Fallout Equestria: Begin Again
Chapter 7: Gravedigger
“So be it. You’ve dug your own grave. Grave! Grave!”

|*| Too Close to the Sun |*|

A Phoenix rose before the mobile of corpses: still proud for its trailing feathers of flame, though their sheen had faded to gray as strips of paint were peeled loose, like the rind of a fruit made dark with rot. The bird splayed its wing up towards the overpass, from which the ropes had drawn taught, to make string puppets out of five ponies… to make a gallows out of this quiet and unsettling place.

Phoenician Energy: Let your journey begin anew. The slogan hung from the steel bones of its wing in rank with those faceless bodies. For each letters’ colors had also been drained, no differently than blood going cold under the skin, to leave them in uniform with so much of this wild new world.

Now that the mist had cleared, the air was becoming more silver than it was white, for the light of the sun came through in beams, which flickered as if in rhythm with the streetlights dotting the road. The storm above was a sleepless and bothersome thing, not unlike an immense godchild vying for our attention.

And its shadows spun around us, as if the world was at the bottom of a pool. We moved forward, towards their ten heavy hooves, though even the twitching of a pine tree or the rustle of straggling leaves would make Caliber stop, and sniff at the air like a dog. Their bodies might have passed for mannequins or ceremonial rag dolls, lifeless as the molting Phoenix, which now looked flat: more a billboard than a bird.

“They died from the hangings.” Each of the ponies had had their faces bloated over broken necks, though, under the nooses, they were whole, nothing like those bodies used as dead sentries around the tribal warcamp that was Hell. Caliber and I drew in a little closer, stepping over the road as carefully as we might a shallow river. “This was… suicide.” I whispered the word, afraid of the power in it.

“Maybe… but keep your eyes peeled, and get real friendly with that Pipbuck of yours,” She said, evenly. We stepped into the easel onto which the streetlights were printing their shadows, again and again.
“This could be some kind of trap.”

Five pieces of bait, cast from the overpass like gray earthworms on a hook. “Let’s see if we can find a way up onto the roof.” Caliber’s voice shook me out of a daze, as watching them sway, watching them bump into one another like muted wind chimes, had me hypnotized. “We should get a better look at ‘em.”

The station’s convenience store, which looked to have been sat on, stretched out under those ten hooves of many colors. “What could have driven them to this?” I asked, trying to tread lightly for how quickly I had condemned that buck before the mouth of Hell: that tortured, heartbroken lunatic.

Caliber ran on ahead, leaving me and my question to one another, but I was quick to follow as I caught the bushfire of her tail disappearing into the store’s breached hull. The squat little building was far worse for the war than the station’s metal roof, or the bundle of gas pumps under its wing. In fact, there was little evidence of the apocalypse here, apart from the great black circles of spilt gasoline, like holes in the asphalt, and that one rusty old jalopy, bleeding out the static and the songs of Galaxy News Radio.

There was a Sparkle Cola machine standing guard beside the doors, and its red lights, coupled with the looping calligraphy that had spun out its name, reminded me of that first night in Acheron. A tender kind of nostalgia came to a glow inside me, and I did my best to shelter it, like one might a small fire.

The building was lodged between the station and the overpass, drowned in the sunlit stream that passed between those two banks of steel and concrete, and it wore an electric brand that named it Quick-Stop. But, as the fluorescents behind its punched out walls flickered, I saw that the ruin had been picked clean.

I entered the building through its jammed doors, instead of pouncing over the ruins of a poster-coated wall like Caliber had, as a part of me thought it would be more polite. As if the station deserved to be treated like a freshly dug grave, with the Phoenix serving as its ornate, and no less desolate, headstone.

As I stepped onto tiles that had crumpled into one another like tectonic plates, littered with faces thanks to a slew of magazine covers and pamphlets, I understood why the dead hadn’t taken their rest in this low place, to make an abattoir of it. Not only did it feel as if all these models and spokesmares were watching as a smiling, beautiful audience from below, but the ceiling had fallen in on itself almost completely.

Caliber stood on what had once been the roof, waiting; as if she’d run the length of a leash between us. A wide tongue of concrete had been pressed into the room, as if to make us a walkway up into the swirling clouds. Empty shelves were pinned down under the serrated edge of the ruin, where the building’s dark framework stuck out like a row of bones that could bend before they broke.

My side of the store, which hadn’t been pinned down under that tongue of rubble, was where the cashier could be found. Its booth opened up to the station outside, so that travelers drawn in by the fires of the Phoenix could pay for their own small share of its power. “Wish these old ruins still set the lights in my eyes to shining,” Caliber said, slipping a nervous spring into my step, until I saw her smiling.

I didn’t yet know if she was a patient mare: if she could stand my slow hoofsteps and wandering eyes for the length of the open West, but the mercenary seemed to get something out of watching me take in the wasteland she had mastered, as if the lights in my eyes were bright enough to shine out over it.

“You’d better skip along now, Sugar. Looked like those corpses were strung up with wire. And they’ll be going soft as boiled apples before long.” My stomach hurt, and it frightened me to think that it might have been for hunger, and not disgust. She nodded up to the station’s roof, though the mare had lost her smile. “I’m bettin the sight of one burst open on the asphalt will blow those lights out like birthday candles.”

*** *** ***

The sky was bright. And, were it not for how surgically the storms had been cut off before the bare blue easel of the North, I would have thought they were finally passing. Now, the clouds might have met an invisible wall, and the fires of a sun we couldn’t see came spilling over their lip like the juice of a forbidden fruit. It was hard to love the light, though, as it made it all too easy to see those five faces, with their bulging eyes and chicken necks, and mistake every trick of the wind as a twitch, as a plea for help.

I tried to ignore them, and looked instead at the symbols on their flanks, which had not been marked with the print of death’s fingers. Their cutie marks might have been pulled from a filly’s sticker book, and pressed over images that matched the violence in the Raider’s naked heart, the weight of Damascus’ empty cross, or the promise of Caliber’s black and white crosshairs.

They might have been hidden under Stable jumpsuits, or worn proudly at the hem of old world fashion. And from east to west, they went something like this: Three candles, a ragged book, the Sun in a ring of triangles, a red ribbon around a key, and a mareless moon tucked into a bed of stars. “This is too neat,” Caliber complained, even as the suspicion flooded back into her voice.

They had become a gallery, and though it was an eerie thought, I imagined those bony fingers, lingering until each body was hung just right, as if Death was a perfectionist. “Do you think they might’ve had help?” I offered, though we couldn’t see the road where their wires would no doubt be tethered.

“Wouldn’t call it help.” She frowned up at the bodies, able to look at them without turning away for air, as if they were nothing more than ornaments bought in bad taste. “You’re some kind of doctor, right?” For a moment, I forget the gallows and beamed, for her word was as good as any graduation day, any hoofshake and certificate. “What’s your read on ‘em? D’you figure they died before getting strung up?”

