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// Alas, Born Amongst Smoke And Salt She Was Not. There Was Probably Some Sand, Though. 
// Story: Fallout Equestria: Taking Life By The Horns 
// by Pokonic 
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"What is he waiting for, anyway? The games are about to start, and we don't even have our seats yet! "







"Your Highness, you must awaken." a gravely old hill of a voice called out mercilessly, waking me up from a very nice nap.

I knew the voice, and had woken up to the unfortunate sound of it before, but I didn't want to listen to it. I kept still, pretending to be asleep in hope that he would leave and let me sleep a little later than usual.

"Aasifa, get up." the old brute trying to make me lose my beauty sleep grumbled out, sounding close this time. "Your Royal Sire's orders."

I groaned, knowing now that I had no choice in getting up, and stuck a foreleg out from under the silken sheets that covered me like a protective cocoon. Ug, I was so comfy. This was a crime against the state, somewhere, in some book or another. 

I slowly untangled myself from the sheets on the bed that was supposed to be made, stopping a few times when I managed to get on my back at some point and had to force myself back sideways, and it was only after a few moments did I managed to get all four hooves on solid ground. I would have felt embarrassed, but I was too tired to be, especially when I had no idea why I was even awake at the infernal hour I found myself at. My room was mostly reds and greens, with the floor dark wood and the ceiling sandy white.

The guard who had awoken me was one I knew, which was only slightly comforting. Baden was a old but sturdy-looking mule, thickly built and having a squarish head that made the light facial scarring on his right temple look even more noticeable. With his green jacket and the gold medals pinned on his breast, it was only his ragged, floppy ears that betrayed him; that he was not some dignified general who hailed from one of the desert tribes, but rather a mule in the service of the crown, one of those who were to guard those who which stallions who could be tempted into treating with less respect then they deserved.

I had known him since fillyhood, and even then he was as distant and rugged as he did standing before me now, if a little more grey around the edges. Baden's father, I knew, was one of the older princes of the family who was not low enough on the royal line to be able to afford to legitimize the offspring he had created with a lowly court servant. Hence, he was trained to be an officer within the royal guard when he came of age, advancing quickly because of a combination of the blessings of genetics and the blessing of not being made a eunuch, being already sterile by design.

And now he was, looking like some old stone sculpture someone decided to wrap in a little suit and looking at me like I was some sort of unfortunate infection.

I was used to his silliness, however, and when I took a delicate step forward, he did not move. He did his best to look like he did not care, but I knew that he, as a member of the guard assigned to watch the mares of the royal family, wasn't even allowed to touch me; bleating at me like a goat with an intestinal problem from across the room was the best he could do in his efforts to wake me up. If he truly needed to awaken me, he would have needed to get one of the younger members of my family to shake me awake.

"And what does my dear father need?" I groaned, heading for my dressing table, which was really more of a reading table at this point. I struggled to find where I left my hairbrush in between stacks of tutor-given reading material and the stacks of half-illegal reading material I had obtained from the rather disapproving royal librarian, who, for the record, was also my third cousin two times removed.

Baden grumbled, his hairless jowls quivering with something like anxiety. "You're father wished to see you immediately, my-"

Seeing that my mane needed to be straightened, I sighed and flipped my hair over to a shoulder, and took up the fine sapphire-adorned hairbrush I had for occasions like this.

"Wauht evuh." I mumbled around the handle of the slim little comb. It was probably about taxes or something.

"My lady, he is entertaining the dignitaries and wishes you to be present." Baden said patiently, like a law enforcement officer would say to a individual who was standing on a tall building and was threatening to jump.

I spat out the hairbrush and quickly rushed to the only other feature of my room of note besides my bed and my dressing table; my closet. If my hair was unfixable, I would need to find something nice to wear that would hopefully distract whoever would be seeing me from my hair. 

"From where?" I half-shouted as I scanned the generous clothing rack where I kept all my stuff, scarves and hats and necklaces given their own little neatly organized rows. Each of the major little countries that sent dignitaries to the Saddles tended to have different tastes in what they wanted to see from a scion of a royal house, because each of them had their own unique, terrible experiences with royalty.

The Germane ambassador would want to see me mostly dressed, as he was fully buisness and more interested in money than mares; the one from Prance would want to see me as dressed as little as possible, because that's just how they did that sort of thing; the one from Bactehran would probably be offended if I didn't arrive fully covered in twenty pounds of jewelry and silks; the Aldornian one would want to see me in something casual and comfortable, but that was because that griffon was gayer than a pile of lesbians and probably wouldn't touch a quivering piece of flank if it would bring world peace.

