Life in the Wasteland

Chapters

Chapter 1: The Encounter
Chapter 2: The Weight of the Past
Chapter 3: Discovery
Chapter 4: Progress
Chapter -1: Original Unedited Contest Version
Chapter 5: The Weight of the Future

Chapter 1: The Encounter

We were five days outside of Equestria and faint, unfamiliar sounds rose and fell beneath the ever-present wind, putting us all on edge.

The rustling and scraping noises had accompanied our march for an hour when the creatures burst from the dead gray earth of the Wasteland. Sinkholes collapsed in the blink of an eye, becoming the open mouths of lightless tunnels from which swarmed the things, glossy black and chitinous. Their carapaces were ridged with spikes and black as nightmare. Their eyes were blue, without pupil or white, and they gave off no reflection from the wan sunlight.

The earth continued to vomit forth the black things, dozens upon dozens rising all around us. Their chitin scraped against itself as they moved, creating the noise we’d been hearing. My stomach lurched as I realized we were at least an hour inside their territory. They encircled us about ten feet away and at least three deep, forming an undisciplined perimeter to box us in. I was shoved roughly, Hook’s normally gentle hoof now stiff with fear. I lost my footing and tumbled to the gray, gravelly earth. My packs cushioned my fall and I rolled and bounded up to find myself surrounded on all sides by a dozen tails. My comrades had surrounded me in a protective ring. Standard doctrine when under attack, but it always made me feel both helpless and useless. But I had no way to fight Wasteland creatures. They weren’t sheep I could herd. So I swallowed my frustration, because being angry at the truth is a losing proposition.

To my right, Hook’s red tail swished uncertainly, but his head was down and his muscles bunched and ready. “You OK, Shepherd?”

“I’m fine, just a bit mussed,” I said dryly. Hook flashed a grin before turning his attention back to the creatures. His tail was still and focused. Good. He had to survive to get back to his family, so he needed every bit of focus.

The rustling of chitin faded to silence, leaving only the wind. Seconds passed. The skin of Bluebelle’s neck twitched as though she were shaking off a fly. She whispered, “Why aren’t they attacking?”

Sarge’s normal speaking voice was a bellow, so his version of a whisper still made my chest vibrate. “Just be ready.”

Doc was the only member of the squad who seemed unafraid. She always was too smart to have any sense. But all things considered, that was probably normal for a magical researcher. That whole crowd seemed too smart to have any sense.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Doc’s head thrust eagerly forward, her eyes darting from one creature to the next. “They are remarkably equinoid,” she said, and I winced at her conversational volume. “There have been no reports of equinoid Wasteland fauna. Perhaps these are Equestrians who were lucky enough to be adapted to the Wasteland by the storms rather than twisted by them?” She paused, thoughtfully. “Sarge, may I attempt to communicate with them?”

He paused for a beat, but if he was surprised it didn’t show in his voice. “Go ahead. Don’t see how it could make the situation worse.”

Doc nodded primly. She raised her head. “We do not wish to harm you.” As she spoke, she swiveled her head, looking for any sign of comprehension. “We only want to pass through your land. May we speak to your leader?”

The chitinous rustle rose again as the creatures parted to let one through. The new creature was formed of the same segmented black chitin as the others, but it was smoother, lacking most of the spikes and spines of its cohorts. It was also smaller, though its sure steps made it seem no less dangerous. Its eyes were the same unrelieved blue, but the thing’s head swept from side to side, pointing them at each of us in turn. I shivered as it looked at me, scared by the alienness of its gaze. It opened its mouth, revealing upper and lower interlocking fangs each the size of my hoof. It hissed, the sound underlaid with a wet gurgling like a poorly-maintained steam pipe. On its back, two slabs of chitin rattled against each other. The rattling and hissing continued for several seconds, then the creature fell silent, standing in a way that seemed expectant.

In the silence, I heard Doc murmur, “Wing covers.” A lump of fear grew heavy in my stomach. I looked sharply at the creatures, revising upward my estimate of the danger they posed. Not all of them seemed to have wing covers, so that was something at least. Doc spoke to the smooth creature. “I don’t understand your language. I’m sorry.” She touched a hoof to her chest. “Doc,” she said clearly, then tilted her head, inviting the creature to respond.

The creature hissed a single syllable. That was proof enough of its intelligence to me. You can’t cuss without a language. I relaxed the tiniest bit. Maybe this really would work out.

Turns out, just because I can cuss doesn’t mean I’m not an idiot.

The creature… shimmered is the only way I could think of it. A wave of energy started at its head and flashed down to its hoof-parts, and in its wake, the creature was changed. I heard gasps around me as the squad saw it. The thing had become an exact double of Doc, even down to the corner of her mouth that was always turned up.

The fake Doc narrowed its brown eyes at us and said, “You understand now. You surrender.”

I stifled a curse, hardly hearing my squadmates’ surprise. The thing could talk, alright. Seventy-some years of Wasteland exploration, and nobody had ever encountered a creature that could speak. At least, they hadn’t made it back with the story.

Doc didn’t seem surprised. She just looked offended, though I wasn’t sure if that was because of its demand or because it was using her voice to speak so poorly. She narrowed her brown eyes right back at the creature. “We wish to pass in peace. There is no need for us to fight.”

Fake Doc’s voice was mocking. “‘We not wish to harm you.’ We wish feed on you. More useful than dead. Surrender.”

Doc sighed and shook her head sadly. “Such a wasted opportunity.”

The fake Doc opened its mouth and shrieked a hiss. Some of the other creatures flared their wings in response, startlingly blue against their blackness and pockmarked as though by disease. The creatures tensed, ready to pounce. The familiar tingle started in my spine as the unicorns surrounding me tapped their magic, preparing for combat.

“Hook,” Sarge said, his voice calm and steady, “push.”

* * *

Two hundred years ago, the End destroyed the world. Ten miles of Equestria had survived, protected by our princesses and the Shield their combined power made possible. Thousands of soldiers, researchers, civilians, and prisoners of war were inside the Shield when it went up. When it came down a hundred years later, the survivors and their children learned that the rest of the world had been transformed into the Wasteland. The slowly-starving Equestrian population was trapped by the dead, unfarmable terrain and the predatory creatures which roamed it.

The best scientific minds in Equestria had survived inside the Shield, but they needed a decade to make the discoveries and develop the theories which described the packages of concentrated magic that became known as Seeds. Afterward, it took the Princesses only days to create the first Seed and fly with it into the Wasteland. And the Wasteland began receding, slowly, grudgingly. It fell back, inch by inch, giving Equestria land to restore into soil and plant with food.

The Princesses carried the Seeds for fifty years, until the distances were too great for them to return safely in a day, for the Wasteland at night was a terror and they knew Equestria could not afford to lose them. That was when the Princesses created the first squad, thirteen brave souls who ventured out to carry on the fight.

There are eight squads now. Someday, there will be more. And we are the ones who fight the Wasteland.

* * *

The unicorn called Hook was big and yellow, and so was the magic that had earned him his nickname. He grunted with effort as he released it. There must have been a hundred of the creatures surrounding the squad, and the air filled with meaty clattering as they were shoved away from us, slamming into each other and raising gray dust clouds as they slid tumbling across the dirt.

“Squad,” Sarge bellowed, “attack!”

Griz and Teacup flared their wings and leapt into the air. The unicorns closed ranks around me and opened fire. Each unicorn has a specialty, some kind of magic they have a natural talent for. Many of those specialties can be used to devastating effect in combat, as Equestria’s enemies had learned all too well in the war. I could pick out the feel of each of my comrades’ magics as they engaged the enemy.

Directly in front of me, Anvil and Glacier worked together with the easy coordination of long familiarity. My magic sense sweltered under long bursts of Anvil's blast-furnace fire magic, punctuated by soothing pops of Glacier's intense cold that felt like an ice cube down my spine. I was short for a stallion while Glacier was tall and Anvil was broad, so I couldn’t see past their combined bulk to observe how the combination was affecting the creatures. But I had no worries about its effectiveness—it had shattered creatures bigger than them in the past.

