The Dead City

Chapters

Part 1: ESCAPE
Part 2: WATER
Part 3: THUNDER
Part 4: DERP
Part 5: ASCENT
Part 6: BURNING
Part 7: -.. . .- -..
Part 8: TERROR
Part 10: TRANSFORM
Part 11: CHOICES
Part 12: EMBARK
Part 13: TAINTED
Part 14: NIGHTMARE
Part 9: CHICAGO

Part 1: ESCAPE

It is evening. Or maybe morning? Since the Cataclysm, the weather pegasi have neglected their duties, and the sky has been a pallid gray blanket for weeks. It rains occasionally, which distracts the bonewalkers, but mostly the city is blanketed in dark fog.

I have been alone for weeks. Manehattan is a ghost of a city, a graveyard of gnarled concrete and corroded brick. The city that never sleeps is now in eternal slumber.

My name is Shining Armor. It’s been thirty-two days since the Cataclysm. I can’t find my wife. I can’t find my sister. I’m not sure how much longer I can go on.

They never said how long it would last. They never said when it would be over. I’ve heard rumors that Canterlot is still up and running, but I can’t be sure. I pray that I trained the guards well enough to protect the city from the Corrupt.

I can’t say for certain that anywhere in Equestria is safe anymore. The Cataclysm annihilated what it could and devastated the rest. Then the Corrupt began to pop up, along with the bonewalkers. It took less than a week for everypony in the city to be killed...or worse, taken.

I am on the balcony of a downtown Manehattan apartment. My mane is matted and unkempt. My face is covered in stubble and dirt. I haven’t slept properly in weeks. I doubt anypony has.

Four weeks previously, Equestria had been normal. Then there was the Cataclysm, or as some ponies called it, Event Nightmare. Some said Nightmare Moon had returned. Others thought it a magical mishap. Whatever the cause, within a day ponies were dying and lands were burning black. Shadow overtook so many. Even I thought at first that Nightmare Moon had returned.

Nopony knows what really happened. And old stallion told me that he had heard a loud voice cry out on the day of Event Nightmare, mere moments before his daughter was Corrupted. Other than that, I know nothing. The clearest memory I have of life before is with my wife, Cadance, and my sister Twilight Sparkle on our honeymoon tour of Manehattan.

I remember waking on the Bucklyn Bridge, amid what I would come to realize was the end of the world. The bridge itself was clogged with scraps of the dead and debris from the fallout. I remember the twisted steel, the bloodied asphalt, and the low groans of supports that threatened to give way under the weight of the rubble on the bridge.

It would only be from the anecdotes of surviving ponies that I would discover what had happened.

Manehattan had become a city of the dead.

A sound tears me from my thoughts. I have nothing to defend me. My magic is gone. The sound is coming from the entrance of the apartment. I had swept the place before settling in, and I hadn’t encountered any bonewalkers.

That leaves one other possibility.

A Corrupt.

I dart inside the apartment and duck into an overturned cupboard, trying not to make any noise. I leave the door open a bit. The apartment is messy from neglect, and the smell of the dirty cupboard disgusts me, but I hold my breath.

It appears without a sound, and the air grows frigid. In the dark it would be invisible, a shadow among shadows. But as pale gray light streams through the broken windows, I catch a brief glimpse of its form through a crack in the cupboard. Its body is blacker than night and it seems to morph and shift by the second, fading in and out of sight like a ghost. Its eyes are red like fire and it makes no sound as it glides across the room. My spine tingles. Silent as a graveyard, the specter examines the spot where I had stood moments before, hovering there for several seconds. Sweat runs down my hide. My ragged jacket presses uncomfortably against my body, but I keep still. I don't want to think about what will happen should the Corrupt find me.

But I catch a break. Dusty sunlight breaks through the cloud cover, and the being vanishes. I wait several seconds, then breathe a sigh of relief, tumbling out of the cupboard. I see from the light that it is dawn. There is only one bridge out of Manehattan that still stands. The Wonderbolts destroyed the main three bridges days ago, and a survivor told me that the Trinket Tunnel was completely flooded.

The Celestial Bridge is the only bridge still standing. It is just a few blocks down the street from the apartment building. I’m low on food and almost out of water.

I need to get out of the city.

* * *

Clogged streets had never been uncommon in Manehattan. I'd been there a few times before, and every visit was accompanied by hours upon hours spent in hideous traffic that the city's streets had become so infamous for. Now the city is even messier. Carts, wagons, drays, and fallen buildings straddle the debris-choked roads and sidewalks, and every step I take chips and dents my hooves.

I can hardly keep my eyes open in the swirls of dust that pound my face whenever the wind picks up. The ever-present groans of straining steel and gutted iron unnerve me. Two more blocks. One more block. My athletic training from guard school is paying off, although we'd never taken lessons on what to do if the world went to hell. I never suspected such things could be.

I arrive at the final block, a tarnished square on the edge of the West River. The Celestial Bridge is ahead, shining like its namesake. Smiling, I place my hooves on the stone walkway.

Then I hear sobbing. Somewhere up the bridge, somepony is crying.

As I listen closely, the sobbing grows louder. It does not belong to a pony. It sounds metallic, like grating steel. Fog blankets the bridge. Then the ground rumbles. I hesitate for a moment, then ready myself for a fight. The crying stops. I hear a shriek. More rumbling. The debris on the bridge is shaking.

A shape bursts from the haze and slams into me, picking me up and carrying me off the ground. Startled, I look up and see greenish eyes on a very dusty head attached to a winged body that is black with soot. A pegasus. Her eyes are wide with fright. I yell in protest, but she does not listen as she flies me back across the bridge. The rumbling is now deafening. We collapse onto the street, hoof in hoof, and the pegasus barely dodges a shattered iron beam. The rumbling suddenly stops, and for the longest moment, the only sound we hear is the medley of our breath.

The bridge explodes, and from the river’s maw erupts a monster worse than any nightmare I had ever had in my entire life. It resembles a gigantic black caterpillar attached to a mound of pulsing, necrotic flesh. A horrifying roar escapes its mouth as black tentacles dripping with slime glaze over its body, as if it were feeling itself. The monster is at least a thousand feet tall. Any taller and it would scrape the roof of the sky.

The bridge is gone. The water of the West River is churning black. The pegasus begins to drag me with surprising strength. My eyes are locked on the monstrosity, and I fail to hear what the pony is yelling.

Then blackness. Total. Absolute. We are tumbling down wet concrete. I fall back onto the pegasus, and we end up in a pile on the ground. My heart beats in my ears, and my breath is dry, scratching my throat whenever I exhale. In the blackness, I can make out my rescuer’s eyes, brimming with tears.

“I’m sorry…” she says. Her voice is timid and high.

“Don’t be,” I respond, brushing myself off. “You saved my life.”

“But I shouldn’t have had to! The creature…it was so angry…”

“Creature? You mean that thing?”

She nods. “I was talking to it, trying to find out what was wrong. I’m usually good with animals, but…”

Suddenly I recognize her voice. “You were at my wedding! You’re Twilight’s friend!”

“Yes, yes! I’m Fluttershy. I’m so sorry, Shining Armor, but when I saw you I couldn’t let the creature get you. Twilight would have been devastated.”

“Wait a minute…Twilight’s alive?”

She nods again. “Yes…I mean, I think so. She was looking for you, but Rainbow Dash and the others got them off the island…but they left me behind…”

My heart stops. “They got off the island? Out of Manehattan? Then why’d they leave you?”

At this, she looks embarrassed. “I was…so afraid. Ponies were running around everywhere, all over the place. I don't like crowds, but I wanted to find my friends. But I...I couldn't catch up to them.”

She begins to shiver, and I look around. We are in a darkened maintenance tunnel, one of several that connect the sewers beneath the city.

“It’s okay,” I lie. “Stick with me. We’ll find a way out.”

But from the look on her face, I know she doesn’t believe me.

Part 2: WATER

If asked which is more painful, drowning in water or drowning in darkness, I would choose the latter. Being crushed by water, devoid of air and sinking—that is undoubtedly painful. But in darkness, when your heart is beating like a drum, when the blackness swallows you whole...

It is sucking me dry. Fluttershy’s kindness warms my heart but not my soul. We have been walking in shadow for hours. She has not spoken. It is as if the darkness has snatched her voice away. We walk in silence.

Then I hear the clattering of bones.

* * *

The first time I saw a bonewalker was when I woke up on the Bucklyn Bridge. The image still haunts me.

At first, it didn't see me. It was digging into something, a body, I imagine. I never found out and I don't really want to know. The walker was like something out of a horror story. Its flesh was rancid, rotting. Its eyes were gone, its sockets hollow. It made no sounds other than the clattering of its bones that, with no muscle to separate them, rubbed and scraped together in a horrible song of noise.

I still don’t know how the bonewalkers can exist. I’ve never seen a pony turn, but when they do, they become monstrous. I don’t know what causes a pony to turn into a bonewalker. Maybe their bites make ponies turn. Maybe it’s a disease. The walker on the bridge never looked up from its feast. I re-entered the city with my mane standing on end and my bladder a little less full.

Now my bladder is completely empty, my mane like the teeth of a manebrush, rigid and unyielding. My training sergeant back at guard school told me that I shouldn't be afraid of anything, not even death.

I'm not afraid of death. But living death...

The sound grows closer and closer. Fluttershy grasps my hoof. I am defenseless. The walkers will be here soon.

This is the…

“Over there!”

“Got it, Rock!”

New voices, coming from behind a metal door, the same door from which the clattering had come. I hear grunts and shrieks and a constant thwuping noise. In a matter of seconds, the clattering stops.

Silence. Then the voices start again, one deep and male, the other carrying and female.

“Alright, Lakota?”

“Fine, Rock. Skinnies got anythin’ good on ‘em?”

“Since when’s a bonewalker had anything good on it?”

“Fair point. But why were they active?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Bonewalkers only come around when they smell flesh…”

“They probably smelled us, Cody.”

“Think back, Rock! That zebra gave us that lifecloak potion, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” Brief silence. “Seraphina?”

More silence. “No. Her pendant’s not going off. It’s not her.”

“Wanna cast equem revelio?”

Equem revelio. The pony revelation spell. So this Lakota is a unicorn.

“Rocky, my magic’s so low that you’d probably have better luck castin’ a spell than I would. But we ain’t alone.”

“What if it’s an animal?”

“What if it’s not?”

“There’s the door.”

Before Fluttershy can cry out, I clasp a hoof over her mouth and, with her, slowly back away from…

“The door. It’s locked. Know what that means, Rocky?”

“Step aside, sweetie.”

CRASH!

The door splits in two, careening off loudly into the depths of the sewer, and in the doorway looms a huge minotaur, his hide gray as fog and his horns like gold. He sees us, and I try to pull away.

I run out of ground.

“Son of a…!”

The minotaur leaps through the air and grabs us both by our necks, pulling us away from the ground, or lack of it. Turning on his hoof, he throws us both into the wall, and my horn nearly breaks. The pain is sharp and intense, but brief. I wearily get up and face my attacker.

Only he’s not attacking anymore. He’s just standing there, looking at me curiously. A pony appears to his right, a beautiful yellow-maned unicorn with skin the color of the sun, with an unknown cutie mark that is covered in bandages, wearing a leather jacket and carrying a crossbow. Seeing the weapon, I put my hooves up. Fluttershy moans and begins to cry.

“Wait, Cody!” the minotaur exclaims, noticing her expression. “They aren’t rats! They were about to touch the water!”

“What?!” the unicorn says, eyeing me closely. “Huh…I guess you aren’t sewer rats…”

“Begging your pardon,” I say, “but what d’you mean by sewer rat?”

“You obviously ain’t been down here for too long,” she replies. “Sewer rats are ponies who’ve been…well, taken by the water.”

“Taken by the water?”

“Yup. You’ll have to excuse Rocky’s behavior. Seems like he was merely tryin’ to save your lives.”

“What?! He threw us against the wall!”

“You mean you’d rather touch the water than have a little headache?!” the minotaur says incredulously.

I stiffen. “What’s wrong with the water?”

The pony and the minotaur look at each other, and to my left Fluttershy gets up, tears in her eyes.

