Chapters The Last Tears in Tartarus
When Eighty-Three died, he was ready for it. He had no strength to cry, nor desire to. While the streets and alleyways of New Sheol froze around him, Eighty-Three was warm. He lay in a lone gutter, reveling in the scent of a dead world, a smell that he didn't realize he could still savor until the very end came. A part of him was immeasurably thankful, the part of him that could still see the orange light when all else was smog and red steam. Soon enough, tiny, winged shadows rose over Eighty-Three, and his ears intinctually twitched upon hearing a chorus of ravenous hissings sounds. Exhaling peacefully, he shut his eyes and felt somepony's phantom breath on him, like a kiss sending him blissfully into a long slumber.
Eighty-Three's last thought flew him back to four moons ago.
New Sheol stood, as it always did, like a black monolith of industry in the center of the gray and desolate landscape. Perpetual night blanketed the charred, ashen world. Every tree and lake and river was gone, replaced instead by endless stretches of smooth stone that had been vulcanized by a tsunami of underworldly flame ten years prior. The only noticeable detail on the moonlit expanse was a rotting moat of refuse that had collected at the base of New Sheol's support pylons. Piles of bones, leather flanks of skin, and petrified bits of internal organs were constantly being expelled out of hissing vents just a hundred meters above the gray world's surface. Clawing through the debris were ink black creatures with jagged wings and scarlet eyes. They fought and hissed and squabbled over the meatier bits of detritus before the vents opened again and rained a pungent spray of organic sludge across the spectacle, forcing the beastly imps to scatter with a series of banshee shrieks.
As the vents closed, a fine red mist billowed out from their edges. This crimson effluence traveled up the metal struts of the hellish platform, doubling and tripling with the hundreds upon hundreds of meters that the body of New Sheol penetrated the frigid sky. Howling winds blew dust and sediment into the obsidian bulkheads of the city's outer layers. However, the platform stood resolute, built out the same unholy metal that had brought an entire kingdom to its knees. The city's multiple floors of red-glowing factories whirred and steamed with impenetrable machine parts, providing a sick contrast to the dark expanse surrounding the purgatorial metropolis.
It was in the middle of such intestinal industry that Eighty-Three labored, half-a-mile above the scarred surface of the world, surrounded by red mist and madness. The earth pony had been working deep in the metal bowels of New Sheol's west hangars. He and three other slaves dangled from rusted ladders in the center of a vertical shaft, busily welding together a series of black pipes. These tight cylinders led up towards a half-constructed landing pad of criss-crossing metal bulkheads that formed a new portion of the platform city above.
One particular stretch of tubing was being stubborn. Grumbling under his breath, Eighty-Three hung onto a grimy rung with his yellow teeth while he converted his left metal hoof into a blow torch. He felt the heat of searing plasma coursing through his forward prosthetic as he sealed the pipes tight.
It was then that he first heard the arrival of the orcish hovercraft. The entire structure shook violently. One slave shrieked and flailed as he was nearly thrown off his grip. He dangled above an eight-hundred foot drop before gripping back onto the ladder opposite Eighty-Three. Only once Eighty-Three's welding task was finished did he glance straight up at the arriving vessel. It was a dull green thing, its body only barely showing through the metal grating above and the smoldering black sky beyond. Several roaring vertical thrusters carried the cargo ship towards the nearest landing pad adjacent to that stretch of platform being constructed. When the thunder of the craft's approach settled, Eighty-Three could hear the cackling voice of a slave beside him.
“Hey, cheer up, pony!” Twenty-Seven exclaimed. He was a frail, gangly goblin with iron-plated hands and feet. A glowing, mechanical eye whirred in the creature's head as he grinned crookedly. “Maybe it's the fleet of the dead Sun Goddess come to ferry you on to green pastures!”
The other two slaves laughed. Eighty-Three merely exhaled a heavy breath. With his length of pipes sealed, he retracted his left limb back into a mechanical hoof. He then pressed a glowing communicator fused into his neck collar. An electrical charge coursed through his body. Sparks ran through a dense mane of rusted needles growing out the back of his neck as he contacted the company's current supervisor. He gritted his teeth to weather the pain, and soon he could hear the sound of a deep, guttural voice murmuring magically in his ears.
“Report, Number Eighty-Three.”
“Lower Strut Beta is fused, Overseer,” Eighty-Three replied. Bright embers spat sporadically out of his skull as he hung there in the depths of New Sheol. “It is ready for circulation.”
“Affirmative,” the voice rattled like a jar of pebbles in his skull. “Initiating test ventilation in T-Minus five... four... three...”
Eighty-Three split the ends of his forelimbs into tri-fold prongs. He hung tightly to the metal ladder and carefully eyed the pipe he had just fused. His breath came out in frosted vapors as he waited with anticipation. Soon, the air heated up as a hot gust of red steam was pumped through the metal tubes. There was a crimson aura shimmering all around him, but not a single cloud of mist escaped the cylindrical material.
“Number Eighty-Three, any sign of leakage?”
He replied, “Negative, Overseer. I confirm structural integrity for Lower Strut Beta.”
“Understood. Your task is complete. Ascend to Platform Twenty.”
The sparks burning in the back of Eighty-Three's neck died. With a whir of his metal legs, he climbed his way up the ladder, much to the groaning envy of the slaves still working beneath him.
“Awwww... Damn his horse luck!” Twenty-Seven spat and waved a wrench in consternation. “If you earn more strips than me again this week, I swear, I'll find you and feed you to Leviathan's parasites myself!”
“Typical of you to be jealous of pony filth,” another goblin said, grinning.
“Oh hush—Whoah!” Twenty-Seven almost fell off the ladder. The other two slaves laughed at him and continued with their work.
In the meantime, Eighty-Three ascended the top of the vertical chamber. He winced, struggling to pull himself onto the black bulkheads atop the metal pit. As soon as he had even footing, there was a miserable popping sound.
He fell flat on his muzzle. A shot of pain flew through his cranium, but it was nothing compared to the throbbing agony in his joints. Once more, his metal prosthetics had slipped loose from their grimy sockets. He could feel the sparks singeing his shaved flesh from where the servos struggled wildly to reconnect. He heard chuckling voices. Several orcs and ogres had paused in their multiple welding tasks to laugh at his misfortune. Not a single one came over to assist him. He didn't expect any better.
After much struggle, Eighty-Three pulled himself onto even ground. He found a loose rivet on the floor and bit onto it with his teeth. Clenching his eyes shut, he coiled the muscles remaining in his natural torso, flexed, and popped all four limbs back into place at once. A shot of electricity bolted through him, illuminating his metal mane, and then his body hung numbly in the receding waves of pain. After a few panting breaths, he limped up into a standing position, spat the nut out, and walked across the cold construction site on whirring, rusted feet.
The black lattice work of the landing pad's support structure was strobing in various places from grimy creatures enmeshed in the throes of hard labor. Several grunts of pain echoed in the distance as random orcs and trolls wrestled with their stubborn equipment. Eighty-Three marched fluidly through all of this, not stopping until he was standing before a large, fat ogre who was carving a series of statistical supports across a band of tanned leather.
“Number Eighty-Three, reporting, Overseer Globflint,” the half-pony hoarsely said.
