Aura Star knelt on the ground in one of her many prayer sessions, her mouth moving with unfathomble silent words as her bent neck began to hurt. She murmered one last quiet prayer before rising to her legs, stretching her legs and neck, which were as stiff as boards.
Aura picked up her new weapon, an AK 40 something or other.The paint had chipped off the gun, leaving the name of the gun unreadable.
She loaded the weapon, which had also turned out to fire quietly, so silent Aura could barely hear its fire when she put her ear against its barrel.(Which she had been foolish enough to try.)
Aura swooped the gun up in her magic. Her eyes traced the skyline, a spout of smoke twirling around above the horizon. Someone or something was camping out there. Aura was running a bit low on food, and with her new AK, she could probably steal some food pretty easily.
She trotted along for several miles before the sun dipped below the horizon. She found a small grove of orange trees, their few leaves sickly gray with large, plump brown-orange fruits hanging from their weak and bendable branches. If she hadn't been as smart as she was know from the Goddesses's gifts and her lifetime of Ruin living, she would have plucked the fruit right of the branch and swallowed it whole and died several days later from radiation poisoning.
Soon she drifted off to sleep, her eyelids fluttering closed. She fell into dream the second those eyelids closed.
Aura was galloping through the desert, the wind picking up hoof fulls of sand and whipping it in her face and mane. She shot a glance behind her. A dark shape, a shadow that was ever changing, was chasing her. The murderer of Twilight and Chrysalis. Shadow Stalker.
She looked up at the sky to see two clusters of stars twirl about above her head. They were what had become of Shadow Stalkers victims. If she did not speed up she would become another twinkling star above the Ruin.
Two stars, one in each cluster, shone the brightest. The Twilighticious Star and the Chrysalisionius Star. The stars of the goddesses.
The brightest two stars formed ghosts of the supernatural beings. Their transparent forms melted off of their respective stars, swooping down into the air above Aura.
"My child," Twilight said. " You have two choices. The palace-" She motioned her hoof towards a dune, which suddenly turned into a majestic ivory castle with golden windows and jade rooftops.
"- or the shack," Chrysalis finished for her wife as she nuzzled Twilight's neck. She motioned her head and a small pillar of red sandstone turned into a creaking wooden shack that seemed ready to collapse.
Aura could see guards stationed with guns on the rooftop of the palace, but knew the only way out was what seemed to be the dumber thing to do.
So Aura dove into the shack, swinging the door closed moments before Shadow Stalker got near.
A lonely earth pony stallion, his coat a pepper gray and his mane a rusty brown, sat on a rocking chair, eating cooked pieces of something. Probably veggies, but it was not unheard of for ponies to eat meat in the Ruin, but Aura was a vegetarian.
"Want some frog?" the stallion asked, extending a hoof that clutched a piece of... cooked frog.
Aura almost screamed. The stallion's cutie mark was one of a frog cut in half, its blood splattered across his flank.
"YOU. WILL EAT. THIS. FROG." The stallion then tried to force the frog down her throat. Aura screamed and started to gag as he stuck his hoof in her mouth. The second her tongue touched the frog...
Aura woke with a start. To find a green frog had fallen asleep in her mouth. Aura spit the amphibian out, its snot like body smacking against the trunk of one of the radioactive orange trees as Aura made a run for the smoke trail to get as far away from the frog as possible.