Generation Z: The Chronicles

Chapters

Prologue PT 1: The Discovery
Prologue PT 2: The Expedition
The Outbreak
Patient Zero
Scootaloo's Fate
Blood Oath
Sketchy Strongholds
Trapped!
Chapter 9: The Outpost
The Dash

Prologue PT 1: The Discovery

Introduction

Good day, Fillies and Gentlecolts. What you are about to read is a factual retelling of the events that led up to, and occurred during, what has come to be known as World War Z. Though occasionally referred to by a few different monikers (The Zombie Apocalypse, The Plague of Trotting Death, and The Blackness to name a few), the name is unimportant. Once the subject is brought up, anypony on Equestria would recognize it as the event that changed the world. What we know about the prelude to the apocalypse was gathered solely from the notes and diary of the one pony that can be credited as the progenitor of the Zombies. While nearly universally vilified for her actions, this documentary aims to shed light on a different point of view; hers. And while this in no way removes the blood of the ponies that have died as the result of her actions, it does serve a purpose as a cautionary tale. When you mix obsession and desperation, no good can come of it. The rest of the narrative begins by following the spread of the disease based on the first-pony accounts of those who were there and survived. After the initial outbreak and some formative events from the childhood of a “Generation Z” pony (one who was born just before or after the initial outbreak, hence Generation Z[ombie]), we pick up the narrative based on the account of a cerulean earth pony named Hope, as she struggles to survive in the post-apocalyptic Equestria.

Chapter 1

Huge Thanks to Pacific Penguin for the time he spent editing this to make it suitable for human consumption.

Prologue part 1: The Discovery.

The following account is based off of a relic scrounged from the twisted depths of the Everfree forest. This relic of arcane design is best described as a memory orb, though there has never before been a confirmed sighting of one, let alone the real McCoy. How I came into possession of this one is a secret I shall take to the grave, more for fear of what should happen if I break my word than anything else. All you need to know is that through assorted dealings with ponies who have a reputation for being able to acquire anything and everything, I heard lore of something never before seen. Something which was having an especially significant impact on unicorns, causing them to babble incoherently and cry and ultimately driving them all quite mad.

Of course, I was interested and over the next few months I made some less than legal deals and bargains in order to obtain this object. And finally, I have it here in my hooves. The pony I bought it from seemed to be relieved to get rid of it. This pony claimed that the darkness had begun to whisper to them since this had come into their possession. Naturally, this made me even more curious. As soon as I got back to my home, I locked the door and reached out my magic to touch the sphere. I was shocked as my magic passed through it like it wasn’t even there. Curious, I reached my magic deeper into it and almost recoiled when the world around me began to lighten. I paused, and the room got no brighter. Feeling far bolder than I should have, I pumped all the magic I could into the orb.

Everything went white as the orb took over, and I found myself looking out upon a scene unlike anything I'd ever seen in my life. The sun seemed brighter, the colors more vivid, and all the ponies seemed as if they hadn't a care in the world. None of them had the lingering pain and constant watchfulness that was omnipresent in the world. After a moment of confusion, I finally grasped what this was. This was a memory orb containing a memory from before the world went to Haydes in a saddlebag. I was living the memories of another pony! As it turns out, I was only half right. Turns out, I wasn’t in the memories of a pony.

~*~*~*~*~

In her time in the Everfree Forest, Zecora had spent much time learning the ways of the plants and animals that live there, making friends with both. As a child, she had been left in the Everfree forest to fend for herself, armed with only her wits; such was the custom of her tribe. Adhering to tradition, she set out to find her own place in the forest to call home. After several days of walking with little food and less water, Zecora was delirious with dehydration and exhaustion. As she could stand no longer, she collapsed to the ground in exhaustion, and her vision swam. Out of the tangled mass of hues of green, a shape detached itself and approached her. This is the last thing she recalls for several days.

When she awoke, she at first thought she was dead, though it didn’t make sense…if she was dead, she shouldn’t feel pain. As her senses returned to her, she began to pick out details of her surroundings. She was in a hammock, suspended between two massive branches of a tree. As she looked around she could tell that she was inside a tree home. About this time a young adult earth pony walked into view with a bowl of food on his back and a bucket of water in his mouth. He was an average height for a stallion, his coat a shade of green not dissimilar to that of the forest. His cutie mark was a group of three trees, and they seemed to be growing out of the verdant field of his flank. She took all this in within a moment, before she locked on to his eyes. This pony's eyes are the exact shade of poison joke; Zecora finds them riveting and struggles to look away. The older pony cracks a relieved smile, and then addresses the zebra in the hammock.

"It's good to see you are awake, m'toto. I was getting worried the fever was more severe than I thought."

This is Zecora's first recollection of her longtime friend, companion, and mentor, Farasi Asili. Ever since that day, "Fossi" had mentored Zecora in the ways of the forest and natural remedies, as both a teacher and a father. Throughout her childhood, they spent innumerable hours together in the forest, and shared in many of the triumphs and pitfalls associated with learning its secrets. Fossi so greatly preferred the Everfree forest and its creatures to the company of "civilized" ponies, that nopony other than Zecora had seen either hide or hair of him in over 20 years. It was under his mentorship that she had blossomed into the mare she had become, a veritable master of natural cures. Fossi was the one pony that Zecora could talk to about anything at all, with no pretense. After all, she was his m'toto…his child.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The striped mare was walking through Ponyville on yet another bright, pleasant day, enjoying the efforts of the Weather Squad. As she passed through town, Zecora was astonished by how much things had changed since she had first wandered into town so many years ago. For as long as she could remember, her arrival to Ponyville was preceded by a mad scramble as ponies hurriedly barricaded themselves indoors. It was all she had ever known, and she came to accept it as normal. She would gather what supplies she could and leave payment on the stoop of whichever shop had "provided" it for her. All that had changed shortly after the arrival of that wonderful lavender unicorn, Twilight. Since that day, ponies no longer hid from her, she had even begun to make friends. As she befriended the ponies of Ponyville, she was struck by the desire to help these ponies in any way she could, as her longtime friend had done for her. She found that she could contribute a little bit to the overall welfare of Ponyville by contributing her vast knowledge of healing plants in the form of tonics and salves.

Thus we find Zecora doing her monthly supply run to gather supplies to package her herbal remedies. While on these errands, she would visit the nurse at the local health clinic to drop off some of her now-famous cure-alls. As she once again drops off her wares to Nurse Redheart, the physician can’t help but proclaim:

“Zecora, I don’t know what we would do without your potions, tonics and salves. They truly are a blessing, and the mark of a great herbalist.”

To this, Zecora can only respond:

“I am only glad that I can help my friends. My reward is saving ponies from undue illness and untimely ends.”

To this, Nurse Redheart can only nod in concurrence; she understood quite well the satisfaction of helping nurse the injured back to health. After Zecora finished her supply run and waved goodbye to everypony, she turned and began the trek back to her home in the Everfree, passing through the construction zone around the bell tower in Ponyville's town square. They appeared to be removing the old, cracked bell from the tower in order to replace it with a much larger, shinier bell. Zecora wondered what would become of the old bell… Lost in thought, she enters the outskirts of Ponyville, on her way back to the Everfree.

Shortly after leaving town, her peaceful daydream was shattered by a loud rumble and an otherworldly gonging, which was cut short by more rumbling. Even as she turned, shrieks of terror reached her ears. As she faced Ponyville, she could see the rising dust coming from where the old bell tower once stood. Her heart skipped a beat as it shifted into overdrive, beating a staccato rhythm on her ribcage. Without a second thought, she unhooked her cart and set off at a mad dash towards the scene of the collapse. As she drew near, she could see Big Mac digging at the rubble with vigor she had never seen the relaxed pony exhibit before. As some ponies stood around in shock and others simply cried, Lyra melted out of the crowd to join Zecora and Mac. The trio joined forces to remove the rubble; Mac using his strong physique to shift the larger debris, Zecora digging out whatever she could get her hooves on and Lyra floating rubble away with her magic. It took all of their combined efforts to shift the once-new bell out of the rubble.

Even while riding the surge of adrenaline that gave them almost super-pony strength, it took all they had to dislodge the now crumpled monolith of bronze out of the rubble. Zecora couldn’t help but wonder if the weight of the bell was too much for the ancient structure, but her mind was quickly re-focused on the task at hand. Between the intermittent sobs, bits of conversation drift through to the excavators.

“Is there someone in there?”

“Yeah, I saw it all happen. He’s buried…”

“…-brown pony. Out of Towner type-…”

“-think his name is Braeburn.”

“That poor pony…hope he is alright…”

Even as this last bit of conversation drifted out of the crowd, the rescuers could tell that the buried pony would not be alright. The rubble began to show stains of a distinct red liquid on it as they neared the victim, causing a new wave of murmurs to pass through the crowd. As they removed the final block, their fears were initially allayed. Aside from a few cuts and bruises and a right foreleg that seemed to have a few too many joints in it, Braeburn looked like he was in pretty good condition, all things considered.

Even as Lyra was levitating the victim into a cart to take him to the clinic, it became apparent that he was far worse off than he initially appeared. His breathing was labored, producing a gurgling sound and occasionally a red bubble would escape his nose. With renewed urgency, the three rescuers loaded him onto a cart and rushed him off to the clinic. Big Mac took the lead in pulling the cart, taking off at a quick trot while the other two tried to comfort Braeburn and keep him from falling out of the cart. In the back of her mind, Zecora was already blaming herself for not grabbing a potion from her cart before she abandoned it. If she had thought ahead and brought one of her healing tonics, she could stabilize him on the way to the clinic, instead of having to race against time and fate to get him to the care he needed.

Even as they drew around the corner to the clinic, Zecora could tell that things were headed south. Her silent cursing had grown from panicked thoughts in her head to loudly muttering under her breath. With each passing moment the gurgling was slowly replaced by hacking and choking, each breath more strained than the last. All three ponies kept casting worried looks back at Braeburn, each in turn becoming more alarmed not only by the growing amount of blood pouring out of his nose, but also the growing panic clearly displayed on his face. Zecora's quiet mutterings were overshadowed by Mac's low pleas to his cousin.

"Hold on Braeburn. Hold on. Keep fightin…y'all can't quit on me. Just hold on...hold on."

Big Mac's words blended together, becoming a litany that grew in volume to match Braeburn's choking gasps. His pace increased to match his voice, an edge of desperation creeping into his usually calm voice, a hint of panic showing up in his demeanor. Each bump in the road elicited a new groan from the patient in the cart, a short coughing fit, or otherwise just involuntary spasms. Shortly after leaving the site of the collapse, blood had begun to drip from the corner of the cart. A steady pattern of drops traced their path through the streets of Ponyville. Zecora can't help but think of the drops as an hourglass with no bottom, suspended over a void; each drop of blood, a grain of sand. As each grain is gone forever as it falls to the void, the drops of blood are no less permanently gone. Knowing that there is no way to upturn the glass and restore the sand, Zecora can't help but wonder how much sand is left in the glass…how long until time runs out…

The answer to the question nobody wants to ask soon becomes clear. Big Mac's supplications and speed reach a frenzied pitch and pace; the large red stallion's eyes are wide open and darting around feverishly. Despite galloping for all her worth to keep pace with Mac, Zecora cannot tear her eyes from Braeburn. Each passing second his eyes grow wider; his face grows more ashen, sunken. The crimson bubbles are no longer being produced as frequently, the choking sounds diminishing. Big Mac called out that they were almost there, pleading with his cousin not to give up the fight. Zecora watched as Braeburn violently convulsed, his eyes rolling to the back of his head. Even as they skidded to a halt in front of the clinic, the three rescuers could tell that this was no longer a makeshift ambulance. With Braeburn's final rattling exhalation, this cart had become a hearse.

Zecora was renowned throughout Ponyville as a veritable guru of holistic cures. Almost any malady caused by nature or the Mane 6, Zecora had an herbal remedy for. Unfortunately, all the curing tonics and potions in Equestria can’t help ponies unable to get the medicine in time. Time and time again, she either heard of the tragic passing of a pony, or worse, a sick or injured pony that expired just before they could receive lifesaving medical care. For one who cared so much about her new friends and acquaintances, the agony of losing a pony that she was certain could have been helped wore greatly on Zecora. The usually content mare would always adopt a somber demeanor for a few days after each one of these losses. One incident above all else pushed Zecora to the brink of madness, and lead to the fall of Ponykind.

After this most recent trauma, Zecora sought Fossi out from his highly secluded home in the canopy of the Everfree for council. Fossi listened to the beginning of her story, and then kindly interrupted his pupil with the suggestion of a stroll through the forest, to a place that she had never before been. Zecora was quite curious as to where she had not been in her years in the Everfree, and therefore most willing to oblige. Walking through the forest was almost always a cure for whatever ailed her, and was always a way for her to raise her spirits.

As they walked, Fossi asked Toto to tell him the story again, from the start. As she explained her desire to help ponies, her frustration and sadness grew with the story of each pony that passed before anypony could get there, before medical help could arrive. She explained that all she wants to do is help, and it crushes her whenever aid doesn’t arrive in time to save a life. She couldn’t help it that she takes each death personally…it is just who she is. With a brief pause and a sigh of utter dejection, Zecora relayed the events of the previous day in Ponyville. In her re-telling, she focused heavily on her failure to bring the potion with her that would have stabilized Braeburn until they arrived at the clinic. After a moment of silent contemplation, Fossi replied:

“Death is a natural part of life. If there were no death to make room, where would the new life grow and live? It is truly sad that some ponies seem to expire before their time, but that is the way it has been for millennia. It is just the way of life.”

Zecora was about to reply when she became aware of the forest around her. She was no longer in the Everfree that she knew, but in a darker place that seemed to be preternaturally silent. The trees were no longer lush and green, but spindly and ragged with an almost gray color. It was as if the pigment had been leached from them by the sheer solemnity of this place. The brush had thinned out to an almost nonexistent state, with but a few bushes populating the forest floor. In the absence of the normal greenery, the forest floor was covered instead by a thick layer of dead leaves, lending the forest a distinct aroma of decay. In all that she could see, and all that she could hear, Zecora could not detect even a trace of animal life. There was no chirping of birds. No rustle of leaves and brush as small critters moved about. No snapping twigs as the larger denizens of the Everfree moved around. Not even the wind stirred to interrupt the silence. Zecora discovered that for reasons she could not entirely fathom, a deep chill pierced her. Though the day had previously been quite temperate, the chill that pierced Zecora could not be alleviated even by the warm rays of sunlight penetrating the canopy. Noticing the change in his student, Fossi stopped and turned towards her.

“I can see it in your eyes. I can feel your discomfort, your apprehension” he said. “When I first stumbled upon this nigh forgotten hollow of the Everfree, I too felt the same chill.”

“Why would you return to a place that sucks the warmth from your soul? This grotto feels like a graveyard…the only things missing are the bones.” Zecora wondered aloud.

“Because you will realize soon enough, there is no other choice. This place calls to you, invites you to discover its secrets; secrets which will reveal to you the true meaning of life and death. Soon, you will see why I say that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a pony. Sometimes, death is but another beginning.”

Though Zecora is accustomed to her teacher’s odd and occasionally foreboding mannerisms, this last exchange spooks her far more than she wants to admit. Without another word, Fossi turns around and continues on the narrow trail through the vast emptiness of the Far Everfree. Through the sparse canopy of this area of forest, Zecora occasionally glimpses tall, jagged mountains, which she is not entirely familiar with. This strikes her as odd since she has lived in the woods since she was but a filly, and was sure she had memorized nearly every feature of the forest. She is in her own world, concentrating on the mountains in an attempt to place them in her known layout of the Everfree. Without warning Fossi stops short, causing her to rear-end him. As Zecora begins to formulate the question of “why did you stop?” Fossi issues an almost inaudible warning:

“Ssshhhhh, Toto. Be very quiet, and do not move a muscle. A Kifo is staring right at us.”

What little warmth this Everfree grotto hadn’t robbed her of already left her instantly, freezing her to the spot as her blood turned to ice. Hardly daring to move her eyes, she searched the path ahead and located the deadly creature. Though the serpent is no more than half as long as a mare is tall, it is possibly the most dangerous creature in all of the Equestria.

A mares’ height long, the serpent is a very bright orange and yellow coloration on its stomach, but a drab green and brown on its back. The color on its back makes it very difficult to detect among the leaf litter on the forest floor. The bright color on its belly is for no reason other than intimidation, to strike fear into its victims. The Kifo has no predators, natural or otherwise. Its' coloring is not a method of self defense, rather one of psychological warfare. Very few who tangle with it survive to tell the tale. While not overtly aggressive, the Kifo has a hair trigger temper, and will attack with the slightest provocation. Since the serpent can slither faster than the average pony can gallop for a short distance, and is known for following its prey for minutes at a time, it is very difficult to escape. Of the few who escape, most are pegasi. Though all of this firmly puts the Kifo on the list of things not to mess with, its venom is what earns it the title of “Death Serpent.”

Without going into too much detail, the venom is cruel in the way it works. It initially paralyses the victim's body, while leaving the head and chest mostly unaffected. This means that the victims are awake, conscious, and capable of speech (if a bit slurred.) This effect is almost immediate. The second stage sets in fully within approximately 20 minutes of the bite. The effect of the second stage is agony, and full paralysis. As stage two sets in, one of the last things to freeze is the face, locking in the grimace of unbearable agony as it does so. The final stage sets in less than an hour after the bite, as the venom begins to take its final toll. The agony subsides, but the paralysis does not. The still fully conscious victim maintains full awareness of their body, allowing them to experience the feeling of their bodily systems shutting down, one by one. The last thing to stop is the heart. The exact moment of death is evident, as the muscles relax and a look of serenity settles upon the countenance of the victim.

All of this passes through Zecora’s mind in an instant, as she recalls one of Fossi’s more dire lessons.

This information is as a tidal wave to her, on which fear for Fossi rises to the top. As if merely contemplating the worst was all the trigger the serpent needed, it struck. In a flash of orange and brown, time stood still. Zecora could see every scale on the serpent’s hide, the way they each caught the light of the forest and shimmered. Zecora was struck by the silly though that this creature would be quite beautiful if it wasn’t for the current circumstances. The moment seemed to hang in the air for an eternity. An eternity in which she was frozen despite all efforts to move. In the blink of an eye, the interminable eons passed; and time began to flow again. Before her beloved mentor could even register the bite, the serpent was slithering away; disappearing into the forest from whence it came. As the horror of the situation became evident, Fossi’s eyes widened in shock as the paralysis struck. Zecora was barely able to catch him and soften his fall, sparing him from a hard, face first landing. As she laid Fossi on the ground, he began to instruct her with a quiet desperation.

“Listen closely, Toto; time is of the essence. Run as fast as you can back to my home. In a glass jar on top of my desk, there is a flower; the Uhai Ua, the Flower of Life. Bring it to me as quickly as you can. When you get back, dump the flower out and rub it into the bite. It is the only way. NOW GO!”

Though numb, and in shock about the potential loss of her closest friend and mentor, Zecora heeded his words without question. As she was sprinting back towards his house with a speed borne of desperation and adrenaline, she is helpless but to wonder if she will get there in time. Zecora immediately pushes the thought from her mind and pushes herself harder, determined not to be too late.

Upon arrival at Fossi’s house, she navigates to his study. This quaint room in his treetop home is packed full of books and specimen jars, on shelves which line every wall in the room. Zecora flashes back to her first visit to the study, so many years ago. She is flooded with memories of her irrational filly fear that the tree could not possibly support all the weight, and would surely collapse as soon as she stepped hoof into the room. Pushing the thoughts from her mind, she quickly goes to the desk and grabs the flower.

Another flashback to her days as a student under Fossi, the hours she spent marveling at its beauty. It looks like a lotus, but the petals are as pure a white as Celestia’s flank and are tipped with a golden color that is almost luminescent. For many moons, she has pondered how it has stayed fresh all these years, showing not the slightest sign of decay.

Her mind snaps back to the current situation and she quickly scoops up the flower and hauls tail back to where her fallen friend lay. As she is runs with all her might, she can see the sun creeping ever closer to the horizon, slowly ticking away the seconds since the bite.

As Zecora breaks through a thicket of shrubs and comes within thirty paces of Fossi, she is momentarily struck dumb by the sight she sees. Her friend and longtime companion is staring at her with a look of abject suffering on his face, features contorted and disfigured by unimaginable suffering. This face will haunt her nightmares until the end of her days. In a split second she recalls that this is only the second stage of the venom, that hope remains for her friend. Spurred on with a renewed energy, she gallops faster than she ever has in her life. As she draws upon her mentor, she stops cold. Nothing in her life or any other could have prepared her for what she sees.

Looking into the twisted countenance of her dear friend, she could see the track of a single tear as it slowly fell from the corner of his eye. The look of suffering on his face was not just one of mortal agony as it had appeared from afar. The gaze of her friend was filled with such sorrow that Zecora would swear to the end of her days that she could physically feel her heart break. The moment they made eye contact, his gaze shifted from one of despair to one of apology. Farasi Asili looked into the very core of his only student and simply said

“I’m sorry.”

Zecora did not know if Fossi had actually spoken, or if he communicated on some other level, nor did she have time to contemplate it. Before her eyes, her ultimate fear was realized. Fossi’s face slipped into a mask of serenity.

Several weeks later

All she wanted was a little more time for help to reach the patients, just to give them the strength to hold on just a bit longer…with this goal in mind, she began to work on a pet project, one which she hoped would potentially be distributed to each pony, unicorn, and pegasus in Equestria to buy them time to be healed. Zecora figured if she could slow down a pony's heart and breathing, she could buy them time to be healed. With her mind set on this task she set to work gathering ingredients and studying the folklore of her people, attempting to find mixtures of plants and cures that would have the desired effect.

After her private tragedy in the Everfree grotto, Zecora had gone on hiatus. Or, at least that is what she told the ponies in Ponyville when they inquired about her absence. She left out the reason for her hiatus, though. Fossi had preferred to live in seclusion broken only by mentoring his sole pupil, his surrogate daughter. She thought that his passing should be handled the same way he lived his life; with a quiet dignity, and a seclusion from all but his Toto. Zecora doubted that any in Ponyville even remembered Fossi, which made their bond all the stronger. Now more fully committed to her project than she had been to anything before, every waking moment not dedicated to helping Ponyville was spent on her search for “The Cure.”

The first hurdle to overcome was simply how to test her new cures. She needed a reliable source of subjects who could be subjected to certain circumstances in order to test her cures. After a brief consideration and much internal strife, Zecora finally settled on a candidate: rats. Due to the nature of her experiments, she knew that the other ponies would object without even considering the reason behind it. She would have to have a place for her to conduct her experiments without being disturbed or having anypony accidentally find out the nature of her work. The first step towards her ultimate goal was set in motion: in the darkness under her home, nestled within the roots was a crude room, aboutfour paces square. The room was originally a storage cellar, but she modified it to suit her needs rather easily. After tiling the room in homemade clay tile for cleanliness purposes, Zecora brought in a table and a few holding rooms. She much preferred this term to “cage,” as the word makes her shudder. Thus prepared, Zecora began her first experiment.

After carefully obtaining a few rats that would not be missed, she applied a common poison to one and waited for it to set in. Once the subject was near death, she applied a standard healing potion to the animal. Zecora watched with growing anticipation, then horror, and finally revulsion and defeat as the poor animal expired. This was her first attempt, and she had failed. She now had innocent blood on her hooves. This blood on her hooves was different from any before…she had actually taken the life of a healthy creature; she was the sole perpetrator of this atrocity. The weight of this failure and the implications of her actions weighed heavily upon her for a moment, until she decided that the eventual reward was worth whatever the short term cost would be. If her potion could save even one pony’s life, would it not be worth it? Zecora pressed ahead, desperate for answers and now vindication for yet another death she felt personally responsible for.

To the second subject, she applied a life threatening but not usually fatal injury, and repeated the process with the healing potion. Over the next few days she kept a close watch on the subject, and noticed a slight improvement. This improvement became more pronounced as time went on. Within a week the animal was fully healed, if wary of Zecora. As time goes on, she begins to mix in various substances and other potions, trying to find one that sends her subjects into a subdued, almost hibernating state while speeding the healing process. Though her healing potions work well enough on injuries, the poison continues to be the bane of her experiments. As time wears on, she is met by a success of sorts; first, she begins to extend the survival time of the subjects. As she continues gaining proficiency at treating poison, she begins to incorporate the elements of the two tests into one. As one may expect, the two drugs had interesting reactions when used together, not all of which were very pretty. After a period of months, Zecora had her first success with the combination of afflictions and treatments. She could almost see the light at the end of the tunnel…almost. Her latest candidate soon developed an unknown illness, one which did not abate after nearly a month. When she reapplied the cure, the subject passed away. She was not deterred by this setback, for she had seen a glimmer of hope that she was nearing The Cure.

The next few months passed in a similar fashion, each new revision bringing a new set of symptoms and challenges. No matter what she tried, Zecora still felt as if she were chasing her tail. Her mounting obsession was slowly being noticed by the town’s ponies, as was the curious disappearance of so many small animals. Every now and again on her midnight “collection runs” in which she gathered the necessary test subjects; she would come across Fluttershy. This pale yellow and pink Pegasus, despite her timid nature, was prowling the Everfree forest at night to try and scare off the animal that was harassing the small creatures. Zecora felt bad about deceiving the sweet, loving mare, but seeing no other option was forced to do it. More than the testing on small animals, it was these occasional fibs that had the greatest impact on Zecora’s moral compass. Could what she was doing really be right if she had to lie to her friends about it? The voice in the back of her head whispered to her:

“Your friends would never understand why you are doing this; could never understand. They have not seen what you have seen; lost what you have lost. Who are they to judge? Nopony, that’s who.”

Somewhere deep down, Zecora knew that this voice was wrong…but it made so much sense, said exactly what she needed to hear to keep going, that she ignored the other feeling. This moment marked the first step down the path that would seal the fate of Equestria.

