The Last Tears in Tartarus

All Eighty-Three could hear was the sound of his own echoing breaths. The thick metal walls of the trash compartment reduced the noises of construction outside the door to a dull hum. Limbless and blind, Eighty-Three could only wait out the dismal imprisonment that Overseer Globflint had sentenced him to. If he tried so much to shuffle his torso a few inches to the left or right, he was encumbered by rancid piles of garbage.

The smell was utterly intolerable at first. Eighty-Three barely stifled the urge to wretch. He felt as if his nostrils were being carved apart from the inside out. As the hours bled on, however, the stench diffused into the darkness, overcoming him, becoming one with his skin. Every time he inhaled, he couldn't tell what was more rank: himself or the garbage all around.

More hours limped by. The reality of the situation was just starting to crash down on him. He had planned to die from many things in his bleak life, but the last thing he expected was starvation. It had already been a day and a half since he was last allowed a meager dish of supplement. A veteran slave such as himself could survive on two days without consuming anything. But at that moment, Eighty-Three had no earthly clue just what he was in for. Globflint had thrown him into the chute like the rest of the trash. He knew that the garbage containers were emptied four moon cycles apart. He didn't find that bit of knowledge very promising.

Was this really, truly making an example for the other workers? Wasn't it enough that Twenty-Seven had been torn asunder for his insolence in front of every slave's twitching eyes? Eighty-Three never guessed the extent of Globflint's knack for sadism, because he never had to before. He had always been a model servant, an obedient and punctual laborer. He would never have even crossed the ogre if it wasn't for a bizarre twist of fate, a chance soul that had stumbled across his path, a pair of eyes: one red as steam and one green as extinct trees.

The very thought of One Eleven burned at Eighty-Three far more than the horrid stench. He winced, because there wasn't a part of him left that could feel anger anymore. Instead, a bitter nausea was rising from his bowels, wracking his body with numb waves. He began to hyperventilate. With each hour that dripped by, he felt the mounds of garbage settling in tighter around him, filling all the raw grooves where his flesh met his metal sockets. The last time he had been separated from his limbs, it had been no less than the space of a few hours, and that was just for brief moments when he underwent maintenance. He had heard stories of slaves who had been left to rot in the streets. Without the luxury of prosthetics to seal them shut where the red steam had decayed them, they suffered a long and torturous death. The howling voices of those overcome with scurvy and various diseases had become a soundtrack to the streets of New Sheol. Here in the belly of a trash compartment, there were no wild gargoyles to circle around and put Eighty-Three out of his misery.

Time dissolved in the pitch blackness. There was no sleeping; there was only pain. Eighty-Three guesstimated it had been the length of a day by the time he felt his stomach twisting in a knot. He wondered how long it would be before his organs would consider digesting themselves in desperation. Suddenly he was glad that his nostrils had become so dead to the smell, because he started brushing his muzzle left and right, sifting through the garbage, solemnly searching for something that could possibly serve him as edible.

With his nose now useless, he had only one useful sense in the abysmal dark. It took him several whimpering hours before he willed his tongue to slither out of his mouth. The first thing he touched touched him back, and he recoiled from a sudden flurry of scurrying noises. If he had any material left in his spleen, he would have lost it right there. But he had no other choice. He stuck his tongue out again and resumed searching.

Over the next two hours, he hardly got any luckier. He found scraps of leather, but after a bold attempt to chew on them, he found himself incapable of tearing them into smaller morsels. He fished further into the garbage mounds. His muzzle came upon something slimy, but he dug even deeper because he felt the unmistakable shape of discarded bones. When his face brushed against flakes of decayed meat, he roped his tongue around it and lassoed it into his mouth. It was barely a sliver of fat, and all it did for him was fill his throat with a rusted taste that refused to go away.

He gave up for a while, during which his stomach felt like it was shrinking into a tiny pit as dense as wood. Every time he moved now, he felt like a hollow bag of flesh. A tingling sensation started to overcome his left flank. With the hours that dragged him further into darkness, that tingling flared up and became an unbearable itch. Eighty-Three found himself hissing, quivering all over as a rash spread over his limbless body. It came to the point where he felt like he was on fire. But he had something far more important to focus on.