“That…hurt…”

“I’m really sorry, missy,” the minotaur says calmly and concernedly, “but I couldn’t let you…”

“There’s something in the water. If you touch it, it…well, it takes you.”

“Takes? You mean kills?”

“No. I mean takes. By the way, I’m Lakota and this is Rocky.”

She sets her crossbow down and launches into an explanation. “We first found out about the water when there were four of us. Me, Rocky, my little sister Seraphina, and a griffon who’d been in-town for a baking contest or somethin’. When everything went haywire, Rocky got us all down here through the subway tunnels. That is, before the subways were bombed and flooded. We haven’t been aboveground since.”

“But what about the water?” I ask impatiently.

“Well, the griffon was thirsty and we noticed the water had gone black,” Rocky chimed in, walking over to Fluttershy and comforting her. “Ever seen black water before? Neither have I. Both Cody and I knew somethin’ was up with the water, but when we found the griffon it was too late. He’d taken a sip.”

“And?”

“And…” Lakota’s eyes well up slightly. “And…it was horrible. Horrible. Something jumped out of the water, something big and dark and…it took the griffon and dragged him under, and a second later something popped back up…a piece of beak…”

I feel like throwing up. Lakota goes on.

“When the thing jumped out…we all got splashed. My sister took the brunt of it, dang near covered in it, and it hurt like heck. That’s how I got this here bandage. Don’t think my cutie mark will ever be the same. But…Seraphina, she freaked and…she fell into the water.”

Even though I’ve never met this mare before, I feel a pang of sadness and sympathy, as well as terror.

“She was quick. Smart, too. She jumped out as soon as she fell in, but…the monster thing came back. Rocky and I tried to fight it, but we couldn’t see it in the dark. I heard Sera scream and gallop off, and by the time I got a light out, she was gone. We tracked her hoofprints, but we haven’t had…had…”

She says nothing more. She doesn’t need to. I go to her, ignoring the pain in my head. “I’m sorry. I have a missing sister, too. She was with me before the Corrupt and the bonewalkers started showing up.”

One gives off a very unusual expression when confused and saddened at the same time, so I can’t in words describe the look she gives me. “What do you mean by Corrupt?”

“You know…the shadows? They can’t go in daylight?”

“Sorry, no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Really? You’re lucky, then.”

“I didn’t catch your name, by the way.”

“Shining Armor. And this is Fluttershy.”

But she doesn’t acknowledge the yellow pegasus. Rather, her jaw drops and her eyes grow wide. Rocky steps away from Fluttershy momentarily to observe me.

“You’re Shining Armor? The Shining Armor? Married to Mi Amore Cadenza?”

I nod.

“Holy mackerel,” she gasps. “You’re Captain of the Royal Guard! You survived!”

“Well, yes. That’s why I’m down here. I was about to go across the Celestial Bridge when Fluttershy here pushed me away before that thing in the river took the bridge out."

Suddenly her face is grave, as if she had a dream and I had just shattered it. “Celestial Bridge is gone?”

“I’m afraid so. I was going to find my wife and sister.”

“They’re probably with friends of mine,” Fluttershy pipes up, smiling tenderly as the minotaur returns to dressing her head wound with a bandage from the pack on his belt. “They escaped the city before…well, this.”

Lakota gives me a once-over with her eyes, as if she's unsure of whether or not I’m the real Shining Armor. However, moments later, she nods and picks up her crossbow.

“How much magic you got in you, Shiny?”

“Barely any. In fact, none.”

“Shucks. Me too. Looks like I gotta protect all of y’all. Don’t worry, Rocky will…”

“What makes you think we can’t protect ourselves?” I interrupt.

She puts a hoof up to calm me. “Easy there, Shining Armor. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. I’m just sayin’ if you wanted to tag along…”

I consider the possibility for a moment. We have nowhere else to go.

“Okay. We’ll tag along.”

“If that’s alright with you,” Fluttershy whispers.

Lakota smiles. “Well then, good to meet y’all. C’mon, Rocky and I were heading toward the South Hoofshire train station before you showed up. We need to get back to the surface.”

“How are you going to get to the train station through the sewer?”

She smiles deviantly. “I’ve got my ways. Just a couple of tips, though I don’t want to sound like I’m belittlin’ your combat experience, Captain. Don’t stray too far. Don’t make any unnecessary noises. And in the name of Celestia, don’t touch the water.”

Part 3: THUNDER

The sewers are not as treacherous as they seem. They reek of refuse and are darker than night, but I feel much more comfortable now that at least one of us has a weapon. I still cannot shake the feeling that I am like a rat in a maze, being led by strangers, one of whom has a crossbow. My careful suspicion of Rocky and Lakota is beginning to outweigh my gratitude toward their kindness. I can do little about it, though, except wait and see what happens.

Within the hour the four of us make it through to the ruins of South Hoofshire Station without encountering a single bonewalker or Corrupt. Taking Lakota’s advice, we avoid the water, which has become so black it is like oil. The station is a mess. Train cars are overturned. Small fires are burning in debris-filled corners. Thick fog mixed with smoke clouds the station. Lakota stays in front. She’s been guiding us this entire time, and I’m still amazed how well she is able to navigate. Now she is on point, crossbow at the ready, eyes never wavering.

A sound. Clattering. Fluttershy ducks behind me. Lakota assumes a firing stance as Rocky crouches behind a piece of fallen rubble that barely conceals his form. A bonewalker stumbles into sight, clattering and growling, searching for flesh. Lakota takes aim, but Rocky stops her. I eye him quizzically, but she nods her head. Grunting, the minotaur abandons his cover and approaches the bonewalker, which is now bathed in dusty sunlight that streams through the broken station window.

The bonewalker growls. Rocky doesn’t appear to be fazed. Not that he should be. It's just a bonewalker, and he's a minotaur. Walking casually, the minotaur cracks his knuckles. It looks as though he is going to punch the bonewalker into the ground.

He raises his fist and makes an O with his fingers, then releases his finger in a flicking motion.

Thunk.

The simple motion sends the walker’s head shooting down the station floor, bouncing and clattering. The rest of it collapses into itself, turning to dust.

“Now why would you waste a bolt when a good finger flick will do the trick?” Rocky says with fake admonishment.

Lakota rolls her eyes. Fluttershy calms and I release my hoof from her mouth.

“That can’t be the only one,” the minotaur says. “We’d best be getting out of here.”

Everypony nods. Lakota points out a derelict staircase that leads up to the raised platform above the tracks. We are halfway up the steps when the Corrupt appears. This time it makes no sound, and though I can’t tell one Corrupt from another, I get a feeling that this is the same one from the apartment. I see its red eyes through the train station haze.

“Fluttershy…Lakota…Rocky…”

I try to make my voice less than a whisper, but they manage to hear me, stopping and turning around.

“Get down,” I gasp. “A Corrupt is here.”

“What?” Rocky says loudly. “Speak up, mate, I can’t…”

“Shut up!” I scream softly, knocking Fluttershy to the ground. The Corrupt’s eyes are unwavering in the darkness. At any moment it could swoop in and kill all of us.

“Move slowly,” I whisper as Lakota and Rocky got down with confused looks on their faces. “Don’t make any loud noises.”

“Why?” Fluttershy whispers. “What’s the matter?”

“Can’t you see the Corrupt?” I breathe, pointing my shaking hoof at the red eyes. Lakota and Rocky sneak a peek.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Me neither.”

“But I…”

The red eyes are gone. Where they were, only blackness remains. I hear nothing but the creaking of broken wood and metal. I breathe.

“It’s gone. Thank Celestia.”

“What in the hoof was that all about?”

“Can we get topside first? Then I can explain.”

She looks at me oddly, then shares the look with her minotaur. I feel as though I am being mocked, so I snort and drag Fluttershy with me as we proceed up the steps.

A hop, skip and a jump later, we are outside. The sun is beginning to break through the clouds, but even the afternoon light is not enough to beautify the destruction on South Hoofshire Street. Lakota and Rocky follow me up, and from their hunched backs and secretive expressions, I know they have just been talking about me behind my back.

“Uhm…Mr. Shining Armor, sir…”

“Yeah? What is it, Fluttershy?”

She looks at me with huge eyes. “I’m a bit tired. Can we stop here for a bit?”

I look around. No bonewalkers. No Corrupt. I shrug. “Sure. I could use a rest, too.”

So we set ourselves down on a fallen piece of building, careful not to impale ourselves on the many broken beams and supports that poke out of the wreckage. Rocky takes something out of his bag and passes it around.

“Lump cake. Got enough for everypony.”

Food. I begin to drool. Thanking the minotaur profusely, I take my piece of lump cake and shove it down my throat. It is the blandest thing I have ever consumed, but I don’t care. My hunger is quelled for the moment.

Fluttershy and Rocky begin to chat, and I sit closer to Lakota as she inspects her crossbow.

“Where’d you get that, if you don’t mind my asking?”

She smiles mirthlessly. “My dad was in Baltimare Peace Guard. He got this one when they were hot off the shelves. We’d been vacationing here, Dad, Sera and me. My mother passed away a few years ago.”

She stops momentarily, as if to wonder why she is giving me so much personal information, then continues, holding up a beautiful purple pendant around her neck. “This was hers. She put a spell on it when the Cataclysm struck. If we ever got separated, this would light up when she was close. But…it hasn’t lit up since we lost her…”

I am about to say how much I miss my own sister, how much I can relate to her, when there is a sound like thunder. Fluttershy screams and points to the sky. I look up.

Amid the clouds are three minute forms flanked by two gigantic ones. Three pegasi and two dragons. Two of the pegasi are trailing smoke, but the center one, who I can see is black rather than the other two, who are blue, is trailing multiple colors. They are all carrying things in their hooves and talons.

Oh no.

A bombing run.

“GET TO COVER! GO! GO!”

The dragons release their bombs, and the ground shakes under my hooves. They are getting closer. Rocky and Lakota act with surprising speed, but Fluttershy is motionless, petrified with fear. I have to drag her by the mane in order to get her out of the street.

We see a hotel to our right as the bombing barrels up the street. All of us duck in with barely a second to spare. As soon as we collapse through the broken revolving door, explosions decimate the street as the dragons roar overhead and the sound of superfast pegasi rings in our ears.

Then silence. Smoke. Fire.

“Is everypony alright?”

Nopony seems to be injured, and Rocky hasn’t even been shaken. But the bombing had entombed us. A huge chunk of concrete has blocked the entranceway.

We are trapped.

Then a voice pipes up behind us.

“Hiya. Do you have any muffins?”

Part 4: DERP

Something cold, very cold, is pressing into my back. Everypony is frozen stiff by the voice. Very, very slowly, I turn around.

Standing behind me is the oddest pegasus I’ve ever seen in my life. She is gray-coated with a bleach-blonde mane, and her eyes are pointed in different directions. Her cutie mark is an array of bubbles, she is carrying a speargun, and she has the widest and most sincere grin on her face. She looks as though she is overjoyed to see us, even though she holds us at gunpoint.

“So…no on the muffins?” she asks, grinning impossibly wider. “That’s okay, I guess. I’d like a muffin or two, haven’t had muffins in a long time, not since Ponyville…hey! I know you!”

She points to Fluttershy and immediately pounces on her. Rocky looks ready to gore the pegasus, but I stop him with a shake of my head, because she is merely hugging Fluttershy.

“Oh my goodness! Is that you, Derpy?” Fluttershy asks in disbelief.

“It’s me, Fluttershy! Remember Derpy?”

“I do, Derpy, I do,” Fluttershy answers. She turns her attention to the rest of us. “Everypony, this is Derpy Hooves. She’s a friend from Ponyville.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here! Things have been boring, real boring. This hotel doesn’t have any bananas!”

Her eyes spin in a nauseating way as she says this.

“But Fluttershy, wowie! YAHOOOO!” She zooms around the room, knocking over everything that hasn’t already been destroyed. I give a small nod to Rocky, who calmly snatches the gray pegasus out of the air.

“Awww,” she moans as she returns to earth. “That’s okay. So, fluttery Fluttershy who are these guys?”

“This is Shining Armor, Derpy.”

