Fallout: Equestria - Of Taint and Colts

Chapter Four - "The White"

I dream.

I dream of walking the same roads.
I dream of thinking the same thoughts.
I dream of following the same plot.

I dream.

I dream of the ash-gray sky.
I dream of the stone-gray walls.
I dream of the pink over every life.

I dream.

I dream of filly and colt.
I dream of the safest route to roam.
I dream of my mother in our home.

I dream.

So many visions pass over my eyes it’s unreal. I hadn’t realized exactly how homesick I was until that point. Everything else in the world is lost to my daze. I can’t make out the words or instructions of my friends. I think Dusk Shine leaves at some point, the nerdy, studious stallion and I exchanging glances as he leaves. I follow Tourniquet robotically over the snow away from Shattered Hoof. The snow is evil, a coating of such purity, yet such deception. I had just learned the harshest lesson in the wasteland, and whoever was in charge of the heavens had seen fit to bean me with a sledgehammer made of it.

I had to trust no one until they proved they could be trusted.

Even the trusty schedule of the Stable had betrayed me in the end, for it had blinded me to the coup d’état brewing against my Overmare. The safest thing I thought I had, my routine, turned against me in my hour of need.

And yet, I want it back.

“Crusader Candy!”

A voice in the thick of a winter snowstorm startles me out of my reverie, and stops whatever mindless procession I am making. To my horror and eternal gratitude, I realize I’ve halted right at the edge of a cliff. The fall is hundreds of miles down a steep embankment.

Within seconds, Tourniquet has pulled me back from the cliff. “Wake up, Candy! These mountain passes are dangerous!”

I gulp and inch further back. “When they said Stable Eighty-Five was built on a flat plateau, I had no idea it was so high in the mountains!”

“It’s the Stable with the second-highest altitude next only to the one at Canterlot, and one of only three outside former Equestrian land holdings,” Tourniquet says. “At least, that’s from the records my ancestor Scootaloo left behind.”

I look down. Far at the bottom of the cliff, a field of bones as far as the eye could see littered the canyon. A thin blue gas emanates from amongst the bones. I look to my left and right and realize that this is clearly not a natural formation.

“Something went off here during the war,” I mumble. The snow slows.

Tourniquet shrugs. “This was here when they gutted the Correctional Facility for materials to make Shattered Hoof ten years ago. No one really knows what happened along this ridge. All we know for sure is that the great stallion Big Macintosh died in the line of fire saving Princess Celestia here.” Tourniquet looks down over the ridge. “His remains are somewhere in that jumble.”

“In history class they told us his remains were brought back to a place called Ponyville,” I recall. “I thought they were buried at the Macintosh War Memorial.”

Tourniquet shook her head. “What rumours and theories I’ve picked up since arriving suggest that the unit Mac was a part of narrowly held off the zebras after his death. I gathered he fell after saving Celestia, but then the offensive mounted by the zebras afterward drove Celestia and his unit back. In fact, it was in such large numbers that Celestia herself had to flee as fast as she could fly.” Tourniquet looks at the crater and shudders. “A Solboom is something no one can escape from.”

It instantly becomes clear to me that none of the rocks in this area have any life growing on them at all. Not only that, the rock surface is sheared smooth. Glass-smooth. It reflects the moonlight so brightly that it illuminates the other mountain, which in turn reflects back to us a perfect representation of the clear night sky as we see above. A little mental tracing and the entire mountaintop a hundred feet higher than our current position that was sacrificed in Celestia’s escape comes into view about fifteen miles southeast.

I gape. “So this canyon was created just before a balefire bomb, and all the ponies and zebras below…”

“Victims of a so-called benevolent ruler’s cowardly escape,” Tourniquet growled.

We walk along this “Solboom Ridge”, as I term it, in amicable silence for a while. I realize I haven’t heard what my companion and Dusk Shine had talked about. Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing Dusk’s cutie mark… he had on a black cloak, obscuring most of his backside.

“So, what did you and Dusk talk about?” I ask. “My mind was a little preoccupied.”

Tourniquet snorted. “You’re telling me. You rambled about how structure and routine were your perfect world and that the Stable provided this, and then you just… shut down.”

