//------------------------------//
// Chapter 3: Blue 
// Story: Fallout Equestria: Renewal 
// by ElbowDeepInAHorse 
//------------------------------//

The blackness on the other side of the great gear of Stable 10 existed like a physical thing. It devoured the dim orange light that escaped the antechamber and for a moment Aurora feared it would slide over the reinforced threshold of her home and consume her too. She descended the ramp, aware that every step she took was irreversible. The seal had been broken and she was committed.
The ramp gave way to a wide catwalk that spanned the final ten feet of the Stable. She noticed a rusty red toolbox laying forgotten under the span and wondered whether it had been there since the beginning. The catwalk sang gently under her hooves as she approached the very limits of her home, a yard-thick wall of steel and concrete that defined her universe. She lifted a hoof and stepped into another.
Her hooves scuffed against weathered concrete. The light from the Stable door illuminated a scant few feet of a semicircular platform that sat flush with her home, a reflection of the massive gear that had already begun its lumbering roll back to where it had rested for over two centuries. Aurora turned to watch. 
A powerful urge pressed her to leap back inside, delete the console’s records and accept an easier punishment than what she was about to inflict upon herself. She nearly did when a ragged voice echoed out of the darkness behind her.
“Seal the door!” it cried, distant but approaching quickly. “Seal the door!”
The silhouette of the great gear was already beginning to eclipse the light spilling out from the antechamber. Her heart thundered. The darkness was swallowing her after all. She fumbled for her Pip-Buck as the door sank into the cogs along the track behind her. Panic fogged her ability to think as she pressed button after button, frantically trying to toggle the built-in lamp while the screen taunted her with flickering menus and maps.
“NO! DON’T LET THEM INSIDE!”
The switch clicked and the Pip-Buck’s green screen flared, pouring light into the darkness and illuminating the three milky-eyed monsters skittering onto the platform. Aurora opened her mouth to scream just as the nearest creature threw itself onto her hard enough to steal the air from her lungs. It drove her backward into the hard steel of the Stable door, knocking her saddlebags to the ground and sending her wing guards skidding away. The creature shrieked with an unbridled rage that washed her heart with ice.
She tried to twist away but the movement of the door against her back threw her off-balance and the creature wasted no time throwing itself into the crook of her knees, jaws snapping and cracked hooves scrambling to find purchase around her hind leg. She barely registered the boom of the Stable door as it changed direction and begun sliding forward into the massive socket. The shrill noise of an animal caught in a trap rose into the air and fell silent as the light from the Stable vanished. Aurora had scant seconds to put the two sounds together before she felt a set of teeth settle against the skin above her hind knee and clamp down, hard.
She screamed and tried getting back onto her hooves to run away but the barely equine creature locked its jaws, blood sheeting across its muzzle as teeth popped through flesh. She screamed again and violently shook her leg, feeling the skin tear deeper. A second creature hurled itself onto her, straddling the barrel of her chest and pressing her face into the cement as it frantically searched for her neck. Aurora realized she was about to die.
Lightning flashed and the creature’s face disintegrated into pulp. It crumpled away from her like a marionette thrown from its strings.
The creature chewing on her hind leg spun its head around fast enough for Aurora to hear vertebrae crunch. The hideous pony that wasn’t quite a pony stared at the source of the gunshot but didn’t move to attack. A flash of fire and her eardrums kicked inward. The creature’s body spun away independent of the remains of its head. Its hooves tapped madly against the concrete as it spasmed before finally going still.
Aurora gulped down air as the echoes of the last gunshot faded into the blackness. Her stomach threatened to crawl out of her throat but she fought it back down with a ferocity. She tried to stand but her hind leg folded under her with a bolt of searing pain. She raised her Pip-Buck, aiming the green lamplight toward her hind leg and her eyes widened. A ragged strip of flesh was simply gone. The crater under her hip filled like a cup fed from the bottom. Blood sheeted across her leg, the green light turning it black.
“Are you alright?”
The owner of the ragged voice stood barely two feet from her. She turned her Pip-Buck toward the source and shrank back at the sight of yet another monster. Its eyes were without irises or pupils, staring down at her like uniform sheets of cloudy jadeite. Plates of chitinous black skin wrapped a vaguely equine shape in a mosaic that looked as if it had been shattered and pieced back together by amateur hooves. Holes clustered up and down its legs, the largest few boring tunnels completely through the limbs. Where mismatched plates pulled away from each other and deep within the holes in the creature’s legs, pale green light dimly emanated from its softer skin. 
