//------------------------------//
// Lesius I 
// Story: Tales From The Wasteland 
// by Inkwell_the_writer_horse 
//------------------------------//

Go That one word, along with its Imperial translation, fired off in Lesius’s mind like a bullet in a gun. It drifted about for a moment before finding it’s mark.
The zebra sat up, his heavy metal-composite plate armor clinking and clanking as he did so. He unslung his canteen from a sling on his side and opened it with a hiss; From the overwhelming stench of alcohol that flooded his nostrils and filled his eyes with tears, he could safely assume that it was at least half full. The drink that filled the vessel was posca- a staple part of any Legionnaire’s diet.
He took a swill, the drink burning his throat on the way down.
“Caesar's* arse, there’s a lot of booze in this.” The zebra coughed, tears streaming down his face. He sealed the bottle and placed it neatly back with his other equipment.
Lesius smiled. The drink had been a celebration of sorts, a reward to himself for completing the first leg of his long flight north. Just mere minutes ago, he had passed from the icy tundra of the suburbs around Arx to the sun-blasted desert of the Verge.
The change could not have been more apparent - the cold, sleet-flinging gales of the Ice City were suddenly replaced by a steadier stream of abrasive sand and scorching heat. All around the armoured zebra, as far as the eye could see, was a massive collection of sharp, rocky crags that peeked up out of the sand layer . They bore a shocking resemblance to an animal’s splintered bones poking out of rotten flesh - every now and then a vulture would circle overhead, undoubtedly flying south from the lush green Equestria as if to feed upon the Verge’s half-stripped carcass.
Lesius stood up shakily, the heavy armor clearly taking its toll on his waning strength. As standard Legionary gear, the suit was made up of thick steel plates overlapping kevlar strips, and covered his entire body save for his head. He had abandoned his plumed helmet long ago, allowing his striped face to breathe and his red-tipped greyscale hair(The mark of a Legion Jezzail) to fall freely across his shoulders.
He started north once again, hampered each and every step he took by the soft, mucky sand layer and what seemed to be a solid wall of wind. While he was well-conditioned and fully able to push on forward, a stranger looking on would see him struggling, swaying softly with each slow tread as if the gust would topple him like an unbraced bridge.
The sun shone down- A being cruel, oppressive, and hot as he trudged. It seemed hours, days, years that he was walking, but since the endless nothingness that surrounded him gave birth to only one shadow; his own, he could only register time through its long march.
He walked, it walked. As he continued on, throwing cursory glances at it, it lengthened, slowly. Agonizingly slowly. A testament to the hours passed.
Very little broke the monotony of his trek- only the occasional dune, rising up out of the stand as a towering monolith compared to the relative emptiness that consumed him. They drove him even further, less physically than spiritually though. As he climbed over each dune, it would inevitably collapse, sending him sliding down as the small avalanche surged around him blowing slightly more sand and dust into his eyes than usual, or, more often than not, sending him tumbling, head over hooves down to the bottom. He would become quickly disoriented as his already sandy world gave way to one large shifting mass of long-eroded rock.
Besides the ceaseless miniature avalanches, climbing them was almost - not quite, but almost - more taxing. His hooves sank into the sand practically to his stomach, each step a confused, annoyed waddle as his legs struggled to either force through the seemingly endless sand, a task quickly proving to be far less efficient than pulling his leg all the way over, swinging it horizontally forwards, and plunging it back into the dune he was climbing. For whatever reason, Lesius would never deviate from his path; never went out of his way to avoid dunes, perhaps he merely did not care to avoid them, perhaps he feared his meagre enough strength would not bear him and his armour through the endless miles of dunes he would need to circumnavigate. Whatever the reason, on he trudged. And trudged.
And trudged.
Time soon lost all meaning again. He no longer even looked at his shadow; it would never stretch fast enough. On he marched. Over a dune. Over a crevasse. Over another dune. Into a cactus. Over another dune. But still he never stopped. The march was taking its bloody toll on him now, the baking sun cascading sweat down his body, he noticed his breath was becoming ragged, a rasp for air as he gasped and wheezed along, hacking coughs tormenting him as sand blew down his parched throat and into his-
Wait.
“OW, FUCK!” He collapsed, the pain from his impact into an evil perennial plant finally managing to register in his worn-down mind. His front hooves shot to his needle-studded, bloody face, trying to stymie the flow of his face-blood as his back legs continued to happily plod their pointless journey along through the air.
“Aaaaagh! Why?!?! I ran down down a gods-damned CARGO TRAIN and I’m gonna get rubbed out by a cactus??!?!” He screamed in agony as he lay on the desert floor once more.
Soon enough, thirst kicked in, and it kicked hard. Like a jacked-up, steroidal MMA fighter with a hydraulic metal leg smashing into your balls. Thirty-seven times. He finally realized a miniature desert had manifested itself inside Lesius’s mouth, cracking his lips open like the aforementioned crevasse he had crossed.
“I made it.”
As the sun began to dip below the veiled horizon, Lesius stood alone upon the final hill before his destination. Below and to the north of him, shielded from the sand by the lip of a blast crater, there was a collection of five or six stout-looking wooden shacks. The edge of the deep crater, even though the sun was still mostly above the horizon line, cast a dark shadow over the shacks that dipped them into an inky state of near-permanent darkness. Piercing the black cloth like knives was several rays of ambient illumination from the windows of the larger and more central of the shacks.
The zebra breathed out, an expression of relief crossing over his sand-pocked face. Having ditched his armor long, long ago, he used the last of his fading energy to nimbly leap into the curve of the blast crater, gracefully sliding on his flank towards the shacks.
As he slid to a stop a few yards from the buildings, the sun winked out it’s last ray of sharp light and disappeared. Looking up, he could see that only two of the shacks were lit- the cleanest, tallest one with an electronic white ambience and the second-tallest one with a warm glow and pleasant chatter that spilled onto the thin floor of sand. It was obviously a restaurant, or a bar of some kind.
The scene, bastions of light piercing an infinite sandy plain of shadow, reminded him uncannily of the myths of Pluto he had heard as a child.
“‘Ey!”