Fallout Equestria: Begin Again
Chapter 1•1: Chant Down Babylon
“But the scars left by the war have not yet healed. And the Earth has not forgotten.”

|*| Delusions and Grandeur |*|

“The Desert,” Caliber decided, as she lifted her hoof like an old world gentleman, and helped me over the trunk of a collapsed birch. The trees that still stood looked to have been battered out of shape, and pawed at the mountainside like weary drunks in washed out coats of gold and green. “Only place the war couldn’t get its teeth around. You could roll a dozen more apocalypses into the desert and see it sweat ‘em out like a bad fever. Always been mile after mile of sand and shotgun diplomacy: of couriers and caravans… it’s always been Wasteland.”

It was as if we were climbing into the belly of the earth, as Zion was a sunken place, shut off from our open country, and it felt as if the mountains were crowding around us. But, though its walls were high and its paths twisted for pillars of stone and crude steps like staples in the earth, the fallout had come into this place as it danced across the country.

“More pilgrimages have passed through this valley than have ever been counted.” I was distracted, and their conversations came to me like melodies chopped up in the static. My neck hurt, as my head had been swiveling like a loose screw, and it was all too easy to lose sight of Ash in the blur, as she took to the bruised stone and papery leaves like a chameleon. “But I do not think this path was made for those hoping to give tribute to their Gods.”

“Damascus says they used to train soldiers down here.” As the valley yawned, I could see pine groves and yellow grass like food caught in its teeth, with the birch trees like wishbones. “I figure a thousand hoofprints must’ve been left between these steps. All in rank and file too.”

For some reason, that made me feel as if we were being protected, as if all those old soldiers had cleared us a safe path for the beating of their hooves. But, when we came to a bridge, like a stolen strip of highway over the water, I was almost afraid to cross is. There was something sinister about the valley, as streams whispered and hissed somewhere far below, and I had already lost sight of the sun. Fingers of smoke had come creeping along behind us, and though the fire at the outpost had died down, I would soon learn that the cold could burn.

Ash stopped in the middle of the bridge, and pointed her hoof to the sky, as if something had just come tearing through it. “That’s it!” Only then, did I pick out a pillar unlike all the others. This was not some crooked finger of stone, but a steady, silver line drawn onto a faraway mountainside. From where I stood, it scarcely looked any bigger than a sewing needle.

“That’s Celestia’s Landing.” She and my Pipbuck chirped at once, as if neither could hold back their excitement. I looked down, to find a new marker on my map.

“You wanna go?” I asked, making her smile back at me through a veil of hair, all with her hoof held up as if in a salute to the Old Gods.

“Yes.” She almost sang the word, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had just made a friend. “At the setting of the first sun, Celestia rested in the stone cradle where that monument now sits. She set her hooves down at the country’s farthest edge, after seeing her daylight sink out of the sky. That place… it’s the closest thing I have to Canterlot.”

“Lot closer to home than the capital.” Caliber had to help the pilgrim lower her hoof, as if adjusting a mannequin. “Why didn’t you all just head here in the first place.”

“We are, all of us, bound to bow before their empty thrones. One way or another. But a Pilgrimage should never follow the shortest path.” She looked out over the valley, and it brightened as those tendrils of smoke went slithering out. “The road to Zion may be short, but in giving yourself to the Goddesses, a dagger to the heart is not to be taken in place of a hundred lashes against a salted hide. One is quicker, but it is pain that makes a Pilgrimage.”

*** *** ***

“One of yours?” Caliber nodded up to the God painted on the stone, as if the little mare between us had carved each of its red stripes as scars on the inside of the valley’s cheek.

“No. It is tribal.” I frowned up at the rearing figure and the crude altar below it, having thought the Zebras would be beyond deifying some champion with a bloody lamb leg, and leaving the rest of the animal to steam from the neck. “We do not slit throats for our Goddesses. Or offer them platters of fruit as if spoon-feeding a foal.”

The buck, who was little more than a silhouette of ribbons, looked to have been flayed, cut into a hundred strips of meat, and then left out to dry on the stone. His face was that of an alien religion, his body as hazy as a shadow cast by the splintered light of a red sunset.

Tiny figures kissed the ground on which he stood, all buckled over on chalky limbs, while dotted red lines surrounded them like fire ants… or bloodied flags of surrender.