I’d never done an autopsy before, as the Stable door had almost kept that bony old fussbudget shut out, but it was clear that the only damage to these five were the rings of raw skin drawn around their necks like collars. “I really don’t think so, Caliber.” I shook my head, slowly, as if her suspicions were to be treated with care. “It looks more like they were trying to say something: to leave a message…”

“You might be on to something,” She said, flicking her tail towards the horizon, which wore the edge of the storm like a shimmering crown, lay slumped into a throne of earth, and made its armrests in the washed out mountains. But before that, easily missed at the cusp of the station’s pale roof, there lay a small circle of saddlebags and richly dyed fabrics, set out in line with the mare hanging in the middle. Caliber winced, as our hoofsteps rang out through the metal, no different to if we had been striking a bell.

The wind was that much more bracing now, as it molded alien smoke signals out of our breath, and I almost felt like I had been dropped onto a raft in the middle of the ocean. The circle, laid out like an offering to the hanged idols above us, enclosed a cluster of five gray faces, as if to mirror those that were looking down on it, though these were square and metal: not fleshy and bloated.

“What are they?” I asked, tentatively, like a mare fresh off the boat from the old world, staring up at the faces of the pioneers and mapmakers who had first come dancing across the water, only to be turned to stone, and to gods, in the jungle. Caliber was circling the shrine, checking for traps or sniffing for treasure, but looked up to answer me.

“Holotapes.”

*** *** ***

“I am Cyrus of the Later Days, and this recording speaks as I no longer can… to leave reason for our flight from the face of the earth.” Something was wailing behind him and, for how lost it was to language, I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t an animal. I might have thought it was a baby, or a pup, but nothing so young could know what it meant to cry like that.

“We once thought that plenty and peace could come again, that our Faith would pave the way to better days, but now… we have learned that this day, and all that follow, will be no different to our last. There will be no return of harmony, and even the promise of paradise has turned sour in our mouths, like grapes, all frozen and foul for this endless season… It is too late.”

It felt as if sandflies were creeping over my body, digging into my skin with every step, sending chills out in circles around them. “We have seen history stripped of its lies, watched our scripture worn thin under the light, and so the path ahead is clear. We began this pilgrimage so that we might see the world that harmony held together, so that we might visit the ruins of paradise, but know now that it never was.”

While we listened, Caliber watched the horizon, wary of whatever dark and terrible thing had pulled the Faith out from under this old buck. “All this time… we sowed our fields and used our guns as better times would see us using more pastoral tools, all for the love of an abomination. An abomination...”

The mercenary was toying with rifles held together by little more than metal rings and straps of leather: the very rifles that had seen them killing as if it was a chore like any other. “The Faith that once made this more than a edgeless waste… is gone, and we must fade with it. I led this pilgrimage, and though I failed to see it bow before the thrones of Canterlot, I will not fail to lead it on these pathways into Darkness.”

“To Sleep. To Peace.” I wanted to speak up, to stop him, as I‘d almost forgotten that nothing could be done, that these words had only barely gotten out before the wire tightened around his neck.
“You will follow me?” He asked, and three voices answered the same.

“Yes.” Wept another, forcing the word out as if in place of her tears.

“You can’t… Goddesses, don’t do this.” Pleaded another voice, which was soft and as stilted as a dove’s coo, though it might have been carrying the weight of the world on its back, for how weary it sounded.

“Are they secure?” He ignored her, and I could already tell that she had been begging well before they’d hit record. And neither would sway, but for the wind and a wire drawn taught. “Good.”

There was a commotion, as the buck readied himself for one last journey, though he was dragging a pilgrimage over the edge after him. “Leave whatever words you would give to this Last of the Later Days… I have nothing more to say.”

The sound of a wire pulling taught, a snap, and a desperate little cry followed the last words of Cyrus. Behind a bed of static, I could hear the country howling, and we looked out into the horizon, where a faraway radio tower’s satellites had been turned to fragile petals.

*** *** ***

“Harvest, please…” Another buck spoke now, though his voice was frail when compared to the first. “Please don’t cry. Not now… We’ll go together. Holding on to one another as the wires tighten. Just… for me - don’t let yourself leave like this.”

“Al-alright,” The mare sputtered. “For you… The sun and moon will set together.”

Slowly, I began to put a cutie mark to each voice, and found Cyrus for the years written in between his words, and the creases in his skin. “Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time?” That worn out voice asked, though even I could hear that she was drawing at straws from their scripture. “Realize what you would be wasting… remember what you would be giving yourselves to.”

“You never believed in the promise that was broken here today. You are still too young to understand.” This third buck was strong, but only for the depth of his voice. Otherwise, I could still hear his twisted nerves and the Faith spilt like so many ashes across the sand. “One day… you will follow us.”

“You’re throwing yourselves away.” I wanted to stand by her side then, as it was all too clear that she was a mare torn into too many pieces to save anyone. “This is pointless!”

“I’m ready…” Harvest had stopped crying now, and I heard her and the second buck kiss. “I love you.”

*** *** ***

“So… I’m next… got to turn myself in to the empty, huh?” As another mare spoke, I knew that the gallows had left at least one survivor, one pilgrim who hadn’t followed Cyrus on his path into darkness. “Maybe… Turnkey, maybe we should stay with her… just for a little while longer.”

“You have to stop… you have to.”

“You saw that thing, Ascella.” The third and the last of the bucks sounded unmoved, as if he was eager to be thrown over the side, eager to go sinking towards the bottom of the world. “You killed it.”

“We all did,” Said the second and the last of the hanged mares.
“Oh… we really did, didn’t we? We killed her.”

“It.” His voice was slowly turning to stone. “There is no one watching over us, Ascella. This isn’t the world we thought it was, that we were taught it was. We were fools… and now we’re alone. We’re all alone.”

There was another snap, like an exclamation mark being struck into the margin. “Goddesses… no.”

*** *** ***

“I’m going to pray for you.”

“No one will hear you. There’s no one left to listen.”

“You can’t really believe that.” I was surprised by the anger trickling into her voice, though it pooled over a single word, and came to a boil. “What we saw wore the skin of an alicorn. But It was an abomination, not a Goddess blackened by the fallout! It meant nothing.”

“Cyrus didn’t think so. He was wrong to give us his Faith. He was wrong to teach us his songs. He was deluded. But, together, we saw the lights go out. This…” I didn’t have to be there, to know that he was waving out at the West. “Is all we have left. And Ascella…. even you cannot live with that. Not for long.”

“Don’t run away.” And, with that, the first and the last of the living fell into a shambles, though I couldn’t tell if the mare was crying, as hooves ground against the overpass. “Don’t… You can’t come back from this.”

The static began to narrow, as if we were going down a tunnel, whose mouth had been pinched closed. “That’s the point.”

*** *** ***

“Caliber,” I said, chasing off the silence that had followed us down from the gas station, like a heavyset and indefinitely loyal animal. We walked between the shadow of the overpass and the mountain’s long faces, searching for the last of these lost pilgrims, following great paths of earth lapped bare as if by the tongues of fallout. “What did they mean, when they said… alicorn?”

There was still one holotape left, and I had stolen it from the shrine, thinking that it might have been filled with the voice of the very mare we were looking for. I had to find her, and clung on to the recording, as one might the last pictures of a onetime valentine.

