The earth pony walked along the side of the rock field; they'd gotten rather frosty lately, and so she loathed going in. The last time, she'd slipped and almost joined the oh-so-romantic pegasi she'd come to retrieve; her hoof rubbed against her badly-dented breastplate, as if to remind herself that it was still there.
“Keep the pebbles off, y'hear?” she shouted—though she knew the moron couldn't hear her past the echo corridor—as she began to work her way past the dense rock formations with the practice of a dancer.
A dancer; that's what she should've been. Certainly not a professional in whatever it is the name was for whatever ungodly horrible thing she did.
The circumstances hadn't exactly given her the choice, though; rotting corpses weren't exactly good to keep around. The ice at least made it semi-bearable; it certainly didn't make her wonder less why she chose to do the job. The flow'd been increasing lately, even more than usual. The sky hadn't stopped receding.
Until then, that was. The damn thing nearly blinded her just as the mare hit the ground. She felt sorry for her for the five seconds it took to register that she'd have to clean her body off the floor.
At least the dumb thing had the courtesy to say something: some gross bastardisation of the Celestial Prayer that she clumsily transcribed down in her little black book, along with the rest. She almost welcomed the Empyreans. Sure, the prayers tended to run the gamut of whiny to pathetic, but the times she didn't hear them were far, far worse.
The flesh tended to become part of the snow, and she wasn't very good with shovels.
With a slight shudder, she moved down her regular path.
The bodies almost always tended to land somewhere in a zone about a mile wide; she normally had plenty of time to make various threats to herself, hypothesise about her alternative career options and lament her indecision, but this time something ripped her from her thoughts.
The sound of crying. Not mare crying or stallion crying; she'd heard plenty of that in the echo corridor.
Foal crying.
She'd heard that once in the corridor.
It wasn't pretty.
“Hey,” she said, and her eyes widened. Had the dumb mare really jumped with her foal? “Hey, who's there?”
A loud whine came back in response.
“Horseapples.” She looked about for a hoof-hold. It wasn't about to happen again; not if the kid was still alive. “Where are you, kid?” she said, as she scrambled her way towards a familiar seeing-rock. “I am an officer of the Equestrian Transitional Authority! Please respond!”
The cries went around the valley, and she groaned as she pulled herself up. She hoped the foal was big enough for her to see; as she reached the top, closing her eyes to shield them from the cold, she pushed her head down and the tip of her muzzle bumped into another.
She opened her eyes and her eyes looked into the brilliant, temporarily silent stare of a pink-haired, white filly, her wings to her sides and horn shining in the light. She looked to its side and then back to her.
There was no cadaver.
“Mama?” she said, and smiled like the sun.