Night had fallen over our little camp. We had opted not to light a fire seeing how one of us was covered in a fur coat, the other was completely impervious to the cold and lastly I was clad in a flightsuit designed to protect me from temperature ranges well below freezing. We had formed a loose semicircle at the edge of the clearing. I sat with my legs folded and Euphoria rested her head in my lap. SAM sat ramrod straight, the picture of a guard dog.

As my eyes moved over her slender body, I hardly recognized the sad mare I had originally come across stuck in her eternal prison. Already her weakened muscled looked more defined, no doubt a result of strenous use; she had made a habit of working herself well past the point of exhaustion on a daily basis, never complaining or displaying any signs of discomfort. As if she were making up for all that time she had lost in captivity. Furthering her transformation, the Unicorn now carried her saddlebag as a permanent accessory, laden with deadly projectile weapons and who knows what kind of survival gear stowed in her bags. She had removed the visor, keeping it close by, just in case. Her clear blue eyes shone with a quiet conviction, radiating strength.

I passed the time working my fingers in small circles over her sore muscles, relieving tension. She reveled in the attention to the point where she seemed almost comatose with glee, tongue lolling out the side of her mouth, her stoic demeanor completely dispelled. I suppressed a chuckle. She looked so adorable, the last thing I wanted to do was to call attention to it.

The stars shined brightly above us, trees hemming us in on all sides standing like dark sentinels. The forest at first seemed quiet but as I listened I picked up on more and more animal sounds. Soft hooting from an owl, a rustling in the bushes, the wind rustling in the leaves. I noticed Euphoria had fallen asleep with her head in my lap, her eyes closed. Her quiet snore told me she was in deep sleep, her body shutting down to recuperate after yet another day of nonstop activity. Her blonde mane fell limply over her head, covering one eye as usual. The billowy curtain hid her damaged horn and like this she appeared as healthy as any Equestrian.

"Your infatuation with the Equestrian is unusual," SAM's spectral voice carried across the short distance easily. The sleek, cold form of the Pegasus Frame sat bold upright like a canine. He turned his visor to face me and actually took the trouble to switch the red lights in his eyes to glare mode. "You're acting like this is some kind of impromptu vacation," he seethed. Euphoria never once stirred in her sleep, unaware of the conversation taking place. The fact that there was even a spoken conversation to begin with proved that SAM definitely had something weighing on his mind. He continued to vent.

"If this was a mission back on Earth you'd never get involved like this," his voice deepened and the synthetic quality became more pronounced as the machine worked to speak in a voice distinctly different from the one we shared. He continued to glare at me, pausing to let his words sink in. I sat very still, my hand frozen in the act of stroking Euphoria's golden hair.

"But now that we're in Equestria, an alternate dimension, suddenly you're breaking your own rules?" he never once raised his voice, keeping it only just loud enough to carry to me across a few yards of open air. Yet his voice was livid with rage, sounding more like a machine than ever. There was no trace of my voice in the synthetic drone.

It's not unusual for SAM to surprise me. Getting used to mind fucks is an absolute must if you're going to share your headspace with him. Yet not many things slip by me unnoticed. This was the first time he'd voiced discontent since our sudden emergence in this world. He was grilling me hard, speaking to me out loud rather than share in our cybernetic link. To say that this cool dismissal stung would be a bit of an understatement. I sat and pondered his words only now past the shock of his cool delivery. He was right though. I had acted very differently than I would on a mission. I furrowed my brow and tried to retort only to realise that my thoughts did not reach him. He had severed our mental link completely for this little one on one.

"Like it could have been avoided. We were completely isolated from any help and the Equestrians took us in. You seemed to be getting pretty candid with Twilight as well," he groused, cautious of waking Euphoria. She only stirred minutely in my lap before settling.

"You fool, don't even pretend for a moment that our minds are alike," the deep, metallic growl cut across the cool night air. SAM turned his entire body to face me now, tensing the synthetic muscles of his wirey limbs in yet another creepy display of human behaviour. "I could murder Twilight Sparkle with impunity if it served our purpose. I am a machine. If I detect 'affection' trying to interfere, I simply shut down that process. Unlike you, Samuel. Be wary of your own mind."

Well, now we were both angry. I took a few calming breaths and bit my tongue. The bastard was playing dirty and for whatever reason, deliberately trying to rile me up as if to prove that I was somehow emotionally compromised. It didn't help that his arguments were essentially valid. I know my claims that I am a pacifist are feeble, especially given some of the things I had done. Murder is definitely not beneath me given the right circumstances, but targetting one of these peaceful Equestrians seemed inconceivable to me. SAM was never shy when it came to admitting his deeds, either. He was built as a tool for warfare and he aimed to live up to that legacy.

