• ...
31
 276
 5,038

Chapter 8: April Showers

Fallout Equestria: Begin Again
Chapter 8: April Showers
“While battle cattle are indeed a dangerous foe; they are one that should be fought ferociously!”

|*| A Star To Steer By |*|

“Stars are heartless things.” I woke up with the cold climbing its way up my spine, and the shadows of a hysterical fire dancing across my belly. It was the wind that had brought winter to rattle my bones and whistled a song to those black stickmen, so that they lapped at the walls of this hollow place like the tongues of desert priests at some shimmering mirage. “As one collapses, it will not let itself slip through the arms of the galaxy alone. But instead lashes its neighbors, and pulls them down with it.”

“And, like those stars that dapple the night’s skies, so are your memories woven together.” I wasn’t broken, though the temple must have struck my body as a hammer strikes a nail, and I could scarcely feel the pain, though it was all around me. My head felt clear, as if the last grains of that terrible voice had been emptied out, but I could feel a brittle and heatless crown pressing into my naked temples.

“But memories are not so heartless. No. They are loyal things. And as one collapses, its sisters will reach down and hold it, even as it pulls them away. The destruction of a single one, might be enough to leave you as barren as the new earth. Or give you your peace.” When the wind touched me, it burned, as if my fever was enough to put it to a boil, and so the pain was like a mob, hammering at the walls of my temple.

It was as if I had been laid out over that little fire, for how I could feel my skin being broiled. Still, it was the winter that had brought my back to a burn, and I felt as if I was being pinched in between a pair of tongs, which had had one of its fingers dipped in ice, and the other in fire. “Peace?” I mouthed the word, as another voice spoke them, as his voice, softened in the last embers of youth, spoke them. “You know that’s not what I want.” It was as if we were speaking as one, though my voice was too soft to be heard.

“You will burn your own path.” I found her, standing in between pillars of smoke, with a body that was painted by orange tongues, dancing matchstick men, and white stripes. Her neck had been shackled in a dozen narrow rings, and her eyes looked to have sunk into pools of electric water. “Find whatever memory you would remove, but be wary of all that it is bound to. If you wish to destroy a something, or a someone, then tear away the moment in which you thought of it most, and remembered it best.”

Her hair was smoke, and the beads along her body were turned to embers by the light. Her voice spun circles around the cave, and seemed to come out of every mask and tribal ornament: out of the face of every smiling madmare and the belly of every animal skin drum. “When you are ready to begin: drink. And the magic of your kind and mine will be your tools in pulling history up by its root: No matter the damage.”

“If the pillars fall: the temple will soon follow,” Damascus said, pushing his voice into the cracks between us. We were not one. This was not my body but somehow, neither was this a dream. “I know the danger. But I am not a child poking at a house of cards. I will leave no ruins behind me.”

“Just as soldiers leave no victims.” The smoke was gathering at the roof of the cave: becoming a tempest to match that which hung like a veil over the face of the nation. “After it is done… we will count our dead. But take comfort in knowing that, if you do let some gold slip through your hooves with all that sand, we can always return to these orbs, and pick up the pieces.”

Damascus looked down, and I could feel my chest swell for the fire that flooded our nostrils.
We both stared at a little vial, into which the night sky, with all its fields of velvet and pinpricks of starlight, had been poured. “Drink that, and you will see your history splayed out like an open book. Drink that, and you will have the power to rip out its spine. Rebind it. Burn away the pages… Begin Again.”

“Your valley treats magic as a pestilence. How was this technology not stamped out?”

“Sadly, Zion is happy to make a friend of plagues and pestilence, if only when they can be tamed.” We looked out at a disc of white, as the sun pierced the end of the cave’s throat. “This alchemy was passed from soldier to soldier: beginning even before our march to Equestria. I would brew it for them, so that Zion’s children might spend their waking hours fighting, and do their training, run their drills and study war, throughout the night. They didn’t listen, when I told them that the mind is exhausted as well as the body. They wouldn’t listen, when I told them that we were making machines of our children.”

“So it fills the same spaces as a dream?” We lifted the vial, to hold it between us and the fire, though the light was drowned in it. “What if one of the children were to slip into the blackness in between?” She might have drawn herself a silver lining in mascara, as her eyes were shining. “Have you ever lost one?”

We would have had a moment of silence then, but the fire cackled, as if there were witches being put to death in it. “Yes,” She said, as that starlight danced a ring around her eyes, and began to trickle over her cheeks as if falling through the twilight. “And you’re just like them, Damascus: You’re going home.” She let a hoof push through the embers and the smoke, to stroke our crown. “Come back.”

The talismans chimed to the breath of winter, as it blew into the cave, as if trying to smoke us out. But the fire and the fir only danced to its whistles, keeping us apart like a child stomping and singing their way through a slow dance. “Things will have changed. That is all that can keep you from falling into it. There will be twisted faces and voices that come out as gibberish for all the words that you’ve forgotten. There will be empty canvases, borrowing their colors and their shapes from older memories.”

Her arm, held over the fire, was like the trunk of a birch tree: burning. “I sent a soldier back once, so that he might relive a battle long since won. And, though he found his fight, the features of his enemy had been forgotten. So, in their place; like a mask that snarled and screamed and died, was the face of his father. And there was nothing he could do but win again.”

A shudder took me by the spine, and pulled me ever father away from Damascus. He hadn’t felt it, as every now and again, it was like we weren’t even sharing a body. I felt lost, as the smoke coaxed tears from their eyes, and the wind pressed into his burns. I was somewhere else: far away and far ahead, where the light of this prehistoric sun had come and gone, again and again: like a season, or the tide.

She let go of the crown, whose red jewel would one day be passed down to me, and Damascus tilted our head up, if only so we could watch the fire exhaust itself, as if pooling against the roof of a smoker’s mouth. I couldn’t feel the elixir, but knew that its stars were skipping down our throat, and was driven close to madness in searching for a taste or a texture: for anything.

Damascus was falling asleep, and the night sky spilled out over the world, leaving me alone.

*** *** ***

I was adrift.

The bonds that had made his senses mine, that had seen us sharing his coronation under the recollector, were severed. I had been cut loose, left to the library through which Damascus had to rifle, searching for the pages that he would pull out: for the books that he would burn.

I was floating through the Stable, watching lines of gold passing me by over great plains of steel, like headlights streaking along a highway, all blurred by the rain. The crowds had empty faces, and though they were my ancestors, I found myself afraid of them, as each seemed to be following me with eyes that had been plastered shut. The medical clinic was a blaring white, and I felt like a newborn as all the doctors and the nurses towered over me, with the mirrors on their heads flashing like cameras.

We didn’t seem so different now: he and I. And I could almost see us growing up together, as a flock of children took off around us, becoming bucks in their best suits and mares in Sunday dresses. As if the first few hundred days of the Stable’s history had been nothing but rolling Sundays.

