01: Light Despondent
Light Despondent Remixed
Chapter 01: Light Despondent
Editors and co-authors:
TB3 - Admittedly, you didn’t do anything this time, but there’s still some bits of your writing left here. Thanks, man. It wouldn’t be the same without you.
Jed R - you’re just the best. You know that, right?
- if you say so - Jed.
I meant every word of that!
August 5, 2022
Just north of Berlin, NH
He took his final breath
I hear it to this day
There's no redemption
And the punishment is delayed
The only reaction that I face
Is hidden well behind my face
A trace surely can
Lead the law right to their man
Well, hurry up
The Light Despondent, Biting Elbows
Dancing Day
Let’s say you were a little unicorn filly named Dancing Day, hiding in the back of a tractor-trailer with her mother, and you were scared out of your bucking mind because the car had drawn to a stop.
Dancing Day been heading up to Canada, for her mother’s new job at PHL R&D, where they always needed more unicorns. The driver had been a friendly enough trucker that everybody called Chipmunk for some reason.
Dancing Day told herself that there were a lot of reasons it could’ve stopped. Traffic lights, border patrol near Canada, but she knew that where you were was wilderness. She also knew that she was quite far from the border. So what could it be? Did a moose walk over the…
That thought just stopped. No, that couldn’t be it. She didn’t know how she knew, but something was out there. Something was not right.
Then she heard it over the gurgling of the river nearby. People talking in sporadic bursts of other languages. She understood some of it, but not all.
“...checking for contraband. You have nothing to fear from us,” a woman said. She was calm. Businesslike.
“Unless you’re a horsefucker,” someone said in German.
“Unless that,” the woman said, on the verge of something like a laugh.
“-authority of free HLF, under the leadership of Michael Carter…”
“Fuck,” Dancing Day’s mother, Astral Nectar said under her breath.
This was absolutely not border patrol, a moose, or a traffic light.
“We are conducting an investigation into the presence of PER in the region,” said a man with a thick, raspy Eastern European accent. “If you’re not them, you have nothing to fear.”
Except these HLF just mentioned Michael Carter, which means that yes, Dancing Day and and her mother had a lot to fear. A little under two years ago had been what the HLF units and independent fighters that Dancing Day and her mother knew they could trust called the Schism, the Snap, or the Idiocy.
It’d started when Algernon Spader, the de facto leader of the HLF, had been assassinated by parties unknown. This had led to a split down the middle - while many of the HLF units had chosen to continue to act under Spader’s ideals, following his “official” replacement and protecting those areas that the PHL could not, keeping them safe from bandits and PER, many others had decided to follow Michael Carter, a man who’d lost his wife to the ponification potion in every way, and under his guidance they’d become the bandits. That’s bad enough, except their knee-jerk reaction to the presence of any pony was usually to shoot them, along with any human who defended them. Or was nearby.
Dancing Day wondered how Chipmunk was taking this.
Chipmunk
“Son. Of. A. Bitch,” Chipmunk said from the cab of the truck.
She looked over the checkpoint. HLF vehicles sat on either side of the road, homebrewed things with spikes and heavy machineguns. They’d been sprayed with slogans that seemingly proclaimed the death of the Solar Empire, though more-often-than-not came across as advocating the death of every pony in range.
Their checkpoint wasn’t too far from a bridge, so they’d probably be able to drive out at a moment’s notice.
Chipmunk had never outfitted her cab with much in the way of weaponry. She had a stubby pump action to the side of the seat, and a cheap HiPoint .45 under the steering wheel. That was it, though.
Two men, one average heigh and heavyset, the other tall and thin, walked just below her door, and Chipmunk felt a sense of unexplainable revulsion at them both. Not necessarily fear. In fact, the revulsion stood out because she was already scared out of her mind.
“Anything we need to know about?” said one man. He had a thick Ukrainian accent, and had a wide, sharp-featured face that looked to be all downward, slashlike lines, with a jaw so wide that Chipmunk wasn’t completely sure he could move his mouth. He had sunken, piercing pale blue eyes that almost reminded Chipmunk of a husky’s eyes.
“No sudden movements,” his taller, thinner friend added. ‘Sharp-featured’ were the first two words that came to mind when Chipmunk looked at him. He had a thin, angular nose, and cheekbones so sharp that Chipmunk couldn’t quite believe weren’t pushing themselves out of his face. He had a thick, wild beard, capped off with an unruly mop of dark hair atop his head.
He looked fucking feral.
Chipmunk couldn’t place his accent, but whatever it was, it was thick. Based on the look on his face, Chipmunk had the strangest feeling he would really enjoy it if she made a sudden move.
