I am dead, but it's not that bad. I've learned to liv...deal with it. I'm sorry but I can't properly introduce myself, I don't have a name anymore. Hardly any of us do, we lose them like horseshoes, forget them like appointments or anniversaries. I think mine have started with an S´, but that´s all I have right now. It's funny, because back when I was alive I used to forget other ponies names. My friendL´ says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is kinda funny when you are dead, but you can't smile anymore because your lips have rotted off.
None of us are particularly attractive; missing limps and bloody, ulcerated lacerations all over the body have become standards. In my case I´m one of the lucky ones, I'm still in the early stages if decay. Just the white empty eyes with the dark circles under it, the ruffled fur, the unpleasant smell. I could almost pass for a living pony in need of vacation.
Before I became a part of the undead herd I must have been a guard; I wear this blood-smeared golden chest plate since I can remember. I used to have a helmet too but I lost him a few hunting trips ago. The rest of my appearance consists of a short blue mane and white fur. Maybe white isn't even my natural color, the armors magic changes colors into this monotone royal white. It's has just been to long for me to really remember.
`L´ makes fun of me sometimes. He points at my armor and tries to laugh, a chocked, gurgling deep in his gut. I admit, it's ironical; an ex-guard walking around and randomly killing ponies to eat them. At least I'm conflicted about it.
`L´ has the usual zombie look, green fur, orange mane, no clothing. The only thing that makes him distinguishable from the herd is the gasping wound in his neck. The area around it is looking pretty macabre by now, he should really go more into the rain when he has the chance.
We like to 'talk' and speculate about the clothes of the others, since these final fashion choices are mostly the only indication of who we were before we all became no one. Some are less obvious than mine: cap and scarf, saddle and dress, shirt and glasses, sometimes a cylinder and a monocle. So we make random guesses. You were a royal. You were a fashion designer. You were a mailmare. Ring any bells? It never does.
Nopony I know has any specific memories about the time before we died. Just a vague vestigial knowledge of an Equestria long gone. Faint impressions of past lives that linger like phantom limbs. We recognize civilization but we have no personal role in it. No history. We are just here. We do what we do, time passes, and nopony asks questions. But like I've said, it's not that bad, although me moan and groan a lot.
We may appear mindless, but we aren't. The rusty cogs of cogency still spin, just geared down and down till the outer motion is barely visible. We grunt and groan, we shrug and nod, sometimes even a few words slip out. I wonder if it's very different from living.
The only thing that makes me sad is that we've forgotten our names and lost our cutie marks. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my identity, at least I want to know my own name. I mourn for everypony else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are.
There are hundreds of us living in an abandoned castle on top of a mountain; I can't remember the name of it anymore. We don't need shelter or warmth, we are already cold, but we like the walls and roofs over our heads. This place somehow also reminds us of the past before dead, I can't explain it, it just feels that we belong here. I don't like open fields, to have nothing around me, nothing to touch or look at, no hard lines whatsoever and just the gasping maw of the sky. I imagine that's what being full-dead is like. An emptiness cast and absolute.
I think we've been here for a long time. I still have nearly all my flesh, but there are also elders who are a way more rugged than me or `L´, I believe that they were dead long before I was. They lost all of their fur like a bird loses his feathers in the molt, their flesh is gray and cluttered with tons of bite injuries and their eyes are almost dried out completely. These guys mostly stay around in the darker places of the castle and the don't hunt or move very often.
The cellar is full of them, I limped down into there by accident a few weeks ago and found something similar to a changeling hive down there. They built themselves some sort of a shrine down there, sitting around it the whole time and starring at it, like it would bring them some sort of...salvation.
If we can 'die' of old age, they must be in the final stage of it, but I've never seen any of us die that way. Getting decapitated, stabbed, slain, shot and these stuff are the main reasons for our demise, there's always a reason behind it, it never just randomly happens.
Maybe we would live forever if we don't get slain, I don't know. The future as as blurry to me as the past. I can't seem to make myself care about anything to the right or left of the present, and the present isn't exactly urgent. You might say death has relaxed me.
I am patrolling through the corridors when L finds me. I patrol through them several times a day, always at the same times. We all have our routines, I don't know why but we have them. Some of us ex-guards stay on certain places at the wall, waiting for nothing, and some us patrol, even when nopony alive would ever come up here.
I once had a 'partner' who accompanied me on my routes, but he disappeared someday.We never talked or interacted, just walked/limped together, like we weren't allowed to do so. Sometimes we went into the dark areas when the light went on. The spells for the lights and the other machines have lost most of their power, but they still flicker on at times. I cherish these moments. The feeling of things coming to life. I stand there and stare into the flickering light like it would allow me to ascend into Afterlife, that sugary dream of our childhoods, now a tasteless joke.
