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Chapter 18: Flight Dream

Fallout Equestria: Begin Again
Chapter 18: Flight Dream
“Burn away the flags. Begin Again."

|*| And the Horse you Rose in On |*|

I fell into the wasteland, as if through an hourglass that had been counting down my time in the desert: in paradise. And as I looked up into a storm that had been worn as thin as papyrus, I could almost believe in the songs and the scripture. I could almost believe that I had fallen from some heaven, tilted myself off of an island in the atmosphere: a satellite kingdom. But no, I hadn’t come tumbling through those holes in the sky. It had all been in my head. And though I’d felt hours pass, the sun seemed to have gone still: waiting for me. Nothing was the same, but nothing had changed. It was as if I had never left.

I lay sprawled out in a bed of yellow grass, and the Deimos groaned beside me, lying on its belly. The warship’s pale emergency lights throbbed. It had left a deep, ugly scar through the prairie, snapping the pines and gutting the mountainside. I couldn’t hear fire crackling or smell smoke trickling out of the ship’s hull. I couldn’t see a clipped wing or a punctured sail. The Deimos had landed as if to sleep, as if made drowsy by the sun. It had not been shot down. There were no fires going cold. There were no screams.

The ship’s windows were broken and its shutters had clicked open, so that the wind played it like a flute. There was something wrong. There was too much color: too many shades of gold coming through the clouds and glazing the grass. It was too bright. It looked like someone had thinned out the storm as if shearing a sheep’s wool. I could almost see the sun, but knew this was no paradise. There was gunfire, and I watched the clouds swelling - blackening, sweating, boiling - to the south. This was wasteland.

There were birds, perched on the warship’s plucked feathers, and they were all white enough to pass for origami swans. They took off, to drift up into the storm like paper planes, at the sound of hoofsteps in the grass. I tried twisting my neck to see who was coming, but froze up as something landed on my nose. I crossed my eyes and saw a locust, rubbing its prickly legs together like two dry sticks, as if to start a fire.

I wanted to squeal, but there were voices ringing off of the steel sides of the Deimos, and I remembered the monsters roiling in its gut. I remembered that this was wasteland; that I had come down from my mind. I could die here. I could lose here. I went still, and lay there like a statue fallen from the walls of some ancient city. I was paralyzed, as if turned to stone by the insect’s stare.

In the corner of my eye, I could see Locusts swarming over the ship, over the city from which I had fallen. Their hooves clicked against its hull, and their bodies were heavy enough to make it groan: to wake it up.

They paid me no mind, and gathered before the deck of the Deimos, like an audience before a stage. And only then, did I see the gargoyle that was standing there, with its wings as black as night under those sundrenched sails. It was the alicorm. And I knew then that she must have left me here: she must have found me dreaming in those pools of electric moonlight, and thrown me off the side of the ship.

Now, the abomination stretched out its bloody neck and half a hundred Locusts stared up at her, falling in love all at once. Even as they began to whisper and babble as if speaking in tongues, the insect climbed up and down my snout, and I remembered creeping into Hell, and seeing the Celestial cross built up from charred bodies and blackened bones. The alicorm only had to spread her wings to give the Locusts their God. I was jealous. I had birthed Eden and Valhalla and Arcadia. But here I was, lying in the dirt.

The locust sang a single sour note, and then sprang into the gathering mob. I hadn’t been breathing, and my chest ached even as I coughed and gasped for air. I rocked up onto my hooves, and looked down at my Pipbuck, which should have been blushing as red bars came marching over the hills. But it was as pale as the moon. The Locusts were showing up white, and I shivered, feeling my blood run cold. We were meant to be enemies. The alicorn should have killed me while I lay dreaming. The Locusts should have pounced on me, foaming at their mouths. I should have drawn my pistol, and shot down their God.

It was as if I had switched sides. I was standing beside an army who had come home limping, painted red in the blood of the Buffalo. I was standing in the court of a city whose king was a stowaway in some machine, whose queen had a stake through her neck, and whose belly was full of twisted things with too many mouths. I wasn’t here to fight. I wasn’t here to take heads or tilt thrones. No… I was their guest.

I had to get out of the shadow of the Deimos; I had to scrub out the stains of that whispering blue voice. I had to find Caliber. And Ash. And go where the sunlight was blotted and cold, to see paradise lost in low spaces and ugly places. I had to throw myself back into the wasteland: a nightmare so dark that it would already have cut to black if I were dreaming. I had to fall into it, if only to be sure I wasn’t still asleep.

*** *** ***

I came up over the hillside, and looked over my shoulder to make sure that nothing had come following me from inside the warship. The Deimos might have been mistaken for a great, dead animal, being swarmed by ants as its flesh went sweet in the sun. The Locusts were filling its gaps, pulling together its cracked shell, as the alicorn stood on its deck, waving her wings and throwing her voice like a street corner preacher. I heard them chanting with her, in animal voices that were low and dull.

They were rebuilding it – sticking bloodied feathers back into a dead bird – and a shiver ran down my spine as I watched them work. There was something in that ship: something that had wrapped itself around my brain, and leaked into it like a psychedelic drug. And now, with the alicorn as its puppet on a stake, so had it taken hold of the Locusts. I could only hope that the twisted things that had sprouted out from around that blue rose, those beasts in the belly of the ship, would snap their mouths at anything that tried to come inside. Unless Sovereign had tamed them too.

I turned my back on the Deimos, and looked up to where the storm was inky enough to swallow up the sun, and take me far away from paradise. As I made my way south, I did my best to weed out the worry in my mind: What if Caliber hadn’t made it out alive? What if Ash had found the alicorn, like a ghost haunting the brig of the ship, and followed her Pilgrimage if only down a different path?

