Fallout Equestria: What We've Lost (Original Version)

“There’s a sense of pure fear when you see that green haze engulf an entire city. The only kind of haze that you see when a Balefire bomb detonates. Then you hear the screams when the wind carries them. The screams of the dead and then the screams of the dying. Foals, mares, stallions, you can hear them. Even after the bombs you can still hear them, echoing throughout the ruined cities.”

Artillery shells land close, spraying the trench with dirt, rubble, and bits of gore from the dead. I adjust the helmet on my head with a clawed hand, myself and uniform covered in mud and grime. Machine gun fire from both our side and theirs occasionally picking off anypony that tries to look over their trench at each other. I check the pocket watch; Half past ten, an hour and a half until we go over. I put it away, picking my rifle up from where it lay and chamber a round, shouldering the rifle and looking down the cracked and beaten scope at the Zebra’s trench and picking off the ones that try to gather the wounded or that try to do the same as I until it’s time to go over. The time passes gruelingly slow, and I check the watch again; 11:56. “Ready boys, four minutes until we go over the top! Make damn sure you’ve got plenty of ammo and your gas masks!” The ponies in the battlements drop down to check their gear, ready to go over the top after myself. The four minutes goes by quick. I yell out to the soldiers behind me to gather at the ladders, myself placing my claws on the wooden ladder in front of me. I brought the gold whistle to my beak, blowing into it as hard as I could, letting it go for the chain catch it back around my neck and forcing myself up and out of the trench under the hail of gunfire, spark rifles, snipers, machine guns, and other miscellaneous rifles firing tracers zip across No-Pony’s land like fireflies in a windstorm.

I pulled out my service pistol, waving it in the air and yelling out for the charge, the masses of ponies bursting out over the trench. At this point in the war, trench warfare was the thing, Spark weapons were in their infancy, Vertibucks were only being thought of, and many other Equestrian technologies were only being tested. I never made it to the enemy trench. I was shot by a Zebra’s Anti-Material rifle, the round went into my shoulder and passed through a lung, just barely missing my heart but blowing out my left arm and left wing. As I lay in the mud bleeding out, one of the soldiers in the platoon I led, a unicorn named Woodwind, was unknowingly to me a test subject of the Mk. I Phoenix Talisman. I couldn’t help but watch as she took her knife and cut the talisman out of herself, jamming it into the gaping wound. It kept me alive but didn’t restore the damages done. She died from her wounds, bled to death long before the medics arrived. I was taken to a field hospital near Mane. I spent five weeks in the field hospital and then six months in a military hospital in Canterlot. Some project had been able to give me cybernetic prosthetics and then sent me back out into the field, I fought for the next several years until the end of the war. My name is Brigadier General Astraeus Stonefeather, formerly Royal Gryphonic Military and Royal Equestrian Military. I fought for a nation that wasn’t even my own during the Great War and I would’ve ended up dying for it. I was on Command for the Stalliongrad Military Base when the bombs fell. I saw the haze from the cities of Marescow and Stalliongrad.

Two hundred years. That’s how long I’ve wandered the Wasteland. I saw the radioactive snow and the sweltering heat, the Pink Cloud in Canterlot. I’ve seen it all, even the bodies of my own family.