Chapters "Tell me a story, tell me a story!"
The foal bounced across the room, school book forgotten at the doorstep, the weariness of an afternoon of factory work almost visibly falling away. The other pony in the room, a stallion wrapped up in in blanket, laughed softly and swept the blanket aside to let the foal in.
She stopped. "Ma says I can't go too near you, Cress," she pouted. "You're sick!"
"Aye, but that won't stop me from putting on a helmet and marching around in an hour. The Militia doesn't allow sick days. You always wanted to be in the Militia, right, Rose?"
Rose bobbed her head vigorously. "Still do! But before you go, brother..."
"Of course," Cress said, pointing another blanket draped over the only table in their shared bedroom, cramped and rusted as it was. The metal siding starting to peel away, he'd have to speak to the dorm head about that. They had a window though, and that was the most important thing. He doubted Rose would give it up for the cleanest bedroom in Equestria's history. And that was saying an awful lot.
Rose sidled up next to him, swathed in her blanket, apparently forgetting his sickness to get a clear view outside. As always, her gaze was transfixed by the sight of the Fourteenth Avenue of Heroes, beginning a few hundred feet from their factory and going out to the harbor. Going into the harbor, actually, in the case of the oldest bits. Bad foundation, he'd been told, and the construction techniques that had allowed the entire precinct his factory was built on to be as sturdy as real ground had been lost centuries ago. That's when they started the Fifteenth Avenue, fifty years ago. He hadn't yet been really able to get across to Rose that the enormous statues she was staring at were recent memory, five hundred years at the oldest. It'd be quite the day when she finally realized how long ponies had been around.
And how far they'd fallen.
"That one!" Rose said, breaking Cress out of his thought, pointing at one of two parallel rows of statues.
"The one with the big rusted cross on her saddlebag?"
"Yeah!" his sister nodded.
"Well, I'm pretty sure that's the Angel of the Docks. Back when the precinct all the way over there " he took her head in his hooves and directed her gaze over to the far end of the breakwater of Baltimare Harbor, mostly covered in smog and soot, "yes, that one, when ponies still lived there."
"She was a Pegasus?" Rose asked, eyes wide.
Cress laughed gently. "No, she was as much of a common pony as you or me. She was an angel because of what she did, not because she had wings. She had a fair golden mane, and grew up in factory a lot like the this one...
Since her youngest days, the Angel of the Docks was a kind-hearted and earnest pony. She worked in an weapons factory during the Twenty Year's War between the Southern Commoners' Republic and the current government of the Free Colonies across the Eastern Sea. Her mother died early in her life in foalbirth of a sibling but the Angel was cheerful and hard working by every account.
When the quotas were doubled, she kept her comrade's spirits up with songs and tales of ponies and places forgotten in our days. When half of the factory's crew was conscripted and sent across the horizon to fight, she helped teach the foals to work the machinery and found the safest jobs for them that were still productive. When they halved the rations, she grew what she could on the roof - in those days, it was very common to look up and be able to see the sun. When the Wasting sickness hit Baltimare, she turned the factory into a hospital and cared for so many ponies with the same zest she had showed in the everything else in her life.
A hundred factory crews still have their own stories of her kindness and infinite tenderness. With barely a remembered conversation or even a description beyond her golden mane, the Angel inspired, and made life for the ponies of her time a great deal more bearable. Things were worse then than they are now; yet the Angel of the Docks was enshrined in stone a half a century after her death at an old age, as pure and worthy a pony as Baltimare has ever sired.
"Wait, that's it? Did she ever get married? Why is the place she lived in abandoned now? Did she have a temper? Why is she called an Angel if she isn't a Pegasus? Why-"
Cress smiled at Rose's inevitable rush of questions, and held up a hoof, waiting for her to quiet down. "I'm sorry, Rose, but I need to get ready for my Militia patrol. You can hear another story when I get home, if you're awake."
Rose nodded and looked down. "I'm sorry, brother. It was a very nice story. Thank you."
She was so bashful sometimes. "It's fine. Stay safe, sister," Cress said, getting up and starting for the door. "I love you."