What if I had worn the clouds so thin? What if I had thrown fuel into the fire of this sun, and made it burn so brightly? What if I was still dreaming? What if I never woke up?

My heart skipped a beat, as the drone of the Locusts had died down and, over the jarring beat of faraway gunfire, I thought I could hear angels sing. I thought the Monster was whispering in my ear.

But these were words I knew: in the voice of a stranger who I could never have met.

We’ll meet again,
don’t know where,
don’t know when.
But I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day.

A spritebot came bobbing up to me as if through water, like punctured cargo taking on weight and sinking. Its wings were broken, and stuck out like the antennae of an insect. But there was no light in its eyes, and no life in it but for the electricity that came crackling out of its sides, and the music stuttering out of its speakers. This was not Okavango Delta, but another piece of this broken Equestria. It was ugly and twisted, and the voice that came pouncing out of it then was enough to show me that I was home.

“We interrupt your regularly scheduled program for… some news! Now I know you’re all fit to burst by now, what with the new relay giving us eyes over the east, but you’ll never guess who this old dog just sniffed out in the wreck.” I looked north, over the Deimos and across the Plain, to where Cabanne sat smoking. And there in between us was that skinny radio tower, lit up like a beacon. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, kids: old soldiers never die.”

“It’s good to see you again, Shepard.” I turned away from the tower, smiling. They had done it.
Somewhere out there, Caliber and Ash were still fighting. “Looks like you’ve been through one hell of a night. And, just going off the absolutely flatlined airship lying just over your shoulder there, I’d say you’ve already started kicking against the Enclave’s pricks. For all the ponies out there who’re still trying to figure out who to root for, why don’t you tell us which side has your gun: the Locusts spilling out of that dead zone in the Middle Passage, or those Buffalo camped out at the bottom of the Dragon’s Stair?”

“The Buffalo…” I said, carefully. I was still a little stunned, and looked out over the Plains to see what I might have missed. To the north, there were great tears in the clouds, through which winged soldiers came like crows, as if to pluck at the bodies littering the battlefield that had grown out around Cabanne. In places, it seemed as though the storm itself was reaching down with dusty fingers, to squash the Locusts or flick the Buffalo away like summer beetles. There were whirlwinds stripping the prairie, stirring up maelstroms in the clouds. As if to follow me up into paradise, the earth had gone to war with the sky.

“Looks like the Shepard is still a little dizzy from the crash. I just wish you could see what I’m seeing, folks. This little filly just came swaggering away from a landing that would’ve left any captain crying for his mother. Hell of a way to make an entrance, Shepard. I take it you’re back to fight the Good Fight?”

It was hard to pull myself away from the Plain, as it had become an almost biblical oil painting of the end of days, with angels coming with the clouds, pillars of rain holding up a sky like a crumbling temple, and fires coloring the horizon. But I looked into the spritebot’s crumpled eye, and remembered that I could be talking to ponies that were hiding in the ruins, cheering from the sidelines, or dying in the wreck.

“Not quite: I’m back to win it.”

*** *** ***

The DJ and I couldn’t have talked without the wasteland hearing our every word, and so I lost my chance to get any answers: to let myself seem tired, confused and alone in a world whose edges were burning and whose earth was soaked in blood and blackened rain. Still, I felt braver for being their champion, and didn’t have any reason to wonder whether I had fallen back onto the wrong side of the board.

I should have scolded myself for being so proud, for biting my tongue before so many questions, as if to trick the world into thinking I was all-knowing. I still didn’t understand why the Enclave were spitting seeds of fire down from the sky, why Hell had opened its mouth and let swarms of Locusts come spilling out, or where Caliber and Ash had gone after lighting the radio tower. All I knew for certain was that the Deimos had once been an Enclave ship, and that the Buffalo had left their pastures to burn. I could almost see them, gathered in a warcamp at the bottom of the Dragon’s Stair, with their tents like Brahmin moths resting in the grass, for the animal skins stretched out into strange patterns on their backs.

Before the spritebot went drifting away, I told the world I was going south, stepping back onto the path that I had been plucked off of. I had to hope that Caliber was out there somewhere, listening, that she knew where I was going: where to find me. While it never came so close that I could feel it, the rain drummed at the plains as I walked down into the Buffalo camp, as if to play me back onto the stage.

The tents were empty, though the wind teased them up over their posts like skirts over skinny legs, and whistled. I bent over a campfire whose pans were scattered and whose pit was like a cigarette burn in the soil, and smelt of wood that was smoky and damp. There were spears, sticking up out of the dirt, with bloody ribbons around their necks. And there were shotgun casings, like the shells of sunflower seeds.

Only after coming deeper into the abandoned camp, did I realize that the earth had been left uneven, cratered by cleft hooves and bodies that had either been helped up, or dragged away. There was still smoke in the air, and it made me lower my eyelids as if putting me to sleep. I saw mud drying up on my sleeve, and I turned my head to pick it off, thinking that I was alone.

“Fillies and gentlecolts, for my next trick… I’ll need some help from my lovely assistant.” I dug my hooves into the mud, and looked up. I had come into a clearing in the camp and there, tied to a post as if to the mast of a sinking ship, was Hennessy. She smiled down at me, her face like a blood orange that had only been halfway peeled. “She looks so beautiful, don’t you agree… don’t you agree?”

“Hennessy…” I breathed out her name.

