Fallout Equestria: Begin Again
Chapter 13: The Last Stop
“Old military. Can still smell the pride. And the fear. Hope of the old world, wrapped in fencing, covered in storm."

|*| Marathon Mare |*|

There was only one bridge, one way to cross the river of Zion without its waters forcing rites of ablution onto your body, and it passed over a staircase of Lilliputian waterfalls. I stopped running, and watched the stars of the naked, northern sky bounce between the water and the bridge’s glass belly, feeling as if I was in some garden to that Kingdom under Hell. It looked like fireflies were dancing over the water.

On the far side of the river, there were pines, feathered in olive and lavender, which were so tall that they seemed to peck at the sky. And between them were the red flares that had led me here, like any savage lured out from their broken Arcadia. Their light seemed to slide up the trees, and sculpted them into caryatids: statues that might have been smuggled out of the capital gardens. The flares smudged the sky red, like bloodstains on a black ball gown.

My legs felt like they were on fire, and I knew it was not because of how far I had run. Something had gone wrong. There were lights, flickering behind me. The smell of a smoking oven and a burnt roast followed me through the valley, and my belly was smudged with black ash. The end of my tail was as brittle as dry straw, and my hooves as hot as horseshoes left out in the sun. My father’s clothes smelt of smoke.

Over my shoulders, I wore red rags that might once have been a cape, and something cold was pressing into my temples, like a headache trying to burrow its way in. While the little waterfalls only mumbled, there were rapids further up the river, and I could hear the water slapping the stones as if they were drums.

There was movement on the bridge, and my hooves skipped from soil to grass to that prehistoric metal and its trimmings of glass. I could hear shouts, muffled, as my senses had been clogged up by catarrhal inflammation. Still, I would not have understood them, for their language was as babbling as the river.

I collapsed onto the bridge, giving myself to them. I might have fallen into some voodoo fever, for the sky was red and its stars were replaced by frowning skulls, and the runes that danced around their rifles.

“Get out of the way!” I was afraid, thinking that I might go slipping back into the river, like a fish swatted out of the water by some clumsy paw. “Move it, facepaint!” But then, Caliber was holding me in her hooves, and I knew that I was safe: that we had won.

“Luna’s bones, you actually did it, didn’t you?” The Zebras parted as if making way for a King, and I thought I saw something sitting on the far side of the bridge: something whose back was as broad as a bear’s, and had three stars smeared across it. “I leave you alone for one night…”

The soldiers folded in around a buck that had to be their Decurion, as he came marching after Caliber. “And you set the edge of the Equestrian Wasteland on fire.” I was still dizzy, from the smoke in my lungs and the blood that was only just rushing to my head, and I decided that I had imagined the bomb: squatting at the edge of the forest like some devil.

The Decurion stood beside her, and Caliber smiled like someone who’d just one a bet. I couldn’t feel the burns now. I was too proud. We had come into the valley, and tipped the scales of a war. I felt like an instrument of Equestria, or even its dead Goddesses, as what we had done could so easily be confused for divine intervention. I wondered if the savages had seen me that way, as I ran through the fire. I wondered if they had seen me as a demon, as a God.

There was something at the back of my mind, a pulse like a stowaway pounding against the walls, screaming for me to go faster. But I knew that it had been worth the cost. I was alive. I had been perched at the tip of the spear, at the tip of my own genocide, and I had escaped: tearing through the valley with my horn shining and my eyes glazed over. Hopefully, the monkey on my back had lost his grip as I ran.

I looked up at the Decurion, as if waiting for him to pin a medal to my chest. Here was a leader that might have come crawling out of a city turned to ash, a city spilling out over the sand, with his head held high. He wore his scars with more pride than he did his armor, while the Caesar was like a child in a paper crown, crying out when it cut him. I wondered where the great savage was. I couldn’t remember -

I shook off the thought, as the Decurion started to speak. “We came to your country, as lions circling a watering hole. We came slowly. We came hungry.” He wove a hoof at the mountains that stood taller, even, than Celestia’s Landing. “But, before the slaughter began, before we could take you by your throats or poison the water to watch you die of thirst, the sky closed, and the savannah burned.” His voice was almost hypnotic, and seemed to go around and around as if to match the red writing that circled his rifle. “And it is law that, before the mouth of fire, lions and lambs; all things are prey.

“You… you set our valley on fire. And now the hunt is over. Zion will soon be won.” He nodded to Caliber. “And your Damascus will have his deal.” A smile split the bones painted across his face, though there was no laughter in it. “It seems you have taken the world by its corner, Shepard, and flipped it upside down. Tonight, we will stamp out the sour light of one Stable, only to march under the light of another.”