"Love you too."
He paused at the door. "You'll stay in my memories, Rose." he said, knowing she wouldn't comprehend the significance of the phrase very well at her age, like always. He was a young stallion, and still hardly did.
"Yeah, same."
Baltimare was an historical city. The winding alleys and heights were heady echoes of the past, half remembered stories about the more impressive piles of ruins or the tales of how the rusted skeleton of a gigantic warship was stretched over the Castle Hill. Empty factories and statues whose features and memory had been worn off decades ago. Miles of urban coastline, a forest of smoke stacks and twisted metal. If you got really close, you could start to see the ponies that lived there, blots in the shadow of greater things.
Cress had grown up here, and the taller he got the more he was aware of how small he was. The living stayed near the shore, usually, in rusting shanties clinging to the sides of the factories that still functioned. That was not to say Baltimare was dead, and that there was no organization or government; in some sections the statues were polished sharp and ponies still thronged the streets in great bustle. Many ships still came and went from Baltimare's natural harbor, and trains clattered on the old trestles to the outside world. There were ponies with uniforms, unicorns sometimes even travelled through, representatives of Canterlot in finery and oozing authority. Cress had never faced starvation in his twenty-three years. Slop, soup, stringy vegetables, and sometimes bread.
Yet everything was in the shadow of the Old City. Ponies got lost in there, utterly desolate streets and broken technologies nopony understood or cared for. Cress had never shaken the feeling that everything and everypony around him were less, a crust on the thousand-year old city, remnants of something much greater.
Cress. There wasn't much he said about himself, and nobody needed to ask. Another worker shifting slag in a heavy coat, a common pony with a coat and mane of dulled green and brown, different in color but much the same from his fellow workers. Common ponies. He'd heard stories, about Earth Ponies, creatures that looked exactly like him but brighter and higher, creatures with a special connection to a living earth. He tried to imagine a connection with the dirt that occasionally poked up through cracks in the pavement on the outskirts of the factory, and was never satisfied. Earth ponies were a favorite story of common ponies. They relished the stories, lived in them and tried to envision what the elders told them.
Some stories were more real than the towering, crumbling edifices that blocked any sight inland, however. They were the reason Cress was trotting along the outskirts of inhabited Baltimare, wrapped up in a grey overcoat with a firearm and a blade slung over his back, staring at the windows above and gutters below. The Cults were very real. Equestrian history, if anything, was a story of loss, Cress had decided. Cults were disgusting abominations, mockeries of organization to a foul goal against all that was good and holy. Besides what his milita officers snarled, Cress had a more simple view. The Cults wanted things back. The Moon Cult, worshipping the Nightmare Triumphant, with a very different history of 1,200 years ago. The Sun Cult, less reviled but officially not tolerated, praising the Living Sun that once tread upon the earth, easy to spot out whenever the clouds and soot occasionally rolled back to display the open sky and the sun. Petty technology cults, collectors. Cress was young and reasonably healthy, so militia service was mandatory for him. A stressful two days out of the week patrolling or sitting around checkpoints, grumbling and staving off recruiting for the Central Guard. Cress had relatives in the service, and had no desire to leave his home and waste away somewhere distant and evil.
A glint of light and flurry of movement in a gaping hole in a wall maybe thirty stories above him snapped out of his thoughts instantly, and Cress unslung his firearm, staring upwards. A current of fear ran through him. Militia often brushed against the Magic Cult in Baltimare, bastards who abused the power of the Heavens that the unicorns of the government used reverently. Magic running through their bodies, capable of insane deeds, Cress had heard stories of rogue unicorns who could blow down an entire patrol or immobilize one of the Militia's rusty old war-machines with an evil burst of power. Common ponies would sometimes disappear from their dorms and be recognized months later, fired with unholy powers. Cress had seen one. His factory mates had eagerly listened to his story of the captured cultist, a defiant stallion with an impossibly bright red mane. A foul sight.
A minute passed, and another. Nothing else stirred, and Cress sighed and turned back to his patrol route.
