Two Thousand Miles: Echoes of the Past

Chapters

Prologue
Chapter 1: The Forgemare
Chapter 2: The Catalyst
Chapter 3: The Last Sunrise
Chapter 4: Where Innocence Dies
Chapter 5: The Will to Live
Chapter 6: The Shadow of Death
Chapter 7: The Descent
Chapter 8: The Surface
Chapter 9: The Help of Strangers
Chapter 10: Where We Wander
Chapter 11: The Sentinels
Chapter 12: The Best Laid Plans
Chapter 13: Where We Draw the Line
Chapter 14: The Bird of Prey
Chapter 15: The Lives We Live
Chapter 16: The Score
Chapter 17: The Promises We Keep
Chapter 18: The Moments We Share
Chapter 19: The Birth of a Movement
Chapter 20: The Kindling Flame
Chapter 21: The Flock
Chapter 22: The Bird of Death
Chapter 23: Where Brother Fights Brother
Chapter 25: The Road to Recovery
Chapter 26: The Hope of the Future
Chapter 27: The Love that Joins Us
Chapter 28: The Calm Before
Chapter 29: Where We Draw the Line (Reprise)
Chapter 30: Where We Pay the Price
Chapter 31: The Survivors
Chapter 32: The Road that Lies Ahead
Epilogue
Chapter 24: The Disappearing Act

Prologue

The 24th Pegasus

Prologue

Alcohol was the first thing that told the unicorn she wasn’t alone. The acrid stench of whiskey on a pony’s breath rode in on the breeze, followed a second later by the sound of hoofsteps. She knew she should’ve been angry to smell that smell, but tonight, she let it slide. Different ponies dealt with stress in different ways, and it’d taken all of her willpower to leave that damn wooden box inside the shack behind her.

Although the unicorn’s ear flicked to the side, she made no other movements as a pegasus sat down next to her. Her orange eyes were fixed squarely on the western horizon, where the fiery blue sun was already halfway concealed. The strong breeze, so common to this region of the planet, pulled at her orange and yellow-streaked mane as she remained motionless. Her throat bobbed like she wanted to speak, but her lips refused to part for any words she might have said.

Sighing, the pegasus leaned against the unicorn, resting her head on the charcoal mare’s shoulder. “You alright?” she murmured, watching the sunset with her companion.

A twitch of a black ear. “Fine.”

It was a lie. Both ponies knew it. Awkward silence hung between them as they watched the blue sun slowly burrow itself in the pink mountains to the west, until finally it was gone. With a grunt, the pegasus crawled to her hooves and nuzzled the unicorn. “Make sure you get some sleep. We’re movin’ at dawn.”

The unicorn slowly, deliberately nodded, and the pegasus noticed her turning an old light disc recorder over in her hooves. She bit her lip and watched the unicorn for a few seconds longer, then shook her head and turned away. One of her wingtips brushed the unicorn’s shoulder, but again, the charcoal mare remained motionless. She didn’t even flinch at the sudden wash of air the pegasus’ wings kicked up behind her as she took to the skies, disappearing somewhere over the shantytown to the east.

When she was alone in the field, the unicorn picked up the recorder in her orange magic. She stared at it for several seconds, licked her lips, then pressed the red button on top. Immediately, the vents on the device glowed with flickering white light.

Lips moved as they fought for words to say. Strange, trilling noises echoed throughout the valley, and the white light flickered different colors as the recorder picked up the sound. Something about the sound stirred the mare, and finally, she began to speak.

“My name is Ember. You might have heard of me. You probably haven’t. It really doesn’t matter either way…”

She swallowed, and the rainbow of colors the recorder had been emitting returned to their blank, white state. Her teeth slid past each other as she parted her lips, and her tongue danced against the roof of her mouth. “Three months ago, I left my home on a journey that would take me across the continent. I hunted down High Queen Twilight’s message and stitched together the pieces. I met an ancient monarch in the mines beneath Atmorah and learned the dark secrets of Equus. I’ve seen things I never would’ve imagined, and I’ve done things I’ll regret for as long as I live. I’m no hero. I’m no icon. I’m just a mare who got in over her head, and somehow it’s brought me here.

“Tomorrow, it all ends,” she said, pausing to swallow and lick her lips. “Regardless of what happens, it ends tomorrow. If we lose… I want to leave this to whoever comes after me. If we win, I want Equus to hear this. This is my story, and I know that ponies can learn from it.

“I only hope they do; I won’t be around to see it. Please, please listen. I learned long ago that a message sent out of desperation can change a world. Let me change yours. I won’t have anything other than this one chance.

“Because tomorrow, I will die, and there’s nothing anypony can do to stop that.”

Chapter 1: The Forgemare

My story begins, like so many others, with a knock on the door. Unfortunately, the sudden noise breaking my concentration caused my hoof to touch one of the lasers I was working with, nudging it slightly off center. I could only widen my eyes as the spinning piece of metal it was focused on glowed bright red, warped, then shattered into hundreds of red hot shards—one of which found a new home in the soft flesh of my cheek.

Not exactly the perfect beginning to my story, really, but at least it sets the tone.

“Ember?!” The stallion’s voice accompanied the opening of the little sheet metal door, which rattled on its rusty hinges as he barged through. Black and white stripes blurred in my vision as the zebra rushed to my side and gently cradled my head while I flailed and gnashed my teeth. I heard a little masculine yelp that might have been the result of my teeth closing around his foreleg; honestly, the burning in my cheek wasn’t helping me think clearly.

The hoof to my horn did, however, snap me out of it, at least long enough to stop biting.

Strong hooves lifted me into a sitting position with my back resting against the rusted side of the lather (some horrendously evil pun on ‘laser’ and ‘lathe’ that made me want to go back a few hundred years and slap the creator) while the red haze from my vision slowly cleared. When it did, the four or five zebras in front of me fused into one, who was giving me quite the worried look with his green eyes. “You alright, Ember?”

I used my hooves to answer that question. To be fair, he should’ve seen it coming.

He recoiled from the sudden application of hoof to nose, rubbing his striped muzzle as I struggled to stand, only to end as a flailing mess. “Gauge, you fucking—gah!” I screamed, hissing in pain through my clenched teeth. Turns out having a three inch long shard of metal protruding from your face makes talking more than a little painful. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes, grabbed the fucking thing in my magic, and tore it free with a little more force than was absolutely necessary. I could’ve sworn I was going to pass out from the pain alone, and my head lolled back against the side of the lather.

The curved splinter of metal clattered to the ground somewhere by my tail, and I simply focused on breathing to keep the pain at bay. In, three, out, three. My hoof traveled to my cheek to stem the warm blood pouring from the wound, and I floated over a first aid kit hanging on the doorframe. I dug out a vinegar-soaked rag from a plastic bag and pressed it against my face, hissing as it reignited the pain and cleansed the wound. Simple and basic, yes, but really, when your colony’s almost two hundred winters late for a supply drop from the next star over, you make do with what you have.

“Let me see,” Gauge said, kneeling in front of me and taking the rag out of my magical grasp. He pulled it away from my face, inadvertently letting me see the red plastered to it, before refolding it and pressing it back. “You have any Stabil-Ice?”

“A small pouch,” I muttered, pulling it out of the kit. It was a little plastic pouch, not even bigger than my hoof, colored in faded blue and white lettering. They were fairly uncommon nowadays, but were practically divine, capable of closing up deep wounds almost instantly. On the one hoof, the cut to my face wasn’t life threatening. On the other, it wouldn’t stop bleeding until I used Stabil-Ice or got stitches. And stitches meant dull needles and thread made from a mare’s tail hair. Given without anesthetic. With more vinegar splashed into the wound so it didn’t get infected.

I primed the pouch by folding it in two, then dropped it in Gauge’s hoof and took a breath. Gauge, careful as always, tore the end off of the pouch with his teeth, took the rag away from my face, and squeezed the clear ooze into the wound. I gasped as an icy tingling seized hold of the left side of my face, then faded into numbness. A few experimental stretches of my jaw worked out the chilly touch of the gel while Gauge chucked the empty patch into the furnace at the end of the room.

“Better?” he asked, offering a hoof to help me stand.

“Meh,” I responded, taking his hoof in my own. He heaved, pulling me to my hooves, and I rubbed the now-closed wound on my face. “Now I have to explain to Mom why I used one of our pouches.”

“I’m sure she’ll understand,” Gauge said, stepping to the side and eyeing the other shards of metal on the floor. “What were you even working on?”

“Barrel for Fortitude,” I muttered, picking up all the pieces of steel and throwing them in a melting pot sitting next to the furnace. My little forge was a mess, with tools strewn all over the various counters and benches, all illuminated by the flickering orange light of the furnace placed in the corner. I shut the laser lathe off with the flick of a switch, then gathered all the parts to a disassembled rifle I had lying on a workbench. With expert, almost mindless precision, I put the rifle back together without even looking at it, then set it aside.

Yeah, I’m pretty good with guns. I’ve had a lot of practice with them.

Gauge gave it a little poke with his hoof. “And why are you taking apart your family’s heirloom?”

“Because the barrel is worn and crooked, and the thing’s not accurate beyond fifty yards.” I slapped a hoof on the schematics I’d drawn up, which in turn were crammed to the sides of some older diagram that must’ve been drawn at least eighty winters ago. “I was trying to make a barrel myself, but out of proper steel instead of that cheap aluminum alloy Equestria used to make everything out of. The steel will give it some forward weight so it doesn’t recoil as much, and it won’t be damaged as easily as the old aluminum barrel.”

“I see. And how did this cause a shard of steel to become embedded in your face?”

I didn’t have to see him to know he was giving me that sly half-smirk of his. “Because our lather is two hundred winters overdue for a tune up, the controller circuits in the vertical beam are fried, and the horizontal beam’s optics are a broken pair of glasses and a magnifying glass. Any sudden movements to the lasers caused by, I don’t know, the machinist getting startled while she’s adjusting them can cause the spinning metal to warp and bend instead of vaporize, and then the torque rips the thing to pieces.” I spun around and pressed my hoof into his chest. “That’s how.”

The corner of Gauge’s striped muzzle twitched. “Sounds like a personal problem.”

“Oh, it’ll be your fucking personal problem,” I grumbled, turning back to my workstation and placing my tools back where they belonged. A quick flash of my horn was all it took to get things back into place. “What do you want? SCaR need new parts?”

At the mention of its name, a little drone about the size of my head chirped from outside and whizzed into the room on a pair of thrusters. Once upon a time, it was an old military drone, used for defending the base. That’s what its name stood for: Surveillance, Combat, and Reconnaissance. Gauge had managed to cobble together enough parts to repair one of them after they’d been just lying around for a hundred winters or so, and now it followed him around like a dog. It was pretty cute, really. Even if it did have an electric probe that could tase a mare and leave her paralyzed for a few minutes.

I should know. I’d slapped Gauge once before he’d gotten safeties programmed into it. SCaR didn’t like that very much.

“No, he’s good as ever,” Gauge said, leaning on the workbench with one elbow and smiling at the drone. It made a happy trilling noise and began to idly wander around my forge. “Nova sent me to get you. She wants you to be there when the techies run the tests.”

“Figures she’d send a dirty greaser to let me know,” I teased, trotting over to the furnace. I closed the vents and then shut the door to snuff out the oxygen supply and save the fuel inside for later. “They finally finished repairing Dish One?”

“We finished repairing Dish One, yes, thank you,” Gauge replied, pressing a grease-stained hoof to his chest. “The techies were just playing with their code and calculations and that sort of thing while we did the hard work. But now that that’s finally finished, they want to get started as soon as possible.”

I nodded, imagining just how antsy the techies must’ve been to get going. Maybe we could get some radio transmissions from the rest of Auris. It was one of the few ways that we knew we weren’t alone on this damn planet—whenever they occasionally trickled in. Since the radio tower we had broke a few winters ago, though, we hadn’t heard anything.

I tossed a box of .308 rounds onto a shelf above my workstation and turned back to Gauge. “Well, we don’t want to keep Nova waiting, then. Somepony has to make sure she doesn’t chew her own hoof off.”

“Working on it,” he said, shaking his head. He pivoted on the black soil and began walking towards the open door while I followed not far behind, SCaR hovering around us. “There’s only so much you can do to get a mare out of a nervous habit.”

“True that,” I muttered, then raised a hoof over my eyes as I stepped out of the forge and into the bright blue sun. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the light, then set off after Gauge, leaving the forge behind. Ahead of us, on the other side of town, three enormous structures loomed, alien constructions on an alien world. They were all massive satellite dishes, or at one point, they had been. Only one dish was still mostly whole, while the second was pockmarked with missing panels and holes across its face, and the third was just a skeleton of steel and titanium, its aluminum dish long since torn down and scrapped for parts. Many of those panels made up the buildings around me as I walked down the ashy streets.

The crisp mountain air seemed to slice its way under the hot soot clinging to my coat, peeling back layers of sweat and ash to make me feel alive again. I hummed as the bright blue light beamed down on me, providing just enough warmth to offset the high-altitude chill. Of all the places to be stranded on a foreign world, this one didn’t have much to complain about.

Except winter. Fuck winter.

Gauge bumped into me, drawing me out of my thoughts. He had that sly half-smile on his striped mug I knew all too well. “You taking everything in for one last time before Equestria picks us up?”

I rolled my eyes and shouldered him back. “Oh, definitely. It’ll be tough giving up the clean air and the view for hot water and a steady food supply. Oh, and working tools.”

“You know, I always thought that was part of the fun.” He winked at me as we skirted around the rickety porch of an aluminum shack and continued down the road. “I mean, not many forgemares can find so many different uses for aluminum.”

“Not many forgemares have only aluminum to work with,” I grumbled.

Gauge chuckled and flicked an ear at another zebra as we passed. “That’s even assuming there’s forgemares left on Equus.”

“Eh, fair point,” I conceded. I puffed out my chest and grinned. “I’ll take pride in being the best forgemare I know.”

“I think your mom still has you beat.”

“Shut up.”

Though by no means a large settlement, Blackwash was still big enough that it took some time to cross from one end of the mountaintop to the other. The walk took close to fifteen minutes, five minutes longer than it would’ve taken had the streets been empty, but it was thirteen in the morning, with another hour left until noon, and ponies (and a few zebra families) were beginning to fill the streets for lunch. An excited buzz hung over Blackwash, filling the spaces in their conversations. Everypony knew that something big was supposed to happen today involving Dish One, although nopony really knew what it was. Access to the dishes was restricted to techies, greasers, and militia. Thankfully for me, I was friends with both the techies and the greasers, and was training to become a militiamare myself. Nopony cared that I technically wasn’t a part of any of the three factions.

A rusted chain-link fence topped with jagged razor wire separated the listening outpost and the radio dishes from the rest of town. Signs that’d all but faded away from the intense blue sunlight over three centuries warned that the razor wire was also carrying a deadly arcing current designed to fry pegasi flying overhead. Clearly the signs were out of date, as I saw half a dozen pegasi glide over the fences in either direction as they came and went from the station. We’d needed that generator for other things a long time ago. I made a mental note to salvage the signs later for their aluminum.

Gauge and I shared a few words with the guards on duty, Maxima and Soil Toil (the latter of whom simply called himself Toil, because honestly, even I had to agree that the name his parents gave him was dumb), and entered the compound. Lots of flat ground, perfect for marching and drilling practices, occupied most of the space within the fence. At the far end were the buildings that made up the compound, and they were, like all pre-Silence Equestrian architecture, flank ugly. Harsh, squat structures made out of steel and aluminum, with sharp edges, small windows, and imposing doorways. Two overbearing multi-story buildings made up the barracks, which nowadays housed the techie, greaser, and militia families who didn’t have homes in town itself. The buildings exuded power, dominating the will, reminding you that you were a piece of the Equestrian machine, designed to serve and support the glory and prosperity of your nation.

Our Equestrian flags had worn away into tatters long before I was born. Guess they weren’t as powerful as they wanted us to believe.

The listening outpost itself was smaller and distinctly prefab. A few rectangular rooms were connected together with square hallways, then fastened with bolts to keep them in place. A huge blast door blocked entrance into the structure, which I always thought was strange, since Gauge told me that the walls were only an inch of steel thick. Even I could cut through that with my lasertorch, given a few minutes. But, like the barracks sitting a few hundred yards away, Equestria really did like to go all-out. Just not on the things that really mattered.

I stepped aside as Gauge approached the blast door and placed his hoof on a frog scanner. Even though I was more or less welcome within the outpost, I still didn’t have clearance to the door, and I likely never would. Only the techies and greasers were allowed in and out of the building unsupervised, and no matter how much I pestered Nova to get my hoof into the system as well, she always refused. I guess even when your dad’s the head honcho of the town, you don’t make exceptions.

Oh, yeah, that. Nova’s dad was the ‘mayor’ of Blackwash, I’d guess you call it. He didn’t really go by any title like that, though. We all just called him Chief Technician, or Stardust if we knew each other well. And since Nova and I were lifelong friends from when we were just little fillies, I knew him fairly well.

The door opened with a pneumatic hiss that was more akin to the death throes of a shrieking shrike than the gliding silence one would expect. A stuffy, dingy, rusty hallway led deeper into the prefab structure, with the ribs supporting its shape plainly showing, and the floorboards little more than dented metal grates between the ribbing. Gauge stepped inside first, his hooves making the grates dully rattle, and I followed at a tail length’s distance. There were a few greasers milling about the halls, and we exchanged some words and greasy hoof bumps with them as we passed. I didn’t mind the grease; after all, I was covered from head to tail in soot from the forge. What’s a little grease and grime on top of that?

The command room of the listening outpost was a hive of activity. Desks, panels, and blinking lights that I’d long since given up on making heads or tails out of were all but covered in papers and notes. Three dozen ponies wearing lab coats in various states of decay scurried back and forth across the room like they were trying to be everywhere at once. Their excited (and nervous) chatter filled the room, and I had to dart backwards several times to avoid getting taken out by a techie with their nose in a clipboard. After a fair bit of shuffling, Gauge and I made it to the corner of the room, which offered the smallest chance of being on the wrong end of a hit-and-run from an egghead.

It didn’t take us long to find Nova; her pristine white coat and blazing red mane stood out like a sore hoof in the dim lighting of the room. She and her dad, who was pretty big for a pegasus, were talking in the center of the room, but I couldn’t make out the words over the noise of the other techies. Stardust caught sight of us first, and patting Nova on the back, he opened a wing in our direction. Nova’s turquoise eyes found us almost immediately, and with a flutter of her own wings, she crossed the room in one bound.

“You made it just in time!” she shouted, landing on her forehooves and letting her momentum carry her muzzle forward into Gauge’s. Her wings fluttered to keep her hind legs off the ground and balance her on the tips of her forehooves as she and Gauge kissed. Seeing the large zebra and the mare I had a full head over meet for a kiss somewhere in the middle was totally adorable. SCaR just made some stuttering noise that was probably its best imitation of rolling eyes it didn’t have.

“I figured you’d need some moral support,” I teased, reaching forward and ruffling Nova’s mane when she and Gauge finally finished their tonsil hockey. She made some mewling protest and skirted away from my hoof, then held her wing out and rubbed her head back and forth against the crest to muss her mane back into its natural position. Once again I was reminded how pegasi seemed to have more bird in them than they let on. “So you’re gonna bring us back to Equus, right?”

Nova rolled her eyes, once again straddling that line between ‘playfully immature’ and ‘educated genius’. “Honestly, Ember, I really don’t think Equestria’s just waiting for us to get the outpost up and running again, assuming there even is an Equestria left. All we’re hoping for is some parting message, some explanation why.”

She waved a wing, and Gauge and I followed her bounding walk back to the terminals in the center of the room. Her father had already moved away to talk with some other techies by a massive stack of recording equipment, leaving the three of us to simply talk amongst ourselves. While Nova flung herself into a threadbare cushioned seat and did some science stuff to the dials and switches in front of her, I grabbed one of the clipboards lying at her desk and brought it up to my face. It was filled with scary symbols I didn’t really understand, and I tossed it aside almost immediately.

“Why is math so scary?” I asked, pointing to the clipboard. “Like, how can you even make sense of all that?”

“Through a lot of practice and even more patience,” Nova responded. Her wing swept up all the clipboards and set them aside, and her hooves began to tap dance on the keyboard and poke at the holographic screen in front of her as she queued up some something or other. “Thankfully, we already did all the math for today a while ago. Today we just sit back and listen.”

Well, that was comforting at least. If there was going to be complicated math involved, I didn’t want any part of this.

Gauge sat down by Nova’s side and rested his head against her downy coat. “When are you gonna get started?” he asked in that soft, sweet voice of his. Sometimes I don’t think Nova realized how lucky she was to have a stallion like him. I certainly realized it.

“When my dad finally gets around to it,” Nova said, shaking her head. I saw Stardust standing in the back of the room, sharing a laugh with some of the older techies who’d undeniably been spending their entire lives working up to this moment. He happened to glance in our direction, where Nova was exasperatedly waving her forelimbs. With that, he said a few last words to the other techies and began to trot over. Good thing, too; I was starting to be afraid that Nova was going to explode if this got put off any longer.

“Ember! Gauge! Happy to see you here!” Stardust bellowed, his booming voice rattling my teeth in my jaw. He gave Gauge a hug then wrapped his forearms around my midsection in a terrifying embrace that took my hooves off of the floor before gently putting me back down again.

“Ack… You too,” I wheezed, pressing a hoof to my presumably bruised ribs as I stumbled backwards. He often forgot that even though I’m a forgemare, I didn’t have warrior’s blood like his race, and I wasn’t really built to be marehandled. I didn’t know how Nova managed to survive until adulthood. Pegasi, am I right?

By the time I caught my breath, Gauge was snickering (wisely outside of my reach) and Nova and Stardust exchanged kisses on each other’s cheeks. One of Stardust’s mighty wings wrapped around his daughter and his eyes darted over the flickering holographic displays before them. “Do you have everything ready?” he asked.

“Everything’s been ready for a while,” Nova droned, flicking his snout with a feather. “Sensors are calibrated and we’ve got fresh discs in the recorders. Let’s do this already.”

Stardust chuckled and patted Nova on the shoulder. “Calm down, my little shooting star, you’re not the only one that’s excited. But if Equestria’s been silent for two hundred winters, then I don’t think a few minutes will hurt.”

He stood up to his full height, which was at least another head and a half on me (seriously, he’s a pegasus, they’re all supposed to be shorter than unicorns), and trotted toward the front of the room. The mere movement of such an enormous body drew everypony’s attention, and by the time he was finally there, he didn’t even have to ask for silence. It was already given.

Stardust looked around him for a few seconds, flustered, then gasped like he suddenly had an idea. His teeth found the back of an old chair and he dragged it in front of him. Placing his front hooves on the chair, he stood up straight, thoughtfully moved his jaw from side to side, then made a gagging noise. Wiping his muzzle with his hoof, he put a large smile on his face. “Ech, there’s just no taste like three hundred year old chair, right?”

That earned a chuckle from everypony present, myself included. Stardust clapped his hooves together and looked around the room. “Well, I’m going to keep this short. We’ve poured a lot of effort into this, long days and sleepless nights, and some of us have spent years working on this project. Stars, it’s been my life’s work for a long time. If my daughter hadn’t joined me, I don’t know where I’d be.”

Nova fidgeted under his gaze, and I elbowed her as a few ponies around the room cheered and whistled. She responded by lightly shoving me, to which I snickered. It was always adorable making ponies with lighter coats blush.

As the noise quietened down again, Stardust shuffled his wings and nodded. “It’s been a long journey to get here. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears from everypony in this room, techie and greaser alike.” He nodded in Gauge’s direction, and Gauge nodded back. A few whistles and playful insults from some of the greasers who were present also added to the response. “But enough about that. How’s about we dial in Equestria and ask them why they’re late to dinner?”

Cheers answered him, and a lot of them, too. But by the time the noise died out, everypony had shifted to business. Techies ran to and fro between machines, and many more sat down at desks like Nova’s and put on headsets. I began to stand, feeling awfully out of place in the middle of this oiled machine, but a look from Nova made me stay. The subtle pleading in her eyes told me all I needed to know.

All the ponies hustling back and forth, the noise and commands shouted from one end of the room to the other, it all made me feel like I was sitting in the middle of a prickwing hive, and I was understandably uncomfortable. In case you’re not from Auris, they’re abominations which more or less resemble some unholy combination of a hornet, a mosquito, and a spider. At least when ponies are scared of bugs here, they have a good reason.

As the techies went about their business, all I could do was sit back, try to relax, and (hopefully) enjoy the show. On the other side of Nova, Gauge leaned in and gently ran his striped hoof down the gap between Nova’s wings, making them involuntarily flutter at her sides. She shot him a flirty look, pecked him on the nose, then pressed her face into the holographic display in front of her as her colleagues cried out over one another. SCaR, meanwhile, patrolled idly around the perimeter of the room. I guess old programming dies hard.

“Power supply connected.”

“Maximal draw to the receivers; let’s get them warmed up, they haven’t been on in a long time.”

“EM Recorders on standby. All other systems nominal.”

“Good. Open ‘er up.”

Nova sat up straighter, and both Gauge and I leaned in as she tapped a button on her headset and then stuck her hoof through the flickering holographic display. “Signal processing beginning… data flow in five, four, three, two, one…”

The holographic panel turned green, and the machinery in the back of the room chattered to life. There was a click from above as the speakers turned on and gentle static began to pour into the room. The techies let out a few triumphant cheers, and Nova was absolutely beaming. She let out a little gasp, kissed Gauge, then turned to me, mouth already beginning to form words.

And then I heard something that I wasn’t expecting. And based on the look on Nova’s face, she wasn’t expecting it either. Over the speakers came a sound, one tiny note, that paralyzed the entire room. It lasted for a fraction of a second before it was gone, and after a few seconds, it was followed by an identical tone. And another one. And another one.

Then the machinery chattered to life to the sound that would change my world forever.

Beep.

Chapter 2: The Catalyst

There’s a little something to be said about radio when it comes to an abandoned colony world literally light years away from civilization. First off, it might as well be magic. When almost everypony who knows anything about how technology works dies in the first five years after losing contact with your homeworld, you’re not leaving a lot of knowledge to be passed on to those who come later. Second, when the only thing resembling a government entirely collapses in that time, and ponies are killing each other over manufactured goods and resources because there’s nothing to stop them, you kick civilization in the balls and it keels over faster than you can blink. Now, with nopony left who knows how the old technology of Equestria works, and no government to hold the fracturing pieces of civilization together to try and train somepony new to figure it out, how hard do you think it is for the survivors of the apocalypse to scrape together enough knowledge and know-how to repair an ancient satellite dish and actually get it to work? Nothing short of a miracle, if you ask me.

You know what they say about the best of times and the worst of times?

In hindsight, I think that’s the point when I should have realized that we’d all just doomed ourselves.

But that wasn’t on my mind, nor anypony else’s, as the room beeped at us. Everypony simply stood in mute shock at what they were hearing, frozen in place, as the sounds of a world we thought long dead were played before us.

“Stars above,” Nova murmured, her eyes fixed on the display in front of her. It pulsed white with every little beep, and a little white square blinked in the corner of a text box, accompanied by strings of code I couldn’t make any sense of. By the look on Gauge’s face, he had no idea what it was supposed to mean either.

Thankfully, there was one pony who wasn’t star struck like everypony else. Stardust took one look at the display on Nova’s screen, looked around the room, and stomped his hooves. His enormous Clydesdaleian hooves (really that was the only explanation for his size) thundered on the metal grates, snapping everypony out of it. Being close to ground zero, I jumped and flattened my ears, which offered me some respite from his booming voice, which immediately followed his hoof and rattled the teeth in my jaw. “Well? Are we going to stand here and listen to the birdies, or are we going to figure out just what we’re hearing?”

Murmurs filled the room, so I assumed that he had his intended effect. At my left, Nova shook her head and poked at the screen in front of her. “Right. It… It looks like some sort of automated hail. The right ascension and declination measurements for the…” she peered at a clock on the far side of the room, “twenty-fourth of August, at thirteen thirty-nine indicate that the point of origin is…” Her voice caught in her throat, and she wiped her muzzle with the tip of a wing. “Equus?”

A rising buzz filled the air, and I fought really hard to keep my hooves still. Could it be? Could we really be hearing from Equus? After all this time?

But Stardust shook his head. He rested his forelegs on the back of Nova’s chair and hummed as he looked at her screen. “No, it couldn’t be from Equus,” he said, deflating my hopes in a single sentence. “That would mean that the FTL beacons are still functional after more than two centuries of abandonment to cosmic weathering. It’s also not planetary in origin; the signal isn’t distorted from distance, it’s still clear.”

“So whatever it is, it’s close,” Nova said, furrowing her brow. Gauge and I shared confused and concerned looks with each other from opposite sides of the white pegasus. Close?

“Local system,” Stardust said, nodding. “Meaning that we’re likely hearing from a probe.”

“Or a spacecraft?” Nova asked, tipping her head back to look up at her father.

Stardust chuckled and tousled Nova’s mane, at least until she ducked away. “Don’t get your hopes up, kiddo. Focus on what we know.”

“Right.” Nova’s hooves danced across the holoscreen, and I saw a big ‘HAILING’ display across the middle. “Attempting to establish communications.”

A gargantuan hoof massaged the little mare’s shoulder. “Good. Don’t forget to put it up on the big screen so everypony can see.”

A few more button presses from Nova was all it took to do so. At the front of the room, placed against the wall, two metal bars arranged parallel to each other began to glow. They were laser displays, and I really only knew that because I had to fabricate parts to repair one of them once. Once the displays had warmed up, they shot beams of white light at each other, which began to contort and produce an image. It was a little fuzzy (I’m sure half of the lenses on those lasers are covered in dust and ash), but it worked, and soon Nova had a copy of her holoscreen on display at the front of the room for everypony to gawk at.

Yes, I mean gawk. At least, that’s what I was doing.

Within seconds of being displayed up front, the big ‘hailing’ message had disappeared, along with the beeping that had been filling the room. It plunged the room into a deathly silence, save for the quiet chatter of the machinery in the back and the hum of SCaR’s thrusters, and I found myself holding my breath.

And then… it happened.

The machines in the back of the room whirred to life with a feverish pitch, and a flexible strip of glass began to enter one large machine from the top and exit from the bottom with little etches decorating its face. Matching the machines beat for beat, noise for noise, the laser displays at the front of the room began to spew out text:

DATA TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

SECURING ENSA SATCOMM UPLINK…………100%

LOCAL TIME: [24.08.0195 1339]

TRAVEL TIME: 269 YR 3 MO 17 DA

WARNING! INTEGRITY 31%

INITIATE EMERGENCY FILE BROADCAST…………100%

DOWNLOADING FILE…………

“Hold on,” I said, reading the message again, then a third time, and a fourth time to make sure I was seeing this right. “This thing’s been travelling for two hundred and sixty-nine years?”

“I’m amazed it even works after that long,” Gauge said, shaking his head. “ENSA built all of their toys to last.”

I cocked my head to the side. “ENSA?”

“The Equestrian National Space Agency,” Nova answered for him, without taking her eyes off of the screen. “And if this thing was launched almost two hundred and seventy years ago…”

Stardust leaned in and stroked his chin. “It was launched near the beginning of the Silence.” He shook his head. “Equestria must’ve launched this right before everything went dark. But why?”

“Wait,” I said, and I even held up a hoof for emphasis. “Wasn’t the Silence only two hundred winters ago?”

“Winters, yes,” Stardust said. “The Auris calendar year is longer than Equus, because it takes longer for our planet to orbit the sun. Two hundred and seventy years on Equus is roughly two hundred winters for us.”

I guess that made sense. I wasn’t used to thinking of the universe as different planets going through life in different rhythms. All I knew was Auris, and that’s all I’d ever know, no matter how much I wished otherwise.

The screen decided to change at that moment, catching us all by surprise. For a second, all we saw was a blank, white rectangle at the front of the room, occasionally flickering or pulsing as ancient technology still tried to perform to standard so many years later. We collectively held our breaths, twenty nerds, a half dozen mechanics, a machinist, and a drone (though I doubt it cared), until the screen flickered again, and more words appeared:

FILE DOWNLOADED

ENCRYPTION LEVEL: ONYX STAR

POWER SUPPLY: 63%

SIGNAL STRENGTH: ADEQUATE

PINGING STATIONS…………

That seemed to get some nervous whispers among the techies present. Even Nova had a worried, almost haunted frown on her muzzle. Behind her, her dad swallowed hard and took a step back, his wings moving at his sides. I’d learned from Nova that it was a sign of anxiety.

It definitely didn’t make me, the clueless forgemare, feel any better.

“What… what does that mean?” I asked, looking between them and the screen for answers, and finding none. I gently tapped Nova on the shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “Well?”

Nova licked her lips before responding. “Almost all files that Equestria used to send to Auris had some level of encryption on them, with ‘White Lily’ being the weakest, and ‘Onyx Star’ being the strongest.” She leaned back in her chair and began chewing on her feathers. “What could they have sent that’s that important?”

“Forget that,” Stardust said, gesturing to the last line on the screen. “What’s this about pinging stations?”

“Well, Blackwash was a listening outpost a long time ago, right?” Gauge asked. We all turned to him as he elaborated. “It wouldn’t make much sense in having a station like this if it didn’t need to send what it heard somewhere else.”

“Then where are they?” I asked, frowning at the screen. “Are they even around? Is there anything left?”

Now, simply waiting a few seconds would’ve given me the answer I wanted, or at least shed some light on this mystery. But it’s important to note that at the time, Blackwash was the only thing I knew. As far as I was concerned, Auris was this mountain, and Blackwash was its sole city. I wasn’t a pegasus, so scaling down the side of the mountain wasn’t practical, but more importantly, I’d never seen another town, settlement, or whatever. The only ponies I knew were ponies from Blackwash, and even though we’d occasionally get radio signals from elsewhere on the planet, we never had anything physical to associate them with. Blackwash was alone, but we were safe, and as I’d soon learn, our isolation wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Instead of answering, Nova merely pointed, and I swung my head from them to the screen to see that it’d already given me the answer.

PINGING STATIONS…………100%

INSTALLATION ICB77-1: RESPONSE RECEIVED

INSTALLATION CDL01-Y: RESPONSE RECEIVED

INSTALLATION BGX37: RESPONSE RECEIVED

INSTALLATION BMR9A: RESPONSE RECEIVED

INSTALLATION SFR04-T: RESPONSE RECEIVED

INSTALLATION HKN19: RESPONSE RECEIVED

I can’t tell you how useful a map of Auris would’ve been right about now. Sadly, I think the maps we might’ve once had were used as kindling decades ago. Much more concerning at the moment were the ‘response received’ messages displayed on screen. I didn’t know exactly what they meant, or what we might have done, but a bad feeling settled in my gut. Remember how I said we were lucky to be isolated from the rest of Auris?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. All any of us knew right now was that somehow, for some reason, our little mountain home had just sent a greeting to the rest of Auris, and got six responses.

Then the screen changed again, and the words appeared at an even more frantic pace than any of the previous messages:

WARNING!!! ATTEMPTING TO ACCESS ENCRYPTED FILES!!!

ENCRYPTION LEVEL: ONYX STAR

LOCKING FILES…

OVERRIDE: EOH PROTOCOL DUSK

EMERGENCY OVERRIDE INITIATED

ROUTING EMERGENCY FILE BROADCAST

FILES DOWNLOADED: 7/7

BROADCASTING FILES…………100%

ACTIVATING GPS…………

ERROR!!! COULD NOT CONNECT TO SATELLITES

ACTIVATING WISPR COORDINATE TAG…………100%

BROADCASTING DISTRESS FREQUENCY 27.065MHZ

FAFA | E | 36-J

By this point, I was getting sick of stunned silences. We all waited what felt like an eternity for the screen to change, too shocked to start speaking again just in case this little probe somewhere in our solar system decided to send us any more messages. But after one long, tense minute, the screen hadn’t changed. Whatever Equestria had wanted to say to us, they’d said it.

I came here expecting answers, and instead I’d gotten a million more questions. It was more than a little frustrating, and more than a little frightening.

“I take it nopony else knows what that all means,” I murmured, unable to look away from a dead world’s confusing last message to its daughter. The more I tried to make sense of it, the more confused I got. At least steel was never this confusing. I decided I liked the simple life of a machinist compared to solving the riddles of an era long gone.

“Whatever it means, I know one thing for certain,” Gauge said, sitting on his rear and crossing his forelegs as he stared up at the screen. “There’s a broadcaster somewhere in this facility, and Equestria’s little message turned it on. Twenty-seven megahertz is in the high frequency range. Those are the ones that can reflect off of the ionosphere, and since Auris has a really strong one, there isn’t a lot of distortion when they do.”

“So… what?” I asked, holding my hooves out. “So Blackwash is sending a distress signal that’s bouncing around the planet?”

“That’s the general gist of it,” he said. He rubbed his muzzle with his hoof (I’m not sure if he actually liked the taste of grease or if he’d just gotten used to it) and frowned. “Basically, Blackwash is sending out a distress signal, and it’s in the appropriate bandwidth to cover the entire planet. If there are ponies listening at the right frequency, then they’ll hear us for sure.”

“That frequency’s what the military used to use for all of their communications across Auris,” Stardust interjected, pointing to the number on the screen. “If ponies have taken control of any other stations like this one, then undoubtedly they’d have that number, too.”

I thought about this for a second, and what I heard was equal parts exciting and terrifying. “So what you’re saying is that almost everypony with a radio knows we’re here now.”

“Right. And these stations—wherever they are—know more specifically that we’ve made contact with something from Equestria,” Stardust said. “If there’s anypony there, they’ll want to know what we heard.”

“But what did we hear?” Nova asked, and I was happy I wasn’t the only one asking questions. “FAFA? E 36-J? What does that all mean? And what about the broadcasting files part? Did it… send files to the other stations it contacted?”

Stardust gently massaged his hooves on Nova’s shoulders. “It must be a code of some sort,” he said, frowning at the screen. “Whatever was in that probe overrode its own encryption, but the message is still in code.” He looked over his shoulder at a pair of techies at a desk behind him, and pointed with his wing. “Go see if you can find any old codebooks. Maybe they’ll shed some clues on this mystery.”

The two techies both nodded and trotted away, heading towards the back of the room. Stardust turned around, only for Gauge to be looking up at him. “What should we do? It doesn’t look like the signal’s going to send anything more.”

Stardust thought for a moment, then stood up straight to address the room. “Okay, everypony, listen up,” he said, his loud voice immediately silencing several hushed conversations. “What happened here today stays in this room, you understand? The rest of Blackwash doesn’t need to know about what we heard today. In fact, don’t tell them that we heard anything. If they ask, just tell them that we got the dish up and running, alright?”

A jumbled chorus of yes’s answered him, and he nodded. “Take the rest of the day off. We’re not going to make any progress until we’ve found some codebooks, and even then, I need to think about what we just heard. We did good work today.” He smiled and brushed a hoof against his chest. “We’re another step closer to unraveling the mysteries of the universe.”

That got a good chuckle out of the crowd, and he dismissed them with a wing. As the techies began to filter out of the room, his expression turned serious, and he nodded to Gauge. “Find where the broadcaster is and shut it off. I don’t want this to paint a target on our backs.”

Gauge nodded and stood up. “Right. I’ll take care of it.”

“Remember, an outpost as important as this one likely has a backup broadcaster, if not an array in triplicate.”

“I’m aware,” Gauge said with a little smirk. “Leave the greasework to the greasers. I’ll have it shut down in no time.” He whistled, and SCaR chirped from across the room before whooshing over to his side. Then, turning to Nova, he leaned in and pecked her lips. “I’m proud of you.”

Nova tittered and wrapped her hooves around his neck. “All in a day’s work. Sorry that you have to clean up after our mess again.”

Gauge shrugged. “It’s my job,” he said, and they kissed again. I couldn’t help but share a look with Nova’s father, who simply stood there, shaking his head.

“Daddy’s right behind you, Nov,” he said, placing his hoof on her shoulder. Nova just laughed it off, and with one last wave, the two lovebirds separated to do their jobs.

When Gauge disappeared into the bowels of the outpost, brainstorming with SCaR about where to look, Nova shook her dad’s hoof off and stood up. She fluttered her wings to raise high enough to kiss Stardust’s cheek, and she smiled like an innocent filly. “I’m gonna get lunch started,” she said, nuzzling his shoulder, the tallest part of him she could reach when standing on four hooves. “You’re invited too, Ember,” she added, turning to me.

Sadly, I had to raise a hoof and shake my head. “Sorry, but I’ve got plans with Mom. She’s probably wondering where I am, too. I just kinda ran off when Gauge came to get me.” I winced, feeling a ghost pain in my cheek, and absentmindedly ran a hoof over the already-scarring wound. Stabil-Ice was some pretty neat stuff. “Maybe another time?”

It was enough to satisfy Nova, even if she let loose a disappointed sigh. “Alright. Another time then.” She waved a wing, adding a quick “See you later!” before turning around and trotting out the door.

That left just me and Stardust in the room, and I nodded to him. “I should probably get going,” I said, smiling and hitting his (tall) shoulder. “It was nice to see you again.”

To my surprise, a big, shaggy hoof blocked my path. Confused, I looked up at him, and was surprised by the seriousness in his face. “Ember,” he said, in a voice that immediately betrayed his concern. “You were trying to join the militia, right?”

That was an odd question. “Well… yeah,” I said, furrowing my brow. “I’ve just never really had the time. And Mom’s always saying that I need to focus on the forge, so I haven’t officially signed up.”

Stardust nodded, and he looked back at the screen, which was still displaying the last bit of the probe’s message. “Why don’t you go out to the range tomorrow and talk with Brass Casing. He’ll get you signed up.”

I blinked and cocked my head to the side. “Sir?”

Stardust merely placed his hoof on my shoulder (making me stagger backwards) and pursed his lips. “Between you and me, Ember, I have a really bad feeling about this.” I had to refuse the urge to tell him that made two of us. “It doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

With that vague explanation, Stardust took his hoof off my shoulder, nodded, then turned around and left the building, leaving me all alone in the heart of ground zero.

Chapter 3: The Last Sunrise

True to their word, the techies and greasers present at the listening outpost yesterday didn’t say anything about what we saw or heard. Mum was certainly the word, and all anypony said about the whole ordeal was that they’d gotten the dish and its recording machinery to work, but they couldn’t say whether or not they were hearing anything yet. It was a white lie, but so long as everypony held their tongue, we weren’t going to get caught.

As for myself? Well, I couldn’t explain how the dish or signals or any of that shit worked to begin with, but my lips were sealed regardless. Even if it meant having to avoid Mom for the rest of the night, or at the very least, blow it off as nothing. Unfortunately, that’s a little hard to do when you share a single-room shack on the top of a mountain, so distance was my only privacy. That was why I’d grabbed Fortitude at the break of dawn and made my way down to the shooting range to wait for Brass Casing to show up.

By the time said earth pony finally made his way to the shooting range, I was at least a pound of brass through a brick of ammo, and I’d chewed out the inner two rings of the target I’d set up at the end of the rocky clearing. I happened to notice him standing a few yards behind me between reloads, and smiling, I took off my ear protection and set it aside. “Hey, Brass. Took you long enough to show.”

True to his name, Brass Casing’s coat resembled its namesake alloy, and his mane and tail were a sooty black like gunpowder. For all intents and purposes, he looked like a spent cartridge, and the perpetual exhaustion on his face only completed the metaphor. I never understood why he always looked so tired. Auris has twenty-eight hour days; even in the height of summer, we still have ten hours of darkness.

I mostly point that out because I’ve learned that Equus only has twenty-four hour days. Seriously, if you’re from there, how do you even find time to do everything in a day? Sometimes twenty-eight hours doesn’t feel like it’s enough.

Anyways, Brass’ response was to shake his head and sit down next to me. “I figured somepony needed to see what was going on. It sounds like a warzone, and half the town is still trying to sleep.”

Did I mention I was up at the crack of dawn? Because I was up at the crack of dawn.

“Just trying to get out of the house,” I said, grabbing a bunch of rounds from the open brick and sliding them into Fortitude’s magazine. It didn’t even take any thought on my part; I’d already gotten in a rhythm from the half hour of shooting earlier. I flicked my mane over my shoulder, adjusting the cord keeping most of it bunched up behind my head and draping the remaining knee-length hair over my left side, and shot him a smile. “So, wanna talk business?”

Brass sighed and shook his head. “Stardust told me that… something went down at the dish yesterday.” He paused long enough to yawn, a motion which seemed to take his entire body. “Didn’t say what, though. Only that I needed to keep the militia on a tight leash.” He eyed me up, squinting through his baggy eyes. “You know what happened? I thought I saw you hanging around the outpost yesterday.”

I only gave him a noncommittal shrug. “Sorry, Brass. Lips are sealed. Stardust’s orders.” I smirked. “Just like how he told me to meet you today to talk about the militia.”

“Right. That.” He watched me slide the magazine into Fortitude and load the first round, then take sight at the target downrange. He flattened his ears against his skull as I took my first shot, and calmly watched me go through all twenty rounds before speaking again. “Well, you’ve certainly got the basics down.”

“Basics? You’re funny,” I scoffed and set the rifle aside. “I can chew the black out of a bullseye at fifty yards. I’m probably a better shot than half of the militia.”

Brass shrugged. “I’m not denying it.” He gestured downrange at the painted plank of wood I’d been using as my target. “You’re probably a better shot than anypony but the old guys. I would’ve loved to have you sooner.”

“Well… thanks,” I said, trying to shrug away the unexpected compliment. I fidgeted, then ejected the magazine and began loading it again. Sighing, I shook my head. “I’ll be honest, I was trying to come up with a list of excuses and reasons to convince you to take me. I didn’t think about what I’d say after you did.”

“Happens,” he said. “Really, I’m not sure what took you so long to get to this point.”

“Mom,” I muttered, shaking my head. At Brass’s raised eyebrow (he did that a lot, now that I think about it, kinda like Gauge), I crossed my limbs and leaned back against a rock I’d been using as my backrest. “She thinks the militia’s a waste of time. She just wants me to be a forgemare and a machinist until the tools finally bite back and kill me.”

“Or maybe she’s just worried that something bad will happen to you,” he offered.

“She thinks I’m going to use it as an excuse to go exploring Auris.” I scowled down the length of my muzzle. “Thanks, Dad,” I muttered, frowning at the dirt between my hooves.

Oops, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. That’s… well, that’s not relevant until later. All you need to know now is that my father was a pegasus, and like pegasi tend to do, he took wing and left shortly after I was born. I didn’t even remember his name, and Mom sure wouldn’t talk about him. Ever. Like, even in passing. He might as well have never existed.

But like I said, not relevant, and definitely not important at the moment, considering how Brass just glossed over it. “It’s just what mothers do,” he said. “They worry.”

“I’d sure appreciate a little less worry.” I tapped the magazine against the black rock to make sure it was fully loaded, then slotted it back into Fortitude and chambered a round. “At least now I’ve got the boss’ permission,” I said, hoisting the rifle in my magical grasp. “So, we good?”

Brass simply found another rock to lean back against and put his hooves behind his head. “New guys have Sundays, Mondays, and Fridays on patrol. Five until twelve. Got that?”

“Mornings?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Mornings,” Brass said, nodding back. “The old guys need their sleep. And I know your mom would throw an even bigger fit than she’s going to throw when you tell her about this if I had you on patrol during the day. She’d complain I’m taking you away from her forge.”

Well, on the one hoof, I certainly enjoyed my sleep (twenty-eight hour days!), but on the other, I’d been trying for a long time to actually join the militia. Really, it wasn’t even a choice.

“Deal,” I said, turning around and sighting down the target. I put one round through where the bullseye should’ve been, if there was any wood left, and smirked at Brass. “Wanna shoot a bit? I’ve got a whole brick to get through.”

He gave me half a shrug. “If we didn’t have enough ammo to last another two hundred winters in storage down here, I’d tell you to stop wasting so much.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Wasting?”

“Well, yeah.” He pointed at the target downrange. “Take it out to a hundred yards. It’s not all that hard to sight a two by four at fifty. And if we did ever have to defend this mound of dirt, you have some long sightlines down the side of the mountain. If you can hit a target at a hundred yards without a scope, you can drill a pony between the eyes at fifty.”

“Fine,” I said, standing up, setting Fortitude on safety, and putting her aside. “I needed to change planks anyway. We’ll play a point for every bullseye.” I stopped long enough to grin at him. “You sure you don’t need a stand or something? I’m using my magic after all; it’d only be fair.”

Brass just yawned and kicked back against the rock. “I’m good. I’m certain you’ve still got a few things to learn yet.”

Turns out, he was right. I won’t say what the final score was… but I didn’t win. It was close, though, I promise.

Like I mentioned earlier, my home was a little single-room shack near the back of the mountaintop, where the surviving wall of the caldera that the town was built in stood. It was a good spot, as the steepening rock and ash meant we didn’t have any neighbors behind us, and we had just enough space to cram a forge in between our house and the rock. Although it didn’t have the scenic mountain views of the shacks closer to the open sides of our mountain, the area was nice, secluded, and peaceful. I could spend entire days working in the forge without even noticing the day passing by.

Of course, I had to share that peace with Mom, just like I had to share everything else with her. When I got back from the shooting range, Fortitude and wounded pride in tow, I already saw smoke rising from the single chimney in the workshop behind my house. I had a nagging suspicion in my gut that our upcoming conversation wasn’t going to be that pleasant, so I took my time eating a late breakfast and rewrapping my mane in cords so it wouldn’t get caught in any machinery before I wandered out back.

My hooves crunched against the stiff and springy pink grass that grows everywhere on Auris as I made my way to the forge. The door was open, meaning that Mom wasn’t busy with any heavy machinery, and thus it was safe to come inside. With a deep breath to steady myself, I gripped Fortitude tighter in my magic and trotted inside. “Hey, Mom.”

Blue ears flicked in my direction at the far end of the forge. “Ember, there you are,” Mom said. Her blue magic dumped a bucket of charcoal into the bin at the top of the furnace, which hummed and flared to life as the temperature inside began to rocket to upwards of a thousand degrees. Setting the bucket aside, she turned around to face me and rested her forelegs on a workbench in the middle of the room. “Have fun shooting today?”

“Yeah,” I said, setting our rifle down on the workbench across from her and disassembling it with practiced skill. “A little target practice with Brass. He’s good.”

Mom raised an eyebrow at me, and by the soot staining her blue coat and blue mane, I could tell she’d been working for a while. Blue eyes watched me, waiting, prodding for me to finally spit out whatever I was holding back.

Her name was Blue Spark, by the way. Just figured I should point that out to complete the theme. Blue coat, blue eyes, blue mane, blue name… Really, I’m surprised that I don’t have any blue on my body whatsoever with genetics like that.

When Fortitude was completely disassembled, I grabbed my cleaning supplies from a nearby shelf and began to get the gunpowder off of all the parts. Chewing on the inside of my cheek, I waited until I’d cleaned the receiver before adding, “I also joined the militia.”

“There it is,” Mom said, shaking her head. Sighing, she placed her head in one hoof and tapped the other against the table. “Ember, we’ve been over this. I need you at the forge. Frankly, I don’t have the time to run all of Blackwash’s orders myself while you play soldier down by the station.”

“It’s not full time, Mom,” I insisted. My magic took hold of another part, which I promptly began to clean to give me something to expend the dread that comes when you have to confront your parents after doing something they disapprove of. “Brass has me on patrol in the mornings, three days a week. I’m hardly missing any daylight to work here!”

“I just don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with carrying a gun all day, sitting on your flank and doing nothing,” Mom said, deflecting the topic away from my logic and positioning her soapbox. “You’re not lazy, Ember, and I don’t have any problem with you going to the range and just shooting. Why does this have to be a job, too?”

Every once in awhile, you make a mistake that lands you in hot water. Right now, I’d describe my situation as ‘simmering’. It was a slip of the tongue that turned up the heat. “Because Stardust told me to.”

Immediately, Mom frowned at me. “Stardust?” she asked. “Is this related to that thing that happened yesterday?” When I didn’t answer, she smiled and trotted to my side. “So it is about that. Just what happened, Em? Nopony seems to know what’s going on.”

“It’s… complicated,” I said, hooves fidgeting. Did Mom put too much charcoal in the furnace? “We just got the dish up and running. That’s it.”

“That’s it?” she asked, rubbing coats with me. At my obstinate silence, she took a step back and tapped a hoof to her chin. “Then why would Stardust tell my little filly to go put herself on the road to ruin if that was it?”

“It’s not a ‘road to ruin’, Mom,” I protested, finally deciding to put the pieces of Fortitude aside and turn to face her. “I don’t know why you’ve got it in your head that just because I join the militia, I’m going to end up like Dad!”

Now that... that was a fucking mistake.

Mom didn’t even have to narrow her eyes at me for me to know I’d fucked up. Without another word, I sullenly glanced down at my hooves, turned back to Fortitude, and began quietly reassembling the pieces, save for the barrel. That was going to be today’s project, assuming I didn’t have any more mishaps like yesterday. And assuming I survived the next thirty seconds.

It must’ve been my lucky day, because Mom was in a ‘silent, piercing glare’ kind of mood. “I’m going to get lunch with some friends,” she said, coolly, in a voice that I knew was attached to a face I didn’t want to have staring at me. “We have a lot of work to do today. Brass put in a huge order of replacement parts for the rifles last night, and he said he wanted them done as soon as possible. Okay?”

“Okay,” I whispered back, looking anywhere but at Mom.

I saw Mom nod out of the corner of my eye, then rigidly turn around and march to the door. “Be back in an hour or two.” Then she was gone.

Sighing, I shook my head and set to work. Might as well do Fortitude’s barrel now while Mom wasn’t here to get mad at me. So, throwing some steel into the melting pot, I gathered the tools and molds I’d need to get the job done, and simply waited. Hopefully, when I was done, I’d have a rifle that could shoot accurately to a hundred yards. That was the real reason why I lost to Brass. He was just better at adjusting his fire than I was. Or he was a gun wizard. Or something.

Thinking back to it, I’m pretty sure the reason I’m alive to even tell my story is because of that gun barrel. I certainly needed it much sooner than I thought I would.

Chapter 4: Where Innocence Dies

Nothing good lasts forever.

You can throw that up there with all the other pessimistic adages I’m sure we’ve all heard before. ‘The good die young,’ ‘you can’t fight fate,’ ‘the gods are dead,’ whatever suits your fancy. Nothing good lasts forever. On that day, I learned that saying firsthoof, and why it’s become such a grim little phrase that we hear constantly. It’s because it’s true.

Mom came back almost three hours after she’d left, which was an hour later than she said she’d be out, and an hour earlier than I expected her back. Apparently, the whole little secret surrounding Dish One was quite the hot topic around town, and gossip was everywhere. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mom personally hunted down every single techie who worked there to try to wring the truth out of them. Judging by the expression on her face when she came back, she wasn’t successful.

“Shut up,” she had grumbled, knowing full well I was about to tease her about it. I merely chuckled and went back to work on the saddle mounts I was making. Not all of our earth ponies and pegasi could freehoof a rifle like Brass could, and military-grade shoulder mounts that automatically pointed wherever the wearer was looking were in short supply. Well, I guess I should say working ones were. We had plenty of dead ones we scavenged parts from when we needed.

We spent the next six hours working together like the awesome team that we were. It always felt satisfying to work side by side with Mom. Whenever we did, it looked like a dance. We both waltzed around the shop, visiting machines to do whatever work we needed on our parts before slipping out of each other’s way. We’d simply call out the names of tools and pick them up from the counter on our right (and always our right) a second after the other dropped them there. We shuffled parts to assemblies back and forth as we finished them, each adding what we had and passing the contraption back to the other so that they could do the same. Mom said that my grandpa called it the ‘Steel Saltarello’, but she called it the Working Waltz. I liked just calling it the Dance.

If only we had some music other than our awful singing. I know ponies are supposed to have some innate magic for musical numbers, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t have it. Besides, we didn’t know any songs apart from those on a select list Equestria had printed way back in the day designed to increase efficiency in the factory or morale on the battlefield, and those were designed to be sung by choruses thousands strong. There weren’t a whole lot of mother and daughter songs on that list about working in a forge on a shitty planet lightyears away.

But like I said, it was probably for the best. We were awful singers.

I remember stepping back from the table against the wall and wiping the sweat off of my brow, staring at the few dozen receivers, trigger mechanisms, barrels, sights, and other spare parts for the rifles in Blackwash’s armory Mom and I had just finished making. I could feel the hot fingers of soot clawing into my coat, and could taste the ash on my lips. Beside me, the soot plastered to Mom’s blue coat stood out a little bit more. Her chest and forelimbs were charcoal black from the ash, and her face was similarly streaked with the stuff. We’d both need to shower before we went to bed.

“Done,” she hummed, setting the last bolt on the table next to its brethren, and brushed shoulders with me. She reeked of sweat, but I knew I didn’t smell any better. Her muzzle was turned into a half-smile, that mixture of proud and exhausted that comes after finishing a long day’s work. I’m pretty sure I had the same expression as well, just mixed with more exhaustion. I’d been up for twenty hours by now, and sleep couldn’t come soon enough.

Mom must’ve been reading my mind (or more likely saw the huge yawn I made) and nuzzled me behind the ears. “Why don’t you go start getting cleaned up,” she said. “I’ll finish cleaning up shop.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled, returning the nuzzle. The hot, sweaty strands of her mane clung to the soot on my face, and refused to separate until I’d walked away from her. While her blue magic began sorting the replacement parts into boxes, my orange magic grabbed Fortitude and a mag of ammo. I might have wanted to try out the new barrel before I showered up and went to bed, just to make sure that it was sighted properly.

There were two moons out tonight, and the larger of the two, Argenta, was nearly full, so I had plenty of light to guide me across the short walk between the shop and the house. The metal roofs of Blackwash were all bathed in a gentle light, and the massive dishes at the edge of town seemed like dim little moons of their own, the white panels reflecting the moonlight. Cello bugs hummed in the night, their little bodies giving off deceptively deep notes that together created a solemn, mournful melody that I couldn’t escape. It was like an orchestra that mourned the death of the day, and would play long into the night until the sun rose in the morning.

It was beautiful. Sometimes on warm summer nights like this, I’d just lay a blanket on the grass and lie there, staring at the stars for hours. They were so crisp and vivid, and sometimes I could see the other planets in the system lazily tracing their way across the sky. They had names, but they were all dumb names, like ‘Meadowbrook-2b’ or whatever the Equestrians used to call them. Nova named them after the four fairy tale princesses, which I thought was kind of cute. “Celestia” was certainly easier to remember than some scientific name.

I set Fortitude down on a rock and trotted over to the side of the house to grab my target. It was a square of metal riveted to a stick and pockmarked with bullet holes from when I was too lazy to go across town and use the gunnery range. I hauled it over to the pile of rocks I usually used to hold it and wedged the end in as far as I could. Then, trotting back to my rifle, I lined up a shot by the light of the moons. Five shots was all it took to get the sights calibrated and know that my new barrel was quality stuff.

I unloaded Fortitude and set her aside. I’d done enough shooting today; I didn’t need to keep ponies awake in the evening as well. Instead, I simply sat on my rock, staring at the stars. By some fluke, I happened to look to the south just as a shooting star burst into flames in Auris’ thick atmosphere. The brilliant streak of light didn’t even last a second before it was gone, but I saw it when I closed my eyes for a long time after. I might not have been a little filly anymore, but when I saw that shooting star, I placed my hooves over my breast and did what everypony’s supposed to do when they see one.

I made a wish.

I didn’t wish for petty things like money or fame. Blackwash didn’t have the former, and we were small enough that the latter wasn’t worth much anyway. I didn’t wish to get off of this planet earlier, despite how much I joked that I wanted to go to Equus and experience first world comforts for the first time in my life. I had a suspicion that they were just as fucked as we were; it was the only explanation I could think of for why they’d abandoned us for such a long time. So instead, I wished for something that would shed answers. I wished that I knew what Equus’ last message was. Was it a library full of ancient secrets? Instructions for how to get off of Auris? Something else? I really wanted to know. And though it might seem like a stupid wish, I didn’t really care. Really, who expects something like that to really come true?

Maybe I should’ve wished then that I knew Fate is a bitch who likes to mess with me when she’s bored.

As I picked up Fortitude and began dragging the target back to the side of the house, my ears perked at a strange noise. It sounded like something beating the air in the valley, accompanied by a high-pitched whine. I’d never heard anything like it before, but it definitely sounded mechanical. Unless this was just some new terror of wildlife that Auris’ freakshow evolution had cooked up for us, but I seriously doubted that. Discarding the sign and clutching Fortitude in my magical grasp, I trotted around the corner of my house to get a better look at the valley.

That was precisely when the first explosion rocked the mountaintop.

It must’ve been close, because it picked me up off my hooves and flung me across my backyard. I hit my head a few times against the ground as I tumbled, and when I finally came to a groaning, dizzy stop, I was thirty feet away from where I started. My ears rang, and for the longest time, I wasn’t even sure I was still alive. When the ringing began to fade away, and I could start to feel all of the cuts and lacerations in my coat from the shrapnel that’d nearly sliced me to pieces, I realized I was still very much alive, and in an awful lot of pain.

Adrenaline kicked in at that moment, and I rolled onto my hooves. I stumbled and nearly fell back down as the world swam around me, so I hunched over and tried taking some deep breaths. When the dizziness finally left and I could stand up straight without feeling like I had to puke, I looked around me to see…

Chaos.

The side of my house had been completely torn apart, and I could see flickering flames inside and billowing smoke pouring out of the gaps in the ceiling and the new hole in the wall. Tiny tongues of flame decorated the yard around me, ignited by shrapnel from the initial explosion. I took one step towards the house, about ready to dash forward and try to put out the fire, before another explosion ripped a house further down the street into shreds. Somewhere, in the black of the night, I heard screaming, and the chatter of automatic rifles began to fill the air.

It must’ve been the concussion smothering my thoughts, but I simply stood in the glow of my burning house for a stupidly long time while I watched everything I knew be torn down around me. The black silhouettes of pegasi moved between the fires and smoke, dropping hoofball-sized objects on buildings which blew up on impact. Dark shadows danced on the walls of buildings as ponies ran from the fires, and somewhere close to the dishes, I heard the telltale sounds of a raging firefight… and somepony calling my name.

I didn’t register that last part until hooves gripped my shoulders and literally shook me out of it. Blinking, I shook my head and rubbed my temple as Mom’s blue face dominated my vision. “Ember, we have to move!” she was screaming, and I felt myself being tugged along after her. Concussed and more than a little confused, I simply followed like a braindead idiot until Mom sat me down on the floor of the workshop and closed the door behind us.

I realized that Fortitude was still in my magic when Mom took it from me and began piling toolboxes in front of the door. There was copper in my mouth, and I worked my jaw from side to side as I felt out the sore spot on my tongue. I must’ve bit it when I was tumbling across the yard. Groaning, I placed my head in my hooves and muttered, “What’s happening?”

Mom was too preoccupied with chewing on her lip and looking out the window of the shop to answer. Her magic pulled the magazine out of Fortitude and she counted the rounds left before sliding it back in. Then she turned to me. “What happened at the dish yesterday?!” she barked, her eyes boring into my soul with pure, concentrated nightmare fuel. Mom was scary when she was angry.

“We… w-we heard something!” I cried back, flattening my ears against my head as another explosion hit not too far away. Just what was going on out there?! “A s-signal! From a probe! An Equestrian one!”

“A signal?” Mom’s eyes widened, and she glanced out the window again, holding the family rifle closer to her chest. “What did it say?”

I shook my head and shrugged. Why was I trembling so much? “We don’t know,” I said, wrapping one foreleg around the other to try to stop my shaking. “It was all in code. It didn’t make any sense, but…” My voice trailed off as realization dawned on me. “But it sent out signals… to the rest of Auris…”

Mom seemed to come to the same conclusion I did, because a new look of horror swept over her features. “The rest of Auris…?” She swallowed hard and all but collapsed into the corner by the window. “Sun and stars…”

Just then, a series of thuds sounded through the roof of the shop. Both Mom and I ducked a little lower, and looked toward the corner of the roof where we’d heard the noise. Fortitude’s barrel swept back and forth, and we both held our breaths, too afraid to make even the slightest noise. Even still, I almost screamed when another set of thuds joined the first, and through the muffled screaming, gunfire, and explosions, we heard two raspy voices.

“Look at them run!”

“Damn shame. It’s not even fair.”

“Shame that the first time we can exercise the ordinance in months, they don’t put up a good fight.”

“Yeah, but remember, we’re only supposed to put down the fighters. The rest are much more valuable alive than dead.”

“Yeah, yeah. Takes the fun out of a good mission. You check this sector yet?”

I looked at Mom, who’d been busy trying to zero in on the source of the noise. I saw her horn briefly strobe, and the safety on the side of Fortitude disengaged. She raised it up to the ceiling before I could stop her. “No, wait—!”

Blam! Blam! Blam! Fortitude thundered in the confined space as Mom fired through the roof at the voices. We were rewarded with pained screams and a heavy thump that shook the roof—but only one. One of the voices cursed and the roof momentarily bowed like a pony had jumped off of it. Given what I’d seen outside, it was likely a pegasus taking flight, and that meant we were fucked. Really, awfully fucked. I looked at Mom in horror, but she was too busy keeping one eye trained on the roof and another looking out the window to her left to notice.

The next thing either of us knew, a hail of bullets came spraying into the shop, through the flimsy roof Mom had just shot through. Both of us ducked our heads and scrambled behind whatever cover we could find as bullets bit into the dirt all around us. Little puffs of dirt and soot plumed up from the ground with each impact, and I could only watch them, mesmerized, as I cowed behind the lather with my hooves over my head.

Heart thundering, I didn’t dare to move until after the barrage stopped. When ash stopped billowing up around me and the roof didn’t shriek from lead tearing through it, I chanced a look around the edge of the lather, searching for Mom. I saw her crammed into an open cabinet underneath one of our workbenches with Fortitude held close to her chest, eyes wide and ears flattened against her skull. I guess she could see the panic in her daughter’s face, because it was like flipping a switch; in the blink of an eye, she’d crawled out from under her cover and readied her rifle again—just as a shadow appeared in the window.

Mom immediately spun the rifle around and put another five rounds through the window, shattering glass and ejecting shell casings across the floor, but failing to elicit any screams. All was silent after the fifth shot rang out, save for the ringing in my ears, and Mom slowly began to move towards me without aiming Fortitude away from the window. Broken glass crunched underneath her hooves, and she kicked a shell casing across the ground as sweat beaded on her brow and she breathed through gritted teeth. When she was halfway across the shop, she stopped at a low chuckle that sent icy fingers through my spine.

“You’ve got some fight in you, eh? Good. Raids just aren’t the same when you keel over and die.” Shadows danced by the window, and I saw a ragged foreleg dart through the window to toss something into the shadows of the shop. “Let’s see how you deal with this!”

Whatever the stallion threw into our shop beeped once, then exploded into a cloud of fiery napalm. Suddenly, it felt like somepony had taken the heat shielding off of the forge, and I felt the hairs in my mane curling as the temperature surged. A bright orange glow bathed everything around me, and I scrambled to my hooves to try to get out of this damn oven.

Only, we’d barricaded the door, and the window was too small to squeeze through.

Mom seemed to realize this as well. A quick flash of her horn caused a faint blue glow to materialize around her and across my vision; I recognized it as a flame retardant spell, useful when working in the forge, but not enough to save us from burning to death. She tossed Fortitude aside (cringe!) and wrapped her magic around the tool cases and machines she’d knocked over in front of the door. “C’mon!” she screamed, struggling with a drill press as her horn sparked and flared with exertion. I reached out with my magic to help her and heaved, and immediately regretted it. It felt like somepony had taken a sledgehammer to the base of my horn, and I fell to my knees, clutching at my skull. Let me tell you, trying to use magic when you’re concussed means life is pain and everything is terrible.

But we were going to die if I didn’t help Mom, so I swallowed hard and rose back to my hooves. This time, I tried to brace myself before heaving against the drill press, and so when I felt the pain come, I turned it into a primal scream and dragged the thing away from the door with Mom’s help. I nearly passed out afterwards, but Mom was there to wrap a foreleg under mine and keep me on my hooves.

Thankfully, the drill press was the only really heavy thing in front of the door, so Mom was able to move the rest while I panted and recovered. Sun and stars, I really needed to sleep for like three weeks straight when this was over with. I was so tired…

“Ember!” Mom screeched as she literally tore the door off its hinges and flung it aside. Her magic grabbed Fortitude and she dashed into the open, wildly spinning in place as she sought out our assailant. Apparently, she didn’t see anypony, because she lowered her rifle and waved at me. “Let’s go!”

I jumped as a falling cinder scorched my flank, providing all the motivation I needed to gallop out of the forge. Mom waited until I was nearly at her side to turn and gallop as well, and the two of us briefly ran towards our house before turning away from the inferno that awaited us. If there was any pain in Mom’s eyes at seeing our home in smoke, I must’ve missed it, because I looked back over my shoulder at the loud groaning of the forge’s roof collapsing. The plume of air billowing out of the shattered window and open door lifted thousands of glowing sparks into the air, casting the barest illumination on a dark figure soaring towards us with wings spread.

“Down!” I screamed, lunging at Mom. She hardly had any time to react before I shouldered her out of the way, sending Fortitude falling from her grasp and knocking us both over. And not a moment too soon; as soon as we hit the dirt, I saw the ground in front of us explode with bullets, followed a moment later by a gust of air as the pegasus zoomed overhead. Flapping his wings, the stallion rose into the smoke over Blackwash and banked out of sight, leaving only swirling dust in his wake.

Mom and I picked ourselves up off of the ground a moment later and scurried to the cover of a rocky outcropping. With the pegasus gone for the moment, we took our chance to breathe. Unfortunately, it also gave us time to look at the carnage in front of us. “Oh, sun and stars,” Mom murmured, staring at Blackwash. “The entire town… I…” I saw her swallow hard, likely trying to hold down her tears. I stood by her side, feeling my throat tighten up too, just from looking at it. Everything I’d ever known was burning to the ground. I… I really hope you never have to feel what I felt in that moment.

For better or for worse, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to dwell on that moment, because our friendly neighborhood marauder chose that time to dive down at us, guns blazing. Mom and I scattered in opposite directions, with me taking Fortitude and scrambling across the ashy ground. I yipped in pain as something tore along my hind leg, making me stumble and trip, ending with me sliding on my shoulder across the ground. I rolled onto my back, grasped my leg between my hooves, and was able to see a red channel carved through the skin and flesh, starting just below the flaming coal on my flank and ending above the knee.

I was also able to see the form of the pegasus as he veered away from the ground. Flashes of light above each shoulder accompanied the crack of gunfire as he fired at Mom, who kicked up dirt and ash as she rolled out of the way—but not far enough. I heard her scream and saw blood plume from her torso as a bullet ripped through her midsection, leaving her in a limp heap on the ground.

“No!!!” I screamed, grabbing Fortitude with my magic and bracing it against the inside of my hind leg. Sorrow was replaced by fury, and the only thing I wanted was blood. I tracked the bastard as he wheeled through the air, likely looking for an easy kill shot on me as I lay on the ground. Just before he could bring those guns mounted on his shoulders to bear, I unloaded with Fortitude at a hundred yards—well outside the range of those automatics he was using. The first bullet missed, tearing a chunk of feathers from his left wing and nothing more, and the stallion tried to bank away. Too bad for him, I’d already began firing to his right, in the direction he was banking. Three bullets chewed through his torso, if the splatters of gore backlighted by burning Blackwash were enough to go by, and in a limp, lifeless heap of feathers, the pegasus crash-landed somewhere against the side of the mountain.

I wasted no time after that. I was on my hooves in a flash, even though the exertion and pain was making me dizzy, and I slipped several times as I galloped to Mom. I kept Fortitude held aloft in my magic and trained toward the sky, just in case, as I slid the last few feet to Mom’s side.

She was still breathing, but not without a lot of trouble. Blood stained her muzzle, and she weakly coughed and writhed as she choked on her own vitality. I wasn’t any doctor, but judging by the hole I could see in her side, it’d gone through her lungs, which would explain the choking. Even worse, her eyes were staring ahead, unfocused. She’d gone into shock.

Of course, none of these thoughts crossed my mind at the time. I was panicking too much to think clearly, and the very first thing I did was drop Fortitude and press my hooves to the bloody wound, trying to stem the bleeding. I didn’t care that I was kneeling in the open, vulnerable to anypony who felt like taking a potshot at me. Tears burned my eyes, and I violently shook my head to try and knock them loose. “M-Mom!” I howled, my voice rough, ragged, and hysterical. “Please, Mom! Please! No!” I choked on a sob, and leaned forward to press my muzzle into her mane. She smelled like soot and ash and ozone, like a fresh welding job. I breathed it in again, and again, and again, not wanting to forget what she smelled like. Moaning, I simply collapsed against her side, my hooves slick with her blood, unable to do anything other than cry and beg. “Mommy…” I cried, wrapping my hooves around her torso and simply laying there with her. “Please… don’t go…”

A bullet wound like Mom’s was a death sentence without any real medicine. I think the bullet went through both of her lungs instead of just one, since she simply collapsed and immediately went into shock after taking it. Even if we had doctors, medical equipment, and weren’t under attack by these strange ponies, it would’ve been a long shot that she would live.

Instead, Blue Spark, my mother, died in my forelegs that night.

Chapter 5: The Will to Live

I don’t remember how long I laid across Mom’s body, sobbing and heaving as the heat slowly left her bloodied, blue coat. It’s hard to keep track of time when you’re dealing with more suffering and anguish than you’ve ever felt in your life. It could’ve been five minutes, or it could’ve been five hours, but I would’ve just laid there next to her for the rest of time if somepony didn’t grab my mane in their teeth and literally pry me off of Mom.

“No!” I screamed, tears blurring my vision as I thrashed and struggled and flailed against the pony dragging me away. “No! Let go of me! Let go of me!” I swung my hoof over my shoulder and hit something soft, likely a nose. There was a cry of pain, and the pony pulling me away let go, allowing me to scramble back to Mom’s body. But before I could get there, another pony hopped over her and swung a rifle like a club, hitting me clean in the face. I cried out in agony and fell over, a few inches away from Mom, with the world spinning around me and feeling like I needed to puke.

Shaggy forelimbs filled my vision as the pony who clubbed me stood over me. In the orange glow of the fires raging around us, his yellow legs seemed to glow gold, even if his fetlocks were long and unshorn, and the hair of his coat was matted and grimy. He wore what looked like Equestrian combat barding fortified with the hide of some creature across his chest, which accommodated the two automatic rifles jutting out over his shoulders and above his wings. His face looked like something out of a nightmare, scarred and torn up, and completely missing any hair whatsoever on the right side. Two eyes bored down at me atop a crooked smile, but only one had an iris and a pupil. He knelt over me, and I caught the smell of something rancid on his breath as he grinned. “Well, you’re a pretty one, aren’t you?”

I screamed. I screamed loud.

Hooves were on me before I could even move, and I suddenly found myself staring down rifled steel stained with black powder. “You’re coming with us,” the half-faced pegasus said, smirking. Or maybe he was trying to smile, but the scarred part of his face didn’t move. “You try to use magic, I break your horn clean off. You try to run, I shoot you. But not in the head, no. In the leg. And then we drag you back and keep going until you learn your lesson, or you’re out of working legs. Understand?” My petrified expression must’ve been enough of an answer for him, because he took the gun barrel away from my face and backed up a few feet. Then he gestured to my hooves with the gun. “Up.”

Trembling, I forced myself to stand, even though the vertigo caused me to stumble and nearly black out. I was pretty sure another hit to my head was just going to knock me out cold at this point, a fancy I briefly entertained if it meant escape from this Tartarus. Then a swift kick to my flank sent me trotting with a yelp, and I couldn’t do anything more than go where the yellow pegasus led me. Behind me, I saw another pegasus, presumably the one who dragged me away from Mom in the first place, pick Fortitude off of the ground and sling it in a holster across his back with a hum of approval. It made me sick to see one of these monsters take the family rifle after having slaughtered Mom.

If I ever got out of here, I was going to kill every last one of them.

But that was a big ‘if’, and as I was forced along the burning streets of Blackwash, forced to inhale the stench of smoke and feel the scalding waves of heat against my sides, it seemed less and less likely. I swiveled my ears in search of gunfire, but heard nothing save the crackling of fires, and the occasional terrified scream from somewhere in the night. Whatever fight Blackwash had, it’d been crushed out of us. These… bandits had won. It wasn’t even close.

The closer to the center of town I got, the more bodies I saw. Ponies I knew laid in bloody heaps, some with clean gunshots through their ribs or necks, others missing entire portions of their skulls. Everywhere we went, it was more of the same. More bodies, more blood, more violence, more death. Some part of my mind figured out they were taking me to the opposite end of town, where the dishes were. But I was too tired and too broken to care. The only thing that kept me moving was some fear of death, some self-preservation instinct. The body wanted to live. It’s probably why I didn’t die that night.

As I saw more bodies, I also saw more bandits, especially as we got closer to the dishes. They were all pegasi, and while they weren’t mangy or dirty, they certainly looked messy, like it’d been a few weeks at least since they’d had a good shower. They all wore stained, patchwork combat barding painted a bright red and supplemented with hide armor from different beasts to protect them from injury (though apparently not from .308 rounds). Their faces were hidden behind some kind of decorative red war paint, ranging from the uncreative blacking under the eyes to one particular pegasus that must’ve spent an hour working on the intricate designs covering his face. With the fighting in Blackwash over, they milled in groups, chatting to each other and stuffing whatever they picked clean from my fallen friends and townsfolk in their numerous pockets. They reminded me of flesh-strippers, strange avian scavengers that could peel the flesh from a corpse in under an hour with their serrated claws and teeth.

Then I saw ponies that I knew who weren’t dead. Many ponies, mostly mares and fillies, had been massed in the wide clearing in front of the listening outpost. Standing around them and hovering overhead were more of the bandits, who kept their rifles trained on the prisoners kneeling before them. With a rough shove, my new best friend pushed me into a crowd of young mares, then nearly broke my back with a savage blow that forced me onto my knees. I collapsed amongst the frightened, whimpering, and sniffling, and when nopony helped me up, I grunted and struggled to upright myself. Shivering, more from my fear than the temperature, I huddled my limbs together and looked around me.

We’d all been segregated by sex and age, with the elderly in one section, stallions and older mares in another, children in a third, and then mares my age where I was. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what the divisions were for. I curled my tail around my waist and hugged it between my forelimbs. If I wasn’t so afraid of death, I would’ve tried to provoke one of the bandits to kill me. Anything would’ve been better than the fate that I knew awaited me.

There was a commotion behind us, and I risked a glance over my shoulder to see a group of bandits leading several techies away from the listening outpost and to our group. Among their number, I saw Nova and Gauge walking side by side, blood staining the snow white coat of the former, and the latter with an ear torn off, which dribbled blood down the side of his skull. Behind them, a pair of bandits kicked the deactivated SCaR around like a hoofball, laughing as they put dents in its casing. The bandits made a fifth group out of them, kneeling them down a few dozen feet to my left. I stared at them with wide, fearful eyes, and managed to catch Nova’s attention. She lightly nudged Gauge and pointed to me, and the three of us tried our hardest to comfort one another from a distance. Just seeing that none of us had died was an immense relief, even if it didn’t provide any solutions to the awful situation we found ourselves in. At the least, it meant we could all share the suffering together.

The bandits began shouting to each other, and my ears twitched at the noise I’d first heard what felt like a lifetime ago, only this time much louder. A distinct whirring noise droned through the night, growing louder by the second, until suddenly in a gust of wind and bright lights, a silver machine rose above the cliff side. The bulk of the machine was a ring about sixty feet in diameter, within which a triangular cabin was suspended by struts connecting the sides to the ring. Something blurred within the superstructure of the ring; it had to be a rotor system of some sort, because I didn’t see how the thing was staying aloft otherwise. The barrels of some really big caliber guns protruded near the forward point of the triangle, beneath a wedge of windows set within its reclining surface, and as I watched, three skids deployed from the undercarriage of the thing, allowing it to settle down on the ashy ground of our ruined town.

I didn’t know at the time I was looking at an Equestrian Ringbird, a pre-Silence gunship and troop transport famed for its reliability and survivability. It would explain how one was still functioning perfectly two hundred winters after it was last used. But at the time, it looked like it might as well have been some sort of alien machine, summoned by the strange signal to bring death and ruin to the planet.

A large cargo door opened on the back of the ring-like machine, and out marched a tall and muscular earth pony, accompanied by a platoon of soldiers of different races. The earth pony had a red coat and wore some kind of hi-tech metal armor, where all the edges had been filed and sharpened into deadly points and blades, and glowing lights flickered in stylistic designs across its scorched surface. Several white marks covered his face, neck, legs, pretty much every bit of his body that was exposed to the air, ugly scars from fights long passed. Black warpaint covered his eyes, cheeks, and muzzle; I guess red really wouldn’t have stood out against his red coat. Hanging from hooks on either side of his armor, two long-barreled hunting shotguns rested, with the grips extending just beyond his shoulders and turned upwards for easy access. I could tell by the way the bandits all gave him space and saluted that he was their leader. He cantered forward at a leisurely pace until he stood in the middle of the five groups of prisoners, then looked us over like he was appraising goods.

“You’re probably wondering what cruel twist of fate brought us to your doorstep,” the earth pony said, in a loud voice with a surprisingly lilting accent that seemed completely out of place with the bandits surrounding us. “That answer is pretty simple, really. Your little toys heard something that was of particular interest to somepony with a lot of bullets.” He gestured to the dishes, then laughed and shook his head. “And so here we are. Please, don’t take it personally. It’s only business, after all.”

He frowned, then paced in front of us. “This is a really nice place you have up here. I’m sorry that my soldiers burnt it to the ground, but that’s the price of business.” He suddenly stopped, and slowly, the most frightening smirk crawled onto his muzzle. “Now, did you know that my employer wanted me to leave no survivors?” he asked. The ponies around me recoiled slightly, and murmured to each other. A mare a few individuals away began sobbing and buried her face in her hooves. This… monster seemed to relish the anguish and dismay, and he began to pace again, grinning. “Now, I’m not cruel. I’m not dishonorable. I think we can come to a proper agreement here.” He’d made his way back to his original starting point, and with a quick pivot about his hooves, turned to face us all. “Tell me what the code says, and I’ll let you live. How does that sound?”

I felt my stomach sink like a rock, and ponies all around me began to frantically whisper to each other. This was all over the code? Stardust’s unvoiced fears had come true. I knew exactly what the code had said: FAFA, E, 36-J. But I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want this sick monster looking at me, so I kept my head down and hoped somepony else would give in.

Apparently, the techies and greasers all had the same idea. When nopony answered him after a few seconds, the earth pony rolled his eyes and bit down on the grip of one of his shotguns. Drawing the weapon, he broke it over his foreleg and made a show of the cartridges nestled in the twin barrels. “Come on, is this really so hard?” he asked, like a parent who’d grown frustrated with their foal. Sighing, he gestured with a hoof, and two pegasi swooped down into the crowd of techies and dragged one out, kicking and screaming. I watched with wide eyes as they threw him down on the ground in front of the red pony, and before the poor stallion could so much as sit up, the earth pony pressed the shotgun against his cheek and fired. Red gore sprayed the ponies closest to him, causing screams and sobs to ring out from us prisoners, and the now headless body fell to the ground by the earth pony’s hooves.

“Maybe we got off on the wrong hoof,” the stallion said, spitting the weapon out and resting it on his foreleg again. “I’m Carrion, enforcer extraordinaire, and leader of the Crimson. And I don’t take kindly to ponies wasting my time. I’ve got a few hundred more shells on my bird, and I can do this all night. So, what’s it going to be?”

I glanced over at Nova and Gauge. The white mare was clinging to Gauge’s foreleg, wings extended in alarm, and shaking uncontrollably. Gauge had sweat beading on his forehead, and he nervously looked from side to side at the ponies standing around him. His throat bobbed, and just before he opened his mouth, another voice rang out from behind him. “The code is encrypted. We weren’t able to access it.”

Carrion raised an eyebrow and turned to the rest of us, holding his forelegs out as if he was asking ‘was that so hard?’ He turned to the group of techies and gestured, and two bandits shoved Stardust out of the crowd. “Finally, somepony who can speak! Praise Celestia, for she is kind!”

If I hadn’t been scared shitless, I probably would’ve raised an eyebrow at that. Celestia? The fairy tale? If his earlier gleeful psychosis hadn’t already made itself apparent, that would’ve been more than a little strange.

Carrion whistled as Stardust finally stood before him. “Well, you’re a big guy, ain’t ya? I might need two for you.” He broke open the shotgun again and ejected the spent shell, then pulled another one off of a bandolier around his shoulder and slid it into place. Closing the breach, he simply let the firearm balance against his shoulder as he looked Stardust up and down. “Now, what do you mean, ‘encrypted?’ because if you can’t get me that code, then pshh, that’s really unfortunate for everypony standing here. Or I guess I should say kneeling.” He grinned at his own awful joke, then tilted his head to the side and rested his cheek in a hoof. “Come on, big guy, we’re all friends here. We don’t need any secrets between friends, right?”

Stardust swallowed, then gestured with his hoof. “Whatever it is, it’s encrypted. Onyx Star. It’s the highest level of—”

“Oh, I know what Onyx Star is,” Carrion said, waving a hoof and cutting Starburst off. “All I want to know is if you can break it.” He rocked his shotgun back into the crook of his foreleg and wiggled his eyebrows. “Think carefully before you answer, now. We wouldn’t want anypony else to get hurt,” he added, kicking the body at his hooves.

“We can,” Stardust said, frantically nodding. “My team and I, we can break the encryption. We just need time, and codebooks, and any other resources we can get our hooves on.”

That made Carrion grin, and I had a sinking feeling in my gut that this wasn’t about to get any better. He holstered his shotgun and began to clap his hooves, while Stardust breathed a visible sigh of relief. “Wow! Bravo! See, somepony with the guts to just buck up and tell the truth. I applaud you, good sir, well done.” Then, turning to the rest of us, he began to pace. “Now, I know the truth can be an ugly thing, but it hurts a lot more to lie to somepony. So I’m going to be very honest with you. We’ve split you guys up into five groups for a reason.”

He cantered over (dare I say ‘gaily’) to the elders in the first group. “Now, my momma raised me to respect my elders, so I’ve decided to be kind to you. Instead of putting you to backbreaking labor or leaving you to starve in the remains of your beautiful town, I’m just gonna kill you and put you out of your misery. Sound good?”

My eyes widened. He couldn’t be serious! If I had Fortitude right now, I’d gun him down, consequences be damned! But Fortitude was in some bandit’s loot stash, and I’d be lucky if I ever saw it again.

Carrion trotted to the second group. “Now, you lot can relax, because I’m not going to kill you. At least not personally. You guys are going to become slaves. We’re going to take you back to our little base, burn your cutie marks off, and then sell you to the highest bidder.” He held up a hoof as some ponies angrily protested and others began to cry. “Now, now! Come on, think of it as doing your part! The Wilderness ain’t gonna civilize itself without some sacrifice, right? Think of the better future you’ll be building with your blood, sweat, tears, but mostly blood! Think of the future your children will be living in when they grow up to be beautiful Crimson soldiers!” he said, gesturing to the third group. He smiled through crooked teeth and tousled a colt’s mane. “Hey, don’t cry too much! We’ve got cookies!”

Then he literally hopped over to my group. “Ah, such beauty! I tell you, whatever’s in the water in the valley, it doesn’t make pretty mares. But you!” He was suddenly leering over me, and before I could back out of the way, he wrapped his massive forehooves around me and hauled me up to his eye level. Brown eyes bored into me as he studied my face and grinned—I felt violated just by the look alone. “Firm, tender, curvy. Like I always say, there’s only one thing better than looting, and that’s fucking. And girl, am I going to fuck your pussy raw.”

He leaned in close until we were brushing muzzles, then stuck his tongue out and ran it across my lips, down the side of my muzzle, over my cheek, and ending just below my jaw. “Mmm… salty…” He winked at me, then dropped me to the ground, where I fell over and curled into a ball. I didn’t bother trying to stand up. I just wanted to lie there forever. To this day, that’s the most terrified I’ve ever been in my entire life.

It was a day full of milestones, wasn’t it?

I missed what Carrion said to the techies and greasers—I was too busy being a pitiful waste of space. In fact, I didn’t notice anything had changed until ponies began to move around me, and Nova’s piercing shrieks split the night in two. My head jolted upright, and I saw her struggling against one of the bandits as two more pried Gauge away from her, shepherding him to the slave group with their hooves and metal rods they wielded like batons. I was on my hooves as fast as me and my concussion could manage, ready to sprint over and try to… I don’t know, do something, but I didn’t even manage to take one step before a gunshot rang out and something whizzed into the ground between my hooves. I recoiled and fell onto my flanks, and looked at a nearby rooftop to see my half-faced friend shaking his head at me. I growled at him, but that only turned into a snort of surprise when somepony put me in a headlock and held me down. Before I knew what was happening, I had a makeshift rope bridle around my muzzle and head, and I was forcibly dragged away from the group, along with many of my fellow mares.

I tried to protest and fight back, but the bridle didn’t offer a lot of room for me to speak or pull away. The most I could do was let my legs fall slack and force the bandit to drag me along, but he was strong enough that that hardly seemed to bother him, and instead only rubbed hot ash into the cuts and scrapes on my body. Suffice it to say that I gave up on that pretty fast, and resigned myself to limping off after him.

And then I heard the screaming.

The bandit led me a few streets over from where we’d been assembled, to where a score of bandits and mares had gathered. The mares were all bridled like me, and they’d been tied to poles and other scrap jutting off of ruined buildings so they couldn’t run away. An old oil drum had been filled with wood and other fuel to make a blazing fire, from which a metal rod protruded. I watched as a bandit trotted over to the rod, grabbed the insulated end between his teeth, then trotted back to a nearby mare, with the end glowing a bright orange. She tried to retreat, but he knocked her over with a hoof and held her down. Then, lowering the brand, he pressed it against her left cutie mark, searing a black heart into her juniper coat.

My head was yanked away from the gruesome sight by my captor taking me over to the side of the road and tying me to a twisted length of rebar. I pulled against the bridle, trying to break free, and even began to try to untie the knot with my magic despite the searing pain my concussion sent through my skull. But the bandit simply walloped me over the head with his baton, leaving me a sprawling, twitching, gasping mess on the ground. After I fought to regain my breath, I tried to stand up again—only for a hoof to hold me down, and a scalding pain to burn through my left flank

I didn’t have the strength to scream anymore. All I could muster was a pained cry that ended in gasps.

The bandit, apparently satisfied with his work, left me alone to chat and laugh at us with his friends. And as I laid there, I felt my terror and anguish being replaced by anger and determination. These ponies had taken everything from me. They’d destroyed my home, kidnapped my friends, and killed my mother. But perhaps worst of all, they’d stolen a piece of me as well. They’d burned a heart onto my left flank, right over my cutie mark, branding me a sex slave. They’d made me less than a mare. I wasn’t Ember to them; I was a tool, something to be used and discarded as they felt. And I knew if I got on that flying machine, I was going to spend the rest of my life as a fuck bucket for some stallion’s dick.

I wasn’t done fighting yet.

I managed to stand up again and lean against the post I’d been tied to. My leg hardly cooperated without sending pain through my flank, and I tried my best to ignore the mark I’d been branded with. Instead, I simply waited for my captor to come back to me. When he was just a foreleg’s length away, I leaned in and whispered into his ear, “Take me somewhere private and I’ll do anything you want. Fuck me all night long until your dick falls off. Just promise to not put me on that ship.”

That certainly got his attention. He stopped, moved his jaw from side to side as if trying to figure out if I was serious, and looked me over. I made sure to curl my foreleg and lift my tail, showing him the promised land underneath long enough to tease him before lowering it. I even batted my eyelashes for good measure.

Admittedly, I wasn’t a very good seductress, but thankfully the stallion I was dealing with didn’t look older than twenty winters. He definitely didn’t look as hardened as some of his comrades. Without discipline to curtail them, hormones spoke a lot louder than common sense, especially when you’re a psychopathic killer.

I don’t think I’ve seen anypony untie a knot as fast as that stallion did. Actually, now that I think about it, he must’ve been only sixteen or so winters. He was definitely too scrawny to be a stallion. I wondered if this colt was another captive who’d been kidnapped and raised to be a Crimson soldier like what Carrion had said. But that didn’t matter to me; all I wanted was out of this nightmare.

So, of course, the very first thing I did when I was untied was trip and fall flat on my face. Yay for me.

I didn’t get much mercy from my captor, as he used the bridle to literally drag me to my hooves. I winced and stumbled after him, keeping my jaw clenched and my head down. Our destination seemed to be one of the buildings that wasn’t burnt out or still currently on fire, and when we approached the door, the bandit bucked it open and shoved me inside. I didn’t protest, and instead went right to the bed and draped myself across it, sweeping my tail to the side in an inviting manner. The bandit, stupid colt as he was, didn’t waste any time shedding his armor and trotting after me. That was when I noticed that he too had a brand over what must’ve been a cutie mark a long time ago, replaced with a knife seared into the flesh. Still, I didn’t waste any thought on that trivial detail, instead moaning slightly to try to draw him over faster.

I didn’t spit out the piece of metal in my mouth until he’d rested his forehooves on my shoulders and I felt him searching for my hole.

Whirling around, I aimed a hoof at the side of his jaw. I connected surprisingly easily; apparently, he wasn’t expecting a fight. As he stumbled backwards, I wrapped the triangular piece of sharp steel in my magic and thrust the makeshift shiv forward, finding a fleshy space between two of his protruding ribs and pushing until the thing disappeared into his flesh completely.

That doesn’t mean I let go of the metal shard, however. As the bandit writhed in pain, I continued slicing and cutting with the shiv within his abdomen, just trying to find his heart and end his agony quickly. Unfortunately, the bandit wasn’t done fighting yet, and with some primal fury, lunged at me, knocking me onto my back. I twisted the shiv inside of his body cavity, and he responded by puking blood onto my face. But even as he drowned in his vitality, he continued to struggle, throttling my head and my horn with weakening blows that still managed to put stars in my eyes. Then the steel twitched in my magical grasp, like something had pushed against it, and I drove it forward with as much force as I could muster. The colt gasped (or gurgled, rather) and locked his limbs, managing to stare into my eyes with a look of pure hatred and agony, before he simply fell limp with a sigh.

Gasping, I only had the strength to shove the body off of me and crawl under the bed before passing out, letting sweet oblivion take me away from the nightmare.

Chapter 6: The Shadow of Death

By some miracle, I didn’t die that night.

Shocking, I know, given that I’m here to tell this story, but, well… let’s just say that you don’t know the half of it.

I don’t know how long I was out for, but when I finally came to, the rays of light shooting through the holes in the shack slanted at steep angles. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings, but it didn’t take me that long to feel the dried blood caking my face, or to feel the lingering heat in my left flank. I reached forward with my hooves, managing to crawl out from under the bed with agonizing effort. Grunting, I forced myself to stand up, hissing as I held my branded leg to the side. I immediately flattened my ears against my head as my grunt sounded like a roar, and I recoiled slightly. That was when I first noticed how… quiet Blackwash was.

Ignoring the corpse lying on the floor, lifeless eyes staring forward forever like glass marbles, I limped to the door, shedding the rope bridle I was still wearing in the process—just another horrible reminder of last night. While things were still more or less a haze to me at this point, they were starting to come back, and in frightening clarity. As soon as I stepped outside, everything suddenly hit me in the face, and I could only stand in the road, breathless, as I took in the carnage around me.

Smoke plumed from a few smoldering buildings near the edges of town, rising into the air before the high altitude winds finally swept them away. It filtered the blue sun’s light, making it less white and more blue, bathing the town in an eerie glow. Spent casings in the dirt reflected the light, giving the ground a dull sparkle. And of course, lining the street, the bodies of ponies I knew lay in limp heaps, attracting flies and flesh strippers.

It was a good thing I was starving, or I’m pretty sure I would’ve puked again. Even still, dry heaving wasn’t much of an improvement.

The wind whistled through the empty streets of the ruins of Blackwash. I walked the entire length of the street without seeing a single untouched building. Even the one I’d passed out in after killing my captor was missing pieces of its roof and rear wall. The dull crunch of my hooves on the ashy ground was the only sound of life in the entire town. Somewhere, hinges creaked in the wind, giving me an eerie feeling I wasn’t used to experiencing in the middle of my town, especially in broad daylight.

I wandered around town in a daze, not really sure where I was going. I still had some lingering dizziness from my concussion, but even if it weren’t for that, I was incapable of thought. A dead mare walking, I drifted through the ruins of town, the ruins of my life, without aim or reason. Maybe I was hoping I’d see somepony else that’d managed to escape like I did. Maybe I was waiting for a bandit to pop out of the ruins of a house and gun me down in the street. I can’t really say. What I do know is that it didn’t take me long before I was staring down the front door of my house—or what was left of it.

Only two walls of the house were still standing, the front and left side and much of the roof had collapsed. Tendrils of smoke escaped from between the charred metal and scorched steel that once made up the roof, and the yard was littered with twisted debris and rubble. It wasn’t too hard to find the crater on the right side of the house, the remains of the bomb that’d given me yesterday’s concussion (and today’s headache). I stumbled into the backyard to see that the forge was completely gone, now little more than a raised mound of scrap on the mountain.

And between the remains of my house and the corpse of the forge…

“Get away from her!” I cried, rushing to Mom’s side in a gallop that was more a prolonged series of trips and falls than anything. Waving my hooves, I managed to chase off the flesh strippers that’d been gathered around her body, forcing them to take flight with shrill trilling sounds and the flapping of their four wings. When I was a few yards away from Mom, my frenzied gallop slowed to a trot, and eventually to a crawl. I fell to my knees by Mom’s side, simply trying to hold back the plethora of emotions as I stared at her bloody and mutilated body. It was pretty obvious that the flesh strippers had been at work for an hour by the time I’d come around.

I didn’t have any more tears to shed. The well had run dry hours ago.

Animals. These… Crimson had treated us like animals, but if anything, they were the animals, not us. In the space of one night, they’d flown into Blackwash from who knows where, burned the whole thing to the ground, enslaved everypony who could work and shot all the rest. My life, and the lives of everypony I knew, had been destroyed in a single night. As I sat next to my mother’s corpse, trying to find the tears to even cry, I wondered how hard it would be to join her, to join everypony else who’d died last night. After all, what was one more body on the mountain for the flesh strippers to feast on?

Then it hit me. As long as I could breathe, my life still meant a whole fucking lot. Not because of me personally. But because as long as I was alive, I was carrying the fate of everypony who’d survived the massacre on my shoulders. Nova. Gauge. Stardust. Brass. So many ponies I knew who were counting on me to save them. And even though I never asked to be a hero… I was the only one who could save them. I was the only one who knew what happened here, and the only one who could make it right.

I was going to get off this damn mountain, find out what Carrion had done with my friends, and put a bullet between his fucking eyes.

But first, I had business to attend to. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. The very first thing on my list was making sure the dead could rest easy. I was only one mare, but if I didn’t do the last rites, nopony would. All I’d be doing would be leaving ponies I knew for the flesh strippers to feast on, until there was nothing left but bones. I wasn’t going to let that happen to Mom, damn it.

I managed to find a shovel in the remains of the forge and haul it back to Mom. Thankfully, using my magic didn’t make me feel like my head was splitting in two, so I was able to get to work. Even still, trying to dig through the ashy soil on the mountaintop was a nightmare, and I hit stone no more than two feet down. But without tools to break up the rock, it was the best I could do.

It took me an hour, but I finally laid Mom to rest. A painted panel of aluminum served as her headstone for her shallow grave, but it was the best I could do. I threw more scrap metal overtop of her grave so the rains wouldn’t wash the dirt away, then simply sat near her head. Somewhere, thunder rumbled in the distance, but I didn’t pay it any mind. My attention was focused on replaying last night’s scenario and wondering if there was any way that I could have saved her.

My throat began to tighten, and pricks of warmth at the corners of my eyes signaled the arrival of tears. I swallowed hard, and as the gentle wind blew through my sweaty, bloodstained mane, I finally parted my mouth. “I… I-I never got to say goodbye,” I murmured. I didn’t know why I was talking, but it just seemed like the right thing to do. “It all… h-happened so f-fast.” Tears ran down the sides of my cheeks, and I rubbed a fetlock against my face to wipe them away. “It’s not fair. N-None of this is. I… I can’t even believe that you’re g-gone.” Swallowing hard, I looked up, to the east, in the direction I’d seen that flying machine come from. “I’m so… so sorry. But… b-but I’m going to make this right. You hear? I-I’m going to make this right!”

I quieted back down as thunder rumbled once more. After a minute of trying (and failing) to hold back tears, I simply hung my head and laid it on the ground next to the headstone. “I love you, Mom,” I whispered. “I love you so much.”

That was it. I didn’t say anything more. Before the depression and helplessness could paralyze me again like it did when she was dying in my forelegs, I rolled over and stood up. I still had a job to do.

I made my way back to the center of town, collecting whatever fuel and scraps of wood I could find along the way. Whenever I saw flesh strippers slicing through a corpse, I’d holler at them and chase them away. I knew I wasn’t solving anything, because they’d simply wait for me to leave before returning to their bloody feast, but it at least made me feel better. Nopony deserved to be a meal for scavengers.

But if I thought the flesh strippers were feasting before, I finally found the banquet.

I screamed in disgust and revulsion and dropped all the wood I’d scavenged at my hooves. I’d finally made my way to the town square, and I figured out that Carrion had meant business. From one side of the square to the other, the corpses of Blackwash’s elders all laid face down in the dirt, surrounded by pools of brown, dried blood. The neat lines told me they’d been executed one by one and left to rot. I could smell the stench carried in on the breeze, and hear the frenzied trilling of the flesh strippers as gangs descended onto the bodies. So much carrion for the feast…

There was no way I could bury that many bodies. That’s why I’d been collecting wood. Bundling it up again, I made my way to the clearing in front of the dishes and dumped the pile there. Then, one by one, I grabbed the bodies of the elderly in my magic and carried them over as well. I could hardly look at them without feeling sick, but I had to do this. I wasn’t going to burn a pile of discarded corpses. I lined them up in neat rows and folded their forelegs across their chests so they could at least go with some dignity, and spread the fuel over them. Hopefully it would be enough. I didn’t see SCaR where the bandits had left it, though. Maybe they took it with them when they left.

By the time it was high noon, there was one more fire burning on the mountaintop. I only lingered for a few minutes; the smell made me sick.

Now that the dead had their rest, it was time for me to get ready to leave. I’d need a weapon, some food, water, traveling supplies, and a map. My growling stomach steered me toward food being the first priority, even though I wasn’t sure I could eat after seeing all the death around me. But hiking down the side of a mountain on an empty stomach is about as bad an idea as they come, and I wanted to avoid as many bad ideas as I could. Apart from, you know, wandering into the Wilderness with no clue where I was or what I was doing.

I trotted over to the remains of the listening outpost; I knew there were some emergency rations still stored there from when the military used to own this place, and dried hardtack and sterilized water is better than no food at all. At least, until I could gather some food of my own. Even though the mountain was covered in pink grass, it was mildly toxic to ponies, meaning grazing was an absolute last resort. I’d have to go hunting for stone hares (which are about as hard to eat as their name would imply), or find some wild berries. There were a few spots where the latter grew on the mountain, and the former occasionally wandered up the slopes close enough to hunt.

The outpost itself had been hit hard. Sure enough, it looked like the Crimson had cut through the side of the prefab, bypassing the big door altogether. I guessed by the twisted shrapnel that they were more of a fan of breaching charges than fusion cutters. There were more bodies scattered around the outpost. A lot more. It looked like most of the fighting took place here. I could’ve stopped to bury every one of them, but I was just one mare, and I’d already used most of my fuel burning the elderly. One mare can’t bury an entire town of hundreds of ponies.

I crawled through the hole in the wall of the outpost and found—big surprise—more bodies. But what was actually surprising was the lack of collateral damage inside the outpost itself. There were only a few holes or dents where bullets were fired, and definitely no scorch marks from explosives. The Crimson had been very careful not to damage anything inside of the outpost, and I had a good idea why.

A few seconds later, I was able to confirm my suspicions. The main control room, where I’d stood not even two days earlier and listened to a message from a long-forgotten world, had been completely stripped bare. All of the computers were gone, all of the holodisk records, everything. Whatever working tech there was in the outpost, the Crimson had stolen all of it.

But why though? I knew that the signal we received drew them here—that much really wasn’t too hard to figure out—but why? I had no idea. And come to think of it, Carrion said he was doing a job for an employer. But who would want to kill a small, isolated, peaceful town on a mountaintop over a message sent hundreds of years ago?

But there were more pressing matters. Who cares if I knew why we were attacked if my friends and family were being sold into slavery, maybe even while I was lingering on the mountain? The ‘whys’ of why my life was destroyed in a night could be put off until later. Right now I had to answer the ‘hows’; like how I was going to get off this mountain, and how I was going to find the Crimson.

I already knew the answer to the first ‘how’: with food, water, blankets, and guns. Thankfully, the Crimson hadn’t found the emergency supplies inside the outpost; either that, or they didn’t care, but I wasn’t complaining. I opened what looked like a little storage closet to find a dozen boxes of hardtack and two dozen metal cans of purified water. Not only that, but there were some blankets and other basic survival gear inside, most importantly of all being saddlebags to carry all of this shit. Loading myself up with two boxes of hardtack and a half dozen cans of water, I felt a little more ready to take on the Wilderness. There was only one problem though.

I needed a gun.

The supply safe didn’t have one, which I guess made sense? I wasn’t really sure what Equestrian protocol was for dealing with supplies in emergency situations, but apparently reserve firearms weren’t mandatory. A trot across the way to the armory yielded… nothing. Apparently the Crimson had stripped it dry, taking all of the dozens of firearms and thousands and thousands and thousands of rounds Blackwash had been stocked with for themselves. I guess bandits like them weren’t about to pass up on an opportunity to bolster their own firepower. But that still left me with no way of defending myself, apart from brute force bludgeoning with a lead pipe or something. And from what I’d seen in town, they’d been pretty thorough in scavenging all the weapons and bullets they could find. That was a little odd. Even bandits had a limit for bullets; how many could they possibly need? Maybe they needed to stock up because they’re terrible shots with those automatics of theirs…

…Which gave me an idea.

Laden with supplies and a bedroll, I trotted across town, taking care to avoid the still-burning pyre in the town square. I felt my throat momentarily seize up as I returned to my home in its sorry state and saw the freshly dug grave outside. But I’d already shed my tears; I didn’t need to shed more. So, head held high and staring forward, I trotted past both until I was climbing the little hills and gullies up against the side of the caldera. After a few minutes of searching, I finally found what, or should I say who, I was looking for.

It was the pegasus bastard who’d killed Mom. His body laid crumpled in a feathery heap where he’d fallen, and if he wasn’t dead when I’d shot him, the awkward angle of his neck told me he would’ve died immediately upon hitting the ground. Brown, dried blood stained his armor and the ashy ground around him, and I could see three puckered marks along his chest—the entry wounds of my rounds. As I stood there, staring at his body, a revelation hit me.

I’d killed ponies last night.

You’re probably thinking I’m stupid or something for coming to that realization way after the fact, but the truth is, I was more concerned with not dying to think about how I’d just snuffed out the lives of two of my fellow equines. Now, they may have been horrible, horrible ponies, but the point remained that I’d taken two lives and hadn’t even thought about it. One of them had even died in incredible agony as I sliced his innards to ribbons and I didn’t even bat an eye. I mean, I’d passed out almost immediately after, but that was beside the point.

Yet here I was, staring face-to-corpse with the repercussions of what I’d done last night. Was taking a life really that easy? Three shots to the chest, just fire and forget? I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. Disgust? Remorse? Joy? I mean, I’d cut the bastard down that’d killed Mom, but for some reason, that didn’t make me feel any better…

In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not a very philosophical mare. So I did what any not-philosophical mare would do, and simply ignored the implications of what I’d done. I could think about them later. Right now, I was wasting valuable time, and a look to the west, where the horizon met a shimmering blue ocean a hundred miles away, showed rainclouds bearing down on me. I only had a few hours before I’d be all but drowning in water. On Auris, when it rains, it pours.

I found the screws that held the automatics to the stallion’s shoulder mounts and quickly undid them. Prying the gun off of his shoulder, I took a step back and spun it in place with my magic to get a good look at it. It looked like a Bronco SM45, an ammo-hungry automatic submachine gun with virtually no accuracy. Basically, this thing sucked beyond twenty-five yards, which was pretty much its maximum range. The only way a pony could hit something at range with it was to just squeeze the trigger and hope its nine hundred rounds per minute would be enough.

At least it seemed in decent condition, which was more than I honestly expected given how mangy the stallion looked, and as I searched through his saddlebags like a damn grave robber I found four drum magazines for two hundred rounds in total, some spare parts, and some cleaning supplies. I decided to leave the other SM45 with the bandit; I only had two hundred rounds, and I didn’t want to divide that between two guns. Besides, I hopefully wouldn’t need to use it anyway, and I think it goes without saying that I’d already be horribly fucked if I needed to wield both of them at once.

There was one more useful thing I found on the bastard’s corpse: a crude map of the area. It took me a few seconds to get my bearings on the mouthdrawn map, but I found Blackwash easy enough by looking for the largest mountain in the west. Sure enough, it’d been circled and marked with an exclamation point. There were a few more things of interest throughout the valley, including a bright red X surrounded by exclamation points nestled in the middle of the mountains probably eighty or so miles away from me. On the opposite side of the river that ran through the valley was a black square marked as ‘HOME’. At least that gave me a direction to shoot for.

A few names were also scribbled at the foot of the mountains, Northlight being the closest. Names of towns, perhaps? It was definitely worth checking out when I finally scaled the mountains. I didn’t even know that there were other towns and other ponies that lived that close by. Remember when I said that Blackwash was my entire world?

I stood up and sighed, tucking the map into one of my saddlebags and fashioning a makeshift sling to hold the SM45 around my neck while I walked. I wanted it at the ready so I wouldn’t have to dig it out of my bags if I was attacked or something and had to act fast. Fully stocked on supplies, I trotted away from the bandit’s corpse, but not without spitting on him first. That fucker killed Mom; I hoped the flesh strippers tore him apart.

Before I left the mountain, however, there was one more thing I wanted to say goodbye to. Trotting off of the hills, I slowed in front of the remains of my house. Something still smoldered inside, but at least the shack looked stable. It’d be pretty fucking ironic if my journey ended before it even began because I got squashed by a house.

Picking my way through the rubble, I found myself inside of the single room shack I’d called home for twenty winters. Only the corner Mom and I used for our kitchen and bathroom was destroyed; everything else was singed or had fallen from its shelves, but at least that all was fine. I walked across the dirt floor to our beds, which we’d placed side by side at one end of the house, and plucked a picture off of mine. It must’ve fallen off of the shelf overhead, and the mattress stopped it from getting broken. I turned and trotted a bit back towards the hole in the wall for some light, and promptly sat down on my haunches and simply stared at the picture.

It was the only picture of our family. All of us. Me, Mom, and Dad, in front of our house. I was still a newborn foal, and Mom looked exhausted, but there was a shining light in her eyes; she was happy. Probably the happiest I’ve ever seen her. And she was leaning against Dad’s side, who had a wing draped over her barrel. He was a wheat brown pegasus, but that was the most I could tell about him. Right as the picture was taken, he’d pulled a hat down over his face, obscuring it. I think he knew even then that he was going to leave.