The pegasus inspects me, sniffs me, and looks me straight in the eye. “Not very shiny for a pony named Shiny Armor.”

“That’s Shining Armor.”

“And these are Lakota and Rocky.”

“Hiya! Oooh, are you a minotaur? I’ve only seen a minotaur once…or maybe twice…it was that Iron Will and his twin, Iron Will…or were they the same?”

She observes our bewildered looks. Her wings sag and she looks sad. “I’m sorry. I’m not a very clever pony.”

“That’s not true, Derpy!” Fluttershy says, comforting her friend. “You’re very clever! You’re clever enough to have gotten through all this!”

Derpy begins to cry. “But…so many others, Fluttershy…Bonbon…Octavia…that one pony whose head looked like a broken cantaloupe…”

“Oh my,” Fluttershy says simply. I come over to her as Rocky and Lakota begin to inspect the hotel.

"Don’t be upset. We’ll find your friends.”

She shakes her head. “You don’t get it, mister…I killed them.”

Suddenly the room is very small. Lakota and Rocky overhear and return to my side, and I find myself gazing into the boggled eyes of a murderer.

“You what?”

“Well, I didn’t really kill them. But they tried to hurt me!”

“How’d they hurt you, Derpy?” Fluttershy says soothingly and obliviously.

The pegasus sniffles. “Well, Lyra and Bonbon were with Octavia and me on a little tour around Manehattan. You know, for the royal wedding between Shining Armor and Princess Canedance.”

I look at Fluttershy disbelievingly, but she scolds me with her eyes.

“Then…dark…oh, it was dark…” Derpy continues. “Ponies started getting sick. Whenever the other pegasi would fly out, that thing in the water would get them. It always does. There’s only one pony I know who escaped it.”

“Who?” Lakota asks, suddenly interested.

Derpy stares at her, eyes full of tears. “Me.”

“Huh?!”

She nods. “A nice pegasus…I can’t even remember his name…he helped me out when Octavia went missing. Lyra and Bonbon couldn’t fly, so they had to wait in our hotel for the help to arrive. When the nice pegasus man flew me across…that thing got him. Me, too. I went underwater in the West River and I saw it.”

Suddenly I am all ears. “You saw the thing in the river? What did it look like?”

Fluttershy again looks at me scathingly, but Derpy answers. “Like a giant burnt muffin with hundreds of tiny bananas on top. It had worms coming out of its head, and…a mouth. A really, really, really big mouth. It was dark and I couldn’t see well, but that was what I saw.”

“How the heck did you escape?” Rocky inquires, crossing his arms and snorting softly.

“I flapped my wings over and over really hard until I was out of the water. Before I knew what was going on, I was back in front of the hotel. But by then…”

She does not go on. She seems devastated. I place my hoof as comfortingly as I can on her wing. “What happened, Derpy?”

The pegasus tears up again. “The hotel was on fire. It still is. I checked. The tenth floor hasn’t stopped burning in over a month. I don’t know what’s causing it. And…Lyra and Bonbon are on the third floor.”

“What? But I thought you said you killed them!”

“Mister Shiny Armor, even I know you can’t kill something that’s already dead.”

My spine tingles. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the skeleton ponies, Shiny Armor. I’ve seen the shadows with the apple eyes.”

“Apple eyes…you mean the Corrupt? You’ve seen a Corrupt?”

She nods, and I turn to Fluttershy. “See, they are real.”

She looks uncertain, and Derpy continues. “But Lyra and Bonbon…at least Bonbon…are different. I only saw Bonbon, not Lyra. Lyra could be anywhere. But Bonbon was…was…dead.”

What an anticlimax. “Dead?”

“Yeah, dead. But moving.”

Everypony gasps. Rocky takes a step forward. “So she was a bonewalker?”

Derpy shakes her head, and we gasp again.

“I knew it was Bonbon by her mane, but…oh…she was different. Blood in her mouth…very red eyes…her skin falling off in places…it was horrible…”

She breaks down. Fluttershy does her best to soothe her. Lakota gets my attention.

“I’ve heard about that, from scavengers over in the Broncs. I think that’s an incomplete bonewalker.”

“What?”

“Incomplete bonewalker. You know, like skeletony but not completely.”

“No, I get that, but…what?”

She sighs. “Zombies, Shining Armor. She’s talking about zombies.”

My eyes grow wide. My heart freezes. My hooves tingle in time with my spine. I collapse into an overstuffed, moth-eaten armchair.

Zombies. Not zombies. Please, anything but zombies.

Bonewalkers I could handle. You could only see their bones.

But fleshy, oozing, necrotic, rotten, smelly, hungry, animalistic, disgusting zombies?

“Oh, buck.”

Derpy stops crying for a moment. “There’s no need for that kind of language, Mister Shiny.”

I sit in the chair for several minutes as Rocky and Lakota talk in low voices. We cannot go back outside. The door is blocked with rubble. Our only way out is up.

But the tenth floor is on fire. Everlasting fire, by the sound of it. It’s a Class-III illegal item in Equestria, punishable by up to twenty years in prison for possession alone. True to its name, it never went out.

And then there were zombies.

Perfect.

“Derpy, where’d you get that speargun?”

She stops crying for a moment and looks at me. “I, uhh…uhhm…I don’t remember.”

I am just about to lose my temper when Lakota takes over, sensing my plan. “Do you know how to use that thing, Derpy?”

"Yep!"

“Alright. We have to get up to the roof. How many floors are there?”

“I think fourteen. We were on the eighth floor. If Lyra’s still…still alive, she’ll probably be there. Can you help my friend?”

“I promise you, Derpy, if we find your friend alive we’ll take her with us. You, too.”

“You mean it?” Her face lights up and she reassumes her impossible grin.

Lakota nods.

“And will I get my muffins?”

“Derpy, if we make it out of this, I’ll get you a mountain of muffins, all for you!”

“REALLY?!”

“Really.”

Derpy jumps up and hugs Lakota tightly, then bounds toward the stairs.

“You promise me if we find Lyra we’ll take her? And the muffins?”

Lakota smiles once more, but there is something different about her grin; it seems forced, insincere, and for the first time since meeting her I detect another side of Lakota, a darker side that I am all-too-familiar with…

But it is gone in an instant, so fast that I doubt I even saw it. Trick of the light, no doubt.

Fluttershy picks herself up and allows Rocky to place her on his shoulder as they approach the doorway. Lakota preps her crossbow, then gives me a very definitive look. I know what that look means.

Neither one of us want to tell Derpy Hooves what would happen if we found her friends dead…or worse.

Part 5: ASCENT

The first two floors are empty, devoid of life and spirit. The darkness nearly overwhelms me on both floors, and I expect a Corrupt to pop up out of any of the abandoned rooms. But there is nothing. No people. No bonewalkers. Just us.

We continue in silence. Nopony wants to make any noise in fear of attracting whatever it is these floors hold. The stairwell is cold and foreboding. Our hooves ring loudly on the concrete. The lights flicker. I’m surprised the electricity in the stairwell still works, when the rest of the building was pitch-black.

“Derpy,” I say. “Back in the lobby, did you say this Bonbon was on the eighth floor or third?”

The gray pegasus looks at me with her strange eyes. “We all were on the eighth floor when it happened. The last time I saw Bonbon was on the third. I don’t know where Lyra is.”

“Don’t worry, my little pony,” Rocky says with strained sympathy. “We’ll find her.”

“The darkness…” Fluttershy utters. “It’s so…so…”

“This ain’t that bad,” Lakota smirks. “Back in the Broncs, at night…”

“Quiet!”

I hear it.

A girl crying.

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That crying…”

“That’s Fluttershy.”

“No, it’s not!”

“Shh! I hear something crying!”

“Is it Lyra?”

“Shut up, you!”

I listen.

“…”

Come on. I know I heard it.

“…help…”

“It’s coming from up the stairs,” I say. “C’mon! She needs our help!”

“What? Shining Armor, who…?”

“I dunno, but if we don’t get up there something really bad might…”

Darkness. Complete. Surrounding me all around. The others are gone. There is no light.

I am alone.

What happened? Where were the others? They were here just a second ago. The lights have gone out, but it is more than that. A new darkness, strengthening the old darkness to form a black monster that nullifies every sense in my body except my sense of fear.

Corrupt?

No. It is worse. Much, much worse. For I see no red eyes and feel no chill. I feel nothing.

“…help…”

I want to gallop, but something (the darkness?) is slowing me. I am in a bog, a black soup of air, like molasses. There is no light except for the minute twinkle that fizzles in and out of existence on the tip of my horn.

I hear it still, but I want to find the others, so I turn around.

The staircase is gone. I look up.

I see it for a fraction of a second. A face, unlike any face I have ever seen before. White. Pale. Eyeless. A smirk on its face…no. Nothing. No mouth. It is not the face of a pony. It is…

Oh…

Hands, slender white hands with fingers as long as snakes and as menacing as whips. They are rushing at me, eager to scoop me up and drag me to hell.

I scream, but it lodges in my throat as the face stares emotionlessly, and I see only death in the form of white, slender, snake-fingered hands.

…

…?

…wake…up…

“GAHH!”

“Huh?”

“’Chu hear that?”

“Yeah, sounded like it came from there!”

…wha?

“Lift it up, Rocky, c’mon!”

Light. Flooding my eyes, blinding me. Then a form, a horned body that lifts me from my tomb.

“Well, I’ll be. It’s Shining Armor!”

“WHAT?!”

Rocky the minotaur sets me down gingerly on the floor. I can see light streaming through the ruins of the hotel…

Wait. Why is there light?

Then, as Lakota comes up to greet me, I see the reason. The hotel’s façade has collapsed, taking with it the whole front of the building that now lay in a heap on the streets below and in the green waters of the West River.

At least it is sunny. No longer is the sky a pallid, lifeless gray.

“Shining!” Lakota cries, then screams as a river of fire tumbles out in front of her, spilling onto the carpeted floor and over the side of the broken wall like a flaming waterfall. Rocky takes me in his arms and launches himself over the fire, grabbing Lakota in the process and skidding to a halt in front of a fire escape. The heat of the flames still presses on my mane, but I am not burned.

I am not harmed.

Why am I not harmed?

“Lakota…Rocky…for hoof’s sake, what the heck is going on?!”

“We’d ask you the same thing, mate,” the minotaur replies. “You ran up the steps, remember? Then the whole thing came crashin’ down.”

“What?!”

“He’s right,” Lakota says. “Might have been an earthquake or something, but I don’t know. We got separated and had to dig our way out. Then the fire…it came down the floors one by one. The whole upper part of the hotel is burning, and it doesn’t seem to be going out. We were just about to head through this exit when we heard you.”

“Which leads me to my question,” Rocky interrupts. “What the heck were ya doing in those stairs?”

“You mean…” I start, trying to catch my breath. “You didn’t hear the crying? You didn’t see the face?”

Lakota looks at me incredulously as Rocky begins to open the door. “What face? Crying? Shining Armor, I don’t think you’re…”

WHUMP.

“OOOOWWWW!”

Suddenly there is blood. A lot of it. Rocky falls back to reveal a gaping wound on his flank, and standing in the doorway, looking like she has just made the biggest mistake of her life, is a unicorn mare with a turquoise mane, turquoise coat, and a cutie mark of a lyre. She has an ax, the handle gripped between her teeth and the blade dripping with minotaur blood.

I am a second too late as I try to stop Lakota, but I do manage to smash into Lakota's arm, disrupting her aim. The bolt veers just a little to the left, enough to miss the unicorn’s forehead, but grazes her skull and makes her cry out and drop the ax. Lakota and I end up on the ground, and she stares at me with the most furious look on her face.

“What are you doing , you clod?!”

“It was an accident! A mistake!”

“AN ACCIDENT? ARE YOU STUPID?!”

“IF YOU WERE IN HER SITUATION, YOU’D HAVE DONE THE SAME THING!”

She shuts up, cowering at my loud voice, and then I realize something.

“Wait…where are Fluttershy and Derpy?”

Lakota pushes me off and refuses to answer. She goes to check on Rocky, who is in pain but will most likely live. I stare out into the dark horizon and I realize that Fluttershy and Derpy are probably dead.

