The subterranean rustling finally faded behind us after three hours of marching. I unclenched just a bit, and thankfully the fearful acid roiling in my stomach settled down a little too. Sarge didn’t acknowledge the change, but relentlessly continued marching. The red sky was deepening toward nightfall as Princess Celestia’s sun approached the horizon. The old sun rode higher in the sky, but it was a mere pinprick that barely outshone the brightest stars. I glanced questioningly at Sarge, and saw others doing the same. The Wasteland at night held dangers no squad wanted to be exposed to.
After an hour, the creatures’ noise had failed to resume. With the sun a mere sliver between two hills, we came upon a tiny, brackish pool of filthy water and Sarge called a halt at last. The squad rushed into action, hurrying to make camp before full dark was upon us.
I released the buckle at my navel and allowed my saddlepack to slide off my back. It landed with a dull thump and a puff of dust, followed by two more as I let my saddlebags fall next to it. The gathering chill in the air felt wonderful on my sweaty coat, but I didn’t stop to enjoy it with the growing dark like a weight on my back. I rolled the saddlepack over and untied it. I flipped its big oiled flap out of the way and unfolded the pack like a flower, thick canvas petals lined with pockets and compartments containing all the tools and implements necessary to survive for up to a month in the Wasteland.
As quickly as I could without damaging anything, I dug into one of the deepest and most protected parts of the pack and retrieved an object that could have done double duty as a mace. A lightweight silvery haft the length of my arm was topped with a hoof-sized sphere of unpolished gray metal. Holding the haft just so, I gave it a twist and a pull. The spring-loaded haft extended with a decisive series of clicks, shooting out to three times its original length and unfolding a stout tripod. I looked around the site for a good spot to place it, then planted it on a small rise on the windward side of the camp. “Glowstick ready,” I announced formally as I stepped back.
Sarge didn’t look up from his unpacking. “Glacier. Doc.”
The two unicorns nodded and concentrated on the glowstick’s metal orb. It began to glow, a barely perceptible red at first, but within seconds it gave off a brilliant white light, too bright to look at directly, like a piece of the sun right here in camp. The nocturnal creatures of the Wasteland didn’t want anything to do with sunlight, and the glowstick’s light was similar enough to fool them, so they stayed away. Usually. A single unicorn could power it, but regulations required two unicorns at all times, just in case. Sarge had chosen Glacier and Doc to take the first shift because they had used less of their magic stores in the fight than the others, so they had more left to feed the glowstick with. Once the glowstick was at full brightness, they turned back to their bags, resuming the work of unpacking with their horns still lit.
The glowstick always felt odd to me. It was holding a magical charge, so it pinged my magic sense, but its light came from magic leaking out of the specially-treated metal rather than from any specific spell being cast. It was a strange feeling, anticipatory and a little nerve-wracking, like hearing someone inhale continuously without ever exhaling. Also the magic inside it came from two different sources, which was a whole other layer of oddness—my magic sense was telling me that a new unicorn had appeared in the camp and was gathering magic for a very impressive spell. I had spent years around glowsticks, so all the weirdness was easy to shrug off, but on my first mission I had hardly slept at all because of it.
I returned to my bags, unrolling my sleeping bag and setting up my tiny tent over it with practiced ease. Our ‘tents’ were hardly more than canvas windbreaks, but that was good enough for me. Facefuls of abrasive Wasteland dust didn’t make for restful sleep.
The sun dipped below the hills and the Wasteland night fell like a curtain. Within minutes, eerie grunting and whistling carried through the chilly air, the sounds of nocturnal things waking to the hunt. Eerie, but reassuring. The truly dangerous creatures were the silent ones.
Hook sat back on his haunches, his home away from home all set up with his usual speed. Anvil nodded at him, beckoning, and Hook heaved himself up and followed Anvil down to the brackish pool. Gathering water was a one-pony job, but it was unwise to go anywhere alone, even a short distance away. They returned a few minutes later, levitating the water blanket between them, sagging full of water. We had collapsible cookpots in our gear, but the tightly-woven blanket was more efficient for large quantities. It had been two days since we had last found water, so a large quantity was what we needed. Hook and Anvil hung the blanket on its tripod of metal legs, leaving an open space below the damp cloth. Anvil applied a gentle flame all around the blanket, slowly heating the water inside toward boiling.
