Death, Sacrifice, and the man in blue

Sand.

Sand was an almost universally known and recognized facet of nature. Sometimes, it was the grim yet irrefutably gorgeous byproduct of innumerable millennia of erosion. Other times, man-made concentrated destruction and pulverizing was the flagrantly red-handed culprit. Or, for the case of Equestria with zero parallels and its sprawling multifaceted population, a pony-made pattern of forced weathering and gullying.

Sand also harbored a bountiful manifold of uses and purposes. A basic foundational element of nature that was far from eye-catching. Yet somepony at some nondescript point in history discovered the pale grainy ingredient and saw it for what it was. An opportunity for unrelenting prosperity. A seed that would blossom into a fruitful basket of idiosyncratic jobs surrounding sand, not one alike to another in any way shape or form.

However, amidst a scattershot populace of banjo-loving yokels and cheapjack hillbillies, one equine in that godforsaken purgatory known as Appleoosa was adept. Proficient in just about every freeform medium or paltry pastime in those rambling swaths of gilded grit. And even that was a statement that, both in paper in the minds of whoever would listen to its utterance, appeared indisputably jaw-dropping. To be fluent and knowledgeable in the whopping three different artforms Appaloosa accorded to its ill-starred residents was far from the grandiose challenge it sounded like. That trio of hobbies being horseshoe tossing, becoming a rodeo clown, and racing.

Mortimer Surly Senior had done the entire triad enough to last him a thousand lifetimes. After all, when you’re teetering dangerously on the brink of being deemed a doddering octogenarian, there’s only so many things one could indulge on. Mortimer tossed hundreds of horseshoes. Made a blithering, half-minded fool of himself all in the name of entertaining the immensity of Appleoosa’s world-weary citizenry. And the races. Oh, the races. He had lost track decades prior of how many impeccable feebleminded fools dared to propose a well-disposed race. All they received was an unjust marathon with an unfathomably lofty skill ceiling and a shower of rancid humiliation.

On balmy days where the sun circumscribed its indiscriminate sweltering fury, Mortimer standing alone outside his gimcrack beguiling cabin was a natural commonality. When the weather harbored as many numbers as he did, that being the mid-sixties to low-fifties, Mortimer would idle outside his jerry-built lodge. Putting roughly four or five feet of distance between him and his moribund dark oak front door. One that was shackled to a bed in hospice care, spending its final weeks of life fettered to an iron lung. Every single day he woke up in that benign sultry cabin, it wasn’t a short prayer thanking the Lord above for another day of existence that was his first action. He shed his blankets, freed his ropey frame from the mattress’ lush siren song, and vagabonded to the kitchen. Nailed to the ringed caliginous wooden wall straighter than any evergreen could ever achieve was a thermometer. And that was nine times out of a ten, bereft of a pinch of doubt, the object of Mortimer’s every desire or wist. Without it, he wouldn’t be able to decipher whether that day would be spent outdoors lumbering awkwardly down Memory Lane. Or spent penned inside his elderly cabin, welded to his garish reclining chair with a sub-par book clamped in his timeworn talons.

That characterless, ordinary November morning was just another example of this long-antiquated cycle. Another day in the obsolete meritless life of either unflaggingly stalking and pursuing two-bit criminals and thugs like famished bloodhounds or…this. Whatever word somebody decides to classify his forlorn recollections of bygone years and decades as. Some, even his fellow confidants in the nefarious Surly Gang, categorized the bittersweet avocation as a “useless waste of time”. Others, meaning exclusively the amicable titan Tacitus, praised the head honcho. Placing it upon a bedazzled regal mantle in the illustrious hall of so-called “therapeutic recreations”. While Mortimer wouldn’t be caught stone-dead referring to his melancholic sojourn into his departed history as anything synonymous with therapy. Hell, Mortimer didn’t even believe in therapy. He barely believed in anything at his age. Nothing but what truly mattered. Liberation from oppression. The irrepressible pursuit of wealth and ceaseless harmony. And above all, the hounding for happiness. The never-ending eternal ouroboros that was the goose chase for joy and contentment. One that Mortimer had been the first in line to participate in since the day his dust-caked wings could carry him.

Mortimer Surly stood far from his unsound, bedraggled cabin. His home was situated noxiously close to the only belt of railroad tracks leading out of this legalized damnation. Far into the banal unending distance, the sight that had grown equally tiresome and semi-homelike greeted him with sultry open arms. Repeating the same monotonous action as it had been for a limitless number of years since his dawn in the tumble-down cabin at his rear. A boundless stifling ocean of sizzling sand painted the impossibly bleak horizon, walloped by a grim drought of hope and luster. Two deviants pledged to shatter the ageless circuit of monotony and merciless tedium. One was the passionless barbed cacti sporadically polka-dotting the insipid hellscape. Standing erect and unbowed like a green-dyed bleached skeleton trapped within a diabolical cage of thorns. Its rangy L-shaped limbs cock-eyed with a single formless fist at the end akin to a verdant pool ball. Some arms were jutted towards the lifeless ground where insects sought refuge from the irate warlord conquering the sky, scampering in unseen tunnels of sand. Some arms of cacti were pointed to the tricolored morning sky, the sun a mere catalyst to the spirited omnibus of arresting hues and shades. As though a buckshot was fired into a pyramid of paint cans and the aftermath was a variegated puzzle. An iridescent glossy lake of vibrance and life with no extant parrales coming anywhere close. Sitting proud and gratified atop the skyscraping bar it set single-handedly.

Fauna entirely separate from the night-invisible arthropods of the blistering desert slithered and hobbled. The alphabet of zoological life ranged from tough-shelled spry armadillos to conniving zone-tailed hawks, perched upon slender branches of dead trees. A facet of the desert seldom witnessed by Mortimer and Company. The second deviant, traitorous to the unsympathetic mundanity of the sand and rocks, was a craggy vista. Composed entirely of remote lonesome families of mountains bearing mind-boggling heights like the weather-beaten decrepit ruins of almighty pyramids. The horizon was rugged and jagged akin to the teeth of a novel buzzsaw, peerless and dread-inducing. In the countless hours, weeks, and months Mortimer spent marooned amidst the eclipsing vastness of the desert, the Griffon never came close to fully comprehending its height. In all truth and veraciousness, if Mortimer was abruptly abducted by space-bound extraterrestrials and dropped on the face of Mars, he wouldn’t be able to discern the difference. The only somewhat attractive drawcard beguiling hapless souls to a soulless place was the physical town of Appaloosa. Which, admittedly, wasn’t as exceptional and revolutionary as it was interminably chalked up to being. The only reason any sane autonomous individual with an unimpaired brain stem would ever go for were two things. A belated family visit or the uber-famous whiskey solely located in the town.

Appaloosa was wholly invisible from the Surly Gang’s alienated flyblown rattletrap. Completely and utterly disjunct from the gluttonous slothful machinations of malevolent civilization. In all honesty, not just the infernal contrivances of the banjo-loving backwater civilians of Appleoosa. They were in the back of beyond in every conceivable way the human mind could imagine. The desert was a vacuum of everything bearing any semblance to vitality and life with a sprinkling of exceptions. The occasional odd rambunctious screech of a starved hawk exercising the textbook definition of insanity. Patrolling the incalculable flaxen wasteland umpteen amounts of times, scrutinizing the grim, pitiless landscape for sustenance.

Around a klick southwest of the cabin, indubitably the most effervescent location in the savage badlands, was a placid river. Teeming with a bountiful abundance of diminutive yet fulfilling bluegill and belligerent trout. In tow with a vast, sprawling manifold of plump boisterous mallards, their vexing quacks incessantly obliterating Mortimer’s tranquil afternoons. Unquestionably, the most engrossing thing dwelling within the blonde panorama was situated ten feet or so on Mortimer’s left. A colossal pueblo-colored rock jutted from the silty earth like a mammoth arrowhead. As if, somewhere amidst the all-encompassing fadeless discord of Hell’s grimmest bowels, a train-sized spear launched from the haze of bedlam. Akin to the countless other endeavors to bring humanity to its righteous unpunctual coda, it failed. Leaving only the titanic whetted tip of the spear visible to the naked eye. A new oddity for the ones he conspired to annihilate to gawk and admire to no end.

“Boss!” Far behind the pensive Griffon outside his cabin, Clear Sky thundered his name. Entirely razing the placid quietude of his harmonious recollections. “Come over here a second, will ya?”

Mortimer whipped his head to the badgersome humdrum behind him. Cracked beak and timeworn cyanic irises sharpened into a sweltering glower. He pounded his right talon into the dirt before he spoke. “What is it, Clear Sky!”

“Just come over here a sec! I need to talk to ya!”

“Son of a bitch!” The Griffon growled scornfully, the distance turning his words into unsung derisions.

Mortimer sauntered back to his dog-tired cabin, vexed beyond the brink of belief. A state of emotions that was poles apart from being considered atypical for the elder. The gang always harbored a miniscule fleeting theory about the forever irate senior. Attempting to derive even the most benign of particles of clarity or sense from his unremitting, unwarranted fury to his so-called “family”. Perhaps it was something that simply came with age. Nothing more and certainly nothing less. Or, the hypothesis almost everyone in the gang had long-since subscribed to, was that somewhere along the sin-stained road of his life, he lost all smidgens of joy. The gang couldn’t precisely pinpoint with laser-sight accuracy what particular event may have caused it. All they knew is that, at one point during his lifelong tenure of hurling good-for-nothing criminals in barred cages, his heart was carpet bombed. And all joviality was turned to ash and dust along with it.

The cabin’s outside view was about a repugnant concoction of deathly stark and barebones combined with the dreadful drab of a squatter’s kingdom. Its aged weather-beaten cherry oak walls were bitter acrimonious husks of its former self. Lorn and drowning in ceaseless yearning for its bygone elegance. The desert’s merciless banality siphoning its envy-inducing brilliance, funneling it into unseen facets of the borderless sands. Atop the cabin was a sloped triangular roof adorned by black shingles spangled with unknown white dots. Random patches of shingles were bemusingly absent. Whether violently scalped by a ravenous thunderstorm or wrenched from the wood by a ruthless squall, it all ended in the same byproduct. With abhorrent patches flaxen wood mottling the roof like rampant melanoma. On the right of the cabin was a large birch wood custom-made covered wagon. Its hulking wheels and flaxen frame nearly identical to the color of the sand callously suffocating the land with its coarse immensity. The white drape covering the cargo in the back of the wagon was begrimed, marred by giant patches of faded mud stains and faded pink splatters of blood. The Surly Gang’s innumerable victims forever tattooed upon the bullet-hole-riddled drape flapping feverishly in the high-pitched desert winds.

The wagon’s rear was a gaping man-sized, U-shaped maw thronging with every ware and apparatus mandatory for an unflappable bounty hunter’s prosperity. A large brown chest sat at the back of the wagon securely latched with a bulky sable padlock. Lounging care-free inside was a superabundance of dried fruit, jerky, and spare munitions. Not the most appetizing chunks of nutrition, but it was a surefire method of keeping starvation and fatigue at bay. Erecting a rigid bulwark between reality and the harrowing hellscape of hypothetical states of affairs. Lining the wagon’s back walls were small birch wood crates with six glasses. Some contained chilled milk fresh out of the cow’s udder while others contained ice water, condensation painting the long-necked glass. In the middle of the cargo bed was a gargantuan burlap sack of freshly picked potatoes vendored in Appaloosa. The town’s name stamped in faded black letters on the top of the sack.

Mortimer approached the seafoam-colored unicorn. She lugged a jug of purified river water into the back of the wagon, sliding it further in. It swiftly became roommates with the vast enormity of ripe potatoes.

“What can I help you with, Clear Sky?” Mortimer inquired coarsely.

She turned to gaze into his cerulean irises. Insufferable vexation clashed with the toils of labor dwelling in Sky’s drowsy sockets. On the sand-blanketed dirt bed at her hooves was a small heap of items yet to be chucked into the soon-to-be makeshift oven. Several glass bottles of crystal-clear water packaged within old moonshine jugs and two small black wooden boxes, one scarred by a single hole in the top-left corner. In the boxes was another abundance of loose rounds and shells in coalition with a supplementary blackened-steel Ranchand’s revolver. A lengthy slender white wooden box was segregated from the others with a custom-made stainless-steel pump-action shotgun within. The only firearm in the Surly Gang’s entire straggling catalog of bloodthirsty artillery that was earmarked exclusively for dire emergencies. Only one instance comes to mind when that glorious, far-famed opus when put into use.

The fallout of the pony who was flogged by its wrath was the primary object of decades of night terrors.

“Would it be out of line to ask what in Tartarus were you doing over there?”

Sky’s voice, effortlessly perceptible in contrast with her fellow hunters, was wholly bereft of the warm country twang. And the reason behind the destitution of the sugar-and-honey hillbilly drawl didn’t take a Harvard scholar’s wits to understand. Born and raised in Manehattan, spent a year’s long sojourn in Appleloosa to clear her head, and met Mortimer Surly Senior in the streets at the dead of night. The rest was history.

Mortimer huffed, already considering the multitude of ways he could pull the plug on this conversation prematurely. “I was…thinkin’. Like I always do. Why does it concern you?”

“‘Cause we’re about to go on the ‘biggest road trip of our lives’ according to you, and you’re not lifting a damn finger to come help.” Sky retorted. “Staring at the mountains or whatever won’t help us.”

“I’ve been helpin’ plenty!” He sneered.

“Barking orders every blue moon don’t count as helping in my book, Mortimer,” Her Boston-accented voice replied. “How about you grab a box and get moving.”

“I’m a senior citizen, box movin’ ain’t my forte anymore. No time for it.”

“But you have more than enough to stare at a cactus, yeah?”