I shed a tear. Just one tear. The heat has evaporated the rest of the water from my body, but I have enough for a single tear.

Part 6: BURNING

“Well?”

We are in the stairwell, sweat dripping down our brows as we observe the unicorn in front of us, tied up with a strip of Rocky’s pants. The sights of Lakota’s crossbow never waver from the unicorn’s forehead.

I sigh. “She’ll talk. But you will tell me what happened to Fluttershy and Derpy.”

“I told you already, they fell when the façade collapsed!”

“They’re pegasi! They could have flown!”

“I didn’t see them, okay! I didn’t see them fly! I just saw them fall, and then everything went dark! I don’t know how long it’s even been! Get off my damn back!”

"Don't talk to me like that!"

“News flash, Your Highness, you’re not the boss of me! You may have been a prince back when everything was fine and dandy, but now you’re nothing but a…”

“I’m a what?! I’M A WHAT?! SAY IT, YOU PIECE OF…”

“SHUT UP!”

It is the unicorn that shouts, and her voice is so loud, so scratchy that my ears almost bleed. She breathes, and Lakota calms, if just a little bit. She has a look on her face like she can’t decide whether to point the crossbow at the unicorn…

Or at me.

I know, at that moment, that something is going to happen. Call it intuition. Call it anything. But I know.

I know two things.

Lakota is planning something.

And Derpy and Fluttershy are not dead.

“So you do talk, huh? Well, mind explaining why you hurt my friend?!”

“I’m sorry,” the unicorn weeps softly. “It’s just…after what happened to my friend, I…then the building collapsed, and I…”

“Spit it out!”

“Oh, shut up!” I yell. I don’t care about being polite anymore. Lakota is becoming more irritable by the second. I turn my attention to the unicorn.

“What’s your name?”

“Heartstrings. Lyra Heartstrings.”

“Lyra? Oh, my gosh…you’re Derpy’s friend!”

“Derpy? You’ve seen Derpy?!” she gasps, her eyes lighting up and twinkling. My own eyes cloud over, and Lakota steps in.

“Derpy’s dead,” she quips, I notice, without a hint of sadness.

“Oh…she was nice, if a bit clumsy…”

“So why’d you attack Rocky?”

“It was an accident!” Lyra cries. “I mean…I heard voices on the other side of the door, and I didn’t realize…I’ve only seen a minotaur once in my life, so I didn’t…I didn’t…”

“Good grief!” Lakota screeches. “What is wrong with you? Can’t you string two words together?!”

“Shut up, Lakota!”

“Make me, Your Highness! In case you haven’t noticed, I’m the one with the crossbow!”

“Cody…”

“Shut up, Rock!” she screams, her eyes filled with hate. “I…I…”

She is suddenly confused, as though she can’t decide whether she hates me or not. I conclude that my relationship with Lakota is over, so I take Lyra by the hoof and begin to carry her.

“Let’s get to the roof.”

“What? You’re gonna leave us?!”

“You won’t tell me what happened to Fluttershy and Derpy.”

“That’s why you’re leaving us?!”

“Cody…”

“ROCK, I SAID SHUT UP!!”

“Let’s get out of here,” I growl, beginning to climb the steps. As I draw away from them, I hear their arguing, their heated words.

I don’t know what went wrong. One minute we were surviving together. The next…

It hits me. I’ve seen it before. Why didn’t I realize it sooner?!

“Mister Armor, what’s wrong?”

I gasp for air, struck with fear.

I know what happened to Fluttershy and Derpy. The argument…the crossbow…

I don’t know how I know. I just know.

“Hang on, Lyra!” I yell as I begin to gallop up the steps, which is no easy task. Fire and blood is common here, and at around the tenth floor I slip on a massive pile of blood and gore and collapse onto Lyra, crashing into the wall.

I hear their footsteps. Lakota’s trimmed hooves on concrete. Rocky, his hooves heavier but imbalanced by the limp from Lyra’s ax.

An eyeball floats past me in the blood pool, malignant and rotten. Lyra begins to cry. I see the eyeball’s inception and nearly choke. A body lies mangled just inside the doorway to the tenth floor, behind which everlasting flame burned. The body barely resembles a pony, festering in a combination of blood, gore, and rot. I can just make out a mane of blue and pink through the blood.

“Oh, Bonbon…why? I had to…I just had to…”

The chop marks on the corpse’s head are all the explanation I need. I pick myself up, straddling Lyra, both of us bathed in blood, and we carry on.

Light. Again. But smoke-laced, hazy.

The roof is hot beneath our hooves. The fire will soon consume the entire building, and more than the façade will collapse.

I realize then how stupid my plan is. There is no way off the roof except to jump. Hitting land meant death. Hitting the water meant death or worse. I couldn’t go back.

Not when…

“Turn around, you stiff-backed dungheap.”

Lakota. I slowly turn around with Lyra still on my back.

She stands there, her crossbow pointed at me, the bolt in line with my heart. Rocky is huffing. The wound on his haunch looks bad. Both of them have mixed looks of satisfaction and confusion.

There we stand, atop the roof of fire. She is going to kill me.

“Why, Lakota?”

“I’d thought you’d figure that out by now,” she sneers. “There are no friends in this world anymore, Your Highness. You can’t trust anypony. That’s why I trusted a minotaur. We found that instead of killing each other, we could kill even more…together.”

“What? Why would you do that?”

“Survival of the fittest, Shining,” Rocky says, his tone less malicious than Lakota’s but no less evil. “Things have changed.”

“You’re murderers. You murdered Fluttershy and Derpy.”

“Yep,” Lakota laughs. “Those feathered twerps had it coming. You should have seen how much that Fluttershy cried when we kicked her off the façade. And that Derpy…she was oblivious the whole time. Kept going on about mail.”

“You killed her?!” Lyra screams.

“Yep, just like I’m gonna kill you now.”

“Lakota, you have to realize. There’s no point in killing us! We’ve got nothing valuable! We’re not worth a bolt!”

“No, you’re not. You’re worth two bolts. Each. One to the heart and one to the head. That oughta teach you.”

“TEACH US WHAT?!”

“To never trust anypony,” Rocky laughs, steam bellowing from his nostrils. “Personally, I’d have let you go. But we can’t let anypony know about what we’ve done.”

“What you’ve…” A dark, horrifying though surfaces in my mind. “Wait…you two didn’t have anything to do with this whole thing, did you?”

Lakota’s eye twitches. Rocky looks uncomfortable, and he falters on his bad leg.

“DID YOU?!”

“Oh, shut up!” she screams, preparing the crossbow. “I’ll see you in the afterland, my Prince. Oh, and by the way, I never liked you. Ever since you married Mi Amore Cadenza. She was my mare, you filth. MY MARE!”

“Huh?!”

I am so confused. What is she talking about? Even Rocky looks bewildered.

And that is my last thought.

Lakota tenses her grip on the crossbow.

Thwup.

Thunk.

“GAH!”

I do not cry. Lyra does not cry. We aren’t hit.

Lakota is looking down at her chest, where a spear has punctured through.

Thunk. Another. Thunk. Another. She is screaming in pain now, and Rocky looks for the source of the spears.

Out of nowhere, a yellow and pink mass slams into the minotaur, knocking him off his hooves—and off the building. The mass tumbles across the roof, but Rocky continues to fall and roar until he meets the ground with a sickly thud.

Lakota is holding herself. There is so much blood. But the spears just keep coming.

Thunk. In her breast.

Thunk. In her flank.

Thunk. In her open mouth, sticking out like a hook on a fish would. She is now covered in blood, and her attacker settles onto the roof on two hooves, an incredible look of fury on her face.

Derpy.

I have no words. Fluttershy, the mass that killed Rocky, is unconscious. Lyra is not looking.

But I see everything.

I see Derpy approach Lakota. I see her forcibly remove the spear that had pierced the back of the unicorn’s throat. I see her flip it around in her tongue, bring it into an arcing motion, and rest it on the inside corner of Lakota’s mouth.

Derpy snaps her head to the right, and there is a slew of blood. Lakota gurgles, then collapses, turning the hot stone red. Derpy spits out the spear and stares at the body of the unicorn, which now resembles a bloody pincushion.

“You promised me a mountain of muffins, bitch.”

The fire is burning, and we are trapped. And I don’t know how to feel.

Part 7: -.. . .- -..

Derpy’s breaths are low and forced, and there is no twinkle of empty-headedness that I had seen before in her eyes. Fluttershy’s eyes have lost their tint of rage. I am speechless. Lyra is shaking.

It is almost too much for my mind to comprehend. Lakota and Rocky. Why didn’t I see it coming? I should have…no. There was no way I could have known. It didn’t make sense, and now they are both dead. Derpy picks up Lakota’s crossbow and inspects it with profound interest. I shake my mane free of Lakota’s blood and try to speak.

“…”

No words. I can’t say anything. It’s just so horrible. The city, the death, the darkness…

For some reason, I find myself thinking back to the hotel staircase. The crying and the never-ending steps and the being with the white hands. All rushing back to me, collapsing on me like a waterfall, threatening to drown me.

A new sound, rhythmic grunting, and I know immediately without even looking. Rocky is still alive. Derpy hears him too and runs over to the side of the hotel. We peek over as Fluttershy joins Lyra.

Sure enough, the minotaur is climbing up the building, grunting, blinded by blood. I knew a creature like him wouldn’t have been killed by a mere fall. He is too far for me to see the rage in his eyes, but I know it is there.

“Shiny Armor, what do we do?”

I sigh. The minotaur is ten floors down. Plenty of time to kill.

“Give me the crossbow.”

I’d had archery training back at Canterlot, but we’d never taken on anything as big as a minotaur. But Rocky is slow-moving as I aim the crossbow down the building’s broken façade.

My hoof tightens on the trigger. Seconds later, Rocky falls again, landing on a jagged rock with an arrow in his skull, dead. In a spurt of rage that comes from nowhere, I hurl the crossbow off the building with a loud, hoarse roar. Smoke curls underneath the roof’s entrance doorway. The fire has reached us. Any second and the roof will collapse, entombing us in flame.

We have to escape.

“Alright, everypony,” I say, taking lead as I inspect Lakota’s body. “We’ve gotta get off this building. We have two pegasi and two unicorns, though I don’t have any magic. We need…”

But something catches my eye as I rummage through the dead unicorn’s pockets. A large loop of rope lying upon a flat piece of wood.

Crude. Insane.

But our only option.

“Here’s what we can do. Derpy, Fluttershy, take that rope and loop around yourselves and the wooden board. We can use it as a platform to get across. Lyra, do you have any magic?”

“Only a little,” the unicorn says uncomfortably.

“That’s okay, we should be able to make it across the river.”

“But what about the creature?” Fluttershy asks anxiously.

“There’s nothing we can do about that, Fluttershy,” I answer. “We have two options. Fly over or burn to death. I don’t know about you, but I am not burning to death.”

“Me neither! Fire is bad!” Derpy yells.

“Right,” I say. “Get to it! I’ll join you in a moment.”

They get to work, and I go to inspect Lakota.

She is no less beautiful in death than she was in life. I nearly cry when I realize that I never really noticed her beauty until now. But I remember her betrayal. What prompted that, anyway? She seemed smart enough to know that there was safety in numbers. And yet she’d been motivated by…by what?

My head hurts. I close my eyes and open them again, catching sight of a shining object jutting out of Lakota’s pocket. I reach down and grab it, examining it. It is a pendant of purple jade, scratched and faded. This must have been her sister’s.

Sister…

I find myself wondering what would happen if we were ever to meet Lakota’s sister. I struggle now to even remember her name. Sara? Selena? I can’t remember. But what would I tell her?

Hey, little girl. My friends and I killed your sister. Wanna come with us?

I stop thinking that as the pain in my head increases. There’s no chance in Tartarus that we’ll ever find her. No chance.

Pain…building in my skull…

Oh…

“Mister Shiny Armor?”

Darkness.

…. .

-.- .. -. -..

…. .- …

-.-. --- -- .

[Echo Team, right side! Right side!]

SCANNING…

...today speaking out about the biohazardous possibilities regarding last Tuesday’s incident…

The note is scribbled on a napkin. 770-355-644-. Call me. :) The last number is blank.

