Our World, Our Life [Part One] {Unedited}
I sat slipped through Canterlot’s underground tunnel system in silence, my paws padding along and currently lacking in claws to click on the stone. Behind me, my two companions had wrapped their hooves in rags, achieving the same result. Their coats were purposefully covered in dirt to dull out the colours. Dull coloured dyes were rare to come across, and we saved those for when the entire group had to move our base. My own coat was currently a dull grey, though it wasn’t dyed.
I had abilities that normal ponies didn’t, and that let me cheat on the need for camouflage for the most part. My father had been a changeling and that had given me a gift of transformation. One that had only grown since the Twilight had begun.
Now, I used it to properly blend in with our surroundings and keep perfectly silent as Snapshot, Nomalanga and myself worked to avoid the detection of the creatures that stalked within the shadows of Canterlot. Sometimes quite literally.
For whatever reason, the tunnels beneath the city didn’t have nearly the same number of creatures, or creatures of the same levels of danger as above. Unfortunately, we always had to do at least a little above ground travel with every trip away from home. Supplies were getting harder and harder to find in the city, and sneaking onto the grounds of the local noble manors for their gardens had started at ‘way too dangerous’ and slowly made their way to ‘outright suicidal’.
Soon, though, we’d have no choice. Which brought us to our current mission. The building my family—because blood or not, that’s what they were—and I currently called our home was a warehouse. Whoever had owned it had used it to store, and possibly smuggle, illegal weaponry and military airship components of all sorts. Among that weaponry had been explosives. Lots and lots of explosives. With the supplies we had gotten from it, if we could sneak onto a noble’s manor, we should be able to blow a hole to the sewers from on the grounds of any noble’s manor.
Sneaking would be made easier and we’d have a more reliable food source. Currently, though, we were only doing the scouting. It would definitely take more than just three of us if we wanted to pull off making a new tunnel entrance. At the very least, we’d need Steel Armour, as that colt was really good at shields.
So for now, we were prioritizing stealth as best we could without actually compromising safety.
“Three hundred metres, a left, we’ll get to the surface twenty-five metres from our goal,” I whispered back to Noma and Snapshot.
They both nodded towards me and Snapshot dimmed the light of her horn even more. She was the only one that really needed the light. I really wished there was some nightvision spell, but she was far better to have than not.
My other companion, Nomalanga, was a zebra shaman's apprentice. The filly had gained an unusual, and large, power boost from the Twilight.
“Winter,” Noma hissed suddenly, her voice barely loud enough for me to hear, even with me having hearing far better than the average pony. Instantly I froze. She didn’t usually speak on mission unless she absolutely needed to, either to answer, or to warn.
I looked back, questioning look on my face. “No lights,” she said softly. Snapshot instantly put out her light, not bothering to question the little filly. I stepped softly back towards them, keeping close as I watched Noma pull out a piece of chalk and draw a quick series of lines and glyphs, enclosed in in a shape. I didn’t look too hard, as they generally either gave me a headache or sort of shifted until I was nauseous.
She then touched it and I felt power surge around us before I felt nothing. Not in the sense of being unconscious or dead, but something else. I couldn’t feel myself, I couldn’t hear my companions, their shapes were wavering outlines, and their smells vanished. It gave the entire situation a suddenly very foreboding feeling.
Ahead of us, in the intersection less than twenty metres ahead of us, one of them came from the left. I had no name for the creatures. It was like they were something directly out of my nightmares. Three years ago, the sight of one of those would have sent me straight for my aunt, or my mom if she was home.
Now though, now I had seen a lot. More than any fifteen year old should, and I felt far older than I was. The creature still caused a bones deep, primal sort of fear, but it was no longer enough to send me running. Sometimes I wish it still was.
This one looked like a wingless dragon, not the juvenile bipeds, but a fully adult dragon of about the size of a stallion. Like all the nightmares, its skin seemed to be made from shadows made solid, and its eyes were the blackest of voids.
It didn’t seem to notice us as it moved across the intersection, its tongue flickering out searchingly. It glanced towards us and I tensed, ready to fight it should it actually approach.
It never did. After a long look down the tunnel we were in, it looked back forwards and continued on at a slow lumbering pace. Noma didn’t drop our cloak for another five minutes. I don’t think I took a breath for at least two of those.
