Warmth.
Deep within, I felt a warmth.
It was not life, but something akin to it.
Numbness gradually subsided, giving way to pain. A dull pain, like a slow burn. Feeling returned to my barrel, radiating out slowly from the warmth. I felt like I had run a marathon, and had nothing left to give. Yet the warmth spread through me.
I could feel my bones fighting it. They wanted to remain and peacefully decay, so they could return to the sky. But the warmth would not let them. It tore me away from a silent nonexistence, a blissful lack of awareness, of feeling, of anything. Rest was stolen from me, for the fire had decided I would rise.
I didn’t open my eyes so much as became aware of them. Dry, stinging, they had always been open, outside of my deadened perception. Contrast was the first thing I saw, harsh light against gray walls, and darkness creeping back, hiding in the corners, fleeing from my vision, giving me sight. My vision spread like fire through the room, expanding, hungry.
Books, papers, scattered across the floor, the words and covers faded from time and exposure. Grey walls, made of cloud. I recognized those. I had awoken, not in a small room, but what seemed to be the corner of a bookstore. Shelves had fallen like dominoes across the room, but I lay in a crumpled heap in one of the few mercifully clear spots. The light seemed to be coming from the ceiling above, or where the ceiling should have been. A great rift had opened the room to the elements, and blinding sunlight was flooding through.
I wanted to look around, but my head, my neck, was still numb. Like it wasn’t even there. I could feel my body below, but my muscles refused to respond, refused to follow instructions. My head was left exactly where it was, where it lay limply against a wall, as I stared up at the hole in the ceiling.
Panic filled me, sluggishly. Everything was wrong. I should have been able to move, to turn my head, to stand. Nothing worked. Why?
The warmth in my chest flared at the panic, and a muscle in my back spasmed. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. My vision tilted back, then snapped forward as my head flopped limply towards my barrel. I was no less a crumpled heap than before, but now I was doubled over at least. Progress, muscle by sore, aching muscle.
There was a sword in my belly. Surely that hadn’t always been there?
It didn't hurt. That was the strangest part. It should have hurt, sharply. The length of metal should’ve caused everywhere it touched to burn. But it only sat there, harmlessly, as it stuck out of my gut. It felt like red was meant to be leaking from the wound, but I couldn’t exactly recall why, or what the red would have been if it was.
It was a strange sword. I couldn’t identify the metal, but that was more because I was having trouble identifying or remembering anything. I could see it was meant to be held with both hooves, or used by a very large creature, judging from the grip. Red stained the blade, but it was the wrong kind of red. The word “rust” slowly filtered back into my mind, but that couldn’t be right. How long had it been there?
How long had I been here?
My foreleg felt like it was filled with jelly, but it was feeling, of a sort. And I could only feel the shoulder. Agonizingly slowly, I pulled each muscle individually, re-learning how to move my foreleg. The best I could get was a limp twitch, independent of my torso. I struggled again, as pain shot through my elbow. The joint was disused to the point of fragility, but in the pain, I could finally feel definition. I could use it to understand how my leg was connected, and how to control it.
Limply, I pulled my hoof upwards, across the floor. It dragged against the carpet until it touched something fluffy, and at first I thought I’d touched my leg, but then whatever it was skittered away. I jerked my hoof in surprise, and the force made my whole body twitch. Finally, the sword hurt, but only for a moment, as I felt the steel drag against my insides.
My vision was still limited to where my head hung limp, but I focused on the grip and crossguard of the sword, and tried to force my hoof to make contact. My first attempt just banged against it, flopping dumbly and causing it to wobble. My second attempt, I hooked the edge of my hoof against the guard, but then I stopped, distracted now with my hoof right before me.
Was that my hoof? It looked so strange. I had no fur, or rather, what fur was left was so thin and ragged that it looked more like mold than anything that had once been a part of me. The bits without fur weren’t much better; my bare flesh had turned thin and nearly transparent from having lain here motionless in the dark for so long. I could see the muscles I forced to move, as they twitched down the length of my leg. It was fascinating, but the fact that it was my own body repulsed me.
