The Light Despondent

by Doctor Fluffy

City Of No Palms

---

Got good intentions.
Isn't it enough? No, it is not enough.
The comprehension of letting yourself get charmed by a bluff is upon me:
There's nothing I can do,
There's always something I could do.
Where would I be if it wasn't for you?
So I just do what I'm supposed to do.
I watch you turn into
А siсkly biomass of black and blue.
Biting Elbows, City of No Palms

You aren’t there, of course.

Seeing as you are a filly named Dancing Day, that’s a good thing. The most famous pony to enter Defiance is - or will be - named Sutra Cross, and her tenancy will be prolonged, and painful in the extreme, pushed beyond any conceivable limit of suffering.

Torture, for days on end. You’re innocent of this knowledge, of course...but that blissful ignorance won’t last. When you do inadvertently see the HLF-disseminated videos on your tablet, you’ll be horrified. Retching all over the screen, crying, you’ll desperately try to crush all sense of empathy as they strip her hooves off. Then comes the horror as you realize that this is a livestream, and the HLF will not stop. Nor will they ever, not till the Barrier atomizes them.

So many times, you’ve run from the HLF, run crying to the arms of your friends. And as you hear Sutra Cross’s gurgles, you’ll understand what Johnny C and Fiddlesticks’ horror stories could never convey...

...and then you’ll pray to whatever God (other than Celestia) who might be listening in that you’ll never be the one dying like that…

And all the while, you can’t help but feel a little afraid of the humans around you, and that is when the HLF’s most pernicious tactic comes into play. They’ve made you cower at the fear of what your very friends might do to you...

...or of what will happen when the Barrier makes landfall. You pray that these bastards will disappear, that they’ll see reason, that their insanity will peter out, not fester and spawn into further bloodshed.

‘When you wish upon a star…’

But no kindly deity will answer your prayers tonight. Lying under the covers of your bed, shivering, clutching a stuffed animal, afraid to fall asleep for fear of the nightmares, you know it will happen. Like rising scum, all of these psychopaths will float to the surface and poison everything they touch, be they PER and Imperial forces… or your friends in the PHL, refugees just trying to escape.

And through it all, you’ll remember that man that saved you, or rather, the man who failed to kill you. The bearded man that looked like Sharlto Copley. You will hope that the moment when he stood over you and chose to do nothing is not an isolated incident, hope that what little shreds of sapient compassion remain in him don’t die, leaving naught behind but a slavering animal.

Will you ever be a child again?

Well right now, for a few sweet moments, yes. Because right now, Kiki has delivered you and your mother safely to the Dancing Bear and your first action is to run into one of Johnny C’s bonecrushing hugs - how can a tiny guy be so strong?

And then, comes the food. It seems Johnny chose to work off some of his anxiety in the bar’s kitchen, which is less a greasy spoon and more a deep-fried cutlery stand! Quickly yourself, Aegis, and Fiddlesticks are sampling some incredibly delicious cornmeal-battered onion rings, over which an amazing sauce has been slathered! Some of the other patrons are sharing out bowls of fine old camp chili (and Texas cornbread) that they’ve prepared over the open fire, and there’s even a few salads to hoof, the slightly softened tomatoes and peppers nevertheless an improvement over the wilted leaves and stalks that have been the recent staple of your diet.

Food, friendship, family...it’s a little slice of the Equestria that once was and is no more; in some perversion of transplant surgery, a healthy scrap removed from the cancerous whole and grafted onto the skin of New England...

And now? What’s happening now? Well now the bar is warm, slightly stuffy with tobacco smoke and the heat of the fire. The food is sitting warm in your gullet, and you’ve sleepily cuddling up to your mommy as she and Kiki recount what happened back at the checkpoint. Through the drowsy veil of oncoming sleep, you manage to giggle at the reactions of everyone in the bar. They are hanging onto every word, mouths open, eyes wide. Cigarettes have dropped to the floor from open jaws. Mugs of booze sit unattended in the grip of frozen hands. Even the unflappable bartender with the huge autoshotgun is surprised, mouth open, eyebrows raised.

The band has fallen silent too, no-longer belting out those wonderful folk tunes from around the world.

“...and then, he lets us go!” Kiki finishes, fingers splayed and palms out.

“Fuckin’ what?!” Johnny C gasps, in time with almost the entire bar’s exclamations of incredulity. His reaction was perhaps the tamest, and your mother holds you tight, hooves over your ears to block out the flood of profanities. You’re pretty nonplussed though, having heard a lot worse, and said as much too.

“That’s the whole of it, sure as I’m sittin’ here,” Kiki nods, a consummate storyteller signing off on her latest and greatest yarn. “Take it or leave it boys, but you’re looking at the luckiest three gals to ever get flagged down by the Hypocrites’ Legion of Fuckwits. He let us go, plain as you like.”

“But couldn’t he have missed them?” the bartender starts, his voice raspy. He turns, the shifting of a beard revealing a disfiguring scar around his neck - the poor bastard had been garrotted once, and somehow survived. Likely from HLF.

“No,” Kiki says. “Astral? Did he see you?”

“Plain as day,” mommy confirms. “He had the trunk open, the revolver to my head, and he just ignored us.” And, before anyone can accuse it of her - “I didn’t do anything. He did that on his own.”

The spell of her voice broken, the bar splits up into heated pockets of discussion, conversations fragmenting already into innumerable rumors.

“Holy shit!” Aegis repeats to himself, over and over. “That...that just doesn’t happen. Holy shit.”

You couldn’t have gotten more of a reaction if you’d walked into town and shot the sheriff. Everyone, from the barkeep to Fiddlesticks, is vacillating somewhere between stunned disbelief and outraged denial. The lemon-coated mare’s fiddle, a precious instrument hoof-carved in Equestria’s high forests and seen battle after battle, crossed a continent and at least one ocean, survived PER and HLF attacks alike, is sagging in her grasp, as if a burden too great for her to carry.

You reach over with one sleepy leg, and lay a hoof on her own. The gesture is enough to snap her out of her funk, and she shares a soft smile with you, before noticing some unwanted attention: a man, heavyset and bearlike, with a military rifle strapped to his back, is staring at the two of you, expression circumspect.