Feeling Doc’s magic always made me itch somewhere down deep in my brain. She wasn’t particularly powerful, but her control was exquisite. I felt most magic with my whole body, but Doc’s was so tightly focused that it was like a scalpel in my magic sense. Metaphorically, I mean. The literal magic scalpels were exclusively for enemies. She lunged forward like a fencer and I got a glimpse of three of the creatures which had regained their feet and begun to charge us. A sun-bright dot danced over them too quickly for my eye to follow, leaving afterimages on my retina. I blinked and the creatures disassembled, falling apart at the seams, their momentum scattering limbs and ichor in a streak on the ground.

They died silently. I realized that the battle was unfolding in silence apart from chitinous movement and the sounds of magic and effort from the unicorns around me. So many of the creatures and not a single noise of pain or rage. Only the one who had transformed had consciously made noise. Maybe the others couldn’t? I filed that thought away for my debriefing.

In the sullen red sky above us, our pegasus and griffon, Teacup and Griz battled with the flying contingent of the creatures. The creatures’ blue wings beat so fast they were just a blur, and they jinked through the air like dragonflies. Their maneuverability was astounding, but Teacup’s foal-like mass gave her the advantage. She darted and weaved, harrying the creatures into a loose pack as Griz coasted lazily above the dogfight. With the creatures gathered, Teacup got down to business. Her wings buzzed violently and she became a tiny purple streak, whirring around the creatures faster and faster until a midget tornado formed with the black things trapped inside. The winds spun them end-over-end and battered them against one another. Griz grinned and tucked into a dive, stooping toward the tornado with sharpened talons poised. She hit the storm at an angle, punching through the wall of wind near its top and emerging near the bottom an instant later, clutching a pair of bleeding enemies in her enviable grip. She released them, letting them fall limply to crunch against the hard dirt, and used her speed to pull up into a half-loop. She re-entered the tornado, her powerful wings letting her cut straight across its center this time, and again appeared holding two dead creatures. She shrieked in triumph, green ichor steaming on her talons.

The staccato pulsing of Sarge’s magic pulled my attention back to the ground battle. Our leader’s style wasn’t flashy or even particularly graceful. He used a simple attack spell, one that nearly any unicorn could cast without trouble. What made it his specialty was his speed. My magic sense ratcheted, like someone was flicking a hoof across a washboard in my spine, and I squinted against the brightness as at least a dozen arrow-like beams of light shot forth from Sarge’s horn to turn a couple of the creatures into Swiss cheese.

I glanced over my shoulder, checking on Hook. I couldn’t see past him, but the feel of his magic and the sight of one of the creatures tossed through the air like a rag doll assured me that he was doing fine.

“Down!” Reflexes drilled into my muscle memory threw me to the ground before I consciously recognized Griz’ voice. One of the creatures passed just over my back, its wings vibrating the air with a sound like a bumblebee the size of a wagon. I cautiously raised my head, wrinkling my nose at the acrid stench the creature had left behind. The rest of the squad had hit the dirt just as quickly as me, and over them I glimpsed one of the creatures trying to lose Griz. She lazed along fifty feet above it, letting her altitude advantage do the work for her. The griffon smirked down at her prey, obviously enjoying its increasingly desperate attempts to shake her off. I often thought she was more cat than bird, but Princesses know I wouldn’t let her hear me say that. The creature began climbing, trying to close the gap, and in a blink Griz was stooping toward it. Twenty sharpened talons and claws slammed into its hard black shell. She bore the thing down into the ground and the cracking of the creature’s anatomy was audible all the way over to me. Griz launched out of the cloud of dust back into the air.

The miniature tornado above us had disrupted the flow of the constant wind, so our own dust was dispersing slowly and was still drifting around the squad as we climbed back to our hooves. Losing track of the enemy can be deadly, so I spun in place looking for the creatures, trying to help by at least lending my eyes to the others. So it was that I happened to be looking at Boxer as the black shape lunged out of a thick clot of dust and carried the red stallion to the ground.

“Boxer!” I screamed. Thankfully, I felt his magic flare and heard the invisible blows landing on chitin, each as powerful as a two-hoofed buck but delivered faster than any pony could kick. Before anyone had time to react, Boxer was standing again, his attacker lying broken and still in the swirling dust.

Sarge watched him rise. “Sound off, soldier. You still in one piece?”

Boxer gave Sarge a firm nod before turning back to the battle and magically clobbering one of the creatures into the dirt.

Sarge nodded back, relief in his expression. “Good.”

Between the shifting bodies of my squadmates, I glimpsed the creature that had taken Doc’s form. It still looked like her, and its white coat stood out sharply amid the gray dirt and the black forms of its cohorts. It wasn’t fighting, but was hanging a healthy distance back and seemed to be observing, its alien gaze watching each of our fighters in turn. I didn’t like it one bit. The thing seemed to become aware that I was looking at it. It met my eyes and smiled, Doc’s lips parting to reveal a mouthful of fangs. I liked that even less.

“Sarge, that one’s watching us. Could be carrying intel back to whatever sort of ruler these things have.”

Sarge glanced over and frowned at the Doc-creature. He looked up, considering. “Boxer, Hook, you two keep the rest of the flying ones off of our backs.” His voice became a shout. “Teacup! Griz! Get that one!”

They followed his hoof and abandoned their current opponents, zooming toward their new target. I had the satisfaction of seeing the creature’s face fall, but it didn’t hesitate. It opened its mouth and hissed loud and sharp, then dove into the ground so easily it could have been water.. Teacup and Griz poured on speed, but it was hopeless. The dirt where it disappeared roiled and shifted for a moment, then went still.

The remaining creatures’ heads went up sharply at the hiss, then they retreated in a rush to the gaping mouths of the sinkholes they had emerged from, swarming back down into the darkness of the tunnels. The squad killed a few as they fled, but most made it to safety. The sinkholes filled in as quickly as they’d opened, and after a few seconds of shifting dirt, there was no sign that they’d existed. All that was left on the battlefield was dozens of chitinous corpses and thirteen stunned Equestrians.

Boxer let out a gurgling sigh and fell down hard.

Doc was at Boxer’s side in the space of three heartbeats, but even as fast as she moved, she had to shove Bluebelle off of Boxer’s still form. “Boxer!” Doc said urgently. “Can you hear me?” She bent close without waiting for a reply, listening for breath. Whatever she heard—or didn’t hear—made her frown. She gathered magic and trickled it out, gently turning Boxer over while holding his head steady.

Her grip was only on his head and neck, so he rolled in an undignified, limb-splaying heap.

Bluebelle stifled a sob. Despite growing up in the same shantytown, she and Boxer hadn’t known each other until they enlisted. Their common history had made them thick as thieves. Whether it had blossomed into love, I didn’t know.

I searched her face, and had to look away. Now I knew.

Looking down at Boxer, Doc shook her head with an even darker frown. I peered over her shoulder and cringed. Boxer’s throat was torn in a ragged gash that ran from chin to collarbone. The ground where he had fallen was a puddle of bloody mud. His red coat had hidden the blood after being attacked, and his pride must have made him keep fighting even as he choked and bled out. Doc peeled back his lip, checking his gums. They were white as bone. She slumped back onto her haunches.

Bluebelle stared at her, her eyes wide and terrified. A distant part of my brain observed that I’d never seen her visibly afraid before. “What are you doing? Save him!”

Doc looked at her levelly, sympathetically. “It’s too late. I might not have been able to save him even immediately after the injury. He just lost blood too fast. It’s amazing that he’s still conscious.” She looked away. “If you have anything you want to say to him, now is your last chance.” She hauled herself up, looking decades older, and addressed the rest of us. “Give her privacy.”

Sarge nodded. “Form a perimeter. Those things might come back.” He turned toward Boxer, his face and posture both rigidly controlled, and snapped his hoof to his heart in a precise salute. The rest of us, all except Bluebelle, joined him.