Sky grabbed the handle of a black briefcase made from bona fide leather of an anonymous creature. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember who the gang robbed to acquire it. All she could discern of its history now was the strident, unwanted jingling of loose revolver rounds and shotgun shells within. Roiling about in its leather dungeon like the shifting of tectonic plates.

Mortimer’s brows were knitted together. The edges of his beak threatened to curl. A snarl so unfettered and viscous, a rabid pitbull piloted by bloodlust would go mad with envy. “Shut the fuck up and pack. We ain’t got the time for this nonsense.”

It was abnormal for Clear Sky to fly into an unhinged bout of flaming dudgeon at Mortimer’s incessant chagrined prods and snide remarks. She didn’t fully subscribe to the notion that the remainder of the gang understood that an irate rise or infuriated glower was exactly what he wanted. At least, that was the theory that Clear Sky clung to with every self-governing fiber of her being. Either he wanted an infuriated implosion of world-rocking magnitudes, or that was simply the building blocks of his often irksome personality. Only one member of the gang felt true undebatable rage at the leader’s crude, sneering diatribes. His own son. Another gang member was stoic and stone-faced in the face of a volley of envenomed insults and ridicules. One that was puzzlingly absent from the cabin.

As Clear Sky grinned at the haggard senior, Mortimer scanned the cabin and its barren outskirts briefly. His meticulous machine-like search yielding zero fruits in all departments.

“Where the hell is Tacitus? We can use him right about now.” Asked Mortimer.

“I’m not sure,” Sky replied, her voice strained and agonistic as she lugged another jug of river water into the wagon. “Junior told me he saw him heading out to the river at five or so. Haven’t heard any updates.”

“The fuckin’ river again,” Mortimer harumphed gutturally. “What’s he bringin’ back this time?”

“He told your son duck was on the menu tonight.”

“Duck again? For shit’s sake!”

“Trust me, I know.”

“I’m tired of him and those fuckin’ mallards. He needs to let them migrate and leave us be. He always salts them till they’re whiter than angels.”

“Maybe you could go bitch at him for a few hours, yeah? That’ll change his mind.” She teased with an infectious bronze-toothed smile. “That’s your specialty, boss.”

Mortimer bore holes into her gleaming beam.

“Mortimer! Come in here a second!”

The Griffon’s ireful gaze snapped on to the gaping front door of the cabin where the sonorous beckon of his name spilled into the formless desert. Confusing the conversate voice was unfeasible to confuse or mistake for any pony whatsoever in that windswept nothingness. It was Dread Shot, beseeching an interaction with his right-hand comrade for whatever reason. There was a kaleidoscope of possibilities of where this inexorable conversation could lead. Ranging from banal and meaningless to operation-changing.

The Griffon met Sky’s irises once more. “Holler if that dumbass ever decides to come back from the river. I’ll send him a few of my kindest words.”

“Will do, boss. Don’t give yourself a hernia in there.”

Clear Sky chortled as the elder sauntered away with a gruff under-the-breath growl. Mortimer Surly strolled into his melancholic, dour sorry-excuse for a living room. The comforting temperature of the outside wasteland and within the cabin’s walls were impossibly congruent. Not a degree neither above nor below that day’s status quo. It was a rare infrequent moment in history where Mortimer rejected living up to his surname’s sake. A strident squall of complaints and grievances staying penned in his rickety rusted lungs.

The cabin’s cramped living room was, without a trifling morsel of doubt, the golden poster child of the Surly Gang’s cabin. In comparison to the hideous remainder of the mangy abode, the tarnished living room was a fountain of youth spewing gold and riches every which way. Only a trio of articles of furniture existed within the crammed congested space. A few inches away from the wall, the ramshackle home to a ravenous society of termites, was a black leather couch. Its lacerated stygian flesh sleek and traumatized, adorned with wild, feral slashes and wounds of enigmatic origin. However, to be frank, judging by the sanguine vandalizing the wagon, it wasn’t fractious to precisely pinpoint the genesis. Prodigious plate-sized blotches of the pale cushion beneath mottled the vest-pocket sofa, the stygian threadbare leather flayed in limitless areas. In front of the shabby couch was a medium-sized coffee table matching the sofa in length, yet significantly wider than it could ever dream of being. Its edges were small jet-black ceramic tiles all pasted together with a single streak of a sooty paste. Resting upon a quartet of slender ebony metal legs, the square center was occupied solely by top-grade splendor. The best money could ever possibly buy. A diminutive rectangular lake of glistening vitreous pitch-black marble spangled by lily-white dots. The night sky abducted from beneath the moon’s uncharitable watchful eye and condemned to an earthly prison. Forever sentenced to serve as a meager conversation piece in a jackleg cabin of stony-hearted thieves and outlaws. Jailed smack-dab in the middle of an endless vacuum of sand and chipped sun-baked rock, where intelligent life all but ceased to exist long ago. Beside the left arm of the couch was a diminutive wooden bedside table. A square of laser-engraved sanded oak wood erected by four rangy treen legs.

Sitting on the withered morose couch was the moon-white stallion who summoned his indignant being inside to begin with. Basking in muted rays of the early morn’s brilliant shafts, slightly muted by floral drapes masking the begrimed windows, was Dread Shot. Atop his formerly naked scalp was an article of headwear seldom sported by the mustang. A midnight blue curved-brim gambler’s hat in nigh-pristine condition. In front of him atop the coffee table, far too illustrious to belong in a den of maniacs like this one, was an unfurled cinnamon-colored newspaper.

“The fuck is it now, Dread Shot? We’re supposed to be packin’ and gettin’ outta here soon.”

“I know, but all that can wait. When does our train leave anyhow?”

Mortimer paused, dust-clogged brain impounded by thought for a few seconds. “An hour or so.”

“We’ll be fine,”

Dread Shot rose from his war-scarred seat, the removal of his rump exposing the largest irreparable lesion of them all. A scalped patch of pale rope-colored cushion that vagabonded far beyond the margins of any possible mending. Dread sauntered with an unsung wordless purpose and planted his hooves in front of the coffee table. Mortimer rested his weary iron-sick bones upon the couch. Taking his place amidst a boundless revolting constellation of wounds and slashes.

“What in Tartarus is this all about? We got places to be, Dread.”

“You think I don’t know that? I figured you’d like to know.” He nudged the newspaper towards the irritated Griffon a few inches. “Take a look.”

Mortimer disgruntledly snapped his indifferent pupils onto the omnibus of articles and over theatrical headlines. If raw unfiltered honesty piloted the ireful senior, and it invariably did in all the errorful ways, Mortimer couldn’t find a thread of bother to spare for the news. The very nanosecond that imposing rampart of words and drawn-out sentences walloped his elderly irises, his focus was eradicated.

“My eyes hurt,” He fibbed.

Dread sighed. With the plethora of papers clutched in his hoof, he relayed its abhorrent contents to the Griffon.

“Three hunters were killed up in the Everfree last night. Messed up real bad, too. One took a shotgun to his head, one got caught a few rounds to his chest. The other got beaten to death.”

“What’s that gotta do with us?”

“Demonio did it. Clear as day.” He dropped the papers back onto the table with a hushed ruffle. “He stole a shit-load of guns from their campsite and went on that little rampage of his.”

“What kind?”

“Another few boar hunters saw him a few hours after but he didn’t see them thankfully. Said he had a huge double-barrel and a few revolvers on his hip. Stole a knife, too.”

“Can’t forget the knife, can you?”

“When are you gonna start taking this serious? As serious as needed?”

Mortimer callously forsook eye contact with his second-in-command. In his right suit jacket pocket was a glut of clear vials of gun polishing oil. He fished one out along with a bone-white velvety cloth with sawblade-like edges, holding them in his left talon.

“Fuck are you talkin’ about? I am takin’ this serious.”

“No, you’re not. I’ve seen you at your most serious and you’re treating this like a big game,” Dread retorted. “Seems nopony in this damned cabin has any sort of sense.”

“I got sense!” Mortimer griped. “I fail to see why this requires so much fuckin’ caution. It’s just a bounty, we’ve done plenty of those.”

“You heard what the Man in Blue said, right?”

“The Man in Blue said a lot of things!” Mortimer riposted. “I also saw the Man in Blue! He looks like he’d be scared of his own shadow. It’s hard to take him serious.”

Mortimer reached his right eroded talon into the interior of his scarlet-lined jacket. Beneath his unequivocally redoubtable jacket, snaking around his wiry shoulders, were brown authentic leather holster suspenders. Resting placidly within the occulted scabbard was Mortimer’s signature, albeit barbarically plundered long ago, time-tested revolver. A gilded Schofield with a snow-white pearlescent handle, scuffed and decadent from innumerable years of unflagging hounding of gutless outlaws and thieves. Engraved with the utmost unambiguous talent and the sharpest of eagle eyes were two paltry letters in the mother-of-pearl. Both bold and arresting on either side of the handle and ensnared with a brilliant golden ringlet. Italicized and adroit no bigger than a human thumb was the letter A on the left, and L on the right. Inlaid with the finest refined gilt-edged ore ponykind could possibly get their fascinated hooves on.

“I don’t blame you, Mort, but you gotta understand where I’m coming from.”

“Who says I’m not?”

“It sure seems like you’re not giving half a shit about any of this!” Dread exclaimed. “Just because you don’t believe in boundaries or limits doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We ain’t the strongest ponies to ever graze Equestria.”

“We ain’t the strongest, sure,” Mortimer untwisted the vial’s cap with his battered war-torn beak. He drizzled the steel-colored liquid onto the handkerchief’s center mass. “But you can rest assured knowin’ I ain’t gonna topple to some hot-shot ‘Gary Demonio’.”

“You really think?”

Mortimer glared at his confidant. The first sorry-excuse for eye contact the pair have had in, at least to Dread Shot, a millenia during this otiose interaction. The Griffon funneled every last drop and ounce of his attention back to his uber-treasured firearm. Diligently sliding the sodden handkerchief up and down its gleaming mesmerizing metal, its lengthy barrel like a truth-telling Pinnochio.

“I ain’t thinkin’ shit. I know.” He moves the handkerchief to the barrel. “I ain’t askin’ for much, all I want is a little faith in our operation. In our abilities. Is that so hard?”

“If you look at it that way, then-”

“There ain’t no way of lookin’ at it, Dread. This is the way it is and the way things are, no changin’ anythin’.”

Mortimer thrust the opulent instrument of ceaseless terror to the left. The sumptuous cylinder flung from its cradle of solid, unquestionable gold. He encompassed the full girth of the loaded cylinder with the inundated handkerchief. The oil was rank and unapologetically obscene. Throat-pounding and merciless, the malodour was akin to a mountain-sized effigy fabricated solely out of plastic and wreathed in flames. Its fumes aberrant and lung-razing.

“Are you even paying attention to a damned word I’m saying?”

“Yes!” His leader barked. “I’m just gettin’ ready for this ‘battle of our lives’ you keep preachin’ about.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Mortimer.”

“You think Tacitus and my boy are ready for war?” Mortimer replied, a timid ghost of a grin snagging the corner of his beak. “Can you see Taci out there yet?”

Dread unleashed a chagrined ireful huff from his vexed lungs. “This is a waste of my time, you couldn’t give a shit even if you’re life hinged on it! And it does!”

Mortimer meteorically rocketed from his couch, slamming the cylinder back into the sheeny base. “Only thing I ain’t givin’ a shit about is santimonium! My mind ain’t got no room for your preachin’.”

“Preaching,” Dread scoffed.

“Yes, preachin’.” Mortimer reiterated, grizzled brows tethered as one single salt-and-pepper strip of hair. “Here’s what you need to understand, Dread.”

“What?”

“This is the biggest fuckin’ bounty of our entire worthless lives, all of us. And we ain’t got time to be sittin’ around doubtin’ and thinkin’ about how dangerous it’s gonna be. It might, or it might not. I don’t think it is.”

“You don’t think a lot of things.”

“Listen to me,” Spoke the haggard weathered elder. “We’re the best bounty hunters this world has ever seen, you realize that? So why waste our time sittin’ in this…” Mortimer waved his occupied hands around the ramshackle cabin. “Hellhole!”

Dread was soundless. His lips a pencil-drawn hyphen carved into an untarnished glacier.

“Is this somewhere you plan on spendin’ the rest of your life, Dread Shot?”

Dread paused. “Absolutely not.”

“Then, what in Tartarus are we still doin’ here?”

“Trying to make you see the danger in all this. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are,” Mortimer riposted. “Only it ain’t workin’ ‘cause there ain’t no danger to be seen.”

Dread inhaled deeply, aurate irises plummeting to the scabbed, grunge grey-wooden floor. A miniscule detail crossed the gold scrutinous beam of judgment that was Dread Shot’s optics. Beneath the pristine coffee table were two empty silver bullet casings. Whichever specific array of nightly drunken shenanigans led to its anti-climactic spawn was nigh-impossible to uncover. An enigma forever smothered by a thick blanket of bemusement.

The uptight uncivilized war of words between both militant parties was nearing its unceremonious coda. That being a humiliating loss and a hefty slice of humble pie to Dread Shot. The serial recipetent of demeaning losses one after another, time and time again. No deviant seeking to rebel against the callous monotony of the wolfish ouroboros of failure and abasement.

Dread, for the first time in what he could only assume to be almost decades, harbored an iota of hope that this auditory farce would prove victorious for the former. However, as he routinely was, life’s cruel algorithms had a starkly different agenda.

“Fine,” Dread spoke. “Fine. We gotta go, I ain’t missing the train.”

“We won’t,”

A thoroughly nettled Dread Shot stormed towards the gaping door. Mortimer Surly did the opposite, strutting over to the hallway in front of the living room.

“Morty!” He bellowed into the lusterless murk-infested cavity.

“Yeah, Dad!” His son shouted.

