“Sky! Sky, come on man, listen to me, wake up already will you?!”
His whole head pounded, feeling like someone had shoved a knife through his skull and left it there, the whole world spinning around and he felt like he was falling.
He couldn’t help but groan, his vision swimming with color and shapes as he tried to move, seemingly only fumbling on the ground.
“Oh thank Faust. You’re alive. I didn’t want to get stranded in this fucking forest by myself.”
He slowly calmed down, his heavy breathing slowly, something he didn’t even realize he was doing up till then. He was laying on his side, he realized, wrapped up in something soft, but the ground itself was hard, rough, and uncomfortable. He groaned again, shutting his eyes again to try and stop the world from spinning.
“Hey, hey! Don’t pass out on me again man!”
“I’m fine Amber, I’m awake.” He managed to get out through grit teeth, blinking his eyes a few times to regain his proper vision. He lay there for a few moments more, eyes shut in pain before attempting to move again. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”
“You saying that repeatedly doesn’t inspire my confidence.” Amber Jem stood over him, looking down at him in concern. “And while I’d love for you to rest up here…” The earth pony glanced over his shoulder, worried scowl on his face. “...We kinda need to move, now. Like now, now. Can you stand?”
Sky became vaguely aware of an orange glow in the background, flickering light bouncing off the thick overgrowth, the sound of crackling and burning growing louder.
“Where… where are we? What happened?” He managed to groan out, his hooves attempting to push him up off the ground but he stumbled, leaving Amber to catch him before he hit the ground again. The parachute silk underneath him was muddied and torn, he realized, the nylon cables stretched all across the ground and strung up the nearest tree.
“Everfree forest. The damn gunner got our engine. We kicked his ass right back though. I watched them spiral and explode before I had to bail out myself. I don’t know what the hell that bomber ws carrying, but it lit up this whole forest.” Amber wrapped a leg around him, stabilizing him on his feet. “There, you can stand at least. Do you think you can walk?”
“So I… so I did get him after all.” Sky chuckled, shaking his head.
“Heh… Yeah, yeah you did man. You riddled him with holes, lit his engine on fire, I saw. They got us back though. Can you walk?” Amber asked again, glazing back towards the encroaching fire. “Anything broken?”
He tried all his legs, wings, neck… “I think so. I think I can walk. Thank you…”
Amber stepped forward, and Sky did the same, slowly walking forward until Sky felt well enough to walk without Amber’s support, the two of them slowly separating as they stepped over roots and rocks.
“Thank Faust I managed to find you in this forest before the fire reached you. Thankfully we weren’t too far apart.” Amber said after a moment. “I managed to bring the Dice down safely in a clearing just ahead. Glad my earth-pony resilience kicked in when I actually needed it for once, otherwise we’d both be dead now.”
The tall trees and dark shadow slowly thinned out gradually, the orange sunset sky slowly making itself visible, in the distance the sounds of flack and battle, the sky in the distance of Canterlot lit up by searchlights and tracer fire.
“Looks like we’re missing the party.” Amber remarked, chuckling to himself. “You think they’ll miss us?” He stopped to wait for Sky to catch up. “You still good?”
The pegasus nodded silently, stopping for a moment to rest and catch his breath. “I’m more worried about if anyone saw us when we went down, and where we crashed.”
“We can hope. But either way…” He glanced in the direction of Canterlot. “...I don’t think we’ll be picked up for a while.”
“Well, the fire might be a good beacon.”
They resumed their walk, Amber occasionally glancing back at the spreading fire, but joined Sky as they finally cleared the forest, emerging at the crest of a hill.
“...Damn.” Sky breathed. “Is that..?”
“The Castle of the Two Sisters? I believe so.” Amber gestured to his left. “Come on, I brought her down over here. Watch out for the ravine though.”
“Ravine…?”
To call it a ‘castle’ in this state was a bit misleading. ‘A pile of misshaped rocks’ would be more apt. From the outside, it could hardly be recognized as a castle at all, just overgrown shapes and crumbled towers that looked like nothing more than a small rocky mountain from a distance.
