I - A Breath of Frigid Air
The end of the world came with a realization, with a single click in the brain that finally acknowledged the obvious. It came sooner for some ponies, centuries sooner, but inevitably for all.
The train is never coming back down those tracks.
The tracks in question were terribly rusted, but the best maintained out of the dozens of similar rails running parallel, a streak in an expansive rail-yard. Ancient boxcars and engines lay abandoned on the other rails, immobilized by age, of vastly differing construction and quality. A ramshackle wooden abomination with several small guns bolted to it was dwarfed by a long, sleek flatbed with a massive and equally sleek weapon built into it. It was a scene of great waste.
The only movement in the whole area was on top of the only reasonably intact building in sight, an old two-story guard shack solidly built and in decent structural shape despite its obvious age. The recesses in the thick concrete walls for windows were boarded up, but the earth pony standing on the roof had a clear view of area, for what little that was worth. The stallion, wearing a tattered overcoat and tattered wrappings, hunched under a dull steel helmet, surveyed the railyard with tired eyes. His weapon, a bulky rifle with a crude bolt-action and oversized stock, was propped up against the parapet beside him.
The train is never coming back down these tracks.
He sighed, started for the exposed stairwell, then paused and took a final glance around him. Past the railyard was a sorry landscape, the foundations of long-decayed buildings dotting a dead earth, Ice covered almost everything, from the railyard to the ground beyond it. The only thing not crusted with ice was the lone set of tracks that had dominated the stallion's thoughts, thought not because of any maintenance. This ice was as much of a relic as the long-suffering train cars in the railyard, a holdover from the last big freeze. That had happened when the stallion was still a filly, but the temperatures hadn't come down enough since then to melt any of it, not once. Almost everything was as it had been centuries ago, for that.
The stallion sighed again, and trotted down the stairs to the second floor, where the telegraph line had a receiving station. That, too, was a relic, a makeshift wire that had been buried under the rails when they'd been layed down a hundred years ago. It was a wonder it still managed to function, and as much as the stallion wished the electronic communication systems of the past still worked, when an earth pony could talk to another across the entire Confederacy with a voice and without having to pass the clicking message down seventy different relays, at least the telegraph worked. Barely. He still hadn't been able to contact the Appleloosa Citadel, or anything east of it.
He sat down at the desk, and tapped out a message out of sheer habit. There was a tank factory a little to the west, at the end of the functioning tracks. The last train carrying the small, ugly war-machines on its flatbeds had gone by a week ago, and food was running short. The trains, supposedly, came every other day. Now, though, no tanks were rolling east and no coal for the factory was going west. Something was amiss.
BARLEY IRONWORKS he tapped out, ARE YOU THERE
The reply came back nearly instantly, which was highly unsettling to the stallion. The factory had so few workers, there was never anypony actually in the telegraph office. He usually had to wait a few minutes until somepony hurried off the lines to respond to the buzzing coming through the factory's PA system.
RAILYARD A3 the factory was saying, WE WERE WAITING
We?
STATUS he quickly replied, hoof shaking slightly.
THERE IS NO FUEL - WE ARE EVACUATING - GOING NORTH
The stallion blinked. NORTH TRULY
NORTH YES - USING LAST TANKS - FINAL BATTLE - HAVE YOU RECIEVED ORDER FROM COUNCIL
NO
SAME - BUT THERE IS NOWHERE ELSE TO GO - NO CONTACT WITH APPLELOOSA CITADEL - WILL YOU COME
He appreciated the effort, but the factory was fifty miles away. One could not simply walk that distance.
LITTLE FOOD - UNABLE - WILL STAY he tapped out, swallowing hard.
GOOD LUCK the factory said simply.
FOR THE CONFEDERACY
So that's it, then.
The stallion closed his eyes, imagining the factory workers scraping together every bit of food and lashing containers of gasoline to the tanks, ready to join what remained of the Earth tribes continue the battle up north. North was where Unity City was, the capital of the Earth Confederacy and seat of the Grand Council - it was also the first and most intense front of the whole war with the pegasi and unicorns, near the middle of Equestria and straddling the territory of both enemy tribes.. And by the sound of it, north was where the final battle would be fought.
Of course, it was suicide either way. The stallion held no illusions about the end of his ancestor's war that was finally here, the outcome of the terrible struggle; the propaganda no longer had any effect on him. Perhaps it never had. Nopony seemed to believe anymore, the only thing besides grim fatalism was that consuming hatred. He'd felt that, too, until a year of his life had been wasted in this guard shack.
His mind, swirling with thoughts of the end and his life's end, clicked. Who said he had to die in this forsaken building?
I'll die outside, looking at something new.
The stallion grabbed his rifle, slung his near-empty pack over his shoulder, and trotted for the outside stairway He paused as he opened the door, blinking at the rush of cold air, and glanced at the wall near him. A map of Equestria hung there, ancient and ragged; on it, most of the land was crossed out with red scribbles. All of the pegasi and unicorn lands were treated that way, but too much of the Confederacy's lands were forsaken by the map.
He gripped a marker in his mouth, and hurriedly crossed out a clean region. Barley Ironworks was displayed prominently on it. There was very little land left occupied, and none of it to the east. He'd go that way, and die in peace. He'd survived his year on the front with blind luck; he'd perish with a conscious choice. Not that he could avoid it . . .
The stallion walked out, taking a breath of frigid air.
II - Survival Is Not Hope
The stallion saw the squat shape on the tracks hours before he reached the train. He'd started out during the morning; now, by the dull light that filtered through the haze of pollution above him, it must be early in the afternoon.
