Vital continually looked over at Pedro, while the big, powerful donkey gently patted and cooed at Flores. More particularly, he looked at the rune carved and scarred into his head. The two missed looking at each other, until one look caught Pedro's eye and the donkey gave a huge, almost-mocking, smile. “Do you like my gift from the caribou, Niño? They were so generous, they gave me something that would last my whole life. They may as well have given me a mayfly.”

“I... I had only heard. I wasn't a rebel that long. Only General Blueblood dared to go after... those places. I never lost my nerve and never dampened my spirit but when I heard about that I... well, I got more angry, but in a kind of hopeless way. It was an ugly evil of such magnitude I could hardly believe it. It was a cap on a litany of outrages that made it all feel almost too big, too horrifying. But I kept on, dedicated and loyal.”

“It's everything and worse, Niño. Everything and worse...” Pedro rubbed the rune on his forehead, fingering the straight lines scarred over and stained with soot. “They tell me it meant property, possession, that which they can inherit. Un esclavo. Pero mucho mas malo. They didn't just intend us to work to death like the old. They held contempt for the old. But they had hate for us. They believed their superiority over us, had disdain for us, thought us as completely worthless and unworthy of rights. That was how they did what they did.”

Old Timer looked on the rune with an askance glance, fingers twitching lightly the longer he held the look. “Please excuse my staring. But it's hard to believe it's real. I did horrendous things under their control. But even still... that seems so far beyond anything I could imagine.”

“'Ta verdadero, Viejo. The camps exist. The treatment exists. Trabajo de escalvo. Our toil is the least of our worries. Starvation, constant beatings, humiliation and degradation at every turn. They even perform... experiments. Not for the benefit of science. The camps are where they shove the elect who offend their sensibilities but still need to be kept happy, and away from mares. Just like they push the foal-defilers into maturation camps, they send monsters like that one we killed into the donkey camps.”

Vital and Old Timer shuddered simultaneously, recalling the insane and scarred beast the three had buried. “I can't believe it. Ponies are ponies, they can't do things like this. They must be normal, they lived in society and were just like others. The caribou perverted them, promised them things, put the ideas for them to take up,” Vital insisted.

“There is a certain poison in a certain percentage,” Old Timer said. “They don't act because society would punish them, and that keeps them caged and tamed, thinking dark thoughts and safely never expressing them, except in odd moments or with heavy implications of humor. If asked, they never take the Veil of Ignorance seriously and argue against laws that guard because it makes their pleasure impossible.”

“Some of the other rebels used to tell me that that was something they had found. The true believers followed along because they had been horrible ponies, some kind of hidden aberration walking around in a kind of disguise before this. Then when they were given the chance to express their monstrosity, they went in head-first and aimed for the deepest end of the sewer.”

“Take away consequence, take away fear of punishment or judgment, then ask them to describe their paradise. They would invent this world, because they're empty creatures, with nothing inside to stop them. They feel no guilt, no shame, no love, no real sense of honor. They get on with the fascists because the fake honor they hold up as an idol is the same kind. They have common ground. And make one a member of the random elect, they become the monsters they always wanted to be. To make them even more monstrous, give them victims they are assured are unworthy of rights.”

“Darles los burros,” Pedro rumbled, gritting his flat teeth. He looked down on Flores and smiled, his fury seeming to calm instantly. “Give them donkeys. Not everypony was as noble as Prince Blueblood. El Principe Azul verdad.”

“If you're marked, you came from a camp. Were you liberated? Did you get lost from the group of the freed? I sincerely apologize if the rebels couldn't help you to escape clean. Sometimes the pursuit is hard and civilians cannot be properly protected. The cowards target the weak and the helpless, especially after a place has been liberated,” Vital said.

“No, no, Niño. I wasn't freed by the rebels. They would have done a proper job. They would have truly helped my kind. All I did was get out. I got out, at a cost so high... I should have stayed there, to die with the rest. It was a condemnation. I knew I was going to die. Now, I only wish for death. La Muerte, vamos a abrazar, cielo.”