Caliber wasn’t answering, and I fussed my way around one of the rare clusters of pine trees, which often stood on a bed of stone and shrubs the color of a flame, as if that Phoenix had spilled its blood into the earth, only so it could be pulled up as firewater into a root. The trees had taken on the color of ink, and were so thin and so sharp that they might have been dashed into the air by a transient fountain pen.

“Caliber?” I caught up to her, after having to skip over a few licks of snow and rusty colored grass, woven out from the root of the mountain as if to make a corner for the immense tapestry called the West.

“You wear a cross on your coat,” She began. “Does that mean you’re… like them?” She tilted her head up at the overpass, where the bodies hung like shadow puppets before a show.

“No.”

“Good.” She let out her breath, though it was quickly turned to smoke. “That’s good. I’d bet money on this alicorn myth coming from a bunch of batshit southern priests, waving crosses and spitting holy water at everything that goes bump in the night.” She made herself laugh, and had to lift her scarf over her lips, catching the giggle as another mare might a cough.

“Problem is: Galaxy’s brought ‘em up a couple times, now. And if you can’t trust DJ Pon3, you can’t trust anybody. Granted, he never talked about them as anything more than an extra. More like local gossip than news: whisperings stirred up by some bite and no bark crazy, y’know?”

“Sure. Even the Stable had its tinfoil hats.” I couldn’t help smiling a little, remembering what Doctor Cross had once said. No one’s crazier than they are on a hospital bed. It’s usually the anesthetic, or the fever dreams, but sometimes the fear of death is enough to bounce a sane mare right off the wall.

“One way or another: that Ascella girl was right to call ‘em abominations. Hear tell they’re your standard night-stalking, pony-snatching boogie mares. Nothing like the old Princesses… those two aren’t exactly hard on the eyes.” She nudged me, and we smiled as if forgetting these devils in the dresses of our country’s first and only saints. “Anyway, this Ascella thinks she killed one. But, far as I could tell from their voices, the rest of those pilgrims were Easterners. And GNR falls off before the Plain.”

“So, wherever they came from, we’re all jumping off of different myths.” I frowned, wondering why it took Pilgrimages, Contracts and Quests to get ponies out here exploring. Even if you had a Damascene bed of laurels to lie back on, it didn’t seem right to let all these wastelands go to waste.

“Are there usually many travelers coming through the Middle Passage?” I asked.

“Well, if you’re crossing the compass, it’s the way to go. There’s another valley to the North, tucked under the last Equestrian mountains. But they got Savages coming up from the underground, and stripes blending in and out of the snow and the Blackrock. Good luck to any caravan trying to talk their way out of that kind of trouble, won’t get much but twisted tongues. Good riddance to anyone stupid enough to try shooting.” My Pipbuck chirped up, and pinned a marker on the heart of the valley like a medal: Zion.

“Southern roads are even worse. The lowlands between these mountains and the capital have gone pink, like Canterlot sprung a leak. Cloud’s not nearly so thick, but the traders steer clear, unless they want to end up dragging their pack Brahmin behind ‘em like big sticks of butter. You can see your hoof in front of your face easy enough, but that won’t seem so sweet once it starts melting.” I winced, wondering what kind of disease might be so ravenous as to eat a pony alive, like a thousand tiny piranhas. “You might be able to see it from MASEBS: a kind of washed out pink dye leaking out of the Canterlot Caves.”

I wanted to ask her about… well, everything: from our beleaguered Capital to the flood that rocked it like an ark at sea. But I knew that there would be another time. For now, it was more important that we find this orphaned mare, and hunt down the alicorns that had chased her pilgrimage off the edge of the world.

“Let’s listen to the last holotape,” I said, as the silence had hung open long enough to let the country’s howling creep in. I had to look back, as it was starting to seem like Caliber was taking her orders to follow me very literally, as she would stop whenever I stopped, and only ran ahead to peek through the pine clusters or around the heels of the overpass’ pillars. “Maybe it’ll tell us where to start looking.”

*** *** ***

“My name is Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum… and I am the last survivor of this Pilgrimage to Canterlot. I will leave this shrine in the shadow of the Phoenix so that, even as I try to save my family, you might choose to pick up some of the pieces of their shattered Faith.” She had been crying, and her voice came out rolling and damp, like an arctic tundra, though even Caliber might not have been able to place it on a map. “But if you came to hear me beg. You will be disappointed. That’s not how I speak to my Gods.”

Caliber and I were huddled together, as the mare’s Bohemian coo was like the fire at the end of a matchstick, and we were beggars rubbing our hooves together in the gutters of winter. Now, the clouds were ink stains, and the sky a white margin, as if the sun had lost some of its color for seeing so many of its children die here today, as if it was rolling backwards, to pull us all back into mourning.

“I saw Canterlot. From the ruin: a place broken long before the war: a place with bones of rock instead of steel. Once these graves are full, that is where I will go. The abomination is still alive, bleeding out on the shore of that pink sea. And once these graves are full. This is where I will go. This is where I will kill it.

“Then Samson prayed to the Lord: ‘O Sovereign Lord, remember me. O God, please strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on these philistines for my two eyes.’ Then Samson reached toward the two central pillars on which the temple stood. Bracing himself against them, his right hand on the one and his left on the other, Samson said: ‘Let me die with these philistines!’

“Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the bodies kneeling in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.”

“Give me the strength of this ancient Minotaur from across the sea, and see this abomination for the philistine that it is, so that I might give my body in service to the Goddesses, and pay for the lives taken here by the misguided and the fearful. My Pilgrimage chose to run away. But I will go into the mountains, and in the black light cast by that false and fallen sun, I will wash away their sins.”

“My Pilgrimage shook the hooves of demons selling self-destruction, but I will pay for that bloodguilt. I pray that my family might still be saved, but only as one escaping through flames. I pray that they are admit into the high kingdom: that Luna will light my empty sky with their souls as stars, and forgive them.”

“But, for now, that abomination still breathes… and we can’t expect the Goddesses to do all the work.”

*** *** ***

Caliber was distracting herself by keeping an ear to the ground, as if the earth could explain this alien and nonsensical thing called religion. The mercenary wasn’t used to it, despite her contract signed in scripture, and seemed distressed at the thought that there existed a force so great, so inescapable, that it could drive ponies to slip their heads into nooses or take up their slings and go charging off to fight giants.

Really, she was listening for the hoofsteps of wild horses, as only moments ago, belts of gunfire had come rolling down this passage behind the highway’s struts and the mountains wrinkled faces. The shots might have been fired out west, at the road’s elbow, or the gas station that we had only just left behind. Either way, we had a mare to find: a soft spoken and heartbroken little mare, and nothing to follow but the soil, which had to be soft enough make a bed for five bodies.

“If these alicorns are real,” I began, walking a wide circle around the mercenary, as she put her nose forward, trying to find ash in the air. “And the rest of the Faith is anything like Cyrus -“

“Then every church in the south will have bodies hanging from its ceiling.” She straightened out her neck, and cocked her head until I heard a crack. “Good thing it’s just a myth. Besides, from what I’ve seen, religion is barely alive, so much as kicking, anywhere south of the mountains running from Calvary to Canterlot.” South of the pink sea’s far shore. “I figure it’s the cold up here: got ponies ready to pray to anything, just in case it can change the seasons. As if any cloud lucky enough to be shaped like Celestia is gonna chase away winter if they ask it nice enough.”