I got to my hooves, and tried to hide how much it hurt. “Thank you,” I said, in a voice that was dark with smoke. “I want to help you find the Caesar and finish this. But first, I have to go back to the monument. I found -” I winced, and Caliber thrust her hoof out as if to catch me before I fell. But I kept my head up. “I found medicine in the Stable. And we both have friends up there who might have been hurt.”

“What do you mean… find the Caesar?” The mercenary frowned, and matched the cracks in the paint that covered the Decurion’s face. “Honey, it looks like you did a lot more than find him.” She lifted her hooves over my head, as if to lower an imaginary crown, and make me an imaginary queen. But instead, as she pulled away, she took with her the headache that had been pounding at my temples.

Then I saw it.
Resting in her hooves, as if she had just plucked it from the ashes of the orchard, was a laurel wreath.

*** *** ***

We walked down the aisle, huddled together, while corpse fires blackened the cathedral walls. In the smoke, each of the stained glass windows was like another sun being tucked in under a thunderstorm. Under Celestia’s window, I thought I saw another litter of bodies, but as we got closer, I came to realize that it was not corpses that had crowded around the throne, but soldiers whose stripes would not be burned away. They were alive, and stood straight and strong, as if the word war had never been spoken.

They had dragged their dead into the elevator, and brought them here so that they might get something like a burial. Better that than to abandon them on the monument, where the wind would pick them clean, and leave them like bones on a plate.

My utility jumpsuit was folded away in my saddlebags, and I had thrown Caesar’s cape and bloodied laurels into the river. Now, Caliber helped me take off my father’s coat, just as she had dressed me in it. I couldn’t bear to pull my clothes on over the burns, not alone. It was like trying to press a needle into your own skin. She threw my father’s coat onto the throne, and it slouched in what had once been the seat of the Goddess, with its cross lying crooked. Celestia’s window shone down on it, like the morning sun.

The soldiers busied themselves with the last of the dead, throwing each of them onto a pile as if putting another log in the fireplace. Only Zalika, the mare who had knocked my lights out on the Landing, was still. She stood on three legs, and as I inspected the one she was keeping bunched up at her chest, I saw that the savages had cut down to the bone, as if they had only wanted to know how well she was cooked.

I hurried over with a bottle of healing potion floating at my side. She had lost a lot of blood, and burbled as I wrapped her knee in gauze. I had the strange urge to paint every other bandage black. By the time I was done tightening the medical brace, she had gotten a grip on the Equestrian alphabet. “Don’t…”

I held the potion to her lips. “Drink it,” I said, in my best imitation of Doctor Cross, whose stern bedside manner had slowly started following her everywhere she went. “Drink it.”

“Keep that poison away from the Decanus.” The soldiers had come to crowd in around me, and one of them spoke up as I got the potion into Zalika’s mouth, and let her suckle at it as a baby would its bottle. “You dare! She has given her life for Zion!”

The buck whinnied, and tried to rear up onto his hind legs, but Caliber was leaning on his back as one would over a bar. “Easy now. She’s not dead yet.” It almost looked like she meant to mount the Zebra, and go on a full contact safari. “Let the good doctor do her work.”

With a pop, I pulled the bottle out, putting a little flair to my magic as if to sell them on Equestrian medicine. “Where are the rest of the wounded?” I was holding a cloth to Zalika’s throat, as she had started to bleed as she choked down the potion. It would stop soon, and I could move on.

“They have already gone to the gate.” His legs had started to shake, as Caliber rocked her weight onto him. It was nice to feel like a team again, though she made a better bodyguard than she did a nurse.

“What about the pilgrim?” Caliber narrowed her eyes. She might have snapped a more brittle buck in half. “The one who bears the star… Where is she?”

“The one who bears the star left with the others. The one who bears the star went down into the old metro station.” It was almost as if he was afraid to call her anything else. “But that one is not dying. That one is not going to the gate. That one went to be alone, to redress herself in bandages.”

“I knew that girl was shy… but that’s taking it a little far.”

"The one who bears the star was stabbed through the vest-"

"Stabbed through the chest?"

"Yes pony, stabbed through the vest." He nodded, as if it pleased him to be muddying up our language. “If you wish to find the one who bears the star: take the elevator down to the train station.” He wove a hoof over his shoulder, and the soldiers behind him cleared a path. "We will not miss you."

“Thanks.” I lifted the cloth from Zalika’s throat, but blood came out of it like water from a hole in a dam. I plugged it up again in a hurry. “You’ll need to keep pressure on this wound. And make sure to give her a sip of healing potion every five minutes.” I looked up at the buck, expecting to see him nod, but found only sterile, sandy eyes. “You… you weren’t just going to let her die, were you?”

