Twilight stood at the border that divided Equestria and Dragon Territory. If she looked behind her, she would see a crowd of exhausted, hungry ponies. Her friends were among them. During the initial rush, Twilight was too caught up in everything to fully realize that so many others were dead. Including the princesses. A single tear fell, splashing the blackened dirt.
Her mentor...her marefriend...her sister in law...all dead and gone. Spike gently brushed his tail beneath her eye, wiping away her tears. He couldn't cry anymore. He was too weak.
She sucked in a breath and steeled herself. This was it. All or nothing. She flared her purple wings and faced the crowd of survivors, trying her best to assume a serious expresion.
"Ponies! Lend me your ears!" she called, her voice sounding louder with nothing for it to echo off of. "I know this is hard. I know it feels hopeless, but it isn't! Look around you." She made a sweeping gesture with her hoof. "You have friends by your side, and the prospect of a new colony, a new kingdom, right in front of you! We made it all the way to the border. We can't stop now. We won't stop now! For tonight we dine in Tartarus!"
An admittedly rather timid cheer sounded from the massive horde of starving and weak ponies. Spike nudged Twilight, getting her attention almost instantly.
"Where'd you get that last line?"
"A video game, before all this happened." Twilight turned back to the horde. "Rainbow Dash?"
"What is it, Twi?" Rainbow took to the air instinctively, only to be brought back down to ground level as she realized how tired, weak, and starving she was. A rather depressed frown formed in her slightly distended cyan face.
"Take some other pegasi with you and see if there's any land we can make our way to. Go as far as you can before coming back." Rainbow Dash nodded and gathered up a few other ponies. They took to the air and flew, gliding low so the dragons nearby wouldn't see them.
Twilight turned to the rest of the remants of Equestria behind her, mostly quiet with idle conversations between some of the members. An incredibly worried look swept over her face as she spotted a mother calming down a pair of distended bellies on each side of her. Those were her children, Twilight assumed. She also spotted three stallions walking slowly by each other's side. The one in the middle lacked one of his hind legs, and seemed to be in great pain. Finally, Twilight looked up and saw one of the pegasi Rainbow Dash was flying with. Much of her coat was burned off, leaving pus filled, reddened blisters all over her body; the mare winced after each beat of her wings as they must've chafed those burned spots. Twilight's heart beat now with sorrow and a slight pity of those severly injured ponies. She sucked in another breath.
"The rest of you, do your best to set up a camp." Twilight nodded to Spike, who took to the skies as their guard of sorts.
A wide murmer spread through the crowd as the Equestrian exodus unloaded their wooden carts of all their immediate supplies, settling down to hunker down for the next night. The air around them was heavy, and tasted of dragon breath; a metallic, slightly sulfurous fume.
A few ponies gathered a small quantity of wooden sticks and piled them over the ground. A unicorn then magically grabbed two rocks, and banged them together in hope to create a fire. A majority of the ponies then followed suit to pitch their tents, tie up their carts, and set up their temporary abode around the small bonfire, which was in dire need of wood.
Murmurs in various parts of the camp circulated back to Twilight over the hours about what to do with the dead and the dying fire. All of those murmurs included burning the dead, not only in respect, but to keep their living loved ones alive through the night.
"No." Twilight firmly stated.
"Why not?" One of the sub-leaders asked, thinking of it as a good idea.
"We bury them. We will not use them. We are not animals." Twilight angrily growled to the mare, tears streaming down her soot-caked face as she let out a single sniffle.
"But without the fire, a lot of us will die from the cold!" The sub-leader protested, throwing her hooves in the air.
"Share sleeping bags." Twilight gave a rebuttle.
"A lot of us have diseases." Another protest from a nearby stallion, taking care his emotionally shattered wife, who sat crying and mumbling quiet words.
"Section them off and let them share their own sleeping space." Twilight coldly replied, still streaming tears from her tired eyes.
The various arguing ponies backed off, and retreated to their weak campfires. Twilight walked over to the huge stretcher they had hauled with them, at Twilight's instistence. Rarity knelt beside it, her horn lighting up with the ocassional spell. She got up and moved aside when Twilight tapped her on the shoulder. Twilight took a deep breath, and pulled off the tarp that covered Celestia's body.
