//------------------------------//
// Blasted Earth 
// Story: Blackacre 
// by Princess Woona 
//------------------------------//

24 February, Y.C. 970
Castle Blackacre

“Thank you for convincing her to give me another chance,” said Dag, pressing himself against the wall momentarily to let a pair of ponies past. “After last time, she didn’t much seem in the mood to listen to reasonable talk.”
“You got her at a bad time,” said LeFleur with a little laugh.
“It’s all a bad time, though, isn’t it.”
“These days, it might as well be.”
These days. He shook his head slightly. These days were all the days he had, it seemed.
Days was, of course, a relative term at this point. Three months he had been here, three months and he hadn’t seen the sun once. Not that he was penned up in a corner, exactly. His room — a real one, once they took him out of the medical cell — was comfortable enough, and this place was huge. Best he could tell, it was a bunker of some sort, networks of tunnels running underground. Between storerooms, quarters, and three large cisterns, it was a little city. Sure, the ceilings were low and the lighting wasn’t all that great, but they survived.
Sheer survival wasn’t generally something to be particularly proud of, but given the uncomfortable familiarity he had acquired with the sounds of artillery, sometimes distant and sometimes not so much, it was well worth keeping at the front of one’s mind.
They reached a junction in the halls. Actually, it wasn’t so much a junction as a place where a half-dozen corridors happened to run into each other; they were all at slightly different levels, and none of them were aligned right with each other, but a step here or a ledge there and the engineers made it work. This place wasn’t built in a day, but Dag had the sneaking suspicion the builders didn’t have the luxury of tightening up the floor plans before starting construction.
“Today’s your lucky day,” said LeFleur, taking them to the third tunnel on the right, which went off into the distance at a slight upward angle. “I don’t think I’ve taken you this way before.”
“You haven’t,” he said, perhaps a bit too quickly. “Lucky me. I like exploring.”
“Plenty of that around here,” she said.
She would know; for the better part of three months she had been the one to lead him around. That was part of the deal, she explained to him. He wasn’t confined — no sense in doing that; he wasn’t a threat — but they couldn’t have him running around willy-nilly. So, he was on his own cognizance within his quarters, but to get around outside of those, he needed to be escorted by somepony. For routine trips, like to the mess hall or the shower block, that usually meant one of the guard ponies, whom he had gotten to know fairly well. Most of the time, though, that meant LeFleur.
At first, he had wondered what they were going to do to him. He realized, though, that the question was what they were going to do for him. She showed him a few corners of daily life down here: the mess halls, the cisterns, the few square meters of hardscrabble earth where they grew basic foodstuffs, at great magical expense.
And then she had shown him the workshops.
He wasn’t entirely sure what all of them did, and to be honest he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The ones LeFleur had shown him were eminently practical ones: a handful of ponies in a medium-sized room, all doing various assorted tasks. Some fixed hand tools, others had a basket of thread out and were repairing overcoats, others still peeled potatoes. It was an entirely random assortment of tasks, all the little things that kept a small city’s worth of ponies running.
They hadn’t asked him to come along, but they had offered. LeFleur was there twelve hours a day, and given the choice between sitting in his room and staring at a wall or tagging along and at least seeing different sections of cement walls, well, who was he to say no?
They hadn’t asked him to help, either; not in so many words. But if he was sitting there anyway, standing around while a half-dozen ponies around him did various tasks… again, who was he to just sit there? So he lent a hoof here and there. And, after a while, he found himself bending to his work, just like all the others.
Dag wasn’t skilled labor, not by a long shot, but it didn’t take skilled labor to, say, replace an axe-head. Well, it took a bit of doing to whittle down the new handle, but he figured that out soon enough. His father had been a tinsmith; maybe there was something of his old man’s attention to detail work in his hooves.
And though it wasn’t much of a specialty, he was actually not half bad at sewing things back up; though it took him a bit longer than the younger ponies to thread needles, he had something of a knack for wrangling burst seams back into place. More often than not, though, the overcoats were stained. He tried to not dwell on that particular fact.
The hallway doubled back on itself. A few moments later, it doubled back again, broke into a short staircase, then passed a set of auxiliary corridors, wound three times to the left, two to the right, down a bit, back up….
“Do you have any idea where you’re going?” he asked with a slightly bewildered expression.
“A pretty good one, I’d say,” said LeFleur with a smile. “I’m glad you don’t, though. You’re supposed to be blindfolded.”