“I must ask for complete silence as, using only her horn, my assistant frees me from my bonds.” She was wriggling inside the ropes, as if to put on a show for the spirits that still squatted around the warcamp. “Now you might think that, since she’s the one doing the magic, she should be the one with her name up in lights. Fair’s fair… but this is show business folks.”

“What happened here?” I asked, though her eyes had glazed over, as if tinny laughter was playing in her head, drowning me out. “Where are all the Buffalo?”

“You’re going off script, sweetheart,” she said, speaking out of one side of her mouth. “They took their show on the road. Can’t go anywhere now without seeing another fight between them and the ‘Custs.” She frowned, and it crumpled up her face like a sheet of paper. “I tell ya: It’s a good thing those flyboys cracked open the sky when they did, otherwise that show would’ve gone stale real fast.”

“Flyboys? Do you mean the Enclave?”

“Yeah, I mean the Enclave! They’re sharpening their stingers because one of them fancy, flying ships got overrun. They figure it was the Locusts, seeing as it happened over in that valley to the west… but you have to know how to work a computer to steer an Enclave ship. And, far as I can tell, we’re all a bunch of cavemen down here.” I saw that prehistoric symbol, like an image burned into my eyes, and I knew: Sovereign had stolen that ship. Sovereign had brought the Enclave down like a drumroll over the Plain.

“I’m looking for my friends,” I said, even as Hennessy tried to shush a crowd of heckling spirits. “Do you know if they came this way?”

“Couldn’t say. Seen a lot of friendly enough faces pass me by. Everyone’s making a run for Calvary. Never seen the Dragon’s Stair so crowded. Was like folks were queuing up to get into one of your Stables.” I tilted my head and looked around her, to a dip in the southern mountains. It was as though one of them had erupted, and taken its own head off, as the Dragon’s Stair looked as pale as a pile of volcanic ash and cinder. “Chances are they went that-a-way.”

“Why? Is Calvary safe?”

She looked up into the sun, which was glaring out at us as if from behind a torn wedding veil. “Not especially. But they’ve still got a roof over their heads.” I looked up, and didn’t stop until my eyes watered.

Without giving myself time to think it over, I untied her, and hurried out of the clearing. Behind me, the poacher bowed, and let ghostly roses pile up around her hooves, smiling one half of death’s naked smile.

*** *** ***

I heard voices as I came to the edge of the camp, and worried that some of Hennessy’s audience might have followed me, holding their flowers out in front of them and asking for my heart. I pulled up the collars of my father’s coat, as if to hide my faces as cameras flashed around me. But, as one of the voices was ground down to a low, rumbling laugh, I knew who I would see standing at the foot of the Dragon’s Stair, like a boulder come rolling down from the mountain.

Hehh. Hehh. Hehhh. Tuskegee rocked from side to side as he laughed, and it was all I could do not to bury myself in his chest, and kiss him like a castaway washed up on the tide might kiss the earth. I had begun to wonder if, tied to her post as if nothing had changed since the last time I’d seen her, Hennessy was a sign that I was dreaming it all up. But Tuskegee was real. He had to be.

And, as if to prove it, two strangers stood in his shadow as it swayed from side to side. It looked like they had been left out of an inside joke. They were dressed in plate armor, which might once have been described as gold, and looked safe for the metal that covered their necks and hooves like too much jewelry. Attached to circlets at their neck were two tattered cloaks, one red and the other the color of deerskin, as if to say that they came from two different armies. They wore chainmail across their bellies and bunched up around their necks like scarves, and carried lances in their saddles instead of rifles. They stood so still that it was as if Tuskegee was only making silly faces at royal guards.

“Shipbreaker!” He cheered, as I skipped up to them, sounding as happy to see me as I was to see him. “This is the girl that drove the Deimos into the dirt, and shook the Plain more than it has been shaken since the first Tuskegee was named Chief!” The mare in his shadow gave me a look as flat as day old soda. Her eyes were the color of the Sparkle-Cola Quantum bottles I’d seen on capsized billboards.

She wore a helmet, which covered her forehead even though its beaklike visor was tilted all the way back.
Her powder blue mane came out of its skullcap like the crest of a cockatoo, though her coat was canary. She wore what might have been the cloak of an old Pegasus politician, but had the hard eyes of one of their statues, still watching over those cities in the clouds.

There were shadows that clung to her face even as the sun did its best to sweep them off, and I could see the bloodstains at the tip of her lance: bloodstains creeping up from the soles of her boots.

I couldn’t look her in the eye for very long, and so tried smiling at the buck beside her. “Good afternoon,” I said, as he smiled back at me. His eyes were almost colorless, and I thought I could see stripes in his hazelnut coat, though they were faint, as if he had tried to wash them out.

“It is, isn’t it? It’s a shame that the Enclave couldn’t have opened up the storm just to say hello. But it’s nice to see the sun, I suppose. Either way… my name is Wonderful Tumble.” He saluted me, beaming as if I had just pinned a medal to his chest. “Well, Officer Wonderful Tumble now. Of the NCPD.”

“Me and the New Calvary Police Department,” Tuskegee couldn’t help snorting as he said that. “Were just talking about getting my warriors into the city once the fighting’s over. The Enclave will tuck themselves back in once their politicians have made their point. But that doesn’t mean our prairies will stop burning.”

A Police Department? I thought, skipping in place. To the mare, it might have looked like I’d come over to ask for directions to the little filly’s room, though she had turned her glare back onto the Buffalo Chief. His eyes shone out from inside his face, as if it were only a heavy, leather mask.

Aucune chance, barbare.” I titled my head and wiggled an ear, trying to tune into her frequency. It was as if the mare was speaking in cursive. “I do not want your… guerriers trailing dirt into Calvary.”

