Fallout Equestria: Renewal

by ElbowDeepInAHorse


Chapter 7: The Cabin

*pop*

--allions had tried to take him, twenty stallions had made a slip

Twenty one would be the ranger with the big iron on his hip

Big iron on his hip.

The spritebot resumed its musical broadcast without skipping a beat. The lonely tune of a guitar mingled with the singer’s voice, the words reflecting off the opposing granite walls like a conversation in an empty corridor. Aurora, Roach and Ginger watched the little metal ball shrink eastward until its distant song was swept away from them on the wind.
“Okay,” Aurora said, breaking the silence. “I get the feeling that doesn’t happen very often out here.”
Roach stared after the spritebot, frowning. “Nope.”
“It’s a first,” Ginger added dubiously. “I don’t like it. Hide? Hide from what?”
“I’m not waiting to find out,” Roach said. He turned from the ridge and walked to the flattened circle of yellowed grass where they had camped. Aurora and Ginger followed.
They slipped into their saddlebags while Roach surveyed their surroundings. Aurora followed his gaze and tried to see the rolling terrain how she envisioned he saw it. There were no convenient doors to duck behind or hallways to use as detours. Everything she could see, from the thin grass atop the bluffs to the sparse trees that dotted the shallow valleys between, were too open. Too exposed.
For her entire life she had lived in a maze of narrow corridors and thick walls that a pony could hide behind should the need arise. Aurora had known the layout of her Stable like the back of her hoof and used it with expert precision to avoid the ponies she knew to have an open work order with Mechanical. Get too close to one of them and they’re apt to try sweet-talking an unwitting pegasi out of the hallway in the hopes of skipping the queue. The face those ponies made when they saw her coming was identical to the last. Expectant, polite and a hint of impatience below the surface. Out of sheer necessity, she had become an expert at disappearing when the need arose.
Out here, not so much.
The ground dipped away from the ridge into a bowl of dry grasses studded with a few dead trees, none of which were grouped together or thick enough to hide behind. She looked to Roach whose jaw was set in a deepening frown. His scarred black ears were perked westward where the highway sloped gently upward before disappearing behind itself. The hurried clack of hooves scraped toward the top of the slope.
“Get down,” Roach growled.
They flattened themselves against the grass barely a yard from the edge of the ridge as the approaching hooves drew closer. Aurora shimmied up to the edge, hoping the grass would provide some camouflage, until she could make out the crest of the road.
A yellow mare bolted over the hill and galloped toward them, her ginger mane flapping in the wind. Even at a distance, the bloodstains on her back legs were evident. Her face was streaked with tears and she gasped every breath as she ran. A ripped and tattered red plaid shirt clung to her shoulders, barely. As the earth pony drew closer, Aurora could see the tattered strips of tape that wrapped the base of her tail. The mare struggled to keep her tail pinned protectively between her legs and she threw more than a few terrified glances over her shoulder as she fled.
“Help me! Please!” the mare cried as she descended into the cut.
Roach and Ginger lay stock-still in the grass, seemingly content to watch this mare drift away alone and forgotten. Aurora felt her skin bristle. She took a breath and opened her mouth to call out to the lone mare but a coffee colored hoof cupped her muzzle before she could say the words.
Don’t,” Ginger hissed. “She’s bait.”
Her eyes flashed outrage at Ginger but the unicorn shook her head with short jerks, her eyes begging for her trust. Aurora exhaled with a scowl.
On the road, the yellow mare had slowed from a gallop to a trot. She turned her head left and right like she had expected to find someone.
“Hello? I need help!” she called out. She sniffed and slowed further, scanning the ridges with an unusual intensity. Her eyes passed over them but she either didn’t see them or she had and was too distracted for it to register. The bloodied mare stopped, turned around and waited for several seconds before cursing at the westward road. “Brindle, you blind cocksucker.”
They watched the mare circle back several yards, passing underneath them a second time and whipping her tail irritably at the air. Aurora noticed the blood on her hind legs didn’t stem from any visible wounds. It was as if she’d been painted with it. The mare sat down in the middle of the road, put the tip of her cracked hoof against her lips and blew a piercing whistle that would have flattened Aurora’s ears if they weren’t already pinned back. She sat down in the middle of the road and produced a small fillet knife from her tattered shirt. Despite lacking wings or magic, she handled the blade with practiced ease. She flicked the flat side of the knife against her hind legs, removing the bulk of someone else’s blood until all that was left were ruddy stains the color of fresh scabs.
She mentally kicked herself. Ginger had been right. So had the spritebot. Aurora tried not to think about what they would be doing had Ginger not been quicker to stop her from calling out. The mare loitering on the road below them wiped her blade against her hip, smearing blood over the place where she’d just cleaned it. It wasn’t her own blood.
Aurora chastised herself and pressed herself flatter against the dirt. She needed to start being more careful.
Hooves - several sets of them - and the grinding crunch of iron rimmed wheels on flaking pavement rumbled from behind the hill. First quiet, then steadily louder until the first bizarrely dressed ponies strode into view. A few wore leather jackets and dusters in varying states of decay while the majority of the rest wore a strange variety of prewar formal wear that might have looked nice had they not been subjected to two hundred years of neglect. Colorful manes had been styled into mohawks, buzz cuts and everything else a rusty pair of scissors and moment of insanity could conjure up. Aurora would have laughed had the growing line of unicorns and earth ponies not been so heavily armed. Carts and wagons rolled over the hill one after another, lumbering behind the pairs of unarmed and unarmored ponies who pulled them. As the caravan turned into a convoy, she realized the ponies in leathers regarded the ponies wearing tattered formal wear with open disdain. The disharmony between the two was impossible to miss, but it was clear each side was tolerating the other. Whether it had to do with the wagons they were escorting or some future goal was anyone’s guess. The signs of a grudging pact were as obvious in the wasteland as they were in a Stable. Tribalism was alive and well in Equestria.
She didn’t have a frame of reference for the convoy’s size, but judging by the concern on both Ginger and Roach’s face, it was unusually large. As the head of the line approached the cut, and the knife-twirling mare sitting inside it, the last of the carts were being hauled over the crest of the hill. The convoy had to be at least a quarter mile long. Over two dozen covered wagons and a scattering of open carts slithered down the concrete like a serpent with guns for scales.
“Nothing again?” a voice shouted from the front of the convoy. A tall stallion with a patchy blue coat in black leathers was watching the opposing ridges as they passed into the cut.
Aurora felt a tug on her vest and scooted back, away from view. She looked at Ginger in time to see her mouth a question to Roach.
Run?
He shook his head. No. Too many eyes.
Aurora could hear her pulse in her ears. They were trapped. She wanted to track down that spritebot and put a dent in it for not telling them where to hide.
The sound of the caravan rose up above the lip of the bluff along with the voice of the yellow mare below.
“Brindle needs his fucking eyes checked. I’m getting sick of these false alarms.”
The stallion did a decent job of keeping most of his exasperation in check, but some leeched through. “You’re sure you saw a pegasus?”
A third voice, a stallion with a reedy voice bordering on a whine, piped up defensively. “Yes! He was jumping off the bluffs and climbing back up. He looked like he’d just shot up on psycho. I saw it.”
“Just like you saw the alicorn?”
“Oh fuck you, Lemon, that was a joke that everyone got except for you.”
“Your jokes get me put on runs, you ass. If you don’t start using your eyes, I’m liable to cut the damn--”
The blue stallion cut them off as if they hadn’t been speaking at all. “If either of you opens your mouth again I’ll put a bullet in it. Brindle, you’re off lookout. Give Lemon your kit and report to the rear of the column. Your people have plenty of ‘food’ back there. Go throw some salt on it before it stinks.”
Brindle’s voice was acidic. “The Epicurians don’t waste their food, Raider.”
“If I wanted a cannibal’s opinion on waste, I’d ask a ghoul. Back of the column, now.”
“We are opportunistic carnivores and--”
Brindle’s wheedling voice was cut short by the crack of a gunshot.
Aurora pressed her wings against the sides of her head and dug her face into the dirt to stifle the sickened noise rising in her throat. She saw Delphi laying on the floor behind her toppled chair, her blood trickling down the curves of mahogany molding. She felt someone’s leg on her back and vaguely understood that Roach was trying to comfort her.
The conversation from the road didn’t pick back up. Hooves plodded eastward while rimmed wheels crunched across concrete. Aurora focused on the smell of the dry soil and the texture of grass crushed against her muzzle. When someone in the convoy made a passing comment about Brindle as they passed, she concentrated on her breathing.
In. Out.
In. Out.
The convoy passed without anyone seeing them. Nobody climbed the ridge to check. The only one who believed Brindle was dead. The rest moved steadily forward to whichever destination had inspired cooperation between raiders and cannibals.
As the sounds of the convoy faded, she became acutely aware of how pitiful she must look. She settled her wings back against her sides, the steady weight of Desperate Times pressing on her right, and lifted her nose until she could see the cloudy sky past the top of the ridge. Roach’s hoof pulled away as she composed herself.
“I’ll never get used to that,” she said dismally.
Roach’s voice was unusually gentle. “Decent ponies don’t.”
She started to sit up, and when nobody moved to stop her she leaned back and turned to see the last few wagons of the convoy sliding around a bend in the road. She scooted past Ginger and lifted the overmare’s rifle to her cheek, tipping her head to peer through the scope. It took her several seconds to relocate the tail end of the convoy.
The last wagon trundled along, guarded by two ponies in gowns that were torn so short they could be mistaken as skirts. The flaps of the wagon hung open enough for her to see the red and pink masses of butchered meat inside. Her stomach twisted but she forced herself to look. Pieces of bodies had been skinned, stacked and packed thick with preserving salt. The rear of the cart was stained brown with old blood.
Ginger put her hoof on the rifle and mercifully pulled it toward the ground. Aurora let her, but her eyes stayed on the receding line of wagons until they disappeared around the bend.
“We should avoid the roads for a while,” Roach said.
Ginger’s eyes lingered on Aurora before she nodded and turned away from the ridge where, presumably, Brindle’s body still lay. She flicked her mane back behind her ear and stared out at the small bluffs that studded the otherwise smooth, grassy lowlands. Highway 51 was, in a literal sense, a direct route to Fillydelphia. Picking through terrain better fitted for prewar hikers than postwar travelers would be difficult.
“Aurora,” Roach said. He was holding out her saddlebags for her. His were already slung over his hips. She slid her wing away from the rifle and accepted her bags with it.
“Thanks,” she said, depositing them across her hip.
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, forcing a smile across his cracked muzzle. “You’ve got the only map so you get to navigate.”
She looked out to the miles of grassy bluffs and forested valleys that reached for the horizon, then down to the Pip-Buck strapped to her foreleg. She wiped the screen against her vest to clear the dirt away and opened up the mapping tool. As she swept the map up the line that delineated Highway 51, she noticed a new notification blinking in the margin of the screen. It simply said: UPDATE AVAILABLE. She tapped it, and her Pip-Buck stuttered. She could feel it chitter gently against her leg as it processed… something? Suddenly the screen went dark and two lines of florescent green text appeared.

