All Roads Lead Home

Chapter Two:
Balefire Heart

“Try to get a better understanding of things before you make your judgment.”

The ominous beam of light emanating from within the city overpowered the few evening rays of the sun that broke through the ceiling of grey. Its glow bathed the area in a subtle cyan tint. The shadow of Stalliongrad loomed further over us with each hoofstep forward. Sea Mist snuggled deeper into her collar and turned her face away from the biting wind. The air was laden with the tang of sulfur; there had been a battle here recently. Instead of bodies, we were faced with empty homes and the barren expanse of white that crunched under our hooves, punctuated by the occasional small mound. Our winter wonderland was quiet except for the light howling of the wind, like the cries of long dead ponies. The stillness of the suburb was attempting to coax apprehension out of what little of my nerves were left.

I didn’t like it.

Sea Mist began to walk ahead of me, humming a tune. “I don’t know why you’re so on edge about this place. There’s nothing here.”

The detector on my bracer beeped; my spine crawled. I grabbed the mare’s collar and yanked her back. She fell onto her side with a surprised yelp.

“What was that for?!” she cried. Ignoring her, I held up my foreleg, sweeping it back and forth across the terrain. The beeping on my detector accelerated from rapid pulses into a constant tone. I knelt down and squinted at the space ahead of me. The wind stopped at a sharp line in the snow, only a few steps ahead.

I reached into a pouch on my vest, shifting the uncomfortable weight of the rifle onto my back. I pulled out a hoofful of rusty bolts and tossed them ahead of me. They silently connected with the invisible threshold and they vanished with small ripples in the air. Ethereal waves of shimmering gold began sheeting off, moving outwards from the anomaly’s border until they faded into nothingness. The weight on my chest lifted.

“Speak of the serpent’s name.”

“Woah…” Sea Mist stared at the waves as if they were a dream. She closed her eyes and breathed in as the waves washed over her and vanished somewhere behind us. The mare grinned.

From the middle of the wave a tiny glowing light appeared and drifted to rest on her nose. Sea Mist scrunched her muzzle and stared down at it, holding her breath in frozen fright. It was a butterfly with a pair of ornate evershifting wings.

“An anomaly.” I started. The bug's wings wrapped around my companion's face as if it were hugging her. “And it seems to like you.”

The mare held her breath. Sweat dripped down her forehead. “W-what?”

“It’s just wild magic.” I held out a hoof to the butterfly. “Don’t worry though. This one isn’t dangerous.”

It fluttered onto my open hoof, and wandered around a bit before resting in one spot. Sea Mist let out a sigh and wiped her brow. “You’re pretty good at this stuff.”

“It’s just luck.” I gently tossed the butterfly into the air. The anomaly vanished almost immediately into the threshold just as mysteriously as it came. I followed it and gestured to Sea Mist to do the same. “Come on Blue. Just don’t lose your head here.”

I stepped through the invisible threshold and, in the blink of an eye, the world around us flashed between our void of stark white and the afterimage of another. One blink brought me to a crowd of ponies thrashing and screaming. Another blink back to the misty present. The clashing realities strained my senses. I closed my eyes to escape the continuous shifting blur of color that enveloped me.

It’s not really happening, remember…

I forced my eyes open.

“What's going on? You’re seeing this, right? T-they’re alive!” Sea Mist’s breath quickened and her horn began to glow.

I grabbed her face and pulled it towards me. “No magic. Echoes hate that.”

“T-then what?” Sea Mist was shaking uncontrollably. Her wide eyes darted sporadically from side to side and she blinked rapidly.

“Relax. Just…” I bit my tongue. “Breathe.”

Her expressions didn’t change but she forced a weak smile. “I-I can try.”

“Good.”

The town roared with sound and motion. Ponies were running through us, crying fillies being dragged behind them, all fleeing from a horde of large mutated beasts chasing after them.

Dirty white fur covered their long bodies from head to tail. Their slender legs resembled something closer to rock than flesh. Three sets of webbed, clawed paws propelled them to blinding speeds, kicking up snow and rocks, as they dashed towards their prey. The mutants’ mouths were wide and salivating as they lunged at the older ponies and children falling behind the pack. I covered my ears as bullets ripped past me and through the mutants before they landed.

“Fucking denos!” a mare shouted behind me.

She was… a zebra? A zebra mare dressed in a plate carrier over a green jacket. The mare led a group of other armed ponies, all firing on the denos coming at them.

“Haki!” one of the ponies hollered over the chaos. “There’s still fillies and colts in the school!”

“I got it!” She pulled out a small, semi-transparent object from her jacket and smashed it on the ground. It burst into white spores that quickly encased Haki’s body completely. “Now don’t shoot me!”