“Too bad we won’t get to kill this cocky bastard.” Caliber waved us away from the altar, as if we had bribed her to pull apart the curtains of some freakshow, and were paying by the minute. “Damascus told me that Zion’s savages used to take orders from something called a Caesar, back when they weren’t all beast and no buck. If this is one of them, these murals are at least a generation old. I don’t think the savages are much for painting nowadays.”

“Why are their stripes red?” I asked, as we returned to the path that dead soldiers ran raw.

“They used to carve ‘em on. Still do. But even Damascus hasn’t figured out why.” She shrugged, and I began to wonder exactly what the savages of Zion were. “Could’ve been to mock the zebras here. Or to become more like them.”

It was quite for a long while after that, as Ash and I tried to make sense of what the mercenary had said, as if to ask would make it seem like we hadn’t been paying attention: like we were a pair of fools. The disquiet swelled, and I wanted a bird to sing. I wanted some distant avalanche to send echoes rolling through the valley. Even faraway gunfire would have been enough to pull me up out of the white, angry drone of the silence.

“What are the savages?” I asked. It felt like I had come up for air.

Caliber looked over her shoulder, and sighed, as if she had only rushed us away from the Caesar to keep us from asking that very question. “Promise me you won’t freak out.”

“You know me.” I shot her a helpless smile, as canned laughter played in my head. She didn’t smile back. “O.K. … I promise.”

She inspected my face, as if looking for cracks in a clay mask, and then put a hoof to my chest. We came to a stop at the edge of an exhausted yellow meadow, at whose heart the streams were woven into a burbling black river. “Now… I don’t know much,” She said, as Ash wriggled her way into a nest of birch bones. “But if we want the zebra’s help: we’re going to have to point our guns the same way as theirs. And that’s towards the savages… towards ponies. At least, that's what they were. Way before the Zebra’s let ‘em… let ‘em out of their Stable.” My eyes went wide, and she watched her reflection wince in pools of champagne.

“It’s been open a long time, Gracie. Barely any different to a cave, now: a lion’s den.” She must have felt my heart hammering. “It’s just another ruin: just Wasteland.”

Swallow, I told myself, as if there was some foul medicine bubbling at the back of my throat. Swallow. It was fear, and anger and melancholy. It was jealousy. To think that someone could say that word, in speaking of a place that wasn’t home: that wasn’t mine: in speaking of a place that had housed a bloody Caesar and his savages. “Where?” I choked on the word.

“Here. Zion.” She bowed her head, and stared up at me, waiting for my mask to melt under a wash of tears, or crack in the heat of some temper tantrum. “What’re you thinking?”

“Nothing.” Undo it. Erase it. Burn it. “I’d just like to see it. I’m… curious.”

“Alright… so Ash has her monument and you have your Stable. This place is turning out to be a real tourist trap, huh?” Her expression didn’t change. And neither, I hope, did mine.

“It would be nice if you could find something to take us out of our way,” Ash mumbled, still preoccupied with her nest. “Then we all will have something to take from Zion.”

“Yeah…” Her eyes narrowed. “That’d be swell. But we’re stuck with wandering until the Zebras show. We’ won’t find them until they want to be found.” I was a thief, caught sneaking out of some pantry with my mouth full of food. And I knew she could see it, trickling out.

Then, as if Zion had grown bored, the silence snapped. But it was not birdsong or the sound of some landslide that went thundering through the valley: it was gunfire.

For a moment, I let the mask slide off like so much wet clay, and breathed. Caliber had turned her head up, to see the calm of the sky shattered as if under a hammer. And by the time she looked back, smiling, she might have forgotten all about me. “Speak of the devil.”

*** *** ***

A red pillar of smoke made it look as if the valley had an open wound: like a harpooned whale, soon to be swarmed by sharks. Though it had become little more than a trickle, by the time we came to the dilapidated military outpost, from whose insides the smoke had first come leaking. It was not unlike a little coliseum, in collapse, though in place of seats there were two steel shelves stacked on top of each other and littered with old equipment. The skinny legs of spotlights and radio antennae jutted out like spears from around the wound.