“You're alive. That's the important thing. If you really wanted death you'd be dead already. You would have let them drag you back to the camp. Your pain is understandable. I know pain, I know sorrow. But don't tell me you have the need to die unless you mean it. I could say the same but I don't because living and breathing takes on a whole new meaning when you've passed through Tartarus and come out broken but alive. You're alive, be alive,” Old Timer insisted.

“It's a strange thing. I live, I move, I act to stay alive. But my past haunts me, my mind betrays me. I want to embrace death but my body will not let me do it. From what you both say, you understand this, both of you.”

“I understand. But I live for the dead. I live because they need me to live. I must bring to birth the old world, nothing will do except that. Hope must be nurtured, the future must come to be. There has to be a reason I live, and my belief in what that reason is drives me,” Vital said.

“You know I get it. But again, I live because if I really didn't want to live, I wouldn't. I would have ended myself in the waste, would have let the bounty hunters take me to a fate worse than death. I'm not going to say you're wrong to think the way you do, but it's not a sensible thing,” Old Timer said.

“Sensibilidad, sensatez, sacrilegio. I don't care about sense anymore. I live in a prison outside those walls. It's an insane world now, and only more insane to me because of what I experienced. I won't live and die on anyone else's schedule. But I know... I'll die on my own time. Just not yet.”

“It's not about dying for the nation. In essence, it's about killing to keep it safe. Grim but necessary, necessary though grim. That's something they put in your head and hammered in hard. You can't die yet. There are caribou to batter into a bloody pulp. They're still out there. So you feel you need to get them,” Vital said.

“Tienes razón, Niño,” Pedro said with a stroke of his chin. “I can't die yet. If nothing else, I need to crush the caribou that oversaw the camp and came by now and then. The ponies inside... some of them got their reward for failure. But there are more. There always seem to be more.”

“They make more of themselves, they brainwash and destroy,” Old Timer sighed.

“And taking them out of the picture is like wiping out ants with a toothpick. You can get them and be sure of it, but they're a swarm. They just pour out of the hill, and nothing seems to stop it.”

Everyone went silent for a time, the heavy silence seeming to make them uncomfortable, as they fidgeted and twitched. “Niño, you say your parents were trabajadores, sí?”

“Ouvriers nonpareil. Mother worked at the Cloudsdale weather factory, father delivered and assembled cloud formations and structures. Why?”

“It seems cliché, but donkeys are known for hard labor, more than even earth ponies. I was what we call a spare foal. Most every donkey family has many foals, and one of them, not oldest or youngest always, were leftover. They never said to do it, they never picked one. But it happened naturally. No se casan. No se muevan de la casa de sus padres. They remain, they work, and soon enough, they take care of their parents, when they are old. It is the Equestrian way, en manera de los burros.”

“I've seen that in many Equestrian places, though usually never so formally,” Old Timer Said

“Most of the griffin clans have a daughter or a few daughters to tend to their father and his hens. The Booted don't, but that's because it could be a hen or tercel that does the caring,” Vital noted.

“It is not too special, but it is expected. Proper. I was that jack. I helped mis sobrinas, Tío Perico. Happy, fun Tío Perico. I always had spare bits, I always let them do most of what they wanted, it was... exactly what Equestria was all about.”

“Tell us about it. We all shared. It helps,” Old Timer encouraged.

“No, Viejo... you know what it was like. Maybe I have a strange mind. To remember it now pains me. But you know what they have done. I saw things... they poisoned the memories. They killed the memories. If the old world comes back, that will be wonderful. But I don't know where I will fit.”

“You'll fit in with me, in therapy, or an asylum, something. What do you plan to do with the likes of us?” Old Timer asked.

“Right now we do what we can. There are a few therapists in the civilian areas. One of the steps in the multi-step post-recovery plan is the training of doctors and therapists. We'll be treating a lot of psychological issues, and we'll do our best to help everyone,” Vital replied.

“I don't think they will help me think back before the camp. Before the hate. Before they made life Tartarus,” Pedro sighed.

”They separated us out because their magic doesn't seem to work on things besides ponies. Burros were immune, and in the population. We fought, so we had to be punished. So they rounded us all up and threw us into pens, just pens, como puercos. We had to be held before they had camps. Converted pueblos.”

