Editors/Co-authors:
Redskin122004

Kizuna Tallis

Rush

1: The Peculiar Loneliness of Macintosh “Big Mac” Apple

Buck the propaganda. Buck my sister. Buck my job. Buck my life. Buck everything. I feel... I just… I’m tired of it all, tired of whatever it is that’s happened to Equestria. I’ve seen too much happen to Equestria to call it the same land I grew up in, and it’s hollowed me out like an old Nightmare Night pumpkin.

I can’t do this. I just can’t. For too long, I sat back and watched my sister turn into a monster before mine and Bloom's eyes. We both sat by while she ranted about the humans, all the while we sent little messages to our contacts within Ponyville, who would relay them to PHL spies. It’s risky business, but Applejack is possibly the worst pony to put in charge of whatever important position she and the Elements occupy because she cannot for the life of her obfuscate the truth. What is she and what her friends, anyway? Terrorists, diplomats, I don’t even know anymore.

I want to smack Applejack, smack the sense back into her. But it won't do. It won't work. I want to cast her out of the family for her warmongering ways, but I can't. I want my sister back and all I have is a monster with her face, a damn caricature that looks for all the world like her but has none of her soul inside. I want to tell her how I feel but I cower away like a foal away from her eyes. Eyes that no longer have that stubborn but warm love and care; just hatred and wrath for anything that goes against Queen Celestia and the so-called ‘greater family and herd’.

Darn it, aren’t we Apples? Aren’t we the largest, most honest, dependable, loving family in Equestria? Do Apples really come to blows enough that they have to say things like that?! When that brat Diamond Tiara said Applebloom was the product of incest, I gave that pink little pig food poisoning. When I broke my ribs right before Applebucking Season, Applejack took over and worked herself to the bone. Whenever she was off the farm for whatever assignment Celestia needed her for, I covered for her.

But one day, Twilight shows up and whisks her away to Canterlot to meet with the Queen, and what comes back isn't my sister.

Granny knew though. Took one look at her and she knew something wasn’t right. Always kept herself at a foreleg's length away from her, never ventured closer than necessary, and always seemed to find chores for us when Applejack was in the same room as the two of us. I think Granny had some kind of sensitivity to the land, a bond that only the oldest Earth Ponies can boast - maybe that’s how she knew. Maybe she sensed something in Equestria, whatever it was that infected the land. She didn't say a word to any of us... but she knew.

Then came Earth and Granny knew things were going downhill faster than a runaway cart. Granny refused to have any newfoals on the farm when she was still alive, called them wind-up toys with painted smiles.

Her death came hard and Applejack had the farm placed under my care, though that didn’t matter as she made the Apple Farm open to newfoals and kept it that way. I agreed on the spot, of course - I was afraid of how she might make me agree.

War came to Equestria and half of Ponyville found themselves harboring monsters. Those first few weeks were horrible, Applejack constantly growling about the humans and cursing the names of ponies that left Ponyville to escape the Tyrant. As if that was the worst thing they ever could have done, so terrible that even ignoring your family and forgetting your grandmother's funeral didn't matter. And worse, their madness spread. I saw ponies who had been uneasy about newfoals and ponification make complete 180s overnight, turning into monsters bent on destroying all humanity with smiles on their faces. And sometimes, I'd get the most terrible thoughts… thoughts that I knew were not mine sometimes just slipping in. I do my best to ignore them. But every day it gets harder, and I’m putting myself at greater and greater risk trying to funnel info to humanity. Every day, I worry that I’ll wake up, and I won’t be me.

Give me a bucking break. I saw what we were becoming and I saw how the growing PHL became a name that Applejack spat at every instance. So I asked around, discreetly of course; didn't want Applejack, the guards, nor the newfoals to know. I didn't know what'd happen, but I didn't like it.

Found out what they do and what they fought for and I felt my heart line up with their cause. I wanted an escape and they offered it to me. I needed it not just for myself, but for Applebloom as well. So I joined, I had Bloom join as well to be on the safe side. But whatever magic that was spreading over the land began to target her as well.

It began to infect Bloom, made her forget her friends and her real responsibilities. I'll be honest, I was truly afraid of what she could’ve become if she stayed here any longer.

Thankfully, she left with Sweetie Belle before she fell to the dark magic that covers this land. Heard they even managed to get their cutie marks.

Looking out to the farm and seeing those newfoals running about and doing farm work with apparent 'happiness'. They will happily work themselves to death unless I tell them to stop. Granny’s description of them is all too accurate.

You know. I think it’s time I follow Granny's advice and leave too. Applejack and her “friends” won’t be back for some time. Off ‘saving’ more humanity, I suppose.

I know for a fact she will be mighty unhappy to find a grove full of corpses. They’re already mentally dead, so letting them physically die might as well be doing them a favor. Maybe what’s left of them can find peace that way. But that’s not my problem anymore. This isn’t an Apple Family farm, it’s a darn slave plantation. We can rail at humanity for practicing slavery in their past, but this isn’t anywhere near different. At least they didn’t lobotomize their slaves.

"Hey Big Mac! Where you going?" a newfoal panted out as he pulled a wagon full of apples. I chewed my wheat stalk for a moment before giving my answer.

"Eenope. Ah reckon Ah can do my own business." I turn to leave before I stopped for a moment. I looked back to see all those eyes looking back at me. It was like looking down a bottomless pit, or into a gaping void, made worse by the knowledge that something should have been there. There was no spark of intelligence, humor, or personality at all in those eyes. "You know what. How about you lot take care of the entire Apple fields? I know you can do it."

"Get to it then." I waved my hoof at them. "Applejack will be mighty proud of you if this entire farm is finished."

“That’s okay!” the newfoal says joyfully. “All for the glory of Equestria! We must embrace our full productive potential, after all!”

As I made off the farm, I couldn’t help but take one last look at the farm that was my home for my entire life. Sweet Apple Acres was gone now. I closed my eyes to remember all the good times before making a turn and heading to Granny's headstone.

I must have sat before her grave for an entire hour before placing a hoof on her head stone.

"Nice talking to you Granny. Maybe one day the farm will be back. Maybe we’ll be Apples once more." It was a beautiful dream, wasn’t it? We could buck apples without the slave labor, and go back to being the finest farming family in Equestria. Applebloom would look up at me after breakfast, have a smile on her face as I gave her a ponyback ride to school, Applejack would be one of the most honest, loyal dependable mares I knew, and she’d… she’d just be herself again.

It wouldn’t be that easy though. No matter what’d happen, well…. if Equestria won, we might be that way, but just moving like decorations on some Neighponese clock. We’d be forced in, nowhere to go. If the humans won, by some miracle, well… I don’t know what’d happen. I know that Applebloom’s had enough of Equestria and Ponyville, so she probably won’t go back. Might be nice to start a farm somewhere else, too, cause I’ve had durned near all my happy memories crapped on here in the past couple years. And Applejack… if whatever happened to her is somehow reversible, she’ll be a broken mare, probably hated by everyone. Including herself, maybe. Come to think of it, that might very well happen to everypony that isn’t in the PHL.

No matter what happens, Equestria - the Equestria I grew up in, and I feel sorry for those foals that grew up in the Empire - will be dead.

"Time to go Big Mac." I turn to see Carrot Top standing behind me, a warm smile on her face.

"I only stayed because of you and Bloom. Now that she’s gone, and I saw you leaving the farm to Granny's grave, I think we know what to do. You told me if I ever saw you heading here, it was your signal to leave," Carrot whispered as she nuzzled me, wrapping her forelegs around my barrel. "Its time for some of us to leave too."

I looked up to the setting sun, enjoying the warmth Carrot gave to me, cause the sun isn't quite up to the task. Hasn’t been for a long time.

I can safely say I won’t be missing this place. If I was leaving the Equestria I grew up in, the Equestria I was raised to believe in, I might miss it. But now?

I would be surprised if it doesn’t fit Granny’s description at this point. A poisoned land that died and came back as nothing but a walking corpse, going about as if it were alive, but dead through and through. It looks like Equestria, it talks like Equestria, it walks like it… but underneath, nothing of it remains.

"Goodbye, Granny," I whisper, taking one last look back at her headstone before I turn to go with Carrot, meet up with Caramel and get out of here.

2: The Worst Day Of Your Life

It is the early morning, as Celestia’s holy sun ascends over the horizon. A particular pony in the city of Hoofington does not feel rejuvenated, as usual, but you suppose that is normal. His nation is at war, after all.

Imagine you are this pony. A young somewhat portly unicorn stallion, recently graduated, hailing from a comfortable life. A Canterlot unicorn to be precise. Degrees in journalism and law, not a magical heavyweight by any means. His name is Inkwell.

This pony, the one you are currently being, was in Hoofington that night. It’s not a bad city, or a big one. It’s... somehow not an Equestrian city, though. It’s a great black cancerous tumor growing on the verdant forests where it was built. Where mountains are blown apart for coal and gems, ponies toil endlessly, and crystals and gems from nopony-knows-where are assembled.

The gold, brass, copper, and precious metals of the city are covered by the grime from the smokestacks for half the day. The other half of which, they are polished by a cleaning crew of newfoals, all so the city can put on a brave face. At least, on the streets that are meant to impress and appease.

How sad. That this city, hailed as a beacon of hope for newfoals to shed what vestiges of humanity they had left, should hold the largest newfoal population in Equestria, and should be so much like those dirty, pollution-choked human cities.

Newfoals toil here every day, building weapons of war for the Solar Empire. They churn out potion vials by the hundreds, and it’s rumored that they have more new devices designed in response to those human weapons made with magic stolen by the PHL. They make chariots, crossbows, arrows, skyliners of a class expected to bring Celestia’s grace to Earth - and, it is rumored, other worlds untouched by the joy of being pony.

There’s one skyliner that intrigues you, though. The mammoth zeppelin Celestia’s Beneficence, larger than even the old Great Equestrian. Armed with new potion mortars, and large enough for Celestia herself to travel on and personally deliver grace to the world, it is going to be a monster of a skyliner... when it’s finished, anyway. You’ve seen the posters, advertising how many newfoals it can convert, house, and drop, and, most amazingly, it has a new-generation magic engine, made to house a power source developed by the Queen herself.

“Extra, extra!” a newfoal yelled. Likely a human child when he’d been ponified, he had a large cart full of newspapers. “Two weeks till the final assault! Humanity expected to fall - their new weapons will be no match for our imperial might!”

Much as you’d like to believe that, you have to wonder. The humans, while still having lost ground, have actually managed to somehow fight to a standstill. And while two weeks isn’t long, you know that they’re not going to be sitting on their flanks. They’re probably pulling all-nighters, overdosing on coffee creating new weapons, right this very minute. Unbeknownst to this pony, yet known to you, that is exactly what is happening. Right at the very second he is thinking this, there is a human, slumped over against his keyboard after 42 hours of calculations to create better magically enhanced munitions, who fought in the Battle of Boston, and is going to make the most of what may very well be his last two weeks as a sentient being.

