Fifteen years had passed since the last time Equestria was a land of happiness and harmony.
No one knew how it happened, not even the princesses had the slightest idea. All that was known was that one day a virus mutated, infecting ponies, and transforming them into hideous creatures thirsty for flesh and immune to conventional magic. And along with them too had appeared a strange mist, seemingly harmless at first, but what it hid inside was almost as horrible as the ponies that had been infected.
Horrific creatures that nopony or anyone else had ever seen or even conceived in their imagination, huge and insatiably hungry, had attacked and devoured them without mercy. Magic had not been able to do much against them. The mist that was their habitat overrode the conventional powers of unicorns, pegasus, and ground ponies. Neither the alicorn magic of the princesses, nor the chaos magic of Discord had managed to stop the invasion of monsters and infected that ravaged the vast lands of Equestria, ancient center of peace and harmony.
They had been practically helpless.
However, one of the princesses had survived and had carried out a plan to ensure that the deadly mist that had covered her land was dispelled.
Princess Twilight had created a spell that would help them, ten years after that moment. She had no one else, her whole family had perished but she still had a small light left to fight for.
Unfortunately, the spell had consumed too much of her life force. She had used all of her magic, and finally the core of the power she had contained within had been extinguished without a single trace. Her very existence had disappeared from this world.
But her efforts had not been in vain. The spell had worked in a certain way, but not as the princess had planned. Her magic had permanently isolated several disjointed areas of Equestria, like flashing domes that stretched for hundreds of miles around, ridding them of mist and monsters, but not of the infected.
The few ponies who had survived the last dusk of their land had to manage without any help, without any guide to lead them in a world devastated by an apocalypse that no one had foreseen. They were blindly in a hostile, withered land.
And there was nothing they could do to change that.
The little pony knew this very well. She had been born almost two years after the mist fell on her land. In all her thirteen years of life, hiding from ponies and the infected, staying away from areas where the mist began, and learning to control the magic her parents had bequeathed to her were the only things she had practically known.
So that story, in a certain way hopeless that his father had always told her, had never moved too many convictions inside her.
She wasn't sure if her father had wanted to warn her, frighten her, or get her to be cautious in her actions. She suspected it and sensed it, although she was not absolutely certain. After all, everypony in that new world knew that placing their trust in someone unknown was an almost certain sentence of a miserable life alongside the new chiefs that land had created.
Ultimately, death was the least of the problems.
The little pony thought about it as she flipped through one of the books she had between her hooves again. Her magic lit up the sheet with a faint white, almost transparent glow, and she turned the page to the next text, full of written spells that she was soon to put into practice. She was so engrossed in her reading that she hardly heard the noise that knocked on the door of her cabin.
Her ears suddenly pricked up, and she looked up from the book as the knock was heard louder than before. She frowned suspiciously and cautiously, pushing the book out of her sight and rising from the place where she had been sitting. The sound of her hooves echoed softly in the wood.
"Dad?" She called in a low, cautious voice, as she walked somewhat slowly towards the front door of her home.
Nopony answered her call.
The little pony's frown deepened, so distrust began to arise inside her. She knew that her father had left a few hours before and was not going to return until night was about to fall. It was his routine from time to time.
But neither could it be someone alien and unknown. Nopony knew how to get around the traps they had set around their home, and the alarm spells were always activated, neither had gone off at that moment. The forest also protected them.
The pony stood away as she opened the door with her magic, in a tense, cautious pose that foresaw any imminent danger. However, there was nothing behind it. Nothing assaulted her or surprised her.
However, that feeling that something wasn't right still lingered within her. She was sure that something had knocked on the door, it was simply impossible for anything to be found behind it. But her father had not yet appeared, and the forest was still as still as it had been minutes before.
Just to make sure, she decided to get a little closer and let her magic run free once more. Her horn was re-ignited with another spell, but she also couldn't detect anything near her surroundings except the normal little life that dwelt inside the forest. The only thing that stood out was a piece of paper thrown in front of her home. She approached, without leaving her misgivings, and took it very carefully, hoping that it would react in some way to her magic. That didn't either.
The paper was blank.
"Dad."
Her voice came out in a worried murmur, and she went back into her home while waiting for the prompt arrival of the pony that had also given her life.
However, her father never returned.