“Hmmph...” The Overseer merely grunted. The ogre was rotund, to say the least, with several strips of leather stitched in a spiraling pattern around his torso in order to contain the bulging fat. Half of his face was disfigured, and his left leg had been replaced by a piston with rusted springs. Upon Eighty-Three's arrival, Overseer Globflint continued carving more figures into the sheet of flesh, summarizing the day's progresses and failures. “High Incubus Paimon entrusts me with the good maintenance of this company,” he muttered. “What do I say to him when I find that all of my slaves are no good maggot bags, save for one conspicuously diligent pony?”
Eighty-Three stared down at the soot covered floor. A gust of red steam billowed to his left, illuminating the dark stains of the place in a crimson light. “I wouldn't rightly know, Overseer.”
“A good answer,” Globflint said. “The best slave is one who refuses to think, even when asked to.” He finished carving a figure and reached for a grimy controller with a metal hand. “Let's see, that makes it two moons of solid work. You've fulfilled your quota for the time being, Eighty-Three. I hereby grant you twelve hours of leave.” He clicked the remote.
A light flashed from red to green in Eighty-Three's neck collar. The pony took a deep breath and bowed. “Much appreciated, Overseer Globflint.”
“The only thing I appreciate is how swiftly you circulate red steam to the new expansions,” the ogre replied. He dropped the remote back onto a rusted tray besides scraps of bone from half-eaten meat. “The orc hovercraft that just arrived is only docking with our Company because that naga shipment of infernal slade departed two hours ago. We need this new landing pad fully constructed if we ever expect to ensure High Incubus Paimon's profit. Always remember, 'fealty means labor...'”
Eighty-Three knew when it was his cue to speak. “'And labor means freedom,'” he dutifully finished.
“Still,” the Overseer's nostrils flared as he chuckled inwardly. “A pony like you is a novelty, these days. Fealty simply means you expend energy by choice, now doesn't it?”
Eighty-Three said nothing. He just stood there, silent, his metal legs anchored to the platform.
Globflint resumed scratching more figures into the dead sheets. After half-a-minute, he grumbled, “Is there any particular reason why you're still here?”
“I mean no disrespect, Overseer, and I am most grateful for my leave. But since it has been two moons, and I've had my first time to visit the surface in weeks, I wonder if you would be so gracious as to allow me the freedom of transferring my strips early.”
“Transferring your strips?” Globflint cast a pale eye in Eighty-Three's direction. “You mean you wish to be paid,” he said flatly.
Eighty-Three stirred with sudden pensiveness.
“Speak up, you pile of horse rubbish!” The Overseer's voice rose dangerously. His metal fingers lingered on a crimson button to his remote. “Is this what you insolently demand?”
“I do not demand, for I cannot demand,” Eighty-Three said in monotone. “I merely ask for the Overseer's grace, if he would see fit to treat his servant as a servant or his rubbish as rubbish.”
“Hmmm...” The Overseer stared sideways at the pony. “Audacious, but honest. It's a strange comfort to me that when Tartarus burst through the gates, the only thing Grand Lord Babellyon's army didn't consume was the equine weakness for telling the truth.” Globflint spun in his seat, then reached into a metal drawer and pulled out several small pieces of leather. He compared them to flesh-colored sheets in a bone-bound book. After shuffling a few more in his grubby hands, he finally tossed a numbered pair before the pony. “There. Forty strips. That's as much as Paimon Company can afford to give you so early.”
Once again, Eighty-Three bowed respectfully. “Much thanks and appreciation, Overseer.”
“But your leave is now ten hours instead of twelve,” the Overseer said with a frown. “The moment you complain, your limbs will be turned off. Do not forget that I am merciful, for Paimon is merciful. The lengths of our grace equal the height of your suspension from suffering.”
“Yes, Overseer.” Eighty-Three took the numerically marked leather strips and backtrotted with a lasting bow. “You are wise and merciful, Overseer.”
“Do not forget it, pony.” Globflint swiveled back to his sheets and resumed carving into the dead flesh. “Your kind is pathetically lucky to have one of the Company's legs, much less four.”
Eighty-Three did not respond. He marched firmly up the ramp leading towards the surface streets. Gusts of red steam billowed on either side of him as he passed by shuffling slave workers, scurrying rats, and emaciated trolls lying in refuse and reaching out for alms. A deep crimson glow bathed his flesh and metal features, illuminating the decade-old scarves of orcish daggers that hid any hint of a cutie mark on his flanks. Finally, with a wave of frosted air that betrayed his haggard breaths to the vaporous winds, he emerged onto the streets of New Sheol.
The sky above was shrouded by smog-ridden night. A forest of tall smokestacks stretched like black throats into the air, funneling endless clouds of ash into the deathly expanse. Darting loudly through the atmosphere on loud thrusters were errant waves of airships armed from wing-to-wing with ghastly weaponry. Where there wasn't the rumbling thunder of industry to be heard, shrieks echoed in shrill bursts as wild gargoyles leapt from rooftop to rooftop, fighting for the ragged scraps of dead birds and other raw meat.
Eighty-Three wasted no time. He trotted briskly down the center street of the demonic city. Every building was a black heap of metal piled on top of identical compartments, so that the entire urbanscape resembled a rusted heap of iron-wrought coffins stacked together. Interwoven through this obsidian network of bulkheads was a complex web of thin pipes, glowing scarlet as they channeled red steam—the bloodline of Tartarus—all throughout New Sheol.
The massive grandeur of the city wasn't the most ominous thing. Shuffling through the streets were half-living creatures, orcs and goblins and ogres who had seen their fair share of carnage, and most of them the losers of such scuffles. They carried themselves on crooked, improvised prosthetics. Leather bandages and barbed-wire stitches held their haggard skin together as they gave into drink and hissed at one another. Those too weak to stand soon found themselves pounced upon by larger and bigger creatures. Thugs spilled the streets and gutters with blood, running away with leather slips while their victims sobbed their way into a slow death at the mouths of vermin.
To the left, Eighty-Three heard a loud series of roars. He glanced down through the bars of a metal great to see a circular arena lit by torches. A pair of captured timber-wolves were being forced at taser-point to fight with one another. In the stands above them, throngs of blood-thirsty orcs waved their leather strips and cheered the monstrosities into murdering one another other.
There was a shrieking sound to his right. Eighty-Three glanced through his peripheral vision to see a pair of goblins being pummeled to the ground and curb-stopped. They yelled and screamed for help, and yet no creature came to their aid as three large ogres hungrily dragged them behind a pile of garbage and unsheathed long blades to do something horrific just beyond Eighty-Three's vantage point.
A trio of small bodies slammed into Eighty-Three. He struggled on whirring metal limbs to keep his balance. As it turned out, three gargoyles had bumped into him. They were fighting over the the lower half of a dog, its purple entrails staining the street as demons hissed and stabbed at one another with their wing-joints. One of the gargoyle's heads suddenly exploded. The street cleared as an angry orc butcher charged out of his slaughterhouse with a boomstick and chased the two imps off.
“What in Beelzebub's name is that?” Croaked a guttural voice from a nearby storefront. In a city of horrors, built by horrors, Eighty-Three knew that an outburst of disbelief could only be directed at him. He became aware of two troll pilots—outsiders—leaning against a wall and eying the earth pony as he limped down the street. “By the Styxx, can you believe that they put legs on that thing?”
“It's a waste of strips, if you ask me.”
“I told you New Sheol is a total dump. We were better off in the Golgoth highlands. At least there they weren't desperate enough to turn filth into labor units.”
“Hey. Do you think that after they're done sending him places, they turn his collar off and ride him around the red steam generators?”
“Hahahaha! Ohhhh—Burn me, Lilith, that's rich!”
