Dawn
Donut Joe wiped the blood off his rolling pin. The last few years he’d stayed alive by sticking to the shadows, striking from ambush, only taking fights when he had a clear advantage.
Couldn’t do that with Saffron was standing on the roof with her horn glowing, linked to the bright new star over the Everfree. A clear beacon shouting; “Hey! Guards! Beat these ponies into a pulp!”
It was his job to stop that from happening.
His homemade grapnel lashed out and caught a pegasus flying over, and he swung her down into a unicorn trying to get a clear shot at Saffron.
The roof of the Midnight Oil was as good a defensive position as they could get. Joe still had access to his workshop here, important tools. The problem was he only had four hooves and a horn - and he wasn’t nearly as good with it as Saffron was.
It also had limited access up, and a chest-high walling around the whole roof. It didn’t give him much protection from the flyers, but if he could survive Lightning Dust, he could survive anyone.
They’d tried lobbing tear gas up here, but Joe had caught it and thrown it back easily enough. Unicorns and earth ponies in gas masks moved unseen through the thick clouds below - a hellish red glow where they caught the light from the Midnight Oil’s neon.
Screams and twisting metal sounds as they hit the traps in the front door and made it into the restaurant - but that was all he’d had left. Soon they’d be able to push the roof.
There was a flash behind him, and Joe turned to knock the unicorn’s head off - but it was Moondancer, her own horn flaring a shield above them.
“I’m relieved, you know,” Moondancer laughed. She was sweating, her glasses were cracked and one lens hung out of the frame. “That you do this better than you make coffee.”
“Can you keep Saffron covered?” Joe was already prowling for the roof access. “I need to clear the ground floor.”
“You don’t want me to take over for her?”
Saffron shook her head. Veins in her neck were straining from the effort. “Are you a particularly loving person, Moondancer?”
Moondancer thought about it. “Not really. I have a lot of pent up aggression, actually.”
“Then please,” Saffron was forcing this through grit teeth now. It was heard, not seen: Her neckerchief was soaked in milk and pressed over her nose and mouth.
Joe was at the door now. He pressed the side of his head to the brick, waiting until he felt the vibration of troopers on the stairs. “We’re calling it Cinnamon Sugar if it’s a girl. Garam Masala if it’s a boy.”
Moondancer looked over at Saffron, raised eyebrows. Her shield brightened and hummed, but for a thin gold tether, like fishing line, stretching from Saffron’s horn to the Everfree.
Joe felt the vibrations, then they stopped. They were getting to breach. He smiled. This was going to be fun.
The door slammed open on its hinge, right into the side Joe was hiding. His back legs shot out like cannons, kicking the door back onto the face of whoever opened it. Something cracked, and the door twisted off its hinge. Then Joe was after it, throwing himself onto the tangle of Guards in the corridor elbows first. They went down the stairs as a twisting ball of limbs and fur.
There was a lot of blood, most of it wasn’t his. That was Joe’s strength here: He wasn’t going to be the best fighter, but he’d definitely had the most practice getting the absolute snot beaten out of him and coming back up.
The rolling pin came up and went down on the knees and elbows of any guards who looked like they had any fight in them. A few seconds later, the twitching stopped, and he had the back kitchen to himself again.
Crossbow bolts went through the cafeteria area, bolts sinking three hooves deep into the wall over the deep fryer - flying through the window between the kitchen and cash register, where he and Saffron took turns yelling orders at each other. He couldn’t make out the shooters through the clouds of gas.
Back upstairs, Saffron could feel it through the spell - they weren’t alone.
Fancy Pants roared a deep and throaty laughter as the star over the Everfree brightened. He’d worried that he’d left Canterlot a shambles without his leadership, but it seemed like a most wonderful young lady was doing an admirable job of things.
Here in Dodge Junction, things were going a lot better.
Chief Thunderhooves watched Fancy with interest, visible even through the thick armour the buffalo had taken to wearing. The Chief shirked the simple flintlocks his warriors all carried, sticking to a heavy sledgehammer used to drive rail spikes. His people’s last line of defense, one that didn’t need to reload.
“It does seem to be working.” The buffalo admitted. “Not that I doubted you.”
“Well, better than me then,” Fancy was filled to bursting with all the love Equestria had to throw at him, and he was throwing it right back, “I doubted this to the very last. Couldn’t think of anything better, though.”
The buffalo grunted. “It makes sense this would be the way of things. That it would take the one thing from ponies we could not make our own.”
“Magic?” Fancy shook his head. “That’s only a small part of it. Most of this is you, right now, good friend.”
The buffalo creaked in his armour, content to wait for Fancy to explain what he meant without being asked. Fancy was happy to oblige him.
“I’m just the tether. I’m sending it all the love you have for your people, and all the love your people have for you. That’s most of it.”