"Some wonderful ambassador you're turning out to be. You're using them just as much as I am if you can be that callous. How do you shut down your apathy?" I spat back, now returning his glare in full. My body had grown tense but Euphoria never picked up on anything as she nuzzled in my lap to get comfortable. I knew my argument was feeble. Two wrongs don't make a right and all that. So what if I'd proven him to be faliable as well? That would just mean we were twice as unfit to carry on with whatever mission this was. It didn't even make me feel any better when I saw that my words had struck SAM speechless. He continued his eerie display of bodylanguage by dimming the glow of his red eyes and pretending to look somewhere else.

For a long time there was only the sound of the forest around us, and Euphoria's soft snore.

"Fine, I admit it. We share a fondness for these creatures," he finally broke the silence, this time sounding completely like his normal self, a ghostly replica of my voice. "However, our plan is to leave this place," he gestured with a hand to the surrounding area. "We mean to return to a world so alien to them that they could never hope to understand. In fact, I won't allow them to. They cannot risk being... tainted, by us. So I mean for us to abandon them when we discover a way home."

Images came to my mind unbidden. A cityscape ravaged by war, the air thick with smoke and gunpowder. Amidst the carnage of humans commiting one of the oldest sins against one another I pictured the horrorstruck faces of the Equestrians we'd met. While they had only known peace, humans had been killing each other since the dawn of our time on earth. It took me a moment to realise I was trembling. I dismissed the thoughts and turned my attention to one of those ponies lying there asleep in my lap. That only made me picture her reaction to the carnage... Would she still smile then? Her new name seemed aptly chosen because I had never seen her react with anything less than joy even when her surroundings were grim. She had spent who knows how long watching everyone she loved slowly decomposing before her eyes, but even that was overridden by the simple elation of being free. If she could stand smiling in a burrial chamber to her kin, could she look at my world and not shy away? SAM seemed to share my abstraction with the mare in question now. His attention was on her as well.

"I will grant you this much. There isn't much that could further taint that one. Still, do we even know that it's possible for her to follow? That anything worthwhile would come of it?" he mused. The likelyhood of our imminent return to earth must have seemed as slim to him as it did to me then. "But she did save your life. I really wouldn't want to fight my way out of there burdened by your corpse."

This seemed to be as close as I'd get to hearing approval of my chosen companion.

Silence returned to our camp and with it came the quiet but gradual increase in animal sounds, shy at first, having been struck silent by the unearthly quality in SAM's synthetic voice, or perhaps detecting the dark thoughts and emotions being flung like knives between the two of us; aliens stranded in their world. One man, the other a machine. I knew SAM always felt like an alien. It's one of my few hangups about the way he turned out when I first wrote the lines of code that would come alive and find a mind of its own. He always felt like an outsider, back on earth and now here as well. This was the first time I got to live with that notion myself.

I had set to watching the episodes available up to the date of my disappearence from earth. One of the handy things about quantum computers. I watch youtube videos streamed directly into my visual and auditory brain centers. No wonder I'm starting to feel alien to this world. Still, our goal here was to find clues about travels between our two worlds.

I then became aware of the absense of the soft mane under my fingers and the missing warmth in my lap. Euphoria had awoken as suddenly and inexplicably as SAM's wrath only moments before, choosing this quiet moment to sit bolt upright in the night, bright blue eyes peering into the deep shadows cast by the gnarled, old trees. SAM's response was instantaneous as he too sat ramrod straight, straining his plethora of sensory devices, perceiving the world in spectrums of light that human minds cannot even conceptualize. At least not unassisted. Needless to say, if there was anything out there no matter how hidden, SAM was bound to pick up on it.

His visor turned fractionally towards me and his head tilted ever so slightly sideways as if raising his brow in silent question to my thoughts. He had noticed my unwavering faith in his ability to see the enemy and flash it up on a Heads Up Display as conveniently as any first person shooter ever delivered. Yet I had not seen the abomination who had, for the lack of a better term, created the mare who had then taken the name Euphoria. The solid ton of malleable scale-covered flesh had sat undetected in the midst of a sea of decay, appearing to SAM and I only when he chose to.