That Mom still had this picture and hadn’t torn it up after he left told me a lot. She loved him. She loved him with all of her heart, and he’d stomped on it and flown away without so much as a word, leaving Mom to care for two-winters-old me by herself. Maybe she kept the picture around because she hoped he’d show up again. I couldn’t really say, and I couldn’t really ask her now. All I could do was take the picture out of its frame, fold it up, and stick it in a pocket. I could at least carry a little piece of both of them with me, wherever I happened to go.

There was a mirror lying on the ground that caught my attention as I left my house. Biting my lip, I picked it up and took a look at myself.

The Ember that looked back was not the mare I knew. Her face was covered in dried blood, and her mane was matted and tangled. Soot, ash, and more blood coated her coat, at least where it was visible beneath the saddlebags and equipment she was carrying. She had one cut hoof draped across a gun hanging from her neck, and her cutie mark on her left flank had been nearly burnt away, instead yielding to a heart seared into the flesh, still raw and red.

I looked like I’d been through hell and back. I suppose that’s not an inaccurate metaphor.

Pocketing the mirror, I limped away from the house and made my way to the east slope of the mountain. There I stood, staring down at a narrow path that twisted and winded down the mountain and the adjacent slopes for hundreds of feet. Me and Nova and Gauge used to make a game out of who could go the farthest down the side of the mountain without getting scared and turning back. I usually won, and I could still see the twisted stump of the tree that I’d touched the very last time we played, eight winters ago and nearly four hundred feet down.

Looking back on it, after seeing how far I’ve come now, and all the things I’ve done since the day I decided to leave Blackwash for the first time, it still amazes me that I’d lived my whole life up until that point within the boundaries of that tree. And there I was, about to venture into the great unknown with reason and purpose, with nothing to look back to and an uncertain future before me.

I didn’t look back at Blackwash as I took my first of many, many steps away from my home. I didn’t want to remember a broken, twisted, and dead town. I wanted to remember the home I grew up in, the place that protected me, the place that I loved, as something alive and well, even if only in my mind. As the damp western wind began to curl my frazzled mane with moisture, I only trudged onwards, eyes focused on the path ahead of me, and making sure that I didn’t lose my hoofing and go rolling down the side of the mountain. Up ahead, the gnarled, hardened trunk of an Auris tree stood, waiting for me to visit it again, daring me to turn back.

I passed it, setting hoof on new ground, and leaving Blackwash behind me… forever.

Chapter 7: The Descent

I was alone.

Even more than when I was the last pony left in Blackwash, I was truly and utterly alone. With nopony for company but me, myself, and I, I slowly inched my way down the side of the mountain, searching for hoofholds when the mountain steepened, or simply shuffling along narrow dirt paths where it flattened. Prickly pink grass stabbed at the bottoms of my hooves, and I used a timer on a survival watch to make sure I took a sip of water every five minutes and nibbled on some hard tack every half hour. I didn’t want to get dehydrated or hungry while I hiked, but at the same time I wanted to carefully ration my food.

The tree was already long behind me, and if I craned my head up (which I did often), I couldn’t see it. I must’ve made a quarter rotation around the mountain as I sought for a way down, because I could see the tip of Dish One poking out over the southern slope. It was the only bit of Blackwash I could still see; even my funeral pyre had burnt itself dry, leaving only thin trails of smoke to spew into the afternoon sky.

Every hour, I paused to rest my legs for fifteen minutes so I could keep up my methodical descent down the mountain. I’d spend that time to consult my map, get another corner of hardtack in me, and try to map out the next leg of the descent. It looked like my easiest way into the valley would be to shoot between the two smaller mountains in front of me, where their bases joined to make a narrow pass that I could get to from the foot of my mountain. Unfortunately, at the rate I was moving, it’d take me another day just to get there. Black Mountain was tall; Nova told me it was the tallest mountain in the entire range, and from the days I used to spend staring over the range and the valley far below me, I knew she was right. That, and you tend to trust a pegasus’ judgment when they say how tall or how high up something is or isn’t.

At the very least, I had a great view the entire time. From my lofty perch, I could see the jagged teeth of Auris’ north jutting out around me, making tiny and treacherous valleys and passes where those mountains met. Pink grass and orange, leafy trees covered those mountains in a living, swaying coat of bright color, and the occasional shrieks of shrikes as they hunted for prey played a perfect melody to the wind pushing fog through the valley. I eventually had to start setting alarms on my survival watch to get me moving when my fifteen minutes of rest were up; the sheer beauty and peace of what I was seeing kept tempting me to simply sit and watch for hours on end, a complete opposite to the horror and death I’d witnessed the night before.

One of these little stops in particular stands out to me even now. I was on my… fourth? Fifth hour of descent? Something like that. I’d stopped on a clearing where the side of the mountain just jutted out straight over open air, topped with a flat rock that I could sprawl across. The stone was warm after baking in our energetic blue sun all day, and to my tired and weary body, it was the best thing ever. After eating a bit of hardtack (which tastes like a combination of cardboard and chalk, by the way. Two out of ten, would not recommend unless starving), I washed it down with the rest of the water I had in my first can. I smacked my lips a few times, trying to get as much moisture off of them as I could, before crushing the can in my magic and chucking it off the side of my little loft. I watched the can twirl in the air, spinning this way and that before bouncing off the side of the mountain a few hundred yards below me, where it tumbled farther down until it disappeared into the undergrowth.

Anyway, I was exhausted, and understandably so. I mean, passing out isn’t really the same as sleeping, even if we use them interchangeably, and I really wanted to take a nap. The warmth coming off of the stone and penetrating deep into my coat wasn’t helping either. Yawning, I shrugged off my supplies and set my watch to wake me in a half hour, then closed my eyes.

Rustling.

I don’t think I had my eyes closed for two minutes before I heard the noise of… something. I couldn’t quite place it, but it sounded like thick pieces of paper shuffling together, or even feathers in the wind. Groaning, I forced myself onto my elbows and rubbed my eyes, opening them to see that my little platform was shrouded in shadow. Did the rain get here already? I looked over my shoulder to check the sky…

…and found myself muzzle to beak with a shrike.

So I’ve mentioned these a few times now, and you’re probably wondering just what exactly a shrike is. Well, I had probably the closest look a pony could possibly have with a living, breathing shrike and survive, so I guess I’m qualified to tell you. A shrike is this enormous four-legged creature with a short, blunt tail full of feathers, three serrated claws on the end of each foot, two pairs of wings spanning almost ten feet each, and a white, feathery head which holds its four eyes and three piece beak. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the beak holds teeth that are four inches long and are as sharp as steel. No, literally. Their teeth actually incorporate iron into their structure.

Oh, did I mention that they’re predators, and the reason that we don’t let our foals wander far from the center of town?

As long as that aside might have been, I barely blinked before the thing shrieked at me and lunged forward, three piece beak snapping wildly and claws slicing through the air. I screamed and hurled myself forward, just away from a very sharp and painful death, and heard the violent snapping of its beak right behind me. Adrenalin roared into my veins, and my magic grabbed my submachine gun and toggled off the safety. Just as I brought it to bear on the shrike, however, it lunged again, and this time its beak found my mane—my very long, very full, very easy-to-grab-hold-of-and-shake-Ember-like-a-chew-toy mane. If you can’t guess what it did next, go back over that last bit for a second. I’ll wait.

Anyhow, I found myself very quickly becoming sick to my stomach as the world blurred around me. I flailed and wrapped my forelegs around my head, if only to stop feeling like the monster was going to snap my neck off of my torso. I began to fire my submachine gun wildly, not sure where it was pointing, just hoping to hit the alien raptor and make it let go. Really, I had a better chance of hitting myself than I did the bird, but I was too busy screaming to care about that. Somehow, I didn’t fill myself with holes, and somehow, I managed to convince the shrike to let go of me. I figured that last part out as my world suddenly turned weightless, and it no longer felt like somepony was trying to rip my mane from my skull. Of course, I failed to notice the immediate implications of ‘the fucking bird just fucking threw me’ until I opened my eyes and saw where I was flying.

I guess shrikes prefer tenderized meat. At least I’d be able to see where I threw that can.

Legs flailing, I shrieked and reached for the edge of the cliff, just barely managing to dig my hooves into the gravel and wrap them around an outcropping of rock. My kicking hind legs found nothing but open air beneath me, and gulping, I looked over my shoulder at the long, long fall down the side of the mountain. Gritting my teeth, I gasped and grunted and began to haul myself up the edge, trying to get on solid ground before my tired limbs gave out on me.

Then the shrike stepped on my foreleg, digging its serrated claws into the flesh. Gasping and panting, I could only look up at it as it stared down at me with some sort of primal, violent intelligence. A clicking growl began to build in its throat, and I could smell its hot, acrid breath on my face. It knew it had its prey cornered, and it could easily fling me off the side of the cliff with a simple toss of its talons.

I closed my eyes, jammed the SM45 right into its eye, and didn’t stop shooting until the thing clicked.

Shrikes might have skulls as hard as a rock, but their eyes and brains are just as fleshy and soft as ours. If anything, its hard skull only helped the submachine gun’s small rounds bounce around inside its head and turn its brain into mush. With a dying gurgle of blood and an unfinished squawk, the monstrous bird slumped over, dead.

Right on top of me.

While I was clinging to a cliff.

The monster fell forward, and the bulk of its weight hit me right in the face, despite my feeble telekinetic attempts to stop it. As you’d expect, I immediately lost my grip on the cliff, and began to fall in a loud, screaming, crying mess of limbs and feathers. The wind tore past my ears, and I could see my mane (minus a big hole torn out of it) whipping straight past my face. The rocky slope rushed up to meet me, jagged stones waiting to dash me to pieces.

In a last ditch effort to avoid becoming a shrike-Ember-mountain sandwich, I kicked my right legs out and clung onto the carcass of the bird for dear life. I barely had time to brace myself before the back of the shrike hit the mountain and the impact bucked me off. I must’ve gotten twenty feet on the bounce, because the next thing I knew, I was flailing my limbs and trying to shield my face as the twisted, crooked branches of a tree suddenly dominated my vision.

I must not have done a good job; there was a crippling pain in my forehead, right beneath my horn, and the entire world exploded into oblivion.

The rain on my face woke me up.

I gasped like a mare come back from the dead. Horribly confused and disoriented, I whipped my aching head back and forth to try to figure out where I was. All I saw was pink and orange, however, at least until I tried to sit up; with a rustle of leaves, my head popped out from beneath the undergrowth, bewildered and afraid. I imagine it would’ve been a pretty entertaining thing to see, if there had been anypony else around to see me.

Groaning, I rubbed my hoof to the base of my aching horn, and was surprised to see (and feel) dried blood flaking off of my forehead. Craning my head back, I looked up at the branches of a tree rising above me. If I squinted, I could see a reasonable impression of my face on one of the branches. Or maybe I was just imagining it. I think I was fulfilling my entire life’s quota of concussions in the past twenty-eight hours alone. The bright spots of light drifting across my eyes were pretty.

A big, fat raindrop landed right on my nose, making me flinch. The skies overhead were angry and gray, beginning to shower, and I knew it’d only be a few minutes before they really opened up. I’d be soaked to the bone in no time, and I knew from experience that the nights are cold on the mountains. Without a fire, I’d freeze to death—especially now that I’d lost all of my supplies.

Well, maybe not all of them. I still had my survival watch, for what good that would do, and one of my saddlebags lying a short ways away; it also must’ve fallen off of the mountain when the shrike knocked me off. I magicked it over to me, ignoring the pain in my horn, and found my map, a single mag of ammo, and one can of water. My hardtack, my bedroll, and my other survival supplies were nowhere to be found. In all likelihood, they were still sitting on the ledge where I was attacked, or they were scattered all across the mountainside. And with a storm rapidly approaching, I didn’t want to spend time to go hunting for my supplies, or trying to climb back up to where I’d fallen from.

Another huge raindrop hit me in the face. I needed to find shelter, fast.

Standing up was almost torturous; everything hurt everywhere. Quickly fastening the saddlebag across my back, I squinted into the shadows of the trees looming around me, looking for a hollow I could hide in and wait out the storm. In the meanwhile, I began to trot onwards, using the big, flat leaves of the trees to protect me from the beginning of the rain. Along the way, I found my SM45 wedged in the branches of a shrub. I considered that a good omen, and after prying it out and slinging it over my shoulder, I decided to keep trotting in the direction I was going, leaving the shrike corpse far behind me. Not that leaving the thing that’d caused me to lose most of my supplies and throw me hundreds of feet down the mountain to rot felt good or anything.

Unfortunately, the rain wasn’t patient. I hadn’t even trotted for a minute before the skies literally tore themselves apart with a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder, and the trees themselves began to shake as the rain came pouring down. I threw some telekinesis up over my head to try to keep the rain off of me, but I was exhausted, both physically and mentally, and it was hard to focus on the spell and navigate the forest at the same time. Occasional lapses in my concentration rewarded me with a shower of cold water that made me squeak like a little filly before reinforcing the spell. Even still, it didn’t protect my legs from the mud and muck splashing up from pools around my hooves, and my long, bushy tail was basically dragging through the mud behind me.

By the time I finally found shelter in the form of a large hollow in the base of a great tree, I’m sure I looked absolutely pathetic. My wet mane was plastered to my face and neck, and my tail was just a thin cord of orange and yellow hairs hanging limply from my rump and half coated in mud. My charcoal coat was sodden, and I was dripping water and shivering furiously. I didn’t waste any time diving into the hollow of the tree and chasing out the few rock-like stone hares that had been taking shelter there. The little things bounded away on their stubby legs before curling into armored balls and simply hurling themselves down the slope of the mountain. I giggled, embracing the delirium and watching them go. What silly little creatures!

Like I said, delirium. Lots of it.

The hollow of the tree was big enough for three ponies to lay side by side, and since it was only me, I had a lot of room to myself. Which was good, because I immediately flopped onto my side and sprawled out, using every inch of available space. Of course, that didn’t last too long; need I remind you that I was soaked to the bone, and the temperature was dropping pretty fast?

I soon found myself cuddled into a little ball to try to keep what body heat I could. Draping my saddlebags over me didn’t really help all that much, because they were damp too. I needed a fire, but I didn’t have any kindling to work with. The fire sticks were all back in the bag on the mountaintop.

Unless…

I flipped my saddlebags over and dumped everything onto the ground, praying that maybe I’d just missed them earlier. Sure enough, jammed into the folds of the bag was a little gray paper stick with a bright red end. It was a little damp, but fire sticks could work underwater. All they needed was a little persuasion. And by persuasion, I mean force.

I gathered all the dead leaves and flammable scrap I could find that littered the inside of the tree and piled it in the center of the hollow. Then, burying the fire stick in the fuel until only the red end was showing, I prepared the fire. All it took was the stomp of a hoof on the red end, and suddenly the whole thing was blazing to life.

I whooped. I hollered. I cheered. Glorious, glorious fire crackled in the middle of the hollow, and I knew the fire stick had enough fuel to last for four hours before it’d burn itself dry. But really, that was all I needed. I could already feel the roasting warmth of the fire pricking my coat and evaporating the rain I collected. So, laying my saddlebags open in front of the fire and arranging all of my supplies around it to dry them off, I found a cozy little pile of dirt at the far corner of the hollow, as far away from the entrance as possible, and laid flat in front of the fire. After taking a few minutes to spread my limp mane and soggy tail so the fire could dry them off, I let out an enormous yawn and rested my cheek on my crossed forelegs.

Let me tell you, I’ve never slept as soundly as I did that night by the cozy warmth of the fire.

In all honesty, morning came too soon.

I didn’t think it was possible to sleep for sixteen hours until I checked my watch the following day. Sure enough, the numbers 0734 were on display, and I remembered falling asleep sometime in the mid-afternoon when the storm hit. I guess I really needed the sleep. I sure as Tartarus felt so much better.

I was also really fucking hungry. The last thing I’d eaten was a square of hardtack a day ago, and I hadn’t eaten much of anything before that. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any food, courtesy of the shrike. As far as I could see it, I only had three options: climb back up the mountain to get my supplies, which was stupid and would take most of the day; try to scavenge what I could from the forest, which had about as much a chance of getting me killed as anything, because I didn’t know what was poisonous or not; or simply press on and try to make it to Northlight before I collapsed. Really, of the three, the last seemed like my best bet.

I sat up against the inner trunk of the tree and looked around me. My little fire had (predictably) burnt itself into a fine ash while I was sleeping, but it’d done its job. My gear was dry, my body was dry, and I was no longer sad. Really, the last one was the most important. Wet gear and wet coat makes a sad Ember, and a sad Ember doesn’t move very far.

Now content, or at least as contented as I could be considering I really wanted something to eat, I began to pack my gear up and plan how I was going to make it to the foot of the mountains. I still had to make it through the pass between those two mountains to the south, and if the bandit’s map was any good, Northlight should be right on the other side. Maybe I could find something to eat there, assuming that the ponies living there were nice. I really hoped they were nice. My entire plan was hinging on the kindness of strangers.

Mornings on Auris would probably be strange to you, since you don't know what it’s like to live under a blue sun, because everything glowed blue, especially after rainfall the previous night. Our blue sun was low enough in the east that I could look almost directly at it without searing my eyes, taking in the tiny blue disc that brought life to my entire planet. The orange trees and pink grass seemed almost brown or luminescent in the blue glow, and my black coat had taken on a faint blue sheen as I stepped into the light. The air was still, calm, in that alien glow. As I trotted beneath the canopy, I felt like I was the only living, breathing thing for miles.

I kept the sun on my left to orient myself to the south as I walked. From what I remembered when I was scaling the mountain above the tree line, this patch of woods would only take me two or three hours to get through before I found myself on open slopes again. That was good; I needed a bit of mostly level walking to make up for all the climbing I did yesterday. Then I’d be back to steep slopes where the trees couldn’t grow, and I’d once again spend the next few hours picking my way down the slopes, except this time on an empty stomach. I popped open my last can of purified water and took a few small sips from it. Hopefully I could trick my hungry stomach with some water, at least until I found something edible. The grass all around me certainly wasn’t; I didn’t feel like puking my brains out, not when I still had a hike to finish.

At the very least, I had plenty to look at and listen to as I made my way through the woods. As the sun rose, so too did the Auris songbirds, and I soon had their little melodies to brighten up my walk and make me forget about the aches in my gut for a while. I caught sight of a few of them flitting from tree to tree, zooming around on their four wings and little tails. For as much as we all loved to tease Nova about pegasi being part bird, it was always clear that they certainly didn’t owe it to Auris’ birds. Unlike pretty much all avian life on this planet, they didn’t have two pairs of wings.

I was a little thankful for that. I was already jealous enough of Nova’s wings as it was (what ground-bound pony doesn’t envy their pegasus friends?). I didn’t need to see her flaunting four of them.

I didn’t even realize I’d stepped out of the woods until the sunlight hit me in the face. I squinted and shielded my face with a hoof, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the bright light. When they finally did, I could see the next leg of my journey spread out below me, a fifty degree incline filled with rocks and other outcroppings for thousands of feet, at least until it hit the mountain pass. On my empty stomach, it looked like it was a continent away. Still, I knew beyond that pass was salvation, and more importantly, food—or at least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

I checked my watch and made note of the time. It was only 1109, which surprised me a little. It must’ve been a little longer of a walk than I thought it would be. My stomach unhelpfully added its own two bits, reminding me that it hadn’t been fed in something like twenty-six hours. At least I was used to surviving on starvation mode when need be. Seriously, winters on top of a fucking mountain are brutal.

Doesn’t mean I was in any less agony right now, though.

I’ll spare you the details, since otherwise, we’ll be here all day. However, it did take me all day to get to the mountain pass. Almost another nine hours of walking, stumbling, falling, and moaning carried me the rest of the way across the slope of the mountain, until finally, I could see the pass through the mountains open up before me. I’d used up the last of my water a few hours ago, and with no food and no water, I was dehydrated and exhausted. I made it as far as the middle of the pass before my legs gave out on me, and I collapsed onto my face, eating a whole lot of dirt and gravel in the process. Trust me, it didn’t help my starvation problem in the slightest.

I was lightheaded, and it felt like my mind was spinning. How far had I gone, only to fall short at the very end? I rolled onto my back and took a look behind me. Far, far above me stood the towering peak of the mountain I once called home. From down below, it looked massive. The rain had put out the last of the fires, or so I assumed; I didn’t see any more smoke rising from the peak. If I squinted my eyes, I could just barely make out the smooth white face of Dish One, overlooking the mountain pass where I laid, and the valley beyond.

You know, not bad for a mare with nothing to lose. If only I could’ve gotten farther…

I laid in the middle of the pass, empty stomach chewing a hole through my abdomen, for some time, staring with eyes half lidded at the small white circle of the dish. My throat felt raw, and the dirt I’d accidentally swallowed wasn’t doing a whole lot to help with the sandpapery feeling. I imagine if I had any water left to sweat, I’d be sweating right now; everything felt so hot and sluggish. Maybe heat stroke would claim me before dehydration did. It probably wasn’t too bad of a way to go, all things considered.

Then I heard hoofsteps.

My bleary eyes realigned, and I forced myself to stand up. Hooves crunching across gravel and the dull ringing of what sounded like cowbells began to make their way up the pass. I stood there, waiting, dumbfounded and more than a little worried. To my tired mind, and based off past experiences, I wondered if I’d accidentally crossed paths with some of the Crimson, and so I raised my SM45 and waited. If I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting. They weren’t going to take me back to their camp and sell me as a sex slave like they’d branded me for. I’d rather die here fighting them.

Of course, my addled mind completely missed the very real possibility that it was just a herder moving their cattle… things… to different pastures.

He was an older stallion, with a scruffy beard beneath eyes that’d seen far too much in their time. Wrinkles were beginning to form along his forehead and around his muzzle, and he walked with a hunch and a limp to his step. A straw hat provided some protection from the sun for his faded yellow head, and what little was left of his gray mane hung in loose, unkempt strands along the side of his neck. He kept his muzzle trained toward the ground, at least until he reached the middle of the pass—where I was standing, pointing a gun at him in my flickering, fading magic.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to run, or try to fight, or do anything, really. He simply stood there, watching me with a curious glint in his eyes. The piece of straw he chewed on flicked back and forth in his muzzle as he waited to see what I would do.

The submachine gun wobbled in my grasp as my telekinesis began to fail. A pony? Another survivor of this horrid world like me? I opened my mouth to say something, but the dryness of my throat stole my voice. It took several tries and numerous dry swallows to lubricate my tongue enough to even remotely work. “Ha… Help…” I wheezed, taking a step closer. “Water…”

I heard the clattering of my gun against the gravel before I even realized I’d dropped it. The ground moved closer, closer to my face, and I didn’t know I was falling until my chin hit the ground, hard. All I had left in me was a pathetic little whimper before my eyes rolled back and everything went dark.

Chapter 8: The Surface

I think I slipped in and out of consciousness several times over the next few hours. I kind of remember seeing the mountains moving around me and feeling myself draped over something. Cowbells and hoofsteps. The twilight screeching of shrikes returning to their nests. The wet taste of water on my muzzle. Little flashes of awareness that came and went like fireflies in the night.

When I finally came to, I immediately noticed several things. For one, I was lying on something soft. Two, I was warm, and didn’t feel too dehydrated. Three, it looked like I was inside some large wooden structure. And of course, four, my supplies were nowhere to be seen.

Well, shit. I had no idea where I was or where any of my shit was. I rolled out of the cot I’d woken up in… and immediately fell on the ground as my legs gave out beneath me. A dried piece of red hay landed on my nose, and I glared at it for a moment before blowing it off. After a second to collect my composure, I finally managed to stand up—and find myself staring face to face with a young colt.

The little shriek I made as I jumped back really made a great first impression.

If anything, though, the colt didn’t seem to notice. “Hey! You’re awake!” he exclaimed in a squeaky little voice. A bright, beaming smile stretched across his muzzle, and his tail wagged back and forth like an excited dog’s. “I was wondering if you were ever going to wake up! I thought you were dead, but Pop-Pop said you just needed your sleep, so I stayed here all night to make sure nopony bothered you!” Beaming, the colt darted back into my personal space, nearly bowling me over. “Is it true that you’re from the Lights?”

“I… I, uh… what?” I asked, trying to take in everything this little ball of energy was saying. The Lights?

“Pop-Pop always says that there are ponies who live under the Lights,” the colt continued, apparently already losing interest in my response, or my confused babbling. “He said that long ago, when the Silence started, a whole bunch of ponies made their way up the mountains to hide under the lights and keep the bad ponies away!”

“Woah, woah, hold on,” I said, literally pressing my hoof against the colt’s muzzle to keep him quiet. “What lights? What do you mean?”

The colt just cocked his head at me like I’d said the sun is yellow. “The Lights? You know, the ones on the big mountain? They’re red and blinky and you can see them at night?”

Red, blinking lights… I tapped my hoof against my chin. Did he mean…? No, that’d be stupid. But then again… “These… lights,” I said, “there are three of them, right? Three red ones in a line?”

The colt gasped and nodded (or maybe he was trying to shake his head off; I wasn’t really sure, but he was bobbing his head really fast). “Yeah! So you have seen them! They’re cool, right?!”

Of course. Now I knew exactly what he was talking about. Each of the three big radio dishes on Blackwash had a red beacon tied to an emergency generator somewhere inside of the outpost. If you looked up at the dishes from the south, you could see the lights slowly pulsing, turning on and off, on and off. It never occurred to me before now that other ponies might have seen those lights as well, unaware of what they were, or how many ponies were living right underneath them.

It’s a small world, isn’t it?

“Yeah, well, I…” my voice trailed off as I considered my options. I had no idea where I was, who saved me, or who this colt was. Did I tell him the truth? How much did he know about Blackwash? Maybe a half-lie would suffice. “Yeah, I’ve been there before,” I said, rubbing a hoof behind my neck and donning a nonchalant smile. “It’s a pretty neat place.”

“Oooh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” The colt began to bounce around on his hooves; I was getting a little concerned that I might need to find his off button soon. “You’ve been there?! What’s it like?! Are the ponies there all pegasi since they live on a mountain? Do they have super-duper advanced awesome machines and things? How do they even grow enough food to eat?”

I stuck my hoof out again and chuckled. “Woah, slow down, kiddo. They’re just ponies like you and me. We—they don’t have anything too spectacular up there. It seemed pretty boring if you ask me.” That seemed to deflate the kid a bit, but I had a feeling I only had a few seconds before he rebounded and launched himself down some other tangent. So, looking around, I asked him, “So, this place… does it belong to your Pop-Pop?”

The colt nodded again. “Mmhmm! This is Pop-Pop’s farm! Me and him and Mama live together, and one day, Pop-Pop is going to give me the farm too! Isn’t that exciting?” He bounced around a little more, but surprisingly came to a sudden halt and frowned at his hooves. “But it’s boring here. There aren’t a lot of other colts in Northlight. Most of them go to the fort when they turn ten.”

Huh, I guess I did make it to Northlight after all. I must’ve had that stallion to thank for that; I really don’t think I had it in me to sleepwalk all the way through the mountain pass and into some random barn in town. Maybe he was this ‘Pop-Pop’ this colt was referring to? “Huh, that’s pretty neat,” I said, lightly tousling the colt’s mane. Then I gave him a friendly smile and lowered my head to his level. “Is your Pop-Pop around? I should probably talk to him.”

“Yeah! He’s probably in the field,” the colt said. He whirled in place, inadvertently hitting my muzzle with his tail, and more or less bounced to the shut door of the barn. “C’mon! I’ll show you!”

I spat out a few of the brown colt’s short tail hairs and trotted after him. The little guy bit down on a knotted rope tied to the handle of the big barn doors and struggled to pull it open. I watched the little earth pony grunt and heave for a moment before giving the thing a tug with my telekinesis. The hinges made an awful, rusty squeal as the door opened, sending a stab of agony into my skull (and my little machinist heart—those things hadn’t been oiled in years!). The colt gave me a frown, like he didn’t want me to help him, but huffed and pulled the door open (screech!) the rest of the way. While I shielded my eyes, he bounded into the sunlight, shouting, “Pop-Pop! She’s awake!”

Wincing, I opened my eyes—and closed my jaw. The barn opened up to a modest field covering at least three or four acres, holding all sorts of twisted purple plants clinging onto meaty red fruit. On the other side of the field, I could see a few more farmhouses paired with their own barns and their own fields stretching in different directions, each surrounded by simple wooden picket fences. Small equine figures dotted the fields surrounding me, and to the east a smaller collection of wooden houses made something resembling a town, surrounding the husk of what once might have been a radio station. To the north, the twisting, jagged teeth of the mountains loomed, swatting down low-flying clouds that dashed themselves to pieces against their spires.

My eyes wandered to the tallest of those stony monoliths, to where I could see the faintest trace of a white circle, almost entirely obscured by the surrounding rock faces. I felt my heart reach out to that circle, to all I could see of Blackwash from here. The tiny town I’d called my entire world now seemed so far away, but still so close that I could see it. It’s amazing that I spent my entire life not knowing that there were other ponies within eyesight of Blackwash, although to be fair, you’d have to be balancing on the very highest point of Dish One to even see the barn where I was standing, which from what I could tell marked the western limits of Northlight. And not even the pegasi wanted to leave the windbreak the mountains offered to fly high enough to catch a glimpse of the land below.

But I put those thoughts away for later, because a familiar grizzled stallion was looking at me. Clearing my throat, I carefully threaded my way through the crops in the field, until I was standing next to him. “Hey,” I said, trying to smile. “I, uh… I guess I have you to thank for saving my life.”

At his side, the colt bounced. “Yeah! See, Pop-Pop? She’s feeling better!”

So I was right. The colt’s grandfather looked me over, his tired brown eyes picking me apart from horn to hoof. I saw his eyes dart to my left flank, and I coughed nervously and turned my body just enough to take the brand out of sight. When he did speak, his voice was gravelly and tired. “Glad to see that you’re feeling better.”

“Glad to be feeling better myself, mostly,” I said, fussing with my mane. I could already tell it was a knotted mess; what I wouldn’t give for a comb and a brush! My stomach decided to growl at that moment, and I sheepishly grinned at him. “Eh heh… you wouldn’t happen to have anything to eat, would you? I haven’t really eaten anything much in two days.”

The stallion slowly nodded, then nudged the colt at his side. “Why don’t you tell Mama to get some lunch ready, hm?” The colt whipped his head back and forth between me and his grandfather, and I could tell he didn’t want to miss a word of our conversation, but another gentle nudge sent him reluctantly stomping away. The old stallion watched him go before shaking his head. “I trust Chaff let you rest?”

“Yeah,” I said, placing a hoof against my abdomen. It felt like my stomach was trying to eat its way out. “He didn’t say anything until after I’d already fallen out of the cot. Thanks for that,” I added, sheepishly smiling at him. “I, uh, haven’t had a good past few nights. It was nice to wake up in something soft for once.”

The stallion chuckled. “I’d hardly call that old, worn thing soft.”

“It certainly beats the dirt.”

“I can imagine.” Sighing, he looked me over again, and I had a feeling he was trying to see the mark on my flank again. Even though the brand was two days old, I could feel it burning against my flesh. Eventually, he cocked his head at me. “So, what’s a Crimson sex slave doing in the middle of the Dragonsteeth Mountains?”

I winced, and I couldn’t help but look at the angry red brand that had burnt away one of my precious cutie marks. “You… know about the Crimson?”

"Know about them?” the stallion sadly shook his head. “Filly, Northlight is owned by them.” He must’ve seen my eyes widen in fear, because he held a hoof out to me. “Believe me, there’s no love lost for them here. They came in and conquered this town about five winters ago. We didn’t put up much of a fight. We were just a few dozen able-bodied stallions against a bandit horde. And now…” I saw his jaw tremble and the hay stalk between his teeth twitch as he chomped down on it. “They took all of our fighting age stallions and pressed them into service or slavery, and they take our colts when they’re old enough for indoctrination. They’re stripping us bare of our most precious resource: our families.”

Brown eyes realigned on me, and I felt a surge of hatred project from them. “So yes, filly, I know about the Crimson. I know what they’ve done, what they do, and what they will keep doing so long as they’re still around. That’s why I decided to take in a scared, dying runaway while I was moving the livestock between pastures.”

I fidgeted in place, biting my lip. So Blackwash wasn’t the only town to have fallen to the Crimson. “At least your town is still alive,” I murmured, staring at my hooves. “Your grandson… Chaff?” At the stallion’s small nod, I shrugged and continued. “Well anyway, he told me about the Lights on the mountain. I… There used to be a town up there. Blackwash. That’s where I’m from.” I saw his eyes widen just a bit, but other than that, he remained silent, still. Sighing, I sat down on my rump and looked in the direction of my home. “Two nights ago, the Crimson attacked it. They… they took everypony who could work. Killed all the rest. I barely escaped with my life… but not without getting this.” I pointed to the brand on my flank. “I’m lucky to still be alive, and not some stallion’s fuck toy. But my friends…”

Oh, sun and stars, my friends. It’d been two days since I’d last seen them; who knew if they were still alive? Who knew what horrors the Crimson were doing to them right now? Nova and Gauge, Brass and Stardust…

I hung my head. “I need to find them,” I said. “Whatever it takes. I’m going to find them and set them free.”

The stallion narrowed his eyes at me. All was silent save for the chattering of distant birds, at least until he coughed and looked to the east. “You’re a dreamer, I’ll give you that. One mare versus an army?” He shook his head. “Not a chance in Tartarus. Most ponies would’ve given up and moved on… or put a bullet through their skull.”

For some reason, that made me crack a smile. “I think whatever common sense I had left got knocked out of me over the last few days.”

His nostrils flared, and I saw the hairy corners of his muzzle turn upwards. “Probably for the best. Common sense would tell you to quit while you’re ahead.” Sighing, he held a hoof out to me. “Barley.”

Smiling, I timidly took it in my own. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I should use my real name, but really, I was a nopony. Literally nopony down here had ever heard of me before; what was the harm in the truth? “Ember,” I said, nodding to him. “Machinist, marksmare, and really fucking hungry.”

Hey, I at least got a chuckle from Barley for that. At least until, sighing, he said, “Watch your tongue around my grandson.” The smile on my lips gradually fell away, but Barley nodded towards a farmhouse next to the barn before things could get too awkward. “We’ll see if my daughter has anything for you to eat; we wouldn’t want you to die of hunger after all this, right?”

“That’d be unbelievably tragic,” I said, snickering.

We began to cross the field to the house, giving me ample time to look around the hilltops and note all the buildings and ponies I saw. Sure enough, most ponies were mares or older stallions, or young colts and fillies helping their elders with the crops. Even as they toiled, though, they had something that Blackwash didn’t: they were alive, if nothing else. Though I had to wonder…

“Hey, Barley?” I asked. “Are there any other settlements nearby?” If the map I’d plucked off that bandit was correct, then there should be a few towns within a few days’ walk from Northlight.

“Of course there are,” Barley said, nodding to the east. “There’s a few more villages deeper in the valley. Green Valley, Holder’s Boulder, Reserve, to name a few.” He sighed and shook his head. “All part of the Crimson’s territory, just like Northlight. Once, we thought the Sentinels could stop them, but they haven’t left their hole in years.”

“Wait, hold up,” I said, literally stopping and holding a hoof up. “Sentinels? Who are they?”

Barley fixed me with a sort of half-incredulous, half-curious stare. “You don’t know who the Sentinels are?”

“Mountain home, remember?” I said. “We didn’t have a lot of visitors. I think the Crimson were the first to come knocking since the Silence.”

“You’ve really been isolated that long?”

I shrugged. “I never knew anypony in my lifetime who wasn’t born on the mountain like me.”

Barley slowly dipped his head. “Interesting.” He coughed into his hoof and wiped it against his chest before climbing the stairs to his homestead on aging joints. “If you’re really so bent on finding your friends, we can discuss it over lunch. If not, then I’m willing to let you stay here. Celestia knows we need all the help we can get around the farm.” He eyed me again, adding, “And, sex slave or not, anypony trying to stay on the Crimson’s good side is going to turn in a mare wandering around by herself with a heart branded on her flank. You’d be safer here with somepony who’s not going to use and sell you.”

That put a pause in my step. As much as I hated to admit it, Barley was right. A mare with a heart on her flank wasn’t going to get very far, especially if I was in the middle of Crimson territory like he said. Plus, I had no idea where to go to find Nova and Gauge. The map I had just said ‘HOME’, and I had no idea what that meant. Maybe that fort Chaff had mentioned? And on the other hoof, Northlight seemed like a nice enough town. Barley and his family would take me in, and give me somewhere to live out the rest of my days in peace…

If I wanted to live in terror of the Crimson…

If I wanted to give up on my friends…

If I wanted Mom to have died for nothing…

I shook my head. “I can’t. I’m really sorry, but I can’t,” I said, staring at my hooves. “I have to do this. Even if it kills me. Even if the Crimson just capture me again. At least I’ll die knowing I tried, because I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t.”

Barley seemed to mull that over for a minute as he stood there, one hoof on the door. Eventually, his brown eyes narrowed at me, and he nodded. “You’re not going to survive out there long without some proper supplies. Once you wander too far from Northlight, you’ll have to travel by night if you don’t want the Crimson to catch you. Even then, they have slaving parties that wander the roads between settlements that round up stray ponies on a nightly basis.”

I stood there, eyes wide, for several long seconds. “You’re… going to help me?”

Barley raised an eyebrow at me. “You seem surprised.”

Well, he wasn’t too far from the truth. “I just… wasn’t expecting to have any help when I left the mountain,” I said, fidgeting. “It’s nice to meet ponies who want to help. The Crimson didn’t make a good impression for outsiders.”

“I can imagine.” He raised his muzzle and sniffed the air, and I did the same. The smell of warm, baked food assaulted my nostrils, and my stomach immediately began to riot. Barley must have heard it, because he smiled softly at me. “Let’s eat before we talk more. We’ll have plenty of time after.”

He opened the door and stepped inside, and I eagerly followed him, already salivating at the smell. “I couldn’t agree more.”

Chapter 9: The Help of Strangers

If I’d known the food on the surface was this good, I would’ve come down sooner.

Hotcakes, hash browns, green eggs, and some kind of juicy meat, topped off with a refreshing glass of fruit juices. I drowned my plate in a sweet syrup and some spices, and basically shoveled the whole thing down my gullet in a few sweeps of telekinesis. When I was done, I ran my tongue over the surface of the plate a few times, only setting it aside when it was absolutely spotless. The entire glass of juice followed it, and, belching, I slapped the glass down on the table and leaned back with a sigh.

Of course, I wasn’t alone. Barley and Chaff both stared at me, along with Chaff’s mother, Hazel, who quietly chuckled. She was a milky-brown mare with long, streaked bangs that nearly veiled her face, ending in swooping lengths of hair draping across her shoulders. She had a sort of quiet, dignified beauty that I’d never be able to reach (largely because I was too loud and obnoxious), and she moved about her house with grace and tenderness. As far as mothers went, she was a long call from the sarcastic mare I called my own.

I decided I liked her. Even as my horrific table manners caused me to commit first impression suicide.

Which apparently was not lost on Chaff. Incredulous, the colt looked first at his mom, then at his grandfather. “How come she gets to lick the plates?!”

Instead of an answer, though, the colt only got an elbow from his grandfather. While Chaff rubbed his shoulder, Barley carefully worked his way through his own food. “Glad that you enjoy it,” he said between mouthfuls. Swallowing a morsel, he nodded to his daughter. “Hazel makes some of the best food in Northlight. Ponies are always coming to her for her recipes.”

“And I see them for theirs, too,” Hazel said in a calm, relaxed tone. “We’re all friends here, and we all rely on each other to survive.”

“Don’t we all,” I said, this time deciding to at least stifle another belch. “Blackwash was a tight bunch. I mean, we had to be, seeing as how if we weren’t, we died. Living on a mountain is hard.”

Hazel’s eyes lit in quiet curiosity. “You’re from the Lights, then?”

I nodded. “Your son mentioned that before. Yeah, Blackwash and the Lights are kind of the same thing. We used to be a military station for Equestria before the Silence, so we had these huge satellite dishes that we used to listen to messages from space, from places lightyears away. They had these blinking red lights on them, I guess so aircraft and pegasi wouldn’t fly into them late at night.” Shrugging, I added, “That’s probably what you see from down here. Not sure if they’re still going to be up there, though. The Crimson…”

I trailed off and went back to staring at my plate. Hazel and Barley shared some concerned looks, while Chaff continued to pout. All was quiet save for the clicking of silverware on plates until I spoke up again. “The Crimson took my friends. I’m going to get them back.”

Hazel smiled and reached across the table, touching my hoof. “That’s a very loyal thing you’re doing,” she said, smiling at me. “Your friends are lucky to have somepony like you.”

Chaff’s ears perked. “You’re gonna go fight the Crimson?” Gasping, the colt sat up straight and clopped his hooves together. “I wanna come too!”

“Chaff,” warned the colt’s grandfather, and the little brown colt stopped slapping his hooves together. “You’re not going anywhere,” Barley said, shaking his head.

“But Pop-Pop!” the colt whined. It wasn’t exactly a fun sound to listen to, honestly.

“No ‘buts’,” Barley insisted. “Now finish eating your food, or you can get an early start on your chores.”

Chaff stuck his tongue out but nevertheless finished the rest of his food like the growing colt he was (which is to say, quickly and violently, although I still think I outdid him). In the meanwhile, Barley and Hazel turned to me. “I guess the first thing I should ask is if you have a plan.”

“Heh… a plan… you overestimate me,” I said, snickering, although judging by the looks on their faces, that was probably the wrong thing to say. Sighing, I shook my head. “The only thing I knew about the lay of the land until two days ago was that one mountain. I don’t even know where to begin.”

“If you’re looking to find Crimson, your best bet is the Fort,” Barley said. He hesitated, then asked, “You have a map, right?”

“If it can be called that,” I said, shrugging. “It’s with my sh—stuff, wherever you put it.”

Hazel scooted away from the table and stood up. “I took care of your things,” she said, trotting over to a counter around the corner from the table and returning a moment later with my pilfered Crimson sack. She set it on the table and I immediately seized it in my magic, making sure that I wasn’t missing any of my (meagre) possessions. “We wanted to put it somewhere out of sight in case a Crimson patrol came by.”

I froze. “They just barge into your homes?”

Hazel nodded. “Regularly. They check our homes every once in a while to make sure that we don’t have weapons, or are hiding any refugees… like you.” I wilted, but she smiled tenderly at me. “But that doesn’t stop us from doing the right thing. Occasionally, a refugee will wander into town, and all of Northlight works together to help them out. There’s no love lost on the Crimson around here.”

“Which is why if you somehow do hurt them, then we’re behind you,” Barley said, nodding. “But even then, you aren’t going to get into the Fort without any help. Maybe you can reach the Sentinels; convince them to knock down the door for you and start helping the rest of us blighted towns out.”

“You mentioned those guys before,” I said, cocking my head to the side. “Who are they?”

“Protectors,” Hazel said. “They used to roam the valley until the Crimson pushed them out about ten years ago.”

So the Crimson were a recent thing. Interesting. “Protectors?” I asked. “From the Crimson?”

“Not originally,” Barley said, shaking his head. “Mostly the wildlife. Tolans occasionally wander into the valley, and most ponies down here don’t have anything that can shoot through their armor. The Sentinels sit on a big depot of Equestrian war supplies, and they used it to protect the towns here. They also used to keep the valley free of small groups of raiders and bandits, but that was before the Crimson got organized.”

I think I was seeing a pattern here. “And that was about ten years ago.”

The old stallion nodded. “We don’t know what happened, but all the bandits and slavers in the valley all unified with the Crimson. The Crimson must have found a hidden military base, because that’s when we saw their first ringbirds.”

“Ringbird?”

“Big Equestrian aircraft that looks like a triangle hanging from a ring,” he said. “Armed to the teeth and has enough cargo space to carry a small army. The Sentinels might have had a lot of advanced technology, but nothing in their arsenal to stop a ringbird.”

Well that certainly seemed familiar. I thought back to the strange aircraft that’d landed at Blackwash and that Carrion had come out of. “That must’ve been the thing they used to take all of their new slaves away,” I muttered, nearly choking on the words. “Yeah, I can see how that’d be just a little hard to take down with guns.”

Barley nodded. “With their ringbirds, the Crimson pushed the Sentinels out of the valley, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since. With them gone, our towns were easy pickings.”

To think that there’d been battles, a war in the valley in my lifetime and I’d never once known about it. While Blackwash struggled to live in isolation, there were ponies down here fighting and dying every day to protect their way of life. Now, that war had come to Blackwash—to me—and I was planning on charging right into the thick of it.

But Barley and Hazel were right. I was going to die if I didn’t have a plan.

“Where can I find the Sentinels?” I asked, rummaging through my bag and pulling out my map. I spread it on the table and smoothed it down with my hooves. “The bandit I pulled this off of didn’t make the best labels.”

Barley stood up and approached the map while Chaff tried to peer at it from his seat and Hazel began to clean up the table. The old stallion pursed his lips and pointed at the map. “The Sentinels were held up in a box canyon a bit to the northeast of here. I assume that’s what all these exclamation marks are,” he said, poking at the red X on the map. “From what I hear, the place is a death trap. Even with their numbers and their ringbirds, the Crimson can’t stomp them out. If you can make it there, you’ll be safe.”

I nodded, and Barley frowned at the map some more. “There’s a Crimson fort right here,” he said, pointing to a large ‘F’ on the map. “It’s about a two days’ walk to the southeast, built right along the river. You can’t miss it. Your friends might be held there, but until you talk to the Sentinels, I’d steer clear. It’s likely to be teeming with patrols.”

“Good to know,” I said. Hesitating, I added, “And if my friends aren’t there?”

Barley shrugged. “Then they’re either dead, sold, or at the Crimson’s home base,” he said, tapping the ‘HOME’ written on the map. “I’ve never been there, and nopony I know has either. But I don’t think you need much imagination to know how you’re going to end up if you go there. If your friends ended up there, then they might as well be dead.”

His dismissiveness to the fate of my friends was starting to get under my coat just a little bit. “I’m going to free them,” I said through gritted teeth. “No matter the cost.”

“Even at the cost of your own life?”

I looked at him, and he simply stared back at me with a knowing, but sad and tired stare. “Take it from me when I say that we can’t always win. I didn’t have the luxury of growing up on a hidden mountaintop where the world didn’t bother me. I’ve lost my fair share of friends. Family too,” he added. Shrugging, he looked away and leaned back as Hazel reached for his plate to carry into the kitchen. When she left, he shook his head. “Life isn’t fair. Auris isn’t fair. And sometimes, bad things happen to good ponies, and there’s nothing we can do but give up and move on.”

What? I blinked, stunned. “So if the Crimson came and took your family and friends, you’d just give up?”

Barley’s level stare didn’t falter. “Filly, I have lost more than I can remember. But I have a daughter and a grandson depending on me. I wouldn’t be doing them any good if I got myself killed.”

“But wouldn’t the bandits kill you if they knew you were hiding me?” I asked. Judging by the way Barley’s hooves ground into the table, or the way Chaff worriedly looked at his Pop-Pop, it wasn’t a particularly good question to ask.

Finally, Barley muttered under his breath, “I’m not going to let the Crimson change who I am as a pony. I’m not going to let my fear make me leave a dying mare on the side of the pass.”

His eyes hardened, and I backed down. After a moment’s consideration, he looked at Chaff and patted the colt on the shoulder. “Why don’t you start feeding the cowigs. I need to get our guest ready for her trip.”

Chaff wordlessly hopped off his chair and trudged to the door, shouldering it open. He looked back for a moment, eyes hopeful that somehow I’d save him from his chores, but all he got was another wave of Barley’s hoof that sent him sighing through the door. It closed behind him, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. “I guess even on the surface, kids hate chores.”

“It’s good to know some things never change,” Barley said. Then, standing up, he nodded to the back. “Come on. Let’s get you all set.” I bowed my head and likewise began to stand up, and Barley looked over his shoulder to where Hazel was washing the dishes. “Put some food and water in her bags while I take her back.”

Hazel hummed her acknowledgement, and Barley led me to the back of the house. He took me into what must’ve been his bedroom, because the few sparse items decorating it all had a dusty roughness to them that seemed fitting for the stallion. Old, worn hats, some sculptures made out of scrap metal, a creased and torn sepia photo of a family. I picked up the last one in my magic and looked it over. There were five ponies in the picture, including a noticeably younger Barley standing off to the side of a young couple. I recognized the mare as Hazel, but not the stallion standing next to her. Even the colt by her side or the foal held against her chest were unfamiliar, at least in the faded color of the photo. Presumably one was Chaff, but the other?

I heard Barley drop something heavy on the table behind me, so I put the picture back down and turned around. The stallion pulled a cloth off of my stolen submachine gun and quickly wiped away a spot before tossing the cloth aside. I took a tentative sniff of the air and nearly began drooling at the smell of fresh gun oil. Forgetting all about the picture, I immediately trotted over to Barley’s side and basked in the scratchy glow of the not-as-shitty-but-still-pretty-shitty automatic. “You cleaned my gun for me?”

“The barrel and rifling was caked with dried blood and some gray bits,” Barley said, raising an eyebrow at me.

“I had a run in with a shrike,” I said, shrugging, although perhaps a little unreasonably proud by the look of shock on the old pony’s face.

“And you lived?”

“They’ve got soft eyes and soft brains,” I said, pointing to the end of the gun to clarify what exactly I meant by it. The little nod I got in return let me know he understood. Tossing my mane over my shoulder, I frowned at the noticeably thin swath down the center about halfway down. “Though they do like to bite. But I think my mane will grow back easier than my throat would.”

Barley shook his head. “Then perhaps I’ve been underestimating you,” he said, to which I smiled. “Still,” he added, sighing, “the Crimson will shoot back. I wouldn’t test my luck with them. Not yet.”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “That’s what you’ve been saying all day.”

“Forgive me for wanting to keep you alive,” Barley grumbled. “I’m making a significant investment in a stranger I don’t know all that much about.”

The piece of hay between his lips twirled (where did that come from?) and he slid the weapon to the side along with the two magazines I had for it. “You had fifty rounds in one clip, and I filled the other up for you. The Crimson likes to barter with their .45s when they don’t feel like outright extorting us for our crops or supplies, so I had plenty left over.”

I picked up the gun and the ammo, and Barley chucked a small leather pouch at me which I barely caught in my magic before it hit me in the muzzle. Confused, I shook the pouch, hearing metal clicking together, and promptly dumped the contents on the table. A hoofful of large caliber bullets rolled across the table, mixed with a bunch of smaller rounds, none of which would fit my submachine gun. “Uh… I don’t have anything that can shoot these.”

“They’re not for shooting. They’re for trading.”

I blinked. “Eh?”

Barley sighed again. “I take it you didn’t have any money in this ‘Blackwash’ of yours?”

I shook my head. “Nope. We just did our jobs, and everypony got what they needed.”

“Sadly, Auris isn’t such a cooperative place,” he said. He nudged the bullets back towards me, and I collected them in my magic and dumped them back into the pouch. “But, at the very least, everypony recognizes cartridges as money. It’s what the traders use, and everypony else has just adopted the system.”

“Yeah, but…” I moved my hoof in empty circular motions. “Why bullets?”

Barley smiled at me… or at least, I think he did through his beard. “There’s one thing that a pony on Auris truly wants, only one thing. We all just want to live a full life. But to do that, we have to protect ourselves, we have to protect our family, and we have to protect our friends.” He tapped the pouch I held in my magic and nodded to the gun on the table. “A bullet does all those things. The more bullets you have, the better your chances of doing them. That’s why ponies trade in bullets. They’re trading protection for goods and services, and a bullet’s protection is worth more than any paper money or metal stand-in.”

“Huh,” I said, picking everything up again and levitating it by my side. So that was why the Crimson plundered our armory and scavenged our weapons so thoroughly. “I guess that makes sense.”

“One of the few things down here that does,” Barley mused. I raised my eyebrow, and he slowly shook his head. “I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough. Auris is a big place, and I’ve heard stories from some of the traders.”

We began to walk back to the kitchen. “What kind of stories?” I asked.

“Ghost stories about old, abandoned bases,” Barley said, shrugging. “Secret military installations filled with the horrors Equestria created before the Silence. Even stories of an enormous, glistening metropolis in the heart of the continent itself.” He scoffed at the last one. “Like ponies could actually band together to make something like that. Bandits like the Crimson would have looted it and burned the whole thing to the ground.”

“But what if it was real?” I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Like, what if there is someplace on Auris where ponies are living in a peaceful, strong community? Maybe they haven’t been ravaged by the Silence. Maybe they still have working tech from before the Silence. What if they can get us off of this planet?”

I’ll admit that a little of my foalhood wonder had crept back into my mind. Even though I had every reason to think otherwise, some part of me wanted to believe that there was someplace on Auris free from the ravages of the Silence. Admittedly, I used to believe that Blackwash was such a place, but the arrival of the Crimson changed that. Was it foalish? Probably. But it at least gave me a better tomorrow to believe in.

If only things could’ve been that simple.

Barley shook his head. “Wishful thinking at best. A fool’s errand at worst. I prefer to concern myself with looking after my family.”

We returned to the kitchen, where I found Hazel finishing up stuffing some apples (yes we had them) and other fruits and foodstuffs into my saddlebag. I also noticed that she’d found another worn and frayed one somewhere to hold some water and some other supplies, which was good, because I’d lost most of my saddlebags and supplies when me and the shrike decided to experiment with gravity. There was also a dusty poncho underneath the bags, and I shifted them aside to unfold it with my magic and get a good look at it.

“To cover your brand,” she said, nodding to my flank. “You don’t want anypony to see that around here.”

“I figured as much,” I said as I threw the thing over my shoulders. It was a little stiff and scratchy from generations of use, but it would do. Fidgeting, I draped the saddlebags across my back and looked between both ponies. “Thank you,” I said, feeling a conscientious blush building under my cheeks. “I didn’t think I’d meet such kind ponies on the surface. I was afraid I’d have to find my friends on my own, and you guys have given so much to a stranger…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Barley said, the straw in his mouth twitching as he spoke. “We just wanted to do right by a mare who has suffered some of the same injustices we have.” He nodded to me, then looked at Hazel. “I’ll go fetch Chaff. He’ll want to say goodbye.”

Hazel quietly nodded, and the door opened and shut behind me as Barley went outside. I began to turn to follow him, until Hazel spoke up. “Ember,” she said, and to my surprise, she reached forward and wrapped her hooves around my shoulders, pulling me into a comforting, motherly hug.

Confused, I gingerly returned the hug. “Yeah?”

We separated, and I saw a glint in Hazel’s eyes—the beginnings of tears. “If you go to the fort,” she said, her voice wavering, “If you find a stallion named Wheat… please don’t hurt him.”

I leaned back a little bit. “Wheat? Why?”

Hazel sniffled, and she rubbed her muzzle with a hoof. “Because he’s my son,” she said.

Wait, what? “Your son?” I echoed, cocking my head to the side. Then I remembered the picture Barley had in his room. “Wait, was he… he was the other colt in the picture, wasn’t he?”

The mare nodded and wiped some tears from her eyes. “The Crimson… t-they took him when they conquered us. His father died in the fighting, and they took all the colts and fillies that could walk on their own when they left. Chaff was too young to remember him, and my father doesn’t want us to talk about him…” She swallowed hard, and I squeezed her shoulder with a hoof to try to comfort her. “They’ve probably made him a soldier by now… He has a pale yellow coat, and he looks like his brother. He’ll be sixteen winters. If you find him, please…” She sniffled, and looked at me with pleading eyes. “Please tell him to come home. His family misses him.”

Well, fuck. I didn’t really know what to say to that. And that made my initial plan of ‘shoot my way through every pony between me and my friends’ a little more complicated. Just how many other ponies had been stolen from their families and pressed into service like Wheat? Was he even still alive? He wasn’t a pegasus, so I knew for sure he didn’t participate in the attack on Blackwash…

“I will,” I blurted. Cringing at the spark of hope that appeared in Hazel’s face, I hastily added, “I’ll try to find him, but he could be anywhere. He might not even want to—” I clamped my muzzle shut. Wrong thing to say. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll see what I can do.”

At the very least, Hazel didn’t fling her forelegs around me, or break down crying or anything like that. She seemed to understand exactly what I meant, and instead only gave me a quiet but appreciative “Thank you” and pressed her neck against mine. We separated after a few moments, and the mare recollected herself with a slow breath. “I packed you enough food to last you a week if you ration it,” she said. “The river is pretty clean, so you can refill your canteen as you need to. I wasn’t sure if you wanted a blanket because they’re pretty bulky, but it is the middle of summer, and the valley air stays warm at night, so I’m sure you’d be fine.”

I nodded and tugged on the straps of my saddlebags, making sure they were tight. “I can’t thank you guys enough for all of this.”

Hazel smiled. “Don’t thank me. Thank my father. He was the one who saved you in the first place.”

“And for that, I’m really grateful,” I said. Turning around, I opened the door and stepped onto their porch, with Hazel right behind me. Both Barley and Chaff were already out there, and as the four of us congregated on the porch, I smiled at them. “I… don’t know if I’ll see you guys again,” I said, nodding to the three of them. “But I’ll never forget you. You saved my life, and I’m going to do everything I can to repay you.”

Barley dipped his head and placed a hoof on my shoulder. “You can repay us by staying alive. Don’t go throwing your life away on something foolish. Whatever it is, Celestia has a greater plan for all of us. We’ll never find out what it is if we get ourselves killed.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I said, smirking. “I’ve got a knack for survival. I’m pretty lucky, after all.”

“Everypony’s luck runs out eventually,” Barley warned, shaking his head. But, shrugging, he patted me on the shoulder. “Take care of yourself out there.”

“I will.” Then, bending over, I tousled Chaff’s mane, making the colt squirm and frown. “It was awesome meeting you,” I said. “You stay out of trouble, and in a few years, you’ll be big and strong. Truly a force to be reckoned with.” He didn’t say anything, instead choosing to glare at his hooves, and I smiled and shook my head. Poor colt. Hazel gave me an apologetic smile on his behalf, and I nodded to her. Unspoken words and promises lingered in the air, but I brushed them aside for now.

I had some Sentinels to find.

Chapter 10: Where We Wander

I could never have imagined the world was this big… or this beautiful.

Until a few days ago, Blackwash was my world. A small little settlement on top of the tallest mountain in an inhospitable chain of stony monoliths, with nothing but trees and rock below us and blue sky above us. If I perched on the edge of town, I could see for miles, at least until the mountains rose up again and blocked off my view. There was nothing beyond those mountains, the teeth of the world, and Blackwash perched right in the middle of that maw. It was a small, alien world, and it was all I had expected to see for the rest of my life.

But here I was, wandering the valley I never thought I would explore, between settlements I never knew existed. I didn’t see anypony for hours; most of the time, it was just me and the dirt road in the ground going to the east, following the natural path of the valley. Tall, pink prairie grasses lined the road, some bedecked with seed pods on stalks as tall as my shoulders. I walked as far away from them as I could, instead choosing to walk along the bank of the crystal clear river flowing toward me on my right. Those grasses were tall enough and thick enough to hide anything, and I figured I had a much smaller chance of getting jumped from the water than I did from the grass.

But it was beautiful. Insects buzzed in the grass, and I occasionally saw songbirds hovering overhead on their four little wings or darting in and out of the plants as they foraged for food. Fluffy white clouds drifted above the valley, giving me some blessed shade from the blistering blue sun; with my black coat underneath a heavy poncho, I was really beginning to work up a sweat. I found a tree that’d been knocked over by a storm, and I stopped to sit and eat a quick snack from some of the food Hazel had given me. It was a peaceful way to spend half an hour, although this time, I kept one eye open for shrikes looking for a snack of their own. Thankfully I didn’t see any; maybe they didn’t hunt this far from the mountains?

I wasn’t alone the entire trip. Occasionally, I spotted a pony walking the other way, and whenever I did, I’d immediately freeze up and consider fleeing. Most of the time, however, the ponies were unremarkable. Sometimes I’d come across a farmer or somepony who looked like that sort; most of the time we’d pass without a word. Occasionally one would nod at me, or say hello, to which I’d try to smile and respond in kind, just to make myself feel like I wasn’t being conspicuous or suspicious. Some of them squinted at me and my borrowed poncho, and I could feel their eyes searching for a glimpse of my flank through the coarse veil, but I’d hurriedly press on, and nopony tried to stop me.

I was stopped once, however, and it wasn’t by the Crimson. I thought it might have been at first when I saw the troop of ponies walking towards me from about half a mile away, and I immediately froze in the road. I could very plainly see them in this stretch of the valley, which was pretty flat and open, and I knew they sure could see me. I considered bolting; if I ran fast enough, I could disappear into the grass, and with luck they wouldn’t be able to find me. But if it really was the Crimson, then they’d come searching, and even if it wasn’t, who knew who these ponies were going to talk to? I could just be making things worse for myself in the long run. Besides, these guys didn’t look like Crimson, although to be fair, the only comparison I could make was that they weren’t mangy pegasi with dual automatics strapped over their shoulders…

But they were armed, and fairly armored. I only counted seven at first, but I noticed a pair of shadows circling around them—add two pegasi to make nine. They all carried a motley assortment of weapons; I could make out everything from shotguns to assault rifles to heavy machineguns. One of them even had what looked like a musket! Despite the diversity of their weapons, their armor looked somewhat uniform. Old Equestrian military combat gear, reinforced with blocks of wood or sheets of aluminum over the vitals. They must’ve been part of a group or something. At least they weren’t wearing that hide armor that the Crimson pegasi wore.

I realized that the ponies were spread out evenly around a wagon full of… stuff covered by a tarp, pulled by two of their team. Walking behind them was a unicorn wearing expensive clothes (or at least I assumed they were expensive; they looked clean is perhaps what I should say) and sporting well-groomed facial hair. A pair of glasses were perched on his muzzle, and a small pistol was holstered on his left shoulder. Unlike the other eight ponies, he didn’t look like he was much of a fighter.

I can recall this pretty clearly because I had a good chance to look at all of them when we crossed paths, and the two ponies leading the group both pointed their shoulder-mounted weapons at me.

Fuck my ass. I flinched and stepped backwards, seeing the barrels of a pretty large caliber machinegun and a scary looking assault shotgun swiveled my way. I raised a hoof up, trying to ease them off. “Hey, I’m just walking, here,” I said with as much calm as I could muster. “Nopony needs to do anything they’re going to regret later, right?”

In truth, I was fucking terrified. The two big stallions I was talking to (or, I guess, more like at) both glared at me. I had a distinct feeling that they weren’t above killing pretty mares who crossed them along the road. Good thing I’d toggled off the safety on my SMG slung across my back.

Before things could escalate, though, the unicorn with the group came galloping up. “Woah! Hey, hey, easy!” he shouted, charging between us all. “Do we have to point our guns at everypony we meet? I’m sure the lot of you have enough firepower to drop a little mare if she was stupid enough to jump us!”

The other two stallions glared at me a second longer before lowering their weapons. “It’s dangerous in the valley, boss,” said the bigger of the two, an earth pony with dreads whose shoulder alone towered above my horn. “Crimson think caravans are sport. They love hiding in the grass.” He tilted his head towards me. “How do we know she ain’t with them?”

“Because, you idiot,” the unicorn said, slapping his companion. Bodyguard? “She’s a whore on the run!”

I paled and took a step back. Fuck fuck fuck. How did he know? I looked over my shoulder, but my poncho was still covering my brand. I heard something jingle in front of me, and when I looked back, the unicorn was standing within a leg’s reach. He looked apologetic, and shaking his head, he reached for my shoulder. “I’m sorry if my stallions scared you, Miss…?”

I flinched and swiped his hoof away. Shrugging, he merely set it back on the ground. “The name is Denarius, if it matters to you. Not my given name, but it’s the one I use.” He smirked at me, the iron hairs on his silver face betraying a slight hint of pride. “You don’t have anything to worry about me or my bodyguards; I’m simply here to earn a few bullets on the less traveled roads.”

So he was a merchant of some sort. I peered at him sort of sideways, still a little leery of the big group of armed stallions. He seemed to recognize my wariness, and with a gesture of his hoof, his bodyguards dispersed along the road, taking up watchful positions in all directions. I could see two shadows making lazy circles across the grass on one side and the river on the other as his pegasi watched from above. When we finally had some breathing room, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and nodded to him. “Nova.”

He smiled at me and nodded. “Pretty name, that,” he said. His hoof reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and produced a little wooden box, out of which his magic pulled what looked like a little brown paper stick. A spark from his horn lit the end, and he stuck it in his mouth. Then, shaking the box, he offered it to me. “Smoke? It isn’t anything from Equus, but I like to save those for special occasions. Besides, I think the Auris stuff’s stronger.”

I held out a hoof and shook my head. Shrugging, he closed the box and stuffed it back in his shirt. “Your loss. Mare like you looks like she could use one. For the nerves.” He took a moment to draw on his cigarette, and the end flared up before he exhaled a cloud of gray smoke. “Can’t have been easy getting away from the Crimson.”

I felt my shoulders tense and I leaned away a little. “How do you know?” I asked, frowning at him.

Denarius casually spat out his cigarette and caught it with his magic before it hit the ground. “You’re a pretty mare wandering the open road by herself with a stolen Crimson gun, a stolen Crimson saddlebag, and a poncho conveniently covering your left flank, despite how hot I know you are with that black coat of yours. You’re either a runaway whore, or you’ve got a death wish, and I can tell from one look at you that the latter isn’t true.” He brought his cigarette back up to his lips for another draw and blew another cloud of smoke into the valley breeze. “Only thing I can’t understand is why you’re going into Crimson territory instead of out of it. Maybe you do have a death wish.”

That was a little unnerving to hear. How many of those farmers or wandering ponies I crossed paths with earlier came to the same conclusion? Gulping, I looked around us, but his bodyguards were still more focused on the valley around us than our conversation. “You’re not going to turn me in, are you?”

Denarius laughed and shook his head. “To the Crimson? No. I’ve seen what mares look like when they’re done with them, when they’re pawned off in Hole to the highest bidder. I wouldn’t want that on any mare. Besides,” he added with a shrug, “doubt they’d pay me anything. All the Crimson are are a bunch of colts who found some toys and think they’re playing soldier. They might be strong, but nopony respects them. The caravans sure don’t.”

“They butchered my town,” I hissed. “Killed my mother and enslaved my friends. Stole what wasn’t bolted down and torched the rest.”

“It sucks,” Denarius said, pretty much succinctly summarizing my thoughts, though with less cursing. “And you’re not the only one who’s looking to make them pay. Not the only one who’s tried, either.”

“So, what?” I asked, shifting my weight onto my right legs and cocking my head at him. “You’re going to try to stop me? I already got enough of that in Northlight.”

To my surprise, Denarius shook his head. “No, ma’am. Not at all. If you think you can kill a few Crimson, then be my guest. The valley will be a better place for it.” His horn briefly lit, and he took his cigarette box out of his breast pocket and passed it to me, pressing it against my chest. When I took it in my hooves, he let go and nodded to me. “Take them. A little charity. Trust me, tobacco’s good for the nerves. You’ll need yours sharp if you want to kill Carrion.”

Then he whistled and pointed down the road, and his bodyguards withdrew to the wagon and began to walk along. Denarius lingered by me for a moment, and I could feel his sharp red eyes peeling me apart in search of the truth inside. After a few seconds, he nodded. “Next time we meet, I hope you feel like telling me your real name, ‘Nova’.”

Winking, the curious merchant turned around and cantered up to his wares, leaving me behind on the road. I stood there, watching him disappear the way I came, for at least five minutes until he finally crested a hill and descended out of sight.

Once he left, I felt a sudden pang of loneliness. He was nice, and I felt a little guilty for lying to him about my name, but I didn’t really know if I could trust him at the time. Tartarus, I still didn’t know if I could trust him. For all I knew he could be going to the nearest Crimson patrol and giving them a lead. But somehow I doubted that. He seemed like an honest stallion; a good stallion. And he’d given me a box of cigarettes for free.

Turning the box over, I took a closer look at it. It was a small wooden box carved from auranoak, a kind of twisting tree with black bark and a red pulp, which gave the box a neat maroon color. There were eight rolled cigarettes inside, and I took one out to give it a sniff. Oh stars… it smelled like pure ass, and not the kind that’s a slur for donkeys. I immediately crinkled my nose and jammed the cancer stick back inside the box. I doubted I was going to get much use out of this if I couldn’t even stand the smell. Maybe I could trade it for some bullets or something, although I had no idea how the different bullets factored into Auris’ money system.

I was just about to toss the cigarette box in one of my saddlebags when I noticed a symbol etched into one of its wooden faces. Squinting, I held it up to get a better look. Carved into the back panel of the box was an etching of a shield with a sword breaking across it. Surrounding that were several stars, all encircled by a laurel wreath. I frowned at the thing, trying to make sense of it. Was this a colonist’s from long ago? The symbol of the Equestrian navy? Some sort of secret order that I was unwittingly stumbling head over hooves into? Or was it simply a crude etching on the back of a cigarette box filled with home-rolled butts?

I couldn’t be sure, and Denarius was a little too far gone to go and ask him at this point. So, instead, I safely tucked the thing inside one of my saddlebags…

…and continued down the road.

I would like to preface this section by saying that had I known who was following me that night, I wouldn’t have been doing what I was doing. Just so we’re clear. I don’t want you thinking bad of me because of some really unfortunate timing on my part. Though to be fair, I didn’t know he was there, and I didn’t know he could be that quiet…

Ugh. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s just go back and do this bit in order so I can get to the fun stuff that happened after which is why this really awkward bit has to be included and—

Fucking shrike shit, Ember, get ahold of yourself, girl.

I didn’t see anypony for the rest of the day after I ran across Denarius. I had no idea what was the usual for these roads down on the surface, so I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or something really bad was brewing around me and my oblivious self. So, as the sun beat on, I started becoming more and more wary of the grasses around me. Hugging the bank of the wide and assuredly deep river, I made my way east as carefully as I could manage, keeping my eyes peeled for Crimson patrols all the while.

Just as the sun was beginning to set, I spotted something unnatural by the side of the road. And by ‘something unnatural’, I mean something built with hooves. Standing just a little ways back from the road, with the prairie grass creeping up all around it, was an old house. I could tell the squat building was a farmhouse, or at least, that’s what it used to be. The paint had all been worn away apart from a few flakes here and there, and mold and woodcutter aphids had done a number on the exterior. The windows had been shattered long ago, and the door apparently decided it wanted to be a welcome mat instead of a door, as it was lying flat on the dilapidated porch, torn off its rusted hinges. Out front, the rusted remains of a tractor were tipped over on the lawn, its fusion engine long since stolen or scrapped and the repulsors it used to hover around were missing.

I would like to take a second to point out that lots of Equestria’s vehicles were using primitive portable fusion drives when the Silence began, and that if a fusion drive ruptures or overheats, it basically explodes with the force of a 500kg bomb. And these things were everywhere across Auris.

Just think about that for a while.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, I wasn’t concerned about that at the moment. It could’ve already been blown up long ago for all I knew; it looked like there was a sizeable divot in the front yard, but that might’ve (almost certainly) been my imagination. I was more concerned about finding a place to lie low for the night and get some sleep somewhere safe. I didn’t know what sort of nocturnal predators hunted the valley, but I wasn’t about to make camp in the middle of the grass and find out for myself.

To that end, the abandoned house was too much to resist. Even still, I kept my distance as I walked a wide circle of the house, trying to get a glimpse of what kind of protection it could offer me, and if there were already any squatters inside. I found some crushed cans and shell casings caked in dirt scattered around the perimeter, but nothing recent. I did find a few .308 rounds lying in a tuft of grass, which I promptly took and shoved into my bullet purse. Hey, you never know when a few spare bucks (or cartridges) will make a difference, right?

Trotting back around the house, I climbed up the creaky, molding stairs and wandered across the fallen door into the interior. While I wouldn’t call the house small, because I lived in a small house for my entire life, and this was definitely larger than my shack in Blackwash, it was certainly… snug. From what I could tell, the ground floor only had three rooms: a living room, a kitchen, and a bedroom. The drywall separating those rooms had collapsed with age, leaving only the supports to hold up the floor above. A small gust tore through the smashed windows as I noted that, making the house creak and moan. I really hoped that those two hundred winter old supports would last.

I decided that if the house did collapse on me while I was sleeping, then it’d probably be better to be on the upper floor. There’d be considerably less rotten wood hitting me in the face, you know? Too bad the stairs were in as bad a shape as the rest of the house. I had to hop over a section that was missing two steps entirely just to go up, and one of the steps was so rotted through that it splintered in two when I tried putting my weight on it. The rest held, however, so that was good.

There was only one room upstairs, and it looked like it doubled as an attic and a spare bedroom of sorts. A lot of debris from things long since decayed were scattered against the walls and across the floor, and I could see the rusted wire cage of a bedframe shoved into the corner. A soggy yellow mattress lied on top of it, and on closer inspection, I could see a few bullet holes, stab marks, and brown splotches covering its surface. Ponies had died on that mattress. I didn’t really feel like tempting fate and joining them by sleeping on it too that night.

Instead, I found an old wardrobe and opened the doors (or tried to; they were so rotted that they just fell off their hinges when my magic grabbed them). There were a few threadbare clothes inside, mostly work clothes to offer some protection from the sun, so I took them all out and threw them into a pile on the floor. I added a few sheets and blankets I could find, and emptying one of my saddlebags, I stuffed it full of cloth and positioned it at one end of the pile of fabric to fashion a pillow. When that was done, I took off my poncho and draped it over everything so I had something clean(er) to sleep on than that mattress. I hated to admit it, but I missed the lumpy thing I used to sleep on back in Blackwash. Even if it did horrible things to my back, at least it was clean. Mostly. As clean as a two hundred winter old mattress can be.

For the moment, though, the sun was just beginning to touch the western horizon, so I had some time before I decided to pass out for the night. Slinging my SMG across my shoulders just in case I happened to need it, I gingerly wandered back down the stairs and began to look through the place, my curiosity getting the better of me. Besides, I was in a house that’d been around since before the Silence; who knew what I would find?

Turns out, a lot of garbage. As I turned over more and more useless shit, I had a distinct feeling that this place had been gutted, then re-gutted, and finally chopped up and combed through by generations of scavengers since society on Auris blew the fuck up. I considered finding a pistol under the couch that was so rusted none of the parts would even move a good find. I was about to give up when, underneath a pile of what once was books, I found a little journal that wasn’t completely trashed by the passage of time.

Prying the caked-on mess of pulp and ink aside, I very, very carefully extracted the journal from its grave. Holding it in my magic, I trotted back to the remains of a couch and sat down on it, although being careful not to lean too far into the mildewy mess. Once I was settled, I began to page through the journal, taking great care not to damage the pages.

For the most part, I didn’t even have to bother with that. Time had stripped pretty much everything of value from the journal’s pages. Instead of clear print and words, I got blue-gray splotches covering most of the pages where sentences would have been. Despite being covered, the water damage must’ve been too much for the journal. Still, I did find one page where I could make some of the words, deep within the journal of itself, where the water didn’t damage it as badly:

…killed today. If Equestria doesn’t send soldiers soon, it won’t be long before… …madness. Tin Kettle said something big was happening on Equus, that’s why they needed all the ships. The MPs in town aren’t saying anything. Tartarus, some of them… joining in. They even… …gangs went out and lynched the sergeant and raped his daughters. Disgusting. Won’t be long before… …to the farm. I have my rifle from the caribou war. They won’t take my family without…

The rest of the journal didn’t hold anything else. That was the last entry. Closing the book, I set it down on a table and stared vacantly out into space, consumed with my own thoughts. Try as I might, I couldn’t really make sense of the farmer’s journal, at least with regards to things I didn’t already know. Something big had happened on Equus, and while that was happening, Auris began to falter and fail. Whatever it was, though, it doesn’t look like Equus ever recovered. They would have sent ships and soldiers if they did.

I didn’t find anything else of value in the house, unless you call spent casings and rot valuable. Plus, it was finally dark outside, and I’d done a lot of walking today; I was tired and ready for bed. Well, nearly. While I wanted to get up early in the morning, I was stressed out, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to sleep well until I’d alleviated at least a little bit of that in the only way I really knew how, besides wasting precious ammunition shooting at targets.

I’m going to stop and say a few things: namely, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed I’ve never mentioned any love interests I’ve had. In a town as small as Blackwash, figures somepony would be left out, and though I was far from the only single pony there, all the others were old, young, or very frankly not my type. Also, I was a sexually mature mare with needs like any other mare; only difference is I didn’t have somepony to take care of them for me. Third, for all I knew, I was alone, and there was nopony around for miles.

I think you can piece together what exactly I’m getting at here.

So, imagine my surprise when, in the middle of masturbating in the attic, I hear one of the stairs creak and groan.

I froze as I laid on the pile of fabric I’d made a makeshift mattress out of, legs splayed, the room smelling of my cunt, and with… with…

Okay, listen, I was a bit short on substitutes for cock, alright?

For the record, it’d been cleaned this morning and I’d unloaded the thing before I used it. And no, this isn’t something that happened often. I had a forge I could make my own… tools with back in Blackwash.

Don’t get me started on the time I found Mom’s.

But, point being, I definitely heard the stairs creak while I was in the middle of some much needed personal time. Absolutely fucking panicking, I pulled the barrel of the SMG out from between my legs and tried to hastily jam a magazine into the bottom of it. I was freaking out so much that I didn’t realize I was trying to put the thing in backwards the first few times as I scrambled away, trying to get behind cover. Finally, after realizing what I was doing, I spun the magazine around, slammed it into the receiver, loaded the first round, and toggled the safety off, aiming the weapon square at the staircase.

That’s when I saw a small and very familiar head appear at the top of the stairs.

I blinked once, then hastily put the safety back on and raised the barrel. “Chaff?!” I shouted, stunned, and completely in shock at seeing the colt here. A very bright heat built under my cheeks that was the result of some combination of surprise, anger, and fear. “What in the sh—what in Tartarus are you doing here?!”

Chaff shuffled his hooves like a colt caught stealing from the cookie jar in the ship on the rocket sled to the fucking moon. One of them. Both of them. Didn’t really matter. Point being that he fucked up, and he knew he fucked up, and was probably expecting the spanking of a lifetime.

“You were gonna go fight the Crimson,” the colt said, looking up at me with big puppydog eyes. “You were gonna go to the fort. I wanted to go to the fort! I wanted to see my friends, like Marble, and Leaven! They were taken to the fort last year, and if you were going to find your friends, then I wanted to find mine!”

My eye twitched. Did this colt really follow me all the way from Northlight? Sighing, I shook my head and stood up. “Does your Pop-Pop know you’re out here?”

It was a rhetorical question, and I already knew the answer, but it was something I had to ask. When Chaff bit his lip and shook his head, I patted the floor next to me for him to come over and sit. “Thought so. And you were following me all the way from Northlight? How come I didn’t see you?”

“I was hiding in the grass,” Chaff said, and making me feel a little insecure that a colt apparently didn’t have any qualms with going through the grass but I was too afraid to go near it. “I was gonna sleep outside and wait for you to leave in the morning, because I was afraid if you found me you were gonna send me back, but I heard voices and I was too scared.” He fidgeted, then added, “Then I heard you moaning and I thought something was wrong so I came up to see what was happening…” he paused, then sniffed the air, gagged, and stuck out his tongue. “Why does it smell like fish?”

“It’s nothing!” I shouted, nervously clutching my gun and trying not to smell the barrel. “I was just, uh… eating! Yeah, that’s it! A midnight snack!”

“Oh,” the colt said, then wincing, rubbed his stomach. “Do you have any more? I like fish!”

My face felt like I’d buried it in coals at the forge. Thankfully it was dark, and on top of that, I had a black coat, so Chaff couldn’t see me blush. Shaking my head, I feebly smiled at him. “Nope! All finished!” Well, that wasn’t even true; I really could’ve used a few more minutes before he came dancing up the fucking stairs to finish! Seeing the colt’s frown, though, I hastily dug through my saddlebag and pulled out a stick of some kind of dried plant. “I’ve got some of… this thing, though!”

Chaff’s face lit up, and I tossed the bar to him. He immediately began to devour it like a ravenous black hole, and I felt my heart rate begin to slow down as I watched him. Before I completely lowered my guard, however, I froze, remembering what he’d said before the fish comment. “Wait; you said you heard voices?!”

The colt didn’t have to reply, because as soon as I said that, I heard hooves stomping across the rotten floorboards below us. I froze, eyes wide, and even Chaff stopped chewing on his food to stare at the stairs in terror. Quickly removing the safety on my gun, I quietly stood up and began to sneak towards the staircase on the tips of my hooves while motioning for Chaff to stay put. I braced myself against the wall and peered down the stairs, gun at the ready, while my ears twitched and strained to make out the conversation below.

“You said you heard screaming?” a voice, a stallion’s voice, asked from below.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t hear it!” a mare shot back. “Sounded like a mare. Maybe a fanger found her. Those things are vicious little shits.”

There was a moment of silence as the two shuffled some things around. A third voice joined them with a raspy cough. “Somepony’s been here recently. Books don’t dig themselves out of trash heaps.”

“Slaves have used this place to hide before,” the mare said. “Take a look upstairs. Fan, you keep watch outside. If somepony tries to run, you tackle them.”

“Right.” Hoofsteps marked that stallion’s departure, while more hooves moved towards the staircase. The sodden steps creaked as the other stallion began to climb them, and I heard him curse under his breath. “Fucking old shit. At least there aren’t any spores in the valley.” I heard him jump the gap in the stairs, followed by the groaning of the staircase as it shifted under his weight. I saw Chaff poke his head out from behind an old desk, and I frantically waved my hoof for him to stay down. Thankfully, he listened, and he disappeared right before the stallion got to the top of the stairs.

I immediately recognized the outfit. Old Equestrian combat armor reinforced with the hide of some creature across the vitals. Two submachine guns were mounted to his shoulders, and he also carried what looked like the hilt of a sword across his chest. Red warpaint covered his eyes in a pattern of triangles that extended halfway down his cheeks. His mane was thin and balding, but thick muscles practically bulged from under his armor. I did not want to get into a hooffight with this guy.

Muscles McRoids slowly wandered into the room, his head (and the guns on his shoulders) swiveling back and forth as he looked around. I’d ducked behind the wardrobe as soon as he’d entered the attic, holding my breath and staying out of sight. I watched him through a crack in the wood; he seemed to be taking his time, keeping his guns at the ready as he looked around the furniture. Eventually, he came to a stop in the middle of the room, where I’d still left most of my supplies just sitting in the open. In my defense, I didn’t think I’d have to worry about where I put them when I dumped everything earlier.

“Come out, come out, little birdy,” the stallion sang, poking through some of the broken furniture lying against one of the walls. “I know you’re in here. I already found your shit.” I heard the floor creak, and my heart jumped into my throat as I saw him turn to where Chaff was hiding. A grin spread across his face, and he stomped over to an overturned table. “Hah!” the stallion exclaimed as he leapt around the corner—only for his face to twist in confusion. Frowning, he lowered his weapons and looked around the room, just missing the scurrying shadow of a colt ducking under the mattress behind him.

Kicking the leg of the table in frustration, the stallion turned around, this time walking in my direction. As he walked, he took a deep breath and licked his lips. “Smells like you were having fun, little birdy,” he said, looking left and right as he walked past rows of scattered, broken furniture. “Why don’t you come on out? I can show you a good time. You’ve never seen or tasted anything like I got, heh heh. I might actually split you open, unless you’re deep enough to take it.”

Okay, fucking ew, and also, fucking ew. Seriously, were all Crimson stallions like twelve or something? My thoughts must’ve been echoed by his companion, because just as he set his hoof down next to me, no more than a few inches from where I was hiding, I heard the mare explode in laughter from downstairs. "Are you really that much of a tool, Lead? You’re not gonna lure her out with that little baby bump you call a dick! Fucking quit playing with your food and find the cunt!”

I heard the stallion growl in frustration and angrily stomp past me, allowing me to breathe for the first time in minutes. But I was near the end of the room, and soon enough he’d turn around and see me. I didn’t want to shoot him, because the noise would bring the rest of his friends running, and I didn’t have anything sharp to stab him with. My heart began to thunder as I looked for a solution, my eyes darting across sodden rags, splintery wood, and a section of rusted pipe—

That would do.

Looking back on this now, I can only shake my head and applaud at the wonderful plan my mind crafted that night. Oh, how I’ve grown since then.

This so-called ‘plan’ was simple. As soon as Mr. Muscles (I guess the mare called him Lead?) walked past me, I very carefully stood up and began to creep after him. Right as he ducked his head to go nosing into something, I (figuratively) pounced, widening my stance for power and leverage, and flaring my horn to life.

A funny thing most non-unicorns don’t realize is that magic isn’t quiet. Whenever we use magic, and you see our horns light up, there’s a distinct trilling hum that accompanies it. Most of the time, it’s too quiet to even hear, and most unicorns learn to block it out after hearing it their entire lives, but in the absolute stillness of an attic at dark, it sounds almost deafening.

Which is why as soon as I began to channel my magic, the big earth pony’s head darted up and turned in my direction. Unfortunately for him, I’d already swung the lead pipe straight at his temple, which collided with as much force as I could muster—and considering I used to wield hammers in my telekinesis to shape steel as it came out of the forge, that was no inconsiderable amount.

Unfortunately for me, this guy was an earth pony, and a big one at that. Despite my blow making a solid hit, and despite that causing blood to pool down the side of his face, and despite that causing him to stumble, I might as well have hit him with a fucking spitball for all the good it did. As soon as the pipe clattered to the ground, the stallion was recovering from the blow, and he turned to point murderous eyes right at me, the idiot standing in the open, shocked that her sneak attack didn’t drop her opponent.

Earth ponies are overpowered.

An enormous, terrifying grin spread over the earth pony’s face, and he began to stalk towards me, while I, terrified, stumbled backwards. “Oh, you’re going to regret that,” he purred through restrained fury, and I could see the guns on his shoulders align with my heart. “Say goodnight, bitch.”

Before I could jump out of the way, I saw the ejection ports on his machineguns fly shut as he bit down on the trigger mechanism extending in front of his muzzle. Instead of firing, however, his guns only spit forth a resounding click of hammers striking empty chambers. Bewildered, the earth pony glanced at the guns on his shoulders. The empty guns on his shoulders.

Grinning, I held two drum magazines and two spare bullets in my magic, while pointing my own gun at his face. “Looking for these?”

In case you’re confused, I’ll briefly explain. While my original plan was to drop the stallion with a lead pipe to the temple, I’d also invoked the legendary unicorn power of multitasking to empty his weapons while he was still reeling from the blow as a backup plan. Sleight of hoof is easy when you don’t even have to get near the guy to do it.

Unfortunately, in my naivety, I didn’t capitalize on my advantage, and learned an important lesson when it comes to fighting earth ponies in close quarters: when they’re unarmed, they’re more likely to charge at you than back down, like a cornered animal, even if you have a weapon trained on them. I was standing only a tail length away from this guy, so when he lowered his head and charged, I had no chance of diving out of the way (teleportation would have been nice, but I didn’t learn that until later). Instead, I caught three hundred pounds of pure muscle right to the chest, and was more or less along for the ride at that point.

Which apparently was through all of the still intact furniture in the room. I cried out in pain as tables and chairs broke against my back until I was finally knocked free of the stallion’s charge and sent rolling across the floor like a ragdoll. The world only stopped spinning when I came to a painful stop by smashing my skull against the steel bedframe in the corner of the room (head trauma!). Gasping for breath, I laid there for several seconds as my senses came back to me and I slowly became aware of how much pain I was in. That was when I saw Chaff under the bed, staring at me with wide, terrified eyes.

Teeth grabbed my mane and hauled me away from the bed. Screaming and flailing my limbs, I tried to break free, but against an earth pony, that really wasn’t going to happen. Suddenly, gravity inverted itself, and I saw the door of a dresser come flying towards my face. I didn’t even have a chance to shake off the pain from the first blow before the stallion drove my face into it again. By the time he was finished, my nose had left a red splotch on the door, which had caved and splintered under the force of my head being driven into it, and I felt my stomach drop into my hooves when the stallion hurled me across the room.

The ground drove whatever breath I had left out of my lungs, preventing me from even screaming or crying out in pain. My back hurt and I could feel blood pouring down my muzzle, but I knew that this wasn’t the worst of what was to come. As I heard hooves stomp across the floor, I desperately looked around for something, anything to save my wretched hide. A pale glint of steel caught my attention, and I grabbed my submachine gun with my magic.

And received a kick to the horn for my efforts.

Tonight had started off so great…

When my ears finally stopped ringing and I could see again, I found myself lying on my back, staring up at the stallion, who had sat down and pressed a rag to the gash on his face, along with who I assumed was the mare I’d heard earlier. She was a unicorn like me, though unlike me, she’d completely shaved her mane, letting the war paint that radiated outward in spirals from the base of her horn stand out. She carried an assault rifle in her magic with a wickedly serrated bayonet that I’m sure would leave mortal wounds on any pony she stabbed with it. Like her companion, she wore Crimson armor, and seemed pretty dirty.

She was also like, a two, in all honesty. The crooked gray and yellow teeth really turned me off.

“I’m impressed,” the mare said, lowering her bayonet until I could feel it pricking my throat. “You’ve got some fight in ya.” She smirked at her companion, who sat down against the wall and cursed under his breath as he changed the bloody rag for a clean-ish one. “You let this little runt give you a lickin’?” she asked him.

“She’s a sneaky little bitch,” the stallion grumbled. “Blindsided me with a lead pipe. Idiot.”

“Oh yeah? And how’d that make you feel? I bet ya no mare’s every whipped your ass around before. I’d say she’s got bigger balls than you.”

I really wanted to tell her to stop needling Muscles over there, but I was afraid if I tried to speak, that bayonet would slice right through my throat. I could only look along the floor to make sure that Chaff was still hiding under the bed. So long as they didn’t find him…

The stallion stood up and stomped over to us. “Let me break the bitch.”

Well that didn’t sound pleasant. Amazingly, the mare rolled her eyes and came to my defense. “You don’t have to stick your dick in everything with holes, Lead.”

“I haven’t tried to fuck you, but I can change that.”

“You’re still a stallion, but I can change that.” She ripped a knife out of a pocket on her armor in the blink of an eye and pressed the blade against the stallion’s neck, right where it met his jaw. “I don’t know any spells that can make you into a mare, but my papa used to raise cowigs. I can geld a bull if I have to.”

The earth pony came to a dead stop, and I saw his throat bob as he swallowed hard. Smirking, the mare flicked the knife away from his throat, shaving off several gray hairs as she did so, and pocketed the thing in its sheath. Then, pulling her bayonet away from my throat, she kicked me under my tail, making me cry out and curl in a ball. “Up, bitch. You’re somepony’s property and we’re gonna bring ya back.” When I was too slow to get up, she frowned and drove the tip of her bayonet into my flank, giving me a sharp prick that had me yipping. “Move!”

Not wanting to get kicked or stabbed anymore, and not wanting to linger in the attic in case they found Chaff, I scrambled to my hooves, coughing and licking my lips to get the blood off of them. I more or less tripped and stumbled my way to the stairs while the two Crimson soldiers marched behind me, and I began to descend while leaning hard on the railing for support.

I’ll be honest, I probably should have expected the kick that sent me falling down and through the moldy stairs to the floor below.

I promptly dug myself out of the rubble, feeling a plethora of fresh cuts and bruises decorating my body, as my captors hopped down beside me, laughing the entire time. Before I could suffer any more abuse, I began to trudge to the door, trying to put a little distance between me and their hooves. While I’m sure seeing me in pain amused them, apparently it wasn’t worth the extra effort to trot after me, knowing full well that their third companion was already outside and waiting.

We emerged into the moonlight, and this time I made sure to trot down the steps of the porch well ahead of the two bandits so I wouldn’t suffer a repeat of inside. In the silvery glow of the two moons, I could see their third member, a pegasus, sitting by the road with his back to us. I lingered halfway between him and the house, at least until the mare shoved me along and called out to her friend. “Hey, Fan! We got a live one! Go and get her shit, will ya? Poor little Lead suffered a booboo and can’t carry it,” she said, snickering, while the earth pony rolled his eyes. When a few seconds passed, and Fan didn’t answer, the mare frowned and trotted forward. “What’d you do, fall asleep, asshole? Huffing root or something? If you’re holding out on us, I swear to Celestia—”

She shook the stallion on the shoulder, then jumped and stood stock-still as his head lolled back farther than anypony’s head should naturally go. I couldn’t make it out all that clearly in the dim glow, but there was definitely a visible slash cut completely through his neck, staining his chest and armor with a faint sheen of blood. A half-surprised look was frozen on the pegasus’ face, like he hadn’t even seen his own death coming.

The mare and the earth pony both widened their stances and stood back to back, with the mare throwing me to the ground and pressing a hoof down on my neck to keep me there. I could only tremble and do my best to look around as I laid there with my cheek in the dust, but I couldn’t see anything. I could feel the mare standing on me shaking through her hoof, hear her ragged breathing as she whipped her head back and forth. Growling, she leaned forward, placing more painful weight on my fragile neck, and shouted into the night. “Stop hiding, fucker! When I find you, I’m gonna strangle you with your guts!”

Then I heard a sound I never thought I’d hear out here: giggling. “Oh, you guys are all the same,” said a mare, somewhere… above us? The mare standing on my neck backed off, allowing me to roll onto my back, and stare straight up at a hovering figure dimly illuminated by the moon’s glow. She was a small pegasus, smaller than me, with a pale orange coat mostly covered by a skin-tight gray jumpsuit. On top of that were silver strips of armor covering her chest, shoulders, and portions of her back, along with little metal panels on her legs, and horseshoes spiked for traction on her hooves. A glistening half-helm that covered the top and back of her head had been fashioned to imitate a unicorn’s horn. The crests of her wings were also protected by short, silver rods, and above them, I could see three channels poking beneath the pauldrons of her armor on each side, the boreholes stained black with gunpowder.

She looked dangerous, powerful, elegant, but most importantly, confident and cocky. If she told me she wanted to fuck me I’d have my tail raised in a heartbeat. Don’t judge. You would too.

The mare in the silver armor gave us a teasing grin and shook her head. “Don’t you ground-pounders ever think to look up? A third of us can fly, you know!”

I could already see my captors taking aim. “Piss off, bird fucker!” the unicorn shouted up at her. “You and your kind are done for, you hear me?! It’s only a matter of time before Carrion stomps you cunts out!”

“Yeah… I just had a thought about that, really,” the mare said, crossing her forelegs and smirking down at us (stars how I loved that smirk). “I swear, you guys spend so much time painting your faces with your own shit that you don’t spend a lot of time to look at the big picture. It’s only a matter of time before you lot run out of blood to throw at us. I mean, let’s be real here, every one of us is worth ten of you. If I were you, I’d run away now.”

“Oh yeah? And how about I blow your fucking brains out of your skull like this?!” my captor screamed before firing a volley of shots at the pegasus. At her side, the stallion began shooting as well, unloading a torrent of lead up at the mare. As soon as I heard the crack of their guns, I thought she was a goner for sure.

Instead, the mare was still just hovering there, unfazed. My eyes widened as I saw the air shimmering and warping around her with each blast of the Crimson’s guns. As I watched, little pebbles of lead rained down around her, hitting the earth with little thumps. When both bandits were out of rounds, the flying mare raised her eyebrow and uncrossed her forelegs. “Wow. You guys haven’t fought an actual Sentinel before, have you?” The lights on her armor flickered for a moment, and blades of red energy appeared along the crests of her wings, casting her face in an intimidating crimson glow. An excited grin crept onto her muzzle, and she leaned down at us mid-hover. “Let me give you the one-oh-one.”

Unlike my captor, this mare was at least a nine. And she was hardly more than a few winters older than me at most. I couldn’t think of a better savior.

Her wings blurred like fire, and while the two Crimson were reloading, she’d already darted behind us. “Spread out!” Bayonets screamed, waving for Lead to put some distance between us. I began to scramble, but apparently I wasn’t allowed to move, because she stomped hard on my cunt to immobilize me, sending crippling pain through my abdomen. At least I wasn’t planning on having foals any time soon…

The Sentinel soared through the sky, the energy laser things on her wings casting her in a deathly glow as she wheeled about. The two bandits took shots at her, but whatever… forcefield or something her armor provided continued to deflect their bullets. Then, with a flourish of her wings, the lithe mare suddenly changed directions and dive-bombed Lead. The stallion dived to the ground, and her energy blades left a red afterglow in her wake as she passed, but by the confident grin on her face, I had no doubt that she could’ve adjusted to cut him in two if she really wanted. Rising back into the air, she continued to circle and dart about, swooping low over the mare or the stallion as she pleased, invincible to their fire.

I was speechless. She was… she was playing with them! If Sentinels were bulletproof and this well-equipped, I couldn’t understand how they were supposedly losing horribly to the Crimson. Slamming her hooves into the ground, the Sentinel grinned at them and cocked her head. “You’re not going to get through my shielding with such low caliber rounds,” she said, shaking her head. “You either need a hunting rifle, shotgun, or other powerful weapon, which I see neither of you have, or enough small arms fire to saturate the thing, which between the two of you, you don’t have. So, that just leaves one option left for you two,” she said, stalking forward. She threw her head from side to side, and I could hear her cracking the vertebrae in her neck. Her wings flexed, and she stopped about twenty feet away from Lead. “Who wants to dance?”

Apparently Lead wanted to, because the hulking brute all but hurled himself at the Sentinel in a mad fury. I could still feel the bruises to my ribcage where he’d plowed into me earlier, and even though this mare had armor, she was smaller than me. It almost didn’t seem fair to watch this little pony try to take on this goliath.

But I needn’t have worried. Spreading her wings, the Sentinel effortlessly dodged around, under, and between Lead’s frenzied attacks. Several times, she spun past an attack to bring an energized wing up to the stallion’s neck before pulling away at the last second. She was having fun, and there was nothing anypony could do to stop her.

At least until the mare standing next to me picked up a few large rocks in her telekinesis and flung them at the Sentinel. To my surprise, they passed right through her forcefield and struck the Sentinel in the back of the head, causing her to stumble right into the swinging hoof of Lead. I gasped as the pegasus reared back from the blow and rubbed her muzzle, quickly darting out of range of Lead’s attacks. That was when I saw the amused smile fade from her face. “Alright. You want to play for keeps? We can do that.”

Snapping her wings open, the Sentinel streaked toward Lead. In response, the stallion bit down on the hilt on his chest and produced an energy saber of his own, maybe realizing just how absolutely fucked he was. And by absolutely fucked, I mean absolutely fucked. The Sentinel came in swinging so fast that Lead could barely block or deflect the swings of her wings, much less parry them. The stallion backpedaled faster and faster, until one of his hooves slipped out from under him, throwing off his block by just enough for the mare to slip through. In a spinning waltz of bladed wings, she entered the fray.

The first spin lopped off Lead’s foreleg.

The second spin cut clean through the armor across his chest.

The third spin lopped off his other foreleg.

The fourth spin slashed his neck wide open, spilling blood that sizzled and crackled along her energized wings.

The whole thing didn’t last even a single second. A dying gasp was all Lead’s body made as it fell to the ground with a dull thump. The Sentinel stood over it for a moment, as if making sure he was really dead, before abruptly spinning in place with a flourish of her wings. She lowered her head towards me and the other mare and leered out from under her helmet. “Surrender and I’ll let you live. But I’ll be really disappointed if you do, so please, try me.”

Just when I thought it was over, telekinesis grabbed me by the mane and hauled me onto my hooves. I struggled against the mare’s grip, at least until I felt cold steel pressed against my neck. “You move and she fucking dies!” the last Crimson soldier screamed at the Sentinel. Hooves wrapped around my shoulders and neck, dragging me backwards as the mare backpedaled. “You hear me? Stay right the fuck where you are!”

The Sentinel just sighed and rolled her eyes. “Ugh, you take all the fun out of everything,” she said, almost complaining. To my horror, she sat down and powered off her energy lances. Crossing her forelegs, she calmly called into the night, “Sig, you wanna get this one?”

“Who the fuck are you talking to?!” the mare screamed, pressing the knife closer to my throat, and starting to cut through my skin. “Huh?! Answer me, you dumb bitch!”

“What, just because I can singlehoofedly whoop all your asses on patrol doesn’t mean I travel alone.” Then, smirking she pointed over our shoulders. “Might want to look behind you.”

“I’m not gonna fall for that, you cu—!” I assume that her last word was going to be ‘cunt’, but before she could finish it, something heavy knocked us over and she screamed. Loudly. I began to clamber to my hooves until her body slammed into the ground next to me, twitching, and missing its fucking throat. Blood pooled and gurgled in the massive hole in her neck as she very quickly and feebly died next to me. Gulping, I turned around. And screamed.

Some sort of monster I’d never seen before stood behind me. Half feline and half avian, it wore similar silver armor to the Sentinel mare that’d cut down Lead, including the metal rods that produced the energy blades on its wings. Lethally sharp talons supported the front half of its body while strong, leonine paws held up the rear. Dusty brown feathers covered its neck and face, turning into a pointy crest at the back of its head, and gradually thinning out until a yellow beak emerged; at least, I assumed it was yellow, because it was currently covered in scarlet gore. If it had two more eyes and two more wings, it would’ve almost looked like a small shrike.

Then it grinned at me. “You alright?”

My response was to faint and slam my face into the ground.

Chapter 11: The Sentinels

For the second time in as many days, I woke up someplace unfamiliar, with no recollection how I got there. In contrast to Barley’s barn, however, this place was harsh and cold. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made out of steel, reinforced with heavy steel bulwarks and painted white; I had a feeling the paint was only to keep the metal from rusting instead of actually trying to make the place look appealing. Harsh fluorescent lights illuminated the little room I was in, which felt more like a cell than a room.

Groaning, I sat up in the bed and rubbed my neck. My body was sore all over from horn to hoof. I knew I’d be feeling those bruises I’d gotten fighting the Crimson last night for some time to come. All things considered, I was just happy to be in one piece. My nose didn’t feel broken, at least; that was a miracle after that earth pony used it to play drums with the doors of the dresser.

“Ember!” It was Chaff’s voice, and I jumped at my name. The colt came scurrying over from the other side of the room where I saw a military bunk similar to the one I’d been sleeping on; I guess he’d been waiting for me to wake up, just like the day before. His hooves clopped against the steel grating that made up the floor before he threw himself against my side and nuzzled me. “You’re up!”

“Yeah, I’m up,” I said, rubbing the colt on the head. “One of these days I’ll stop falling on my face and passing out.” I looked around the room, but didn’t see anypony else. “Where are we?”

“I dunno,” Chaff said, also looking around himself like this was the first time he’d actually stopped to think about it. “After that awesome pony and that bird-cat-guy killed those two Crimson they searched the house and found me. They said they’re Sentinels!” he squeaked, his excitement making it hard for him to keep still. “They said they were gonna take us someplace safe, and they picked up your things and carried you down the road. Then we met up with more Sentinels and these unicorns appeared out of nowhere and cast some cool magic and then we were here! Well, not here here, because we appeared somewhere else, but they took us here to rest until you were better.” Gasping, he pressed his hooves against his cheeks and flung himself back on my bed. “We’re at the Sentinels’ base! Isn’t that awesome?!”

That would be pretty damn awesome—if it happened to be true. Thankfully, right as Chaff finished saying that, the door to our little cell opened and in stepped two familiar figures to testify to his story. The orange mare and cat-bird-thing both stepped into the room, except this time without armor. They were both smiling, or at least, I knew the mare was; I wasn’t sure if that was a smile on the other Sentinel’s beak or what. The latter closed the door behind them, and the mare calmly walked up to the two of us. “So you’re up? Good to see. I was a little worried about you when you passed out last night. Sig might be a fast griffon, but even he can drop the ball sometimes.”

The… griffon? The other sentinel crossed his arms and leaned back against the door jamb. “I wasn’t expecting her to pass out like that,” he said, smirking at me. He rubbed back some of the feathers around his eyes, which I noticed were dyed blue, and shrugged. “I’d like to think she was just stunned by my dashing looks. It’s not everyday you’re rescued by a knight in shining armor.”

The mare shook her head and rubbed her brow with her feathers. “Yeah, I bet that’s it,” she said, smirking at me. I shuddered and shifted in place. The Sentinels should probably think about turning down the heat. “Anyways, glad to see that you’re up,” she said, sticking her hoof out towards me. “Name’s Zip. The big guy over there is Sigur, but we just call him Sig. We’ve been making it our duty to help runaways like you two for the better part of five years now.”

I timidly shook her hoof, still feeling uncomfortable under my cheeks and in… other places. Trust me, if you could see this mare, you’d understand. “E-Ember,” I stuttered, trying to smile back. “I… I-I can’t thank you enough for what you did back there. If you hadn’t shown up…”

“Pshaw,” Zip said, dismissively waving her wing. “It’s what we’re here for. Isn’t that right, Sig?”

“It’s why I left the quarry,” the griffon said, examining his talons. “Figured I’d do better fighting bandits than beating my rivals over rocks and mates back home.” He blinked, then raised an eyebrow at me. “What, you’ve never seen a griffon before?”

So I might have been staring a little now that I had a chance to get a good look at him. And by a little, I mean a lot. I’d never heard of a griffon before back in Blackwash, and as I’d later find out, they aren’t exactly common to the planet to begin with, either. So I was understandably fascinated and a little bit scared of him, because I’d never seen anything like him before. Well, I had seen a few things resembling him that’d I’d gotten intimately familiar with in recent memory. “You’re… like a small shrike.”

Zip began to giggle. “A little shrike? Please. This catbird could give the shrikes a run for their money in the fighting department.”

“I don’t know whether I should be offended or honored,” Sigur said. “My flock father always said I had some of the hunters’ ferocity in me. Of course, my siblings said I had their brains as well, but I was the only one smart enough to realize there was more to the world than the quarry.”

“You’re cool!” Chaff suddenly exclaimed, hopping off of the bed and bounding over to the Sentinel. “I can’t wait to tell Mama and Pop-Pop that I met a real life griffon! Oh! Oh! Is it true that you guys eat pony meat? Or that you hatched from eggs? Or—?”

Sigur chuckled and patted Chaff on the head. “Slow down on the questions there, kiddo. There will be plenty of time to talk about that later. How about we get some breakfast first, hmm? I bet you’re starving.”

The mere mention of food had Chaff bobbing his head in agreement, and opening the door, Sigur led the colt away. As the griffon’s tail was disappearing from sight, Zip looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Sig’s got a good point. Let’s get some food in us, and then we can talk some more.” Her energetic wings blurred at her sides, taking her to the door in the blink of an eye, and she looked back at me. “Well? You coming?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but it felt like my tongue was made of cotton. Instead, I hastily nodded and scrambled off the bed after her, silently cursing myself as she glided ahead. Some first impression I was making with the Sentinels; here I was, literally chasing tail around their base.

Speaking of their base, it was massive. We left the cell behind, which judging by the surroundings was actually a holding cell in the brig of the base, and began to trot down long halls of concrete and steel. Enormous blast doors cordoned off sections of the base, but most were kept open. Only once did we have to stop and wait for a pony in a gray uniform to open one of the doors, and that took a solid minute before we could proceed. The blast doors were twenty inches of solid steel and titanium, and probably weighed a hundred tons. If those things were locked, nopony was going to get through them.

Chaff and Sigur chatted ahead of us, leaving Zip and I to walk side by side in their wake. I could feel myself sweating under my coat, and I hastily cleared my throat to try to alleviate some of the awkward tension that I could feel building around us. “So, uh… this is some base you guys have.”

Zip nodded. “Old military. This was one of Equestria’s weapons depots on Auris. It was also its base of operations in the north, in case the planet was ever invaded. The Sentinels have been using what’s down here for the past two hundred winters to bring peace to the valley. Trust me,” she said, winking, “you can’t even imagine just how many bullets we’ve got down there. Lots of pre-Silence tech and machinery, too, but there isn’t enough power to open the doors to see what we’ve got, and the past forty years of digging and cutting haven’t managed to crack open the storage bays. Even still, we’ve got a tank that was taken out of storage for maintenance when the Silence hit. Thing’s definitely seen better days, but we’re trying to fix it. Finding parts for that monster has been a challenge in itself when most of the parts are in the storage bay as well.”

“A… tank?” I said, trying to imagine just what an Equestrian tank would look like. If their ringbirds were anything to go by, it probably carried enough firepower to level a mountain. Equestria was sure fond of overkill. “Why would Equestria need a tank here? Who would invade Auris?”

“Turns out, a lot of people would,” Zip said. The four of us rounded a corner, and Sig held open the door to a large mess hall. We trotted inside and began to move towards one of the many, many empty tables in the hall as Zip continued. “We’ve been able to decode a few of the messages the base received right before the Silence. Apparently there was a huge war on Equus before all communications went down, and Equestria didn’t have many friends. Griffons, dragons, zebra, even caribou, they all wanted us dead. And the feeling was apparently mutual.”

That would certainly explain a lot, but even that only raised more questions. “But if we lost, then how come all those people that wanted to kill Equestria never came here? How come we weren’t wiped out?”

Zip only shrugged and flagged down a colt hardly much older than Chaff who was carrying some food on his back. “We don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. Something happened, and we were left alive. Forgotten, ignored, or just damn lucky, we’re still here, and that’s all that matters.” The colt finally made his way to our table and dropped a platter of what looked like pasty brown soup in front of us before bowing and backing away. Believe me, it tasted as bad as it looked. I thought poor Chaff was gonna start puking, to say nothing about how my own stomach felt.

Zip and Sig weren’t bothered by it at all, judging by how quickly they began to devour their meal. I guess the taste grows on you or something; I was just trying to not be sick. Or distracted by Zip licking her orange muzzle after she set her bowl down from just jamming her face into the goop. Sighing, the mare belched and leaned back in her seat. “It’s not like we can ask Equus what happened, anyway,” she said, finally finishing her thoughts she’d started a minute ago.

I tried to force down another gulp of the sticky mush that apparently passed for food around here. The Sentinels might have had a lot of fancy toys, but they really needed a good cook. That was when I thought back to just a few days ago. “Well… that might not be true.”

Both Chaff and Sigur stopped their chitchat to look at me, and even Zip raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

I hesitantly nodded. “Yeah. I used to live in an old Equestrian listening outpost on top of the mountains,” I said, earning surprised looks from the two Sentinels sitting with me. They suddenly seemed much more interested in what I had to say, even more than when I’d just claimed that communications with Equestria might not be as hopeless as they seemed a second ago. “About… stars, it was just five days ago, we received a signal from an Equestrian probe. It sent something in code… we couldn’t make sense of it.” I shrugged, looked at my ‘soup’, and pushed it away in disgust. “Next thing we knew, the Crimson came knocking. They burned everything down and stole all the computers at the outpost. Whatever it did, they noticed, and it got a lot of ponies I knew killed. Or worse.”

Zip bit her lip, and Sigur uncomfortably ran a talon through his crest feathers. Even the usually energetic Chaff was silent. Before I knew it, however, I felt Zip rest a feathery wing across my back. “I’m sorry,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “I didn’t know… I thought you’d been a captive of the Crimson for a while when I saw your brand. I didn’t know that you’d lost so much so recently.”

“Yeah…” I let the word trail out into silence. Shrugging, I set my hooves down on the table and pushed my chair back. “My friends are still alive, though. The Crimson took them when they left the mountain. But I’m going to get them back.” Standing up, I looked down at the two sitting Sentinels. “Will you guys help me?”