“No. No Zebra should have to die on Equestrian soil.” Caliber climbed off the buck’s back, as if she thought he had been tamed. “But we have no doctors. We use no medicine. This is our way. If she is dying, we will not watch: we will take her from this place, through the tunnels… to the gate.” He tilted his head at the elevator. “She would bleed out into soil that has never been pierced by an Equestrian flag.”

They were crazy. I heard the sound of a harp string snapping in half, and pictured myself beating the buck over the head with a big, red cross, screaming: Take your medicine! Take your medicine, you stripy buffoon! You love it! You love it!”

“Okay!” I clapped my hooves together, chasing out the daydream. “I guess she’s staying with us.”

“So you are going to the gate?” He asked, tilting his head to the side, like someone trying to get the sand out of their ears. I nodded, knowing that I had to save the others who had gone to wait for death as if at a bus stop. “Then go into the tunnels. Follow them north, until you reach the old Equestrian installation. Then step out under the naked sky. This is where you will leave her. This where we have chosen to die.”

Caliber shrugged, and rolled her hoof around one ear, as if winding herself up. “I’m game. We needed to stop by another one of the installations anyway; best way to get in touch with the boss.” She looked at Zalika. “But it’s been a while since I had to play mule.” Then, she flicked her tail at the soldiers, and walked down between the pews and the corpse fires. “Get your coat, honey. I’ll go find us a wagon.”

*** *** ***

Our voices echoed through the station, so that the name Ash rang out between broken down train cars and went bounding off into the tunnels that led south, into Hell. Zalika sat beside me in the chariot that Caliber had taken from the soldiers, and the Decanus seemed to be learning how to talk again. She had only just untwisted her mother tongue, and threw strange curses up at the electric billboards and tattered posters, making enemies of pastel soldiers and their Princesses. The first word I could understand was star, and she sang it out again and again, as if the pilgrim would answer to it.

It was never Ash’s voice that came back to us, only our own. But we found her trimming fresh bandages in the shadow of a few dozen fairy lights, which had been twisted into the wall to make a cross. She sat at the open mouth of a stairwell, whose tube lights blinked like lighting in a bottle. The letters EL TIA’S LANDING had been stapled on under the cross, while C, E and S lay scattered around the pilgrim.

She didn’t have much to say, but the stains on her body spoke for her: There was smoke. There was fire. There was blood.

I moved Zalika over like a sack of potatoes, and let Ash slide into the chariot next to me. The thing had carried the weight of a balefire bomb once, and Caliber pulled it along without even breaking a sweat. We moved as if on the tide, and the little mare helped dress me in bandages, from the hooves to the haunch and shoulder. I pretended she was my mother, getting me ready to go out on Nightmare Night.

“Feels like I’m the only one out of uniform,” Caliber muttered, as she steered us around the last two train cars, which were as crumpled as tin cans. The walls had turned to stone around us, and we veered around sandbags and scattered floodlights. The chariot’s wheels got caught in thickets of barbed wire, that seemed to have spread like undergrowth, but Caliber kept talking as she pulled us into the outpost.

“Hey doc,” she said. “Get her talking straight, would ya?” Suddenly, the Zebra spoke up, as if to answer her, but only got through a short rhyming couplet. It was nonsense. “Try shaking her up a little. Treat her like a soda machine and rattle some sense into her. I need to know more about this installation.”

Then, it was as though we were back on the tide, drifting through shallow water, as the chariot’s wheels turned easily over the metal and the glass. I looked up at pillars that the stone seemed to have grown over like moss around a tree trunk, as Caliber used my light as her lantern, and followed a low humming that seemed to come up out of the earth.

“These markings will not stay for long,” Ash said, as the chariot creaked like a cradle on the bough. “You actually have more bruises than you have burns… How did this happen?”

“The Caesar was on fire,” I said, pruning my answer until it was almost bare. I didn’t want to look down into the pit that was Stable 23; I didn’t want to try remembering what had happened. I knew his hooves had pressed into my ribs. I knew I could hear his heart beating, and see his breath spewing out from a horrible serpent’s head: earless and skinless and bald, the color of burnt flesh. But I didn’t know how I had killed him, or why I had put on his laurels before dancing with the fire through the forest.

Maybe I was jealous.

Suddenly, the chariot was rattling, as if Caliber meant to shake us awake after a long trip. She was pulling us up a short flight of stairs, and into a room whose ceiling hung low, and whose lights had been shot out long ago. We were at the end of the tunnel, but the mercenary had veered off into a little security office that had once controlled the great gate that now lay like a splintered shield on the floor. The night came poking in through the gap, carrying grains of daylight in between its fingers for the coming dawn.

“This better work: otherwise I’m liable to slap that Zebra across the face with a dictionary,” Caliber grumbled, as I poked my head up out of the chariot, and watched her go to work on a terminal in the wall. Its light frayed the edges of my magic, and changed the color of her mane like a flame turned blue.