“What? This the closest you ever got to a pony?” she snipes. “Move on, pal.”

His eyes flash softly, almost dangerously, but he still shuffles his stool around towards Kiki, who is still at the centre of attention and visibly loving every second of it.

“...can’t have missed them,” she says, pointing at yourself and your mother. “Astral and Dancing were right in the sights of that monster revolver of his…. and he let us go.”

“An HLF man... did that?” the bearish man says, as if not quite believing. Something about his tone makes you think he’s seen the HLF before, and the encounter was not pleasant.

“Yes indeed,” Kiki smirks. “Saw them… and let them go.”

As she continues, your own tiny eyes pan away. The warmth, from the food and the fire and your mother holding you close, is singing you towards sleep...

...but as your gaze sweeps over the wall of bounties, something catches your attention.

“Look momma, Sharlto Copley’s ‘WANTED’…” you giggle, pointing at a familiar face on the wall, so similar to the funny man you’ve seen scream and rage on numerous TV screens.

“That’s sweet, honey,” Momma says, before she herself looks. You feel her grip tense.

“There!” she cries out, gesturing with one hoof at the very picture you just noticed. “That’s him, right there!”

The whole bar is silenced once more. Johnny C is the one who reacts however, standing and crossing to the wall in the space of a second. He points to several faces in turn, looking for a reaction.

“This one?”

‘Atlas Galt’, a serious-looking man in a military uniform. Momma shakes her head.

“Him?”

‘Michael Carter’, an embittered scowl implanted into what might once have been a smiling face.

“Not his daughter?”

“No!” Momma says. “It wasn’t a girl who held us up! It was him, that one with the beard!”

Johnny’s finger slides slowly away from the likeness of a slightly-hispanic young woman whose hair has been done up in a filthy ponytail, and comes to rest on the right face.

“Yeah,” Kiki says softly. “That was him.”

“....Mothafucka,” Johnny C whispers as soon as he realizes.

Everyone tenses subtly. The atmosphere, close and warm seconds ago, is now chill as winter ice, and just as solid.

“Well, shit,” Fiddlesticks says, just as Aegis says one word.

“Kraber.”

And like some invocation of power, that name is enough to conjure up a flood of reactions. The man in question is infamy on legs, after all.

There’s so many stories suddenly being told and repeated that they all blur together into one curriculum vitae of blood, sweat and gunpowder.

Kraber….the poster child for PHL excess. The man who cut a swathe across Eastern European and Turkish Conversion Bureaus.

‘Saint Guillotine’, some called him. The Death Dealer and Reaper of Fate. Doctor Sawbones. The Machinegun Surgeon. The man that walked the bloody path from enemy to enemy.

They say that he’s been in a committed relationship with Kagan Burakgazi, the Plague Doktor whose horrific chemical weapons had been unleashed upon the PER. They said that he danced across a stage of blood and entrails, living a grindhouse festival of slaughter. Butchering ponies en masse, heaping up a body count that becomes even more terrifying when one paused to considers the nameless, uncounted newfoals he must have slaughtered.

A man whose kill-count probably runs well into four figures. A man with a stolen PHL gun.

And this was the man who had chosen to spare your life...

Johnny C pulls out his iPhone and struggles for a signal, and fails. Without asking he climbs across the bar and grabs the landline, dials rapidly. The barkeeper doesn’t comment, but instead leans in close to listen.

“Hello? Weiss? Yeah, it’s Heald here. Look, Kiki and the fillies are safe, but you’re not going to believe how…”

“Ten bucks says it’s nothing special. I’ll even bet you a dollar for every minute I freak out,” Weiss’s voice crackles out, before Johnny realises he’s got the phone on ‘speaker’, and switches it back to a more private volume.

As he does, Aegis pushes in, standing up on the chair next to Johnny C and pressing his forehooves to the wall for balance.

“Believe it, Jack,” he calls into the mouthpiece, which Johnny holds up for him.

There’s an audible suggestion of surprise on the other end of the line, as if the person on the other end was not expecting to hear Aegis’s voice. Your pony ears are sharp for their age,but not sharp enough to make out the details.

You hear enough though. Muttered words and snatches of conversion. The name of Kraber comes up more than once.

For about three minutes, Johnny C stands, wincing under some tirade, replying in short monosyllabic sentences, answering questions as best he can.

And then the call ends, and Johnny is coming out from behind the bar. He looks shaken, a silently pushes a ten-dollar bill and three ones into your saddlebag, mumbling something about how he’ll get it back off Jack Weiss later.

You use it tomorrow morning to buy yourself some ice-cream. But in that moment in the bar, your attention is on Johnny, and the stunned, churning crowd, and the face on the wall, the face of the pony-reaping madman who let you live.

And you ask yourself again: “Why?’”

---

They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness..”

---

Some months later, you’ll meet him later, and ask him that question.

He’ll sigh and sit down.

Here’s the story he will tell you, reading off from the script he was writing at the time. He’ll joke that he’d intended for Sharlto Copley to play him in the story of his life, and then, like clockwork, Aegis will add, “who did you expect him to recommend? Grant Bowler?”

It had started outside a PER camp in the middle of Vermont, near an old copper mine. The unit surveying it was pre-HLF, the remnants of the German Menschabwehrfraktion, from back in the days when there was no single banner for anti-pony humans to rally under. In time, they’d been folded in, unit after unit. Officially, much as anything could be official in the HLF, they were still Menschabwehrfraktion, but they had so many members from other brigades, both large units and small remnants and squads, that they couldn’t rightly say they were German anymore. They were just happy to kill the invaders.

But now, they were HLF, and had located the ‘enemy camp’ with what had already become the Front’s trademark intelligence-gathering technique: tying a PER pony or human to a chair, gloating over how this counted as a public service, and then letting some psychopath go nuts on them till they spilled the beans. Usually, it’s Kraber.

Because he’s good at it, and knows how to keep them alive longer than any hack with a knife.

Because they expect it of him.

Because above all, it’s fokking fun.

And here, we, go...

