Chapter 8: When the Stillness Comes

Phantasia Star stood alone on the slowly rising platform of the great elevator that led into and out of Stable 113. She’d left her two new friends down there after seeing them safely tucked into a pair of standard-issue Stable-Tec beds in the staff quarters. She had wondered a bit why they insisted on separate beds, after some of the sounds she’d heard coming from the showers earlier, but that wasn’t any of her business.

They’d invited her to take a bed and rest with them as well, but she’d gently refused. “I’ve slept enough,” she’d said, but doubted either of them knew or could even fathom what that statement had really meant to her.

Well, the black one might. Strange as she was, she’d seemed unusually perceptive to emotions. And, Phantasia had noticed, also kept looking at her in strange ways. Almost like she’d wanted to touch her in the kind of ways her husband did. The thought confused her a bit. Homosexuality wasn’t a big deal in the Equestria of old, of course. She’d seen others, even had friends with lovers of the same sex. But she’d never been on the receiving end of that kind of attention from another mare. And aside from the unfamiliarity of that situation, it felt wrong; disloyal of her to even consider it, especially not even having had the time to properly mourn her late husband. Still, knowing what she knew of Midnight Shadow, she was sure that the mare was probably not even aware she was doing it, and would quickly put a stop to it if asked. That had helped her feel more comfortable with the situation overall.

Two hundred thirty-nine years had somehow passed her by in what seemed like an instant. It still didn’t feel real. In cryogenic sleep, there was no awareness of the passage of time. It was like having surgery - one minute you’re being wheeled into the operating room, and then the next thing you’re aware of is being in recovery, unaware of the hours you’d spent in there being worked on. One minute, your eyes were frosting over, the next you were on the floor, over two centuries older but none the wiser. It had felt to her like a matter of hours at most, since the bombs started to fall. She clearly remembered that green fireball, the poisonous mushroom rising into the sky. She remembered the feeling of panic, the overdose of adrenaline shooting through her, even though her heart refused to race or thump in her chest the way it ought to have.

Even in that moment of terror, of being fully conscious that she was bearing witness to the death of the world she knew, she still could never forget. Could never escape the keen awareness that she was only half a pony.

She’d needed a walk. She’d needed to see outside. To see some of this radically changed world for herself. To see that there still was a world outside to see.

Phantasia looked up and saw the circle of dim light growing ever larger as the platform inched closer and closer to the surface. The stars still looked the same as they always had. The moon as well - all the watchers of the night sky continued to keep their cold, indifferent vigil, just as they always had. For what and why, ponykind might never know. The immortal princesses who once ruled this land were up there somewhere as well, the book Midnight had given her said. Fully deified now that their physical forms were gone, they were still worshipped and prayed to, but whether they knew, whether they cared, whether they even could intervene any longer, nopony knew.

The elevator came to a stop at the surface, and the yellow safety railings dropped back into their places around it, leaving her to stand here alone on this metal plate on top of the mesa. The full moon gave enough light to see unaided, but her enhanced vision helped her see farther into the distance than another pony would. The view around her didn’t seem much different than it had before. Sand, jagged rocks, dry scrub brush, the same as always.

The differences between then and now became more apparent as she started to descend the path down the mesa, back toward her neighborhood. She saw the gate where she’d shown her pass, where the ponies who didn’t have Stable passes were violently denied entry to the Stable area. The decay of it struck her. The basic structures still stood for the most part, but much of the wood used in the checkpoint’s construction was rotted, the window glass had been shot out, and the paint had badly chipped, allowing the metals underneath to corrode.

That corrosion was so bad that even though the gate had been closed and secured with locks, those locks exploded into a fine dust of oxidized metal with a kick that was only a tiny fraction of what Phantasia could muster.

She paused at the bottom of the trail to survey the neighborhood. The layout of the streets remained the same, but the sidewalks and pavement were split with cracks through which sickly-looking weeds had grown. The grass had died out long ago, what wild weeds would still grow having replaced them, and the trees were nothing but skeletal branches arching out over broken and splintered trunks. Their bark looked ashen white in the moonlight, but the sides of them that faced where the bomb had gone off had been burned black.

