Dusty Rose wiped the mingled sweat and gore from her eyes with an annoyed, automatic huff. Another medic barrelled past and she hardly noticed. Around them, the wounded groaned in a ragged, disjointed choir. Some of them were going to trail off on their own. It was inevitable.
The medic from B Company called out for gauze, and Rose’s mind flew through her mental ledger. “I have a roll he can use,” she said to the soldier she’d dragged with her. “My bag, it’s in the side pocket. I need the rest. Go, I’ll need you soon.”
If he replied she didn’t hear. Her hoofs were busy binding the pony on the ground enough to move him. The orderly squirmed next to her, and she wanted to bite him.
The soldier returned and she had the orderly use his magic to lift the wounded stallion onto a stretcher and sent them both packing back towards the field hospital on the other side of the divide. Another orderly replaced him, another unicorn, but less shaky than the first. They moved on.
She was grateful that A Company had bothered to move their dead and dying away from the ridge, if only because it meant she was shielded from the storm brewing. She felt it like they a lightning rod. Insanely, she remembered one of the couriers saying something—Not even war can burn the weatherpony out of a pegasus. A thousand years of pegasi riding havoc through earthpony villages hammered behind her eyes as she treated the next pony.
Something large hit the ridge. It tore the desiccated badlands soil apart, it did to the very earth what bullets had done to these poor ponies. The earth bled in great gushes, thrown rock and sand dumped out on her makeshift bivouac. She would have cursed, but a hoof-ful of it was in her mouth and Rose laid on her side, hacking at the air. After the displaced earth came a drifting heavy fog of ash, and her eyes burned. Somehow, she’d been displaced herself. Thoughts swam haphazardly on the surface of her conscious mind.
“Celestia, which one of you is it?” she called, but the orderly couldn’t hear her. He was trying to unbury the soldier she’d just been working on. Fuck. The ridge had partially collapsed. When the hell had that happened?
She staggered forward, flapping the dust out of her mane. “Which—”
“I can’t,” the orderly bawled, turning as if just realizing she was there. “The whole side came down. I—”
“I need you to clear the air so I can fucking see,” Dusty yelled, cutting him off. “There’s nowhere better to move!”
The unicorn hesitated and then his horn lit with a harsh, ugly yellow glow as strong winds blew the ash and earth out of her eyes. Rose spat the last of it out of her mouth.
“We need to go,” said the unicorn, but she shook her head.
“Go where? The field hospital? Not before we get anyone we can. I’ll get this one.”
As soon as he was gone she tore into the landslide, pulling the wounded stallion out by his now half-destroyed uniform. The white cotton was soiled by more than blood, now. He was very dead. Grimly, she tugged him further and laid him by the others as the orderly and the now-returned soldier moved another pony on a stretcher.
Work continued. It never seemed like it would end. She had been here in the divide for hours, squatting behind this destroyed ridge, praying to the princess whatever the comissar said that the Lunar steam tanks wouldn’t roll over the rise and crush them all. Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst. She could leave! The field hospital had food. She wouldn’t die there!
She was working on another pony. Company B was falling back, the radiopony with them said so. Somepony was applying pressure while she prepared gauze.
A shadow fell over her patient and her heart hammered with terror at what it might be, but her body kept moving. She had to start wrapping. She had to stop the bleeding so she could move him to a stretcher so he could go to the field hospital so she could move to the next pony so they could go back. Her body was a machine and she was no longer in control.
Somepony landed beside her. She finished with the writhing pony on the ground and whoever was helping her helped pick him up. She grabbed her bag and came face to face with a bewildered-looking batpony a big, bright Celestian symbol around her neck.
“I-I have a letter,” she squeaked. Dusty Rose stared at her, willing herself to comprehend and move on. But the sight of a batpony not about to rip her throat out with fangs and hoofblades was too odd. She hated thinking that.
“What?”
“Letter, I have, uh, is that Corporal Silver?”
Rose shook herself. The groaning, writhing pony cried out that he was a Corporal Silver. The little batpony awkwardly laid the letter on his bloody abdomen, and before she could say a word about it those tufted ears darted under her chin and she felt her heart skip a beat as fangs flashed in her mind’s eyes. But death did not follow.
