It was terribly hot and humid inside Manehattan’s main prison block. Persei’s heart was racing, sweat dripping from her brow, her hooves aching. She was trotting through the stone hall, the cells lining the pathway crammed full of infected ponies. They were all screaming, striking the iron bars, begging for somepony to save them from the virus that was eating them from the inside out.
The disease was infectious beyond belief, and not even knowing how it spread, there was no way they could protect themselves. It seemed like every time they locked more ponies up into quarantine, more would appear outside. They were running out of places to put the infected, and with the hospitals destroyed, they didn’t even have morphine to dull their pain.
Persei was doing her best to block them out, but she could not help but blame herself for their suffering. She estimated that it had been ten days since she and Ultra Violet had opened the first cyst chamber, unwittingly unleashing the virus upon the population. Since then, countless others had been infected. The situation was spiraling out of control.
Persei had a mask wrapped around her muzzle, gloves on all her hooves, a layer of insect repellant on her fur, and a jug of bottled water strapped to her saddle. She had taken every precaution to protect herself from infection.
She trotted to the end of the hallway, where there was a cell that had only one pony in it. She looked into the cell, putting her gloved hooves against the metal bars. “Maelstrom….”
He looked at her sadly. The red pustules had covered the stallion, and the puss leaking out of the sores was hardening and dropping off. The disease was at its most contagious in this stage. “Persei…” he whispered. “Why are you still here?”
Persei looked down, swallowing. “I don’t know what to do… I can’t handle this.” Maelstrom was staring at her. “This is all my fault… and I have to face this all alone. Ultra Violet broke my heart and was playing me all along, and now she’s dead.” She sniffed, tears falling from her eyes. “You’re all that I have left.”
Maelstrom drew closer to her. “Persei, you cannot lose hope. You are not trapped inside a cell like I am. You are healthy. You are alive.”
“It’s so hard…” she whispered.
Maelstrom nodded. “And it will get harder. You must be strong, and the Scions need your guidance more than ever. You have to do what is necessary to prevent the infection from spreading.” He looked her dead in the eyes. “You must be willing to lock us up, burn our corpses, and if things get bad enough… kill us as soon as we show signs of infection.”
She sobbed and shook her head. “I can’t do that! I’m not a sociopath like Ultra Violet or Necron where I can ruthlessly cull them… they are just innocent ponies who are suffering.”
Maelstrom nodded. “I think this is why Necron chose this weapon to use against you. You have to be willing to kill sick ponies to protect the ones who are still healthy.” He gathered himself up and turned away from her. “That is why… I want you to burn this place.”
Persei’s eyes went wide with shock. “No…” she whispered. “I can’t…” she grabbed her head. “I can’t kill all of you!”
“We are suffering!” Maelstrom barked, gesturing to all the cells that were crammed full of sick and dying ponies. “By the time you find the cure, if there is even one, we’ll all be dead.”
Persei put her head against the bars, sniffing. “I can’t leave you, Maelstrom.”
“You must,” he urged. “And please…” she looked up at him. There were tears in his eyes. “Can you please tell Callista that I love her?”
Persei nodded, and put her hooves down from the cell bars. She began to trot away, moving past the sick ponies. “Please! Don’t leave us to die!” they cried out, reaching out of their crammed prison cells.
She avoided their grasping hooves, and stepped outside. Taking a shaky breath, she gave her soldiers the order.
Persei and the Scions of Celestion departed Manehattan, the prison burning behind them. The screams of sick ponies being burned alive filled the air, slowly growing louder. Persei clutched her head, falling to the ground. “Noooo!” she screamed.
After the cries of agony faded, she put her hooves down from her head. Suddenly, all the soldiers around her started to scream and distance themselves from her. She looked at her hooves, and saw the red spots of infection on her. A unicorn soldier shot her with a blast of magic, setting her ablaze. Persei screamed in agony as she galloped around, the pain beyond belief.
“Arrggghh!” Persei cried out, awakening from her dream. Her sheets were soaked with perspiration, and now sitting up, she looked all around her large tent. She still felt the pain of her imaginary burns, the horror she felt once she realized that she was infected. She took several deep breaths of the cool night air, trying to calm herself down.
Persei remembered that lucid dreaming was a side effect of the magical treatment she was getting for her brain tumors. It turns out, that the growths were benign, meaning that it wouldn’t spread and destroy her brain like cancer would. Once she completed several rounds of the treatment, the tumors would be shrunk down enough for a surgeon to excise them.