The Chief seemed satisfied, creaked again in the hull of the locomotive shell he wore. “It is much better, then, to be something of our own.”
Shots rang out. The Shadowbolts were back again. The only group in Equestria that would still face the buffalo after the Siege of Appleoosa. The lightning they kicked couldn’t shock a buffalo in its conductive armor, but it could super-heat the metal, searing the buffalo in their heavy plate.
But still, Fancy Pants laughed. “Trust me, Chief,” he explained, “There’s nowhere in Equestria you’d rather be than here.”
Outside Manehattan, a pony smoked a cigarette and looked out towards the city. She’d been carried out here on a palanquin, because she couldn’t walk anymore. Her cracked horn could barely hold the cigarette. Still, she smiled.
Now, the star over the Everfree was one of the only ones visible in the sky of the city that never slept.
The projector beside her wouldn’t be quite that bright. But it would be clear enough against the clouds, anyway. She’d spent weeks sending agents to hide the speakers throughout the city, too - she wished she had time to do more, but Shining Armor’s message had made it clear there wouldn’t be.
She put the cigarette down so she had the strength to hit the ‘start’ button on this whole fiasco. It was an honour, the Resistance agreed, that should remain hers.
Vinyl Scratch’s movie played one more time on the skies above Manehattan, with a few significant edits on Photo Finish’s part. A new ending, a new call to action.
This was what she’d died for.
How inconvenient that she still lived to see it.
Beside her, an older writer downed a bottle of wine, then lit his horn towards the star over the Everfree. Unionists of all stripes filled dug-out trenches in this hill, armed with knives tied to boom poles and crossbows taken from stage armories - they looked real, because they were.
There was nothing Manehattan loved more than a good movie, where the heroes save the day.
Pony Joe slid on his stomach towards the crumpled ball of breachers. One of them must have had a shield, hadn’t they?
But no. Only weapons.
Time to get creative. He had his tools down here, a heavy metal box of it under the sink.
He took a screwdriver from it and started taking it to the fridge door, tearing off the thinner welds when it was quicker. There was a shelf in the door that attached at both ends, it had a gap between it and the door. Joe held one arm to it and looped it thick around the shelf until it made a decent improvised riot shield.
It hurt his shoulder something fierce, though. There was no balance to it. He took a safety razor, and sheathed it in the ball of tape on his left foreleg. He needed to be able to detach himself from this quick.
Also under the sink, some other toys. Some plastic explosives he’d stolen during his last fight with Lightning. He’d been saving this for a rainy day…
Then Moondancer was beside him, staring at him. She had a shield around her head like a bubble, keeping the gas out.
“Hey,” Joe coughed.
“Why?”
“Crossbows.”
“Oh. Why don’t you use a shield?”
“Nyeh nyeh nyeh.” Joe said rogueishly, like Con Mane would.
“Right. Sorry.” Moondancer grimaced. “Forgot not everyone-”
“Why aren’t you protecting Saffron?”
“Some friends of yours showed up. Some dragon with an apron, Blueblood, Fleur. I thought you’d need help down here.” Moondancer said this while pointedly looking at Joe’s fridge-arm. “Can’t imagine why. You’ve clearly got this handled.”
Joe perked up. “Ginger’s here?”
“The dragon’s name is Ginger?”
“I happen to think Ginger is a very good name for a dragon, actually.”
Moondancer plucked one of the crossbows from the wall and analyzed it. “I didn’t see them out on the street. They’re shooting from in that gas cloud.”
“Good to know,” Joe coughed, “You got any spells for that? I was kind of just going to try charging out while holding my breath, see how well that worked out for me.”
Moondancer pulled a gas mask off one of the guards in the pile, and in a flash it was fixed to Joe’s face. It wouldn’t do anything for the stinging in his eyes or the fact it felt like his lungs were already breathing, but it’d stop it from getting any worse.
“Thanks.”
“Nice job with them, by the way.” Moondancer admitted. She closed her eyes, concentrated. “There’s six of them. All with crossbows. Four on the right, two on the left. I think they tried to flip your tables, but they’re bolted to the floor, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So they’re hiding in booth seats. It’ll be hard to get to them, but they’re going to be stuck there if you make it.”
Joe looked at his fridge shield. “I can’t point this both ways. Either side I go for, I’ll be exposed to the other one. Got any ideas?”
“Get a better shield.” Moondancer deadpanned.
Joe grimaced. “You know any combat magic?”
Moondancer shook her head. “Not really. That was Shining Armor’s-” she stopped. “They’re getting ready to advance.”
“Fantastic.”
“Two more about to come in. I think one of them has a grenade launcher.” Moondancer grinned. “That’s our opening.”
“That’s our opening?!” Joe seethed.
“I’ll set it off when it’s in the middle of the room,” Moondancer was concentrating hard, her horn glowing. “That’s your chance.”