When the soldier stirred, the postmare seemed taken aback, and blinked at him for a moment before slapping her forehead in frustration.
“Uh, sorry, that’s not the right Silver. I think I misread! Lots of ponies to get to today!”
The soldier managed a strangled noise of confusion as the courier grabbed her letter and hurled herself back into the smoke-filled sky. Rose couldn’t watch her flight. She had a stretcher to carry.
Mass artillery on over the divide. It was not the first time that Rose had pondered the absurdity of trenches. Sure, she wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of being out in the open when balefire shells landed. But the war was three dimensional now, surely. Airships filled the skies, pegasi flew daring raids overhead, all of that. And yet here she sat, in a trench dugout, securing crates.
Bombardments were standard. She hardly noticed the normal intensity ones, that came everyday. But this one was different. It was in the third hour, for one. For another, Corporal Braid had swung by the dugout to offer her team his flask and left it with them.
The earth shook, knocking little rivulets of soil free. Rose pulled an errant strand of mane back and looked around aimlessly. The wounded had been moved off the line by the Regimental medic company’s vehicles, leaving her with no one to patch up and nothing to do. When was the last time she had nothing to do?
She sat down. Another shell, closer this time.
“You ever heard of the ten thousand hour rule?” asked Corporal Breeze.
She blinked at him.
“Yeah. It’s an urban legend, right? Do something ten thousand hours and you’ll be a master? Like, I get it, practice is how you get good at stuff, but the number seems a bit arbitrary.”
She liked Corporal Breeze. He was actually a riflepony from the Air Cavalry, but ponypower was low and his unit was gone anyway. He was alright, for a replacement. He offered her the flask and she shook her head. “Allergic,” she said. Braid thought he was clever, passing off his damn cocoa for booze. She hoped he returned soon.
The little pegasus gave her a sympathetic look. “Rough. And nah, there’s this science pony whose done a bunch of studies on it, wrote a book—”
“I’m sure he did. Maybe he’s even right,” she said. For some reason, despite liking him well enough, hearing his voice grated. It would have been any voice that grated. But that wasn’t his fault. Without heat, she sighed and continued. “Breeze, how do you stand being underground?”
“I could ask you the same, ma’am.”
“I’m an Earthpony. It’s earth.” She patted the ground with a hoof. “Ain’t great earth, but its earth. I had a garden before.”
“An earthpony, gardening?” asked one of the other orderlies. She laughed.
“Hey, I did other things. But yeah, I gardened. A lot, actually.”
Breeze shrugged. “I don’t like it. It’s cramped. I feel too big, which is a weird sensation for me. Not a lot of situations that I feel too big.” Somepony badly suppressed a chuckle and he rolled his eyes. “Right, whatever. But yeah. I’m doing fine. Thanks for asking.”
“Of course.” Rose closed her eyes for a moment.
Another shell. Another.
Something blew out her ear drums and she flailed about for leverage as the earth shook.Outside, in the main trench, she saw ponies pushing past, one with blood seeping down from his mane. Rose stood.
It was Braid, bleeding from a cut somewhere beneath his mane. He had none of his usual cheer. “I need to move ponies in here,” he managed before a fit of coughs took him. She didn’t bother answering. The wounded had moved themselves already, ponies caught in the fire or in the magical residue it left, their bodies perforated by the thaumic shrapnel, coalescing for only a moment into white-hot matter before returning to raw energy. She’d already laid out stretchers for such a case. It wasn’t hard to get the effected in.
Keeping the unharmed out was harder. With Braid himself injured she didn’t have anypony to back her up, and surrendered to the tide. The medical dugout was full of ponies huddling in the dusklight.
It went on like that. No more hit the trench, but no one left. The command dugout had been caved in, somepony told her, but only Braid had been inside it. He’d managed to dive into the main trench before being crushed. One pony hoped the Lunarites were getting this as well, but no one had the heart to agree with him.
Dusty Rose wasn’t sure she felt the same.