The day began as usual, crushing the rotting skulls of the infected who had been unlucky enough to fall into her traps. She knew that it didn't do any good to eliminate them, but at least it managed to stop their annoying existence for a while.
The infected in front of her writhed violently into the trap, trying to break free with broad bites and scratches from the net that had caught it. It didn't help much. The net was strengthened by a magic that almost no one knew how to master, and she possessed several of those.
The mare summoned a protective shield to prevent the dangerous remains from splashing her, and she wedged her spear into the middle of the place where the creature had once had its eyes, a place that was now only a mass of bloody, stinky flesh writhing like a clump of worms exposed to the bright sunlight. She drew her weapon with a slight grimace of disgust, wiping away the remains that had been imbued with her magic, and let the creature finish writhing inside the trap.
Because this pony had been infected with the strange virus for years, his body had mutated into a faster but much less aware version of his surroundings. The being practically didn't understand anything, so as long as she stayed far enough away, it wouldn't be able to detect her presence.
The pony walked away from the infected, taking several steps back as she took a quick cautious look at the strange tentacle-like protrusions protruding from the creature's mouth. Its body was a mass of exposed skin, flesh, and bones that seemed too fragile to support, subjected to the harshness of the elements for so long. There was nothing left, either in its body or in its mind, of the pony that it had been in the beginning.
She adjusted the two saddlebags she held on each side and the slightly threadbare cloak that covered her body, preparing to open the net into which the infected had fallen, but first she took a quick look at herself. She felt a hint of relief inside her, as she did every time she performed that task, to see that her dark lavender coat had not been affected by any of the creature's remains that had ended up scattered here and there. But no doubt he would take an extensive bath in the river when he was done with all that.
Finally, she opened the net and let the creature fall with a thud to the ground. She didn't take her eyes off it as she watched it slowly get up and stand in its place, as if it didn't know or wasn't sure where to go. The tentacles of its mouth twisted in a way that would have sent shivers down the spine of anyone close enough to watch it, though everything about this being shuddered.
Luckily she was already used to it, so the only thing she could feel at that moment was a slight curiosity. Maybe it used them to sniff the air? Although it is most likely that it had them to trap and immobilize its victims.
She sighed. Now came the slightly complicated part. Her horn ignited once more, but not with her run-of-the-mill magic. A strange dark glow surrounded the creature's body and then, in less than five seconds, a black smoke completely covered it and made it disappear as if it had never been there.
The mare extinguished her horn and rubbed her forehead lightly with a hoof, which ran the same through her short jet mane. Mastering magic was not too difficult for her, but the slight headache it always left her was somewhat annoying, even if it only lasted a few seconds. But she had no choice.
Normal magic didn't work with those creatures, so she'd had to resort to other forbidden means that she had to learn on her own from books.
Finally, once she teleported the infected to an area far away from that place, she rearranged the net waiting for a new prey and left there with a calm step. Her day began with the task of checking every trap that had been activated, and now she only had one left to check, the one closest to her home.
The pony's brow furrowed slightly because of how weird it was. That net was almost never activated because no creature made it more than the first three hundred feet from the perimeter, so it was strange that any had been intelligent or perceptive enough to get around all the others that had been put in the way.
However, when she arrived, she definitely did not expect to meet what her eyes now saw.
There was a pony caught in the net several feet from her head, a living pony, with all his flesh, skin, and bones in place. The mare gave him a slightly surprised look and a long look at his yellow coat, fluffy pink mane, and the body of what she could define as a ground stallion. He was twisting to escape the grip of the net, groaning in pain as the material tightened further into his body.
Enough of everything, now she had to find out why that pony was loitering so close to her home.
She then approached cautiously, looking at him with a serious expression all the time. The stallion noticed her presence and looked at her with his eyes wide open when he did so; then a guilty smile was seen on his face.
"Hey, if it's not a nuisance... Could you help me?"
She didn't answer. She continued to stare at him with the same emotionless expression, one that made the unknown pony nervous when he looked into the mare's cold blue eyes. She raised the spear she was holding with her magic above her head and pointed it straight in his direction. The stallion closed his eyes tightly, but a second later the sound of a rip was heard and he finally fell to the ground with a loud and painful rumble.
The pony began to get up, with a sore groan, as he struggled to remove the remains of the net that had caught him. He rubbed a hoof on his head and opened his eyes slowly, still disoriented.
