Dead Sea

Encased in her menacing black armor, though choosing to have her helmet removed for this endeavor, Applejack walked between the ruined tents of the Equestrian encampment with an evident scowl upon her face, her eyes ablaze with a deep rooted disgust that was noted by those that had set up a small perimeter around her.

When had it become normal when Ah would feel more comfortable in my armor, than out of it? But then again, Ah can’t remember much of the past any more… too much to think about, now… surviving… being with Twilight…

Ah can’t quite tell if this is a dream or a nightmare… Ah don’t think Ah can tell the difference anymore.

Flanked either side by two of her personal guards with the newly dubbed Captain on her flank and yet another soldier taking point some meters away, every single one of them bore their crossbows up; ready for anything as they so brazenly strolled into the abandoned camp as if they had owned it.

As they passed every tent, the soldiers around her poked their crossbows between the flaps, checking to make sure that their occupants had indeed departed; and given the disarray and state to which it was in, it seemed that they left in quite the hurry.

Ah hate to say it, but maybe Twilight was wrong? Ah can’t see anything out of the ordinary here.

The campfires that were dotted around the area was still bearing signs of life; the ashen clumps at their centers still smouldering and releasing just enough of a trail of smoke to be just about visible to the naked eye. Large cast iron cauldrons hung above just some of these pits, and all of the insides were caked with the boiled down contents of an evaporated stew, which had long since burnt into a foul and sticky, charred clump.

As the group moves through the ranks of tents, they soon realized that not every tent was empty. There was one or two that housed a single corpse, with their causes of death all being eerily similar and violent in pattern.

Not that there was much left of them to even discern a pattern… Maybe Twi’ was right… Somepony else is definitely here and, Ah have a feeling they ain’t alive, neither.

Innards were torn out and limbs were gnawed to the bone; every single dead pony was unrecognisable as nothing more than a gorey feast to whatever animal had fed upon them.

Even though they were now mortal enemies, the griffins could not help but feel something for the ponies that were so brutally murdered. As the majority in the group kept their mouths shut, one griffin quite couldn’t contain himself.

“This is… horrible…” Whispered one of the guards as he quickly turned away from a tent he had just inspected, holding a claw to his beak as he restrained the bile from rising up into his throat. “How did this happen? It’s like something just… ripped them apart...”

“Keep your eyes open and stay in formation!” Katan reprimanded with a glance towards the straggler.

Quickly the soldier picked up the pace to return to his original position, though, looking that little bit more unnerved by the situation they found themselves in.

In truth, the Captain himself had some questions about that.

As far as he knew all the reanimated were currently in their possession back at camp. They never strayed too far from the Queen; like stalwart and undead protectors.

Every living soul back at their camp found such a sight just a little bit unnerving. Especially when their own troops counted amongst the ranks of the walking dead. Katan had seen several of his friends rotting amongst the horde, standing vigilant even in death.

Katan was not quite sure what to make of it. But he knew; they all knew that sacrifices were needed to be made so that they could once again live peaceful lives. Even if it meant becoming one of them to continue the good fight against the corrupt Princesses of Equestria and their iron-hoofed tyranny.

Picking up the pace pace as he approached Applejack with his crossbow lowered, Katan cleared his throat as he broke the eerie ensemble of the wind rustling the tents. “Excuse me, General...”

“What is it, Captain?” Applejack replied monotonously, her eyes roaming around for any signs of life.

“I’m sorry, but I was under the assumption that we were here to scout out the area to see if the enemy force were still holding up here, not to search it…” Katan winced when Applejack’s gaze shot to him. “Besides… I feel it might be a bit dangerous if my assumption of what occurred here is correct. I think it might be best if we head on back now before the enemy’s aerial units spot us and come to investigate. They may have abandoned this camp, but you can never be too careful. If they were to capture you or worse, General, our whole rebellion will crumble to dust.”

“An’ what exactly is it that ya’ll assuming, hm?” Applejack responded with a little grin. “Looks like to me tha’ somepony threw a party and didn’ go an’ invite us along for the ride. Besides, Ah think ya’ll do just fine without me. Ah’m just one pony, after all. An army is made up of individuals, not just one.”

Katan felt his words melt from his mouth as he drank in his General’s grin.

Every single griffin knew that when it came to an overwhelming wealth of kindness and self-sacrifice, it was almost always Applejack that came to their mind. Through thick and thin she fought hard for them; she was dependable, loyal and quite frankly, a nice mare. She played with the children and often would teach them certain life skills to survive in the wilderness and even had the capacity to console those who had lost their loved ones.

It was all agreed that perhaps, Applejack, was the most kindest of ponies that they had ever met.

But then, when it came to the treatment of her own kind; whenever she placed her armor on and entered a battle against the Equestrian forces… there was nothing of that pony they knew that existed. It was as if Applejack possessed some kind of mental switch that existed deep inside of her, allowing her to switch her emotions on and off whenever it suited her best.

Regardless of what they thought of her, she was a broken and battered shell forged into a heartless, cold-blooded killer. She had little sympathy for other ponies; she would sooner dispatch them with a brutal efficiency and grim determination than to spare their lives.