For the past several hours, he had become aware of deep rustling noise from the depths of the rubbish all around him. He wasn't alone in the compartment. A heavy weight was shifting through the trash, circling him, pausing at indeterminate lengths before resuming its chaotic, winding path. Eighty-Three remained quiet. He hunted the movement without hunting it, by staying absolutely still. He played dead, for it occurred to him that the best way to attract his adversary was to become an attractive corpse, so that he appeared one with the garbage.

It took an eon of lying paralyzed in the darkness, but his plan worked out. The bodiless mass emerged from a wall of refuse in front of him and came to a stop just an inch before his muzzle. Eighty-Three held his breath. The very moment he felt something tap his face, he snapped his jaws forward. He had hoped against hope that it was a rat or large mouse. Upon the crunching sensation that filled his mouth and the multiple feelers wriggling between his lips, he discovered otherwise. But he couldn't let his disappointment get the best of him. He bit down again and again. He wouldn't see what he was devouring; he wouldn't have to. He swallowed every slimy morsel of the quivering thing down his gullet. Thinking quickly, he sifted through the garbage until he found a chunk of loose metal. This, he bit down on, filling his mouth so as to block any chance of his nourishment being vomited back out. As it turns out, it did just the trick on two subsequent occasions.

His stomach was satisfied, but not for long. If anything, he had only made his insides worse. A deep-seated heat billowed from deep inside his intestines. A throbbing pain resonated in a frequency that matched the burning rash molting over his haggard flesh. He found his body twitching as sparks of agony rocketed up his leg joints. This woke him—gasping—from a dismal spell. He knew that his metal limbs weren't attached, and yet as the dark-lit hours crept on and on, he started to feel pain where parts of him no longer existed. He gnashed at his teeth, trying to focus instead on the rash that was turning his skin to rotting puss, anything to ignore the ghostly tendrils of agony taunting him from beyond himself.

The phantom senses turned into phantom sights, like tiny stars dancing before the curtains of oblivion in front of him. Eighty-Three weakly searched that projection, whimpering like a little foal, and it was not the blood-stained streets of New Sheol that he saw. It wasn't the festering cesspools of the upper pits or the glowing red steam that came out of the battery compartments of tortured pony bodies. It wasn't even the fog-shrouded kiss of the moon or the green depth of One Eleven's enchanting eye.

Eighty-Three saw flashes of lightning outside the bedroom window of his cottage in rural Fillydelphia. It was several months before the Breach of the Gates of Tartarus. He was four years old. He hid under the covers, shivering. When even that wasn't enough to drive away the frightening bellows of the stormfront, he slid up against the soft coat of his mother. He wasn't alone: his little sister was there, choking back on tears. Gently smiling, his mother leaned in and nuzzled them both. She dried their faces and licked their manes straight before cradling them in the warm crescent her graceful body had formed in the center of the bed. She absorbed their every shiver and sob, protecting them from the chaos outside the cabin. When morning came with its soft golden rays, his father returned, a little soaked from the rain torrents but no worse for wear. Giggling with joy, he and his sister ran up and nuzzled the stallion's strong legs. He laughed and scooped them up in a dear hug as his wife trotted over to welcome him home, safe and sound, with a tender kiss.

It was then that Eighty-Three started to smell, for the first time in hours... for the first time in years. He smelled his grandmother's cinammon toast in the bleary mornings before school. He smelled fresh dew clinging to grass in his front yard. He smelled chalk blowing across the classroom, the modest vanilla perfume of his teacher, the scent of bubblegum from the colt sitting next to him. There were green things then, like One Eleven's eye, but it was everywhere, filling Eighty-Three's nose and mouth and ears. Celery crunched deliciously beneath his teeth. Flowers bent and fluttered beneath his hooves. The leaves of trees waved and danced overhead. When the sun set on a living world, it was released with a happy sigh and not a mournful sob. The moon rose over silver waters instead of pale smog. Before bedtime, his family lit the fireplace, and Eighty-Three stared into the dancing orange bands. He dreamt of all the places left in the world he wanted to gallop to, the ponies he had yet to meet, the stories he had yet to hear and tell and repeat the day he himself had children to bequeath the beautiful emerald fibers of this fragile world.