“Well, here we are. Or what’s left of her at least.” It was a sad thing, to see the aircraft you’d served on for the past two months crashed and crumpled, the smell of leaking gasoline and creaking metal all that remained of the aircraft you’d been in only minutes before. “Lets see if that survival kit survived the crash…”
It was clear the Defiant had come down hard, a large gash in the ground pointing a large gash right toward where the aircraft finally came to a rest. The right wing lay a few feet away from the rest, separated from a tree impact, the rest of the fuselage strewn in bits and pieces across the clearing. The white-painted text of Dice Roller lay stained with mud and barely visible, the four kill marks along the edge of the windshield almost torn away. The rear turret stood still, guns somehow still facing skyward, bullet holes visible snaking across the glass. Sky shuddered, wondering how he ever survived those.
“Alright. Here it is.” Amber had stuck his head in through a hole in the fuselage, pulling out a bright orange box. “The inflatable life raft is still in here, though with a big gash in it. I don’t think we’ll be needing that though…”
Sky helped Amber pull the box free of the twisted metal of the camo-painted aircraft skin, placing it down on the kicked up dirt and undoing the latches, tossing the top away and dumping out all the contents.
“A few first-aid kits, bandages, some quick rations, a flare gun, a knife, a fire starter kit… and a pistol. With one reload.” Amber said, sifting through the contents.
“Do you thin-”
A loud howl echoed through the forest, seemingly coming from every direction, loud enough that Sky attempted to cover his ears before it disappeared as suddenly as it happened, the sounds echoing through the forest. The Pegasus and Earth pony each gave each other quick glances, before both took off running.
“What the hell was that!?” Sky hissed, watching as Amber shoved everything in the crate and took off after him.
“Timberwolves!” The crate rattled on Amber's back as they ran away from the crashed aircraft. “Let’s just say we shouldn’t be standing out in the open!. I saw a bridge over the ravine, this way!”
Sky made the quick mistake of glancing back as another howl sounded through the forest, spotting several dark shapes just inside the treeline, and he knew for sure they were watching them. One burst out from the underbrush, flames licking across it’s back as it dashed towards them. It didn’t manage to get close, it's frame crumbling around it and it collapsed into a pile of flaming debris, but more quickly emerged to follow it.
“Let me guess, they’re not supposed to be on fire?”
They reached the bridge, nothing more than wooden planks and some wood, and neither of them paid any thought to how old this bridge was, or if it would even be able to support their weight.
The faded path led right up to the front wooden door of the castle, one of the heavy doors ajar, holes covering it's whole surface. Amber shoved it open enough to just for both of them to squeeze through, the whole thing creaking and shuddering as it opened.
Once inside the relative safety of the building, both of them stopped to catch their breath, panting and wheezing as they leaned against the cold stone walls for a moment, Amber tossing the box onto the floor.
“You got a weapon?” He asked the pegasus, who was still huffing against a wall, who shook his head. “Here. Knife.”
He slid it across the stone brick to him, the pegasus picking it up as he looked back through a hole in the door, sighing. “...Fuck, there’s quite a number out there. What did you say these things were?”
“Timberwolves. Are they crossing the bridge?” The earth pony stood up, the pistol in hoof, coming to stand next to Sky near the door.
“Not yet… Fuck I should’ve kicked it over or something after we’d crossed.” He groaned. “What are these things?”
“They’re like some kind of golem, I think is the consensus. They generate in the Everfree. Apparently we don’t know how or why.”
“Well that's just great. We’re fighting a horde of magical leaf-monster things. We got anything to make a fire?”
“Well, there’s that fire starter kit. But I think that’s for, like, campfires. Good luck finding anything to burn in here anyway.”
“Aaaaaagh.” He groaned. “Anywhere to hide?”
“All exits seem to be blocked, but go ahead and look if you really want.”
“No point. This place is broken enough as it is.” He gestured to the handgun. “How much is in that thing?”
“Seven. Two magazines. So fourteen total.”
“You think that’ll be enough to scare them off?” He glanced out the door again, seeing the dark shapes slowly make their way towards the castle. The sun had gone down now, the only light the now immense burning light from the roaring wildfire, a large column of smoke visible billowing into the sky even against the black night.
“We can hope.”
The two stepped away from the door, slowly backing up till they were hidden behind a pair of pillars of stone in the center of the room, hidden from view. After a few tense moments, they could hear the wolves reach the door, clawing at the wood and shoving against the heavy door, the wood not budging.
“Maybe if we just stay quiet for a few minutes they’ll go away?” Whispered Sky, biting his lip and trying to slow his pounding heart.