It wasn’t just the physical disgust at a foreign object that happened to be repulsive. It was the fact that it was my own body, so twisted and decayed. What had happened? What made me like this? How long had I been here? Where was I?
...Who was I?
I reached as far back as I could, scrabbling at the corners of my mind like a hungry rat, scouring it for anything. Any memory. Anything that told me where I was, what I was doing here. All I could remember was a figure.
A blurry figure. Dark, a shadow silhouetted in the sunlight. I didn’t know where we were, there was nothing around it. But there was sunlight, and there was the dark, blurry, figure. It was shaped like a pony, but the edges were all wrong. Too sharp, too angular, they continued out further than the lines of a pony had any right to. And the eyes. Eyes that burned red.
My ears heard a quiet keening. A sad, terrified wail, if it could even be described as that. I was making it. I leapt back from my memories as if they’d stung me, desperate to rid myself of that figure. I never wanted to think about it ever again.
My rotted, ragged hoof filled my vision, and I remembered the sword. I pushed my hoof outwards, trying to drag the sword out by the crossguard. Again, that sensation of something being dragged through my insides overcame me, and I wanted to throw up as I fought against everything inside me screaming to stop, that I was doing more damage this way. I didn’t want a sword stuck in my belly, pinning me to the wall I lay against.
Black ooze welled up around the base, where the blade met flesh, and I curled an eyebrow as I pushed again. The black ooze was strange, like liquid, but it moved slowly, like thick mud. It began seeping from around the corners of my wound, and didn’t seem to stop so long as I kept forcing the blade out.
Was this the red I had been dreading? But what was wrong with it? It didn’t look like anything that should be in a pony. I wanted it out. The black ichor from within, and the sword, I wanted them both out of my body.
My hoof flopped limply to the floor as my leg fully extended, and reached the limits of its range of movement. The crossguard was too far away, now. Reaching across my barrel, over the sword, I stained my leg with the black ichor. I needed to find my other leg, touch it, make it feel, so the fire would know where to flow. A moment later, I felt the foreign touch of my own hoof on the unused limb, unsure of where it was in relation to the rest of my body. From there, I worked up to my shoulder, exploring, making the nerves in my chest connect to the nerves in my leg by force.
I found the connection, and pain crept back down my leg like abyssal ice, but I’d rescued my leg from the dark numbness. Still half-asleep, it buzzed as I made it flop across my barrel as well. Together, my hooves pressed against either side of the dull, rusted blade of the sword, and pushed it away.
Sharp pain shot through my chest. I gasped, and black ichor spattered onto my hooves. I tasted iron and rot. But the sword moved. Sliding out, it began to tilt down, and the section still inside my gut tilted up. The length of the blade stung now, just like I’d expected, and I found myself wishing it numb once again.
After a moment, the sword fell free from my body, and a clatter of metal on wood echoed through the room. As the echoes faded, I heard a distinct skittering in one of the far corners, but any kind of search for the source was futile so long as I was blinded by the hole in the roof.
The black ichor was eagerly dribbling down my barrel now, staining the flesh a dark, coagulated red. I watched it as it flowed, and gradually, it stopped, slowing to a trickle, then nothing. It had hardened, or perhaps coagulated, as I watched, for however long that had taken.
More time passed. Eventually, I began mentally exploring outwards again, pulling haphazardly at random muscles I could feel but could not locate, like the strings of a puppet being pulled experimentally. I discovered my hindlegs, before anything else. They had always been there, but I slowly realized I could feel them, and began to pull at them as well. My knee spasmed, the leg pulling inwards as the heel of my hoof dragged along the wood. Flexing it again, I pushed off the floor, and felt vertigo as I tipped over.
My face hit the wooden boards of the floor, and I felt fresh pain, but dulled. My leg, so happy with its accomplishment, spread out and stretched across the floor. But my fore was now trapped, my shoulder numbing once again. My other foreleg crossed my barrel once more, bracing itself against the floor.
Not a bone or muscle in my body would cooperate, but the fire inside me didn’t care. I would rise. I pushed against the floor, and my foreleg was free, but I didn’t stop there. I gathered my numb foreleg under me, joining the first, and forced myself up.
