about Free Rein… we had to get away." I was glad to see her getting comfortable, even if it was for looking at me as some dusty amnesiac, climbing out of the rubble, as if into an alien world. "The Railway doesn't run through Calvary, and that... that makes it paradise."

"We'll get you back on your way." I said, making promises of paradise like some street corner preacher. "If nothing else, we can at least get you armed." I couldn't escort them to Calvary, and I wouldn't take them to Hell. But the thrill of rescue had yet to leave me, as if some glory could still be wrung out of them.

"Excuse me, Ma'am." The filly whispered, climbing over her words like hurdles built too high. Still, her manners went straight to my heart, and started cuddling. "Are you a shepard?"

"Shepard?" I asked, hanging back a little to keep in step. “Doesn’t that make you a sheep?” This got a little giggle out of her, but she quickly looked to her parents as if in need of help to explain something.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” The Father recited a passage of that homespun scripture, which I remembered through the voice of my mother, as others might bedtime stories and lullabies.

“I always thought a Shepard was somepony who watched over a flock of animals.” The russet-colored colt argued. Neither foal was any larger than a saddlebag, and I knew, as ash came into the wind around us, that the Raiders deserved to get their justice in the court of only the oldest and most hotheaded Gods.

“But Uncle said it meant more than that.”

“Sure, but he got that from his book about the Princesses.” The colt stormed on, explaining for everyone. “Uncle was funny; he called 'em by these fancy names, and thought for sure they were always watching him.” Maybe their Faith wasn't so different after all. “But I think that the Princesses have better things to do than watch Uncle, or at least somepony a little more interesting to spy on.” I smiled, almost forgetting the smell of ash, even as I tried to stand between the children and the mare beheaded by fire. “Like you!”

“Now why would the Princesses want to watch somepony like me?”

“Like you don’t know!” The colt's voice broke into pieces, as he lifted it over us all. “You save ponies! Weren’t you paying attention?” His sister seemed to remember something then, and started tugging at his side. “Wh-?” He began, but was struck silent as she whispered to him. Their faces dropped, and their eyes went dim, as we walked by the one pony that I hadn't saved.

*** *** ***

“I need to see him…” The mare said, holding a hoof to my chest as we came marching up to the ridge, though she was careful not to touch me, as if my heartbeat might bruise her.

"Honey-"

"Him." She forced the word out, as if it was a name to be whispered only under the breath of the brave.

"I want to see that son of a bitch dead." I had given up on censoring the new world for the sake of the children, as their parents seemed all too ready to see them wading through graveyards spilt over the highway, or watching as blurry curse words flew over their heads. "I need to see him dead."

"Who, Mommy?" The colt was quick to ask, though, from the way his sister was bunched up behind dusty hooves, I could tell that she already knew. Their mother would have me lead her to the grave of that chieftain Raider: that barbarian king, who had ruled under the tattered banner of rape and pillage.

“Show me.” She pleaded, turning to me, with a face of glass for the sheen of her tears. “Please.”

It didn't take us long to find the chieftain, as the other bodies looked like molehills around his amber clad mountain of a corpse, from which a dozen red rivers had burst as if coming through broken dams. His face was almost intact, caught in a roar that bared teeth as large and crude as limestone. And, as I threw off the helmet that was his crown, we stared into eyes that were filled with sickness and the color red.

He had bitten off his own tongue in some final throe of agony, and half of it lay, long and dark and limp, beside his open mouth. It looked like he had suffered.

The mare just stared: as the weight of her mane covered eyes that might have been mistaken for two enormous tears, too stubborn to fall. When she finally started weeping, I knew that my shoulder wasn't the one that she needed to dampen, that I should have watched the children, as the father came to hold her as she shook. So, after taking on some of her weight, I walked the mare back to her medicine.

They lay down together, and the family let their colors blend, as they crowded around their enfeebled mother. "I'm going to go find Caliber." I said, needing an excuse to leave them alone.

Okavango followed as I made my way back to the toll, still buoyant despite how little attention I'd given him. Life was so clean for Cerberus' watchdog, so black and white. If he was playing guardian, it didn't matter that he couldn't protect anypony from the monsters stowed away in the corners of their own mind, the shadows that milked them for tears, leaving them empty, and raw at the edges.

If he was following me, it didn't matter that I trotted on ahead, skipping over bodies and patterns of gore as if crossing a hopscotch course, without throwing back so much as a thank you for making the children smile again. It didn't matter that Equestria could have its highways littered with hollowed out demons, all lined up at the toll, as if taking the place of so many tourists and travelers.

But, as his speakers fought though that overgrown tangle of static to play me another song: I knew that things weren't so simple, that Okavango Delta saw the world in at least one more color: Little Girl Blue.

We stood, with death spread across the asphalt, and listened to that dusty piano, and the tired voice of a singer in an empty theater. I turned to the light of his galactic heart, and as so much flesh gave the last of its warmth to the winter, I started crying. For the girl, and for all that had been wasted around me, I opened up to the faceless, as his song had brought the new world beating against me with all its wrong.

I didn't weep, as the mother had, but tears came to leave a silver scar down each of my cheeks. Lights of green and red and starry blue had come to a blur around me, coloring the mist in splotches, like watercolor paint on an immense and irresolute canvas. But they soon became sharp, as my eyes dried, and the melody trickled to a close. Tears could not fall from the spritebot's single electric eye, but he had managed to tear my heart from my chest, and put it back in its cradle even as the music ran dry.

"Where're the Slaves?" Even after hearing the crunch of gravel under four hooves, and seeing the plumes of smoke for the heat of her breath, my entire body jolted as a steely voice tapped me on the shoulder.

"Caliber!" I sang, and was more than a little surprised for how happy I sounded. The mercenary’s back might have started creaking for the armory that she had slung across it, as even her saddlebags had swollen to the size of prize swine. I looked over to the gateway before the East, and saw a body hanging from its farthest toll bar: limp and distended. The stage was set, and the Coltilde was not likely to pick up our scent through the fetid air, as only a Raider could have left somepony to die like that.

"Yeah." The word came out flat, as Caliber was already walking by me. I hurried to catch up, as she drove each step after the last with something not unlike violence. "I don't like this, Grace."

I had to wonder what the Slaver might have said to her. I’d seen ponies who thought themselves on the brink of death, though it was most often for hypochondria or the breathing in of ethanol fumes, and I knew how catching sight of the end could retune our voices. "Anything I should know?"

"Nah. It's just that... you and I aren't seeing this the same way." And, though she didn't say it out loud, I knew that both of us thought we were in the right, while the other had to be wearing tinted glasses, whether of rose or of ash. "If the Slavers find out what we did-"

"They won't!" I was almost laughing, as if the idea was nothing short of ludicrous.

"They probably won't: probably! I don't like leaving loose ends, Lamplight, and this operation doesn't end any other way." She sighed, and her breath passed me by like a pale and lumbering animal. "The fact is: a lot of ponies have their heads on the rails because of us, just for the sake of saving four."

"That isn't how it works." I couldn't keep up, as the mare never fell anything less than a nose ahead of me. "You can't think of it that way!" She looked back at me, but didn't turn her head. "It doesn't matter how many we saved: This isn't a market. We did what was right, not what worked out to the best bargain!"

"Grace -" She began, about to explain some illusory truth me, though the sight of the family, and their picture of something timeless… something tribal, was enough to cut her short. The children met us with welcoming cheers, and I knew that they could not have been abandoned: Not for the price of the world.

I'd gathered that Caliber dealt in absolutes, seeing every card for its number and color and suit, following her contract as if it had been signed in blood, and charting her winnings right up against her losses. To her, we had saved four, and risked an entire deck. But seeing them together, even looking at them as a gambler might a lucky hand, blindsided the mercenary, and softened her barren eyes, making her a mare.

She looked back at me, and turned her head, smiling just enough. “Hello Shepard," the little blue filly cooed, from between the hooves of her parents. It really wasn't fair to what was left of Caliber's argument, but it was good to see the last scraps of it picked up on the wind, like a crumpled house of cards.

"Who're you!?" The colt demanded, in the brash and inoffensive voice that belonged only to children.

Caliber stayed quiet, as if she'd never met somepony so harmless, somepony that couldn't be killed. "This is my partner: Caliber!" I stepped in to introduce her, pitching a new comic book superhero to a test audience. "Remember that big explosion?" They nodded. "Well then: if I'm the Shepard, then she must be..." My face fell: I hadn't thought that one out. "She made the explosion!"

"Whoa." They drew the word out together, as if it were an ice cream cone, and they had to see who could make theirs last the longest. "Did you do that with your earth pony magic?"

"What? Earth ponies can't just make explosions with their minds! If they could then I would've done one!" The Colt shot back, tapping his forehead. "I would've done a whole lot of them!"

His sister scratched her head, pushing a hoof through the folds of her dusty mane. "Oh. Well I heard that some earth ponies have magic of their own: and they don't even need a horn or anything."

“That’s the magic of being in-dus-trious and hardworking!” The colt sounded out the longer words exactly as Caliber did, and I smiled at her, though she was too stunned to notice. “Not the magic of explosions!”

“Alright kids, knock it out. I’m sure that Ms. Caliber wants to keep her magic a secret,” the children’s father excused, but Caliber only drew circles in the dirt, looking more ashamed than awkward, and gave the buck a thankful look.

"Right. Well, me and the - Sheep herder? - over here need to figure out which of these guns will get you where you're going." Caliber had clearly made her decision on how we would be helping the family from here on out, and leading them along until we were free to play escort had likely never crossed her mind. "Just tell me where that is, and I can get some kind of loadout ready for ya."

"Forgive the children: we're all just a little overwhelmed." The mare gave us both a ghostlike embrace, and then faded back to her husband's side. "Thank you both so much for what you've done." Caliber just stared, waiting for her to pick something out of our menu of high quality problem solvers. "We're going to New Calvary. There's something changing in the North. The Coltilde was gone for such a long time... And I can't live with it hanging over my shoulder."

"To Calvary, then." Caliber nodded, and looked over at the rifles on her back. "Were you planning to find a tunnel onto the Starline or follow the road east?" The mercenary seemed all too comfortable with interrogations, and might have pulled out a pad and a quill, to stare out from under a smoky fedora like one of the detectives from True Police Stories.

The buck nodded towards the valley's mouth, and Caliber began untangling the bundle of rifles. "Fine. Now, The Slavers will be digging their hooves in over Hellside, so I figure that train's not gonna be pulling its weight along for a while yet. My advice: get out of the valley, and don't look back: Hell's making a fist."

“Hell?” The colt repeated. “That’s a weird name.”

“Yeah, well there’s this sign - probably used to say Hello and welcome to Cerberus’ House of Cults and Conspiracies - but it’s so torn up now that the only thing left is the word Hello with its head bit off. Damascus’ been around forever: he probably knows what it was actually called.” She shrugged.

“Hey!" I yelped, getting an idea, though it might have nipped me in the flank for the sound I'd just made. "Why don’t we hire out one of the mercenaries? I mean, Charon could escort them to Calvary easy."

Caliber lifted a hoof, as if to say that I was getting ahead of myself. "No offense folks: But I think we've done enough for ya." Hearing her say that was like a slap across the cheek, as I'd been waiting for those words to come from the Father, or even his sheepish wife. And, though it made me out to be a glutton for gratitude - like a foal holding up an empty cone, asking for more even as she licked the ice cream from her lips - I had to admit: I felt cheated not to have heard it from them. "There's trouble on the homefront, and we got a boss who could end up being anything from a little stirred up, to bent under a guillotine because of what we did here. So no, Hell can't spare one of her hounds just to go on a walk with you."

"Besides, I wouldn’t trust a mercenary as far as I could throw one.” She went on, before I could point out the hypocrisy. "Now, just pretend that somepony slapped a sign across my face that says: Quick, take these guns before this idiot realizes how much they're worth!" She brandished her crowded sides to the family, and did a pretty good impression of somepony with a sign posted over their face.

Of all things, I was worried about what Caliber's tirade might have done to our reputation with the children, but they only stared up at her with awe and admiration brimming out of their bright little eyes.

Then, as the stunned couple hurried to find something that might go on as their new guardian into Calvary, and the foals whispered to each other, I realized that my hero pitch might have gone a little too well. While they had lifted me from scripture, as a namesake to some humble and pastoral caretaker, when it came to a popularity contest amongst children, it was hard to beat someone who had just been rude to their parents. A rebel was a tough act to follow.

*** *** ***

“Bye Shepard! Bye Cali-Belle!” The children yelled, both perched neatly on their mother’s back, like birds on a wire. Okavango bounced around them, glinting under the sheets of bleached light that were pinned over the mountains, over the very stone that Calvary held up as its shield against Hell and its winter.

“Thank you again, Shepard. I hope something out there rewards you for what we can’t.” The Father followed close behind them, passing through the filth of the Raider's den, and beginning along the long, empty road that fell out into the whitewashed East. “When you come into New Calvary: look for us. If we’ve managed to make something for ourselves, then you’ll be welcome to take your fill of it."

“Just get there safely, and it’s a promise.” I shook his hoof, as if salutes were too formal now.

“Give that filly a better life,” Caliber added, if a little sternly. There hadn’t been any hoofshakes for the mare, and I wondered if she might have left the couple a little afraid of her. After all, mercenaries didn’t seem to have the best reputation, and her contract might as well have been carved into her bones.

“I’d die for my children, but to know that you would have done the same… that’s something I won’t forget,” he said, speaking to both of us as Okavango left his foals with one last melody. Then, the buck turned to lead his family out east, with guns and supplies strapped to his body on holsters and saddlebags.

They left us with shouts of farewell and thanks, before they were scrubbed up into the white lather that was the East, to begin on their way to New Calvary.

“Feeling better?” I asked, as we watched them become little more than smudges on the skirts of the morning.

“Feeling damn good.” Caliber let herself smile then, though I had already heard the laughter: woven into her voice like sunlight through the mist.

Footnote: Level Up!

Perk Added: Child at Heart: Who says growing up is a good thing? You call yourself charismatic but the fact that you get along best with children makes it seem like you’re just immature. This perk greatly improves your interactions with children, no matter how old, usually in the form of unique dialogue options.

Here's something you should see.

Chapter 6: Beggar in the Morning

Fallout Equestria: Begin Again

Chapter 6: Beggar in the Morning

“Sometimes the smallest roles in the Good Fight are the most important.”

|*| Bits and Pieces |*|

I watched my reflection, as it mirrored that of a warhorse. The scars across the toll booth's face closed over me like the notches of a tribal mask, as if I was expected to take on all of the window's wounds. I could have been a little glass lion, for my proud mane and pale scars, but was surprised to find that, even as I moved, some of the marks moved with me, and took on more cardinal colors. Still, this new image was to be a blessing, for Caliber's plan would see me clothed in the uniform of a disfigured kingdom.

Now I tightened fraying leather belts around my middle, but still felt naked without those high collars fluttering against my neck. It was strange to be wearing clothes that had been stripped from the dead, but I was only happy to have forced nakedness on a corpse left by some other killer: a corpse I didn’t know.

It wouldn’t be long before we walked through the Raider’s jungles, and, if I could pass for one of them, then we might come out from the company of death, and walk into Hell without its fingers like a bone necklace around our collars. Caliber would lead us right into the jaws of this new Equestrian monster, and I could only hope that we wouldn't tread on its tongue, and let it taste us. Okavango and Charon could ferry me past old, dormant technology and our insomniac ancestors, but Caliber didn't make time for the past, and would throw us over one of the country's freshest wounds, like salt.

“Are you done in there?” The mercenary’s voice sounded exhausted, though I had only kept her waiting for a few minutes, and I ignored it, if only to fold away my father’s vest, treating its scripture like the fringe of a flag, to be set down over a soldier's grave. Once everything was neatly packed away, I burst out of the toll booth with flourish, and slammed its door as if to play myself onto a stage.

Behold! I only just shut my voice in, knowing better than to say the word aloud. "What do you think?" I asked, skirting modesty. It had taken a little while, but from the sad collection that was Raider fashion, I'd picked out the best for the journey to come, letting myself be a puppet to my genteel mother.

No longer could I go about my business unclothed, and put so little work into my image. Not knowing that I would face bucks as distinguished as Damascus, and a world that might soon ask for my name in lights, shining over its doors. If Equestria wasn't built in a day, it certainly wasn't built by the naked.

"Oh my stars," Caliber said, playing a lightheaded debutante in some southern heat spell. She might have become frustrated in searching the toll, keeping her nose to the ground in pursuit of some paper trail to this deal between Rail and Raider. But, for now, she had a character to play. "That's the one." Okavango ooed, as if to agree. "Uh-huh, honey... you're making me as faint as a filly in the middle of Ju-ly."

She had pieced together a strange outfit for herself: a scrapyard of thick padding, worn in an almost indecent fashion, as a patchwork suit of armor built of everything from strips of mattress to baseball kneepads protected the few places that had not been left bare to skilled snipers and leering eyes.

"What else do you need to hear?" She asked, leaving the act in a shambles. "It really brings out your eyes - Makes you look fat? Impossible! - The Raider Badlands Collection really is some of their best work." I looked down, as if to pick up the pieces of that southern belle. "What does it matter? We're trying to be discreet: Now's not the time to be fussing over how many heads you'll turn."

That was hard to hear. A large part of this whole production had been put on in the hopes of impressing her. After all, she was one of the only ponies to whom I'd think to present myself, be it in arms or haute école: one of those few that I truly wanted to impress. "You look great." She surrendered, after a long and unsaddling silence. "After all: you're a Stable pony. You all look like you just stepped out of a billboard."

“You don’t think these shorts are too tight?” I peered worryingly back at my flanks. The tawny, cutoff rear to the outfit was especially strange, as it left me feeling more naked than nudity ever had.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, honey.” She glanced conspiratorially at Okavango. “After all, they… say…” As she crept through the sentence, our semisentient jukebox started blaring along behind her, with such flawless timing that I might’ve sworn that they planned this. You gotta Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive.

A sermon, coming from what had to be a preacher who was kicking up his robes, went bouncing off with the horns. Caliber shot me a devilish smile and tilted her head West, with her hooves becoming instruments as they tapped against the highway. And, if asked, I'd have let her dance me back to Hell.

To illustrate. My last remark. Luna in the moon. Discord in the park.

What did they do? Just when everything looked so dark?

“Come on, Lamplight. Let’s hit the road.”

*** *** ***

Even in her new uniform, Caliber had kept what was clearly some kind of radio strapped to her chest like a badge, and I had begun to wonder if Damascus could not come to speak through it, and steer us in another direction. "Caliber," I began, as we came deeper into the valley that, only the night before, had been flooded in thick and starless ink. "Couldn't we get our orders over the radio?"

The mercenary shook her head. "Not from down Damascus' way, we can't. There isn't much that can jump out over all of Cerberus’ hurdles." And, before I could think to ask, she nodded back to the cheery spritebot. "I still can't figure where Mister In-Between over there found the time to record those songs."

“Maybe Cerberus lets itself by.” Okavango Delta certainly hadn't had much trouble when ferrying me through the passages of glass and light that served as veins to Hell's subterranean heart.

“Yeah, maybe. I’d try and figure a way back to Damascus that makes use of your little keycard, but I’d rather walk into the Hell I know than the one that's hidden behind all those old locks. History's seen a lot worse than the Raiders… and I want to be in one piece for whatever comes next.”

“What do you think he has planned for us?” I said us because, by now, I’d decided that this was the way it was going to be. I couldn’t leave Caliber until I’d sold her a little more hope for the world, as to hear her doubting Equestria’s new dawn, was to hear someone calling my God little more than a windup toy, and watch them crossing out entire lines of scripture under a firm and faithless red pen.

"Sounds like the Slavers might not be wearing the first collar of the food chain anymore, but I figure Damascus already had his suspicions about that. Either way, he’ll need to pull out all the stops before he can get his plan rolling, and I’m sure we’ll get caught up doing most of the legwork.”

The streetlights cut out, as if falling into a tepid and dreamless sleep, so that they would be ready to take the place of a setting sun. “Who could the Slavers possibly be working for?” I didn’t know much about the pieces in play across what Caliber would call The Wasteland, but I was eager to learn about those that remained from the days before Equestria burst. “They control the northern rails, for Pete's sake!"

“If the world's still spinning: it's spinning on blood and money. All it would take to control the Coltilde is a carrot dangling from a stick, or a knife pressed up against its throat. Anypony with the money or the caps could take the Slaver's reins right out of their hooves.” She paused. “The only contenders I can think of would be more interested in wiping them out than controlling them, so… I guess I can't answer that.”

“That’s alright. I’m sure we’ll figure it out.” She smiled a little to hear me say that, and we fell back into the silence of trudging hooves and a crooning spritebot. Okavango only put on a show for special occasions, but his standards were clearly dropping with every mile marker, as even a passing bird or the echo of gunfire might inspire in him the need to sing a song, whose words had very little to do with anything.

As the electrical pylons returned, marching across the broken hills like soldiers and pilgrims all at once, I got some perspective on where we were. Acheron was not much farther along, and I could see its ragged radio tower standing proud against the West. I remember that the highway continued on even as the land sank, propped up by thick pillars that, for the most part, had endured the weight of hollow cars and the litter of a long and anemic offseason. The turnoff to Hell would steer us north soon enough, and I could almost feel the pulse of the kingdom, even through all its sickness and the bruises in the air.

