Fallout Equestria: Begin Again
Chapter 15: Poetic Justice
“Civilized? You think you’re civilized because you live in the burnt-out ruins of a beforetime town?”

|*| Orange Soda |*|

An old newspaper drifted down the highway, and as I soaked in the glow of the fluorescent lights, and listened to the fences rattle, shaken by the storm as a forest of wire branches and paper leaves, I felt far away from Zion. I could still see the silhouette of that stone Pegasus, leaping off of the bridge high above us, its one wing pushing apart the stars. The twilight was rolling over on the horizon, and sent ripples of sunlight through the prairie, so that it seemed to swell like an ocean in the eventide.

Ash and I sat on its shore, huddled together under the roof of a gas station. I had my back against one of the pumps, and watched Caliber as she argued with the merchants on the curb. She was little more than the red glow of her cigarette, dwarfed by the barrels of fire and kerosene lanterns that lit up the marketplace that had spilled out of a nearby town. She was raising her voice up at an overweight Saddle Arabian, who was selling kebabs, and wore tailored white robes and a hat like an upside down ashtray.

Orange bottles of Sparkle Cola clinked together at her side, all strung up by the neck, and glowed to match the alphabet of neon letters and firefly lights that lingered over the marketplace. She circled back to the station, with three sticks and the cigarette quivering between her teeth.

I could hear dogs barking, and their voices echoed off of Zion’s wall. The weary little town sat on the edge of the rippling plain, and seemed to be leaning into it, like a pier being sucked into a yawning bay. And, from the heart of the town, underneath the haggles and the howls, I could hear voices. And music, beating out a rhythm on the belly of the night, droning on under the sound of the fluorescent lights.

The kebabs tasted sweet, but their scent began to sting the back of my throat, as though I were licking honey right off the comb, and swallowing bees. I washed the feeling out with a mouthful of Sparkle Cola, and then plucked off another piece of meat, like strange fruit from a branch.

Caliber lit another cigarette and, for a while, she and I ate in silence, biting our tongues. Still, our voices might have slipped out of us, and I could almost feel them crowding in around Ash, whispering: What happened to your wings? What happened to your wings!? Tell us what happened to your wings!

“We were nomads,” she said, and the silence was blown to ribbons like a bicycle wheel pumped one too many times. We had walked out of Zion without saying a word to each other. “Living on the edge of the map. Just faraway enough so that we did not fear the Enclave’s sword. Just stubborn enough so that we would not take cover behind its shield. Our families had shrugged off their laws years and years ago, and built colonies in the northern skies, where the storms are wild and the seasons fight for their turn.”

“We were always going: sailing. Always close enough so that we could still call ourselves Equestrians. But always running. Better that, they said, than to have our fate wrung out in between the slow, clogged gears of their bureaucracy. Better that, they said, than to give up our liberty.”

“So the Enclave caught on, huh? Which one of those bastards clipped you?” Caliber asked. “I’d like to run their wings through a newspaper press.”

“No… not clipped,” I began, as I watched the stubs at her sides fluttering, like the useless stump of a three-legged dog, pumping as if in step with its paws. “Burned.”

The pilgrim nodded, as if that was fair: as if that was how stories were supposed to go. “Somewhere – perhaps tucked into a filing cabinet or shred to ribbons – there is an edict that named us terrorists, and called for our extermination.” She looked up at the Pegasus Bridge, as Zion’s dribbled over like a teething foal. “They set our colonies on fire, and boiled them into the atmosphere.”

“They ran us through with an enormous airship, not so different to the ones that we had once taken our wings from, and all I could think to do was look for my father in the belly of the colony. When the sirens began to sound, he had gone running down to the engines. But the colony was being disemboweled, and I was caught under the hooves of the crowds. It was as if we had all forgotten how to fly.”

“Are you sure it was the Enclave?” I asked, though it was heard to speak. Caliber frowned at me, as if to doubt their cruelty was to take their side; to salute their flag.

“From the day my father first fed me - first started making ships out of every spoonful - he set out to show me how our fleet, how each of our colony ships, was built from the bones of the old world’s navy.” She looked up at me, and her eyes were full of stars, like coins at the bottom of a shallow pool.
“I know a warship when I see one.”

I stared down into an oil stain, and sipped at my Sparkle Cola. There was nothing I could do to make it better, to heal these old wounds. “And, as it ploughed through our fleet, breathing fire, we could hear their bullhorns, rising over the screams: Too close to the Sun… You flew too close to the Sun.”

“Luna’s bones,” Caliber said. “How did you make it out alive?”