Tuskegee furrowed his brow. “We are not gorillas.”

“Guerriers! I said guerriers.” She stomped her hoof, and got a little dirt on my collar. “Imbécile!”

The Buffalo smiled a Brahmin’s lazy smile, and nodded along as she swung her hoof out of the muck and stormed around in little circles, making up words that sounded mean but meant nothing to any of us. Tuskegee might have been playing dumb to get on her nerves, and I wondered how long they had been stuck like this. “Is there any way that we- … that I can help?” I asked, after the mare wound herself down.

“You are a refugee, n’est pas? Then go up l’escalier and wait at Fort Abaddon with all the others.” She thrust a hoof at the Dragon’s Stair, which I had come to realize was not a pile of ash, but a mountain that had been stripped naked and decapitated. “There should be space for you still, Mignon.” She looked the Buffalo up and down, and took her time about it. “For this one and his… Calvary has no space.”

“Maybe me and mine will have to make our own space.” I was so close that I could hear his voice come rumbling up out of his gut, and smelt smoke and stale meat on his breath. “Run back to your masters in Calvary, sergeant. And tell them that the Chief named Tuskegee said this: Once my warriors have had their fill of Locusts… I won’t be asking to come into your city. I won’t be asking for anything.”

And then, just as I thought he was going to go thundering back into the camp, Tuskegee leaned in close, and his breath seemed as heavy as an arm around my shoulder. “If you ever find your friend, don’t let her go. It’s time we had a toast together.” He rocked his weight, and laughed as he went trundling away. Hehh. Hehh. Hehhh. “Here’s to the Chiefslayer. Here’s to the Shipbreaker. And here’s to War!”

The sergeant watched him go, as one might watch a thunderstorm close over the sun. “Merde.”

*** *** ***

“A mercenary and a pilgrim… together? I think I would’ve remembered that.” Officer Tumble punctuated his sentences with little laughs, and walked up the Dragon’s Stair with a spring in his step. Our path was broken up by standing stones, like the plaster casts of pilgrims who had died in some volcanic eruption. “But we only just left New Calvary, really. NCPD officers don’t usually get sent this far away from the city. But with all you refugees coming into the valley…” Just ahead of us, the sergeant dug her hooves in, and stopped short. “Sergeant?”

The mare spun around on one hoof, and marched up to me. “That symbol on your coat, celui-là: la croix.” She prodded at my flank, and I felt like I had been caught smuggling a Goddess into Calvary. “What is the word you use for it?” Her lance was quivering at my chest, as if to say she would skewer me if I answered the question wrong.

My voice shook. “Cross.”

Cross!” She backed away from me, her hooves slipping on the stone. “C’est la seul: this is the one we have been looking for… The Cross-bearer.”

Wonderful Tumble’s watery eyes went wide. “Sacre bleu!” Then, the sergeant came crashing into me, so that I ended up sprawled out on the stone like a toppled house of cards. Her hoof pressed into my neck, catching a lump in my throat, even as she barked orders at the officer. I looked up out of the corner of my eye, and watched him pull a chunky metal collar out from under his cloak.

“Désolé, Mignon. There is no other way. Il ne faut rien laisser au chance.” The officer clicked the collar open, and it glinted in the filtered light of the sun. “The Buffalo want to come into our city. The refugees want us to drive out the Locusts. And you want to go free. But the NCPD doesn’t give anyone what they want… we give them what they need.” She was breathing down my neck now. “Tant pis.”

Then, even as she took the collar in her mouth and leaned in a little closer, there came the howling of a shotgun, and I heard buckshot sizzling against the stone. “Aie!” She cried, and the collar went skittering down the Dragon’s Stair like a metal scorpion. “Je suis attaqué!”

She left me there, in the dirt, and I tried to stay still even as the buckshot crackled all around me. The sergeant ducked behind a nearby standing stone, reeling out a string of curses in cursive. The lance at her side might have been a kind of lightning rod, as electricity danced around its tip. The buckshot came after her her like a swarm of bees, and I dragged myself up the stair, my belly scraping against the stone.

“Fillies and Gentlecolts! The images you are about to see-“ The voice broke off, with another thunderclap from what had to be a Buffalo’s shotgun. “- may be unsuitable for younger viewers. So if you have any children with you-“ It was as if one of those big bands was following Hennessy up the Dragon’s Stair, as the gunfire sounded like the crash and rattle of cymbals. “Tell ‘em to grow up already!”

The poacher came storming up to me, firing her weapons like a mare playing too many instruments at once.“Get along now, Miss Knockout. I’ll keep these piglets off your tail.” A bolt of lightning struck the space between her hooves, as if she had sworn to God, and already gone back on her word.

“Arrêter, clochard! You are under arrest!” The sergeant yelled, after ducking back behind her standing stone. “Anything you say or do can be used against you in a court of law.”

“A court of what?” Hennessy pelted the stone with buckshot, and then turned to shoo me away as one might a dog. “Go on now, git.” I hesitated, and lines of lighting burst out of the sergeant’s lance, splitting the space between us just as I went scampering away. With my heart hammering, I left the poacher there, but not before looking back to see death smiling out at me as if we were friends.

*** *** ***

The sun had begun to sink by the time I came up onto the bald scalp of the Dragon’s Stair, and the shadows of the standing stones seemed to be reaching up after me like skinny black fingers. I wanted to let them take me, let them pinch my tail and drag me down the Dragon’s Stair.