We paused, just beside one of the highway’s massive stilts, though its middle had fallen into ruin, and now looked like a blown out kneecap. “Maybe it’s the sky,” I said, looking north.

“Maybe.” She circled the pillar, and I followed like a hunter after his hound. “Damascus told me that, way back before the radio towers went up, the earth ponies down Calvary way were far enough away from the Princesses to mistake them for Gods. As if looking at ‘em from a distance made it harder to tell.”

She nodded up at the overpass. “All these railways and roads were only rolled out during the war, but the mountains were hanging around long before any of us showed up. They did a good job of shuttin’ off the north for the first few ticks of the millennium hand. And when you leave us earth ponies alone… let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if this alicorn story didn’t spark up for two flat foreheads knocking together.”

I couldn’t help giggling a little then, though my horn might have had us in the same minefield that those three tribes had first danced through: where words like flathead were enough to kick off a war. “I don’t know about that, Caliber. You seem to have everything straight.”

“Well, I’m really very wise,” She said, polishing a hoof against her vest. “And, on top of that, religion was starting to fizzle out even before the bombs fell. The war had it ground down to cinders, and I like to think the Fallout blew ‘em out. I mean, all this counts on Damascus’ word enough to go on… But it is. That buck might has more decades under his belt than you have years.”

If you actually put the apocalypse down on a timeline, that wouldn’t seem possible, but I got the point. Damascus had an old soul. And I had to wonder how much of it might had been shut into those six orbs.

“The war made religion obsolete?” I wondered aloud. “I suppose that only makes sense: It must have been hard to see Celestia and Luna as Gods when they were going door to door trying to sell war bonds.”

I didn’t really know what to think of the Princesses. But they had certainly tried their best to see an Equestria victory, even if it meant fanning away their age old airs of mystery, and hitting the streets like girl scout caravans, dragging along wagons full of cookies or, in their case, enlistment pamphlets.

Caliber had gone very quiet, and I quickly did the same as I watched her pressing an ear to the dirt. Our old textbooks had often shown Buffalo doing the same, and I wondered if Caliber might have picked up the habit from one of their tribes. The mare wouldn’t seem at all out of place in those grainy old pictures of the Marejave, and it wasn’t like a desert would look all that different for passing storms of balefire.

“This usually only works for two kinds of movement,” She whispered, as a hoof wove me out of the empty space between the pines. “Slow, lumbering, powerful movements… the kind that sends tremors through the earth, like something back Tartarus way is pounding against the walls of its cell. And jerky, erratic, excitable movements… the kind that hopscotch through the sand.”

She tucked me away behind one of the pillars, as my heart started skipping rope in my chest.
Fudge, fudge, call the judge, Mama had a bay-bee.
It’s not a boy. It’s not a girl. It’s just a little lay-dee.

“What’s coming?” I asked, even as their voices began to ring through the pillars.

She unlatched that hefty black rifle, and hugged it to her chest just as a filly might her favorite doll. “Trouble.”

*** *** ***

I suddenly felt very crowded, as if Equestria had just been flooded by waves of unwanted refugees, though no more than four ponies marched by us, like giant ants in a line. They looked worn out, but not weary: broken down, but not beaten. And even when they smiled, they didn’t look happy.

One of them was a unicorn, but I saw the thick pistol he had aimed at the storm before I did the horn buried in his dirty blonde mane. The weapon had a long clip arcing out from under its trigger, and looked like nothing I’d ever seen in the magazines. The same pistol hung out of the next mare’s mouth, but it looked far less terrible wrapped in a muzzle than it did bobbing in his colorless magic.

The other two bucks, who wore the same rough and tumble uniform of ragged edges and trophies dug up out of fresh graves, carried a shovel and a glinting knife in their mouths, and followed the dirty light of their leader like tireless young mules after a carrot on a stick.

Not that I have anything against mules… or that anypony should. I’m sure that, if I ever met a mule… well, I wouldn’t expect him to be trundling along after some silly old carrot.

Salt of the earth, that’s what they are, those mules.

Anyway, Caliber had her rifle leveled over a concrete bar stripped from the road, and I kept my laser pistol hovering at my hooves, so that these salty passersby would not catch the light of my own magic in the corners of their eyes. There were some tightly knit pine trees between us, and even if I were to look down the blocky sights of my pistol, they might mistake its glow for the light of the early afternoon sun.

“Uh oh. What if they find the pilgrim before we do?” I asked, in a voice low enough to go scurrying under closed doors. I couldn’t make anything close to words out of the Raider’s own garbled voices, but felt the need to whisper all the same.

Caliber arched a brow over the cusp of her rifle’s scope, and I watched her eye roll lazily over to me. “I’m sorry, were you not planning on killing them?” I glanced back at the passing parade, as if I needed to see those severed hooves again, all rattling along behind them like tin cans bound to a wedding car, with a head bouncing along at the end of a rope. “I didn’t realize we were letting Raiders into Hell now. We’d better go get Charon, so he can take their coins and sing ‘em the Welcome song.”

Jeez, I thought, smiling like a giddy idiot. I guess no one wanted a little bird chirping in their ear when they were looking down a line of fire. No matter how nice its song sounded. “Right. Sorry. So we’re just gonna… shoot at them, then?” I asked, tapping my hooves together in front of me.

“That’s usually how it goes, yeah.” She furrowed her brow, and pressed back into the scope. “Go around the pillar, and wait for me to take the first shot. When they turn and start runnin’ at me, go ahead and light ‘em up. If you get into trouble, just back on up and I’ll be here to get you out of it.”

I nodded. “These are the basics, Lamplight: the box steps.” She said that as if Death – who she so often dressed up as a dancer – was riding in the passenger seat of the Raiders’ wedding car, and they were bound to have their honeymoon on the dance floor. “It might not be long before you need to do this alone. So come on, Sugar. Sharpen your spear, and try not to think so much.”

“Yeah… thanks.”
I hurried off towards the pillar, and tried my best to take her advice, even if it meant drowning myself out.
Fudge, fudge, call the judge, Mama had a bay-bee.
It’s not a boy. It’s not a girl. It’s just a little lay-dee.
My laser pistol was shaking, and when the whip crack of Caliber’s rifle hit the mountains, it almost burst out of its cradle, as my magic came loose at the corners.

Before I knew what was happening, I saw the Raider's shovel digging into the earth, after spinning in a full circle for how violently its master’s neck had been twisted out of place. At least a half dozen rotten teeth were thrown into the air, like a witchdoctor’s rolling bones, as a red fountain pen scratched sloppy red lines into the snow. The buck’s skull was broken into pieces, as if it were a balloon, and Caliber’s bullet had been the last of too many breaths out.

Then, the pine trees were torn to splinters, as two submachine guns emptied their bellies at once. The third buck, whose teeth might have been coated in silver as the knife glinted in his mouth, managed to duck around the bullets, though they tore through the air like an angry swarm of wasps. He went bounding towards Caliber, and I finally collected my magic around the pistol, and aimed it at the mare who was breathing fire, as she emptied another clip into the concrete.