“I fell.” Now, she stared out over the lake, which looked like a wax painting of the sky, melting. “The ground was burnt out from under my hooves, and the fire licked up at my wings. I had nothing to tread but open sky.” I followed her eyes, as she looked back, and watched herself fall. “And then: water.”

“My body was washed up onto the shore, wings in blackened rags. And that would have been the end of it, if the Congregation had not found me there: if destiny had not swept me onto their doorstep. Just as it has swept them on to the Goddess’.”

Caliber’s cigarette hung from her bottom lip, and shook as she spoke. “How old were you?”

“It’s how I got my cutie mark.”

I stumbled to my hooves, and let the Sparkle Cola slip out of my magic. The bottle shattered against the curb, and little pieces of glass spread out over the oil stains, and caught the neon lights, like stars of many colors. I had to fix it. I had to go back, and catch her. But I couldn’t. And though my heart was beating as if to burst, and I felt like running, I didn’t know where to go: what to do. I was lost.

My knees were shaking, but I stood before them, like a star blinded by the stage lights and the cameras, and cried.

*** *** ***

After I was done, the music stopped, and the sound of raised voices and clicking rifles came out of the town as if in applause. We had come to know this sound well. It was the voice of Equestria: cursing down at us and crying for help all at once, like an old buck leaning out of the window of a burning building, telling the firefighters below to get off of his lawn.

I watched Caliber straightening out her back, to stare into the market and its baths of neon and smoke. Her ears twitched from side to side, as I tried to shake off the image of burnt feathers on a ripple, like birds on a wire. There was a gunshot, and Caliber went off like a greyhound, leaving Ash and I to waddle along after her, feeling clumsy and inelegant for seeing how well she had taken the new world in stride.

“Would you like a kebab, young lady?” The Saddle Arabian asked, as we came up to the curb. His voice was deep, and made me think of a huge, snoring animal. “Brahmin, mutton, mouse! One free for every new visitor to Rosecrans.” Caliber skidded to a halt just ahead of us, and there was a rumbling, though it was not coming from the mouth of the towering desert horse. “The Buffalo comin’… take two kebabs.”

“Buffalo? I’d say Lucky us, but that sounds like a fucking stampede.” Caliber led us into the town then, and we came through its neon gate as if passing under an electric rainbow, with half of its bulbs blown out. “If they don’t pay us any mind, chances are this whole town might be flat before sunup.”

She rushed us through the dimly lit streets of Rosecrans, whose houses looked like they had been sat on and whose cars had been stripped to the bone. We came to a crossroads, where wires had been slung across steel lanterns, and the few traffic lights whose eyes had not been blackened, shone green.

Rosecrans wasn’t much more than a boneyard. Shingles hung off of the roofs like autumn leaves, and windows full of broken glass flashed like snapping, toothy mouths.

There was another gunshot, as we saw a handsome mare at the middle of the crossroads, pointing her rifle into the sky. Her mane looked to have been carved from stone, but it could hardly be seen under a rawhide hat. Her coat matched the colors of the prairie, as if she had been born to lower her belly to the earth, and prowl. She was dressed like a comic book sheriff, and as the beads of a dreamcatcher clicked against her rifle, I couldn’t help thinking how out of place she seemed in this gray and electric suburb.

“Listen and listen well, Mayor… You’d better get your boys out of the street!” She hollered, in a voice that might have bubbled up from a belly full of smoke and cognac. “Otherwise we’re all road kill!”

Tin cans began to rattle in the gutters then, and on the sidewalk, a set of dice and a stack of poker chips clicked against one another like castanets, or chattering teeth. Someone had been gambling here, and each hand of cards stretched out like the wings of a bloody dove, with crowns and scepters tucked in between its feathers. This stranger, and the posse at her side, had turned the night around.

The entire town seemed to have its eyes on one buck – an overdressed earth pony who had been knocked back against the curb, and wrung a loose bowtie out between his hooves, as his cufflinks glinted in the streetlight. Despite his outfit, he didn’t look out of place with the rest of the townsfolk, and might even have been throwing down some caps in that abandoned dice game. In fact, with his pinstripe vest and starched collars, he looked like a winner: a champion in the gutter.

“Fine,” said the Mayor. “But you’re going to get what’s coming to you.” There had been a circle closing in around the mare, but now, a dozen bucks armed with every from hunting shotguns to broken bottles spun on their hooves, and the circle was broken. “Buffalo comin’. Everypony get inside.” The mare smiled, and began to slink away, with her posse trailing along behind her like a pack of snickering hyenas.