“Un sekai nerahma safah,” Kraber whispered to the gun in his hand, looking on with satisfaction as the runes etched into it began to glow faintly in the darkness that preceded dawn. He vaguely remembered the PHL using incantations to activate those oddly painted weapons they were using, and this seemed to work.

“I still say you should throw that thing in the Umbagog River,” Emil said, looking over at Kraber. “It’ll melt you.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve bought into that kak,” Kraber joked. “Honestly, do we ever see people get melted from just being close to magic? I mean, when does that actually happen? It’d be just like the Queen Bitch to lie to us like that.”

Maybe Emil had swallowed ‘that kak, maybe he hadn’t. It wasn’t him who answered though.

“You should listen to him, Viktor” Captain Lovikov said bluntly, pushing the gun’s barrel down with one hand. “That’s PHL tech-”

“And yet it’s the only gun we have that isn’t a fokking overchambered monstrosity or surplus shit that isn’t worth kak against shields,” Kraber replies, hefting the weapon again and checking the sights. “But go ahead, if you want me to use a gun with less than twenty rounds that the most dof fokking mall ninja would think was a piece of kak, go ahead.”

He glanced at Lovikov’s .50 Beowulf Kalashnikov. The thing was ungainly, and fed from an absofokkinlutley massive homemade drum magazine. “Or, God forbid, those stupid fokking .50 BMG open-bolt automatic pieces of shit made in junkyards from metal I wouldn’t use for paperclips…”

Lovikov scowled, but took no obvious action. Kraber had fought with him over matters like this repeatedly, along with many other residents of Defiance. There’d been people that threatened to throw the stolen PHL/Bundeswehr prototype MG2019 into the Umbagog or the Androscoggin, but Kraber had threatened not to treat them with loot if they did, or had simply beaten them up.

“Are you ready though, Comrade?”

As before, Kraber looked down at the lightly glowing runes, and smiled.

“Oh…. yeah.”

Carefully he aimed the immense medium machinegun, and squeezing the trigger so softly that the first blast came almost as a surprise, fired on the PER encampment below.

The .338 Norma Magnum rounds punched through trees and shattered the bones and muscle of any PER caught behind them. Those in the open were simply torn apart.

As Kraber fired again and again in controlled bursts, he noticed a smell like sulphur, and saw tiny flashes when the bullets hit anything. Klank magic shit. The PHL had been thoughtful enough that you didn’t need magic bullets - you could pick them up from any store, cause the magic was in the gun. Thoughtful of them. And practical - Ammunition was already pretty expensive.

“Support teams!” Lovikov called. “Open fire, rapid!”

All around the camp, HLF troops burst out from under leaves and behind rocks, firing into the PER. Those closest to the front, where ranges were closer, charged under cover of their teammate’s fire, blunderbuss-like shotguns in their hands. Bayonets had been lashed to the barrels, and the combination of blade and cannister shot punched into the hesitant defence like a boot through dry rot.

What some people forgot about the PER was that they did have armor. The units that had gone underground made use of homebrewed vests like the HLF themselves used, but ‘regulars’ protected themselves with high-end stuff looted from civilian gunstores.

Of course, the HLF ‘shopped’ with the same vendors. Like against like, could make for interesting fare.

‘This slaughter is brought to you by Ammunation.’

Of course, the new MG2019 ignored all that. Its bullets pierced through any body armor presented to it, punching through riot shields and barricades alike, perforating PER and leaving them grasping missing limbs and great holes blasted in their bodies, or convulsing on the leaf-covered ground as they went into shock.

The smell of blood rose on the dawn breeze, mingling with the metallic reek rising off the old mine’s tailings and spoil heaps. Sniffing it, Kraber bared his teeth in a lupine grin. Beside him, his friends weren’t doing too badly for themselves - PER shields went down before pipebombs or sheer massed fire, but Kraber and his new toy were felling the foe as if it was going out of style.

“I am the son of rock'n'roll
I got the masses under my control
I like to drink, I love the dope
I want your money and I want your hope!”

He saw one rookie, a fresh-faced girl from Quebec (and, allegedly, a survivor of the Tbilisi Massacre) who he might have thought was a bakvissie before the War. She was looking speculatively, jealously at the MG2019, as she fired an homebrewed autoshotgun loaded for slug rounds.

“Try and steal it, and I’ll tell them you got ponified!” Kraber cautioned her, knowing that he was a terrifying sight in the gas mask he habitually wore. Like many HLF men, he’d painted it… but his chosen paint was of a wolf’s head.

“Alright…”

Nodding fearfully, she turned away and stared down the sights of her own weapon, firing spasmodically into clusters of newfoals and PER. That was the magic of a good reputation.

A green pegasus newfoal, its eyes like glass marbles wedged into undersized sockets, dive-bombed Kraber. With one hand, he whipped out his .50 revolver quicker than anyone’s eyes could track and fired, splattering the creature’s skull across the leaves.

“Must have been a recent one,” he said casually. “The ones that have had time to age tend to steer clear from fokking machinegun surgeons!”

And yet, more ponies came, charging up the steep hill armed with bandoliers of potion, weapons suspended in clouds of magic, or weaponized spells. Iron and lightning and fire lanced through the early morning. One HLF woman Kraber knew to be named Anna had been set afire by a unicorn’s spell, and was rolling around on the ground, screaming as the fire ate through her armor. Casually, he stepped up and, with a booted foot, punted the screaming torch down the slope, at the bottom of which was a dry ditch in which soft soil had gathered. That extinguished the flames quickly.

Anna’d be fine, he supposed, but she’d look like roadkill for awhile.

“Die, you defilers of nature! You rapists!” screamed an earth pony.

And speaking of roadkill…

“DON’T YOU… EVER… FOKKING CALL ME A RAPIST!” Kraber yelled, nailing the earth pony in the balls with his revolver, leaving the new gelding screaming, hooves pressed to the bloody ruin that had once been his family jewels. The bullet, tipped with a blue fulminated mercury cap, went on, ramming a PER man in the left leg, exploding everything between his kneecap and the pelvis. As a final coup-de-grace, a shard of the man’s knee-guard, sent flying, took out a considerable chunk out of the stomach of a PER servicewoman standing beside him. “CALL ME A DEFILER OF NATURE TOO?! Oh, fokkin sure, we’re not the ones causing a fokking forest fire!”