“S-sorry…” I squeak, trying my best to hide behind my mane.

“Watch it!” Tourniquet shouts.

I am shoved into the side of the mountain. A burst of pain explodes along my right side as it connects with the rocks. I wince as I recover from the collision. All of that is temporarily forgotten as the walkway I was about to step on crumbles to nothing. I yelp and leap back, but the pathway behind and beneath me crumbles as well. I scream. A hoof grabs my own, and I dangle precariously off a ledge. I kick frantically.

“Tourniquet! Don’t let me go!”

“Hold on! Let me get you up!” Tourniquet calls from above. I hear some struggling noises as she tries to get a grip. I’m slipping! I’m slipping!! “Just a sec…” Clank. An actual warm hoof! Grip! I have grip!! “There! Now, for the other one.”

Crud. Crud crud crud crudmuffins… I’m slipping again… “Help me!”

“Damn this fucking…”

I slip a little farther down. I screech.

Tourniquet barks, “Geez! Will ya shut up down there?” A pause. “Hey, aren’t you a pegasus? Use your blasted wings, ya flying sack o’ meat!”

My eyes fly open. I feel a strong heat come over my cheeks. How did I forget I could fly?

“Let go,” I instruct flatly. “Just… let me go. I’m embarrassed enough as it is.”

With that, I enter freefall as Tourniquet and I unlock hooves. The experience of flying outside of a commanded schedule is a little scary. It feels as if my PipBuck would activate and tell me to get in line. Fully expecting this to happen, I unfurl my wings anyway. I pull out of the slow spin I’m in band catch the cold wind under my wings.

There is no sound from my PipBuck.

There is no structure.

There is no sound at all.

I am free.

I ponder freedom for a moment as I slowly bank left, the wind grazing my wings. My mane whirls in the breeze. I flap my wings to gain the fifty feet or so I had lost in my fall into Celestia’s desolation. The night sky and the stars… those beautiful crystalline sky-bound gems… they absorb me into them as I soar higher than the mountains. The air is biting up here, even more so than below. I’m wearing a brown cloak that I probably got from Dusk, so that helps repel a cold I had practically ignored for the better part of the day, lost to the suffocation of homesickness. I decide to let Tourniquet know I will be flying for a while, and to make herself comfortable, so I could seriously take stock of what had happened over my life. As I pass lazily through the canyon at my current elevation back to where I had first fallen away, I spot Tourniquet on the ridge. She had backed up a ways as the path had collapsed in front of her, and rests beside a large boulder near the edge of the cliff. The path no longer appears in any danger of receding, at least, not yet.

Maybe I should put my self-reflection on hold…

I shift my wings and feathers and angle my form toward the core of the planet, aiming for the Steel Ranger. It isn’t long before I can see her sealed metal shell in detail. I land a few seconds later, at an awkward canter, and work myself down to a trot. A brief spell brings me eye-to-eye with my traveling companion.

“Good flight?” she asks.

I nod. “It was. I’m still waiting for my PipBuck to click on and tell me off for unauthorized flying, however.”

Tourniquet chuckles. “You’ll get used to it, I’m sure.”

I look solemnly over the cliff face. “I guess we’ve got to find another way to get to… wait. Where are we going?”

My companion stops for a second and lowers her head in thought. She lifts a hoof and taps her chin. She sighs.

“Well, if you can fly us over that crevasse, we can get to that land over there,” she says. “We’ll be working our way towards what was once called Equestria. Otherwise, we’ll be heading through Ba’asr Pass to the village of Einamir, due west. It’s the closest village to us, and the biggest group of zebra allies that Shattered Hoof ever had under Gearshift.”

“What will we face?” I ask.

She smirked. “Nothing much, except raiders and maybe a few deformities. It’s actually a fairly easy path if you keep your gun loaded.”

“And that way?” I point toward Equestria.

