Tales by Balefirelight (a Fallout: Equestria Group Collab)

Zebras

by Interloper

They came in the night, searching for the one who had taken the lives of their own. If they could not find the murderer, they would find blood.

And they did.

Masika slogged through the snow, tears freezing along her cheeks as her village burned behind her. Her entire village, slaughtered … butchered like animals. By ponies. The zebra mare turned her head over her shoulder as the snowfall began to thicken, and she watched, with contracted, glistening pupils, as the inferno that burned over her village consumed every corpse, every hovel, every memory of her life until there was nothing left.

Nothing left. Her family, her friends, her neighbors. Dead.

All because they needed firewood.

Winter had come, and it, like the last nineteen years of her life, brought not a warm hearth and gifts like it may have two hundred years ago, but death and darkness. It had only been three weeks into the winter and her village had lost many a zebra to the frost.

In the forest that her kind had been forced to reside in, there were many trees – but of them, very few could actually burn. It was difficult igniting a log that had been charred to a blackened husk. Without fuel, there could be no fire.

Without fire, there could be no warmth. And her village would continue to die.

Like many scarce resources, it was fought over. Killed for. Just like in the war her ancestors had fought with the ponies. The past had repeated itself, and now everyone was dead. Her father, Baako, had told her, the night before, that ponies never changed, that for them, the war had never ended. That war never changes. He had told her to not leave the village, lest she lose herself in pony territory.

She knew not of the world outside her village. But she did know that there were not enough zebras, not enough ponies left to afford bloodshed. The war had ended two hundred years ago, and she had hoped ... she had hoped that it had ended for them too.

        She was tired of freezing in the snow.

Despite her efforts, she was still freezing in the snow, but now, without a home to return to. She was the only one left, spared from the slaughter by sheer chance.  If only they had listened … if only her father had listened … if only he had let her turn herself in. This never would've happened.

She had killed them. A stallion and his two colts.

Her village had not had firewood in nearly three days. Since winter came, there were not enough stallions to work outside. One would bear the responsibility of two, or three, or four as more of her kin perished to the cold bite of the Northern Wasteland’s frozen wind.

In the darkest hours of the night, defying her father’s whims and the roles of zebra society, she had ventured off into the forest to ease the burdens upon the shoulders of her village's weary stallions, in search of firewood to enkindle her family’s cold hearth. She had hoped the ponies would understand her village’s suffering. That they would be charitable souls who pitied the zebras who froze and died in the forest while they lived within their metal shelters in the pony settlement of Dusktown.

She was wrong.

That night, she had found herself lost. In pony territory. Like territorial beasts, they descended upon her. They would not listen to her pleas for pity, nor pleas of reason – not even when she begged upon her knees. They simply didn't care if two dozen zebras perished in the snow. They simply wouldn't understand the plight of the zebra.

She killed them that night. They would not let her leave with her firewood.

That night, her family warmed their hooves by the fire.

And on this night, her family had burned in the fires that had consumed her town.

All because they needed firewood.

As she plodded away from the inferno she began to understand. Her father was right. War never changes. And neither do ponies. She understood this now. The ponies could never let go of the past; for them, the war had never ended, and old hatreds continued to burn even as the world had burned out.

As she waded through the snow, she found herself lost once more amidst the shifting, ashen tides. In pony territory.

A light shined upon her face, as a wagon approached.

She lifted her hoof to them, clinging to a sliver of hope and denial that the ponies within would take her with them to warmth and safety. She hoped that they were not the same, that their hearts were not blinded by the ancient hatred that burned between their two races.

Again, she was wrong. In the back of the wagon she rode, in chains.

War never changes. And neither do ponies.

Masika knew this well.