“Who am I?” Ki fumbled with the words, “Well there’s a loaded question if ever there was one. The short answer is that I’m Sargeant Steen of her majesty’s army. I served Under Lt. Maud, mostly to keep me from being in Pinkamena’s direct chain of command. She saved my life. She stopped the train when nopony else could. But that’s really a dodge. The real question is who was I, before I came to equestria. There was a life that put me in front of that train, long before I ever even knew there was a place called equestria at all.”
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Before there was Equestria, before there was Pinkie Pie, or Pinkamena, or Diane… there was madness. There was the instability that every day threatened to rip my life apart. The stigma that set me aside and made it okay to talk like you thought I couldn’t hear you. When I was younger I used to imagine that I was seeing the world on a level that no one else could, because it was easier to call myself “psychic” than “broken”. I grew out of it.
Fourteen years ago I met two people who understood. A sixteen year old girl whose family had mistaken her condition for demonic possession, and a 31 year old man who had been brain damaged in a bad car crash… think carriage crash, but with more metal and glass.
We were all artists and musicians. We all believed in witchcraft (that’s what humans call magic, it’s a rare thing, but not as unheard of as most humans believe). We formed a coven, which is a gathering of witches (that’s the human word for humans who believe in magic). You wouldn’t be wrong to think of it as herd of sorts. We were a family. We loved each other, very much and very deeply.
Sometimes we all lived together, other times I needed my own space away from them, and they never begrudged me that space. There was an understanding between us that comes with madness. Together we made art and music that was both beautiful and terrible. We descended into depths of drug abuse and depravity that dragged many around us into the abyss, but we pulled each other out. Time and again, when one of us would travel too deep into the depths the other two were there to pull them back.
We were brawlers, without a doubt. Even in the most violent of mosh pits, we didn’t just endure the violence, we brought it. How can I describe the beauty of the pit to ponies? That’s question I struggle with. It was both angry and friendly. Imagine a thousand ponies all fighting all at once, to the point that muscles tore and bones cracked, and yet at the end of it we all would laugh and we all would be closer friends for the ordeal we ourselves created. The laughter I think was the key part of it. Jack and Spright understood that. You had to laugh. You had to move past the pain.
Gwar was the Bloody Pit of Horror. So many humans, all beating each other down and laughing, packed so tightly that you could lift your feet off the floor and be supported by the mass of the humans beating you down. And there was never anger in that pit, only laughter. And the laughter washed away all the pain, and all the shame, and all the awkwardness of living with a malfunctioning brain. And then we’d go home, and we’d sprawl around on the various couches in our living room and we’d nurse our torn muscles and cracked ribs, and then we would laugh some more. We would sit around and watch reruns of Sid and Marty Croft and we would laugh at what spectacularly broken monkeys we really were.
And the laughter would wash away the pain, and the hurt, and the rejection that all the other humans threw at us, and we would all go to sleep like that, just lying about the common room. And when we woke up we would nurse our sore bones and muscles and we would make art, and work our garden, and brew our cider. It doesn’t sound like it, I know, but was a good life.
Me and Jack would work on small engines during the week. Lawn mowers, four wheelers, leaf blowers… lot’s of things used small engines on our world. On the weekends, we would hunt. You know that humans are omnivores, and I’m sorry because I know you find it distasteful, but most humans got their meat casually from giant “super” markets. To them it was never a real living thing, just a collection of food wrapped in plastic. We knew better. Meat was a thing you took. Jack saw a power in that taking. Perhaps that was the first early warning.
It was a happy life. On weekends we would gather scrap metal. Throughout the week I would tend the garden that kept us in vegetables. In the fall the pear trees would come into fruit and we would brew cider twenty gallons at time. Each week adjusting the mix, filtering out the pulp, and sipping the fruits of our labors. It was a good life. It should have lasted.
Then one day, Jack’s Dad said we could all move down to his auto shop. We could work on big engines, and grow our garden and have our happy simple life. All Jack had to do was reign in his younger brother. So Jack made a plan. He would go to South Georgia during the week and get things set up. He would come back on weekends and we would work our garden, hunt, and brew our cider, and then we would all go down together and we would work on big engines and have a happy life.
It didn’t work. We worked because when one of us would sink there were two more to pull them out. Jack Sank. Instead of reigning in his brother he fell in with him. He began using drugs again, bad drugs, the type I don’t even know if you have. And finally I had to leave.
I skipped town, following my own brother in the promise of a job that faded like the stars at dawn. Spright left to, months later, following her mother to Upstate New York. I tried to talk her into staying, to making a go of it together, but she said that in the end we were better off alone than feeding our own madness, and waiting until our relationship grew toxic. And then I was really and truly alone. I walked that line as long as I could. Every day catching a train to a job that never quite paid my bills. I thought every day about the past 12 years and the times when food wasn’t just something that came from the market wrapped in plastic. And then one day I came to hate that train. I wanted to spite it. I wanted to throw myself into it like it was some annoying bastard in a mosh pit. And I failed. And that’s when the text found me. And that’s who I was.
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Luna swallowed hard, and a tear ran down Celestia’s face. For Discord’s part, he only bowed his head respectfully.
“He is a creature of chaos,” the draconequus said without flair, “He was trapped in his own body, and I felt a kinship with that. He didn’t free a hive of changelings. He didn’t save the Crystal Empire. He just got out of bed and tried to make the world better, even if he was bad at it, until the weight of it all finally broke him. I judged that to be enough.”