Apr. 2014 - Sweat, Flesh, Blood, And Bones - 1. Where The Rocks Pour
New Version:
When the blast shattered the Dragon’s den peak, hundreds of boulders, debris of all aspects and volutes of dirt scattered over Ponyville’s and Canterlot’s valleys; covering the region of thick and chafing greyish clouds. The atmosphere blackened.
The muddy fallouts concealed the sun for hours and the concerned ponies panicked as darkness was casted upon the Realm of the Two Sisters. Terrorized, some of them shouted that Nightmare Moon had returned.
In no time, Cloudsdale came to Canterlot’s rescue. But even with the common effort of everypony, it took a long time to chase the smoke away. The ambiance was prone to spread terror, deceit and thoughts of ill-omen into the minds of the surrounding inhabitants.
And this was why that, in this exceptional situation, nopony witnessed some tiny and strange shaped shadows fall across the blackish sky.
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Falling along, five featherless bodies were shaking their limbs in vain. Powerless, they screamed; the ground was approaching at an insane speed.
Having the time and a mind dedicated to reflection, they would have seen on their left horizon a strange chain of sharped mountains, bordered by a dense forest of dark green leaves, location where they were desperately heading. Long and impressively large rivers crossed this green sea.
They would have also seen hung onto a steep mountain a strange and magnificent castle of gold and silver.
However, staying alive was the unique idea agitating their minds at the moment.
Tearing down the air, they saw themselves closing to a lake dwelling in the middle of the strange forest. The number of feet separating them from the impact was lessening each second. The unfortunate and still conscious sky-divers held their breath.
They dipped into water. It felt like crashing into concrete, smashing… in the literal way.
Waves formed onto the lake as the five falling ‘birds’ sunk into at an astonishing speed. Seconds later, a wrecked four wheeled cage of metal crashed on the shores few meters away, bounced and finished its reckless race on the bordering beach.
Giving off fumes, the vehicle broke down and fell apart in thousands of pieces.
The waves faded away and the place recovered its former silent state.
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In the hours following the biggest, and certainly the coolest as said by a certain rainbow coloured Pegasus, explosion Equestria had ever seen, the two Princesses Luna and Celestia went to Ponyville to hear the account of the oldest sister’s most faithful student.
Dazed, they listened to the whole story.
“So you’re telling me,” initiated Princess Celestia, massaging her temple to make the report easier to chew on. “That you cast an explosive spell on the tallest mountain of Equestria in order to scatter away a magical storm.”
Twilight’s lips drew a strange shaped smile, swinging between a poorly executed poker face and an anxious rictus.
“Basically… no… I mean… yes, but everypo…”
Celestia and Luna covered their eyes with their hooves, disbelieving. Luna cut her off.
“Do thou understand how aberrant thy deed hath been?” She said with a mighty anger glaring in her eyes. “What if falling pieces of the peak had broken into the midst of random cottages? It could have killed ponies! This could have been pudh!”
Luna became more and more cryptic as her speech slept toward a very old equestrian dialect. She started grunting, spasms running within her neck’s fur.
“But, I tried that spell Celestia learned me month ago about cloud chasing.”
“It was meant to be a kind of fun spell we can use during parties to shape the clouds… not to make them go away. That’s a pegasus’s job…” Celestia pointed out with a stern voice after having pushed aside her sister. “And you used the Elements!”
“I ran out of power… And they were so intrusive and oppressing. Don’t punish me please…” Twilight squeaked, mentioning her friends.
She leaned toward her teacher, mumbling in fear and shame. Celestia and Luna let out a loud breath. The Princess of the Sun raised her head and start talking with a compassionate and friendly voice.
“You can’t solve everything with pure magic and power,” She turned and faced Twilight’s friends. “And you shall learn that forcing out advantages from your friend is not a worthy of and respectable behaviour.”
“We’re sorry.” Everypony yielded.
“Now go out and help everypony clear the chaos you’ve wreaked upon us.” Luna added after she calmed herself. “You will write a letter tonight to my sister… all of you. And Fluttershy…”
The yellow pegasus dunked her head in her shoulders when she heard her name.
“Lots of debris struck the surrounding forests. You should ask Zecora to help you searching for hurt or wounded animals.”
Fluttershy nodded, thanked the princess and went out with all of her friends.
“Huge explosion on second thought,” Luna remarked, a small smile printed on her lips.
“Maybe too huge… do you remember thousand years ago during our confrontation? We tore apart some fabric of time and space.”
“Yes, now you told it We remember. That was utterly amusing,” She giggled before Celestia sent her a clear message about the seriousness of the situation. Her stare glared daggers.
“And this is how we… I… had to fight this Shoggoth or whatever the name legends gave to it,” The princess of the Sun shivered.
“Tekeli-li!” Luna howled, startling Celestia who jumped on the nearest table as if she had seen a mouse.
“Stop… Stop It!” She yelled, her white and silky fur bristled all over her body. “We said to never talk of this again!”
Luna was still laughing when they came out of the Golden Oak Library. She stopped and arched an eyebrow. A huge boulder was standing in the middle of the street. Earth ponies were digging it out with pickaxes, making it easier to move.
“It’s nearly time to set the sun and raise the moon Lulu.”
“Don’t call me that way, it’s unnerving.”
“Everything is a fair game… Lulu,” Celestia stuck out her tongue, winking.
In the sky, the emissaries and forces of Cloudsdale were clearing the last remnants of the smoky clouds.
The moon had risen on Equestria and the stars were tingling above the tired lands. Ponies were going to sleep.
Luna was standing on her balcony. It was time for her duty. She stretched her legs and leaned on her couch. Her horn started glowing a bright cyan, throwing small sparkles all over her deep blue mane. Her brows slowly closed and she felt slipping away.