Boxer’s eyes were already growing dull, but he smiled faintly and his hoof twitched toward his heart.

Sarge spun on his heels and marched stiffly away out of earshot. As the rest of us spread out, I saw him wiping his eyes. Maybe I only imagined it.

Bluebelle sat close by Boxer, holding his hoof in both of hers. Whatever words were said between them, I didn’t hear. I could only hope that those few moments were enough for them. Knowing that they weren’t. My mind was curiously blank as I stood waiting for Boxer to die. Our vigil passed in silence, the only sound the wind scratching against the dirt. Three short minutes later, Bluebelle’s keening drifted across the wind. My shoulders slumped. It was over. It was only then that I cried.

“Doc?” Bluebelle’s voice was thick with grief, but steady. Doc left the perimeter and went to her, bending down to exchange inaudible words. I wiped my eyes clear and watched. They conferred for a moment, then Doc recoiled, shaking her head. Bluebelle gestured firmly and pointed at Boxer’s body. Doc looked at her, doubt in every line of her posture. Bluebelle nodded once. Slowly, Doc nodded back. Her horn glowed for just the blink of an eye.

Doc turned, seeming dazed. “Anvil,” she called. “We need your help.” Behind her, Bluebelle gathered something up, wrapping it in bandages and stowing it in one of her packs.

As though Doc’s call had been a signal, the rest of us slowly returned to the body. Boxer’s eyes were closed. His face was peaceful. Maybe it’s naive of me, but it looked like he died happy. However, something seemed off about him, though I couldn’t put my hoof on it.

The other unicorns arrived after I did, and each of them recoiled immediately, just as Doc had. I blinked in puzzlement, and as though that had cleared my vision, I saw it: Boxer’s horn was gone, amputated neatly at its base. My earth pony eyes hadn’t immediately noticed the lack. I looked at Bluebelle, and she met my gaze defiantly with eyes still wet with tears. Around me, the other unicorns shifted awkwardly. I was missing something, that was clear.

Whatever was going on, Anvil decided to ignore it. “What do you need, Doc?”

“Burn Boxer’s body.”

Anvil balked. “What?” I was just as surprised. Standard doctrine was to bury soldiers who fell in the Wasteland, or build a cairn if the ground was too hard for burial. Equestrians always returned to the earth. That was simply a given.

“We can’t leave him here for those things. They are obviously intelligent. We can’t afford to let them learn anything from his body.”

Hook shouldered in. “We can carry him, take him someplace else, bury him there.”

Sarge cut Doc’s reply off with a gesture. “We all heard those things before we saw ‘em. You know as well as I do that we’re an hour inside their territory and we’ve got Princesses know how much further to go before we’re clear. You saw how fast they appeared. This time they wanted to capture us. If they change their mind next time, whoever’s carrying Boxer might be too slow. One casualty is plenty.” He paused. Hook nodded, plainly not pleased but bowing to the cold logic of what Sarge was saying. He knew as well as any of us that we couldn’t return to Equestria until the mission was complete. There were only eight Wasteland squads, and the missions had to be accomplished. If we went home, we’d just have to come back to try again later, and by then, these creatures could be prepared for us. Sarge looked around, searching for other objections. There were none, though no one would meet his eyes. “Anvil. Do it.”

We stepped back as Anvil concentrated, preparing his flames. To my magic sense, it was like the sun was beating down on my skin from the inside. When he released the built-up power and the fire leapt forth like an eager beast, the merely physical heat was a relief. When a unicorn cast a spell, they first gathered raw magic in their body, then channeled it through their horn, which allowed them to shape the raw magic into the specific effect they wanted. My extra sense could only feel the raw magic, not fully-shaped spells. But that ability was a big part of why a helpless earth pony like me was in the squad in the first place.

I worried that I would be able to smell Boxer burning. I wasn’t sure if I could handle that. But Anvil’s fire burned white-hot and blinding, eradicating even the particles that would have carried scent. Anvil maintained the flames for a full minute before cutting them off, stumbling slightly as he did so. “It’s done,” he panted. Glacier hurried to his side and he leaned on her with a grateful look.

I steeled myself to look at Boxer, but I needn’t have worried. He was gone. Only a charred piece of ground and a thin pile of gray ash remained of our comrade, and the endless wind was already beginning to carry him away.

Sarge nodded, his chin jerking up and down like a puppet. “Let’s get out of here. Double time, march!” He set off, moving fast in the direction we’d been traveling before the attack.

Within a mile, the underground rustling and scraping joined our march. I tensed up hard, as though there were already fangs closing on my throat. Glancing at the formation ahead and behind, it didn’t look like I was alone in that reaction. We marched in silence, our usual trail banter as dead as the Wasteland’s soil.

Author's Note

Thanks to several of my friends for beta reading this story. First and foremost is Fedora Mask, whose discerning eye and literary savviness were a great help in improving various and sundry details as well as the overall flow of the story. It's a far better piece than it was before he gnawed on it.
Kyronea got first crack at it, and she had wise things to say about portions of the story where my head was slightly too far up my fundament.
Arcainum contributed that ineffable sense of British class that's so important to a good story, as well as a lingering scent of digestive biscuits that honestly I could do without. He also pointed out a serious structural issue that I hastily corrected, thereby allowing me to maintain my ruse as a competent writer for a precious while longer.

Chapter 2: The Weight of the Past

The subterranean rustling finally faded behind us after three hours of marching. I unclenched just a bit, and thankfully the fearful acid roiling in my stomach settled down a little too. Sarge didn’t acknowledge the change, but relentlessly continued marching. The red sky was deepening toward nightfall as Princess Celestia’s sun approached the horizon. The old sun rode higher in the sky, but it was a mere pinprick that barely outshone the brightest stars. I glanced questioningly at Sarge, and saw others doing the same. The Wasteland at night held dangers no squad wanted to be exposed to.

After an hour, the creatures’ noise had failed to resume. With the sun a mere sliver between two hills, we came upon a tiny, brackish pool of filthy water and Sarge called a halt at last. The squad rushed into action, hurrying to make camp before full dark was upon us.

I released the buckle at my navel and allowed my saddlepack to slide off my back. It landed with a dull thump and a puff of dust, followed by two more as I let my saddlebags fall next to it. The gathering chill in the air felt wonderful on my sweaty coat, but I didn’t stop to enjoy it with the growing dark like a weight on my back. I rolled the saddlepack over and untied it. I flipped its big oiled flap out of the way and unfolded the pack like a flower, thick canvas petals lined with pockets and compartments containing all the tools and implements necessary to survive for up to a month in the Wasteland.

As quickly as I could without damaging anything, I dug into one of the deepest and most protected parts of the pack and retrieved an object that could have done double duty as a mace. A lightweight silvery haft the length of my arm was topped with a hoof-sized sphere of unpolished gray metal. Holding the haft just so, I gave it a twist and a pull. The spring-loaded haft extended with a decisive series of clicks, shooting out to three times its original length and unfolding a stout tripod. I looked around the site for a good spot to place it, then planted it on a small rise on the windward side of the camp. “Glowstick ready,” I announced formally as I stepped back.

Sarge didn’t look up from his unpacking. “Glacier. Doc.”

The two unicorns nodded and concentrated on the glowstick’s metal orb. It began to glow, a barely perceptible red at first, but within seconds it gave off a brilliant white light, too bright to look at directly, like a piece of the sun right here in camp. The nocturnal creatures of the Wasteland didn’t want anything to do with sunlight, and the glowstick’s light was similar enough to fool them, so they stayed away. Usually. A single unicorn could power it, but regulations required two unicorns at all times, just in case. Sarge had chosen Glacier and Doc to take the first shift because they had used less of their magic stores in the fight than the others, so they had more left to feed the glowstick with. Once the glowstick was at full brightness, they turned back to their bags, resuming the work of unpacking with their horns still lit.