“Looks like they set off a flare.” Caliber bounced a small cylinder in her hooves, as if burping it, so that the last of the smoke went trailing out over the valley. She had to raise her voice at us, as the outpost was shaped like a C, and we still stood outside of its arms. There were bodies inside them, all bloody, disfigured by gaping scars like zebra stripes. I recoiled, like a filly afraid to test the waters of some frigid ocean. But Ash, instead, looked like one who was content to watch the lapping of its tides, as if she and Death were used to each other by now.

I went up to Caliber, skipping over four of the eight dead savages, all dressed in uniforms of feathers, animal bone and crude leather. I couldn’t help but to stain my hooves on the way. Their blood was already going cold, and I shivered even as I tried to shake it off. Ash stayed behind, and when next I looked back, I saw her playing with a leaf.

“Zebra flare,” Caliber said, tossing it aside. I watched it roll under a broad, steel shingle that had sloughed off of one of the shelves, where it shone no brighter than a candle. “Wasn’t to send for help… it was bait.” Like a lamb leg tossed into the ocean by some spearfisher out for shark meat. “The savages must be out of it. There sure isn’t anything worth dying for here.”

“Even animals would have known better than that,” I thought aloud, though we too had followed the smoke and gunfire to a trap that had only just been sprung. “They might as well have been moths throwing themselves into a fire.”

“What kind of Caesar could have ordered them to give up so much?” Ash asked, making my heart somersault for showing up out of nowhere. The pilgrim might only have crossed a stream of spring water for how clean her hooves were, and I had to wonder if the Goddesses were teleporting her from place to place when we weren’t looking.

“Only order left to ‘em now is basic instinct, I bet... and the leftovers of that schizoid religion.” Caliber took to the red sea, and this time we followed. “Don’t know if they’re still fighting for the sake of feeding themselves, bad blood… or ‘cause the Zebras are set on wiping them off the face of Zion. But whatever all this is for: I’m just glad we don’t have stripes.”

*** *** ***

I came up to the water, and put my hooves into it, to see the current running red in between dirt and oil stains. We’d seen something black in the clearing ahead, and Caliber had us hanging back until we could be sure it wouldn’t move. She had accused the thing of being a bear, an Ursa, but the mercenary had already made wolves out of insouciant shadows, and conspiring whispers out of the babble of the river. This place was not kind to the paranoid.

The river split Zion into two valleys, as a forest of monstrous pines crowded its southern side, while grasses of gold and green had been spun around the North’s dark stones. And ahead, the ursine figure seemed to wear a crown of canary colored leaves, as birch groves closed in around it like a mob holding up torches, or glasses of champagne in a toast.

“Did you look at their flanks?” Ash asked, as her reflection and mine came to bob together in the water. The river was dark and, were it not for the daylight that sat so heavily aboard the storm; I would have seen little more than a black wall as I stared into it. “They were bare.”

I had to look up at her then, and pulled away from the water as if I had seen something come slithering up at me. “You mean-“ I thought back to that little red sea, that bloody coliseum, worrying that she might be right. Under all those bruises, all those scars… to think that there mightn’t have been anything hidden there. “But that can’t be.”

“They are less than children, Shepard.” I almost looked over my shoulder, thinking she was talking to somepony else. “Worse than animals. Little more than a sickness loosed from that Stable. Better to flush them out of the basin they have bloodied.” Her breath came out as steam, and it seemed to wrap itself around my neck, and tighten. “I am here – following you. But this is holy ground, and if we find those savages anywhere near Celestia’s Landing…”

“We should look for a way around!” For how different their voices were, Caliber seemed to be shouting. “That’s no Ursa. But I know bones when I see ‘em.” The pilgrim bowed her head, and gave me a look that carried with it the last words of her sawed-off sentence. She followed me away from the river, watching me in a way that made my neck tingle.

Only later, would I realize that she had been afraid: afraid that I would have us sparing Zion’s savages, as I had Bodacious in Silo City. But just then, beside the blackwater, I thought she was looking at me as a heretic from another Stable: as a part of the same sickness.

“Grace,” Caliber yelped, as I hurried past her, almost as if the pilgrim was chasing me. “Grace!” The radar on my Pipbuck was bare, and even if some Ursa was sleeping in the clearing ahead, I almost wanted to be fighting: I wanted the distraction.