“Kraber, search the truck,” the Ukrainian man said, and Chipmunk felt her heart sink. SHIT.
Viktor Kraber. That was the only person the sharp-featured man could be. A notorious HLF man who’d committed mass murder in the Purple Spring when the HLF rose up against the Conversion Bureaus. A man with a bad reputation for torturing newfoals and PER, and an even worse reputation for civilian casualties and collateral damage.
If he finds the ponies in my trailer, Chipmunk thought, with singular clarity, He will kill them. Then me.
“Right on it, Comrade Lovikov,” Kraber said.
Chipmunk’s heart sank. Shit shit shit. Of all the HLF who could stop me here....
If that was Viktor Kraber, he’d called that man Lovikov… well, that couldn’t be anything good. The only HLF man by the name of Lovikov - actually, the only man with that name period - that Chipmunk knew was an HLF man who, similar to Kraber, had a long history of violent crime against any pony in range. There’d been rumors of him, Kraber, and other like-minded individuals throwing molotov cocktails at businesses that employed ponies, into pony neighborhoods. So far, nothing had been pinned on them.
It was only a matter of time, though.
“What’s your HLF ID number?” Chipmunk found herself asking.
“HLF-004-2541,” the Ukrainian said.
Again. SHIT.
There were a lot of HLF units, but their ID numbers were actually pretty easy to keep track of once you learned what they meant. Back in the day, when Spader’s influence ruled, every unit had been assigned a three digit ID number. ‘004’ was the number for the Menschabwehrfraktion - once a loyalist group under an Austrian or German man named Helmetag, but now…
Well. Now they ran checkpoints in the middle of nowhere, ransacking cars, and almost certainly stealing from them.
Dancing Day
She heard him tramping through the truck, through a maze of wooden crates and machine parts. His boots thumped against the metal floor.
Dancing Day didn’t want to breathe. Her mother tried to shrink back into the compartment in the crate, flattening herself against the wood.
Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.
They drew closer. She could feel them through the crate, and she could feel her lungs screaming in protest as you tried not to make a sound.
Then they stopped. She could hear him breathing not even a foot away.
Will he find us?!
It was just then that he flung the crate open.
Dancing Day and her mother stared up at the man. He was tall and somewhat thin, lean and muscled, with a well-travelled body. His armor looked pieced together from surplus military equipment, though you saw stolen metal beneath the fabric. The barding had been thrown together, and held in place with ropes and strips of plastic almost as thick as a human's thumb, patched in places with duct tape. His beard was wild and unkempt, sticking out in all directions. His teeth and breath were rotten, every exhalation reeking of tobacco, poorly homebrewed alcohol, and hand-rolled cigarettes. His restless eyes, the color of maple syrup, darted from side to side. They were hardened, predatory, peeking out over dark bags that marked him as tired, restless. There were booze and other drugs on his breath, and he held a heavy revolver in one hand. His finger was on the trigger. He stared, nigh-immobile.
To Dancing Day’s young eyes, the yawning barrel of the revolver filled the world.
She and her mother were too terrified to make a sound.
It was then that Dancing Day noticed another strange detail about him. On his back was a pony-modified weapon, a long, thin rifle with the bullets all together in a belt. she could feel the magic radiating off of it.
‘How?!’ she asked herself. ‘How did he get this?!’
And that’s when the second-strangest thing happened: in some strange way, Dancing Day felt sorry for him. She could see genuine pain in his eyes, and understood it. Anyone with that much pain can’t be a bad person, she thought as she inched closer to her mother, who lay beside her, one hoof laid protectively over your body.
Astral Nectar was terrified, and yet she returned the HLF man’s maddened gaze with defiance. Her horn glowed softly, and Dancing Day trembled, wishing she could be as strong as her mother.
But most of all, she wished it didn’t end like this. No, after having survived this long, it CANNOT END LIKE THIS.
And suddenly, impossibly, it didn't. Which was the strangest thing that happened that night.
He saw Dancing Day embracing her mother, and something flashed across his face. His eyes watered. He was remembering something. Slowly, quietly, he did something to the back of his pistol which, in a flash of understanding, she knew to be called a ‘revolver’.
It clicked, she flinched… and he lowered it. Placed it in the... Sheath? Was that what it was called?
And then he closed the panel back on the two unicorns, one finger held to his mouth in the gesture you know to be a plea for silence.
He walked away, his boots clinking against the floor of the tractor trailer.
“Everything seems to be in order,” he said to Chipmunk. His voice sounded...flat, somehow. Not sad, nor drained of emotion, just hollow. Empty.