He wondered how he had forgotten so easily, how he had wrapped his life around fighting off suffering as opposed to preserving precious things. Tartarus, for all its real horrors, was merely a veil, Eighty-Three realized. Perhaps, as One Eleven had said, not all was hopeless, if only Eighty-Three had known that he could grab such beautiful shapes from darkness before, where he was most alone and most alive all at once.

It was almost a disappointment to his squinting eyes the very moment the door to the trash compartment opened in a burning sliver, and Overseer Globflint's metal hand reached through the vision to yank Eighty-Three once more into the world of steam and frost.

Eighty-Three grunted as he fell in a wet thud across the metal bulkheads. He awoke to the burning rash across his flanks and a horrible knot in his stomach. It took several hyperventilating seconds before he summoned the strength to look at the bright red world engulfing him. When he did, he became aware of the ogre's peg leg pacing about him.

“I would have left you in there longer, pony,” the Overseer spoke, “if I had a reason to believe it would finally teach you your lesson. But, as it so happens, you've become a lot more valuable in the last twenty-four hours than you were the day we last spoke. So, here you are.”

“Mmmmf...” Eighty-Three rocked pathetically left and right, his metal mane dripping with trash bits. “How.... how... h-how long...?”

“Four days, runt,” Globflint grunted. “But that's not what matters right now.” He leered over the writhing equine torso. “As of this morning, you've become twelve hundred strips richer. Which...” He sighed in a groaning fashion. “... is more than enough to cover the damage you so recklessly caused to the steam pipes of the lower struts.”

He cleared his throat and marched over to a metal tray. Various orcs and trolls were still welding, utterly ignoring the return of the garbage-strewn, rash-colored slave in their midst. Collecting a familiar quartet of grimy limbs, Globflint shuffled back Eighty-Three's way.

“I took the liberty of subtracting seven hundred credits to pay for the damages. That leaves you with five hundred credits to do Lilith-knows-what with.” He held the metal legs just above the pony's twitching body. “And you are welcome to resume work for High Incubus Paimon at your earliest... convenience.”

“I...” Eighty-Three's face tensed in confusion. He was too starving and nauseated to properly comprehend the euphoria of this information. “I don't understand... How...” He gulped and hoarsely whispered, “Who?”

“Like you, I know better than to question fortune in Tartarus when it comes to us. I am many things, slave, but I am no robber. These strips were filed specifically into the account of Number Eighty-Three of Paimon Company Alpha. They are yours. Now...” He juggled the four limbs while sighing inwardly. “These too have a price, one that is paid in respect and fealty. I assume you are wise and humble enough to recognize the payment for this, as well as for your sudden freedom.”

Eighty-Three gulped. He clenched his eyes shut. During his entire stay inside the garbage compartment, he had managed to keep from vomiting. Saying the next few words almost made him wretch right there. “You... are m-most merciful, Overseer...”

All that came from Globflint was a scowl. “Are words enough... from a lowly pony slave?”

A nauseated breath escaped Eighty-Three's lips. Regardless, he tensed his face muscles. He wriggled, crawled, squirmed his way over towards the ogre's shadow. Once he reached his peg leg, he gently nuzzled it with his shivering muzzle, kissing the rusted spokes in the piston before murmuring, “Thank you so very much, merciful Overseer. 'Fealty means labor...'”

“'And labor means freedom,'” Globflint finished with a nod. He crouched and cradled Eighty-Three's chin with a metal hand. “I don't know how, but you've bought yourself a new lease on life, pony.” The rusted fingers tightened painfully as he forced Eighty-Three to look up into his gnarled glare. “I will personally make sure that you do not waste it.” That snarled, he dropped the pony's torso back onto the bulkhead, grabbed the left forelimb, and snapped it into place. The rest of the legs, however, he dropped uselessly by Eighty-Three's trembling form. “I'm sure you have the tenacity to finish the job on your own.” He clicked a button on his remote. The collar around Eighty-Three's neck came alive, and it was green. “You have eight hours of leave to pull yourself back together. Then it's back to the steam struts.”

