I've Got Only My Bones

FREAK HEATWAVE LEAVES ROADS ICED

That’s how my adventure was recorded in the news. Apparently, the Princesses didn’t want it to get out that they accidentally paid off an evil necromancer to murder anti-changeling partisans for not showing sufficient deference. I wonder why.

Princess Celestia might not always make good decisions, but she understands one thing: Sometimes you survive a bear attack by being faster than your friends, but no one ever survived a bear attack by standing still.

“Your check... ma’am...”

I put the newspaper down. The waitress has noticed that this is unusual for me, even though she never served me before. Or maybe she noticed that I’m reading last week’s news. Or maybe she hasn’t noticed anything at all. She’s pretty distracted. “What happened to the waiter who’s normally here?” I ask.

“It was the last air raid. He was out walking his dog and he… didn’t make it.” She explains sadly.

“Were you close?”

“I think, now that he’s gone, that he was my best friend.”

I look down. Now I’m sad, too. Without him, it won’t be the same. I’m sick, as if I’m only just now noticing that I hate far too much. “I’m surprised you came to work. I’m not sure I would have been able to get out of bed.” I suggest.

Behind her, a group of changeling officers enter the room, chittering loudly to each other. A tear rolls down her cheek as she tries to ignore it. “I… I don’t know. It just feels like it’s better to be here.”

“Whatever works, I suppose. It’s not like you can go back.” I say. I pull out every mark I have and put the banknotes on the table. I'm almost certainly overpaying, but I don’t think she can handle me rubbing it in asking how much my food costed in the invader’s currency. Either way, this place is depressing now, I’m not coming back. “I can tell you one thing from experience. Either accept that it is what it is, or don’t. There is no compromise, only a delay.”

My antics had had a measurable strategic effect. When Celestia stopped going out of her way to make the sun shine on Tall Tale, the melted snow refroze, covering the entire city in a slick layer of ice that made it unsafe to drive with any real speed. At least a hundred car accidents occurred in the next few days. Many involved the Equestrian Royal Army, who didn’t know the roads were all frozen over at first. In one case, an entire truckload of soldiers was turned into casualties when they hit a turn too hard and the vehicle wrapped itself around a lightpole. In another, a tank didn’t brake fast enough and fell into the river. Smashing through the ice and hitting the silt knocked all the crew unconscious, and by the time they woke up, the compartment was filled with water and the lights had been short-circuited. Or maybe they all got concussions and drowned before they ever came to. I can’t say for sure either way, I wasn’t willing to get close enough to find out, even knowing consciously that the ice could probably hold my weight.

The changelings, who were used to being screwed by the weather at our behest, adapted much better. They plowed a half-track through an antique store, but that was all I ever found out about. Their reconquest of the town was otherwise quite swift.

There was a new wave of bombers, of shellings, of street battles and of hiding in shelters. I saw a group of infantry ponies get turned into red chunks by a panzer with a heavy machine gun, and a hospital collapse into rubble. I saw other things, too, but those are the ones that had been replayed in my dreams the most. By now, I had mostly figured out how to avoid the chaos, though, and it was relatively uneventful. There was a new set of destroyed buildings, the streets were just a little less populated, and another few dozen bodies were dumped in the river, but all that was old news to me.

As the explosions thudded overhead, causing the other ponies in the bomb shelter to shudder and recoil, I had decided to take a more active role in my experiments. I felt that I wasn’t going to get much further by simply dissecting the long-dead. I wanted to see the process of death up close.

By now, I know how the changelings think when it comes to disposing of those they didn’t want. I adore their regularity and their love of their own manuals. They've figured out that the creek can only have so many sets of remains in it before the water became undrinkable, so they have started taking civilians they don’t like and shooting them in batches in the woods. After making them dig their own pit, since why do that yourself when you have the free labor right there? It's not like the victims will complain.

They try to hide what they’re doing, of course, behind some basic subtlety. Can’t have every pony knowing exactly how many of their neighbors were killed after that last raid. But with my special eye, I could see that the truck passing in front of me on the way out of town had a number of ponies sitting in the covered bed, and there were a limited number of reasons that could be.

I got on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could to follow it.

The truck easily got ahead of me, but I could guess about where it was headed. I caught sight of the soon-to-be-deceased on a trail off the main road through this section of the woods, and put up my bike somewhere with a bit of concealment to get closer on-hoof. After some minutes of crawling through the underbrush, I could see them with my normal eyes. There were a half-dozen or so, using their hooves to dig a hole in a tiny clearing under the guard of three changelings. I watched them from behind a bush, hoping I wouldn’t have another fit when I saw those lives all get snuffed out. My fling with ultimate necromantic power hadn’t made me better-suited to being so close to violence.

Right as the ponies were all forced to stoop down for easy execution, something impacted my head and left me stunned. After I blinked a few times, I had been dragged out, and I was now being thrown at the hooves of the officer in charge. My heart nearly stopped. Coming all this way to die in such a pointless way wouldn’t be shocking for me, but that didn’t mean it was what I wanted.

The officer had his pistol out and he stuck it right up to my forehead. I stared up at him, hoping my terror didn’t show. He and a changeling behind me traded words in their chittering language, and he stared back down at me. “Well, well, well. What do we have here? Tell me, miss, do you know what you have stumbled upon?”

I didn’t think playing dumb would help since I clearly went out of my way to be here, or was astronomically unlucky. “An execution?”

“Exactly.” He says. “Interesting that you’re here watching it. Tell me, do you have a good excuse for this?”

I didn’t. And yet, in a way, I did. “Bits.” I explain hesitantly. “I want their bits.”

He cocks his head and looks me up and down. “What good will bits do you?” He asks.

“None of you changelings take the bits when you search bodies for useful items. I take them afterwards. When you are in charge, I’m a scavenger, but I was that way before you came… but when Equestria comes back…” I smile weakly. “I live like a princess.”

The changeling officer took a second to process it, then laughed. He babbled to his comrades, and a few of them laughed, too. “You are such a strange case!” He turned back to me, taking the gun from my head. “Listen,” he continued, smiling. The victims had caught on something was happening and snapped out of their tears and grim determination to stare daggers at me. “I am willing to help you in this worthy cause of feeding the hungry. We’ll clean up these rabble-rousers, then we’ll let you take whatever you want from them, as long as you help us bury the bodies and promise to not tell anyone about this.”

I couldn’t believe it. “I can most certainly do that, but I have to ask… why?”

He looks to the side, remembering worse days. “You probably don’t recognize me, but I owe a debt. If it weren’t for you, I may very well be hanging from a tree right now. And if it weren’t for that debt, I would have no hesitation about doing the same to you, since you’ve really stuck your nose in something you shouldn’t have. But what kind of creature would I be if I could repay you and didn’t?”

“Wait, was that you in that grocery store?” I asked, recalling my miniature adventure protecting a changeling soldier from an angry mob.

“Indeed. My army found me in an Equestrian prison and put me back in uniform.” He explained. “So… want to make some money?” He nodded to the side, and one of his soldiers took a submachine gun and started putting bursts into the backs of the prisoner’s heads, going down the row and kicking each one into the pit afterwards.

When all was said and done, we waved goodbye to each other and went out separate ways.