“You really think you can set off a grenade mid air?”
“Well, if I can’t, we both just die.” Moondancer admitted. “I’ve never tried this before. But, I mean, you got any better ideas?”
Joe thought about it, shrugged. The shoulder with the fridge door attached to it shrugged visibly less. “This was basically as far as I got.”
“Well then.” Moondancer’s closed eyes winced harder. “Ready in three… two…”
There was the kchunk of a grenade being fired. Joe started running.
The griffins scowled at the flaring light hanging in the night sky.
They would have no part in this.
Zecora had watched as, over the minutes, the star burning above the Everfree had grown in size, from a pinhead to a pea. It was still growing now.
She wondered if she should not have tried her pilgrimage to the Everfree after all. Maybe not all ponies would have been as hostile and hateful as she feared. It was the first time she ever felt a pang of regret for staying.
All the zebra in the village looked to the growing star in the north. There was something strange about its light - you only had to look at it to know what it meant. To feel a profound sense of love and community.
Had the potential been inside them all along? It must have been.
“The hate I feared from pony minds, a hate that tainted all their kind,
Unnatural as forever-night, I see that in this sunny light
They have found their way, I don’t know how, I only pray I may be welcome, now.”
The zebra of Zecora’s village had grown to fear what would happen when the ponies stopped expanding West, and looked South instead. Found in the zebra lands fertile soil and mineral wealth.
If it weren’t for the fierceness of the buffalo, and others like them, villages just like this one might already have been colonized.
In the jungle around Zecora, birds chirped their dawn chorus. Some were so young that it was the first of their lives.
The Empire ran on coal.
The trains that pushed military and material into the Western expanses and the Northern warfront burned coal. The electric lighting and heaters needed to replace the lost sunlight burned coal.
The Empire ran on coal. And coal ran on sweat and blood, more blood than was needed.
A coal miner would crawl a mile on average from the bottom of the mine shaft to the coal face, through tunnels too narrow to stand. A normal pony would call that a full workday on its own, but a coal pony then had to break and shovel coal for another ten hours. A coal pony had to shovel a ton a day, each of them.
There was plenty of natural gas. All it took was the sparks from a pick to ignite it, bury survivors under rubble. And sometimes it was digging out survivors that caused more cave-ins. One in a hundred miners were seriously injured every year. One in a thousand died.
The Empire ran on coal, and coal was mined with blood. If the miners stopped, so did the Empire. So the Empire was willing to spill as much blood as needed to keep the mine’s going. No price too high.
Well. No price but livable wages and better working conditions. It was far cheaper to hire one guard with a crossbow to keep a hundred miners down, then it was to pay a hundred miners one share more. Too often that’s what happened.
Dotted Line was a chemist, born and bred in the North. He’d wanted to become a civil servant, and he would have made a damned good one. Instead, he’d become a union leader. He wasn’t as good at it as he needed to be.
He was short, fussy, and nobody could tell if black were his natural colour or if he just never got the soot off. He was probably naturally black, once, but stress had turned most of his coat silver at a young age. He’d already had a heart attack by thirty. He was back at work the next day.
A geologist, Maud Pie, had brought cross sections of the mountain with her, pointing to fault lines dynamite could be placed to cause major landslides. Normally, that was to be avoided. Maud tied her red bandana tight around her face as she left.
Dotted Line signed off on the blasting charges she’d need, matched her up to a crew capable of laying them. Next petitioner. The last one. Everyone else had their marching orders.
Limestone was outside, pouring kerosene into empty cider bottles and loading them into crate. Each bottle had an oily red rag wrapped around its neck, ready to light. Dotted regarded her.
“These are only to make it harder to pursue anyone falling back,” he warned. “I won’t tolerate you throwing them at anyone.”
Limestone rolled her eyes, but didn’t argue. “Fine. Stab ‘em, shoot ‘em, but don’t burn ‘em. Wouldn’t want to be the bad guys here.”
“No. We don’t.” He chided. “It’s not about whether or not they deserve it. It’s about not doing that to ourselves. We are are our actions, not our reasons.”
“Actually, about that.” Limestone grunted as she hefted the first crate up. “That star over the Everfree, it’s getting brighter. There’s something special about it. You’d probably like it.”
Dotted stepped outside his office for the first time in three weeks. He looked at the star, now the size of a penny in the sky. It pulsed. It urged him to reach out with his horn, like it was close enough to touch. The chemist instincts in him, strong enough to have kept him holding on to all four limbs this long, screamed at him not to do it.
It took a lot of effort to ignore them, and reach out anyway.
He flinched away from it. He could have fallen to his knees and wept if he felt it a second longer.
The miners were their own. The soldiers had made it impossible for the resistance to operate here - Dotted Line’s union had been illegal enough, repressed enough. They hadn’t been preparing for this siege, a thousand miners, two hundred to each mountain top, because they’d received orders. They’d seen the swelling ranks of soldiers and feared the worst.
