Fallout: Equestria - Murky Number Seven

by FuzzyVeeVee

The Lost Virtue of Legends

    “What's it like to lose faith?”

    A downward spiral. 

    Like...like I'd been low before, right?  I'd been really low in my life up till now.  Most of the nights I knew I could remember were spent curled up in a corner or under the harsh wasteland weather, crying myself to sleep and failing to dream as any pony should.

    But the last while had been building me up, filling me with sources of strength, the ones that any other pony has to some degree.  Friends, advice, self decision, and even small victories amongst the darkness.  Reunions with those that mattered. I was waking up for the first time in my life.

    At my core, however, I had one pushing urge greater than any.  One that had been with me since the moment I had witnessed her soar above the Pit I had lain stricken in, rising from the stagnant horrors into the light.  My belief in the Stable Dweller, in her legend.  They had been telling me that she was not the hero I believed, but I thought I knew better. Every day on the radio I listened to her exploits, old and new, like the tales of some mythical being that had once crossed my path.  She was my absolute. The one thing I could hold to, believe in and trust the efforts of. To know, through efforts of her and those like her that the outside world was a better place than Fillydelphia.  That Red Eye was wrong.

I’d put all my hopes in creating this implausibly perfect icon of a pony in my mind.

    But...but...

    “But then Arbu...”

    Yes...

    I think I just lay and...and clutched that PipBuck until I was forced to move by hunger.  I didn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it! The Stable Dweller was my hero!  I’d insisted she was perfect and strong and brave and kind and modest and lovely and...and...and everything!  Every minute I just felt my chest ache as I waited for the broadcast that would tell me it was all a horrible mistake!

    “You're shaking...are you gonna be—”

    No!  I'm not fine, all right?  Because I had to sit alone, away from everypony and listen to that broadcast! I didn’t have anyone around me to offer words of comfort! No one to tell me if it was all just a big mistake!

    My mind only knew one way to cope.  To fall back on mere belief. I had my faith in her and it had to remain strong!  Heroes didn’t just change like that! Ponies who do so much for others and Equestria couldn't be corrupted like that.  Living legends that I’d believe protected and inspired us and...and...

Sorry...I didn't mean to shout, and, well, this part’s difficult. I'm just scared.

    “Of what?”

    I was alone.  Alone and more outcast than ever before when I had a crisis of belief. My very innermost inspirations my life began to take a downward spiral. A fall that I couldn't turn back from no matter how hard I tried.  One that just kept going and hurting and forcing me down. I still feel it.

    The legends of Equestria were beginning to fall around me.

    Without them I was defenceless, unable to feel the hope.

    If they could fall, if those mighty titans of wonder could fall, how could somepony like me rise up? That’s all I could think about. That I would be better off just staying a slave and realising the truth, that there never was any great and inspired 'better' world to escape to in the first place.

    That message was what started the descent into the darkest period of my entire life.

    Lines...lines became...a line...

    Shivering, I spat out the charcoal, before ripping the page from my journal entirely.  Throwing it to the side, it landed within the damp corner of my hideout. I began staring at the blank page...taking the charcoal up once again and lowering my head to...to place a single dot and...

    And draw a...a line...

    It squiggled, juddering from side to side.  Then...then it could be her tail! I'll just move it to the side and fit her in the corner then!  Lifting the charcoal, I repositioned and gently drew an arc. Yes...yes, curves! Curves came next!  Draw a c-curve...

    The line ground across the paper much harder than it needed, chipping the charcoal.  Her head! Yes...round it up and flick for the ear...just...flick and—

    NO!  Too much!  My hooves wiped across my straggled mane, biting my lower lip so hard I tasted blood.  My hoof scraped at the paper, trying to rub a little bit out. It just smudged. Wait...wait maybe if I smudged it all I could redo the main bits in sharper lines!

    My hoof rubbed, harshly ripping away at all I had drawn to turn it to nothing but a black mist.  Quaking, I took up the charcoal and attempted to start again. She'd just be darker than normal, not as bright as I'd once seen her in the sky.  Just...just like they s-said...

    Lines...lines...

    I looked upon the lines I had drawn, like a crude foal's stick figure.

    Crying out in frustration, I took up the journal and tore another page out...

    “Get that little rat!  Somepony grab him! Thief!”

    I burst from the back door of the old supermarket, skidding across the mud and falling onto my side.  My wing stinging madly, I staggered to my hooves, hearing the clatter of hooves behind me. Breathing quickly around the clasp I held in my mouth, I fled.  Behind me, the stout quartermaster from one of Red Eye's supply depots in this supermarket knocked the door open again so hard it smacked against the wall. Brandishing a cleaver in his magic, the bearded unicorn swivelled his eyes, spotting me clambering out of the mud and galloping off.

    “There he is!  Guards! Guards!”

    A chainlink fence surrounded the supermarket.  The only gate in was immediately swarmed by six slavers in masks, kicking their battle saddles into gear to take aim.  Panicking, breathing hard, I instead ran around the opposite side of the building to where a dozen large rubbish containers sat awaiting somepony to ever arrive to empty them.  Screams to circle around the building permeated the air, guards pursued behind me.

    Diving between two of the garbage containers, I began stuffing my saddlebag and the package through the small hole I'd dug under the fence.  Immediately after, I pushed my head through and started kicking furiously at the dirt.

    “Get those containers out the way!  Grab his legs!”

    Shrieking at them being so close, I bucked out of habit, only striking the solid metal surface of a container, before yanking myself through the slick and searing mud.  The rain had come and gone in Fillydelphia, keeping it drenched and dark amidst occasional electrical storms. Yelping when the sharp underside of the fence tore along my back and rump, I felt my body finally slip through and—

    “Ah!  Gotcha!”

    My body jarred to a halt, feeling a pain shoot right from the top of my rump.  Turning, sweating and pulling at the ground, I saw a slaver with his head right down at the hole, grasping my tail between his teeth.  A gas mask was pushed up over his head.

    “Go roun'!  I 'ot 'im!” he snarled through my filthy tail, fixing me with a look.  Behind him, I saw the slavers going back for the entranceway, aiming to properly get me.

    Panic overtook me, before I lashed out with a back hoof onto the fence.  The impact didn't hit him, but the sharp impact on the metal near his face distracted him enough that my tail slipped out, tearing a few strands along with it.  Crying out loud again at the sharp twang, I fell forward. No, I couldn't stop now! I had too much to lose right now!

    Either side, slavers were coming around the fences, galloping toward me.  Scrambling to retrieve the package I'd stolen, I simply took off toward the closest group of buildings that I could.  I needed cover! Somewhere to hide and wait them out! Immediately, in my rush, I slipped and fell upon the mud. I was caked in it, from the time spent crawling or falling in it during desperate efforts to escape everypony who had heeded the word of the slavers, that the one who brought in the pegasus would immediately win a reprieve from work for a week.

    My limbs were tired already. How long had I been on the run?  Was it just hours? Had it been days? My eyes felt heavy, my limbs leaden, and my mind drawn thin with exhaustion.  I hadn't slept since the hospital over a day ago. My one sandwich had lasted one short meal to recover from the efforts in the FunBarn with Unity.

    It could have only been a couple hours, but to me it simply felt like an unending rush to survive.

    Up ahead, a group of slavers heard the calls of those skidding across the mud behind me and began rushing to cut me off.  I was standing on a road between the supermarket and a housing estate. To my right lay busy factories, to my left a large soiled field filled in wet slop that in better days had once been a grassy expanse.

    “Come on...come on, Murky. Ideas...ideas...”

    Feeling tears running down my face as the slavers closed in, I paced rapidly on the spot, before simply screaming and running away from them all, no matter whether I knew the way or not.  Finding myself heading toward the factories, I pushed my legs to gallop madly, trying to lengthen the time before they caught me. Glancing back, I saw the horror of six slavers catching up at a frightening pace.  Why did everypony else have to be so tall or have such long strides!?

    Slaves looked up as they saw the chase pass by.  Many of them recognised me, but few dared interrupt the slavers (who, naturally, had a much greater reward for catching me than any mere slave) in their efforts—other than some who stood up, considering joining the chase.  At their head was the quartermaster, that cleaver following him the entire way. Ducking around groups of slaves, trying to put as many tight corners between me and them as possible, I simply tried to break line of sight amidst the construction materials and large stockpiles of bar iron outside the main factory building.

    Ahead of me there was a huge ditch that fell away by a good fifteen feet into what seemed to be a small quarry or deep storage basin.  A storm drain ran along the bottom, filled with a green gunk. Striving to reach the ledge to slide down, I found my way blocked by a mesh fence that had been crudely stamped into the ground.  The top was lined with razorwire. Above it, a massive crane loomed between the factory ground and the quarry. Its stairway was blocked off. Crashing against the fence, I spun to look behind me, finding confused slaves looking up at me.  In the distance, I saw the slavers searching around the buildings. I had a little space! Time to dig! Then I could— YARGH!

    “Hold him!  Hold him! They'll like us if we just slow him down!”

    Two slaves had grabbed my hind legs.  Hooves were not the greatest for holding, I lashed out, bucking and trying to stop one stinking tar coated slave from lying over me to pin me down.  Her hooves knocked my bandaged shoulder, drawing a squeal from me.

    “Over here!  He's here!”

    “Please!  Let me go!  I'm like you!  I'm like you!”

    “Shut up, featherbrain!  I'm getting a break for you!”

    The slavers closed in, finding me held down by the slaves.  Slowing, breathing hard, the quartermaster grinned and cackled.

    “Think you can steal from Pony Moe's market, huh?  I'm gonna have you strung up by your balls for this!  Right outside my storehouse so nopony will ever think about that again, you little thieving rat!  We got you red-hoofed.”

    I struggled, pulling my hooves in vain against the slaves who kept me on my back and spread-eagled before the slaver.  My eyes couldn't leave that huge bloodstained cleaver.

    Wailing, I paused for just a second before letting loose what desperation I could muster and simply biting the muzzle of the slave atop me with savagery I could only draw from sheer terror.  She sprung back, howling as I felt a chunk of skin come out. Lashing out, crying, panicking and pushing myself against the fence with at least one part of my body free, I flicked my hoof to deploy my battle saddle's mouthpiece and looked skyward before pulling the trigger.

    With a jolt, the grappling hook rocketed vertically toward the crane with a burst of pressurised air.  Above me, I heard the clang of impact. Kicking at the slaves trying to hold my back hooves down, I bit hard on the mouthpiece, pressing my tongue onto the trigger to make the device start retracting.

    The rope went taut, before I bucked once again at my captors and swung free into the air, pulled almost vertically upwards by the gun winding in the rope.  Pulling my legs up, the cleaver whizzed below me, narrowly skiffing the hairs of my tail before the winding gears in my saddle got into their stride and whisked me upwards.  Bouncing off the fence, pulling my legs up and away from them, I only barely missed the razorwire before whizzing off to a good height about them all. The storm's wind spun me until my stomach churned, blowing me back and forth like a pendulum.  I had to get this right...

    Unable to properly see where I was, hanging twenty feet from the ground by a rope attached to a crane and spinning madly like some wretched and well beaten piñata, I tried to gauge the right moment and bit down on the mouthpiece to release the hook from the crane.

    Suddenly, gravity took over rather harshly.

    I fell, tumbling through the air, dull red horizon after grey earth after black stormclouds in a whirling spiral before the wind was bludgeoned from my body.  Gasping in shock as much as pain, I felt my body roll and fall further, sliding down a steep embankment of rough rocks and loose gravel. Shouting, whimpering and struggling to get upright, my hooves skittered out before I simply fell again onto my side, bouncing off the uneven ground to slam down again and again.  Bones ground in my wings and I felt my muzzle's rad-sore savagely tore at before everything thudded to a halt upon an earth level surface. My balance was shot, the instinctive effort to get up and run leading onto to a dizzied fall and pathetic pedalling of my rear hooves.  My front hooves simply clutched my own torso, breathing through gritted teeth until the pain subsided.

    “Don't stop, Murky, don't stop, they'll be coming!  Get the package and go! You need it!”

    Growling the words to myself, and forcing all the pain into a howl of frustration and determination, I slowly pulled myself to my feet, finding the grapple lying nearby.  I bit the mouthpiece again, drawing the last length of it back into the saddle. Turning my head, my muzzle now seeping infected looking fluids from the sores, I glanced toward the fence at the top of the large embankment I'd just fallen down.  Slavers were tearing at the fencing, drawing bolt cutters from the tool chests nearby to start cutting through. Even as I watched, that cleaver flashed and separated an entire set of links. His eyes met mine, before they started trying to force through.  They promised a lot more than just being handed over to The Master.

    Groaning, I began limping, then trotting, then a painful canter toward my goal: the drainpipe of the storm trench.  I could see a small gap just large enough for me in the thick bars that covered it. It would take me back to my hideout!  Dragging the messenger bag package behind me from my teeth, I heard the scuffling of hooves on gravel.

    “Stop there, slave!”

    Don't listen, you'll obey...don't listen, you'll obey...don't listen!

    “I said, STOP!”

    I half tripped, my hooves juddering and trying to halt on the spot out of fear of offending my masters further.  But I kept going, sloshing through liquid waste and pus-yellow slop around the drain entrance to drag my shrivelled body through a gap nopony else could hope to get through.  Behind me, the slavers and even a few slaves rushed the drainage ditch, clambering down the sides and surging forward. With one more striving push, I popped through, scant feet ahead of them.  The quartermaster slammed against the bars, his cleaver flying between them in his magic to swing at me. Screaming, I backed off, pushing myself into the huge pipeline of Fillydelphia's sewer system to get out of his magical reach.  The slaver beat against the bars, laughing maniacally and hollering at me.

    “You can't run forever, runt!  We'll get you eventually!  Shackles wants ya! SHACKLES WANTS YA!  YOU CAN'T RUN!”

    Knee deep in sewage, I turned the first corner I could see before lying against the sewer wall to get my breath back.  My nose was still blocked, unable to take any smells in, but I could still taste the rank atmosphere and feel the stuffy heat of Fillydelphia trapped down here.  My eyes felt too dry to cry, so I simply huddled down and quivered, clutching the package closely. My body was failing, the hunt for RadAway not going well. Everything felt hot, the sprint from the supermarket had left me dizzy and my lungs burning.  Biting a leg to stop the coughing, I searched inside the package for them.

    My hoof drew out three small dry biscuits, almost crushed completely.  Feeling my stomach twist and cramp, I guzzled the biscuit shrapnel as best I could.

    That was it.

    Still desperately hungry, my dry throat crying out for water that wasn't simply taken from the brown sludge in puddles that seared my throat from the acidity, I lay back to let my legs recover.  While doing so, I felt the little jab in my chest before drawing out the newest valuable I'd acquired and kept close to my heart.

    The little statuette of the Stable Dweller that Unity had made for me. 

    I should have taken comfort in it, strength in it...

    But with one sentence from a radio, half its meaning had been taken away before I'd even gotten the chance to enjoy having it.

    No!  No! No!

    It wasn't right!

    Scrunching up the paper, I hurled it behind me, landing amongst the few others that now slowly dissolved on the wet cobblestone floor of the sewer maintenance room.  Her neck had been way too long and...and stupid...argh! Come on, Murky! Just draw her right this time!

    “You know what she looks like. Draw her all...all heroic and…”

    My charcoal stick lowered, shivering, and tentatively drew one long curve.  Yes...yes that's her back, now flick it upward and make a small circle to rough out the head...a...a shape!  The curve becomes a shape and then the shape...

    I stopped, before letting out a foal-like whine and whinny of sheer annoyance and frustration.  Her head was too big! I started adding new lines, the old ones I could work into her mane, I could save this!  I could save her!  Save how I saw her!

    The charcoal stick scribbled, making one new curve for the head...too small!  Another...too long! Another! Another!  Another and another and—

    That was too many!  I...I couldn't fix it.

    “PLEASE!” I cried at the paper itself, breathing hard and hearing my lungs wheeze.  I was sweating, both from sickness and the frantic worry. I...I couldn't draw any more!  Everything I did just...just turned to a mess!

    No, I had to keep trying!  Drawing was how I saw the world, viewed it, judged it; how I believed in it!  Why couldn't I make her look good again?

    Why couldn't I make her look good again?!

    “You didn't do it...you didn't do it, Pip. I know you didn't...it's all a lie...all a lie!”

    The horrible mess of lines and awful curves was torn away, joining the growing pile behind me where all my charcoal attempts of the Stable Dweller slowly darkened until they almost seemed to gel with the black stone itself.

    Panting, my entire body jittering and stinging, I skidded around the corner of the hallway and dove into the bathroom.  Three sets of hooves thudded and rumbled across the teak wooden flooring in pursuit, rounding off at the top of the stairs and locking onto me like fervent predators.  Whimpering, shouting my pleads and begs to them, I slammed the door shut, pushing my back against it.

    The first impact nearly knocked me clean away, the doorway burst open by a few inches.  Catching my hooves, I threw myself back against it again, holding it shut.

    “He won't give you anything!  Leave me alone! Please!”

    “Push it!  Push the door!  Harder!”

    The slaves rushed it, bucking and ramming the doorway.  My little hooves struggled, being bashed and bruised upon the door that let its fragile nature be known when it kept smashing back in my face.  Weeping openly, I just kept pushing my hooves against the slippery tiled floor to try and keep it shut between each impact. Eyes flickering, I saw this was a dead end.  I'd run here simply to put a door between myself and the three slaves who'd spotted me. I hadn't even thought about what I was trapping myself in!

    I fumbled for the lock, but the rusted latch fell right off, being knocked away as the door was forced inwards by a good couple of feet.  A hoof appeared around it, being pulled back sharply as I knocked it back and jammed them in the door.

    “Argh!  You little fucker!  You're getting it!  GET HIM!”

    Again, again, and again, the door was assaulted, starting to chip in places but all too horrifyingly being forced open against my pitiful strength.  I couldn't shut it fully, I just couldn't compete with their power! A body wedged itself into the gap, a hoof swinging to grab or strike me. Knocked onto my back, I braced myself against the wall behind the door and just shoved my back hooves against the bottom, frantically trying to keep it shut just a few seconds longer by using my own full body.  Each crushing blow sent a jarring pain through my spine, giving me more than enough reason to keep shouting for them to stop.

    One more charge and forcing wrench from the wedged stallion knocked me clean away from it.  My back hit the far wall of light wood, shattering much of it to fall down the gap between the outer and inner walls of the house.  My assailants were in. Nursing my neck, I held one hoof up to the first one bearing a nasty cut on her hoof, the one I'd jammed in.  Looking up from behind it, I saw them come to claim their prize. Noose, Lemon, and presumably their new stallion member of the gang.

    “No, no!  I'll come!  I'll come, just don't-”

    Her hoof whipped across my face, dropping me to my side amongst a splitting and searing wash of pain in my cheek.  Curling up, I felt another three or four stamps upon my ribs, clearly held back or they would have been pulverised.  Noose was angered enough to hurt me, not frenzied enough to ruin The Master's prize. But it drove all the fight from me, leaving me a groaning heap before them.  Hissing through her teeth, Noose shook her patchwork mane and snarled. Her ganglife colleagues flanked her, the rough form of Lemon and the new and very large stallion.

    “Ya gotta do anythin' you can in here to survive.  So if that means giving you up, runt, I'm happy! You thought we wouldn't recognise you in the crowd?  Trying to blend in, huh? Well I remember your fucking face!”

    Even as I had tried to sit up again, she struck me once more, right across the jawline.  I felt my head whiplash around and strike against the porcelain of the toilet. Stars spun, my vision turning hazy.  I simply rolled onto my back, moaning. The blurry shape of Noose stood up more fully, before heaving and hawking a wad of spit onto my face.

    “A damned pegasus. Wish I'd just beat you to death in the airport for what you brought on one of our gang.  Well now you're going back to him. Lemon! Get that rope, tie him up!”

    Both my eyes were throbbing, still blackened from but a couple of days ago with Barb's raiders.  But squinting them open, I saw Noose toss a length of rope to Lemon, the same rope she used to tie me up in for fun, to make me miss shifts so that she could watch the results. 

My body wouldn't move to stand, but Ias I pushed my hoof against the wall to try and get some leverage, I felt it pass through.

    My collision from her striking me had knocked a small hole on the wall. The rotten wood had splintered away.

    Feeling the trundle of Lemon's approach, I did all I knew I could. With a deep breath, I threw my whole weight into the wall itself, and crashed through the weak surface into the gap between the walls of the house.

    Immediately falling, I felt the gap, far too thin to properly accommodate even a pony of my size, splinter and scrape at my sides.  Thick cobwebs broke beneath me, coating my face and hooves in them. But the fragile wood was also slowing me down, ensuring I never simply tumbled to the ground floor and crushed myself from the height of the fall.

    Not that it made it any easier.

    A sudden impact marked the ground floor, void of any further injury.  My head ached terribly, the close darkness and complete blindness not helping any.  Only then did I realise the real horror.

    The ground floor walls had been made of two layers of brickwork that were either side of me.

    I was trapped.

    My breathing accelerated, the gap was so thin I felt my sides being crushed in, unable to move forward or backwards due to the tightening width. I couldn't pull myself upwards and the floor was beneath me.  In complete darkness, covered in thick web, I could barely even struggle while my limbs burned, full of small splinters. My hind leg was wedged awkwardly backward at an angle that was already beginning to cramp.  Above me, the curses of the gang echoed downward, but I couldn't turn my head to see upward.

    The thought of being stuck here, unable to escape, and slowly dying of starvation hit me.  I'd be nothing but a lost soul, nopony would know what had happened to me!  I'd just be a skeleton in a wall to scare somepony else in the far-off future…

    I began simply struggling and stamping my hooves.  The only movement I could, just to make some vain effort to feel like I hadn't consigned myself to a few days of a lingering death.  Below me, I heard a crack. Fixating on it entirely, ignoring the shouts of the gang that they were dropping a rope if I would prefer to go with them, I kept slamming my little hooves on the dry flooring.  It was wood! Maybe I could...I could...

    I heard a creak, and took a sharp breath, this wasn’t going to be good.

    The floor splintered and shattered below me, drawing a long shriek as my sides once again ripped against the walls.  I prayed my wings weren't damaged further, as I dropped another ten feet into darkness before striking concrete. Landing on my hooves before simply falling to the side, my hooves cradled my injured head before it slapped against the concrete I now lay on.  Under my mane, I could feel the welt of my scar, red and angry as it ever had been. But I breathed in the rotten and trapped air like it was a saving grace. I had fallen into a full room.  

