Chapters Here It Is. Here Is The End
This isn't going to be another sad tale of the apocalypse, where everything's dead and there's no hope. There's no meaning behind it, no moral or underlying truth of life. It's a story about what happens when the world ends. Just a story.
I entered Manehattan roughly five years after the first attack. I knew everything would change once I stepped into those walls of protection. No more digging up old potatoes from abandoned farms, or piecing a meal from the scraps of stores. I could go back to my old life, finish an education in ancient magic and become a resident scholar. I could pursue my career in restoration, bringing back spells once lost to time and nature, earn fame and fortune as the stallion who brought the past to life, and settle down for a good life.
I hated the thought. Every pony thought I was crazy, they told me I could finally live my life in the last remaining city in Equestria. I told them they hadn't seen how raw life could be. No, I didn't want to go back and risk everything for the sake of thrill, but neither could I sit around and stare at books and scrolls anymore. I had to work, I had to act.
I decided to drop it all and step outside again, but this time with a different purpose. Two E.U.P. soldiers at my back, a photographer at my front, a pen and notepad in my saddlebag, and I was ready. I'd capture the daunting reality of the wasteland for every pony to see, and maybe then they'd understand why I was always restless when I sat.
The two soldiers were a funny sort. An old fellow and a young fellow these two were, and they worked with great efficiency together. They'd set up our camps and make sure the area was safe from Changelings. They never lit fires except to heat our rations, since Changelings hated the cold nights and were drawn to anything remotely warm, and instead carried extra layers of blankets and jackets.
Despite their similar preparedness and cooperation in work, the two soldiers seemed to care little for each other. They rarely spoke to each other outside of their duties, and almost actively avoided spending time together once the camp had been set up. If you could see them like I did, you didn't half to talk to them to know the difference.
The young soldier, free from constraints of Manehattan's strict policies, never kept his ketamine shots off his uniform. If he needed to leave his bag at our camp for any reason, he'd always pack a few shots of the stuff to keep himself steady. He didn't use them openly, though. He took care to wait to step away from the group for a moment if the urge got to strong, but usually the young soldier just had to make sure we were distracted with other things.
Still, I noticed what he did whenever he got sloppy, which is more than I can say for what I saw about the old soldier. There didn't seem anything about him, except for the photo of his family. His watch was different too, gold, but wasn't necessarily a special watch. Sometimes I wondered if he was on something too, like his younger counterpart, and if he was just better at hiding it.
The old fellow was recluse, and that made it difficult working with him. Short and strait to the point he always was. "Get firewood," or "Berry bush south," or "old ammo cache in there," he never sat down for a conversation with me. All I knew was that he had kids, almost working adults, and wanted to live to see them fulfill their dreams.
"Don't run into trouble," he told me when I asked if we could take a look at a collapsed building. I wanted to get close and see how the trees had taken over the abandoned train station. "I'm not going in after you if you do." I could handle myself well enough, but I still took it to heart, and whenever there was a risk I always considered the chance that the old soldier could just turn and trot away.
Other times were better. The young soldier never told me his real name, because he said he preferred the nickname he earned when he was based in what was left of Appleloosa. Tunneler, his friends called him, after sixteen outstanding runs into underground Changeling tunnel systems. One day, he even showed me a scar to prove it.
"Caught me on my way out," he said. The mark ran from his right hind leg up to the middle of his back. He told me how a Changeling had hid in a nook and waited for him to pass by. He even laughed, describing how its magic blast flung him out of the tunnel and into the air.
I liked Tunneler's stories, they always painted some part of the world I hadn't seen before. One night, I asked him, "Got any stories you'd want in a book?" He looked at me for moment, and then smiled. We stayed up all night, talking and chatting. He wasn't a clever writer or literary lover, and I had to ask a lot of questions to get the right details from him, but by the dawn of the next day we had a good story. His true story, he said.
