Equestria's Doom

Twilight’s weight bore heavily on Rainbow Dash’s back and she almost let herself feel tired, if only for a brief moment.

The light of the afternoon sun streamed through the autumn leaves of the forest. The forest’s floor was filled with leaves and brambles which grabbed at Dash’s hooves as she trotted alongside Fluttershy. Every so often, the silence of nature would be punctuated by a moan from Twilight or a groan from Fluttershy. Only a gentle breeze that trailed through the branches from some heaven on high was enough to soothe Dash and Fluttershy on their travels through the woods.

Their journey to Zecora’s hut through the woods hadn’t been an easy one so far. Neither Rainbow Dash or Fluttershy spoke to the other as they tried to make progress as quickly as possible. The only break which either of them let themselves take was a brief moment of rest beneath a willow tree. Dash had slept on her stomach to avoid untying Twilight from her back and Fluttershy had tended to Twilight’s needs and cleansed her of the various things she couldn’t help in her unconscious state.

Nonetheless, they had made steady progress through the woods and both ponies wondered if they were yet upon Zecora’s hut.

Dash paused for a moment to analyze the map after a brief moment of fiddling with the saddlebags she had looted from the Majesty before leaving that wreck behind forever. She managed to withdraw them without sending Twilight tumbling off her back, to her relief. Then she surveyed the map and after a brief period of analysis turned to Fluttershy.

“We should be about a half hour out. There’s a main road we can take to get there quicker that’s close to here, but there might be a little demon risk.” explained Rainbow Dash.

Fluttershy brushed some leaves from her mane before speaking. “I don’t know how safe it is to keep transporting her like this. We need to take any path we can to speed things up.”

Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy both proceeded to trudge through the woods and get closer to the path.

Fluttershy gasped loudly and tapped Dash’s shoulder. “Dash, look!”

Rainbow Dash followed her gesture and her eyes widened.

Several other ponies were visible through the foliage, though they were too distant for Dash to make out any distinguishing features.

“Hello!” called Fluttershy loudly. “Our friend needs help!”

The ponies failed to respond and Dash frowned in confusion. She then consulted the map again and noticed that the ponies were heading to the location marked as Zecora’s hut.

Dash pushed aside a branch with her hoof to speak to Fluttershy. “We need to see what this is.”

Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash, Twilight in tow, pushed through the remaining bushes and were in full view of the main road they had sought to reach earlier. They could see both the ponies from before and a far larger crowd.

After a brief moment, it struck them why nopony had responded to their cries.

Dozens of ponies stuck out as they trodded along the wide breadth of the road, nearly each one with some form of bandage or wrapping around a limb. Sleds and wagons filled with the wounded and dead were pulled behind stallions weeping from exhaustion. Parents carried foals and fillies missing limbs and eyes, some of whom sobbed from the extent of their injuries, while others turned their gaze towards the skies with drooling mouths.

Rainbow Dash felt a sudden twinge of nausea ripple through her stomach when she noticed that some of the sleds and wagons were so full that the ponies inside were literally stacked on top of one another in writhing, sobbing tangles of limbs and manes. One of the wagons was close enough for her to smell a ghastly scent of blood, urine and worse things than she cared to name from within the compressed mass of bodies.

Despite herself, she felt a sense of relief that she couldn’t recognize any of the wounded or dead ponies.

A cry came from her left and she turned to observe the scene.

“We-we’ve been walking for hours!” sobbed a red unicorn pulling a wagon behind her.

Dash took a moment to observe the unicorn and let out a small scream when she realized that the unicorn’s original color wasn’t red, but in fact white. Small patches of her original white fur showed through the streaks of gore and blood that coated most of her body. Her left eye had been scratched out and the filthy wound writhed with maggots.

The unicorn collapsed in her reigns and began to loudly shriek with her hooves on her head.

A pony that Dash guessed was her husband sat up from the bed of the wagon that she was pulling. “We’re close, dear. Just...just keep going, we’ll get there soon.”

“Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!” screamed the mare. “My eye hurts, my legs are…”

As her tirade continued, Dash felt a sudden pulse of anger and stepped forwards to confront the stallion.

She grimaced and her words came out as an angry snarl. “Hey buddy, why don’t you take a turn? She’s injured and tired-”

Dash stopped in her tracks when she realized the stallion had no legs.

