//------------------------------//
// Chapter XI 
// Story: Shattered 
// by sunstar93 
//------------------------------//

A hideous wailing echo woke me from the first decent sleep I’d had in a while. I scramble to my hooves and prick my ears, trying to locate the sound, holding my breath. Sky Feather is silent as she picks up her head, listens, then stands beside me.

“What is that?” I ask, keeping my voice low as another wail reverberates through the trees. I listen again and realize I can feel a shuffling vibration in my hooves. “Is it something underground?” The vibration is getting stronger and is now accompanied by a faint shhhhuck shhhhuck sound, like when a pony is stuck in mud and trying to get free. Another wail sends chills down my withers and spine.

“Swamp shamblers,” Sky Feather replies quietly. “I’ve heard them before. They sound quite sad, actually.” She presses closer to my side and more chills run through me, but this time it’s not from the creature wandering in the woods.

“What are they, exactly?” Before she can answer my question, in the earliest rays of dawn breaking through the tree canopy, I see the poor monstrosity. It is bigger than Father, at least twice his size. It is completely made of swamp plants: moss, vines, duckweed, aquatic grasses, and cattails. Its legs look like the woven trunks of bog trees - mangroves, I believe they are called – and where its hooves should have been are just a tangle of roots flattened on the bottom. A couple of bare branches grow from the creature’s back, the bark black and slimy. There is at least a distinct head and neck, not much of one, but it is obvious where the face should have been. It has eyes, but not like a normal pony; these eyes are much larger, rounder, and completely milky-white. I’m not even sure if the eyes are necessary, but it seems to have some sense of direction. Instead of just crashing through the trees, it is making a conscious effort to weave through them. Every step is laborious, and the shhhhuck sound comes from every pained stride the creature takes.

“Ponies that have been lost to Froggy Bottom Bog. I don’t know how, but they were resurrected from the bog, and Lady Fluttershy uses them to spread the Everfree’s influence. They just wander around aimlessly, until they are called into battle.” Sky Feather’s voice is somewhat drowned out as the swamp shambler laments again, sounding even more pathetic this time.

“I think it’s in pain. Why did they do this?” Applejack would never do anything close to bringing back dead ponies to fill in her ranks. As desperate as she was in the beginning to grow her army, it is disrespectful to disrupt the peace of the dead. But, Lady Fluttershy has always been a mystery to the rest of the Houses. I just hope that the shambler isn’t in as much pain as it seems.




The sight of the swamp shambler has me a bit rattled. Every strange sound startles me. I hate this. I was a Juggernaut, and suddenly I’m afraid of bird calls? No, don’t think that way. You don’t know what’s actually out there. I just want to be home. I want to see Father again, and Striker, and Wildfire. I want to train again, to run into battle for my House, to return home covered in blood and sweat and scars. But I look at Sky Feather and I can’t toss aside the gnawing sense of duty to help her. Besides, they would probably just find me again.

“What do you remember of your mother?” Sky Feather’s voice pulls me out of my thoughts. We are nearing a refugee camp near the edge of the Everfree forest; at least, that is what I am told. Once we leave the forest, we will be near what remains of the original Ponyville, then cross into House Stormwing territory to find another refugee camp.

“Very little,” I answer stiffly. I had been trying to keep thoughts of my mother out of my mind. “She left me with my father when I was just a few years old, right when the war broke out. I missed her for a little while, but that’s it.”

“You never tried to find out who she was?” she presses.

“I asked a few times, but no one would ever answer me. It bothered me sometimes, but I never felt she left a void in my life. I mostly just wondered why she didn’t want to take care of me anymore.”

“Maybe it was for your own safety,” Sky Feather suggests. “You know how they treat non-Unicorns in her territory.”

“I don’t particularly care if that was the reason or not. I’m proud of who I am, and who my Father is, and what House I belong to,” I snap back a little too harshly.

“And no reason not to be. Just curious, that’s all,” she replied coolly.

“I remember learning how to buck apples with my Father,” I say, changing the subject slightly. “I was really skinny as a colt, and it was beyond pathetic watching me try to hit the trees hard enough to even shake the branches.” I think back to those days, when the trees were already black and withered, and no apples had been harvested for some time. “There’s still an ongoing dispute on who was the best apple bucker: Applejack or my father.”

“What is she like? The Supreme Commander?” Sky Feather inquires. I can faintly smell campfire smoke; we are almost to the refugee camp.

“Serious. Focused. A little cold sometimes, but that’s just part of the job, I guess. She wasn’t like that in the very beginning, though. I think…” I pause, trying to find what to say. “I think she misses how things used to be, when they were all friends. Before the sisters disappeared.”

In the camp, there are the usual menagerie of zebras and Earth ponies, but this time there are two Unicorns there. I’m not sure how common it is to have Unicorn refugees here, but with the wide berth the others are giving them, I am inclined to think it is fairly rare.

“I’ll go ask her,” one of them whispers, and I see them staring at Sky Feather. I stick close to her, unsure of what they want. Both of them make their way to us, and Sky Feather turns her head to me.

“They might be Whitegold spies,” she hisses. “Don’t trust them or tell them anything. Let me speak to them.”