-
The cold metal felt nice, my headache softly pounding behind my eyes almost in time with the steady engine of the zeppelin as it lit through the cloudy sky. We’d reach Agona soon and collectively knew it was coming. An involuntary sigh left me at that, the quiet of my cell resonating the melancholy ache and looming fear that fact brought about in me. A rehabilitation camp, the place where ponies go and when they leave they aren’t ponies anymore. It was like an unspoken rule that everyone knew except me and laughed as I floundered in my worry. It was like I was dying in slow motion, though of course we are all dying in slow motion. This didn’t comfort me.
I am- well, maybe I was a farmer. It was odd to picture myself as anything else, a farmer, a child, a hard-worker. The chuckle escaped my lips before I could stifle it with a slight, soft sob. A hard-worker… it was funny. That word meant the opposite of its usual meaning.
And that’s funny too, I guess.
“I suppose I didn’t work hard enough,” I thought bitterly, thinking back to my before because at this point, imagining an after was even worse.
They had come in shells of metal, brandishing guns and sick sadistic smiles. Sombra’s stallions and machines, they were practically no longer the former as they moved with his orders and cared not for the commoners they crushed in the wake. No one cares for us anymore, even the rumors of rebels in a mountains were faint whispers to the shrieking presence of what we have here.
They were professional, and I think that is what was horrifying because it made everything seem to be caught in the soupy drifting fog of what was.
“You didn’t meet the quota this month,” they had said in monotone, mechanical ponies with flesh suits on.
“You didn’t meet the quota this month,” they had said knowing full well what that would mean for me. They knew, they just didn’t care because they weren’t on the rack.
“You didn’t meet the quota this month,” they had intoned despite the drought that had raked through my crops, drying them and wilting their ill-born fruit.
I wished I had fought back, I wish I could’ve been someone who struck rebellion into the stallions and mares of the Crystal Empire. I wish I had whipped my hoe from the ground and broken that smug smile off their faces. I wish I had ran so they would have shot me on principal.
I wish I was dead.
My headache slowed down and stopped, no wait, the engine did. A clash of metal on metal rang out and I tasted blood on my lips as slammed down from my slumped spot in the cramped room. Murmurs rang out from the other cell’s, words fraying and broken cries of panic. A foal was screaming and I desired to run, but pressed back against the wall in cramped solidarity I found myself frozen in sheer terror.
We were here.
We were lost.
-
Agona was smug, and arrogant. Not unlike Sombra himself as he sat in his house, on his metaphorical throne, fat on the food and lost wealth of the poor beneath his hooves. There were no walls, no fences, no guard towers looming. Just miles of mountains surrounding the cluster of dilapidated shacks. The metal stallions mulled about near the the taller black building that sat like the reaper and gazed down upon us as we were shoved into the various shacks. Stallions in farmer’s clothing and mares stitched in rags, a few foals while the rest were just drowned like ill-bred puppies. I suppose that would be the merciful thing to do.
The Rehabilitation Camp. I’ve met ponies, my neighbor’s son and the carrot farmer from two years ago. One day they were just living their lives, and the next day they were gone. The stallions had come to their house, the metal ones with iron smiles. They came and then these sons and parents just disappeared. Like campfire smoke in the night. I’ve never met someone from the aftermath. I have heard stories, though. Stories of ponies from before that were never the same; that talked of things that didn’t exist and were missing parts of themselves.
STOP!
NO!
I won’t think about an after, I can’t believe in an after. I’m a damned mare, we’re damned folk. The moment we walked into that zeppelin we signed our own deal with the devil. And I cannot for my life play that golden fiddle.
We have no hope, hope is for the rich. There are whispers on the wind, little things among the older commoner generations. Talks of rebels in the mountains. But it is just a sweet, seldom-heard fiction.
The wind crashed out of me and pain tingled up my body as the cabin door shut behind me. I couldn’t catch myself with my hooves as they were in chains. I groaned deeply, feeling the resonance in my chest. And as I pushed myself off the floor, I took in the sarcastic smile and the deep amber eyes of a scarred mare's face. I felt my eyebrows bend in confusion. Her mouth twitched once before she took my forehooves and pulled me from the floor. As she did she spoke in satire and poison:
“Welcome to hell.”
-
To say I didn’t like Desire would be a lie, to say I found her presumptuous as hell would be spot on.
“...so that’s how I got here,” she concluded, another tragedy I half listened to. Though I kept my gaze on her I took in the room as well. It was empty, except for us, but the other two beds looked slept in. One bed was neatly made, but not stripped like mine had been. And then the other was messy, the blanket ripped up in meticulous strokes that looked planned in a way I couldn’t discern. It smelled like iron, this whole place smelled of iron. Metallic, like drying blood with the faint hint of something rotting.
“Hey!” I jumped, her face coming into to focus. “How’d you get in here?” she continued in soft exasperation. I had the sheer desire to roll my eyes. “I am not a child!” my brain matter-o-factly dictated.
But I didn’t say that; instead, I held back and told it curtly, unlike her droning, “I was,” I internally flinched at the word, “I was a farmer, I didn’t meet quota that month and they took me here.” It seemed unreal, how my whole life could change or stop in a single sentence, a single moment of time in which everything became a shard of glass.