When she opened her eyes again, Luna was floating over her physical body. She had taken an invisible and ghostly shape. On this plan of existence, Luna’s view was shaded and blackened as was the environment. She looked at her hooves. Pure white light was exuding of her body whose contours seemed unclear.
In this sea of darkness where the remnant colours seemed to be distorted, she could see islands of pure blue light. Each was picturing a pony or any living being experiencing a peaceful dream. The light turned bloody when nightmares and fears were overcoming an unfortunate dreamer.
It had been this way for eons, and she did not expect this fact to change.
Levitating, she elevated herself over the lands. She reached the upper parts of the atmosphere. Millions of lights were glowing in the grim dark. The silent of space was overwhelming. She liked it. The common reality was a noisy, deceitful and disgraceful place to stride across. Here, in this deaf place she was whole, she was a true goddess.
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Earlier…
Heads surfaced, breathing in loudly, coughing and swearing. Five strange forms swam aimlessly and clumsily to the beach where the car was dwelling, torn apart. Crawling in the sand, all the survivors felt the wet sand gluing to their hands, skin and clothes. Some spat and vomited the water filling their lungs.
The five had survived thanks to an ungodly luck. If the lake had not been here, they would have ended as pulp-like puddles on the ground.
The sun was low in the sky and dusk’s light was reverberating on dark and smoggy clouds miles away from here. The sky was a melting pot of shades of blue, deep purple and pink.
“Maria?” the hesitant voice of Ray asked. “How long it has been since we saw a nearly-clear sky last and… the sun?”
“Years…” She replied with a smile as she gulped out an ounce of water.
“Three hundred and eighty nine days.” Kreps specified and deadpanned: “At least we don’t have to see a burning solar storm.”
“Thanks egg-head,” Ray giggled as he passed away from exhaust, water was running from his dark brown hair.
Spread out on the shore, everyone was taking great delight in sinking their hands into the fine sand.
Maria tilted her head on her left. Not everyone was enjoying the situation… Verdugo was reanimating the kid, using his type of “kind” heart massage that only he had the secret. The child could have spat out his intestines that would have been unsurprising. Unlucky was a suited word in the end. It was the first time Maria paid attention to the young boy. He was very small and had suffered from malnutrition. His black hairs were badly cut and his face was bruised. He had been molested for weeks as old and new marks were placed on the top of each other.
Salty water came instead of the bloody organs. Trembling, the kid opened his eyes and looked at his saviour with a wandering stare.
On his own, Verdugo was also shaking. It was due to the pain running in the wound plaguing his shoulder. It was flooding blood again and everyone could see that how many times the injured man tried, he could not move his right arm. His limb was pitifully dangling, dragging along the sand when he was on his knees.
Three times, he palpated it with his working left hand, each time he frowned. And before Maria, Ray or Kreps asked him about it, he shouted in disbelief.
“It isn’t working. I can’t feel it beyond the wound.”
However he could still barely move his fingers. He kicked away angrily a scrap of metal which crashed in the lake’s water, drowning fast.
“Verd’, night is coming. Come here that I heal you up a bit.” Ray proposed as he got up, worries dwelling in his eyes. He cared about his friend.
Objecting, Verdugo surrendered when Ray, the leader of this group of stooges casted a stern and caring glance at the stinking and ugly hollow in his shoulder.
“Maria will be sad when she’ll bury your rotting corpse tomorrow morning.”
Verdugo acted as he had heard nothing.
The wound was naughty, but Ray tried his best to fix it without throwing up. Now the bandage was holding Verdugo’s arm tight to his pectoral, keeping it from bleeding out.
“It’s the least I can do, but we need to urge, we have no antiseptic for you.”
“I’m going to hunt something to eat. I’m starving,” Verdugo stated as a response, emotionless. “Take a look to the map with Kreps, I think it was on the back seat when the storm struck us.”
Ray’s mouth was hanging low. He tried to contest his wounded friend’s will to go hunt some wild animals, but Verdugo was as stubborn as a mule. And before he disappeared behind the bushes which marked a clear distinction between the dark forest and the beach, Verdugo called the only woman of the group.
“Maria, find the f’cking box and keep the kid from touching it… ever again,” Verdugo paused, pointing her with his finger. “Then give it to Kreps, it’s his own after all.”
He leaped silently in the forest after Maria had given him a long and rusty knife. She sighed, offended.
“He’s stupid,” Maria looked at the sky, searching for a sign which could have agreed with her.
“Insanely mad,” Kreps supposed, occupied to draw in the sand and curled up to avoid any pain easen the pain coming from his thorax.
“Nah… He’s doing his job. That’s what I ask him to. We must rely on each one’s skills remember,” Ray cut them off while he was trying to extract the shard of glass from his face, remains of his loved glasses. He glared at the forest’s edge. “And he will never change.”
Yes, he never changed and would never. Was he already a bloody killer before? They were all clueless. Only Maria could have known, she was the first to have crossed Verdugo’s blood smeared path. And the only one to have looked in the metal cylinder he was always carrying with him, and survived the aftermaths. As every random human, no one liked to be spied on. And Verdugo was an extremely spiteful person. What was inside the cylinder was as secret as what was lying inside Kreps’s metal box. However Maria had always stayed quite silent about it. She was afraid and also appreciative of him.
Maria always pictured Verdugo as a big brother while Ray saw him as a friend or an employee… It was depending of the time. Kreps on his own considered him as a colleague and a rival.
On the other hand, Verdugo had always been distant with everyone. He was always hanging away from them… but also from everyone. This applied to every situation, during the occasional peaceful meeting on the roads, during the trading with random voyagers or even during the deadly fights for survival, when he was not sinking a sharped edge in someone’s flesh. The exception was maybe Maria.
Ray and Kreps snapped out of their thinking.