All the while the photographer captured the scenery. Panoram loved the nature around us as we traveled. She saw the deserts as a canvas, she told me when we neared Dodge Junction at one point. She admired the Everfree Forest, she claimed, when we sought out an alleged camp of ponies. Aside from her cameras, she carried books to identify plants and birds, and even took up pressing flowers when we stumbled across a half-finished flower pressing book at what used to be Rainbow Falls.
She frustrated me routinely, arguing that I shouldn't always see the losses of our civilization. She tried to tell me what to write in my book to match her photos, which were mostly of green trees and fields of grass and flowers. Occasionally, she captured scenes of the decimated cities, like Canterlot and Vanhoover, but even those pictures had growing moss or roses sprouting from concrete at its center.
She didn't understand what I wanted from my book. It wasn't supposed to be depressing or nostalgic. I didn't want to make ponies yearn for the way things were before.
I concluded once we got back to Manehattan that I didn't like the photos, and that I didn't like her. So I sat down at my desk, pushed aside the dusty history books, and pressed the pen to the paper.
I began a story. It began like this: I am Stylo Pen. Here it is. Here is the end. This isn't going to be another sad tale of the apocalypse, where everything's dead and there's no hope. Me and my friends thought we could wait it out in the hills outside of town...
Here It Is. Here Is The End
Me and my friends thought we could wait it out in the hills in the countryside when Fillydelphia came under siege from the Changelings. We were the second year class at Fillydelphia's Hall of History, and we thought we knew the patterns of civilization well enough to avoid the crisis.
Between all of us, the reactions were different. Bitter Ginger couldn't stop bawling her eyes out. I didn't blame her, the Changelings set fire to her house and caught her family as they tried to escape, either harvesting them on the spot or collecting them for their hive.
Gerbil, because his front teeth were so big, ate what he could find at Sweet Radish's family farm. He was a big stallion, at the prime of his physical abilities, but that made his appetite just as big. I found it funny when he would apologize for asking for extra hay or carrots, because he felt he was eating too much and we'd soon run out of rations.
Sweet Radish's farm was the best I knew. Her parents were nice, and I personally considered them lucky to have been taken by age rather than face what we saw in the city. I knew Mr. and Mrs. Radish well, and they were practically my extended family.
When we arrived, I felt like I was at home. I had honestly spent as much time on that farm as I did at my folk's house in Fillydelphia, and I almost didn't think about what could have happened to them at that point. I had gotten out with my friends, and it was all I could think about at that point.
For a while, things were alright. It was almost time for harvest on the farm, so Gerbil and I spent most of our time clearing out the barn and repairing the silos to store the crops. In a week, Bitter Ginger was up for doing the tougher chores again. She still hadn't gotten over anything, but at least she could think strait long enough for us to assemble a new silo after a heavy storm blew one down the previous year.
We worked on other little things, too. Mr.Radish had a study room I envied all my life, and original, hoof-written copies of historic books I had only ever studied about. I took to them quickly, reading what was intact and repairing what wasn't. Again, I felt like I was at home.
**************
It was a cloudy day when we had to leave. Not too cloudy, where you couldn't see the sun or blue sky, but just enough to make you look up and think, hey, that's some nice clouds, one even looks like a rabbit .
Anyways, we had to leave on that day. Ironically that morning, Gerbil had told me how he was getting used to life on the farm. He didn't mind that he was away from his family, they lived in Manehattan, and by then we had known that Manehattan was the last secure city in Equestria. He said he could get used to a place to work and eat. I simply nodded and repaired the spine of another book while he talked about everything great about farms.
Bitter Ginger felt the same. She didn't want to go anywhere else, because we had a great view at the top of the hill. In the distance, we could watch the lights of Fillydelphia flicker. We knew they were all fires, probably from burning wreckage, but Bitter Ginger just wanted to imagine things were a-okay in the city.
That's how everything was when we left, a-okay. It started like a nagging thought. Six weeks together on a farm was relaxing, but the things we heard on the radio were too much to ignore. So the thoughts came, and we wondered what Ponyville was like, and Appleloosa, and Vanhoover.