The glowstick always felt odd to me. It was holding a magical charge, so it pinged my magic sense, but its light came from magic leaking out of the specially-treated metal rather than from any specific spell being cast. It was a strange feeling, anticipatory and a little nerve-wracking, like hearing someone inhale continuously without ever exhaling. Also the magic inside it came from two different sources, which was a whole other layer of oddness—my magic sense was telling me that a new unicorn had appeared in the camp and was gathering magic for a very impressive spell. I had spent years around glowsticks, so all the weirdness was easy to shrug off, but on my first mission I had hardly slept at all because of it.

I returned to my bags, unrolling my sleeping bag and setting up my tiny tent over it with practiced ease. Our ‘tents’ were hardly more than canvas windbreaks, but that was good enough for me. Facefuls of abrasive Wasteland dust didn’t make for restful sleep.

The sun dipped below the hills and the Wasteland night fell like a curtain. Within minutes, eerie grunting and whistling carried through the chilly air, the sounds of nocturnal things waking to the hunt. Eerie, but reassuring. The truly dangerous creatures were the silent ones.

Hook sat back on his haunches, his home away from home all set up with his usual speed. Anvil nodded at him, beckoning, and Hook heaved himself up and followed Anvil down to the brackish pool. Gathering water was a one-pony job, but it was unwise to go anywhere alone, even a short distance away. They returned a few minutes later, levitating the water blanket between them, sagging full of water. We had collapsible cookpots in our gear, but the tightly-woven blanket was more efficient for large quantities. It had been two days since we had last found water, so a large quantity was what we needed. Hook and Anvil hung the blanket on its tripod of metal legs, leaving an open space below the damp cloth. Anvil applied a gentle flame all around the blanket, slowly heating the water inside toward boiling.

In the meantime, I pulled aside a flap deep in the guts of my pack, revealing a pair of reinforced pockets securely tied with complex knots. Out of habit, I touched the pockets, reassuring myself that their precious contents hadn’t vanished since last night. Then I bent and lipped the knots apart on one of the pockets. I reached in and felt the warmth of the Seed. As I brought it out, it glowed with a warm internal light. I held it for a moment in my hooves, staring deeply into it. Shining green motes swam beneath its translucent skin, vital and dancing playfully. The two Equestria Seeds I carried were my responsibility, and were the reason my squadmates would die to protect someone as helpless as me. I forced that thought out of my head and concentrated on the feel of the Seed. It was packed with magic, groaning with it, full to bursting with it, but something about the Seeds made them invisible to my senses until I touched them. I loved touching them. The magic contained inside was Equestria, pure magic tapped from our tiny patch of untainted earth and crystallized into a physical thing by the Princesses. Holding it felt like home, like sheepfolds and farmland and neighbors in the shantytown that huddled around the castle and warm memories of foalhood: my family in our tiny brick shack telling stories around the crackling oven about heroes, and villains, and the brilliant and ashen past. I was conscious of the Seed’s magic flowing into me, sating a deep cellular hunger.

For a few moments, I was able to forget the Wasteland. I forgot the constant sense of danger, forgot the cold night and the gritty dead earth under my hooves, and forgot the too-recent pain of losing Boxer.

I blinked, and the spell was broken. I wiped my eyes with a filthy hoof as it all came rushing back.

I felt a touch on my shoulder. It was Hook, smiling at me with sympathy in his eyes. “You OK, Shepherd?”

He was the one member of the squad who understood some of what the Seed meant to me, learned in years of quiet conversations on the march or standing watch. I smiled back and nodded. “I’m OK. It’s just… it was a bad day.”

He pressed his hoof more firmly into my shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

I cleared my throat, grating myself fully back into the cold, dirty moment, and called quietly across the camp. “Sarge, the Seed is ready.”

A moment later, Sarge trotted over and accepted the Seed from me. He sat on his haunches and closed his eyes, holding the Seed to his chest. Hook and I left him alone with it. From experience, I guessed that it would take him about thirty minutes to recharge.

Before the War, before the End, the planet had practically thrummed with magic. The raw energy of the earth had flowed hither and yon in ley lines, allowing magical creatures like us to draw on it almost anywhere. Wherever ley lines had crossed, the earth’s power burst forth like a fountain. The mightiest of magics could be cast by drawing on those intersections, and the capitals of each nation were built atop them. But the War had broken the world. The unfathomable energies released in the End had wiped out hundreds of nations, but the spells had been too strong to simply fade away afterwards. Instead they had combined in unpredictable ways, perverting into world-spanning storms of uncontrolled wild magic. The wild magic storms had corrupted the planet, reshaping land, sea, and sky into hostile alien landscapes, and transforming living things into new and monstrous forms: the Wasteland.

No one knew if it was the End or the storms that had destroyed the ley lines. But they were gone, leaving behind only skeletal traces of their former power hiding deep beneath the earth. Without the lines, magical creatures would starve and die—our bodies required magic as surely as they required food. Most kinds of magical creatures had a natural store of magic that let us subsist for a while even away from ley lines, but squads like ours spent far too long in the Wasteland to survive on our innate reserves. The Princesses had created the Seeds for another purpose, but our bodies could feed on their stored magic as readily as they could from a natural ley line.

Each day, every member of the squad would hold the Seed until their stores were full. I could fully charge in moments, because I only had to replace what my body consumed to live. Griz and Teacup would each take around a quarter of an hour to charge, because Teacup’s flight and Griz’ strength were fueled by magic. Unicorns took the longest to charge, because they had larger capacities and because their spells drew from their bodies for energy. A battle would make that day’s recharge take considerably longer. The whole process usually took several hours, and was accommodated amongst watches and other camp duties.

I returned to my unpacking as Hook lounged nearby. I gathered my rations to be cooked and lined up my empty canteens to be scoured and refilled. Hook’s yellow face was uncharacteristically still as he watched me work. Finally, he glanced back at Sarge, or perhaps at the Seed glowing in his hooves, and said, “Strange, isn’t it?”

“Hm?” I replied, distracted by a whiff of mildew inside a canteen.

“So many lives on the line for such a small thing.”

I followed his gaze and frowned at that echo of my own earlier thoughts. “We’re not out here for the Seed. We’re here because of what the Seed means to Equestria.”

He shrugged a hoof dismissively. “Yeah, I know the big picture. I just wonder whether it’s big enough.”

“Saving the world sounds pretty big to me.” I injected a flippant note into my tone, hoping to make him smile.

He didn’t smile. “Is that what we’re doing, though? We—people just like us—destroyed the world two hundred years ago. The Wasteland is a new world, and now we’re destroying that one too. Maybe we should just let it be. Equestria is doing fine the way it is.”

The memory of the Seed was fresh in my mind, but his words clashed against those homesick green feelings, making them as gray as Boxer’s ashes. It made me angry. I turned on him, unsure whether it was him I was angry at, or myself for needing protection instead of being able to protect. “Listen, kid.” He tried to object, but weakly. I rarely brought up our age difference, and I could see in his eyes that he saw the anger in mine. “My parents were around before the War, and I learned about the old days from them. Equestria is not ‘doing fine.’ We’re cramped and hobbled and we’ve lost more than you can imagine. Art, science, magic. Gone, all gone. All we remember now is how to fight and how to survive. We need the world back so that we can stop falling before we hit bottom.”

“Yeah, but—”

I cut him off, unwilling or unable to stop. The words poured out of me, pushed up out of my gut by the old, scabbed-over nugget of self-hatred that Boxer’s death had made tender and raw. “I was barely old enough to remember the Shield coming down, but I sure remember what it was like before that. You should count yourself lucky that you don’t. Equestria was locked inside the Shield for a hundred years, a bunch of soldiers and their enemies crammed together with no room to breathe even before they started having kids. It’s a simple equation: a growing population and not enough farmland to feed them. Near the end, people were killing each other over bread crusts. My parents said the Princesses dropped the Shield not knowing whether the storms were still outside, because Equestria was going to die either way. We got lucky. Some people were relocated to the edge of the Wasteland, and we planted where their homes used to stand, and Equestria managed to cling to civilization for a few more years until the Seeds saved us. But now that the Princesses can’t use the Seeds anymore, it’s down to us. If we’re not out here risking ourselves, then there isn’t going to be any more new farmland, ever. And I remember the answer to that equation. I’ll die before I let you sentence Equestria to that horror again.”