DOWNLOADING UPDATES … 1 / 2,102

“Well…” she said, but didn’t know how to finish the sentence. She settled on, “shit.”
“Something wrong, Aurora?” Ginger asked.
She tapped the screen, but nothing happened. The Pip-Buck continued to process while ignoring its owner completely. “It locked me out,” she said.
Roach held out a hoof and turned Aurora’s leg toward him so he could read the screen. The Pip-Buck stuttered, and the 1 switched to a 2. He whistled when he saw the grand total of updates still pending. “Why didn’t the Stable update anything?”
She took back her leg. “We didn’t know there were still updates. Maybe the landslide had something to do with it.”
“Maybe. Either way, we can’t wait for that to finish. I want to get some distance between us and the road before another one of those convoys spots us. Come on.” Roach began picking his way down the hill. Ginger turned to follow, but Aurora hesitated.
She stepped toward the ridge and peered over the edge. A dark pool of blood thickened on the warm asphalt but there was no body to indicate why it was there. Brindle’s corpse was no doubt heaped somewhere in the butcher’s cart. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was responsible for that. Logically, she knew she shouldn’t feel sorry for a cannibal. Brindle had sent Lemon to kill her and had died because of it. That was the definition of justice, but Aurora was surprised how hard it was for her to square that in her mind.
Did the wasteland turn ponies like Brindle and Cider into monsters, or were they inevitably going to take that path on their own? Why hadn’t Roach or Ginger gone down a similar route?
She blew out a breath and decided to leave the philosophy to the ponies who had the brains for it. It only made her head hurt. Brindle was dead and she wasn’t. She’d hidden from hundreds of raiders and cannibals without being spotted. And spritebots wandered the roads dispensing lifesaving advice to its travelers.
She turned to follow her companions.
That was good enough for her.