A charcoal black horn rose from its forehead, a deep fissure running its length.
Aurora felt for the strap of the overmare’s rifle but came up empty. A coldness blanketed her. 
“Stay away from me,” she warned. 
The collage of nightmares eyed her bleeding leg as it took a step back. Its voice churned like something in its throat had rotted and come loose. “You’re hurt. I want to help you.”
Aurora squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force them to focus. Pain radiated from her hip in waves that made her nauseous. Her head felt heavier, or maybe her neck felt weaker. She opened her mouth to speak and heard a howling scream echo from the deep darkness of the tunnel. 
The blackened creature pivoted and pointed its right foreleg into the darkness. The gesture struck her as strange. Then she saw the rusted shotgun strapped to the inside of its foreleg. A corner of her brain tried to puzzle out how he got it on.
Wind washed over the platform in a gust that scoured it clean of dust. Aurora heard the beat of wings above her and tipped her Pip-Buck upward, the green light blooming around the deformed pegasus hovering above them. Its foggy eyes bore into the sealed Stable door like a predator that had lost its prey. Then they snapped toward Aurora’s Pip-Buck with terrifying speed. Sinew in its sunken cheeks pulled its jaws tight. With one powerful beat of its wings, it hurled itself toward her like a bullet.
The blackened creature bellowed. “BLUE, STOP!”
The pegasus landed inches from Aurora’s head, hard enough to split its front hoof deep into the living bone. It shook like an engine that had thrown a rod, torn between instinct and command. The turquoise pegasus stamped its cracked hoof, spread its wings open and drained its lungs at Aurora with a shriek that crackled with disuse.
“Blue!” the creature rumbled. “Be calm.”
The pegasus slapped its wings to its sides like a book cover, spinning vortices through the cloud of ancient dust. It turned away from Aurora and walked to the Stable door, its vacant eyes staring up at the massive 10 painted on the face of the gear.
The black creature said something to her, but somehow the words sounded distant and muddled. She could hear her heartbeat pounding rapidly in her ears. She watched the twisted pegasus press the top of its head against the Stable door, its milky eyes staring through the concrete platform below.
Aurora’s thoughts drifted as darkness encroached the edges of her vision. Her leg was wet but she didn’t remember why. The cold concrete pulled her down, bidding her to fall asleep.





 


Fire plunged into her hind leg and she kicked hard with a sputtering curse. Her hoof connected and suddenly the gurgling voice of the black creature was yelling at Blue to back away. Aurora turned over to see the winged monster poised between her and its chitinous companion, staring daggers at her inches from her muzzle. Behind it, the black pony held a hoof to its jaw. 
“It’s okay,” it said, though Aurora wasn’t sure to which one of them. “Go home, Blue.”
Several expressions puzzled over the pegasus’ face.
“Go home, Blue,” the voice repeated firmly.
It looked up at the Stable door for several seconds and chuffed with irritation. Its wings lifted high and swept down, the pegasus lifting into the air before its wingtips could touch the concrete and slipping silently down the darkened tunnel like a ghost.
Aurora lifted her head, watching Blue fly away with a mixture of relief and astonishment. It was the first time she’d seen a pegasus take flight.
“How’s your leg feeling?” the black pony asked.
Aurora moved a strand of white mane away from her eye and looked back at her hind leg. She was surprised to see a thick wrap of dirty brown bandage where the ragged gash had been. A deep red circle had leeched through the rags but didn’t seem to be growing any larger. She flexed the muscle and hissed as the skin under the bandage throbbed in protest.
The black pony tucked an empty syringe into a tattered saddlebag on its hip. Aurora hadn’t noticed the bags before. The wrongness of the chitinous creature had been a powerful distraction. “That bite’s deep. I have another stimpack and some antibiotics back home. Can you walk on it?”
The lengthening silence pressured her to answer.
“I think so,” she said and pushed herself up. She leaned carefully on the injured leg and felt dull pain bloom under the bandage, but it bore her weight. She looked down at the stiffening pool of blood that covered the platform and a large portion of her right side. How long had she been out?