I had been staring at him, keeping his gaze locked on me. It was only as I was coming down from my anger that I saw the pain on his face and understood the feelings behind what he had said, but all too late. I dropped my eyes, ashamed at myself for letting my frustration rule me like that. My cheeks burned, and I kicked myself mentally for adding to Hook’s hurts instead of pulling my weight. “Sorry,” I mumbled into the silence between us. “I’m scared too, Hook. Boxer shouldn’t have gone out like that, not to those things. But we’ll figure something out. We always do.”

I held my breath across the yawning gap of his silence until, finally, he nodded with his eyes downcast. “Apology accepted. And… I’m sorry too. I guess losing Boxer shook me up more than I realized. I’ve never seen anyone die to something that could talk.”

I shuffled closer and put an arm around his shoulders. I had to stretch to do it. “It’s OK. We’ve come up against scarier things before, and we beat them all, didn’t we? Remember those glass spiders?”

Hook’s chuckle sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well, but he rose to the distraction. “Those were nothing. Remember that acidic slime mold?”

I grinned. “Aw, that one wasn’t worth sneezing at… until it split up into all those little ones. I never knew slime mold could sprint.”

He grinned back for a moment before it flickered and died. His eyes were serious as they met mine. “Shepherd, what are we gonna do about those things?”

I remembered the fake Doc watching us fight with those intelligent eyes. I remembered its fang-filled smile. “I don’t know,” I replied honestly.

Chapter 3: Discovery

I had drawn third watch with Anvil and Sarge, so as I sipped a cup of hot broth to fight the chill, I had the small pleasure of hearing the Wasteland’s night sounds fade away as the unseen things in the dark hid from the oncoming dawn. Celestia’s sun peeped over the rolling flatlands to the east, throwing long shadows against the low hills to the west. I squinted at the sun as the glowstick faded out behind me, grateful for the connection to Equestria. Searching the horizon near Celestia’s sun, I was able to pick out the old sun, now scarcely more than another bright star. When I was a foal, it had been larger, perhaps half the size of Luna’s moon, and I had heard stories of the old days, when that tiny dot had been the one and only sun. The cataclysmic energies of the End had broken the sky as well as the earth—the moon had vanished and the sun grew dimmer and weaker year by year. Even the stars had come unstuck and began drifting across the sky, though some more quickly than others. After the Shield fell, the changes were all too obvious, or so my parents had told me. Finally the faded sun had become too weak to grow healthy crops, so Celestia and Luna had drawn upon the power below Equestria to create a new sun and a new moon to replace those the End had cost us. Each day, they moved the new bodies around the planet, giving us light even out here in the Wasteland. I liked it this way.

I took another sip of broth and caught a glint of light out of the corner of my eye. Anvil had gotten an acorn-sized chunk of crystal from somewhere and was levitating it, peering through it at the sun. It shattered the sunlight into fragments of rainbows and sparkling motes that danced over his broad head, shaggy mane, and delighted smile. I carefully surveyed my arc of watch territory, then let my curiosity take me to Anvil. “What’s that crystal?”

“A trinket I acquired from a friend. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I nodded. It was that. “Where did it come from?”

“Have you heard that the mountain near Equestria was reclaimed?”

My eyebrows went up. “I hadn’t. When was this?” The mountain was a craggy, conical spire that towered over both its neighbors and the Equestrian plains that the Shield had preserved. The mountain had not existed before the End, so it had been a subject of intense curiosity for decades.

“Just a few weeks ago. The Front finally covered it a while back, and an exploration team found it empty of creatures.” He lowered the crystal and beamed proudly at me, as though the reclamation of the mountain was entirely his doing. “Progress, Shepherd! We’re doing it!”

I couldn’t help but grin. Anvil was easy to like. A blacksmith by trade, he was bluff and straightforward. I allowed his words to dive down into that hidden place in my belly where I kept my anger, fear, and frustration. We’re doing it. It was a soothing balm for yesterday and so many yesterdays before it. “We are. Little by little. I take it your crystal came from the mountain?”

“Just so. It seems that there are natural caves in the guts of the mountain, miles and miles of them, the team said, and just filled with these lovely crystals. They hacked off a few to bring back for testing, and my friend secured a little souvenir for me, knowing my fondness for beautiful things. Look how it shines in the light.” The crystal moved in the air, levitating over to me. Anvil nodded at me, smiling. “Be careful, it’s heavier than it looks.”

As it approached, my magic sense tingled a faint, unfamiliar message. I frowned at the crystal in puzzlement and cautiously lifted a hoof to hold it. When I touched it, my eyes widened in shock. The crystal had magic inside it. I had almost not recognized that it held a charge, because it felt like nothing I had ever sensed. I hefted it, finding that it was so light that it seemed fragile. It had felt heavy to Anvil because he was having to use extra magic to levitate it, not realizing that the crystal was absorbing much of what he was touching it with.

Anvil tilted his head at me. “What is it, Shepherd?”

“This crystal stores magic.”

He blinked. “Like the Seed?”

“Like the Seed.” I turned that over in my head. The Princesses had to labor intensely to make a single Seed. What possibilities would become available with an abundant supply of natural magical storage? This deserved investigation. I set the crystal on the ground and stepped back. “Try charging it like the glowstick. But, uh, step back. In case it explodes or something.”

He looked at me curiously, but nodded. He backed up and concentrated. I found that after holding the crystal, I could recognize its signature more easily, but it was still very faint. I closed my eyes and focused on it, listening with my whole body.

Where the glowstick with its leaky magic felt like drawing in a breath but never exhaling, the crystal held tightly to the charge, feeling like prodigious lungs holding a breath in preparation for a mighty shout. Anvil continued to expend magic, and the crystal continued to drink it, its charge growing and growing more. It was deeply strange to me that the crystal wasn’t taking on Anvil’s signature when it was holding his magic. The feel of the magic inside was somehow clear and uncolored. Perhaps the crystal was returning the magic to a completely raw state? Such a phenomenon was entirely outside my experience. I knew Doc would be fascinated.

After a minute, I opened my eyes to stare at the crystal. The sensation I was receiving from it had not changed one iota. It continued to draw power as readily as ever, despite now holding a charge sufficient to cast a powerful spell. How much could it hold? I glanced up and met Anvil’s eyes, which looked just as surprised as I felt. “Give it more,” I whispered.

Wordlessly, he increased his flow. Anvil’s fire magic was, so I was told, the most basic of fire spells. His ability to manifest blast-furnace heat from such a commonplace spell came from his ability to gather spectacular quantities of magic to channel into the spell. In Equestria, he used his specialty magic in his blacksmithing. He had no need of a forge fire—he could heat metal hotter than any furnace. He channeled magic into the crystal like he was forging steel, and still the crystal devoured it. I felt the magic flowing through him, his vast buffer being filled and drained simultaneously as he pumped magic out of himself as fast as he could.

Ten minutes we stood like that, Anvil blowing and sweating from the strain, but with an iron-hard look of determination on his face. I glanced back and forth between him and the crystal, wondering which would break first. Then between one heartbeat and the next, the feeling of the crystal changed. It stopped accepting magic all at once, as sudden and decisive as an infant turning away from the teat. “Stop!” I cried.

Anvil stopped, but not before a blast of fire flashed up around the crystal. I flinched away from its heat and light, then whipped back, hoping the crystal had not been damaged. Flames danced on the ground, blocking sight, but I breathed a sigh of relief as I felt the crystal still humming with energy. More energy than I’d ever felt in one place aside from a Seed. It was eye-watering in its power. It must have been holding an entire day’s worth of magic.