All of the above would be probably better than having to deal with the ambassador from the Zebra Empire, who talked too much and kept talking about how much they appreciated the hospitality were were giving him.

"Equestria!" yelled the mule, making my plans basicly crumble. The Equestrian delegation must had just arrived, then, because the arrival of the ponies from across the sea tended to begin with the zebra's having a fit and ended with the Equestrian diplomat being flown back over to Equestria and the Saddles feeling embarrassed about trying to court both sides of a war.

I had little idea what to wear, really, because I was never around when the Equestrian ponies came around. There were higher royals than myself, and they usually handled it. My father was also not usually one called to talk about the Equestrians, unless it happened to involve about the ledgers regarding the oil money we were getting from them.

Taking a sheer turquoise shawl that matched my eyes and quickly wrapping it around my neck, I stepped out of my closet and glared at the jack, who wasn't looking especially happy either.

"Where are they?" I asked, expecting, of course, to be told that they were meeting in one of the dining rooms.

"Your Highness, they are within your father's study." Baden grumbled out, surprisingly me lightly. My father's study had known more pens than people, let alone Equestrians. 

"Is there a reason for that?" I questioned. The mule shaking his head, grunted out a rather simple reply.

"Not that I know of." he wheezed, before adding on "Your Highness."

I sighed, shook my head, and motioned a hoof outside my room. 

Baden did what he was told, like a good servant. I stood inside my room until the sound of his wide clunky mule-hooves against the marble floor faded away, and, after waiting a few good minutes, stepped outside my room and into the hall, to see my father for some reason I couldn't discern.





The palace looked beautiful at night.

Of course, it looked beautiful in the day, too, but when it was probably about two in the morning and the overhead lighting was just dim enough so that they couldn't be called turned off, one tried to try and find things one doesn't notice in the hustle and bustle of the day, when one couldn't pause to stop and take in what was around them.

The palace was mostly constructed of white marble, from floor to ceiling, and in the day it took constant overlooking and cleaning to make sure it was free of markings and scuffing, as to not ruin the image it gave. What decor that hung from the walls tended to be green or golden cloth, and the patterns in the tile floors tended towards blues and darker greens. One visitor told me that the royal palace was like an oasis in still life. especially when one was in the main hall, from which sapphires were inlaid in the floor and a small garden was placed in the center. He might have had a point, but in the darkness of night, all the delicate colors and expensive decorations all sort of faded into blacks and greys and browns.

Walking alone in the palace, though, was still a pleasing experience. It was cool and, thanks to several opened windows, pleasantly breezy. I occasionally heard the far-off sound of hooves or the occasional snippet of talk, but in a building that had more than ten floors and was as sprawling as the palace was, one could never be truly alone. I knew a few people who were probably visiting friends, or going to see one relative or another, or were simply using one of the lesser-used chambers for some purpose or another. There were probably some children playing about, or servants working on whatever they had yet to finished in the waking hours of the day. The guards were on patrol outside as well, but they rarely ventured this deep into the palace, where it would take a good half-hour to end up outside even if one took the nearest route to one of the interior gardens.

But one could pretend to be alone in the palace if they wanted to, like I did. I didn't go through any of the main chambers of the palace, where there would probably be some stragglers from the court, on my way to my father's chambers, partly because of that very reason.

The other reason, though, was that my father was no where near any of the main parts of the palace, and was sequestered in a far-off corner of it himself, within a section of the old palace that was left standing when it underwent revisions just a few years before I was born,

I couldn't help but think about what sort of Equestrian would want to see my father. He wasn't a very important person in the court; he was the last person in place for the direct male line of succession. His father was the youngest son of the old king of Saddle Arabia, and because of that he never bothered with trying to admass any power himself. Sure, he was still higher in rank than the sons and daughters born to the cadet branches of the family, but he was still low enough on the political and familial totem pole to where he would never get a managing position in the kingdom of any real importance. He was content to read his books and isolate himself from the rest of the family.

I was happy that I was more like my mother, if not because my father also had a horrible sense of direction and I almost missed a turn down one hall that would have led me to walking down into the servants quarters. I thought it was a little funny that the servants might have had a better idea of why there were ponies meeting my father, but only because I had absolutely no idea why they were meeting him and I wasn't normally told to get up in the middle of the night to see him anyway.

I probably should have talked to Baden more. He probably did know what the Equestrians were doing here and just didn't want to tell me. 





The door to my father's study was open, which surprised me slightly. He was usually adamant in keeping his study at about twenty degrees cooler than the rest of the palace for the sake of keeping his precious books from being damaged from the heat, and part of that, besides keeping three or so miniature fans running at all times, was keeping the old wooden door to his study closed, so it wouldn't let in hot air. When I was younger, I once joked to friends that he was afraid to let out all the hot air he carried around, but that joke wasn't nearly as funny as I thought it was.