    “Oh, thank you…” I muttered to whatever luck had let me get out of there.

    Finally, blinking, I let my eyes adjust to the dark down here.  (I didn't dare use my PipBuck's light.) Small wooden pillars held up the ceiling but the rest of it was just like an old antique store.  Everything from cabinets to tables and chairs were littered amongst packing crates and dressing boards. Massive cobwebs hung on the diagonals, off the pillars, or between the furniture.  I could see two wooden staircases rising to differing doorways. Trotting up, I found one that seemed open, but far too heavy for me to push while injured.

    Above me, dust dropped from the ceiling, dislodged by a rampant clatter of hooves on the floors above. They were coming down, and I didn't have the time to force any doors.  

“Right, plenty of hiding spots, plenty…”

    Dragging myself up, I staggered over to a thick collection of furniture.  The door to the basement slammed open only just as I tugged away some of the larger webs and reluctantly forced myself into the sticky confines behind a musty old couch.  Noose and her gang galloped down the stairway.

    “We know you're in here!  Better to come out and let me beat your head in than me getting angry looking for you and letting Barbell do his thing!  I hear he likes little bucks.  They squeal louder!”

    I dreaded to think.  But I simply huddled close.  The sofa was buried beneath a few upturned tables and bore dozens of old bags stuffed with long lost possessions, so I simply prayed they considered it too thickly buried to be a hiding spot.  As such, I just waited.

    It took a lot of willpower, by my standards, to ignore that odd feeling of something creeping up my left hind leg.  My skin crawled.

    The sound of furniture being thrown and bags torn open reverberated around the basement.  They moved nearer and further away in apparently random decisions to ransack the entire place.  I heard Lemon holler upon pulling away something.

    “SHIT!  SHIT! SHIT!”

    “What!?  What is it?  You got 'im?” Noose screamed over to him.

    “NO!” Lemon sounded strung out.  “Fucking spider nest just crawled from this bag!  Just...FUCK!”

    “Shut up, you pussy.  An' keep looking.”

    “Pretty rich, that coming from you.”

    “I said shut up!  It means coward. Not 'female,' you stupid lunk!  Hey, runt! I said come out! You still hiding? Hoping?  You got nothing to hope for, kid! Word's spreading about that bitch in the wastes killin' our gangers and all that.  We know you always liked her! Ha! You've lost her, runt! She turned! One of us now! Never gonna go pork her now, are you?  She's one of us!  So just give up!”

    Every shiver, every smash that neared me just bore a new wave of terror.  I tried to blank her out. To not listen. She...she wasn't! I couldn't just stop and start believing that there was nothing worth fighting for!  Heroes didn't fall like that!

    “You'll learn...wasteland's fucked up worse in places out there than here...you'll learn...”

    I wanted to move, to jump, as I felt whatever it was move up around my rump and over my cutie mark.  Rapid, light touches, like many legs. I tried to shift a front hoof back to swat at it, or use my tail.  But that only gave way to a rapid movement that skittered across my back. Biting my lip as hard as I dared, I whined into my hoof.

    “Ere', there's a second door up there.” That must have been the new pony, Barbell.  His voice was richer than the other two. In fact it would have been almost oddly relaxing, if I hadn't already known his allegiance.

    “So?”

    “Just thinkin', maybe he went and ran off up it.  Might not be here, little buck seemed in a rush.”

    “Shit, you're right.  Go!”

    Luck, it seemed, felt good in these times.  The three of them darted off, rushing up the stairs.  One of them seemed to hesitate, snorting and smashing something made of glass before they all departed.  No sooner had the door shut than I immediately pushed and tugged myself free from behind the sofa. Rolling, I swatted and flailed at my hindquarters until I was sure nothing was on me.  In the darkness, I saw something the size of somepony's hoof skitter off under the sofa again.

    Then, I collapsed.

    I had wanted to run upstairs, hide in a room till they went further, but the fear, adrenaline, and emotional pain just slammed down, driving me to simply fall on my side upon the floor.  The dusty air here was giving my throat hell. My excursion to try and steal from a supply cart had gone so badly when they'd spotted me. I'd seen RadAway on it, something I desperately needed.  Coughing fits were becoming more common. My spit had a metallic tang to it, while the pressure in my head and chest was growing. Even past my cold, I was definitely feeling the initial effects of radiation poisoning.  Breathing lightly, holding my head and feeling the lump growing from my cheek, I simply did my best to keep believing.

    There was still something out there...it wasn't true.  There was more to life than slavery, she'd shown me that!

    Opening my eyes, I almost jumped as I saw what had been broken on their retreat.  An old dusty mirror, now in shards upon the floor. It showed everything that I now felt.

    In one shard, I saw my PipBuck.  But in another, the scar upon my forehead.  A third held my eyes, a fourth the weltering rad-sores that began to swell on my muzzle as my deadline neared for death.  Another held my cutie mark.

    All separate, all meaning different things now.

    Water was flowing.

    From the waste tunnels in roaring cascades that broke upon the brickwork and let steam rise from the algae and sewage that it ate and dissolved in its path.  The spray washed over the sides, flowing its bitter burning taste into the old sewer workshop.

    It flowed from the ceiling, centuries of neglect leaving fractures and leaks to allow water to trickle and gush from corners and down the walls, pooling amongst the cobblestone.  It soaked and destroyed the bottom layers of the growing pile of scrap paper into a mushy mess that stank and shifted.

    But it also flowed from my eyes.  Streaming and unending, it came from puffy injured eyes and clung to my face before dripping constantly upon the failures beneath my head.  Tears fell onto lines of charcoal that were already obsolete and forgotten, my desperate efforts concentrating elsewhere on a page.

    Another page was torn and thrown.  Then another. And another. All began to lie in corners, all around me or upon the slowly dampening pile.

    Lines...remember lines...they lead to curves...make shapes from the curves and it comes to life!  It always worked that way! Why wasn't it working now?  I had been awoken to draw by inspiration and love, given the soul of the artist by the emotions I felt and wanted to release upon paper rather than simply through all too common tears.  But it was being pulled away from me, a skill lost. Had I not practised enough? I hadn't drawn properly in a little while. Had I been too lazy and not done as much as I should have?

    Wiping the tears and wet spray from my damp coat over my face, I took up the charcoal and tried again.  Draw just any normal pony, make it basic, make it simple!

    The stick slid, gaining momentum.  Yes...yes, yes! It flowed, her back and spinal shape.  Then curve up into her neck...yes! A circle! Her head!  I had her head! Two ears flicked over it, careful smooth triangles in just the right place.  I even went back to the other end of her back, curving it around and down to her hind legs.  I went over it a couple times, make it just right.  

    I sat back, wiping my brow with a hoof, breathing heavily with worry.  Telling myself constantly how to draw, to not worry about what— yes, that was it!  I saw her in many ways, how I felt, no matter how stupid it was, could be a part of it!

    Now...now her face.  I could see her face again.  Determined and of goodwill, telling me through her eyes alone that everything would be fine.  That she was still the good pony I had come to believe in and feel more than a little liking of after seeing.  I was trapped in a stinking sewer under Fillydelphia, a million miles from any knowing home, while she was out saving Equestria.  But I could still have faith to meet my own ends.

    If I could...just...get her face right...

    Gently, I began placing her muzzle in, using a cross across the circle I'd drawn to shape it all out.  I could always erase that later! I just needed one drawing, one little sketch to prove I could still do this!  I could still save her in my eyes, prove to myself she was good.

    Muzzle...bring it out...a little line for the mouth for now.  Back to her eyes...please let her eyes work, they would make it complete!  Slowly...tentatively, I let two circles of charcoal form, shaped around her head...and...and...

    A ridiculous wannabe of a pony stared back at me.  The muzzle was at completely the wrong angle, her eyes not even shaped right in the perspective.

    “No...please!  Don't do this!”

    My charcoal stick flew back down.  I could fix this! Frantic, rushed fixes, add the proper mouth, I could work from its perspective instead!  Add her mane, that was easy, right? But it covered her eyes. I tried redrawing them, again and again. The charcoal pressed harder each time, scraping and zigzagging across the paper in mad strokes born of utmost need and panic.

    “Why can't I draw?  Why can’t I draw!”

    I sat back, panting, looking at the mad mess of shapes and incredibly stupid-looking face that could have been drawn by a foal that looked back at me.

    I had no words.  Nothing but a wailing screech of sheer frustration and a welt of tears burst from me as I fell down on the journal, pressing the side of my face upon it and beating upon the hard cobblestone with my hoof.  Savage coughing broke through, making my little skeleton-like body spasm and shake. Filled with anger at myself, the page was torn and ripped in half, tearing the perfectly finely drawn middle of her body down the centre, before they were thrown to the water.

    Around it, the water just kept flowing.  From the tunnels, the walls, and my eyes.

    The shelves rattled as I hopped up and clambered all over them to reach my goal.  Living as an outlaw in Fillydelphia, even for the short amount of time I had done, was proving to be a nightmare all unto itself.  Everypony, from slave to slaver, could recognise me. Anypony might be a threat like Noose and her cronies had been. Merely finding enough food to see me by a few more hours had been an adventure unto itself.

    My balance almost went, perched on the little ladder (Why ladders?  We had hooves!) I felt my head spin and blur.  The light panels above me seemed to burn like the sun, hurting my eyes and making my headache worse.  But I kept searching.

    I'd finally remembered that I'd dug into the container storage yard when I'd last been here and been seen by Slit.  The moment I'd found a break in the rain, I'd galloped out to retrace my steps and enter through the hole she'd cut in the fence.  One of these containers had to have something! Any RadAway would have been taken, but the ingredients might still be around! Weathervane could make some, he knew how!

    The horror had struck my mind that I didn't remember what the fluid used to create it even looked like.  I cursed my memory, along with my inability to read. The container I'd slunk into had been filled with row upon row of liquids and stored gels.

    I had no idea what was what.  I'd hoped that I might remember what it looked like, after fetching some for Weathervane in the crater before, but now I only realised they were like so many other things in the industrial cities of old Equestria. They were all standardised and brain-achingly similar to one another.  In frustration, pushing my way around the shelves, I eventually just jumped off to land in the crowded mess that was the floor of the liquids container. Well, I only needed one RadAway to survive for now.  The logical thing would be to take one of everything and let Weathervane figure it out!  I could always come back for more once I knew.

    Pausing, I heard somepony shift past the outside of the container.  A heavy pallet was being dragged behind them. Holding my breath, I simply prayed they didn't come inside this one.  Gradually, after a moment of tension, the sound faded off. Assured that nopony was outside, I grabbed bag after bag of the gel-like fluids and stuffed them into my saddlebag.  Grumbling, I found I had to take a lot out and store them in the many pockets of my fleece. My journal went underneath me in my belly pocket, various papers and plans that Protégé had given me of the Ministry were folded up and placed in my front leg pockets.  The remaining pepper canister and a few scraps of old parchment found spots on my leg pockets too. Finally, gingerly, with the utmost respect, I lifted Twilight's visual memory orb out to very carefully store on the left of my torso. I had so many questions about that thing, mostly why such a personal item had still been in Aurora's office.  Twilight had seemed to trust her to a certain extent as a colleague, but it hadn't seemed like a message anypony in power would want heard.

    A mystery for another time, no doubt.

    But it made enough space in the end that I could fit just about every sachet of the clear fluid in.  Hopefully, it would be enough to give Weathervane a way to make things up with what ingredients he had left.  

“Right, time to go, Murky. Just keep pushing.”

Muttering to myself, feeling the mental and physical strain of being on the run, I took a slow breath. The rain could come back on any moment, with the storm lingering above for so long.  I was hurt enough, limping and feeling my entire skull burn with rad-fever, without body burns from acidic rain to compete with too. I'd get out of here, get to Hearts and Hooves, and hide out in Weathervane's basement lab until he next came in.

    It wasn't difficult to make my way out of the container area.  The hole in the fence from Slit's pursuit was, of course, still there.  I wrapped a piece of wafting cloth from the container around my head like a shawl. I’d taken to using suc ha tactic lately; griffon spotters were everywhere.

    Before I even contemplated moving out of the container yard itself, I held myself low near the fence, watching the road that led between it and the industrial skyport Slit had chased me into.  A few carts passed, mostly pulled by slaves. A column trudged by on the opposite side, whips cracking as some faltered on cracked hooves. Nothing massive, nothing that I couldn't wander with under my shawl.  All the same, the sight of so many ponies being led to whatever form of work there was made even me in my battered state wince. Finally pushing myself through, I began to trot in the same direction as them, slowly working my way into the crush of sick and coughing ponies.  I fitted right in with my own blood-spat coughs to—

    “Get moving, worms!”

    I was ducked between two ponies before my mind could even begin to think.  Though all my illness, my medical condition, my injuries and even my crisis of faith, I felt it all overruled by an immediacy of terror that locked my muscles in place, giving me an awkward stumbling gait.

    “You there!  You! Three seconds to get up.  One! Two! Three!”

    A whip cracked, accompanied by the meaty slap of hard leather on flesh.  A mare screamed out loud. She must have fallen. I heard him again.

    “One!  Two! Three!”

    The scream came again...and again...and again...every time she failed to get up.  I recognised the punishment all too clearly. Struck by overwhelming curiosity and worry, I raised up my cowl, squinting out between the ponies I was travelling with.

    The Master stood in the middle of the road, commanding the long line of slaves through the city.  My eyes widened at the sight of him. He stood taller than that crazed hunch he'd once had, with a straighter neck, and outstretched legs telling of an authority he was born into now finally being handed to him.  Around him, slaves cowered, obeying his every glance to look away or go on.  I saw ponies with crippling injuries, burns, and festering infections cantering far faster than any hurt pony should be able to.  The line went on for a long way. If this was for the Mall, he must have brought more in.

    The same line I'd wandered into.  Oh, this was bad.

    I was seeing The Master in his real element at last.  No longer just the overseer known for being harsh, he truly was his own Master now.  It made sense why he was kept around, if this was the sort of brutal short term efficiency and result he could drive from ponies that Fillydelphia couldn't properly feed anyway.  I thought of what Grizzly had said...that he had come from before Red Eye in Fillydelphia. What kind of life had he grown up with, to become this bastion of symbolic slavery?

    Below him, the target of his attentions lay in a shivering heap, her back bleeding rapidly.

    All the attention I might have had held to The Master was removed if but for a few seconds. In horror,  saw that the mare that had been whipped was Sunny Days.

    She was bucked from the ground a good four feet back into the line. A few bucks pulled her up as roughly as any slaver would. The fear on their faces was clear. If they didn't get her back on her feet, aggressive as it was, it would only be worse for her. But my once-saviour was in a very poor way. Even below the fresh blood, I could see long welts that would scar by the night's end. The Master's whip skills were a whole new world beyond what I'd ever seen before.

    I'd felt them once. Never again...never again.

    “Don't you all go get ideas of lazing off! You've got work to do, if we don't get another twenty feet today in the mines, you're all losing food rations.”

    The Master's whip slapped against the ground, sending pebbles pinging in every direction. One of them struck amidst the ponies I hid behind, giving me reason to squeak and drop back down.

    “Master! Master!”

    A galloping pony came up the road. I heard his sharp clip-clop above the low rumble of three dozen ponies in the column. Just keep moving, wait your chance, don't make eye contact with him. I was sweating, and breathing quickly.

    “What is it?”

    The galloping stopped. I poked my head around the side, close to the ground, to see that scrawny assistant, burdened down in scrolls and messenger bags. He bowed before The Master, before offering one scroll up.

    “Master Grindstone reports that they may have discovered some of the blueprints for Aurora Star’s projection orbs and—”

    “This matters to me, how?” The Master glowered at the messenger. “Grindstone can chase side projects from his home in that Ministry all he wants.”

    “Well...you...you see, Master. In those blueprints there was a note. It mentioned something that he...he wants to tell all of you. He's called a meeting, later on tomorrow at the Ministry of Arcane Science. He...um...requests that you attend.”

    I saw The Master grin. “Good choice of wording to replace his message with, you're learning. I'll speak with the ass later. For now, I want you to go back to the Mall. Keep those slaves working, the repairs aren't done nearly as fast as I'd like. Cancel the food supply for today. They'll survive till it’s done, but it'll give them the shake up they need to work faster.”

    My heart leapt into my mouth. Glimmer, Brimstone, and Coral were still there...I hadn't seen them in the column. If the food was being cut out...oh no...

    “In fact, tell the biggest slaver to start running the competition, I know he enjoys that. That'll get some unwarranted shifts out of 'em...heh.”

    “Y-yes, Master! Right away, Master!”

    He didn't overstay his welcome, galloping off, despite his own tiredness. Biting my lip in worry, I looked back to The Master, shivering and trying to remain as still and quiet as I could. We were headed away from the Hospital, but I just needed to get to the other side of the road and use the mass of supply yards behind the skyport for cover. I could lose even a griffon in there. Up ahead I could see the long hill that moved down to the skyport, the one leading to that workshop I'd ran to before Barb caught me. If I could just get near it...

    “Keep the pace up!” His voice bellowed forth, leading me to jump at the command and start cantering. I'd reacted before any of them...

    That wasn't a very good sign...

    But we advanced all the quicker. So much so, I hoped that we might pass right by him and turn a corner. The moment he couldn't see me, I'd go.

    Something held me back from going all-out though. Just ahead of me through the crush, I could see Sunny pushing herself in the travel line with a pained look. Just a few words to let her know we were coming for her eventually, I had to try!

    “Sunny!” I hissed, whispering as loudly as I dared. The Master was casting his eyes over the line. “Sunny!”

    I saw her ear twitch. I pressed closer.

    “Sunny...it's me. Murky.”

    Now wandering right beside her, almost using her for cover from The Master's sightline, I tapped her side to get her attention.

    “M-Murk?” Her dry voice was breathless, like somepony talking in their sleep.

    Pushing my shawl away slightly, I nodded lightly. Her pupils seemed to just shake as she saw me, somewhat disbelieving, and contracted until they were little more than just dots.

    “Y...you have t-to...run. Stay away...” She gasped, and I recognised the signs of her being dehydrated.

    “I'm on the run, he's after me, I know. But...but I had to let you know. We're going to get out. Me and a few others, my friends you saw, we're putting together a plan. Just hold on in there, we won't leave without you.”

    “He's a monster, Murky...”

    “I know, but we will be coming for you! I pro—”

    “Halt right there! All of you!”

    The column juddered to a stop so quickly I ran into the rump of the mare in front of me. Silence fell. Some ponies looked over toward The Master. I joined them, peering around Sunny to see what he was doing.

    “Now, something isn't right here. Whoever you are that slipped in, you think that a born slaver wouldn't spot a discrepancy in his stock? Somepony who doesn't belong?”

    Pain flared on my forehead, that throbbing warning. My loose tooth quaked and stung. My cutie mark itched. Every sign of slavery and reminder in my mindset rang the warning bells as the fear set in. Looking to every direction, there was nothing. The road was at least twenty feet from any cover on either side, either the skyport or back to the container yard. Any attempt to gallop away would be noticed.

    Behind me, The Master shoved into the column, throwing ponies out left and right, storming his way through it and pulling back shawls or staring into eyes deeply. Had he been counting his slaves or something? Oh this was bad...very, very bad. The cries of injured ponies being stallion-handled so roughly were just getting closer as he worked his way up. My covers may have hid me from his general perception, but he'd spot my size the moment he got close enough.

    “Listen, Sunny, please. Just keep it together. Just hang in there...”

    Unity's own advice to me days ago was all that rung to mind. The sting of guilt and fear as I began to feel the weight of impossibility to rescue her too only slammed home again and again. Oh...Unity...

    “Feels like there’s no escaping him...” Sunny's voice was strained.

    “There is. Just find something or somepony to believe in. I did, I found—”

    I stalled, my heart in my throat. Had I really anymore? Did I truly believe I could do this? It all felt so impossible now, we could plan and talk about it, but what had we really done yet? What if there truly wasn't a way out?

    “Aha...up here, eh?”

    I spun, keeping my shawl tightly over my face. The Master was barging his way through, that immense bulk towering over all the rest as he stomped directly toward me. With one horrible moment he stopped dead about twenty feet away down the column.

    His eyes were fixed directly on mine.

    Then he grinned.

    I began to back away; to move as far as I could before the commands came.

    “I'm sorry, Sunny...”

    The Master advanced, stomping slowly.

    “Knew I'd recognise my own eyes...like father...”

    “I'm so sorry, Sunny...I didn't mean this for you...”

    “...like son!”

    “I'M SORRY!”

    I broke off the moment The Master moved directly for me. Ducking beneath the other slaves, I galloped down the embankment toward the skyport.

    “Get him! Everypony! Bring the born slave home!”

    To my absolute horror, the thundering sound that was dozens of hooves galloping quickly built. A huge mass of ponies, driven by an indomitable will and terror of refusing an order, turned and commenced a grand charge down the slope after me like a wartime attack formation. Simply screaming, I pushed my hooves harder and harder, dashing over the broken metal and pipes that littered the edges of the runway. Turning my head back, my shawl flying off from the wind, I wasn't sure what horrified me more.

    That The Master was leading the charge by some distance and still grinning.

    Or the fact that Sunny was with them. I hoped with all my heart she was simply protecting herself by not being the one to refuse.

    Already, exhaustion was kicking in. I was no sprinter, a lifetime of day long activities and toils had built a slow burn stamina into me (and even that was lower than most ponies) rather than the ability to quickly explode and run hell for leather. The sound only got louder, the swarm of slaves closing in. Already, faster ponies at the flanks were beginning to arc ahead, as though seeking to enclose me entirely. The ground itself shook as they began to near, the thick thuds of The Master's hooves always audible over it all. I heard the clank of chains around his neck, the jingle of a collar dragging. There was nowhere to go! Any cover was way too far away!

    I had...I had nothing...literally nothing!

    My eyes misted up, finding it hard to see. I began to stumble, fall and trip over rocks and slippery sections of mud. Going around behind the runway, still littered with old sky chariots lashed to cracking bones, I finally collapsed. A harsh metal clang impacted on my side against the grapplegun.

    Taking the first breath I had since I ran, I saw that I'd landed on a drain cover to wash rainwater from the runway. They lined both sides all the way down!