It wasn’t for them. Whoever was responsible for the star over the Everfree had made Nightmare Moon very afraid.
“No more blood, today.” Dotted told Limestone. “Tell them all, not ours, not theirs, no more. Tell every unicorn to focus on keeping that star alive.”
Limestone scoffed. She saw the light too, but she couldn’t feel it like he did. She was thinking clearer. “It’s not ours I’m worried about. What if they don’t listen?”
Dotted stopped. They hadn’t won yet, he had to remind himself. There were too many who believed in their very heart of hearts that Nightmare Moon was right. There were just as many who had too much blood on their hooves to stop now - to live in a world that might hold them accountable for it.
Too many.
“Just the unicorns, then.” He corrected himself. “Tell the rest that whatever comes next, we can’t hate our enemies. We do this for love of our friends, who we can’t stand to see hurt any more.”
Limestone took the first crate off. She’d be back for the second, soon. The stout pony stood on his mountainside and touched the star again, and he listened to Equestria sing.
Nightmare Moon’s loyalist unicorns tried to tear it down, as they were told.
They didn’t believe in what they were doing, though, not really. Where the resistance acted in co-ordination, the loyalists faced the spell with their own motivations, their own reasons. They acted as individuals, co-ordinated only by circumstance.
Some were loyal only out of fear. They turned away first. The truly hateful, the superior, held out longer. But love is nourishing, it feeds itself. Hate is exhausting. Even the most fervent of Nightmare Moon’s legion couldn’t keep their hand on the hot stove forever.
That was the worst part about the spell surrounding the Crystal Heart; They could feel what was in the hearts of their allies, too. Equestria sang to them, and how could they respond with anything but shame?
One by one, then all at once, they felt as the others winked out.
Rarity turned away in disgust. This was who she was. It was not who she should have been.
The sky was a rosey pink now.
Twilight was too terrified to touch the heart. She, more than anyone, knew the implications of the spell. She didn’t know if she could ever be ready - if she deserved to be a part of this.
She hadn’t been a hero. She was an antisocial, depressed loner. The kind of person who can speak out is the kind of person who’s used to being hated, anyway.
And here she was, helping save Equestria with the power of love.
Here with her wife.
What a bizarre word. She wasn’t used to that, yet.
Pinkie Sparkle-Pie nudged her side again. “Go on,” she said. “It’s yours as much as anyone’s.”
Twilight’s voice cracked, her throat was dry paper. “I don’t deserve this.”
“Who cares? Don’t do it because you need to, do it because you want to.”
Twilight touched the heart, and gasped.
She felt the Buffalo in Dodge Junction. Their love for each other, and their hopes for freedom.
She felt a desperate struggle in Canterlot, in the seat of power. Of a desperate need for hope. A fierce need to protect those who could not protect themselves.
She felt an army on a mountaintop, and their conviction that either all lives mattered, or none could.
She felt Manehattan, their need for expression, for connection.
She felt beyond Equestria’s borders, and their love for their way of life they had been so scared would be taken from them.
She felt the fear and anger and hate of the loyalists still clinging on. They were lost. They were losing.
One of them had been a stage magician. She had wanted to be great and powerful, but now she had never felt so small and insignificant.
Twilight felt it, too, but didn’t flinch away from it. Everyone mattered. It was as simple as that. Of course she didn’t feel like she deserved to be the hero of the story; When she touched the Crystal Heart, she was lost in just how massive Equestria was, how it felt to hear every single voice in it.
Nobody could be the hero, because everybody had to be.
Equestria had to save itself, if there was ever to be anything in it worth saving.
The traitor-pegasus lay in a crumpled wad at the treeline. The subrace with the noisy toys was having her guts stitched back in by a pegasus only of threat to herself. Celestia’s Captain had fled.
It had taken disgustingly long.
Nightmare Moon reached towards the infant sun, to tear it from the sky.
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Well, that led to some tears. I'm supposed to be in class. I'm lucky my camera is off.
It was fierce, it was touching. I was so scared when I saw Dotted Line was in this world.
And just this line. "She felt the fear and anger and hate of the loyalists still clinging on. They were lost. They were losing." That's when I lost it.
Damn, there's so much emotional and thematic depth here. I shouldn't have worried.
THANKS GUYS.
Yo, Dotted Line! It's been a minute since I've seen you!
Oh Rarity...
The multiple-perspective format of this chapter is so good. That little bit of comedy with the griffons was a welcome and unexpected breather from the justifiably high tension.
The one pressing question I have is: Photo Finish is a unicorn in this timeline?
10509625
She's not, I'm an idiot
I think that the red word should be 'when' rather than 'with'.
Oh, Rarity, why must you be so?