The sun was almost under the horizon when he arrived at the Southern Perimeter Barracks, exhausted with the prospect of grabbing a lantern and heading back to his factory to complete his shift. The Barracks was practically a small fortress, a grated metal wall surrounding some weapon towers and grey buildings, banners of the Central Government hanging from them, muted in the twilight. It was surrounded by rubble, old perimeter housing torn down to provide clear lanes of fire. He passed through the checkpoints, uncomfortable under the watch of automatic weapon emplacements, but even more uncomfortable with what he saw as he walked into the courtyard.
An airship, and honest to the Heavens airship was fueling in a recess in the courtyard, hidden from outside view. Dozens of ponies in the black helmets of the Central Guard stood around it, but as he neared, Cress recognized some of them to be fellow members of the Militia, one of them even a mate at his factory who had set out on patrol an hour before Cress.
An officer in gold braid had gone unnoticed on the edge of the fueling pit, focused as Cress was on the airship, but as Cress drew up to the pit the officer barked for his attention.
Cress clicked his hooves and straightened up. "What is it, sir?"
The officer was definitely a real member of the Central Guard, calm and at the same time staring down Cress with an intensity he could see. "You are a member of the Militia of Baltimare?" the officer asked without preamble.
"Aye, sir," Cress replied, "of Factory Three, Precinct Seventeen."
The officer nodded. "Are you married?"
"No."
"Then there is no question. You are hereby conscripted into the Central Guard to fulfill your duty as a citizen of Equestria to defend its ponies and its order. You will receive a new helmet and ship out by airship to a troop ship in the harbor as soon as possible. Please see the pony at the boarding ramp of the airship below." The officer took a folder out from under his uniform, pulled out a paper with a generic message and conscripted stamped onto it, and handed it to Cress.
Cress blinked, an involuntary shudder running down spine, processing the information bluntly. "Yes, sir," was all he could say, and turned away, swallowing hard, shoving the paper into a coat pocket.
"I am Colonel Arbor, commander of the 485th Conscript Battalion, and your commanding officer." the officer called after him, and Cress was down the stairway, trotting through the press of his fellow soldiers to the ramp. In a haze, he traded his dented helmet for a black Central Guard one, and was given a saddlebag with a very small amount of extra ammunition in it. The pony behind the small desk had him sign his conscription papers, and he was done, and sent away. He stood with his fellows, looking up at the darkened sky; the floodlights of the Barracks were turned on as he stared, and he looked down to avoid the glare. He was shivering under his heavy coat.
Eventually, he was vaguely aware of a voice raising above the tumult of the conscripts' harried and fearful conversations. It was the Colonel.
"We are about to leave!" he yelled. "First, however, I will be selecting some of you married fellows to return to your factories, as per the guidelines of the emergency orders from the Central Government that have landed you here today. Please come up the stairway in an orderly fashion."
The conscripts did anything but. All the married ones were pushing and fighting their way up the stairs, and Cress was certain a few of the ponies he knew in the crush were certainly not married but still trying to reach the Colonel. Perhaps they figured the Colonel would not check the difference between a marefriend and a wife, with how desperate things must be to snap up militiaponies at night with an airship.
For his part, Cress stayed in the pit, taking in the glare of the floodlights, the roar of the airship engines spinning up, the voices of conscripts and airship crew alike, feeling the wind as the propellers began to turn. He was a turmoil of emotions, fear and a damned sense of living in this moment, like it was special and memorable. He was making a story. Those thoughts ended when he thought briefly of Rose and his family.
"Paper," he muttered to himself, "I need paper, I need to write."
The Colonel was sorting through the married ponies quickly, ignoring the pleading of the ones he passed over until they went back down the stairway.
"I need paper! A quill! Anyone, does anyone have it?" he cried, increasingly impatient.
He had a flash of inspiration, and bounded over to the loading ramp of the airship, where the pony who had given him his equipment was packing up. "Sir, sir, please-" he sputtered, breathless.
"I'm just a Guard," the pony said.
"Please, do you have a quill? You were signing off on our papers, yes?"
"Um, yes. Why do you-"
"Can I have it?"