It occurred to her that the black pony had saved her life, twice. If it was planning to kill her, then it was doing so with remarkable patience. She looked at the corpses of the creatures near the Stable wall. The damage done to them by the shotgun tied around the black pony’s foreleg was gruesome. In the seam of the great gear of Stable 10, the rear half of a third creature hung from the edge of the door - the other half presumably inside. A second faster and it would have been staggering inside the Stable, waiting to ambush the security ponies once they reached the antechamber.
“What were they?” she asked.
The black pony turned away. “You need medicine, Stable dweller. We can talk about them on the way.”
It began walking toward the edge of the semicircular platform and waited for Aurora to follow. She took a few tenuous steps forward with a noticeable limp. When the black pony was confident she could move under her own power, he descended the steps of the platform and led her into the tunnel.
The green lamplight of Aurora’s Pip-Buck cast long shadows among the detritus that littered the tunnel floor. She recognized the small piles for what they were, but the piece of her that would have recoiled with shock had already been beaten numb. Dark clusters of bone lay huddled around the thick pillars that held up the tunnel’s ceiling, some sitting alone while others had gathered around smaller figures that Aurora tried not to linger on. Suitcases and saddlebags lay open everywhere she turned her light, the contents stacked in neat piles alongside the containers with the reverence that suggested someone had taken care with their looting.
Hanging above the bodies that had come to rest against the far walls, faded and flaking signage bore reminders to keep fillies close. To remain in line. To have identification ready. To stay calm.
“There was barely any warning before the bombs fell,” the black pony said, noticing her wandering gaze. It looked at the passing bones as if recalling a distant memory. “We were told to be ready to leave at any moment, but it was easy to get complacent once you had a spot in a Stable. Knowing we had a safe place to go made us feel safe. Nobody was prepared to leave when the bombs started falling.”
Aurora could see an orange light at the end of the tunnel far ahead. It felt strange to walk in a straight line for so long without needing to turn down a corridor or take a lift to another level. She looked over her shoulder and could barely make out the dark shape of the Stable door.
She looked back at the pony with the strange, chitinous skin and asked the obvious question. “You were here?”
It nodded. “I was working when the news came that Cloudsdale had fallen. It took more than an hour to fly home and...” it stopped, then moved on. “The air smelled like old coins on the way here. I’ll never forget that smell.”
Aurora moved around a discarded suitcase and walked alongside the black pony. Its eyes regarded her for a moment before returned to the flagstone floor. 
“What’s your name?” she asked.
It shrugged as it walked. “It doesn't matter. Most ponies call me Roach. Beats being called it.”
Aurora winced. Roach didn’t seem to notice.
“Mine’s Aurora,” she offered.
“It’s a pretty name,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, “Ponies tend to excel at those.”
Roach snorted, the tension in his shoulders loosening by a few degrees. 
Aurora let herself smile a little as they approached the end of the tunnel. Her expression sank when she saw the hill of broken cement and boulders that rose from the floor toward the ceiling. The cave-in sealed the tunnel shut like a cork.
Roach noticed her dismay. “A balefire bomb dropped on an ammunition depot a few miles south of here and kicked off a landslide.” He pointed a perforated leg toward the right corner of the debris where a smaller tunnel had been burrowed into the rubble, shored up with bent lengths of rebar. “It’s a little snug, but it gets me in and out just fine.”
He led her toward the source of the light, between two pillars and to a thin metal door near the rubble labeled ELEC PANEL RM 02. Dented and rusted jerry cans stood in a neat row along the wall left of the doorway. Several trunks and more than a few of the sturdier suitcases from the tunnel sat against the wall on the opposite side, most of their lids fastened shut. Aurora hesitated outside the doorway as Roach stepped inside.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “The war was two hundred and twenty years ago. Nobody lives that long, especially outside of a Stable.”
A battered green hurricane lantern burned softly in the middle of the small maintenance space. Roach lifted it by the wire handle and jostled it, listening to the fuel sloshing in its reservoir. Satisfied, he set it down and walked to the far corner of the narrow room where a disheveled turquoise pegasus lay on a tattered sleeping bag. Blue’s milky eyes stared at nothing from behind a thin veil of gray mane. Roach lifted it behind her mangled ear. The pegasus didn’t react.
“Ghouls do,” he said. “She did.”
“What’s a ghoul? I still don’t…”
“I know,” Roach said, his expression strained. “Bear with me. When a pony is exposed to radiation, that pony gets sick. Coats start falling out, the skin dies, organs start to be affected, the whole nine yards. Either that pony gets away from the source and recovers, or they don’t and eventually die. Radiation is a binary thing. There’s usually no middle ground.”