And, though this is traitorous PHL talk, you’re worried. There have been rumors that Celestia’s clone had not retreated. Rumors that she’d suffered a humiliating battle at the hands of a former teacher, the Knight of Germania and, most improbably, Discord and the traitor Princess Luna.

Which shouldn’t be possible, of course. Humans shouldn’t have weapons that effective, Cheerilee was an earth pony with no training, and the last two shouldn’t have been able to fight! Discord had been banished after his escape, and Luna was petrified as a traitor! Nopony should have been able to free her! There was just no way that...! But that wasn’t your place to question.

No, what was your place to question was the state of the newfoals, as you trot down this street. They are thin, emaciated almost, and yet they still smile. In a way, you admire their determination.

“Pardon me,” says a mare, almost middle-aged, sitting in a rocking chair. “But don’t be on this street at night. The newfoals get... weird at night.”

“Your point?” she asks. “They may look like ponies, but there’s something else inside.”

“Humanity?” you ask, shocked. “The potion washes all of that out of them! It-”

“Not that,” the mare says. “Something else.” She refuses to speak another word, no matter how much you ask and plead.

No matter, though. There’s plenty of other things to do here. For starters, there is a certain alleyway, created more as an accident than out of genuine civic planning, sandwiched in between two great factories employing hundreds of newfoals.

An alleyway where you are sure to find the answers. It is between Golden Spike and Oiled Spoke’s locomotive and chariot factories, great ugly buildings that pump raw thaumic radiation and smoke into the air.

That’s what the directives from PETN said, anyway. They were simple - investigate rumors of poor treatment of newfoals in Hoofington. Make a report on the general state of newfoals. Come back. If you took a report on that alleyway, though, it would be a great success for newfoal rights.

‘There it is,’ you think, rounding the corner, jostling through the intense crowds of ponies and narrowly avoiding a carriage, taking note of the shabby conditions of the shops and apartments across from the factories. ‘Wait, shabby?’ you ask. ‘This truly is too human. We were giving them the ponification serum and offering them a better life here in Equestria, where they would have jobs and nice homes, and yet they live in these shabby conditions? Next, I’m going to see slums or something like that!’

Perhaps, in the fullness of time as humans become a footnote on history books, the wooden sign nailed to the narrow corridor between the factories will become a curiosity to historians. “No-man’s alley.”

As you trot down the alleyway, it is as if you are walking into some magical pocket dimension where most laws of the natural world are moot. Drips to the ground become louder. You swear you hear a river rushing underneath. Pipes snake overhead into each factory, carrying the rockmilk that superconducts magic, momentarily blocking out the sun.

At the end, you can see hundreds of newfoals. Thousands, maybe, all crammed into a wide street between tall concrete tenements. They sleep in cardboard boxes on the cobblestones, under lumpy trash-covered constructions that are not quite sleeping bags or tents. There are stalls with ponies in ragged ensembles, such as fine, patched bowler hats, a poorly-fastened tie, a wool jacket over a white worker’s undershirt. These outfits fall just short of respectability by virtue of being just so ragged, selling what looks to be either overripe fruit, limp vegetables well past the point of being edible, rusty appliances, or whatever else could be found. An elevated trolley covers the street, blocking it off from the sky.

With what may or may not be a smile, knowing what injustices you’re going to uncover, you levitate a camera from your saddlebags, and you begin to take pictures.

You push through the crowd, though it is surprisingly easy. The ponies - all newfoals, you realize - part around you like water. They are so polite and courteous. Too polite and courteous in fact...

There is not much to say about what happens on your journey down the street. Everywhere, it is much the same. The “preacher” newfoals, railing about the One True Monarch and how much better life is. More destitute newfoals sleeping in garbage. And not even minding their situations.

You keep taking photos. The newfoals are eager to help you, of course. They practically throw themselves at your forehooves, saying that they would do anything for you. But they just don’t question anything.

It’s hard not to notice how many of them look like they haven’t gotten a decent meal, or a shower, in weeks. Maybe even months…

Could life on Earth really have been so bad that this right here was an improvement?

You try to ignore the nagging little voice in the back of your mind saying no. Thoughts like that are what got your cousin arrested. Thoughts like that are why seemingly every pony from Ponyville other than the Elements and a few scant others left without a trace, and became enemies of the state; murderers, outlaws, thieves.

Thoughts like that can get a pony in trouble. Or worse. Still, that is only necessary to the War Effort. The Great Solar Empire cannot tolerate such Dissent in Wartime. Dissent leads to Disharmony. In Disharmony, we are little better than those Filthy Apes.

...For all of 14.5 seconds, as you walk by the facade of what might have once been a wealthy department store. A sense of inexplicable dread washes over you. Its sign has been painted over, and replaced with neon stolen from signs all over the city. It is in numerous shades of pink, blue, and purple, stark and bright even in the early morning.

The Skye Engine, the jury-rigged neon sign proclaims. You try not to look at it. You cannot look at it. The Skye Engine does not exist. The rumors are just that. They have been exaggerated through hearsay, you say, reassuring yourself, slowly, shakily trotting away from it.

Even though you totally are. There! See? Right there. You’re turning around ever so slightly, no matter how much you don’t want to see. But curiosity is a fickle beast, and you need to know. It has inveigled its way into your mind, and you cannot stop.

Newfoals of many ages, most of them adults but some that look to be still in foalhood, mill about its doorways. Many are female, but there’s a decent number of males too. They are clad in outfits that - no, their garments cannot be dignified by calling them outfits. They are more like costumes, imitations of Miss Rarity’s designs that foals might wear, only aged up and cut to pieces. For one thing, they show too much fur. Even skin, in some places. Many of them have scarves, or bizarre leather constructions that conceal the mouth. Some of them are wearing costumes that you do not have words to describe. There are many that have been to the bio-thaumaturge, modified to in-equine extents. They are in the windows of course, but what little you see of them shakes you to the core, your heart pounding within your barrel like a runaway locomotive.

You mind rebels against this travesty. Surely the newfoals disagree with this! Surely, they-

You stare, trembling. You have heard from Dowsing Rod, your old cantankerous grandfather, that the newfoals seem too happy. That they smile too much, too wide, for it to look natural. You cannot report him though, as he is your grandfather and you love him very much.

You had protested that they are happy with their new state, happier than they had ever been, no, than they ever could be as humans. And he had said one word:

They’re smiling. Not just any smile. The one that newfoals always wear, too wide, too toothy, too much of something to truly mean anything.

“Ugh,” says one mare, clad in a wool coat doing a poor imitation of a suitcoat, a ragged tie that had surely been taken from a garbage dump, and an incongruously polished bowler hat. She isn’t a newfoal. “I hate it when that slips.”

“Is that all you can say?!” you gasp. “ALL YOU CAN SAY?! These poor newfoals have come from a world that’s essentially a giant Everfree Forest, and this is what we give them?! Are you devoid of compassion?! Are you hu-”

“Don’t call me that!” she yells. “I may disagree with you in a lot of ways. I can see that. But tell me something - have you ever seen a newfoal say no to anything you ask of it?”

“I thought so. Do you know why the farmers of Equestria, or Golden Spike, Oiled Spoke, most of the industrialists making machines for this war like the Beneficence are so stringent about giving their workers breaks?”

Of course you do! Even if it’s an out of context question. “Labor laws,” you say confidently.

“No. It’s not,” the mare says, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “Because the newfoals will work themselves to death if nopony tells them to stop. They’re little better than automatons or golems.”

“Of course they are!” you protest weakly. “They have to be! Earth took everything from them, they have to work because they believe that it’ll all be taken from them! They-”

“Oh, you poor thing. You don’t even believe what you’re saying, do you? Then how do you explain that?” she asked, pointing a hoof at the Skye Engine. You noticed a large window with one newfoal mare standing on her hind legs, gyrating her plot around in a titillating motion. A trio of stallions, not newfoals, are egging her on before they drag her away to somewhere more secluded, clearly intending to have sex with her. They’re yelling rather exuberantly, and their language is so filthy, it makes you cringe and blush at the same time.

“Remember. Newfoals can’t say no. That extends to, well… that,” the mare says, as she walks into the building. “Why do you think so many ponies are getting married to newfoals? Like this friend of mine… Oh, poor Claw Hammer, his wife was horrible! Bet she’d get on real well with my old husband.”

What do you need, anyway? It is as if everything you know is wrong. As if Equestria has dropped out from under your hooves.

As a member of PETN who has personally dined with Fleur-De-Lis and Fancy Pants (who, despite the name, was not actually wearing pants at the time), you were told by both of them that somepony had to speak up for the newfoals. As former humans, they’re likely to get abused.

Yes, speak up for the oppressed. Which is noble and all. But with all you’ve just seen today, how is that supposed to mean anything when they can’t speak up for themselves? Not out of fear, but…

Why can’t they think for themselves, anyway? Why are they always so polite, smiling despite clearly starving and living in poverty and squalor? They… Alright. You’ve seen photos of Earth. You get that. Polluted wastelands, overpopulated slums in places like India and China, impoverished people, complicated politics, famine in places like Africa, but… what if not everywhere on earth was like that? And maybe the humans weren’t all a bunch of savages and violent brutes. It would be a ridiculous world if every single place was like that, if every single inhabitant of the place was just nothing but a thoughtless beast. The humans would have all destroyed themselves centuries ago! No, Earth can’t have been that bad, because the ponies running away from the Barrier have survived. Somehow. And there were the ones fighting alongside humans...

The report sits half-written on your table. No matter what, you cannot get past that. Clearly the newfoals have been subject to abuse, but from what you’ve seen, it’s nigh-impossible for them not to be abused.

But you can’t write that. Fleur would be sad and disgusted, as would everyone else, and then you would… Well, that didn’t bear thinking on. Tired, sickened, and not sure what to do, you lie on the bed, levitating up PETN’s weekly magazine.

“I was a PHL member!” screams the heading of one page. You’ve heard of this stallion, a former PHL member before he was captured and he saw Celestia’s Light, immediately becoming a die-hard PETN, and then PER member.

You investigate, of course. Even if the newfoals are desperate to the point of being unable to say no, there has to be some great abuse that is keeping them down!

You talk to the new manager of a struggling grocery store, an inexperienced young stallion who frequently mutters about how it was better when his old supervisor Green Grocer was running the show. He has this to say.

“Ever tried to buy food during the lunch rush?” the young stallion asks. “Now, imagine that your favorite store or restaurant has two billion new customers now, all trying to buy food. That’s what it’s like for every grocery store and restaurant in Equestria. We struggle just trying to stock up for the next day! I don’t know how the humans fed such a huge population, but the Barrier reverts their farmland to forest and plains, so we’ll never know. I’ve heard something about them having ‘high-yield strains’ but we’ll never know cause the Barrier destroyed them.”