"Oops, that really hurt... Ow ow ow! How is it possible that you are taller than me?" He said as he pointed at her with his hoof, ignoring the serious and somewhat annoyed look with which the mare was looking at him. "No, seriously, look at you, you must be as tall as Princess Cadence was in the past."
The pony held back the urge to roll her eyes and corrected what the stallion had said.
"We're only a few inches apart, in case you haven't noticed, you're also a little taller than an average stallion."
"Yeah, that's thanks my dad," he said, not interpreting the seriousness in her tone as he should, and then gave her an enthusiastic smile. "Anyway, my name is Little Cheese, although my acquaintances call me Lil Cheese. What's your name?"
Without answering, the mare turned and began to pick up the destroyed remains of the net, holding back a snort of annoyance at how she had lost one of her precious and vital protections. Then she put them in one of her bags.
"That doesn't matter to you," she replied dryly, without hinting at the real annoyance in her tone.
However, Little Cheese didn't seem to be intimidated by this.
"What do you mean? Of course it does matter, if we are going to get to know each other better..."
"I don't intend to get to know you, much less to know you better," she said without looking at him, turning her back and starting to walk in the opposite direction.
"Well, my mom always says that you have to reciprocate with those who help you and you helped me a few minutes ago with that trap," Little Cheese highlighted in a grateful voice, following her behind on her way.
The pony held another sigh, this time of boredom, and turned to him as her mind stood out something else in what he had said. She quickly looked at him with growing suspicion.
"Traps are only activated when an intruder is prowling around the perimeter," she said as she began to look at him in a different way, much more cautious and suspicious, tightening the magical grip of her spear. "What was it that you were doing so close to my territory? No pony or living creature goes too far into this forest."
For the first time since the few minutes they had met, she saw how he stood still and began to show a palpable nervousness that he could hardly hide. That attitude did not help her suspicion to diminish, quite the opposite.
"Yeah, well... The truth is that I..." Little Cheese said as he looked away, a slight blush of embarrassment rising up his face as he rubbed the back of his neck with a hoof. "I got lost."
The mare couldn't help but be taken aback. How could it be possible for somepony to be so unaware considering the world in which they lived? Was he an idiot? Because she really had no idea how he had managed to survive until now.
"Your overconfidence and recklessness seem stupid to me," she said in a simple tone, as if only pointing to an observation.
Then she resumed her journey, leaving the stallion in the midst of his confusion and not caring what happened to him. But soon she heard the sound of his hooves and his slightly desperate voice.
"Please tell me your name! So I can find a way to make up for it."
She really couldn't understand what the fact of knowing her name was related to that supposed compensation. However, in a way she knew that he would not stop insisting on her or stop following her until she did; although she could not trust herself either. The stallion did not seem to be dangerous or very threatening, but appearances were always deceiving.
And even more so in that land.
"My name is North Light, are you happy?" She replied sharply as she turned, letting out a short snort when she saw his confused and surprised expression again. However, he seemed to pull himself together quickly.
"Oh, then I can call you Northie or Lighty?" He suggested with a raised eyebrow, tilting his head.
The disgust in her expression was perfectly noticeable.
"Of course you're not going to call me either way."
Intending to keep as much distance as possible between herself and the stallion, the pony quickened her pace at a slightly faster trot. She frowned irritably when she saw that he kept following her, so she soon turned again and stopped him with a raised hoof.
"Stay here a moment and don't follow me."
Little Cheese stopped and opened his eyes wide again.
"Are you going to leave me here alone?" He hinted in surprise in his voice, looking away in all directions around him. "With... the infected and all the other things in the forest, knowing that they crawl even now that it's daytime?"
North Light shrugged her shoulders, as if that didn't really matter to her, which made Little Cheese visibly nervous, who couldn't help but shift uncomfortably in his place. She resumed her path without waiting for a response from him, satisfied that she no longer heard the sound of his hooves behind her.
However, that satisfaction turned to confusion, then to worry, and finally to terror when her nose picked up a well-known smell in the direction of the clearing where her home was. She quickly galloped off to that place, stopping suddenly when she arrived, and she saw it.
Her house.
The cabin that had been her home since she was a ten-year-old filly, in which she had lived the last ten years of her life...
It caught fire.