“If I caught you stalking on me, I’ll make you eat your own balls,” The woman stated, staring evilly at her friends. “And this isn’t a joke. You eyeball, you’ll never see them all.”
Hiding behind the car wreck, she put off her clothes and dived into the lake. In apnea she examined the bottom of the huge loch where they fell into. She surfaced, breathed in and peaked again.
Kreps and Ray, afraid of their little fury, scavenged the remains of the car, avoiding casting a glance to the shore. Maria had always been modest; even more she seemed to fear people looking at her naked. She was a woman after all, usual target in the wasteland.
There was nothing much left around the car, speaking of functional things. They found one torchlight, wet matches, a lighter, a net, few meters of rope, two maps – one of Europe and another of the world – wet as well, and of course a large, heavy and indented metal box.
They struggled extracting it out of the car’s trunk.
Ray searched in his pockets, only to find wet dirt and few coins… He threw them in the lake. The key to the lock was missing. They sighed. During fifty minutes they tried opening it by force with an improvised crowbar, a rock and even Kreps’s head.
Nothing got done with it in the end.
“Hey, take that!”
Maria, now drying her long dark hair, threw them the key she had pull out of her jacket, hanging on the car, two meters away from her two male mates. Their tired and murderous stares fixed her. She laughed.
She had wrapped herself in a fabric, hiding her sickly thin body nearly entirely. Her skin was tanned, but time and a lack of sunlight had washed out her original tint.
In the box was tidied up half a dozen of weapons, knives and guns. Add to this armoury an old rifle, a shotgun, a long sword, two ice-picks and at least sixty or seventy cartridges of all sorts. Any witness would have a good insight of the group’s fire power. Wandering and stalking in the cities and abandoned military areas had always been rewarding, but also awfully dangerous. More than one scar was the reminder of such truth.
It would have been an even more impressive equipment if not all the weapons had been rusty and eaten up by time and climate. Moreover, most of the cartridges did not match with the present weapons.
The last part of the scavenging was to extract the useful components of the car, its battery, wires, lamps, oil and everything on what they could rely on in the future.
The sun had set at the horizon when Maria lit a fire. The warm was welcomed as everyone was shivering in the night’s coldness.
“Where are we?” Maria asked, looking at the map lying in front of everyone. It was written in German.
“Before today’s… incident, we were thirty kilometres away from Vienna,” Kreps showed with his finger pointing a position to the South-East of the city’s name. “We derived a bit from the chosen path because of the smashed roads. Remember we’ve passed the Alps ten days ago thanks to the Spring and,” he turned toward Ray. “You wanted us to go to…”
“Berlin,” Ray responded.
Kreps’s eyes brightened up.
Again, Maria would have liked to know why but a rustle in their back cut off their discussion. With his poorly sharped and broken knife drawn out, Verdugo was carrying a big animal. Blood from the flank of the thing was running on his grey rags.
The animal seemed like a big rodent, a very large rat with a small tail.
“What the hell is that?” Maria asked along with Kreps. Utter disgust could be read on their face.
Troubled stares welcomed him and his catch.
“It’s a coypu,” Verdugo replied with a raised brow. “A kind of beaver if you want to know the details,” He insisted. “There is lots of life around here, bears and stuff.”
“Is it… eatable?” Ray pouted.
“Will see.”
Annoyed, Verdugo fixed Kreps who was holding the map.
“Are you sure we’re still in Austria? I thought it was around Vienna that a chemical bombing has been performed by Russia or whatever... years ago.”
“I guess, I don’t know what the storm did but we got catapulted…” Kreps noticed blasé.
“We ain’t dead, that’s the first miracle,” Verdugo looked askance at Maria. “And the box? What about it?”
Maria’s jaw dropped. She raised her hand in a desperate and useless attempt to explain herself. No sound came out of her mouth. An amused smile cleared her face.
Verdugo, on his own tried to join the palms of his hands in a praying gesture, only to see his right arm was still not working. It added a straw to his current overloaded burden.
“What I’m gonna do with you all...” He whispered.
Ray, felling a conflict forthcoming eased the tension, pretending it would be easier to search for the dangerous box in the morning.
They grilled the dead animal and eat it up in silence. They first threw up. The taste was revolting, a mix between mud, fat and bitterness. It was like biting through sludge.
They ended up with a remaining hunger, assiduously clinging to their guts, and with an awful bellyache.
Later after the unsavoury meal, Maria came to see Verdugo’s state. He was lying in the frame of the car, complaining on the last available seat. Whatever the position he took, the pain was driving him insane.
Seeing Maria getting into the wreck he turned over the opposite side. He was still angry at her.
“Oh come on, stop rolling your dumb eyes.”
“You know if it wasn’t you I might have ripped off your neck.”
“I know, but I’m your sister after all.”
“You’re just my foster sister, “He emphasised on ‘foster’. “Remember that I didn’t sign for this. And I don’t want them to know,” He pointed Kreps’s and Ray’s sleeping forms near the fire. “I took care of your pretty ass since I raided that bandit camp three years ago.”
“I was fourteen years old, I was a burden, but you still kept me. And Ray and Kreps ain’t blind… C’mon admit it, you like me!” She teased him up.
“I like you because you’re the only one here that I can have a good fight with. Ray is too preoccupied in getting in touch with his parents again to endanger the cohesion of the group and Kreps… well he’s the egghead. He has his own strange plans. And I don’t hit the one who can repair my knife.”
“Eh you’re so stupid that I want to believe you do it on purpose!” She giggled. “You would like to do a Baraka.”
“It’s been a long time indeed. But I think my right arm won’t let me perform such… unfeminine sport,” He replied ironically.
Maria gave him back his spooky smile. This contest they had invented was indeed pretty dangerous, deadly sometimes.
“I’ll beat you again as I did over the ten last games, filthy barbaric!”
“Will see that. Tomorrow we head to the North-West. We gonna see if Vienna is still standing there.”