As Globflint hobbled away, Eighty-Three breathed deeply, feeling a weak build-up of energy now that his left forelimb was reattached. Bolts of energy danced across his mane, singeing the flakes of garbage that had collected on the needletips. The air above him filled with a thin cloud of smoke as he reached for the other limbs and slowly went about piecing his artificial body back together. With each leg that clicked back in place, he felt a burning enthusiasm blossoming inside of him.

Five hundred credits. Eighty-Three suddenly had five hundred credits. He was starving. Half of his body was on fire with an incurable rash. While attaching the rear left leg, a sharp pain shot through him as he realized that the flesh around the socket had begun to bleed and rot. However, none of these things mattered. He made a bee-line out of the hangar bay and practically galloped down the streets of New Sheol.

Eighty-Three paid no attention to the suffering sights all around him. He bounded over whimpering beggars and rushed past stray gargoyles. When he reached the Bank of New Sheol, there were hardly any creatures in line. Part of him rejoiced. If there was as dense a group as the previous visit, he was certain he would have tackled them all to the ground in the desperation now animating his aching body.

He approached the teller and asked for a review of his account. His eyes lit up as she confirmed that he had over five hundred strips under his name. Without hesitation, he made two consecutive payments of two hundred strips under the category of Power Battery Decommissioning. The remaining three hundred, he split between a third identical payment and a request for rations under Resupply.

Eighty-Three got food in his belly. He managed a few hours of sleep. The only thing he didn't have the time or energy to cover was the far-gone infection spreading through his body. After all, he had learned a long time ago the value of not wasting the most splendid opportunities of his anguished life. The next few work-shifts passed by in a blur, and all he could think about was the last few payments he had made. Finally, when he was granted his next dozen hours of leave, he rushed once more to the bank. He had to wait in an extraordinarily long line on this occasion, but by the time he stood before the teller, it was worth all of his patience.

He had been given two new tags, the proof of his requested decommissioning having gone through. The grimy insignias on them read “149” and “204.” He couldn't read them for long before his vision started blurring. It had been years since the last time Eighty-Three cried over anything. It had been well over a decade since those tears had been the product of joy. For the rest of his leave time, he sat on a corner of the decrepit streets of New Sheol, cradling the two tags, nuzzling them like newborn infants and weeping quietly. Passing orcs and trolls gave him funny looks, but he didn't care. Tartarus was only a veil to something warm and real. Somehow he had seen that in the darkness of the garbage compartment, and he was seeing it yet again.

Another day went by. Eighty-Three's rash was getting worse. The red steam had consumed him terribly. He saw a Company physician and was given a meager physical. The prognosis wasn't good, but Eighty-Three hadn't suspected otherwise. He knew that not even twelve hundred strips would have been enough to fix the parts of him that had crumbled away by then. He had made this festering bed for himself, but it was completely and utterly worth it. Each time his leather bag jingled with the rattling tags of the rusted numbers within, he was reminded of how far he had succeeded, and the final lengths he had left to cross, one strip at a time.

It may have not been pure happiness he was feeling, but it was enough to numb his remaining senses, so that he was yet again oblivious to One Eleven's presence until the pegasus had to resort to clearing his throat loudly.

Eighty-Three spun around. That day, he was working in a circular compartment lined with steam consoles. He was in the middle of tweaking a set of valves when he saw One Eleven crawling down to join him. It wasn't anger that sparked across Eighty-Three's mind. Much rather, it was confusion.

“You?”

“Yeah...” Was all One Eleven managed to stammer. He stood awkwardly across the glowing red room, digging his hooves pensively into the metal bulkheads beneath them. “It's me.”

“But...” Eighty-Three's eyes narrowed. He blinked a few times, processing the words in his mind before finally spitting them forth, “It's been over six days. A week, in fact. Your hovercraft made its delivery. Shouldn't you have left port long ago?”

“The ship did leave,” One Eleven said quietly. “Three days ago. My captain had to spill a few more pints of slave blood before he had his fill. Heh...”

“I don't get it.” Eighty-Three murmured. He was dizzy from days of limping across town, dealing with his rash and malnourishment. His vision remained locked on the green eye on the side of the pegasus' face. “Just why are you here?”

“I had to see you,” One Eleven said.