Amber opened his mouth to say something, but before he could a familiar sound could be heard in the distance, growing louder. The deep rumble of an aircraft engine.
“The flare gun! Where is it?”
“Here!” Amber fumbled with it for a moment before tossing it, the pegasus managing to expertly catch it. “Think you can fly up to the roof and shoot this off before they leave?”
Sky gave his wings a few experimental flaps, the joints still stiff and sore from the crash, but they seemed to be working enough, and his gave his pilot a short nod before taking to air. He had to weave in between a few fallen beams and ancient glass mosaics, emerging from a hole in the roof. He couldn’t see the plane above him in the smoke choked sky, but he could hear it close by. He pointed the gun up, aimed in a random direction and pulled the trigger. The green light momentarily blinded him as it shot into the sky, the star shell arcing into the sky and illuminating the whole area, the green light contrasting with the bright orange shooting off the forest fire.
Now the only hope was that the aircraft actually saw it.
“Oh, they did not like that!” A loud crash could be heard from below. “Might want to get back down here Sky!”
Another crash, Sky diving down just in time to see a Timberwolf burst through the rotting wood of the front door, Amber cussing and firing off two shots, the bullets zipping through the wolves like paper, crumpling into piles of leaves and twigs. One screamed as it fell, two more breaking through the door to replace them.
Sky managed to dive down off the roof, slashing through the leg of one and swiping at the other, watching the first one stumble and the second turn to growl at him, before a bullet shot through it’s head, exploding into splinters.
The rumbling returned, the plane flying low overhead, obscuring the sound of gunfire as yet another wolf died to bullets, laying on top of the former bodies of the rest of its pack.
“These guys just don't want to let up, huh?” Amber remarked, kneeling next to one of the pillars as Sky landed next to him.
“How much do you have left in that?”
A third hole in the door now burst open, the Timberwolf charging towards them. It sped over the bodies of it's pack, leaping into the air and diving on the two of them. Amber’s gun cracked twice, both bullets grazing the creature in the air. It stumbled, crashing to the ground, sliding into a pile of debris behind them. Before it even had the chance to get up, Sky shoved his blade into its head, watching as the green magical light faded from its eyes.
“Well, one now. Fuck this is not good.”
“”Well, that plane flew back over our position. We can assume they saw our flare at least.” There seemed to be a lull in the attacks, as the green light from said flare began to fade, the orange glow of the fire returning, brighter than ever.
“Well it’s not going to do us any good if we don’t survive the next few minutes. These fucking wolves aren’t normally like this.”
“Like what? Murderous?”
“So aggressive. Getting a few killed should’ve been enough for them to back off. Something must’ve spooked them.”
“Maybe like the giant forest fire?”
Amber's eyes snapped to something above him. “Watch out!”
Sky ducked, and a bullet whizzed over his shoulder, a Timberwolf falling off a balcony to land off the floor beside them.
“Maybe.” Amber huffed, the empty mag clattering to the floor, the slide of the gun locked back. “Or maybe they’re just really fucking hungry!” He reached up and grabbed the slide again, snapping it forward again with a click.
A roar, loud, came from outside. This one was different from the others they had heard. This one was deeper, louder, and singular, the many voices of the pack of wolves drowned out.
“I know the damn stories of this forest itself being alive, same as you Amber. I read Princess Twilight’s published journals. So please tell me what the Faust was that?!”
“Uhhhh…” Amber Jem seemed at a loss of words, slowly getting to his feet as they both cautiously approached the door again, now significantly more holes in it than before. “I think it’s apt to say that if the forest is alive, it wants us dead. And now it really wants us dead.”
The hulking creature roared again, emerging from the trees, flames licking across its back, it's already singed fur black and burned. It seemed to stampede forward, before stopping and turning it's head toward the castle, looking right at them.
Sky squinted. “Is that thing.. translucent?”
Amber hissed. “Fuck.”
“Maybe we can just hide? I really don't think we can fight that thing…”
The bear-monster stepped forward, a single step sending shockwaves through the ground.
“That’s a fucking Ursa Major dude! No one has seen one of those in decades! What the hell do you suppose we do? That thing is the same size as the castle! There’s no way we’re fighting it with this.” he waved the pistol around. “And there’s nowhere to run to that doesn’t involve getting attacked by wolves again!”