Many of the houses she passed by as she slowly walked down the street were nothing more than rubble. Those that still stood were so badly damaged that they barely counted as shelters. Not a pane of unbroken glass remained anywhere. The outer siding and tiles had been blown or burned away from both the outer walls and roofs in many places, exposing the skeletal metal framework beneath, and leaving the rooms inside open to the air.

As Phantasia slowly walked down those streets, she found herself comparing the scenery that was to what had been before, and the contrast struck deep inside her, where her heart would be if she still had one. Dread built up within her as she approached #39, the house where her little nuclear family had once lived. She didn’t want to go in there; didn’t want to see the ruin that she knew her home had become, just like all the others. But at the same time, she felt she had to. Curiosity, and a need for some measure of closure, pushed those metal hooves forward and up the concrete steps to the front door.

The heavy wooden door had its paint scorched and cracked along with the rest of the house’s facade, but it still stood. Fishing the key from her purse, she unlocked the door and slowly opened it. The sight of the inside was much as she had expected, but heartbreaking nonetheless. The entire living room was peppered with pieces of broken glass. Shelves stood crooked and empty, the things they had once held having been taken long before. The furniture was still present, but had aged badly in the elements to which they were now exposed, leaving them stained and worn. The kitchen beyond had been entirely cleaned out. Every scrap of food had been taken along with every small appliance - the rest of the hardware had been gutted for parts.

It was then that she heard the sound of a pony snoring. But where the sound would have made most ponies go cold, Phantasia had felt enraged. She didn’t care how much time had passed, this was her home, and whoever was sleeping here had not asked her permission to do so. Lowering her body into a crouch, she stalked silently toward the bedrooms, while considering her options. She had left Frostbite behind, not having intended to get into a fight here, and was carrying only the sidearm. But guns were noisy, and she didn’t know if the nearby houses were occupied. This left her with a small survival knife she kept in her right foreleg’s compartment area - the same place occupied by her Pip-Buck on the left. It would do.

Drawing it, she crept first into the bedroom she and her husband had once shared. There wasn’t much sense in calling it a room anymore since between the destruction of the windows and wall paneling it was pretty much exposed to the street. The bed had collapsed but there were a pair of ponies still attempting to sleep in it. They slept in their dirty, dingy leathers with bits of improvised armor attached to their jackets. Both were armed. This was going to be tricky to take both with just a knife.

But, she noticed that she might have an advantage. Among the glass shards on the floor were littered around them many spent chem containers - mostly Dash inhalers. Which meant that they were likely sleeping it off here, and would be too out of it to notice if one or the other were attacked. At least, she hoped they would. It had been a while, but she had done this sort of thing before.

She fell on them, embracing the first one from behind and silencing him with one hoof while the other pulled the blade of the knife across his throat, cutting deeply into the large blood vessels on both sides. The pony immediately came to life, trying desperately to struggle, to scream, to wrench himself away from his attacker, but her cyber-limbs would allow none of it. Gradually the pony’s struggling weakened as his muscles were deprived of the oxygen they needed to continue fighting, and soon after he was completely limp in her arms.

His partner was already starting to stir. Quickly Phantasia pinned her to the bed with her own body, smothering her muzzle with her hoof while driving that knife into the meeting point of her neck and shoulder, twisting to make sure the artery was completely severed before she pulled it out. Again, she felt the spray of hot red liquid and reveled in its caress upon her face and chest. The mare under her was looking at her with eyes widened in desperate terror as she tried and failed to plead for her life past the hoof that silenced her. But Phantasia remained implacable, knowing it was already too late for her in any case.

She turned toward the smaller bedroom across the hall. Inside, a stallion was trying to make himself comfortable on a bed sized for a colt, and managing only fitful sleep. His night ended in her deadly embrace as well, her limbs holding onto him, silencing him as she had the others while driving the knife into his kidney. She twisted, and felt a rush of almost sexual pleasure from the wash of hot blood over her belly. In an extra spark of cruelty, she sang a tender, soft lullabye into writhing stallion’s ear as he passed into eternal slumber. “Hush now, quiet now…”

She lay there on the floor with him for a moment after he’d stopped kicking, listening to the silence. Even in a quiet, remote suburb like this, there had always been a background noise. The lives and activities of others around combined to form it - not just ponies, but other animals, birds, even insects contributed to it. It wasn’t something one could even really describe as a sound, and most of the time one wasn’t even aware of it at all, but in very quiet moments, if a pony listened for it, it was there. The only times one usually experienced its absence was when it snowed at night, or if one ventured into very remote places far from civilization. Even then, though, that silence would be broken every so often by something nearby.