I’ll admit, I was expecting the two of them to be a little more gung-ho about striking back at the Crimson after the show they made last night. Instead, they shared concerned glances with each other. “Ember,” Sig said, resting his forearms on the table, “you’re asking us to take down the Crimson stronghold in the hope that your friends might still be there.”

“Yeah, and?” I said, looking between the two of them, incredulous. “You guys have the best armor I’ve ever seen. You’re pretty much invincible! That and you’ve got a f—freaking tank!” I exclaimed, only catching myself on the last word when I remembered Chaff was still at the table with us. “If you just organized all your forces and struck at them, I’m sure—”

“Ember, look around us,” Zip suddenly cut in, with a scathing voice that stopped me in my tracks. “How many other Sentinels do you see? And I’m not talking about the ponies in the gray suits. How many other ponies in armor are there?”

I looked around the mess, reminded again just how empty it felt. Most of the ponies here were wearing those gray uniforms, and they definitely didn’t look like the fighting type. In the far corner of the mess I spotted three ponies sitting at a table, fully dressed in the silver armor of the Sentinels. “Where is everypony?”

“Elsewhere in the base or on patrol,” Sigur said, pushing his empty bowl to the edge of the table. “There are only fifty of us left, plus three times as many in support staff. There used to be a lot more, but…”

“The Crimson,” Zip finished for him. She raised a shaky hoof as if she was pouring one out for her comrades, and Sigur did the same, even if they didn’t have anything to drink in front of them. “When I joined five years ago, there were a hundred of us. Five years before that, there were two hundred. We might have the tech, but we don’t have the people.” Sighing, she likewise tossed her empty bowl into Sig’s and frowned at it. “The painted fuckers have hundreds, if not a thousand or more. Plus, they can always conscript more slaves from the towns in the valley when they’re running low on numbers. We used to recruit our soldiers from those towns, but they drove us out of the valley. We would have lost so many more if we didn’t retreat to the Bastion.”

Sigur leaned across the table and grabbed Zip’s hoof, steadying its trembles. “We will survive. We will fight. And one day, we will win. But we can’t be idiots,” he said, looking to me and shaking his head. “It’s better to hold here and keep harassing their patrols than to try to strike at them directly. We may have a tech advantage, but we’re not invincible. Especially when they bring their damn ringbirds into the fight. No amount of shields can stop cannon rounds, especially high explosive ones.”

I looked between the two of them, stunned, and feeling all of my hopes and plans suddenly slipping through my hooves like water. What the fuck was I going to do if the Sentinels wouldn’t help me? I slammed my hooves on the table, feeling tears of desperation beginning to well up as my options began slipping away. “Is that it, then?!” I cried, wildly whipping my head between the two of them as my frustration boiled over. “I came all this way and for what?! I thought you could help me, that’s why I was marching deeper into Crimson territory instead of away from it! I thought you could help me save my friends!”

I realized I was screaming when I noticed how frightened Chaff looked, and I immediately recoiled. My fury swiftly gave way to exhaustion and sorrow, and I collapsed back into my seat. Trembling, I did my best to blink my tears away. The last thing I needed was to start bawling now.

Then orange limbs wrapped around my barrel and drew me in close. “Shhh…” Zip comforted, holding my head against her neck and stroking my mane. My entire body was encased in a caring cocoon of orange, and I found myself leaning on the smaller mare for support. “It’s okay, Ember. Let it out. Just let it out.”

I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to fight back. How could she even pretend to care after all but saying to my face that she couldn’t help, wouldn’t help me save Nova and Gauge and everypony else I cared about?! Fuck the Sentinels! Fuck her! I’d be better off just leaving now and never looking back!

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. As Zip hummed and cradled my head, stroking my mane and patting my back, I began to hiccup into her shoulder. Those hiccups freed the tears hanging beneath my eyes, and from there, I couldn’t stop myself. I wailed like a little filly in the middle of the mess hall as days of stress and failure finally caught up with me.

'The Bastion,’ as the Sentinels called it, was nestled at the end of a rugged box canyon, literally carved into the stone around it. A hundred and fifty feet of exposed steel betrayed its presence in the canyon wall, but the base extended considerably deeper into the earth around it. It was designed to resist orbital bombardment, and the sheer number of hardened bunkers facing out towards the rest of the canyon meant that the full mile of exposed ground in front of it could be covered with devastating fire. Any assault on the Bastion would cost thousands and thousands of lives, even if the assaulting army was equipped with state of the art tech. The Crimson weren’t, and even their gunships would be immediately swatted out of the sky by the antiaircraft artillery the Bastion housed in its upper bunkers. No wonder the Sentinels had retreated here when they lost the valley, and no wonder the Crimson hadn’t been able to stomp them out once and for all. The fortress was simply impenetrable.

For now, though, the canyon was quiet. Peaceful. I sat in front of a window on one of the upper bunkers, staring out over the rough terrain, imagining an army trying to take this place. Faceless soldiers tried to dart between trees and gullies in the face of a brutal onslaught of machine gun fire and mortar strikes from the upper levels of the Bastion. Over there, a monstrosity of an armored tank lay overturned and broken on some rocks, its hull scorched out from an antitank round that punched clean through its upper glacis. Above me, I could see a ghostly wing of ringbirds descending on the fortress, guns blazing as they tried to suppress the defenders in the bunkers, only for the triple-A to shred them to pieces before they could get close. Not even the artillery raking the sides of the Bastion could lessen the sheer amount of death it put out towards those trying to take it.

But there was no battle, not today. The Bastion never saw the kind of orbital invasion it was designed to withstand. I was certain the Sentinels had to defend the thing in the past, or maybe even ponies who came before them, but for now, the canyon was quiet. And for as crazy as Carrion seemed, from what little I saw of him, he didn’t seem like the kind of pony to pointlessly send thousands of soldiers to their deaths trying to crush the Sentinels. As far as he was concerned, he’d already won. The valley was his, and the Sentinels were just a nuisance, one he was slowly but surely whittling down, while he only grew stronger.

My ears briefly turned behind me when I heard the heavy metal door to the bunker creak open, but the rest of me didn’t move. I only continued to stare out over the canyon as I heard claws scrape across the concrete floor. Sure enough, I caught Sig in my peripheral vision, standing just off to my left. “How are you feeling?” he asked in a quiet, sensitive tone. “You alright?”

The truth was, I still felt awful. No amount of kind words could change that. But, admittedly, I was feeling much better after Zip let me cry on her shoulder until I had no tears left to shed. She’d taken me here afterwards to give me some place to sit and be alone with my thoughts, giving me the space I needed, where other Sentinels wouldn’t bother me. I was grateful to her for that—for all of it, really. After the worst days of my life, it was good to know that there was somepony who cared.

Of course, I didn’t tell Sig any of that. Call it petty anger or whatever you will, I dredged up some more disappointment and melancholy to show him as I shrugged and rested my chin on the window in the bunker. “Fine.”

The griffon hesitated before he decided to sit a respectful distance away from me. “Zip went to talk to our captain, and I gave Chaff to some of the mechanics to keep an eye on him,” he said, watching me with careful hawk eyes. “Figured they could keep the colt busy while we figure out when we can spare a patrol to get him back to his family. Plus, he seemed excited to get to sit in a tank, and the mechanics were happy to have him.”

Silence filled the air between us while he waited for me to make some remark, but I simply didn’t have anything to say. It was good that Chaff was at least enjoying his time here. If only I could say the same for myself. As much as I tried to avoid the thoughts, my mind was only occupied with the fact that I’d nearly gotten myself and a colt captured by the Crimson by chasing a dead end. And even though I’d killed two of them in Blackwash, last night was a stark reminder of how hopelessly outmatched I was by even their average soldier. Really, what hope did I even have of freeing Nova and Gauge if I couldn’t even kill a fucking bandit with the element of surprise?

Sigur must have seen the look on my face, or maybe griffons can read minds or something, because he scooted a little closer to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “What was your home like?” he asked, catching me off guard. When I looked at him, confused, he offered me a kind smile. “I know it hurts to think about, to remind ourselves of everything we’ve lost, but if we can't remember where we came from, then we won’t have the strength to keep on keeping on. It’s important to remember that—now more than ever.”

I began silently fuming. What right did he have to ask about Blackwash? It’s not like it mattered anymore. There wasn’t a Blackwash left to remember. It’d all been burnt to the ground days ago, its population killed off or enslaved. Everything I loved, even everything I hated, was simply gone.

But Sigur surprised me again by speaking first. “I grew up in a quarry,” he said, staring out over the canyon with me, although I felt his eyes were elsewhere, seeing something far away that I couldn’t see. “We didn’t have any fancy name for it, because we weren’t all that creative. We just called it ‘the quarry’. And even though it was hard, it was still home.” He cocked his head towards me, a gesture I learned was the griffon equivalent of raising an eyebrow, as they didn’t have any. “I imagine you can relate.”

It took me a moment, but I hesitantly nodded. Grunting, the griffon leaned forward and tapped his talons on the concrete bulwark of the bunker. “The quarry used to be where the settlements in the area got their stone. Granite, mostly. Equestria dug deep in the seventeen winters that they maintained the colony until the Silence began. It’d take you a full ten seconds to hit the bottom of the quarry if you jumped from the highest ridge. Take it from somebody who has wings, that’s a long fall. The sun hardly hits the bottom of the quarry, so we live on the higher levels.

“We have a nice community there,” Sigur continued, staring out to the horizon in what I assumed was likely the direction the quarry was. “A nice flock. Everygriffon plays their part. The adults hunt for food and guard the quarry. The elders lead the flock, prepare the food, and watch the fledglings, who do everything else as they can.” He quietly chuckled and cast me a sidelong glance. “I’ll admit, when I first met a pony, I thought your family structures were weird. Everypony has their own set of parents, grandparents, and so on. I doubt you’re any different.” I nodded, and he continued. “In the quarry, we don’t have any of that. We’re a flock. Everygriffon born in one year is given to a flock father to raise. They’re the elders of the flock that are too weak to fight or leave the safety of the quarry. And in place of our mothers, we have the nest makers. Those are the old hens, and they’re sort of like mothers to everygriffon in the quarry. I always thought it was nice because it made sense, you know? It let the adults take care of the flock without having to also raise their children.”

Despite my efforts to stick to my melancholy mood, I couldn’t help but feel a little interested in learning about Sig’s way of life. It reminded me just how big Auris was to have societies that could be so different from each other despite coming from the same beginnings. “But that seems kind of… I don’t know, impersonal,” I said, furrowing my brow at him. “Didn’t you know who your real parents were?”

Sigur shrugged. “I know who my birth mother is. It’s a little harder when it comes to my father, because mating season is… well, it’s something to be seen to be believed, and even then, I’m not sure a pony like you would want to.” Oh stars, I could already see the horrifying pictures of griffon orgies filling my mind. I began to grimace, and Sig laughed. “Another reason why a pony family ideal would be hard for us to use. But it doesn’t matter to us. My flock father raised me and fourteen other griffons from the day we were born until the day we became tercels and hens—stallions and mares, if we were ponies. They may not have been my blood, but they’re a truer family than my own blood, as far as I care to follow it back—which isn’t very far at all, mind you.”

It also went without saying that it would’ve been impossible for Sigur to go back more than a generation or two with just how little emphasis the griffons placed on their lineage. If the flock practiced communal child rearing, then they wouldn’t have any reason to keep written record of who was whose foal (or fledgling, as the case would be). But there were a few things I still wanted to know. “Why did you join the Sentinels?” I asked, possibly catching him off guard with the sudden shift in topic. “Did something happen to the quarry?”

Sigur held out a talon and shook his head. “Thankfully no, by the spirits’ blessings. The quarry is fine, as are my siblings. I was motivated by… let’s call it a sense of higher calling.”

“Meaning…?”

“Twelve years ago, me and my brother—one of them, anyway—we were on sentry duty along the south cliff,” Sig said, shifting his limbs and making himself comfortable. “We had only recently become tercels. Not even a year or two prior. That meant we had all the shitty jobs, like going on watch, collecting lumber and flax for building materials and hauling it back to the quarry, that sort of thing. We’re the strongest, if not the sharpest, so the flock uses our simple strengths while we learn to become true adults. And sure we’d complain, but not too loudly. It’s something that everygriffon did when they were growing up, and soon we’d be making the fledglings under us do it too.

“But anyways,” Sigur said with a dismissive wave of his hand, as if it helped him disperse the tangent he’d started down, “Jahlen and I were on watch on the south cliff, just the two of us. The rest of my brothers and sisters were on watches elsewhere around the quarry, because when one of us got watch, we all got watch. We passed our time with idle conversation as the moons rose and kept the rocky landscape around us well lit. Talk of our rivals, if we were planning on getting involved in the mating season brawls, for lack of a better word, and who we had our eyes on if we were—that sort of thing. Watch was boring, and nothing ever happened. But of course, that night was different.

“We heard a scream,” he continued, slowly rotating his hand about the wrist as he dredged the memories from the back of his skull. “Definitely wasn’t a griffon, because it didn’t have a shrill raptor screech to it. It took us a moment to realize that it was a pony, a mare, and she stumbled out of the brush below us not long after.”

He paused as if he was carefully considering what he was about to say next. “I’d seen ponies before. The caravans stopped by the quarry occasionally for our stone, and in exchange they gave us bullets and other goods we couldn’t make ourselves. But I wasn’t a flock father, so I never interacted with them. But this mare, I could tell something was wrong, even more than a scream in the night would tell you.

“When she dashed into the clearing beneath the cliff only to find herself in a dead end, she stood still long enough for me to get a good look at her.” The Sentinel’s voice dropped to a dark tone that made the hair on the back of my mane crawl. “She was beaten, bruised, bloodied. It looked like she’d been in a fight she’d only barely slipped away from, and something told me she wasn’t going to stand a chance if whatever her opponent was came back for round two. And then she turned around and we saw her tail.” Sigur grimaced, clenching and relaxing his fist. “It was messy. We knew immediately that she’d been raped, and by the looks of things, by more than one bastard. She also had a brand burned into her left cutie mark. A heart.” He nodded to me. “Just like yours.”

I scowled and felt anger begin to churn my stomach. “The Crimson.”

Sigur stretched his wings and leaned back. “This was before they’d driven the Sentinels out of the valley. They were loosely organized then, and reckless. But Carrion was consolidating his hold on the bandits, and soon they were pushing deeper into the valley, raping and slaving as they went. That one of their slaves was at the outskirts of the quarry meant that there would be bandits not far behind her, so we had to act fast.

“Of course, as good brothers tend to do, we had different ideas on what we needed to do.” Chuckling, Sig shook his head. “He wanted to fly back to the quarry and raise the alarm. I wanted to go save the poor mare before the Crimson found her again. It didn’t really help much when the Crimson showed up before we could even leave, anyway. Poor mare didn’t stand a chance against the five of them. They had her back on the ground in a second.”

I hated that I could sympathize with this nameless mare. I’d been there, and although I was lucky enough to escape before I could be raped, that didn’t mean I didn’t know the terror of the mere prospect of it. Maybe a little bit of that terror crept into my voice, because I swallowed hard and spoke in a wavering tone. “What did you do?”

Silence stretched between us for a surprising amount of time before Sigur swallowed and bowed his head. “Nothing,” he said, staring down at his talons. “It would’ve been the two of us against the five of them. And they had better weapons than we did; most of our firearms were homemade, and the pipe rifle I had didn’t have anywhere near the firepower as the dual automatics that the Crimson carry. We couldn’t have done anything. So I sat there and watched while all five of them had their turns raping her before they dragged her exhausted body back through the woods to whatever camp they had made.”

His talons clenched and shook with fury he’d repressed until now. “Jahlen was just happy that we didn’t get caught. ‘Better her than us,’ he said. But I couldn’t stand it. The next day, I gathered what meagre belongings I had and left to try to find her. My wingmates called me an idiot, but I was the only one who cared enough to try to do something.” Shrugging, he merely sighed and gestured around us. “Never found the Crimson or their camp, but I ran into a Sentinel patrol. They asked me what I was doing, I told them, and they picked me up. Been here ever since, for better or for worse.” He hesitated, then added with a defeated sigh, “Never did find the mare, though. It wasn’t like there was much of a chance to begin with, but it still hurt, all the same.”

And here I was hoping for a happy ending. Sadly, stories like Sigur’s seemed to be the trend down on the surface. How many other nameless mares suffered similar fates over the years? How many more would see the same? Until the Crimson was stopped, until somehow Auris managed to drag itself out of the pit of savagery and lawlessness that we all lived in now, these things were just going to keep happening, and there was little anypony could do except try to slow it down.

“What about your siblings?” I asked. “They couldn’t have been happy with you just leaving them like that.”

Sigur fidgeted and fussed with the feathery crest on his head. It was pretty clear that I struck a sensitive topic. “I… they…”

He never got the chance to finish, for we both heard the airy swoosh of feathers followed by the dropping of hooves to the ground. We turned to find Zip standing in the doorway, panting lightly, and with her armor strapped to her body. She rested a foreleg against the massive steel door and nodded to the two of us. “Sig, Platinum Rampart wants to see us. He’s planning a strike.”

Sigur was already scrambling to his paws and talons. “A strike? I thought we were putting all offensives on hold indefinitely.”

Zip gave him a level nod, but I could see the excitement in how her shoulders trembled and how she rocked her weight back and forth across the tips of her hooves. “Times change. Looks like we’re going to be let out of the cage for more than routine patrol.” Then she turned to me and gave me a huge grin, like I was the one responsible for liberating her from the boredom of the Bastion. “Something about the Crimson stealing a piece of a message from Equestria got him to finally get us moving.”

I blinked stupidly at her. Was I really hearing this right? Or was this just some kind of cruel joke? I hardly dared to breathe in case it was the latter. “Wait… you mean…” Maybe, just maybe, this slog wasn’t such a dead end after all.

My heart soared when Zip excitedly nodded. “Rampart wants to see you, too. Anything you can tell him about the signal, have it ready for him. He’ll want to hear it.” Spreading her wings, the mare began to hover and back out of the bunker. “Looks like you’re going to get that help you wanted after all.”

Chapter 12: The Best Laid Plans

The war room inside the Bastion was my first real exposure to just how advanced Equestria was before the Silence. While the outpost on Blackwash had seemed magical to me, it was really low-tech in comparison to this. The perimeter of the room was ringed with chairs and attached desks for writing notes, and several holographic screens dominated the four walls, although none were displaying anything particularly important at the time. What really made the room so impressive was the slowly rotating holographic map of the valley, complete with names and tiny 3D models of the settlements within. The display was so lifelike that I actually felt like I was sitting on a cloud high above the valley, taking it all in, instead of stuck inside a massive fortress built into the wall of a canyon.

Me and Chaff had followed Zip and Sig into the war room and taken our seats next to the two while several other ponies wandered in. They all wore nearly identical armor to Zip’s, but I could tell there were some individual flourishes here and there, the most common being different designs painted across the chest plate. They gave Chaff and I curious looks as they noticed us, but for the most part they were friendly enough. I think they were more curious as to what two outsiders were doing here in their war room.

Once it seemed like everypony had assembled, an earth pony who had been standing at the front of the room since I entered turned around and examined us. He looked like he’d seen fifty winters, and the metallic silver of his coat was streaked through with aging white, especially around his muzzle and wrinkling face. He wasn’t particularly large, but I could tell that he’d spent most of his life training, and he was probably stronger than he looked, especially for his age. His mane looked like it might have been blue in his younger years, but it’d long since lost its luster, instead favoring gray. But the most striking feature was his face; his muzzle looked like it’d been horribly burnt a long time ago, and the scar tissue that covered it made it look twisted and broken. If it weren’t for that, I would’ve said that he looked pretty handsome for an old stallion, but grotesque scars like that are a little hard to ignore.

“That’s Platinum Rampart,” Zip whispered to me as the idle chatter in the room began to die off. “He’s been the commander of the Bastion for the last thirty winters. He works us hard, but he’s fair. Everypony respects him.”

I nodded; it wasn’t hard to see why. Rampart projected an air of discipline, but that was mixed with confidence and compassion. He wanted his Sentinels to fight as hard as they could, but he wasn’t going to do anything that needlessly risked their lives. I had a feeling that the deaths of every Sentinel who perished under his command weighed heavily on him, and I was impressed. Not all ponies could carry that kind of weight on their shoulders.

Rampart stopped in front of a metal control terminal and pressed a few buttons on it, dimming the lights in the war room. The map hovering in the middle also changed, zooming in on a ramshackle construction spanning the river in the middle of the valley. Even though I knew it was all just a projection, the image was so lifelike that I could imagine I was standing in front of it. Honestly it fascinated me more than it should have, but after all I’d been through, the distraction of some pretty neat tech was all I could focus on.

Then the earth pony cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, Sentinels,” he greeted, adding a small nod. The Sentinels in the room mumbled their greeting back, and Rampart pointed to the fort displayed before us. “Hard Point Beta, or as the Crimson like to call it, the Fort. I know you’re all familiar with the thing; old Equestrian military depot that the Crimson garrisoned after we abandoned the valley.” I heard a few agitated grumbles from some of the Sentinels in the back, but Rampart silenced them with a stern glare. “During our height, we used Hard Point Beta to police the western stretch of the valley, but ever since the Crimson seized it, they’ve been using it as a staging point for their patrols and slaving parties. Northlight, Green Valley, and countless other local settlements have fallen to Crimson raids staged from those walls. It’s also where they funnel their slaves they take from the valley before they route them back to Celestia Dam, where they’re sold to the rest of the hinterland. It is a vile scar on our planet, and as long as it stands, this stretch of the valley will know no safety from Crimson terror.

“Recently, I received word that another settlement was attacked, one previously unheard of due to their isolation in the mountains,” Platinum continued. It didn’t take long for him to seek me out, and when he did, his eyes fell hard on me, bringing the attention of the rest of the room along with them. “The settlement of…”

Zip nudged me, and startled, I cleared my throat. “Blackwash, sir.”

Platinum nodded and turned back to his soldiers. “Thank you. The settlement of Blackwash was an old Equestrian listening outpost in the mountains to the north. They lived in isolation from the rest of the valley since the Silence; isolation that was broken not even a week ago by a raid from the Crimson. But unlike the other towns in the valley, the nature of the Crimson assault was quite different. Instead of conquering the settlement, they destroyed it. Whether the population was eradicated or merely enslaved, I don’t know; I wasn’t told as much. But it matters little. What we do know is that this peaceful settlement was ruthlessly assaulted and exterminated from the map by the barbaric equines that dare call themselves ponies. That in itself is inexcusable.”

I found myself hanging more and more on every one of Platinum Rampart’s words. The stallion spoke with a measured passion that more cultivated the energy and anger of the Sentinels in the room to suit his needs rather than whip it into a frenzy. Being a forgemare, I’ll go ahead and make the awful metaphor that it reminded me of tempering steel; carefully controlled heat and shaping, or in this case, passion and disdain, made something far stronger than just chucking a piece of steel in the forge and hammering it flat when it glowed orange and yellow.

“But what’s more unsettling was the reason behind this cruel attack on a town nopony else has heard of before.” Frowning, Rampart was silent for a moment while his words set in. “As I’ve been told, this settlement of Blackwash heard something from our parents lightyears away. A signal of some kind.” Excited and nervous murmuring broke out among the Sentinels gathered, and Platinum silenced it with a raised hoof. “I don’t know the details, and it’s extraordinarily unlikely that we would have ever found out about this signal, had not sergeants Zip and Sigur stumbled upon a survivor of the settlement last night.” He turned to me and pointed. “Why don’t you tell us what you heard, Miss?”

All eyes settled on me again, and I nervously stood up to address them. “We, uh… Blackwash had a bunch of old satellite dishes. I guess the ponies that came before us used them to communicate with Equus or something.” I swallowed hard; public speaking was not one of my strengths. I had awful stage fright, and it took all of my willpower to not seize up like a motor without any oil. “We had three of them—the dishes, that is—and we’d managed to get one working. It took a lot of hard work from everypony on the mountain, and…”

I trailed off, because I noticed Platinum Rampart frowning at me. Sigur quietly chuckled by my side, while Zip sighed and buried her face in her feathers. That was a helpful indication I was making a fool of myself in front of all of her comrades. Plus, embarrassing the idol of my lust was a pretty good motivator to cut it out and get the fuck on with it.

“A-anyway, five days ago, we turned on the dish for the first time, and we heard something,” I said after a little cough to try to kill some of the awkwardness in the room. “The ponies who knew how all that stuff worked thought that it was a signal coming from a probe in deep space—an Equestrian probe,” I added for emphasis. “Before we knew what was happening, it downloaded some sort of code to our computers, which began talking to other installations on the planet. Then the following night, the Crimson came.” I shuddered, staring at my hooves. “They killed or enslaved us all. I was the only one who managed to escape.”

Rampart gave me a respectful nod. “We’re all sorry for your loss,” he said, and the other Sentinels in the room murmured similar condolences. Then, standing up straighter, the Sentinels’ leader resumed his disciplined demeanor. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

I wracked my brain for any details I’d missed. At least remembering it wasn’t too hard; I’m certain that horrific night is burned into my memory for the rest of my life. I thought about the bandits and Carrion, and two important things stood out. “This pony named Carrion was there, and he said that somepony paid him to get it. He wasn’t trying to take the code for himself. He didn’t say who paid him, but there was this one pegasus there who looked like he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t have any war paint on his face—whatever was left of it, anyway.”

That last bit caused Platinum’s ears to perk. “Was he a yellow pegasus with severe scarring to the right side of his face?” When I nodded, already seeing the monster leering over me again as he dragged me out of the ash at Blackwash, Rampart frowned. “That pegasus goes by the name of Yeoman. He’s an envoy from the Ivory City; does all of Reclaimer’s dirty work he needs done out in the field. It only makes sense that Reclaimer would get involved in something as important as this.”

Before I could ask about Reclaimer or what the Ivory City was, Rampart pressed a few buttons on the control panel, making the map change. “Regardless, that is a matter that can wait. Your fellow ponies were in all likelihood taken to the Fort, which, as you can see, is well defended.”

The holographic map changed to give us a closer view of the Fort, and I could see machine gun nests lining the walls, along with a heavy blast door that was probably damn near impossible to get through. A large central radio tower rose above the compound, and access from the river was blocked with thick grates probably just as strong as the walls. In addition to that, the land surrounding the Fort was flat, apart from rolls of barbed wire and other such anti-infantry countermeasures. I also assumed that the land was mined; that would complete the whole ‘fuck off’ vibe I was getting from this thing.

“Despite Hard Point Beta’s usefulness as a forward outpost, and despite the fact that retaking it would be a devastating blow for Crimson forces in the area, I have not authorized a strike on this fortification in the past for fear of bleeding ourselves dry.” Rampart began to pace around the holographic display, looking over his soldiers in turn as he spoke. “Even if it was our moral duty to free the slaves being kept there, I’ve had to ignore our consciences in favor of the bigger picture; namely, the eventual liberation of the valley.”

He came to a stop where he began, behind the control panel at the end of the room. “But, strike or not, we’ve been withering away over the past ten years until we only have a fraction of our strength left. If we’re going to survive beyond the coming winter, we need to drive the Crimson out of the valley and rebuild our numbers. Soldiers, we’re looking at the big picture now. This code that the listening outpost received could very well change the balance of power on Auris as we know it. If the Crimson have a piece of it, if the Ivory City wants it, we cannot let them keep it. That is why I am authorizing this strike on the Fort; your objective is nothing less than the complete seizure of the Fort and all of its assets, with priorities on the stolen computers from Blackwash. The liberation of slaves is a secondary objective.” I began to frown, but he cut me off with a stern look. “Don’t worry, Miss. Sentinels never fail. We will rescue your friends and family.”

From there, plans were made for the capture of the Fort. The Sentinels planned to use ten of their unicorns to ritual teleport the strike force to just outside of the Fort’s walls, where the fliers of the group like Zip and Sig would storm the gatehouse and attempt to open the fortress to the rest. There had been some talk of teleporting directly into the fortress itself, but that idea had been discarded over concerns about what the Crimson might have done to the Fort while they’d owned it. Things get moved around over the course of ten years, and teleporting directly into the middle of a stack of crates guaranteed a painful death as the spell ripped you limb from limb to fit around the obstruction. Teleporting somewhere only to find that a plank of wood had split you in half was an awful way to go, or so I was told.

I grabbed my gear from the storage where Zip and Sig had left it and began to trot back to the assembly station. Though anxiety made me feel sick to my stomach, I powered through by sheer determination. Nova and Gauge were waiting for me, and now was my chance to free them. I wasn’t going to fail them now.

The hallways and rooms of the Bastion were pretty much a giant damn labyrinth, but at least all the walkways had been marked with helpful signs and arrows that told me where I needed to go. So it was only with a little difficulty that I made my way to a maintenance platform above the open floor of a massive hangar where the strike team was assembling. They seemed so small, almost thirty ponies standing inside of an empty hangar that once upon a time probably held a hundred ringbirds, plus all their ammunition and fuel. I caught sight of Chaff, Sigur, and Zip watching over them from the railing, and I could hardly keep out the spring in my step or the trembling in my knees as I approached them. “I’m ready!” I valiantly cried out, walking into the midst of the three of them. “When do we move?”

I was surprised that neither Sentinel answered me immediately. Instead, the two shared concerned looks, like they knew something I was stupidly oblivious to.

Zip grimaced and broke eye contact with Sigur first to look at me. “Ember,” she said, and the tone in her voice made it clear I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear. “When you went to get your things, we had a talk with Platinum Rampart.” She nervously rubbed the back of her head with the crest of her left wing and slowly strode a few steps closer. “He… forbid us from taking you along on this mission.”

I blinked, the smile on my face vanishing. “W-what?” I asked, stunned and incredulous. “But I… no, my friends are there. They’re counting on me to save them, I’m not just gonna—”

The orange mare cut me off by gently resting her hoof on my shoulder. “We know, and that’s why Rampart didn’t want you joining us on this mission. He was afraid that given your ties to the ponies being held captive there, you’d do something irrational. The mission is perilous enough as is; we can’t risk one mare’s boiling emotions from endangering it.”

I felt like I’d been slapped. “Are you calling me hotheaded?” I growled, feeling my temper flaring up like a fire that’d just found fresh fuel. “I know how to use a gun, I know how to look after myself. Let me join you! I can be another gun in the field. You’re short enough on manpower as it is, and I’m basically expendable. Why turn me away?”

“Because it wouldn’t be right,” Sigur said, joining Zip in front of me. “We’re Sentinels. We protect ponies. Even if we save just one life, we’re doing our job. We will not endanger yours just to have one more gun in the field.”

“Besides,” Zip added, trying her best to look sympathetic and reasonable, “you don’t understand our command structure or our doctrines. That, and you’d be a distraction to the other Sentinels. They’d be so concerned with your safety that they might endanger themselves to help you.” She nodded at me, as if that was supposed to press home her argument. “We trust each other to look after ourselves when shit hits the fan. You might be good, Ember, but you haven’t fought with us before. We don’t know what you’re capable of, and for that, it’s not a risk we’re willing to take.”

I was silent, if only because I worried I’d say something stupid if I opened my mouth. My heart insisted that I fight them on it, demand that they take me along. These were my friends, my people. I should be there to free them. Fuck the Crimson, fuck danger. I wasn’t going to let that stop me. If I could hold my own against a shrike, I could hold my own with Sentinels to support me.

But my brain said no. Once I had a moment to vent my emotions, simple logic caught up with me. I was hardly an equal to a single Sentinel, and they were right. I’d only be a distraction if everypony else had to look after me. What could I possible contribute by being there? In all honesty, they had a better chance of completing their mission and saving Nova and Gauge and all the others without me. I’d likely just get everyone killed. Or worse.

Zip seemed to take my silence for reluctant acceptance. “We’ll bring them back,” she said. The metal bars that made the energy blades on her wings rattled as she flexed those appendages before taking my hoof in hers and pressing it against her chest. “I swear on my life, we’ll bring them back safely.”

I wasn’t in much condition to do anything other than give her a wordless nod. She cast one last sympathetic look at me before dropping my hoof and beginning to back away. Then, sharing a nod with Sigur, the two Sentinels began to walk toward the stairs leading down to the hangar floor.

That left me alone with Chaff, and growling, I crossed my forelegs and used the railing to support myself. For his part, the colt seemed unsure of what to say; quite unlike the hyperactive thing that first greeted me when I woke up… fuck, was that only yesterday? Each of these past few days felt like it’d lasted a week. I wondered how long it would be until things finally went back to normal.

Heh. Normal. That was a funny thought. Nothing would ever be ‘normal’ again. Too many ponies had died. Too much had been lost. I didn’t think I could ever go back to being normal while I still had this damn heart branded on my left flank.

Chaff surprised me with a question. “Why aren’t you going?”

I frowned. Had he not been paying attention? “Because they told me not to.”

“Yeah, but…” the colt fidgeted as he undoubtedly struggled to figure out the best way to say what was on his mind. “Don’t you want to be there?”

I bit my lip. “Zip and Sigur said that my friends would be fine. They’d get them out safe and sound. I don’t have any reason to worry.”

“But what if something awesome happens?” Chaff asked, looking up at me with a curious and confused look. “Wouldn’t you want to be there?” He huffed and hung his forelegs over the railing, staring down at the Sentinels as they began to assemble for the teleportation. “I’d want to be there if something happens. It’s no fun to be left home.”

It would’ve been easy enough to dismiss Chaff’s words as the ramblings of a kid who still had yet to discover how the world works, but they struck something within me. While Chaff seemed disappointed and confused that I wouldn’t try to tag along for something he thought was going to be awesome (no doubt because he likely held no reservations from sneaking away from his family to do just that when he followed me), I began to see it in a different light. What if something went wrong? Could I really forgive myself if Nova died during the strike and I wasn’t there to help her? Or Gauge, or Brass, or anypony else I knew? Could I live with myself if I never saw them again because I stayed at the Bastion with my hoof up my ass?

As it turns out, in a battle of the brain versus the heart, the heart tends to win if motivated enough.

My legs were moving before I even knew what I was thinking. Pressing off of the railing, I turned and galloped towards the stairs that Zip and Sigur had descended just a few minutes ago. Chaff whirled around, startled, but before he could move, I shouted at him to stay put. I didn’t spare the effort to see if he listened to me or not, because I was already barreling down the stairs and out of sight. Besides, I was pretty sure if I took a second to look away from the stairs, I’d trip and fall flat on my face, I was descending them so fast.

I jumped down the last five or six steps and began galloping straight toward the assembled group. They’d huddled themselves into a circle between the ten unicorns, who began to arc magic between their horns as they built up the strength of the ritual. For the most part, the Sentinels occupied themselves with idle talk while they prepared for the teleportation spell to fire, but there were others wandering around the hangar that noticed my frantic charge toward the group. Somepony cried out, catching the attention of two mechanics near me, who both tried to lunge forward and stop me. Before they could get close, however, I wrapped my telekinesis around their hooves and lifted, not enough to actually pick them up, but enough to prevent their hooves from hitting the metal floor as they tried to intercept me. That caused the two to fall over, and I effortlessly jumped over both of them as they tumbled across the floor.

That left me a clear opening to the circle, and so I poured on the speed. Only when I was about twenty feet away did I see Zip look up from her conversation with Sigur to see what all the commotion was about. Her eyes widened as she saw me charging toward her, and she shoved through the group to try to head me off. “No, Ember, wait!” she cried, but I’d gone too far to stop now. Instead, I bunched my muscles beneath my frame and kicked off of the hangar as hard as I could, propelling myself directly toward the middle of the circle.

Then the unicorns’ horns flared to life, and I was blinded by a bright flash of light as the world tore itself to pieces around me.

Within the relative safety of the Bastion, it hadn’t been that hard to decide that I was going on the strike no matter what. There, I had a few moments to myself to decide what I needed to do, and the choice felt like an obvious one. Even when Sentinels were trying to stop me from breaching the ritual circle, I had no doubt that what I was doing was right, even if the others wouldn’t agree with me.

Sitting on my ass with twenty-five angry Sentinels staring down at me put things into perspective. It didn’t help that one of those Sentinels was the mare I admired, and that she was the first one to call me out.

Angry hooves stomped across the ground, trampling pink grass as she marched over to me. I managed to get in a nervous smile like a foal caught stealing an extra ration before her rage hit me. Hard. And literally. And by rage, I mean her hoof. The blow cracked my head to the right with such force that I actually flailed and toppled over. The crippling pain came a second later once my brain realized what just happened.

“Ember, what the fuck?!” Zip howled at me, standing over me like a predator about to rip its prey to pieces. I’m certain she was trying to restrain herself from kicking me while I picked myself off the ground. “You idiot! You could have gotten yourself killed! You could have gotten all of us killed!”

Grunting, I managed to come to my hooves, but I kept my ears flat and my head held submissively low. Perhaps more than anything else, I was horrendously embarrassed that I was getting chewed out in front of Zip’s peers. I wanted to crawl back into a hole, but I couldn’t just stand there and take Zip’s verbal lashing without some token defense. “I-I don’t get it, what do you mean?”

In response, Zip grabbed my tail, but not in the way I would’ve liked her to. Instead, she just held it up so I could see the end of it, where a good six or seven inches had just disappeared, leaving a straight, scorched line behind. I blinked and stared at it for a second, dumbfounded, before the implication hit me. If I was just a moment later, the teleportation circle would have cut me in half. Well, not so much cutting as merely teleporting everything from my bellybutton up while leaving my lower half behind. It probably would’ve been just as bad as teleporting into a wall.

I said probably about the stupidest thing I could’ve come up with, apart from making some joke about Zip grabbing my tail. “Well, at least it won’t be sweeping the ground when I walk anymore.”

To be fair, my tail was really long prior to that, and cleaning it was a pain in the ass. If I didn’t think I looked good (I’m loathe to use the word ‘pretty’) with my shoulder-length mane and long tail, I probably would have cut both back long ago.

I’m pretty sure Zip strongly considered hitting me again, and I don’t blame her; I would’ve hit me if I’d been standing in her shoes. Instead, I was saved by Sig quickly making his way to her side and resting a hand on her shoulder. She looked at him, and he shook his head; I wasn’t sure whether to feel glad or what that he was basically telling her I wasn’t worth it.

Now that she had that out of her system, Zip just merely found a nearby rock to sit down on. Removing her helmet, she rubbed her face with a wing and sighed. “We’re off target,” she grumbled, and I made a quick look around us to confirm that there was no fort in sight, capitalized or otherwise. Instead, we’d ended up in a basin between several hills, with the mountains looming up a mile or so to the south. “You jumping into the spell messed up the preparations the spellcasters made. They put in enough power to move the twenty-five of us to within a mile of the Fort, not twenty-six. So we’ve got some walking to do.”

I fidgeted in place, ultimately deciding to sit down near her, but carefully outside of her kicking range. “I’m sorry,” I mustered enough energy to say. “I couldn’t stay back at the Bastion. I had to be out here. My friends are counting on me.”

“Even after everything we said?” Zip asked, fixing me with a pointed glare. I had no response to that, so the mare just sighed and flipped her helmet back on. “Well, consider yourself lucky. You got what you wanted. We can’t send you back now, not until the mission is done. I trust you can hold your own.”

I nodded, and with that, Zip went back to the gathering crowd of Sentinels, dismissing them with a hoof. Soon enough, I heard orders being barked out, and several pegasi flew into the air to scout out the land. If my fuck up really had made us miss our target, it was essential that we figured out where we were before we continued.

I found Sigur was much more sympathetic to me, as he sat down by my side and wrapped a wing around my back for comfort. “She’s not really mad at you,” he began, and when I shot him a doubting look, he wilted and held up a hand. “Okay, she’s a little mad. But she’s more frustrated than anything. And worried, too. She was the one who found you last night, so she feels responsible. She doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

Well, that was surprisingly reassuring. It even played to my fancy that maybe I’d score with her. And I knew I fucked up; I could understand why she was mad with me. If there was a chance for reconciliation…

I ran a hoof through my mane, mostly because sitting still was beginning to bother me. Surprisingly enough, getting whacked in the face doesn’t do much to actually get rid of that pent-up excitement you get before a fight. “I guess,” I conceded, shrugging. “I’m just… I didn’t know that I’d be messing something up when I tried to join you guys. I just thought it was… you know, a big circle that goes ‘poof’ and magically sends you wherever you want to go.”

Sigur chuckled and scratched his beak. “Well, you’re the unicorn; I figured you’d understand how it works better than I do. Magic isn’t exactly a griffon’s strong suit.”

“Yeah, well, the only magic I understand is telekinesis, because every damn unicorn knows telekinesis” I said, shrugging. “I do know some other basic spells, like fire protection. I used to work as a smith before Blackwash… you know…” I bit my lip and stared at the mountains walling off the valley in the north. I had no idea which one of their spires held the remains of my home anymore; they all looked the same from down here. “Teleportation or casting lightning bolts from my horn weren’t exactly spells I needed to learn. I doubt I could’ve if I wanted to, anyway; it’s not like we had any spellbooks on the mountain.” I felt myself grinning as I added, “But if you need to not be lit on fire, then I’m your mare.”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m burning to death,” Sigur said, smiling. Then, on a more serious note, he waved a talon. “The record keepers have some old military manuals at the Bastion that go over basic combat spells. If you want, you can take a look at them when we’re done here. Any unicorn can use telekinesis to fire a gun, but the Equestrian soldiers before the Silence also knew how to wield fire and lightning and other spells to just as devastating an effect. Having a few of those under your belt might be useful if you ever find yourself in trouble.”

Huh… Now that was a tempting offer. I’ll admit I briefly imagined myself standing atop a tall rock, pouring lead and raining fire on an army of screaming Crimson mooks below me. I mean, bullets are effective and all, but they just don’t have the same panic-inducing, morale-shattering effect of a fireball. Throw in some maniacal laughter and it’d make a pretty good recreation of a cheesy storybook villain.

I chuckled (but not maniacally, because I’m not a storybook villain) and took a moment to sip from my canteen before I nodded. “Yeah, that sounds awesome. I could get a lot of use out of that, especially with bullets being a money system or something like that.” I shook my head at that. “You’d think that a bullet-based economy would run out of money sooner or later with all the shooting you guys do at each other.”

“I’m no trader, so I couldn’t tell you how it all stays afloat,” Sigur said, shrugging. “Best I can tell, a lot of the small towns anchor themselves to settlements that are set up in old military bunkers, like the Bastion, because they have all the bullets. The towns give the military settlements things they need, and the settlements give them bullets in return. And if you’ve ever seen just how many bullets the army liked to stuff into these forts before the Silence began, then you’d understand they’re not going to run out anytime soon, even if they shoot off thousands, like we’re probably going to do today.”

Sig’s comment did remind me of something else, though. Reaching into my bags, I pulled out the cigarette box that Denarius had given me. “Do you know what this is?” I asked, pointing to the symbol on the lid.

The griffon took it in his talons and looked it over, but gave it back after a few seconds. “Can’t say that I do,” he said, shaking his head. “Where’d you get this? You don’t look like the kind of mare who smokes.”

“A trader I crossed paths with gave it to me for free,” I said. “Didn’t say anything about the symbol, and he was gone before I could ask him. It could just be some decorative crest from before the Silence for all I know, but I wouldn’t put it past this guy that it’s something else entirely. There was just something… off about him.” I shrugged, not really wanting to think about it at the moment, and put the box away. Instead, I focused on a group of Sentinels that had assembled, which Zip was a part of, standing in a circle around a stallion with a sky blue coat and a mane that alternated between blue and gray stripes. I got the feeling that he must’ve been an officer of some sort, given the way everypony silently listened to him speak. Nudging Sig, I pointed to the pegasus. “Who’s he?”

“Commander Thunder Dash,” Sig responded. “He’s been with us for a while. His family was old military before the Silence, and it seems they stuck to their jobs once it started. They played an important part in organizing the Sentinels when we were first founded a long time ago. Thunder’s just the latest in a long line of officers from his family name. I’d trust the stallion with my life.”

“Huh.” I watched him speak to his subordinates for a little longer, then raised an eyebrow at Sig. “Why aren’t you there listening to him?”

Sig waved a hand. “Zip will tell me everything I need to know. I let her handle the briefings and that sort of thing. I prefer to spend my time on other causes, like making sure our unexpected guest doesn’t spend the rest of her day kicking herself too badly,” he said, winking.

I felt myself blush a little and toyed with my mane. “Yeah… thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Sig said. The group in front of us broke and began rallying the other Sentinels scattered about the basin, and the griffon stood up as Zip came trotting back to us. “What’s the plan?”

"Recon says we’re about ten miles northeast of the Fort, so we’ll have to hoof it the rest of the way there. From there, we’re going to survey the defenses, but if everything checks out, Thunder wants to hit the fort from three angles. Fifteen on the front door to draw their attention, and two groups of five to hit the rear, one from the hills and one from the river.”

“And which group are we?” Sigur said, checking his gear as we prepared to move out.

“River,” Zip answered, moving to Sig’s side and helping the griffon with a buckle on his armor. “The secondary groups are two fliers, two bruisers, and a caster.” Turning to me, she made an airy sigh and slapped my shoulder. “I managed to convince Thunder to let you come with us. He wanted to make you sit out, by force if necessary, for messing up the mission, but I convinced him you’d redeem yourself if we let you.”

Knowing that Zip had decided to stick up for me when she was pissed just moments ago was like a shot in the foreleg. “You can count on me,” I said, trying to meet her gorgeous eyes with a confident smile. It wasn’t easy.

Zip must’ve seen how flustered I was, because she just shook her head and patted me on the back. “All I ask is that when we’re moving on the Fort is that you keep an eye on our surroundings instead of on my tail,” she said. “We can’t have any distractions on the battlefield, can we?”

She walked past me as the group began to move out, and I swear she intentionally brushed her tail against the side of my neck as she did so. My response was to merely lock up in panic, staring blankly ahead as my mind tried to process what happened. If I didn’t have a black coat, I’m pretty sure Sigur would’ve been able to see just how pale I was from Zip’s words.

Instead, the griffon just laughed and thumped his chest as he caught up to his companion. “By the spirits, Zip, you’re gonna kill the poor mare.”

Walking to the Fort took us the better part of the remainder of the day, and by the time we’d reached a hill overlooking the structure, the sunset was giving everything a blue glow. Zip and some of the other Sentinels had been discussing the details of their battle plans with Thunder Dash the entire way here, including whether or not to wait to strike at night. However, everypony agreed that a daylight strike would be better; in the dark of the night, we wouldn’t be able to see any traps that the Crimson had laid for us, and the glowing lights on the Sentinels’ armor would’ve given them away while the Crimson themselves remained concealed in darkness. Thus, we had to strike while there was still some light out. Plus, if they could see the main force approaching from the front, more would be drawn away from the rear of the Fort—the actual target.

While the Sentinels prepared themselves for the assault, as super fancy high tech armor apparently needs a lot of time to get ready, I crawled up to the ridge we were hiding behind while we prepared to get a good look at the Fort. It was arranged like a pentagon, with the flat end pointed towards us and aligned with what I assumed was a road a long time ago, and the opposite point on the other side of the river that flowed through it. The walls were made of solid steel, reinforced with thick bulwarks that I figured could survive orbital bombardment, and watchtowers set at regular intervals stood guard over the surrounding land. Within the walls were several large prefab buildings, and rising from them all was an impressively tall radio tower. I had a feeling that once upon a time, that radio tower and Blackwash used to speak to each other constantly. Now, one was dead, and the other looked like it barely functioned. There wasn’t a whole lot keeping the thing standing upright; were it not for some extra cables wrapped around its frame, the crooked tower looked like it would’ve fallen long ago.

Then there were the Crimson. They walked the walls in pairs, weapons primed and ready, and I noticed that not all of them carried their standard dual submachine guns. Several had rifles and shotguns, and I saw at least one sniper sweeping the countryside through his scope. A few mounted machine guns protected the road, each with a gunner and loader chatting idly behind them. I felt my stomach twist into a knot as I looked over those defenses. The Sentinels might have shielding in their armor, but if what Zip had said last night was true, it wasn’t going to protect them from that amount of firepower.

But the Sentinels had a solution for that problem. I trotted back to Zip and Sigur as they slotted metal plates onto the sides of their armor. From what they’d told me, they were deployable cover, since there wasn’t a lot of cover in the open ground around the Fort, and they’d need what they could get to protect themselves from sniper fire. It apparently made a shield large enough for three ponies to hide behind when deployed, and could be launched from a distance to sustain an advance. While we hopefully wouldn’t need them as an infiltration team, the frontal assault was going to make extensive use of them to give their soldiers some cover from enemy fire. Otherwise, the open ground in front of the Fort would turn into a killing field, and what little cover there was facing the Fort was probably mined and too dangerous to use.

Zip looked up at me as I approached. “Feeling excited yet?” she asked, and I noticed that the small orange mare was rocking back and forth on her haunches, like it was impossible to keep still. She noticed that I noticed, for she promptly hopped to her hooves and began jogging in place. “It’s been too long since I was on a good strike. Patrol is boring work; I’m glad that we’re finally taking the fight to the bastards instead of trying to whittle them down in the dark of the night, for all the good that’s done us so far.”

Where Zip let her excitement run freely, Sig was much more calm and collected. “It’s kept us alive is what it’s done. Not all of us, but enough that we even had this opportunity today. If we can take back the Fort, well…” the griffon shrugged his shoulders, rattling the armor fastened to his body. “We open up the west valley for recruitment and we can start building our numbers again. It’s what it’s going to take to finally topple the Crimson.”

I nodded, feeling the anxiety settling in my gut. Today, I was going to either witness the rebirth of the Sentinels, or their last hurrah. Zip had said they only had fifty soldiers before, and half of them were on this strike. As defensible as the Bastion was, I didn’t think the Sentinels could properly defend it with only twenty-five soldiers. If we lost here, Carrion would surely strike back and crush the Sentinels once and for all.

“Soldiers,” Thunder called out, interrupting my thoughts. Zip and Sig both turned to face him along with the other twenty-three Sentinels around us. Thunder Dash stood in the middle of the circle, his face a careful mask of neutrality. When he saw that we were all watching him, he pointed a wing to the ridge and the fortification behind it. “Beyond that ridge lies the Fort. I don’t think I need to point out to you that the future of our entire way of life hinges on whether we take it back from the Crimson or not. Our objective is to breach those walls, neutralize any resistance, secure the data they stole, and free the slaves. In that order. Am I understood?”

The Sentinels around him all nodded and muttered “sir”. “Good,” he said, eyes sweeping over everypony (and griffon) assembled before him. “It will not be easy, and I’m not naïve enough to believe that we can do this without casualties. But play it smart and stick to the plan, and we’ll get out of this alive.” Then his eyes narrowed on me, making me shiver. “If any of you have any questions or concerns, now’s the time to voice them. There’s no turning back now, and you won’t have a second chance.”

I swallowed hard and stood up straighter, rising to meet Thunder’s challenge. I may not have been a Sentinel, but I wasn’t going to be intimidated by him. I knew the risks (okay, the more direct, shooty ones) when I jumped in the circle, and I wasn’t going to back out now. The ponies of Blackwash were counting on me.

My show of confidence got me a small nod of approval from Thunder, and when nopony said anything, he gestured with his wings. “Good. I’ll be in radio contact with the two infiltration teams. Don’t approach the Fort until you hear my signal. You’ll know when it’s time to breach.” He gave us one last glance before adding, “Move out.”

As the Sentinels fell into their parties, I did my best to stay close to Zip and Sigur. Zip let out a shrill whistle from the front of our group, and soon we set off down the side of the ridge, approaching the river from a blind spot on the Fort. Though I did my best to stay calm, I couldn’t suppress the fear grabbing hold of my gut.

I was terrified. And I was certain I was going to die.

Chapter 13: Where We Draw the Line

I felt like my heart was going to burst through my chest.

The six of us in our squad waded through the river, with the water coming up well past my knees and soaking my stomach. Thankfully it was summer, so the water was warm, but it made my thick tail feel like a twenty pound weight attached to my rear. I guess on the bright side, the shrike ripping about half of my mane off meant that it wasn’t dragging through the water, too. The slippery riverbed beneath my hooves had also nearly sent me into the water, and I could feel water dripping off of my muzzle after my latest slip up. Pun maybe intended.

Despite how unpleasant wading through the water was, the real reason why I felt like I was going to have a heart attack was because of what lay ahead of us. The river passed through three nested iron grates set inside a massive wall about twenty feet high with nothing but smooth, slanted metal to prevent it from being scaled. Flanking the grates and the river were two towers, each one with dual heavy machine guns pointing down at us. The Crimson soldiers in the towers were so close that I could make out the designs of their war paint and hear tidbits of their conversations over the sounds of birds and the running water.

The only reason that they didn’t notice us was because of the other unicorn with us. Warped Glass was what the other Sentinels called a warlock; he relied more on his magic than his guns and armor to do his job, and was just as deadly while remaining very versatile. While we approached the Fort, he was responsible for keeping a cloaking field around us so we wouldn’t be spotted. I’d been really nervous about it at first, because to me, nothing looked different except for a shimmering of the air in front of us. Sig and Zip had to literally drag me out from behind the rocks to get me to move with them. At least my terror kept me quiet; even though we were invisible to the Crimson, they could still hear us if we talked.

And then there was timing to consider. We waded into the water five minutes ago to make sure we were in position by the Fort when the frontal assault started. However, as Glass told me before we started, maintaining a cloaking spell is taxing enough as it is for one pony, but increase that to a field big enough for six, and the caster will get tired quickly. We still had a few hundred more feet to go until we were against the side of the Fort, and I could see the sweat pouring off of Glass’ face. If he dropped the spell, we’d be cut down where we stood. Those machine guns looked like .50cal; it’d only take one bullet to drop each of us, and there were four barrels up there. The odds weren’t in our favor, and Sentinel armor wasn’t going to stop them.

The two earth ponies with us, Runabout and Failsafe, each offered Glass a shoulder to lean on so he could concentrate on his spell. When I first saw Zip in action, I thought she had a lot of guns, but these two had an entire arsenal at their disposal. Their bulky armor had the standard six gun ports that all Sentinel armor had, but they’d also strengthened their chest pieces with extra metal and had gone so far as to strap miniature rocket launchers to their armor. Each pony carried sixteen tiny rockets, eight on each flank, tipped with antimatter warheads that gave each one the punch of a cruise missile. We were relying on those rockets to get us through the grates blocking the river and to make short work of the machinegun nests once we had the signal.

I tried to stay as far away from those two as I could. Not because I didn’t like them or anything, but if they got shot, I didn’t want to be a part of the chain reaction. There’s dying, and then there’s being disintegrated by antimatter.

Zip and Sig walked at the front of our group, their faces unreadable masks. In the calm before the storm, they remained focused and loose, as if the danger we were in didn’t faze them at all. Still, I could see Zip’s wings twitching, like she was ready to take to the skies at any moment. I wasn’t sure if I should’ve been comforted or worried that even badass soldiers like her could get nervous.

After what felt like a lifetime, we made it to the wall of the Fort. I had to remember to stifle my sigh of relief; we were close enough to the towers that the guards would’ve been able to hear even the tiniest sound. Still, we were in a blind spot between the two towers, so Glass dropped the invisibility field to recover before the fight. As he did that, we ducked into what little cover we had in the corners next to the grate across the river. By some luck, I ended up next to the grate, and I carefully peeked through the opening to see what awaited us on the other side.

I saw maybe ten Crimson soldiers in the back, shooting at targets across the river hidden behind various assortments of makeshift cover. It seems that even slaving and raping bandits found the time for a little target practice now and then. They didn’t seem to have any obvious superior watching them, so I guess they were just doing their own thing. I wondered how exactly the Crimson organized themselves; I didn’t really see anypony that looked like a sergeant or whatever during the attack on Blackwash. If there was some identifying mark, it had to have been in their war paint, but I wasn’t a savage sicko so I couldn’t tell.

I also noticed a distinct lack of slaves. Well, I was looking for my friends specifically, but I didn’t see any slaves outside. I’d imagined seeing big pens or cages with the ponies from Blackwash stuffed inside like animals, but there wasn’t any of that to be found. If there were slaves here, then they had to be inside one of the buildings.

That just meant I’d have to shoot my way through every last one of them until I found my friends.

A sharp crack echoed over the fortress, making me flinch away from the grate. For a few long, terrifying seconds, the six of us just stood still, not daring to move, and hardly daring to breathe. We looked at each other, the same question in all of our minds. Was that the signal, or just a misfire?

Then the shooting began in earnest. The rapid chattering of numerous guns firing, both near and far, pounded my ears. Heavy machine guns thumped from their positions on the walls, and the Sentinels’ guns responded with this awful noise that sounded like a piece of sheet metal being torn in half. Soon, I could hear the blasts of explosives, and the ground began to tremble as the earth ponies in Thunder Dash’s platoon fired their antimatter rockets.

An alarm sounded, and another peek through the grate let me catch a glimpse of the drilling Crimson in the yard grabbing their weapons and dashing towards the diversion. I felt a hoof on my shoulder and turned to see Zip silently questioning me. I gathered what she was asking and nodded. She nodded back, then waved her hoof at the rest of the squad. It was time.

Zip, Sig, Glass, and I huddled together while Runabout and Failsafe darted away from the wall and into the open. A foggy white shield formed around us, courtesy of Glass’ magic, and our walking artillery batteries went to work. I saw the holographic visors in their helmets flash red, and a second later, each earth pony loosed a rocket at a tower. The little rockets were hardly bigger than my hoof, but when they hit the towers, they let out a brilliant flash of light and an eardrum popping boom as their antimatter warheads detonated. The force of the blasts shook the earth around us, but amazingly the towers seemed unscathed. That wasn’t to say the defenders inside were unharmed, though. Plumes of fire some thirty feet long rocketed out of the windows of the towers, incinerating everything within in an instant. At least it was a painless death, since I doubted the Crimson inside even lived long enough to register the pain of being incinerated. It was still better than the fuckers deserved, though.

Still, even with the diversion in the front, somepony was likely to notice that. We had to move quick and take the courtyard before the Crimson responded.

And that’s what Glass’ shield was for. As soon as she dropped her tower, Runabout pointed her rocket pods at the grate over the river and fired. The little rocket whooshed out and struck one of the bars in the center of the grate before detonating, blowing it to pieces and scattering tiny fragments of steel shrapnel everywhere, leaving behind glowing, dripping white bars that’d been heated to their melting point by the energy let off by the missile. Glass’ shield prevented us from being incinerated, although I did note that there were cracks in the shield as he let it down. It had held, but just barely.

Zip wasted no time springing into action. Her wings opened in a flash, and before the smoke even cleared she was darting toward the hole in the wall. “We take the watch!” she cried, the turbulence off her wings making the smoke swirl in her wake, and leaving the rest of us to scramble afterwards. The adrenaline poured into my blood, fighting off the terror that tried to paralyze my limbs, and sent me after her, SM45 held in my magic. My hooves splashed up water that promptly made its way into my face, nearly blinding me as I dashed into the Fort.

No turning back now.

As soon as I parted the smoke and galloped out of the river, I came to a stop. Zip had already deployed one of her covers and was hiding behind it, firing bullets through the portable force field at Crimson soldiers on the other side. The synchronized, rapid firing of the six guns in her armor was mesmerizing, as they fired in succession to create an almost continuous stream of lead at her targets. That also explained their distinctive buzzsaw sound, which I imagined was really intimidating if you happened to be downrange of a Sentinel.

Of course, the middle of a battlefield isn’t a good place to be having thoughts like that. I gasped as a heavy weight hit me from behind, nearly knocking me over before dragging me across the ground. After a second of struggling I recognized the sharp grip of Sigur’s talons on my shoulder, and also saw the ground where I’d been standing explode into puffs of dirt as bullets slammed into it. Once he’d dragged me to the cover Zip was behind, the griffon released me and helped me stand back up. He handed me my gun, which I guess I dropped when he hit me, and nodded to where Zip was firing. “Shoot now, daydream later, okay?”

I nodded, taking the gun in my magic, and surveyed the situation. We were in the open behind one of Zip’s deployable covers, facing toward the center of the fort. Glass, Failsafe, and Runabout had likewise deployed a cover, and were hiding behind that as they pelted the walls with antimatter rockets and lightning to swat the defenders off of them before they could flank us. Behind us, the second infiltration team was storming the walls and towers, clearing them out and securing our rear from Crimson attack. That left just a few scattered defenders in front of us, who’d quickly taken up cover behind crates and anything else they could find. We needed to kill them to make our way to the first building in front of us and clear it out.

Time to get to work.

My little submachine gun didn’t have the range to accurately hit them from this distance, but I was a unicorn with line of sight. While Zip and Sigur kept the Crimson hunkered down behind cover, I widened my stance and let my horn flare to life. Across the courtyard, a large pile of crates that two bandits were hiding behind began to glow orange. My bright magic was hard to miss, especially when it was happening right in front of them, so the bandits broke cover and ran, afraid of what I was going to do next.

Which was absolutely nothing. The crates were too heavy for me to pick up, and I didn’t know any complicated spells that could’ve made then explode or something. But that wasn’t the intention. As soon as the Crimson soldiers darted into the open, Zip and Sigur cut them down with sprays of their weapons. I flinched as I was pelted by hot shells, as I was standing between the two of them, but all things considered, those two bandits got the short end of the stick.

“Push!” Zip screamed, and she turned to point her right side toward the Crimson, inadvertently whipping my face with her tail. There was a small crack as separator charges detonated underneath the deployable cover attached to her side, propelling the steel rectangle downrange. It let out a blinding flash of light as it hit the ground, momentarily stunning the bandits nearest to it, before another translucent barrier appeared ten yards away. As soon as the cover deployed, Sigur spread his wings and leapt over ours before dashing toward it, the air around him rippling as his armor deflected a few stray rounds that might have hit him. By my side, Zip unloaded with her guns, keeping the Crimson with more powerful weapons down and behind cover. Once Sig had landed safely, he began shooting at the ponies closest to him, completely tearing the skull off of one as multiple bullets ripped through the bandit’s face.

Then Zip slapped me on the shoulder. “Move! I’ll cover you!” she screamed. The carnage around us was so loud that I almost couldn’t hear what she said, though she got her point across pretty quickly when she pointed to the cover and began firing. Gulping, I galloped around the side of the cover and bolted straight for Sigur, trying to stay low as I moved. I heard a few bullets whizz past my ears, and I stumbled once when it felt like somepony had bucked me in the side, but I carried enough momentum forward that when I did trip and fall, I was able to slide behind the cover with Sig. Grunting, I flipped onto my hooves and poked my gun around the corner of a crate a few feet away from me before unleashing a torrent of bullets. I didn’t stop shooting until I saw a bloodied hoof appear in the open around the corner of the crate. That’s the benefit of telekinesis.

In the face of our advance, several of the less disciplined Crimson broke ranks and fled deeper into the fort, abandoning their comrades at the front as they sought shelter inside the buildings. I sprayed my SM45 at them as they ran, hoping that what I lacked in accuracy I’d make up for in sheer number of bullets. I’m pretty sure I shot the dick off one stallion as he ran, because he immediately fell and clutched his nethers, and I couldn’t help but wince a little. In fairness, he probably deserved it. Who knew how many mares he’d defiled anyway?

Still, it afforded Zip a chance to join us, so that’s what she did. She flung open her bright orange wings and darted into the sky, attempting to replicate the little maneuver Sig had pulled off earlier. Only this time, the Crimson were ready for it. I don’t know where the shot came from, but it must’ve been from a rifle instead of a submachine gun. The air around Zip physically contorted as the bullet slammed into her shield until finally, with a bright flash of light and electricity, it ripped through her barrier and struck her in the leg. Her scream of pain turned my blood to ice, and it was all she could do to flap her wings and get behind cover before she could get shot again. I used my telekinesis to catch her as she fell so she wouldn’t hit her head on the ground, and immediately rushed to her side.

To my surprise, she shoved me back with her good hoof. “Keep fighting!” she cried. “Keep shooting!” I was too shocked at the fury in her voice to really do anything else but what she said. I could see some concern in Sig’s face as he likewise kept firing, but he didn’t stop to help Zip at all, instead focusing on driving the bandits back.

Between us, Zip clenched her teeth and stopped writhing long enough to get a look at her wounded leg. It must’ve been good enough to her, because she opened a pack on her armor and produced a metal ring and some gauze. While we forced the Crimson away from our position, Zip slipped the metal ring around her foreleg above the bullet wound and bit down on it. It took me a second to realize that she was using some kind of tourniquet to slow the blood flow to her leg while she wrapped her lower leg in gauze. She moved like she’d done this before, swift and precise, until she knotted off the reddening gauze and stretched her limb a few times. The small metal bracer around her foreleg flashed and extended two metal rods that traveled the length of her leg from her knee to her hoof and joined underneath.

Amazingly, she was able to get back on her hooves and join us in cutting down the last of the Crimson in the area; I assumed that those rods kept her weight off of her hoof so that she could still stand and walk until she got some actual medical attention. The air around her pricked my skin with static discharge, and only when I saw it shimmer and flicker did I realize that her deflector shields had reactivated.

With no more Crimson in sight, Glass and the other two ponies in our squad moved up to join us. “The walls are clear, for now,” Failsafe said, nodding to Zip. “The second squad has seized the south wall and is making their way to the front. What are our orders?”

Zip frowned and I saw a few lights flicker on her holographic visor. “Commander Dash, this is infiltration team Apple. We’ve taken the courtyard, and Buck team is clearing the walls.” She was silent for a moment as Thunder said something I couldn’t hear, then nodded. “Affirmative. Moving now.” She turned to face us. “We’re on signal duty. We’re to clear the buildings until we find the data cache stolen from the listening outpost and secure it for transmission to the Bastion. We’re going to start with this one here,” she said, pointing to the building closest to us.

She winced in pain as she set her wounded hoof down, and Sigur effortlessly took over for her. “Set breaching charges,” he said, directing Failsafe and Runabout to the wall. “Watch your fire when we breach; we don’t want to hit the data banks or any slaves they might have inside. Glass, you take care of any bandit using equine shields.”

While Sig coordinated the breach, I hovered near Zip’s side like a concerned mother. “Are you alright?” I asked, fear creeping into my voice. Even if the wound wasn’t life threatening, it didn’t stop me from panicking.

“Fine,” Zip said through clenched teeth. “Just happy the bullet didn’t go through something more vital. A leg’s easier to replace than a brain.” She tested her leg, and I could see that the brace kept her hoof about an inch off the ground. “I can still walk, and I can still fight. They may have slowed me down, but they haven’t clipped me,” she said, flexing her wings and letting a confident smirk appear on her muzzle.

Stars I wanted to kiss her.

“Zip!” Sigur shouted, distracting us before I could act on my hormones and make a fucking fool of myself. We turned toward him to see Failsafe finish placing a white bar on the wall and backing up while Sig, Runabout, and Glass all stood huddled against one wall. Zip spread her wings and fluttered over to the opposite side of the bar, and I followed her, using the opportunity to press myself as close to her as I could without being weird. When we were in position, Failsafe threw a white square on the ground and stomped on it.

The bar between our two groups glowed red and began to hiss. I noticed the steel wall of the building bend and buckle around it, before with a deafening crack that left me dazed, the wall just imploded around the bar and collapsed, leaving a gap for two ponies to enter side by side. Zip and Sig were the first inside, and I heard them immediately begin firing. Me and Runabout followed them, and I shielded my eyes from the dust and debris still hovering in the air.

It felt like the world was in slow motion as I jumped through the gap. Zip was on my left and Sig on my right; both were shooting at Crimson that tried in vain to run away from them. Directly in front of me was a bandit that was trying to pick himself up off of the ground, but I didn’t give him a chance. I lowered my SM45 and fired directly at him, watching the bullets rip him apart before he could even grab his own weapon and shoot back. A submachine gun might have been awful at a distance, but it was much more suited to close quarters. I couldn’t possibly miss.

After eight shots the weapon let out a helpful chime telling me it was empty, so I dropped the empty mag and slotted a new one in, looking for any more targets. There was only one more Crimson soldier left in the building, and he was wounded. His feeble attempts to crawl away were hampered by a broken leg that looked like it’d taken a few bullets to the bone. I growled and pointed my gun at him, ready to end the job, but a white glow of telekinesis overpowered my orange and pointed the barrel up. Startled, I looked behind me to see Glass’ horn lit and him shaking his head at me. “Don’t. There’s nothing to be gained from killing a defeated enemy. Besides,” he added, pointing toward Sig, who was already stalking over to the wounded pony, “the dead can’t talk, but the living can.”

He let go of my gun and joined the other Sentinels in searching the room, which looked like a storeroom of some kind. Frowning, I set the safety on my SMG and slung it over my back; despite Glass’ cautioning words, I still felt tempted to shoot the last fucker the first chance I got. For now, however, his life was in Sigur’s talons–literally. The griffon had grabbed the earth pony by the throat and held him against a wall, with the six guns on his armor pointing right at the stallion’s center of mass. Zip joined him by his side, so naturally I trotted over to accompany them. While the earth pony struggled with the vise-like grip Sig had on his neck, the griffon took off his helmet, no doubt to expose his menacing beak and intimidate his prisoner. “A raid was staged on a nearby settlement five days ago. Your friends left with a bunch of computers and data banks. Where are they?”

“C… C-Comm tower!” the stallion choked, struggling to breathe. His powerful hind legs tried to buck at Sig, but the griffon was too close to him for him to get any leverage on his strikes. “Trying… trying to beam the message back to the City! Ivory City! But it’s encrypted and we can’t access it! Please, I don’t know anything, just let me live!”

Sig frowned and abruptly released his hold on the earth pony, who fell to the ground, wheezing for breath. “You’re not worth the bullets,” Sig said, kicking the pony’s gun to Zip, who picked it up and sliced it into two glowing pieces with the lasers on her wings. “If I were you, I’d stay down until this is all over. Unlike some ponies, we treat our prisoners with respect.”

Zip nodded to add a little emphasis to Sig’s words, then turned to the rest of us. “We’re moving!” she exclaimed from the breached wall. “The comm tower’s just on the other side of these buildings! That’s where we’ll find the signal!” She turned directly to me and added, “If I’d stolen some tech from a town that knew how to use it, how much do you want to bet I’d get some of those ponies to make it work for me?”

The implication was clear there, and I wasted no time getting to my hooves and galloping over to her and the rest of our assembling squad. Behind me, the stallion reached for us and wailed. “Wait! Don’t leave me! I’m bleeding! There’s so much blood!”

Zip rolled her eyes and grabbed one of those tourniquet rings and some gauze out of her supplies and threw them at him. “Place the ring above the wound and bite down on it, then wrap it up. You can deal with the broken leg later, so long as you don’t mangle it by trying to move.”

While the terrified bandit tried to stop himself from bleeding out, I turned back to Zip and Sig. “I’m ready,” I said, checking my submachine gun and adjusting my saddlebags. “Let’s do this.”

So we did.

There were about a hundred yards of open space between the storeroom and the radio tower, along with a bunch of rallying Crimson, fresh off the walls to try to stop us now that we’d been discovered. But we didn’t give them the chance. Sig, Failsafe, and Glass all deployed covers into the open while Zip darted to the rooftops and began firing down on the Crimson. Runabout found an opening between us and fired two antimatter missiles at the bandits, killing a ton of them and scattering the rest. And me? Well, I just shot as many bullets as I could at them while they ran.

Turns out that in the face of that much firepower, there’s nothing you can do to mount a decent defense. We ripped them to pieces in a matter of minutes. Between the hail of bullets, antimatter rockets, and Glass’ elemental spells, we scattered and killed dozens of Crimson, and the survivors very eagerly surrendered. The path to the comm tower was clear.

Of course, I wasted no time in breaking down the door. And by that, I mean I waited for the other Sentinels to breach it when my attempts at throwing my weight into it and bucking the corners failed miserably. At least give me some credit for trying, alright?

Sig was much more successful at opening the door, given that he had laser bladed wings and all that. All he had to do was activate one of the blades and then jam it into the doorframe until it melted straight through the hinges. Grasping the protruding edges with his talons, the griffon heaved and tore the door down.

For the record, I helped with the last part. Telekinesis is pretty useful when you apply it right. I just don’t want you thinking I did fuck all on this mission apart from being another gun.

What I wasn’t expecting to find was a dead bandit slumped against the door with a set of pliers sticking out of the back of his neck.

The comm room was dark, apart from a glowing set of monitors at the back end of the room. Red emergency lighting provided an eerie glow that the steam hanging in the air scattered into a confusing haze. Something metallic popped under the floor, sending shivers down my spine.

Zip frowned at the body by our hooves and pulled the pliers out, the ends stained with blood. After a second, she chucked them aside and looked up at Sig. “You remember those old horror vids we used to watch with the others on break?”

“I didn’t need you to remind me,” Sig muttered, rubbing his beak with his talons. Then, readying his wings, he began to cautiously stalk into the building, the red light on his wings making him look terrifying. “Whoever you are, come on out. We don’t mean to hurt you. We’re here to rescue you.” When he didn’t hear anything, he frowned and began check the lockers and behind some of the pipes covering one wall, closing the valve that was pouring steam into the room.

Meanwhile, I casually trotted past him and began prying up the floor tiles with my telekinesis.

“What are you doing?!” Sig hissed as I started chucking the tiles aside. “We don’t know who killed that guy, not for sure. If it was the slaves, you could scare them and they’d attack you by mistake!”

“Oh, I know exactly who did this,” I said, grinning. I searched around with my telekinesis until I felt something hiding beneath the floor and began pulling it to the opening I made. There was a cry of alarm, and that something struggled against my grasp, but I had a pretty solid hold on its tail. In a few seconds, I hauled out a greasy and bruised zebra and held him in the air by his tail. “Hey, Gauge! Remember me?!”

Gauge blinked and rubbed his eyes in disbelief. “Ember? Is that… you’re alive?!” I gently set him down, and he immediately dashed over to me, where we collided in a teary hug. I was startled when he all but collapsed in my forelegs, almost too weak to stand. It’d only been five days since the attack, but I doubted that the Crimson were giving him much food, if anything at all. Gauge was already a lean stallion to begin with; it wouldn’t take much for starvation to take its toll on him.

Smiling, we separated from our embrace and nuzzled each other. “Yeah, I’m alive,” I said, fighting back tears. I couldn’t believe I was seeing him again after everything that’d happened to us. “It wasn’t easy, but I’m here.”

“When they loaded us onto their flying machines, I didn’t see you with us…” Gauge said, swallowing hard. “I feared the worst. I thought one of these painted fuckers had taken you out back to rut before they threw you in with the other mares. We all saw what that Carrion stallion did to you.”

I shuddered, remembering that moment with vivid clarity. My hoof unconsciously traveled down to my flank, rubbing the seared flesh they’d burned over my cutie mark. It was still pretty painful to touch; hopefully that would go away soon. Gauge saw it too, and he placed a hoof on my shoulder. “Stars, Ember, what happened to you?”

“I could ask the same thing about you, but we don’t have time for that. Not now.” I looked around the room and spotted a few more ponies crawling out of the darkness. I noticed that they were almost all techies and greasers, ponies I knew from Blackwash, plus a few unfamiliar slaves that were so starved they looked like skeletons. Despite that, I didn’t see a white pegasus with a fiery red mane come bounding out to greet me. Frowning, I turned back to Gauge. “Where’s Nova?”

Gauge’s breath caught in his throat, and the entire stallion deflated like a heavy weight had been pressed down on his shoulders. “They took her away a few days ago. They said they needed her and some of the other important techies at their base.” His eyes widened, and he stepped a bit closer. “This is all about that signal, Ember. They’ve been trying to get us to unlock the computers they stole from us. Beating us when they get impatient,” he added, pointing to a nasty welt caked in dried blood on his cheek. “And then I overheard one of them saying that they got a piece of the signal at their base, some dam or something…”

“There’s a signal at the dam?” Zip suddenly cut in, trotting up to us. Behind her, the rest of our squad trotted into the building, keeping their eyes peeled for any sudden attacks from the shadows. I saw Gauge eying them warily, so I stepped between the two groups and rested a hoof on both Gauge’s and Zip’s shoulders.

“Gauge, this is Zip. She’s with the Sentinels, and they’re the ones liberating your lucky ass today.” Then I turned to Zip and slapped Gauge on the shoulder. “Zip, this is my friend, Gauge. We’ve been close ever since we were foals. He’s a dirty greaser, but he kept all the shit at Blackwash running. Hasn’t met a machine he can’t fix with enough elbow grease and the right tools. Speaking of which,” I said, eying him with a toothy grin on my face, “did you seriously kill that bandit with a set of pliers?”

Gauge shrugged. “Anything’s a weapon if you use it the right way.”

The corners of Zip’s muzzle twitched into a smile. “Pleasure to meet you,” she said, shaking hooves with Gauge. “Can’t wait to talk more. If you’re a friend of Ember’s then you’re good in my books.”

“Likewise,” Gauge said, taking a step back. Then, looking to me, he asked, “I hope we have an escape plan?”

I nickered and waved my hoof. “Pssh. Yeah, totally.” Then I abruptly turned to Zip. “So what now?”

But it was Sigur who answered me. He fluttered in from the side of the room with his big griffon wings and looked around us. “Buck squad is storming the gatehouse now. They’ll get the gates opened and Thunder will join us.”

“And the prisoners?” Zip asked.

“Failsafe is staring them down outside,” Sig said, smirking. “They’re too afraid to try anything, because they know that she can erase them all in an instant if she just fires one rocket at them.”

“Good.” Then, sighing, Zip took off her helmet and let her sweaty black mane tumble down the side of her face. She sat down on a stool with a weary smile and shook her head. “I can’t believe we did it,” she said to nobody in particular. Then, smirking, she arched her back and stretched her wings to their full orange glory. “I am going to get so shitfaced tonight.”

I chuckled and sat down. I didn’t like alcohol all that much, but I could probably be persuaded to take a few drinks by a pretty mare.

Okay, I promise I’ll try to tone down the ‘I’m so attracted to her’ remarks. Just assume it’s my default state of mind for now.

Once they heard that news, the slaves, or I guess I should say former slaves began to rejoice. They embraced in teary hugs and cried out in excitement, and several came my way to give me a hug and say their thanks. Even if I didn’t really speak with some of these ponies all that much when we lived in Blackwash, we were still all from the ill-fated town, and we’d all suffered. That in itself was reason enough to stick together and commiserate after all we’d been through.

I couldn’t help it. Seeing all the joy in the faces of ponies I knew broke me. Like a bursting dam, my emotions welled up and poured over, spilling tears down the side of my face.

We’d done it. I’d done it. I never thought I’d actually help topple the Crimson, yet here we were. And though we still had a long way to go, this was a start.

One day soon, I’d find Nova, and Brass, and everypony else they still had, and I’d set them free. One day, I’d make this all right.

Chapter 14: The Bird of Prey

Soon enough, Commander Thunder and his team showed up, along with a few of their wounded. Of the fifteen Sentinels he’d taken, three were limping and bandaged, one had to be carried in on a stretcher, and another who I first thought was just badly wounded they set aside and draped a blanket over. Adding in Zip’s injury to her foreleg as well as the unicorn from Buck squadron who suffered burnout left seven wounded of the twenty-five Sentinels we started with. Not bad, considering what we were up against—I think I heard somepony mention there were about eighty Crimson in the Fort altogether—but not exactly good, either, when you only have fifty soldiers in total to fight with. Still, if seizing the Fort was as important of an accomplishment as Rampart had made it out to be, then the Sentinels should’ve been able to start actively recruiting from the west of the valley again. Every soldier would make a difference in the fights to come.

While the Sentinels worked on downloading the content of the stolen computers with the help of some of the freed techies, Gauge and I had retreated to the walls of the Fort just to get away from everything. Neither of us were really computer savvy, anyway; we’d just be getting in the way otherwise, and some of the other foalnapped ponies from Blackwash had shown the Sentinels where some more slaves were being kept, so we didn’t have anything to do.

So instead, we found a gun tower that didn’t have any bodies or fires in it and sat down, staring out at the countryside in silence. I guess after everything that’d happened, neither of us really knew where to start. I had so many experiences since leaving the mountain, and I was sure Gauge did as well, but we didn’t want to talk about those. They were just painful memories, still-bleeding wounds in our minds, too much suffering in so short a time. The only one of us who didn’t seem affected was SCaR. Gauge had found him after digging through the Crimson’s storage, and had reactivated the little drone with some tinkering. Now SCaR just puttered around the gun tower in a series of endless loops, giving us something to watch as we sat in awkward silence.

Still, the silence wasn’t going to last forever. I caught Gauge trying to sneak peeks at the brand in my flank, and I could see the thoughts running through his mind. “They never touched me,” I said, shifting slightly so he could see it better. “I didn’t give them the chance.”

I could actually see the sigh of relief Gauge released. “That’s… that’s good,” he said, managing to dig up a sad little smile to put on his lips. “When we didn’t see you at the Fort, I feared the worst. We all knew Carrion wanted you.”

For some reason, that made me laugh. “I hope I didn’t disappoint him,” I said, smiling for some stupid reason. Maybe it was just because my escape had slightly inconvenienced the bastard that butchered my hometown. “Was he pissed?”

I guess my smile was infectious or something, because Gauge returned it and casually shook his head. “He kept poking around the mares while they were separating us. You should have seen the look on his face.” Then his smile died in an instant, and he murmured, “He took three others with him instead. We could hear them screaming as he raped them.”

Well wasn’t that a downer. Swallowing hard, I looked right at the zebra. “Who?”

I think Gauge knew what I was thinking, because he waved his hoof at me. “Don’t worry about it, Ember. They’re—”

“Tell me.”

Gauge’s shoulders sagged as he gave in. “Meadow Lark, Copper Coil, and Dahlia. They’re still in the Fort somewhere.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “This isn’t your fault, Em.”

It might not have been my fault, but that didn’t make me feel any less awful about it. Had I been here, would Carrion have raped them? Or just me? Was I worth more than those three other mares? Meadow Lark was only fifteen winters. Copper Coil and Nova were friends. Dahlia lived two shacks down from me. Was it right that they suffered in my place?

No. Fuck no it wasn’t. There was nothing I could do to make it up to them over what happened. But I could apologize and let them cry on me. Hit me if they really wanted to, too. I owed that much to them, at least.

SCaR began to beep in the ensuing silence, and the robot’s usually blue lights turned red. Gauge and I both jumped, and the zebra turned his attention to the distant hilltops. “What?” I asked, looking first at him, then in the direction he was looking. “What is it?”

“Shh!” Gauge hissed, holding out a hoof. “Don’t you hear that?”

I frowned, straining as best as I could, and pointing my ears in that direction. Unfortunately, my ears were still ringing from all the shooting earlier (tinnitus, yay), so I could hear fuck all. After a few seconds, however, I didn’t need to, because a metallic shape darted into view from behind a ridge a few miles away. It looked like a triangle suspended from a ring, and it was moving fast.

Gauge and I both knew exactly what it was.

“Ringbird…” I whispered, stories of how those things had wiped the floor with the Sentinels and kicked them out of the valley storming back to me. I should have figured that the Crimson weren’t going to let go of this base so easily. It’d be here in a minute, and unless Thunder had deployed some scouts on overwatch, it’d catch them all by surprise.

I dashed forward and grabbed the dual heavy machine guns in my hooves and pulled back on the bolts with my magic. Sighting in on the machine with the holographic crosshairs above the twin guns, I pressed the triggers and flattened my ears against my head as the weapons thumped in my hooves, rattling my teeth in my skull.

“What are you doing?!” I heard Gauge screaming between my bursts of fire. “You’re not going to kill that thing with those!”

“Wasn’t planning on it!” I screamed back. “But this is faster than finding Thunder and rallying the Sentinels! They’ll hear this and know something’s coming!”

I watched the tracers leaving the guns fizzle and strike the ground somewhere underneath the approaching ringbird, so I adjusted my fire and tried again. This time, my accuracy was on point, but I immediately encountered another problem; like the Sentinels, the ringbirds apparently had some sort of deflector shielding installed, because my tracers began ricocheting wildly in different directions before even hitting the thing. Damn it, Equestria, did you really have to make all your shit impossible to kill?!

Apparently, I made it mad. I saw two flashes of light erupt from either side of its triangular body, turning into jets of smoke streaking right toward the bunker me and Gauge were in.

The only way I could’ve been more fucked was if I turned around and presented my asshole to it.

I heard Gauge scream my name, then a heavy weight tackle me from behind. The momentum carried us forward and through the opening in the gun tower, straight into the open air on the other side. My stomach did a backflip as I flailed my limbs and realized there wasn’t any ground below me, and I began to plummet. I would’ve screamed on the way down, but Gauge’s tackle had knocked the breath from my lungs, so it was more of like a choked wheeze or something.

I felt my eardrums pop as the two rockets the ringbird launched flew into the bunker where we’d been standing just moments before and detonated. Scalding heat seared my back as plumes of fire exploded out of the window, casting everything in a bright orange and yellow light that momentarily blinded me to the rapidly approaching ground below. When I could finally see again, I just had just enough time to see the slanted wall of the Fort filling my vision before we hit it.

Something cracked inside of my chest, and all I could focus on was the pain and vertigo that followed. When I finally got hold of my senses, I found myself lying on my back, on the ground below the smoking tower, with decent portions of my mane and tail on fire. Seriously, at this rate I wasn’t going to have any orange or yellow hair left in another week. Thankfully, me and fire get along pretty nicely, so all I had to do was cast a simple spell to make myself not flammable, and the flames went away on their own.

Gauge groaned at my side, and I turned to find him starting to stand up. He quickly swatted away the little fires in his hair and shook some of the ash off of his striped coat. He’d suffered some bad flash burns in splotches along his back, and I knew from experience that he’d be feeling those in an hour or two once his nerves finally realized just what’d happened to them. Still, he was tougher than me, and didn’t seem nearly as fazed by our fall as I was. Then again, he did kinda sorta use me to break his fall, and so I was the one with a broken rib.

Then we heard gunfire. Lots of it. From just outside the walls, we could see the ringbird hovering over the Fort, spewing pegasi into the vicinity. Reinforcements had arrived, and they brought some heavy machinery with them. I couldn’t help the feeling that we were completely, utterly fucked, and that the Sentinels had gambled everything on this mission and lost horribly.

"We have to get out of here,” Gauge said, grabbing me by the mane and hauling me to my hooves. “Before they come looking for us.”

It certainly seemed like the logical thing to do. What could the Sentinels do against one of these things? I saw a few antimatter rockets fired from one of the heavy soldiers streak towards the ringbird, only to be blown up in midair by some sort of point defense the gunship had. Some pegasus Sentinels had taken wing to try to fight off the reinforcements before they could get into good cover, but the gunship kept them suppressed and wouldn’t give them a chance to do any real damage. I could imagine that whatever Sentinels that could were retreating inside of the buildings in the compound, desperate to get away from the hailstorm of lead being thrown at them. But that thing had rockets, and I doubt the buildings could survive an onslaught of those. For all intents and purposes, the battle seemed lost.

I understood now just how the Sentinels could be losing so badly despite seemingly having superior technology.

Then I saw an orange mare dancing through the gunfire, energized wings glowing through the smoke and ash and gun ports on her shoulders flashing as she did her best to fight off the counterattack.

It wasn’t even a decision anymore. Leave now, and everything was lost. Everypony would die, and there’d be no hope of rescuing Nova and stopping whatever it was that the Crimson were planning. If I stayed, maybe, just maybe, I could be the difference.

And fuck it. If I died, it’d be better than living with the shame of letting everypony I knew die or be sold into slavery.

“Where are you going?!” Gauge shouted at me as I set my hooves in a line and galloped toward the open gate of the Fort.

“We have to stop this thing or we’ll never save Nova!” I cried back. That was a bad idea, as my broken rib helpfully reminded me, and I stumbled and nearly fell back to the ground as the pain caught me unawares. Gauge galloped to my side and supported me while I did my best to catch my breath without screaming. Using his support, I finished my limping charge into the Fort, where we sat down behind some crates and debris for cover. “Fucking fuck damn it,” I groaned, clutching my chest now that we had some cover.

Gauge’s eyes widened, and he immediately hovered over me while SCaR literally hovered over the both of us. “You’re hurt?” he asked, searching me for any obvious wounds. “Damn it, Ember, you can’t do this if you can hardly move!”

“Fuck you, I’ll do it anyway,” I wheezed through a crooked grin. I did my best to wave him off with my hooves, but it wasn’t until the massive brown body of Sig landed between us that he actually backed away. “Hey, Sig. Hope you guys got my warning in time.”

The griffon was covered in ash, and his armor was scored with scorch marks from a close encounter with one of the gunship’s rockets. Despite that, he seemed unharmed, just a little singed. He quickly ducked down behind the crates next to me and gave me a concerned look. “We did. I’m glad I was able to spot you so quickly.” He tapped the side of his helmet. “Hawk eyes and all that. You need to get inside, now.”

“What about the gunship?” Gauge asked, cautiously peering around the corner of our cover. I couldn’t see what he was looking at, but I heard the chatter of the cannons on that thing and saw him wince before hiding with us again. “That thing has rockets, it’ll blow us up even if we do get inside. And the pegasi…”

“We’re not worried about them; we can swat them out of the sky easily. The problem is the gunship won’t give us the chance.” He glanced upwards, to where Zip was still evading gunfire and slicing through pegasi with her laser wings. “I need to be up there with my wingmare. You two stay down. Thunder’s raiding the armory to see if there’s a railgun in there. With that damn point defense, it’s about the only thing that’ll drop it.” Without another word, the griffon spread his wings and propelled himself into the air, his armor raining shells as his machine guns ripped through a Crimson pegasus in a short burst of lead.

“They’re not going to find a railgun,” Gauge said, watching the aerial dance of death above us.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“You’d be amazed what those bastards talk about when they think you’re not listening,” he replied. “Carrion always figured that the Sentinels would try to retake the Fort one day, so he made sure there wasn’t anything left here that they could use against one of his gunships. He was planning on doubling the garrison here and stationing a ringbird here full time, but you guys attacked sooner than he expected. He was still sorting the spoils he’d taken from his last raid: us.”

The pain in my chest had subsided to a throbbing ache, so I carefully sat up and peered over the crates. Apart from the air battle, most of the Sentinels had already vanished into the buildings, leaving the unarmed prisoners outside in their mad dash for cover. Still, some of the pegasi had broken off from the skies to free their comrades in arms as best they could, though some Sentinels in the buildings were taking shots at them whenever they got too close. Even if they weren’t armed, there were still plenty of weapons lying around the battleground, and the Sentinels wouldn’t be able to deal with the gunship and that many troops rejoining the fight.

We needed to drop the ringbird, fast, but we didn’t have anything that could do it. I’d even lost my SM45 in the gun tower when the ringbird nearly killed us, so I was unarmed as well. How I wished I knew some fire magic to help out. Assuming I survived today with my freedom intact, I was going to go devour as many pyromancy spellbooks as I possibly could.

But watching the ringbird hover there, motionless as its guns tried to pick off the Sentinels flying around it and its rockets pounded the buildings below, I suddenly came up with an idea that just might be stupid enough to work.

“Hey, Gauge,” I said, trying to assemble the details in my head. “How hard would it be to topple that radio tower?”

Gauge poked his head out from behind cover and frowned as he looked at it. “How it hasn’t fallen over yet is beyond me. The cables aren’t spaced evenly, and breaking just one would be enough to send it toppling over.” His eyes widened as he realized what I was getting at. “I hope your friends won’t be too upset if we start breaking things.”

“If it swats that damn ringbird out of the sky, then I think they’ll forgive us.”

“Right.” The zebra went back to analyzing my insane plan, and nodded. “It can work. We just need it to stay still until the tower hits it.”

“It doesn’t look like it can move very fast while it’s shooting,” I said, watching the thing lazily glide above the Fort as its cannons blazed. “And there’s lots of things to shoot at.”

Gauge nodded. “Then let’s hope your friends can get it to shoot while it’s in the right spot. If we break that cable,” he said, pointing about two hundred or so yards to our left, “the tower will fall toward the river.”

“And then we’re heroes,” I said, smirking a bit. Grunting, I stared down the path to the cable and tried to steel myself against the pain coming. At least my broken rib was too far down to bother my lungs, otherwise it would’ve been impossible to run. “Ready?”

SCaR helpfully whistled and lowered itself until it was hovering only a foot off the ground.

“As I’ll ever be,” Gauge said. “If this works…”

I would’ve asked ‘what’s the worst that could happen’ if the list of everything that could go wrong and all the ways we could die doing this wasn’t so fucking long.

The moment the ringbird faced away from us, we broke out into a gallop across the open ground. My chest burned and I relied on Gauge’s shoulder to keep moving, but I refused to give in to the pain and kept pushing. The first fifty or so yards passed without any mishap, and I could hear the blood roaring in my ears as I struggled to push myself. Maybe we could get through this after all.

That’s when SCaR blared an alarm and bullets began dancing around us, biting the dirt as a pegasus or two spotted our mad dash. Their automatics were horridly inaccurate at range, but they spit out so many bullets that sheer probability said we were going to get shot up sooner rather than later. “Em!” Gauge shouted, moving his head in the direction of a large pile of scrap metal and patches lying on the ground, and I grasped his meaning easily enough. Horn bursting to life, I seized a large panel of thick steel and hefted it over the two of us, providing us with some sort of mobile cover. And not a moment too soon, either; as soon as I had the thing in place, I heard it rattle as bullets pinged off of it.

Still, telekinesis doesn’t make things weightless, and galloping across an open field while being shot at and while it felt like my bones were trying to claw their way out of my chest meant trying to keep the heavy piece of steel over us was exhausting work. We managed to cover only another fifty yards before I pointed towards a nearby building and we dashed to it, jumping inside the open door before I lost my grip on our cover. As soon as we were inside, I spread my legs, and mustering all the magic I could, I flung the steel patch like an enormous discus at our pursuers. It didn’t carry a lot of force or go very far, but we were being pursued so closely that it didn’t really matter. With startled squawks, the pegasi pursuing us dispersed to avoid getting clobbered by the thing, though I did hear one brief cry of pain that left me smugly satisfied before SCaR darted inside and Gauge slammed the door shut.

Of course, my satisfaction disappeared real quick when I felt the heat of a wing laser hovering an inch from my throat.

Thankfully, Commander Thunder recognized me before he could finish slicing my head off, though with all the headache I’d given him today, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had continued anyway. Frowning, he lowered his wing, and the other Sentinels with him likewise relaxed. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “You’re still alive? I’m impressed. We saw the ringbird blow up the watchtower you two were in.” He gave me a respectful nod, adding, “Much as it pains me to admit it, your warning saved a lot of lives. Most of us were already mobilizing or in cover when the ringbird came.”

We flinched when another explosion rocked the Fort—well, okay, I flinched, but the Sentinels didn’t even seem to notice. SCaR buzzed when a chunk of debris from the ceiling whacked one of its thrusters, and Gauge gently patted the drone like he was trying to soothe it. Scowling, Thunder kicked an ammo crate, knocking it over and sending loose bullets scattering across the floor of the building. “I’m trying to coordinate my teams, but the Crimson’s reinforcements are making organizing an effective defense difficult. Our best bet is a rocket swarm to overwhelm the gunship’s point defenses, but there are only seven assault troopers, and that was before the gunship arrived. And launching a rocket swarm is going to expose my ponies to its fire. The fliers can dodge those cannons all day, but an earth pony will get cut down the moment they’re spotted if they’re not moving.” He motioned to the several smashed open crates around him. “I was hoping there would be a railgun to shut it down, but the Crimson cleaned house when they took over.”

“Well…” I said, grinning at Gauge. “I did have an idea that might help us.”

Thunder’s eyes narrowed. “And?”

“I was thinking we could drop the radio tower on it,” I said. “It’s leaning and I don’t think it works anyway, right?”

Thunder shook his head. “We were never able to get the radio tower working again, but we didn’t need it. The Fort was connected to the Bastion by underground cables, and we had our own radios that were powerful enough to communicate back and forth.” He paused, obviously thinking over my plan, and determining whether or not it had a chance to succeed. “You would need to get the ringbird to hold still while you dropped a tower on it. It can’t change velocity when it’s using its point defense, though. Its computers aren’t powerful enough to generate a firing solution while it’s maneuvering and turning.” I could see the pieces falling into place, and he nodded. “A smaller rocket swarm would keep it in place. If we’re not actually trying to kill it with the swarm, then that will expose less of my soldiers to its fire. But first we have to draw its attention. Where are you going to drop the tower on it?”

Gauge cleared his throat and stepped forward. “There’s a cable about a hundred yards from here that’s exposed. If we cut it, the tower is leaning enough that it’ll fall across the middle of the river.”

Thunder shook his head. “That’s not accurate enough, but I think I see a solution.” His holographic visor flickered as he did some things with his thoughts, and then he spoke again. “Sergeants Zip, Lightning Wing, Freefall, this is Commander Thunder Dash. Rally your wings at the radio tower. We’re going to cut the lines and drop it on the gunship. Prepare to give it the push it needs to land on target. Sergeants Hammer Hoof, Dozer, and Foundry, draw the bird over the river, but keep out of its fire as best you can. When I give the signal, you’re to shower it with rockets to keep it in place. Keep the barrage going for as long as you can, but don’t worry about effectiveness or exposing yourself to air attack. We’re only abusing a flaw in its point defense, not killing it outright.”

He turned to me and slid a metal box over. Inside were a dozen little metal discs about two hooves across. “Set demo charges on the cable and blow them after the other two go down. I can’t guarantee that you’ll stay out of fire, but the two of you should be able to move unnoticed once the rest of us draw them away. Do you understand?”

I couldn’t help but salute and grab the box in my magic. “Sir, yes sir!”

Hey, I was enjoying playing soldier. In spite of how fucking awful things seemed to be going right now, that the Sentinels had not only accepted my plan but were helping me act on it felt great. Don’t blame me for finding something to get excited about.

“Sentinels, ready yourselves!” Thunder shouted, slamming his hoof against the ground. “We’re splitting into two teams. I’m attacking the eastern cable, sergeant Ironbark will take the other. We move once the ringbird is distracted.”

My ears twitched in the ensuing silence, straining to pick up muffled noise through the shut door. Soon enough, however, we heard the chatter of numerous Sentinel machine guns and the explosions of rockets detonating, and Thunder opened the door. “They’re engaging the ringbird, move, move, move!”

The Sentinels obeyed his command, wasting no time in pouring out the door and striking off in the direction of their objectives, filling the skies with bullets and suppressing fire to keep the Crimson pegasi away. Once they were all out, Thunder turned to us and nodded. “Best of luck. We’re counting on you two.” Then in a flurry of feathers, he was gone, leaving Gauge and I in the armory by ourselves.

We waited a few seconds for the Sentinels to draw fire away from the armory before moving toward the door. Gauge inhaled and let out a sharp breath, like he couldn’t believe he was doing this. “Ready?” he asked me, pausing by the doorframe when he saw me nosing through some crates. “Em?”

I found what I was looking for in the armory and levitated it over: a burst fire Bronco BR12A assault rifle. It wasn’t the BR11 marksmare rifle I was used to, and it definitely didn’t say Fortitude on it, but it’d do nicely. Plus the range was a significant improvement over my lost SM45. I quickly loaded the rifle with a fresh mag and stuck four more in my saddlebag for the time being and powered on the sights. Numbers flashed on the holo-sight telling me the range to whatever I was pointing at, plus the number of shots left in the magazine. Definitely an improvement over my submachine gun that just went ‘ding’ whenever it was empty. Grinning from ear to ear, I trotted over to Gauge with my new prize held proudly in the air. “I’m fucking ready.”

SCaR wolf whistled in response, and Gauge slapped the drone, which retorted with an angry whirring noise.

I poked my head out of the doorway, checking the skies to make sure we weren’t being watched, then kind of ran in some combination of limping and galloping as my ribs would let me. Gauge stuck close by my side, again providing me the support I needed to actually move at a decent pace, and we took off toward the cables, hugging the buildings to stay out of sight. SCaR led the way from above, beckoning to us when the coast was clear and guiding our movements. Up above us, the ringbird stalked some Sentinels on the ground, moving closer to the river, and stopping in place every so often to pluck an antimatter rocket out of the sky. By the radio tower, I could see the glint of Sentinel armor as they wheeled about in midair, doing their best to dodge incoming fire and cut down the Crimson trying to get to them. There was so much chaos everywhere that Gauge and I managed to make it to the support cable unnoticed.

Well, almost unnoticed. I heard SCaR cry in alarm right as we reached the cable and looked overhead to see two Crimson that had broken off from the fight pointing at us. Tossing the box of demo charges on the ground (which, in hindsight, probably isn’t the safest way to handle explosives), I found a column holding up the Fort’s wall to hide behind. “Place the charges!” I rasped to Gauge as I sighted in on the first pegasus. Then I fired.

It was electrifying. The weapon chattered with a crisp bark, spitting out three bullets in a single pull of the trigger. Recoil dampeners built into the rifle kept it from straying off my target as it fired, and the receiver ejected the spent shells safely toward the ground on my right so they wouldn’t ricochet off anything near me. The numbers in the sights clicked down from thirty to twenty-seven, and the middle bullet let off the bright glow of a tracer round before whizzing past the wings of the pegasus I was aiming at.

Sure, I missed, but the point is that the BR12A is a sexy gun. SCaR had good taste at least.

Plus, even though I missed, I’d successfully gotten the attention of both pegasi away from Gauge and his drone while they planted the charges. I fired two more bursts at the pegasi to no avail, then darted across the open ground until I had the shadow of another building to hide under. A round grazed the tip of my ear, making me wince in pain, but once I was under cover they couldn’t hit me from directly above any more. They’d have to come down to my level to fight me, which is exactly what I wanted.

Thankfully, they were more than happy to oblige, although they decided to be really stars-damned annoying about it and land on either side of me. I was able to jump back into a nook in the wall for cover as they both fired at me, and bullets slammed into steel struts on both my left and right, spraying me with hot little flakes of lead as their rounds shattered. Using my telekinesis, I poked the barrel of my rifle out to my left and fired two bursts before flipping the thing over and shooting two bursts to the right, getting them both to duck back in cover. Then I made my move.

Even as I finished the second burst to the right I was galloping out of cover and charging the pegasus on my left. He barely had time to poke his head out from behind the shot-up crate he’d hidden behind before I was on him, firing wildly as I closed the distance. The first burst missed and the second burst hit the dirt right next to him, but the third was on target, stopping him quite literally dead in his tracks before he could fire back at me. My rifle let out a mechanical squawk as I took that pegasus’ cover, and a simple button press ejected the spring-loaded magazine so I could slide a fresh box in. The whole process didn’t even take a second, and the weapon itself greedily bit down on the magazine and loaded the first bullet without even a thought on my end. Stars, this thing was amazing.

I whirled around my cover only to see that my second adversary was waiting for me. Almost as soon as my orange and yellow mane appeared he was firing, and I instinctively flinched back and hit the dirt before I caught any bullets with my face. The bandit stopped firing as soon as I disappeared, which told me he was smart enough to conserve ammo, which meant he was smart enough to plan. If I hunkered down behind cover for too long, he was likely going to take wing and hit me where I wouldn’t see him coming, or get some reinforcements from his friends in the sky. I needed to kill him before either of those happened.

Well, it’d worked well before, I guessed it was time for the encore.

I had three crates in front of me to use, so I tested them with my magic. Not too heavy, and sturdy enough to block a few bullets. I smirked and made sure my rifle was ready. Time to have some fun.

My orange glow wrapped around the first crate and flung it full force at the pegasus’ cover. It collided with it like a bowling ball, knocking over the metal standing cover he’d been using to hide behind, forcing him to take wing. The second crate I tossed at him directly but a little off to the right, trying to force him away from the buildings, and he dodged just as I hoped, flying off to my left. Using the last crate to shield myself and steady my rifle, I fired several tight bursts at him in anticipation of his moves.

I think I startled Gauge when the body landed right behind him with a wet crunch.

I trotted over to him in time to see him grimace and gingerly step around the body, averting his eyes from the missing half of the stallion’s skull. He chucked a little aluminum box with a red button on it to me, and I caught it in my magic. “Charges are set. We just have to wait for the others to do their thing.”

I nodded, then eyed the charges we were standing next to. “Yeah, let’s get out of here before we blow these things up.”

“No, I thought we’d want to be standing next to the twelve fusion explosives I just slapped onto a cable ten feet behind us,” he retorted, rolling his eyes. “SCaR was feeling a bit chilly.”

I frowned and held the detonator between the two of us. “I could light our asses up right now, you know.”

Gauge just smirked and trotted past me. “I’ve led a good life, don’t know about you.”

We found a spot on the wall to sit and simply wait for the signal. It took all of my willpower to not chew on my hooves, and I kept scanning the sky for signs of my friends. Thankfully, Sig was the only griffon in the air, so he wasn’t too hard to find, but Zip was a little more difficult. I would think I’d caught a glimpse of her, but then she’d disappear back into the melee and I’d lose her again. Meanwhile, the ringbird had come to a stop on the opposite side of the tower, where a slow but steady trickle of rockets seemed to keep it anchored in place. I did notice that it apparently could still use its guns while it was stuck fending off missiles. I just hoped it wasn’t getting any kills.

My thoughts were interrupted by a concussive boom shaking the Fort from somewhere off to the left, and I saw the first cable on the tower snap and fly upwards as it released its tension. Almost immediately afterwards, the cable on the right did the same, and I think I saw the whipping cable slice an unlucky pegasus in half. That had to hurt.

“Now!” Gauge shouted, slapping me in the shoulder. Without any more hesitation, I pressed the button on the detonator, and promptly lost hearing as the demo charges exploded.

The concussive force from the explosion was enough to knock Gauge and I backwards and send SCaR spinning wildly out of control, even though we were at least a hundred feet away, and the blast sent shrapnel flying everywhere. I ducked as a length of steel embedded itself in the steel walls right next to me, and flinched as the heat of the explosion made the ends of my mane and tail curl up. Still, that was the last support, and with nothing to hold it, the leaning tower groaned as it buckled and bent under its own weight. The rusty monstrosity lumbered toward the river, and I saw the Sentinels fly away from it after giving it a push in the right direction.

The ringbird underneath wasn’t lucky. Locked in place from the continual barrage of rockets, it couldn’t move out of the way as the tower fell downwards. The ring that gave it lift shattered in two as the tower struck it, and a hundred little rotor blades came spewing out of it in all directions as it broke. Now helpless underneath the tower, the cannons on the ringbird fired wildly into the air as it was swatted down, ending with an enormous fireball of an explosion somewhere behind the buildings where I couldn’t see it. Acrid black smoke rose into the air, and the chatter of detonating ammunition punctured the night, until finally, finally, all was quiet again.

I jumped into the air and cheered. Never mind my broken rib; we’d just taken down a fucking ringbird. The Fort was securely in Sentinel hooves. If I was Carrion, I’d be hesitant to launch another counterattack after the first one ended with the destruction of one of his few, precious gunships. The battle was over.

Two sets of wings fluttered down by my side, and I saw Zip and Sig standing on the wall next to us. Zip was panting and panting from her nonstop flying, her mane drenched in sweat and grime, but she was grinning. Leaning over, she slapped me on the shoulder. “We did it! We’re alive! Take that, you bastards!”

Seeing that spark of excitement in her eyes, that cheerful grin on her muzzle, the fluttering of her sooty eyelashes, I couldn’t help myself. I threw my bags on the ground and launched myself at her, going straight for the muzzle. We rolled across the ground before I ended up on top of her, muzzle to muzzle, my lips firmly planted against hers, humming in joy and ecstasy. She gasped in surprise, but she didn’t stop my tongue from finding hers. I felt her legs tighten around my flanks as she found something to grip onto, and she ran her good hoof through my mane, pulling me closer.

I heard Sig and Gauge chuckling and jabbing me with some joke or something, but I didn’t care. Fuck everything that’d happened today. It couldn’t touch me now. This was my moment, and I was going to enjoy it for as long as I could.

After we broke for breath, it was Zip who pulled me back down again for round two.

Today was fucking awesome.

Chapter 15: The Lives We Live

Sure enough, Carrion didn’t send anything else to try to force us out of the Fort, giving us a chance to relax and catch our breath. It would seem even the mass hordes of the Crimson war machine had their limits. By the time the sun finally set, the Sentinels had all of the prisoners they’d captured secured in the brig and were busy making repairs to the Fort, including reestablishing comm lines with the Bastion so they could let the rest of their comrades know that we won. Sig had gone to oversee that, and he’d taken Gauge with him to help. Greasers are gonna grease, I guess, but for now, at least, the day was my own.

The setting blue sun, already disappearing beneath the mountain range in the west, made the western horizon an infinite expanse of blues and yellows and greens. It was the perfect thing to just sit and watch from outside the Fort’s headquarters. After our moment on the wall, duty summoned Zip once more, and she left to go meet with Commander Thunder and the other squad leaders for a debriefing. I’ll admit, after she surprised me by returning my affections, what happened afterwards was hazy, and I simply followed her around like a little puppy until she made me wait outside the headquarters. Apparently, making out with a sergeant doesn’t give you access to confidential Sentinel shit. In the meanwhile, at least, I’d gotten Glass to look at my chest, and he did his best to repair my broken rib with his magic. It seemed to have worked, because I could breathe easy without crying in pain, the soreness in my ribs reduced to a throbbing ache.

Within the Fort, though, I saw all I needed to see. Sentinels leisurely walked from place to place, chatting in small groups and taking off their helmets now that the danger was over. A small group had even started up a game of soccer in the dusty courtyard and fashioned makeshift goals with bayoneted rifles jammed into the ground. Where they found the soccer ball, I had no idea, but it was amusing to watch a bunch of mares and stallions chasing a ball around while covered in grime and little cuts, their armor discarded and forgotten along the sidelines.

What really got to me, though, were the slaves—or I guess I should say, the former slaves. Finally liberated, they sat in small clusters around the Fort, simply in awe that their torment was over. Some were smiling, sitting with their backs against the wall and digging through the Crimson’s food stores that the Sentinels had dragged out for them. Others followed some of the soldiers around, offering thanks over and over and over again, and cheering whenever a group came into sight. Still more sat in small groups, hugging each other and crying, though I knew their tears were tears of joy, because they couldn’t wash away the smiles on their muzzles. For most of these ponies, they’d only suffered through five days of the worst things a pony can do to another. But for others, today was only the end of what had been months, maybe years of imprisonment. Those ponies in particular were hardly more than skeletons, with gaunt faces and sunken eyes and ribs visible through thin coats. But I found another reason to love and believe in my neighbors, for the ponies of Blackwash were doing their best to get those slaves to eat and cheer them up now that it all was over.

The hissing of the hydraulics on the door of the HQ snapped me out of my thoughts. I stood up and stepped away from the wall as the Sentinels inside filed out. Zip and Thunder were the last two out, though mostly because of Thunder’s wounded leg; his left foreleg was wrapped up in red gauze from the fetlock to knee, and he avoided putting any weight on it, instead using Zip’s shoulder as support. Despite the ringbird mangling his foreleg pretty badly during our attempts to knock that thing out of the sky, Thunder still portrayed the look of a commander in complete control of the situation. I could only assume he was using some kind of painkillers, because that thing looked like it needed to be amputated, and a wound that bad would be unimaginably painful. Regardless, that he could even maintain his commanding and authoritative air despite his injuries was impressive, to say the least.