But I stopped, as my hoof touched bone. Skeletons had been sprawled out in a ring around the grove. As the thing Caliber had called Ursa, had me thinking I might never leave, that I could only stare until I crumbled into this field of bones: a servant to the Old God. Every skull seemed to be staring into it, this black heart of Zion, just as every skinny hoof reached for it.

It was no living thing, but I could almost hear it breathing. I could almost feel its hunger, like that of a great beast ready to take the world by the throat, and drag us, screaming, into its den. It was alone, though it was once but one ember to a fire, one spoonful from a well of poison. It was faceless, though its sisters had swallowed up the world, and burst.

On its back, which was broad and black, three ugly stars had been painted.
There was silence, as we stared at the bomb. But then, I could hear a stranger breathing.

“I stole it from them.” The sentence was snapped in half, as Caliber’s rifle clicked up at this jarring new voice. “Well… that’s what they let me think.” I turned, and saw Ash rearing up onto two legs, as a knife soaked in oily magic pressed against her throat. There was a unicorn, tucked between the birch trees behind her, his eyes bloodshot and his face made prickly with stubble. His clothes made it look like he’d gotten lost in the woods years ago, and over his shoulders, he wore the tattered remains of an all too familiar jumpsuit.

“Those are pony bones.” He had none of those Caesarian scars. “Our bones.” He pulled the pilgrim in a little tighter, and the knife kept her from swallowing. “We’re on the same side.”

He paused, and I could hear Ash’s thin, desperate breaths. “They used this old bomb like any one of their flares. Let the savages I sent drag it out here and then started gunning them down.” The buck glared up into the trees, as the sunlight striped their leaves. “They’ve still got sentries, watching… waiting. But the Stable doesn't know why it matters anymore.”

Ash sounded old, breathing in and out as if for the last time, wheezing like an old squeaky toy. “And the Zebras won’t touch the damn thing now. Too afraid.” He cursed in an alien tongue. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t painted on those damn stars.” I looked at his flank, and found a stack of books, whose pages stuck out and whose spines were torn down the middle. He was one of them, but… different.

“Are you hearing me!?” He was touching Ash, and only then did I see how she had been petrified as his belly pressed into her back. “Call off your dog!”

I looked back, and saw Caliber baring her teeth, with her rifle’s bit wedged in between them. All she had to do was squeeze, and it would be over. She was locked into place, as if somebody had to die here. But, as my eyes met hers, pleading, I saw her grip loosen.

“Good. That’s good.” Like Caliber, he relaxed, and then shifted his weight off of Ash. “Been following you from the flare… And you ought to be licking the dirt off of my hooves for it.” He nodded at the bones. “The sentries shoot everything that so much as stumbles into that clearing. And they don’t even sniff at anything else.” His horn dimmed, and Ash gasped as if coming up for air. “The thing of it is: I just saved your lives. And now I want to talk. It's been a long time since I just... talked.”

*** *** ***

The number on his back had been mangled, but not enough to keep me from making sense of it. 23. Somewhere in Zion, where the rivers ran black between mountains that bowed to one another, was the twenty third light. But, one way or another, it would soon burn out.

“Everyone in that place is wasted.” He was frustrated, and tried his best to shrug off the Stable, though I didn’t see the point in talking about anything else. “They’re tearing at the seams: pulling themselves apart… been fucking themselves stupid since the end of it all. I’m the only one who isn’t inbred... not that I haven't been spreading my wild oats real wide, y'know? Figure I'm almost part of the family now.”

“Might as well call it bestiality and be done with it.” Caliber could have been on her own then, as the word of incest was enough to make children out of Ash and I. Between us, we’d only run afoul of it in the least treasured lines of scripture, those dark passages buried deep inside the Faith. “You could’ve climbed onto a timberwolf and had less of a fight on your hooves.”

“Listen lady, their numbers are already coming up short… Morons don’t grow on trees, y’know?” The last voice of Stable 23 was starting to sound a little boorish, and I almost wanted to bow out, before its last light turned sour. “I was just doing my part. If they fucked that Stable into the mess it’s in now… those animals can fuck a warpath right through Zion.”

“Hedonist.” Ash barely breathed out the word, as if there was no greater insult.

“What d’you want me to do, huh? Ignore this?” He beat his hoof against the earth. “I found the greener side of the grass. This is paradise! While those idiots scrape by on Zebra meat and what’s left of the old orchard, I’ve got caches hidden all over this valley. I won’t go hungry for a hundred years. And in the beggining, before they ran me out, I didn’t go horny for very long either.”

