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// Interlude: Today We Are Kittens.  Tomorrow, We Are Tigers. 
// Story: I Am Going To Save And/Or Destroy Equestria! 
// by Bucking Nonsense 
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The world as I knew it ended one year ago.
My name is Tick Tock.  My father was a clockmaker, a stallion who loved precision.  The idea of regulating the world into tiny ticks of a clock fascinated him, especially given how random and chaotic the world can be.  I suppose that I may have inherited my own love of order, of regulation, from him.  That said, it is terribly ironic that we should live in the age we had.  We had seen the cruelties and depravity of the fiends.  We had seen Discord himself run amok.  We had seen terrors that dwarf the imagination... and all of that was before the princesses died, and the fiends, all of them, broke free once again.
I am humble pony.  I have reason to be: I'm a mousy little unicorn, I admit, with a brown coat and a chestnut mane, along with hazel eyes, so I am utterly unremarkable, save for a pair of spectacles, a rarity on a pony of common birth, and my cutie mark of two interlocked gears.  However, while on the outside, I may be unremarkable, I am proud to say I have a spectacular mind.
Not that I thought such a thing mattered in this day and age.
My father's life ended the day the fiends came to my home town.  Well, I call it a town, but it was once one of the grandest cities in Equestria.  The city walls were one of the wonders of the modern age, having been one of the first efforts of cooperation between the three races of ponykind: Earth pony architecture made those walls structurally solid in spite of their incredible height and thickness, unicorn magic made it magically invulnerable, and pegasus military discipline made the guards who patrolled it the envy of kingdoms the world over.  It was often joked that, when the world ended, the last thing standing would be the walls of Baltimare.  We were fools.  All of us, myself included.
The ponies of the city of my birth were confident in the security of those walls.  Less than five miles away, Commander Hurricane and his army were doing battle with the fiends.  Equestrian steel and strength, we believed, might fail in pushing the fiends back, but there was no way that we'd be in any danger...
I was watching, with my father and a great many others, atop those walls, as Commander Hurricane's forces were decimated by the power of the fiends, and as the armies of Equestria were routed, three of the fiends turned their attention to our city, and began to advance upon us.
We weren't afraid, at least not then.  Why would we be?  We had the walls of Baltimare to protect us: Surely even all of the fiends combined could not harm us here.  Tirek, Grogar, and Crunch moved towards us with the slow certainty of the tides, and most of us watched with amusement at their advance.
"Stone, enhanced with sorcery," Grogar noted, as the trio reached the wall.  "And if I recall, their soldiers are well trained.
"As if magic could ever stop me," Tirek boasted, and opened his mouth, and we watched, in horror, as the magic that helped make our walls so secure was drained away, and his body began to swell and grow larger.  Where before, he was little larger than a tall stallion, within moments, he had grown to colossal size.  While not yet taller than the walls, he was now tall enough that he might climb over them with minimal effort.
The Stone Wall, the brave pegasus soldiers who defended us, moved to attack the fiends, and Grogar simply laughed, boasting, "As if mortal ponies could ever stop me," and summoned forth a wave of dark magic.  As the darkness washed over the guards, we watched in greater terror as, suddenly, they all dropped dead, their bodies striking the ground with a horrifying sound... and then...
...And then they rose up, moaning, and began moving towards the wall.  The defenders of our walls had died, and been turned into undead abominations, now laying siege to the city they'd sworn to give their lives to defend.
While some, the more intelligent ponies at least, began to flee, many others, myself included, simply stood and watched in numb shock as Crunch, the massive hound of stone, simply looked at our walls, and boasted, "As if stone walls could ever stop me."  He then simply walked through the stone, the mighty bricks crumbling to dust as he advanced through them.  Tirek climbed over the walls, crushing ponies in his advance, and Grogar and his new minions followed Crunch through the gap.
I cannot begin to describe the panic of the exodus that followed.  The great wall that had once been our greatest defense became our greatest enemy: Half the guards that Grogar had turned into undead abominations blocked the hole behind their master, so that no earth pony or unicorn could hope to escape.  The remaining half of our former protectors descended upon those pegasai who tried to flee.  Those that were caught by the undead became like them.  A few simply jumped from the walls.  If any survived the plunge, the undead were certain to catch them before the now crippled ponies made it far.
Our city was now a prison, the walls that were once our pride and joy were now nothing more than a barrier, a pen to keep us from escaping those that would feed upon us.
My father was too slow to escape, and was caught by a dozen undead citizens, ponies unfortunate enough to be caught in the path of one of Grogar's spells.  His last words to me, before he became an abomination like them, were to flee, and to not look back.