When you protested about all the jobless newfoals, he simply said, “Do I need to repeat myself? We have too many newfoals and not enough job openings. It’s the same everywhere! We have to make colonies and farms just to have living space!”

“Sweet Apple Acres and some of their extended family’s farms,” he says. “The Apple family and their closest friends and relatives in the agriculture business manage a lot of farms in the colonies in New Equestria. Along with transporting goods. I think they have an office over by the railroad station?”

“You have no idea at all what you’re talking about, do you?” he sighed. “Anyway, I need to get back to work. Nobody can figure out what system Green Grocer used to organize all this, and it’s driving us mad!”

“I know, I know,” you sigh. “I’ve been getting that a lot. But humans made it, so-”

“Listen,” the mare says. Half of her bloodstream is probably caffeine at this point. She looks like she considers sleep a luxury or a treat, like chocolate. “I don’t care what you have to say on that. But humans had trains that could travel 320 kilometers per hour, and the Barrier atomized them! Guess what we have. Go on. Guess.”

“Well, yeah, but compared to what humans made, they’re obsolete and inefficient. We don’t have continent-spanning railroad systems! Even if we don’t have engines as efficient as human locomotives, we’ve destroyed all the infrastructure! We have to build everything from scratch because the Barrier won’t even let us take human steel, so colonies are forced to build from the ground up! Sure, we have bountiful land, but we can barely use it!”

“Because all the magic and resources they take up are needed for the war effort, and they… look. They just don’t work for transporting freight. You’d need something bigger than the Beneficence for that, and that’s already taking enough resources to establish several colonies.”

“...It is a huge project,” you admit. After what you’ve seen, it’s hard to argue with her. “I… have to admit, I haven’t seen the Beneficence’s construction site, but it’s said that it’ll even dwarf the Great Equestrian.”

“And that was destroyed by some human superweapon. Nopony knows what it was, and Twilight Sparkle is still trying to work out how that was even possible!”

It is getting late. Celestia is easing the sun down, and soon she will raise the moon. It is good that she is so used to doing that - who would have thought that Luna would have been on the verge of another traitorous outburst?

It’s clear, very clear that she had never really stopped being Nightmare Moon, for-

Your train of thought derails. Is she? Is she, really? Really? You heard the impossible reports from Boston, but the petrified statue of Luna is still there.

Your notepad sits blank in your saddlebags. It’s blank, so it doesn’t actually say anything, but you feel as if it is mocking you.

You just…. it’s like somepony cut the strings of your bow. You had a perfect shot lined up, something that’d be close to a work of art. And now, that just doesn’t work. You were prepared to write about an uncaring city, prepared to try and galvanize everypony into action to bring newfoals better conditions…

But can you? And is it worth it? Sure, newfoals don’t deserve to be abused, or kept in squalor. But how do you try and prevent horrible conditions when your nation is so clearly overstretched and in hindsight, completely unprepared to support them? Or prevent the abuse when newfoals can’t say no, or are little better than automatons?

They can’t think you realize, to your shock. They… they weren’t this way. They can’t have been.

That’s right! Perhaps you can argue for a more humane use of the potion. Clearly, in removing that 'human nature' that kept them greedy and selfish, making them more carefree and friendly, something went wrong. It made them too docile. It made them too-

There is a crowd of newfoals up ahead, trotting down a narrow passage between two buildings hammered together from whatever scrap wood could be found in the city. It is altogether too narrow to really be called an alleyway.

You wait, curious. It is not the sick, nauseating fascination that you felt in front of the Skye Engine. It seems healthy enough. This is the closest thing you’ve seen to a large group of newfoals acting on their own, so, naturally, you’re curious.

Adjusting your saddlebags so nopony can see your cutie mark, you follow them between the two buildings. The shanties. The newfoals appear to be heading down a hole caused by a broken pipe shattering the cobblestones, each with single-minded drive and efficiency.

And sweet mother of Celestia, it is even worse down there than it was on No Man’s Alley. The newfoals are simply packed against one another in tight shanties, and… Sweet Celestia, how can it be this bad?! How?!

But even that pales in comparison to what you are about to see next. The procession of newfoals travels through a narrow pipe, through what feels like miles of identical tunnels, though you tell yourself that it cannot be that long.

Finally, the newfoals come to a massive room in the sewers. A cavernous space that could easily fit a house, and seems to be… there are objects on the walls. Photographs, clearly cut and pasted from magazines, some of which you have clearly seen in PETN newsletters, are all over the walls. There are crude, brutalized bipedal statues lining every alcove.

It has an aspect of… what humans call a church? One of the places of worship where humans, or Zebras, or any other Enemies of Equestria worship their false gods instead of the One True Monarch, Celestia, the smiling goddess.

The newfoals are gathered there, in front of a statue of Celestia that was either stolen from somewhere or carved by newfoals. It is standing atop somepony’s crude approximation of a human skeleton, a smile on its face. You cannot fault it for that, but… still, there is something wrong with the image. You cannot tell what, though.

“Celestia has saved us from our humanity, from greed, from all the vices that made us human,” says one newfoal mare, standing before the statue. She looks like some sort of leader. “We are unworthy. We are pathetic-”

Well, this is unexpectedly worse and yet somehow better than you had expected. The newfoals are usually proud to be ponies… what is going on here? You make your way to a solitary pipe hanging over the cavernous room, a stream of noxious water dripping downwards.

“-and unworthy of feeling. Unworthy to truly feel. As ponies, absorbed into the Empire, we can be nothing. But only by serving the Empire can we truly be allowed to feel, to be alive,” he says. “By crushing those that would go against her harmony. Rainy Daze…” and she points toward a newfoal stallion. “What say you at this moment?”

“Can’t stand it,” he says. “We deserve this for once being human. For our very existence as them, but… I can’t...I NEED TO FEEL IT!” the newfoal stallion screams, a high piercing note that could shatter glass.

...Well, that can’t be a good sign. Newfoals are supposed to be peaceful! Even if the latest batch of potion is flawed, you know that this can't be right.

“Bring out the effigy,” the mare commands, taking out a large scarecrow, roughly human-sized. The newfoal stares down at it, and… is that a smile? The one he is wearing, the one that all newfoals wear, it deepens. It is like a pencil and paper drawing immediately becoming a painting. He stomps on the hideous effigy of a human.

“Rainy Daze, how do you feel?” yells the newfoal mare that appears to be leading this strange church.

“ALIVE!” the stallion yells, laughing, his eyes deep, crazy, bloodshot red. “I can feel it! I FEEL EVERYTHING!”

It is as if stomping on the human’s effigy has revitalized him in some way. As if some unholy vigor has been infused through him. The smile on his face, which has seemed increasingly unlike a smile all day, is, to your horror, an actual smile. The emotion is plain on his face, at a level of expression that most newfoals just don’t or can’t display.

“Oh, this… I’m alive!” the stallion says, practically weeping in joy as he stares at the ketchup-splattered dummy of a human. “Though I am filthy, undeserving of such mercy, I am happy!”

“You of the Salvation Army,” says the mare leading this perverse service, “What did you find? Did you experience the new Joy that Celestia has given us?”

The newfoals that step forward are ragged, missing eyes and great patches of fur. They have odd, awkwardly fixed peg legs. These ponies have to be war heroes or something! To have gotten home from the Salvation Army, well…

You have heard Things from the battlefields that the newspapers won’t talk about. Stories of humans and ponies (you instinctively suppress the revulsion) who are able to slaughter newfoals and native Equestrians in droves. Humans and ponies alike have taken up particular fighting styles and enhanced weaponry that make them infinitely more effective than the average “grunt,” as they call their basic soldiers, leading attacks against our forces. Not just the ones that somehow managed to win the Battle of Boston, but all over the world. It’s rapidly becoming a darned deathtrap for Ponykind’s righteous battle. Human guns now pierce through shields, and almost all Potion-based weaponry save for gas has become impractical. Newfoal rushes have become simply untenable. And in the few countries the Barrier hasn’t purified of human influence, there is a firearm behind every tree, behind every dune, around every corner.

Though you wonder if it is righteous anymore. Even though you are not supposed to think like that.

“We were… we managed to get out of Boston, avoiding the charge,” one says. “But we found a Betrayer, and we beat her for hours.” Her smile does that inexplicable deepening as well. “Jammed our hooves into her eyes, left her screaming on the floor, and we just stomped on her till she bled. Ripped off her horn, too.”

Torture?! That’s… that’s a human thing. Only humans do that, right? Only humans are so violent, right?! That has to be, it has to be, that you know for the Queen told you so-

The denial has become less pronounced, though you can still hear some voice in the back of your mind, protesting that you have to be right, that Equestria has to be right! And yet...

It is as if a switch has been flipped. You are wrong, you realize. This whole war is wrong. If you’ve made ponies resort to torture and worse, enjoy it, then you cannot be right. Before the war, Hoofington did not have such vast poverty. It did not have a food crisis, it did not have any of the scars that have certainly come from war. There were not horrific workplace accidents or slums dedicated entirely to newfoals.

And ponies were… they… how can it be right for newfoals to be this way?! They’re caricatures of ponies! Black and white caricatures with no depth! Twilight Sparkle said that her newfoal husband embodied the Elements better than most ponies, but that…

Was pretty hypocritical and sickening now that you thought about it. Newfoals were just humans molded into ponies, so why were they better ponies than you? Did that mean smiling constantly with few visible other emotions, working yourself to death just because somepony forgot to tell you to stop, not having enough of yourself to hide, save for this monstrosity, helping everypony so fervently that you wasted away, and making more humans into ponies so they could come to our horribly overstretched empire made you a better pony?! Because this was just doing so much more harm than good! You’d seen the photos that ponies would take of captured cities and towns, of humans in the worst of conditions who had escaped the Barrier, but… for the majority of them, it seemed that the Barrier was what actually caused their terrible living conditions. And by pressing the Barrier onward, Equestria has made them more overpopulated, creating more terrible conditions to use as propaganda fodder. Which is even worse because Equestria keeps scaring them off with the threat of ponification, which would likely make them more brutally violent, more scared, more liable to torture...

‘Oh sweet Celestia, we’re the bad guys! They were brutal and monstrous before, but we’ve made them worse.’

You cannot write an article that supports the war or newfoals now. You cannot do anything that is pro-war. You have seen too much suffering, too much destruction of innocence to ever truly support the war.

Trembling, you stand up, and attempt to turn around. The pipe echoes with your movement, and-

As if they only have one mind, all the newfoals stare up at you, far too alert, far too synchronized.

You run, trying not to scream, as the newfoals - those not pony things, aliens molded into an equine likeness, chase you. You try to stave off thoughts of them assuming you’re a PHL betrayer, then torturing you. Of them somehow making you like them, a terrible “perfect” smiling pony, as they smile, using their magic and-

“Can we help you down?” asks a pegasus, floating up to you. “That looks so hard to turn around in. I don’t even know if you can!”

“So sorry you couldn’t get out,” says another pegasus. “That pipe looks awfully cramped.”

