HEARTLESS
A Tale of the Equestrian Wasteland
"It's plowing today," my father told me. "Good day for a colt to spend getting some learning in. You have a few years yet before you'll be able to haul one yourself. Enjoy them while you can."
I was torn. On the one hoof, what young colt wants to admit that he's not old enough to do grown-up work? But on the other, I was already plenty familiar with hard work. Having a chance to take a break from scratching at the thin, rocky soil of the Crystal Mountains was a rare treat. We could grow more than most places in the Wasteland, I know, but still never enough. Ten ponies could raise enough food in a year to sustain eight. The difference had to come from stores, and those were irreplaceable. At least being so near to the Frozen North we had clean water, with regular runoff melting and filtering through the rock, and several edible funguses in the caves. Even at that age I knew to consider myself lucky. Or at least that I should.
Diamond Mine was the oldest pony in Imperial Reach, and he was still the best mining engineer we had. But nobody needs to lay out a new mine in the early spring, when the heavy plows need to be pulled and the melting snow seeping through the rock makes digging chancy business anyhow, and he was getting too old for plowing. So, the colts and fillies it was for him. He wasn't the best teacher, but he was what we had, and he tried honestly. He was terrible at teaching math precisely because he was so good at it; he couldn't tell which steps some poor student was finding difficult because to him it was all simple. He wasn't a wonderful storyteller either, but he knew his facts.
There were four of us that day. There never were a lot of foals at a time, and a colt had to become a stallion young. Diamond Mine probably couldn't have handled a lot more anyhow. He started off the way he always did, bluntly.
"We're going to do history today. Get your plots on the ground and listen. We've done history of Equestria before, so I'm going to tell you about the Crystal Empire today. That's where a fair part of our ancestors came from, and it's where the rest of them were fleeing to, so this is YOUR history. It's all of our history. Someday it might be your turn to share this, so listen up.
"So. A long, long time ago, the Crystal Empire was the shining heart of pony-kind. The Crystal Princess ruled for nobody-knows-how-long, and while Equestria was suffering under Discord, the Empire kept civilization going all on its lonesome. With the Crystal Heart, the Princess could use her love for her ponies to shield the entire Empire. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could stand against that power of love, and they thought nothing could ever overcome love. In a way, they were right, too. What eventually left the Empire weakened was love itself. Some greedy, grasping pony prince for some other land, nobody knows which one, thought he had a way to take over the Crystal Empire. He snuck the Crystal Princess a love potion - and that was the end of it. The two of them were so locked in love with each other, the Princess didn't have any love left for the entire rest of the Empire, and didn't think about her duties anyhow. So all that love that the Crystal Ponies needed, it was wasted on some selfish, scheming foreign stallion."
One of the other foals, Salt Water, a colt, asked, "Who was he? What'd he look like?" Diamond Mine just shook his head. "Too long ago, and too much happened since. Don't even know where he came from. Just that he came in and stole the Princess' love."
"Fortunately, that was about when Princess Celestia and Princess Luna defeated Discord, so at least the Empire didn't fall under his rule. But you could argue what they got instead was worse. Discord was capricious and nasty, sure, but he only did things to amuse himself. The pony who conquered the Empire was named King Sombra, and he was just plain a bad pony. He was a unicorn, but he used hate and fear to power his spells - starting with finishing off the weakened and wasted Crystal Princess and her unworthy lover. In an Empire built around love, there wasn't a Crystal Pony alive who could resist him. He didn't reign long, but he left his mark on the Empire while he did. Crystal Ponies lost their coats, and he took most of them as slaves. When Celestia and Luna finished consolidating their rule over Equestria, they moved in on the Empire, too. They banished Sombra, but he left a curse on the Empire on his way out, stealing what was left of the love and joy left there and letting the snow and ice of the arctic north consume the entire place."
Garnet Glaze, a unicorn filly a good year younger than me, started to cry. "But... but... but the ponies! He can't freeze all the ponies! He can't do that! It's not fair! Make him not do that!" I said Diamond Mine wasn't the best teacher, and that was one of the times he showed it. Other ponies might've talked her down, explained things so a little filly could understand, or just hugged her and made her feel better. He wasn't that kind of pony. He sat and waited. Garnet's crying got the other two foals going too, and the room was full of racket. Not me, though. Something about this story was catching my interest. I waited with him. When the others cried themselves out, I asked, "So what happened next?"