We didn’t pass through any of their churches, and I had to wonder if the Faith had even begun to kick at the walls of the womb we called home. But, even as shades of red and whispered psalms began to trickle in over blurred lines, I realized that I had let too much of the Stable slip by: and felt like a mare who’d missed her stop, only to watch it disappearing behind sheets of rain, as blotted lights over the sleepers.

After only a little while it had all melted together, as if into a great lake of watercolors, and so the faceless ones were drowned. A long belt of rainstorms had their showers turned into a thicket of black crosses, a crown of thorns, as the horizons were struck across the sky. And then, as if to part the storm, Celestia pulled and pitter-pattered her chariot along the belly of our galaxy, and had me believing that the world was being born again. We were gone – damned – and I could hardly keep myself from crying for having let it slip through my hooves again, like gray sand lined with gold.

Damascus needed a fresh memory: one that stood as a pillar to the temples he sought to destroy, one that held the key to turning all that time loose. But, from the way he had spoken of the orbs, I didn’t expect him to start by burning away the ugly: putting a torch to thickets and thorn bushes. I expected him to light a match under a beautiful dress, or throw a stack of love poems, all sealed with kisses, into the furnace.

South, south, south.
The world was being given shape below us, as the deluge seemed to keep it as soft as wet clay, and the hoofsteps of that solar Goddess made valleys and tundra, pounding into the earth as a baker’s hooves into dough. We were both so far from home, but we had both become young again.

And, as I found my hooves where his were, and came to fill the space that he filled: I knew that we had escaped the aching – the wildfire lapping over his skin and the smoke in his eyes – that had been keeping us apart. We had cheated something just a step down from death and, for that, we were together.

*** *** ***

Outside, I could see windows like eyes to a thousand broken faces, all crumbling at the footsteps of the apocalypse that was walking the world. We pressed our back into dry concrete, and stared into the lights, even as they flashed and fizzled out. And, as names like Sparkle Cola and words like Ministry skittered across the walls, like insects over cold skin, I knew that we had been set down in some immense, Equestrian city. We walked over to a window pulled wide, and looked down onto an empty street.

The air was blue. Not the sky, but everything bottled up beneath it. Snow that was bright and electric rode on the back of the wind, and every pane of glass that hadn’t been coated in ash shone, catching the light of this static rain, of these latter day fireflies. The whole city blinked, as its screens and billboards, its smiling faces and logos, went dark, though the blue ivy in the air clung on like the spots I saw after first staring into the sun. Damascus looked up, and did the same, as it cut through the storm as a queen to the fireflies: blue and brilliant. It might have been molting, so that its skin dotted the air around us.

It looked as if the city had just been hit by a tidal wave, as its streets were swept clear of its clutters and cavalcades, and its eyes were only just drying their tears. There was a mare, creeping her way along the slickened road, and her eyes flitted from skyscraper to skyscraper, from screen to screen, as if she was trying to pick a product. We watched her slink out into the open square, which might once have seen a thousand bodies bottled in all at the same time. We had a service rifle in our hooves, and held it close.

We looked down its sights, and trailed the mare as she came into the belly of that dry riverbed of a street. She disappeared behind a broken chain of motorcars, whose bodies were smooth and bleached, as if sprayed down until their first coat of paint was chipped off. Damascus lowered the rifle and, as he rigged it to his side, I saw that his coat was the color of sand, and wore what wounds it had like oases.

Then, we were running down a staircase, as the posters became a blur beside us, so that those few faces that I could never forget and words like Enlist and Bombs and Nation ran into each other. Pink was the only color that could keep up and, though we left it behind, I could have sworn a smile was following us.

We slid out into the street and as Damascus turned, I realized that he was not chasing after the mare as if being pulled along by his heartstrings, like a buck with a ring in his pocket or a rose in between his teeth. He only wanted to run away. The city was so nearly empty that it hurt to think of all these early wanderers, walking roads around each other just to keep themselves separate: to keep themselves safe.

I remembered what he had then, as I watched a naked hoof – stripped of its Pipbuck in an early ritual – making ripples in the road. He had his Goddesses, and would run on alone though, down any alley or behind any of the jalopies that looked like boats sunk into the static, there could be so many red bars. And, thinking of naked rats in the tunnels below us, and alicorns playing God, nesting in the spires above, I felt a shiver run down my spine, despite the turn of the season.

It was warm out, though the sun did little but press its palms down onto the storm, and Damascus might as well have been wearing clothes, for how small and feeble a thing winter was then. And though the lights in the sky were alien, and the storm might never be pulled apart: it was a beautiful day, bright as any prewar springtime for how all the water and the glass had been set on fire.

At the end of the road, the skyscrapers fell away before some kind of river or canal, and all I could say for sure was that there had once been a bridge running across it. Now, the structure was alone, as it had lost its grip on either side of the city, and let its arms sag into the water. In fact, it sort of looked like a cross…
.
Damascus stopped, as we watched a thunderhead rolling over the horizon, and saw that the rain had painted black wrists to hold it up to the sun. Our heartbeats quickened, as a siren swept through the city: singing, not to seduce us, but to drive us away. The clouds had black bellies, and looked like cotton balls that had been dipped in ink. Damascus started running towards them, and I felt powerless for how little I could do to turn him away: to stop him from swimming against the current.

The street had become cluttered, as the frayed tail of an abandoned traffic jam spread out around us, and Damascus slid to a stop, kicking up silver dust in the place of ash or dirt. I couldn’t know if it had been left here by the fallout, like glitter rolling off the bridal train of a newlywed, or if it was something Damascus was just dreaming up to blanket the grime. Either way, I wished that I could bring a basket of it back with me, so that I might skip along like a flower girl to the Fallout, and sprinkle Equestria with stardust.

It was strange that Damascus and I could be looking at different things, though we shared the same eyes. But, as I watched those little constellations drift apart, he beheld the arrival of three angels in power armor, and ducked behind the hood of the nearest jalopy. The soldiers, who went marching through a red light, almost seemed to frighten him, if only for the draconic scales that ran up their spines and the visors that had hidden their faces, though neither was enough to keep him from weaving us a way towards them.

They turned, and there was a terrible whirring noise, as miniguns began to spin and grenades went clicking into narrow chambers. He stood at the center of the crossroads, and stared down the tips of their spears, even as his heart beat against our chest like the hooves of a madmare pounding against the walls of her padded cell. One of them raised a hoof, armored in the fashion of medieval knights, and the others cooled down as quickly as fire shut up under a glass.

“Star’s sake… you’re normal.” I realized then that they were not looking on us with anger, but awe. Damascus seemed just as surprised as I was, and slunk over to them as an animal to a hunter holding out a palm full of bait. “Don’t know if you lived through Hell, or just came climbing up out of it.”

His voice came out muffled, and was nearly rinsed out by the songs of the sirens. “But you’d better find someplace to bunker down, citizen.” It was a good thing that Damascus had already written this script, otherwise I would have let out a girlish squee as, for saying citizen, the soldier might as well have called me beautiful. “The Fallout ran itself dry years ago. But we’ve got a radiation storm rolling in.”