Pedro gathered his family around him, that family that he had managed to keep with him. His face was a battered collection of blood and lumps, the reward for his attempts at protecting his nieces and nephews from being taken away to places unknown. They had claimed it was to maturation cams, but for all he knew they were going to be killed and eaten. They were literal monsters. It was a proper concern.

It was his job to protect his family in any manner he could. He was the spare foal. He was there to be the flexible wild card. In a way, he felt that he had already failed. Besides his young charges he had lost the ones whose care and safety had been his ultimate concern. His parents had been spirited away, stolen to be the victims of the caribou's deadly maw. Sent to die, broken, suffering and starving in the work camps.

All he had left were his brothers and sisters, and those children old enough to be considered fair game, which inspired drooling and assault from the caribou and ponies. They were showered with abusive words and declarations of their inferiority and status as mud-beings. The other donkeys in with them had suffered similarly, and were all marked with the indications of abuse and disdain.

They had been packed en masse into what amounted to an upgraded pigpen, the enclosing fence given height with clapboard and wire mesh, along with rusty metal and sharpened stakes to keep the donkeys away from the walls. There were many of them dotting the conquered pig farm, all packed to uncomfortable levels with wailing and braying donkeys.

Pedro had a stoic cast to his features, surveying it all with a detached seeming. He needed to be strong for the sake of his remaining family. He turned his ears to try and hear the ponies and caribou around them, barely catching little pieces of the speech.

“No way to get around it, gotta... to the west, there's some old towns... walls and some dirty water, it's all the braying knob... die. No big loss if we run out.”

“... at least we can beat them when we fuck them, I heard... put them somewhere. Donkeys aren't real equines so they can... pretty creepy, but they were chosen... okay with this.”

“The glorious and invincible Stag King cares nothing... more worthless than ponies, more filthy... good for death, and nothing else... keep them in line, and break... them to death.”

“What are they going to do, hermano?” His sister Celestina Mimosa asked with a shaky voice.

“We're going to die,” his brother Rubio huffed.

“¡Callate, cabrón! Tonto... the caribou know what they will do and the ponies are brainwashed to believe in what they do. We're going to be sent somewhere. Probably to slave for them. We can refuse and die, or work and keep them going, so they can kill us with beating and starving. Lo mismo.”

“Such joy, hermano,” Rubio grunted.

“Lies don't help, hermano. We're not going to do much, maybe die, maybe wish we were dead,” Pedro sighed.

Celestina Mimosa buried her face in her hands and brayed out sadly. “Princessas... princessas... ¡Celestia y Luna, ayúdanos!”

”The didn't help us. They needed our help, being free from brainwashing and willing to fight. But we could not help. We were strong, dedicated ciudadanos, soldados, willing to fight. That was why they beat us, caged us and sent us to die far away.

“They didn't bother to separate us into genders. Once the small towns had been converted into appropriate camps we were marched, in chains, to the camps, to be marked with their rune. I... failed again. Mis hermanos... they split up the families as best they could. They made a point of it. They wanted as much division and as few chances for happiness as possible. They whipped us, screamed at us, took away food and water at any chance. No les importaban.

“It didn't matter if we survived. They didn't want to bother with us, they could treat us like dirt, because they had been freed from the need to worry about how others would see them. It was okay to hate us. We had no value, no rights. Fuimos animales. Carne. Objectos. Nada.

“If we wanted to eat, they made sure we had to steal. We lived in the mud, under the ruins of the houses they had destroyed in their estúpido raids. All they can do. Destruyen. It was all misery; miseria y tortura. You've heard of the camps. I saw it. I lived it.

“I saw who they put there...”

The donkeys huddled in their filthy shelter, conserving their energy as they were starved another day. They seldom spoke, they moved only when commanded, and did their utmost to make their guards forget them. They did occasionally perform slave labor, but even the inept fools made to guard them figured out the routine abuse and starvation made them mostly useless at forced labor.

Among the helpless crowd was a jenny who had unknowingly come into the place pregnant. She tried her best to hide behind the rest, to keep herself out of sight of the others. It was a useless endeavor. As they got scrawnier, she stood out. They had shared their starvation rations with her, but that had only helped to make her more notable.

