We Is. For the longest time We have been Is, living in the wastes. We haven’t always had the luxury of being Is. For the longest time before becoming Is, We Was. We Was a creature without thought, doing without thinking, instinct given a body borne of blood and flesh. We do not know much of our times before Is, but We know that We would never go back. We are a creature of consumption.
For the longest times We have been prowling, seeking to commune with the others who are no longer living. We find them in the wastes, broken and bloodless, and add them to Our Self. It is never enough, and We always hunger for more. Their flesh fills us, satiates us for a time, but We always hunger for more knowledge.
We feast upon flesh from the animals, but this does not give us intelligence. Their inferior lobes can only give hints of instinct, never pangs of acumen. What We desire is to commune with a truly intelligent creature, to extend our tendrils through the bone of the skull and feast upon the richness of neurons trapped inside, to bring another into our fold. Only then could We improve Our comprehension, to grow and expand as a being.
The rotting and decomposing bodies of ponies that We find offer us morsels of thought. Many times they are desiccated, cooked to a crisp in the sun, and We can derive but the barest hint of biomass from their bodies. The brains are never intact, the connections between neurons rotted away into nothingness. We do not disparage at this, for occasionally there is something salvageable. From many, We take communion of their patterns into ourselves and incorporate it. From others the damage is too severe and We can only digest them.
Incorporation is our main method of expansion. Inside of Our Self We carry a living record of everything that We have communed with, a living record etched into a matrixing ladder of lockstep Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, Cytosine and Uracil to lock away our secrets in the genetic record. From what We take into ourselves We can create from anything We have ever sampled. Out current form bears the hallmarks of it - an equinoid body, the pony-form chosen for superior agility and malleability.
We Is most happy when We found a pony who had only been dead for half a day. The body still had the tiniest amount of warmth to Our touch, and with much enthusiasm We rushed to commune with their cerebrum, to penetrate their cerebral cortex, to taste the cerebellum. Treasures of treasures, it was the most magnificent body We had ever found! The words, the connections, the memories stored within the grey matter! Most were unusable, the connections having deteriorated after death, but what remained brought Us upwards, elevated Us into intelligence!! Joy of joys, we had found Legion!
We Knew! We had knowings of things that We had never seen! We knew of earth ponies, pegasi ponies, and unicorn ponies! We knew the name of a stallion: Firebrand, of a building buried in the vast mountains. We knew the names of friends, foals, acquaintances, lovers, enemies. We knew words, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs! We knew concepts! The memories are muddled, and We can only pull blurry images from them, but this is no problem, for We are content with Our bounty. Our mind spun with the possibilities, pouring over what the stallion had experienced, had lived until his death.
It took several hours to catalog the information that We communed. From it We expand our knowledge. We classified and organized the life of the stallion named Firebrand into ourselves. Now every part of Us contains a part of Him, and always will. He has found immortality in Us. No one must fear death for We are their saviour.
What We learned from both the body and mind was astounding. The pony-forms possess magical abilities. Those of Earth are kindred to plants and are endowed with strength, the Horned channel magical energy, the Winged could take to the sky.
We gave a chuckle to Ourselves, as the situation seemed ironic, one of the new words that We had learned. The stallion Fireband, while seemingly a worthless layabout in life had gained prominence in death. We would always remember him, always commemorate the one who gave Us our first true words, Our first true spark.
We resolved to commune with the remaining two types that We might have a more complete sampling of the abilities, a more varied understanding of the genome. To do this, we would need to leave what We now knew as desert and set off to other places. It struck Us for a moment that We didn’t have a name. We took a moment to dig through the memories, and the essence of ourselves hit Us in an instant. Armed with recently assimilated knowledge, and wearing Firebrand’s form We resolved to set forth and explore.
“Blue, you’re cut up pretty bad.”
“We can keep going. I can make it. I’m... I’m fine,” the pegasi mare stammered.
“Look, Blue, you’re barely standing as is. If you don’t let me fix you up, you’ll fall over dead,” RipEar said with a scowl, “I’ve told all this to you before.” He pushed Blue down to a sitting position, despite her protests.
He took a minute to examine her wounds, then muttered something to himself as he dug through his saddlebags.“Now that cut is pretty deep, but it’s just in the chest. He didn’t cut anything. You should count yourself lucky.” RipEar got to work packing the wound with gauze and started wrapping a bandage around it.
To keep her mind off her injury while RipEar was bandaging it, Blue concentrated her senses, trying to figure out what RipEar had noticed that had tipped him off about the concealed attacker. If she could figure out the trick, then maybe she wouldn’t be such a amatuer all the time. She focused herself and tried to listen.
She heard the wind in the trees, birdsong far away, and… a strange squelching sound, like when she was a filly in the facility and she’d gotten into mud when wearing her boots. The squelching noises repeated itself… sometimes faintly, but other times noticeably louder.
“Rip, what’s that noise?”