They’re… they’re so helpful. So kind. To a fault even, but they’d been keeping almost the same tone when talking about torture and murder.

“Why, celebrating the glory of Equestria, of course!” says the newfoal who had trampled the effigy of the human.

You stare at him, almost sick, trying to stave off nausea. “This? How is this a celebration?!” you ask, trying to keep yourself from sounding too disgusted. You don’t want them to think you’re a Betrayer, after all. “Torture! You’re celebrating the torture of-”

“Why shouldn’t we?” one yellow newfoal unicorn asks, cocking her head to the side. “They’re just Betrayers and…” she speaks the word as if it is the most vile, hateful insult she can muster, and considering that newfoals can’t swear and are obsessively, fanatically, singlemindedly patriotic, it just might well be. “Un-Equestrians.”

You are going to say something. Argue not on behalf of humans, but on behalf of the decency that humans have so little of, though they are starting to seem almost sane compared to the singlemindedness of newfoals.

“Why, you are not advocating for them being afforded any of the rights of ponies, are you?” another newfoal asks. It’s the pegasus that had carried you down to the floor, and you are eerily sure that if you are to say something about Equestria that they don’t like, the pegasus could just fly up and drop you to the ground, or they could drown you.... “Because the humans have no souls and they aren’t sentient, and the Betrayers have just sold themselves into barbarism.”

“No, n… no,” you say, trying desperately to keep yourself sounding like you at least mostly agree with them. “I… just think… you hear all those stories about the HLF, right? Torturing, murdering, stuff like that? I just don’t want to sink to their level is all.”

“Oh, we couldn’t possibly sink that far,” said one newfoal, and you realize that her eyes almost glow with belief. Absolute conviction, no room for doubt, no room to question morality. Or even to want to question it. “We’re ponies. We love and care for one another. We are perfect, as we have killed our imperfect selves. We are better than them.”

It was easy to convince the newfoals you did not want to stay. You told them you were sick, that you were curious, and you didn’t have the stomach to watch things like that.

Eyes darting from side to side, you crawled up, up and out of the sewers, and found your way to an inn on the outskirts of Hoofington. At first, you had wanted to look for a ‘perfect’ inn and dinner, a ‘perfect’ view, all kinds of characteristics for which you cannot find that perfect balance.

As you ran out of town, you passed the same mare, still in her rocking chair. You clearly heard her as you passed her by.

"Told you not stay out at night." She called out as you blazed past. You were not sure if she was giving off a cackle of laughter at your foolishness.

You are so far outside of Hoofington that you are practically in the mountains, in this old wooden inn that creaks in the cold night winds. It was upon reaching the inn, after taking a streetcar and trotting miles, you realized what you were truly looking for.

You just wanted out, didn’t you? You wanted to be away from the newfoals, away from the city crumbling and choking under the weight of its own population, away from the war, away from this new Equestria that is mostly newfoals, to some peaceful place that for a few fleeting moments you can pretend you’re in an Equestria from before the war. Before… actually, the change has been so gradual that you cannot point to any single event. The Crystal Empire seems slightly too late, even Nightmare Moon’s return seems too late. There has to be some event that made Equestria lose its way, some event where-

You are sitting in your room, staring forlornly at the blank piece of paper in front of you, on your desk.

The instructions were clear - write an expose on Hoofington’s abuse of newfoals. If anything, it seems like the newfoals are abusing it. Not abusing it, actually - more like draining it. And yet, it didn’t seem to be by any fault of their own; Equestria was simply unprepared to care for such a huge, massive number of new inhabitants.

You catch yourself before you write that out. You’ve found the opposite of seemingly everything you need to write a positive story.

You cannot write this in Equestria. But you have to. Because in Equestria, you can always fix mistakes. Celestia has… she has made a mistake. That has to be it.

You passed out drafts of your article to the PETN members. Fleur De Lis’ husband Fancy Pants was there, the old fop. As were a mare and her filly from Ponyville, and countless others. You had been sitting around a table, eating a cake allegedly made from a human recipe before the Barrier atomized it.

They had been eager to hear you talk to them. Eager to hear you give your report on how cruel Hoofington was for newfoals. You don’t know what they expected - cruel industrialists that treated their workers like replaceable machines they didn’t have to pay money for, discrimination, businesses refusing to sell their services to newfoals? - but you most certainly didn’t have it.

You told them the truth. You told them about the brothel of newfoals, the starvation, the poverty, how there were just not enough jobs or goods to go around. The almost cult-like group of newfoals who took far too much joy in the prospect of hurting so called 'Betrayers' and humans, enough to make you uneasy. How they had become almost revitalized by the prospect of making humans suffer, with casual, gleeful sociopathy.

At first, there was silence. Fancy Pants’ eyes had darted across the room. The Ponyville mare, Berry Punch, if you remember correctly, had stared at you in anger, and started screaming bloody murder at you.

All of them but Fancy Pants. who was in the middle of some emotion that could perhaps be called quiet disgust, given his silence and bowed head, had been angry. You had argued, of course. Pleaded. Told them it was the truth, begged for them to listen.

They didn’t. As soon as you showed yourself as even slightly disagreeing with the Empire, they had pounced on you like the hungry predators of Earth or the Everfree, or one of the zones of New Equestria that hadn’t been culled by hunters and was still plagued by predation.

You had protested that you had never been against the empire. You merely thought that perhaps the war was wrong, that maybe the humans did not have it that badly on earth and maybe humans were not all savages for that matter, that maybe this wasn’t the right way to help them. That the war had been poorly planned and your nation was steadily destroying itself.

The PETN had looked at you with fear, then pity. You had been knocked out by the Royal guards, and, in the current parlance of the public, Disappeared. Or, in the parlance of the Empire, Detained to Prevent Further Destabilization of Wartime Morale.

You’d been hit with a sedative spell of some kind from a unicorn, then he and a mare had dragged you outside, using magic to force your limbs to walk. You were dragged into a civilian wagon, as if you were their drunk friend, then forced in.

The ride had taken what felt like hours, and your limbs would not move. You’d been dragged by that puppeteer spell through Canterlot Castle, marched against your will then brought into a dark room, where your hooves are shackled and the place smells of mildew and rust.

Finally, after who knows how long, you are brought before Queen Celestia. You aren’t allowed to walk, of course.

Just forced to walk by that puppet spell. And worst of all, it’s Twilight Sparkle doing it, forcing you to walk.

You don’t want this. You’re not even allowed to throw up, or scream, or say anything. The bile is building up at the back of your mouth. If only there was some way to escape, some way to run! But no, you are inexorably marched toward the Queen, down the hallways of the castle as the terrible purple mare smiles. You try to look at her, to give a questioning look, but even as you try, her hold over your neck tightens.

You want to run, but you can’t! It’s… it has to be a nightmare. It has to be. There is no other way at all, no way you could be made so helpless, so powerless.

As soon as you feel the control released, you fall to the floor, your legs wobbly from lack of use.

You take a look at your surroundings. The sun streams in through the stained glass windows of the Elements and various militaries of Equestria in various actions. Vanquishing Nightmare Moon, taking over human cities, bestowing the gift of ponification.

It is warm. The white marble that makes up the floor and ceiling are cool, the light is just that perfect shade to keep you from being burnt, and relax you at the same time. Being before your glorious ruler should fill you with a sense of peace, but now? Here?

All you can fill is fear. Deep, pounding fear from the bottom of your heart as, to your horror, the Elements stand by her. Twilight is at the feet of the throne, an anticipatory smile on her face. You have only rarely seen Celestia in all her majesty. More power than any unicorn can dream of, immortal, fur whiter than snow, a mane all the colors of the sky. She is so radiant that she makes every color in the vicinity seem grayer and duller.

But it is the eyes that worry you. Cold, dark, hard purple. There is no mercy in those eyes.

“Mighty Queen,” Twilight says, bowing her head before Queen Celestia, touching her horn to the floor and them giving her mentor a nuzzle. “We have the Betrayer.”

“You were going to destabilize wartime morale. Make ponies question our noble battle to save humanity from itself,” Queen Celestia says. “That is betrayal. And I can’t have that.”

All the while, she is smiling as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Not too much like a newfoal, now that you think about it. But there is intelligence behind her eyes.

“I didn’t want to do any of that!” you protest, taking care not to dig yourself deeper. “I just wanted to tell everyone that there are things in this war that we aren’t doing right. Maybe it wo-” you catch yourself, just barely.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have gone through it,” you say, and you plunge into your argument before you can make things worse. “We’ve overstretched our infrastructure by destroying human infrastructure, and we can’t feed ponies with human high-yield strains because the Barrier somehow destroys them as well. We’ve taken in more newfoals than we were prepared to support, so we don’t have enough jobs or living space, and we’ve gutted the economy. The humans had continent-spanning railroad systems, and we haven’t managed to make enough transport to cover the lands we’ve… purified.”

“We’re so eager to destroy humanity that we’re destroying ourselves!” you say. “And… you may need to rework the potion.”

“The ponification potion isn’t… I think it makes them too concerned with being ponies. They have little, if any will of their own, they hate humanity to the extent that they take joy in stomping on effigies of themselves. They outright said that they could barely feel anything when they weren’t trying-”

None of them are dismayed or anything. They show no signs of disappointment. If anything, they are smiling wider.

“It was on purpose,” you breathe in realization. “You made the newfoals this way on purpose. They have no hopes, dreams, thoughts, anything for themselves! They’re blank! They’re… they’re smiling nzambi!”

“You too?” Queen Celestia sighs, and her words are sweet. Not the sweet of candy, but of something rotten. Of something too sweet, enough that it makes you want to throw up just smelling it. “I will never understand why everyone compares them to zombies. Aren’t they happier? Aren’t they better even than humans?”

“NO!” you gasp. “No they bucking aren’t! You’ve made them constantly happy without any negative emotions! So, they…. after awhile, they just don’t feel anything! How… how could anything have possibly justified this?!”

“Awww, come on!” Pinkie Pie says, laughing. “Everypony wants to be happy, don’t they? So we made them that way. Look how happy they all are! They just smile smile, fill your heart with sunshine sunshine!

“They are human!” she protests. “They deserve to be made perfect! Look what they’ve made! Look what they’ve done! They do not respect one another, they do not care for each other, they are-”

“No. I won’t accept that,” you say. “I don’t. We’re not perfect. Nopony is. Even you aren’t! I don’t know why you’re ponifying them, maybe you’re jealous of them or something, but-”

“NEVER INTERRUPT ME,” Queen Celestia says. Though her voice is quiet, and she might as well have been whispering, her voice reverberates through the throne room, with almost enough force in those words to crack the stained-glass windows. “I offer you a choice now. You can either submit to me, and none of this ever happened. Or you can disappear to one of the work camps.”

“I am going to die as myself,” you say. “Nopony will take that away from me.”

"Take him away." You feel the guards drag you away, listening as she talks to Twilight and the others. "I need you for a very important project later. All of you.”