I pulled the trigger three times, though she had started to burn before I was done. She took one beam to the neck, another to the rat’s nest that was her mane, and dodged the last even as she beat at the wildfire spreading through the tangles of her hair.

With smoke rising from her crown of brittle thorns, and eyes full of tears, she punched another clip into the submachine gun, and was holding down the trigger well before she took aim. She didn’t hit anything but the pillar, as if we were all trying to bring the highway crashing down on legs full of lead.

I fired another two shots, knocking her head back with the first, and turning the submachine gun to something like hot wax in her mouth. She was demonized then, as her jaw was pulled wide by the weight of all that molten steel grafted to her tongue. Her mane had become a blackened ruin, like a forest put to the torch, and a third eye was glaring at me from the center of her brow.

With what was left of the laser pistol’s clip, I beat her down, as each shot landed like a slap across her cheek or a swift kick to her gut. She might have died early, but I fought her body to the ground, using energy cells in place of my own four hooves. In fact, if I hadn’t been too hysteric to reload, I might have turned her to ash. But instead, I pulled at the trigger, willing the pistol to spit something up.

As I stood over her, something cold and flat slapped against my side, and sent a lurch rolling across my belly. I looked up, just in time to see the second submachine gun go spinning out of its basket of pale magic, knocked out of place as one of Caliber’s bullets crumpled against its side.

But that was one fight, and for the bruise coming to bloom under my ribs, I knew that I was in another.

I skipped a few paces to the left, just as the second buck, the one that had once held a combat knife in between his teeth, swung at me with the shovel of his dead comrade. It looked like the knife had slipped, as his lips were torn at one corner, and the shovel’s handle was pressing into the wound, as if to leave its splinters like teeth into a freshly carved mouth.

He swung at me again, but I hopped over the flat of the shovel’s blade as it cut under me, and had more than enough time to cycle over to my baseball bat as he tried to come around for another attack. The Raider’s eyes had heavy bags under them, and looked at me with something like desire, though it was dull at its edges, as if I was the shimmering mirage of an oasis, or the X on a treasure map.

There were two holes in his chest, from which blood spilled like water out of a pierced canteen, and when he lunged at me, I could see that he barely had the strength to throw his weight around. This was already over. He had been thrown out of the ring, as if Caliber meant for me to knock her opponents out for her, as the bell went on ringing over our heads. I swung once, and broke the head off of his shovel.

I swung again, and as the tip of the bat touched the bottom of his jaw, the buck went rearing back onto his hind legs. Then, after skidding on his own blood, he collapsed into the dirt.

After making sure he was dead, I looked back West, and saw that Caliber had finished her fight. She had gunned down that blond Raider as he ran circles around the pine clusters, and troughed the earth for his submachine gun. Her kills were far cleaner than mine, as even the pieces of a shattered skull seemed serene when compared to melted flesh, burnt hair and twisted tongues.

“You alright?” As she ambled over to me, and refastened that terrible black rifle to her side, I had to wonder if we could ever lose a fight, once the bones of her battle saddle were put together again.

I nodded, and almost caught myself smiling. I didn’t like killing. But winning was nice.

She walked over to the head that had been trailing along behind them, and spat. “Shit.” She touched it. “This thing’s fresh off the branch.” I put a hoof over my mouth, repulsed by how easily she fondled that hollow face. “Wait…” She narrowed her eyes, and leaned in a little closer. “This guy look familiar to you?”

“Just leave it alone, Cal.” I said, as if she was my big brother, poking at a spider on our doorstep. Eventually, she backed away from the thing, but couldn’t help keeping it in the corner of her eye.

“This is why we shoot Raiders on sight, Sugar.” She had the buck’s submachine gun hanging at her side, and held it up after dipping her hooves into the snowmelt, and washing the blood off. “Take this.”

I hesitated, but swept it up in my magic as the weight of it began to make her hoof shake. “I don’t use submachine guns: I do my killing down a scope, or at kissing distance. You give me a rifle with a long barrel, or a ballistic fist, and I’ll march into Hell with my contract pinned to my sleeve. That’s black and white. I like that. It’s everything in-between that’ll have you slipping a noose around your neck.”

*** *** ***

I might have thought the sun was setting, as the storm had wings of ink splaying out over it as if from a fountain pen with its head snapped off. Still, all the spaces between the stains shone out white as streetlights, and though they didn’t flicker: they came and went like sandbars under a fitful tide.

We were following the sound of metal scratching at the earth and, if only for Caliber dropping its name: I couldn’t help imagining the inmates of Tartarus, trying to dig themselves out. We came to the lip of something like a pasture, tucked inside that dotted timberline and the litter of both highway and mountain, which might have been mistaken for the ruins of the first stone city.

The flat edge of a shovel bobbed out of one of five holes in the earth, throwing up silt like ashes to ashes.

“This is it.” Fudge, fudge, call the judge. “Try to watch what you say around her.” Mama had a bay-bee. “Don’t tread on Celestia’s tail. Faith might be the only thing that’s keeping her going.”
It’s not a boy. It’s not a girl. It’s just a little lay-dee.

“Got it.” With a sly look on her face, Caliber closed in on me, as one of her hooves came to hover between us. “Just as long as you remember what she’s hunting, and try your best not to look like such a Goddess.” She booped my nose, and ran off in a flurry of red, like a filly playing ding dong ditch.

I couldn’t help blushing a little, and felt my nose with a tentative hoof, as if the Princess herself, on a campaign to win back the country, had just planted a kiss there. After standing by for a little while longer, as if to move would be to give up the hearth’s warming that had reddened my cheeks, I skipped along, with my hooves clicking like sleigh bells.

Caliber tapped her hoof against a stone, treating it like a bell on a hotel counter, and the mare in the grave looked up. She might have slept in a bed of autumn leaves, for the texture of her mane, though it had been colored purple by brushes dipped everywhere from the spaces between the stars of dawn to the darkest flowers of a lilac tree. It fell like a hood clasped at her shoulders, and she had to brush it away, so that she could look up at us. Her eyes were dark, but shone like glass speckled in the rain.

She planted her hooves in the middle of the grave, and stared through us without so much as a word. Her coat was a pale olive, but a pattern of stains, shifted a few shades darker, spread all across her body. At first, I thought the dirt had drawn those strange designs on her, but a thick belt of bandages, running from her belly to the collars of a white undershirt, had me thinking that they might be old burns.

The cotton of her torn off sleeves and the rumpled black of her vest, which was decorated in needlework swirls, made her own colors seem faded and tired, as if to show that the West had not welcomed her with open arms, but only sought to wear her away like any other inkstain. And even as the wind fluttered her collars, she didn’t make a sound, as if she was made only of worn pieces of paper, pasted onto the world.

Around her neck, she wore a short cashmere shawl, whose colors made it look like the sand and the soil under that bed of leaves. And, over the darker edge of the cloth, there hung a tribal necklace, though I couldn’t decide what it looked like more: an airship overgrown with rust, or the molted skin of a locust.

“Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum,” I recited, pronouncing her name as best I could, as if that would be enough to show her that the songs from the scripture had been my lullabies, that the dead language buried in her name was not lost to the world. But the little pilgrim stayed quiet, and as the silence hung open, as the country began to wail behind us, I could almost hear my heart pounding. Fudge, fudge, call the judge.

“Hear tell there’s someone playing Goddess in the mountains.” Caliber put one hoof in the grave, offering to pull the mare out. And only then, did I see the shotgun rigged to her side. “Let’s go kill her.”

*** *** ***

As Caliber pulled her out of the grave, I had taken a good look at her cutie mark, for it was a symbol no less cryptic than my own, and I felt like we might both be searching for the same Rosetta stone. Hers was a black teardrop, with four diamantine corners, and a star resting at its base, colored after fields of twilight. It was falling, as a Phoenix’s tail of deep purple licked up to the sharpened point of the teardrop.

“So…” Caliber began, as the crunch of our hoofsteps against the soil and those narrow feathers of snow became too much to bear. The pilgrim hadn’t said a word and, for hearing her only though the speakers of my Pipbuck, I listened for the whirring of cassette wheels, as if when she finally opened her mouth, static would come out. “Once we’re done patting the dirt over those graves, what’re we gonna be up against? What’s your read on this abomination?”

I almost felt guilty, as the mercenary was doing all the work in keeping the silence from collapsing in on us, pressing her weight against the front door, trying to keep all the snow from snapping its hinges.

“I mean, I’ve met folks that’d bet an arm and a leg on there being aliens spinning around this old world, usually on account of catching a streetlight blink in the corner of their eye, or having too much whiskey warming their bellies.” She had to look away from the little mare, as her eyes were like a forest in a fence: they might have been easy to get lost in, if only you could find a way in. “Now, I’m just playing Discord’s advocate here, but… you sure you’re not making hurricanes out of the beating of butterfly wings here?”

I winced, as if she was bringing the hammers down on my highest strings, and not the pilgrim’s.
“I spilt its blood on the sand,” She said, in the voice of a gypsy girl, running through the crowd that had gathered to watch her father dance, with a hat full of coins. “And it folded itself away into the air, as if cutting a door out of the sky, and slamming it shut. It ran away. I know that it can be hurt. That it can feel fear: that it can be chased. That’s all that matters.”

She was starting to sound like Damascus, and from the way Caliber had gone quiet, I had to wonder if she could hear it, or if, like a dog, she had lowered her ears to what sounded like the voice of her master. Damascus was Damascus, but knowing that the word of some Celestia entombed in scripture could turn this mare, who was barely more than a child, into another soldier of god, was enough to make me shiver.

“The Goddesses ask only for honest actions, produced by honest hearts.” She recited, as we circled another of those concrete pillars. “I don’t know why you are helping me, but if it is only for proof, then take the abomination’s head when we are done. I don’t care if it ends up signing on the wall of a bar, or worshiped on the dais of some tribal priestess’ shrine. Just as long as the light in its eyes has gone out.”

I caught sight of that plucked Phoenix, rising as a pillar of ashes from the ashes, and watched the paper pilgrim, hoping that I might find a filly tucked under all the wrath of this holy war. And then, as if my eyes were no different to a barbarian siege or trumpet’s call, the walls came tumbling down, and I saw the little girl who had watched her family throw themselves from the overpass like so much litter.

They bumped together in the breeze, like boats packed too snugly into a narrow bay, or the mobile over a baby’s cradle on the bough, and as Ash’s eyes were pierced, and beads of ink seemed to pool before running clear, the tears went trickling down her cheeks.

And, for a moment, I was happy: Happy to know that she could still be saved, that she could come back from this. But then, I looked up at the bodies, and saw an abattoir picked clean of its meat: a harbor full of ships torn to pieces by the winds of a monsoon. And, as Caliber cursed under her breath, I remembered the Raiders, and knew from which tree they had plucked those strange fruit.

*** *** ***

Caliber and I stood back, trying not to watch as this stranger buckled and shook, surrounded by the scattered pieces of her family. I couldn’t tell if she was praying, or wailing, but it was clear that we could not step onto the temple’s bloody floors, all littered with flesh like pages of scripture torn from the spine.

The sky was dotted with little white birds, as if an enormous cage of doves had been turned loose to make a spectacle of these last rites, but they did not fly, and instead sank to the earth and melted away.

“Is this… snow?” I had to gather up my courage before asking, as the silence had never felt more at home, and a part of me worried that the air might only have been crowded by the flotsam of radioactive fallout. I held up my hooves, trying to catch the dots as a beggar would crumbs.

Caliber just nodded, and turned her head up, to let the sky’s mercury spill over the brown of her eyes. I was a little startled when she stuck her tongue out, and let the feathers melt onto its tip. She giggled, and shook the dew out of her mane, as if she had fallen asleep in a ring of red cups on the lawn.

I copied her, and we licked at the sky as if it was cotton candy, laughing as Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum stared up a carousel whose horses had been pulled apart.

“I’m going to ask her to come with us,” I announced, as the corpses spun in the corner of my eye, like ballerinas streaked in red warpaint. “After this is over... Once the alicorn is dead.”

“Grace…” We watched the mare ahead of us trembling, and the snow might as well have turned to ash in our mouths. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“She’s all alone.”

“And we’re not?” It was almost like she wanted to leave, to sneak away as Ash lowered her forehead to the earth, and had it smeared red. “You heard the tape: this changed her. She’s got nothing to lose but it.”

“You’re afraid of her.”

“Afraid? No.” She shook her head. “But there’s a fire in that mare. And if it gets out: there’s no telling who it might burn. I’ve seen decent ponies fall off for less than this: seen Raiders cooked up for less than this.”

“That won’t happen with her. It’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen with her.”
Even if it meant walking the pilgrim to war.

Caliber looked back to the corpses, and her eyes ran along the length of a buck who had been left in two pink halves, like those of a fish laid out over a bed of ice. “It’s your call.” She shrugged. “I guess it can’t be much worse than working for a religious nut, right?” I dug an elbow into her side, and we were both smiling, even as the snow wove diamonds into our hair.

Ash glided back over to us, with the shawl pulled up over her nose, and the colors of her Pilgrimage dotting the end of each of her hooves. It wasn’t hard to see that she’d been crying, as her eyes were lined with that same shade of red, and her body was still shaking. She was a bird with a broken wing, and I felt like picking her up, and building her a nest in the front pocket of my father’s shirt.

“Alright, Ascella.” Caliber clapped her hooves together, coaxing the pilgrim out from behind her shawl. “I think it’s about time we deep six this bitch. So lead on, and we’ll send that abomination… bang!” She clicked her hoof and made a whistling noise as she dipped it into the sky. “Straight to the moon!”

Ash laughed. And, for a moment, I thought she might be choking, as her voice was still waterlogged, just as her cheeks still shone. It didn’t last long, more like a chirp than a trill, and though I hardly knew the beleaguered pilgrim: I liked to see her smile. “Thank you…” Her voice trailed off.

“Caliber,” said Caliber, and they shook hooves, making a blood oath for the sake of dead pilgrims.