Mare, stallion… colt… it did not matter to her. As long as they all ended up six feet beneath her hooves.

There was no denying it. Applejack was a fine soldier and it was no secret that she was Queen Midnight Sparkle’s confidant in many things, both political and personal. They were both, two very dear friends lost upon a slippery slope of blood and bone.

But friends don’t do the things they do, do they?

Every griffin knew that they were a pair seemingly destined to fly or to fall together. They were joined at the hip in public; rarely was one seen without the other.

They all could see it. Every single one of them knew the love they shared was real.

“Do Ah have somethin’ on my face, Captain?” Applejack chuckled. “Ya’ll just staring at me like you're in some sort of trance.”

Shaking his head, Katan bowed his head a little. “Sorry, Sir, I was… please do not say that about yourself, General.”

“Say what now?”

“You. If it was not for you, we would be lost. Without your heroism and victories on the field of battle, I don’t think we could have gotten as far as we have. You give us courage, General. Your mere presence is enough to make us feel we can take on the Equestrians and win.” He decided to change the subject. The last thing he wanted to do was to get into an argument with her over something as silly as disagreeing her worth to their cause. “To answer your question, though, it is clear to me that the undead was here and is more than likely responsible for this massacre.”

“Ah concur, Captain. Th’ savagery of the undead and the state of the victims as Ah witnessed them upon the battlefield yesturday is similar to what we are seein’ here.”

“It’s strange though…” Katan remarked, watching Applejack’s face closely. “By the looks of it, this camp had about a hundred or so troops stationed here, by my estimation. I very much doubt even a good handful of the dead could cause such a strength of Equestrian numbers to route.”

“Tha’ is exactly why we are here, Captain.” Applejack stopped, turning to fully face Katan and to address the rest of the squadron. “Ah’ve kept quiet about the mission long enough. We are not here just to scout the enemy encampment for intel that they may had left behind during their evacuation from this area. While tha’ part has some truth to it, the real reason is because our Queen sensed somethin’ odd about this place. Something is here.”

“Odd?” Said one of the guards, looking around now nervously. “There’s plenty enough odd with it… I can’t imagine anything more odder than an abandoned enemy camp full of dead bodies that we have no idea what happened to…”

Applejack glared the griffin down, her tone borderline menacing. “I wasn’t finished...”

“S-sorry, General.”

Katan rolled his eyes and gave the private a long glance before nodding his head back to Applejack. “Continue, I apologize for his rudeness. We’re all just a little bit on edge standing in the enemy’s bedroom.”

“It’s alright… it’s fine to be nervous. Ah honestly don’ mind if any of you speak ya’ll minds in front of me… infact, Ah welcome it.” Taking a couple of steps forward, Applejack cast her eyes around the tents again, remaining vigilant despite her oncoming explanation of the mission.

“Our Queen suspects tha’ one of the undead has gone… Ah suppose you could say, ‘rogue?’ From what Ah understand of th’ explanation she gave me, it shouldn’t ought to happen… at all. It’s supposed to return home like the rest of ‘em like some kind of homing pigeon. Considerin’ how it has not been exposed to the Queen’s presence, it should had jus’ stopped moving several hours ago…”

The third bodyguard who had been silent the entire time now spoke, clearly confused. “Wait a minute… if that is true then it should be pretty darn easy to find it... but we have yet to find its body… it has been almost a day since the battle, so, wouldn’t it be technically ‘dead’ again already? Are we just looking for a body, or…?”

“From what Midnight suspects, we’re lookin’ for a very confused and lost walking corpse, an’ nothin’ more.”

Katan nodded slowly. “This should be easy then. What are our orders? Are we to take it out?”

“All we need to do Captain is to find it, capture it, an’ take it back so that Midnight can find out the cause of its odd wanderings. It ought to peacefully listen to any of ya’ll orders like the others, but, if it doesn’ an’ it becomes violent for whatever reason, then Ah authorize you to use your weapons. Of course, since it is already dead, it doesn’ need to be in one piece for Midnight, however? Please, if it does come to that, try not to shoot it in th’ head or damage the corpse too heavily.” Applejack intoned her next statement as a dangerous warning. “We sure as hay do not want to anger the Queen by returning empty hoofed, is tha’ understood?”

“Yes, Sir.” Saluting, Katan turned to the other soldiers. “You heard the General—fan out and find this thing. Signal the moment you have eyes on it. Do not approach it alone; as the General mentioned we do not know what this ‘abnormal’ will do upon noticing us. Posse out.”

Applejack lifted a brow at Katan, looking upon him incredulously. “Posse out? Ah’m gonna pretend Ah didn’t hear that.”

Katan flexed his wings as he took to hovering a few inches off of the ground, looking back to the General. “Well I thought it sounded pretty cool…”

Applejack cracked a smile as she took off walking in no particular direction, shaking her head. “Sure thing, Dash…”

“Um… I’m sorry, Sir, who?”

Pausing mid step, Applejack mentally cursed herself as she looked back towards Katan. “Nothing. Just… you sounded like somepony I used to know.”