Dancing Day looked back at her mother frantically, at the dying flickers of light on her horn. Did she use her talents….get in his head? Was that her psychomancy, or some kind of mnemosurgery?
She had an odd look on her face.
“Did you…” Dancing Day looked at her mother. “Do something to him?”
She didn’t answer.
Chipmunk
She’d expected two things: Either a), he found nothing. b) He found everything and then tried to kill them.
She had not expected him to find the two unicorns, step up to the drivers-side window and gruffly wave her one with his gun. Of course, she didn’t know that he’d found the two unicorns - as far as she knew at that moment, she’d gotten away home free.
“Everything seems to be in order, right away…” he barked. “I’m sure your cargo will find a willing fence in Colebrook.”
He looked as if he was ready to throw up all over the ground, cheeks and forehead ashen behind the unkept mass of his beard. In fact, Chipmunk would learn that later, he did indeed void his stomach contents into the river.
Chipmunk nodded, fingertips brushing the gun as she reached to turn the ignition key. A look passed between them that might have been gratitude on her parts, or wariness. And then they had been in motion, peeling off into the distance at over eighty miles per hour.
Viktor Kraber
The man - whose name was Viktor Marius Kraber - was sat, or tired (in his native Afrikaans) and looking forward to some quality time with a bottle of rotgut. Home-brewed booze among the Fraktion tasted like paint thinner, with lying labels slapped on, but he didn’t give a fok.
I need a fokkin’ drink, he thought. The scene played over and over in his mind as he headed back to the HLF truck he’d used earlier that day, hoping there was something to drink. Staring down into the open trunk, he had felt an accusatory stare blazing back at him. Not from the fearful, if defiant mother, the one with the butt-mark of the telescope, but…
He had pressed the barrel of the revolver to the pony spawnling, and then he’d practically been paralyzed in their glare. He tried to yell, tried to pull the trigger, splatter the two hoenderpoes against the wall.
He stayed silent and failed.
Staring into those faces, gazing upon that pleading, pitying filly, he’d seen his family. In the mother mare, he’d seen Kate protecting a scared child. In the filly, he’d seen either Peter or Anka.
And through this lens, he saw his family. And they were…
“You’d disgust us if you were still alive,” he thought he heard Kate say.
“Daddy? Why are you hurting them?” he heard Peter ask.
“Mommy, daddy’s scaring me!” Anka screamed. “Make him stop doing it! Make him stop!”
So he had had uncocked and holstered the revolver, and stepped back.
He’d let them go.
Maybe, in the near future, he will reinterpret that moment as the ghosts of his lost family looming over him in judgment, rather than just a vague feeling of what would they do in his place, but a sense of disappointment was apparent.
Anka loved them, Kraber thought. She had loved the natural-born ponies...and their foals too.
Something about that unsettled him, now. Did… did I kill innocent ponies that’d been her friends? Wait. Why the fok am I thinking about that? There’s better questions.
Something about the look on that filly’s face had stopped him, and he was left feeling more clueless than he’d been in most of his life. Anger, he understood. Fear? Well, that just made sense, didn’t it, if he was coming after somebody. Hell, he almost enjoyed the thrill of it all. Especially the screams of PER as he came down on them and… disassembled them. Limb by limb, muscle by muscle. Sometimes alphabetically. ‘A’ is for ‘Amygdala’.
But never, never before had he gotten pity.
‘They must’ve used magic on me,’ Kraber thought. ‘Ja. That had to be it. I’ll tell Lovikov about the ponies in the lorry, and-
The train of thought derailed. Somehow, he couldn’t muster the energy to do it. That, and if he said so, Lovikov might very well shoot him.
I can’t let them know about what they must’ve done to me, Kraber thought, and it was just then that he saw Leonid Lovikov. Fok.
“Find anything?” Lovikov asked.
The heavyset Ukrainian man was shorter than him, and probably a little bit older. But he made up for it by looking like he was almost as wide with muscle as he was tall. He held an oversized M4 in his hands, some silly American thing rechambered for .50 Beowulf. A small, homemade SMG was strapped to his chest.
It took a few seconds for Kraber to answer. “No.”
“Don’t be like that. You’ll never guess what I found in this car!” his Ukrainian friend said, hefting the bag. “Actual goddamn cinnamon! I haven’t had cinnamon in forever! Okhu el! Back in the Suhoputnye voyska, we never had hauls like this!”
“Find any ponies?” Kraber asked unsteadily.
“Hey,” said another one of their number, a dark-haired woman with blue eyes. “Should I be concerned, Leonid, that you took food from those people?”