The night was a long one. She ended up posted by the dugout doorway once sentries had been posted and things had cleared up, with Braid and Breeze. The sun was hanging around the horizon, as if it were waiting for some invitation to rise.
Braid, half his head in bandages, took a sip from his flask. Actual whiskey this time, thank you, and medically prescribed at that. Technically.
“I’m off duty, and glad for it,” he said softly. “Think there’ll be a night raid on our section, flyboy?”
Breeze shrugged. “Wouldn’t know.”
“Ah, come on. Speculate. Play with me in the space.”
Breeze shook his head. Rose jumped in. “Probably not. We’re in the middle of the line. What would they gain here? If they killed us all they’d just be in the middle of the biggest trap on earth.”
“Fair,” Braid admitted.
“‘Sides,” Breeze added, “I doubt they want to fly or march at night anymore than we do. Moon or not, not a lot of light since the long eclipse.”
“They can all see in the dark, you know.”
“Bullshit,” Rose said, and let herself smile. “And you know it. I know it, for one. I treated some Lunarites who surrendered early on. They’re just normal ponies.”
“Batponies?” Braid asked.
The smile vanished. “Unicorns,” she said flatly, and raised an eyebrow at Braids own horn. He seemed about to bristle, and then shrug.
“Fair, fair.”
“Are they going to start doing that now, make the mutation rumors ‘canon’? I know the political corps…”
Braid put a hoof to his lips, and winked at her. “I suppose they might if they existed,” he said conspiratorially.
Breeze sighed. “Political corps. Commissars. Celestia help us.”
“Celestia Protects,” Braid said formally, stiffly.
“She does,” Rose echoed, much quieter.
The rumble of artillery was dying out. Another shell hit, and Breeze moved. He brought up the stopwatch he’d been cradling in one wing’s awkward grasp.
“Two minutes,” he said. “Really is leveling off.”
“Good. My infirmary is full as it is.”
They lapsed into quiet again. The rumbles faded, but didn’t go away for good.
A pony down the trench, on the other side of a collapsed section, called as quietly as he could. “Flier! Right ahead, high!”
All three of them looked up.
There, high in the sky, they all saw the winged pony. The sun had finally started to crest the horizon in earnest. In the half-light, the flier was like a gnat. The pony who had spotted them had already lugged a long gun up to the edge of the trench before Braid stashed his whiskey and hissed at him to stand down. Dusty Rose just gazed up, simple as a child, her mind absolutely blank.
The flier swayed as the wind picked up.
“A spotter?” Braid asked, she wasn’t sure who.
Breeze let out a grunt. “Probably. If they find us—”
“Yeah, I know.”
“If we fire—”
“I know!” Braid hissed again. “Celestia! Damn. Damn.”
“We have to shoot her down.”
“If we do,” Braid said, in Breeze’s face for a moment, manic. “If we do, then they’ll hit us dead on.”
“And if we don’t they’ll hit the whole regiment dead on. They have imaging spells.”
“I know!”
“Then—”
Dusty Rose blinked.
She wondered who it might be. That pony seemed a bit too careless for this world. They reminded her of the messenger pigeons old Rosewood down the street in Everfree took care of. She loved those birds, and they loved her, and there were so many that the whole street was subjected to their cooing every morning as they were let out into the sunny world—
Breeze blasted into the sky, the force of his wings displacing air making Dusty’s mane come a bit loose from her tie. She blankly watched him as he raced towards the flier.
Braid was furious and cursing.
“It’s the postmare,” she said. “The one I told you about. The batpony.”
“What?”
“The postmare,” Dusty said again, her voice faint and flat.
There was a dull thud. Up in the sky, an explosion of flak. Black expanding clouds of death. The regimental command had already seen the supposed interloper.
Breeze up above met the postmare in midflight and they tussled. He seemed to come to grips with who she was. Another boom, and another, and another, closer now. He whipped his body around into one great kick that sent the postmare hurtling down towards them.
He vanished in the flak.
The postmare pulled out of her spin before she hit the ground, and landed on the otherside of the trench. Behind her, letters torn from her back spun in the wind as they flopped down into the dust.