He waved at his companions, as if cutting them loose, so that they could march away on heavy hooves. “You from the Stable?” He asked, making us feel famous, and Damascus nodded, keeping his silence. “Find me when the sirens die down… We should talk.”

“We might be the first ponies to poke our heads out, Twenty-Nine.” He said the number like a nickname. “Pretty much makes us neighbors, huh?” I could hear him smiling under those steel bridles, and felt a little twist in my chest, as I remembered that he and I could never be friends: that the soldier would be lying in some long buried grave, with Equestria’s flag folded over him.

“Now, find someplace with its windows boarded up: someplace dark. The radiation gets on everything the light touches.” He waved at a roll of dimestores, which had once sold everything from newspapers to roses. “It’s just a damn shame you don’t have one of those Pipbucks.” He bowed his head, looking at our naked hoof, and he became a dragon ridden with guilt after a rampage.

Damascus even got a salute before we parted ways, and went on in a quiet state of shock. While I would have been playing in the puddles, letting my laughter ring out through the shimmering city, Damascus was impossible to read, though we were in his library: laying his pages bare. And I couldn’t know if the silence had come from a lump in his throat, a knot in his stomach or some longstanding vow.

*** *** ***

The buck in the store window had Damascus in his eyes – and, for the symbol on his flank, Damascus on a cross. And, though his hair was the color of cinnamon, salt and pepper palms ran along his jaw and up his cheeks, and were beginning to run their fingers through his mane. It looked like alpaca wool, and might have been shorn off by pieces of broken glass or knives pulled from walls or warm bodies.

As he ran a hoof along his scars, and shifted his weight so that the window would not disfigure him, I thought of that morning at the toll, when I’d done just the same. But his hair was wooly and mine was leonine, and I had to recite that old idiom: March comes in like a lion, and leaves like a lamb.

We came into the flower shop, and found it dark but for a few slanted pillars of sunlight, making stars out of the dirt in the air. I might have counted a thousand shriveled flowers; all bent over and curled up, as if the smoke of a burning city had pinched their stems, and choked them to death. Petals littered the tile, as if a mare had passed through the room in a panic, looking for any answer other than He loves me not.

Some had survived in display cases, like precious stones, and for the sheen of the glass that shielded its shelves; the flower shop might have passed for a jewelry store. And I had to wonder then: what would become of a buck who bent his knee, and held up a daffodil in place of a diamond.

Our hoofsteps slowed, as his heartbeats quickened, and we came to the far side of the room, where those beams of sunlight had drawn splintered crosses. There, in the sanctuary of a little glass silo, looking like it was on fire for the light that danced around its petals, was a rose.

And, as we walked towards it, the world began to bleed. All the colors, though they were few and ashy here, were blurred at their edges, like rivers running wild over their banks. The sunlight spread as fire put to the corner of a page, and folded over us, so that we were alone with the rose. We could only watch, as its petals took off into the blush of the sun, like bruised and bloody doves. This was it.

As the walls fell away, taking with them the city and its siren call, I knew that Damascus had found a place to start his fire, to start pouring himself into the orbs. It would begin with Rose.

A mare, beautiful even as the candlelight softened her features, and remolded them like clay, stood with us even as history went reeling by: all drunken and clumsy. Everything about her was yellow, from hair that might have been spun from gold, and a coat like so many pastures and wheat fields, to eyes that had stolen their colors from the sun, and the lines around us now: the lines that I had so often followed home.

She was a billboard mare, whose smile kept Damascus’ heart beating against our chest, as if it wanted to get out: to be taken into her arms and held as a shivering animal. And I wondered if he had ever known what loneliness was, before he met her: before the first night he had spent without her.

Everything started to fall apart then, as the orb sipped her up, and shut her away just as that silo of glass had made a prisoner of its rose. She flashed by me, as if there was a metro train passing between us, with its window blurring together. And she was young. She was old, and she was young, as a gray curl was spun through her mane: as ribbons and roses were woven together on her flanks.

I saw her standing beside the mural we schoolchildren had been drawing for these last one hundred years, though it had been little more than a field of wild scribbles then, like a country that had yet to be tamed. She drew a line, planting the seeds to a garden that would grow with the children of the century.

I saw her in the lower Atrium, as a face in the crowd, with the Celestial cross filling the wall behind her. It had been smeared on as two crooked yellow lines, more like the brand of anarchy, than the silhouette of a God. She had been there, when the Faith came up out of the water. Damascus and I stood on a stage, throwing our voice over the mob, holding the Stable’s door open so that the Goddesses could slip in.

I saw her woven through the fabric of history: be it the Stable’s, mine, or Damascus’. They lay together on the floor of a maintenance room, where great engines could be heard snoring through every wall, and looked up at the ceiling: ready to meet their Goddesses. Then, he was asking her to marry him.

More meetings: at first held at a whisper, with faces like masks at the edge of the candlelight, but then becoming great and groundbreaking, earthshaking things. Pony after starry eyed pony stood in rank and file with the yellow mare, as if Damascus was building an army.

A wedding flashed by as a flock of paper roses, whose breasts were white and red, though the audience was smaller now, and she could not be found in the crowd: She was standing right beside us.

She does.

The medical wing wrapped us up in its blaring lights, and, for once, there was happiness in it. My mother wasn’t here, held down by a disease: drowning in it. And his mother wasn’t here, shackled at the hoof and rambling on with the voices in her head. Both were at peace, and the latter paid for one life with another.

A child played, a filly, rolling and laughing from mother and father. And somehow, I knew that she would be next: that he had made himself forget her. Damascus was getting rid of it all: all his love and affection. He wasn’t selling his soul: he was giving it away. And I could only watch it go, as a witness to the waste.
She was young: Too young to speak, too young to put on her little dresses. But she had the bluest eyes.

Marie.

After the girl, there was red. More of it than we’d ever seen: all over my hooves, all over my home. The filly wailed, but she was quiet. I couldn’t hear her breathing, and she couldn’t see me crying. She couldn’t know how frantically I tried to put her pieces back together again. Like torn petals saying she loves me.

Rose.

More red, as my hooves became as bruised and as bloody as those petal doves. But I didn’t care. Bastard. Bastard. Bastard. One life for another. Isn’t that the way it always goes? The wheel keeps turning. And where the dead rest in peace and pieces, the damned must go on, in eternity and Equestria.

Repent.

<=======ooO Ooo=======>

I woke up, and could smell winter in the air, though cigarette smoke and the smell of rain had spilt over it. A bundle of rifles lay crossed over me, and they rattled as the cart rolled closer and closer to the sun, which had pierced a hole in the savage skies beyond Equestria’s border, leaving burns in the sleeves of faraway storm clouds, all strung out and held up by black pillars of rain that the sun had put a shine to.