Diamond Mine resumed where he'd left off. "His curse lasted a thousand years, more or less. When it ended, the Empire emerged from the cold once more, and the ponies were left just as they were when the ice arrived. Which means, terrified, hurt, and scarred, with precious little love to go around, and the Crystal Heart hidden away by Sombra... who came back from his banishment at the same time. It took a heroic baby dragon to defy him and find the Heart, and a new alicorn, Princess Cadance, to empower it with her love for her new adopted people - and for her husband, Shining Armor.
"They ruled in peace for only a few decades, though. You all know about the war, and honestly the Empire wasn't too much a part of it. The Empire's primary output was crystals, with just about enough land to feed itself. It never got much into the way of factories and technology. Princess Cadance didn't approve of the turn Equestria had taken, and she kept the Empire close to its traditional ways. Shining Armor talked her into letting him keep the military up to date, but they imported all their weapons from Equestria. They never made much in the way of trade beyond Equestria; nobody else could get to the Empire without either going through Equestria or through miles and miles of freezing storms. They call Equestria the Wasteland now, but at least you can stand in most of it without freezing to death. Not so the land around the Empire.
"It wasn't enough to be a peaceful, inoffensive kingdom far to the north, though. Not for the zebras. They just saw an Equestrian ally. Right before the end of the war, they sent in thieves to steal the Crystal Heart, and they snatched it right out of the palace."
I had to interrupt. It was my turn, I guess. "Did they catch them? How did anyone know it was zebras?"
Diamond Mine scowled at me, and I knew I'd found an important point he didn't want to cover. "Who else could it have been? Maybe they hired griffons or had traitors inside do it. Doesn't matter exactly how they got the Heart. They thought by taking the Heart, they could make the Empire stop helping Equestria, or maybe they thought it would make Sombra's curse return. But it had to be the zebras behind it all. They admitted it. They sent an ultimatum to Princess Cadance. Stop supplying Equestria with crystals, or never get the Heart back. She refused, naturally. She wouldn't turn her back on an ally like that, and she loved Princess Celestia and Princess Luna like sisters."
Garnet Glaze broke in again. "Was she their sister?"
Diamond Mine cleared his throat. "No. She was much, much younger. She loved them like sisters, not as sisters. So anyhow. The zebras had the Heart, somewhere. The war was nearing its end, and the borders between Equestria and most of its neighbors were already militarized, so the Heart was probably somewhere in Equestria still. There was enough magic around the borders that bringing a powerful artifact like the Heart there would've set off all sorts of alarms. But the zebras wouldn't say where it was, just that they had it. Up until the last month or so, they kept repeating their offer, and Princess Cadance kept rejecting it.
He took a deep breath and blew it out. "And then came the end of Equestria. You all know about that part. The megaspells, the poisons. Canterlot. Manehattan. Cloud City. Well, the Crystal Empire didn't get hit with any megaspells. It didn't matter too much. According to legend, a pegasus brought word to Princess Cadance about what happened to Canterlot, and it broke *her* heart. She fell on her husband, sobbing, and the ice wrapped itself around the two of them on the spot, and began to spread. That pegasus barely got out - nobody knows if a pegasus could survive getting buried in the Empire's ice, and we can only hope that Shining Armor could.
"The pegasus made it to the first place he found that wasn't swallowed up by the north. It was a border outpost with Equestria, in a valley in the Crystal Mountains. Right here, in fact. Shining Armor's search parties were using it as a staging area, and the pegasus told them what happened, then lit off for the clouds. Nobody ever saw him again. An hour or so later, the refugee train pulled up with ponies from Equestria hoping to take shelter in the Crystal Empire. They didn't have much other choice but to get off and turn that little outpost into something resembling a home. And we've all been here ever since, growing what we can, dipping into the supplies from the train to make up the difference."
I listened to every last word with my ears aquiver. When he was done, I just had to jump up onto my hooves. "So the Heart is out there? Somewhere? And if we can find it... and if somepony can find an alicorn with enough love to power it..."