“How was your first?” Caliber spoke up, as we came to choose between an empty Acheron and a crowded Hell. The valley seemed louder now, though there had been no music since we saw the Coltilde’s smoke rising out of distant spillways, and no words since those pylons crossing the valley.

“She was pretty.” I said, as if I had only just realized it. “Under all that animal…” Putting it into words wouldn’t help me but, for some reason, I felt as if I had to say something. “But her face… just burned away. Like paper. So many wasted years: So much work undone. She would have been master to the most finely tuned instrument in the world, but because of her madness… it had to be pulled apart.”

“That was her fault. Not yours.”

“I know,” I said, without breathing, as if I could only inhale in Hell. “I know.” Beyond the church and above the shattered outskirts, I could see corpses hanging, ripe and ready to be plucked; the only fruit that still grew in the Middle Passage. Now, I wanted noise, I wanted the winds that roared over the hills like a lion cub playing king and the ruins that creaked no louder than rocking chairs to rise and match the storm that had fallen over our country. “But I feel… different, knowing how easy it is to take a life.”

“Or lose one.” She added, saying what I couldn't bring myself to say. Killing the mare hadn’t left anything in me that was heavier than the fear of death, and now I couldn't help thinking about the light being boiled out of her eyes, and was left feeling hollow but for the weight of it, like a tumor crowding my heart.

“Do you think that’s what it was like with the bombs?” I asked, as she looked up to the sky, and saw that it still wore a mask. We hadn’t known what we were capable of, until it was done. We couldn't have understood how much power we had, though it was right there in front of us; proven on paper and in practice. We didn’t know how easy it had become to end the world, until it was already over.

“Maybe. Except what you did was right.” The mare seemed to draw into herself then, as if she was trying to decide what she might have done, if given the order to lead the war, and all its armies, over the edge.

We were coming to the cemetery now, as if carrying Death home on our shoulders after a long and exhausting night, and it was hard to think of anything else for his arm slumped around my neck. “Would you tell me about your first kill?” I asked, as we slowed to a stop before the fence, which rose out of the earth like a row of sharpened teeth from soiled and misshapen gums.

“I think I might have forgotten it.” Caliber's answer came out as if from under her breath and, if she hadn't stormed ahead, stepping over that field of long sown bodies - that might have blossomed under the cruel tending of the Raiders - I would have asked her to repeat herself. "Wait here."

She disappeared into the church, into The Light at the Edge of the World, which I slowly realized had gone quiet, as its colors faded, as if trampled under the chariot that was the sun.

*** *** ***

By the time Caliber came out of the church, the mist had been burnt away, leaving the storm naked in all the shades of its temper, as the sunlight tore its uniform to rags and sat on its back as if it were a throne.

"Keep my rifle ready." She tossed me some ammunition, without slowing down, and the cartons went into a frenzy between panels of magic, as if being fought over by an entire troupe of jugglers. "It isn't quiet. But better for the Raiders to hear a gunshot than one of their own bleating out a call to arms." She led me down the road, which would turn west to divide the blocks of cement that cradled Hell.

The staircases that broke up its southern face were guarded by shoddy barricades, whose grisly ornaments marked the territory, just as well as any flag or insignia. “If any of them come up to us alone; we drop 'em. You’re not passing for a raider with any look clearer than a squint, but if I have to talk our way out of something: just pretend you had your tongue cut out. The first thing that comes out of your mouth every time you speak might as well be: Boy, it sure is neat being a Stable pony.”

She went trotting on ahead before I could think of anything to say, but Okavango and I looked at each other as if to ask: What’s with her? I had to wonder how tense this morning might have been for Caliber as, to her, we were two fillies coming into a smoky study, to confess our pretty little sins to some stern and stone-faced father. And, to make it worse, she would have to play the part of his daughter, his princess, while I was no closer to the fallout than a tagalong friend from some neighboring kingdom.

We had nothing to show for our investigation at the toll, but for a claim to the deserted sword and scales of a lopsided lady justice, and an imaginary medal pinned to my chest. And for our shaking up of the hornet's nest, something had to give, even if it boiled down to a lecture or a slap on the hoof.

But, even though Damascus would wear a cross and a chevron on his shoulder before he would a bleeding heart, it wasn't ridiculous to think that he might even approve of what we had done. What worried me most, though, was that a pony like him should need to be so careful.

Rose colored water might have trickled into my Pipbuck, for how many hostile markers came up as the Raider's kingdom lorded over us. I pulled in a little closer to Caliber and Okavango, as if they could cushion me from the sound of rutting animals in the damp heart of a battlefield. "How many are there?"

“We don’t know.” My Pipbuck started to tick as we reached the end of that first stunted tower, where the roads joined together like streams into a dock between two piers. “Welcome to Castle Clusterfuck, kids. Damascus has mercs who can walk with the ferals - live with 'em over on the north side of town like it was some old world paradise - but if the dead can be tamed… Raiders can’t.”

She peeked around the edge of the block, scoping out the road that divided walking corpses from so many talking animals. I noticed a door built into the opposite wharf, but decided that, if I were to ask her about it, Caliber would only unveil whatever horror waited behind it, ready to swallow up naïve wanderers, bored locals and bound mercenaries. “Looks like we’re in the clear… I say we hug this southern wall until the next set of stairs, then we can head up to the nearest metro entrance.”

Of all the colors that had stood out against the night, the green that spoiled the valley's northern air had best survived the coming of day. I saw something moving, just over the lip that seemed to be keeping the sickness from spilling out into the asphalt docking bay. It shuffled by, as if on patrol, and gave no hint to the incredible speed that ferals seemed only to wield when hunting. "Okay," Caliber began. "Let's go!"

Wishing that I could float by as inoffensively as Okavango, or move with as much confidence as the mercenary, I scampered along as the middle part to our little caravan, following our leader as she wove around crooked streetlights, and skipped over litter that had trickled down from above.

We all jumped over a headless body, as if it were a hurdle, and I realized, for the plank that jutted out over us and the spatter of dark stains that reached out to north, that this pony had been sent to the undiscovered country in some ritualistic execution over the unmovable river that parted Hell.

We came to a notch in the naked foundation, and stopped before throwing ourselves into the final run of our dainty invasion. My Pipbuck chirped up, and advertised a Metro station just shy of the stairway’s peak. I wanted to show it off to Caliber, like a new watch, but she had clearly come this way before.

“You’d think Damascus might try to set up shop somewhere a little more practical.” She almost laughed, over shallow breaths. Adrenaline seemed to have improved her mood, and she smiled back at us as if to say Here we go, before pouncing on the stairs, and throwing us into absolute Raider territory.

The litter of the old world carpeted Hell's piers, as flyers of many lackluster colors and newspaper birds blotted out the concrete. But, while one side of the road rested under an irradiated fog, it was the other that wore the stench of death. Even as I clambered over the last few steps, I was hit by it, and retched, poking my head out over the first flight of stairs. I’d never smelt something so heavy and rank, and as Caliber helped me back along our way, I found the seeds from which this wall of stench had grown.

One of the alleys, carved out from between two square and somehow elephantine buildings, had been turned into a slaughterhouse. And yet, I almost wanted to thank the stars, for the meat strung up there took on shapes far stranger than any anatomy recorded in the pages of medical journals. "Those things have two heads." I muttered, more to myself than anyone else.

I had to wonder if the Raiders had grafted the extra parts on, in a childish attempt to design some kind of Supercow. More familiar shapes drifted over the opposite end of that hallway of meat, and got me moving again. I picked out more Raiders, loitering ahead, far along the edge of their little city, whose legs swung out over the road below, as if they were dipping their hooves in the cool waters of a canal.

"Damn it. There aren't enough of 'em up here." I nodded, as if she wasn't crazy to be complaining. "Means the tunnels will be clogged up with the bastards." I could make out the familiar shape of a Metro entrance, between her and the spread of Raiders. “There’s a door to some of the safer utility tunnels deeper in.” She waved a hoof at the concrete jungle. “D’you think we should go for it?”

"Utility tunnels?" I asked, though it wasn't like Hell had a lot safe places to spare. "Might as well."

"You're conviction is truly something to behold." She smirked. "Just keep close. If any of ‘em ask: I'll say we're looking to score some Jet. Try to look shivery, and... less like you." She inspected Okavango Delta next, trying to figure out a way to make him look more at home on the homefront.

"And you... Can’t you, y'know: blink? Raiders don't usually stumble across Cerberus tech, but I've seen some of 'em leashing up the standard issue spritebots. And that big blue eye of yours will be a problem." As smoothly as a Wonderbolt putting on her sunglasses, Okavango let a steel shutter slide over his heart. "Perfect. We can't have you looking too pretty." She scratched her chin, and turned all the scrutiny of her Raider makeover plan back onto me. "Speaking of: I think the robot just gave me a pretty good idea."

*** *** ***

“Sorry about the smell. I tried cleaning it out.” After seeing Hell sway from side to side, like a docked ship riding the tide, I found her though the narrow slit that was all I had left of the world, following nothing but the mercenary’s raspy voice and the scent of that hanging garden of meat, as both crept around the edges of the arclight helmet. “But one of these sickos must have blown the owner’s brains out from behind.”

“That’s alright!” I cried, having to raise my voice for how much the tilted steel muffled it. “I’ll get used to it!”

“Could’ve gone for a hockey mask, but it’d show off too much of your eyes.” I took that as a compliment. “And you do not wanna be inside one of those wastehound helmets.” I could tell that she was starting to move, and stumbled around in circles to find her. “Here, just muzzle into my tail.” She brushed up under the welder’s mask and blinded me in a flurry of red. “I think it might be a sign of submission with these guys.” I got over myself and obeyed, thinking that the grossness was worth having an anchor against this place. She tasted a little like cinnamon. But more like dust. “Now they’ll think you’re my bitch.”

As she began pulling me along, Okavango bumped up against my side, clamoring for attention like a beggar on his knees or a child on the tips of their hooves. “Huh. Don’t think he likes seeing you this way.” I let go of her tail, and let the spritebot guide me, as if he were no different to a shoal of fish gathered at the belly of a blind whale, steering it home. “Little bastard is smarter than I figured.”

I heard voices rising all around me, as we came into what felt like an open square. I tried to walk like a Raider might; attacking the ground with each step, and even going so far as to growl under my breath. Okavango swung around to my left side, after travelling under my belly, as if caught in orbit.

He had the sense to straighten out my arclight helmet, though I had realized that the accessory was nearly incompatible with unicorns. As far as plans went, this might have been one of the worst, were it not for the fact that – despite the mare walking as if following the scent of a gazelle through some savannah, and the robot drawing cursive blue lines around her body – we scarcely turned a head.

The Raiders only circled bonfires built from ruin, fired their crude weapons into the air as if their bullets were notes from an instrument, and watched senseless dogfights over Hell’s plentiful stores of meat.

Almost a quarter of the bodies I saw, were either mounting, or being mounted, though Kings hunched over other Kings just as often as they did their Queens, as if this greasy deck of cards was being shuffled by a fitful and irreverent dealer. These proud displays of sodomy were enough to send me back behind my shield, though it was good to know that, if nothing else, they couldn’t multiply by going that way.

“The Raiders tend to take the road less travelled,” Caliber whispered, as even a mare in blinds could not cross the square and shrug off their rutting. “Hey… check it out.”

I was afraid to look, but the mercenary pressed her tail against my cheek and, as she tilted my head up, I was almost knocked to my haunches for seeing what lorded over the city. Standing between two crude, concrete structures, was an enormous Celestial Cross. But it was nothing like the symbol sewn across the cover of a hymn books, or beautifully pieced together from matchsticks and scraps of metal from the lower floor. This was an insult, and even a godless mare, might feel her stomach churn at the sight of it.

The monument was a blackened, sagging thing, whose wings were flesh and whose body looked to have been nailed to a tower of pinewood and discolored metal like that of an insect in a display case. Its wings, though molded in the image of those that had carried Celestia over the world, those instruments that had been forged in the fires of the first day, wore feathers strung up at the neck, which were slowly being peeled of their ashy skin by the smoke and the winds that rolled through Hell.

This ugly Princess wore no crown and, from a distance, might have been mistaken for no less of a corpse than the bodies that were pressed together to color her silhouette. This bald alicorn, a skeleton to some crude religion, could not have risen for anything like love or devotion and, somehow, I knew that it was no tribute to Nightmare Moon, or even the ancillary sister that she had swallowed. This was Celestia, demonized, strung up and twisted like any of the Brahmin in the alley.

I couldn’t move, and Caliber had to prod at my sides, leading me along as she might herd cattle around the fences of a stockyard, or some early and uncomplicated culture through the first church in the wild.

I couldn’t think of anything but the serpentine face of that God among monsters, that idol to the damned. And, as the mercenary guided me down a flight of stairs that sank into the concrete, I realized that the corpses lining Hell’s edge were not like those at the toll. There were faces here that had been marked in chalk runes and dark ink that mimicked wings or flooded over one another to color black and white suns, as if the Raiders were children, smearing their bodies in paint and letting the dust gather over old toys.

This city in the storm was filled with something darker than those pony peddlers and savages: for there were black crosses standing around their kingdom, and each held up another body, as if to let it blister under the veiled sun. The Faith had been so close, their scripture had skirted the edge of gospel, if only for all those rambling promises of sinners and sicknesses and circles… of demons.

“They blew out into the East, into the Great Plain,” Caliber began, as she pried open a tired old door, and guided me in the serene light of another utility tunnel. “So Damascus always calls ‘em what the Buffalo do-” From his port before this swarm, from that sanctuary of glass and light, he had named them.

“The Locusts.”

*** *** ***

Soon, as the weight of the earth above us became immeasurable, the walls changed, and our hoofsteps rang for beating against the steel and the glass, which seemed to float over a pulsing cavity far below.

“Damascus says this kind of archi-tec-ture is a lot more common over in the Crystal Empire,” Caliber explained, as I peered down into the currents of silvery light, as if watching a river go by. “Told me that everything built like this was here before Equestria.” A little bit of wonder had almost fluttered into her voice. “Came from when we stole our blueprints from the Dragons, and learned how to use their metal.”

“That explains the size of it all.” The ceiling was so high that, by the time his light came to pool against it, Okavango might have become a star, bound to us as if by lasso. “I don’t see any crystals, though.”

“You’d have to go a lot further East for that.” I noticed that the door ahead had been torn down, as if the beast Cerberus had once hammered against it, until hinges of light surrendered to heavy and tireless paws. “The first tribes preferred this kind of metal alloy, see?” She dragged one hoof along the wall, following a raw vein. “There’s less of a flourish to it: It’s more honest.”

“I like silver.”

“You like everything.” It seemed Caliber had shaken off some of the morning’s tension, and now hurried on to meet Damascus with something like a spring in her step. It was strange to see peril, for all its commotion and adrenaline, swinging a pony up into such high spirits, but I was glad to see her happy.

We stepped over the once adamantine door, and entered an immensely tall room – a hallway standing on its head – whose middle was filled by a finely carved pillar, like a brittle violin in a glass case. It was surrounded, choked by a thousand stairs, and weighed down by blinking consoles and dreadlocks of wire. The room might have seemed calm, spacious and untouched, were it not for our leechlike machines.

The color of the light, which shone down as if from a waning sun, told me that we were getting close, that Damascus was only a staircase away. It was, however, a distressingly tall staircase, and I frowned up at it, wondering which sadist of an architect had been its designer. This kind of pilgrimage was usually reserved as a trial to the madly religious, or a routine to the clinically unfit.

“The door on the far wall has an elevator behind it.” Caliber said, though she didn’t make it sound like this was especially good news. “Behind it.” We both stared up at what would have to come next, and I noticed something then, as we stood in silence: the room was breathing. For every pulse of color, both magic and machine took another breath, to feed the blood of their beating hearts.

As if he had finally gotten tired of waiting for me to remember him, Okavango started towards the door, humming inharmoniously as he went. Of course: The Skeleton Key! I tried to slap my brow in surprise, but only succeeded in hurting myself, as hoof met steel and kicked off a panic between the slanted mask, its loosening strap, and my deranged mane.

“Don’t tell me he can get that open!” Caliber hurried after the spritebot, even as he woke up the door. “We’re gonna have to start looking for more of these things: Damascus would pass out caps by the shovelful for something to walk Cerberus through this rat’s maze.”

Okavango floated into the elevator, as if to say that we’d slowed him down enough: that he was too busy to have to deal with this nonsense. “Thank you,” I offered, as we came to stand at either side of him.

Under our hooves, the veins of light seemed to go on forever, and I could only hope that it was an illusion.

“Alright, operator: crank that dial to eleven, and get us floating.” Caliber poked at one of his antennae, making the spritebot do his best impression of a grumble. “Top Floor: Kings, Contracts and Keys to Super-Dungeons.” The room lit up, as Okavango lowered himself before a screen in the wall.

The Installation took a deep breath, and we began to rise, with that pattern of lights racing away beneath us, like the headlights of an unbottled traffic jam. When it was over, we were turned loose into a wide, broken ring, which, according to my Pipbuck, went on to tighten around Damascus’ chamber, like a collar.

“That… made things a lot easier.” Caliber sounded stunned, as if she couldn’t believe that Hell might be so suddenly tamed. “Does Damascus know about him?” She lowered her voice, and jabbed a hoof at Okavango conspiratorially, as if she could be talking about anyone else.

As if to give her an answer, the security officer blustered out a few would-be expletives, and then drifted off into the gloom. “I’m guessing he doesn’t want to be an elevator boy for the rest of his life.” I tried to wave, but Okavango Delta was already gone. “Looks like it’ll just be you and Me.”

“Not quite, Lamplight: I need you to let me go in alone,” She said, flatly. “At least for now.” I nearly reared onto my hind legs, as What’s and Why’s filled my mouth like so many red and yellow cherries. “Damascus needs a report, not a confession. You won’t tell him everything straight: you’ll dip your hooves into it all, and tilt the scales. I need him to do this right, to decide if I went too far out of margins of my contract.”

I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. This really meant something to her, and though I didn’t understand it, I held my tongue. She needed an arbiter, some authority far greater than I, to push her over the edge, or tuck her back into her contract, as if it were a paper blanket.

The mercenary was gone before I’d even thought to force her into a hug and, more than anything, I felt like I’d been slapped across the face, and left in the middle of a ballroom, with my partner storming off over some overambitious hoof or a whispering of sweet and sour nothings.

Okavango had decided to fly laps to and from each of the ring’s broken ends, and passed me by without so much as a song, more like an officer on patrol, than a janitor dancing around his mop. He became the pendulum of a grandfather clock, and had done no more than three laps, by the time the wait was over.

As my eyes traced the lines of light that crossed the walls like narrow canals, I felt her hoof on my back, and shivered, as if my body was trying to shake it off. “The Coltilde sent out a search party.” She explained, smiling in the glow even as it floated by like a blue and bucolic lantern. “And there I was expecting them to start tearing into Cerberus’ neck as soon as the dust settled.”

“If Damascus is as good a liar as I think he is: the Slavers will put their bloody little noses down so far off the trail, that they’ll be sniffing red circles around the West.” She almost seemed giddy, caught up in the shock of having so many things go her way. “Luna’s bones, Gracie… we’re going to be alright.”

It wasn’t adrenaline that was making the mercenary seem so warm now, but the weight that had just been lifted, freeing her from all the burdens that I’d led her to bear. “Of course we are.” I couldn’t help laughing a little, as if she was a filly on my knee. “We’re the heroes, remember?”

*** *** ***

“Good work at the toll. Even the Goddesses could not wash the salt from this earth’s wounds, and prepare it for harvest. And so we must take a sword to it, and carve fields from the ashes.” I watched the Coltilde breathing behind him, as great continents of smoke drifted apart over a serene and honey-colored ocean, making it look as if Damascus had imprisoned a dragon behind that pane of scriptured glass. “You and I serve our masters by another name, but our methods may not be so different after all.”

“We will be taking action – whether or not there is any worth behind the words of the one you found dying.” If that Slaver had been telling the truth, then there might be another, standing on the shore, watching as our fleets churned up the surf, and filled the water with shipwreck. “If the Coltilde has a master, it will make itself known in time. And we must be ready.”

“Where do we start?”

“I once believed that, in serving them, I would walk under the cover of a thousand shields and pillars, all keeping the world from folding over me like it had over so many others. But I was wrong.” He began. “Legends of the Steel Rangers, of the Buffalo tribes and the untouched north, made me blind. But each of them proved to be nothing more than tricks of the light, left behind by the old world.”

Like dead satellites, pretending to be stars. “You need to reach out to those illusions, and light them as if striking flint against a sword. It would be so easy for those old armies to wipe the slate, to come down from the skies or march across the earth and leave our country clean... and I believe that there are still some, tucked into the ranks of the dormant powers that dot Equestria, that might beat the dust from their banners, and lift them with the dawn. We only need to call them out.”

“How can these ponies just ignore the Railway? Why wouldn’t they fight?” I demanded, as if all those idle soldiers were on their knees before me, asking to be judged.

“They aren’t under the threat of annihilation: we are. And they would not face the wasteland, but ignore it, and find a means to their blindness in some ancient codex or mistranslated law. They would see everything around them die out, before stepping out of their bomb shelters, drifting away from their tribes, to reclaim an empty, lonely world. They are slow to care, and this is the greatest obstacle we face.”

“The Steel Rangers will be the last, as there is a chapter to their order hidden somewhere inside New Calvary, and on arriving there, you will already have the banner to a small army on your back.” I almost felt light-headed, as I could hardly believe that this buck, who might have watched the world being mounted by the Fallout, had steered me onto his road. “But first, information will give you course.” He paused, and the light caught his crystalline eyes. “And that, is where the DJ comes in.”