The cart prattled along, bound for the great gateway between MASEBS and Zion’s mountain, from which trails of white dust waved, like white flags bleached in the sunlight. My head lolled, as I felt too numb to straighten my neck, and too safe for thinking that I was to be taken into the arms of the sun, and not thrown into its fires like any other virgin sacrifice.

There were pines trees, standing in their little families of three or four or five, almost naked but for a few needled crowns and tattered robes of snow, which had been draped over both mountains ranges and the basin between them. As if some mad baker had poured a little sugar over the world. I felt like I was falling in love with it all, and wondered if Equestria could win my heart, though it had so often been shutout for fear of its father’s blackness. My head was jolted back then, turning my smile upside down, and I found myself beholding a colossal old machine.

There, faraway and to the south, stood a Bucket Wheel Excavator: one of the very things that had dug our country dry. I found myself hating the thing, as if all the world's demons were hidden somewhere in its enormous skeleton of a shell. And though it was only a piece of heavy equipment, it might have passed for some kind of alien city, as flashing lights came out pale despite the sunset, and clean smokestacks rose as twisted watchtowers all around it.

The machine stood tall, almost in line with the lower mountains, though it was bent over the earth like a bird picking at swollen worms. The excavator at the end of its neck was starting to look like a saw blade. In fact, the entire construct seemed more like a weapon than it did a tool, and I started to worry that it might come roaring after me, as a thousand spinning wheels turned its treads.

I turned back to the sun, and fled like I had been saved. It was older than the oldest machine, and could swallow up planets, plucking them out of orbit like berries from a branch. The sight of it was almost enough to have me believing that Celestia was really up there, steering it around the world.

“Grace?” Ash chirped, as she sprang up beside the cart. The breeze made her mane dance, like a crowd of desert priestesses taking part in some holy ritual, with lavender silk spinning around them, and bare hooves searing in the sand. She didn’t seem able to speak, as if that single line of birdsong was all she knew: as if to smile for too long would be to go dancing over their graves. And then, if only to bring me down with her, the little pilgrim told me why she had followed me north. “The abomination… it’s not over”

“Welcome aboard!” Caliber called out, like a mare with her ears plugged, as she pulled the carriage towards the horizon. Her mane made me think of the roses, as both had been set on fire in the sun. “Please stow your crippled limbs inside of the cart at all times, and keep those rifles away from children aged three and under. They may contain small parts… probably in the way of bullets.” She tipped an imaginary conductor’s hat. “Next stop: Silo City… Otherwise known as the end of the line.”

She waved at five grain towers, which stood guard to the radio tower and its mountains ahead. The silo on the far left was leaning over its neighbor, like a drunk trying to slow dance, and left a deep dent in its steel fuselage. Their colors didn’t quite match, as three granary silos rose like crooked missiles, while the other two, standing in between them, had oily black faces. The centermost silo poked over all the others, and I could make out walkways, pipelines and barricade walls stitched over the entire superstructure.

“They’ve got a clinic there. Should be able sell us the supplies you’ll need to patch yourself up.” I beamed; feeling like the closest thing the world had to a doctor. “And with the caps we make off of this haul… well, we won’t exactly be livin’ it up. Silo City doesn’t trade in much more than ammunition and Brahmin.”

The town could only be shored behind the silos, as there was little to see now but for torched farmsteads, pastures picked clean, and the radio tower looking out over it all from the north.

“Silo City might be the only settlement in the wasteland without a working girl under its belt,” Caliber added. “Unless you count Ol’ Bessie, though that’s the kind of taste most ponies aren’t exactly chompin’ at the bit to acquire.” At that, she came to a sudden stop, making the cart and all its contents bounce.

“There’s supposed to be a sniper looking out from that middle tower.” She turned her snout up and sniffed at the air, as if the scent of danger hadn’t clogged up the sky. “Something’s wrong.”

With a jolt, Caliber pulled the cart over the bones of a wooden fence, though she kept her hoofsteps to a slink, and bobbed her head from side to side as if there was something lurking in between these brittle crops. She ploughed us a steady path through an old corn field, and Ash kept a steady pace beside me.

“Hey… Ms. Ascella.” I was whispering, as the mercenary pricked up her ears. “Can I ask you something?” After thinking it over for a while: she nodded, and I let myself sink back into the cart as if it were a bath. Then, as I tilted my head up to the sky, I wondered if I even had the strength to force the alicorn back into the space between us: if I had the right to tread on the tail of that sleeping dog.

“That’s only fair: The mercenary had her questions answered,” She let herself smile a little, and I decided to let it lie, though whenever I tried to think back to that temple before the pink sea I might as well have invited a headache in to hammer at the shattered memories, like an infant mechanic.

“Oh, don’t mind her,” I said, as Caliber stopped, and poked her head up over the crops like a meerkat. “She’s just a little paranoid.”

“You had a question.”

“Right.” I tried to wave my hoof, and realized that it had been bundled up in one of my own medical braces. “Well…” Then, as if Celestia herself had decided to help me out, the storms seemed to start spinning the other way, and caught my eye. “Have those clouds always been there?” Their curtains looked to have been trimmed just above the radio tower, as if a seamstress had walked all along the northern mountains, with her scissors to the sky. “I mean, is something making them that way.”

Somepony.” Her eyes followed mine, and the roof of the world was reflected in pools of black and gold: of ink and champagne. “The Enclave.”

“Pegasus bastards!” Caliber hollered back at us, as she puzzled over an unbroken fence. “Got themselves set up nice and cozy up there. Hear tell they’re still living like it’s the old days: with taxes and everything.” She punched the fence. “Hell, they’ve even got their own military. Troopers come poking around sometimes, looking for a new excuse to stay shut up behind the clouds.”

“They took flight from Equestria just before the war came to its sunset, and closed up the sky behind them.” They might as well have slapped me across the cheek, as I’d never thought our own people might have pulled the wool over the eye of the world. “They made themselves a Kingdom in the Skies, and so: chained themselves to it. When their ascension comes, their hooves will be too heavy to tread the path.”

The thought of it made me sick, and I wanted to believe that Ash was right – that those who had stolen the sun would face the jurors of some divine court – but I couldn’t. Still, Caliber might have taken her frustration out on anything with feathers, and I worried for the Pegasus that were trapped here with her. The mercenary had never stopped treading at the wasteland’s water, never let herself go under, while the Enclave grew fat and blind, like pigs whose faces were buried in a bottomless trough.

Ash looked a little sad, as if she pitied the citizens of the Enclave who might have been saved, were it not for the hooves over their eyes. Caliber furrowed her brow, and punched a hole through the fence.

My stomach hurt.

*** *** ***

Welcome to Silo City Cows!
No Ponies Aloud!

An ugly shade of paint had been smeared over the sign, though it looked more like a wine stain than blood. The gate to Silo City was wide open, leaving everything inside of its walls, which were like those of a bullpen, naked. A Brahmin stood beside the entrance, and I was a little shaken to see one alive for the abattoirs of Hell, even though it did little more than chew, and stare out at us through sunken eyes.