As if underlining my fears, SAM showed no outward sign of picking up anything abnormal in the woods, yet contrary to his verdict sat Euphoria, glaring into the darkness as if willing herself to see the threat lurking there. Her ears perked, swiveling to pick up the noise, listening for something that we had missed. Her nostrils flared and to my growing horror her expression grew wooden, slipping back into the mask that I first had seen looking down on me in endless sorrow. I could hardly stand to see her like this, and if whatever she was sensing was triggering this relapse then it had to be bad. Prior to coming here the enemy had always been a known quantity. Visible, touchable. Yet this strange world filled with magic was desperately beyond our ability to fathom, and we both liked to think we were pretty clever when all things had been said and done.

Witnessing magic for the first time, sitting in that cramped little bed in a quaint hospital room in a quaint little pony town, I had responded with fear. Alertness. A heightened sense of expectation, of feeling the effect on my body the moment the unicorn doctor's horn flared to life in an eldritch light. Yet I had felt nothing and sensed nothing as the little pastel colored magical horse had swiftly and effortlessly diserned the extent of my damages and noticed the absense of magic in me. It just didn't touch the human senses, nor apparently the machine's impressive aray as SAM sat silent witness to events he could not measure against his databanks comprised of the sum total of human knowledge, the bits he had chosen anyway.

Euphoria however was a native to the world of magic, a unicorn still. Her eyes and ears were now trained on one particular patch of darkness. Curiously the animals in that area were not as vocal as the other occupants of the forest. As if that place was still not quite settled yet. Before I could respond she snapped into motion, turning and dipping her head down to slip into what had now become almost a part of her lately - the visor. Already armed with her saddlebags and their deadly cargo, she stormed off into the darkness more swiftly than either of us could respond. By the time I had gotten to my feet SAM had bolted like an overgrown mechanical hare, quickly closing the gap to Euphoria. I grapped my rifle and the halberd VENGEANCE before rushing to catch up. Already shrinking into obscurity, I sensed rather than saw Euphoria as SAM chased after her. At the same time, I was also seeing through her half of the visor, tracking everything she paid closer attention to as she bolted through the woods. She noted animals hiding even before the clop of her hooves could have spooked them. She clenched her teeth and shook her mane as if feeling a bite in the air. SAM's gas spectrometer detected no deviations in pressure or humidity. Again, whatever had spooked our resident Equestrian, human technology just wasn't catching it.

I cut across a densely wooded area that Euphoria had chosen to skirt around, loping through tight gaps between branches and roots, all eager to trip me up and impede my progress. I had caught up enough to watch Euphoria's phantom chase unfolding in three overlaying pictures, from Euphoria's visor, SAM's visor and my own eyes. The sensory overload only stressed the pointed normality of the woods, yet Euphoria's agitation was palpable. She saw and heard things that spurred her on in a mad rush through snaking paths deeper into the woods. Up ahead the trees were all very young and clustered tightly together, each vying to reach a bit higher towards the heavens. A narrow triangular gap about 2 feet wide was the only way through. Euphoria dove through and out of sight. SAM fired the pistons in his hindlegs and shot into the sky like a bullet, partly unfolding his wings to glide across the obstacle. I ran full tilt and threw myself down, sliding sideways through the gap. The flightsuit kept my skin from being shredded as I suddenly tumbled into a deep cavern. Soil and roots were replaced by sheer stone and I collided with Euphoria who was doing her own rendition of Bamby on Ice. We came down in a tangle of limbs, the noise of our graceless entry roaring in the cavernous darkness. Infrared and themorgraphic vision filters from Euphoria's visor outlined the massive stone champer. Sleek white marble laid down in careful symetry centuries ago had since become cracked and tilted slightly to one side. Of the massive pillars supporting the roof, about half still stood. A bit of light did trickle into the room from a hole in the ceiling, and with a dull thud SAM's robotic frame eclipsed the pale moon above as he landed perched on the edge of the hole. The stone structure had stood curiously shielded from the outside, somehow hidden behind a small tangle of trees, yet the structure laid out before us would have dwarfed the plants, making weeds of them in the shadow of a great temple. Whatever had masked its presence, Euphoria's natural senses had picked up on it and led us here and from the inside the spell was broken. The building was very definitely there. A massive building left to be sucked up by the forest growing around it. The trees in the temple's shadow were younger than this decayed shell. What we did see was not encouraging. The badly eroded stone sculpting lining the walls and the pillars had seen more than the ravages of time. The faces of two Alicorns had been pointedly chipped off leaving gharish, scarred masks in their place. All around them, other ponies had been erased fully or partially by careful vandalism in some forgotten time. Rotted tapestries had fallen from the walls not because of decay. Their gilded frames had been cruelly torn down by the same ones who had defaced the diarchs. In their wake, vivid red colors bleeched eerily black where the moonlight touched them, were great scrawls of graffiti, written in what appeared to be the only organic matter not decomposing in here; blood. How it had stayed fresh when the chambers had otherwise lain undisturbed was a mystery, just as the building itself. I know I've joked about pony homes seeming bigger on the inside, but that was mostly accomplished by simply having fewer walls and floor divisions. This stone temple however, really did feel bigger on the inside. It was massive and while SAM flashed cryptic images on the inside of the visor, assisted by Euohoria, I turned in a circle and surveyed the rest of the area. Towards the back was a smaller shrine, disconcertingly repurposed as a sacrificial slap complete with rusted chains hanging off the corners. There was signs of blood having seeped into the stoneworks, leaving timeless blotches of discolored stone as silent witness to the death that had taken place here.