It took every ounce of my strength. I pushed my own body up, away from the crumpled mess I was, away from the corpse I had been before. Shoving the rest of the world away from myself for some space would surely have been easier. But I hauled myself up and away from the floor, and gathered my shaking, numb, emaciated hinds below myself as well.
I stood, under my own power. I was alive, or something akin to it.
My legs shook, rattling the wooden boards beneath me. The world was at an angle, not flat like I had hoped. Very subtle, but enough that I could notice, even with my compromised sense of balance and shaking knees. My neck fought me every step of the way, but I didn’t want to start trying to walk until I had sorted out how stiff it was.
Twisting and stretching, I sought to realign the bones in my neck as they were meant to be. Something in my throat crunched and crackled with the movements, vertebrae separating and sliding so they could set properly. Soon, my legs ached from the effort of standing, but I was nearly done. With a final hollow pop, it all felt right, barring the same dull ache that permeated the rest of me. Haltingly, I tilted my head upwards.
My victory was ruined by the disgusting sensation of something gelatinous sliding down my throat, gone before I could stop it. It didn’t even have the decency to wet my gullet as it went, only tugging at the dry flesh, making me wish for moisture. I tried to swear, gently, under my breath, but all this seemed to do was make the problem worse. Black fluid filled my mouth, splashing across my tongue and spattering across the floor, my mouth still hanging open just as limp as my legs.
Eventually, my lungs calmed down, though I noticed that I didn’t breathe subconsciously any more, nor did I seem to need to. Forcing my lungs to inhale manually drew more ichor, and I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, resolving myself to come back to that later.
I moved back to my legs, testing my weight and the movement of the disused joints, unable to stop my thoughts from flying away like the wind. What was I? Was I dead, or alive? I seemed… trapped, somehow, in between the two states. A moving corpse, at best. I hoped against hope I’d never find a mirror.
Thankfully, it seemed the more practice I got pulling my muscles manually, the less conscious of those movements I needed to be. Mobility was coming back to me, gradually and slowly. I was running no marathons, but I could move, at the very least. Hesitantly, I took a step forward, and nearly tripped over a fuzzy lump. Again I jerked back my hoof, eyes glancing down to see what it was this time, and I paused, sitting back in confusion.
I’d tripped over… a dead bird, it seemed. A falcon of some sort, a hunter, but it looked old and stained with grime and age. The feathers were loose and falling out, and any exposed flesh was red raw. Vermin had been chewing at it, feeding off it. Better it than me, but I couldn’t shake a sense of abstract sadness at such a creature reduced to nothing. Not unlike myself, really.
Beside it, the sword. As I looked at it, I marveled at just how long the blade was, and how a definite skein of rust had marked the depth it had been stabbed into my chest. At least a leg-length and a half, if not two. Gently, I bent down to pick up the sword in my teeth by the grip, then spat it out onto my hooves so I could hold it up closer. It almost looked like something had been engraved into the grip, an intricate decoration, but the metal was warped by time and erosion, blackened somehow. Had it been in a fire? I glanced around the room, but the decaying wood floor had no scorch marks, and no burned books could be seen.
I shook my head, and let the blade clatter back to the floor. There was that skittering noise again, and my ruined ears twitched to follow it. Haltingly, I turned. Every step was a test, my shaking hooves carefully placed in between fallen books. My balance was still terrifyingly unsteady as I began to walk through the bookstore.
The building was an utter mess. Not a single book remained on the shelves, and intermittent rain had fallen through a crevasse torn in the ceiling, soaking the floors in here. Even now, the wood felt slightly spongy, though something about that twinged at me. I stopped by a nearby wall and stared at it, then gently raised a hoof, pressing at it. It gave, pushing inwards and springing back, and a memory returned.
Cloud. Walls made of cloud. Pegasi did that. I was in a cloud-built bookstore?
Pressing on, I made my way towards the front counter, and beside the door. There was another skitter, in the next aisle over, and a furry lump bolted past. It left papers aflutter in the backdraft as it ran for the door, but it was gone before I could get a good look at it. I glanced down the aisle it had come from, and froze.