Before I could ask, the screen flashed white, and a three-headed lion threw shadows across the room. “If Damascus knows about what you did – and I bet he does – then he’s already wrapped our orders up nice and cozy in the static.” The screen began to crackle, and something low and angry, like the growling of a dog, came out of it. “Don’t know if you ever got to hear it, Lamplight. But Hell hums.”

There was a high whine like a single line of lightning through the thunder. And then another, and another, whipping through the static. “Is that…” Ash began, as she poked her head up next to mine. “Morse code?”

Caliber threw up her hoof, calling for silence just as a reverend might. And then, as the pattern went on in a loop as though it were coming out of an angry, industrial music box, she found the word that would send us east. “Buffalo.”

*** *** ***

Caliber stepped through the gate and, if only for a moment, it might have looked like she was pulling the entire country along behind her, as if to drag it out across the steppe, to shorter days and northern lights. The beam of Celestia’s Landing would have been like the needle of a sewing machine, putting stitches in the dark blue velvet of the sky, with the mountains like knuckles massaging out the creases. But we were the only things that followed Caliber out of the country, and off the side of the map.

Once the chariot’s wheels stopped turning, the silence began to feel like a weight around my neck. The outpost lay like a sprawling, windswept wreck all around us, and there was little that came up out of the barren earth but for a few stranded pine trees, twirling patterns of grass or snow and strange flowers that had stacked themselves up like lavender colored cairns. But there were gardens in the sky, of a thousand gilded lilies and the moon like a single, white rose. I had never seen so many stars.

I left my father’s coat in the chariot, so that the wind could creep into my bandages, and put out the fires there. I walked on soil that was so dry and so colorless that it might have been mistaken for sand, and looked out over mile after mile of nothing else. There were mountains on the horizon, but they were so small that I could only make them out for their cloaks of snow. They were like doves on a wire.

Zalika followed me, having found our language just as we left the country from which it had come. She wore her bandages like a collar now, but walked with one leg folded up against her chest, and tripped over every other word. I had not done anything to dull her pain, knowing that she needed it, that she was proud of it. She would have liked to die out here, as Zion didn’t have heroes: only martyrs.

“We might as well be treading on burial mounds,” She said, as I searched the wreckage, hoping to see stripes. “You should not have brought me here. This is a place for the dying.”

“Where are they, then?” Caliber asked, as she wriggled out of her harness.

Zalika pointed her hoof at the horizon. “They have already begun walking. Even to die in this outpost, is to leave our bones too close to your country’s.” I felt a little cheated, then. Even after everything we’d done, the Zebras would rather die alone under the stars, than in Equestria.

“For Celestia’s sake, if they had strength enough to come this far: I could have saved them. “ I turned, and found Zalika climbing into Caliber’s harness. “None of them had to die.”

“In the eyes of our empire, Sacrifice was never a virtue. It is expected.” She looked at me as if I had stolen something from her. “When will I die for Zion? When will I have another chance?” From the look of it, Zalika was going to leave us out there, and take the chariot home with her. “I am a soldier. And I was broken. Were your spear to break, Equestrian… would you turn to another tribe, and ask them to repair it, so that you might drive it into their belly?”

We stared at each other, and I could see the stars in her eyes. After a while, I floated out the vial of orange medicine that had saved me from the fire and the Caesar, and held it up as if to count what few drops there were left to swallow. "I’m going after them,” I said, as Caliber peered into the vial, trying to figure out what was inside it. “I’m going to save them, and send them home.” To Equestria.

As if I'd just made a toast, I brought the vial to my lips and, as every last bead of Dash came to trickle down my throat, I watched the lights in the sky rolling away. The world was starting to spin faster, and faster, until the stars couldn’t keep up. The sky was like an old chalkboard, with name after name, equation after equation, poem after poem crisscrossed over each other, and shining.

They were fireflies and headlights, sunshine dancing across the water. They were rings of light, not so different to those of a tree’s dissected trunk, showing us the age of the sky.

“What did you just do?” Caliber asked, though her words went tearing through the naked sky, cutting through the atmosphere

like a hot knife through butter.
like the searchlights of a ship, through the waters of some fitful surf.
like the edge of a knife being pulled across the throat of a pig.
like the last light of a dead star, spreading out through open space.

You’re a literary genius.
I should’ve let the Caesar take you. Maybe he’d have fucked some inspiration into that hollow little head of yours. You make us so soft. So tender. Keep us so weak. But now you know how to be better.
How to be fast.

like a freaking missile, baby!
Boom! Poetry!

And with that, the light of my horn imploded, and I was gone, knowing that I could outrun the stars.

*** *** ***

"Grace!"

