14:25 - 19/02/1011 - Manerba, Chiropterra

Tonight, exactly fifteen years ago, Merzaal’s life as he knew it came to an end. It was an anniversary with nothing to celebrate.

Fifteen years was a long slice of any life. A long time to change, physically and mentally. In that time he had moments of triumph and he had moments of despair. But in all that time, through bright and dark, he always believed he’d be free once again.

Last week he ran into Abdaz again by chance. One look at how weary and scarred Abdaz’s face had become told him everything he needed to know. Nobody had been spared from wartime austerity, but those like Merzaal were getting by better by standing up for themselves. Hopefully, Abdaz would understand this and talk to those labour organisers and give him what he needed to take back some of his own life.

After his run in, once he was actually into the work week itself, he’d been assigned to make a delivery run on a new route. It was a longer drive than he might’ve liked, but still well within the limits of their collective agreement.

The route would take him down the western coast of the island of Manerba.

His place of birth. His home. Where his whole life had been set, before he was taken.

He showed up to work early that morning.

Working alongside the other depot workers, Merzaal got his lorry loaded up as quickly as possible and he was off. Through Ursagrad, the roads varied from smooth and well-lit to dim and littered with rubble from bombing raids. In all regards, they were just that bit more busy with traffic to keep him waiting for longer than he’d have liked at red lights. Whenever he was on an open stretch of road, he drove a little faster than he knew he should’ve.

Once out of Ursagrad, the road hugged the edge of the coast, winding between sheer rock faces and the vast sea. The roads remained smooth, every mile of the journey illuminated by highway lamps. All he had to keep him company was the crackle of the stereo, playing the tunes he’d burned onto a tape rather than parroting the lines of a state controlled radio station. Or worse, a pop station.

After many miles alone on the road, he eventually arrived at the so-called Eternal Eclipse bridge, the narrowest point between the Zebrican mainland and the small island of Manerba. It stretched long over the narrow strait, a rigid chain linking the island to the Chiropterran heartland. Without doubt, an impressive feat of engineering. The bridge was named after the last chief of the Native Affairs Commission. But as Merzaal approached, his thoughts were with the native workers that died building it, who didn’t even have a commemorative plaque in their name.

He had to pass through a Chiropterrans checkpoint before he crossed the bridge. One last shakedown by the Chiropterrans before he could return to his homeland. Fortunately, he was cleared to pass in less than five minutes.

Driving onwards to Manerba, the road quality took a noticeable dive, the new roads and highways had rattly ruggedness typical of a hasty construction. The roads were dark, unlit, and largely deserted. Every so often, maybe every ten or twenty minutes, a car or truck on the other side of the road would drive past. Merzaal’s only guide in the darkness was the lights from his headlamps and the distant haze of settlements further down the way. No bomb damage though, not much out here worth bombing. Many families who couldn’t afford to evacuate their foals to Equestria had moved them to Manerba instead.

More often than not, the towns he drove through were militarised frontier settlements, all of them built recently. All designed to look like Chiropterran towns and villages, gridded road patterns filled with blocky utilitarian buildings lit with subtle purple street lamps. Like a piece of the Nightmareland had been picked up and planted down on Manerba. The residents, almost all ponies, strutted through the streets and glided through the buildings openly carrying rifles on their backs. Every time he was stopped at a red light, Merzaal was thankful he was obscured behind a windshield.

Separated from the Chiropterran settlements by long stretches of rural road stood what was left of old native villages. The roads were devoid of streetlamps, limiting what he could see from behind the wheel. Most of the buildings were empty, dilapidated, or both. What native settlements that did exist on this coast were small, separated by distance and rarely lasted long. They used to be frequent targets for Chiropterran slave raids, being separated by just a few miles of sea. Those native settlements that remained had since been emptied, the population having been “evacuated” to cities like Ursagrad during the Storm War. Only stragglers and squatters remained.

One such settlement was the place of his birth. A coastal village called Tizi. The cliffs, the winds of the road, and the shape of the distant silhouetted hills touching the night sky were all more increasingly in tune with his memory. He knew he was getting close.

The road sloped gently downward, into the curve of an intimately familiar bay. Nestled inland, right where he remembered it, was Tizi.

Yet a pang twisted deep in his chest at the sight. The village remained, a shrunken remnant of what it had once been, but crouched in the shadow of towering new constructions that hemmed it in on all sides, like a solid wall built by the invaders to seal in what little remained of the old community.