“DJ Pon3?” I couldn’t help jumping at the name, as Caliber let it roll off her tongue. “GNR’s signal cuts off a few clicks east of here, boss. Calvary must be buried pretty deep in that same dead zone.”

“That’s why you’re going West. The GNR broadcast makes use of a broken chain of relays that was once known as the MASEBS system. The nearest functioning tower leaves our Middle Passage at the very edge of absolute static, though it can still be seen from the mouth of the valley.” Seen, but barely heard. “You might be able to use it to make contact with the DJ, and then we will have our eyes into the storm.”

“Why me?” I asked, after cycling through a dozen other questions. To show any sign of doubt was a risk, but Damascus did not seem capable of being unsure of anything. He had to have a reason.

“You are a symbol, a flag in the earth and a gunshot at the start of a race. And your arrival has tipped the scales – not like the weight of a single coin, but the impact of a comet. I could never make anything of the damned, of all those that the Stable spat at this place: could never set them on the right path, but you… your destiny is being shaped by an authority far greater than mine. And we can do nothing to stop it.”

Luckily, Damascus wasn’t about to waste our time, waiting for me to think of something to say, though he might have mistaken my silence for something other than awe. “I expect there are reasons for you to doubt me, for you to hesitate, but know that you must put your instincts aside.”

“I trust you.” I said, surprised that he could have thought otherwise.

“Good. That saves us time. But there are still two things we must address before you can leave this place.” I felt Caliber bristle beside me, as if she was a windup toy whose key was being turned.

“There’ve been some changes to my contract.” She explained, as we turned our heads to face one another, and both became twofaced for light and the lack of it. “I’m gonna be working on standing orders.” She sounded proud, as if this was something that other mercenaries might be jealous of. “And as of now, we’ve got ourselves a neat little Your wish is my command relationship.” I tapped a hoof against my chest, wondering onto whose wishes she meant to leash herself. “That’s right.”

The storm behind him cast torpid shadows over the throne room, and they became whales drifting through a sea that was the color of butter, or a sky in the flush of sunrise. And Damascus went on, before I could even begin to choke on my first word. “Now, for the last step we must take, before your first.”

He lifted his hoof, and set it on a small box, whose trimming glinted in the light of the window, beside half a dozen eyes. “You have a wasteland to stitch together, and I have fires to start… We have everything to do, and no time to do it in. Take these, for when your trust begins to lose its balance.” He pushed the case over to me, and it slid over the glass as if it were ice. “Take these, and you will know Me.”

“Damascus…” Caliber breathed out his name, and stared down at the thing, as if it were an animal to be sacrificed before us. I floated the case over - as it pleaded to be taken into the folds of my magic, and tucked into the hollow of my saddlebags - and clicked it open. A row of small spheres, all cushioned in the compartment’s soft lining, caught the chamber’s lights in all its tides and streams, and I saw that each was tinted a different shade, with its own color taking slow breaths somewhere beneath a silvery surface.

I counted all six, and then shut the case as the mercenary spoke. “You don’t know what’s in there.”

“They are memories that I no longer needed – sentiments that once hung around my neck like millstones. My mistakes are my own, my sins like wounds that should be made fresh for every passing morning, but those small pieces of history were to be forgotten: kept separate… but safe.”

“She’s a unicorn.” Caliber said, fencing me out with a word, like a line put to paper with a flourish, with a twist of the neck or roll of the hoof. “She could watch those, Damascus.”

“She may be the last one who has the chance.” I couldn’t help peeking into the case then, wondering how my horn might allow me to relive history, even where others could not. But I was quickly drawn back to the buck before the storm, as a crinkle in the scars on his cheek, made it seem like he was smiling. “The north always had a remarkably flat head.”

I packed the orbs away, even as Caliber furrowed her brow, and tightened her lips. She seemed to know enough about the devices to stand against their being wrapped in ribbon, and I decided that she could help me if I were ever to go wandering into these abandoned pieces of Damascus’ almost mythological life. “I’ll keep them safe.” I said, as they watched me fiddle with the clasp of my saddlebag.

“Don’t fall in and out of them as you might a daydream. And if you must, then visit each once, and only once.” An enormous plume of smoke pressed against the window then, and darkened the chamber like a hoof over a candle, as if to remind us of the beast that had come to eat at time as a serpent might its own tail. “We cannot afford to see you wasted. In a world full of misery and uncertainty, it is too great comfort to know that, in the end, there is still light in the darkness.”

The mercenary drew a cross around her chest, as if making a promise. I’ll take care of her. “Caliber will brief you as you go, but do not hesitate to walk circles around the path, to wander off of its sides. To put reins on destiny, would be to tie a rope around its neck, and choke it with every turn.”

I might have wished him Good Luck, as to remain in Hell was to let the mouth of the Coltilde close around you, but I had come to understand how little luck meant to ponies of the Faith. Besides, the buck didn’t seem at all interested in anything like a goodbye, and so I moved to follow Caliber out of the chamber, and found that she was standing by, as if to let me pull her along by the leash.

Before leaving Damascus and his Kingdom of Glass, I did manage a salute, and a neat little march that I couldn’t help being proud of, if only for how hard it had been to keep myself from skipping.

*** *** ***

“That was Sweetie Belle, the voice of the frozen era, with Wish upon a Star, a song that’s been topping the charts for over a century.” The previously explosive buck now spoke in soft, reverent voice, as if he didn’t want to wake the age old music, or had simply changed for coming out of Okavango’s speakers.

I could see the valley’s northern mountain range coming to an end through the last swirls of mist, as we stepped off the highway, and walked towards that divider of valleys. The wind howled over uneven hills and wove through the ornate cement pillars that lifted the road high beside us. Across the fields ahead, it played eerie songs with electrical pylons and pine tree clusters as its only instruments.

“You’re listening to Galaxy News Radio; we’re Radio Free Wasteland, and we’re here… for you.” For a moment, I thought that somepony soft-spoken had booted the DJ out of his chair, to hijack the station, but then the buck’s voice picked up into a howl, breaking the air of calm that had settled under a crooning storm and the echoes of Ms. Belle’s heart-wrenching song. “Boy, do I have some news for you!”

Few ruins dotted the valley’s western mouth, though the rails lay ahead like a long spine built across the back of Equestria, and the road rose to curve off behind the distant end of southern mountains.

“It’s going to be a little bit of both sides of the coin today, kiddies. We’re living in a bipolar time, so get yourselves ready for some serious ups and downs in today’s report.” Caliber had set a course for the farthest standing electrical pylon, and we walked past cabals of pine trees and boulders, all bound together by streaks of grass, crossing the untamed earth to reach what she had called her shack.

“First things first; the dark and twisted. I know this isn’t always what you wanna hear, but you all know the rule: Truth, no matter how bad it hurts.” The voice bounced behind us, as Okavango entertained himself. “So you kids know all about what’s been going down up north, don’t you?” He paused. “Of course you don’t! That’s why I have a job… Now, forget about everything you might have read in the picture books or tour guides children, ‘cause the farther up you go, the more fucked up things get.”

“You can forget the wonderland: We’re talkin’ Winter Wasteland, and that means you’ve got the cold nipping at your hooves right along with every two-bit savage or snapping set of manacles.” As he spoke, I had to wonder what the season of summer was like, as every word seemed to remind my body of the chill in the air. “I’ll tell you; if I was drinking all the same irradiated crap, and living under deep freeze to boot, I might have to make my living as a lime-flavored Popsicle machine.”

I looked to Caliber for an explanation, feeling like I had missed something, but she just smiled and waved me away. “However the Slavers, bless their hearts, have decided to try and protect the towns along their Railway from that old dog named Winter… too bad their doing it by putting them to the torch. Those lovable bastards have spread themselves wide, and I mean wide folks. Straight out of this Old DJ’s iron sights. And, not only are they snatching ponies up from the Capital to Calvary, these collectors have recently gone above and beyond the call of being evil sons of bitches… but we’ll get to that in a sec.”

“Now they’ve got themselves set up cozy, and run their ring over one line; one set of tracks.” With one terrible train. “But DJ, don’t you see?” He asked, doing an impression of us all. “If we set some good old fashioned dynamite down on that ‘one line’ we can stop those Slavers short!” The funny thing was, I might have said exactly that. “Not happening, my little heroes. Those tracks are damn near indestructible. Wartime defense regulations wouldn’t have had it any other way: That Applejack was a real stickler.”

As we drew ever closer to the electrical pylon, I noticed a modest pen of steel sheets and woodwork around its base, and an opening that looked out onto the East and the traces of Hell that remained there.

“Now, lemme tell you how things get worse: A settlement far and clear of us here in dearest Manehattan… has gone quiet. But this wasn’t some shanty town that got blown away in a radstorm; this was Free Rein. I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened there, but from what I’m hearing: the place was flattened. Oh, and if you’re wondering why I can’t tell you more, hear this: there was nothing left. No survivors, no corpses, no witnesses… children, that shiver down your spine wasn’t from the col-.”

The voice cut off, not fifty paces from the repurposed electrical pylon, and I looked back to investigate. “He was about to get to the Good News,” I complained, getting the words out before I noticed Okavango sputtering and seizing in place. Bursts of static shot out of him like artillery rounds, and the percussion of swing songs coupled with sultry horn sections to mimic the sounds of a warzone.

“Love me… Love me… Love me as though there were no no no no no no no no no.” I doubled back to his side, but found myself at a loss for having no limbs to restrain or arteries to inject with a save-all sedative.

I winced away as he played out the sound of a massive, terrible explosion. “Where will you be when the bombs fall?” Then came actual gunfire to outshine the music. “Enlist to- to- to- to-…”

“Sugar Bombs.” Jingle. “Fancy Foal!” Jangle. “Take a Sparkle Break… for Equestria’s Sake.” Jingle.

“Yippee-yaaaaaayy!”

“This is new,” Caliber said, standing by as I tried to console the panicking spritebot.

“Reserve your spot today.” I could only hold him in my magic, as he rattled and shook, like a machine with a wrench in its belly. “It’s all coming down… Oh… Oh they hit the Capital! The entire city, the Princ-“

“Kindness Honesty Laughter…” Okavango started to cackle maniacally, as his voice devolved into that of a mad mare. The music became chipper and obnoxious, and I wished that my magic could suffocate it, and silence this massive malfunction. “Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...” The howl changed from that of the DJ, to a soul singer’s, and finally a siren to announce the end of days.

“Armor? The means to remake yourself. Build Mass with Sasasasasasasasasasassssssss…” He hissed. “Weapons? The world is a dangerous and unbalanced place, children. The roads are the dustiest...” The meld of music, advertisements and voices both familiar and unknown were rubbing me the wrong way, but I managed to turn Okavango around, and stared into his flickering heart. Red. Blue. Red. Blue. White!

“Equestria? Celestia! It’d be best if ya: Left Equestria!” The seditious song cut out. “Guidance? Duck and Cover, duck and coooov-er.” Caliber stepped up to my side, and lifted a hoof. “Absolutely Everything? “You bet! To protect our Equestrian way of life.” She slammed her hoof down against the spritebot, as if he were a sputtering jukebox. “Virtue…” He managed, before coming to rest only a few paces East.

“Stay there!” She ordered, pointing her miraculous hoof at a silent Okavango. “Stay right there!” He obeyed, and whimpered like a dog on a guilt trip, knowing that he’d done something wrong. I looked to Caliber, hoping that she might explain. “Cerberus lets itself by… but it doesn’t let itself out.”

“You mean…”

“Yeah, Mister In-Between isn’t leaving the nest.” She began pacing along some imagined line. “I set up shop in this pylon because it’s over what every map marks as the edge of Hell. Call me superstitious, but I’m not sleeping inside the lines of a place like that.” I looked back at the patchwork walls that ringed the last soldier of electricity, and realized that the wreck we’d been heading for was Caliber’s home. “I knew it had to mean something.” Despite the whole ordeal, she seemed pleased, if only for finding this proof.

I, on the other hoof, could only stare at the electrical pylon. “You live here?” I peered into the doorless doorway, and counted two shelves full of color, one naked bed, and a rusty table. “There’s no roof!”

A series of disheartened beeps pulled me back into the story of that surgery of hoofbumps, though I was now too wary to cross back over into Hell’s palm. Okavango stared at me from beyond the rim, as if a wire fence had risen to keep us apart, and I felt myself getting caught up in thinking that he was being taken from me. “Settle down, Sugar.” Caliber set a hoof on my shoulder, as if standing beside me on the docks, to watch our little spritebot drowning in the radio currents of Hell.

“Okavango!” He turned away from us, and began to float back into the circle of that ugly city, with his eye to the earth. “Okavango!” I reached a hoof out over the border, as if I was trying to pull him back. But it was over; he had surrendered to the world as it reached down with uncaring tongs, and forced us apart. “I’ll come back for you,” I promised, with my voice at a whisper. “I’ll come back for you!”

After a few more seconds of holding my hoof out, like some sailor’s wife waving to the ships as they were taken by the sea, it started to hurt a little, so I stopped. Okavango too, realized that it would take him quite a long time to get back home if he kept up this melancholic pace, and turned back around to beep one last goodbye, before moving on at a much less emotionally expressive speed. But, despite these changes, Caliber didn’t watch us with anything but a slanted expression on her face.

“You guys are weird.”

*** *** ***

“Are we ready to go, Caliber?” Now, it was my turn to be waiting in the wings, as the mercenary stalled the beginning of our mission to tinker with her favorite gun’s rig over a workbench.

I didn’t mind that much, as the world had gotten no smaller, and no less beautiful in its second day. Equestria lay beneath a great collide between the East’s mist and sunlight through a filter, and the West’s temperamental sky, raging like a colorless fire over the broken pieces of a highway. And I found myself loving the country for what it had once been, as well as the nation on its knees that it had now become.

I had changed back into my father’s clothes, and even donned the cross bearing coat, if only to survive the darkening storm that still heaved and threatened snow above us. Caliber too, had returned to her usual outfit, and the Raider’s garb now burned beside her shack. Damascus hadn’t seemed to mind the disguise, but it would do me no good to go about rallying Equestria, dressed as one of its worst pests.

As I took another look at the path ahead, and measured a great, open field marked by rare clusters of stripped pine trees, it occurred to me that Caliber would have grown up in this place. With the light of the open sky on our right, beating against the earth, the illusion of sunset in the morning was created for shadows leaning south. The grass whispered and the wild wind roared, for being bent over these narrow valleys, and I knew that this place might shape a filly far differently than the Stable had me.

“Caliber.” She looked up from her desk, as if peering at me over eyeglasses, and I couldn’t help but to picture her in a bedraggled shirt and tie, bent over a newspaper whose headlines read WAR! with coffee and a pipe building pillars of steam in place of her cigarette. “Is this where you grew up?”

The shack was cozy enough, and wasn’t much smaller than my own quarters, but it was far too isolated to have fostered a family, and far too naked, like a raft caught in the storm. “All I can tell you is that I got my cutie mark in the snow, and that this rifle’s been with me as far as I can remember.” She lifted a hoof away from the disemboweled rifle, and tapped at the bandage on her temple. “Only got bits and pieces to go on, mostly: everything before my crusadin’ was over – as they say – is as clear as flat cola.”

“Most of my growing up got blown right out of me.” It was a gunshot wound. My mouth hung open, as I blinked at the mare who had dusted herself off after her own execution: who had beaten Shady Sands. “I had this blossom of gunpowder on the side of my face after it was over, like a crater, and the Doc figured I couldn’t have been more than a few paces away from the pistol.” She explained, skipping over her death as if it were a movie whose reel had only just been pieced together.

My eyes leapt from the neatly dressed wound to the crosshair on her flanks, as the thought of a life tied up in so much violence made my legs buckle. The mare smiled, and even knowing that she still could gave me a sickly kind of hope, that was far too bogged down in pity and guilt to taste anything but sour. “Got shot quite a while after this pretty little thing appeared on my flank.” But, even then, she would only have been pushing at the front lines of childhood. “And a long way away, too: Down South.”

“I couldn’t remember anything until I tried piecing together my cutie mark story. But once I’d put some color onto that empty slate, a lot of things started coming back to me.” I could only stare, marveling at the relationship between this mare, her mark, and her marksman’s carbine. In a way, the thought of it was kind of beautiful, and it left me feeling even happier to have been bound to this mare.

I watched, as she weighed her body down, with the belts of her battle saddle drawing taught, each wearing bullets like bars on the shoulder of a new world soldier. “We should stop in Silo City on our way to the satellite tower. Damascus says there’s one hell of a sniper working the wall there, and it couldn’t hurt to shop around a little... After all, you don’t play Follow the Lady with less than three cards.” She closed her bag, after sliding in what looked like a child’s map of the entire country, with its monuments made into swollen caricatures, and then tossed me her rifle.

To see the weapon up in the air startled me, and my magic grabbed at it just as a dozen hooves might come into a clamor for the bridal bouquet. “I just fixed a scope onto it for ya… Try it out.” I looked back at her dumbly, as if I needed more instruction. “Go ahead. Aim it down at that gas station. Let’s see if you can read the sign.” I brought the rifle to bear, and she took it in her hooves, to help me point it towards the southwest. “There, see… hanging under that big, pasty looking Phoenix.”

A large roof cast its shadow over most of the station, standing with its skirts hiked over a cluster of blocky gas pumps and a burnt out jalopy, which had been left to a lonely feast from this paradisiacal soda fountain. Its height could not match the overpass that lurched on behind it, though a figure rose, in the shape of a great bird, with an outstretched wing waving travelers down from the road.

Even for the coming midday, the station’s lights still blinked up at the Phoenix, though its feathers had nearly taken on the color of fuel, for a hundred years of fallout.

And then, I saw them, hanging in the shadow of the station, swaying like wind chimes: Corpses.

Footnote: Level Up!

Perk Added: Bloody Mess: Death is just so much messier around you. And he should be coming around a little more often, now that you have +5% damage. Make some Friends!

END OF BOOK I: GENESIS

|*| I guess you think you know this story |*|You don't. You're all too drunk on toasts and glory.The watered down one, the one you know.Was made up centuries ago. They made it sound all soft and sappy. Just to keep the children happy.Twisted fictions, sick addictions.You're grown up now. It's time to listen.

Chapter 7: Gravedigger

Fallout Equestria: Begin Again

Chapter 7: Gravedigger

“So be it. You’ve dug your own grave. Grave! Grave!”

|*| Too Close to the Sun |*|

A Phoenix rose before the mobile of corpses: still proud for its trailing feathers of flame, though their sheen had faded to gray as strips of paint were peeled loose, like the rind of a fruit made dark with rot. The bird splayed its wing up towards the overpass, from which the ropes had drawn taught, to make string puppets out of five ponies… to make a gallows out of this quiet and unsettling place.

Phoenician Energy: Let your journey begin anew. The slogan hung from the steel bones of its wing in rank with those faceless bodies. For each letters’ colors had also been drained, no differently than blood going cold under the skin, to leave them in uniform with so much of this wild new world.

Now that the mist had cleared, the air was becoming more silver than it was white, for the light of the sun came through in beams, which flickered as if in rhythm with the streetlights dotting the road. The storm above was a sleepless and bothersome thing, not unlike an immense godchild vying for our attention.

And its shadows spun around us, as if the world was at the bottom of a pool. We moved forward, towards their ten heavy hooves, though even the twitching of a pine tree or the rustle of straggling leaves would make Caliber stop, and sniff at the air like a dog. Their bodies might have passed for mannequins or ceremonial rag dolls, lifeless as the molting Phoenix, which now looked flat: more a billboard than a bird.

“They died from the hangings.” Each of the ponies had had their faces bloated over broken necks, though, under the nooses, they were whole, nothing like those bodies used as dead sentries around the tribal warcamp that was Hell. Caliber and I drew in a little closer, stepping over the road as carefully as we might a shallow river. “This was… suicide.” I whispered the word, afraid of the power in it.

“Maybe… but keep your eyes peeled, and get real friendly with that Pipbuck of yours,” She said, evenly. We stepped into the easel onto which the streetlights were printing their shadows, again and again.

“This could be some kind of trap.”

Five pieces of bait, cast from the overpass like gray earthworms on a hook. “Let’s see if we can find a way up onto the roof.” Caliber’s voice shook me out of a daze, as watching them sway, watching them bump into one another like muted wind chimes, had me hypnotized. “We should get a better look at ‘em.”

The station’s convenience store, which looked to have been sat on, stretched out under those ten hooves of many colors. “What could have driven them to this?” I asked, trying to tread lightly for how quickly I had condemned that buck before the mouth of Hell: that tortured, heartbroken lunatic.

Caliber ran on ahead, leaving me and my question to one another, but I was quick to follow as I caught the bushfire of her tail disappearing into the store’s breached hull. The squat little building was far worse for the war than the station’s metal roof, or the bundle of gas pumps under its wing. In fact, there was little evidence of the apocalypse here, apart from the great black circles of spilt gasoline, like holes in the asphalt, and that one rusty old jalopy, bleeding out the static and the songs of Galaxy News Radio.

There was a Sparkle Cola machine standing guard beside the doors, and its red lights, coupled with the looping calligraphy that had spun out its name, reminded me of that first night in Acheron. A tender kind of nostalgia came to a glow inside me, and I did my best to shelter it, like one might a small fire.