Thunder signaled for Zip to stop, and the commander looked at me. “Ember, was it?” he asked, and I nodded, a little wary of what he wanted with me. “Despite your recklessness putting my ponies in danger and interfering with our teleport, I’m glad to see that you’re still alive. The idea to use the radio tower against the ringbird was a good one, and if sergeant Zip is to be believed, you fought bravely. Much better than I would’ve expected from a civilian.”

I blinked, merely trying to process the compliments being given to me. By Thunder’s side, Zip winked at me. Swallowing, I put on a weak smile and did an imitation of a salute. “T-Thanks, sir.”

The stallion nodded, I guess appreciative of the effort. “I don’t know what your plans are long-term, but taking the Fort today was only the first objective in fighting back the Crimson. There’s a bloody battle looming on the horizon, and we’re going to need all the soldiers we can get. Though you’re a long ways from being a soldier, I can recommend your name to Platinum Rampart. I think, with a little discipline,” he added, frowning at the scorched end of my tail, which I quickly brushed out of sight, “we can make you a decent Sentinel.”

It took me a second to understand what he was saying. “Wait, what?” I asked, whipping my head back and forth. “You want to make me a Sentinel?” At Thunder’s nod, I swallowed hard. Me, a Sentinel? Was this really happening? Did the Sentinels really want me?

…Did I want to be a Sentinel?

Thunder seemed to read the indecision (and, more likely, panic) on my face, and shrugged. “Take your time to think about it. The offer will stand. And though we’ll be trying to draft as many of the liberated ponies as we can once we’ve secured the Fort and opened comms with the Bastion, my personal recommendation is not something I give easily.”

With a nod to Zip, the stallion limped away from her supportive shoulder and spread his wings. “I need to assess the Fort so I can have a report ready for Platinum Rampart when we reestablish communications. Get some rest however you want, but be on guard; I wouldn’t put it past Carrion to try a second attack after dark.”

Zip saluted. “Yes, sir.”

With a flap of his wings, Thunder was gone, heading off to some other corner of the Fort. All that was left in his wake was a feather and a few drops of blood staining where he stood. That left me and Zip standing alone in front of the HQ, and for some reason, that made things really awkward.

I coughed into my hoof. “Uhh…”

Zip rolled her eyes and walked past me, brushing her tail against my nose as she moved. I understood the message perfectly, and followed her across the Fort. She eventually took me up to the walls, where we found an open spot to sit and look out over the valley. It seemed that the wall was a popular spot for having private conversations. I just hoped that this time I wouldn’t be interrupted by another ringbird. We didn’t have another radio tower to drop on it.

As soon as we sat down, I remembered how I surprised Zip with my kiss on these walls upon seeing her alive, and I began to blush furiously. Unable to take the silence any longer, I rubbed my neck and cleared my throat. “Sorry about… well… you know.”

The orange pegasus raised her eyebrow, and realization dawned on her a moment later. With an amused chuckle, she patted me on the back. “Oh, that. I’ll admit, you were surprisingly forward about that.” I saw a teasing glint in her eye, and she added, “You know, for only meeting me not even a day ago.”

I glared at my hooves and tried to fight down my rising embarrassment. When that failed, I was simply happy that I had a black coat. “Well… I-I mean, you kissed me back,” I countered.

Zip just shrugged. “Hey, I was riding the same emotional high you were. That’s the first ringbird I’ve ever killed you know.” She smiled, giving me a glimpse of her teeth. “Besides, you’re kind of cute. Especially when you’re flustered.”

“I’m not flustered!” I shouted back. Too late I realized I was playing right into Zip’s hooves. Crossing my forelegs, I frowned out at the valley. “I’m not cute, either.”

I felt a warm wing wrap around my shoulders and pull me close against Zip’s side. I’m sure it looked ridiculous to see the little pegasus holding the bigger unicorn like that. “Sure you are,” Zip teased me, leaning against my shoulder. I have to admit, it felt good to just sit here with her. I hadn’t had a chance to really just be with her and see her as a pony instead of just an object of my fascination. Still, this sudden affection left me with a nervous terror in my gut that I just couldn’t shake.

“What was that?” I asked, making Zip raise an eyebrow. “What is… w-what is this?”

To my annoyance, Zip just shrugged. “Don’t know. Fun? You’re nice, Ember, and I think you look good,” she said, her compliments making me sit up a little straighter. “As for anything more… I’m going to be honest, we haven’t known each other more than a day. I don’t think I can call it any more than that.”

My ears drooped, and I wilted a bit. Still, she was right. I couldn’t even be sure that our attraction was real. I thought she was hot, and I really wanted to go down on her, and apparently she thought I was attractive too. But love? That wasn’t even there. Not this soon after meeting each other. Love at first sight is bullshit and all that.

Zip’s wing rubbed my back, the crest digging into the space between my shoulder blades. I was happy that she had taken off her armor; those laser blade things on her wings were about the last thing I needed in my back. “But, Thunder did offer you a chance to stay with the Sentinels. If you stayed on…” She let the thought and its implication drag out.

And I was tempted. If I took Thunder Dash up on his offer and actually joined the Sentinels I’d be spending a lot of time with Zip. Enough time that our lust could actually be love. And if the Sentinels were going to try to recruit from the survivors of Blackwash, chances are that there’d be a lot of ponies I knew at the Bastion with me. I could even convince Gauge and Nova to come along. Really, where else were we going to go? Blackwash was a pile of rubble on top of a mountain, and the Bastion was big enough and safe enough to take all of us in without complaint. Or, at least that’s what I hoped.

But then again, did I really want to be anchored in one place for the rest of my life? I didn’t consider myself a soldier, and I doubted I’d take well to somepony ordering me around all day every day. Plus, there was a whole world out there, and the Sentinels were only concerned with the valley. And if there were more pieces to that code floating around Auris somewhere…

In the end, I came to the same indecision I was at when Thunder tried to convince me to join. I wasn’t great at thinking far into the future; I preferred to live in the here and now. Maybe I’d have an answer once Nova was freed and we’d finally put an end to the Crimson. Maybe. But for now, call me selfish or whatever, I figured it’d be best to tag along as a ‘hired’ gun or something like that. Helping the Sentinels out without binding myself to them for who knows how long.

Of course, I didn’t want to say anything like that in case it ruined my chances of getting closer to Zip, so I just shrugged. “I don’t know, Zip. It’s really tempting, but I don’t know if I’m ready for something like that. That’s… kind of a big commitment, honestly.”

Zip just waved her wing. “Don’t worry, Ember. I understand. Maybe when this whole thing is over, right? Rampart should be looking to take down the dam soon enough.”

“Yeah, I guess. I’ll keep it in mind.” Sighing, I leaned back against one of the low crenellations, careful not to pin Zip’s wing behind my back, and watched the purple of night push away the blues and greens of the sunset. It was a really pretty view. Not as great as the ones we had in Blackwash, though. Watching the mountains slowly blanket in shadow, that magical moment when Blackwash straddled the divide between day on one side and night on the other. The stars up above, crystal clear from that high up, so close yet so, so far away.

Then again, I didn’t have a pony who wanted me as much as I wanted them watching with me in Blackwash.

Zip grunted and stretched her wounded leg out, and I could see a little brown oval in the gauze where she’d taken the bullet. I also got a good look at the brace she’d taken off her armor, still looped just above her knee, and how it joined in one solid piece about half an inch away from her hoof. Far enough to prevent the hoof from taking any weight, but close enough that it wouldn’t make walking awkward.

Still, I was more concerned about the injury itself. “Is that okay?” I asked, pointing at it.

Zip rolled her eyes and waved her hoof as if the simple motion would make all my worries go away. “It just went through flesh. I’m lucky; if the bullet hit the bone, I would’ve been a crying mess. Can’t really fight like that,” she said, a little smile on her muzzle.

“You? Crying?” I asked, somewhat incredulous. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Just because I’m a badass soldier doesn’t mean that I’m immune to pain,” Zip said, finally setting her hoof back down by her side. “Broken bones hurt. Bullets make them hurt more.” After a moment, she simply rubbed my shoulders with her wing. “I can go see one of the medics later. They’ll patch it up with a spell or something. Right now, there are other ponies who need their attention more.”

I nodded, ultimately deciding that I would have to be satisfied with that. If it wasn’t a serious wound, I didn’t have any reason to press her. Instead, I contented myself with sitting on the walls in silence, watching the sky slowly turn to night above us.

It was another few minutes before Zip grunted and sat up. Eying my saddlebags, she poked one with a hoof. “Got anything good in there?”

I’d started to doze off, but her movement woke me up. “Hmm?”

“We should celebrate,” Zip said, smiling at me and pulling my bags over anyway. “You know, to being alive.”

Groaning, I sat up and watched her go through my things. “I don’t know, I don’t really have any alcohol or anything.”

Zip looked at me like that was the dumbest thing I could’ve possibly said. “Really? I couldn’t go through all the shit you have without getting something to drink every once in awhile.”

I just made a face and stuck my tongue out. “I don’t like it.” At Zip’s incredulous look, I held out a placating hoof. “Probably four winters ago, me and Gauge and his marefriend, Nova, went to try some of Cipi’s moonshine. That shit was strong. Before I even finished one mug, I couldn’t see straight, and I spent the entire night puking my brains out until I passed out.” I shuddered, remembering the awful hangover that followed the next day. “First and last time I ever had anything to drink. I swore off booze right then and there.”

“Boo,” was all Zip had to say about that, though I did hear her hum in approval as she found something to her liking in my bag. Tossing the bag aside, she pulled out the box of cigarettes Denarius had given me. “You smoke?”

“Never tried it,” I said, shrugging. “We couldn’t grow tobacco on the mountains. Some of the techies got a little smokeweed to grow in a makeshift greenhouse they made, but I heard it just can’t compare to the Equestrian stuff.”

“You’re right about that,” Zip said, balancing a cigarette between her wingtips and holding it to her nose. She took a deep breath, then smiled and plopped the thing into her outstretched hoof. “And this smells like Auris-grown Equestrian tobacco. About as good as you can get, all things considered.” She bit down on one end and shook the box as she offered it to me. “If you don’t smoke, where’d you get these?”

“A merchant gave them to me. Stallion by the name of Denarius.” I took the box in my magic and eyed the cigarettes inside warily. “Do you know him? He seemed to make trips through the valley pretty often, from what he said.”

Zip just shrugged. “The name’s not familiar, no, but it sounds like he’s from the Brass Bank. Big merchant guild that runs a lot of the caravans on Auris,” she explained. She saw me hesitating with the cigarette and rolled her eyes. “Come on, don’t be a foal. It’s good for you.”

I raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Really?”

“Pssh, no, though the nicotine will help calm you down. It’s the perfect way to unwind after a fight.” Leaning back against the crenellations at my side, Zip pulled out a little dagger from her armor. Slapping a button on the hilt with her hoof, a red laser blade appeared, similar to the blades on her wings, and all she had to do was touch the cigarette against it to get it to light. Then she looked at me expectantly.

That caught me in a hard place. On the one hoof, I was a little uneasy about filling my lungs with smoke and tar and all that shit. Plus, my moonshine story had me a little wary of trying anything new. But on the other hoof, the mare I wanted to bang was already doing it, and I didn’t want to let her down, did I?

Peer pressure is a hell of a thing, especially when it’s coming from someone you want to fuck.

“I didn’t know that you smoked,” I said, pulling a cigarette out of the box and touching it against the laser dagger like Zip did. The end immediately burst to life, quickly turning into a little smolder at the tip. Frowning, I stuck the thing between my lips and let it hang there for a moment.

“A little, back when I was younger,” Zip said, taking a draw from her cigarette. The end glowed a bright orange as she inhaled, and after a second, she blew a cloud of smoke out of the other corner of her mouth. “It was about the only thing that made life tolerable where I grew up. Farming sucks.”

I did my best to follow Zip’s example, but I think I pulled too hard on the thing, because I had a cloud of hot ash go shooting down my lungs. Doubling over and coughing, I dropped the cigarette on the wall as I wheezed and shook at the unpleasant sensation. Grimacing, I sat up straight and plucked the cigarette off of the wall while Zip just snorted and tried to hold back her laughter. “That was… unpleasant,” I managed to choke out.

“These things don’t have filters on them, so you can’t just try to suck it all down,” Zip said, slapping me on the back while I finished coughing out the last of the literal fire in my lungs. “Slow draws, and use your teeth as a shield to keep the cinders out.”

Rolling my eyes, I tried again, this time being more careful. The feeling of smoke in my lungs was uncomfortable, but the chemicals soon hit my blood and took all that away. When I blew out the smoke, I could feel my tension going with it. Sighing, I slumped back against the wall and watched the cloud of smoke disappear into the air. “You know, this kinda reminds me of the forge. The smoke, the heat… makes me think of home.”

Zip’s ears perked. “You were a smith or something?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Me and my mom ran a forge back at Blackwash. We were in charge of basically everything involving metal: reclamation and salvage, manufacturing, repair. We had a whole set of advanced machinery from before the Silence. Though by the time I was old enough to use it, most of it was held together with duct tape and rust.” I laughed, somewhat bitterly, over those little memories of home. “It was a good life. Not exactly the most interesting one, but I was happy enough. One day, I would’ve been in charge of the forge, and then I would’ve passed it down to my son or daughter. Just like my mom, and her parents, and their parents, all the way back to before the Silence.”

“It sounds like a nice place,” Zip said, taking another puff of her cigarette. I nodded and did the same, feeling the fire warm my lungs. It was actually pretty nice. “And your parents… if you don’t mind me asking…?”

I knew what she was really asking, and I shook my head. “The Crimson killed my mom. It’s kinda personal.” I leaned back and looked up at the stars, just beginning to become visible with the dwindling daylight. “Dad was never around. He was there for a few years growing up, but he flew the coop before I was two or three winters old. I hardly remember him.” Chuckling, I turned to Zip. “Do all pegasi bail on their children, or was he just an ass?”

My joke must’ve made her feel a bit more comfortable about discussing my lack of parents, because Zip shrugged with a small smile on her face. “Only if they can’t fly with them. It’s kind of hard for a pegasus to stay tied to one spot for too long.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Another pull on the cigarette. This thing was actually pretty good. “But you said you were a farmer? That must’ve been hard.”

“Yup. The most boring eighteen winters of my life.” Two clouds of smoke flew out of Zip’s nostrils and she scratched the back of her head. “I grew up on a farm in the valley. There were a few other farmers scattered over the area. We didn’t have a town name, though if we did, it’d probably just be ‘Home’. Corny, I know, but hey, that’s life.”

She sighed, and I could see her begin to smile. “It was weird being the only pegasus in a family of earth ponies growing up, but I loved my family. Still do. I wasn’t as good at plowing fields and that sort of thing, but I could move clouds, and when you’re a farmer, reliable rain is just as important if not more so than properly plowed fields.”

“Heh, we never had that problem. It rained all the time in Blackwash.” What I didn’t mention was how miserable that was. Rain is nice and all, but not when you’ve got a hundred little leaks in your shack and you’re just trying to stay dry while the heavens boom around you. “It’s where we got the name. We lived in the crater of a volcano, and there was all this ash lying around. It made it really good for growing crops, but whenever it rained, all the black ash would wash off of the rocks and collect in the middle of town.” I chuckled, adding, “I’m glad I have a black coat. Nova has a white coat, and she always complained about how hard it was to stay clean.”

Zip snorted and shook her head. “Poor mare. That must’ve driven her mad.”

“Oh, she hardly walked if she could help it. She preferred to use her wings when she was outside.” Sighing at happy memories, I drew on the cigarette and tried to make a smoke ring. Of course, having no idea what I was actually doing, that went about as well as you’d expect. Frowning, I waved a hoof in vain through the cloud and grunted. “Why’d you leave them behind? You know, to join the Sentinels?”

“Did I mention the part where it was boring?” Zip joked. After a moment to collect her thoughts, the pegasus simply shrugged. “Nothing much to it, really. By that point, the Sentinels had been driven out of the valley, and we were living under the hoof of the Crimson. They tried to come and take me once,” she said, a dark shadow appearing over her face. “Dad didn’t let them. He convinced them I was pregnant, and my older brother pretended to be my husband. It was weird,” she said, chuckling. “Still, tough as the Crimson think they are, a pregnant mare makes stallions uncomfortable. They don’t like the nastiness that comes with the female body. And if I was pregnant, that means I wasn’t going to be fuckable for much longer. So they left without bothering us.”

“Wow…” I murmured, equal parts amused and amazed. “Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Zip confirmed, bobbing her head once. “Good thing their ‘recruitment’ party didn’t have any mares with them, or they would’ve sniffed me out real good.” She sighed and rubbed the back of her head. “Daddy didn’t want to keep me around after that. He said it’d be too dangerous for me to stay, especially if they learned I wasn’t actually pregnant. So he packed me some rations and supplies and gave me a map and pointed me to where the Sentinels were, hoping that they’d protect me.” A determined smile crept onto her muzzle. “They did what they thought was best to keep me safe. Five years later, I’m working to keep them safe. Funny how that works, eh?”

I nodded in agreement. “Have you been able to see them since you left?”

“Once,” Zip said. “I managed to convince Thunder with a lot of begging and pleading to put me on a patrol that was going through the area. It was the middle of the night, and I only got to talk to them for five or ten minutes, but after not seeing them for a year or two, it was worth it.” She crossed her forelegs behind her head and hummed, a warm smile on her face. “Dad was so happy to see me. Turns out shortly after I left he’d convinced himself he’d just gone and gotten me killed by sending me off on my own. Just seeing me alive was really something he needed. Same for my siblings, and their kids. Coming back and finding out that I’m an aunt was weird.” She looked off to the distance at the retreating sunset and pursed her lips. “It’s been like three winters since I last saw them. Maybe when this is all over, I’ll go back and find them. Make up for lost time, you know?”

I wrapped my forelegs around her shoulders and drew the little pegasus into a hug. “That sounds like a great idea. Maybe you can take them to the Bastion with you. Who knows?”

“I doubt that,” Zip said, chuckling. “They’re earth ponies, which means they’re stubborn as dirt. They aren’t abandoning their land for anything. Not even the Crimson could drive them off their farm.”

We both shared heartfelt laughter, though that died away after a few minutes. In its place, the brilliant sunset, now almost completely gone. All that remained was a few streaks of color in the west, while in the east, the stars shone clearly through the cloudless sky.

Sighing, I took one last draw from the cigarette and tossed the butt off the wall. “Gauge should hopefully be done with his shit by now,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to go find him.” Zip nodded, and I stared at her for a moment, fascinated by her. In the end, I smiled and leaned forward to kiss her cheek, earning a giggle from the mare. “See you soon.”

“Don’t fall into any craters,” Zip joked, shifting slightly and standing up. “I need to grab my armor anyway. If you see Thunder, tell him I’m taking watch on the west wall.”

I nodded and, lighting my horn to provide a little illumination for the shadowy walls, found the staircase down into the courtyard and set off towards the comm station.

Chapter 16: The Score

Even without its radio tower, the communication center was easy to find simply by following the Sentinels going to and fro. Messages needed to be relayed across the Fort, and the low building in its center served as the nerve center. I had to be careful to make sure I wasn’t bowled over by soldiers charging in and out as needed as I tried to enter.

I found Gauge and Sigur chatting in front of an assortment of monitors and screens and other techy shit that I couldn’t make sense of. Sigur had taken off his helmet, which I spotted on an empty desk at the back of the room, and Gauge was covered in so much grease and grime he almost didn’t look like a zebra. I tweaked his ear with my magic as I approached, interrupting their conversation, and smirked at the zebra. “Greasers gonna grease, right?”

“You know it, Em,” Gauge said, grinning at me. “They had me crawling through a lot of tight spots trying to reconnect wires. The Sentinels did a number on this place when they pulled out all those years ago, and the spider rats haven’t helped. SCaR’s welding probe was useful for a little more than just repairing comm lines down there, that’s for sure.”

I grimaced, imagining the little eight-legged monstrosities that had to have been crawling around under the floor panels. “Fun. Hope you didn’t make out with any.”

“No, I’ll leave the spit-swapping to you,” Gauge shot back. I glared at him, but that only seemed to embolden him. “When’s the wedding?”

From the side of the room, Sig simply chuckled. “I was wondering that myself. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen Zip act like that.”

“Shut up,” I grumbled, swatting the griffon on the shoulder. Before they could tease me any more, I decided to change the subject. “So you got everything to work?”

Sigur nodded. “Yeah, mostly. We were just in contact with Platinum Rampart a few minutes ago, at least until comms died again. Gauge has his robot checking the lines now to figure out where the break is. Still, that was enough time to get some important orders across and let the Bastion know that we won while we finish securing the link. It’ll probably be another few days before this base is up and operational again.”

“Their leader also said that they’d be organizing teleportation ‘trains’ to get the rest of us into their base,” Gauge said. “They start tomorrow at dawn and will probably take all day to move everypony. They can only move like twenty-five at a time.”

I could feel Sig’s eyes boring into my skull with smug amusement.

“Well, that’s good,” I said. I spotted an empty chair and dragged it over with my magic, dumping my bags on the ground and leaning my rifle against the wall. “I’ve been there before. The Bastion’s pretty fucking huge. It’ll fit everypony easy. Plus, it’s safe.”

“Good,” Gauge said, sitting down next to me with a weary sigh. “After all that we’ve been through, I don’t want this to all be for nothing.”

“The Bastion will protect you,” Sig insisted. “It’s kept us safe for years now. And though we have to split our forces across two points now, hopefully some of your townsfolk will help bolster our numbers.”

“There’s still capable stallions left that’ll be itching for revenge,” Gauge said. “Though they killed most of our militia in the attack, there are plenty who know how to handle a gun. They’ll fight with you for sure.”

Sig leaned back against a desk and grunted as he stretched sore muscles. “Good to hear. And I know Ember will be sticking with us, at least. She proved that she’s more than capable—if a bit reckless.”

“Eh heh…” I rubbed my neck and looked at my hooves. “I mean, I’m alive, right?”

“Right,” Sigur said with a little dip of his beak. “Point being,” he said, turning back to Gauge, “we’re going to need all the help we can get if we want to shatter the Crimson once and for all. So, what I want to know is this: can we count on you to help? From what I’ve seen, you’re a capable mechanic, and we could use all the help we can get.”

Gauge, true to form, simply looked Sig in the eye and said, “The Crimson still have my marefriend. I’d be trying to help even if you wouldn’t let me.”

Smirking, the griffon extended his hand and shook Gauge’s hoof. “Glad to hear it. If you’re half as good a mechanic as Ember claims you are, then you’ll be incredibly useful to us. In fact, I’ve got a special project in mind that we could use you and your friends’ help with…”

We were interrupted by the doors opening and Thunder Dash walking in, flanked by two other Sentinels. Upon seeing him, Sig broke into a quick salute, which Thunder acknowledged with a nod. Gauge and I merely offered waves, though he ignored us entirely. “Are the lines repaired yet?”

“Almost, sir,” Sig said, gesturing to the blank monitors. “We were briefly in contact with Platinum Rampart. We were able to relay news of our victory and give him a quick status report. We sent a runner to find you, but we lost contact again before you could get here.” He tapped a talon against one of the floor panels that’d been pried out and stood against the wall. “We’re trying to establish secure lines. We should be ready in another hour or two.”

Thunder nodded and limped further inside. I noticed that the bandages on his leg had been freshly changed, but they were already spotted red and brown. At least he’d seen some treatment since I saw him last, though if the expressions on the Sentinels behind him were anything to go by, they were just as worried as I was about his leg.

“What’s the situation?” the pegasus asked, reaching the rest of us. I immediately stood up and offered him my seat, but he pretended he didn’t notice me, so I just kind of awkwardly hovered near the chair until I sat back down again.

“The Bastion will be sending teleportation trains to get the liberated ponies back over the course of the day, starting at dawn. We’ll need to take stock of how many survivors we have and how many will be willing to join us.”

“I’ll have it taken care of,” Thunder said, dismissively waving a wing. “What about the wounded?” he asked, though I could tell that he only counted himself in that category as an afterthought, if he even thought about his injury at all. “Will we be getting the standard deployment?”

Sigur shook his head. “I had the foresight to ask Rampart for an additional team of medics, as well as antibiotics and fungicides. There’s apparently a blue lung epidemic amongst the slaves, and they need treatment as soon as possible.”

I shuddered at the mention of blue lung. Though the spores usually never made it far enough up the mountain to hurt us in Blackwash, there had been a few isolated incidents I remembered, mostly in kids that wandered too far down the mountain and started nosing around things that they shouldn’t. The fungus was easily treated with the right medicine, but that medicine was something that we never had. Though you could survive it if you were lucky, it’d leave you with a crippling shortness of breath for the rest of your life. Otherwise, the fungus literally ate your lungs from the inside out until you suffocated.

Gauge was already holding out his hoof and shaking his head by the time I shot a worried look at him. I guess he really hadn’t been with the slaves long enough to catch any of the spores. Still, I planned on keeping an eye on him for coughing or wheezing over the next week just to be sure.

Thunder simply nodded in agreement to all Sig had said. “When you get in contact with Rampart again, tell him that I’m bringing specialist Springtail back for an autopsy before her burial.”

Sigur cocked his head. “Odd requests, if you don’t mind me saying, sir. Do you think it’s—?”

“Weapons from the Ivory City?” Thunder interrupted. When Sig nodded, he gravely returned the nod. “Yes. The bullet that hit Springtail was powerful enough to defeat her deflectors and pierce her chest piece. She died almost instantly, though from the entry wound the round would have missed her heart. If I were to make a guess, she was likely hit with some kind of fragmentation round that delivered massive organ trauma as soon as it entered.”

Sig grimaced, and Gauge winced. That was a pretty nasty way to go. “Was the weapon located?” the griffon asked.

“No, but we’re examining the ammunition left behind to see if there are any more rounds like it.” Thunder’s eyes momentarily darkened, and he added, “It was likely meant for me. Spring darted in front of me as she was changing cover and accidentally took the shot. I kept the rest of the team tight behind cover until the infiltration teams had thrown their defenses into disarray.”

Sigur simply bowed his head. “‘Her watch is finished.’”

“‘And now she may rest,’” Thunder responded, almost on reflex. I guess it was ceremonial thing or something. Kind of depressing, if you ask me. Then, straightening his shoulders and shuffling his wings, Thunder gestured to the awfully familiar computers stacked near the monitors. “Any luck on the code?”

“Yes, some,” Sig said, glancing at Gauge. “With the help of some of the ponies taken from Blackwash, we were able to unlock the computers. As to anything new about the code…” he shrugged. “Nothing. We can’t make sense of it.”

“Pull it up,” Thunder ordered. “Let me see.”

Sig gestured to Gauge, and Gauge in turn went to the nearest computer bank and powered them up. From there, the screens flickered, displaying lines of garbled gibberish and symbols that I couldn’t make sense of. In the middle of the screen, however, was a familiar message.

WARNING!!! ATTEMPTING TO ACCESS ENCRYPTED FILES!!!

ENCRYPTION LEVEL: ONYX STAR

LOCKING FILES…

OVERRIDE: EOH PROTOCOL DUSK

EMERGENCY OVERRIDE INITIATED.

ROUTING EMERGENCY FILE BROADCAST

FILES DOWNLOADED: 7/7

BROADCASTING FILES…………100%

ACTIVATING GPS…………

ERROR!!! COULD NOT CONNECT TO SATELLITES.

ACTIVATING WISPR COORDINATE TAG…………100%

BROADCASTING DISTRESS FREQUENCY 27.065MHZ

FAFA | E | 36-J

“It’s a record of the last thing we received from the signal,” Gauge explained. While Thunder frowned and read the printout, he elaborated. “There was more, something about pinging installations with a bunch of numbers and letters, but that’s all gone. The computers were damaged when the Crimson forcefully tore them out of the listening post in Blackwash. It’s a miracle we even recovered this much.”

Sigur furrowed his… head feathers? Griffons don’t really have brows… Anyway, Sig did that and pointed to the screen. “Is that the code? The FAFA thing?” He looked to me for confirmation, and I merely shrugged.

Thankfully, Thunder seemed to have an answer. “Part of it,” he said, limping forward to get a closer look. “The ‘FAFA’ bit is a piece of the code, and the ‘E’ is likely part of the cipher. It looks like ADFGX code.”

I blinked. “What what?”

“It’s a military code that Equestria used before the Silence,” Thunder explained. “A message would be encoded using combination pairs of the letters A, D, F, G, and X. This code would then be further scrambled with a transposition key, usually an easily remembered word with unique letters. After writing the letters beneath the key, the key would be arranged so its letters are alphabetical, and the columns under them broadcast one at a time. So, if this is really ADFGX code, then ‘FAFA’ are the four letters under the letter ‘E’ in the key.”

“So… we don’t know what any of this means?” I asked.

“Not without the rest of the code,” Thunder said, shaking his head. “It looks like it was split into seven parts, though if there are only four letters in this part, then it must be a short message. You’d have to find the other six parts if we want to translate what was sent to us.”

“And the 36-J?” Gauge asked. “What does that mean?”

“Likely the codebook and alphabetical key needed to break the code,” Thunder said. “There are codebooks at the Bastion, and I’ll have some aides look through them to find any matching that identification. In the meanwhile, however, this fragment of the code is useless.”

Frowning, I pointed at the code. “So my town got destroyed over something that’s just fucking gibberish?!”

Thunder fixed me with a hard glare that immediately cowed me. “Without the rest of the pieces, this is gibberish, yes. But ponies will kill for this, if they know what it is. There are other fragments out there; who knows who has them?” He shook his head. “‘Who’ has them isn’t that important right now, however. We know that the Crimson wanted the piece at your settlement, and the presence of Yeoman at the attack means that the Ivory City is involved as well. They likely contracted the Crimson to recover the piece for them, since they’re a ways away from here.”

I held up a hoof. “Okay, I’ve heard their name a few times now. What’s the Ivory City?”

“It was supposed to be the planetary capital of Auris,” Sig said from the side. “Back when Equestria was actively building the colony before the Silence. It was the only real settlement that they actually finished.”

“It was supposedly home to ten thousand ponies inside a few rings of walls and sturdy fortifications to make it difficult to take,” Thunder said. “Equestria at the time had enemies everywhere, and they were worried that they’d try to take her colony as well. But when everything fell to pieces, those walls didn’t stop the city from falling, too.”

“Nopony really knows what happened to the Ivory City for a hundred and fifty years or so,” Sig continued, picking up where Thunder left off. “It was apparently a hold for gangs and slavers like the Crimson, but about fifty years ago they got driven off. Since then, the City has rebuilt itself into a powerful faction to be reckoned with in the very center of the continent.”

“But that sounds like they got rid of their problems,” I said, tilting my head to the side. “Why are they bad, then?”

“Because of their leader,” Thunder said. “We don’t know much about him this far away, but he apparently goes by the name of Reclaimer, and the stories we’ve heard from the merchants lead us to believe that he’s trying to build his own little empire in the ruins of the old world. The problem is that he’s ruthless and underhoofed, completely willing to massacre towns and buy off bandits to do his dirty work for him in the name of ‘civilization’ and ‘rebuilding’. He’s a terror who will either burn himself out or put the entire planet under his hoof.”

I could see the pieces falling in place. If a pony like that found out about the signal and the code, then it makes sense that he would try to get all the pieces before anypony else could. At the least, it seemed that we thwarted him by getting this piece here before the Crimson could send it back to him.

“So what would a code like this even do?” I asked. “If it’s apparently just a short message, how could that help Reclaimer?”

“Maybe it won’t,” Thunder said, shrugging. “For all we know, it could be a distress signal. It could, however, just as likely be a password to activate something we don’t know about. There are dozens of hidden military installations across Auris; any one of them could hold something that would allow Reclaimer to conquer the planet. Advanced weapons, huge stockpiles, forbidden arcane knowledge, we’re not sure. But there is one thing we know for sure: Reclaimer wants this code, and he’s willing to buy off bandits like the Crimson this far away from his sphere of influence to get it. Therefore, we cannot let him get his hooves on the rest of this code.”

“But how?” Gauge asked. “From what I’ve been hearing, you Sentinels are a little too short on numbers to make a crusade into the center of the continent to go deal with this Reclaimer guy.”

Thunder sighed, an honest to the stars weary sigh, and bowed his head. “I don’t know. But we will have to find a way. For now, however, we need to focus on taking down the Crimson.”

“Speaking of this code, I heard something that might be interesting,” Gauge said, holding up his hoof like a colt waiting to be acknowledged by the teacher. When Thunder turned to him, he pointed to the screens still displaying the messages we received at Blackwash. “I heard a few of the Crimson talking while they were trying to get us to make the computers work again. Apparently, they got a piece of the signal too, at this dam or something. It must’ve been sent to them after Blackwash decoded the message and scattered fragments of this code across the planet.”

Thunder’s eyes narrowed. “The Crimson’s base of operations is Celestia Dam. It provided power to most of Auris before the Crimson took it. But if the Crimson have a second piece of the code, then we can take it from them.. By now, they’ve probably already sent a copy of it to the Ivory City and deleted it at Reclaimer’s request. But I know Carrion, and he’s smart enough to know something like that is valuable. He will have likely made a copy of it to sell to whoever will give him the most cartridges, which means that we still have a chance of getting it.”

Well, that accounted for two of the seven pieces. I could only assume that a third was somewhere in the Ivory City if Reclaimer knew about it in the first place. “That still leaves a bunch unaccounted for,” I commented, staring at the FAFA mocking me from the screen. “Where would they be?”

“Installations somewhere on the planet,” Thunder said, “Though if they’re inhabited or not, I couldn’t tell. I don’t even know where they are. I do know for certain that word of this will likely be getting out soon, and there will be salvage parties scouring the Wilderness looking for pieces to sell to the highest bidder. There will be so many fake code fragments out there that the only way to know for certain if you have a legitimate piece is to find the installation it was sent to and take it from there. Maybe then we could solve this mystery…”

But then he sighed, and the stallion looked like he was ten years older. “But that is a problem we cannot deal with right now. The Crimson still stand in our way, and they’re the most immediate threat. If we have this piece of the code, we can delay whatever Reclaimer is trying to do so long as we hold onto it. He can wait until Carrion is dead.”

Then, turning to Sig, he gave the griffon a casual salute. “Find me again if you establish a secure connection with Platinum Rampart. In the meanwhile, prepare the logs from those computers for transmission. Once the code and anything else that might be hiding in their data stores has been sent and backed up, destroy them.”

“Will do, sir,” Sig said, saluting back. Thunder turned around and began to limp out, but Sig cleared his throat before he left. “Um, sir? Your leg…”

Thunder stopped and looked over his shoulder. For a second, I thought he was going to reprimand Sig for bringing it up, but after a moment, he just nodded. “I’ll have the medics take a look at it. They should’ve treated the slaves by now.” Then the door hissed, letting the night air in for a few seconds before it shut again, taking Thunder and the other two Sentinels with him.

Sig ran a talon through the brown feathers on his head and sighed. “One day, Thunder’s stubbornness is going to kill him. If he doesn’t die in battle, blood loss or infection will get him after it.”

“You kinda have to admire a stallion like that, though,” Gauge said. “Making sure everypony under his charge and protection is taken care of first is definitely the sign of a true leader.”

“Thunder hasn’t led us wrong, and I trust that he’ll continue to do so.” Shaking his head, Sigur added, “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if it shortens his lifespan considerably. One of these days, he’ll come up against something more stubborn than him.”

“Hopefully that day won’t be for a while yet,” I said, staring at the shut door that Thunder left through. “He’s a good pony.” I briefly entertained the idea of admitting to Sigur that Thunder had said he’d recommend me if I wanted to join the Sentinels, but thought against it. No use telling everypony about it and then revealing that I had no idea whether I wanted to join or not. That, and I’m not sure how Gauge would take it. I’d probably need to have that discussion with him sooner or later.

Sigur looked at Gauge and grabbed a coil of wire lying on the ground. “Well, ready to get back to work?”

Gauge made to stand up, but I gave him a nudge with my magic. “Before you bury yourself in grease again, do you have a few moments?” I shuffled my hooves. “It’s been a bit, and I want to talk.” Smirking, I added, “And I’m sure your little baby can take care of himself down there for a few more minutes.”

Confused, Gauge cocked his head to the side. “O-Okay?” He looked to Sig for confirmation, and the griffon just shrugged. With a shrug of his own, Gauge stood up and walked over to me, and I led him out the door.

We walked in silence across the Fort, me deliberating what I wanted to say next, Gauge simply following and waiting. When we found a quiet spot in the middle of the courtyard, not too far away from the glow put off by the still-smoldering wreck of the ringbird, I cleared my throat and rolled my shoulders. “I never really got the chance to ask, but… how is everypony? Are they… alright?” I winced, remembering our earlier conversation. “Apart from… you know.”

The zebra nodded, telling me that he did in fact know what I was referring to. “Those of us that were left here are as good as we could be, everything considered,” he said with a shrug. “The Crimson beat us when we didn’t listen, so most of us just tried to keep our heads down. There were a few of us that were getting on their nerves, though.” He swallowed hard before adding, “I’m certain they would’ve killed some of us if we’d been in their mane any longer. Me and some of the others were trying to do everything we could to get back at them. Sabotaging systems and that sort of thing. I took a shit in one of their AC units when nopony was looking,” he proudly added with a smirk.

I choked on a laugh and shook my head. “Stars above, Gauge. No wonder they beat your flank.” We both chuckled quietly for a few moments, before the mirth died away completely. In its place, I only had a cold pit of fear and worry in my gut. “Did they ever… well, really hurt anypony?”

Gauge sighed. “Some of the Crimson would take a few mares out every night. We did our best to protect them, but they kept us separated. There really wasn’t anything we could do except try to comfort them when they returned them the next morning.” His nostrils flared as he sucked in a hard breath before adding, “There was a buyer who came by yesterday. A few of them, in fact.”

I felt my heart drop. “Buyers?”

“Yeah. The Crimson put a bunch of us out on display. The buyers spent an hour poking, prodding, ‘testing’ out the merchandise. End of the day, they left with twenty-six of us.” He shuddered. “They burned away their cutie marks and branded them with two marks. They put their job on their left flank—farmer, maintenance, sex slave,” he said with a glance at the heart on my own branded flank. “They burned the cutie mark of the buyer over their right mark. Then they were just… gone.” He hung his head. “I don’t know where they came from, or where they’re going to take them. They’re lost, Em. If we ever find them again, it’ll be a miracle.”

I fidgeted, my hoof digging deeper and deeper into the ground. That news hit me hard, and I felt like I’d somehow failed those twenty-six ponies. Damn it! Stars damn it! Even after all I’d done, I couldn’t save everypony. I’d hoped that maybe, just maybe, I’d be fast enough to save my kin from being bought off like property, but I couldn’t even do that right. Twenty-six? Blackwash was only a few hundred ponies! I knew I’d never find those ponies again. Gauge was right. They could’ve been taken anywhere. Was this going to hang over my head the rest of my life? The ponies I couldn’t save?

No, I couldn’t let that get to me. I never had a chance of saving everypony from Blackwash to begin with. Ponies had died in the attack. I could never get those lives back. I could never save everypony. I prayed that maybe one day I’d find some way to track down the slaves bought off and free them, but at the moment there wasn’t anything I could do. At least, not for them.

I did my best to shake it off, literally shaking my head and shoulders as if that would help get rid of the thoughts. “And the mares Carrion touched?”

Gauge trotted in front of me and put a hoof on my chest. “Em…”

I swatted it aside. “Gauge.”

The zebra sighed and shook his head. “Okay. Fine. Come with me. But you don’t have to do this,” he said, his eyes practically pleading with me to stop.

He was right, really. I didn’t have to do this. But those mares had been ravaged instead of me. When a stallion does that to you… that’s not something you just forget. That doesn’t just go away. They’d carry those scars in their memories for the rest of their lives. The least I could do was find them and give them a shoulder to cry on if they needed it. And I was certain that they needed it.

Gauge led me across the interior of the Fort, where most of the Sentinels were finishing up their tasks and getting ready to turn in for a well-deserved night’s sleep. We stopped in front of a simple access door leading down into an underground bunker, the doors propped wide open, and voices rising up from a staircase. Gauge shuddered as he stared at the single red light illuminating the whole stairwell. “This is where they kept us. Heavy blast doors that we’d never be able to break through, all the walls made of hardened concrete and lead. The only daylight we could see was the flickering reflection of the sun off the walls of a vent in the ceiling.” He made a small attempt at a smile and nudged my shoulder. “You had it good, sleeping on the dirt.”

“I guess so,” I murmured back to him. I stared down the dim stairwell, feeling each beat of my heart in my chest. “Gauge,” I said, licking my lips and swallowing hard. “Can you wait here for me? I feel like… I need to talk to them myself.”

He looked surprised, but he nodded nonetheless. “I’ll be right here. Just call if you need me.”

“Thanks.” Then, with a shaky breath, I slowly stumbled down the steps.

Another open door greeted me at the bottom of the stairs, and as soon as I entered, I could smell the awful reek of shit. The bunker was just one big, empty room, with columns embedded in the walls giving the ceiling strength, and harsh halogen lights buried within blocks of bulletproof glass set in the walls kept it lit. In one corner of the room, the slaves had hung a threadbare blanket to provide some privacy for what I assumed was the shit bucket. I would’ve been surprised if the Crimson had even given them that much.

And the ponies… most of them were mares, huddled in small groups against the walls, silently sitting in each other’s embrace, whispering things to each other while they shook and shivered. A few Sentinels, whom I noticed were all mares, did their best to move from group to group and simply talk to the frightened ponies. A few stallions milled about the place, wandering about in a daze, bruises and other injuries covering their bodies.

I shuddered as I walked through the room. Some of these ponies looked like they’d been here for a long time. At least we were helping more than just ponies from Blackwash.

I found the three mares I was looking for huddled together and whispering in the very back of the room. A bottle of fresh water and a plate with some rations on it had been set in front of them, though the three didn’t look like they’d touched it at all. They must’ve noticed me approaching them, because it was a long, straight walk from the stairway, but they didn’t really choose to acknowledge me until I stopped in front of them.

My heart jumped into my throat and I fought for breath. Dahlia’s brilliant orange coat was covered in dirt, dried blood, and welts. One of Copper Coil’s green eyes was swollen shut, and she did her best to hide behind the knotted and sweaty veil of her mane. Poor Meadow Lark, the filly of fifteen winters, stared dead ahead, straight through me, like I wasn’t even there. If it weren’t for the shuddering rise and fall of her green chest, she would’ve looked like a corpse.

Dahlia’s eyes widened in recognition first. “E-Ember?” she whispered, her eyes searching every bit of me like they were trying to pry my coat off and find the lie underneath. “Is… you’re alive?” She swallowed hard, then stood up on shaky legs. She held her right hind leg in the air, close to her body, and I could see that it didn’t really bend the right way. Stars, what happened to these ponies?!

She hobbled toward me, only stopping when we were face to face. “We never saw you here. We thought the worst had happened…” Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes, and I saw her struggling to breathe evenly.

I held out a hoof and stepped closer, guiding her head to my shoulder. It was like I’d burst a dam, for as soon as she felt my careful hooves wrap around her, she began bawling and clung to me for dear life. I found myself having to shoulder more of the earth pony than I would’ve liked, and I grunted as I planted my hooves to give her something to lean against.

“It’s over,” I whispered in her ear, rubbing my hoof up and down her spine. “It’s over, okay? He’s not going to touch you. He’ll never touch you again.”

Dahlia’s wailing must’ve snapped Copper Coil out of her fright, because she managed to look me square in the eyes with her one good eye. “You don’t know what that monster did to us!” she hissed, standing up and arching her back like a cornered cat. The natural spreading of her forelegs lowered her head towards me, a head topped with a cracked horn, sparking with magic. “He wanted you, Ember! He asked for you when they took us here, and when you weren’t here, he grabbed us instead! Do you know what it’s like?! Do you know what it’s like to have your hooves bound, to be thrown onto a bed, unable to crawl away, as a monster holds you down?! Do you know what it’s like to feel him inside of you, ripping away your dignity with every second he forces himself on you?! What about when your body betrays you and gives him what he wants?! What then?!”

Her voice cracked as she rose into hysterics, turning her words into painful, frenzied, but frightened screeching. I wilted under the tirade, and probably would’ve collapsed if I hadn’t been holding onto Dahlia. Tears streamed freely from her face, but I couldn’t tell if they were from anger, fear, or something else. Gently letting Dahlia back to her hooves, I walked away from the earth pony and stood in front of Copper. “I… I-I’m so sorry,” I managed, trying and failing to meet Copper’s eyes. “This never should have happened… not to you… not to any of you.” Grinding my teeth together, I held out a foreleg as an invitation for a hug like I’d given Dahlia. “Please, I’m sorry.”

For a second, I thought that was enough to calm Copper down. The unicorn stopped panting and simply looked at me with her mouth slightly agape. Just as I started to relax, however, her hoof flew from the ground and struck me beneath the base of my horn, sending me to the floor in a single blow. Dahlia let loose a little surprised scream as I crumpled, and I felt her hooves on my shoulder, trying to help me get back up. I just laid on the ground though, not really by choice, but because I couldn’t see straight and I felt like I was going to vomit. Figures that another unicorn would be the one to hit me there, because not many pegasi or earth ponies really understood what a blow to the forehead is like when you have a horn. We’d all smashed our heads on shit as foals, and there are so many nerve endings at the base of the horn that it’s not something you’re going to forget. I’ve heard it’s a similar amount of pain as getting kicked in the balls, though I’ll just have to take the word of the unicorn stallions who’ve told me that before.

When I could finally see straight again, I forced myself to stand up on trembling legs. Sticky blood tricked down my muzzle from where Copper had hit me; I didn’t think she’d really hit me that hard. At least she’d stormed away after all but knocking me out; I really didn’t want to have to go for round two. This time, Dahlia was the one who leant her shoulder for me to lean on, at least until the world stopped spinning around me.

“I’m sorry, Ember,” she said, looking after Copper with a sad frown on her face. “She just… she’s taking it really hard. Carrion hit her more than the rest of us.”

“Don’t apologize,” I grumbled, wiping away some blood with a fetlock. “I probably deserved it.”

“You didn’t,” came a frail whisper from behind us. I turned around to see Meadow looking up at me with soft pink eyes. “If it weren’t for you… Carrion would’ve only been the first.”

I felt my heart breaking in two. This poor filly didn’t deserve any of this. Shuddering, I knelt down in front of her and ran a hoof through her mane. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, feeling my eyes well up with tears. Her face looked dead, empty, like Carrion had drained it of life. “I’m so, s-so sorry…”

Meadow surprised me by wrapping her hooves around my neck and pulling me into a hug. I sniffled and wrapped my hooves around her, holding her close, bleeding into her mane, and cried. This shouldn’t ever have happened. This filly shouldn’t have ever had to know the fear she felt when Carrion took her. But she was the one holding me now; she was the one who was being strong. And as much as I wanted to comfort her over what happened to her, she was the one comforting me for my failures.

I couldn’t save everypony from the Crimson. I couldn’t even save the survivors from the scars they’d carry with them for the rest of their lives. What good was I if I always failed?!

But I didn’t fail. Not all the time. Meadow stroked my mane and hummed, and I realized that she wasn’t the one shaking. I was. Just a day ago, this filly must’ve been terrified, huddling down in this bunker wondering if the next time that door opened she was going to be sold off to be some stallion’s fuck toy for the rest of her life. Now here she was, singing a happy melody, because she knew that that wasn’t going to happen. She knew that she was free. And she knew that I helped free her.

Nopony here deserved what happened to them. But because of me and the Sentinels, they had a chance to move on, to make a better future for themselves. Maybe I couldn’t save everypony, but that didn’t make the lives I did save any less precious. If anything, it made them more special. And they wouldn’t be free today if it wasn’t for me.

I took solace in that thought. It was the only thing I could do.

Chapter 17: The Promises We Keep

I don’t exactly remember when I passed out, but it was shortly after my ill-fated confrontation with the three mares Carrion had raped. Somehow, I’d ended up across the Fort in its barracks, wrapped in (what I hoped was) a fresh blanket, lying on top of a simple mattress in an aluminum bedframe. I almost didn’t want to get up; the bed, simple as it was, was much more comfortable than the ground I was so accustomed to sleeping on. The small windows in the bunker let in a sharp sapphire light, so I figured it had to still be early in the morning. With that information in mind, I decided to catch a simple five more minutes, and shut my eyes.

When I opened my eyes again, the sunlight was definitely not morning blue, and had shifted to regular white daylight entering at a sharp angle. I could hear the sounds of lots of ponies talking outside, along with the hissing clap of teleportation that rattled the ground. Cursing, I rolled out of bed, though my legs were so tangled in the blankets that I ended up falling on my face. Groaning, I managed to remove the blanket with my magic and tossed it aside, and walked to the nearest doorway. Eventually, I stumbled my way outside, and after a moment to let my eyes adjust to the brightness, I looked around me.

All of the liberated ponies had been gathered into happy, excited, if a bit nervous, groups. The majority of the Sentinels that had taken the Fort were milling about the walls or around the brig, where I guessed the prisoners were still being kept, but a lot of their support staff and noncombatants were directing ponies from place to place. I guess when the first unicorns teleported to the Fort, they brought those ponies with them to help get things organized. The simple order of everything going on outside made it feel like the Fort was finally on its way to becoming a fully operational installation again.

“Oh, hey, look who’s finally awake.” I lazily turned my head to the left to see Gauge trotting over from one of the groups of ponies sitting in the courtyard, SCaR floating next to him like usual. “You get your beauty sleep, princess?”

“Shut up,” I said, lightly punching him in the shoulder as soon as he got close enough. I noticed that he wasn’t covered head to hoof in grease, and raised an eyebrow at that. “You washed off your second coat?”

“After living in your own shit for a week, you would too,” Gauge said, shaking his head. “There’s an actual working shower in the barracks. It even has hot water. It’s amazing.”

It took me a full second to process that. “Wait… did you say…?”

Gauge merely nodded, an amused grin overtaking his muzzle.

I spun around so fast I actually whipped him in the face with my tail. “Be back in an hour.”

He just chuckled and turned back to the courtyard while I galloped back in the direction I came. Nosing around a few doors led me to the showers, which were thankfully empty. Not that I would’ve minded another pony in here with me (we’re all naked, anyway!), but I doubt anypony would’ve wanted to be with me while I moaned under the steaming water like I was having an orgasm.

Though the shower head and handle of the shower were a little rusty, and I doubted they saw much use anyway while the Fort was controlled by the Crimson, the water was thankfully colorless and fresh. After shivering under the blast of cold water for the first few minutes, I sighed in sweet bliss once the temperature finally warmed up. The jets of warm water ripped through the grime sticking to my coat, and the water running off of my legs and dripping from my body was literally a sooty brown and black. The warmth piercing my muscles felt so good, and I fell onto my flank with a moan.

I did the best I could in cleaning myself without a brush or comb or even soap, but at least I had my magic. I must’ve spent half an hour just standing under the water, untangling the strands of my mane and tail one hair at a time. I would’ve killed somepony for a comb, but I figured out how to twist my telekinesis into something close enough. After several minutes of blindly fiddling with my hair to get it back in place (and holding a brief memorial service for the end of my tail), I finally felt like a real pony again, ready to go back out to the shit show that was life on Auris. That, and the skin under my hooves was getting pruney.

Thankfully, whoever moved me back to the barracks to sleep had also dumped my gear at the foot of the bed, which I completely forgot to grab when I stumbled out this morning. Strapping my bags across my flanks and slinging my sexy new battle rifle over my shoulders, I once again marched out of the barracks, wincing as I trotted under the cloudless sky. I decided to stick close to the shade of the buildings as I made my way across the Fort. The energetic blue sun would fry me and my black coat if I stayed in the open for too long. If only I had a blue coat like my mom to reflect all that blue light.

But I didn’t, so I did my best to stay cool. I didn’t know what happened to Gauge, or even Zip and Sig, for that matter, so I sort of wandered the base aimlessly. Every fifteen minutes or so, there’d be a crack of thunder as unicorns teleported in or out, taking another group of ponies back to the Bastion and returning empty hooved for the next group of twenty-five. Just seeing the ponies of Blackwash finally leaving this Tartarus made me giddy. Somehow, despite the odds, I’d succeeded in freeing them. I almost couldn’t believe it.

I spotted a procession of ponies marching out of one of the buildings under the keen eyes of several Sentinels. The war paint on their faces and limbs, now faded and smeared and covered in blood, gave them away immediately. All the defeated Crimson that the Sentinels had managed to take alive trudged out of the brig, most keeping their heads down like beaten dogs. Some tried to provoke or antagonize the Sentinels watching them, but to their credit, the Sentinels refused to answer their taunts and insults. One pony jumped out of line, but he didn’t make it very far before the Sentinel nearest to him darted forward and took his legs out from under him with a clean sweep of her leg. Another Sentinel pounced on the downed bandit from above and drove all four hooves into his back, crushing the wind from his lungs and leaving him a wheezing mess easily dragged away.

The orange pegasus took wing again, and I grinned as I watched Zip return to the air. Our conversation on the wall came back to me, and I felt my heart flutter and hooves tingle. I desperately wanted to have another personal moment with her when this was all over, and maybe steal another kiss. I could already feel the heat building in my cheeks and lips at the thought. I flicked my tail and cleared my throat. “Hey, Zip!”

Zip’s head turned at my voice, and with a blur of her wings, she was hovering in front of me in a second. “Hey, good to see you’re awake. You sleep well?”

“Like a rock,” I said, grinning up at her. I leaned in to nuzzle her, but to my surprise she stopped me with a hoof and shook her head.

“Not now. I’m on duty,” she said, gently pushing me away. “It’s not all fun and sex when you’re a soldier, you know. I have to do work sometimes.” I pouted, and she rolled her eyes and swatted my nose with her wing. “Later, okay?”

That lifted my spirits… and my hopes. “Oh?” I said, perking my tail up just so. “Later, huh?”

I saw a teasing glint enter Zip’s eyes a moment before she opened her mouth. “I don’t want your squealing to break the mages’ concentration.”

I felt my cheeks go very red. “I don’t squeal.”

“You look like the squealing type to me,” Zip shot back, smirking at me. After a second’s delay, she twisted the knife even further. “It’s a good thing my name’s so short.”

Oh, she was good. I couldn’t help myself as I blurted back at her, “I’ll make you cry my name first.” As soon as I said that, I shrank back and felt more heat build in my face. The amused look Zip gave me didn’t help in the slightest.

“Oh, I always love a challenge,” she practically purred back at me, briefly poking my nose with her hoof. But just as quickly as it happened, she fluttered back a foot or two. “Now seriously, Ember, I’m on duty. I don’t need Thunder sticking me on toilet duty for the next month. That would seriously cramp my style.”

I shrugged. “You already have a dirty mouth. Why not dirty hooves?” Zip just rolled her eyes and shook her head, turning her attention back to the prisoners as the Sentinels broke them into groups of twenty-five. “What are you going to do with all them?”

“Not my expertise,” Zip said, shrugging in midair. “Thunder will probably pull them aside one by one and ask them the usual questions. Recent troop deployments, Carrion’s plans, that sort of thing. Maybe we’ll actually get something useful out of them since there’s bound to be some pretty important bastards out here.” She made an exaggerated sigh. “And I’m probably going to have to do my share of standing around looking all big and scary.”

I smirked as I looked the tiny pegasus over. “Yeah. Good luck with that.”

“Shut up,” Zip growled, punching me in the shoulder. It actually kinda hurt. That was when I saw that her leg wasn’t in its brace anymore. Zip must’ve noticed that I noticed, because she smiled and waved it in front of my face. “I saw the medics last night. Good as new.”

“Well that’s good,” I said. “So long as that’s taken care of.”

A whistle sounded in the air, and Zip’s wings became a blur of orange. “Time to be a big and scary mare with six machine guns standing in front of a bunch of prisoners to keep them in line,” she said as she flew up and over the crowds of ponies. “Seeya!”

I waved a hoof as she disappeared before I could even say anything. I briefly saw her touch down in front of a loose group of Crimson bandits and scream at them, igniting the laser blades on her wing for dramatic effect, and forcing them to bunch up and sit down. A curtain of ponies made me lose sight of her, but I had to admit, she could act pretty big and pretty scary despite being a tiny little mare.

I found a little bit of shade next to the brig and sat down, leaning against the steel building and keeping my eyes peeled for Sig. I hadn’t spotted the griffon yet, which was odd, considering he was the only griffon in what felt like the entire valley. Maybe he’d already gone back to the Bastion? He had been in contact with Platinum Rampart last night, so maybe the Sentinels’ leader wanted to hear the reports from him personally? Fuck if I knew.

Sitting down here did give me a chance to survey the Crimson seated in small groups around the courtyard. I was surprised by what I saw; most of them looked terrified. They looked like what we did at Blackwash when their friends enslaved us and burned our town to the ground, like they were staring death in the face. As far as I knew, the Sentinels weren’t like that, though. They were the good guys, and they spared lives when they could, but weren’t afraid to cut a villain down when needed. The bandits should’ve realized that there wasn’t anything to be gained from slaughtering helpless ponies. At least it brought me some satisfaction to see the tables turned on them, though.

My eyes stopped wandering the groups of prisoners, freezing on a yellow earth pony sitting with his back to me. I blinked, blinked again, and stood up. The pony looked like he was only fifteen winters, though it was hard to tell under the war paint covering his face. Frowning, I trotted over to the group, stopping when I was almost close enough to touch him, and stared at him in silence.

It didn’t take long before my awkward hovering caught the earth pony’s attention. He turned around and looked at me, a little bit confused and a little bit angry. “What do you want?” he asked in a gruff voice, though it couldn’t mask the fear lying underneath. His eyes darted to the heart burned into my left flank, then back to my expressionless face. “You’re one of the whores? Sorry, but I can’t take you on a ride right now. I don’t think the tin can would approve,” he said, pointing to the Sentinel watching him with a slight scowl on his face.

I pointed a hoof at him. “Is your name Wheat?”

The stallion flinched like I’d slapped him in the face. “The fuck does it matter to you?!” he shouted back at me. He gnashed his teeth and rubbed at the paint on his face, smearing it a little bit. “Who the fuck are you?”

“A family friend,” I said, sitting down across from him. “Your mom wanted me to look for you.”

Wheat blinked and his mouth moved, though no words came out. “My… mom?” he asked, staring at the dirt beneath his hooves. Scowling, he gave me a closer look. “You’re not one of the slaves…”

“No. I’m not,” I said, meeting him with a level stare. “I’m one of the ponies of that town your friends destroyed a few days ago. Remember that?” I saw him shrink back in fear, and I leaned forward, pressing the attack. “You fuckers killed my mom, and I swore I was going to kill every last one of you. But I’m not going to. And you know why?” When he didn’t answer, I leaned back and shifted to a more comfortable position. “I met a mare when I got off of the mountains named Hazel. She told me that the Crimson foalnapped her son five winters ago and begged me not to kill him if I saw him. It made me realize that everyone, even the bastards who killed so many ponies I knew and loved, has family too.”

The stallion shuddered and bowed his head even lower. “My mom… my family…” He looked at me with glistening eyes. “They’re… alive?”

I’ll admit, his question caught me a bit off guard. “Uh… yeah. You didn’t know?” When he shook his head, I furrowed my brow. “Like… really?”

“They told me they died,” Wheat said. “The Sentinels killed them because my town surrendered to the Crimson. They kill all their enemies! Look at them!” he shouted, pointing at the one Sentinel watching over his group. “They’re monsters! You can’t shoot them to death! They kill everything that gets in their way!” A tear fell down the side of his muzzle, turning a ruddy brown as it traveled across the war paint on his face. “They told me that the Sentinels killed my family and that they were the only ones who could help me avenge them!”

He put his head in his hooves and shuddered. I could see the trembles wracking his body. “I never wanted any of this,” he moaned. “But what choice did I have? The Crimson made me theirs. I’m one of them.” He looked up at me, tears in his eyes. “But my family is alive… Chaff? Pop-Pop? They’re still…?”

“Alive and kicking. The both of them.” I tried to give him a comforting smile from where I sat, but it was kind of hard to do. I was talking with a pony that’d spent the last five years of his life hanging around ponies who enjoyed slaughtering and enslaving the innocent. That doesn’t just go away once you realize that you’ve been wrong all that time. “Chaff actually tried to follow me to the Sentinels. The kid’s got heart, that’s for sure.”

“The last time I saw Chaff he could hardly walk…” Wheat said, staring at his hooves once more. After a moment of silence, he finally looked at me. “Has it really been five years?”

I nodded. “Your mom hasn’t stopped thinking about you. She wouldn’t let me leave your house until I promised I’d look for you.” I decided to neglect mentioning how his grandfather didn’t mention him once, and that Hazel had pulled me aside to privately ask me to look for him. No need to drive that needle under his skin.

Wheat was quiet for a little while. I was starting to wonder if he was going to say anything when he suddenly spoke in a low murmur. “I can’t go back to them.” I frowned, but he didn’t notice. “I’ve done so many awful, awful things. I’m not the same son my mom might think I am. I don’t want to hurt her anymore.”

“And what, you think just never showing your face again will make her happier?” I asked. When he nodded, I had to fight the urge to slap him. “I met your mom a few days ago. She’s one of the sweetest, nicest ponies I’ve ever known. And she was crying when she told me about you.” I crossed my forelegs and looked at him pointedly, even though he averted his eyes. “If you think that hiding from her for the rest of your life is going to make her feel any better, then you really are an awful pony. You really are one of them.”

I stood up and adjusted my bags and rifle. “I’m Ember, by the way. If you change your mind, ask for me. We have to run Chaff back to your family, anyway. Might as well save us the second trip.”

Then I turned around and walked away before he could respond. I didn’t want to hear any more bitching and moaning from him, really. Once I was far enough from the prisoners, I stopped and surveyed the courtyard. Apart from the groups of Crimson, almost all of the ponies in the courtyard had been safely teleported away. I saw a striped hoof waving to me from one of the last pockets of Blackwash ponies, and I trotted over. Gauge’s familiar bemused smile greeted me as I approached. “Stars, Ember, I didn’t know your coat was white under all that shit.”

“Is that what your stripes are?” I shot back, bumping shoulders with the zebra as I fell in by his side. Letting out a sigh of relief, I glanced over the ponies in our group. Only twenty-one. Twenty-two if you counted SCaR, but I’m not sure how the spell really worked when it came to drones. At least I wasn’t being an extra mare again. Cracking my neck, I sat down in the dirt while we waited for the port out of here. “It’ll be good to be back at the Bastion.”

“I’ve had enough of this place for a lifetime,” Gauge said, sitting down by my side. He sighed, and I could see just how… how tired he looked. I had a feeling I’d have to sit down with him and have an honest talk about everything that’d happened in the five days we’d been separated. “And we’re the lucky ones.”

I knew immediately who he thought the unlucky ones were. I placed my hoof on his back and leaned in for a hug. “She’s a big girl, Gauge,” I said, trying to comfort him. “And her dad’s there to protect her. She’ll be fine.”

Though Gauge just quietly nodded, I could tell from the look in his eyes that he didn’t believe me. I just tried to hug him more. He was in love, and that meant he was going to worry regardless of what I said. Nothing I could do about that except be supportive.

Some words were said near the front of our group, and the ponies of Blackwash began to move around us. I helped Gauge to his hooves, and together we followed the pack into the circle of unicorns in the courtyard. After spending a full day out in the valley and nearly dying several times in the Fort, I was looking forward to the safety offered by the Bastion. Maybe once I got back, I could pretend I was living a somewhat normal life again.

I spotted Zip and Sig talking in front of some of the prisoners and waved to them. Though we were too far away to say anything, they at least smiled at me and waved back. It’d be great to just sit down with them and eat once we were all back at the Bastion. And if Zip’s promise of ‘later’ was true, I couldn’t wait for dessert.

The hair on my scalp began to tingle as the unicorns started the spell. There was so much magic floating in the air that it was practically saturated. Gauge looked at me with a nervous look in his eyes; I’m sure he could feel it too, but not being a unicorn, it was probably alien and frightening to him. I smiled back, and before I could say anything, a flash and a crack of thunder ripped us away from the Fort and the blue sun of the valley.

Chapter 18: The Moments We Share

My second teleport went a lot smoother than the first. I mean, for one thing, I wasn’t nearly cut in half, and for another, we weren’t miles off target. As soon as I recognized the enormous steel walls of the Bastion’s hangar looming around me, I smiled and trotted forward in a daze. It felt good to be back within the safety of the Sentinels’ fortress. At least I didn’t have to worry about surprise ringbird attacks here.

I heard a gasp and a decidedly not-masculine squeak as Gauge collapsed to his knees behind me. The poor zebra looked like he was going to be sick; his stripes looked more black and green instead of black and white. After dry heaving a few times and squeezing his eyes shut, Gauge grimaced and stood up. “N-Never again…”

“Hey, at least you didn’t die,” I said, smirking and standing in front of him.

“Mmrf… and that’s a good thing?” Gauge muttered, staggering toward me. “I f-feel awful… just kill me and put me out of my m-misery.”

I rolled my eyes and gave him a shoulder to lean on. “Oh, don’t be such a baby. You’re alive and in one piece. The rest is all in your mind.”

“Easy for you to say…” he grumbled.

All around us, the Bastion’s hangar was filled with a sense of orderly chaos. It looked like the Sentinels’ support staff was out in force, shuttling the ponies of Blackwash out of the hangar and to another section of the base. A group of armed Sentinels hovered overhead, I guess on the lookout for any signs of trouble, but they didn’t look like they were paying too much attention to what was going on below them. I didn’t blame them, really; as far as I could see, ponies were weeping and smiling and clinging to each other for love and support. Their ordeal was finally over.

“Ember!” I heard an excited voice squeak from the side of the hangar, and I turned to see an excited colt galloping towards me as fast as his legs would carry him. I didn’t realize he had no intention of stopping until he was right on top of me, and so Chaff nearly bowled me over when he slammed into my legs. “You’re okay! I knew you would be!”

“That makes one of us,” I said, embracing the colt and ruffling his short mane. “I thought I was dead meat for sure.”

“You?” Chaff asked, surprise pretty evident in his voice. He shook his head and grinned at me. “Not you! You’re too awesome for that!”

Gauge took one look at the colt and smirked at me. “Gee, Ember, I didn’t know you had a kid since I saw you last.”

“Shut up,” I said, taking a step back so the three of us could form a little circle. “Gauge, this is Chaff. The little stinker followed me after I left his family’s place to look for the Sentinels.” Then, smiling at Chaff, I patted Gauge on the head. “Chaff, this is Gauge, my idiot best friend from the Lights. If you throw a wrench he’ll fetch it like a dog. It’s pretty funny. And the little guy buzzing around his head like a ringbird is SCaR. You’ll probably like him more than Gauge,” I teased, earning a huff from the zebra.

“You’re from the Lights too?” Chaff asked Gauge, his eyes widening in awe.

I leaned in and whispered in Gauge’s ear, “That’s what they called Blackwash. They could see the dish lights from the valley.”

He made some kind of noise of understanding in his throat and nodded at Chaff. “Yeah, I spent a lot of time working on those, uh, lights. Keeping them working and that sort of thing, you know?”

“Cool!” Then he stopped like he suddenly remembered something, and his ears flattened against his skull. “I’m sorry that the Crimson broke the Lights…”

Gauge just smiled softly and tousled the kid’s mane. “The important thing is that the ponies who lived there are okay now, thanks to the Sentinels,” he said, pointing to the ponies moving with purpose through the hangar. “And we’re going to kick the Crimson’s flanks and rebuild those lights.”

I blinked, and looked at Gauge. I’d have to talk to him about Blackwash and the fact that the Crimson burned the whole thing to the ground after they flew him away. Blackwash was well and truly dead, and I don’t think we could ever go back. Not like I could ever forget what I’ve seen since coming down from the mountain. I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what was happening down here, away from the isolation of the mountains. Knowing that we weren’t the only ponies left on Auris would gnaw at the back of my mind for the rest of my life.

That was a bit more philosophical than I cared for, though, so I just shrugged and turned back to Chaff. “I hope you didn’t cause too much havoc while I was gone.”

“No, I was bored, mostly,” Chaff said, frowning. “They made me stay in my room until this morning. It was really boring.”

“Probably for the best,” I said, offering the colt a sympathetic smile. “I’m sure they didn’t want anypony else pulling some dumb stunt like I did.”

There was another boom of thunder behind us, and I looked to see that the ten unicorns had teleported back to the Fort, leaving a smoldering runic circle in the ground. A few Blackwash ponies cried out in alarm at the sudden noise, but the Sentinels lingering nearby quickly quieted them down. Chaff hardly even flinched at the sudden noise; he’d probably been listening to it all day waiting for me to come back. I began to move towards the end of the hangar, motioning for Chaff and Gauge to follow. “Come on, we’re just going to be in the way if we hang around here any longer. Who’s hungry? I know I am.”

I got a jubilant cheer from Chaff, and even an agreeable grunt from Gauge. Food it was, then.

The rest of the day was kind of a boring blur, in that it felt like a lot of things were happening, but I was only at best kinda-sorta involved. Lunch was a dull affair, as the Sentinels had decided that a good welcoming feast for all the starving ponies liberated from the Fort was that disgusting thing that passed for soup. At least it was loaded with nutrients and that sort of thing, which I guess was more important than tasty food for all the ponies brought over from the Fort. Still, I would’ve killed for a little salt and pepper so it didn’t taste like I was eating actual shit.

Following that, I went and showed Gauge around the Bastion, or what little I’d seen in the day that I was there. He especially liked the view that the bunkers on the wall gave of the canyon leading up to the place. I think he was more interested in the old AAA piece left inside, though. If I gave him a set of wrenches and some grease, I’m sure he’d have the thing working again in no time.

Then Chaff wandered off on his own, and Gauge and I spent the next half hour looking for him. I got a much better appreciation for just how fucking big the Bastion was after that. At least SCaR had been making a map in its robot head while we were walking around so we wouldn’t get lost.

After conspiring with Gauge to get the colt to sit still by regaling him with (kid friendly) tales of the sort of things that happened during the attack on the Fort, we managed to pass the time until Zip, Sig, and the other Sentinels who had joined the attack were relieved and brought back to the Bastion. In their place, the other twenty-five soldiers who’d stayed behind at the Bastion were sent to the Fort to focus on securing the surrounding area and start trying to draft troops for the Sentinels’ cause. That left us with a slow night of R&R, which wasn’t bad or anything, but a slow night nonetheless.

At least for dinner, the Sentinels had brought back some of the stores of fresh food the Crimson had at the Fort, which was a welcome change from eating more of that mush they fed their soldiers. I nearly died of joy upon getting a plate full of steamed vegetables and songbird wings. Stars above, actual food!

Apparently Zip and Sig appreciated the change in meals as well, because they ripped through their rations almost as fast as some of the starving ponies we’d saved at the Fort. As a result, we didn’t have a very talkative dinner. We were all too focused on eating actual good food for the first time in what felt like forever.

It still couldn’t compare to Mom’s cooking, though. I missed that more than anything.

Only after we finished eating did we finally find the time to talk. Gauge was the first to break the silence, talking to Sig. “So you said something yesterday about a project you wanted my help on. Mind if I ask what it is?”

“Oh, that,” the griffon responded, picking up a morsel of meat between his talons and tossing it into his beak. “There’s a lot of old military equipment in the Bastion that’s broken or unusable. We think there’s more deeper in the base, but we can’t get any of the blast doors to open to get to it. Anyway, we do have an old Equestrian assault tank that was apparently brought out of storage before the Silence hit. It’s completely out of commission, but we’ve been trying to get it to work for a while now. Now that we have the Fort, we might be able to salvage parts that we need to get it running again.”

Gauge blinked. “You want me to help you fix a tank?”

The griffon shot him a grin. “How’s that for a project?”

“Well, I don’t know the slightest thing about tanks,” Gauge said, passing his cup of water between his hooves, “but if it’s greased, I can probably figure my way around it.”

I just snorted and rolled my eyes. “Dirty Greaser.”

“Just wait, Em,” Gauge said, winking at me. “Nova’s going to be damn impressed when we roll up to the Crimson’s hideout with a tank. Think we’ll get Carrion to piss himself?”

“Oh, I hope so,” I said, laughing. Then, turning to Zip, I reached across the table and took her hoof. “Can we please stick the cannon up his asshole and shoot it? Please?”

Zip snorted and leaned back in her chair. “I think you’ll have to get in line, Ember. There’s a whole lot of ponies that want to personally kick that smug bastard’s teeth in. I don’t think he’ll have any left by the time you get to him.”

“I don’t care about his teeth,” I said, crossing my forelegs. “I just want to shove something so far up his ass that he chokes on it. I’m not asking for much.”

“Maybe you can crush him with the tank!” Chaff suddenly exclaimed, reminding the adults at the table that we had a kid eating with us. “Smoosh him flat until he pops like a gas bean!”

“Is that what these things are?” Gauge asked, poking at some red bean thing with his fork. One of the tongs punctured the skin, and the bean let out a pitiful whistle as it deflated on his plate. I was more concerned about the fact that a colt five winters old was talking about crushing another pony until he died a very gruesome and gory death.

Zip coughed into her wing, trying to steer the conversation away from beans and crushing earth ponies like them. “Say, Sig, didn’t you have the number of volunteers and that sort of thing from the Fort?”

Sig blinked, but a nudge from the pegasus at his side seemed to get him going. “Oh, those.” He dug into a pocket on the jumpsuit he usually wore under his armor and pulled out a scrap of paper. “We did a few tallies as we were getting your townsfolk out of the Fort. We pulled out one hundred and seven liberated slaves in total, and of those, twenty-eight volunteered to help us fight the Crimson.” He bunched the paper up and slipped it back into his pocket. “Honestly, I would’ve liked to see more join us, if only to make up for their lack of training, but most of the ponies we got out of there were mares and kids not really old enough to fight.”

“That’s still half again the number that you have right now,” I observed. “That has to count for something.”

“Yeah, but without the training, they’ll only be half as good as their number in Sentinels, even if we give them our armor,” Zip said. “The gear’s one thing, but knowing how to use it and knowing how to follow orders on the battlefield are another. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take all the help we can get… I’m just not going to set unrealistically high expectations for them.”

Sig nodded in agreement. “Lieutenant Star Curtain relieved Thunder at the Fort, and I hope she’ll be able to get some of the ponies from the nearby settlements to join in. She’s the perfect mare for the job, and the Crimson aren’t well liked, so I expect we can probably get another thirty or forty off of her. But again, they’re not trained…”

“I don’t think there’s much you can do about that at this point,” I said. Cocking my head to the side, I looked over the huge crowd of ponies gathered in the mess, happily digging into their food. “How many ponies would you need to take down the Crimson?”

The griffon just shrugged. “I might be good with numbers, but I’m no tactician. That’s for the likes of Thunder Dash and Platinum Rampart to figure out.” Tapping a talon against his beak, he eventually added, “There’s fifty-ish well-trained Sentinels, following the attack on the Fort. Add in roughly thirty from the slaves that joined us, and an optimistic forty from local recruitment…” He shrugged and pushed his empty plate aside. “We have the gear to equip a lot of ponies, which will help quite a bit. We might even be able to arm the slaves the Crimson keep at the dam if we can get to them fast enough. But I wouldn’t feel comfortable attacking with anything less than a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred ponies. Of course, if we can get the tank working, then we have a better chance. That thing has the firepower to ward off any ringbirds that might get too close.”

“Maybe some of the Crimson you captured would be willing to fight against Carrion?” I suggested, remembering Wheat. “Some of the ones at the Fort didn’t really want to be a part of them, anyway. Plenty were just pressed into service or foalnapped as kids. They might want to take a shot at the pony who flipped their lives upside down and forced them to do his bidding.”

“Eh, maybe,” Zip said, crossing her forelegs. “But I don’t trust anypony who has killed and raped and enslaved with those bastards. If it were up to me, I’d shoot the lot of them. No amount of ‘I’m sorry’ is ever going to make it up to a mare who’s been raped, a father who’s had his son taken from him…” She pointedly looked me in the eyes. “Or a daughter who’s watched her mother die in front of her.”

I fidgeted in my seat, but thankfully Gauge answered for me. “That seems harsh to me, and I was the one they enslaved.”

“Is it harsh? Or is it justice?” Zip asked. “How many second chances are you going to give a marauding bastard like a Crimson hoof soldier? How many times are you willing to get stabbed in the back before it’s not worth it anymore?” She took her drink and downed the last of it in one big gulp. “Shoot them and be done with it. It’s safer that way—for you and for everypony else.”

Then she stood up and pushed her empty tray to the center of the table. “I’m going to go back to the room and get freshened up. Maybe grab a shower along the way. Too busy this morning to get one then.” Sig nodded, and Zip sidled around the table until she brushed against my side. “Look for 38C if you want dessert,” she whispered in my ear as she passed.

It was a good thing I wasn’t drinking anything, because I probably would’ve choked on it right then. Even still, the surprised snort I made was hardly what you’d call dignified.

Only after Zip disappeared from the mess hall did all eyes at the table turn to me. I pretended I was too interested in my food to notice, at least until Gauge elbowed me. “What was that about, Em?” he asked, a smile of pure evil plastered onto his muzzle.

“Shut up…” I warned him, doing my best to keep my blush under control and my voice steady.

“Oh, I get it,” Gauge said, preemptively scooting a little farther away from my hooves. “It’s not appropriate for kids, right?”

That caught Chaff’s attention. “What’s not appropriate for kids?” he asked, a keen interest in his eyes. “I want to know!”

“Yeah, Ember, why don’t you tell him?”

I hissed at the zebra, “Gauge, I’m going to cut your fucking zebra dick off—”

“Now that wouldn’t be very nice.”

“—and put a ribbon on it and give it to Nova in a box!”

“Zip said there’s ‘dessert’ in her room,” Sig said, smirking at me. Gauge immediately snickered and placed a hoof over his muzzle. “I feel like I should add that that’s my room, too. Don’t get my bed dirty.”

I blinked, trying to fight down a tidal wave of emotions at once. In the end, surprise won out. “You heard that?!”

Sig just tapped the side of his feathery head. “I’ve got a bird’s head. Little known fact, birds have incredible hearing.”

Stomping my hooves down, I simply stood up and flipped my empty tray at Gauge’s muzzle. “Whatever. Fuck you, I’ll talk to you later.”

Marching out of the mess hall, I couldn’t help but catch one last little tidbit from Chaff. “Wait, why can’t I have dessert, too?”

Trying to navigate the Bastion was next to fucking impossible. I don’t know how long it took me to find the barracks, but by the time I did, I was more than a little pissed at having to navigate this labyrinth by myself. Still, finally, at the end of a hallway of identical steel doors, the tag ‘38C’ painted in blocky red letters beckoned to me. The door was even slightly ajar, an open invitation I was more than ready to accept.

Still, as I held up my hoof to knock on the door, I couldn’t help but feel a little doubt and anxiety. A flood of emotions hit me all at once, from doubt to excitement to fear. Was this really happening? Would I be good enough? Would Zip be good enough? Of the last one, I had no doubt, but that didn’t stop the thought from crossing my mind.

Fuck her—it. Fuck it. Fucking her would come soon, I hoped.

I knocked on the door, and immediately heard Zip’s inviting voice. “Come in,” she all but sung, and my tongue immediately felt fuzzy as I tried to formulate a response. Thankfully the door momentarily shielded me from my embarrassment, at least until I pushed it open with a burst of my magic.

Zip’s (and Sig’s) room was pretty bare, but honestly, what was I expecting when I was at a military fort? There were two beds, two desks, two chairs, two lamps, and two small trunks, one of each set on each side of the room. About the only interesting things I left out of that description were the bright lights set into the ceiling, and the orange mare reclined on the bed to the left.

Zip’s ears perked and her face brightened as she saw me. “You get lost or something?”

“Yeah,” I admitted, slowly walking into the room. “This place is a stars-damned maze. A map would’ve been real nice.” Zip smirked, and I took that as a good sign. Taking a deep breath, I shut the door behind me and looked around. “They don’t let you decorate your rooms or…?”

“With what?” Zip said, rolling off of her bed and stretching her wings. “There aren’t really any posters or pictures to hang up around here. Some of the soldiers that lived here before the Silence had some shit, or at least, I assume so; it was all moldy trash when Sig and I were assigned here.”

I snorted. “Sig didn’t turn that into a nest or something?”

It got a little giggle out of Zip. “He tried to, but sanitation regulations being what they are…” she shrugged, smirking just a little bit. “You should see him when he wakes up in the morning. Blankets strewn everywhere. I guess he tries to build a nest in his sleep or something.”

“Do you hide eggs under his blankets?” I asked, stepping a little closer to the orange mare. “Freak him out real good?”

“Oh, I did that once,” she said, shaking her head and tossing her short mane from side to side. “Didn’t work all that well, though. I guess his siblings back at the quarry used to pull that kind of thing on him all the time.” She paused, then cocked her head at me. “Did he tell you about them?”

“A little,” I said. “He told me about the quarry and the flock fathers and all those kinds of things.” I shook my head, adding, “Griffons are weird.”

Zip nodded. “Yeah. The, uh… ‘mating season’ really got me the first time I heard it.”

We both laughed a little at that, but that laugh faded into an uncomfortable silence. After a second, I decided that was as good a time as any to segue into some snatch. “So, about that ‘dessert’…”

An evil smile spread across Zip’s face, and she took a step back. “Oh, right, that. Close your eyes.” I raised an eyebrow at her, but she frowned at me. “Do it or you won’t get any.”

I’ve never squeezed my eyes shut so hard in my life.

I heard some shuffling around near Zip’s bed, and the sound of paper unwrapping. I blindly frowned in her general direction. If she was just fucking with me instead of fucking me, I was going to be really pissed. And disappointed. But mostly pissed.

Hoofsteps made their way toward me, and I felt her hot breath on my muzzle. My shoulders tensed as I wondered what she was going to do next. “Relax,” I heard her say, though it sounded like she was speaking around something. It turned out that something was a sweet berry of some sort she held between her teeth. I figured that last part out when she kissed me and shoved the thing into my mouth.

But she didn’t retreat after that. She kept her lips locked with mine, and threw her forelegs around my shoulders, only pulling us tighter together. The berry, turned into a juicy pulp between my teeth, slipped back to her as her tongue invaded my mouth. The sticky and frighteningly sweet taste remained on my tongue, and as I tried to steal the berry back from her, the tartness sent shivers down my spine. I moaned in dismay when I felt her jaw shift slightly and the berry disappeared down her throat.

Our muzzles broke contact, and I opened my eyes to see her smirking at me. “If you want your dessert you have to come and get it,” she whispered, her voice taking on a sultry and husky tone. She even winked at me.

Okay, consider me turned on. I don’t even know why I had that brief flicker of doubt earlier. But I had to strike while the iron was hot, and my iron was definitely hot. Before Zip could react, I began attacking her face with my lips, driving her backwards to the bed as she tried to resist. I managed to touch everything from the tip of her nose to the soft orange of her cheeks before her rump bumped into the bed, and we spilled over it, me ending up on top. I gave Zip just enough time to breathe before I pressed the assault, crawling the rest of the way onto the bed, and pinning her beneath me, using my unicorn weight and size advantage over her little pegasus frame to keep her in place. Only when I felt her hooves pushing against my chest, accompanied by her giggling of “Stop!”, did I momentarily relent.

I looked around her bed, spotting a tin tray full of some bright yellow berries, and picked one up in my magic. I barely had the time to set it in my teeth before Zip flung her forelegs around my shoulders and dragged me down to the bed with her. I grunted in surprise, though that died pretty fast when she pressed her lips to mine, trying to steal the berry away again. I fought her every step of the way, trying to sweep the pulp out with my tongue from the tart and moist reaches of her mouth, but after a few seconds, she managed to swallow it again. Frowning, I faked irritation and broke off the kiss, staring down at her while I kept her pinned to the bed. “You’re too good with your tongue for your own good.”

Zip just stuck out her tongue and winked at me. “My own good? What about yours?” Before I knew what was happening, she’d somehow flipped me onto my back so now she was straddling my midsection. The mattress still springing from the solid thwump of me ending up on my back, Zip took to the offensive, showering my face and neck with kisses and nips that left me laughing and squirming. She was completely in control now, and I was as helpless as a foal under her attack.

Not that I minded, really.

We kissed again, and I held her as tight against my body as I could. Our curves interlocked like pieces of a puzzle, and I felt her tail flick against the space between my legs. The contact only drove me onward, and I broke the kiss to begin pecking at her neck and shoulders, slowly making my way down her chest. Without her armor and jumpsuit on, I could see so many pale scars on her flesh, small white marks where the hair wouldn’t grow back. It was like reading a story of all her fights, her battles, her brushes with death. Some were nastier than others, but each one had a story behind it, I knew. Though Zip probably didn’t remember the stories tied to each scar, I made sure my lips brushed every one, and I soon found myself staring at her bellybutton. Smirking, I leaned in and blew a raspberry into it, making Zip giggle and lightly swat my horn.

That was when the orange mare took charge once again. Gently pushing me back down into the bed, she shifted lower so that she could mimic me, kissing her way down my neck and chest, toward my bellybutton. She went further, though, her lips teasing the perky, fixed points just below. Her teeth nipping at my nipples sent icy fingers creeping up and down my spine, and I gasped as my hooves blindly fumbled for something to hold on to. They clutched at her mane briefly, but a feathery wing brushed them aside and held them back. She apparently wouldn’t be satisfied until I began to squeak, and try as I might, I couldn’t keep it in for long. She stopped as soon as she heard the sound, and when I opened my eyes, I could see her grinning up at me.

“Sensitive?” she teased. I was too breathless to do anything other than glare at her. Smirking, she scooted backwards, her eyes leaving my tits for something lower.

The only warning I had was her breath against my lower lips sending shivers up my body before she dove in.

I gasped as her tongue made contact with my clit, spreading my lips wide and searching for that magical spot. Panting, I moaned and feebly kicked with my legs as she did her work. Her tongue moved up and down, in and out, teasing and toying with my flesh in every way I could think of. I pressed my hind legs against her shoulders, the sensation overwhelming me. My legs clenched, driving her face into my cunt. She made some protest, but I didn’t listen. I was too busy bathing myself in the sensation shooting through my crotch. The heat and pressure between my legs grew and grew, and sweat beaded on my forehead. My moans became cries of ecstasy and pleasure, and a shivering sensation that was at once numbing and exciting spread through my legs. “Don’t… Don’t st—” I moaned, eyes shut as I let the sensation drown me. Zip didn’t relent; she began to get her hooves involved to spread my lips wider, letting her jam her tongue farther into my cunt.

That was when I reached the breaking point. With a mighty shudder, I gasped and moaned as it felt like my entire body contracted. A balloon burst between my legs, spreading fire up my crotch. The smell of sex thickened, almost suffocating me. Brilliant colors and lights flashed behind my eyes, a dazzling display of ecstasy. My hooves dug at the sheets, clinging onto them like a drowning mare to a piece of driftwood. Burning needles of ice danced across my legs and my hooves. Through it all, my brain felt like it’d completely shut down, absolutely overwhelmed by the sensation assaulting me from all sides.

It was almost a minute before my breathing slowed and I could open my eyes again. I found Zip laying on my chest, her eyes watching me while a small smile danced on her muzzle. I could smell my own musk on her muzzle, and the orange hair around her lips and chin and nose was sodden and slicked back. The light in the room gave it a dull shine, a sort of luster that matched the light in her blue eyes.

It was beautiful. Perfect.

“Good?” she asked, the single word carrying in it more tenderness than I thought possible.

“Good,” I said, confirming it with a breathless little nod of my head. “You’re good at that.”

Zip smirked, and she used the back of her fetlock to wipe a little of my juices off of her muzzle. “I try to be,” she said, before leaning down and kissing my lips, giving me a little taste of my own crotch. The smell of sex hitting my nose was enough to pump a little energy back into my limbs, and sitting up, I met Zip for another kiss before pushing her down to the bed. She didn’t offer any resistance, only wrapping her forelegs behind my neck and pulling me down with her.

I did my best to shower her with kisses before moving on to other parts of her body. I nipped at her ears, giving one a light tug that caught her by surprise. She made an adorable mewling sound and feebly pushed against my chest as I nibbled on the tip of her ear, teasing the soft flesh between my flat teeth. Smirking, I darted my tongue inside of her ear, making her gasp and buck at the sudden unwelcome sensation. I just pulled my head back and smirked at her while she rubbed at her ear, trying to get my saliva out.

“Gross,” she muttered, feigning an offended glare at me. I just grinned at her and shifted my body downwards, admiring the smooth orange curves of her body, and the hard points poking out through the short hair near her crotch. I pressed my lips to one and began to suck on it, earning a contented sigh from Zip as I ran my tongue over her tit, teasing the hard spot back and forth. I could feel the shivers dancing through her skin like lightning, and the soft feathers of her wings began to curl around my head as I worked and sucked, even poking at it with my teeth for good measure. When I finished with the first, I moved to the next, giving it the same treatment, and making Zip moan in delight. Then I focused my attention even lower.

Sliding back a bit more, I brushed Zip’s short tail out of the way of her crotch, catching a strong whiff of her pussy. The lips were slightly bulged and slick with her fluid, ready and inviting. Licking my lips and brushing my long mane back, I cautiously approached her cunt, not quite exactly sure how best to go about it. I didn’t want to keep her waiting, though, so I decided to improvise and dived right in, burying my muzzle in her crotch, tongue fully extended to part her lips and search for that sweet spot.

I grimaced at the sour taste on my tongue, and recoiled slightly. The smell dominated my nose, almost blocking out everything else. Still, the gasp I got out of Zip was worth it, so I steeled myself and dove in again. This time, I forced my tongue deeper, sliding it in and out as I traced the walls of her vagina until I found that little spot that sent her into shivers and twitches at my touch. Her thighs pressed against the sides of my face and pulled back, burying my face into her crotch like she wanted to shove my entire muzzle inside of her. While I did my best to pleasure her, I blindly reached forward with my hooves until I found her nipples again and began to rub them in slow, circular motions. She gasped and tried to say something, but I couldn’t really make out what it was from all the way down there. Instead, I just focused on working my tongue and my hooves as her body began to gently convulse, working up the strength to finally orgasm.

Before she could, though, I suddenly pulled back, leaving her panting and sitting on the verge of coming. She shot me a betrayed glance through her sweaty mane and the dazed mix of pleasure and bliss in her eyes, and I just smiled at her. Pushing my mane back as far as I could, I let a little ambient mana bathe my horn in an orange glow, and I lowered my head again. This time, however, it wasn’t my tongue that I stuck inside of her, and Zip gasped as I introduced her cunt to a much harder member of my body. Almost immediately, I felt the walls of her pussy grip the spiraled grooves of my horn, and her legs and wings thrashed for a second as she finally climaxed, the gasp and moan completely stealing away her breath. I felt a tingle of pleasure run through my skull that put me in a daze as well as her sex slowly released its grip on my horn, allowing me to slide it back out, separating us once again.

Rubbing a hoof against my brow to wipe away the sticky lubricant Zip’s marehood bathed my forehead in, I crawled my way up the bed and wrapped my forelegs around the little pegasus, holding her close to my chest as she began to recover. After a minute or two, her crystal blue eyes fluttered open, staring right into mine. Humming, Zip shifted her body slightly, finding some way to cuddle in even tighter against me. “Mmmm… not bad.”

I kissed her forehead. “That’s it?” I murmured back to her.

She giggled slightly and shut her eyes, fitting her head beneath my chin and wrapping her wings around my back like a feathery blanket. “Okay, you were good. Better?”

“Better.” Smiling, I shut my eyes, just listening to her breathe, feeling the rise and fall of her chest against mine. “Thanks for that.”

“Don’t worry about it. I needed it as well,” she said. Her lips brushed my chest, and she grunted as she wrapped her hind legs with mine. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah,” was all I said.

After a moment’s pause, Zip shifted so she could run her hoof across my ribs. “You’ve been with somepony before?”

I hesitated, not really sure if I should mention it, but decided that he wouldn’t really mind if I told her. “Yes,” I said, thinking back to that encounter four winters ago. “A stallion. Brass Casing.”

“That’s a name,” Zip said. “He like guns like you do?”

“He was a militia captain, so I hope so,” I said, chuckling. Sighing, I dredged up the memories from where they lay, mostly forgotten about since then. “We were stupid kids. I was barely more than a filly, and he was a few winters older than me. We fucked on the floor of my family workshop. It was the only place I could think of to get away from my mom that wasn’t somewhere out in the open.”

Zip hummed and nuzzled my neck. “Fucking under the stars wasn’t an option?”

“In a town that small, I’m sure somepony would have heard,” I said, blushing slightly. “But it was… it was good. Messy, sure, because we were both making shit up as we went along, trying to figure out how the other sex worked, but it was good.”

“Hmm…” Zip said, right before she yawned at least. “I didn’t take you for a bi.”

“Sex is sex,” I said, running a hoof through the mare’s mane. “Mares and stallions do it differently. Maybe I just don’t want to limit myself to only half the population.”

“With an attitude like that I’m sure you could put any whore out of business,” Zip joked. Her hoof traced the heart seared into my flank, and I could feel her wincing from her remark. “Sorry, that was bad…”

“It’s not like they actually made me do any of that,” I said. “I got away before they could. The fuckers just stole one of my marks. All things considered, I’ll take it.”

I felt a yawn coming on, and try as I might, I couldn’t suppress it. Closing my eyes, I shifted the pillow with my magic and laid my head down on it. I guess the sex had taken more out of me than I cared to admit. At least Zip seemed to understand, and I felt her lips on the underside of my jaw. “Sleepy?”

“Mmhmm,” I hummed, grunting and shifting slightly to get more comfortable. “Exhausted.”

Zip kissed me again and pressed herself even more firmly against my body. “Me too.”

She didn’t have to say anything more, I craned my neck back until I found the light switch, and a quick burst of my magic shut the lights off. Zip hummed in contentment as darkness finally bathed us, and I managed to drape some of the blankets over us. Finally tucked in, we kissed one more time, and Zip tightened the soft and downy grip of her wings around my back.

“Night,” she whispered, giving me a little squeeze.

“Night,” I whispered back, stroking her mane. Within seconds, she was gone, and it didn’t take much longer before I followed her.

Chapter 19: The Birth of a Movement

I woke up early the next morning when I heard the shrill buzzing of an alarm clock right next to my head. My eyes flew open and I jumped at the sudden noise. My heart began to pound as I struggled to remember where I was, but a feathery warmth fit in the protective embrace of my forelegs brought the memories of last night storming back to the front of my brain. I looked down at Zip, somehow still asleep in my hooves despite my jumping and flailing, and nuzzled her mane. The orange pegasus squeaked and pressed her nose against my chest, and I felt her soft wings unconsciously pull me closer to her.

Well, I wasn’t going to complain about that.

I blindly fumbled with the alarm clock in my magic before I finally found the off button and tossed it back onto Zip’s nightstand. Shutting my eyes, I laid my head back down on the pillow and tried to claw my way back to the blissful warmth of sleep. Of course, that was almost impossible to do; I kept thinking back to everything that’d happened last night. So many warm and fuzzy memories. It felt nice to do that with another pony for once. There’s nothing like the real thing.

When I realized I wasn’t going to fall back asleep, I decided I might as well grab a shower and go get some food. I was really looking forward to the shower; the hairs of my muzzle were still ripe with the smell of Zip’s cunt, and that ages like a fish left out in the sun. With a little bit of squirming, I managed to work my way out of Zip’s feathery embrace without waking her, and I stuffed a pillow into her outstretched forelegs for her to cling onto. I took the satisfied hum she made as a good sign and slipped out the door.

Shutting it behind me, I found myself in the hallway of the barracks, raising a foreleg to shield myself from the evil bright lights. That’s when I remembered that the Bastion is a fucking evil labyrinth that didn’t make sense whatsoever. Biting my lip, I ultimately just chose a random direction and went with it, hoping that it’d take me to the showers. If not, maybe somepony would stumble across my rotting corpse one day to give me a proper burial.

For once, thankfully, it seemed like the world felt like being nice to me, because I found the showers after only about five or ten minutes of aimless wandering. Throwing open the door, I finally limped inside, spun the nearest faucet with my magic, and collapsed under the cold water. At least I was used to cold showers in Blackwash (whenever we had the water to spare for a shower, that is), because the water that came out of that shower head was frigid. Hissing, I spun the faucet all the way around, and after a few minutes, was rewarded with hot water.

Yes, I know this is the second shower I’ve mentioned in like two or three logs. I have a thing for showers, okay? You would too if you spent your whole life going months at a time without them and then suddenly had access to steaming warm water whenever you wanted.

I was just rinsing off when the shower door opened, and in stumbled Zip, not even trying to suppress the wide yawn that wrenched her jaws open. The hair on the entire left side of her face and her mane pointed at a different angle from the right, a parting gift from how she slept, and her wings almost dragged across the tiles as she made her way to me. I watched her as she did so, up to and including the part where she stopped right next to me, blinked once, then rested her forehead against my shoulder and groaned.

“Not a morning pony?” I asked her, shuffling back a little bit so she could join me under the water.

“No,” she mumbled. “I hate mornings.” Yawning again, she slowly blinked and all but shoved me out of the way to get under the steamy water. Sighing, she plopped down on her haunches and moaned, letting the water drill its way into her muscles.

I waited until she was awake enough to stand before forcing my way back under the shower with her. Grabbing the soap and brush I’d used earlier, I set to work on Zip with my magic, giving her a good scrub down and helping her get the places she couldn’t reach. She happily sighed as I scrubbed the space between her wings, and I jumped back when she started vigorously flapping them, scattering soapy water everywhere. While I recoiled, she began to shake out her mane and flick her tail back and forth, all the while flailing her wings and rubbing her face against their crests.

She finally stopped after a few minutes of that, and ruffling her sodden feathers, simply turned to look at me. “Sorry. Pegasus thing.”

Chuckling, I made my way back up to her and began to wash down her shapely flanks. “My best friend is a pegasus. I’ve seen it before… birdbrain,” I said, poking Zip’s skull with my hoof. Zip just swatted my hoof away and rolled her eyes while I stuck my tongue out at her. As I worked, I took a second to admire her cutie mark: a zigzagging line darting around three stars. I realized that I hadn’t gotten the chance to see it until now; she was always in her armor and jumpsuit, save for last night, and I was a little too busy with the rest of her body to notice it then. “Your mark is pretty.”

“Thanks,” Zip said, smiling at it with me. “I got it trying to move some chickens back to their coop, funny enough. A big storm was rolling in and we had to get them out of the field before they got blown away. Using my wings, I had all of them safely inside in seconds, right before the storm hit. I didn’t even notice the mark until my brother pointed it out to me.”

“That’s neat,” I said, tracing the line with a hoof before moving to her sides and stomach. “I got mine by throwing shit in a fire.”

Zip scoffed. “Actually?”

“Well, I mean, there was a bit more work involved. Mom was sick at the time, and I only started playing around in the forge when I was like eleven winters. Late bloomer, I know.” I felt a little bit of embarrassment at that; most ponies got their marks around six or seven winters. Those few years without it weren’t very fun. “Anyway, Nova and Gauge were just starting to become interested in each other. Hormones beginning to take over, you know? Well, Gauge was nervous about asking Nova out, so I made him a little anklet to give her when he asked. It was a piece of garbage, because I wasn’t very good at using the tools in the forge then, but it didn’t fall apart when he took it, so that was good.”

“Did it work?” Zip asked.

“Yeah, it worked,” I said. “She didn’t take the thing off for like a year. She was really upset when it broke, so I ended up making her a new one.” Sighing, I took a step back to admire the only mark I had left. “So yeah. There’s that.”

“It’s a pretty story,” Zip said, smiling at me. “Sure beats chasing chickens around,” she added with a laugh. I chuckled as well and went back to work with the soap and brush. Using her wings, she began to clean her mane, while I worked on her tail and legs. I couldn’t help but sneak a peek at her pussy while I did so, and her tail flicked as I washed around it.

“Careful, there,” she said, looking over her shoulder at me and smirking. “The other Sentinels don’t like it when ponies have sex in the shower.”

“I’m full, thank you,” I said, winking back at her and moving down to her hooves. After giving each one a solid polish (and discovering that she’s ticklish down there), I stood up and set the soap and brush back where they came from. “Congratulations, you passed your examination,” I said, pretending to put a blue ribbon on her chest.

“Oh, thank you so much,” Zip said, taking a step closer to me, the wet hair on our chests brushing together. “How can I ever repay you?”

“I can think of a few ways,” I said, pressing myself more firmly against her and resting a hoof on her shoulder. With hardly any warning, Zip put both her hooves on my shoulder and pressed her lips against mine, pushing me back under the hot water of the showerhead. I moaned and kissed her back, feeling the heat of the water on my back and the clingy wetness of our bodies as we pressed them together. Another push from Zip had my back against the wall, and I began to slide down it, down, down, down, until Zip was looming over me, practically laying on my chest. Only then did she break off the kiss.

She opened her mouth to say something, her eyes full of tenderness mixed with mischief, when the clicking of talons on tile stopped her. Both of us whipped our heads toward the door, where Sig simply stood there, shaking his head. “Whenever you two are done, Platinum wants to see you. Both of you.”

Zip and I could only wordlessly nod. I wasn’t sure if that was just the hot water on my face or my blood rushing to my cheeks.

Clicking his talons against the wall once more, Sig turned around and marched back to the door. “At least you don’t have to worry about cleaning up after yourselves,” he shouted before disappearing completely. Zip and I merely remained locked in place after the door shut, staring at it for a few seconds longer.

Clearing her throat, Zip looked down at me and sheepishly smirked. “I told you…”

“Oh shut up,” I said, grabbing her head and pulling it back down to kiss her again. She didn’t put up much resistance to that.

Even almost two days from their victory at the Fort, I was surprised to see that the Sentinels were still busy as ever trying to sort out the logistics of the situation and preparing for the push to take down the Crimson. After a quick bite to eat (and I’m sure you can guess what they served us), Zip and I made our way to the war room, dodging a few support staff along the way. We entered to find Platinum Rampart seated in front of the holographic table of the valley, with Commander Thunder on his left and a unicorn mare I didn’t recognize on his right. As soon as we entered, the aging stallion cleared his throat and gestured to the chairs opposite the three of them. “Good. We can begin.”

Zip saluted and sat down, and I cautiously mirrored the motion and sat down beside her. “You wanted to see us, sir?” Zip prompted, her eyes bouncing between the three ponies sitting across from her.

Rampart nodded and steepled his hooves. “Yes. I’m sure you’re aware of the Three Pillars of our organization, sergeant.”

Zip visibly stiffened, and the tips of her wings fidgeted against her cutie mark. “Yes, sir. The Sentinels were founded in unity by the three pony races surviving on Auris. To ensure cooperation and fairness, each pillar has been occupied by the most capable soldier of each race. It’s how we’ve managed to stay strong despite the advances of the Crimson.”

“Good,” Platinum said, and I saw a very faint smile appear on his muzzle. “Commander Thunder Dash was wounded in the battle for the Fort. Though we were able to save his leg, it will need some time to heal before he can use it again. There are some things that magic simply cannot mend.”

I blinked and looked at Thunder’s bandaged leg, held in a sling close against his chest. The pegasus’ face was neutral, an empty stoic mask that hid his thoughts. Still, I had a feeling that he wasn’t too happy to be stuck on the sidelines for the immediate future.

Wait a minute…

Platinum stood up, and both Thunder and the unicorn mare watched him from their seats. “Until Commander Thunder Dash’s recovery from injuries sustained in battle, we have decided to promote you, sergeant Zip, to Acting Pegasus Commander in his stead. Your combat record is phenomenal, and you’re the best pegasus NCO in our ranks. With your years of experience, we trust in your ability to take appropriate action in a combat scenario and your judgment under stress. That, above all the others we considered, is the reason we selected you for this position.”

I felt like I could hear Zip shaking next to me. To her credit, she managed to swallow her shock and give the three ponies across from her a crisp salute. “Thank you, sir. I will fulfill the duties of Acting Commander as faithfully as I can and to the best of my ability. When the time comes for Commander Thunder to return to his position, I will readily yield command back to him.”

“As would be expected of you. Commander Thunder will give you a full briefing of your duties after we are done here.” Waving a hoof, he set Zip at ease and sat back down in his chair. “Now that that matter is out of the way, we do have business to discuss. We didn’t only summon you here to give you a promotion.”

“Commander Fusillade and I have been busying ourselves with preparing the assault on the Crimson,” Thunder said, motioning to the mare on the other side of Rampart. “Using the latest reports from the scouts we’ve sent to Celestia Dam, we’ve begun to draw up a battle plan. Best case scenario, we can take the dam with one hundred and fifty soldiers, but only if we strike within the next two weeks.”

“Why the timetable?” Zip asked. “We’re low on trained soldiers as it is. Wouldn’t we want to sit back and train any new recruits we can pick up from the valley? Teach them how to use the armor? A trained soldier is five times more valuable than a jumpy farmer with twin triples at the trigger.”

“Because we must act quickly to act upon our advantage, lest it waste away to nothing,” the mare, Fusillade, said in a shockingly thick accent I couldn’t begin to describe. “I have been fighting Carrion for years, even before he consolidated the Crimson. I know how he thinks. As of now, the froussard is still reeling from the destruction of one of his little birds. He is content to sit on his flank and observe our position. In his eyes, we appear more numerous than he thought; otherwise we would not have dared to attack the Fort. Two weeks to count troops and watch our patrols will reveal our farce. He will strike back at the Fort with twice the force and wrest it from us. The Sisters save us if it falls. We won’t have enough soldiers to hold even the Bastion if we lose our garrison at Hard Point Beta.”

“The other option would be to abandon the hard point entirely,” Thunder rumbled. “But that puts us back where we started: cut off from the rest of the valley while attrition takes its toll. As I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s hardly an option at all.”

Zip nodded. “So this is it, then. We either fold or go all in on two pair and hope that’s good enough to win the pot.”

“The poker analogy is unnecessary but illustrates the point well enough,” Rampart said. “By taking the Fort, we committed ourselves to this attempt. In reality, we have only one choice. We must fully commit ourselves to the coming battle, striking hard and quickly, or we are finished. It may not be for another few years, but if we don’t kill Carrion now, the Bastion will fall within a decade. We will be lucky to make it that long.”

The other ponies around the table quietly nodded, each falling into their own grim thoughts about the huge challenge that still laid ahead. I wasn’t a soldier or a tactician, but I had my own worries as well. If we failed, we wouldn’t save Nova. We wouldn’t save anypony. The Crimson would just round us all up again and sell us off like livestock. They’d kill all the Sentinels they could get their hooves on, butcher them like animals. And supposing they didn’t kill me too, they’d take me back to Carrion, and he’d burn his cutie mark over mine and make me his toy. I’d spend the rest of my life bent over his bed with his dick inside of me, plowing me until my cunt bled.

I’d sooner put a bullet in my own brain than let things come to that.

“So where do we begin?” Zip asked after a period of silence. “If we’re racing against time, then we can’t sit around on our flanks forever.”

Rampart nodded. “Right. We need numbers. I don’t care how we get them, but we have fewer than fifty experienced soldiers combat ready at the moment. We need to triple that number if we want to have any chance at taking apart the Crimson.”

“We’ve reached out to the mercenary companies in the valley, the few that are left at least,” Fusillade said. “Most are cautious about taking any jobs that strike at the Crimson, so we’re making an almost irresistible offer. One thousand cartridges to each soldier willing to fight, with two hundred and fifty as a down payment and the rest to be collected afterwards.”

Zip whistled. “A grand in cartridges? Each? That’s a lot.”

“And we are stocked with millions of rounds of all shapes and sizes,” Platinum said. “We can afford it, and those that don’t survive the assault or flee like cowards won’t get the remaining seven-fifty. But we need to ensure that we get some mercenary support if we’re going to take the Dam. We’re paying for experience, and you said it yourself: a trained soldier is five times more valuable than a jumpy farmer with no experience whatsoever.”

“Uh, sorry to interrupt,” I said, raising my hoof and earning a baleful glare from Fusillade that nearly had me running out the door like a scared foal. “But aren’t the Crimson in the hundreds? How can a hundred and fifty ponies, only a third of which are trained Sentinels, plus some mercenaries, take on that many bandits? I’m sure they have guns that can punch through your armor there, too, if what I saw at the Fort was any indicator of that.”

“Because we don’t have to kill every bandit at the dam to take apart the Crimson,” Rampart said. “We only have to kill one.”

Fusillade muttered something in some language I didn’t know and spat on the floor.

“Carrion is the only thing that holds those bastards together,” Thunder said. “If he dies, they scatter. It’s as simple as that.”

“A hundred ponies can lead the breakthrough to find Carrion and kill him. The recruits are just there to provide fire support to our Sentinels as they punch through the Crimson’s defenses,” Rampart said, pulling up a holographic map of the dam on the table. “The other fifty will establish a perimeter and make sure he doesn’t escape. It will be dangerous, but we can’t win in a heavyweight fight. Our only hope will be to strike hard and fast before we can get overwhelmed.”

And then his eyes fixed on me. “But we can’t start without recruits.”

I blinked. “Me?”

“Commander Thunder gave me his recommendation,” Rampart said. “I don’t see any reason to disagree with him. I’m offering to make you a Sentinel not as a reward, but because we need you. And more important than that, we need your people.” Resting his hooves on the edge of the table, he leaned over it toward me. “We rescued one hundred and seven ponies at the Fort. Only a quarter of those have volunteered. We need more.”

“But… but what am I supposed to do?” I stammered. “I don’t have any sway with them. I’m just a forgemare. I melted metal and made shit for them. That’s all I did!”

Rampart shook his head. “Wrong. You’re more than that. You’re the one who escaped, the one who got away. As far as they’re concerned, you’re the one who led us to them. You’re responsible for freeing them.” His eyes narrowed at me. “If nothing else, Ember, you’re a symbol. If you join the Sentinels, you can bring twice the number we got with you. We need them, and the ponies still held at the dam? They need you.”

He nodded once to me while I stood there, too stupid to even move. “Like it or not, the start of this thing rests on your shoulders. We might be able to scrape together enough to win without your help, but you’ll have to decide if that gamble’s worth it.

“So… what will it be?”

An hour later found me in the Sentinels’ armory staring at a black mare in silvery armor. She looked uncomfortable and more than a little bit nervous. The armor clinging to her back and shoulders shined with fresh polish and fit tightly around her frame. The six gun channels near her shoulders even had the black tarnish of gunpowder scrubbed off of them, letting them glisten in the harsh light of the armory.

I frowned at my reflection while Sig helped attach the bracers to my legs. Even though the armor was remarkably lightweight, I was still carrying a lot of uncomfortable metal around my body. I’d left the helmet on a nearby bench, not wanting to bother with it for now. Besides, my mane was so big that it didn’t even fit right. I understood now why Zip kept hers so short.

Gauge watched me from a distance, his expression unreadable. Chaff poked around some of the armor on the nearby stands, most sets covered in a thin layer of dust. They were all salvaged sets pulled off of the bodies of Sentinels who fell in combat, even the armor I was wearing. Sig didn’t say anything about it, but I noticed three blemishes across the chest piece I was wearing, bullet holes that’d been repaired. Somepony died in the armor I was wearing right now. It certainly wasn’t all that comforting.

“I don’t like it,” Gauge muttered for probably like the third or fourth time.

“What else am I supposed to do?” I muttered back at him, starting to get exasperated. “They need more ponies if they want to take out Carrion. We need them if we want to rescue Nova. We don’t have the luxury to just sit on our flanks and hope everything fixes itself.”

“So making yourself their puppet is fine with you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at me.