Eighty-Three held his breath tight. Finally, after marching through a swarm of flies gathered around a decaying beggar's body, Eighty-Three reached his destination. It was a metal stand, guarded by tall orcs brandishing razor-sharp pole-axes. A series of nether runes atop the establishment read “Bank of New Sheol – Paimon Company.” Several creatures were standing in a solid line by the time Eighty-Three got there.
Just like him, the various slaves bore metal collars around their throats. All of the neck-pieces were lit green, all except for one trembling troll's. Right before Eighty-Three's eyes, the poor wretch's collar switched to red, then shorted out completely. As the light went out, the troll's metal arms went limp from the shoulders down. He panicked, his breath coming out in rancid vapors as he tried to break out of the crowd, only for one of the brutish guards to reach out and yank him by the neck. The troll dangled helplessly in the guard's grasp. Upon close inspection of the dead light on the troll's collar, the guard grunted and ripped the laborer's prosethetics out of their grimy sockets. After collecting Company property, the guard tossed the troll—shrieking—into a gutter south-wind of the decaying beggar. Desperate, he squirmed his way towards the far side of the street with thrashing legs, only to be overtaken by a swarm of hungry gargoyles that bit and pecked at his shrieking face.
Eighty-Three absorbed himself into the thick crowd of waiting servants. He kept his eyes forward. None of them looked at him, and he didn't bother gazing their way either. Over time, his ears twitched, for he heard a series of chuckling, healthy voices. Momentarily curious, he turned and gazed behind his blank flanks.
Several tall, muscular orcs and ogres were marching down the street. Eighty-Three realized that they must have been the crew of the hovercraft that had just landed at his company's pad. These outsiders brandished guns, daggers, axes, and various other well-polished weaponry. What was more, they had the trophies of war hanging from their necks. The one in the front—most likely the leader of the pack—wore a tunic of hydra flesh, and about his neck their hung the teeth of at least twenty-different species. Even from a long distance, it took Eighty-Three barely half-a-minute to recognize the molars of zebras, mules, and other equines densely populating the leader's necklace.
Suddenly, the tallest orc froze... and frowned. It was then that Eighty-Three realized that they had made eye contact. The glare that followed was positively chilling.
“Step up, runt.”
Eighty-Three jumped. He turned around and realized that the line had disappeared in front of him. Several creatures angrily shoved him forward. On whirring legs, he stumbled into the bank teller. Concentrating, he converted his lower limbs into tripods and leaned his forward body upwards like a biped. He then placed the leather strips onto the counter with metal fingers.
“State your designation,” grunted the troll behind the counter, a scar-faced female with gray dreadlocks. Upon seeing the face of the only pony in New Sheol, her mouth tightened, as if struggling to hold her lunch in.
“Number Eighty-Three of Paimon Company, Group Alpha.”
She grabbed the leather pieces, counted them emotionlessly, and punched a series of keys into a loud, oily machine. “Forty strips.” She pulled a lever and a metal sheet slid under a presser beside her, ready for engraving. “Emancipation, Resupply, or Augmentation?”
“None of the above,” Eighty-Three firmly stated. Those in back of the line stirred curiously as he spoke forth, “Power Battery Decommissioning.”
She glanced curiously at him. She must have been new to this wing of New Sheol. If Eighty-Three wasn't assertive, there was the awful chance that she might disregard his request, and he'd not have a chance to pay up for another two moons.
“It's under my file,” he said. “I lay claim to five units, two of which are retired.”
“Hrmmm... One moment.” She reached up to a compartment at the top of her window and pulled down a sheet of flesh. Her eyes scanned down the leather inscriptions until she found a matrix of data. “Paimon Company – Alpha – Eighty Three – Indentured Servant – Equine,” her voice droned each bit of data as she read it aloud. “Says here you have full claim to Units Forty-Nine, Seventy-Two, One Hundred and Five, One Hundred and Twenty-Three, and Two Hundred and Four of the Central New Sheol Battery Supply.”
“Yes, in accordance with Paimon Company Article Eleven,” Eighty-Three said, nodding. “But Units Seventy-Two and One Hundred and Five have been decommissioned already. I would like to pay twenty strips towards the decommissioning of Forty-Nine and twenty strips towards Two Hundred and Four, likewise.”
The troll glanced at the sheet, at him, and then at the sheet once more. Her greasy nostrils flared indignantly. “Very well.” She flung the sheet back up into its sheathe, grabbed his strips, hammered the numbers into the machine, and punched the figures into the metal plate. After the plate was sliced free, she tossed it lazily towards him. “Strips issued. Battery Units Forty-Nine and Two Hundred and Four have a remaining total balance of four hundred strips until complete decommissioning. Battery Unit One Hundred and Twenty-Three: eight hundred strips.”
“Understood.” Eighty-Three nodded, took the plate in his teeth, and limped away swiftly so that the impatient line could take his spot. Once out in the street, he paused to open a leather pouch hanging along his left side just between the two metal joints. He dropped the plate in, but not without pausing to see two rusted tags that had been lying inside the bag already. Two numbers—stained with blood and excrement—spoke to him: “72” and “105.” They were merely figures, statistics, but in a dark world of soot and grime, they were the most beautiful things he had ever looked at.
After a meditative breath, Eighty-Three tightened the bag shut, turned around, and promptly tripped over an outstretched, battle-scarred leg.
“Ooof!” He fell hard to the ground, wincing.
Several tall creatures laughed and spat on him. He felt cold shadows lingering over his figure and heard the metallic sound of metal blades dangling against one other.
“What's this? A prancing pony trying to earn his hooves in Tartarus?” The orc leader of the bunch loomed over him, grinning with a severe under-bite. “I swear, my stomach would be growling if I hadn't killed hundreds just like him in my sleep.”
Eighty-Three winced. He struggled to gain control over his creaking joints. The flesh around his prosthetic sockets strained and bled as he pulled himself back onto his metal legs.
“Look at how he squirms! It's been ten years, and still they can't handle the pain!” The head orc's cohorts laughed and guffawed as he paced around the quadruped. “You gotta take what the world gives you now, horse filth! You locked us up for centuries in the dark dungeon of the world like we were trash, and now look at you! What's the matter? Work load getting a little too tough, slave?”
“Hahahah! Hey! Where's an apple? Somebody feed her an apple! That's what they like, isn't it?”
“You idiot! Can't you see?! It's a guy!”
“Not much of one from where I'm looking!”
“Hahaha! Like you can tell! What prissy little manure machines!”
“Hah hah hah!”
Eighty-Three didn't look at them. He finally got control of his legs. The joints snapped into place as he stood up solidly and marched off.
“Hey!” The orc leader laughed. He stretched his arms out and rattled his bone trophies in the crimson glow of red steam vents. “Where you galloping off to? I just wanna have a talk, cutie! I'm sure you've got several hilarious tales to tell of the old world, that is until we frickin' razed it to ash! Hahah!”
Eighty-Three was fuming. He heard the cold rattle of the numbered tags in his bag. Perhaps that was what set him off, what briefly stripped him of sanity as he grumbled back without looking. “You only wished it was your world to begin with.”
The group of orcs and ogres became dead quiet, all save for their leader. His seething breath came out of him like a locomotive. There was a ringing sound of slicing metal, then several bounding thumps, immediately followed by his leathery foot slamming down across Eighty-Three's spine.
“Augh!” He fell to the metal street, only to have the side of his face pressed mercilessly against a length of blood-stained bulkheads. Eighty-Three winced in pain as the orc leaned down towards him, running the cold edge of an electrified eviscerater against the nape of his collared neck.