At that thought I glanced up in fear. Anvil was looking down haughtily at the crystal, triumph on his face. As I watched, his knees wobbled and gave out, sending him unceremoniously to the ground. He rolled his eyes up to me. “I think I’ll be needing the Seed again,” he observed dryly.

An hour later, the squad was packed up and ready to march. Anvil had been recharged and Sarge had been belatedly filled in on why one of the watch had suddenly collapsed. He’d read us the riot act, but was somewhat mollified by Doc’s very vocal interest in the crystal. She had thoroughly interviewed Anvil and myself about our impromptu experiment, taking copious notes all the while.

When the interviews were completed, Doc shut the notebook with a flourish, pumped magic into her horn, and dissected a hapless rock. She picked up the crystal with a hoof, closing her eyes in concentration. She nodded. “It seems to refill one’s magical stores the same way a Seed does. Interesting.” She set it back down and thoughtfully added a note to her book. “That in itself will make these crystals useful. I wonder, though…” She glanced up, her eyes holding the girlish glee that was nowhere else on her face. "Shepherd, come here. Monitor the object for any change."

Sarge checked the position of the sun, his mouth set in an impatient line. “You’ve got ten minutes, Doc.” She gave no sign that she’d heard.

She might have been breathing a little faster as she leaned forward over the crystal. Perhaps her lips were parted in anticipation. Maybe I was only imagining it from her posture. I knew better than to ask anything about what she expected. She was in her element, and science was more important than talking. I hid a smile as I nodded agreement to her order and focused on the crystal.

I felt her gathering magic like a paper cut in my brain, and then there was a curious feeling. She was expending the accumulated magic, but in the merest trickle, so delicately she might have been painting with a single hair. I tried to ignore it and concentrated on the crystal. Occasionally it wiggled just enough to stir a few particles of dust into the air, but otherwise nothing happened. Doc began to sweat, droplets making their way down her furrowed brow. Minutes passed. I heard Hook’s big hooves shuffling impatiently behind me.

Then I found myself flat on my rump and blind as a bat. I realized that most of the squad was crying out in distress and surprise. I panicked for a dozen accelerated heartbeats, then realized that my vision was returning. I was just well and truly dazzled, not blind. I let my breath hiss out in relief. “Doc?”

Through the haze of my returning vision, I could see that Doc’s eyes were very wide and she was blinking rapidly. “Yes, Shepherd?”

“There was a change in the object.”

She frowned disapprovingly in my general direction. “Thank you, Shepherd.”

Thankfully, our vision didn’t seem permanently harmed by the intense light the crystal had given off, and while we were recovering, Sarge had stern words for Doc about testing potentially hazardous objects in the field. I’ll never know how she did it, but Doc convinced him that the crystal posed no potential danger now that she’d discovered what it could do. That reasoning seemed a bit flimsy to me, but I figured that Doc valued her hide about as much as experimenting with her new toy, and that meant there would be no explosions. Probably.

Soon enough, we could see again and were ready for the day’s march. Before giving the order, Sarge came to me. “What’s our heading, Shepherd?”

On a normal day, I would have had a heading ready for him, but Doc and the crystal had occupied my attention. I closed my eyes and stood still and silent, listening downwards with my magic sense. The rest of the squad cooperated by practically holding their breath. I felt it. Far below, deep in the earth. The ghost of magic, barely there, like a hoofprint covered in snow or the lingering smell of last week's dinner. It was the remains of a ley line, the bloodless veins of a dead world. I listened harder, taking in every meager bit of information it had to offer. Finally, I opened my eyes. “We're still atop it. It continues to the west, but begins curving to the north in the next few miles. I'll need to take regular soundings to ensure we stay on course.”

Sarge nodded, then set off westward at a steady pace. He called the order over his shoulder. “Squad, march!”

The day passed uneventfully. We followed the ley line through rising foothills that lay like a rough lake around the feet of cruelly steep mountains to the north of our course. Dusk found us encamped at the blunt peak of one of the hills. I drew first shift and the night was practically silent by Wasteland standards. It would have been peaceful too, if I hadn't overheard Doc and Sarge having a quiet, intense conversation about how best to fight or avoid the chitinous creatures.

When I finished my watch, my sleep was troubled by dreams of black spines and shining white fangs in a smiling mouth.

Chapter 4: Progress

Our seventh day in the Wasteland dawned clear and cold. Our modest altitude put us above the usual morning dust clouds that scudded along the ground, so the sunrise illuminated the empty red sky. It was something resembling beautiful. Everyone seemed to be feeling it. Our breakfast of broth and gruel even seemed more satisfying, seasoned by easy conversation. The ley line continued straight on to the west, and our march felt jaunty as we followed its lead. During our midday pause to dig our lunch of trail rations out of our bags, I read the ley line again, listening to the deep whispers of the dead earth, and what I felt made a smile burst out on my face. For just a moment, I allowed myself to think of home, my little house with its white plaster walls and the sheepfold outside with my flock calling for their food in the morning, and the golden sun rising behind the Princesses’ castle. I missed the peace and the green with a longing ache, as I always did when I was away. With a little luck, I’d be home again soon.

Hook noticed my expression and smiled too. “Found it, huh?”

I nodded quickly to him, but spoke to Sarge. “Sarge, I can feel an intersection. It’s around ten miles away.”

Quiet cheers went up from the squad, and Sarge’s craggy face relaxed into a smile. “Good work. Let’s move out!”

An eager pace brought us to the intersection well before dusk. It proved to lie in a tiny valley between two of the gently sloped foothills. The ley line we had been following led us straight into the valley, and the intersecting line ran off almost perpendicular to it. At least for this mission, X really did mark the spot.

I left my bags on the ground a safe distance away while I walked the intersection, getting a feel for it. Intersections were large places. Two small ley lines might make an intersection a few paces across. This one, at the confluence of two bigger lines, could have accommodated most of the squad standing nose-to-tail across its diameter. I circled it slowly, spiraling in toward the middle, feeling carefully for just the right spot. As I walked, using my hoofprints in the gray dirt to track my course, I tried to imagine what this place had been like before the War. Standing where I was, I would have been virtually immolated in magic, practically drowning in it. I wondered whether the hills and mountains had been formed by the storms, or whether houses and farms had straddled the valleys and climbed the slopes. I wondered who had lived here two centuries ago, when the world was whole. I wondered how they had died in the End.

Two yards north of the intersection’s geometric center, my hooves tingled. I stopped walking to probe more deeply. Dead ley lines weren’t entirely dead. There were innumerable, miniscule sparks along any stretch of line where the planet’s magic still glowed like embers buried in ash. Those embers were a big part of what let me feel the ley lines at all, but they were otherwise useless and meaningless – except where ley lines crossed.

I smiled, feeling exactly what I had been looking for. At that moment, I stood over two overlapping embers, one from each ley line. Their combined glow was more than an ember. It was smoldering punk, and any breath of air would coax it into flame. And I had carried a breath all the way here from Equestria.

I dug down into the dead earth with my hooves until I was knee-deep, then I stepped out of the hole and returned to my bags. The atmosphere around the squad sparked with excitement. This was the mission. We’d made it, and soon we would turn our steps toward home. Hook clapped me on the back as I unfolded my bag. Anvil and Glacier danced a jig together. Even Bluebelle looked happy.

First, I opened the pocket containing the Seed that fed us. I reached in and laid my hoof on it, letting it restore the energy I had consumed since last night. When I was full to the brim, I tied its pocket securely closed and opened the other pocket. Inside was the second Seed, fully charged with undiluted Equestria and set aside untouched until this very moment. The green motes under its skin were beacons, stars pulled from the sky, so bright I had to avert my eyes as I brought it out. It sloshed so full of the vital magic of the living planet that holding it was like wading through a rushing river of springtime, filled with the smell of new grass tickling my ankles and lengthening days spent peacefully grazing the sheep.

I carried the Seed to the shallow hole and placed it gently inside. I brushed the dirt back into the hole, covering the Seed. Then I concentrated.

