//------------------------------// // Chapter Five // Story: Hornless // by Death Pony //------------------------------// Deep and endless darkness surrounded her. At first, she didn’t feel anything; no warmth, no chill, no breeze, not even gravity. She wondered if maybe she should feel scared or perhaps lonely. Maybe even something deeper, like melancholy? In the end though, she felt nothing, not even impatience. How did she get here? She couldn’t remember. It seemed like ages since she’d been floating here in the void. Was she waiting for something? Time didn’t seem to have much meaning anymore. Then, something changed. A pulse surging through the void and sending ripples across her being. It caused her thinking to jumpstart forward and seek answers to all these questions. She was pretty sure was a… A what? It was on the tip of her consciousness… Pony Yes, that’s right she was a…a pony. A pony. A… Pegasus Weather Elite Oh, now there were more pieces of something and they came faster this time. She started to remember who and what she was. Harpies Forest Ah, and then recent events began to come to her. Surprise Excitement Terror And now she started to remember feelings. Snowy Skies Yes, that was her name. She was a weather pony. She was going home…when… EMERALD BREEZE And now she felt something again. She swallowed intense fear and then sadness for her friend. Did she live? What happened? Were they hurt? Lost? Dying? She needed to wake up, and find out what happened. Light began to rush at her from beyond the void, and she moved towards it while dreading what she might find. She willed her eyes to open. And so they did. Snowy Skies opened her eyes for the first time in what felt like an eternity. Luckily for her, the only light in the room seemed to be from a pair of gently burning candles, so her eyes were spared any harsh treatment. Even with that, she had to blink them several times while her brain struggled to finish waking up and actually start doing something useful. The second thing she noticed after the dim lighting was how warm she felt. A quick glance down told her both why and where Emerald Breeze was; seeing as how her wing was spread over Snowy while Breezie slept and left a trail of drool on the pillow they were both sharing. Snowy couldn’t help but give a weak grin at seeing her friend’s goofy smile as she soaked the corner of her pillow in spittle, while sawing some serious logs. They had known each other for years and had been close friends since almost foalhood, but Emerald Breeze (or ‘Breezie’ as she called her) often confounded her. The mare would strut around like a badflank one second as if to challenge the world, then squeal like a filly over some article about archaeology or ancient magic the next and deny the second event ever occurred. Her musings were interrupted by a yawn as the pull of sleep tried to drag her back down into the mattress. She wanted to wonder where they were and whose cabin they were in, who saved them, and how they even got here, but she was dead tired and decided that was a problem for tomorrow’s Snowy Skies and lay back down. Instead of a cold void this time however, she was pulled into the healing sleep of the living and began to dream. The man, now calling himself ‘Hornless’ waited until the pegasus’ breathing leveled out into the rhythm of sleep before he moved. He’d been sitting in the corner of the room, keeping an eye on the pair as they slept to make sure there were no complications following the work Doc had been forced to do to save Snowy Skies from death. Once the mare had woken up, glanced around, and looked at her friend for a second, she’d fallen back to sleep and he was able to relax again. Apparently she hadn’t even noticed him sitting in the shadows, but that was fine. He needed to go and ready himself for a trip through the deadly forest and some time alone to think was exactly what he needed at the moment. Rising from the roughly crafted chair, he moved silently out of the bedroom of the cabin and past the Auto Doc to the front door. Taking one last look around the living room, he opened the door and stepped out into the cold night. The pitch black forest seemed to swallow him along with the last vestiges of light that had spilled out the front door during his exit. He softy marched his boots in place a few times while he let his eyes adjust to the night, then pulled out a small penlight and clicked the end, bringing forth a small and shallow pool of light that looked as out of place here as he felt in this strange world. Concentrating now on remembering every step, ‘Hornless’ began the relatively short trip through the woods to where it all began. Soon enough, he found himself in a small and sheltered clearing, even more camouflaged than natural from the outside observer thanks to his efforts with branches and leaves. Recessed a bit into the ground was a hatch composed of a titanium alloy the likes of which had probably never been seen on this world before. Crouching down, Hornless ran his mitten over the hatch a few times to clear away the snow and debris that had collected over the last couple of days and revealed both a handle and some script etched into the material: SEC 7 VAULT Δ. Below him lie one of twelve sections of the vault the man had been born in, Vault Δ or Vault Delta as it was known to those who lived there. Only two months before he found himself in this strange world, the massive vault doors that had kept them all safe opened for the first time in two hundred years and allowed its citizens the freedom to go topside and leave the vault forever, if one chose to. Only two weeks after this event, the vault was almost entirely empty of personnel; the call of Outside too strong for most to ignore excepting only the elderly and the infirm. Truthfully, even ‘Hornless’ had wanted to leave the vault and see the world. The man calling himself Hornless had not chosen to go however. To be fair, he couldn’t have chosen to just leave because there was someone counting on his continued presence there and he had no intention of abandoning her; this person was his mother. For almost nine months now, the man had been struggling to keep his mother alive by constantly doing maintenance on the last Mk. II Asclepius Pod the vault had left. The pod’s capabilities were unmatched by anything else in their possession when it came to treating illness and injury, but its prototype build and lack of spare parts had left it on its last legs after almost two hundred years of use and abuse. It was waging a losing battle against both time and the aggressive cancer than threatened to leave the man bereft of all family. He kept toiling as much as possible, cannibalizing parts from whatever tech had broken down or been proven useless over the years. He kept working long hours at his assigned duty only to follow it with hours of time spent keeping the pod from shutting down for good. He kept breaking things down and building them up again, because he was hoping against hope that maybe eventually, the machine would win and his mother would be cured. He tried to ignore the signs of her failing health, the sad smile she always wore these days, and the look of resignation that seemed to have settled into her eyes. He knew, deep down knew that there was no happy ending in sight, but he couldn’t make himself give up and he suspected his mother couldn’t bring herself to crush what little hope her son had nourished for so long, thus the cycle repeated while they both continued to wear down under the strain of it all. One day he had been rummaging around Section 7 for spare parts and tools when the whole vault seemed to come alive, with hidden pumps and engines roaring to life and the usually dull and glassy sections of the tunnels blazing with blue and purple light-arcs racing from end to end in a brilliant light show. The vault speakers blared a short alarm and followed that with an announcement stating “Project Delta has been ENGAGED! All personnel report to your sections!” and that was shortly followed by “Vault Tech is proud of your pioneering spirit in the face of nuclear eradication. Humanity will always remember you as the first to find our new home. God speed and may He have mercy on us all. Amen.” The last thing the man remembered before passing out in a blinding explosion of light was screaming for his mother.