“You listen to me and you listen to me good!” The leader snarled. His eyes lit up bloodily like the red steam all around them. “I've crapped out filth that smells better than you! You are nothing! Not even maggots would like to taste you! That goes for every pathetic equine that came before! You don't believe me? My father was there, you insignificant cockroach! He was there in the heart of your crumbling empire when Grand Lord Babellyon beat your feeble Queen into bloody submission! I myself have touched the very blade that cut out her heart! I've been to the podium where her hollow carcass was put on display for my brothers and sisters to piss on! Your Sun Goddess is dead, your land is strip bare, and everything now bows to the glory and horror of Tartarus! So what's stopping me from slicing you to meaty bits right now and teaching you what your pancreas tastes like?!”
“Because he belongs to Paimon Company!” shouted a booming voice. Eighty-Three weakly glanced up to see the large figure of Overseer Globflint waddling down the street. The heavy-set ogre leaned on his metal peg under pale lamplight. The avenue cleared of nervous bodies behind him. “And it would not make your trade manager happy to know that you caused New Sheol property loss by playing pretend-soldier upon immediately making port.”
The orc sneered and aimed his eviscerater at the ogre from afar. “Back off, ya mangy slob! I'm teaching this horse some respect! He shouldn't even be allowed to walk! Lilith burn me, I have a good mind to shove these cruddy legs of his right up your—!”
With a loud hum, the Overseer's left arm split open to expose a sparkling scimitar that tripled the size of the orc's blade. His pale eyes danced with tiny bolts of electricity. “Do your best, boy,” he calmly grunted. “At least now your comrades will see how your father's strength died the day he gorged on the Queen of Ponies.”
The orc jerked where he stood. He heard his cohorts snickering. His body shook furiously. With a sigh, he let go of Eighty-Three, stood up straight, and sheathed his blade. “Come on, runts,” he grunted and motioned his clique along with him as he shuffled down the dirty street. “We can kill pony filth any other day. Let's see what the local rum tastes like.” With a cloud of trailing laughs and guffaws, the cretin was gone.
Globflint tiredly exhaled. He retracted his arm back into a metal wrist, shifted his enormous weight on his piston leg, and shuffled over to Eighty-Three. “When I granted you leave, slave, this was not what I meant.”
Eighty-Three stood up, wobbling. “I am most sorry, Overseer—”
The ogre's engorged knuckles slammed violently across the pony's face.
Eighty-Three flew against the metal wall of a building. Before he could slump to the ground, he had the Overseer's meaty wrist clamped around his collar.
“You are not sorry!” Globflint snarled into the slave's face. “You are nothing! You are a number, a grunt, a cog in the machine! Until you earn enough strips to emancipate yourself—which, by the Styxx, I can't even comprehend why you haven't done so by now—you belong to High Incubus Paimon, and you belong to me! If it wasn't for my intervention, no one would have seen fit to attach any tools to you whatsoever, and instead you would be screaming in agony along with the rest of your piss-stained brethren! I will not have you getting the ire of our customers up, or Lilith help me I will tear those limbs of yours off, return them to Paimon Company stock, and sell what's left of your writhing carcass to the Power Department! Do I make myself clear?”
“Scrkkk... cl-clearly, Overseer...”
The ogre hissed his rancid breath into Eighty-Three's face. “Am I merciful? Say it!”
Just before Eighty-Three's eyes rolled back in their sockets, he caught sight of a bright figure flying overhead. The odd sight jolted a spark of energy down his metal mane, and he hissed, “You are... m-most merciful... Overseer...” He gulped and wheezed, “'Fealty means labor and labor means freedom.'”
Globflint dropped him hard onto the metal sidewalk. “Well said.” He brushed his flesh and metal hands off. “Ever since the hovercraft landed, our communication array has been malfunctioning. I came here personally to round up you and the rest of the servants. I'm afraid your leave must come to an end, pony. The hovercraft has a shipment of batteries, and they must be hauled off the ship and into storage immediately. While the main crew is visiting the warehouses and inns of New Sheol, their laborers have been ordered to provide their services. We need every limb empowered by Paimon Company to assist them. That means you.”
Eighty-Three nodded, gulped, and rubbed his neck with a metal hoof. “Y-yes, Overseer. I shall return to the hangars swiftly.”
“Do not let me find you tarrying. Your pathetic sun is long gone, pony. Tartarus has no time for the likes of you to waste.” He swiveled on his peg leg and hobbled back the way he came.
“Yes, Overseer,” Eighty-Three murmured. But as he stood up, he daringly paused to glance up at the sky. He saw the usual smog and jets of industrial smoke. For several seconds, he squinted, hoping to spot what was so colorful, what had sparked him from the inside. He was about to give up when he finally saw it. On a burst of jet fuel, a living figure was rocketing towards the hangars from the center of the city platform, hauling a supply net full of tools to assist in the upcoming labor. The figure's outline was startling, for all four of his limbs dangled below his torso. That's when Eighty-Three realized that it was a quadruped.
Then something happened that startled him. The figure stopped in mid-air, hovering. A bright green eye and a glowing red eye gazed his way. The creature had half-a-skull of titanium and silver wings full of whirring gears and thruster engines. But there was no denying what it was.
Eighty-Three stirred uncomfortably where he stood. The only thing more shocking than the sight of the pegasus was the sight of the pegasus staring back at him, without ceasing. Snapping his metal joints straight, Eighty-Three forced himself to look away as he marched back towards the hangar, and another stretch of work without sleep or rest.
The Last Tears in Tartarus
The orcish hovercraft was gigantic up close. Its dense green hull stretched for hundreds of feet, occupying the greater lengths of the Paimon Company landing pad where it had moored along the western platform of New Sheol. Dozens of slaves had gathered around the starboard side. They clamored over the cargo hold like festering insects, unloading crate after crate of heavily armored power batteries into a mobile array of steam-operated cranes and metal carts.
The servants of the orcish crew were a heterogeneous gang of goblins, gremlins, imps, and a few limber trolls. Each individual was very richly provided for—as was common with the slaves of trade vessels. The complex prosthetics, burning jet packs, and segmented wings of their augmented bodies put the grimy limbs of the Paimon slaves to shame. These workers darted back and forth in the freezing air, attaching metal couplings to the rectangular stacks of power batteries while the Sheol inhabitants carried them away in fives and tens from the slowly emptying hovercraft.
It was a very monotonous task, one that spawned conversation from the laboring groups. Paimon slaves asked the hovering visitors about the rest of Tartarus beyond New Sheol. The vessel's crew spoke of such dazzling yet horrific sights as the black bluffs of Archeron City, the pale bone towers of Hinnomvale, and—naturally—the dreaded bastions of Mount Samael.
“There is simply no words to describe it,” murmured a gremlin with goggled eyes and pale, rancid flesh. He was in the middle of loading yet another power battery into the grip of a Paimon Company lifting crane. “I am lucky to have seen the new capital of Tartarus with my own eyes. I still hear the glorious shrieks of the weak and foolish as they power the spirit lamps that line the calcified walls. The brimstone there is immaculate. The fire burns brighter than the moon and without stop. There is nothing left to be seen of the Sun Goddess' feeble bowers of yesteryear. Our Grand Lord Babellyon, the Morning Star, has blackened everything with his most gorgeous power. I have heard him speak, and I wept with joy as the years were siphoned from my body. When I die, I shall die for him in blissful cold. I'm telling each and every one of you runts: you must make the pilgrimage to the black fortress as soon as you're emancipated. There is no suffering like righteous suffering.”