I ran, and I ran, until finally, I came to the one place that the walls did not block: Baltimare Harbor..  And there...
There I saw that we were being assaulted, not by three fiends, but by four.
Squirk the sea fiend, a massive octopus easily as large as any dreadnaught to ever sail the seas, was snatching up ponies who were trying to flee by water in his tentacles.  Once caught, he was wringing them out like dishrags and laughing at the screams of his victims, gleefully showering himself in their gore.  Some were able to escape him, myself included, but not many.  Perhaps one in twenty made it past him, but I doubt that most who made it past him would would have survived the swim to safety.  I very nearly did not, myself...
The waters I swam through were red with the blood of ponykind, and when I crawled out upon a beach miles away, half-dead from my extended submersion in icy water, I was coated in a scarlet that took weeks to fade away.  As I recovered there, panting in exhaustion and wondering if I would die, a terrible understanding came to me...
Grogar gained new minions with every pony his magic slew, and Tirek gained more power with every pony he drained.  Meanwhile, Crunch hated all things soft or weak, so his assault on unarmed civilians was understandable, as it was no change from his past behavior.  But what did Squirk, who had been imprisoned for raiding Equestrian ships for plunder, gain?  Our deaths did nothing to empower him or grant him sustenance, so what profit did he make from slaughtering us by the score?
Simple: Equines had sealed Squirk, and the other fiends, away, and we had intended to seal them away forever.  Now that the princesses were gone, and the magical seals of Tartarus with them, the fiends were going to make sure that there would not be a single pony left who might be a threat to them.  This was not a war of conquest as we had previously thought.  Instead, it was a war of annihilation.
This was the world of the fiends now, not ours.  Perhaps it never had been ours, perhaps it had been the world of fiends and alicorns only, and we only lived because the alicorns had protected us.  Once, the fiends might have tolerated our continued existence.  Now, however?  Now, we would be wiped off the face of the planet, every mare, every stallion, every colt, every filly, every foal.  They would not rest until we were gone, our extinction being the punishment for our arrogance in thinking that they could be contained.  We had sealed the fiends away, and then forgot about them, living our lives as though we had the right to rule this land, when the world belonged to the fiends by right of their terrible might.  Now, we would be annihilated until not even memories remained of us.  Our cities would become ruins, and then ground to dust under the hooves and paws of the fiends.
Diretusk is a fool to think he can control such unimaginable power and rage.  Even if he can temporarily control them, sooner or later, the fiends will slip their leash, and they will do to the Boarcs, every last one of them, what they are doing to us, and all because of the actions of one arrogant little piglet.
The only way to fight those monsters is with another monster, an Equine monster.  For that reason, I had contributed to King Sombra's resurrection.  Until I had seen what he could do to Arabus, I had been disappointed.
...But now...
Our new ruler, the stallion we had thought could only save us because he was more terrifying than any of the fiends, he tells us that we will not be prey to the fiends, but the ones who will hunt them into extinction.  Not him, but us.  All of us.
My head tells me that I should mock him for his foolishness, to shout to all of my fellow Equines that he is a fool, that we should flee while we have the chance...
And yet my heart, the heart that weeps for the ponies of Baltimare, and who mourns the death of my father, my innocence, and my world, has me shouting as loudly as any other mare.  The king's vision is audacious, but he is right: This cannot be just his victory.  It must be all of Equestria's victory, or it means nothing.  We must all take part in annihilating the fiends and pushing the invaders off of Equestrian soil.
As the din of shouting ponies ends, I find myself pulling a quill, ink pot, and paper out of the mane of that incessant blabbermouth, Babbling Brook.  Before I realized what it was I was doing, I was sketching things...
Wonderful, terrible things.  In an Equestria at peace, I would be feared for even imagining the weapons I was creating, and possibly even locked away in an asylum.  However, as Babbling Brook and others look upon the things on the paper in front of me, I can only see awe, and approval, in their eyes.  It would require a great many things before these drawings would come to life: Metals, both common and rare; skilled craftsponies and smiths, to turn those materials into parts, and those parts into their final forms; soldiers, trained to use those forms and fearless enough to fight the fiends, and the boarcs, and either destroy them or push them into the sea.  And yet, a mighty oak tree starts as an acorn, and I was planting that seed now.
The fiends laughed at Equestrian walls, at Equestrian spells, and at Equestrian soldiers.  They will learn to fear Equestrian courage, Equestrian craftsponyship, Equestrian imagination, and Equestrian ingenuity, and I will laugh as our enemies are ground to dust between my gears.