It felt as if I had skipped ahead, as if some of the pages to this story had gotten stuck together, and turned over all at once. But the sky was closing, and I had to go on. The sunlight felt heavy and cool even as it broke over the standing stones and set fire to the branches of the birch trees. It was as if it had been watered down in the rain. I stopped walking, realizing that there had been rain, and I never got to feel it.

I wanted to go back: to drive out the Locusts, and the Enclave, to brush them off of the Plain like so many clinging insects. I wanted to light up that old radio tower, and listen to the first song that came whistling out of it as if from a flute. I wanted to fight beside the Buffalo, to patch up bullet wounds that were, to them, like nothing more than pricks from a thorn tree.

I wanted to see Caliber again, and earn the name Shipbreaker.

But most of all: I wanted to be a part of the war that so many had been pulled into. There were the soldiers, stitching together the storm that they themselves had cut open, and the Locusts piecing together the shipwreck. There were the Buffalo who were still fighting out in between wildfire and floodplains. There was Tuskegee and the officers who would not let him come into the Calvary, and the poacher who was still spitting buckshot at them like so many watermelon seeds.

There was the alicorn. And the Monster. And me.

But there was only one mare that I knew, that I knew, was on my side… if only for the leash closed tight around her neck. And she wasn’t here. She wasn’t anywhere.

I listened to my hooves crunching against the stone of the Dragon’s Stair, and the bottlecaps jingling at the bottom of my saddlebags. I listened to the whir of the Locusts, to the hum of cities high above me and ancient engines far below. I listened to the wind go singing by, making up the songs as it went, and to the birch trees that were dancing to it, all naked with their arms on fire. The pines shivered, perched on the mountainside more like birds bundled up under damp feathers, or bodies under damp clothes. And the sun shone behind me, even as the clouds closed in around it like so much dirty water going down a drain.

Even then, I did not envy the Enclave. I knew what it was like now, to stay dry in some paradise while the rest of the world sank, while it drowned. If they knew we were down here, if they knew we were looking up at them, waiting for them to throw us a lifeline that might never come, then they couldn’t be happy. They would never have peace, no matter how much empty space was stacked between us. It was like sleeping on a pile of a thousand mattresses, and still being able to feel the pea.

The air felt thinner here, as the Dragon’s Stair was only a head shorter than the mountains around it. I lay back against one of the standing stones, and tried to take deep breaths. My lungs had swelled up like the stomachs of the starving, and never seemed to have their fill.

The mountains opened out to Calvary just ahead, and I watched little shivering lights come on as the sun slipped and fell off the edge of the world. The city lay sprawled out as a wet animal trying to dry itself before nightfall, so that beads of water glistened in its coat. Calvary was made of circles inside of circles, and to look at them now was to see naked bodies in the light of a candle, as their curves were honeyed by the sun, and all their ugliness was that much harder to see. In the dark, there might never have been a war.

Smokestacks breathed out over the industrial strips, and there was an overpass like a loose belt around the belly of Calvary. Streetlights and billboards blinked out at me from in between suburban sprawls and strip malls, and there were skyscrapers like long, glass knives piercing the heart of the city. They seemed to be sharing one seat, as the mountains had made them a stone throne, if only so they might sit in the shadow of Old Calvary’s three towers. Those ancient pillars of steel made the city below look babyish, though they were little more than silhouettes now, and bobbed into the clouds as if to push up the sky.

To the south, I could see the ocean, as the sunset went dancing into it against the tide. It seemed to have swallowed up some of the coast, as cranes stood up to their neck in water, while piers, beachfront markets and lighthouses glittered under the surface like schools of phosphorescent fish.

There were no lights to the west. It was as if some enormous pink creature was crouching in the dark, leaning in over the city as a child over castles made of sand. I remembered the day I had met Ash: The day that I had met the alicorn. I remembered how she stood at the edge of that temple, at the shore of a floating sea. That was the Cloud, like a bloody, blushing face pressed up against Calvary’s window.

I lowered my eyes, and stared back into the city lights, as if to look that pink stranger in the eye would be to invite it in. That’s when I saw the shipwreck, like the crumpled body of a bird that had flown into a windowpane. What looked like another Enclave airship had crashed into one of Calvary’s industrial strips, and red lights throbbed all around it, disfiguring its already twisted body. But it was not like the Deimos.

This ship had gone down in flames. I didn’t think any survivors had come limping away from its charred carcass. Still, it looked to have gone cold long ago, and was more like a twisted little skeleton than a body whose feathers were still twitching: whose heartbeat was only just slowing down.

Everything had gone quiet. And I felt something tickling me: a breeze as faint as one coming off of pages being flipped backwards. It went on, and on. But I kept myself from crying out, from begging it to stop, and stared out over Calvary until the city lights began to drift out of focus.

I could hear angels sing.

The suns climbs back into its saddle on top of the sky, which is naked and clean as a body that has been hosed down. The shipwreck starts to crawl, to heave and twitch as if life had been breathed back into it. The pieces of it that have been scattered come in like a crowd, or a tide, swelling around some ark. The ship seems to catch fire, as if to be born again in it, and takes off with smoke coming out of its gut.

It is going backwards. There are clouds to the west, to the east. The storm is everywhere, but cannot come over the valley. It cannot come under the sun. The horizon breathes it in and out like a drug. There are three airships in the sky now, like hammerheads being pulled back after burying the nail.

One springs out from the mountains that surround the Dragon’s Stair. But each ship drifts towards Calvary. Their shadows spread over the spaces where they had just been buried, as the sun burns a hole in the sky. In the city below, there are clocks spinning the wrong way. The whole world is spinning the wrong way: away from the whirlpool of balefire that once swallowed it up. Not into it, but away.