A Saddle Arabian mare glided by me, and eyes that were as wild and as dark as the tempest shone out from behind her burka. Its fabric, like the night sky folded over, was more elegant than anything I’d seen in my mother’s fashion magazines. It had me thinking that this was some sort of exiled Princess, searching for a new throne in the prairie.

A few of the ponies were dressed - not in skirts and square-necked dresses, or the lapels and loosened collars of their mayor – but in the same ashtray hats as the butcher; the same sparkling robes as this black princess. They walked away from the crossroads with their heads held high and their eyes calm, with a quiet dignity that reminded me of Damascus.

Soon, the streets were empty but for paper birds that had been torn up in the barbed wire, three mares who had bruised the ego of a Goddess, and the thunder. Everypony was likely tucked away in some basement or bomb shelter by now, as though we were not hearing hoofsteps, but sirens.

“We’re in.” Caliber clicked her hooves together, and smiled like that old devil called Chaos. “Didn’t you see what she was wearing?” I shook my head. “Buffalo hide. That was a poacher. And I bet she figured she could hide out here in Rosecrans. We help the Buffalo catch her, and we’ll get on like a straw house on fire. All we have to do is tell ‘em which door to go huffing and puffing on. Or, even better: do it for ‘em!”

Then, after putting an ear to the asphalt, and keeping an eye on the rattling dice, Caliber bustled us out to the edge of Rosecrans, and into the sightlines of the stampede.

In the distance, was a great wall of dust, a sandstorm whose belly had been colored gold by a thousand blades of grass, like a thousand little brushstrokes, rolling over the Great Plain. It blotted out the southeast, and mirrored the clouds that the northern horizon wore like a crown under its starry mane.

Ash stepped out onto the naked highway and became a figurehead to Rosecrans as it sailed over those buttery grasslands, and into that rolling thunder. She was wearing my father’s coat, though it fit her like an army jacket would a foal. With her dark eyes, and her jacaranda mane, it looked like she had rolled right out of a bed of cardboard and newspaper on the sidewalk. She looked like a beggar.

“Ascella… I don’t know if these Buffalo are like the ones in the desert-“ Caliber put a hoof on her shoulder, as if talking a madmare down from the side of a bridge. “But down south: they don’t just stop.”

“They’ll stop.” I knew that she was right, as it always seemed like the pilgrim had skipped a few pages ahead, and already knew how the story went. So, even as the skirts of the storm fell over us, and the earth shook as the rattle to some Godchild, we stood by her.

Then, as my bones stopped shaking and my teeth stopped clattering, everything went quiet, and the storm rolled its eye on to Rosecrans.

“My name is Ash Ascella of Caeli’Velum.” The little beggar mare raised her voice, and it parted the dust so that a headdress of white feathers, whose tips had been dipped in ink or oil, could be seen. The head that wore this crown was almost reptilian, its eyes like two boreholes, and its skin as wrinkled as the parched tongue of Zion. “And I am a Pilgrim: not a Poacher.”

The Buffalo grunted, and blew steam out of his nose. “I fought many battles beside a Pilgrim.” Caliber eyes became bright. “I fought many more against a Preacher.” Then, they seemed to have flipped like coins, polished on one side, and dull on the other. “Same Gods. To one they said peace. To the other: war.” His words came like sailing stones, grinding their way across the sand.

“We have seen you. You come out of Zion smelling of smoke and blood. Tell me what I must think your Gods are whispering to you: peace or war. Tell me that you are not like the one who cannot age: the blue eyed devil who came out of Zion before.”

“Blue eyed devil?” Caliber bristled. “Hold on a minute, pal. I think that’s taking it too fuc-“

“We can prove it.” Ash spoke up, cutting the mercenary off. “The Poachers you are hunting have hidden themselves somewhere in Rosecrans. We will find them, and bring them out to you.”

The Chieftain, who was the only Buffalo who seemed to be doing anything more than breathing, chewed on the pilgrim’s words for a while. Watching him blink was almost narcoleptic, but eventually, some of his clansmen began to harrumph and stomp their hooves, and he nodded.

“We must have their ringleader alive.” Behind him, one of the warriors rocked from side to side, and his feathers looked like knives, as they might have been dipped in blood. “The rest are yours.”

“Sounds good,” Caliber said. “Way I see it: we can get the pups to turn Mama over for the sake of their own sorry hides. Won’t even have to fire a shot.” The warriors were glaring at me, their eyes colored in shades of red that could have been dug up out of the earth. Their nostrils flared as Caliber laid out her plan. “You’re boys don’t have a problem with letting the rest of those crooks run, do they?”