The longer she walked, the more Aurora found herself appreciating the strange beauty that surrounded her. Every pegasus in Stable 10 had been told since foalhood that the outside world had been scoured clean by the balefire bombs. They had every reason to expect Equestria to be a cracked and desolate wasteland devoid of flora and fauna alike. The Stables contained the seeds to rejuvenate the world once the five-hundred year shelter period ended.
But Equestria wasn’t dead. Changed, yes. Struggling, definitely.
Dead? Hardly.
Leaves brushed over Aurora’s sides as she followed Roach and Ginger through a pair of scraggly shrub bushes that hadn’t tangled together quite enough to steal the diffuse sunlight away from the thin grasses beneath them. Trees straddled the bottom of a steep bluff. Most were dormant but a few had thrown taproots down deep enough to find the area’s water table. Their leaves varied from dim yellow to vibrant green depending on how well they fared. Most leaned toward yellow but despite being under constant stress, the trees clung to their leaves with a tenacity.
They passed under the shade of one of those trees and Aurora breathed deeply, sampling the cooler air. Her hooves rasped through thin grass that somehow survived in the hard packed soil. The valleys between the bluffs weren’t verdant by any means, but they were a far better picture than the blasted hellscape Stable 10 had painted.
She checked her Pip-Buck.

DOWNLOADING UPDATES … 355 / 2,102

She groaned. They had been walking for the better part of the afternoon. With the highway too much of a risk and no map to follow, they had resorted to navigating the sparsely wooded lowlands while staying some approximation of “near” the main eastern artery. The gentle hills looked inviting from pavement but once the uneven dirt was underhoof, the hills weren’t so gentle. They didn’t even have the decency to be steep. They just never ended. Aurora’s calf muscles burned like open blisters, but it was a pain she was used to. Years of hauling equipment, fighting rusted nuts and throwing her wings into work intended for hooves taught her everything she needed to know about pain. It didn’t mean she enjoyed it, but she could bully her way through it enough to enjoy the scenery.
In front of her, Ginger levitated a half bottle of water to her lips and took a pull before drifting it back toward Aurora. She took it in her wing and tipped it back.
Burning legs be damned. The view was worth it.
She caught herself staring and quickly averted her eyes, her neck and face flushed. What the hell was she doing? She held the bottle out to Ginger who floated it out of her wing, seemingly unaware of Aurora’s attention. The bottle slid into Roach’s waiting hoof, was capped and stowed in his saddlebag.
“You two are quiet,” he commented, sparing a glance over his shoulder at the two mares.
Ginger nodded, but didn’t seem willing to break the silence. She’d been lost in thought since the convoy.
Aurora tipped her chin at Roach to pull his focus from Ginger. “Sorry, just thinking,” she said.
They stepped over a fallen log one by one. Their hooves thumped over the hollow wood like a foreign drum.
“About?” Roach probed.
Aurora lifted an eyebrow and smirked at him. Of all the ponies she knew, Roach was the last one she’d expect to be uncomfortable with silence. She looked up at the heavy branches that hung overhead, a few of which were still thick with leaves. “About home,” she said, and decided to follow that thread. “About whether it’s right to keep ponies locked in Stables when the world outside is already inhabitable.”
Roach mulled over her words for a thoughtful moment before asking, “What do you think would happen if Stable 10 opened long enough for the residents to pack up and leave?”
A tendril of ground ivy caught around Aurora’s hoof and gave way with a gentle snap. She shook the plant away, her eyes pinched with thought. “Are we assuming the landslide isn’t blocking the exit?”
“Sure,” he said. “They all trot out into Equestria like it’s an early Reclamation Day. What happens?”
Aurora could sense Roach had a point to make, and he expected her to meet him halfway. If he weren’t a prewar ghoul, she would have assumed he was related to Sledge. “I think they’d have a hard time adjusting,” she said.
Roach winced a little. “Stable dwellers don’t usually get time to adjust,” he said. “More often than not, they come across slavers or raiders before they get a chance to find a settlement that’ll protect them.”
“Ah,” Aurora said. She let the tenuous hope of throwing open her Stable’s door being a solution drop into her mental shredder. A dead branch furrowed a line through the hair along her withers and she twitched away from it with a little irritation.
Ginger’s hoof struck a pebble and it skittered ahead of her, catching Aurora’s eye. It clattered against two strangely identical stones before lodging itself under a patch of weeds. Ginger didn’t seem to notice but Aurora found herself frowning confusion at the ground as she passed over it. Jagged bits of granite jutted out from under ivy and dotted the bare dirt in uniform little lumps.
“That’s… weird,” she said. “Hey guys?”
Roach and Ginger turned around. Aurora plucked a bit of stone from the forest floor and held it in her wing for them to see. Roach took it and looked down at the hundreds of stones embedded in the dirt just like it.
“Gravel,” he said, but Aurora only looked at him like he’d made the word up. He clarified. “Crushed stones ponies used back in the day to make cheap roads. Might be worth following.”
“It hasn’t been touched in years, probably longer. I’d say it’s absolutely worth following,” Ginger chimed. Whatever thoughts had been weighing on her earlier had been set aside. Her neck craned from side to side, already trying to discern a direction from the thin smattering of granite. Her eyes focused on something distant. “There.”
She pointed northeast where bits of stone littered the ground like breadcrumbs in a gentle rightward curve. Unbidden, Ginger began to follow it. Roach offered Aurora a questioning glance that she shrugged at in response. The two of them fell in behind the unicorn.
“This is a lot like the forest outside the Stable,” she said.
“Minus the carriages,” Roach added.
“Yeah, I like this one better.”
The road twisted through the woods for several miles, disappearing in and out of sight seemingly at random. They had to stop and backtrack more than once when they realized they’d lost the trail. It led them through a large break in the trees that was awash with what looked like a scraggly variant of wheat crop. The road cut across the field in a straight line and disappeared back into the treeline. Jutting out of the forest stood a high hill roughly a half mile wide. The side facing them had sheared away centuries ago, exposing a sheet of gray stone.
Partially obscured by trees that had grown unchecked around the foot of the bluff, Aurora could make out the dark pitch of a shingled roof.
“I think that’s where we’re going,” she said.
“Mmhm,” Roach answered.
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye and caught the wistful smile on his face. When he saw her looking at him, he pointed his horn at the old rooftop. “It’s a cabin. I used to rent one on Saddle Lake during the summer for my--” his lip twitched and he stopped talking.
Ginger deliberately slowed until the two caught up to her. She whispered something into Roach’s ear and the changeling cleared his throat and nodded before trotting ahead of them. They watched him go for a long while. The trees on the other side of the clearing wrapped his dark chitin like an embrace.
Aurora stared after him. “Is he okay?”
“He just needs a few minutes alone,” Ginger said. “What about you? Are you okay?”
The question caught Aurora off guard. Had Ginger seen her staring earlier? She felt the blood seeping up her neck. She cobbled together an explanation to brush the question aside, but when she turned to look at Ginger she didn’t see accusation on the mare’s face she expected.