The pony didn't answer, looking very confused, but Cress spotted a quill still on the little table that he'd gotten his black helmet at. He snatched it up, took his conscription paper out of his pocket, turned it over, and began scribbling frantically.
Dear Rose. I have been conscripted into the Central Guard. I don't know when I'll be back. Study hard and work well. Old Barley tells good stories. I am making my own right now. You're doing that too, even if you don't know it. I love you. Be well. Please let me stay in your memories, Rose. You will stay in mine. - Cress.
He glanced up, and saw the Colonel was finished, a small number of married ponies standing near the edge, their black helmets gone, most looking very relieved. Cress ran up to the edge, saw a pony he knew from the factory.
"Hey, hey!" he called. The pony looked down.
"Cress?"
"Get this to a foal named Rose, she lives in the harbor corner of Floor 16. Please!" he said, crumpling up the paper and throwing it to the pony.
"What is this-"
"Rose! Floor 16!" Cress yelled desperately.
"Rose, Floor 16." the pony repeated, looking over the paper. He opened his mouth to say more, but Cress was gone, running for the ramp into the airship with the rest of the conscripts.
Cress felt like a pegasus skipping over clouds. He bounded up the ramp with a light heart, given the circumstances, reveling in the groan of the airship and roar of the engines, straining under his weapon and saddlebag, every nerve tingling from the moment.
They had disembarked from the airship at docks that Cress had never seen seen used in his lifetime, though he could see his factory from there. It struck him that the airship's speed meant that Rose probably didn't even have his letter yet. He hoped she was asleep, and wasn't waiting for his return.
Maybe she was looking up at where the airships were coming and going, and gawking at the large steamer that lay at rest. Looking up at him without knowing.
The docks were tall, rusted, and unstable. Still, they held the steamer fast, and Cress had little time to worry before he and his comrades were pounding up the gangplanks to the steamer, hundreds of ponies doing the same around him.
The steamer was choked with soldiers, regular Guards and conscripts shoved together and fighting for space. A lieutenant led his group to an enormous hall, filled with bunks; they settled in, joining what seemed like a hundred other ponies, and waited.
Before long, the floor beneath them rumbled as the engines spun up, and the everything shuddered as the steamer eased off and headed for open sea. Cress wasn't able to get the top decks and they had no windows, and he massively regretted not being able to see Baltimare recede into the horizon.
Two days into the boring and cramped journey, sick of eating sailor's slop, the door opened and finally somepony who was not a crewmember walked out.
"I will tell you about Loyalty's Triumph," the Colonel announced loudly without preamble, walking into the hall in his full gilted uniform.
One of the Lieutenants greeted him, saluting, "You mean to give the briefing, sir? I will get the folder."
"No," the Colonel shook his head, "a story."
Cress sat up in his bunk, suddenly very interested in the Colone's presence, his comrades doing the same.
"The Colonies were at war with the Mainland, centuries before our Central Government. It was fought with technologies you couldn't understand, for reasons lost to time - but Loyalty, steadfast, will never change."
The Heavens had beheld a thousand wars and a thousand thousand dead exchanged between the Mainland and the Colonies. Conflict between Equestria and Eas, the Equestrian Union and the Free Colonies, the Tri-Confederation and the Empire. The names are too numerous to know, but death has forever crossed the Eastern Ocean, paying no heed to why. As in all things, this incalcuable suffering is but a tiny facet to the tale of Equestria.
Yet Loyalty's Triumph is important, for we are about to add another page to its storied history. A great techno-fortress was razed there by the Pegasus Dominion. The first waves of the Fourth Disaster to reach a shore hit here. The Sik's Armada was shattered on the rocks before the Nightmare's Second Coming.
It was but three hundred years ago that it took the name of the ancient Element.
The greatest Magic Cult in memory built an edifice to their powers on the lee shore of the archipeligo. Bitter and fearful ponies raised ceaceless praise to their powers, as the process of a thousand years reached its end. As the magic faded from the rest of our kind, drained by the Unicorn Empire's foundries, or perhaps by the will of the Heavens, the Magic Cult grew strong. The followers of the Old Ways, they called themselves. We can look back on such a name and smile.