“We’re leavin’! Pack your shit!”

Mortimer Surly swiftly became evanescent in the caliginous aperture. Vagabonding down the narrow aboveground catacombs to his son’s discordant bedroom. Failing to mirror the factious kingdom of raw, unbridled chaos that was the gang’s cabin and its totality. Dread shot, bearing zero patience for any possible shenanigans between father and unruly chip-on-the-shoulder son, sauntered out the yawning front door.

Outside, Clear Sky had brought her rigorous and untiring packing to a gratifying conclusion. The wagon’s broad-mouthed rear was the esophagus of a beached whale, lying cavernous and agog. Inside was a titanic immensity of pale-colored boxes and crates. Repurposed moonshine jugs accorded a fresh chance at a better life with purified river water. Stygian leather briefcases and colossal burlap sacks of diverse vegetables. Sitting pridefully in front of it was the Manehattan escapee herself, roosting boastfully on the back of the wagon. Bare back legs hanging above the rambling fervid ocean of sand, fidgeting with her trademark lever-action repeater lying horizontal across her lap. The sleek unsullied silver barrel staring out at the unending lifeless topography. A flaxen lake of grainy cobbled sand and the odd, almost extraterrestrial rock formation. Either standing or crouched down like ghostly avatars. Condemned to forever stand unwavering and inexpressive in this coarse damnation. Akin to an unreachable out-of-bounds zone knowing no margins in a dirt-poor budgeted video game.

Sky gloried in the rejuvenating provision of shade brought upon by the wagon’s morose covering. It itself was an egregious, flagrant tapestry of every sin and unforgivable transgression executed by the unmerciful gang. Either tactlessly slaughtered by their bloodthirsty, often obnoxiously gung-ho, leader or heartlessly dispatched by his lackeys. It wasn’t often when Dread Shot found himself behind the worn trigger of a gun. And the already pencil-thin chances of a reality where he was the pony taking lives like candy from a baby’s clutches was practically non-existent. Dread would’ve fervently treasured a reality where the sullied cover of their wagon wasn’t…whatever class he could categorize this into. A brazen winding maze of sporadic faded blood splatters and pockmarks of dried dirt and sludge like unorthodox hickeys. Its abhorrent detestable nature punctuated by a sprawling, fungating network of grisly bullet holes. A permanent scar forever etched into the satin almost khaki-colored textile by those poignant sorrow-ridden ponies. Misguided souls sojourning blindly and aimlessly down the vast warrens of life’s underground cesspit of unapologetic barbarity and debauchery. Beings, some he would even classify as innocent, burglarized of their singular limited-time-only opportunity to right their wrongs. Iron the irksome kinks marring their defaced, vandalized reputation and image. A chance that had long-expired. And, more importantly, a chance that Mortimer Surly and the others cared little to acknowledge. Heaven forbid allowing a so-called “irredeemable son of a bitch” to exercise another chance turning their deeds letter-perfect.

After all, Lord knows Dread Shot would kill for that chance.

The mustang approached the engaged unicorn. Her horn dull and lifeless like a blunt stalagmite, manually loading round after round into the chamber of her repeater. Prepared and embattled for a war that was terrifyingly inevitable, yet sorrowfully meritless.

“Good job with all this, Miss Sky.” Dread commended merrily with a broad closed-mouth grin.

Sky was wrenched from her mesmerized haze, meeting his irises. She mirrored his beam. Hers undeniably bewitching, ordained with her single bronze canine glinting in the half-risen sun illuminating the wasteland. Perhaps this vacuum harbored life and joviality after all.

“About damn time somepony recognized hard work,” Sky replied. “You seen Taci anywhere?”

“Wish I did.”

“Where’s the boss?”

“Inside getting Junior up and ready. I can only imagine how he feels about all this.”

“I don’t even wanna think about it.” Clear Sky laid her repeater on her right side, folding one hind leg over her knee. “They’re both masters at bitching about nothing at all.” She chuckled.

Dread couldn’t deny it. “Cut the poor colt some slack, he’s had it…rough. That’s the best way I can put it.”

“LIke all of us haven’t?”

“Maybe you’re right,”

She chortled. “When am I not?”

Mortimer and his oddly chipper son emerged from the cabin’s gaping maw. Mortimer Junior was clad in an outfit nigh-congruent with his first conference with the Man in Blue. Gladly assuming the stead of his gaudy checkered flannel was a sable long-sleeved button-down, every button free and unbound. His bare chest was a bounty of ghostly silvery feathers fondled by the shrill pernicious desert winds. Affixed to the young Griffon’s plumy scalp was his matte-black purple-banded derby hat. Its curved brims failing to combat the spear-like beams of the morning sun. Peeking over the unnameable horizon, austere and graceful, like a colossal wedge of molten gold. Mortimer Junior granted the wonder-striking vista with a fleeting glance, his bleary eyes barely hung at half-mast.

He shuffled to the back of the wagon while sloppily and lethargically buttoning his shirt. Dread Shot reached a hoof into the sprawling immensity of boxes and crates. He emerged with a timeworn tattered leather holster the color of coffee. Crafted from the marvelous hide of a dastardly coyote he slew what felt like lifetimes ago. In reality, if his shoddy memory sought to please him, twenty years or so had passed since that mindless execution. Slaughtered with the very same black-steel Mauser pistol tenanting the trite holster. He belted it around his waist.

Mortimer Senior followed his son out of the door, passing him and moving to the front of the pale birchen wagon. The encumbered wooden bed behind him moaned pitifully as his son became situated. A hushed yet all too audible groan of contempt expelling from his huffing lungs.

“Any updates on Taci, boss?” Clear Sky inquired.

“He ain’t been back. He’ll just have to meet us at the station, he’ll live.” Mortimer responded.

At the head of the wagon lie two burly, ironclad birch wood yokes. Each one fettered to the wagon’s blemishless face by a short wooden square pole, connected to the pole by a small steel chain. They sat in the silky satin sand like forgotten marooned carcasses. Unmoored and deserted in the boundless flaxen oblivion.

Mortimer picked up the right yoke. His rusted joints and weather-beaten sun-cracked bones roared for mercy. Dread Shot stood to the side, glowering unsatisfied at the event.

“What’s our first order of business in Ponyville, boss? We got any leads?” Clear sky questioned, shifting noisily on one of the meshwork of boxes.

“Of course we fuckin’ do. I wouldn’t have left the house without one. He killed a few hunters out in the dark parts of the Everfree Forest, miles away from the town.” Mortimer replied. “We got the trip of our lives, gentlecolts.”

His son huffed vexingly, rubbing his piercing sapphire globes in conspicuous irritation. “Here we go again.” He whined into his talons.

“Quite your ass down back there, son! It’ll be done before you know it!” His father chided.

Mortimer abstracted his white pork pie from his iron-grey pate. Headwear outstretched in his left talon, the monolithic ring of robust wood in his right. He gingerly lowered the yoke down, allowing it to roost mellowly upon his eroded dilapidated shoulders. The Griffon groaned in unwarranted vexation from the badgersome weight upon his weary elderly frame. Both literally and metaphorically. The sun wasted no time in walloping the geriatric’s susceptible crown. Exacting the same indiscriminate stony-hearted treatment it did just about every entity, both inanimate and vigorous, in that unvarying hellscape. Grilling the roof of his head bereft of a morsel of clemency. He returned the hat to his head.

As Mortimer’s talons shifted unpleasantly, slowly but surely coming to terms with the elephantine onus upon his dog-tired spine, he gazed to his left. All he found was the yoke still slumped lousily on the sun-baked desert floor, and Dread Shot standing six-inches from it. Standing intolerant and unfaltering. The Griffon gazed out at the ceaseless reaches of the sand in front of him. His milky cyanic optics seemingly breaching the flaming horizon. He ogled for numerous seconds before swiveling his head, imprisoning Dread’s peepers in a wicked contest. A competition to see who could defy and rebel against one another the longest before a seismic nuclear apocalypse of rage and vulgarities commenced.

“What’re you doin’?”

Dread stared soundlessly for a moments before he replied. “Last chance. We could all just unpack and head inside and live our lives in peace, pretend this never happened. Leave Demonio to his demons. Taci’s still gone, it could work.”

“Now why in Tartarus would I do a thing like that?”

Dread inched towards him. A few steps. “I don’t think you’ve really realized what we’re walking into. What you’re walking into.”

“We’re walkin’ into a bounty lookin’ for some money! What’s the big damned difference you keep belly-achin’ about?”

“This isn’t some bounty. It ain’t some asshole who stole a few apples from a store and got a price on their heads, this is a killer. A cold-blooded killer.”

“And?”

“He could kill us all in a split-second. You heard the Man in-”

“I don’t fancy the Man in Blue a liar!” Mortimer interjected. “Only an exaggerator. I’m sure Celestia paid him to make it sound as bad as possible.”

“I doubt it,”

“It don’t matter what you doubt!” Mortimer growled. “All that matters is the truth.”

“What truth?”

Mortimer slapped the sand with his talons. Chagrined beyond belief. “The truth to the matter is we’re in good hooves, Dread Shot! That’s what you need to understand.”

“I ain’t doubting that. I’m just saying we’d probably be better off pursuing something else.”

“Somethin’?”

“Yeah, something. A new job or a new…anything. Something else that ain’t this. We ain’t obligated to see this through.”

“We talked to the Princess and her lackeys. We sat in her castle. If that’s not an obligation I don’t know what the fuck is.”

Dread sighed, his jaws divorcing to breathe life into another vocal cesspool of obstructions and defiance. Mortimer interrupted the dubious pony.

“Dread, listen to me close. Real close.” He cleared his throat. “If I truly thought for one second in my head you were right, that if I believed this was some hidden death trap, I’d still be asleep. Believe me. I’d tell Cronell and all them idiots up in Canterlot to go fuck themselves. But I haven’t.”

“Mort, I-”

“Please, just trust me. This is our last rodeo. I mean it. After this, we ain’t gotta worry about no more of this horseshit.”

Dread Shot was seized by the unsympathetic throes of an internal deliberation. Unable to effectively pinpoint what exactly magnetized his infuriated gilded irises to the king-sized yoke. Slumped slothfully in the sultry lake of torrid grainy stone-littered sand, rambling far into the stupefying unfathomable distance. He wasn’t exactly sure what foreign cancerous emotion in his perturbed heart hijacked his dexterity to don the yoke. Mirroring the exact self same actions performed mere seconds before by his brother-in-arms. Momentarily removing his hat, slipping the wooden halo over his neck like a macabre medieval punishment, and placing his gambler atop his head.

Who was the culprit? Which conniving traitorous sensation in his rattled core was behind these machinations?

Was it stupidity? A dire drought of impossibly common sense and a third-grade education? Loyalty so blind that all it knew was perpetual unceasing darkness? Or was it the prospect of a tranquil catharsis when the endgame of Mortimer’s plane came and went? Was that it?

Dread Shot wasn’t sure what he wanted. All he knew was that, akin to every other feeble gutless attempt in their decades of cabals, he failed to convince the Griffon otherwise. Even steering him from a glaring flashing neon sign pointing to Ponyville that “CERTAIN DEATH AHEAD” was an impractical task.

The Surly Gang dragged that birchen chockablock wagon beneath the bold morning sky. Marching bereft of a reputable guide, shepherded like a herd of sightless sheep lumbering haplessly without rhyme or reason. The shepherd himself having not a sliver of a clue of their ultimate destination or endgame. All he had to himself was his vacant sockets, tenanted only by a gluttonous hankering for…something.

Whatever Mortimer Surly truly desired.

Whatever Mortimer Surly was willing to die for.

The daunted-slash-battle-hungry Surly Gang walked across the blistering desert floor. Their crosshairs welded to that brazen, bold-faced neon sign, Certain death.

With a shallow pitiful groan of a door painted whiter than the heavens, Silver Spears, the decadent callous chieftain of the ill-famed Golden Dashers stood in its gaping frame. A rectangular arch flawlessly mimicking the colors of a world-ending supernova, bereft of any flakes of bare wood or mottles of amputated color. As pristine and novel as the setting of its genesis. The illustrious, fabled puffy wonderland known only by its prestigious unmistakable name. Cloudsdale, the home of all things flying and aviation. A euphoric optimum arcadia with no known parallels anchored in reality. The only known wonderland bearing any similarities to this nigh-fantastical prairie of elation being an infantile daydream. The intramural machinations of a bone-tired toddler, granted the desperately pined-for repose it hungered for. A jubilated imaginarium of the highest possible caliber. A frothing conduit for the gluttonous, back-breaking demands for a continuous stream of joy.

The loathsome lull in Silver’s requisite slumber didn’t, at least she vehemently hoped it didn’t, arrive without a warranted rhyme or reason. And even then, whether it fit her impossibly hard-and-fast compendium of scrutinous rules was a wholly different story. After all, with a jerry-built apartment cursed with wafer-thin walls constructed ten feet from Cloudsdale’s singular bar, it was no wonder nettlesome disruptions became habitual. Infuriatingly, vexingly, wrathfully habitual. Over the years of her serene tenure at her comme il faut apartment, she had shouldered a straggly bounty of cacophonous, raucous gaps in her pined-for beauty sleep. Almost every night in that crude mockery of a gilt-edged euphoria, a discordant implosion of riotous sound and slurred voices. Ambling cock-eyed and objectiveless out of her beloved Tavern, bellowing whatever happened to cross the inebriated chaos-riddled landscape of their minds. Bellowing miscellaneous Christmas carols at the apex of their lungs smack-dab in the middle of November. Flying in purposeless circles around the bar late into the owl’s singing hours, thundering the lyrics to amalgamated, butchered lullabies and nursery rhymes. To engaging in liquor-fueled bouts of mindless ritualistic combat. A duo of either perturbed geezers or chagrined young lads, it didn’t matter how far or low you were on the boundless spectrum of age. Octogenarian to hapless pegasi ensnared in the throes of a mid-life crisis.