Aurora hesitated and glanced back to where Roach had disappeared between the trees. She felt the conversation veering toward terrain she didn’t want to revisit. She gave Ginger her best grin and hoped it looked authentic. “My legs feel like they’re about to fall off and I almost got us caught by roving cannibals, but I’m actually doing pretty good.”
Ginger offered a half smile that told Aurora she wasn’t buying it. The unicorn looked out at the wild field of wheat and took a deep breath. “I’m only asking because Cider had a reputation for… taking liberties.”
Her hackles went up. “I’m fine,” she said.
Aurora stood two inches shorter than Ginger. The pained sadness on the unicorn’s face made it feel like two feet.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she added, and hated how much it felt like an admission. Hated how Ginger nodded in response to it. It was an admission. She could already see where the conversation was going. The assumption that she had let Cider get farther than he had would force her to clarify exactly what he’d done, first to Ginger and then to Roach.
She grit her teeth, angry at herself and not understanding why.
“If there’s anything to talk about,” Ginger said gently, “just know I’m willing to listen when you’re ready.”
Aurora recognized the out Ginger was giving her and almost took it. The words to make the entire inquisition go away were in her throat but she wasn’t able to speak them out loud. Something about the way Ginger spoke promised discretion that she assumed wouldn’t be an option.
She chewed her lip. “Thanks,” and added, “I’ll think about it.”
Ginger’s eyes softened and she looked forward with a reserved smile.
They passed under the arch of the treeline and the gravel road began to gently rise up the slope of the hill. It took them several more minutes of walking before the speckles of gravel gave way to a decorative cobblestone driveway. Time and weather had slowly pulled the bricks downhill, causing the pattern to buckle in several places. They navigated the uneven cobbles toward a wide veranda that encircled the aging structure. Aurora wasn’t sure what to think about the cabin. The steep triangular roof and the wrap-around porch made it look larger than it was. The large interlocking timbers of its four walls were bleached silver where they weren’t streaked with mint green patches of dry moss. A dead tree reclined across the side of the cabin facing the bluff, partially collapsing the veranda and gashing the roof open. The sturdy wall, however, still stood.
A strong breeze rolled through the canopy of dead and living trees. A few dried leaves skittered across the cobblestones in the wind.
Aurora spotted Roach sitting on a porch swing near the front door whose chain was well past the point of squeaking and deep into the years of rust crunching against rust. His hind legs swung gently beneath him and ruddy powder snowed onto his shoulder from the rusted chain above.
He glanced up at the two mares and tipped his head to the open front door. “You can head inside. It’s safe.”
Ginger touched Roach on the knee and smiled sadly at him before stepping inside.
Aurora looked after Ginger and back to Roach. She wanted to say something soothing but her mind drew a blank. This was her father’s strength, not hers. Everything that came to mind felt cheap and recycled like the sympathy letters sent to her terminal the day after her mother died. She remembered how much it hurt to read I’m sorry for your loss and My condolences until the words lost their meaning.
He eyed her as she lingered. “I’m alright,” he said.
She scuffed her hoof against the weathered planks. “You and me both.”
Roach smiled ruefully. “Want to talk about it?”
“No,” she said. “You?”
“Not yet,” he said. “You should go inside. It really is something.”
She looked through the doorway and had to admit she was interested in what she saw. “I’ll see you inside.”
Aurora stepped over the threshold and into a living room from a different time.
The interior had been beautiful once. The ceiling vaulted up with the pitch of the roof and decorative timbers crossed the gap like ribs. Two ceiling fans hung from the beams to Aurora’s left and right, their press board blades long since rotted to powder. A wide fireplace built from heavy stones and mortar climbed the sealed wooden wall on Aurora’s right. A narrow metal rack held a neat pile of quartered wood still waiting to be burned. Two armchairs caked in dust faced the fireplace while a wide leather couch faced a floor television on the opposite wall.
Aurora noticed that everything was covered in a thick layer of grime, not just the chairs. She looked over to Ginger who had opened the glass window of a barrister bookcase next to the television set. Her hoofprints let patches of dark slate flooring peek through the dust. Aurora swiped her own hoof across the floor, revealing a feathered pattern of charcoals and grays. Whoever lived here had bits to spare.
“This place is beautiful,” she said.
“It really is a treasure,” Ginger said. She closed the bookcase window and stepped over to a dark three-sided curio cabinet full of strange knick-knacks that rattled when she pulled open the glass door. Aurora joined Ginger while she perused the shelves.
Black and white framed photos stood alongside dozens of wooden carvings. Most resembled animals that must have lived in the area. A shaggy bear stood up on its hind legs, its tiny mouth open with a series of nicks cut out for teeth. Something with antlers that Aurora didn’t know the name of stared peacefully into the middle distance.
She picked up a picture frame, careful not to bump the carvings around it, and looked at the two ponies frozen mid-stride in dance. A stallion with a handsome streak of gray in his black mane dipped a mare whose face bore the first wrinkles of age, embarrassed laughter or both. They were too busy enjoying themselves to notice the picture being taken. Aurora squinted and saw that their cutie marks were similar. On the grinning mare’s hip was a pie missing a slice. The stallion’s bore the slice.
Aurora nudged Ginger, brushing dust off the frame with her wingtip. “Look at this.”
Ginger closed a small whittling knife hovering in her magic and looked at the photo. Her smile matched the dipping mare. “Oh, that’s lovely. Matching cutie marks were exceedingly rare back then. Even more so now.”
Aurora set the photo back into the curio next to an empty brass pedestal green with tarnish. “Do you think they owned this cabin?”
“Them?” Ginger shook her head, still admiring the photo. “No, color photography was around well before the war. This was an old picture even back then. I’d put my caps on those two being grandparents or great-grandparents to the ponies who lived here. Plenty of time for one of their descendants to find a talent for whittling something other than pies.” Ginger chuckled at her own joke and turned her attention back to admire the small collection of whittling knives on the bottom shelf.
Aurora stepped back from the curio and turned to the rest of the cabin, but not before stealing a look at the spot on Ginger’s left hip where her cutie mark should be. It puzzled her that a pony with such a clear eye for design wouldn’t have a mark and yet something a seemingly trivial as liking pie would earn two ponies an incredibly rare matching set. She wondered if Ginger might have had hers removed. Was that even possible?
“You’re staring, darling.”
Aurora jerked like she’d touched a live wire. She looked back from Ginger’s hip to see the mare wearing a shameless grin that edged close to laughter. Aurora’s wings lifted slightly as she stepped away in embarrassment. Her brain and her tongue tripped over one another. “I didn’t mean to… I wasn’t… goddesses, I wasn’t trying to!”