“I’m nopony’s fucking puppet!” I shouted back at him, stomping my hoof and sending the bracer Sig was trying to attach to it to the floor. “I’m a mare of Blackwash first, okay? I’m only doing this because I have to. There’s no other way to take down the Crimson!”

“Since when did their problem become ours? Why do we have to die for their stupid war?”

“Since they fucking burned our town to the ground and killed everypony!” I shouted back at him, baring my teeth. “Stars, Gauge, the fuck is wrong with you?! You were so gung-ho about volunteering to fight the Crimson the other day, and now you’re trying to tell me it’s not our fight? I’m trying to save Nova, damn it! Why are you fighting me over this?!”

“Because we’re nothing to them, okay?” he growled back at me, finally walking over from the sidelines. “I heard them talk while you were chasing tail. They want to attack this dam or whatever, where the Crimson are hiding, and they need us for fodder. They don’t care if we know how to shoot a gun or not, they only want us there to give Carrion’s fuckers something else to shoot at other than them. Even if they win, there might not be a Blackwash left when all’s said and done.”

“So what do you want us to do? Fucking nothing? They could be raping her right now for all we know!” As soon as I said the words, I immediately regretted them. Gauge flinched like he’d been struck, and I felt my stomach drop like a rock. I tried to say something to undo the damage I’d done, but there’s no way you can simply make up for something like that.

Sig made some grinding noise with his beak that I assumed was a griffon’s way of biting his lip. Setting the bracer in his hand down, he covered the short distance between him and Gauge in two strides and laid a hand on the zebra’s shoulder. “She will be fine, Gauge. She’s a… what did you call them, ‘techie’? They need her to work on their computers and decode the signal. They won’t hurt her, not so long as this code mystery goes on.”

Stepping away, Sig went back to me and finished putting the bracers on my legs. “As for my opinion… well, it is what it is. We need soldiers if we’re going to win this thing. But it’s no victory if everyone is too dead to appreciate it.” He looked up at me and slowly nodded his head. “Yes, we’re asking ponies who have no business doing what we’re doing to help us. But if we really didn’t care about your lives, we would’ve forced you to fight with us—like the Crimson.”

Gauge sighed and sat down on a bench, putting his head in his hooves. “I just don’t want to see any more ponies I know die.”

“They killed Mom in front of me, Gauge,” I said, sympathizing from where I stood. “Believe me, I don’t want to see anypony else die as well.”

To our surprise, Chaff piped up from the corner of the room. “But if the Crimson aren’t stopped, aren’t more ponies gonna die?”

I gravely nodded at him. “It’ll just start over again. They’ll kill us all if we don’t do something.”

The door behind me hissed open, and Zip trotted in, oblivious to our conversation. “My, don’t you look like a real soldier,” she purred, moving to Sig’s side and looking me over. “It’s a good look, Ember.”

“Right now, it’s all look,” Sig said, pointing to the empty chambers at the flanks of the armor. “Figured it’d be best to leave the guns empty until she learns how to control them. Don’t want an accidental discharge or sixty.”

Zip smirked and brushed off some invisible speck of dust or something on my chest piece. “I could see you as one of us. You’ve certainly got the right attitude for it. Maybe we can get you to model for some propaganda reels.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure I can whip the valley into a frenzy by saying ‘fuck up the Crimson and stuff.’” Shaking my head, I picked up the helmet in my magic and looked at my reflection in the shiny medal. “I’m only doing this because Rampart asked me to. I’ll be the shittiest Sentinel who ever lived if it means getting Nova back.”

“That’s the spirit,” Sig chuckled, stepping back and admiring his work. “Well, you’re all set to go. You think about what you’re going to say?”

My blood ran cold and I felt my knees tremble. “You want me to go out there and give a speech?”

Gauge snickered and crossed his forelegs. “Ember? Giving a speech? This I have to see. You guys better let her curse. That’s half her vocabulary.”

“Shut the fuck up, Gauge,” I hissed at him.

He just smirked and winked at Chaff. “See?”

“Everypony’s gathering for lunch. It’ll be the best time to get the point across,” Zip said. “Everypony can see you, and you can speak to them all at once.”

I felt like I was going to be sick.

Gauge shook his head and stood up. “Not helping,” he said, trotting toward me and gently pushing Zip and Sig back. Standing in front of me, he looked me up and down and nodded approvingly. “I know public speaking isn’t really your thing, Em,” he said, putting a hoof on my armored shoulder. “But, as much as I hate to admit it, you’re right. We’re not going to get anywhere without everypony’s help. They’ll understand it, trust me.” Sighing, he looked away for a brief moment before turning back to me. “Play up your role in rescuing us. I don’t care if you were just some forgemare before all of this; you’re a hero now, undeserved or not. That place was like nightmares come true, and when it was finally over, you were there. Ponies will listen to what you have to say, and if you tell them that the Sentinels need their help to free our neighbors, then they’ll listen.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to try to steady myself. “Okay,” I whispered, shaking off my trembles as best as I could. “But if I fuck this up—”

“You won’t,” Gauge said, taking a step back. “You’ve made it this far. Past a shrike, past the fighting at the Fort, past a damn ringbird. A quick talk to ponies that already respect you is a piece of cake.”

“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled, turning around and staring at the door Zip had just come through. “You’re not the one who’s gonna be talking out of his ass.”

“You want a good luck kiss?” Zip teased, draping a wing over my back.

“It certainly wouldn’t be unappreciated,” I said. A moment later, orange lips pressed against my cheek, but I was still a bit too out of it to respond. Taking a deep breath, I shook my head, rattled the alien armor covering my body, and marched toward the door. “Fuck it. If I stand here any longer I’m gonna soil my shiny new scavenged-off-a-dead-pony armor.”

I set off down the halls like I was being marched to my execution. Gauge was right; I hated public speaking. Like, I had no problem with speaking my mind in front of ponies. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that I was so concerned with not making an ass of myself that I tended to trip all over my words. Speaking in front of a bunch of ponies wasn’t something that I ever really did in Blackwash (because what the fuck would I be speaking about anyway), so I was definitely a bit… well, scared to speak in front of a hundred plus. Of course it didn’t help that I was just told I had to do this now.

I could’ve really used a cigarette. Too bad I’d left the box in the armory with my other gear.

When we entered the mess, my legs froze in the doorway, like my body was trying to stop me from looking like an idiot in front of all these ponies. Almost all of the survivors from Blackwash were here, along with a lot of Sentinels and their support staff. Probably close to two hundred ponies. Two hundred ponies about to see how big of a fucking dumbass I was.

Gauge nudged my shoulder, and I turned to see him offering me a calm smile. “I’m going to go sit at one of the tables,” he said, pointing to somewhere in the middle of the mess. “If you get stuck, just look for me. Pretend you’re talking to me. Ignore everypony else.”

I gave him a shaky nod, and he trotted off into the crowd after one last pat on my shoulder. I stood there for a minute, watching him go, hoping that some miracle would save me from having to do this. But that wasn’t going to happen. Sig walked out ahead of me, over to a line of empty tables at one of the short ends of the mess, and simply waited expectantly for me to follow.

“If you do this, I’ll give you a hornjob,” Zip whispered in my ear, shooting me an evil smile. That managed to shake me out of my stupor, at least a little bit. She brushed by me, running her tail along my muzzle as she did so. I didn’t realize I was following her until I was already standing between her and Sig.

Stars fucking fuck. Why does that keep working?

I had less time than I would’ve liked to try to gather what meagre thoughts my tiny brain could put together, because Sig stomped his talons and literally fucking shrike screeched to get everypony’s attention. I saw more than a few heads duck in cover; we all knew what that sound meant at Blackwash. Once the Blackwash ponies who’d never met a griffon before got over their shock, all eyes turned toward the three of us at the front of the mess.

And then Zip and Sig stepped back, leaving me front and center.

Fuck.

“Uhm… H-Hey,” I said, though it was more like a whimper. I swallowed hard and fought the urge to rip my own head off. This was already going so great. “I-I just… how’s everypony doing?”

Silence. Fuck me.

I immediately sought out Gauge in the crowd. Thankfully he wasn’t too hard to find; Blackwash only had a small zebra population to begin with. I saw Chaff sitting next to him, and both were giving me encouraging smiles. I did what Gauge said and tried to ignore everypony else in the mess and just talk to them. “I h-hope you all are feeling better now that you’ve had some time to rest and relax. I mean, even the shit they serve here is better than nothing, right? But if you could survive those Crimson fuckers, then a little processed ass can’t kill you.”

That managed to get a chuckle out of them. Thank the stars. Maybe there was hope for me yet.

Gauge gave me a little nod, so I cleared my throat and decided to press whatever advantage I had. “But what’s important is that we’re free now. We’re the lucky ones, you know? The Crimson, they tried to sell us like livestock, but instead we kicked them in the dick and got out alive. But not all of us.”

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. “They still have a bunch of our friends at their base. We may be free, but they aren’t, so we’re not done yet, are we?” I saw a bunch of thoughtful looks and shaking heads, which was good. They were listening, and most importantly, not laughing or whatever. “The Crimson still have some of our friends and family. I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan to rest until they’re free. I don’t give a fuck if I die trying. It’d be better than living and knowing that I gave up on them.”

I looked at Sig and Zip on either side of me and got their approving nods. “None of this would’ve been possible without the Sentinels. They’re the ones that took the Fort and freed you. I just gave them the push they needed to do so. They risked everything for us. They hardly have enough soldiers to hold both this base and the one the Crimson had, and they did it anyway, because they care about ponies. They care about us.

“Now they want to go take the dam,” I said, feeling a little energy making its way into my voice. “That’s going to be really tough. The Crimson are going to have a few hundred ponies there, way more than they had guarding the Fort. And we won’t be able to catch them by surprise again.” Looking over them, I touched my chest piece and the little insignia on it. “Yeah, I said ‘we’. That’s because they need help. They need more soldiers. They need volunteers. And if they’re gonna take out the Crimson once and for all, and save the rest of Blackwash, then I’ll give them everything I can. I’ll become a Sentinel if it means saving the ponies I care about.”

I took a second to let those words sink in before I narrowed my eyes at the ponies closest to me. “If you care about them, then you should too.”

Without another word, I abruptly turned in place and marched off, making a beeline for the nearest door. Only once I disappeared out of sight and ponies began to murmur to each other about what I said did I let my legs collapse from under me. Sliding down a nearby wall, I placed my head in my hooves and took a deep breath.

Hoofsteps and the clicking of talons approached me, and I looked up to see Zip and Sig looking down at me with smiles on their faces. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Zip asked, kneeling down in front of me. “You’re alive and in one piece, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, but I couldn’t really hide the shaking in my legs. “At least it’s fucking done with.”

“Now all we have to do is wait and see,” Sig said, looking through the open doorway back into the mess. “Looks like you got them talking, though. That’s a good sign.”

“It better fucking be,” I mumbled, massaging my temples with my hooves. At least I did it. Rampart better be happy. Sighing, I managed to crack a smile and look up at Zip. “I need a cigarette and a hornjob. Not necessarily in that order.”

Zip smirked at me. “That can be arranged.”

“Good,” I brushed a hoof through my mane and shook it out. “Because I’m not looking forward to the next two weeks.”

Chapter 20: The Kindling Flame

“Again.”

I gritted my teeth and bathed my horn in orange mana for something like the hundredth time that day. Across from me, no more than ten yards away, was a plank of wood. I focused on the scorched target and tried to reach out into the world, to shape the threads of reality with my magic, to bend them to my will. If that sounds really fucking hard to you, then imagine being the one trying to do it.

Still, I could feel the intangible fingers of my magic grabbing onto something in the air. They radiated outward from a single point in the target, pulling heat out of the air and towards the focus. A bead of sweat tickling my forehead threatened to shatter my concentration, and I did my best to ignore it, which only made it worse. Finally, bellowing with all my might, I flared my horn with a powerful surge and released all the heat I’d managed to trap at once.

Another little scorch mark, smoking ever so faintly, was added to the board.

From the side of the empty metal hangar, Warped Glass walked over, shaking his head. “Enough for now. Go take a break and get yourself cleaned up before dinner.”

I frowned at him and wiped the sweat off of my brow. “I nearly had it that time.”

“After the last twenty times you said that I’m starting to doubt it,” Glass said, shaking his head. “A scorch is just a distraction, nothing more. And with a casting speed like that, you’ll just get yourself killed for nothing.”

I stomped my hoof on the ground. “I’m sorry I didn’t have any fancy teachers growing up to make me a fucking pyromancer,” I muttered, exasperated. “I only learned what I needed to learn for the forge. Telekinesis and fire resistance. That’s it.”

“And?” Glass asked, raising an eyebrow. “You’re going to let that stop you?”

I ground my teeth against each other but remained silent.

“It’s never too late to learn new spells,” Glass continued, pacing in front of me. “I spend all my free time combing through the archives, searching for any new spells and tools of my craft that Equestria might have left us. Before the Silence, every unicorn knew how to cast a dozen basic spells. If the average civilian could light a candle with a thought, then we can too.”

“Lucky them,” I grumbled, pawing at the metal floor. We were in one of the Bastion’s empty hangars that the Sentinels had converted into a proving grounds for spells and that sort of thing. All sorts of targets and obstacles filled the place to let soldiers practice teleportation and other combat-oriented spells in a safe and controlled environment. Even now, a few unicorns were practicing their spellcraft, weaving serpents of fire and howling storms of icicles across holographic projections of griffons, zebras, dragons, some sort of bug ponies... basically anything that wasn’t a pony. The fact that none of the projections were ponies said something about who Equestria considered a threat before the Silence happened.

Sighing, Glass removed his helmet and rubbed at his sweaty mane. The pyromancies the other unicorns were casting were really making this place hot. “You have talent in you, kid. Your magic is naturally attuned to fire. Doesn’t take a trained mage to see that,” he said, pointing to the remaining burning coal on my right flank. “You just need to figure out how to tap into it. When you manage to do that, you’ll be burning your enemies to a crisp in no time.”

“And how do I do that?” I retorted, growing frustrated with both him and myself. “You make it sound oh so easy.”

“Watch your tone,” Glass warned me, and I flinched and gave him a salute. It’d been a few days since I became a Sentinel (or, well, a Sentinel-in-training) but I still slipped up from time to time when addressing officers. It didn’t help that I was kinda-sorta dating one who didn’t care for formalities. Except for when I forgot to address her by her title in front of a whole bunch of new recruits from Blackwash. I think she got some sort of sick amusement from dumping an entire crate of bullets on the ground and making me spend the rest of the day organizing them by serial number and putting them back.

Sighing, I shook my head. “It’s frustrating, sir,” I said, remembering to address him with a little more respect unless I wanted to get slapped with some more menial punishment. “To know that I’m supposed to be good at fire and then not be able to light up a stupid target.”

Glass just nodded. “Even the simplest spell takes practice. Work on it in your free time and read the Equestrian Field Manual for Unicorns. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to bathe an entire field in fire with enough practice.”

I bowed my head. “Thank you.” At his look, I hastily amended, “Sir.”

“Good. Go clean up. You’ve done a lot of work so far. Take the break before you’re back into the fire… hopefully not literally.”

“I’ll take literally if it means I can actually cast fire,” I said, smirking at him. Then I gave him a quick salute, and when he returned it, I pivoted in place and marched out of the hangar. At least marching basics hadn’t been too hard to get a handle on.

Without even a second thought, I hung a right upon leaving the proving grounds. Even though the Bastion was still a huge labyrinth, I was starting to get the feel of it after four days of training and drilling. I passed by a few ponies I recognized on my way to my bunk, and we exchanged simple nods. As it turns out, my shitty little speech was actually able to get a few more volunteers on board with taking down the Crimson. I think Sig said there were something like sixty ponies out of a hundred-something who volunteered for combat. The forty or so who didn’t volunteered to help out behind the scenes, making sure weapons and supplies were ready for the fight, that sort of thing. At least it was better than doing nothing. I was so proud of my community. Everypony was pitching in to rescue the ones Carrion still kept locked up at his hideout.

I found the staircase and began the long trek down to the maintenance hangar, wishing that the elevators worked. Another thing I learned over the last few days was that the Bastion was really only running on emergency power. Gauge, of course, had spent a lot of time talking to the support staff and learning as much as he could about their facility, and he told me that the Bastion’s fusion plants had melted down sometime over the past two hundred winters due to neglect. Apparently, the bottom four levels or something like that were practically glowing with radiation and fallout, so nopony dared to go down there. That just left solar power and an aging fission plant to try to keep critical systems powered. If the Bastion did have more power, then they would’ve been able to access its heavy weapons arsenal, rumored to be home to dozens of tanks and ringbirds and other heavy machinery—machinery that would’ve made a huge difference in the fight against the Crimson.

I stepped out of the staircase and into a short hallway lit by dim red lights. The hangar was just down the hall, and it was the only thing on this floor that was close enough to well lit. Inside were a ton of greasy and dirty ponies crawling in, around, and on top of a metal behemoth, resting idly in the middle of the hangar. The thing was low profile and looked very sharp with all its angles and sleek construction. Sporting a whopping Bronco 124mm cannon housed in a turret that could lower into the body of the tank to reduce its profile, the Scinfaxi T11 Main Battle Tank was a mean machine that I would’ve loved to have on our side. But, well, finding parts to repair its decrepit turbine engine made that wish little more than a pipe dream.

I found Chaff playing on the turret of the tank. It was his favorite place to be while he stayed with us at the Bastion. I’d wanted to send him back to his parents as soon as possible, but the Sentinels didn’t see it as worth the effort to bring him back home when they needed to focus on doing the impossible and beating down the Crimson with what little time we had on our side. So, for now, the colt just hung around the hangar, entertaining himself and the mechanics with his antics.

I’d also kept it a secret that not only did he have an older brother, but said brother was currently sitting in chains in the brig as a prisoner of war. Not sure how well that would’ve gone over. I figured he’d learn from his parents whenever we finally got around to bringing him home. Probably after Barley beat his flank for running away from home and leaving them worried.

A striped tail poked out from under the back end of the tank, and I dragged the fat ass it was attached to out with my magic. Gauge yelped at the sudden tug and glared up at me once he saw who was responsible. “Oh, it’s you. Don’t you have better things to be doing than bothering me? Like organizing a box of bullets or bathing in a drill sergeant’s shit?”

“Did enough of that today. Glass told me to get some rest before dinner.” I found a toolbox to sit down on and took off my helmet. After wearing Sentinel armor for a few days, I was finally getting used to the weight. They still wouldn’t let me turn it on, though, so the guns were empty and the shields were down. They only had a small number of power cores that had to be kept charged when not in use and they weren’t going to waste them when there wasn’t any danger.

“Oh?” Gauge asked, sitting up and tossing a huge wrench to the side, nearly clipping SCaR as it darted out from under the tank. “So, what? Have you become death incarnate, ready to bring a fiery end to the Crimson’s reign of terror across the valley?”

“If only,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. “I can’t even set a stupid piece of wood on fire. I just scorch the damn thing. And then I see the veterans that can make all sorts of fiery cool shit with a thought and it pisses me off.” Sighing, I set my helmet on the ground and rubbed at my eyes. “I’m not patient enough for this shit.”

“That was never one of your strong suits, no,” Gauge said, giving me a half-smirk. A shower of sparks drew his attention, and he waved his hooves as SCaR began fiddling with something in the engine. “No, no, no! That goes there, that goes there!” he shouted, pointing at a few different doohickeys I couldn’t make any sense of. SCaR made some annoyed buzzing noise and went back to work, leaving Gauge to shake his head and sigh. Groaning, he stood up and dragged another toolbox over to sit on. “Bet you’re making better progress than we are, though.”

I looked at the back end of the tank, which was basically gutted. The Sentinels had stripped its huge turbine engine a while ago to try to get a better idea of what they needed to fix it. “What’s the hitch now?”

“Just a whole lot of little menial things,” Gauge said, shrugging. “A lot of the pieces inside of it need to be replaced. Warm air and moisture did a lot of awful things to the moving parts. They did find a stash of much needed spare parts at the Fort, and they salvaged a ton off of the ringbird we downed. If all goes according to plan, and I hesitate to say it will…” He just gave the tank something of an excited look.

“Guess that’s why you guys started stacking shells over there?” I asked, pointing to the space that’d been cleared in the corner of the hangar, where a pair of earth ponies were busy rolling out high explosive shells and lining them up in neat order.

“We’re hopeful. Really, getting pieces from the ringbird’s rotor engines helped immensely.”

The clopping of hooves turned our attention to Chaff, who was victoriously trotting toward us from where he’d leapt off the tank. “I can’t wait for you guys to fix the tank! Will I get to ride on it? Huh?”

Gauge and I exchanged looks. “Maybe,” Gauge offered, trying to placate the colt. “We’ll have to test drive it before we put it to use in battle. Assuming that we even finish it in time.”

“But you’re not going to ride it into battle,” I said, frowning at the colt. “If it were up to me, we’d have already sent you back to Northlight. Your mom and your Pop-Pop are worried sick about you.”

Chaff fidgeted where he stood. “Yeah…”

Gauge was more sympathetic to him. “They’ll just be happy to know that you’re safe. The moment this is all over, we’ll bring you home safely. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Just prepare for the flank whooping of a lifetime,” I muttered out of the side of my muzzle. I just shrugged when Gauge shot me a dirty look. I mean, was I wrong to expect that?

Gauge gave the tank one last look before shrugging and kicking open his toolbox. “You said you were going to get dinner?”

“After I clean up,” I said. “I’m icky and covered in sweat.”

“Never stopped you at Blackwash,” Gauge said, a hint of a tease in his voice.

“Back in Blackwash we couldn’t shower whenever we wanted,” I said. “I just got used to going to bed caked in soot and ash from the forge. It’s really good for eyeliner.”

Gauge chuckled. “Eyeliner? On you? I don’t think black on black stands out all that much.”

“No, but Nova sure loved it,” I said, smirking at him. “Stands out pretty nice on a white coat. Mix a little ash with some grease and you’ve got yourself some passable makeup. I’d give her some whenever she wanted to impress.”

“Charcoal and chicken egg whites!” Chaff exclaimed from where he sat. “That’s how my mama does it!”

“You mares and your makeup,” Gauge said. “Not even the fall of civilization is going to stop you from trying to look pretty.”

“You’re complaining?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

He laughed and shook his head. “Not in the slightest. If anything, I’m flattered that you think us stallions are worth impressing.”

Chaff just made a gagging noise and stuck out his tongue.

Gauge began to collect his scattered tools from around the tank and toss them in the toolbox. “I’m going to do some cleanup down here, then I’ll meet you for dinner. Sound good?”

I nodded, looking forward to getting out of my armor. It didn’t weigh all that much, but it was still plenty of extra weight I carried around all day. “See you then.”

Gauge and Chaff were already in the mess hall by the time I got there. Neither had showered like I had; I could tell at a glance, because Gauge still proudly wore his grease stains like a second coat. The mess was still pretty empty, because most of the Bastion was busy training the volunteers and getting them as ready for war as possible before we ran out of time. The only reason I wasn’t stuck with the rest of them was because I’d already proved myself at the Fort, and I’d just be taking time away from ponies who actually needed to learn how to use a gun properly. Besides, getting specialist training in pyromancy was a much more fulfilling use of my time, even if I was awful at it.

I tossed my damp mane over my shoulder and grabbed the usual awful fare from the line before sitting down with Gauge and Chaff. At this point, I just mindlessly ate the shit. You learn to deal with it when it’s the only thing to eat.

Ponies trickled in as we ate, though they were mostly support staff that kept to themselves. Gauge and I watched them as they muttered amongst themselves and stretched sore muscles. “Guess even they have to do some training,” Gauge commented.

I nodded. “Zip said that they’re the Sentinels’ last resort. Even if we do beat the Crimson, they’re probably going to lose a lot of good soldiers. They’ll need something to build off of, make sure that they don’t collapse even after winning the war.”

“And if the worst happens?” Gauge asked.

“Then they’ll have to hold the Bastion and try to survive,” I said, shrugging. “Not a pretty picture, but this place is so damn important and fortified. Imagine if Carrion kicked us out and moved in. Nothing would ever be able to destroy the Crimson then.”

Gauge gravely nodded and held his cup between his hooves. “I still can’t believe that it’s all coming down to a roll of the dice. That’s not a very encouraging idea to put faith in.”

“It was a roll of the dice that led to us taking the Fort and freeing you,” I said, reaching across the table and holding his hoof. “That could have easily been the ruin of the Sentinels and they tried it anyway. Their gamble paid off. We just need to believe that luck is on our side.”

“That’s really all we can do.” Sighing, he put his head in his hooves. “I wish I had something better to stake Nova’s fate on.”

The chatter of a hundred exhausted ponies entering the mess interrupted our conversation. In staggered the Blackwash volunteers, many hardly able to do more than limp and groan, with equally exhausted Sentinels at their flanks. While they found food and seats, Zip and Sig glided over to our usual table and took off their helmets. I could tell from their sluggish wingbeats that even they were basically dead from drilling recruits all day. As they sat down, I discreetly leaned over to Zip and nuzzled her cheek for a second before parting. As she made evidently clear with the bullet incident, she didn’t want our little relationship undermining her authority, but I could tell she needed the affection. She gave me a quiet hum and flicked her tail against mine to show the gesture was appreciated, but nothing else.

“Busy day?” I asked, pushing my empty tray aside.

Zip’s head slowly tilted down and back up. “You know it,” she mumbled, her bleary eyes watching the volunteers work their way through the line for food. “I don’t know how we’re going to be ready for this fight. We can only cram so many things into their skulls before we’re all too tired to do anything more.”

“At least they respond well to commands,” Sig offered. He began to claw some dirt out of his talons and shrugged his wings. “Half of them know at least the basics of using a gun. The ones who served in that militia of yours are very helpful for getting lessons across,” he added, shooting me a weary smile.

A little Blackwash pride stirred in my breast. “We put a lot of emphasis on having a solid militia. We never knew if something would come after us one day, and we had to keep the local shrike population under control as well.” Then my ears wilted as I remembered exactly why I was here. “Turns out we were less prepared than we thought…”

“You were ambushed late at night by a vicious and experienced raiding party,” Sig said. “All things considered, it could’ve been a lot worse.”

“I hate to think of how things could’ve been worse,” Gauge muttered, staring at his hooves. SCaR sadly whirred, and Gauge patted it like a dog.

Well that sure killed the mood. Though he was right; I don’t think things could’ve gotten much worse for us. I don’t even think every one of us dying would’ve been all that bad compared to what Gauge and the others that were captured have been through.

Zip cleared her throat and pulled out a scrap of paper from one of the pockets on her armor. She dropped it in front of me and pointed to it. “Your first orders. Congratulations.”

I blinked at the paper and unfurled it with my magic. “Orders?”

“Hastily trained volunteers given guns and armor aren’t going to win this fight for us,” Sig said. “We need to recruit people who already have experience. We’ve got a few missions lined up to comb the valley for volunteers, and we’re assigned to this one.”

Frowning, I spun the paper around in my magic until I finally had it oriented the right way. It only had a simple note scribbled across it: ‘Quarry. Sgt Sigur and PFC Ember. 0500.’

When I set the paper down, Sig smiled at me and stretched his wings slightly. “It’ll just be the two of us, and we’ll be leaving before dawn. Make sure you’re ready to go.”

“Go where?” Gauge asked, looking between me and Zip and Sig. “It’s not classified, is it?”

“‘Where’ isn’t all that important, other than that we can find help there,” Sig said, crossing his arms. “And I know that they’ll be willing to help.”

“Good,” Gauge said. “The more ponies we have to help kill that bastard, the sooner I’ll get to see Nova.”

“We never said anything about ponies,” Zip said, smirking at the zebra.

At Gauge’s confused expression, Sig nodded. “That’s right.” Smirking at me, he leaned back in his seat. “I figure it’s high time I paid my flock a visit.”

Chapter 21: The Flock

I blinked my eyes and recoiled slightly as I traded the harsh artificial lighting of the Sentinels’ teleportation hangar for the dim blue light of the rising sun. By my side, Sigur angled his head this way and that, obviously scouting our surroundings for any immediate danger. When he was satisfied, and once my eyes adjusted to the faint light of the early morning, he nodded to me. “Good?”

“Good,” I answered, taking a look around. We’d been teleported onto an empty metal pad in a clearing in the middle of a forest. The familiar sounds of songbirds and the snapping of twigs as Auris’ wildlife foraged for the first meal of the day was all I heard. It felt like Sig and I were the only two people left on the planet.

I also noted that I didn’t see a quarry, or anything resembling one. “Where are we?” I asked, looking around for any signs of where we needed to go.

“The start of our hike,” Sig said, pointing toward a craggy mountain to the northeast. Although having spent almost all of my life living on a mountain, the biggest in the range, it was more like a big hill to me. “The mages had to teleport us somewhere safe so we didn’t end up halfway through a tree. Thankfully, the Bastion has a list of all of the rapid transit zones in the valley, so they knew precisely where to put us.”

He began to set off toward the mountain, and I fell in at his side. “Rapid transit zone?”

“The pad,” he said, scraping it with his talons for emphasis. “Field manuals that survived the Silence tell us that Equestria’s army was big on mobility and rapid response. Therefore, they employed unicorns specially trained in long-distance teleportation. They’d use them to move troops and equipment rapidly across the front to respond to any breaches or thrusts by an enemy. But to do that, they needed to have a dedicated reference point to ensure that the soldiers reached their assignments safely, no matter where they were teleported from.”

“So it’s basically a staging zone,” I said.

“Basically. The metal keeps plants from growing in the middle of the point, so we can be reasonably certain that we’re not literally going to become one with nature.”

“And when we attacked the Fort?” I asked. “I didn’t see any metal pads out there.”

Sigur nodded and flexed his talons in the soft earth as he stepped off the pad. “Right. The one we normally used was inside the Fort itself, if you remember from how we got everypony out of there. But the Crimson had blocked it with crates and that sort of thing, so we couldn’t use it. Instead, we had scouts go find a suitable target to use instead—although we never made it that far, because of somepony,” he said, angling his head at me.

“Never going to let me live that down, are you,” I said, rolling my eyes and shifting the extra weight of the armor on my flanks. After a little bit of training, they’d given me the full load of rounds for the machine guns in addition to the BR12A I’d picked up at the Fort. Through the clever use of some spells, I was carrying over a thousand rounds in all for the six machine guns in the armor despite having the space to carry only a tenth as much. The Equestrians really knew how to fuse magic and tech together, I’ll give them that. And given how valuable a thousand cartridges apparently were, I felt like I might as well have been carrying gold bars on me.

Moving through the forest with the extra weight on my back was a little more difficult and a lot more exhausting than I thought it would be. It didn’t help that we had to go uphill, and so we had to stop for breaks every so often. Those quick rests gave me a chance to appreciate the beautiful wildlife of Auris I’d hardly known from the top of the mountain—a wildlife Sig had known all his life.

“Pterofyn,” Sig said without warning during one of our breaks.

I capped my canteen and raised an eyebrow. “Huh?”

“You hear it?” he asked, pointing up toward the feathery leaves of the trees above us. “It has a very distinctive call.”

My ears twitched atop my head as I angled it to the side, sitting still and hardly breathing as I listened. Apart from the occasional gust of wind blowing through the trees, I didn’t hear anything. But after a second, I picked up on a very faint song in the forest.

Twaw-EEEEP Twaw-EEEEP Twaw-EHEHEHEHEH!

“That it?” I asked when there was a break in its song, and Sigur nodded.

“Yeah. They’re little birds, only about…” He held up his hands and spread his claws out, just barely touching them together. “Very colorful, too. A very vibrant purple with two stripes of orange on their shoulders. The flight feathers on their rear wings are also orange. They’re pretty to look at, and they love to sing.”

I tried to imagine the little bird. It was pretty cute, in my head at least. “Maybe they could teach their big brothers a thing or two about playing nice.” I felt for the hole in the middle of my mane where the shrike had ripped out a chunk of it days ago. Dumb thing didn’t fit under my helmet, and I’d told Zip that I’d sooner shoot myself than shave it off, even if it was against regulations. A girl’s gotta have a little pride in her looks, right?

Sigur just smirked and shook his head. “Shrikes are hunters by nature. They’re powerful and elegant birds, they just have the unfortunate tendency to think anything smaller than them is food.”

“You would think a shrike is ‘elegant,’” I said, shaking my head. “You try to make out with one? You griffons have so much in common with them.”

Shrikes try to kill our young,” Sig said, shrugging. “Like I said, anything smaller than them is a meal in their eyes. They’re intelligent, though, so they learned to stay away from the quarry.” After a moment’s pause, he crossed his arms at me and added, “And no, we don’t ‘make out’. We don’t have lips, remember? A little hard to do that without them.”

“Sucks,” I said. “What do you do instead?”

“Preen each other. It’s a sign of affection and intimacy. Even pegasi look at it that way. Like Zip.” He stood up with a grunt and rolled his shoulders. “Well, time to get moving again,” he said, and he set off toward the mountain, leaving me to scramble after him.

“W-Wait! What do you mean?” I exclaimed, managing to gallop to his side. “Even pegasi, too?”

“Didn’t you have a pegasus friend?” Sig ask, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Yeah, but she wasn’t my marefriend! I didn’t know that preening was a thing lovers did!” I stopped in my tracks and angled my head. That means Gauge must’ve preened Nova before. I needed to talk to him more about loving a pegasus. That seemed like it’d be a really handy thing to learn more about.

I realized Sig had walked off ahead of me, and I galloped back up to him again. “So, like, Zip likes that? You think she’d like it if I did it for her?”

“Oh, certainly,” Sig said, pushing a branch out of our way and letting it snap back once we’d passed. “Like I said, it’s an intimate thing for griffons and pegasi. We’d only let somebody really close to us preen our wings. Just make sure you get her permission first before you do it.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said, thinking it over while I trotted alongside him. A pegasus’ wings were incredibly important to them. I learned that from knowing Nova all these years. I guess it would be like me and my horn, or earth ponies and their… hooves? They do like to kick things… But I certainly would be startled if somepony just grabbed my horn without my permission. Especially if they put it in their mouth. Hornjobs are nice and all, but not something you want to be surprised with.

One question naturally led to the next. “How do I preen a pegasus’ wings?”

Sigur pressed his hand against his face and chuckled. “You’re full of questions today, aren’t you?”

“Shut up, I want to get laid again,” I said, sticking my tongue out at him. Then, cantering up to him, I leaned against his shoulder. “So? How about it? You’re like…” I looked him up and down, quickly doing the math in my head. “…three-sevenths bird or something like that? Surely you can give me a few tips of the trade, right?”

“I have a little experience here or there,” Sig said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. When I frowned at him, he just flexed a wing and showed me the long, straight feathers hanging out from the meat of it. “Work on flight feathers first. They’re easiest, and you can put the thick shaft between your teeth to guide it along. Just don’t use your tongue, you’ll just make a mess.”

I struggled to hold back a laugh. “L-Lewd,” I managed without breaking down laughing.

Sigur just rolled his eyes. “Fine, no more advice for you.”

“Okay, okay, sorry,” I said, holding up a hoof and momentarily hobbling on the other three. “Feathers, teeth, no tongue… what else? Whenever I watch a pegasus preen, it just looks like they’re chewing on their feathers.”

“It’s…” Sig momentarily faltered for words. “How to word this…” He took a few moments to gather his thoughts. “Preening is just finding feathers that are out of alignment and putting them back in place. We make sure that the barbs on the feather are all hooked together using our teeth or beak, and we give the smaller feathers little tugs back into alignment, or just pull them out altogether if they’re too badly askew.” At my blank look, he just shrugged. “I’m sure Zip can walk you through it if you offer.”

We left it at that for the time being. I doubted I was going to get anything more useful out of badgering Sig.

The day beat on, and after a few hours of hiking, I was really starting to feel the heat and humidity. The energetic blue sun made my armor scalding hot to the touch, and the gray jumpsuit I had to wear along with it was the only insulation I had between it and my hide. I was sweating buckets, and I went through my canteen far faster than I thought I would. Even Sig seemed to struggle with the heat, because I noticed him walking with his wings slightly extended and his beak open, panting. Whenever a cloud managed to drift in front of the sun and give us momentary relief, we would both let out pitiful cheers and quickly recover in the shade before it passed again.

We came to an outcropping of rock that not even the hardy Auris trees could grow on, and we immediately sought shelter in the shade of an overhang. The metal pad that we’d teleported to was a few miles away and a few hundred feet below us, hardly visible in the sea of feathery orange leaves. Beyond that, I could see the river, and then the far wall of the valley to the south. But here I could see something I hadn’t noticed before: at the eastern end of the valley, a massive monolith of steel and concrete stretched from one side to the other, spewing water through four spillways that pooled beneath it before forming the river that then meandered through the rest of the valley. I could see tiny specks of towers on the walls at the top, and an enormous symbol made of green patina in the smooth wall facing us. It looked like a winged horseshoe with a unicorn horn protruding through the U-like space in the middle. Framing it in the four cardinal directions were depictions of a sun, a heart, a moon, and a star, if you worked your way around it in a clockwise direction from the top.

I looked at Sig and pointed in the direction of it. “Is that the dam?”

Sig slowly nodded. “Yeah. Celestia Dam, I think it’s called in our database. It used to provide power to the entirety of the valley, or at least, that’s what it was designed to do once Auris was settled more. It’s been the Crimson’s base of operations since before they unified the other bandit factions under their banner.”

I rubbed my eyes and squinted at the distant structure, but it was too far away for me to make anything out in detail, other than the symbol worked into the concrete face. “And we’re going to be taking that?”

“If all goes well, then yes.” Grunting, Sig took off his helmet and began fooling with his head crest. “I spent my whole life with that thing there, looming in the distance. We all knew at the quarry that bandits and slavers lived there. We just hoped that they’d never come our way.”

“It couldn’t have been easy to sleep at night knowing that,” I said.

The griffon just shrugged. “We had sentries around the quarry. Nobody can sneak past a griffon, so we didn’t have anything to worry about.”

“What about the symbols?” I asked. “Hearts don’t seem to be Carrion’s style. Unless, you know, they’re burned onto the flanks of mares.”

“It was the emblem of Equestria back in the day,” Sig said. “The horseshoe represents the three main races. You know, pegasus, unicorn, earth pony.”

“And the things around it?”

“There were supposedly four gods who ruled Equestria once upon a time. Whether they were real or just part of the Equestrian mythos, I have no idea.” Then, standing up, he pointed up the rocky face, to where another line of trees awaited us. “But enough of that. We should get going.”

I nodded and followed him up the slope some more. We made good progress, taking a quick break at a stream and topping off our canteens before pressing onwards again. Only when the little heads-up display my helmet was projecting over my left eye said the time was 1132 did Sig suddenly stop and hold out his hand.

Now on guard, I toggled the safety on the machine guns with a thought and was rewarded with a red exclamation mark popping up in the corner of my vision, letting me know that the guns were ready to fire if I willed it. I also unslung my rifle and held it in front of me as I cautiously sidestepped to Sig. “What is it?” I whispered, my eyes scanning the trees and rocks around us. Though I couldn’t see anything, I figured Sig’s sharp eyesight and keen hearing were more reliable than my own.

Sig responded by gesturing for me to stay put, and he slowly padded out across the grass. After a few seconds of scanning the treeline, he raised his head and made a series of low calls and chirps. Tense silence reigned for a few moments, and I could feel my heart begin to pound as I searched in vain for what was spooking him. Then I heard another bunch of calls and chirps, and in front of me, Sig visibly relaxed.

Turning to me, he held out his hand and pointed to the ground. “Place the rifle on the ground and turn your safeties back on.” When I hesitated, he just pointed again, and I reluctantly parted with the battle rifle.

That was when two more griffons inexplicably dropped out of the trees on either side of us.

I jumped and fell on my flank, but Sigur didn’t even flinch. The other griffons didn’t wear any armor, but they’d affixed branches and boughs of leaves to a course netting they draped over their bodies as camouflage. Each one carried a makeshift high powered rifle that I knew at a glance could punch right through the shields of my armor. Underneath their camo, each griffon had a muscular brown body like Sigur’s, though their heads differed in the coloration and patterning of their feathers: one had ashy gray feathers that swooped out over his brow, and the other had drooping white feathers like a more exaggerated version of Sig’s own headcrest.

“Well, look who came back?” the griffon with the white feathers purred. Strolling up to Sigur, he slung his rifle over his back and jabbed at the Sentinel’s armor. “We could hear you from a mile away in that noisy can of yours. If we wanted, we could’ve put a bullet right through your heart, and I don’t think your fancy shields could’ve stopped it.”

“If I didn’t want you to know I was coming, you wouldn’t have heard me,” Sig said, stepping closer to the white-feathered griffon and lowering his head. I bit my lip and sized up the other griffon standing off to the side, his rifle pointed in my vague direction. If shit went down, I could probably light him up with the machine guns in my armor before grabbing my rifle and drilling the other one in the head. Supposing the one watching me didn’t just carve a new hole in my chest with his rifle. I toggled the safety off on my guns again, just in case.

And then, all of a sudden, both Sig and the white-feathered griffon laughed and clapped their hands together before pulling together in a quick embrace. Even the griffon watching me lowered his gun and smiled. “It’s been too long, you dumb bastard,” the white griffon said, patting Sig on the shoulder with one hand and slinging his rifle over his back with the other. “I’m amazed to see your rotten ass is still alive.”

“And I figured the quarry would’ve collapsed without me to watch over yours and Gatre’s mangy hides, Jahlen,” Sig responded, shooting the ashen griffon in the back a quick grin.

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” the white griffon, who I guess was Jahlen, said with a chuckle. “Once we got rid of the dead weight, we’ve been better than ever!”

“Yeah, yeah. Hope the old guy hasn’t missed me too much,” Sig said. “I was the best shot out of all of you. I’m surprised you aren’t skin and bones without me to hunt for you.”

“He has his moments,” the other griffon, Gatre, said. “Dacie’s getting pretty competent with the bow, though. She creeps up on two-tailers like she’s the wind and hits them in the face. The old guy’s pretty happy that she doesn’t have to use bullets on them.”

“That’s good. I’ll have to find her when I get back,” Sigur said. “She always was one of the more fun ones.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you,” Jahlen said. “She was pissed for a whole month when you left.”

They chuckled a bit, and then Gatre’s green eyes bored into me. He waved to the other two and nodded in my direction. “Who’s this, Sig? Marefriend? I didn’t know you were into ponies.”

Jahlen snickered, and Sig just shook his head. “Apprentice of mine, I guess you could call her.” He motioned to me and stepped forward. “Why don’t you get off your flank and say hey to my brothers, Ember?”

I picked up my rifle and reset all the safeties before trotting over. “Hey,” I said, trying to act natural, despite still being a little leery about having a gun pointed at me just moments ago. “Ember.”

“Gatre,” the black griffon said, taking my outstretched hoof and shaking it.

“Jahlen,” the white one said, nodding from Sigur’s side. Then, smirking at Sig, he nudged him in the ribs. “She is pretty cute for a pony. Too bad she’s not a pegasus. At least they have wings.”

“You want me to turn you into a pony?” I bluffed, frowning at Jahlen. “I’m standing right here, you know.”

Sigur chuckled and decided to play along. “Don’t mess with unicorns, J. Especially ones with short tempers.”

Jahlen just held up his hands in mock surrender and backed off a step. “Hey, I’m just having a little fun. No need to get all upset.”

“I’m taken, thank you,” I growled at him, lowering my horn for half a second. A look from Sig, however, made me take a breath and chill out. “So, where’s this quarry? We’ve got important Sentinel business to do.”

“Important Sentinel business?” Gatre said, scratching his beak. His eyes narrowed at Sig, and his head crest shifted along with his frown. “What’re you up to, Sig?”

“Talk for the old guy’s earholes,” Sig said, shrugging.

Jahlen likewise frowned. “We heard about what you guys did at that fort or whatever. You’re just kicking a prickwings’ nest; you know that, right?”

“And if you’re pissing off the Crimson, we don’t want anything to do with it,” Gatre said, leaning back against a tree and crossing his arms. “We should just make you go now if you’re dragging us into this mess.”

Sigur shut his eyes and took a deep breath; it was pretty clear he was using every bit of effort to keep himself calm. “I won’t leave until I speak to the old guy. Whether you like it or not, I’m here on business. Not for a family reunion.”

The other two griffons exchanged looks before glaring at Sig. “Fine. But only because you’re our brother.”

Jahlen unslung his rifle and spread his wings, taking to the air. “Bring them back, I’ll cover for you in the meanwhile.”

Gatre nodded and waved at us. “Well, come on. The sooner we get you to leave, the sooner we don’t have to worry about pissing off the Crimson.”

He began to march off to the north, and Jahlen disappeared into the orange leaves with a flash of feathers. I just looked at Sigur, and he gave me an apologetic shrug before wordlessly setting off after Gatre. Sighing, I fell in behind the two griffons, frowning at the ground. Things were already off to a great start.

Another hour of hiking brought us to the quarry. By now, it was almost thirteen o’clock, and the sun glared at us from overhead. I was hot, sweaty, thirsty, and now hungry. Hopefully I could take care of a few of those things at the quarry.

Which was massive. I didn’t know what I was looking at at first when we finally came to a stone summit. I thought I was looking at a small ravine of sorts, but after rubbing my eyes a few times, I realized that there were artificial layers of platforms ringing around the central pit all the way to the bottom. Numerous caves and hollows had been dug out of the limestone; many of these had colorful curtains that were either drawn or held open with makeshift fasteners. A series of construction lights were placed at regular intervals along the walls and platforms, connected by snaking wires to a huge fusion generator nestled in one of the uppermost caves. The rusted carcasses of old mining equipment and machinery were scattered around the perimeter of the pit, many salvaged for parts and fusion batteries long ago.

And the griffons. There were hundreds of them, at least. They certainly numbered much more than Blackwash, and even probably more than everypony at the Bastion. Adults flew directly across the enormous hole in the ground from one platform to another, usually in small groups and happily chatting with each other. Fledglings played on the lower levels where any falls wouldn’t be as severe with their unsure wings. Old hens and tercels with ragged feathers and gnarled talons sat in the shade of the larger hollows, watching the goings-on of the day with a passive interest. The squawking and chirping and just bird noises echoing in the deep pit gave the whole place an amazing sense of life.

Sig stopped by the edge of the quarry, resting his talons over the precipice. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, letting it all loose at once in a contented sigh. “How I’ve missed this place.”

“Ain’t nothing like home,” I said, standing next to him and just taking it all in.

“You never should’ve left in the first place,” Gatre grumbled. He shot Sig a betrayed look and clawed at the ground. “Your family was—is here. Not in some stupid secret base full of righteous idiots like you who think they can actually change things.”

“It was as hard on me as it was for you,” Sigur said.

Gatre spat on the ground. “Ponyshit.”

I spared a moment to glare at him.

Sig either ignored my indignant look or just didn’t see it altogether; he was a fair bit taller than me. “I joined the Sentinels as much for my family as I did for the people of the valley.”

“Oh really? And how’s that?”

Sig just narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Because sooner or later, Carrion’s not going to tolerate a bunch of hybrid freaks living at the doorstep of his new world order.” Frowning, he kicked a pebble off the edge and watched it clatter down the rocky slope. “Whether or not the rest of you pull your heads out of your collective assholes long enough to see that is another story entirely.”

Gatre frowned and spread his wings, hitting Sigur in the head as he did so. I wasn’t so sure it was unintentional. “Whatever. You want to talk to the old guy? Let’s talk to the old guy.” And he began to glide to one of the hollows on the other side.

Sig just shook his head and likewise spread his wings. “One day you’ll see,” he muttered to himself, launching after Gatre and lowering into the quarry with wide circles.

I just blinked and stomped my hoof. “Hey, you fuckers! I can’t fly!” When they didn’t come back for me, I ground my teeth in frustration and stomped off for the nearest ramp down into the quarry. “Fucking bird brains, the lot of them.”

I got more than a few curious looks as I began the long trot around the perimeter of the pit to get to where I saw Sig and Gatre land. The griffons largely kept to themselves, stopping what they were doing only long enough to watch me as I passed. I heard the sounds of grinding beaks and clacking talons as I walked past one of the large hollows that the elders gathered in; none of them looked too thrilled to see me. Like Gatre, I think they knew that Sentinel involvement was just asking for trouble, especially with the Crimson so close by.

The hollow that Sig and Gatre had flown to was the biggest, at least as far as I could tell, so obviously it must’ve been the most important. The hollowed space was tall enough to allow griffons to fly over anyone on the floor, and they’d even decorated it with simple paintings and some furniture. There were a few more elders here, but most of the griffons appeared to be middle-aged (what is middle age for a griffon? Don’t they live like a hundred winters?). They also wore formal dress, or as formal as you could expect for not having access to dry cleaning and a tailor for more than two hundred winters. It certainly stood in pretty stark contrast to the naked griffons (of which there were many) or the camo that Jahlen and Gatre wore.

I quickly spotted Sig and Gatre. They were a ways in the back of the hollow, standing near a drawn curtain that I guess covered somewhere deeper into the rock behind it. Across from them was an aging griffon, with tawny feathers and a spotted hide, a frayed head crest, and crooked gray talons. He also wore an old patchwork suit jacket, though it looked like all the buttons had popped off long ago. In a glance, I figured that he must’ve been the ‘old guy’ they mentioned.

And he didn’t look pleased. I must’ve missed the pleasantries in the time it took me to walk down here if Sig’s rapidly fading smile was anything to go by. Like Gatre, like Jahlen, like all the other griffons in this hole in the ground, the old guy didn’t seem thrilled to have Sentinels on his doorstep. The moment I entered the hollow, his eyes shifted to me, and I stopped dead in my tracks. Something about those blood red eyes, even with one clouded with cataracts, wouldn’t let me move.

My mouth went dry as I fumbled for words. Eventually, I managed a lame “I’m with him” and a vague point in Sigur’s general direction. When the griffon blinked, I felt whatever grip he had on me release, and I scurried to Sig’s side for safety. Which was kind of dumb, considering I had more guns on my person than the griffons had in the whole hollow. But they had talons and beaks, and I was more terrified of being ripped apart than I was of being shot. At least one way would’ve been quick.

It didn’t help that Sig and the old griffon just stared at each other. The tension hung so thick in the air that it was hard to breathe. When it became clear that the old griffon wasn’t interested in speaking first, Sig held a talon to his beak and coughed. “So…”

“No,” the old griffon said, his gravely voice heavy with anger. “Leaving to join them was a foolish mistake. One I hoped was just a passing sentiment of youth. I’d hoped that when you returned to us, assuming that you even survived that far from the quarry, it would be to return to our flock. Not ask it to join you in ruin.”

Sigur inhaled sharply. “Elder Kerzin, I know you’re not blind to the happenings in the valley. If Gatre and Jahlen already know about what the Sentinels did to the Crimson’s fort, then I know that you’re aware, too. Surely you have to understand that there will never be an opportunity like the present to end them once and for all.”

“What I understand,” Kerzin barked, his gnarled talons flexing against the stone, “is that you’ve made the Crimson angry… and now you want to throw your brothers and sisters headlong into the fray where they’ll be slaughtered in your stead?” He snorted and scowled at us. “Are you truly so far gone that you’re willing to sacrifice your family for somebody else’s problems?”

I could tell that Sigur was trying very hard to keep his tone in check. “Elder, you have to understand—”

“I understand completely,” Kerzin said, cutting him off with a wave of his hand. “The Crimson have never bothered us, because they know that we’re more trouble than it’s worth. They would lose two ponies for every one of us. But if we throw our weight behind their enemies, suddenly killing us is worth that price.” He shook his head. “Think with your brain, Sigur. Not with your heart. Our safety is all that matters. The rest of the valley can become Carrion’s personal plaything for all I care.”

He tapped his talons against the ground like he was satisfied with his answer. But while Sig tried to form some kind of calm response, I decided I’d heard enough of this ‘it’s not my problem’ shit from people this week. Stomping my hoof on the ground, I leered at Kerzin and all but spat my words out. “Really? Really? Are you that much of a short-sighted retarded shithead that you don’t understand what’s happening out there?!” I pointed behind us in the general direction of the valley. “Carrion has taken everything. Everything! The whole damn valley is his, from that fucking dam you can all see every day to little shitholes a hundred miles from here! Two weeks ago, I didn’t even know that there were other ponies living in the valley, right under my nose. But that didn’t stop the Crimson from slaughtering my mother and enslaving my friends when they found us! And sooner or later, it’s going to happen to you, too. Because Carrion’s running out of places to enslave, and now he’s got some ponies in a faraway place personally interested in his little operation. So yes, he’s willing to pay the price in blood and lead to put your sorry hides under his hoof too.” Snarling, I withdrew a step and tried to stare down the Elder. “And he doesn’t give a single fuck about how many lives it’s going to take to crush you. He has ringbirds that will swat you out of the sky no problem. What are you gonna do against that? He will crush you. And when he does, the rest of us will be too busy being fucking dead from fighting him to help.”

I felt the red haze slowly pull back from my vision and realized I was panting. I also realized that Sig looked horrified. I also realized that instead of threatening Kerzin with logic, it only looked like I’d pissed him off. In hindsight, I probably should have avoided calling him a ‘retarded shithead’, even if it was true.

Kerzin’s not-cloudy eye narrowed at me. “Leave,” he growled, his voice a quiet whisper of pure rage. “Leave before you kill us all.”

Sigur stepped forward and held up a talon. “Elder, please—!”

“No!” Kerzin snapped, his head whipping from me to Sig. “We let you back because you were family. Now I’m not so sure I was right to do so.” He pointed to me and hissed through his crooked beak, “Them or us. It’s as simple as that.”

Sig froze with his beak hanging open. After a moment, he clapped his hands together and practically begged Kerzin to reconsider. “Elder, please think about this. Her words might not be respectful, but—!”

“What part did I not make clear?” Kerzin hissed. His claws clicked across the floor as he limped over to Sig until he was beak to beak with the Sentinel. “Your friends are not welcome here. They never will be. And we will not be joining them.” Pulling back, the Elder let out a forced breath and pointed toward Gatre, who’d been standing to the side with a pensive look on his face. “Do not make me have to have your own brother remove you from my sight.”

Closing his eyes, Sig curtly nodded once. “We cannot return until sunrise tomorrow. That’s when the mages will teleport to the forest to bring us back home.”

Kerzin scratched at his beak. It looked like he was eyeing Sigur up, and I debated whether I should toggle the safeties on my machine guns. Finally, scowling, he waved a talon and turned away. “Fine. You may stay until then. I suggest you use the time to get a few last words in with your siblings. The stones know that you’ll never see them again.”

Sigur’s head crest drooped, but he covered it with a stiff nod. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Then, turning to me, he just gave me a sharp glare before marching to the mouth of the hollow. Spreading his wings, he took off into the air, climbing toward the edge of the quarry, leaving me alone in the chamber.

Swallowing hard, I gave Gatre a nervous look before I scampered out after Sig. The griffons didn’t want anything to do with the Sentinels because they were afraid of upsetting the Crimson. Any chance of persuading them otherwise went up in flames the moment I opened my fat mouth. Even worse, I might’ve gotten Sig exiled from the quarry for the rest of his life.

What had I done?

Chapter 22: The Bird of Death

Sig was not happy to see me.

I’d tracked him down after he flew away from Kerzin. He was perched on one of the cliffs overlooking the valley, his helmet discarded and lying in the dirt. His long, leonine tail was wrapped around his body, and he sat almost as still as a statue. At least, until I got close and opened my mouth to apologize.

“Ember,” he said, sharply cutting me off before I could even say a word. Icy blue hawk eyes snapped into view, staring me down with a predatory glare. “Do you ever think before you speak?”

“Uh…” I said, already floundering before I even had a chance to start. “Sometimes?”

Sigur’s beak grinded and he looked away with an exasperated sigh. “Right.”

Biting my lip, I slowly walked over to Sig’s side. Eventually, ears wilting, I stared down at my hooves. “I’m sorry. I’m just… frustrated.”

It took a moment before Sig responded. “There’s nothing wrong with frustration. Believe me, I’m frustrated too.” His talons scratched against the rock he was sitting on, and he shook his head. “They’re too scared to take a stand. They want to spend the rest of their lives hiding under a rock and hoping that the Crimson don’t come their way. After all, it’s worked for us in the past. We’re so close to the dam and they don’t bother us. But that’s not going to last. I know it. You know it. I bet even they know it, even if they want to pretend otherwise.”

Then he glared at me. “But insulting them isn’t going to make them listen. That’s probably the worst thing you could’ve done.”

I fell to my haunches and nodded. “I fucked up. I’m sorry,” I said, frowning at the rock under my hooves. “I should’ve kept my muzzle shut.”

“I’m glad we agree,” Sig said, a coolness in his voice. Then, shaking his head, he laid down on his stomach and hung his talons over the edge of the cliff. “I’m going to try again later to convince them after the old guy calms down a bit. And I think I’ll talk to him alone,” he added, shooting me a sideways glance.

I conceded defeat and bowed my head. “Probably for the best…”

It was pretty clear Sigur needed some time to just think, so I stood up and left him alone. Besides, I needed a little bit of time to myself, anyway. No, not that kind of time. I had Zip for that. But just time to… to just mull over my thoughts and try to relax. I certainly knew I wasn’t going to get the chance to do that in the quarry with a bunch of pissed off griffons watching me, so I worked my way around until I found a rusted out excavator to sit on. Sliding my helmet off of my head, I dropped it on the ground next to me and dug into my saddlebags until I found a wooden box with a familiar symbol on it.

I pulled out one of the four remaining cigarettes in it and lit the end with a thought. At least I could do that with my magic. Maybe one day I’d master fireballs. I stuck the cancer stick between my lips and took a draw, closing my eyes as I did so. The chemicals hit my bloodstream within seconds, and I felt like I blew a great deal of my frustration and worry out of my body with the cloud of smoke. These things were great.

Even though I originally wanted to come over here and think, I found myself just pushing away all my thoughts. I’d had enough of worrying about my own failures since the Crimson attack on Blackwash. Though I couldn’t just go do some target practice or fuck my brains out with Zip, this worked just as well. Sad that I only had three left now. I was probably going to need more than three over the next week or two alone.

But what kind of weeks would those be? Would we be moving forward with our plan, confident that we had the numbers to succeed? Or would we merely be readying for a suicidal last stand, a final cry of defiance before Carrion crushed us all under his hoof? Fuck if I knew. I didn’t want to think about it, which meant that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When I began to suck down ash from the tiny stub between my lips, I spat the butt away and instinctively whipped out another without even thinking. Well, I guess I was down to two now…

“Nervous?”

I jumped at the voice, just barely recognizing it from days ago. Looking over my shoulder, I saw none other than Denarius standing next to me, still wearing his suit, still with his neatly trimmed facial hair. The silvery unicorn shook his head and sat down next to me, groaning as he leaned back against the excavator. “I don’t blame you. You’ve certainly got a lot to worry about.”

I plucked my cigarette from my lips and just held it in the air with my magic. “What are you doing here?!” I asked, incredulous.

Denarius just chuckled. “I’m a merchant. I go where the cartridges are.” His red magic shook a bag hanging from his neck, which made a few jingling sounds as bullets of all sorts and sizes clattered against each other. “Last week it was Green Valley, this week it’s the griffons’ quarry. They need supplies as badly as any other valley settlement, if not more.”

I looked to my left, where I could see the dam in the distance. “You’re a little close to Crimson territory, though. Didn’t you say that they just pillage caravans for fun?”

“Nopony ever made any money without taking a gamble every now and then,” Denarius said, shrugging. “Doubled my bodyguards as a precaution anyway. Turns out bandits don’t want to test their mettle against sixteen well-armed mercenaries. They have enough brainpower to know that’s a bad idea.”

I nodded and fell silent, putting the cigarette back in my mouth and taking another draw from it. Between the idle chatter with Denarius and the chemicals bombarding my brain, I was starting to forget about my anxiety. Sure it was two cigarettes in a hoofful of minutes, but at least it wasn’t anything hard, right?

“I heard about what your friends did to the Crimson’s fort,” Denarius said after a bit. “Damn impressive. Bold, even, if the rumors I’ve heard about their numbers are true.” He eyed the armor I was wearing and pointed at it. “You one of them now?”

“For better or for worse,” I said, shrugging. “It’s not where I figured I’d end up a week ago, but desperate times call for desperate measures. They needed me, and I needed them. It worked for everypony.”

Denarius nodded. “So did you find your friends?”

“One of them,” I said. “They took the others to the dam.” I looked to the left again, trying to stare through the concrete and steel keeping it together. This was the closest I’d been to Nova and Brass since the attack on Blackwash. Where in that relic of the old world where they being held? More importantly, were they even still alive? Nova they needed (or at least I prayed they needed her), but Brass? He was just a militiapony, even if he was a captain. What use would Carrion see in him to keep him around and alive?

“Well, I wish you the best of luck in rescuing them,” Denarius said, standing up and grunting. “You’re going to need all the help you can get, and I want to make sure that I’m far away from the dam when it happens. Maybe even gone from the valley entirely. Celestia knows that if you lose, there won’t be anypony to hold them back if they decide to get real nasty with the caravans.”

I held up a hoof and sat upright. “What is that all about?”

Denarius blinked. “Pardon?”

“Celestia,” I said, angling my head to the side. “I’ve heard it a bunch of times since coming to the valley. I thought it was just a fairy tale.”

“Well,” Denarius said, brushing a hoof against his suit, “Tell that to the ponies of the valley. They’re very superstitious. Legend has it that Celestia was a deity that moved the sun around Equus. Supposedly ruled Equestria too for a long time. At least, until she died.”

I furrowed my brow, remembering the symbol on the dam… the dam bearing her name. “And ponies actually believe that?”

The merchant shrugged. “It’s more common than you think. Ponies on Auris will worship any or all of the four alicorns. Celestia, Luna, Cadance, Twilight—any of them. It gives them something to believe in when times are rough.”

“And you?” I asked, taking a draw on the cigarette and flicking away the butt. “What do you believe?”

Denarius pursed his lips; I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “I believe in hope,” he finally said. “Deep inside of us, there’s good waiting to come out. We might have forgotten it when Equestria abandoned us all those years ago, but it’s still there. You can see it in the farmer, in the child, in the slave who’s been beaten into submission, time and time again. All it takes is the right moment to draw that goodness out and for something magical to happen. And so long as ponies are still willing to believe in kind and merciful beings like Celestia, then there’s hope for them yet.”

I nodded, mulling over his words. “You certainly sound like an optimist,” I finally said, a small smile settling on my lips.

“I try to be,” Denarius said, smiling back at me. “A pessimist would’ve given up long ago.”

“Heh. Right.” Sighing, I looked at the box lying next to me and shut it with a flick of my magic. Then I remembered who I was talking to. “Hey, before you go…” Denarius raised an eyebrow and turned back to me, and I lightly shook the box. “Got any more? I could probably use a top off before shit hits the fan.”

Denarius just shrugged. “Supposing you got the bullets, I’m sure I’ve got a few lying in my bags.” He beckoned for me to follow him, and together we set off toward the lip of the quarry, where I saw his small army of mercenaries gathered, thin bags of supplies on their backs. I guess Denarius dumped off a good bit of his wares while Sig and I were busy trying to convince Kerzin to join us. His magic pulled a wrap of paper out of the bags of one of the mercenaries, and he unfolded it to show me almost two dozen home rolled cigarettes.

I’ll skip over the haggling part, but I feel like Denarius gave me a fair lesson in how much a bullet was worth in Auris’ economy. Big bullets were worth much more than little bullets; I was able to trade a single .50cal round I’d gotten in the random assortment of cartridges Barley had given me for two cigarettes, but it took like ten or twelve .22 rounds to buy just one. In the end, I gave Denarius a whole bunch of random bullets for ten more cigarettes, which I greedily added to my box. At least I was stocked up for a while now.

As we finished our exchange, I noticed a gaggle of griffons watching us from a distance, whispering among themselves. A shiver ran down my spine, and I tried my best to shake it off with a literal shake of my head. Denarius noticed my uneasiness, and his eyes flicked to the griffons. “Seems like you’re not welcome here,” he commented.

“You can say that again,” I muttered, frowning at the griffons. “The Sentinels sent me and another soldier that grew up here to try and negotiate an alliance of sorts. We need their numbers if we’re going to kill Carrion. But they don’t want anything to do with us.”

Denarius nodded and watched the group disband, the griffons flying in different directions. “They’re afraid of what the Crimson would do to them if word gets out that they’re hiding Sentinels.”

“But they don’t seem to understand that if they just join us then they won’t have to worry about the Crimson ever again!” I hung my head, exasperated, and kicked a pebble away. “We could end this, but people are too afraid to stand up for what’s right.”

“It’s hard to convince somepony to risk death for some cause that they’re not a part of,” Denarius said. “Why throw away your safety trying to change the status quo?”

“It’s stupid,” I muttered. “So stupid.”

The merchant patted me on the shoulder. “I understand your frustration. I really do. If there was some way I could help you, I would.”

“Well, you have a bunch of mercenaries, right?” I asked, feeling a tiny glimmer of hope. “And they’re really well armed, too.”

But Denarius shook his head. “‘Fighting a war’ isn’t in their contract,” he said. “They’re only paid to escort me between my stops in the valley. If I tried to rent them out as a private army, they’d abandon me in an instant. No merc wants to fight the Crimson anyway. There are always easier jobs.”

Well that was disappointing. “The Sentinels are trying to hire mercs, though,” I said. “I think they were gonna pay them a thousand cartridges each. Wouldn’t your guards be interested in that when they’re done protecting you?”

Denarius shrugged. “Maybe. Throw a thousand .50s at a merc and they’ll probably sign up, even if it means squaring off against Carrion. The Sentinels can probably afford it, too.” After a moment, he added, “Though if they’re this desperate to try to recruit local settlements instead of hiring a mercenary army, they’re either really stingy with their ammo, or they really don’t have much to begin with. I couldn’t say, though. I’ve never been to the Bastion myself.”

It was certainly something to speak to Zip or Sigur about, at least. Before I could say anything else, a look from one of Denarius’ mercenaries got his attention. Grunting, he rolled his shoulders and stretched his limbs. “The mercs are getting antsy. The longer they’re out here with me, the longer it’ll take for them to go back to their base of operations and take new contracts.”

I felt a little crestfallen that Denarius was already leaving again. “Aww. Well, I hope the rest of your stops pay off,” I said, turning back to his supply bags as he began to tidy them up and strap them on. “Hopefully this won’t be the last time we see each other.”

“Well, if the stars are willing, then we’ll meet again,” he said, solemnly chuckling. Once he had all of his bags strapped across his flanks, he smiled at me and touched my shoulder. “Stay safe out there. That armor won’t protect you from everything.”

I nodded back at him. “I will, don’t worry.”

“Good.” Then, with a bow, the merchant turned away and began to walk away from the quarry to the trail leading back down the mountain, his mercenaries leading the way.

But before he could disappear entirely, I galloped after him. “Wait!” I shouted, causing the little caravan to stop. When I reached his side, I held my hoof out to him. “Ember. It’s… it’s my real name.”

The merchant smiled and shook my hoof. “Ember. That’s a beautiful name.” Then, patting me on the shoulder once more, he nodded to me. “Stay safe, Ember.”

Then he turned away and the caravan began to move again. I watched them disappear down the mountainside until finally they were little more than colorful specks vanishing under the treetops.

The rest of the day was… uneventful. You’d think that something interesting would happen, but nope, at least not while Sig and I were there. It felt like the griffons were going out of their way to avoid us as much as possible, which, to be fair, is probably exactly what they were doing. Even Sig’s attempts to appeal to his siblings weren’t working. Kerzin had made up his mind, and the rest of the flock was falling in behind their leader.

I did get to meet a few of Sig’s siblings, though, such as his younger sister, Dacie. She was a gray hen with an assortment of lighter and darker gray feathers across her face and chest. The display was pretty attractive, at least in my opinion. I wasn’t sure how her looks stacked up by griffon standards. But apparently, she liked me, because when we went to visit her, she spent a lot of time by my side, making some sort of purring noise and stealing looks at me when she thought I wasn’t looking.

Suffice it to say, I was a little uncomfortable about that. Just the thought of having a sharp beak or talons anywhere near my nethers was a terrifying prospect.

“So why don’t you just stay here?” Dacie had asked when we’d gone to see her in her hollow. Well, technically it was Sig’s hollow, too. All of his brothers and sisters occupied one literal hole in the quarry wall, just like the other flocks of siblings that’d come before and after his. At the moment, though, Dacie was the only one there, grabbing a bow and a quiver of arrows to go hunting.

“Because I have obligations to the Sentinels,” Sig said, running a hand through his head crest. He was standing on the opposite side of Dacie’s bed while she got her things. “I’m one of their veteran soldiers. I can’t leave them now.”

“Why not?” Dacie said, frowning and crossing her arms. “You left us without a second thought. Or did you forget that, too?”

I fidgeted from where I sat at the side of the room. At least Dacie being mad at her brother had taken her attention away from me for a moment, though it still left me trapped in awkward silence as the fucking shitshow that was today just kept getting worse.

When Sig didn’t answer, Dacie sighed and reached across one side of the bed to grasp his talons. “It’s been twelve winters, Sig. You’ve been gone from the quarry for twelve years!”

“I know,” Sig murmured.

“You remember Ailia and Filo and their siblings, right?” Dacie asked. When Sig nodded, she released his talons and pointed out the opening of the hollow. “They’re all grown up now! They’re the ones doing the shit jobs, and when you left, they could hardly fly! Spirits, Yvelde has already had three kids, and I’ve had one of my own!” Her talons tightened around the bow in frustration, and she spread her arms wide. “How could you just leave all of us like that?! And not only leave us, but never bother to visit once in all that time?!”

“It hasn’t been all fun and games for me, you know,” Sigur growled back, forcing Dacie to back down. “I’ve spent the last five years hiding at our home base because of the Crimson. They own the valley now, Dacie! Everything from the dam to the coast is theirs. Theirs to enslave and plunder as they wish.”

He tipped his head down and stared at his balled fists. “I’ve been fighting that every day since I left home. For twelve years—don’t you understand?” He stretched a talon out to Dacie like he was pleading for her to listen to him. “I’ve been fighting them for twelve years to save you. To save all of you. Until the Crimson are gone, you’ll never be safe. Never.”

Dacie fidgeted with her bow. “The Crimson don’t bother us,” she murmured. “And they never will.”

Sig’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t possibly know that for sure.”

“They’ll never bother us,” she murmured again, clutching her bow to her chest. “And if you know what’s best for you, you’ll leave as soon as you can.”

Without another word, she slipped around the bed and marched toward the exit, not even bothering to look over her shoulder as she did so.

We were begrudgingly offered some food to eat and a hollow to sleep in near the bottom of the quarry. At least the food was pleasant, even if our hosts’ attitudes weren’t. It certainly beat the mush that the Sentinels served day in and day out. Seriously, they really needed a good cook. I’m surprised morale was as high as it was when you only had what basically amounted to cardboard oatmeal to eat for your three square meals a day.

The hollow, on the other hoof, was cramped and bare, and this far down in the quarry, it got dark early. All we were provided with were two threadbare bedrolls and old, smelly pillows. We had to pile our armor and bags on the ground in the back of the hollow, and even then, the end of my bedroll poked out under the night sky. At least it was still summer, and still warm, so I didn’t really need blankets. And besides, it still wasn’t as bad as sleeping inside of a tree or on a half-rotted floor in an attic. The hard stone did really hurt my back, though, and I knew I’d be feeling the pain in the morning.

Which probably explained why I couldn’t get any sleep. Sig didn’t have that problem, because he was out like a light. Turns out that griffons can snore, though it was more of a whistling noise because of his beak. I also really had to piss, so I had enough motivation to go wandering around the quarry at like two in the morning.

I left my shit in the hollow, figuring I wouldn’t need it, and began the long spiraling walk out of the quarry. I really wished that I had wings or knew how to teleport; it would’ve turned a ten minute walk into like a twenty second flight or a few teleports out of the bottom of the quarry. The glaring halogen construction lights chased away whatever heaviness had been building in my eyelids, and the cello bugs’ deep trilling provided a calm stillness to the night. Only one of the two moons was out tonight, so I could see the stars overhead. They weren’t as clear as they usually were in Blackwash, but the brightest constellations were still visible, even with the bright light the bigger moon, Argenta, reflected into the night. The curtains on most of the griffon hollows were drawn shut as the cat-birds got some sleep.

I was definitely awake by the time I finished the hike out of the quarry, and with my bladder about to burst, I found a shadowy corner behind an excavator to make water in. I noticed after I squatted down that I could see the dam from here, its top awash in harsh lights that threw off a haze into the surrounding night. Smirking, I imagined Carrion looking out his window to see me pissing in front of his home, a big ‘fuck you’ to the Crimson and everything it stood for. One day, when we finally put him in the ground, I was going to piss on his grave, too.

Sighing, I stepped away from the excavator and shook my matted mane out. I knew I had helmet hair, and even though I was supposed to be sleeping, it was pissing me off. Maybe the next time I banged Zip I’d ask her to comb it and brush it and braid it and shit. It’d been too long since somepony played with my mane, and I certainly didn’t have the time to style it myself. What with saving my friends and shooting Carrion in the dick and all that.

Then I noticed the light moving across the valley, away from the dam.

Toward me.

I blinked, blinked again, then rubbed my eyes, blinking once more just to be sure. Yes, that light just flew away from the dam. And yes, it was going in my direction. If I held my breath, I could hear the sound of a turbine echoing over the emptiness of the valley—and growing louder.

Spewing forth a string of obscenities, I turned around and galloped back down the ramp into the quarry, only stopping when I finally made it to our little hovel at the bottom. Once there, I rushed to wake Sig up, and by ‘rushed to him’ I mean ‘tripped and fell on my face in front of him’.

Thankfully, the clattering of my tangled limbs, my pained grunt, and my subsequent panting was enough to wake the griffon up, and stars did he jump out of his bedroll. “Ember?” he asked as soon as he confirmed that he wasn’t in any immediate danger. “What’s going on?”

He hopped over to me and helped me up, and I immediately grabbed my armor and began slapping the pieces on with my magic. “Ri… Ringbird,” I panted. “In the valley… Coming toward us…”

“Shit,” was all Sigur had to say, and he immediately began throwing his own armor on. Thankfully it was pretty advanced stuff, so all we had to do was hold the pieces near each other and they’d connect and lock with a hiss and a whir. In a minute we were both armed and armored, and the adrenaline now roaring through my blood had chased away whatever lingering exhaustion remained.

Then I got another healthy shot of it when Sigur said “Hold on” and grabbed me by the shoulders, taking wing with me dangling beneath him.

I may or may not have screamed at suddenly becoming weightless.

Sigur’s quick flight across the quarry took us to the central hollow, and he barely gave me any warning before he let go and dropped me the last foot or two to the ground. Through some lucky limb flailing I didn’t end up on my face again, and I immediately turned to follow him past the drawn curtain. I noticed that there was plenty of light inside, unlike the other hollows which were all mostly dark.

Inside, I found out why. Kerzin sat in a chair, watching a candle slowly burn down, with ten armed griffons sitting or standing around him. They all seemed like they were waiting for something, and the looks they gave me set off something in my core. A chill crept down my spine as the hair on my neck stood on end, and my legs locked up as I felt anxiety taking hold of my limbs.

In short, something was wrong.

Whether or not Sigur noticed it, I didn’t know. Panting from the quick dash across the quarry, he steadied himself with a hand against one of the quarry walls and looked right at the back of Kerzin’s head. “Elder, you have to raise the alarm. Call the patrols back, now.”

Kerzin was silent, his eyes still fixated on the dancing flame in front of him. Around him, the other griffons in the room fidgeted. I recognized one as Jahlen, though Gatre was nowhere to be seen. He wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

“Elder Kerzin,” Sig tried again when the old griffon didn’t respond. “The Crimson… they’re coming. There’s a ringbird in the valley, and it’s coming here. We have to ready everygriffon, get the young ones to the lower hollows, and the nest makers, too. We won’t have long before they’re here.”

Silence. I swallowed hard as a cold sweat broke out on my forehead.

Exasperated, Sig turned to Jahlen. “J, what’s going on? What’s with the old guy?”

“You should never have come here,” Kerzin rasped, slowly shaking his head from side to side as he stared into the flame. “You should have never done this to your flock.”

Sig’s beak moved, and I could see the confusion on his face. “E-Elder?”

Grunting, Kerzin stood up and turned around, his hawk eyes immediately fixing us in place. “Do you know why the Crimson have never bothered us, and why they will never bother us?” he asked, stepping closer. “It’s not because they ignore us. Far from it. They know that we are here. They know that we’re too weak to stop them if they wanted to enslave us all. We are only alive today because I have made us useful to them. We are more valuable to them alive than dead.”

I felt my jaw hanging slack. “W-What?” I stammered, taking a step back as the elder got close. “Y-You’re not—?”

“I do what I must to keep us safe,” Kerzin spat, glaring at me. “The Crimson wants tribute. They want information. I give it to them. I have scouts keep an eye on caravans and Sentinel patrols around the quarry. In return, they don’t wipe us off the face of Auris. And when word got out that the Sentinels were gaining ground in the valley after their attack on the fort…”

He stopped in front of Sigur and looked him in the eyes. “Carrion was very clear to report the presence of any Sentinels near the quarry. If he ever found out that we’d harbored them, even for a night, he promised to burn everything we have. When given the choice between extermination and subjugation, I believe the choice I made was easy.”

“You sold us out,” Sig hissed, his voice dripping with venom.

“Do you think I wanted to?” Kerzin retorted, glaring at Sig. “Sentinel or not, you were one of our flock. I have no delusions about what the Crimson will do once they get here. My best I can offer you is a burial with our ancestors, so that they may look after your soul. As for the pony…” His eyes swiveled to me. “Whether or not the flesh strippers make a meal out of her is their decision. Or maybe we can sell her to him. He pays well for attractive young mares.” I wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or not that the jumpsuit I wore under the armor covered the brand on my flank. If it came down to it, I’d rather be executed than sold into slavery.

I realized I could hear the whirring noise of the ringbird’s rotor wheel, and it was pretty damn loud. If it wasn’t over the quarry right now, then it had to be really fucking close. Knowing that Sig and I had only a tiny window to shoot our way out of here and escape, I switched off the safeties on my armor guns and pointed the crosshair on my HUD right at Kerzin’s head. “You little—!”

I didn’t even get to finish that before I took a solid whack to the back of the head, sending me onto the floor. Thank the stars I was wearing my helmet, otherwise that probably would’ve knocked me out cold. Instead, I got the lovely feeling of a set of claws held around my throat and a gun barrel all but shoved up my nose as one of Kerzin’s thugs held me down. Next to me, I saw Sig struggle for a moment before a few of the other griffons restrained him and trained their rifles on him. Though they looked like low caliber automatics, I doubted that our armors’ shields would do much against a gun placed right against our fucking skulls. In the corner of the room, Jahlen shifted uncomfortably, but kept his rifle aimed at my brains nonetheless.

“Strip their armor,” Kerzin barked, spinning in place and going back to sit in front of the candle. “Bring them up to Carrion’s soldiers and do whatever they say. Come back to me when it’s finished.”

As a pair of griffons dragged me to my hooves, Sigur fought against the two restraining him even as they tore away his armor. “Think about what you’re doing! You’re writing your name into the wrong side of history! When the Sentinels kill Carrion and learn what happened here, it’ll be your head, Elder! Your head!”

“Better for me to die for the safety of my flock than to drive it into the flames of war,” Kerzin muttered, not even turning to watch as his lackeys dragged us away. “For its fire will leave none untouched, and only charred bones will remain.”

“You fucker!” I screamed at him as the griffons dragged us away, stripping our armor in the process. “You’re dead! You’re fucking dead!” My horn lit up with my rage, earning me a crack across the brow with a griffon’s open hand, the talons raking through my flesh and spilling blood into my eyes. I howled in pain and thrashed about before a punch to the gut completely winded me, leaving me struggling to breathe as my diaphragm spasmed from the blow. Whether or not Sig was also trying to fight, I couldn’t tell, but Kerzin’s thugs dragged us out of the hollow and began driving us out of the quarry.

When the dizziness and nausea finally cleared after the beating I just took, my mind began to race a million miles a minute. I could see the ringbird perched just off to the edge of the quarry above us, its harsh lights almost blinding me as we marched out of the hole in the ground. The silhouettes of a few ponies stood on the edge of the quarry, outlined by the lights behind them. I could see four or five from here, but who knew how many more awaited us just out of sight. Then the blood pouring off of my brow blinded me again, and I shook my head to try and toss it from my eyes. It stung, but it wasn’t like I could stop and wipe it away with my hooves. Using my horn was also out of the question, unless I wanted to get clawed again.

Our march drew some attention from the other griffons in the quarry. Candles were lit and curtains were pulled back as curious griffons poked their heads out to see what all the commotion was about. The elders watched with solemn looks on their faces, while the fledglings watched with piqued curiosity. From her hollow, I caught sight of Dacie watching us go, the horror on her face seemingly etched in stone. Gatre stood by her side, one hand on her shoulder and his beak nervously chewing on the claws of his other hand.

At my side, Sigur turned to his brother. “Did you know about this?” he asked him, hurt painfully clear in his voice. The other griffons shoved him along before he could get his answer, however, and Jahlen only followed at a distance, his wings slowly beating the air and Sigur’s armor held in his talons.

Once we got out of the quarry, the griffons drove us toward a waiting group of six Crimson soldiers. Their leader, who I immediately picked out by his wild and spiky black war paint, trotted up to us with a grin on his face. “Look what we have here! You two fucks lost?”

Sigur didn’t say a word; he only glared at the bandit. For once in my life, I decided to stay quiet and follow his example. I was well aware of the fact that I was a pretty mare surrounded by a group of hardened slavers who probably hadn’t gotten their daily dose of rape in yet. The less I provoked them, the better.

Metal plates clattered behind us as Jahlen and another griffon dumped our armor on the ground. “They came in this morning,” the other griffon said. “Started asking around if we’d join them. We tied them up long enough for you guys to get here.”

“Carrion got the message from your elder, monster,” the Crimson soldier growled, making the griffon shrink back. “And we’ll honor our deal. Consider next month’s tithe paid off.”

The griffon bowed his head, and as a group, they began to back away from us. Even though we weren’t being restrained anymore, neither Sig nor I dared to move with all the guns pointing our way. We were unarmed, or at least I was, since Sig had his claws and everything, and we didn’t have our armor to protect us. They’d gun us down before we even moved a yard. ‘Fucked’ doesn’t even begin to describe just how hopelessly boned we were.

“What are you going to do with them?” Jahlen asked, fidgeting with the other griffons.

“The fuck do you think we’re going to do with them?” The unicorn stomped forward and took a revolver out of its holster, jamming it under my chin before I could blink. My breath caught in my throat as I heard him draw the hammer back. He could end my life with a thought. “They’re Sentinels. They’re too dangerous to make slaves. The only way to be safe is to put a bullet in their fucking skulls.”

“N-Not here, you won’t,” Jahlen stammered, holding up his talons. When the bandit leered at him, he swallowed hard and gestured to the quarry. “The quarry is… it’s hallowed ground. Blood can’t be spilled here.”

I would’ve raised my eyebrow at that, considering I’m pretty sure some of my blood had been spilled on the death march up here, but I was afraid even the tiniest move would set off the gun under my chin. The bullet was less than a fucking foot from its chamber in the revolver to the base of my brain. Just the mere thought of that was enough to hold me still out of fear.

After a tense few seconds, the bandit leader finally took his revolver away from my head, and I gasped for air as I dared to breathe again. “Fine,” the bandit said, holstering his revolver. “We’ll do it out of sight of your stupid hole in the ground. Do what you want with the bodies, we only need the armor to prove to Carrion that the job is done.”

Then he turned to the ponies standing next to him and nodded to us, a sick smile on his muzzle. “Break them.”

As one, the Crimson soldiers moved toward us, hauling me and Sig off of the ground and restraining our attempts to struggle free. While they held me in place, I felt one of them grab hold of my right hind leg and extend it, only for another pony to strike it right in the knee with his rifle. I screamed in pain as my leg immediately snapped in half, and it sounded like they were doing the same to Sigur. Red haze filled my vision, or what was left of it with the blood still falling into my eyes, and all the strength fled my limbs at once. I was too weak and in too much pain to even attempt to resist the Crimson as they dragged me away, my broken and now useless leg trailing through the dirt, sending fresh knives of pain into my flank with every bump and every rock.

Sometimes I really regretted not just living the rest of my life on Barley’s farm, away from all of this shit.

The pain crippling my body made it really hard to keep track of how far they dragged us. All I know is that when they finally released me, we were sitting on a ledge overlooking a very steep fall to the ground below. Under the light of the moon, I thought I could see some kind of six-legged wolf-like things running around under the cliff. Maybe they knew they were about to get some fresh, tenderized meat to feast on.

By my side, Sig struggled to sit up. One of his wings looked dislocated, and they’d also broken one of his cat legs. I tried to help him, but the click of a hammer being cocked froze me in place. Gulping, I looked over my shoulder to see the bandit leader standing behind us with his revolver drawn and aimed at me, the rest of his soldiers watching from a short distance behind him.

My heart pounded in my chest, fighting to burst free. My mouth went dry, and a cold, primal fear settled in my gut. This was it. This was the end of the line. A bullet in the brain and a fall off the cliff to the predators below. That was how it was going to end. I’d never free my friends. I’d never see Gauge or Nova again. I’d never see Zip and her beautiful smiling orange face. I never thought that last night would’ve been the last time I’d ever see her.

I looked away, my eyes drifting up to the moon. I thought I saw Mom’s ghost looking down on me from the stars. If she was up there... if there even was an ‘up there’ to go to... well, I’d guess I’d find that out soon.

I shared one last look with Sigur before closing my eyes. I felt my lungs expand and contract. The coarseness of the stone under my legs. The fiery fingers of pain weaving their way along the nerves in my broken leg. The cut across my brow, still oozing a fair amount of sticky blood. Funny, I never felt so alive before.

One last exhale, my breath flowing over my tongue and between my teeth like water.

“Goodnight,” was all the bandit said to me. A split second later, a gunshot rang out over the valley with a deafening roar.

Chapter 23: Where Brother Fights Brother

Boom!

That was the last thing I heard before the bandit fired. Even though I tried to steel myself for my death, I still flinched at the noise. Funny, I didn’t think I’d even be able to flinch before the bullet blew my skull to pieces.

Two seconds later I realized I was still alive, and my ear really hurt, though nowhere near as bad as my leg.

I opened my eyes and lowered my forelegs, which I’d hidden behind at the last second like they were really going to help me, to see that the bandit had dropped his revolver on the ground. Sticking out of his neck was the bloody shaft of an arrow, the tip dropping beads of crimson onto the moonlit stone beneath him. The unicorn gagged and clawed at the arrow in his neck for a second before he fell to the ground in a meaty, lifeless heap.

That’s when the shooting started.

Sig and I threw ourselves onto the ground as rifle flashes appeared in the bushes around us, cutting into the Crimson soldiers that’d taken us out to our execution. There wasn’t much cover out here by the ledge, and the focused fire from the bushes dropped the other four soldiers in a few seconds. They hardly even got the chance to return fire before they were all dead.

Trembling, I slowly raised my head from the ground as the bushes rustled around us. After a second, a hoofful of griffons emerged from the shadows; I immediately recognized Dacie, Jahlen, and Gatre, and a few others that I assumed were some of Sig’s siblings. Immediately upon seeing Sig’s dislocated wing and broken leg, Dacie cried out and fluttered over to him, literally hovering over him as she looked at his wounds. “Oh, spirits, Sig! What did they do to you?!”

“It’s… it’s fine,” Sig wheezed, doing his best to fight down the pain. I could certainly empathize with him; I also had a completely broken leg that made it hard to do anything other than lie on the ground and scream. “I’ve had worse.”

If he wasn’t going to do it, I sure was. “Fuck!” I screamed as I accidentally put some weight on my leg. Dacie turned her attention to me as Sig’s brothers gathered around him, and she steadied me with a hand on my back.

“Fucking monsters,” Dacie said, sparing a quick glare at the corpses on the ground. “Are you alr—?”

“They broke my fucking leg!” I howled, making her flinch. I knew at a glance that my leg was not supposed to bend like that. “Fuck! Fucking fuck fuck fuck!”

“I can see that,” Dacie murmured, and she turned back to her siblings. “Gatre, some sticks for splints, and some cloth.” The aforementioned griffon nodded once and flew off, and then Dacie turned her attention to Jahlen and Sig. “J, wait for Hoana to get here to set his wing. It only looks dislocated, thank the spirits. She’s the expert at that stuff anyway.”

“What about the ringbird?” Sig asked, pointing back toward the quarry. “They likely had more—”

“It’s taken care of,” Dacie said, waving her hand. “It was grounded and its transport bay was open. Pilots weren’t expecting a fight. Where else do you think the rest of our siblings are?”

“And Kerzin?”

“Probably holing himself up as we speak,” Jahlen said. “The whole quarry could hear the gunfire, I bet. It’s definitely not two shots in the night.”

Gatre returned a minute later with the supplies to make splints, and he and Dacie set about patching us up as best as they could. “They’re drawing fucking lines in the quarry,” he said as soon as he landed. “Kerzin’s pulling all the older flocks to him. Everygriffon else is falling in line because they don’t know what’s happening.” He looked to Jahlen and nodded. “If J didn’t tell us what was going on we wouldn’t have been able to save you.”

I gasped as Dacie straightened my leg and bound it in place with the splint. “So the rest of the quarry is against us?” she asked.

“Some of the younger flocks and the flocks around our age might join us,” Gatre said. “They knew us the best. They’ll be just as pissed at Kerzin as we are that he tried to sell Sig out to the Crimson.”

Dacie finished my splint and put her head in her hands. “Fuck… This can’t be happening…”

Jahlen swallowed hard. “There has to be some other way. I’m not going to fight family.”

“Do… do you think they’ll actually fight back?” I asked, still feeling dizzy from the pain in my leg. At least it was dying down now that I had it in a splint. “Kerzin’s insane, but the rest of you? Will they shoot if we don’t?”

Sigur looked at Jahlen. “How much does anygriffon else know about Kerzin’s deal with the Crimson?”

Jahlen shrugged. “Not much, as best I can tell. Maybe some of the other elders know, but I’ve never heard anygriffon speak of it before. He didn’t even tell me why he needed me tonight, only that something important was going to happen.”

A pair of griffons fluttered over from somewhere near the quarry and landed in front of us. “We have the ringbird,” one of them, a hen, said. “The pilots weren’t expecting an ambush.” Seeing Sig’s wing, she immediately set her rifle on the ground and rushed over to him. “Did they do that to you?!”

“Yeah, Hoana,” Sig said as she put her talons around his dislocated wing’s crest. “If you could just—gah!”

“Just what?” she asked, letting go of Sig’s newly relocated wing. The wet popping noise it made was kind of unsettling.

“Ungh… Never mind. Thanks.” Sig stretched his relocated wing, wincing as he put it through the full range of motions. “That’s going to be sore for a week.”

“Stay off it until the ligaments heal,” Hoana warned. “They need rest to strengthen and repair.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Grunting, Sig attempted to stand up, and Jahlen and Gatre lent him their support. His makeshift splint kept his broken leg off of the ground, and he staggered across the stone on three limbs. “This is going to be difficult to fight with.”

I managed to stand up as well, though a sudden bout of dizziness from changing positions nearly sent me staggering off the cliffside. Dacie yanked me back to her and held me safely against her side—a little too close for my comfort. I nodded to her and waved her off once the world stopped spinning, and broke free from her hold to go tot over to Sigur. “How long do you think we have before Carrion realizes something’s wrong?”

“He’ll probably radio in within the hour,” Sig said, frowning at his talons as he thought. “He’ll respond violently if he thinks he’s going to lose another ringbird. Letting one of his trump cards fall into our hands is not something he’ll tolerate.”

“How violently are we talking about here?” I asked, warily eyeing the distant dam. It probably wasn’t even an hour’s flight, maybe two, as the pegasus flies from here to there. And I’d seen firsthoof what one of the Crimson’s pegasus assault forces could do. I didn’t want to turn Sig’s home into another Blackwash.

“He may respond with another ringbird if he thinks the stakes are high enough. Not sure how many he has left, but we’ve only ever counted three, so it’d likely be his last. At the very least, given our size, he’ll probably send two hundred fliers.” Sig looked down at the glowing lights of the quarry just on the other side of this stony outcrop of rock. “And if we’re as fractured as Gatre says we are, there won’t be a fight.”

“Only a slaughter,” I murmured, images of Blackwash flashing before my eyes. I stomped my hoof on a tuft of grass to try to relieve some stress. “So we have at best like three hours to get everyone out of the quarry. At worst, a little over an hour.”

Sig nodded, but Jahlen sputtered and flew up to us. “Evacuate the quarry?! Are you insane?!” He grabbed Sig by the shoulders and lowered his head until their beaks were almost touching. “This is our home, Sig! Our home! We can’t just leave it!”

You want to fucking die?” I asked, limping up next to him. “The Crimson are going to kill your cat asses if you try to defend this shithole. They’ve got better guns, more soldiers, and Carrion isn’t afraid to send hundreds to die to wipe you guys out. He’s got a ringbird, and even though we stole one of his, I bet that nobody here knows how to fly it.” I took a step back and nodded toward the dam. “You want to try to fight that tonight? Or would you rather live through tonight to take your quarry back when the Sentinels kill his ass?”

Jahlen leered at me. “There it is. I bet you two played this out to force us to join the Sentinels, didn’t you?”

“If I was going to try to trick you, J, I would’ve done so without nearly getting executed,” Sig said. “Technically speaking, it wasn’t me or Ember who killed all those Crimson bandits.”

Jahlen looked like he was about ready to explode, but Dacie stopped him with a hand on his shoulder and another against his cheek. “J, we have to do it. There’s no other way.”

“Like shit there isn’t!” Jahlen shouted, rounding on Dacie. “There has to be another way! We can… can…”

“It’s all fucked,” Gatre said from behind us, and even Hoana nodded. “At this point, we have to go. Otherwise we’re all dead.”

Jahlen’s beak moved, but no words came out. Eventually, he sighed and dipped his head. “Fine. You’re right.” Then he pointed to the quarry. “But what about all of them? They weren’t the ones that killed these Crimson fuckers, but Carrion will still kill them all if we leave them. We have to get them out of here!”

“We need to get rid of Kerzin,” Sig said, and the rest of his siblings looked at each other. “He’s the one keeping them at the quarry. If we get rid of him, we should be able to explain to the rest what’s going on. The other elders would know just what we’re up against.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” Hoana asked, brushing her swooping raven feathers out of her face.

“Then we get as many griffons to follow us as we can and we get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Seriously, three hours at best. We’ll have to disappear into the forest so that the Crimson can’t find us until the morning. That’s when we can all get teleported back to the Bastion.”

“Don’t forget the ringbird,” Sig said, pointing back in the direction of where it was landed. “That could be a huge game changer. We can’t let the Crimson take it back.”

Dacie crossed her arms. “So, how are we supposed to get rid of the old guy, get everygriffon out of the quarry, and hide a huge transport craft that none of us can fly in under three hours?”

“Fuck it, we’ll improvise,” I said, starting to limp toward the quarry. “All I know is that standing around here isn’t going to do anything other than waste time we don’t have.”

“Ember’s right,” Sig said, limping after me. “Let’s see if we can deal with Kerzin first. Is our armor still by the ringbird?”

Gatre nodded as the rest of Sig’s siblings fell in behind us. “Dumped in a pile, right where the bandits left it.” He swallowed hard before adding, “I hope you won’t need to use it.”

“I hope so too,” Sig murmured, with similar thoughts almost definitely bouncing around the other griffons’ heads. At the very least, not another word was spoken until we made it to the ringbird.

Just like Gatre said, we found our armor and guns in front of the ringbird, where another small flock of griffons were gathered. They waved to Sig as we approached, and Hoana flew ahead of us to the other group, presumably to tell them what happened. I simply began to float the pieces of my armor off of the ground and don them while Sig did the same. When I donned my helmet, I finally noticed that half of my left ear had been shot off when I’d nearly been executed. It hurt pretty bad, but nowhere near as bad as my leg. The worst part was simply the blood pouring off of it and getting into my earhole; hopefully that stopped soon. But, all things considered, I’d gladly lose half an ear if it meant I got to keep the rest of my head.

It felt strange to sit this close to a ringbird and not be shitting myself. The metal monstrosity loomed over my head, its rotor ring dormant and still, its cargo door open and forming a ramp to the ground. Tiny gun pods were affixed to the sides of the ringbird’s hull at various points, each one fitted with three short barrels—probably its point defense, if I were to take a guess. Carved into the nose were six gun ports, each one housing what looked like a 30mm cannon, and retractable panels that probably housed additional ordinance decorated the lower face of the hull. But most interesting, however, was the emblem emblazoned near the cockpit. It wasn’t the winged horseshoe of Equestria or anything red that I would’ve assumed would identify it as Crimson. Instead, there were three white rectangles of different heights, with the middle being the tallest, set within a ring of gold. What it meant, I hadn’t the slightest idea.

I noticed that Sigur’s siblings had started some conference on their own, and Sig was apparently content to let them resolve it without him. “So this is what they look like up close?” I asked him when he limped over to me. “It’s certainly a beautiful piece of metalworking.”

“If we can get her to fly then she’ll be much more than just pretty,” Sig said, climbing up the ramp. He gestured to me and I followed him into the cargo hold, then through a door into the cockpit. Apart from some drying blood staining the seats, I was impressed with how neat the inside of the war machine was. The ringbird’s cockpit could seat four, two on the left and two on the right of the door, the two seats on each side stacked one behind the other. It looked like the front two seats were for the pilot and co-pilot, and the rear seats handled weapons and electronics. Holographic displays still shimmered in front of each seat, and even with the cockpit’s weirdly angled construction, the windows offered good visibility of the land around us.

Sig clambered into the pilot’s seat and stared at the holographic display as well as the small arsenal of levers and buttons on the panel in front of him. “It’d be too easy to have a ‘go that way’ button, wouldn’t it?” he joked, his talons lightly dancing over the different controls and switches. “Not like I could fly it anyway,” he said, pointing to the floor where two large paddles moved in opposite directions when he pushed down on one of them. “Need both of my legs to work for that.”

I looked at my own broken leg, reminded once again of the throbbing ache that simply wouldn’t go away. I really couldn’t wait to get back to the Bastion and get a medic to throw some healing spells at it, but I’d probably still be in a cast for a little while. Unfortunately, I had to deal with it for the rest of the night. “We’ll get somebody else to take a look at it. Right now, we need to figure out how to deal with Kerzin,” I said.

“Right, right,” Sig said, using the panels to pull himself out of the seat. “Seat’s too cramped for me anyway. The cockpit was made just big enough for ponies to fit comfortably, and then they shrunk it down. Military, right?”

I snickered and led the way out of the ringbird to where Sig’s siblings had all gathered. “Well, what’s the plan?” Sig asked as he descended the ramp.

“We’re going to try to appeal to Kerzin first,” Jahlen said. “If he truly cares about the flock like he claimed he did when he made us turn you guys over, then maybe we can end this peacefully. Get him to come along with us so we can all evacuate with plenty of time before the Crimson get here.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” I asked.

“Then we try to get as many to come with us as we can,” Dacie said. “After everything that’s happened tonight, I know that some of them have to see Kerzin’s mad. He betrayed a flockmate. We don’t forgive that.”

“But if anygriffon shoots at us, then it’s fair game,” Gatre said. “At that point, we need to stop Kerzin by any means necessary. If we take him down, then the rest of the flock should follow us.”

I didn’t really like it, but honestly I didn’t have any better ideas. I could feel the clock winding down, time slipping away until I had another Blackwash on my hooves. “We’re betting a lot on hoping everygriffon else realizes that Kerzin’s insane,” I observed.

“They’ll do the right thing,” Dacie said, smiling at me. “Trust me.”

“I sure hope so,” I said. “I’d like to avoid shooting at your family and friends if I can.”

“Well the longer we stand here the more likely that’s going to happen,” Sig said, his flexing talons digging into the dirt. “We’re just giving Kerzin more time to tell his side of the story.”

Jahlen nodded and took up his rifle. “Right. So how about we get this over with?”

He earned a half-hearted cheer from the rest of us. To be completely honest, nobody really wanted to have this confrontation. It made me sick to my stomach just thinking about it, and I wasn’t the one who might have to shoot at family and friends if this whole thing went south.

As a group, we marched toward the quarry, Sig and I taking the lead with our powerful armor despite our broken legs. I felt myself trembling with each step I took, and I swallowed hard to try to fight down my anxiety. I really didn’t want to do this, not only because I might have to shoot at other griffons, but also because I knew that some of them had rifles that could pierce my armor’s shielding. I’d already nearly eaten lead tonight; I didn’t want to risk doing it again.

When we made it to the lip of the quarry, I felt my stomach drop. Kerzin stood in the middle of a huge crowd of griffons around the main hollow, basically preaching his story to the rest of the quarry. A lot of those griffons were armed, and they listened to Kerzin speak in rapt attention. The old griffon’s waving arms seemed tired but forceful and confident, like he truly believed that what he was saying was the truth.

Jahlen was the first to take wing and hover above that group. “Traitor!” he screamed at Kerzin, interrupting his preaching. Several more of Sig’s siblings took wing alongside Jahlen, while Sigur and Dacie and me started walking down the ramp into the quarry with the rest.

Kerzin calmly lifted his head toward Jahlen. “My child, you do not understand the dangers that we face living so close to the Crimson. How can I be a traitor to our flock if everything I’ve done has only been to protect it?”

“We’re a flock! We’re family!” Hoana shouted down at Kerzin and his followers. “We don’t sell each other out! We don’t try to kill each other when it’s convenient to do so!”

The elder noted Sigur and me walking into the quarry, and I thought I saw a tiny flash of anger in his eyes. It was hard to tell, though, because we were still pretty far away. “And is it any less horrible to try to drag your flock into the flames of war, a war that we can still avoid? When Sigur left years ago, I accepted his delusions as nothing more than the wanderlust and passions of youth. But now that he has returned to lead more of our flock astray, to drive us into a suicidal crusade against an entity that we could not possibly beat even under the best of circumstances, I could not remain passive.” He held at an arthritic talon toward Sigur, pointing with a shaky hand. “He has fought against our benefactor and killed his soldiers. Our only hope for survival now is to offer him to the Crimson and pray that they forgive what has happened here tonight.”

“You’re wrong,” Sigur retorted, holding a talon out in front of me and signaling for us to stop a safe distance away from Kerzin’s troops. “My siblings killed Crimson soldiers at the quarry tonight while trying to defend their brother. Do you think Carrion will actually care whose fault it is? There is only one way out of this, and that’s to leave now before he retaliates.”

“If my ears do not deceive me, then you freely admit that you and your siblings are the reason why our way of life faces extinction!” Kerzin hissed back. “I know what this is! You would turn the Crimson against us to drive us toward your side. You would spill blood in our name to lead us into a war, one we cannot hope to win!”

“And you would sell out a member of your own flock the moment it’s too dangerous to remember our ties!” Dacie shouted at him. Then, pointing to him, she puffed out her chest in a display to the other griffons. “And don’t think for a second that he wouldn’t betray you too if he thought it would save his hide!”

“Everything I have done has been for the good of the flock,” Kerzin growled again. Then, turning to the crowd gathered around him, he gestured to us. “As the wise and respected elder leader of this flock, I show you the only way which we can hope to survive the night. We must purify the threat that seeks to destroy us from within.” His eyes narrowed and I thought I saw his hand tremble for the briefest of moments as he pointed at us. “Kill them.”

I felt my mane bristle underneath my helmet, and we all collectively shuffled back a few steps as the crowd began to move. I saw rifles raise at us as a few of Kerzin’s faithful took aim—but just as many rifles were pointed at each other in the crowd. The griffons began to scream at each other as they took sides.

“They’re our family!”

“They’re traitors and they’re going to get us all killed!”

“Does the flock mean nothing to you?!”

“We’re no better than they are if we start killing each other!”

“The flock above all else! For the good of the flock!”

“The flock is our family! Family doesn’t kill family!”

I don’t know who fired the first shot. It broke the stillness of the night with a thunderous roar. In a split second, the dam had burst, and Sigur’s worst fears came to fruition.

I staggered backwards as I felt the bullet ricochet off of my armor’s deflectors right in front of my face. I actually saw the hot lead squash against the shield protecting me before it reflected somewhere into the night. Two yellow exclamation marks popped up in the corner of my vision alerting me that I was under attack, and the safeties on my guns toggled off in response.

All this happened in the blink of an eye. By the time I realized that I’d dodged death for the second time tonight, the griffons around me were already moving. Jahlen and his siblings in the air scattered to avoid gunfire and gain altitude as some of Kerzin’s loyalists rose to meet them. Sig shoved Dacie behind himself, presumably to let his armor’s shields protect her, and the laser blades on his wings crackled to life. Around Kerzin, gunfire broke out at point blank range, but most of the griffons down there began to fight with talons and beaks in a brutal, bloody melee. And in the middle of it all, Kerzin slunk back toward the hollow, his retreat covered by his handpicked bodyguards.

“Ember!” Sig shouted, pointing to the hollow. I immediately understood and lowered my head, charging right into the fray. Taking down Kerzin was my number one priority. The sooner I took care of him, the sooner we could stop the madness.

Bullets peppered the stone walls around me as I galloped as fast as I could on only three legs, which wasn’t very fast at all. A few quick thoughts redirected the majority of my shields to my front to try to repel higher caliber bullets at the cost of leaving my rear and flanks unprotected. It was a good thing I did that too, because I actually staggered from some of the hits my shields took Of course every griffon was trying to shoot at the pony! Really, who else would they shoot at?!

And then I was right on top of the melee. I could smell the reek of blood as the griffons tore into each other with their beaks and talons. Most of the gunfire had died down simply because of how huge the melee was, but that didn’t mean everyone was too preoccupied to notice me.

I figured that out when a huge weight slammed into my side, knocking me over and flat on my back. My panicked thoughts triggered a short burst from my six machine guns, shaking my entire body and actually providing enough recoil to jerk me backwards and move my neck out of the way of the beak lunging for it. When the griffon missed, I immediately responded by head-butting him. It hurt to use my horn like that, but I’m pretty sure it hurt him more when my horn when into his eye. While he howled in pain, I used my forelegs to clobber his face and force him back. He swung his talons in frustration, actually scoring hits on my unarmored stomach, easily ripping through the jumpsuit into the flesh underneath. I cried out in pain and with a burst of my magic propped my battle rifle under his chin and fired. The top of his skull blew outwards as the rounds went clean through his brains, and he fell to the side as a lifeless husk.

Well, so much for doing this without bloodshed, but I couldn’t dwell on that now. Grunting, I heaved the body off of me and rolled to my hooves, only to collapse again in pain as I realized my splint had come undone. Gasping in pain, I crawled away from the melee before attempting to stand again. My leg hurt like a bitch, and I could feel my blood spilling from my gut, but there was actually nothing I could possibly do about either right now other than try to stop my limp hoof from touching the ground and avoid exerting myself as much as I could.

By some stroke of luck, the path between me and the interior of the hollow was clear, so I bit down on my tongue and staggered away from the ball of screeching griffons. Throwing aside the curtain, I immediately raised my rifle and took two shots to the chest. One of the rounds actually managed to pierce my shields, though it must’ve been a hollow point because it just squashed harmlessly against my chest armor, though it did wind me a bit. I responded by unloading my machine guns at the first brown thing I saw, the terrifying screech of the Sentinels’ armament nearly deafening me and my one and a half ears. When I finally stopped firing, the griffon I’d shot at was merely a sack of meat full of lead, his body utterly mutilated by my concentrated firepower.

And that was enough to get the other griffons in the room to surrender. Turns out Sentinels are fucking terrifying if you’ve never seen them in action before. As they threw down their weapons and backed away from me, I sought out the one griffon sitting in the back of the hollow, eyes wide at what just happened.

“Make them stop!” I screamed at Kerzin, drawing my rifle and pointing it right at his fucking face. It took all of my willpower just to not light him up then and there after everything he’d done. “Make them stop or you’re dead!”

Kerzin’s shock turned into cold hatred. “You and Sigur and his siblings are all fools,” he spat. “The Crimson are too powerful to topple. They’ll outlast us all, even you Sentinels. Fighting them is a hopeless endeavor; do you not understand that our only course of action is to ally ourselves with them?”

“So you’d be willing to stuff your fucking conscience in a bag and turn a blind eye to all they’ve done, all the slaving and raping and pillaging of pony settlements just like yours, just like mine, in the stupidest fucking tiny hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll think you’re worth keeping around?!” I advanced a few steps toward him, my gun almost close enough for him to touch. “And not only that, but you’re willing to kill anygriffon in your flock who opposes you to do it?!”

“The safety of my flock has always been my primary concern. Always!” Kerzin spat, allowing some anger to creep into his voice. “I will not let Sigur drag his family into a bloody war where dozens will die!”

“Sigur is fighting for what’s right!” I screamed back at him. “Anybody who doesn’t stand up to the Crimson, pony or griffon or whatever, is just as guilty as they are in letting them do what they want to the valley! You’re supporting the murder of stallions, the raping of mares, the slaving of foals!” I turned to the side and pulled back on my jumpsuit with my magic, pulling the gray fabric away from my flank enough to reveal the heart seared over my cutie mark. “Look at this. Look at it!” I screamed again when he wouldn’t. “You know what this means? This means I’m a fucking cum bucket for whoever will pay Carrion the most for me! I’m not even a fucking mare to them! I’m just a thing! A fucking thing for some stallion to stick his dick in whenever he’s horny! A fucking thing to tie up, beat, and throw away when I’m not pretty anymore! Do you know what that’s like?! Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a thing?!”

I released the fabric and jabbed my rifle into his chest. “I was lucky. I escaped before they could take me. But I’m only one of maybe thousands of mares that they’ve branded over the years. And if you keep this up, then you’re just helping Carrion make more mares like me into things. And who knows, maybe one day, the market will open up for griffon hens, and guess who will be an easy source to harvest from?”

Kerzin’s beak clenched, and suddenly he couldn’t look me in the eyes anymore. “So long as we stay with the Crimson, the flock will be safe.” It sounded like he was trying to convince himself. It certainly wasn’t convincing me or even the other griffons still in the hollow.

“For fuck’s sake!” I shouted at him, backing up just a step and pointing outside. “Your flock is killing itself out there! All because of you and your stupid fucking delusions! Make them fucking stop!”

Kerzin’s face twisted into something I didn’t expect. Was that… pain? Sorrow? “My flock,” he murmured. “Oh, my precious, beautiful flock. Why did it have to be like this?” He swallowed hard, and that’s when I realized he had a revolver in his hand. Not like that could get through my shields, though. “I only wanted to keep them safe. Safe and happy in their home. And if I had to turn over a son to the Crimson to ensure that they would leave us alone, then I would be the one to shoulder that guilt.

“You could never understand,” he said, and I thought I saw the beginnings of tears in his eyes. “Not until you have a family of your own. The things you do to keep them safe… even if that means handing over one of your sons so that hundreds of your children could live… You don’t know what it takes to do that.”

He raised the revolver, and I widened my stance in response. “They’re still fighting outside right now!” I shouted at him. “You can stop this! Stop your children before it’s too late!”