Each squad included one earth pony. Earth ponies were all but helpless. We couldn’t defend ourselves or our squadmates against the creatures of the Wasteland. There were even some unicorns who had magic senses nearly as sensitive as mine. On the face of it, earth ponies were nothing but a liability in the Wasteland.

But each squad included one earth pony, because our magic is green.

I reached into the Seed, not with my senses but with my magic. I let the Seed’s magic flow into me and around me, putting all the power of Equestria at my command, and I had no need of a horn to shape it. I forged the spell with hooves that had walked through rows of growing green crops and with bones that had carried me over the good black earth that would one day hold me. I called to the Seed and it responded, filling my body with its eagerness to send down roots and grow up toward the sun. I smiled, and I let it.

Magic rushed out of me and into the ground like a silent explosion. I staggered from the loss and the joy of it, and where I had stood, a sapling thrust up out of the dead earth, its tiny leaves glistening silver with dew that had never fallen in the Wasteland. In a heartbeat, its thin branches were at my eye level. In another, they shaded me from high overhead, bright green leaves and strong branches supported by a trunk thick enough to hold up the sky. I touched its gnarled bark and felt through it to its roots, creaking and groaning as they spread wide to clutch the earth in an unbreakable grip. And most importantly, I felt its taproot, a limb formed more of magic than of wood. Its unknowable length plunged into the depths of the earth and pierced both ley lines’ embers, binding them together and breathing the magic of life through them.

Touching the tree, I felt the embers catch fire. It was a small fire, hardly noticeable, but the Wasteland couldn’t extinguish it. It would grow and spread, slowly at first, but inch by inch it would infect the Wasteland with the rejuvenated power of the earth. That power was anathema to the Wasteland, and its touch would transform the Wasteland into something else. It would not be what it was before the War, but it would be something my children’s children could call home. Someday, these ley lines would flow again with power.

I slumped against the trunk of the tree, exhausted and drained. Hook rushed over with the other Seed, pressing it to the back of my neck. replenishing the vast quantity of magic I had just spent. “Thanks,” I said weakly.

He just nodded and sat down next to me, holding the Seed in place as I recovered.

We made camp under the canopy of the tree. It would be years before the ley line flowed with enough magic to draw from, but we all felt happier being near a piece of Equestria. Besides which, the magic of the activated Seed was as hostile to Wasteland life as the lack of such magic was to Equestrians. The creatures would steer well clear of the tree. A night in a tree-camp was like a holiday for us. It was our reward for making it here.

With the glowstick casting merry shadows among the windblown leaves, we gathered for dinner. Sarge always smuggled a treat along in his bags for the night we accomplished our mission. This time, it was a little pot of honey and a hoof-sized round of hard old cheese. I drizzled honey over a biscuit of hardtack and shivered with pleasure at the taste. Anvil and Glacier laughingly toasted our success with slivers of cheese, and ate them looking into each other’s eyes. Hook teased them with catcalls, making Anvil blush and earning a smack on the arm from Glacier.

Doc mostly ignored the festival atmosphere, still immersed in fiddling with the magic-storing crystal. After her initial catastrophic success, she had learned to exert some degree of control over how much magic the crystal discharged at once. It struck me as a useless project, because the crystal’s discharges were only raw magic that simply flashed into light. Its function as a new kind of magic storage medium was much more interesting, I thought. I was already envisioning squads wearing bandoliers of charged crystals against their coats, holding enough magic to feed them during an entire mission without any need for lengthy sessions individually holding a Seed.

I looked away as the crystal flashed, blinking the dazzle out of my eyes as Doc grumbled under her breath. As my vision cleared, I noticed Bluebelle sitting by herself against the tree, partially hidden by the gentle curve of the immense trunk. I hesitated, then slipped away from the party and quietly went to join her. As I approached, I saw that she was holding Boxer’s horn. She had partially unwrapped the bandages from around it and was cradling it in her hooves, looking down at it with fathomless eyes. “Bluebelle? Mind if I join you?”

She flinched away, covering the horn with a spastic movement, but when she looked up and saw it was me, she relaxed. “I don’t mind if you don’t,” she said.

I eased myself down next to her. We sat in silence with our backs pressed to the rough bark. I didn’t look at Boxer’s horn. I knew anything I could say would be inadequate, so I waited for her to say it. Princess Luna’s moon glided over the hills, huge and full, casting gray shadows over the gray Wasteland. Its light made quicksilver of Bluebelle’s tears.

“He loved fighting, you know.” She looked at me as though making sure I was listening, as though I could be doing anything else. I met her eyes and she turned away. “He always knew he’d die in the Wasteland. He told me so. But he never seemed afraid of it. It was more like he looked forward to it, like it was something glorious instead of…” She choked. “Instead of dying where we couldn’t even bury him.”

I just nodded.

“Even at the very end, he wasn’t afraid.” She clutched the horn tighter. “He was angry. Because he couldn’t keep fighting. He whispered it to me.” A tear dropped into her lap as she turned to face me. Her eyes were pleading. “He was so much braver than I am. Why does that make me hate him?”

“You’re no coward,” I told her. “I’ve seen you fight just as hard as Boxer ever did. You were his equal in every way, except one.” She held her breath, hopeful and yet fearful, unsure what I would say next. “To you, death isn’t glorious.”

Her held breath hissed out in a sigh and her eyes fell to the horn. Slowly, she nodded. “He’s just… gone. There’s no reason for it, no justification. He can’t wear the medals the Princesses will award him when we get back.” She snuffled and wiped her nose roughly with the back of a dirty hoof. “And we’re gonna have to fight those things again, and now I have to fight hard enough for me and him. He’s a stupid fool for dying and making me do that.” She laughed like sobbing.

I nodded in agreement, and smiled wryly, and stayed by her. It was the only form of repayment I could make.

The moon hung high above the hills when Bluebelle spoke again. “Shepherd, would you bury Boxer for me?”

“Of course,” I murmured.

“Here, under the tree,” she said, looking around. “He wanted to be buried in the Wasteland, but if he’s here it’s like being buried in both the Wasteland and in Equestria, don’t you think?”

“I think that’s true.”

She swallowed hard, but her voice remained steady as she held the horn out to me, still partially wrapped in its bloodless bandages. “I want you to do it because you’ll find just the right spot for him. That’s what you do.”

I accepted the horn and carefully wrapped it back up. “Do you want to be there?” I asked gently.

She shook her head. “Show me where when it’s done.”

I nodded and quietly left to look for just the right spot.

I had a good idea of where Boxer should rest. There was a place I had noticed earlier, a lee between two of the tree’s roots, facing the wind and the mouth of the valley, where he could stand eternal guard.

I circled the tree’s huge trunk, stepping carefully over roots and stones as I went. My path took me through the camp, which had grown quiet in my time with Bluebelle. Everyone seemed to be either asleep or casually conversing as they stood a practically-ceremonial watch. Everyone except Doc.

Even as filthy as she was after an unwashed week in the Wasteland, Doc’s white coat shone in the light of the glowstick. She was burning the midnight oil, still hunched over the chunk of crystal. As I stepped over a root immediately behind her tent, the crystal let out a burst of light and my magic sense jolted as the horn jumped off of my hoof.

I froze in shock, blinking down at it. After a moment I gathered my courage and picked the wrapped horn up, holding it at arm's length. I twisted it around, inspecting it from all angles, uncertain about what I might find. The bandages at the tip end of the horn were torn in a ragged hole, as though something had burst through them. I stood staring at the horn for a long moment while pieces of the puzzle clicked together in my head.

I gasped aloud. My heart thundered as I hurried back to Bluebelle.

“What?” Bluebelle said, looking poleaxed.

“I think there is a way for Boxer to keep fighting,” I repeated, holding his horn up between us. “But it’s your call whether I reveal it to the rest of the squad.” I fell silent, waiting, unable to guess what her answer would be.

She sat perfectly still with her gaze turned inward. The moment stretched.