It was the morning of the middle of the week. Zecora gathered her supplies and headed out into the forest, fulfilling a promise she had made over a year ago. By mid-morning, she had arrived at Fossi’s grave, in that all too familiar grotto in the woods.

“Hello there, old friend. It is good to see you again.” She said.

Silence was the only reply. As it always was. Zecora came here every week to keep a promise she had made to someone who would never hear it. She talks about her experiments, her new combinations, and the unexpected results. She would go on for an hour or more, feeling the burden of residual guilt slowly lighten as she spoke. As she always did, though not specifically a part of the ritual, upon leaving she asked simply:

“What were you trying to show me, my dear friend? To this day, death is still the end.”

Upon returning to her house, she once again delves into her studies. She was getting close to a cure, she could feel it. Not just a cure to buy ponies enough time to be taken to a hospital. Not just a tonic to revitalize a worn out equine. Though she could not see it, her goals had warped and twisted over time from a noble ambition to a manic obsession. If she was successful in her new pursuit, Zecora would put an end to illness and suffering forever. She wanted not only to beat the clock. She wanted to beat the Reaper. However, the more she tried, the more impossible it seemed.

Thoroughly infuriated by her utter failure in the most recent test, she goes for a walk in the Everfree to clear her head. Some things never change. She kept running over her experiments in her head, trying to see what she could have done differently, what she hadn’t yet tried, trying to find the mysterious quality that would make her experiment a success. She became aware of an all too familiar silence that broke her train of thought. She had subconsciously walked back to the very place that had changed her life so many moons ago. She realized that she had never explored beyond the gravesite, never continued down the path. Zecora suddenly felt compelled to continue down the path, to go where she had never gone. Perhaps she would find the answers she sought.

A short distance down the trail, she came across a dry streambed in a clearing, and saw that it seemed to come from the mysterious mountains she had glimpsed so long ago. A chill swept through her, a feeling that she had not felt since that fateful day when it seemed all the warmth she possessed had left her for good. Heedless, she headed towards the mountains. As she crested a slight rise at the foot of the mountains, the valley came into view in its entirety. The valley was nearly as devoid of plant life compared to the surrounding area, save for a few exceptionally strange plants that populated the area. The valley itself was very steeply sided, forming nearly vertical walls on three sides. The only side which seemed to be remotely traversable was the one from which the streambed spawned. The bottom of the valley sloped towards a massive sinkhole at the center, the rim of which boasted a higher concentration of plant life than was present anywhere within an hours’ trot. It appeared that a large cave had broken the surface many years ago, forming a pit which was simply huge.

Though wanting desperately to explore this new region, Zecora did not have any gear with which to navigate the steep trail down. Reluctantly, she turned back to head for home. As she walked away, a sudden gust of wind swayed her, nearly toppling her from her hooves. Moments later, the gust moaned through the valley. The moan was not unlike that of a pony, though very much drawn out and seemingly possessed of a soulless hunger.

More than anything else, this last thought spooked Zecora, though for the life of her she could not figure out why. She decided that knowing why it spooked her was less important than getting far away from this place by nightfall, so without a second thought on the subject she picked up a quick trot and headed for home. As she was cantering home, she couldn’t help but smile as she thought of her experiments.

Prologue PT 2: The Expedition

Chapter 2

Prologue part 2: The Expedition

Again, all glory to Pacific Penguin for a bang-up job as an editor. This should be much more read-able now, and make more sense besides.

Zecora spends the next week preparing for the trek to the area she has dubbed “The Hole” between caring for the bystanders in yet another Mane Six Malady. Given the distance away from her home, she concludes that there is no way to make it a day trip and still accomplish all the exploration she desires. Though the area still vaguely discomforts her, Zecora is determined to explore the area and learn what she can of the strange valley. Not a day goes by that she isn’t haunted by visions of The Hole, or of the face of Fossi. She cannot help but wonder if this valley is the place that Fossi was trying to show her on that fateful day. As she remembers her old teacher, she is overcome by a wave of grief, tinted by guilt. If he had not taken her for a walk to calm her down, if she had not burdened him with her problems…perhaps she would not have lost him.

Zecora knows that no amount of “what if” questions or second guesses can bring Fossi back to her. She forces these thoughts from her mind and continues to pack. After brief consideration, Zecora brings along a rather large jug labeled “Liquid Courage.” While the contents of the jug are a secret to all but Zecora, nopony who has partaken of it could deny that it could bolster the spirits of even the meekest pony, as well as grant vigor to the weary. Night in the Everfree is a dangerous time for anypony, so Zecora packs a hammock. This way when night falls she can be up in the canopy, well out of reach of most of the dangerous animals. Along with a scroll and quill for notes, she brings a few jars and a pair of shears to collect samples of the plants in the valley. After the rations are packed, she deems herself ready for the expedition.

During her last supply run into town, she avoided the suspicious stares of the ponies as she ran her errands. She left a larger than usual batch of her potions, tonics, and salves outside of the clinic along with a note explaining that she would be gone for a few days, and that this should suffice until her return. On her way out of town, she mumbled under her breath:

“The ponies watch my approach with dread. Surely nasty rumors have begun to spread.”

Zecora was right. She had overheard some of the townsfolk whispering as she passed. The townsfolk had begun to notice the disappearance of the small animals that once roamed the forest; and a few had heard a strange tinkle in the night, accompanied by swift shadows and the squeal of terrified critters. A tinkle which was not at all dissimilar to the sound Zecora’s jewelry makes as she walks through town. Soon enough, Zecora's visits to the town had reverted back to the state they were in prior to Twilight’s arrival, with ponies scattering and seeking shelter from her presence. This suited Zecora just fine, as she knew that once The Cure was unveiled, everypony would see what she had been working for, and then they would forgive her. Then they would see…they would see. In the mean time, she just had to keep her head up. As long as she was still making progress on her experiments, there was hope.

The next morning, Zecora set a course for the Hole. As she stopped by Fossi’s grave, she said a quick prayer and continued on towards her objective. She reached the valley just after midday, and paused for lunch before descending the narrow, rocky trail. Prior to beginning her descent, Zecora remembered the rope she had brought, and tied one end to a large boulder at the brink of the precipice. After fashioning a harness out of rope, she began her descent. The trail was initially wide enough that two ponies could have walked abreast of each other without difficulty, but it soon narrowed to barely wide enough for one. As she continued to navigate the series of switchbacks, the trail got increasingly narrow. Several times, Zecora had the ground beneath her give way, the safety line she had tied earlier the only thing saving her from what would have been a severe injury. Towards the bottom of the path, it widened a bit, affording a more stable footing and faster movement. The afternoon was nearly over, and she had been delayed far more than she thought she would have been, and thus was behind schedule. Reluctant to wait another day to visit the hole, but seeing no other choice, Zecora searched for a place to make camp.

Though she had not seen any trace of wildlife in several hours, she decided to err on the side of caution and located a place to pitch camp that offered good security. She picked out a shelf in the side of the cliff she had just descended, and decided it was as good a spot as any. About four shoulders off the ground and with only a narrow shelf of rock to serve as a path, the spot was barely accessible to the nimble zebra, let alone any predatory animal. It was actually a shallow cave, not big enough to harbor anything dangerous, but deep enough to provide overhead shelter in the event of rain.

Though Zecora was not terribly fond of the idea of backtracking, she could see no other shelter as suitable to her needs. With a sigh of resignation, she clambered back up the trail. By the time she had her hammock strung up and had eaten dinner, night was beginning to fall in the valley. As the night took over and the light grew dimmer, The Hole appeared to grow, swallowing everything in the valley. This mental image was slightly disconcerting, and for a while Zecora could not find sleep. After a double shot of liquid courage, she felt her eyelids grow heavy as her anxiety left her, and she slowly drifted into sleep.

That night, Zecora experienced troubling dreams. She dreamed of Ponyville, during the day. The sun was bright, the sky was blue, and the temperature was pleasant. The only thing that marred the otherwise idyllic setting was the complete lack of anypony else. The town was deserted. Though the content of her dream was not ominous or malign in any way, a faint scratching noise pervaded the night. She could not discover the source of it in her dream, though she searched all of Ponyville for it. Despite her efforts, she was woken by the dawn without having successfully located the source of the noise. Bleary eyed and slightly annoyed by her dream, she surveyed the valley in the weak morning light. She was immediately struck by the impression that something was not right. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and tried to determine what exactly had changed. The weak light of the dawn and the steep angle of the sun conspired to throw long shadows, obscuring most of the valley floor.

Perhaps the most disconcerting trick played by the light was the effect it had on the Hole. The near side had several jagged rock formations, which the extreme angle of the sun illuminated to give the impression of teeth around a gaping maw. The shadow of the rock piles was cast upon the far side of the Hole, creating a very similar effect, completing the illusion of a massive beast yawning. While certainly unusual and a little spooky, this was not the change in the valley that made her mane stand on end. Whatever was responsible for that was not visible in such weak light. Zecora tried to put it out of her mind until after breakfast, when she would be able to investigate the valley more thoroughly due to the better illumination afforded by the rising sun. Even as she was eating breakfast, she could not shake the feeling she was being watched. She ate her meal with her back to the wall of the cave, scrutinizing the valley below for movement.

Soon enough, the sun broke over the mountain and spilled its light into the valley. About an hour after the sun first crested the peak, Zecora moved to the edge of the shelf to investigate the valley floor. It immediately became clear what had changed; every single shrub in the valley had shifted towards her while she slept. The plants had only moved about 20 paces, but their path was evidenced by the trail they left in the rocky soil. In the grip of panic, Zecora blindly groped for the bottle of Liquid Courage and took a hefty swig. After a few moments, when the tonic kicked in, she was able to face the valley again, but with a more objective outlook. With her cleared mind, she marveled at the plants. She was no stranger to lore of walking plants, but this was the first time she had ever encountered any. After a brief hesitation, she traversed the trail towards the valley below and then headed straight for the nearest plant. It was singularly the most unusual plant she had ever seen, and she did not recognize it. This came as a slight shock to her, for she was no novice in these matters. For her not to recognize a plant in the Everfree was shocking, made no less shocking by the fact that this was but a days’ journey from her home.

The plant was a thorn bush, about as tall as the average mare. The trunk was about the same diameter as a carrot, and branched off into smaller limbs. The stalks were a deep burgundy color, oddly reminiscent of blood. This thought sent a small shiver of fear through her flank, one which was chased away with the warmth of Liquid Courage. The leaves were unlike any she had ever seen before. About the size of a hoof and teardrop shaped, they boasted a most unusual coloration. Starting out a deep, vibrant green at the edges, it faded to a very gray color near the veins in the leaf. It seemed like it was drawing its color from the air around it. Or drawing life from it.

Zecora quickly looked behind her, surprised by the voice that had seemingly come from nowhere. She was as alone as she had ever been. Confused and a bit scared, she applied the only solution she had handy: Liquid Courage. By now, she had exceeded the maximum dose she recommended for anypony, but that was of little consequence to her. All that mattered was investigating the Hole. Everything else fell secondary to that one goal, that one obsession. Pushing everything else from her mind, she focused on the mission at hand. Using a glass jar and the shears she brought, she snipped off a part of the plant into the jar. Perhaps the Liquid Courage was getting to her, but she could swear the plant recoiled from the snip. The site of the amputated limb was leaking a viscous red sap, looking entirely too much like blood for Zecora’s comfort. She hastily bottled her sample and headed off towards the Hole. By this point, it was just over an hour after sunrise.

By the time she approached the hole, it was nearing noon. Zecora’s initial investigation revealed that the entire chasm was flooded, the water level stopping about three shoulders below the rim of the Hole. Zecora briefly debated renaming it “The Pool,” but decided against it. The Hole it would remain. As she peered into the shimmering pool, she concluded two things. First, the water was of such exceptional clarity that if not for the occasional glimmer of a ripple, it would not be apparent that it was there at all. Second, the Hole was exceedingly deep. She could make out the side of the chasm down to almost a hundred shoulders deep, but the angle of the sun conspired to cloak the bottom in a veil of darkness. Only when the sun was almost directly overhead could she hope to see the bottom of the Hole.

To pass the time, she attempted to eat lunch despite a lack of appetite. As Zecora was polishing off an apple, a shadow passed over her. Immediately rolling to the left to dodge an aerial attack, she rolled and looked up to spot her attacker. The only thing in the wide open sky was a single cloud drifting in front of the sun. Thankful that there was no imminent aerial attack, Zecora smiled at her reaction, not feeling foalish at all. The same dodging maneuver had saved her hide half a dozen times from overhead assault, and she was proud that it had become instinct. Remembering the purpose of her expedition, she quickly re-focused and walked back to the Hole. The sun was in almost the right position for her to see the bottom, and in 15 minutes or so, she should begin to be able to make out the bottom of the Hole…if there was one. To pass the time, Zecora would occasionally pick up a pebble and toss it into the Hole, watching it drift down until it was obscured by darkness.

As she was watching a stone sink to the depths, she caught her first glimpse of the bottom. About one hundred and twenty shoulders down (give or take about thirty…depth estimation was not Zecora’s strong suit) she saw what looked like a jumble of stone. As the circle of light tracked with the sun, the jumble of stones became illuminated. As she stared at them, Zecora began to see what at first glance was an unusual pattern in the stones.

As she stared, she grasped exactly what it was that didn't seem right about the debris at the bottom of the hole; it was arrayed in a generally geometric formation. There were far too many 90-degree corners and straight sections to be coincidence, and the meaning of this discovery was confirmed as the sun illuminated the remainder of the stones.

The jumbles of stone are not merely debris, thought Zecora, they are the remainders of buildings. And the sheer number of them pointed towards the conclusion that this had once been a rather large city, though it now stood submerged and in ruin. As she was beginning to get an idea of the size and scale of the ruins, another cloud passed in front of the sun. Looking up in annoyance, Zecora saw that there was a large mass of clouds passing in front of the sun. Just as Zecora was vowing to give the pegasi an earful, a break in the clouds illuminated the area. Thoughts of a tongue lashing instantly evaporated as her attention was once again focused at the bottom of the Hole.

She could make out that it was indeed a ruined city, and one of grand scale. The maze of streets and buildings suggested that the builders were masters of stonework. As Zecora stared, she became aware of movement in the shadows. She would have just assumed it was a school of fish if not for the utter desolation and lifelessness of the surrounding area. As she strained to get a better view, the sun was obscured by clouds once more. Cursing the pegasi once more, but without lifting her gaze, Zecora promised a slew of comical hexes upon the weather squad. With a brief splash of light between clouds, she saw something that didn’t seem possible. Just as she was dismissing it as a trick of the light reflecting from the surface of the water, the clouds broke again. Though the day had been rather warm for the time of year, the golden rays of sun could no longer warm the zebra trapped beneath a glacier of icy terror. At the bottom of The Hole, staring up with a partially exposed skeleton and a mouth opened in a silent moan, there was a pony. The last thing Zecora can remember is the way its vacant sockets locked eyes with her.

Zecora’s next conscious thought was one of profound confusion. Where am I? She wondered. As her eyes swam into focus, a familiar sight greeted her. The recognition of her surroundings drove a red-hot shard of loss into her heart, bringing forth tears she did not know she possessed. In all the time since Fossi’s death, she had not cried. She did not allow herself this comfort. Instead, she had turned her anguish inward, using it to fuel the fire of her motivation to find the Cure. Why then, upon regaining consciousness in the study of her long deceased mentor, did she surrender to weakness? It was a question she could not fathom an answer for. Biting back the few tears that had escaped, she was pierced by an extreme hunger pang. How long had she gone without eating? More importantly, how had she escaped from the Valley of the Hole? Contemplation of the answers to these questions took a backseat to the need for food.

Standing up on shaky legs, Zecora discovered that she somehow still had the bag she brought with her to the valley. She opened it up and was shocked and delighted that there was still food in it. Though the fruit was smooshed and bruised, nothing had ever tasted so good. After wolfing down the contents of her bag, her hunger was placated enough for her to think clearly. Her first thought went out to her test subjects, wondering how they had fared. She quickly gathered herself and trotted home, anxious to make sure her progress had not been lost, and to clean out those that had not responded to treatment in her absence.

Upon reaching her home however, she was greeted by a shocking sight. Her front door was ajar, and her home had clearly been ransacked. Bottles of ingredients were strewn about the floor; shattered remnants littered the entire workshop floor. Her ancient books, passed down from generation to generation, were strewn about like trash. All of her carefully amassed specimens had been smashed or thrown. An entire lifetime’s worth of work and generations’ worth of tribal knowledge had been obliterated. Zecora was shocked into silence. No matter how badly the townsfolk might have mistrusted her, she could think of none who was so cold hearted or malicious as to do such a thing. Again, her mind locked on to her lab. If her lab had been compromised, then everything she had done, all of the sacrifices she had made, were in vain. All the lives that were lost for her experiments would have been for nothing. She raced into the kitchen, where the concealed entrance to her lab lay. To her horror and misery, it stood open. Fearing the worst, but hoping against the odds that everything would be alright, she slowly entered the subterranean chamber.

As she rounded the final corner in the passage to her lab, she stopped dead in her tracks. Though the lab was indeed the scene of a devastating rampage, there seemed to be some semblance of order that yet remained. There was a series of bowls, mortars, pestles, tubes, and the small black cauldron from the broom closet scattered on the floor. The ground beneath the cauldron was blackened, as if by fire. The ash that created a film all over the room supported this theory. Interspersed randomly over the floor was a score of books and broken containers, the contents of which had been tracked throughout the lab. The green and red solution in the cauldron seemed to be the same one as was contained in the nearly half a dozen containers of various shapes and sizes nearby. Zecora could not believe her eyes. The containers all had the same hasty label on them, written in none other than Zecora’s hoofwriting. All were labeled simply, “CuRe.” Still numb with shock, she goes to check on all the subjects. All are healthy and happy. Even the ones which Zecora was sure would expire before her return seemed healthier as ever.

Zecora decided that there was only one way to test the veracity of the Cure, to confirm the seemingly miraculous solution that apparently came from nowhere. With the precision and measured surety of a practiced hand, Zecora selected a test subject and administered a lethal dose of venom. She further compounded the test by also administering a severe injury, not unlike the one that had claimed the life of Braeburn. Working quickly, mindful of the venom working its way through her subject, she administered a large dose of the Cure. Since she had no way of knowing what the proper dosage was, Zecora decided that more was better. As she administered the Cure, she held her breath. Within mere moments, a change was evident. The subjects' irregular breathing had begun to slow down and adopt a more measured pace as the effects of the venom were negated. The misshapen form of the subject ballooned out and assumed a normal shape once again, erasing all traces of the injury that only moments ago surely would have been fatal.

Zecora could not believe it. Less than half a minute after receiving not only a dose of venom five times a lethal amount, but also an injury that should have been fatal, or at the very least permanently crippling, the subject was not only still alive, but walking. The subject regarded Zecora with a wary eye, but was otherwise perfectly healed. Incredulous, she looked around, trying to find the notes she must have made about the concoction. There were none. Frustration hit her like a landslide, carrying her with it into a valley of madness. As she sat fuming, a spark of inspiration hit her. Surely the recipe for this mixture was scattered somewhere in this mess. All she had to do was try to identify the ingredients on the floor and match them to the recipes scattered about, and by process of elimination she could determine what the miracle was.

After nearly half a day's work at a frantic pace, she had done it. Out of all the ingredients on the floor, there were only two she could not identify: a grey powder that could be any one of a hundred things, and an exceedingly strange red paste substance. Only one recipe of the dozens scattered on the floor contained all the ingredients she could identify. Somehow in her fugue state, she had apparently accessed some ancestral knowledge, or otherwise been struck by the inspiration to search these ancient tomes for the knowledge that eluded her. In the end, she may have never understood how she found the solution. But none of that was relevant now, because she had it. It was here. Zecora was more excited than she ever before. Very carefully, she replicated the recipe on the tattered fragment of parchment.

She hurriedly gathered all the ingredients that the recipe called for and began the task of mixing them in carefully measured increments. The cauldron was at a seething boil, and the fumes were nearly overwhelming. The steps to mix the concoction were among the most specific and demanding of any Zecora had ever seen. The minutes stretched on into hours, slowly eating away the day. By the time she had finished the potion, Zecora was exhausted. Nearly an entire day had passed, and the dawn was only a few hours away.

As she constructed the mixture from a few dozen sub-mixtures, she had gained an insight to the way it worked. The key ingredient to it was powdered essence of Parasprite. From what she could tell from her experience and tribal knowledge, the Parasprite essence was actually a living organism. By carefully manipulating this organism in the many sub-mixtures, it had been cultured to attack disease and poison within its host, as well as repair damage to the flesh. The method by which the organism could discriminate between disease and the host's body was completely unknown to Zecora, but once she made another batch, she would give a sample to Twilight Sparkle, confident that the unicorn would extract the secrets of the cure, and possibly find a way to mass produce it. That would really be something, Zecora thought.

"No longer before their time will a pony breathe their last breath. I have found a way to steal back life from death. All the lives thus far forfeit will not be in vain. With this Cure, I have vanquished sickness, injury, and pain."

Zecora was exhausted from 14 hour concocting session, and was readying her hammock for the night. As she lay down, she followed memory lane from the past to the present, stopping to fondly remember her dearest friend; her Fossi. It was in the very hammock she now lies in that she had first laid eyes on Fossi. Her mind played over all the happy moments they had together. As she was drifting off to sleep, the memory of one of the best nights of her life comes back to her.

She was a young filly again, so full of energy and curiosity. Her eyes glow with delight as if lit from within. Since meeting Fossi only a month ago, she has fully accepted him as her teacher, mentor, and more importantly, friend. Despite her young age, she is held rapt for hours at a time, walking speechless next to him as they walk through the forest. If and when she speaks up, it is to ask questions about Fossi's latest story, or to ask about a plant or animal that she doesn’t quite understand. The only time she ever comes close to back-talking her teacher is when he calls her Toto. She dislikes the name her teacher has given her ever since she found out what it meant.

"Child? Why do you call me a child? Do I not act like an adult, though my curiosity is wild? I always keep myself calm and collected. Of a child, is such behavior expected?"

To this, Fossi can do nothing but chuckle as Toto's naïveté once again takes him by surprise. His mirth rubs his pupil's coat the wrong way, eliciting an even rasher response from her.

"Just because you are old does not mean that I am so young. I think in old age your brain has filled with dung."

Zecora immediately clamps a hoof over her mouth, immediately regretting what she has said to the pony that has taught her nearly everything she knows about the forest and about survival. This pony, who has given up so much of his way of life to accommodate her, from the food on his plate to the space in his home. Though she knows all of this, she could not keep those insulting things from spilling out of her mouth. She just sits there with a hoof over her mouth, blushing brightly, and trying to keep tears from falling. She sits there for what seems to be an eternity, waiting for him to yell at her and throw her out of his house, or…or…something. Zecora can't even bring herself to look her mentor in the eye. Her shame squeezes a tear from her eye, and once it starts, she is powerless to stop it. Though it seems like hours, mere seconds pass before Fossi speaks up.

"Toto, come here my child."

Zecora finally manages to muster the courage to look her teacher in the eye, expecting to see his kind face distorted by anger. Instead, she is shocked to see a small smile on his face. She stares at him in confusion for a moment, wondering when he sat down, and why his arms are open. A look of skepticism and hurt lodges on her face. He speaks again.

"Do not fret, Toto. I am not angry. Would you favor your old teacher with a hug?"

Fossi barely finished his sentence before a black and white streak impacts him in the chest, nearly crushing him in a powerful hug. He can feel her warm tears dripping on his chest and soaking into his coat. Her small frame is wracked by sobs she refuses to give voice to. Fossi returns her embrace and gently strokes her mane, calming the distraught filly. Without a word, he carries his little Toto up to the highest balcony, and sits her next to him to watch the sunset. He slowly explains where the name comes from.

"My dear, you seem to misunderstand why I call you Toto. Yes, the word means child, this much is true. But it is not to say that you act like a silly young foal, or to imply you are weak as a child might be. When I was younger, my mother called me Toto as well, and I had the same reaction you did at the time."

At this, Zecora balks. Surely, Fossi isn't being serious? He must be joking. Though, the more she studies his face, the more she thinks otherwise. He begins again.

"Back then, I was a stubborn young colt. I was sure I knew everything, that I was the toughest, strongest, bravest pony in my whole tribe. As such, why should I be called a child? It made no sense to me. I revolted against everything that had to do with me being a child. I broke all my toys and proudly piled them up in out hut, as a statement that I no longer needed them. From that day forth, I wouldn’t permit my mother to hug me. It seemed too childish to me, and I was far too grown up for that. Oh, such a fool was I that I never stopped to see that I was breaking my mother's heart."

Zecora was speechless. She had never told anybody about this, but just before she left home to venture into the forest, her mother had tried to give her a hug. Though she tolerated the hug for a moment, she broke the embrace and gruffly brushed off her mother, saying she was too old for such foalish things. As Zecora turned to begin her journey, she thought she saw a glint of a tear in her mother's eye. She didn’t pause to find out. Just like that, she was on her own, alone in the Everfree. Fossi continues.

"My village was a poor one, isolated from the rest of Equestria it seemed. Illness was common there. I noticed one day that my mother was coughing a lot. I thought nothing of it. Still, I refused her embrace. A few days later, she came to me and said 'Toto, please. Give your mother a hug?' I scoffed and stomped away. I felt bad about it, but it needed to be done I told myself. She was going to have to learn that I was too old for such things, and get over it. The next day I didn’t see her at all, which was odd. It wasn’t until dinner that night that I found out. My father came in, tears matting his fur. This completely shook me. My father never cried. As I looked at him, all he said was,

'She's gone.'

And then it hit me. I had refused my dying mother's embrace. I was in shock for days. I barely ate, barely slept. I always cried. My father came to join me one day. He was looking at me with such pity. He called me Toto, and I lost it. I went off, poured out all the anger I had directed at myself onto him. I raged at him for calling me a child, especially when I had been so tough, so responsible. When I finally collapsed to the floor in exhaustion, he regarded me with a curious look on his face. I'll never forget what he said next."

