Diary of the Dead

by AppleTank

5: Nekrogarten

1152 years ago

The first thing I found out after my almost seventeen year mental exile was that some sort of eternal snowstorm had started a few weeks after I left Sunny Pines. I was essentially holed up underground for the entire time, and only found out once I poked my head out and asked people. Agatha was suspicious when the first snow fell, and hastily began construction of underground farms that were insulated from the cold. Most of the residents of Appleton still stayed above ground.

After finally getting a grip on how much I’ve missed, I went to work on figuring out how I was going to live the rest of my unlife. Dimi’s words were still ringing in my head.

First of all, I didn’t go straight into interviewing. The results of that would have been embarrassing, to say the least. Instead, after considering who I knew and what I knew about them, I sought out Gladas to get an education on the basics. I found out earlier she was the only one who finished higher education. My reading was passable after I brute forced learning it after over half a decade of doing nothing but reading, but I haven’t really had a chance to practice writing besides what could be generously called notes I scrawled down. Most of it was kept in my memory, which felt like it got a significant upgrade after my death.

Gladas stacked a pile of books in front of me. “Flip through them. When they start getting confusing, we can start there.”

“What’s with all the griffons?”

“I bought them from a griffon bookstore.”

My memories were almost as clear as crystal, and if prompted I could easily recite the pages I’ve read over the past seventeen years. If I focused hard enough, and went slowly enough, I could even redraw memories onto canvas. It certainly made the period of writing leaf-litter shorter, especially since I was technically mentally in my late twenties now. I could pretend to be still ten, but that left me with nothing better to do.

Reading and writing wasn’t the only thing I did. With numbers as small as we had right now, we could be easily overwhelmed if any force tried to attack us. If any experiments went awry, we also had to be strong enough to clean up whatever natural disaster that had been cooked up, since it was unlikely that anyone else would be able to deal with it. It was our responsibility anyways.

It started as basic stretching exercises, since Gladas wanted to determine the range of my limbs. And then help me with subsurface modification of joints so that I could jump and twist everywhere. Her own demonstration looked more like a dance one would enact on limbless dolls.

My hoof soared a hair’s-breath over Gladas’s head, while my legs kicked back to avoid a bandaged wing from striking my stomach. I hit the ground and rolled, legs spread to let her form soar above me. I rolled and swung upwards, brushing past her tail.

We spun, spinning to face each other, hoof and fist shooting towards heads. We froze, a bit of sweat dripping off our frames and plinking on the hardwood. I could feel her light breaths on my hoof, and her clenched talon was close enough to my eye I could touch it with my eyelashes.

“One centimeter distance,” Gladas observed. “Good job.” We relaxed or limbs, a bit of out of breath and a little sweaty.

I looked at my own limbs. “I know you started off simple, but I’m not really feeling as tired as I think I should be.”

“Ah right,” Gladas said, “I need to teach you that before you collapse without notice. A lot of your bodily functions have to be manually activated now, like sweating, like the nerves that send pain signals when your muscles are running out of available energy. You can alter their sensitivity though, so they don’t adversely hurt you. Come back to the lab, I’ll help you locate them...”

Once my flexibility was ramped up the same way everyone else was apparently, they started teaching me fighting techniques and whether or not I was able to learn any of their combat spells.

The third part of my training was public relations; it was why Plan P was built fairly close to the pony town Appleton, and why Gladas had a simple herbs store named Option P she operated in the town. If we couldn’t get along with our next street neighbors, then we might as well hole up inside a mountain for the rest of eternity.

Considering how the vast majority of ponies in this time period still had issues with their own subspecies, this was to be our longest, slowest, and final project to finish.

---

I wandered over to the backyard, staring disappointedly as the morning sun barely lightened the snow-filled clouds. It had been an exhausting few months as I transitioned from squatting in a basement for a decade to rejoining society. Sure, I didn’t have to weight lift as much, but instead I meditated for a few hours to trigger muscle growth, then I spent most of my time catching up on the education I should have gotten had I not died, and the rest was specialized training so I could get used to my new undead body and the responsibilities it entailed from joining the Honeycomb Club.

There was a pile of compost I had gathered late last night, and pushed some of my magic into it and let it shimmer. Now, there was a lightly steaming pile of mush. I gathered them in bags, loaded them into a cart, and started hauling the fertilizers into the basement farm.