“We’ve got people back at camp who are starving, Blanchett,” Lovikov said. “Besides, haven’t we earned this? We’ve kept this place safe from PER and horsefuckers.”
‘Somehow,’ Kraber thought, ‘I’m not sure we made that driver feel safe.’ But he brushed that thought off. ‘She was a perdnaaier, same as most anyone we’ve killed. She probably fokkin’ deserves it.’
Then why didn’t I kill them all?
He didn’t have any answers to that question. But he did have an answer to Blanchett’s: “Lovikov’s right,” he said. “We’ve got people at home who need it.”
Children were starving in Defiance after all…
...kids who have never been children and may never be again. Some of them...the ones who listen to Lovikov and Viktor’s rants, want to head off to the nearest town and ‘bring the rain’ upon the traitors and horsefuckers. None of them would ever consider seeking shelter with someone outside the HLF.
For a moment, Kraber thought about how much he wished his children were in Defiance, playing with the children of the shantytown. And then, suddenly, inexplicably, he felt sick at the thought of how they’d be. He could almost hear the anger in Anka’s voice. Imagine Peter holding an SMG, even though his kids would’ve been barely out of primary school.
‘Daddy? Why are you hurting them?’ he heard Anka ask from somewhere.
Why wouldn’t he hurt them? Ponies had taken fokkin’ everything from him. His home. His family. His friends. They were even taking over the fight against the Empire, when any human could have seen - SHOULD HAVE FOKKIN’ SEEN! - that the world would be better without all of them. Racism against humans was idiotic, but punishing the... the things that’d ruined his life, his world?
That was just fokkin’ justice.
Except Kraber didn’t believe that. He knew it, but somehow, he didn’t feel it.
‘What would they be ashamed of?’ Kraber thought. I’ve spent all this time avenging them.
Somehow, that didn’t make him feel better. A sense of dread settled over him.
Except… he looked down at the pavement. Did that family of ponies earlier today do anything? Did they… need to be… I… He stopped. Refocused himself. I mean, they were ponies, but…
Blanchett and Lovikov looked to him, concern and confusion on their faces.
“Viktor,” Blanchett said, “Are you feeling okay?”
“I think I’m fine,” Viktor said.
He was absolutely not fine.
Johnny C Nny
Colebrook, NH
Meanwhile, while all that was happening, a man Nny - Nny to his friends, a local hero due to his actions in Alaska - had collapsed against one the comfier chairs in this Colebrook bar. He had the kind of stocky build that comes from being naturally short, the kind of frame that people can’t tell is flab or muscle, and hair that had naturally formed itself into something approximating a pompadour.
There were two earth ponies travelling with him. One was a mare named Fiddlesticks Apple, a yellow-furred, blue-maned earth pony, one of Nny's fellow heroes from Alaska. One of very, very few survivors. By sheer coincidence, both she and Nny hailed from longstanding dynasties of apple farmers. The other pony's name was Aegis.
‘Huge’ seemed almost like an understatement when describing that particular hypertrophically large Equestrian native. As did ‘pony.’ Terms more akin to ‘small horse' came to mind, and Nny's first words upon seeing him were "Good God they're making them big nowadays! Don't they know there's a gas crunch? Look at the size of you..."
Fiddlesticks had openly gaped at their first meeting, muttering something about how Aegis was ‘a good size up on Big Mac’.... No mean feat, apparently.
Aegis looked tired. He’d hoped to have gone to bed soon, but Chipmunk wasn’t there yet, and Nny assumed that worrying about her was keeping him awake. She was usually so…
Okay, she was late pretty frequently.
“Should you call her?” Aegis asked. It was easy to hear concern in his deep baritone voice.
“Even if I could, the wifi is shit where she is,” Nny said. “We’ll know sooner or late-”
“...No more crawl back to Equestria than you would go crawlin’ back in yer mom, ya fuckin’ dipshit!” Fiddlesticks yelled.
The bar fell silent as all attention focused on the small yellow mare, and the man with the battered Windham Weaponry AR who stood, staring at her in shock.
“You can’t talk to me that way,” the man with the AR said, voice strangely uncertain.
“I just did,” Fiddlesticks said. “What’re you gonna do about it? Now, I got a band to play in.”
She trotted up to a stage at one corner of the bar, quite pointedly not looking at the man.
Aegis snorted.