“Me?” It was then that a familiar wave of anger returned once more to Eighty-Three's furrowed brow. “I thought we'd been over this. We're slaves to different companies. Just so much as talking to you is only inviting a chance to get thrown into a heap of garbage again.”

“I... uh...” One Eleven trotted a step or two closer. “I heard about that. Ahem.” He brushed a hoof across his neck, fidgeting. “I also heard that you came upon a lot of strips.”

“Mmmph... Yes...” Eighty-Three gazed once more at his monotonous work. “I swear, nothing stays a secret in New Sheol for more than a day. If the other laborers would just use their Company limbs as much as their tongues—”

“Who were they?” One Eleven asked.

Eighty-Three turned back and blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

“The other day,” One Eleven stated. “When we last talked and everything... heh... went to hell.” He smiled bitterly and avoided Eighty-Three's gaze. “I asked you something. I asked if... if you knew any of the ponies that were in the batteries.”

Eighty-Three's useless nostrils flared. He muttered towards the bulkheads. “So what if I did?”

“Would you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” Eighty-Three growled.

“Who they were,” One Eleven said. “The ones you decommissioned?”

“Listen, do you ever get a clue?” Eighty-Three sighed and gazed tiredly at the pegasus. “How many times must I spell it out for you before you finally leave—?” He stopped suddenly, blinking in surprise. “Where... What happened to your wings?”

One Eleven wobbled precariously in the middle of the red room. This was because his sleek pair of metal prosthetics were gone, thruster engines and all. Not only that, but he no longer had his prehensile metal tail or the complex tools attached to them.

“I... uhm... I sold them,” he said.

“You sold them?!” Eighty-Three gasped.

“Mmmmhmmm.”

“But, whatever for?!” Eighty-Three was breathless. “They were priceless tech! Air merchant quality! Why, the wings alone could have gotten you six hundred strips apiece—!” He froze in mid speech, his jaw hanging agape. His eyes curved painfully, as he turned to face the stranger. “It was you.”

One Eleven merely stared back.

“It was you...” Eighty-Three repeated. He slumped back on his haunches. His body stung from the contact of his rotting flank with the metal floor, but he no longer registered the pain. He could only sit there in stunned silence as the wheels turned smoothly through his head. “The bank. My account. While I was in isolation, you made the payment.”

“All I did was ask for the file of an equine working for Paimon Company with a claim on Power Batteries,” One Eleven quietly explained. “Really, it was easy.”

“Easy?” Eighty-Three almost whispered. He gulped a sore lump down his throat and gazed sympathetically at One Eleven. “Those... Those wings were your livelihood! A servant's job in Tartarus is the very crux of his existence!”

“If I believed that, would I be here right now?” One Eleven said, his one good eye like a hardened emerald. “Now, would you do me the grace of telling me who it was?” He swallowed and took another bold step forward. “Just who were paid for? Who were in those batteries?”

Eighty-Three's breaths rose sharply through him. Slowly he bowed his head, as if his broken body had deflated even further. The truth came out of him like a limp gust of steam. “It was my family,” he said quietly. “I was a young colt in Fillydelphia when the Breach happened. The forces of Tartarus came charging over the fields of Equestria. You know as well as I do that nothing stood in their way, not even the might of the Princesses. When they came upon Fillydelphia, my family was living on the outskirts. We were the first to fall to the orcish legions under command of their demon overlords. Because of that, we became... their experiments. We were the first to enter their torture camps, to be carted like coal into their hate furnaces.”

Eighty-Three shuddered, running a metal hoof to his mane and almost surprised to find metal needles instead of foalish silk. One Eleven listened quietly as the slave spoke to the red-lit struts around them.