On topic, though, because of the fact that the lights were on and I did not hear signs of conversation, I carefully opened the door and stepped inside. Because of how the room was set up, I had to turn to the side to see the interior of it.

Behind a big, old wooden desk, one imported from some western nation or another and covered with volumes of legal documents, was my father.

My father was not what most thought of when they thought of the Saddle royal family, which was fine with everyone involved, as he wasn't part of the family by blood. He was from the Seglawi tribe, who were primarily noted for looking, for a lack of a better word, pretty. Long legs, unblemished skin, good cheekbones, and with a taste for the finer things in life, like expensive foreign wines and expensive foreign clothing and expensive foreign mistresses.

Unfortunately, that legendary prettiness wasn't obvious on my father. He was little too thinly built to possibly be completely healthy; not quite sickly, but too weakly built to be due to his bookishness. His beard was scraggly and didn't sit well on his thin face; he kept his eyes narrowed in a slight leer and his mouth in a hard grimace, making his default expression rather intimidating to any who didn't know any better. Most who knew him better often said that he had a heart of gold, though, to use a western phrase. 

That's a lie, though. His interior was exactly like his exterior.

He had a plain look on his face, as usual, when he motioned for me to sit down on the cushion in front of his desk. When I settled down, it was only then did he speak.

"It is time that we should talk about your future."

I looked at him. His facial expression had yet to change. I had no idea what to say; where were these ponies? What was the point of waking up at this horrid hour? Did Baden lie to me, or was he ignorant of the real reason I was sent down to see my father. Was I supposed to respond?

Apparently, I wasn't, because my father continued to speak.

"Aasifa, what is the reason that Equestria has been at war with the Zebra Empire for more than twelve years?"

I wasn't expecting a pop quiz at three in the morning, and I wasn't exactly amused, but I answered him right away because I knew the answer.

"Energy." I replied, tiredly, "The Equestrians wished for coal and the zebras wished for gems. The trade was useful to them both until their relations went sour."

"And what do we, the rulers of Saddle Arabia, have to do within this war?"

I was being walked through something nearly every child in the family understood by the time they could walk unassisted. I was too tired to be mad, but I was feeling something like spite towards my father around this time.

"Absolutely nothing. We sell our oil to both the Equestrians and the Zebricans, and in return not a single horse has died in the war. Both countries need what we have direly, and as such neither of them are willing to slight us."

My father sighed lightly. "Do you believe that is true, Aasifa?"

I frowned. It made sense. "I would like to think so."

"I believed that, too." my father replied, sounding slightly sad. "Until today."

I had the slightest feeling of impending dread.

"Father, what is this about?" I asked, trying to not sound the slightest bit judgemental.

"Aasifa, have you considered where you are to go for you're higher education?"

His words confused me slightly. To most members of the Saddles, getting a certification of higher education involved sending a letter to the heads of one of the many prestigious houses of learning in the country and then getting their doctorate of whatever they choose in the mail a few days later. But, I did wish to actually go to college. It sounded fun, anyhow. 

"I was thinking a local university, father."

He shook his head. "Have you ever wished to go out of the country for college?"

The thought had never crossed my mind. 

"Why would I?"

A strange look overcame my father's face. It took me a few moments to register that he looked like looked pained.

"I believe you need to have support from individuals outside the family, Aasifa. You speak the pony language well enough."

There was more to this, I knew, but I was really quite tired. "What does that mean, father?"

He looked old then, as opposed to merely worn. "It means that, starting tonight, you are going to stay in Caledonia for the remainder of the war."

I didn't reply immediately, because I was hoping he was going to correct himself. My hopes faltered the longer I realized that this wasn't some horrible nightmare, and that I really was awake.

But my father had his reasons. He was not stupid, and neither was he cruel. To be frank, I did see myself living outside the capital for a few years, like I had seen several of my cousins do. Usually it was due to diplomacy, but there were a few who cut ties with the family for misguided political reasons, like those who wanted to make the country democratic in some way or another.

I wasn't one of those, though. If I was going to go stay a few years in another country, I saw myself living in, say, Prance, perhaps set up in a nice big apartment staffed by little ponies in little maid outfits. Not in some obscure northern pony place that was frozen half the year and was mostly grass and dirt.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked, hoping that the answer had nothing to do with myself, or my mother.

My father grimaced.

"The King has been assassinated; killed by a zebra poison planted in his drink. Ar-Rideyadh is not a safe place to be for the daughter of a outspoken communist anymore."