Yet it was no idle threat to the security of Equestria. The Colonies were the Cult's plaything. In this they achieved lasting memory, as the Cults and magic worship are still strong in our time in the inhabitants of these distant shores. The Colonies had a fell purpose three hundred years ago. As still another war between the common ponies and the unicorns flamed, the names of their decade-long countries lost to time, the Magic Cult doomed magic in Equestria forever. It is purest irony that they should do so.
The Tree of Harmony was very real in those days. Certainly every one of you were told the story of that Tree in your youngest days; you could scarcely be called ponies of Equestria otherwise. The Living Sun and the Falling Moon banished the God of Chaos with all Six Elements, gifted by the Tree to restore the balance. God of not, wielding all six Elements at once is something the purest and most accomplished of ponies today would die instantly even attempting.
The Magic Cult stole the Tree, after a thousand years resting beneath the Old Castle. A thousand died fighting to the chamber of the Tree, a third of the Castle Guard betraying their fellows after years without a hint of treachery. A hundred fools were blown into the dust of creation, but they were desperate, and the Cult uprooted the Tree and stole it away to the Colonies across the Eastern Ocean. What magic still lived in the earth of Equestria died after that, living on only the peerage of the Unicorns in our days. Nations uncounted had passed even in their days, but the Tree had always been there, the sire of the holy Elements themselves. The entirety of Equestria's soldiers of a hundred kingdoms and empires, ten million ponies, pursued the Cultists.
Warships that were larger than anything seen in our days, dwarfing the wreckage of anything still rusting on our shores, were rent apart and smashed against the foreign shores. Storms that spat upon nature roared over the fleet, crackling with energies that drove common ponies to their knees and unicorns over the side in agony. As is the nature of ponies, the fleet endured the tempest through excruciating suffering. On the the seventh day, the remnants came ashore at a great natural harbor, marching out in the shadow of the great mountain that once towered there.
The assault was violent beyond imagining. The ponies of a hundred realms ground up against arcane horrors, abominations and twisted things created by the fickle power that choked the air around them. Yet these ponies had technologies beyond imagining, and magic was met with technology in decline even in those days, but nevertheless incomprehensibly powerful. What survived from the fleet was enough to raze the great mountain to nothing, even as warships were sucked into the depths, smashed apart by shards of the mountain hurled by ponies glowing with sickening power.
Above all this, however, were ponies not unlike you all, fighting and dying in the collapsing shadow of the mountain. They came ashore and into the city that ringed the harbor, the vast majority common ponies. Certainly they had war-machines more advanced than anything in our days, but in the factories and apartments, it was the common ponies who pressed forward against every instinct, fighting through both cultists and the terrible magic in the air that stirred something wrong within them.
Their bravery could do nothing when the first assault waves succeeded in breaking through to the rubble of the mountain. There they found the Tree, shining with a light that burnt the eyes, having been hidden away in a cave before the battle. It had survived an entire mountain falling upon it, and around it the Magic Cult rallied, empowered and utterly fanatical. Yet the cultists and abominations could still die - the most damning thing was the Tree. The Tree seemed to fight by itself, waves of power ripping apart war-machines and ponies, swatting aside firepower and turning back the Equestrian unicorns present in agony. The common ponies retreated, their will finally broken as their bodies piled up around the Tree in terrible numbers, and they called in the power of the fleet. Yet the Tree endured, and it was as shells and rockets and energies forgotten roared and crashed around that Tree that someone reported the pony at the center, bound to the Tree by arcane chains, glowing with a light like of a Living Sun.
It was blasphemy beyond compare, and that is when the Element of Loyalty arrived, sent by Dominion, its owners at the time. The Bearer of Loyalty strode off of its ship unhindered by the magic, and wasted no time. The battle between the Tree and Loyalty cannot be described. The common ponies that survived could only speak of a light and noise that drove them into the ground, writhing and straining to put their heads deeper into the dirt, feeling like their heads would split open. The only unicorns that survived were the ones that fled. The fleet said it was light so bright they could not look at it, that the crews begged their captains to flee from the horrible wrongness that churned in them. Everyone present spoke of that, the consuming knowledge in them that what was happening was wrong, the Tree and the Element of Loyalty fighting.