“I saw my mother and father dismembered before my very eyes,” Eighty-Three continued. “I heard the anguished shrieks of my siblings as they were taken apart in the chamber next to mine. I saw trays of the metal devices they... they stapled to their writhing bodies.” Eighty-Three clamped a metal limb over his face and shuddered briefly. Eventually, he went on. “When they got to me, the pain wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. Hearing my family torn to bits was enough. Imagine my horror when I realized that they were not killed. They were carted off to Celestia-knows-where while my body was shipped out to another part of the bonelands for further experimentation. However, the hovership I was put on collapsed in a cyclone. I was brought here to New Sheol, where I was found by an ogre overseer who decided that I was too damaged to be siphoned for red steam. So, I was inducted into Paimon Company instead, to serve as more valuable property than a defective energy source. I soon found out that not only had my family been relocated here, but they had... had become living generators for the demonic city, fueling the platforms with the red steam channeled from their endless torment and pain. Hundreds of thousands of ponies have been turned into such batteries all over Equestria, powering this new age of Tartarus, and somehow I ended up in the one city where I knew that my family was being violated beneath my very nose. What was I to do? Earn my freedom and run away from here, turning my back on them?”

“You wanted to free them instead,” One Eleven said, squinting knowingly.

Eighty-Three gulped and nodded. “Over the last ten years, I worked every day for the strips to do it. After the first four years, I earned the right to decommission my mother and grandmother. Next, I worked to cover my father and baby sister. I was just a few moons away from doing it... when you... when you accomplished it in a blink.” He gazed up at One Eleven, his eyes soft and vulnerable. Out of a grimace, a bitter smile formed. “They're dead now. All four of them. They no longer have to suffer endlessly in those horrid containers. They can have peace.” A pained expression returned as he sniffed and gazed towards the walls of the place. “Now... Now only my brother remains. But... thanks to the strips... hmmph... thanks to you, I am within a stone's throw of getting his battery unit decommissioned as well. Then all of my family will be dead. They will be free.”

“And what of yourself?”

“I don't care,” Eighty-Three bluntly retorted. He frowned up at One-Eleven, though the glossiness in his eyes betrayed such a lasting bulwark. “I've done what I've lived in this putrid city so long to accomplish. It's enough.”

One Eleven slowly nodded. “Well...” He exhaled with the barest hint of a smile. “I'm glad that... that I had a part to play in something that means so much to you...”

“But why?!” Eighty-Three stood up and leaned forward, his face awash with extreme curiosity. “Why would you do all this?! Why would you give... give so much?” He gazed sympathetically towards the metallic joints where two wings once graced the augmented pegasus. “You no longer have a company to answer to—”

“Actually, I transferred to another ship.”

“A ship that takes non-fliers?” Eighty-Three made a face. “What kind of a hovercraft is that?”

“It's a submersible, actually,” One Eleven said in a low voice. He ran a hoof through his buzzed mane. “There are many positions available, and the credit payment is high.”

Eighty-Three squinted with suspicion. “Where's its destination?”

“Cocytus,” One Eleven said with an exhale. There was a distant look in his eyes. “I'm headed their to help dredge up the bones of Leviathan. He died soon after the Breach, as you well know.”

“Cocytus...” Eighty-Three gasped, his face paling over. “That's worse than Archeron City. Hardly anybody who goes there comes back alive.”

One Eleven gazed calmly back at him. “I know,” he said.

Eighty-Three grimace. The next breath came out of him in a whimper, “But... But you had dreams! Dreams of finding other ponies and—”

“And I did,” One Eleven said, his face producing a warm smile. “I did right here.”

“No! Don't...” Eighty-Three hissed and stamped his metal legs. “Don't sign your life away! And most of all, don't pin it on me!”

“You were right about one thing,” One Eleven calmly replied. “There is no hope left in this world. But if you've taught me anything, it's that there's still room for beauty... and the preservation of such. We're both appendixes to a dead masterpiece. What you've done for your family, what I found you to be committed to through all these years...” One Eleven inhaled sharply as his green eye moistened. “It... It filled my life with colors that I thought were entirely gone.” He gulped hard and said, “I know that whatever happens to me now, bad or worse, I will never afford another glimpse nearly as beautiful.”

“But... But...” Eighty-Three tried to protest, but all he could see was a great darkness waiting for him, as black as the nothingness that had surrounded him in the garbage compartment. He realized that he had seen colors in the midst of oblivion as well, and no longer did he have the strength to prove to One Eleven otherwise, for he too would never grasp something so solid and palpable ever again.

“What's your name?” One Eleven asked him.

Eighty-Three was shaken rather viciously from deep thought upon hearing that. Looking up, he ritualistically muttered forth, “Eighty-Three.”