The pony came. The terror of the camp. He smiled an odd smile at all moments, carried himself with a light sense of eternal privilege. He was a strange pinkish-peach pegasus, with a lusterless golden mop of a mane and a habit for walking around in bloodstained clothes. The pieces were always different but they always had blood spotting them.

He had burly guards with him, to force away protectors and bring the sobbing, pregnant jenny forward. They had little trouble. Pedro fought back against them, his muscles still solid. But even with preternatural strength given the treatment, he was one jack, and was beaten back. The poor, pregnant jenny was delivered to the smiling stallion, who smiled wider when she got to him.

“I'm Master Bliss, and you are perfect for my laboratory. Beat them if they try to come out. Now, come with me.”

Pedro was beaten again, when he tried to reach the struggling, braying jenny as she was dragged away from the structure.
She wasn't returned until after dark, face frozen in a rictus of horror. Her eyes stared out, seeing nothing, milk white and marked with oozing cuts and sear marks. Her teeth were mostly gone and her tongue was attached to those remaining with wire. Worst was her body, marked with round rings of burned flesh, from both fire and chemicals. The largest number were concentrated on her belly, burned so deeply and badly it had almost eaten through into the womb, the flesh just visible in the deepest wounds.

Pedro couldn't keep quiet, leaping up even in the face of the guards. “¿Por qué? What is the purpose of this? What science is this for?”

Master Bliss laughed heartlessly as Pedro was punched in the face and kicked in the side. “Purpose? Science? You donkeys are stupid sub-equine mud creatures after all. The purpose is pleasure. Esoteric pleasure, disconnected from the base and common ideas of sex that you inferior filth know. I am a god among gods, that's why I was sent here. My reward for loyalty. They saw what I did to mares and they sent me here to live without restrictions. Mares have value as flesh. You're things.”

All the ponies walked out of the structure, leaving the frightened donkeys surrounding the abused jenny, with Pedro stroking her cheek and squeezing her hand when she voiced her pain.

”He took her one last time. No volvió. The child did, until a guard thought he didn't deserve rations. I won't say what became of him. I will carry that around in my heart until I die. One reason I sometimes wish death would embrace me swiftly. La Muerte. Cielito linda.
“I think that was why I did it. I did a foolish thing. The worst possible thing.

“It wasn't that I tried to escape. But that I did. Porque, no estuve solo.”

Some of the others, like Pedro, were still strong enough to do more than blandly slave away or sit around weeping. They had the strength needed to plan and execute an escape. It wasn't theoretically that hard. Being a caribou project the whole thing was slapped together, limited resources tightened even more as they were being used for creatures they considered unworthy of investment.

The ruined town was surrounded by two layers of fence, an inner one made of wood and some metal, and an outer one that was more of a glorified earthworks barrier. Gaps abounded in the fence, to some extent, and the earthen bulwark was just to slow escape so archers could pick off the escapees. If a concentrated effort were made at one time, when the guards were most distracted, they could clear the mound and be away, hopefully to a better location.

The ones who had chosen to undertake the attempt used every legitimate method possible to get close to the inner fence and examine it, sometimes even daring to loosen and replace certain parts, creating more than one viable egress. They had to take their time with it, make sure it was all ready. They had one chance, and only one chance.

The guards had grown lazy, burning off their bile and hate during the day and leaving themselves too tired to care about patrols. They figured no one would dare, plus the archers supposedly had a night shift. But they, too, had grown complacent and indolent. Half the time the night shift slept as well. That was what the escapees were banking on.

They chose the most likely exit, a section of wood that had detached from the surrounding metal and detritus. The hole was just large enough for the figures to slip through, doing their best to make as little noise as possible as they scaled the bulwark, which was harder than they anticipated given the slippery mud that covered the surface.

One of the last ones through rattled the clattering collection of junk that was the inner fence and sent much of it nosily crashing to the ground. That alerted the archers who were not actively sleeping. They needed little encouragement to send arrows flying, downing the ones inside the fence and just outside. They even shot one still trying to weakly scale the earthworks, pinning him to the muddy rise.