Pull yourself out of the dust.
Get on your hooves, and start running. Make the world turn under you, make it spin.
Be that mare again. She was cool! She was awesome! She was radical!

"Caeli... look at her eyes." This egghead? This scrambled egghead is holding you down?

Break her neck. Break her sad little swan's neck. Break it! Break it! Break it!
Don't you want to win?
You do?

Then get some more Dash.
OR BREAK HER NECK!

"Get me the orbs. We've got to bring her back to Zion." One is weak. The other is even weaker.
But you are the weakest.

You have to show them that speed is all that matters.
Get up. Stop crying. And set the world on fire.

"Get me those fucking orbs!" She's better than you.
She's one of Hell's knights. Burning the squares black. And you aren't even on the board.
She’s the one in charge. She brought you to Zion. She walked you through Hell.
You aren’t a leader. You’re a follower.

You can't follow me into the orb.
No. I’m the best part of you.
You can’t hurt my friends while I’m gone.
No. You have no friends.
You’ll be waiting for me.
Yes. Coward.

“Aisha,” I said. “Aisha, something’s different.” My burns had spread. They were everywhere. And the headache had wormed its way in, only to pound at the walls like an animal in a trap.

I was wearing a crown. “That machine will not destroy your memory, but copy it.” Through the fire, I thought I saw something like worry flickering in her eyes. “This is changing you, Damascus: this hollowing.” I frowned. She was too soft, too womanly. She wanted to reprint the pages, but I needed to tear them out. “I am afraid. You have already lost your family. You cannot lose your faith too.”

“What do you mean? I’m not asking you t-“

“You are wearing a recollector.” Her hoof came up out of the smoke and, as she touched us, we were quiet. “Find a memory that would make you believe again. No matter what else you forget. Find a memory that would make anyone believe, in case… after this is over… you aren’t yourself anymore.”

“So this orb is to be a cradle, a place to keep the Goddesses, in case I pull my knife so wide as to carve them out?” Aisha nodded, and pushed another vial around the fire. Inside it, I saw the same lights that were shining, somewhere, over Zebras bleeding out on the steppe. “This will not make me forget them?”

She turned her eyes down, and smiled, as if to remind us that she was beautiful. “If only it were so easy.” When she looked up again, Damascus had already flushed the stars down our throat, and her electric eyes were the last thing we saw, before everything went as black as the shadow of a balefire bomb.

*** *** ***

Steel walls lined with gold went tearing by like freight trains, cities rose and fell all around me like the spears of passing soldiers, and then there was sand. I had come out of the Stable, and walked all across Equestria, only to end up here, in a place where the storm was an inky tempest and I could feel summer in the air. And still, without my burns, I felt naked. I felt cold.

There was a tin soldier following close behind, matching my steps as if he had been wound up by a key in his back. His hooves beat the earth like a drum, and from the look of the scratches on his armor, he had just walked out of a thorn bush. He breathed in the air through narrow vents, and pushed it out like a bull.

By his side, was a mare covered in dirt and makeup. Her lips were the color of black cherries, and her absinthe eyes might have been circled in ink. Her hair was heavy and swollen and dark, like a storm cloud, though her coat was a watery shade of green. She might have been a statue into which some Goddess had breathed life, for how finely her features were sculpted.

The brute carried weapons that could bring down city walls, while the concubine had knives and narrow pistols holstered all over her body, as if in place of jewelry. There was a rifle slung over my shoulder.

Ruins dotted the landscape ahead, like the broken shells of eggs that had fallen off of the valley walls. They pointed up at the storm with crooked concrete fingers, and it was as if some enormous horse had come charging through the valley, leaving its hoofprints as shallow craters and buildings folded in on themselves. And then, the ground began to shake, as if it was coming back.

Dead leaves and little pieces of stone skittered over the earth, like insects, and we stood very still, if only so we wouldn’t tread on them. I heard gun safeties clicking, explosives rolling into their chambers, and blades being slipped out of leather sheaths. My body stood firm, even as I tried my best to abandon it, as if I could wriggle my way out of one ear, and go scampering off into the thicket like a magician’s rabbit.

The rumbling slid under our hooves, and I knew that whatever had come was not charging over the earth, but burrowing through it. Everything went quiet then, and I heard my companions breathing, like a bull and a brothel. Dust devils came springing out of the soil, as drills of fur and leather burrowed up through the earth as easily as if it were water, and enormous paws swatted at the air.

The tin soldier, whose cannons had already begun to spin at his side, pelted the creatures with silver grenades. And, as a doglike body was torn to pieces in the explosions, the soldier might as well have taken the valley, and shaken it by its shoulders. The mare and I rocked on our hooves, trying our best not to tilt over like chess pieces, but managed to gun down the survivors even as the dust settled.