______________________

Midnight’s personal quarters was more like a well constructed straw hut than the tents that Applejack and her army take residence in. Although she had just about the same amenities as the rest of her subjects, Midnight had very little in her room to show off her status as their exalted leader and Queen.

However, one particular feature at the center of the room, was a large black cauldron and inside of it, full to the brim and threatening to overflow onto the straw covered ground was a vat of black liquid; almost resembling oil, though with a far shinier and viscous quality to its surface and it was before this cauldron, did the dark alicorn stood, gazing down solemnly into the murky depths.

“I hope she is alright…” Midnight murmured. “I should had sent a larger force with her.”

It was often whenever Applejack had to go away, Midnight’s mood would deflate and a certain kind of paranoia would settle in.

“But then… that would had left us defenseless against any surprise attacks… Urgh! Stop over thinking this, Twilight. You’re just going to work yourself up into a worry over nothing...”

Lifting up a hoof, Midnight gestured just so above the cauldron’s contents, her horn aglow with dark energies that quickly enveloped the pot, shifting the surface’s reflective surface into a transparent gloss, allowing her to summon a birdseye view of the abandoned encampment to which she viewed with an intense, crimson eyed stare.

“There you are…”

She smiled upon seeing the tiny figures moving amongst the tents below, seemingly in quite the wide breadth from the other. A typical search pattern, Midnight had surmised after viewing their meanderings for some time.

“Perhaps they won’t find anything, after all.”

Midnight was not quite sure what it was they were going to find there. She had her theories, of course, but she had nothing solid of which to clearly lean on.

Every inch of her gut told her that it was a blip on her magical radar, but then, if it was not for scrying of the area much like what she was doing now, and what she had witnessed during that happenstance of a session, Midnight might had missed it.

The first time she had observed the area, the soldiers of the Equestrian camp were quickly on their way in a sudden retreat, to which she conjectured was due to their crushing defeat at the hoofs and claws of her army of the dead. They were rapidly relocating further into Equestrian soil; more than likely to regroup and resupply, in a much safer area.

This movement of force, however, was not uncommon.

Such a thing was a commonplace warfare tactic for the Equestrians. They had been trying to make their detection closer to her territory an annoyance for Midnight and her army by leaving erected decoy camps all over the countryside, frequently boobytrapping them in the vain hopes that Midnight’s scouts would go up in a fiery blaze of detonated firebombs upon further inspection.

Unfortunately for them, Midnight was not that stupid.

They had no idea she had been watching them from above, magically, from the very moment this war had started… but that did not stop her from tripping every trap. She wanted them to believe they had the upper hoof in this.

“Pft. Do they honestly think I would be that disorganized? The foals.”

She spun her own web of lies, much like Luna had done her own, and lured them all into the most perfected of traps.

However, in this instance, as the main bulk of the troops left the encampment, something strange had occurred to the remaining soldiers tasked with rigging up the traps. As Midnight watched in perplexed wonderment, one by one, they were dragged into tents and individually taken out covertly as if by some assassin that she most certainly did not employ. The theme of stealth-kills continued for at least an hour until one pony seemingly raised the alarm… and that was when all hell broke loose.

Something quick and agile; pony shaped, that much Midnight could work out, was moving amongst the ranks like a creature possessed. Soldiers were thrown around like ragdolls and others torn apart just as easily.

It took a full five minutes for a remaining count of nigh on one hundred soldiers to all become silent, and to top it all off, Midnight could had sworn she had seen the thing get shot and stabbed several times by the defenders, causing her to deduce that indirectly, her reanimation magic may have had a play in the creation of such a monstrosity.

Blinking out of her reminiscence, Midnight drew her attention back to the pool, her eyes growing concerned as she watched Applejack and her soldiers filter deeper into the camp.

“Wait…” Midnight leaned forward, drawing her muzzle closer to the substance. “I thought there was five of them...”

______________________

A horrendous scream caused Applejack to exit a tent she had suspected to belong to an officer with her sword drawn and clenched tightly between her teeth. Swinging her gaze around, Applejack was soon met with a body crashing and tumbling into a tent nearby with an almighty wet slap.

“Hold on!”

Rushing over as quickly as she could to the griffin, Applejack slowed her pace upon realizing that there was little point in attempting to save his life.

The snarky griffin, who she had just reprimanded, had been torn into two; with his lower half having landed somewhere else out of sight.

Whatever had happened to him, it must have happened quickly.

For he was still just about clinging to life.

With cold eyes, Applejack stared silently as the griffin wept and attempted to scoop his innards back into his body with two broken arms.

“H-help, m-me…” He looked up at her with pleading, bloodshot eyes, a red foam bubbling from his broken beak as he spoke.

Another terrified screech and the wail of a crossbolt cutting through the air drew Applejack’s attention back to the situation at hoof.

Ah don’ have time for this.

“G-General… aghhck… h-help—”

Applejack moved on past the griffin, but not before sailing her wickedly crafted blade through his neck with a swing of her neck, removing his head clean from the rest of his body as if his neck was made of butter.

“Dismissed.”

Author's Note

Like, flame, hate, eat my brains, whatever it is you do it's good.