The noisome laundry list of innumerable drunken altercations stretched far into the formless depths of oblivion. Days of the circadian nonsensical discord stretched into months. Those melted into trimesters. Then, it became years of this boyish bedlam. Silver heard almost every meritless tasteless conversation ever bellowed between their tight-knit groups of revelers. Some she annoyingly recognized as her own teammates, both subordinates and allegiant comrades.

Although tonight…tonight was a deviant to that unending ouroboros of preposterous balderdash. On that nondescript Wednesday evening, dead-center in Autumn’s horrifically frigid rampage, a sound breached the bulwark of tranquility in her shared apartment. A noise worth scrutinizing to the highest possible extent.

Across from Silver’s bedroom separated by a smokey-grey slender wall was the dormitory of Cloud Rider. Her christened best friend and closest out of the platoon of nimrods employed at the Golden Dashers’ kingdom-esque compound. Not only did she effortlessly scale the ranks in the notorious team in a matter of trifling months, she also bounded up the rungs in Silver’s life. As the late-night hours passed them by without an acknowledgment or utterance, their jaws continued to flap. Volley after volley of emotionally-charged words leaping from their maws. Their hearts all but soldered together as one unstoppable relationship no earthly force could ever consider challenging. The exact time of the dissonant clamor was lost on the stone-grey pegasus. And in full undiluted honesty, its importance was neither here nor there.

All it took was the sleep-robbing din of an elephantine weight in some medium or another colliding with the floor. The tumult akin to a bloated whale carcass slung against the undeserving carpet like a world-weary titan’s play-thing. Her veins wreathed in white-hot, electrifying wires of bewilderment. Starved jumper cables of primordial fright clamped onto her pitiable bones, striking her goggle-eyed and disconcerted.

“Shit!”

That muted exclamation, try as her esteemed housemate might, refused to fall upon deaf ears. Ever-so-slightly suppressed by the gimcrack drywall, yet far from unharked. Silver Spears emerged from the cramped box of caliginous tenebrosity listlessly. Three of her four ironclad calloused hooves fully functional and primed for employment. While one, the bona fide black sheep out of the squad of extremities, was savagely war-scarred. Clad in a skintight helmet of snow-white bandages with zero accrued sympathy under its belt, even in the weeks following the warranted grievous injury. She waggled and quivered on a three-legged stance, her strife-ridden bandaged forelimb levitating two inches from the hallway’s ashen rug. A piddling handful of labored half-bounces freed her from the dismal confines of her gloomful bedroom.

The shared gimcrack apartment was as modest and vapid as the Cloudsdale housing industry could possibly be. A miniscule two-bedroom home ornamented with a singular uncannily vibrant bathroom. The hall was a narrow gossamer-thin corridor no wider than a set of railroad tracks. To Silver’s left marking the dead-end of the hallway was a shut door, cascaded in a murky comber of soupy stygian. Behind the loose golden knob, its bygone allured a waning memory, and ash-colored lively paint was the bathroom. If anything, it was nothing more than a glorified cubicle with a few garish overcolored articles of fashion. A vivacious undeniably ostentatious forest green shower curtain and a teeming excess of variegated towels. Each one harboring its own unique pattern, theme, style and flamboyant scheme of nauseating color. For any normal abode under any normal umbrella of circumstances, the vivid spectrum would be a well-received addition. However, in defiance to their herculean efforts, they couldn’t find it in their hearts to adore it.

In front of the merciless pegasus, standing statuesque and swaggering against a smokey-grey wall, was an archaic Grandfather Clock. The antiquated artifact of a foregone hoary period stood lofty, strainlessly imposing upon the wounded equine. When Silver’s grandparents bit the dust and transcended to a more jovial care-free plane of existence long ago, this was the singular object left solely to Silver. Their cherished grand-daughter, who grew shamelessly elated at the grandiose prospect of a hefty inheritance, was instead granted a venerable clock. A stately pillar of wispy shadow, cloaked in a cimmerian poncho of viscous bramble of darkness. Through the lithesome gaps in the spidery tentacles of tenebrosity, a pristine gold pendulum swung absentmindedly. Swaying back and forth in endless interminable cycles like a killer condemned to the gallows, left to dangle enticingly in the shrill afternoon winds. Its soft ginger tick was an oddly soothing repetition. The exclusive solitary aberrant to the ruthless command of silence the apartment was almost always oppressed by. Providing a pacifying, delicate source of irreplaceable white noise no earthbound device or apparatus could ever rival. If she was accorded the decision to cast the clock into obscurity in favor of a bounty of inheritance, it was blatantly apparent the choice she’d make.

To her right were two apertures, one gaping while the other identical to her bedroom door. A few inches to the right of the ever-wakeful clock was a gaping doorway, shaped like the entrance to a colossal medieval castle bereft of a drawbridge. It spilled into the quaint conglomerate of a living room and kitchen, exponentially meek in the realm of furniture and decorations. With blinds veiling the meager duo of windows and the gaunt starlight exiled, hardly nothing could be seen. Just a squared arch of a doorless frame into pure and unadulterated nothingness. An abyss with hidden life secreting the secrets to an unseen oblivion. On Silver’s right, the object of her numerous perplexed and confounded desires, was the clamorous bedroom of Cloud Rider. From an outside superficial viewing, one would be forgiven for instantaneously confusing the two doors. For anyone who wasn’t a continuous force dwelling beneath the roof on a day-to-day basis, discerning which one belonged to which cherished housemate would be an impractical task. A duty that proved arduous and puzzling to the likes of Silver Spears on occasion. When the redoubtable sun retired for the night, relinquishing its prerogative to the crater-riddled moon, attempting to spot the difference between the two was unfeasible. As the proud owner of that modest abode, distinguishing the two was wholly trouble-free. Peculiarly, no light breached the underside nor any cracks or lacunas in the door. Its appearance was the average normative custom for that time of the night in Silver’s home. Lifeless. Stagnant. Bereft of any sliver of luster or radiance.

Silver hobbled from her dusky bedroom. Her back legs and left forelimb gracing the well furnished carpet. The dourly maimed right hoof, however, was a different story in its entirety. Levitating a measly inch or two from the plush flooring, a grim wince ravaging her aching bone with every accidental graze of the ground. A whetted searing punji stick of agony launching through her leg. Truthfully, her brutish unpitying blitzkrieg upon the Wonderbolts spearhead yielded little to no fruits for all parties involved. For Spitfire, the fallout of the banzai assault was ragingly apparent. A vile stomach-churning constellation of bruises, scars and split lips. Transforming her from a robust ironclad pegasus elated for the heat of cut-throat competition, to a bundle of sun-yellow feathers and flesh. Bedbound and wallowing in a blistering lake of regret and self-pity. The only detestable mementos received by Silver Spears were a few missing feathers, a sore wing, and last but not least, her maltreated hoof. An area where a lack of pain and interminable dysphoria was greatly taken for granted.

Silver ceased her harrowing nerve-shredding movements at the face of Cloud’s door. Within its concealed adynamic bowels was a desolate vacuum of life and utter quietude. The only aberrant exceptions to that all-encompassing rule being the gentle heartbeat of the ancient clock and the hushed movements upon carpet inside. Silver leaned against the ashen wall, twisting the gilded knob with her ailment-free hoof.

“Cloudy?” Silver spoke, bleary-eyed and flagging. Rubbing her dog-tired copper irises as the door groaned open. “What’re you doing?”

Silver nudged the door to the wall, granting her bewildered optics a full panoptic viewing sparse, semi-congested poor specimen of a bedroom.

Akin to the lilliputian unjustifiably ennoble cage Silver Spears somehow called a snug amiable domicile. The contents of Cloud’s bedroom, an overglorious dungeon of aged timeworn drywall and outdated flaxen carpet, was the prime blaring reason she sparsely occupied it. In the left upper-hand corner was a quaint medium-sized table equipped with a black swivel chair and replete with a teeming manifold of paper and documents. Some pertaining to the dog-eat-dog unmerciful realm of the Golden Dashers and their vehement opponents, rivals who couldn’t even consider stomaching the prospect of a loss. Others, one small weathered brown leather book in particular, was the lackluster Pandora’s box of all of Cloud’s coveted sentiments and judgements. Its sleek oldfangled dark brown flesh mottled with hives of reprehensible coffee rings. The byproduct of steaming mugs of barefaced concentrated caffeine left to languish upon its glossy skin.

Behind the table in the back left nook of the soulless benumbed vacuum was a diminutive, sacrilegious mockery of a bed. In the stead of the bounteous eye-appealing alternatives one would envision upon hearing the word, the confineless catalog was destitute of…that. A large wafer-thin mattress was an oversized featureless circuit board, held away from the ground by four pudgy rectangular legs. Stubby and blubbery, yet doubtlessly untiring. A ghostly white sheet smothering the bed like a discarded article of dust-clogged unwanted furniture, forever shoved into a nondescript corner of a lorn storage container. Bemusingly, the entirety of its accessories and bedware were absent. Leaving nothing more than a bare rambling void of snow-white nothingness with zero occupants or spectators. On the right of the bed, carved into the wall, was a small closet with black wooden sliding doors. The flawlessly groomed and tidied closest was inexplicably gutted, its innards innards, once hanging on pale seafoam green hangers, burglarized callously. The center of the floor housed the culprit behind the abundant multitude of unaccounted oddities.

Cloud Rider squatted on her haunches in her own bedroom’s zero point. A black unzipped backpack, its flappy unjointed maw gaping and agog, rested broad-mouthed on the sand-colored carpet. At her side was a black battery-powered lamp no bigger than two cans of processed goods stacked atop one another. Its bleached pretentious shafts of synthetic luster projectile vomited on the tan walls. Scattered evenly across the sprawling network of vibrant, nauseatingly-colored posters. Each one a starkly different disparate facet of her ceaseless and perpetually deviating interests and hobbies. Movies, famous actors, far-famed singers, and even one above her barren bed about the Golden Dashers. One Silver couldn’t help but smirk pridefully at.

“Cloudy?” Silver reiterated her comrade’s name somnolently, leaning her full and unbridled weight against the chipped door frame. Rubbing her bronze irises once more.

“I heard you the first time.” Cloud replied, razor-sharp and unwavering. Focus never straying far from her rigorous inexorable stream of packing.

“Then, when are you gonna tell me what’s up?”

“I…” She paused for a fleeting moment. A spare tee-shirt frozen in her hoof, inches away from the backpack’s floppy gluttonous mouth. “I was banking on the hope you’d still be asleep.”

“I guessed that,”

“Well, can you guess what else I’m doing, then?”

“No. And I don’t want to,” Silver retorted. “What’s wrong, Cloudy?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Can I know why?”

She shoved a loose cyanic hoodie into the backpack. “Can you guess why, since you guessed everything else?”

Silver’s brows furrowed. Knitted into an underscore etched above her bleary yet vexed orbs. “You don’t have a reason to be so ugly to me, Cloudy.”

“I have every reason, Silver.” Cloud responded, her somber cadence peppered with grains of melancholy. “I was hoping you’d still be asleep.” She concluded solemnly. Her voice devolving into a paltry guilty murmur.

“What woke me up to begin with?” Silver inquired, rubbing her forehead with closed muddled eyes.

She paused once more. The nigh-constant rhythmic disruptions in her movements like a dying car. Its engine pitifully gurgling to life and perishing mere seconds later. A mournful ouroboros with no conceivable end or coda in sight. “I tripped.”

“Huh.” Silver limped a few more haggard steps towards her, gnashing her teeth when her wounded hoof greeted the blonde dirty blonde carpet. She swept her iron-grey bangs from her forehead.

Silver was permitted an all-inclusive gaze inside Cloud Rider’s bulbous pig-bellied backpack. The top surface-level of its contents were a motley array of long-sleeved shirts and hoodies, each one a bold iridescent color, and a green-and-black checkered blanket. Through a crack between the tip of the iceberg of textile and cloth, she discerned the purple corner of her pillowcase. The once unsolvable enigma of the missing sleeping utensils was finally solved.

Silver dropped her voice down a singular octave. A hushed, tranquil whisper teetering on the border of being considered a loving purr. One she allotted exclusively and specifically for ponies who sat upon the apex of her hierarchy of friends. Cloud Rider was perched at the absolute summit, alone and devoid of a soul to compete with.

“What’s going on, Cloudy?” She crooned. “You can’t just up and leave in the middle of the night, it’ll kill you.”

With an unsuspecting Equestria now smack-dab in the center of Fall’s indiscriminate warpath, the half-decent temperatures facilitated by the sun toppled. It was nigh on forty degrees in Cloudsdale, and most likely the same for wherever Cloud was hellbent on sojourning to. A vivid vermillion cardigan and stark white tank top’s efforts against the glacial cold would be all but unavailing. Marching outside into the wintry wrath was poles apart from the ticket to the prosperity Cloud hoped to jaunt to.

However, for the first time in their years of adamantine camaraderie, Silver Spears wasn’t sure what Cloud Rider wanted.

She shoved the last of her garments in the backpack. A helter-skelter clod of satiny fabric was a conglomerate of lustrous, velvety shirts and boxer briefs. Cloud crammed the synthesis of varying fabrics and materials into the overfluxed bag. The backpack, utterly and completely packed to the gills, was akin to a titanic bowl of halloween candy. A fathomless pocket of variegated colors with no twins or doppelgangers extant. She hastily zipped the bag and slung it over her ironclad back, flexing with a wiry network of stalwart muscle.