A body. Another pony.
Hesitantly, I approached. They were splayed awkwardly across the floor, legs askew in a way that seemed unnatural, and they lay face down. They wore the plain, utilitarian steel barding of a soldier, though I didn’t recognize the sigils stamped into the plates, or the faded colors of the under armor. A pouch was attached at their hip, but their sword was several leg-lengths away. It had been thrown aside, or perhaps lost in battle.
Silently, I gave a small prayer to the winds. It wouldn’t help them, but it was better than nothing. I left the corpse undisturbed and turned back to the front door, and made the final few steps to the sunlight outside.
The glass in the door was shattered, the broken remnants left in the frame ground flat by time and wind. It hung half open, and I was showered by wet rust from the frame and the hinges as I shoved it completely open with only a moment of effort. Outside, the door opened haphazardly into a babbling brook, shallow but a few leg-lengths wide. Stepping out into the cold stream of the river, I shivered. I was on more solid ground, however, and level enough, in comparison to the bookstore behind me.
Speaking of… I turned to look at it from outside, and my confusion only mounted. What was it doing here? No sane pony would have built this here, not at that angle. And the front end was crushed, tufts of cotton cloud bleeding into the creek and drifting downstream. I craned my neck up to see if it had fallen from somewhere, but the sky made it impossible to tell.
I guess that the time must have been around sunset, though it was hard to tell. The sun was a bright glow amidst the thick fog that seemed to have enveloped the land around me. Everywhere I looked, there was the fog, too thick to see more than maybe fifty leg-lengths in any direction. It all glowed a bright orange, which was beautiful, but all-obscuring.
Unsettled, I tipped my head down to the brook, grateful at least for the water. Maybe it would clear my head. My dry throat eagerly accepted the water, but more brackish nastiness came up in response, as the river water rehydrated the dust. I coughed again, and then spat a phlegmy black lump downstream, where I watched it bob downstream and stain the water red.
This continued for a little while, taking sips of water and spitting up more bloody phlegm, until my throat finally seemed to have been cleared. Then, I couldn’t seem to get enough water to truly slake my thirst. No matter how much I drank, my throat remained dry, and I began to worry about water leaking through my flesh. Who knows what that sword had pierced?
I shook my head again, and chose to enjoy the endless bounty of the shallow stream. Instead, I focused on washing as much of the dried blood off myself as I could with my bare hooves. Fur and flesh quickly began to come loose alongside the smeared filth, and I had to force myself to stop. What had happened to me?
Could I even speak? I pursed my moistened lips, and tried to utter a sound. At first, nothing. I needed air to force through my vocal cords. So delicate creatures were we, and yet I remained.
“Kkkkk...“ I gagged, trying to force out anything that wasn’t a horrific rattle, or a coughing wheeze. “Pl…ple…ple…ease…”
Words. Barely. I wanted to cry, more than anything else. But I fought it back down as best I could. The fire urged me forward, to keep moving, and I obeyed. I moved towards the side of the brook, where a slightly steep hill ascended to some sort of road. Hills this steep on legs this unsteady were trouble, I knew, but I had to find something, go somewhere. I could follow this brook for miles and not get anywhere, but roads were pony-made. Roads led somewhere.
I crested the hill, and froze. Another furry shape, another pony. This one… standing. They seemed to be a soldier as well, wearing armor and staring down the road. Maybe... maybe they could help me. I slowly stepped closer, my throat burning already as I prepared to speak.
“H…hel…Hello…” Barely a warble, the words as unsteady as my gait, but it got their attention. The soldier turned around, and my words caught in my throat as I saw their face. He had no eyes, just dull red burning embers hanging in the sockets, fixing me with his undead gaze.
“W-wait,” I stuttered, stepping backwards. The soldier, a stallion, was a unicorn as well, and his horn glowed gently with a thin corona of magic. Held in his aura was a shortsword, like the other soldier inside the bookstore had, and he held it aloft as he began to stagger towards me.
