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Oh, brave new world5,155 words
Dreams and tribulation4,203 words
Welcome to Necro City...?3,809 words

Welcome to Necro City...?

I trudged through the marsh, while Wind Brace flew overhead. The cool mud sucking at my new robe and legs was quite annoying, but there wasn't any real way to go. Wind had offered to carry me over the marsh, but I declined, mainly because I was afraid that his legs would fall off if he tried to lift me.

Wind Brace flew down and alighted, treading carefully so that his legs didn't fall apart. We continued in silence, him not sure how to talk to me and me just keeping silent and focused on the journey. Eventually, he mustered up the courage to break the silence between us. "So, Lazarus. Where did you come from?"

I wracked my brains for a suitable answer. Should I tell him the truth... no, he'd think I was insane. Should I lie? He seemed like a fairly astute person in spite of his friendliness, and he would probably pick a hole in my story. Eventually, I decided to tell him part of the truth. "I came from a large island about 40000 kilometres wide."

Always tell a technical truth.

He adopted a deadpan glare. "Riiight. Next thing, you'll be telling me that there're spiders living in everything."

I shrugged, my bony grin now more reflective of my actual feelings. "You read my mind."

Wind stopped in mid-step, just looking at me with an 'are you for real?' expression on his face. "Anything else weird and bizarre about it?"

I was just feeling in a snarky mood, and technical truths that sounded too bizarre would hopefully keep him too distracted to ask any pertinent questions, like how I got here and why I don't know anything about Equestria beyond what was on the show. "Well, we put savoury pies in pea soup and cover it in ketchup, if that helps. Oh, and everything catches on fire during the summer."

Wind Brace's eye fell out, possibly from surprise and possibly from gravity's influence. "I... wuh... okay, you're messing with me, aren't you." He picked it up delicately and screwed it back in. From the little twist of his lip, I could guess that this had happened many times before.

I really miss having a face. Nevertheless, I trudged on in silence, neither confirming or denying his suspicions. I had told him the truth, or part of it, and he was content with that. Either that, or he felt that if he asked any more questions I would continue to lead him around with ever-increasing ridiculous stories. Whatever his opinion, we travelled in relative silence, apart from the click of bone and the squelch of mud beneath my feet.

It was a further two hours before we reached the entrance to Necro City, a pair of huge doors with a boulder resting near them. Wind Brace frowned. "That shouldn't be like that." After a few moments of looking at the door, he turned to me. "Hey, would you mind giving me a hand with this?"

I looked around the clearing, and eventually found something- a simple, rather thick branch. I carefully wedged it beneath the boulder and pushed down on it, Wind Brace aiding me in moving the rather heavy boulder. Eventually, we had managed to move the boulder so that it didn't impede our path into the city. After a few moments of metaphorically catching our breath, during which he checked his stitches to make sure he wasn't falling apart, he pushed the doors open with a bit of a struggle. He walked through the doors, me following him with my sword at the ready.

As we walked for what felt like hours, we eventually found what looked like the city. It wasn't all that large, but then again, I lived in Adelaide, so who am I to judge? What made it different from what Wind had originally thought would be here? There wasn't a single living or undead crature there. The whole place felt dead. Wind Brace looked around, aghast.

"How... how..."

Unsure of what to do, I hesitantly gripped his shoulder. "This place looks like it has abandoned recently. Do you know of any other undead cities nearby?"

Wind Brace shook his head. "No, I don't. There might be undead, but... I can't..." He burst into tears, somehow. The green liquid that came from his eyes had the appearance of tears, or at least the symbolic meaning of tears in spite of its mysterious make-up. I stoically stood aside as he continued to blubber. How on earth was I supposed to comfort him?

After taking a bit of a kI had a question to ask him. "How long were you stuck in that swamp?"

"At least a week." A week? He'd been a long time away from here. I narrowed my eyes, metaphorically. A lot could happen in a week. One bit of miscellaneous trivia I had picked up was that it was the average lifespan of the Peruvian wasp. It was wholly possible that the town could have been evacuated, or they were killed.

He was "I, I, I just don't know what to do. They must've gone to Tartarus, or something! Yes, that's what everypony must've done; there's a Gate around here, it's rumoured, and only a gem from the king's crown could open it. It's probably the safest place in the whole of Equestria for them!"

This sounded interesting. Given that Tartarus was guarded by Cerberus, it seemed unlikely that anything much would go within ten feet of an entrance. "Could we enter the Gate?"