The head that was glaring at us, as the other ate something that looked quite a lot like a shirt, wore a colander as a helmet and had a number of growths on the right side of his face, like cancerous moles. His eyes widened as he looked over the cart, with me in it, as if he’d just realized something very obvious. “Ambassador!” He brayed. “Amba-sassador! Ambasasafrasador!” The bull’s voice rose to a wordless bellow, and his thick gray tongue flailed like a fish out of water.

I could see his ribs as their hide was pulled taught, and while he bucked their weight back and forth; his brother did his best not to choke on the shirt. “Whoa there,” Caliber said with two hooves raised, as if she was about to bless them. “Whoa there!” To this, both of the Brahmin’s heads became still, but for a lazy sway from side to side. “Could’ya just tell us what’s going on here? … Where are all the ponies?

I shook my head, like a god trying to dry its ears. She was talking to a bull. A two headed bull. A two headed bull wearing a colander and eating a shirt. “Go now, woman! Take the Ambassador to see Bodacious!” He wrenched his head towards that corral of a town, and sent his makeshift helmet flying. “Hurry! Before Simmental comes home from the fields!”

Caliber shrugged back at me, and then crept into the town on the tips of her hooves, as the buildings surrounded us like circling wagons. Their architecture borrowed from that of an iconic Equestrian village, though in place of candy colored coats of paint or time honored woodwork, there was rust and grime and faces wearing masks of mud and ruin, taken from the scattered farms that dotted this northern corner.

One was branded The OK, by a bold sign slapped over its porch. There was a primitive stable built between the silos and the western wall, but it had been almost entirely abandoned. Only a mottled old bull was left, leaning against its side, as the structure had sagged from a square to a rhombus. I had to look back, for one of his heads wore a bowling hat tilted all the way forward, and the other smoked a cigar.

A hollowed out barn stood at the feet of the silos, as proud and as worn down as any medieval castle. Orange light spilled out of its windows, and came creeping through lesions all across the building’s toasted face. Like the Brahmin at the gate, the barn had a strange pattern of growths riddling its sides, and might have passed for a great, wooden bull, like a crude monument to some ancient rodeo legend.

My Pipbuck showed clusters of white bars scattered throughout Silo City, and a great, shivering hoard of ivory tusks inside The OK. I looked back at the gate, wondering if I would see one bar or two, and couldn’t help feeling a little shortchanged. “Is it usual to have a cow guarding the town?” I asked, as Caliber walked circles around the snowmelt, and came to the mouth of the barn.

“About as usual as having one run it.” We came to a sudden stop as there, nestled in a throne of damp hay and flanked by a pair of armored Brahmin, was something I never thought I’d find outside of a deck of cards: a king with two heads… but only one crown. “Welcome to the Equestrian Wasteland, Sugar.”

*** *** ***

"So… you have come at last.” The Great Bull’s voice seemed to shake the barn, as if thunderheads had come to lay siege on Silo City. “To beg for peace, or lay down your arms as tribute?” His eyes, whose lids were heavy if only to cover up a yellow madness, rolled over the rifles. “I have waited a long time for this, Equestrian. But it is good to see that your kind still has enough sense to know when you are beaten.”

He must have mistaken the cart for a carriage, and now saw me as some kind of noblemare, come to speak on behalf of a voiceless country. “You make it sound like this land might be anything but ours… Don’t forget that Silo City stands on Equestrian soil, your cowness.” It was kinda hard not to step up and defend the country. Plus, I really liked being called Equestrian. “What gives you the right to rule it?”

“For decades, my kind toiled over this cold and bitter earth! We Brahmin were the ones who tended it, who cared for it, who bled for it! And now, we Brahmin are taking back what is ours!” One of his guards stomped a hoof, and then nudged the other as if to remind him to do the same. “Do you know what it is like to be so subjected… to be so insulted? Do you know what it is like to be milked?

Ash was standing very still, as if she was bunkering down against the thunder of his voice, and the pilgrim seemed to fade away a little more with every word. She was growing more distant by the sentence, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to look over and find her gone. “No… no, you live like royalty. Every one of you ponies, a king in his own right, never thinking of the bones beneath your thrones.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re sitting on.” Caliber sneered. “But it sure looks like a throne to me, pal.” The crown on his head, made of a decorated general’s cap with its top punched out, wasn’t helping. “Now, how ‘bout you tell us where the locals ran off to: I’m fittin’ to sell these guns and wash my hooves of this ass-backwards tomfuckery as soon as possible.”

“Rein in your wild bitch of a dog, Equestrian.” From the look of this place, there couldn’t be enough soap to wash out both of their mouths. “The common of blood and simple of mind have no place in such glorious theaters of power.” The head beside his was limp, and shook as if in disagreement whenever Bodacious shifted his weight. “Now, see what I have made of your kind. And tremble!

He pulled on the chain around his knotted hoof, and a pony burst out of the straw, as if this had all been some kind of intricate magic trick. The buck was shackled at the neck, and a pair of glasses were set askew across his snout. Over his clothes, he wore only a silken strip of cloth, which had coiled around his legs, making it look as if he’d dipped them in cotton candy. “See?” The Bull roared triumphantly. “Even your most delicate trophies, your fairest maiden, can be crushed under the hoof of King Bodacious!”

Caliber laughed, and if it weren’t for the look of defeat on the buck’s face, I might have done the same. “Don’t know how many times we’re gonna have to go over this, Bo…” At the sight of us, a smile danced to the prisoner’s face, as if he already knew that we would set him free. “But I’m not a maiden.”

He was fair enough, though: especially beside the bulls, and I couldn’t blame Bodacious for making the wrong call. Hay stuck out of his electric gray mane, making it a thicket that was only held back by a square sided military cap. His coat was the color of expensive chocolate, around which the coils of silk might have made a bow, and he wore a khaki trader’s vest, whose collar was black and whose pockets were running over like a magpie’s nest. His cutie mark was a yellow road sign, which looked to have taken two bullets to its breast, and wore one arrow pointing up, and another pointing down.

But, as the buck straightened out his glasses and gave us a little nod, I saw the real problem. His eyes might have been cut and pasted from the cover of a magazine: stolen off of an Applewood starlet.
“Alright, honey,” Caliber began, without softening the edges of her tone. “Tell us where this clodhopping crazy put the rest of Silo City, and I’ll leave a bullet in his head on my way out of town.”

Caliber wasn’t very good at diplomatic negotiations! “Haha,” I said, in a very poor imitation of laughter. “What a joker. What a card. What a jester, even.” I pulled myself a little farther out of the rifles, and tried to make a throne out of them just as he had the hay. Since Ash had left us like a cartoon character running off without their silhouette, and Caliber had set herself back like a dog about to pounce, it looked like it was up to me to stop Silo City from spinning any further out of control.