“Blindfolded. Over those stairs?” He jerked a hoof back at the most recent set of stairs, little more than a set of uneven steps chiseled into bedrock. “You’re kidding.”
“Not at all!” she said cheerfully. “Just pretend you were, okay?”
“Pretend that I have no idea where I am?” He snorted. “Done.”
“Good.” She stopped short in the hallway, and he realized that this was a real corridor, not just a shored-up tunnel. It might look dirty and generally in severe need of a cleaning, but the floor was actual stonework. The walls, too. And the ceiling was… well, ten times what he was used to, which meant it was probably only four or five times a normal ceiling height. Still!
“We’re here.”
She rapped on the wall, the sound echoing warmly on what was definitely not stone. A few moments later the wall popped outwards with a light shower of dust. A unicorn stuck his head out, glanced them over, then nodded at her.
“You’re expected. Come on in.”
“Thanks, Chester,” she said, waving him in. “C’mon, Dag. This is your moment.”
Dag took a few steps through the door and realized that, his moment or not, he wasn’t going to get it all to himself. There were perhaps a dozen ponies in what looked an awful lot like a hall. Most of them were clustered around a table towards the middle, but every so often one would scurry out a side door, or come back in with a message to hand off.
And, in the middle of it all, one unicorn with a light blue coat. She didn’t move much, but she didn’t have to. Everything surrounded her; she was involved in everypony’s discussions, if only tangentially. Every few seconds she would say something, triggering a flurry of reactions as the ponies around her took notes, discussed among themselves, and updated thousands of little marks on the huge table in the center of the room.
The guard who let them in — Chester — went over and said a few words to one of the ponies on the periphery. That pony moved a bit closer into the center and relayed the word to somepony else; after a few handings-up of the message, news of their arrival came to Beatrix’ ears. She glanced over at them with what seemed like acknowledgement and immediately turned back to her work.
“My moment, huh?” he said under his breath.
“It’s all a bad time,” quoted LeFleur. “Anyway, she’s usually busy like this. Just give her a moment.”
Fortunately for them, it wasn’t a particularly long moment. Words were exchanged, little marks were placed on the map, and with a firm nod from their leader, the table shed ponies like a wet dog, leaving only Beatrix and two others.
“That’s our cue,” said LeFleur, walking Dag over. As they approached, Beatrix gave him a curt nod. No need for introductions; she knew him, he knew her, and that was the end of it. He didn’t know the other ponies, but something told him that operational security would advise against it.
“Mr. Hammer,” she said curtly. “Thank you for joining me.”
“Thank you for listening,” he said, glad to avoid the conundrum of what, exactly, to call her. She might technically be a mayor, but he had a sneaking suspicion that things had changed since he was last briefed on the situation here. “If I may, I’d like to start —”
“You may not. My apologies for my curtness,” she said, cutting him off with what seemed like a genuinely apologetic gesture, “but I don’t have much time, and I already have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to tell me.”
Dag glanced at LeFleur; she shrugged. Fair enough; he had bounced ideas off of her, so it was only fair that she relay them back to her boss.
“Let me cut right to the chase, then,” he said. “None of this needs to be happening. It’s not too —”
“Mr. Hammer,” cut in Beatrix with a tight smile. “Please.”
Sometimes, you just had to fold. He motioned for her to go on.
“Gaston,” she said, and an orange pony next to her turned slightly. “What are the latest casualty figures?”
“Fourteen thousand, four hundred and twenty,” he recited from memory.
“Canterlot’s casualties?”
“Estimated twenty-five thousand.”
“Injured?”
“Eight thousand on our side. Estimates largely unavailable for them.”
“Understood. Thank you.”
The orange pony gave a nod and turned back to whatever it was he was doing. Beatrix said something else, but Dag wasn’t paying attention.
Three months.
Forty thousand dead.
“How…” he muttered.
“I see you’re starting to understand our position,” said Beatrix in an unnerving deadpan.
“How,” he repeated, quite unable to find the words for more.
“If you’re wondering how they’re able to sustain those losses,” she said, casting a hoof over a set of blue markings on the map, “it’s easy. They’re drafting. Not officially, but there are ‘recommended quotas’ and ‘encouragement programs’ in every major city. And the photos, too. They’re wonderful propaganda pieces.”
Dag’s mouth tightened. He remembered one of those quite vividly. How could he not? A day didn’t pass when the image didn’t pop into his head, unbidden. Wreckage, ponies all around it, and in the center, a stretcher with… with Jackie. Dead. Or dying. Did it matter, now?