They paused, a long silent settled between them. Verdugo finally faced Maria, plunging his stare in the nut-brown eyes of the girl.
“Did you ever go there?” Maria asked genuinely.
“Nah! But it is said it is… was a beautiful place. An’ you?”
“No… Before the uproar I never went out of Spain…” She remained silent for several seconds. “Oh wait, I got something for you!”
She dropped a heavy case on Verdugo’s knees. She had hidden it behind her jacket the whole time.
“Where… you shitty liar!”
“It landed in a bush not far from the beach. Kreps saw it when he went pissing earlier.”
“Take this thing away from me…” Verdugo protested in disgust. “… And us, that’s a dangerous shit.”
“Yeah, yeah… You sure that’s radioactive?”
“I already said it’s Kreps’s box, I’m only the keeper. And he is the engineer, he should have kept it.”
After being casted away, Maria left Verdugo to his unsteady sleep. Before coming back to her warm couch near of the fire, she dropped the case in the water. ‘It is said that liquid can reduce radioactivity, right?’, she thought.
Sleepiness took over the camp as the moon was at his height.
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Luna was wandering around in her night sky. Looping and free as she never felt before, she moved carelessly over Equestria and the lands beyond. Sometimes, when a bright sphere was turning red, she was slowly closing and with a kind touch of her hoof spread peace in its heart.
She liked this dawdling carefree spirit state. She could hear the stars twinkling above her head.
And each time she went here every night, it was always feeling like her first time. It was an unending and everlasting discovery.
She moved to the Bad Lands. She giggled when she sent a tiny spider in Chrysalis’s dream, only living creature the Hive Queen was scared of, ‘oh the irony’ everypony would say if they knew the truth. But Luna always kept this secret like a Pinkie Pie’s promise to herself.
She went to Warclaw, the griffon capital across the see. There she gave her most devoted salute to the Griffon Imperator which was dreaming of his youth.
She floated to the North where, as she found out that Shining Armour and Princess Cadance were having the same hot and sweaty dream, she linked their thoughts and dream for the night.
She also guided this old dragon in the Deep South which was desperately searching for the best position to fall into slumber.
She started coming back to her balcony, as the sun would rise within the hour. But she found herself attracted by a certain region of a certain forest. There, sleeping near of a lake, five spheres were shining along. These beings of light were absolutely different from what she had ever seen and experienced before.
In fact, each species has its own orb’s shape. Ponies’ was perfectly spherical when Griffons’ was a bit oval. And these five throbbing shapes looked like broken shards. Luna could not definitely call these… orbs.
Her curiosity being aroused, Princess Luna took a deep breath and put her hooves on the first shard, she bring it closer to her horn until they touched. A small bolt of lightning joined them both, and Luna sunk into the dream.
The place was a bright, magnificent and delightful meadow of yellow wheat. The wind was slowly brushing through the field, printing evanescent shapes on the tops of the crop. The breeze was carrying smells of fresh out of the oven bread and croissants as a dash of sugar and honey filled Luna’s mouth and lungs.
She longley breath in.
It was beyond describable. It was similar to standing into the greatest bakery a world would ever possess. She was into heaven or at least she thought that she had found what Alicorns’ Paradise could look like, feel like, taste like and of course smell like.
Resting in a recess of the field, surrounded by the warm cereals, Luna was savouring the moment when she heard laughter. Brought by the wind, the giggles flooded Luna’s mind as she sought for its source. On the top of the recess was toddling a strange, small creature.
Standing on two limbs, it was chasing a butterfly. Its hooves which in reality ended with hands similar to those of a dragon were devoid of claws. The cute creature was trying ineffectively to grasp the tiny blue and red insect.
The creature’s mane was composed of a long dark coiffure contrasting with the golden colour of the field. She had absolutely no fur. Her bare skin was pale. The wind was blowing, making her hairs fluttering.
Her cries and giggles echoed in Luna’s mind. The little, armless and lovely creature was running away.
“Child, wait!” Luna asked, raising a hoof toward what it looked like to be the dreamer.
Unfortunately no answer came from the running being as it started fading beyond the top of the hill. Luna launched herself in what appeared to be the dreamer’s tow. She ran for few minutes as if the hill was far higher than it seemed to be.
The child was on her knees, holding a teddy bear. But Luna could not have cared less about it; she was stricken by an unfair spectacle.
An ocean of burning buildings of every shape stood before her. The smoke was raising high in the sky. The smell of baking was suddenly chased away by the one of roasting and rotting flesh of livings. Her ears were flooded by thousands of screams.
Luna could not keep herself from crying.
“I always wanted a pony,” the child genuinely said, picking up Luna’s attention. “But mommy and daddy…” She hesitated. “…aren’t here anymore to gift me one.”
She grabbed Luna’s fur with her small and chubby hands and stared in her tearful eyes. Her look was earth-shattering. The child’s brown eyes were amazingly moving.
“Miss, do you know where are my daddy and mommy?”
The dream ended abruptly.
Even in this ghostly plan, Luna caught herself crying, her? Having tears rolling on her cheeks in this dimension where she was an absolute god? It was unthinkable. Even deeply-moved, her curiosity was still excited. And what she saw was quite amusing. One of the lasting spheres was flickering back and forth from blue to red.
It was titillating. She repeated the same procedure, came closer to the strangely shaped dream and dived into it.
It was pitch black. Luna was without a doubt walking on something but she could not see the ground or the ceiling. In fact she first thought she was blinded.
There was nothing but blackness… and her. The princess could see herself distinctly but once it was not her, she was blind. Her horseshoes echoed as if she was walking on a marbled surface.
She hit her head against an invisible wall. Lifting her up, she groped for what she crashed into. Luna felt the wall at the end of her hoof. She gave a little bang.