“It’s already too late,” Kerzin said, swallowing hard. Then he put the revolver against his head. “Spirits take me to my flock—”

My horn lit up to stop him, but I wasn’t fast enough. Gore spattered the wall to Kerzin’s left, and the elder’s body collapsed, lifeless. I simply stood there in shock, oblivious to what was happening around me, unable to tear my eyes away from the elder’s remains.

Then I remembered myself and just what was happening outside. I turned to two of the griffons in the hollow who were just staring at Kerzin’s body with wide eyes. “Get his body,” I barked at them. “Bring it outside.” When they hesitated, I stomped my hoof and brought my rifle to bear. “Go!”

Thankfully they didn’t need to be told again. The griffons in the hollow quickly picked up Kerzin’s body between them and began to move outside. I followed them at a distance until they set it down just outside of the hollow, and then I fired my rifle several times into the air to get everyone’s attention

“Stop fighting!” I screamed, stepping toward the body. Thankfully, that seemed to stop most of the immediate clawing and biting in its tracks for the moment, and I pointed to Kerzin. “Look what it’s doing to you! Look around you! You’re family, and you’re killing each other! Your elder might have been delusional, but he wanted to protect his flock, not rip it apart! And look what it’s done to him! He couldn’t bear to see so many of his children die!”

I slung my rifle across my back and began to walk right into the middle of the crowd. “Please, I’m begging you, stop fighting before it kills anygriffon else. It doesn’t have to be like this. The Crimson will be coming soon, and we need everyone to be ready to work together. Not at each other’s throats like animals.” Swallowing hard, I stomped my hoof on the ground. “Don’t let this tragedy continue.”

Murmurs broke out among the crowd, and to my immense relief, the fighting didn’t start again. Griffons helped each other off of the ground, and some departed only to show up again with first aid supplies. In a complete flip of what’d been happening just minutes ago, the griffons were working together like one flock, apologizing and working together to help their wounded—and tend to their dead.

While they did that, I crawled to the side of the hollow and collapsed against the wall, tossing my helmet off and holding a hoof to my chest. It came away slick with blood, and I swallowed hard as I tried to put pressure on the wound. The griffon’s claws must’ve struck deeper than I thought. Between the blood loss, my shredded ear, and my broken leg, I was about ready to just keel over and pass out. It was very difficult to stay awake.

“Don’t go dying just yet,” I heard Dacie say, and I saw her crouch in front of me through the bleariness in my eyes. Something she held in her talons snapped, and she bit off the end of a silvery pouch before squeezing whatever was inside to the claw marks in my stomach. Almost immediately, a chilling numbness settled over the affected area, and after I blinked away my bleariness, I saw Dacie toss an empty Stabil-Ice pack aside before getting another.

I sighed in relief as the pain went away and my blood stopped pouring out. Stabil-Ice is some pretty neat stuff. “It over?” I asked, or more like mumbled; I didn’t want to know just how much blood I’d lost tonight.

“Yeah, it’s over,” she said, smiling at me. “Just take it easy for now. You’re more than a little fucked up, to be honest.”

“I figured that one out myself,” I said, closing my eyes and leaning back. While Dacie worked on replacing the splint on my leg, I winced and muttered, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Dacie asked. “For what?”

“I had to kill two,” I said, my head lolling to the side as I tried to avoid eye contact with her. “I didn’t want to… but I did it anyway.”

Dacie was silent for a moment, her work completely forgotten about. Then I felt her hand on my muzzle, her thumb talon gently stroking my cheek. “You did what you had to do,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re still alive.”

“You and me both,” I said, chuckling. “I’ve got too much shit to do to die now.”

We shared a small laugh, though that quickly died away when we saw the elders leading the fledglings out of the safer hollows in the quarry. The fledglings looked terrified, and the younger ones especially clung close to their flock fathers, who did the best to lead them around the blood staining the stone from the vicious fight. I noticed several elders trying to escort a seemingly lost group of fledglings, maybe only like five winters old. It was odd to see them led by elders instead of a single father griffon, but the heartbroken noise Dacie made in her throat told me all I needed to know.

“Dacie!” It was Sig’s voice, and both Dacie and me snapped our heads to the right. Dacie squawked and rocketed away from my side, hitting me in the face with her wing and blinding me for a second. When I stopped sputtering out her gray feathers, I saw her, Sig, Gatre, Hoana, and the rest of their siblings all forming a ring around another figure in the middle. I immediately recognized Jahlen’s white feathers, stained with blood.

I tried to stand, but my body was having none of that, so I could only watch, helpless, as Sigur and his siblings kneeled around Jahlen’s body. It looked like he’d been shot in the chest; it was slick with blood, and I couldn’t see any other marks on his body from where I was. I wanted desperately to go to Sigur and try to console him; the pain stood out so vividly on his face. But he had his siblings for that, and after they set Jahlen down, they all joined into a ball of comforting hugs with arms and wings, and using their beaks to preen each other’s heads and necks. It was probably for the best that I didn’t join them. This was a family moment between siblings at the loss of a brother. I would’ve just been hopelessly out of place.

Instead, I simply found the strength to limp away from it all. All the pain and suffering. All the blood that’d been spilled. All the needless death. I left it all behind in the quarry, instead making my way to the ringbird, where I sat down on one of the seats in the cargo hold, hung my head, and buried my face in my hooves.

And cried.

Chapter 25: The Road to Recovery

“Ember? Hey, wake up.”

I groaned as I felt talons shaking me and tried to fight them away. “Five… fifty more minutes…”

“Ember, for the love of…” The talons stopped shaking me, and I sighed as I began to curl back up to continue my nap. Getting slapped on the nose, however, put an end to that.

“Fuck!” I cried, jolting upright and clutching my nose. After waiting for the pain to subside, I opened my eyes to find Dacie standing in front of me in the middle of the cockpit. “The shit was that for?!” I shouted, rubbing my poor nose and trying to blink the tears out of my eyes.

“We’re here,” Dacie said, pointing out the window. “Well, within a few miles of it. You told me to let you know when we got here, and here we are.”

Rubbing my eyes, I grunted and managed to stand up, Dacie shuffling out of my way in the cramped cockpit. In front of us, the rocky tops of the mountains suddenly gave way to the steep walls of a canyon about a mile or two away. At the very end of that canyon, underneath the starry night sky, the harsh and almost blinding glow of the Bastion’s lights lit everything around it like it was daytime. I was surprised that the Bastion’s emergency power could even provide that much illumination.

“Good,” I said, turning around and flopping back into my seat. I noticed that the clock on the holographic display said 0551 and inwardly groaned. “Nearly six in the morning? How long were we flying for?”

“About two hours,” Dacie said. “This thing moves surprisingly fast.”

“I can believe that,” I muttered, frowning as I studied the screen, looking for the radio controls. Were all of Equestria’s pilots computer geniuses? I don’t know how they’d be able to navigate this shit in the middle of a combat situation. After a minute of searching, I finally found the radio, and quickly set it to the frequency Sig told me to. “Well, here goes nothing.”

I opened the channel and attempted to hail the Bastion. “This is Private First-Class Ember hailing the Bastion. I, uh, have mission critical information to relay. Over.” When I didn’t get a response after a few seconds, I tried again. “This is Private First-Class Ember hailing the Bastion, please respond, over.”

Dacie did that thing that griffons do where they grind their beak while we waited for a response. Frowning, I looked at the display again. Did I put in the right frequency? Sigur said 364.2 MHz, right? Or was it 362.4? Should I try other frequencies around that?

Just then, the radio crackled to life. “PFC Ember, this is Operations Control. We have you on record as deployed to the Pie Quarry until dawn. Please inform why you are breaking radio silence before the end of your deployment, over.”

I sighed in relief and slumped back in my chair (or tried to, rather) and smiled at Dacie. At least we wouldn’t have to go walking! I turned the radio on again and leaned forward into the mic. “We saw an opportunity and we took it,” I said. “During our stay at the quarry, the Crimson came to investigate via ringbird. We were able to eliminate the Crimson soldiers that came with it and stole it.” Smirking, I added, “Sergeant Sigur thought it’d make a big difference in the fight against the Crimson, over.”

The radio was silent for a while after I finished transmitting, and I just shared a happy look with Dacie. I could only imagine the confusion and possible excitement going on back at the Bastion. “Say again, Private, did you capture a ringbird? Are we hearing that right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Figured that it’d be a good idea to let you know before we flew up to the Bastion. I’m not particularly keen on getting blown out of the sky, over.”

I heard some chatter on the other end of the radio, and the operator’s voice came back on the line. “We’re ordering the artillery batteries to stand down. You are to fly the ringbird into the canyon, set it down in front of the Bastion, and power off the aircraft before emerging and awaiting further instructions, over.”

“Yeah, copy that, we’ll be right over. Over,” I said, grinning at Dacie. Dacie just grinned back at me and squeezed herself into the pilot’s seat, powering up the engines in a few seconds.

“Just fly toward the light, then?” she asked once she got her headset on.

“Yeah,” I said into mine. “You heard what they had to say. Set it down right in front of that huge steel wall and power it down. They’re probably just making sure that it’s not a trap or something to get them to lower their defenses before an attack.”

The ringbird lurched as Dacie revved the engines and put it into the air, then began to fly toward the lights at the end of the canyon. She took us down into the canyon, with the sharp walls of stone rising up on either side of us, and I thought I saw her quickly rub her eyes in awe as we approached. “That’s the Bastion?” she asked, completely enthralled by the huge steel wall jutting out of the rock face in front of us. “It’s huge!”

“That’s just the surface,” I said, smirking and looking the thing over. I had to admit, it was pretty amazing. I hadn’t really seen much of the outside in my time there so far. “It goes who knows how far into the rock, and then down into the earth. It was supposed to resist orbital bombardment.”

When we were finally within reach of the Bastion, Dacie put the aircraft into a hover and lowered it to the ground a lot more gently than I expected. Apparently she’d honed her skills while I was passed out in the back seat being anything but useful. Touching a few options on her holographic screen, she shut the engines off and lowered the ramp behind the ringbird. All we were left with was the whistling whine of the rotor ring slowing down above us as we made our way out of the craft.

My hooves crunched on dry, brittle grass, and I sighed as I staggered out into the bright spotlights of the Bastion. “Home sweet home,” I joked, slowly limping in front of the machine and sitting down in front of it. “Please, somepony take me to the infirmary,” I moaned into the night as I looked at my bandaged midsection and my broken leg. “I’m fucked up real bad.”

Dacie stood by my side and blocked some of the harsh light with her talons. “Where are they?” she asked, squinting just to see anything of the Bastion in front of us. I had to admit, those lights were really painful, and I couldn’t see fuck all because of them.

Then I heard the sounds of wings flapping, and I raised a hoof over my eyes to try to block out some of the light. Ten shadowy figures leapt off of the Bastion’s upper walls and were flying down towards us in wide circles. Dacie started as they landed in a circle around us and the ringbird, one’s hooves actually making metallic clanks as they landed on the ring of the aircraft itself. “You! Hands up, wings out!” One of the pegasi shouted to Dacie, and the frightened griffon immediately complied.

Groaning, I sat up and supported myself with my hooves. “She’s from the quarry, she’s with me. She’s actually the one who flew this thing back here.” I watched as the silhouettes of pegasus Sentinels moved toward us, while the rest moved toward the ringbird itself. “Can I get a ride to the infirmary or something?” I asked, pointing to my leg. “I really don’t want to walk.”

Suddenly the earth shook around us so violently that it started rattling the teeth in my skull. The spotlights on the Bastion moved away, allowing me to see, and after exchanging an alarmed look with Dacie, I looked forward at the front of the Bastion. There, an enormous door was opening, granting access to the staging hangar immediately inside of the base. When it finally stopped moving, it left behind a gap in the wall big enough to fit the ringbird into with lots of room to spare all around.

I almost didn’t see the ponies marching out the front door, as it were, until they were right on top of me. I suddenly found the bright lights on the walls blocked by a middle-aged unicorn mare in Sentinel armor staring down at me, with an assortment of other Sentinels at her flanks. “You still live?” Fusillade said in what I’d since learned was an incredibly thick Prench accent. “Magnifique. And you even stole one of Carrion’s ringbirds?”

I managed to weakly salute her. “Yes, ma’am. We went through a lot of trouble—”

“Where is sergeant Sigur?” the unicorn commander asked. Her eyes narrowed on Dacie and she pointed a blue hoof at the hen. “Who are you?”

Dacie swallowed hard. “Dacie, ma’am. I’m Sig’s sister.”

“Sig’s still at the quarry,” I said. “They had to evacuate before we left, otherwise the Crimson were going to kill us all. He’s making sure they stay safe until the morning.” I felt a stickiness around my stomach, and I realized that my bandages were starting to turn red. I guess I reopened my claw wounds when I tried to sit up. “Listen, I can explain everything, but can we save it until I’m not bleeding out?”

Fusillade nodded once and abruptly turned to the soldiers on her right. “Get a stretcher and bring her to the infirmary. I will wake Commander Rampart and Acting-Commander Zip for a debriefing.” Then she spun to her left and pointed to Dacie. “You two, take her to detainment until we hear the private’s report. Treat her well.” Then, clearing her throat, she stomped on the ground and raised her voice. “The rest of you, secure the ringbird and move it inside as soon as possible. I want preliminary analysis done before noon.” Then, nodding to the sky, she added, “The sun is going to be up soon. No time to lose.”

Dacie looked over to me, a little bit frightened at being separated in an unfamiliar place, but I just smiled at her and waved my hoof. “You’ll be fine,” I assured her as the two soldiers encouraged her to move toward the facility. “I’ll see you when I’m done, okay?”

She just nodded and finally began to follow the soldiers, leaving me to lie on the ground, clutching my stomach and trying to stem the bleeding. A minute later, two unicorns trotted up to me, bearing a stretcher, and set me into it before carrying me into the base.

I’ll spare you the details, but half an hour later, I found myself reclining in a really soft chair, my hind leg set in an enchanted cast and receiving some kind of magical treatment that’d have the bone fixed in a few days, and a doctor sitting over me as he painstakingly fused skin and muscle back together with his magic. It was really uncomfortable and really itchy, but he’d already restrained my limbs so I couldn’t scratch while he was trying to work. Apparently that could result in him accidentally fusing my hoof to my stomach, and that sounded like something I really wanted to avoid, so I willingly let him and the nurse strap me down until he was finished.

About halfway through the second of the three claw wounds in my chest, the door opened, and in came Fusillade, Rampart, and my beautiful orange angel. Just seeing Zip again after all I’d been through, after nearly dying out there without her, made me really happy. I suddenly wished I wasn’t strapped down so I could throw myself out of this big chair and hug her. At least Zip looked like she was struggling to refrain from doing the same, if that was any consolation to me.

The three leaders sat down in chairs opposite the doctor, just within my sight. Weakly smiling at them, I turned my head to the side. “I’d salute, but I’m a little tied up at the moment.”

Zip just rolled her eyes and suppressed a smile, while Fusillade looked at me like I needed to do fifty pushups now. For his part, Rampart remained passive as ever. “I’m glad to see you’re still mostly in one piece,” he said, nodding to my wounds. “If Commander Thunder’s recommendation for your actions at Hard Point Beta wasn’t proof enough, I think it’s safe to say after tonight that you can hold your own when duty calls.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I hope you liked my present.”

“We’ll have our engineers take a closer look at it, find out if we can exploit any weaknesses in its design for the attack on the dam,” Rampart said. “You’ve done an invaluable service to us by recovering it. But I need to know what happened there. So,” he said, nodding to me. “Report.”

And I did. I told him everything that happened since Sig and I arrived at the metal pad in the middle of the forest. Running into his brothers on the ascent to the quarry. Meeting Kerzin, and his refusal to join us. The hostility that the griffons showed us. Then Kerzin’s betrayal in the middle of the night, how he sold us out and nearly got us killed. How Sig’s siblings saved us and secured the ringbird. The battle in the quarry that ended with Kerzin’s death. All of it.

“When we left,” I was saying, “Sig was going to take all of the griffons from the quarry into the forest to hide until the Crimson left. Carrion’s troops should’ve arrived at the quarry while Dacie and I were still flying back here. Once daylight comes, Sig was going to move the flock to the pad so that they could be teleported to safety here.”

“We barely have an hour until dawn,” Zip commented, looking at Platinum Rampart. “We should make sure the mages are ready to go. Teleporting the entire flock is going to take most of the day.”

Rampart nodded and turned to Fusillade. “I’ll entrust that duty to you, Commander. Make it happen.”

The mare nodded and stood up, skirting around me and the doctor as she made her way to the door. When she was gone, Rampart turned his attention back to me. “I apologize for the risk that we put you and sergeant Sigur in on this mission, but that’s simply life. We had no way of knowing that the griffons’ elder had forged ties with the Crimson, but I’m glad that it worked out in the end regardless.”

“Assuming the Crimson don’t find them tonight, sir,” I said. “But barring that, you’ll have hundreds of griffons on your doorstep for the foreseeable future.”

“A number the Bastion is well-equipped to house, I assure you,” Rampart said. “I will have the preparations made for their arrival. Hopefully, with volunteers from the flock, we will finally have the numbers we need to launch our operation. If a hundred volunteer, we’ll have more than I hoped we would just a few days ago.”

He stood up and nodded to Zip. “Take care of her,” he said, a small smile forming on his lips. “I couldn’t think of a better pony for the job.”

Zip blushed and saluted Rampart. “I-I will, sir.”

“Good,” he said, momentarily placing his hoof on her shoulder. Then, turning to me, he actually gave me a salute. “You’re a hero, soldier. Take as long as you need to rest and recover. I think you’ve paid off your obligations for the time being after everything you’ve done tonight.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I will.”

Rampart nodded once then turned around and walked out the door, leaving me alone with Zip and the doctor. Fluttering to her hooves, Zip moved to my side and looked over the wounds in my gut. She made some sort of face and shuddered. “That’s disturbing.”

“It is what it is, Commander,” the doctor said, not even taking his eyes off my stomach for a second. “Growing and repairing tissue by horn is time-consuming and tedious.”

“Not to mention really itchy,” I hissed, doing my best to not squirm as the doctor worked around my bellybutton. “Consider yourself lucky.”

“Stitches and staples too primitive?” Zip asked, angling her head as she tried to see around the doctor’s muzzle.

“If I wanted to leave lasting abdominal injury and risk her intestines bursting out of her gut like a horror movie the moment she tried to exert herself, then no,” the doctor said, honestly sounding a little bit annoyed. I wonder how many times he’d heard questions like that before. “She’s lucky to even be alive, honestly. Another inch deeper and those talons would’ve ripped her viscera into pieces. The only reason she lasted this long was the Stabil-Ice somepony poured into her wounds before bandaging them.”

“Right here, you know,” I muttered, frowning at the two of them.

But the doctor just continued to ignore me. “So, in order to keep her alive and all of her organs safely within her body, I have to manually repair the damage done by growing the tissue to fill in the gaps. This means growing muscle and connective tissue, as well as her dermis and epidermis—not a simple task, as anypony with any experience in magical tissue repair will tell you.”

“But it’ll be good as new, right?” I asked him.

“In terms of functionality, yes,” he said. “The muscles will work, the skin will maintain itself. Your hair won’t regrow, however, and there won’t be any feeling in that area, so you will have noticeable scarring to your abdomen. After stringing together the neural network that will allow you to properly innervate the repaired muscles, I’m not going to take the extra effort to manually place hair follicles and nerve endings in your skin.”

Kind of disappointing, but not really too much of a price to pay to keep my intestines inside of me. “And my ear?” I asked, wiggling the stump that remained on my head.

“Don’t be such a foal,” the doctor said. “I’m not going to waste time and energy on that. It’s not bleeding anymore, and I already treated it for infection. It still functions, and you have a perfectly good right ear. You’ll be fine.”

Then, grunting, he slid his chair back and stood up, the magic from his horn undoing the restraints around my limbs all at once. “There. Good as new. Don’t put too much pressure on your leg over the next three days, and in fact I’m going to order you to stay off it entirely for twelve hours. Come see me after three days and we’ll remove your cast.”

I grunted as I sat up and looked at the scarring on my chest. Three pink lines stood out amongst the black hairs on my gut, and like the doctor said, when I poked them, I couldn’t feel my hoof. “Thanks, Doc,” I said, offering him an appreciative smile.

The doctor just straightened his lab coat and turned away. “Yes, yes, you’re welcome. Now go so I can prepare for the rush later today. I had to process almost every single one of the slaves liberated from the Fort, and I can only imagine that Commander Rampart is going to want me to do the same with the hundreds of griffons they’ll be bringing back today. Me and the other doctors have to get ready.”

Unwilling to provoke the doctor’s fury, I rolled off of the chair and landed on three hooves, keeping my broken leg held against my stomach. Zip was at my side in a flash, offering her support and wrapping her wing around my back to steady me as she guided me out the door. Only when the door hissed shut behind us did I finally feel like I could start to relax. “Who was that?”

“Hacksaw,” Zip said, and I could feel her shudder against my side. “He’s a medical genius, and he’s saved all our lives several times over—mine included. He’s just… impatient.” Then, stopping in the middle of the hallway, she buried her face in my mane. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” I said, rubbing my cheek against hers. “I never thought I’d see you again.” I remembered the absolute terror that’d gripped me when the Crimson sat me on that ledge and aimed a gun at my head. The remains of my left ear would be a constant reminder of how close I came to dying tonight.

She touched my chin with a feather and guided my muzzle toward her waiting lips. The kiss was sweet and tender, made all the more amazing because I never thought I’d feel her lips on mine again. When it finally ended some seconds later, we touched our foreheads together and looked deep into each other’s eyes. “I’m glad you’re back,” Zip whispered.

“I’m glad I am, too,” I whispered back, smiling. That smile quickly fell apart into a yawn, though, as my exhaustion suddenly slammed into me like a charging earth pony. Groaning, I rubbed at my eyes and shook my head. “Sorry, I’m on like… three hours of sleep, maybe, in the past twenty-eight hours.”

“Well, let’s get you somewhere quiet then, alright?” she asked, and I lethargically nodded. Smiling softly at me, she led me down the hallway, past a number of open and vacant operating rooms to the central staircase in the Bastion. With a little bit of her help, we made it up the stairs to the C block without too much effort on my part. I was too tired to realize where she was taking me until I saw the number ‘38C’ painted on the wall next to a door.

“That’s not my barracks,” I mumbled, really struggling to fight off my exhaustion.

“I figured you could use someplace quieter than your barracks,” Zip said, opening the door and ushering me inside. She didn’t step away until she’d laid me down on her bed and pulled the covers over me. “Get as much sleep as you can, okay? I’ll be helping move the griffons to their quarters once they start to arrive.”

I nodded, already feeling the thick tendrils of sleep starting to pull me under. “Zip?” I asked before the pegasus could step out of the door, and she stopped in the door frame, framed by the light outside like an angel. “Five minutes? Please?”

Zip smiled softly and stepped back into the room, shutting the door behind her and bathing us in darkness. I felt the mattress shake as she put her weight on it and the covers shift as she slipped in next to me. Kind forelegs and downy wings wrapped around me, holding me close to her warmth as we fit our bodies together. “Okay,” she whispered. “Five minutes.”

“Thank you,” I whispered as I nuzzled her mane. I didn’t hear if she made a reply or not; I was already gone.

Chapter 26: The Hope of the Future

When I woke up sometime later, Zip was already gone, the impression she left in her mattress cold. I mean, I expected as much; she had things to do, being acting-commander and all that shit, while I didn’t. Which, after all the shit I went through yesterday, was a good thing, I supposed. At least they wouldn’t have me doing menial shit. Maybe I could practice my pyromancy before the big fight.

A quick glance at the clock on Zip’s nightstand told me that it was just past thirteen in the morning. I guess five or six hours of sleep would be good enough. Besides, I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything in almost sixteen hours. I’d kill somepony for food if it came down to it.

I shifted in bed, about ready to roll off of the mattress, when I felt the unnatural weight of the cast around my hind leg. Doctor Hacksaw’s warning came back to me, and I more gingerly slid out of bed, landing on my three good legs while keeping the fourth in the air. I still had to hobble around like this for six more hours, according to his orders, but considering I was getting a completely broken leg fixed in three days instead of like three months, I wasn’t going to complain (too loudly).

I’ll be honest, it was more than a little annoying trying to navigate the Bastion on only three legs, especially when it came to the stairs. Going down a few flights was slow and agonizingly tedious work. But the sortie hangar wasn’t on the C block, and I wanted to see Sig return with his flock. Of course, he could very well have already been here on the first teleport in and gotten medical treatment already, but I wouldn’t really know. Best place to find out would be the center of the action, though.

And holy fuck was it busy. I could hear the commotion even before I got there. Lots of support staff ran to and fro, and a few armored Sentinels walked past me to the hangar. Slipping through the door before it could close, I immediately hobbled over to the railing overlooking the hangar floor and blinked in astonishment. There were so many griffons here, and the Sentinels were doing their best to organize them all, take stock of their belongings, and have them sent off to their quarters. In just a few hours of teleporting runs, the population of the Bastion had about doubled, and it was only going to get larger as the day wore on.

I saw Dacie hovering about, looking a little bit lost, and I waved her over. “They take care of you?” I asked when she got close enough.

She alighted next to me and nodded. “Yeah, once they got everything sorted out, they turned me loose. They were just worried about who I might be and that sort of thing, given how you just showed up out of the blue with a ringbird and a griffon.”

“Good to hear,” I said. “I hope they at least gave you somepony to follow until you know your way around here. It’s really stars-damned huge.” Chuckling, I added, “I’ve gotten hopelessly lost a few times before.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s been alright,” Dacie said. “I followed a few ponies around, asked a few others where things were. Supposing I can find the central stairs, though, then the important stuff isn’t too hard to find.” Her eyes darted over my cast and the stitches in my forehead. “They fix you up?”

I shrugged. “More or less. Doctor says my leg will be good in three days while the enchantments in the cast do their thing. He wouldn’t do anything about my ear,” I said, flicking the stub on my forehead. “But, well, not much I can do about that. Apparently my stomach was the worst, though. He spent like an hour manually growing tissue with his magic. He said another inch deeper and those talons would’ve killed me.”

“Oh, spirits, I’m glad you’re alright, then!” Dacie exclaimed. “I didn’t know it was that bad when I treated you!”

“You saved my life with the Stabil-Ice. Stopped the bleeding long enough for it to get looked at.” Smiling at her, I nudged her shoulder. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

She brushed it off with a wave of her hand, and we went back to watching the Sentinels try to sort out her flock. Another group of griffons had just arrived, and they were trying to clear the teleportation area before the unicorns went back for the next group. I noticed that they had quite a few soldiers standing guard around them; I guess I’d left a lasting impression or something. “See Sig yet?” I asked Dacie. “I’ve been sleeping since I got out of the infirmary.”

“No, I heard he’s staying behind to make sure everygriffon makes it over here in one piece,” she said. “Same with the rest of my siblings. I even asked one of the ponies in charge of the thing, this older blue mare, if they could take me back, because we always do everything together, but she wouldn’t let them. In fact, she seemed a little bit annoyed that I bothered her.”

“That’s Commander Fusillade for you,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know her all that well, but she’s apparently from a settlement east of the dam, and she came west to the Bastion when the Crimson organized. Kind of explains the accent I guess, but she’s just like that from what the other soldiers have told me.”

“Huh. Neat.” She leaned forward and draped her arms over the railing, simply watching the Sentinels move a group of griffons down one of the halls towards their quarters for the foreseeable future. “I wonder what it’s like outside of the valley. I bet she has stories to tell, if you could ever get them out of her.”

“It’s probably just like the stories inside the valley,” I said. “Small settlements struggling to survive on a planet that wants nothing more than to fucking kill them, and fighting off bandits and raiders and shit who are also trying to kill them for their shit.”

“I heard from one of the merchants once that there’s a whole bunch of cities outside of the valley,” Dacie said. “Big settlements of thousands of ponies and griffons and even zebras and dragons. They’re closer to real civilization than anything in the valley. And the closer you get to the center of the continent, the bigger the settlements become. That’s where most of the ponies are, because that’s where Equestria started colonizing before the Silence. The valley is actually, like, really young in terms of when it was settled.”

I simply shrugged. “Well, maybe for the rest of the valley, but not for me. My town was built around an old military installation that used to share messages with Equus. When the Silence happened, well, the ponies who were stationed there survived and expanded.”

Dacie started giving me a pretty weird look. “How many ponies were stationed there before the Silence?”

“I don’t know, like, forty? Fifty?” I shrugged again. “It wasn’t that big, if the size of the barracks was anything to go by.” I saw her look and I frowned. “What?”

“Oh, nothing, I’m just, uh, thinking,” Dacie said, tripping over her words. “Wouldn’t you be worried about your genes… cousins…”

It took me a second, but I finally understood what she was getting at. “Are you calling me inbred?” I asked her, probably a little louder than I intended.

“N-No!” Dacie recoiled. “I mean, I’m just saying that wasn’t that a concern for your settlement? If you give it enough generations, then bloodlines could get a little mixed. At the quarry, at least, we started with almost two hundred griffons, so we didn’t have it as bad as you would.”

“It was kind of an afterthought behind making sure we even stayed alive,” I said. “One missed harvest could doom us all. We weren’t really thinking about keeping blood clean when we were one famine away from being wiped out.” Then, shrugging, I added, “But I mean, the zebras would’ve been hit the hardest. There weren’t a lot of zebras to begin with, and they usually stayed within their own circles. Even then, my zebra friend Gauge probably has about as much pony blood in him as he does zebra, he just doesn’t show it.”

Shifting in place, I leaned myself against the railing like Dacie and rested my chin on my crossed forelegs. “But I mean, I’m probably better off than most from Blackwash, what with my dad and all.”

Dacie cocked her head. “Your dad wasn’t from your town?”

“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t,” I said. “My mom never talked about him, and because of that, other ponies didn’t as well, but I’ve heard a few things over twenty winters. Supposedly he showed up one day at the mountain, and nopony knew who he was or where he came from. Something something something, he stuck around for a few winters, I was born, then he disappeared without a trace. Haven’t seen him ever since. He’s probably long dead.”

“Oh,” Dacie said, and I saw her fidget with her claws. “Well, uh… sorry?”

“Don’t be,” I said. “He broke my mom’s heart. Fuck him.”

Dacie didn’t really have anything to say to that, so we just stood in silence, watching the hangar gradually grow more organized as the Sentinels filed the griffons out. I saw Fusillade a few times in that mess, ordering ponies about, and cussing in Prench loud enough for me to hear whenever somepony fucked up. I had a feeling just from watching her work that between her, Rampart, and Thunder or Zip, she was the one that most of the Sentinels dreaded falling under. Still, she’d probably bite a bullet and then some if it meant keeping the soldiers under her command alive. Though there’d be hell to pay afterwards.

I saw Dacie’s talons flex out of the corner of my eye, and I turned to see her beak open wide as she yawned. Smiling at her, I punched her shoulder. “You look like you could use some rest,” I said.

“I’m waiting for Sig,” she grumbled, crossing her arms and doing her best to look awake.

“Sig’s probably not going to be back here for another few hours,” I told her. “He’ll be the last one back, knowing him. You have plenty of time to rest before then.” When she didn’t move, I added, “You know he’d hate to find out that you kept yourself up just waiting for him to get back. A nap isn't going to hurt anybody.”

Sighing, she bowed her head. “Alright, fine,” she said. “But I want to know the moment he gets back, okay? I know he’ll be looking for me.”

“And I’ll make sure somepony tells him exactly where you are,” I said. “He knows his way around this place, he’ll find where you’re passed out. Just go to whatever room they gave you so he can be directed to the right place, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, stepping away from the railing. “I’m down at the A block, room… twenty-four, I think? Somewhere around there. Just let him know.” Then, as she staggered back towards the central stairs, she called out over her shoulder, “Seeya.”

“Take care,” I said, waving after her, watching as her feline tail disappeared down the hallway. Then, grunting, I pushed off of the railing and stepped away from the hangar. I figured it was time to check in on a zebra and a colt who I knew were surely missing me by now.

After I got something to eat, of course.

A short walk later found me in the maintenance hangar, which was unusually busy due to a big recent addition. Somehow the Sentinels had moved the stolen ringbird down here, right next to the tank, and the place was way more crowded because of it. But the Sentinels weren’t wasting any time; even as I entered the hangar, there were a whole bunch of ponies crawling all over the thing, doing telemetry and diagnostics and that sort of shit. If there were any weaknesses in it, they were going to find them to keep this bird in the air, and hopefully shoot down any the Crimson threw at us.

I found Gauge and Chaff sitting on the back of the tank eating lunch. Somehow they’d managed to find some sandwiches, and were happily working their way through them, idly chatting as they ate. But, of the three of them, it was SCaR who noticed me first. With a chirp and a whistle, it hovered over to me, excitedly spinning around my head while I just grinned.

“Nice to see you too, little guy,” I said, winking at the drone, which immediately flew back to Gauge. “You giving SCaR enough attention, there, Gauge?” I called out to him. “He seems kinda lonely.”

Gauge jumped and looked my way. “Ember!” he exclaimed, tossing his sandwich down on a plate and hopping off the back of the tank. “You’re back!” He galloped up to me for a hug, but stopped when he saw the stitches in my head, the missing part of my ear, or maybe it was the cast on my leg. Eyes wide, he placed his hooves on my shoulders. “Stars, Em, what happened out there?”

“It’s… it’s a long story,” I said, feeling tired just thinking about what all I’d been through in the past twenty-eight hours. “I’m fine, though. That’s all that matters.”

“Ember!” Chaff shouted moments before slamming into my forelegs and wrapping them in a hug. “Did you really steal that ringbird? That’s what all the Sentinels are saying! That’s awesome!”

I mussed Chaff’s mane and nodded at him. “Yeah, I guess you could say that. We had a run in with some Crimson, and we ended up stealing their ringbird. With that and the tank and the griffons we brought back from the quarry, there’s no way the Crimson can stop us now.”

“I should’ve known you couldn’t stay out of trouble,” Gauge said, smirking at me. Then, leaning forward, he hugged me, and I hugged him back. “It’s good to have you back.”

“After all the shit I went through out there, it’s good to be back.” I shook out my mane, feeling it dance over the still-raw flesh of my left ear, and I pointed to Gauge’s head. “Guess we’re twins now, eh?”

“You’ve still got half of yours,” Gauge said, rubbing at the spot on his skull where his entire left ear was missing. “The Crimson ripped mine off when they dragged me out of the listening post back in Blackwash.”

“Yeah, I saw,” I said, remembering that horrid night. “But that’s why we have two, right?”

“Something like that,” Gauge said. Then, stepping aside, he pointed to the tank, which I realized was hovering a few inches above the ground. “Check out what we got to work while you were gone.”

I hobbled a few steps closer to the tank. “Well shit, Gauge, you’ve been busy, haven’t you? When are you taking it out to the shooting range?”

“One of the Sentinels said they were gonna drive it around and shoot at stuff soon!” Chaff exclaimed, bounding over to my side. “They said they were gonna let me shoot the cannon!”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” I asked, looking to Gauge. “The cannon’s bigger than you are.”

“He’ll be fine,” Gauge said, waving a hoof. “They were going to take it out to the canyon in a few days, shoot at some targets and get the optics calibrated. Plus, we need to make sure that its engine can hold up under pressure. Right now we’re just having it run idle for some endurance testing before we have it do any real work.”

“Well, as far as I know, the Crimson don’t have any tanks of their own, so now we have the advantage over them,” I said. “I don’t think Carrion realizes just how fucked he is.”

Gauge hummed his agreement and slowly walked back to the tank, SCaR hovering around his head. “I can’t believe that all the pieces are falling into place,” he said, hopping onto the back of the tank and picking up his sandwich. “A week ago, I thought my life was over. I didn’t think I’d ever see Nova again. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” he said, looking at me. “But now here we are. We’ve got a tank, a ringbird, and an army to take down the bastards who did this to us, and we can finally get Nova back. The end to this nightmare’s finally in sight.”

“Yeah,” I said, a little shocked by that revelation myself. Were we really this close to ending it all? To finally going back to something resembling normal? I almost couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t have been able to believe it at all had I not been a part of the missions that made it possible. Even still, to think that it’d all be over soon… it was unreal.

“You think of what’ll come after?” Gauge asked, catching me by surprise.

“Huh?”

“After this,” Gauge said, slapping the tank. “When the Crimson are gone and Nova’s free… what then? Do we go back to the mountain? Do we stay here? Go somewhere else?”

“I…” I was at a loss for what to say. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it. Everything since coming to the Bastion for the first time had just been an insane whirlwind of activity, so much so that I didn’t really have any time to myself to just think about things like this. What would we do afterwards? Would I stay a Sentinel? Would I leave them behind so I could be with Gauge and Nova if they left? What?

In the end, I just shook my head. “We’re not the only ones who’ll make that decision,” I said. “That’ll be up to Stardust and everypony else once we get them free. But if I had to say…” I shrugged. “Maybe it’d be best if we just stayed here. The Bastion’s big enough for all of us, and there’s nothing to go back to at Blackwash.”

“We can rebuild,” Gauge said. “It’s our home.”

“Gauge, there’s nothing left,” I said, looking up at him. “There was hardly a building left standing. I…” I swallowed hard and felt some tears pricking at my eyes. “The Crimson just left the bodies sitting under the sun. I couldn’t bury them all. I… h-had to burn them so the flesh strippers wouldn’t maul them.” I shook my head. “I’m not going back to Blackwash, Gauge, even if everypony else decides to. I can’t. Not after that.”

Gauge just looked at me for a second, disbelief in his eyes. “You never said anything about that.”

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” I said, looking at my hooves. “I just want to pretend it never happened.”

SCaR made a sad buzzing noise, and Gauge slid off of the tank to stand by my side. “I didn’t know, Em,” he said, hugging me again. “I can’t imagine what you had to do just to get here. But don’t just keep it all bottled up, okay?” He lifted my chin with a hoof so he could look me in the eyes. “Just… if you ever need to talk… just talk, alright? To me, Zip, Chaff…” he chuckled. “Even SCaR. The little guy’s a great listener. I complain to him all the time.”

The drone made some sort of splatting noise and wobbled. I wasn’t as good at communicating with it as Gauge was, but I could only assume it was rolling its eyes or something like that.

“Thanks,” I said, nodding and wiping a tear from my eye before it could fall. “I just… want everything to go back to how it was,” I said. “But it can’t. It’ll never go back. And, well, there’s not a whole lot I can do about that. And it pisses me off.”

“But if it didn’t happen then we wouldn’t be here,” Chaff said, trotting up to me. “You guys wouldn’t be stopping the Crimson!”

“You wouldn’t have met Zip either,” Gauge said, making me blush.

“Well,” I huffed, trying to hide behind my mane. “I mean, yeah. I just… well, I just wish it didn’t have to cost so many lives.”

Gauge hummed. “I know what you mean,” he said. “When they stormed the outpost, it was messy. They just started cutting ponies down until they decided they’d made their point. Still didn’t stop them from beating us senseless, though. Guess they really don’t like zebras or something.” He pointed to his missing ear for emphasis.

“I saw the bodies,” I said. “I’m just… just glad that you and Nova weren’t caught in the fire.”

That killed our conversation really fast, and the three of us just stood in awkward silence for a minute or so. “Get a chance to check out the bird?” I asked, looking for any way to break the silence.

Gauge shook his head. “No, not yet. They only want their top staff looking it over at the moment. I think they’re trying to empty its data logs, see if anything interesting is stored on there. Any little bit is going to help, you know?”

“Yeah. The fewer of us that die trying to take the dam, the better.” I groaned and stretched my leg out. I couldn’t wait until I could put my weight on it again.

“Are you gonna fight like that?” Chaff asked, seeing me move my leg around.

I shook my head. “No, at least I don’t hope so. The doctor said that it’ll be fixed in three days.” I looked at Gauge and grinned. “Ain’t that something?”

Gauge rubbed his right foreleg. “Don’t remind me,” he said. “I’m just happy that my leg mended fine. Sticks and cloth don’t make a very good cast, and I didn’t enjoy chewing on ice moss to dull the pain.”

“Well, at least you learned your lesson,” I said, remembering the time that Gauge broke his leg when he slipped and fell from the roof of my forge when we were kids. He was going to drop a bucket of machine oil on my head as I came out of the shop, but, well, the bucket wasn’t the only thing that fell when I opened the door. Nova and I still teased him about it occasionally. But he was right; given that we didn’t have any magical casts or any real medicine besides a few lingering Stabil-Ice packs, Gauge was lucky that his leg had mended fine.

Gauge was about to say something, but the tank suddenly made a sputtering sound and a screech, and the entire floor shook as it fell back onto the hangar. Sighing, he shook his head, while I just looked at the thing like it might explode any second. “And this is why we wanted to endurance test the engine,” he said, moving toward his toolbox as the entire hangar stopped what they were doing to look at the tank. Digging through the red box, he pulled out a few spanners and other tools and laid them out in front of him. “Well, I’ve got to take a look at this and see what went wrong. Chaff, you want to help?”

The colt nodded and bounded over to Gauge’s side. “Yeah!” he exclaimed, grabbing a wrench and beginning to undo the bolts on a panel at the back of the tank. Within a few seconds, he had the panel popped open—and got sprayed in the face with a whole lot of motor oil.

Gauge and I just chuckled while the colt made a face and tried to wipe the oil away with a rag. “Your apprentice still seems like he’s got a lot to learn,” I teased him, to which Gauge just waved his hoof. Then, taking a few steps back, I waved once. “I’m going to leave you two to it. Gonna wait for Sig to get back, maybe see what Zip’s up to in the meanwhile.”

“Yeah, sounds good,” Gauge said. “Dinner tonight?”

“You know it. It’s been a while since we had a nice family meal.” Then, smiling, I trotted toward the door. “Seeya!”

I had to wait quite some time before Sig finally made it back with the last group of griffons from the quarry. Most of that was spent lounging around the hangar anxiously waiting, but at least I could talk to Zip from time to time. The mare was still busy with all of her duties, and that even included showing griffons to their new quarters. I guess they were a bit understaffed with that, but they didn’t recruit me, even when I offered to help. Probably because I was wounded and technically wasn’t supposed to be doing anything. I had a feeling that Zip had put a few words in to make sure I didn’t end up helping out. I’d have to get her back for that at some point.

But at least I could finally use my leg again. Enough time had passed that I could put some weight on my broken leg, and it felt largely whole and sturdy. I didn’t even know how bad the break was, only that it was complete, but it felt like my bones were at least fused together again. The soreness was also starting to die away, which I was really happy about. Without anything to distract myself with, it’d been a long several hours.

Finally, just before dinnertime, the unicorns teleported back again, not even bringing twenty-five with them. A few of the griffons staggered about, looking horribly confused, disoriented, and sick, but the one in the center stood tall and hobbled forward unfazed. A smile on his beak and a spring in his step, only hampered a little by his broken leg, Sig strode away from the circle of mages and in my direction. I waved at him, and he half-heartedly waved back. When he got close enough, I could see why clearly enough: the griffon looked exhausted. I thought I had it bad when I got back here, but knowing Sig, he didn’t take any time to nap since I left him. All he had was a few hours of sleep before Kerzin sold us out, and by now, he’d have been up for almost sixteen hours.

I lazily saluted him and stood up, trotting forward to meet him. “Long day?” I asked, a little smile on my face from the dumb question.

Sig bumped into me, nearly falling over, and I winced when he used his talons to steady himself with my shoulder. “Sorry,” he said, taking his hand off of me. “I haven’t slept in a long time.”

“Understandable,” I said, looking past him to where his siblings were being directed to their quarters. “Let’s get you to the doctor first, then you can go pass out.”

“Sounds good,” Sig said, before yawning so hard his whole body shook. “I could use a cast like yours.”

We set off down the hall to the infirmary, which I kind of remembered how to get to when I was taken there this morning. Thankfully, Sig knew where he was going and corrected me a few times, despite being half asleep. When we got there, however, we found out that Doctor Hacksaw was busy treating the wounds some griffons had earned in the fighting at the quarry, so we sat off to the side and waited.

“The ringbird get back in one piece?” Sig asked.

“I mean, I’m here, right?” I asked back. “Dacie’s a good pilot. The autopilot did most of the hard work, but she did a little flying by herself once we got close.”

“Heh. Sounds like her,” he said. “My siblings and I are all looking forward to seeing her again, now that we’re all here in one piece.”

I chuckled. “C’mon, it’s only been several hours. Surely you don’t miss each other that much,” I said with a smile.

“I don’t know, we’re pretty damn close. We couldn’t even use the bathroom alone without somegriffon wondering where we went.”

We laughed for a few seconds at that. Oh, it felt so good to just laugh again and be happy after all of yesterday’s shit. Still, I had a few things that I wanted to know about last night. “What happened after I left?” I asked him. “Any trouble with the Crimson?”

Sig inhaled and closed his eyes. “No, thankfully, though it was a long night. Probably no more than half an hour after you and Dacie left, we heard the rotors of another ringbird approaching. We were already in the forest away from the quarry, so we were out of sight, but we could see its lights through the treetops. I had some of the elders move the flock deeper into the forest while me and my siblings stood watch near the quarry, just in case they decided to go poking around, looking for us.”

“Did they?” I asked.

“Half-heartedly, maybe,” Sig said. “They were almost certainly more concerned about the stolen ringbird than finding where we’d run off to. They didn’t spend too long at the quarry, only enough time to touch down and scavenge anything of value we’d left behind. Which was mostly our fusion generator and any fuel cores we still had for it. That’s going to be a bitch to replace.” Shrugging, he leaned back against the wall and massaged his sore wing. “The ringbird took off as soon as they’d put that in its hold, and the pegasi that were with it followed. They did some sweeping over the immediate area, but the forest is too dense for a ringbird to land, so I guess they figured we must’ve moved it somewhere else. Last we saw them, they were going south to check the river before they probably flew back to the dam.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said. “I was worried that when I woke up I was going to find out that the Crimson had caught you guys. Glad to hear that everything went alright.”

Sig just chuckled. “Well, mostly. We had to chase off a pack of wargs when we accidentally stumbled into their territory.” When he saw that I had no idea what those were, he elaborated. “Those six-legged wolf things you saw when the Crimson tried to execute us. Nobody got really hurt, though. Just a few bite marks that we bandaged quickly.”

“Eesh. Glad I wasn’t there,” I said, grimacing at the thought. Those things looked like they could move fast, and if they attacked the flock, they would’ve caused a lot of panic. “You didn’t sleep at all, though?”

Sig shook his head. “I was keeping watch.”

I frowned at him. “Others could’ve done that for you.”

“It was my fault anyway that the Crimson drove them from the quarry,” Sig said. “So I kept them safe, made sure that the Crimson didn’t find them. And it’s not like I was alone,” he continued. “Remember what I said about my siblings way back when? When one of us gets watch, we all get watch.”

I smiled and pressed his hand with a hoof. “I’m glad that you and your siblings are together again.”

“Certainly for the time being, at least,” Sig said, nodding. “I missed them, and they missed me. I might have been cruel in going so long without seeing them, but after what happened last night…” He sighed and shook his head.

“You all needed to grieve together,” I said, finishing for him.

Sig sighed and bowed his head. “J and I were the closest. It’s going to be a long time before the pain scars over.” He looked at me, and I could see the sadness in his eyes. “I wish you had more time to get to know him.”

“Me too,” I said. “And I mean…” I fidgeted, searching for the right words to say. “If you want to talk, I’ll listen, you know? And your other siblings…”

“Yeah… yeah,” the griffon said, staring vacantly at the floor. “I’ll be with them, helping to comfort them. We could all use some time to ourselves.” He looked at me and faintly smiled. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said, patting Sig’s shoulder. “I’m just trying to help.”

“You’re so good at it,” Sig said. “Maybe you should become a counselor.”

I snorted and shook my head. “No way. I hate talking about emotions. They’re messy.”

“Right. You just prefer to let your emotions do the talking.”

I caught Sig’s smirk and rolled my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I’m impulsive, I get it. But I think life’s more fun that way.”

The door opened next to us, and one of the griffons from Sig’s flock stepped into the hallway. Spotting us, he hesitantly approached. “Hey, uh, where’s the A block?”

Sig began to speak, but I was faster. “Head down the hall to the central stairs and go up two flights. Everything there is numbered, so as long as you know where you’re going you shouldn’t get lost.”

The griffon smiled at me and bowed his head. “Thanks.”

I waved him off. “No problem.”

He left us alone in front of the infirmary, and Sig chuckled and shook his head. “A week ago, you couldn’t walk around the Bastion without getting lost.”

“A week ago, I wasn’t a Sentinel,” I said, shrugging.

Sig nodded and patted my shoulder. “You’ve come a long way,” he said, softly smiling at me. “And it’s almost over. Don’t forget that.”

“I hope,” I said, shrugging. “I don’t think I could do this the rest of my life.”

Sigur was quiet for a moment, but ultimately he stood up and moved toward the door. “Don’t worry about that now. We’ll focus on saving your friends and taking down the Crimson first. After that, well, we can think about the future.” Tapping a button on the wall, the door hissed open, and he looked at me when I started to stand. “You don’t have to stick around, I can take care of myself. It’s not the first time I’ve had Hacksaw take a look at me.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “I was going to go see if Gauge wanted to get dinner anyway. See you in the mess in a bit?”

“Sure. I’ll make sure to bring the family,” he said, smiling. I suddenly realized just how crowded dinner was going to be with a few hundred more griffons joining us. I’d have to be fast to make sure we got our usual table. “Take care.”

Then he disappeared into the infirmary, leaving me alone in the hallway. I turned around and moved toward the stairs, already imagining dinner. Hopefully it would be another feast like when we liberated the Fort.

I still couldn’t shake the feeling that this was finally happening, though. Like, it finally began to strike me. We had the numbers. We had the machines. We had the firepower. We were finally on the verge of striking down the Crimson for good. In another week, we were going to be storming the dam, ready to put an end to this thing once and for all. The valley would be a better place, and I’d finally avenge Blackwash. The day was coming when the nightmare was finally going to end.

So how come I was afraid of it?

Chapter 27: The Love that Joins Us

The days slid by, some faster than others, but all of them still pretty damn busy. It took almost three days to get Sig’s flock settled comfortably, which I tried my best to help out with despite Zip’s wishes. By the end of it, the A block sounded like an aviary, and it was almost impossible to go from one end of the complex to the other without running into at least five griffons. I was so thankful that my barracks was on the B block; sometimes I could hear them through the vents in the floor when I was trying to sleep, and it wasn’t pretty.

On the first day after Sig brought the flock back to the Bastion, he and his siblings held a brief memorial for Jahlen, which they later opened up to the rest of their flock to remember those that died in the schism. Zip and I did our best to comfort him and lend him a shoulder to lean on, but nothing compared to simply commiserating with his other siblings. They were nearly inseparable, like Sig had warned me, and about the only time he ever left his group behind was when duties summoned him elsewhere and his brothers and sisters couldn’t follow.

Gauge and Chaff, meanwhile, had continued tuning up the tank, and Gauge even got to poke around the ringbird a bit before he had to go back to his project. They’d finally sorted out all the issues with the tank’s engine, so the thing was nearly in working shape. They were supposed to have a test run with it as soon as that was fixed, but its computers crashed and it took an entire brain trust of techies liberated from the Fort to figure out what was wrong. After benefitting from our mechanics for so long, the Sentinels were pretty happy to have our brainy bunch to work with when it came to that as well.

The ringbird was less work, at least on the mechanical side, but its computers and tech shit were a fucking mess. The techies of Blackwash managed to copy over the entire contents of the ringbird’s databanks with some help from the Sentinels and were busy poring through that data. I couldn’t tell you the slightest thing about what they were looking for or what they were finding, because I hardly know anything about computers other than the power button, but I think they were looking for its mission logs to figure out just how long the Crimson had the thing and where it’d been to. When I asked Zip about what she was hearing, she told me that signs pointed to the Ivory City, a connection that seemed to be growing stronger by the day. Apparently, the emblem painted on the thing’s hull, the three white rectangles within a gold ring, was the symbol for the city. Where before the Sentinels merely believed the Ivory City had contracted the Crimson to find the pieces of the code sent to Auris, now it was looking like the two were tied much closer together than anypony had thought. What that meant for our attack on the dam, though, I didn’t know. It wasn’t my job to plan and worry about that.

I, meanwhile, spent most of my time at the proving grounds, trying in vain to hone my virtually nonexistent pyromancy skills. With the assault on the Crimson growing closer by the day, I felt like having some trick under my belt would be useful. Unfortunately, my magic refused to cooperate with me, even when I got additional instruction from Warped Glass. My attempts at combustion were little more than paltry candles; my fireballs fizzled and died before they could even travel five feet. My attempts to make a protective wall of fire around me only ended up with me setting my tail on fire when I miscalculated the radius and the point of origin. Glass joked that I could only start a fire by using myself as kindling first. That just encouraged me to work harder—and increase my failures per minute. It didn’t seem like any trick or tip worked for me; the more I failed, the more frustrated I became, and the more frustrated I became, the more I failed. It was hardly more than an endless loop of incompetence and anger that went on for days.

So I blew off steam the only ways I knew how: shooting and fucking. By day, I spent my free time after pyromancy practice at the range, plucking away at target after target, and getting a better feel for the machine guns in my armor. By night, I found excuses to sneak off with Zip, and we spent a lot of quiet time together. There was a lot of kissing and touching in the bunkers on the walls, but the actual fucking part was harder to come by. Zip and Sig both ended most of their days exhausted, and neither Zip nor I wanted to chase Sig out of their shared quarters for some sex after all he’d been through. Though he didn’t really show it, it was clear he was still coping with his brother’s loss. And as for my quarters, they were a little more communal than hers. Good luck with that.

So we got what little enjoyments we could in the moments we weren’t working or busy with other things, which sadly were few and far between. One of those moments found Zip and I walking along the top wall of the Bastion, with nothing but a towering rock wall to our left and a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the canyon floor on our right. I don’t remember how or why we ended up there, only that I’d followed Zip in the hopes of finding someplace quiet to be with her. The air was warm, the sun was low, and the canyon and the distant valley were alive with the sounds of Auris’ wildlife settling in for the evening. A perfect twilight before the darkness of night.

Zip found a flat part of the wall that extended a bit from the stone behind it and lied down, stretching her wings and beckoning for me to join her. Rolling my shoulders, I lied down on my stomach and shuffled a bit closer to her so our coats were touching. The sheer drops all around us unnerved me a bit, considering the last time I’d stretched myself out on a cliff a shrike had flung me off of it, but Zip wrapping her wing around my shoulders and pulling me close to her orange body helped to shake some of that anxiety away.

“Pretty,” I cooed, breaking the silence while we watched the sun go down to our right. The sky was awash with an entire rainbow of colors, from blues and greens directly above us to faint reds and pinks and purples closer to the setting blue sun. A few thin clouds added some white streaks to the whole picture, and the rocks of the canyon stood out in sharp detail as the shadows intensified around them.

“It’s one of my favorite places to be,” Zip said, smiling softly as she did so. “Sometimes I forget what the sky’s like, I spend so much time inside the Bastion. It makes me feel… homesick, I guess. Pegasi were never meant to live inside. We need—I need the sun on my shoulders and the wind in my wings. It’s where I belong.”

I nuzzled her cheek. “You can take the pegasus out of the sky but you can’t take the sky out of the pegasus?”

“In a sense,” she said. “Technically, martial law states that we’re not to leave the Bastion for any reasons other than assignments for fear of desertion or enemy snipers. But, seriously,” she said, waving her hoof over the picturesque canyon, “who’s going to bother us here? Not the Crimson, that’s for sure. They don’t have the technology to get past all of our early warning systems. They used to send scouts here to keep tabs on us, but between all the hidden cameras and pressure sensors scattered everywhere, they realized that they were just sending us free prisoners to interrogate. Carrion hasn’t sent scouts or snipers in years.”

“You ever have a problem with desertion, though?” I asked. “It’d be pretty bad if Carrion got his hooves on working Sentinel armor or information about the Bastion.”

She shrugged. “Not since I’ve been a Sentinel. We’re all too dedicated to our cause to desert now. We all know what the Crimson are like. Deserting doesn’t mean that they’ll treat you like a hero. Besides, after the Sentinels fell back from the valley, that was when they had their largest desertion. Ponies didn’t think that they’d ever recover from that, so they left to go try to live out the rest of their lives somewhere in the valley and hope the Crimson wouldn’t bother them.”

“Any idea what might have happened to them since then?” I asked. “Maybe they’d join us again.”

“I have no idea,” Zip admitted. “That was before my time. Maybe some have gone on to be mercenaries since then. Others probably want nothing to do with that life again—remember, ten winters is a long time—and a good bunch of them are likely dead. I don’t think we’re going to see many of them back.”

“Yeah, I guess. At least we don’t really need them, right?”

Zip shifted a bit and rubbed the crest of her wing in the space between my shoulders. “No, we shouldn’t. Bringing in the entirety of Sig’s flock really helped. That added almost two hundred able-bodied griffons eager to take back their home. Add about fifty trained Sentinels to that, plus the sixty volunteers from your town, forty volunteers from the nearby settlements, and another thirty experienced mercs, and we’re at three hundred and eighty ponies, griffons, and zebras all ready to take back the valley against a thousand Crimson.”

“Plus who knows how many slaves we can liberate at the dam itself,” I added.

“And our ringbird and tank against their ringbird and defenses.” Zip smiled a bit and rubbed her hooves together. “A fair fight in the end. If we can strike hard and fast, we win.”

But of course there was the other unspoken outcome. If we let the Crimson bog down the assault, it’d only be a matter of time before attrition destroyed us. Carrion had the numbers, and we had the technology. In the end, however, technology would always fall to numbers. I just prayed it’d give us our edge long enough to win before the Crimson blunted it.

Sitting in the open here under the sun, though, made it hard to think about that kind of doom and gloom. The assault was just a few days away, and I knew that this might be one of the last sunsets I ever saw. For all I knew, come this time next week, they’d be laying me down under six feet of dirt. While I hoped that my practice at the range would keep me alive when it came down to it, for now I was only concerned with enjoying the remaining time I had left before then with my marefriend. Nopony could take that from us, and I’d fight for every last second.

I crossed my neck behind Zip’s and buried my muzzle in her mane. She smelled so wonderful. I wanted to spend the rest of my life lost in her scent. I felt her shift her wing across my back to pull me in closer beside her, and her cheek brushed my own as she turned her head. “You’re worried.”

I parted my lip to say no, but my breath caught in my throat. Of course she knew I was worried. She could read me so easily. “Mmhmm,” I hummed, closing my eyes and huddling under her wing. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Zip clucked her tongue and leaned back a bit so she could hold my face in her wingtips. “Ember, you don’t have anything to worry about,” she said, smiling and trying to encourage me. “I’ve fought worse before. Crimson bandits are easy compared to some of the things I’ve fought. Did I ever tell you I fought a tolan once?”

I shook my head. “Sig told me you did. He didn’t say much else.”

“Yeah, I fought one. Sig’s just jealous that he didn’t get in on the action.” She released my face and shifted back to lying shoulder to shoulder with me. “I found one with my squad at the time on patrol a few years ago. Tolans usually don’t come to the valley anymore, but this one looked like it was rabid or something. The moment it caught a whiff of us, it came charging over on its huge legs. We happened to be near a settlement, so my squad leader ordered us to lure it the other way, away from innocents. We kept up a barrage of bullets to keep its attention, and we ran as fast as we could.

“Of course, we were near the river, so shit was fucked,” Zip said, her eyes losing focus and drifting to her memories. “We had the settlement in front of us, the river to our backs, and flat ground all around. Nowhere to hide. We couldn’t outrun the thing so we circled it and tried to get its attention if it went after one of us so they could get away. Still, we didn’t all get out of there in one piece. Gray Water had one of his legs torn off by its claws, and it swallowed Sergeant Hemlock whole. Nearly crushed her under its foot and probably broke her spine before it scooped her up in its jaws. Destroyed her machine guns so she just couldn’t shoot it from the inside. I could hear her screaming all the way down its throat.”

“Holy fuck,” I murmured.

Zip shuddered. “Yeah. Unpleasant. I was the only pegasus in the squad, so I knew I had the only real chance of killing it before it ate the rest of us. It had its sights set on Gray Water as he tried to crawl away, and it stopped paying attention to the rest of us when it realized that we couldn’t hurt it. That was my chance. I flew in fast and high so it couldn’t see me, and I turned on my razor wings. I just dived on it and held my wing out to slice through its neck on the way down. I didn’t get a good angle to kill it outright, but it collapsed from the blow. Before it could stand back up, I jumped on its back and just kept slicing and slicing until I’d severed its spine. It died pretty quickly after that.”

The mare shrugged her wings, though I saw them twitching at her sides as they relived the memory of that flight. “We had to evacuate right then before Gray Water bled out. I wanted to stay and try to cut Hemlock out, but we didn’t hear her screaming anymore. Tolans have gizzards that can crush rocks and stomach acids that can melt steel. Between that and the wounds she’d already taken, there was no way she survived. So we fell back to our extraction point and got out of there as fast as we could. They promoted me to sergeant after that for killing the tolan and to replace Hemlock.” Then, with a quiet smile, she added, “After dealing with that nightmare, the Crimson are a piece of cake. The only thing they had that worried me were their ringbirds, and we’ve already killed one and stolen another. They don’t scare me now.”

Then, touching my cheek again, she turned my head toward hers and kissed me. When we separated, she placed her forehead against mine. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Ember. I know what I’m doing, and so do you. We’ll be fine, and when it’s all over, well…” She grinned at me. “Think you could go the full twenty-eight hours?”

“I don’t know,” I said, a mischievous smile forming on my face, “I think I’ll need some practice first…”

Zip’s attack was fast and sudden, taking me by surprise. Before I knew it, she had me pinned on the wall, her body firmly pressed against mine as our lips locked and our bodies thrashed. I wrapped my hooves across her shoulders, holding her against me as our legs locked and our tails entwined.

I’ll put it pretty blunt here: we fucked, and we fucked for a while. I don’t feel the need to recount another one of my sexual experiences here; it wouldn’t add anything new to my story, really. About the only thing I have to say about it was that a few times our rolling took us dangerously close to the edge of the wall, and we had to stop and center ourselves whenever that happened. Falling to our deaths (or realistically, mine) would’ve been a total mood killer.

We finally finished well after the sun had set and the stars were appearing in the sky. It felt good to just relax after sex under the beauty of the night sky, me and Zip both lying on our sides with our hooves wrapped around each other’s barrels. We occasionally kissed whenever we made eye contact, but we’d both gotten our fill of loving for the moment. She was satisfied, and I was too. That was all that mattered.

“I think I’m in love,” I said to her, just completely out of the blue. My heart sped up when I saw her raise an eyebrow, and I felt heat building in my cheeks. “I… I-I hope I’m not saying that too soon.”

“You may be right,” Zip said, kissing my nose. “About the love part, that is.” I felt dismay in my chest when she took her forelegs off of me and slowly stood up by my side, but a rush of adrenaline came back to me when she offered me her hoof to help stand. “I know how to prove it.”

I stood up next to her, and she led me a few steps toward the edge of the wall. My eyes darted down when she spread her wings and began hovering next to me, slowly turning me around until I was the one with my back to the canyon. Taking both of my hooves in hers, she flew a little closer until our muzzles were right next to each other. “Do you trust me?”

I swallowed hard and looked away for a moment. “I…”

She shook her head. “Look at me. Don’t look away.” When I did so, she asked again. “Do you trust me?”

My mouth felt fuzzy, and my heart began to pound. “I-I trust you.”

She nodded and began flying against me, pushing me back a bit. “Don’t look away,” she said. “Just look into my eyes. Trust me.”

I nodded and tried to stare into her eyes without blinking as I stepped back and back. My heart hammered in my chest like it was trying to break out and tell me I was being an idiot. I wasn’t stupid. I had a good idea of what she was going to do. Still… I trusted her. She would never let anything happen to me.

My hind leg stepped on nothing, and I gasped as I slipped.

The top of the wall began to rocket away from me, and my mane and tail whipped toward Zip as she fell with me. Every single instinct told me to scream and flail as terror set in and the roaring wind deafened me. But Zip hardly blinked; she only looked at me with a soft smile on her muzzle, and somehow that was enough to calm me. I stared back at her, eyes probably wide with terror, but I only looked at her, completely oblivious to just how far away I was from becoming a stain on the ground.

Suddenly, Zip opened her wings, and I felt gravity invert as she pulled me upwards. The change in perspective let me see the ground whizzing by us for a second before she started climbing again. It was really fucking close. I’m surprised I didn’t piss myself at that.

Zip’s wings eventually took us back to the wall with me clinging to her for dear life, and it wasn’t until she set all four hooves on the steel and smiled at me that I feebly let go and flopped onto the ground. While I panted and hyperventilated, all but kissing the metal beneath my hooves, Zip just grinned by my side and rubbed her wing on my back. “Yes,” she finally said once my heart rate slowed down a bit. She looked like she was practically glowing as she grinned at me. “I’d say that you are in love.”

For some reason, I thought that was funny. I started to laugh, and soon enough I had to start wiping tears from my eyes. When I finally calmed down, Zip was giving me a strange look. “I’m sorry,” I ultimately said. “I’m just… I never thought I’d be happy like this. This is just so… you’re just so wonderful.”

That put a smile back on her face, and she draped her wing over my shoulders. “You’re wonderful too, you know.”

I smiled and nodded. “Thanks. I’m just… well…” I looked into her eyes, and she looked up into mine. “You’re amazing. And I love you.”

Zip’s wings fluttered in excitement, and her smile revealed her teeth for a moment before she rubbed noses with me. “I love you, too.”

We kissed, but it was so much more than that. It wasn’t a kiss between two ponies dating. It was a kiss between two ponies coming to grips with love. A perfect, shining moment, like nothing I’d ever experienced before. This was the beginning of something beautiful, something that we’d hold to our hearts for years. I wanted to capture this moment, hold onto it, and if it had lasted forever…

Well…

I would’ve been okay with that.

Chapter 28: The Calm Before

I was on fire.

No, not literally. This time, at least.

After Zip and I finally managed to say those three little words to each other, I felt like I’d been filled with energy. I could do anything. For the first time in a long time, I felt like there was a real spring in my step, and I just couldn’t stop smiling. Even as the date of the assault drew near, I was all smiles and full of energy. Gauge said it was creepy seeing me act like this and started wondering what I’d done with the real Ember. I smiled as I cuffed him behind the ears, too.

I’d taken a bit of that positivity with me into pyromancy practice, and for once, I felt like I was actually improving. Widening my stance and lowering my horn, I was able to send a modestly sized fireball downrange and blast a target about thirty yards away. Flakes of hot ash and fingers of smoke whirled into the air around the smoldering target, which slowly curled in on itself as my fire consumed it.

As I stood there, grinning like a little filly at my work, I heard hoofsteps approach from behind. “I told you so,” Warped Glass said to me, patting me on the back. “I knew you had the talent to become a pyromancer somewhere within you.”

“I guess I just needed a spark,” I said, watching the last of the target burn away.

“Every fire does,” Glass said. His magic touched a few buttons on a control panel a few feet away and more targets appeared. When I looked at him, he just pointed to them. “What? You think I’m going to be impressed with a one-hit wonder? Light them up, soldier!”

I didn’t hesitate. Though my casting speed still left something to be desired, I had a trio of fireballs downrange in a matter of seconds. Guided along by my thoughts, they struck their targets in rapid succession, and radiant orange light bathed me and Glass as the targets burned away.

I looked to Glass for some sign of approval, but his horn had already lit and more targets were appearing. “Again. Faster.”

I bit my lip and repeated the spell, trying to pour as much of my magic into each fireball as possible before letting them go. Once again, the targets erupted into flame, and I felt my hooves began to tingle.

More targets appeared. “Again.”

Once more.

“Faster.”

They burned.

“Again.”

I began to pant, but they went up in flames.

“Faster.”

I stumbled, but I pushed myself.

“Again.”

Three bright fires burned through the darkness clouding my vision.

“Faster.”

This time, when I tried to cast, summoning the last reserves of mana I had left in me, my numb legs buckled and I collapsed on my side. I panted and panted, sweat pouring down my face, my whole body shivering and trembling. “I… I… c-can’t…” I gasped between breaths of air. I shuddered as I felt something spasm and twitch inside my chest. Was that my heart?

Glass merely stood over me, studying my face as I struggled to breathe. “Have you ever drained yourself like that before?”

In between gasps, I weakly shook my head. “N-No sir.”

“Magic is what sets us apart from the other races,” Glass said, his horn lighting in a pale glow. “They have magic of their own, but it’s not tangible like ours. Magic is tied to what it means to be a unicorn, and a unicorn is defined by our magic. It is, in a sense, our very soul—in more ways than one.”

My breathing had finally stabilized, and my heart went back to its regular rhythm instead of weakly thrashing in my ribs. Glass nodded and offered me his hoof to stand, which I gratefully took. Standing made me a bit dizzy, but at least I didn’t fall over.

“When you use your magic for pyromancy, Ember, you have to be careful,” Glass said once I’d regained my balance. “Don’t push yourself more than you need to. This is why warlocks have guns and armor as well as our magic. If you burn through your mana too quickly, the next thing to go will be your life force. You are not a mage; you do not have lifelong practice and training like the mages of old Equestria, who fought solely with their spells. You are a warlock. Your strength lies in using your spells to add another layer of unpredictability to your combat. Given time, you’ll grow your mana pool with exercise, but for now, don’t burn yourself out.”

Feeling started to come back to my hooves, and I shuffled around on them to try and restore the rest of it. “So why make me do that instead of just telling me?”

“Because you need to understand what you’re feeling before you find yourself in a life or death situation,” Glass said. “It can be tempting to use magic to solve all your problems, but that’s dangerous without careful practice and experience. Don’t push yourself past a burnout, because the next spell might be your last.”

He looked at me like he was waiting for something more, so I hastily saluted him. “Yes, sir.”

That seemed to satisfy him. “Keep practicing and working on your casting time. That’s much more important than the size of a fireball. But for now, take it easy. Give your mana time to recover. You need to be fresh and ready when it’s time to take on the Crimson.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, bowing my head.

He patted me on the shoulder. “I heard that the mechanics were going to put the tank through its paces today. Why don’t you go take a break, see how that’s coming? It’ll probably help to be familiar with the armor support we’ll be bringing to the dam. Plus, I heard that your zebra friend volunteered to be one of the crew.”

Well that was certainly news to me. I wondered what he’d be doing in the tank. “That sounds good. I think I’ll do that.” Once again, I saluted him before moving toward the door. “Thank you, sir.”

“Take care, soldier.”

I apparently wasn’t the only one who wanted to see the tank in action. By the time I made it outside the Bastion, there was already a pretty large crowd gathered near the rocks, excitedly chattering among themselves. Sitting over a flat patch of land was the tank, its thrusters humming and the air beneath and around it rippling as it hovered in place. Ponies stood on top of the engine deck wearing gray suits, and I saw Gauge, Chaff, and SCaR among their number. It looked like they’d kept true to their promise to let Chaff ride on the tank, and the colt was loving every minute of it.

I spotted Zip and Sig in the crowd, not because Sig stood out like he usually does, but because Zip did. Sig had all of his brothers and sisters around him while Zip sat in the middle of that group, a bright orange splash of color in all the browns and grays and whites. Threading my way through everyone waiting for the test to start, I finally made it to Zip’s side. “Looks like I made it just in time.”

I sat down next to her, and she draped her wing across my shoulders. “Yup. They’re looking to get started in a few minutes.” Her wing tugged me closer against her side, and she kissed my cheek. “How was the pyromancy practice?”

“Ugh, don’t get me started,” I said, rubbing the base of my horn. “My head still hurts.”

Sig turned away from a conversation his siblings were having and angled his head. “Bad?”

“Not entirely. I actually started casting fireballs.” I grinned, and Zip rubbed her wing up and down on my back. “So that was fun. Then Glass nearly killed me.”

“You set something on fire that you weren’t supposed to?” Zip asked.

I shook my head. “No. He just made me keep casting faster and faster until I nearly killed myself. Actually, though.” At their concerned looks, I just shrugged. “Turns out if a unicorn pushes herself past complete exhaustion, past burnout, she’ll kill herself. Something about using up so much mana that you start casting away your life energy or something like that. He made sure I knew what that feeling was like the hard way so I’d be more careful with my magic in the future.”

“Sweet Celestia, Ember, are you alright?” Zip asked. “I’ve talked with some of our warlocks from time to time, but I didn’t know Glass did that to them too!”

“It’s really nothing,” I said, waving a hoof. “I started feeling like myself again after a few minutes. Nothing to worry about.” Which was true enough; I felt fine, if a bit tired and looking for a nap. But I figured I didn’t need to worry her about how my vision started blacking out, or how I lost all feeling in my legs, or how my heart almost stopped beating for a few seconds. That wouldn’t accomplish anything productive.

Though Zip didn’t say anything, I could just tell that she wasn’t buying it entirely. So of course the very next thing I did was vigorously kiss her to prove it. She at least let me savor it for a second or two before she gently but firmly pushed me away. “I might not be in my armor, but I’m still technically on duty, you know,” she said.

I rolled my eyes and mock-saluted her. “No offense, ma’am, but you did kiss me first.”

Her gaze hardened into a playful frown. “You looking for punishment, soldier?”

“Only if I get to choose where and when,” I sang back at her, sticking out my tongue.

Sig’s chuckling reminded us that we weren’t alone. “Easy, you two,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t want to set a terrible example for our recruits, right?”

“Why not?” I asked, smirking at him. “In my experience, fucking my superior officer has worked out pretty great for me.”

“In that case, carry on,” he said with a dismissive wave of his talon. “I, on the other hand, want to see the show.”

Both Zip and I turned our heads back to the tank, where we saw Gauge and three other ponies crawl into a hatch in the turret. After a few seconds of nothing, the tank shifted in place slightly, and the turret elevated itself out of the body of the tank. It just simply sat there for a moment, doing nothing, but then it began to move. Gliding along on oiled joints and greased bearings, the turret pointed its cannon at its first target, a large sheet of metal painted blue to stand out against the pink grass. Then it fired.

And holy fuck was it loud.

The tank wobbled slightly as the recoil of its gun pushed it backwards a few feet, as it didn’t have treads or any contact with the ground to anchor it in place. Downrange, an enormous cloud of dirt and dust flew into the air, showering the target with debris from the near miss. But we didn’t care, what with all the cheering and applause. We were just all excited that the damn thing actually worked. Optics could be calibrated easy enough; the thing had a computer in it that worked out the firing solution anyway, so it was just a matter of tuning its rangefinder. I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that in minutes they’d have the tank shooting perfect bullseyes at all its targets, no matter how far downrange they were.

Zip’s wings fluttered with excitement as she clapped her hooves together. “Let’s see Carrion stop that!” she exclaimed. “A cannon that powerful will rip through anything!”

“Does it have shielding, too?” I asked. “Like the ringbird, or our armor?”

“Yeah, and stronger than a ringbird’s, too,” Sig said. “Its power plant provides a lot of energy to maintain its shields, and since it’s smaller than a ringbird, it can concentrate it better. The only downside is it can’t keep its shields up and fire at the same time; something about how they work would interfere with sending a shell downrange, so they momentarily lower when the tank fires. Some of your techies or whatever you call them figured that out when they had to restart the computer system”

“At least we figured out its weaknesses before we brought it to the dam,” Zip said. “We wouldn’t want our shiny new toy to get taken out by an anti-tank gun before we get the chance to really use it.”

“Does Carrion have those?” I asked. “Anti-tank guns?”

“We don’t know anything for certain, really,” Zip said. “We’ve had scouts on recon at the dam for a week now to try to gauge our best avenue of attack, but they can’t get too close without giving their positions away. But if the ringbirds are any indication, it seems like Carrion’s been getting supplies from the Ivory City for a while now. If Reclaimer has ringbirds, then he might have anti-tank guns and artillery.”

“I guess we’ll have to keep an eye out for those,” I mused, my eyes drifting back towards the tank, which thundered as it let loose another near-miss at the target downrange. If Gauge was going to be in that tank when we stormed the dam, then it was my job to make sure I killed any anti-tank guns I might find. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if he died under my watch.

Zip shrugged. “I’m sure it’s something we’ll be discussing later today. Rampart thinks it’s time.”

I whipped my head toward her. “It’s time?”

She slowly nodded. “We’re approaching the end of Fusillade’s two-week window. I did some planning for our pegasi with Rampart, Fusillade, and Thunder yesterday and the day before. The hope is that we can strike not tomorrow, but the day after. We’ll be spending the rest of today and tomorrow going over the plan and getting everything into position.” Then, smiling at me, she added, “If everything goes well, you’ll be seeing your friends again in two days.”

The tank roared again, and this time the blue sheet of metal shattered into so many tiny pieces, much to the satisfaction of the crowd. But I wasn’t paying it any mind now. Two days. Just two more days, and I’d see Nova again. Two more days, and the Crimson would fall.

The rest of the display was entertaining, but I just couldn’t pay attention to it. My mind was stuck on what Zip said, repeating it over and over again. It didn’t seem real to be this close. For some reason, I never thought the day would come. I couldn’t picture myself at the dam, freeing Nova and Brass and putting a bullet in Carrion’s brain.

But here we were. Finally on the verge of the end.

And I knew tomorrow would be the longest day of my life.

It’d been some time since I was last in the Bastion’s war room, but it certainly wasn’t this cramped before. The whole place was standing room only as everypony gathered around the holographic table in the center. In front of the table stood Platinum Rampart, Fusillade, Zip, and Thunder Dash, each patiently waiting while the rest of us got ourselves organized around them.

“They brought everypony,” I whispered to Gauge. “There’s no place to sit.”

“I don’t even think they got everypony,” Gauge murmured back. “There’s maybe two hundred here. Didn’t you say that we had like four hundred?”

“About.” I looked around, noting the different factions I saw in the room. “Looks like they left most of the mercs out. Only their captains are here.”

“Probably because mercs fight for whoever pays them the most,” he said. “They don’t want anypony who thinks the Crimson might pay them more for our plans to listen to them.”

Sig overheard our quiet conversation with his fucking bird super hearing and stopped chatting with Dacie to lean toward us. “I figured it’d be best if we didn’t flood the war room with a few hundred griffons, too. Just a few siblings from each nest who’ll tell the rest what they need to do.”

“I can certainly appreciate the lack of bird noises,” I said. “It sounds like a fucking aviary downstairs when I’m trying to sleep at night.”

“That why I keep finding you curled up with Zip in her bed?”

“One of the reasons, certainly.”

Thankfully, I was spared from having to talk more about my love life (as great as it was) by the loud stomp of a horseshoe against steel. We all turned to Fusillade, who stood with one hoof raised above the edge of the table, and her usual dour look on her face. By her side, Rampart dipped his head appreciatively before addressing the rest of us. “I trust everyone who we asked to be here is here?” The nods and murmurs he got from the crowd were apparently enough, so he pressed a few buttons on the table. “Good. Let’s get started.”

The hologram on the table changed from its usual overview of the valley to an enormous dam at the very east end. “Celestia Dam. It’s served as Carrion’s base of operations since he slaughtered his way to the top of the bandit factions years ago and united them into the Crimson. A long time ago, the dam provided power to a huge number of installations in the valley and surrounding area, including the Bastion, but it hasn’t functioned in decades. I’ll spare you all the history lesson, but the dam’s position at the end of the valley meant it was a perfect spot for raiders and bandits to congregate and choke off the rest of the valley from the civilization that lies to the south of it. Removing the Crimson from it would not only free the rest of the valley from their hold, but it would connect us with the other settlements still on Auris. In short, we cannot fail. Too much depends on us.”

He pressed a few more buttons on the display, and the hologram changed to a close-up of the dam. On the western side, we could clearly see the winged horseshoe symbol built into the concrete—the symbol of the Equestrian Synarchy. On the east, an enormous reservoir of water formed a lake between the mountains, held back only by Equestrian engineering two centuries old. I morbidly wondered what would happen if the dam were to burst. That much water would be… problematic, to say the least.

“The Celestia Dam spans the width of the valley neck, from the Dragonsteeth Mountains in the north to the Shattered Hoof Range in the south,” Rampart said. “It is a little less than a mile long from end to end—certainly a daunting size. You can see that it is incredibly fortified. Watchtowers along the entire length of the dam keep the surrounding area under surveillance for miles, and the top of the dam is split into multiple checkpoints and fallback lines.” At each of those, he pointed to increasingly bigger sets of walls and defenses building up toward the center of the dam. “In the center lies the control tower, which our scouts say is the central hub of the Crimson’s activity. It’s likely we’ll find Carrion there, but this tower is protected by anti-aircraft artillery. We won’t be able to perform a surgical strike using our ringbird to take Carrion out and be done with it.”

The map shifted toward the north, where the mountains and hills leveled out enough into a mostly flat area, filled with trenches and other fortifications. Between that and the dam was a huge gate, with two large gun towers absolutely bristling with machine guns and small artillery pieces. Just the sight of that, even in a hologram, made me feel sick. It felt like the dam was almost as heavily fortified as the Bastion!

“This is going to be the first point of our assault,” the aging earth pony said. “The ringbird will approach this site from the north, using the cover of the mountains to keep out of sight and, more importantly, away from their triple-A. There is a rapid transit zone here, and we have the coordinates for it in our computers. The first strike team will be responsible for clearing and securing this zone, and defending it against any counterattacks. Once the RTZ is secured, we will be running teleportation trains non-stop to pour our soldiers in and begin the assault in earnest. Chief among them will be our tank and its crew,” he said, touching a few more buttons and causing a holographic tank to appear in the area. “The tank will disable the gun towers, smash through the gate, and lead the charge into the dam’s interior defenses.”

As he said that, the tank turned its turret and fired once at each of the towers, causing them to collapse, before blasting its way through the gate and advancing into the interior of the dam. “Ground forces will support the tank as it clears a path to the central compound,” Rampart continued. “The Crimson may have some anti-tank capability, so you must find and neutralize those threats if they appear. We cannot afford to lose the tank. But, in the event that we do, Acting Commander Zip will coordinate the backup plan.”

He nodded to Zip and stepped aside, and Zip shuffled in front of the table. “While the ground assault is underway, our fliers will be responsible for keeping the skies clean. Tonight and tomorrow, we’ll be moving most of our airborne elements to Hard Point Beta in preparation for the attack. We will be in close radio contact with the strike team to synchronize our attacks on the dam. Our job will be to keep the Crimson disoriented and confused while the strike team secures the RTZ, at which point our objective shifts to eliminating the triple-A so our ringbird can support us. We will also be responding to any changes in the battlefield, striking where and when we are needed. The more off-balance we can keep the Crimson, the better chance we have of succeeding.”

She stepped away to let Rampart retake the reins of the briefing. “Under the Acting-Commander’s orders, our forces on the ground should not have much to worry about in the sky. If Carrion shows his own ringbird, ours will attempt to lead it away from the dam, and if it lingers, will engage it to keep its attention away from our troops. We have been fortunate enough to find a pilot able to competently fly this machine, and I trust that she’ll be more than up to the task.”

Dacie shrunk back a bit under Rampart’s sudden attention, and I smiled to myself as I remembered being in that position not too long ago. Clearing her throat, Dacie raised her talons to her forehead in an uncomfortable salute. “Y-You can count on me, sir.”

Rampart nodded once and looked away, and Dacie gasped and lowered her hand. Sig patted her on the back and ran his beak through a few of her head feathers quickly while Rampart resumed his briefing. “But, merely storming the dam will not be enough,” he said, quickly putting in some command that caused a few structures on the dam to glow red. “These are the access points to the interior of the dam. This is where most of the Crimson will be. When the attack begins, they are likely to begin pouring out of these access points. If we are not careful, they will flood in behind us and cut off our retreat, or even worse, seize control of the RTZ. There are four such access points between the RTZ and the central tower. These will have to be secured as we advance, meaning that the closer we get to the tower, the thinner our forces will become. If we get to the central tower and find that Carrion is not there, then we will have to breach the lower levels and find him. But for now, only concern yourselves with securing these points and ensuring the assault proceeds as planned.”

Fusillade gave Rampart a quick look, and the stallion bowed and stepped back. The unicorn marched into his place and surveyed all of us with a stern look. “The logistics of the teams will be sorted out by the end of tomorrow, and each strike team will be briefed on their individual objectives. Once Carrion is located and his death is confirmed, we will regroup at the central tower and ensure that the rest of the Crimson knows. That should be enough to force their surrender. If not, then we will plan the best course of action for cleaning them from the dam once and for all.”

Then, stepping away from the center of the table, Fusillade swiped her hoof through the hologram, dispersing it. “Pour la chance, l’honneur, et la gloire. Do your part, and the Crimson will fall. That much I can promise you. If the stars are willing, then we will celebrate when this is all over.”

She looked over to Rampart and bowed her head. A small smile appeared on the stallion’s lips, and he gestured in her direction. “Commander Fusillade is right. If we all do our jobs, then in just two days, the valley will be free. Now go. Enjoy the time we have left before we buckle down and get to work. You’ve earned it.”

He waved his hoof, and the ponies (and griffons and zebra) in the room saluted and began to go their separate ways. The four commanders exchanged a few words for a moment then split, and I managed to catch Zip before she walked past me.

“Good briefing, Commander,” I said, falling in at her side and teasing her with her title.

She chuckled and rolled her eyes. “Thanks. I said like two things.”

“I can’t help it, I love to hear you talk,” I said, smirking at her. At her look, I groaned and shook my head. “Yeah, yeah, I know, on duty and shit. But that’s actually good, because I wanted to ask my superior something, not my marefriend.”

“And what would that be?” she asked. “You want to be the first one in?”

“No, not that,” I said. “Think you could pull a favor for me?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Depends on the favor. What do you need?”

I’d never been to the Bastion’s brig before, or at least, not this part. I mean, when I first woke up here all those days ago, it was in a small room in the brig, but it’s not like that part was actually used to hold prisoners. It was more of an isolated place to keep newcomers until the Sentinels figured out what to do with them. This part, however, was definitely used to house prisoners. I could’ve figured that out from all the heavy doors with thick bars drawn across them, even without the faint sounds of ponies inside each one.

I followed Zip (and her shapely orange flanks) deeper into the brig. She wasn’t too thrilled with my request, but at least she decided to help. Plus, she had the authority of a commander, even if she was only a replacement for the time being, so she didn’t need to consult with Rampart or Fusillade. I wasn’t sure if Rampart would’ve helped me, and I’m pretty sure Fusillade would’ve thrown me in the brig myself for what I wanted to do. But hey, I had a promise to keep, and if we lost the battle at the dam, well, I wasn’t going to be able to keep it.

We rounded a corner and stopped in front of one of the doors, the number ‘66-1’ painted on it. “Here,” Zip said, tapping her hoof against the door and sliding back the slat to peer inside. “Not sure what you want with him, but he’s a Crimson soldier regardless. Be careful, okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, frowning at her. “I already told you, he’s not interested in that anymore. He was just some kid that the Crimson foalnapped and then forced him to be a soldier, alright?”

Zip gave me a look like she thought I was an idiot, which probably isn’t far from the truth. “That doesn’t mean anything. Plenty of those foals go on to become some of the more violent bandits in Carrion’s fold. Some of them are his top generals.”

I threw my hooves into the air in frustration. “Yeah, and I already talked to him at the Fort. He’s fine, okay? You don’t have to worry about him.”

“Right.” Zip wrapped a hoof around a handle on the bar and slid it over, then took a keycard and unlocked the door. “I’ll be out here when shit hits the fan. Holler if you need me.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Shrugging, Zip pulled open the door, and I realized that the thing was at least six inches thick. I don’t know what kind of prisoners Equestria would’ve been taking back in the day, but I don’t think they needed that much steel to keep them locked up. I guess that’s why the Sentinels were content to merely use bars and keycards to keep everything secure; who was ever going to get through something like that?

When the door opened wide enough, I slipped through the gap into a fairly small cell, even smaller than the one I woke up in once. There was a mattress lying on the floor, a bench welded to the wall, and a toilet bowl that rose a few inches out of the floor, all within reach of each other. Hardly enough room to pace properly, either. I realized that when I saw the stallion I came to visit trying to pace at the ‘far’ end of his cell, and all he was doing was basically spinning in circles.

The door slammed shut behind me, leaving me in here with the stallion. I guess Zip wasn’t in the mood for any parting jokes about getting shanked or whatever.

The pale yellow stallion started at the noise, and cautiously looked at me. When he recognized me, however, his ears perked a bit. “Oh, it’s… it’s you. Heh. Sorry, I… I didn’t know you were coming.” He took a step toward me but hesitated, unsure of what to do. He didn’t have any more war paint on his face—I guess that’d come off in the shower or something—so he actually looked like a normal young stallion, not the bandit I last spoke to at the Fort.

I saw he was nervous so I waved a hoof. “Don’t worry, Wheat, you’re fine. In fact, I come bearing good news.” Smiling at him, I sat down on the bench, and tapped the seat next to me. When he hesitated, I rolled my eyes. “I’m not going to bite, come on. Stars, I would’ve thought a stallion like you would be jumping for the chance to sit next to a pretty mare like me after all this time alone.”

Something slammed (or more accurately, kicked) the door to Wheat’s cell from the outside. I smirked and slowly shook my head while Wheat just gave it a suspicious look. I guess Zip really was listening after all. “Don’t worry about her,” I said, patting the bench again and raising my voice so Zip could hear me. “I’ll make her feel better later.”

Finally, Wheat sat down next to me, though he kept a cool distance between us. I guess I didn’t really blame him; I was a Sentinel after all, one of the ponies keeping him prisoner. So I figured it’d be a good idea to try to break the ice a little before I told him what I really wanted to. “They treating you alright?”

He shrugged. “Three square meals a day, even if it is some awful paste, plus a clean mattress and showers every few days? Maybe I should’ve gotten myself captured sooner,” he said, an amused smile creeping onto his muzzle. That was good at least. “Those things were sort of hard to come by when I was with the Crimson. Well, the Fort did have showers, but we hardly used them simply because of how long it took to do the whole painting thing. It’d take me half an hour every day to put my paint on correctly if I washed it off all the time.”

“Yeah, I don’t get that, though,” I said. “What’s the point of it? Just to look big and bad and scary?”

“Part of it, yeah,” he said. “They always said it was to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies and stuff like that. But it was also a sort of personal thing too, you know? Everypony did theirs in a different way. It helped us stand out in a fight.”

I nodded, imagining all the different styles of face paint I’d seen in my clashes with the Crimson. Amusingly enough, it was almost like a protest against the Sentinels. We all had our sleek and shiny armor, our formal ranks, our standardized weapons. We all looked more or less the same. But the Crimson were a crew of individuals, a whole bunch of different ponies banding together with mutual interests. Now, granted, those mutual interests included murder, slavery, and rape, and for that, fuck them, but it was still a neat little contrast all the same.

He sighed and shook his head, slowly hunching over. “Still didn’t mean shit when you guys came for us. The average soldier only gets those small submachine guns—I think they’re called SM45s?” When I nodded, he shrugged. “Those things can’t do shit against your shields. We had a few rifles, but those belonged to the older guys. Even then, they don’t stand a chance against… how many machine guns do you have in your armor?”

“Six,” I told him. “With two hundred rounds in each. Plus laser lances, wingblades, and antimatter rocket pods—”

“Yeah, I get the picture. One of those rockets nearly destroyed me. Barely escaped the watchtower before they blasted it to pieces.” He gave me a skeptical look. “Was that really necessary?”

“Uhh… maybe?” I shrugged and held up my hooves. “Look, I’m not the one with rockets. Those are the earth ponies. I’m just a warlock. Or, well, I guess warlock in training. You know, raining fiery death on ponies and that sort of thing.”

“Because that’s so much better?” Wheat grunted and looked at me. “Whatever. Even if I never wanted to be in the Crimson, you guys still killed a bunch of my friends.”

I bit my lip. “I’m… sorry?” I said, honestly unsure of how to feel about that. I mean, on the one hoof, these were ponies that Wheat cared about, which automatically made me feel a little guilty. On the other, these ponies were probably awful ponies who killed and murdered their way through the valley, so the fewer of them, the better.

I had a feeling this conversation was slipping in the wrong direction, so I decided to just cut to the chase now. “Alright, let’s just forget about the Fort, okay? We’re both alive, so that’s all that really matters.” He looked at me for a moment before slowly nodding, and I let out a sigh of relief. This was going to work much better if he was actually going to cooperate with me. “So! Let’s, uh, let’s go back to the good news.”

“There was good news in this?” Wheat asked.

“Yeah, totally!” Smiling, I stood up and gestured to the door. “We’re letting you go!”

Wheat just blinked at me.

When he didn’t do anything, I shuffled in place. “No, like seriously. I’m not joking.”

“Really?” Wheat asked, slowly standing up. “Just like that? Why?”

“Well, to be fair, it’s not condition free, but I’m sure you won’t mind.” Taking a deep breath, I stepped closer to him. “Shit’s going to hit the fan in a few days. Either the Sentinels or the Crimson are going to die, and I don’t know which one. Even if the Sentinels win, I might die, and it’ll be hard for me to keep the promise I made to your mom if I’m dead. So, I got them to let you go free. We both know that you’re not going to go running back to the Crimson as soon as you’re free, right?”

“Fuck no,” Wheat said, baring his teeth for a moment. “I’m done with them. So what’s the catch?”

“You’re taking your brother back with you,” I said. Wheat flinched back, but didn’t say anything, and I furrowed my brow. “What, that bother you or something?”

“No, it’s just…” Wheat stopped, searching for the right words. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him. Does he even remember me?”

Well, fuck. I’d hoped I would’ve been able to avoid answering that question, but I guess that wasn’t happening. “Not as far as I can tell. He certainly hasn’t mentioned you.” I saw his ears wilt, and I placed a hoof on his shoulder. “Hey, maybe you can bond on the trip back, right? And if worst comes to worst, you can just wait until you get home. Your mom will be happy to see you—both of you.”

Wheat still didn’t say anything, only hanging his head. “Look, I know it’s probably not the most fun thing in the world, but I’m trying to help your family out, okay? You get to go home, you bring Chaff home safe, your mom and your grandpa’s happy, everypony wins.” I tried to give him an encouraging smile. “What do you say?”

Those few seconds seemed to stretch on forever before he finally answered me. “Okay,” he said with a small nod. “Okay, sure. Why not. I’ll do it. Anything will beat sitting in here for who knows how long.”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you so much,” I said, maybe catching him by surprise a little with that. “That means a lot.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t mention it?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay, sure.” I grinned and felt a huge weight come off of my shoulders. “They’ll let you go tomorrow, give you supplies and shit for the trip back. I don’t think it’s far from here to Northlight, but I don’t really know. But I know you’ll be fine. I mean, Chaff followed me most of the way here without getting caught, so he’s got good luck at least.”

Wheat smiled faintly. “Yeah, yeah. I’m sure we’ll be fine. Thanks.”

I took a few steps toward the door and knocked on it. “Alright. You probably won’t see me again; I’m going to be busy tomorrow, so I won’t be able to see you off. I’ll try to be there, though. But… take care. And tell your family I said hi, and I’m doing well.”

He bowed his head. “Will do. Be safe out there.”

The door slid open, and I quietly slipped out and stood next to it while Zip closed and barred it again. Then we set off, back the way we came, back toward the mess hall, where we knew a nice dinner was waiting for us.

I managed to restrain myself until we got to the top of the stairs leading out of the brig. “Told you so.”

A cuff from Zip’s wing was my reward.

The whole Bastion was just filled with excitement. Tomorrow, we’d be moving ponies to the staging area at the Fort, and the day after that, we’d be storming the dam. Word got out that Rampart was planning on holding dinner in two days on the wall of the dam once we’d locked the whole thing down. Everybody planned on being there, and some of the Sentinels went digging through old scrap tech to see if they could find any working cameras. It was certainly going to be the night to remember.

And that’s all everypony talked about; what we were going to do once we took the dam. Nopony even considered the alternative, or at least didn’t say anything about it publically. It probably would’ve been almost the same as treason or something. We were going to win. That’s all there was to it.

Since this was going to be the last dinner we had together before we split up into our teams, and the last dinner I was going to have with Zip and Sig until after the assault, we’d all gone down to the mess to seize a table and feast on the rare good food that the cooks prepared. They had everything from vegetables and fresh fruit to pastas and even meat for the griffons and those of us ponies who felt like it. And even more astonishingly, somepony had produced a few surprisingly large kegs of moonshine from somewhere. I had the distinct feeling that brewing booze was against the law or whatever you call it in a military base, but the commanders seemed to overlook that just for tonight. Even Fusillade seemed to have removed the spiked club up her ass for the night, because I caught her actually smiling and drinking with a few of the older officers. It was like she was a completely different pony.

We talked and we laughed as we filled our stomachs with all sorts of good shit. I had some red lettuce, pink broccoli, and a mess of taproot on my plate, mixed with some pasta and a few stone hare legs, and a little bit of moonshine in a glass that I purposefully ignored. Zip, who I was leaning so hard against that there wasn’t a single inch of space between us from our shoulders to our flanks, had gone pretty pasta heavy, though she did mix a bunch of apple slices into it, as well as some sugarfruit that grew in the valley. Gauge and Chaff sported an equal mix of plants and meat, and Sig and his whole flock of siblings had plates just piled with juicy red meat. Sometimes I really wished pony anatomy was a little more compatible with meat; their meals looked delicious.

But, all in all, sharing jokes and eating with my friends and with my lover at my side, I finally felt like I’d found something. Something normal. For once, I wasn’t an outsider who’d managed to worm her way into a suit of armor because it’d help her free her friends. As I looked around and saw my friends and my marefriend listening to Gauge with smiles on their faces as he told some funny story about his life as a greaser back in Blackwash, I realized how normal everything felt. These weren’t soldiers ready to destroy the Crimson; these were ponies and griffons and zebras, loving life and living happy, normal lives. And for the first time, I could see myself doing this; I could see myself here far into the future. I’d found a family and a home in the Sentinels. They’d help Blackwash live on, and once we took care of the Crimson, maybe they’d give me the support I needed to go chase down the rest of the code.

That wasn’t something I’d really talked with anypony about, though. For now, everypony was concerned with the assault on the dam, but over the last few days my mind had started to wander to the future. There were pieces of the code out there, somewhere on Auris, and ponies were trying to get them. For what, I had no idea. Nopony did. All I knew was that the hunt for the code had led to the Crimson attacking us. Who knows how many more settlements like Blackwash might be caught in the crossfire of some global scavenger hunt that could change the course of Auris forever? How many more ponies might die over a stupid signal sent from outer space?

A nudge (or I guess it’d be more like a boop) from Zip’s nose against my cheek shook me out of my thoughts. I blinked and looked aside at her, at her beautiful crystal blue eyes watching me. “Something bothering you?” she asked, keeping her voice low and our conversation private while Gauge continued his story with increasingly excited leg waving.

“No, uh, nothing,” I said, quickly shaking my head. “Just… thinking.”

“Oh.” The single syllable sounded disappointed, and I knew she was reading right through me. “Well, what are you thinking about?”

“Right now, how pretty your eyes are,” I said, smiling at her, and making her smile in turn. “And how lucky I am to have a mare like you who loves a mare like me.”

“Tstch. Sweet talker,” Zip said, playfully shaking her head. Then she fluttered her eyes and leaned in, lips slightly parted, and I mirrored her without even hesitating. Yeah, this was the life. I could get used to this wing around my back and that orange against my black.

“Alright, that’s enough out of you two,” Sig teased, pointing his fork between the two of us as we abruptly broke off our kiss and blushed a bit. “You don’t need to be doing that at the dinner table. There are kids here.”

Chaff just frowned at him indignantly. “I’m not a kid! I’m six winters!”

Gauge made a face like he was seriously considering Chaff’s protests. “You know, he’s got a point there.” SCaR chirped twice and wobbled over Chaff’s head, the thrust it gave off tossing his mane everywhere. “See, even SCaR agrees.”

Gatre snorted and waved his hand. “I don’t know, that just sounds like a whole lot of squawking to me.”

Dacie grinned from across the table. “Gat’s got a point.”

“And we all know how loud he snores,” Hoana said, winking at her brother. “If anygriffon knows squawks and chirps, it’d be him. He practices in his sleep.”

Gatre tossed his silverware in his pile of meat. “Do not!” he exclaimed, holding out his hands.

“You really do,” another one of their brothers (I forget his name) said. A few more of his siblings nodded their agreement.

“Sorry, bro, you’re out of luck,” Sig said, smirking at Gatre. “Though I am curious how you even translate that thing,” he said, turning to Gauge.

Gauge just shrugged, because of course that’s what he did. “A lot of practice, a lot of experience. SCaR’s pretty emotive if you get to know him.” That got a whistle from the drone, which buzzed around his head in slow circles, stopping when Gauge began to pat it on the central frame, like you would a dog’s head.

I stuffed another bite of my dinner in my mouth and pointed at him with my fork. “SCaR just sends shit into his mind by antenna. Why do you think it’s always buzzing around his head?”

Everyone chuckled at that, even Gauge, who just shook his head. “He’s attracted to intelligence,” the zebra shot back. “Ember’s just jealous that SCaR never comes to her.”

Another chorus of chuckling broke out at my expense, and I just dismissively waved my hoof. “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I said, hunching over while Zip rubbed her wing against my back.

When the laughter died down, Sig grabbed his moonshine and raised it in the air. “Well, everyone, I just want to say this. No matter how we got here, no matter how we all found ourselves in this mess, it ends soon.”

The rest of us immediately stopped our own conversations and watched him, raising our glasses like he did. “We have a big fight ahead of us, that’s true,” he continued. “It’s not going to be easy. Carrion isn’t going to just keel over and die no matter how much we wish that he would. But, if we stick together and do our jobs, we’ll be alright in the end.”

Then, raising his glass just a little bit higher, he cheered. “Next time, on the dam!”

“For the flock!” his siblings shouted.

“For the Sentinels!” Zip added.

“For Blackwash!” Gauge and I said, smiling at each other as we did so.

We crashed our aluminum cups together in a hearty toast over the middle of the table, spilling a little moonshine onto everything as we did so. Then we drank, or in my case, took a sip from the bitter brew before returning to our conversations and dinner. Laughter returned, and as the night wore on and booze replaced food, the whole mess began singing and dancing in one final night of carefree bliss before the coming storm. And even though I hardly drank anything, by the end of it, I was drunk off of the sheer joy alone.

And in two nights, we’d be doing it all again. The only difference would be us celebrating the end, not the beginning. We’d be celebrating with Nova and Brass and the rest of Blackwash.

It was a night I couldn’t wait for.

Of course, with great drinking, comes great responsibility. Not for the one doing the drinking, though. That’s saved for her friends.

I figured that out when I found myself sitting outside the bathroom, listening to the poor mare retching inside. This had been going on for the better part of half an hour, and I’d grown tired of counting all the steel panels in the floor (all six hundred and eighty-four) of the hallway. At least after I heard the toilet flush this time, the poor orange mare stumbled out of the bathroom and into my shoulder, a little bit of puke still hanging off of her chin. I wiped it away with my magic and managed to get her wing around my neck, and I basically began to drag her down the hall to her room.

“…s’rry,” Zip slurred, her clumsy hooves barely managing to keep her upright as we walked.

I nuzzled her cheek. “It’s okay,” I said, pausing to adjust her weight across my back and side. “I’m taking care of you.”

We stumbled along for a bit more before Zip began to shake her head from side to side in increasingly exaggerated motions. “Too much t’drink.”

“Thank you, Acting-Commander Obvious.”

Poor Zip never stood a chance once the drinking began in earnest. She was already a pretty small mare, and she was trying to keep up with Sigur and his flock, all of whom were much bigger than her. Gauge and Chaff and I watched it all from the sidelines, each of us sipping our own drinks (and me giving the rest of mine to Gauge when I couldn’t take the taste of alcohol anymore without feeling like I was going to puke). I eventually had to take Zip away from the mess when it was clear she was finished, after she had fallen off of her seat, tried to stand up again, and had fallen over a second time. We didn’t leave a moment too soon, either; almost as soon as I’d escorted her from the mess hall, she immediately staggered over to the bathroom and began puking her brains out in the toilet.

The stairs took a long time to navigate, mostly because Zip insisted on taking them herself and wouldn’t let me just drape her over my back and carry her up myself. I gently humored her, though I all but lifted her up each step with my magic, which she was too drunk to realize I had enveloped around her entire torso. But, finally, and after many failed attempts at drunken babbling from my marefriend, I got her back to her quarters and tucked her into bed.

I gave her a kiss on the forehead and stroked her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow before you go, okay?” I told her, making a mental note to make sure she was awake and not too hungover before her deployment time. “You just get some rest.”

I stepped back to leave her be, but she stretched her hooves toward me like a foal reaching for its mother. “Noooooo…” she moaned, waving her forelegs and nearly falling out of the bed. “Staaaayyyy….”

Biting my lip, I ultimately shook my head at her and moved back toward the bed. “Move over,” I said, gently sliding her to the other half of her bed and climbing in next to her. Funny how almost a week ago our roles were reversed, with Zip being the one to get a hardly-coherent me into her bed for rest. This time, I was the one holding Zip to my chest and rubbing her back while she curled up in my embrace.

We stayed like that for a long time, Zip’s head pressed against my neck, and her torso tightly held between my four legs. I almost thought she was asleep, she was so quiet, at least until she whimpered and pulled herself closer to me. “Please don’t die…”

My ears perked at her whisper; it was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. “Hmm?”

“Please don’t die,” she repeated in the same whisper. “I love you. I love you so much. Please don’t die.” She looked up at me, and I could see tears in her eyes. “I order you to not die!”

I had a feeling that was a little more than the alcohol talking. “Zip, what’s wrong?” I asked her, pressing my nose to hers. “Why are you upset?”

She started shaking like a leaf, and I held her as close as I could to try to stop it. “I’m afraid,” she said, blinking away tears. “Afraid that… that you’ll die. They’ll take you from me. D-Don’t want to be alone…”

“Hey… hey…” I said, gently wiping away her tears. “It’s okay. I won’t be going anywhere, alright?” Even through the drunken glaze in her eyes, I could see the fear inside. Suddenly, a lot of things started to make sense. I started to wonder just how much of her personal fears and worries she kept bottled up underneath her cocky and almost dangerously carefree attitude, behind her mask of professionalism and discipline. It was strange to see the mare I loved, the mare I idolized, break apart once alcohol lowered her guard.

I kissed her, because it was the only thing I could think of doing to get her to calm down. I’m really not that great with words. It took her a second to respond, but when she did, I kissed her again, this time with more passion. My tongue darted around her mouth, fleeing and poking at her sluggish counterpart. She made some sort of indignant moan before chasing mine back into my mouth, and she began to move with a little more lively energy now that I’d turned her on. Some part of me worried for the moment whether I was taking advantage of her addled state, so I resolved not to push her past what she wanted tonight. I’d let her do the leading and simply follow along, holding her hoof as she drunkenly stumbled ahead.

She rolled me onto my back and positioned herself on my chest with a little help so she could continue her assault. I opened my jaw to her tongue, letting her invade as much as she wanted while my hooves massaged her shoulders around the base of her wings. Her tail, whether intentionally or not, flicked against my crotch, and my legs quivered as she woke it up. I moaned and counterattacked, pinning her to my chest with my hooves while I kissed her over and over again. She giggled and tried to fight it off, but given that I was bigger than her and she was drunk, there wasn’t much she could do.

I let her escape after a few more kisses to her cheeks and muzzle, and she responded by sliding down my chest and burying her muzzle in my belly. I wondered what she was doing for a split second until she suddenly blew a raspberry into my belly button. I laughed and kicked into the air, completely taken by surprise by just how… how silly it was. Zip’s eyes shone in the darkness as she looked up at me, and then she did it again. My laughter and protests of ‘stop!’ turned into moans of pleasure when she shifted her attention lower and began to tease my tits with her teeth. And then, once she felt like she had full control over me, she went even lower.

Let me tell you, even when drunk out of her mind, Zip still knew how to fuck. It might have been the best fucking I’ve ever gotten.

Her tongue left me unable to move, and her hooves on my tits completely paralyzed my lower body. I could only moan and push against the blankets with my forelegs while she worked her way deeper, carving her way through my cunt with her tongue. The pressure and heat built up between my legs until, like a balloon, it burst all at once. I felt the walls of my pussy clench and every muscle in my body flex as I orgasmed, and the stench of sex bathed my nose with its pungent smell. My hooves went numb and the world flashed across my blind eyes until finally, finally, the wave began to recede, and I slowly recovered my senses and mind an inch at a time.

Zip drunkenly crawled up from between my legs and went back to resting on my chest, the side of her head pressed against my body. “Your heart is pretty…” she cooed, hooves running up and down my sides.

“Your face is pretty,” I teased her, and when she looked up at me, I stuck my tongue out. She frowned at me, then finished crawling up my body to plant her muzzle against mine. It was a little weird tasting my own cunt, but I enjoyed the kiss all the same. She eventually broke it off, and then just looked at me with a sparkle in her eyes. It wasn’t hard to guess what she wanted.

So I flipped her onto her back, taking care not to make her dizzy (because I had no idea if she was really done puking for the night), and went to work. I knew what she liked from doing this a few times already, so I worked my way down from her mouth in a trail of kisses, stopping momentarily at her tits to get her ready. By the time I actually made it to her crotch, her cunt was already wet and glistening, and she’d managed to tangle her forelegs in my enormous mane. A tug on it was enough for her to pull my face into her pussy, and I got to work with tongue and hooves until she eventually came.

I held her in my forelegs while I waited for her to come down again, gently stroking her short mane and tracing a few of the scars on her body. When she opened her eyes, I kissed her, and we split again to put our heads together. “I love you,” I whispered to her.

“Love you too,” she said. She traced the side of my jaw with one of her wings, even if she almost drunkenly jammed a few of her out of place feathers into my eye. Quickly pecking her on the nose, I slowly removed my hooves from underneath her body and rolled her onto her stomach to get me a better angle of attack on her wings. “What’re you dooinnnggg…?” she whined as I stretched one out and positioned the crest near my mouth.

“Preening you,” I said, looking at the disheveled feathers everywhere. “You really need it.”

It was a little weird putting her feathers into my mouth and sliding them along. They made this zipping noise as I ran the vane between my teeth, hooking the edges of the feathers together. They were also covered in this chalky dust that I accidentally got on my tongue. I think it had something to do with keeping them waterproof. I knew from Nova’s whining back in Blackwash during the spring seasons that she couldn’t fly if she spent too much time in the rain. But, when the tip of the feather slid out from between my teeth, the thing was straight and whole—a far cry from the rest of the feathers on each of her wings.

Zip would fidget a bit as I worked my way through first one wing and then the next, but by the time I finally finished with the other one, she was struggling to stay awake. Lying down next to her, I pulled her back into my forelegs and kissed her forehead. “We should get to sleep.”

“Mmmyeah…” she murmured, shifting slightly to get in a more comfortable position. “S’good.”

“I love you,” I said again, closing my eyes and resting my head on the pillow.

“Forever,” Zip mumbled. “Forever and always…”

Then she was out, leaving me clinging on for a few more minutes. “Yeah,” I whispered to myself. “Forever and always.”

Chapter 29: Where We Draw the Line (Reprise)

Another burst of turbulence shook the ringbird.

I leaned forward in my seat, rubbing my hooves together, and tried my hardest to stop tapping my hoof against the floor. My armor felt tight and uncomfortable, and my lungs burned with the hot smoke I inhaled. Dim red light outlined my hooves as I held them, shaking, in front of my face. I couldn’t tell if the shaking was from the turbulence or if it was just me. I tried to pretend it was only the turbulence.