Fossi turns to look Zecora in the eye as he tells the next part of his story. Zecora holds his gaze, unflinching.

"My father said to me;

'Son. Do you really not know why your mother called you Toto?'

To this, all I could do was shake my head stupidly. My father sighed.

'Toto. Your mother called you that because that is what her mother called her. And her mother before her. But it is not calling you a child. Not in a bad way, at least. Have you really never noticed the way your mother swelled with pride when she said that? No, of course you didn’t. But I will say this to you now, and swear on my life it is true. Every time your mother called you Toto, she said it with PRIDE. She was proud of you, Toto. I am proud of you. Every time she called you Toto, she was telling everybody about her pride in her son. As her mother did with her children, and so on.'

By this point in my father's speech, I was crying. What seemed so simple when he laid it out for me had entirely escaped me all those years."

As Fossi tells his story, his eyes mist a little. Though she doesn’t realize it, Zecora has tears flowing unchecked down her face.

"My father gave me some advice the night we buried my mother. We lowered her into the ground as the sun set. Our tradition shows us that the sun is the vessel on which our spirits ride to the next life. Sending a body into the ground releases the soul. Doing it at sunset permits the soul to be carried into the next world almost immediately. The last thing we wanted was for a loved one's soul to linger before the sun carried away. Better that their last memory before passing is of their life, and not of the sorrow their death caused. Better that they go happy. As the sun set on that day, my father took me under his arm. He said to me,

'Son, listen, and listen well. This might well seem like the blackest night of your life. It very well might be. Whenever you feel that the night is too long, that you just can't take it, think of this. The sun may set, and bring with it the darkest night, but it will always reappear in the morning, bringing with it the promise of a new day. Thus has it been for generations, thus it shall be. Remember that no matter how black the night, the day will come. You just have to hold out for day.'

At this, I couldn’t think of a reply. Turns out I didn’t need to, the lesson wasn’t over. He says to me,

'There is another reason we bury our dead at sunset. Think about your life as a day. At the beginning, it is dark, hard to see. But the sun rises and brightens our world. We see everything clearly as the sun rises. And though the clouds may hide the sun, we always know it is there. If we can wait out the storm, the sun will come back. Towards the end of our life, the sun sets. We may be sad to see it go, but we know that the light will come back. So it has always been so it shall always be.'

At this, a light comes on in my head. As long as I can hold out, this night shall pass. The sun will rise, and with each new day comes hope. The sun, to me at least, represented hope; with every sunrise, there was the possibility of a better life. For all I knew, this new dawn's light could change my life forever. While the sun represented hope, the night represented faith. I had to have faith that it would get better. The night is not eternal; the day shall come again."

Zecora stared at her mentor, really seeing him for the first time. She had never before really thought of him as a pony with feelings…he was just Fossi. She had never really thought that he had emotions or a past…how selfish of me she thinks. What had started out as a simple explanation of his pet name for her had ended up revealing so much more than she had ever thought possible. As she sits in awe of her teacher and his newfound aura of wisdom, he motions with his head towards the horizon. As Zecora looks, she is transfixed by the brilliance of the sun as it slips below the horizon. In this moment, everything is right.

Zecora drifts through her dream, swimming in memories. The pleasant feeling of nostalgia washes over, sweeping her from memory to memory. As she floats along on these warm pastel colored currents, something changes. The current is no longer so bright, not as warm. As does the night sky when the sun descends, the currents faded from yellow and orange to red, purple, blue and then black, taking all the warmth with it. The blissful currents began to buck Zecora like a bronco, waves lifting her up and smashing her down. The current was cold and violent, all traces of serenity forgotten. The wind picked up, carrying with it a voice that was all too familiar. Though she knew exactly what was going to happen, she was powerless to stop it or change the direction this dream was heading. The wind whispers to her.

"You let them die."

Uselessly, Zecora cannot help but defend herself against this faceless enemy:

"These lies you tell are not true. The things you say, I did not do."

"Liar. You could have helped them. You could have SAVED them. But you did NOTHING. Murderer."

At this last outburst, images flash across the sky. The ponies that have died in Ponyville before they could be treated. Faces; laughing. Zecora recognizes all of them, even if she doesn’t know their names. The faces hang in the sky for a moment, and each in turn is followed by an image of death.

A blue mare, laughing with a group of friends.
A fresh grave, bowing of all heads. Tears flow freely.

A brown colt, barely out of school. He is showing off his new cutie mark, an open book with a red cover.
A body, impaled on a branch. A flash of lightning silhouetting it, a distant scream in the air.

A tan stallion, wearing a vest and a Stetson. A faraway rumble, a distant gong.
A mass of red, sitting on his haunches. A brief shudder, a helpless whimper.

"Stop this madness! It is not fair! I could have done nothing more…what is all this torture for?!"

Zecora pleads desperately, knowing what face will come next. She wants this nightmare to be over. She tries to brace herself against the inevitable.

Fossi, walking with her. The last day he was alive.

Out of the ether, a ghostly echo of the past.

"Sometimes, death is but another beginning."

Zecora loses her mind as never before. Something snaps, deep within her. This was new…this was not her nightmare. This was a new, fresh Haydes she had fallen into. At the top of her lungs, she screams.

"To this day, I know not what you mean! Death is still the end! What else is there to be seen?!"

The sky is filled with an image of the strange plant she had seen in the valley of the Hole. The ghostly voice of the dead echoes again.

"You do not know what you seek. You say you wish to conquer illness and injury. To what lengths will you go to achieve this? WHAT PRICE ARE YOU WILLING TO PAY TO BEAT THE REAPER?!"

With a steel edge of conviction in her voice that she had not known she still possessed, Zecora responds with her ultimatum, feeling confident that she was in control of the nightmare for once.

"I will pay ANY COST! Nothing on Equestria is too high a price to beat the reaper! With hints of a solution, you do entice; of what knowledge are you the keeper?"

The wind suddenly calms, the current stops bucking. All is as still as the grave. Nothing moves, and there is no sound. At the edge of her senses, Zecora can feel a pressure ebbing and flowing; though she has no idea what is it. Out of the ether, the interminable void produces a dim light. The light begins to expand and clarify. It is a page of text from one of the ancient tomes in Fossi's library. On the page is the plant from the valley. Out of nothingness comes a soft voice, reading off the words on the page. The voice is feminine, and oddly familiar.

"Nightshade; plant of the walking death. This plant contains a sap unlike any other found on Equestria. The sap is a poison without equal, the mere touch of it on an open wound is fatal. This is not unique though; there are several similarly deadly venoms. What makes this venom unique is that it is not venom. It is an organism. A plague. Once infected, the victim will begin to display unusual symptoms, though each case is different. In most cases, a fever is present, usually accompanied by vomiting. In the final stages, convulsions are usually present. Two things are constant throughout all cases, however. First is death. All infected will die, sooner or later. This is inevitable. Secondly, the dead do not stay that way. They resurrect, and begin to walk again."

Zecora recognizes the voice; it is hers, though it displays none of her distinctive speech patterns. This revelation is entirely swept away under the weight of the information preceding it. There is a way to beat death! To infect a pony with this substance is to guarantee that neither illness nor injury will ever claim another life. Finally. A way to beat the reaper once and for all. Even if the pony is subjected to a fatal blow, they will reanimate to be healed!

In the back of Zecora's head, the alarm bells are ringing with unprecedented fervor, alerting her that nothing has ever been as wrong in her entire life. She almost gives in to caution before an all too familiar voice in the back of her head chimes in.

"There is nothing to be concerned about. This is the answer you sought, is it not? What risks have you already taken to come this far? Are all the lives of the test subjects still weighing on your conscience, or have you forgotten the scores of lives your hands have made forfeit? Sure, the cure works. Unless they are nearly dead. In that case, not even your 'miracle' can save them. But you have the answer in front of you. Would you be doing justice to the blood on your hands to stop just short of the ultimate goal? You have within your grasp shackles with which to bind the hooves of death. How can you resist the power?"

Zecora rouses suddenly from sleep as if hit by a cart. She knows what she has to do to finally beat the reaper. But first, a few experiments. With a grim expression and a maniacal twinkle in her eye, Zecora goes to fetch a subject for her experiment.

In Canterlot, at Canterlot General Hospital, a quite frazzled grey stallion is pacing the waiting lounge, as he has been for hours. Around him, the sound of a distant wail permeates the white noise of hooves on tile and shuffling papers. Overhead, the intercom belches out a garbled message before clicking off. His pacing is interrupted by the sound of a door opening behind him. He spins around so quickly he frightens the nurse that was emerging, almost causing her to drop her clipboard. She stammers a bit as she nervously squeaks out:

"Th-the doctor s-says you can come in now."

The agitated stallion barrels through the door, nearly toppling the poor nurse in the doorway before he freezes just past the threshold. All of his anxiety and stress melt away at once as he lays eyes upon the most beautiful mare in all of Equestria, holding a tiny bundle that can only be one thing. Though thoroughly disheveled, Dawn looks up at him and smiles, causing his heart to melt just like it did when they first met. Artie walks up to her and gives her a peck on the cheek as he inspects the bundle in his wife's lap. The only thing showing is a cerulean head and a tuft of deep blue mane. She whispers to him in a shaky voice,

"It's a girl. Our baby girl…our Hope."

Artie can't speak…joy has left him speechless. All he can do is nod in agreement as a tear makes its way down his snout. He finally manages to choke out,

"She is beautiful. Just like her mother."

Dawn looks at her husband and smiles broadly. They share a passionate kiss, as they both try to imagine what their life will be like raising their precious bundle of joy.

Not in their wildest nightmares could they fathom the horror that would shortly unfold, or the impact it would have on not only their family, but all of Equestria, on pony-kind itself.

In her subterranean chamber, Zecora is preparing for her final experiment, the experiment that will decide whether or not her personal crusade to conquer death will be a success or a failure. She has already extracted the sap of the nightshade and prepared a syringe for her test. As soon as she enters the chamber with the syringe, every single test subject reacts violently. Gnashing their teeth and running around the cages, looking for some place, any place, to hide. She makes a note of their behavior for future study. But she pushes that from her mind and concentrates on the task at hand. After much wrangling, she manages to grab the subject of her first test of the Cure. She makes a quick jab with the needle, injecting a miniscule amount. She releases the animal back into its cage to observe. The subject immediately runs to the far corner of the cage and cowers. The subject then evacuates itself of its last meal, hacking and wheezing. Each breath comes more ragged than the last. With a final sputtering wheeze that is far too reminiscent of a certain tan pony's last breath, the subject expires. Zecora anxiously awaits the resurrection. Seconds drag on into minutes, drags out to an entire hour. Using utmost care, she grabs a pair of tongs to remove the subject. Despite her hopes, the subject is gone and not coming back. She discards the remains into the furnace that serves as her crematorium. She goes upstairs and takes a hefty swig of Liquid Courage to help settle her thoughts. As she sits there, she lets her mind grow fuzzy. From the depths of her subconscious, she grasps an echo from a book.

"The nightshade organism is truly a masterpiece of death. The plague can be transmitted to any living creature, and it is fatal to all. For unknown reasons, the only creatures to reanimate are ponies. Theories abound, but the most common one has to do with the central nervous system and the way it functions."

Her stomach plummets as the meaning of this sinks in. In order to truly test the ultimate cure, she will need to do the unthinkable: use a pony. This is the closest Zecora has ever come to giving up. Success was so close, she could taste it. Unfortunately, the cost seemed too high, the price unthinkable. Again, the echoes of her dream course through her thoughts. She had vowed that she would pay any cost to realize her dream of beating death. With this grim determination, she set out on her darkest mission yet; to acquire a pony for her experiments. With a gleam of malice in her eye, she knew exactly where to strike, which pony would be the perfect subject.

At nightfall, she set out for Ponyville. The weather was still chilly for this time of year, so as soon as the warming rays of the sun dwindled, ponies tended to head inside. By the time she was nearing Ponyville, she could tell that the streets were deserted. So far the plan was going swimmingly. She closed in on her target; the schoolhouse. She hazarded a glance through the window and was instantly relieved. There were only two ponies in the building: Cheerilee, and Diamond Tiara. The schoolteacher was busily sorting through a large stack of papers, looking a bit frazzled, and the little filly was writing "I will not attempt to make my classmates bow to their betters." The chalkboard was nearly full, so Zecora had to act fast. Reaching under her cloak, she removed a jar and a cloth. She held the cloth in her mouth as she opened the jar. The pungent fumes wafting out made her eyes water. She dropped the lid and spit out the rag, dipping it in the fluid. She poured out the remnants into the grass and stuffed the jar and lid back into her cloak. Just in time, she finished her preparations as a commotion arose from the schoolhouse. Blending perfectly into the shadows, Zecora waited as her prey exited the schoolhouse.

As Diamond Tiara walked out, she let out an excessively loud, theatrical sigh and rolled her eyes at what her teacher said. As the door slammed shut she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. A mass of shadows with two gleaming eyes and a predatory grin was right on top of her. Even as she opened her mouth to scream, there was a rag stuffed in it. The last thought to cross Diamond Tiara's mind as she lost consciousness was how bad the rag tasted.

With her mission accomplished with the ease of a skilled professional, Zecora used the darkness and spirited her precious cargo away to her home in the forest. Once in the security of her underground laboratory, Zecora began to prepare for her largest undertaking yet. This experiment would be the crown jewel of her two year crusade to beat death. When everything was in place, and her subject firmly strapped down, all she had to do was wait. She wanted the subject to be awake for this, all the better to gather information from. Right on cue, Diamond begins to stir. Soon enough, she begins to mumble about the indignity and vow vengeance upon whoever did this to her. Zecora watched with a grin from the shadows, just out of her line of sight. Finally she was fully awake. The voice in the back of Zecora's head suddenly surged to the front, and began to speak for her.

"Good to see you are awake, my dear."

Zecora did not recognize her own voice. Foremost, her speech lacked her usual mannerisms and penchant for rhyming. More disturbing than that however was the tone of voice. Her voice was low and sensuous, smooth as molten caramel, yet laced with a very definite steel edge. The predatory gleam in her eye was also present in her voice. Understandably, Diamond was even more confused and disturbed by this unseen voice. She took to whimpering, and finally got up the nerve to speak.

"Do you know who I am? Who my FATHER is? You will never get away with this."

The filly's attitude had always been annoying. After all, it was that very attitude that got her chosen for the experiment in the first place. Under the circumstances though, it was alternating infuriating and pitiful. This young filly had nothing if not her power, and she knows it. She might not ever admit it, but it is written all over her. This makes the poor creature easy to pity. However, the tone which she uses despite her obvious disadvantage is maddeningly smug.

"There is nothing to get away with my dear. After this, everything will be forgiven. I will be looked upon as a hero; the pony who not only vanquished injury and illness, but DEATH itself. I'll be a demigod."

Diamond's response died on her lips as the implications of what she had just heard seeped in. There was madness in this pony's voice…and another quality she couldn’t identify, but that struck her as deeply wrong. She dropped all pretenses, and began begging like the scared filly she was.

"P-please don’t hurt me. I don’t know what I did, but I'll never do it again. I promise. Tell me what it is and I swear I'll never do it again. P-please let me go."

The sudden change of gears almost threw her off, but Zecora recovered quickly.

"Oh, how quickly the castle crumbles. Just a moment ago, I thought you said I would never get away with this. But you need not fret, Toto. This won't hurt for long. And once it is over, you will be the very first pony of the new breed; the first to scoff at death and disease as if it were nothing but a butterfly. You should be excited for the honor."

Diamond spoke without thinking first, something that had always been a problem for her.

"Did you just call me a TOAD?! And wait, what was that about being the first of a new bread? Death and butterflies?"

Zecora's first reaction was to be royally pissed at the toad remark. An instant before she retaliated verbally, she recalled that her reaction had not been so different those many years ago. She decided she would try to get the point across again.

"No, my dear. I did not call you a toad. I addressed you as Toto, a word for child. And to clarify the rest, you will be the first pony to receive the miracle cure. With this, you will never get sick or be injured ever again. You will live forever. You are the first my child."

The thought of being the first pony in all of Equestria to become a super-pony was almost more than she could handle. All her misgivings and the voice in the back of her head screaming for her to run were all pushed out of the way to make room for her superiority complex to balloon.

"Well, you obviously chose the right pony for this. We wouldn’t want one of those lesser beasts walking around as the first super-pony. It is fitting that a natural superior should be the first. Let's get started."

Zecora was surprised at how quickly the filly had changed her mind, though the reappearance of that smug tone was quite annoying. However, all the other things were pushed away as she realized that she now had a willing subject to gather feedback from.

"I warn you, this will not be pleasant. But listen closely; here is what I want you to do…"

Zecora laid out the plan, from the time of injection of nightshade, to the administration of the miracle cure, explaining how critical it was that Diamond tell her everything that she is feeling to assist with the tests. Everything being greedily agreed to by the younger pony, the experiment began.

Diamond was strapped to the gurney despite her protests, though she eventually relented. Zecora's alternate ego was still calling the shots, and she sat back and watched in her own mind as the events unfolded. First, Diamond was administered a dose of the Cure. Within moments, she reported that she was feeling fantastic, like she could do anything. Zecora grabbed an extremely sharp scalpel and set it on her worktable, by the gurney. Taking a swab of topical anesthetic, she applies it to Diamond's left shoulder. Once in full effect, Zecora reminds Diamond about what she is going to do. Though the filly is clearly nervous despite repeated assurances that she will feel nothing, she does not look away. Zecora grabs the scalpel, and makes a tiny nick in the fillies shoulder. The filly displays startling aloofness by letting out a giggle, saying that it didn’t hurt at all. Only the tiniest drop of crimson is released before the wound closes itself as if nothing ever happened. Zecora repeats the procedure, though she went significantly deeper this time. Despite eliciting a slight whimper from the filly, the wound begins to heal almost immediately. In less than a minute, the wound is fully healed. The only evidence of the experiment is a hair-thin scar that is rapidly diminishing.

Emboldened by this success, Zecora moves on to the next test. A small vial of venom is placed near Diamond. Though she eyes the vial of amber liquid with skepticism, she does not object. She voices her opinion that it looks like apple juice. Zecora draws out a miniscule amount, and injects it into the left foreleg. Immediately, Diamond's eyes get wide and she begins to whimper that it hurts, that it burns. She begins to tear up and sniffle for a moment, and then begins to visibly relax. According to the filly it made its way about halfway up her arm from the injection site before being stopped. There are blackened veins in the wake of the venom, though they fade visibly in seconds. Zecora doesn’t tell the filly that she was just injected with enough Grievous venom to fell 20 full grown stallions. Satisfied that the cure is fully in effect, she moves to Phase Two.

Zecora prepares the injection site with an alcohol swab. Wouldn’t want the soon to be immortal-esque filly to get an infection, she chuckles to herself. She picks up the syringe containing the nightshade, and marvels at it. The crimson liquid moves seemingly of its own accord, the fine particles in it reflecting light and causing it to shimmer. With all the ceremony she can muster, she administers a truly miniscule dosage. She uses her finest syringe, capable of dispensing fractions of a drop at a time. After administering the dosage, she sits back to observe. Diamond reports that the area around the site tickles and burns a bit. This feeling goes away after a moment.

After nearly 10 minutes, Zecora is contemplating administering a larger dose, when Diamond coughs. She looks a little dazed. Upon questioning, she reports that she hears a faint buzzing in her head. Shortly thereafter, she says she feels nauseous. Zecora is beginning to grow concerned, though she does her best not to show it. She readies a massive dose of the cure, just in case. Why weren't the two parts combining? According to her experiments, the cure should overwhelm the nightshade, absorbing it. Then it should be able to duplicate its resurrecting power, staving off death indefinitely. After all, the cure absorbed all the other contaminants in it. Why should nightshade be any different?

Zecora decided to do a quick test. How could she have been so stupid? She had put a sample of the cure into a dish and tried to kill it. Dumping enough venom onto it to wipe out every member of Ponyville fivefold did not phase it. Harsh chemicals, deadly mushroom extract, even window cleaner from under the sink. Nothing could defeat it. Even after all of that, she took a sample and injected into a subject, and then inflicted several crippling and potentially lethal injuries to it. Then she poisoned it, just for good measure. Despite being polluted with nearly triple its volume in poison, venom, and cleaning products, the cure worked well. In a very short time, the effects of the venom were negated, and the creature ballooned out, before returning to its original form. Entirely alive and thoroughly pissed, her subject watched her, staring claymores the entire time. The one thing she had overlooked was the CRUX of her experiment. If this failed, she knew that she had kidnapped a filly and then condemned her to death with a smile.

Nervously, Zecora poured a large amount of Cure into a bowl. To this, she brought the nightshade. Before introducing the two, she said a quick prayer. She prayed not for herself, but to the filly whose very life depended on this result. Without anything left to delay her, she squeezed a drop into the bowl of Cure. She watched in fascination as the nightshade floated on top, like oil on water. The only difference was that oil doesn’t spread out. And oil doesn’t grow tendrils that snake through the water. With mounting horror and a block of ice the size of Equestria hanging in her stomach, she watched the nightshade spread. The nightshade was using the cure. Instead of the Cure consuming the nightshade and gaining its power over death, the opposite was true. As she was falling into despair the likes of which she had never seen, there was a beacon of hope. The nightshade was being beaten back by the cure. Sure enough, the pool of crimson that had once nearly blanketed the surface had been pushed back significantly. As she watched, she could see the crimson finally fade to nothing.

She then became aware of something disconcerting. The bowl was steaming, hot to the touch. In its attempt to beat back the nightshade, the cure had produced incredible heat, likely burning the other organism away. Zecora quickly looks back at Diamond and is shocked by what she sees. The pale pink filly has seemingly gotten even paler, her coat matted by a thick sheen of perspiration. She realized that if she didn’t act soon, there wouldn’t be anything left of the filly to save. Zecora pushed the gurney over to the sink against the far wall, and hooked up a hose to the spout and turned the water on cold. Once the water was flowing, Zecora made sure she wasn't going to drown her patient, and then did the only thing she could; she waited. Occasionally there would be a small wisp of steam, but that was the only indication. There was no movement. No sound.

After about 10 minutes under the water, a moan rose from the gurney. The groan was familiar, yet heart pounding. Hoping against hope, Zecora rounded the sink. The filly was still there, struggling mechanically against her restraints. She felt her blood run cold as her heart ground to a stop. The filly's once well groomed and styled mane hung limply around her shoulders, drenched with sweat and water. Diamond's eyes were sunken and ringed by a dark circle, much like a bruise. The single most dreadful thing about the filly's eyes was their focus; or rather, lack thereof. As the eyes of the filly lock onto Zecora, it appears that she is not looking at her, but through her. Zecora's heart froze in place only to be immediately kicked into overdrive. An adrenaline surge that would have killed a lesser pony rocked her system. The second Zecora was framed by the fillies vacant gaze, Diamond emitted a sound that was simply unpony. The filly's moan seemed to be a distillate of nightmares, so full of rage, hunger, and sorrow that is seemed as if the heavens themselves were mourning.

Zecora found herself backing into a corner, unable to face the horrible reality staring her in the face. The lore of her tribe, which she long ago dismissed as old mares' tales, suddenly rocked her as the full weight of their implications bore down upon her. The stories from when she was a filly, sitting around a campfire with her friends as each tried to outdo the last with a tale of frightful content began to permeate her consciousness. She was snapped from her flashback by another moan of the filly strapped to the gurney.

Any lingering illusions Zecora still held about her current situation were dispelled. Her guilt crashed down around her ears as the pillars of delusion she had erected to hold it up crumbled under the weight of a new revelation. She had created an abomination; something that was in insult not only to the Goddesses, but to every living thing in the world. The abomination had once been a filly, and its existence was spawned by Zecora and her misguided attempts to help Ponykind. Worse yet, she had manipulated the filly into believing her, exploiting Diamond's notorious superiority complex to suit her own desires.

Zecora clamped her hooves over her ears to drown out the filly's moans in an attempt to remember more of the folklore she had dismissed so many years ago, trying to recall a cure. Her mind races through tatters and fragments of memories, fueled by desperation and an adrenaline surge that would surely take a few years off of her life.

A shard of conversation from the distant past sticks out to her. Though she does not remember anything about the place in which it was spoken, or by whom, she knows to what it refers.

"…you know this as well as I. There is no cure for this. This monster cannot be reasoned with; nothing exists of what it was before, save for the form it takes. The only way to deal with this vile thing is to separate its head from its body and burn it all, and then burn the ashes."

She knows now what she has to do, but every fiber of Zecora's being is raging against the notion. In her mind, she can see that this is the only way to end the disease and be sure it never appears again. Her heart is screaming at her that this is only a child, and a pony at that. What she is contemplating is so far outside of what is acceptable, reasonable, and right that she is frozen by long moments by indecision. As the minutes stretch out, her arms grow tired and she lowers them from her ears without thinking. Instantly, her conscious thought pattern is destroyed by a wail from the bound filly. Her heart is terrified so thoroughly by the sound that it forgets its opposition to what she plans to do. This momentary lapse is all it takes for Zecora to build the resolve to do what must be done. She approaches Diamond and whispers a quiet prayer for the filly and her family. Grasping the abomination's head, she gives it a violent, twisting jerk. Then promptly goes to the corner and loses her lunch.

With the dark task concluded, Zecora steps outside to get some air and gather her thoughts. She knows she needs to burn the body, but to do so would require a large fire. After much consideration, she concludes that here is no feasible way to do this in the seclusion of her own home, as the heat required would burn it down. And even if it didn’t, the stench of burning a body to ashes would be more than enough to make the house uninhabitable. Without further delay she began to gather materials for a pyre.

