Foe Hie Odyssey

The journey to Manich took all of that day.  The trees on either side slowly gave way to pale lifeless husks.  When we at last came within sight of the city, night was falling, and we noticed an odd stillness to the air.  It seemed that the only movement in the wasteland was a single great plume of smoke rising from the center of the city.  This close to any city or town we should have heard something, but we didn't.  Haywire was worried and said that I should turn invisible and watch her from afar while she went in alone.  I convinced her to let me go in alone; after all I didn’t know how the raiders would react to meeting her.

I strode towards the city and as I got closer I noticed that ashes and debris lined the street as well as several empty crosses.  As I got closer I saw that there were bones amid the debris piles.  Oddly enough there was even what looked like a lottery ticket.  Manich wasn’t a town.  It wasn’t even a large town like Plowton.  This was a city.  Its population in its heyday, no pun intended, could have easily been over a million ponies.  After the Megaspells were dropped many of the ponies must have died.

It was apparent that many of the tall buildings and cathedrals had fallen down centuries ago, probably as a result of the nearby Megaspell detonation.  It was also apparent that many ponies had been living here as of recently, maybe not as many as before the war, but it was definitely a larger population than that of any other settlement I had seen thus far.  There was fresh gore intermixed with the debris and more than a few surfaces had been stained with blood.  There were the burnt remains of huts, built from the debris of the dead city, erected alongside the road as well as the broken stalls of vendors who use to sell food or various odds and ends to passersby.  Now that I had passed into this shanty town built upon a fallen city I was able to hear the sound of a far off bonfire and smell the burning bodies.

I walked as if in a dream through the broken city remembering something long forgotten as I drew towards the source of the burning.  I passed a superstore with a hoof painted sign out in front and boarded up windows.  There was a hole in its side as if it had been struck by an artillery shell.  I passed a cathedral that had recently been set on fire, so recently that I could even hear beams breaking from within it.  Outside was a damaged hoof painted sign that looked like it said “Esoteric Order of Dragon”.  As I walked I passed yet more of the empty crosses.  Despite being empty the crosses were almost all slick with blood.

Once I reached the center of town I saw a massive pyre.  The flames reached towards the heavens rising at least forty feet from the ruins all around them.  It took me a long moment to comprehend what I was seeing.  There were simply so many bodies that I had to briefly wonder, how such a thing was even possible.  As my senses returned to me I realized that I wasn’t alone.

There were a handful of ponies sitting around and watching the fire, seven ponies just staring up in awe.  Two of the ponies seemed to sense my approach and got up to meet me.  Silver Wing limped towards me as Black Hawke tackled me to the ground.  After that I asked what happened to the city.  They said that it was the legion.  Silver Wing even told me something that surprised me.  The crucifixion of ponies was a special punishment reserved for only the worst criminals.  According to a former acquaintance of Silver Wing nopony had been crucified by the legion since the middle ages.  The ponies must really have pissed off the legion to receive this kind of treatment.

The Silver Wing Slicers after discovering the massacre had taken all of the bodies off the crosses and built a pyre for them.  There were barely four hundred dead, about a tenth of the city’s population a few weeks ago. The other ponies probably had had the sense to flee north.

That was where we would be heading.  Silver Wing said that Omega’s boss was in to the Northwest at a place called Mareburg and Silver Wing still blamed Omega for the trap that I had led the Family into.  I could not dissuade Silver Wing from his present course.  The Family wanted blood.  They wanted to kill Omega and his employer.  With a heavy heart I followed the raiders north on their revenge mission and I was, in turn, followed by an invisible Haywire.

*****

It has been a day since we left Manich again entering a great and sickly forest.  In that time I haven’t been able to talk with Haywire, but I know that she’s there.  I have however found out what happened to the population of Manich.  We crossed an irradiated river this morning that Silver Wing said marks the boundary to Magna Germania.  The Zebras had lost the province during the War after having fought hoof and hide to take it more than a millennium before.  It was here amidst dead trees that we found more crosses lining the road.  They were spread out with one about each tenth of a mile.  Upon each cross was the same label declaring the dead pony’s crime, “Executed for Raiding, Slavery, Heresy, Organ Harvesting, Allowing Foal Prostitution, Rape, Endorsing Slavery, Harboring Raiders, Harboring Slavers, Defending Drug Lords, Defending Pimps, Defending Heretics, Aiding, Abetting, or in Some Way Participating in the Aforementioned, and Opposing the Will of Roam”.  Silver Wing showed me a map indicating where we were going and said that there must be thousands of them.

We traveled for a few days along the road, occasionally passing through small settlements.  Most of the settlements that we passed through were for the most part untouched by the legion.  Even here the road was lined in crosses as a warning to the inhabitants of what would happen if they crossed the legion.  Every once in a while though we would pass through a small burned out settlement where the inhabitant's bodies had been left to rot beside the road.  We did our best to ignore the dead in the towns and on the crosses.  There were simply too many to bury them all.  A handful of the ponies on crosses still lived and they cried to us for mercy.  We gave them each a last drink and a bullet.  It was all the kindness we could give for they were so far gone.

I would have tried to slip away at times to meet with Haywire and tell her where we were going, but Black Hawke was always watching me with hungry eyes, as if daring me to wander out of sight of the others.  I felt bad for Haywire, the nights had gotten colder, but she couldn’t light a fire or she’d risk being seen.  I shared a fire with the raiders and even with the fire Black Hawke still needed to huddle with me for warmth.

Eventually we got to a point where all the trees were dead and there were no more bodies beside the road and in the distance across a blackened field scarred with trenches and shell craters we could now see a line of fire. So it was that on our way to Mareburg we came to the outskirts of Flankfurt.

Ulysses

Insanity 39%