Know this: the bearer of Loyalty of this time was one of its greatest. The bearer should have in all rights died very quickly in the battle with the Tree, but magic seared and crackled, a new drive stirred in the breast of every Equestrian present. It was duty to their homeland and their comrades, crossing over race or politics, sending them up and into the maelstrom. Those who could not go on spoke of staring straight into the light of the battle with hatred and not a shred of self preservation. It was Loyalty. In its greatest hour, every pony in the rubble or in the fleet leapt up and was united, and in that moment, Loyalty triumphed. The pony shackled to the Tree was dissolved into the stuff of creation, the cultists and abominations killed. The magic lingered, but the threat of the foul goals the Magic Cult had for the Tree had been destroyed. The bearer of Loyalty died an hour after the battle, smiling its triumph, and the Element was carried back to Equestria in glory. Thus the harbor, one of the largest cities in the Free Colonies, was left in ruin and forever known as Loyalty's Triumph.
The hall was silent. The Colonel opened his eyes, and smiled. "Don't think this is what you're going to fight, ponies. Everything is lesser in our days, perhaps for better. I hope."
"What happened to the Tree, sir?" somepony spoke up.
"It was left behind. They couldn't move it even after a few days, and they were being attacked all the while by remnants and sympathizers of the Magic Cult. They left, vowing to return and uproot it, until it was realized that the tree had been the source of what magic remained in the soil of Equestria. Equestrians never returned for the Tree. Technology has never surpassed those days anyway, so we couldn't now."
"Then why are we going to Loyalty's Triumph, sir?" another pony asked. "I assume that's where we're going?"
"We will secure and patrol the city. There are already thirty thousand Equestrians there, doing much the same."
The Colonel refused further questions, and left. The hall was filled with uneasy ponies that night.
It was a week in when the clouds began to boil up on the horizon, and every pony who'd heard the Colonel was terrified of them. Their ship was larger than anything they'd seen, but if the story was to be believed...
They could see it, the waves smashing against themselves and closing. It almost seemed like the storm was coming for them, rather than they to it, not that it would matter. The Colonel had made it quite clear that the Central Government would spare nothing for the mission that had put them here.
With all eyes in front, no one noticed the smaller ship coming up fast to the stern until it was practically parallel with theirs. It was a greater sight than the storm, furnished in pink and gold and covered in banners, coiling thick black smoke into the sky, its pounding engines audible from two hundred feet of metal decks away. Script and text of an unknown language was inscribed on every exposed surface. Ponies were visible on the deck, swathed in pink.
"The Element of Laughter!" the Colonel called from the top deck above them, and there was a murmur through all that heard him. "Captain, we must keep up with that ship! It will not wait for us!"
Their ship shuddered and groaned alarmingly with the effort, but they managed to keep up. All eyes were glued to the stern of the Element of Laughter, and then to everywhere else as they went through the storm; it was falling away from the Element, the waves settling down and clouds rolling into wisps, and the blue sky hung above them. An arrow pierced the gloom.
There was a hundred whispered explanations of it, pessimism being the most common, but Cress like one above all others.
"Magic doesn't attack its own."
They arrived safely at Loyalty's Triumph, passing by a decayed techno-fortress at its edge, sharp white edges and powered down weapons and banners that still held the color of a passed nation. A battered fleet and a massive city greeted them, and they disembarked at dawn into the clamor of a million voices and constant gunshots.
It was in the shadow of vast factories, not a mountain, that Cress shivered in. Everything here felt wrong. There were ponies outside the hastily put up perimeter walls, crowds of foreigners watching and bustling with activity. On the other hoof, Cress had never seen so many soldiers in one place. There must have been fifty thousand black helmeted ponies disembarking from a hundred transports, falling into formations and marching off into the city. Most marched towards the rubble of the mountain. He couldn't see it past the factories, but he could feel it. The story of Loyalty's Triumph was an uncomfortable memory as every pony spoke of the burning wrongness inside them, and occasionally a great light would flare up from beyond the factories.