The settlers' buildings glowed an unnatural purple in the night sky, staining the air like a bruise. They rose in a uniform, impenetrable wall, hard angles of stone and concrete pressing down on the old village. Once proud and open to the sky, the indigenous homes had been dwarfed by the sprawling constructions that encircled them. The heart of the old community had been corralled, closed in on from all sides, a prisoner of its own land.

On entering, he passed a metal sign made of modern retroreflective material, reading, “Welcome to Starston”. Half buried and abandoned in the dirt beneath, barely visible and worn by time, lay a wooden sign painted with the name “Tizi”.

When driving through the new constructions, all around him was much like what he’d seen before. Chiropterran settlers parading through streets of Chiropterran architecture draped in Chiropterran banners. The roads were wider now, smoothed over with fresh asphalt. Yet, beneath this new skin of development, he could still navigate the lorry to his destination by digging into the recesses of his memory.

He steered the lorry by instinct more than sight, following the echoes of roads long faded, the paths of his childhood buried beneath the relentless colonial encroachment. When he finally reached the edge of the old village, something inside him clenched tight. There, at last, the world remained still. The crooked, narrow lanes still snaked through the village, as though time had forgotten this little pocket of existence.

At last, he pulled the lorry to a halt on a road he remembered. It too had changed, all cloaked in the shadow of the new constructions that encircled the old village. The familiarity of it stung. He stepped down from the lorry, hooves touching down on the hard asphalt. It felt like stepping into a dream, one where everything was both intimately known and impossibly foreign.

He ventured forward, and he found it. Where the old village met the new settlement, there it stood. His childhood home.

The house loomed before him, its bones unchanged but the drapes and face different so that it was both familiar and unsettlingly new at the same time. Its squat, single-story frame of weathered yellow stone still crouched beneath the same steep red-tiled roof. The arch above the front door yawned, heavy with memories that would never be spoken. His eyes traced the low wall that now wrapped possessively around the yard. New stones, sharp and precise, slicing across the earth that whispered of barriers that had been hurled up while he was gone. He remembered an inviting home, but now he saw a fortress.

Slowly, he moved closer. When he reached the wall, he sat atop it, as though he needed its solidity to anchor himself. From there, he could see the house in its entirety. The exterior as it was, untouched by years, but a strange purple glow seeped from within, casting the windows in a ghostly hue. It spilled out like a wound, bleeding something foreign.

He inhaled deeply and the air tasted different, the salt of the sea tinged with something bitter. The house may have stood as it always had, but it no longer welcomed him. It wasn’t his home anymore. It had been stolen from him, as had everything else in his earlier life. There was nothing for him to return to, nothing to escape to. He’d made peace with the fate that would befall Tizi years ago. He just needed to see it.

“Howdy there! Welcome to Starston!” called a voice, ripping Merzaal from his thoughts.

Merzaal spun around to face the one calling him. A hippopotamus of an earth pony mare with a long stringy mane and a pig-like head faced him with a yellow-toothed grin. The weathered olive shirt she wore was several sizes too small for her, with a pack of cigarettes bulging in her shirt pocket. Around forty years old, pale-blue coat and black mane, she carried the stench of fried grease in her coat and fur, and a shotgun over her back.

“Hello,” Merzaal replied.

“I can tell you’re not from these here parts. This is a community for the faithful.” The mare’s Equestrian accent was as thick and sickly sweet as a mouthful of syrup. She approached Merzaal, closing the distance between them in seconds. She didn’t stop smiling, and she was making no effort to hide her shotgun. “And you seem to be taking a mighty kind interest in my home. And I’d kindly ask you to get off my garden wall. Any reason what makes my house so special to ya?”

So, this is who was living in his old home. Merzaal’s hooves pressed into the wall, his muscles going tense. “Just passing through.” Merzaal nodded to the lorry.

“Ah, I see.” The mare nodded her head. Something audibly gurgled in her gut. “I hope nothing’s keepin’ you, then.”

The mare’s chest heaved as breath rushed in and out of her mouth, accompanied by a high-pitched wheezing sound. Her cold eyes remained locked on Merzaal, but didn’t make contact with his, eyeing him up like a freshly cooked meal. She wasn’t doing much of anything, but nor was he. She didn’t need to say much more, the look she gave and the shotgun she carried said everything.

