The Greatest Sin

by Uncr3at1ve

Rating: teen
Tags: Adventure, Dark
Length: 1092

A war rages across Equestria, and all Applejack can feel is passive anger.

Fighting a seemingly futile war with no end in sight, Equestria is slowly losing the villages and cities that once made it great.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2014-08-22 07:30:05 UTC

Complacency

Complacency, in all its forms, is one of the greatest evils to exist.  Though it can do great things, the fires it creates are often the downfall of the society in which it is placed. One single act against the grain is simple; a single coin given to a beggar, yet the continual actions cannot be maintained unless one is consciously aware of why they do them. The same can be said of the sins of society; training a singular race to be below them, both within their own caste as well as the lower class, and they themselves will believe in that sin. Yet all the same there pervades a growing sense that those in power are infinitely more entitled to make the choices for the few, and in this thought complacency gains it's notoriety.

Applejack swung down with the axe, severing the body of the once pony in front of her. The soft rivulets of otherness flowing from the gaping slice within the miasmic darkness. Growing and regenerating rapidly, too quickly for there to be bought more than a simple few seconds, seconds that saved the life of the foal that was within the grasps of the flickering entity.

The foal then only looked on in shock, the breath of life given to him wasted in the awe of having received it. All alone with little context the foal scampered away to the thing that reminded him most of sanity, straight through the ever-shifting field of clouds into his own house. Thinking little of it, Applejack continued to fight, nothing mattered but pushing back the entities that sought to take the village she was assigned to several winters ago.

The ever-increasing crash of demonic clouds phasing through structures weakening the very molecular makeup of the walls they passed through, encouraging the building to collapse long after their passing, weighed heavily on Applejack's mind as she swung her axe repeatedly at the ever-increasing hoards. Soon there would be little point in saving the village, the very passing of the clouds down a path rendered the fields on either side inert for the following planting, and with the ever-increasing entities, there was little reason to continue to fight.

Applejack stared on in horror at the increasing corruption before her, the souls of innocent ponies, and the occasional whelp or wild beast, trapped in the chaotic darkness away from the light of Equestria's harmony, the only hope of saving them gone within moments of their corruption. Applejack could see no light, no good end for this town, so she ran. Ran as far away as she could until her breaths drew short and the burn of her muscles created a black outline to her vision, then she came to a halt a small clearing in the Everfree, the only place chaos couldn't form into being, the entities diffused through the air, as if defeated by more powerful forces.

Reaching into her torso pocket Applejack pulled out a small purple gem, she studied it passively before gently depressing a button inlaid within the magical devise. Twilight had once described how the gem worked, by sending a ping of a specific magical frequency out onto the ethereal fabric of the world a transmitter and receiver could be built to send a distress call. Or, if fashioned correctly, could transmit vocal conversations. Twilight unfortunately was overtaken by an experiment gone horribly wrong, the beginning of the maddening spiral the remaining Elements of Harmony have fought to stop for the past eight months.

No voice greeted her on the other end of the gem, no one had the time anymore to do anything but fight. Except the necessary industrial and agricultural workers. Stabilizing her voice Applejack reported the loss of yet another agricultural village, a rare luxury these times, the sheer space of habitable land seemed to draw the clouds out of whatever dark corner they continued to crawl out of. It also made it more difficult to set up the explosive failsafe beneath and throughout the villages, designed to eliminate large groups of those things when a town could no longer be held.

Once more steeling herself for what she was about to do, Applejack held the stone to her muzzle and barely above a whisper activated the failsafe. "Echo hotel hotel designate lima at prospect alpha lima, initiate failsafe whiskey charlie," her words unable to be spoken with more disheartened malice. Yet the double click from the receiving end notified her that the voice recognition had received her order, soon the town would be bathed in a sick glow caused from magical residue and the fading souls of chaos. The sheer amount of magical radiation caused all things within to slowly burn up from feedback, which thankfully did affected the creatures, if only Rarity hadn't been the one to initiate that logic… Being surrounded by chaos she had overloaded her horn causing a short-range blast causing the beings surrounding her to dissolve, at the cost of her magic and mind, she stayed now at the only safe place left: the old abandoned castle in the center of the Everfree.

Driven by a sick desire to watch the entities sizzle under the magical radiation Applejack slinked up a nearby hill to gaze at the village still within visual distance to see the slow shamble of each individual. Slowly, as the effects of the radiation built outwards from the center, the beings began to burn. Softly at first, a mere candle to what they would become, until they simply burst into mist, though even their screams were silent. Applejack simple watched the widening circle of effect until at once the colt who she had saved mere minutes ago burst out of his hiding hole ablaze with the effects of the radiation, his screams were exceptionally noticeable amongst the silent passing of the darkened clouds.

Never before had Applejack heard such piteous cries. The sheer agony rippling through the body of the young colt was recognizable even at this range as he ran with no direction, slamming into various objects before coming to a stop, hunched over, as he began vomiting. His final act before he simply fell over into his own slime, his corpse being slowly evaporated from the continuously building magical power, though the clouds at the very edge of the effect managed to slink back to where they came from barely escaping the encroaching radiation field. Applejack merely frowned, more worried over the escaped clouds than the lost soul of the child.