Silence drizzled onto the still-waking pegasus like molten glass poured from a colossal unseen conduit in the star-spangled void above. The more she thought about it, the twinkling stareworthy ocean of indigo above bore one too many commonalities with their current state of affairs. Both the late night sky and Cloud Rider’s bedroom were a dire vacuum of merriness and noise. Both pledged infrangible allegiance to an impenetrable formless silence. Both were annexed by incontestable, undaunted silence, its inaudible reaches smothering and blatant. The sole difference separating the sullen bedroom to the equally melancholic sky they dwelled in was Silver Spears. The ignorant pegasus who foolishly decided to betray its cold command of quietude.

As Cloud Rider shifted her brawny frame towards the yawning bedroom door, Silver fool-heartedly was insubordinate to the tyrannic governance of silence.

“Cloud, please-”

“Stop!” Cloud’s ear-splitting bark threatened to rock the house to its unwary core. To say it threatened to shake the entire globe to its core would be far from an understatement in and of itself. “Just stop, Silver?”

“What’s wrong?”

“You know what’s wrong!” She exclaimed.

“No, I don’t.” Silver riposted, turning around and welding her back to the door. “And you’re not going anywhere unless-”

“Damn this!” Cloud exclaimed, stomping the floor and whipping her head to the adjacent wall. It was nothing short of a miracle her chagrined glower didn’t encase the room in a cubicle of ardent flame. “Damn it, Silver, why couldn’t you just stay asleep!”

“Cloud, you need to listen to me.”

Her housemate snapped her optics back towards her, glunching indignantly. “What do I need to hear that I haven’t heard before? What, Silver, what?!”

“I don’t know where this came from, but all I want to know is what’s troubling you.”

“You’re troubling me!”

Every ounce of ginger motherly care melted from her visage. Her countenance was rebooted to default settings. Gaze narrow and needle-like. Mouth an underscore pencil-drawn beneath her muzzle. “What could I have done that warrants this?”

“You’re really gonna ask me that?”

“If it was so important you needed to cause this much shit in the middle of the night, why didn’t you mention it before?”

“Because I knew you wouldn’t give a damn! Like you always do!”

“Then, let me in, Cloudy. What did I do?”

“Look at your hoof! Do you remember where that’s from? Or did you ‘forget’ again?” She exclaimed.

“What’re yo-”

Cloud empathically shook her head, tossing it side-to-side. Flakes of her volcanic rage slung every which way. “I’m not wasting my time here. Move.”

With three elongated strides, her hooves practically branding the carpet with her rampant vexation, she closed the distance between her and her unceremonious exit. Sauntering through the empty aperture and into the shadowy tenebrosity of a model Cloudsdale night. Defied only by the hazy milky sheen of the stars, gazing contently down upon the citizens. Even the snake skulking among an endless array of saints known only as Silver Spears.

“What’re you doing, Cloud Rider?”

“Something I should’ve done months ago, Silvy. Months.” She exclaimed from the amorphous dark.

Living in that merry abode with the lightest sleeper known to humanity came with an arduous gauntlet of challenges. Especially for a serial night owl such as Cloud. A pony who revolted her brain’s stern demands for slumber on a nightly-basis. Cautiously and meticulously traversing the living room straying emphatically from the few articles of furniture was second nature. The floor plan of the central hub of the apartment had become inscribed into her brain. As such, braving the caliginous dimensionless void at that lusterless hour and storming around the couch was impossibly facile.

Silver on the other hand was entirely inexperienced in that field. Opting to amble with her trademarked pathetic limp to the squared doorless frame. Hobbling like a feebleminded pirate with a rotting peg-leg. Silver leaned against the left side of the vacant aperture, stroking her wounded hoof in vain efforts at self-soothing.

“You aren’t going out that door unless you tell me what’s up!” Silver exclaimed into the abyss.

A vague silhouette of the ironbound pegasus stood humorless and sober inches from the front door. Next to the entrance of their lodgings was a mahogany coat rack. A slender, sylphlike wooden pole with an eight-armed crown atop with a glossy round dome in the center of it. The octet of octopine extremities each jutted out like upside-down sickles with their acuate ends substituted with small orbs. Only a trifling twain of vestures called that lank construction their home. A red fleece-lined flannel zip-up, consummate in the realm of staving off the high wintry dudgeon outside. Hooked next to it was an arresting navy blue bomber jacket with a small nickel-sized hole in the right pocket. Weather-beaten and emaciated, but far from neglected.

Cloud’s laughable, pity-wracked attempts at feverishly donning the sultry jacket was a spectacle in and of itself. Far more superior than any bread-and-circuses showpiece and reaching heights that were never thought possible. As the righteously irate equine fumbled piteously for the first sleeve, Silver shouted into the cimmerian nothingness consuming every centimeter of their living room. Shouting at the vague sketch of her closest friend drowned in the unending viscous oblivion. Her veiled physique draped with a downy quilt of inky black and bleached starlight.

“I don’t understand!”

Silver’s indomitable conquest for answers to her scorching questions was undeterrable. Her ravenous, unfettered scrounging knew no foreseeable coda or terminus. The foraging persisting and thriving in the flaming face of the obstinate harbinger, refusing to expel the reasoning behind her behavior from her grasp.

“If you can’t understand now, nothing I’ll say is gonna fix this.”

“Fix what?”

“Stop playing stupid!” Cloud thundered. “You’re smarter than that! I wanna believe you are, at least!”

Silver shifted her position against the doorframe. She winced, her teeth gnashing in vehement disapproval. “There’s a much easier way to handle this, Cloudy. I don’t wanna wake up our neighbors-”

“So that’s what’s important right now? Our neighbors? Not me?”

“Cloud, it’s not like that.”

“Look at your hoof, Silver! Do you see what you did? Have you understood it? The mayhem you keep causing for no good reason!”

Silver scoffed. “This is about that idiot up at the Wonderbolts HQ, isn’t it?”

Cloud’s countenance was incandescent. Cascaded by a skyscraping, mountain-sized comber of scintillating, burnished flame. “Her name’s Spitfire and it’s not about her, it’s about you!” She sneered. “It’s always ever been you!”

“You’re letting our competition get in the way between us? Is that it?”

“Do you understand the gravity of what you did, Silver? You snuck into her compound and almost beat her to death in broad daylight! Have you not comprehended what you did?”

“I comprehended ever since the hour it happened,” Silver responded. “I think about it every night. Everyday.”

“Probably don’t regret a damned thing, do you? You’d do it again in a wingbeat.”

“Don’t sit here and put words in my mouth.”

“I’m not putting words anywhere! They’ve always been there you just don’t wanna admit it.” Cloud proclaimed. “I’m done.”

“What do you mean you’re ‘done’? What’s that supposed to mean? The second game’s tomorrow.”

Cloud Rider glowered ardently, wrathfully penetrating the right sleeve of her jacket with a raring forelimb. “Count me out of it.”

“You can’t be serious. You’re bluffing!”

“I couldn’t be more serious. The most serious I’ve been in my whole life.”

Silver gawked agape. She paused before she spoke. “How long has this been in the cooker for, Cloud Rider?”

“Long enough. Ever since I’ve seen you flush your meds night after night. Did you guess I would ever find that out?”

Medication. Silver Spears detested the word. Spending every paltry drop and drizzle of impassioned malignity gnawing her heart to loath it. Thoroughly despise the term and its innumerable definitions and meanings. Some smothered in enigmatic ambiguity, others clearer than the burning morning sky.

She wasn’t exactly sure why the word and its inculpative connotations turned her veins into a winding, tangled labyrinth of flaming gas trails. Whether it was the implications of ill-boding lunacy, both unsung and exclusively implicit, or the exact antipode was the essence of torrid debate. Whatever the case may be, it didn’t cool the pegasus’ igneous nerves and thunderous heart by even a scanty degree.

“Excuse me?”

“Did you think I don’t have a brain? I know what you’ve been up to.”

“And what’s that been?” Silver riposted, embittered. Her words more sharp and knife-like than expired vinegar, each letter a whetted torrent of daggers.

“Going into the medicine cabinet at two-o’clock in the morning everyday then taking a one-minute bathroom trip? Every fucking night, Silver.” Cloud militantly scorned. “I wanted to give my best friend the benefit of the doubt. Trust me, I did.“

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because you’ve been…” The indigo-haired mustang gagged on a wad of her despondent, brain-stabbing words. A barbed, bristled cord of thorny unvoiced judgements lacing her throat. “You’ve been too eager to hurt ponies, Silver, I don’t know how else to explain it to you.”

Silver’s visage was mangled. A brutalized, discordant muddle of mind-boggling disbelief at the egregious accusations and an omnibus of…something. Cloud Rider couldn’t quite pinpoint the macabre encroaching sentiment. A faint apparition of the ghastly emotion blighted her pools of molten bronze. Feeble and spectral, like an impotent haze wiped unjustly from the plain of existence by a herculean gale, yet unapologetically grim. A singular vague parallel materialized in her palpitating dolorous heart. One she struggled to accept as candid gospel, in spite of the lofty chances of it being reality. A reality that was as palpable and unabashed as the grains of pride marring her scintillating irises.

“I can’t believe you,” Silver’s head dropped like a broken Pez machine. Her neck rubbery and fallible. She shifted uncomfortably against the wall, her robust extremities impaled by white-hot glowing spears of fatigue.

“I can’t either.” Cloud fired back. The black-and-red flannel zip-up fully veiled her statuesque frame. Her bounteous backpack was a colossal tumor welded onto the center of her spine. Hexed with the grisly appearance of a malformed hunchback in the gloomful living room.

“Who are you to get angry on that cocky bitch’s behalf? We both know she needed to be knocked down a peg or two. Maybe three pegs!” Silver bellowed shamelessly.

“Oh, no…”

“What I did, what I’ve been up to all these years, that’s simply the price you gotta pay to be in this business. It’s the cost of admission, Cloud Rider. That’s your ticket to success here. What’s the point of being the ‘best’ or being ‘great’ if nopony’s there to challenge you? They need me!”

“To beat them and leave them to die?”

“If that’s the way you wanna put it, then absolutely.”

Cloud’s stare was a meager duo of terror-struck pinpoints. Those ravishing diamond-like optics irreparably cracked and fissure-ridden. Clouded with a nameless ineffable revulsion that no mortal could ever begin to comprehend. Even the pegasus that found herself shackled to its kafkaesque throne of unutterable earthly terrors. She paused before she spoke.

“I’m not gonna sit here and wait for somepony to come get their revenge on you for this. I mean, you heard what the Man in Blue said, didn’t you? And you’re far from retiring early!” Cloud withdrew a trembling, quaking chunk of oxygen from the suspensive atmosphere. “This is it. I’m finished. I refuse to be a sitting duck when he comes here to kill you, Silver! I won’t do it.”

“He-”

“Count me out of the game. Count me out of everything while you’re at it.”

The wispy caliginous configuration of oblong shapes and picturesque brawn departed. With one brisky hasty motion, she flipped the deadbolt, twisted the knob, and ventured into the Icelandic eventide. Forsaking her former housemate, lorn and dismayed beyond basic comprehension, to dwell in a rancid cesspool of her gravest transgressions and sins. Deserting her in a living room as black and unsympathetic as her maniacal psyche. No entities were present in that household. Just the lunacy-wracked Silver Spears, her ireful blusterous heart, and her mind. A mind that was swiftly annexed by a raging maelstrom of self-loathing and the inability to accept her…what was a good word for them? What was an appropriate term to christen her brazen bouts of merciless assault? The world around her, the sane right-hearted aggregate of Equestria, harbored a colorful encyclopedic vault for words to coin her bold-faced abominations. Unwarranted blasphemies exacted upon those, depending on a myriad of circumstances, were ineffective in the realm of self-defense.

The ancient, dust-blanketed Grandfather Clock stood stoic and formal like a bodyguard at a high-society thronging funeral. Its rangy aurous hands ticking tranquilly, shifting inch by inch at a glacier’s pace. Second after second, minute after minute. Grueling hour after grueling hour. Perpetually imprisoned within a cyclical unending race with no finish line. A maze with no prize or hidden tunnel to freedom. A serpentine labyrinthian with no minotaur to conclude the suffering of the singular ill-starred inhabitant. Merely endless ticking on a stark white numbered face. The only exception to this brutal, callous monotony being the rhythmic sonorous chime. The golden pendulum watched from its spotless glass case as a bereaved, tear-logged Silver Spears lumbered from the lightless room. Catapulting volcanic clods of profanities and unholy vulgarities at no one. Clumps of flaming grievances taken out upon an invisible force that didn’t exist.

Two entities were present in that house. Only two. The miserably weeping Silver Spears and that old antiquated clock. Older than the floorboards it rested upon. Its thunderous nasally chime failing to drown out the strident inconsolable wails behind Silver’s bedroom door.

The pegasus ruminated ceaselessly about that grievous night from the moment she was abducted by sleep’s ginger embrace, until the nanosecond her alarm pried her from it.

She wrenched herself from the beguiling margins of her lush mattress. Contemptibly lumbering from the barren austere apartment, encumbered by a morose drought of sound and fervor. Silver’s somberly taciturn home, at least in the realm of joy and overall felicity, was a bone-dry fruitless wasteland. The only known parallel hosting an abundant nimiety of similarities being the extentless, recessed deserts of Appleooza. Silver Spears, a misfavored pegasus drowning in scalding infamy every waking second of her existence, waddled wretchedly. Every formerly effortless and brisk, passion-filled step to her routine was back-breaking drudgery. The most wearisome spree of ho-hum donkey work conceivable within the demarcations of reality. Every distinct stage in her ritualistic, religiously obeyed morning routine was completed at a glacier’s pace. Fishing a half-decent outfit from her wardrobe was impossibly arduous. Cleansing her teeth of its accrued nightly grime and combing her chrome locks was strenuous. In all uncensored honesty, attempting to create a marble statue with rusted dinner spoons would’ve been immensely easier. More unstrained and facile by leaps, bounds, and hurdles. Her apartment was nothing short of a lusterless, gulag-like purgatory rather than a functioning mirthful abode.