Around me, twenty Sentinels sat in their seats in the ringbird’s cargo bay, all of them quiet. Whatever talk or laughter they’d shared when we first boarded before sunrise had long since left them. All we knew was that we’d been flying for two, nearly three hours, stuck in this windowless box. It wasn’t hard to imagine the turbulence between the mountains as anti-air artillery on the dam. That was why I’d dug into my cigarette box, despite the tight space with almost no ventilation. I needed a smoke bad to calm my nerves before we landed.

Zip and Sig had left with most of the griffons and about half of the Sentinels’ pegasi early yesterday afternoon. We’d shared a heartfelt goodbye, promising to see each other again at the dam, and to look out for each other once that happened. Then the unicorns teleported them away, leaving me to do little but mope around the Bastion with Gauge and Chaff for the next hour. Then, they finally released Wheat, and he and Chaff loaded up with supplies for the long journey ahead.

I’d taken Chaff over to the side of the hangar and knelt in front of him while he fussed with the oversized bag on his back. “Stay close to Wheat,” I had told him, my hooves set on his shoulders. “He knows his way around the valley. He’ll get you home to Northlight.”

Chaff had been, as expected, pretty disappointed that the Sentinels wouldn’t take him along to the dam, and even more disappointed that we were making him leave. But, in spite of all of that, I could tell the little colt was homesick. When he didn’t say anything, I put my hoof under his jaw. “Chaff,” I said, making him look at me, “you are the bravest little colt I’ve ever met. There are adults who have less guts than you. Stars, I was the one nearly pissing myself at every corner when I left Northlight, and you followed me unseen through the grass without a care. And with the attack on the dam tomorrow, I wish I had your courage.

“But it’s time for you to go home,” I’d said, giving him a sympathetic smile. “I know you’re worried about what your mom and what your grandfather are going to say, but don’t be. They’ve been missing you even more than you’ve missed them. And I guarantee you, the first thing your mom is going to do when she sees you is take you in her forelegs and give you a big hug, then make your favorite meal. You don’t have anything to be worried about, okay?”

He’d slowly nodded his head, and I’d drawn him in for a hug. “I’m gonna miss you, Chaff,” I’d said, holding his head against my chest. “Maybe when this is all over, I’ll come and visit you again, okay?”

“Okay,” the little colt had whispered. Then, looking up at me, he’d added, “Thanks for letting me stay.”

I’d started to tear up at that point, so I’d just whispered ‘You’re welcome’ and gave him one last parting hug before letting Wheat take over. He’d shared a few details about his plan to get back to Northlight, and offered me words of encouragement for the assault on the dam. I likewise gave him some encouragement for the road, and then Gauge and I watched as the two walked right out the open hangar door. I’d simply stood there, tears starting to form in my eyes, until the closing doors had blocked my sight of them.

The red light in the ringbird buzzed and switched to yellow, snapping me out of my meditation, if you could call it that. Speakers crackled, and Dacie’s voice rolled through the cargo bay. “We’re about five miles out from the drop-off point, over.”

Near the door, Fusillade grunted and stood up. She was the one in charge of the strike team, of which I was a part of, and it was her job to make sure that we seized the RTZ so the rest of the troops could come flooding in. Underneath her imposing armor, which had been trimmed in diamond to help her casting or something like that, the mare looked terrifying. Despite being in her late forties at least, I had no doubt that she could hold her own on the field of battle. She was almost certainly one of the best warlocks the Sentinels had, to boot.

Hooking a foreleg around a handle near the cargo door, Fusillade looked out over all of us. “Your orders are very simple, understand?” she shouted over the roar of the aircraft’s engines. “When we land, find cover immediately, and begin to drive them back. Bombardiers, I want those gun towers bathed in rockets, and anything that tries to move, vaporize it. Unicorns, rally at the RTZ and begin clearing any obstructions with your magic. As soon as the RTZ is clear, defend it and secure a perimeter until we get the tank here.”

Her eyes slid across us one last time, and her magic grabbed four machine pistols and slotted them into brackets on her armor. “Check your weapons and shields. The second we land, you’re going to need them.”

Around me, the other Sentinels began to do just that, looking over their equipment and running quick diagnostics on their armor. I queued up my own diagnostics program with a thought and took one last drag on the cigarette before crushing it into the floor. I let the smoke linger in my lungs for as long as I could stand it before blowing it out through my nose, the heat tickling the back of my throat. The next time I dipped into that wooden box, I’d be sitting on Carrion’s corpse. I was certain of it.

My diagnostics check came back with no warnings; everything was green across the board. I pried my BR12A out from the clamps that locked it in place next to me and gave it a quick inspection. Its sights still worked normally, showing the number of rounds left in the mag and the distance to target. I’d spent a long time last night cleaning the thing and making sure it was in perfect condition for today. Hopefully between that, the machine guns in my armor, and my magic, I had all I needed to cut my way through the dam and find Nova. I even had two of those deployable cover things mounted to the sides of my armor, in case I really needed them.

The ringbird shook and I heard something that sounded like a whip cracking. Fusillade wasted no time pounding the intercom next to her. “What the fuck was that?”

“Triple-A, ma’am!” Dacie shouted into the speaker. “They must’ve set some up in the mountains! Shields deflected it, though!”

“Distance?” Fusillade shouted back.

“One mile! It’s gonna be rough!”

“Take it in fast and low!” the mare ordered. “Hover over the RTZ for ten seconds and then go! I’m going to open the cargo door, brace for a little turbulence!”

Her magic took hold of the red lever next to her and pulled it down hard. Almost immediately, a warning siren began to go off as the door started to lower. A burst of wind came roaring through the cargo bay, and I held up my hoof to shield my eyes from it. When I opened them again, I saw the mountains roaring beneath us, a blur of dull pink and orange in the low blue light of the rising sun. I could also hear the thundering of artillery guns firing below us, and that awful whip-cracking sound of the ringbird’s shields repelling their shells before they could blow us out of the sky. You know, with how fond Equestria was with shielding all of their important shit, just what exactly would it take to shoot something like this out of the sky?

Turns out, I really didn’t want to know what the answer to that was, because it seemed like the Crimson had it. There was some horrible thundering noise that nearly blew out our eardrums, and the ringbird shook violently as something hit it. I saw pieces of metal come flying off of the back, and the air around us crackle with electricity. Fusillade swore in Prench and hooked herself around the frame so she didn’t go flying out the open door. “Statut!” she ordered, slipping into her native tongue.

“Shields down and charging… glancing hit to the rotor housing,” Dacie said, and I could imagine her struggling to keep the thing flying stable. “Approaching RTZ in ten seconds!”

The commander turned to us and drew her four pistols. “Ready for drop!” she screamed, feeding magazines into each of her pistols with her magic. Swallowing hard, I hugged my battle rifle against my chest and slid forward on my seat, ready to jump to my hooves and gallop toward the door as soon as the ponies in front of me did so. The ground beneath us changed from grass and trees to a broad area of pancaked dirt and mud, with trenches dug into the ground and fortified with machine gun nests. I could even see a few startled Crimson in the trenches lower their heads as the ringbird came buzzing in a few feet off of the ground. “Go!”

Like a true leader, Fusillade was the first out of the door, jumping from the ringbird before it even stopped moving and landing with a practiced roll. Each of her four machine pistols took aim at a different bandit and fired a lethal burst at the same time, dropping four of them in an instant. Then she slid into the nearest trench and concentrated all four in front of her, turning the entrenchment into a terrifying hail of lead.

The rest of the Sentinels followed right behind her, landing scattered throughout the immediate area as the ringbird drifted along. When it was my turn, I bit down on the tac-rail of my battle rifle for a little extra grip as I jumped out of the cargo bay. I hit the ground with a heavy thud, the weight of the armor on my back nearly crushing my legs, and I immediately scrambled for the trench as bullets landed all around me.

My rifle came flying out from between my teeth pretty painfully when I landed on my tail, but I caught it in my magic before it hit the mud. My heart pounding in my chest, I took two seconds to inhale and try to calm myself down before I peeked out over the trench. Something hit the ground across from me and blew up, showering me and the Sentinels around me in dirt. I cowered against the wall of the trench, waiting for the dirt to stop falling, and then I carefully opened my eyes and peered over the trench toward the dam.

Well fuck.

I saw the ringbird retract its cargo door as the last of the Sentinels jumped out of it, a smoldering scorch mark scored diagonally across the rotor ring and exposing the blades inside. Those Sentinels galloped toward the trench the rest of us were in while two enormous concrete towers lit up in all sorts of machine gun fire. Two of the Sentinels didn’t make it; I saw their shields pop as .50cal rounds ripped through their armor, cutting them into gory pieces where they stood. Then bigger guns higher up in the towers thundered, and the ground around us exploded again.

The skies were a mess. Flak filled the air with thick black clouds and flaming shrapnel, occasionally knocking a winged figure out of the sky. Pegasi and griffons chased each other above the dam, and bullets flew wildly between them as they did the dance of death. In the distance, lightning flashed and thunder growled; it seemed like it’d only be a matter of time before the heavens themselves decided they wanted in on the melee.

Things weren’t any prettier on the ground. The Sentinels moved left and right down the trench, with the right side spearheaded by Fusillade herself. Crimson soldiers scurried to defensive positions in a second layer of trenches, rushing to machine gun nests and likely securing the heavy ordinance they needed to kill us. Behind them, I could barely see a metal pad in the ground, piled high with crates and scrap metal and garbage, and with heavy iron stakes driven into it. And beyond that stood a tall gate, probably at least fifteen feet high and topped with barbed wire, more machine guns, and more Crimson. Oh, and it was flanked by those two huge gun towers which just rained death on us.

I about shit myself upon seeing all of that. But I knew what my job was. I needed to get to that metal pad so I could start throwing shit off of it. And the longer we stayed holed in here, the sooner the Crimson got those artillery pieces in the gun towers trained on our trench and just annihilated us.

The first wave of antimatter rockets streaked out of our trench the moment Dacie took the ringbird a safe distance away. They detonated against the gun towers, throwing up huge clouds of debris and smoke, but when it cleared the damn towers were still standing. Not that I expected they’d do anything to the towers, but it was still disheartening to see the towers return fire almost immediately. More rockets detonated against the gate, destroying machine gun emplacements and throwing bandits off of the walls. At least those volleys did something.

I heard the air snap right behind my ears, and I instinctively ducked down. When I looked behind me, I saw a sandbag spilling its contents onto the ground through a perfectly round hole in the fabric. Great. Fucking snipers. Compared to the assault on the Fort, I decided that just this single minute on the ground was worse. It was definitely more daunting, if anything, just seeing what we were up against.

I scooted along the trench to a safer spot and poked my head out, making a quick survey of the battlefield. There was a machine gun nest about fifty yards downrange that was suppressing a group of Sentinels trying to barrage the gun towers, so I leveled my battle rifle at it and began spraying. With the rangefinder in the scope, I was able to get a few clean shots off, taking down two Crimson and probably gravely wounding a third. A warning light and what felt like a solid whack to my right side alerted me to incoming fire, and I ducked back down into the trenches before something that could bypass my shields finally got me.

A whistle down in Fusillade’s direction shrieked into the air, and an enormous barrage of antimatter rockets blanketed everything downrange of us. I knew what that whistle meant, and seeing that I still had eighteen rounds in my mag, I scrambled out of the trench and charged across the open ground. Around me, about half of our strike force dashed across the open terrain with a ferocious battle cry, while the remaining half provided the suppressing fire. Bullets fell all around me, and I nearly slipped on my hooves as I tried to spin out of the way of an incoming barrage of tracers. But I could see the end goal in sight, and with one last leap, I jumped into the second trench.

Right on top of another bandit with a raised bayonet.

I felt the sharp tip of the bayonet slice into my side, past where the light Sentinel armor covered me. I gasped in pain, and the two of us crashed down hard in the bottom of the trench. I still felt my battle rifle somewhere in my magical grip, so I at least knew I hadn’t lost it, but at the moment I was too concerned with the mare writhing under me. She kicked me off with a powerful buck to my helmet (which was the moment I realized she was an earth pony) and began to scramble back to her hooves, drawing a knife from a sheath on her shoulder. I managed to get my hooves under me and lunge at her before she could bring it to bear, sending the two of us back to the ground again, with me on top and trying to pummel her face with my spiked horseshoes to make her drop her weapon. Even though the points drew blood from her face beneath her smeared war paint, and even though I’m pretty sure I broke her nose, the mare didn’t let go of her knife, and instead sliced at my exposed leg. I felt the blade whizz through my skin, but thankfully it was only a shallow cut. Still, it forced me to back off enough to let her stand up and come at me again.

I tried to bring my rifle to bear as I darted away from the knife, but she was too close for me to use it effectively and I didn’t have a bayonet on it. One of her hooves swatted it aside as I fired a burst, sending the bullets into the ground, and she lunged at me again with the knife. This time, I threw my shoulder at her, putting her off balance enough to make her miss her swing and get me some leverage under her body. Growling, I shoved her back and spun around to deliver a buck to her chest, sending her stumbling away from me.

Screaming in frustration, the mare tried to lunge for me again, but somepony else finally noticed our fight. Before she even closed half of the distance, her neck suddenly erupted with a ton of small holes as bullets tore through it, going so far as to ricochet off of my shielding afterwards. She fell in a meaty pile on the ground, and Fusillade came galloping over, one of her machine pistols smoking at the barrel, and the other three aimed at targets on the gate.

“Rifle!” she screamed at me, her magic grabbing my battle rifle and chucking it in my direction. I managed to catch it before it hit my face, and I quickly sighted another Crimson bandit on the gate and forced him back into cover with three more bursts. I received a surprisingly hard slap to my shoulder and turned to see Fusillade pointing to a mounted machine gun pointing through the gate. “Drop it, marksmare!”

A big red number three flashed at me in the sights of my rifle as I sighted the gun emplacement, but it thankfully didn’t matter; with my last burst, I took the head off of the bandit behind the gun, and my rifle automatically ejected the empty magazine and greedily loaded the next one I slotted into it. We didn’t get to savor our victory for long, though. Within seconds, the Crimson on the wall were back to shooting at us, and I felt something rip through my shield but ping off of my armor just above my left flank. We both hit the dirt, not wanting to expose ourselves to that kind of fire, and waited for our shields to return to full strength.

Then I realized something. “You shot at me!” I shouted at Fusillade.

The unicorn commander just gave me an irritated frown. “Did I injure you?”

Wilting from her glare, I just mutely shook my head.

She snorted. “Small caliber,” she said, shaking one of her machine pistols. “Lets me shoot into a melee without any risk of friendly fire. Our shields protect us from bullets this small.” We heard a shout from a Crimson soldier approaching, and without breaking eye contact with me, Fusillade just raised two of her machine pistols above the edge of the trench and sprayed in an arc. A second later we heard a choking gasp and a shitty SM45 submachine gun tumbled into the trench, landing between us. Fusillade’s magic opened two boxes riveted onto her armor, and she quickly exchanged the two magazines for two fresh ones from her reserves.

I just nervously smiled and shuffled backwards a bit. “I can see why you’re a commander, ma’am.”

“I wasn’t made a commander for that,” she said, standing back up. Placing her hooves on the ground, she holstered her machine pistols and her horn began to glow with a bright white light. My eyes widened as the gems in her armor began to glow as well, and I saw threads of magic dance between them and her horn. “I was made unicorn commander for this!”

She released her magic and the ground rippled in front of her, literally breaking apart as her spell tore through the earth. It traveled in a line of white energy directly from her to the RTZ, where the spell burrowed into the shit piled on top of it. In a burst of radiant energy, everything just exploded in a white light, scattering the shattered remains of the blockade in a million different directions. When the blinding light finally died away, there only remained the stakes driven into the pad and a small pile of remains covering it. There was also the vaporized remains of a pony or two around it; all I could see were skeletons coated in the tattered remains of Crimson armor.

Fusillade fell back into the trench next to me, panting. “Je deviens trop vieux pour cette merde…” she muttered, wiping at her lips. I noted a tiny stain of red on her blue fetlock, and Glass’ warning came back to me. Still, I hardly paid that any mind.

I fell to my haunches, my eyes wide and forehooves outstretched to her. “Teach me how the fuck to do that!”

She shot a glare at me. “You are not even close to being ready,” she said. “And you still have a job to do.” Dabbing at her lips again to make sure that she wasn’t still bleeding, she drew her machine pistols and stood up. “Get the RTZ cleared!”

I drew back and sat up, peering over the edge of the trench. The RTZ was like twenty yards ahead of me, and the second half of the strike team galloped into our trench while the rest of us provided covering fire for them. Still, I saw one drop, and I could make out three Sentinels lying in the open, plus one bleeding profusely in our trench. Add the two that got obliterated from artillery after landing, and maybe one or two more in the first trench that I couldn’t see, and we were already nearly down to half strength. If we didn’t clear the RTZ soon, the assault would fail.

Luckily, it seemed like we had some help from above. I saw a few pegasi and griffons come swooping in, strafing the top and the back of the gate with machine gun fire, momentarily disrupting the barrage directed against us. I seized that moment to climb over the top and gallop toward the RTZ pad, spraying my battle rifle in concentrated bursts at any Crimson bandits I saw within range. Another battle cry went up from the strike team, and I saw four or five unicorns, Fusillade included, join me in the charge to the RTZ. One took a sniper round right between the eyes; I felt my stomach do backflips as his head exploded into pieces. Still, five of us made it to the pile of rubble Fusillade’s spell left behind, and we immediately took up positions around it.

“Shields!” Fusillade screamed, and her magic picked up a few scrap panels and chunks of rubble to levitate in front of us, since we were basically standing in the open. Me and another unicorn joined her, grabbing what we could and trying to hold it up to the gate. Some ponies in the strike team fired a few deployable shields around us to keep flanking fire under control, but they weren’t tall enough to stop the machine guns on the gate from shooting down at us, so I still had to hold the makeshift shield above and in front of us like Fusillade. I felt the chunk of concrete I held in my magical grip shudder as bullets slammed into it, and I began to sweat and pant as I struggled to hold a few hundred pounds of rubble in the air in front of me. While we did that, the remaining two unicorns began flinging rubble off of the pad, stacking it up on either side as makeshift cover from flanking attacks. They left the impaled beams for later, though. That was something that we’d have to figure out how to deal with.

“They’re charging!” Fusillade screamed, rearranging her makeshift cover to create firing ports for her machine pistols. I moved a few pieces of concrete and saw a group of Crimson rushing our position, submachine guns blazing. A few stray bullets found their way between the cracks in my rubble, but they thankfully bounced off of my shielding. Still, shit was likely going to get very bad if they got on top of us, so I jammed my battle rifle into the opening and began firing wildly. I dropped two, and Fusillade picked off a couple herself, but they were soon on top of us, rushing around our shields.

But the Sentinels in the second trench had our backs, and they opened fire with a devastating hail of bullets that began cutting them down before they could flank us. I saw the bodies mounting and the bullets flying, and soon my rifle squawked at me and automatically dropped its empty magazine. Fuck, how many were there? They just kept coming!

The stallion on my left cried out as a bandit leapt over the rubble and bodies of his companions and landed on the stallion’s back, knife drawn. A few bloody stabs of the knife cut through the gray jumpsuit around the Sentinel’s neck, and he fell to the ground before I could reload my rifle and bring it to bear. His pile of rubble collapsed in front of him as he fell, exposing the unicorns working to clear the pad to the machine gun fire from the gate walls.

Thankfully, somepony gunned him down before he could jam that knife into my side, but that still left us up shit creek without a paddle. “Cover it!” Fusillade screamed at me, and she grabbed more rubble to add to her shield while shoving mine to the left to fill in the gap. Straining and heaving, I picked up a few more pieces of scrap metal and concrete to add to my cover, dropping my rifle to focus on maintaining it. My jaw was wide open as I panted, sucking down air as my heart rate began to climb. I’d never held this much in my magic before. I was easily holding five hundred pounds in front of me, probably more. My sweaty mane began to cling to my neck and face underneath my helmet, and for the first time, I wished that it was shorter. With that sticky feeling threatening to break my concentration, I closed my eyes to try to focus everything I had into the cover. I could already feel the sensation starting to leave my legs.

And of course, the Crimson just kept coming, desperately trying to break our defense and stop us from clearing the RTZ. We were out of direct sight of the artillery in the gun towers, which was the only reason we hadn’t been blown to pieces yet, but that didn’t mean that the Crimson didn’t have hundreds of bodies to throw at us. I couldn’t see what was happening around me, but I could hear the shooting, the screaming, and the dying. I was scared. I didn’t know when a knife was going to rip through my neck as the fighting around us became more frantic. The shrieking of metal behind me must’ve been the other unicorns prying a metal stake out of the pad, but I didn’t know how many more of those they had left. It definitely took them a long time to just get one out.

Then, out of nowhere, I heard gunfire above us, accompanied by a desperate battle cry. The shrieking of Sentinel machine guns filled my ears, and I felt air thrown off by flapping wings blow against my sweaty neck. I cracked open my left eye to see figures landing around us and firing downrange, and a hazy blur of orange dominated my vision. It fired a burst of its machine guns at a bandit charging me, and then it spoke in an angelic voice. “Hang in there! Just a little longer!”

“Z-Zip?” I wheezed, struggling to make out the mare’s face. “What’re you—?”

“Later, okay?” she shouted back, the gun ports in her armor flashing as she killed another bandit. “Just keep that cover up!”

She moved to my side, offering me support while I put my all into my telekinesis. I even added another block of concrete to plug a hole in the cover. I didn’t want to know how much I was holding, but it was a fucking lot. I didn’t think telekinesis was going to be the spell to kill me.

Then the load lessened in my grasp, and I opened my eyes to see another unicorn helping to lift it. She just nodded at me, and I transferred some of my burden to her. Bullets and rockets rained hell on the Crimson trying to drive us off of the RTZ, and above us, the fliers had rallied to keep us safe. A pair of pegasi worked on the steel stakes behind us, slicing away at the metal with their laser blades while the unicorns tried to pry them out. In the face of our coordinated effort, the Crimson’s mass assault counterattack began to lose steam as we shredded them to pieces.

“They’re falling back!” Fusillade shouted. Through the gaps in my cover I could see the Crimson in front of us turning tail and diving back through the doors in the gate before they slammed shut. I felt the barrage of bullets against my cover lessen, and I dropped a few smaller chunks to focus on the big pieces. “Keep up the pressure!”

A few more minutes was all it took to clear the last of the stakes from the pad. “It’s clear!” one of the pegasi shouted. “Let’s go!”

Fusillade nodded and began to spin the rubble she held in front of her. “Back to the trench! I’m calling it in!” Then, with a howl of exertion, she flung the debris in front of her, dashing a bandit trapped on this side of the gate to pieces and destroying a machine gun nest on top of it. Then, spraying her machine pistols, she withdrew to the trench, dodging hot lead along the way.

Zip tugged on my shoulder. “Come on, let’s go!” she screeched, and I saw the air wobble around her head as her shields deflected a bullet. That was enough motivation for me; lacking the strength to fling my cover at the wall like Fusillade did, I just dropped it in a pile off to the side of the pad and began galloping back, trying to cover our retreat with my battle rifle pointed at the gate and blindly firing behind us. We both slid along the ground and landed in the trench, dirt and mud and shell casings pelting us in our faces as we fell on our backs, choking as we inhaled the smoke given off by the rocket pods on the bombardiers.

Fusillade already had her back to the trench wall and a hoof pressed against her helmet when we sat up. “Silverwing 1, this is Commander Fusillade. The RTZ is clear, I repeat, the RTZ is clear!”

‘Silverwing 1’ was the callsign for Dacie’s ringbird, and I craned my head around, looking for it in the dim morning light, or what little of it there was through the approaching storm. Past the brutal melee in the skies, I thought I caught sight of the ringbird flying wide around the dam, staying out of the way of the Crimson’s AAA. Still no sight of the Crimson’s remaining ringbird, though. Where Carron was keeping it, or what he was planning to do with it, was beyond me.

Of course, I couldn’t listen in on what Dacie or any of her copilots might have been saying back to Fusillade, since I didn’t have a command radio keyed to the ringbird. I could only watch the mare’s face as she listened to their reply, which wasn’t too helpful; Fusillade was hardly expressive at the best of times, and about the only response she made to what she was hearing was a brief flaring of her nostrils. But, after a moment of prolonged silence, she suddenly stood up and waved to the rest of us. “Down! Down! Here it comes!”

Zip had been about to take off and rejoin the melee in the skies, but I pulled her down with me at Fusillade’s order. Truth be told I was happy for the excuse to keep her by my side, prevent her from flying back into the air where she could be taken out by a stray round or a really good sniper. I didn’t know what casualties were like in the air, but I assumed they had to be brutal. Most of our fliers were griffons from Sig’s quarry, and they didn’t have Sentinel armor like we did. We simply didn’t have enough suits of griffon armor; Sig had modified his himself when he first joined all those years ago because they couldn’t find anything that fit him. I guess griffons didn’t serve in the Synarchy’s Special Forces.

A few sparks of electricity and flashes of light interrupted my thoughts, and we all peered over the edge of the trench toward the RTZ. The air above it seemed to ripple and distort, and I could tell something was happening. Then my horn buzzed as I felt a huge surge of mana build in the air around us, until with a thunderous bang, a fifty-two ton behemoth of steel and depleted uranium appeared above the middle of the pad.

Everything stopped on both sides. The machine guns, the rockets, the screaming, everything. About the only thing that didn’t stop was the aerial melee, scattered as it was above the dam. Everypony simply stood where they were in awe of this enormous machine, defying gravity above the metal pad.

Then the cannon fired, obliterating the entire center portion of the gate and much of the wall above it, sending shrapnel, body parts, and screams of agony and terror into the air.

The shooting began again, but this time it was mostly one sided. With a cry of valor, the strike team leapt over the top of the trench and began shooting at the fleeing Crimson, who were running for their lives in a disorganized mob from the tank. The tank ejected an enormous brass casing out the side of its turret, and then it pointed up and to the left, taking aim at the gun tower there. Another blast from its powerful cannon blew a hole in the side of the tower, and plumes of flame roared out of the various bunkers and gun ports as the ammo inside cooked off, turning everything within to a black char in seconds. The tank ejected its second shell as it turned to the right, and it repeated the punishment to the remaining tower. Then, with a roar and a whistle of its powerful turbine engine, the tank glided forward off of the RTZ, and the hatch on the top opened.

Silver hooves supported the weight of an aging stallion as he climbed halfway out of the commander’s cupola, and all of us immediately stopped what we were doing and saluted Platinum Rampart. Fusillade seemed particularly taken aback. “Sir, I thought you were staying behind at the Bastion?”

Rampart smiled ever so faintly and held up his hoof. “Commander Thunder is leading the Bastion in my absence. Since his injury prevents him from being on the field, I figured I would take his place. After all, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a good scrum, and if I wasn’t here when we brought down Carrion, that just wouldn’t be right.”

We looked behind us as another group of Sentinels teleported in and immediately rushed forward to take point at the smoldering remains of the gate, relieving the battered and weary strike team. Rampart took note of the cleared rubble around the RTZ and nodded. “Excellent work as always, Commander. I knew putting you in charge of the strike was the correct decision.” Fusillade bowed her head, and Rampart turned a bit to see what awaited us beyond the ruined gate. “What is your take on the situation?”

Fusillade straightened up like she was giving a formal debriefing back at the Bastion. “The Crimson are in disarray for the moment and running scared, but Carrion’s elite will have them back at the next line of defenses in a few minutes. We have four gates to break through to get to the central command tower, and knowing Carrion, he’s going to start throwing slaves in the way as shields by the third. We’ll have to be careful with our fire.”

I felt a seething anger welling up inside of me. Of course the little shit would resort to that! Even though he had many more ponies than we did, of course he was going to play dirty with us. Anything to fuck us over and stall our attack, because he had to know that we had the initiative by now. I could only hope that we’d end this fight quickly before too many more lives were lost and too many slaves died in the crossfire. If I wasn’t fast enough, Nova might be one of them.

Rampart thought her words over and nodded once. “Expected. Our soldiers are disciplined enough to watch their fire, and the mercenaries are aware that civilian casualties will come out of their final payment. We should have our forces lead the charge, followed by the mercenaries, while the griffons and the volunteers focus on holding our rear and clearing out the buildings.”

“With all due respect, Sir, I’d rather have my ponies work on clearing the buildings than a bunch of trigger-happy volunteers who couldn’t march in a straight line a week ago,” Fusillade protested. “They can keep collateral damage to a minimum.”

“Commander, what is the strength of your team?” Rampart asked her.

Fusillade stiffened like she knew she was beat. “Eleven ponies, sir, including myself.”

The earth pony slowly nodded. “I want your team to follow the tank and work with the fresh soldiers to take the checkpoints. Direct the volunteers to hold our territory and defend any buildings the Crimson could use to get behind our advance. We can’t afford to let Carrion retake the RTZ.” He turned to Zip, who was still at my side, as another wave of Sentinels and mercenaries teleported in. “Keep the skies above our spearhead clean. The tank’s armor is thinnest on the top, and I don’t want any homemade bombs dropped on it. Neutralize the triple-A threat so we can move the ringbird in to provide fire support, and have the griffons work on clearing the buildings we bypass from the top-down. Understood?”

Zip saluted. “It’ll be done at once, Commander.” Then, spreading her wings, she only spared the time for a weary smile for me before taking off and rejoining the fight.

I felt my heart go with her as she returned to that dance of death. If something happened to her up there… No, I pushed the thought out of my mind. She’d be fine. Her and Sig, both. They’d all be fine. They were too good to get taken down like that.

“Ember?” Rampart asked, and I jumped at my name. I saluted to him, and he slapped the hull of the tank. “Your zebra friend is a pretty good driver, and he figured out how to wire that sentry drone of his directly into the tank’s firing computers. It generates a firing solution much faster now, thanks to him. I’m glad to have him on board.”

That made me feel a little warmer inside. “Thank you, sir,” I said, imagining just how excited Gauge had to be to have that monster under his control. “He won’t let you down.”

“I’m counting on it.” The stallion looked toward the front, where the Sentinels began driving the Crimson back out of this sector of the dam and securing building entrances. “But that’s enough chatter. We have a job to do.” Then, grunting, he lowered himself into the tank, closing the hatch after him, and with another roar of its engines, the mighty metal monstrosity glided forward into the heart of the next sector.

Fusillade wasted no time in delivering orders now that the tattered remains of our strike team gathered around her. “Listen here!” the mare shouted. “We’ve done our part, but the battle isn’t over yet. We are to follow the tank and provide fire support for the fresh soldiers at the front, and eliminate any flanking threats Carrion might throw at us! Stay close to the tank and its shields will keep you safe, and soon we’ll have Carrion’s head on a plate. Now move! Rejeté!”

The Prench mare fell back to the RTZ to direct the incoming troops, who were appearing in batches every minute, while the rest of us rushed forward to the tank and formed up in a line behind it. Side by side and five deep, the remaining ten soldiers of the strike team, myself included, trotted along after the tank, our ears ringing and heads pounding with each concussive blast of its powerful cannon. I realized that every shell the tank fired was at least in part directed by SCaR, and I could imagine the little drone having a blast (ha-ha) at being a tank. Assuming of course the drone was even programmed to find things fun, but I didn’t really know. It walked a fine line between machine and pet, and I never really knew which side of the spectrum SCaR fell on.

Another blast from the tank’s cannon sent the next checkpoint up in flames, tearing apart the crude fortification and sending the Crimson running. This sector hadn’t been contested at all; the bandits were too terrified of this monstrosity of Equestrian engineering we’d brought with us to take the dam. But I could tell from the heavy shooting going on through the smoke and the number of bullets that ricocheted off of the tank’s shield that the next checkpoint was going to be harder to take.

The fresh Sentinels dashed through the smoke, laying down suppressive fire with the machine guns in their armor while occasionally stopping to take more precise aim with a rifle. More and more volunteers from Blackwash and the neighboring settlements filled up the rear, taking defensive positions near doors and buildings to repulse any Crimson counterattack. The terrifying part was that I knew there were hundreds more Crimson under me, inside of the dam itself. Above me, pegasi fought with each other while griffons harassed them from above, landing on buildings and prying apart the shoddy steel roofs to flush the Crimson hiding inside out into the open. We were surrounded by Carrion’s forces, but we were the ones driving forward. We were the ones with the momentum.

I coughed on some of the acrid black smoke as we followed the tank through it; the thrusters keeping it in the air more blew the smoke into my face than dispersed it like I hoped they would. On the other side, things were looking a lot more organized for the Crimson. The area between this checkpoint and the next was basically flat and bare, providing no cover whatsoever apart from a concrete bulwark on the right. The big gate guarding the next sector was taller than the previous one and decorated with a whole bunch of machine gun nests that immediately began shooting as soon as they had a bead on us. Me and Fusillade’s strike team were safe behind the tank’s shields, but some of the others weren’t so lucky. A few were able to push through and get to the cover behind the bulwark or deploy their own, but most just retreated and let the tank go first. A few bodies and pools of blood scattered the area, many of them Crimson, a few of them Sentinel.

I stopped when the tank did, one hoof rested on its rear armor, and peered around its corner. The tank aligned its turret with the gate and dashed it to pieces after a few more rounds, and the entire thing collapsed in a horrible shrieking of twisting metal. When nothing stirred among the rubble and ruin, the tank glided forward again, the rest of us hugging it closely, using its shields and mass as cover against any snipers that might be lingering in the area. I saw a group of volunteers break off to cover enormous steel doors that presumably led deeper into the dam, securing our rear from any surprise attacks. Unfortunately for us, they couldn’t cover the sky.

The characteristic rotor noise of a ringbird spread over the dam, and one of them suddenly appeared to our rear. I thought it was Dacie’s at first, given that that’s where it showed up, but the moment it opened fire with its cannons that assumption vanished pretty quickly. Those of us that could huddled right next to the tank, hoping that its shields would protect us from the rounds coming in, and thankfully for me, they did. But for the Sentinels who couldn’t get to safety…

When the ringbird finished its pass, it left a lot of bodies in its wake. Some of them were Sentinels. Some were mercenaries or griffons. Many of them were familiar faces, ponies I’d grown up around in Blackwash. Their bodies and limbs laid strewn about the open, and those who’d eluded the ringbird’s strafing run rushed forward to try to drag the wounded back to cover before it could make another pass. I didn’t want to know how many it killed. Just seeing all the dead and familiar faces and coats lying behind us devastated me. I fell to my knees, brokenly screaming at what I saw. But really, what the fuck did I expect? This was what I signed them up for: to die for the Sentinels so they could take down the Crimson. I did this! I fucking killed them, because they followed my example! Mine!

A roar broke out over the dam, and I finally got enough of a grip on myself to stop screaming and actually look around. Now that their ringbird had thrown us into disarray, the Crimson soldiers mounted a massive counterattack. Ponies galloped out of the smoking remains of the gate ahead of us, firing wildly, while pegasi dove from above and began strafing everypony they could see. I could even hear the sounds of shooting behind us as they tried to break out of the buildings we’d contained them in, and attempted to storm the two stairways between the tank and our reserves. I didn’t have to be a general to realize that we’d stumbled into a trap.

“Hold the line!” ponies began screaming, trying to form up into ranks and seize whatever cover they could get to defend against the massive counterattack. The tank rumbled and its machine guns blazed as it tried to halt the charge in front of us, so I pressed my back against the tank and sighted some pegasi landing around me. Several quick and desperate bursts dropped a couple, but not before they could get some shots off on me. Thankfully, they only had those twin automatics which were shit at piercing my shields. If they had something heavier, then I probably would have been fucked.

I almost didn’t see the bundle of grenades land right next to me. I wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t slammed off of the back of the tank right next to my head. If I hadn’t been high on adrenalin right then, I probably would’ve reacted too slow to keep my limbs attached to my body.

My orange magic surrounded the grenade bouquet in a protective dome a split second before the bundle exploded. I wasn’t anywhere near skilled enough or strong enough with my magic to contain it, though, so I felt a painful spike of pain stab my brain through my horn as my shield burst and shattered. Hot shards of shrapnel and lead balls pelted the shield of my armor, which did its best to deflect them; I think my magic helped a bit by slowing the shrapnel down, because my shields didn’t break, and I realized I was still alive a split second later. The ground underneath the grenade was pitted, and I could see plenty of shrapnel poking out of the blasted concrete.

Before the Crimson could drop too many more of those improvised bombs, our forces in the sky rallied above us and began forcing them back. Much of the fighting around me had turned into a desperate melee, with ponies so close together that I couldn’t risk shooting with my battle rifle without possibly killing somepony on our side. But the Crimson didn’t seem to have any concerns about that as they fired blindly into the fray, killing more of their own than they were ours. As for me, I kept my eyes peeled for more bombs and fired desperately at any Crimson who broke off and tried to rush the back of the tank. If they got to it, I knew they could do some serious damage, maybe break the thing entirely. And we still had two checkpoints for this thing to blast through.

A bullet ripped through my shields, tearing along my right side before slamming into the tank behind me. I cried out in pain and collapsed to the ground, feeling the burning sensation around my barrel. I didn’t know how deep the bullet bit me, only that it hurt a fuckload. Cursing and cussing between gritted teeth, I raised my head off of the concrete and fired a few volleys at a pair of Crimson trying to rush toward the tank while I was down, assuming I was dead. I was only thankful they didn’t double-tap; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here recording my story for you right now.

I heard the roaring of rotors again, and I looked up to see the Crimson’s ringbird coming in for another attack run. With most of our forces caught in combat in the open, its cannons were set to decimate us. I screamed some warning about the incoming monstrosity, but it seemed like nopony heard me over the roar of the battle. It swooped in low, guns surely taking aim, and preparing to possibly end our assault in one pass.

It didn’t get the chance. A stream of tracers flew at it from the left, ripping through what shielding it had and pelting the thing in the side. I saw Dacie fly our ringbird in from that direction, guns blazing as she tried to swat the bastards out of the sky. Once she got in close enough, she unleashed a volley of rockets at it, which the wounded ringbird tried in vain to swat down with its point defense. The surprise onslaught soon sent the Crimson’s machine up in flames, and a thunderous explosion that shook the dam signaled the end of their last ringbird.

I cheered as hot steel and debris pelted the dam around us, and I could feel morale picking up. The Crimson that now found themselves trapped behind our lines with no air support began to panic, and from there it didn’t take too much effort to clean them up. Bodies coated the ground with blood, and the screams of the wounded and dying soon took the place of gunfire.

But Dacie’s charge didn’t come without a price. Apparently Zip hadn’t managed to take down the AAA near the central tower, because I saw black clouds of flack begin to explode around the ringbird. Dacie tried to pivot it and turn it away, but in that tiny moment where she was changing directions, I saw a big shell slam into the rotor ring and detonate. Spewing fire and razor sharp rotor blades, the ringbird plummeted to the dam below, just barely landing on the road instead of falling off of the side. There the thing laid, fire guttering from its engine and smoke pouring from the cockpit. I felt my heart jump into my throat as I watched, fearing the worst, until I saw the windows of the thing’s cockpit eject and four figures frantically climb out of the burning mess, one of them distinctly leonine in appearance.

With the Crimson repulsed again for the moment, I broke cover and galloped toward the ringbird wreckage. Dacie and her copilots huddled against the ringbird’s hull, obviously a bit shaken about getting shot down, but none of them looked hurt. Before I could get there and check that out, however, a familiar griffon dived out of the air and landed right by his sister’s side. I arrived just in time to hear Sigur worriedly ask, “Are you okay?!”

Dacie nodded her head, but she looked a bit dazed. Maybe she hit her head when she crashed or something? “Yeah, Sig, I’m fine,” she said, gently pushing Sig back. “Just a little shaken up.” She looked over her shoulder at the ringbird wreckage and winced. “Sorry about the bird.”

“Spirits fuck the bird,” Sig said, hugging his sister. “I’m just glad you’re alright.”

I just stood back and let the two have their moment. My eyes drifted to the ringbird and looked it over. It looked like it was salvageable; the only real damage was to the rotor ring and maybe the engine. With a little work, the Sentinels maybe might’ve been able to get it running again. The rest of the hull and the superstructure of the thing was in pretty good shape, at least. Dacie had done a good job setting it down fast without destroying it.

The revving of the tank’s massive engine caught all of our attentions, and the armored behemoth began to glide forward again with a pack of Sentinels, mercenaries, and volunteers following closely behind it. I even saw Fusillade fighting her way through the ranks to get to the front; apparently she’d dumped command of the RTZ to somepony else and had rushed forward to rejoin the fighting. Or maybe we’d simply moved everyone to the dam already so she didn’t need to be at the RTZ anymore. Fuck if I knew.

Sig and Dacie finally noticed me, because I felt talons grab my shoulder and pull me closer when I was watching the tank float past. “Glad to see you’re still alive, Ember,” Sig said, smiling at me. “I don’t think even I’d survive all the shit you’ve been through so far.”

“I don’t even feel like I survived it myself,” I said, looking at my side. My gray jumpsuit had been split where the bullet had ripped into it, leaving a small line that oozed blood all the way back to my flank. I winced at the throbbing pain; that was going to be a bitch to deal with. “Almost didn’t.” I smiled at Dacie. “Thanks for getting us to hell in one piece.”

Dacie waved her hand and sat back down. “Yeah, yeah. Too bad I couldn’t keep myself in the air.” Then, reaching for a holster at her side, she drew a pistol and loaded it. “Guess I’ll have to make do on the ground.”

She tried to stand up, but Sig held her down with a claw. “You’ve done enough, Dacie. You can stay out of this.”

“My place is up there with you and our siblings,” Dacie said, glaring at him. “You can try to stop me, or you can let me take your wing. Either way, I’m fighting for our home.”

I bumped Sig’s shoulder with the butt of my rifle to get his attention. “Let her fly with you,” I said, smiling at Dacie. “Trust me, it’s safer up there than it is on the ground, and if you won’t let her fly with you, then guess where she’ll be.”

Sig looked at his sister and sighed, shaking his head. “Stay with me and follow my lead. Got it?”

Dacie stood up and grinned. “Lead the way, brother.”

They spread their wings to take off, but I tugged on Sig’s feathers with my magic. “Stay safe up there, okay?” I pleaded with him. “And make sure nothing happens to Zip.”

Sig patted me on the head of all places. “Don’t you worry about her. She knows what she’s doing.” He flew up a few feet more. “You, on the other hand…”

“I’ll be fine,” I growled at him. I looked to my left, seeing the tank almost at the remains of the third checkpoint. “Fuck, I have to go! I’ll see you when this shit’s all over!”

Sig and Dacie didn’t waste any more time getting into the sky, and I didn’t waste any time galloping back over to the tank. I really didn’t want to be caught out in the open without its protective shield around me in case we ran into any more heavy machine guns. Around me, ponies rushed forward, but I could tell that our momentum was flagging. They weren’t moving as fast or as frantically as they were in the beginning, and a lot of the volunteers from Blackwash looked like they were on the verge of running. I couldn’t blame them; a lot of us had died and we hadn’t even secured the upper level of the dam yet.

But I saw their eyes follow me, and for some reason that put a little bit of spring into their step. I stopped in the middle of the road, watching the volunteers from Blackwash begin to congregate around me. Many were covered in dirt and grime, and a few in blood, and there was some sort of desperate light in their eyes, like they were lost but had finally found a way home. Swallowing hard, I raised my rifle into the air for everypony to see it. “We’re almost there!” I yelled in a shaky voice. “Two more to go, and everypony will be free! Everypony! And Carrion will know that he made a huge mistake when he decided to fuck with Blackwash!”

Then, lowering my rifle, I pointed it toward the rear of the tank ahead of us, which was just visible through the smoke. “Let’s show them what we’re made of!”

The ponies of Blackwash cheered, and I saw hope in their faces. Hope and determination. Here we were, three weeks after the attack on Blackwash, fighting to avenge our town and return the favor to Carrion. Not only that, but we were freeing friends and family. I could list off the names of every pony that stood around me, because I’d known all of them my entire life, and they all knew me. Every single one of us knew ponies still held captive by the Crimson, and together, we were going to free them. We were going to free them, or die trying.

I led the charge back into the fray, and I felt the drumming of hooves around me, heard the flutter of wing beats above me as the ponies of Blackwash followed. Ahead of us, Fusillade’s strike team fanned out as the tank pushed through the debris of the second checkpoint, the Sentinels all taking cover where they could find it and delivering shots downrange. I was about to charge around the left side of the tank, and was about a foot away from doing so, when I heard a huge blast of something and I glimpsed a shell rocket past the tank, passing right in front of me. I spun around to see it rip right through a pony’s body, tearing him to pieces, before slamming into a concrete bulwark behind us all and exploding, showering the ground with hot shrapnel.

I guess the Crimson did have anti-tank guns after all.

The volunteers I’d rallied dispersed behind whatever cover they could find, and I peered around the rear of the tank to see what lay ahead of us. This sector of the dam was a lot more closed off and tight quartered, with ramshackle buildings rising up on either side of us, filled with Crimson raining death down on us from above. That wasn’t the worst part, though; at the far end of the sector, right next to the checkpoint, I spotted a pair of anti-tank guns with crew frantically reloading as our tank advanced. To make matters worse, the sector was littered with a bunch of unarmored, unarmed ponies just… standing there. I recognized a few mane and coat color combinations from Blackwash among their number; but why the fuck were they just standing around?

I tried to line up a shot at the anti-tank gun to the tank’s left, but there were a pair of slaves just standing in the open in front of it. I couldn’t get a clear shot at the ponies crewing the gun, and even though I was pretty accurate, I didn’t want to risk hitting any slaves. About the only thing I could see clearly was the armored front plate of the gun, and there wasn’t anything I could do to that.

The second anti-tank gun fired, the air in front of the tank exploded as the shell slammed into its shields, pelting everypony standing nearby with hot, biting shrapnel. The impact alone was enough to shove the tank back a foot or two, nearly knocking me over in the process. That gun also had two slaves just standing in front of it, completely unfazed by the loud noise right next to their ears. The Sentinels were slowly fighting their way through this sector using what cover they had and deploying their own cover where they could, but by the time they even got to the anti-tank guns one of them would definitely be able to pierce the tank’s shields. And I knew Rampart sure wasn’t going to use the tank to destroy the guns with innocent bystanders nearby, and Fusillade probably wouldn’t either. What the fuck did I do?

On the right, I saw Fusillade lead the charge, her machine pistols laying precise suppressing fire on any Crimson that poked their heads out of cover. She slid behind a piece of deployable cover about halfway up through the sector, and she holstered her machine pistols to free up her telekinesis. Her magic surrounded a slave’s mane and yanked her to the ground, exposing one of the loaders to an accurate burst of fire from the Sentinels standing behind Fusillade. Without their pony shields, the crew of that anti-tank gun got cut down very fast, and the Sentinels advanced along the right flank, trying to outflank the anti-tank gun on the left.

Which had just reloaded. The barrel pivoted slightly and elevated, and right as the tank lowered its shields to fire and blow a hole through the checkpoint, the anti-tank gun fired. The shell sliced through the air, visibly punching it out of the way, before it slammed into the turret ring of the tank, right at the thinly armored part that raised out of the hull to allow the turret to swivel. With a painful cry of metal, the shell pierced the tank’s neck armor and blew up, shooting the turret into the air as the ammunition inside detonated. The tank’s engine shrieked as it started to burn up, and the hull of the machine dropped to the earth with a solid thud, like a hammer pounding an anvil.

“Gauge!” I screamed, immediately losing all sense of caution and galloping over to the tank. I threw my rifle onto the ground and hopped on top of the tank’s hull, my magic straining and prying at the driver’s hatch. A few bullets shattered against the tank’s armor around me, and my shields caught a few more, but I didn’t really notice at the time. My thoughts were entirely on ripping this hatch off of its hinges and getting Gauge out before the fire spread to the rest of the tank’s ammo or engine.

The hatch suddenly flew open, and a striped foreleg reached out of the smoky interior of the tank. I immediately wrapped my magic around it and pulled, hefting Gauge out of the steel coffin as fast as I could. He finally came out with a yelp, limbs flailing as I accidentally threw him a foot or so in the air before falling off the tank myself. He hit the ground with a thud, groaning, and I immediately pried one of those deployable cover things off the side of my armor and activated it in front of us, shielding us from the machine gun fire of the front wall.

I shuffled over to it and helped Gauge sit upright. “Are you okay?!” I asked him, practically screaming in hysterics over the noise of the fighting around us.

“I’m fine!” he shouted, pushing away my hooves, which I’d put a little close to his face. “Where’s SCaR?”

An alarmed chirp and squawk echoed from inside of the tank, and the little sentry drone buzzed out of the smoke and ducked behind our cover. Gauge breathed a visible sigh of relief and reached out a hoof, patting the drone on its ‘head’ before turning back to the tank. “Holy shit…” he murmured, looking at the damaged wreck next to us. “Did anypony else…?”

I bit my lip and shook my head, unable to take my eyes off of the flames licking the rim of the turret ring. “I didn’t see anypony…”

I could see morale flagging around me with the tank in ruins and the Sentinels’ leader most likely dead. A counterattack and suppressive barrage began to push us back toward the second gate, and casualties were starting to become a big concern. By now, we’d already lost half of our original forty-eight veteran Sentinels we had left after the attack on the Fort, including Platinum Rampart. Who knows how many volunteers, griffons, and mercs we’d lost, too. Our advance was wavering, and the Crimson were growing more confident, having destroyed our two trump cards.

Then I saw Fusillade leap onto the wreckage of the tank, completely turning her back to the ruined checkpoint and raising her machine pistols for all of us to see. “Allons!” she screamed at us. “Three down! One to go! Give it everything you got!” Turning around, she pointed toward the last checkpoint in front of us, the final obstacle between us and the dam’s central tower. “Pour la chance, l’honneur, et la gloire! We take the watch!”

In the chaos and madness of the battlefield, the aging Prench mare was like a beacon, a shimmering ray of hope and defiance. I couldn’t quite explain it, but seeing her standing there, covered in dirt and blood, the diamond trim of her armor reflecting the light of the burning tank like a million exploding stars while bullets fell around her, gave me the hope that somehow we’d do it. Somehow we’d overcome the setbacks. Somehow we’d free the slaves. Somehow we’d kill Carrion.

“Stay here,” I told Gauge as I picked myself up off the ground, snatched my rifle, and charged.

Bullets flew at me every step of the way, but I didn’t stop. I aimed as best I could while galloping and fired several bursts downrange at any Crimson I could see. Around me, the rest of our forces did the same, turning our advance into a mass of bodies determined to drive the Crimson back. Even still, we kept our fire controlled and disciplined to avoid hitting any of the slaves the Crimson had thrown into the mix. Most of these slaves, however, actually tried to get down and get away from the fighting, sometimes giving us clear shots at the Crimson, and sometimes inadvertently blocking some. I didn’t see a white pegasus or a brass-coated stallion at the least.

I dashed forward, trying to get to some debris the tank had blasted off of the previous checkpoint to shield me from some of the bullets flying everywhere. Just as I got there, though, two Crimson bandits popped up on the other side, and their eyes widened at seeing me charging toward them. I didn’t waste a second; I took aim at one and then the other, and I took both of them down with two quick bursts before vaulting off of that cover and tackling a wandering slave on the other side, bringing her down before she could get hit by a stray bullet.

Popping my second deployable cover in front of me, I safely tucked the slave behind it and tried to sit her up. “What are you doing?! You’re going to get yourself killed!” I shouted at her, recognizing Signal Flare, one of the techies back in Blackwash.

“My master told me to stand here,” she said, almost droning with some sort of fake enthusiasm. I blinked, completely taken aback, and noticed that something didn’t seem… right about her. Her pupils were pinpricks in her eyes, and they stared blankly ahead, not even looking at me. Whenever she did blink, which was not very often at all, it was slow and deliberate. I noticed with some shock that she’d been shot clean through the leg, but she didn’t even seem to notice it. Her left cutie mark had been burned off, replaced with a heart like mine.

“What the fuck did they do to you, Flare?” I asked, looking in the direction of the central tower. Was this what Carrion meant when he said he was going to mindfuck me? I shuddered at the thought of that; I’d honestly rather just be dead than be like… whatever the fuck Flare was. Propping her against the cover, I put my hoof on her shoulder. “Stay here and don’t move. I swear we’re going to figure out how to fix you.”

“Okay, master,” Flare droned, not blinking as she slumped against the cover I’d set up for her. That just sent a million chills down my spine. I didn’t want to think of how many of the Crimson she’d willingly spread her legs for because of that spell. I only prayed that she wouldn’t remember any of it when we fixed her… if we fixed her…

I could see the central tower just past the gate in front of us, unmanned anti-air guns around its perimeter. I guess Zip and Sig had finally managed to clear the tower of its AAA. Which was good, if a bit late, considering that our ringbird was already out of commission. Above us, the battle still raged, but it looked like we were winning. There were certainly a lot more griffons up there than there were ponies. Already, some of our fliers were starting to launch strafe runs against the Crimson on the ground. My heart soared when I saw my orange girl lighting up some unsuspecting bandits with the shrieking roar of her machine guns.

Hey, battlefield love is a strange and usually pretty violent thing.

Grunting and the sliding of unshod hooves on concrete drew my eyes to my right, and I saw Gauge sliding into cover next to me, SCaR buzzing after him. He spat out a submachine gun he’d scavenged off of the ground, dropped it, and then winced when the thing accidentally shot at me. Thankfully, my shields sent those bullets flying away, but it still made me jump and nearly fall out of my cover, almost into the line of fire of a really fucking annoying Crimson machine gun. Still, he hurriedly grabbed the submachine gun, made sure the safety was set, and looked to me. “So what’s the plan?”

“Plan?!” I screeched at him. “Your fucking dumb zebra ass just shot me!”

“You have shields!” Gauge protested. “It didn’t really shoot you!”

“Fucker, if that was a few inches closer it would’ve been inside my shields, and I would’ve died!”

“Hey, I’m doing my best, okay?” Gauge shouted back at me. “Guns aren’t really my thing!”

“Then why the fuck are you up here?! Nopony’s going to get close enough for you to beat to death with a wrench!”

I heard a yell behind me and turned around just in time to stop a bandit from bayoneting me in the back. I swung my rifle like a club as I turned, and the butt cracked the Crimson soldier right in the muzzle before he could get to me. When he fell to the ground, I quickly put the rifle to his face and blew his brains into bloody pulp on the concrete, shuddering as I did so. Getting splattered with another pony’s gore was never a fun sensation.

Gauge just looked at me, and I actually pointed my rifle at him. “Don’t you fucking say anything,” I warned him before immediately peering around the corner of our cover. I noticed with some horror that Flare was still smiling despite the fact that she had a piece of the bandit’s skull plastered to her cheek and her body was covered in his blood. I could actually see the blood droplets on her eyeballs, too. It was really fucking disgusting and disturbing. I wish I had brain bleach to wipe that memory away, especially the part where I started trying to clean her with my magic.

“What’s wrong with Flare?” Gauge asked once he finished retching after getting sprayed with gore, finally taking notice of the third pony we shared our cover with. “Stars, what did they do to her?”

“My masters made me more obedient for my new owner,” Flare mechanically sung.

“You don’t want to know,” I said to Gauge, dropping the gore I’d picked off of Flare’s face on the ground. “But we’re going to fix it. Right after we string Carrion up by his balls.”

I took a few shots at an exposed Crimson machine gunner, reloading when my rifle automatically ejected its empty mag. A quick glance at the ammo containers bolted to my armor showed I had five mags left. Already half done. I had to marvel a little bit at just how expensive this battle had been so far. I could’ve bought like a hundred cigarettes with all the bullets I’d fired today!

For the record, I am not an addict, I swear.

“Hold!” I heard Fusillade shout from somewhere nearby, though with all the smoke and chaos of the battlefield, I couldn’t actually see her. “Hold this position!”

“Why does she want us to hold?” Gauge asked me, shying away from the edge of our cover as bullets struck around it. “I mean, not that I’m complaining…”

“Because we don’t have a fucking tank to get through the fucking gate,” I growled, sighting down a bandit through the translucent cover in front of us and firing at him. He ducked when the first burst whistled around his head. “Fucking shitbag!”

“Then how are we going to get through it?” He tried to balance the SM45 in his hooves and fire through the cover like I did, though the violent recoil of the submachine gun almost ripped itself out of his hooves. He shook the thing in frustration and locked his left foreleg into the leg brace near the end of the barrel to try again. “How do you aim with this thing?!”

“I swear on the stars, Gauge,” I muttered, finally taking that bandit’s head off when he peeked over cover again. “Too much time in the maintenance hangar and not enough time at the firing range.”

The submachine gun in his hooves stopped firing and began to squawk at him, and he stupidly looked at the thing. Rolling my eyes, I just took it out of his hooves and set it on the ground. “Just… don’t worry about it and let me do the shooting,” I told him. “If somepony sneaks up on me, though, beat them into a fucking pulp. You’re good with beating things, right?”

Gauge just glared at me, and I chuckled a bit. Honestly, just having one of my friends here with me to tease took a lot of the stress off of my shoulders. Especially when I caught a glimpse of an orange pegasus diving onto the walls of the gate, guns blazing as our fliers fought to capture the checkpoint now that we couldn’t just blow it up.

But I shouldn’t have worried too much. Even though we’d taken a lot of casualties getting this far, the Crimson were also getting exhausted, and most of their soldiers were still deep within the dam itself. The bandits holding this gate were the last line of defense before the central tower itself, and the sheer number of griffons we had from the quarry had simply overpowered the pegasi Carrion had been able to muster to fight back. With the skies firmly in our control, our fliers simply attacked the checkpoint from all angles, and after a few minutes, the shooting stopped.

I noticed that for the first time since I’d stepped into the ringbird’s cargo hold several hours ago, everything was finally quiet. I could hear the ringing in my ears from the sudden lack of noise. There was nothing but the sound of the wind and the clicking calls of the flesh-strippers circling over the dam.

Then the gate in front of us began to open, and I instinctively trained my rifle at the seam. But when I saw an orange pegasus there, exhausted and covered in blood but still alive, I let out a huge sigh of relief and lowered my rifle. One by one, the Sentinels and mercs and volunteers began to move out of cover toward Zip, and I saw Fusillade approach her from our side as well. She was pretty much the only reason I didn’t run forward and tackle Zip in a hug and a volley of kisses.

“Status?” Fusillade asked when the two mares were close enough, while me and Gauge trotted up from the side.

“Secure,” Zip said. “Whoever else was on top of the dam retreated to the interior to make a stand there. The surface is ours.” She looked over Fusillade’s shoulder, toward the burning wreckage of the tank in the background. “Stars, is Commander Rampart…?”

Fusillade grimly nodded. “I have taken control of this operation, Commander. It is up to the two of us to see this through to the end.” She likewise looked over her shoulder, and her head hung just the slightest bit for a tiny moment. “We will tend to our dead later. We’ve taken many casualties to get to this point. We shall not let their sacrifices be in vain.”

Zip curtly nodded, and I saw her eyes dart over to me. She visibly relaxed when I nodded to her, and she turned her attention back to Fusillade. “The path to the central tower is secure. We can regroup there while we plan our next move.”

“Good,” Fusillade said. Then, turning to the rest of us who’d gathered around her, she pointed back the way we came. “I want the access points to the interior of the dam secure. Nopony comes out while we stand guard. You have orders to shoot at the slightest movement from those staircases.” Then, pointing toward the opposite end of the dam, she added, “I also want the remaining checkpoints secured and the access points on that side of the dam locked down. Sergeants, partition your duties amongst yourselves.” Then, turning to Zip, she nodded. “To the tower.”

Zip quickly touched her wingtip to her brow before turning around and moving toward the central tower. Without any orders of my own, I followed the two of them and the small posse that they assembled as they walked to the tower. Gauge and SCaR stayed close by me, but wisely let the rest of us trained and armed Sentinels lead the way. Who knew if there were still defenders in the central tower, after all.

Without the chaos of the battlefield, I finally had the time to look around me and see just how dearly we’d paid for half of the dam’s surface level. Griffons and a few pegasi in Sentinel armor laid across the ground, their bodies perforated with bullet holes, and in some cases missing limbs or even more. But for all the casualties I saw, there were many more Crimson. There were three, maybe four Crimson for every Sentinel I saw lying on the ground. It turns out, in the face of overwhelming firepower and superior training, the average Crimson soldier didn’t stand a single stars-damned chance against us. It was only the masses of troops and the occasional lucky shot that made the Crimson such a potent force to be reckoned with.

Ahead of us loomed the central tower. Larger than any of the other buildings we’d passed thus far (apart from maybe the gun towers at the beginning), it dominated the space made available to it. It had a narrow base that kept it to one side of the road running through the dam, but the upper levels of it expanded and bulged over the road below like a fat watchtower. The behemoth of steel and concrete loomed above us as we approached, the AAA on its roof silent and surrounded by dead bodies.

I shuddered as I passed underneath the shadow of the building. Thankfully, Zip was close enough to brush my shoulder with her wingtip, though she didn’t do much else while there was still business to be done. Behind me, I could hear Gauge breathing nervously as we approached the door. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was thinking about Nova and praying that she was here.

We piled in on either side of the door, and Fusillade nodded to Runabout, one of the earth ponies whom I’d accompanied with Zip and Sig when we attacked the Fort. I was glad to see she was still okay, and she didn’t look any worse for wear, which was good. Reaching across her armor, she pulled out several breaching charges and mounted the bars to the door. Once she took a few steps back, she pulled out a white detonator and threw it on the ground. “Clear!”

She stomped on the detonator, and like in the Fort, the bar hissed and glowed before crumpling the door around itself and falling to the ground. I still didn’t really know how those things worked, but it had something to do with them increasing their local gravity to a million times that of Auris’ gravity to break walls. But that wasn’t really important, because it did its job, and that was all I cared about. One by one, the Sentinels dashed into the building, immediately securing the area by the time I even filed in.

The central tower was pretty large and surprisingly organized for an operation run by a bunch of rape-happy bandits. In fact, I think the damn thing was cleaner than Blackwash’s listening outpost. Computers and other equipment were neatly spaced on tables lining the walls of the large central room, and I saw several opened notebooks with notes and messages written in neat writing. I pulled one closer to myself and scanned the first few lines just to satisfy my curiosity:

Carrion,

Something woke the computers in the ICEC. The engineers say that they received a signal around 14:00 from a listening outpost at the attached coordinates. They think it’s Equestrian, and it sent us a five-lettered code, claiming this was 1 part of 7. The installation numbers attached referenced the dam as well, so you should have received a part as well. I am willing to purchase the piece of the code you received for 2 million Cs in various caliber, kind and size negotiable at your behest. Furthermore, I am willing to pay you a further 2 million Cs for the code still held at the source of the transmission. Your orders are to seize any Equestrian technology you find at the source and eradicate the local population. Nopony beyond us must see what these pieces of the code are.

Once you have sent both pieces to me, and Yeoman confirms that both are legitimate, you are to erase them. These cannot fall into the wrong hooves. The good of Auris depends on it. Use the ringbirds as necessary to accomplish what you must.

I make this offer out of the generosity of my heart and the goodwill of the Ivory City. Do not cross me. We both know you don’t stand a chance.

-Reclaimer

Frowning, I ripped the message out of the notebook and tucked it into a pouch on my armor. It finally confirmed something I’d been suspicious of for a long time now: this whole thing was a lot bigger than I could imagine. The Crimson didn’t attack Blackwash for the hell of it; the Ivory City and this pony, Reclaimer, were the real ones behind it all. Carrion’s Crimson might have killed my mom and my town, but Reclaimer was the one who made him do it.

Not that I wasn’t going to kill Reclaimer any less. He still did all this shit to me—to us.

“Stairs,” Zip said, and I looked over to where she and Sig were peering around the corner to a staircase that went up. I followed Fusillade over to the two of them, Gauge and SCaR following at an anxious distance.

Fusillade gave the stairs a discerning glare and turned to Sig. “Well?”

“I hear movement,” Sig said, angling his head this way and that. “Can’t tell how many, though. It sounds like they’re trying to stay quiet.”

The Prench mare nodded and stepped forward, her machine pistols at the ready. “Keep your fire under control,” she said, gingerly stepping onto the first step. She looked over her shoulder and nodded at me, the first pony she saw. “You, with me. Don’t shoot unless shot at.”

I gulped and nodded, falling in behind her. Zip’s wingtip brushed along my armored side as I did so, and I turned to her to share a quick nod. Gauge lingered in the middle of the room, awkwardly shifting from hoof to hoof while SCaR orbited his head. I flashed him a comforting smile, then began to ascend.

Fusillade paused at the landing while she waited for me to follow her. A shut door cut us off from the next room, but it looked like it was made of flimsy shit. Nodding to me, Fusillade lit her horn. “Watch the right.” At my nod, she set her jaw and wrapped her magic around the handle, ripping it and the entire latch out of the door. Fuck, it probably would’ve been easier to just rip the thing off its hinges!

But I didn’t have time to think about that. As soon as the door swung open, Fusillade darted in, her machine pistols drawn. I followed her in and swung my rifle to the right. My eyes took in a blur of holographic computer screens in the darkness, some flipped tables, and a few shell casings lying on the ground. The coppery smell of blood hit my nostrils like a fucking wall, and I glanced down to see a body lying on the floor near my hooves. A body with its face painted in red. Distracted as I was, I only barely caught the glimpse of movement right against the wall as it advanced toward me, and I immediately raised my rifle and jammed it forward.

Teal eyes blinked in shock and fear beneath a short and disheveled red and yellow mane. The tip of the barrel of my rifle touched a white nose on a white body, and a few pearly feathers twirled down around me as the figure’s wings snapped open in alarm.

My breath caught in my throat. “Nova?!”

“Ember?!” the pegasus squeaked at me, and I immediately lowered my rifle and set it to safe. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, shook my head, everything just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. But after all that, the pegasus was still there. Still alive. Still… still smiling.

My first friend, my best friend, was alive.

I squealed like a filly and tackled her, nuzzling her as hard as I could. Nova giggled and laughed and wrapped her legs around me even as tears poured from her eyes. I felt the stress of everything, everything since the attack on Blackwash disappear, even if only for a few moments. Nova was here and alive, and more than that, she was healthy and well. Safe at last. That was all I cared about.

Hoofsteps thundered on the stairs behind me. “Nov?!” I heard Gauge shout in the stairwell a second before he burst through after us. After a moment to look around, he spotted the two of us on the floor, and dogpiled onto us with a happy yell. Nova’s eyes lit up, and before she could say anything, the two were already kissing. Kissing and rolling, while I just did my best to slide out of the way.

I stood up and waited off to the side, grinning from ear to ear and even shedding a few tears of joy. The two of them, zebra and pegasus, just sat together, holding each other in their forelegs and crying, kissing each other over and over again. I felt a warm presence at my side as I watched, and soon Zip’s wing wrapped around my shoulders. Even her eyes flashed with moisture, and she sniffled once over the grin she wore on her muzzle.

“Ah, être jeune et amoureux...” Fusillade said, smiling and sitting down even as other slaves started to crawl out of their hiding places. I have no idea what that meant, but fuck it. It sounded right.

Now there was only one more thing to take care of.

Chapter 30: Where We Pay the Price

I squinted and frowned at the scrap of paper sitting on the table. Next to me, Fusillade and Zip shared my expression, and Zip even scratched the end of her muzzle with a wingtip. Across from us, Nova sat in Gauge’s lap, watching the three of us with a pleased expression. I couldn’t tell if that was from giving us what we were after, or simply that Gauge was holding her close. The two hadn’t separated since they’d been reunited, like they were afraid that if they ever let go, they’d lose each other again.

“Any other markings?” Fusillade asked, shifting her attention to Nova. “Anything else that could tell us what we’re after?”

Nova shook her head. “I couldn’t say. As soon as we broke the encryption on the message we received, Carrion moved us from the Fort and had us work on the one the dam got. Once he had both pieces of code, he gave copies to that scary pegasus… Yeoman?” The three of us standing across from her nodded, and she placed her hooves on the table. “Yeah, he gave the copies of the downloads to him, and then they had us wipe the mainframes here. Though I think from what you’ve said, you guys attacked the Fort before they were able to clean the computers they stole from Blackwash.”

Gauge nodded. “They’re still in one piece back at the Sentinels’ headquarters. Some of the techies left behind when he took you have been trying to pull anything else they could out of it.”

“Wish I was there to help,” Nova said, shaking her head. “Anything would’ve been better than… than this.”

I felt like somepony started wrenching on my heart. Though she was alive and in one piece (and insisted to Gauge and me that nopony touched her), she’d definitely been through a lot. Her eyes were gaunt and bloodshot, her mane and tail were huge messes, and she hadn’t been preening her wings, so her feathers were starting to fall out. There was already a little pile around the seat where she and Gauge sat, and a good number looked like they were a breath away from dropping out of her dirty wings. But worst of all, I could see her ribs, and her legs were withering and bony. She’d nearly passed out from the excitement of our reunion, so we got her some water and distributed some rations among the other slaves hiding in the tower. That’d at least got her back on her hooves again. Apparently the Crimson were only feeding them two slices of stale bread a day. They didn’t want them physically strong since they were just computer nerds so they didn’t have to worry about them escaping. I doubted Nova could even fly if she wanted to.

Gauge tightened his grip around Nova and nuzzled the mare’s cheek. “It’s over now, okay? We’ll get you better in no time.”

“Yeah…” Nova said, and I saw her hoof drift toward her left cutie mark—or what remained of it. Like me, she’d been branded, and just seeing the mark on her flank made me want to kill somepony. Unlike me, however, she didn’t have a heart, which was good. Hers was a pair of curly braces, supposed to represent computer code or some shit like that. I didn’t really know, I was just making assumptions. I didn’t want to ask her about it and remind her of any of the shit she’d been through.

I dragged the piece of paper over to me and held it in front of my face now that the actual mares in charge were done with it. It was only a single line scratched into the paper by what must have been a makeshift quill with dirt and grease for ink. Nova must’ve been in a hurry to get this down before she got caught or something.

FFFGG | I | 36-J

Fusillade looked at me, so I gave the scrap to her after trying to commit it to memory. Tucking it into her armor, she stood up and rested a hoof on Nova’s shoulder. “You have done very good work,” she said. “Your ordeal is over. Rest here for now. When the dam is secure, we will bring you someplace safer to recover.”

Then, looking at Zip, she nodded toward the door. “Come. We have work to do.”

Zip stood up, and I waited until she walked past me and Fusillade was already halfway through the door to grab her mane with my magic and pull her muzzle down to mine. She snorted in surprise but didn’t resist the kiss I gave her. In fact, she ate it up, savoring every tiny fraction of a second in the moment we had together. She didn’t say anything when we parted, and neither did I. We just looked each other in the eyes, and then she was gone, vanishing through the door, back out to the surface of the dam.

I sighed as she left, something that Nova didn’t fail to catch. “Who’s she, Ember?” she asked, angling her pretty little head. “You two seem… uh, close?”

“She’s Zip,” I said, smiling merely at the mention of her name. “She’s the current acting commander of the pegasi in the Sentinels, since the current commander is still recovering from getting fucked up in the battle for the Fort.” Then, after a second, I smirked and added, “She’s also the hottest piece of flank I’ve seen in my entire life.”

Nova giggled and rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Ember.”

Gauge kissed his marefriend on the cheek. “For the record, your flank is much better than hers.”

“Oh, shut up,” I said, dismissively waving my hoof. “Let’s not get in a dick-measuring contest, especially when only one of us actually has a dick to measure.”

“So I win by default?” Gauge asked.

“I think she was talking about herself,” Nova said, making all of us laugh. Oh, it felt so good to finally be together again, even if we were still in a building sitting on top of another few hundred angry bandits.

“I missed this,” I said, placing my hooves on the table. “It feels like it’s been years since we were all together… all happy. You know?”

“More like lifetimes,” Nova said. “What happened since then? I thought for sure you were dead when they didn’t put you on that flying machine of theirs with us, Em.”

I rubbed my hoof behind my neck. “It’s a long story…”

“Do I look like I care?” Nova asked, smiling slightly. “As far as I’m concerned, we’ve got all the time in the world to catch up.

“Well, alright. Better make yourself comfortable on Gauge’s crotch…”

And with that little quip out of the way, I told her everything. From the moment the Crimson led me away from the rest of them in Blackwash, to me joining the Sentinels, the attack on the Fort, the betrayal at the quarry, up to what I went through just to get to her that day. Gauge supplied little anecdotes where he could and felt like it, and Nova just patiently listened to everything. She only interrupted once to tease me when I kinda-sorta mentioned that me and Zip had taken a romp or two (or several) in her bed since we got back from the Fort. But, after giving her the abbreviated version (which still took like fifteen minutes), I finally got her up to speed on all the shit that’d happened over the past three weeks.

Nova whistled and shook her head. “You sound like you’ve been through hell. Thank the stars that they kept you safe!”

“I’m pretty sure the stars tried to kill me about as much as they helped me, but whatever. I’m alive.” I swallowed hard before I said, “And you… Did they treat you… you know?” When Nova shuddered, I figured that was an awful way to go, so I shifted the conversation a bit. “What about everypony else from Blackwash? Is Brass still here? What about your dad?”

Nova drew her skinny forelegs in closer to her bony chest. “Brass is s-still fine,” she squeaked. “A-At least, I think so. It’s been awhile since I… s-since I saw him.”

Concern spread across Gauge’s face, and he pressed his cheek against Nova’s. “Nov, what’s wrong? Is it… is it your dad?”

Oh fuck. The poor mare was trying to fight back tears. Standing up, I made my way around the table and wrapped her in a hug. “Nova, I’m so sorry…”

“T-They k-k-killed him,” Nova hiccupped. “They h-had him do s-something to the computers before they wiped them. They only let him s-see… T-Then they k-killed h-him…”

In that instant, she shattered. My best friend broke down sobbing, face buried in her hooves and shuddering with each breath. Gauge and I held her as tightly as we could between us, simply trying to ease the pain with our presence. I remembered feeling exactly how she did when Mom died in the attack. I only wished that Nova didn’t have to feel that, too.

While she cried, Gauge and I locked eyes over her head. I knew he was planning just as much as I was how we were going to torture Carrion to pay him back for what he did to Nova. But apart from my always-present rage at Carrion and how I wanted to kill him in increasingly painful ways, another question poked at the back of my mind. Just what had Carrion made Stardust do to the computers? Was there something he wanted in the signal? That seemed like the most likely option. It would also explain why the fucker killed him when he was done. Whatever that secret was, I had a feeling that I needed to figure it out. I didn’t like the way it all sat in my gut.

Nova eventually recovered; instead of sobbing, she only shook quietly against Gauge’s side, her eyelids puffy and her teal eyes staring forward into nothingness. I wanted to stay there longer to comfort her, but the door opened and Zip stuck her head in. “Ember,” she said, pointing the way she came with a wing. “You’re need—oh, uh, shit. Is this a bad time?”

“No, it’s…” I held up a hoof and tried to assure her with a sad smile. “It’s fine. We’re just… just grieving together.”

Zip slowly nodded her head. “Whatever it is, I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes flicking to Nova, who didn’t even react to her presence. Then they darted back to me. “We’re rallying for the next stage. We’re going to free the rest of the slaves still held inside the dam and kill Carrion. We’ll put an end to this before lunch.”

I took a step away from Nova and Gauge. “Alright, I’ll be there in a minute. I just need a moment with these two.”

“Right. I’ll tell Fusillade you’re on the shitter or something.” She chuckled and shook her head. “That’s not a bad idea, actually,” she mumbled to herself as she turned around and shut the door behind her.

I shared a look with Gauge and just chuckled and shook my head. “The mare I love,” I said, reaching forward and rubbing Nova’s back. Then I wiped the smile from my face and pointedly met Gauge’s eyes. “Stay here with her, okay? Look out for the other slaves, too,” I said, nodding toward the other end of the room, where the other six slaves we’d rescued were huddling amongst themselves.

“Are you sure?” Gauge asked, sitting up a bit straighter. “You sure you don’t want us to—?”

“No. Don’t even think about it.” I gave him a firm frown. “You can hardly shoot, and Nova’s too weak to move right now. Besides, she needs you here with her. Just… just stay out of it, okay?” I asked him. “After all we’ve been through… please don’t go and get yourself killed trying to fight with me. I know what I’m doing, and I’ve got the gear and training for it. Plus I have Zip and Sig to bail my ass out if I really need it.” Picking my rifle up from where I’d set it against the wall, I slung it around my neck and rested a leg across the top. “I promise to bring the bastard’s head back so we can take turns face-fucking it until we’re happy.”

Gauge made a disgusted face and almost gagged. “That’s fucking disgusting, Em.”

“But you imagined it,” I said, smirking. “Too bad there’s no such thing as brain bleach!”

I trotted to the door and opened it with my magic when I heard Gauge call out behind me. “Ember, wait,” he said, and I stopped where I was to look at him. Nodding to me, he simply said, “Stay safe. Kill them dead.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And I plan on it.”

As soon as I stepped away from the shelter of the central tower’s walls, I was buffeted by the wind ripping through the valley. On my right, I could see the reservoir rippling with whitecaps and choppy water. The trees on either side of the river swayed in the wind, and the smoke rising from the dam dispersed as soon as it got a few feet off of the ground. I could feel the moisture in the air, and my ear twitched when a raindrop hit it dead center. Thunder rolled over the dam, shaking the air around me. It wouldn’t be long now.

I saw Zip and Sig standing in a throng of Sentinels, mercs, griffons, and volunteers in the shelter of a row of buildings that kept the worst of the wind away from them. Galloping across the open surface with the wind trying to rip my thick mane and bushy tail out of my body, I managed to slide between them and breathe a sigh of relief. “Good thing we’re going inside, right?” I joked as a light mist began to fill the air around us. “Fighting in the rain sounds like it’d suck.”

As if the heavens just wanted to fuck with me, lightning flashed, thunder roared, and it began pouring two seconds later.

I frowned as the pouring rain drenched me to the bone in seconds. Of course my fucking shields didn’t do anything about the water pelting me. They could deflect projectiles traveling at the speed of sound, but not fucking rain. Around me, everypony (and everygriffon) recoiled from the downpour, but Fusillade refused to move, so the rest of us weren’t moving either. In fact, I’m pretty sure the Prench mare glared at the clouds above us like she was calling them out or something.

Zip shivered by my side, trying to cover her head with her wings. Smirking, I made an orange shield with my telekinesis and held it above our heads, extending it enough to get Sig under it, too. Most of the unicorns in the huddle did the same, adding colorful splashes of magic to an otherwise dreary, gray day. Sig waved at his siblings who all stood together without magic to cover them, trying to keep each other dry with outstretched wings. One of them splashed water at him, earning a snicker among the griffons, though that died pretty fast when Fusillade decapitated it with an annoyed scowl.

“We have done well to get this far,” Fusillade said, her eyes sliding over the crowd assembled in front of her. “But seizing the tower is only the beginning. Now comes the hard part: killing Carrion and putting an end to this once and for all.”

She touched a few buttons on her left foreleg bracer (buttons my armor didn’t have) and projected a simple hologram of the dam. “We’ve secured the four buildings containing the stairways that lead into and out of the interior of the dam,” she said, and four sections of the dam lit up, two on each side of the midline. “They’re fortified to resist a mass charge in case the Crimson try to break out, but they’ve likely fortified the lower levels themselves. Carrion wants to force us to play a game of numbers with him, and that is a game he will win.” Her eyes looked past us, and I looked over my shoulder to see rows and rows of bodies covered in black tarps snapping in the wind. “We’ve lost too many to play that game with him now.”

“But, with data and building plans secured from the central tower, we’ve identified another way in.” The hologram of the dam shifted to show the back middle, where I could see the intakes that led to the turbines inside the dam and the spillways on the other end. “The dam has not used its turbines in centuries,” Fusillade said, “which means that we can use them to access the interior, behind any defenses that Carrion may have set up. Right now, the water simply overflows to the spillways. The spillways are connected to the interior of the dam for maintenance and monitoring purposes. That is our way in.

“Once inside, the task becomes simple,” Fusillade said, and again the hologram changed to show the interior of the dam. “Clear the Crimson fortifications at the bottom of the west stairs and make our way to the central power plant. From what the slaves we’ve rescued so far have said, the Crimson have converted it into their holding pens, as it is the largest and most central room in the dam. Once there, free the slaves, and with their numbers and our firepower, we’ll overwhelm the Crimson once and for all.”

Her eyes fixed on Zip beneath her sodden mane, a mane which clung to her faded blue muzzle and cheeks. “Commander Zip, I am giving command of the infiltration team to you. Pick as many as you need to get inside and make your way to the stairs so that the rest of us can join you. I will organize the remaining troops at the west buildings and be ready to storm the lower levels when you are in position.”

Zip nodded and moved forward into the middle of the ring. “I need nine volunteers,” she said, her eyes darting over each of us. “We’re going to move fast and hit hard. Any more than ten and we’re too slow to get to the stairs before we’re overwhelmed. So, who wants to go diving into the prickwings’ nest?”

My hoof shot up almost immediately. What, did you think I wasn’t going to be the first pony to volunteer?

Of course, Zip was expecting it, because her eyes were already on me and she nodded her head before I even fully raised my hoof. I trotted forward to her side as she also waved Sig and a bunch of his siblings over. I’m pretty sure they all would’ve come, because that’s just how they were, but there were more of them than there were spots. After some discussion among themselves, Sig stepped forward with Dacie, Gatre, Hoana, and two more of his brothers to make seven of us.

While they were discussing that, Zip had chosen Warped Glass, Runabout, and Failsafe to recreate the team we used when we took the Fort what felt like ages ago. With her team put together, Zip nodded to Fusillade. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Fusillade nodded. “You know what to do.” Then, turning to the rest of our forces, she pointed back the way we’d advanced. “Take up positions at the doors. Wait until you hear shooting to advance. Sentinels, we will lead the way once we do.” As everyone moved that way, Fusillade turned to face us one last time. “Good luck. We are all counting on you.” Then she too walked away.

That left the ten of us standing in a small cluster underneath the rain shields Glass and I maintained. “What’s the plan?” I asked Zip.

“First, we’re going to go swimming,” Zip said, and she began to walk toward the edge of the dam, the rest of us following her.

I faltered a bit behind her. “S-Swimming?”

“Uh, yeah?” she said. “We’re using the spillways to get in, so we have to go into the water. That a problem?”

I felt the eyes of everyone else on me. “Uhhh… no? I-I mean, it’s just that the water’s rough and probably cold. Isn’t that dangerous?”

“It’s still summer,” Sig reminded me. “The water’s probably about as warm as the rain. Besides, we’re already wet anyway. Not like it can get much worse.”

“R-Right. If you say so.” I swallowed hard as we finally reached the edge of the reservoir. About twenty feet below the edge of the dam, the choppy dark water of the river frothed as the wind whipped across it. It was an unnerving sight in itself, and the fact that I couldn’t swim made it all the worse.

What, you’re surprised? I lived on top of a mountain. It’s not like Blackwash had the water to spare for swimming pools!

“How do you want to do this, Commander?” Glass asked.

“I’m going to scout ahead,” Zip said. “There’s a ladder over there that will take us down to the water level. The spillways should be another ten feet down and somewhere to the right.” She bit down on a piece of metal extending from the collar of her armor and pried it loose, then stuck it between her teeth like a bit. “Good thing we have these,” she said around the thing in her mouth.

“What about us?” Sig asked, pointing to his siblings. “We can’t use rebreathers. No lips. Not like we have enough anyway.”

“I can keep the water out,” Glass said. “We’ll have a dome of air to breathe while we move to the spillway. I’ll need your help,” he said to me.

“I don’t know that spell,” I said, frowning.

Glass shook his head. “You don’t have to. Just give me your mana so I don’t have to shoulder the burden myself. You know how to do that at least, right?”

I nodded. That was something I had actually done before, back in Blackwash. Sometimes Mom needed my help with transmuting metals from the shitty aluminum we had tons of to better things like steel. She’d taught me the spell, but two unicorns casting the spell at once isn’t anywhere near as effective as one unicorn helping another to cast it much more powerfully. So I usually ended up being the spare battery for her while she worked.

“Right. Now that that’s settled, I’ll see you down below.” Zip extended her wings and shook what water she could off of them, then took a running start off the edge of the dam, fluttering the whole time. She managed to catch a little air at the end, rising up a few feet before folding her wings against her sides, twirling in midair, and diving for the water below. It seemed like not even a life or death mission was going to stop her from showing off when she could.

We peered over the edge of the dam just in time to see Zip splash into the water below. A few seconds later, her orange head reemerged from the dark depths, and she waved at us before diving down again. We looked at each other for a moment before Glass shrugged and made his way to the ladder next to us. “Guess we should get moving, too.”

Gatre ruffled his feathers behind us. “Great…”

Glass made his way down the ladder first, followed by Runabout and Failsafe. The three of them had taken out their rebreathers and stuck them between their jaws as well, I guess just in case their heavy armor weighed them down once they got into the water.

Just like I was wearing… oh, fuck me.

Sig and his siblings went down the ladder as well; I guess their big wings were too waterlogged to fly, and they weren’t keen on belly flopping into the reservoir from twenty feet up. That just left me up top, fidgeting in place. I could see Fusillade and the rest of our forces moving down the dam toward their positions. If I wanted to, I could’ve easily galloped up to them and joined them. It certainly would beat drowning, that was for sure. But was I really going to leave Zip and Sig and all my other friends I’d made behind?

I sighed and put my shaking hooves on the ladder. Loyalty and pride were going to get me killed one day. I at least put the rebreather between the bars of my mouth before I went down. Maybe that’d stop me from drowning, at least for a little while.

As soon as the water touched my hooves, I shivered. It wasn’t so much that it was cold—it was actually warmer than the rain hitting me in the face now that I’d dropped my shield—but I couldn’t see through it. I felt like I was entering an empty, murky void, even as I saw the others treading water around me. I had no idea how Glass or Sig or any of them clad in Sentinel armor could do it. Lightweight as it was, it was still heavy metal resting on our backs. I also couldn’t see Zip; I could only assume she was somewhere beneath the murky water, trying to scout out the spillways.

Taking a deep breath, I tensed my muscles and let go of the ladder.

I squeaked as the weight of the armor on my shoulders tried to drag me beneath the choppy surface, but some instinct set my legs into a furious dog paddle to try to stay afloat. It worked—mostly. I could at least keep my face above the water, but it was tiring. I felt like the frantic flailing of my limbs wasn’t doing anything. Thankfully, before I exhausted myself just trying to stay alive, I felt a pair of talons wrap around my forelegs and hold me above the water. Gasping, I looked left and right to see Sig and Gatre supporting me. “Thanks,” I said, almost breathless, as I just focused on kicking the water with my hind legs. “Just… don’t say anything, okay?” I added in a whisper. This was already hurting my pride enough.

“We should get you some practice in the river when this is all over,” Sig said, though that was all. Warped Glass clearing his throat brought our attention back to where the Sentinel was treading water, magic building on his horn.

“You ready?” he asked me, to which I nodded. Taking a deep breath and trying to forget about the endless watery void beneath me, I reached out with my magic until I felt the buzz of Glass’ horn. I found an opening in his magic and attached mine to his, essentially linking our mana supplies together. As soon as I did that, I felt a tiny wave of dizziness hit me as he began drawing mana from my body. For my part, I just focused on holding the bridge open, letting him do the work.

A shimmering shield of orange and white rippling together appeared above us, matching the two-toned pattern on Glass’ horn. It slowly spread until it encompassed all of us, the edge of the shimmering dome reaching a foot or so under the water. It looked like he’d simply taken a rain shield and expanded it a bit, made it a solid able to keep air inside as well. That had to be tough, and explained why he needed my help; making a barrier tight enough to stop air from passing in or out is incredibly difficult. I’d never been able to do it when it got really windy at Blackwash.

“So how does this work?” Dacie asked, looking around. “I mean, if it’s only a dome…”

“Just tread in place, and you’ll be fine,” Glass said, and I felt another pull on my magic. Around us, the water began to rise around the dome—no, we were the ones going down. The air pressure (or maybe it was another part of the spell) kept the water level inside of the dome the same, even as we went beneath the surface of the water. Glass pulled on more of my mana the deeper we got, I guess because of the weight of the water pushing down on us. But soon enough, with my heart pounding in my chest, we stopped descending, and apart from the light given off by our magic, things were a lot darker than they were at the surface.

Hoana shuddered and ran a talon through her raven head crest. “This is… new.”

“Definitely deeper than a birdbath,” I joked, still kicking at the water below me. I was really glad Sig and Gatre were helping me stay afloat. I swore when this was all done I was going to have Zip teach me how to swim. Learning how not to drown seemed like it’d be a useful skill to have going forward.

“Where are we going?” Dacie asked. “The water’s too murky. The storm’s kicking up a lot of sediment.”

“Follow the light,” Glass said, pointing off ahead of us. There, I could see two glowing red lines in the water, moving back and forth in paddling motions. It took me a second to figure out what they were, but I recognized them quickly enough as the laser blades on Zip’s wings. She must’ve found the spillway entrance and was guiding us over to it.

The dome began to move forward, and everyone started to swim after it to stay within the bubble of air. Sig and Gatre changing their angle and starting to swim forward themselves ended up splashing my muzzle into the water, and I sputtered in surprise and nearly swallowed a mouthful of water. Thankfully, the rebreather in my mouth stopped the water from pouring down my throat, and instead I only inhaled air. I wasn’t sure how exactly it worked, but my best bet was some kind of techno-magic bullshit. That’s how most of Equestria’s shit worked, anyway.

I like, half-paddled, half-flailed my way across the water until we finally reached Zip. The dome enclosed her, and she shook off her sodden mane and inhaled a deep breath through her nose. “Right through here,” she said around the rebreather in her muzzle, pointing to the right and swimming a bit in that direction. Glass followed her with the bubble, and we followed Glass until we could see an opening in the wall. By that point, the current flowing behind us did most of the work, and all we had to do was stay afloat as it sucked us into the dam.

Zip’s wingblades and the glow the shield gave off were our only sources of light as we were drawn through that dark tunnel. I could hardly see my hooves, but down below us, I saw red light glint off of flat metal radiating outward from a central point. “Are those the turbines?” I asked, pointing downwards. “They have to be like sixty feet across!”

“And it’s a good thing they aren’t running,” Zip said. “Whatever protective grating they had in front of them is probably long gone. We’d be sliced meat in no time.”

“Spirits,” Dacie breathed, and she drifted a little bit closer to Sig.

We followed the current for a little bit longer, past the turbines, when suddenly, out of the darkness, a white pony lunged at us.

Except it wasn’t a pony.

It was a skeleton.

I screamed, and even Dacie and Hoana uttered bird-like shrieks of alarm. The stallions and tercels in our party cursed and splashed lower in the water, which I didn’t really appreciate because it meant Gatre dunked my head under the water again. Only when we got all our wits about us did we realize the skeleton wasn’t lunging at us. It was just stuck overhead in some pipes, which we couldn’t see until we got close. Still, it looked like it’d been there a while. Its jaw was missing, as were a few of its limbs. It didn’t even have any tatters of clothes to identify it.

And there were more of them. We passed one, then two, then five, then eight. So many skeletons down here in this little spillway, all of them picked clean, many of them wearing weighted collars around their necks. It was haunting and fucking scary. Even Glass seemed nervous.

“What are they all doing here?” Runabout asked, her worried purple eyes darting around from one skeleton to the next.

“Looks like somepony drowned them,” Zip said, shuddering as we passed by them. “And there’s so many…”

“Probably Carrion’s way of cleaning house,” Glass said. “When the Crimson absorbed all the other bandit factions around the dam, there likely would’ve been challengers to his title. So he dumped them down here, let the current dash them to pieces against the pipes, and if they didn’t get stuck and drown, then the fall from the spillways certainly would’ve killed them.”

I blinked at that. “Uh… so we have a plan to not fall to our deaths, right? Because that sounds like a bad way to go.”

“See that light up there?” Zip asked.

“Is that the light at the end of the fucking tunnel?” I asked back. “Because I swear to fuck…”

“Be ready to grab!” Sig shouted as we rapidly approached the glowing in the distance. “Ready your guns, too! Who knows what we’ll find!”

Heart roaring in my chest, I clung tightly to Sig and made sure my machine guns were primed and ready. We were moving really fast…

And just like that, light. Harsh, blinding light. I felt Sig lurch to the side and grab onto something, and Glass let go of my mana as the shield collapsed around us. My hooves flailed for something, anything, and I found a hard block of concrete to hold onto. Using that, I dragged myself forward, away from the water roaring past my tail, and pulled myself onto solid ground.

Holy fuck…

Panting, I laid on the concrete, the rebreather tumbling out of my mouth, and waited a second before opening my eyes. Around me, the rest of our little infiltration team lied scattered on the ground on either side of a roaring channel of water, emerging from one dark corridor and pouring through another. I didn’t want to know where I’d have ended up if I went through there. But, miraculously, it looked like we were all intact, if a little shaken, and we were inside of the dam.

“I am not fucking doing that again,” I muttered, finally standing on my shaking hooves. Oh, blessed ground! I didn’t have to worry about sinking into the endless abyss, never to be seen again! No more swimming for me. I’d done enough for a lifetime, as far as I was concerned.

“If we go back in the water, it’ll be when Carrion dumps our corpses,” Sig said, leaning forward and letting the water spill out of the gun channels in his armor. I noticed the rest of the Sentinels doing that as well, so I mimicked them, adding a little bit more to the sopping puddle around me. I took a few more moments to clean myself up, too. My mane was plastered to my face and neck, and my tail felt like a heavy rope attached to my ass, so I combed what water I could out of them with my magic. At least it’d do for now.

A little walkway over the rushing water allowed us to regroup in front of a metal door. “Well, we’re in…” Hoana said, tightening her grip on what looked like a homemade shotgun and adjusting the medical bags on her back. “Now what?”

“Now we make our way to the stairs,” Zip said, walking forward and resting her hooves on the door. “And we try not to make a sound while we’re at it.”

The Sentinels in the room all drew combat knives and held them in their mouths or their magic, in Glass’ case, and I did the same. The griffons flexed their talons and worked their beaks from side to side. They already had their melee built in. Once we were all ready, Zip turned a big rusty wheel in the middle of the door, and the bolts slid open with a hideous groaning noise.

“So much for stealth,” I muttered, wincing along with everyone else. Who needed to post sentries down here when that door shook the whole dam?

“Let’s move!” Zip hissed, shouldering the door open and fluttering inside with sodden wings. We followed her in a hurry, us ponies trying to keep our hooves quiet on the hard floor while the griffons just glided along on their soft, padded hind paws and talons that hardly touched the floor. It was pretty clear which of the two of us was the predator species.

A long, dark corridor lined with old pipes in the ceilings and walls greeted us on the other side of the door. Amazingly, we didn’t see any sentries, though I figured that might’ve had something to do with Carrion putting all hooves on deck to repel the assault. I didn’t get a chance to count the Crimson bodies lying on top of the dam, but I figured we had to have done a number on them. It would explain why nopony was down here to guard random spillways.

It took us some time before we even found the first Crimson bandit. We went up a creaky and rusty staircase to a junction room of some kind with a whole bunch of doors in it. There were two bandits sitting there, talking in worried whispers about what was going on outside. As soon as they heard us and saw us come up the stairs and through the doors, they jumped in alarm and shouted, raising their guns to fire. They didn’t get the chance.

I yanked my knife out of the one bandit’s neck as Glass finished cutting through the other. We’d used our telekinesis to stab them from like twenty feet away before they could even fire. Zip just smiled at me and nodded. “This is why I like having unicorns on missions.”

“If they’d shot, the whole dam would’ve known we’re here,” Glass said. “Lucky they didn’t.”

“Let’s hope we can keep it up, then,” I said. I really didn’t want to have to split-second stab somepony again. That frayed my nerves a little more than I wanted to admit.

After a few seconds to look at the doors and plan our path, Zip opened one seemingly at random and peered through the crack. When all was clear, she waved over to us to follow her, and so we crept through the door into a short hallway with—you guessed it—more doors around.

Let me just skip ahead to something more interesting. There’s only so many descriptions of empty hallways and rooms in this maze I can give before even I get bored.

After navigating the corridors and rooms for some time (and dropping a few unsuspecting Crimson along the way), Zip opened a door at the top of a staircase that led out onto a large balcony. Framed by massive support columns running the inner perimeter of the balcony, it wrapped around the outside of a big, open room. From a glance, I figured we had to have stumbled across the central room of the dam. Massive power generators lined both walls about fifteen feet below us, connected to huge pipes that disappeared into the concrete. Those must’ve been where the turbines led to. But even more important than those and the hordes of Crimson soldiers gathered down below were the cages. Stacked as high as five tall, cages hardly big enough to hold a pony sitting down lined almost every available wall in the middle of this room. And inside each cage was an emaciated pony, usually lying down in what little space they were provided, which wasn’t even enough to stretch out fully. Some of the ponies I recognized from Blackwash. Hundreds more I didn’t.

“That’s horrible!” Dacie whispered, her eyes wide at the sight in front of us.

“And Kerzin tried to befriend them,” Gatre said, his talons scraping across the ground.

“They’re caged like animals,” I whispered, feeling my blood coming to a boil. No wonder the slaves all looked so sick and frail. Carrion and the Crimson didn’t give a fuck about their ‘property!’ I was glad that Nova wasn’t in one of these cages when we found her. But that still left Brass and others to suffer down here. The sooner we got them out, well, the sooner I could put my mind at ease.

“We’ll get them out. Trust me,” Zip said, staying low and sneaking against the walls. “But we have to open a path first.”

I nodded and fell in line behind her. After pausing to listen at a door, she opened it and led us in. That’s when I noticed I could hear voices.

“We’re close,” Sig commented. “I can hear machine guns being loaded.”

“Right.” Zip stood up tall and the rest of us congregated around her. “Sig, I’m leaving you and three of your siblings behind to guard our asses. Make sure nopony gets through this door.” Sig nodded and pulled over Hoana and his other two brothers that he’d brought with us. “The rest of us, stay low and quiet until their fortifications are in sight. Runabout, Failsafe, once you’re in position, wipe them with rockets. We’ll clean up the rest.” Smirking at me, she added, “Ready to get loud?”

“I never liked sneaking around,” I said. “Let’s let Carrion know he’s fucked.”

While Sig set up two deployable covers about halfway down the hall, the rest of us crept ahead toward the noise. A peek around a corner and through another open doorway took us into an open room with tables and blocks of concrete scattered haphazardly about to provide some cover for the defenders, of which there were a lot. There were probably twenty or thirty Crimson down here, all waiting behind cover with heavy weapons trained on the doorway. Too bad for them they weren’t expecting anypony to come from behind.

All it took was one nod from Zip, and our two bombardiers rained hell on the oblivious defenders. I even chucked a fireball into the mix once or twice for good measure.

In the face of that much firepower, whatever fortifications the Crimson had put together fell in an instant. Soon, there wasn’t anything left but the scattered remains of the defenders, blown to bits by the rocket barrage hurled at them. We’d just wiped another thirty Crimson without taking any casualties; if we kept that up, we’d have the dam in no time.

Zip stood in front of the open doorway as Fusillade led the rest of her soldiers down the stairs. The elder mare looked at the destruction around us and nodded once. “I was expecting a fight, not a massacre.”

“They didn’t have any rearguard,” Zip said. “I think even Carrion’s starting to spread himself thin.”

“Then we will finish him once and for all,” Fusillade said. “All it will take is one more push.”

We heard shooting coming from somewhere down the halls behind us, and I worriedly turned to Zip. “Looks like we pissed them off.”

“I left sergeant Sig and three others to hold the line while we cleared the path,” Zip said to Fusillade. “We need to relieve them before they get overrun.”

“Then I suppose we have better things to do than idling here.” Turning to the rest of us, Fusillade raised her machine pistols. “We have the initiative! Drive them back! Allons!”

We rushed back down the hallway, Zip and I near the front, as we tried to get back to Sig as quickly as we could. We found him holding the line with his siblings, exchanging heavy fire with a mass of Crimson trying to break through and overrun them. Just before they could do so, though, we arrived on the scene, and began unloading a barrage of lead down the hall. That cut many down where they stood and drove the rest back, and before they could fortify the other end of the doorway, we broke through.

Now the real madness began.

There wasn’t much of a plan other than ‘stay alive and push forward,’ so that’s what I tried to do. As soon as I cleared the doorway, I looked to my left and fired a few bursts at some bandits I saw running away from us. I dropped two and wounded a third, but my armor alerted me to gunfire from the right, so I quickly ducked behind a support column before something that could pierce my shields hit me. Somepony finished off the one bandit I wounded while I peered around the column and quickly spotted a few Crimson firing on my position from the floor below. I sent a few more bursts down at them before I had to reload, though I didn’t get any kills. Truth be told, I was a little hesitant to poke my head out of cover with all the bullets flying around, and that was before the heavy machine guns on the other end of the central room began firing.

A blur of orange feathers filled my vision as Zip jumped, slid, and rolled into cover next to me, dodging the barrage of bullets around us. By the door, the rest of the Sentinels finished pouring into the room and began spreading out, using the support columns for cover and deploying their own in the spaces in between. I saw Sig and his siblings holding down the middle, and Dacie even used her claws and talons to climb up the side of the rough concrete column to get a better firing angle on some of the Crimson down below. In the center of the room, the slaves in their cages huddled as low as they could, hoping and praying that the bullets filling the air didn’t accidentally come flying towards them. And every second that we lost, the Crimson fortified their positions and organized their forces to sweep us back. We had the initiative, but we still didn’t have the advantage. Not until we got the slaves on our side.

“What now?!” I shouted at Zip over the gunfire all around us. I used my telekinesis to blind fire around the column at the machine guns at the far end of the room, only stopping when I emptied that mag, too. I opened my ammo pouch and threw another one in. One in the rifle and two in the bag. Only ninety bullets left; I’d have to be careful with my fire from now on. At least I still had plenty in the machine guns in my armor.

“We need to take out that machine gun so we can get to the slaves!” she shouted back. “We’ll get cut to pieces if we try to go down there now!”

“How are you on ammo?” I asked. Unlike me, Zip didn’t have a spare rifle to shoot with. All she had were the six machine guns in her armor.

“A little over two hundred rounds! Air superiority uses a lot of bullets!” She flinched as a big round tore off a chunk of concrete next to her face, and she shrunk back behind cover. “You?”

“Ninety for the rifle, more than nine hundred for my MGs!” I shouted back. “Need some?”

Zip bit down on the ammo release lever on her armor and pulled, opening the side ports. She pulled out the ammo belts for the three guns on her left and chucked them to me. “Take these! Give me yours!”

I did the same, pulling out the nearly-full belts I had in my left side guns and floating them over to her. She loaded them into her armor, and I loaded the scraps of the belts she gave me into mine. Depressing the lever, the guns popped back into my armor and the firing computer quickly recalibrated them. Once that was done, I turned to Zip and nodded. “Ready?”

“Ready!” she shouted, spinning out of cover. She began firing downrange with her machine guns, distracting the Crimson at the other end of the room, while I darted around the balcony to the left side. Still, that didn’t take all of the attention off of me. Bullets cratered the walls and columns around me, occasionally bouncing off of my shields. I had to stop and slide into cover when the machine gun noticed me again and began firing, which gave Zip the opportunity she needed to flutter up to me. This time, I covered her as she moved, following only when she was in position. We did that a few times until eventually we made it to the flank of the machine gun.

“Peekaboo!” Zip shouted as she spun around the corner, unloading with her machine guns at the exposed flank of the Crimson gunners. I leaned around the column and carefully fired over her shoulder at any Crimson darting behind cover, and in a few seconds, we cut them down to size. That left us on the opposite end of the room from where we started, with our forces spreading all around on the upper balconies and the Crimson surrounded down below. But despite that, they were still putting up a fight, and now they were trying to use the slave cages as cover.

“We have to get them out of there,” I said, panting a little bit from that charge to the machine gun. “What do we do?”

Zip looked at the machine gun next to us and smiled. Placing her hooves on the firing paddles, she sighted down it for a second and checked the belt. “How about we give them a taste of their own medicine?”

I grinned back at her. “I love you,” I said, nuzzling her cheek quickly before hopping over to a set of stairs in the corner of the balcony. “Keep me covered, I’m going to try to get them away from the slaves!”

“I’ll try not to shoot you in the plot! I like the holes it already has just fine!”

I nearly tripped on the first step when she said that. Damn it, Zip, now is not the time for that!

But I wouldn’t mind her visiting my plot once this was all over…

I took the stairs three at a time in leaps and bounds and was at the bottom in a few seconds. Chaos reigned all around me as our forces shot down on the Crimson scattered below, who were doing their best to simply get out of here and into someplace more defensible. Dodging bullets and weaving around empty cages and some crates, I made my way to the first row of caged slaves and pulled my rifle. I didn’t recognize the mare curled in the back with her ears pressed flat against her skull, but it looked like she’d been here for a while. “Stay back!” I shouted at her a moment before I drew my knife. A press on the hilt caused a red laser to appear along the length of the blade, and I fit it into the gap between the door and the lock. It took a few seconds, but I melted the cage door open, and I threw it open wide. “Get out of here! Find cover!” I shouted at her as I moved onto the next one.

A bullet ricocheted off of one of the cages as I ran to it, the tumbling lead actually moving slow enough to bypass my shields and pelt me in the face. Flinching, I slipped and fell backwards, though that inadvertently made me dodge a barrage aimed at me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same for the stallion locked in that cage, who collapsed as the bullets ripped through him. Cursing, I rolled over and aimed my rifle at the Crimson who shot at me, only for Zip to cut them into pieces with her new toy on the balcony. I saw her wave a wing at me, and I climbed back onto my hooves and raced to the next cage. No sense wasting time crying over collateral damage…

“Ember!” I heard a familiar voice shout, and I looked a few cages down the line to see a brass-coated stallion pressing himself against the bars. “What the fuck are you doing here?!”

“Getting you out!” I shouted to him, skipping over a hoofful of frightened slaves to stop in front of him. “Today we make Carrion pay for what he did to us!”

I put the dagger to the lock, and Brass Casing withdrew a few steps from the glowing metal. He looked thin like Nova, but unlike Nova, he was covered in cuts and bruises. Some of his wounds began oozing blood as he moved, and his nose had been badly broken. More than once. “What the fuck did they do to you?!” I asked, appalled.

He smiled slightly through crooked and chipped teeth. “Turns out they don’t like anypony who fights back. That I was our militia captain just made them hate me twice as much.” He must’ve been looking me over, because the next thing he asked was, “What are you wearing? What have you been up to?”

“Long story,” I said. “The short version is that I found ponies who’d help. They’re the ones you should be thanking when this is all over, not me.” I finally cut my way through the lock, and threw the door open. “Now, let’s get the rest of you—”

“Look out!” Brass shouted, stumbling forward to try to shove me out of the way or something but unable to do so on his weak legs. I looked over my shoulder to see a bandit taking aim at me. He fired first, but my shields were able to deflect the bullets, much to Brass’ amazement. I brought my rifle to bear and put one burst through the bandit’s skull, dropping him where he stood, before turning back and helping Brass out of the cage and get him behind cover. He simply stared up at me in awe. “What the fuck…”

“I know, I’m a real badass now, aren’t I?” I said, grinning at him. Around me, Sentinels began descending into the center of the room, driving the remaining Crimson away and working on the slave cages with their own daggers or simply shooting off the locks. So many bandit bodies littered the floor, and the rest retreated to the far end of the room. And at the end of the room…

I locked eyes with him, and I saw a spark of recognition in those horrible brown eyes of his, beneath that black warpaint. He sneered at me and licked his lips before turning around and storming into the next room with a hoofful of his elites in red war paint. The rest of his forces scattered into what cover they could find to defend his retreat.

I wasn’t the only pony who saw him. Fusillade saw him too. Same with Zip, who fluttered down off of the walls.

We looked at each other.

I stabbed my dagger into a crate behind Brass’ head. “Free the rest of the slaves. I’m going to fucking end this.”

I left him behind, confused, and galloped over to Zip and Fusillade, who were rallying behind cover in the center of the room. I slid to a stop and crouched into cover next to them. “Carrion’s in that fucking room.”

Fusillade just nodded once. “Oui.”

“One last push…” Zip said, checking her wingblades quickly. Then, with an authoritative shout, she screamed to the rest of us. “Everyone! Take them down! This is it!”

The three of us jumped out of cover as one, galloping straight for the door as bullets whistled back and forth above and around us. We unloaded with our machine guns at the mass of Crimson standing between us and the door, cutting a swath through their lines. And before they could react or fill in the hole in their line, we plunged through into the next room, leaving the rest of our forces to clean them up behind us.

We found ourselves in the guts of the dam. Pipes rose and fell around and between catwalks suspended by rusting metal cables. Generators hummed along the walls, and wires stretched across the ceiling. Several control panels were stationed at various points around the room, clustered near ancient machinery that dotted the floor and jutted out from the walls. And there, standing on the other side of the room, was Carrion and six other Crimson.

Fusillade slammed the door shut behind us, alerting Carrion and his bodyguards to our presence. “It’s over, Carrion. You have lost. The dam is ours.” She aimed her machine pistols at his face. “Surrender. Or don’t. I would enjoy killing you.”

The big red bastard slowly turned around and narrowed his brown eyes at us. “Ah, I remember you!” he said, a hungry smile breaking out across his muzzle. “Commander Fussy, was it? Froussard, maybe, since you’re Prench?” He laughed. “And you brought friends! I recognize the dark beauty next to you,” he said, eyes flicking to me and making me shiver, “but not the other one. She Prench, too? I don’t even know if there were any Prench left on Auris. Besides you, of course. I thought I killed all of you years ago.”

Fusillade stiffened a bit at that, and Zip and I spared a glance from watching Carrion’s bodyguards to look at her. “So long as one of us lives, you have not won,” Fusillade said in a low voice. “I may have been your first conquest, but I will be the one to end you.”

Carrion barked some chilling laughter and crossed his forelegs over the back of a railing. “Oh, that’s good. What happened to you, Fussy? I didn’t accidentally leave my bone up your ass when I took you all those winters ago?” His eyebrows lowered as Fusillade bared her teeth and widened her stance. “Or are you still upset about what happened to your son?”

Fusillade blew up. It was like flipping a switch. The moment Carrion mentioned ‘her son’, the Prench mare screamed in rage and began firing wildly at him and his bodyguards. Everypony scattered in an instant, me diving one way into cover and Zip shooting up to the pipes above us while Carrion’s bodyguards found their own cover. But Carrion himself was hardly fazed. The lights on the scarred combat armor he wore glowed, and his own shields powered up, deflecting the barrage of lead Fusillade launched from her machine pistols. Then he calmly drew one of his shotguns and stalked toward us with the grip in his mouth.

My heart pounded in my throat. It was three against seven, and even though we had the tech advantage, Fusillade seemed out of control. She sprayed round after round at Carrion, and even hurled a few terrifying spells at him that ripped up metal and cracked the concrete. Carrion let his powerful shields deflect her bullets and danced between spells on surprisingly light hooves, making it look frighteningly easy. The two of them worked their way off to the right, away from the center of the battlefield. Carrion’s two pegasus bodyguards took off to pursue Zip, and I could hear them exchanging fire among the pipes and other shit in the ceiling. That left me to deal with Carrion’s other four lackeys.

Fuck me.