The Colonel was positively glowing, pointing out weapons and technologies dragged out of storage or museum, detailing the histories of the banners that some of the Central Guard units flew. Cress only half listened, until the Colonel yelled in delight at the sight of a procession rolling off a completely armor-clad ship, the gavel of justice painted five hundred feet tall on its side. A judge in orange and gilded robes strode out, flanked by a hundred unicorns of dazzling appearance.
"Look! The Element of Honesty! There is a great battle happening, this is a tale worthy of a thousand years of song! It's happening again!"
The Colonel was barely disappointed when they recieved orders from a harried Guard officer to march for the Southern Quarter, aside the mountain and the growing roar of combat, and secure the underfactory areas. The industry was so built up here, and stil inhabited, that there was practically another city beneath it. Cress was rather relieved that they were not maching towards the mountain.
They were split up, and Cress soon completely lost his sense of direction as they plunged into the masses of ponies that were getting out of work, or just leaving to stare up as the clouds flashed from the light of the battle below. Not a single one was hostile or gave the Central Guards a nasty look, but so many had odd totems and necklaces affixed to them, obviously having something to do with the Magic Cult. Cress and his fellows were on edge, but none made an attempt to detain the cultists, who rushed to a fro without care. The air was filled with excited conversation, and every face save the foreign Guards had a smile.
The Lieutenant leading them had no more idea of what to do that they did, and started posting Guards in sight of each other, telling them to shoot whoever started a ritual and commend their souls to the Heavens. Cress ended up on a street corner, surrounded by metal and apartments and foreign ponies as more factory shifts were obviosly ending. His black helmet felt very heavy on his head as he jumped up onto the curb to avoid being swept away by the crowds.
He hardly realized it when one of them started talking to him. "Hey, hey!" sounded like any of the other greetings and words, until a mare in an overcoat not unlike the ones worn back home tapped him. "Are you from Equestria?"
"Erm," he hesitated, then remembered the black helmet on his head, "yes, I am."
"Oh, how interesting! My brothers are fighting your fellows right now at the Element." she gushed, smiling as she spoke words that made Cress shrink back and feel around for his blade. "Everything has come together, Equestrian! The magic is coming back!"
Cress narrowed his eyes but did not draw his blade. The mare looked brighter than a common pony, but not so bright as the cultists back home. Truth be told he was more curious than anything. He glanced around, and could not see any other black helmeted ponies. Perhaps they were simply lost in the crowd. Perhaps they were being killed off by something. A strong desire to leave took hold of him.
"Very interesting words," he said finally, "very different from what I would say about this."
"We're supposed to be fighting!" the mare said cheerily, "but what's the point if you might die and miss out on the end? An Equestrian, here, and the Seventh Element raising up, in my time! Simply exciting. I feel like the luckiest mare in all history."
"You speak much like us," Cress observed, glad to hear her mention the past like a proper common pony.
"We're just ponies, but we can be so much more," she smiled, and pointed to a door nearby. "Come on! We've surely only got a little time before the end."
Cress did not argue, quite confused but possessed of that damning desire to find out what was going on. Surely this was a proper military thing to do, gathering intelligence.
She led him into a tiny 'cafe' as she called it, grabbing hot drinks and sitting down at a table with a little window.
"This is not at all how I expected the landings to go for me," Cress confessed as he sipped at the drink. The taste was unfamiliar but the liquid was hot, so he drank it with gusto.
"Well. You expected Loyalty's Damnation, did you not?"
"Damnation? Let me tell you of Loyalty's Triumph, foreigner..." Cress was happy to see the mare perk up with the same eagerness for a story any of his factory mates would display back home. That Rose would display.
He told her the story, as best as he could remember, of the mountain's fall and the Tree's defeat.
The mare nodded vigorously, smiling at the while. "You Equestrians don't understand much, do you?" she said after he was finished. "Not even the basics. Things were different in Equestria, long ago.