    I'd already been trapped in a small hole once today. If this went wrong...

    “That's it, Number Seven! You know it's worthless trying, you'll always be mine in the end.”

    I glared up, The Master had stopped, bringing the clatter of the slaves to circle around. I saw Sunny looking conflicted and pale. Only now I noticed that her back leg was bleeding terribly. Then, The Master began to trot forward.

    “You've led me a merry chase, slave. Don't think you won't pay for that insult. You know there's nowhere for you to go. I know about your little hero, not anymore is she? You know the truth, just accept it. A slave is all you've ever been, it's all you ever will be! She didn't save you, and now you're seeing the reason why!”

    Trying not to listen, I slowly let my hooves rest on the hinge of the drain cover. I'd only get one quick chance at this. He was wrong. One of the few things I could genuinely hear from his mouth and know in my heart was that he was wrong! Why couldn't ponies just see that she was right? That to be like her could help us! Why did they have to make up lies? Heroes didn't do that!

    “Don't even think of pulling that!”

    My hoof froze. Of course he'd spot it, he wasn't stupid! But I still tried to keep my muscles tensed...no, more than tensed. I had to do this! I couldn't get caught now! I...I had to escape, for Unity, for Sunny. To somehow find a way to prove to everypony that Littlepip was still worth believing in! I couldn't get caught now!

    I pulled.

    The drain cover lifted. The five seconds it took to pull it, to watch him break forward and bellow an order, to try and throw myself down, it felt like five minutes of constant worry and tension. Head first, I simply dived, the dark hole barely fitting my body before—

    Stopping.

    My back leg jarred in pain, something catching it. Crying out at the shock and harsh pull upon it, I twisted, but being unable to turn my head far enough in the thin pipe. Below me was nothing but a black void and the sound of rushing water. I had stopped...

    He had grabbed my hind leg, pressing it under his hoof against the floor.

    “You don't get away, Number Seven! Not this time!”

    With crushing power, I felt my leg being dragged. The rainwater still draining in sloshed past my face and body, making it tough to breathe, the more I came out, the more it washed into my eyes and mouth, stinging and hissing. I was being dragged free, bit by bit. I couldn't even struggle, the hole was too small. I was terrified that if I did fall I would simply get stuck upside down in a small pipe underground, but if I didn't...

    “I got him! I got him for you!”

    Sunny? I felt her bite my tail, pushing in to help pull me out, but knocking the others aside. Even The Master's hoof seemed to lessen off, just enough that my weight and a careful release from her mouth on my tail dropped me into the darkness.

    In those scant half seconds before my descent, I only heard the rage filled roar of The Master.

    Thank you, Sunny. You did it again for me. I wasn't without heroes around me in here after all. I hoped dearly that she wasn't punished for it, but I knew The Master all too well.

    But there was little time to think on anything, as my life became nothing more than a painful scraping hell, falling vertically in a space that any normal sized pony would have been jammed in instantly. My skull bounced, my legs grazed, and my torso thudded from side to side. I felt it all closing in, becoming a thinner pipe as it went down. Panic set in, that this might grow too thin and I’d drown upside down, before finally, mercifully, I was thrown from it, falling blind.

In pitch darkness, I hit water. I kicked out, thrashing, my inability to swim at all leading me to simply flail. I hadn't gotten a breath in, there was no surface. I could only feel the pipe on all sides of me.

    A current picked me up, swirling me onward and away. Over and over, tumbling, and feeling my sick lungs burn with the effort of holding my breath. My whole body juddered, lack of oxygen making me lose all sense of up and down as I was thrown this way and that by the current. A steady roar began to drift to my ears through the darkness, an accelerating speed before the sudden shock of being thrown free.

    Above water, in the air, I tumbled. I tried to grab what breaths I could. The waterfall threw me out and forced me down. A hard wet slap across my belly dragging me underwater once again, and forcing the air from my lungs. A mouthful of water gulped down my throat, kicking off a coughing fit. Sucking down more and more water, drowning on the spot. I felt myself being spun over and over, unable to force my way up. I kicked out, throwing every effort to simply save my life. Yes, I was moving, I was...

    ...pushing my way to the bottom.

    Disorientation was kicking in bad. My head throbbed, loss of consciousness beginning to become a very real danger. I pushed off the ground, feeling the force of the waterfall crushing down upon my head above. Moaning and fighting the urge to take one breath, I let it carry me further along before then trying again. I fought up...up...all four limbs wildly surging in the filthy water. My saddlebag dragged me down, the weight of my fleece soaking it all up making it hard to move. My lungs were empty, filled with dead air, my throat in agony as I held a full radiation-driven fever fit at bay to not take in more water. I considered dropping my saddlebag or my fleece, but I didn't have the time to even do that. I just kept kicking and kicking and—

    The surface! I broke it and fell down again, lacking the ability to tread water. Again and again I broke the water, gulping air and feeling my entire inside body ache from the water intake. My eyes adjusted quickly; I could see bricks nearby! A ledge! 

Fighting the current, my muscles heavy and sore, I kept pushing. Underwater, on the surface, underwater again, again, and again, a pathetic struggle against drowning until I finally felt the cold wet brick under my hooves. Surprising myself, the adrenaline and terror forced me to push myself up and roll onto it, finally out.

    Retching, spinning onto my hooves, I threw up more water than I thought possible. Sucking air in between the convulsions, I felt my eyes stinging from the the water, and the tingle all over my body from the shivering fever that now wracked me. Finally, restlessly, I fell to my side, pausing only to draw out my items to let them dry on the higher brickwork. I could see a door, and some sort of workshop, but that could wait.

    That was too close...too close...he had almost got me that time. If it hadn't been for Sunny...

    All the worries...lies...guilt...it all just faded. I could do nothing but just concentrate on breathing.

    To concentrate on not believing those same four words that echoed again and again...

    She didn't save you.

    But I could still save her.

    So many ponies not believing in her, readily insulting her with all these lies on the radio!  I could...I could show them!  I'd draw her good, draw her heroic, and show them all how good she was!

    I couldn't.

    Every drawing, every sketch, rough draft and vague attempt turned to nothing but a pitiful mess.  It never looked right! I'd tried everything I knew how. Everything.  I must have used up a whole quarter of the thick journal, ripping page after page out to throw them across the room.  I'd tried the walls, drawing over damp cobblestone, surrounding me in the failed attempts that stared back with their unreal proportions, messy outlines, and mismatched scales.  None of them looked right.

    The artist's nightmare.  My mane had collapsed around my head in the damp environment, still soaking from dragging myself out of the water earlier.

    I was livid.  Terrified and in anguish of the mind, frenziedly tearing the charcoal across the paper so hard it sometimes tore.  My shaky tooth ached, my entire face bulged from Noose's strike and made the very act of drawing hurt. But I couldn't stop. I couldn't...I couldn't!

    It all came to one horrid lashing of my hooves in an explosion of feelings that I simply couldn't comprehend.  The charcoal stick went flying as I simply sat and screamed at the blank pages, at why this had to happen to me.  Why something as simple as a legend to believe in could be torn away. Everything felt conflicted. I wanted to believe, but everypony kept telling me otherwise.  I wanted to be the one strong pony who didn't lose hope, who denied it all and believed that the truth would emerge later. But I couldn't deny that it had taken grip of me too.

    The Stable Dweller had fallen to the wasteland like so many had before.

    Simply sitting still, I closed my eyes, trying to remember her.  To remember that look on her face as she defied Red Eye, and climbed from the Pit.

    I could still see it, still believe in that memory.  But why couldn't I draw it?  My body began shaking, building with the frustration and sheer self anger at my inability to save her memories, back to the hero I once thought I knew.  To fall in love with a legend and then have it shattered...it was just so...so...

    “UNFAIR!”

    Screeching the word, I picked up the journal, hurling it across the room to clatter against the wall.  It bounced, rolling on the spine back within reach. Simply furious, feeling the red mist of a cruel life and corrupting wasteland fall across my belief in heroes, I picked it up.  If they weren't true then nothing was!  What was life without ponies who could be better?

    I carried it outside the workshop, near the frothing waterline that I'd come down.  If I'd lost my ability to draw, then what was the point of owning this thing that would only serve to remind me of a lost hero?  I'd just be rid of it. Lifting the journal, I drew back my front legs and...and...

    Slowly, my hooves descended, and I hugged it to my chest.  I couldn't bring myself to do it, to lose it all forever. As the anger faded, I realised that I never had really wanted to do it at all.

    “Why won't you let me draw you?” I sniffled and spoke quietly, opening it to flick through them. “What’s wrong?”

    The pictures offered no response.  Eventually reaching the latest, scrawled and pitiful attempt, I just scowled and yelled at nothing in particular, just from sheer frustration. Eventually, the hardship and tiredness of my body caught up to me, twisting the anger and bile in a hot fevered episode of retching and clutching my stomach.  Blood speckled from my mouth, landing across the drawing. I just couldn't stop trying to fight some dreaded realisation that perhaps I was just a dying slave in Fillydelphia, desperately trying to end his life with some sort of hope by believing a lie.

    Shivering, tightly hugging myself, I slowly drew my head up and pulled my mane from my eyes.  Above me, a noise had ceased, the slow thudding of the rain above ground had eased off. It was time to move. I needed to get to Weathervane and have my ingredients mixed up into RadAway.  Moving slowly, carefully, I simply packed and left, leaving all the ruined paper to slowly mould and dissolve behind me forever.

    Keep moving...just keep moving and believing.  They were wrong, even if I was worried...they were wrong.  I'd show them all someday.  I would.

    Flowerpot greeted me in his usual fashion.  The lack of the oncoming tirade of cursing to shut him up gave rise to the thought that Weathervane wasn't down here at the moment.  As such, I let myself in, the radiation of the trip into the basement had already made my chest feel swollen and painful. Flowerpot's howling screams and slams on the reinforced door only made my head hurt worse.

    His lab was much barer than I had last seen it. Presumably Weathervane had to have used his supplies to aid ponies from the Mall.  I searched in vain for any RadAway or even RadPurge, but none were kept down here any longer. Just a mass of beakers and glasses filled with liquids I didn't dare touch.  The silver magic orb was still sat upon the research table, sparkling and gently glowing with barely contained medical power. If only it could have healed me...

    My legs were weakening.  I'd had to gallop twice on the way over to avoid groups of ponies who'd heard me and come to investigate.  They hadn't spotted me, but it'd been terrifying enough. As such, I simply pulled myself onto the main stretcher and lay down on my side, wheezing hard on an enclosed throat.  Still dripping wet, I felt the blanket soak under me and drip off the sides onto the vinyl flooring.

    My eyes spotted the photoframe of Sundial and his father on Weathervane's desk.  I tried to just focus on that, on better times. He looked so happy, innocent under that overgrown blonde mane, a lot like Caduceus' had been, only bushier, and clean.  It was enough to make me want to forget everything. Forget I was sick and dying in slave labour two hundred years into his future amidst a ruined damn wasteland.  Why couldn't I have had his life?

    My eyes felt heavy, the dizziness kicking in even worse.  Even as I felt my exhaustion and injuries catching up, I just kept looking at him.  At least for now I could believe in his fun times and pretend that when I woke up, I'd be just awakening from this whole nightmare once and for all.

    Instead, I had a sharp pain in my front left leg to startle me away from sleep.

    Colour and light flashed back to me so quickly I actually jerked and choked on a bit of saliva that went down the wrong way.  Firm hooves kept me pinned down.

    “Fucking calm it!  Stay down!” The raspy tone was recognisable, oddly comforting and expected by now.  I took a deep breath. before settling down and raising my leg.

    “Had to put you on intravenous RadAway drip from that stuff you brought in, it'll do more for you than just ingesting the drinkable version, but it won't be as comfortable.  You needed the rest, so just take it. Stay lying there till the drip's done. Now roll over and let me get a look at those wings.”

    Wiping the sweat of fear from my brow, I nodded, lethargically pulling myself onto my front.  The drip feed was injected into my leg all right, giving an uncomfortably painful swelling in my veins as the liquid passed into me.  Weathervane trotted around to where I could see him. The doctor looked haggard, no doubt run off his hooves. Rubbing my eyes, I blinked and focussed on him.

    “T-thank you...for before and...and for now.” I wasn't sure what else to bring up.  Really, I still felt empty and rotten at my failed drawing attempts.

    “In the job description when I signed on to that Ministry in the first place, kid.  You've done me good bringing that stuff though, and that swamp donkey in the stores told me they had none of it fucking left either.  I'll go crack some heads up their own arses later about it. Now, how are you coping?”

    I sniffed.  “N-not well. I can barely get food, they keep it so locked up!  Every slave wants me, The Master almost caught me, I lost a friend, and the high ranking slavers got me involved in some big game of theirs now.  I can't do this! I can't live like a rat in a sewer from day to day, perpetually running away!”

    One of my wings was painfully yanked out.  Squeaking loudly, I looked around to see Weathervane moving each feather in turn, swivelling it in the base joint.  The wing was dead, I couldn't do anything with its movement. That said, it didn't hurt as much as it once might have.

    “Well, for all that activity, these have settled the atrophied muscles pretty damn well.”

    He quickly jerked it to one side, making me yell.  I shot him a harsh glance.

    “Apparently not completely yet. Well, this sort of shitty injury so early will take a lot of effort to heal up.  That bastard must have really done a number on you. Speaking of, you aren't the only winged one I've treated recently...”

    I felt confused for a second.  Another pegasus? The thought quickly settled, as I realised who he meant.

    “Ragini?”

    “That's her. Those fucknuggets in the Mall didn't mess around.  I could repair the damage, similar to yours. But, I'm sorry to say she'll never fly again.  Too much trauma in too short a time, plus one of the fuckers actually struck her wing base and tore it apart so badly the only thing connecting it to her body was her skin.”

    I felt my torso shiver.  Ragini was a clearly hated me, but anyone with wings could relate to that sort of hurt.  I certainly could. The feeling of being held down and my wing stretched over a cold anvil still was far too icy and real for comfort.

    I spent the next half hour under Weathervane's care; telling him, often through tears, about what had happened to me and just letting it all out.  The doctor didn't often seem to care, but he at least listened. He gave me something that made me throw up again and again, ejecting dull water into a pan and making my lungs feel a little clearer.  An ointment-smothered cloth was rubbed against my bruises, taking the edge off the injury. To my surprise, he even permitted me a small healing potion to keep my ribs from bruising over.

    Eventually, I found myself explaining about Unity. That caught his attention more.

    “Mm, well, I can certainly relate there, kid.  Sending Sundial off to that Stable was one of the hardest things I've ever done.  Watching him go and knowing that it was the last time. It's not easy, but at least you got to say goodbye.”

    The double impact of discussing Unity and hearing him referring to Sundial hit me hard.  I wanted to tell him how I'd not given up on her yet, but I simply couldn't find it in myself to continue that line of questioning.  Instead, I just sighed and lay down, finding any way to change the subject from a potentially dangerous one about his son.

    “Doctor...have...have you ever believed in somepony really really strongly...and then just had it taken away from you?”

    The ghoul had been moving back to his desk to wait out my drip feed.  But he stopped, turning his head and lowering his eyes.

    “You heard that one, huh?” His voice was, for once, oddly soft and caring.  I simply nodded.

    Sighing, Weathervane turned and sat in his chair.

    “Yes, you could say that.  Most ponies like me could. Two hundred fucking years and you'll see a lot of ponies rise and fall, see the wasteland corrupt them or force them to do things that no good pony would ever dare.  But that's not the ones I mean, for me it came long before.”

    His horn lit, dragging a cabinet open and pulling from it an old rotted piece of paper on a wooden backboard, bearing a pink ribbon.  I couldn't read any of it, but I saw the symbol of three butterflies emblazoned upon it.

    “My certificate to become one of the leads at the Fillydelphia Ministry of Peace.  Signed by one of them. Means a lot, to go up and shake the hoof of somepony who looks just as nervous, just as real as anypony you'll ever meet.  To see a hero face to face and hear them thank you for what you’ve done. To see two of her friends, two other heroes of Equestria, waiting in the background and attending the ceremony.  Makes you really start to think you can make a difference if you just keep believing in them. Not just those three either...”

    His milky eyes seemed to waver in their sockets, before he blinked and reasserted them.

    “Six times, even.  Six ponies, who told us they would save us all and stop the war.  Not necessarily win, just stop.  Every single day, as I treated pegasi who'd had their wings torn off or eyes shattered under cracking visors, I thought of them.  Every time I pulled closed the zip on one more lost young soul, I thought of them. Every. Fucking. Time, that I had to go to the parents and explain to them why I couldn't save their child, I thought of those six. Trusted them, believed in them.  We had faith in the medical units, we all did. Fluttershy was, at least from what I saw, the most determined of them all to do better.  You know, one day she brought us into this hall in Canterlot's Ministry of Peace hub, stood up and told such a speech that if anypony who cared today heard it...it'd change their entire fucking life.  About how we had to do better.  To be the good ponies in a world turning bad.  We believed it. We strived for years believing it, taking comfort in that they were always doing the right thing.”

    Weathervane turned, looking at the certificate for a long time.  Before, without warning, he simply hurled it across the room to clatter into the darkness.

    “Bunch of piss damned nonsense.  In the end, one of them turned our lives into a non-stop worry over who was watching.  One built even more weapons.  One banned books and learning from our schools if they didn't fit the 'image' they wanted.  One did near enough fucking nothing.  Even Twilight Sparkle got involved in some serious shit nopony wanted to be a part of.  When my colleagues and I got calls to rush out and help somepony with 'unidentified alterations' at the Arcane Ministry then told to keep quiet about the shit that we saw, that was bad enough. But there were always rumours, stuff to make you wanna go feral to just forget it.  But Fluttershy...”

    He stopped, as though realising something he was about to say.  Then he just shook his head and inclined a hoof to the silver orb, the healing megaspell we’d recovered from the crater.

    “I helped work on the spells to amplify magic for healing.  We all knew it could be used for other things. Let's just say, even if I wasn't one of the core team and even if I'm not sure who exactly created the megaspells, I know my own projects when I see them.”

    The ghoul glanced in the mirror.

    “And I saw it pretty fucking well.  Point is, kid, legends don't last. They're only legendary for the time it takes for people to see the shit that comes with being that important.  We all had to endure the downfall of six great ponies, ones I'd watched save my world numerous times before. If you want my advice, put the girl out your mind, son.  It'll only come back again and again to clamp down on your ass until it drives you insane. Learn to let go, believe in what you have around you.”

    His magic pulled the drip from my leg.  I hadn't even noticed it finished, so the sudden sting made me squeak.  Wandering over, Weathervane wrapped the bleeding hole in gauze.

    “I've seen it enough times in these wastes.  Take it from somepony who's seen a dozen bright sparks turn into bastards, a hundred believers become ruined fucking shells.  If you're proven right about believing in her, then it happens, but don't hold hope for the impossible. You're trying for enough insane shit with your life as it is.”

    “But I—”

    “Murk.”

    His steely gaze met mine as I twisted painfully off the stretcher.  My complaint was lost in my throat.

    “Six of the greatest mares in Equestrian history, ones who saved the world more than once...they fell, made mistakes, became what they weren't.  If they couldn't maintain what they were, what hope does one little mare from a Stable stand? Legends have to end eventually. Take comfort in what she gave you, no more. Rely on those still with you. Now, speaking of them, there are ponies close to you who need your presence.”

    “H-huh?”

    “Your friend, Glimmerlight.  She asked if I could send you to her at the Mall if I ever saw you.  Shackles has them all camping outside till it's repaired, so you should be able to get in to her no problem.”

    “The Master said he would be seeing Grindstone or something...”

    “Even better.  I think it's about your plan.  I imagine you'll want to see her anyway.”

    Yes!  I really did.  She would know what to say to help me!  Glimmerlight always knew the best things to keep us all optimistic and happy, even if I'd likely have to be embarrassed to make it happen.  That at least brought a small surge of hope to me.

    “I'll...I'll go right now!  Before the rain starts!”

    Weathervane nodded gently.  Wandering into the corner, I saw him lift the certificate and unbend the crease.  The pink ribbon had fallen off.

    “Harmony fell...Harmony failed.  The faith of an entire realm destroyed.  Don't make the same mistake we did by staking everything on idols, Murk.  I don't want to see that pain hit you hard if it turns out to be true in the same way it did for me.  Even now I feel it at the back of my mind, making me angrier than I used to be, more...feral. An animal inside trying to make me remember it all and fall into the darkness, to get angry enough that I'll just stop caring about anything and become one of them.”

    I didn't move.  It was the first time I'd ever heard him talk of any real danger of falling to the feral mindset.  I just bit my lip, unsure what to say. The way he spoke, it was like even just one more horrid event or truth could drive him over that edge.  That caring and sticking to his goals was all that kept him going these days. I couldn't ever tell him. It hurt, but I couldn't let him know. It would break him.

    “Now get the hell out of here, much less radiation in the lab but that doesn’t mean you should stay here any longer than you should with that nap earlier. And you don't want Shackles coming back to the Mall on you.”

    I was about to leave, but one thing came to my mind, making me turn back and start digging in my pockets.  Weathervane, sat amongst his picture frames, almost looked angry at my insistence to stay. But I kept digging, before I brought out the Twilight orb, placing it upon its stand.  The ghoul's eyes widened as the sparkling illuminations forming in the air intertwined and shifted together into star shapes, and projected the form of one of the ponies he had once believed in.

    “I don't know who you are or where you found this, nor how long has passed since I recorded it.  Aurora Star has promised that they do not break easily, so this could be as far as I might imagine into the future.  So please, allow me to introduce myself...”

    I backed away as I saw the old father stand and lower his head a little in respect. I left him to the message, praying that it might do something, anything to help him find some way to push back the fall into a feral a little more...

    Around the Mall lay a hasty mesh fence and shanty town of tents and old shacks.  Apparently, everypony was living out here now that the inside was under repairs to prevent entire floors from collapsing or ensure better security.  I could see work teams on the roof edges, hoisting up materials via shackled groups on the ground pulling as beasts of burden. Others dragged slates of rubble out the front doors.  Many others simply lay under flimsy cover, shivering and sniffling after the drenching they no doubt had to endure. They had wrapped themselves in anything they could to stave off the burning rain.  The guards watched the new perimeter, observing from quick built towers above the slave grounds. The new slave camp seemed to extend right around the Mall.