INTRUSION DETECTED. ACTIVATING DEFENSIVE MEASURES…

[Comms, we’re losing too many to these fuckers! And something just appeared on our scopes that we cannot identify. Repeat, unidentified entity at…]

…President saying that he does not regard these events as the results of a biochemical or biogenetic attack, but refused to comment further…

770.

355.

644-.

What?

[Echo Team, check in!]

ERROR. ALERT. SYSTEM FAILURE. SYSTEM FAILURE.

.. -- .

.. …

.-. ..- -. -. .. -. --.

--- ..- -

Wouldn’t you agree, Shining Armor?

You shall awaken soon. Go back to your friends. Are they your friends?

You don’t know me. You can’t even respond. You are in danger of burning to death. I can’t have that. It’s not wise to let one’s key fall before it reaches the lock.

You have not reached the lock.

.-.. --- -.-. -.-

But worry not, Shining Armor. You will see me again. I won’t let you die.

Not yet.

… --- --- -.

I bear a message from your sister. Are you ready to hear it?

…. .

-.- .. -. -..

…. .- …

-.-. --- -- .

I’m here, Shining Armor. I’m here.

Go to her. We shall meet again.

-E

The sun rises above the terrible night

the endless hours of worry and fright

dawn illuminates the grave

of ponies that he couldn’t save.

“GAAAAHHHH!”

“Ack! Ooh, you scared me good, Mister Shiny Armor! Scared me real good!”

I am back on the roof of the hotel. It is nighttime, but the fire lights up the area. It has reached the steps. A few more hours and we will all be cooked alive.

“Shining Armor! We did it!”

Fluttershy? She nudges me and I look to the side to see a crude contraption of canvas and wood, limp like a deflated balloon.

“Uh…good, great! Yeah, great!”

“Are you okay, by the way? You just sort of dropped out there.”

“H-how long have I been asleep?”

“About four hours,” says Lyra.

“Oh, buck.”

“Again with the language?”

“Not now, Derpy…go and…go and help Fluttershy. I need to think about something.”

She does what I say as I stumble to the railing, gasping. I nearly vomit over the side of the building as smoke curls in my face.

What just happened? What was all that? I saw nothing, but heard so many things…

I don’t know. I can’t explain it.

But my sister…

I’m here, Shining Armor. I’m here.

I know, Twili. And I’m coming.

Part 8: TERROR

This is a stupid idea. A very, very stupid idea.

I suppose I’m going through with it because I can’t at the moment decipher all my thoughts at once. Flashes of memory…no, not memory. Dreams. Was it a dream? I can’t tell.

Those dots and dashes…Twili…

We stood now on the edge of the hotel roof. The building is leaning beneath our hooves. I am carrying a unicorn and have two pegasi at either side of me, and we are all attached to a big array of canvas and lumber that vaguely resembles a dragon.

I must be insane. There’s no way in Tartarus this will work.

“This is gonna work!” Derpy cries enthusiastically. I can only grimace.

Still, I imagine the fall into the water would be nowhere near as painful as burning to death.

But something else is in the water…

Lyra is shivering. Thankfully she’s light, so she won’t be a burden. But Fluttershy’s shaking is making the whole contraption wobble. I don’t blame her, really. If my mind wasn’t so screwed up, I’d be scared, too.

“Okie-dokie,” Derpy says, grinning. “On the count of three. Alright?”

“Yeah, okay,” I answer, regretting having opened my mouth.

“One…”

“…oh no…”

“Two…”

I ready myself, but I don’t know what to expect. I’ve never flown before.

“…uh…what comes after two?”

“Three,” Lyra responds, and suddenly Derpy jumps up and whinnies, making us all jump, and she takes off, dragging us behind her. The whole plan is going haywire. I try my best to get a grip on the situation, but then I run out of ground.

Soaring over a concrete wasteland. Then over dark water. I gulped. The wind slams into my face as the pounding of wings fills my ears. We are lopsided above the water. Derpy is pulling the canvas-craft one way while Fluttershy pulls in another. Lyra screams. I think I am screaming, too.

My mind decides to organize itself at that moment, and I feel fear, cold, slimy fear.

Wait.

That’s not fear.

“GAHK!”

We’ve run into the river monster. Literally. Slamming full force into the monstrosity, the makeshift glider folds and breaks like a twig, and suddenly I am falling, falling…

“Gotcha!”

I feel warm hooves on my back and suddenly I am no longer falling. Derpy!

“What?! What happened?!”

I don’t hear her response over the roar of the monster.

“KAO OFI’LAK ZOTO! AKA’M KHUNOR!”

Huh?!

Who said that?! What said that?!

“What?!”

“I said I’m sorry!” Derpy yells, flying with tears in her eyes. “I didn’t see it…it came out of nowhere!”

My mind races, and a horrible realization surfaces. “Fluttershy? Lyra?!”

She shakes her head as we race through the wind, and for the first time, I can see land on the other side of the river, through the fog.

“I can’t go back for them, Shiny! I’m just gonna hafta…”

WHAM!

More cold slime, and a hit so violent I feel something break in my chest. Derpy disappears, and the last thing I see before plunging into ice-cold water is a long black tentacle lined with teeth.

Underwater. No air. No light. And yet I see perfectly. What the…?

“ER’TRIO, AKA’M KUNOR. DAR FIGAS L’ZOHO?”

The voice is like the Royal Canterlot Voice, loud and reverberating through the water. I can still see nothing, and yet I see everything.

Oh, my…

I see the inside of my own body, my heart beating in my chest; my ribcage, bent and broken, blood slowly pooling around my lungs; my eyes, searching, blind; my brain, working at lightning speed and yet still completely ignorant…

I see something else. A mountain of black flesh, bigger than Canterlot, bigger than the highest peak in Equestria. Many-tentacled, many-toothed, and black as night. Slimy. Necrotic. I knew that aboveground it would smell like a dung heap. Through the murky black, I see it. Through it. But there is nothing to see through it. Nothing to see…

Only darkness. Complete. What’s going on? My head…

Oh…

Tentacles. Like fingers. This time black. They swarm toward me like hungry snakes ready to rip into pony flesh. My vision is clouding. My lungs scream for air, and, in a spout of terror, I scream soundlessly into the abyss.

Fingers.

Dark fingers.

“KAO FU, KHUNOR. KAO FU G’ALAAM…”

BOOM.

Low boom, low something. A circle opens up underwater, a red circle, in it blackness.

It appears. The thing from the staircase. Come to reclaim me. Its white fingers are like tendrils of a jellyfish, like quills of a porcupine. Its eyes are white as snow. It is whiter than white, yet is still subdued by the darkness that is the watery abyss that will soon become my grave…

The black snakes coil around me. Choke me. As if I needed choking. My lungs were filling with water.

I hear a scream, the most horrifying, unnatural, inequine scream I’ve ever heard. It is a scream of pain, of misery, like the sickening roar of a wretched beast. The black tendrils uncoil themselves and scurry away into the darkness, and now I float soundlessly, dead…

My eyes are closing. My world is closing. My world…

Vibrating water. Quaking. The white thing with the needle-fingers.

Reach out.

“Touch fate, Shining Armor.”

Who said tha…

Fingers. Rushing up at me like the snakes. And I am dead again.

“PAA…ooo…huh…gah…guh…”

I am ashore, waterlogged and chilled to the bone. My chest aches. My ribs are broken. I hear voices, low and quick. I am too weak to think, so I crawl and crawl until I see the edge of what looks like a forest, and from the woods appear three figures, all ponies with armaments.

“…help…” I moan, unable to stand up. The first one gasps, but I cannot see him through the haze of water and tiredness that has clouded my vision. He steps forward, as if to examine me, and I see that he is holding a crossbow.

Then things become clearer. I cough violently, hocking up blood. The pony steps away in disgust, and I look into his eyes.

Her eyes.

Purple. Crystalline. Above which sat a purple horn, and a mauve mane…

“T…Twi…?”

My sister.

It’s her.

“TWI!”

I struggle to my hooves and stagger towards her, my heart bursting and my head full of exhausted joy. “Oh, thank Celestia…I thought you were…you…”

My words trail off, as does my elation. For Twilight’s eyes are hardened, like Lakota’s were when she had taken aim at me on the hotel rooftop. I do not understand.

“Twi, it’s me! It’s Shining…”

Then pain. Oh, more pain. My cheek. Something has slammed into my cheek, and as I fall to the ground, blackness settling in around my eyes, I realize that my sister has just sucker-punched me in the jaw. She says something, but I have gone deaf again. The pain is too much. Pain…

Blackness.

[Helix Point to Echo Team, status, over.]

[Helix, this is Echo One, we’ve got a situation that’s beyond fubar right now! We gotta get the hell outta Dodge before more of these biters show up!]

[Roger that, be advised, you are in the target path of an incoming B-52. That sucker’s gonna light up Michigan Avenue, so get the hell outta there!]

[But sir! We have civilian casualties! Charlie Team is unresponsive! And the UO is…wait…what the fuck? Ferron, you got eyes on the UO?]

[Echo One, please repeat.]

[Holy shit…Helix Point, something…no, two…fuckin’ Christ, three more unidentified objects have just appeared in…oh, my God…]

[More Deltas?]

[Negative, negative, they look like…fuckin’ dogs, or something…but holy shit, the UO just lit up like the Fourth of July. Helix, we’ve gotta much bigger situation on our hands right now. We gotta see what this thing us and what the fuck just came out of it.]

[Negative, negative! You are in the path of the B-52, danger close, repeat, danger close! Get the hell outta there, Echo One!]

[Helix, if you were seeing what I’m fuckin’ seeing right now, you’d wanna see it further!]

[You ain’t gonna be seein’ anything if you don’t get the fuck outta there, Echo One! Grab your men and GO!]

[…]

[Echo One, do you copy?]

[…]

[Echo One?]

…

Part 10: TRANSFORM

…

Well played, my old friend. Very well played.

You were never an acquaintance of mine.

Don’t be so sure, comrade. In a past existence…

There has been no existence save for this one.

Such naiveté. Can you really be so brash?

You resort to petty insults? Is that the best you can do in the little time we have left?

Hardly petty. I am, after all, that which can defy you and live to see the dawn.

You have killed the dawn. You have killed too many.

You are no seraph, Entrail. Your crimes are as heinous as mine.

I never said they weren’t.

Do you not take pride, or at least some small hint of satisfaction, in the fact that you have exterminated races, planets, and even entire solar systems in your attempts to stop me?

Stop you? How could I stop you? I can hinder you no more than you can hinder me.

The Eternal Deadlock.

Indeed.

Yet still, we kill.

We kill.

Because we cannot kill each other, we kill others in the hope that they will kill us.

You wish for death?

Death has no meaning to me. Death is void. Nonexistent.

Now it is you that is naïve.

What say you?

To doubt the path of death is foolish. To believe in life everlasting is a crime against common sense.

I never figured you to be a promulgator of common sense.

Common sense would dictate that beings like us would not exist.

Do we exist?

We do.

And what of the game?

The game is still in play.

And whose turn is it?

Mine.

But it’s always yours!

You know the rules. You will wait your turn.

Very well. Then I suppose we have no further need of conciliation?

Was that what you invoked this gathering for? Conciliation?

No. I invoked this meeting to kill you, but you have spoiled my opportunity.

Indeed I have.

The knight draws closer to the Source.

He does.

The man has become the shepherd.

He has.

They will kill me.

They will.

We shall see about that.

I have decided.

Always were one for chess, correct, Entrail?

Always.

Then make your move.

I shall.

…

How interesting. How very, very interesting…

My horn is throbbing. That can’t mean anything good. I hear the crackling of a fire. I try to move, but something is holding me back. I open my eyes.

I am in a moonlit forest, bound by ropes to the trunk of an oak tree as a gaggle of ponies sit around a campfire in a small clearing in front of me. Their faces are masked by darkness, their forms hunched as if they were engaged in reclusive discussion. My throat is dry, too dry to form the words I want to shout out to the group. So I struggle and tug at the ropes that bind me until one of them, a pegasus with a mane of many colors, approaches me.

“Wait—I know you!” I finally manage to say. “You were at my wedding…you’re Rainbow Dash!”