3: Horrible Truths and Thin Facades

It would be something of a stretch to say Fleur De Lis was a bad pony. She merely had that unique combination of social connections, ignorance of the world at large, and good intentions that made her position more an unfortunate quirk of circumstance than genuine villainy.

She sipped her tea, and sighed, reading a newspaper article about how a rather high-placed executive at Barnyard Bargains had been found with leaflets and pamphlets containing anti-Newfoal rhetoric. Why did ponies refuse to accept newfoals? Ponification was a necessity, and yet so many ponies treated newfoals as if the potion had not purified them.

Well, okay, sure, maybe the newfoals sometimes acted funny, but after having shed away their old nature, what made them greedy and cruel and seeing how much better it was, why wouldn’t they be in such marvel of everything around them?

She had started the Ponies for the Ethical Treatment of Newfoals to protect incoming newfoals. They’d likely face plenty of discrimination for what they had been, or be treated as if they still had that nasty nature that made them human in the first place. Ponies leaving graffiti or throwing things at their door, throwing crude cutouts of hands at them, or saying “You’ll never be ponies, just filthy, disgusting, bloodthirsty humans!”

It had seemed laughable. HER? A model, rumored to be a trophy wife? She was just going with it because it was fashionable!

Her husband, Fancy Pants, trotted into her new office. She was an important pony now, so she was given an office with white stucco walls, dark hardwood floors, thaumoelectric lights, and modern amenities to befit a princess. And they had - this office was in a manor that had belonged to the disgraced Princess Cadance. Though nopony would have guessed it belonged to a disgraced princess, particularly her - her ex-husband Shining Armor, claiming that she had sex with a human as so many mares were wont to do these days, had destroyed every statue, painting, or sculpture containing her likeness.

She was happy to see so much of Fancy around their home. When she had been busy at PETN before her promotion to the Newfoal Affairs department of the Equestrian government, Fancy had been off at what he described as a ‘rather secretive club in Canterlot low-town. A rather… scandalous place!’ And he had then given her a wink, assuring her that it was not a newfoal brothel, claiming that the idea sickened him. Which had kept Fleur relieved, knowing that whatever her husband was doing, it wasn’t too depraved. The foppish stallion had few mean bones in his body.

Now, however, he appeared to have cut back on his visits to that club, whatever it was, and appeared to be doing much of the paperwork to help her cause. She’d never asked what he’d been doing, and he’d never told. Too much could slip out at Canterlot nobility parties, and cause a debilitating scandal. Besides, she trusted him.

“So,” Fleur asked, “how goes our struggle against the paperwork monster?”

“Poorly,” Fancy groaned, his waxed mustache and elegantly styled mane drooping. “While Inkwell did lose his way-” The poor, unsubtle moron! he thought. Just a pony whose good intentions hurt him. “-He did raise good points. I’m already trying to get those brothels shut down.”

‘And turning them into newfoals doesn’t?!’ Fancy thought inwardly, getting slightly angry. Nevertheless, he pushed those thoughts out of the way. It was the closest she could get to being kind in the Empire, and they were doing some good, anyway. He had to admire her generosity to newfoals who had given up everything and found themselves destitute. She was doing better than even the actual element of Generosity was nowadays, probably…

Fleur added, “Though we did get a letter. We, and several important functionaries, are required for the christening of the Celestia’s Beneficence.”

“The Beneficence?” Fancy asked. And, before he could stop himself, “Isn’t that the new assault skyliner that’s being developed?” His flower shop, and numerous loosely-connected PHL cells he only knew through dead drops had been trying to find information on the thing for a while, but he knew precious little about the thing. Apparently, it was some kind of massive skyliner, bigger even than the Great Equestrian, but he knew nothing about it. Perhaps he could-

Stop. Trade Secret was dead. Killed in the fire. And if he suddenly came back, he’d put Fleur in danger. Everything that the two of them had worked to create for each other.

Calling upon some distant reservoir of gentlestallionly poise, he simply arched an eyebrow and said, “It’s not exactly a well-kept secret.”

“Ah, I see,” Fleur said. “Did you learn about it at that oh-so-exclusive club you visited?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “The stallions there… are exclusive, connected ponies. They wouldn’t like to be revealed.” Technically, this was true. There were stallions in the few PHL holdouts of Equestria who would care not to be revealed, all of whom had done their business wearing unremarkable garments with inverted Want-It Need-It spells. Though considering how untalkative one was, and how enormous he was, Fancy suspected that one was Big Macintosh Apple. Perhaps the most productive yet dangerous position to be in, the brother of an Element Bearer who could not lie or even obscure the truth to save her life. Besides, there were numerous mares involved who would also not care to be involved. Particularly a certain easily-frightened group of flower sellers…

“We certainly are,” Fleur says. “I do hope it’s not as horrible as I’ve heard.”

As a young stallion with more money than attention span, Fancy had traveled Equus, to places that were unlikely to exist anymore, seeing slums, badlands, industrial wastes, alongside areas that were so beautiful he wondered why nopony seemed to talk about them. Not counting the more adventurous trek through the Griffon Kingdom and his odd 'hobby' he gained while living there.

Possibly as a result of his travels, when the train exited a long tunnel, he was at least slightly prepared for the pure dirtiness of the city.

Unpredictable thaumaturgic compounds had leaked into the surrounding landscape, twisting the flora and fauna of the Hoofington Range into strange, unlikely forms. Trees were gnarled and twisted, statues were overgrown, and bizarre vines crawled up trees and strangled them. Yet, at the same time, runoff from factories not powered by thaumic machinery had caused massive die-offs of riverside plants, with dead fish bobbing in the river. It was a myriad of ugly, unnatural colors, thanks to the pollution of Hoofington’s rapid unrestrained industrialization.

From their first-class railway wagon, which was possibly one of the few railway wagons in Equestria that actually qualified as a passenger car, as much of Equestria’s passenger rolling stock had been converted from obsolete boxcars, to save materials during the War and support increased rail usage, Fleur stared at the ecological devastation.

It got worse as the train neared the city, passing through Spatters, a housing project that had been taken over by newfoals. It had originally been made as affordable housing for newfoal workers, but it had quickly become a ghetto as newfoal squatters with no place to go other than the clouds above Hoofington had flooded in, taking over even the skeletons of skyscrapers-in-progress.

“It’s so terrible that newfoals are forced to live like this,” Fleur sighed. “Perhaps Inkwell was at least partly right.”

“We could have slowed the Barrier and given ourselves time to build our forces,” she said. “But if we’d done that, the war would have been even more brutal. It’s a terrible necessity, I suppose…”

“Not much we can do about all of that, though,” Fancy said. “Not instantly, anyway…” he looked at the ground soberly. “Fleur, there’s something I want you to know.”

“You’re a good mare, Fleur,” Fancy said. “For all that you do, I can’t help but love you more. I just feel ashamed that I haven’t done enough. To stop any of-” he swept his foreleg out in a wide gesture, “This.”

“Have I?” Fancy asked. “I’ve donated money to pro-newfoal causes. I’ve been at rallies. I’ve been braver than most of the inbred fools in Canterlot, and I haven’t stopped any of this!”

“The newfoals, the social injustice, the food prices, the feeling that Inkwell was right. It’s this war, Fleur. The feeling that it’s all unavoidable. It makes me feel so powerless. So impotent.”

“I wouldn’t say that you’re-” Fleur started, looking away from him as he spoke.

“No! Not like that. Like no matter what I do, I won’t make a difference to Equestria. I won’t do something that matters to even one pony,” he sighed. “I’ve tried so much, and so little has changed.”

“Fancy, you’ve done plenty of good! All those things you mentioned, I know that they’ve helped somepony!” Fleur protested.

“Have I?” Fancy asked. “We’re still at war, Fleur. We still have this. We still have ponies suffering because of the war. I haven’t done enough.”

“Equestria was not built in a day, Fancy,” Fleur said. “We will be able to help in time, and one day, you will have created something wonderful. I promise.”

Somewhere in Fancy Pant’s mind, Trade Secret was still there. Not as an actual split personality, or the bold, dashing rogue he hadn’t been for years, but as a quiet, nagging urge. He wanted to write on the injustice of Hoofington. He wanted to pat Inkwell on the back with his forehoof and say, “Son, you were right.”

But he couldn’t, and Inkwell was likely in a work camp in one of the colony zones, possibly on the downright terrifying remains of the African Front, where even venturing into purified land was a death sentence.

Even if there was no humans to fight, Africa had its own perils that seemingly made the Everfree look like a joke in some comparison. Strangely, reports he received indicated that it was only newfoals that had gotten killed by the dozens of predators, in a foolhardy attempt to ‘domesticate’ them. Natives were left alone or ignored entirely by the predators. Many suspected that it was the zebra’s doing, using their subtle, natural magic to create a curse that would make the already dangerous continent even more so. Though there was also a theory that predators simply didn’t like something in the newfoals, and attacked them. Personally, Fancy liked the first one more.

His cover would be blown. And, though he would, in his own way, be doing good things, Fleur would be ashamed of his work to protect the humans. Because, after all, he was supporting them, making him a Betrayer. When Fleur found out, it would not be pretty. In the event that Equestria consumed Earth, he’d likely be treated the same way humans had treated escaped Nazi war criminals. Optimistically, if the humans won, she… might leave him in disgust, for facilitating the downfall of her nation.

Oh, how it tore him up inside to lie to her, to play up his foppish nature so much! To keep from screaming as they walked past homeless and destitute newfoals, restrain his disgust not at them but the process they’d been made from. To keep himself from crying at the sight of them, and drown his sorrows in expensive alcohol.

He had to be careful with the second thing. A loose tongue could lead to the brainwashing of his colleagues. The destruction of untold millions. PHL spies being lead into traps, soon to have their minds laid bare before Queen Celestia or Twilight Sparkle, their psyches unraveled till they became little more than newfoals with cutie marks.

Those were thoughts that kept him up at night. Even after long, happy nights in the expensive Hoofington hotel they had stayed at, eating delicacies that must have cost exorbitant amounts as farmland was used more and more to feed Equestria’s growing newfoal population.

Fleur De Lis stared at her husband with nothing but concern. Fancy Pants clearly had not slept well. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his fur was strangely matted, but it was nothing that she couldn’t fix. She was a model, she had plenty of experience with makeup, and making sure somepony looked pretty for any occasion.

Was he still saddened about not being able to do enough? Either way, now didn’t feel like a good time to discuss.

'Poor Fancy,' Fleur thought. 'I never thought it would have gotten to him so much!'

As soon as he finished his last bite of apple butterscotch pancakes, he sighed. “So then, where is this site we’ll be visiting?”

Fleur checked her invitation. “Stormdancer yards, apparently. We’ll know it when we see it.”