SIMULATED ARTIFICAL MIND
Translation in progress...

OPeN tHe gaTes of Tartarus.

The red text flashed in english within my own mind and seeing double, I knew SAM's visor was feeding Euphoria with the Equestrian translation as well. My reality filter was not dealing well with the exchange of information. I am used to wearing the suit so I don't have to feed images directly into my visual cortex. This time my overstrained brain almost gave out altogether when I heard a bone-chilling laughter drowning out the artificial reality the computer had laid over my human senses. It registered not in my normal hearing, but in the sensory regions of my brain that are normally interfacing with the machine. Yet this laughter was neither the work of SAM, nor my own subconscious. It had started the moment SAM had flashed that translation and by the look of things, Euphoria had heard it as well. Her already pale coat, leeched lifeless by moonlight, shook with primal terror and I am sure I trembled, too.

SAM stood in stark contrast, sensing nothing that caused him any level of distress, and curiously not seeming to pick up on what we were hearing. The laughter resonating in my mind was a bitchy-tittery male voice with a rasping rattle towards the end, sounding almost corpselike after a few moments of sustained mocking laughter. It was joined in by other voice until my senses were pried open to a cocophany of voices echoing madly in my mind. I think I screamed, or tried to, but if I succeeded, the sound was drowned out by the babble of a thousand voices speaking in dead tongues that sounded a mockery of the melodic Equestrian speech. I was no longer able to sense Euphoria or SAM at all. Not with any of my human senses, nor through the DNI linking our senses together. The sudden isolation was smothering and I fell to my knees, trying to scream and claw at the nothingness that had enveloped me.

...

I fucking hate magic sometimes. Whatever the fuck this was, it certainly did not spring from Friendship. The illusion was partly dispelled when one of the mocking voices was cut off, pitching into a strangled cry and a dull thud as blood sprayed in my face. Something had been struck dead only inches from my face, and the momentary reprieve allowed me to realize that there were physical enemies present and I wasn't seeing them.

Another voice cut off in a deathrattle as a wooden javelin flew inches from my face, impaling the ghastly skull of an animated equine corpse to the wall next to me. I had been herded into a corner in my terror and one of the spellcasters had become visible, slain by Euphoria's javelin. Shit, she was faring better than me if she could attack them through this nightmare mirrage.

I had an idea that SAM was fighting too, if the first kill had not been by her javelin. Even blind to them, SAM was fighting as well. I noticed the corpse Euphoria had taken down, and it really did seem dead before hitting the ground. It had once been a unicorn, now marred beyond recognition with cruel scarification, tattoos and brands, all of them written in that vular, archaic, bastardized form of Equestrian. His horn was a cruel double of Euphoria's; snapped off halfway with deliberate contempt for the symetry of the protusion. These were spellcasters and by the look of things, necromancy was at play. Their constant illusion left me in purgatory. I was numb with cold and saw nothing but darkness. My mind heard only their mocking laughs and mad chants, which I am sure I was better off not fully comprehending. The only thing I could sense, not even my own body, was the halberd VENGEANCE. It hung rigid and unwavering in the nothingness and when I looked at it, I once again had eyes, a face, a body and a hand to hold it. For a moment the illusions played a trick, giving me a skeletal hand in place of the black glove covering my prosthetic hand. Then that too was gone and I was a human again. VENGEANCE shone with a silver light, cutting gashes in the illuroy tapestry, allowing me to catch glimpses of my attackers.