    But the Mall itself...it had already changed.  From the dull yet grand scale of concrete and sheet metal, it had now been repaired and rebuilt using all a manner of rusted metals that now covered the holes.  Multiple layers of pipes formed barriers to the scaffold walks that ran around the entire building, topped with mesh as a crude roof. Pits had been dug in the earth surrounding it, covered over with corrugated steel and weighed down by thick slabs of rock.  I could hear the cries of those who had been left in them. Solitary confinement, I guessed. From many of the holes in the Mall, red ash belched forth from incinerators, and I dreaded to think why The Master needed those.  I hadn't really thought about how much the Mall had begun to mean something to me as a better place under Protégé, with its shelter and more regular food.  But now to see it becoming the same red hell of steel, pipe, ash, and chainlink fencing as the rest of Fillydelphia made the city feel all the more cramped than it already was.

    It quickly became clear to me, viewing from a nearby second floor of a building, that The Master had brought his own hidden stock out to join the Mall.  There were far more slaves here than had survived the riots. At least it afforded me better cover. It wasn't a difficult matter to get in, now I had my battle saddle's grappling hook.

    Glimmerlight wasn't hard to spot in such a slave containment, sitting towards a corner of the enclosed area.  I could see two tents, one large beside her and the other much smaller, set up just beside it where she now rested, fiddling with something in her hooves.  Hobbling for all I was worth through the stodgy remains of the Mall's decorative garden, I moved toward her.

    The huge cheer, however, grabbed my attention.

    Off toward the Mall, closer to the entrance, there was a large congregation of slaves and slavers.  The cheer had been preceded by a sharp tunk of something striking a wooden surface hard.  I noticed it was only the slavers whooping. What was going on over there?

    I saw The Master's assistant, that wiry pony.  A group of burly earth pony slavers had many of the slaves lined up beside him near a small table.  The slaver sitting beside it in tattered green barding was grinning like a lunatic. A rather exhausted looking earth pony slave wandered away from him, dejected.

    “Who's next?” His voice rattled out, loud and tinged with malicious glee.  The slaves seemed to look at one another, before one of them gulped and moved forward to sit opposite the slaver.  Oh Goddesses, please tell me the guards hadn't gotten a taste for Six Shooter Surprise! With a thump, I saw him rest one hoof on the table to...

    ...hoof wrestle?

“Well, all right then…” I muttered softly, feeling a sense of relief.

    As far as slavers went, that seemed fairly benign, which of course only gave rise to me feeling like I'd missed something here.  I continued toward Glimmerlight, aiming to duck into the tent and hide from them as soon as I could.

    My friend was sat alone, her initiate robes pulled close.  Her head wasn't up as I approached, instead it just hung low, toying with a clear little sphere between her hooves.  Beside her, hooked to an old sign was an odd contraption made out of some rubber hose, rusted piping and what seemed to be a few layers of cloth.  Water still dripped into a small mug below it. Had Glimmer managed to rig up something to purify the rain of its acid? She still didn't seem too happy though, occasionally lifting the sphere before sighing and letting it drop again.  Even from here, I could hear her stomach growling and see the weary look of a pony been thrown through the grind far too many times in too short a period.

    “Hey, sis?” I used our little shared acknowledgement, feeling a surge delight when she sharply looked up and smiled at me approaching.  It didn't take long for me to rush forward into her embrace, before she pulled me inside the tent to hide. Holding me by the shoulders, her tired face lit up a little as she glanced me over.

    “A grapplegun and a disguise. You really are coming into your own, Murky.  It's such a relief to know you're all right. You know I don't like to act all...well, nervous, but I've been worried sick!  I heard they were hunting you. Hell, even when I saw you fall in the Mall I swear my heart stopped. I didn't even know you'd gone up to fight Barb with Protégé.”

She hesitated, before kissing me on the forehead.

“I'm so proud of you, taking him out probably saved all our lives.”

    I flushed a little, but gladly accepted the happiness in knowing that merely visiting her from my outlaw status was something to help cheer her up too.  But the more I looked at her, the more it began to settle in. Her stomach was drawn, her limbs thin, and small flecks around her lips betrayed a lack of proper sustenance and aid.  After a moment, I could see she was clearly thinking the same about me.

    Somehow, it made us both chuckle and lie together once again.  Just having her here, knowing that for these few minutes we could be reassured the other was, broadly, fine, made things seem a little better.  We spent a little time talking, letting me get out a lot of what I wouldn't dare tell Weathervane or feel he'd understand. I told her about Unity and The Master.  About Sunny and my desperate attempts to survive. Glimmerlight seemed interested in Unity being unable to remember, suggesting if it was anything like her own problems.  But I shook my head, Unity didn’t seem to know those spells.

    Something wasn't right with Glimmer's voice as she talked, though. It lacked that spark the moment we crossed onto the issue of memory.  Where were the embarrassing jokes? The old stories of rampant casual pleasure? Shifting around, I tried to force a little assertiveness into me, I couldn't let friendship be a one way thing here.  I watched her sit back, toying with that orb again in her hooves and occasionally staring at it, biting her lip as though fighting some temptation.

    Then it struck me, something that in such a rush and having Unity to talk to about it had slowly lessened for me.  She hadn't had anypony to really talk about losing Caduceus with yet...

    “Sis?  I...I'm sorry about—”

    She interrupted me, her eyes not leaving the orb.

    “I know, I know. I've just been trying to think on it, well, a little peripherally.  I don't think I'm ready to really talk about it yet. Trying to avoid the orbs.”

    I just nodded slowly, feeling a little upset that I'd asked something she didn't want to discuss.  Instead, I heard her sigh and look across to me.

    “There's a bit of a giant elephant in the room here, Murky.  You...you heard the radio?”

    Gradually, she began to catch my eye and clearly see the sadness within.  I nodded, clutching my belly, feeling both the journal and my Littlepip Statuette in their pockets.

    “It's not the end of you believing in her, y'know?  Like the DJ said, they still don't know quite what happened.”

    Sighing, I lowered my head onto my front hooves and nodded.  If I could get through this without crying, I'd be happy.

    “I know, but nopony else does.  They keep saying that she's turned bad!  That the wasteland got to her and really messed her up, and that she slaughtered an entire settlement!  I keep telling myself that it's a lie and I try to draw her and make it all better but I j-just...just can't...”

    Well, so much for getting through it without crying.  I felt her hoof wrap around me.

    “We've still got each other, Murky. You can trust in us.  If it's worth anything, I don't think she's gone yet. It's too...sudden, y'know? I’d rather wait and know everything.”

    Her hoof lifted my head up gently, she leaned in, forehead to forehead and speaking quietly.

    “No matter what, you saw her escape that Pit.  You saw her defy Red Eye and escape Fillydelphia.  That's the bit that matters to you and no one will ever take that away from you.”

    Just as I'd hoped, Glimmerlight always knew what to say.  Feeling a smile creep onto my face, my tears were more of relief and a little happiness than outright mental anguish anymore.  I pressed my head against her neck, hugging her briefly.

    “Thank you...” I simply murmured it.  The pain wasn't gone, the worry and turmoil the news report had stirred in my heart was still present.  But Glimmer's words had taken the edge off it for now.

    “Now, we've got other stuff to worry about.  Get comfy at the back and I'll explain. We've not got any food. Shackles took all of it and I can't get to our hidden stash inside yet, but I've got some purified water from the little doodad I hooked up.  You look like you need some...”

    She wandered to the entrance, humming to herself.  The transition from somber pony trying to help me to the swaggering mare I knew seemed almost shocking, like she was just shoving everything to the back of her mind briefly.  Either that, or looking at some of the memory orbs hanging from her bags, I began to worry over what details of the Mall might already have been put away for good. I remembered what Coral had said, that I would come back here to find Glimmer doing the same things all over again...

    “Took a little work to get it going, really.  You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get a hold of a rubber hose in this place. First person I asked said I could have one if he could use a rubber with me, if you know what I mean.”

    I really didn't.

    “Well, all he got for that was a hoof across the cheek! Had to frame him and steal it from behind his back later. Anyway, so! While we get this thing working, I've been looking through those metro plans and comparing them to the map we found in Protégé's office.  That station that Aurora bought out for the Ministry to keep underground? Turns out it's actually a bit of a weird one, not really in the inner or outer circles.  It's sort of between them, hence why I thought it was in the, uh, inner.  Doesn't change the plan though, that we need to get down there, find the place this unfinished station was placed, dig through to it from the inner, then dig into the outer from the Ministry Station and escape!  Simple, eh?”

    “I hope so...”

    “I know so.  Just perfect, even gives us a staging post, y'know?  We could get you, me, Brim, Coral and her son; Unity and her buck, even Sunny.  Hell, you can even bring Protégé if you seduce him in time.”

    The metal mug I'd been fetching to give to her dropped from my hooves and clattered off the rocks upon the ground.

    “I...I...but...what...huh?”

    “Oh don't worry, I can give you all the advice you'll need on just where bucks like to be—”

    “But...but I don't...I like mares...”

    The look she gave me was very homely.  Unspoken. 'I know, just go with the humour, stay bright.' Picking up the mug in her magic, she began squeezing the filthy looking water into it.  I guess 'purified' was all a matter of scale in this place. All the same, I eagerly accepted a chance to get some real fluid into me. Even the metallic and sickly taste wasn't enough to keep the lukewarm water from settling a lot of the dryness in my throat.  Rejoining me, Glimmer pulled over the metro map and pointed to a symbol a little distance away, toward the edges of the industrial zone.

    “You know where this is in Fillydelphia?”

    “Mhm...”

    “Well,” she began, “this is what I needed you here for.  I can't be sure, but I think this is perhaps the closest metro station to what I guess we'll call 'The Ministry Station.' You being an outlaw actually works out for us, keeps you out of harm’s way underground and gives you a chance to scout out our route ahead of time.  I was hoping you could use your sneaky-sneakiness to sneak into the metro and sneak around a bit, real sneaky like, see?”

    Glancing my eyes along the map, I could see that the station was the closest to the Ministry itself.  No wonder Glimmer had chosen it. It did seem the most likely place that Aurora would have chosen, if there was anything at all.  Already I felt a little scared, but I'd done worse by now. Underground, where it was all dark, seemed much my sort of place to sneak around in.  Not to mention, the feeling of actively preparing for our escape was beginning to come back.

    We'd get out—get everypony out—then I'd go find Littlepip and prove it was all wrong.

    My attention however, was drawn to another slam of hoof on wood and the rowdy cheer of the slavers.

    “Next victim!” The slaver's voice bellowed above it all.  Another pony wandered off with a despairing face.

    “What are they doing over there?” I poked my head out to look at them, seeing the ponies involved looking wretched, drawn out and staggering.  Glimmerlight sighed, shaking her head.

    “Hoof wrestling with stakes.  If they win they get a free break from a shift and an extra meal; something many of us need to survive right now.  Shackles has thrown us on triple shifts, I just got off an eight hour one and I'm back on in another twenty minutes.  Trying to win at their little game is his way of taunting us to try and get slapped down again...”

    She clutched her own stomach with a hoof.  I could heard the gurgling quite clearly, if the ragged expression on her face wasn't obvious enough.  Indeed, Glimmer looked a little weak on her hooves.

    “If they lose...?”

    Glimmerlight bit her lip, as though pondering whether to tell me or not.  Eventually, watching the one pony drop under his corrugated shelter after losing, she looked down to me.

    “The losers have to pull an extra shift under somepony else, chosen by Shackles of all ponies.  He sometimes mentions mining.  The ones that return just looked wasted, more than most of us, but a lot of them seem to stay there. I knew I wanted a slim waistline, but even I'm starting to want to put on a few pounds, Murky.”

    The joke fell a little flat between us, but took the edge off the extortion The Master had going through his teams.

    Glimmerlight filled another mug for herself, before telekinetically drawing it across.  The teasing of sustenance was only making my own drawn underside groan in need, though. Pressing a hoof to it, feeling my own ribs far more than anypony should, I just fell to the side.  Oh, what I'd do for another apple stew from Protégé right about now...

    I looked up at Glimmer, toying with her scrap-built filter again.  Her eyes were focused, as though trying to forget her own hunger and deteriorating body by stint of just getting on with it.  How could this mare have sold out a village to raiders? I had to ask Brimstone on the side sometime. He'd know something about it if he'd led the clan.  Had somepony lied to Coral about what she'd done? But then why did she erase the memory?

    Moreover, I began to worry if the same light that she was in my life would remain the same without her coping mechanism.  To imagine her falling from being anything other than an energetic radiance of goodness in my life hurt terribly to imagine.  She saw me looking up as she had her front hooves above her with the filter. Trying to force a smile on, she leaned down to ruffle my head once more.

    “You get any news on Protégé?  Rather have him in charge than, well, you know.”

    I nodded gently.  “He's lost command of the Mall.  Weathervane says he's really badly hurt...”

    “So I saw when they wheeled him out.  I guess he really is a nicer guy than I maybe gave credit.  The way he tried to keep you in the game or defend you once he made his move.  He seems like he has this absolute determination to protect slaves, you in particular.  Reminds me, he said something about spending two years to know about that breaking wall?  Any idea? You think he was—”

    Again, I nodded curtly, cutting her off.  Quietly, I explained what I now knew, much to Glimmerlight's surprise.  Clearly, she hadn't anticipated much from the chances of actually succeeding in the two year task.  To think how much Protégé had pushed through it and judging by the way he seemed only slightly older than me, he must have been a little younger when it started too.

    Glimmer sat mystified, but oddly relaxed.  Finally, rubbing her chin, she shrugged a little, looking down at me.

    “Well, if anything...good sign, right?  He knows the problems we have. Makes it a little easier to want him back in power.  Heck, part of me even wonders if he'd even be willing to offer what inside help he could.  We've got more ponies than we thought to get out now.”

    That was true. Coral had said as much as well.  Herself and her son. There were at least two other ponies I knew I needed to fetch at some point too.  Clearly Glimmerlight was still building water supplies for us here, and I'd have been surprised if Brimstone wasn't up to something, but we'd need much more supplies the more ponies we brought into this.

    “I think I'd like Protégé on top of the Mall operations again.  At least he got us food inside our stomachs, you agree?” She clutched her stomach again.

    Sadly, I just nodded, sighing.  “Mhm...yeah, I'd like him on top, so I can get something inside me too.”

    There was a rather sudden pause from Glimmerlight.  Curious, I looked up to find her straining to clearly not erupt into laughter, snorting gently and biting her lip while looking at me.  Eventually, she could hold it no longer, falling to the side and roaring with laughter.

    “Oh, you are too easy sometimes!  Haha! Oh, that's just classic!”

    “What!?  WHAT!?” I stood up in the tent, protesting.  What? It was about food! What had I—

    Oh.  Very quickly, I found myself blushing fiercely.

    Under the almost ear-splitting sound of my friend at least acting a little more joyful again, I took refuge in the mug of water instead.  Still snorting to herself, thanking me for helping her to at least laugh properly for the first time since the battle, she went back to work on her contraption.

    “Just finish your drink before you go anywhere, Murky. Truth be told, I'd rather you be here for all you could be while he's away. I hate thinking of you all alone out there.”

    For the next few minutes, accompanied only by the cheers of those slaves desperate for food, trying to take on The Master, we were left to ourselves.

    The thick stomping of somepony very big was all that eventually brought us up to take notice when Brimstone Blitz returned from his shift hauling the pulley systems to the roof.

    Trotting toward the larger tent, he dumped a bag of large tools from his back and thumped the ground with his four hooves, stretching them out.  Dour faced, he just gruffly nodded to me about my return. Apparently, that was all I'd get from him. But by now I knew even an acknowledgement meant a lot from the big guy.  I nodded back, a little hesitantly. Smiling thinly to her hulking protector, Glimmerlight came back into the tent to tinker with a piece of machinery. Carefully watching around, I crept over to Brimstone's tent a few feet away instead.

    I was pretty sure Brimstone spotted me wanting to talk, shaking the dust and ash out of his tent flooring by tossing the ragged thin cotton blanket around, he just glanced back over again.  Clearly, he read something on my face about some apprehension to ask this.

    “Somethin' got you skittish about me, kid?”

    Squeaking on the spot, prompting a confused little glance from Glimmer, I shook my head frantically.

    “No!  No, no...nothing!  Just...”

    My head wandered over to Glimmerlight, still humming away to herself and working on the filter to eek out whatever liquid she could from it.  Her eyes, I noticed, kept glancing down to that one empty orb beside her pack. I dearly wanted to talk about it with her, but I couldn't force the subject.  She may not have loved Caduceus, but those two had been, as far as newly met friends could be, close. In here, that counted for a lot. Shaking my head, I looked back at Brimstone again.

    “Just...you...you destroyed her village.”

    “My clan did that.  I just turned up to get the best loot.  Clan was bloody big, kid, hundred-plus ponies, and other folks too.  Not to mention any raider groups we knocked into line. That village was one of half a dozen places in the area we turned over that day, wasn't my raid to lead.  Recognised her only after I'd saved her the first time. Didn't know her name before that.  Just another lass in a cage far as I cared in the wastes.”

    His words slowed, a little more painful as he reminisced on how he had seen her before Fillydelphia.

    “So if you're wondering if I know what that other unicorn means about her betraying them, I'm not the one to go to.  All I heard was they found the place, not how. That was enough for me to tell them to go nut it over.”

    “Hey, you two done swapping stories of drunken adventures over there?” Glimmerlight dropped from the filter, turning back to us.  “Cos you know, I'm not exactly excluded from that club, remember?  I’ve still to tell you the time I climbed Friendship City's spires, drunk off my ass and singing the Carol of Hearth's Warming Eve!”

    I prayed my face didn't look too suspicious.  She likely would understand, but I couldn't bring it up for her.  Not now.

    “No!  No, uh...I was just asking Brimstone about the past!” There, that was still kinda true.  “Like, um, how he lost his ear!”

    The look Brimstone gave me spoke volumes.

    “Oh?  Huh, I've not heard that one either.  Well, come on, out with it big guy!”

    He shrugged, turning away from me and sitting down with a dull thump, apparently consigned to tell the story to pass the time.

    “Good while back now...bunch of the clan and I were off teaching a small gang a lesson for claiming they owned a part of our territory near Ponyville.  Dealt with those wee arseholes easy enough, but on the way back, the dozen of us on the trip thought we'd make a run at a settlement, see what we could pick off.  New Appleloosa, that was it.”

    “That's a bit out of your way...” Glimmer cocked his head, making her still damp mane slide over her face.  “New Appleloosa's a fair distance from Ponyville.”

    “Not for us.  Could gallop for a whole day and still pound somepony into red paste.  Anyway, we never went near it, but we did spy this one little caravan coming from the town over a gulley, figured we'd just take it.  Well, that was a mistake.”

    “Oh?” I couldn't help but feel curious...any story of the wastes interested me.  The place I always wanted to be free in...

    “Sniper.  Some little arse with a dual shot rifle, probably a saddle, playing hero from on high, higher than any hill I can tell you that.  Never did see nopony, but the first bullet went right between my armour plates, the second took off my ear. Two hits at long range, damn' good shot.  Put me right down, scared off the rest of them when I went to the ground. We pulled back. Was fightin' off challengers for leadership for a whole damned month after that.”

    “Damn, Brim...” Glimmer muttered, whistling lightly, “can't say I particularly feel the sympathy, but sniping with a twin-gunned battle saddle?  Impressive stuff.”

    Brimstone just grunted.  “Guess it's good they kept me from doing something I'd regret today.  Just not sure if I want to shake his hoof for stopping me or nut the bastard into oblivion for giving me hearing problems the rest of my life.”

    I tilted my head, speaking up.  “I didn't know you had hearing problems...”

    “What?”

    “I said, I didn't know you had...oh.”

    Spotting Brimstone grinning and winking down at me as well, I just rolled my eyes and dropped onto my knees, realisation setting in.  Oh come on, why couldn't I be smart and witty too?

    Only then did I spot Glimmerlight snorting, mouthing 'too easy' once again.

    Thunk!  “Ha!  Next up!”

    The slaver's voice echoed up, accompanied by another of the regular cheers from the slavers.  Their game was still going. I saw Brimstone raise his head to watch them, before grinning and getting up.

    “I'll be right back...”

    Trotting his way down the gentle slope toward the walls of the Mall, I found Glimmerlight and I watching each other.  A slow grin came over her face before we both upped and began following at a fair distance. She followed Brim, while I lightly hopped between tents, eventually settling in an unoccupied one close by to the commotion.  Pulling the cover over, I held my eyes up to a small gap left over, with Glimmerlight just outside the entrance. Really, I felt a little proud. I could really do this sneaky stuff sometimes...

    They were still cheering, slapping hooves on the burly slaver's back while he grinned around.  Others had joined, forcing some slaves forward who were meekly determined to try for the food that would keep them in a healthier state.  Many were crying in the queue, knowing that the obvious hope of the slaver being tired out by the time they arrived for their turn was looking unlikely.  But the moment Brimstone stomped in, the cheering fell to simple silence. In a moment of satisfaction, I saw the slaver turn a little pale. Without even waiting a turn, Brimstone sat himself down at the table.

    “Hold it right there!”

    Any positive hope I'd had jarred in my mind.  The Master's voice cracked across the yard, before I saw him approach from the main gate, his immense bulk flanked by numerous weedy looking assistants that dragged checklists.  Moving around the hoof wrestling table, he let his gaze fall to Brimstone. Shivering, I backed into the tent a little more. Oh Goddesses, he was meant to be somewhere! Or was that tomorrow?  I couldn't remember...oh dear...oh dear...

    “The great heroes of the Mall come try their luck at the food-hoof wrestle, eh?  Big guy still think he’s got it? Good for you. Oh, and don't think I can't see you standing at the back there, Ranger.  Don't you worry, I'll find something for you to do soon enough. Could always use a personal assistant while I'm hunting for my pet...hehe...”

    No!  Even I could feel the shot of fear go through Glimmerlight.  Imagining what he'd done to Sunny, but to my best friend! To my sis'!

    “Hold on one second.”

    Brimstone's voice slid right in, effortlessly sharing the authority of the scene.  I saw at least a dozen ponies step back from the two of them, the two largest ponies in the area when one had defied the other.

    “You set this up, this gamble for a free shift and food.  I'm not doing this for me.” Brimstone cast a glance back, right toward my friend.  “I'm doing it for her. I win and she stays away from you for a day longer.”