Please, O Kingliest of Cows. There’s no need for this kind of behavior. Just tell us what you want, and we’ll patch things over between you and Silo City.” I was going to go about this as if he was a lion with a thorn in its paw, as this was an unstable bull, that somepony had tipped over. “Let me help you. And maybe ponies and cows can… finally coexist peacefully?”

To be honest, even I had to wince for how thickly I was laying it on, as I might as well have been pouring syrup over pancakes. “Hmm…” He stroked his other head, which remained unsettlingly still, as if nothing could wake it. “Perhaps you can help me.” His eyes darted from guard to glassy eyed guard, though both looked to be chewing on their own tongues. “I mean… serve me, of course.”

Bodacious seemed very different from the other Brahmin, and though he might not have been one of the new world’s greatest minds, he certainly had his chromosomes on straighter than his, if not loyal then very easily tamed, subjects. “Just tell me how to set things right, your… bovine eminence.”

Caliber scoffed, and the collared buck settled back into the hay, as if he was watching some kind of puppet-show parliament. “You see... I never liked Equestria much.” I bristled a little, as he stroked the hair on his chin. “And when Brutus died, I thought I’d go north. Where the Great Space Cow can be seen each and every night, and the milk falls like rain, to make our women plump and… open to experimentation.”

Just as I had been shaken up by that blasé insult to Equestria, so was Ash at the mention of a Cow in the Kingdom of her Goddesses, though she quickly shied away for talk of fat and uninhibited cowgirls. “But Brutus still whispers to me. And speaks of an Equestria overthrown… put under the hoof of our great race.” As he turned wary eyes onto his second head, I had to put a hoof to my mouth for fear of retching.

It was dead.

Brutus was not some shadowy advisor, pulling the strings of Silo City from behind its throne, but only a lifeless head, still latched on to the body of his brother, like a tumor long since overgrown. “And… I can’t bring myself to leave. He wouldn’t allow it. I…” Then, Bodacious’ eyes glazed over, as if something deep inside of him had been stirred from sleep. “How could I even think to run away? To waste this gift…”

The Bull tapped at the base of his crown, and we could only watch with puzzled expressions, wondering what gift he might have hidden there. “Wanna hear my theory?” The buck with the Applewood eyes spoke up, and only then did I pick up on his accent, though it wasn’t a far cry from that of the steel soldiers in Damascus’ orb. “Your typical Brahmin can barely talk half the time and, when they do, it’s usually head by head: One or the other in turn. Like their mind is split between the two.”

“Just because you’re born with two heads, doesn’t mean you get enough brains to go around.” Caliber nodded. “So what: King Olly Olly Oxen Free here is two times smarter than your a-verage Brahmin?”

“Hold your tongue, or I will have it nailed to the side of this barn!” The earth rumbled, as Bodacious rocked his weight forward, starting to pay attention again. “One speaks too much and the other speaks too little,” He noted, as the pilgrim pressed her hooves a little deeper into the earth, as if being pushed backwards, and stared up into his soiled eyes.

The bull groped at his temple with an awkward hoof, as if a terrible and electric pain had just shot through him. “You are testing my patience, Equestrian! And Brutus is never more alive than he is in anger.” I shuddered, as that great weight sagged even lower, as if it was about to go rolling away like a rotten apple. “You can let me go. Free me of Brutus: and you free Equestria of us both.”

And, with that, I knew what he wanted me to do, and all that remained was searching Silo City for the tools with which I could remove that bloated tumor named Brutus: be they scalpels and anesthetics or hammers and hacksaws. “You want me to decapitate you?”

“Yes…” Half of the enormous bull laughed. “What better way to put an end to a kingdom?”

*** *** ***

The storm clouds had yet to part, and so blurred the light of the sun, to make the northern horizon into a fresh painting over which water had been spilled. The radio tower looked like a gilded lily, as the light made petals out of its satellites. And though the mountains nearly folded over one another, to shut the country off no differently than the margins of a map, and the Enclave lost its grip on the storm, so that it fell apart over the open sky, I knew that we had only just scratched the surface of Equestria.

A bull named Simmental was playing taskmaster over the ponies laboring in these blackened fields, if only to rub in his kind’s revolution. And, hopefully, Silo City’s clinician would be with him, as I would need more than a combat knife and some wishful thinking to cut off a head without doing any serious damage.

“This is a new low,” Caliber muttered, as we made our way along a road through the dappled pastures. She was the only one of us who could point out the mare who ran the clinic, and had no choice but to drag me along, as I tried to settle things peacefully from atop my throne of rifles. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Grace. And I’ve taken my share of contracts from the bottom of the last barrel. But playing nurse for the sake of some uppity cow? …I can’t stand it.”

“You don’t like Brahmin?” Ash asked, as she trotted alongside the cart, much more at home out in the open country. “They seemed nice enough to me… at least, the stupid ones did.”

“Don’t get me wrong: I usually love Brahmin. And Silo City used to be a lot better for ‘em.” The cart bounced, as we passed over a crack in the road, following a litter of faceless pastel smudges in the distance. “But they’re meant to be simple: They like it that way. We’re not helping anyone but that bastard Bodacious here. And we’d do everyone just as much good by lopping off his talking head instead.”

“What about all the ponies of Silo City?” I pressed her, wondering how she could have forgotten the trophy that Bodacious had pulled out of his haystacks. “We’re doing this to rescue them, aren’t we?”

“Like they couldn’t get themselves out of this mess.” She rolled her eyes, as we closed in on Simmental and his toys. “I’d bet you anything that they’re more scared of putting scratches on their livestock than they are of Bodacious’ threats. Brahmin aren’t exactly the fightin’ type, no matter how many heads they’ve got. But alive: they’re worth their weight in caps, and that’s the best kind of armor there is.”

“Maybe they have grown to care about these lowly beasts,” Ash offered, in a sentiment that was both heartwarming and mildly offensive. “Only the Brahmin Bodacious is at fault. The rest are, as you said, too simple to be blamed for this. Perhaps Silo City could not bear to fight and kill its own pets.”

As if to prove them both wrong: a great gray body could now be seen lying in between about a half dozen ponies, collapsed like a besieged castle or the uprooted statues of a dictator. They had ploughed through the outermost lines of dead or dying crops, leaving something like a clearing around them.

“Simmental!” I raised my voice, though had very little reason to mourn the fallen bull. The fieldworkers looked up at us, and started to back away from the body as if Caliber and the cart were no less a symbol of the law than a wailing police car. “What happened here?” I asked, as we swung to a dramatic stop, so that clouds of dust rolled out from under our wheels. “Well?”

“We…” One of the mares tapped her hooves together, and flashed me a nervous smile: Clear evidence of murder most foul! “Well, we tipped him.”

And, just like that, we went from ace detectives on the trail of conspiracy to county cops dealing with a prom night prank, and I caught myself feeling slightly disappointed to find the bull well enough alive. Caliber looked to have been knocked back onto her flanks, and held a hoof over her face, likely wondering how her career could have come to this. Ash didn’t seem to care much.