The building was lodged between the station and the overpass, drowned in the sunlit stream that passed between those two banks of steel and concrete, and it wore an electric brand that named it Quick-Stop. But, as the fluorescents behind its punched out walls flickered, I saw that the ruin had been picked clean.

I entered the building through its jammed doors, instead of pouncing over the ruins of a poster-coated wall like Caliber had, as a part of me thought it would be more polite. As if the station deserved to be treated like a freshly dug grave, with the Phoenix serving as its ornate, and no less desolate, headstone.

As I stepped onto tiles that had crumpled into one another like tectonic plates, littered with faces thanks to a slew of magazine covers and pamphlets, I understood why the dead hadn’t taken their rest in this low place, to make an abattoir of it. Not only did it feel as if all these models and spokesmares were watching as a smiling, beautiful audience from below, but the ceiling had fallen in on itself almost completely.

Caliber stood on what had once been the roof, waiting; as if she’d run the length of a leash between us. A wide tongue of concrete had been pressed into the room, as if to make us a walkway up into the swirling clouds. Empty shelves were pinned down under the serrated edge of the ruin, where the building’s dark framework stuck out like a row of bones that could bend before they broke.

My side of the store, which hadn’t been pinned down under that tongue of rubble, was where the cashier could be found. Its booth opened up to the station outside, so that travelers drawn in by the fires of the Phoenix could pay for their own small share of its power. “Wish these old ruins still set the lights in my eyes to shining,” Caliber said, slipping a nervous spring into my step, until I saw her smiling.

I didn’t yet know if she was a patient mare: if she could stand my slow hoofsteps and wandering eyes for the length of the open West, but the mercenary seemed to get something out of watching me take in the wasteland she had mastered, as if the lights in my eyes were bright enough to shine out over it.

“You’d better skip along now, Sugar. Looked like those corpses were strung up with wire. And they’ll be going soft as boiled apples before long.” My stomach hurt, and it frightened me to think that it might have been for hunger, and not disgust. She nodded up to the station’s roof, though the mare had lost her smile. “I’m bettin the sight of one burst open on the asphalt will blow those lights out like birthday candles.”

*** *** ***

The sky was bright. And, were it not for how surgically the storms had been cut off before the bare blue easel of the North, I would have thought they were finally passing. Now, the clouds might have met an invisible wall, and the fires of a sun we couldn’t see came spilling over their lip like the juice of a forbidden fruit. It was hard to love the light, though, as it made it all too easy to see those five faces, with their bulging eyes and chicken necks, and mistake every trick of the wind as a twitch, as a plea for help.

I tried to ignore them, and looked instead at the symbols on their flanks, which had not been marked with the print of death’s fingers. Their cutie marks might have been pulled from a filly’s sticker book, and pressed over images that matched the violence in the Raider’s naked heart, the weight of Damascus’ empty cross, or the promise of Caliber’s black and white crosshairs.

They might have been hidden under Stable jumpsuits, or worn proudly at the hem of old world fashion. And from east to west, they went something like this: Three candles, a ragged book, the Sun in a ring of triangles, a red ribbon around a key, and a mareless moon tucked into a bed of stars. “This is too neat,” Caliber complained, even as the suspicion flooded back into her voice.

They had become a gallery, and though it was an eerie thought, I imagined those bony fingers, lingering until each body was hung just right, as if Death was a perfectionist. “Do you think they might’ve had help?” I offered, though we couldn’t see the road where their wires would no doubt be tethered.

“Wouldn’t call it help.” She frowned up at the bodies, able to look at them without turning away for air, as if they were nothing more than ornaments bought in bad taste. “You’re some kind of doctor, right?” For a moment, I forget the gallows and beamed, for her word was as good as any graduation day, any hoofshake and certificate. “What’s your read on ‘em? D’you figure they died before getting strung up?”

I’d never done an autopsy before, as the Stable door had almost kept that bony old fussbudget shut out, but it was clear that the only damage to these five were the rings of raw skin drawn around their necks like collars. “I really don’t think so, Caliber.” I shook my head, slowly, as if her suspicions were to be treated with care. “It looks more like they were trying to say something: to leave a message…”

“You might be on to something,” She said, flicking her tail towards the horizon, which wore the edge of the storm like a shimmering crown, lay slumped into a throne of earth, and made its armrests in the washed out mountains. But before that, easily missed at the cusp of the station’s pale roof, there lay a small circle of saddlebags and richly dyed fabrics, set out in line with the mare hanging in the middle. Caliber winced, as our hoofsteps rang out through the metal, no different to if we had been striking a bell.

The wind was that much more bracing now, as it molded alien smoke signals out of our breath, and I almost felt like I had been dropped onto a raft in the middle of the ocean. The circle, laid out like an offering to the hanged idols above us, enclosed a cluster of five gray faces, as if to mirror those that were looking down on it, though these were square and metal: not fleshy and bloated.

“What are they?” I asked, tentatively, like a mare fresh off the boat from the old world, staring up at the faces of the pioneers and mapmakers who had first come dancing across the water, only to be turned to stone, and to gods, in the jungle. Caliber was circling the shrine, checking for traps or sniffing for treasure, but looked up to answer me.

“Holotapes.”

*** *** ***

“I am Cyrus of the Later Days, and this recording speaks as I no longer can… to leave reason for our flight from the face of the earth.” Something was wailing behind him and, for how lost it was to language, I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t an animal. I might have thought it was a baby, or a pup, but nothing so young could know what it meant to cry like that.

“We once thought that plenty and peace could come again, that our Faith would pave the way to better days, but now… we have learned that this day, and all that follow, will be no different to our last. There will be no return of harmony, and even the promise of paradise has turned sour in our mouths, like grapes, all frozen and foul for this endless season… It is too late.”

It felt as if sandflies were creeping over my body, digging into my skin with every step, sending chills out in circles around them. “We have seen history stripped of its lies, watched our scripture worn thin under the light, and so the path ahead is clear. We began this pilgrimage so that we might see the world that harmony held together, so that we might visit the ruins of paradise, but know now that it never was.”

While we listened, Caliber watched the horizon, wary of whatever dark and terrible thing had pulled the Faith out from under this old buck. “All this time… we sowed our fields and used our guns as better times would see us using more pastoral tools, all for the love of an abomination. An abomination...”

The mercenary was toying with rifles held together by little more than metal rings and straps of leather: the very rifles that had seen them killing as if it was a chore like any other. “The Faith that once made this more than a edgeless waste… is gone, and we must fade with it. I led this pilgrimage, and though I failed to see it bow before the thrones of Canterlot, I will not fail to lead it on these pathways into Darkness.”

“To Sleep. To Peace.” I wanted to speak up, to stop him, as I‘d almost forgotten that nothing could be done, that these words had only barely gotten out before the wire tightened around his neck.

“You will follow me?” He asked, and three voices answered the same.

“Yes.” Wept another, forcing the word out as if in place of her tears.

“You can’t… Goddesses, don’t do this.” Pleaded another voice, which was soft and as stilted as a dove’s coo, though it might have been carrying the weight of the world on its back, for how weary it sounded.

“Are they secure?” He ignored her, and I could already tell that she had been begging well before they’d hit record. And neither would sway, but for the wind and a wire drawn taught. “Good.”

There was a commotion, as the buck readied himself for one last journey, though he was dragging a pilgrimage over the edge after him. “Leave whatever words you would give to this Last of the Later Days… I have nothing more to say.”

The sound of a wire pulling taught, a snap, and a desperate little cry followed the last words of Cyrus. Behind a bed of static, I could hear the country howling, and we looked out into the horizon, where a faraway radio tower’s satellites had been turned to fragile petals.

*** *** ***

“Harvest, please…” Another buck spoke now, though his voice was frail when compared to the first. “Please don’t cry. Not now… We’ll go together. Holding on to one another as the wires tighten. Just… for me - don’t let yourself leave like this.”

“Al-alright,” The mare sputtered. “For you… The sun and moon will set together.”

Slowly, I began to put a cutie mark to each voice, and found Cyrus for the years written in between his words, and the creases in his skin. “Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time?” That worn out voice asked, though even I could hear that she was drawing at straws from their scripture. “Realize what you would be wasting… remember what you would be giving yourselves to.”

“You never believed in the promise that was broken here today. You are still too young to understand.” This third buck was strong, but only for the depth of his voice. Otherwise, I could still hear his twisted nerves and the Faith spilt like so many ashes across the sand. “One day… you will follow us.”

“You’re throwing yourselves away.” I wanted to stand by her side then, as it was all too clear that she was a mare torn into too many pieces to save anyone. “This is pointless!”

“I’m ready…” Harvest had stopped crying now, and I heard her and the second buck kiss. “I love you.”

*** *** ***

“So… I’m next… got to turn myself in to the empty, huh?” As another mare spoke, I knew that the gallows had left at least one survivor, one pilgrim who hadn’t followed Cyrus on his path into darkness. “Maybe… Turnkey, maybe we should stay with her… just for a little while longer.”

“You have to stop… you have to.”

“You saw that thing, Ascella.” The third and the last of the bucks sounded unmoved, as if he was eager to be thrown over the side, eager to go sinking towards the bottom of the world. “You killed it.”

“We all did,” Said the second and the last of the hanged mares.

“Oh… we really did, didn’t we? We killed her.”

“It.” His voice was slowly turning to stone. “There is no one watching over us, Ascella. This isn’t the world we thought it was, that we were taught it was. We were fools… and now we’re alone. We’re all alone.”

There was another snap, like an exclamation mark being struck into the margin. “Goddesses… no.”

*** *** ***

“I’m going to pray for you.”

“No one will hear you. There’s no one left to listen.”

“You can’t really believe that.” I was surprised by the anger trickling into her voice, though it pooled over a single word, and came to a boil. “What we saw wore the skin of an alicorn. But It was an abomination, not a Goddess blackened by the fallout! It meant nothing.”

“Cyrus didn’t think so. He was wrong to give us his Faith. He was wrong to teach us his songs. He was deluded. But, together, we saw the lights go out. This…” I didn’t have to be there, to know that he was waving out at the West. “Is all we have left. And Ascella…. even you cannot live with that. Not for long.”

“Don’t run away.” And, with that, the first and the last of the living fell into a shambles, though I couldn’t tell if the mare was crying, as hooves ground against the overpass. “Don’t… You can’t come back from this.”

The static began to narrow, as if we were going down a tunnel, whose mouth had been pinched closed. “That’s the point.”

*** *** ***

“Caliber,” I said, chasing off the silence that had followed us down from the gas station, like a heavyset and indefinitely loyal animal. We walked between the shadow of the overpass and the mountain’s long faces, searching for the last of these lost pilgrims, following great paths of earth lapped bare as if by the tongues of fallout. “What did they mean, when they said… alicorn?”

There was still one holotape left, and I had stolen it from the shrine, thinking that it might have been filled with the voice of the very mare we were looking for. I had to find her, and clung on to the recording, as one might the last pictures of a onetime valentine.

Caliber wasn’t answering, and I fussed my way around one of the rare clusters of pine trees, which often stood on a bed of stone and shrubs the color of a flame, as if that Phoenix had spilled its blood into the earth, only so it could be pulled up as firewater into a root. The trees had taken on the color of ink, and were so thin and so sharp that they might have been dashed into the air by a transient fountain pen.

“Caliber?” I caught up to her, after having to skip over a few licks of snow and rusty colored grass, woven out from the root of the mountain as if to make a corner for the immense tapestry called the West.

“You wear a cross on your coat,” She began. “Does that mean you’re… like them?” She tilted her head up at the overpass, where the bodies hung like shadow puppets before a show.

“No.”

“Good.” She let out her breath, though it was quickly turned to smoke. “That’s good. I’d bet money on this alicorn myth coming from a bunch of batshit southern priests, waving crosses and spitting holy water at everything that goes bump in the night.” She made herself laugh, and had to lift her scarf over her lips, catching the giggle as another mare might a cough.

“Problem is: Galaxy’s brought ‘em up a couple times, now. And if you can’t trust DJ Pon3, you can’t trust anybody. Granted, he never talked about them as anything more than an extra. More like local gossip than news: whisperings stirred up by some bite and no bark crazy, y’know?”

“Sure. Even the Stable had its tinfoil hats.” I couldn’t help smiling a little, remembering what Doctor Cross had once said. No one’s crazier than they are on a hospital bed. It’s usually the anesthetic, or the fever dreams, but sometimes the fear of death is enough to bounce a sane mare right off the wall.

“One way or another: that Ascella girl was right to call ‘em abominations. Hear tell they’re your standard night-stalking, pony-snatching boogie mares. Nothing like the old Princesses… those two aren’t exactly hard on the eyes.” She nudged me, and we smiled as if forgetting these devils in the dresses of our country’s first and only saints. “Anyway, this Ascella thinks she killed one. But, far as I could tell from their voices, the rest of those pilgrims were Easterners. And GNR falls off before the Plain.”

“So, wherever they came from, we’re all jumping off of different myths.” I frowned, wondering why it took Pilgrimages, Contracts and Quests to get ponies out here exploring. Even if you had a Damascene bed of laurels to lie back on, it didn’t seem right to let all these wastelands go to waste.

“Are there usually many travelers coming through the Middle Passage?” I asked.

“Well, if you’re crossing the compass, it’s the way to go. There’s another valley to the North, tucked under the last Equestrian mountains. But they got Savages coming up from the underground, and stripes blending in and out of the snow and the Blackrock. Good luck to any caravan trying to talk their way out of that kind of trouble, won’t get much but twisted tongues. Good riddance to anyone stupid enough to try shooting.” My Pipbuck chirped up, and pinned a marker on the heart of the valley like a medal: Zion.

“Southern roads are even worse. The lowlands between these mountains and the capital have gone pink, like Canterlot sprung a leak. Cloud’s not nearly so thick, but the traders steer clear, unless they want to end up dragging their pack Brahmin behind ‘em like big sticks of butter. You can see your hoof in front of your face easy enough, but that won’t seem so sweet once it starts melting.” I winced, wondering what kind of disease might be so ravenous as to eat a pony alive, like a thousand tiny piranhas. “You might be able to see it from MASEBS: a kind of washed out pink dye leaking out of the Canterlot Caves.”

I wanted to ask her about… well, everything: from our beleaguered Capital to the flood that rocked it like an ark at sea. But I knew that there would be another time. For now, it was more important that we find this orphaned mare, and hunt down the alicorns that had chased her pilgrimage off the edge of the world.

“Let’s listen to the last holotape,” I said, as the silence had hung open long enough to let the country’s howling creep in. I had to look back, as it was starting to seem like Caliber was taking her orders to follow me very literally, as she would stop whenever I stopped, and only ran ahead to peek through the pine clusters or around the heels of the overpass’ pillars. “Maybe it’ll tell us where to start looking.”

*** *** ***

“My name is Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum… and I am the last survivor of this Pilgrimage to Canterlot. I will leave this shrine in the shadow of the Phoenix so that, even as I try to save my family, you might choose to pick up some of the pieces of their shattered Faith.” She had been crying, and her voice came out rolling and damp, like an arctic tundra, though even Caliber might not have been able to place it on a map. “But if you came to hear me beg. You will be disappointed. That’s not how I speak to my Gods.”

Caliber and I were huddled together, as the mare’s Bohemian coo was like the fire at the end of a matchstick, and we were beggars rubbing our hooves together in the gutters of winter. Now, the clouds were ink stains, and the sky a white margin, as if the sun had lost some of its color for seeing so many of its children die here today, as if it was rolling backwards, to pull us all back into mourning.

“I saw Canterlot. From the ruin: a place broken long before the war: a place with bones of rock instead of steel. Once these graves are full, that is where I will go. The abomination is still alive, bleeding out on the shore of that pink sea. And once these graves are full. This is where I will go. This is where I will kill it.

“Then Samson prayed to the Lord: ‘O Sovereign Lord, remember me. O God, please strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on these philistines for my two eyes.’ Then Samson reached toward the two central pillars on which the temple stood. Bracing himself against them, his right hand on the one and his left on the other, Samson said: ‘Let me die with these philistines!’

“Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the bodies kneeling in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.”

“Give me the strength of this ancient Minotaur from across the sea, and see this abomination for the philistine that it is, so that I might give my body in service to the Goddesses, and pay for the lives taken here by the misguided and the fearful. My Pilgrimage chose to run away. But I will go into the mountains, and in the black light cast by that false and fallen sun, I will wash away their sins.”

“My Pilgrimage shook the hooves of demons selling self-destruction, but I will pay for that bloodguilt. I pray that my family might still be saved, but only as one escaping through flames. I pray that they are admit into the high kingdom: that Luna will light my empty sky with their souls as stars, and forgive them.”

“But, for now, that abomination still breathes… and we can’t expect the Goddesses to do all the work.”

*** *** ***

Caliber was distracting herself by keeping an ear to the ground, as if the earth could explain this alien and nonsensical thing called religion. The mercenary wasn’t used to it, despite her contract signed in scripture, and seemed distressed at the thought that there existed a force so great, so inescapable, that it could drive ponies to slip their heads into nooses or take up their slings and go charging off to fight giants.

Really, she was listening for the hoofsteps of wild horses, as only moments ago, belts of gunfire had come rolling down this passage behind the highway’s struts and the mountains wrinkled faces. The shots might have been fired out west, at the road’s elbow, or the gas station that we had only just left behind. Either way, we had a mare to find: a soft spoken and heartbroken little mare, and nothing to follow but the soil, which had to be soft enough make a bed for five bodies.

“If these alicorns are real,” I began, walking a wide circle around the mercenary, as she put her nose forward, trying to find ash in the air. “And the rest of the Faith is anything like Cyrus -“

“Then every church in the south will have bodies hanging from its ceiling.” She straightened out her neck, and cocked her head until I heard a crack. “Good thing it’s just a myth. Besides, from what I’ve seen, religion is barely alive, so much as kicking, anywhere south of the mountains running from Calvary to Canterlot.” South of the pink sea’s far shore. “I figure it’s the cold up here: got ponies ready to pray to anything, just in case it can change the seasons. As if any cloud lucky enough to be shaped like Celestia is gonna chase away winter if they ask it nice enough.”

We paused, just beside one of the highway’s massive stilts, though its middle had fallen into ruin, and now looked like a blown out kneecap. “Maybe it’s the sky,” I said, looking north.

“Maybe.” She circled the pillar, and I followed like a hunter after his hound. “Damascus told me that, way back before the radio towers went up, the earth ponies down Calvary way were far enough away from the Princesses to mistake them for Gods. As if looking at ‘em from a distance made it harder to tell.”

She nodded up at the overpass. “All these railways and roads were only rolled out during the war, but the mountains were hanging around long before any of us showed up. They did a good job of shuttin’ off the north for the first few ticks of the millennium hand. And when you leave us earth ponies alone… let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if this alicorn story didn’t spark up for two flat foreheads knocking together.”

I couldn’t help giggling a little then, though my horn might have had us in the same minefield that those three tribes had first danced through: where words like flathead were enough to kick off a war. “I don’t know about that, Caliber. You seem to have everything straight.”

“Well, I’m really very wise,” She said, polishing a hoof against her vest. “And, on top of that, religion was starting to fizzle out even before the bombs fell. The war had it ground down to cinders, and I like to think the Fallout blew ‘em out. I mean, all this counts on Damascus’ word enough to go on… But it is. That buck might has more decades under his belt than you have years.”

If you actually put the apocalypse down on a timeline, that wouldn’t seem possible, but I got the point. Damascus had an old soul. And I had to wonder how much of it might had been shut into those six orbs.

“The war made religion obsolete?” I wondered aloud. “I suppose that only makes sense: It must have been hard to see Celestia and Luna as Gods when they were going door to door trying to sell war bonds.”

I didn’t really know what to think of the Princesses. But they had certainly tried their best to see an Equestria victory, even if it meant fanning away their age old airs of mystery, and hitting the streets like girl scout caravans, dragging along wagons full of cookies or, in their case, enlistment pamphlets.

Caliber had gone very quiet, and I quickly did the same as I watched her pressing an ear to the dirt. Our old textbooks had often shown Buffalo doing the same, and I wondered if Caliber might have picked up the habit from one of their tribes. The mare wouldn’t seem at all out of place in those grainy old pictures of the Marejave, and it wasn’t like a desert would look all that different for passing storms of balefire.

“This usually only works for two kinds of movement,” She whispered, as a hoof wove me out of the empty space between the pines. “Slow, lumbering, powerful movements… the kind that sends tremors through the earth, like something back Tartarus way is pounding against the walls of its cell. And jerky, erratic, excitable movements… the kind that hopscotch through the sand.”

She tucked me away behind one of the pillars, as my heart started skipping rope in my chest.

Fudge, fudge, call the judge, Mama had a bay-bee.

It’s not a boy. It’s not a girl. It’s just a little lay-dee.

“What’s coming?” I asked, even as their voices began to ring through the pillars.

She unlatched that hefty black rifle, and hugged it to her chest just as a filly might her favorite doll. “Trouble.”

*** *** ***

I suddenly felt very crowded, as if Equestria had just been flooded by waves of unwanted refugees, though no more than four ponies marched by us, like giant ants in a line. They looked worn out, but not weary: broken down, but not beaten. And even when they smiled, they didn’t look happy.

One of them was a unicorn, but I saw the thick pistol he had aimed at the storm before I did the horn buried in his mane of washed out sunshine. The weapon had a long clip arcing out from under its trigger, and looked like nothing I’d ever seen in the magazines. The same pistol hung out of the next mare’s mouth, but it looked far less terrible wrapped in a muzzle than it did bobbing in his colorless magic.