Ginger blinked several times as Aurora fumbled and her grin widened. When she spoke, her voice was punctuated by soft laughter. “It’s all right, slow down!”
Aurora burned like a furnace. Mercifully, Ginger didn’t seem bothered. “I… you don’t have a cutie mark.”
“So I’ve been told,” she said, lifting an eyebrow at Aurora. “I assume there are some pegasi in your Stable with the same condition.”
Aurora frowned. “Condition?”
Ginger closed the cabinet and rolled her eyes. “Their word, not mine.” She crossed the living room, beckoning Aurora to follow with a gesture. Two doors waited on either side of the fireplace. She walked through the one that stood open and stepped into the cabin’s small kitchen.
The walls were painted powder blue that had begun to crack and peel courtesy of a window that had been left open. A small eating nook sat under the window with a bench along the wall and two chairs sitting across the narrow table. A refrigerator, stove and sink stood opposite the nook, surrounded by cabinets that had begun to sag.
Aurora leaned in the doorway and watched Ginger begin rummaging through the first cabinet. Metal clattered as she shifted the contents one way, then the other. “Something about the war changed how cutie marks work.” Ginger continued. She grunted and pulled an old blender out onto the dirty linoleum before scooting over to the next cabinet.
“It used to be that every pony received theirs sooner or later. Whether they symbolized an interest, talent or some mystical purpose divined from beyond the stars,” she added a mocking flare to the last one, “eventually we all got one. Except now some of us don’t. There are still late bloomers - there always have been - but maybe one out of every hundred ponies live their entire lives without a mark. There’s no shortage of theories for why it’s happening: radiation, bad genetics, lack of inspiration…”
“Which you have plenty of,” Aurora said.
“Thank you!” she smiled, and yanked a hot plate out from the second cabinet by its cable, sliding it over toward the blender. “The way I look at it, cutie marks are a curse.”
Aurora wrinkled her nose. “What, like zebra voodoo?”
Ginger winced. “Sorry, that was a little strong. I’ve had too much time to think about this and you did sort of open Palomino’s Box by bringing it up. Also, you’re staring again.”
Aurora sucked on her lip and made a show of staring at the ceiling. “’Cutie marks are a curse,’” she prompted flatly.
Ginger shot her a smirk and checked the stove before sliding over to the next cabinet. “Yes and no. Don’t get me wrong, most ponies truly do value the mark they get. They can define a pony’s future and open doors that would have been otherwise shut.” A cupcake pan slid free and crashed into the floor. “Agh, sorry. But that’s the problem with them. They give ponies a narrow path to follow that everyone else assumes is destiny or inevitability. Out of a million choices we have when we’re born, something we don’t understand brands us with one. It’s cruel.”
Aurora had a hard time arguing with her logic mostly due to the fact that she’d never considered it. Cutie marks deciding a pony’s future was something that happened in history books, not in a Stable. It didn’t matter what a pony wound up getting. There were only so many jobs to choose from and few residents cared whether the two aligned in any meaningful way. If you weren’t good at your job, someone else needed to take it. Destiny had nothing to do with it.
Roach coughed barely a foot from Aurora’s ear. “Uh oh, you-”
Celestia’s cockratchet!” Aurora screamed and her hooves whipped out from under her, landing her hard on her side in a blur of feathers. Ginger banged her head against the inside of the cabinet and backed out quickly, dragging a cacophony of rusted bakeware out with her. “Dammit, Roach, I almost pissed myself!”
“I’m glad you didn’t, I was standing right behind you,” he deadpanned.
Dust drifted down around her in thick clots. She blew a clump out of her mane as she got off the floor. Her left side looked like a shop vac had blown up next to her. She leveled a feather at his nose. “Don’t scare me like that.”
He pushed her wing down with his hoof. “Then don’t let your guard down,” he said.
Aurora opened her mouth, stopped, and closed it. He had a point. She blew out a breath through her nose and made room for Roach to enter the kitchen.
“Find anything good?” he asked.
Ginger gestured to the blender and hot plate with a dismissive hoof while rubbing the back of her head with the other. “Eh,” she said.
Roach reached down and set the blender’s glass jar aside. He flipped the base upside down so he could see the bottom while Ginger peered back into the cabinet. “No rust that I can see. It probably has a good motor,” he said.
“I’m aware how scavenging works,” Ginger grunted. “I’m going to have a headache for the rest of the day, Roach.”
Roach nodded agreement and moved around Ginger toward the big blue refrigerator on the far side of the kitchen.
Aurora watched him with a measure of admiration. He’d seen so much death and lost so much. There were clearly still memories that haunted him. Some still had the power to rip open old scars. But he didn’t give over to his grief easily. Aurora wasn’t sure if that should reassure or worry her. She watched him turn the door latch and pull it open. There was only a calm curiosity in his eyes as he reached inside and twisted his leg left and right. The cracked chitin around his eyes pinched together in concentration as he continued to do something with his leg.
A wry smile formed on his face. He looked at Aurora like a magician getting ready to do a trick. “Ginger,” he said, “Look.”
Ginger sighed and sat up to see what Roach was up to. When she saw him hiding his leg in the fridge, her expression changed from mild annoyance to revulsion. “You didn’t.”
“I did,” he declared, and carefully withdrew his leg.
Brown liquid sloshed inside three glass bottles standing upside-down by their necks in the strange holes that burrowed through Roach’s leg. Ginger rested her forehead against the countertop with the face of a mother who just discovered her child drawing on the wall for the third time.
“You’re incorrigible.”
He held his leg out to her. “Want one?”
Ginger glared at the offering from the corner of her eye. “If any of those touch me, I’ll put it in a different hole.”
Roach’s throat rumbled with a deep chuckle and he lifted his leg toward Aurora, unwilling to let the joke die just yet. He waggled his hoof and the protruding bottles sloshed in response.
Aurora squinted at the bottles with an even mixture of horror and intrigue. She couldn’t help but respect him a little for owning his strangeness. If it weren’t for the chitin, wanton perforations and featureless eyes, he would fit right in with the rest of the grease heads on her shift in Mechanical.
She stepped around the mess of bakeware on the kitchen floor and tugged a bottle out of his leg with her wing. His grin widened and he carefully tipped the remaining two bottles down onto the countertop, dipped the neck of one of them back into his leg and flicked his hoof . The bottle cap popped off and tinkled against the countertop.
“You’re not going to drink that,” Aurora said, but her confidence faded as Roach picked up the bottle. “Roach, that’s been sitting in there for two hundred years.”
“It’s still good.” He shrugged and tipped back the bottle.
Ginger speared her with a look that said, You encouraged him. She closed the cabinet and wrapped her magic around the remaining bottle on the countertop, snapping the cap off. A few small bubbles formed on the inside of the glass. A far cry from what should have been there when it was still within its sell-by date.
“Good and edible are two different things,” Ginger said. She sipped from the edge of the bottle and wrinkled her nose. “Sparkle-Colas are edible. They aren’t good.”
Aurora looked dubiously at the bottle in her wing. White stylized lettering painted onto the bottle curved around a deep purple background.