“I’m glad to see no one was hurt,” I said, lying just a little bit. “I’ve found a way to settle this peacefully, for both Brahmin and pony. Soon, Bodacious will be out of Silo City for good.”

“That’s funny…” One of the bucks came forward, ploughing past younger ponies as if he wasn’t twice their age. “Because we just found a way to settle things very, very violently.” His gray eyes, which looked even older than he was, were set on the rifles of Raiders and Pilgrims alike. “How much are you selling those weapons for, Red? Or maybe that bleeding heart of yours would see us taking them for free.”

“It’s her heart that’s bleeding.” She thrust a hoof back at me. “And that’s where I get my orders from: So no dice.” She was standing now, and seemed a little too ready to fight these ponies run under the wheels of revolution. “Now, Bed and Breakfast needs to show us what medical supplies she’s got back at The OK.”

Bed and Breakfast? I sounded out the name, as they turned to a mare whose coat was the color of syrup and waffles slapped together: who wore strips of bacon instead of wounds, and had eggs in her eyes.

“Hold on a second,” I said, as if my iron throne was enough to make me Queen. “Why are you all set on killing Bodacious? Wasn’t he harmless until he… found his mind?” Funny how that worked out. “There are better ways to settle him back down again.”

“It’s not about that,” The old buck spat. “It’s about what that bastard bull deserves.” For that, he got a few cheers. “Ask any of the Brahmin – Land’s sake, just ask Simmental – and maybe you’ll understand. This is a local problem. And we’re fixin’ to settle it the local way.” They were starting to look a little like an angry mob. “He melted down our guns. Trampled our sniper to death. He’s got debts to pay.”

“Fuck,” Caliber said, letting herself sound exhausted. “That’s no way for a good marksman to die.” She turned back to me, and the look in her eyes almost had me passing out rifles. “Maybe that’s the reason Bodacious wants to get out of dodge: He knows the Brahmin will lose interest in this whole song and dance eventually: Knows he can’t keep Silo City from wriggling out from under his hoof forever.”

“You are looking at him as a victim,” Ash added, throwing her name in with the mob. “Though he might be little more than a coward in a crown. Perhaps this talk of Brutus was only meant to confuse you.”

They all looked up at me, with their eyes wide, waiting for a ruling, as if my carriage had made me judge, jury and executioner. “No.” Their faces fell, as if I had just told them it was bedtime, and there would be no time for one more game. “Brutus is behind this. And I’ll give you his head. Along with my word that Bodacious will leave Silo City, will leave the country, by the time this is over.”

Everypony but that gray old buck seemed to set down their torches and pitchforks then as, just like those children begging to see their first midnight, they were really very tired. “We made a home for these Brahmin. And he ran it into the mud. That bull has no love for us, or his brothers… no love for his family.”

“This all started when Brutus died, but that still leaves one set of shoulders to carry the yoke of this guilt.” He waved at the toppled bull. “Ask Simmental to tell you about the Stables, and maybe you’ll plug the holes in that bleeding heart of yours. Maybe you’ll see that Bodacious doesn’t deserve anyone’s mercy.”

He began marching past the cart, with the other ponies following close behind. “This isn’t mercy,” I said, raising my voice after him, though I might have needed to hear myself more than anypony else did. “This is the benefit of the doubt.”

They became little more than watercolor smudges then, as the road carried them back to the strange serenity of Silo City, and I leaned out of the cart as best I could for crippled limbs, trying to look down at the bull. “Mister Simmental?” I prodded him, as if my words were no different to a long stick. “Were you listening to any of that?” He was walking - well, he was trying – and his hooves tread at the air as if it was water. And, from the look of sleepy content on his face, I didn’t know if he could tell the difference.

Ash circled around to his head, and I realized how massive these beasts of burden really were, especially for how easily the pilgrim seemed to drift away. Simmental might have choked her down in only a few bites, or swallowed her in one if he was hungry enough, though that image alone was enough to make my skin crawl. She poked one of his snouts, where a rust colored ring had been hung like an old door knocker, and had to skip away from a blanket of hot air. “Hmm?” He asked, with his voice at a snore.

“Hello sir, we were wondering if you could spare a few minutes of your time to talk about Bodacious.” We might as well have been clutching books of scripture to our chests, so that the pins of our name tags dug in a little deeper. But the bull didn’t react like most woken by the word of an early rising God, and smiled lazily, as if he had just come out of a dream. “Is there anything you can tell us about Silo City’s Stables?”

“Tell?” He yawned, and I nearly tackled Ash, to get her clear of his mouth. “Nah… but I can show you.”

*** *** ***

I was wrong.

The Stables weren’t empty, as from every stall jutted the hindquarters of another Brahmin, and under each was a swollen udder. They were arranged as racers at the starting line, all facing the wrong way, and they would have been able to look out into town if the shadows that hung over their faces like bride’s veils weren’t so inky. We stood at the mouth of a narrow alley of dirt and pockets of snowmelt, which ran in between the western wall of Silo City, and the backsides of so many breeders.

“Caeli,” Ash said, as she crossed herself. Simmental stood beside her, with a vacant look on his faces. “This is an assembly line.”

“More like a toy box.” Caliber scowled up at Simmental. “Those girls might not know it: but they’re nothing more than playthings to keep the bulls happy: to keep ‘em in line with Bodacious.” She turned on me, and I had to look away, for fear of having my will broken. “Tell me we’re gonna kill this bastard, Grace.” But she could see it in my eyes: the certainty that only the whispers of a dead bull, of a spirit driven mad by being split in half and bottled up, could drive anyone to this. “Damn it.”

At first, Caliber only muttered the words but, as she bruised her hoof against the side of the Stables, striking it as if to knock down the two headed king’s house of cards, she barked them at me. “Damn it!

“He’s sick,” I said, as if it would matter to her at all. “Bodacious needs our help. He can be fixed.” Caliber threw her weight at me and, for a second, I was sure she was about to hit me. But, instead, she threw a knockout punch at Simmental’s shoulder, though he only went on sucking his teeth.

The bull let out a slow, stupid laugh, as if Caliber was tickling his side, and not tenderizing it. “Everything will go back to the way it was,” I promised, as she beat herself down against him like a boxer in a meatlocker. “Please, Cal…” His laugh was only making her angrier, though I didn’t dare to reach down and push them apart, for fear of getting my hoof bitten. “There’s nobody to blame for this but Brutus.”

Why?” She stumbled away from the side of the bull: burnt out. “Because you can call him a monster? Because he can just be evil, and leave the rest of us as virgin sacrifices and fucking saints?” She spat out the curse word, like venom. “All that shit about war: about Ambassadors and Equestria and Power… Those were excuses, Lamplight! It’s been done a thousand times before… and it started exactly.” She struck the carriage, making my throne shake. “Like.” Once for every word. “This!

And, with that, Caliber threw up her hooves and left, though the fire of her tail seemed to go out as she ploughed her way through the snowmelt between us and The OK. But then, with a bark and a curse, she turned around and slapped that same stupid smile over my face. “Wait there. I’ll go find you a fucking axe.”

