//------------------------------// // 16 - Hope From Ashes // Story: Limits of the Horizon // by Beware The Carpenter //------------------------------// Clastic Strain was nodding... nodding... gone. There were just three questions left on the chapter he was reading, and then he would have earned the right to six hours of beautiful, uninterrupted sleep. He really shouldn't go to bed before he finished this exercise, he couldn't, and he wasn't; he was just laying his head down for a fifteen minute nap. Someone started banging on the farmhouse door. Clastic Strain jumped with a groan, and stumbled downstairs; half-dreaming that Professor Sparkle had come to scold him for missing a test. Instead, it was just some pegasus gasping that Ponyville had been attacked by - Clastic Strain slammed the door on him before he could finish his sentence. Four minutes later there was a second runner. The third one was bleeding, smelled like smoke and convinced Clastic Strain to at least take a look. Fifty feet of altitude showed the fires of Ponyville, and a forty foot drop through Benefair’s window followed soon afterwards. He kicked her bed frame, yelled for her to get up, and then skidded across the hall, lifted Crackle Jack a few feet off his bed with telekinesis and then dropped him. As Crackle Jack moaned an inaudible curse, Clastic Strain was already in Winnow’s room looking for his youngest brother to wake him up, but the bed was empty. Clastic Strain spun around to check if Winnow was in the bathroom, then realized that Winnow’s coat was gone… and so was his war games set. Clastic Strain stormed out of the farmhouse and began flying towards Ponyville; followed by Benefair and Jack who shouted unanswered questions. They arrived too late. The trio arrived to a broken town, without any buffalo and hardly any ponies. Laneways lit by house fires were smeared with blood, littered occasionally by the dead or wounded, left in various stages of safety, pain and consciousness. Clastic Strain ignored them for now, and bee lined for Board Swipe's house at the end of a street which was alight with flames. Clastic Strain shed his coat and plunged inside; making his way by trial and error into the smoke infested basement. The ground was littered with corpses, some armed, some disarmed, many dismembered in the most gruesome ways. They were all figurines, no real ponies were inside. Clastic Strain made it back outside; wheezing, singed, but alive, and tripped over an unconscious earth pony. When he knocked a cough out from the colt, Clastic Strain turned around, recognized the colt, dragged him to the fountain at the end of the street and dunked his head under. When Board Swipe’s legs started flailing, Clastic Strain let him up, then threw him to the ground; “Where is Winnow!?” Swipe sputtered and choked; Clastic Strain waited impatiently; but could make out Board choke out the word ‘gone’, as he pointed west. Clastic Strain pivoted into the air, past the smoke and cast a spell to momentarily enhance his eyesight. On the dark horizon, he could see barely hundreds of buffalo, galloping away from Ponyville dragging hundreds of ponies behind them. By now they were about ten miles out, but he could still catch them if- “Clastic Strain!” Clastic Strain looked down, Benefair was beneath him, holding a high school student in her magic who’d had nearly half his fur burned off, and was withering in pain. He felt nauseous, and like he wanted to scream, and that was just from looking at the injured colt. He’d studied battle, and the sorts of injuries that could occur, but with the smell of burnt skin and the sight of exposed bone, this was the first time any of it became real. If the buffalo had taken prisoners, it meant they needed them for something, meaning the prisoners were safe… for now. Some of the ponies below him couldn’t wait for help, and who knew how many more were trapped in burning buildings. What would dad do? Clastic Strain took stock of the situation, chose his priorities, and flew towards the lake. Dozens of fresh rain clouds had been stockpiled to fuel the waterslide throughout Youtherd; Clastic Strain grabbed as many of them as he could and began clubbing house fires with the watery masses. The first batch of clouds was used within minutes and Clastic Strain returned to the waterslide for more clouds; only to find they were occupied. Clastic Strain counted nine pegasi sitting idly on some of the lower clouds, just watching the village burn. “Follow me in as I put out the fires,” commanded Clastic Strain, “Split into groups of three and begin searching houses for trapped and injured ponies.” Two ponies stood up, seven sat, one spoke; “You can’t go into a building that’s been on fire, it could collapse on-” CRACK! A bolt launched from Clastic Strain’s horn, striking the pegasus who went tumbling off the cloud, ten feet to the ground below. It was just a stun spell, but Clastic Strain did a convincing job of making it look dangerous, and he didn’t give the other pegasi a chance to check their comrade. “Split into teams of two, and start searching those houses; NOW.” Those eight pegasi suddenly became cooperative; and after an organized relief effort was underway, other survivors began gathering. Some simply showed up and started helping with hardly saying a word, but most needed to be asked before they would do anything useful. The ponies that actually lived in Ponyville, whose houses and businesses had burned, were the hardest hit. Many of them simply walked among the ruined celebrations in a dazed stupor, or wept over the body of a loved one. Then there was the last group of ponies, too angry and vengeful to do anything except take their frustrations out on any buffalo they could find who’d been too wounded to retreat. Clastic Strain would chase a group of them off whichever buffalo they’d been mobbing, and yell at them to start digging in the ruins of the hospital for desperately needed medical supplies, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and neither could he post a guard to protect each prisoner, or keep them from escaping. He needed someone he could trust, and that someone was Tia. She’d arrived just a few minutes after he had, and fallen in behind Benefair in tending