“Ponify me!” the PER man screamed as he thrashed on the ground, his blood staining the leaves. “I… have to be useful… to Queen… Celestia-”

A red pegasus mare flew over, a tuft of purple cloud held in her hooves, ready to ponify him. Kraber fired the revolver again, exploding the mare’s head before she could get anywhere near him. Good.

“YOU MONSTER!” screamed a purple unicorn, crouched by a tree. He couldn’t have been more than a teenager when he’d been ponified. “He just wanted to serve his rightful ruler, and-”

“Shut,” Kraber said, one eye twitching beneath his monstrous gas-mask, “The fok. UP.”

He fired the pipebomb launcher under his MG2019. Now that was HLF-made. Like many members, he’d attached spikes to both ends of his pipebombs. When fired, the pipebomb embedded itself in the purple unicorn’s throat. Gasping, choking and wheezing, he tried to telekinetically pull it out. Friends, fellow ‘converts’, rushed to his aid like lemmings, bringing willing hooves and magic to stem the blee-

!!CRACK!!

The pipebomb exploded, vaporizing the newfoal teen’s head. Surfing the blast wave, nails and shrapnel flew out, ripping through flesh and bark alike. Shredded wood became more deadly debris, expanding the kill-zone to encompass an entire corner of the camp.

It was madness, and Kraber loved it, thrived in it. The trees were a canvas he and his own had painted red with blood, and the beautiful musical screams of the foe were his orchestra. Even the rising smoke of the fires gained a touch of art, pierced by the first rays of dawn. This was his stage, and he was the maestro. Every bullet, every explosion, everything was making one of the invaders, one of those goddamned race-traitors suffer.

One nearby woman suddenly screeched in agony, a pained, heartfelt solo that drew his approving ear. She was clutching at her cheek - except, as Kraber now saw, she had no cheek left. Instead, blood was welling up from from a gash that extended all the way down to her neck. He could see her teeth through it, and with a single bullet blasted a complementary hole through her brainpan, to balance the whole. Oh man, her face was everywhere! It even got all over one of those ponies! That was hilarious!

Further tableaus were revealed to his awestruck eyes as he pressed further into the camp, acting as the lancehead of the assault.

A young human acolyte who had caught a directly spray of splinters, clutching at her mauled face, fingers probing empty eye-sockets in screaming terror? Damn! That was impressive! He’d have to try that again, he didn’t know that was possible! Had to keep the potion away from her, though - that’d be too easy for the bitch.

A PER pony who had taken a six-inch railroad spike from someone else’s launcher straight through a leg, convulsing as he bled out in vivid, arterial bursts? Transcendent!

Onwards he pressed, the unstoppable Kraber Express, critiquing each montage with blade and bullet. “I'm gonna track down your grandparents and turn them inside-out, nobody can stop the blood train that will turn your loved ones into a red splatter across the tracks of humanity!!” he yelled.

It was artistry in swords, a gale of guns.

And yet, despite all the spilled blood and wounds that should have killed anything with a sense of pain, the newfoals affiliated with the PER kept on coming, limping onwards on mangled stumps, blood, tears and splitt comingling as they fought into their death-throes.

Let them come! Let them fokking come! He’d rip them apart, make them pay for what they’d done! MAKE! THEM! PAY!

“DON’T DROP THE SOAP IN THIS LEAD SHOWER!” he roared.

The frenzy ascended mountains of violence. Kneecaps were shattered and limbs split, faces while ground against blood-stained rocks. The blood was the life, and today it flowed like sweet wine.

Kraber observed all this through the tinted lenses gas mask, smiling at his handiwork. Beside him, the HLF, his brothers and sisters, whooped and hollered, hyping each other on.

“That’s Kraber for ya!” Emil could be heard to laugh, firing his own rifle into a squadron of airborne pegasus newfoals. The heavy rounds had fearsome penetrative power, punching straight through what looked like royal guard-issue armor and inflicting instant, catastrophic organ trauma. The newfoals were dead long before they hit the ground, and as their corpses dropped from the sky to burst like rotten fruit, the potion flasks they had been carrying rained down on the HLF.

Kraber was dimly aware of his friends being ponified, and vented his ire upon them with characteristic style.

“JOU FOKKIN SCUM BLIKSEM!” he yelled, firing again, shredding the line of newfoals as they struggled to hatch out of their old body-armor. “DON’T NEVER HANG AROUND UNDER A PEGASUS KILL-ZONE!”

It was a lesson that, sadly, none of those newfoals could ever put into practice, torn asunder as they were by the churning fire of his MG.

“GRENADES!” Lovikov suddenly yelled. “Unicorns and pegasai, three-o-clock!”

Without a word, Martineau, the thin French dancer (Ah, Martineau! Kraber thought) fired her homemade pipebomb launcher straight into the advancing unicorn phalanx, the two crude explosives shattering their magical shields, their formation, and their bodies, in a one-two goregasm.

“Kaboom,” she whispered.

Exploiting the opening she’d blasted, Lovikov sighted above a pegasus about to take off, and fired his own shotgun. Caught, the creature backflipped into a stall and crashed to the ground like a broken bird, blood pouring from every joint of his barding. Kraber laughed, realising that Lovikov’s rounds had gone right through one of the ‘sweet spot’ gaps in the pony’s barding, and ricocheted repeatedly off the inside of the armor plates, multiplying the internal damage to ludicrous levels. His organs were most likely paste.

Then, an earth pony, ‘stealthed’ by Equestrian magic so as to be invisible and inaudible save for the crunch of his hooves on the mulch, rushed at Kraber, jumping and pinning him, a potion flask in its mouth. Shit. Too close!

“DONKIE KONT!” Kraber roared, ripping a knife out of his shoulder holster, and slewed it in front of him in a quick ‘z’. The first pass connected with the phial, knocking it out of the newfoal’s mouth; the second and third tore open the abdomen and exposed the meaty innards within. Freed from the pony’s body cavity, steaming ropes of guts poured out over Kraber, bathing him in ichor.