The most herculean obstacle, devoid of doubt’s ghastly aura, was that fateful, heart-rending gaze into her pristine bathroom mirror. Leering acerbically at her dolorous, bereaved visage, boring holes into her red-rimmed lakes of liquified copper. The stygian plastic handle of her veteran hair brush clasped in her wounded, war-torn hoof. Her plaintive globes, bordered by a puffy ring of pale ruby-red flesh, straight and unfaltering. Inaesthetic eye bags painted a pallid unpicturesque salmon-pink. The veteran brush, used exclusively by her for an unnumbered sum of years yet still fit as a fiddle, went through its habitual mannerisms. Traveling through her rowdy discordant river of iron sprouting from her scalp and cascading down the rear of her neck. It too as disheveled and distraught as the pony it supplied a luscious mane to. It took almost ten mournful minutes to thoroughly and errorlessly wring her psyche out. Exhaustively cleansing her overwrought tempestuous brain and gut-shot heart of the remnants of the previous calamitous night. Even after that scanty period of despondence, the woeful byproducts of Cloud Rider’s melancholic departure survived. Persisted against a skyscraping alpine of leviathanic odds. Enduring her unflappable endeavors at purging every trifling atom of its existence from the tear-stained slate.

The couch she roosted disquietly upon was a broad ashen sofa. Its perturbing sooty color scheme was irrefutably disconcerting, as though clad in a boot-faced panoply of armor forged from the ashes of a scorched mansion. A tiny placid triad of tricolored throwing pillows were uniformly deployed in the couch corners. In the right-hand corner was the blank stygian patriarch. The left housed one fabricated from velvety scarlet textile, adorned with a bold ornate cross-stitched illustration of an afternoon sun. In the middle, haphazardly lying flat as a washing board in the couch’s center, was a faded seafoam green pillow, perceptibly punier than the rest for no ostensible reason. Silver Spears blighted the left-hand side of the titanic sofa. Her swathed staunched hoof dangling lifelessly in her lap, languishing listlessly above the unsullied living room flooring. After another rueful spree of feverish eye-rubbing and a frenzy of self-loathing of the highest caliber, Silver clashed tooth-and-nail with her intramural yearnings. Contravening against the nonpermissive catalog of various noxious fantasies she desperately longed to bleed into reality. Among the prolific was a twain of rampant euphorias, one that garnered the most bizarrely exotic enthusiasts imaginable. Two imaginariums that only the most slothful of self-pitying basement-dweller’s could possibly pine for. Either she traipsed back to her gleamless bedroom and wallowed ceaselessly, or she absentmindedly drifted back to the only place that made sense amidst a tapestry of bedlam. The Golden Dashers compound. More specifically, into the frigid confines of her box-like office. Glowered upon by the twinkling superabundance of pocketed trophies and gilded resplendent accolades. The fruits of her unvarying steadfast endeavors. Bounteous yields from her grueling day-by-day toils and ear-splitting shouts to her parched fervid team. The only heavenly elixir that could ever quench their nagging cravings being a bone-crunching victory. Accrued no matter the cost.

Silver’s deliberations were irreparable muddles and clouded by her inexorable ruminations. Smothering her scrutinous consideration in a vision-robbing haze. Ultimately, trekking to her solitary duty with no zealous Cloud Rider in tow was preferable over the other myriad of possibilities. After all, being secure and sound in insured safety inside her castle-like sanctuary was vastly better than her home. Sitting high-strung and anxious, trying in vain to bide her time until the Man in Blue arrives to pay her grievous dues. Silver Spears gathered the shattered fragments of her bearings, hid her vermillion eye sockets from the world, and decamped from her abode.

The Man in Blue.

The half of a foreign human duo, none other than the sword-wielding uninvited Levi Cronell, polluted her every thought and notion no matter the subject. Her cumbersome flight with the leaden weight of her insurmountable injustices cracking her vertebrae was sullen to say the least. Every flap of her robust, ironclad wings arrived bereft of the flaming whip of passion lashing her drumming heart. The only companion in her extensive verbose life that was there to stay and tore its roots from her frame. Callously exiled and shunned by a melancholic army of countless. The barbaric Captain Sorrow and his chiliad of equally barbarous soldiers and goons, each one a variation of their chieftain.

If Silver was as veracious as she proclaimed to anyone who would listen, she wasn’t entirely sure who to blame for this travesty. The unbridled volcanic fulmination of her most cherished, prized relationship. Every inch and flap of her wings throughout that strenuous trek from her cadaverous home to the Dashers’ compound was spent contending. Internally mooting endlessly with no merciful coda, neither forced nor natural, on the horizon to rescue her being from the thorny shackles of contention. It seemed no answer her semi-lucid psyche could conjure was proficient enough to outlast her outlandish standards. If her mind’s alleged “remedy” for her boundless mulling didn’t fit in her wasp-waisted requirements, it was stony-heartedly ousted. Banished for insubordination it would’ve never dared to take part in. Not in any conceivable manner, fashion, or method.

With Silver’s heart in a shambolic mound of sliced sorrowful ribbons, it came as little surprise she opted for a shortcut. An airborne path far afield from the conventional routine route undergone by limitless average citizens daily. Not the aftermath of some abrupt epiphany that her enfeebled public image could be furthermore sullied by tear-misted visage. She simply longed for a vagabond to her occupation occupied predominantly by halcyon repose. Coveted peace and quiet, in everyday layman’s terms. A period of time, regardless of length or objective, where the air was annexed by pure and unadulterated tranquility. Candidly, especially in a lively city such as the vibrant Cloudsdale, the prospect was a will-o’-the-wisp. But one she somehow managed to achieve. Somehow, someway, Silver Spears was always delivered what she desired upon a gleaming silver platter by fate. Whether it be a mundane yearning for vaunted repose or impunity from her injurious manic shortcomings. Fantastical, wizardly, unfathomable impunity.

She darted high above the already lofty metropolis, the shrill platoons of gales and maelstroms screeching in her eardrums like a cavalry of ear-splitting teapots. In fact, the more she burned rubber northbound towards the sun’s indomitable monarchy, it appeared Mother Nature was surly. Growing dog-tired and vexed of her interminable spells of forced one-sided gladiatorial combat with ill-deserving ponies. The way the clouds hindered her bloodshot pupils. Not enough to be a dire crisis that demanded stern acknowledgment, but just nettlesome enough to be considered a trivial chafe. In all undiluted actuality, it wasn’t just the nuggets of downy ivory cloud that sought to badger the Dashers’ ambassador. It seemed impossibly clamant that every facet of the far-famed, distinguished golden morning sky was hellbent on obstructing her shortcut. The way the stone-cold whistling wind lashed her glower. Transforming her still-damp paths where tears gushed the night prior into an aberrant, entirely personalized torture apparatus. Harrowing the bottoms of her eyes like a heat-seeking fleet of acute icicles.

The way herculean sun glinted ferociously in the slim gaps between the migrating clouds. The way the Autumn morn was just a trifling degree or two above the already semi-comfortable status quo. Every crucial ingredient to make the introduction to that anguishing November Wednesday even ever-so-slightly adequate was absent. All aspects and dimensions, no matter how minor or arbitrary they appear on a surface-level spectation, were unapologetically egregious in one way or another. Yet, as Silver Spears always did when her team was the object of her heart’s unfaltering desire, she endured. Equestria’s attempt at erecting an impregnable rampart between her and her second non-blood-related family were in vain. Whether their reasons for the purposeful hindrances were rooted in positive intention, or the sickest of dark desires.

The commune to the Dashers’ compound was a tad bit longer than it usually was, courtesy of the unorthodox bird’s-eye-view shortcut she undertook. Adding a handful of precious moments onto her shuttle all in the name of avoiding Cloudsdale’s thronging civilization was…bemusing. Especially for a stickler who placed rules and fast-and-hard regulations in her facility on a grandiose throne such as Silver Spears. For the entirety of the taciturn fifteen-and-a-half minutes, she decrepitly fluttered like a maimed eagle through that cloud-mottled cerulean expanse. On the outside, her exoskeleton was misery-wracked and infected by the unceasing Silence Virus. A voracious, wolfish plague that seemed to revolutionize the ambient pale blue ether. Her globes were a glossy, nebulous dam between the world encompassing her and a chiliad of unwarranted tears. In fact, the totality of her being seemed like a glorified, pompous doomed-to-fail attempt at staving off despondecy's power-intensive armies.

Being almost two miles above the buzzing, teeming streets of Cloudsdale, she passed a manifold of buildings and various constructions. No twins or duplicates existing in this sorry-excuse for a God’s-eye view of the sprawling city. The mammoth distance dressed any methodically fabricated edifice in a thickset helm of anonymity. Through a paper-thin layer of misty clouds, the structure donning a nebulous haze, all she saw was a ghostly outline. The faint, nigh-imperceptible diagram of the unparticular building’s framework. Each phantom-esque sketched-out framework appeared pencil-drawn, occupying the bottom half of her peripheral view in its entirety. Every block or rectangular prism seeming more like plastic pieces in a broad, all-encompassing game of Monopoly. Eventually, by some mystical grain of divine heavenly luck, the outline of the Golden Dashers’ headquarters endowed her quick-tempered vision.

A titanic staple-shaped structure fabricated solely from the black concrete of its cobbled ceiling and the smokey-grey concrete of the remainder of its goliath skeleton. The ashen walls were bisected, its top half an arresting, bold gold and its antipode bearing a saturated royal blue. Behind the colossal hunk of concrete and barred glass windows, its mold like a gargantuan handlebar to an unseen detonator, was the training field. A prodigious rambling expanse of a flat faceless plain of ivory cloud. Sporadically scattered haphazardly were medium-sized clusters of the lily-white fluff. These pellets of land polka-dotted the brilliant azure backdrop of the ravishing Cloudsdale sky, housing a novel myriad of vibrant metal hoops.

Silver Spears paid little to no mind in any fashion to the extravagant jungle gym posterior to the compound. Frankly, she callously neglected and disregarded every entity, both inanimate and the reverse opposite, that blighted her shallow sour gaze. Any emotion or activity illuminating the outside world that dared to breach her somber copper-colored stare was tactlessly ostracized and shunned. Heartlessly extradited without rhyme or reason from Silver’s own self-absorbed manufactured universe in her skull.

When the spotless glass double-doors soundlessly divided, a barren flaxen lobby deserted by all symbols of life welcomed her with lusterless arms. Its cobalt polished tile floor and stark white bricked walls housing zero indications that a red-blooded being dwelled within its demarcations. A broad salivating maw of icelandic air clamped its wintry, pitiless jaws around every inch of her joyless physique with feral abandon. When her chestnut irises and pupils, clogged with anguish yet to be mitigated, landed upon the rows of vacant chairs, a fuse burst inside. A circuit breaker residing in the loathsome margins of her smoked and popped.

She was alone. Utterly and completely recessed from the conventional inexorable tumult from her semi-redundant everyday existence. Was she as exponentially appreciative of the unscheduled quietude as she wanted to be? That was a daunting question to provide an answer for. The benumbing, elephantine weight, try as it might, left more than enough room for doubt to mosey inside and make itself comfortable. Nestling snug and well-heeled in the crow cage of Silver’s heart.

Whatever specific name or helm the dagger-sharp vehemence sported was arbitrary. It was neither here nor there. The dire significance it possessed beneath those harrowingly peculiar circumstances was few and far between. All that mattered to Silver Spears, the alleged fearless lionhearted leader of the Golden Dashers. The solitary illustrious pegasus who, with her zealous confidant Cloud Rider at her right-hand side, would shepherd their fervorous team to victory. The barren arctic halls were the textbook definition of barren and its perpetual laundry list of synonyms and its variety of classifications. Her hooves tapped shallowly against the pepful blue-tiled corridor like fist-sized pouches of marbles dropped onto the tasteless, pale shadow of a mosaic. Each systematized vivacious square bordered by a slender stygian thread of paste, saddled with unmerciful uniformity. Grey-painted walls with the sole exception to the mundanity existing in the form of a golden bar. A sun-yellow stripe embellishing the wall’s bisected bottom portion, situated easefully inches beneath the rectangular barred windows. The broad expanse of imprisoned glass rain-streaked from the undried drops of the long bygone storm. Remnants of those raucous torrents eternally begriming the window, itself fettered within an ageless crow cage.

Her office was settled in a matrix of unbridled isolation that recognized little to no parallels. A pale grey door at the tail end of a lengthy verbose corridor, the only of its kind amidst the countless feet of concrete and nauseating hues and shades. The right-hand section of the blocky upside-down U-shaped compound was afflicted with a morose drought of life. All that populated its razor-sharp corners and redundant cadaverous halls was the tiresome architectural status quo. A boundless stretch of unsullied cobalt tiles, twinkling in the rangy tubes of artificial light socketed above, and windows incarcerated by a ribcage of spotless steel bars. The reason being? Silver, even after nigh on seven years of calling this leviathanic building her second home, had not a grain of a clue.

Silver Spears vagabonded to her modest-slash-egomaniacal office on the dejected lonesome right wing of the compound. Plucking a small aurous key from the breast pocket of her snow-white button-down, unlatching the pale grey door, and entering its glimmering innards. Her sojourn inside the gelid cubicle lasted a trifling fifteen seconds before she materialized from its glimmering innards. Wreathing her neck mapped by sooty veins was a gangly, rich scarlet woven necklace. Tethered to the center was the unshared reasoning behind venturing to her office from the get-go. Her small untarnished silver whistle. Resting placidly against her sleek chest and perched atop the slim unbuttoned crevasse of her collar like a holy pendant. Feverishly purged of all signs of grime or wear, no matter how minor or negligible. Emancipated from the abhorrent quivering jaws of flagrant disrepair. A fair that an abundance of the Dashers’ compound suffered in the dark, its creators sickeningly neglectful and unbothered.