    Brimstone's glance threw a stare back at Shackles behind the wrestling slaver.

    The Master didn't even stop grinning, a hoof tapping the slaver before him on the shoulder.  “And if she losesm she gets the shift too, I think you conviniently forgot to mention. I know all too well you’d work as many as you need without caring. Win or lose is on her. Could say that's bending the rules there, eh?  In that case let us make a substitution...”

    The hoof hurled the slaver off the chair as though it weighed nothing, along with the chair.  With a sharp thump, he moved his own massive body into the space instead.

    “Me.”

    That was it.  Around us, dozens of slaves and slavers were even dropping their work to cluster around.  Very soon, I felt trapped. Masses of ponies were crowding around the tent to see the table where the two largest ponies I'd ever seen stared each other down.  Was he really doing this? I had every confidence in Brimstone's strength, but The Master would abuse every ounce of the winnings if he came out on top. Oh Brim, please know what you're doing...

    Glimmerlight trotted forward to Brimstone.

    “Brim...are you sure?  Look, you know how Shackles works, he'll have something planned or you know he would—”

    “Glim.” The syllable didn't even include his eyes moving from the light green of his opponent.  “Back off. You're hiding it well, but I know the first signs of starvation when I see it. You need the food and the time off after your injuries in the riots.  Besides...”

    His eyes squinted.

    “I've wanted to do this for a long time...”

    “Sure you still have what it takes, old stallion?  Hehe...” The Master cackled.

    One of the slavers stepped up, signalling them to move their hooves forward.  The Master did so first, slamming one front leg on the table with a sick grin.  Brim's slapped into his to make a savage and tight grip immediately, accompanied by a sharp crack from their large bony hooves meeting.  After Barb, I'd had enough of games to decide my friend's futures, even with it being Brim, part of me couldn't help but worry.  Above, some slavers swung their searchlights from the scaffolding down onto the table, highlighting them under the hot rays.  Cast in contrast, the crowd of slaves and slavers equally beginning to build up a frenzy for the expectant match were blacked out in the darkness of post-storm Fillydelphia, me amongst their horrid, singular, moving black shadows.

    “First hoof to hit the table loses!  You go on three, no other limb movement and any interdiction from outside seen by me disqualifies the one benefiting!  Take the strain!”

    Muscles crunched, the judder of movement between the two set the tight strain prior to the start.  Brimstone looked like an unmoving rock, his entire body still and staring from a blank face. The Master just licked his pock marked lips with his tongue, grinning through yellowed teeth while shaking off his shoulders.  The chain around his neck jingled...that metal collar he had attached to it swinging loosely to the side. As though sensing me watching, his other hoof just stroked it gently. I felt my stomach turn.

    “One!” The crowd joined in.  “Two!” The pair matched a hard glance.

    “...THREE!”

The table actually shook from the sudden rush of power going under their legs up to the hooves on their ends.  The crowd began screaming out, every slaver for The Master, most slaves just a general cheer. They didn't dare support The Master's opponent directly.  I saw Glimmerlight stomp a hoof and smile as Brimstone's hoof gained the immediate advantage, getting the first push in to knock The Master's back a good few inches already.  But it had stopped there, where they now strained and matched strengths.

    “Come on raider, is a cheap first push all you have?  Perhaps you're still wounded?”

Brimstone gave no reaction, simply keeping up the pressure.  Despite his boast, The Master's hoof was slowly being pushed down.  Shaking and gradual, Brimstone was like an advancing unstoppable wall of power that gave no ground.  Muscles and veins bulged on both their legs as Brimstone brought him halfway to the table, forcing on the advantage.

“Hgn...not bad...not bad...” To my horror, The Master just grinned.  “...for a pony long past his prime. You're just an old stallion now, 'warlord,' a relic of your own...sssh...history!  Me? I'm still part of the present, headed to a future you can't stop!”

Their hooves ceased, before with a warping of his face and twitching of an eyebrow in strain, The Master began exerting his power.  My mouth slowly began falling open as I saw him actually resist, match, and then push backward, returning the battle closer to the middle.  The slavers were deafening, stomping the thick mud up to splash my eyes and coat, my...well...coat, with wet muck that flew in through the tent entrance.  Squinting, I felt Glimmerlight wrap her hoof around mine in silent support under the flap. Brimstone wouldn't want us distracting him with cheers...but come on...

No...no...the denial entered my head as I saw Brimstone's hoof move past the centre, slowly losing ground.  The Master's shoulders and body seemed larger than I'd ever imagined, bringing forth far more power than I'd ever thought that wide body ever possessed.  Brimstone was taller and ripped upon every muscle on his body, while The Master was simply broad and had a certain squat power that belied his own large height and thickset torso.  It dawned on me that though Brimstone was clearly stronger, The Master's physical stature may actually place him at a huge advantage in this particular game.

    He knew that going in, of course, he never did anything without absolutely knowing.  Whimpering, I just watched as Brimstone's huge muscles shook and strained to try and stop the gradual pressure of The Master's hoof pressing him past the halfway point to losing.

“You're trying to protect the little whore with this, warlord?” The Master eyed Brimstone, receiving a harsh look in response.  “Oh, I'm going to enjoy having her all to myself the moment I'm done here.  I'm sure you know the feeling...raider.  Hehehe...”

    Oh boy, that did it.  That did it.

Brimstone's hoof stopped on the spot, six inches from the table.  Brimstone's eyes widened, baring his teeth as he reversed the momentum, stopping just short of the point of no return.

    “She won't be yours, nor will he, not while I can change anything to try and keep anypony away from you, Shackles.”

A growing strength began building in his body.  It became clear how much more he still had left to give as he began to lift The Master's hoof up, round past the halfway point with apparent ease as he threw what seemed to be every bit of power he had into the game.  Two of the biggest and strongest ponies together, but one showing just how outrageously powerful he could suddenly be. The Master seemed to be cut short of a comeback, sweat beading off of his head when his hoof was bent over, being forced down toward the table on the other side.  Around me, the cheering had wisely stopped from the slaves, the slavers decrying Brimstone and stomping for their leader to up his game. To 'crush the raider.'

I began to feel a little elation, Brimstone was doing it!  Glimmerlight was fearlessly cheering for him, hopping up on her hind legs to stomp with both front hooves.

    Then I saw The Master's eyes once more, and I saw the truth.

    He wasn't desperate and losing, not at all.  He'd wanted to give us hope.

“Not...bad...warlord...” His eyes remained on mine, grinning wider and wider as he struggled to keep Brimstone's power back.  The raider was almost leaning over, snorting to finish this now. “Not...bad...at all...pity I've been holding back...nopony beats me at this...”

The tables turned on the spot.  His back seemed to arch, those massive shoulders under the plate armour twisting, and bellowing out loud, The Master threw every ounce of his real untapped strength behind the game.  Under the cheering of the slavers, Brimstone's hoof came back, back, and back at a horrible rate. Struggling, I saw a drop of sweat actually drip from his forehead. The Master's new assault stalled, stammered, but then crushed down with unceasing power.  Laughing out loud, he brought Brimstone's hoof over to the other side of the table...holding it above it...

    “Last chance to win out, warlord!  How's it feel to know you're past your time?  All downhill from here!”

I saw Brimstone offer one last push...but The Master's hoof slammed down, dropping his weight and strength to throw Brimstone's hoof right down.

    There was a sound of a hoof on wood.

The crowd exploded in cheering.  Bets that had been made changed hooves upon that one sound of the table being struck.  I saw Glimmerlight stagger backward, feeling myself already trying to pull her away into the tent...to get her away from the Master before he came to claim my sister.  She was...she was...his...for the day.  No...no, how could Brimstone have lost? 

    “Hey, wait, what the fuck?”

The shout of the slaver overseeing the match sent a jolt of silence around, as everypony looked back at the pair.  The Master was still straining, frowning, sweating and giving it his all.

    Brimstone's hoof had simply ceased to move a half inch from the table.  The noise had been his other hoof, tapping on the tabletop as though bored.  Letting my eyes glance up, I saw him just staring with calm eyes. Had he just been toying with The Master?  Then, he cleared his throat.

    “So, we done warming up?  You ready to play for real, Shackles?”

    “What...you...”

    “Three, two, one, go.” Brimstone deadpanned, before actually trying for the first time all along.

The muscles along his leg swelled, bulging like I'd never seen as the legendary warlord let a life’s worth of grown strength and raw power flow.  Snarling, letting that primal instinct take over to reach heights of irresistible energy combined with that massive earth pony spirit, he let fly with his real strength.  Their hooves snapped over almost too fast for me to even follow, slamming down on the table hard enough to snap the entire thing in half and shatter pieces of wood across the crowd.  Shackles was flung from his protesting chair, dumped on his side below Brimstone to collapse in the mud.

    That...oh...that made the crowd go silent.  The Master had just been defied.  In public.

He swirled, roaring with rage to get to his hooves and stamp the floor, shoving a slaver who tried to help him away.  I could hear him muttering below his breath as dozens of ponies decided to make themselves scarce, both slavers and slaves.

    “Oh, you fool...daring to do that...to try embarrassing your Master!?”

Rounding off to stare at Brimstone, he found the raider's steely gaze simply looking him in the eye.  Nopony was near them, anticipating the outbreak of a serious incident. The Master looked ready to simply destroy him, but Brimstone didn't even blink.  I saw my friend lean closer, almost whispering.

    “You're going to what then?  Punish me?  You just lost, Shackles.  Take it from a veteran...you don't hold your end of the bargain, you throw the toy out the pram?  You'll lose more respect of your position than you'll ever recover with anger and fear alone.”

    The Master met his eyes, glowering.
   
    “So you 'protected' the mare. Grand job, but I still have you to order around.  Don't think you're free of 'repercussions' here, raider!”

I doubted many could hear them.  I stood rock still, watching two of the most lethal ponies I knew in the middle of a heated argument.  Oh this could be bad, this could be very bad...

    “Give me extra shifts?  I welcome them, Shackles!  Execute me? I deserve it. You want to damage my body?  Go ahead, you'll get nothing out of me.  Make me work and I'll get the job done happily.  Face it, Shackles.”

    Their faces came close together.

    “I'm the one pony you'll never be able to hurt.  So you're going to have to just accept that.  Back off...and get the order to get Glim some food and a free day if you want to claw back any respect from your underlings.”

The Master was seething with an underlying rage I'd never seen him exude.  This was no mere show of force, for once he was truly and utterly angry. But Brimstone merely met it with a cold glare.  Slowly, against all my belief, I saw The Master step to the side, snarling at Brimstone before barking to one of his subordinates to fetch some oatmeal for their tent.  Sensing the real entertainment had passed, many of the ponies around had returned to work or shoving others to work. Nopony dared go near him. 

Brimstone turned, trotting back toward us with his eyes firmly (smartly, I presumed) set on the departing slaver.  The Master simply continued to growl in response, his eyes occasionally glancing to the pale Glimmer, like she was a toy denied.

    “Only until I find a way to hurt you, slave...hurt you bad. Oh I'll find a way.  Just you wait, you've made a mistake that will cost you someday with this...”

With that, he turned his thick bulk around, stomping off.  I highly pitied whoever was next on his schedule. But what he'd said.  That sounded like a threat, but The Master didn't make threats. Slit had told me as much.

    Somehow, that only made it worse.

We were left alone until the food came, past a quick attempt to congratulate Brimstone from Glimmer.  The moment we had some much needed sustenance to share, even if it was sloppy and milky out of date oatmeal, we began to make plans.  Brimstone and Glimmerlight detailed what we still had. The stashes inside were allegedly safe, just too important to risk bringing to the outdoor temporary camp.  That meant we still had some food and drink, plus whatever Glimmerlight's filter could make from the last rainfall. Added into that were three spell-orbs that Glimmer had stolen from Protégé's desk and hidden deep in her own robes between the seams.  In the rush for medical support, nopony had really searched us. That, and we'd been seen to be helping the slavers, so I guessed that afforded some trust.

Including Barb's death and the pacification of the raiders, we might have called this a complete success, now that we ended with more materials than we'd gone in with.  But the looming depression of having lost somepony who said they'd help us kept reality in firm check. We were slaves, prone to punishment, labour, and accident more than anypony.

But we did come to one conclusion: I still had a little space to work in, being on the run.  Before too long had passed, it became clear I needed to make myself scarce. I couldn't hide in their tents forever before somepony came to fetch them for a shift.

“You remember the way?  Just look for anything you can in that metro, Murky.  Be it hiding spots, loose walls, locked doors...scout anything, draw it out, if you can, to a map.”

    A pang of hurt shot down my spine.  I couldn't draw anything right now, but I nodded, allowing Glimmer to saddle me up for leaving.  But even as I approached the wall to grapple over it into the darkness, I felt her lunge forward to embrace me once more.  I returned it, holding it for just a little while longer. I could see her pushing the tragic events of late down hard. It was so obvious.

    “You going to be okay, sis’?”

    I could see she appreciated that, and nodded.

“Maybe...maybe when you're back I can talk, Murky. Just give me time, we can start on trying to help me remember then, perhaps. I think that’d help. Thanks for coming back.”

    “I'll help you. I promised. Cross my heart.”

“Hope to fly.” She finished for me, leaning back to smile lightly, before ruffling my mane.  “We'll see you around, Murky. Stay safe out there.”

    Stepping back, I separated from her.  Brimstone gave another curt nod, as impassive as ever.

    I looked behind me at Glimmer, before whispering to Brimstone.

    “Take care of her, please?”

    I regretted asking, expecting him to chide me for stating the obvious. But the big earth pony just nodded.

    “Always.  We'll get by.  You just concentrate on finding us a path to escape.”

It took a lot of effort to turn around, fire that grapple, and leave them behind under The Master's rule. But yet conversely, I felt the trust they had in me now. 

Especially now, in what felt like our darkest hours, I had to live up to that.

The metro station lay before me.  The journey across had been fairly easy, what with most slaves and slavers inside out of the rain earlier.  Now, I hid in an overturned food cart across the street and cast my eyes to the metro itself. A skeleton of metal and rotted wood, it had clearly once been a building made almost entirely of glass that had been blown out.  The street and floor were covered in shards that had been broken time and time again. It left behind a strangely empty looking shell of a cover for the metro station entrance. I could hear ponies inside, mostly chatting calmly, likely slavers then.  Two more patrolled outside, just calmly keeping an eye on the street. They wouldn't be any trouble to avoid; even from here I could see a building by the side that would let me creep in, now that the windows were all gone.

I thought while I made my way around, trying to avoid splashing through puddles and making a noise.  Protégé had told me that the inner metro circle was simply used as a shelter for some slaves now, or to house supplies where they might be more preserved.  It was all too likely I was wandering my way into a slaver den. That would explain the low security...

    Why couldn't I ever go any place nice?

Carefully pulling my (still rather sore) body around tumbled furniture, I dropped into the alley through a window of the adjoining building.  Glass tinkled below me, leading me to freeze on the spot. Had they heard me?

    They hadn’t. Sticking around, a few minutes later I heard no change in their patrols.

Sticking to hopping between fallen rocks to avoid the glass covered floor, I made my way into the metro station from the side.  I emerged into a small cafeteria, surrounded by a low wall bearing dead plant life atop it. Immediately, it became apparent how new this place must have been before the balefire hit.  Many of the chromed metal turnstyles and benches were still somewhat shiny; whatever process that had created them preserving their coat. Beside the wooden slots for small kiosks and rotted plants, it created a very strange duality of old and new.  I saw closed shutters on the windows for tickets, a higher level with offices (probably management), and a few tunnels leading to overground railroads near the back of this area. In the middle of the hub was a large opening with long and shallow steps that led underground. That had to be it.

Unfortunately, there were plenty enough slavers lazing around on the benches that to try and get by would be an exercise in futility.  A couple were playing an odd game on a checkered board while others cleaned some rather unclean looking weapons. One snoozed off even as I watched her.  There was no going down from the normal route.  There had to be a way! This station was likely our best bet to find the Ministry Station and our ticket to the outer circle.  Glimmer and Brimstone were relying on me to scout this out and find us a way to sneak past all this! Ducking back into the cafeteria, I had a thought.

Metro lines were underground. This had been a world that lived in perpetual fear of zebra strikes.  Even if it wasn't a megaspell, even I'd heard tales of zebra terror attacks upon Equestria. A cramped metro seemed, to me, a likely target.  If I could figure that out, likely so could the architects of old. If I were designing this place, I'd want to have alternate entrances and exits to the underground to help give ponies a way out should the worst happen.

Taking my time, emboldened by the thought, I began to sneak around the edge.  Sticking to the cafeteria, I hopped out of it and hid behind a large marble square that had once housed an interior tree.  Bit by bit, I jumped from square to square, heading for the ticket kiosk. If there were any way down, surely the staff would have control of it?  One of the toughened glass windows lay around the corner from the sight of the slavers, so I rolled toward it instead. Tugging my saddlebag off, I pushed it through the thin gap where caps would have been exchanged.  (Pre-war used caps too, right? I would have. They were so shiny and colourful!) After that, I squeezed my own body through, trying not to let the obvious worry about how thin I had to be to even permit that take hold in my mind.  I didn't get stuck, but it was a bit of a tug, before I finally popped out and landed on the other side, knocking the revolving chair flying.  I landed with a grunt of pain, failing to stop the chair before it fell.

    “You hear that?”

Immediately, the sound of trotting emerged.  I stuffed myself into the shelves below the counter, pulling my saddlebag into my belly as tightly as I could.  The trotting came closer, followed by another. A vibration went through the counter as they tapped on the glass of the kiosk.

    “The hell are you doin'?”

    “Makin' noise.  Scares radroaches off if it's them.”

An argument about what radroaches were really scared of or not took place, followed by more tapping on the window.  I really wished they'd stop; every 'thunk' was only making my hypersensitive ears twitch and my head pound from the noise.  After a while, I heard somepony sniffing at the gap.

    “Urgh...yeah, radroaches.  Stinks in there...”

    Oh come on...

“Well, I ain't getting it.  They'll just come back anyway.  C'mon, it's your move. By the way, you hear that on the radio?  'Bout the Dweller?”

“Shit, man!  Quiet! You want them to know you've been listening to that banned station?  Yes, I heard. About fucking time she realised there's not any point after giving us such a hard time.”

    They trotted away slowly.  Trying to force the insults they laid at her hooves out of my mind, I dropped back out of the shelf and stretched my legs.  Almost to my shock, the mouthpiece of my saddle sprung out the moment I did. Grumbling, I flicked it away again.  Someday I'd get used to this thing. Not that it made me any less gleeful to have it. Sometimes, I found myself just looking back at it around me and smiling like a foal with a present.  It had helped keep my mind off the pressures of being an outlaw.

A little quiet exploration found a back office.  I'd feared for any remains, but there was nothing but someplace that had clearly been left in a hurry.  Well, if you have a metro nearby, of course you'd run there the moment those deathly sirens had started.  There were, surprisingly, no desks (a first for everything...) but rather just one long work surface that ran around the edge of the room, covered in old tickets and a few faulty looking terminals.  I spotted another holstered set of audio diaries beside one. A single diary lay on the floor, a little red light still blinking. Glancing around me, I pulled out my PipBuck and adjusted the volume to low before picking up the diary and clipping it on.  It took a few seconds of fiddling and remembering which buttons did what, but I eventually got it to play, hearing the busy sounds of an office behind a mare's voice.

    “End of day list for Friday, assistant manager Creamy Pop.  Hey, Bulb? When you get this tomorrow, I'm real sorry, but the terminals went down today so the cash up hasn't been sent to HQ yet.  That's about it, other than that there may be a complaint coming into you tomorrow too. Nothing big, just some idiot who can't read the rules.  Oh, and...I know you had family in Manehattan, so...lemme know how it all is, okay? Everyone's talking about the rumours that they got hit a few minutes ago by some sort of terror strike.  Just let me know, okay? We're going to head to the news desks to wait for information, hopefully we won't—”

    I felt my entire body clench tightly.  In the background of the diary, a low and wailing note was beginning to pick up and gain in volume.  Ever-present and immediately controlling the atmosphere, the siren began to sound.

    “Oh Goddesses, is that...is that a drill?  Hey, everypony, you heard of any drills? Please tell me it's just a drill!”

“Terminal doesn't say, but they were planning on having a surprise one this month.  My brother works at Stable-Tec; says they keep requesting them for Stable ticket holders.  Hey, listen!”

    The sound in the background didn't change, what were they listening for...?

    “It's still going...”

    “So?”

“Don't you read the brochures, Creamy?  A long one that doesn't change is ‘alert,’ one that warbles and goes up and down is 'attack.' It'll be the drill, they wouldn't dare use 'attack' for one.  We should treat it like it's real though, you know what Bulb's like for following Ministry Law for drill practice...”

“All right, we'll go by the book.  Everypony! Pack up and get underground now!  Get the PA system to the public and move to the service stairs at the back!  Oh horseapples, those sirens creep me out, that's the third time this year already...”

    “I think that's the point, boss.  Let's go.”

    The diary hit the desk before falling to the ground, I could heard the clacks as it was dropped.

    “Ah, damn!  Broke the record button...well that's this one done in.  C'mon! Move it! I don't want to be up here with those things longer than I have to.  Chills down my spine, you'd think they could make a nicer—”

    Click.

    “End of day recording limit reached.”

    My entire body was shivering.  Drill or not, that noise had elicited a reaction in me.  Like in my escape attempt when they had sounded it as an alarm.  As though the knowledge that it had actually happened was enough to biologically condition all newborns of the pony race with the same blood-freezing terror of that deathly wail.  Those same ponies in the drill would have heard the real thing, the 'attack' variant. They knew the difference. They'd have known on the spot their world was over.

But it had at least confirmed what I sought. That there were some alternate ways down back here.  Still trying to fight that sound from my memory, I limped on. It wasn't far, just through past some old toilets and down into the back area for all the shops and staff members.  A spiral stairway, almost too short for four legged ponies, was built into the corner. Glancing around, I could see each of the shop back doors had been flung open, items strewn everywhere from the last rush for the real siren.  Very quickly, I began to fear what I might find below ground.  As though unwilling, I spent a little time hunting around the debris.  I located a few old plastic bottles for Glimmer to fill up inside a long non-functional fridge as well as, to my delight, a single can of unopened food.

It took a little working with one of my grappling gun's hooks, but I finally managed to break open the seal.  Inside, I found a thick white mush. Potato!  