*** *** ***

I cut off his head.

*** *** ***

Silo City looked like a very different place when we left the barn, and seemed to shine a little brighter for every step we took through the hub of the wagon wheel town. There were cows and ponies out in the open now, and some came together like sisters who hadn’t hugged each other in a thousand years, even as the sun started setting and, somewhere over Equestria, the moon rose.

Even the bulls, who had been husbands to each other’s wives, who had bowed to a tyrant king only moments ago, were welcomed back as if they had been no less like prisoners than the ponies in The OK. Those few who had been given weapons, were soon stripped of them, and each battle saddles might have been a yoke that was hammered on too tight for how happy they were to see them go.

Bodacious was gone. But nopony seemed to care which head I sent rolling away from that throne of straw. The difference between justice, and revenge, hardly seemed to matter to them now. Things never go back to normal, Caliber had said, as we walked up to the barn, dragging our axes. But now, as she looked around at all those little reunions, I thought I saw the lights in her eyes shine a little brighter.

That pretty buck hurried over at more of a skip than a run, and I saw that he’d turned those coils of silk into a scarf, as if it to show off his freedom. “Thought you’d have your legs all patched up by now, doc.” With the sun folding gold foil around his chocolate coat, and trickling over those heavy lashes, I couldn’t blame anyone who mistook the southern unicorn for a mare. “Bo burned through all those supplies?”

I was still crippled, and only dared to leave the cart to play executioner. Caliber had already sold the rifles, and replaced them with a sack of hay for the sake of my spine. “The bleeding got a little out of control,” I explained, as vaguely as I could. “But I’m sure we’ll find some more potions up north.”

“Well, I thought I might help you out with that… getting north, I mean.” The buck might as well have rouged his cheeks, as Caliber looked like she had just tasted something sour, and wasn’t trying to hide it. But, even as she stood there with her face screwed up, I couldn’t help feeling like the luckiest mare in Equestria: as I might have been the only one she would let herself laugh with.

“I kinda figured I owe you, so I hired out two of the bulls to run you up to the border.” That got her turned around, and I could almost see her putting a hoof around his shoulder, sharing a cigar and cheering: What a guy! What a pal! “I’m really very grateful that you did what you did.”

Caliber bumped his hoof, as if holding a glass and making a toast. She looked relieved, and must have thought he was going to try tagging along. “And we’re more than happy to cash in on that gratitude…”

“Stockholm,” He said, taking the trail of Caliber’s sentence as a dotted line on which to write his name. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Manners?” I asked, dumbly, as I’d been taught not to expect so much as pleases and thank you’s.

“Oh, sorry.” Apologizing for manners? Wasn’t that like… double manners? “I’m just used to trying to sell something to everypony I meet. And it helps to play nice.” He hesitated, as if trying to make up his mind. “Everything’s free for you, of course… assuming you ever come back to Silo City.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from around here.” I pointed out, trying to pin him down on the map.

“Came up from Manehattan. Thought I could make it to New Calvary. Would’ve been one of the first too: there isn’t a caravan in the world that would make that trip on a loop. But, there were these stories getting passed around. Got me a little spooked.” I had to look around to find Ash, as she had started pawing circles in the snow, like a filly caught in orbit, as her parents made small talk. It was as if some trickster God had granted me my wish, taking a match to old birthday candles so that the pilgrim could be young again. “Just because the Middle Passage is the safest way East, doesn’t mean it’s really all that safe.

“And once Free Rein was dusted, and the Slaver’s train started howling again, I knew better than to get too close to that machine of theirs.” He nodded back at the Bucket Wheel Excavator, which could still be seen through the silos, like some Jurassic beast sending rumbles through the rain forest.

“That thing belongs to the Slavers?” I asked, remembering the DJ’s report on Free Rein, soon after it was wiped off the map. “They haven’t got it up and running, have they?” The monstrous thing could surely raze entire towns, just as it had once churned up the soul, and I had to wonder if it had lowered its neck, to swallow Free Rein up like a worm.

“Damascus says it’s dead in the water. They’d need something just short of a flat out balefire reactor to get its heart beating again.” Caliber sidled up to me, and I couldn’t help feeling very proud, as if I was the only hunter in a hinterland tavern who had the charm to tame a wolf. “But they’ve gotta be up to something. They’re not just plucking ponies from the lowest branches anymore… they’re burning the forests down. And the way Damascus tells it: These are the days of wrath.”

I was glad to see Ash keeping her ears pointed our way, though the look on her face made it seem like she was listening through a keyhole. “Whoa. Sounds like you’re really tapped into this stuff.” Stockholm’s eyes went wide, as he became the poster girl to any given horror picture show. “You aren’t planning to fight them are you?” I could only look up at the taller mare then, as if I had asked the question myself.

“Considering that our ‘army’ pretty much boils down to Damascus, Charon, Cerberus, Me and –“

“I’ll help!” Ash chirped, making me wonder how closely Caliber had caught her up to the story so far.

“And Ascella over there.” She added, as we beamed at Ash, treating her like a baby who’d just spoken her first word. “The Coltilde would steamroll us. We’re gonna need a put a lot more on the table than a pair of mercenaries, a whole suit of guns for hire, two zealots and one trump card of a Stable Pony.”

“A Stable Pony! I thought as much!” Stockholm dialed his voice up, and made me feel famous. “Now, I know I shouldn’t keep giving you things off the books, but this is too perfect.” He started riffling through his swollen duffle bags, and kept one hoof high, like a magician calming the crowd as he tried to get a grip on his rabbit’s ears. “You can count this as one thank you. But if you’re ever in Calvary, be sure to look me up. I might move on once Silo’s fought her way off the ropes. I’m planning to have the entire city sold on Stockholm’s Fashion from Manehattan, and farmers don’t care much for ribbons and bows...”

He was laughing, but I felt as if a cold dagger was sliding in between my ribs, and pricking into my heart. Electricity shot through my veins then, as if a current had been passed through the steel of the blade, and I thought I heard fuses blowing out inside me. He was holding up a jumpsuit, and though it was blue; all I could see were the lines of gold that had once led me home like northern lights.

And I knew… just as a part of me, deep down, had known since that Steel Soldier asked his question.
You from the Stable?
And, whether the answer came from me or Damascus, it would always be: No…. A Stable.

We were not the last light of Equestria. But I nearly started crying for having let that light slip through my hooves only hours ago, like gray sand lined with gold.





Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Wasteland Doctor: (pre-requisite Wasteland Medic) You can fully restore crippled limbs, just as long as you have the right supplies at hoof. You also gain a +5% critical chance against opponents with familiar anatomy.

Companion Perk: Piggy in the Middle: For as long as both Caliber and Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum are in your party by their own free will… or by binding contract… or religious fealty, you gain a +20 bonus to speech in conversations with everyone but them.
And yes, the name of this perk does make you look fat.