And of course, they did. Stormdancer Yards was a rough, ugly part of the city, a line of huge warehouses that looked for all the world like a wharf at the edge of the sea, with the dirty cobblestones, wooden buildings between warehouses, great shipping terminals, heavily-muscled stallions trotting to and fro with huge loads in their carts, and massive hulls being assembled…

Except it was at the edge of a large field of scrubby yellow grass that nopony dared eat.

This was the skyliner construction district. As soon as the two of them got off the train, a smiling brown newfoal in a purple vest and pillbox hat had directed them to a cab, and hitched herself to it, driving the two of them down a wide street between several warehouses, bustling with workers. Anti-union posters lined the walls - not that newfoals had enough free will between them to ask for that, Fancy reflected.

The newfoal had taken them onto a street blocked by royal guards brandishing what looked like new spears, and up to a large, fancifully painted doorway that appeared to have been erected just for the occasion. She then led them through, into a large crowd where they saw…

Fancy struggled to restrain his fears as he and his wife marveled at the leviathan supership. It was even bigger than the Great Equestrian, and he had little doubt that it could hold enough newfoals to swarm even the largest position. Despicable, stupid tactic, that was.

Fancy looked in the direction she was pointing with her forehooves, and saw her. The great enemy.

Queen Celestia herself had appeared to grace them all with her presence and glorify the massive ship. It was undeniable to anyone that the Beneficence was a marvel of a skyliner, the most magnificent that ever was or would be. It was done up in white and gold. It’s probably paint, even though Celestia must have insisted on actual gold to the protests of the engineers.

And it was massive on a level rivaling even human aircraft carriers. It was so enormous that a staging area had to be created above several warehouses. Newfoals swarmed to and fro, putting on last-minute touches.

It was longer than a skyscraper dropped on it's side, and far wider than that description suggested. Wide enough that the Great Equestrian would look like a small civilian aerostat in comparison. It even had a figurehead, a great gold-painted statue of Celestia striding forward in front of the gasbag. It had multiple decks, each one bristling with-

“Gun ports?!” gasped one stallion, clearly a pony of money. “Have we sunk so low as to include human weapons on our purifying-”

“No,” Celestia interrupted as she looked down to them. “Those are Ponification Mortars. Enchanted explosive canisters where the gas ponifies any humans in the area. Designed by Twilight Sparkle herself.”

Those were not the Beneficence’s only armaments. There were massive ballistas mounted at regular intervals between the mortars, and, just under the four gun decks, Fancy could see massive bays below, clearly meant to launch something. But what? There were also huge brass trumpet-like machines nearby, clearly meant to do something important.

“As it happens, the Beneficence is also equipped with launch bays for pegasi, whether they be charioteers, lone fighters, or anything. There’s also a new generation of thaumic cloud-seeders embedded nearby, so pegasi will be able to shape clouds even in the dead, magicless void of Earth!”

'Oh, NO,' Fancy Pants thought with utter dread. Thankfully, no pony noticed this, but this was utterly frightening.

He was the only PHL member watching this, he had to be. All the other PHL-affiliated nobles had been purged, nopony else had access to anything remotely like this.

Something had to be done. It couldn’t be him, it couldn’t be him, it couldn’t…

“Your majesty?” asked one newfoal, a sea-green pegasus with a blue mane. “We’d been thinking that it was for the best if you did the honors in naming the ship.” She reached into her saddlebag, pulling out a large bottle of champagne. “Simply smash it against the hull to do so.”

“Very well, my little pony,” Celestia smiled, telekinetically lifting it, her gold aura visible around the bottle. With a grin on her face, something that almost reminded Fancy of the old Celestia, she threw it at the ship.

The bottle did not break, and simply bounced off the hull. Onlookers stared in amazement, shock on their faces as they watched the bottle drop… and then land on one of the ports for ponification mortars, finally shattering.

Though to Fancy, it looked as if the bottle had shattered in midair, right before it hit the port.

To Fancy, it was an incredibly obvious sign. A sign for him to give up and do his duty. But fear of discovery and the fallout stayed in his mind. He needed to think on this and what it would mean in the future.

‘Buck it all. This has to be done. I might not like it, but I have to do this.

That night, upon returning to the house that had once belonged to Cadance, Fancy Pants woke up in a cold sweat.

Officially, Trade Secret was dead. He’d had an obituary, a fake body, and everything. But something needed to be done. The humans could have been winning, but the Beneficence was almost indescribably massive, a small city unto itself. It could ponify cities, turn the HLF and possibly even the UN/PHL taskforce into distant memories.

It was a dreadnought to end a war. While he didn’t doubt the firepower his human allies could bring on the beast, the ship wouldn’t be by itself. It would bring every ship to cover itself from the fire and by the time they got to it, they would have wasted everything they had short of their most devastating weapons. And it was that power that Fancy feared of being unleashed while there were still people fighting on the ground. And if the PHL caused that much destruction, possibly annhilating even their troops to stop the skyliner, a move that would destroy their reputation… they might just fall, become crippled by both public opinion, infighting, and lack of numbers. And when that happened, humanity would be doomed. It could fall to the HLF, who would gladly throw away any long-term solutions for the chance to kill more ponies in the present.

Or worse, the humans could use their most devastating weapons on the scouting forces, and, in their parlance, be “tapped out.”

It was so long since he’d done it, but he had to. So, with little trepidation, Fancy Pants trotted out of the bedroom, and headed for his study. He didn’t have the light on, as he didn't want to draw attention to himself from any house servants still awake. It was unlikely, given the hour of night, but he could not afford to take any chances.

Trotting quiet as could be, he made his way to a small closet and began writing. He used his mouth, however. It was incredibly undignified, and considered a poor habit among grown unicorns, but it was far less noticeable than using a horn.

To whoever reads this,
I have seen the Celestia’s Beneficence. Whatever you do, make sure this letter gets to any of us left. It’s a ship to end a war-there’s so much weaponry on it that it could ponify every stronghold we have. It possesses ponification mortars, ballistas, it can generate its own clouds, perhaps its own weather systems. It wouldn’t surprise me if somepony figures out how.
It is an enormous skyliner to put the Great Equestrian to shame. And unlike that one, it’s not built for an attack. It’s built to invade, continuously. It’ll ponify a city and move on, like some kind of gigantic cancerous mass. Worst of all, it’s made to personally convey the Qu-

Fancy Pants stopped cold, with the sense someone was watching him. There was a blade nearby, one he received in his travels through Prance, he levitated it quietly, only to find-

Oh sweet Luna no. He might have actually been less worried if a Royal Guardspony had walked in on him.

“I’ve known you were depressed, but-” Fleur started, and saw the note he was writing, and the knife he had levitated. “Are you trying to kill yourself?!” she gasped. “I knew you’d been depressed, I knew you had been sad, but I didn’t think it was that terrible!”

“No! I’m not killing myself!” Fancy argued. “I just wanted to write a letter!”

“Then why did you have this?” Fleur asked as she read the note over his shoulder. “Why are you writing that, and-Oh my Celestia!”

Fancy set the knife down and said, "Fleur, I know what you're thinking and I can explain-"

"Explain?!" She cried out. "How? When I said I wanted to start the PETN, you had my back completely! You donated untold amounts of money to support laws for better treatment of newfoals. How could you aid the betrayers?!"

"Listen to me!" Fancy held Fleur close, even as she struggled against him. "This war has killed us all. Please, you know I wouldn't do this without reason!"

"Without reason?! The humans have slaughtered millions of their own without rhyme or reason! We do this for their sake as our right-" Whatever she was going to say next died on a whimper as she saw Fancy pull himself to full height.

Fancy was not quite a foppish noble - he merely played the part because it was easy. Nopony expected much of a fop, so there were numerous things he could keep under the mask. His family taught the scions to work for their efforts and do what they could to survive in not only business, but at whatever the world can throw at them. Something that Fleur had forgotten when she first met the rogue noble as he fought off several robbers to protect her. And now having him bearing over her reminded her, she remembered all too well of what he was capable of. "And we’ve destroyed their homes, their history, families, lives, economy, and virtually everything that belongs to them! We’ve taken their children from them in hospitals, herded them into Bureaus as if they were less than cattle, and called it justice! What right do we have to demand such things?! We would be no better than Sombra himself! My darling wife, as much as I love you so, you can be so short sighted!"

"I joined the PHL in hopes of ending this madness. But I realized how much harm it would put on you if they found out about my dealings." Fancy stepped away, his eyes closed as he looked away in shame. "I had to drop the ruse in order to protect you. Everything I do is for you. It was my burden to bear, but one you would no doubt suffer for."

Fleur was nervously pacing, a hoof against her forehead as she tried to make sense of this. "Fancy, I don't know what's happened. I can bring you to the mind healers or something, clearly something has corrupted you-"

"Nothing has corrupted me, Fleur," Fancy said. “I am doing this of my own free will.”

Fleur stepped away at the answer, her world crashing around her head as her own husband turned out to be a Betrayer.

“I-I can talk to Queen Celestia,” Fleur pleaded as she tried to figure out a way to keep him safe, her train of thought quickly derailing as the situation became too much to handle. “I can make sure you’re safe. I can work out deals, I can reason-”

“NO!” Fancy hissed. “You… You can’t! She’s beyond reasoning! Whatever has taken hold of her… it’s made her into something that isn’t Celestia. It looks like her, talks like her, acts like her, but it isn’t her. Tell me, do you think that ten years ago, Celestia would have supported this, when she sought nothing but peace with other nations?”

“But that’s different!” Fleur protested. “Humans are carnivores! They-”

“So? The griffons are too, but she acted like the humans had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. As if they were the scum of their world. How is any of this even remotely in-character?! It’s like something derailed her character, and forced her to become some evil tyrant!”

"Please, Fleur... I want all of us to survive. Join me or stay silent, I have to finish this letter. I'm sorry."

"No... no-no-no!" Fleur cried out, throwing herself onto his back. Only for Fancy to gently pick her up and place her on the ground while he continued to finish the letter.

"Trade Secret has one last letter to deliver." Fancy whispered out loud as he penned his cover name. "Then you can send for the guards once I leave-"

“Wait. You’re Trade Secret?!” Fleur gasped out loud. “I heard of him! He was-”

Fancy and Fleur both looked to the doorway, a stunned newfoal servant that had been paid handsomely by Fleur standing at the door with eyes wide open and looking angry. Or at least the closest to angry a newfoal could muster.

“Oh no,” Fancy said, bearing that particularly dreadful calm of a stallion who knows everything is going to go downhill, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

"BETRAYER!" The newfoal charged at Fancy, looking like it was going to assault him.

"No!" Fleur managed to grab him before he was halfway across the room. "He is only sick in the mind! Work has addled his brain and he is simply gone mad from the stress! Please ignore him!"

"Mistress Fleur! How could you protect a Betrayer?!" The newfoal growled, glaring daggers at Fancy. Fancy's eyes narrowed at the newfoal's words, his magic glowing as he leveled his dagger at him.