She had been positioned to look like she was sleeping, her eyes - once filled with love and light in her breathing days - closed, a sleepy yet forced smile on her face. Tears began to stream down Twilight's lavender cheeks. Celestia and Luna had both sacrificed themselves to the poison gas to save the other ponies. To save Twilight.
A few muffled sounds came from Rarity as she too cried. The dark corner of Twilight's mind thought that Rarity's sobs meant nothing, that she had never known and could never know the mentorly love Celestia had bestowed upon her, the love she had taken for granted.
Twilight stopped stalling. Bringing to the surface her last dregs of magic, she scooped a small hill's worth of dirt out of the ground, flinging it aside. Then she carefully lowered Celestia's body into the hole, piling the dirt on top. She walked, slowly and carefully, towards the mound that guarded her dead teacher. With a single wounded, purple hoof, she drew in the dirt:
"Long Live Princess Celestia."
Little did everypony know, Luna, although promised to be there when the other ponies arrived, had also died to the poison gas, though her body was never recovered. Twilight thought of this as she stood at the grave of her most loved teacher, and thought nothing of it.
"We'll cross that bridge when we get there." She muttered to herself as she turned around to go find the camp she and her friends were spending the night in. Applejack, Fluttershy, and Pinkie Pie huddled together, keeping each other warm.
Applejack hadn't spoken a single word since Ponyville was hit by the menacing cloud of poisonous smoke, when her entire immediate family was killed.
Pinkie Pie's hair was permananetly flat nowadays, as nopony had anything to smile about now, and there were certainly no parties to throw. Or at least no good reason to throw them.
Fluttershy had perpetual tears soaking her cheeks. Her animal friends were trapped inside her cottage as the gas engulfed the surrounding forest. She barely made it out alive. Her lungs ached horribly with every breath she took, the cruel side effect of those who survived afer inhaling the gas and lived to tell the tale. Ocassionally she would have throaty and dry coughing fits, lasting for torturous nearly-hours before she continued her usual internal sobbing.
They had all suffered through so much. Made it out of so much by the skins of their teeth. They had all been so strong, for the sake of all of pony-kind. Applejack had a scar that marred her cutie mark permanently. Pinkie's tail was terribly mangled from all of the bushes and such she had yanked it through. Fluttershy's mane would forever be short and blackened.
"Hi, Twilight." Pinkie's usual timid greeting sounded from the corner the three huddled in. Twilight joined them, curling up next to Fluttershy. Applejack nodded to her.
"I think there's open land nearby, guys. A permanent home." Twilight painfully forced the corners of her mouth up.
"Yay." Fluttershy mumbled softly. Pinkie and Applejack merely stared at the ground.
"Aren't you guys excited?" Twilight raised an eyebrow.
Fluttershy spoke up. "M-me and Pinkie Pie were d-discussing it before you came in...What are we even fighting for? What do we have left to lose?"
"We have ourselves. We have whatever's left. We have the last chance Equestria has for rebuilding." Twilight tried to be optimistic, however, after a short deep gaze into Applejack's eyes, she quickly shut her mouth.
Rarity came in a few minutes after that, sitting down silently beside Applejack. The farm was practically Rarity's second home before the gas, and she was almost as silent as her orange marefriend.
Twilight considered Fluttershy's question. Like all statements that made her think, it had a ring of truth. They were running out of supplies fast. There were no other survivors last they checked. And they didn't have anything to take care of the next generation.
Rainbow Dash quietly and slowly landed next to Rarity, looking at Twilight with concern.
"The only water source nearby is this stupidly small pond. If we make it there tomorrow, we can fill up our canteens and try to find a river or something we can settle next to. The only timber we could find was the same distance, but it was in the other direction you sent me towards." She spouted what Twilight wanted to know and then instantly grew silent, putting a hoof around the despair riddled Rarity.
"See, guys?" Twilight piped up, a small dose of confidence working its way into her veins. "There's still hope. There's water nearby, and wood. Most likely some form of food, too."
The others did their best to smile, and slipped into their bedrolls. Twilight took the hint and snuggled into her own, her body quivering from the minimal heat she received. Just before she fell asleep to Spike's soothing roars, a single thought darted through her mind.
Celestia-forsaken changelings.