They had been reduced to bloody stumps that were crudely clotted with wads of newspaper and toilet tissue. The stallion looked at her with an open mouth for a brief moment and then shut his jaw.

Dash began to cry tears of her own as the wails of the mare grew louder. “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t realize-”

“It’s okay.” said the stallion. “I know what it looked like from where you couldn’t see this. My name is Arrow Head, by the way.”

Rainbow Dash nodded and her tears stopped. Her lip trembled before she started talking. “What’s going on? Why is all of this happening?”

“We all missed the last refugee caravans to Canterlot.” said the stallion in a defeated tone. “Word got around that Zecora and a few other ponies were treating folks down at her hut, so we all started making our way down there.”

“What do you mean the last caravans?” spat Rainbow Dash. She felt her heart pound in fury at the idea of all of these ponies, all of these children, wives and husbands, being abandoned in a time of war.

“They had to stop sending them down to get us because it got too dangerous. The last soldiers out just told us all good luck and flew off with the last couple carts full of children.” explained Arrow Head in a voice that grew softer and softer as he spoke.

Rainbow Dash noticed that the mare beside her had stopped sobbing. She took a moment to reassuringly stroke her mane and then withdrew her hoof to find it slick with blood.

Fluttershy trotted past her and briefly checked the mare’s vitals.

“She’s gone.” she said in a quiet, defeated tone.

Rainbow Dash turned back towards the legless stallion in the wagon’s bed and said the first, the only words that came to her mind. “I’m sorry.”

Arrow Head shook his head. “None of the children made it. I saw them swarm the carts and rip them into pieces in mid-air. First time I wet myself since I was a little kid.”

Fluttershy gasped. “Carts full of children-”

“They burned them, threw them out while laughing, did everything you can think of to them. Half this shit soaking my fur probably isn’t even mine.” muttered Arrow Head in a voice now so low that Rainbow Dash struggled to even hear it.

“How many more-” she started.

Arrow Head’s eyes had grown blank and his head fell back to hit the wagon’s bed.

“Fluttershy!” squealed Dash.

Fluttershy trotted up slowly and checked his vitals with a frown. “He’s gone, too.”

“What. Is. THIS!” howled Rainbow Dash as she squeezed her eyes shut.

In the darkness, Dash could feel something pulsing. Something she had never felt before. It felt like a helix of raw energies surging through her heart, a wildfire that threatened to consume her very soul, a primal sensation that ignited her nerve endings and sent her brain into a frenzy of emotion.

The images continued to molest her mind as she opened her eyes and shut them over and over again.

A dead filly missing its eyes fell from the back of an overflowing wagon and was trodden underfoot by the flowing stream of blank-eyed refugees.

Two lovers shared sex in a pool of blood beside a pile of bodies abandoned at the side of the trail.

A mother with a bandage wrapped around her head was being led by her sweating, panting filly with a single hoof.

More and more wagons of bodies, some of them sobbing in pain and others already dead, stretched off into the distance in a seemingly endless parade of horror.

Spots began to form in front of Dash’s vision and she felt her breathing grow faster and faster. A sensation that she was lifting out of her body, that she was no longer Rainbow Dash, overtook her and she embraced the temporary numbness. Her limbs felt like blocks of ice and she found it hard to move her legs. The sound of her heartbeat pounded in her ears and drowned out the cries of wounded children meandering down the trail.

Fluttershy whispered in her ear. “We have to keep going, Rainbow Dash. We can’t give up.”

Rainbow Dash took a slow, steady breath and everything snapped back to normal. She turned her mind from the horrors of the trail of refugees and focused her attention solely on Twilight.

“They’re coming!” shrieked a mare from behind her.

Everypony on the trail stopped moving as if some remote was coordinating their actions.

They all turned to face the skies and a chorus of screams broke out. Rainbow Dash followed their gaze and let out a cry of her own.

A batlike swarm of demons was pushing down from a cloudbank towards the refugees at breakneck speed. Dash could see the glimmer of their claws in the afternoon sun and the sharp, triangular profiles of their fangs shining in their mouths. Green fire burned in their eyes and they howled as they shot down towards the refugees.

The refugees on the trail began to scatter. Parents scooped up sobbing children, while some entirely abandoned their offspring to writhe in terror on the trail. Dash noticed a mare simply stare at the oncoming swarm with empty eyes and void herself like a young child in mindless fright.