They’re dogs, I thought, enormous, mutated dogs. With snouts that were short and crumpled, that left rows of ugly teeth naked under snarling faces. And bodies that were ropy and all too canine. They might have been wolves grown in narrow test tubes, to be shaped like bonsai trees.

The soldier emptied out his cannon, after plucking the last silver apple from the orchard slung over his back. But two more holes were being clawed open, and I could see wild, yellow eyes through the smoke. There was some kind of intelligence in these animals, something more than hunger.

These weren’t predators, but enemy soldiers: guards before some castle sinking into this irradiated valley.

my son - My Scion.

The voice slid into Damascus’ mind like fingers that were wet with wine and the juices of a rare steak, and it pushed us apart, leaving me alone, curled up at the bottom of the orb. There were three of us in his head, and this new terrible thing was holding me down. I could barely see the world anymore. I had to look out of him, as if out of a pit.

I can feel you… your strength - strength?
your conviction - conviction!

Compared to this thing - this third - my boastful, drugged up echo was nothing.
But it didn’t know I was there. Because I hadn’t been. So I tried my best to see through his eyes again.

Damascus had gone very still, and might have thought nothing of the violence around him. He didn’t care. He couldn’t. For all that was, all that could ever be, had wrapped itself tight around his mind, like a fever.

You will – listen. finally - listen.
Yes. You will obey!

There was a child murmuring the words, something desperate and lightheaded, but it was not enough to soften the blow, to distract me from the low, guttural voice of a mare with a mouthful of tar.

We will be together.
You will be the first, Scion.
We will be whole.
Unity...

I could only watch, as the courtesan was dashed against the stone, as her body went limp. I could only listen, as she began to weep, as she began to beg. The creature, which had been batting her from side to side like a cat might the ragged corpse of a songbird, was gunned down, as the tin soldier brought another of his siege weapons to bear. And still, Damascus stood: numb to it.

One.
One is all we need. One is all that our unity has for so long been stalled.
There will be no more fighting. No more war.
There will be no more sadness. No more pain. Only the Unity.
One instrument. One disciple. One to turn the wheel.

Please. Damascus mouthed the word, as if to mimic the mare who lay bleeding in the sand. She was digging through her saddlebags, but moved like a newborn. The soldier’s guns were still shaking the valley, as the last dog came hurtling towards him, came dancing around his bullets. “Tell me what to do.”

Come to - us - us.
The sagging place that all must know as the grave of their Goddess.
And then, we - we - can begin.
Unity...

“Damascus!” She screamed, as the dog and the soldier came together. And still, we could not be stirred. We stared at her, through eyes clouded under a purple haze.

One.

His helmet went rolling across the sand, leaving a trail of red, like a wine stain down the lip of the valley. The dog was hunched over, with one paw weighing it down like an executioner’s ax. And, behind it, like a statue that was slowly breaking down at the heart of some forgotten city, was the body of the tine soldier.

Unity

A high, mechanical whine ripped through the silence, and the black tendrils that clung to Damascus’ mind, like undergrowth to stones pulled from the mud, went slithering out at the sound of it. And, as they slipped back into the sunken grave from which they had come, our body had the life breathed back into it.

Damascus gasped, as if he hadn’t been breathing, and turned to see the courtesan pressing a small device to her chest. It blinked red, and wailed. The last dog slapped its ears, as if it was trying to get water out of them, and I could almost hear its whimpering under the whine. It went bounding back into the dustbowl, always keeping one ear covered like a hatless schoolboy running home through the cold.

I wore Damascus’ face like a mask, as he showed no sign of regret over the dead soldier, or even of the lowest pity, as he hurried over to that battered ragdoll of a mare. They didn’t matter to him now.

Still, he took her onto our back, like a sack of flour whose seams had begun to come apart, and that wailing little machine went rolling down into the dustbowl, where it would scream until its lungs collapsed.
Then, without so much as a prayer for the brute, we started to run, forgetting everything that had drawn us into the dry and sand-encrusted mouth of the valley.

“You- you bastard…” She said, her voice breathless and jolting as we crossed the broken earth. I could feel her bleeding out on my back. “Where are you taking me?”

“I’ll leave you somewhere safe.”

“… Leave me?” She spat the words at us, though they came out of her mouth thick with blood and sand. “Where the- where the fuck are you going?”

Damascus didn’t answer at first, staying quiet until he had steered us towards an old and august mountain, whose crown had begun to sag. “Canterlot.”

I woke up feeling hollow, like a fruit whose pulp had been scraped from the rind, though it must have become sour and black for how clean I felt without it. The smoke and the dust had been washed out of my mane, and it felt as soft as a velveteen crown. I was naked. And, though it didn’t make any sense, I began to wonder if I’d only just been born.