There was that urge to yell back. That urge to call her a thief, to point out that this wasn’t her home and that she was squatting in his, not the other way round. But Merzaal knew to pick his battles, and antagonising an armed settler would only end with him dead.

Yet past her cold eyes, Merzaal could see an unmistakable tinge of fear brought by his very presence. Just enough of a jitter in her eyelids and a break in her curled lips, revealing the fear and terror beneath the mask.

This wasn’t the hill to die on, not when he had to fight back in Ursagrad. Instead, Merzaal hopped to his hooves and returned to his lorry.

“Safe travels!” called the mare. Merzaal didn’t call back, but caught one glimpse of the mare clutching her chest once he was out of the way.

The engine roared to life as he turned the key, and he was off. He wasn’t in Tizi for much longer. But he was glad he came. He was glad he could see what had been done to his home.

In truth, Merzaal knew he had a lot to be grateful for. When out in the cold and utterly alone, Abdaz gave him shelter. When citizenship remained an uncertainty, Abdaz advocated for him. Abdaz helped make every day working at that factory just that slight bit more tolerable, even if it didn’t work out in the end. There were those other workers who’d stood alongside him when fighting against the ones holding their chains, both in the factory and in the depot. Even if they weren’t always his mate.

But all it took was one glance at Tizi and he knew. He’d never be grateful to the Chiropterrans. He’d never thank the thieves who stole everything that he was. He’d never thank the exploitative rats who treated him like an expendable cog in their rancid machine. He’d never thank those two-faced ghouls who gave him a choice to either toil or starve and called it emancipation. Everything they’d given him had been built off the backs of those like him. And everything he’d taken back had been won by his own hoof and the hooves of his fellow workers.

Tempting as it may have been to take the lorry off road and find some isolated native community on Manerba to settle into, he knew he couldn’t. From the moment he set off, he knew he couldn’t. Not that it wasn’t possible or that he couldn’t get away with it, he probably could. What mattered was all the fellow workers in Ursagrad, the ones he’d built networks of trust with, the ones he was working hoof in hoof with to forge a path for a better life. And there remained those he was yet to meet, those like Abdaz who’d been beaten down and demoralised, those who still listened to the siren song of complacency. Those who needed to be shook awake from their shambling facsimile of a life.

The Chiropterran monster, no, the Lunar monster, the Imperial monster, was bigger than one zebra could ever hope to outrun. He couldn’t just run away from it and hunker down out in some nowhere settlement. He’d either be on the ball or would spend his life running before being inevitably rolled over. Without those in the belly of the beast stabbing away at its internals, the present reality of Manerba and Tizi would be the future of all the world.

Endless miles of open road ran along a coast. Moonlight glistened down on a boundless ocean. Seagulls called as they flew in the air above.

And Merzaal, behind the wheel of a lorry, took in the seaside air.

For a moment, for longer than a moment.

That dream felt closer than ever.

Author's Note

Holy hell thank you for reading all the way to the end.

These notes were supposed to be a quick explanation of the process behind this story but it’s scope creeped into like 1300 words lol.

It's been a long time since I really “felt” a story. You can tell this by just looking at my page, at the longer and longer gaps between me posting stories, at the fact that the story I published before this one is on hiatus (as of Nov 2024). It's not due to a lack of ideas, far from it. I'm brimming with ideas, but when it comes to sitting down and actually writing them out? I don't “feel” it.

There's a saying that goes like “if the story can't retain your interest, it definitely won't retain the audience's interest”. I can’t remember who said it first, but I believe in this wholeheartedly. If I didn't care about what I was writing it'd show in the final product.

That’s why It's Just A Shot Away is on hiatus (as of Nov 2024), by the way. I have the whole outline prepared and early drafts of a few unreleased chapters, but I haven’t gone and written them for the simple fact that if I wrote them while I wasn’t feeling them, the story would suck.

This story was different. I felt it from the moment I started on it. I had a story that I really wanted to tell and was putting the work in to tell it nearly every day I had the chance.

As to why this story did that, I think it's because it isn't about something fantastical I have little to no personal relation to or within a theme or environment I have no experience in. I've drawn upon my own experiences in previous stories, but not to the extent here. It draws heavily on my own experiences. Not one-to-one, I've never been beaten up by cops while on a picket line thank god, but I’ve had all experiences with work, with coworkers, with money, with leisure, and life generally that I all drew upon for this story.