Sparkle-Cola

For that burst of Magic Energy!

“This has magic in it?” she asked.
Ginger snorted, eyeing the back of the label. “No, but it does have 55 grams of sugar.”
Aurora considered the centuries-old cola. She flicked the cap off with the tip of her hoof and lifted the bottle to her lips. Her first impression was that the lukewarm beverage tasted awful. It had an acrid bite like expired cloves or cinnamon and a powerful sweetness that lingered on the back of her tongue. Still, it wasn’t nearly as awful as the homebrewed beers that some pegasi sold out of their compartments back home. She took another swig.
Roach set his bottle down at the table and took a chair. Ginger leaned next to the sink and Aurora took the second chair for herself. The three of them drank in amicable silence until Roach pointed the bottom of his bottle at Aurora’s cutie mark. “You two were talking about cutie marks. What do you think yours means?” he asked.
Ginger’s ears spun toward them before she could turn her head.
Aurora glanced back at her own marking - a wing reflecting an aurora across its metal feathers - and shrugged. It was a question that bothered her when she was younger and one that she’d given up trying to answer now that she’d crept into her thirties. “I don’t think it means anything. I have wings, I work with machines and my parents named me Aurora,” she said bluntly, and tapped the marking with a feather. “Wing, metal, aurora.”
“Without sounding rude,” Ginger said, swirling her cola as she spoke, “that’s exactly the point I was making earlier. Cutie marks are an uninspired handicap. What if you hadn’t wanted to be a… a repair mechanic?”
Aurora winced. “Just ‘mechanic.’ And I did because my mom was a mechanic.”
“But what if you decided you wanted to do something else?” Ginger pressed.
She took a pull of Sparkle-Cola and considered that while Roach drained his first bottle and went back to the fridge for a second. Aurora swore she saw him grinning despite himself and suspected he had restarted the discussion for his own amusement. She scowled at the back of his neck.
“I guess I would have gotten a different cutie mark,” she said, turning back to Ginger. “Does it matter?”
Ginger made a dramatic flourish with both her forelegs. “It does matter! It baffles me that a filly can show a little talent for knitting and suddenly a ball of yarn appears on her hips. Blammo! She’s destined to stitch until her mane turns gray? That’s insanity.”
Roach flicked his bottle cap into his saddlebag and sat back down in his chair. He lifted an eyebrow at Ginger. “Did you just say ‘blammo?’”
Ginger leveled her eyes at him dangerously. “It’s a valid colloquialism,” she stated and returned to her theory without skipping a beat. There was an intensity in her eyes that betrayed the fact that she’d been thinking about this for a lot longer than she was letting on. “Now, what if that filly decides she doesn’t want to knit? What if she realizes her true passion is, for example, fixing machines like Aurora?”
Aurora finished the last slosh of cola and set the empty bottle on the table. “Well, she’s already got her cutie mark…”
Ginger jabbed a hoof at Aurora. “Exactly. That’s exactly what everyone says and we all know that the pressure will keep building until that filly settles to do something with her life involving yarn, all over a cutie mark. It’s insidious.”
“Hey, if you’re not careful you’re going to end up making Aurora think you’re one of those conspiracy nuts,” Roach said.
The unicorn’s chest puffed with irritation and Roach chuckled.
Aurora shrugged Desperate Times off her shoulder and leaned it up against the wall next to the nook. Roach’s eyes drifted to the weapon, then to the empty Sparkle-Cola bottles collecting in the kitchen.
He slid out of his chair with a short grunt and walked to the refrigerator. Aurora and Ginger watched him as he rummaged around, removing an assortment of glass containers from the rusty wire shelves. He slipped two more Sparkle-Colas into his saddlebags and set an assortment of sodas, liquors and a jar of what had once been pickles and was now an organic slurry onto the countertop.
Ginger pointed at the pickle jar. “What on earth do you plan on doing with that.”
“I’m not doing anything with it,” Roach said. He lifted a box of .308 ammunition from his saddlebag and set it atop the lid of the disgusting jar. “Aurora’s going to shoot it.”
Roach had promised her shooting lessons and there they sat on the linoleum. Aurora watched the septic pickle brine swirl inside the jar.
“Fantastic.”