The other two bucks, who wore the same rough and tumble uniform of ragged edges and trophies dug up out of fresh graves, carried a shovel and a glinting knife in their mouths, and followed the dirty light of their leader like tireless young mules after a carrot on a stick.

Not that I have anything against mules… or that anypony should. I’m sure that, if I ever met a mule… well, I wouldn’t expect him to be trundling along after some silly old carrot.

Salt of the earth, that’s what they are, those mules.

Anyway, Caliber had her rifle leveled over a concrete bar stripped from the road, and I kept my laser pistol hovering at my hooves, so that these salty passersby would not catch the light of my own magic in the corners of their eyes. There were some tightly knit pine trees between us, and even if I were to look down the blocky sights of my pistol, they might mistake its glow for the light of the early afternoon sun.

“Uh oh. What if they find the pilgrim before we do?” I asked, in a voice low enough to go scurrying under closed doors. I couldn’t make anything close to words out of the Raider’s own garbled voices, but felt the need to whisper all the same.

Caliber arched a brow over the cusp of her rifle’s scope, and I watched her eye roll lazily over to me. “I’m sorry, were you not planning on killing them?” I glanced back at the passing parade, as if I needed to see those severed hooves again, all rattling along behind them like tin cans bound to a wedding car, with a head bouncing along at the end of a rope. “I didn’t realize we were letting Raiders into Hell now. We’d better go get Charon, so he can take their coins and sing ‘em the Welcome song.”

Jeez, I thought, smiling like a giddy idiot. I guess no one wanted a little bird chirping in their ear when they were looking down a line of fire. No matter how nice its song sounded. “Right. Sorry. So we’re just gonna… shoot at them, then?” I asked, tapping my hooves together in front of me.

“That’s usually how it goes, yeah.” She furrowed her brow, and pressed back into the scope. “Go around the pillar, and wait for me to take the first shot. When they turn and start runnin’ at me, go ahead and light ‘em up. If you get into trouble, just back on up and I’ll be here to get you out of it.”

I nodded. “These are the basics, Lamplight: the box steps.” She said that as if Death – who she so often dressed up as a dancer – was riding in the passenger seat of the Raiders’ wedding car, and they were bound to have their honeymoon on the dance floor. “It might not be long before you need to do this alone. So come on, Sugar. Sharpen your spear, and try not to think so much.”

“Yeah… thanks.”

I hurried off towards the pillar, and tried my best to take her advice, even if it meant drowning myself out.

Fudge, fudge, call the judge, Mama had a bay-bee.

It’s not a boy. It’s not a girl. It’s just a little lay-dee.

My laser pistol was shaking, and when the whip crack of Caliber’s rifle hit the mountains, it almost burst out of its cradle, as my magic came loose at the corners.

Before I knew what was happening, I saw the Raider’s shovel digging into the earth, after spinning in a full circle for how violently its master’s neck had been twisted out of place. At least a half dozen rotten teeth were thrown into the air, like a witchdoctor’s rolling bones, as a red fountain pen scratched sloppy red lines into the snow. The buck’s skull was broken into pieces, as if it were a balloon, and Caliber’s bullet had been the last of too many breaths out.

Then, the pine trees were torn to splinters, as two submachine guns emptied their bellies at once. The third buck, whose teeth might have been coated in silver as the knife glinted in his mouth, managed to duck around the bullets, though they tore through the air like an angry swarm of wasps. He went bounding towards Caliber, and I finally collected my magic around the pistol, and aimed it at the mare who was breathing fire, as she emptied another clip into the concrete.

I pulled the trigger three times, though she had started to burn before I was done. She took one beam to the neck, another to the rat’s nest that was her mane, and dodged the last even as she beat at the wildfire spreading through the tangles of her hair.

With smoke rising from her crown of brittle thorns, and eyes full of tears, she punched another clip into the submachine gun, and was holding down the trigger well before she took aim. She didn’t hit anything but the pillar, as if we were all trying to bring the highway crashing down on legs full of lead.

I fired another two shots, knocking her head back with the first, and turning the submachine gun to something like hot wax in her mouth. She was demonized then, as her jaw was pulled wide by the weight of all that molten steel grafted to her tongue. Her mane had become a blackened ruin, like a forest put to the torch, and a third eye was glaring at me from the center of her brow.

With what was left of the laser pistol’s clip, I beat her down, as each shot landed like a slap across her cheek or a swift kick to her gut. She might have died early, but I fought her body to the ground, using energy cells in place of my own four hooves. In fact, if I hadn’t been too hysteric to reload, I might have turned her to ash. But instead, I pulled at the trigger, willing the pistol to spit something up.

As I stood over her, something cold and flat slapped against my side, and sent a lurch rolling across my belly. I looked up, just in time to see the second submachine gun go spinning out of its basket of pale magic, knocked out of place as one of Caliber’s bullets crumpled against its side.

But that was one fight, and for the bruise coming to bloom under my ribs, I knew that I was in another.

I skipped a few paces to the left, just as the second buck, the one that had once held a combat knife in between his teeth, swung at me with the shovel of his dead comrade. It looked like the knife had slipped, as his lips were torn at one corner, and the shovel’s handle was pressing into the wound, as if to leave its splinters like teeth into a freshly carved mouth.

He swung at me again, but I hopped over the flat of the shovel’s blade as it cut under me, and had more than enough time to cycle over to my baseball bat as he tried to come around for another attack. The Raider’s eyes had heavy bags under them, and looked at me with something like desire, though it was dull at its edges, as if I was the shimmering mirage of an oasis, or the X on a treasure map.

There were two holes in his chest, from which blood spilled like water out of a pierced canteen, and when he lunged at me, I could see that he barely had the strength to throw his weight around. This was already over. He had been thrown out of the ring, as if Caliber meant for me to knock her opponents out for her, as the bell went on ringing over our heads. I swung once, and broke the head off of his shovel.

I swung again, and as the tip of the bat touched the bottom of his jaw, the buck went rearing back onto his hind legs. Then, after skidding on his own blood, he collapsed into the dirt.

After making sure he was dead, I looked back West, and saw that Caliber had finished her fight. She had gunned down that blond Raider as he ran circles around the pine clusters, and troughed the earth for his submachine gun. Her kills were far cleaner than mine, as even the pieces of a shattered skull seemed serene when compared to melted flesh, burnt hair and twisted tongues.

“You alright?” As she ambled over to me, and refastened that terrible black rifle to her side, I had to wonder if we could ever lose a fight, once the bones of her battle saddle were put together again.

I nodded, and almost caught myself smiling. I didn’t like killing. But winning was nice.

She walked over to the head that had been trailing along behind them, and spat. “Shit.” She touched it. “This thing’s fresh off the branch.” I put a hoof over my mouth, repulsed by how easily she fondled that hollow face. “Wait…” She narrowed her eyes, and leaned in a little closer. “This guy look familiar to you?”

“Just leave it alone, Cal.” I said, as if she was my big brother, poking at a spider on our doorstep. Eventually, she backed away from the thing, but couldn’t help keeping it in the corner of her eye.

“This is why we shoot Raider’s on sight, Sugar.” She had the buck’s submachine gun hanging at her side, and held it up after dipping her hooves into the snowmelt, and washing the blood off. “Take this.”

I hesitated, but swept it up in my magic as the weight of it began to make her hoof shake. “I don’t use submachine guns: I do my killing down a scope, or at kissing distance. You give me a rifle with a long barrel, or a ballistic fist, and I’ll march into Hell with my contract pinned to my sleeve. That’s black and white. I like that. It’s everything in-between that’ll have you slipping a noose around your neck.”

*** *** ***

I might have thought the sun was setting, as the storm had wings of ink splaying out over it as if from a fountain pen with its head snapped off. Still, all the spaces between the stains shone out white as streetlights, and though they didn’t flicker: they came and went like sandbars under a fitful tide.

We were following the sound of metal scratching at the earth and, if only for Caliber dropping its name: I couldn’t help imagining the inmates of Tartarus, trying to dig themselves out. We came to the lip of something like a pasture, tucked inside that dotted timberline and the litter of both highway and mountain, which might have been mistaken for the ruins of the first stone city.

The flat edge of a shovel bobbed out of one of five holes in the earth, throwing up silt like ashes to ashes.

“This is it.” Fudge, fudge, call the judge. “Try to watch what you say around her.” Mama had a bay-bee. “Don’t tread on Celestia’s tail. Faith might be the only thing that’s keeping her going.”

It’s not a boy. It’s not a girl. It’s just a little lay-dee.

“Got it.” With a sly look on her face, Caliber closed in on me, as one of her hooves came to hover between us. “Just as long as you remember what she’s hunting, and try your best not to look like such a Goddess.” She booped my nose, and ran off in a flurry of red, like a filly playing ding dong ditch.

I couldn’t help blushing a little, and felt my nose with a tentative hoof, as if the Princess herself, on a campaign to win back the country, had just planted a kiss there. After standing by for a little while longer, as if to move would be to give up the hearth’s warming that had reddened my cheeks, I skipped along, with my hooves clicking like sleigh bells.

Caliber tapped her hoof against a stone, treating it like a bell on a hotel counter, and the mare in the grave looked up. She might have slept in a bed of autumn leaves, for the texture of her mane, though it had been colored purple by brushes dipped everywhere from the spaces between the stars of dawn to the darkest flowers of a lilac tree. It fell like a hood clasped at her shoulders, and she had to brush it away, so that she could look up at us. Her eyes were dark, but shone like glass speckled in the rain.

She planted her hooves in the middle of the grave, and stared through us without so much as a word. Her coat was a pale olive, but a pattern of stains, shifted a few shades darker, spread all across her body. At first, I thought the dirt had drawn those strange designs on her, but a thick belt of bandages, running from her belly to the collars of a white undershirt, had me thinking that they might be old burns.

The cotton of her torn off sleeves and the rumpled black of her vest, which was decorated in needlework swirls, made her own colors seem faded and tired, as if to show that the West had not welcomed her with open arms, but only sought to wear her away like any other inkstain. And even as the wind fluttered her collars, she didn’t make a sound, as if she was made only of worn pieces of paper, pasted onto the world.

Around her neck, she wore a short cashmere shawl, whose colors made it look like the sand and the soil under that bed of leaves. And, over the darker edge of the cloth, there hung a tribal necklace, though I couldn’t decide what it looked like more: an airship overgrown with rust, or the molted skin of a locust.

“Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum,” I recited, pronouncing her name as best I could, as if that would be enough to show her that the songs from the scripture had been my lullabies, that the dead language buried in her name was not lost to the world. But the little pilgrim stayed quiet, and as the silence hung open, as the country began to wail behind us, I could almost hear my heart pounding. Fudge, fudge, call the judge.

“Hear tell there’s someone playing Goddess in the mountains.” Caliber put one hoof in the grave, offering to pull the mare out. And only then, did I see the shotgun rigged to her side. “Let’s go kill her.”

*** *** ***

As Caliber pulled her out of the grave, I had taken a good look at her cutie mark, for it was a symbol no less cryptic than my own, and I felt like we might both be searching for the same Rosetta stone. Hers was a black teardrop, with four diamantine corners, and a star resting at its base, colored after fields of twilight. It was falling, as a Phoenix’s tail of deep purple licked up to the sharpened point of the teardrop.

“So…” Caliber began, as the crunch of our hoofsteps against the soil and those narrow feathers of snow became too much to bear. The pilgrim hadn’t said a word and, for hearing her only though the speakers of my Pipbuck, I listened for the whirring of cassette wheels, as if when she finally opened her mouth, static would come out. “Once we’re done patting the dirt over those graves, what’re we gonna be up against? What’s your read on this abomination?”

I almost felt guilty, as the mercenary was doing all the work in keeping the silence from collapsing in on us, pressing her weight against the front door, trying to keep all the snow from snapping its hinges.

“I mean, I’ve met folks that’d bet an arm and a leg on there being aliens spinning around this old world, usually on account of catching a streetlight blink in the corner of their eye, or having too much whiskey warming their bellies.” She had to look away from the little mare, as her eyes were like a forest in a fence: they might have been easy to get lost in, if only you could find a way in. “Now, I’m just playing Discord’s advocate here, but… you sure you’re not making hurricanes out of the beating of butterfly wings here?”

I winced, as if she was bringing the hammers down on my highest strings, and not the pilgrim’s.

“I spilt its blood on the sand,” She said, in the voice of a gypsy girl, running through the crowd that had gathered to watch her father dance, with a hat full of coins. “And it folded itself away into the air, as if cutting a door out of the sky, and slamming it shut. It ran away. I know that it can be hurt. That it can feel fear: that it can be chased. That’s all that matters.”

She was starting to sound like Damascus, and from the way Caliber had gone quiet, I had to wonder if she could hear it, or if, like a dog, she had lowered her ears to what sounded like the voice of her master. Damascus was Damascus, but knowing that the word of some Celestia entombed in scripture could turn this mare, who was barely more than a child, into another soldier of god, was enough to make me shiver.

“The Goddesses ask only for honest actions, produced by honest hearts.” She recited, as we circled another of those concrete pillars. “I don’t know why you are helping me, but if it is only for proof, then take the abomination’s head when we are done. I don’t care if it ends up signing on the wall of a bar, or worshiped on the dais of some tribal priestess’ shrine. Just as long as the light in its eyes has gone out.”

I caught sight of that plucked Phoenix, rising as a pillar of ashes from the ashes, and watched the paper pilgrim, hoping that I might find a filly tucked under all the wrath of this holy war. And then, as if my eyes were no different to a barbarian siege or trumpet’s call, the walls came tumbling down, and I saw the little girl who had watched her family throw themselves from the overpass like so much litter.

They bumped together in the breeze, like boats packed too snugly into a narrow bay, or the mobile over a baby’s cradle on the bough, and as Ash’s eyes were pierced, and beads of ink seemed to pool before running clear, the tears went trickling down her cheeks.

And, for a moment, I was happy: Happy to know that she could still be saved, that she could come back from this. But then, I looked up at the bodies, and saw an abattoir picked clean of its meat: a harbor full of ships torn to pieces by the winds of a monsoon. And, as Caliber cursed under her breath, I remembered the Raiders, and knew from which tree they had plucked those strange fruit.

*** *** ***

Caliber and I stood back, trying not to watch as this stranger buckled and shook, surrounded by the scattered pieces of her family. I couldn’t tell if she was praying, or wailing, but it was clear that we could not step onto the temple’s bloody floors, all littered with flesh like pages of scripture torn from the spine.

The sky was dotted with little white birds, as if an enormous cage of doves had been turned loose to make a spectacle of these last rites, but they did not fly, and instead sank to the earth and melted away.

“Is this… snow?” I had to gather up my courage before asking, as the silence had never felt more at home, and a part of me worried that the air might only have been crowded by the flotsam of radioactive fallout. I held up my hooves, trying to catch the dots as a beggar would crumbs.

Caliber just nodded, and turned her head up, to let the sky’s mercury spill over the brown of her eyes. I was a little startled when she stuck her tongue out, and let the feathers melt onto its tip. She giggled, and shook the dew out of her mane, as if she had fallen asleep in a ring of red cups on the lawn.

I copied her, and we licked at the sky as if it was cotton candy, laughing as Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum stared up a carousel whose horses had been pulled apart.

“I’m going to ask her to come with us,” I announced, as the corpses spun in the corner of my eye, like ballerinas streaked in red warpaint. “After this is over... Once the alicorn is dead.”

“Grace…” We watched the mare ahead of us trembling, and the snow might as well have turned to ash in our mouths. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“She’s all alone.”

“And we’re not?” It was almost like she wanted to leave, to sneak away as Ash lowered her forehead to the earth, and had it smeared red. “You heard the tape: this changed her. She’s got nothing to lose but it.”

“You’re afraid of her.”

“Afraid? No.” She shook her head. “But there’s a fire in that mare. And if it gets out: there’s no telling who it might burn. I’ve seen decent ponies fall off for less than this: seen Raiders cooked up for less than this.”

“That won’t happen with her. It’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen with her.”

Even if it meant walking the pilgrim to war.

Caliber looked back to the corpses, and her eyes ran along the length of a buck who had been left in two pink halves, like those of a fish laid out over a bed of ice. “It’s your call.” She shrugged. “I guess it can’t be much worse than working for a religious nut, right?” I dug an elbow into her side, and we were both smiling, even as the snow wove diamonds into our hair.

Ash glided back over to us, with the shawl pulled up over her nose, and the colors of her Pilgrimage dotting the end of each of her hooves. It wasn’t hard to see that she’d been crying, as her eyes were lined with that same shade of red, and her body was still shaking. She was a bird with a broken wing, and I felt like picking her up, and building her a nest in the front pocket of my father’s shirt.

“Alright, Ascella.” Caliber clapped her hooves together, coaxing the pilgrim out from behind her shawl. “I think it’s about time we deep six this bitch. So lead on, and we’ll send that abomination… bang!” She clicked her hoof and made a whistling noise as she dipped it into the sky. “Straight to the moon!”

Ash laughed. And, for a moment, I thought she might be choking, as her voice was still waterlogged, just as her cheeks still shone. It didn’t last long, more like a chirp than a trill, and though I hardly knew the beleaguered pilgrim: I liked to see her smile. “Thank you…” Her voice trailed off.

“Caliber,” said Caliber, and they shook hooves, making a blood oath for the sake of dead pilgrims.

“Grace.” I said, just a little too early.

Still, the pilgrim let her hoof drift over to me, and hummed, as if repeating my name in melody alone.

“That is an optimistic name.”

“I guess it is…” I shook her hoof. “It’s nice to meet you Ms. Ascella.” Caliber snorted and rolled her eyes, reminding me that manners fit the new world like a curse did the lips of a priest. And so, thinking that I had to win her back, I said something that would once have gotten me little more than a mouthful of soap. “Now, let’s go get this bitch deep-sixed.”

*** *** ***

The storm had run black, and for the snow that freckled its face, it might have passed for a shimmering night sky. From the root of this narrow gorge, which cut through mountains like the first notch on a stone tablet, the wind followed, and played with our hair. But the scent of death had left us, as if scrubbed away.

A twist in the path ahead turned the temple into something alien, as this place that the liar God called its throne could only be seen for the rare pillars bursting from either end of the path like rusted rifle barrels. The sand under my hooves felt cold and coarse, and as the wind beat against the mountainside, I already felt like I’d stepped out onto a shore worn down under the Wintertide. I kept my head up, as the clouds rolled in between those walls of stone, as if I was flying above an inky arroyo, looking down.

It was serene, but a part of me wanted to turn the blaring horns and howling voices of Galaxy News Radio loose, as if they were only demons caught in my Pipbuck. The DJ knew something about the alicorns, and he had pointed my gun before, in kicking off the open season for hunting Equestria’s Raiders. I needed him to tell me which way to lean, as all I had to spur me on now was the barroom mythology of a bound mercenary, and the dense eyes of a brooding zealot.

Ahead, I could see the arch of a crumbling gateway, which looked to have been built even before the mountains rose, as if this young landform had grown up around it. Where one might once have expected vines and overgrowth, there were only patterns of ash, as this was not a ruin like those explored by the likes of Daring Doo. This was a ruin that might never have been anything else, as if its architects had wanted to invent themselves a history.

We stepped through the gate, and came to the edge of an altar: a stony shore before the open sky, and a sea whose surf had been turned pink for all that thrashed and bled inside of it. Around the dais at its heart, there stood old torches; though they were more like shaven heads for their long since extinguished flames. But I couldn’t pay the architecture, or even the affliction being stirred over its lip, much attention, for what stood at the cusp of the temple, and the coast of that misty sea, like a gargoyle or a stone God.

It blinked, and I felt my heart sink. Knowing that it was alive, that it was real, made it hard for me to breathe. Stretched out at its sides, were wings, which looked to have been pieced together by a meticulous jeweler, running an entire chest full of black diamonds dry. Its feathers fanned out for every thunderhead that rolled away from its lips, and drew in tight when the abomination breathed in.

The blood running along its belly could only be seen when the light rolled the right way, and made it shine, or when a drop of it burst against the temple floor. Its ears twitched like nervous satellite dishes, and there, in between them, there was a spear breaking the skin of its brow.

Alicorn! The word came screaming into my mind. Celestia! Luna!

Nightmare Moon! I looked to its flank for a crescent moon, but found nothing but a starless night sky.

The thing had no cutie mark.

Even Caliber was holding her breath, though she answered to no Goddesses, and thought of the Princesses as two more pretty faces on the back of a magazine, or the side of a crooked skyscraper. Here was something out of a storybook: a villain and an animal, with naked flanks and black blood, that carried with it the sword of our country’s royalty. It had more power than it knew what to do with, like a child with a gun cradled in its frail arms, or a frightened nation with its hoof on that big, red button.

Ash looked up at me, as if this was my chance to stop her, as if I had any reason to think she would do better to walk away. Once the moment had passed, and the window closed, I heard Caliber unlatching her rifle, and watched as she pointed up at a nearby ridgeline, which ran like a wrinkle across the mountain’s face. “If we’re really doing this: I can keep a pin through that thing’s back from up there.”

“It is bound to this place: to the whispers it hears from the belly of that pink sea. But someone, whichever fool of a machinist twisted together this abomination, wrote the old magic into it. And I don’t know how far it might go, the next time it opens a door in the sky.” She pointed across the shore, whose pillars were as crooked as driftwood. “I will cross the altar, and throw myself into the fire. All you need to do is light it.”