Roach sat down on the yellowed linoleum, idly caressing the ridge of Blue’s neck. If the attention was soothing to her, she didn’t show it and Roach didn’t look for it. Blue stared through him without blinking, seemingly lost in her own thoughts or simply drifting along separate of them. Aurora leaned against the open door frame, her bandaged leg thanking her for the relief, and listened.
“Balefire wasn’t just radiation. It killed just as effectively, if not moreso, but the untethered magic that powered the bombs turned it into something darker. Nobody thought or cared about the aftereffects of balefire until it had already decimated Equestria. The vast majority of ponies exposed to balefire died slowly or died quickly.” Roach looked over at the gas lantern ruefully, “Except some didn’t.”
His jade eyes sparkled as a long-forgotten memory rose to the surface. He looked at Aurora with a sad smile. 
“When I was a little colt, my mother used to keep a big crystal dish of hard candy on the kitchen counter. I would sneak some into my bags before school so I could have something sweet to eat when I got bored. Whenever Ms. Cheerilee caught me with it she’d ask, ‘Did you bring enough to share with the rest of the class?’” 
Roach pressed his lips together and reached a hoof to the lantern, adjusting the flame. 
“Balefire was a lot like that. It killed so generously that it didn’t have enough to share with everyone. Ghouls don’t die. We just forget pieces of who we were until there’s nothing left to remember. The ghouls that attacked you went feral from the start. They never bothered me and it made sense to keep them around in case raiders ever figured out what was under this mountain.”
Aurora furrowed her eyebrows. “You used them to protect the Stable?”
Roach nodded.
“Why? Those things seemed more interested in killing me than guarding a door.”
Roach looked up at her. “I thought I had better control over them, and I wasn’t exactly expecting visitors from that end of the tunnel. When they heard the door opening they just started running.”
“Did you know them?” she asked.
Roach squinted at the floor, thinking hard. “No, I don’t think so. I think they were good ponies.” 
Aurora tried to think of a fitting condolence and inevitably failed. What could she say to somebody who lost everything he had and was keenly aware that he was forgetting what little he remembered? Standing in a tunnel buried by the corpse of a dead world, sharing a moment with a pony that it refused to kill, she was at a loss for words. 
“I’m sorry,” she offered.
“Me too,” he accepted, taking his hoof from Blue’s mane and pushing himself off the ground. “Let’s get you something for that leg.”
Aurora bit the inside of her cheek and tipped her head to her saddlebags. “Thanks. I don’t have any bits to repay you… do you like apples?”
Roach offered her a cracked smile. “That covers the medicine, but you owe me a story. Tell me about what it’s been like in the Stable.”
Aurora sat down inside the narrow room and picked up a thread beginning with her fillyhood. Roach listened as he walked outside to the trunks and came back with a syringe, a bundle of brown cloth and a crumpled tube of ointment. Surprisingly and just a little unsettling, she recognized the brand. As he tended to her leg, she told him about the ponies she knew and their hopes to one day leave the Stable when the world was safe again. 
She paused when he pressed the needle of the stimpack into her hip, the pressurized cartridge sinking the plunger automatically, and watched as Roach carefully removed the bandages over the wound. It bled weakly as the last layer peeled away. Roach squeezed a strip of antibiotic ointment into the deep gash and dressed it with bandages that didn’t look much cleaner than the old ones.
Roach dropped the empty syringes into a container outside and accepted an apple from Aurora on the way back in. He showed it to Blue as he sat down next to her in the corner and brought it to his strangely decayed mouth. The fruit crunched loudly and he closed his pale eyes, savoring the taste as a rivulet of juice ran between the cracks in his chitin. He finished the apple, core and all, enraptured by the stories from a Stable he’d been locked out of.
He resumed stroking Blue’s mane while she told him about the generator at the bottom of Stable 10 and the fatal flaw that had been designed into its talisman. How she had said goodbye to her father in her own way, that her mentor had been thrust into a new role as overstallion and the suicide of Overmare Delphi shortly after. She confessed to stealing the rifle slung over her shoulder and to being the least qualified mare to carry it. She eventually told him her plan to find a replacement talisman for her Stable.
When she finished, Roach looked at her with something akin to respect. “I don’t think I’ll ever bet against a pony willing to hot-wire her Stable door.”