“That’s my Fiddlesticks,” Nny said, taking a gulp of some rum and coke, vaguely irritated that he didn’t even feel even a hint of a buzz. He looked over the bar, eyeing a few rough, hard-looking types who were sitting over by a wall of wanted posters. Some that, from their bearing, clearly lean more towards the Rogue HLF’s side of the political spectrum, were giving Aegis a little more attention than he would like.
Nny raised an eyebrow and eased back his coat, giving half the bar, bounty hunters included, a glimpse of his personal sidearm, a top-break .44 magnum with a twenty-gauge central barrel. A futurised LeMat that is likely the biggest pistol in the room.
Aegis shifted as well, and the dagger strapped to his haunch glinted subtly in the light.
Neither of them could probably take the bounty hunters, even working together, but the demonstration served as a reminder that they were armed, and willing to fight. As if weighing in on their side, the barkeep banged a sign hanging prominently over the drinks rack with the barrel of a stubby, decades-old Saiga autoshotgun with cracking plastic furniture.
RIOTERS WILL BE SHOT
And under that, in spray paint and stencil, it reads:
This is your only warning.
The proprietor didn’t pull back the charging handle. The shotgun was punctuation enough.
Immediately, a bit too quickly, they went back to looking at ‘wanted’-writs. Aegis, his personal liberty reaffirmed, sidled up a little closer to inspect them for himself, and Nny found himself doing the same.
He found himself looking at a wanted poster, and remembered his time back in the arctic. Remembered the pony who’d wiped an entire town off the map on the spur of the moment, the pony who’d been willing to condemn a god - or something very much like it - to a painful undeath in the service of the Equestrian Empire.
‘Shieldwall’
FACTION: PER
REWARD: $600,000 DEAD OR ALIVE.
WANTED FOR: PER activity, subversion of human governments and settlements, terrorism, arson, abduction, assault, mass ponification, collusion, mass murder, theft (And someone had scrawled “and a really crappy attitude!” at the end.)
Report any useful information to the authorities as soon as possible.
And then, unbidden:
“I hope you’re fucking happy,” Aegis said, looking at the newfoal poster. “I hope you’re fucking happy, Woven Sugar.”
Nny looked at Aegis uncertainly.
“Do you want to…” Nny asked, not sure how he’d end the question.
“Tell you what,” Aegis said, “Let’s just listen to the music.”
Nny nodded, almost relieved.
The band started playing, and Aegis started absentmindedly tapping his hooves in time with the music. It was just as well they were loud enough, it meant that neither of them could hear the TV just over the length of the bar.
It was broadcasting footage of some PHL troops. From their green lyre patches, they were associated with Nny's cousin Yael Ben Ze'ev’s forces, smoking out some nondescript town. The banner bar proclaimed them in Quebec, trying to break a HLF pocket that'd turned the small town into their little fiefdom. It was impossible to hear audio over the crowd or the band, but someone had turned on the old ‘teletext’ feature.
...officially, this is an act of mutiny. Many of these troops are not under the official command of Lieutenant Ze’ev, and our PHL liaison has refused to pass comment...
Years ago, this wouldn’t have happened. But that was before the Schism, when you could trust HLF to look after their own. With the original commanding authority behind the HLF gone, while many of the remaining units had decided to uphold Spader’s ideals, many others had gone off the rails and given into their worst excesses. Become bandits, caused huge amounts of collateral damage, killed ponies who’d never dream of being PER, taken over towns and ruled them with iron fists. The HLF were engaged in a civil war - although no one called it that. It was, at best, a schism, a conflict, a mutiny.
The news footage was shaky, taken from a news chopper (armed, most likely) hovering high above the town. Yael, prominent from her tall, thin build and position at the front, was crouched behind the scorched wreck of a car, toting a heavy rocket launcher. Nny, a gun-nut if there ever was one, watched with interest as she spun out from cover, aimed, and fired in one fluid action. Judging from the backblast, her weapon was something like a Russian Pozhar.
Then he sat up in shock. Onscreen, atop the rooftop behind Yael, a HLF soldier with a cheap submachinegun was clambering into view, a knife clenched in his teeth. The camera jolted, presumably because the cameraman was himself shouting a warning…
...and then the human abruptly lost head, a purple-pink pegasus flickering into frame, saddle-mounted rifle smoking.
‘So that’d be Heliotrope there’, Nny muttered.
One of the tanks Yael had brought to help open up a beachhead swiveled its turret toward a building, and fired.
‘It’s too close to - wait. It’s a damn flamethrower tank!’
The wooden building into which the tank had just fired burst into flames, crumbling as men, women, and children in battered tac-vests of stolen kevlar and hammered metal ran out, screaming and flailing…
The footage cut out, as the news anchor began discussing the disappearance of a PHL nurse named Sutra Cross, whose aid caravan had been raided by rogue HLF.