“You’re a waste,” I said, frowning as if I was just unraveling a riddle. “You could have helped them. You could have changed things.”

“Why d’you think I’m out here in exile?” As the olives that were his eyes rolled over to me, I felt a shiver run down my spine. “I spoke up.” Maybe I had misjudged him. “Granted: I just wanted to get a share of the fleshier mares… put a little padding in my plotline.” Or not.

“It’s all about fighting, to them. A whole lot of good all these words did me when I got caught resting on Big Caesar’s laurels. If it weren’t for the elevator and their goldfish memories, the boys would have trampled me years ago.” He sighed. “Way it started out: I could come as I pleased, long as I gave ‘em time to cool off. Don’t know what changed. Can’t get in and out now without getting a few hairs snapped off my tail.”

I looked back at Caliber, needing to hear her voice, and saw that she had not let the rifle’s bit slip from her lips, though the buck had long since sheathed his knife, and sat back on his haunches as if at a picnic. “It’s not all sunshine and rainbows out here either. Just ‘cause I've wriggled my way out of getting striped doesn’t mean the Zebras want me any less wiped.”

“They’ve had it out for the savages from the start. They got that door open, and –“ He clicked his hooves together. “- it was war. I don’t think they’d even lost our language yet. Didn’t even have the scars. But now the boys carve themselves up, hunt for the fun of it, and leave the meat to rot. And the girls pop out infertile little inbreds every other time they give birth. They’re dying out. And it won’t be long before the Stable’s chewing at its own throat.”

I straightened my neck and dug my hooves a little deeper into the soil; tricking myself into thinking I had a plan. “We have to put an end to this.”

But, as I stood there like some war hero having her picture taken, he laughed at me. “You do?” The laughter made a mask of his ugly face and, as it glittered in his eyes and his teeth and on the tip of his tongue. "You!?" I realized that it was hurting me. “But you’re mares!” He howled. “You all are good for three things… And that’s only because you’ve got three h-“

Before he could finish, Caliber had knocked three holes into his smile, and the buck lay whimpering in the dirt, trying to gather up his teeth like a beggar would bits of bread crust.
“You…” He said, whistling. “You bitch!”

It might have been good if one of us hit him again, but as the buck sniveled on the blood gushing from his nose, I was tempted to help him up. He could have been their last light, and I wanted him to be better than this. I wanted him to be brave and handsome and good.

But he was not.

“I tried to help them.” His face was purpling, flushed with blood as he saw the disgust in my eyes. “When I first came to the valley… I tried to show them what was happening: what they’d done to themsel-.” He tried to bury one of his teeth back into the gum, and wailed. “I tried to… teach them how to.” He pushed a little harder, and there was blood. “Read!”

“They wouldn’t…” He looked away, and stared at the bomb, blaming it. “They wouldn’t.”

“No one would listen. Now my neighbors are wolves. My lovers… sheep.” I looked at the books stacked up on his flank, at the only cutie mark in Zion, and knew that he was different: he was a stranger to the inbreds. I’d know that from the start. But, only then, did I see how alone he was in this place he’d called paradise. “They never even knew my name.”

“We need to find the Zebras,” Caliber said, as if we had only stopped to ask this shivering wreck for directions. “Sounds like they still think they’re fighting a war. If we tell ‘em how bad things are getting in the Stable, then they can bust it open like a rotten apple.”

“You should get out of the valley.” He might have been listening to me, but couldn’t bring himself to look away from the bomb. “You should get out.”

“I figure we ought to toss him to the bomb,” She said, as if it were a caged animal that had picked this field of bones clean. “That might get the Zebra’s attention.”

“You want to know how to get their attention?” Something changed about the buck then, and that bloody, sagging look of despair left his face just as surely as if it had been slapped off. He stared up at me, as if I was mad. “Go to Celestia’s Landing, and light it… that’ll do it.”

*** *** ***

We left him with the bomb, though he seemed ready to roll over that ring of bones, and give himself up to paradise. I felt lonely, and almost wished that I had asked him to come with us, as Caliber might have been tying her tongue in a knot while the buck showed me how to get to the old monument. And so, as leaves rustled and branches snapped behind me, it was as if I was being followed by two curious animals.