I could hear the babble of the river, and knew its voice just as I would that of a friend, or an enemy. The sky had gone white, sterile almost, and I had the feeling that it was morning. The pines sprung up around me like birds around a crumb, bundled up tight in their feathered cloaks of lavender and green. And the air was thin, scrubbed of the smoke and the smell of that oven under the earth. I felt lost.

Where the sky had once been velvet, it was now cotton. There were no flares, there were no stars. But I could still see the mountains, hiding the edge of the storm, as if the clouds had been tucked around their peaks like fresh sheets under a mattress. I went looking for the voice, for my own delirious Goddess, and was met with silence. It was as if Dash had gotten bored without me, unable to sit still on the throne that I had left behind. I could only hope that, like mine, the demon in Damascus’ head had been shut out.

“Graish!” Ash said, through a mouthful of laundry. She dropped the clothes and, for a second, I was sure that the pilgrim was going to run up and hug me. She didn’t, so I pretended I was stretching.

“What did you do to me?” I asked, as I felt myself up, looking for a surgical scar. “I feel fantastic!”

She didn’t look proud. “Caliber said we had to purge your system.” I bit my lip, and pulled down my own smile as if lowering a flag. “It was not clean.” Her words stumbled over each other then, as if they were all afraid of stepping too close to the subject. “Mostly… um, well it was mostly… most of it came up.”

Most of it!? I nearly had to cover up my face in shame. What a way to make friends.

“The Zebras showed us to some herbs.” They gave me a laxative! “They were… more powerful than we expected.” I managed to bottle up a groan, but couldn’t keep myself from blushing. “I just finished washing your clothes.” She passed me the shirt, whose sleeves were unfurled and damp. And, as I dressed myself, I was surprised to find fresh bandages wrapped around my legs.

“Caliber is collecting water from the river… upstream.” Caliber knew too! I tried to shake off the shame, and looked out over the black, burbling water. The mountains had crowded the opposite bank with their bare feet, as if they had only just walked across the steppe, and needed to cool their heels.

I had just pulled the shirt over my head, and was sitting in it, thinking of how big it was on me when it wasn’t folded up under my father’s vest. “You look like one of those mares on the billboards,” Ash said, as she rubbed her shoulder, and stared into the grass. “Not… not like the ones for Sodom and Gomorrah.” She added, though her voice had already started trailing away. “The nice ones.”

“Thanks, Ash.” She looked tender, and I knew she was trying to give me a compliment, and help me forget what I’d put her through. I put on the vest, and busied myself with making sure it was just so. “That’s sweet of you to say.” She could tell I didn’t mean it.

“No, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m tired, Grace. I haven’t slept.” I’d never liked compliments. They always came from my mother after too much of a fuss – Well, we’re never going to get these curls combed out. It’s a good thing you have the face for them. A cherub’s face – Or from those leering bucks at the back of the class. Their compliments had been salty and sniggered: not the kind that made you feel beautiful.

Still, I felt like I owed the mare for trying to cheer me up. “Your… bandages look good.”

Ash looked up at me, as if realizing, for the first time, that she wasn’t the only one who didn’t always know what to say. “Thank you, Grace… So do yours.”

“And on that day, by the riverside-” We might have unscrewed our heads, for how quickly they turned to the sound of her storyteller’s voice. “-Grace and Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum took the oath of the scissor sisters, and brought back the summer with the warmth of their mareheat and the force of their friction.”

Caliber was leaning against one of the pine tree’s stripped trunks, with her hooves crossed and her smile crooked. The waters of Zion had put the color back into the mercenary, and we laughed with her as she came into the clearing, even though she'd sent the joke soaring over our heads.

*** *** ***

I told them about the Stable, about finding what I had found in the desk, about doing what I had done to get out in time. Thinking about the fire made my bandages itch, and talking about the Caesar made me feel like he could come bursting out of the blackwater like a fat, pink fish. But by the time I was done, it felt as if a millstone had been lifted from around my neck, as if I had learned a lesson.

Caliber had unpacked the electric hotplate from her satchel, and now pillars of steam rose out of our coffee cups – which were nothing more than old tin cans rinsed clean - and the mercenary’s cigarette. Caliber fried up some bird’s eggs and meat out of a can, and the smell of breakfast made me feel as if we had crowded into the shell of an old diner. I almost forgot the valley that was licking its wounds behind us.

“Your Damascus wants you to make allies of the Buffalo?” Ash asked again, as if everyone who was going along with his plan, from Caliber to the runt of Cerberus’ litter, had to be crazy. “This cannot be done: the Buffalo are not allies with the Buffalo.”

