“My name is Macintosh. My world is fire. And blood. Once, I was a cop; a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy. Me... or everyone else. Here they come again. Worming their way into the black matter of my brain. I told myself... they cannot touch me. They are all dead. I am the one who runs from both the living and the dead. Hunted by scavengers. Haunted by those I could not protect. So I exist in this Wasteland. A stallion reduced to a single instinct: survive.

“Centuries ago, the Princesses warned us. They said our self-destructive waste would lead to nothing more than death. Well, they were right. First came the magical fallout. The burning flesh and land alike. Fuel, necessary to move our vehicles, to heat our homes, went next as infrastructure failed. With the fall of industry, water became scarce. Then, almost as a final nail in our coffin, Sol stopped in the sky for forty days. Only the begging of burnt, dying ponies convinced the Princesses to bring back the night.

“At least, that is the story ponies tell themselves. The Princesses haven't been seen, nor heard from in over fifty thousand days. Harmony is but a memory in those old enough to remember. Now, we live off what sustenance we can scrounge up.”

A dark red stallion stood at the edge of a cliff, watching the desert below. An almost absently placed back hoof smashed down on a two-headed lizard, which was quickly scraped up. True, Ponies were not normally carnivorous, but one took what one could get. His flat teeth crunched sickeningly against the bones of the lizard, and he swallowed it roughly, gagging at the familiar, and still disgusting flavor. A quick glance to the edge of the cliff, and he rolled a bedroll up, tossing it roughly onto the floor of a rather battered old police interceptor. There used to be a seat there. He used to have a partner sitting in it. Armor was a crazy old bird, but he was loyal. Mac scowled at the pile of fabric sitting where the seat used to be. His last resort to get the image of Armor's stupid little smirk out of his head.

”Mac...You don't want to forget...Do you?”

The ghostly specter hovered at the edge of his vision, uniform still crisp, horn polished to a shine, and a rifle in his hooves. That stupid smirk. Mac ripped his eyes away from what they couldn't possibly see, and shoved the transmission into gear with a loud grating sound. The interceptor leaped forward, darting down the slope and ripping away into the sands. The roar of the engine was barely enough to drown out Armor hooting and hollering...Hallucination. Mac shook his head to get Armor to shut up, but that only resulted in him jerking the wheel, or was it Armor that grabbed the leather wrapped ring. The interceptor twisted and rolled, throwing up clouds of dust and sand as it came to rest upside down.

“Shii...” Mac saw his old partner shooting him a rare apologetic look before everything went black. It felt like a hoof to his head, and he was out cold.

–
“Would ya look at this poor bastard? Wonder why he jinked like that,” a white painted stallion with dark grease around his eyes scratched at his shoulder, “Just went and fuckin' bombed his axles.” He sighed and pulled the brown stallion out, trussing him up. His hoof rubbed at a spot on his side, a lump that flinched away, where he used to have a wing, “Alright then, Up you go!” He hefted the unconscious body into a cargo rack on the side of his truck before hitching the wrecked interceptor to the rear and driving off, “Bet Solus'll love this motor. It's a beast.”

–
“I think he's wakin' up. Hold 'im,” a reasonably attractive mare with a purple streaked mane poked at the bare back of his latest masterpiece, carving in small letters that would nevertheless show up, fur or no fur. She put the blade back down, etching in a circle with three small dashes beside it, a mark representing a universal donor, for Earth ponies. The knife settled onto a side table, her almost tar colored magic releasing it and lifting a small heated circle with a pattern carved into it.

The masterpiece snorted angrily and kicked, the hoof very nearly colliding with the artist before he took off down the corridor. “After him! Don't break him!” Two things that almost didn't go together, but she needed the masterpiece intact to use for parts to fix up the Immortal's War-Horses.

–
Mac darted away, his warm blood dripping down his back, then his arms and legs. He kicked off a wall, rounding a corner sharply, and came to a very abrupt halt at the edge of a chasm. He turned around and saw Armor leaning on the wall. The smug little transparent shit was flicking his magic and gesturing off the cliff, ”Well. Go on. I've seen you fly. Sometimes you didn't even need an engine.” Mac swore at the hallucination and turned to look out over the chasm, away from Armor. Except, sitting there on the hook of a crane was another one. At least, he hoped Sprog was only a hallucination. There was no way a young Pegasus should be able to get to that hook, that far up in the air. There was no way an Earth pony could either, but he could hear the shouts of ponies coming up behind him. “Fuck.”

He crouched and launched himself into the void, reaching with the chain of his hoof-cuffs. They caught, just barely, passing through the hooves of the hallucination of his child, who laughed at him, ”Look at you daddy! You can fly too!” she clapped her hooves together and giggled as the hook started moving. The wrong way. It was going back towards the hole he had jumped from. They were grabbing at his old boots. Then they were beating him back into unconsciousness. Again. The last thing he saw was Armor with his hoof in Sprog's mane, mussing it in that way he always did/ had.

–
“Lord Solus, your armor, Sir?” The shaped plastic sheets made the old Unicorn sweat like nothing else, but they hid his furless, scarred body. What little white fur he had left stood out boldly around his flanks, accenting the brilliant blue of his mane and tail. He slid into the armor, allowing his second in command to secure the sheets to him, then to brush the false fur hanging from the plates.

Solus rasped out a barely audible 'Thank you' before his second slid a grotesque mask over his muzzle. He hissed softly as the cool air flowed into his lungs. “Rage. Prepare the...” he made a move like he was spitting, an action rendered impossible by his lack of salivary glands, “Vermin.”

Author's Note

And here...We...Go!