In the meantime, I pulled aside a flap deep in the guts of my pack, revealing a pair of reinforced pockets securely tied with complex knots. Out of habit, I touched the pockets, reassuring myself that their precious contents hadn’t vanished since last night. Then I bent and lipped the knots apart on one of the pockets. I reached in and felt the warmth of the Seed. As I brought it out, it glowed with a warm internal light. I held it for a moment in my hooves, staring deeply into it. Shining green motes swam beneath its translucent skin, vital and dancing playfully. The two Equestria Seeds I carried were my responsibility, and were the reason my squadmates would die to protect someone as helpless as me. I forced that thought out of my head and concentrated on the feel of the Seed. It was packed with magic, groaning with it, full to bursting with it, but something about the Seeds made them invisible to my senses until I touched them. I loved touching them. The magic contained inside was Equestria, pure magic tapped from our tiny patch of untainted earth and crystallized into a physical thing by the Princesses. Holding it felt like home, like sheepfolds and farmland and neighbors in the shantytown that huddled around the castle and warm memories of foalhood: my family in our tiny brick shack telling stories around the crackling oven about heroes, and villains, and the brilliant and ashen past. I was conscious of the Seed’s magic flowing into me, sating a deep cellular hunger.
For a few moments, I was able to forget the Wasteland. I forgot the constant sense of danger, forgot the cold night and the gritty dead earth under my hooves, and forgot the too-recent pain of losing Boxer.
I blinked, and the spell was broken. I wiped my eyes with a filthy hoof as it all came rushing back.
I felt a touch on my shoulder. It was Hook, smiling at me with sympathy in his eyes. “You OK, Shepherd?”
He was the one member of the squad who understood some of what the Seed meant to me, learned in years of quiet conversations on the march or standing watch. I smiled back and nodded. “I’m OK. It’s just… it was a bad day.”
He pressed his hoof more firmly into my shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”
I cleared my throat, grating myself fully back into the cold, dirty moment, and called quietly across the camp. “Sarge, the Seed is ready.”
A moment later, Sarge trotted over and accepted the Seed from me. He sat on his haunches and closed his eyes, holding the Seed to his chest. Hook and I left him alone with it. From experience, I guessed that it would take him about thirty minutes to recharge.
Before the War, before the End, the planet had practically thrummed with magic. The raw energy of the earth had flowed hither and yon in ley lines, allowing magical creatures like us to draw on it almost anywhere. Wherever ley lines had crossed, the earth’s power burst forth like a fountain. The mightiest of magics could be cast by drawing on those intersections, and the capitals of each nation were built atop them. But the War had broken the world. The unfathomable energies released in the End had wiped out hundreds of nations, but the spells had been too strong to simply fade away afterwards. Instead they had combined in unpredictable ways, perverting into world-spanning storms of uncontrolled wild magic. The wild magic storms had corrupted the planet, reshaping land, sea, and sky into hostile alien landscapes, and transforming living things into new and monstrous forms: the Wasteland.
No one knew if it was the End or the storms that had destroyed the ley lines. But they were gone, leaving behind only skeletal traces of their former power hiding deep beneath the earth. Without the lines, magical creatures would starve and die—our bodies required magic as surely as they required food. Most kinds of magical creatures had a natural store of magic that let us subsist for a while even away from ley lines, but squads like ours spent far too long in the Wasteland to survive on our innate reserves. The Princesses had created the Seeds for another purpose, but our bodies could feed on their stored magic as readily as they could from a natural ley line.
Each day, every member of the squad would hold the Seed until their stores were full. I could fully charge in moments, because I only had to replace what my body consumed to live. Griz and Teacup would each take around a quarter of an hour to charge, because Teacup’s flight and Griz’ strength were fueled by magic. Unicorns took the longest to charge, because they had larger capacities and because their spells drew from their bodies for energy. A battle would make that day’s recharge take considerably longer. The whole process usually took several hours, and was accommodated amongst watches and other camp duties.
