Badlands: A tale of Angels

by Platinum Jack

Rating: teen
Tags: Dark, Alternate Universe, Adventure, Tragedy
Length: 746

most stories begin with the birth of a hero, but there are those few that begin with the death. A young stallion killed in his prime sent back to carry out a dangerous task in the hopes if getting back the life that was ripped away from him.

Icarus was an overly confident and foolhardy gunslinger that claimed to be the best in the badlands, he was told that such bold claims can get him killed many times but he refused to believe it. After Icarus meets a dark and strange stallion that also claims to be a master gunslinger Icarus wastes no time in challenging him. The duel that happens shortly after results in the brutal murder of Icarus, but this is not where the stallion's story ends, it is where it begins. To cheat death Icarus agrees to become an 'angel of death' to earn back the life he so carelessly wasted. Now Icarus must take the life of another pony who cheated death to win back his own.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2014-07-07 01:18:11 UTC

the beginning

"So i suppose i had this comin'..huh?" I kept my head low as i spoke, refusing to look up at him. He shifted his gaze from me to the vast abyss around us. "Well, that is the price for such recklessness, you played a dangerous game, and you knew the stakes." He had such a matter-of-fact tone to his voice that kind of agitated me, the same tone a mother would have when scolding her child for breaking something of value. As much as his tone pissed me off..he was right, i put my life on the line knowing full well this was a possible outcome. His pale eyes shifted back to me, and i met his gaze. "So, how about we start from the beginning? I am curious to hear the story from your perspective." I hesitated for a moment, then drew in a deep breath and sat down. "I think it's best if we start off from the saloon, that's where things began to go south." The man stood there, I gestured for him to sit down but he refused, he simply stood there..with that expectant gaze.

A tad cliche..

My name is Icarus. I was a young wanderer and occasional gunslinger that spent around two years travelling the Badlands of southern Equestria, but the details of my life and everything i have done are irrelevant now, because this is not the story of how I lived, but how I died. To save time i'm going to skip right to the day I was killed, since I don't have much time to explain all this.

I think a good place to begin would be in the saloon.

I opened my eyes but my vision was far too blurry to tell what was going on around me. The muffled sounds of men yelling and the occasional gunshot rang through my ears, I knew these sounds came from just feet away but they sounded as if they were halfway across the Badlands. I felt somepony grab me by the shoulders and begin dragging me back, this shocked me enough to bring my vision back into focus and i got some of my wits back. I shook off whoever was dragging me and i rolled onto my stomach, threw myself to my feet and threw my right foreleg into my leg holster, and after my hoof only hit the bottom of the empty holster it hit me that my gun must have fallen out when I was thrown over the railing of the second floor walkway.

The shock of losing my weapon had given whoever was trying to drag me a chance to strike and I was thrown off my hooves when whoever it was threw their head into my chest, landing on my side with a painful thud. I tried to get to my hooves but halfway up the cold steel of a pistol's barrel was placed on the center of my forehead. Admittedly, I was a bit frightened, but a few seconds later the pang of three deafening gunshots ripped through the pony holding the weapon to my head.

The warm blood of the poor son of a bitch standing over me splattered onto my hair and face. After his body fell to the floor I saw A pony in a cloak staring right at me the only facial feature that could be seen under his hood were his dark blue eyes, a smoking hoof-mounted revolver held low on his left hoof. We had to have sat there, staring at each other for at least five or six minutes. I snapped back to reality after hearing a nearby gun go off and I jumped to my hooves. By the time I was standing the stranger in the cloak was gone, having run off I easily lost sight of him with all the chaos going on. I turned my gaze to the body on the floor at my hooves and with my hooves I slipped his hoof-mounted pistol off of his foreleg, as i removed the weapon the bendable grip collapsed down from the circular shape of a ponies foreleg to a stretched out oval-like shape, holding the gun by the barrel in my left hoof I pushed my right hoof into the grip and the flexible material began to bend until the grip was secured firmly over my foreleg, the end of the pistol coming past the end of my hoof.