Barren Equestria

Chapter 1:

Steelheart

It was my seventh birthday today. I was happy, a rare feeling living in such a barren land. My mother was placing a freshly baked pastry on a clean white plate onto our kitchen table while my father carried two items wrapped in dusty, stained festive paper from the time my grandpa had told me about when things weren’t so bad.

He had passed away a couple of days before my sixth birthday so I wasn’t nearly as happy about that as I was about this one. My mother had been a beige Pegasus with a chocolate brown mane while my father was a Unicorn who had steel grey fur and a black mane. I was like my father, grey with black hair but had my mother`s green eyes. I was a unicorn like my dad was but sometimes I saw mom soaring through the air and wished I knew what it was like up there.

My Dad`s cutie mark was a hammer and saw crossed because he was really good at building stuff. My mother had a mixing bowl filled with batter with a stirring spoon in it as hers. I was a blank flank meaning I hadn’t found my special talent yet but I was pretty good at helping my Parents with their household jobs.

My name is Steelheart. My parents said it was because I was going to have to be very brave to live in this world. I liked my name it was pretty cool sounding and sometimes I could pretend I was a hero, Captain Steel defender of the world. I would run around with a costume my Mom made for me on my fifth birthday. I didn’t know my Parents names to me they were just mom and dad.

While I had been thinking my Dad had placed a lit candle on my birthday pastry. We all sang happy birthday like we did every year. I wondered what I should wish for this year. The song eventually came to an end and luckily I had decided what to wish for. I took a deep breath and blew out the candle in a short puff of air.

Just as the candle flickered out someone knocked on our front door loudly. My father trotted over and opened it. The instant he opened the door a loud noise rang out. My father fell to the ground as my mother screamed I screamed to I was startled by the noise and my mother screaming.

Several mean looking ponies stepped through the door holding big sticks with metal ends one was smoking from the end. The Ponies reminded me of one of the pictures from my story book Daring Do and the Sea Serpent. She had encountered Pirate Ponies and they fought with shiny swords. I wondered briefly why Pirate Ponies had come into my house but stopped when I heard another loud bang.

I saw my Mother fall to the floor. I began to cry loudly and rushed to her side. She looked like she was sleeping but I couldn’t hear her breathing.  I kept yelling for her to wake up. “Wake up Mommy! Wake up please!” I screamed.

I heard laughing coming from the Pirates I couldn’t understand why they were laughing. There was something wrong with my Parents and they were laughing at me. Why? I screamed at the pirates to stop but they only laughed harder.

I sat shaking my mother’s unresponsive hoof sobbing loudly. Suddenly there was another loud bang and a sharp pain in my back. It felt like I had been punched hard and all the air was knocked out of my lungs. When I regained the ability to breath I found I couldn’t draw breath. Everything began to lose color and grow cold I heard another bang and more pain this time in my left hoof. Eventually I couldn’t feel anything witch was good because my hand and chest really hurt and I didn’t know why.

I was thinking really slowly and stuff was getting really hard to see and hear. Eventually everything went black and I slumped over unconscious…

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The little colt slumped over on to the bloodstained floor as me and my companions continued laughing at his pathetic last moments. He was really young probably only seven or eight years old. The fact he didn’t have a cutie mark confirmed this. Mine was fitting it was a cracked skull. I was very good at smashing them after all.

One of my crew an Earth Pony named Shank yelled out to me. “Hey boss check this out I think it was the foal’s birthday!” he called. If I was a normal Pony I would be sad that a colt had been killed on his birthday right after seeing his Parents die. However I didn’t give a shit, I just laughed harder at this. I was a Pony who killed others for fun. I was born into a tribe of raiders and I was proclaimed leader after murdering my own father, who was chieftain, with a rock.

I remember that day clear as ever. It was the dead of night as I stepped into his tent with a sizeable rock. I stepped over to the form of my sleeping father and dropped it on his head. It exploded like an overripe gourd. Afterwards I made a necklace with his teeth. This was normal for our tribe for in order to ascend to leader you had to kill the current one first. I knew that one day one of my sons would poison my stew or slip a knife in between my ribs.

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My wings flapped as I flew lazily through the air. I remembered the war it ended 87 years ago. I remembered the times before that predominantly memories of my childhood friend rainbow dash. We were in the Junior Speedsters together. In my old age I couldn’t remember the ridiculous chant that Dash made my sing once when we were grown up.

That was before the war though. And our friendship had been broken long before those cursed years when then damned Ponies attacked unprovoked. She had chosen to fight against them and in the end had to nearly kill her old friend but spared her because of their previous friendship.

While remembering all the memories of her life she suddenly heard several shots ring out. She turned and flew in the direction of the noise. She eventually came into view of a small house along one of the old highways there was something off about this house and for the first time in almost her entire life, Gilda stopped to help somepony.

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My tribe mates had managed to find a good deal of bits in this house along with other things that would be useful like food and water. I suddenly heard some blood curdling screaming.

I and the rest of the bandits turned the corner of the house to see an elderly griffon standing over the Bloodied, slightly twitching Shank. His face had been disfigured by the griffon`s talons and now it seemed those talons had a new target. The elderly griffon moved much quicker than me and my group would have thought and had already taken Titus and Bones down.

That left only me and a yellow mare left. She screamed and threw her gun down causing it to fire sending hot lead tearing through my leg. She ran off down the road screaming leaving me here with the enraged griffon.

The old griffon stood above me as I groped for the Mare`s discarded weapon. A taloned foot came crashing down onto my leg pinning it down. I look up to the figure looming above me. I looked into her cold unforgiving eyes. For once in my life I was terrified. I had killed countless Ponies just because and now I was going to pay. The griffons head moved quickly and I began to scream.

                                                …

Fresh blood dripped slowly from her beak as she entered the house. Her eyes beheld a new seen of blood and death. A family of ponies had been killed by the raiders. The father was laying right by the door, the mother by the table and a small colt by her side. All was quiet in the home except for barely audible breathing.

The breathing was ragged and irregular. I walked through the room until I had found that the colt was not dead. Tears streaked his face and he lay in a pool of his and his mother`s drying blood. He had two wounds, a gunshot through his back and out his chest and another bullet wound to his left leg.

I picked up the small colt and began to walk out the door with him slung over my back. I took off into the air towards the town I lived outside that had a doctor that could save this foal`s life.