She worked quickly, wanting to have the fire burning hard enough to incinerate the body before anypony came poking around in the light of day. As the moon was reaching its apex in the night sky, she had gathered a quite sizeable pile of tinder for the fire. As her final touch she had sprinkled a concoction known as Dragon's Breath on it, to make it burn with an unholy fury and insure that there would be nothing left of the body. With her preparations concluded, she went to fetch the reason for the pyre.

Zecora had been running on very little sleep for days now, and she could feel exhaustion weighing heavily upon her as she sought to complete the task at hand. In her exhaustion she didn’t notice that the filly's mouth yet moved, even hours after having its neck broken. She wasn’t aware of this until she had unstrapped the filly from the gurney and begun to carry her up the stairs. As Zecora adjusted the burden on her back, she began to notice a snapping sound as if the wooden stairs were beginning to break. She made a note to investigate in the morning and replace the worn tread as she continued up the stairs. She suddenly felt a sharp pain in her ankle, but chocked it up to an unseen root that had nicked her as she cleared the stairs and emerged through the door. She once again shifted her burden and continued to the pyre.

As Zecora threw the guest of honor onto the pyre constructed in her honor, the moon had moved from its apex and was more than halfway to the horizon. Zecora took a moment to say one last prayer for the filly and her family, before she lit the kindling. A side effect of the powder she used as an accelerant was that the fire burned an extremely bright green, not just hotter. As she shielded her eyes from the blaze, she could swear she saw movement within the conflagration. Between the tongues of flame, she got glimpses of the form on the pyre before she was consumed by the flames. To her horror, Zecora realized that the little abomination's mouth was moving in a dark parody of speech. There was nothing to do but look on, numb with the implications of what this meant.

As she was watching the pyre burn, her thoughts drifted back to the stairs. She looked down to investigate the wound, and saw that it was bleeding far more than she would have expected. As she looked closer she began to make out the nature of the wound. There was no doubt about it; this was no cut or scrape. Clearly visible were the puncture marks and surrounding bruising showing the outline of a filly's teeth. It dawned on Zecora what the sounds in the stairs were. It was not the cracking of the treads as she had initially assumed. It was the clack of the filly's teeth as they closed around nothing but air.

In the dark of the forest, Zecora let out the cackle of a madmare. Her thoughts wrestle with the torrent of different emotions that flood her.

"Isn't it ironic that it should turn out this way. Far too late, I learned what Fossi was trying to say.

"How blind I was, my dear friend. I see now what you mean, that death is not the end."

Zecora realized that her time was running out as she headed back to her home. She had stayed by the inferno until it had burned itself into the ground, standing close enough that she received mild burns by the time it was over. She concluded as she walked away though that she was burning up. She had never felt hotter in her entire life, and she could no longer blame it on the fire. She caught herself stumbling a few times as she walked through the portal to her home, and she knew what was happening. Zecora had no more energy with which to feel pity for herself, or remorse for her actions. She had simply run out of feeling. It was in this cold and detached state that she came up with a few ideas. First, she gathered a few ingredients, among which was a large crystal ball.

With these ingredients in hoof, she proceeded to the basement and locked herself in, barricading the door with everything she could. Using the last of her strength and rushing to complete her task while she could still think mostly clearly, she drew a diagram on the floor with some archaic symbols, and placed the crystal orb in the center. She drew another diagram on the floor some distance away and stood in the middle of it, drinking a potion which shimmered like liquid metal. The purpose of the potion is to allow a non-unicorn to focus their thoughts and project themselves into a vessel, in this case a crystal sphere, and record their memories so that others can see hear and feel what they did.

As Zecora closes her eyes and focuses on the orb, the memories begin to fade away, and I slowly surfaced, a pony broken in more ways than one.

~*~*~*

*Author's Note:

I get a lot of unusual answers when I ask ponies about how they think the infection started. Everything from a top secret government program gone awry to an alien invasion attempt, I've heard it all. The one thing I have never heard though is something close to the truth. After all, who wants to believe that a frightened little filly volunteered to be the test subject, even after being kidnapped? No, everypony wants to believe something different, but nopony wants to believe that it was a simple mistake by one otherwise so innocent. It is easy to blame the ever present, omnipotent, malicious "They," but to point the hoof at a mere filly? Preposterous. Perhaps some expected for the coming of the end times to be heralded by a tremendous gong and the sound of the sky being rent asunder. What is funny, though, is that those ponies were right. Had that tower not collapsed under the weight of the shiny new bell, this entire thing might have been avoided. Perhaps it is some kind of act of fate, commenting on the pony condition. Despite the fact that the bell in the tower had been there for over 300 years, some saw it fit to replace it. True to pony nature, they couldn’t just put in a newer one and retire the old one to a museum (as Twilight Sparkle had suggested…numerous times). No, they had to "plus it." Go big or go home, right? Well, look how that turned out. Regardless of how or why it happened, it happened. You can apply whatever cliché you wish upon this situation, but in the end, all it took was a pony being pushed too far. And if you want to blame any single pony for the outbreak, I guess Zecora is the most convenient. Personally, I blame the snake. That is just me though. Draw your own conclusions.

The Outbreak

Chapter three: The Outbreak.

All our Glory are belongs to Pacific Penguin.

Scootaloo was walking through Ponyville on another bracingly chilly morning. Despite the fact that winter had already been wrapped up, it was still quite chilly for some reason. As she walked through the streets, heading towards Sugarcube Corner to pick up some sweets for school, she glanced over to look at the Everfree forest. While it had always been a kind of creepy place, lately it had gotten a lot worse. Ever since that Diamond filly had gone missing, ponies blamed a creature of the Everfree for her disappearance. In the beginning, rumors abounded that it was Zecora that had taken the filly, but when a search party was dispatched and came across her hut, they found it utterly ransacked and devoid of life; and most notably, it was devoid of the zebra who once lived there. Also curious was the large pile of ash a short distance away that still radiated heat, even when they returned several days later to continue searching.

More concerning however, were the reports of strange moans coming from the Everfree in the dead of night. It was enough to give several foals recurring nightmares. Though Scoots would never admit it, she had heard the moans one night as she was walking home from a double detention with the other crusaders. She had split off from the other two in order to go grab a cupcake from Sugarcube Corner. As she was licking the last scraps of frosting from her muzzle, she was frozen to the spot by a faint moan drifting from the trees of the Everfree forest. She stood, rooted to the spot by a sound she wasn’t entirely sure she had heard. As she stood there the moan rose from the trees again, utterly unlike anything she had ever heard before. By this time she has heard the stories of the Everfree moans, and she knew better than to charge off into the Everfree at night to investigate, even if she wanted to. Thing is, she didn’t want to. Not even a little. For reasons she couldn’t fathom, the sound frightened her as nothing ever had before.

You remember that feeling you got as a child, when you were walking towards your house at night? How you suddenly felt that if you didn’t start running right away, something was going to swoop from the shadows and take you away forever? Scoots got that feeling…but this was different… she felt a greater sense of imminence and dread than she had ever felt before in her life. Without another thought, she took off for home as fast as she could, beating her wings to give her extra speed. In the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but think that Rainbow Dash would be proud of her. She arrived at her house in record time, out of breath and drenched in sweat. Luckily, nopony was around to see her in this state, so she quickly went upstairs to the bathroom and took a shower.

That night, she was plagued by nightmares. She was running through the streets of Ponyville, and not a soul was in sight. That singularly frightening moan from earlier was the only sound in her dream, aside from that of her hooves on pavement and of her heart pounding in her ears. She had no idea what she was running from, only that she needed to outrun it or suffer some unimaginable fate. No matter how fast she ran, she could not escape her pursuer. She could feel the unseen menace pressing closer to her no matter how fast she ran. Worse, she began to grow tired. Very tired. She kept pushing herself to run faster, but to no avail. She began to call out for somebody to help her.

"Help me! Somepony, help me! Don’t let it get me!"

Nobody could help her. There was nopony around except for whatever it was that she was running from.

'If only I was faster…' She thought. 'Rainbow Dash would have no problem outrunning this thing. Why can't I be more like her?'

It was no use. She could feel herself slowing down. Her legs burned, her ineffective wings ached, but the menace gained. It closed the distance steadily. Under her breath, she began to mutter.

"No. I can't stop, it will eat me. No, no, NO, NO, NO, NOOOOO!"

As she screamed the last word, she felt strong arms grab her. In that moment, she lost all control and began to sob as never before and scream herself hoarse, flailing for all she was worth. Over the sound of her struggles, a familiar voice pierced her terror and let in a ray of light, even as the arms that held her tightened their grip.

"Scoots! Calm down, it's okay! It is just a dream, wake up. Wake up, scoots. C'mon, relax and wake up."

She recognized the voice, though she could not immediately place it. But she trusted this voice. And it had told her to wake up, but that didn’t make any sense…this was too real to be a dream. Even as she thought that, the framework of Ponyville began to evaporate around her, and light began to fill her senses.

As she awoke, she realized that she really had been dreaming. She began to notice her surroundings, and how a few things were not right. First, she was covered in sweat with tears running unchecked down her face. Second, she was on the floor instead of in her bed, and a good distance away from it at that. And finally, someone was holding her. She looked down in disbelief at the arms wrapped around her. Around her chest was something out of a dream, albeit a much more pleasant one than the one she had just awoken from. She stared for a moment at the cyan arms embracing her, drinking in their presence and locking away the memory forever in her mind. She would keep this moment with her until her final breath. She finally looked over her shoulder into the magenta eyes she has dreamed about since she saw them for the first time. Those eyes were looking at her with an expression of fright and concern. Finally, Rainbow Dash broke the silence.

"Are you okay? That had to have been one HAY of a nightmare. I heard you screaming from halfway across Ponyville, so I had to come and make sure you were okay. I thought something was hurting my friend, and I wasn’t about to let that happen."

At this Scootaloo blushed, partially out of embarrassment for causing such a scene, and partially because her idol not only acknowledged her existence but called her a friend. All she could do in response was nod that she was okay, and look away bashfully.

They sat like that for a while. Just talking, neither one mentioning the reason for the meeting in the first place, until Scoots finally calmed down enough that the tears stopped flowing and her body ceased trembling like a leaf in the wind. At this point, it was early in the morning, and both were very tired. The conversation slowed, and they found themselves drifting off to sleep; Dash in the corner and Scootaloo in her lap. Scoots managed to let herself forget about the nightmare that she had mere hours ago, and Dash lets her own problems go as well. And for a moment, it seemed that all was right in the world. In times to come, these memories of peace would be the only things that kept most ponies going, along with the hope of better days.

In the darkness that is her room at Sugarcube Corner, Pinkie Pie rolls over in her sleep, and mumbles a single word.

"Zecora."

Authors Note:

I know you all were expecting a much longer Chapter, but I've made the decision to transition to smaller, more manageable chapters in order to help me update more frequently. If you prefer the longer chapters, let me know, and I shall transition back. As always, Feedback is greatly appreciated.

Patient Zero

First Contact

Again, I must extend a heartfelt 'Thank You' to Pacific Penguin for his tireless devotion to proper grammar, spelling, and generally coherent sentence structure. *Brohoof* Much obliged, good sir.

Celestia raised the sun on another beautiful day in Equestria. As the sun came up, ponies began to rouse and begin their daily tasks. Some, however, were up before the sun and already hard at work by dawns first light, bucking apple trees and plowing fields while the rest of Equestria was still fast asleep. For the most part though, the ponies rise with the sun. Just as the sun had full peaked over the horizon, the market square in Ponyville was a bustling hub of activity, with ponies rushing to and fro. The market is and always has been a lively place full of the friendly banter between ponies, and the sound of laughter is often present as well.

As the first rays of sunlight peeked into her window, Scootaloo woke from a pleasant and blessedly dream-free slumber. Her friendship with Rainbow Dash had blossomed in the few weeks since the nightmare, and she was looking forward to seeing the pegasus again today. Scoots wanted to do something special for her friend, so she set off to the market early in the morning to get some apples from Applebloom. Turns out she wasn’t half bad at baking, and she had learned an easy recipe from Applejack that she taught to Scootaloo. Scoot's plan this morning was to make the only thing she knew how to bake and share it with RD when she showed up later.

As Scoots entered the marketplace, everything was business as usual; ponies laughing, and conversations taking place in a light tone all around her. As she was walking up to the apple family stand, a singular sound echoed through the plaza that made every pony stop mid-sentence and gaze towards its origin. The entire market was deathly silent; nopony so much as moved a muscle as their eyes sought the source of the disturbance. Echoing from a nightmare, the sound came again. The moan that had occasionally been heard echoing from the Everfree forest was now coming from the area just outside of the plaza.

All heads turned as one and locked on the source of the sound. A ripple of recognition swept through the crowd, and several mothers grabbed their foals and hightailed out of there while others simply screamed. The cause of the disturbance was none other than Zecora, though in such a shape that it would have taken a moment to recognize her if there had there ever been another zebra in Ponyville. She was simply skeletal, with several large gashes on her flanks that were not bleeding, but rather oozing a brownish black ichor, and her eyes were sunken and ringed by a dark purple-green bruise. Her gait was a stuttering shamble, and she lurched unevenly with each step.

Though most ponies were slowly retreating from the shambling visitor, one of the more hot-headed ponies confronted Zecora about Diamond's disappearance, accusing her of terrible things. The only response was that Zecora began to shamble towards the accuser and emit another moan that seemed to be a distillate of nightmares. This silenced the accuser swiftly, and it was clear that he was rethinking his decision to confront this shambling nightmare in the first place. As the creature drew near the pony that had only moments ago had been shouting at it, the clack of its teeth as they closed around emptiness was clearly audible, and caused the pony to back up as the creature advanced. As the ghoul began to shamble closer to the accuser, he finally turned tail and ran, narrowly avoiding the jaws of the accused as they closed around the space his face had occupied mere moments before. As its target departed, and the creature began to circle back and focus its attention on the remaining ponies in the square, pandemonium broke loose.

Scootaloo could only stand rooted to the spot as this creature of nightmares slowly shambled in her direction, snapping at anything that crossed its path. A mere pace away from Scoots, the shambling horror was tackled and pinned to the ground by a pink blur.

"OhmygoshZecorawherehaveyoubeen!Youknowwhatthiscallsfor? A PAR-TAY!"

Even as the warning was leaving Scootaloo's lips, the creature bent its head forward and latched its teeth onto the pink party pony. Pinkie cried out in pain and shock.

"YEEOOOUUCH! That really hurts a lot, Zecora! Why are you being such a meanie-pants and biting ponies?"

The creature continued to chew on pinkie, causing her to yank her arm away, aggravating the injury, which was now bleeding profusely. The sight of the blood snapped Scootaloo out of her reverie, and she rushed over to Pinkie Pie.

"Ohmygosh Pinkie, are you okay? We need to get you to nurse Redheart! That looks really bad…"

Pinkie's hair had gone flat and she had started crying silent tears, as she cradled her injured arm in her hoof. She merely nodded in agreement as they headed off to the clinic. As they neared the clinic, Pinkie began to ask if she could have a glass of water, because she was very hot. As they entered the clinic, nurse Redheart appeared seemingly from nowhere and began to assess Pinkie's injuries.

"Oh, dear. How did you get such a wound? No matter, we will have you right as rain in a jiffy. Oh my, you are burning up. Let's get you to a bed and get started on your treatment."

Without another word, nurse Redheart lead Pinkie to a gurney and swiftly out of sight. As Scootaloo tried to follow her friend, she found her path blocked by guards. When she tried to go around them, they told her that the area beyond was a restricted area, and she could not pass for sanitary purposes. As she looked down at her hooves, she saw they were splattered with Pinkie's blood from when she helped the party pony get to the clinic. The sight of another pony's blood on her made Scootaloo want to gag. She hurried to the bathroom and began to scrub vigorously.

Scootaloo's hooves were red and tender from the hot water and furious scrubbing, but she couldn’t seem to get clean, no matter how hard she scrubbed. That was when she heard the first scream. She forgot about cleanliness entirely, and rushed out to the waiting room to see what was causing the commotion. The first thing she noticed was that the doors Pinkie had disappeared through earlier were still swinging in the wake of the two guard ponies that had rushed through them only moments ago. Her crusader instincts kicking in, she rushed through the doors to investigate the source of the scream.

Her thoughts of what an investigator cutie mark would look like were interrupted by another ear piercing shriek and yelling. The sounds appeared to be coming from the other side of the window at the end of the hall, and Scootaloo hurried towards it to see what was happening. She drew up to the window to the operating room, and stood on her hind legs to see over the sill. What she saw was worse than any nightmare she had ever dreamt. Pinkie was strapped to the gurney by her forearms, her hair fallen flat and her jaws snapping at anything and everything. The gurney was covered in blood, and there were several nurses holding bandages to their forelegs and trying to stop the bleeding.

The two guard ponies were attempting to subdue Pinkie's thrashing and strap her to the gurney, but were being met with what seemed like an impossible amount of resistance from the pink pony. Pinkie was straining against her restraints with an incredible amount of force. With one violent lurch, there was a loud snap, and Pinkie's right arm developed a new joint. Both of the guards stopped in shock, and one of the nurses gasped, though Pinkie didn't seem to notice. Scootaloo watched, frozen in horror as the pink pony kept wrenching her leg in an attempt to escape. With a sickening ripping, popping sound, pinkie had freed herself from the restraints…except for the fact that her foreleg was still in the restraints.

Scootaloo dropped to the ground in shock, horror, and revulsion at what she had just seen. Somewhere in the background she registered the sound of a door slamming open and hooves clopping down the hall. She was struggling not to be sick as she felt a hoof on her shoulder. She looked up in terror, only to see nurse Redheart standing over her, looking deeply concerned. Without a word, the good nurse began to lead the filly into a playroom that was unoccupied at the moment. Scoots could remember coming here when she was younger and had to get shots or a checkup. The brightly painted walls and cheerful decorations seemed to be mocking the happiness she had once felt, a happiness she thought she might never feel again. Scootaloo backed herself into a corner and tucked her knees up to her chin and wrapped her legs around them. She sat in silence until nurse Redheart broke it.

"Scootaloo, I know this has to be very difficult for you. I wish you hadn't seen what you've seen, but it is too late for that now. What I need of you right now is for you to be a brave little pony and tell me just what happened to Pinkie Pie before you brought her here. I need to know what we are dealing with."

Scootaloo was numb, and it took a moment for the question to sink in. Once it did, she had to force the scene she just witnessed out of her mind long enough to think back to what had taken place before it. After getting out of bed, she decided she wanted to do something nice for RD, so she went to the market to buy apples, when that creepy Zecora zebra showed up and then Pinkie showed up and…and…Scootaloo broke down and sobbed. Between sobs, she tried to get her story out.

"W-when I got to the m-market this morning…t-there was a weird p-pony walking u-up. I-it was Z-Zecora. But s-she didn’t l-look normal. She w-was bony, and b-bleeding black a-all over. S-somepony tried t-to yell at h-her, but she just m-moaned. She t-tried to bite him, b-but he ran away. And then, P-Pinkie tackled her into a h-hug, and Zecora b-bit her."

As Scootaloo finished her halting story, she looked at nurse Redheart to see the caretaker's gaze fall down to her own hoof as her face went pale. As Scootaloo followed her gaze, it landed upon the bandage on her forehoof. Scootaloo was in shock, and when she looked back up at the nurse, she could see the nurse was sweating really hard, and shaking badly. Nurse Redheart started to get up and mumbled something about the filly needing to go home right away, but she collapsed on the floor and began to spasm.

Scootaloo could do nothing but look on in horror as the nurse stopped twitching, and the even rise and fall of her chest stopped. This was the last bit of tragedy that broke the filly from her trance. She knew she needed to get out of there, and fast, needed to find Rainbow Dash and then everything would be alright. The young pegasus gathered herself off the floor and walked along the wall as far away from the mare in the middle of the floor as possible. As she turned the handle on the door, she discovered it was locked. Then she remembered it always was locked, to keep the adventurous foals from running amok in the clinic. She looked back to the nurse on the floor and saw that she had the key in her extended hoof.

As Scootaloo drew nearer and was about to pick up the key, Nurse Redheart's eyes snapped open. The pegasus recoiled in horror as the creature that had once been the friendly nurse began to try to stand on legs that seemed to be made of wet noodles. The filly knew that she had to get out now or she never would. She lunged forward to grab the key, narrowly avoiding the nurse's bite as she scooped it up. She fumbled with the key as she heard the slow, steady clop of the nurse approaching. She finally managed to open the door and burst out into the hall, almost knocking over one of the guards in the process. With tears in her eyes she looked up to warn the guard, but her gaze was met only by a half of one, as the guard was missing one of his eyes. She pushed away from the guard and narrowly escaped yet another bite, and she began to dash for the exit with everything she had. She burst out of the clinic into the fresh air and dazzling sunlight, but didn’t stop running. She ran until she ran out of breath, ran out of tears, and ran out of road. By this point, she was dizzy from exhaustion, her eyes swimming and unable to focus. She collapsed by the side of the road, and promptly passed out. As her vision faded to black, the last thing she saw was a shadow, blocking out the sun.

Scootaloo's Fate

At this rate, Pacific Penguin correct every one of the chapters I have written so far by the end of the week. That, or he will have an aneurism brought on my my atrocious grammar...time will tell.

Scootaloo wakes with a start, feeling very ill at ease. The events of the day seem surreal, like a horribly vivid nightmare.

'But if that's the case, then why am I covered in mud and scratches, lying on the side of the road outside Ponyville?' she wonders.

Most of the day has slipped away, and it is already late afternoon. Her stomach confirms this with a sharp pain and a loud grumble, complaining about the time since her last meal. Still quite shaken and hesitant, she turns to the one place she can think of to get food. With a knot in her chest and a stomach full of lead, she slowly begins to move towards Ponyville.

As Scootaloo walks through the desolate streets of Ponyville, the afternoon slips into evening as dusk rises up to swallow the sky. Scoots comes across the Apple family stand, and reaches underneath to grab an apple. She makes a mental note to give Applebloom the bits for it the next time she sees her. As she is munching on the apple, she notices that it is not nearly as crunchy and delicious as it should be, and seems to be making her even hungrier the more she eats of it. Annoyed, she throws it away with all her might, and turns toward her home. As she turns, she hears a distant thud and can't help but smirk at the distance she made on her throw.

Even as she was congratulating herself and wondering what an apple-core-throwing cutie mark would look like, a sound rose up behind her that caused her smile to fade like it was never there, as her pupils shrank to pinpoints. Even as she was trying to reassure herself that there was nothing to be afraid of because there was nothing there, the sound rose again. There was no mistaking that moan. She quickened her pace to get away, feeling the soreness from her earlier expenditure with every step. Soon her legs felt like they were made of stone and her lungs were burning as if filled with magma, yet her pursuer seemed to be gaining on her. Every step she took brought the moan closer.

As she crossed the market again, a different moan sprang up in front of her. She slid to a stop, backed up and turned the way she came, only to confront the owner of the first moan she ran from. Again she backpedaled, as more moans began to pop up in all directions. She found herself in the center of the market square, surrounded on all sides by a horde of these…whatever they were.

Day had fallen, Celestia's sun disappearing from the sky. As the the last of its rays left the sky, so did the warmth. Fog began to roll in as dusk reigned. All around her, the eyes of these creatures seemed to glow an unnatural crimson color. Scootaloo slowly turned in a circle, looking for a way out. The creatures begin to close in around her, making her more and more frantic. Out of the horde that bears down upon her, one thing above all else catches her attention. As she stares in disbelief and horror, tears begin to flow unchecked down her face. There, not half a block away and closing fast was a certain pony. Her stump of a foreleg made a sickening squelch with every other step, and her now deflated mane hung limp on her face. Through the mane, only the briefest shimmer of crimson shone through.

Scootaloo lost what little composure she had left and sat down and wept, all hope lost. She could do nothing but weep as the squelching sound slowly grew closer, coming to a stop just in front of her. She held her breath and waited for the end to come. In the back of her mind, she could hear her mother's voice, reassuring her.

'I'm coming home, mommy. Soon, we'll be together again' she thought to herself.

As a hoof roughly grasped her shoulder and shook her, she screamed. The fog closed in, becoming incredibly dense, suffocating her. Everything faded to black as her senses dulled, she felt herself slipping away. Or so she thought.

Reverberating through the fog, a voice came that was all too familiar.

"Whoa nelly!"

At the sound of this voice in the ether, all of the fight went out of Scootaloo, and she sat for a moment in a daze. Again, the voice came forth.

"Wake up, Scoots. You must be having one HAY of a nightmare."

At this, Scootaloo's eyes snap open. There was no way this could all have been a dream. Even as the thought formed in her mind, the fog thinned ever so slightly, though the moans did not. As her eyes focused, Scootaloo discovered the owner of the hoof that had shaken her was none other than Applebloom. In her half delirious state, she can still hear the moans of the horde. She looks into Applebloom's concerned eyes, and the last echoes of the nightmare fade away. As soon as Scootaloo regained enough composure to stop weeping, Applebloom began to bombard her with questions about what kind of nightmare she had experienced, and why Applejack found her passed out on the side of the road near the farm. Still somewhat delirious, Scootaloo recounted the days' events as best she could, followed by the nightmare.

As Scootaloo finished recounting the events, she looked up to her friend. Apparently sometime during her story, Applebloom had mysteriously acquired a notepad, pencil, and pipe, and was blowing bubbles and scribbling furiously. After a moment of silence broken only by the scratch of pencil on paper, Applebloom looked up, and into Scootaloo's eyes. following a brief pause, they simultaneously said

"Cutie mark crusaders head doctor."

Applebloom smiled, and Scootaloo facehoofed.

Scootaloo broke the short silence.

"So, 'Doc,' what's your conclusion?"

"Ah think you've been hearin' too many ghost stories, an' they gone to your head."

Scootaloo facehoofed so hard it hurt. Frustrated, she began to argue with Applebloom. The two were in the midst of a heated debate when Applejack walked in.