Finally she nodded. “He would have liked nothing more.”

I tried not to let my relief be too obvious. We would need every possible advantage to meet the danger posed by those too-intelligent creatures. Now I just had to hope that I wasn’t barking up the wrong tree.

“What?” Doc said, looking suspicious.

Sarge only grunted in agreement.

I jabbed Boxer’s horn at them eagerly. The two unicorns flinched away. “An amputated horn still works. Boxer’s can still shape his spell.”

Doc straightened, seeming to get her bearings. She shook her head dismissively. “There’s no evidence for such an outrageous and perverse claim, but even if there were, so what? Without a living body to supply raw magic to the horn…” She trailed off, slowly following the line of my pointing hoof. Her eyes found the crystal. “You can’t mean…” She trailed off into silence. I was prepared to argue further, but noticed the faraway look in her eyes just in time and clapped my mouth closed, allowing her to talk herself into it. “The bursts are raw magic, it’s true, but they’re undirected— perhaps a Lodestar manifold? Yes, that could work… and a shaped crystal to enhance the effect? Though that will have to wait for better facilities.” She continued muttering to herself as she wrenched open her notebook and began scrawling furiously.

I looked at Sarge. He shrugged, torn between resignation and wry amusement. “If Doc’s OK with trying it, I’m OK with trying it. Good thinking, Shepherd.”

We remained camped at the tree for another day as Doc cannibalized every spare piece of metal in our equipment, using Anvil and Glacier mercilessly to heat and cool the metal with their magic, mangling and reshaping it into a seemingly endless series of enclosures and rigs, flanges and curlicues. I had no idea what any of it did, but Doc knew her business. I didn’t doubt her.

I was by my tent, allowing my mind to wander as I cleaned my remaining gear for the hundredth time, when my reverie was broken by Doc’s voice calling me. I stood, a little stiffly from laying in one place for so long, and went around the tree trunk to where Doc’s improvised foundry had been set up to keep the heat and noise away from the rest of us.

Anvil and Glacier lay in the shade, looking exhausted. Even Sarge was a little ragged around the edges.

Doc, by contrast, seemed full of energy. She waved a hoof insistently. “Shepherd! Come come, we need to test it.”

“It?” I asked, my eyebrows tilting.

Doc grinned and stepped aside with a flourish, revealing a stubby metal object laying atop a spread piece of canvas.

“Oh.” I squinted, trying to make sense of the thing. “What is it?”

Doc rolled her eyes, but even my obviously staggering ignorance couldn’t dampen her enthusiasm. “Quite possibly the greatest leap forward in magical engineering in a thousand years! Even Coldfire’s hatpin didn’t have implications as far-reaching as this!”

“You don’t say?” I had never heard of Coldfire or their hatpin before.

“I do indeed! Why—” Sarge cleared his throat meaningfully, and Doc’s eyes darted to him. She visibly restrained herself. “Ahem. We’ve tested the device in isolation, but naturally it needs further testing, in a field setting. That’s where you come in, Shepherd.”

“Me?”

“Of course. It’s your weapon, after all.” Her horn glowed, levitating the object up to hover in front of me. She slowly rotated it so I could admire it from all angles.

From a distance it had merely been unimpressive. Up close, it was ugly. It was a short tube, about the diameter and half again the length of a unicorn’s horn. It was formed from a piece of metal that had been rolled and joined at the seam by a lumpy weld. A crude cap sealed off one end of the tube, but the other end gaped open. As Doc rotated it to reveal the opposite side, I felt a lump in my throat. A word had been etched into the metal: BOXER. Around the name, a roughly square section of the tube had been cut on three sides, like a flap.

“Like it?” Doc asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Boxer’s horn and the crystal are inside, as well as a magic-transferring circuit of my own design.” She paused for a moment to look self-satisfied. “The button here—” She indicated the square flap. “—closes the circuit and sends a shot of magic from the crystal into the horn, producing one of Boxer’s telekinetic bucks.”

“Now, let’s get you into the harness.” She tied the tube down under a flap of canvas attached to a crude bridle-like assembly made from lengths of rope and strips of blanket, then held it up for me to see. “It will hold the weapon next to your head, so you should be able to aim simply by looking at your target.”

The harness looked itchy, but I held still as she pulled it over my head, seating it around my muzzle and behind my neck. Not only was it itchy, the weapon made a strange weight on the right side of my face. I hoped I’d get used to it soon.

Doc stepped back, eyeing the harness critically. “The fit is alright. Try using it on the dirt over there.” She waved a hoof generally away from the camp.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, and reached up to my cheek. The button depressed silently, which surprised me for some reason. I felt magic jolt out of the crystal and through the horn, shockingly close and intense. A tiny crater thumped into existence a few yards away, tossing a plume of dust into the breeze. I gaped at it. “Huh.” It felt strange. Not the physical discomfort of the harness, but the possibility that I might not be helpless forever. “Huh,” I repeated.

It took me a while to get the hang of aiming the thing. The crude harness couldn’t hold it perfectly straight, so I had to compensate for its tendency to pull right as I pressed the button. Doc and Sarge helped by stacking rocks and making marks in the dirt for me to aim at as I fired over and over again. Boxer’s magic packed a punch, denting the ground into craters and shattering most rocks after a hit or two. I threw myself into the task and by the time dusk was rolling in, I’d progressed to shooting at thrown rocks. Doc’s horn glowed as she lobbed them as frequently as she could manage, while Sarge stood nearby, floating a steady stream of rocks to Doc to replace the ones I was turning into powder. I was just pleased that I was hitting more rocks than I was missing.

Finally, Doc called a halt. She wiped a thin sheen of sweat from her forehead, though I felt fine. She considered me appraisingly. “I hadn’t considered how much of an advantage mechanical magic would provide. Without the necessity of focusing and shaping the magic, the user suffers much lower levels of mental fatigue. Even unicorns would find devices like this useful.”

Sarge’s mouth twisted. “Maybe so, but having someone else’s horn like that… it’s not right.”

She frowned disapprovingly at him. “Such atavistic opinions have no place in scientific progress.”

He waved a hoof with a sigh. “I don’t have to like it to see the benefits. Shepherd here has been practicing for half a day and he’s already as combat-capable as unicorns who’ve spent decades honing their abilities. That’s a big deal, no matter how you slice it. This tech isn’t going away anytime soon. I’m just, yanno, expressing my reservations.”

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” I began slowly, feeling the words out as I said them, remembering Bluebelle under the tree and my flash of impotent anger at Hook. “While we’re alive and fighting, we matter. We’re working toward a future that’s better than the past. When we die, our part in that dies with us. Boxer is gone, but this—” I touched the weapon gently. “—means that he’s still able to work toward that future. It means his death wasn’t meaningless. That’s important, I think.”

Sarge looked at me for a long moment before walking toward the camp. He didn’t say anything, but he patted my shoulder as he passed by.

I chose to continue wearing the harness during dinner, hoping to get used to its awkward weight as soon as possible. I should have expected that it would be a topic of conversation, but luckily, Doc was more than happy to field all the questions about it. To her credit, she kept the boasting to a minimum.

As I ate, I thought about what I had said to Sarge. It still felt right, but I wasn’t sure how much of it was true and how much was born out of what the weapon meant to me personally.

I felt eyes on me, and looked up to meet Bluebelle’s gaze. I quailed inside, wondering what she thought of giving her approval now that she was confronted with the reality of it. But she smiled, and nodded to me, and turned her attention back to her food. I relaxed. Maybe what I’d said hadn’t been quite as self-serving as I’d feared.

A few minutes later, I popped the last bit of ration into my mouth and chewed as I went to my tent, leaving the cookfire conversations behind. I began gathering the supplies to scrub out my mess kit, but a moment later, I froze. The quiet rustling and scraping sounds of chitin moving against chitin rose up through the gray earth, rapidly growing louder. My heart hammered in my chest and I heard my own voice screaming, “We’re under attack!”

Chapter -1: Original Unedited Contest Version