“I-I do…don’t want…any...tr-trouble—”
The stallion let out a snarl as he began staggering faster, and I kept backing up in a futile attempt to keep distance between us. I glanced behind me to watch where my hooves landed, and it was my undoing. Searing pain slashed across my chest in the wake of his shortsword, cutting across my barrel and neck upward, a spray of red, so dark as to be black, spattered across his own muzzle.
I let out a strangled cry as I tried to back away further, and the edge of the hill fell away from below me. My footing was gone, and so I was unable to stop myself as I tumbled back down the incline. Vertigo was a cruel mistress. I hit the water with a splash and a crack, and the back of my head disappeared into blinding pain. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, all I felt was the cold chill of the water splashing around my corpse once more. And then, the darkness closed back in again.
* * *
Felt the sharp pain first, but it gradually faded into a dull throb at the back of my skull. The cold chill of death had sunk into my bones, and again, I struggled to move them. Eventually, my eyes opened once more, taking in the brilliantly blinding orange color of the fog above.
I was dying. I was sure of it. Had I blacked out for only a moment? Surely the Stallion was on his way down the hill after me, to finish me off. Better I not see it coming. I closed my eyes again, bracing myself for a finishing blow that never came.
Gradually, the pain subsided almost entirely. I barely felt the cut in my barrel and neck. Confused, I opened my eyes again, and my aching head lifted, looking around. The Stallion was nowhere to be seen. Cold water ran down my head, dripping back into the brook that had so thoroughly soaked me now. Slowly, carefully, I sat up, and pressed a hoof to my breast and neck where I’d felt the cut.
Gone. Like it had never been. I traced the path with my hoof, just to make sure, but there simply was no evidence of any wound. The stab wound from the sword I’d removed from my chest was gone as well. How…? Shaking my head, I rolled to my hooves, feeling the back of my head. It was still sore, but I would’ve sworn I’d split it open on the rock. How was this possible?
I glanced back up the hill. The stallion was truly nowhere to be seen, and had presumably gone back to where he had been standing before I disturbed him. Why had he attacked me? What had happened to him, to make him… almost feral, like that?
I drunkenly rolled to my hooves, but kept my eyes locked on the top of the hill, in case he heard me stand. The water splashed off my soaked body as the chill subsided, and my fire within had already begun to warm my bones. I could try to leave, wander away from this river and the fallen bookstore. I could sneak past him, up the river, find the road again.
Then my eyes strayed back to the bookstore. That other soldier in there, the dead one, they had a sword. And the feral pony would keep attacking anypony who came this way.
I sloshed back across the brook, and stepped up into the dark doorway of the ruined building. My eyes took long seconds to adjust to the dim light within, after I had spent so long in the sunlit riverbed, and as I was blind, I distinctly heard more skittering. Vermin of some sort. Rats, perhaps, feeding off of the soldier’s corpse. Maybe my own, until I had risen. I tried to ignore the sound of the rat’s movement. I had better things to do. As I approached the dead soldier, I took a moment to examine them up close.
She seemed to have been a mare. Her smaller frame looked absolutely miniscule, scattered across the floor as she was. Her armor would be useful as well, I realized. I couldn’t see any buckles on this side, so I pushed my hooves under her and pulled, to try and roll her over. My weakened hooves weren’t enough to do more than rock her from side to side, however, and I glanced around for something I could use as a lever.
Her shortsword would do nicely. Taking the grip in my teeth, I slid the dull, worn blade under her barrel, jamming the end into the mouldering wooden floor, and pushed. With the new leverage, she started to roll well enough, and I reached out my hoof to shove it under her, and fully turn her corpse over.
Then her own hoof grabbed me back. I jumped back and yelped, as I dropped the sword with a clatter onto the floor. The dead mare sluggishly tried to come to life, and clawed at the air mindlessly as she tried to reach for me. She was still alive? How? I slapped the sword away from us both in a panic, so she couldn’t use it, but as I watched her struggle, I began to realize that was as far as she would ever get. She was mindless, like the feral stallion outside, and crippled on top of that, with her body broken from battle. The best she could manage was limp, mindless flailing.
A pang of sadness gripped me, and I pitied the poor mare. We were not so different, she and I. Why had I risen from the dead with my mind intact, but she and the stallion outside had lost theirs? What made the two of us so different?