“To each their own, ya slimy maggot huffer,” chuckled Twenty-Seven. He fumbled with the controls of the crane down below, weathering the weight of more and more power batteries as they were stacked onto the apparatus. “Once I'm emancipated, I'm joining an orcish speeder!”
Several slaves chuckled all around him.
“No, I mean it!” The goblin growled. His mechanical eye whirred as he spoke, “Not one of those boring transport schooners, but a weapon of war! I want to join the hunt of the black frontier! I want to be there when the orcs catch up with the last of the stubborn griffons and rip their beaks out of their screaming maws. You can have your righteous suffering. I won't be happy until I can wear a totem of dead talons about my neck!”
“You can do that here in New Sheol!” The gremlin replied with a smirk. “Your platform has a rather horrific supply of... pigeons from what I've seen!”
“Hah hah! There you go, Twenty-Seven!” A Paimon operator shouted from the side, sweating from a cart full of supplies he was pushing. “Sounds like a worthy hunt for you! You'll be riding with the hellions of war soon enough!”
“Oh shut your burn hole!” Twenty-Seven snarled. The other servants laughed all the more. He sighed and jerked at the controls. “For Styxx's sake, what's taking so long up there?!”
“The last two containers are refusing to connect to one another,” the visiting gremlin replied, struggling with the fasteners. “This is going to take some extra work.” He turned and called over his shoulder. “One Eleven!”
A flare of rocket thrusters sounded overhead. It was at this moment—and not during any of the varied conversations preceding it—that Eighty-Three finally looked up from his busy task of attaching several metal carts together. He watched with a nervous shudder as a familiar, bright figure levitated down to the top of the hovercraft's supply door right next to the gremlin.
“Yes, Five Sixty?” The pegasus replied, retracting his metal wings. “What do you need?”
“These fasteners won't bend right. I think there's grout in the joints. Got the tools to take care of it?”
“Step aside.” One Eleven stretched a hoof forward. He crawled over to the pair of battery containers and narrowed his red eye at the problematic couplings between them. Then, with a motorized noise, he stretched a serpentine tale of bendable metal towards his front. The end of it produced two prongs that swiftly became a blow torch. Crouching low atop the stack of metal compartments, he applied the burning tip of his prosthetic tail to the grimy fasteners, surgically loosening them one after another. In the midst of his work, he somehow found the time to cast a natural, green eye towards Eighty-Three.
Eighty-Three immediately turned back to his task with the metal carts. He felt his breath quickening beneath his scarred chest. The part of his throat that constantly made contact with his collar felt more sore than normal. He tried distracting himself, meditating, concentrating on the gusts of red steam that billowed in the background. No matter how hard he tried, he could only make out the sound of One Eleven's blowtorch, as well as the voice that followed the silencing of the searing tool's roar.
“Done. That should do it.” One Eleven squinted down at the crane operator. “But if you ask me, I think you've stacked up too much weight.”
“Nobody asked you, horse filth!” Twenty-Seven growled from his station. “If you're so concerned about weight, how about you get your rusted flanks off the damn thing so I can lower it already!”
One Eleven sighed, cast Five Sixty a tired look, and took off with a burst of orange thrusters. In the meantime, the heavy crane whirred and exhaled bursts of red steam as it began lowering the stack of power batteries towards the metal carts in waiting.
“Easy! Easy, Twenty-Seven,” another Paimon slave said.
“I know what I'm doing!” Twenty-Seven smirked and pulled at the controls. “Stop barking at me like I'm some stray head of Cerberus! I'm earning my damn strips and a good meal for... once...” His face tensed as the instrument panel before him sparked with errant flashes of electrical discharge. “Wuh oh...”
“Lilith burn me!” Another servant gasped and ran up to the machine. “Apply the reserve thrusters! It's buckling—”
“I said I got it!” Twenty-Seven shouted, though he was sweating visibly. A disgusting groan came from the heart of the crane apparatus. Red steam screamed out of the hydraulic joints. Slowly, the huge stack of crates buckled and leaned to the side. Several servants ran away from the scene, shouting. Eighty-Three was not ashamed to be one of them. “Nnnngh—Bollocks!” Twenty-Seven shrieked as the instrument panel finally flew away from his grasp, collapsing along with the entirety of the crane.
The thunder that followed sent reverberations all throughout the hangars of New Sheol. Several hidden gargoyles shrieked and flew out of the grimy alcoves of the place. Red hot shrapnel and bits of crane mechanisms flew randomly across the black bulkheads. Finally, a few of the battery compartments broke open. Breathless, Eighty-Three spun about for a look. He was able to catch the sight of two or three power rods falling loose and disappearing beyond the metal grates below. But that was not all he saw. Eighty-Three could make out the shapes of thrashing, moaning bodies inside the ruptured containers. Red steam burst out of the quivering compartments, laced with muffled groans of agony in the freezing air.
The combined crowd of Paimon and hovercraft slaves converged on the mess. But they barely had a chance to clean up the debacle when the loud, angry voice of the docked hovercraft's orcish captain lit the air.
“By Babellyon's black blood!” The orc shouted. He happened to be marching up with his clique of wide-eyed cretins that very second. “What is the meaning of this pathetic incompetence?!”
Eighty-Three instantly shied away from the sight of him. He stood inconspicuously behind the metal carts, as far away from the center of the hideous scene. He could make out the trembling sight of Twenty-Seven as the frail goblin stood, beside himself with panic.
“I-I don't know what happened, sir! I swear the equipment has handled this sort of a load before! I can't imagine how or why it would have failed—”
“I've traveled thousands of leagues over dead ash and bone to get those priceless, living batteries!” The orc captain sneered down at the wincing slave. “And as soon as I turn my back, some pathetic mongrel child is ruining hours of expensive labor! I swear by the unholy lights, New Sheol is nothing but defecation and dunces!” A loud metal ringing sound filled the air, replaced by a hum as he aimed his electrified eviscerater in the gasping goblin's face. “I'll make sure there's enough room inside your putrid chest for a hell hound to hibernate in by the time I'm done with you!”
Just then, Overseer Globflint marched up, along with several other menacing supervisors of Paimon Company. “What in Leviathan's name is all this racket?” He glared down at the goblin. “Number Twenty-Seven! Report! Now!”
“I... I...” The goblin gulped and stood up straight on his frail limbs. “I was operating the crane, sir. We loaded the next round of power batteries onto the clamps, but as I attempted to lower it, the machinery broke from the inside. It buckled, and—”
“You overloaded the apparatus, is what you mean to say!” Globflint growled. He marched his rotund body towards Twenty-Seven, leaning his bulbous weight on a rusted peg. “Look at that pitiful stack of excess, you miserable runt! Haven't you been taught better?”
Twenty-Seven gulped. He knelt down in the round shadow of the towering ogre. “Please, Overseer. I beg for your mercy. My strips should make up for the loss! Just check my file! I will take responsibility for what's happened!”
“Hmmm... Strips, you say?” Globflint snapped two metal fingers. One of his fellow supervisors produced a bone-bound book of leather. He flipped towards a stretch of carved flesh and pointed at a series of numbers. Globflint's pale eyes examined it closely. His gnarled face twisted. “Seventy strips. That's hardly enough to pay for your mistakes here today, Twenty-Seven.”
“S-seventy?!” The goblin's mechanical eye sparked. His mouth hung open, twitching. “But... But how can that be?! I thought I had earned another two hundred!”