A mouth, open as wide as one whose teeth were being scraped clean, had been carved into the mountain. It had square, marble lips, stained as if with spiced wine and a spoonful of gold, and a throat that I could not see the back of. This was the way to Celestia’s Landing, though the tip of the monument could be seen poking out from between ebon mountains high above us. Ash had wanted to come this way, instead of climbing yet another broken staircase into the sky further west, and she looked into the darkness as if there was light there.

The architects of Hell might have taken inspiration from this place, as though there were no cicatrices of glass or steel, and though the stone had become discolored, I felt as if I knew these shapes: these silhouettes in the shadows. Little did I know, then, that my ancestors, the kings and queens dancing in paintings on the stone around us, had looked to Hell as they drew the blueprints to this place: borrowing from architecture older, even, than the princess whose name still sat on Zion’s northern wall.

My horn soaked us in an efflorescence, just bright enough to keep the weight of the darkness off of our backs: to keep the mouth from swallowing us, though the walls of its throat seemed to be drawing in tighter for every step forward. I was struck by the thought that we might never find our way back: that we would be marooned in the belly of the world.

Ash was slowing us down, as she would stop without warning, falling out of my light as if over the side of a ship, and stare up at the stories spread over the walls. It wracked my nerves to know I might lose her, but I couldn’t complain, as I knew Caliber saw that same look in my eyes, and heard that same hush in my hoofsteps, whenever we were in sight of something beautiful. The difference between us was this: the pilgrim was not afraid of the dark.

She stood before a statue then: a weeping mother who had made a cradle of her hooves, and whose diamantine eyes pleaded with the bundle tucked inside of it. Whatever was left in the fold of those coarse blankets was a frail and unhealthy thing, and would have been crying more for medicine than milk. The mother was so thin that her cheekbones had to have been chiseled out of her face, and before we left, I had started to think of the child as a leech.

I took the time to salute an angry looking soldier, who would have passed for little more than an empty suit of armor where it not for the creased and crumpled mask that was his face. I couldn’t know whose flag he had died under, but winced at the sight of a spear wedged through a gap in his plate armor, and buried deep into his belly.

“This doesn't seem right,” I whispered, as if my voice might wake up these soldiers and widows, these tribes that had made gods of their kings, even as the same kings shrugged off their prayers. “I thought this monument was built as a celebration of the first day.”

“This is the Wintertide. Sunless and brutal. This is all that the Goddesses saved us from,” Ash explained, as we stepped out into a vacuous chamber, whose walls threw our voices back at us as if insulted by them. “This is the darkness before the dawn.”

As if they had only come to haunt us, the statues fell away, and Caliber might as well have been kicking up stars as she dragged a hoof across the stone. My light set the dust on fire as it spun up around us, and I felt as if I was being held by the spiraling arms of the galaxy.

After swimming through the blackness for a while, I saw pillars come breaking out of it. They all stood around a smooth shore, which was not unlike a staircase whose steps had yet to be chiseled into place. My breathing had become shallow by the time we’d reached the top of the slope, but I tried my best to hide it, even as Ash whispered the old language under her breath.

We came into a cathedral, into which six stained windows let in the daylight, though each of their round faces had discolored the sun in its own way. At the far side of the room – which was broken up as if by hurdles for a litter of pews – was a perfect circle of glass the color of the sun on the winter solstice. It filled the wall, and draped skinny shadows over the church like so many sunsets had over the north. I put out my horn, as we began down a long, rose-colored carpet, which would have led heroes to their medals and mares to matrimony.

There was a dais at the end of it, and a throne that sat crooked, as if the last of some blue bloodline had leapt up from it and left in a hurry. It was barely more than a silhouette, but caught the light of each of the glass suns that hung over the cathedral. They cast six beams like searchlights over the aisle, and while purple and white and orange beat down on us from the left: yellow, blue and pink came from the right, though they were almost flushed out by the light of the seventh sun: that window behind the throne.

The ceiling, too, was glass, as there was little more than a thin ring of stone surrounding a window that looked up into an enormous blackness: a hollow pit in the stomach of the mountain. It was like staring up at the dark side of the moon.