I trotted through the underground micro-forest, appreciating the sounds of summer coming alive despite winter pounding at our doors. It kept me grounded, and reminded me that life still existed, could be fought for. Quieted the shouts of rage and helplessness from being unable to do anything about the corpses littering my old town.

I avoided thinking about it when possible. My new crystal brain was pretty good at that.

I stepped out of the dark, downwards ramp and out into the light of the backlit clouds. The clouds were bright enough to gradually warm up the greenhouse, at least, though regular shoveling was still a must. I could see the silhouette of ponies doing so above us. Fields of crops were spread out in front of me, and a more controlled forest of apple trees further still. This is what fed Appleton now.

According to Gladas, the town was barely only settled a little over a century ago. When Agatha and Gladas’s grandfather, Wally, moved here, there was only a single row of buildings, and they were still relying on food stores while they waited for their harvest to ripen.

I walked down the well worn path towards the closest group of ponies. The farmers waved when they saw me. “Fertilizer,” I called, head nodding towards the bags carted behind me.

Most ponies would’ve been frightened at first sight. We were foals with barely an understanding what we were playing with, and our crude flails have left an aura that is hard to hide, even today. Just as your magic constantly flow throughs you, so does ours. Our magic is not a giving one. It is consuming, and controlling, desperately clinging to life.

The Appleton ponies simply increased their own flows of magic to their skin before approaching me and pulling down a few bags for distribution.

It was a far cry from when the old generation hid from Wally and Agatha just sitting at the edge of town, taking months before someone gathered up their nerve long enough to ask what they were there for.

It took me a few hours to make all my deliveries, and then I was back to Plan P. As I was adjusting the cart’s position in our storage shed, I heard the sound of sliced trees, falling leaves, and exploding bark.

I closed the door to the storage shed, then trotted off to investigate.

In the backyard of Plan P, I found a walking corpse of a griffon. Most of his coat miraculously retained its tannish color, but it hung on his frame in tatters, with enough tears that one could see through in places. Places with noticeably missing organs. Black smoke trailed behind red eye-pits as he danced through the forest, with glowing, buzzing blades spinning around all his limbs. Chips of bark misted the air as his blades grazed the trees, with a tint of green as low hanging leaves were sliced into ribbons. His wings were held out straight, giving his jumps extra distance, and leaving cuts into more trees as crackling magic arced through them.

So this was Wally Falcowolf in his element.

I didn’t interact much with the residents of Plan P, especially after spending over a decade holed up in the basement library, but I needed to get some first-hoof accounts eventually. I delayed enough with the excuse of weeks of training with Gladas.

I cleared my throat. “Mr. Falcowolf?”

The elder griffon glided in a circle and slid to stop, facing me, showing me a body ravaged by time. The left side of his skull was exposed with friction scars still visible on his cheekbones and brow. The other half of his face was barely better, with dried, stretched skin and balding feathers. That was the only side to still have an eyeball, covered in cataracts. The other socket was empty, save for a flickering, angry red spark. The rest of his body was in a similar shape, with torn skin tied down to bones to prevent them from just flapping about, stretched tendons exposed like guitar strings, and enough holes everywhere else for one to tell that he hadn’t been able to rely on a proper circulatory system for a long, long time. Instead, there were what appeared to be tiny coils of his red magic circling throughout and around his bones as some sort of magical replacement.

A whisper of mist escaped his beak. “What do you need from me,” he said, with a strange, metallic timber.

I gaped at his voice. “How do you talk like that?”

He snorted, and folded back a bit of skin around his throat. “Lost my vocal cords long ago. Replaced them with cello string. Now, I repeat, what do you need from me, and I better not need to repeat a third time.”

I shook my head and took a deep breath. “I have been accepted as the Club’s historian, and would like to interview you.” I pushed my cloak off to the side and showed him the writing pad poking out of my bag.

He hissed through his beak, brow furrowing. “There are better creatures who can tell that tale.”

“But none of them are you.”

Falcowolf grumbled, his head bowed. Eventually, he pushed his cloak and settled down onto the snow. “The preservation of knowledge is so delicate, yet its bounty is priceless. I would be a hypocrite if I were to purposely take this to my grave. Alright, colt. If you want the truth, then--” he glanced at the snow falling on my pad. “--we should go inside first.”