“I don’t.”

“Not good enough.” Caliber spat on her hoof, then thrust it towards the Chief.” And, for a moment, I thought she was about to try polishing out the great Buffalo’s wrinkles. “If those Poachers turn over their boss without starting any trouble: your clan lets ‘em go.” Her eyes narrowed. “Shake on it, Chief.”

It might have been a little humiliating for the old Buffalo to rock his weight to the side, and give an Equestrian girl her way, but his face didn’t betray anything but the same, unshakable pride. Still, I thought I saw that red Warrior’s frown deepen, as if he was disgusted by this compromise between us. Ready to leave, Ash had begun to drift, like a newspaper hovering over the gutter.

But then, as if she was trying to bring the Buffalo’s temper to a boil, Caliber reached up, and plucked a feather from the Chief’s headdress. “Just so they know I’m not lying.” The Chief harrumphed, and even that would have been enough to send another mercenary running scared.

“So what’d this mare really do, anyway?” Caliber asked, as she tucked the feather into her vest. “Make a rug out of your spirit animal, or something?”

“She is wearing my eldest son as a coat.”

“Huh.” She said, looking around as if to find something to say.
“Must be a little big around the shoulders.”

*** *** ***

“Why, Caliber?” The mercenary furrowed her brow, and rapped at the basement door, doing nothing to answer Ash’s question. “Aren’t we here to make bannermen of these Buffalo?”

“Yeah.” I could almost hear the Poachers ignoring us inside, and began to feel a little sympathy for those missionaries of the Faith, who had so often played drummer at the doors of my neighbors, with scripture tucked under one arm, and the Celestial cross jingling against their chests. “But I don’t like the way ol’ Sitting Bull was spitting bull about the boss.”

“The boss? You mean Damascus?” I asked, though she didn’t seem to hear me.

“I take my orders from one of the last good ponies in the North – in anywhere - A shining pillar of moral strength!” She was almost punching bruises into the soft pinewood now, and with the automatic pistol hovering at my side, I felt like a police officer poised before a battering ram. “Not some blue. Eyed. Devil.”

The doors swung open, and clapped Caliber across the ear, as if scolding her out of a bad tantrum. Ash and I skipped back, but settled into place as if turned to stone, as three rifles clicked at us. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

“Well, good evenin’ ladies!” The handsome stranger popped her head out of the cellar, laughing through eyes the color of the old world’s sky. “The name’s Hennessy.” She lowered her rifle, and tapped at the dreamcatcher she’d nailed into its side. “Spirits told me you’d be coming… and that you’re looking to buy.”

*** *** ***

“That looks like angel dust.” Caliber drew little circles through a fine white powder, which covered the floor of the cellar. She kept her voice low, though the poachers jeered and giggled all around us, eyes wide and stubble speckled white. They might have put their snouts to the floorboards, and patrolled the basement like so many bloodhounds.

“Works like angel dust, too,” said the mare, as she climbed up onto a nearby bench. Pieces of a broken pool table lay scattered around the room, all flaking green and damp, and there was a litter of cues, liquor bottles and skulls that had been so violently cracked open that they looked like eggshells whose yolks had been lapped up. “Couple of the boys couldn’t help breathing it in when we came tumbling in here.”

Hennessey hadn’t even bothered to confiscate our weapons, but I could feel rifles trailing us from all around the room. This was the new world, where narrow eyes were so often joined, and security cameras so often replaced, by the sights of a gun. Even if she thought we were here looking for a reasonably priced Buffalo skin coat, her posse would be ready to gun us down.

“Hope they’re not too far gone,” Caliber began. “We’re not here to shop. But I got a deal to cut.” I kept my father’s pistol pointed up, as if aiming at the room’s one lightbulb, which hung from a wire like a neuron from a raw nerve. Without it, everyone would be blind.

“The Buffalo want you to surrender!” I said, a little too loudly. "We're helping!"

A mad cackle passed over the hyenas, though their ringleader only cocked her smile, and looked me up and down. “Voice as pretty as that picture show face of yours.” Suddenly, she had a flagon in her hoof, and bits of froth spilt out of it as she stumbled up and down the bench, like a drunken gymnast. “So I take it y’all are mercenaries… that or a caravan. Pin you on a map, and we’d have Red somewhere down San Palomino way. Miss Knockout here has her star on the streets of Applewood.”

“And you…” She rolled her pale eyes over onto Ash, and the room became quiet as the rumpled pilgrim stared back. “I figure you must be one of those Los Pegasus crackpots, hollerin’ about getting tipped off the side of a flying saucer. No? Well, I can’t be all wrong. There’s just something… alien about you.”