Wind Brace shook his head. "No, we'd need the king's crown to enter, and even if we could... we'd need to find the gate first. It's practically impossible!"

I sat and pondered. If they'd needed to escape these Revenant Dawn types, then we effectively were the masters of a dead city. Eventually, I came upon a solution. "There are other undead, right? Then we'll need to get rid of this place. We'll have to gather up anything that they left behind, and we're going to strike out. There's got to be more undead. We should let them know."

Wind Brace looked deterred for a brief moment, then he cracked a grin. "You're right. There's bound to be stuff that hasn't been taken into Tartarus."

==---------==

From what I could tell as I walked through the empty streets of Necro City, this place would have been bustling with unlife. Empty market stalls, except for a few that hadn't been completely emptied, dominated the narrow streets. I saw a couple of discarded dicing tables, cut with some sort of weapon a few days ago (splinters on the ground are recent, but given timeframe, probably a few days ago.) I paused by one, examining the surface. How many games had been played on here? It had been worn smooth by countless dice rolls, such that the markings on the wood that indicated positions were barely legible.

Whatever. Not really my concern. We drifted through the ghost town. Maybe there were a few people who hadn't left? But as we kicked the door down of the first house, and heard no objections, nobody flying at us, our spirits fell. The house had been stripped bare of every necessity, except for a few tables, still stacked with cracked plates. I poked the earthworms crawling sluggishly through the earthen meal. So, this was what the dead ate? It seems as if some habits are hard to give up on death. We trooped upstairs, and what I saw sickened me.

Wind Brace nearly vomited at the sight of a zombified filly, stuck through with a spear. I hastened over, dropping my sword to check for unlife. After a few moments, I shook my head. "She's dead. Been dead for at least four days. There wasn't anything you could've done; I guess that this spear has to have been enchanted."

Wind Brace recovered. "I knew her. Her name was Mary. She was a sweet kid... she didn't do anything! She was an innocent! Oh god... let's get her out of here. She deserves better than this. She needs a proper burial."

I yanked the spear out of her chest, looking at the blackened blood slowly pouring out of the wound. "I agree. Cheer up though; it seems as if somebody did in her killer."

At his questioning stare, I pointed him towards the opposite side of the smashed window. A paladin had apparently been thrown through here, and had impacted with the opposite house, evidently killing him. The body was still there, still with a surprised look on the griffin's face. Wind Brace snorted approvingly. "That's good, otherwise I'd hunt down the bastard who did."

We buried her near the house. I scraped dirt out from the road mechanically, not really thinking about what I was doing. Instead, I was thinking about the expression on the foals face, thinking about that surprise, fear and desperation. How I couldn't stop picturing her death- her just sitting in her room, afraid of those attacking, and then, this griffin crashes through, and somebody barrels upstairs, jsut in time to see him sink the enchanted lance into her heart, killing her permanently. How his triumph had shown on his face, just before whoever had killed him had thrown him out of the window.

Sometimes, being so good at reading people and situations is a horrible curse. Other thoughts tumbled through my mind as I replayed it over and over and over.

This isn't right. God damnit, this is horrible. Kids don't deserve this kind of shit.
This kind of fight is downright depressing. I don't want anything like this to ever happen again, no matter what.

When I'd finished, I carefully lowered the body in. We checked her again, for any spark of life, but she didn't blink, not even when I poked her side so hard that I pierced her flesh. Eventually, I sighed. "Rest in Peace, Mary."

Other houses yielded practically the same results- stripped bare, with maybe a corpse found. Most of them were fully grown, which was a relative relief. We dug graves for them, remembering who they were. We also found a couple of corpses from the paladins who'd attacked. Their red armbands with their insignia denoted who they were. Them we showed no such respect as the corpses of those zombies and skeletons we'd found. We shoved their corpses into a mass grave, and we carved into the soil over it,

Here lie foal molesters and murderers. They were also paladins who forsook justice.

Eventually, we found a cart, which we loaded our looted wares onto. Wind Brace suddenly collapsed as my shoddy sewing finally gave way. "Oh bugger."

After a few moments of staring, I sighed, reaccepting the needle and thread and getting ready to reattach the hoof. I gripped the needle and thread and got to clumsily stitching again. These fingers were a fair bit thicker than my original ones were, so they weren't really suited for a fine motor skill like sewing. Still, it was reattached without much hassle. Wind Brace looked at it. "It'll do for now, until we find another survivor."