She jumped back as she saw a white wave spreading upon what she just knocked, embracing the structure then fading away. For a second, Luna saw a corner appear few feet away from her.
She got an idea.
Jumping high in the air, she fell heavily on the ground. This time, bigger white waves sprawled on a far longer distance. She saw two buildings standing in front of her.
She started running, thundering her silver horseshoes onto the ground, flooding this strange dream of her white shockwaves. A hollowed and silent city started shaping and blooming under her hooves as she headed to a monstrously large square. In its centre stood a gigantic fountain. Unfortunately, no water was filling its pond.
Silence came back as Luna stopped stomping the ground, but the edge of the buildings did not fade with this sudden stop. The white contours of the constructions remained. A deafened black and white city was circling the Princess. She was reluctant to say if she was feeling at ease or not.
There was absolutely no sound…
A… a jingling? A jingling reverberated throughout the city.
”When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon…”
Luna turned around. Far away from her, deep inside the shadows of a skimpy street, a floating and bouncing jawbone loaded of sharped teeth was closing in. The jingling intensified. Another bouncing jaw appeared, creeping out of the next street. Another came up, and a new one showed up, again and again until Luna found herself surrounded by these monstrous breeds of a mind she did not know or imagine to exist.
Stress filled up Luna’s mind, the fear crawled within her skin, climbing back up her limbs and her fur and gaining her chest. Luna felt like a sharpened and cold talon had tightened her beating heart and with its claws was trying to squeeze it out. Shivers ran through Luna’s mane.
She felt a void of love, of this good feeling of happiness inside of her mind. Everything had been replaced by utter panic. Her terror was so high it made her unable to move an inch. More than just feeling her heart tightened, this… was like having a hand crushing her inner being, and trying to rip off her soul out of her thorax. Never again she wanted to feel that way. It was unbearable.
“Make it stop! Please!!” She implored.
The jaws stopped, circling Luna and the fountain. Ready to strike and aiming at the throat, they were all drooling… waiting for her to move.
A strong hand grasped Luna’s neck. She was forced to turn back.
A muscled entity was staring at her, trying to understand something out of Luna’s range. He looked like and differed also from the first dreamer. He was not that tall. Well he was way taller than a random pony but Luna was clearly overcoming him in height, thanks to her horn. But the strength the creature was delivering outmatched everything Luna had faced before. Worse, she was unable to fight back when her opponent was only using one arm.
He was strangling her, his grasp was too powerful. Luna’s glance ran over his head, a skinny and plate head with a small black mane on its top, two dark green eyes and a mouth loaded of dental plaque. His skin was tanned and covered of scars. His chest was muscled, but the starvation made him look like a skeleton. What captivated the princess was that monstrous hollow at the level of his right shoulder. The wound was disgusting to watch, but no blood was flooding out.
“You’re hurt?” the princess hissed in pain.
Luna tried to ease the situation, losing any sense of manners. Sweat of stress rolled on her face.
Her interlocutor was not amused. He released his suffocating grasp and forced Luna to bend, pushing her onto her knees. His stare was frightening.
He started talking.
“My… my… my. What do we got here? I really am becoming insane,” The surprised creature laughed swiftly, ruffling the mane on his head.
Drawing out a long knife he jabbed her with its point. She shrieked.
“What a funny shape you’ve got here.”
Luna was bemused. He was a… lucid dreamer. That was unexpected… dangerously unexpected. Few ponies were actually able to perform such experience, and Luna always avoided those dreams. In fact, the orbs of each dreamer had to turn a slightly green when they was starting a “lucid dive”. The looping changes of colour of the creature’s shard had deceived her.
“My beloved subject, we shall let thou at thy dream as our duty forbids us to intervene within those who awaken in the sleepy Limbos.”
The creature laughed. It was a frank laugh, something he had not performed since… for a long period.
“I really am mad. First time my own dreams tell me that kind of crap.”
“We are the Princess of the Night, keeper of the dreaming realm. Thou violent creature hast an impolite behaviour. Shall We punish thy deeds tonight, bringing nightmares to thou?”
At her last words the creature frowned. Luna started regretting her sayings when the monster’s face distorted in a strange grin.
She tried to break the link between her and the conscious dreamer. Gob-smacked, she witnessed her powerlessness to escape from this ethereal place. The creature looked at the pond, anger could be read on his face. He sighed.
“Here are two options that are yours to choose. To wake up from a dream, you know that either you have to kill the dreamer,” he smiled again. “Or, you have to wait until the dreamer has finished his business down here.”
The creature waved at the steady jaws waiting to leap on Luna and him. They replied with a cacophony of laughter and clinking.
“So, here are the so-called choices. On the first hand you decide to kill me in the most horrendous way you could imagine…This is your…” He sniggered. “so-called punishment... Time to see if my own dreams are interesting.”
He drew out a bloodied and broken knife then placed it in Luna’s trembling hoof. Her stare was swapping between the suicidal monster and the bladed weapon.
“… or you wait until I wake up while you’ll be devoured by my over excited sprawling imagination, with me as a spectator.”
He snapped his finger, which made Luna focus.
“The choice is yours,” He said with dryness. His grin was skanky. “You have the choice, you rebellious dream of mine.”
Luna was aware that the dreamer thought she was a dream. Sometimes, the lucid dreamer was fighting to keep themselves awake within here. This kind of situation was rare but absolutely dangerous for watchers like Luna.
Now she was quivering, unable to understand the reasoning behind the monster’s saying, behind the choices she was given. She stared at her mind tormentor, she was going to ask for mercy, but the outcome came to be different as he became aware of the princess’s next sentence.
“Wrong answer!” He sadistically said.
Kicking the knife away from Luna’s hoof, the creature drew out of the blackness a sword and aimed toward Luna’s neck. The blow was fast and clear. The floating jaws leaped on the two shapes facing them.