“We came from Zion.” I said, thinking that it was now up to me to keep Ash’s secret a secret.

“Blew in with the smoke, then.” Her eyes narrowed. “Wait… Zion!” She thrust her hooves out, as though it were a curse word. “You’re from that Stable!”

A ripple passed through the room then, and I heard poker chips hitting the floor like so many bullet casings, as the boozehounds and baseheads crowded in around me. I saw that some of the faces belonged to the ponies of Rosecrans, the ponies who had filled these ash trays, emptied these broken bottles and powdered the room.

Hennessy leaned in, purring, and her breath smelt like barley and old meat. “Tis the season… And nothing sells quite like a Stable pony. Here I was, with nothing but skin coats for when the Coltilde comes around. But now...” She put her arm around me. “O Celestia, y’all are too good to me.” I could feel the hyenas pressing in around us, drooling as they waited for the lion to make its kill. “If I can wriggle us both out of Rosecrans alive: You’re going to make me so much money.”

“There's your problem.” Caliber smiled, as she was the mare with the trump card: with the weighted dice. “See, I did a little di-plo-macy. Got it set so all these boys can run free. ‘Long as they leave the Buffalo a little… consolation prize.” She prodded the mare’s chest, as if she meant to cut out her heart, and offer it as a plumb to the Gods. “Matter of fact, I even had the Chief shake hooves on it.”

“Buffalo don’t compromise,” Hennessy said, laughing off the fear that had whipped across her face.

Caliber pulled out the feather, and held it over the mob.
“You ever try plucking the feathers off of a Buffalo?”

And, just like that, as if they couldn’t stand to go hungry any longer, the hyenas turned on their lion.

*** *** ***

By the time we wrangled Hennessy out onto the street, her nose had been smeared as red as a drinker’s and both of her eyelids were blackened, smeared as those of a harlot rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and blurry pictures out of her mind. The Poachers carried her as a crowd would the champion of a bar fight, and she spat curses at hooves that had once followed her up the steppes.

I had taken her rifle, and held it over the crowd like a rod, herding them south, though some of the Buffalo had already begun to roam through Rosecrans, as if the town was to be kept on lockdown until it spat out this one bad seed. The weapon was set in mahogany, though it had a rusty silver barrel and an ivory magazine. Under the dreamcatcher, crude circles had been scratched into the rifle’s stock, and a mobile of beads and feathers hung below it, to catch passing nightmares by the heel, and pull them into the web.

Some of the locals had decided to add their bodies to the crowd, and so, around the Buffalo skin coats were those rumpled collars and rolled up sleeves, those torn stockings and tousled manes. And, on top of it all, limp as a ragdoll, was Hennessy: this dirty little city’s living sacrifice.

The Chief stood where we had left him, and the crowd began to break apart as we closed the distance between us, as we climbed the steps, and came to the altar where we would carve out her heart. That frowning red Warrior was pacing a furrow in the dirt behind him, but even he seemed to cheer up at the sight of our strange parade. The rest of his clan followed us out of Rosecrans, cottoning on to the side of the crowd like immense sweetgum seeds.

By the time we reached the edge of town, a sandstorm had gathered under our hooves, and as the mob took its last step, it spun around us like ground nutmeg stirred up from the bottom of a glass.

“Alright, fellas: you can go ahead and set her down!” Caliber’s voice parted the crowed, and Hennessy sank into it like a pill into water. “It’s over.”

Caliber sidled up to the Chief, waving his feather over the ragdoll that had once been the poacher’s ringleader. “Ta da.” Ash and I sat down beside the mercenary, so that we were facing the crowd, who might have just finished stoning the body between us. “That is one poached poacher, if I do say so myself.” As if to prove her point, the mare started bleeding out onto the road, like a pierced yolk.

“Ta…da.” Hennessy rolled onto her back and there, quivering to her lips, was a smile. “Goddesses… I would’a loved to be a… a magician.” Watching her twitch, I couldn’t help thinking of the radroaches that would sometimes creep into the Stable, only to be crushed under someone’s baton or boot.

“This is her.” The Chief nodded slowly, as Caliber showed off her own crooked smile, looking up at him like a filly, proud of some masterpiece hidden in the latest mess she’d made. I’d never really noticed it before: but the mercenary’s teeth were perfectly white. “Now… the rest die.”

Then, turned loose by these two mares, whose smiles were so much like his: there was Chaos. There was thunder and sand, as though the Gods had seen the blackness of the offered plumb, and had been insulted; As if they had taken their hammer to the altar, and the temple was falling to pieces around us.