But there are guns on the walls of New Calvary, like rifles peeking out through the curtains.
Guns the size of streetcars, whose eyes burn and blink like headlights in the rain. They choke on their own bullets, their own missiles, sucking them out of the ships bellies like snake venom from a wound.

These were Equestrian ships. And those were Equestrian guns. They were killing themselves. Everything was backwards, and bodies slipped in through the holes in the skips, even as they were shut. Backwards. Backwards. Backwards. But then, it all stopped, as if the tape had been rewound as war as it could go.

This… is the way the world ends.

Bodies slipped out through the holes in the ships, even as they were eviscerated by the guns. The city walls flashed, and missiles took off, sagging through the air like fat doves. The airships caught fire, and began to sink. The storm closed in a little tighter, and so the open sky was like a shallow pool, shrinking in the heat. The wind blew, instead of sucking. And Equestria fell to its knees, instead of running away.

As the ships crashed, the earth shook, and shook again, and the red lights throbbed like a pulse far below. The last airship tore towards the scalp of the Dragon’s Stair, keeling over to the east as it came. The mountains caught the wreck in its teeth, like a dog snatching a bird out of the air. And so the cannons on New Calvary’s wall were like the guns of duck hunters that had been crouching in the grass.

The ship was burning, and shadows climbed up the stone. They danced around the fire, like spirits come leaping out of this fresh grave, to celebrate being set free from their cages of flesh and bone. They spun, around and around, and turned the whole world underneath them. They came skipping out of the fires, skipping over the fallout, until Equestria was dark with the dead.

And I was alone.

*** *** ***

Alone. Alone alone alone alone.

I stared out over the city, and it was as if I had found the place where the stars came to hide at sunrise. The night had already stretched its legs and taken off running, but the valley was bright. I could see emergency lights and lampposts and a thousand windows like scattered yellow pages. I could see headlights and storefronts and billboards. Light Pollution, it was called. Even if the storm were to be pulled open, there would be no stars over Calvary tonight. It would be as if they had been shot down.

I got to my hooves. Then sat down again. I stood up, and paced from one standing stone to the other. There was no way out. How can you run away if you’re alone? When there’s no one left to run to…
When there’s no one left to run from.

I scooped up a rock in the light of my own magic, and started cutting into one of the standing stones: drawing as if to get something out of me, to make sense of a thousand garbled words. I didn’t stop until the symbol was in the stone, no different than if it had been carved there in prehistory.

“Sovereign,” I said to it, before raising my voice as if to cry for help. “Sovereign!
No answer. I was alone. Even the Monster had left me, like a devil gone skipping off of my shoulder.

My clothes felt tight, my saddlebag like a great stone that made my knees buckle and my back ache. I tried to wriggle out of the strap, but it got caught around my neck, and under my nose, and behind my ear. I threw it to the ground, as if wrestling off the monkey on my back.

Its buckle had come loose, and my things slid out into the dirt. I bent over to gather them up, but went very still as I saw the corner of a small box poking out. Its trimming glinted in the light of the city. And I could hear Damascus’ orbs clicking together, as they rocked from side to side in their cradle.

I had found a way out.

<=======ooO Ooo=======>

The firewood and the smoke, the smell of spice and ephemeral herbs in the air. I wanted to drown in it.
Damascus once had a voice in his head. And it had come like a tendril snaking into the hollow spaces in his head, claiming to be a Goddess. I once had a voice in my head, claiming to be a God. I hoped that we would escape them here, that we could hide from them… together. Like two children lying under the table and dreaming, while their parents fought far above them. I didn’t want to watch the world end.

You are… I am.” The Zebra’s voice was soft, pleading with us, or praying for us. “Why can’t you leave it at that?”

“I am clearing my mind, Aisha – not losing it,” Damascus said, and I could only hope that he was right. About both of us. “This is meditation. I am finding peace.”

“Peace? You’re only clearing your mind to make room for war.” She sighed, and her breath made the smoke twirl like a dancer’s skirts. “There’s no sense in trying to change your mind now…” She slid over another vial of stars and the night sky, as if she had dipped out glass into some galaxy. “Not if you won’t remember it.”

He swallowed it down like a spoonful of medicine, and stared at her through the smoke. “I won’t.”

*** *** ***

The Stable roared around me, and I felt like a stowaway on another gutted airship, as it all came falling down. Damascus did not want to stay here for long, and pushed us up out of the gray, as if to come up for air. Then, I saw wastelands turned over like pages, passing me by like those beautiful places in my mind, as if to prove that every paradise casts a shadow.

Storms fought over the sky, rolling over and over like animals tearing at the skin of each other’s necks, while the sun and the moon chased each other around the planet. They began to slow, as if losing their breath, and creaked to a stop. My heart sank, as the daylight rolled away like the grand prize on a wheel of fortune. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was already setting into the skirts of a gathering storm.

We stood in the rotting skeleton of what was once a homey little town.

It was as though all the adults had disappeared, leaving their children to take over the village. There were curses scribbled on the walls, and games abandoned in the streets: a marketplace jumbled into a maze, rolling pastry and fruit stalls stripped down and turned to race carts, bones like pickup sticks and jawless skulls cracked open like conkers. The houses had been ransacked, and their walls colored as if by the hurling of children who had eaten too much candy. Damascus looked into a broken window, and watched a dozen dead cats sway, all nailed to the ceilings by their tails, as if as a warning to the curious.