“Perhaps that would be the case...” Globlint narrowed his eyes on the tiny figure. He slapped the leather book shut and handed it blindly to one of his cohorts. “... if it was two or three moons from now.” He reached to his side and pulled out a grimy remote. “Number Twenty-Seven of Paimon Company Alpha, as a result of an inexcusable lack of strips to pay for your error...”
“No...”
“... I hereby discharge you from service, and strip you of Company protection.” Globflint's finger pressed onto the red button.
“No no no no no!” Twenty-Seven whimpered. His fingers scrambled over his collar, powerless to keep the light turning from red to green to nothing. A vomit of sparks fell from the neckpiece. At the same time, his mechanical eye went limp. He hissed and clutched his skull as the communicator in his lateral lobes shorted out. Soon enough, his metal fingers hung limp and useless from his fleshy wrists. “Nnnnngh...” He opened his eyes, tearing, seething with pain and panic.
In the meantime, Globflint twirled around on his peg leg and sighed the orc captain's way. “Paimon Company will pay the normal price for the batteries, seeing as they were damaged by... a former member of the work force.” He shuffled towards the side of the loading platform.
In the meantime, the orc captain smiled wide. He licked his teeth and twisted the handle of his eviscerater, extending the sparkling blade by a few more inches. “Riff raff,” he hissed, his red eyes locked on Twenty-Seven.
“Please... No, don't—!” The goblin shuffled away from him, waving a numb forearm in desperation.
The orc marched over. Without breaking his stride, he shoved the blade deep into the former-slave's belly. A bolt of electricity shot down the length of the penetrating metal, and when the orc yanked back, the eviscerater had forked into four perpendicular blades. Twenty-Seven was disemboweled instantly. He thrashed on the ground, howling, his entrails spouting steam from the heat of his exposed body to the cold air. The orc marched away from him while his buddies laughed and kicked around the leaking organs of the goblin while he was still alive. The captain looked across the hangar... and caught sight of Eighty-Three. Upon a shared glance, he smirked and retracted the eviscerater blades before licking the metal clean with a wet tongue.
Eighty-Three gulped and said nothing. As the captain marched threateningly past him, he glanced up and saw One Eleven perched on the edge of the hovercraft. The pegasus was staring down at him the entire time. The two estranged ponies held their mutual gaze, weathering the last lingering howls of Twenty-Seven, until the round sight of Globflint stood in the way.
“Pony,” the Overseer spoke down at him. “Ninety-Two says that three rods fell loose from the ruptured power batteries when the rigging collapsed. Is this true?”
Eighty-Three needed a few seconds to find his voice. He swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes, Overseer. I saw them myself. They fell through the grating between the loading platform and the moored hovercraft.”
“Then they must have fallen as far deep as the upper pits,” Globflint said. “Go fetch them. We might have to put these ruptured batteries into defective status, but we may be able to at least salvage the power rods for Paimon Company's backup generators.”
Eighty-Three's muzzle twitched. He knew the nature of the task ahead of him. Not a single part of him looked forward to it. Nevertheless, he bowed his rusted mane of needles and said, “As you wish, Overseer. I shall go down there immediately.”
“See that you do.” The fat ogre marched off.
As Eighty-Three trudged on metal hooves towards a descending metal shaft, a slave or two snickered his way.
“Have fun in the pits, cutie flanks.”
“That was Twenty-Seven's detail, after all. Heh...”
Eighty-Three didn't respond. His nostrils merely flared. He reached the ladder and turned his hooves into metal prongs to properly grab a hold of them. As he started to lower, he paused. He glanced up once more. One Eleven was nowhere to be seen.
With a sigh, Eighty-Three descended. It was a lengthy trip, traversing no less than ten platforms into the progressively darker bowels of New Sheol. Gusts of red steam billowed around him, fogging sickly condensation against his metal joints. The stench intensified as well, to the point that Eighty-Three spat up tiny globlets of bile with each platform he passed. The smells of Tartarus spoke of more than death. Tiny, skittering things moved out of Eighty-Three's shadow as he came upon the brink of his destination. His only consolation was that the deeper he went, the hotter it was, so that the frigid smog of the surface streets were but a horrible dream by the time he chanced upon an even worse nightmare.
At the base of the upper platforms was a sea of cesspools, rows upon rows of congealed waste, refuse, and sludge that had collected in the metal vacuoles beneath the city's gigantic support struts. The loud roar of furnaces and red steam filtration units echoed all around Eighty-Three as he climbed off the ladder and faced the steamy currents of slime and excrement. Not wasting any time, he scanned the westernmost edges of the pits, looking for where the power rods would have fallen. He found one of them instantly, and just as swiftly made the next step of his humble journey.
Eighty-Three waded chest-deep into the sludge. He brushed past bloated carcasses and decaying entrails of unfortunate creatures who had fallen from the upper struts long ago. His nostrils filled with every horrible smell imaginable by the time he reached the power rod and gripped onto it with his bare mouth. He hung off the west edge of the pits, just inches away from where howling winds churned the cold black reaches of Tatarus into dust and oblivion beyond New Sheol. Fishing around with his lower hooves, he found the second rod and pulled it to the slimy surface. Shaking curds of fecal matter off the still-warm cylinder, he reached his metal limbs once more into the festering depths. For a brief moment he hoped that both he and Globflint had been incorrect in their count, but he knew better. Sure enough, he felt the tell-tale shape of a third rod, but it was stuck to a leathery mass clinging to the bottom of the cesspool. Groaning, Eighty-Three rested the first two rods against the side of the pits, took a deep breath, and did the unthinkable.
Half-an-hour later, he was navigating the misty corridor that led to Paimon Company's power generator facility. His metal limbs left dribbling puddles behind him. Bright furnaces full of dancing red steam billowed on either side of Eighty-Three as he entered a large compartment. The entire wall was comprised of power batteries stacked on top of one another. The muffled sounds of anguished moans and sobs filled his slime-covered ears.
There were two slaves on duty, a pair of leprotic trolls. They paused in the middle of minding the valve controls that channeled red steam from the multiple batteries. Making ugly faces, they turned and clamped their noses shut upon Eighty-Three's entrance.
“For Styxx's sake, horse filth! Did all ponies smell as bad as you!”
“You should know,” Eighty-Three grunted. He was not in the mood. “You're around them the most.”
“Ugh! Morning Star, bleed me!” One troll almost gagged. “Just tell us what you want us to do with those power rods and get the blazes out of here!”
“They may not look like much...” Eighty-Three loosened the three rods from a leather strap on his side. “But they're fresher than what we have in inventory. Overseer Globflint personally sent me to fetch them so they can be put to use here. Which batteries need upgrading the most?”
“Ugh...” The other troll waved the steamy air before his face and pointed towards the second column. “Those three, the ones with the low output rating. They've been giving us problems for the last twelve moons at least. I'm sure they've still got plenty of red steam to give off.”
“Very well.” Eighty-Three offered the rods. “They're yours.”
“Hah! Like I'm going anywhere near those dirty things, horse filth! Especially after where they've been!” The taller of the two trolls smirked at him. “Globflint himself sent you, yes? Why don't you finish the job?”
Eighty-Three's brow furrowed. He stared at the trolls, then at the rows of power batteries. Once again, he heard the deep resonating sound of muffled moans. If a part of him still could be horrified by anything, he might have protested. Instead he sighed, shifted the rods in his metallic grip, and approached the wall of compartments.
“Very well. But I have to make it quick. I have more steam welding to do.”