Rising, daubed in blood and intestinal juice, he kicked the dying animal in the face.

“JOU FOKKIN POESNEUS!”

Then he stamped on the neck for good measure, and was rewarded with the crunchy sound of vertebrae collapsing.

FOKKING ponies.

Satisfied for the barest instant, Kraber turned, trying to find a fresh target. And he got one, though not one that he’d wanted.

“Emil...oh, fok.”

The potion phial he had struck away had burst on the young trooper’s flak-jacket, slathering his face and neck with purple squick. The resulting transformation was already well advanced, and what looked like a puddle of writhing, bubbling flesh was beginning to sprout fur and pull itself together...

“Poeskak!” Kraber cursed, as Emil completed the metamorphosis. Where the kid had been, there now stood a pink unicorn newfoal, blue energy already swirling around his horn as he warmed up a spell. Seeing this, the bearded man sighed, and picked up the youth’s dropped shotgun.

“Emil, I’m so sorry!” he said.

“Emil?” the newfoal asked, cocking his head and launching the spell as if cracking a whip. “I’m Pas de Deux now! Won’t you dance with m-”

Kraber easily sidestepped the clumsy bolt of magic, hefted the gun in one hand, and fired. Both barrels discharged together, and the newfoal’s face was shredded instantly by a hail of buckshot, fresh pelt and skin peeling away to expose white bone in a flash. Some of the shot penetrated all the way back into the brain cavity, terminating what passed for thought in the golem’s skull.

“I’m… so… so sorry,” Kraber whispered, as the still-smiling husk went ‘splat’ on the forest floor. He dropped the shotgun onto the corpse, which still twitched, as if something inside was fighting for life, the body unaware that its owner’s soul had already fled. Emil had been… well, he was a wonderful dancer, and such a great kisser. He and Kraber had shared many a night together, looking up at the stars, sometimes falling out the tent and rolling down a hill… and he had been able to make dishes slopped together from forest mushrooms, stolen butter, and meat of unidentifiable provenance feel utterly delicious.

He’d been a kind soul, except when it came to ponies.

When off the field, he’d been almost saintly. On it, he’d been a nightmare.

“GODDAMN HOERKIND PONIES!” Kraber screamed, spinning and bringing his new toy back up, muzzle already flashing.

The best way to honor Emil’s memory was to follow his example. And as he pasued to swap out a clip, Kraber quickly scanned the battlefield, and came to a delighted conclusion: the enemy was still trying to advance.

He smiled, despite himself. If this livestock wanted to wade into the meat-grinder, then he was happy to oblige. This was gonna be perfect.

Oh, so many ponies were going to die...

“MAKE WAY FOR SCHARNHORST!” Lovikov yelled.

Scharnhorst? Kraber thought. Scharnhorst?! Oh, f-

BRRRRRRRRRRBRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

A sound like tearing fabric heralded the arrival of Scharnhorst, a true giant of a man in a woodland-camouflaged, armoured hazmat suit, over which he wore a hydraulic Kawasaki exoskeleton stolen from a PHL construction site. He needed the mechanical struts to support the weight of the immense General Dynamics minigun carried in his hands. ‘Liberated’ from the wreck of Mirai a beached Japanese cruiser, the 20mm leviathan fired depleted uranium rounds designed to shoot down inbound anti-ship missiles.

Against living targets, it was beyond lethal. Ponies caught in Scharnhost’s sights simply became burst of red paint. Entire trees were felled as his arc of fire swept across their trunks, the splintering crash of their fall harmonising with the chainsaw buzz of the gun.

There was a reason Scharnhorst had nicknamed it ‘The Lumberjack’. Now the motorised patriot was laughing like a madman behind his oxygen mask as he let off burst after burst, each pulse of bullets sounding like sheets of metal being ripped in half. Where he fired, ponies and PER died. Their own weapons, low-velocity shotguns firing slugs charged with potion simply burst on his armoured carapace. Even the few grenade launchers they had, launching potion-charges from frames identical to those on which the HLF’s pipebombs were mounted, were futile in the face of a man wearing enough kit to wade through a flamethrower’s spray without even getting singed.

“SCHARNHORST! SCHARNHORST” cheered the HLF fighters, and Kraber roared along with them.

‘Emil, oh poor Emil…oh he would have loved to see this!’ he mused to himself. ‘If only I’d been quicker! If only I’d saved him, like I had…’

The epiphany, when it came, was surprisingly gentle. It neither struck him like a blow or beat him around the heat. It was more like a wave that gently washed over him, before running back out through a metaphoric hole in his gullet.

And with it went all of his rage and fire, leaving him naked and empty, alone with himself in the dark nadir of the soul.

Who had he saved recently, if he was honest with himself? Prisoners, maybe, but… had he been heroic? Had he left someone thinking “I am genuinely grateful for this man’s existence?” Had he felt satisfied for saving someone?

Not… recently. He’d killed ponies.

But… somehow that didn’t feel like enough, he thought, even as he watched Scharnhorst mow the newfoals down.

The forest blazed, and the troopers roared.

It was the height of summer, he was wearing full body armor, and yet Viktor suddenly felt cold...

---

“It was unearthly, and the men were - No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate power.”

---

What remained of the HLF had finally made it to the PER camp, thank to Scharnhorst and Kraber’s efforts. They had paid in blood and treasure to spells and ponification, but they had arrived.

Now for the part Kraber had been most looking forward to.

“Kwaai,” he said, slapping Scharnhorst on the back as he stared at the remaining tents and clapboard structures. The armored man-mountain looked at him in confused, childlike bemusement.

“Blanchett?” Lovikov called to a woman whose face was coarsely scarred from a unicorn’s fireball. In response, she produced several molotov cocktails and began distributing them. Kraber pulled out his lighter, smirking as the flame flickered into life. He placed it to the tip of the old beer bottle until the scrap of rag that served as a wick caught alight, and then tossed into the entrance of one a tent. Oh, these konts were going to fokking burn.

His squadmates did the same, setting the whole camp ablaze. The flames burst and spread, lighting the tents from the inside. Kraber watched the diffused glow closely, waiting...