Magic was in every pony, common or unicorn, and pegasi flew in great numbers. It bound ponies to the earth, and to each other. The Tree was the source of all things and of magic, and the Six Elements were its offspring. Yet when the offspring forgets its roots and ponies forget their magic, it is up to the parent to set things right and as they were.
"Short, I know," she said, "but I learned that at a very early age. Everypony here does, about how we have the real element."
"Of what? Equestria has them all. We're lucky to have them all under the control of one government, too, in our days."
"Like what?"
"We have Loyalty, for starters." he said.
"Do you?" the mare asked, deadly serious without warning. Before Cress could respond, a great shriek sent a bolt of agony through him and the wind howled in fury outside. Everypony else appeared absolutely estatic at this development. He looked back to the mare, who was grinning from ear to ear. "Would you look at that, Harmony is chastising her children. You brought all six Elements here, did you not?"
"Um, yes," Cress said, gripping their table to steady himself.
"You know," the mare said, heedless as the wind increased and the light of the heavens cast shadows that defied the sun, "The bearer used to be somepony special in the old days. It used to be bound to them, not thrown about like some weapon. Loyalty? You've got that helmet of yours, but I can see you don't love it. I have this little necklace," she pulled at a bit of metal on a string that was around her neck, "and I love it. This is a tiny shard of metal from the armor of a cultist three hundred years ago, at your 'Triumph'."
"You speak well, foreigner." was all that Cress said.
"I really am so very lucky, though," the mare gushed, changing topics with dizzying speed. "A hundred generations of mucking around before Loyalty was damned against the Tree, and another three hundred years before know. It's very exciting."
"I gather so much, foreigner."
"Foreigner. You call me a foreigner. You call yourself an Equestrian. But the real Equestrians, so many thousands of years ago with more magic than we would know to do with, would be horrified."
"That's a real Equestrian? Somepony all those years ago? You foreigners are more rooted in the past than we are. You can't even look forward."
"Oh but we are. We are raising up the Element of Harmony."
Cress shook his head. "What even is that?" he asked.
"We will bring the end of all things. You Equestrians have strayed so far. Last time we shackled the Tree to fight you, but we were supposed to release it. Three hundred years of planning and preparation is nothing."
"You know so much and you do not seem like very much."
"Neither do you. I suspect we both were told stories by our leaders."
"Leaders, ancestors, elders. What does it matter?"
The mare smiled with warmth, and closed her eyes. "We are nothing, you and I. We are the dust of creation. Shadows of magical beings. What is there to celebrate about defeating the Tree and beating some cultists and having another thousand years of ponies forgetting those who came before? You must admit this. This is the greatest moment. We're the tiniest speck on what's going on, just talking in a cafe before Harmony is restored. You must feel something ."
Cress shuddered. "I do. I certainly do. This is a small event, here, this table and two ponies from across the sea, but it is the world to me right now."
"You're sounding like an old storyteller," the mare laughed, then stopped. "Quiet now. What little magic that is in me can feel it. The ritual has been completed."
A notably load sound echoed around them, and a oddly colorful light from above bathed the street outside. They rushed out without a word, joining the throng of ponies staring up. The mare was right. Cress knew he was seeing and living through an incredibly momentous occasion. Six lights were striking out at the brighter seventh in the heavens, but the light wasn't painful anymore. There was a rainbow, reaching out to join all seven, and that was when the world began to shake.
The mare shrieked with laughter, and Cress joined in as the air warped and an utterly foreign feeling of warmness and rightness spread through him. He looked around, saw holes in the air, saw worlds unfamiliar and terrifying and inviting through them.
"Oh Rose, if you could see this. If you could see this!" he yelled, and the mare wrapped a leg around him, leaning on him and nearly falling over in her happiness as the seven lights merged in the sky.
"Momentous. Simply momentous!" the mare giggled, and the staggered like drunkards. "We will see fantastic things."
"We will. And I will show a mare from across the horizon to my sister, one day. Unless you have something better to do?"
The lights shone brighter and the rainbow exploded outwards. "It's Petunia. I've never seen a petunia. I've seen roses, though, they're very lovely."
Cress smiled, the mare smiled, and they looked on to the future as the lights began to dim.