With her pride and joy fastened to her throat and her merciless melancholy transiently stifled, Silver Spears began to walk. In uncensored actuality, the word ‘walk’ wasn’t the quintessential word the bronze-eyed equine would employ to describe…this. For a grueling period that passed like decades, Silver paced back and forth from one end of the compound’s pristine upper floor to the other.

Ambling pathetically.

Hobbling pitifully.

Lumbering.

Lumbering.

Lumbering.

“It don’t gotta be perfect, Silvy. For goodness sakes, it don’t even gotta be good. Not decent neither. Just run this place the way you see fit.” A geriatric venerable pony rasped in an archaic family manor long ago. His brambly voice like brain-sized stones twirled ferociously in a raring dryer.

“Take care of it for me, will you? Please. It’s all I ask.”

It was nigh-impossible to decipher the misty line between indifference to her cadaverous father’s final rites, or some other mystical esoteric excuse. Either a morose, dour deficiency of the capabilities to fulfill her dearest companion’s singular deathbed request. Or…something else. A chimeric infrequent reason that she hadn’t mass-produced innumerable amounts of times yesteryear. Attempting to feverishly scour the unending cabinets of excuses and bounteous vaults of exculpations. To locate that will-o’-the-wisp, that irreplaceable singularity in the virus-riddled motherboard of her mind, was inches from the biome of impossibility. In all unfiltered reality, reaping a matchless, copybook excuse, one that never dwelled upon the facetious tongue of Silver Spears before, was impossible. Simply put, in every contortion and definition of the word, an ignis fatuus. An infantile delusion penned within the fallacious demarcations of a toddler’s imaginarium. Delusions that aided naught but overfeeding the blissful dreams and jubilations of her father. Tossing gluts of mendacious hopes onto her moribund guardian’s plate, already replete and bountiful from her years of hollow disconsolate promises.

Silver sat stolid and inanimate atop a board of timeworn black-speckled oak planks. Its formerly unflawed, adeptly ridged topmost layer eroded by the dampened towel-clad posteriors of the aggregate of the lawless Dashers. The haggard bench was affixed to the seafoam-green-and-white checkered tiles, each square larger than a dice, by two metal pillars. In a foregone epoch, these metallic pillars bearing the mirrored shape of a fully exerted paper towel roll were endowed with a brilliant hue. In all of her innumerable years vagabonding to luminously painted stadiums and mastodonic arenas, that arcane facet of the boundless wheel of color was seldom viewed. In all reality, to even say “seldom” was a gargantuan understatement. That decrepit twain of cylindrical tubes of steel fastened to the peculiarly unsullied floor by hexagonal bolts, once upon a time, was the most brilliant of red. A gorgeous hybrid between vivacious vermillion and pepful scarlet. Endowed with the consummate quantity of shades and tones to somehow ameliorate its flawless features. Each metal tube was endowed with this gorgeous color and donned it with resistless pride. A tint unseen by the debauched Silver Spears in spite of the sheer incalculable copiousness of her travels to venues of all varieties and varicolored patterns.

A quartet of those miraculously unsullied benches idled mere inches from one another. Each construction of piebald ragged wood and ravishingly painted steel had between them around six or seven inches. Lined and ordered in utmost copybook uniformity that would’ve calmed the unshackled lunacy of the most compulsive of men. Maddened and steered towards impossible depths of their ineffable, roaring hunger for perfection. Idyllic, halcyon perfection that, of all places, found and erected sanctuary in the barren stomach of the Golden Dashers’ compound. Behind the anarchical pegasus was a foursome of rectangular showers. Each cubicle constructed solely from spotless aquamarine tile was appended to the equally clear-swept wall. All interconnected and separated by a singular turquoise rampart.

That color…

That shivery color. The self-same indistinguishable tone pridefully donned by one image that every centimeter of every facet of Equestria seamlessly integrated into everyday society. An alarming hue prodigal with detestable perturbation that invaded the limelight with a killer’s tatterdemalion attire. The exact epithet of the so-called “Butcher of The Everfree”, a label sanguinely endowed by some, was lost on her. Yet the color of that ragged getup, a shambolic dour mosaic of his crimes and transgressions, never departed her psyche.

Dangling from the pale rod was a thick yet willowy curtain vertically striped with royal blue and brilliant lustrous gold. The avant-garde saucer-head of the shower, its perforated visage blighted with a lily-white rustic powder of enigmatic origin, stood prominent above the curtain. Soldered to the wall above the tiled carrel for, yet again, a bizarre reason helmed in an oracular mist.

With a single turn of throbbing head, Silver’s soulful irises would’ve crashed down upon either one of the pair of twins on her right and left. Dwelling in both factions of her vision was a titanic roofless cube, its color congruent with its minute brethren a few scant feet from its side. Through a small doorless aperture stood a lusterless commodious cube with stark-white tiled floors, bemusingly untouched by the fluorescent slender bulbs above almost entirely. Permitting the access of soupy, vision-robbing murk to annex its jury-rigged defenses. A squad of rangy, lithesome silver pipes jutted from the grimeless walls with four disc heads welded to them.

Somehow, in some fantastical way, a lukewarm shower in this glorified prison of blinding tiles was a pacifying ritual for Silver Spears. Of all ponies who dwelled within Equestria’s mind-twisting demarcations, it was the Dashers’ ungoverned leader who derived allaying tranquility from an avocation such as this. A meager wedge of personal time spent idling beneath an untarnished rivulet, basking in the elementary sensation of water against flesh. A pegasus who believes the only sane means of acquiring a victory was nearly fording the line into perpetrating a brutish murder, water against skin seemed too…what was the word for it? Normal? Sensible? Too ordinary and lawful?

Silver in all of her low-spirited, sympathy-hungry glory was taking the habitual preparations to indulge once more. Garish bile-yellow towel folded in her parted lap. Stark white metal door pockmarked by chipped paint, bearing a reveal for the spartan steel beneath, was latched and double-secured. Far behind her was the door’s congruent twin, it too locked and double-checked. Line of sight to its brethren irreparable impeded by the mastodonic shower block to her right.

Doors fastened to hamper the unheralded entry of any one pony. In spite of the barren population residing in the empty-bellied corridors above her head, safety was always her chief priority when it came to vulnerable moments of this degree. At night, before slumber’s unpitying battalions savagely wrested her from the grasp of the mortal world, her doors were always locked. Three double-checks later, and her home would at last feel innocuous enough for her shut-eye. Her office was the same story. Checked the lock once. Checked it twice. Checked it again. As long as her well-being was the one dangled hazardously in the balance, the ramifications of a disregard for her arbitrary rituals was the most dire of nightmares.

With the pipes activated and the air conditioning cascading that malevolently cascaded that capacious room disarmed, Silver Spears was thoroughly prepared. Although, any sane human being of sound mind and lucid thought would be quick to understand this bootless action comes without a grain of cruciality. No horde of fetid sweat begriming her glistening coat could parallel the caliber of what desperately needed sterilization. Her soul. That scabrous, tarnished, blackened pulp of ingrateful sin she somehow managed to call a heart day-in and day-out. That was what truly, bereft of a hint of doubt, required a rigorous scrubbing in its loathsome entirety.

“I thought my words were clear.”

Silver’s sin-caked heart bounded vociferously like a rabid race horse, unshackled and unfettered from the chains that obligedly bated him. However, presently, those adamantine manacles were a fugitive memory. A skull-grating screech of the shower curtain’s rings against its rod burglarized every scant drop and morsel of her attention. Her bogged head and plaintive irises swiveled at a speed only a woolgathering Hermes could ever dream of trumping. Melancholic globes finding the incensed victim of her heat-seeking yet disconcerted wide-eyed gaze.

Standing high and mighty in all of his velvety, wrathful glory was an irrefutably ireful Man in Blue. Idling within the second incommodious shower block filling every centimeter of space that green-and-white checkered cubicle brought to the table. His attire was, in more ways than one, a deviant to the monastic outfit he donned upon their foreboding introduction. A sleek, fine-grained collared leather jacket sleeved his gracile frame effortlessly and bereft of any loathsome wrinkles or loose material. The stygian coat was perfectly fitted to his willowy chassis. Its fabrication was doubtlessly the work of a maestro in the sophisticated craft of fashion. In Ponyville, it didn’t take a Harvard-educated rocket scientist to put two and two together on who its dexterous creator was. Understanding Levi’s indignant intentions, powered exclusively by righteous fury, didn’t take the intellect of a one-in-a-million polymath either.

It was clear why he was here.

And it was clear that a harmless escape for Silver Spears was far removed from the deck of possibilities for how that interaction would conclude.

“L-Levi!?” Silver choked, pouncing from the timeworn bench. Ostentatious towel slipping between her ardent legs and crumbling pathetically onto the tiles in a pale yellow heap. “How-! Why did you-”

“My words were clear, weren’t they?” He bowed beneath the alabaster-white rod and past the tiled margins of the cubicle. His chaste burgundy steel-toed leather boots clacking stridently like rouge dice rocketed to the floor with each and every step. Balled fists welded to the side of his thighs. Knuckles painted a ghostly white. Jaw clenched, varicolored veins mapping his throat. Emerald irises keen and choleric, incaging the cowardly pegasus in his houndlike stare.

‘Oh, no! No, no, no, NO!’ Silver’s agonized roars reverberated endlessly in the pounding vestibule of her skull. ‘Why here!? Why NOW!? Why now?’

“I-”

“I gave you a choice.”

“I-I know, I-”

“Either you step down or you stay, right?” Levi inquired, eyes manic with unvoiced rage. Trapped in a boiling vat in the deepest recesses of his jovial heart, now free from their bindings. “I didn’t leave any room for confusion.”

Levi approached closer, stridulent steps failing to mirror the pace of Silver’s stampeding oozing heart. Silver backed away with every stride, Levi only trekked closer. Extremities stifling an irate tremble. The male found himself in the Lilliputian quartet of venerable benches. He strode between the back duo of benches, throwing his roiled-up dominant hand and latching onto the side of the wood. His one and only herculean tug was in vain, too impotent to uproot the Augean bolts in the tiles. Accomplishing nothing but etching a vibrant, bulging composition of veins across his unsleeved forearm.

His core only sank deeper in the bubbling raving dale of rageful slag bulldozing through his bones. Usurping his bloodstream and bringing the frothing ichor to a torrid slow-bubbling boil.

He was ready for this.

His amped body and fevered extremities were ready.

His unquenchable thirst and voracious stomach for revenge and blood was ready.

His mind… His mind was an entirely different story. The only impregnable hindrance he feared would erect an impedance on his sojourn to Cloudsdale. The only thing that could come close to hampering his ignominious warpath. This dishonorable, unrelenting crusade that wouldn’t halt and answer to any totem of authority, in spite of their insurmountable nature. His heart was struck daunted and frightened at the prospect of an unforecastable caesura. In truth, his heart was ensnared in a rusted bear trap of matchless dread at the option a wrench could be rocketed into his, albeit tenuous and jerry-built, plans.

Yet…here he was. Contrivances unimpeded. Loosely engineered agenda for merited retribution as stalwart as they come. Him, the valorless sod before him cowering in the smoldering face of his fury, and two locked doors.

Levi approached ever-closer. War-torn cavitied scabbard slapping his thigh with every lunging purposeful stride. Holographic sword, untainted by the cancerous light of the compound’s unnumbered bulbs, fit snugly in the weather-beaten leather. Pearlescent gold-lined hilt glistening in the shafts of synthetic luster. Silver cowered snivelingly against the stark-white wall, a deviant to the hard-and-fast creed of mundane colors this dungeon of banality followed. Entire right half of her body all but soldered to the blanched bricks. Aghast irises agog and plumbing the fathomless depths of fear and all of its winding caverns. Dragging her malleating heart into profundities she ne’er thought possible in all of her decades of life on Earth.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to her? What you’ve done to me!? Even the slightest clue!” The Man in Blue barked sonorously.

“Yeah, but I didn’t think this would happen!” Silver finally parried with her own embittered remark. A spiteful chortle preceded her next envenomed rejoinder. “That asshole had it coming! About time somepony-“

The remainder of her acrimonious banter, verbatim with Spitfire’s peace and tranquility, was unmendably squashed. A bony hand catapulted from its temporary domicile against his left thigh and circumventing the width of Silver’s throat. Ferocious digits, batteried by unhallowed forces far beyond the capabilities of her understanding, becoming a vice of flesh and bone. Tightening with the unrivaled brawn of a precocious gladiator. Her words mashed into a trifling squeak fleeing from parted lips.

The male rammed the pegasus barbarically into the bricks. Back of her skull bouncing off the marmoreal wall. Bronze snapped onto emerald. A vociferous vortexes of sorrow and wrath boring holes into those piteous chestnut globes. She scoured every inch of her brutish attacker’s umbrageous optics. A twain of peridot pools almost entirely conquered by a stygian void, his dilated pupils like boundless vortexes into a vanquished dimension. Just pure, unadulterated, unalloyed oblivion as far as her jerry-built mind was able to fathom.

“Don’t you dare laugh at me now! We’re past those games!” The male thundered tympanically. Distance between his grudgeful visage and hers was a paltry few centimeters. His breath smelled potently of apple cider and peppermint toothpaste. “We’re past everything!”

The left side of Silver’s face was tenaciously jostled against the wall. His bone-splitting grip on her throat unceasing and barbaric, her impeccant lymph nodes wailing for coveted mercy. In fact, it seemed every millimeter of her dysphoric frame miserably cried for that same clemency. A wish that shall never see the light of fruition.