I floated out the submachine gun, which had but a few dozen 10 millimeter rounds to digest, and charted my own path along the western edge of the temple.

I heard a click, as Caliber knocked a hoof against the space behind her chin, and between the lines of her jaw. “Far as I’ve seen: everyone’s got a soft spot.” The wind seemed to be groping at my neck then, and I squirmed. “And it’s usually right -” Click. Click. Click. “- Here.”

“Just let me punch a bullet into its skull before you start shooting.” She added, before we broke away from our huddle, like missionaries fanning out to three of the map’s four corners: all ready to burn this false idol to dead monarchs, to uproot this statue molded in the image of a Goddess.

I kept my head low, and circled the temple, worried that looking out over that great ethereal sea of rose petals, and the abandoned ship that was Canterlot, might have me hypnotized: so that the gargoyle and I could be sisters, for our rightful home in that faraway garden of prisoners set in stone.

I got as close as I had the courage to, coming around to the last of the altar’s broken crown of pillars, and kept the submachine close at my side. Now, I only had to wait until Cal-

Like the club of some wasteland purifier being struck against the filing cabinets of a ghoul infested office building, I heard her rifle. But, from the look of surprise that flashed across the alicorn’s face, I would have thought she missed, were it not for the spiral of blood that burst out from beneath the creature’s horn.

Then, the air began to warp around its hooves, and I saw a trapdoor swinging open into a basement full of blaring white light. It almost got away, but I shackled the abomination in place, as my Pipbuck grabbed the hands of Equestria's clock. It was as if the device had flipped order onto its head, to turn Discord loose on a world where everything was frozen still, but for the prisoners of the garden: those Phoenix turned to stone.

She was little more than an outline, cut out of the glare like one of those little paper fillies holding hooves. She was still very much alive, though a red meteor had put a crack in the altar from which her horn rose. Still, I primed the submachine gun, to have it spit its seeds at this caged bird, and let the world's hands spin.

A flash spread over the sky, as the alicorn’s magic slowly blew itself out: more like a birthday candle than a stick of dynamite, and for a moment I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t be throwing a clip of 10 millimeter bullets out over the poisoned fields of the south. But, as that wall of light began to crumble, to fizzle out, her body, black and damp as the hull of a ship, could still be seen, plowing through the stardust.

Golden lines of fire were drawn out between us, as the submachine gun was milked dry as if by the air, which still seemed thick and drowsy as molasses. I was lost to time now, and couldn’t know when all those mired clocks might start ticking up to speed. All I could do was watch.

The abomination had spread its wings over me, though their feathers barely twitched as that volley of lead tickled the beast’s belly. And, as the air became thin and my ears were unplugged, I heard the death rattle of the submachine gun, the drumbeat of a shotgun, and the whip crack of Caliber’s rifle.

The alicorn glided over the temple, leaving pools of blood like hoofprints, and plucked Caliber out of her nest. The mercenary’s rifle went spinning away from her, and as she reached after it, her hooves seemed to pierce the yolk of that silvery magic, and it fell apart around her. Even the color of it was alien, and as it broke, leaving Caliber to crumple against the altar, it was like watching a nebula getting swept up from the floor of the galaxy, as if the Goddesses were cleaning house.

Showers of buckshot tore through the alicorn’s wings, and even as I fed another clip into the submachine gun, long pentagons of that same light came to hover in the air, as shields held up around a king.

Our bullets sent ripples across her magic, and slowly wore down that electric suit of armor, until they were biting into her flesh, like mites that had crept into a breastplate. Ash and I came together at the cusp of the altar, and I helped Caliber to her hooves as the pilgrim spat up at those flickering screens.There was another flash, and the alicorn was warped into the space between us, coming together as if from the lines of code that had given Hell its one friendly face. I hadn’t known there was an exact opposite to gold… until now.

“INFIDELS!” Its voice pushed against the walls of my temples, from the inside out, and I clutched my ears as if to plug up slow trickles of blood. “**Leave me alone. *WHY** CAN’T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!?*” In its tantrum, the alicorn’s struck me across the shoulder, and sent me stumbling into the sand around the altar. “I just want to listen… I only wanted…” Her voice became quiet, losing its grip on my mind.

The temple was reeling around me, and as I watched half a dozen stone knives hovering over the ruin, I thought the world had finally rolled off the edge, where it had been teetering since the bombs fell. But, after rubbing my eyes, I saw that eerie and interstellar dust making cocoons around each of the knives, as the abomination was pulling thorns out of the palm of the earth, only to turn them on us.

I limped back to the heart of the temple, where Ash and Caliber were running circles around the alicorn, whose eyes had become stars, and whose wings were splayed wide, to burn a black cross into the skin of the sky. And then, without so much as another lightning strike… it all fell down.

“YOU *RUINED EVERYTHING!” Like a mobile with its strings snapped, the knives were crashing around us, and it was as if an asteroid belt had been steered into the temple. Caliber was running beside me then, and threw her weight against me, as if I was a frightened lamb, who had to be steered back into its pen. “You **TOOK HER* from ME!” The abomination was howling, though its voice flitted from emotion to emotion, from volume to volume, as if someone was toying with its dials.

The alicorn was trembling now, and as its hooves pounded down against the temple’s floor, Caliber went careening away from me, though I couldn’t know which one of us had lost their balance. “I’m sorry… Oh,” it moaned. “I’m so sorry.” It pulled up another shield, and let it tilt over Ash, who had surely worn her shotgun down as a wooden sword into a splinter. Soon, the pilgrim had her hooves pressing up against its shield, and the alicorn lowered it over her like the sole of a shoe over an insect.

A heavy round tore one of the alicorn’s cheeks into ribbons, only seconds before it disappeared, as if drained into the pinprick of starlight it left behind.

“I am getting so sick of this shit!” Caliber spat, and it came out red. “Headshots are Head Shots! Head. Shots. … For fuck’s sake!” I had to wonder what my mother would wash out of the mercenary’s mouth first: the blood or the four letter words. “This thing should be dead a dozen times already!”

Ash was lying on her back and, with all four of her hooves up, it looked like she had gotten stuck with the job of holding up the sky. “That thing… should never have been born,” She added, even as I cycled over to my father’s automatic pistol. “We must correct that mistake.”

“GODDESS!” The word nearly knocked me off of my hooves, as it struck the temple like an immense hammer. “GODDESS!” We had our flanks to one another now, and spun like the blades of a pinwheel. “PLEASE.” I felt a tremor behind me, as the sky was pulled apart as if along a seam. I ducked away from the rift, thinking that it might pull me in, and soon found myself standing on one side of the abomination, as Caliber and Ash ducked out from under its forelegs. “Speak to me”

It dug another shield into the earth, and began to slide it towards that great pink sea, like a plough. Caliber and Ash were caught behind the walls, and I saw them pounding at them as if at panes of glass. I looked up, to see a horn which might have skewered a star, and knew what to do.

With the automatic pistol rocking steady beside me, I held a hoof up over my mouth like a shawl, as the earth was being churned up behind the alicorn’s plough. Staring at the tip of that galaxy piercing spear, I drew my magic in tight around the trigger, and let the pistol kick against its cradle.

The wall came tumbling down, and I could hear the alicorn screaming from the lowest spaces of my mind. Even as my clip ran on empty, the creature's wings started beating, though I only had eyes for its neck, which was long enough to make prisoners of its prey, like the belly of a python.

I floated out the combat knife that a Raider and I had once paced circles around, and steeled myself, knowing that I would soon be cutting the abomination’s throat. Like two exhausted Pegasi thrown from a hurricane, Caliber and Ash fell back for the beating of its wings, and it was all I could do to stop myself from running to them. As it turned, to swat me away like any other insect, I threw myself towards the abomination, kicking hard off of the temple’s stone, and tackled its neck.

“REMOVE YOURSELF FROM OUR BACK!”

My weight made It rock, as if in water, for the alicorn had already lifted its hooves from the altar’s face. And then, as if I had pushed it off the edge of this temple on the shore, its hooves were drawing ripples through the rosewater, and I was flying.

The cross on my father’s coat became a golden bird, as it whipped out behind me, and the alicorn spun violent circles around the temple, like a moth circling a lightbulb. The combat knife nearly slipped out of my telekinesis, as its edges were fraying in the wind, and I had to take the weapon’s hilt between my teeth, and bite down hard, for fear of seeing it sinking to the bottom of the pink sea.

The world was going by in a blur, and pulled tears out of the corners of my eyes. I clung on to the alicorn’s neck as a fisherman might the mast of his ship, and though it banked and spun, it wasn’t long before the chaos got bored of us, and picked a side. The abomination threw its weight to the west one last time and, as if on its own, the knife had sheathed itself in her throat.

“Goddess… p-please.” Her voice was shivering, curled up at the bottom of my mind and, as we started to fall, I stopped choking the alicorn, and hugged her instead. “Goddess?” Her eyes rolled back, and I saw that pinprick of starlight, curled up at the bottom of each iris: shivering.

The temple was rushing towards us, and I watched it coming as so many had the skirts of the balefire. But then, as if turned out on negative film, the colors of her eyes were flipped, and they boiled over as the surface of two blue suns, pierced through the middle.

“You found me.” Electricity whipped around her horn, as if wrenched from the cables that ran under the country’s skin, and I imagined every streetlight in Equestria stuttering on and off.

Then, the candle went out. And I was alone.

*** *** ***

Grace? *Grace!***

Shit… She might have broken bones.

We need to get her bound. Before she makes the damage worse.

You listening to me, Ascella?

Ascella!

It’s gone.

Yeah… Yeah, I know.

I’m sorry.

Just get me that old case out of her saddlebags. I’ve got an idea.

These are…

Yeah, I know what they are. Now come on… roll me the red one.

The red one, Ascella.

Grace! Now I need you to hold this for me, alright Sugar? There’s a good girl…

You’re going to be okay.

Footnote: Level Up!

Perk added: Gunslinger: Not only is weapon equipping and holstering now 50% faster, but all pistols, sawed off shotguns and submachine guns have their spread halved while walking or running.

Chapter 8: April Showers

Fallout Equestria: Begin Again

Chapter 8: April Showers

“While battle cattle are indeed a dangerous foe; they are one that should be fought ferociously!”

|*| A Star To Steer By |*|

“Stars are heartless things.” I woke up with the cold climbing its way up my spine, and the shadows of a hysterical fire dancing across my belly. It was the wind that had brought winter to rattle my bones and whistled a song to those black stickmen, so that they lapped at the walls of this hollow place like the tongues of desert priests at some shimmering mirage. “As one collapses, it will not let itself slip through the arms of the galaxy alone. But instead lashes its neighbors, and pulls them down with it.”

“And, like those stars that dapple the night’s skies, so are your memories woven together.” I wasn’t broken, though the temple must have struck my body as a hammer strikes a nail, and I could scarcely feel the pain, though it was all around me. My head felt clear, as if the last grains of that terrible voice had been emptied out, but I could feel a brittle and heatless crown pressing into my naked temples.

“But memories are not so heartless. No. They are loyal things. And as one collapses, its sisters will reach down and hold it, even as it pulls them away. The destruction of a single one, might be enough to leave you as barren as the new earth. Or give you your peace.” When the wind touched me, it burned, as if my fever was enough to put it to a boil, and so the pain was like a mob, hammering at the walls of my temple.

It was as if I had been laid out over that little fire, for how I could feel my skin being broiled. Still, it was the winter that had brought my back to a burn, and I felt as if I was being pinched in between a pair of tongs, which had had one of its fingers dipped in ice, and the other in fire. “Peace?” I mouthed the word, as another voice spoke them, as his voice, softened in the last embers of youth, spoke them. “You know that’s not what I want.” It was as if we were speaking as one, though my voice was too soft to be heard.

“You will burn your own path.” I found her, standing in between pillars of smoke, with a body that was painted by orange tongues, dancing matchstick men, and white stripes. Her neck had been shackled in a dozen narrow rings, and her eyes looked to have sunk into pools of electric water. “Find whatever memory you would remove, but be wary of all that it is bound to. If you wish to destroy a something, or a someone, then tear away the moment in which you thought of it most, and remembered it best.”

Her hair was smoke, and the beads along her body were turned to embers by the light. Her voice spun circles around the cave, and seemed to come out of every mask and tribal ornament: out of the face of every smiling madmare and the belly of every animal skin drum. “When you are ready to begin: drink. And the magic of your kind and mine will be your tools in pulling history up by its root: No matter the damage.”

“If the pillars fall: the temple will soon follow,” Damascus said, pushing his voice into the cracks between us. We were not one. This was not my body but somehow, neither was this a dream. “I know the danger. But I am not a child poking at a house of cards. I will leave no ruins behind me.”

“Just as soldiers leave no victims.” The smoke was gathering at the roof of the cave: becoming a tempest to match that which hung like a veil over the face of the nation. “After it is done… we will count our dead. But take comfort in knowing that, if you do let some gold slip through your hooves with all that sand, we can always return to these orbs, and pick up the pieces.”

Damascus looked down, and I could feel my chest swell for the fire that flooded our nostrils.

We both stared at a little vial, into which the night sky, with all its fields of velvet and pinpricks of starlight, had been poured. “Drink that, and you will see your history splayed out like an open book. Drink that, and you will have the power to rip out its spine. Rebind it. Burn away the pages… Begin Again.”

“Your valley treats magic as a pestilence. How was this technology not stamped out?”

“Sadly, Zion is happy to make a friend of plagues and pestilence, if only when they can be tamed.” We looked out at a disc of white, as the sun pierced the end of the cave’s throat. “This alchemy was passed from soldier to soldier: beginning even before our march to Equestria. I would brew it for them, so that Zion’s children might spend their waking hours fighting, and do their training, run their drills and study war, throughout the night. They didn’t listen, when I told them that the mind is exhausted as well as the body. They wouldn’t listen, when I told them that we were making machines of our children.”

“So it fills the same spaces as a dream?” We lifted the vial, to hold it between us and the fire, though the light was drowned in it. “What if one of the children were to slip into the blackness in between?” She might have drawn herself a silver lining in mascara, as her eyes were shining. “Have you ever lost one?”

We would have had a moment of silence then, but the fire cackled, as if there were witches being put to death in it. “Yes,” She said, as that starlight danced a ring around her eyes, and began to trickle over her cheeks as if falling through the twilight. “And you’re just like them, Damascus: You’re going home.” She let a hoof push through the embers and the smoke, to stroke our crown. “Come back.”

The talismans chimed to the breath of winter, as it blew into the cave, as if trying to smoke us out. But the fire and the fir only danced to its whistles, keeping us apart like a child stomping and singing their way through a slow dance. “Things will have changed. That is all that can keep you from falling into it. There will be twisted faces and voices that come out as gibberish for all the words that you’ve forgotten. There will be empty canvases, borrowing their colors and their shapes from older memories.”

Her arm, held over the fire, was like the trunk of a birch tree: burning. “I sent a soldier back once, so that he might relive a battle long since won. And, though he found his fight, the features of his enemy had been forgotten. So, in their place; like a mask that snarled and screamed and died, was the face of his father. And there was nothing he could do but win again.”

A shudder took me by the spine, and pulled me ever father away from Damascus. He hadn’t felt it, as every now and again, it was like we weren’t even sharing a body. I felt lost, as the smoke coaxed tears from their eyes, and the wind pressed into his burns. I was somewhere else: far away and far ahead, where the light of this prehistoric sun had come and gone, again and again: like a season, or the tide.

She let go of the crown, whose red jewel would one day be passed down to me, and Damascus tilted our head up, if only so we could watch the fire exhaust itself, as if pooling against the roof of a smoker’s mouth. I couldn’t feel the elixir, but knew that its stars were skipping down our throat, and was driven close to madness in searching for a taste or a texture: for anything.

Damascus was falling asleep, and the night sky spilled out over the world, leaving me alone.

*** *** ***

I was adrift.

The bonds that had made his senses mine, that had seen us sharing his coronation under the recollector, were severed. I had been cut loose, left to the library through which Damascus had to rifle, searching for the pages that he would pull out: for the books that he would burn.

I was floating through the Stable, watching lines of gold passing me by over great plains of steel, like headlights streaking along a highway, all blurred by the rain. The crowds had empty faces, and though they were my ancestors, I found myself afraid of them, as each seemed to be following me with eyes that had been plastered shut. The medical clinic was a blaring white, and I felt like a newborn as all the doctors and the nurses towered over me, with the mirrors on their heads flashing like cameras.

We didn’t seem so different now: he and I. And I could almost see us growing up together, as a flock of children took off around us, becoming bucks in their best suits and mares in Sunday dresses. As if the first few hundred days of the Stable’s history had been nothing but rolling Sundays.

We didn’t pass through any of their churches, and I had to wonder if the Faith had even begun to kick at the walls of the womb we called home. But, even as shades of red and whispered psalms began to trickle in over blurred lines, I realized that I had let too much of the Stable slip by: and felt like a mare who’d missed her stop, only to watch it disappearing behind sheets of rain, as blotted lights over the sleepers.

After only a little while it had all melted together, as if into a great lake of watercolors, and so the faceless ones were drowned. A long belt of rainstorms had their showers turned into a thicket of black crosses, a crown of thorns, as the horizons were struck across the sky. And then, as if to part the storm, Celestia pulled and pitter-pattered her chariot along the belly of our galaxy, and had me believing that the world was being born again. We were gone – damned – and I could hardly keep myself from crying for having let it slip through my hooves again, like gray sand lined with gold.

Damascus needed a fresh memory: one that stood as a pillar to the temples he sought to destroy, one that held the key to turning all that time loose. But, from the way he had spoken of the orbs, I didn’t expect him to start by burning away the ugly: putting a torch to thickets and thorn bushes. I expected him to light a match under a beautiful dress, or throw a stack of love poems, all sealed with kisses, into the furnace.

South, south, south.

The world was being given shape below us, as the deluge seemed to keep it as soft as wet clay, and the hoofsteps of that solar Goddess made valleys and tundra, pounding into the earth as a baker’s hooves into dough. We were both so far from home, but we had both become young again.

And, as I found my hooves where his were, and came to fill the space that he filled: I knew that we had escaped the aching – the wildfire lapping over his skin and the smoke in his eyes – that had been keeping us apart. We had cheated something just a step down from death and, for that, we were together.

*** *** ***

Outside, I could see windows like eyes to a thousand broken faces, all crumbling at the footsteps of the apocalypse that was walking the world. We pressed our back into dry concrete, and stared into the lights, even as they flashed and fizzled out. And, as names like Sparkle Cola and words like Ministry skittered across the walls, like insects over cold skin, I knew that we had been set down in some immense, Equestrian city. We walked over to a window pulled wide, and looked down onto an empty street.

The air was blue. Not the sky, but everything bottled up beneath it. Snow that was bright and electric rode on the back of the wind, and every pane of glass that hadn’t been coated in ash shone, catching the light of this static rain, of these latter day fireflies. The whole city blinked, as its screens and billboards, its smiling faces and logos, went dark, though the blue ivy in the air clung on like the spots I saw after first staring into the sun. Damascus looked up, and did the same, as it cut through the storm as a queen to the fireflies: blue and brilliant. It might have been molting, so that its skin dotted the air around us.

It looked as if the city had just been hit by a tidal wave, as its streets were swept clear of its clutters and cavalcades, and its eyes were only just drying their tears. There was a mare, creeping her way along the slickened road, and her eyes flitted from skyscraper to skyscraper, from screen to screen, as if she was trying to pick a product. We watched her slink out into the open square, which might once have seen a thousand bodies bottled in all at the same time. We had a service rifle in our hooves, and held it close.

We looked down its sights, and trailed the mare as she came into the belly of that dry riverbed of a street. She disappeared behind a broken chain of motorcars, whose bodies were smooth and bleached, as if sprayed down until their first coat of paint was chipped off. Damascus lowered the rifle and, as he rigged it to his side, I saw that his coat was the color of sand, and wore what wounds it had like oases.

Then, we were running down a staircase, as the posters became a blur beside us, so that those few faces that I could never forget and words like Enlist and Bombs and Nation ran into each other. Pink was the only color that could keep up and, though we left it behind, I could have sworn a smile was following us.

We slid out into the street and as Damascus turned, I realized that he was not chasing after the mare as if being pulled along by his heartstrings, like a buck with a ring in his pocket or a rose in between his teeth. He only wanted to run away. The city was so nearly empty that it hurt to think of all these early wanderers, walking roads around each other just to keep themselves separate: to keep themselves safe.

I remembered what he had then, as I watched a naked hoof – stripped of its Pipbuck in an early ritual – making ripples in the road. He had his Goddesses, and would run on alone though, down any alley or behind any of the jalopies that looked like boats sunk into the static, there could be so many red bars. And, thinking of naked rats in the tunnels below us, and alicorns playing God, nesting in the spires above, I felt a shiver run down my spine, despite the turn of the season.

It was warm out, though the sun did little but press its palms down onto the storm, and Damascus might as well have been wearing clothes, for how small and feeble a thing winter was then. And though the lights in the sky were alien, and the storm might never be pulled apart: it was a beautiful day, bright as any prewar springtime for how all the water and the glass had been set on fire.

