Here It Is. Here Is The End

When I first neared Manehattan for the first time, it was three years after the war began. I didn't get to go in yet, and I wouldn't for another two years, but at that moment I saw the peaks of the walls, with their barbed wire, watchtowers, and floodlights, I felt safe.

There were refugees all around me as I stood with a mare I picked up from a hidden camp under Canterlot. Despite being hidden from the Changelings, and living in relative security, Nes told me that her friend had died trying to get their group to Manehattan. The brother and sister she was with were happy to stay, but Nes wouldn't take it anymore.

The day I left the camp, after trading for travelling supplies, Nes snuck out of the group to join me. She hid inside my cart, because the camp's leaders wouldn't let any pony leave without permission, and stayed there until Ponyville, or what was left of it, was a distant image.

At first, I thought she was strange. I had chosen not to stay at the camp because I was not needed there, and I had interests in Manehattan. Nes had no reason but to fulfill a dying wish, something that didn't hold much value in the apocalypse. But after some time, she became wise with her madness.

"You gotta see it the end," she said over a camp fire one night. "You know what I mean? You've got to finish what you started." I simply shrugged and said that I must not understand things the way she does.

"No, I think you know," she replied. "Look around us. We're at our end right now. Vanhoover's all but gone, Appleloosa's on its lasts stings according to the rumors, and even Manehattan can't hold out forever." I began nodding my head a little bit.

"Maybe I see it," I told her. "But why bring it up?"

"I was just thinking about how you looked at me when I followed out out here on your quest to Manehattan." She looked me in the eye this time. "It's not the same look now, but it hasn't left completely. I'm just saying it because it's the right thing, you know? Like a story, you gotta have an ending to it."

I took it as her motto of never giving up, never taking the easy route and dropping it all. But it was how she said it that struck a different tone. It was right. Nes didn't seem to be the hard worker, even if she was a determined character. Often times she would take the lazy way and avoid the harder things. But if she started it, she sure as hell finished it.

Like the time we found a survivor's safe house, made out of the ruins of a train station. Most of the things there were coal, as it was just a minor station for refueling and restocking food. The majority of the food was eaten, but there was plenty of coal. We used the coal to pile up a wall around the station to take cover behind in case of a Changeling attack.

By the fourth night there I had recovered from a sprained hoof I got falling down a cliff two weeks prior, and I suggested leaving while we were ahead. But the wall, only half way around the train station, was incomplete.

"Better to just protect this place entirely," Nes said every time I said leaving would put us ahead of our schedule, and we ended up stayng there for another three days.

Another time, I was telling Nes a story about how I met Bitter Ginger at Dodge Junction. I was still searching for a life in the apocalypse when I trotted into Dodge with an empty saddlebag and a downtrodden look. I walked into a food court made from a huge open tent in the outer ring of the town and asked for a drink.

There, I saw Bitter Ginger, working in the makeshift food court with a scar freshly cut on her face. It was a long scar. It ran from her right cheek to the bottom of her ear, but was almost unnoticeable from most angled. I didn't say anything to her the first day, or the second, because I felt an understanding between us. Like two flares in the night, we had our own little sphere. I understood she went through tough times, and didn't ask about the scar. She did the same and didn't ask about how I got to Dodge Junction.

Then, at the end of the week, she came asking for payment for all the drinks I had asked for.

It kind of felt weird, that she didn't recognize me, or didn't want to at least. I didn't pay much attention at the time, I just got to work and brought in enough salvage to pay off my drinks.

One day, I told Nes, Bitter Ginger trotted up to me and gave me an offer. She said an acquaintance of hers had a died from an infection he got from a cut while working with some scrap metal. She said his stuff was salvaged or burned, but the tent was still good enough for a survivor like me.

"I'd love to use it," I told her, and she said as long as I kept coming to her stall for drinks after work I could have it. I smiled at her, ordered up some watered down mead served in a small bucket, and went off to take apart a derelict train.

That night, I stumbled through the thick jungle of tents and found the one Bitter had told me about. It was big enough to take a step in any direction from the center, and just tall enough to stand in without ducking my head down. There were a couple blankets laid out to sleep on, and a stack of books with torn bindings that needed fixing.

It was late and I was tired, but somehow I managed to restore one of those books. Obscure Griffon History and Politics. I went to Bitter Sweet the next day and asked for it. She just told me I looked like some pony who liked books.

I just brushed it off like before, though I shouldn't have. That's what I said to Nes. I looked across the campfire and, and looked right in her eyes.

"You've got me thinking Nes," I said, "maybe I should finish things up, and find out what Bitter was talking about."

Nes just nodded, and I reached into my saddlebag and took out a piece of paper and started writing. I wrote about how I decided not to drop the books into Ghastly Gorge on accident one day, but instead sat in the tent and repaired books for Dodge Junction. I wrote about the titles I saw, about the number of fillies and colts with their Daring Do books, and about how I talked to Bitter Ginger until she finally told me what I wanted to know.

"I found a home on the coast, a little surfing shack down in Baltimare," I made her tell me. It was what I heard as I thought. "Just a place where any pony could pick up a board and test the waves. Seaweed cooked in a pot on the shore, with just a couple of stallions and mares living out the rest of their lives the way they were before the Changelings."

Nothing changed, I would ask. But it wasn't a question. I knew it was true, I was just filling in the gaps of my thoughts with words. I wrote that Bitter nodded at me and went back to sweeping the dirt and hair out of her tent before telling me more. There, on the surf of Baltimare, she was washed away. Taken by some big wave or something.

Penned in the fact that it seemed a blur, that she didn't realize it until it was too late, but it did happen. After that, everything was rearranged by the tides. Things like me were washed away, and I asked her if giving me the books was a way of remembering or a final anchor to cut loose.

"I never did finish that story" I told myself yesterday, when I woke up to start writing this chapter. I looked through some things to get through a writer's block, and started thinking about all the messes Nes would insist on cleaning up, just because she had to finish a task. I started thinking about Bitter Ginger again, wondering where she was in the world.

I didn't know, but what I did know was that one day, I woke up late one morning and rushed out the train tracks so I wouldn't loose my salvage spot. Some books dropped out of my bag that day, and though it was relieving to be rid of their weight, I had to ask myself whether the desert wind was taking the from me, or whether I had dropped them on purpose.