The flailing was pathetic, and I took the blade back up in my teeth as I approached. No more. I would end her suffering. Intentionally using the sword as a weapon felt wrong, especially how I held it in my mouth like this. The weight was heavy, my head was off balance, and the tip dragged against the rotten wooden floor. It felt like it took me an eternity to line up the length of the blade with her empty eye socket, the embers within glowing dully as we stared at each other.
I forced my eyes closed so I wouldn’t have to see her, and shoved the sword forward. Resistance and the shock of impact shook the sword, but I kept it as straight as I could, and continued to push it through her skull. Her hoof shuddered, twitching spasmodically, until I felt a crunch, and the sword broke through the back of her head. Then she stilled, and her hoof dropped to the floor with a final clatter.
I didn’t know if I had ever killed another creature before. It felt unnatural, every step of the process. Like I had been doing it all wrong. But now I had killed, regardless if it had been natural to me in my life beforehand or not. A quiet kill, if not exactly a quick one. The mare hadn’t suffered too much, if she could even comprehend pain any more. It had been terrifyingly easy, putting down a dead pony like that.
A dead pony, just like me.
What had happened to the world? I had vague memories of a place, a country… a nation. Filled with ponies like her or me, so many ponies, smiling and happy. But those memories, I couldn’t remember any faces or cutie marks. They were all blurs. Stains of pastel color in what felt like a foal’s drawing of the world before. Equestria. Our nation had been named Equestria, our world Equus. The names were all I knew, and nothing else emerged clearly.
I sighed, and began tugging once more at the grip of the blade. I had to wiggle it inside the mare’s skull to make it come free, but it came loose with a sudden sucking noise, a squirt of black blood staining the blade. I let the sword drop to the floor as I focused on the mare’s armor, searching for buckles or straps or anything that would allow me to remove it. I quickly found the pouch at her side again, though, and pulled it open, unsure of what I even wanted to find.
The interior was black. Not empty, not stained black. Just empty, infinite void. It was as if the pouch opened to the deepest ocean, bottomless and hungry. Confused, and more than a little unsettled, I closed the flap again, resolving to investigate it later.
Eventually I found the straps to her armor on her underside, and I had to use my teeth to tug them loose. I hated every moment of it, shoving my face so close to her corpse, using my rotting, horrifyingly loose teeth for such a delicate job. I was terrified I was going to lose them for such a minor effort, but the straps loosened before my jaw did. The armor fell away soon after, though I had to pull her forward again to get the armor off fully.
She might have been pretty once, I thought. She might have been colored bright blue, but now it had all been dulled gray by time. But now it was far, far too late for her, and blood stained that pretty fur and her eyeless sockets. Out of curiosity, I pulled her leg up, rolling her back over one last time, ignoring the black stain on the floor behind her head.
Her cutie mark was more similar to the bag she was carrying than I cared to admit. It seemed to depict a black spiral, faint lines of color twisting and curling into an inky black point at the center. Looking closer, my eyes started to…blur somehow, like I was looking at something I shouldn’t. The center of her cutie mark…wasn’t fur. I could ascertain that, but nothing else. It was like the color of her fur across her body was being sucked into a hole bored through her flank.
A horrible feeling overcame me, and I turned, stretching out an aching leg to inspect my own flank, then turning to inspect the other. Both shared the same mark as on the mare. This was no cutie mark. I didn’t know what it was, aside from a reminder that I felt utterly alien in the body I called mine.
I needed to cover it, just so I couldn’t look at it any more. So I could pretend it wasn’t there. Thankfully her armor seemed to fit me, though it was tight, and didn’t quite sit right on my back, for some reason. Still, I was happy to have it.
I rattled as I moved now. The rotten cloth woven through the metal was simply insufficient to muffle the plating clicking against itself. It began to irritate me almost immediately, and I spent a few minutes staggering around the bookstore, tightening straps and tugging at the plating, to no avail. I would simply rattle and scrape at all times when I moved.
With the armor on and her sword nearby, the dead mare had nothing left for me to take. I was as equipped as I would ever be, to fight the feral pony outside. Taking up the grip of the black-stained sword in my teeth once more, I dragged it out through the door, sloshing back across the brook one last time.