Worry creased her muzzle. “I just hope that Sledge will let me back in if… when I get back. Stable-Tec could have a wheelbarrow of working talismans somewhere out there. They won’t do any good if they decide they’re safer with me out here.”
“Maybe,” Roach said. “But it sounds to me like you’re the only chance they have to survive. The way I see it, you’ve got this Sledge guy by the balls.”
Aurora cringed at the mental image.
“Either way, you’ll eat yourself alive worrying about it before you need to.” Roach continued, “I can’t speak to whether you’ll find any salvageable talismans in Fillydelphia, but last I heard Stable-Tec Headquarters survived the worst of the bombing.”
Aurora hadn’t allowed herself to consider the possibility that it might not be standing. Had she made the journey only to find it in ruins...
“Lloy,” Blue murmured.
They both turned their attention to Blue, whose gaze seemed fixed on a patch of air just in front of her muzzle. Confusion pinched the corners of her eyes.
Roach reached behind her with a grunt and extracted a large book from beneath the torn flap of her sleeping bag. The lavender tome was scuffed and bent, its spine barely more than flaking leather clinging to ancient fiber and glue. The pages showed several dark stains where they had been exposed to a variety of fluids, but despite the significant wear Aurora saw the gem-studded pink horseshoe embossed into the cover. In the center of the shoe sat a jewel in the shape of a star. 
She knew it immediately. Any Stable pony would. It was the only book authored by the six friends who would eventually become the ministry mares of Equestria. The Friendship Journal was a mainstay of any yearling’s early education, but the one in Roach’s hooves looked like an original.
Roach set the book down in front of the turquoise pegasus. Aurora watched the ghoul’s eyes gradually focus on the worn cover. Blue shifted forward unbidden, nudging the book open with her muzzle and pushing her nose into a shallow void that had been cut into the last third of its pages. She dragged an ornate golden necklace from the book and set it down in front of her. Nestled between two clouds that streaked away toward a sturdy clasp, an empty socket in the shape of a lightning bolt flared with the light of the lantern.
Aurora felt a stone land in the pit of her stomach.
On the dirty sleeping bag, Rainbow Dash gently curled her body around her necklace and shut her eyes.
Here lay one of the greatest pegasi to have ever lived. A heroine of Equestria many times over, now reduced to a state of existence so detached from what could be called living that it spoke volumes to the capacity of the outside world’s cruelty. Rainbow Dash had dedicated her life to protecting Equestria and it had returned the favor by chewing her up and spitting her into a cavern where death ignored her and her mind decayed.
“No… no, I can’t do this,” Aurora whispered. Tears pooled in her eyes and she stood up, her legs trembling as they took her out into the tunnel and away from the forgotten husk that had once been of the Element of Loyalty. She heard Roach’s hooves scraping against the linoleum behind her as he followed after her.
“Aurora, wait.”
She didn’t wait. 
Roach caught up to her. “Aurora, I’m sorry. I should have warned you before...”
“You’re fine,” she said, a sob bubbling into her throat. “It’s just too much all at once, you know? What made me think I could handle all...” She gestured at the bones around her. “All this. She was the best of us. Where do I rank? Goddesses, I left my only family for this!”
Roach nodded. He followed her in silence until she found an upturned length of flagstone and sat down. “She had family, too,” he said.
Aurora sniffed. The warm glow of the lantern flickered through the doorway a few meters away. Roach’s chitin scraped against the flagstone as he sat down next to her. She looked at him, embarrassed at the tears stinging her eyes, and looked back at the light.
His voice was quiet and melancholic when he spoke into the silence.
“She arrived here not long after I did. If the world hadn’t been ending, I think I would have been a little more excited to have beaten Rainbow Dash anywhere,” Roach said, smiling for a moment. “I didn’t find out until after the landslide sealed us in that she’d come looking for her parents. The scene she made once she realized the door wasn’t going to open was… well, she lived up to her reputation. She only stopped beating on the door after I told her that her mother and father had made it inside.”
“Did they?” Aurora asked.
Roach looked her in the eye. “Does it matter if they did or didn’t? There was nothing any of us could do at that point. The rocks had sealed the way out and Overmare Spitfire wasn’t about to unseal the Stable with radiation seeping into the tunnel. We needed her to stop panicking so that everybody could focus on digging out the tunnel.”
Aurora looked at the small piles of rubble that had been scooped away, clearing the way for the shored up tunnel at the foot of the hill. Then she looked at the bones of the pegasi, unicorns and earth ponies that lay dead around her. “It doesn’t look like it helped.”