She sighed, lying back down. She grabbed her pillow, burying her head in it. The dream reminded her of the terrible reality that she had experienced for the past few days. It had been four days since the Scions had marched out of Manehattan, and although Maelstrom had urged her to burn the quarantine zones, unlike her dream, she hadn’t followed through. She had left them locked up with enough food and water to last two weeks.
Killing wasn’t quite so easy now that the tumors weren’t constantly triggering aggressive, hyper emotional reactions to every single little thing.
But during their march, she sometimes wished that the tumors still affected her the way they did before. In the haze of anger, vengeful desires, and ambition, she was blind to the suffering of other ponies. The things she had seen crossing through towns on their way to Canterlot….
It seemed that the disease reared its ugly face everywhere she went. The contagion had spread far and wide in an incredibly short period of time. She shuddered, thinking about it. The infection was subtle at first. The pathogens incubated for about two days, and the affected pony would feel body aches, fatigue, malaise, all symptoms of a harmless cold. It was after that two days where the red spots started to appear, and the disease became contagious.
The patient then rapidly deteriorated.
Persei shuddered, horrifying images of the advanced stages filling her mind.
A scorching fever would grip the victim, making him feel like he was slowly being burned alive. The red spots would become sore, puss filled pustules all over his body. The internal organs would begin hemorrhaging, causing him excruciating pain. Drenched in sweat, the pony would cry out, but by then, all his friends would have left him to die.
Persei shivered. So far, she had recorded a 100% mortality rate. Everypony infected would eventually die.
The disease, whatever it was, was biologically engineered to be exceptionally lethal.
Unlike the events that occurred in her dream, she now knew that the disease was transmitted from one pony to another by exposure to the infected pony’s body fluids. Basically, it spread through contact, both direct and indirect. Whatever the infected pony touched, would become a venue for infection: Clothes, eating utensils, bed sheets, even doorknobs and elevator buttons. But most infectious of all, were their dead bodies.
Persei had ordered many villages to be put to the torch because the local populations had been overwhelmed by the disease. Corpses with the horrifying pustules would be lying on the street, forsaken by the ones who loved them. She recalled one town that was using mass graves to get rid of the prodigious amounts of dead they had accumulated. The graves, giant pits full of dead ponies wrapped in sheets, had been laying open. It had turned out that the ponies who were burying them, grew ill, and had eventually fallen into the grave themselves.
They had come across another village where revolution had been underway, but chaos ensued once the disease arrived. They had all been wiped out in several days.
Then there were the fires. Huge blazes that spread far and wide, devouring settlements and scorching the lush landscapes black.
If Persei were to imagine an apocalypse, this is exactly how it would look like. Equestria had fallen into widespread disorder with the revolution, but now, the plague had plunged everything into anarchy. The only city that was still free of infection and in control of the government was Canterlot.
That was where they were headed. She had heard rumors that there were vaccines being distributed there, and not only that, Canterlot had Equestria’s finest medical research facilities. If a cure existed, it was to be found there.
Persei took a deep breath, suddenly grateful that she wasn’t infected. After she had seen the devastation and suffering it had caused, at the end of the day, she thanked fate for not letting her succumb to the disease. She had been at the heart of it all, being one of the first ponies to open up the cyst chambers. Yet, she had avoided infection. How?
Was it more than just blind luck that she hadn’t been invaded by the pathogen?
She remembered the fateful night where they had taken Manehattan. The night where she had learned of Ultra Violet’s betrayal, the last night she had seen Maelstrom healthy, and there was one event that still eluded her understanding: the strange Lunaran Knight that looked like Cepheus.
Or whoever he was.
Perhaps he was just a hallucination brought on by the tumors, Persei though. But how could a figment of her imagination have stolen the Element of Magic from her?
Could it be that Ultra Violet had lied about the Lunaran Knights killing Cepheus?
Persei nodded to herself. She now had to go back and question everything Ultra Violet had ever told her.
What if he had actually been there that night? He had mentioned something about protecting her.
She remembered him stabbing her with the syringe, claiming that it was a vaccine.
Persei shifted the sheets, turning her head around so that she could see the small spot where he had injected her. What if he had been telling the truth? What if that actually was her brother?
A mental image of her holding the spear came into mind. She had driven it into his belly, pinning him against the wall. She remembered the blood dripping from his muzzle, the sight of his intestines when she had twisted the spear in his wound….
Persei was devastated. “Oh no…” she whispered, horrified. “Did I kill my own brother?”
The realization prevented her from going back to sleep. He had saved her life, protecting her like he had always done. “And I killed him….”
Persei began to cry, tugging painfully at her own mane. “Cepheus!” she howled in the night, gasping for breath through her sobs. “I’m so sorry!”