“Heh. Whatever you say, pony,” one troll chuckled as he wandered over to a lever.
“This, I gotta see,” the other said, folding his arms.
“Just open them already,” Eighty-Three grunted.
The slaves complied. One lever was yanked, then another. With a loud hiss, every battery compartment along the second row opened up. The crimson room filled with wretched cries and moans.
Inside each battery compartment was the legless torso of an equine figure. Their faces were obscured by rusted clamps that covered their eyes and encased their muzzles. Several glowing tools lined with hellish runes were fastened to their necks, spines, and flanks. Sparks of otherworldly magic lit the runes up periodically, eliciting a torturous groan from the living bodies bound to them. Upon each wave of pain, a crimson glow circulated through the ponies' bodies, illuminating a sparkling series of cables that were funneled hotly into a dense supply of brimstone. The heat melted the dark matter and produced red steam, which was then cycled into the pipelines that wormed their way upwards into the heart of New Sheol.
Without wasting a breath, Eighty-Three marched towards the three closest battery compartments. He stuck his neck deep into the compartment, briefly nuzzling past the hairless pony writhing within. He snapped the burnt-out power rod and tossed it to the floor before replacing it with the fresh one that had fallen from the loading platform above. He repeated this grim process twice with the next adjacent batteries. During the last installation, the pony inside thrashed violently upon contact, exhaling unintelligible words of anguish into his muzzle-brace. Holding his breath, Eighty-Three dutifully finished the task, pulled out from the compartment, and signaled the other slaves.
With brief chuckles, the trolls responded on their end. They yanked at the levers, shutting the battery compartments and sealing the suffering energy sources once more within. Eighty-Three swiftly looked away, not so much to erase the sight from his mind, but because he wanted to avoid seeing the rusted tags labeling each battery, for fear that he might recognize the numbers stamped upon them.
“Just like clock-work, pony. We should be able to take it from here.”
“Yeah, now if you don't mind taking your horrible stink elsewhere. We've got jobs to do as well, y'know. We're no good to the Overseers if we vomit all over ourselves.”
“From the stench of things, I'm surprised those caged creeps haven't done so already!”
“Hah hah hah!”
Eighty-Three had departed before he could let the trolls indulge in their laughter. He heard the muffled cries of the batteries beyond them, and it carried him faster on metal legs towards his next destination. Even hours later, on a completely different platform hundreds of feet away, he couldn't stop hearing the cries. He gazed up at every vent of New Sheol that spat out red steam and knew there was no way he could outrun them.
All he could do was work and work harder. He welded pipes to one another, focusing discreetly on his task, hoping that the meticulousness of his labor would somehow blot out the comprehension of just what he was building the cylinders to funnel. He lost track of the years that had gone by just as easily as he missed the blurring passage of moon cycles. All he knew was that Tartarus had consumed everything, and yet he had become just another imp in the grand machine of suffering. As much as he hated himself, he couldn't stop working, he couldn't stop earning bits, he couldn't stop animating the wheels and spokes of hate. There was too much at stake, too much he had to work for, and all of it paved in leather strips.
He was, in fact, so focused on his task that it was One Eleven's voice—and not the sound of his wing thrusters—that startled him. “You've been here a long time, have you?”
Eighty-Three jolted. The welding tool on his left limb almost shorted out. Sparks danced painfully across his metal mane. Grimacing, he glared over his shoulder at the pegasus... but said nothing.
One Eleven remained staring at him calmly. He was perched on the edge of an open elevator shaft. The two of them were at least four hundred feet deep into the struts of New Sheol. One Eleven was far away from his masters' hovercraft. The fact that he was there, so much as speaking with another company's imp outside of laboring, was a very dangerous thing to be doing. And yet, as Eighty-Three resumed his work and pretended that the pegasus wasn't there, One Eleven took a few brave steps closer. His metal wings folded by his side as his shiny, serpentine tail flicked back and forth.
“Long enough to have earned yourself emancipation, I'd imagine,” One Eleven further murmured. His green eye narrowed curiously while the metal half of his face flickered crimson. “We both know where the red steam comes from. I was told long ago what the larger cities of Tartarus use to power their spires. I didn't believe it at first, until I saw some of our shipments with my own eye. I can't imagine being enslaved to work around it all so much... not without losing my mind, at least.”
Eighty-Three's nostrils flared. He continued applying the torch to the pipes. He pretended that One Eleven wasn't there.
The pegasus shifted where he stood. He stared at the forest of rusted needles that formed Eighty-Three's mane, at his shaved spine fused with electrodes, and finally at his scarred flanks.
“I see they took your cutie marks too,” One Eleven murmured. “I've only met four ponies since the Breach happened. We've all been scarred in the same place. Who knew orcish warlords could be so meticulous?”
The blowtorch began shorting out. Eighty-Three flicked his left limb. His mane sparked, and the torch flared with renewed energy as he put on the finishing touches. He secretly wished there were more miles of tubes to attend to that day, if it only meant an excuse for ignoring this visitor even longer.
One Eleven just couldn't stop talking. “Tell me. Have you ever chanced upon a cutie mark in passing?” He bit his lip as he practically whimpered the next part out, “On th-the leather strips they force us to accept as currency, I mean...”
The blow-torch shut off like a dying breath. “You will be punished severely by your overseers if you continue pestering me.”
One Eleven's good ear drooped. “Huh?”
“Leave,” Eighty-Three grunted, still staring point blank at the pipes. “Do the smart thing and fly away. We shouldn't be talking.”
“Why shouldn't we?” One Eleven softly inquired.
Eighty-Three sighed.
“I mean... Don't lie to me. I know it's been ages for you; it has been for me! Just when was the last time you had an opportunity to—”
“To what?!” Eighty-Three flashed him an angry glare. “The past is dead. Equestria is dead. Now leave!” He turned once more towards the pipes, fuming. “There is nothing good to come of this.”
One Eleven's jaw dropped as he wilted from Eighty-Three's anger. “How could you say that? We are not dead, are we? You and I...” He gulped. “We aren't as alone as you think! I know there are other ponies out there! Working on transport vessels, locked in the bellies of dark cities, hiding in secret clusters throughout the bonelands... We aren't all dead! As soon as I'm emancipated, I'm going out to find them! I must believe that there's still hope! But I don't have to go there alone...”
“There is no hope...”
“How many strips do you have to your number? How close are you to emancipation—?”
“Just go !” Eighty-Three roared this time, his face redder than the steam billowing around them. He glared daggers at One Eleven and shrieked, “There is no hope! All you can earn is the chance to live another day without suffering! You think nearly as many ponies have it as lucky as you and I? I'm not about to waste this chance! And neither should you! At least you still have your legs intact, you ungrateful featherbrain!” Upon the last utterance, he slumped down in a weak breath, panting slightly.
One Eleven blinked. He gazed at Eighty-Three's metallic joints, at how horribly grimy and in disrepair they were. He swallowed and eventually murmured, “They have you imprisoned in your own body. They taunt you day in and day out. And yet you're still here. If your credits don't go towards emancipation, then where do they go?”
Eighty-Three stared into a grimy corner of the place, shivering. His ears twitched, as if bearing the brunt of a wave of anguished screams.
One Eleven's one good eye glossed over. “Blessed Celestia...” He glanced at the vents of red steam, then at Eighty-Three once again. “Do you... do you know the ponies inside?”
