The Warm Oven

by Cogitationis

The Warm Oven

I was on oven duty again. It’s a great place to work if you don’t mind the smell. Nopony could escape the smell anyways.

I looked through through the glowing window of the oven. It was the only source of light in the whole room. There was a reason why they wouldn’t install any other sources of light in here. Sometimes it is better when you can’t see what you are doing. The pane of glass flickered brighter and darker as it faded between shades of yellow and orange. Despite the brightness of the fire inside it barely let any light into the room through the charred glass.

It would soon be ready for more burning material.

I pulled the uniform tighter around my shivering shoulders. The cruel coldness crept through the room from an untight door together with a few rays of light. The whole situation reminded me of a line from the Hearth Warming Eve play. It had been years ago when I had last seen it. Those words that are burned into my mind.

‘And now our bodies will become as cold as our hearts... all because we were foolish enough to hate.’

The rest of the play is just a blur. But those words… I feel like not even death would be able to erase them from my mind. Only a few years ago everything had been so peaceful. We were all so young. What once had been meant nothing anymore. More than a millennia of the Princesses rule now came back to haunt us. None of us had been ready for this. We didn’t know how to handle tension. We didn’t know how to handle conflict. It is amazing how fast a war can start when nobody knows what a war is. They cheered for us as we paraded through the streets after the mobilization was announced. All of us were fools.

I hugged myself and rubbed my shoulders in an attempt to wash away the coldness. The frost made us feel like the parasites that we were. It was nature's immune system trying to wash us away.

The door creaked open and a wave of cold air made me shutter. A stallion dragged more burning material into the room. He didn’t have much trouble doing it. His pants of exertion came from the aching of his cold muscles not the weight. The bag of skin and bones he was carrying barely caused resistance as it was dragged over the concrete floor. I hated the sight, even if it was only because it meant that it was now my turn to go outside.

I grasped the handle of the oven door and pulled it open. I could suddenly see the wretched horror that filled the room. A uniformed stallion covered from head to hoof with cloth where his grey outfit didn’t cover his coat. No eyes, only menacing goggles stared back at me as they reflected the eerie light. Between us lay the emaciated body of a mare. I looked at the brand mark on her collar where a circle had been burnt into her coat.

“A pacifist. You don’t see them very often.” I said while shaking my head.

They weren’t ponies anymore, they were faceless and colorless things. The only thing that gave any indication to whom they had once been was burned into their coats.

I grabbed her and lifted her over the ledge and shoved her into the oven. The blaze made a quiet and deep hissing noise. I basked in the heat before pulling back. A loud clang filled the room as the mechanism snapped shut.

“They others were given a ration of hard liquor.” he said.

I sighed and replied: “I was hoping that today would be a more peaceful day.”

He shrugged and sat himself in front of the oven and rubbed his shoulders like I had only a few moments ago.

“Quit staring and get out of here.”

After a few moments I was standing outside of the concrete block. Snowy wasteland and fog in every other direction. Only a few hundred meters in the distance I knew that there was a forest. I would probably never see it again because of the everlasting winter. I probably didn’t deserve to either.

“How was it?”

“How was what?” I replied to the uniformed stallion who walked towards me with a bottle in his hoof.

“How was it like to dispose the Element of Kindness?”

Element of Kindness? Did he mean the Elements of Harmony? Another memory of times long passed. No, it was the same memory. The last time I had seen the Hearths Warming Eve play was in Canterlot. The Elements of Harmony filled the main roles that year.

“Hey, I asked you something.”

“How did you know?” I responded while trying to piece together what had just happened.

“I saw how Berry dragged her out of the camp. I would have recognized that mare anywhere.”

She played the role of Private Pansy, Commander Hurricane’s right hand. Maybe I would have recognized her if I were in any other place. Faces have no meaning here. Neither the color of your coat or the cutie mark on your flank mattered. Either you were one of us or one of them.

“So we killed kindness?” I asked before I started to chuckle.

He looked at me with a straight face. Slowly a smile began to spread across his lips.

“I guess we did.”