“D-Dammit, Levi! Let me g-go!”

“I gave you a choice, right? A decision that you had to make! I told you what would happen clear as day.” He barked. “Either you step down or something you’re not gonna like is gonna happen, right? Isn’t that what I said?”

He pounded the rear of her skull against the wall as he reiterated her options. Selections that were, in every imaginable, choosing the least lethal of two poisons. Being demanded by a foreign resident in her home that never belonged to either lose every noteworthy thing dear to her or this wasn’t much of a choice.

She nodded pathetically.

He pressed her firmer into the tiles and lifted her a few more inches higher from the ground. Forelegs dangling like jellyfish tentacles in the high-strung open air. His left hand slinked across his waist and his digits coiled around the defectless hilt of his sword. Both hands now occupied by a veiny, robust grip that only the gods of Olympus could ever think of breaking.

“Then, tell me why you’re still here.” He ordered through gnashed teeth. “Do you want to die? Are you that guilty? Is this your death wish?”

“P-Please. L-Let me-”

“GIVE ME A FUCKING ANSWER THAT MAKES SENSE!” His stentorian roar rocked her harrowed skull. The room threatened to recoil in fright. “You left her in a pool of her own blood and waited for her to die! And I’m supposed to just let you go!? You’re making it hard for me to even consider letting you go!”

“W-Why?” Silver replied in strangled words.

“Because you’re still here!”

The entirety of the bottom floor was annexed by that familiar soundless tyranny. Tadpoles of sweat commencing a prodigious derby upon his bulging forehead and blazing countenance. His twain of indignant moss-green orbs bringing Silver’s petrified irises to a smoking broil. The volcanic anger roiling within his sockets as incomprehensibly vitriolic as it always was, no matter the target or recipient. It was always indiscriminate. Its focalization always trained on the nature of the sin and who cruel-heartedly committed it. No other factor could ever begin to stifle the conflagrant tongue of blaze lapping up his heart like a parched dog in the reaches of the Sahara. Somehow, someway, his obstinate psyche conjured a method of taming that rapacious jackal fettered behind his ribcage.

Every factor presented brazen and flagrant before Silver Spears all spelled a watertight, unfaltering fate. A rage of Homeric proportions previously unseen by the pegasus, a utensil of limitless ruination and violence at his hip, and a white-knuckled grasp upon the hilt. The equation was simple. Impossibly elementary, yet unfathomably dire. An angry man, the origin of his heartache in his acerbic clutches, and a sword primed for carnage. It all seemed methodically engineered for a singular ichor-stained outcome that Silver always dreaded the prospect of facing the instant she stormed into this playing field. She stared down the lightless barrel of all of her crimes and injustices, the seeds she sowed had bloomed long ago. And Levi Cronell presented the scythe to reap them.

Minutes of restive quietude moved like a slug bathed in molasses. Hand welded to the uncivilized mongrel’s throat with peerless might. His left one magnetized to the illustrious handle protruding from his age-old scabbard. Brows knitted together, sweat budding across his brow in spate. Divulging a bestial war against the inexorable cravings to slake his desires for a sanguinary requital. Two brisk motions is all it would take for this nightmarish encounter, and the penniless existence of an equine who didn’t see the value of life, would conclude.

Tearing the sword from its holster and laying waste to her heart. Two movements. Pulling and plunging. That’s all it would take. For reasons shrouded in anonymity to the Man in Blue, he was incapable of performing his heart’s broadest desire. His bones struck leaden by hesitation.

“Fuck!” He irately sneered.

Levi razed the stalemate. He brought the bronze-eyed pony back to her trembling hindlegs, hooves sparking contact with the prestigious delicacy known only as solid ground. The male liberated both his hilt and Silver’s garishly bruised throat from his Augean grasp. Two throbbing hands seized a spate of silky lily-white fabric from her button-down, twirling his frame and pirouetting the pegasus the full weight of the pegasus along with him. He stood her on her hind legs behind him, nestled uncongenial between the front twain of benches. His left hand clutched a mound of buttons and downy opal-white textile while his dominant extremity had other ideas. In a singular brisk motion, with time exuviating all meaning and relevance as it tended to do in instances of this nature, he wound back a clubfist and launched it into Silver’s visage.

The iniquitous equine’s nose stood a diminutive chance against the gaunt yet sharp mass of bony knuckles and skin rocketing at her indubious countenance. She soared backwards, crashing down upon the speckless tiles supine. The rearmost portion of her skull walloping the unforgiving floor. Fraying her searing nerves and amplifying the scorching agony baking the back of her skull, as though she landed upon a smoking bed of red-hot glowing coals. And every hellish moment that passed, an unseen force hammered her deeper into the Tartaren cavity of martyrdom. She slid backwards almost a foot away from her unruffled attacker. Standing monolithic and stoic still stationed at the wall she was practically ironed to meager milliseconds before. Crimson dotted his trembling white-hot knuckles like visceral pond scum.

“Dammit! What the fuck!” Silver bellowed. Her voice was a sallow travesty of its former far more stupendous self. Struck nasally and whiny like the squeal of a pig outfitted for slaughter performed by a bass singer.

“Why’d you have to stay here?” Levi inquired. “I don’t see the appeal, Silver. I warned you!”

“You just broke my nose, you fucking lunatic!”

“Yeah, I did, but what makes you think I wanted any of this mess? I didn’t.”

“Don’t lie now! This is exactly what you wanted!” Silver wailed, spinning and going prone.

Rich, obscene ichor trailed from her pulverized nostrils, bearing the appearance of caved-in tunnels. Rivulets of ruby-red trounced down her upper lip and tainted her pearlescent teeth and tongue, the pink slab of muscle recoiling in abhorrence. She spat a red-tinted loogie onto the tiles. Gore fervorously pumped from her nose, dripping onto the floor apace like one of Hell’s broken faucets.

Levi closed his disquieted eyes and breathed as deep as his organs permitted before he spoke. Fists balled at his obliques, his quaking digits zealously itching for his gloried hilt. His voice was low and baritone yet somehow managed to remain an untoppled dastardizing pillar. Looking down upon the battered and aboundingly bleeding pegasus like a wrathful god.

“You can’t understand how much I want to kill you right now. To just…” He brought his fists up to the sides of his head and flexed them open and closed. Eyes closed, face twisting into a cracking mask of unholy thoughts unable to be funneled into reality. “To just beat you into the floor and watch you bleed. Walk away and leave you to die in the dark. Just like you did to her.”

“That cocky, arrogant bitch needed it,” Silver riposted with a secreted grin. “What makes you think she’s past punishment?”

“Punished for what? Who made you the lawbringer of Cloudsdale?”

“You’re one to talk,” She put forth a singular futile attempt to rise to her hooves, crumbling back onto her stomach. Her rattled pounding skull in an unmendable dizzying haze. “Breaking in here like some hotshot. Holding me up against my own wall. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m not going around hurting people who don’t need hurting, all for a damn trophy? You’ve lost your mind way before I showed up.”

“Who suddenly made you the judge and jury?” Chortled Silver. “You get Platinum’s old plaything and Celestia’s blessing and now your…what exactly? Some god? You aren’t anything but a loyal lapdog.”

“I’m here to protect you ponies. Protect Equestria.” Silver guffawed at the male’s rejoinder. “And if that means beating a few bad seeds senseless, then I’ll do it. Don’t mean I wanted it.”

“Oh, you wanted this. I know you more than you know yourself.” She snarled. “Call it what you want, but what you’ve done to me is vile.”

Levi stifled a pitiful laugh at the nigh-comedic clogged voice Silver tried and failed to fashion into an intimidating timbre. If he was honest, he wasn’t entirely sure his body bore the capabilities to laugh at that moment. Better yet, showing any signs that anything other than scalding rage torched his innards was unfeasible.

He paused, fingers dancing fervently a handful of scant centimeters away from his hilt. Two brisk movements and this could all be over. That was the sole sentiment occupying his overladen psyche.

“This is the price of the game! There’s things you do and things you don’t do, it’s as simple as that. That asshole has been a thorn in my side as long as I’ve been flying here.” Silver exclaimed. The floor was a mosaic of viscera. “If it wasn’t me, nopony would’ve.”

Levi breathed deep before he spoke. Clashing with every rapid-firing neuron in his mind to prevent the callous killing of Silver Spears.

“You deserve to die for what you did. There’s no doubting that.” Levi spoke, vastly calmer than before. “I’m not a judge. Or an executioner. I don’t get to decide who lives and dies yet. That wouldn’t be fair for anyone.”

Bronze met emerald. Silver’s mandible was varnished by crimson, glistening hideously in the mendacious radiance. She propelled another loogie onto the tapestry of bone-white, defaced aquamarine and vivid squalid carmine. An ignoble, hideous tapestry for an equally hideous pony. Still lying prone atop the horrific opus of her own creation, her rhythmic spitting as unceasing as the streamlets of cherry-red from her atomized nostrils.

“What’re you saying?”

“I’m saying that you don’t deserve what I’m about to give you, not by a longshot, but it’s the only fair choice I see.” Levi gazed resentfully down at the battered Golden Dasher, his eyes like an antique box television swarmed by nothing but dead static. Unreadable, puzzling, strangled by unintelligible mystery. “This is the last chance I’m gonna give you.”

“I can’t wait to hear this,” Silver retorted. She underwent another contemptible endeavor at standing once more. Yet, it only followed the pitiable mold of her last honest attempt. Rising only a measly inch or two from the blemished tiles before plummeting back down to the earth like a wounded dog. All it would take from Silver would be a strident whine of botheration and Levi wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

“Don’t ever step foot in Ponyville. Stay far, far away from Spitfire and the Wonderbolts. Stay out of my life. I have a lot more important things to worry about then you, Silver. And I’m getting sick and tired of worrying about you.”

Her head pirouetted endlessly. Mind rattled and psyche scrambled. Yet, with every last minute drop of might, she listened to his demands. Bottom jaw quivering.

“I don’t ever wanna see your face again for as long as I live.” He continued. “If I ever do, or if you ever give me a reason to come back here, I’ll kill you. Am I understood?”

Silver said nothing. Just glowering ignominiously. Her tangled brain trying and failing to concoct an intricate plan to deliver reprisal to the Man in Blue.

He dropped to a squat and dangled his forearms over his knees, his hands limp and sinewy. Not exactly eye-level with the equine as he desired, but close enough to satisfy the hot spring of fury drowning his heart.

“Am I?”

“Yes!” She growled through gritted, blood-stained teeth. Deep scarlet smudged across her incisors.

“Alright,” He slowly assumed his mastodonic standing position. “My advice is to get out of Cloudsdale.”

Silver gaped ever-so-slightly aghast and ravished by shock. “I’m not going anywhere!”

“Oh, I know that. I’m just suggesting you leave is all.” Levi spoke. “Fly off to the mountains or to some other kingdom. Go live dignified somewhere else. Let this team grieve and get a new leader.”

“You don’t get to demand me! I’m not leaving until I’m good and ready!” She barked. Another apple-colored loogie was fired onto the tiles.

“It’s just a warning, nothing more. Whether you listen or not is up to you. You know what happens if you don’t.”

“You can rot for all I care. Take your warnings and get the fuck out!” She barked. “You should be the one doing the worrying.”

“Whatever you say,” Sighed Levi.

The male strode past the cluster of benches and cleared the colossal turquoise shower block, still crammed to its absolute brim by soupy murk. He meandered to the rearmost exit of the shower floor. To the Man in Blue, however, that exponentially coveted lily-white door bore a myriad of other names far more prestigeful than a meager exit. A one-way-ticket to the paradisal elysium of the outside world far removed from the monotonous demarcations of Cloudsdale’s most notorious inhabitants. The team and its entirety prodigal with infamy. Their limitless laundry list of sins and injustices upon the innocent and inculpable dissected beneath an ignominious microscope. If Levi was permitted the option to peruse Hell and plumb its unending smoldering roads of brimstone and anguish or stay one more minute in those showers, the choice was blatant. Gallivanting down those flaming avenues dwelled exclusively by languishing souls and damned forlorn spirits sounded immensely more enjoyable than Silver Spears’ presence. A comparison he never would’ve believed he’d contrive in a hundred years, for anyone at any time. Yet, here he was. Choosing to consensually analyze every nook and cranny of the fearsome land of righteous, sweltering reckoning then dwell longer beneath that roof.

The lock was akin to the tip of a flat-head screwdriver jutting from the center of the lever-style doorknob, all created chiefly from refined polished brass. He clicked the lock and smashed the knob down and swung the titanic sheet of pale metal towards him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Exclaimed Silver.

“Away. And you need to do the same,” Levi craned his neck to meet her globes. “I meant what I said. Every word. Get out of here and live the life of an innocent somewhere far away from here.”

“I don’t gotta listen to a fucking word you say!”

“You don’t.” He halted for a few seconds before resuming. “I didn’t want you to choose this. Truly, I didn’t. You brought this on yourself, I wanted peace.”

“No, you didn’t,” She spat. “You never wanted peace.”

“If peace is the opposite of this, then I’ll take it.”

Beyond the cusp of Silver’s view, the door groaned stridulantly and leather boots clacked obnoxiously against tile as they breached the margins of her compound. Striding out into sweet, succulent relief of the arcadia of the outside world. Far afield from the monstrous pegasus he deserted, bleeding and unfathomably humiliated upon the shower floor. Upon Levi’s departure, the rotten, vile figurehead of the Golden Dashers rose to her hooves at long last. Heart floundering in a septic loch of fury and sorrow burning hotter than even the brightest minds could thoroughly comprehend. Shame summoned a curtain of tears to her puffy bronze orbs.

Alone and forsaken in the bowels of her own establishment, Silver Spears began to weep.