Rifles from the soldiers in the crowd cracked and several of their number dropped, but it still wasn’t enough to keep the swarm at bay.

“Dash, RUN!” yelped Fluttershy.

Dash barreled forwards as quickly as she could. She stepped over crying, abandoned children curled into terrified balls. Wagons of ponies had been left behind by the ones pulling them and the ponies inside began to plead for help.

Rainbow Dash made the mistake of looking at one of the wagons for longer than a brief moment. She counted at least eight heavily wounded ponies inside.

One of them pointed a hoof at her. “You can’t leave us,” whimpered one of the mares.

“Do something, anything, please just hurry!” pleaded a stallion with a bleeding stump for a left hind-leg.

Fluttershy ran up to the cart when Dash put a hoof on her shoulder. “Don’t even bother. Just look.”

Fluttershy’s chest began to heave with sobs as she saw three more carts loaded with wounded sitting abandoned on the trail.

A brief amount of hope was restored when Dash noticed the amount of carts that hadn’t been abandoned. Even where many had been simply left, other ponies had stepped up and pulled them as hard as they could, veins bulging along their foreheads and oceans of sweat dampening their fur.

Rainbow Dash joined the drunken stampede of the other refugees as the swarm grew closer and closer. Cries of help and shrieks of terror sweeped the crowd as fireballs began to rain down. They exploded in plumes of green magic that stuck to the ground like tar and some unlucky ponies were caught in their fire, letting out wails of suffering impossible to conceive of as they died.

“No, no, NO! I’m not gonna die! Not like this!” yelled Rainbow Dash.

Her teeth mashed together in exertion. She could feel beads of sweat flying off of her mane and her nostrils flared furiously as she sucked in air to maintain her furious pace. Her heart once again pounded as if it was going to tear apart the walls of her chest itself. Twilight’s riggings on her back threatened to break under the sudden strain she put on it, but it still held sturdy through her charge. Even Fluttershy was forgotten in her single-minded sprint towards a finish line that was simply too far off for her to make in time.

Then she stopped moving entirely and her jaw fell open.

It was suddenly there, in the middle of the trail.

Ponies streamed around its massive boots while others yelled in fright and others still uselessly battered its legs, mistaking it for a demonic aggressor.

The sun reflected off of his visor as it tilted its head skywards. Green armor glinted in the sunlight and titanic brown boots supported the gigantic, trunk-like legs of the bipedal creature. Rainbow Dash paused while she remembered where she had previously seen this mass of green armor and white skin brimming with impossibly thick layers of tightly bound muscles and bulging veins.

At once, all of the demons in the swarm turned their attention from the crowd and towards the mysterious beast.

“The Slayer,” breathed Rainbow Dash in relief. “We’re saved.”

The Slayer launched himself into the air by swinging on a tree branch and flinging himself skywards. He soared through the air like a green missile and seized one of the demons, ripping its wings off and sending it to the ground in a pile of its gore. His fist swung out and smashed the skulls of three more demons into a briney paste that rained from the sky along with the deceased demonic corpses.

The other demons in the swarm flocked to the now-falling Slayer. He simply grabbed another demon and crushed its head, using its body as a platform to reach the next demon.

A red blade flickered out from his hand suddenly and a dozen of the demons fell from the sky dead.

Only ten more remained and he swung from demon to demon like some great, heroic ape, crushing their skulls as he went. Each one fell to the ground and died from the speed and intensity of the fall.

He slammed back down on the ground with a titanic, metallic thud and a loud squish as he grounded the demons underneath his boots.

Various ponies in the refugee crowd began to cheer with an insane intensity. Several mares ran up and began to hug and kiss his gigantic legs. Many began to walk up to him with praises and offers of thanks.

But as soon as the Slayer had appeared, he was gone, leaving a confused but nonetheless grateful swarm of refugees in his wake.

Rainbow Dash reeled from the sudden barrage of action and took a moment to catch her breath. She turned around to see that Fluttershy was okay as she emerged from cowering under a nearby bush.

She took a shaky breath in an attempt to calm herself. “Only a few more minutes and we’ll be at the hut, Fluttershy.”

The pair joined the steady trickle of refugees on the path to Zecora’s hut.