Sticking my muzzle in as far as I could to lap it all out, I found it to be powdery, dry, and lacking in any real taste.  But it was sustenance. It was something, and my growling stomach was all the more grateful.  Pulling the tin off, feeling my muzzle's rad sores stinging from the rub, I let out as much of a satisfied breath as I could.  Unfortunately, this seemed to just have been somepony's old lunch. Everything else was rotted or long spilled. Without venturing too close to the shop windows, (I could still hear the slavers outside) I took one last look around and pocketed an old mouth-torch before finally moving to the stairs.  Casting a glance down, I saw a rather shocking drop beneath me. My eyes turned briefly to my PipBuck. Likely I would be hearing from Sundial soon, as well.

    “Well, here goes.” 

I took a slow breath. Time to find the next steps of my way home.

Taking my time, I began to realise that underground was not perhaps what I was expecting.  Things had been fine and isolated upon my descent, but I had stopped now.

    I'd heard something.

A low noise, like background hum and ambience that rippled up the long vertical walls of the service stairwell.  Unpredictable, bereft of any pattern, it continued its low and undulating groan that picked up the deeper I went.  Remembering Protégé's tales of the metro, I could only bite my lip and almost hope that this was something as simple as a slaver den.  Occasionally, louder sounds would spike up, higher pitched and sharper. But it was, all of it, simply cast into an unidentifiable drifting mess by the shape of the tunnels and height that I was hearing it from.

Gradually, I began to continue, my ears twitching and my mind worrying.  The noise kept eating away at my already frayed nerves, growing and then dropping.  Always there in the background, just waiting to—

    Beep!

    My hooves scrambled, falling against the wall and covering my head with a squeal that dropped off into a whimper.

    Beep!

Quickly, I began to realise.  I'd been so high strung that even Sundial's messages startled me.  Quickly digging the PipBuck out and tying it to my hoof to listen, I continued.  At least he could keep me distracted from the growing volume.

    Click.

    Instead, I got a mare's voice, fast talking and playful, one I recognised from before.

“Hi there, Sundial's nightly update!  So sorry he can't do it himself, so I guess I'll do it for him.  I just know he'd have wanted to say, 'Hi there! I'm Sundial and I have the greatest marefriend in history, she's so perfect in every way!  She is soooo understanding that she even saw the magazines I had under my bed and didn't mind a—”

    “H-hey!  Are you recording on that!?”

    “Oh, hello sweetie!  Just offering the 'Sky-eye-view' on your life!”

    “Aw, come on, Sky!  They don't need to hear about...oh...”

    “Just realised what I said, huh?”

    “Yeah...”

    I heard Skydancer giggle, before a soft sound of somepony kissing another was heard.

    “You are so cute when you blush, you know that?  Fiiiine, I'll let you have your little toy back, I've got to head home to get ready anyway.  So, bye-bye, ponies of the future!”

    “You really are crazy, Sky...”

    “You know you love it.  If the feisty looks in those photos of the magazine are anything to go by—”

    “Hey!  Gimme that, please, Sky!”

    “Gotta take iiit!”

    A little playful scuffle broke out, in which I could hear the PipBuck being tugged away behind Skydancer, giggling madly, and Sundial's pleading.  Sometimes his words were interrupted with the altogether more loving sound of a quick peck on the lips. Finally, with a little exhale of air, I heard somepony pinned down.

    “Hah!  Some earth pony!  Pinned by a little pegasus like me?  Here you go, hun. I'll see you tomorrow after work, flying the night shift tonight.”

    “Phew...yeah...okay.  I'll see you then.”

    They said their goodbyes, the wonderful sound of them interacting as buck and mare with such a light hearted fun to their relationship making me both feel warmed inside as much as it hit home like a sharp envy in my heart.

Sundial seemed to dust himself off, muttering about 'that crazy mare' and laughing to himself, before sitting down again (I presumed) with the PipBuck.

    “Uh, sorry about all that.  I might delete it...dunno. Anyway, for the proper update. I've made a choice.  I can't let her go, I can't even risk having to let her go again.  There are more and more drills, like somepony up top's beginning to fear we need the practice.  I...I'm going to sell something to the zebras. The money they're offering is just too large to ignore—with it, I could afford another ticket in under a few months!  I...I've decided to try something that seems important...an old design of armour we abandoned before the current project.  They'll think it's all high tech, but it was way over-designed and barely worked at all, so it won't hurt Equestria, right?”

    Beneath me, the sound was only getting louder.  I felt I recognised the sounds...what were they?  Everything was so distorted in this strange spiral shaft.

    “So long as somepony else doesn't give up the good stuff, they won't ever know I'm feeding them long out of date info.  Maybe...maybe this could work for Equestria in the end, huh?  Like, counter espionage or something.  Oh I don't know, the Ministry of Morale's gonna take me away if they ever find out!  But the meeting's tonight, I've already got the blueprints copied to hand over. This entire city just feels lethal now. We've all heard the reports of ponies being taken from the refugee camps, disappearing into the night with no trace.  The Ministry of Peace has been running all over the place trying to find them, even investigating a few workers who went missing from our factory last month. I figure they just bailed and went to the country. The cities aren't what they once were.”

    Suddenly, one of the noises from below me got much louder, more clarity coming to it as I neared the bottom.

    Oh Goddesses, I knew what that sound was. I'd heard it a million times in my life.

    “I best be going. The zebras were very specific.  Ten at night, around the back of the factory complex.  I have to admit, them being here and a bunch of refugees going missing?  Seems way too much of a coincidence. It'd be just like the stripes to kill off a few defenceless refugees to keep them spreading fear and worry amongst another populace.  Urgh. Right, they're getting their plans, I'm getting my money, and then Sky and I will be off to a Stable to be safe forever. That's all that matters now to me. Wish me luck...”

    “Good luck...”

    “Heh, I guess I'll get around to telling this thing about how I got my cutie mark someday, huh?  Goodnight.”

    “Night, Sundial...”

    Click.

Biting my lip, I wanted to sit and think for a pony that was quickly, through all of time, becoming like another friend to me.  But the noise was too great, far too great now, and I knew what it was.

    It was the sound of ponies in misery.

Slowly, like the reveal of a grand hall upon entering the gates, the metro came to light before me through a fallen section of wall near the bottom of the shaft.  Massive, spreading in all directions, the opening into the main trainstop filled my gaze. Dual layered, with the platforms beneath and an open plan suspended waiting area at the top, it almost felt like an outdoor site.  An old and chipped mosaic lined the roof, depicting the great cycle of night and day between the great Goddesses. In the middle, lined along the twilight between times, lay the six symbols of the Ministries.

    But it was no longer a metro station.

    It was a gate into hell.

Under the symbols of the past, lay the horror of the future laid bare.  Opposite the entranceway, had I taken the normal route, there lay a large doorway from which a dull red light pulsed and radiated.  Outside it lay lines of slaves in neck-chains, kept standing by a will seeking to dominate their life. Many of them were tugging full converted metro trains that were laid low on their suspensions with thick rock and wreckage.  Others advanced into the tunnels bearing tools across their backs, pickaxes, auto axes, and spades. Those coming in off their work were dragged ruthlessly into the gate, disappearing into the red light to join the commotion that seemed to drift out of it and up the shaft I had descended.  The looks on their faces...I knew it from my own, the day I had been put in that collar.

    Below Fillydelphia itself, the slavery only went on, even more brutal than on the surface...

It all flowed outward from a central point that explained everything, absolutely everything, as to why this was such a nightmare made real for ponies like me.  At the centre of the raised platform, I could see one pony overseeing everything, standing before it all.

    The Master.

    This was the entrance to The Master's personal slave camp.

Fear told me to go back, to report that this was not a way out.

Hope told me that this was the only known link we had to find evidence of a way out.

Courage was silent. In the wake of the Mall riots, I had proven myself to at least have some. But it had been drawn from examples and determination to protect. The last day had already proven one of those examples had been corrupted in my mind.

But loyalty, that still drove me. Loyalty to find a way home for my friends. The same loyalty that Protégé had proven and shown to me.

I had to go on.

At least an element of logic comforted me. I wouldn't have to go into his camp. The tunnels left in many more directions than that, with enough of a crowd and large trains being carted down them that being able to sneak along wouldn't be impossible.

But even with all of that, it was tough to keep going and descend those stairs knowing that he was observing the area. Everywhere I had gone today, he’d been waiting, like something was keeping us within a hundred metres or one another.

Thankfully, the service stairwell I'd descended opened out into the metro tunnels from the very side, deep in shadows. I had a little space to choose my chance to exit.

Pressing my front hooves against the stairwell's door, the rusting locks almost seemed to crust apart under being moved at all. But all the sounds here were reverberating off the walls, pounding into my head far worse than they should. A mare's cries shot above it all amongst the crack of a whip. A buck weeping openly in the chain gang had the sound of sobbing echoing back and forward. They were, all of them, like the ponies I'd seen earlier around Sunny. Blackened, choking, sick, and covered in burns or crudely healed injuries. I'd seen such things on many slaves above ground, but it was everypony down here.

I fell back inside the door for a second to get my bearings, drawing the map to think about directions and which tunnel would go closest to the Ministry.

    “Why are you lying down?  You will stand, slave! Stand and await your cart!”

Everypony around who even was slightly kneeling shot to their hooves, whether or not they were the ones being called out.  I did too.

    That wasn't a good sign. Why was I obeying?  Why was I obeying!?

    “The second shift of the night shall begin!  Slavers! Take them back to their cages, their third shift will begin in one hour.”

A chorus of slavers chanted out in agreement, as willingly obedient as the slaves.  Forcing my legs to crouch again in the service room, I used my PipBuck light on the map.  If I was reading it right (something I highly doubted), the closest tunnel to the Ministry was the one on the same side as my stairwell, but the one on the other side of the platform from the way the door opened.  I'd need to briefly go out there to make it in...

    Folding up the map, I bit my lip.  The Master could spot me in a crowd instantly.  He knew my every movement, shape and size.  He was far too observant to just hide in a box or something either.  If I moved, I'd have to do it with absolute stealth. Why was he even here anyway?  Didn't he have the Mall to take care of?  It was like he knew where to just wait and terrify me from.  I wondered if he knew I'd been so close, if he was just messing with me, screwing up my head by always being in the right place to make me scared before the collar would suddenly clamp around my neck when I least expected it.

Right...Murky...be brave.  Just be brave, you can do this.  Be brave like Brim and Glimmer and Protégé and Littlepi—

My train of thought jarred, feeling a welling of emotion that I had to almost beat back down.  I couldn't let it affect me now.

    It was perhaps the most terrifying twenty feet of my entire life up till now.

Sticking low to the ground, I slid around the corner and into the main station itself.  Immediately, I rushed up and crouched behind a series of seats. Drawing my mirror, I angled it to watch for The Master to look away each time.  The rest of the slavers I'd just have to pray didn't care as much to look. Slaves glanced at me with dead and hopeless eyes, their mouths hanging open like mentally damaged patients who had been stripped of all personality.  Oh, look away! You'll give me away!

    “Eyes front!  Back in line!”

    Their heads snapped around.  Please don't look at what they saw.  The mirror showed his head turning to snap at some others while speaking to another of his seemingly many assistants.  Over the cacophony, I couldn't detect the individual words, just his rumbling and scraggly voice. Taking the opportunity, I leapt forward to behind an old advertisement board.  Pinkie Pie stared down at me from the other side of it, seemingly advertising a new brand of singing party sprite-bot, judging by the little song notes coming out of it. I recognised the design; I'd seen those odd ones with video screens now and again around Fillydelphia.

Part of me found a little respite in thinking about them.  Anything other than concentrating on the ongoing, never-screams of anguish emerging from that hateful gateway...

    I made the jump to the next one, catching The Master's face whipping around the moment I did.  Pulling my tail in quickly, I sat and huddled up behind the next bench, the last one before the next tunnel!  I didn't even dare put my mirror around the corner, but I could feel his gaze witheringly directed at this one spot, feel it chilling my body more than any siren could.

    “Get off the bench!  Not your place! Now get back to work, I expect to see another ten feet by the time I'm back!”

He was leaving. I could hear his stomping coming down, passing by the entrance to his den and across the platforms toward the stairs.  Then he stopped.

    “Somepony close that door, who opened it?”

I heard chains clatter as he drove toward the area.  Figuring his attention was away, I dashed forward and hopped around the corner.  Behind me, glancing out, I saw a group of slaves point my way.

    “S-slave...”

    The Master's hoof crunched upon the buck's face, throwing him back in line.

    “Wrong answer, wretch.  What.  Slave?”

The buck pointed this way.  I leapt back and immediately began galloping down the tunnel, not even caring about the other slaves that looked up, surprised at one of their number moving as fast.  But I could hear the thumping sound of The Master approaching, seeking out the rebellious one of his number. If he even got a clue it was me, the entire place would go on lockdown!  The tunnel was uneven, hard to run down with the rail tracks overlapping one another and interspersed with debris and old slippery puddles. I ran alongside a huge metro-train cart that was loaded up with tools to go back in.  The sides were barricaded up with scrap metal, making it impossible to leap up and hide! So I ran on, into the darkness. Down the tunnel, the groans and sniffs of dozens of ponies echoed and solidified even more. Crimson hazes washed down from behind us, giving the darkness a thick quality that mixed with the bloodstained slaves.  Behind me I could see the massive silhouette against his den's red light standing at the entranceway.

Praying that the darkness hid me enough, I spotted one indent into the side wall of the cramped metro tunnel.  Hopping between lines of automaton-like slaves, I tripped over their chains, landing face down on the tracks. The solid impact on my chin dizzied me, making the remainder of my stagger into the gap all the more haphazard.  My teeth shook, my loose one wobbling in the gums from the impact. The gap was fairly large, surrounded with wire fencing, probably an old maintenance cubby hole. Jamming myself against the nearest side of the wall I could, I listened for The Master approaching.

    Nothing...

Eventually, I dared to risk peeking my head out.  Focusing my eyes past the procession of slaves heading into the same tunnel on part of his ongoing operations down here, I saw no silhouette in the tunnel entrance forty feet back at the station itself.  Phew...

    Turning back into the cubby hole, I took a second to rest.  Allowing my eyes to move around. Yet as I saw what was there, I had to cover my mouth to stop the scream.

It was a dumping ground for slaves.  Piled high, those that had passed out in the tunnels had simply been thrown in here to be dealt with later.  Still 'fresh,' many lay with open eyes or mouths, every one of them simply looking tired and drawn. I could see ribs, leg joints and pelvises protruding through threadbare coats and thin skin.  They had simply been worked to death.

Backing off, I fell into the main tunnel again, my eyes not leaving the grotesque heap.  Amongst the smells of rancid slaves and thick dust I could still smell that sweet sickly flavour in the air, the one I'd so wretchedly had to be immersed in once long ago.

Why...just....just why?  What was the purpose of all this?  Why did he want to do this to ponies?

Behind me, the slaves offered no answer, trudging onward on the commands that they had been given, not willing to look or see for anything better for fear of being singled out.  Unable to take it all on board, I merely continued galloping into the tunnel, sticking to the edges and ignoring every one of the foul stinking corpse dens from then on...

The sound of rock chipping and the whine of auto axes began to waft up the tunnels.  I had slowed down to take the next hundred metres carefully. Occasionally having to join the slaves or hide behind a moving cart as a slaver trotted past, I nervously kept advancing.  So far, this wasn't looking much like a good route to the Ministry Station, even if it were down here.  The proximity of The Master's own personal den just behind me was a threat enough, but the tunnels were active and seemingly in constant use.  This one workforce that was down here seemed to be perpetually on the job. Those coming back down the tunnel were dust covered and choking, staggering by sheer exhaustion.  The ones going in bore a look that could only be described as harsh acceptance of their place in life. For the first time, I began to get a sense of what it was like to look at me from the outside sometimes...

I reached a junction, where the tunnels split off into about four others.  No doubt service tunnels or older routes. Some of them bore shattered wooden planks along the ground like they'd been reopened.  In the hazy darkness, the heavy dust, and strong heat down here, slavers washed dim torches back and forth, lighting the reality of work down here.

    They were mining.

Along every stretch of wall, slaves were chipping and picking away at the solid rock or concrete.  Swung by weary heads or flickering weak magic, the axes seemed to only graze a little off at a time.  Clearly, The Master preferred to work by a 'slow but constant' method down here. Moving away from the entrance, I ducked behind one of the many waiting carts where slaves were heaving scraps of rock in for removal.  In this darkness it was easy to simply lie low.

Something still made me itch though. The Master never just 'gave up' like before.  Had I really given him the slip again or was he just waiting back there at my way out?

    Shaking my head, I tried to clear the horrid thoughts that being so close to (or within) his den were giving me.  I could still hear the sounds from back there, the low moan drifting through the metro from his own little corner of depraved practice.  I could see many of the slaves here bearing obvious scars. No way were that buck's lash scars from just a mistake...that mare was likely walking with a limp for another reason...

    This was...sick, even by Fillydelphia's standards.  These ponies were literally working themselves to death down here, trapped in whatever horrors went on behind those gates.  The stench of rancid sweat and the horrid conditions around their own filth while not being allowed to cease mining gave a reason to why the slavers trotted with their gas masks firmly on.  Catching a draft down one tunnel in a bad way almost made me throw up on the spot. Ponies had to work in this...

    But really, my other thought was what they were doing here anyway.  What was there to mine in a metro?

    The thought slapped me across like a leather whip.  It was so obvious.

    They knew about the Ministry Station.

The Master was in league with Grindstone.  No doubt the old donkey had seen the same things I did in Aurora's office and made the same conclusions as Glimmer.  He had wanted Aurora's research from Stable Ninety-Three. He was trying to make her inventions work. Now he and The Master wanted her hidden stash of whatever it was they were putting together down here.  I began to wonder if even Red Eye knew of their real intentions, outside of trying to locate Ministry secrets. Would they 'do a Sundial' and perhaps only give him the things they didn't want to keep secret?  Grizzly had mentioned some great political game going on. Was I seeing one of the more covert large operations?

Even as I watched, one slave collapsed from the wall.  Falling backward, she landed on the tracks and seemed to have a spasm on the spot.  A filthy yellow infection on her belly looked distended, weeping pus across the floor.  Slavers immediately galloped over, hauling the poor mare to her feet. To my horror, they simply set her, at gunpoint, to work again.  She cried even as she kept striking the wall, her stomach visibly weeping infectious fluids still. Across the junction, another mare was set upon by a second slaver for pausing.  A baton cracked across her neck, leaving thick lumps after only a few seconds. Her screams of pain only joined the others echoing in the air. Along the walls, occasionally I saw whole groups of ponies lying together?  Dead? No, resting. They weren't even allowed to leave the mining wall to sleep. Many twitched, clearly in the throes of the same nightmare they would soon be woken to again.

Shivering, I pulled myself tighter. This really was a truly proper hell for slaves down here.  Trapped in the dark, forced to work at a blank face, seemingly almost all day.

Carefully, I began to pull myself through the busy intersections in the middle.  Carts were being pulled along the rails and swivelled on some large turntable (pulled by slaves, of course) until they faced down another tunnel where other teams worked.  Trying the old trick of getting under one of them, I managed to make it to the far side fairly easily. Really, the hardest thing was trying to not let my emotions and fears get the better of my tearducts.  This was such an atrocity against ponies.

The further I crept down the tunnels, the more I got a sense of just how long this had lasted.  Wall after wall had been chipped away at for a few feet, before being given up on. This entire tunnel past a certain point bore the markings.  They had to have been at this for months!

    No...I needed somewhere to hide for a moment.  This was just too much.

Checking around me, I slid into the nearest maintenance room, noting an odd scrawled sign by the door.  Immediately inside, I gagged. Coughing out hard enough that I had to kneel down, I dropped to my side and dug out a section of cloth to cover my mouth with.  There was nothing in here but the sad sight of a great many dead ponies, long rotting. By now, it almost felt routine in this place. I was filled with all sorts of sudden emotion.  Sadness at their plight, fury and anger at the same, and a heavy frustration that I could do nothing to help them mixed in with the terror of being trapped within it all myself.  That I had kept going down here in the darkness to blend in and sneak well was a testament to that I really still wanted out.  I still had some courage to work with.

    “Still...still able...” I breathed out.

    “Still able to what, hairball?”

    The rough voice made me scream, spinning to see the corpses standing up!  Memories of a janitor in the Mall almost made me run madly for the door, before I saw the light of intelligence in their eyes.  Ghouls! It was just ghouls.

    Looking at the chains that linked them all together, it became apparent to me that they were slaves.

    “Asked you a question, hairball, still able to what?”

    “Answer him, come on.  Not like we get much talk down here...”

    “Mm...”

    “Yes...”

Talking almost like a committee, the ghouls formed an arc around me, all staring with yellowed or bleeding eyes over their blackened and rotten skin or muscle.  Whimpering, I looked up at them.

    “Still able to go on. To keep hopeful that I...I'll get out...”

    They laughed.  Ghouls laughing were rather unsettling sounds, filled with a dry and cracked wheeze of air.

    “Get out of Shackles' tunnels?  You don't get out! You just keep workin’ till you drop. Pity for us we can't.”

    “W-who are you?”

The lead ghoul glanced at his comrades.  Most of them wandered back to the rear wall to settle down again.  Clearly they didn't get to rest much, but four remained. Looking back at me, I was told to lie down. I obeyed rather immediately.  They settled, weariness showing in their movements. Many were carrying injuries that seeped oddly coloured blood.

    He indicated a mare to his left with a few very long strands of hair left in her mane and tail.

    “Nurse Splint.  She keeps us going best she can, worked for the last few hundred years...”

    Another mare on the same side, bearing a wrap around where her eyes, I guessed, used to be.

    “Nurse Bedlay Bloom, bastards took her eyes for looking at them wrong.”

    He then indicated a buck on the other side of him, the last one.

“Lastly, the rookie, if you could call him that these days.  Windtail Breeze was the student doctor when the bombs hit. And I'm Baton Round, was head of security at Hearts and Hooves Hospital; we all worked there.”

Hearts and Hooves! I sprang up, finding a middle subject we might all know!  Perhaps these ghouls had some good information if I could get on their side!

    “Hearts and Hooves Hospital?  You must know Doctor Weathervane!”

There was a sudden silence, before Baton Round finally stopped blinking. His chipped horn lit with a wavy yellow to close the door behind me.