Ash went twirling down the aisle, letting her eyes catch the light of each window, again and again, and it almost looked like she was dancing. We followed her, as heretics afraid that they might catch on fire for stepping into this sacred place. But I smiled as Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum kicked up the stars, and spun a thread of quiet, silver laughter out of thin air.

*** *** ***

The cathedral had been built in the shape of a cross, and at the end of each arm was a steel door, hammered awkwardly into the stone. “This is… convenient,” I said, as Caliber punched one of the elevator’s call buttons. In the Stable, Faith and technology had made a habit of butting heads with one another, and there was no better evidence of this than Damascus’ naked leg, and all those coffins chosen over stasis pods. It almost felt like blasphemy, that the church should be stirred from sleep by the humming of an engine.

“I’m sure the tourists didn’t like their pilgrimages to go on for much longer than an afternoon.” Caliber was scowling at the elevator doors, as if they were only staying together to spite her. “Pain might make a pilgrimage, but most of us aren’t into that whole mortification of the flesh deal.” She was practically pounding at the wall now.

There was a ding, and I could only imagine how relieved the call button was to hear it. As the doors slid open, I realized that I had missed technology. Zion had its occasional military base – and super weapon, to be fair – but it still made for a dramatic change from the towers, streetlights and electrical pylons that dotted the open country behind us.

But, then again, even Hell had its elevators.

The lights fluttered on, and I saw that I had stepped into a litter of little skeletons. And though their bones came poking out of tattered school uniforms, the children lay in pairs, as if they were afraid to lose each other even now. Ash crossed herself and Caliber sighed before following me into the lift, and hitting the button for Celestia’s Landing. As we climbed the mountain, I stood very still, and worried that it had been too easy to keep myself from crying, that I had dammed up the only river that still ran through some desert: some wasteland.

The power must have gone out, as the earth was taken by its shoulders and shaken, leaving these children trapped in what was to become their tomb. And I wondered if the buck with the bookstack on his flank had been right to say that we were on the same side, if only for the shape of our skeletons. After all, it had been the Zebras who brought the bomb here: pushed it like a ball of dung across their sand and pulled it like a sleigh full of presents through our snow. They had cast the first stone. And it was as quiet and as black as the shadow of death.

Those are pony bones, I heard him say, as I remembered that ring where so many lay dead. Our bones.

*** *** ***

“So… how do we light it?” I asked, as we looked up at the silver pillar that had once seemed no bigger than a sewing needle. The monument looked like a finely trimmed feather, whose tip had once been clipped as if to stop some silver bird from flying.

It was built into the mountain’s face, and so I couldn’t tell if it was much thicker than a bird’s wing, or if it was to the mountain what that knife had been to Ash, as it pressed into the skin of her throat. An incision ran all the way up the structure’s middle, as if to show that this was not a feather at all, but an enormous pair of wings that had been cast in iron.

Celestia’s Landing had been built in a bowl scooped out of the mountains, and was surrounded by soldier pines and stone. We had come to the heart of the monument by way of a wide plaza, which was bent to fit the shape of a twisted pass. From squares picked out its floor like chocolates from a calender, sprouted trees whose crowns were the color of blood and gold, and statues of cherubs, all white and winged, oblivious to the sorrows far below.

At the foot of its monolithic pillar, was a broad circle left bare to commemorate the princess that had once rested here: like a pool of solid water into which our first sun had set. A great, pale orb seemed to swell up to its banks, though it was no more than an illusion in the stone. A short staircase came up out of the pool, and lead to a little shrine at the stem of the feather.

“We’re really going to take his word for it, huh?” Caliber arched an eyebrow at me, still suspicious. But it was good to be hearing her voice again. “What do the Zebras care if this thing starts shooting electric candlelight every which way.”

“Celestia’s Landing is a beacon,” Ash explained, even as she pointed out a thin vein of glass that ran behind the monument, like a narrow lightbulb. “The priests of Zion used to light it at the fall of every Summer Sun Celebration, just as the festivities in Canterlot came to a calm. And Equestria would look towards the light of this monument, the light of its first sun, even as the sky behind it was painted red as another set.”

“So what? It’s like a big bug zapper.” Caliber rolled her hoof along the length of the pillar, as if showing off a circus animal. “And that makes the Zebras…?”

“It is not a big bug zapper.” Ash rolled her r’s almost as far, as if someone was holding down the key on a terminal in her head. And I almost giggled, for how silly those three words sounded when spoken in her stumbling coo. “It is an instrument of the Goddesses.”