At the end of the road, the skyscrapers fell away before some kind of river or canal, and all I could say for sure was that there had once been a bridge running across it. Now, the structure was alone, as it had lost its grip on either side of the city, and let its arms sag into the water. In fact, it sort of looked like a cross…

Damascus stopped, as we watched a thunderhead rolling over the horizon, and saw that the rain had painted black wrists to hold it up to the sun. Our heartbeats quickened, as a siren swept through the city: singing, not to seduce us, but to drive us away. The clouds had black bellies, and looked like cotton balls that had been dipped in ink. Damascus started running towards them, and I felt powerless for how little I could do to turn him away: to stop him from swimming against the current.

The street had become cluttered, as the frayed tail of an abandoned traffic jam spread out around us, and Damascus slid to a stop, kicking up silver dust in the place of ash or dirt. I couldn’t know if it had been left here by the fallout, like glitter rolling off the bridal train of a newlywed, or if it was something Damascus was just dreaming up to blanket the grime. Either way, I wished that I could bring a basket of it back with me, so that I might skip along like a flower girl to the Fallout, and sprinkle Equestria with stardust.

It was strange that Damascus and I could be looking at different things, though we shared the same eyes. But, as I watched those little constellations drift apart, he beheld the arrival of three angels in power armor, and ducked behind the hood of the nearest jalopy. The soldiers, who went marching through a red light, almost seemed to frighten him, if only for the draconic scales that ran up their spines and the visors that had hidden their faces, though neither was enough to keep him from weaving us a way towards them.

They turned, and there was a terrible whirring noise, as miniguns began to spin and grenades went clicking into narrow chambers. He stood at the center of the crossroads, and stared down the tips of their spears, even as his heart beat against our chest like the hooves of a madmare pounding against the walls of her padded cell. One of them raised a hoof, armored in the fashion of medieval knights, and the others cooled down as quickly as fire shut up under a glass.

“Star’s sake… you’re normal.” I realized then that they were not looking on us with anger, but awe. Damascus seemed just as surprised as I was, and slunk over to them as an animal to a hunter holding out a palm full of bait. “Don’t know if you lived through Hell, or just came climbing up out of it.”

His voice came out muffled, and was nearly rinsed out by the songs of the sirens. “But you’d better find someplace to bunker down, citizen.” It was a good thing that Damascus had already written this script, otherwise I would have let out a girlish squee as, for saying citizen, the soldier might as well have called me beautiful. “The Fallout ran itself dry years ago. But we’ve got a radiation storm rolling in.”

He waved at his companions, as if cutting them loose, so that they could march away on heavy hooves. “You from the Stable?” He asked, making us feel famous, and Damascus nodded, keeping his silence. “Find me when the sirens die down… We should talk.”

“We might be the first ponies to poke our heads out, Twenty-Nine.” He said the number like a nickname. “Pretty much makes us neighbors, huh?” I could hear him smiling under those steel bridles, and felt a little twist in my chest, as I remembered that he and I could never be friends: that the soldier would be lying in some long buried grave, with Equestria’s flag folded over him.

“Now, find someplace with its windows boarded up: someplace dark. The radiation gets on everything the light touches.” He waved at a roll of dimestores, which had once sold everything from newspapers to roses. “It’s just a damn shame you don’t have one of those Pipbucks.” He bowed his head, looking at our naked hoof, and he became a dragon ridden with guilt after a rampage.

Damascus even got a salute before we parted ways, and went on in a quiet state of shock. While I would have been playing in the puddles, letting my laughter ring out through the shimmering city, Damascus was impossible to read, though we were in his library: laying his pages bare. And I couldn’t know if the silence had come from a lump in his throat, a knot in his stomach or some longstanding vow.

*** *** ***

The buck in the store window had Damascus in his eyes – and, for the symbol on his flank, Damascus on a cross. And, though his hair was the color of cinnamon, salt and pepper palms ran along his jaw and up his cheeks, and were beginning to run their fingers through his mane. It looked like alpaca wool, and might have been shorn off by pieces of broken glass or knives pulled from walls or warm bodies.

As he ran a hoof along his scars, and shifted his weight so that the window would not disfigure him, I thought of that morning at the toll, when I’d done just the same. But his hair was wooly and mine was leonine, and I had to recite that old idiom: March comes in like a lion, and leaves like a lamb.

We came into the flower shop, and found it dark but for a few slanted pillars of sunlight, making stars out of the dirt in the air. I might have counted a thousand shriveled flowers; all bent over and curled up, as if the smoke of a burning city had pinched their stems, and choked them to death. Petals littered the tile, as if a mare had passed through the room in a panic, looking for any answer other than He loves me not.

Some had survived in display cases, like precious stones, and for the sheen of the glass that shielded its shelves; the flower shop might have passed for a jewelry store. And I had to wonder then: what would become of a buck who bent his knee, and held up a daffodil in place of a diamond.

Our hoofsteps slowed, as his heartbeats quickened, and we came to the far side of the room, where those beams of sunlight had drawn splintered crosses. There, in the sanctuary of a little glass silo, looking like it was on fire for the light that danced around its petals, was a rose.

And, as we walked towards it, the world began to bleed. All the colors, though they were few and ashy here, were blurred at their edges, like rivers running wild over their banks. The sunlight spread as fire put to the corner of a page, and folded over us, so that we were alone with the rose. We could only watch, as its petals took off into the blush of the sun, like bruised and bloody doves. This was it.

As the walls fell away, taking with them the city and its siren call, I knew that Damascus had found a place to start his fire, to start pouring himself into the orbs. It would begin with Rose.

A mare, beautiful even as the candlelight softened her features, and remolded them like clay, stood with us even as history went reeling by: all drunken and clumsy. Everything about her was yellow, from hair that might have been spun from gold, and a coat like so many pastures and wheat fields, to eyes that had stolen their colors from the sun, and the lines around us now: the lines that I had so often followed home.

She was a billboard mare, whose smile kept Damascus’ heart beating against our chest, as if it wanted to get out: to be taken into her arms and held as a shivering animal. And I wondered if he had ever known what loneliness was, before he met her: before the first night he had spent without her.

Everything started to fall apart then, as the orb sipped her up, and shut her away just as that silo of glass had made a prisoner of its rose. She flashed by me, as if there was a metro train passing between us, with its window blurring together. And she was young. She was old, and she was young, as a gray curl was spun through her mane: as ribbons and roses were woven together on her flanks.

I saw her standing beside the mural we schoolchildren had been drawing for these last one hundred years, though it had been little more than a field of wild scribbles then, like a country that had yet to be tamed. She drew a line, planting the seeds to a garden that would grow with the children of the century.

I saw her in the lower Atrium, as a face in the crowd, with the Celestial cross filling the wall behind her. It had been smeared on as two crooked yellow lines, more like the brand of anarchy, than the silhouette of a God. She had been there, when the Faith came up out of the water. Damascus and I stood on a stage, throwing our voice over the mob, holding the Stable’s door open so that the Goddesses could slip in.

I saw her woven through the fabric of history: be it the Stable’s, mine, or Damascus’. They lay together on the floor of a maintenance room, where great engines could be heard snoring through every wall, and looked up at the ceiling: ready to meet their Goddesses. Then, he was asking her to marry him.

More meetings: at first held at a whisper, with faces like masks at the edge of the candlelight, but then becoming great and groundbreaking, earthshaking things. Pony after starry eyed pony stood in rank and file with the yellow mare, as if Damascus was building an army.

A wedding flashed by as a flock of paper roses, whose breasts were white and red, though the audience was smaller now, and she could not be found in the crowd: She was standing right beside us.

She does.

The medical wing wrapped us up in its blaring lights, and, for once, there was happiness in it. My mother wasn’t here, held down by a disease: drowning in it. And his mother wasn’t here, shackled at the hoof and rambling on with the voices in her head. Both were at peace, and the latter paid for one life with another.

A child played, a filly, rolling and laughing from mother and father. And somehow, I knew that she would be next: that he had made himself forget her. Damascus was getting rid of it all: all his love and affection. He wasn’t selling his soul: he was giving it away. And I could only watch it go, as a witness to the waste.

She was young: Too young to speak, too young to put on her little dresses. But she had the bluest eyes.

Marie.

After the girl, there was red. More of it than we’d ever seen: all over my hooves, all over my home. The filly wailed, but she was quiet. I couldn’t hear her breathing, and she couldn’t see me crying. She couldn’t know how frantically I tried to put her pieces back together again. Like torn petals saying she loves me.

Rose.

More red, as my hooves became as bruised and as bloody as those petal doves. But I didn’t care. Bastard. Bastard. Bastard. One life for another. Isn’t that the way it always goes? The wheel keeps turning. And where the dead rest in peace and pieces, the damned must go on, in eternity and Equestria.

Repent.<=======ooO Ooo=======>

I woke up, and could smell winter in the air, though cigarette smoke and the smell of rain had spilt over it. A bundle of rifles lay crossed over me, and they rattled as the cart rolled closer and closer to the sun, which had pierced a hole in the savage skies beyond Equestria’s border, leaving burns in the sleeves of faraway storm clouds, all strung out and held up by black pillars of rain that the sun had put a shine to.

The cart prattled along, bound for the great gateway between MASEBS and Zion’s mountain, from which trails of white dust waved, like white flags bleached in the sunlight. My head lolled, as I felt too numb to straighten my neck, and too safe for thinking that I was to be taken into the arms of the sun, and not thrown into its fires like any other virgin sacrifice.

There were pines trees, standing in their little families of three or four or five, almost naked but for a few needled crowns and tattered robes of snow, which had been draped over both mountains ranges and the basin between them. As if some mad baker had poured a little sugar over the world. I felt like I was falling in love with it all, and wondered if Equestria could win my heart, though it had so often been shutout for fear of its father’s blackness. My head was jolted back then, turning my smile upside down, and I found myself beholding a colossal old machine.

There, faraway and to the south, stood a Bucket Wheel Excavator: one of the very things that had dug our country dry. I found myself hating the thing, as if all the world's demons were hidden somewhere in its enormous skeleton of a shell. And though it was only a piece of heavy equipment, it might have passed for some kind of alien city, as flashing lights came out pale despite the sunset, and clean smokestacks rose as twisted watchtowers all around it.

The machine stood tall, almost in line with the lower mountains, though it was bent over the earth like a bird picking at swollen worms. The excavator at the end of its neck was starting to look like a saw blade. In fact, the entire construct seemed more like a weapon than it did a tool, and I started to worry that it might come roaring after me, as a thousand spinning wheels turned its treads.

I turned back to the sun, and fled like I had been saved. It was older than the oldest machine, and could swallow up planets, plucking them out of orbit like berries from a branch. The sight of it was almost enough to have me believing that Celestia was really up there, steering it around the world.

“Grace?” Ash chirped, as she sprang up beside the cart. The breeze made her mane dance, like a crowd of desert priestesses taking part in some holy ritual, with lavender silk spinning around them, and bare hooves searing in the sand. She didn’t seem able to speak, as if that single line of birdsong was all she knew: as if to smile for too long would be to go dancing over their graves. And then, if only to bring me down with her, the little pilgrim told me why she had followed me north. “The abomination… it’s not over”

“Welcome aboard!” Caliber called out, like a mare with her ears plugged, as she pulled the carriage towards the horizon. Her mane made me think of the roses, as both had been set on fire in the sun. “Please stow your crippled limbs inside of the cart at all times, and keep those rifles away from children aged three and under. They may contain small parts… probably in the way of bullets.” She tipped an imaginary conductor’s hat. “Next stop: Silo City… Otherwise known as the end of the line.”

She waved at five grain towers, which stood guard to the radio tower and its mountains ahead. The silo on the far left was leaning over its neighbor, like a drunk trying to slow dance, and left a deep dent in its steel fuselage. Their colors didn’t quite match, as three granary silos rose like crooked missiles, while the other two, standing in between them, had oily black faces. The centermost silo poked over all the others, and I could make out walkways, pipelines and barricade walls stitched over the entire superstructure.

“They’ve got a clinic there. Should be able sell us the supplies you’ll need to patch yourself up.” I beamed; feeling like the closest thing the world had to a doctor. “And with the caps we make off of this haul… well, we won’t exactly be livin’ it up. Silo City doesn’t trade in much more than ammunition and Brahmin.”

The town could only be shored behind the silos, as there was little to see now but for torched farmsteads, pastures picked clean, and the radio tower looking out over it all from the north.

“Silo City might be the only settlement in the wasteland without a working girl under its belt,” Caliber added. “Unless you count Ol’ Bessie, though that’s the kind of taste most ponies aren’t exactly chompin’ at the bit to acquire.” At that, she came to a sudden stop, making the cart and all its contents bounce.

“There’s supposed to be a sniper looking out from that middle tower.” She turned her snout up and sniffed at the air, as if the scent of danger hadn’t clogged up the sky. “Something’s wrong.”

With a jolt, Caliber pulled the cart over the bones of a wooden fence, though she kept her hoofsteps to a slink, and bobbed her head from side to side as if there was something lurking in between these brittle crops. She ploughed us a steady path through an old corn field, and Ash kept a steady pace beside me.

“Hey… Ms. Ascella.” I was whispering, as the mercenary pricked up her ears. “Can I ask you something?” After thinking it over for a while: she nodded, and I let myself sink back into the cart as if it were a bath. Then, as I tilted my head up to the sky, I wondered if I even had the strength to force the alicorn back into the space between us: if I had the right to tread on the tail of that sleeping dog.

“That’s only fair: The mercenary had her questions answered,” She let herself smile a little, and I decided to let it lie, though whenever I tried to think back to that temple before the pink sea I might as well have invited a headache in to hammer at the shattered memories, like an infant mechanic.

“Oh, don’t mind her,” I said, as Caliber stopped, and poked her head up over the crops like a meerkat. “She’s just a little paranoid.”

“You had a question.”

“Right.” I tried to wave my hoof, and realized that it had been bundled up in one of my own medical braces. “Well…” Then, as if Celestia herself had decided to help me out, the storms seemed to start spinning the other way, and caught my eye. “Have those clouds always been there?” Their curtains looked to have been trimmed just above the radio tower, as if a seamstress had walked all along the northern mountains, with her scissors to the sky. “I mean, is something making them that way.”

“Somepony.” Her eyes followed mine, and the roof of the world was reflected in pools of black and gold: of ink and champagne. “The Enclave.”

“Pegasus bastards!” Caliber hollered back at us, as she puzzled over an unbroken fence. “Got themselves set up nice and cozy up there. Hear tell they’re still living like it’s the old days: with taxes and everything.” She punched the fence. “Hell, they’ve even got their own military. Troopers come poking around sometimes, looking for a new excuse to stay shut up behind the clouds.”

“They took flight from Equestria just before the war came to its sunset, and closed up the sky behind them.” They might as well have slapped me across the cheek, as I’d never thought our own people might have pulled the wool over the eye of the world. “They made themselves a Kingdom in the Skies, and so: chained themselves to it. When their ascension comes, their hooves will be too heavy to tread the path.”

The thought of it made me sick, and I wanted to believe that Ash was right – that those who had stolen the sun would face the jurors of some divine court – but I couldn’t. Still, Caliber might have taken her frustration out on anything with feathers, and I worried for the Pegasus that were trapped here with her. The mercenary had never stopped treading at the wasteland’s water, never let herself go under, while the Enclave grew fat and blind, like pigs whose faces were buried in a bottomless trough.

Ash looked a little sad, as if she pitied the citizens of the Enclave who might have been saved, were it not for the hooves over their eyes. Caliber furrowed her brow, and punched a hole through the fence.

My stomach hurt.

*** *** ***

Welcome to Silo City Cows!

No Ponies Aloud!

An ugly shade of paint had been smeared over the sign, though it looked more like a wine stain than blood. The gate to Silo City was wide open, leaving everything inside of its walls, which were like those of a bullpen, naked. A Brahmin stood beside the entrance, and I was a little shaken to see one alive for the abattoirs of Hell, even though it did little more than chew, and stare out at us through sunken eyes.

The head that was glaring at us, as the other ate something that looked quite a lot like a shirt, wore a colander as a helmet and had a number of growths on the right side of his face, like cancerous moles. His eyes widened as he looked over the cart, with me in it, as if he’d just realized something very obvious. “Ambassador!” He brayed. “Amba-sassador! Ambasasafrasador!” The bull’s voice rose to a wordless bellow, and his thick gray tongue flailed like a fish out of water.

I could see his ribs as their hide was pulled taught, and while he bucked their weight back and forth; his brother did his best not to choke on the shirt. “Whoa there,” Caliber said with two hooves raised, as if she was about to bless them. “Whoa there!” To this, both of the Brahmin’s heads became still, but for a lazy sway from side to side. “Could’ya just tell us what’s going on here? … Where are all the ponies?”

I shook my head, like a god trying to dry its ears. She was talking to a bull. A two headed bull. A two headed bull wearing a colander and eating a shirt. “Go now, woman! Take the Ambassador to see Bodacious!” He wrenched his head towards that corral of a town, and sent his makeshift helmet flying. “Hurry! Before Simmental comes home from the fields!”

Caliber shrugged back at me, and then crept into the town on the tips of her hooves, as the buildings surrounded us like circling wagons. Their architecture borrowed from that of an iconic Equestrian village, though in place of candy colored coats of paint or time honored woodwork, there was rust and grime and faces wearing masks of mud and ruin, taken from the scattered farms that dotted this northern corner.

One was branded The OK, by a bold sign slapped over its porch. There was a primitive stable built between the silos and the western wall, but it had been almost entirely abandoned. Only a mottled old bull was left, leaning against its side, as the structure had sagged from a square to a rhombus. I had to look back, for one of his heads wore a bowling hat tilted all the way forward, and the other smoked a cigar.

A hollowed out barn stood at the feet of the silos, as proud and as worn down as any medieval castle. Orange light spilled out of its windows, and came creeping through lesions all across the building’s toasted face. Like the Brahmin at the gate, the barn had a strange pattern of growths riddling its sides, and might have passed for a great, wooden bull, like a crude monument to some ancient rodeo legend.

My Pipbuck showed clusters of white bars scattered throughout Silo City, and a great, shivering hoard of ivory tusks inside The OK. I looked back at the gate, wondering if I would see one bar or two, and couldn’t help feeling a little shortchanged. “Is it usual to have a cow guarding the town?” I asked, as Caliber walked circles around the snowmelt, and came to the mouth of the barn.

“About as usual as having one run it.” We came to a sudden stop as there, nestled in a throne of damp hay and flanked by a pair of armored Brahmin, was something I never thought I’d find outside of a deck of cards: a king with two heads… but only one crown. “Welcome to the Equestrian Wasteland, Sugar.”

*** *** ***

"So… you have come at last.” The Great Bull’s voice seemed to shake the barn, as if thunderheads had come to lay siege on Silo City. “To beg for peace, or lay down your arms as tribute?” His eyes, whose lids were heavy if only to cover up a yellow madness, rolled over the rifles. “I have waited a long time for this, Equestrian. But it is good to see that your kind still has enough sense to know when you are beaten.”

He must have mistaken the cart for a carriage, and now saw me as some kind of noblemare, come to speak on behalf of a voiceless country. “You make it sound like this land might be anything but ours… Don’t forget that Silo City stands on Equestrian soil, your cowness.” It was kinda hard not to step up and defend the country. Plus, I really liked being called Equestrian. “What gives you the right to rule it?”

“For decades, my kind toiled over this cold and bitter earth! We Brahmin were the ones who tended it, who cared for it, who bled for it! And now, we Brahmin are taking back what is ours!” One of his guards stomped a hoof, and then nudged the other as if to remind him to do the same. “Do you know what it is like to be so subjected… to be so insulted? Do you know what it is like to be milked?”

Ash was standing very still, as if she was bunkering down against the thunder of his voice, and the pilgrim seemed to fade away a little more with every word. She was growing more distant by the sentence, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to look over and find her gone. “No… no, you live like royalty. Every one of you ponies, a king in his own right, never thinking of the bones beneath your thrones.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re sitting on.” Caliber sneered. “But it sure looks like a throne to me, pal.” The crown on his head, made of a decorated general’s cap with its top punched out, wasn’t helping. “Now, how ‘bout you tell us where the locals ran off to: I’m fittin’ to sell these guns and wash my hooves of this ass-backwards tomfuckery as soon as possible.”

“Rein in your wild bitch of a dog, Equestrian.” From the look of this place, there couldn’t be enough soap to wash out both of their mouths. “The common of blood and simple of mind have no place in such glorious theaters of power.” The head beside his was limp, and shook as if in disagreement whenever Bodacious shifted his weight. “Now, see what I have made of your kind. And tremble!”

He pulled on the chain around his knotted hoof, and a pony burst out of the straw, as if this had all been some kind of intricate magic trick. The buck was shackled at the neck, and a pair of glasses were set askew across his snout. Over his clothes, he wore only a silken strip of cloth, which had coiled around his legs, making it look as if he’d dipped them in cotton candy. “See?” The Bull roared triumphantly. “Even your most delicate trophies, your fairest maiden, can be crushed under the hoof of King Bodacious!”

Caliber laughed, and if it weren’t for the look of defeat on the buck’s face, I might have done the same. “Don’t know how many times we’re gonna have to go over this, Bo…” At the sight of us, a smile danced to the prisoner’s face, as if he already knew that we would set him free. “But I’m not a maiden.”

He was fair enough, though: especially beside the bulls, and I couldn’t blame Bodacious for making the wrong call. Hay stuck out of his electric gray mane, making it a thicket that was only held back by a square sided military cap. His coat was the color of expensive chocolate, around which the coils of silk might have made a bow, and he wore a khaki trader’s vest, whose collar was black and whose pockets were running over like a magpie’s nest. His cutie mark was a yellow road sign, which looked to have taken two bullets to its breast, and wore one arrow pointing up, and another pointing down.