RipEar paused his ministrations for a moment, then started again. “It’s nothing. Just the wind in the leaves. Pipe down and let me work.”
Blue furrowed her brow. She listened intently for the noise, and heard it again. “It isn’t nothing! Tell me what it is RipEar!”
“Blue, you don’t want to know, okay?”
“No, I do want to know.”
“Blue,” RipEar gave a deep sigh. “When I got that stallion off of ya, I stabbed him real good in the chest. Judging from those noises, he’s got a collapsed lung. He’s dying real slow.”
“Could we save him?” Blue asked quietly.
RipEar snorted. “Blue, the moment that stallion attacked us, he’d signed his own death warrant. I ain’t gonna shed a tear for him. He was a scumbag through and through. Just give me a minute and I’ll be done. We need to get outta here before something else scents in on his blood.”
“But RipEar, maybe you could just-” RipEar suddenly stuck his hoof out and covered Blue’s muzzle, interrupting her next words. He’d just heard something. Leaves and branches trampled underfoot. Something was coming.
“It’s a mad’un, Blue. Keep quiet and stay low. It can’t see us from right here. We can get out of here if we don’t have to fight it.”
Blue peeked around the tree. The mad’un pony had trotted up to the dying robber, and was just standing there, looking. Something was off about the pony though;, it hadn’t been walking normally. The legs were moving all wrong. It gave an overall stilted look to the pony, further cementing that it was a mad’un in Blue’s mind. Still though, it stood there, over the mortally wounded stallion that had tried to attack them earlier.
Blue had almost edged her head back behind the tree when she heard what sounded like wet tearing. She cocked her head back around and nearly screamed at what she saw. In the moments that she’d looked away the mad’un pony had split down the middle, the chest swelling and the head tilting unnaturally back. The throat swelled and burst, a long tongue snaking out, lolling lazily in the air. The abomination gave a wheeze as it’s chest exploded outwards in a mass of writhing tendrils which shot down and stabbed into the dying robber, who could only gurgle in agony.
Blue slowly pulled her head back behind the tree in horror, shaking as the sounds of tearing meat filled the forest. She met the gaze of RipEar and nodded. Together they crawled along the forest floor, making as little sound as possible while the creature feasted in obvious ecstasy.
After they had gotten to a distance where they could no longer hear the noises, they stood up and galloped further away. After ten minutes of galloping, both ponies were lathered a fair bit and stopped for a rest.
“Blue, that’s why I always try to get around mad’uns,” he said, panting. “That thing would’ve killed us in a split second.”
“RipEar,” Blue said, panting hard as well. “I’m sorry. I messed up. Badly. If I’d been paying more attention… I… I wouldn’t have gotten us attacked.”
“It ain’t your fault Blue. You’ve lived in a facility most your life. You don’t have the experience.” RipEar checked the timepiece that he carried in his saddlebags. “I don’t want to stay in this forest a moment more than I have to. If we keep heading north we’ll hit Settler's Peak by daybreak, and then we might be able to get a hot meal and sleep in a real bed.”
We have been following the scent of blood for some time now. With Our nose We smelt it, and now with Our eyes We seek it. The assimilation of many woodland creatures has given Us a new wealth of additions. Our nose no longer contains the inferior pony-form receptors, but those of the wolf-form. With every draught of air We sniff, We lock in on the scent of blood. Pony blood has a unique smell. The wolves knew of it and now We knew of it.
It is not long before We find the small clearing in the trees, where the broken body of a Pony is located. We walk up and congratulate Ourselves on a successful tracking. This one is still alive. We have never communed with a living Pony before. The wealth of information contained in His brain matter, un-deteriorated, full of information, and waiting to be harvested makes Our jaws drool. We cannot believe Our good fortune.
We begin the rite of communion by shifting our form. The pony form is only a shell that contains Our tendrils of communion, and must be split for their release. With a most Glorious sound, we rip the shell asunder and release our multitude of communing tendrils.
He is trying to shift away from Us. He should not be fearful of Us, we only wish to commune with him, to make him a part of Us. We extend Our form and pin him to the forest floor with our tentacles, piercing his inelegant and unoptimized body. Soon He would know perfection, soon He would know Us and Our Selves.
One of our communion tendrils pierces the cranial cavity and we eagerly push it forward through the skull. In a matter of moments we have taken his essence into Our own. Onwards and onwards We rush and consume, worming through the cerebellum and taking it all for Ourselves.
Bounties most beautiful! We had exulted upon finding the corpse of a pony dead for a mere twelve hours, but the secrets that a living pony had unlocked filled Us with pleasure.! Memories, as clear as day. Faces, names, places, all known, and all catalogued into Our biological matrix.
We take Our time and assimilate the rest of the biomass at Our leisure. We take the pony-form of Fireband once more, and once again We set off. No more fumbling in the forest when We now knew where to seek the Pony prey. We seek Settler's Peak.