Tourniquet shrugs. “Best guess from the one Steel Ranger party that made it through the pass is we’ll come across much of the same, except more vicious. They said something about a ‘garden of Equestria’ or something purging all the radiation from the land, and cleansing it of all the damage that zebras did during the war. Problem with that cleanser, apparently, is when it wiped out all the balefire bomb remnants and chemical compounds damaging and irradiating Equestria to oblivion, it caused an undetected chemical change within the monstrosities that had grown reliant on the various Clouds and radiations. Most of them either went insane or developed societies of their own in an effort to protect what they could salvage of what they lost. They said it was more chaotic than ever, and most other groups other than the New Canterlot Republic had perished. Even they were falling to raiders, thieves, and chaos when the Rangers came. They didn’t go into too much detail beyond that, though one mentioned the name ‘Gawdyna Grimfeathers’ and the word ‘assassinated’ in the same sentence.”

“So Equestria is more dangerous than I’d ever been taught,” I summarize.

“There isn’t anywhere safe on this continent,” Tourniquet said. “When Equestria fell, apparently everything fell.”

“Maybe the zebra lands are safer.” I suggest.

Tourniquet grins. “Only one way to find out.”

So we head back a few kilometres, trotting leisurely and trading stories about our lives. I tell of emergencies within the Stable, disrupting the normal flow of life. She revels in days of no activity, enjoying what little time of nothing there is in the wasteland. I regale her with some of the Stable’s inventions, like artificial paste food and the food synthesizer. She passes on stories of favourite guns and friends won and lost. In this way, we trade stories as we walk on.

It isn’t long before we tread back upon a very familiar slope, one we had descended down from Shattered Hoof on our way out of their territory that I had failed to notice in my earlier daze. I look up at a ramshackle watchtower, perched about halfway up the embankment. I catch the eye of a burlap-cloaked pony. As he raises his gun a little, I tear my eyes from him and pick up the pace a bit.

“Something catch your eye, Candy?” Tourniquet asks.

I gulp. “S-something like that. We better get off this ridge.”

Bang! “You don’t see me arguing!” Tourniquet blasts off at a dead run.

I chase after her, not waiting for the follow-up shots. We run into another shallow valley, descending the other side of the mountain, away from the homeland of ponies and into zebra territories.

Well, this is it, Candy, I tell myself as our short sprint comes to an end, there’s no going back now.

The white road in front of us beckons to our hooves. Tourniquet and I walk this lonely path together, whatever desolation of yesteryear that remains cloaked firmly and emphatically by sixteen dozen winters’ cold embraces.

A growl.

Tourniquet and I lock eyes. I blush.

“Got any rations on you?” My partner rolls her eyes and hoofs me a piece of jerky. I groan. “More jerky?”

I feel like I hear the world chuckle as Tourniquet repeats the exact same line Gearshift did earlier: “Learn to eat what you must.”

I repeat my groan. “Fine…”

I take the piece of meat in my hoof and look it over. It didn’t appear to be anything special, just a piece of flesh carved from the muscle of a formerly living creature. I hobble on three legs and take a slow lick of the stuff. It’s almost tasteless, and the texture is that of unpolished leather. I stop and grimace before putting on a poker face and taking a bite. As expected, all I can taste is the wood it was smoked on, and some of the spices used to make it edible.

But it wasn’t horrible.

Ponies aren’t naturally accustomed to eating meat. As such, the tastelessness wasn’t entirely unexpected. I polish off the piece, grateful for the first semblance of food since the nuts nearly twelve hours prior. My gut sends me a gurgle of thanks. I trot a little faster to catch up to Tourniquet and prod her for a second piece. She chuckles.

“Not as bad as you thought, eh?”

I hum a little, neither expressing displeasure nor approval. “I’m tired of being hungry.”

Tourniquet hoofs me over another piece, which I promptly consume.

“How about we set up a campfire and break out our lunch rations while we warm up?” she asks me.

I stop and give her my strangest look. “Setting up a fire in the middle of the snow? Are you nuts? You can’t do that.”

Tourniquet looked up into the sky. “Get me some wood. I’ll show you how ‘nuts’ I am.”

I looked around at the white of the road around us, not seeing a source of wood for miles. I scoff and glare at her. “Where’s the wood?”