There was Caliber, screaming, shredding her voice against the storm from this asylum in its eye. And there was the feather, torn to pieces under their hooves like Caesar’s laurels in the whitewater.

*** *** ***

Where is he?” Her mane was coming out of place in little springs, and though even the Buffalo seemed to glide through all the dust that they had churned up, she shouldered her way through it like a crowd. “Where is that son of a bitch?”

Ash and I stood surrounded by a rose garden of corpses turned to a pulp, like two dusty orphans in a city of clay that had been melted in some deluge. The poacher’s bodies had been ground into ocher, and then smeared over the road like the first sunset over the wall of a cave. But for a few locals, who had slipped through the fingers of this Discord and run back into Rosecrans, only Hennessy had been spared. She lay, licking the salt out of her wounds, beside us.

“You bastard!” Caliber had found the Chief, and beat her hooves against his wrinkled face. He closed his eyes, and let the mercenary exhaust herself. “We had a deal! I promised them. I promised –“ She was too lightheaded to keep her sentences from slipping away from her then. “You made me a liar!”

The mercenary finally let herself collapse against him, and one hoof slumped over the Buffalo’s horn, while the other ran down his painted cheek, as though they were about to dance. Her face was pressed against the malpais between his eyes, and I could almost hear a needle drop, so that slow, haunting music could set a rhythm for their hoofsteps.

“You shook my hoof.” We were all so tired. Whether for fresh bruises that were still spreading out as blue inkblots, for being cheated, reliving the sacking of a city in the sky, or for getting up onto the stage once the show was over, and crying: crying because the curtains were closed, and you could do nothing to open them up again. “You shook my hoof!” She threw her weight back, and struck him across the cheek, breaking a bar of war paint into white splinters.

Like bubbles over boiling water, the anger swelled out of her, only to pop out and simmer itself flat. She was breathing it in, and blowing it out; filling herself up, emptying herself out. “Say something…” She said, begging him. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

“Didn’t I tell ya?” Hennessy twisted her neck, and looked up with something like sympathy in her eyes. “Buffalo don’t compromise. Hell, they’re probably going to drag me down this highway until I’m in ribbons.”

“So that’s it?” Caliber took a few steps back, and curled her lip up over those milk white teeth, disgusted by that stern, totem face, whose rules were so different to our own. “That’s it? You don’t even care enough to try wriggling your way out of this through some loophole.” She scoffed, and it sounded like the breath had been knocked out of her. “Do you?”

Then, as if someone had twisted her dials to the farthest notch, she was screaming. “Do you!?”

I had to cover my ears, as she might have rolled her tongue along the roof of her mouth, and whipped it down with enough force to send an echo rolling out into the tundra beyond the plains. Though it was not the steel in her voice that had clicked before the thunderclap, but the trigger of her rifle.

Caliber had taken the bit of her battle saddle in between her teeth, and wrenched it as one would the cord of a chainsaw. And, as she stumbled away, losing her balance, I saw blood rushing through the wrinkles of that old Buffalo’s face, as if some red spring in the malpais had broken through all of its dams at once.

His irises began to drift out of place, like planets knocked out of orbit. And, as the Buffalo swayed from side to side, I thought I could hear Equestria groaning under his weight. The blood ran off of his face like so many tears and so much snot, to pool in between those macerated bodies. His mouth lolled open and, finally, the Buffalo Chief broke his silence with a pitched down wail.

“Huh!?” Caliber wasn’t done. And, as her hoof skidded through his blood, she looked like a dancer on ice, with her legs twisted. She picked herself up and, always staring into those untethered eyes, pulled the cord of her rifle again. “Do you!?” Their voices were either side of the piano then, and each might have gone bursting out of the farthest ends of the scale, had the second bullet not unstitched the Buffalo’s brows, and ground his brains against his skull like a pestle to cornmeal in a mortar.

Ash and I held on to each other, as the Buffalo toppled, and rocked Equestria as if to tilt it out of bed. With one last drumbeat, the Chief of the Buffalo fell, and Caliber stood over him, as if she were the champion of the world, and stared down into the totem whose face she had turned to clay. When the dust settled, we looked out at all the faces that were still as hard and as knotted as the trunk of an oak tree, and my heart started skipping. Fudge, fudge, call the judge…

Caliber let the blood wash over her hooves, wearing the face of a mare watching a money tree burn, as that great red Warrior came walking up to us. He began to laugh, and the sound came out slow and coarse as a boulder rolling over. Hehh Hehh Hehhh.

