//------------------------------//
// Excerpt VI 
// Story: Seashell 
// by Winston 
//------------------------------//


Seashell
VI








From the journal of Sunburst, June 2, 1329 YS:






It's been a couple days since the thing with the roses, and it's still bugging me.

I may have done something a little foolish in that regard. I couldn't help asking the question. I'm still on the morning shift, and this morning I was on door guard duty. That didn't help me resist temptation, being by far the most boring of the watches. Seriously, I have to just stand there literally doing nothing.

For six hours.

There was another guard next to me to talk to, which makes the time go by more easily, though if I'd been alone I wouldn't have had the chance to poke something I probably shouldn't have. As fate would have it, the other guard on the door with me was Rolling Thunder, a long-time Advanced Combat Flier. He's always intimidated me a little bit. He's not very big, but he's got muscles and tendons like steel cords under his sand-colored coat. A wedge-shaped chunk that looks suspiciously like a griffin bite was torn from one of his ears at some point, among other scars he carries. I also know he saw the Northern War firsthoof, something that by all accounts hardens anypony.

Neither of us were very inclined to talk much at first, so I thought for a while that things would be okay. I made it almost two hours in silence, at least.

Of course, though, eventually it gnawed inside me too much and it finally got out.

"Hey... You know those white roses, in the middle of the garden?" I asked.

"Sure. What about 'em?" Thunder responded.

"Is there anything special about them?" I asked.

"I dunno," he shrugged. "I heard Princess Twilight had them planted when she first moved into the palace. Didn't change the rest of the gardens, but she wanted those pretty specifically."

"So do you know if they mean anything?" I continued.

"Well, I saw that in the middle of all those bushes there's a round white stone," he pointed out.

"Yes, I noticed it. I don't really know what it means, though," I said. I'd always thought it was just a regular plain old rock.

"Heh. Right, you weren't there, you wouldn't have seen them," he thought for a second. "It reminds me of the memorial stones we used to make and set out in the field for the soldiers we lost during the war."

"What about Captain Dash? Has she ever said anything about them?" I asked. "The roses, or that stone, or anything like that?"

"Why? Did you see something?" He got serious all of a sudden.

"... Yes," I admitted.

"I need to tell you a story." He looked straight ahead, not at me. "Not one that I like to tell, but you'll get the picture when you hear it."

"Okay," I nodded.

"Alright. Well, I was in the Combat Fliers when the war started. The first objective of the war strategy was to secure Equestria's border. We decided the best way to do that would be to eliminate the griffin border towns to stop them from being used as jumping-off points into Equestria, and at the same time we also wanted to scare the griffins into staying on their side." He was quiet for a moment.

"So the way we went about doing both of those things at once in one particular border village was like this," he continued. "We flew in waves from every direction. We surrounded the town, and we pinned down the griffins from the air. When a griffin would take off, that griffin would die. We'd smash 'em down by bashing them with chainweights or by breaking their wings. After a couple hours or so, the griffins stopped trying to fly. They just hid in their houses, trying to wait it out.

"But we didn't let them off that easy, either." He paused. "We smoked them out, building by building, and killed them one by one once we got hold of 'em. Didn't take too long. By the end of the day, the village was cleared. We didn't take any prisoners. There was just... Just this pile of dead griffins."

"Whoa." I was taken aback. "I never heard about anything like that happening."

"You think any of us would want to talk about it?" He asked. He had a point, I suppose. "We were all upset. Griffin raiders had been killing and eating ponies and we knew it. Still, though, that's no excuse for what we did. It gets worse, too. We piled up those bodies, on top of whatever wood was left from all the buildings in the village that we could heap up. We set all that on fire. It was one big mass cremation. I'll never forget the smell. It was like nothing else before or since. I won't forget it as long as I live. It was horrible.

"After that fire was finally out, there was nothing left but a pile of ashes and bones where a village used to be. I mean, nothing. We erased it from the map. And after we did, we went back through those bones in the ashes and we found all the skulls. We flew in some wooden poles, and sharpened the ends. Those poles got stuck upright in the ground. We took the skulls, and impaled them on the poles, one skull on top of another.

"Those were what we left behind for the rest of the griffins to find: stacks of skulls and a pile of burned bones. That was the warning we left them to stop the raids and stay out of Equestria. Those are the kind of things that happened in that war. Most of it wasn't on the same scale of outright slaughter as that, but there was brutality everywhere. Ponies were killed. Griffins were killed. Usually more griffins, but too many of both."

I found myself with a lot to think about. The war was just before my time, I've never been through it. I realized that if what had affected Captain Dash was something like this, something from the war, maybe it was better if I didn't know what it was. How would I ever really understand it, anyway? At best, knowing what had happened wouldn't get me closer to really comprehending her and the magnitiude of whatever she'd experienced. At worst, it might be something that would make her seem like an absolute monster, and I know she's not a monster. I don't want to think of her that way.

"Everypony who was out there, especially the ones on the front line doing the worst of the fighting, saw death and loss. Everypony has somepony they wish they could have saved, or something they wish they could have done differently and they wish to God they could take back but they can't because you can't give back lives. Maybe not just one thing, either, maybe a lot of them. They hurt, Sunburst. They hurt a whole lot. The things we did out there, and the things that happened... They haunt you forever," he said.

"Alright. Yeah," I nodded. "I get the picture."

"It isn't a pretty one, is it?" He asked.

"No," I thought for a minute, but there wasn't much else to say.

"So you'd better leave it alone." His voice was a bit on the strong side, but at the same time he didn't seem angry, just sad. "Just... Just forget about it, whatever you saw. I don't know what she did or where she was, or the things that happened to her. But she was an Advanced Combat Flier like me, and she's got the marks of that. I know that whatever it was, she doesn't want to think about it and dredge it all back up now. I can promise you that. I've never met any of us who do. It is what it is and you can't change the past. She's moving on the best she knows how. Let her do that."

I was inclined to agree very much by that point.

That story's gonna give me nightmares and I wasn't even there.



Enough bad memories for today.