We'll just go look for other survivors, we thought. Maybe we could find some parts to fix up Cart #3's broken wheel, we hoped. Slowly, we took turns leaving the farm. As far as I knew, we all did it in secret. We found out later, of course, but for a couple weeks we were liberated in the night.
For me, I was gone after the first week. I thought I could control myself, keep myself from trotting too far from the farm, but by the end of the week I was coming back only minutes before any pony else woke up. I felt like I was out of place at the farm after that night, when I found a dead Changeling at the edge of the city.
I was desensitized to the whole scene, maybe because it was dark, but after I left the body I could only turn back. I don't know what the others found out there, Sweet Radish never told me. But one thing's for sure, we were all gone before we knew it.
It was weird the day we left. We were already gone, but each of us wasn't aware of it yet. Not surprisingly, we finally explored on the same night, and found each other out on the way back. I ran into Gerbil, who was carrying an overgrown pumpkin on his back.
"What's that for?" I asked, not quite realizing yet that it was the first time I had seen Gerbil leave the farm.
"Secret stash," he told me. We looked at each other for one more moment, before both our eyes widened with a realization that we both had lied to the group, including each other. Young and unable to handle the awkward encounter, the two of us did the sensible thing and ran in opposite directions.
Gerbil ran into Bitter Ginger, so he says, and I collided paths with Sweet Radish. We had questions for each other, most important of them being, "What are you doing out here?" We tried explaining ourselves to each other, and quickly realized that Gerbil and Bitter Ginger had explaining to do as well.
At the farm, we had a long moment of argument. Bitter Ginger accused me of being condescending toward her, and called out Gerbil for hording the best pieces of the harvest. Her words cut deep for Gerbil, who said he only left so he wouldn't take more of the harvest from the rest of us, and he insisted we let him leave.
"I don't do anything around here," he told us as he left, "I just lend a hoof in the chores and move stuff around." He started rattling on about how we'd be better without him when Sweet Radish yanked him back into the farm house and looked him strait in the eyes.
"No pony lasts long on their own anymore," she said to him. "You do plenty of work here, so don't act so humble when you're an essential team player."
Gerbil didn't seem so sure about her words, but by noon his bag was unpacked and he was resting again in his room. I was relieved to have him back, and so was Sweet, but Bitter Ginger still targeted her daily glares toward the stallion throughout the following days.
One day, the glares stopped. Bitter Ginger was done with us, done with whatever feelings she harbored against us. Gerbil blamed himself, and found his escape by eating himself to death. It's true, I had to clean him up when he exploded, his stomach pumped full of guilt and hay.
Sweet Radish and I didn't know what to do after that. At least, I didn't. Somewhere down the line we lost our friends before they lost their lives, and we couldn't help but think of those two as connected.
But, while Sweet Radish worked silently everyday, my mind had to talk its way out of it. "Don't worry, we'll be fine," I'd say sometimes, or "I'll be here if you need me." I thought it'd work, and sometimes Sweet Radish would come at night and lay with me at night, until the bed was wet with tears.
I was ready in the mornings when that happened, with tissue papers and all. After that, I'd tell her not to worry. I thought I could say things like that, even if it was just for my own pride. Just a stallion and a mare on a farm, how much cornier could things get? I felt proud that I was there with her, and even though we were childhood friends something nagged for more.
I thought I could do it, be a real stallion and stand up for her no matter what. That was a inner voice whispering, always nagging at me. But the voice screamed at me to be a coward, another voice telling me what was right. I was a bookworm, a unicorn with books and a way to fix them.
I couldn't be brave and stay there on the farm, hiding from the world with the last pony I cared for. I followed Bitter, I fled from Gerbil, I left Sweet. I was a coward and let the apocalypse consume me. It ate me alive, tore my heart out. I felt it, too. I'd star gaze some nights and fall back into my habits of imagining Sweet Radish there with me.