But, as the buck straightened out his glasses and gave us a little nod, I saw the real problem. His eyes might have been cut and pasted from the cover of a magazine: stolen off of an Applewood starlet.

“Alright, honey,” Caliber began, without softening the edges of her tone. “Tell us where this clodhopping crazy put the rest of Silo City, and I’ll leave a bullet in his head on my way out of town.”

Caliber wasn’t very good at diplomatic negotiations! “Haha,” I said, in a very poor imitation of laughter. “What a joker. What a card. What a jester, even.” I pulled myself a little farther out of the rifles, and tried to make a throne out of them just as he had the hay. Since Ash had left us like a cartoon character running off without their silhouette, and Caliber had set herself back like a dog about to pounce, it looked like it was up to me to stop Silo City from spinning any further out of control.

“Please, O Kingliest of Cows. There’s no need for this kind of behavior. Just tell us what you want, and we’ll patch things over between you and Silo City.” I was going to go about this as if he was a lion with a thorn in its paw, as this was an unstable bull, that somepony had tipped over. “Let me help you. And maybe ponies and cows can… finally coexist peacefully?”

To be honest, even I had to wince for how thickly I was laying it on, as I might as well have been pouring syrup over pancakes. “Hmm…” He stroked his other head, which remained unsettlingly still, as if nothing could wake it. “Perhaps you can help me.” His eyes darted from guard to glassy eyed guard, though both looked to be chewing on their own tongues. “I mean… serve me, of course.”

Bodacious seemed very different from the other Brahmin, and though he might not have been one of the new world’s greatest minds, her certainly had his chromosomes on straighter than his, if not loyal then very easily tamed, subjects. “Just tell me how to set things right, your… bovine eminence.”

Caliber scoffed, and the collared buck settled back into the hay, as if he was watching some kind of puppet-show parliament. “You see... I never liked Equestria much.” I bristled a little, as he stroked the hair on his chin. “And when Brutus died, I thought I’d go north. Where the Great Space Cow can be seen each and every night, and the milk falls like rain, to make our women plump and… open to experimentation.”

Just as I had been shaken up by that blasé insult to Equestria, so was Ash at the mention of a Cow in the Kingdom of her Goddesses, though she quickly shied away for talk of fat and uninhibited cowgirls. “But Brutus still whispers to me. And speaks of an Equestria overthrown… put under the hoof of our great race.” As he turned wary eyes onto his second head, I had to put a hoof to my mouth for fear of retching.

It was dead.

Brutus was not some shadowy advisor, pulling the strings of Silo City from behind its throne, but only a lifeless head, still latched on to the body of his brother, like a tumor long since overgrown. “And… I can’t bring myself to leave. He wouldn’t allow it. I…” Then, Bodacious’ eyes glazed over, as if something deep inside of him had been stirred from sleep. “How could I even think to run away? To waste this gift…”

The Bull tapped at the base of his crown, and we could only watch with puzzled expressions, wondering what gift he might have hidden there. “Wanna hear my theory?” The buck with the Applewood eyes spoke up, and only then did I pick up on his accent, though it wasn’t a far cry from that of the steel soldiers in Damascus’ orb. “Your typical Brahmin can barely talk half the time and, when they do, it’s usually head by head: One or the other in turn. Like their mind is split between the two.”

“Just because you’re born with two heads, doesn’t mean you get enough brains to go around.” Caliber nodded. “So what: King Olly Olly Oxen Free here is two times smarter than your a-verage Brahmin?”

“Hold your tongue, or I will have it nailed to the side of this barn!” The earth rumbled, as Bodacious rocked his weight forward, starting to pay attention again. “One speaks too much and the other speaks too little,” He noted, as the pilgrim pressed her hooves a little deeper into the earth, as if being pushed backwards, and stared up into his soiled eyes.

The bull groped at his temple with an awkward hoof, as if a terrible and electric pain had just shot through him. “You are testing my patience, Equestrian! And Brutus is never more alive than he is in anger.” I shuddered, as that great weight sagged even lower, as if it was about to go rolling away like a rotten apple. “You can let me go. Free me of Brutus: and you free Equestria of us both.”

And, with that, I knew what he wanted me to do, and all that remained was searching Silo City for the tools with which I could remove that bloated tumor named Brutus: be they scalpels and anesthetics or hammers and hacksaws. “You want me to decapitate you?”

“Yes…” Half of the enormous bull laughed. “What better way to put an end to a kingdom?”

*** *** ***

The storm clouds had yet to part, and so blurred the light of the sun, to make the northern horizon into a fresh painting over which water had been spilled. The radio tower looked like a gilded lily, as the light made petals out of its satellites. And though the mountains nearly folded over one another, to shut the country off no differently than the margins of a map, and the Enclave lost its grip on the storm, so that it fell apart over the open sky, I knew that we had only just scratched the surface of Equestria.

A bull named Simmental was playing taskmaster over the ponies laboring in these blackened fields, if only to rub in his kind’s revolution. And, hopefully, Silo City’s clinician would be with him, as I would need more than a combat knife and some wishful thinking to cut off a head without doing any serious damage.

“This is a new low,” Caliber muttered, as we made our way along a road through the dappled pastures. She was the only one of us who could point out the mare who ran the clinic, and had no choice but to drag me along, as I tried to settle things peacefully from atop my throne of rifles. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Grace. And I’ve taken my share of contracts from the bottom of the last barrel. But playing nurse for the sake of some uppity cow? …I can’t stand it.”

“You don’t like Brahmin?” Ash asked, as she trotted alongside the cart, much more at home out in the open country. “They seemed nice enough to me… at least, the stupid ones did.”

“Don’t get me wrong: I usually love Brahmin. And Silo City used to be a lot better for ‘em.” The cart bounced, as we passed over a crack in the road, following a litter of faceless pastel smudges in the distance. “But they’re meant to be simple: They like it that way. We’re not helping anyone but that bastard Bodacious here. And we’d do everyone just as much good by lopping off his talking head instead.”

“What about all the ponies of Silo City?” I pressed her, wondering how she could have forgotten the trophy that Bodacious had pulled out of his haystacks. “We’re doing this to rescue them, aren’t we?”

“Like they couldn’t get themselves out of this mess.” She rolled her eyes, as we closed in on Simmental and his toys. “I’d bet you anything that they’re more scared of putting scratches on their livestock than they are of Bodacious’ threats. Brahmin aren’t exactly the fightin’ type, no matter how many heads they’ve got. But alive: they’re worth their weight in caps, and that’s the best kind of armor there is.”

“Maybe they have grown to care about these lowly beasts,” Ash offered, in a sentiment that was both heartwarming and mildly offensive. “Only the Brahmin Bodacious is at fault. The rest are, as you said, too simple to be blamed for this. Perhaps Silo City could not bear to fight and kill its own pets.”

As if to prove them both wrong: a great gray body could now be seen lying in between about a half dozen ponies, collapsed like a besieged castle or the uprooted statues of a dictator. They had ploughed through the outermost lines of dead or dying crops, leaving something like a clearing around them.

“Simmental!” I raised my voice, though had very little reason to mourn the fallen bull. The fieldworkers looked up at us, and started to back away from the body as if Caliber and the cart were no less a symbol of the law than a wailing police car. “What happened here?” I asked, as we swung to a dramatic stop, so that clouds of dust rolled out from under our wheels. “Well?”

“We…” One of the mares tapped her hooves together, and flashed me a nervous smile: Clear evidence of murder most foul! “Well, we tipped him.”

And, just like that, we went from ace detectives on the trail of conspiracy to county cops dealing with a prom night prank, and I caught myself feeling slightly disappointed to find the bull well enough alive. Caliber looked to have been knocked back onto her flanks, and held a hoof over her face, likely wondering how her career could have come to this. Ash didn’t seem to care much.

“I’m glad to see no one was hurt,” I said, lying just a little bit. “I’ve found a way to settle this peacefully, for both Brahmin and pony. Soon, Bodacious will be out of Silo City for good.”

“That’s funny…” One of the bucks came forward, ploughing past younger ponies as if he wasn’t twice their age. “Because we just found a way to settle things very, very violently.” His gray eyes, which looked even older than he was, were set on the rifles of Raiders and Pilgrims alike. “How much are you selling those weapons for, Red? Or maybe that bleeding heart of yours would see us taking them for free.”

“It’s her heat that’s bleeding.” She thrust a hoof back at me. “And that’s where I get my orders from: So no dice.” She was standing now, and seemed a little too ready to fight these ponies run under the wheels of revolution. “Now, Bed and Breakfast needs to show us what medical supplies she’s got back at The OK.”

Bed and Breakfast? I sounded out the name, as they turned to a mare whose coat was the color of syrup and waffles slapped together: who wore strips of bacon instead of wounds, and had eggs in her eyes.

“Hold on a second,” I said, as if my iron throne was enough to make me Queen. “Why are you all set on killing Bodacious? Wasn’t he harmless until he… found his mind?” Funny how that worked out. “There are better ways to settle him back down again.”

“It’s not about that,” The old buck spat. “It’s about what that bastard bull deserves.” For that, he got a few cheers. “Ask any of the Brahmin – Land’s sake, just ask Simmental – and maybe you’ll understand. This is a local problem. And we’re fixin’ to settle it the local way.” They were starting to look a little like an angry mob. “He melted down our guns. Trampled our sniper to death. He’s got debts to pay.”

“Fuck,” Caliber said, letting herself sound exhausted. “That’s no way for a good marksman to die.” She turned back to me, and the look in her eyes almost had me passing out rifles. “Maybe that’s the reason Bodacious wants to get out of dodge: He knows the Brahmin will lose interest in this whole song and dance eventually: Knows he can’t keep Silo City from wriggling out from under his hoof forever.”

“You are looking at him as a victim,” Ash added, throwing her name in with the mob. “Though he might be little more than a coward in a crown. Perhaps this talk of Brutus was only meant to confuse you.”

They all looked up at me, with their eyes wide, waiting for a ruling, as if my carriage had made me judge, jury and executioner. “No.” Their faces fell, as if I had just told them it was bedtime, and there would be no time for one more game. “Brutus is behind this. And I’ll give you his head. Along with my word that Bodacious will leave Silo City, will leave the country, by the time this is over.”

Everypony but that gray old buck seemed to set down their torches and pitchforks then as, just like those children begging to see their first midnight, they were really very tired. “We made a home for these Brahmin. And he ran it into the mud. That bull has no love for us, or his brothers… no love for his family.”

“This all started when Brutus died, but that still leaves one set of shoulders to carry the yoke of this guilt.” He waved at the toppled bull. “Ask Simmental to tell you about the Stables, and maybe you’ll plug the holes in that bleeding heart of yours. Maybe you’ll see that Bodacious doesn’t deserve anyone’s mercy.”

He began marching past the cart, with the other ponies following close behind. “This isn’t mercy,” I said, raising my voice after him, though I might have needed to hear myself more than anypony else did. “This is the benefit of the doubt.”

They became little more than watercolor smudges then, as the road carried them back to the strange serenity of Silo City, and I leaned out of the cart as best I could for crippled limbs, trying to look down at the bull. “Mister Simmental?” I prodded him, as if my words were no different to a long stick. “Were you listening to any of that?” He was walking - well, he was trying – and his hooves tread at the air as if it was water. And, from the look of sleepy content on his face, I didn’t know if he could tell the difference.

Ash circled around to his head, and I realized how massive these beasts of burden really were, especially for how easily the pilgrim seemed to drift away. Simmental might have choked her down in only a few bites, or swallowed her in one if he was hungry enough, though that image alone was enough to make my skin crawl. She poked one of his snouts, where a rust colored ring had been hung like an old door knocker, and had to skip away from a blanket of hot air. “Hmm?” He asked, with his voice at a snore.

“Hello sir, we were wondering if you could spare a few minutes of your time to talk about Bodacious.” We might as well have been clutching books of scripture to our chests, so that the pins of our name tags dug in a little deeper. But the bull didn’t react like most woken by the word of an early rising God, and smiled lazily, as if he had just come out of a dream. “Is there anything you can tell us about Silo City’s Stables?”

“Tell?” He yawned, and I nearly tackled Ash, to get her clear of his mouth. “Nah… but I can show you.”

*** *** ***

I was wrong.

The Stables weren’t empty, as from every stall jutted the hindquarters of another Brahmin, and under each was a swollen udder. They were arranged as racers at the starting line, all facing the wrong way, and they would have been able to look out into town if the shadows that hung over their faces like bride’s veils weren’t so inky. We stood at the mouth of a narrow alley of dirt and pockets of snowmelt, which ran in between the western wall of Silo City, and the backsides of so many breeders.

“Caeli,” Ash said, as she crossed herself. Simmental stood beside her, with a vacant look on his faces. “This is an assembly line.”

“More like a toy box.” Caliber scowled up at Simmental. “Those girls might not know it: but they’re nothing more than playthings to keep the bulls happy: to keep ‘em in line with Bodacious.” She turned on me, and I had to look away, for fear of having my will broken. “Tell me we’re gonna kill this bastard, Grace.” But she could see it in my eyes: the certainty that only the whispers of a dead bull, of a spirit driven mad by being split in half and bottled up, could drive anyone to this. “Damn it.”

At first, Caliber only muttered the words but, as she bruised her hoof against the side of the Stables, striking it as if to knock down the two headed king’s house of cards, she barked them at me. “Damn it!”

“He’s sick,” I said, as if it would matter to her at all. “Bodacious needs our help. He can be fixed.” Caliber threw her weight at me and, for a second, I was sure she was about to hit me. But, instead, she threw a knockout punch at Simmental’s shoulder, though he only went on sucking his teeth.

The bull let out a slow, stupid laugh, as if Caliber was tickling his side, and not tenderizing it. “Everything will go back to the way it was,” I promised, as she beat herself down against him like a boxer in a meatlocker. “Please, Cal…” His laugh was only making her angrier, though I didn’t dare to reach down and push them apart, for fear of getting my hoof bitten. “There’s nobody to blame for this but Brutus.”

“Why?” She stumbled away from the side of the bull: burnt out. “Because you can call him a monster? Because he can just be evil, and leave the rest of us as virgin sacrifices and fucking saints?” She spat out the curse word, like venom. “All that shit about war: about Ambassadors and Equestria and Power… Those were excuses, Lamplight! It’s been done a thousand times before… and it started exactly.” She struck the carriage, making my throne shake. “Like.” Once for every word. “This!”

And, with that, Caliber threw up her hooves and left, though the fire of her tail seemed to go out as she ploughed her way through the snowmelt between us and The OK. But then, with a bark and a curse, she turned around and slapped that same stupid smile over my face. “Wait there. I’ll go find you a fucking axe.”

*** *** ***

I cut off his head.

*** *** ***

Silo City looked like a very different place when we left the barn, and seemed to shine a little brighter for every step we took through the hub of the wagon wheel town. There were cows and ponies out in the open now, and some came together like sisters who hadn’t hugged each other in a thousand years, even as the sun started setting and, somewhere over Equestria, the moon rose.

Even the bulls, who had been husbands to each other’s wives, who had bowed to a tyrant king only moments ago, were welcomed back as if they had been no less like prisoners than the ponies in The OK. Those few who had been given weapons, were soon stripped of them, and each battle saddles might have been a yoke that was hammered on too tight for how happy they were to see them go.

Bodacious was gone. But nopony seemed to care which head I sent rolling away from that throne of straw. The difference between justice, and revenge, hardly seemed to matter to them now. Things never go back to normal, Caliber had said, as we walked up to the barn, dragging our axes. But now, as she looked around at all those little reunions, I thought I saw the lights in her eyes shine a little brighter.

That pretty buck hurried over at more of a skip than a run, and I saw that he’d turned those coils of silk into a scarf, as if it to show off his freedom. “Thought you’d have your legs all patched up by now, doc.” With the sun folding gold foil around his chocolate coat, and trickling over those heavy lashes, I couldn’t blame anyone who mistook the southern unicorn for a mare. “Bo burned through all those supplies?”

I was still crippled, and only dared to leave the cart to play executioner. Caliber had already sold the rifles, and replaced them with a sack of hay for the sake of my spine. “The bleeding got a little out of control,” I explained, as vaguely as I could. “But I’m sure we’ll find some more potions up north.”

“Well, I thought I might help you out with that… getting north, I mean.” The buck might as well have rouged his cheeks, as Caliber looked like she had just tasted something sour, and wasn’t trying to hide it. But, even as she stood there with her face screwed up, I couldn’t help feeling like the luckiest mare in Equestria: as I might have been the only one she would let herself laugh with.

“I kinda figured I owe you, so I hired out two of the bulls to run you up to the border.” That got her turned around, and I could almost see her putting a hoof around his shoulder, sharing a cigar and cheering: What a guy! What a pal! “I’m really very grateful that you did what you did.”

Caliber bumped his hoof, as if holding a glass and making a toast. She looked relieved, and must have thought he was going to try tagging along. “And we’re more than happy to cash in on that gratitude…”

“Stockholm,” He said, taking the trail of Caliber’s sentence as a dotted line on which to write his name. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Manners?” I asked, dumbly, as I’d been taught not to expect so much as pleases and thank you’s.

“Oh, sorry.” Apologizing for manners? Wasn’t that like… double manners? “I’m just used to trying to sell something to everypony I meet. And it helps to play nice.” He hesitated, as if trying to make up his mind. “Everything’s free for you, of course… assuming you ever come back to Silo City.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from around here.” I pointed out, trying to pin him down on the map.

“Came up from Manehattan. Thought I could make it to New Calvary. Would’ve been one of the first too: there isn’t a caravan in the world that would make that trip on a loop. But, there were these stories getting passed around. Got me a little spooked.” I had to look around to find Ash, as she had started pawing circles in the snow, like a filly caught in orbit, as her parents made small talk. It was as if some trickster God had granted me my wish, taking a match to old birthday candles so that the pilgrim could be young again. “Just because the Middle Passage is the safest way East, doesn’t mean it’s really all that safe.

“And once Free Rein was dusted, and the Slaver’s train started howling again, I knew better than to get too close to that machine of theirs.” He nodded back at the Bucket Wheel Excavator, which could still be seen through the silos, like some Jurassic beast sending rumbles through the rain forest.

“That thing belongs to the Slavers?” I asked, remembering the DJ’s report on Free Rein, soon after it was wiped off the map. “They haven’t got it up and running, have they?” The monstrous thing could surely raze entire towns, just as it had once churned up the soul, and I had to wonder if it had lowered its neck, to swallow Free Rein up like a worm.

“Damascus says it’s dead in the water. They’d need something just short of a flat out balefire reactor to get its heart beating again.” Caliber sidled up to me, and I couldn’t help feeling very proud, as if I was the only hunter in a hinterland tavern who had the charm to tame a wolf. “But they’ve gotta be up to something. They’re not just plucking ponies from the lowest branches anymore… they’re burning the forests down. And the way Damascus tells it: These are the days of wrath.”

I was glad to see Ash keeping her ears pointed our way, though the look on her face made it seem like she was listening through a keyhole. “Whoa. Sounds like you’re really tapped into this stuff.” Stockholm’s eyes went wide, as he became the poster girl to any given horror picture show. “You aren’t planning to fight them are you?” I could only look up at the taller mare then, as if I had asked the question myself.

“Considering that our ‘army’ pretty much boils down to Damascus, Charon, Cerberus, Me and –“

“I’ll help!” Ash chirped, making me wonder how closely Caliber had caught her up to the story so far.

“And Ascella over there.” She added, as we beamed at Ash, treating her like a baby who’d just spoken her first word. “The Coltilde would steamroll us. We’re gonna need a put a lot more on the table than a pair of mercenaries, a whole suit of guns for hire, two zealots and one trump card of a Stable Pony.”

“A Stable Pony! I thought as much!” Stockholm dialed his voice up, and made me feel famous. “Now, I know I shouldn’t keep giving you things off the books, but this is too perfect.” He started riffling through his swollen duffle bags, and kept one hoof high, like a magician calming the crowd as he tried to get a grip on his rabbit’s ears. “You can count this as one thank you. But if you’re ever in Calvary, be sure to look me up. I might move on once Silo’s fought her way off the ropes. I’m planning to have the entire city sold on Stockholm’s Fashion from Manehattan, and farmers don’t care much for ribbons and bows...”

He was laughing, but I felt as if a cold dagger was sliding in between my ribs, and pricking into my heart. Electricity shot through my veins then, as if a current had been passed through the steel of the blade, and I thought I heard fuses blowing out inside me. He was holding up a jumpsuit, and thought it was blue; all I could see were the lines of gold that had once led me home like northern lights.

And I knew… just as a part of me, deep down, had known since that Steel Soldier asked his question.

You from the Stable?

And, whether the answer came from me or Damascus, it would always be: No…. A Stable.

We were not the last light of Equestria. But I nearly started crying for having let that light slip through my hooves only hours ago, like gray sand lined with gold.

Footnote: Level Up!

Perk Added: Wasteland Doctor: (pre-requisite Wasteland Medic) You can fully restore crippled limbs, just as long as you have the right supplies at hoof. You also gain a +5% critical chance against opponents with familiar anatomy.

Companion Perk: Piggy in the Middle: For as long as both Caliber and Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum are in your party by their own free will… or by binding contract… or religious fealty, you gain a +20 bonus to speech in conversations with everyone but them.

And yes, the name of this perk does make you look fat.

Chapter 9: Overnight Celebrity