“Go Horsefuckers,” he muttered absently, fumbling for his drink.
“French country music in New Hampshire,” Aegis said, distracting Nny. “How about that?”
Watching Fiddlesticks strumming her fiddle, the two of them shared an awkward silence before:
“Seriously though,” Aegis said, “Should we call Chipmunk?”
“Beginning to think we should,” Nny said, checking his iPhone and realizing that it was almost 10:30. She had promised to meet with them here forty-five minutes ago. Trying to stem growing pangs of anxiety, he comforted himself with two readily available things: a cup of steaming clam chowder so thick his spoon can stand up in it, and the smile on Fiddlesticks’ face. The yellow earth pony mare with the inky blue mane looked so happy to be playing in this nowhere bar along the Canadian border, with the whole bar clapping and drunkenly singing along with her.
I can almost believe it’s before the war, Nny thought appreciatively. After all, it took him back to a time before he’d ever felt true hate, let alone the searing fires banked up in his heart towards people like Nichols or the damn Carters.
Before night watches in towns, before armed men and women had been forced to take up nocturnal patrols to protect their homes, families, friends, and livelihoods. Before weapons were openly carried on the streets, or before he’d had to carry a runically enhanced rifle with a balanced recoil system in his car at all times.
Back in some unseen halcyon days and weeks after Equestria first manifested, days where ponies were welcomed as visitors, with the promise of mutual learning and understanding lending every second of the day with new prospect, a new vision and hope for the future.
Nny missed the good old days in a way that made him wonder if they’d ever really existed.
Kraber
Kraber was absolutely not fine.
The rest of the cars, evidently judged to be ‘safe’, sped off into the distance. Undoubtedly, they’d call 911 as soon as they come back into the range of the dwindling cellphone networks, but the cops up here wouldn’t come looking for either the checkpoint, or Defiance.
They drove deeper into the forest, bumping and juddering on the old logging road, silent trees flashing by as the pickups penetrate their ancient fastness. The abandoned trail grew narrower and rougher, overgrowth pressing in so close that the rear view mirrors scraped against tangled branches.
When at last they stopped, the troops took up defensive positions to confirm they were not followed. After Lovikov had motioned ‘all clear’, they silently retrieve tarpaulins from the hollowed-out corpse of a felled tree, and throw it over the vehicles to shroud them from aerial view.
Then, on foot through the forest, Lovikov at point and Kraber guarding them. Fingers were on safeties as they tread softly on the undergrowth, a slightest ‘crack’ of a twig, cause for concern. At least, they made it to their camp.
The settlement Kraber was traveling to was not a proper home by any means. But most of the people inhabiting it had discarded the concept of a fixed home, knowing that the Barrier would come eventually and force them to move.
Building on the remains of an old lumber camp, it was designed by people like Kraber, historians of the partisans of World War II and the Cold War. The ‘cursed soldiers’ of Poland and the Japanese holdouts of the Pacific would have felt much at home here. Its infrastructure consisted in part of easily disassembled buildings thrown up from readily-available timber, but mostly tents and dugouts. A church consisting of a cross suspended between two trees, a small synagogue some distance away. A buddha that someone took from London sat upon a cairn of stones at the foot of a rocky cliff that shields that side of the camp from the weather. There was even what some of the brothers referred to as a reliquary, a container holding holy relics stolen before their native shrines could be overwhelmed.
Old mattresses and ugly, rough blankets were held in commune in a larger tent. They were kept dry by the heat from the adjacent foundry, built upon the rough foundations of the old camp sawmill. Here, to the roar of forges and the scream of lathes, the complex’s armorers were hand-making newer, bigger guns.
Not far from the smithies, a snarling diesel generator stood beside the modest command center shipping container-turned-hut that was Lovikov’s home, home of over-annotated maps and wild ideas: who, where and why to strike. The walls were virtually covered in reconnaissance data, collating as best as possible the known movements of all PER forces, some PHL, and Spader’s HLF loyalists.
The hut was buzzing with activity. A few computer screens flickered, while off in one corner was a man with an honest-to-god typewriter, typing out circulars, pasting in photos, making HLF circulars. It was then sent for duplication in their prized Xerox machine, loaded both with stolen paper and some hand-made stuff pressed from pulped bark. Even if it sometimes jammed up the rollers, it was all towards the goal of self-sustainability that Lovikov supported. Most of the duplicated circulars would be placed on roadsides in dead drops, for affiliated motorists to pick up and distribute.