₰ ϡ ϗ φ ϗ ϡ ₰
Luna escaped her sleeping state and howled with a deep and hissing breath. She started groping nervously around her neck, her shoulders and her chest. They were nothing, no blood, no flesh dawdling around, nothing.
Sweat streamed on her body as she regained her senses. She was still on her balcony, shaking. Celestia was standing in front of her, worries casted in her eyes. Her breath was heavy and loud.
Three guards were circling the princess in a security perimeter.
The moon had set and the sun had already swapped with its place high in the horizon, Celestia had taken initiatives.
“Lulu, you’ve worried us all. We couldn’t wake you up! What happened?”
Still feeling around her skin she started talking with a trembling and blabbering voice.
“Deep in the Everfree, they were five dreamers, I’ve explored two of their dreams,” She hissed, her eyes insanely wide opened. “The first one was disturbing, sad. But the last one…” She started crying. “The dreamer… he trapped me inside. It was scary. I never felt that way before…”
Luna leaped into Celestia’s hooves, searching for reassuring warmth while bursting into tears. She had forgotten about her etiquette. Only fear was bathing her mind. This already new situation shocked the three guards. Powerless in front of this pathetic play, Celestia asked for privacy. The witnesses drew back out of Luna’s room.
“Then it… that unknown creature… it… he talked to me and asked me two things I couldn’t do,” She squeezed her head between her hooves. “And he… he had that tremendous sword. He slashed me!”
The last word came as a screech, Luna was grinding her teeth. She stared into Celestia’s eyes, grieved and astray.
“I… I died down there… for the first time in my life.”
Luna cringed in her sister’s hooves. Celestia tried to give her a sisterly hug. But her sister never really stopped shaking. This play was earth-shattering, pitiful and unnerving.
The Princess of the Day called back her guards.
“Contact the Element Bearers! They have to find these five sparks in the night. Tell them to go in the Everfree Forest. Make sure they bring them back here,” She paused. “Nopony will ever harm my sister again nor will endanger my little ponies’ security. I want to know how they are. Bring them back here… peacefully.”
Celestia was visibly infuriated. The look of her crying sister was clearly an unbearable spectacle to watch. What did Twilight’s explosive experience have brought to this world? She looked toward the Everfree Forest far away in the horizon.
₰ ϡ ϗ φ ϗ ϡ ₰
Maria yawned, stretching her body. She looked around and saw she was the first to wake up. She had made a strange dream. But as usual she could not remember it clearly and soon this memory would fade away.
She laid on her back for basically twenty minutes straight, waiting for the sun to rise from behind the mountains standing high in the East. And then it showed up.
The sun was biting her skin. Two days of full sunshine was too hard to bear for somebody who had not seen it for more than a year. But on the other side, it was relieving. It reminded her of her old country, bathed by the warmth and the sunshine. A place once beautiful and where living was cheerful and carefree.
She decided to take a peak in the lake’s clear waters. Refreshing was the only word which popped in her mind.
She surfaced. Something was afoot in fact. She now remembered that at the east of their position, they should not be mountains. They had already passed the Alps she kept saying, it was weird. She had to ask Kreps, but tickling the sleeping geek was like playing with amorphous goo… basically useless. A roaring plane could carpet bomb his ass that it would not even make him move a hair or arch a brow.
Once she went out of the water, she instantly wrapped herself in the same fabric than the last evening. She dried herself as fast as possible.
She looked at her back and put on her clothes. She jumped onto the top of the wrecked car, making his inhabitant grumbling in his sleep and cast a glare around her. She expected the sun to warm her up.
It was a magnificent beach positioned in a vast clearing of the surrounding forest. From her location Maria could see fishes swimming around the shore. She cursed the world for not having a line.
Speaking of the forest, it seemed inscrutable. The thick foliage of thousands of trees was hiding the sun from the lower part of the place. Maria was not claustrophobic, but thinking about wandering into that place was not giving her the best feeling.
She gasped.
Something had grabbed her leg and had thrown her on the sand. She screamed like a scared bird as she fell onto the ground.
“And bang you’re dead!” Verdugo scorned.
“Fuck off man; you’ve beat the shit out of me!”
“Yeah, it’s fun.”
“Your death will be long and painful!”
“And would you be so kind to tell me how?” He deadpanned.
She thought with a finger on her lips. An idea came up.
“If I kick up your ass during the next Baraka you’ll tell me what you were doing before the Uproar.”
“My little dear,” He sighed. “You can know about Ray, Kreps, this child,” he pointed the so-called kid, still sleeping on his handmade couch of sand. “But you know that I don’t want to talk about something which does not matter anymore.”
“Chicken?” She imitated the animal.
Verdugo was slung to the quick. He did not like to have his honour flouted that way.
“Okay, this is on!”
When Ray opened his eyes, he witnessed two furious noisy acquaintances fighting over a matter way ahead of his preoccupations. He rubbed his eyes before taking one of the last remnants of the beaver. He liked so much a cold rotten and sickly tasting meat as breakfast. But the hunger was driving him insane. He chew air, masticating the thick and dried saliva between his cheeks.
He called out loud the two demons to stop their fight right away. They groused before bending to his demand and joined him around the cold feast.
“I had a weird dream,” Ray said. “I saw you Verd’. You were wearing a ballerina outfit.”
Maria spat the chewed beaver out of her mouth, laughing out loud.
“Ah… ah… ah. I hoped I gave you a boner. ” The concerned party replied with a fake laugh and irony.
Maria raised her voice.
“I dreamed about a girl, me… I don’t remember, but I saw a blue and black unicorn in my dream. I felt like crazy. Unicorn? That’s silly…” Maria guffawed when she remembered some random parts of her dream.