“Grace.” I said, just a little too early.

Still, the pilgrim let her hoof drift over to me, and hummed, as if repeating my name in melody alone.
“That is an optimistic name.”

“I guess it is…” I shook her hoof. “It’s nice to meet you Ms. Ascella.” Caliber snorted and rolled her eyes, reminding me that manners fit the new world like a curse did the lips of a priest. And so, thinking that I had to win her back, I said something that would once have gotten me little more than a mouthful of soap. “Now, let’s go get this bitch deep-sixed.”

*** *** ***

The storm had run black, and for the snow that freckled its face, it might have passed for a shimmering night sky. From the root of this narrow gorge, which cut through mountains like the first notch on a stone tablet, the wind followed, and played with our hair. But the scent of death had left us, as if scrubbed away.

A twist in the path ahead turned the temple into something alien, as this place that the liar God called its throne could only be seen for the rare pillars bursting from either end of the path like rusted rifle barrels. The sand under my hooves felt cold and coarse, and as the wind beat against the mountainside, I already felt like I’d stepped out onto a shore worn down under the Wintertide. I kept my head up, as the clouds rolled in between those walls of stone, as if I was flying above an inky arroyo, looking down.

It was serene, but a part of me wanted to turn the blaring horns and howling voices of Galaxy News Radio loose, as if they were only demons caught in my Pipbuck. The DJ knew something about the alicorns, and he had pointed my gun before, in kicking off the open season for hunting Equestria’s Raiders. I needed him to tell me which way to lean, as all I had to spur me on now was the barroom mythology of a bound mercenary, and the dense eyes of a brooding zealot.

Ahead, I could see the arch of a crumbling gateway, which looked to have been built even before the mountains rose, as if this young landform had grown up around it. Where one might once have expected vines and overgrowth, there were only patterns of ash, as this was not a ruin like those explored by the likes of Daring Doo. This was a ruin that might never have been anything else, as if its architects had wanted to invent themselves a history.

We stepped through the gate, and came to the edge of an altar: a stony shore before the open sky, and a sea whose surf had been turned pink for all that thrashed and bled inside of it. Around the dais at its heart, there stood old torches; though they were more like shaven heads for their long since extinguished flames. But I couldn’t pay the architecture, or even the affliction being stirred over its lip, much attention, for what stood at the cusp of the temple, and the coast of that misty sea, like a gargoyle or a stone God.

It blinked, and I felt my heart sink. Knowing that it was alive, that it was real, made it hard for me to breathe. Stretched out at its sides, were wings, which looked to have been pieced together by a meticulous jeweler, running an entire chest full of black diamonds dry. Its feathers fanned out for every thunderhead that rolled away from its lips, and drew in tight when the abomination breathed in.

The blood running along its belly could only be seen when the light rolled the right way, and made it shine, or when a drop of it burst against the temple floor. Its ears twitched like nervous satellite dishes, and there, in between them, there was a spear breaking the skin of its brow.

Alicorn! The word came screaming into my mind. Celestia! Luna!
Nightmare Moon! I looked to its flank for a crescent moon, but found nothing but a starless night sky.
The thing had no cutie mark.

Even Caliber was holding her breath, though she answered to no Goddesses, and thought of the Princesses as two more pretty faces on the back of a magazine, or the side of a crooked skyscraper. Here was something out of a storybook: a villain and an animal, with naked flanks and black blood, that carried with it the sword of our country’s royalty. It had more power than it knew what to do with, like a child with a gun cradled in its frail arms, or a frightened nation with its hoof on that big, red button.

Ash looked up at me, as if this was my chance to stop her, as if I had any reason to think she would do better to walk away. Once the moment had passed, and the window closed, I heard Caliber unlatching her rifle, and watched as she pointed up at a nearby ridgeline, which ran like a wrinkle across the mountain’s face. “If we’re really doing this: I can keep a pin through that thing’s back from up there.”

“It is bound to this place: to the whispers it hears from the belly of that pink sea. But someone, whichever fool of a machinist twisted together this abomination, wrote the old magic into it. And I don’t know how far it might go, the next time it opens a door in the sky.” She pointed across the shore, whose pillars were as crooked as driftwood. “I will cross the altar, and throw myself into the fire. All you need to do is light it.”

I floated out the submachine gun, which had but a few dozen 10 millimeter rounds to digest, and charted my own path along the western edge of the temple.

I heard a click, as Caliber knocked a hoof against the space behind her chin, and between the lines of her jaw. “Far as I’ve seen: everyone’s got a soft spot.” The wind seemed to be groping at my neck then, and I squirmed. “And it’s usually right -” Click. Click. Click. “- Here.”

“Just let me punch a bullet into its skull before you start shooting.” She added, before we broke away from our huddle, like missionaries fanning out to three of the map’s four corners: all ready to burn this false idol to dead monarchs, to uproot this statue molded in the image of a Goddess.

I kept my head low, and circled the temple, worried that looking out over that great ethereal sea of rose petals, and the abandoned ship that was Canterlot, might have me hypnotized: so that the gargoyle and I could be sisters, for our rightful home in that faraway garden of prisoners set in stone.

I got as close as I had the courage to, coming around to the last of the altar’s broken crown of pillars, and kept the submachine close at my side. Now, I only had to wait until Cal-

Like the club of some wasteland purifier being struck against the filing cabinets of a ghoul infested office building, I heard her rifle. But, from the look of surprise that flashed across the alicorn’s face, I would have thought she missed, were it not for the spiral of blood that burst out from beneath the creature’s horn.

Then, the air began to warp around its hooves, and I saw a trapdoor swinging open into a basement full of blaring white light. It almost got away, but I shackled the abomination in place, as my Pipbuck grabbed the hands of Equestria's clock. It was as if the device had flipped order onto its head, to turn Discord loose on a world where everything was frozen still, but for the prisoners of the garden: those Phoenix turned to stone.

She was little more than an outline, cut out of the glare like one of those little paper fillies holding hooves. She was still very much alive, though a red meteor had put a crack in the altar from which her horn rose. Still, I primed the submachine gun, to have it spit its seeds at this caged bird, and let the world's hands spin.

A flash spread over the sky, as the alicorn’s magic slowly blew itself out: more like a birthday candle than a stick of dynamite, and for a moment I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t be throwing a clip of 10 millimeter bullets out over the poisoned fields of the south. But, as that wall of light began to crumble, to fizzle out, her body, black and damp as the hull of a ship, could still be seen, plowing through the stardust.

Golden lines of fire were drawn out between us, as the submachine gun was milked dry as if by the air, which still seemed thick and drowsy as molasses. I was lost to time now, and couldn’t know when all those mired clocks might start ticking up to speed. All I could do was watch.

The abomination had spread its wings over me, though their feathers barely twitched as that volley of lead tickled the beast’s belly. And, as the air became thin and my ears were unplugged, I heard the death rattle of the submachine gun, the drumbeat of a shotgun, and the whip crack of Caliber’s rifle.