The other guards exited the camp to hunt down the escapees that had not been picked off. A few archers came, but it was mostly sword-wielding guards, rushing after the slower, more fatigued donkeys. They had a head start, but weakness and fear made that gap close with great speed. The archers took moving shots, using numbers to cover for the lack of precise aim.

Pedro was out ahead, still capable of some speed, along with a jack named Thomas, who moved a bit more slowly but could still match pace. Most of the guards had split off to bear by the wounded to the camp, but an archer that was still running let loose an arrow that sunk deep into Thomas' right thigh, sending him screaming to the ground.

They were not far from a scrubby expanse, a place with just enough cover to hide in and be lost. Pedro looked on it, then down at Thomas. “¡Ven acá!¡Rápido, amigo! ¡Van a venir dentro de poco!”

“No... ¡No puedo continuar!” Thomas tried to rise again but fell down with a bray of pain.

Pedro tried to drag Thomas with him, but another arrow hit dangerously close to him, and that sent him stumbling back. He looked on the fallen jack for a short moment before turning and running for the scrubland.

He tried, with all his might, to ignore the screaming of his name which was silenced by a sickening sound of metal stabbing flesh.

Pedro was quiet after his story, for a long while. He just toyed with Flores' little curl of a mane and tried to ignore the others. “I'm a spare foal. Cuido de mis padres... mi familia. Ya no tengo una famila más... I couldn't even save a stranger that needed me to save him. Estoy un fracasado. I am nothing.”

Vital spoke, rather faster than he seemed to intend. “You're alive. We established that. That's more important than anything else. But more than that, you're still a citizen. The nation never truly fell, and it never stopped caring about you. Do you still care for it?”

“Por supuesto. Siemre,” Pedro answered, with a soft huff.

“A living citizen is not a nothing, they're more vitally important than anything. The nation is made of citizens, you're the flesh of the body politic. Every minute you stay alive, you make up that nation. And you can peel away some of the flesh of the other nation that's feasting on our body. Les corbeaux et vautours. Surely you want to rip that Bliss fellow out of the caribou's political corpse and crush him like a grape.”

“He would make excellent sangria,” Pedro darkly muttered.

Old Timer reached out and softly patted Pedro on the arm. “We're all not right here, at varying levels. I went crazy. You hover there. And the kid, well... he's gonna keep us grounded.”

Vital softly placed his hand on Flores' body, and motioned to her. “She's our concern, our only concern. The future. A youth with a chance for a brighter tomorrow if we just stand together and get her there. Get her to the rebels, they can care for her, keep her away from the Blisses and Valles of this polluted world. They will raise her like an Equestrian, like she could have been raised if the caribou had stayed in their accursed homeland and let the cataclysm kill them.”

Pedro looked down on Flores, into her sleeping face, and he smiled. “Familia... for her, I would fight the pendejo rey venado. It is my duty, to her parents, to her. She must live.”

“It's our duty,” Old Timer said. “We all have a duty to make sure she lives. However broken and ruined we all are, if there's one thing in the wreck of our lives that matters, it's her.”

Vital dug in his pack and pulled out his book, flipping it to a page he had bookmarked. “We've used a lot of griffin things, because their steely defense against a traitorous insurgency makes them worthy of emulation. The Black-Verreaux war march, calling for partisan citizen-soldiers is a particular favorite of mine. Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons. Let an impure blood water our fields. I was very eager to water Equestria with the enemy's blood. I'm sure you understand.”

“Better than almost anyone...” Old Timer sighed.

“Aux armes, citoyens. To arms, citizens. Let's water our land with the flood from their deaths,” Vital said. He placed his hand on Fores and looked on her with adoration. “For her. Aux armes, citoyens. Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.”

Old Timer joined the motion. “For her. To arms, citizens. Let polluted blood flood our fields.”

Pedro looked on her sleeping, innocent face, and thought back on the foal that had lived a day, and no more. He gingerly placed his hand on top of the others and nodded. “For her. A las armas, ciudadanos. Que una sangre impura inunde nuestros surcos.”

Author's Note

If you dehumanization a population to the point that they have no claim on human rights, do they become actually unreal, meaning they don't count when it comes to fantasy fetishes? Thought experiment for all the Master Bliss people out there.