“You’re becoming too soft woman! Bad habits are coming back,” Verdugo teased her, his voice seemed hesitant. “One step further and we’ll have to build you a kitchen to remain in.”
“Nah… just a moment of distraction. And you Verd’, did you dream?”
He stood up, pretending to examine his badly bandaged and oozing wound.
“Yeah I dreamt but that’s none of your business.”
Ray and Maria fixed each other with a worried look. Ray gave her a shrug. She applied the palm of her hand onto her forehead.
Ray often asked himself if this man who had helped, saved and defended him and his group so many times was nothing but a grieved hollowed body that did appear in the following of the apocalypse to keep them alive, like a guardian angel…
Few minutes later, the muted kid and Kreps had woken up and were voraciously, but with a pinch of disgust, eating the last drops of the beaver. But in fact, nothing could undermine the hunger of the group at the moment.
Maria was trying to catch fish bare-handed, task nearly impossible though while Verdugo was walking into circles at the opposite side of the beach.
Ray was surprised and worried about the kid. He did not talk, never told his name and seemed to be reluctant to have anybody moving closer to him. He was like a scared animal… a frightened pet which was always keeping a safe distance with its “masters” but was forced to follow them in order to survive another day in this world.
He was young, very young; maybe ten… twelve years old.
One of his incisors was missing, a milk tooth probably and he had numerous scars running on his face. He had black hairs and his skin was scarily ghoulish. Strange, he had amazingly light blue eyes that pierced from side to side whoever stared into.
His clothes were torn apart. With a hint of compassion, Ray tried to find a way to give him decent clothing. But he found himself also wearing remainders of such items. How long had it been since he last saw himself in a mirror?
He looked toward the lake. The temptation to look at his reflection was teasing, but he did not want to see how ugly and wrecked he was. When he was gazing at Kreps or Verdugo, what he was seeing was two walking bag of bones whose faces were covered of unclean beard and scars, with shadows under their eyes.
Reaching his chin, Ray touched a rough mass of filthy hair and a small bald mark, his neck scar. He sighed.
Maria was his sunshine, always radiant even if she was skinny as hell and that she had developed no breast at all… thanks starvation. But she was always smiling and joking around in the group. Maybe she was the only thing keeping him and everyone sane from the madness of the post-uproar world.
He would have not been able to keep up without her around. Did he love her? He did not know. But what he was sure of was that he would defend her at all cost… because ‘light must not die’, he thought.
Verdugo came up with a clever invention. He had cut two long and resistant stick of wood. And with an intertwining of ropes, he made of the heavy metallic trunk where every weapon was resting something barely transportable. It required two strong pairs of shoulders to be manoeuvred. The case weighted nearly one hundred pounds.
“Okay, who start the tour?” Verdugo asked.
Everybody started whistling.
He, in spite of his injured right shoulder, and Kreps started carrying the heavy case as Maria was leading the tow, the “radioactive” box in her bag. Everyone was carrying a heavy pack on their back and even the soundless child was participating in the exhausting manoeuvre, wearing the wet blanket Maria used to dry herself.
Ray was desperately deciphering the map written in German, which was not a language he was mastering at all.
“Neu… Neusi… Neusiedler See. If this is the lake we’re going along, we’re at twenty… thrity miles from Vienna. If we go straight to its north we’ll find…Neu… Neusiedl am… Oh fuck! Why German names are so unpronounceable!”
Kreps laughed.
“No seriously that’s annoying!”
“You want to swap spaces,” Kreps asked, panting heavily.
Ray got muted and gave himself a minute of reflection. Ray got hold of himself.
“Okay, if we find that f’cking city we could find a road to Vienna. But if we don’t, we have to go to the North West. Should be easy no?”
He said this expecting a global nod from each of his companions. But everybody was focusing on not stepping on a devilish root which could make them fall. The forest was thick and Maria had to cut through with Verdugo’s knife. Weird and stressing sounds were popping intermittently. Branches cracked under everyone boots. And the lack of animals’ cries, howls and presence evidences was another straw on the camel back.
“Remind me to never come here again please,” Maria asked with a trembling voice. “And… Verdugo, don’t you say yesterday that you saw animals?”
“Yes… yesterday…”
A distant howl echoed in the forest, the first and macabre proof that something was still living in this remote place of Europe… But was it really Europe? The trees were slightly different. The sky was different. Everything looked similar, but also deeply changed. Everyone had witnessed that the colours were more vivid, flashy, or smooth, they could not find words to describe this impression. Kreps supposed this was the sunlight’s influence. They had stared to a greyish environment for so long their eyes had forgotten the true meaning of colour.
The sun was high in the sky and the group enjoyed each pause in the few clearings they passed by. It was relieving. One had to enjoy the little things a great mind said someday.
The trekking lasted for hours and the sun was low in the west now when they finally found something.
“Hey look! Here is the city!” Maria shouted as she cleared a way through a vast area where wild grass and wheat was growing chaotically.
On the other side of the field was standing a huge and abandoned construction of stone.
“In a few miles you’ll be able to admire an antic castle of whatever the fuck it could be era,” Kreps ironized, mimicking the voice of a low quality GPS.
It was indeed an old and remote place whose walls had been undermined by the time. No window was still standing intact and the area seemed to have been unvisited for eons.
“Okay,” Ray stopped everyone before they went out of the safe cover the forest was offering them. “Take some weapons out, we could encounter bandits and we have wounded peoples.”
He stared at Verdugo and Kreps who was both wounded and had grumbled all along the way. Ray and Maria had to swap with their position dozens of times during the walk. Kreps had a rib cracked and only Maria’s nimble fingers made him able to surpass the pain. Verdugo’s state was way more worrying. He had fallen several times on the way. The wound was infected and fever had started running through his veins. Within hours he won’t have any strength left to move and it will be the end of the trip for him. And this, Maria could not let it be. She would like to be more useful but she had to fight her friend’s fierceness and proudness.