They set up in the cobblestone driveway.
Roach dragged the two kitchen chairs down to the edge of the treeline and tracked down a thick piece of fallen timber to lay across them. The rotted underside of the limb allowed him to scrape it relatively flat with his hoof before spacing a line of bottles and one pickle jar evenly along its length.
Then he trotted back up the slope of the driveway to where Aurora waited. Desperate Times sat awkwardly across her hooves like a foal she was trying not to drop. A 150-count box of brass rounds sat on the ground next to her saddlebags in front of her.
Ginger watched from the porch swing. A half-empty bottle of Sparkle-Cola floated near her muzzle.
Aurora’s ears perked as Roach approached.
“Alright, I think we’re ready to start,” he said. “Down on your belly.”
She set the rifle down and shimmied down onto the cool bricks. Roach got down next to her and told her how to adjust her posture. When he was satisfied, he picked up the overmare’s rifle and settled it against her shoulder.
Her wing splayed sideways against the stones under the rifle stock like a skirt of feathers. The hooks Ginger had installed allowed her to hold the back of the rifle steady between her right wing and left hoof. She felt uneasy laying down with the weapon, partly because of the strange posture and partly because of what she knew the rifle could do. Wrenches didn’t kill ponies if you used them wrong. Not usually, anyway. Desperate Times was built exclusively for killing.
“You don’t have a bipod,” Roach said, and slid Aurora’s saddlebag under the rifle’s stock. “So you’ll want to stabilize it by getting something right under the furthest lens of your scope, like a fulcrum.”
He had her look down the scope and watch how the sight moved as she moved her wing, left hoof and shoulder. When she nodded understanding, he rolled the rifle on its side and showed her where the magazine seated in front of the trigger guard and how to drop it out of the rifle for reloading. She watched, then demonstrated how to press five individual rounds into the magazine and click it into place under the rifle.
“You treat it like it’s always loaded,” Roach said firmly. “Now say it to me.”
“Treat it like it’s always loaded,” she repeated, and not for the first time.
Roach spent more time than she expected to explain the basic components of the rifle. She learned how to pull back the bolt and startled when an unfired round sprang out of the ejection port. He made her keep cycling the bolt until she stopped flinching and she quickly disliked the tedium of pressing the same rounds back into the magazine.
Eventually they moved onto the scope which was a tool she was already vaguely familiar with. The elevation and windage adjustments were a simple concept once she realized she could apply a few measuring tricks she’d learned in the Stable. When he was certain she had the basics down, he backed away.
“Good,” he said. “Now budge up a little.”
She shuffled forward a few inches until the butt pressed firmly into her shoulder. Roach rechecked her posture and crouched down on her left side.
“We’re going to aim for that pickle jar,” he said.
Aurora’s stomach churned. She pressed her cheek against the rifle and looked through the scope. It took her a moment to find the jar of sludge. It filled her view and she frowned. She lifted her left wing to the scope and dialed down the magnification until the jar shrank to a more manageable target.
Aurora made herself comfortable and slipped her primary feathers through the trigger guard. She took a deep breath and slowly exhaled while adding slow pressure to the trigger. The sight wobbled over the jar.
The rifle bucked back into her shoulder with a cracking explosion. Its echo rebounded off the neighboring bluff a few seconds later.
Aurora looked over the top of the rifle and saw the pickle jar still sitting on the branch.
“You were a little high,” Roach said.
She adjusted the elevation of the scope.
“Other way,” Roach said.
She adjusted the elevation of the scope the other way.
Aurora ran the bolt back and ejected the spent brass, pushed it closed and settled back into position. She pressed her cheek against the rifle. The pickle jar danced in the sight. She inhaled, exhaled, lined up the jar and pulled the trigger.
The rifle jumped and gravel spat out of the forgotten road. In the foreground sat a perfectly intact pickle jar.
She sighed through her nose and tried to gauge the difference between the hit in the road and the jar. Still too high. She ran the bolt again and twisted the elevation down another two ticks. Breathe. Aim. Squeeze.
Desperate Times barked and the pickle jar popped like a blister. It vomited its contents over the makeshift platform and onto the cobblestones in a mess of shattered glass and two hundred year old vegetable matter.
Aurora’s stomach lurched and she looked away for several seconds. It gradually settled enough for her to feel a happy tingle of success. She gave Roach a little grin and said, “Blammo.”
He smiled and pointed at the remaining bottles. “Good shot. Now pick another target.”
They slipped into a routine. Aurora shot and Roach offered advice when he saw a need for it. As she sank rounds into the dirt and, on rare occasion, through a bottle, she wondered what might happen to the rifle when she returned to Stable 10. There would be no safe place to practice with it and most likely Sledge would want it preserved for the overmare or overstallion that succeeded him.
The thought crawled into her brain: would she give it back? Would she, once the generator was fixed, want to continue living there? She looked over the top of the scope at the unending bank of tumbling clouds. Her wings twitched instinctively.
She looked back through the scope and aimed at the last bottle. Breathe in. Breathe out. Squeeze.
Her rifle punched against her and the bottom of the limb sneezed a clot of dry wood onto the cobbles. The impact popped the bottle into the air and it shattered on the ground.
“Dammit,” she hissed.
Roach clapped her on the back and pushed himself to his feet. “You’re doing fine. Try to hit the same spot on that log. I’ll find some more targets.”
Aurora watched him climb up the porch, plucking Ginger’s empty cola bottle off the railing as he walked. Ginger sat on the porch steps, watching her. The unicorn lifted a hoof and Aurora lifted her wing in acknowledgement.
Over the course of an hour, her aimed improved. Not significantly - she still had more misses than hits - but enough for her to know she was getting a feel for it. The approaching twilight was making it hard to tell the difference between the bullet-chewed log and the row of milk glasses on top of it by the time she dipped her wing into the cardboard box for another round and came up empty.
Aurora cracked her neck and felt the dull throb of her shoulder as she stood up. She’d been on the ground so long that it took her body a moment to pump blood in the right directions, giving her a brief bout of vertigo.
“Time for a break?” Roach asked, though it was more of an observation than a question. He stood, picking up the empty ammo box in his teeth, and stretched his legs. Chitin pulled apart along his joints like a black eggshell.
“Time for sleep,” she said. After last night, her internal clock was begging her to lay down and make up for the lost hours.
She slung the rifle over her shoulder by its strap and ejected the last round from the chamber, checking that it was clear before pushing the bolt back and pulling the trigger. It clicked empty and she set the safety.
Roach watched her stow the rifle under her wing and gave her a weary smile. “Good job,” he said.