“You sons of bitches!” screamed a woman, who staggered out of the tent, flames licking up the back of her jacket. She had a vial of potion in one hand. “You-”

Lovikov shot her in the head with his Lolife pistol. All around them, more tents were burning, and had Kraber not been wearing a gas mask, he would have savoured the wonderfully sweet aroma of cooking flesh. All the horsefuckers, the goddamn race-traitors and betrayers, the merry-go-round toys were burning to death.

Not exactly an ironically fitting punishment, but not an undeserved one either.

More screams, the squeals of ponies and humans burning alive. Good.

“HELP!”

A discordant note, an interruption that ran against the music of the anguished cries. Everybody snapped to alert, weapons out and scanning the area.

“HELP!” the voice yelled again. “They’ve got us in the tunnels!”

Using handsignals to communicate, Lovikov pointed towards the bluffs at the back of the old mining camp. There was certainly at least one adit back there, the kind of easily-guarded hole that was perfect for holding prisoners…

Following the Russian officer’s silent commands, the unit split into fire-teams, using the ruins of the old mineyard to flank and approach the foot of the slope. As he moved, Viktor holstered his lovely new MG and unlimbered his shotgun. It consisted of two Mossberg pump-actions that had been welded together. Answering a nod from Lovikov with a small salute, he approached first. Just as insurance, he’d already changed the filter on his gas mask.

“Please!” the voice called out.

“You heard the guns!” another chimed in. “They’re here to save us!”

This speaker sounded younger. Like a child. Oh, if the PER had taken child prisoners, he was gonna slaughter whoever was left.

“Shut up!” someone else yelled, and there was the sound of a hoof against flesh.

Kraber kept his silence as he rounded the back of a crumbled assay office, looking towards where a rock-hewn adit tunnel opened into the yard. A single unicorn newfoal was standing guard, and immediately spun towards Kraber, casting clumsy spells. They were easily dodged, but the newfoal’s focus on the South African gave a Front sister the perfect opening to slip in behind the beast and snap its neck between two gloved hands.

“Nicely done,” approved Lovikov. “Guard down, without expending any ammo.”

Viktor however had already moved to take cover at the entrance to the mine tunnel, and was cautiously shining a torch down it with one hand while cradling the double-Mossberg in the other.

“Sound off!” he called. “If you’re prisoners, identify yourselves!”

“Yes! They’re holding us captive!”

“Silence!” screamed an incoherent voice, and Kraber winced.

“How many are guards are in there with you?” he demanded, ignoring the guard’s protestations.

“Only the two! He-ARGH!”

The sound of a body being beaten gave the needed opportunity. While the guard was engaged with beating his prisoners, Kraber threw himself out of cover and sprinted down the tunnel. His eyes did not have time to adjust to the dark, but there was no need, not from the pocket of light cast by the horn of a male unicorn as he laid into his victim with a levitated crowbar. A female stood beside him, a phial of potion in her mouth. His focus entirely on the stallion, Kraber ignored the mare, whose head exploded courtesy of a well-placed sniper round fired down from the tunnel mouth.

The ‘CRACK’ of the bullet was deafening in the closed space, but not as loud as the smash as Kraber brought his shotgun’s stock down on the stallion’s head. The animal ducked at the last second, rolling aside so that the swipe missed him. The glaze of his wide, almost swollen-to-bursting eyes told his entire story: newfoal.

“They deserved it!” he shrieked. “You’re all apes, monsters, and-”

“I don’t fokking have time for this, jou bliksem,” Kraber sighed, kicking it in the face. The horizontal adit was plunged into darkness as the light of newfoal’s horn was snuffed out, but the Afrikaner heard his opponent landing at his feet, and grabbed it by the tail.

With little pause, he dragged the unconscious beast out into the open air and pressed the snout of the double-shotgun into the soft vicinity of its sheathed genitals.

D-DHOOM!

He fired with both barrels. Everything below the pony’s ribcage simply vanished, leaving the approach cutting to the adit slick with blood and viscera. The hindlegs flew off in separate directions, slamming into the rock walls with wet, meaty thumps. Ignoring the explosion of blood, Kraber reloaded the gun and, turning, returned inside the mine...

...only to find a stunned Lovikov.

“Where’s the prisoners?” Viktor grunted, before the wannabe-zampolit pointed with his torch at a few silent figures cowering against the rough-hewn side of the tunnel.

Ponies.

The beam of light illuminated a stallion and a mare, along with three little foals. They were crying, miserable beyond all belief. ‘Mutilated’ was a mild word to describe what had been done to them. The walls of their hooves had been peeled away, leaving bloody nubs of soft tissue on which it would be impossible to walk. Each equine was covered in the scum of their own tears, shit, spit and blood, leaving them so filthy that Kraber couldn’t even tell what color they had been when they’d come out of the womb. Their cutie marks had been cut off, wings clipped back to the bone, and their horns chiselled away.

And worst of all was their silence. You could see the pain and grief in their eyes, but they could not vocalise it. They had been systemically traumatized beyond even screaming.

“P...pliss,” whispered the stallion. “I… am PHL. I am important to them.”

He repeated the words, almost as if it was a mantra. Time and again he spoke, invoking the name of the Ponies for Human Life as if it was an invocation, a warding spell of protection.

And Kraber? Kraber...

...did not kill them. No, instead he shot ‘Comrade Lovikov’ in the balls and bitchslapped Blanchett to the ground with the gun. Then he’d carried the stricken family to a getaway vehicle and driven them to safety.

...yes, that was it. He’d run away with them, and joined the PHL. Repentant, he had patched up refugees as a trauma surgeon, once more devoting himself to life and healing rather than death and destruction. He’d risen high. He’d crippled the HLF by bringing along plenty of other disaffected ‘reformists’, which essentially ripped out their conscience, but made them desperate enough to do downright stupid things. At the end, the HLF would just be a hate group, trusted by few and reduced to such terrible actions that they’d be guaranteed little (if any) sympathy. Oakes would be dead, Birch would be dead too, and maybe - just maybe - he’d helped people.