Next to the command center was a theater of sorts, an improvised briefing room and communal space, ‘seating’ as many people as can actually pack themselves in. There was even a projector, allowing them to play movies now and then.
And all around were flags, hung on the sides of rough-cut walls, flying from improvised flagpoles, and even strung between the dripping trees. They were the tattered standards of dead and dying nations, hung in memorial, but the black HLF flag, embossed with a chalk-white fist within a circle representing Earth, took precedence above all else.
This settlement’s name would live in infamy for generations to come.
Defiance.
Though, at that moment, none of that mattered to Kraber. Not the complex chain of events that had led to the camp allying itself with Michael Carter over Maximilian Yarrow, the fact that they had the pony nurse Sutra Cross as a prisoner, or even the planned meeting with Carter’s Thenardier Guards in a day or two.
He looked out over the camp, then down at his hands. They shook like leaves in the wind.
He felt like he was back in the ocean and a wave was about to crest over him. And for a second, he felt-
Cold. Drenched in saltwater. The wave cresting down on him, a freak wave much bigger than usually came to the beaches outside Cape Town.
is this a
Water filling his lungs. Then
Is this a
For a second, Kraber was back in the main room of the house in Garmisch Partenkirchen. The one Kate had liked, but the pictures she’d hung on the walls had always made her miss Boston. She’d liked it, but it hadn’t quite been home.
He saw his family dead on the floor. Peter, Anka, and Kate, all the children at the birthday party, lay strewn about the floor. There were bulletholes in their skulls. Except…
No, that wasn’t right, they were ponified! And I didn’t even have a-
“Viktor,” Kate said, and Kraber could see through to the carpet through the hole in her head. “We’re still newfoals, Viktor.”
Before he knew it, he was on his knees.
Count to four, he reminded himself. Inhale. 1. 2. 3. 4.
He breathed out, and looked over the camp. Nobody seemed to have noticed, least of all Lovikov.
Especially not Lovikov, who was walking out into camp, regaling everyone with the story of the PER they’d killed that day. Holding out the bag of cinnamon.
“-And Viktor found the ponies!” Lovikov yelled at the top of his lungs, a wide smile on his face. “They were…. They must’ve been some of the biggest, baddest PHL operatives I’d ever seen. Oh, you should’ve seen him slaughtering them!”
‘Those weren’t soldiers, jou fokkin’ liar,’ Kraber found himself thinking. ‘They fokkin’ weren’t. And I… killed them. Just like that. He found himself pausing. Why am I getting so worked up over it? They were only ponies.
He didn’t want to listen to what Lovikov was saying. He stood up, turned around, and headed towards his tent when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
Kraber went ramrod straight and twisted backwards, hand on his revolver, ready to-
It was just Mariesa. Another one of Lovikov’s drivers. Kraber made a show of relaxing, sliding the gun into his holster, pushing it in so hard he wondered if the front sight would cut through the leather.
“Is this about Emil?” Mariesa asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“He was…” Kraber sighed. “Fok. I feel like I walked home and found him stuffed in the fridge. He was…”
“We’re all going to miss Emil,” Mariesa said.
“Really?” Kraber asked. “I feel like we all barely knew him.”
“Maybe,” Mariesa said. “But… you’re home, now. You’re with friends. If you want to go get rotgut at the bar, that’s fine. If you want to be alone, that’ll also be fine.”
Somehow, ‘fine’ was not one of the words that came to Kraber’s mind when he thought about how he would feel for the rest of the night.
“I think I might need time alone,” Kraber said, heading off to his tent. “I just feel… different. Wrong.”
“You need to talk to anyone,” Mariesa said, “Just ask.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” Kraber said. “I… I need time to think.”
December 2022
Dancing Day
“So that’s what was going through your head?” you ask.
Kraber nods. “Ja. It’s… it wasn’t the first time I went, made bad decisions, and couldn’t stop myself. There was the time in college I started drinking, trying cocaine-”
“Which time?” Aegis interrupts. “Because as far as I can tell from your college friends, that happened a lot.”
“Aweh, exactly,” Kraber said. “Or the time I was afraid of fatherhood and tried to avoid Kate. Or the time I burned down that conversion ca-”
“Wait,” you say. “How could have you done that in college?”
“Nevermind, that’s not important,” Kraber says quickly. “Besides, I plead the fifth. But there’d always be this question, eventually. What in the fok am I doing? And why haven’t I stopped yet?”
Dancing Day
Just outside Colebrook
“HE FUCKING WHAT?!” Chipmunk yelled, and Dancing Day cringed. “You… I don’t… what the fuck… fuck this… the fuck did he even… fucking… fuck!”