The air was thick, squashed under the storm, and reminded me of the Stable’s shower room though it smelt, not of lather and lady’s perfume, but gunpowder and wood that was soft and riddled with insects. It was humid, and the wind was not biting, but massaging and wet as a tongue over food that had already been chewed. I could hear bells toll, buildings creak, and gunfire ringing through the streets behind us.

We were running.

Damascus hooves clicked against a stone bridge, even as bullets went singing past our ears. He threw our weight, and bunched us up on the other side. There was a river between us and the town now, though it looked more like mud than water. We looked back at the buildings that squatted around its banks, and then to the scourged farmlands that were sprawling out around the town, like great corpses. A sign on a chain creaked nearby, but I couldn’t read it, and there was no Pipbuck on my leg to guide me.

We had to be somewhere in the south, for it was hot and the air was heavy, but the clouds had been parted wide above us. I could still see the orange and purple swirls coming off of the sunset, as if it were a capsule dissolving at the bottom of a glass: some medicine being stirred into the sky.

The storm was overflowing into this open space, and what was left of the daylight washed over a dense forest, only to be soaked up in the overgrowth, and wasted. Damascus ran into it, just as big whooping children came stumbling across the bridge: Raiders, more familiar than anything in this southern place.

We ran into what had to be some kind of swamp, so that its trees sagged in around us, limp and twisted. The earth might have been peeled, and was wet, splashing up from underneath our hooves. Sometimes, I couldn’t see the sky as inky tangles of vegetation had crisscrossed over it. But in the gaps, were spots of orange and purple that I almost mistook for plump, overripe fruits, and the eyes of some tropical creature.

It was dark, and the plants were strange. We might have been lost in a funhouse of flora, or stranded on some Jurassic planet. There were faces in the trees: hollow eyes and howling mouths that had been scooped out. Vines and fingers of fungus closed in tight around their trunks, choking the forest.

Damascus was alone.

I was curled up at the back of his mind, thinking of how much he had done for me when he signed Caliber over, as if giving up his daughter for marriage. Thanks to him, I had never been to a place as terrible as this: I had never been so alone. And if we were to swap places, like a driver and his passenger or an actor and his audience, I knew I couldn’t have done what he did: couldn’t have run into the jungle.

But then again, like the devil that had perched on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear as I walked through paradise: he thought he had a Goddess with him in this pit. He was praying under his breath.

Ye though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
I will fear no evil – for you are with me.
Surely goodness and love will follow me – all the days of my life
And I will dwell in the house of the Goddess forever.

The trees were standing further apart now, spreading out as if for room to breathe, and I could see daylight. Mangled branches seemed to reach for us as we slowed down, but it was only the vacuum of the storm, plucking leaves that were as black as raven’s feathers and towing us up onto a barren hillside.

There was a weeping willow at the top of the hill, and it seemed to be rocking itself back and forth, like a mare crying in her sleep. Its leaves were pink, and lay like petals over the lavender sheets of the sky. There was thunder like something rolling over far above us, and Damascus walked up to the tree as if in a trance. I stared into its melted face, and wished that there was some way to stop him from touching it.

I realized then that the storm here had not been split open, that the clouds spilling together far above us were not being pulled over the setting sun like a sheet over the faces of the dead. There were no Enclave soldiers pulling them as chariots. They were moving on their own. This was a place that no one had tamed, a wild place that was no more Equestrian than an alien planet. This was Everfree.

Blue tendrils came bursting out from between the willow’s roots then, and lashed up at us like whips. They coiled around Damascus’ legs, and I could feel his heart hammering in our chest. He was flailing, kicking and screaming as they twisted his limbs and pulled on his tail, as they fought over him. They were like headless snakes, and though I could see no teeth flashing, and felt nothing like hot breath from a hungry mouth, I was sure we were about to be swallowed up.

Damascus squirmed until he could look out over the forest, and on to the mountains that had for so long been like his compass needle: his Caliber. And there, like a sinking ship on the storm, was Canterlot.

It felt like the tendrils were burrowing into us then, like they had broken through our flesh as easily as hot tongues through butter, and were licking out bones. They went deeper, wrapping themselves around his heart, and squeezing until it went still, as if suffocating a small animal. Damascus stared at the city and howled, screaming the dead language, pulling it out of its grave. I knew the words. I said them with him.

It is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned!
And is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life!
It is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

And I am ready to die.

His heart stopped beating. And I scurried down into the darkness, as if hiding in the belly of a dead whale. But we cried together. And I prayed my own little prayer, over and over until everything went dark.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake.
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

When we woke up, the willow was looking down at us, like a nurse with tears in her eyes. Damascus clutched his chest, as if the sight of the tree was enough to break his heart. He got up, and stumbled into the forest; with one hoof trying to feel a heartbeat, trying to find his own pulse.

There was nothing there but dead weight. It was as though his heart had been turned to stone.
So Damascus ran.

It was raining now, and he tripped over roots, bruised himself against the tree trunks, and fell into the mud. Blood began to run down his face, as a stone had left a scar across his cheek just as red lips might once have left lipstick. The water seemed to come through the canopy all at once, as if the forest was taking sips, and it wasn’t long before our body had been washed of Equestria’s ashes.

The Everfree was laughing at us. It had sprung its trap, and seemed to be letting us go. It would watch us leave, but not without laughing as if this had all been some kind of practical joke.

The leaves shivered as though chilled by the rain, and once Damascus and I saw the satellite tower in the spaces between them, even the bellowing of the thunder was not enough to slow us down. We leapt out of the forest, and into the shadow of a solar array, which a signpost buried in the dirt named Hope.

