Solstice Blood

Littlepip barrels around the corner and into the darkness of the alleyway, hoping to find an escape as blood trickles down her sides from multiple gashes. In her rush, she loses her footing and slides into the wall on the opposite side. “Celestia’s titanic fucking crotchboobs!!” Her shout does nothing to help throw the raiders off of her tail, but it feels good to swear as she staggers to her hooves and starts again down the alleyway. Her pace is slower as she gasps for breath, her horn hurting from where one of the raiders managed to strike it. As she continues to try to run, a shout rings out from the entrance to the alleyway.

“She’s down here!”

Littlepip forces herself to go faster, her horn burning as she tries to summon magic again, only for it to fail and send a wild assortment of sparks down onto her face. With no way to levitate or teleport herself out, she focuses on running for the end of the alleyway, only for a group of raiders to round the corner and block her escape. She tries to stop, turn and run back the other way, but in her haste, she slips again on her bloody hooves and slides to a stop right in front of the raiders. They laugh and jeer at her as she stands back up. Turning away from them, she finds the first group of raiders that were chasing her only a few yards away.

Moving in a circle, she quickly realizes that she’s completely surrounded. Her wounds burn and slowly bleed as she continues to turn, trying to form a plan to escape these violent monsters. She doesn’t find the chance to make a plan, though, as the raiders rush in, hooting and hollering as they charge her. She tries to duck under them, but one of the raiders quickly snatches her up and throws her into the wall of the alleyway. The meaty thwack of her body smacking against the wall is joined by her scream as she collapses to the ground with a softer thud.

In an instant, two raiders are on her; one bringing their tire iron down on her right hind leg as hard as they can and shattering the bone, while the other fastball specials her horn, shattering it into little pieces. The scream from Littlepip’s mouth was earsplitting, and even forced a couple of the raiders to press their hooves to their ears. Her scream didn’t stop one of them from stomping on left foreleg hard enough to snap it. It’s all too much for Littlepip, her form going limp as the pain overwhelms her.

Not five minutes later, she wakes up, her back and legs burning with pain as she’s dragged across the ground by a pair of raiders who have ropes tied around her forelegs. Littlepip tries to kick her hind legs to no avail, and as she looks down she finds they’re also tied up. Frustrated and scared, she screams and puts her all into flailing, which only serves to make the pain worse. It doesn’t help that a raider slams a hoof into her gut, causing her to vomit up blood in an attempt to make her shut up. Several large sanguineous splotches are added alongside the increasingly long trail of blood she’s leaving from the raiders who take turns slamming their hooves into her gut as they drag her along.

Eventually, they reach their destination, the large clearing she had spotted before, where many pikes stand tall, each adorned with the head of a pony. Some of the heads are old, the flesh slowly rotting off of them, while others are much newer, including the heads of Velvet Remedy and Calamity. Every pike has a head except for the one in the center, the one she is being dragged towards right now. Standing there, next to a small altar made of scrap, is the raider priestess who had killed her other two friends, and who’s undoubtedly going to kill her. As she’s dragged towards the altar, the other raiders fan out around the array of pikes, cheering as she’s pulled along the ground.

The cheering starts to quiet down as she’s dragged onto the altar and tied down, forced to look up at the heads as the raider priestess circles around the altar several times. Once all of the raiders are silent, the priestess comes to a stop, letting Littlepip see that she is wearing “robes” made from the skin of ponies. There’s even a cutie mark clearly visible on the robe from one of the raiders’ victims. The priestess’ muddy red coat and steel gray mane are splotched with blood.

“Brothers and sisters of Blood!” the raider priestess cries out, her voice maniacal and haunting. “The winter solstice is upon us, and it is time to make our final sacrifice to Bloodstone Crown, The Raider Lord!”

“Blooooood Stoooooone!” the raiders hoot and holler, cheering wildly as they stomp loudly. “Death! Death! Death!”

“Yes!” the raider priestess screams loudly as she brandishes a bloodstained machete with a serrated edge. “Scream as we sacrifice her to our lord!”

The raiders continue to scream, howl and shout as the priestess lowers the blade to Littlepip’s throat and starts sawing. The shallow cut from the first few strokes of the machete are quickly deepened as the priestess wildly saws away with the machete.

All hope leaves Littlepip as her carotid artery is severed and blood pours from her neck. Her vision darkens into a tunnel of light as her lifeblood ebbs from her neck, then fades to complete darkness as the Lightbringer is no more.

The raider priestess continues her bloody work, sawing the machete back and forth, only encountering difficulty when she reaches Littlepip’s spine. Screaming, the priestess pulls the blade from Littlepip’s nearly headless body and swings it back down as hard as she can, severing the spine in one go. The machete doesn’t stop once Littlepip’s spine is severed and cuts the rest of the way through her neck, sending her head rolling off of the altar and onto the ground, staining it with blood as it rolls across the pool of her blood that had formed at the bottom of the altar.

The raiders burst into louder screams, many firing their guns into the air as they cheer. The priestess takes the head from the ground and carries it up to the one empty pike. As the priestess approaches the pike, the raiders quiet down again. High above the raiders, a small sliver of cloud drifts out of the way, and a tiny shaft of moonlight shines down onto Littlepip’s head as the priestess holds it up.

“Great Raider Lord Bloodstone Crown! We sacrificed this hero in your name!” the priestess yells as she looks up at the clouds. “With her head, we complete our ritual of blood! Set us free, and we shall bring carnage to the wasteland like none have seen since your regime of terror!”

The priestess raises the severed head of Littlepip above the pike and, as if on cue, thunder rumbles overhead and the small hole in the cloud closes up just as the raider priestess impales Littlepip’s head on the pike. Miles above, lightning dances across the sky and thunder roars as the raiders down below howl and scream. It takes more than a minute for the priestess to calm them down before she begins chanting.

“Oh Lord Bloodstone, greatest of the Raider Lords. Come to us in our blood, our rage and our madness!” Her voice is joined by nearly all of the raiders as thunder rumbles again above them. “Be our guide, let us be a splash of carnage across the wasteland that will echo in the minds of the weak for millennia to come!”

“Praise be Bloodstone Crown!” the raiders around the pike chorus. “Praise be the raider king!”

“Oh great Bloodstone Crown, may your thundering drums be the call to war for all raiders!” the priestess shouts as the raiders all stomp their hooves. “We will cut a bloody swath across the wasteland in your honor!”

“Blood! Blood! Blood!” the raiders scream, their howls reaching high into the air and echoing out across the land around them.

“Bloooooooooooooooooddddddddddd!” the priestess screams along with them, their voices reaching a crescendo that shatters the remaining windows in the nearby buildings. As the calling comes to an end, the priestess looks out across the raiders with her crazed green eyes and smiles. “Now we eat this bitch! Take her to the kitchen and carve her up!”

The raiders cheer, and two of the acolytes approach the altar, unbind the headless body and drag it off as the priestess stands below the severed head of Littlepip, mounted in its proper place; a bloody pike amidst the heads of the other “heroes” of the waste.