Author's Note:
See? I'm actually trying to stick to my resolution, and upload more often. Due to lack of a pre-reader (hint, hint), there might be a few errors in this chapter...I've scrubbed it to where it looks good to me, but I'm sure I've missed something. Any kind of feedback is appreciated, and if you are interested in becoming a pre-reader, drop me a line. I'm looking to make this the best Fic I can, and I can't do that without you, Reader. I've said my piece, expect more soon. (Like real soon...possibly later tonight...no promises though.)

Blood Oath

Once again, all of my thanks go to Pacific Penguin, for his tireless efforts to rectify my abominable grammar.

And spelling...

Author's note:
It seems like I'm always apologizing for something or another…more often than not it is for taking so damn long to update the next chapter. Several things have unexpectedly popped up this week, necessarily delaying the process of writing. As if things ever expectedly pop up. Anywho, I meant for this to be a different scene, but I ended up having Waaaayyyyyyy too much fun writing the office scene. Oh well. *Pinkieshrug* I hope you enjoy it, and as always, Constructive Comments are ALWAYS welcome.

The mayor of Ponyville was pacing rapidly back and forth in her office. With each passing moment her agitation visibly worsened, as two guards from the Ponyville clinic recounted their harrowing experience in gruesome detail. Though her agitation was mostly due to the unprecedented nature of the events they described, the way the two kept trying to talk over the other and interrupt with their own details was quickly wearing her nerves down to the wire. Also not helping their case was the way, Celestia help them, they seemed to be bragging about the slaughter at the clinic. When they began arguing amongst themselves as to who had the closer brush with death, Miss Mayor lost her composure.

"Yeah right! I totally almost got bit by that one in the hall! I've got the bald spot to prove it!" bragged Coconut.

"Whatever, manure-for-brains, that bald spot has been there since the academy." Retorted Cosmic.

"How would you know? You been staring at my flank, have you? I always knew-"

"ENOUGH!" Miss Mayor shouted, cutting the insult off mid-sentence and shocking both of the colts into silence.

"I swear that if serving in the Civil Guard wasn't required of everypony in this town, I would make sure that neither of you EVER got near a uniform again."

On her first night in Ponyville, Twilight was awoken by a loud commotion in the street outside. As she peered over the balcony, she could clearly see the outline of a manticore digging through her garbage bin. For the rest of the night she couldn't find rest, as every breeze that stirred the branches of her home also conjured visions of a large creature perched in the boughs above her bed, waiting to pounce. As her restless mind raced, she began to contemplate a possible solution. When Celestia's sun heralded the new day and brought the promise of safety, she made her way to the Town Hall to pitch her solution to Miss Mayor.

Twilight's suggestion to conscript every able-bodied pony to serve a term as a guard pony had not only nearly eradicated unwanted visits from creatures of the Everfree, but had also helped to build an even tighter sense of community amongst the citizens. All in all it had been a rousing success, and had even earned Twilight a spot on the Ponyville Committee as an adviser. Unfortunately it also bound Miss Mayor's hooves, as she could not "fire" a member of the guard for merely being annoying. Much to her chagrin, she had to find another way to deal with these two.

Miss Mayor spoke up again, after more than a brief moment of favoring the two in her office with an arctic glare.

"If what you tell me is true, and not some horrendous exaggeration, then we have a serious problem on our hooves."

Sobered as they were by the Mayor's outburst, the colts merely nodded solemnly. A thought made itself known in the back of Miss Mayor's mind. It seems like all that bragging was their way of coping with this…a moment ago, they were full of piss and vinegar, and now they look like the scared colts they are. Softening her tone whilst maintaining her air of authority, she regarded the Guards before her with a more motherly disposition.

"Now listen closely you two. You two were the only ones that saw this all happen that weren't…consumed by it, correct?"

The two nodded in unison, neither having seen the orange Pegasus filly that was also a witness to the carnage. Miss Mayor continued.

"I don't have to tell you that this kind of news would cause an outright panic if it got out. Innocent ponies could die in the mayhem that ensued. However, we cannot allow life to go on as if nothing had happened; we would have no way to control the situation. If another incident were to occur, word would spread like wildfire and this town would descend into the flames of madness."

In her younger days, Miss Mayor was an avid reader and lover of poetry. Due to the sedate pace of life in Ponyville, she rarely had use for her colorful vocabulary and capable wordsmithing. Though she masked it under a look of concern, she felt a warm sensation of pride flow through her as she demonstrated that she hadn't lost her touch. In fact, judging by the way the Guardcolts in front of her were trembling, she felt she might have overdone it. Just a tad, though.

"Now you see what we are dealing with, and how serious the situation could become if not handled properly. I need you two to promise me that you will not breathe a word of this to anypony. Not friends, not family, not even each other. I need more than your word; for this most dire of pacts I require an oath of blood."

She struggled to hold a stern look and not beam at her own masterful crafting of syntax. Her smug satisfaction was short lived however; the blank stares she received from the Guardcolts indicated a lack of understanding as the meaning of her artful wordsmithing was lost on the pair. Miraculously, she abstained from facehoofing. She tried again as she walked away from the two, towards her desk.

"What I was trying to say is that this is a very serious matter. And I do apologize, but I require something more binding than just your word. "

As she reached her desk, she reached underneath and pressed a concealed button. The resulting click was so soft that it was all but inaudible to the colts a mere five paces away. Miss Mayor reached up and turned the lever that now protruded from the underside of the desk, causing a slender door to open in one of the legs of the desk. Delicately, she removed the scroll inside and unfurled it on the desk. Cosmic and Coconut watched silently and winced as Miss Mayor took a letter opener and nicked her hoof with it. Slowly, a drop of blood formed and fell onto the parchment, when something unexpected happened. The parchment flashed a dim blue color as the blood struck its surface, and shadowy runes spread out from the point of impact, leaving archaic writing in their stead.

Perhaps neither of them were particularly bright, but Cosmic and Coconut weren’t dumb, either. Both knew that they had just seen this earth pony use magic, and were nothing short of awestruck. Despite appearances, Miss Mayor had not actually used magic. Seeing the shock on the Guardcolts faces, she explained what they had just seen.

"I know what it looks like, but I have not actually used magic. This parchment is an enchanted relic, created by a unicorn for a very specific purpose. This is a Blood Seal, an arcane enchantment applied to an object that turns it into a powerful talisman. In this case, the Blood Seal is a special variety known as a Blood Oath. The Blood Oath has two parts; the first part is the initiation, which you have just seen. The originator of the contract first summons up an impression or idea of what they want. Then, they spill their blood onto the relic, causing their will to manifest in the form of these runes you now see."

As the colts step forward to inspect the script on the parchment, their eyes lock on the strange symbols. Despite the fact that they had no idea what the symbols meant, it somehow conveyed exactly what the mayor had already explained to them. It was as if a mental snapshot of Miss Mayor's thought had been captured on the page and burned itself into their respective psyches as they looked at it. Seeing the reaction of the ponies in front of her, she continued her explanation.

"And now for the second part. Now that my will is made known to you, all that is required of you is your blood. A drop will do. Once your blood touches this parchment, you will be UNABLE to break your oath. Should you try, you will first begin to notice that your throat has become dry and scratchy. Should you persist, it only gets worse until one of two things happens. Best case scenario is that you decide you didn’t want to break your oath that badly."

Both colts shared a look, but Coconut spoke up first.

"And the worst case…?"

A moment of silence passed as Miss Mayor considered how to word her reply.

"You die."

The two guard ponies gulped in unison. After a brief hesitation, Cosmic grabbed the letter opener and nicked his hoof in one swift motion, slamming his hoof onto the desk a bit more forcefully than was necessary. After all, he had to make up for Coconut speaking up first. The parchment flashed blue under his hoof. Coconut followed suit. As his hoof touched the parchment, it flared a bright green and disappeared in a puff of smoke. Nothing else needed to be said, as all the details of the plan had been imprinted on the Guardcolts when they viewed the parchment. With naught but a nod, the Guards headed off to implement the plan.

Once they had left, Miss Mayor sat down and began to write furiously, composing a letter to Twilight Sparkle at her suite in Canterlot, where she was on some Princess' errand or another. Without going into too much detail, she recounted the events of the last two days, omitting much about the events in the clinic so as not to alarm the lavender unicorn. Once Miss Mayor re-read the letter to make sure she covered all the salient details, she headed downstairs and was met by a certain wall-eyed mail mare. After explaining to Ditzy that this was a rush letter to Canterlot and that it was critical that it get there as soon as possible, she promised a muffin basket as payment for the rush delivery. Ditzy snapped a crisp salute, and took off with a speed that would make Rainbow Dash proud. Elsewhere, the Civil Guard ponies were preparing to set the plan in motion.

The plan was quite simple, and only comprised of three parts: The Summoning, the Dispatch, and The secret mission. First, they had to sound the bell in the bell tower, signaling a Meeting of the Guards. Construction had only recently been finished on the bell tower, and its once plain mortared stone walls had their thickness doubled with the addition of great timber supports in order to cope with the weight of the newly re-cast bell. The cornerstone of the tower held a small plaque as a memorial to Braeburn. Within half an hour, the Civil Guard had assembled outside the tower, idly chatting and speculating as to what the sudden meeting was about, and why it couldn’t have waited until after lunch. Thus assembled, phase two began with a speech from Coconut.

"Okay everypony, listen up. Cosmic and I just came from a meeting with the Mayor, and that is why we've called this meeting. There is a slight emergency going on in Ponyville, and we have been called upon to help keep everypony safe."

At this, a few gasps rose from the crowd, and all of the side conversations ground to an immediate halt.

"There were reports of a strange illness in Ponyville, it seems to be some form of rabies. Until we know more about it, Ponyville will be under quarantine. Don't worry, this is just a precaution. There is no evidence that there is any danger to the citizens, but better to be safe than sorry."

Coconut cast a glance towards Cosmic, who looked like he was trying to swallow a mouthful of dry crackers. In the back of his own throat, he felt an itch. He cleared his throat, and began again.

"At this time, we need to separate into groups. Squad leaders take charge of your sections and begin to send ponies home. Once that is complete, set up roaming guards to make sure they stay in their homes. Lyra, Pokie: you two are with us."

With discipline and organization that was far better than anypony could have dared to hope for, they broke down into teams and set about sending ponies home. Lyra and Pokie approached, curious as to why they weren't going with everypony else to help out. With all the authority he could muster and more than a little apprehension that he couldn't hide, Coconut addressed the two unicorns.

"Lyra, Pokie; you two have been selected to help us carry out a dangerous mission. This mission will be super-duper secret, so you have to agree to it before we can tell you what it is. Once you agree, there will be no turning back, and you can't speak a word to anypony else about it. Deal?"

Both unicorns agreed after only a moment's hesitation. Seeing their enthusiasm, Coconut felt a little better. At least they had numbers on their side. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come down to that. With a steel edge to his voice that he didn't know he possessed, Coconut spoke.

"Filly and gentlecolts, we are after a Zebra."

Thus began stage three: The Hunt.

Sketchy Strongholds

Good news, everyone. I'm back from the dead, as it were.

And I've finished this chapter. Oh goody.

See? I told you all I was getting better at writing. When this one came back from Pacific Penguin, he told me he only had to use 3 red pens to correct it. Heck, at least 20% of the story came back its original color instead of red! Progress, I say!

Again, much love and appreciation to Pacific Penguin for his efforts.

Chapter 7: Sketchy Strongholds

Celestia’s sun was reaching its zenith in the sky as the Civil Guard dispersed to round up the citizens. It had only been about six hours since the "Zero Hour", and all was calm. Nobody knew what was bearing down on them, or what the future held. By this time the next day, there would be no laughter, no smiles. The squeals of joy would be replaced by shrieks of agony and terror, and the citizens of Ponyville would face a horror the likes of which they had never before encountered: the reality of their mortality. But for now, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and a cool breeze gently chased blades of grass. It is noon on day Zero, and all is calm.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

In one of the numerous sprawling meadows in the areas surrounding Ponyville, a filly named Hope frolics in the long grass, chasing grasshoppers. Her parents called back to her to keep up, but their words were lost on the excitable filly. As long as she stays within their general vicinity, she is free to frolic to her hearts’ content. The Strongheart family was enjoying one of their sporadic outdoor adventures, soaking up the sun on a pristine meadow on a splendidly temperate day. Dawn had suggested that they bring some food and make a picnic out of it. Arthur agreed, and next thing they knew the whole family was trekking out to their favorite spot for a well-deserved day off. Artie had just set up the picnic and settled down, when a call rose up from behind him. He turned towards the sound and saw a Civil Guard pony waving at him. Smiling, he waved back. The guard called out something else, but the gentle breeze carried his words away, leaving Arthur with no idea what he had said.

About this time, Hope lost track of the grasshopper she was tracking. Her disappointment at losing her little friend was tempered by the fact that in the process of searching for her leggy friend, she had dislodged a beautiful butterfly from its rest. She was back to frolicking at her maximum capacity in no time at all. She barely took notice of the guard as he approached her father, entranced as she was by the winged beauty before her. As the butterfly circled around and around, she catches bits of conversation.

“…illness…rain-bees? It’s going to rain bees?! That sounds bad.”

As Hope continues to chase the fluttering beauty around, she noticed that her parents were packing up the picnic. This upset her a good bit. After all, they just got here. She hadn’t even gotten to explore yet…it was just so unfair…why did they have to go so soon? Dawn and Artie could see the storm brewing from a mile away and already had a strategy to diffuse the coming tantrum. With a flair for the dramatic that a certain alabaster unicorn would approve of, Dawn raised a foreleg to her head and with as much over-wrought drama as she could muster, said:

“Oh dear! The horror…the HORROR! This picnic is dreadfully deficient of ice cream…we must go somewhere with a better supply, quickly!”

As Dawn said this, she stole a glance at Hope. The troubled look and the eyes beginning to brim with tears had been replaced with a sparkle in the eye and grin as wide as a mile. She shared a knowing look with her husband and continued to pack the picnic away. The happy family was packed up and on their way to the ice cream store in no time.. On the way, Hope said she was tired, and asked if she could be carried. Her mom gave her a kind smile and relented, allowing the filly to ride on her back. She soon got comfortable and drifted off to sleep, as the sun was making its way across the western sky.

It was late afternoon when they wandered into the city. The shadows of the buildings grew longer and began to meld into one, creating an artificial dusk in the more crowded areas of the city. As the family of three walked home, Dawn and Artie discuss the strange message the Civil Guard delivered earlier.

“Artie, what do you think is going on? There hasn’t been a rabies outbreak in 50 years, if not longer…I’m worried.”

“Dear, I’m sure it’s nothing to be worried about. These things do happen from time to time, and it seems like the Guard has it under control. They are surprisingly well organized for a largely untrained force.”

“But doesn’t it concern you that they want us all to stay confined to our homes? We will be isolated from all of our friends, and have no access to supplies. Who knows how long this outbreak will last. What if we run out of food? We can’t go buy more, because all the shops will be closed, so we will have to steal food and leave an apology and bits, and-“

“Calm down, Love. Just because there was an isolated incident of what MIGHT be rabies, you don’t need to freak out. I understand your concerns and they are reasonable, but I highly doubt that it will get to that point. We have enough food to last a couple months, and if this thing lasts that long, we will have much bigger things to worry about by that time.

“Oh…okay. Yeah, you are right I suppose. I’m sorry; you know how I get sometimes.”

“Dear, don’t apologize. You worry because you care. You have one of the biggest hearts of anyone I’ve ever met.”

At this, the two shared an affectionate nuzzle. They had taken a meandering path through the streets of Ponyville, and wound up in a business sector near their home. The sun was midway in its descent as they passed through the town, and all was calm. As they turned a corner onto a narrow avenue, a sound arose from an alley up ahead. As they drew upon the source of the noise, a rancid smelling pony shambled out of the alcove directly into their path. With nothing more than a moan the creature begins to shuffle towards the family, as Artie moves to stand in between. As it draws near, Arthur readies for a confrontation. The figure stops short, before it speaks.

“Beware. The dead…they trot. TROT I SAY! They be hungry for the flesh of the living, says I. Accursed are we, doomed are we. They trot…”

As the figure walks away mumbling about trotting, the three ponies stand stunned into silence; The smell of alcohol is strong in the air. Dawn is the first to recover enough to speak and quickly urges the rest home. As they walk the last few blocks to their home, a scream echoes out in the distance and is cut short. Hope looks towards the source of the sound, but says nothing.

They soon arrive at their home, having picked up a good bit of steam after their unusual encounter. As they opened up the door, several notes looked up at them from where they had been slid under the door. As Dawn went to prepare dinner, Artie closed the door and pushed a small bookshelf in front of the door to secure it, then began reading the notes. They were all written hastily, and basically said the same thing: the shuffling, moaning ponies are infected with rabies. They infect other ponies through biting, and they feel no pain. It is best to barricade yourself inside your home and wait for it to pass.

As Artie reads the last of the notes, there is a rapid knock on the door. Looking through the peephole, Artie sighs when he sees his good friend Davenport, who lives up the street. What puzzles him once he opens the door is the small pile of luggage piled around his feet. Davenport explains that the luggage is for when he is in the pavilion. He explains that a large group of ponies are going to hole up in the pavilion so that they are not alone for the entire quarantine. Dave then extends an invitation to Artie and his family to join him, which is promptly accepted. Dave departs as Artie goes to tell his family about the new arrangement. Soon enough, all members of the Strongheart family are suitably burdened with supplies and they strike out towards the pavilion, leaving their home devoid of life and uncannily empty. Inside the empty house, silence reigns; all is calm.

As they walk away from their home, Hope looks back. For a reason she does not quite understand, it seems like they are walking away from the house for the last time. Twilight is creeping over the horizon, chasing the light from the sky; night soon will fall. A loud noise erupts a few houses down, halting all progress as the family turns in unison to stare at the source. The smelly pony from earlier is wrestling with another pony, and appears to be losing. The new pony knocks over Smelly, who bucks with all his might, sending the new pony flying through the air. Time seems to slow down as this new pony soars through the air and hits a mailbox. The mailbox is snapped off the top of the post by the force of the impact, leaving a jagged, splintery pike in its place. The unidentified pony’s momentum proceeds to drive him onto the pike, plunging it through his chest with a snapping of ribs and a tearing of flesh. His impalement is arrested roughly halfway down the remainder of the post as the blunt end punches through his chest, exiting just below his shoulder. In the ocher light of dusk, the image of this corpse skewered on a post is painted in a crimson tint by the failing light. In the wake of the sudden violence, everything seems preternaturally silent.

The impaled pony lies still, as silence settles like a shroud around the world. Out of the silence, a strange creaking arises. The impaled pony slowly struggles against the pole through its chest. With a mighty heave the beast snaps the pole off just above the ground, and begins shambling after Smelly. Smelly just stands there, rigid with fright as the beast closes in. With a start, Smelly’s brain catches up to the moment and he begins to stumble backwards as he trips over a rock. He has no time to react before the impaled pony is on top of him. Despite the horror unfolding in front of them, no one can move to stop it or look away. Seconds seem to tick on into hours as time slows to a crawl. The beast latches its jaws around the smelly pony’s neck. Smelly’s scream is transformed into a muted gurgle, punctuated by a wet, ripping sound. The trance broken, the Strongheart family turned and fled as one, desperate to put distance between themselves and the horror unfolding behind them. Artie threw Hope onto his back and took off at a gallop.

As they run towards the pavilion in the center of town, Hope bombards her parents with questions, receiving in reply only 'we will talk about this later'. This does absolutely nothing to quench her curiosity so she keeps on questioning. Finally, Artie's patience runs out as the usually calm and collected stallion breaks his composure in an unprecedented way: he raises his voice at Hope.

"Hope! That is enough with the questions! Just…be… quiet!"

Artie's outburst caught them all off guard, and the trio fell into silence as they continue towards the pavilion. They arrived at the pavilion as the last rays of the sun disappeared from the sky, covered in sweat and thoroughly exhausted. As they rounded the corner, they saw they doors swinging shut. Artie demonstrated a previously unknown level of athleticism as he leaped and closed the distance, wedging his hoof in the gap between the doors at the last second. Overall, it was a rather heroic move, if a bit pointless. As the door swung back open after rebounding off his hoof, Artie looked inside the pavilion at the nearly three dozen faces staring back at him. Among them was Dave, who graciously and mysteriously held up a scorecard with an eight on it, and exclaimed:

"Nice form, but you need to work on the landing."

At this, the tension broke and conversation returned to normal as the rest of the Strongheart clan made their way into the pavilion. Once inside, the scale of the operation became evident. There were stacks of canned and preserved goods in the corners, and some piles even reached the second floor. Groups of foals clustered around game boards while their adult counterparts formed circles of gossip. Even as Dawn and Artie were still taking in the scope of it all, Hope had run off to join a game of tag with her friend Pip. The two had become the best of friends about 10 minutes into their first day of school, and were nearly inseparable whenever the opportunity for each other's company presented itself.

All around the perimeter, benches, chairs, tables, and other detritus was piled up against the windows and doors haphazardly. There were two immediately discernible reasons for this, the first being to provide a measure of protection from whatever was outside. The second reason was to clear the floor so that everypony had a place to lay their head. Even from just a preliminary look, Artie could tell it was going to be a long night. He had no clue just how long, however. The sun had sunk entirely below the horizon by this time, and the light was fading fast. As the light waned, so did the vigor of the crowd and one by one they dropped off to sleep. A guard rotation was established for fire watch, and everypony else settled in for the night.

***Canterlot, at the Royal Library***

Twilight sat at a table piled high with books, enjoying her privileged access to the Royal Library during her down time in Canterlot. Her concentration was abruptly shattered as Derpy flew into the library through a window, landing in an unceremonious fashion at Twilight's table. The window hadn't been open. Twilight's jaw hit the table in shock as the wall eyed mail mare shook herself off and regarded the shattered window with a strange grin.

"Oops…"

-was all she had to say for herself. As Twilight struggled to regain her composure, Derpy rummaged through her bags for the letter she had come to deliver, dropping it on the desk with a smile as Twilight mumbled something of a thankful nature. Derpy snapped a salute, and disappeared in a blur. Finally shaking off her shock, Twi opened the letter and began to read. As she read about the "attacks" and the symptoms of those who were bitten, an icy ball of dread began to form in her stomach. The symptoms sounded familiar, and she knew exactly where to look to verify.

She began to trace a route through the labyrinth of dusty tomes into one of the oldest sections of the library. In a dark alcove covered in dust, with cobwebs in the rafters, Twi found the book she sought. 'A study of the Anthropological background behind Old Mares' Tales'. Despite a title that was so dry it could parch at thirty paces, the book itself was actually an engaging read. What made this book special was that it was written by an anthropologist trying to PROVE that old mares' tales were rooted in fact, and with success in several cases. One of these stories in particular held her interest, and she went straight to the section in question.

The section dealt with a folk legend from far away in the land of the rising sun, that originated before recorded history. Reading the author's description of his time spent trekking the jungles in search of a fabled village and its dark secret, Twi came across the name she had been searching for; Somnambulation. While its literal meaning was "Sleep Walking", the condition it describes was actually far different. The victims are not sleeping, but dead. They are meat puppets with a heinous virus at the reigns. Equestrian history is riddled with isolated cases of outbreaks throughout history. In a remote area of the jungle, an entire village disappeared without a trace. In the darker areas of the Everfree Forest, there were areas from which ponies simply never returned. The virus has been around since the dawn of Equestria and the outbreaks had always been relatively small and isolated, never really posing a great threat.

Twi was struck by a startling realization. This time, it might be different. Ponies were no longer isolated as they were in the past, with the advent of the railroad system bringing an unparalleled level of interconnectivity to Equestria. In this new day and age, the virus could spread to all corners of the globe as never before, with a swiftness that could only be described as shocking. This was compounded by the fact that the population density in most cities was greater than any other time in equestrian history; with the advent of better medicine ponies lived longer, compounding this effect . The entire population was a powder keg, and all it would take to ignite it was a single ember. At the moment, Ponyville was a roaring inferno of infection…all it would take is for one of the infected to make their way to a populated area, and the whole of Equestria would go up in flames. Twilight shook herself out of her contemplative daze with a start. it was imperative that she hurry; She had a letter to write.

Her letter to Mayor Mare was brief. Essentially, nopony leaves Ponyville for any reason. She sent the letter directly to Mayor Mare with magic, and swayed on her hooves for a moment as the drain of the spell hit her. She had significantly underestimated the distance to Ponyville, and the additional strain left her woozy. After a moment of recovery, she headed to the throne room. It was sunset, and that meant that the Princesses would be in the throne room, as they transferred authority. Sure enough, Princess Celestia had just finished lowering the sun and had relinquished control of Equestria to Luna. Twilight approached Princess Celestia and bowed before beginning her soliloquy.

"Princess Celestia, we have a problem…"

Trapped!

Author's note: The times in this section (and likely from here on out) will be expressed in 24 hour format, to better facilitate an accurate chronological scale. In regards to said chronological scale, I must advise you that there are several events which take place concurrently, and the story may hop a bit back and forth chronologically. I have tried to make it as logical and fluid as possible, but I felt that a bit of a heads up couldn't hurt. To this end, I have implemented time stamps in the story to help keep track of the events. As always, anything that you see that is wrong, or doesn't quite make sense to you, please leave me a comment or a message so I can attempt to de-conflict the offending section. Enjoy!

Once again, a bang-up job as an editor by Pacific Penguin. (Insert catchy phrase extolling his virtues here.)

Chapter 8: Trapped!

By the time Twi finished her meeting with Princess Celestia, the sun had long since set and the halls have grown empty. The only signs of life in the vast, splendid desolation were the guards who patrolled the grounds, monitoring for signs of trouble. As pupil and teacher conversed, the situation in Ponyville was outlined; initial objectives and fallback plans were devised. Every eventuality was discussed in depth, ranging from a simple clean up job in Ponyville to an Equestria wide crisis management scheme, no detail was overlooked as being unimportant. Despite the hours of strategizing, there were numerous variables which could potentially alter the outcome of the preparations greatly.