“If you’re wondering about us,” Beatrix was saying, “it’s not quite that easy, but we’re doing our best. Most of our casualties came towards the beginning. Now that we’ve settled into… less conventional tactics, we have a better return on investment.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said, mainly to the orange pony, who had started to pay attention again and was looking somewhat agitated. “It’s not like he’s going to walk this information back to Pommel. And even if he did, it’s not like any of this is news.”
Assuaged, the orange pony turned back to his work. Beatrix gave a little what-can-you-do shrug, dismissing him.
“Anyway.”
“I…” started Dag, but wasn’t entirely sure where to go with that sentence. “I didn’t know.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t. Not that that would have stopped you, but you would just have had to work all the harder to come up with something reasonable. You would, in the end, of course. That’s what you types do.”
He slipped a glance at LeFleur, whose expression was entirely unreadable.
“Not that you can come up with anything that will change our minds at this point,” finished Beatrix. “It’s far too late for far too many ponies.”
“I might not have known about the magnitude of the… conflict,” said Dag, somehow keeping his voice relatively level, “but that doesn’t mean the underlying principles are any different. I think you’ll find….”
“I think you’re still not understanding what I’m telling you,” said Beatrix quietly. “Walk with me.”
She turned away from the table and he followed, up a short set of broad stairs he hadn’t even realized were there in the first place. For that matter… if the room with the table was a hall, or a ceremonial atrium of some sort… but that made no sense. It had no windows; surely such a great hall would have —
He stopped short as he realized that, just up the few steps, the hall kept going, long and narrow and with a twin dais at the end. The kind of dais that held a throne, the kind that only royalty used. And there were two of them, a design that didn’t make sense, that hadn’t made sense for a thousand years.
“Castle Blackacre.”
“Correct,” said Beatrix, beckoning him over to part of the wall.
“The bunker… the whole underground complex.”
“Is directly under Castle Blackacre,” said Beatrix with a nod. “Then you know what this is supposed to look like.”
“This?”
“This,” she said, waving a hoof around the room. “Once upon a time, Celestia supposedly ruled from here. I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“I — that’s a good point.” He paused. “Who builds a hall like this without windows? Is this actually the castle?”
“Great Hall, in point of fact. As for the windows, we’ve closed them up,” she said, prying at the wall. “Except for here. Look.”
She pulled back what looked like a piece of iron sheeting. Dag stepped forward, rubbing an eye at the grey light outside….
And froze, utterly astounded.
If he hadn’t been told this was Castle Blackacre, dead in the middle of one of the most lush regions in Equestria, he would have guessed they were somewhere in the Frozen North. Maybe on the moon. Anywhere but Blackacre — anywhere but somewhere where there was life.
The outside world was a sheet of grey. The sky was grey, the ground was grey. It looked like snow, but a fine silt covered everything, a thin layer of char and ash. There were ruins outside, what looked like a courtyard, all dead and black, nothing but broken stone and frozen earth. Off in the distance, he saw something very much like a line of trees, but broken up by what looked like impact craters, huge blasts full of charred wreckage, all covered by snow and ice and ash.
“This… this is impossible.”
“It’s entirely possible, I assure you. Ponies have died, good ponies, thousands of them, to make this possible,” she said with a snort. “Behold, the Princess’ work.”
Dag leaned against a wall, unable to fully hold himself up. Death tolls were one thing: they were a number, easily digested and ignored. But this blasted earth? It was… it wasn’t real. And yet it was. And he knew it was like this well beyond just the castle: it was charred and broken from here to the border.
“I hope you realize,” she said quietly, “that nothing you propose will be acceptable. We’ve lost thousands of young ponies. Mares and stallions, foals and old ones. Your bombs aren’t very picky. And they’re everywhere,” she breathed. “This isn’t just the castle. This is Blackacre. Every tree, every pony.”
With a grunt, she closed the panel back up, shoving the iron into place.
“I hope you understand, Mr. Hammer. We’re not fighting you because we want to. We’re fighting because it’s all we have left.”
For a moment, silence.
“LeFleur, please take our guest back to his quarters. There’s work that needs doing.”
Dag let himself be led away. Visions of peace crumbled in his mind. This was blasted earth in every sense of the word. Deaths, countless deaths. Against that, what did he have? Words?
He shook his head as he left the room.
Words weren’t enough.