One Among Millions

by AtlasAbove

Rating: mature
Tags: Dark, Sad
Length: 939

Who remembers the fodder? Who remembers the unnamed silhouettes in the midst of battle? In a world of heros, who remembers the average guard pony?

I've always been enamored to the idea of these shades. You see them in every video game, every action movie, every book: the unnamed soldiers who throw their lives away at the hero's ever whim. Not the heroic life savers, the hard and gritty men and women in the thick of everything who's lives are spent in the heat of split bodies and their weapons lodged in flesh and gristle. Too often you see them covering the screen or page, only to look again five minutes later and see only corpses strewn about a road or prairie.

Consider this a eulogy to the many and the unknown.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2013-03-21 19:10:37 UTC

Heroes on the Horizon

Celestia's Glorious Second Division

3rd Battalion

8nd Company "Sky Rangers"

Light Cavalry Squad 3

Lancer

Pegasus

Sweat pooled in my helmet and slid into my eyes. The golden finish shining brightly in the morning sun; it was a beautiful day. The lance below my left wing was loose and bounced against my side in time with my wing beats. It's point, sharpened to tip of folded steel, was painted blood red. The weapons of my squad mates and the rest of my company were similarly painted. We were the Sky Rangers: the first into the heat and the last out of the press. Our wings were swift and quiet, like a flock of birds flying over head. Thousands of pegasi, a mobile cloud of career warriors, floated in the air; waiting for the signals from Celestia's Matriarchs.

The Matriarchs had been with Equestra for longer than most ponies alive remember. Here and there, a few of the old breed talk about the times before the Great Wars. They spoke of Discord, Nightmare Moon, Sombre, and the Changelings. The old warriors spoke of Harmony and the Elements. They spoke of a still innocent world.

Whether the Matriarchs are really the Elements of Harmony or not, they are as immortal as our God-Princesses. Wounds that would end a strong stallions life do nothing to them. They stride through battles as if the press of bodies were no more than a small stream. Occasionally they dip their hand in to save a floundering creature or spear a fish.

My squad mates snort in impatience. Belkin adjusts his wing blades. Frost flexes his charged hoof-claws. Prism tightens the straps on her many sword belts, her mane painted to mirror our Matriarchs. At the head of our battalion, our immortal general stood atop a cloud, rose eyes surveying the battle grounds ahead. She tossed her multicolored mane and turned back to us: her warriors, her servants, her sword arm. She called out once, her voice easily echoing through the spring-morning air and other the sounds of thousands of soldier finishing their final checks and rites. It was time to go.

I tightened my lance strap, locking it into place below my wing. As one, we rose into the shafts of light; gleaming soldiers ready to take the fight to our god's foes. With a wordless cry, our Matriarch led us over the cloud cover and into the heat and stink of death. Diving, we closed the distance quickly. The speeds narrowed my vision and focused me onto my squad. Belkin had told us the battle plans before we had set out the night before. The Sky Rangers were to be the hard left side of a spear driven into the enemies main forces. Ours was the third squad in the kilometer long line of bodies and steel.

The distance to the ground and our enemies closed in a matter of seconds. Timed slowed down as we neared the hundred meter mark. We had come in with the sun, dazzling the badlands changelings with the gleam of our armor and the piercing sun. My first kill turned his empty green eyes skyward, looking for the source of the whistling wind. My lance took him full on in the chest, cutting through his thick carapace like a comb through fur. The impact halted my dive and impaled him further onto my lance as I hit the ground with a harsh crack, my hooves crunching another changeling. Frost landed next to me, his claws cutting another to ribbons. Prism came down gently, making quick work of a startled changeling. Belkin hit the deck muzzle first, snapping his neck and flopping up into the air with a wet crunch. A quick changeling had gotten a paralysis spell into the air and had stuck him before he could pull out of his dive. I mounted it on my lance, adding to my growing collection of dead. A few more and I would have to pull them off or drop my lance in favor for my short sword tucked under my other wing.

The element of surprise was quickly wearing off, more and more changelings were flinging magic into the air, and more pegasi were hitting the grounds with wet slaps. The horde of insect-like ponies moved in waves, crashing back on themselves in an effort to squash the spearhead of our charge. Dark carapaces filled the battle, wave after buzzing wave came at us. Frost looks back at Belkin before moving us on, there was no time to mourn. Like a knife buried in a rock fault, we scrapped up the sides of the changeling forces. Prism picked apart the changelings, her swords finding any and every chink in their natural armor. Frost claws cut them into strips of meat, the steel enchanted by the unicorns before we left the city. I used my wings to launch myself into the masses, spearing bodies on my lance like the old pegasi hunters used to spear fish. I used my forelegs to push off the latest corpse attached to my lance. Charge, thrust, push, back-stroke. Rinse and repeat. Like the golden and red splattered ponies down the line, we held the line.

A bellowing roar rolled down the grasslands, a chageling behemoth looked from behind a stand of trees. The hulking beserker lowered it's hammer head and charged the line, smashing changeling and ponies aside in it's haste to reach it's target: a blue blur with a swatch of colors following it. Everyone saw it, something of that size doesn't go unnoticed, even in battle.