After a few minutes of walking around, I managed to spot a sign, still as anything. Wind Brace looked up. "The Smashed Skeleton! Oh, this was a good spot to have a good drink. Ah... good times."

He pushed the door open. it creaking on its hinges. I saw a microphone, hanging desolutely. Every other instrument that had been here had long ago been removed. Once, this place had been teeming with customers, all crowding for a drink; now, it was as empty and dead as the rest of the town.The Smashed Skeleton had managed to yield a couple of pints of alcohol. I poured us each a glass. Wind Brace raised his mug solemnly, a frown on his face. "To those who died."

I raised mine and clanked them together. "To those who died."

It needed to be said, as much for our benefit as theirs. As I drank, I suddenly realised something. Where was the alcohol going? I looked down- no wet patch of ale forming below me. I just stared, then shook my head. It was better to focus on the here and now rather than pointlessly pontificating about where the alcohol I drank was going. Better to focus on the here and now.

==------------------==

Time wasn't something that I could easily tell down here. The sunless, vaulted roof of the cavern betrayed nothing about the time of day. According to Wind, it was now six in the morning. How he knew that, I wasn't going to ask. We eventually made our way to the castle. It couldn't have all been cleared out, I knew it.

Red awnings and red carpet greeted our eyes when we'd finally shoved the doors open. Dark stone and torch holders, now empty, greeted us. Wind Brace looked around in awe, and so did I.

"I've never been inside the castle before. This is a whole new experience for me. It's... everything I dreamed it was and more!"

I grunted. While I appreciated its surprising beauty, we had more pressing concerns at this point in time. "Wonder later, loot now."

After about three hours of painstakingly searching the castle, we'd found the Gate. It was hidden in the basements, whose stores of gold had mostly been left behind as an afterthought. Wind Brace hammered on the gates, hoping for an answer.
"HELLO? ANYPONY? PLEASE ANSWER?!" But no answer came from the gates; it'd been sealed firmly. Nothing was entering. After a few moments, he slumped. I patted him on the back.

Even though I've been told that I can be a bit standoffish, I am perfectly capable of comforting people. It's just that I don't really enjoy doing so unless it is absolutely necessary. "We should leave. We'll find some fellow undead, and we'll take them to a safer place."

Wind Brace nodded. "I suppose you're right. But we'll send them a message, when it's safe for the undead to return to Necro City." He'd already found his boots, strapping them firmly so that his hooves wouldn't fall of again. After a few moments of silence, we returned to taking everything we could find and placing it on the cart we'd found.

Why the cart was there I do not know, but I was thankful for its presence. It made the mind-numbing tedium of it all seem worthwhile. Find something potentially useful, throw it in. So far, we'd amassed a small library, most of an armoury, including anvil, some highly suspect money found in socks, some leftover herbs from an apothecary, and what looked like a riding crop.

Every other undead being had been very careful, either that or there was some looter here who'd taken all of the really good stuff. Still, a couple of books on alchemy was jolly good. Finally, we were ready to leave. There were other undead out there, there had to be. Otherwise, this was all for nothing.

As he hauled our cart up the steps, I started to talk. "So, Wind. What do you undead do around here?"

"What did we do? Oh, well, we fought. A lot. There's something visceral about it; nopony knows why, but fighting... we enjoy the ACT of fighting. Maybe it's because we can feel somewhat alive again. You'll know what I mean."

I grit my teeth. "Maybe. Until then, we'll have to focus on surviving. Let's do that, eh?"

Wind Brace kept talking as the wheels of our cart trundled up the stairs. "Did you see the arena? Well, there's a bit of a story to it. You see, a long time ago, there was a necromancer in the Black Marshes, name of Mordroc. He summoned creatures called Stalfos, had them guard the city. Unfortunately, he didn't make himself exempt from their rage, so they killed him."

Wow. What an incompetent moron. "Sounds like he was mentally retarded. Go on."

"Well, after that the Stalfos ran the whole city. There was one good one, called Captain Keeta. He tried to be decent to everybody, not just the skeletons. But then, King Highwind attacked Necro City, and all the Stalfos, except for Captain Keeta, were destroyed. Captain Keeta, on the other hand, was sealed away; nopony really knows where, somewhere outside."

"After that, people didn't have much to do. We really liked to fight, so there were a lot of riots and brawls in the streets. So King Highwind decides to build the arena. I know you saw it."