Here, there was nothing. Lying on the floor of what had been meant to Starlight Glimmer’s bedroom when he’d grown enough to not need his parents’ attention so frequently in the night, Phantasia found that she could gaze up at the stars through the holes in the roof, the ceiling tiles having either been removed or burned away long ago. That unnerving silence was roaring in her ears.

She started to laugh as she lay there, as the blood started to dry, making her skin feel tight. She couldn’t even tell why she was laughing. It started softly at first, then built into a crescendo of mad, howling laughter that metamorphosed itself into hysterical sobbing that she couldn’t stop.

So many battles fought. She remembered them all. Blood on the snow. The buzz of bullets like angry bees; the whine of energy weapons. Explosions. So many friends; so many comrades dead, maimed, brutalized. So much pain. And in the end, it had all been in vain. Everypony and everything she knew was gone. Equestria couldn’t be saved. “A fixed point in time,” she heard the faint echo of a stallion’s gentle voice saying from somewhere, soft and full of regret. “I’m so sorry.”

This land, this place, this house… It wasn’t her home anymore.

Nowhere was her home anymore.

She’d just murdered three ponies for nothing, Phantasia realized. For simply for daring to seek what shelter they could in a place that had once meant something to her. A long time had passed since then. She’d lost her claim to it. She was the one who didn’t belong here. She didn’t belong in this place, in this time, in this world.

With that understanding dawning on her, she was starting to really feel that loneliness that Midnight Shadow had talked about earlier, the kind that could all too easily swallow a pony up completely. She found herself wishing that the black pegasus was here with her now. Maybe she’d have stopped her. Maybe she’d have helped. Either way, it would have definitely been better not to be alone.

It would have been so easy to just give in. To take that EQP and finally do what she’d been too cowardly to do before. Squeeze the trigger. End it all. But she couldn’t. Not now. She couldn’t let herself be broken by this. She had no time to wallow in whatever ponies were supposed to wallow in. Starlight Glimmer was still out there, somewhere. Lost, alone, needing her, needing his mother. The time for mourning the loss of creation itself would come later.

With that, she dragged herself to her hooves again. Her legs felt so heavy now. Using a piece of the stallion’s ragged clothing, she wiped the blood from her knife before putting it away. Practicality guided her to spend a moment taking what she could from the bodies. They hadn’t had much. Their weapons were so poorly maintained that they were practically junk - as likely to kill them in a misfire as they were to harm anypony else. They’d had some ammo in various sizes, most of it completely wrong for what they carried. A few bottlecaps - the Survival Guide had insisted these were money now though Phantasia remained dubious - and a random assortment of prepackaged foods and bottled water.

From what they had, she was able to piece together a decentish leather cuirass which she put on over her stable barding. It featured a shoulder holster, and she’d felt better about keeping her old sidearm there rather then in her now completely overstuffed purse. Not a gem to be found, though. Her energy level was down to about 35% which was making her worry.

With that, she headed out, not even noticing the single blue bar that rotated around her EFS compass as she trotted past the bathroom. Not wanting to see any more, she climbed up to the top of the mesa, and took that long elevator ride back down into the Stable.

After a long shower she’d managed to scrub all the blood from herself, and she didn’t bother to dress again as she walked into the Stable staff quarters where Sapphire Star and Midnight Shadow peacefully slept. She laid down on another of the beds and made herself comfortable, intending to read more of the Survival Guide. With a sigh, she muttered to herself, “I should have just done this from the beginning.” She rapidly found, though, that she had to keep her natural eye closed as it refused to focus on the page. But even with her cyber-pony stamina, she was only able to get a few more pages read before she was asleep.

Author's Note

A short but emotional (for me at least) chapter. I sacrificed introducing a Codsworth type character in order to try and demonstrate that Phantasia's both not entirely stable and teetering between heroic and obviously evil. I'm not sure how successful that was.