I returned to my unpacking as Hook lounged nearby. I gathered my rations to be cooked and lined up my empty canteens to be scoured and refilled. Hook’s yellow face was uncharacteristically still as he watched me work. Finally, he glanced back at Sarge, or perhaps at the Seed glowing in his hooves, and said, “Strange, isn’t it?”
“Hm?” I replied, distracted by a whiff of mildew inside a canteen.
“So many lives on the line for such a small thing.”
I followed his gaze and frowned at that echo of my own earlier thoughts. “We’re not out here for the Seed. We’re here because of what the Seed means to Equestria.”
He shrugged a hoof dismissively. “Yeah, I know the big picture. I just wonder whether it’s big enough.”
“Saving the world sounds pretty big to me.” I injected a flippant note into my tone, hoping to make him smile.
He didn’t smile. “Is that what we’re doing, though? We—people just like us—destroyed the world two hundred years ago. The Wasteland is a new world, and now we’re destroying that one too. Maybe we should just let it be. Equestria is doing fine the way it is.”
The memory of the Seed was fresh in my mind, but his words clashed against those homesick green feelings, making them as gray as Boxer’s ashes. It made me angry. I turned on him, unsure whether it was him I was angry at, or myself for needing protection instead of being able to protect. “Listen, kid.” He tried to object, but weakly. I rarely brought up our age difference, and I could see in his eyes that he saw the anger in mine. “My parents were around before the War, and I learned about the old days from them. Equestria is not ‘doing fine.’ We’re cramped and hobbled and we’ve lost more than you can imagine. Art, science, magic. Gone, all gone. All we remember now is how to fight and how to survive. We need the world back so that we can stop falling before we hit bottom.”
“Yeah, but—”
I cut him off, unwilling or unable to stop. The words poured out of me, pushed up out of my gut by the old, scabbed-over nugget of self-hatred that Boxer’s death had made tender and raw. “I was barely old enough to remember the Shield coming down, but I sure remember what it was like before that. You should count yourself lucky that you don’t. Equestria was locked inside the Shield for a hundred years, a bunch of soldiers and their enemies crammed together with no room to breathe even before they started having kids. It’s a simple equation: a growing population and not enough farmland to feed them. Near the end, people were killing each other over bread crusts. My parents said the Princesses dropped the Shield not knowing whether the storms were still outside, because Equestria was going to die either way. We got lucky. Some people were relocated to the edge of the Wasteland, and we planted where their homes used to stand, and Equestria managed to cling to civilization for a few more years until the Seeds saved us. But now that the Princesses can’t use the Seeds anymore, it’s down to us. If we’re not out here risking ourselves, then there isn’t going to be any more new farmland, ever. And I remember the answer to that equation. I’ll die before I let you sentence Equestria to that horror again.”
I had been staring at him, keeping his gaze locked on me. It was only as I was coming down from my anger that I saw the pain on his face and understood the feelings behind what he had said, but all too late. I dropped my eyes, ashamed at myself for letting my frustration rule me like that. My cheeks burned, and I kicked myself mentally for adding to Hook’s hurts instead of pulling my weight. “Sorry,” I mumbled into the silence between us. “I’m scared too, Hook. Boxer shouldn’t have gone out like that, not to those things. But we’ll figure something out. We always do.”
I held my breath across the yawning gap of his silence until, finally, he nodded with his eyes downcast. “Apology accepted. And… I’m sorry too. I guess losing Boxer shook me up more than I realized. I’ve never seen anyone die to something that could talk.”
I shuffled closer and put an arm around his shoulders. I had to stretch to do it. “It’s OK. We’ve come up against scarier things before, and we beat them all, didn’t we? Remember those glass spiders?”
Hook’s chuckle sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well, but he rose to the distraction. “Those were nothing. Remember that acidic slime mold?”
I grinned. “Aw, that one wasn’t worth sneezing at… until it split up into all those little ones. I never knew slime mold could sprint.”
He grinned back for a moment before it flickered and died. His eyes were serious as they met mine. “Shepherd, what are we gonna do about those things?”
I remembered the fake Doc watching us fight with those intelligent eyes. I remembered its fang-filled smile. “I don’t know,” I replied honestly.