Wight · 5:38pm Sep 5th, 2018
Wight is a tall, thin unicorn stallion. It is unclear at first glance what color his coat used to be as his ghoulification left him horrifically putrefied. In his ‘past life’, as he refers to it, he was a simple businesscolt. A stallion with a different name and different life. A little too old to go off and fight in the war, he spent most of his days living an exceedingly normal life. He would wake up, kiss his wife and baby girl goodbye and go to work in Manehattan. On the day the bombs fell he was just heading in to the city. The balefire ripped it to shreds and cast a hellish green glow as an expanding magical shockwave tore through everything. His wagon was lifted from the street and tumbled end over end.
When he awoke everything was in ruins. His head throbbed and he could feel his guts churn. He crawled out of his overturned wagon and set eyes upon the destruction. Everything for miles had been scorched, leveled or outright erased from the power of the bombs. He staggered down the highway like a ghost, bleeding from the broken stub where his horn used to be. He didn’t have time to focus on or worry about it though. He had to get home.
It took hours to crawl over, around and through the devastation. And when he finally reached his home, it had been reduced to blackened framework and smoldering ash. The entire neighborhood has been blasted and burned. He scrounged through the ashes, finding mementos from his life erased from this plane of existed. Hope began to take hold that his wife and child had gotten out. Gotten somewhere safe. And then his hope was shattered. In the remnants of the bedroom he found them. His wife’s body curled protectively around his daughter. His heart stopped. He reached out reflexively to give her a gentle shake, as if it would wake her from the slumber. Their ashen forms collapsed, reduced to nothing.
He gathered up a few meager belongings, the only remaining picture of his wife and foal, and left the pain of his former life behind. The magical radiation and Zebra necromantic magics changed him. His flesh began to putrefy and slough off while his eyes became white, featureless orbs. Equestria died with them it seems. The Pegasi retreated behind the clouds, essentially pulling the sheet over the corpse that was his homeland. The ponies who survived on the ground learned to do just about anything to keep surviving.
He witnessed many atrocities as the morals of ponies gave way to survival instinct and madness. Roughly a year of wandering the corpse of Equestria, he was set upon by a group of ponies. They demanded his food, of which he had none. They beat him and tore through his belongings. He curled himself around the scorched picture of his family while they kicked him, pleading to the powers that be to deliver him from this nightmare. They accused him of hiding his food somewhere and beat him more for refusing to tell them where. One of the unicorns ripped the photo from his hooves and tore it to shreds as he pleaded for him to stop. When it was so much confetti the stallion let the remnants drift to the ground. That was when he died. That was when Wight was born. There was an old trick his daughter used to adore where he would make her favorite plushies dance and twirl to her amusement. His broken horn crackled and flared with purple energy, crackling and sparking as the spell worked. His attackers froze, the movements halted. Their eyes darted this way and that as they found themselves stuck and unable to do anything. Wight slowly got to his hooves, a faint glimmer of his magic reflecting in his dead eyes.
First he made them dance, like his daughter would have enjoyed.
Then, he made them apologize for all they had done.
And lastly, he made them eat eachother alive since they were so desperate for food. As he stared at the bleeding corpses of his attackers he realized that life would never be the same, and that if he were to survive, he’d need to become somepony else. Some… thing else. He telekinetically straightened his slightly burnt business suit and set off to make his way in this new and terrible world.
Over time he amassed a following of ponies. Desperate and disparate souls who made him their leader. Not raiders, but not good ponies either, they controlled a significant area of the wasteland outside Baltimare. Wight became known as the Puppet Master, and his strings stretched wide over the wasteland. He collected tithes of food and water for his underlings, taking only the most irradiated for himself. Though he was not one to trifle with, neither was he a wanton monster. His ponies were well cared for, and this care extended to the ponies in the territory he controlled. In fifty years he’d founded himself a small empire. It was after all this time that he realized how it was all for naught. The land he owned and the ponies under his control did nothing to soothe the ache inside him. So he left. He passed on his empire of dirt to his second and walked out on the life with nothing but the clothes on his back. Some years later he would hear the tale in a saloon of how the empire of Baltimare crumbled to infighting and greed.
Two hundred years since the bombs fell and Wight lives alone, in a shack at the far edges of a shanty town, deep in a radiation zone from a zebra bomb. The town grudgingly accepts his presence. Afterall none here were alive when his empire still ruled, or even when it fell. He was here when ponies began building the settlement and will likely be here after. At first he was annoyed with the ponies suddenly interrupting his solitude. And then one morning he heard a sound he’d not heard for so very long. A foal, squealing its little head off. One of the mares in town had had a child, and despite himself, Wight was just as pleased as all the other residents. He’d congratulated the new parents, and offered his knowledge on how to raise a child. The parents had politely accepted, but never took him up on the offer. He didn’t care. It was just nice to see life created for a change.
Wait a minute? What's this? Oh... something. Something... big. 