When Nomalanga finally released the cloak, she slumped against a wall, breathing heavily. Not just from the effort of the magic, but also from the adrenaline I knew to be coursing through her veins. She’d probably been the one that had changed the least of us. Zebrica, her original home, was a hostile land full of predators, monsters, and hardship, so when the Twilight came, she wasn’t unready for the tartarus on Equestria.
But that also meant that she’s seen this enough before that she had a good idea of what to expect. Thankfully, very few of the rest of us had even seen a pony killed by the shadow creatures. I’d been… unlucky enough to see it once and it still gave me nightmares. “We need to keep moving,” I whispered after a moment. “We can’t stay here for long.” They already knew that, I knew, but somepony had to be the one to get us moving again.
The rest of our trek, all three hundred metres of it, went without any more incidents. I looked up at the grate above, the one things standing between us and the surface right now. The surface and the much higher number of monsters.
I sighed. “Ready?” I asked my companions softly, receiving nods in return as Snapshot once more killed the light atop her horn. I took a breath and changed. My legs and body became thicker with muscle and my wings went from those similar to a humming birds—my natural ones—to leathery and larger. My canine-like paws became claws, and in moments I was a mare sized dragon.
A hungry mare-sized dragon, but hunger could be dealt with later. Right now we had twenty-five metres of extremely dangerous surface world to cover, and we needed whatever advantages we could get.
I reached up and firmly grasped the grate at the top of the short ladder. My claws dug into the wall, I tensed, pushed, and there was a scraping, crumbling sound as I ripped the grate free of the ground and pushed it to the side, scanning what little of the alleyway I could see before I even thought of sticking my head out. I’d learned that lesson the hard way.
Once I was reasonably certain the coast was clear, I poked my head out onto street level. For whatever reason, the majority of the creatures didn’t take well to the underground. Taking another long look around, I slid out fully onto street level, keeping low and crouched in the long shadows case by the building beside me. The sun hadn’t moved in three years, now, making it extremely easy to predict just where and how the shadows would fall in any given area of Canterlot.
I glanced behind me to make sure that Nomalanga and Snapshot had made it out of the grate before slowly, carefully sneaking forward towards the main street from the alley we were currently taking shelter in, my ears constantly listening, even if they were currently immobile. Not that hearing was even the sense that gave me the warning most of the time, anyway.
With great care, I poked my nose out onto the main street area, keeping low as I could as I checked out the street for any obvious threats. The bright sun shone down, lighting the street up well, but casting long shadows at the same time. Long shadows that potentially hid more nightmares.
That was one of the worst things about the surface. You could never truly tell if you were safe. Every shadow could hold a nightmare, stepping into the light revealed you for all to see. There was simply nothing good about the surface outside our warehouse anymore. I looked across the street at our goal.
Ignis Estate had stood in its place for as long as Canterlot had been on the mountain. Longer, if what some ponies said was true. It was old, stout, and above all, built like a damn fortress. It also had a peach grove that would do wonders to sustain myself and my family. All we needed was a safe way to get to it. Well, safe-ish, considering what a loaded word ‘safe’ really was.
Still, just beyond the walls was Ignis Estate’s peach Grove. Our hopeful new food supply, if only we could get to it.
Our World, Our Life [Part Two] {Unedited}
Of course, that was a big ‘if’ seeing as the place was built like a fortress in the first place and it had a ton of wards on top of that to make up for the fact the old building had fallen so far behind technology. That would just make things all the harder, depending on when or if the Estate had ever been abandoned.
“What’s the warding look like?” I asked Snapshot softly.
“Like it could still stand up to an armoured alicorn assault for days,” she answered, tone more than a little grumpy. “It’s not Iron Sentinel Systems, either, or even sharing a base, so I can’t backdoor it properly.”
That explained her grumpiness. Without it being her dad’s system, it meant that we had no easy way in. Or even a way in at all, if the wards were still holding up as well as Snapshot suggested. “Well, where else do you suggest?” I asked her quietly. “None of the other noble manors have a readymade food supply, or the ability to host one anytime soon.”