The initial plan was to isolate the infected and use the Elements of Harmony to purge the infection. Should the Elements of Harmony fail to achieve the desired results, a more direct course of action would be implemented. The secondary course of action would utilize a more kinetic approach, and the remains would be disposed of in an inferno, augmented by arcane sciences. This was the most likely course of action, due to the uncertainty of the Elements of Harmony’s effectiveness on the infection. Of course, this primary course of action is based on the assumption that the infected individual(s) could be contained, and that the number of infected were relatively few (five or fewer, as indicated by the earlier report).

As was her nature, Twi insisted on secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary contingency plans based on a number of factors, primarily number and dispersion of infected within Ponyville. The most dangerous course of action dealt with an infection that had broken loose of containment and was running rampant in Ponyville, possibly already being spread to other cities by the infected that had not yet succumb to the virus. In the event of a widespread outbreak, all mass transit systems would be shut down by Royal Decree. No sky carriages would be permitted to fly, and all ports would be closed until further notice. In certain defensible positions, "Havens" would be set up to protect the uninfected from the hordes. In these Havens, food and water supplies would be gathered and rationed to the inhabitants until such a time as the infection had been wiped from Equestria and the survivors could return home.

The sites for the Havens had been pre-selected by Twilight based on geographic location, availability of resources, and defensibility against the threat at hand. By the time their discussion had come to a close, both Princess Celestia and Twi had greatly bolstered confidence in their plans, only slightly shadowed by the fear of a worst case scenario. Though it had been planned for, the worst case seemed like an impossibility; a feeling that was bolstered by the report from Ponyville. Confident that every contingency had been planned for, the discussion drew to a close, and the two parted ways. Princess Celestia ventured to her chambers for some well deserved rest, and Twi struck out to the chariot depot to catch a flight to Ponyville. Being the star pupil of royalty had its perks; nigh unlimited access to the skyport and charter flights chief among them. This was especially handy since the balloon was in maintenance for its annual safety certification. After a bit of a delay due to shift change, Twi boarded a specially chartered flight to Ponyville. The time was about 2200 when she took flight, and thanks to a circuitous route and a few stops along the way, she would arrive in Ponyville with the first light of dawn. With a yawn, Twi settled in for the flight, and promptly dozed off.

~*~*~*~

Ponyville Pavilion, 2000 (8 PM)

The doors to the pavilion had been locked up and barricaded with the remaining debris to further secure it. As the sun slipped fully below the horizon, the preparations were complete. Arthur was one of the citizens on the first guard shift, and had made his way up to the balcony as the sun was setting. Looking out over the city as the light faded, he could see that most of the houses were dark. There were but a few islands of light in the growing gloom, which he guessed might be strongholds similar to the one he was sheltering in. He gazed out on his beloved village as the last rays of the sun faded to darkness. At first the guard shift was uneventful, boring even. By about 2130 though, that sentiment vanished as the first of the infected sent up its ghastly howl. One by one, more of the creatures showed up, adding its voice to the lilting choir of the damned. Slowly the numbers begin to grow, and the creatures begin to bang on the doors and walls, seeking entrance.

Artie retreated inside to be with his family. Vaguely, somepony mumbles that the light may be attracting them, and with great haste all the lights are dimmed. This does nothing to dissuade the throng gathered round already, and the moans and pounding steadily grow. Soon, the racket is so great that no soul can sleep. Around 0130, the first pane of glass breaks, wringing a collective gasp and several shrieks from the ponies trapped within. At this point the pavilion is surrounded, and the makeshift barriers pop and squeal in protest but remain in place. Glass intermittently shatters, and in a few places hooves are beginning to poke through the barriers, seeking entrance. As the onslaught continues, the barriers begin to splinter and crack under the pressure of the mob outside. Somewhere, a mare is crying. Everything seems quite distant as Artie gathers his family, holding them tight. He can feel the fear radiating from his wife and foal, but this only serves to steel his nerves, allowing him to radiate an aura of calm that is far from his true emotional state. They hold each other tight, knowing that these might be their last moments together.

~*~*~*~

Rarity’s Boutique, approximately midnight.

Rarity paces back and forth in her boutique, her usually perfect mane disheveled, and growing bags under her eyes. Since she had gotten the word from the Ponyville Civil Guard that all citizens were to hole up and remain confined to their quarters, she could do little but pace and fret over the whereabouts of Sweetie Belle. She knew that she had gone to Sweet Apple Acres earlier to hang out with Apple Bloom, but she should have returned home hours ago, or at least let Rarity know that she would be spending the night…quite flustered, she flicked on the light in the kitchen and opened up the pantry, pulling out a vintage bottle of Marelot. Few things could steady the nerves like a glass of fine wine. Reaching out with her telekinesis, she simultaneously grabbed the bottle of wine and a glass. She set the glass on the counter and poured herself a generous portion. She momentarily debated putting the bottle back, but decided that she would more likely than not be back for another glass soon enough.

Floating the glass to her lips, she took a healthy sip, enjoying the subtle nuances of the wine. She couldn’t help but smile as the warmth began to spread through her. Grinning, she closed the pantry door. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye. Outside her kitchen window, she could swear she saw something move. Wondering if it was Sweetie Belle, she walked over to the window and looked around. Movement to the left of the window, just beyond the range of the light spilling out of the kitchen, drew her attention. Squinting, she tried to pierce the darkness, to no avail. As she turned her attention from the darkness beyond the window, she came face to face with a ghoul. Her mind ceased to function as she took in the figure before her. A stallion with a charcoal coat and a black mane was staring at her from the other side of the window. What drew her attention were not the ruggedly handsome features of the stallion, but rather the fact that he was missing half of his face. The left side of his face seemed to have been torn off, exposing his jawbone and teeth, as his eye hung loosely from its socket. The creature's mangled features were less than a body length away, and neither moved for a moment.

Rarity’s mind was still reeling from the ghastly figure before her, when the creature sent up an unearthly howl. The sound chilled the very marrow in her bones and instantly snapped her out of her daze. Her telekinetic grip on the wine glass faltered, the chalice shattered on the ground. She began to hastily backpedal, stumbling over a number of things as she went. Somewhere in the house there was a crash followed by a moan as one of the creatures made itself an entrance. In a blind panic, Rarity sprinted to her sewing room and slammed the door behind her. She flung everything that was not nailed down against the door, making a barricade from so many mannequins and bolts of fabric. She huddled herself into a corner with her knees to her chest, hyperventilating and trying to make the image of the stallion get out of her head.

Presently, there arose a pounding against the door, and despite her adrenaline surge, not even her telekinetic assistance could stop the door from being battered open. As her last defense failed, the oil lamp on the desk was knocked asunder, breaking and setting the area in front of the doorway ablaze. The abominations walked through the conflagration, paying no heed as the burning oil splashed upon them and set them alight. The charcoal stallion from outside the window was the first one into the room, followed closely by several more. As the stallion closed the distance between them, the flames engulfed him entirely. The combination of the missing face, the immolated body, and the reflections of the flames dancing in the abomination’s eye was too much for the alabaster mare to handle. She fainted as the creature closed to within a body length of her.

In her unconsciousness, she passed from this life in a pleasant bliss. Her proclivity for melodrama ended up being the greatest mercy she could have received, as she felt no pain nor had to witness her meticulously cared for body being rent asunder by the infected creatures. As deaths at the hooves of these abominations go, hers was relatively peaceful.

~*~*~*~*~

Ponyville Pavilion, approximately 0200

Through one of the windows, an orange glow becomes visible. Over the course of only a few minutes, the soft glow becomes a harsh light, and the faint smell of smoke permeates the pavilion. Artie can’t help but wonder, in morbid fashion, which will claim them first; the fire or the zombies. As he chuckles bitterly to himself, he takes notice of the fact that the banging has subsided substantially. Even as he makes note of this, he can hear the moans dying away as well. With great thanks for small favors, he realizes that the siege of the pavilion has broken in favor of an easier target. By about 0330, the moaning finally stops. Somewhere, a wretched soul continues to weep, the quiet sobs bearing witness to the horror that was narrowly avoided. Despite the fact that it is quite early in the morning, nopony can get back to sleep.

~*~*~*~*~

On a cloud at the edge of Ponyville, approximately 0200

RD was sleeping in one of her favorite hiding spots near the Everfree, dreaming about the roar of the crowd as she dazzled them time and time again with her amazing aerobatic maneuvers. Their cheers roared in her ears with all the adoration that she commanded as the Lead Flyer in the Wonderbolts. This was one of her favorite dreams, one that hadn’t gotten old even after several years of replays. Her grin slowly faded away as the dream began to splinter. The color of the dream began to bleed away, the adoring faces of the crowd packed into the amphitheater blurred together, and the sound of cheering slowly diminished.

Somehow a trace of the thunderous applause remained, a low crackle that did not disappear with the rest of the dream. Confused, Dash tried to place the sound as best she could. Her mind still muddled with dreams of glory, she detected a familiar smell though she could not immediately place it. The smell reminded her of the woods, of s’mores, her first kiss at Junior Speedsters Summer Camp and…fire. As soon as it clicked, Dash was wide awake. Shaking her head to try and clear the lingering sound of applause from it did no good, and she soon realized why. The muted sound was not the echoes of a fading dream, but rather the sound of a large fire somewhere below. A peek around the edge of the cloud revealed a towering inferno, easily a three alarm fire.

Even as she was wondering why the alarm hadn’t yet been sounded, she kicked into high gear. Bucking the cloud on which she had rested as hard as possible, she wrought a deafening peal of thunder from it; the pegasi alarm for fire. Looking around, Dash spotted a cloud heavy with rain that was floating nearby. The cloud was supposed to be used for a moderate shower the next day, but the fire trumped that need. As part of the weather team, Dash had been trained as a first responder for fires, as it was much quicker for a pegasus to grab a rain cloud than for an earth pony or unicorn to grab a bucket.

Presently, her training kicked in and in a flash she had the cloud in position over the fire. Even as she was rearing to buck the cloud and unleash the deluge, something caught her eye. In the top floor of the building, a trio of ponies was nearly hanging out of the window. Forgetting about the cloud for a moment, Dash zipped down to attempt a rescue. Normally, this was strictly discouraged due to the risk of the rescuer becoming an additional victim, but one of the three ponies was a filly with an orange coat and a purple mane.

Dash’s heart caught in her throat as she imagined Scootaloo hanging out of the window. On the ground outside the window, a group of ponies had gathered, presumably to catch the trapped family if one of them should fall. As Rainbow drew near the trio at the window, the door behind them burst open and a gaggle of ponies jostled into the room. The trapped ponies turned as one to face the door. Rescuers, thought Dash. And not a moment too soon, either. Her praise for the rescuers died in her throat as they lunged at the family, jaws snapping.

In a moment, the family had been savagely attacked by the group of “rescuers”. Dash could not comprehend what was happening, her brain refusing to acknowledge what she was seeing. The family was being EATEN for Celestia’s sake! Even as she stared in her shell-shocked state, the fire spread into the room, fueled by the air from the open window. Before her eyes the scene transcended the realm of nightmares to something far more hellish, as the attacking ponies were engulfed in flames. As close as she was, Dash could see the hair burning away from the skin, could see the skin crack and bubble. A moan rose up from beneath her, breaking her out of the trance she had fallen into.

As she looked down, she realized two things; first, she had been unconsciously descending as her attention was focused more on the horror before her than on maintaining altitude. Second, the group of good Samaritans below her was not what it seemed. These were no concerned citizens; they were a cluster of the same monstrosities that had just committed the atrocity upstairs. She realized that she was dangerously low and rocketed skyward with a great beat of her wings - and not a moment too soon. One of the creatures’ jaws closed on the empty space her flank had just vacated. As soon as she began moving, she could not stop. She flew faster and faster, trying to outrun the horror that was now and forever ingrained into her memory.

At the scene of the fire, a forgotten raincloud drifts along slowly, insensate to the horrors below.

~*~*~*~*~

Twi stirred in the chariot as dawn began to break. The roundabout trip was nearing its end, and Ponyville would be coming into view as soon as they cleared the next ridge. Stretching out the kinks that had settled during her nap, Twi mentally reviewed her plans for the situation in Ponyville. Based on the information she had been presented in the letter from Mayor Mare, it would be a very simple matter to head off the infection before it could propagate out of control. Her plot to put a positive spin on the situation and to reassure the citizens of Ponyville ground to a halt as the chariot crested the final ridge. Smoke curled from several buildings in town, and flames were still licking at the sky in others.

Twi could only stare in mute horror as they drew upon the besieged city. At her request, the pilots slowed down and made a low, slow pass over the city center and market square. As they passed over the city, Twi saw a group of nearly two dozen ponies meandering through the square. Her greeting died in her throat as she got a good glimpse of them for the first time. Tattered flesh hung in ragged strips from several of the creatures. The entrails of one were being dragged along the ground behind it. As the creature shambled forward, its gristly train caught upon a stone, entirely eviscerating the oblivious abomination. The wet slap of organs hitting pavement caused the lavender mare to become violently ill, her stomach mercifully empty due to a skipped meal. There were signs of a massacre everywhere she looked. Even as she ran the numbers in her head, accounting for the total population, population density, and a slew of other factors, she could not deny the truth. Ponyville was overrun, and there was simply no way to contain the infected.

In the span of 48 hours, the infection had spread from 5 confirmed cases to no less than 20, with the actual number most likely well into the triple digits. As she watches in numb shock, Twi observes one of the infected walk through a puddle of some kind of burning liquid. In a moment, the beast was entirely immolated, the sizzle of its fat clearly audible even from a distance. And yet, the creature seemed not to notice in the slightest and continued shambling along until the flames consumed it entirely, at which point it simply fell over and continued to burn. For the second time in as many minutes, Twi’s stomach tried to turn itself inside out. A grim realization settled upon her shoulders, and she knew she would have to make haste if she was to have a chance at success. She instructed her pilots to change their landing zone to Sweet Apple Acres, which they more than happily agreed to.

Twi crushed her feelings of despair and remorse under a sense of obligation and duty as she prepared to enact the last ditch effort to save Equestria. She quickly penned a letter to the Princess informing her of the dire circumstances and sent it on its way. With luck, the rest of the world would follow the Princess' instructions without question or delay, as even a slight hesitation could spell certain death for hundreds of ponies. Vaguely, Twi recognized a smoking ruin as the former site of Rarity’s boutique. Despite her best efforts to contain them, tears escaped unchecked down Twilight's face, washing away a bit of the ash that had settled there. ‘I must be strong’ she thought to herself. 'Everypony needs me to be strong right now. There will be time for tears later, once everypony is safe.' Through a monumental effort of will, Twilight regained her composure. With a grim sense of determination and the weight of the lives of hundreds of ponies hanging over her head, she began to review the contingency plan. Step one, set up the Outpost.

Chapter 9: The Outpost

I need to take lessons in 'Awesome' from Pacific Penguin. That's a real thing, right? Right? Oh well...nevermind then.

Realizing that plans A-F were no longer options, Twi immediately began to implement ‘Plan G’. The short amount of time it took for the chariot to reach Sweet Apple Acres from Ponyville gave her a chance to consider how to break the news to AJ. As the chariot touched down in the clearing, Twilight decided that the brutal truth would be the best approach when dealing with the Element of Honesty. The thought of the Elements brought a pang of sadness at the loss of Generosity, threatening to break her composure. Twi blinked back the tears that were welling up in her eyes; she had too much to do to lose her composure just yet. Steeling herself for what she might find inside, she waved off the chariot and approached the Apple family home.

Twilight rapped thrice upon the thick wooden door and waited for a response. From within, there was a muffled thump followed by a moan as the sound of hooves on wood approached the door. Upon hearing the moan, her heart beat furiously against her ribs like an angry bird trying to escape from her ribcage. She had never stopped to think what she would do if the infection had spread this far; the farm was so far from Ponyville that it never occurred to her that the infection could even make it this far before she arrived. She didn't have time to contemplate it further as a hoof pawed at the door handle, opening it on the third try.

As the door swung outward, the sight of the orange mare on the other side began to register as somehow different than normal. First, there was the moaning and slow shuffling steps from earlier. Second, the mare on the other side of the threshold had eyes that were bloodshot and ringed by dark circles. Finally, the most incongruous thing about her appearance was the lack of a Stetson on the mare’s head. Applejack almost never took her hat off, at least not that Twi had ever seen. As all of these little observations ran through her mind, Twi's brain concluded that the one scenario she failed to plan for was staring her in the face. As the creature squinted across the doorway and opened its jaws wide, Twilight struck out reflexively with her magic and hurled the pony into the wall on the other side of the hallway, where it landed with a mighty thump.

Twilight knew that the blow would not have done more than stun the creature, and began sifting through her knowledge for a spell that would do the trick even as the creature was still in the air. A sharp cry of surprise and pain sounded from the earth pony as she impacted the wall, and it was this sound that stayed the telekinetic blade that had begun to form near her neck. The silence that followed the impact was absolute; oppressive even. The suffocating stillness was shattered by an ungodly loud holler.

“WHAT THE HAY!?”

In a flash, the orange mare had gotten to her hooves and closed the distance between herself and the lavender unicorn. So swift was AJ’s movement that Twilight didn’t have time to comprehend and react before she landed on the floor, hooves up, with stars dancing above her. She lay there in shock, attempting to piece together what just transpired. Retracing the events in her mind, Twi analyzed what had happened. First, she had knocked on the door. Alright, doing well so far. Then, she heard a thump and a moan, followed by shuffling hooves. Yep, that was accurate as well. The door opened, and she was met by…? At this point doubt filled Twilight’s thoughts. AJ had all the classic symptoms of the infected, but zombies don’t speak…nor do they move that swiftly. She suppressed a shudder as she contemplated what it would be like if they did. The final bit of evidence suggesting AJ was not a zombie, was that she was standing over Twilight, staring daggers into her very soul, but not gnawing at her flesh like Pinkie Pie with a cupcake.

As the world stopped spinning around her and the stars dimmed to nothing, Twilight’s eyes focused on the emerald ones that held her in their icy gaze. At this, AJ addressed the pinned unicorn.

“Twi, I love you to death, but if’n you don’t have a damned good reason for delaying my morning cup of joe by throwing me across my own home, ah’m likely to kill you so hard you die to death.”

Twilight sat for a moment, internally debating as to how technically correct ‘kill you so hard you die to death’ was before realizing it was a joke. She then began struggling to decide whether for facehoof or laugh. She settled on both as she began her explanation. AJ looked like she was about to thump her upside the head for laughing, but the maniacal tint to her laugh must have caused her to reconsider. Twi explained that she was under a lot of stress and that it was a huge misunderstanding that led her to toss her friend like that, and bargained to explain it fully over a hot cup o’ joe. AJ agreed, mostly because she was cranky and could really use some coffee.

Once settled at the table and half a pot deep into caffeinated bliss, the pair of mares sighed in unison. AJ was still sore at being tossed, sporting a slight bruise from where she hit the wall. Twilight was not much better off, having apparently been decked upside the head by AJ none too gently. Through idle chitchat, Twi expressed her slight confusion as to how AJ had acquired a taste for coffee. Apparently when she was back in Manehattan, her uncle had given her some when she pestered him about what he was drinking. Since then, her caffeine addiction had grown to the point that she was nigh non-functional before her first cup. That explains the thump, the moan, and the red eyes thought Twilight, she rolled out of bed and shuffled to the door to see who was there, without the aid of her morning brew. Rubbing her sore noggin, Twi began to recount the circumstances of her visit. She had gotten through her visit to Canterlot and partly through the letter from the Mayor before AJ stopped her with a hoof in the space between them.

“Now, don’t you go telling me you believe all these ghost stories too, Twilight. I figured you were too smart for old mare's tales like those.”

“Applejack, this is no mare's tale. Beyond the fact that a mare is telling the story, that is. Also, what do you mean ‘you too’?”

“I came across Scootaloo, passed out in the dirt beside the road into town. I carried her back here and when she woke up, she was tellin’ tall tales about zombies in Ponyville. Way ah figure, she done told so many ghost stories that some of them got stuck in her head.”

“Applejack, would you follow me outside?”

With a nod and a look of befuddlement, AJ complied. As they stepped outside, the duo stepped into the first rays of sunlight to break through the trees. They took a moment to bask in the warmth before continuing. Twilight gestured in the direction of Ponyville. Normally, she would have had to calculate the angle of the sun in the sky, the time of the day, and the time of year to determine a direction with any sort of accuracy, but the rising pillars of smoke from Ponyville rendered this approach unnecessary. As AJ looked on with a dazed and confused look, she briefly summed up what she had seen in Ponyville, and what she needed from AJ. Despite the mounting evidence, AJ's mind still denied that such a thing could be really happening. When Twilight reached the part of her plan where she explained why she needed the Apple family's entire harvest, AJ’s mind snapped back into high gear.

“Whoa, Nelly. There is no way in tarnation, no reason on Equestria, no circumstance under the Fiery Sun of Celestia that would make me part with my entire harvest. Twi, do you know what yer askin'? If we gave up our entire harvest we would starve, never mind that we would have no bits to make repairs or buy supplies for next year’s crop. If we do what ya ask, this entire farm will wither and die. Ah can’t let that happen, not after all we have put into it. Ah’m sorry Twi, I just can’t.”

Seeing no other alternative, Twilight quickly apologized to AJ before touching her horn to the Stetson perched on her head. Nothing happened. Rolling her eyes, Twi pushed the hat out of the way and touched her horn to the tangled blonde mane in front of her. Using a variation of a memory orb spell, she pushed her memories across the connection and into AJ’s consciousness. She could feel AJ’s mind squirm and recoil, not used to having its personal space violated in this manner, but Twi pressed on and slipped her memories of last night and her knowledge about past outbreaks into AJ’s mind.

Exercising all the control she could muster, she did not force the images and memories into the other's mind, as it seemed like it would be a great violation of AJ’s psyche; rather, she passively moved them into AJ’s mind.

The easiest way to visualize this would be to imagine the two mares sitting at the coffee table from earlier. The table represents the connection they now share as their minds are linked by the spell. Now, imagine Twi with a manila envelope in her hooves. This envelope represents all of the pertinent knowledge and memories about the happenings in Ponyville. Instead of Twilight forcing the other mare to take the envelope or trying to cram it down her throat (so to speak), Twi places it on the table, gently urging AJ to pick it up, but not forcing her to do so. Realizing Twilight’s intent and trusting the unicorn explicitly, AJ’s mind tentatively reaches out to pick up the envelope. As soon as contact is made, Applejack’s mind is bombarded by images, words, scenes from a fiery hellscape of nightmare, and the undeniable truth of what must be done.

Overwhelmed in several ways at once and feeling mildly violated, AJ sits down hard and weeps silently. She weeps for the loss of Rarity, for the death of so many ponies she barely knew, but mostly for the death of Equestria. This conclusion was inescapable once presented with all the facts. Equestria would soon be overrun, and there was nothing anypony could do to stop it. All ponykind could do was save what they could, who they could, and try to survive. Twilight looked back to the house, her gaze met by five sets of eyes. The three crusaders watched warily from an upstairs window, Big Mac stood in the doorway, seeming to debate whether or not to intervene, and Granny Smith was wearing a thousand yard stare, focused intently on something nopony else could see.

Presently, AJ calmed down enough to curb the flow of tears. When she spoke, her voice quivered slightly, the only outward sign of the emotions undoubtedly roiling within her.

“Ah’ll help you Twi, we all will. We’ll do all we can for you.”

At this, Twilight let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding. As AJ stood up to convince the rest of the family of what must be done, she made a single parting remark.

“And Twi? Don’t ever do that again.”

With this, she walked back to the house, shoulders hunched under her new burden.

Unsurprisingly, winning over AJ was far and away the most difficult part of the whole ordeal, and with her support any opposition the others may have held towards the plan quickly vanished. For the most part the rest of the household stared on, numb with shock as Twi summed up the reason for the paradigm shift that was about to occur. The only pony that reacted was Scootaloo, a look of grim satisfaction settling on her visage as she was vindicated of letting old mares' tales go to her head, acknowledging AJ's apology with little more than a nod. In less than 15 minutes all of the questions had been answered more or less satisfactorily, and Twi headed outside to let the others mull over the implications of what she had told them as she surveyed their position and a began to formulate a plan. She was soon joined outside by AJ who, despite her best efforts to hide it, was still quite disturbed by what had transpired earlier.

The two of them sat in a silence that quickly grew awkward, as each tried to work out how to bring up the topic that was weighing heavily upon their minds. The tension was broken quite abruptly as a hexa-chromatic blur swooped out of the sky, snatching them both into a bone crushing hug. As the duo tried to gather their wits from a perfectly executed dive-bomb-hug, they grew aware that this was not an ordinary hug, as evidenced by the gentle sobbing coming from the hunched pegasus. Something quite traumatic had obviously occurred, though exactly what this might have been was a mystery to the both of them. They didn't have to wait long for it to be made clear. Over and over, the pegasus kept muttering the same phrase again and again.

“I couldn't save them. I couldn't save them. I couldn't save them.”

The words blended together into a litany of guilt, escaping from between wretched sobs. Twi and AJ shared a knowing look as they returned the tormented pegasus' hug, stroking her mane and whispering reassurances to her. Soon, she had calmed down enough to relate the events of the previous evening to the pair of ponies comforting her. As her anecdote drew to its conclusion, she couldn't contain herself any longer and began to sob again. Somehow, between shuddering breaths, she revealed what had truly been weighing on her heart; the thought of Scootaloo's corpse being picked at by scavengers because Rainbow had failed to protect her.

They had a date of sorts lined up for the previous day, and the excitable orange filly had clearly been looking forward to it, if her ear to ear grin was any indication. However, Dash had stayed up a bit later than she should have pulling jokes on couples near make out lane the night before, and overslept their meeting by a good half hour. Even though she rushed to the restaurant and searched the town high and low, no sign of her friend was to be found. Rainbow reasoned that by missing her date with the filly she had shattered scooter's self esteem, causing her to go into a deep depression and run away from Ponyville and get caught, and subsequently eaten, by zombies.