The porch creaked as they filed into the cabin, and Aurora could see Ginger had been keeping herself busy. A neat stack of logs burned in the fireplace, throwing long shadows across the living room. Long, sweeping arcs of disturbed dust bent from where the old leather couch had been to where it currently sat facing the crackling fire. Ginger had tried to sweep the dust off the cushions but given the state of her jacket, much of it had found its way onto her.
She didn’t seem to notice. She leaned against the arm of the couch with her cheek balanced against the knee of her foreleg. A thin hardcover book hovered a few feet from her nose.
“Little warm for a fire,” Roach commented. He pushed the door shut behind Aurora.
“I might’ve gotten carried away with it,” she admitted. She covered her mouth with the back of her hoof as she yawned. “It’ll cool off tonight.”
Roach stepped toward the fireplace and flicked a couple charred nuggets of wood off the slate and into the flames. He dropped the empty ammo box into the hearth and walked toward the curio at the other side of the room where he was at less risk of combusting.
Aurora hopped up onto the couch and took the opposite arm from Ginger. The heat soaked into her skin like a sponge and she settled comfortably into the thick cushions. She watched the fire burn with fascination. She’d never seen one burn freely before and the dancing flames were mesmerizing. Ginger turned a page and Aurora looked at the book she was reading. She could just make out the hoof-written words on the pages.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Ginger floated the book toward her and Aurora wrapped it in her wing. “It’s a journal,” she said.
Aurora squinted at the arcing loops and swirls of ink and wrinkled her nose. “What language is this in?”
“Cursive,” Ginger chuckled. “Don’t worry, you’re not missing much.”
She lifted the book out of Aurora’s wing and settled back in to continue reading. Aurora considered asking Ginger to read her a few entries but felt silly for thinking it. Still, for an uninteresting read Ginger seemed interested enough to turn the page.
Roach closed the curio door behind them and yawned. None of them were running on a full night’s sleep.
“Roach, there’s a bed in the other room if you want to turn in,” Ginger said, pointing to the door left of the fireplace. “It’ll be a bit cooler in there.”
He rubbed the side of his face with his hoof and looked blearily at the open door. Aurora yawned with sympathy. With the shadow of the bluff dropping the cabin into an early night, they were all starting to shut down. He tottered over to the doorway and poked his head in. “So that’s where that tree landed,” he said, and shut the door behind him.
“Poor thing,” Ginger chuckled.
“Hmm,” Aurora hummed, her eyes on the fire. “How long have the two of you known each other?”
Ginger closed the book and leaned back into the cushions. She tilted her head toward Aurora while she looked thoughtfully into the fire. “It depends on how you measure it,” she said. “I met him on the road maybe… fourteen, fifteen years ago? I had just left home and had no idea how to survive, so he taught me in exchange for keeping watch at night so he could finally sleep. He took me as far as Junction City and went back to guard your Stable. Ever since, he’s made a point to come visit once or twice a year to see how I’m doing.”
Aurora’s thoughts went to her father. How she’d made excuses not to visit out of thoughtless anger. Even after reconciling with him, she felt guilt twist in her chest. She’d never get that time back with him. There would always be a gap in their lives they couldn’t go back to fill.
She could hear snoring grind out from the bedroom. Roach was out like a broken bulb.
Ginger glanced at the door, then to Aurora. “Has he told you why he guards your Stable?”
Her thoughts went to Blue. Once upon a time ponies had called her Rainbow Dash, Element of Loyalty, and ministry mare of her self-titled Ministry of Awesome. Now, impossibly trapped in a purgatory between pony and feral ghoul, she lay locked in a dark breaker room to keep her safe.
Had Roach told Ginger about her? Was this a test?
“No,” she said.
A log popped and an ember skittered out onto the slate. Ginger picked up a rusted pair of iron tongs with her magic and used them to drop the ember back into the fire. “Before the war, Roach had a family; a husband and a daughter. His husband did some contract work with the ministries which was how all three of them were selected for residency by Stable-Tec. When the bombs fell, Roach ignored the evacuation procedures and went home to check on his family. They’d already gone to the Stable, and by the time he reached it the door was sealed. He never saw them again.”
Aurora slowly shook her head, listening to the quiet snoring rise and fall from the other room. She remembered Roach telling her that the only way he knew to keep Rainbow Dash from causing a panic at the Stable door was to tell her that her parents had gotten in safely. That she needed to set an example for the other ponies trapped on their side of the door. How hard had it been for him to say those words with conviction while knowing his family was sealed away without him?
She remembered Roach kissing Rainbow Dash on the forehead before they left, like a father kissing his daughter before turning out the lights. Of course he treated her like a surrogate daughter. How could he have not? Together, they protected the entrance to Stable 10 and the descendants of their lost families for over two hundred years.
“That’s…” Aurora whispered, and failed to find the right word.
“That’s why you need to be careful,” Ginger said.
Aurora blinked confusion and frowned at her.
“You aren’t the only pony with something to lose if your home goes dark,” she warned. “As far as Roach is concerned, anyone from Stable 10 could be a descendant of his husband or his daughter. He’ll do anything to protect them, and that includes you.”
She let that sink in.
“Thanks for telling me,” she finally said.
Ginger nodded and, sensing the end of the conversation, opened the journal.
“And…” Aurora hesitated, but pressed forward anyway. “I’m sorry you lost your shop.”
Ginger pursed her lips and set the journal onto the arm of the couch. She watched the fire flicker between the charred logs. “I didn’t lose anything that can’t be replaced,” she said. Her voice was bittersweet. “None of it was your fault.”
She caught the double meaning and looked away, staring intently at the window in the far wall. The twilight had begun to darken and low branches swayed outside the deformed glass as cool air slid through them down the bluff.
“He tried.” She looked furtively at Ginger and saw the question on her face. “Cider,” she clarified and looked back to the window. “He tried.”
Ginger didn’t reply. Anger and shame boiled up into Aurora’s heart and she fought to keep control of herself. Of course. Of course this the reaction she would get. Dead silence and more pity. Why did she say anything at all? Cider was dead. He couldn’t be punished any more than he already had, and she barely even knew-
Aurora felt Ginger’s hoof around her shoulders and she felt the a visceral urge to pull away. She stopped. That wasn’t normal.
Cider had changed her after all.
The window blurred behind a veil of tears. They came faster than she could stifle them and dark, wet tracks streamed down her face. She bit the inside of her lip, bracing herself against the racking sobs that tried to break past her chest and into her throat. She stared bitterly at the flames, unable to focus her vision for what felt like ages while Ginger provided quiet comfort.
When she ran out of tears, they sat together in silence. The fire dwindled, replaced by a glowing bed of embers. It shimmered as the old cabin cooled. She was vaguely aware of the gentle light from Ginger’s horn and the sound of pages being turned. She didn’t remember closing her eyes.
Her head dipped into Ginger’s shoulder and she fell asleep.