"Release me so I can drag him to the glorious Queen!” the newfoal ranted, his mind caught somewhere between a newfoal’s compulsive happiness and compulsive anger at anti-Equestrian sentiments, making it look as if he was in a fit of sadistic glee. “She will decide his fate, I doubt he will live long. Trade Secret is a hated Betrayer and he will die in our Queen’s grace."

"He is the father of our foal!" Fleur held on the newfoal tighter, all but begging him to listen.

Fleur stammered, "I only just found out yesterday. I was planning to keep it a surprise and deliver the news after we win this war... double the good news..."

“Fleur, I’m happy and all, but the prospect of raising a foal in what this world has become terrifies me.” Fancy managed out before a low growl gain their attention.

The newfoal growled at Fleur, staring at her face then to her barrel. He gave a chilling smile as he raised his hoof and took aim at her barrel. "The disease of Betrayers should not be spread."

"NO!" Fancy roared as he tackled the newfoal off Fleur, slamming his hooves into his side before blasting him out of his study. Fleur stood shocked, shaking like a leaf, terror spreading throughout her mind as the image of the newfoal standing over her and denouncing her foal like it was a plague, or it had succumbed to some ever-nebulous “corruption”.

Fancy took the knife and then quickly stabbed the newfoal repeatedly. Blood splattered all over the floor and the walls, as he was running on nothing but boiling rage at how this monstrosity tried to harm his wife and their unborn baby.

"BETRAYER!" Fancy turned to see several more servants in the hall, all of them rushing at him.

"Fleur! Run!" Fancy sent out a telekinetic blast of pure concussive force that knocked the newfoals back several meters backwards, dazing them, knocking one down a set of stairs. "To the Trophy Room!"

Fleur and Fancy ran through the halls, the sounds of hooves and calls for their capture echoing all around her. Fancy could see that Fleur was in full panic mode, something he had gotten too used to seeing in ponies that realized they were well above the normal amount of trouble. But by Luna, he’d never seen this level of trouble. The two rushed inside, Fancy slamming the door shut and locking it with his magic, then barricading it with a heavy oak table before going up to his wife.

Fleur was in a state of panic, even more so now that she was in her husband's 'Trophy Room', her eyes darting all over the place to see his trophies.

Swords. Dozens upon dozens of blades of every sort. Crude Diamond Dog Short swords, Prench rapiers, Minoan great swords, Reindeer long swords, Griffon forged katanas, Royal Guard gladii, spears, and broadswords, obsidian cutlasses from who-knew-where, daggers of every make, and even Zebrican spears carved from ivory.

"Fleur. Listen to me." Fancy cupped his wife's face, staring into her eyes. "There is a secret passage within this room. Found it when we first moved in. I want you to take it and go to Ponyville. Find Big Macintosh Apple; if he is not there, there is a trio of flower sellers named Roseluck, Lily, and Daisy. Take this letter and go with them out of Equestria. And for the love of Luna, raise our foal right! Raise him or her to love all species, to find the best in all of them! Raise her to tell stories about the good in both of them, and teach ponies and humans to follow the values that Equestria only claims to respect!”

"M-maybe I can plead-" Fleur stammered out only for Fancy to grab her and held her tightly against himself.

"You know what will happen to me. To you. She will not be merciful. She hasn’t been in a long time,” Fancy said. “Like I said, she’s beyond the point of pleading. We are living in an age where a worse madness than that which gripped Luna and turned her into Nightmare Moon has seized Celestia, only she’s been far more subtle - turning us into her so slowly we couldn’t realize. If you try and ask her to show mercy, you will be lucky if she only kills you. Do you understand?”

Quietly, the whole time, Fancy had been lifting a Zebrican tribal shield, a priceless antique. He had then slowly taken off several boards, revealing a small space that lead to a stairway. “Had to keep it quiet. They can’t know you’re going to escape. Least of all where you’ll escape to. This leads to a small shed on the outskirts of the town nearby. Nopony will see you there.”

“Dammit, Fleur! You have to!” Fancy pleaded. There were tears in his eyes. “For our foal. For humanity. For the freedom of every sentient being left on this planet. You wanted to do good, go through the crawlspace and make sure the PHL know!”

“It has to be this way,” Fancy said. “You’re a philanthropist, I’m a Betrayer. They will never let me out of this land as long as I live.”

“We can’t,” Fancy sighed. “If Celestia was still the same pony she was, if we were living in the same Equestria where problems could be solved within thirty minutes and capped off with a speech, we wouldn’t have newfoals trying to kill our foal simply because I am the father.”

‘Oh Celestia, he’s right!’ Fleur thought. ‘And if he’s right about that, then how much else could have gone wrong?!’

“You have done good, protecting newfoals,” Fancy said. “No matter what you may fear, you can at least live knowing that. Though personally, I always thought it was more moral to ensure that fewer were even created. You made a point to protect the newfoals, ensure that they were accepted and lived well, and for that I couldn’t help but love you more.”

Fleur stared at him as he lightly tapped a wooden panel, causing a false wall to appear and slide closed. “You can debate the morality of it with humans. They do seem to love their moralistic speeches,” he said. “Just remember. Above all else, I trust you to do the right thing.” With that said, he cast a soundproofing spell over the wall.

Fancy closed his eyes as the passage closed shut, his wife's tear-stained face looking back at him before it vanished. The doors behind him banging as the new foals slammed themselves against it.

"Well old friends. It appears we have one last tourney to go through," Fancy said out loud as his horn glowed, a Dog short sword and Prench rapier floating out of their respective sheaths. "For too long you sat here, your initial purpose forgotten and laid to collect dust. But now it appears we will have one last fight together."

He rose up on his hindlegs, his mass centered and balanced as he used the uncertain magic of hooves to grip his swords with his forehooves. Three more rose from their places. Two Minoan greatswords floating beside him and a Griffon Tsumerai katana floating over head.

"I only ever used you all in my youth, joked around that you all was just a passing..." Fancy gave a rueful smile, "'fancy', I acquired growing up."

The doors groaned as they held back the assault. He swung the rapier in a rapid motion, the blade singing at his motion. He gave a quiet sigh as he looked at the blade, seeing his reflection.

"But if I am to die here and now, I might as well take up the name I once used before." Fancy looked to the door as it burst open, a newfoal skidding across the ground while another rushed at him.

“Oh, you poor sad cannon-fodder bastards,” Fancy sighed. “I bet you all had families, that you once defended your country, honorable humans once before. I don’t know that of course - just made it up. But if there’s any of the men and women you once were left in there, I want you to know: I don’t hold you accountable.”

Neither newfoal acknowledged having heard his speech. The first only had time to see him before his rapier slammed through his chest, piercing his heart. He barely had time to look at his chest before he was magically thrown into the other newfoal that rushed in. The second had just got back on his hooves when one of the great swords slammed through him and pinned him to the wall before he was violently ripped in half by the blade.

Fancy watched as the blood ran across the floor, the sounds of hooves racing towards his position. "Know this. I grant you freedom from your sad fragments of lives. Five Blade Fancy will give you that much."

A unicorn newfoal charged up a spell, and the katana flew across the room, beheading her. The newfoal’s head practically jumped off his body, lazily flipping through the air and spraying blood, as blood gushed from the neck-stump.

‘Perhaps I should take an axe,’ Fancy thought. ‘Rather more suitable for beheading.’

There were almost twenty newfoals in the manor at all times, as paid servants, guests, PETN or ministry employees. He’d already taken care of three. The rest, who would be compelled to attack him by the hideous lattice of spellwork that governed their minds wouldn’t be a problem. He wasn’t exaggerating when he’d used the word ‘hideous’ there, though such a descriptor rarely applied to magic. A unicorn had once shown him a newfoal’s mind using a bastardized Mind Delve spell, and Fancy had vomited and suffered nightmares for the better part of a week after seeing it. Even though they had families to look after, they would charge at him without regard for their own safety.

‘You can’t even keep that promise anymore, can you, Celestia?’ Fancy thought, sidestepping and bisecting a red newfoal pegasus with his short sword. The poor pony had simply charged at him, howling and screaming - he would have been cannon fodder in the average invasion. ‘Come to Equestria where we guarantee a more peaceful life, only to turn around and use you as zombie shock troops.’

“BETRAYER!” yelled one orange earth pony newfoal maid, clutching a knife in her mouth. Fancy knew her - he’d helped her dust the blackwood chamber, she had a foal, and he’d already killed her husband in the trophy room.

The other Minoan greatsword swept across the floor under her, so low it could have shaved both the carpet and maybe part of her hoof, and sliced off her right foreleg.

Blood spurted from the artery he’d just cut through, spraying against the wall. Surely that would stop her, that was a very important artery, so-

“Be… tra…” she wheezed, blood dripping in great gouts from her jagged stump. She would die of blood loss soon, and yet she kept coming.

‘Shit,’ Fancy thought, and stabbed her in the brain with the rapier. “She’ll probably guilt me for that, of course. Oh no, I’ve killed a kind and loving mommy, how could I! But, judging by the foal she left, she was probably converted just after giving birth. You’d already killed her worse than I ever could have, you Tyrant Sun.” He spat on the rug, a ludicrously expensive thing that could perhaps be hung in Canterlot in an art museum. It felt so good to say that out loud. Tyrant.

“YOU HAVE HINDERED CELESTIA’S LIGHT!” screamed one unicorn newfoal, this one white, with a red and black mane. “That makes you as bad as any of those human beasts! Those animals! Those-”

Using both the katana and the greatsword floating above him, Fancy maneuvered them to the side, and, as if using a giant pair of scissors, simply cut through her legs above the joints. Her barrel, still in motion as it was separated from her legs, tumbled over the carpet, joints spraying blood everywhere as she bounced.

She was a unicorn, though, so she’d likely try to throw a bust of an alicorn at him. ‘Better safe than sorry,’ he thought as he thrust the rapier into her eye, killing her instantly. He probably could have accidentally lobotomized her, but it wasn’t as if there was much he would have changed.

It didn’t matter where he was going. The important thing was to kill enough ponies for Fleur and his foal to escape the ensuing madness. ‘I will probably never even know their name. Would it be a colt? A filly? Will they grow to be a strapping young stallion like myself, or a vision of beauty like my wife? Will Fleur even mention me to them or keep me as some horrid example of ponykind? Hm. Perhaps it will be best if they didn’t know me, if we lose of course.. Maybe he’d live, maybe he wouldn’t, but he had a sinking feeling he knew how this had to end.

He walked down the stairs, one newfoal screaming down. “He walks like a human! Truly he must have been corrup-”

The griffon katana abruptly pierced through his throat, its bright blade sticking through the pony’s mane like some absurd accessory that Rarity or Fleur might have liked.

“You’re one to talk,” Fancy sighed, removing his fashionable spectacles. They’d become so covered in blood that they were essentially useless. Shame, too. He’d liked those spectacles.