She nodded, like she understood, and maybe she did. She came here just as I did, Desire of Arcova. Woman of the sea, widow of a fisherman shot at her arrest. So far away from home in these mountains… and I? My home isn’t too far away, but even now. Do I miss anything?
Do I miss anyone? I didn’t have many friends, maybe Empty Glass, the barkeep from town. But a famine plagued farm, almost all my food sold to save my life. I would have starved.
Would that have been better?
“Would what have been better?” Desire asked, shaking me out of my thoughts.
Heat rushed through me in embrassement, “Nothing,” I said quickly, hoping she’d brush it off.
She looked down at her hooves, my gaze following. She sighed, “Yeah probably.” Desire didn’t continue and I didn’t ask.
I don’t think I need to.
I don’t think I want to.
-
Life here went in breathless days followed by heavy nights. It was like drowning, my lungs burned and my back ached. The days blur, we would go into the black building and ride down the lift into the smithy below. Shoveling coal for the melting process, or worse actually being close to the pot itself. Yesterday, or maybe yesterday a colt from one of the other bunkers fell into the pot. I want to say it was quick, but he was screaming and screaming. The worst was the smell.
A cycle of sleep and pain, and exhaustion. When you had a break you slept or ate what little we had. And when these failed we talked, not about big things, little things mostly. Desire knew all about the sea, and I’ve never been to the coast. She liked to talk about it, and I think I wasn’t the only one who liked it.
I was right, it wasn’t just Desiree and I in the room. Well, I guess in a metaphorical sense maybe it was. Golden String, or at least that’s who he said he was. He had been here for a year. There were many here, him included that had lost bits of themselves in this place. Golden had been, according to Desire, a weaver and his hooves were so important to him. And now, his hooves seemed to be god’s gift to ponykind. Blankets became puppets and people were just shadows in his vision. Unimportant little shadows. He didn’t care about himself, all he liked were his hooves and those little puppets which he crafted with anything he could find.
He didn’t talk to us, not really. Sometimes he would mutter, but he looked right through us. But occasionally he’d stop, tilt his head and listen as we exchanged words. I think I caught him smiling, swaying to some unknown tune in a childlike way while crafting a new puppet.
Opal Heart fell in step with his delusions, her bed neat next to the shining lamp. She smiled broadly, I don’t believe she remembered or recognized the horror of her story. Desire said that Opal had come here on purpose to search for her grandson. She’d never found him, and she’d lost herself in the process.
Desire didn’t know how long she’d been here, too long for anyone to remember. Opal Heart did what she was told, she was a perfect worker. She should have been out as her mind was just what Sombra wanted for everyone that wasn’t him. I guess it was her age,
“It’s a morbid thought, but not many ponies Opal’s age last much longer,” he remembered Desire saying the night he had met them both.
They had had… stale bread and an apple for breakfast. He’d woken up freezing because Golden String had stolen his blanket to make puppets. Opal had been hunched in the corner talking to the lamp and offering to share her breakfast with it. To say I wasn’t a little disturbed.
But now, in this present I see them in a new light. We are living in the after, and maybe it can be okay before our clocks stop. Desire was laughing at some joke about fish and I chuckled with her even though I missed it entirely. Golden was happily sewing away while Opal sang the lamp a lullaby believing with all her heart that it was her grandson.
I smiled, not sarcastically or grimly. I just smiled.
i
When I woke up this morning, Desire was gone. Her bed was stripped and a twinge of dread filled me.
Des had said ponies would just be doing their work here, like the stallion before me had. And then one day he just disappeared. But she had some idea on what happened, that the guards had taken him to the room above the shaft to the forges. Where psychopaths like Dr. Iron Hooves stayed when they weren’t out creating new weapons for Sombra or doling out depraved punishments. Only they could come up with Rehabilitation camps. When the stallion before had come back the next day he’d been different.
And then he jumped in the white hot iron. Suicide, we’d had one since I came here… since I came here...
When did I come here?
I’ve been forgetting things, little things. My parent’s names, their birthdays, my birthday. I don’t know when it started. I just started losing little pieces of myself.
I shook myself out, noting Golden staring at me from his bed.
He blinked once, and to my surprised whispered faintly, “We all fall down…” it was something out of an old song.
-
I can’t remember how the song went, “da-da-bum-bum,” I muttered softly.
I sat slumped, but kept my eyes focused on Golden String’s bed.
All of his puppets are gone now, he cried and bit and screamed as they dragged him out of the cabin. Eventually the guard just shot him, said, “he wasn’t worth it.”
They stripped his bed, but the mattress still had blood on it. I didn’t move, I still didn’t move.
I sat, I stared.
Opal sang some tune to her lamp.
The noise, the noise!
STOP!
-
...I didn’t mean to…
I just wanted her to stop.
I didn’t mean to break the lamp
I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
-
Opal Heart stopped singing.
She stopped, just like Golden, and Desire and Desire’s husband.
The clocks have stopped ticking. Tick, tock, tick...
Everything is quiet now.
Everything is finally quiet.