Despite everything, I caught myself admiring him then. For in a crowd of shimmering dark eyes, like pieces of coal being pressed under so many brows, his were laughing. I wished that I could find the courage, someday, to be the only one who laughed.

He was only a little smaller than the Chief, but wore rusted plate armor across his sides. He might simply have stripped the doors off of a jalopy, as if pulling the wings off of a fly, and bent its hood over his own hunched spine. Caliber didn’t even flinch as he put his hoof around her shoulders, and rattled her from side to side. She was in shock, and I saw the stars that had already been spinning around her head being thrown out of orbit, and digging their points into the bloodied earth, as the Buffalo shook her.

“Here’s an Equestria I’d like to fight!” She looked a little queasy, and I could only stare, waiting for my Caliber to snap back into place. The red warrior might have had a manticore run its claws in between his snout and his smiling right eye, and his scars made him look almost as wrinkled as the malpais, running dry beside them. “And what a battle it would be: The Chiefslayer against the rightful Chief!”

“Wh-wha?” She asked, getting ahold of herself just enough to shrug away from his hoof. “Chief?”

Hehh. Hehh. Hehhh. “Yes, Chiefslayer.” He was giddy. And, were it not for his size and the timbre of his voice, I would have compared him to a child in a paper crown; drunk on their own power. In fact, as he spoke, it was as if someone had taken the voice of a boy, and pitched it down. “You just killed my father.”

Caliber had made mulch of one totem head, just as Cody wore the skin of the next over her shoulders. And I had the terrible feeling that, for sending its crown rolling so far down the line, the two mares might have rushed the Plains into a season of chaos.

“For too long has the name Tuskegee wallowed in the smoke of his peace pipes… It’s time we remember who we are.” He looked around, as the rest of the Buffalo widened their sunken eyes, and watched him pluck the feathers out of his father’s crown. “But first… we should celebrate!” Then, to make his own crown, he stuck the feathers dipped in ink between those which had been dipped in blood.

When he was done, the buffalo punched Caliber across the shoulder, and she nearly fell to pieces. “Come, Chiefslayer. I think I owe you a drink.”

*** *** ***

The rest of Rosecrans was slowly lifting its head out of the sand, as though the howling of the fallout had died down, and now a dozen Stable doors could be heard rolling off of their hinges. Still, only the bartender had the courage to stay anything less than a stone’s throw away from Tuskegee. And we found ourselves in another ring of bodies; all pressed up against the tavern’s papered walls, or crowding the stairs to the brother above the bar.

Even Celestia, whose picture was nesting in a bed of paper flowers at the heart of an incense shrine in between shelves of colored glass bottles, was watching, as Caliber nursed her drink.

Most of the Buffalo were outside, keeping watch over Hennessy and sharing their thoughts over the change in management, very loudly. Some had followed us through the tavern’s wide doors, seeming just as pleased with their new Chief as he was with himself. Two of them were trying to play pool at one of the tables, and I didn’t know if they had noticed the mares, all too afraid to wriggle out from under it.

Everyone looked their best. Every mare had bruised her eyes or pierced her skin, hanging bottlecaps from their ears or wearing bike chains around their necks. Just as every buck had pressed out his shirts and rolled up his sleeves, pinning bottlecaps to their cuffs and slicking back their hair with grease from the same chains. The light, which was rich for the shades over every bulb and the tinted glass over every candle, rippled over the bottles, and I couldn’t help basking in it all a little bit.

The smell of cigarettes filled the air, and there were still squeals coming from upstairs, but it had been a long time since I’d been somewhere that felt so much like a church. With Celestia on the wall, and everypony in quiet awe, it felt like a holy place. It was as if we had spoiled the fun by walking in with God.

Still, my chest felt tight, as what Tuskegee called firewater made the air burn as I breathed it in. And Caliber was smoking a cigar: the proud father of a dictatorship.

The Chief of the Buffalo kept patting her on the back, and had the bartender make it so that she could never finish her drink. She took the whiskey in doses, like medicine, and as the record player spun in the corner, I could see her dancing, just a little bit, despite herself.

“You know, Chiefslayer, I used to be a mercenary!” Some of the other Buffalo cheered and emptied their glasses at that. “I was the best Mi Amore and its glass girls ever saw! … Until that old softhorn pulled me back home by the bloodline.”