One landed in front of her. One landed on Braid’s face.
She took the one on his face as he sputtered and looked at it.
“It’s for Tincture,” she said. A pause. “The one over here is for a nurse in B company.”
Braid stared at her. Another letter fell on the collapsed portion and then another. They just kep coming. Across the mound of dust and broken wooden supports, two rifleponies had pulled the shellshocked postmare into the trench. Flak continued.
She picked up another and began to laugh.
“It’s for Breeze!” she said, and she opened it. Braid stared at her, and her hoarse giggle filled the whole trench.
“It’s for Breeze!”
Dusty Rose sorted through a pile of mail. They’d made her do it because the postmare was in her infirmary. Her leg was shot-through with shrapnel. Not that she wasn’t also helping.
“Why’d they give you something important if you were all on your own?” she asked evenly for the third time. “And why like this?”
“Because I’m fast and I’m good at flying at night,” said the postmare. Her name was Amaranth. Her voice was soft and pretty. “And because the captain said his runner was dead. Run over by a steam tank,” she added, helpfully.
“Mm. I suppose.”
“Yeah,” Amaranth said.
The nurse helping them look through the piles was another earthpony. Her name was Lily. She sighed to herself, and Rose wondered if she had it in her to feel awkward. The mood in the company was bleak.
“You know, it’s funny,” she said. “I’m used to lots of flower names. I’m an earthpony. But only two of us are earth ponies, and yet we have three flower names.” She offered a perfunctory smile at the postmare. “One of my neighbors had some lovely amaranths.”
“Oh? Where was that?”
Her “s” sounds were a bit harsher than normal,accented only slightly. Rose wondered at it. Had she tried to train herself to speak like a pegasus, perhaps? And when? Was even thinking about it rude?
“Everfree, before the war. Well, I lived in Everfree. I’m from a little town south of it. Buckcastle, in the Meadowlands. I was a nurse in a hospital in Everfree. I thought they would need ponies like me, if ponies got… When ponies got hurt.”
The beats of silence were awful and stupid. So she was grateful when someone ended them.
Amaranth hummed. “I’ve never been. I grew up in the south.”
“Oh, Mareway?”
“Ah, the jungle,” the abtpony replied, her ears drooping a bit. But then she brightened. “My parents were happy to see Amaranth in a flower shop when they visited Baltimare. Amaranth bloomed in Jannah.”
“What?”
“It is, ah, nothing.”
The postmare looked away from them both.
Lily looked at her, and Dusty shrugged. She had no idea. It wasn’t worth asking about. Batponies were from elsewhere. They had their own stories and their own weird beliefs. Who knew? She’d say if it was important, anyhow.
“I don’t envy your couriers,” said Lily after a moment. “This is tedious.”
“Every letter is for someone,” Amaranth said simply.
Dusty Rose thought about that. Every letter was a pony out there on the line. Or behind it. Every single one. Somewhere, somepony.
“I envy the letters. So many of them. So many ponies get letters. Some get to go home,” she said quietly. Dusty picked up another letter. It wasn’t the missive to Regimental command. She sighed. “Some of them go home away from the war. They get to go home when a pony… they get to go home,” she finished lamely.
“They do,” Amaranth agreed.
“I’d like to go home in one of these envelopes. Nice and safe and warm and ready for departure,” Dusty said. Her voice was light. “Maybe a nice postmare would drop me by my parent’s house in Buckcastle.”
“I’m not sure most postmares would take passengers, but I might for someone as nice as you, ma’am.Maybe we’ll fly away home together after all this.”
After that, quiet. Their silence remained unbroken until at last, she pulled a nice letter with prim, exact hoofwriting and let out a breath. “Found it.” She pulled the letter free.
Behind her, Rose heard Braid stepping in. She knew it was him because he coughed poliutely and she turned, letter still flopped sadly between two hoofs. “Sorry,” he said. “Did you ever find that letter?”
Dusty Rose nodded. “Right here!”
“The Colonel’s dead. We just got a runner from regimental command. I guess his letter is kind of a moot point…”
“Not at all. It still needs to get to him,” the postmare said. “Now more than ever.”