“No promises!” one of the stallions responded.

As she sprinted past, I got a glance at the patch on her vest: a yellow radioactive sign.

“I thought zebras were all evil?” Sea Mist glared in bewilderment.

“Not all of them,” I snapped. “Now come on!”

We bolted after Haki, who was busy fighting off the few denos that got past the flurry of lead that protected her. The spores on her coat contorted to areas where the mutants clawed at, sparking on contact. Haki still whined at each hit, but no scars or marks were left.

She pulled off one of the two pipes that hung from her vest and ripped the tab on top, which made a tearing sound as it began shooting out a shower of sparks. Haki tossed the grenade behind her as she dove into one of the school’s front windows. The resulting concussion tore at the surrounding area indiscriminately. Shrapnel, dirt, glass, and blood rained down on her from the explosion. She let out a groan and laboriously pulled herself onto her hooves.

The mare drew her pistol and began meticulously checking each room for hostiles. The noise of the stampede outside was deafening. Haki gently pushed open each of the doors before thrusting her pistol in. Many of the rooms proved to be empty, though the fourth revealed a shivering, huddled mass of fillies and colts. They could not have been more than three or four years old. Haki’s face softened and she holstered her gun.

“Hey kids.” The young ponies trembled in fear at the unfamiliar zebra. The young ponies snuggled closer together when Haki extended her hoof. “No need to be scared. I'm gonna get you out of here, okay? Does that sound good?”

A few nodded slowly. Haki’s ears perked up at a strong set of steps echoing towards the room. She swung a punch towards the unicorn stallion who entered the doorway.

“Woah, easy! Same team, remember?” he shouted while dodging.

The zebra rolled her eyes. “Why the fuck are you here?”

“Can’t let you have all the glory.” Haki blankly stared. “I cleared the back alley so we can get them out of here.”

“Fine.” She glanced at the children. “Come on kids, let’s get you guys out of here.”

They followed behind the pair, a few hugging the stallion’s legs to keep some distance away from the zebra.

Suddenly, a deno prowled through the back door. The mutant burst in, a flash of white, like a winter cloud, smashing into the zebra’s head first. Pistol flew out of her mouth and clattered across the floor, away. Deno’s claws deftly went around Haki’s armored parts and into the flesh. A scream, floor tiles painted crimson. She wasn’t dead yet, screaming her lungs out and fighting back, one punch at a time. spun around and bucked the mutant off her, sending it crashing into one of the rooms.

“Run!” The fillies and colts didn’t object to the command. They sprinted as fast as they could, out the back door and up the alley.

Haki pushed herself to her hooves. She grabbed her gun off the ground and stumbled to the room with the deno. At the mere sight of Haki, the creature thrashed and flailed wildly between the desks. Haki braced her body on the door’s frame, leveled her pistol, and unloaded into the creature. The classroom exploded into a crimson mess. The pistol clicked repeatedly, signaling it was empty even as she continued to pull the trigger. She dropped the gun on the floor and grabbed her side, gasping for air.

“You good?” came the stallion’s voice from behind her. The mare’s face was turning pale.

“What do you think, smartass?” Haki scowled. “Let’s get out of here.”

The stallion punched her, sending her sprawling into the room. She gasped, landing on the mutant’s bloodied corpse. “Why?! What the fuck did I do to you?”

“These denos weren't a problem 'til your striped ass showed up!” He levitated the pistol off the ground and reloaded it.

“Are you dense!?”

“I can see through you. You don’t care about these ponies!” Haki screamed as he fired a shot into her hip. “You just revel in our… anguish! All that power from playing the ‘hero’. Drop the act, you striped whore!”

She spat blood into the stallion’s face. He pinned her to the floor, pressing his hooves to her throat, his face twisted in rage. Haki contorted her body, throwing lame punches at the assaulter's chest trying to push him off. The disheveled stallion leaned forward to glare at her, grinding his teeth together. A large grin crossed his face as Haki’s body began to violently convulse.

R I P

The sound reverberated through the building as Haki pulled the stallion into a tight embrace and gave a bloody grin. A muffled hiss came from between them. He assaulted her face with a flurry of blows. “Let go!”

“I’m sorry.”

I threw myself around Sea Mist as the room erupted in smoke and shrapnel. I closed my eyes and held my breath, waiting for the heat that never came. A chill washed over my neck, and I reached my hoof back to wipe at the meltwater that had dripped upon me. I opened my eyes to look around at the frosty present.