“I…” Sky froze for a moment, his mouth hanging open for a second as his mind raced to find a solution. The bear didn’t give him a chance to speak, however, as it reached the ravine. It didn’t stop, however, simply stepping across the hole and up the hill towards them, roaring again as the flames burned its face.
“...Fuck it, I have a plan. Do you think you can cover me if I run for the Dice?”
“Sky High, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“The Dice Roller still has guns on it doesn’t it?”
Amber Jem gave him a blank, disapproving stare.
“Do you have a better idea?”
Amber Jem just sighed, and shook his head.
Sky spread his wings as he hit the grass, sprinting as fast as he could muster as he heard the crack of pistol gunfire behind him. He had no idea if the bear had even spotted him or not, but considering the ground was shaking a whole lot more now, he didn’t want to risk looking back to see. He jumped into the air over a small hill, flapping his wings a few times to get some speed. He could see the crashed plane ahead, the bare metal reflecting the burning light from the forest fire. The air was filled with smoke now, burning embers and thick ash, his throat crying and dry. He coughed, diving lower slightly, his front hooves suddenly catching the ground, causing him to stumble, face-planing into the dirt.
He could hear Amber shouting something behind him, followed by gunfire, but he couldn’t tell if it was directed at him or the Ursa as he shook the dirt out of his mane. The Defiant was still where it lay only a few hours before, the guns still pointed upward, appearing ghostly in the smoke and fire. He kicked a loose piece of metal away as he clambered over the shattered fuselage and cockpit glass, squeezing his way into the remains of the back turret, paying no mind to the blood now running down his legs from the glass shards.
He could only see the silhouette of it now, but the Ursa Major was clearly visible in the distance, walking slowly in his direction, a huge and easy target to hit.
“Oh Luna please don’t be jammed…” he muttered to himself, making a quick glance over everything.
Normally the electric drives would’ve kicked in to spin the turret around, but as the engine was dead and destroyed, the only way was manually, a crank in the floor the only means of turning the turret. It turned slowly, with a groan and a creak, but it did turn. He breathed a short sigh of relief as he spun it round, visually inspecting the guns one last time as he lined the crosshairs up against the silhouette of the monster.
The Ursa emerged from the smoke as if in slow motion, smoke swirling around its large tusks as it stepped forward, looking directly at him. It roared again, the sound passing over him and shaking his chest, Sky realizing at that moment that he was holding his breath.
He also came to the realization at that moment that he should’ve joined the navy.
.303 bullet casings rained down around him, clattering to the floor as the four guns opened up, tracer fire streaking towards the hulking bear. It impacted just under the chin, it's translucent skin rupturing and falling away, flesh and fur covered in blood.
The bear roared in pain. He adjusted his aim, watching as the tracers slowly inched upward, teeth in it’s massive jaw shattering and falling away, loose flesh falling away as he strafed it’s whole head with bullets. The purple bear fell hard, the whole ground shaking as it crashed down, legs not making purchase with the ground. It slid on the grass, the momentum carrying it forward a few more feet, before it finally came to a stop, it’s hide steaming and eyes rolled back in it's massive head.
It was only then Sky let go of the trigger, the guns having jammed a few moments before. And he just sat there, finally releasing the breath he had been holding, watching the monster for any signs of movement.
“Sky! Sky!” Amber ran through the smoke, shouting his name. “Sky! You alright?”
“I’m… fine.” He said, shaking his head, coming back to reality after a moment in a daze.
“Dude! Dude you did it!” Amber laughed. “I can’t believe it! You fucking killed it dude!”
Sky glanced back at the fallen creature again. Still unmoving. He tried to say something, but only ended up in a coughing fit, the smoke causing his eyes to water.
He felt Amber grab his shoulders, pulling him onto the grass through the ruined metal frame.
“Geez man, you inhaled a lot of smoke there.” Amber stood over him, dragging him yet again for the second time that day.
“I’m fine, just woozy…” He managed to stand by himself again, much better than before. “Let's get back to the castle before more show up, huh?”
Amber nodded, turning as he followed behind him, the two of them walking slowly.
“So… I killed a Ursa Major..”
“Uh huh. First person in history, I think. Princess Twilight would be jealous!”
Sky, after everything, couldn’t help but chuckle at them. “Think she’ll give me a medal or something when we get back?”
Author's Note
Literally wrote all this in a single session over like 18 hours since the very second I woke up this morning to 2am at night to get this out on time. No idea why.