They all looked at her. She seemed… odd, suddenly. Her voice a little too clear.
“Thought the letter tellin’ the news got home before you, not with you,” Braid said mildly.
The postmare smiled at him, and then at Rose. “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate it.”
It was like she’d never been wounded. She took the letter with grace and made a little bow as she left. For a moment, a brief moment, Dusty thought she was about to turn. Her mouth fell open. What she saw…
They were all frozen in awe, unsure why they felt the way they did.
“You know.. There’s something…” Braid shook his head. “Nah. Just a weird way about her. Doesn’t matter. Sure we’ll see her again sometime.”
“Yeah,” Dusty said listlessly. “Yeah.”
The postmare had turned. And she saw a pony pale white, pale as bone, pale as the whites of your eyes when they rolled up into your dead head. Pale as the dusty earth before it tasted blood. Her eyes were hollows of ink. Not skeletal, no, not skeletal, something worse than that. No scythe, not as she’d imagined, just a lantern and a knapsack full of letters. She had not lied. She was, after all, a postmare.
Gentle admissions rang in her head, and her heart felt frozen in ice. The postmare’s smile had been so inviting. But it had also been cold. It was not a pony’s smile.
The rest of the day was a blur. Regimental command sent several runners, each more dazed and confused than the last. Something was happening to the east.
Braid came to her before dinner. The flank had been rolled up. There’d been a breach and the Lunarites had exploited it. The confusion of a shell landing in the middle of the Colonel’s forward base had kept critical support from stopping it. They were all fleeing north.
She accepted this rather numbly, not even happy to finally be going somewhere else. Orderlies helped her pack up the infirmary. The soldiers streamed past her, slow and staggering. She had no idea how long it took but it felt like hours passed. Time slowed to barely a crawl and through it all she felt the postmare’s midnight gaze following her. Her eyes hung disembodied just out of sight.
The route intensified outside. Braid swung by and tried to bully her orderlies into moving faster, but she barely noticed him until he was shaking her.
“Dusty, for Celestia’s sake! We need to go! We were the last one’s moving! The whole company is going to be encircled.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said, barely talking to him.
He cursed and dragged her, despite protestations, out of the trench. Braid barked orders at the two closest ponies to help the orderlies grab the last of the crates and load them on the wagon behind the last trench line.
Dusty Rose squinted into the dying sunlight. Where had the time gone?
“I’m not letting you lag behind,” Braid was saying. “I am getting you out of here.”
“Why are you so worried?” she asked.
“I don’t know!” he sounded frantic. “I don’t know! I have a bad feeling!”
“It’s alright,” she replied, and stopped him. Her hooves were on either side of his face. “It’s alright, Braid. Go do your job.”
He sputtered, and she smiled at him until he nodded. As soon as he was released he hurried off, and Dusty Rose took the most leisurely stroll of her life. She should be afraid, honestly. Soldiers around her were panicking. Somepony pushed by her and fell, dropping a heavy cast-iron machinegun shield, and tried to pull it out of the new divot it had made. She helped him, and he kept running. But the cart wasn’t going anywhere immediately, she reasoned. Panic wasn’t necessary.
At least, she thought this until something heavy and fast hit the ground in front of her. It was only about ten meters away, between her and the medical wagon. It leaked a strange, purplish-green gas.
She knew what that was. Now she panicked.
No mask. She pulled at her surgical mask and yelled at anypony who could hear to find alcohol and gauze, anything thick enough with alcohol could be a mask for a few minutes, run! Run as fast you can! Don’t breathe! Don’t open your eyes more than you have to!
But it was in her already. She hacked and coughed and dropped to her knees and crawled and yelled. Someone ahead of her was digging into the medical wagon. She yelled at them half-gurgled instructions on how to keep the gas out.
And as she collapsed, a gentle hoof pat her head. She looked up, eyes filled with tears and blood. The postmare smiled at her. It was a nice smile. It was peaceful, and hopeful, and she thought it had something like love in it.
“I’ve got a letter for you,” the postmare said.
