For Nurse Gray
You are the wind beneath my wings.
War, war never changes. Somepony told me that when I was a colt, I didn’t understand it at the time: I do now. I thought it was about armies and nations, battles and banners: It’s not. Later, when I grew up, I thought it was about the unending cycle of violence forced upon everypony living in the Wasteland: I was wrong.
War isn’t about nations, it has nothing to do with sides or ideals or money or land. War isn’t about survival or protection or conquest. War is about ponies. It’s about the choices we make, it’s about how we fail and fall; how we succeed and rise. War never changes because we never change. We try so hard to do what we think is right; we grasp onto these... things called nations and ideals and we lie to ourselves. We create an Us and a Them and as long as there is an Us and a Them there will be conflict, and conflict always leads to war.
The harsh truth is that the war, the Great War, was inevitable. If it hadn’t been the zebras it would have been the griffons or the dragons or, failing that, it would have been ourselves.
Because war, war never changes.
Some nights I lay awake wondering if I could have saved them. I wonder if the choices I made were the right ones, if the choices I made even mattered, or was this the inevitable outcome; the only difference being that somepony else would be sitting here telling their story instead of mine. I don’t have an answer to that. It doesn’t matter in the end. I am here, and everything has fallen to me. I don’t have a choice anymore– if I ever really did. Even now I would turn away if I could, I would leave it all behind. But there are things more important to me now. The future matters, her future matters... and I can’t afford to leave that in another pony’s hooves.
Now I stand upon the precipice, the key to everything in my hoof, and I hesitate. I wonder. Would not be better to let it all fall away? To give in and end the cycle… but I am nothing if not selfish. I look upon her, and I know that I will never surrender.
War never changes, because war... war is our hope for the future.