They wanted me mad, they wanted me scared. They wanted me to know of the profane rituals they had performed. VENGEANCE seemed to cry out in defiance of their evil and my arm moved by reflex, deflecting a scimitar blow. The notched, rusted weapon was clutched in the ghastly maw of a corpse, lips peeled back by fish hooks displaying the jagged teeth, piled to canine points. The thing slavered onto the handle clutched in its jaws as it swung again. I could only see a fraction of the creature's body through the illusion and it danced in my blindspots, but I was fighting. I could deflect his blows with the glowing Halberd, feeling it almost willing itself to move into the trajectory of the blade and trying to counter attack, but when I plunged the tip of the blade into the nothingness where the illusion had cut the equine body in two, I struck nothing. It phased through the corpse's body and the once-pony leered at me as if he could appreciate my confusion. Then VENGEANCE flared brightly, dispelling the darkness it had plunged into and when the whole of the grotesque pony body had been revealed, he has been bisected. His jaw dropped the blade and his voice laughed in that bitchy-tittery voice I had first heard as he died fully.

My path now cleared, I swung VENGEANCE in a big, swooping arc, dispersing more of the darkness. I came full circle and stood in a defensive posture, feet spread wide, the halberd extended in one direction, my left arm open in a defensive posture on my flank. I could feel the hellish creatures draw away from me, skirting the light emanating from my weapon. Whatever they were, my magical blade seemed to loathe them. Another shadow crept up behind me, but I sensed no malice from this one. The Pegasus Frame unfolded behind me and swiftly enveloped me. I grew a foot in height as I adjusted my stance, reared up on the hydraulic sabatons like a minotaur. The twilight colorjob seemed fitting for a battle against foul sorcerers and SAM's visor would perhaps help even the playing field.

The glaring red Heads Up Display was clogged with errors and faulty coding. The illusion was not just playing havoc with my head, my computer friend was being scrampled as well. Operating on limited processing power, the reality filter remained offline as it had been for too long already. To tell it plainly, my sensory experience was nightmarish. There was only death, violence and confusion as I leaped at my enemies and cut a swath into them. Their corpselike bodies seemed to remember death, seizing up in rigor mortis when VENGEANCE touched them.

My surroundings swam with torrents of blood and I saw familiar faces drowning in the thin puddles. Twilight and her friends, as well as any number of other Ponyvilleans were brought out to deepen the nightmare experience, but I could see the shape of the room and my foes and that was enough. My anthropomorphic extended leg frame crashed with a piston-like kick as it came down on one of the spellcasters, flattening his midsection to paste. In the same moment, a sweep of VENGEANCE cut three of them apart and the tail with its bladed tip ripped the head off another once-unicorn caster. My rifle crashed, aiming unassisted by SAM's targeting algorithms, but solid marksmanship sent the last of my buttlets through the brains of another three necromancers that had crowded around Euphoria.

She was down to her last javelin, having found new homes for all but two of them in her agressors. My last three live rounds cleared a path for her and she closed her eyes, seeming to inhale the putrid air. Then I saw her broken horn glowing a sickly green and her eyes snapped open, ringed by a glow of sickly gold. Her teeth were clenched and her muscles tensed as she literally drank up the darkness of the illusion. Like a minature black hole, the act of swallowing the nothingness of their spell could only be perceived by color leeching back into the world in a swirling spiral pattern from Euphoria's horn. She trembled as if she could taste the foulness of the fake visions as they were sucked into her broken horn. Not blasting magic, but sucking it up like a sponge.

My momentary distraction proved to be nearly fatal. SAM's sensory aides had not been able to see my attacker who hid in the last tendrils of darkness. The rotted form broke against me as a spear was thrust clean through my side, the momentum unbroken causing the owner to splatter himself onto my armor. The stench of death was cloying and the agony of the wound sung in tandem with the lingering visions of the illusion.

The last moments of the fight are a blur and I only remember that I kept myself going long enough to stomp every last one of the fuckers into a fine paste. Euphoria was trampling them as well, and I remember her smiling even after having aborbed the spell that broke my mind. SAM suffered in his own purgatory as the codes that made up his mind were partly undone. But we did finish the fight, all of us alive at the end of it. Well, I was once again in the maybe-zone. It was a zone I was too familiar with. Damn it, SAM had already restarted my heart once this month.

...

I fucking hate necromancy.

Author's Note

It lives!

After more than a year of sitting on my ass doing nothing with this otherwise well-received story, I have finally gotten back to writing about Samuel. In truth I had not run out of ideas. There is never any fear of me running out of ideas. I was stressing over life and death. I know, a dreary topic, so instead let's focus on fictional life and death. I seem to enjoy being awful to ponies and here you have my newest invention: the necro-reaver-pony. If you've watched Firefly, you'll know what inspired their looks.

I'm going back to writing the next chapter and I hope this one was to your liking. I felt the story was due for another big combat scene. Samuel's bullets are all gone now. I guess VENGEANCE makes up for it though. Do you like the weapon? Or should I write less about the thing?