He’d been skilled, and gifted, and gained enough traction as the resident ‘House, MD’ to convince command to finance the medical radio drama he’d longed to create...a dream that he nurtured from the day when Miranda Severance (who worked at PHL biology now, didn’t she?) linked him to a version of episode 19 of Night Vale, with Kevin and Cecil’s reactions synched up to show the contrast between them. And maybe, just maybe, using the traction he’d gained from that after the barrier somehow fell

how was it going to fall?

he’d be able to finance a movie about his life, maybe directed by Ilya Naishuller, maybe by Neil Blomkamp. And he’d be played by Sharlto Copley, of course… and vice versa.

He’d taught himself to draw, to paint and write. He’d given himself over to reinvent himself, to be anything other than the bastard who shot prisoners-

No. That was a lie.

What Kraber had done, what he had really done, was laugh hysterically.

Yeah. Confronted with that brutalised family of newfoals, he had laughed, and mocked the father’s ‘words of power’ as he and Lovikov dragged them out into daylight...

They’d killed the foals first, with Scharnhorst tossing them into the air for Kraber and Lovikov to test their marksmanship on moving targets, like skeet-shooting.

One daughter, a pegasus, had tried to fly away with her tattered wings, and the crunch she made as she hit the ground had been hilarious.

None of them screamed. Even then, none of them had made so much as a sound. That had been a little disappointing. They might have had the good grace to make things as amusing as possible.

So Kraber had filled the silence by laughing. When it was time to execute the parents, he’d done it personally, admiring the pretty rorschach patterns the sprays of blood had made against the rock and dirt.

Amd he’d relished every second, gleefully slaughtering each of the invaders. Each of the spies. Each of the fuckers - or buckers, that’s how they said it, ja? - that had brutalised and persecuted mankind, abused human trust and exploited human kindness.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

The mare and the stallion he’d killed slowly, placing a bullet in each limb and then gradually working his way up through the abdomen to the neck. Blanchett had taken comparative notes, and expressed surprise when the stallion refused to die from blood-loss alone.

No, finishing that bastard off had required one last slug right in the socket that had housed his horn. The rage, the betrayal, and condemnation in his eyes as he stared up at Kraber had been striking, not just for its sheer intensity, but for how impotent it had been…

...as Kraber proved when he’d laughed one last time and pulled the trigger.

BANG!

He’d gone into the camp skop, skiet, and donner, he had completed his slaughter of that familiar with a laugh, and a contemptuous kick.

Which was only natural, of course. They were ponies, they were the invaders, they’d destroyed the world and killed billions….

At least, that was what he told himself, for the longest time.

---

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”

---

“Viktor…. We’re still newfoals, Viktor,” said the equine in the other end of the canoe. It was a grotesque thing, covered in blood and eyes full of worms, one foreleg missing, a jagged stump where there should have been a horn.

Kraber shook his head as he paddled the canoe across the Umbagog. Aside from himself, it was empty...burdened down only with himself, and the colossal weight of his thoughts.

His treacherous, worrisome thoughts...

On that morning back at the mine, all that he’d done had seemed natural. At the been he’d been unable to understand how the PHL could side with the goddamn kickstands.

Oh, how the narrative he’d built for himself had seemed so simple, so logical and right. Each morning he would wake up, strap on his guns, and maybe squeeze in some target practice, wasting as little of their precious ammunition ammunition as possible.

His entire mind was set to the destruction of the ponies. His moments of relaxation, when he attempted to write, or teach himself to draw, were the only interludes he allowed himself from that focus, that lodestone of his being. But those moments did not bring him peace, no, only quietude.

Peace was what he got gesuip for, drunk to all hell. And the killing, that brought him peace too, in the knowledge that he was fulfilling his purpose.

Yes, the life of Viktor M. Kraber followed a simple creed: ponies and traitors were targets, humans who did not associate with them were heroes. Simple.

But then… Emil had died. And that family of ponies had died. Some of his friends had been ponified, again, and he’d been forced to kill them, again.

He’d laughed at the mine, laughed to fill the silence of the foals. But as they’d driven back to Defiance, old shadows had pressed into his mind. That night, not for the first time in a while, he hadn’t been sure...

When they’d returned from slaughtering everyone in that PER camp, Kraber had been sullen, quiet, withdrawn. He’d been thinking, turning towards introspection when normally he’d at this point been searching for some rotgut to quell the unease, to sink into drunken, unquestioning peace, free of doubts.

Not that night. There’d been an accident at the stills earlier in the week and three people were consequently missing limbs and various digits. The base command had consequently put a freeze on the production of liquor, and in true Prohibition-style, those who had some hoarded stocks of booze to trade had boosted their ‘prices’ to astronomical highs.

With two days the cheaper stuff was gone, and by the day of the attack at the mine, the last sips of 200-proof had been traded for twelve full mags of hollow-point ammo and a satchel of grenades. Consequently, Viktor was now going cold-turkey on his doubts, and he was not alone. Morale in Defiance was plummeting like a sub in a crash dive.

So, Captain Lovikov had suggested setting up a temporary checkpoint ‘over on the highway’, to let some of the troops vent off their frustration, and maybe even ‘salvage’ some useful supplies.

That was how Kraber’s path had crossed with that of the car driven by a pony-pounder. He’d opened the trunk and discovered the mare and the filly hiding inside, and then…

‘...a simple creed. Ponies and traitors are targets...’

Staring down at that foal, finger on the trigger of his revolver, things had suddenly seemed not so simple. He’d tried to fire. Tried to call out what he had discovered, but…he’d not had it in him. He later swore that he’d seen Kate and Anka (not Peter, oddly enough) looking back at him from behind the eyes of those ponies.

It was not quite a hallucination. It had felt, for a moment, as if his family weren’t ponified, as if he’d somehow stepped into a different universe, where they were still alive.

And in that moment, the filly had transfixed him in the light of her pity. He was not ready for that, an expression so much deeper than the shallow, unseeing joy of newfoals. Not even the dead, worm-filled eyes that dominated his dreams had held such power.

Through the eyes of a child, his had seen his family, and they had been disappointed in him. Forgiving, yes, but still disappointed.

And pitying him.

Somehow, that was even worse. He didn't know why - wouldn’t Kate and Anka want him to avenge them? Still… at least he wasn’t-

-inflicting the same anguish that he’d suffered through?