I stop my circumnavigation of the castle to find L waiting for me at a broken window. Bald, bruised and rotten, his grisly visage slides into my view as I limp over to him. He grunts to greet me, his ragged mouth oozing black drool.
I point in a vague direction and grunt, 'City'. It was meant as a question, but I'm not good in pronunciation anymore. He nods and follows me.
We are going to find food. A hunting party forms around us as we shuffle towards a town some miles away from the castle. We have a town here too, but there isn't much anymore.
It's not hard to find recruits for those expeditions, even if nopony is really hungry. Focused thought is a rare occurrence here, and we all follow it when it manifests. Otherwise we'd just be standing around and groaning all day. We do a lot of standing around and groaning at each other. Years pass this way. The flesh withers on our bones an we stand here, waiting for it to go. I often wonder how old I actually am.
The city where we do our hunting is relatively close. We arrive early in the morning the next day and start looking for flesh. The new hunger is a strange feeling. We don't feel it in our stomach, some of us don't even have one. We feel it everywhere, a sinking, sagging sensation, as if our cells are deflating.
While I stumble over a frozen corpse, I realize that it's getting winter again. Some areas of the city are already covered under tiny layers of snow and iced puddles cover the streets. I had to fall down several times before I understood that ice is no solid ground to walk. It's funny that I forget such simple things, but what do you want to do against it.
Last winter, when so many living joined the dead and our prey became scarce, I watched some of my friend become full-dead. The transition was undramatic. They just slowed down, then stopped, and after a while I realized they were corpses. It disquieted me at first, but it's kinda against the etiquette to notice when one of us dies so I did the only logical thing. Moaning and groaning to distract myself.
I think Equestria has mostly ended, because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Once pompous carriages clog the streets and rust away. Most glass is shattered and the wind drifting through the hollow houses and shops moans like an animal left to die. I don't know what really happened. Disease? War? Social collapse?
Or was it just us? The dead replacing the living? It doesn't matter to me, it's not important. Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matter which route you took.
We starts to smell the living as we approach a dilapidated building which was built into a big now rotten and lifeless tree. The smell is not the musk of sweat and fur, but the effervescence of life energy. Compare it with the ionized tang of lightning and lavender. We don't smell it with our noses; it hits us deeper inside, we feel it near our useless hearts.
We let out a long and loud moan so the dispersed groups can join us. The living surely heard us and get prepared, but we count on overpowering them through pure mass anyways.
We stand there and wait in silence. There is no need to communicate, we already found what we were looking for. A couple of minutes later we are enough to flood the building twice. Some of us groan and we start to converge the building and crash our ways inside, I climb/fall through a smashed window to get in.
We find them huddled in an upper room, they built a barricade on the stair with everything they could find, but that won't hold long against so many hungry mouths. It took us like 30 seconds to breach through the rotten tables and planks.
They look more rugged than we do, wrapped in filthy tatters and rags, all of them badly in need of a bath and a shave. L will be saddled with a short gray beard for the rest of his fleshy existence, but everypony else in our party is relatively clean-shaven. It's one of the perks of being dead, another thing we don't have to worry about any more. We stay in the way we died, manes, tails or beards aren't growing anymore. Our once wild bodies have finally been tamed.
A bit faster then before and with unswerving commitment pushed by the hunger, we launch ourselves at the living. Arrows and sword thrusts sizzle through the air, black blood spatters the floor and walls. The loss of a leg, an ear, a portion of torso, this is disregarded and shrugged off. Not more than a minor cosmetic issue. But some of us loose their heads or take shots to our brains, and we drop. Apparently there's still something of value in that withered grey sponge, because if we lose it, we are dead-dead corpses.
The fellow dead to my left and right hit the ground with moist thuds, an arrow missed my head for an inch and now sticks into the neck of the mare behind me. The living try their best to stop is, but there are plenty of us. We are overwhelming. We set upon the living, and we eat.
Eating is not a pleasant business. I rip off a green mare's chest and take a big bite, and I hate it. I hate her screams and her crying, because I don't like pain, I don't like killing ponies, but that's the way the things are now. This is what we do. Of course I don't eat all of her, if I spare her brain she'll rise up and probably follow me back to castle, and that might make me feel better. I'll introduce her to L if he has survived, and maybe we'll stay around and groan for a while. It's hard for me to say what 'friends' are anymore, but that might be close.
Sparing her brain isn't that hard; ponies always believe we would prefer the brain but that's not really the truth. Of course I would eat it if I could, but cracking a skull isn't that easy, so I just spread her rips and go straight for the good part, that part that makes my head light up like a picture tube. I eat the heart and, for about 3 seconds, I feel alive and warm again.
Flashes of parades, perfume, music...life. Then it fades, and I get up, and we all stumble out of the city with our new brothers and sisters, still cold and dead, but feeling a little bit better. Not 'good', exactly, not 'happy', obviously not 'alive', but... a little less dead. This is the best we can do.