Eighty-Three's teeth gnashed. He jumped up viciously. For a second, he looked ready to do something violent, when a huge burst of red mist exploded from behind him. In the time that he had allowed himself to get distracted, a huge plume of pressurized steam had gathered in the pipes, forcing them to rupture. Now he was desperately stumbling to redirect the flow of heated vapors. The temperature of the room raised by ten degrees in less than a minute. As he fought and struggled to shut off the valves below, he saw the limbs of One Eleven working alongside him.
“Leave already!” Eighty-Three shouted above the noise of venting steam. “Haven't you done enough?!”
“I saw what happened to that goblin up above! I'm not leaving you alone to deal with this! Not if there's a chance to fix—”
“Nnngh!” Eighty-Three viciously bucked One-Eleven aside. He shouted down at the pegasus' collapsed form. “Let me fix what needs to be fixed!”
“But—”
“If worse comes to worst, I don't want the both of us being eviscerated!” Eighty-Three said. “Do you?!”
One Eleven gazed up at him. For once he was speechless, helpless to do anything.
“Now go!” Eighty-Three shouted, pointing with a metal limb. “For the last time!” As One Eleven breathlessly scurried away, Eighty-Three rushed up to the valves and twisted them with all his might. He heard the firing of wing thrusters. He gnashed at his teeth and redirected as much of the spilling steam as he could. Still, he wasn't capable of containing it all. The damage had obviously been done, for he could already see the lamps and heat sources of the upper struts flickering dimly around him.
Sooner than he had hoped, he felt a hissing sensation through his skull. He cried out in pain as several sparks shot through his mane, followed by the growling voice of Overseer Globflint in his ears. “Number Eighty-Three! Report! What in blazes is going on down there?!”
“I've had a containment leak! I'm venting red steam! The lights are starting to dim along these struts!”
“How in Lilith's name did that happen?! Was there a rupture?!”
Eighty-Three should have answered that. He should have responded immediately like an obedient slave. However, he was suddenly assaulted by two memories. One was Twenty-Seven's howling screams. The second was the sight of two rusted tags in his leather pouch.
“I need help down here!” he eventually said. “Please send a backup team immediately! I can't contain this leak on my own!”
All he got was a sound of Globflint's cursing breath. His mane sparked again, and the airwaves went silent. He struggled with the valves for the space of five minutes, and was relieved to finally hear the hissing noise of elevator hydraulics to his flank. The platform lowered with a groan, and several collared goblins and trolls scampered over to join him. However, Overseer Globflint was also there. He watched, his meaty arms folded as he glared at the catastrophe, ominously waiting for the grunts to patch up the problem that Eighty-Three had started.
It took the better portion of an hour, but the leak was finally contained. One of the goblins had brought a gauge with him, and once the pipes were all patched up, he held the device in his grasp and bore a forlorn expression as he read it.
“Two batteries had to have been burnt out from that breach alone,” the slave said. “It's amazing we still have light down here.”
“Nnngh!” Another worker spun and frowned at Eighty-Three, shaking a gnarled fist. “Stupid horse filth! You realize how far back this puts us?!”
“We haven't even finished with the new landing pad!”
“I thought I had earned all my slips this moon cycle, you manure sucking piece of—”
“Silence , curs!” Overseer Globflint's massive lungs bellowed.
The servants became as quiet as stone. They stood back and formed a line as Globflint limped his hulking way towards the wilted sight of Eighty-Three.
“Worker, how did this happen?” The Overseer's eyes were like twin stars at the top of an infernal well. “How did you allow this rupture to take place on your watch?”
Eighty-Three barely lifted his face. He gazed into the depths of the pits. He saw the red glow of steam, the black surface of obsidian metal, the brown shades of brimstone and cesspools stretching on forever. Still, all he could think of was the verdant green of One Eleven's good eye, like the last glimpse into a living world before it was swallowed by putrid death.
“I... was distracted, Overseer.”
“Distracted?! Explain yourself!”
“I... have no excuse, Overseer,” Eighty-Three muttered. He felt a soreness beneath his collar as he trembled below the ogre's girth. “I was... negligent in my duties, and I allowed myself to ignore the key details that could have prevented this malfunction.”
The misty chamber was silent for a few moments, until a few snickering breaths broke the stillness.
“Heheheh... Egads... 'distracted.'”
“That sure didn't work for Twenty-Seven, did it?”
“Guess we're all eating horse meat tonight.”
“Heheheh—”
Globflint's metal leg stomped emphatically before the line of laborers. “Twenty-Seven...” The ogre sneered down at them. “... was a rancid piece of mucuous filth. He only pretended to work, like the most of you do. He would never think of taking responsibility for his mistakes, and that is why I left him to the whims of a merciless orc who would gladly eat each and every one of your for breakfast. So think hard about whose grace allows you to continue breathing before me, you worthless pigs!”
The slaves all bowed low with a mutual chorus of “Yes, Overseer” and “Thank you, Overseer.”
Eighty-Three was tactfully joining the gesture, when he suddenly felt a grubby hand yanking him harshly by the ear. He heard cartilage snapping from his skull as he was tossed like a bag of meat into the elevator car. As soon as his body slammed into the wall of the shaft, he felt his metal legs going limp. Overseer Globflint was marching stormily towards him, his hand on his remote's red button.
“Clean up this mess, you maggots!” The ogre shouted before punching the elevator controls. As the rattling platform ascended, he roared with finality, “Or I'll be making holes in each of you that no company of slaves could ever hope to fix!”
In the meantime, Eighty-Three was wincing, shivering. His torso twitched from the weight of his dead legs. Blood was trickling down from what was left of his ear as he gazed at the platforms flying down past them. Waves of crimson light bathed him as he heard the moans of battery sources ebbing and flowing like a tortured seashore.
“I've kept you in my employ this long for a reason, pony,” Globflint spoke in a muttering breath of disappointment. “No matter how many times the other slaves may have ridiculed or threatened you, I knew that you were better than them. Your diligent perseverance has always been a secret source of inspiration for the rest of the crew... until now.”
They reached the top floor of the hangars. The doors flew wide open. Globflint grabbed one of Eighty-Three's limbs with a meaty fist and dragged the paralyzed pony through the grimy corridors of the half-constructed landing pad.
“Is it enough that I deal with incompetent meatbags day in, day out, every moon cycle, that you have to disappoint me as well?!” The limping ogre seethed. Several curious orcs and trolls glanced over from their jobs to see the humiliating sight of Eighty-Three's dead weight scraping along the bulkheads. “If I had known you could be so foolish, I would have considered paying you in cyanide instead of strips—then that might make you of greater use to me than you are today!”
He came to a stop at the grimy door to a large trash receptacle. He slammed a fist over a button, opening the two-meter wide door.
“'Distracted?!'” Globflint growled, staring angrily into Eighty-Three's trembling face. Two pale eyes flickered like thunderclouds. “'Distracted?!' I'll give you something to be distracted about, you thankless, mindless sack of dung!”
With furious strength, he popped each of Eighty-Three's legs out of their sockets, one by one. He cast the metal limbs to the floor... before tossing Eighty-Three's spasming torso deep into the dark pit of refuse. Eighty-Three coughed and sputtered, rolling up against a slimy ball of leather scraps and organic waste.
“Lie there and rot, you incompetent slug!” Globflint's bellowing voice echoed through the black enclosure. “Think about what it'd be like to have spent all this time inside a battery compartment instead, along with all of ponydom's other failures, and then maybe... just maybe you'll come to understand whose mercy you've exhausted today!”
With that, the Overseer slammed the door to the garbage chute, and Eighty-Three's broken body was suspended in darkness.
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.