I turn and there she is, snuggled tight, and then the familiar tears would come. They felt nice, and I'd feel their wet warmth and put my arm around my imagination, as if at any moment she'd take the tears with her and escape my mind.
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.
Here It Is. Here Is The End
Most ponies found their way to Manehattan by land. From Vanhoover to Ponyville, every pony had a trail of land to cover to find their haven. Had I not left Fillydelphia in the way I did, it could have been the same for me. Just a quick trip north, and the great city would have been there.
Before I had come across Nes and the camp of survivors, I sailed with a pegasus sky ship over Equestria. The captain and the crew lived off the need for trade. What the government could not send with their Wonderbolts and EUP, the sky ship would fill. It was a cobbled mess of engineering, combining hot air balloons, magic, and clouds into one big floating ship.
Magic came naturally enough to me that I could stay on the clouds with a simple spell. In fact, it was the entire reason I found them in the first place. Made mostly of clouds, no pony expected me to stow away when they landed in Dodge Junction to trade.
I wasn't in a good spot then; scavenging the kitchens on derelict first-class train cars fed me most of the time, and the other times I haggled for food using parts I had taken from the train itself. I felt tied down by my condition, and naturally saw an escape the instant the sky ship clouded the sun.
No pony bother to check the cargo when I snuck in. Any pony else, and they would have been fine, but I had a trick to make casting a cloud easy. At least I thought so. The captain, to my surprise, was an earth pony of magnificent bluntness, and so he caught me off guard when his flashlight blinded my eyes in the dark cargo hold.
"What're you looking for?" he asked me. Not much suspicion or contempt, just a simple question.
I didn't know how to respond at first, but then I took a closer look at him. He was an earth pony, miraculously standing on a ship of clouds and commanding a crew of skilled fliers. What he had accomplished was more improbable than my stunt, and he was taking it to great lengths. I looked at him, and new what answer would please him and hold true.
"Liberty," I told him. "I'm looking for liberty."
For a months I was stuck on cleaning duty, making sure the clouds didn't hold onto any feathers or dust during each landing. It was menial labor at best, but I was never stuck. I roamed every inch of the ship while I had time, and saw more of Equestria with each landing.
Word spread about how I got on board quickly, and by the time I was allowed to give a helping hoof with unloading Appleloosan apples at a survivor camp in Los Pegasus, it had become a motto.
"What're you look for?" every pony would ask each other as they left the ship.
"Liberty bro, liberty," each crew member would say.
Now, it wasn't always the best of times. Changelings did always get in the way, either staging raids midair, or ambushing us as we landed. I saw my fair share of combat, firing harpoons from one of the balloons on the edges of the ship.
The first crew member I ever saw die was on my first battle. He took the harpoon in the balloon next to me and gave me tips on how to shoot. He was one of the top harpooners on the ship, only missing twice when the captain had to steer the ship away from the Changeling ambush.
"You'll always hit if you shoot at the swarm," he shouted to me as he died. "Changelings are like bugs, and they're just as stupid without their queen." He for a part of the ambush where the Changeling swarm was thickest and fired after barely looking at what he shot at. It hit one of the creatures in the head, splattering it in a burst of green ichor.
He cheered, then he fell of the side of the balloon as a Changeling passed by and blew out his heart with a bolt of magic. I still remember his face, even now. I see him smiling, not even realizing he had died. His forelegs were thrown up in victory, and he was feeling the thrill of the kill pump through his blood.
As he plummeted down, I watched his body hold his position of cheering. At the time, I wondered what he was thinking as he fell. Now I know he died happy and careless. He wouldn't contend with chores, or have clean his bed everyday, or even eat and piss. He was free from his life, and as he fell to the earth he seemed free from the world as well, as if falling had lifted him to the sky.
The next day, after we got our bearing and recovered at a nearby ruin, we turned back for that Changeling camp. We sniffed them out, and we burned their encampment to the ground.