I galloped to the left, all but screaming as the four of them fired at me with powerful carbines. I knew just from the sound they made that they could pierce my shields with no real effort. My heart felt like it was going to explode by the time I ducked behind cover. I quickly shut my eyes and took two deep breaths before I realized I needed to do something now. It was only a matter of time before I got outflanked and gunned down. I could hear their hooves drumming across the grated floors as they ran in different directions. Now, if I had three buddies and a single target pinned behind cover, what would I do?

I charged a fireball on my horn and hurled it to my left before darting to the right. It worked; I caught the two trying to flank left off guard and charged the one on the right with guns blazing. He ducked down behind a generator, but not before I could grab his mane with my telekinesis. A solid yank was all I needed to drag his head out into the open, and I perforated it with three bullets.

One down. Three to go.

Of course, that little stunt left me out in the open, which the fourth bodyguard who held his ground quickly took advantage of. I felt my shields break and a lance of pure fire stab me deep in the left side. I fell to the ground, screaming in pain, and just barely managed to crawl behind cover before they could take me out.

So that’s what it’s like to get shot...

I groaned and sat up, muzzle contorted in pain as I pressed a hoof against my left side. It came away red and bloody, and simply touching the hole just under the edge of my side armor almost made me scream again. I could feel the bullet lodged somewhere in my gut; that was going to have to come out later. At the moment, though I doubted I could move very fast at all. I was effectively pinned behind this cover as the three Crimson closed in on me.

But my scream didn’t fall on deaf ears. Moments after a painted body riddled with bullet holes fell to the ground, an orange blur streaked by, machine guns blazing. The six guns ripped one of the Crimson elite to shreds, dropping him where he stood. I looked up just in time to see Zip frantically flapping her wings, trying to gain altitude as bullets roared by her. One clipped her right wing, tearing a few feathers loose, but other than her wobbling a bit she recovered, out-flying the bandit behind her. She really earned her name.

Two to go, and one bullet in my side. I could do this. I didn’t know what happened to Fusillade and Carrion; they were still fighting somewhere out of sight in one of the side rooms here, and every so often I heard the shriek of metal as Fusillade used magic. Was she actually just ripping apart pipes and throwing them at Carrion? Because that’s what it sounded like.

Bullets slammed around me, and I lowered myself further behind cover, wincing as I moved the muscles in my left side. Right. Still had two fuckers to deal with. So I figured I’d try something stupid.

I quickly picked out where the two of them were. They were advancing on me from both sides, left and right, and both fired a few shots as soon as I poked my head out. Thankfully, I kept my head, and I picked up my rifle in my telekinesis and blind fired at the stallion trying to move to my left in a few bursts. I saw through the cracks in some metal panels I snuck past that he ducked behind cover while I kept firing, waiting for me to run out of ammo. I measured my bursts, but that wasn’t all. I also crept toward my right while I left my gun in place. By the time I was out of ammo, I was already twenty-five feet to the right. My rifle squawked and dropped its mag, and I lowered it behind cover.

The pony on the right jumped out of cover to take my head off.

I was already crouching next to his chest.

His armor wasn’t enough to stop six machine guns from ripping into him point-blank.

He fired his rifle a few times as he died, but they were wild shots that didn’t hit anything. The most he accomplished was slumping over on top of me, effectively pinning me underneath his literal dead weight. I shouted in protest, especially as the body forced me to flex my wounded side and another stab of pain tore through my gut. That burning knife destroyed my focus, and I stopped trying to get the body off of me. The only thing I could focus on was the pain. Holy fuck, it hurt like nothing else.

Galloping hooves behind me snapped me out of it, and I used my magic to fling the dead body back so I didn’t have to physically exert myself. I quickly rolled over to see the last bodyguard gallop around the corner and point his carbine at me, ready to shoot me dead. Thankfully for me, my rifle was still over there, and even though it was empty, that didn’t mean it was useless. It may not have had a bayonet, but who needs a bayonet when you’ve spent your entire life swinging sledgehammers and shaping metal with your telekinesis?

He fired at me, but not before I clubbed him across the muzzle with my rifle, causing him to miss. Gritting my teeth, I poured all my effort into just beating him to death with my rifle, trying to keep him off balance and unable to shoot at me. I even used it to sweep his legs from underneath him when he darted backwards, and then I started trying to guillotine his neck with it. Unfortunately for me, he was able to twist and kick the rifle out of my grip and roll away before I could start bludgeoning him with it again.

Unfortunately for him, Zip decided to suplex the other pegasus right on top of him. The three of them crashed to the ground with Zip on top, and she snapped her wings open to activate the laser blades before she went to work. It was like watching a butcher in her shop; a terrifying, gory butcherer of ponies. When it was over, Zip’s chest and face were more red than orange, and the two Crimson under her were a mass of smoking limbs and burnt hair.

She made a disgusted face when she realized just how much of their blood she was wearing, and she violently shook her wings to get some of the blood out of them. Then she looked to her left and saw me crawling over and struggling to sit upright against the wall. Eyes wide, she slammed her wings shut against her sides, rocketing her over to me in a single flap. “Where?!” she asked, hooves helping me steady against the wall as her eyes looked me over. “Where did they—?!”

I followed her eyes to the wound in my side. My gray jumpsuit glistened with blood, and I could see some of my vitality smeared across the ground. My wound was still bleeding pretty badly, and I was starting to feel lightheaded. But I still tried to smile (it was more of a grimace) and gently push her back. “I’ll live, Zip. I’ve still got time.” We both flinched as we heard something crunch, followed by the firing of two shotgun blasts and a pained cry from Fusillade. “But Fusillade…”

Zip nodded and stood up. “I’ll take care of him quickly,” she said, turning around and starting to run in the direction of the fighting. “You just stay pu—!”

Her words turned into a surprised grunt as Fusillade came flying out of nowhere and struck her across the chest, knocking her over. Fusillade moved slowly, like she was in a daze, and her face and neck were slick with blood and sparkled with shiny balls of lead embedded in her coat. Zip quickly wormed her way out from underneath Fusillade and stood up right as Carrion came trotting over to us. The stallion bled heavily from a deep gouge in his forehead and his armor was cracked and crushed in several places, but between him and Fusillade, he definitely looked like he’d taken his beating a lot better.

“Why do you Celestia-damned paladins even fucking try?!” Carrion shouted at us, a frightening layer of rage underneath his usually slimy and sarcastic personality. “Auris isn’t for your fucking kind! Auris is for the strong! Equestria died fucking centuries ago, and yet here you are, pretending that it’s still here! Well sorry to burst your bubble, but Equestria wasn’t the good guys! Equestria was the fucking bad guys!”

I blinked in surprise, and Carrion leered down at me. “I’ve read a lot of the old transmissions in the central tower. The fucking Synarchy got killed by their neighbors because we were the bad guys. We were the ones who conquered the zebra nations. We were the ones that glassed the griffon homelands. We exterminated an entire race of insect-like ponies because they scared us. Don’t you see how stupid you’re being?” He laughed like an evil mastermind who’d just played the heroes for fools. “You’re not upholding Equestria’s legacy. I am. And with Reclaimer’s help, we’re going to pick up where the Synarchy left off. Auris is fresh and young. It’s fertile land to grow a new Synarchy. And once Reclaimer unites this damn planet with that code, we’re going to find our way back to the stars.” Then he frowned at me and placed the shotgun barrels against my head. “And you fucking goodie-goodie four shoes are standing in the way of progress.”

The barrels of the shotgun suddenly glowed white, and Carrion’s eyes widened for a split second. Fusillade’s magic didn’t just pull the shotgun away from my skull; she bent the stars-damned barrels upwards. Carrion spat out the broken shotgun and turned toward where Fusillade stood, using Zip’s shoulder as a support. “We are making a better future, Carrion,” she spat. “If that’s how the Synarchy used to be like, then they deserved to die. We have a chance for a fresh start.” Her eyes narrowed as her horn surged again. “And you aren’t invited.”

The two of them unloaded with their machine guns, twelve in total between the two of them. That would’ve turned anypony to mist in an instant. But whatever armor Carrion had, it was some high-tech shit. Even more advanced than our Sentinel armor, if that were even possible. Before Zip and Fusillade even began firing, the bastard had stomped his forehooves into the ground, and a solid, shimmering shield appeared in front of him as the lights on his armor glowed brighter. The small caliber bullets shattered into pieces against it, raining tiny lead specks on the ground. When they finally stopped shooting and took a concerned step back, Carrion smirked and drew his other shotgun. “My turn.”

He bit down on the handle and both barrels of the shotgun roared to life, spraying cones of buckshot downrange at Zip and Fusillade. Before they could hit, however, Fusillade shoved Zip to the side and tried to shield her face with a foreleg. My eyes widened in shock as the buckshot overwhelmed Fusillade’s shields and chewed up her flesh, sending her to the ground with a pained scream and turning her blue coat red. The Prench mare was still breathing, but barely, and Carrion sneered as he broke the breech of the shotgun and quickly slid two more shells in without a second thought.

Zip wasn’t idle, and I heard her shout as she swooped down on Carrion from above, machine guns blazing. Carrion’s armor reacted on its own, manifesting another solid shield at his flanks and above his head, shattering the bullets before they even got close to him. He quickly brought his shotgun to bear and fired two cones up at Zip, trying to take out her wings, but she quickly spun to the left and kicked off of some pipes to abruptly change course. Two more empty shells clattered against the ground, and the breech of Carrion’s shotgun snapped shut again.

While that was happening, I managed to crawl onto my hooves and limp away while Carrion was still distracted. As soon as I heard him close the breech, though, and his hooves clop against the cement, I flung myself to the ground, despite how much the bullet in my side hurt. The pipes in front of my face exploded as buckshot perforated them, and I wasted no more time slinking behind cover and picking up my rifle. At least I’d put some distance between me and him; I really didn’t want to be next to the fucker when he had a shotgun and I could hardly move without collapsing in pain.

“Where are you going?” Carrion taunted me, and I heard him walking closer to my cover. “Quit playing hard to get. You’re starting to make me angry.”

“Like you were so much better when you were ‘nice’,” I said through clenched teeth. I quickly threw another mag in my rifle and held it against my chest. I needed a plan. I doubted my rifle could get around his shields if twelve machine guns couldn’t. So I needed something else.

Zip’s machine guns chattered overhead, and I heard another shotgun blast as Carrion returned fire. I didn’t know who was going to run out of ammo first; her or him. It’s not like Zip had a whole lot coming into this fight, and her machine guns seemed to be chattering half as fast now. She must’ve used up what she had left in her right guns, and who knew how much she had left in the other three. Carrion, on the other hoof, was practically bristling with shotgun shells, and he only used two at a time. It didn’t look like outgunning him was going to be an option.

My eyes wandered toward the pipes in front of me, which were hissing and throwing off some steam. I wondered…

I grabbed onto the pipes with my magic and heaved. Like I said earlier, I had pretty strong telekinesis from working in the forge all my life, but shearing metal in half was still really damn difficult. Gritting my teeth, I leveled my rifle at the pipes and fired several bursts into the metal. After punching a few more holes in it, I felt the steel begin to give way, and with a cry of exertion, I ripped them apart.

Hot steam flooded the room, nearly scalding my skin and making the hairs of my coat curl. Still, in seconds, a huge cloud of white vapor rolled over me and Carrion, blinding the both of us. I could hardly see a foot in front of me as the steam billowed into the room. But if I couldn’t see anything, then Carrion couldn’t see me. It was the perfect time to slink away and find someplace to hide and regroup.

“You cunt!” Carrion screamed in rage, and he blindly fired his shotgun twice more into the steam. I heard pellets ricochet off of the pipes and walls around me, but thankfully he didn’t hit me. “Come out here and fight with honor! Isn’t that what you pricks are all about?! Honor and justice?!” Over my shoulder, I could see the lights on his armor glowing through the steam; I was happy that my armor’s lights were a softer blue and weren’t as easy to see as his red ones. I quickly ducked into a gap between a pump unit and a support column when I saw the lights coming my way, and I held my breath and shrunk myself down as small as I could when he passed. Thankfully he didn’t notice me hiding in the darkness. Otherwise, that would’ve been the end of me.

Pipes clanged somewhere overhead, and I saw the lights on Carrion’s armor stop, accompanied by another blast of his shotgun into the air. I looked up to the source of the noise, and I saw orange wings glowing with laser blades on either side of some old catwalk supports. In a few seconds, Zip sliced through the supports holding the catwalk up, and with a groan of metal, it twisted and came tumbling down toward Carrion. To my amazement, however, the big earth pony hopped backwards, narrowly dodging the steel Zip sent at him, and he fired a shot from the remaining barrel up at her.

My blood ran cold when she cried out in pain, and I saw her tumble out of the sky, wings haphazardly flapping as she tried to gain some lift. Metal rang out as she crashed to the floor, gasping as she did so. Two more empty shells bounced off of the concrete, and I saw the lights on Carrion’s armor move to the right.

“I always loved going pheasant hunting,” Carrion purred. “Why do you think I use shotguns? Your shields can’t figure out how to deflect that many pellets.” I crawled out of the steam after him, heart pounding in my chest, and my eyes widened when I saw him stop and put a hoof on Zip’s back. Her orange wings were tattered from the buckshot, and she looked like she was still dazed from the fall. Slowly, Carrion put another two shells in his shotgun and closed the breech. “This won’t hurt a bit, little birdy.”

No. I wasn’t going to let that happen. Lowering my rifle, I fired two bursts at his flanks, but his shields materialized and deflected them. Still, it took his attention off of Zip for a second, and then I released the spell I’d been building on my horn. “Burn, you bastard!”

I didn’t have any intention of trying to get through Carrion’s shield; shooting at it was just to put it someplace out of the way. The fireball I released arced around the room, passing over Fusillade on the ground before slamming into Carrion’s blindside. The bastard cried out in pain as I scorched him, and he stumbled backwards, away from Zip. Zip didn’t waste any time igniting her wingblades and drawing her dagger, and with a yell, pounced on Carrion, fighting desperately to fight and slash her way through his armor.

But somehow, Carrion resisted her assault. She couldn’t find an angle to attack him with her wings or knife, despite having two extra limbs to attack with, and he managed to wrap her forelegs around her neck and lift her into the air. Shouting, he piledrived Zip into the ground, and then he turned around and started stomping on her chest. “You fucking cunts!” he screamed, absolutely furious. “You fucking bitches! Fucking die! All of you!”

Gritting my teeth, I stumbled over to Carrion and flung myself at him. Since I’d given Brass my dagger to break out the prisoners, I didn’t really have anything to kill Carrion in melee, but I could at least let Zip get free. While Carrion roared and tried to shake me off, I saw Zip roll away and hobble toward the dagger she’d dropped. Before she could pick it up, however, Carrion managed to throw me from his shoulders and bucked me in the chest before I hit the ground. Thankfully I was wearing armor, because I’m pretty sure that buck would’ve broken all of my ribs. Still, that blow sent me flying into Zip, and the two of us fell to the ground. I guess I figured out what happened to Fusillade when she went flying into Zip that first time as well. Zip made some sort of indignant-sounding grunt as I hit her and we fell over in a tangle of limbs. Hey, I’d be annoyed too if that was the second time today I’d been tackled with another pony projectile.

Carrion stalked over to us, pure fury in his face. “I should fill your cunts with lead,” he hissed at us, seething with anger. “It’s over! You fucks might have taken the dam, but we’ll be back! The Crimson won’t fucking die, and Reclaimer’s going to make sure of that! Now it’s my time! Your days are over!”

“N-No,” a heavily-accented voice coughed from behind him. He stopped before he could reach us and turned around to see Fusillade crawling up the side of a railing just to stand. “It was never your time,” she wheezed, blood dripping from her lips. “And I’m going to bury you so deep Auris will forget you in a year.”

Roaring, Carrion quickly loaded his shotgun and began to move, but Fusillade’s horn was faster. I didn’t even realize what she was doing until I heard a shriek and a crack above me. I looked up just in time to see her pull on a massive fissure in the concrete ceiling. With a last cry of shattering rebar and crumbling concrete, Fusillade brought the house down on Carrion.

Carrion might have been a fast pony. Carrion might have been a strong pony. He might even have been a smart pony, in his own way.

It turns out that several tons of concrete don’t give a single fuck about what kind of a pony you are. Or I guess I should say, were.

I shielded myself with my forelegs from the rocks landing around me as Carrion let loose one final enraged howl before the concrete entombed him on the floor. I watched the rubble pile wearily for a few seconds, expecting him to emerge from underneath the concrete any minute with a maniacal laugh. But the only red thing that I saw was a pool of blood slowly trickling out from underneath the rubble.

Carrion, the pony who killed Blackwash, who murdered Nova’s dad, who raped and slaughtered his way across the valley, was finally dead.

Fusillade gasped and sat down as she tried to recover from the spell she just used. “Au revoir, bon débarras, et allez vous baiser.” I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded appropriate. The aging mare’s weary voice made it seem all the more fitting.

It was finally over.

When Fusillade was finally seated against the railing and Zip looked over all of our wounds to make sure none were life-threatening (and Fusillade cursed her out in Prench for worrying about her despite the amount of blood she was losing), Zip moved to me again. She dug into a pouch in her armor and pulled out a Stabil-Ice pouch, snapped it in two, and applied it to the hole in my side. “We’ll get the bullet out later,” she said. “But we can stop you from bleeding out in the meanwhile.”

The creeping numbness of the Stabil-Ice was a welcome change from the burning fire in my side. “Thanks,” I said to her, lolling my head back and sighing in relief. “That feels so much better.”

She brushed my cheek with a hoof when she was finished, bringing my attention back to her. “You’re welcome. I’m just glad you’re alive.”

“Heh. Me too,” I said, smiling at her. Even if she was covered in a lot of Crimson blood, and even if her face was covered in cuts and welts from the beating Carrion threw down on her, she was still stars-damned beautiful. I closed my eyes and leaned in to kiss her, and she did the same. Our lips met, and I purred at the warm embrace. This was how it was supposed to be. The heroine slayed the monster and got the mare. I was so looking forward to what tonight was going to bring.

And then my life changed in an instant.

Something thundered above us. Zip lurched and nearly collapsed onto me, her eyes bulging out of their sockets. She coughed, and before our lips separated, I felt something warm and coppery coat my teeth and my tongue. Her legs collapsed from underneath her, and suddenly I was the one trying to support her.

“Zip?!” I screamed, completely in shock at what just happened. I dragged her down into cover with me, just to get her out of the line of fire of whatever that was. Blood was pouring from her muzzle and nose, and her eyes were wide with fear. Her wings hung limply at her sides, twitching occasionally, and in her back—stars, fucking stars—I saw a hole about a quarter-hoof across.

She trembled in my grasp. Her nostrils flared and her mouth parted like she was desperate for air, but her chest didn’t move, like she simply couldn’t draw a breath. I felt blood soaking my chest, but it wasn’t from her head; tiny holes punctured through her gut bled, slowly but surely. Her head lolled back, and I held it back up with my hoof. She could hardly move a muscle.

“Zip, no, you’re going to be okay!” I screeched at her, shaking her slightly. “You’re going to be fine! We’ll take you back to the doctor and… and…”

She didn’t say anything; I don’t think she even could’ve. All she did was raise a shaky, bloody hoof to her lips, then touch that hoof to my muzzle. Instead of fear in her eyes, I saw regret now. Regret and sadness. Regret and sadness and tears.

Then those eyes turned to glass.

My Zip was gone.

My vision snapped upward to a yellow pegasus standing on a bit of the collapsed ceiling, a monstrous looking rifle of some kind balanced in his forelegs. I recognized that half-faced bastard anywhere.

“Tragic.” Yeoman said, staring down at us almost expressionlessly. “I hoped that would’ve killed both of you. Still, a Sentinel commander isn’t too bad of a prize.”

“You fucker!” I screamed at him, holding Zip’s lifeless head close to my chest as her blood stained my coat and armor. “What the fuck did you do?! What the fuck did you do?!”

“I killed her,” he said, matter-of-factly. He slid the breach of his scary rifle closed. “And you’ll die too.”

I cradled my marefriend’s corpse, unable to do anything else other than cry and press my forehead against hers. They’d taken her from me. Reclaimer and his lackeys, Yeoman and Carrion. They’d taken so stars-damned much from me. So fucking much. Just when I thought I could find happiness, just when I thought I could find some peace about Blackwash, that half-faced fucker took the mare I loved. One second, she was here. Now, she was a cooling body in my hooves, a still lump of flesh and blood.

No more. No fucking more.

I gently set Zip’s head on the ground next to me and staggered to my hooves. Fusillade tried to do the same where she sat, but she was too exhausted after ripping apart the ceiling to do so. It was just me and Yeoman now. Me and the fucker who stole my chance at happiness.

I exploded in rage and galloped up the collapsed rubble toward him, firing wildly as I did so. The bullet in my side meant nothing now; I was a mare driven by fury alone. Just as Yeoman fired at me, I grabbed a piece of rubble with my magic and blocked the shot, making it blow up against the concrete and scatter flechettes everywhere.

Yeoman saw me coming, knew exactly what I was going to do. He collapsed the rifle in his grasp with a single button press and darted back from the breach in the ceiling, stopping only long enough to buck rubble down at me before spreading his wings and flying down the hallway. I dodged the rubble sent in my direction before emerging after him, firing the whole time. My rifle squawked that it was empty, and I threw the next mag in it. I was going to fucking kill him. I was going to fucking flay that fucker alive. I’d break his fucking wings and shove knives down the stumps. I’d throw the other half of his face in a forge and sear it off. I’d rip his legs off and impale him on them. There was nothing I could possibly do to him that could even come close to avenging Zip.

I galloped after him in the hallways, trying desperately to keep pace with his flight. Sheer fury drove me onwards, kept me right behind him. Yet for all I tried, I couldn’t manage to hit him. He was always just out of reach, always just a wingbeat ahead.

He raced up a set of steps, and I quickly followed him. I heard gunfire for the briefest of moments as he spun in place upon emerging on top of the dam, cutting down the Blackwash volunteers who were supposed to be guarding this stairway in a single spray. I didn’t stop to look at the bodies to see if I recognized any, though; my eyes were set solely on Yeoman.

Rain whipped across the dam and nearly blinded me as I chased him. He fluttered over to some old scaffolding and construction on the valley side of the dam instead of flying straight up and away from me, but I was too enraged to notice why. My rifle let me know it was empty again, and when I reached for a new mag, I found I was all out. That didn’t stop me. I still had my fucking pyromancies. And now that I was furious, I felt like I could light the whole world on fire.

I flung my rifle aside and dashed onto the scaffolding, slipping once on the wet ground. I saw Yeoman flutter up to the highest level, so I rapidly dashed up the scaffolding after him. Every time I caught a glimpse of him, I hurled a fireball in his direction. I managed to singe his feathers a few times, but I could never score a direct fucking hit. I didn’t even notice the darkness creeping into the edges of my vision. I just hurled fireball after fireball at him, trying to burn him out of the sky.

My vision suddenly went black, and I stumbled as my hooves became leaden weights. Panting, I tried to stand up, and I forced my vision to come back to me, inch by inch. But it was too late. I heard hooves land behind me, and before I could react, something looped around my throat and dragged me backwards. When I could finally see again, I saw a coil of rope unwinding in front of me as Yeoman dragged me backwards, my hooves clawing at the makeshift noose around my neck.

Then he found something to loop the rope on. I choked and gasped as the rope suddenly dragged me upwards. My panicked flailing spun me around in midair, and I saw Yeoman looping the rope over an extended pole hanging out over the edge of the dam. When my hind legs lost contact with the ground, the pegasus tied the rope and knotted it to a plank in the scaffolding, stringing me up high.

The wind batted me back and forth, and the rain hitting me in the face coupled with the noose around my neck made me feel like I was drowning, not suffocating. I kicked my hooves and clawed at the rope strangling me. I couldn’t fucking breathe at all, and my heart was racing. How the fuck was I going to get out of this?! How fucking far of a fall was it to the bottom of the dam if the rope snapped? Despite my mind racing a million miles a minute, I couldn’t form any escape plan. I was terrified and starting to black out from the lack of oxygen.

Wingbeats sounded in front of me as Yeoman hovered in front of my face. “I suppose I should thank you on behalf of Reclaimer for eliminating Carrion for us,” he said, half of his face grinning, and water pouring off of his mane. “Now that we have the code segment from the dam, we don’t have a need for him and his gang of raiders. You’ve saved the Ivory City a lot of work in waking the Azimuth.” He thought for a moment, then flew closer to me and whispered in my ear. “Oh, and about your marefriend,” he said. “She died in pain. A lot of it. That was a flechette round for killing Sentinels just like her. I popped her lungs like balloons and turned her heart into a pincushion. She couldn’t do anything but wait until the internal bleeding killed her while she remained oh-so-painfully conscious.” His hoof patted my cheek. “Compared with that, I think you should thank me that I only hanged you.”

I tried to kick at him, do something, anything, but he merely fluttered back a few feet. “My work here is done. I hope your friends enjoy this victory while it lasts, and that they give you a nice funeral. You certainly deserve it.”

Flaring his wings, Yeoman then dove out of sight, away from the dam. I caught a glimpse of yellow feathers lower in the valley, tracing their way over the river and away from the dam before he disappeared into the haze of the rainy morning. But I couldn’t focus on that for very long. I could hardly see anything, and my chest desperately heaved for breath, breath which the rope around my neck wouldn’t let me have.

Lightning crackled around me. Thunder boomed. My limbs became numb and weak, and they fell away from my neck. My horn sparked a few times, but I couldn’t summon any spells. Not like I knew any spells that could help me here. As my vision faded to black, I finally gave up. It was over. I’d lost. At least I’d saved Nova and Gauge. I’d saved them and so many others. That had to count for something.

And now, I could be with Zip. I could be with her forever.

I surrendered to the void right as somepony distant shouted my name.

Chapter 31: The Survivors

I didn’t want to wake up.

Reality and horrible, horrible life came crashing through the peaceful void I’d given myself to. Dim lights seemed as harsh as the sun when I opened my eyes, and when I tried to move, my muscles screamed in agony. My head swam with the slightest movement, and I felt like I was trying to breathe through a collapsed windpipe. Which, considering that I just survived being hanged, wasn’t too surprising.

As soon as I remembered that, everything else came storming back to me. The assault on the dam. Freeing the slaves. Killing Carrion. Losing… losing Zip. How she died in my hooves. How I tried to avenge her by killing Yeoman. How he almost killed me instead. How he should have killed me instead.

If there had been a gun or a knife or something next to me, I might have killed myself then. The agony that ripped my heart open was too fresh, too painful. Yeoman had stolen Zip from me, and I wanted nothing more than to follow her into the afterlife. Fuck, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have given just to have her by my side right now, smiling, happy that this was all over. If only I could’ve been the one to take the bullet for her instead of the other way around. She was one of the Sentinels’ leaders. She was an important and happy and charismatic pony. I was just a foul-mouthed machinist. I regularly got herself in over my head. I got ponies around me killed. It should have been me, not her.

Groaning, I tried to sit up, and I felt fresh pain in my left side. Wincing, I placed my hoof over the wound, but instead of a hole and shredded flesh, I felt clean bandages firmly wrapped against my side. Apparently somepony had taken care of me after they cut me loose. I poked around my neck, just under my jaw, and winced at each touch. I probably had big bruises and welts there. It would explain why it felt difficult to breathe.

I looked around myself. I was sitting in a cot in some open building with a lot of floor space. Lots of other ponies and griffons lied on cots of their own, some of them whimpering, some of them out cold, and others just chatting with their neighbors. A few figures wandered between the cots, stopping occasionally to dress wounds or offer a few consoling words with a wounded pony. I recognized Hoana and her medical bags near the middle of the room; she seemed to be focusing on the members of her flock, and she whistled a cheerful and soothing melody as she worked.

The mere idea of happiness after all this made me sick to my stomach.

My cot creaked as I slid toward the edge, and I heard movement by the near wall. Craning my neck, I saw Nova snort once and begin to stir from a nap. Moaning, she rubbed at her bloodshot eyes and blinked away the last shreds of her rest before her bleary teal orbs focused on me. “You’re up?” she asked, still half-asleep. Then, blinking, her usual bright smile appeared on her muzzle. “Y-You’re up! Oh my goodness. Thank the stars!” She scrambled off of the chair she’d been resting in and tripped all the way to my side on her weak legs. Practically throwing her forelegs and wings around me, she laughed in pure joy and nuzzled my neck. “We thought we’d lost you! Gauge saw you fighting that other pegasus from the tower, and he ran to get help as fast as he could. By the time he got to you, you were hanging from a rope, and you weren’t moving…”

She shuddered and pressed her head against my cheek. “You lost a lot of blood from that bullet in your side, but they were able to get it out and patch you up. Thankfully you’d only just blacked out when we got to you. If Gauge was a minute later, well…”

Her words trailed off, and she slowly leaned back to look at me. “Ember? Are you alr—w-what’s wrong?”

Everything. Everything was wrong. But how could I tell her that? She couldn’t understand. She didn’t know what I was fucking going through. Even sitting here with her, feeling feathers around my shoulders and her nuzzling my cheek, reminded me of what I lost. I was never going to feel Zip’s wings around me. I was never going to hold her close again and stroke her orange cheeks. I was never going to hear her voice or blush at her raunchy remarks. She was gone. Gone, and all I had left of her were memories. Memories, and nothing more.

I gently but firmly pushed Nova away and stood up. The poor mare blinked in confusion when I stormed past her, and I heard her hooves clopping on the floor after me. “Ember? Ember! Where are you… Y-You’re not supposed to be out of the infirmary yet!” I heard her wings flutter, but after a grunt and a gasp, she just galloped in front of me and blocked the doorway. “Ember, what happened?” Nova asked me, eyes glistening. “Tell me! Please! P-Please, I want to help!”

I only stopped for a second before I shouldered her out of the way. “Leave me alone,” I growled as I stormed past her. If I was an earth pony, I’m pretty sure my hooves would’ve been cracking the concrete underneath them. Still, I left the white mare standing in the doorway, stunned, as I walked away from her.

The storm had let up since I blacked out. The ground was wet and the air was moist like it’d just finished raining, but the wind had died down to almost nothing. Around me, I saw a few ponies moving with a strange mix of excitement and sadness. Excited that we’d defied the odds and won. Excited that their friends and family were free. Excited that Carrion was dead. But sad because some many ponies died to do it. So many ponies they knew—that I knew too—who’d died. In the middle of the dam, the bodies had been neatly laid in rows and covered in tarps. There had to be more than a hundred of them. Add to that the wounded in the makeshift infirmary I just escaped, and the mission had to have a fifty percent casualty rate.

Two hundred dead or wounded, but only one I cared about.

I heard Nova’s hooves following me, and I tried to fight down the urge to scream at her and chase her away. Maybe if I just ignored her she’d get the hint and fuck off. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem like it was going to happen anytime soon, because coming from the other direction was Gauge with a few trays of food balanced on his back. The zebra and his drone momentarily slowed in their tracks when they saw me, but he quickly broke into a trot and made his way to my side. “I knew you’d be up before too long,” he said, smiling at me. “A little strangulation wasn’t going to keep you down, eh?” He lightly punched my shoulder, trying to get me to play along, but I wasn’t having any of it. Not now.

My horn flared to life and I forcefully shoved him away from me. I heard SCaR squawk some sort of warning tone, but if the drone had gotten near me, I probably would have flung it away too. Gritting my teeth, I marched onward, leaving Gauge and Nova to follow at a worried distance.

“What happened?” I heard Gauge whisper behind me.

“I don’t know,” Nova said. “She just woke up and she was like this.”

I took a deep breath and tried to stop grinding my teeth against each other.

“Did something happen down there? Maybe—oh no.”

“Oh no? ‘Oh no’ what?”

Breathe, Ember. I sped up my plodding walk into a slow canter.

“You haven’t seen Zip, have you?”

“Zip? Oh, she was the orange pegasus, right?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t in the infirmary?”

“Not that I could tell.” I heard Nova make a sudden gasp of realization. “You don’t think—?”

I couldn’t take it anymore. Stomping my hoof into the ground, I spun around and fixed the two of them with a death stare. “They fucking killed her, alright?!” I screamed at them, my voice cracking into ragged tatters. “She died! She fucking died in my fucking forelegs! They took her from me, and now I’ll never see her again! Never! Don’t you fucking understand?!” Baring my teeth just to try to fight back the tears welling up in my eyes, I leered into their faces and made them stumble back a step or two. “So leave me be! Fucking leave me alone!”

Gauge and Nova blinked, stunned at my outburst. Good. Maybe they’d leave me alone now. But instead, Gauge took a step closer and reached for me. “Ember… I’m so sorry… I didn’t know…”

I swatted his hoof away and jabbed my own into his chest. “It could’ve been you, Gauge!” I screamed at him. “If we hadn’t come here, Zip would still be alive! But you’re the one who gets to live another day with your marefriend! Not me! Not fucking me!” The rage and misery boiling over inside of me finally broke the whole thing altogether. “So you two go fucking hold each other close and thank the stars and all that other bullshit that you’re still alive and together! Good for fucking you! Don’t fucking mind me! My marefriend’s dead! She’s fucking dead, not yours!”

Stunned. Speechless. I could see the hurt in both of their faces, but I didn’t care. I knew what I said was wrong. I knew what I said was uncalled for. But I didn’t fucking care. The only thing I cared about in this fucking shithole of a planet was Zip, and she was gone. She was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it. Absolutely nothing.

I stormed away from the two of them. Finally, they didn’t follow me.

I walked in a daze.

I would’ve gone over and looked at the bodies for Zip’s, but Gauge and Nova were still there, and after what I said to them, I felt sick. Like, even more sick than I did when I woke up and realized I was still alive. Plus, they were all under tarps, and I didn’t want to go peeking at all the ponies who’d died. It’d likely make me even more depressed than I already was.

So I walked on, without aim or reason.

I found myself backtracking our advance through the dam. Most of the Crimson bodies had been left where they fell; we were more concerned with recovering our own dead than dealing with theirs for now. Bodies lied in bloody messes and pieces of skulls or limbs dotted everywhere. The flesh strippers had already set to work, their buzz saw-like teeth making horrible noises as they peeled meat off of bones. That was probably the real reason we were collecting our dead first. Our fallen deserved more than to be left out for the birds. The Crimson… well, I found it hard to say anything nice about them. Especially given the circumstances.

A small crew of Sentinels stood around the burnt-out husk of the tank in the third sector, taking a closer look at its remains. One small body lied next to the tank under the tarp; I guess they’d managed to pull somepony else out of the wreckage, or at least, pieces of them. I saw a pegasus grab a shovel and a bucket, flutter up to the remains of the turret ring, and hop inside, followed the sounds of the shovel scraping something burnt off of metal. I shuddered and quickly cantered past them. I didn’t want to think about that anymore.

I saw the ringbird in the sector beyond. It looked like the Sentinels had dragged it back from the edge of the dam and set it firmly on solid ground just to make sure nothing happened to it. At least this one looked like it could be fixed, unlike the tank. The only thing broken on it was the rotor ring. Sure, that’d be a bitch and a half to replace, but it was possible. It’d just take a lot of time and effort.

But what I was more interested in was that there wasn’t anypony around. Everypony was off taking care of the interior of the dam or whatever they’d been doing since I blacked out. I had this entire section of the wall to myself.

I abruptly turned to my left and walked to the very edge of the dam. I could see the valley spread out below me, with a lake at the bottom of the dam that turned into the river winding its way through the mountains. Somewhere in the distance, I could make out a broad, flat-topped mountain—Sigur’s quarry. Beyond that, the peaks and rifts of the mountains became too chaotic to pick out anything else, eventually blending into one big orange and pink mess. Somewhere down there were towns and settlements that didn’t know they were free. Somewhere down there were local bands of Crimson that didn’t know they’d lost. It was going to take some time, but the Sentinels would eventually bring peace to the valley, and things would go back to how they were before the Crimson arrived. The future was looking bright.

For them.

I winced as I climbed onto the rampart of the wall and sat down, hind legs dangling over the side. A thousand foot drop was all that stood between me and the lake down below. A little bit of wind blew at my back, like a gentle hoof softly urging me forward. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. It was so tempting. To just lean forward, forelegs spread, step off of the wall…

My ass slipped a bit and I leaned back by reflex, hooves grabbing onto the ramparts, heart thundering in my chest. My mouth went dry, and I simply laid there unable to bring myself to move. Only when I calmed down a bit and my heart stopped pounding did I sit up and exhale sharply.

“What am I doing here?” I murmured to myself, staring down at my hooves. “Why her? Why not me?”

It was a question I couldn’t answer. It was just dumb bad luck. That was the only reason why Zip died instead of me. If only I’d paid more attention. If only I’d made her look at Fusillade instead. So many things I could’ve done that could’ve saved her life. But I didn’t know to do any of them.

“It should have been me,” I said again, as if trying to explain to the universe that it made a mistake and it should return Zip’s life for mine.

Talons scraped behind me, and I hunched over more. “Go away,” I said, hanging my head between my shoulders. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Yeah.” I heard Sig’s voice behind me, and I slid my teeth against each other. “But you need to.”

“I don’t need to do fucking anything,” I remarked, bitterly. “I shouldn’t even be alive right now.”

Sig’s talons scraped at the rampart wall as he climbed on top of it and sat down next to me. I slid a few inches away and pointedly stared dead ahead, watching the water flow down the river. At least he didn’t put his wing around my shoulders. I might have actually jumped.

Sig was quiet for a few seconds, and I braced myself for the ‘I’m sorry, it’s gonna be alright’ bullshit. But instead of that, he just shook his head. “Do you think you’re the only one who hurts?”

That caught me so off guard that I didn’t know how to answer that. “Uh… no?”

Ice blue hawk eyes stared at me. “I lost three siblings today and a mare I was proud to have called my best friend. Tell me that your pain is worse than mine.”

Gritting my teeth in frustration, I beat my hooves against the rampart. “What the fuck do you want from me, Sig?” I asked him. “To feel sorry for you? Fuck, I’m sorry! There! Happy?”

But the griffon just shook his head. “I don’t want anything from you, Ember. All I want is for you to stop kicking yourself.” Sighing, he looked away and shook his head. “People die. They die all the time, and we usually don’t have a say in the matter unless we’re the one pulling the trigger. Everyone knew today that there was a good chance we weren’t coming back from this. Even Zip. Even you. And yes, it’s okay to grieve. It’d be wrong not to.” Then he pivoted back to me. “But cursing out your friends and jumping off the dam isn’t the way to do it.”

My ears flattened against my head and I shrunk down a bit. “How… h-how much did you hear?”

“Enough,” he said. “I stopped to try to comfort them when you stormed away. Your friend, Nova, she was in tears. Gauge wasn’t much better.”

I felt like I’d been bucked in the stomach. Oh, stars, how the fuck could I say those things to them? I basically told Gauge that my marefriend would still be alive if we didn’t come for his. I told Nova that my marefriend would be alive if we didn’t come to save her. What kind of a friend says things like that?

“You should just throw me off the dam,” I said to Sig. “It’d put me out of a lot of other ponies’ misery.”

Sig shook his head. “I flew here when I was done talking to them to make sure that you didn’t throw yourself off of the dam. I’m not about to undo all my hard work,” he added, smirking slightly.

“So you would’ve caught me?”

“Absolutely.”

I took a deep breath. We sat in silence for several minutes, just a griffon and a broken mare sitting on the wall together. Deep down inside, I was thankful for Sig’s presence. Just talking to him and sitting with him was oddly calming. It helped push back the haze of rage and regret clouding my thoughts and preventing me from thinking straight.

“Yeoman was the one who shot her,” I said, staring unblinkingly ahead. “He was also the one who hung me when I chased him.” Swallowing hard, I turned to Sig to see him watching me carefully. “He… h-he said that she died in a lot of pain. Is it… is it true?” When I saw Sig hesitating, I slid a little closer to him. “I want to know the truth, Sig. Let me know what the fucker did to her so I can pay him back in kind.”

Sighing, Sig looked down at his talons. “I… won’t know unless we autopsy her body,” Sig said. “But there were pieces of lung in her mouth. If she didn’t die immediately from the impact…” he looked to me for confirmation, and I sadly shook my head. “Then yes, Ember. He’s right. She did die in pain.”

“I see,” I said, quietly. “That’s… t-that’s what I was afraid of.” I felt heat beginning to prick at the corners of my eyes, so I shut them and took a deep breath. “That’s all I need to know.”

Sig hesitated for a moment, but he finally decided to wrap his wing around my shoulders and pull me closer to his side. “I know you’re hurting, Ember,” he said. “I am too. But we both know what she’d want. She wouldn’t want you killing yourself. She wouldn’t want you suffering because she’s gone. She’d want you to live and keep fighting for what’s right.” He added an arm to the hug, and he began to stroke my head between the ears with his other hand. “So grieve now. Let it out. Let all of it out. And then—when you’re ready—then we can think about killing the fucker who killed her.”

The embrace and Sig’s words chipped away at my barrier until it was no more. He was right. Zip wouldn’t want me jumping off the dam or doing anything stupid like that. She wouldn’t want me hurting myself over her death. She’d want me out there, making the world a better place, making it more like her a little bit at a time. And I couldn’t do that if I was just going to sit here and cry.

But Sig was also right about another thing. Now was the time to grieve. And now, finally, after all I’d been through, I lowered my guard. Tears streamed from my eyes, and I began to hiccup as I leaned into his chest feathers. He just patted me on the back as I pawed at his coat, shaking and heaving, until finally the sobs came. I cried, I bawled, I screamed in anguish as I clung to the griffon for dear life, bathing in my misery one tear at a time.

In the valley, a mare’s cries of desolation and despair echoed off of the mountains, drowning out the cries of shrikes and flesh strippers alike.

Chapter 32: The Road that Lies Ahead

I sat with my back against the wall, a cigarette between my lips and saddlebags lying on the ground. Every draw on the cancer stick was like a godsend as I watched the ponies around me run to and fro. After I spent what felt like hours just wailing against Sigur, my tears had finally dried up. I had no doubt there’d be more to come, but for the moment, I was too tired to cry anymore. And in the end, he was right. Crying was exactly what I needed there. Not cursing out my friends and letting my anguish get the best of me.

When I’d finally run out of tears, Sig took his leave, saying that there were things he had to attend to. With both Rampart and Zip dead, Fusillade incapacitated and delirious, and Thunder Dash back at the Bastion, he’d taken control of the situation as one of the few remaining veterans and was busy organizing the occupation of the dam. It also helped that all the griffons knew and respected him, and he could count on his siblings to do whatever he asked without question. He seemed to have a natural talent for it, at least. Maybe they’d give him a promotion when this was all done with. They certainly needed more officers after today.

I shut my eyes momentarily and took a deep breath. No, no more tears. I’d cried enough today.

I finished off the last of the cigarette before flicking it away from me and blowing a cloud of smoke through my nose. Digging through my bags, I pulled out a folded picture I’d almost forgotten about in the madness of the past few weeks. I simply stared at it, at me, Mom, and my dad, taken so many winters ago. When things were normal. When ponies were happy. The bright smile on Mom’s exhausted face after bringing me into this world reminded me that there was still hope for the planet. Even if so many of us spent our lives killing each other, there were many more who simply lived in peace, trying to scratch out a living with their families. How many families did I help save by bringing down the Crimson? I couldn’t say. But if it meant fewer daughters burying their mothers, then it was worth it.

And that’s why Zip fought. For something bigger than herself. Unlike me, who only fought because I needed other ponies to free my friends. Even if I’d known about the Crimson before they attacked Blackwash, I knew for a fact that I wouldn’t have raised a hoof to stop them. If it didn’t concern me, why should I become involved?

But Zip had shown me a better way, even if I didn’t realize it until that moment. She was willing to fight and die for the ponies of Auris, regardless of whether or not they knew it. She was willing to lay down her life to do the right thing. She was a better pony than me. But now I had an example, an inspiration to follow. And damn it, I’d make her proud.

I wiped away a few tears forming at the corners of my eyes and put the picture back in my bags. I knew what I had to do. I just hoped that Sig would understand.

But first… well, I owed two friends an apology.

I found Nova and Gauge sitting out in the open near the central tower. The two of them were side by side, coats brushing together, with a big plate of food in front of them. Gauge merely watched Nova bury her muzzle in the food, stroking her neck and massaging her between the wings while she made up for a few weeks of missed meals. Nova was too preoccupied with her meal to notice me approach, but Gauge’s eyes lifted as soon as I stepped into view.

“Ember,” he said. His voice was measured but strained. I honestly couldn’t blame him.

I didn’t say anything until I sat down in front of the two of them. Gauge’s expression was neutral, but Nova’s looked hurt. SCaR hovered above the two of them, its cameras fixed on me and whirring slightly. Sighing, I sniffled and hung my head so low that my nose touched the ground. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I was stupid and I… I-I’m sorry.”

I looked up at the two of them to see them struggling to respond. Sniffling some more, I shuddered and looked right at them, pleading. “I-I was hurting, okay?” I said, trying to will them to accept my apology. “I wasn’t thinking right. I could only think about… about her.” I shook my head and lost the strength to maintain eye contact. “You two are my best friends. I shouldn’t have said any of what I said. I just… I was just miserable. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t stop to think that maybe you just wanted to help me.” Tears began to fall, and I hung my head once more. “I’m sorry,” I whispered again. “I’m so, so sorry.”

They moved at the edges of my vision, but I couldn’t bring myself to look up. I nearly jumped when I felt hooves wrap around my shoulders—from both sides. I looked up to see Nova nuzzling my shoulder and Gauge giving me his weight to lean against. “We’re sorry too, Em,” Nova said, resting her head against my neck. “We just… well, I didn’t know at first. I didn’t understand what was wrong.”

“We’re here for you,” Gauge added, rubbing his hoof in circular motions across my back. “I told you back at the Bastion, if you ever need to talk, I’ll always listen.”

“We’re your friends,” Nova said. “We’ll always have your back, okay?”

I rubbed at my runny nose and nodded. “T-Thanks, guys,” I said, managing a tiny, relieved smile. “I’m just… I-I’m just going through a lot.”

“Take your time,” Nova insisted. “Nopony expects you to be over it in a day.” She closed her eyes and adjusted her frayed wings to blanket me tighter. “For what it’s worth, she seemed like a wonderful mare. I could tell that she made you very happy. I would’ve loved to have gotten the chance to know her better. She would’ve fit right in with us misfits.”

“Yeah,” I said, starting to choke up a bit. “She would’ve…” I squeezed my eyes shut and took a few deep breaths. No more crying. Not now.

Gauge seemed to realize that I didn’t want to talk about it anymore and helpfully changed the subject. “You should have seen the prisoner roundup earlier,” he said, sliding away a bit to bring the plate of food closer to the three of us. “I saw it when I went to find food. The Sentinels marched all the Crimson into the cages used to hold the slaves downstairs. Gave them a little taste of their own medicine.”

“Good. Fuck’em. It’s about time they experienced a little misery of their own.” I picked a little of the food off the plate and stuffed it in my face. I didn’t realize that I was hungry. Even mushy Sentinel cardboard soup tasted amazing. “Have you guys seen Brass? I found him downstairs and broke him out. He come up here yet?”

Gauge shook his head. “No, but I imagine he’s down there somewhere. Probably making sure everything’s in order and the rest of us from Blackwash are okay.”

“He’s in charge now,” Nova said, her wings drooping a bit at her sides. “Now that Dad’s gone, it’s up to him as militia captain.”

I patted her on the back, trying to return the favor and comfort her a bit. “Brass knows what he’s doing,” I said. “Blackwash will be safe with him in charge.”

“At least, I hope so.”

I looked over my shoulder at Brass’ voice and saw him limping over to us. We slid around a little bit to make room for him around the food plate and he sat down, groaning like an old stallion as he did so. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said once he got his legs comfortably underneath him.

“Oh, no, not at all!” Nova said, cheerfully waving a hoof and encouraging him to take some of the food. “We were just talking about you. Ember said she broke you out?”

Brass helped himself to a few bites of some vegetables and meats from the Crimson’s food lockers and nodded. “She was one of the first down to the cages and she started cutting open locks. She gave me her knife to finish for her when she went after Carrion. Speaking of which…” He reached into a bag on his back and pulled out my missing laser dagger, which I readily took and returned to my own bags. “You don’t know how happy I was to see her.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” Nova said, smiling at him. “I thought I was dreaming at first.”

“I’m still not sure that I’m not,” Brass said. He closed his eyes and shuddered. “You two don’t understand what it was like to be trapped here,” he said to me and Gauge. “And you and the other techies, Nova, well, they took it easy on you guys. They didn’t shoot rubber bullets at you when they were bored, or drag one of us out to beat when they wanted a good ‘fight’. They’d stick tinder in our cages and light it on fire just to watch us freak out and scorch our hooves. And don’t get me started on the mares…”

I placed my hoof on Brass’. “They’re dead now, Brass,” I said, trying to comfort him. “It’ll never happen again.”

The earth pony nodded once. “Yeah, so it seems. It’s going to take those of us who’ve been trapped here some time to get over it. You don’t forget those things…”

We heard a troop of Sentinels marching behind us, and we all turned to watch a group of four soldiers lead something like twenty or thirty mares to another building on the complex. I felt my skin crawl as I watched them walk in a perfect line, eyes wide open, enormous forced smiles on their muzzles. I shuddered and turned to Brass. “What did they do to them?”

Brass slowly shook his head. “Those were the mares marked with hearts,” he said. “No stallion’s going to buy a mare who fights back or might want to try and seek revenge. So they did something to their minds. They can only think in terms of pleasing their masters, whoever they may be.” Sighing, he added, “I know a few proud mares that they turned into toys. Gradient, Snap Freeze, Nola…”

I recognized those names, knew the faces they were attached to. “Signal Flare,” I added, remembering when I ran into her. Brass just solemnly nodded. “I hope they can fix them.”

“I hope so, too. Watching them happily march off each night, then come back the following morning, beaten, bruised, and rutted til they bled… It was horrifying. I hope that your Sentinel friends can fix that. They deserve better.” Of course, nopony said anything about what might happen to them if they couldn’t be fixed. What do you do then with a bunch of mares who can only think in terms of sex and obedience if you’re just trying to help them get better?

We sat in silence and just focused on enjoying the food together. It was nice to just have a sort of family meal in the aftermath of all this pain and misery. The nightmare that began weeks ago was finally over, and now, we could look toward the future.

Which was something I was interested in. “So, fearless leader,” I said, managing a little bit of a sly smile, “what’s the future of Blackwash?”

I must’ve asked the question everypony wanted to know, because both Gauge and Nova stopped snuggling long enough to look up at Brass. “Well… that’s tricky,” Brass said, his head leaning first one way, then the other as he thought. “We could always try going back to Blackwash and rebuilding.”

I shook my head. “It’s dead, Brass,” I said. “I managed to escape the Crimson after they branded me. I was the last pony alive there. There’s nothing left.”

Brass bit his lip for a few seconds. “But we can rebuild with the scrap, can’t we?”

“Blackwash is dead,” I insisted, looking him squarely in the eyes. “The Crimson stole anything of value, burned the crops, destroyed the outpost, what have you. I had to burn the bodies of all of our elders and everypony else who died in the attack.” I shivered at that particular memory. “You can try to go back there, scrape out a pathetic existence, and pretend that this shit never happened. But I can’t ever go back. Not after this.”

“I don’t think I could, either,” Nova added. Gauge silently agreed.

“Alright, I think I understand,” Brass said, conceding defeat on that matter. “But if not our mountain, then where?”

“The Sentinels are always looking to take people in at their home base,” I said. “And after today, they could use the numbers.”

“You could stay here,” Nova said, surprising all of us. When we turned to her, she shrugged her wings a little bit. “I mean, it’s not a bad idea, right? If Ember’s right, then our saviors aren't really going to have the ponies they need to hold the dam, their home base, and that outpost fort in the valley they brought us to the first time. We could stay here and watch it for them.”

Brass tapped his chin. “That’s an idea…”

“Yeah. Great idea, Nova,” I said, and she smiled at me. “The dam has pretty strong defenses. We may have fucked up a bunch of them, but they can be fixed, right? Plus, it’s more than big enough to hold everypony, with lots of room to grow.”

“And the turbines,” Gauge said, rubbing his hooves together. “I’d love to go diving down there and getting them working again. We could have all the power we’d ever need. We can even bring power to the rest of the valley!”

“It does have a fair amount of pre-Silence tech, too,” Nova added. “The military ran this place before everything fell apart. It also has some sort of communications network, given that it got the signal we accidentally broadcasted at Blackwash.”

Brass bobbed his head a few times. “Alright, I suppose you make a fair point. I’ll have to bring it up with some of the others, see what they think about it. Some might not like the idea of living where we were imprisoned, though. That could be tricky to work around.”

“Regardless of that, it’s the best idea,” I said. “Hopefully they’ll realize that.”

I heard wingbeats behind me along with scraping talons. “Hey, Ember,” Sig said, strutting a bit closer to our group. “Fusillade’s feeling good enough to have a debriefing. I figured you’d want to join in.”

“That I do,” I said, standing up. I looked over my three friends and nodded to them. “Catch you guys in a bit. And… well, thanks. I… I really needed it.”

Nova stood up and gave me a bony hug. “Anytime, Em,” she said. “I’m always here if you need somepony to talk to.”

“Thanks, Nov,” I said, patting her on the back. “You just take it easy and eat up, get your strength back.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just because I’m a bit thin doesn’t mean I can’t get full. This is more food than I’ve eaten this entire week.”

‘A bit thin’ was an understatement. I don’t think the mare weighed more than fifty pounds. Pegasi were already pretty light even before you starved them.

But at least she was eating, and she had her coltfriend to look out for her, so I let her be and stepped away. After waving goodbye to Gauge and Brass, I turned back to Sig. “So, Fusillade’s feeling better? Well, I guess I’d better humor the stubborn bitch with my presence.”

Somehow, Fusillade had turned her quarters of the infirmary into her own private headquarters. Curtains had been drawn out of… somewhere to block off the back corner. I followed Sig as he brushed them aside and marched in to stand at the foot of her cot, maneuvering past two other ponies, Glass and Runabout. We nodded to each other, and Glass cleared his throat.

Sig and I both saluted when Fusillade looked up at us. “Ma’am,” Sig said. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”

Fusillade winced and shook her head. “I am not feeling better at all. I still feel like merde.” Groaning, she sat up on her cot and turned to face us. “But we cannot rest for a moment, can we? There are too many things to be done, and not enough time to do them.”

I winced and unconsciously took a step back when Fusillade looked at us. Most of the blood on her coat had been cleaned up, and bandages covered her neck and chest. I could still see glistening specks of lead sitting in the skin of her face from where Carrion had shot her, and her left eye was… well, disturbing would be one way to put it. It was red with blood and looked like shattered glass. That was going to have to be removed.

She turned her eyes (eye and a half?) to me and nodded. “I am glad that you are up and about, though. After Yeoman killed Acting-Commander Zip, I was worried he was going to kill you too.” Her good eye narrowed on the bruises around my neck, and I fidgeted slightly under the look. “Looks like he almost did.”

I sighed and shook my head. “That was my fault, ma’am. I shouldn’t have… have run off after him like that.”

Fusillade slowly nodded. “Yes. You should not have.” Then her magic tilted my chin up a bit so I looked right at her. “But I understand your pain. Though I frown on relationships between officers and soldiers, it was clear even to me that the two of you cared deeply for each other.” Her voice took on a wistful tone as she added, “When you find love only to have it taken from you… there is no greater pain than that.”

Swallowing hard, I stepped forward a bit. “Is that… is that what Carrion was talking about?” I asked her. I quickly held up a hoof. “I-I mean, I don’t mean to pry, ma’am, but—”

She nodded and looked away. “Yes. When I was a younger mare like yourself, I used to believe that the world was safe. Auris is a dangerous planet, yes, but if you know how to live on it, then it is not so bad. If you live in a settlement with family and friends, then life is normal and boring. It is amusing to me to think back on it now, but I would give nearly anything to return to the boring and normal life I once held.”

She stopped for a few moments to collect her thoughts and sort her memories. “I lived in the settlement of New Oatleans. We were descended from Prench colonists that arrived before the Silence. We lived just south of the valley, past the mountains, barely more than twenty miles away from here. Apart from the traders that ran between the Valley and the inland settlements, we had almost no contact with the outside world. Much like your Blackwash, from what I have gathered.” I nodded, and she continued. “We were the first settlement Carrion ever conquered. Before he had the ringbirds. Before the Crimson were strong. They were barely more than a band of fools with rifles. But they outnumbered us, and they attacked us in the middle of the night. We did not stand a chance.”

Swallowing, her voice dropped to a dark murmur. “We fell without too much resistance, and when it was over, we were divided like spoils. My husband was killed. My son, too. He was only three winters old. As for myself…” she shifted slightly and pointed to a faded heart branded onto her left flank. I almost did a double-take; how had I never noticed that before? But then I realized that I’d never seen Fusillade without her armor and jumpsuit on.

“You can surmise the remainder from that and what he said to me,” Fusillade finished. “I have been fighting him ever since I managed to escape from the dam and join the Sentinels. Finally crushing him was… therapeutic.”

“Yikes… well, I’m just glad that he’s dead too, ma’am.” Fusillade dipped her head slightly, and I rubbed at the bandage on my left side. “So, uh… what’s the meeting for?”

Fusillade grunted and leaned forward, resting her hooves on her thighs, and wincing as she did so. “A few things. I am not going to say anything pointless about the mission. We succeeded, and that is all that matters. However, we took many casualties. I want a debriefing on our losses.”

She looked between the four of us, and Glass was the one to step forward, pulling a scrap of paper out of his armor. “We committed four hundred and twelve ponies and griffons to the assault, along with one tank and one ringbird. We suffered ninety-eight dead, including Commander Rampart and Acting-Commander Zip.” I winced and hung my head a bit, but Glass continued on after a short pause. “Twenty-four of the casualties were veteran Sentinels. Thirty-one were mercenaries. The rest were volunteers. As for the wounded,” he said, flipping the page over, “we have one hundred and twenty-one wounded. Forty-four are severely wounded, sixty-seven are moderately wounded, and the remainder are only lightly wounded. That includes eleven veteran Sentinels. And I think it goes without saying that the tank is a complete loss. The ringbird can still be repaired, but finding the parts to rebuild and replace the rotor ring will be difficult.”

Fusillade’s frown only seemed to harshen with each number. When it was done, she just shook her head. “When I left the Bastion this morning, there were forty-nine of us veterans still alive. Now there are only twenty-five, with eleven wounded. Twelve, if you count Commander Thunder Dash, but he should be combat ready any day now. That is good. We will need him while we focus on rebuilding.”

Sig cleared his throat. “How will we divide our garrisons? The Fort and the Bastion are held by our support staff, and though we’ve given them some training, they simply aren’t going to replace a veteran Sentinel. Thirteen Sentinels aren’t going to be enough to hold all three locations. And there are still bands of Crimson in the valley, they could possibly organize and retake the Fort while we’re spread thin.”

I saw an opportunity to speak up for Blackwash, so I cleared my throat and dove into the conversation before it could go on without me. “I’ve talked with Brass Casing. He’s the leader of the ponies from my town. He offered to settle the dam for you and hold it until your numbers are stronger.” I mean, he was still deciding whether he wanted to do that, but I had a feeling he was going to come around. Besides, why let this opportunity slip by? “Plus, we need somewhere to go now. Our old settlement is in ruins. We need somewhere new to live, and the dam’s perfect.”

Fusillade nodded slowly like she was considering it, and Glass added his two bits to the conversation. “It could be beneficial for all of us,” he said. “The freed slaves get a settlement of their own, and we have an ally defending the dam for us. We can redistribute our remaining forces between the Bastion and the fort until we recruit and train enough replacements.”

“I like it,” Fusillade said. “I will meet with this ‘Brass Casing’ pony later and come to an agreement with him. I will likely end up leaving one or two Sentinels here to supervise the construction of defenses and repairs, but that gives me enough to work with at the fort and the Bastion for the time being.”

For the first time since… well, you know… I felt a warm glimmer in my chest. My friends had a home. It might not have been Blackwash, but it would do just fine. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was better than the original in every way. Especially if that meant they’d actually have access to trading caravans now.

“What next, ma’am?” Runabout asked.

“Administrative things,” Fusillade said. She looked at Runabout and nodded. “With Commander Platinum Rampart killed in action, I am promoting you to Commander of Earth Pony Forces. Your service record is outstanding, and we need some young blood in command.”

Runabout blinked, a little shocked, but she quickly saluted Fusillade, trying to control the smile on her face. “Thank you, Commander. I will do my best to maintain discipline and perform such duties as are expected of me.”

“Congratulations,” Sig said, leaning in and offering his hand for Runabout to shake. “You deserve it.”

“As do you, sergeant,” Fusillade said, catching Sig by surprise. “After the losses we suffered today, we need replacements. The griffons from your quarry fought with valor and discipline. The Sentinels would be much better with them. Thus, I am offering to establish the position of Commander of Griffon Forces and bestow the rank to you.”

I smiled and poked Sig in the ribs. “You’ve been with them for what, twelve winters now? About time they gave you some recognition.”

Sig stood tall and saluted. “It would be my honor, Commander.”

“Good. When this is over, I want you to try to recruit as many griffons from your quarry as you can. We will need them before we know it.” Then she turned to me and Glass. “As for you, Warped Glass, I am appointing you as Acting-Commander of Unicorn Forces until my eye has been removed and I have recovered enough strength to serve again. Do not make yourself too comfortable in my office,” she added, her lips shifting into the slightest grin I’ve ever seen. “I would be back in it tomorrow if Doctor Hacksaw would let me, but I know he would insist that I delegate my duties for at least three days.” Glass nodded, and Fusillade’s eyes shifted to me. “As for you, Ember, I would offer you a post here at the dam. I know that many of these slaves are ponies and zebras from your home settlement, and I believe you would feel right at home among them. You will be relatively free of duty with the exception of daily reports on the progress of the dam’s repairs and to ensure that the liberated slaves settle in to the facility without any problems.”

I blinked, taken aback by the surprise offer. The chance to represent the Sentinels at the dam, surrounded by my friends from Blackwash? It was almost too good to be true. I’d be the big mare in town, as it were, with my training and arsenal, and I could help Brass train up a new batch of militia. I could even train ponies to send off to the Sentinels and bolster their numbers. And with the defenses of the dam, I wouldn’t have to worry about another Blackwash happening to us ever again.

But…

I shook my head. “Sorry, ma’am, but I’m afraid I have to refuse.”

Fusillade raised an eyebrow, and even the other three looked at me, surprised by my response. “Oh?”

I swallowed and stepped forward. “I wish to pursue a different mission, ma’am. One that I think will be much better than garrisoning the dam.”

The Prench mare adjusted slightly and fixed me with her good eye. “Go on.”

“The signal, ma’am,” I said. “We only have two of the pieces. We know that there are seven. Reclaimer has three of them, since the Ivory City sounds like it also got a piece. We know that he was supplying the Crimson, and when Yeoman tried to hang me, he told me that Reclaimer was going to wipe out the Crimson anyway when the time came. He also mentioned something about ‘waking the Azimuth.’” Pausing, I reordered my thoughts and said, “I’m worried, ma’am, about what might happen if Reclaimer gets his hooves on the rest of the signal. Whatever the Azimuth is, it sounds scary. Therefore, I’d like to try to stop him, maybe even recover the signal pieces myself. After all, if I can just get to one piece before he does and delete it, he’ll never be able to complete the code.”

I left out my other reason for wanting to do this: Yeoman was also after the signal pieces, and if I followed them, I’d likely cross paths with him at some point. Then I could finally avenge Zip by putting a bullet through the fucker’s skull.

Fusillade seemed to think about my offer for a long time. “You realize that you would be alone in this mission? I don’t have the soldiers to spare to give you any backup.”

I nodded. “I understand, ma’am.”

“And you would not be able to bring your armor with you. It would run out of power in a week if the core was not charged regularly.”

Well, that complicated things a little bit; I was hoping to bring the super invincible armor with me. I guess that just meant I’d have to try harder to not get shot. “I understand.”

She looked at me like she was really making sure that I knew what sort of shit I was getting myself into. I tried to stand there as motionless and as confident as I could; I was afraid that if I wavered even the slightest bit, she’d stop me from going. Eventually, she sighed and nodded. “Very well. Your new mission, sergeant, is to pursue the code fragments scattered throughout Auris. You are to return any you find to us and do whatever you can within your power to prevent them from falling into Reclaimer’s hooves. I also want you to learn anything you can about this ‘Azimuth’. If it is important enough that it has a name, then it must be a super weapon of some kind, a weapon that Reclaimer would use to conquer Auris under the Ivory City’s banner. Therefore, he cannot be allowed to ‘wake’ it. I can give you whatever support I can before you leave, but once you leave the valley, you will be on your own.” Then, to my surprise, she saluted me. “It is a tough task, but I believe you are more than competent. Know that wherever you go, wherever your journey takes you, you will have my support, and the support of all the Sentinels.”

I beamed with warmth, and probably with just a little manic happiness as the first step in my plan for vengeance fell into place. Plus, I got promoted, too. That was pretty neat. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Fusillade nodded, then looked out over the rest of us. “I believe that is all that we have to discuss for now. Tomorrow, we shall bury our fallen. Commander Sigur, I want graves to be dug today, while the ground is still soft. Use the land around the RTZ; it should be fairly chewed up by the artillery this morning.” Then, groaning, she laid back down on her cot and closed her eyes. “Dismissed.”

The four of us emerged from the infirmary and looked at each other. We’d all gotten pretty big promotions (with the possible exception of Glass, simply because his post was only temporary) and we were all excited about what was to come. Runabout was the first to lose her composure, and she bounced on the tips of her hooves for a few seconds before excitedly squealing. “‘Commander’? Can you believe it?” she asked us, a wide smile on her muzzle. “I never thought this day would come!”

“You certainly deserved it,” I said, grinning. “After all the shit you did at the Fort, and then again today.”

“I always figured your name had to be somewhere near the top of their list,” Sig said, patting the mare on the shoulder. “You’ll make a great commander for us. I look forward to working with you.”

“You as well, Commander Sigur,” Runabout said, lazily saluting him. “I never thought we’d ever have enough griffons to end up making a branch for them. You were the only one for the longest time.”

“Pretty soon they’ll have a branch for zebras,” Glass said, shaking his head. “All we have to do is find a zebra settlement to recruit from.”

Sig shrugged and smiled. “I’m sure they’re out there somewhere. We don’t even know what all settlements live in the valley. We haven’t gone very far west. We never made it as far as Blackwash, and that’s still a good distance from the coast. Who knows what we’ll find?”

“Maybe more settlements like mine,” I said. “Just make your first contact with them peaceful, though. I certainly didn’t enjoy our first brush with the outside world.”

“We’ll certainly try,” Sig said.

Yawning, Glass roughly shook himself awake and took a step back. “Alright, I’m going to go dispatch a few orders before I take a nap. Fusillade has the right idea,” he said, smirking. “I think we could all use some rest.”

Runabout nodded. “I’m going to go find Failsafe and let her know. We’re going to hit the Crimson’s booze stores tonight and celebrate. You’re all more than welcome to join us!”

“We’ll think about it,” Sig said, and after a last wave, the two of them went their separate ways. That left Sig and I standing in front of the infirmary, alone. A little ways away, I could see Nova, Gauge, and Brass still talking together around their picnic spot. My teeth played with my lip as I watched them from afar.

“You haven’t told them yet, have you?” Sig asked, following my gaze.

I shook my head. “No. Not yet.” I turned to him and bit the inside of my cheek. “They’d go anywhere with me if I asked them to, and they’d follow me even if I didn’t. I don’t want to bring them along on this. Nova’s too weak. The best thing for her is to stay here at the dam with Gauge and the rest of us Blackwash ponies. Not wandering across uncharted territory where death could be waiting to fuck us over behind every tree.”

“So you plan on going it alone, then?”

I sighed and sat down. “I don’t want to, but I have to. You heard Fusillade; she said that she can’t spare any of you guys to join me. And you’re about the only person I’d trust to really have my back, anyway.”

Sig thought for a moment, sitting down next to me while he did so. “Tell them,” he said, finally. “They deserve to know.”

“And what if they insist on following me?” I asked. “I already had an excited colt follow me for an entire day and I didn’t notice at all. I’m pretty sure two adults as clever as they are could follow me for a while without me noticing.” I chuckled and shook my head. “I’m not very observant, am I?”

“Yeah, you can be fairly single-minded at times.” Smirking, Sig rolled his shoulders. “All the more reason you should let them come with you.”

I blinked. “What?” When I turned to him, I realized he wasn’t joking. “You can’t be serious!”

Sigur rested a hand on my shoulders and a wing across my back. “Ember, twelve years ago, I left my family to join the Sentinels. I met Zip, but that was about six years later. Sure, I had friends and brothers-in-arms, but I was lonely. When we went to the quarry to see my family again, I realized that I should have come back sooner.” He looked me in the eyes with a look that was almost pleading for me to not repeat his mistakes. “I don’t know how long you’re going to be out in the world looking for these code fragments. I don’t know how far your journey’s going to take you. But I promise you this: you’ll need friends. I don’t think you can do it alone. I may be wrong,” he hastily amended, “but I don’t think I am. If you’re by yourself and something happens to you out there, you can die and nopony would ever know. If you have friends, you can all at least look out for each other.”

“I don’t know…” I said, looking across the dam at them again. “I don’t want to put them in danger. And Nova…”

“She’ll be fine after a few days,” Sig said. “You’ll have to take it easy for the first week or so, but after that, so long as you keep your strength up, she’ll be good as new. And trust me, where you’re going, it never hurts to have an eye in the sky.”

I mulled it over for a bit, but eventually sighed and nodded. “I guess you’re right. I’ll talk it over with them.” I saw them look over their shoulders at me, and Nova happily waved for a moment before they resumed their conversation. I chuckled again; was I really doubting that ball of nearly limitless energy? She’d probably be flying again in a few days.

We sat together and enjoyed the silence as we both realized that our time together was coming to an end. In days—not even days, in hours—I’d be on the road again, this time to destinations unknown.

“It’s going to be a long time before I see you again, isn’t it?” I asked.

Sigur exhaled slowly and his talons drummed against the concrete. “Yeah. I guess it is.”

After a few seconds of chewing my lip into pieces, I slid over to Sig and wrapped my forelegs around his neck. He shifted slightly to return the hug, and the two of us sat in each other’s embrace for a long time. We didn’t worry about what we left unsaid; we didn’t worry about wishing each other good luck and that sort of thing until we saw each other next. Just the hug was enough. Enough to remind us both of what we were fighting for, and the roads that lay ahead of each of us.

And enough to remind us that one day, we would see each other again.

Author's Note

Epilogue

I tried not to flinch as the blue sun shone directly into my eyes.

Around me were the graves of one hundred and seventeen ponies and griffons, dug into the soft ground. Another nineteen had died during the night despite what limited treatment the Sentinels could give them, so more graves had to be dug than the ninety-eight we’d originally planned for. Each body laid to the left of its designated grave, covered in a tarp. Two bodies in particular stood out from the rest, lying in makeshift caskets with a rifle resting on top of each. One of those caskets held an orange pegasus inside, her pretty eyes forever shut, her muzzle wiped clean of blood and resting peacefully for eternity.

I stood in a line with six other Sentinels, our rifles resting on their butts at our hooves and their barrels at our right shoulders. Across from the graves dug in the ground stood a congregation of the survivors from the assault, watching the ceremony with solemn eyes. Despite the quiet reverence and mourning hanging over us, the sun had decided to poke its brilliant blue light through the clouds, adding what I felt was an unwelcome cheer to the funeral.

Standing square in the middle of the RTZ, just ahead of the graves, was Fusillade. She’d worn some cloth bandages over the left side of her face to cover her destroyed eye, and somehow she’d gotten her officer’s uniform to wear from the Bastion. I guess she had a unicorn teleport back specifically for that last night or this morning. After a moment to collect her thoughts, she looked over the crowd and cleared her throat.

“The battle is over,” she said, her voice mournful, solemn. “That much we can see around us. The towers that shelled us on this very ground a day ago are silent. The machine guns that tried to hold back our cause have been taken down. There is no fighting here. Not anymore. For we did our part—all of us. Everyone standing before me today did what they had to do to ensure that the light of the future could shine through the darkness of the past. And that goes doubly so for these brave souls we are about to commit to their final rest.”

Tears pricked at my eyes, and I blinked quickly to hold them back. Fusillade, meanwhile, merely bowed her head in reverence for the bodies lying behind her. “Every one of them believed in a dream for the future. They dreamed of a world without the violence and destruction sown by our predecessors. They dreamed of a world free from pain and misery, cruelty and abuse. Yesterday, they fell to defend that dream, so that one day, we may wake and find that the dream has become a reality. And now it is up to us to honor their legacy and continue their work.

“Before peace can be won, it has to be earned,” Fusillade continued, raising her head high. “Some of us will yet give our lives for the dream of peace, and when we do, we will pass the torch to the next generation. As long as the spark of good remains in our hearts, evil will not wipe hope from this world. There is a future for Auris yet, and it is a bright one. And today, with our victory over the Crimson, we have taken a vital step to earning it.”

She looked around her and gestured with a hoof. “The land we give to these heroes will be forever hallowed with their sacrifice. When one day Auris knows nothing but peace and prosperity, the people of that future will look back to this small patch of dirt overlooking the valley and know that this is where it began. And they will know that we stood, we fought, and we died for them. Because Auris is bigger than all of us. And the future is worth dying for.”

She stood still, her eyes slowly wandering over the crowd. Then, turning around to face the graves, she saluted. “Pour la chance, l’honneur, et la gloire! We take the watch!”

Sigur, who’d been standing off to the side of me and the other six rifleponies, suddenly snapped to attention. “Present arms!”

As one, we picked up our rifles in our magic and aimed them skyward. At each command, we fired in unison until three volleys had been fired. The volleys echoed throughout the valley, cracking against the mountains, dancing over the river, fading into the blue sky. A final salute to the fallen.

The crowd began to disperse, and several ponies began to move the bodies into the graves, gently laying each one down six feet. I broke ranks with my fellow Sentinels to go sit by Zip’s side one last time, and I simply sat there, stroking the Equestrian flag draped over her coffin. The blue sun warmed my coat, naked and without armor, as I sat by her side. Pterofyns and other birds sang their songs, and the rushing of water through the dam’s spillways added a pleasant background buzz to the day. You know, I take back what I said earlier. Even though I felt like my heart was about to split open again, it was a beautiful day. A peaceful day. And if I imagined that Zip gave her life to guarantee days like this for years to come…

Heh. I’m getting sappy. But I think it was worth it.

Four figures approached me, each laden with bags for a long journey ahead. Gauge and Nova stood in front of me, and Brass and Sig dropped some more supplies on the ground. I didn’t say anything to them as they approached, only continued to stroke the flag on Zip’s coffin.

“She’ll rest easy here,” Brass said, nodding to the coffin. “We’ll take good care of them all. We’ll never forget what they did for us. As far as I’m concerned, this is holy ground from now on.”

I smiled a bit and nodded. “Thanks, Brass. That… that means a lot to me.”

Brass bowed his head. “I’m happy, then. You’ve given so much for us, Ember. I wish I could get you to stay, but… well, I guess you don’t owe us anything after all that.”

I waved my hoof. “Don’t worry about that. I owed it to you guys to get you free. We’re even now.”

Brass smirked a bit and opened the bag he dropped. After nosing around in it for a second, he pulled out a tin and popped open the lid. Inside were two, maybe three dozen biscuits and other pastries. “It’s not much, and I can’t promise you that the Crimson had any quality ingredients lying around, but some of the mares stayed up real late last night to make you these when they heard you were leaving. It’ll be like carrying a little bit of home with you until you can make it to the next settlement over.”

I took the tin and looked them over in my magic. They were crumbly, yes, but a nibble on one proved they still tasted like home. “Honey Cakes made these, didn’t she?” I asked, smiling. She always made the best desserts.

“She was the one who came up with the idea,” Brass said. “She would’ve been up here to see you off, but she could hardly stand after she was done.”

I closed the tin and slid it into one of my bags. “Thanks. Tell everypony that I’m so thankful for the gift. And… a-and that I love them so much.”

Brass nodded and took a step back while I batted away tears forming on my lashes. “We’re all rooting for you, Ember,” he said. “And when this is all over, we’ll have a spot of honor for you here at the dam. The gates will always be open to you. No matter where you go, Blackwash will always be your home.”

In his place, Sig stepped forward and dropped a bag of ammo. “Six hundred .308 rounds for that rifle of yours,” he said, “plus a few sidearms and ammo, and some miscellaneous bullets for bartering.” He dropped another bag and looked at Gauge and Nova. “First aid supplies, binoculars, medicine, and camp supplies. You name it, it’s probably in here.” Then, smirking, he glanced at me before extending a talon in my direction. “Make sure you watch out for this one. She’ll probably need bandages by the end of the first day.”

“You have so little faith in me,” I teased, rolling my eyes.

“Yeah,” Nova said, chuckling. “It’ll take her two days to hurt herself.”

“Shut up, Nov,” I said, laughing and shaking my head. When the mirth died away, I leaned toward Sigur and hugged him. “Thanks for all this. Thanks for everything.” Smirking, I added, “If it weren’t for you and Zip all those nights ago, that Crimson patrol would’ve dragged me back to the fort and we’d never be where we are now.”

“I try to make it a point to save as many as I can,” Sig said, winking. “You never know when they’ll come in handy later.” Then, shaking his head, he added, “Whatever happens out there, Ember, just stay true to your heart. It’ll lead you the right way when things start to get difficult. But I have no doubt whatsoever that you’ll succeed. You’re too stubborn of a bitch to quit.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, punching him in the shoulder. “You too, you big birdbrain.” He smiled and stepped back, and I turned to Nova and Gauge. “You guys sure you want to do this? You don’t have to do anything. If you want to stay, I won’t think any less of you.”

Gauge smiled softly and stepped closer to me, SCaR puttering along after him. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said, placing a hoof on my shoulder. “But we would. You’re our best friend, Ember. We’d do anything for you. Even if that means leaving everything we’ve ever known behind to follow you and make sure you succeed.”

Nova nodded and grinned. “We’re with you a hundred percent of the way!”

I sniffled and wiped at some more tears. “Thanks, guys,” I said, leaning forward and quickly embracing Gauge. Nova threw herself onto the pile a few seconds later, and we all nuzzled each other for a good long while. “I don’t know what I’d ever do without you.”

“Probably something dumb,” Gauge said, grinning. SCaR chattered with synthetic laughter, and even I couldn’t help but smile a bit.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. But hey, stupidity got me this far…”

After a few more quick laughs, our attention turned to the coffin next to us. I looked back at Sig and he gestured toward it. “Ready?”

“Just a second,” I said, kneeling down by it one more time. Biting my lip, I hesitated on what to do for a second before I just leaned in and pressed my cheek against it. “Thank you, Zip,” I said, my voice barely more than a solemn whisper. “For everything. You taught me so many things… you showed me how to live life… how to love to the fullest.” Sniffling, I closed my eyes and let a few tears soak the flag. “I will never, ever, forget you. And when I dream, I’ll come find you. And we can be together, if only for the night.” Sniffling and dabbing at my eyes, I lifted my head and placed my hoof against the coffin one last time. “I love you. Forever and always.”

Then I stepped back and nodded to Sig. The griffon wordlessly made his way to one end of the coffin, and I moved to the other. Then, between my magic and his talons, we picked her up and lowered her into her grave, removing the flag and the rifle afterwards. It didn’t take long to bury her, leaving nothing behind except for a brown rectangle of upturned dirt and a slightly raised mound in the ground.

Closing my eyes, I took a few last shuddering breaths, and let my tears fall on the dirt. Here she’d rest for the rest of time. The only thing to remind future generations of her sacrifice would be a cross with a white sun in the center. For now, however, we only had a plank with the name ‘Acting-Commander Zip’ carved into it. Simple, but it would do for now.

Sighing, I turned and looked west, walking past the four of them to get a clear view of the valley. A crystal blue river ran between gently sloping mountains of pink and orange, curving a bit to the south after many miles. White clouds floated overhead, and the distant figures of shrikes and other birds wheeled high above the grasses below. It was picturesque and beautiful. I couldn’t think of a better spot to bury her.

“I’m a bit jealous of her view,” I joked when I heard them walk up behind me. “The sunsets must be amazing.”

Turning around, I picked up my bags and set them across my back. Nova and Gauge had already done the same with theirs. Then, softly smiling, I stepped forward, and we all embraced. I made sure to give Brass and Sig an extra squeeze. “I’ll miss you two.”

“And we’ll miss you,” Brass said, and Sig nodded his agreement. “Take care out there.”

“We will,” I said. “Besides, I’ve got the two smart ponies to make sure I don’t do something stupid. We’ll be fine.”

Sig bowed his head and ran his beak through my mane quickly. When he stepped back, he squeezed my shoulder once before letting go. “I’ll be waiting for you to come back. And if you happen to find any old comms networks, drop the Bastion a line. I’ll make sure we’ll have an open channel to talk. I’ll be waiting.”

I nodded and slapped him on the shoulder. “Take care, big guy. Keep Dacie in line.” I turned to Brass and bumped hooves with him as well. “Show the Sentinels that the Blackwash militia is the best in the valley.”

“I’ll make sure they know it,” he said. “Take care!”

We nodded to him and began our walk back through the dam. Everywhere we looked, ponies, griffons, and Sentinels alike stopped what they were doing to wave at us and offer us words of encouragement. It made my heart soar just to receive this much support, and Nova looked like she was beaming with excitement. As for Gauge and SCaR, well, one of them seemed much more excited in the attention than the other.

But soon enough, we made it to the last gate at the south end of the dam. We paused at the threshold, looking out at the land on the other side, and the old trail worn into the ground that turned sharply to the east against the flow of the river. It went on for probably three miles before it wound to the right, out of sight. If the map we’d been given was any good, there’d be a passage through the mountains in about twenty miles. Beyond that? Well… I wanted to be surprised.

Smiling at Gauge and Nova, I adjusted my bags and made sure they fit comfortably. “Well, you two ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Gauge said. SCaR chirped its agreement.

“Yup yup yup,” Nova said, grinning at me. “I’ve had enough of the dam. There’s a whole world out there, and I want to see it.”

“Then we’ll do our best to see it,” I said, striking a path down the trail. Gauge and Nova followed me, though we measured our pace by Nova’s to make sure she didn’t exhaust herself. The dam dwindled and dwindled behind us, and the road ahead bloomed into a new horizon, a path into the unknown. Who knew what awaited us beyond these mountains? I certainly didn't... but we were going to find out.

Two hours later, I looked back over my shoulder.

The dam was gone.

Author's Note

Chapter 24: The Disappearing Act

Almost half an hour passed before somepony finally came to find me. Of course, out of everygriffon, it was Dacie. The gray hen moved with lethargic steps, and she navigated the back of the ringbird more with her talons than her eyes, which her hung head kept to the ground. Once on the ramp, though, she grabbed ahold of the side of the ringbird’s hull and looked up at me. “Sig said to help you figure out how to fly this thing.”

I flicked the tiny butt of a used cigarette away and crushed it under my hoof. “How’s… is everything going okay down there?”

Dacie sighed, and her wings drooped until they touched the floor. “It’s going. Sig’s explaining what’s happening while we treat our wounded and get ready to burn the dead. At least there’s no more fighting, but if we’ll ever be the same after this…” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Family killed family. Those wounds will take a long time to heal.”

I solemnly nodded. “Yeah. But at least you’ll be able to heal.” I stood up and limped to her, my broken leg held off the ground by her splint and some bracing from my armor, my stomach wrapped up around my midsection with gauze and feathery auranoak leaves. “I... I know how you feel,” I said, joining her in staring at the floor. “And I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry that just me being here made this happen. I understand if you completely hate me or whatever for this, but…”

I trailed off, and Dacie looked up at me. “No,” she said, shaking her head, and I thought I could see fresh tears in her eyes. “This is Kerzin’s fault. Not yours. Not Sig’s.”

The best I could do was give her a nod. Even if she was doing her best to hide it, I knew she was in a lot of pain. I knew that pain from when the Crimson killed Mom. But at least they could rebuild. I couldn’t. Assuming we even beat Carrion in the first place, what was going to become of Blackwash once everypony was free? Were we going to move into the Bastion permanently? Were we going to try to rebuild on the mountaintop? Maybe go somewhere else? I didn’t have a clue.

Dacie looked over her shoulder to the glow of the quarry, now all lit up after the chaotic events of the night. “We still have a chance to get everygriffon out of here in one piece,” she said, trying to move the topic to a lighter note. “We still have a chance to take back our home once you Sentinels win. We have a chance for normalcy when this is all over…”

Her words trailed off, but I finished her thought for her. “But it’ll never be the same,” I said, looking down at my hooves. At least she’d be able to almost go back to how things used to be once the Crimson were gone. My chance for normalcy died the moment I heard a message from deep space, the first signal from Equestria in over two centuries. That’s when I realized that this whole thing wasn’t just affecting me—the signal had changed everything on Auris, even if most of the population didn’t know it yet. With that code we picked up from Equestria, the Silence was over. One hundred and ninety cycles of loneliness and confusion, and now it was over. It felt strange to be a part of the generation witnessing its end. But what that end would mean to Auris’ future, well, I couldn’t even begin to know.

Of course, philosophy has its own time for discussion, and that certainly wasn’t now. We still had shit to do before we ran out of time, so I stepped forward and hugged Dacie. “I’m sorry that he’s gone,” I said, patting her on the back. “I didn’t know him that long, but he seemed like a good griffon.”

Dacie sniffled and leaned into my embrace. “He died trying to save his flock from Kerzin. He… I don’t think he would’ve asked for more.” We parted, and she wiped tears from her eyes. “Sig’s probably… well, I think he’s taking it the hardest. He’d been gone for twelve years, and then he comes back only to get his brother killed for his war…” She took a deep breath. “Poor guy. We’re all feeling the same pain right now… but he’s feeling it the hardest.”

I nodded, imagining how Sig must’ve been feeling. “Let’s just make sure it wasn’t for nothing, okay?” I asked her, and she nodded. “Once we move the ringbird, then we can mourn those we’ve lost.”

I opened the door to the cockpit of the ringbird and stepped inside with Dacie following a few steps behind. Once again I found myself standing between the four seats, unsure of just what exactly any of the flashing lights on the panels meant. When Dacie shuffled up behind me, I shrugged and sat down in one of the two forward seats. “Pilot and co-pilot should be fine, right? We won’t need anyone sitting in those seats for weapons and electronics.”

Dacie crammed herself into the tiny seat opposite me and managed to squirm her limbs under the controls. “Let’s hope, though I can barely move.” She grunted and batted the flight stick away. “It’s like Equestria specifically made this thing to not be griffon compatible.”

“If you’ve seen what their shooting ranges look like, you wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “They didn’t seem to like anyone that wasn’t a pony.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t eject me for being a griffon then,” Dacie joked, and I snickered. Then, turning her attention to the controls, she frowned. “So… I guess the first mystery is how to turn this thing on.”

I stared at the panel in front of me. That’s basically all I had, apart from the flight sticks and the pedals in the floor. I guess that most of the other controls were holographic and shit, but I needed to turn the damn thing on first. “Couldn’t your siblings have kept the pilots alive or something?”

“That would’ve been nice,” Dacie muttered. “Tsala loves to fight, and if the pilots shot first, then she definitely wouldn’t hold back.”

I groaned and bashed my head against the panel, and the thing beeped at me. Blinking, I sat back up and stared at a simple horseshoe symbol. Frowning, I put my hoof against it, and was rewarded with an angry squawk and the screen flashing red. I looked over to Dacie, who saw the same thing on her screen, and pointed at it. “Think we need their hooves?”

Dacie grunted and all but fell out of her seat as she tried to escape it. “I’ll go get them,” she said after she stood up and dusted herself off. I acknowledged her with a wave and tried to sit back in my chair while she was gone. It certainly wasn’t easy or comfortable; I don’t think the seat could move in the first place. But it didn’t really matter anyway, because a few minutes after I gave up trying, Dacie returned with a bunch of hooves.

Yes, literally a bunch of hooves.

“What the fuck?!” I shouted as she dumped them on the floor. Gray, green, blue, and white severed limbs oozed blood onto the floor. I picked one up with my magic and pointed at it. “Was that really necessary?”

Dacie crossed her arms. “I wasn’t going to drag the four of them in here one at a time until we figured out whose hoof worked!”

“Still probably would’ve been faster and cleaner than actually cutting their hooves off. How did you even do that in the first place?” When she opened her beak, her red beak, I held up a hoof—my own hoof, that is, not one of the pilots’. “Never mind, I don’t want to know, even though I’m pretty sure I unfortunately already do. Let’s just see if this stupid idea works.”

I took the four hooves in my magic and held them in front of the symbol on the screen. The first hoof didn’t do anything, and neither did the second, so I violently tossed them through the door as hard as I could so I wouldn’t have to look at them anymore. Just when I was starting to worry, though, the third hoof made the panel turn green, and a lot of numbers and messages began to pop up on the panel in front of me.

A lot of numbers and messages.

I just stared at them all like a retard, my jaw probably slack, as an overwhelming number of messages decorated the holographic display in front of my face like fireworks. I looked at Dacie, who seemed equally confused, and groaned, putting my head in my hooves. “I fucking hate computers.”

“Well… there has to be some sort of method to this madness, right?” the hen said, squinting at her display. “Let’s see here… ‘Commands’… ‘Diagnostics’? No, we don’t need those. Umm…” She began moving things to the edge of the display space with her talons, and I mimicked her example, clearing up the space in front of my face in a few moments. Then she snapped her talons and pointed at an option in the center of the screen. “Hey, here we go! ‘Rotor Controls’. That’s a good place to start, right?”

“Good as any,” I said, holding up my hooves in defeat and trying (and failing) to recline some in my seat. Seriously, Equestria, just a little bit of adjustment to these seats would’ve been great! They were killing my back, and I was wearing armor too!

Dacie poked around in the menu for a few seconds more, before grinning and dramatically poking her talon into the screen. I jumped as the ringbird shook, and something clunked into place in the superstructure above my head. Within seconds, a whining noise began to fill the cockpit, and the aircraft started to vibrate.

“I got it!” Dacie shouted, clapping her hands together. “There we go! Now we’re ready to fly!”

I grinned and looked down at my screen, noticing that most of the annoying pop-ups on the holographic panel had gone away. In its place were a few core gauges and readouts—heading, fuel, engine temperature, shield integrity, airspeed, those sorts of things. The display also had a simplified model of the ringbird in the center of it, with the surrounding terrain mapped around it, offering a sort of third-person look at the thing. Certainly useful for maneuvering this monstrosity, and we were definitely going to need it. Even the metal panels between the windows had seemingly disappeared, replaced by images of the outside taken by cameras. It looked like me and Dacie were sitting in chairs over nothing; the display even stretched to the floor, so I could actually see the ground underneath of the ringbird.

“That’s fucking neat,” I said.

“Yeah it is,” Dacie said, grinning at me. Then she turned back to the controls and wrapped her left talons around a stick protruding from the panel in front of her. “Let’s test this baby out!”

She pushed the stick forward and the whirring of the rotors intensified. After a few shuddering moments, I felt a slight pressure on my shoulders, and I saw the ground moving underneath the ringbird, slowly lowering beneath us. In front of us, the derelict equipment around the ringbird seemingly fell away as we went up, until Dacie put it in a hover about twenty feet off of the ground.

“Holy fuck, we’re flying,” I said, my face all but pressed against the window. “We’re actually flying! Look at that!” Whooping and hollering in joy, I accidentally kicked one of the pedals on the floor with my good leg, and was nearly thrown from my seat when the ringbird viciously spun to the left. Thankfully, Dacie stomped on her own set of pedals, and the thing stabilized before we could slam into the rocks and probably violently blow up.

Wilting under her glare, I shimmied out of my seat and went to sit in the chair behind it. “Okay, no more controls for me. You seem like you’ve got it anyway.” That’s when I noticed a flashing red microphone symbol on that seat’s panel, and frowning, I poked it.

“Windigo 3-3, there you are! Fucking finally!” a voice blasted through the speakers in the panel. Biting my lip, I looked at Dacie, who simply gave me a concerned look. “Carrion’s about ready to kill somepony! What’s taking so long at that shithole?!”

“Uh… everything’s under control, situation normal,” I growled into the panel, doing my best Crimson bastard impersonation. “We, uh... had a slight weapons malfunction. But, uh, everything's perfectly alright now. We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you.” As an afterthought, I added, “How are you?”

I looked at Dacie, daring to hope that maybe these guys were stupid enough that I could call off the counterattack and buy some more time for the quarry. I mean, they noticed that I’d accidentally turned the comms on, so I really didn’t have anything to lose at this point, right?

There was a moment of silence on the radio save for the crackling of some static before the voice spoke again. “Who the fuck is this?” he shouted, pretty stars-damned angrily. “Answer me, you bitch!”

Well, I guess my voice wasn’t deep enough to pass for a stallion’s, but I honestly didn’t really expect it to work. Smirking, I leaned forward, closer to the panel. “Oh, I’m sorry, but your pilots lost their little toy,” I taunted him. “Tell Carrion that the Sentinels are going to make great use of it for him. It’s not like you guys were using it for anything good, anyway.”

There was some sort of scuffle on the other end of the microphone, and when it crackled to life again, it was no longer the radio operator’s voice, but one that was pretty hauntingly familiar to me. “Listen, whore, you might think you’re being cute and all, trying to steal one of my fancy little birdies, and that’s fine. No, seriously, I get it. You’re all mad and upset that you can’t stop progress, so you go around killing ponies and breaking things to feel better about yourselves. Now, you already broke one of my birds at the Fort, and now you’re trying to make off with another one, like that’s really going to help you. Well boo-hoo. I hope you’ve got your tantrum out of the way, because I’m about ready to put all of you in time-out.”

“Bite me, dipshit,” I spat back at him. When all I got was stunned silence, I laughed and all but put my muzzle right against the holographic panel. “That’s right, big boy, I’m not dead,” I taunted him in the most sultry voice I could muster. “In fact, I’m doing better than ever. Now the Sentinels are helping to reunite us. I can’t wait until I get to see your ugly painted face again and offer you some payback for all the shit you’ve put us through.”

I wasn’t expecting him to just laugh at me in response. I was expecting some anger or astonishment, but not laughter. “Oh, I remember you,” Carrion said, and I could just imagine the disgusting smile on his painted face. “You know, it’s not nice to turn a stallion on and then leave him alone. I was all looking forward to a cozy night together after our first meeting. What put you off? Was it my company? My cologne? I’m sorry if you didn’t like it, but I am a bit partial to gunpowder and blood.” He laughed again, and just that alone made my skin crawl. “Baby, next time we see each other, I’ll take you for the ride of your life. It’ll just be you and me, night after night, year after year after year. Maybe I’ll even let your friends watch. Maybe I’ll watch you fuck them when I’m feeling too tired. And even if you don’t come around to loving your new lot in life, I’ve got some friends who know a few spells that’ll help you out. They’ll make you do whatever I want, and they’ll fiddle with your mind to make you like it. That’s not so bad, is it? Why fight and struggle and die when I can just turn you into the perfect whore? One who loves the taste of dick in her mouth, who gets wet at just the thought of sharing a bed with me?”

“You’re fucking disgusting,” I said. “Fuck you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you!”

Carrion just hummed on the radio. “You make it sound like fucking me is a bad thing,” he almost sung. Then, chuckling, he shouted something I couldn’t make out to ponies presumably standing near him. “I’ll see you soon, filly.”

There was a sharp click as Carrion hung up, leaving me staring blankly at the panel in front of me. I didn’t notice that Dacie had set the ringbird back on the ground until I felt her hand on my shoulder.

“You alright?” she asked, obvious concern in her voice.

I shakily nodded and waved my hoof through the holographic screen, scattering notifications everywhere. “Y-Yeah,” I said, still struggling to catch my breath. I forced a frown to my face and stood up, sliding out of the chair and walking into the cargo bay on shaky legs. “He’s just a fuck, that’s all.”

Dacie followed a few steps behind me. “That was him, wasn’t it? Carrion?” When I nodded, she shuddered and flicked her leonine tail. “Just knowing that Kerzin had allied us with that…” She noticed that I’d gone and sat back down on one of the chairs and taken another cigarette out, and cautiously approached me. “Are you sure you’re alright? How many of those have you had tonight?”

“Too fucking many,” I muttered, lighting it and setting it between my lips. When she only continued to stare at me, I waved her off. “Go tell Sig that you can fly the ringbird and that we need to start moving now. We won’t have long before Carrion sends more soldiers here.” I blew some smoke from my nostrils, and when I saw her still standing in front of me, I yanked her tail with my magic. “Go!”

Dacie stumbled forward, nearly tripping over herself as she got to the ramp, but ultimately sighed and disappeared. Good. I wanted to be alone right now. As soon as she left, I plucked the cigarette from my lips and curled into a ball, trying to hold the warmth in my lungs for as long as I could. I didn’t want to show it in front of Dacie, but Carrion’s threats had shaken me. Even when I thought I’d be unfazed by talking to him, seeing as how I was part of the Sentinels and had stolen one of his ringbirds, it seemed he still had some sort of power over me.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop imagining myself splayed out across Carrion’s bed, pinned underneath the stallion’s weight, and moaning in ecstasy as he fucked me. I had no idea whether Carrion actually had unicorns that could completely fuck with my mind and turn me into a willing fuck toy, but I really didn’t want to think about it. It freaked me out more than I care to admit. And perhaps more than anything, it scared me that this monster could reduce me to a shivering panicked wreck with his voice alone. How could I really beat him if he held that much power over me?

But I had a job to do. Ponies (and griffons) were counting on me to play my part in helping the Sentinels triumph over Carrion and the Crimson. And so long as I did my job, I wouldn’t have to worry about becoming a thing, like I’d screamed at Kerzin about. We would prevail, and I would put a bullet in Carrion’s brains once this was all over.

Sitting up, I stuck my cigarette between my lips and finished it off. I’d need the energy for the rest of the night.

The quarry was the definition of chaos. Everywhere I looked, griffons moved about in flurries of feathers. All the hollows were being turned inside out, their contents dumped onto the ground to pick through as the flock tried to scavenge what it could take before fleeing from the approaching Crimson. The fledglings, eyes wide and shaking with fear, had been protectively corralled near the top of the quarry by some of the elders, while the more able-bodied griffons helped move things from the hollows outside of the quarry. Black smoke rose from the very bottom of the pit; I assumed that they’d just finished taking care of their dead.

I found Sigur directing traffic near the main hollow, making sure that everygriffon got to where they needed to be and serving as the executive voice over what could go with them and what had to stay behind. At the moment he was busy arguing with a younger tercel about what he and his siblings could take with them from their hollow. After sorting that out and forcing those griffons to dump a few overstuffed bags on the ground, I approached him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Sig grunted back. Scratching around his beak, he sighed and sat down. “Dacie told me the bird works. She also told me that you spoke to Carrion on the radio.”

I shuddered at the reminder. “Yeah…”

Sig placed his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let him get to you. He’d have to get to all of us to do the things he said he’d do to you. We’d never let that happen.”

“Thanks,” I said, bowing my head. Whether or not that made me feel any better, well, I couldn’t say. After seeing just a small taste of what Carrion was like at Blackwash, the mere idea of what he could do put me into an irrational panic. I didn’t think I’d be free from that until he was finally dead.

But the less I thought about that, the better. “How are you doing?” I asked, almost whispering. “I know you two were close, even if it’d been years since you last saw each other.”

Sigur’s talons scraped across the stone. “I’m dealing with it,” he said, his voice sounding hollow and dead.

When he didn’t say anything more, I turned to the side and wrapped my forelegs around his midsection in the biggest hug I could manage. “I’m really sorry,” I said, nuzzling his feathery neck. “I know what you’re going through. If you need anything, just ask, okay?”

I felt a shudder run through Sig’s body, and when he didn’t move, I gave him another squeeze and a nuzzle before separating. “How’s… this going?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

Sig sighed and shook his head. “Well enough, sadly.”

“Sadly?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that they never should have had to do this,” Sig said, watching a group of like ten or twelve siblings embrace outside of their now-emptied hollow on the other side of the quarry. “All we wanted from this were a few good volunteers to help fight Carrion. We never wanted to drive the flock from the quarry. And yet, here we are.” Shaking his head, he bitterly added, “Rampart will have all the griffons he could possibly want now.”

“How many is that?” I asked, looking at the ever growing mass of griffons at the top of the quarry.

“Somewhere around six hundred,” Sig said. “If the number of inhabited hollows are anything to go by, at least.”

“Can the Bastion even support that many? That’s like, twice the number of ponies already living there or something like that.”

Sig nodded. “Water’s not an issue, because the Bastion is built over an aquifer. As for food, I’m sure there’s plenty to hunt around the canyon. I’ve gone hunting before when I feel like getting something other than the mush they give us, and it’s almost like the moss lemmings don’t even know they should hide from me.” He smirked, but it died away just as fast. “It’ll hold everygriffon for two weeks, spirits willing. Enough time to stomp out the Crimson and move back to the quarry.”

I nodded, and after a few seconds of silence, I nudged his elbow and smiled. “Think of this like a big vacation for the flock, then,” I said. “Everygriffon gets to go and hang somewhere else, do a little shooting, then come back when it’s all over.”

Sig snorted. “I’m sure the fledglings will love it, at least. The Bastion’s a big place to play in and explore.”

Just then, Gatre fluttered down from the top of the quarry and landed in front of Sig. “Just about got everygriffon organized up there. We’ll be heading out pretty soon.”

Nodding, Sig step forward and gave Gatre a one-armed hug, which his brother returned. “Good. Let’s make something of it, eh?”

They stepped apart, and Gatre turned around to look at the now almost hauntingly desolate quarry. “I’ve lived here all my life… and now I’m leaving to somewhere new.”

He shivered, and Sig stepped forward to stand by his side while I just hovered awkwardly in the back. “We’ll come back,” Sig said. “Once Carrion’s dead and the Crimson dismantled… we’ll bring the flock home.”

“Spirits protect me long enough to see it,” Gatre said, balling his right hand into a fist and placing it over his heart.

“They’ll watch over us,” Sig assured him. “They always have.” Then, patting his brother on the back, he nodded toward the top of the quarry. “Make sure the others are doing alright. Hoana especially. You know how they were. I’ll be up once the last griffon is out of the quarry.”

Gatre nodded and wordlessly stepped away before spreading his wings and heaving himself off the ground with a few powerful flaps. When he was gone, Sig turned back to me and gestured for me to follow. “I’m just going to check the nesting hollows, make sure we didn’t forget anyone. Then we’ll be out of here.”

I bowed my head and fell in at the griffon’s side, the two of us limping along on our broken legs. As we passed by the first of many empty hollows, I looked up at Sig’s face. “So what’s the plan for getting everyone out of here?”

“The plan, if you could call it that,” Sig said, peering into another abandoned hollow, “is to fly everyone out to the forest and lay low until sunrise. No lights, no fires, no noise that could give our position away. We’ll fly a few miles away from the quarry just to be out of the immediate area and hope that they don’t find us. At sunrise, we’ll scout to make sure that they’re gone, then go back to the rapid transit zone and meet with the mages that are supposed to teleport us out of here, explain to them what’s going on. If all goes well, we should have everyone back at the Bastion by the end of the day.”

“That’ll take a while,” I observed. “Twenty-five griffons per run at like half an hour apart? If there’s six hundred like you said, that’ll be twelve hours.”

Sig nodded. “I’ll have them bring in a security team of a few off-duty Sentinels to secure the area while we get everyone out of here. Just to keep everyone in line, make sure that the local wildlife doesn’t bother us. At least we’re not in tolan territory.”

“The fuck is a tolan?” I asked, peering into yet another empty hollow. At least we were getting close to the top of the quarry now.

“Big, scary, violent reptiles,” Sig said. “That used to be one of the Sentinels’ big jobs before we got pushed out of the valley: tolan control. Imagine… you know what a dinosaur is?” he asked, and I hesitantly nodded.

“They were super big lizards that existed before ponies or something like that. All we knew about them at Blackwash came from a foal’s book that somepony found. Not exactly the most useful place for information.”

“Right, so tolans are something like that,” Sig said. “They’re about fifteen or twenty feet tall and like thirty feet long. Their tail is spiked and hard enough that it can smash through steel. They’ve got six legs, each with a pair of claws, plus two more with long claws that they use as arms. They also have an enormous maw full of razor sharp teeth reinforced with iron, like a shrike’s.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, my jaw hanging wide open. “…The fuck, Auris?!”

Sig chuckled and shook his head. “Add some armor plates that can stop most bullets and a top sprinting speed of fifty kilometers per hour, faster than even the fittest pony can gallop. They can eat entire settlements if they’re not kept in check. Thankfully, they keep to the plains, but the valley used to be full of them when Auris was first settled, if the stories are to be believed. That was before the Sentinels started doing something about them.”

“And how the fuck do you kill something like that?” I asked, trotting back up next to him.

“Either a lot of high caliber armor piercing rounds or one pegasus brave enough to land on its head and sever its spinal cord with their laser blades.” Sig said. “The last way tends to be the cleanest, if the more dangerous option. Two of their four eyes have a little bit of rear vision in their field of view, and if it sees you coming, you’ll land in its mouth instead of on its head.”

“I’m glad I didn’t run into any of those while I briefly wandered the valley,” I said, shuddering. “What about you? You ever fight one?”

Sig shook his head. “No, they were pretty under control when I joined, and we had to start looking at the Crimson as the bigger threat. Zip, though,” he said, then smirked at me. “Ask her about it sometime.”

“Wait, Zip?” I asked, cocking my head. “She fought a tolan?”

“If her story is to be believed,” Sig said, and I could just feel him teasing me. I didn’t even know if he was telling the truth or not. “She’s one of the few left today that can say they’ve killed a tolan before. Old soldiers like Platinum Rampart and Thunder Dash have their share of kills, too. Plural.”

“Yeesh. Well, I hope I never run into one of them.” It’d probably end horribly for me anyway. I imagined some reptilian monstrosity thundering along with a long orange and yellow tail sticking out of its mouth before comically slurping it down. That’d probably be a pretty bad way to go. Then I imagined a certain orange pegasus landing on its head and driving her wings into its neck. That I had to ask Zip about when I saw her again.

“We’re sure going to have one hell of a story to tell Zip when we get back,” I said as we finally made our way to the top of the quarry.

Sig nodded. “Tonight has certainly been a night I won’t forget,” he said, somewhat ruefully.

“You and me both.” We stopped at the edge of the quarry, just looking at the mass of griffons crowded onto the rocky ground around it. Perhaps more important than that, however, was the metal aircraft, still perched on the rocks where Dacie had left it. “What are we gonna do with that?”

“We’ll have to move it before the Crimson get here, obviously,” Sig said. “I don’t know if it has any tracking devices or not, but we’ll want to keep it away from the rest of the group at all costs.”

“So we’ll find a clearing to set it down a few miles away from the group then?” I asked. “Just have a small guard watching it?”

“That still risks it being retaken if the Crimson do have a means to track it,” Sig said. “So, I’ve got a better idea.”

“If you say so. I’m all ears.” Then, shrugging, I added, “Or, like, an ear and a half.”

Sig rolled his eyes (hey, I thought it was funny!) and pointed to the northwest. “You and Dacie are going to take the bird and fly it back to the Bastion. Even if it’s got a tracker on it, Carrion can’t take it back if it’s locked away inside of millions of tons of steel and concrete. The rest of us will meet up in the morning once the teleportation train starts.”

I blinked, then blinked again. “Uh… Sig? Are you sure that’s a good idea? We just figured out how to get that thing off the ground. Are you sure we can take it for a cross-country flight?”

“It should have an autopilot in it,” Sig said. “If you can figure that out, just have it fly itself to the Bastion, at least until you get close.”

“Yeah, but I have no idea where the Bastion is from here. Or if they’ll even let us get close before trying to blow us out of the sky. I mean, it’s not like they know that we stole a ringbird.”

Sig’s response was to hand me a scrap of paper with some numbers written on it. “Those are the coordinates of the Bastion, if they aren’t already in the ringbird’s computer as a place to avoid. As soon as you get within a mile, set the ringbird down out of sight of the Bastion and try to raise radio contact with them. All mission-critical transmissions are held on 364.2 MHz. If that doesn’t work, well, I guess you’ll have to do some walking.”

I fidgeted in place. “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”

“Ember, I trust you,” Sig said. “Me and my siblings can handle keeping everygriffon safe down here, but we need to get this ringbird out of here before we lose it for good. You and Dacie know more about flying the thing than anyone else here, so I’m asking you two to handle it. I already told Dacie what I was thinking when she came to find me earlier. She’ll be waiting in the bird for you.”

Sighing, I hung my head. “Alright. I’ll do my best,” I said. I wasn’t too thrilled at trying to navigate the mountains in the dark, even if we did have the moonlight to guide us. I just hoped that the ringbird had good night vision cameras. And that it’s autopilot knew not to crash into the mountains. “See you at the Bastion, then?”

Sig nodded and placed his hands on my shoulders. “You can count on it.”

“Stay safe,” I said as we leaned in for a hug. “I’ll make sure everypony’s ready to give you a hero’s welcome when you get back.”

“I’d certainly appreciate it,” he said, smiling at me. Then he slapped me on the helmet and pointed to the ringbird. “Now get going. The sooner you’re out of here, the sooner this thing’s safely in our hands.”

Nodding, I turned around and trotted up to the ringbird, skirting my way past crowds of griffons as I did so. I looked over my shoulder to see Sig fluttering over to Gatre and Hoana and some more of his siblings, and they briefly looked in my direction before going back to organizing the rest of the flock. Then they disappeared into the mass of bodies, and sighing, I climbed up the ramp and limped into the cockpit.

Dacie was already seated in the pilot’s seat when I got in. “Ready?” she asked, cocking her head to the side as I entered.

I flopped down in the seat behind her and tried to familiarize myself with the instrument panel. At least I’d have a long flight to figure out how to get the radio to work and do more than just accept incoming transmissions. “Ready whenever you are,” I said, tossing my helmet to the other side of the cockpit and putting a headset on my head so we could communicate over the noise of the engine. It stung my half-ear ever so slightly, and I ended up sliding the left ear cup back a bit and off of that ear.

Dacie nodded and turned her attention to the controls, poking around in the holographic screen for a few moments before gripping onto the throttle and revving the engine up. Within seconds, she’d shakily lifted us above the ground, and I looked through the floor to see a mass of griffons waving at us. Dacie waved back, and I couldn’t help but raise my hoof as well, even though I knew that they couldn’t see into the cockpit from down there.

“Got a waypoint?” I heard Dacie’s voice crackle through the headset.

“Something like that,” I said back to her. “Sig gave me the coordinates. I’ll get them punched in as soon as I figure out how to get the damn autopilot working. In the meanwhile, just go northwest. The more distance we put between us and the dam, the better.”

“Got it,” Dacie said, and with her left hand on the throttle and her right hand on the flight stick, she pivoted the ringbird in that direction and haphazardly set us along the way. It wasn’t perfect, and I figured that if she flew the thing herself for more than an hour I was going to start hurling, but she did the best that she could. At least we were going up and forwards, not down and backwards.

And as for me? Once I figured out how to put in the coordinates Sig gave me, and once I confirmed with Dacie that the waypoint was showing for her and the autopilot was engaged, I told her our plan for once we got near the Bastion. With that all sorted out, and with a promise from Dacie to let me know once we got within five miles, I promptly took my headset off, shed my armor, got as comfortable as I could in the tiny cockpit, and passed out.

It had been a long day.