This time, as I crested the hill, he was already staggering his way towards me, his own sword again held aloft in the grip of his magic. I was less and less sure of myself as I approached, and fear shot through me. I had slain the mare inside, but she barely moved. I had no idea how to fight, no idea how to kill. I knew the sword needed to stab him, but how in Tartarus would I manage to do that before he stabbed me with his?
The fear made me hesitate, and the feral pony did not. He was already swinging his sword, that same horizontal slash across my front, and I tried to meet him, swing my own sword upwards in a panic to meet it. Pain shot across my front as the armor saved me from the cut of the blade, but not the impact. Then my mouth burned as my teeth were jarred loose—the shock of the clashing steel on steel had knocked my sword free from my mouth, as well as a spray of blood.
I staggered and gasped like a fish, but the feral pony moved without pause. He sought only to kill, and to render me immobile once more. His sword came down from on high this time, and chopped into my exposed neck, where it buried itself half a hoof deep into my flesh. I barely let out a gurgling cry, in pain, in fear and despair, before he shoulder-checked me. Our armor slammed together at the breastplate, and the shock yanked his sword free for him. My torn flesh trailed black blood as I fell back down the hillside, and rolled limply backwards as my body turned numb. I had no doubt my neck was broken, either from the sword blow, the charge, or my own fall backwards.
I felt vertigo once more as the world span, for my head was limply along for the ride that my body was taking it on. I saw a flash of running water and hard, round stones, and then I was blinded by pain. My body had taken too much, and mercifully, I faded from existence once more.
* * *
Why couldn’t I remain dead?
The pain in my neck stung, and this time easily matched the pain in my head. Maybe even surpassed it. My face was pressed into the stones and mud at the bottom of the brook, and cold water and silty mud flooded my lungs. Yet I did not drown. I was sliced and smashed and broken, and yet the fire within my belly knit my body back together.
What magic kept me alive? Forced me forward? I wanted nothing more than to fade here. Let myself pass into blissful oblivion at the bottom of this stream. But the fire refused to let me fade. I could not die. I could not even sleep here, rest under the water’s surface. I could only stare at the water as it ran past my eyes, and the orange fog above.
With a groan, I gathered my hooves underneath myself. My jaw hung limply from my face as water rushed out of it, draining from my empty lungs and sinuses. I sloshed as I walked, and stopped only to peer into the river, in case I could see my reflection in the water. But it was too fast, and moved too much, and the lighting was wrong anyway. All I saw was the shimmer of the setting sun above, and my own blurry, muddy form.
I was still leaking water like a rotten sieve. After a moment, I sighed and shook my head. One last try. This time, I hoped he would kill me for good.
As I slogged slowly back up the hill, I thought about how to fight him. He always opened with the same horizontal slash. It wasn’t a wide slash, and the only reason it hit me is because both times I had stupidly let him get close. If I just stepped back when he did, I might have an opening. The only problem now was my sword, which was still up there next to him. Assuming he didn’t just pick that up too, and I wasn’t about to fight a feral pony armed with two swords.
As I crested the hill, I sighed as I saw him once more stumbling dumbly towards me. At least he only had the one sword. Staggering barely faster than he did, I cut a wide berth around him, walking in a circle when he tried to walk straight towards me. Even turning while walking seemed to be too much for him to properly process, and he tripped over his own hooves, stumbling slightly as he tried to follow me. I made a note of that, he did not turn well.
My sword lay exactly where it had fallen before, still stained with my blood. I ran my tongue over the teeth still in my skull, expecting to find gaps and sharp broken molars, but somehow they were all fine. Not a one out of place, but all still loose, and they moved when I pushed them. I wasn’t looking forward to having them knocked out of my mouth again.
Bending down, I picked up my stolen shortsword and held it back up as far as I could. As the shambling corpse limped towards me, I gave the blade an experimental swing. I could just about move it fast enough to make the wind whistle through my teeth, hopefully at lethal speeds.