The train rested on a siding, its engine smashed in, innards spilled out onto the frozen ground. The foundations of a guard shack poked up from the earth nearby, the burn marks on the concrete giving away how a pegasi raiding party had attacked this little station. The cars of the train were in slightly better condition, frozen over; an arrangement of stones could be seen a few hundred hooves down the line, and the stallion resolved the look it over once he was done with the train.
The old, brutish engine, albeit better than any of the ones that had chugged past him to the factory, was passed without inspection. It had been wrecked by the pegasi, and the faint thought of food paid no heed to the thing. With a growl in his stomach, the stallion strapped his rifle to his back, and climbed in to the first car, the officer's car by the aged gilding.
The inside was a mess, the stallion passing through the empty doorway, the door itself lying splintered against a wall. Pegasi. They probably hadn't even been thinking of decapitating the leadership, just wanting the glory of facing higher ranking enemies. The windows were shattered too, shards of glass crunching under his steps. Pegasi had probably dived through those. Broken tables and cases were everywhere, slashes and gunshots dotting the walls. A shudder passed through him even as he bent down to rifle through the debris.
Nothing. Of course, even if the pegasi had left anything, an earth pony salvage crew would've gone through at least the officer's car by now. Perhaps he'd have better luck in the soldier's cars. More shattered doors allowed his entry, and after passing through an intervening heating car filled with boilers to warm the whole train (a curious oddity, and a sure sign of the train's age if there ever was any), the stallion walked into a far less decorated car.
Devastation, but of a more organized kind. A makeshift barricade was piled high in the middle of the car, spent cartridges surrounding it, broken rifles of an older, more advanced type propped on the thing. Scattered on the floor were bits of bone and blade.
With a flash of dull inspiration, the stallion considered the destruction around him, realizing he'd be lucky to find anything besides wreckage in the cars ahead. He reached down, snatching a splintered board off the ground and gripping it in his teeth, and began smashing the barricade. When a few solid blows only shattered some ice off, he took to prying out debris. His board was broken and replaced many times, but in only a few minutes, five decent-looking boxes and cases were laid out to the side, freed from the barricade.
He easily smashed the brittle walls of wood and cloth with a hoof, and counted out his findings. Ammunition, sleek and finely made compared to the crudely machined cartridges in his pack. Too bad they didn't fit his rifle.
More pleasingly, packets of rations tumbled out. Many were long rotted away, but some of the hardier stuff, bulk rice and wheat, had survived. Products of the past, certainly, modified to be resistant to the most extreme environments.
The scientists probably didn't think those environments would include the Confederacy itself.
No, this food was from a time when ponies had traveled across oceans to fight for relics, ways to win the war. Cities and armies had been obliterated, ancient evils unleashed, but ponies had still endured and outlived it all. For what that was worth.
The stallion shook his head vigorously, shaken by how far his mind had wandered at the sight of packaged rice and wheat. He hurriedly stuffed all he could into the pack, weeks worth of food at a quick estimation. So long as he didn't abruptly freeze, he could travel very far east indeed! Maybe even make it to the coast . . .
The coast. Abandoned for a century, apparently frozen by the cold sea storms. Confederacy guns could keep pegasi from inflaming the weather unduly, but they could nothing to stop the natural storms. The coast would be an fantastic thing to see, and all the places along the way he could explore . . !
He would travel far with this food, and see much.
Yet hope did not warm his chest.
The stallion made his way out of the train, resolving to eat after he'd looked over that arrangement of stones further down the tracks. If he didn't know better, they looked like gravestones; though certainly not of the style of earth ponies.
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria...
Hatred and grief poisoned the land. Ever since their leaders had perished in the initial discovery of Equestria, the three Pony tribes had lived in unrelenting suspicion, and most of the time, war. Ignoring the terrible cold, they forged independent nations nigh-dedicated to the destruction of the others. In the south sprawled the vast Earth Confederacy, staining the skies with their industry and renting the ground with mines. The Pegasi formed a great Empire that dotted the mountains of the land, after having been driven from their cloud-cities once the Confederacy had developed their gunpowder weapons sufficiently; and finally, near the coasts of the North, Unicornia glistened in tarnished glory.
War and division lasted for centuries, spears and swords giving way to guns and machines. Each side developed ever more fantastic technologies, tactics, and spells to break the deadlock; generations of ponies were sent into the maelstrom of combat. Each passing year and each fresh campaign promised to win the war. Towering Confederacy Titans crushed armies beneath their hooves, Empire Airships scoured the ground below with a torrent of bombs, and advanced Unicornia war-spells allowed a fortunate few the power to blow away mountains. Either way, the war's seemed ever the more imminent.
Yet this is not that story. The War did not end.
The Titans fell, the Airships burnt, and the unicorns drained the very land of its magic with overuse. Resource scarcity had come and went man years ago; Earth ponies reopened empty mines and scoured them for traces, the Pegasi fell back on the older , simpler ways, and the Unicorns dabbled in increasingly dark arts. The Titans and Airships and overcharged spells were only notes in history now, or twisted wrecks dotting the lands. In the Confederacy, small "tanks" with poor quality parts were the vehicles of choice now, and the armored battlesuits were replaced by gaunt ponies with steel helmets. The Empire became obsessed with the warrior culture and the art of the blade, and the Unicorns devastated themselves trying to recreate past magical triumphs. Yet the hatred endured, and worsened.
And so has the winter.
Equestria is depleted, a broken husk. The environment is ruined, the temperatures are falling, the land is hopelessly divided, and there are increasing shortages of everything. Food, iron, ponies. Centuries of war have left few to suffer through these final days.
They used to say we would inevitably triumph over our enemies. Now they say we will surely outlive the others.