“Weathervane...been a long time since I last heard of that cranky old bastard.  Been a long time under Shackles...too long. Yes, we know him. Was a friend of mine, actually. I took care of a war trauma patient about to gut him and he healed the gutting that I got given instead.  Sort of forges a bond, that sort of thing. The rest worked under him. Good terms, right?”

There was a murmuring.  Nurse Bedlay Bloom looked up, her face not even looking directly at me, the wrap around her eyes staring at the wall instead.

    “He helped me deliver my first foal when there were complications. I was so proud to work under him.”

    Splint nodded and smiled.  “Deliver your child? He delivered me.  Good stallion, he is...good stallion.  He really liked us being around...good days...good days...”

Very quickly, I sensed the scale of this conversation flying way beyond my ability to relate.  These ponies had all worked with Weathervane back before the bombs. Hell, they'd seen old Equestria in the same way Weathervane had.  Now they were slaves in their own city.

    But something didn't make sense.

“If...if you're all ghouls.  Why don't you sign onto the crater duty?  A few months and you're free, no way The Master could stop you, that's Red Eye's rules!”

    Windtail Breeze shook his head sadly.

“You think Shackles plays by the rules?  Well, you're right in this case, that he couldn't stop us.  But...this is our city. We were all born here, worked here...died here.  We rose again together and we survived together. Now we're rebuilding it together.  We won't abandon Fillydelphia to the balefire. We'll do what we can to repair it before we go.  Even if it means this...it's what kept us sane. That thought that we could one day see it proper again before we let go and fall to the feral...”

    “You...chose to stay!?”

“Yes,” muttered Baton Round, “we did.  It's our home. Means a lot to a ghoul, that does...out there?  We wouldn't recognise it. Never left Filly even before the megaspells.  I'd just be in a place where I'd fall to the feral all the faster. Here at least I got something to cling to, to keep me alive and going.  Just wish it weren't in here though. Shackles wouldn't let us get any word out to join somethin' else if we tried. Nopony else comes down here, either...”

“What keeps you going, little one?” Bedlam Bloom turned vaguely in my direction.  “Your voice sounds so small...weak. You are scared...”

    “I...I am. It's terrible down here...”

“It's terrible everywhere.  Here...worse, yes. I try...I try to forget what they are doing to us.  The last few months have been bad. Even many of the unlife ponies like us are passing.  Their games, their experiments killing us gradually off. Behind those gates lies nothing but pain, young one.  Your words betray that you do not know it yet. I am sorry that you are here with us now.”

I considered she must have been an incredible nurse with such a calming tone.  I could see the horrid injuries across her body. Deep cuts, infections to her very body visible without her skin and a mangled back right hoof.  I wondered just how long these ghouls had left. They all looked about ready to fall apart in a few days. It probably explained their rather drifting nostalgia about the past.

“I'm not a slave down here. I'm...I'm on the run.  Trying to find a way out. C-can you help me? I could, well, see about helping you too...”

    “How, murky pony?”

    “My name's Murky Number Seven...”

    “Appropriate and scary...” muttered Windtail.

    “How could you help us then, Murky Number Seven?” Baton Round cut in.

I took a slow breath, then regretted it instantly in the cramped room with so many ghouls.  Outside, I could hear the slavers moving around. But this was sort of what I'd hoped for, some inside intelligence on the tunnels!

“Some of us, we're planning to use the tunnels to get out. To find the Ministry Station and get to the outer circle.  If we can, we could maybe get you away from The Master at least. Somewhere you could do proper work to help repair your city.  We...um...we just need help down here.  It's too heavily guarded to get lots of ponies down.”

    They seemed to glance at one another, before Baton Round, their obvious leader by stint of (apparent) maturity, nodded.

“We are nearing our end down here, Murky.  I'd...I'd quite like to see old Weathervane again before it comes to my time.  Please, if you could get us topside in your escape...we will give you all the help you want.  We're all scared, Murky. We try to deny it, but we're terrified. Two hundred years is a long time to feel wasted with death down here.  Please, Weathervane needs us back too. Before we were sent down here, I was fearing he was turning. Getting angrier...”

“He told me to 'shut the Goddesses damned hell the fucking shit fuck up' last time...” Windtail murmured off to the side.  “But I don't wanna die down here...so much left to do. Lots of bad fates for ghouls below ground when they become useless.  Please, if you can get us out, get us to Weathervane. He knows how to treat ghouls. He could save us, I know it. We're his friends, Murk.  We need him to live, he needs us to help him through his pain. Please...”

It took all my effort to control my emotions for these tragic figures, gulping in the musty atmosphere, before nodding.

“I'll try!”

Baton Round seemed pleased, he turned me toward the doorway.

“Shackles has us all mining down here, looking for something in the walls.  But these tunnels go on for a long way. I don't know where this Ministry Station is, but I can tell you that you don't need to use the entrance you did through this hellhole.  Along this tunnel is another service shaft that leads to the surface. It's shaky...unstable, but a few ponies could go up or down it with a little effort. You can use it to get back out.  The mining never stops, but we're here about this time each day between our shifts. There's a radioactive water leak at the back of this room we use to heal up as best we can.”

    He indicated further down the tunnel, where he'd mentioned.

“Plenty of hiding spots down here. Why, if we weren't in chains, we'd break for them.  Just keep following the inner circle service line and you'll avoid most of Red Eye's storage areas in the metro.  Nopony really uses the service line since it was collapsed away from the outer circle.”

    I tried to keep all this information in my mind.  This was crucial.  Our way out could very well depend on being able to survive down here for a few days.  Baton Round and the help of his ghouls could make this go a lot faster if we could figure out just where to mine that The Master hadn't.  Frankly, I trusted Glimmer's ability to read memory orbs and the past a lot more than I did Grindstone's.

“Th-thank you, sir. I'll make sure to try and come back.  I'll...I'll tell Weathervane about you. Let him know you're still alive.  I hope you can come with us. We all have our reasons to want to go. Like one of my friends, she wants to get her son free.  Another wants to help repair her life and get back to her parents.”

    Splint nodded, as though feeling the sting of long lost parents herself, but then she looked closely at me.

    “What about you, young Murky?  What's your reason?”

    The question caught me by surprise, making me hesitate. Gulping, I lowered my voice.

    “I...I've never been free...”

The ghouls seemed to share a moment of sadness for me.  No doubt their medically driven mindsets still at work, somewhere deep inside those broken bodies.  Even as I watched, I could see Baton Round's muzzle seem to slip and move in ways no muzzle should be able to.  Had it been...snapped? Splint sighed, patting my fleece lightly.

    “Oh, I'm so sorry...”

    Taking a deeper breath, I felt it deserved a little explanation.

    “I want to be though, it's all I've tried for since the Pit.  Since the Stable Dweller escaped. She's like my inspiration!”

There was an odd silence amongst the ghouls.  They cast looks to one another. In the background, many of the other ghouls looked over at the group speaking to me.  I could see one of them held a radio.

    “The fallen mare...”

    Bedlay Bloom frowned, shivering and sitting down.  Baton Round lay a hoof over her back before turning to me.

    “I despair to be the one to bring you foul news, young slave.  But—”

    “It's not true!” I blurted forth, interrupting them long before they could speak the lies I had been dealing with since that one report.  “She didn't do that! It's...it's somepony just using her name to ruin her reputation!  She would never!”

    The ghouls glanced to one another, I could feel the unspoken conversation.  Baton looked back at me, like one might look at an idiot child barely grown.

“You have a rather frighteningly short-sighted faith in her, Murky Number Seven.  This is how the wastelands go. If you've never been free to know, then I don't blame you for—”

“I know!  All right?  I know it's not her!  She saved...she saved me from the Pit!  Showed me what it meant to be free! I don't care what you say, she's a good pony!  A good pony!  Why can't anypony but me see that?”

I settled down, turning my head away.  These were good ponies, these ghouls, but they actually bought into this stuff?

“Murk, allow me to tell you a story...” Baton sat down.  “You know, I know how it feels to watch your hero be taken by the morality and horror of the wastes like this.  I really do. Remember, I've been in Fillydelphia since it happened. It used to be even worse, no order at all.  We hid from gangs who wanted to commit genocide on ghouls. We watched ponies nailed to beams and held skyward for all to see and fear from.  There was no authority, no organisation, just an unending war between gangs and slave traders. Slaves themselves were handed guns and forced into the fires that raged uncontrollably.  Some blazes normal, some balefire. Horrors emerged from the metro and found a lush hunting ground. Hellhounds came in from the wastes. It was the culmination of everything the wasteland had to offer. Murk, we lived within a nightmare.  An inferno of violence, depravity and pointless agony on anypony still within the borders.”

    He glanced at his friends.

“We lost most of those who survived with us, either early on, or as ghouls.  Falls to the feral side were regular, consumed by the hate rising from that crater.  It seemed Fillydelphia would extinguish itself in the brutality that wracked every street and tunnel.  Chainlink Shackles was born into this, Murk. Why do you think he turned out like he did? I watched him go from a commanding infant to a brutal up-and-coming slaver who has believed since birth that those his family owned were his property. That everypony was just another waiting addition to his collection.  Raised by hate and living in the flames bred a pony the likes of which terrifies me to the core, Murk.  But he wasn't the only pony of note...”

The mentions of The Master made me shiver.  I couldn't imagine him as a young pony, but it was such a perfect duality, like The Master had said.  I had been born an accident...a tribute to slavery's demands on a young mare. He had been born on the other side of the fence, forever the symbol against what innocence I possessed.

    “Th-then who else?”

    Baton smiled.

    “A pony from across the wastes.  He came to Fillydelphia and we laughed at him.  He didn't shoot or hurt ponies, he just talked to them.  But oh, when he talked. I remember he approached our shelter, calmly drawing us out with a helping of his own supplies and food.  We sat with him and he told us of how things could be better. This stallion aided us, providing us with other allies he had found amongst the madness.  What a pony! Kind, generous, and a great dreamer, he set about organising us to help work and create safe zones. Under his direction, we fought to defend those he cared for. He led us, even pulled me from a burning building once. Together, we saved lives. Eventually, we realised that a greater Equestria to come about, if only we would all pull together and work for it. He had inspired us. He was our hero.”

    The smile vanished. I sat with an open mouth, beginning to catch up to what he was gearing toward.

“His name was Red Eye.  We were the first 'workers,' Murk.  Don't place all your hope in legends. You never know what they'll become.  At least you weren’t around to be hurt by what yours did.”

    I simply huddled my front legs close to my body, sniffling.  No, she was different from him. She was different.

    “She wouldn't...”

“Legends don't last. Somepony wiser than me told me that hundreds of years ago.  Don't let it get to you. These things happen to ponies in the wasteland.”

How could they be so flippant and disillusioned about it?  Was being alive that long what made them so willing to forget the good?  Maybe even Red Eye could be good again! Or his ideals picked up by somepony else like Protégé!  Was I really being too naïve? Believing in heroes and legends in a world that adamantly believed they didn't exist?

Any answer wasn’t given a chance to be said. The slavers were shouting from the tunnels.

“All right, you slags!  Next section of wall! Come on!  Where's the rots? Get them out here now, they've had enough rest in their little rad-den!”

    The ghouls began to get up.  Baton looked toward the door and immediately moved over to me.

    “Don't give up hope, but trust in who's around you.  Not in who's out there. But all the same, I hope that you'll come back.  I don't wanna rot down here until I die. That’s my city up there needs rebuilding.  Get going, Murky Number Seven. We'll wait for you.”

The ghouls began to filter past in their chained up order.  Baton Round and Bedlay Bloom shimmied forward first, Windtail and Splint a little afterward.  The 'younger' Windtail looked at me almost pleadingly. The massive metal collar far too large for his neck, where it left weighty marks from years of servitude...

    “We'll wait for you...”

The ghouls trooped past the door and toward the mining tunnels.  Keeping back, I hid in the darkness before making off to find the service shaft.  But I kept watching backward as they disappeared around the corner, limping and slowly dying.  I wondered how many times they'd let their hope rise, and whether I was simply giving them another last hope before I too would turn out to let them down.

Leaving the metro was difficult.  Not in the physical sense, for my grappling hook let me climb the stairwell Baton had mentioned with ease, suffering only a few squealing falls onto my rump.  (To be fair, I hadn't had much chance to practice with this thing yet...)

No, it was difficult because I remembered everything The Master had said before.  About wanting twenty feet 'done' while marching Sunny's column in this direction.

    I was knowingly leaving my twice hero behind to the metro.

Rather slowly, it began to dawn on me that any hope she saw in me was as likely misplaced as many found in their own heroes throughout time.

The Mall was quiet.  Or rather, the camp around it was.  No doubt in The Master's absence to the tunnels, the slaves not on shifts took what time they could to rest and relax.  Those on the job were still clambering across the Mall, sliding new twisting lengths of razorwire onto the window ledges and scaffold tops.  Using the same method as before, I dropped down behind the fence and immediately took cover. My eyes found Glimmerlight's rather pitiful looking and leaky tent.  Brimstone wasn't present, but I could see a shadow on Glimmer's tent of somepony inside. She was here. Oh thank Celestia...

Quietly hoofing it over, I ducked behind crude shelters and hid in old craters to close the distance.  Oh, how I wanted to simply gallop to her side again and report that we had a potential way out if we could rig climbing equipment to get down that shaft again.  Moving up to the area, I started creeping from cover to move into the—

    Somepony quickly looked up from nearby toward me.  Were they a slaver? I couldn't take the chance, I rushed forward and dove into Glimmerlight's tent.  Tumbling through the flap, I fell against somepony, hearing a feminine yelp of surprise.  Then a second feminine cry. Then a third.

    Oh, wait...the last one had been me.

Covers tussled, I felt two ponies struggling out from under them on either side of me in the cramped little tent.  I'd fallen between two resting ponies. Lying on my back, I now found Glimmerlight to one side of me and her...new friend, on the other.  An earth pony mare with a lavender mane and soft blue coat sat up in shock out of the blanket. If it weren't for Glimmerlight seeming at ease (if surprised) I figured she might have been out of the tent.  Instead, Glimmer reached over to gently stroke her mane and look down at me lying half snuggled (by accident, I swear) between them.

    “Oh, hello there!” Glimmer was entirely too cheery.  I could only imagine why.

“You...you invited a buck too?” The mare leaned over me to speak to my friend, glancing down at me on my back with my hooves in the air. She seemed uncertain of my presence.  “So, who's your friend?”

“Oh, this is Murky!” Glimmerlight shimmied in, pressing herself against me in a little half hug.  I felt my face turn a hasty shade of beetroot as I felt Glimmer's 'bed buddy' do the same.

    “Nah, didn't invite him, not in that sense.  He's just back way earlier than I thought!” Glimmerlight continued, winking at me as she ruffled my mane.  “He's also just the most adorably little innocent buck around, just look at that blush, Leafshine! Just can’t resist a little hug for him, can you?”

    They giggled together.  Clearly of the same type of humour to embarrass me shamelessly by snuggling in on either side.

    “I...I...I scouted...”

“Ah, business later, Murky.  Comfy rest time now. Good thing you weren't five minutes earlier.  Leafshine and I were just, hmm, taking the edge off developments.”

“You're lucky to have Glimmerlight, Murk.” Leafshine chuckled in her clipped accent, stroking a hoof around Glimmer's jawline.  “Just a wonderful pony who knows how to make things seem nicer.”

    “Y-y-yes...s-s-she d-does...” I could feel my ears burning with embarrassment as I saw Leafshine lean over to lightly kiss my, uh...friend.  “In other ways, mostly...”

“Mhm!  Like my little bro, you are, Murky!  Hey, Leafshine! You wanna take a peek at his journal?  Come on, Murky, let’s all have a look. We're all somewhat mature ponies here!”

    “Ooooh...the one you said you got that pose from?  Yes, lets!”

    The pair leaned in, grinning eagerly.

    I just covered my face with my hooves. Why, oh why, did it always have to be me?

    Oh my...

Leafshine departed soon after the monolithically embarrassing art showcase.  I might have taken at least some pride in it...but looking at the imagery I had once drawn so fluidly, it only reminded me of my inability to do the same now.

Another part of me felt somewhat annoyed at myself after Leafshine had offered to pose for me. Not in any sort of improper manner; instead, she had wanted to see herself drawn to look like she wasn't a bedraggled slave.  I wished I could have, but I had only politely declined, citing that I didn't want to do her an injustice with my skills. The words seemed to make Glimmerlight look at me with a worried expression.

    It raised my curiosity, that somepony as in grief over Caduceus’ death would find another mare so fast to help cheer herself up with. I guessed it was just one way of her coping.

I forced it to the back of my mind, concentrating instead on explaining everything about the tunnels, den, and the ghouls to Glimmerlight.  The news that The Master had knowledge of Ministry Station was bad enough, leading her to think for some time. She concluded that we could still go ahead, but that we needed to find some sort of edge to locate the Ministry Station first, and then be able to hide our progress.  We would make a little den of our own inside it and slowly smuggle ponies inside to hiding before making our break into the lethal outer circle.

    But right now, plans updated, I heard the report from Glimmerlight's side of things.  The first news wasn't great.

    “Brim's gone.”

“What!?” I almost dropped the blanket I'd been forced to cover myself with in my short visit to here.  The tent wasn't very warm and the rain threatened to tear it off. When was this storm going to end!?

“The Master...his revenge, I guess.  He couldn't hurt Brimstone, but he could still send him away.  He's been sent on a temporary posting to the mustering yards to haul heavy weaponry onto the trains and caravans.  Brute work to keep him busy and away from The Master, I guess. He'll be back in a while, Shackles wouldn’t dare lose him and he can’t make such a prize too Red Eye disappear, but we're on our own again for now, Murky.”

    The thought just struck up every annoyance in my mind.  Every single one of them.  Every time we made a hoof forward, we were knocked back by something stupid like this.  Why was The Master even doing that? Petty revenge wasn't his thing, even I knew that! Brimstone would likely enjoy the work.

    “B-but you...will you be alright without him?”

“I'll get by, lil’bro.  I managed for a while before Brimstone too, and most of the worst ponies were taken out with the riots. Sure wish Caduceus was here to help, though...”

    The atmosphere seemed to chill a little. I edged forward, looking at her azure eyes as seriously as I could.

    “You...you want to talk about him, now?”

“I guess so.” Glimmer's face went a little void.  “I've gotta talk sometime. Just...just wish he was still here.  Poor Caddy...he didn't deserve that. I just...I keep feeling temptations...”

    “Temptations to what?”

She glanced to me, before her horn lit and carried a small orb to me, the one I'd seen her toying with earlier.  It was unspoken, we both knew what she meant. Again and again, I heard Coral's warning and words from the hospital.  Glimmer didn't know how to deal with consequence, how to commit to her actions.

    “Please, you can't.  You said—”

“I know what I said, Murky!  But I've been doing everything I can to just try and not think about it!  To shut it out, to immerse myself in research, to build gemlights and purifiers.  Hell, I even spent half an hour with Leafshine to get my mind off losing somepony like that!  I just keep seeing him, Murky...keep seeing him putting that revolver in his mouth and blowing his own fucking face off!  I can't handle that. I'm remembering why I kept forgetting things.”

She wasn't crying, but it wasn't far off.  Feeling a little pushing influence to my mind, I moved forward, wrapping the blanket around her as well as myself.

    “It'll...it'll, um, get better...”

“So I keep telling myself.  I could just take those few seconds.  The moment where he pulled the trigger and get rid of that, couldn't I?  But that's how this all started. Just a few horrible minutes...then maybe an afternoon I didn't like...a day isn't too much, right?  It all builds like some sort of ridiculous addiction to chipping and smoothing my life into the one I want. The one where I'm just happy...maybe Coral's right...”

    “She...she said—”

    Glimmerlight looked up, almost falling out our blanket as she spun to face me.

    “You talked to her?”

    Her eyes seemed desperate, her hooves grabbing me around the shoulders.

    “You spoke to Coral?  I...I probably shouldn't ask this, but what about?”

    Nervously, I bit my lip before replying.  “A-about you, mostly. She wanted me to pass on a message.  That she's...”

    I paused.

“Grateful. She's grateful that you saved her.  She...she said that you did it, proved you are willing t-to do something about your life.  You did it, you got her interest, Glimmer. She's...she's wanting you to know that she does want you to try to be better.  To be the friend you used to be to her...”

    I was taking liberties a little, but Glimmerlight needed this.  I couldn't let her fall back into her 'orb addictions,' Caduceus didn't die to be forgotten piece by piece until he was nothing but a series of chosen moments!  I knew Coral needed it too, she hadn't said it, but I could see the need for somepony to be there for her too. She was truly alone without her family, friends, or even her own son.

Glimmerlight simply sat still, before tears started draining from her eyes.  I'd seen her cry, seen her upset, but now I simply saw an empty pony really needing others around.

    “Murky...”

    “Yes, sis?”

    “Help me.  I...I want to do it.  I want to remember. Will you help me do it?  Before you go?”

I could barely survive.  I couldn't save all the ponies I wanted.  Sunny, Weathervane's sanity, his friends in the tunnels, Unity...they had all been taken or were in danger of being lost.  But here, in this moment, I could do this. I would help Glimmerlight repair her life.

    “I will.”

    Glimmerlight pulled the blanket around us tighter, before her magic started pulling her bag across to dig through the mounds of orbs.  She slowly examined each at a time, speaking slowly and lowly.  The mood had gone dark, neither of us knew what we'd find.

“Coral is a better pony than I ever can be, Murky. She didn't forget any of what happened to her.  Whatever they did to her, whatever they did to her family in front of her eyes. Her son being dragged away.  She remembers it, and she's still got it together enough to be a strong pony and...and look to offer me at least a chance to prove myself by facing what I did.  If any pony deserves to be known for forgiveness...it's her, Murky.  Not me.”

Eventually, one dull blue orb hung out of the mass she had placed down around us.  We were surrounded in the windswept tent by glittering memories...the chosen one hanging in the air.

“This...this is older.  Maybe before it all happened but...but I'll need to start slow, okay?  I don't know what this'll contain...”

    I laid my hoof over hers.

    “I...I'm here.”

Her horn lit.  I felt her tense up.  She was so fragile right now.  I could feel her ready to shout at me, tell me to stop agreeing with her to do this.  But then the sparkles flew from her horn, the orb glowed, and we drifted away.