A Royal Guard pony burst in through a window, this one a pegasus. He had unicorn backup as well, and an earth pony as well. He had no idea how they’d gotten to his house so quickly, but in the end it didn’t matter. They’d be leaving just as fast.

"Cease your fight Betrayer! You are outnumbered! There is no place for your kind!" the unicorn Royal Guard roared as he raised his shield around him as he charged. Fancy jumped back, both great swords swinging at the guard from opposite sides. Fancy raised an eyebrow as the swords shattered the shield and eviscerated the guard. While jumping backward, he telekinetically threw one greatsword at the pegasus, shearing off a wing.

“YOU MEANIE-PANTS!” the pegasus shrieked, leaping at Fancy. Fancy snorted at the childish, profoundly silly insult, then thrust his shortsword into the pegasus’ throat.

At the same time, Fancy threw the katana forward in a wide spinning arc, its blade destroying the earth pony’s eyes. The earth pony sputtered in anger and pain, roaring out the babytalk that passed for curses for them. Even as he had lost an eye, and roughly a quarter of his face was drenched in blood, all he could yell were inanities such as “crab apples!” and “poopbrain!”

Fancy was honestly unsure whether it was funny or disturbing. Either way, he didn’t want to see any more of it because of how uneasy it made him, so he strengthened his telekinetic grip and sliced apart the newfoal’s head.

"Hm. Pity. It appears the Royal Guards have newfoals within their ranks." Fancy ducked from a spell, launching a greatsword at the guard, punching through him and the guard behind him. He swung corpses off and slammed it into another guard, only for it to shatter.

"Damn. Back to the Trophy Room." Fancy muttered as he raised the former blade to his eye. He looked to the rushing tide with a frown. "One down. Many more to go."

Queen Celestia quietly walked up the stairs, a river of blood slowly dripping down its steps while she passed several corpses hanging on the rail or on the stairs themselves. She shook her head at the report, unable to believe that a single pony caused this amount of death and destruction. Several royal guard followed her cautiously, swords and spears readied to defend their Queen.

"To think, you of all ponies were a Betrayer," Celestia muttered out loud, a group of guards holding position at door. "You were possibly the most notorious of all of them. I never would have guessed you had this in you..."

She walked inside, bodies of newfoals littered the floor. Body parts and organs were strewn across the once luxurious carpet, broken weapons lodged into them or broken armor. She ignored them, possibly banished its very existence within her mind. "Fancy Pants."

Fancy gave a rueful smile, slick with blood covering his once pristine coat, a concerning lack of wounds visible on his body. He gave her a mock bow, three swords floating behind him while he still had two remaining in his hooves. "Ah! If it isn't my tyrannical leader herself! Excuse the mess, I just had to fight for my right to think my own thoughts. They were awfully sure your 'Light' would give them strength to overcome me. Rather malnourished, they were… what do you feed them on, revolutionary spirit? That doesn’t exactly make a good meal.”

“None of your concerns." Fancy replied with some happiness. "Far enough away from your hooves."

Celestia scowled at his answer, eyeing his blades before looking back at him. She stalked towards him, unconcerned for whatever he might be about to do. "So. You decided to gain my attention by slaughtering an entire company of guards with nothing but a sword?"

"Several swords in fact. Most of them I gained during my youthful adventures. But I digress, I prefer the term ‘distraction’. I would have gotten your attention even if I didn't do it. The same would have happened if I made a social slip while drunk at a party," Fancy pointed his sword at her, backing away. "I wanted you here so I can take you down myself."

“Benevolent Queen!” protested one royal guard. “Let us defeat him! He is beneath you!”

“Nonsense,” she said, a smile on her face. “He needs to learn his place. And who better to teach him but me?”

“And who better to teach you than me?” Fancy asked. “With luck, tonight I’ll be the pony that kills you.”

Celestia gave a cackle of laughter at his declaration, as Fancy backed through the mansion with care and sure footing. "Taken up the mantle of Five Blade Fancy once more? Poor fool, you believe you can win with skill alone."

"I say I have just much of a chance of killing you as any other being. Specifically a human with a rather impressive blade." Fancy gave a grin when she scowled at his answer. His horn flared to life, the broken blades floating off the ground and corpses. "Come, Mad Queen! Let us end this tonight!"

Fancy threw every broken blade at her in one shove, Celestia giving off a bark of condescending laughter as she caught every blade, even the great sword aimed at her eyes. "Is it my turn to..."

Her eyes widened as Fancy slammed the last blade, a decorative Griffon forged katana, into the ground. His magic spiraled down its blade into the floor. Every blade dropped from her grasp as the magic drained from her, she felt her legs weaken as she slowly lost her strength. She turned to see the Royal Guards dropping like flies as their magic was ripped from them.

“I thank the Maker that whatever it is that has possessed you is incredibly overconfident,” Fancy coughed out as he fell onto his side.

"What have you done?" She croaked out as runes glowed brightly and spread throughout the house, through the very grain of the wood. The house glowed, quaking under the weight of so much thaumic energy so violently that it felt it would shake itself apart.

"A little insurance in case I was ever found out," Fancy coughed out. "I only intended it to incinerate the house and all the documents that incriminate the PHL, but this seems like as good a time to use it as any. Not sure if it will kill you, but it will ruin your day."

Celestia’s eyes widened as the runes flared brightly, absorbing enough magic to execute their spell.

"Long live True Harmony between all species. Without you," Fancy gasped out and the runes activated. “Goodbye Fleur… I’m so sorry.”

It had been extraordinarily lucky that Fleur was far enough into the tunnel that the house’s collapse didn’t hurt her, but rather unlucky that from even the small, dingy shed, she could see the conflagration.

No onomatopoeia could adequately describe the sound it made, however. Guardsponies who had been posted outside looking for Fleur, claimed that the windows had glowed a warm blue, then the glow had rapidly darkened and changed to a bright red as the house shook as if caught in the throes of an earthquake. Then, for one terrible moment, nothing happened. It was if the leaves on the trees had stopped, the wind had stopped, everything was simply frozen.

Then the house exploded in a great multicolored cloud in the shape of a mushroom, rainbow-colored lightning arcing through the thaumically dense cloud. A thaumoemotive indicator, in one unicorn’s arsenal of various magic accoutrements, had predictably gone nuts. He idly wondered why there weren’t thaumoemotive indicators built to handle larger amounts of thaumic pressure.

Somewhere, deep inside, Fleur knew that Queen Celestia had survived. Some part of her wanted to find Celestia and tell her, to serve her Empire. And yet, it had been Fancy’s dying wish that she leave for Ponyville and help the PHL. The Betrayers, the ones that had gone against her empire…

But when had it been an Empire? Hadn’t it just been a diarchy until a few years ago? Empire did not have good implications. But if she gave it to the humans, they’d destroy Equestria. Ravage it. Burn every inch of it and kill thousands, if not millions. And yet, if she went to Celestia, she’d lose her foal. She’d be beaten, treated like a collaborator to the Betrayers, possibly thrown into one of those prisoner camps for “enemies of the state” up north in the Crystal Empire. And if she’d get thrown in there for trying to help, was that really a nation worth fighting for? Yet… this was where she’d been raised. A kind place. But a kind place where a newfoal would attempt to injure her and abort her foal? Were newfoals as kind as she had preached, if they were willing to do that so gleefully?

“Ah, what do I do?!” Fleur sobbed, in this dark, desolate shed, such an unlikely environment for a pony like her.

Roseluck groaned, bleary-eyed, woken up from a rather nice dream. A beautiful dream, of the way things used to be, then how they could have been. Of a world where humanity and ponies joined hooves and hands to explore the stars and create wonders of technology and magic, a world where they learned from each other. A world without Celestia.

Roseluck rolled out of bed, trotting angrily down her stairs, and opened the door to her home, irritated at being woken up well before Celestia had raised the sun. Not just because of the sleep she’d lose, but because she hated sunrises on Equestria. They… gave her a slightly sickly feel in her stomach.

"Listen you idiots! Just because you want to deliver the newspaper so early in the...!" Roseluck growled out before she stood frozen in shock at seeing a traumatized and distraught Fleur De Lis standing before her. "Mrs. Pants? What are-"

"My husband is dead... He... he..." Fleur broke down, Roseluck immediately grabbing her into a hug and pulling her into the house, as the now former socialite cried her heart out at the memory of losing her husband.

“What?! Fancy Pants is dead?!” Roseluck asked in horror, tears coming to her own eyes. “How did he die?”

“He blew up the house!” Fleur sobbed. “With him and… and Queen Celestia still inside!”

Roseluck stared at her for a moment. While it was a serious moment, losing one’s husband to an explosion was somewhat out of left field. “...What?!”

“Put me down a secret passage, after killing the newfoals… and then blew it all up! He… the last thing he told me before he told me to run, he said… I should contact you. And give you this,” she choked out before taking the note Fancy had written earlier out of her coat pocket.

“Fleur,” Roseluck breathed, “Do you know what this is? Do… do you know why he said to visit me?”

Fleur nodded and said, “Because you know ponies… and humans that would know what to do with this information.”

Dread came over Roseluck, who instinctively looked from side to side, expecting an attack or some kind of betrayal. “You can stay here,” she hissed. “You need to stay hidden, and we need to keep quiet. I know you’re normally a poised, talkative pony, but we have to keep quiet. The empire has spies everywhere.”

Fancy Pants had miscalculated. It wasn’t his fault, however. He couldn’t have imagined that his Queen had enough magic power that it beggared belief, enough that thaumic classifications were useless and would, in all likelihood, reduce ponies to grasping thaumoemotive indicators in their mouths or telekinetic fields, screaming madly about the impossibly high readings while crushing their instruments.

Battered and dazed from the loss of her power and the shock of the explosion, Celestia staggered out of the cellar hole, to the cheers of her subjects.

As with the last time this had happened, she made a point to appear poised and calm, as always. Because that was what her subjects expected, and it simply wouldn’t do to show weakness before them.

They cheered for her, happy smiles on their faces, ecstatic that the Betrayer was dead, rotting in Tartarus, unconcerned about the dead guards.

A newspony, wearing the brown hat common to them, strode up to her. “Benevolent Queen, what have you to say about this… this… Betrayer?” he spat out the last word.

“That I have a message for all of them,” she said, with barely restrained rage. “Know this, Betrayers, you “Ponies for Human Life” who have sold your souls for those brutes. I am displeased with you… though when you inevitably come to Equestria, crying and broken as the last human stronghold is destroyed, I will show you the mercy that you withhold from our noble troops. Because that is what heroes do. Look at yourselves, Betrayers! You are reduced to this?! Suicide attacks bound to fail, to killing children, to killing ponies who only want to save humanity! If you are listening to this, Betrayers, know that you are failures! You are scum! And yet, even in your broken states… I can forgive you if you just return to Equestria and submit yourself to me.”

A pleasant speech, she thought. But she really had to be off - the Machine awaited. And so did the Bag.

Calm Before The Storm

by Doctor Fluffy

The Empire