“Really? I didn’t even know they played.” Caliber rolled her eyes, and I wondered if I would have to stop Ash from declaring a crusade on her. “You can go ahead and set the whole mountain on fire if you want. I’ll be over there.” She poked at the open sky, where the wide circle that marked Celestia’s Landing fell out under the path of her flight. “The Zebras are bound to have a camp set up somewhere, and where there’s camps: there’s campfires.”

Almost at once, Caliber and Ash turned and walked off in opposite directions, as if they had decided to settle things in an old fashioned pistol duel. One headed for the far rim of the monument, while the other made for the shrine at the foot of its famous pillar.

Luckily, Ash didn’t seem like the type to care who I chose to go after, and might not have noticed my tagging along behind Caliber. It’s not that I was picking sides: I only wanted to look out across Equestria, and see things from the perspective of the setting sun.

The sky looked as if it were being drained, as honeyed ribbons slipped away behind the shield between Equestria and that nationless waste, leaving just enough light to make embers out of the snow as it went twirling down the mountainside. Even the pine trees that crowded around the monument like an audience in tattered rags, caught some of the sunset’s fire, and became silhouettes as if to hide their nakedness. As beads of snow melted on their branches, and glistened in many colors, it was as if someone had strung fairy lights up around the valley.

I looked back, after following that silver pillar down the mountain’s face as if it were the trail of a tear, and saw Ash curled up at the shrine. I couldn’t know if she was praying… or crying.

Suddenly, I felt a hoof pressing into my chest. “Might want to look where you’re going, Hon.”
My father’s coat whipped around me, lazily, as if I were submerged in water, and my heart hiccupped. I was no more than a few paces away from the big empty that hung over Equestria, and would have walked off the edge of the monument, if she hadn’t stopped me.

I backpedaled to an unreasonably safe distance, and saw that Caliber was leaning out over those cliffs like so much choppy water. I lay back, terrified, waiting for the next gust of wind to send her tumbling into it. And it felt like I was going to fall with her, as if there really was a leash binding us by the neck.

“With heights,” she said. “It’s those nerves that’ll get you killed.” Her body almost seemed to move with the breeze, gracefully, and my stomach lurched in protest.

I looked past her, and distracted myself in the country sprawled around us. The west had been glazed, as the sunlight spilled in through the lowlands between Zion and the MASEBS tower. And shadows rolled over the prairies of the east, as the scorched clouds of that lawless sky dipped themselves in and out of the sun, like slices of toast into a honeypot.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, forgetting the fall for mountains beyond mountains.

“That’s not what we’re looking for,” Caliber mumbled, and her eyes never wandered away from the darkest of those dangerous places. I gathered up my courage, and came close enough to tug at her sleeve, like a filly with another masterpiece to be hung up on the fridge. I wove a hoof from Canterlot to Calvary and, soon enough, her eyes were filled to the brim with honey, and I heard what I needed to hear. “But it is beautiful.”

“Did you see any Zebras?” I managed to peek out over the valley, and then skipped back in a fit of nervous, unmelodic giggles. But Caliber shook her head. There had been no sign of our onetime enemies, and though they might have been watching us from the trees even then, it was as if we were the only ones left: inheritors of everything the light was touching.

“Shepard.” As it so often did, Ash’s voice came lilting in out of nowhere, and almost made me jump. It sounded shakier than usual, and I expected to see her with red rings around her eyes and a wet patch on each cheek.

I turned, and might as well have run into a wall. A streak of black and white hit me across the temple like a cudgel, and my legs were turned to pillars of sand. They toppled over one another, and I fell into the sunken sun of Celestia’s Landing. When I looked up, I saw a dozen skeleton masks hovering around my head as if in place of stars and songbirds.

And, as this circle of skulls pulled the darkness in over me, like the bones around their own atomic bomb, I thought I heard Caliber’s voice coming off the tips of their alien tongues.

Speak of the Devil

Speak of the Devil.

Speak of the Devil.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Keys to the Kingdom: You do 25% more damage when using 9 millimeter pistols, 45 automatic pistols and submachine guns, service rifles, assault and marksman carbines, light machine guns, grenade rifles and rocket launchers, frag grenades, combat knives and the kitchen sink.