As Dash took a deep breath to presumably heap more undeserved blame onto herself, AJ and Twi shared another knowing look. Rainbow launched into a continuation of her predictable diatribe of self pity and undeserved blame only to be silenced by a pair of hooves being pressed to her muzzle. Looking confused and hurt that they had silenced her in the middle of her rant, Dash's gaze shifted questioningly between the two ponies muzzling her. Twilight was the first to speak.

“Rainbow? Not to cut short your exposition on how you think you are the worst pony ever, but we thought you might want to know...Scootaloo is alive.”

At this, Dash's eyes widened and lit up with unabashed hope that was quickly replaced by a crushing sadness that threatened to send the Pegasus into a weeping fit. At this, AJ chimed in.

“It's true, sugar cube. She's upstairs with the other two right now."

In a blue flash and a gust of wind, the Pegasus rocketed into the house at a rate that didn't seem possible, let alone safe. A couple muffled thumps later a trio of voices screamed in unison, one being cut short quite suddenly. The two ponies on the lawn looked at each other, a gesture that had been repeated more in the last day than in the six months prior combined. The awkward conversation that they had been attempting to broach earlier no longer seemed important in the light of what they had just experienced. Suddenly, Twi sat up straight.

“Does Sweetie Belle know about her sister?”

AJ opened her mouth to say something but paused, and after a moment of contemplation closed it again and shook her head dejectedly. Seeing this, Twilight hung her head, dreading breaking the news to Sweetie. The poor filly would be devastated when she found out. Twi shook her head again, muttering to herself.

“Dammit. “

Vaguely, she wondered how things were going upstairs.

*-*-*-*

Upstairs, the guest bedroom was in a state of total bedlam. An extremely frightened little pegasus was having the life squeezed out of her by a larger, sobbing pegasus. The big one was muttering something unintelligible while smiling in a most disconcerting manner and stroking the smaller one's mane. The miniature white unicorn was sucking in deep heaving breaths as she held a hoof over her heart, pantomiming a heart attack. The small butter colored earth pony was the quickest to snap back to her senses, and was presently trying to disengage the pegasi before the little one turned any other shades of blue. And finally, the little pegasus was busy turning several shades of blue and contemplating the afterlife, having given struggling for air up as futile.

As the situation quickly became desperate, the earth filly pulled a last ditch maneuver to free the mini pegasus. Rearing onto her back hooves, Apple Bloom pushed down on her friend's face with all her might. Had she not been unconscious, Scootaloo would have been in a world of pain from the impact. Nevertheless, Scootaloo's head popped free with a sound like a bottle of champagne being uncorked. For a moment, the larger Pegasus stared at the space between her hooves that had suddenly become quite emptier than it had been previously. With a mighty gasp followed by a tremendous fit of coughing, Scooter began to return to a normal shade. In a moment, Dash had realized that her petite pegasus prize had presently escaped her embrace, and quickly scooped her back into an embrace, though not one so tight as to impair survival. Sweetie Belle had caught her breath enough to berate the cyan streak for scaring the daylight out of them, shaking her hoof menacingly to further communicate her displeasure.

Scootaloo had recovered from her brush with death well enough to grasp the situation and return the embrace. This went on for several moments essentially unchanged. Eventually, the collective heart rate dropped somewhere into the range of somepony running uphill, and calmer heads prevailed. Both Scootaloo and Rainbow tried to apologize to the other for missing their appointment at the same time, realizing simultaneously that the other pony had stood them up. They went from apologizing to bickering in ten seconds flat. The pair soon realized what they were doing and collapsed in a fit of giggling at their sheer joy in knowing the other was alive. Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle shared a look of confusion, not unlike what Twilight and AJ had been doing all morning.

In the yard, Twilight had decided on how she was going to set up the initial outpost for Ponyville. The humble Apple family farm would first and foremost need to be fortified against a potential onslaught of undead. Despite being a bit flimsy at the moment, the wooden fence that encircled the homestead from the apple orchard could be beefed up to a respectable state with a bit of elbow grease. By logging the apple trees that had already been harvested of their fruit and cutting them down to size, the fence could be bolstered without any outside materials. More than anything, this operation would require horsepower, and a good bit of it at that. This was quite the conundrum, as the only settlement that could be tapped for resources just happened to be under siege by hordes of the undead.

In spite of the risks involved, Twilight would have to begin to bring the survivors out of Ponyville if her endeavor was to be successful. That is not to say that she didn’t already have the framework of a plan in place for this, but the details would have to be fleshed out ‘on the run’ as it were. Twilight summoned Dash, and soon the cyan pegasus emerged from the house with Scootaloo on her back. Once she was within speaking distance, Twilight addressed the pegasus.

“Dash, I need you to do a mission for me. It won’t take long and shouldn’t be difficult, but you’ll have to leave Scootaloo behind.”

At this, Dash seemed to draw back in shock, not sure if she was ready to let the filly out of her sight so soon after being reunited. Before she could question why Scoots couldn’t come with her, Twilight continued her instruction.

“I’ll need you to fly to the edge of the Everfree and collect Fluttershy. In addition to Fluttershy, I need you to help her gather up about a dozen small animals. Don’t bother asking why just yet, I’ll explain it when you return. I need you to head straight there, grab Fluttershy and her animals, and then come straight back. Do not stop for ANYTHING. We need you, Dash. If something happened to you down there, this entire plan would fall apart and our mission would certainly fail. I know this for a fact. Do you understand how important you are, Dash? Not just to the mission, but to your friends as well?”

Rainbow couldn’t help but crack a smile as the words sunk in. Of course she was mission critical. After all, who could deny the value of having the fastest flyer in Equestria as a part of their team? And even beyond that, she knew how important her friends were to her; it was only right that they should feel the same about her. She would not let them down, not when they needed her so badly. Turning to look at Scootaloo, she favored the little pegasus with an affectionate nuzzle before she spoke.

“Scooter, I need you to stay here. I don’t like the thought of leaving you here after everything that happened, but you couldn’t be in safer hooves. I’ll come right back for you. I promise. “

With that, Scootaloo gave a tiny nod, and slid off Rainbow’s back. As the larger pegasus hovered momentarily, she gave a quick nod to Twilight before shooting off into the distance, a prismatic contrail marking her passage. As the winds died down in the wake of the pegasus’ departure, Twilight motioned for Scootaloo to follow her. Catching Applejack’s eye from across the yard, the unicorn repeated the gesture, beckoning her to follow. At about 0600, the entire crew was gathered in the living room awaiting further information. As Twilight returned to the gathering with a pile of parchment and maps that had come from Celestia-knows-where, she addressed the group simply.

“Everypony, I have a plan…”

The Dash

Chapter 10: The Dash

"...And so it was, that the noble Pacific Penguin had slain the seemingly immortal Grammar-zilla, burying the fallen colossus beside his nefarious kin, the mighty Spell-a-saurus. In time, the deeds of our hero would be immortalized in the songs of bards, sung far and wide. A yearly tradition had sprung up to commemorate the trials that had been overcome, the obstacles surmounted. The tradition was called "The Offering" , and is celebrated as such: From all the lands, the farmers send a portion of their butter throughout the year to be stored in a cold cellar far below ground. On the night before the Summer Solstice, the butter would be carted up from the cellar and sculpted by skilled artisans into an homage to the hero, bearing his noble visage. By nightfall the monument would be no more, dissolved by the rays of the sun; signifying Pacific Penguin's surmounting of the great obstacles that befell him. The day is concluded with much ale; a tremendous celebration indeed.

With her mission firmly in her mind, Dash set off for Fluttershy’s cottage by the edge of the Everfree Forest. She flew high above the trees, skirting the undersides of the clouds in order to keep as much distance between the infected Ponyville and herself as possible. After all, it would be easier to follow her friends’ directions if there wasn’t the temptation of helping a pony in need. Dipping below the clouds, she checked her progress. As fast as she was flying, she would arrive any minute. Sure enough, after only a few more flaps of her wings Rainbow spotted the clearing in which her canary friend resides, marked as it was by a litter of woodland creatures.

Fluttershy’s Cottage, 0630

Pulling into a steep dive and tucking her wings in, Dash rocketed towards the ground at an irresponsible speed. She took a moment to revel in the sheer thrill of a high speed maneuver, but was forced to flare her wings and pull up to avoid becoming a mangled cyan and crimson crater in the ground. As her powerful wings bled off her momentum, the wind they created was not dissimilar to a hurricane, and sent most of the smaller animals tumbling. As she touched down, she began to look around for Fluttershy. That’s odd…thought Dash. Usually her timid friend was out and about this time of day, tending to the needs of the assortment of fauna that congregated near her home.

Before she had a chance to really ponder where her friend had gone, a bit of pink poking out from a bush drew her attention. As she cantered over to investigate, the situation was revealed in its comical entirety. As Dash had bled off the momentum of her dive, Fluttershy had been outside, tending to one of her animals or another, and had been caught unaware by the sudden gust of wind. This resulted in her being sent careening through the air, into the bush where she landed and was stuck. If not for the look of embarrassment on her poor friend's face, Dash might have fallen to the ground laughing. As it was, she apologized and helped poor Fluttershy out of the shrubbery.

As soon as the fragile mare stopped shaking, Rainbow Dash began to try and explain what exactly it was that she needed from her. Despite the fact that Dash was putting on her best game face possible and trying to act like her usual, confident self, it was painfully obvious that the fastest flyer in Equestria was barely holding it together. Fluttershy tried to pick a bit of revelation from the cyan pegasus, but to no avail. And when Rainbow Dash asked for a dozen small animals, Fluttershy stared in confusion for a moment. It was all Dash could do to convince Fluttershy that the animals would come to no harm, and that it was some crazy scheme of Twilight’s.

After a quick back and forth, Fluttershy quickly dispersed to round up a few of the animals. After only a few minutes, she returned carrying a basket that was emitting none-too-pleasant sounds, and a gaggle of rabbits perched upon her back. Dash couldn’t figure out what in the heck would make a noise like was coming from the basket, so she inquired as to its contents.

“Fluttershy…What is in the basket?”

“Badgers.”

“Badgers?”

“Badgers.”

“Shy, why badgers?”

“Badgers are strong, brave animals with a strong sense of loyalty. I had to put them in the basket because their sharp claws would not have made flying easy.”

At this, Dash just shrugged. It seemed like a pretty good reason to her. As they were preparing to leave, she had a thought that stuck her as incredibly funny and couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Hehehe. Badger Basket.”

And thus, the pegasus who tried not to let her stress show, and the one who could see it anyway, set off for Sweet Apple Acres.

As they cleared the edge of the everfree, Fluttershy took in a sharp gasp and called out to Rainbow.

“Ohmygosh! Dash, we have to go to Ponyville! Somepony could be in trouble down there.”

“Shy, we can’t go down there. Twi told me to get you and come straight back.”

“Dash, are you even hearing yourself? Are you really saying that you would abandon the city in its time of need? That doesn’t sound like the element of Loyalty I know."

"Fluttershy, please. Don’t do this to me. Twilight specifically told me not to go to Ponyville. All I really know is that something terrible has happened, and that we are needed far more at AJ’s place than in town. “

Taken aback by Dash’s begging, Fluttershy relented. Something very bad must have happened to cause the confident, assertive pegasus to resort to begging. This just added to the questions that Fluttershy wasn’t sure if she wanted answers to as they continued to Sweet Apple Acres.

At Sweet Apple Acres, approximately 0715

Fluttershy and Dash returned to the outpost far later than Dash would have liked, taking half again as long as it took Dash to get there, a fact she was quite content to keep bringing up. Despite the fact that Rainbow had taken the basket and lifted a significant burden from Fluttershy, the meek pegasus was still struggling to keep up with her. With a great sense of relief, albeit for different reasons, the two set down near the barn at the Outpost. While Fluttershy sat down to try to catch her breath, Dash went to find Scootaloo and Twilight to let them know she had returned. The former came careening out of the doorway as Dash tried to enter, sending them both sprawling onto the porch, rubbing their assorted new bruises. Even as they nursed their new injuries, they attempted to embrace each other, earning more than a few exclamations of discomfort from the both of them.

Soon enough, a suitable embrace had been accomplished, and the smaller pegasus took her now customary place on the back of the larger one. Thus situated, they began their search for Twilight, a search that ended about as abruptly as the first when the lavender unicorn walked out of the doorway to see what was causing such a racket. Seemingly at ease, Dash gave Twilight a quick update on what had happened during her trip. Upon learning that Fluttershy had brought six badgers, Twi’s eyes gleamed for a moment as she was lost in thought. When Dash asked what the look was for, Twi simply replied that things were going better than expected with a dismissive wave of her hoof. Dash gave a shrug of her wings, nearly dislodging Scootaloo from her tenuous position.

As Dash finished her "After Action Review", Twilight gestured over at Fluttershy, still sitting in the clearing in which they landed, and inquired as to how much she knew about what had actually happened. Dash considered it for a moment before responding.

“Not much, other than something really bad happened in Ponyville, and she is needed far more here than in town. I nearly had to drag her, but she finally decided that she would follow me once I told her that this was all part of your plan. You do have a plan, right?”

At this, Twilight at first nodded in assent, but when Dash questioned whether or not she had a plan, Twi looked downright hurt. To question whether or not she (who had a plan and a backup plan for her backup plan when she so much as brushed her mane) had a backup plan for what might well be the end of civilization and ponykind as we know it, was almost blasphemous. After a moment in indulging her wounded ego, Twilight realized that it was a symptom of something much darker, and potentially fatal; her friends were starting to doubt her. Resolving to eliminate any doubts by nipping the whole situation in the bud, Twilight instructed Dash to round up the rest of the group to meet in the living room again at 0800.

Dash looked up at the sun, now entirely above the horizon, and decided that she had plenty of time to grab a snack for Scootaloo and herself before rounding everypony up. As she turned to go into the kitchen, she saw Twilight also break contact and head into the meadow to talk to Fluttershy. ‘This can’t end well’ thought Dash. Deciding that Fluttershy was in good hooves, Dash’s hunger overruled her desire to overhear the conversation between the two.

Twilight approached the delicate pegasus with much trepidation. She truly felt sorry for what she was going to have to put the sweet mare through, but there was simply no way to avoid it. If everypony was to stand a chance at survival, they all needed to be familiar with what they were facing. Even as she approached, she was contemplating the easiest way to break the news to Fluttershy. The distance between them ran out all too soon, leaving Twilight with only a vague idea of what she was going to say. As Twi drew upon her, Fluttershy looked up with a start, relaxing when she saw the face of her good friend. Her relaxed look was nearly immediately replaced by one of concern as she saw the distress Twilight was in, as she addressed the haggard looking unicorn.

“Oh dear, Twilight. You look awful. Oh, I didn’t mean it like that…you are very pretty...I only meant to say that you look like you have a lot on your mind…not that you don’t always, but…um…I…are you okay?”

As she spoke, the pitiful mare grew steadily more flustered, trying to disappear behind her mane with a bit of success. Hoping to ease the tension even a little bit, Twi sat down next to Fluttershy and put an arm around her. Fluttershy initially recoiled out of habit, but soon leaned into the embrace, taking comfort from the proximity of a trusted friend. Twi hated that they couldn’t just freeze time right at that moment. It was just her and this innocent canary mare, as yet unaware of the horror that had befallen Ponyville and two of their friends. While Rainbow had been gone to gather up Fluttershy, Twilight had gathered the rest of the group in the living room and distributed a list of tasks that each was responsible for accomplishing as soon as possible. Even now, she could see them all hard at work...Big Mac was felling trees that had already been harvested as AJ and the Crusaders minus one were furiously bucking Apples and putting them into baskets respectively. Steeling herself for the pain she was going to cause, Twilight took a deep breath before speaking to Fluttershy.

“Fluttershy? I’m sure you saw the smoke in Ponyville on the way over here. Do you know what it was from?”

At the mention of her name the pegasus stiffened momentarily, before relaxing and sagging her shoulders lower than before. Looking at the ground as if she was trying to see the grass growing before her eyes, she slowly shook her head. Negative. Twilight continued.

“Something very bad has happened in Ponyville. A lot of ponies have died, and many more will. There is nothing we can do to change that.”

Fluttershy stopped tracing patterns in the grass and froze in place. She let her hoof fall to the turf, the first tear tracing its way down her face. The only thing that betrayed the grief behind her mane was the soft patter of tears on the ground. Twilight would give anything to spare her timid friend from this grief; she was so sweet, she didn’t deserve the pain that this knowledge would bring. Sadly, there was no way around it. Feeling her own composure flagging, Twilight pushed on.

“There is nothing we can do. A lot of ponies are going to die. I hate it, but what has taken hold cannot be stopped. All we can do is save who we can while there are still ponies to save.”

From behind her pink wall of mane, Fluttershy’s voice was barely a whisper as she spoke up. Her voice cracked with grief Fluttershy did not even try to disguise.

“Why, Twilight? Why do they have to die? Why can’t we save them?”

“Fluttershy, we cannot save them. We don’t have the power or the technology. There is a disease running loose in Ponyville that is killing them, and it has already begun to spread. There is nothing we can do but save who we can.”

“Can’t we cure them? Diseases can be cured…can we vaccinate them? How does the disease spread? Can we stop the spread?”

“Shy, there is no cure. Not that we know of, at least. Same goes for vaccination. As for how it spreads, it is only from contact with the infected. Not airborne, waterborne, or food borne. Again, as far as we know, that is how it spreads.”

“How…How do they die?”

At this, Twilight balked. How much should she tell her? Where was the line between “Enough information to make her fully aware of the threat” and “so much information that she became a nervous wreck”? Even as she thought about it, there was a good chance that the latter had already happened. Picking her words carefully, she tried to explain as best she could.

“Well…they suffer from high fever and faintness near the end. Then they become unconscious. This is followed by coma and death. “

“That…that’s not so bad. At least it is peaceful. When they die, can you still be infected by them? If everypony locked themselves inside and waited it out, then all they would have to do is clean up the ones who didn’t make it, right? There is no reason for a lot of ponies to die.”

“Well…that isn’t quite right. They can still infect when they die. Without going into too much detail, they are most dangerous when they die. And waiting them out is no good. Because they do not stay down.”

At this, it was Fluttershy’s turn to balk. She turned to face Twi, hoping for a better explanation, a beseeching look in her bloodshot eyes.

“Fluttershy…I don’t know how else to say this. The disease…it is a virus. It takes over the host body. This is the cause of the symptoms, as the body tries to fight off the invader. The virus always wins, though. Once it hits the brain, it takes over and shuts everything down. This is when they go into a coma and die. They cease to live as we know it. But this is not the end. Once the virus shuts everything down, it takes total control. It…it pilots them. It moves their arms and legs and jaws, seeks out new ponies to infect. This is how it spreads. By taking over a pony and using them like a puppet.”

Fluttershy stared in a daze. She was so far gone that even the tears stopped flowing. Her eyes glazed over and her mouth hung limp as everything began to set in. Slowly, her mouth began moving as though she was speaking, though no sound emerged. This kept up for a minute or so before the tears started anew with greater force than before. Fluttershy’s breathing became ragged, interspersed with choking sounds as if she was trying to swallow a mouth full of crackers. Her mouth, which had hitherto hung agape, snapped shut with frightening speed and emitted a loud clack. At this, Twilight nearly jumped out of her skin. As her heart decided it was safe to beat again and tried to make up for lost time, Fluttershy broke down and wept.

These were not the quiet tears that had escaped earlier. Nor were they the great, howling sobs of hormones and a sense of injustice. These were quiet, desperate sobs, punctuated only by a pitiful mewling sound, the sound of which is tragic in itself. The sight of Kindness in such a pitiful state was too much for Twilight to bear. Nopony deserved to be in this kind of emotional distress, least of all such a sweet, loving creature as this. The injustice of it all coupled with the heart wrenching, tortured sounds coming from the pegasus of shattered innocence drove Twilight to weep despite her efforts to stay strong for her friend. Twilight circled her other arm around her broken friend, a gesture that was gratefully returned, and the two held each other and wept until there were no more tears.

Twilight was the first to calm down, already having become a bit deadened to the pain of loss in the last 12 hours. Wiping the tears from her eyes, Twilight reached a hoof down and slowly lifted Fluttershy’s chin, so they were eye to eye. Their muzzles were only a hoof or so apart, and each could feel the breath of the other on their muzzles as they stared into their counterparts’ eyes. Twilight noticed Fluttershy’s cheeks beginning to turn an adorable shade of pink, most likely due to her embarrassment at breaking down like that in front of her friend. To break the tension, Twilight spoke up first.

“Don’t worry about it, Shy. Everypony does it now and again. You’ll be fine; it’s our little secret. I promise not to tell anypony if you don’t” Twi said with her winning-est smile.

Far from relieving Fluttershy’s embarrassment about her breakdown, it somehow seemed to make things worse, as the butter colored mares’ cheeks went a much deeper shade of red and her eyes darted around furiously, flitting around like a butterfly. Her eyes would lock on Twilights for a moment before quickly going elsewhere.

As she tried to figure out the reason for the strange reaction she was receiving, everything clicked into place. She was holding the pegasus quite close; one arm around her shoulders, the other propping her chin up so she could look Shy in the eyes. Their muzzles were only a short distance apart; they were both breathing heavily, and they were both emotionally vulnerable right now…everything fell into place in her mind at the same time, and Twi figured out what was causing the strange reaction she was receiving; Fluttershy thought Twi was going to kiss her. In the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like…Blinking furiously, she snapped out of it as her eyes re-focused. The mare she was holding was regarding her with a mix of trepidation and interest, a look she was pretty sure was mirrored on her own face.

Lowering her hoof, Twi’s mind reeled at the implications. Fluttershy thought she was going to kiss her, and she didn’t look thrilled. On the other hand, she didn’t look appalled either. Twi couldn’t believe she was entertaining the notion, but something about the thought of those silky wings embracing her made her feel…funny inside. She would have to do some heavy thinking about this later. For the moment though, she needed to explain what had happened without embarrassing herself or the pegasus. After all, she didn’t want to potentially ruin a chance to feel what those glorious wings would feel like wrapped around her body, as- ‘BACK ON TRACK, TWI’ she mentally berated herself, feeling a blush growing on her own cheeks. She scrambled to explain the situation.

“Fluttershy…I didn’t mean it like that…I mean, I have no problem with it and I don’t want to rule anything out, but now isn’t a good time, and I really like you and I don’t want to lose what we have, so please don’t be upset with me, I didn’t mean *GASP* to make you uncomfortable, and I really should stop talking now, this is getting out of hand, but I can’t –mmph!”

Fluttershy interrupted what was likely the single longest sentence she had ever heard (from anypony other than Pinkie Pie) with a gentle hoof to the mouth of a certain lavender unicorn.

“Twi, you don’t have to explain. I see what you were trying to say, and I agree. The time isn’t right to try. But someday, it might be.”

With a muffled sigh, Twilight let all of her pent up excuses flow out of her, immensely relieved that the whole situation hadn’t gotten any more awkward. If it was this bad just from the implication that they might have kissed, Twi couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if they actually did…groaning and rolling her eyes, she vowed to push the topic from her mind until she had time to properly contemplate the ramifications of it. She became aware of a hurt pegasus regarding her as if she had been slapped.

“Well, if you don’t want to, that’s fine too, I guess…I was just hoping that we…we could still be friends?”

Facehoofing so hard it hurt, Twi tried desperately to explain.

“NO! No, that’s not it at all Fluttershy. I think we should maybe give it a shot when things aren’t so…”

As she said this last part, Twi gesticulated wildly, both hooves flailing in a frenzied manner. At first, Shy looked confused, but then nodded in understanding as the meaning sunk in. Twilight continued.

“I really like you, Shy. I don’t want anything to come between our friendship. But if at some point something more develops, I have no objections if you don’t. Until then, friends?”

Twilight held out her hoof, which Fluttershy quickly accepted.

“Friends.”

As the awkward situation passed into memory, raising a score of new questions and answering others that had never been asked, it took with it a distraction that had averted the minds of the mares from the situation at hand. The momentary joy that had come from their shared revelation faded abruptly as reality crashed back down. Ponyville was full of the infected, and ponies were dying every minute. Preparations needed to be implemented at once.

Twilight glanced up at the sun, realizing with a start that it was well on its way to the peak of the sky, indicating that it was almost 1000! She was late for the meeting by a long shot. She took off galloping, calling back for the startled mare to gather her animals and for them to meet her in the living room ASAP. As Twi slid to a halt, a dozen eyes stared at her with a range of emotion from concern to indignation. The grumbling had been cut off as quickly as it started when Twi explained she had been with Fluttershy. As if on cue, Fluttershy walked in, her mane still a mess, and the tracks of tears still visible in her coat. All argument ceased.

Once she had everypony situated, Twilight began her lecture.

“If we are to survive and help those who are still out there fighting for their lives, we need a plan. This plan needs three things for it to work; food, water, and shelter for every single survivor. The food is pretty much taken care of; we have enough supplies on this farm to plant an entire orchard somewhere else and enough preserves in the cellar to feed a hundred ponies for three years if managed right. Water and shelter are a bit more difficult, but luckily that problem was solved for us many, many years ago. What very few ponies know is that there is a college campus tucked away in a remote area of the Equestrian Mountains. I say remote because when it was built, the designer wanted to be as far away from civilization as feasible, for a number of reasons. Since then, however, Equestria has expanded greatly, and there is now a town a mere day's trot from it. That town is Ponyville, and the college is Starswirl’s Academy of Astronomy."

A gallery of blank stares greeted Twilight. She had expected as much, and pressed on.

