Bits of Ash

by No one is home

Memory Lane

I remember the day I gave up on the world. I remember the pain, the loss, and the bitterness of her death. My wife died in childbirth during one of the gas attacks. She was a doppelganger named Mint Surprise. The war and Soft Whisper took her and our newborn daughter, Diane, in one fell swoop. And it was more than I could take. And as I held them in my hooves, choking from the fumes and drowning in my own tears and mucous, I declared my hatred and contempt for the gods and the whole wide world... and it’s funny, but I never imagined the world would give up on me right back. I forget how many times I thought, “This has to be the end,” as the whole world just exploded in blazes of elemental agony before I resigned myself to the idea that I had already died, and this was just hell. I could even accept that. An earth pony lives close to the earth, and he accepts that death is part of life, or he’s supposed too.

I had forsaken Soft Whisper. She took too much, one too many times. I never imagined that the sky might turn into the nine hells, and maybe she would reject me right back. I was just a pony. I was a pony once. But I rejected death, and had the misfortune of rejecting her right before her time was come. So I guess it’s fair that death would forsake me right back. And that was my punishment. I cursed the gods, and they cursed me right back. And they were better at it. I don’t even remember how the war started anymore, only how it ended as I was burned and mangled over and over until I was almost not even recognizable as a pony anymore.

Another god found me… though I’ll never know what he saw in the ruined wreck of an earth bound pony who couldn’t die while the world burned around him. The blaze didn’t kill me, but it erased me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember who I used to be… I just wasn’t that pony anymore. And the Unspoken Jester reshaped the scarified husk of flesh that the Blaze left lying in the ashes in his own twisted image. And I wandered the wastes for years like that. Or maybe it was decades? Or months? Who can know? I was a lowly deformed horse with no name, wandering the desert.

Eventually I was picked up by a traveling circus, because even in a world this broken the best a pony like me could ever be was a sideshow freak. But then something amazing happened. I was exploring an old bunker with some of my fellow performers, and we found something inside, a small, tiny compared to my massive form, inert Steel Heart filly, clearly manufactured before the war, on her flank was marked a peculiar serial number, “Crusader MK SB-978”. The others thought she was just a husk, a shell. But I knew better. I knew she was alive and alert, and something inside my brain knew that it had been my destiny, since the day the blaze consumed the world, to find this filly. She was a relic forgotten by the old world, just like me.

Bullette saved me, because in her foalish mind, she had to call me something. And I clearly had no name. She gave me something still worth protecting in this hell, even if I’m pretty sure she could kill me dead in a fight. Without hope, we’d all be better off if the Blaze had wiped us off the map. I don’t remember much from back then, and that’s probably a good thing. But she taught me that I still have a place in this world. And maybe, just maybe, if I don’t mess it up again, Soft Whisper will forgive me. And maybe I can have a happy ending. Because until that happens, there can be no happy ending for me, because it never really ends.

“It’s THEIR friendship! The robot, and the mutant pony with snakes in his mouth!” Silverstream clapped while Galus looked blankly at the scene as it unfolded.

“They… all died.” The gryphon youth stammered. “They just made the whole world explode.”

“We didn’t mean to be bad…” Ocellus covered her head with her hooves. “Queen Chrysalis just made us do bad things! We’re not like those ponies!”

“Ponies… could do that…” Sandbar droned absently.

“Woah… look at him… Every wave of it… it’s like it’s melting him and something is just twisting it back into shape.” Smolder stared on in wonder. “But whatevers doing it just can’t decide on the shape.”

“Beautiful and grotesque all at once.” Discord looked on with sad, sparkly eyes. “The miracle of chaotic birth.”

“Yona seen yak born, so… meh…” Yona shrugged casually.

“So we’ve gotten past the end of the world as we know it.” Discord hurried on as the bus lurched abruptly right.. “So let’s just ride a few years up the road.”

“Why did we kill them?” Bullette’s autotuned voice reverberated with fresh pain.

“They would have killed us, Bullette,” The giant mutant she rode atop huffed.

“Life is ugly.” The little white metal filly grumped. “It’s short, and it’s mean, and it’s ugly! There is a 78.6% chance that life has no meaning.”

“You don’t believe that, girl.” A careful observer would have noted that the giant’s voice came from the mouth of the middle of three snake like tendrils that constantly, almost playfully darted in and out of the creature’s bisected mouth.

“I do not believe that.” Bullette Bell confessed with a sigh, “But I believe there is a 86.8% chance that you believe that.”

“Oops, too far… Okay so I missed a turn or two.” Discord griped. “We’ll just turn around and drive back a few years.”

Comments

[David Silver]

I am now caught up.

[No one is home]

8949598
I hope I'm doing justice to your setting.