“No.” One Eleven shook his head. He trotted slowly across the room, melting the meager distance between them. “What is your name?”

Eighty-Three stared at him. His lips quivered. A tear rolled down his cheek as something was reborn from his lips. “Spring Step,” he whimpered. “My name is Spring Step.”

The pegasus came to a stop, face to face with the other pony. “My name is Dream Peace,” he said with a tranquil smile. “Spring Step, I helped pay for your family's death because you reminded me that I am 'Dream Peace.' I wish to die a pony and not a number. Don't you see? I'm not afraid anymore.” He raised a hoof and placed it gently on the other's shoulder. “Wherever they send me, however deep or however cold, I will be warm there because of you.”

Spring Step shivered, shaking his head slowly. “What... What's so special about me...?”

“You are here,” Dream Peace said, caressing his face. “And for that I am thankful.”

Spring Step clenched his teeth. He hung his face and shook it, hissing. “No. No! There is nothing beautiful left! Don't you s-see?! They took your wings! They took my legs! They t-took our world...!”

“Shhhhhhh...” Dream Peace leaned in and gently whispered into his ear. “But they will never take our hearts.”

Spring Step thought that every part of him had broken. He was wrong. He collapsed there, and Dream Peace was there to support him. The two ponies were scarred, rotting, and foul-stenched, but they were ponies. In the center of so much decay and death, a single fragrance stood alone as soon as they embraced. It was the one, final smell Spring Step could ever hope to sense. It was the smell he was born for. As Dream Peace nuzzled him, hugged him, held him dear, he let himself drown in the divine warmth of it all, for soon they would both be ripped asunder, cast like broken shells to the frigid winds of a ravaged world. Spring Step knew that this had been coming his entire life, and Dream Peace's limbs cradled him through a tempest of sobs, catching every tear he had left to shed, his last tears.

For several minutes, the two souls held each other, fused by each other's breaths, until every lasting sob was wrung from their bodies, so that all that was left was the gentle courage to embrace the blackness beyond the layers of grime and metal. Dream Peace exited to the deathly world above, but his smile remained, as did his warm breath, forever lingering against the final stretch of skin Spring Step cared to feel. That breath empowered him, animated him beyond the numbing throes of his spreading infection. It gave him the strength to persist for the last few mooncycles of his life, as he paid for his older brother's death one leather strip at a time. When he limped through the streets of New Sheol, creatures could only gawk at the crazed horse filth falling to pieces just to crawl his way to the bank for one final payment.

It wasn't until Spring Step was handed a tag from the teller—a rusted plaque reading '123'—that he realized his final task was already complete. By that point, he no longer had the strength to stand. He was a veritable corpse. So he did what all corpses were good for. He found a quiet place on the metal sidewalk of New Sheol and took a seat. Hours later, that seat turned into a bed, for he was lying on his side. The collar in his neck flickered from green to red, and still he didn't move a single inch. Much later, the heavy shape of Overseer Globflint came into view. The ogre shuffled up to Spring Step and murmured a number that the pony couldn't understand. After several tries and no responses, it was a sigh instead of a growl that came from Globflint's lips. He reached down with bizarre gentleness, removing the slave's limbs, taking what he could and returning it to Paimon Company's stock.

Globflint left the collar. It was merely a dull and heavy thing that passing orcs laughed at. Several more creatures stopped to balk at Spring Step, but he paid them very little attention. He saw bright flashes of lightning just beyond the windows of his cottage, but they no longer frightened him either. After all, he had weathered the darkest tempest of all in the comforting embrace of Dream Peace, and what lay beyond the darkness was colored far greener than the pegasus' emerald eye. Somewhere in the hazy shade of it all, Spring Step's mother waited with a smile and a warm coat to nuzzle against. His sister's and brother's laughter filled the walls of the cabin while his father stoked the flames of the fireplace. The scent of his grandmother's toasted cinammon grazed his nose like a stallion's warm breath. Spring Step gazed into the dancing orange shadows of the hearth, and they briefly resembled a flock of winged creatures shuffling up towards him. When their bright talons reached his face, he had no tears left to give, only a smile.