I don’t expect the blow, and I cry out as her hoof connects with my cheek. When I look into her face I see an incomparable fire burning in her eyes, a fire fueled by some unknown rage.

` “Shut up, you dirty little worm! Don’t try to get friendly with me! I know what you are! We all do!”

“Wha…What?! I don’t understand. Rainbow Dash…”

“How much do you know? Is this her work?”

“Huh?!”

She isn’t making sense. I don’t know what’s going on. From the shadows behind her emerge two other ponies that I’ve never seen before, a big red stallion and a blue unicorn with a musical note for its cutie mark. Then to Rainbow Dash’s left appears…

“Twilight!”

But once again, she looks angry at me, as if I’ve done something terribly wrong.

“Don’t call me Twilight,” she growls, hatred layered in her voice. “We all know what you are.”

“Twili, what are you talking about? This is crazy! It’s me, Shining Armor!”

“No, it’s not,” says a voice from beyond the treeline. “You are not Shining Armor.”

“What?!” I cry, struggling. “Who’s there? Show yourself!”

The speaker did show himself, and when he does, my heart takes a plunge into a vat of ice water. My hooves go numb and my head pounds.

No. It isn’t possible. It can’t be.

And yet standing there next to my sister, his narrowed eyes glinting in the firelight…

…is me. Shining Armor.

A creature stirs in a pockmarked plain, surrounded on all sides by the limp bodies of unconscious ponies. As he awakens, his olfactory senses take a beating as a tsunami of odors barrels into his nose, nearly overwhelming him. It takes several minutes for him to calm down, and when he does, the world opens up to him.

He can smell everything. He can smell the blood on the strange ponies’ bodies and can even smell their fear. The scent of death is everywhere, lingering in the air like a bad aftertaste. There are other scents. Smoke, bilge, filth, vomit, and a menagerie of horrid odors amalgamate and mix in his nostrils. Retching, he catches sight of a dirty puddle in a crater the size of a dinner plate on the ground. He crawls over to it, faintly aware that his legs are not working and that there is something on his back.

It all dawns on him as he crosses the crater’s threshold and peers into the dirty water.

Staring back is a dog with dark and light brown fur and bronze colored eyes. Its pointed ears move independently of one another and its tongue hangs out limply. As he inspects further, he catches a glimpse of his hand, or rather, his paw, malformed as if it had gone through a grinder. Staring behind him, he realizes that his entire body is slimmer and covered in brown fur, culminating in a tail that swishes lazily behind him. He reaches up into his mouth and feels sharp teeth, then runs his paws over his entire front, feeling only hair and fur.

It can’t be possible. Yet it has happened.

One of the ponies, the gray pegasus, stirs and awakens, blinking in the harsh sunlight. She catches sight of the bipedal dog.

“Hey, doggies don’t walk on two legs!”

She giggles, unaware that she is bleeding from the forehead. The other two ponies are still unconscious. The dog-creature turns to face the pegasus.

“I am no dog,” he says in a guttural voice. “My name…my name is…”

“Maddux?”

The dog-creature is taken aback. “What?!”

“It says Maddux on your collar, silly! Are you a Diamond Dog?”

The creature realizes that he is indeed wearing a collar, and on it, engraved in the silver tag, is the name Maddux.

“I…”

“Hi, Maddux! I’m Ditzy Doo, but everypony calls me Derpy! Nice to meet you!”

She stuck out a hoof, but the dog-creature looks confused, which in turn makes Derpy confused. He shudders, and Derpy frowns, fearing she has done something wrong.

The dog-creature looks at his paw in horror, then back to the bleeding pegasus. Sunlight glints off his bronze pupils as he stands there, confused and shocked, not a man and not a dog, but a hybrid. A shepherd. The shepherd.

Part 11: CHOICES

I am Shining Armor.

He is Shining Armor.

Two Shining Armors.

“Twilight…”

“SHUT UP!” she yells, and I cringe at my sister’s rage. She stares at me with the most hateful of looks.

“I know you are not my brother. I know you are a Changeling. How dare you think you can walk in here and pretend to be him! He’s twice the pony you’ll ever be, and you’re not even a pony, you miserable pile of filth!”

She spits at me. I am in tears.

“Twilight…it’s me…it’s your brother…”

“False,” the other Shining Armor sneers. “You are a Changeling and we are going to kill you.”

“I’m no Changeling!” I yell. “I’ve been stuck in Manehattan for a month! I lost you…on the Bucklyn Bridge…”

“Lies, Twilight,” the other Shining Armor says. “All lies. You know I was with you the entire time.”

Twilight looks at both of us, and I see the quickest flicker of uncertainty dash across her eyes. I look at her.

“Twili…I’m the real Shining Armor!”

“Nonsense!” the other Shining Armor yells. “He’s lying to you, Twilight!”

“Yeah…”

But I can hear her doubt. I struggle and gasp.

“Twili, it’s me! I got out of the city, I tried so hard to find you! Why are you doing this?”

“Shut the buck up!” Rainbow Dash suddenly yells. “Or I’ll get Big Macintosh to beat you senseless!”

“Eyup,” says the giant red stallion. Tears fall from my eyes. I don’t know what to feel anymore. Twilight isn’t looking at me or the other Shining Armor.

“Twilight, please! Please!”

“Shut up!” the other Shining Armor yells. “Twilight, we need to kill this…thing. It knows our camp! It’s probably an agent of Chrysalis!”

What?!

“Chrysalis?! Are you nuts?! You’re the Changeling! I’m the real Shining Armor!”

“No, I’m the real Shining Armor!”

“SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!”

I cringe at Twilight’s roar, as does my doppelganger. She breathes and spits on the ground.

“So one of you is Shining Armor, and the other is a Changeling. Perhaps I was a little too quick to see who’s who.”

I nod excitedly, my spirits lifting. “Yes, Twili, yes!”

“Twilight…” said the other Shining Armor. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m buckin’ serious. Now shut up, both of you. I’ll find a way to tell who’s who.”

She walks up to me. “If you’re really my brother, I take back all those things I said. If you’re not, then I’m going to make sure you die a very painful death.”

Her voice cracks, and I realize that nothing I can do will convince her. She turns her back on me.

Then I get an idea, a crazy, stupid idea. It was the kind of idea that could make or break a situation, and this idea would either kill me or kill the other imposter Changeling.

I clear my throat.

“You stupid whore.”

Everypony gasps. Twilight stops and slowly turns around. I speak again.

“You mangy whore pony. You shitfaced little mare. You’re dirt. No, you’re LOWER than dirt! You’re a bucking disgrace!!”

“See?!” the other Shining Armor yells. “This is proof! He has given up his charade! Kill him, Twilight Sparkle! Kill him!”

“You’re nothing! You never were anything to our family!” I continue to scream, even though my heart is breaking as I do it. “You’re shit! Everypony knows it! I hate you! I HATE YOU!”

Soon only my doppelganger and I are shouting, and Twilight, her eyes full of tears, reaches for a deadly looking blade in her pocket. I continue to spout vile things, but tears are falling from my eyes as well, and I can’t hold them back.

“Dad hated you! Mom hated you even more! You were a freak! A disgrace of a daughter! Even Cadence hated you!”

I feel like throwing up, and soon my eyes are waterfalls. Twilight holds the blade up to my neck. She finally speaks.

“Go on.”

Her voice is shaky, but out of fear for my life I continue.

“You…you never did anything…right…Mom and Dad…”

I can’t do it anymore. I am destroying my sister in hopes that she doesn’t destroy me, but I may very well be driving the final nail into my coffin. She presses the blade against my neck.

“Yes, yes, kill him!” the other Shining Armor yells. “Kill him! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! He is not your brother! He is nothing but a—”

SCHING!

Thunk!

“Gaaagh…”

It takes me a moment to realize that my eyes are closed, and when I open them I see no knife sticking out of my body, no blood. Twilight is looking down at what used to be the other Shining Armor, who now is black, necrotic, and anything but ponylike, and with a knife in his throat.

A Changeling.

Tears fall from her eyes as she approaches me without saying a word. Already phlegm is gathering in the back of my throat as I hiccup with tears in my eyes and aching pains in my stomach. She cuts me free, and I collapse to the ground, my muscles stiff. I catch a glimpse of Rainbow Dash and the big red pony, looking confused and shocked. Rainbow Dash steps forward.

“Shining Armor?”

I look up and see my sister’s stricken face, pinched from exhaustion and worry. I can not imagine what she is thinking at this moment. Her brother had been, for the past month, an imposter bent on…on what? Assassination? Sabotage? There is still so much I don’t know. But then Twilight wraps her arms around me and cries into my shoulder, and I cry with her. We cry throughout the night as the dead Changeling festers, and nopony says anything more. This is not a time for words. This is a time for tears.

Check.

I thought you would do this.

Of course you did.

She made a choice, did she not? Choices always tickle my fancy.

Genocide would more likely tickle your fancy, I think.

The same could be said of you.

It would be an untruth to say otherwise.

My turn at last.

Yes.

What of the Variable?

It is in place. He killed it on the rooftop.

That should be very interesting for him, to see it back.

Indeed.

Let’s see. The pieces are scattered and warped. To bring them back would be a great mistake.

A boon for me, and doom for you.

Quite right. So…to keep them apart…

Send them back to the start.

Part 12: EMBARK

Twilight and I look over the ruins of the Manehattan Bridge into the swirling black waters of the Frost River at least one hundred feet below. The river seems to be boiling. Both of us know by now that the bubbles aren’t caused by heat, but rather by a bloodthirsty monster.

I look over to her and see, as I do every day, the exhaustion on her face. I doubt that I look much better. It has been three months since I shaved last, and every morning my stubble grew and grew. I wear now only a dirty shirt to combat the cold that has befallen the land. Our group has shrunk by three since Twilight killed the Changeling imposter three months ago. Two struck out by themselves, and one died of the trots. Now we merely have Rainbow Dash, Twilight, me, Big Macintosh, Noteworthy, and a pony named Sundance in our group. I’ve learned a lot about these ponies since we first met under rather hostile circumstances.

Three long, hungry months passed. We only got as far as Coltville, just a few hundred miles outside the city. It’d been abandoned and looted. Only bonewalkers populated the small town.

We had no choice. We had to turn back. And so here we are.

“See anything?” I say to my sister as we observe the destroyed bridge. Twilight stares hard at the empty space where concrete should have lain. The bridge’s supports and wires are still intact, so when I first saw it I knew there had to be some crossable remnant of the bridge left. It seems, however, that no such remnant exists.

“Wait, Shining! I see something! Look!”

She points to the left side of the bridge, and immediately I see it; a two-meter-wide stretch of stone that jutted out into open air. I trace it with my eyes back to the foggy city. The bridge is only partially collapsed, and the far end remains intact. Twilight smiles at me, and I return her grin.

We have found a way.

“Everypony!” I call out. “There’s a way across! C’mon!”

The group joins us, and we prepare to cross. However my mind is completely rejecting the notion that I go anywhere near Manehattan after what happened four months previously. But our options are thin; starve or go into the city.

We start across the bridge.

The girders creak and the waves rumble beneath our hooves as we inch along the thin concrete chunk that keeps us from plunging to a watery grave. The high winds threaten to knock us off, but Twilight uses her magic to give us more balance.

But when we are merely fifty feet away from the other side, Sundance jumps.

“NO!” I yell, but it is too late. I watch his yellowish body grow smaller and smaller until it is eaten up by the waves. My heart grows sick, and I know that Sundance will be eaten by far more than water.

“What the buck?!” Noteworthy screams over the high wind. “Did he jump?!”

“Oh my gosh,” Twilight stammers. I have no words. I’d known Sundance for less than a month. Actually that is incorrect. I hardly knew him at all.

But I know that he jumped on purpose.

“BUCKING DAMN IT!” I scream, wobbling.

“No, SHINING!” Twilight magicks me so that I regain my balance, and we all shimmy toward the end of the concrete slab.

“Why’d he jump?” Noteworthy yells. “What the buck just happened?”

“Shut up!” I scream. “No talking until we’re across!”

The sun barely shines through the thick clouds. It must be around noon. The last girder we must cross is wet with rainwater and spray, but thankfully we all manage to get across.