The world spun, my 'self' quickly faded to be replaced by foreign feelings.  A sense of stretching, of being taller, better built, and healthier. Before I knew it, I was in the wasteland again.  That unsettling sense of being trapped within my own body settled home hard. I tried to ignore it, to simply watch what was happening.

I was Glimmerlight. Her mane still felt much longer than it was these days.  She was trotting under a forest of dead trees, the same one I'd seen surrounding her new home, Creaky Hollow.  The light wasteland wind drifted and made her long pink mane flow and blow across her face, while the light seemed almost blinding compared to the storm-swept Fillydelphia.

She wasn't alone. Beside her I could see somepony else.  A wasteland weathered and tattooed stallion. He had a slightly dopey expression under a face that held a few scars below his eyes.  His voice seemed relatively informal.

“Thanks fer walkin' me out, Glim.  Always means a lot to get a chance to see you in between caravan trips.  Sure you can't take me home? We'd make a good trade for you lot, wherever you are in these woods.”

    I...sorry...Glimmer laughed.  She shook her head.

    “Sorry, hun.  Village rules and all.  We stay out the way. Hell, I don't think I'm even meant to be out here seeing you, never mind take you back to meet the town.  You know I'm always gonna bring a few caps to get stuff with you.  Try to come back this way again soon, huh?”

    She stepped forward, hugging him tightly.  I could feel his coat was rough, but thick and the sort of one I wished I could possess.

“You betcha, Glim.  S'all I think about on the road, getting back to my little pink dreamer for a couple days out in the woods.”

    “Don't I look forward to it?  Never gonna take me to see the caravan, though?  I could trade on the village's behalf...”

The stallion shook his head.  As he stepped back, I got a better look at him.  Clad in tied leather armour with a heavy fabric undershirt. His body looked a lot like a rougher, darker coloured version of Caduceus, with the same proportions. Briefly, it occured to me that Glimmer's preferences were looking pretty clear.  On his flanks I could see a cutie mark of a marred, dirty and chipped diamond beside a small pickaxe. Wait, I was looking at his flanks? No, that meant she was! Oh, come on, Glimmer, the guy's trying to say goodbye here.

“'Fraid not, Glim.  They don't like dealing like that. Please, it's best if you don't come to them.  We'll just stick one to one, okay? I got your needs for gems and orbs anyway. I'll see you later, pink dream.”

“See you later, Diamond.  Take care out there in the wastes, all right?  I don't want to have to come save your flank.”

They shared a giggle, before Glimmer cut it short with a rather aggressively assertive kiss right to his lips.  My mind barely had a moment to think before the reality hit home that I was kissing a stallion.  Oh, please, Glimmer!  Have a little restraint, don't use your—

    She did. Ooooh boy...

With her eyes thankfully closed, I just kept trying to distract myself by thinking about the situation.  Thus far, this memory didn't seem to hold anything particularly traumatic, (by her standards, anyway) so why get rid of this?

    I could feel myself—rather her—beginning to blush as they shared the ongoing intimacy of their mouths.  Glimmer really didn't hold back.  It took him to gasp for air and lightly push her off to stop it.  I felt her grin cheekily and lower her eyes. That look.  He seemed to flush.

    “Oh don't tempt me...”

    Please, sis.  Don't.

    “...cause I've gotta get on the way.  See ya roun', Glim!”

She waved as he trotted off into the dry bushes and away, licking her lips and grinning to herself.  He was quiet on his hooves, or was that just the dull hearing of ponies other than me?

    Apparently not, I heard a crack behind her from a twig breaking.  Swinging, I felt her mane wash around. I wished could see her mane like this.  She would look amazing.  But her eyes now found the newcomer now emerging up a path through bracken, pushing it away with a hoof.

    “Glimmer, was that him again?”

Her voice was a world apart.  I saw her better fed and kept.  Coral Eve was dressed in a light dress stitched from wool, a basket over her back.  Most surprisingly, she had none of the bitter resentment and anger that I saw in her eyes.

    “Yeah, I figure you saw him anyway.  Don't worry, we just met out in the woods.”

“I know Glimmer, I know.  Here, c'mon, we need to get back before the elder comes looking.  You do remember what I said, right?”

The pair began to trot home.  I saw Glimmer's eyes focus on the thicker innards of the forest.  I couldn't even vaguely see the village. It really was well hidden.

“To be careful?  Don't worry, I got a couple in my shack!  Brought them from Bucklyn, the Rangers don't like unintentional reproduction in a low population bridge base after—”

    “I don't mean that!” Coral laughed, knocking Glimmer's side.  “I mean about him.  Did you see those tattoos?  The scars? He's had a rough life in the wastes. I don't want you to get hurt, dear.  Caravanner types lead harsh lives, lots of inter-company rivalries and stuff.”

    “Aw, c'mon, he's not like that!  You should meet him, then you'll see. He's really lovely!  Look what he brought me?”

    Glimmer pulled a small bag from her own saddle.  Opening it, I saw a luminous shine that seemed to glow on its own accord.  It was full of gemstones of all types!  Despite her worry, I could see Coral's eyes go wide at the sight.

    “Wow...generous for a wastelander...”

“I know, right?  Plus, he's a real sweet one in the throes of the moment, I'll tell you that.”

She leaned close, whispering something I really wished I hadn’t heard.  They shared a friendly chuckle, holding one another over the shoulders at the cheeky bit of gossip.  They had stopped briefly, leaning on a seemingly random part of fence still standing. I could see the rest fallen through the browned bushes around them.  Their laughter grew, but Coral stifled hers first, patting her friend on the shoulders.

“That's all lovely, Glim.  Just take care, all right? You know I love you like family. And that means II just don't want anything to happen to you.  You've been a world of good to the village, even if you are a little...”

    “Friendly?”

“...I was going to say naive.  Look, if this stallion gives you someone to commit to, I'm happy for you.  But just take care. Maybe we'll bring it up to the elder at the next meeting, okay?  Now, let's get going. I don't wanna leave Chirpy too long alone.”

    Glimmerlight breathed a sigh of relief, I imagined this had been worrying her as to what Coral might think. She leaned forward, giving her friend a quick, friendly peck on the cheek. I felt it returned.

“Thanks, Coral. Love you.”

They shared a hug, before cantering on down the trail.  They raced, laughing as they went, running into the darkness that began to surround my viewpoint from Glimmer's eyes...the darkness that...

...faded into the black tent.  The light had gone out while we were under.  The calm wasteland day was replaced with the howling wind that seared through the open flaps and washed over our bodies hidden beneath the blanket.  Rubbing my eyes, dizzy and groaning, I sat up. Glimmer seemed less affected than I, already crouched over, holding the orb carefully.

    “Diamond...” She barely whispered it.  “I...I don't remember a Diamond, but it was like I really liked him.  He's the only thing I'd want to forget from that, nothing else was out of place!  But he seemed nice...”

    She hugged the orb close.

“It's something about him, it has to be. What did I do?  Did...did I break the rules? Did I sell them out to him for something?  Was he really not nice? Coral seemed wary, and I know I was always a bit reckless.”

She sighed.

“Oh Murky, what have I done? What if I was the one who led those who destroyed Creaky Hollow in?  If he was a raider.  I lay down with a fucking raider and sold them out to him!”

    “Maybe it's not that!”

    “What else could it be, Murky?”

    Her voice snapped, swivelling her head around at me.  I recoiled, seeing the hard stare. Glimmer’s voice turned self deprative, ranting about herself.

    “Glimmerlight! Slapping flanks with a torturing and raping beast because he wanted to get her home out of her!  I'm an idiot, Murky. A naive idiot! Coral's got every reason to hate me for...for not hearing her warning.  Oh...oh, Murky, I'm sorry...”

    She clearly saw the shock in my eyes from her outburst. Really, it had been seeing my friend hurting herself so much with her own words.  Moving over, she hugged me tightly.

    “I'm sorry...it's just...”

“It's...it's okay. You knew it'd be hard.  But...but maybe there's still a lot to see, we'll take our time, okay?  I'm...I'm with you. Always.”

Glimmerlight sniffed, squeezing me once and not letting go.  We simply sat and shook, both our minds running over theories and ideas.  But it all kept coming back to the one horrid fact over just who this Diamond really was...

    “A toast!”

    “A TOAST!  YEAH!”

Only now, the ambient sound was beginning to come to my mind.  We could hear a lot more commotion outside from the slaves. Hooves pounded on the ground.  Voices roared. We looked at each other, before immediately moving to poke our heads out.

A congregation of slaves had gathered.  Weak, diseased, yet still showing a sudden surge of strength together.  They had brought what water they could from the rain, many of them trying to copy Glimmer's purifier (with varying success, I saw one with a sock), to get what they could into mugs and waterskins.  Some even just held bowls in their telekinesis. But they were clustered around a fallen trolley rack, surrounding a fire barrel.  The wind blew the sooty smoke through the tents as they chanted and stomped. What was going on?

    “What do we toast to?”

    “THE FALLEN!”

    “To WHAT?”

    “THE FALLEN!”

    Many of them swilled the foul water.  What did they mean by the fallen? What was...

    Oh...no they did not.

    A slave raised a hoof, aiming for silence.

“We got the shit end of the stick, but what did we get then?  Some pony galloping around, thinking she was the fucking messiah or something?  Causing trouble in Filly and getting dozens of us shot for her escape? Well, did we see her helping us?”

    “NO!” The crowd cheered.

    “So drink, fellow slaves of the great shit end!  Finally, an end to all that lording-it-up bullshit as we find out she's just like the rest of us!  She gonna shoot me because I stole from farms to survive?  Gonna kill Skippy over there cos he had to give his clients a beating if they couldn't pay?  You know she wasn't gonna stop at raiders!”

    “NOT STOP!” They picked up the line with a raising of mugs.

“Not any more!  She's guilty, and now somepony can give her some of her own method! No more gun-happy mare shooting up the place!”

    I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

    “No more stupid Dweller riling up the raiders and giving us hell!”

    How...how dare they...

All day, I'd found ponies who didn't believe in heroes, ponies who had lost faith in legends.  I'd fought and driven myself to near insanity in an effort to keep clinging onto some hope. I was not hearing this now!

    “No more false 'hero' only making things worse!”

    Why did everypony think that?  No, she...wasn't! Legends could exist!  They could!  THEY COULD! What was wrong with everypony to stay so bad?

    “Nothing but a murderer herself!  Red Eye should get her back in here!  The corrupted pony!”

    Well I had had enough of it.

    “HOW DARE YOU!”

The words screamed from my throat so hard that I felt my vocal chords go raw and sore.  But they heard me, heads turned. I rushed forward, feeling Glimmerlight fail to restrain me.  Galloping between the tents, I ran into the crowd, standing near the barrels amongst a hundred staring eyes.

    “How can you all say that!?  Can't anypony see?  Everypony keeps saying she's turned or gone bad.  She's good! She is! You should trust in her!”

    They regarded me with distaste.

    “Shut up, runt!”

    “Get lost!  She's just a shitty shade of grey like any of us!  Get over yourself!”

    I hopped onto the base of the trolley rack, moving up its bend roof until I was slightly above them, shouting to merely be heard above their voices. The arc of scowling slaves surrounded me, all looking up at me screaming at them.

“I...I saw her!  How can you all just sit here and cheer about this?  The Stable Dweller is trying to help the world to make this sort of stuff stop!  Why can't you all see that? She's trying to help you! She's trying to help everypony!  Please, listen to me! 

I looked left and right, but I saw ponies just wave their hooves and jeer. An empty can flew past my head. Seething, I tried again.

“The wasteland just wants everypony to give in and be horrible to one another!  She tried to do something about it. But you all, while in this hellhole, keep saying that's the wrong thing?  She's stopped raiders! She saved slaves!”

    “I don't see my life changing, did she stop to save us?  She just ran away for herself and a fucking stripe!”

    “She's trying!  She...”

    The words were soul crushing to have to admit, that I wasn't under her protection...

“...she can't save everypony.” I forced myself to go on, feeling those words sting.  “Not if they don't want to be saved! I heard you all in the Pit, screaming for her to be killed like some bloodsport!  Why can't you all just see that she's trying to be good and you all need to help out? She's the one last good pony really doing something out there and you all belittle her for it!  How is that anything like Equestria? HOW!?”

That got their attention, and a silence followed.  Stomping a hoof, tears in my eyes, I kept going, feeling my whole body shaking with nerves, fear, and outright adrenaline.

“So many ponies have died trying to save our world. They all try so hard, and sometimes they fail or go bad!  I've seen them, I've seen the past! I've heard the stories of Red Eye. How many could have gone further if other people, not just ponies, had stood together instead of always fighting?  They...they cried like me, they fought so hard, and it didn't matter! Because it's not one pony who changes everything. They can only show the way and inspire!  Like she inspired me!  Gave me a life I never had before!  She showed you all the same thing! Why can't you see that?  Why can't you see anything beyond just yourselves!?”

    I sniffed, tears dripping off the pillar, falling below into the burning smoke that stung my eyes.

“Why can't we all just be better ponies?  The Stable Dweller, she's...she's what we should be!  How can you celebrate the bad and try to knock down the good?  We're all ponies inside. Can't you feel that longing to be a part of a good Equestria again?  That need we all have? That little spark in all of us that knows this is wrong? Ponies like The Master try to turn us against one another, and feed the fires of hatred and discord to all of us.  She is trying to restore what we once were!”

    “She murdered a whole fucking village!”

    “I knew ponies there!”

    “She's just a fucking psychopath!  Least now we know it!”

    I screamed back, feeling this quickly becoming a trading of barbs and denials.

    “No she isn't!”

    “SHE IS!”

    “She wouldn't!  I believe she wouldn't!”

    From within the smoke, a half brick clanged off the metal beneath me.

    “You're just talkin' bullshit, kid!  She's a fucking raider now! Always was and just lying!”

    “But she's good!  She's trying to save all of— OW!”

A pebble, propelled by telekinesis, struck my forehead.  A mug hit the lip of the trolley rack, and sloshed filthy water on me. More items pinged or struck off me.  Another rock hit my chest, making me almost fall. I was simply shrieking, hollering. The wind swirled the ash and smoke around, making the crowd seem like one horrible entity, shifting and heaving as a singular force.  Like I was seeing the physical manifestation of the wasteland itself before my eyes, recoiling and sneering at any effort to fight it.

    “She's trying to save all of us!  ALL OF US! PLEASE, BELIEVE ME, SHE— ARGH!”

Flaming wood crashed again upon the pillar, I almost tripped.  Terror was overtaking the faithful will to try and convince the crowd.

    I had to believe, to have faith that this would work.

    “I...I'LL PROVE IT!  IT'S ALL A LIE! That all this stuff on the radio is just a mistake!”

They stopped only briefly, my bruised but defiant body standing above them.  I pulled my PipBuck from my bag, strapped it to my hoof and began pressing the buttons to get to the radio, whispering gently to myself.

“Please, please Littlepip. I believe in you.  Have this be solved, have the truth come out now.  Please DJ, please Goddesses...I need this now. I need this as much as anypony else…”

I took a deep breath, and threw my hoof in the air, cranking the volume to maximum.

“Now, all of you just LISTEN!”

A straggly static washed across the area, before I heard the DJ's wonderful voice break through.

    “—Wastelanders.  We have, right now for the first time since Arbu...an update on the incident for all those who missed my last news...”

    Yes!  The newscast at the perfect time, this could work!

    Everypony beneath seemed stunned at the seemingly prophetic timing, glancing upward with wide eyes.

    “News is slow filtering back but...but I'm sorry to say...”

    My heart stopped.

    “It's happened again.  Another settlement has gone lights out, close to Arbu.  But this time it's no defenceless village. It's that bastion of the Steel Rangers themselves, Bucklyn Cross.  Lost with all ponies, they're saying. Nopony got out alive after the Stable Dweller's band were seen heading there...”

All the sound in the world stopped, the crowd didn't matter as I felt every emotion in my heart collapse.  But one thought forced my head to turn away from the slowly angering crowd. Beside the tents, at the side, through the fires, I saw Glimmerlight standing in abject shock, looking at my PipBuck.  Her eyes filled with tears immediately, her legs trembling, the horror upon her face actually painful to take in.

    “Ah don't know what to think of this, my little ponies.  Another whole group of folks, Rangers or not...it's just not right.  All reports say it simple. Far as we know right now, nopony in Bucklyn Cross survived the massacre.”

    I could see her mouth moving...

    “Bucklyn Cross...Mom...Dad...”

    Every ounce of motivation was sucked clean out of me at that sight.

    She took off, running through the crowds into the darkness.  At the same time, a pain exploded across my face as a halfbrick slammed into my temple.  The shock threw me off, almost falling into a fiery barrel until I grabbed the edge and swung myself clear. The jeering, the shouting and betrayed horror that drove their anger was worse than ever, and I had just offered myself as a target.  

Under a barrage of projectiles, I covered my face as everything from stones to old boots clanged and whizzed past me.

I could have worried about them...I could have feared for my life at being seen.  But all I knew was that Glimmer needed somepony. I saw her galloping, away into the Mall to escape everything.  Shouting, I pulled myself to my feet, muscles aching...running after her, tearing away from the angry slaves.

    “Glimmer!” There was no reply.  “GLIMMER!”

Passing inside, I saw her stumble on the stairs, grief driving her to be barely able to see through misted eyes. I rushed up to her side.

    “I...I'm sorry!  There's some mistake or...or lies or—”

“NO!” Her hoof pushed me off, a face filled with anguish and furious sadness spinning on me.  “That's it! That is...it! Once is something to be wary about, but a second time!? Murky, that's the proof. It had to have been her!”

    “She wouldn't!”

    “She damn well did, Murk!”

    I wasn't sure what stung me more: that my friend believed this, or that in her anger she'd reverted to...to what others called me...

    “Bucklyn Cross was a fortress!  My...my mom wouldn't be killed off by some random raider, she was a Paladin!  It had to have been her!  They were too powerful to go down!  Twice in a row...can't you see? I'm so sorry, Murky...she's fallen...”

    I stomped my two front hooves, refusing to let her believe this.

    “No she hasn't!  Littlepip wouldn't—”

    “You can say that all you like but it doesn't change anything, Murky!  Wake up and smell the ashes, don’t try to defend her to me here! She's just murdered my fucking parents! You can't follow somepony like this!  That mare isn't what you thought, I'm sorry—”

    “I don't believe that!”

We stood facing each other, her higher on the stairs than myself.  The dull glow of Fillydelphia, lingering crimson and reflecting everything that came forth...the conflicted belief and anger.

    “She's the one that gave me hope, Glimmer!  She saved my life!”

    “She saved herself!  You just got caught up in it, believe in us, Murky!  Not some mare out there!  How can...how can you dare speak good of her after what she did?  Two settlements, dozens of innocents, and my own mom and dad? Oh no...”

We both stopped, breathing heavily.  Our eyes wouldn't blink, wouldn't move from the other.  But finally, I saw Glimmer step back and snort.

“Perhaps you shouldn't be around me for a while. If you're going to praise high and fucking mighty the mare that just killed my folk.  Too many times to be a coincidence now, and while you wear that PipBuck like her and carry a statue of her with that childish belief...I don't think I want to be around you. Not for now, at any rate, not till you...not till you realise what you’re...”

Her voice trailed off, and I saw just how torn up she was inside.

    “But—”

    I stopped myself as her words only just hit home.

    She shook her heads, her soaked cheeks glinting in the red light.

“I know you’re still trying figure things out and...and to go through, but no, I can’t just...not now. Look at it from my side, Murky.  I'm seeing somepony I considered a friend telling me my parents' killer is some perfect pony. But till then I think you should just go.”

    She turned past me to walk onward.

“Go hide and s-stay safe, because so help me I can't bring myself to want anything bad to happen to you.  I don't want to be the one that hurts you if you stay around, preaching her name to my face when I just lost my parents!  We'll... maybe we’ll meet later but...but for now just...just...go.”

Glimmerlight began to trot on into the Mall, her voice cracking under wracking sobs on the last few words.  I...I didn't...what did I...what could I say? I...

    “...Sis?”

    “Don't even think of calling me that right now.”

Her head low, filled with tears, she galloped off into the musky corridors.  Somehow, seeing her go, feeling the weight of the argument with her, I found myself falling to the stairs in great sobs.  My front hooves wrapped around my head, I could only remember the times we had laughed together, played and bantered. The times we'd saved one another's lives and...and been chosen siblings...

    Was it gone?

    Silence lay across the lonely stairwell, populated only by me.

    Instead of helping an ally, I'd just lost a sister.

I don't know how long I lay, crying into my hooves.  I'd...I'd hurt her, somehow and I didn't even know how.  I had to believe in Littlepip. If I stopped, then that was it.  She was my foundation, but...but my belief in her was hurting a pony near me who thought otherwise.

    Hooves approached, from back the way Glimmer had gone.  Trotting close, I felt the presence of somepony above me.

    Gently...slowly, I felt a hoof ruffle my mane, exactly as she did.  She...she was...

    “I'm sorry!” I wailed with my eyes closed.  “I...I'm so sorry!”

    Then I opened my eyes and looked up...to see my own staring back at me.  Light green...my mouth began to widen to scream.

    “Oh, you will be.” The Master leered down from above me.

    My hooves screamed into action, but it was far too late.  A weight descended as I felt it clamp around my neck, the collar dropping hard and snapping shut before locking.  Kicking out, I ran anyway, before my neck tugged and jarred to a halt, throwing my hooves from below me.

Lying on my side, thrashing, but being dragged all the same across the ground into the Mall, I could only scream and scream, accompanied by the triumphant laughter of My Master.

    “Please...if anypony out there knows something, anything, let us here at the radio know.  You know I don't like sounding emotional on here, wastelanders, but hope's been taken from us.  I imagine there's a lot of folks out there clustering around their radios, waiting for it to be renewed.  There'll be a lot of hurt ponies who need her back, need that light in their lives...

I don't pretend to ignore that some poor little wishful pony's life out there might rely on it.

    So I plead of you, wasteland.  Find anypony...anypony with a little information on what happened.  Because I'll wager there's a lot of folks depending on it right about now to save them.

    Let me bring them the truth, no matter how bad it hurts.”

    Perk lost...

Path of the Lightbringer – Something has fallen in you, a faith shaken to the point of great loss.  Somehow, you just can't muster the same unwavering hope to keep you going any longer. You no longer receive the adrenaline rush when low on health.