I had; it was very hard to miss. It was situated in the very centre of the town, where anybody could reach it with ease. I'd frowned at it at the time, disapproving of the gladiatorial nature it had. Now that I'd heard that story, I could understand why it had been built- bread and circuses again and again throughout history proved this.

"I did. Now, you were saying something about the fights. Anything interesting about them?"

Wind Brace nodded. "Anybody who can qualify through them can meet with the king and talk. It's an incredible honour."

I wondered about this mysterious 'King.' "So, the King... is he alive?"

Wind Brace shook his head. "Well, he was, but he then became a vampire. Like Dracula."

Dracula? It seems as if the need for exceedingly powerful vampires named Dracula is a multiversal constant.

"Alright, Dracula; who he?"

Wind Brace chuckled. "Oh, you don't know him. Well, he's a bit of a recluse. Very good fighter though, and he's been around since the city's founding. Nopony really knows why he's here at all. He's a mystery."

With that, we lapsed into a contemplative silence, focusing on hauling the cart further and further.

==---------==

After a lot of gutbusting, we were out in the light of my second day here. Wind Brace and I continued hauling our cart along, the spoils of our plunder weighing heavily, along with our pilfered bones and fur. We were going to have a lot of fun finding other undead, I just knew it.

We walked with our cart for a few minutes, not spotting any other living creature. The cloying muck of the swamp sought to draw our cart into its depths, but we kept moving, preventing it from getting a hold on our wares.

Ah, we're on the road again. Well, going to a road. There might not be a road for miles; wait, no, I tell a lie. There's a settlement of living ponies a few hours walk from-
No, not applicable. For all we know, it might be some sort of paladin stronghold. We have to-

The sound of something falling and smashing into the ground only a couple of meters away from us shook me out of my contemplation. We paused, and on some unspoken word, we hefted our weapons- I favoured my sword, while Wind lifted a pair of axes he'd found from the armoury we'd looted. I absently noticed that the axeheads were glowing with a red light, and I filed that away under 'ask him how he does that.'

Wind Brace flicked his yellowing eyes around him, trying to find the source of the crash. "What do you suppose that was, old fellow?"

I shook my skull, pinpointing and triangulating where it was with my superior sense of hearing. "I have no idea. I think that we should check it out though." Though this would be the wrong thing to do in just about any horror movie, something told me that knowing about specific tropes of horror movies and others wouldn't really be applicable to our situation. I was a skeleton travelling with a zombie. We didn't need horror movie tropes, we were a horror movie.

We advanced to the crash site, hoping that whatever was there wasn't too dangerous. Wind Brace's axes were at the ready, as was my sword. The crater was rather small, implying that whatever had crashed hadn't been that big to begin with. We walked up carefully nonetheless, concerned it might be some incendiary device that just hadn't properly exploded yet. When I saw what lay at the bottom of the tiny crater, my jaw literally fell off. No way was this here. What next, a Red Orb? Wind Brace, ever helpful, got my jar and handed it to me.

"Ank hyou." I mumbled, reattaching my jaw as I looked at the object yet again.

It was a small, emerald green flask, which I picked up reverently. Wind Brace looked at me curiously. "What's that? Do you know what that is?"

"This is an Estus flask. Undead where I'm from favour these flasks, as they can heal most wounds. What on Earth is an Estus flask doing all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?"

Wind Brace shrugged. "I have no idea."

I definitely didn't; video game items in Equestria was odd. Maybe it was a side effect of the Pawns being thrown here? Gods aren't always the most careful beings. Look at Aphrodite and Ares, tied up when they were having sex behind Hephaestus' back, and every god present laughed at them. Then, Poseidon had to pay Hephaestus a full dowry.

In any case, it always paid to be cautious. I gripped my sword tightly, straining my ears for the sound of any intruder at all. When no other traveller readily appeared, I relaxed slightly, and we continued traversing the marsh.

Author's Note:

So, to everybody's who's followed and favourited this, first of all I must thank you for your patience.
I am resolved to upload more chapters in 2015, so don't worry.

Every chapter will contain, as a bare minimum, 3,000 words. Any lower than that will be more special chapters.

There was originally a crossover that was with this chapter, but the guy I was crossing over with was unable to do anything more. So, next chapter will be something suitably action packed.

This chapter's a bit unedited, but hopefully it's up to the same standard as the other two.

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