“Shit…”

What was left of Haki wasn’t even enough for a skeleton. Chips of bone marrow, a femur with some charred cloth stuck to it, and a skull cratered just above the eye socket with a missing jaw were the only parts that were left recognizable. After everything, she deserved a clean burial, but I would have needed a bucket to bury the mess that was left.

“What are you doing?” Sea Mist asked as I reached for the skull.

“Old customs, I guess you’d call it. You mind?”

Sea Mist didn’t reply, but I really wasn’t asking for approval. I tried to grab the skull as gingerly as I could, and managed not to widen any of the cracks as I hefted it off of the charred floor.

“What are you doing here, stalker? You know we aren’t allowed to be here, don’t you?”

Silence. Of course the skull wasn’t going to talk back to me. That didn’t mean I wasn’t right.

Without another word, I trudged out of the building. Exhaustion seeped into my veins, and I wasn’t sure whether it was fatigue or aftershock from seeing...

Snow.

I blinked, then shook my head. Flakes drifted from a leaden sky like ash particles, and my eyes followed an errant speck on its uneven descent as I tried to collect myself. Onward drifted the snowflake, twisting in one direction, then another, until it finally settled on a small pile of scraps: bits of cloth and tiny…

“Fuck.”

It wasn’t enough. Haki had been good — even better than me — and…

Nopony deserved anything, objectively and philosophically speaking. I’d like to believe I wasn’t naive or delusional enough to think otherwise. But for that moment, my eyes burned as my brain screamed in raw anger about the injustice of it all.

Stacked like snow. Everything she’d done…

What a stupid fucking stallion. It’s been two hundred years. Why couldn’t the war just die already?

I gazed into the skull’s eye sockets, then at the pile of postmortal detritus. Snow settled on my mane and bled down into my scalp, and I stood there, staring at the pile, skull still clutched in my shaking hoof.

“What are you doing?” Sea Mist piped up.

I didn’t have an answer for one second. Two. Three. I exhaled my hot dismay then, silently, I made my way across the ruined asphalt and set the sku—no, Haki—on top of the pile.

“Giving her a final watch,” I pressed my lips together into a tight line and turned towards her. “And a better view.”

Sea Mist’s face paled. “I...oh, Celestia, that isn’t…”

“Yeah.” The melting snow was making my mane sag, and I rubbed it out of my eyes as I stared at her. “You can’t change the past, but… I really wish I could.”

Sea Mist bit down hard on her bottom lip. Her puffy eyes were growing misty.

“Blue, she chose to watch over them, you know. That was her call.” Briefly, I turned to look back at the skull. “She did everything she could, and the world still spit in her eye, so I figured I’d cut her a break. Help her out.”

Sea Mist sniffed and hid her face from me, but didn’t say anything. The impulse to rest my hoof on her head struck me, and I almost gave in but pulled away at the last minute. I gave her a head pat instead; it was all I was capable of. She whimpered into her hooves. It had probably been ages since somepony had tried to comfort her like this.

“Nothing else but forgotten echoes here,” I offered. “You gonna be okay?”

The answer was obvious: no. Sea Mist looked up at me and gave a nod of assent.

Good enough for the moment.

“Okay…umm.” I pulled away from her and turned back to the building. “Let’s leave this place.”

Together we headed towards the shining blue beam in the sky. The sight made me feel nervous. After all this time, what if everything’s different? I shivered at the thought.

Sea Mist tried to return to her cheery humming from earlier, but it was much more somber this time. The notes sounded more like whimpers, the cadence sporadic. Eventually, she dropped the act altogether. “Wildcard...”

“Yeah, Blue?”

“What’s a stalker?” She croaked.

I let my shoulders slump. “You wanna continue talking about that?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Sea Mist tried to hide behind her short mane.

“No, it’s not…” I sighed. “I was just wondering why you care about it.”

“Well, you called Haki that.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Shit. I thought about the best way to explain it. The gears in my head beat to the hollow rhythm of our hooves in the snow. It echoed into the barren expanse of...

Nothing. There was nothing to describe it. My ears dropped.

“Stalkers are just a bunch of louses. Searching for freedom from all…”

I gestured at the howling wind and frozen wasteland around us.

“This. To escape themselv—”

I choked on that word until my face bled with heat. I practically hacked my lungs out. Sea Mist put out a hoof to help but I pushed it away. My ribs ached and whined at my answer. I ripped my hip flask from its pouch and slammed back a shot, letting the sweet liquid bite back at not only the coughs but my mouth as well.

“They’ll never find it. All that’s theirs is behind the barbed wire of that damn city.”

Sea Mist tilted her head to the side, wide eyed.

“I’m sorry. None of this gonna make sense to your sheltered ears, but one day, you may understand.”