We are on solid ground, and I collapse. Tears fall from my eyes as grief seizes my body.

“Shining Armor, what happened?” Rainbow Dash says, floating down. She’d flown across to scout. “Where’s Sundance?”

“He jumped off.”

She gasped. “What?! No, no he must have—”

“He bucking JUMPED OFF!” I scream.

“But why?”

“Why wouldn’ he?” Big Macintosh answers. “Whole world’s gone t’hell. His family’s probably dead or worse. Anypony he knew, dead. I’m surprised he didn’ jump sooner.”

“Holy buck,” Noteworthy says, collapsing to his knees. I wipe away my tears.

“Forget Sundance. We have to carry on. Now’s not the time for grief. Rainbow Dash, what did you see?”

The pegasus gulps and wipes her brow. “Uhm…uh…well, there’s like some sorta camp just a ways down the bridge. Looks abandoned, but the fire’s still going. Tents and everything.”

“Then that’s where we’re going. C’mon.”

I can think of little else other than Sundance and why the buck he jumped, but my thoughts are interrupted by an arrow to the knee.

“GAAAH!”

“AMBUSH!”

Suddenly we are set upon by dozens of hooded ponies with knives, swords, spears, and bows. I collapse to the ground as my leg turns red with blood, and all around me my friends are fighting.

Bandits. They cried out like hyenas, swiping and stabbing. I saw Rainbow Dash smash into one and Big Macintosh kick another off the bridge. The bandit screamed as it plunged.

“Gah! Somepony get me a weapon!” I cry. I have the most military experience of the group, but when I look I see that my friends are faring well against the bandits. Twilight has in her mouth a nasty-looking blade that, when catching wind of my call, she tosses to me and then proceeds to pick up a spear, goring the bandit pony through the chest. I grasp the sword’s handle and enter the fray.

But my knee hinders me, leaves me open to attack. The bandits waste no time in making me into mincemeat.

I fall back and collapse onto my back, weak from blood loss. I must have been cut a dozen times by a dozen different weapons. But the bandits keep coming. How many are there? We cannot fight them all. I am fading…Big Macintosh is on the ground, unmoving…Twilight is overwhelmed…

Suddenly a roar. No. A cry? Yes, a cry. A cry rings out and I see shadowy shapes go flying by, before realizing that the shapes are the bandits being thrown off the bridge. I want so desperately to look to see who our savior is, but I cannot lift my head. My blood has turned my skin red. I see out of the corner of my eye that a bandit holds Twilight by the neck, his blade resting against her jugular vein. I can see the bandit’s grim little eyes, bloodshot and desperate for food. They are like us, but with weapons.

He screams once as a shadow overtakes him, then vanishes from sight. I fall back. Twilight is safe.

Voices, deep and distant. One sounds familiar. I try to look up, but suddenly a shadow consumes me.

It is a being, a very familiar being…

Oh my god.

“No…” I utter, blood forming at the corners of my lips. “No…”

It can’t be.

It can’t…be…

“We…we…”

No. Impossible.

Not possible.

“We…killed…you…”

The Variable has come.

Indeed.

How very interesting…

Part 13: TAINTED

“I’m telling you, Mister Armor, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Twilight and Big Macintosh are holding me back so that I don’t run the minotaur through with my horn. Rainbow Dash and Noteworthy are looking at me with weary concern. We are in a garbage-filled parking lot right next to the Frost River, and I am staring at an old foe.

But is he still my foe?

“You’re Rocky,” I growl, stopping my struggle. “You were with Lakota. You tried to kill me and Derpy and Fluttershy.”

I had told Twilight about the two pegasi when we had reunited three months ago, and she still believed that they were alive somewhere. Hope of their discovery is one of the reasons we came back to the city in the first place.

The minotaur puts up his hands. At this point it is very difficult to tell whether or not he is telling the truth. His eyes betray nothing, nor does his body. But I know who he is. I know what he did. And I know that he is supposed to be dead.

“How did you survive the fall? The harpoon?”

“Fall? Harpoon? Shining Armor, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been here since everything began, and I just wanted to rescue you and your friends from those bandits!”

“And a fine job you did, Rocky,” Twilight says hesitantly. I shoot her an evil look, but now I am unsure. Is this minotaur telling the truth?

I calm to the point where Big Macintosh and my sister let me go. I sit down.

“So you don’t remember anything.”

Rocky looks at me with genuine confusion. He is either a very good liar, or not a liar at all. “I only remember waking up in a ditch on South Bonham Street, surrounded by corpses. Then I came here and helped you guys out when I heard the commotion on the bridge.”

“You woke up in a ditch?”

He nods. “I didn’t know what was going on. To be honest, I still don’t know what’s going on. It’s all a blur.”

“You’re not the only one,” Big Macintosh grumbles. I am still unsure. Minotaurs are big, powerful brutes, but they’re not always the smartest or craftiest of creatures. So am I to believe then that Rocky is telling the truth?

Rocky…

His name.

He still remembers his name.

“Rocky,” I say excitedly, “if you can’t remember anything, how do you know your name?”

Checkmate. Maybe.

But he looks at me once again, puzzled. “I know who I am, Shining Armor. I know who you are, too. I haven’t forgotten everything, just the stuff that matters.”

Just the stuff that matters. How convenient.

“I’m not gonna lie,” I say. “I don’t trust you. I know these guys weren’t here to see what you did, but I was. You tried to kill me, Rocky.”

He puts down his hands. “If you say so, Shining Armor. But I’m not going to kill you now. I’m going to help you. All of you. Come with me, there’s a place where we can spend the night. It’s safe from bonewalkers and bandits. Come on!”

He leads us away, and as I follow I wonder why I am following him, why I am trusting him, after what he did to me, to Derpy and Lyra and Fluttershy.

At the corner of what used to be Foal Street and Ardennais Avenue, a very strange group picks its way through the rubble. The group consists of two pegasi, a unicorn, and a strange bipedal creature that has the head of a dog. Maddux and the ponies.

“Look!” Maddux shouts, pointing his clawed finger at a building. There, the sign ‘Mr. Goodie’s Goods’ can just barely be made out. Fluttershy and Derpy gasp, while Lyra is half asleep. All of them are hungry and tired. They need a place to stay for the night. Maddux thinks this place will do fine.

But they have to make sure it’s safe first, so Maddux bares his teeth as the girls hang back. The door is open, and the window displays have been looted. He slowly inches his way to the door, peeking inside. No one. He can’t smell anyone either. It is safe.

“We’ll rest here for the night,” he says, swishing his tail. “Maybe we’ll find some food.”

“Hey, I see some over there!” Fluttershy cries. Suddenly they are scrambling to get at the food, but Maddux jumps in front of them and smacks the food off the counter. The food, a big slab of green meat, lands on the floor with a loud splat. Derpy looks indignant.

“Whadja do that for?”

Maddux inspects the meat. It is putrid and covered with flies.

“I don’t need to use my nose to know that’s tainted,” he says. “We can’t eat that.”

“Then what can we eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“But I’m hungry!”

“I KNOW!” Maddux cries, baring his teeth. The girls jump back, frightened. Maddux calms and sits down.

“I’m sorry. I’m hungry too. But we can’t eat that, or we’ll die. Look for something else.”

They search but find nothing. The store is picked clean. They sit down in the middle of the store.

Maddux’s stomach growls. “Heh. Funny I’m still hungry. Funny I’m still alive.”

“What do you mean?” Fluttershy asks.

“I remember…only bits and pieces of what happened to me. I know I was not always like this,” he says, pointing to himself. “There was something else…a big flash of light, a lot of screaming…”

“I was wondering that too, Mr. Maddux!” Derpy says happily, oblivious to the gnawing pain in her stomach. “Maybe you’re a Diamond Dog!”

He cocks his head. “A what?”

“A Diamond Dog,” Lyra pipes up. “They like to dig for gems and stuff.”

“No, I think I was…”

Suddenly there is a strange howl in the distance. Maddux stands up and bares his teeth. Fluttershy and Lyra huddle together behind an overturned shelf. Derpy bounces around aimlessly.

She stops when a thousand red eyes peek through the broken windows of the store, leering at her.

“Derpy,” Maddux whispers. “Get behind me. Now.”

She doesn't listen. She giggles and reaches out to touch the blackness.

The howl pierces the night silence again, closer. Then there is only quiet.

Part 14: NIGHTMARE

I am in a dream. It has to be a dream.

I am still in Manehattan, but the city is bustling as if the Cataclysm had never happened.

I see a shadow where there should be no shadow. It is strange seeing such a shadow in the middle of a busy street. Nopony else seems to notice it but me. It moves like ink in water, stretching out and blooming and moving closer to me with every passing moment. I try to move, without success. I am paralyzed. The city moves on without me, and everything seems to go faster and faster until time itself is having trouble keeping up. The shadow is noiseless. Everything is noiseless. Where there should be sounds of traffic and echoes of the urban jungle, there is only silence. The air seems hollow. The lights are flashing by, streaks of bright color moving faster than any pegasus in the world could ever hope to move. The shadow is hovering in front of me, constantly morphing as if it were unsure of what form it wanted to take. One moment it was a mass of black tentacles, the next a dark skull with its mouth drawn open in a silent scream. I feel like I should fear it, like my legs should be shaking and my brow should be covered in cold sweat. But I am still paralyzed. My legs cannot move.

From the shadow bursts an arm the size of a bull, with four fingers that end in claws. It grabs me and pulls me in, and suddenly I am blind. But my ears have opened. I can hear again.

I hear the music of madness, a masochistic melody with instruments of dying screams, a symphony of terror. The shrieks and moans of unseen ghosts claw at my airs and rake my mind. I struggle to do anything to ease the pain.

Then it is gone, and I hear a ringing in my ears. The blackness fades, and I see that I am above the world. Manehattan is sprawled out beneath me, a plain of concrete towers and burning bulbs. It is dark out, and I am flying.

But when I turn around I see a sight that I had forgotten: the Equestria Tower, the tallest building in the world. It was built as a fortress during the time of the Windigos, and now stands as a skyscraper, a blend of ancient stone and modern steel. It stands nearly two thousand feet tall, dominating the skyline. I wonder why I have not seen it in so long. Was it the clouds over Manehattan? Had I been too busy to notice it before? No, it couldn’t be. I’d been all over Manehattan since the apocalypse and never once caught a glimpse of the tower. Something had happened to it, something…

Suddenly a voice rings in my head.

“In the tower lies the end.”

And then I see it. It’s in the tower…everything’s in the tower…

The sky lets me go, and I am falling, falling, falling…

My stomach lurches and I gasp as I shot up from the ground. Around me, the familiar sights of destruction greet my eyes. It was a dream, only a dream. We are still camped in the abandoned building next to the parking lot. I seem to have woken up everypony. Twilight is staring at me with a concerned look on her face.

“Shining Armor? What’s wrong?”

I ignore her momentarily and go outside into the dusty morning light. I look up.

There it is. The Equestria Tower, absolutely untouched by the destruction. I point at it.

“There. We have to go there.”

The others are waking up. Twilight looks at me as if I had just said that I was a potato.

“What? Shining Armor, what are you talking about?”

I look at the tower. “We have to go there. We have to.”

“What? Why? What’s in the tower?”

I stare at her, my thoughts colliding.

“The answer. To everything.”

Maddux picks up his severed arm, realizing that the bleeding has stopped. He looks over at the girls. Fluttershy is now wingless and Derpy’s nose is broken. Lyra is dead. There is blood everywhere.

The red-eyed demons had been quick like shadows and brutal like hungry wolves. Maddux does not remember how they managed to drive them off. Was it the daylight? The noise? Or perhaps they managed to fight them back.

No. They had been like lambs to the slaughter. And they had welcomed the morning with bloodied lips and body parts.

And Lyra was dead. Fluttershy had used her body as pillow to gain the approximate hour of sleep that she could manage after the fight. Derpy is still upbeat even though she is covered in blood. They had all cauterized their wounds with the fire Maddux had managed to start. Fluttershy looks over at him.

“What do we do now, Mister Maddux?”