No. Couldn’t think that way-they were the Enemy and they-

-deserved to experience the same horrors that they’d dealt, deserved to see their children die in misery, just like every boy and girl who suffered? Just like him?

Yes! Yes they deserved it! That was justice! An eye for an eye, a limb for a limb-

-and so everyone ends up blind and crippled.

NO!

He’d tried to stem down those disloyal chains of thought. That kind of thinking put you in with the ponypounders.

Was it any wonder that, with no respite in the depths of a bottle, he’d needed to get away and think.

So, he’d volunteered for Lake Patrol, which consisted of taking a kayak out to the islands in Lake Umbagog and checking for any ‘unwanted guests’. It promised a solitude in which he could wrestle his mind into line, and even better, was a full 40-minute drive away from Defiance. So, after covering the ground in one of the Front’s kitbashed ‘roadsters’, something that looked like a nightmare from out of Mad Max, he paddled out into the placid lake, making for one of the islands near the mouth of the Magalloway.

It was almost like paid leave (as if any of the HLF’s soldiers expected financial remuneration for their services, and pay was a sketchy thing in the HLF. You could get anything in return for a job, be it a little cash, bullets, a gun, food), but he’d needed a day to himself, and time to try and find some accord between his warring doubts and drives. Command had been surprised at his volunteering for Lake Patrol, but who were they to disagree with one of the best surgeons in camp, and the man with the best gun that didn’t require Scharnhorst’s exoskeleton to heft? Upon returning, no doubt he’d be the murder machine they all expected him to be, screaming something about meat and fluid, but for now…

...now he could just try and find some peace, in nature’s magnificent desolation.

But as he’d paddled out across the mirror-calm, misty waters, he’d found himself plagued again by the thoughts, and confronted with the grotesquely animated newfoal from his nightmares.

He tried to ignore it, focusing instead on the beauty of his surroundings. By contrast Defiance was an ugly, sprawling collection of tents and vrek. But...he always loved open spaces, and this lake was one of the most unspoiled.

‘You can almost see the PER’s point, can’t you. Look at this serenity...’

He stamped those doubts down, even as the hallucinatory newfoal in the prow of the kayak smirked at him. And yet, yes, what he loved so much about Lake Umbagog was the lack of people - there were no ugly McMansions cluttering up the shore, no restaurants selling terrible fried seafood, buffalo wings or bear cla-

‘Bear!’

Oh, yeah! There was an actual black bear over there on one island, a young adult that had climbed up into the canopy of a tree. He snapped a photo of it on his phone, but did not reach for the .50 revolver at his hip. Unlike their grizzly cousins further west, Ursus Americanus rarely confronted humans.

”So unlike yourself, huh Viktor?” mocked the dead pony, slumped back with one bloody hoof dangling in the water. ”Is that what you are, an animal that lashes back because it was hurt? A machine following primitive code? Hah! You’re nothing more a newfoal on two legs…”

Kraber wanted to shoot that newfoal so much. But, trying to calm himself, he watched the bear in silence, wondering what'd happen if it touched the Barrier. Reports of what happened to earth animals were rather...inconclusive. They didn't seem to like it, but they could usually survive.

Usually. The higher primates, genetically closed to humans, were an exception, unable to survive the passage, and apparently some of the more intelligent marine mammals were the same way. But Africa's diverse wildlife had survived, anyway...and apparently thrived.

”Lions, Tigers and Krabers, oh my!”

But it never lasted...he’d read enough stolen intelligence reports to know that Equestria were ruthlessly ‘pacifying’ their new colonial possessions.

“The White Mare’s Burden…”

There were descriptions of thousand-pony safaris, and prescribed fires all across the Congo, clearing lands for agriculture and settlement...

”You don’t like considering that, do you...the chimps and the dolphins dying, the decimation of the jungles...because then this war becomes an attack against all sapient life, and it’s not just humans being targeted…”

Shut up. Shut up. He tried to focus on other thoughts, focused on the bear - idly he considered if it had a family...

“...and that means the PHL have a point…”

Family. Oh God.

The memories flooded back. Memories of that filly and her mother, of those ponies in the mine…

And of his own family, Kate, Peter and Anka welcoming him back after work. Not like some picture perfect vision of family life but in a way that was real and genuine...Kate calling out a greeting as she chatted with friends on the phone, Peter nodding ‘hi’ as he played videogames.

All the feelings and emotions that he’d tried to compartmentalise and push away, they all came back. Those were the years that, while strenuous beyond belief, had been his best.

And then he remembered that clown laughing… that mank genaaide bergbok Pinkie Pie...the giggles of the things that had been his beautiful children.

The rage flared again, a familiar drug that he latched onto for a second, only for his grasp to slip through it like smoke…

And he understood...and lashed out in denial.

“Don’t fight it!” said the newfoal, but this time it sounded remorseful, and sad. “Don’t deny it Viktor, accept that truth!”

The truth…

His stomach suddenly lurched, and he leaned over the side of the canoe, breathing heavily. He managed to keep the vomit down, but looking down into the water, into his reflection…

...he saw that filly, the one he had let escape.

She’d pitied him, yes. But there had been something else in those eyes, something he saw in his own every day.

Fear, and hate. Hate and rage against injustice, against the monster stealing away everything wonderful and good.

Now he was looking down into Pinkie Pie’s face reflected in the water...

That was the truth. He’d become the monster.

Shaking, he pulled himself upright, and hugged himself closely. He was shaking, almost catatonic with shock.

Despite everything, it was perhaps the most lucid he had been in weeks, months, or even years...

Shivering, his eyes drifted towards the island, where the bear had climbed down from the tree, and was walking away into the scrub. For a second it glanced back, and Viktor did not know what to make of its melancholy expression.

Why did he care? Why was that important to him? What was it in the bear’s mournful eyes that spoke to him?

“Oh, Viktor”, sighed the dead newfoal. ”Where’d you go so wrong?”

This time, it had spoken in Kate’s voice.

---

“I found myself back in the sepulchral city, resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts…”

Author's Note:

Experimenting to see if I can move chapters around a bit without automatically shunting them to the bottom. This is just a test.