“I have devoted hours upon hours of research into a place that Ponyville could relocate should something devastate the city. I was searching for places that had natural resources enough to support the entire population of Ponyville with minimal supplementation. There was no place that met such a requirement, though I had anticipated that there probably wouldn’t be. I did, however find a few that came close. I chose the Academy to become our Haven for a number of reasons, though primarily its location. The Academy is located in a valley with steep mountains on three sides. The other side, and the only entrance to the Academy, is a narrow pass between the ridges, and a single rope bridge over a crevasse with a river at the bottom. So there you have the basic layout: a bowl shaped depression ringed on all sides by sheer cliffs, and a single entry point that can be easily modified to control access."

“The second reason this site was chosen was for its natural resources. There is a large freshwater lake towards the north of the clearing, which contains more than enough water to supply the entirety of Canterlot, let alone Ponyville. It is fed by streams of melting snow from the mountains, and it will not run dry under normal usage. Another resource is the forest that rings the mountains; they can provide wood for construction purposes, as well as a variety of nuts and berries for food, as they are indigenous to the area. Finally, the large meadow itself is a resource, providing plenty of space to grow crops and do training exercises."

The mention of training exercises raised a few eyebrows, though none spoke up.

“And the final reason I decided on this location was the infrastructure. As I said before, there was an Academy built here many years ago. Though it has doubtlessly suffered to some extent from the long period of dereliction, with a bit of work it should be up and running again in no time. After studying the blueprints of the building combined with a slew of sketches and paintings done of the building in its prime, I can assess with high confidence that the dormitory can easily handle 150 ponies, and with a bit of retrofit, we can push it up to about 230 without modifying the structure. Any more than that, and we will have to build new facilities. Based on the evidence so far, this seems unnecessary."

“In order for this Haven to be a success and ensure the survival of Ponykind, We will have to work diligently and quickly to prepare for the first wave of survivors. The Haven, as I have christened the Academy, will be our main outpost and headquarters. It will house everypony and be a staging area for missions out into the rest of Equestria. Sweet Apple Acres will be our first priority to fortify, and will become our Forward Operating Base, or FOB. Any questions so far?”

After a brief hesitation, Applebloom raised her hoof.

“What do ya mean ‘trainin exercises’?”

“An excellent question, but one whose answer is a bit complicated. Suffice it to say, once we get to the Haven, some things will necessarily be different. Anything else?”

No more hooves went into the air.

“Alright, moving right along. Earlier, I mentioned bringing in survivors; this is how I plan to do it. While the rest of us are back here working our flanks off, Rainbow is going to be tasked with a critical mission.”

Turning to address Dash directly, Twilight continued.

“I need you to perform a recon mission of Ponyville; I need to know what areas seem to be the most heavily affected, and try to learn as much about the infected as possible. Try to stay out of sight. If you are spotted, then before returning to the FOB, I need you to take a slow, meandering path towards the Everfree to draw them away from our position. Once you have lost them, break contact and fly high; the higher the better. Take an indirect route back just in case. While you are performing recon, be on the lookout for survivors or signs of them. If you can do so safely, and let me emphasize SAFELY, engage the survivors. Do not land or get within 10 shoulders of the ground under any circumstance. We cannot afford to lose you, Rainbow. Both as your friends and as a part of your team, we need you. Once you engage the survivors, direct them back to the meadow where we have our pet play date. Once they are informed, break contact and resume recon. Continue this mission until the sun begins to set; at which time, break contact like I said earlier and Return To Base, or RTB. Any questions, Dash?”

The cyan mare seemed like her head was spinning as it tried to comprehend the information it just received. Reaching up to scratch her mane, Dash nodded.

“Twi? What’s up with all the fancy phrases and letters and stuff?”

“You mean the acronyms and abbreviations?”

Dash nodded to the affirmative.

“I read a lot about military communications, and the way they use the abbreviations to transmit large messages or meanings with the fewest syllables possible. I know it sounds like a bunch of alphabet soup, but I thought it would be very useful for us. I’ve also studied various other aspects of the military and combined it with common sense to come up with the best way to survive. Anything else?”

“When do I start?”

“Right now. Set down Scootaloo, and head out to begin your recon.”

After a few parting words and reassurances to Scootaloo, Dash snapped a sharp salute to the lavender unicorn and trotted out the door. Her exit was signaled by the flap of wings, and then silence. Turning back to the rest of the group, Twi addressed them.

“Well, the rest of us have a lot of work ahead of us. It should be about 1100 right now, and we have much to accomplish by nightfall. AJ? I need you to buck as many apples as you can. Sweetie Belle, Applebloom, and Scootaloo? I need you to collect the apples that AJ bucks and put them in baskets. Granny Smith will supervise. Big Mac? I need you to come with me to the meadow; we have a lot to do there. That just leaves Fluttershy.”

Each pony gathered around nodded in acknowledgement when they received their task, save for the last one. As AJ and the CMC dispersed to begin the harvest, the rest stayed put. Twilight levitated out a map from who-knows-where, and unfurled it. Using her hoof to trace a path and giving a series of land marks, Twilight outlined the route to the Haven and instructed Fluttershy to head out and establish a home for the animals near the observatory. Fluttershy uttered a meek phrase that might have been an affirmation before she turned around and went to collect her critters. With a look towards Big Mac and a short nod, the two set off towards the field that separates Sweet Apple Acres from Ponyville.

On either side of the meadow, there flowed a stream, swollen as it was by the melting snow farther up the mountains. This was the first line of defense for the FOB; the swollen streams would carry away anypony unlucky enough to be caught in them, whisking them far away before they could even hope to escape. As Twilight and Big Mac drew upon the meadow, Twilight instructed him to begin bucking down the trees near the far side of the meadow, closer to the FOB. A quick nod, and he set off; his progress announced by a rhythmic thump and punctuated with the crash of a tree.

Satisfied that the large stallion would meet the requirements, Twi turned her attention to the task at hand. Presently, she wrapped her magic around the bridge over the stream, probing with her purple aura. She quickly found its weak points and with a loud rumble, tore it from its foundation and set it down on the near side of the Meadow. Expertly exploiting her magic, she systematically disassembled the bridge into neat stacks of bricks, planks, and nails.

Pleased with her handy work, she ventured to the other side of the meadow to see how far Mac had gotten. She very nearly tripped when she saw what he had accomplished in the few minutes he had been working. Nearly half an acre had been cleared of trees, which lay like so many twigs about the ground on which he stood. As she closed the distance, she told him that he could stop, they had quite enough already. Giving a satisfied smile and a nod, he sat on his haunches as she wrapped about a dozen logs in her purple aura. In a flash, they had been milled down to standard lumber dimensions, the remainder falling away in a shower of sawdust. Levitating the planks behind her, she struck out towards the pile of supplies.

Based on her observation of the infected earlier that day, Twilight had discovered a serious vulnerability of theirs; a lacking self-preservation instinct. One of the infected had walked headlong into a fire, oblivious to the concept of pain. It demonstrated that they apparently did not possess even rudimentary reasoning power, as the alley had been only partially blocked by the fire. Any marginally intelligent creature would have simply gone around the flames, so therefore the infected lacked reasoning power entirely. This was the basis for Twilight’s first line of defense: a zigzag bridge. Ponies would zig and zag, navigating the bridge with little difficulty. The infected however, would attempt to walk straight, and would fall into the stream and be carried away. Simple, yet effective.

Soon Twilight had the bridge fully fabricated, with enough zigzags to throw off the infected without endangering the survivors with excessive twists. Nodding, Twilight headed back to Macintosh. She rigged up a crude scale using a tree trunk and a stump, and asked Mac to stand on one side of it. Confused yet compliant, he did as she asked. She then began to pile on trees until she had a rough approximation of his weight as indicated by the crude scale. Nodding, she levitated the bundle of logs over the second river, followed by the rest of the felled trees. Once there, she began to convert the bridge to the FOB into a counterweighted drawbridge, using Mac as the counterweight required to lower the bridge. This process went on for a while, requiring much trial and error to get it just right. By the time they had finished, the sun had started to descend towards the horizon. Satisfied with her work, Twilight gathered Mac and headed back to the FOB.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Ponyville Pavilion, 0600 that morning

Day finally breaks, bringing with it a slight sense of relief to those inside the pavilion. The relief of the siege breaking was tempered by the realization that their shelter was woefully inadequate, and would not have survived the onslaught had it been pressed much longer. Once the initial shock had worn off, several ponies began to reconstruct the barriers as best they could; their fervor springing from the terror of last night and inducing a cold logic into the construction of the barriers that were not present before. By daybreak, the barriers had all been retrofitted into a more stable configuration. The light of day also revealed the enemy from the night before, still milling about aimlessly and seemingly unaware of the ponies in the pavilion. Unaware that is, until one of the ponies inside the pavilion tripped over her own hooves and went sprawling into one of the barricades. The resulting clamor of falling debris and shouts of confusion sent up a roar from the infected outside. And just like that, the moans returned in force, along with the renewed thunder of hooves against the barricades.

The state inside the pavilion quickly descended into pandemonium as a mob of angry ponies descended on the poor mare that had tripped and fallen. Her supplications were lost to the roar of the crowd, their frustration and fear finally being given a target to latch onto. Hope buried her head in her hooves as the shouts of the mob were periodically pierced by screams of pain from the mare, as the mob extracted its bloody vengeance. The sound of stomping hooves and cursing far outlasted the screams of the mare. At the edge of all the sounds, Hope swore she could hear a wet, smushing sound. She fought the urge to be sick. The uproar only lasted for a minute or so, but the sound of the mare's pleading seemed like it would haunt Hope until her final breath.

The energy of the mob seemed to drain away, its shouts fading away to nothing. The silence within was absolute save for the moaning and pounding of the infected outside. A voice sounded from above Hope, and she looked up from where she was laying to see that her dad had positioned himself over her at some time during the riot, where he now addressed the mob.

“You are all monsters. MONSTERS! You are no better than those demons outside! This innocent mare tripped, she fucking TRIPPED, and you killed her for it. You murdered her. And now you have to live with that till the day you die, live with the knowledge that by your hooves an innocent life was ended. And thanks to the racket you all caused in your little murder-spree, that might not be very much longer anyways.”

Artie’s speech was met with silence, as most tried to deny what they did. A few regarded their hooves and the red matter that covered them with a look of unabated horror. After this, the group dispersed to the corners, trying not to look at each other and occasionally stealing glances at the broken form on the floor.

Whatever color this mare had once been, it was now indistinguishable. Dawn came back with a table cloth from a supply closet and draped it over the broken form. The white cloth turned red at the point contact, and the red slowly spread. In the wake of what happened, nopony really spoke or moved; they just huddled in clusters around the floor, trying to stay as far from the body and from the barricades as possible. By 0900, the horde outside had swelled.

The moans had long since ceased to be individual sounds, but had blended together into a continuous roar. The pounding also had grown in intensity, the last windows shattering and the barriers creaking in protest. In an alcove under the stairs, Artie, Dawn, and Hope cuddled together, drawing strength from the company of each other. From their alcove hidey-hole, the family had an unfortunately good view of what was to come next. As the pounding intensified by the minute, the barriers began to fail. The first barrier to relent was the one composed of benches that had been wedged in front of the main doors. With an abnormally loud thump, something crashed into the door, splintering the bench. The weakened barricade gave way by degrees, each new push creating a wider and wider gap. First, a hoof and fetlock pushed through, followed by a nightmarish approximation of a head.

The creature that pushed what used to be a head and neck through the door was something out of a bad horror movie. It was just simply too over the top to be real. Its throat had been torn out from the jaw to the collarbone, ragged bits of flesh hanging off in strips. The abomination's esophagus hung out of the hole, having been severed near the head, as it flopped back and forth like a gristly parody of a neck tie. The flesh along the bottom of the jaw had also been stripped, allowing the tongue to dangle in much the same fashion as the esophagus. From the depths of hell, this creature produced a bloodcurdling gurgle, as if somepony had submerged a filly and dismembered it. The imagery that the sound conjured in the mind was nearly as bad as the sight of the creature that made it.

This sound broke several ponies from their stupor. A trio of stallions rushed the door, slamming their bodies into it. As they impact it, a grotesque crunch rings out, followed by a wet plop. Looking down, the trio see that the top of the creatures head remained inside, a pile of black ichors, bone, and pelt. A single ear protrudes from the pile, in remarkably pristine condition, almost mocking those who look upon it. Despite the best efforts of the stallions holding the door, there is no stopping it. The wall of infected on the other side push on relentlessly; mindless of exhaustion and exertion. Soon enough, the trio of guardians attempting to hold the line succumb to fatigue and overexertion, falling prey to the relentless horde as they gain entrance to the stronghold.

As the defense crumbles, so too does the last vestige of sanity in the pavilion. At once, everypony ceases to be a member of a team, a part of the community. Instead, each reverts to a primal fight or flight state of mind, listlessly forcing their way up the stairs to higher ground. Artie, Dawn, and Hope bring up the rear of the tangle of ponies as they fight their way up the stairs. The stairwell becomes a clogged mass of equinity, each shoving forward with all they have in a mad drive to gain the high ground. Artie tosses Hope in his back and pushes forward, driven by terror.

Even as he hits the first of the steps, he realizes the futility of the situation. There is no way to make it. Without a word, he lifts Hope onto Dawn’s back. Realizing his intent, Dawn breaks down, crying and pleading with her husband. He puts on a sad smile and gently shakes his head. He knows what he must do to give them a chance at survival. His last words echo throughout the pavilion as he charges the horde swarming through the doors.

“I love you!”

Artie pivots and lands a buck square in the face of one of the infected, sending it flying through the air with a crunch. Dawn turns and hurries up the stairs, weeping openly. She cannot bear to watch as the stallion she loves throws himself into a meat grinder to buy them time to escape. Hope, however, cannot look away. Being thrown onto her mother's back facing rearward, she can’t bring herself to avert her eyes as her dad bucks the infected one after another. Her eyes are wide with horror as her dad misjudges a kick, allowing one of the infected to grab it. He is pulled off of his feet as the zombies close in around him, forming a wall of undead around him. Though the wall of undead blocks out the sight of him, it does nothing to muffle his screams or the sight of his blood as it spurts into the air, his scream transformed to a gurgle and then silenced.

The cluster of ponies was just clearing the top of the stairs as the zombies started up after them. Dawn looked back, panic rising by the second as the infected closed the distance between them. Despite pushing with all her might, Dawn is helpless to get out of harm’s way. Hope watches numbly, all emotion seeming to have died with her father’s final scream. Slowly, mechanically, the zombies close the distance, assured destruction getting closer by the second. Some of their muzzles still dripped with what was left of Artie. Not even this macabre sight could stir the faintest emotion within Hope.

Dawn, on the other hand, saw the impending doom as just that; impending doom. In the face of certain death, Dawn’s maternal instincts kicked in. She reached back and grabbed Hope’s tail in her mouth, and with a swift yank and a flick of the neck sent the cerulean pony spinning through the air like a Frisbee. By some horrible twist of fate, Hope landed a bit dazed and quite dizzy, facing her mother at the head of the stairs. Hope could see her mom, as she was visible through the legs of the ponies between them.

As they locked eyes, Dawn’s went wide; and just like that, she disappeared down the stairs. Hope cries out in pain, partly from witnessing the demise of both her parents in less than a minute, partly from the fact that she is being trampled to death under the mob of ponies. Dimly, Hope wonders why she should get up. Why shouldn’t she just lay here and die? She has lost everything; her family, her friends, her home…what was left for her? Hope’s own voice echoed throughout her mind as she had some sort of mental break and her subconscious took over, shouting at her.

‘NO! Get up, you. They died so you could live. They gave their LIVES for you, are you just going to throw their sacrifice away like this? You are pathetic. You have not even gotten your cutie mark yet, and here you are ready to throw your life away. Get up, Hope. You are not allowed to die.’

With this, a spring of resolve she didn’t know she possessed blossomed inside of Hope’s chest. The crowd had thinned somewhat as the zombies drew near, allowing Hope to get her hooves under herself. She knew she had to get away from them or she would be trapped with them. Once she was back on all fours, she had to duck, dodge, dip, dive, and dodge to get free of the tangle of legs around her. She extricated herself from the mass of equinity just in time to come face to face with half a dozen infected at the top of the stairs. Hope had the advantage of youth and adrenaline, and managed to abscond from right under the noses of the zombies. Again using her small size to her benefit, she proceeded to maneuver herself on top of the seething mass of ponies, hopping from one to another as they packed themselves tighter into the space they occupied. From the corner of her eye, Hope caught sight of a grate covering an air duct. Without a second thought, she gamboled across the backs of the other ponies, bucked the grate with all her might and scampered inside.

The grate clanged off the end of the vent before rattling down the air shaft to the first floor. The sound of its decent was magnified and echoed by the confines of the vent shaft, echoing throughout the pavilion. If there had been any hope that her antics had gone unnoticed, they had been dashed to pieces by the grate. The horizontal shaft she was in was not very deep, only going a short way before running into a vertical air shaft. Hope backed as far into the vent as she could, her rear hooves perched precariously on the cusp of the shaft. She could retreat no farther, nor could she go back the way she came; the zombies had just reached her position in pursuit of the rest of the ponies. She was trying to decide what to do next when the screaming began.

In their haste to get to higher ground, the frightened herd had backed itself into a corner isolating itself from any escape route. As the zombies approach, the hapless ponies were funneled into a dead end, as sheep to the slaughter. And a slaughter it was, in every sense of the word. The nearly three dozen ponies in the corner turned to face nearly thrice their number of undead, who began to mechanically tear through every single pony. One by one, the screams were silenced and replaced by wet, ripping sounds punctuated by the pop of joints dislocating and tendons tearing. The screaming ended less than a minute after it began, as the infected added to their numbers as they went.

The same cruel trick of acoustics that had reverberated the entire pavilion with the sound of the falling grate also served to amplify and focus every sound within the pavilion. These sounds converged on the air vent in which Hope sheltered, affording her horrendously clear audio. Every pitter-patter of blood, every snap of a tendon, every clack of jaws echoed like an explosion in the vent. Though the massacre itself lasted less than a minute, the echoes of the carnage reverberated in her mind as hope tried to block them out. The screams seemed to go on forever…

A loud clang at her hooves brought her back to the present in an instant. Her mind instantly registered that a zombie was attempting to crawl into the vent after her. Its jaws snapped feverishly just short of her fetlock, spraying the inside of the vent with saliva. Its hoof scraped around the inside of the vent, seeking purchase; the slick metal foiled its attempts at gaining any leverage. Slowly, the infected pony worked its way deeper into the vent, drawing nearer the filly perched so very precariously on the edge. With a violent lunge and a swipe of its hoof, the zombie managed to catch Hope’s front hoof. While it was not enough for the creature to get a grip, it was enough to dislodge the filly from her perch. She tumbled backwards into the shaft, spreading her limbs reflexively. She slid down for a moment before her hooves gained a hold on the slick surface, halting her descent. Taking a moment to thank Celestia she was still alive, she took a moment to assess her situation. She was hopelessly trapped in an air shaft in a building overrun by zombies, in the middle of a town also overrun by zombies. Things were not looking so great for the little blue filly. Even as she was contemplating her own defeat, the voice in her head from earlier decided to speak up again.

‘Look up.’

And look up she did, noticing for the first time that the top of the vent was quite bright.

‘That’s because it leads outside, dummy.’

Before Hope could begin to argue with herself about how she was not a dummy, her slipping hooves brought her back to the task at hand: climbing up the air shaft…somehow. Determined not to fail, she began to shimmy up the vent with a good deal of effort. Aiding her ascent were the joints of the shaft, spaced at regular intervals and providing her with a solid grip. Before long, she even had a system down, allowing her to climb faster. Despite this, as she neared the top of the shaft, her legs felt like jello and it was all she could do to keep moving. Despite this, whenever she felt like she could go no farther and would just fall if she tried to move, a surge of energy welled up within her, allowing her to continue. As she went on though, the cumulative effects of the exertion were beginning to set in. Even the extra boost wasn’t doing as much as it was before, only giving her a little boost now. As she reached the final few feet, she had nothing left. The boosts had been the only thing allowing her to move, and those had finally run out. She sat there, wedged in the airshaft wondering what would happen next. A single moan rose from below, calling forth a chorus of the damned in its wake. The images of everything she had seen in the last hour flooded her memory, but from somewhere a voice rang out.

‘Assuming direct control.'

At this point everything seemed like a dream, and Hope felt as if she was watching someone else at the reigns of her body. She was too beaten to care as she watched herself crawl the last few feet and collapse over the edge. Everything became real again as she began to tumble down the steep roof, her uncooperative limbs flailing about uselessly. As the slope leveled out, she came to rest on her back. She had lost all sense of time in the vent. The only thing she could be sure of was that the sun was very bright and seemed to be directly overhead. Her eyes swam as she passed out, blessed oblivion wrapping her in a tender embrace.

When she awoke, the sun had only shifted a bit in the sky, presumably headed towards the horizon. Hope’s mind is black; only a dull throb in her chest reminds her that she is alive. She wants to weep, but cannot make her body comply. This makes her want to weep more, starting the cycle anew. The cycle is finally broken by a single, wretched cry of despair which was immediately met by dozens of answering calls.

She wanted to look over the edge of the roof, to get a better look at the creatures that had stolen so much from her in the last few hours. As Hope tried to make her arms bend to her will and carry her to the edge, she saw a flash of color from the corner of her eye. Turning her head to focus on the source proved to be futile, as whatever the source of the color was seemed to have disappeared.

Hope’s eyes unfocused slightly as they tried to see into forever. As they unfocused, they detected something they had not seen before; there were several small clouds in the sky. She had seen this earlier, but what she had missed was that one of them was moving against the wind, in the opposite direction of the rest of the clouds. And, sure enough, there was a small sliver of color flapping in the breeze behind the cloud. Once again her body surprised her as it sprang to its hooves of its own volition and began to shout and gesticulate wildly, even rearing onto its hind legs to wave both arms over its head. That proved to be a mistake, and with a single misstep Hope was once again in control of her body as it careened off the edge of the roof.

Time slowed to a crawl as she slid off the roof; as she fell, her outstretched limb caught the edge of the roof. It was not enough to stop her descent, and all she managed to do was send herself into a gentle pirouette on her way towards the ground. As she tumbled, her gaze slowly panned across the Ponyville skyline. She saw the roof receding in perfect clarity, just beyond her reach. Into the interminable eons she fell; time passing at a crawl and permitting her to take in every detail.

She saw the thin wisps of smoke as they curled into the sky. She could clearly distinguish the dozens of broken windows throughout Ponyville, a sure sign of the struggle that had ensued previously. It was perfectly easy to make out the spiders' webs in the eve of one of the buildings, and she could practically count the drops of blood on the sidewalk.

The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes were the soulless eyes and gaping maws of no less than sixty zombies milling about below her. One in particular locked eyes with her, and with the eye contact established, every last bit of fight seemed to evaporate from Hope. As she fell, her father reared up on his hind legs, as if to catch her. If it wasn’t for the ragged hole in his throat and the way his jaws snapped in anticipation, she could almost believe that he was still alive. She closed her eyes, close enough now to smell the drying blood and dirt from the street below. As the pressed her eyes closed, her father’s face remained in her mind’s eye, as it had been the day before at the picnic in the park. As the distance between her and the ground rapidly closed, Hope whispered to her father, knowing full well that this thing was not her father. She could care less.

“Catch me, Daddy. I miss you.”

With that, strong arms closed around her and held her in a tight embrace as everything exploded into light. Hope could feel herself rising, light as a feather. There was no pain, no sorrow, no remorse; the smell of blood and dirt had been replaced by the scent of rain falling in a meadow. And still, she rose into the light.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Hope had no idea how long this was supposed to take seeing as she had never died before, but she still felt like it should be quicker than this. Even as she formed the thought, the bubble of nothingness around her popped; a rhythmic crack punctuated her thoughts with a steady tempo. She became aware of the feeling of wind on her backside, which was quite confusing and disconcerting at the same time. She cracked her eyes open and stared for a moment, not quite understanding what she was seeing. The ground seemed to be very, very far away and moving very quickly. It almost seemed like…yes, she was moving, not the ground. Though why she was going backwards, or why her rump was over her head could not be met with a simple answer. As she looked around, the first thing to catch her attention were the bright colors waving about just over her head. Reaching up to give it an experimental tug, she found herself very nearly dropped as whatever was carrying her jumped in mid-air. This feat in and of itself was quite impressive. Next thing she knew she was flipping through the air before coming face-to-face with a pair of magenta eyes regarding her with a look of indignation.

“What’s the big idea, pulling on my tail like that?”

“I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to hurt you…I just looked up and I saw it, and it was so pretty…I’m really sorry…”

The pegasus regarded Hope with a curious look for a moment before her gaze softened. Hope had deduced that it was a pegasus that had caught her…the wings were a dead giveaway. The pegasus spoke up again.

“Eh, it’s okay kid. No harm, no foul; just don’t do it again. By the way, I’m Rainbow Dash. Who are you?”

“My name is Hope. Thank you for saving me, Miss Rainbow.”

“Just call me Dash; all my friends do.”

“Okay. Thank you, Miss Dash.”

“Not Miss; just Dash.”

“Oh…alright. Thank you, Dash.”

“No problem. I’m going to throw you onto my back now, you're kinda heavy.”

“I’m not heavy, I’m Hope!”

Any further retort was cut off by a flip style maneuver in which Dash situated the filly on her back in one swift, fluid movement. The filly gripped Dash’s neck for dear life, before relaxing a bit. All in all, it was quite peaceful in the sky. For the first time since the day before, Hope felt safe. She wasn’t sure why she trusted this Pegasus she just met aside from the fact that she had rescued Hope, but she was sure that she did. And that was good enough for Hope. Soon, her mental and emotional exhaustion caught up with her; Hope soon drifted to the edge of sleep. As she finally relaxed for the first time in almost 24 hours, her mind had time to process everything that had happened. The screams of the ponies as they were torn apart. Watching her parents die one by one. And finally, the look on her father’s face as she plummeted towards him. It all became too much for the filly to take. As the events washed over her like a tsunami, so too did the tears. Exhausted, she wept, as only one who has lost everything dear to them can weep.