Diamond Mine nodded. "Ayup. The Crystal Empire is waiting under the ice for the Heart and the one who has enough love for it. A handful of ponies have gone off to search for it." He stood up and stretched out his forehooves. "And the rest of us keep surviving for their sake. The searchers are the hope the rest of us rely on."
I inhaled as much as my young lungs would let me. "I'm going to be one of them."
Diamond Mine looked at me for a long time. I looked back at him. He slowly nodded his head. "Looks like you will. Congratulations." And he pointed a hoof at my flank.
I had my cutie mark. The sign of the Lost Heart.
Author's Note
Originally published in short segments at http://spinelstride,tumblr.com . I plan to continue the story that way - as each chapter finishes posting section by section, I'll make any edits I get in comments there and post the consolidated chapter here.
FALLOUT: EQUESTRIA
HEARTLESS
Chapter 1
Searchers don't often come back home. Going out into the Wasteland isn't healthy. Quartz Quest and Ruby Do are the only ones who've come back to Outpost after going on Search, and neither of them stayed. The Search is a destiny. You can't walk away from it. The kinds of ponies who go on the Search wouldn't want to. No matter what they find.
Or don't find.
My name is Spinel Stride. I'm a Searcher. The Lost Heart is out there somewhere. My cutie mark is two curved black lines that make the hollow outline, marking out where the Heart is missing. It doesn't mean I'll find it. But it means I'll try. Everyone's counting on me. So far as we know, there aren't any other Crystal Ponies left outside the ice. We've got an empire waiting for us to save it.
For me to save it.
It's a heady feeling. I've been training for it pretty much all my life, though. Ever since I got my mark, I've known what I have to do. Find the Heart. Find an alicorn whose love can empower it. Restore the Crystal Empire. Save everyone. So I've read the journals Quartz and Ruby left behind, and I've trained relentlessly. I know about raiders, about radigators, about balefire phoenixes. I'm the best hoof-to-hoof fighter in Outpost, and I'm a pretty good shot with a rock.
Yes, a rock. I've practiced kicking them up and bucking them at range until my hooves were sore. Outpost started out as just that, a border outpost between two friendly countries. There weren't a lot of weapons there when the Empire fell, and a trainload of refugees didn't haul along any carts of ammo either. If we had anything that anyone wanted, the place would probably have been overrun in the early days, but it's a long ways off from the main body of Equestria, and the only real thing we have is fresh water, from snowmelt. Water's heavy. The few raiders who've come our way were in poor shape by the time they got to us, and they couldn't get through the Shining Shields.
I should probably explain that. It's a Crystal Pony thing. Nowadays, at least. Just because we lost our crystal coats doesn't mean we lost our affinity for crystals. Radiation seems to count as a 'crystal' for our purposes. Maybe we just got irradiated enough to mutate a little. We won't know until we get some of our ancestors out of the ice and compare. Anyway, those early ponies didn't have much in the way of guns or explosives, but they were trained by Shining Armor himself. They formed the Order of the Shining One to keep his teachings going, and developed a fighting style based on what he taught them. It's a defensive style, but martial anyhow. You defend until you have your chance to defeat the guilty. The Shining Shield is an outgrowth of that. You learn to feel the radiation around you and pull it together, and drive it back with a buck. It takes shape for just a second or two, but that's enough to block a rock, a kick, or a bullet. It takes training, but enough ponies at outpost can do it to keep the place protected as long as it takes.
Be worthy of the one you love. A simple enough phrase, but it encapsulates everything you need. I’ve long since taken it to heart. If I ever do find the Lost Heart, I’ll have to be worthy of a love strong enough to empower it. That’s a tall order in the Wasteland. Just surviving by any means at all is a tall order in the Wasteland.
Take that first day. Not really the first day outside of Outpost; I’d been outside often enough, patrolling, learning to sneak around, things like that. But there’s a long trek from Outpost to the Wasteland proper, along the path the train once took, and there’s a tunnel it passes through. Hidden in that tunnel is where you leave a few days’ worth of food and water, so if you find the Heart and make it back that far, you’ll have the supplies to finish the trip. When you step outside the tunnel, that’s really when you’re in the Wasteland.
I almost got shot before I got out of the tunnel. It wasn’t even anyone shooting at me, swear to Cadance. I heard a mosquito-whine go by my ear and dropped to my belly while I was still inside the tunnel, on top of the old rail ties there. A slow creep forward and I got my first look at the Wasteland while I listened to more gunshots than I’d heard in my life put together.