“Do you know how he got me?” He nudged Caliber, and she almost lost her grip on the counter. “Do you?” She shook her head. “Well, I’ve only met one Crystal Pony crazy enough to try bedding a Buffalo. And after all that time in Mi Amore, well… when he told me he needed some grandsons: I was ready to get to work!” The Buffalo laughed, and the tavern shook, as their armor clicked like the feathers of so many steel birds. “I didn’t leave the female’s camp for a month.”

I felt sick, and asked the bartender for an orange soda. Some of the Buffalo’s hooves were as bloody red as Tuskegee’s eyes, and though Caliber had given the Poachers what little justice the new world could afford by putting two bullets into his father’s skull, that hardly made us heroes.

I tried not to think about what had happened, and sank into the music that even Caliber and Tuskegee were letting themselves bob in and out of. I’d heard someone say that unicorns couldn’t dance. But I wasn’t in the mood to find out if they were right.

Ash had not come into the tavern, and went drifting off into the streets instead, if only to be pelted with the coins of kindly strangers. And so, as a few of the locals gathered up their nerves, and their skirts, and started dancing circles around the Buffalo, I felt like a teenager without a date.

“Another!” Tuskegee bellowed. “And when this one runs dry: we will beat our shoulders against the walls of this world, and make it remember us!”

The bartender didn’t waste any time before sliding out the next amber bottle. He had been the bell at the end of enough brawls, and lent his ear to enough drunks whose hearts had been broken as they fell down the stairs, to keep his cool around a few rowdy Buffalo. He had heard these songs a thousand times before, and moved with music as if he had no choice, like the ballerina on top of a music box.

And so, but for the few who still hugged the walls, babysitting their drinks, Rosecrans was dancing.

I knew that there would be no one to save tonight, and when Caliber tilted her head towards the door, she might as well have been the most handsome boy at the prom, holding out his hoof, even as my favorite song was spun out under the needle.

*** *** ***

“I’m so tired, Gracie.” We were out on the corner and, from down the road, I could hear a mare laughing as someone kissed her neck, and a buck cursing as he rolled his caps right into someone else’s pocket. “It’s been a long day.”

“Well… at least the sun’s set.”

“Yeah.” A drowsy smile spread across her face. “And once Tuskegee has worked this power trip out of his system, I’d bet anything on us having the Buffalo in our corner.” I could almost see her eyes getting prettier then, softening like chocolate coins.

“Now we just have to hoof it over to the radio tower, and get GNR ringing her bells over the east.” She lowered her eyelids, and I caught myself thinking that I had to stop her: as if the mare who I had never seen sleeping might not know how to wake up. “If we can get a line to Hell, Damascus can tell us if there’s anything left between us and Calvary.”

“We’d better wait for the sun to come up,” I said, as if tucking her in. The Great Plain, with its rolling pastures and scattered ruins, was not unlike a great ocean, dotted by the wreckage of a fleet torn apart in a passing storm. From what I had seen on the way down from the Pegasus Bridge, the highways crossed it like dotted lines. To leave Rosecrans now, in these darkest hours before the dawn, would be to throw ourselves off the side of an ocean liner: to fall from the lip of a city in the clouds.

Ash came running into the street and, behind her; I thought I could hear thunder. “What’s going on?” I asked, as the pilgrim skidded to a stop before us, losing her smile as if she was embarrassed by it. She rubbed her arm, rolling up the sleeves of my father’s coat.

“Tuskegee is about to do what his father wouldn’t… what Cyrus had for so long begged him to do.” Try as I might, I couldn’t help picturing that bloated old pilgrim, and the totem that Caliber had carved hollow. “He’s going to take back Cabanne.”

“Cabanne?”

“There is an ancient city, perched on a great mesa, which is said to cast the only shadow that falls over the Great Plain. It was empty until the Locusts came, blown out on the winds of the Middle Passage.” Like a sickness on the breath of Hell. “Cyrus fought a war against them once, trying to clean them out of the city. He would see them stamped out once and for all.”

“But what does Tuskegee have against the Locusts?” I looked back, and saw that Caliber was asleep. We had an anchor around our necks, keeping us from leaving Rosecrans until a buttery dawn was spread across the sky. If I woke Caliber now, I couldn’t know when she would let herself sleep again. “I mean, why is he doing this now?”

The newly crowned Chief went tearing through the streets behind her, with a rope stretched taught in between his battle saddle and the fetlock of a mare who was clutching a rawhide hat in her crooked smile. But her face was quickly losing all of the laughter on it, as if it was being peeled off by the road.

“He is a Buffalo. He has something to prove.” Under the thunder, I could hear Hennessy yowling, and looked down at the dreamcatcher whose beads were clicking together at my side.
“And I asked him to.”