"Gambit wait," Melody calls to me. A fondness for the filly standing in front of me had grown in me over the past couple days. "You forgot to say goodbye."
"I'm only going to be gone for a little while," I say to her.
"But, what if something happens to you?"
"Melody I promise that I'll be fine, okay."
"Okay," she says a little dejectedly.
"I gotta go now the others are waiting for me."
I go find the others, who have already cleared away the barricade in front of the entrance, and we set off.
Five of us made up the recovery team. There was Dr. Cross and Book Binding, who was brought along in hopes that something he had read would be useful to us. Then there was a retired E.U.P. guard named Lancestriker and one of the Doctor's nurses whose name I couldn't recall.
We step out and find that up close the city looks so much worse. It's just so more... more real. The leveled buildings who would touch the heavens no longer, and the bodies. Oh the bodies. Some are burned beyond any form of recognition, a husk of their former selves. While others look like they could just get up and walk away, as if waking from some terrible nightmare and right into another. Then the foals who only just a week ago had so much life to look forward to now lay dead on the cluttered street unmoving like ragdolls. This is what Equestria is now. A mass grave that the living have to suffer through, and highlight it all was that red burning hole frozen in motion most perhaps to stay there never to move again.
As we walk through the streets of the forsaken the nurses spots something and falls to the ground screaming, "Oh Celestia," in tears.
"Are you alright," Dr. Cross says as he rushes to help her.
"Yeah... yeah I'm fine," she says calming as she gets to her feet. "It's just that I used to know her," she points to a body covered in pieces rubble. "I was one of the bridesmaids at her... at her wedding," she finishes as she started in an overwhelm of tears.
"Let's move along best not to dwell on the past," Cross urges as he escorts her away, and it occurs to me that I'm the lucky one in all of this. I have no past to dwell on, no friends to find dead, and no family to worry about. No sorrows and no regrets.