We both broke out in hysterical laughter. There was nothing else we could do. We had all accepted it already. The machine had started. You can start a war whenever you want to, but you can’t stop it. Nopony could stop it. The leaders of both sides tried to carry on in an insane game of chicken. To top it all off we let the incarnation of kindness starve to death in captivity. We adjusted to the insane situation by becoming insane. The situation was so surreal and we could do nothing. So we laughed, giggled, grinned and howled. My sides ached and I could barely breath. The laughing made my lungs and throat burn as the frozen air pulled through them.

Eventually I slowly stopped laughing.

“So I see they passed out liquor rations.” I said in a very serious tone.

He stopped laughing and brushed a frozen tear from his eye.

“Yeah.” he replied while he looked at the bottle in his hoof.

A dry pop echoed from around the building followed by a loud scream. Neither of us was fazed by the sudden discharge of a rifle, they had been giving out alcohol after all. Judging by the scream the shooter had missed his mark.

“Are you on duty?” I asked.

“Yeah.” he replied. He drank the last third of the bottle empty in one pull.

The firing squad refused to fulfill their duty when they were sober. Eventually the officers gave in and started giving out alcohol. The problem was that a drunken firing squad didn’t hit very well. In some cases it took minutes of shooting for a lethal shot to finally end the condemned.

“Hopefully this will all stop when we win the war.” He said before leaving.

‘And now our bodies will become as cold as our hearts... all because we were foolish enough to hate.’

This was a war.

We were all going to lose in the end.

Author's Note:

I'm fairly new to writing fanfiction. If you could provide any feedback, I would really be thankful.

Comments

[Gabriel LaVedier]

Some context might help. Who are the sides. If it's pony versus pony some explanation of the sides is necessary. How long has it been going on? If the Elements are alive then it can't be long. And how could it have happened. I understand you want artistic ambiguity. That works well for one in a thousand writers. One in a million. And then not all the time for them. It mostly ends up as a confused mish-mash that leaves the reader grasping for an ending that never comes because the footing they needed wasn't there. The end feels like they were simply abandoned by the author. So you may want to consider all that.

[Cogitationis]

4318758

First of all thanks for commenting.

I took a few minutes to think about your response, and compared it to what I wanted to create.

It seems I have failed to portrait what I wanted to, and I take full responsibility for that.

Artistic ambuigy was certainly not what I had been aiming for. This may sound strange, but I simply don't think anything outside of what I mentioned is important for this story. The perspective is a first person shot from the view of the soldier. For him the details of the war don't matter. I actually have written over 100k of words about the war and everything around it. The soldier doesn't care about any of it. He cares about the cold, his fellow servicemen, and few other things. What he has seen has desensiblized him so far, that the death of the element of kindness makes him laugh because he doesn't know how else he should react. Even which side wins the war doesn't bother him, since he clearly believes that everybody is loosing in the end. It once did interest him, but he has given up and only returns back to the thoughts mostly out of habit. He already lost all hope.

That is exactly what I wanted to capture. A snapshot of the guard that silently lives in a small part of my mind.

In hindsight the snyopsis in the description is wrong. It invoked false expectations. I should have given that more thought. I will probably change that.

I willl leave this story as it is, and release a series of stories interconnected with this one. I actually have short story that is connected with this one already published, but the connection hasn't been published yet.

All in all for a German writing noob without an editor I am actually pretty happy with the result. As long as I get better everything is okay.

[Gabriel LaVedier]

4319116

Now, your use of language was quite effective. And you did capture the sense of futility, and the inevitability of death and loss. It's especially impressive for a non-native speaker.

I just figured that you would drip in some details to give your readers a fingerhold, lest they get lost or simply drift away, not feeling connected because they are being asked to stare at the equivalent of a white wall. I also had a brief stab of fear. A female, in a collar, her identity erased, treated like meat, and burned. I thought this was more tiny-penised "I think women are weird and confusing and too powerful for my feeble ego" misogynist Fall of Equestria stuff. It's odd to say but it was a relief to see it was a random genocidal war.