I had several primary motivations for actually getting off my ass and writing this. The one that spurred the idea was as simple as an acquaintance telling me "Do more with Chiropterra in NLM. I want to see more reformist Chiropterra content." and from there I was possessed with a creative spirit that forced my hands to start typing.

Now see, "Reformist Chiropterra" is an interesting writing prompt because there's two ways you can go about it. You can write about a gradual process of Chiropterra going from a bad society to a good society, possibly even skipping that part and going straight to the good society. Or, you can acknowledge that reformist Chiropterra is still Chiropterra, a state wrought with persistent problems so deeply ingrained in its national identity that to solve them would mean that the country is no longer Chiropterra. I could only go for the latter.

Setting it in Chiropterra and having it follow North Zebrican Zebras means coming up with distinctly different names than someone writing Equestrian ponies would be used to. This was almost a problem. Fortunately some fellow Equestria at War contributors let me in on their secret technique for naming North Zebrican Zebra characters: Taking Phoenecian names and arbitrarily adding a “Z” somewhere. I mean, it works!

There was some more silliness involved. “Spichka”, for instance, is the Russian word for match, and he was named that because a lit match and starting fires invokes striking imagery during a story about fighting back against oppressive systems. Conversely, Zakob. He is loosely based on a guy I knew called Jacob.

Around the time I started writing it was also when I was playing Disco Elysium, another inspiration and motivation. I don't want to spoil much about the game for those who haven't played it (and if you've already played it you know this already), but it's an incredibly well written story that's (GENERALLY) about finding hope in seemingly hopeless situations. That can be feeling hopeless against the terrifying might of international capital or feeling hopeless about the player character's alcoholism. The devastating effects of succumbing to that hopelessness, and the beautiful things that can happen when you’re willing to put in the hard work to try.

The game has some of the most brilliantly creative writing I’ve seen anywhere, and it kind of reminded me that prose writing can be fucking awesome. I know I cannot make Disco Elysium or write anything close to its quality, but I wanted to try and carry on its spirit.

This story also served to fill something I found to be lacking in the New Lunar Millennium project on the whole: Perspectives of normal people, and of the Empire’s nightly anonymous victims.

I had to make new characters and tell their complete story here, because my regular cast of OCs are all in or represent the ruling class in some way. Take the characters focused on in Marks of the Moon. Moonatik is a self insert wish fulfilment lad. Carte is an elite secret agent. Pocarona leads the development of military technology. Grim Fate is a powerful necromancer doing dark magic research. And Selenite is the highest ranking pony in the entire Empire beneath only the literal God Empress.

The closest one to a regular working class guy out of the MooM cast is Sol Nightshade. Yes, he’s from a working class background, but there he’s Selenite’s husband. It stops being the perspective of a normal guy at that point.

With this cast you’re only really seeing the society from the top, looking down on all the little people below. So, why not write a story exclusively from the perspectives of two people at the very bottom of the Empire’s social system? And, why not tie it back to the first story I published in the NLM universe? Culture Shock, that story, showed the abolition of slavery in Chiropterra, but it was about the interpersonal conflicts and strategic disagreements between the people in the halls of power. What about the people most directly impacted by their decisions? What becomes of their lives? What does the future hold for them? What will they do with these decisions?

This is the answer to those questions. Here is how real people are impacted by the decisions of those far above them. Here is how they thrive due to those decisions, and how they suffer.

But, crucially, just because those people are subject to these decisions, they don’t have to be passive.

They can stand up and fight on their own terms.

They may not always win. They may bleed. They may lose. They may die.

But they can win.

And when they do, they win more than they ever would’ve by keeping their head down and hoping for the best.

I didn’t mean to publish this story just a few weeks after a certain political event, one that instilled heaps of dread in many of my friends and acquaintances. I know a lot of people who feel hopeless in the face of oppressive power because of that event. The story isn’t about that event. If that event had gone the other way, this story and its message would be completely unchanged. Not to reveal the magician’s secrets but there’s a reason you’re not told who won the elections mentioned in Chapter 6. None of it fucking mattered.

Change, tangible and positive change, doesn’t come to those who wait. The wheels of history were never turned by idle hands or by those who slavishly followed the rituals of their oppressors. They are turned by those who fight on their own independent terms.

And if there’s one message I really want to drive home with this story, it’s that.

Thanks for reading.