“That we know of,” Snapshot shot back. “We haven’t even begun to raid their pantries. There might be some survivalists out there that didn’t take everything with them.”
I thought about it for a moment, but before I could answer, Nomalanga spoke. “Too dangerous right now. We still have other sources.”
Snapshot frowned, but nodded. “Well, I can’t crack this now. Not without giving it my full attention. We’re going to need armour here, at the very least, to help crack it. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to have Fallen with us either.”
I mirrored Snapshot’s frown, but for different reasons. We usually only went out in threes because that was the best way to stay stealthy, while still having some ability to defend ourselves if a really nasty Nightmare showed up. The more of us there were, the harder it would be to remain unnoticed, but Snapshot knew that well.
I sighed. “We’ll talk to Stormy about it,” I said. “I don’t like either of those choices, but that just seems to be life now doesn’t it.”
“Which choice is less bad?” Snapshot asked. “I’ve been making those choices for a longer than the Twilight’s been around, remember?”
I blushed. “Sorry.” I’d forgotten. She was only a year older than me, but her life hadn’t exactly been a happy one.
“Less talk, more move,” Nomalanga said softly. “We know what we need. We know who we need. Now let’s go home.”
I nodded. “Home,” I said softly, a small smile coming to my face. It had been our home for almost two years now. We were family. No matter what else had happened, we at least had that in this hellhole.
My two companions slipped underground first. I always made sure to be the first and last one on the surface, due to the fact I could escape so much easier if things got bad, and the underground worked more to Snapshot and Noma’s advantage than the open street and air.
Before I could slip in after them, I heard a low, threatening growl off to me side, deeper into the alley. I turned to face it, a snarl moving over my own expression as I silently cursed the fact I was already a dragon in form, removing my ability to try intimidating whatever it was with the transformation.
Out of the shadows stepped a hyena, the growl turning into a demented sort of laughter-like bark. Just behind it, three more creatures exited the shadows. Then I heard two more step around the corner at the mouth of the alley behind me.
My tail lashed threateningly at the ones behind me to let them know that, while I hadn’t taken my eyes from the set in front of me, I most definitely knew they were there. This had just become one of the worst case scenarios possible. Any sort of canine tended to be smart, vicious, and to bucking tough for any of us to be comfortable with.
I made eye contact with the leader, staring him down. Daring him to attack a dragon. Even if I wasn’t a big one, I was still a dragon and plenty of creatures would think twice about attacking.
Apparently not these ones. The leader met my eyes and its snarl seemed to curl up into something almost like a smile.
The leader attacked first. As one, the four others followed.
Welcome to the Twilight [Prologue] {Unedited}
Three years ago, the sun and moon stopped moving, and Equestria began the Twilight.
Three days later, the citizens of Equestria found out why the Princesses wouldn’t move the sun. They couldn’t, having fallen into a coma they had yet to awaken from.
Twilight Sparkle took control of the Government as the remaining Princess, Cadence’s focus being forced to remain on the Crystal Empire. In truth, it was the Advisers that ran things behind the scenes, as Twilight was nowhere near ready to run a country.
It took two weeks before the noble court and all hereditary positions within the court were totally stripped of their authority. While there were a few that were genuinely trying to help, enough of a majority were being a detriment to Equestria with their power games.
Equestria held together as a nation for only six months before the first city fell into anarchy. Baltimare had ever been a place of two sides. As a thriving port city, it had more than its fair share of problems with crime, smuggling, and even sometimes pirates.
Baltimare was the first domino. Manehattan was lost next. Then Vanhoover. Not even instituting martial law in an attempt to keep the peace had been enough. Canterlot had been the last to fall, the seat of Government almost seemed to be enough.
Then, two years ago, the monsters began to appear. Creatures of shadow and death. Nightmares figuratively and literally, born of the realm of dreams and given life by the Everlasting Twilight. Now, there was no law, no government. Everypony was out for themselves, not caring about others. The cities had more or less been abandoned for the countryside and villages, where food could be grown for a community and a fortified stronghold more easily build.
But there were those that remained in the city and those that had slipped through the cracks. One such group that slipped through the cracks was a group of foals now living in what was left of one of Canterlot’s warehouse districts outside the airship drydocks.
This is their story…