burn victims. At first he let her be, but after Clastic Strain found one street where half a dozen buffalo were having the remainder of their lives beaten out of them, he sent Tia to arrange a prison hospital there, and gave Big Mac a wagon with orders to start collecting the rest of the prisoners. Clastic Strain… couldn’t assign her any medical supplies. He knew that some of the buffalo might not survive without them, but they had been the ones who’d attacked, and there weren’t enough for everyone to have what they needed. Tia argued briefly with him, but when she knew he wouldn’t change his mind, she set to work doing what she could without complaint. After the rainclouds had been exhausted, some of the houses began catching back alight, but so long as they had already been searched for ponies, Clastic Strain was willing to let them burn. Unfortunately, not everyone felt the same way. Sometimes the house owners tried to go back in for their possessions, sometimes looters decided to see what they could get, sometimes either group got caught in a re-ignited house and sometimes these two groups ran into each other. Whichever way it turned out, all it meant for Clastic Strain was more injured for an overloaded, under-staffed and under-supplied medical team. The night was brutal, gut wrenching, backbreaking and heartbreaking; and just like rain clouds and morphine, Clastic Strain’s adrenaline was not an inexhaustible supply. By the time the sun had risen however, smiling merrily to itself as it pranced through the sky, the worst of the struggle had ended. Clastic Strain was sitting by himself, covered in soot and splotches of blood, wishing for a cup of coffee, and that’s when he saw her. She was shuffling through the crowed of injured ponies; not striding purposely, not cantering, daring anyone to stand in her way, but shuffling, ears drooped as if she’d been hurt, although physically she looked fine. Clastic Strain was by Dinky’s side in an instant, noticing that, even against a face wet from rain Clastic Strain could see clear lines on her face from where she’d been crying. It was the first time that Clastic Strain had ever seen her that she actually looked… vulnerable. “They took my mom.” Clastic Strain nodded, “They got Winnow as well.” Dinky’s eyes clouded some, and Clastic Strain became aware she was looking past him to where Benefair and Crackle Jack were rationing out a bottle of aspirin someone had found, then behind them to Canterlot in the distance. “…She’s all I have.” “Don’t worry, we’ll get them back, we just-” “How!?” demanded Dinky, “By now the buffalo have a four hour head start; and the closest military garrison is in Canterlot. We’ll never catch them on hoof!” “Canterlot will send airships and-” “Airships!? Every wind within thirty miles of the buffalo’s course is heading east. It doesn’t matter what altitude they fly at, Canterlot airships won’t work.” “You can’t possibly know that.” “I know.” Dinky hissed, “Airships. Won’t. Work.” “… Then I’ll fly them down.” Dinky Snorted, “The whole army? By yourself?” “So long as I’m airborne I can pick them off one by on-” “What are you going to do about the unicorn in the palanquin who was blasting pegasi out of the sky?” “I can deal with one unicorn.” “Not this one!” shrieked Dinky. “I was able to get a MQ rating of it when it missed me; twelve hundred and forty-four!” Clastic Strain stopped cold. That was four points short of Celestia, almost twice as strong as Professor Sparkle. “There has to be a mistake.” “It’s not a mistake! And it wasn’t a white elephant either! It was a unicorn!” “… What do you suggest then?” Dinky swallowed, fighting back tears, “… Come with me.” Clastic Strain looked around; the wounded were mostly cared for, and the panic of the attack was melting away, his siblings were standing behind him listening. “Come with me” Dinky repeated, “… please.” --- Before Clastic Strain knew it, Clastic Strain was following Dinky towards the outskirts of Ponyville with Benefair and Crackle Jack in tow. “Where are you taking us?” “My house.” Sniffed Dinky slightly. The journey wasn’t long; but as they moved out of the area the buffalo had hit, and charred masses gave way to healthy houses, the effect on the scenery was almost as radical as the change that happened in Dinky. Her breathing became steady to fit the steady trot they were in and as they went she almost regained a portion of her usual gleam momentarily before stopping outside a ruined one room cottage, smaller than Clastic Strain’s walk-in closet at home. “This is it.” Clastic Strain halted… this was where Dinky lived. He’d always guessed she was poor from working at Sugarcube Corner and supporting her mom but this… a ragged lawn draped haphazardly in a tattered picket fence, void of any garden or veggie patch. When Dinky opened the door, the inside was even worse. Wooden cabinets had their doors almost fallen off, revealing barren shelves in the middle of summer, the roof was almost non-existent and would be virtually useless during winter. Clastic Strain didn’t know why Dinky had wanted to bring him here; it seemed irrelevant to the current crisis but at the same time he wished she had shown him this years ago. This wasn’t a way for anyone to live. Waves of guilt of the opulence he’d been born to began falling on him like bricks and he promised himself that once their families were safe, he would make Dinky accept his help. Clastic Strain looked back and forth, there wasn’t any bed; no mattress, no pile of hay… not so much as a rug or mat. “Where do you sleep at night?” “In there.” Dinky point towards a tattered blue wardrobe in the corner; Clastic Strain hesitated, then took a tentative step towards the box, half-imagining that he could hear the screams of Dinky begging to be let out as a child. “It was my father’s, and it’s the warmest place in the house to sleep at night… would you like to see inside?” No. Clastic Strain could think of nothing he’d hate more. His mind warped with images of rusted nails still sticking into the sides of it to make it – the doors swung open, and Clastic Strain’s knees went weak. “Welcome to the TARDIS.” Smirked Dinky, trotting past him and into a courtyard of paved stone. Chapter Seventeen >>> Slave Girl