Two bands of raiders were duking it out. Maybe one of them was defending their turf from the other, maybe they just ran into each other out there and started fighting, maybe one of them was running out of supplies and was getting desperate. I didn’t know enough about raiders then to even tell who was fighting who. They were all done up in, well, raider gear. Scraps of barding, skulls, bones, blood, war paint, whatever they felt like. A couple of them were already down, bright red pools spreading under them.
That was my first quashed noble impulse. I wanted to charge out and win the battle for the good guys, whoever they were. The reason I quashed it then was that I couldn’t figure out that crucial detail. Now I know there weren’t any. Just two batches of bad guys. So I laid there quietly, mostly hidden in the tunnel mouth, and watched ponies killing each other. It was… educational. I hadn’t appreciated the idea of ‘rate of fire’ before then. I could already tell that their tactics were terrible, though. The whole thing was a free-for-all, and everypony was so busy going wild attacking that they weren’t using cover properly.
I was a little busy being horrified at the time to take it all in at first, but that passed while the bullets were still flying. The journals made it very clear that life is cheap in the Wastelands, so I’d been intellectually ready for it, and I suppose I might not be a very nice pony in some ways. I don’t think it was more than three minutes before the fight was over, and that seems like a short time to make that kind of emotional leap. There were only three raiders left breathing when they were finished, and one of those three wasn’t going to last much longer even if the other two hadn’t come up and stomped on his head. That did rattle me again.
The two survivors didn’t seem to much care that their friends were dead too. Or their compatriots, anyhow. I don’t think anypony can really be friends with a raider, even another raider. In any case, they searched all the bodies, took what they wanted, and then just walked off, bristling with even more weapons than they’d started with. I wasn’t too eager to test my hooves against guns just yet, so I waited and watched them until they’d gotten out of sight and stayed there a good half-hour.
Then I went down to search the bodies myself. Yes, it was a bit gruesome, but that little display made it very clear that you don’t leave anything useful behind in the Wasteland. Even so it never occurred to me to take their armor; not only was it thoroughly disgusting, but I wasn’t in the habit of dressing up and I had an innate confidence in my Shining Shield over barding. The two survivors had taken all the ammunition and all of the guns that weren’t on the verge of falling apart, but they hadn’t taken everything. One of the raiders (who’d ended up with a hole right between his eyes) was carrying two entire bandoliers of grenades.
I didn’t think I’d be able to do much good with the guns, and these were particularly disturbing models – the raiders were holding them in their mouths and using their tongues to press the triggers, and given what those raiders looked like I was in no hurry to put my mouth on anything they’d been holding. I took a decrepit rifle anyhow, on the off chance I might come across bullets for it and want to learn how to use one in an emergency. The grenades were much more up my alley, though. More or less the same size and weight as those rocks I practiced with, and yanking the pin with my teeth wouldn’t be hard at all.
I practiced. Once. I’m happy to say I took to it like a unicorn to telekinesis. Grab the grenade by the stem to pull it from the bandolier, catch the ring with my tongue, flick the grenade over my shoulder, give it a buck to send it on its way, and boom goes the target. I didn’t have enough to waste more than one, but I didn’t think it would be a clever move on my part to try it for the first time when I really needed it.
I never did find out what those raiders were fighting over, or why they’d come that far north already. I didn’t figure they were likely to know anything about the Lost Heart, so I didn’t try to track them. For all I know, they blew each other’s heads off ten seconds after they walked out of sight.
From there, I didn’t have much in the way of a plan, other than ‘not follow the ponies with all those guns.’ My cutie mark gave me destiny and motivation, but not a lot of specific useful information, so I just started walking south. I assumed if the Heart was somewhere near the tunnel, one of the earlier Searchers would have found it and restored the Crystal Empire by now.
Footnote: Level Up
New Perk: Searchin’ General – You are adept at finding things ponies tried to hide. You have an additional 20% chance to find items when searching bodies or containers.
Author's Note
A little short, I admit, but I've been quite busy, and the prologue seems to have had a mixed reception, which perhaps dulled my enthusiasm to some degree. Mea cupola (or at least mea patio).