Maddux sits against the wall, feeling phantom pains where his arm used to be. “I don’t know, Fluttershy. I don’t know. That was…horrible. I thought we were all going to die.”

“Luckily we didn’t,” says Derpy, who smiles obliviously. “But what do you think those things were?”

“I think I know,” says Fluttershy. “Before we were separated, my friend Shining Armor was talking about something he called the Corrupt. They way he described him matches the way those monsters looked. I think…”

“Hey, is Lyra ever going to wake up?” Derpy interrupts. There is brief silence, then Fluttershy begins to cry.

“L-Lyra…”

“She didn’t deserve this,” Maddux says, standing up and feeling the scars on his snout. “None of us do. But we don’t have time to mourn. We have to find a safer place to go to.”

“Are we just going to leave her here?” Fluttershy says angrily. “Just leave her here to rot?”

“We don’t have a choice, Fluttershy! If it hadn’t been for the sun coming up we all would have been torn apart by those things! They ripped your wings off, goddamn it! They took my arm!”

“They broke my nose!” Derpy chimes in happily.

“And they broke Derpy’s nose!” Maddux snarls. “We have to go someplace where they won’t reach us.”

“But no place on this island is safe!” says Fluttershy. Her skin is still pale from blood loss and her eyes are bloodshot and full of anger. “We can’t go anywhere!”

“How about there?”

Maddux looks up and sees Derpy pointing at the sky, and as he turns he sees something he has not seen before: a big black skyscraper, standing tall over the ruined city. It is tall enough to touch the heavens, a giant tower that had not been there before. Maddux was shocked.

“Where did…how…what?”

“That seems like a good place!” Derpy laughs, but then she moans in pain. Her broken nose has not been set properly. The pain is still there.

Maddux stares in disbelief, but slowly a smile forms on his face, despite all the pain and debauchery that had befallen them. He has not smiled in the longest time, and now he grins from ear to ear.

“Yeah. Yeah, it does.”

Part 9: CHICAGO

11:54 A.M. November 19, 2013 – 02:32:41 since UOA

Lieutenant Rackham Shaw sits in his living room with his German shepherd Maddux lying at his feet. His eyes are glued to the TV screen as a reporter ducks and dives to avoid the flying debris all around him. The camera cuts out, and the screen shows an aerial view of a massive black hole ringed with bluish-white fire that is smack-dab in the middle of downtown Chicago.

His cell phone rings, and he answers, waving Maddux out of the room.

“This is Shaw.”

“Shaw, it’s Ferron. You’ve seen the stuff on the TV?”

“Of course I’ve seen it, Kyle, it’s over the whole fucking network.”

“Well, we got orders. All available units are to report to Centennial Park for…”

“Wait a second, Kyle…holy SHIT!”

On the TV, the Willis Tower succumbs to the black hole, crumbling into itself and disintegrating.

“Did you see that? The fuckin’ Willis Tower!”

“Oh my fucking God…”

“Alright, alright,” Shaw says, exasperated. “Centennial Park?”

“Under the Bean.”

“Got it. Okay, gather the rest of the team and meet me there!”

“Yes, sir!”

He hangs up and turns the TV off, sparing a glance out his apartment window. The black hole hangs like an ominous, blue-ringed storm cloud over the city. Shaw whistles for Maddux and they go downstairs to Shaw’s F-150. Maddux climbs into the passenger seat as Shaw starts the engine. They pull out of the apartment parking lot and drive toward Chicago…and toward certain doom.

12:20 P.M.

Shaw’s drive to Centennial Park is unimpeded, as the outbound roads are clogged with fleeing drivers while the inbound lanes were clear. Maddux pants happily all the way. Nothing ever scares him.

The same can’t be said about Shaw. This thing over Chicago is definitely scaring him. What the fuck is it? How the fuck did it get here? He turns on the radio to check for updates.

“…whether or not this is related to the biohazardous outbreak last Tuesday, Marsha, but it appears…hold on…we’re getting reports that the citizens of downtown Chicago are rioting…wait, no…Tom? Is this right?”

The radio announcer’s voice is shaking and uncertain.

“…my God…this just in, the citizens of Chicago are killing each other. Something is happening, folks, and we really can’t explain what…”

Then static, sudden and quick. Before Shaw can even register what is happening, something invisible slams into his truck and stops it dead in its tracks.

Maddux begins to whine. Shaw curses and tries the engine. Nothing. It’s fried. Then he looks around and sees that he is not the only one affected. Dozens of drivers have exited their dead cars, some running away, others standing still in shock.

“Fuckin’ son of a shit!” Shaw curses. “C’mon, Maddie! We gotta go!”

They exit the car, and as Shaw tries to call Ferron, he realizes that his cell phone has been fried.

No. Impossible.

“EMP?”

Oh, shit.

1:10 P.M.

Out of breath and clutching himself, Shaw finally makes it to the command post set up around the giant chrome bean in Centennial Park. Kyle Ferron, a fellow lieutenant, is waiting for him.

“Shaw! Pulse got you too?”

“Huh?!”

“All our electronics are down. Well, not all of ‘em. We still got NODs and comms, but that’s about it. But that EMP is the least of our worries right now!”

“What are you saying, Kyle?!”

“Look for your fuckin’ self!”

Ferron points down the street where gunshots and explosions can be heard. Shaw sees several uniformed men, each blazing the insignia of the SRS (Special Response Squadron,) his unit. But they were firing at…

“Civilians? Why the fuck are they firing at…”

“I’ll show you why the fuck they are! Take this!”

Ferron tosses him a Colt Python, an irregular piece of weaponry for the Army but not so irregular in the SRS. Ferron is already decked out in full combat fatigues, completely black, and he places a gasmask and Kevlar helmet over his face so that only his brown eyes are visible. Clutching his G36C, Ferron motions the completely unarmored Shaw and Maddux down the street. Regretting his decision already, Shaw follows.

Ferron hands him earplugs so that he won’t go deaf from the gunfire, and as Shaw puts them in, they stop behind an overturned taxi. Ferron then hands him a pair of binoculars. He takes them and looks through them.

It becomes clear why the men are shooting at unarmed civilians.

Every citizen has blood coming down his and her chest. Their eyes are gone, plucked out by the looks of it, and their mouths froth with blood. Their hands have morphed into claws, terrible-looking talon-fingers that drip with blood and body matter. As Shaw looks closer, he realizes the blood on their chests is not blood at all. The citizens have gaping holes in their chests from which black tentacles, lined with canine teeth, whip and whirl around like one of those tube-men advertising balloons.

They are monsters. And they are attacking.

“What the fuck?!”

“Biters,” Ferron replies, his voice muffled by his rubber S-10. “’Least that’s what we’ve been calling them. We don’t know what the hell is going on, but those things took out all of Velazquez’s men!”

“WHAT?!”

“Now you know why we’re shooting them!”

“What the fuck are they?!”

“How the fuck should I know?!”

Just like that, Ferron pulls Shaw away from the barricade and back up to the command post, entering a tent and pulling off his gasmask.

“Okay, Lieutenant, we need to get you suited up.”

“But what was…what…”

“Oh, mother of a fuck, why’d you bring Maddie?!”

“I thought…the Willis Tower, there might have been survivors…”

“The tower’s gone, Rack. No one’s left.”

“Do you have a vest for him?”

“Yeah, should be one. I’ll get your gear. Stay here.”

Ferron goes off in search of equipment, and Shaw holds his head in his hands. Maddux looks up at him confusedly.

“What the hell was all that?” the lieutenant asks himself. “Oh my God…oh my fucking God…”

It is the beginning, Rackham.

“What?!” Shaw whips around and scans the area. Ferron is not back. The only sounds he can hear are the sounds of gunfire and explosions, as well as a low humming noise and Maddie’s panting.

“Who’s there? Identify yourself!” He holds the Python out, but the command post is deserted except for medical and radio personnel, who are in the next building over. Not a good sign. That meant that all available men had been deployed, which meant that they were losing.

He had heard a voice. But who…?

Ferron is back and is carrying a gear-set identical to his own, as well as a custom Kevlar vest for Maddux. Wasting no time, Shaw gets dressed and geared, fitting the S-10 over his head, smelling rubber and feeling it enclose around his skull. He fits the bulletproof vest onto Maddux, then proceeds to take a spare G36 from Ferron. Fully locked and loaded, the two men and the dog walk out to join their comrades at the front line.

1:50 P.M.

“Echo Team, right side! Right side!”

“Holy shit! UO is growing and shadowing our location, over!”

Shaw crouches next to Ferron and three other gasmasked boys from Echo Team at the barricade, dropping zombie after zombie. He can’t think of what else to call them. They aren’t human, and they can’t be alive. So they must be zombies.

They have moved up significantly and were now using an overturned bus as a wall against the horde of monsters that choked the Magnificent Mile.

“Runner! Drop him!”

“Got it!”

Machine gun fire.

“Ferron, are you going to explain to me what the fuck is going on?!”

Maddux barks madly. Ferron looks at Shaw. His eyes are wide behind the mask.

“I don’t know, man! I don’t fuckin’ know! First the goddamn hole in the sky, now fucking zombies! Jesus Christ, what next?!”

“Sir!” calls a soldier to Ferron’s right. “Helix advises! B-52s inbound!”

“Shit! They’ll drop ‘em right on top of us!”

Maddux is still barking. Shaw leans in.

“Tell them we can’t go yet! We’ve got no response from Charlie Team! And we have injured civilians!”

The soldier begins to relay the message, when suddenly a low boom echoes across the city, and the soldiers are nearly knocked off their feet.

“What the fuck? Ferron, you got eyes on the UO?”

“No, what?! Another EMP?!”

“Doesn’t look like it! Comms are still working!”

“LOOK AT THE UO!”

The fire-ringed black hole in the sky seems to pulsate, then contract. Teal light forms in the middle of the hole, and three objects burst from the light, on a collision course with Echo Team.

“What the fuck?!”

“What are those things?”

“They look like dogs or something!”

“Jesus!”

The black hole is going nuts. Trails of multicolored light blow up like fireworks around it. Maddux whines and barks. The three objects slam into the street before them and are swarmed by the zombies.

“GET THEM OFF! GET THEM OFF!” Shaw screams, letting loose a bulletstorm, not letting up until every creature is dead. Pulling off his gasmask, not really sure of what he is doing, Shaw breaks the barricade and runs toward the fallen objects.

There are three objects, living and breathing. One is gray. One is yellow. One is turquoise.

“OH MY GOD!”

Shaw looks up. Something is sticking out of the black hole, a huge thing, bigger than Mt. Everest. It resembles a black uprooted tree with tentacles longer and thicker than the Great Wall of China. It roars unnaturally, a beast of the sky, and Shaw sees something in its tentacle.

The B-52.

The comms go dead. He can’t hear anything except Maddux’s barks and the roar of the monster in the sky. Like a gaping maw, the hole widens and quivers. The tentacle holding the plane spins around and lets go, hurling the bomber off course.

Straight into the John Hancock Observatory.

The B-52, laden with explosives, slams into the building and blows up, taking with it the entire observatory in a cataclysmic deluge of flame, dust, and melting steel. Shaw can’t hear anything else. The tower collapses, and a wall of dust and debris speeds down Michigan Avenue, swallowing everything in its path. Instinctively, Shaw puts his gasmask on and grabs Maddux, but then he catches sight of one of the creatures, the yellow one. Its eyes are wide and teary. It looks scared beyond all recognition. Making a decision, Shaw, with his German shepherd still under his arm, tackles the creatures and covers them as the dust cloud swallows him whole.

The world ends.

00:00 A.M.

No, no, Lieutenant Shaw.

The world has not ended. Yours, perhaps. I cannot say with certainty how very badly your world will be affected by my colleague’s outbursts. Let me affirm that I have no desire for your planet, nor do any of my clients, or His…oh, what does he call them? Sheep? It matters not.

Let me affirm that these phenomena are not exclusive to your world, Lieutenant. Your kind has had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quite literally.

I wish to concede that I take no action on behalf of Earth’s destruction. The blame is His and His alone.

But you must be wondering why you are still alive, Rackham Shaw. You wonder who or what I am.

Answers will come with time, and time has not ended.

I am Entrail.

This is merely the beginning.

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