“Don’t worry about it, Ascella. The Damascus I know doesn’t shoot to miss.” It was as though Caliber ran on caffeine and nicotine, and she polished her rifle as I licked my plate clean. “If he thinks it can be done: it can. Either way, I’m sticking to the plan.”

"And that is?"

She shrugged, “follow my instincts,” then tilted her chin at me. “Follow her orders.” I swelled up like a canteen filled with liquid pride. I was a leader. “But I’ll give you one thing: I’ve signed off on a lot of contracts - done some strange things to get a hard drink in my belly and a soft mare in my bed - but I’ve never done anything like this before. Shoot, we’re practically dip-lo-mats.”

“You… spent money on a mare to sleep with?”

“Like I said, I follow my instincts. But from what I’ve heard, there’s all kinds of, swinging-from-the-chandeliers, lower-your-voice-so-the-kids-don’t-hear, would-you-look-at-that: the-milkmare’s-here, debauchery packed into the scripture.” Ash frowned. She must have skimmed over those parts. “Anyway, everything is instinct.” She waved a hoof at me, as I licked my plate. “You eat when you’re hungry, right?”

“And you are what you eat!” I recited cheerily, before holding out my empty plate like a parrot waiting for its treat. Caliber giggled, as she poured out a tin of beans for me. It was nice to see her letting that girlish laugh bubble up like that. She usually tried to choke it down.

The mercenary reached out a hoof, and winked as one of her ears fell flat. “Amen to that, sister.” I bumper her hoof, unsure of what exactly I might have signed up for.

“I do not think you should bother… eating, unless it is in the sake of reproduction.” That kind of killed the euphemism. “Be fruitful and multiply. She said that to us, in the beginning, before the country grew strong. And it is even more important now that the country is so weak. Why eat, unless it is to procreate?”

“Cause it tastes good,” Caliber said. “Feels pretty good too. Hell, procreation is one of the drawbacks to doing it. Not that it’s a problem for mares like us.” I bumped her hoof again, knowing that I shouldn’t. It was fun. And it made her smile. “Trust me. Old world or New:” I had missed her smile. “Sex is recreation.”

“It only feels good so that the swine and the cattle and the wild horses – the basal creatures that were there when the world was born – will keep breeding. We know better now. We must reproduce, or face extinction.” She might have made a good point, but it was hard to concentrate with all that breakfast in the way. She made a point, I know that much. “To lie with a mare… that’s like planting soil in soil.”

“Boy, when this is all over, I’m going to have the biggest orgy. I’m going to build a mountain of the most pillowiest, melt-in-your-mouth mares. And you’re not invited.”

“Fine. It all sounds too messy for me, anyway.” She looked at me. I was trying to lick the sauce off of my cheek, but it was too far away. “But you must see that sex only exists as a catalyst for procreation.”

"You're a wet blanket, Ascella. And not in the good way." Caliber dug her hooves in. "Sex is recreation."

"Caliber, that is not righ-"

"Recreation!"

"I don't see your point."

"Come on!" I peeked up over the edge of my tin of beans, as Caliber giggled again. “Quit trying to string together those fancy sentences and argue like they did over the first two words.”

"What? Like who did?"

"Recreation!"

"Oh. I think I understand now.” She said that as if this was some sort of primitive ritual “... Procreation?"

“Recreation!"

"Pro! – ah.” Ash winced, as if she had sprained something as she tried to raise her voice. “Procreation."

“Reeeeecreation!” Caliber threw her hooves up into the air like an old world cheerleader.

“Procreation!”.

“What ever happened to love!?” I asked, through a mouthful of beans.

They just stared at me then, as if they couldn’t believe I was real. Caliber couldn’t bear it for long, and snorted back another fit of laughter. Still, I had to sit there with an empty tin resting on my belly, tapping me hooves together as if to measure the silence.

“That’s still a thing, right?”

They lost it, and fell back into the grass, so that their manes spread like a rose garden and a field of lavender. I watched them laughing, as if to fill the silence that the songbirds once would have, and knew that I was happy. I was happy, though the feeling had snuck up on me like a thief or a tropical storm. I was happy, though my legs were burnt as matchsticks, and worn down from running around the world.

They went very quiet then, and Caliber held a hoof over her lips as I walked over. Ash had fallen asleep, and I saw that her eyelids were dark and heavy. We had been up all night, all alone and all at once.

I tucked myself in between the mares, so that our shoulders were touching, and started to sing under my breath. I was happy, though it hurt too much to skip or dance. I could still sing us to sleep.

Round and round the world goes round and round.
The sun goes up and the sun comes down.

Whether your lost or whether your found.
Round and round the world goes round and round.

Kill the king, kill the king 'cause the king is a clown.
From the city down to the small town.

Keep your hooves on the ground, but your head in the clouds.
Cause the world goes round and round, goes round and round.