“Down that hill and on a plateau to the right,” my companion said. “I’ve been down this road many times before with Gearshift. The forest is sparse and small, but it should have enough wood to keep us warm as we eat.”

I smirk. I know I’m right. There’s no wood for miles. As I lift off, flying through the sky, I follow the path. Immediately, the smile on my face falters as a small bunch of shrubbery becomes visible. The shrubbery quickly gains altitude, transforming into a small thicket of three-foot-tall trees. I land and grimace, taking in the wood before me with no small amount of trepidation taking hold inside myself. Only one thought takes hold in my head.

“There will be no living with her after this.”

I proceed to break branches and build a small pile with the wood I collect. In a few minutes, I’ve gathered about twenty pieces. I carefully angle my wings to create a sort of basket, and then I dig underneath the branches. After a couple tries where I snag all but seven branches, I realize I can’t get all of them on with the method I’ve been trying. I pick up the remainder with my teeth and load them on my back.

I’m forced to leave two in the snow. I am completely out of shape for this kind of work. I grunt and struggle as I climb the shallow hill towards the encampment. Every step I take up the white bump sounds like an echo in eternity. I begin sweating under my limited clothing, the strain on my left wing in particular palpable. I had used that side in my attempts to shovel the sticks onto my back, so it would only be natural that it would be worn out. However, I think I may have layered the other sticks too much to that one side.

I grunt and attempt to shuffle the weight over. This works a little, but causes a single stick to shuffle in such a way that it stabs my right wing with an errant branch. I bite my lip in an attempt to ignore the pain as I continue trudging through the powder. Every step is a practice in torture from then on – the stick continually jabs at my wing, mere inches away from a pressure point. On the odd step, it presses up against that point, lancing my wing with a sharp slash of pain.

Seven agonizing minutes later, I sloth my way towards a familiar Steel Ranger who has dug a three-foot hole into the hard-packed snow and covered it with blocks of more snow. A little tubular opening, again made of ice, juts out from one side. Another half-minute of pain and the wood is dropped in front of my companion while I let my wings collapse to my sides, not even bothering to fold them up. I allow the icy wind to soothe my aching muscles as I slip into the structure on my belly. My wing bones fold neatly around my flank into that little opening.

A brief bit later, I pop out the other side. As I move away from the entrance, I look at the clean dome carved out of pieces of the snow. I admire the small circular collection of stones in the middle, placed atop a large, flat stone. There is a singular boulder large enough for two ponies on one side of the room. I realize it is already warmer in here than it was outside, and with the firewood I gathered, it could only get better.

The entrance began to grunt. Seconds pass, then Tourniquet’s flank appears from inside the hole. I watch her wrestle a branch through that small hole, muttering profanities I was sure weren’t Equestrian. Eventually she breaks through and begins dividing the branch up. She repeats this process of dragging a branch inside and turning it into kindling of different sizes until we have in our possession a pile of wood that is at least barrel-high.

I hear the release of a metal container. It is then that I realize Tourniquet is taking her Steel Ranger outfit off for the first time since I’ve seen her. The first thing that comes off are the leg braces, revealing a coat of mottled greens, and a long, ugly scar that worms its way up her armor, which comes off next. The scar continues writing its path of destruction in a loop up her left shoulder, down in a crude and jagged angle over her back, and around to her flank, encircling a cutie mark of a red cross. The tail that slides out is striped equally with crimson and white and flows like the ocean from her backside, curling daintily around itself into a double-slipknot. I estimate that, if let loose, it would run to a length that would allow her to circumnavigate her form.

Finally, she takes off her helmet.

The face that stares back at me is perfectly formed: a dainty muzzle, two pale pink eyes, and a mane matching the coloration her tail done up into three loops. She has a serious look on her face, a grimace at taking off her armor.

However, the eyes are dead. There is no life in them at all.

I stare, puzzled, at this mare before me. Those eyes tell me nothing about her or her personality. They are blank. Totally blank. What does it mean? What is wrong? Something isn’t as it should be here. That is not how eyes should look. They barely move as she looks around. They barely seem to serve any purpose at all, other than as decorations for her f-

Wait.

Tourniquet is blind!