//------------------------------//
// Missing 
// Story: Children of Darkness and Light 
// by Aquaman 
//------------------------------//

Spike strode forward on carefully placed claws, and the road crumbled beneath him and rose in clouds of dust in his wake. 

Behind him stood pillowy green hills tucked under a blanket of ash-gray clouds, bisected by a valley with a glittering blue river running through its center and a narrow stripe of gravel tracing its southern bank. Ahead of him, the valley sloped down and widened into a basin, where the riverbed split into tributaries all feeding into the expanse of the western sea. 

It was a perfect place to raise a city, and there had been once here for centuries. From his vantage point, he could still see the outlines of streets, the skeletal frames of brick buildings built to withstand earthquakes and typhoons — now clouded with dust and ash, smothered under a shroud of unnatural and total silence that darkened his violet scales, speckled his green frill, and dulled the gold of the cog-and-lightning medallion pinned to the lapel of his road-worn nylon coat. 

“Oh…”

The pegasus who’d been following Spike for a mile or so had stopped, hypnotized by what looked like it had once been an unpowered wooden wagon. Its back half was more or less intact, save for the odd scrape and divot that any often-used tool would collect, and the right-side wheel even looked brand-new compared to the one on the left. 

The front half of the wagon was gone — not smashed or burned, but simply not there, as if a cosmic chef’s knife had sliced the vehicle cleanly in two. Only on closer inspection could Spike see that the cut wasn’t clean after all. Irregular gray fingers of decay stretched back towards the wagon’s rear from a buffer of colorless rot marking where the vehicle’s front half should have began, perfectly aligned with where the road vanished, the river narrowed to a brown trickle, and the green grass turned to dead and empty earth. 

The pony lifted a forehoof and gently brushed it against the decayed wood, and the material disintegrated at his touch like a castle made of dry sand. He made another soft sound, then at last noticed Spike’s attention.

“Something wrong?” Spike asked.

The pegasus gave him a look that said, “What isn’t wrong about this?” but visibly bit back to the urge to put the thought into words. He was a soldier, after all: Staff Sergeant Garnet Sunrise of Her Majesty’s Crystallian Army. He knew better than to offer an opinion without an order to do so. Spike thought for a moment about giving him such an order, and then thought better of it.

“Nothing,” Garnet said, eyes darting back towards the wagon as he faced Spike. “Just… nothing.” He braced himself with a sigh, then nodded towards what lay ahead of them. “You wanna see it up close?”

“I’ve seen enough,” Spike replied. “You lead from here.”

“Right.” The pegasus took a few steps forward, then stopped just as he edged ahead of Spike. He spared another glance, this time at the annihilated earth beneath his frontmost hoof. “I don’t… know everything, Spike. I remember most of it, the general gist, but exactly what happened, what everypony said, I…”

“Just tell me what you can,” Spike said, gesturing with a gloved claw. “And walk while you talk.”

“All right, then,” Garnet murmured. “This way.”

Keeping just to the outside of the line demarcating where life ended and the wasteland began, Garnet passed in front of the dragon and pushed through roadside foliage towards the seemingly untouched forest beyond it. Spike took a breath, flexed his claws inside their fur-lined wrappings, and followed the pegasus into the past.