The alicorn glided over the temple, leaving pools of blood like hoofprints, and plucked Caliber out of her nest. The mercenary’s rifle went spinning away from her, and as she reached after it, her hooves seemed to pierce the yolk of that silvery magic, and it fell apart around her. Even the color of it was alien, and as it broke, leaving Caliber to crumple against the altar, it was like watching a nebula getting swept up from the floor of the galaxy, as if the Goddesses were cleaning house.

Showers of buckshot tore through the alicorn’s wings, and even as I fed another clip into the submachine gun, long pentagons of that same light came to hover in the air, as shields held up around a king.

Our bullets sent ripples across her magic, and slowly wore down that electric suit of armor, until they were biting into her flesh, like mites that had crept into a breastplate. Ash and I came together at the cusp of the altar, and I helped Caliber to her hooves as the pilgrim spat up at those flickering screens.There was another flash, and the alicorn was warped into the space between us, coming together as if from the lines of code that had given Hell its one friendly face. I hadn’t known there was an exact opposite to gold… until now.

“INFIDELS!” Its voice pushed against the walls of my temples, from the inside out, and I clutched my ears as if to plug up slow trickles of blood. “Leave me alone. WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!?” In its tantrum, the alicorn’s struck me across the shoulder, and sent me stumbling into the sand around the altar. “I just want to listen… I only wanted…” Her voice became quiet, losing its grip on my mind.

The temple was reeling around me, and as I watched half a dozen stone knives hovering over the ruin, I thought the world had finally rolled off the edge, where it had been teetering since the bombs fell. But, after rubbing my eyes, I saw that eerie and interstellar dust making cocoons around each of the knives, as the abomination was pulling thorns out of the palm of the earth, only to turn them on us.

I limped back to the heart of the temple, where Ash and Caliber were running circles around the alicorn, whose eyes had become stars, and whose wings were splayed wide, to burn a black cross into the skin of the sky. And then, without so much as another lightning strike… it all fell down.

“YOU RUINED EVERYTHING!” Like a mobile with its strings snapped, the knives were crashing around us, and it was as if an asteroid belt had been steered into the temple. Caliber was running beside me then, and threw her weight against me, as if I was a frightened lamb, who had to be steered back into its pen. “You TOOK HER from ME!” The abomination was howling, though its voice flitted from emotion to emotion, from volume to volume, as if someone was toying with its dials.

The alicorn was trembling now, and as its hooves pounded down against the temple’s floor, Caliber went careening away from me, though I couldn’t know which one of us had lost their balance. “I’m sorry… Oh,” it moaned. “I’m so sorry.” It pulled up another shield, and let it tilt over Ash, who had surely worn her shotgun down as a wooden sword into a splinter. Soon, the pilgrim had her hooves pressing up against its shield, and the alicorn lowered it over her like the sole of a shoe over an insect.

A heavy round tore one of the alicorn’s cheeks into ribbons, only seconds before it disappeared, as if drained into the pinprick of starlight it left behind.

“I am getting so sick of this shit!” Caliber spat, and it came out red. “Headshots are Head Shots! Head. Shots. … For fuck’s sake!” I had to wonder what my mother would wash out of the mercenary’s mouth first: the blood or the four letter words. “This thing should be dead a dozen times already!”

Ash was lying on her back and, with all four of her hooves up, it looked like she had gotten stuck with the job of holding up the sky. “That thing… should never have been born,” She added, even as I cycled over to my father’s automatic pistol. “We must correct that mistake.”

“GODDESS!” The word nearly knocked me off of my hooves, as it struck the temple like an immense hammer. “GODDESS!” We had our flanks to one another now, and spun like the blades of a pinwheel. “PLEASE.” I felt a tremor behind me, as the sky was pulled apart as if along a seam. I ducked away from the rift, thinking that it might pull me in, and soon found myself standing on one side of the abomination, as Caliber and Ash ducked out from under its forelegs. “Speak to me”

It dug another shield into the earth, and began to slide it towards that great pink sea, like a plough. Caliber and Ash were caught behind the walls, and I saw them pounding at them as if at panes of glass. I looked up, to see a horn which might have skewered a star, and knew what to do.

With the automatic pistol rocking steady beside me, I held a hoof up over my mouth like a shawl, as the earth was being churned up behind the alicorn’s plough. Staring at the tip of that galaxy piercing spear, I drew my magic in tight around the trigger, and let the pistol kick against its cradle.

The wall came tumbling down, and I could hear the alicorn screaming from the lowest spaces of my mind. Even as my clip ran on empty, the creature's wings started beating, though I only had eyes for its neck, which was long enough to make prisoners of its prey, like the belly of a python.

I floated out the combat knife that a Raider and I had once paced circles around, and steeled myself, knowing that I would soon be cutting the abomination’s throat. Like two exhausted Pegasi thrown from a hurricane, Caliber and Ash fell back for the beating of its wings, and it was all I could do to stop myself from running to them. As it turned, to swat me away like any other insect, I threw myself towards the abomination, kicking hard off of the temple’s stone, and tackled its neck.

“REMOVE YOURSELF FROM OUR BACK!”

My weight made It rock, as if in water, for the alicorn had already lifted its hooves from the altar’s face. And then, as if I had pushed it off the edge of this temple on the shore, its hooves were drawing ripples through the rosewater, and I was flying.

The cross on my father’s coat became a golden bird, as it whipped out behind me, and the alicorn spun violent circles around the temple, like a moth circling a lightbulb. The combat knife nearly slipped out of my telekinesis, as its edges were fraying in the wind, and I had to take the weapon’s hilt between my teeth, and bite down hard, for fear of seeing it sinking to the bottom of the pink sea.

The world was going by in a blur, and pulled tears out of the corners of my eyes. I clung on to the alicorn’s neck as a fisherman might the mast of his ship, and though it banked and spun, it wasn’t long before the chaos got bored of us, and picked a side. The abomination threw its weight to the west one last time and, as if on its own, the knife had sheathed itself in her throat.

“Goddess… p-please.” Her voice was shivering, curled up at the bottom of my mind and, as we started to fall, I stopped choking the alicorn, and hugged her instead. “Goddess?” Her eyes rolled back, and I saw that pinprick of starlight, curled up at the bottom of each iris: shivering.

The temple was rushing towards us, and I watched it coming as so many had the skirts of the balefire. But then, as if turned out on negative film, the colors of her eyes were flipped, and they boiled over as the surface of two blue suns, pierced through the middle.

“You found me.” Electricity whipped around her horn, as if wrenched from the cables that ran under the country’s skin, and I imagined every streetlight in Equestria stuttering on and off.

Then, the candle went out. And I was alone.

*** *** ***

Grace? Grace!

Shit… She might have broken bones.
We need to get her bound. Before she makes the damage worse.
You listening to me, Ascella?
Ascella!

It’s gone.

Yeah… Yeah, I know.
I’m sorry.

Just get me that old case out of her saddlebags. I’ve got an idea.

These are…

Yeah, I know what they are. Now come on… roll me the red one.
The red one, Ascella.

Grace! Now I need you to hold this for me, alright Sugar? There’s a good girl…
You’re going to be okay.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk added: Gunslinger: Not only is weapon equipping and holstering now 50% faster, but all pistols, sawed off shotguns and submachine guns have their spread halved while walking or running.