The corpse closed the rest of the distance while I was reeling from the vertigo of flicking my neck to swing the sword, and I nearly missed that same damned opening slash. Almost. I stepped back just in time, and I felt the gust of wind as the sword whipped past my throat.
I let out as close to a battle cry as I could, which sounded more like a terrified, keening whine through my teeth clenched around the grip. As I did, I stepped forward and swung the sword down with as much force and violence as I could muster. I aimed for his neck, just as he had done for me, but my aim was still off. There was a great clashing of steel on plating as the blade smacked into his shoulder, and my teeth stung, but I kept my grip on the sword tight even as my teeth shifted around it like marbles in my mouth.
My own neck burned from the effort it took to wield the weight of the blade, but I didn’t have the luxury of time. Thankfully, he seemed staggered even by the deflected hit, and he wobbled on unsteady hooves as he flicked his horn around in another downward slash. This time, I sidestepped, and the dull blade of the sword smacked into the hard-packed dirt of the road, ripping out a clod of dusty soil.
This time, I aimed for his head. No horn meant no magic. Thank the wind helmets didn’t seem to be part of the standard soldier’s equipment. I brought the sword up and then back down on his skull, and there was a ‘bang’ as I connected. This time, the blade was jerked out of my mouth anyways, as my neck popped from being twisted so sharply. Reeling, I staggered back, hoof pressed to my aching neck.
This time, I had been dead on target, and the soldier was wobbling from side to side, dull ember eyes twitching wildly. I’d smashed his horn like a cheap bottle, and bolts of magic flickered and sputtered randomly from the ruined and cracked stump, his horn core destabilized. An arc of pure magic lept from the end to his own metal armor, shocking him, and I knew then that I had rendered him helpless.
I wanted to savor my victory, but all I could taste in my mouth was my own ichorous blood. I staggered over one last time, picking up his own sword this time, and brought it down on his head, unwilling to leave the job half done.
The blade dug into his skull, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes as the embers in his eye sockets and his crackling magic winked out for what would hopefully be the final time. I let the blade fall as he did, still buried in his rotting brain, and then spat a mouthful of blood on his corpse. If he cared, he was too dead to show it, and guilt filled me a moment later. That act of disrespect filled me with more satisfaction than I was comfortable with.
Sighing, I said a prayer to the wind for him too. He was just as much a victim as I was, of whatever magic was keeping us alive, keeping us going, long after we were meant to have died. Now, at least, he was still. But I was still alive, on some sort of cosmic technicality.
I stayed there for a little bit, still staring at his corpse. He looked even worse than the mare had, now that I could see one of them in the sunlight. His flesh had been sloughing off, chafed raw at the neck by his armor. His mane was simply gone, all having fallen out a long time ago, and the remaining flesh was thin enough to see the veins spiderwebbed across his ragged muscles. Those same veins had turned varicose throughout his body, and had stiffened as the black blood pumped through them. That same sludge, even now, still leaked from his wounds, and appeared to steam gently when exposed to sunlight, where it wafted away on the breeze.
I tore my eyes away from the sight, and looked to either side, down the road both ways. Where could I go? I knew not where this road came from or led, or even which direction was north so I could orient myself. The forest around was thin, though the trees looked old and gnarled, and they quickly disappeared into the fog around me. This had once been a well-traveled path along the side of a larger, steeper hill, carved out to make a road along the path of the stream. Maybe I could climb the slope?
A quick glance upward tore that notion from my mind. Too steep, too high. I could barely see the peak from here. But as I was staring upwards like that, I did notice a shadow against the fog. It darkened as I followed the sky down, and I realized what the shadow was a moment later.
It seemed to be smoke, far beyond the mist, and a lot of it. Smoke meant fire. Fire meant disparity, or at least led to change. More importantly, they had to have been lit by somepony, or at least something. That meant I was guaranteed to find something in that direction.
I sucked at my teeth, as I picked up my sword again, and searched my armor for a scabbard. When I found it and slid the sword into the moldy leather, I was satisfied it would stay while I walked. I was incredibly thankful I wouldn’t have to carry it in my teeth the entire time.
I watched the sky to follow the smoke, as I began limping down the road, towards the fires far.