The storm was already pulling the satellites apart, plucking off great rusted panels like petals from a flower, one by one. But Damascus threw us into the clearing, and began digging around in the dirt. He found a piece of metal shaped like a spearhead, took it between his teeth and sat back against the tower. The rain fell a little harder, and thrummed the satellite like a steel drum. But it couldn’t touch us here.

I didn’t know what he was doing, and I suddenly wanted to get out of his body: to escape him. The towers groaned above us. It sounded like they were dying.

Damascus twisted his neck, buried the spearhead into our chest, and began to cut us open. There were tears in his eyes, and he had cut his tongue on the blade. But he didn’t stop.

My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen on me.
Fear and trembling have beset me; horror has overwhelmed me.
I said “O, that I had the wings of a dove.” I would fly away and be at rest.
I would flee far away, and stay in the desert; I would hurry to my place of shelter
far from the tempest and the storm…

One of the satellites was twisted loose, and I watched it fall, though Damascus’ eyes were on the wound as it grew wider and wider. The satellite hit the earth, and shook it like the footstep of some giant, but Damascus just kept cutting. I tried to pull away; so far away that I would see him as a silhouette, curled up beneath the tower, with Canterlot watching over his shoulder. But we had the same eyes, the same mouth, and it wasn’t long before I could taste his blood. It wasn’t long before I could see his heart.

It had not been turned to stone by those blue tendrils, as if they were Basilisks that had slithered in around his ribs, but to glass. There was a pink crystal where his heart should have been. And it shone, pulsing as if being flushed with blood, and then drained of it.

He began to stab at the crystal heart, and didn’t stop until the spearhead had been bent out of shape. There wasn’t so much as a scratch in the glass, and I thought I could see Damascus, and the storm above him, crying in it. He thought he was going to die, as those blue vines closed around his heart. He had been ready. But, if he had seen the Kingdom of the stars open its gates, then he would only have glimpsed at it before he came falling back to earth: back into the pit.

It was though the forest was teasing him, and I thought I could hear it laughing as the leaves rustled: laughing at its own sick joke. You’ll never die, Damascus. You’ll never get out of this place.
How do you stop a glass heart from beating?

He must have tried to get it out. He must have had wasteland surgeons put him under a saw, or grassland shamans press their ears to his chest. He must have had Aisha cut him open, and try her best to break his heart. None of it had worked. Why else would he have to make himself forget?

It was night by the time he looked up out of the hole in his chest, and Canterlot had gone sinking into the dark. We were alone. The solar array had its head twisted off. The storm had run dry. And Everfree had had its fun. Rose was gone. Marie was gone. And soon, even the memory of his glass heart would be torn out. But this time, I couldn’t blame him. How do you go on living, if you know you’ll never die?

I might have been given the wings of a dove then, as I left him, and went away from the tempest and the storm. And though it was hard to admit it: I was glad to get out. I was glad to go back to that place at the top of the Dragon’s Stair, where the city lights still shone, and I could feel my heart beat.

<=======ooO Ooo=======>

It was as if I had never left.

I packed up my things, put a hoof to my chest, and stared at the symbol that I’d carved into the stone as though it were my flag. I didn’t know what it meant to be alone. Not really. I looked out over the city of Calvary, and knew that I had someone to find. As the lights invited me in like so many candles being held out of so many open doors, I knew I had a heart. And - at the sight of a pass going up into the mountains on my left; going up into the wreck of that old airship - It started skipping rope in my chest.

Fudge, fudge, call the judge, Mama had a bay-bee.
It’s not a boy. It’s not a girl. It’s just a little lay-dee.

I saw a weary signpost leaning against the stone, and two words had been scratched onto it: Fort Abaddon. That was where the refugees had gone. That was where I could find Caliber.

The path was lit up by colorless floodlights, which might have been hauled up out of the ship after it crashed. The grass grew in rashes, and around me there lay boulders knocked down from the mountain, supply crates and rusted sheets of metal as still and as ancient as the ruins of some temple. There were machines like idols to a pagan God, and satellites like magnolia petals plucked from the branch.

I could still smell the rain, and the air coming up from the prairie was smoky and wet. There was snow snuggled up against the mountainside, smothering the wildflowers. One of the floodlights shone down at me from behind an aspen tree, and its light was broken like glass on the back of its branches.

Ahead, I could see the great engines of the ship, buried in the mountainside. The lights washed over them, and as shadows slid across the stone I knew that I had found Fort Abaddon, though it would be little more than a clumsy refugee camp tucked into the wreck, isolated as a mining town in the sierra.

And then, as I came to the halved wing that was Fort Abaddon’s gate, I could hear singing. Not of angels, but voices that slurred their words and stumbled in and out of tune. There was a clearing beneath the ship’s crumpled engines, and a crowd had gathered to dance in circles under a decrepit antenna.

They wore the clothes of peasants and priests, of mercenaries and trainyard drifters, of silken concubines and buttoned-down housewives. They wore cassocks and dog collars, torn coats and belts of ammunition, lacy nightgowns and flowery aprons. They were the refugees, all blown in on the wind, or run out by the thunder. But while the Enclave filed their paperwork, and the Locusts signed themselves over to some devil, these ponies were clicking their heels and singing in the floodlights. We had survived.

I broke through the circle, and started to dance, spinning so that I could see them smiling in at me.

And then, even with the light in my eyes and dizziness in my heart, I saw two more colors come to bloom in the circle. One was lavender, and the other as red as a rose dripping with stolen wine.

Footnote: Maximum Level
There'll Be Another Time: They say old soldiers never die. And war... war never changes.