He shrugged dispassionately. 
“It gave the adults among us something to do that didn’t involve panicking. We had to think about the foals that were with us, Aurora.” Roach took a deep breath and exhaled, composing himself. “We ran out of water on the second day. Somebody remembered they had a bottle of pills for insomnia and we agreed that the young shouldn’t have to watch their parents starve to death. The foals just went to sleep and didn’t wake up.”
Roach’s opaque eyes shined with tears. Aurora’s Pip-Buck ticked, unnoticed.
“After, a lot of ponies found quiet corners of the tunnel to kill themselves in. Someone had brought their family pistols with them and the guns just made the rounds each night. A hoofful were too afraid to pull the trigger and found other ways. I found Rainbow Dash holed away in that room. Neither of us had the stomach for suicide, so we waited to starve instead.” Roach cleared his throat and swallowed. “It didn’t quite go that way. I became what I am. She got stuck somewhere in between. Probably something to do with being the bearer of an Element, or maybe just because she’s too damn stubborn to let herself go feral.”
“Or guilt,” Aurora murmured.
“Or that,” Roach agreed.
Neither of them spoke for a long time. Aurora tried to imagine what it might be like living in a fog of disjointed memories after having lived through the last days of the tunnel. She felt an irrational anger toward her kin that she struggled to process. So many died because one overmare had refused to open one door. Overmare Spitfire had never featured prominently in her history books. Now Aurora suspected she knew why.
Rainbow Dash, on the other hoof, was so regularly idolized by fillies and colts that it became something of a running joke between the residents. As an Element of Harmony she had helped defeat Nightmare Moon and Discord. As a Wonderbolt she had enjoyed fame as an elite flyer. As the leader of the Ministry of Awesome, her role in the war effort was shrouded in mystery as the oddly named ministry developed technologies that would ultimately change the way battles were won. And then, as every young learned, she died when balefire dropped Cloudsdale from the sky.
In reality, she had spent her last nights listening to hundreds of ponies kill themselves in plain view of the door to Stable 10.
Now Aurora sat outside that bastion of security and recoiled when she realized the same tragedy was threatening to play out inside her home. The lights would fail, gardens would wither and the pegasi trapped inside would be forced to make the same impossible decisions that these ponies had made.
Despite her failure, Rainbow Dash had fought tirelessly for the very same goal. 
“How did she do it?” Aurora asked quietly. “How does anybody do what they did, knowing it could all end up like this?”
Roach looked at her from the corner of his eye. “I feel like you’re fishing for a pep talk.”
Aurora wiped her eyes with the back of her leg. She could feel her resolve gathering in her chest. “I could really use one.”
Roach blew out a breath. “Well… Rainbow Dash did what she did because it was the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter that she failed. What matters is that she tried at all. I think the same applies to you. I don’t know you very well but it seems to me that you already made your decision when you left your Stable. There’s ponies worth saving in there, and you’re going to try because it’s the right thing to do.”
Aurora blinked and looked at Roach. “Wow.”
He winced. “That bad?”
“It wasn’t great,” she laughed, “But I get your point. Thank you, Roach.”
Roach nodded pensively. “Maybe I can get better at it on the way to Fillydelphia.”
She shot him a look that quickly softened. “Don’t joke about that. Wait, really?”
He offered up an expression that asked why not? 
“The way I see it, you have no clue what you’re doing. You’re carrying a rifle you don’t know how to use, you don’t know which areas of the Wasteland to avoid and I’m willing to bet that you don’t have the first clue how to fly.”
Aurora lifted an eyebrow. “Are you sure you didn’t miss anything?”
Roach turned up his front hooves in an exaggerated shrug. “You’re also the only pony I’ve met within the last hundred years that hasn’t said anything rude about me being a changeling, and I really miss having conversations.”
Aurora slipped off the flagstone ridge and stretched her legs with a grunt. “What’s a changeling?”
Roach opened his mouth, stopped himself and closed it. He looked down at the dapple gray pegasus he’d only just met and watched her stretch her wings hard enough to make the tips tremble.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just a word.”
Aurora looked up at him skeptically and decided she could ask him about it later. She turned her eyes to the hand-dug tunnel that disappeared into the rubble. Her ears caught the sound of wind whistling somewhere on the other side.
“If you say so,” Aurora said. “Now hurry up. I want to see the sky.”