Mommy looked up at Chipmunk. “Yeah, that’s what happened.”
“And…” Chipmunk ran her fingers through her thick hair. “Christ.” She sighed. “When we get in there, I’m going to find the most gorgeous woman I can and fuck her brains out.”
Dancing Day blinked.
“What?” Mommy asked.
“What do you mean?” Chipmunk asked.
“It’s just that… you…”
“Look,” Chipmunk said, “What you have to understand is… that was a damn miracle, and we are all lucky to be alive. So… as far as I’m concerned, we deserve to celebrate.”
“Yeah!” Dancing Day said, nodding frantically.
She remembered that, a little over a year ago, her mother had been able to trust the HLF. Or at least, she’d been able to trust the HLF to understand they weren’t PER, that they provided valuable services that others needed to grease the wheels of wartime life.
This had been before the Schism.
By now, Dancing Day had begun to hear… stories. Towns the HLF had essentially conquered, sucking the locals dry of cash and food in return for protection. There’d been a mostly HLF-aligned farmer around these parts who’d begun abusing the earth ponies who worked for him. There was Michael Carter’s unspeakable crime, filling innocent ponies with lead as they stood to walls. There was the disappearance of Sutra Cross and all her medical supplies. There was the bruise on her mother’s jaw, the one she’d gotten the day she decided to make the trip to Montreal. There were rumors of prominent pony emigres found dead in alleyways, absolutely not PER jobs.
But as far as Dancing Day knew, they were just that. Stories. And rumors.
Though it made her wonder: What if they’re not? We wouldn’t have had to be hidden if they weren’t just stories…
“Well then,” Chipmunk said, as she stepped out of the trailer, the two ponies in tow, “Let’s head in.”
The three of them walked into the Dancing Bear, and everything almost seemed to stop.
Neither of them cut for impressive figures. Dancing Day was a small unicorn filly, her mother was - as most ponies were - quite small, and Chipmunk… well, she wasn’t exactly someone who habitually drew attention.
“Chipmunk,” Nny said, downing what was certainly not his first glass of alcohol, a pile of onion food on the table. Aegis was nearby, chowing down on his own separate pile. “What… the hell.”
“Boy,” Dancing Day said, “do we have a story to tell.”
Aegis
Cigarettes dropped to the floor from open jaws. Mugs of booze ait unattended in the grip of frozen hands. Even the unflappable bartender with the huge autoshotgun stood 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!” Chipmunk finished, fingers splayed and palms out.
“Fuckin’ what?!” Nny gasped, in time with almost the entire bar’s exclamations of incredulity. His reaction was tame by the standards of the bar.
At that, Dancing Day’s mother held her tight, hooves over her ears to block out the flood of profanities.
Aegis didn’t quite get that. Admittedly, he’d done the same with his foals, but it wasn’t like holding his hooves over Amber or Rivet’s ears would make them un-hear all the other times they’d heard people swearing.
“But couldn’t he have missed them?” the bartender started in a rasping voice. He turns, the shifting of a beard revealing a disfiguring scar around his neck - the poor bastard had been garrotted once.
“No,” Chipmunk said. “Astral? Did he see you?”
“Plain as day,” Mommy confirmed. “He had the trunk open, the revolver to my head, and he just ignored us.”
“Could you have…” asked one bar patron, a woman with scraggly brown hair.
“I didn’t do anything,” Mommy said. “He did that on his own.”
The spell of her voice broken, the bar split up into heated pockets of discussion, conversations fragmenting already into innumerable rumors.
“Holy shit!” Aegis repeated to himself, over and over. “That...that just doesn’t happen. Holy shit.”
“It’s worse,” Chipmunk said, “It was Viktor Kraber who did it.”
The bar went silent.
Shit, Aegis thought.
Kraber was the poster child for HLF excess. The one who would always be used as an example when somebody wanted to classify them as a hate group. More tellingly, he was the example that usually convinced someone.
He’d cut a swathe across Eastern European and Turkish Conversion Bureaus before he’d been brought to heel. They said his kill-count probably ran well into four figures when you took newfoals into account. A man with a stolen PHL gun.
And this was the man who had chosen to spare Dancing Day’s life…
Why?
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Insert "Its Alive!" YouTube video here. Just as soon as I have a working computer again.
8633150
Thanks for the fave, and also the like.
or alternatively
Wonderful first chapter! Thanks for the update!
8633738
Thanks so much, man! It's good to have you back.
Just started reading this. It looks very interesting.
8866675
Thanks, man! I try my best to keep it fun.