Ray spoke to the mute boy who was hiding behind a tree.
“Look, I know you won’t talk, you won’t let us come close to you, I don’t even know if you understand us, but please… stay close and don’t make a silly move.”
They all stared at the castle and peered into the meadow waiting in front of them.
Old Version:
When the blast shattered the Dragon’s den peak, hundreds of boulders, debris of all aspects and volutes of dirt scattered over Ponyville’s and Canterlot’s valleys; covering the region of thick and chafing greyish clouds. The atmosphere blackened.
The muddy fallouts concealed the sun for hours and the concerned ponies panicked as darkness was casted upon the Realm of the Two Sisters. Terrorized, some of them shouted that Nightmare Moon had returned.
In no time, Cloudsdale came to Canterlot’s rescue. But even with the common effort of everypony, it took a long time to chase the smoke away. The ambiance was prone to spread terror, deceit and thoughts of ill-omen into the minds of the surrounding inhabitants.
And this was why that, in this exceptional situation, nopony witnessed some tiny and strange shaped shadows fall across the blackish sky.
₰ ϡ ϗ φ ϗ ϡ ₰
Falling along, five featherless bodies were shaking their limbs in vain. Powerless, they screamed; the ground was approaching at an insane speed.
Having the time and a mind dedicated to reflection, they would have seen on their left horizon a strange chain of sharped mountains, bordered by a dense forest of dark green leaves, location where they were desperately heading. Long and impressively large rivers crossed this green sea.
They would have also seen hung onto a steep mountain a strange and magnificent castle of gold and silver.
However, staying alive was the unique idea agitating their minds at the moment.
Tearing down the air, they saw themselves closing to a lake dwelling in the middle of the strange forest. The number of feet separating them from the impact was lessening each second. The unfortunate and still conscious sky-divers held their breath.
They dipped into water. It felt like crashing into concrete, smashing… in the literal way.
Waves formed onto the lake as the five falling ‘birds’ sunk into at an astonishing speed. Seconds later, a wrecked four wheeled cage of metal crashed on the shores few meters away, bounced and finished its reckless race on the bordering beach.
Giving off fumes, the vehicle broke down and fell apart in thousands of pieces.
The waves faded away and the place recovered its former silent state.
₰ ϡ ϗ φ ϗ ϡ ₰
In the hours following the biggest, and certainly the coolest as said by a certain rainbow coloured Pegasus, explosion Equestria had ever seen, the two Princesses Luna and Celestia went to Ponyville to hear the account of the oldest sister’s most faithful student.
Dazed, they listened to the whole story.
“So you’re telling me,” initiated Princess Celestia, massaging her temple to make the report easier to chew on. “That you cast an explosive spell on the tallest mountain of Equestria in order to scatter away a magical storm.”
Twilight’s lips drew a strange shaped smile, swinging between a poorly executed poker face and an anxious rictus.
“Basically… no… I mean… yes, but everypo…”
Celestia and Luna covered their eyes with their hooves, disbelieving. Luna cut her off.
“Do thou understand how aberrant thy deed hath been?” She said with a mighty anger glaring in her eyes. “What if falling pieces of the peak had broken into the midst of random cottages? It could have killed ponies! This could have been pudh!”
Luna became more and more cryptic as her speech slept toward a very old equestrian dialect. She started grunting, spasms running within her neck’s fur.
“But, I tried that spell Celestia learned me month ago about cloud chasing.”
“It was meant to be a kind of fun spell we can use during parties to shape the clouds… not to make them go away. That’s a pegasus’s job…” Celestia pointed out with a stern voice after having pushed aside her sister. “And you used the Elements!”
“I ran out of power… And they were so intrusive and oppressing. Don’t punish me please…” Twilight squeaked, mentioning her friends.
She leaned toward her teacher, mumbling in fear and shame. Celestia and Luna let out a loud breath. The Princess of the Sun raised her head and start talking with a compassionate and friendly voice.
“You can’t solve everything with pure magic and power,” She turned and faced Twilight’s friends. “And you shall learn that forcing out advantages from your friend is not a worthy of and respectable behaviour.”
“We’re sorry.” Everypony yielded.
“Now go out and help everypony clear the chaos you’ve wreaked upon us.” Luna added after she calmed herself. “You will write a letter tonight to my sister… all of you. And Fluttershy…”
The yellow pegasus dunked her head in her shoulders when she heard her name.
“Lots of debris struck the surrounding forests. You should ask Zecora to help you searching for hurt or wounded animals.”
Fluttershy nodded, thanked the princess and went out with all of her friends.
“Huge explosion on second thought,” Luna remarked, a small smile printed on her lips.
“Maybe too huge… do you remember thousand years ago during our confrontation? We tore apart some fabric of time and space.”
“Yes, now you told it We remember. That was utterly amusing,” She giggled before Celestia sent her a clear message about the seriousness of the situation. Her stare glared daggers.
“And this is how we… I… had to fight this Shoggoth or whatever the name legends gave to it,” The princess of the Sun shivered.
“Tekeli-li!” Luna howled, startling Celestia who jumped on the nearest table as if she had seen a mouse.
“Stop… Stop It!” She yelled, her white and silky fur bristled all over her body. “We said to never talk of this again!”
Luna was still laughing when they came out of the Golden Oak Library. She stopped and arched an eyebrow. A huge boulder was standing in the middle of the street. Earth ponies were digging it out with pickaxes, making it easier to move.
“It’s nearly time to set the sun and raise the moon Lulu.”
“Don’t call me that way, it’s unnerving.”
“Everything is a fair game… Lulu,” Celestia stuck out her tongue, winking.
In the sky, the emissaries and forces of Cloudsdale were clearing the last remnants of the smoky clouds.
The moon had risen on Equestria and the stars were tingling above the tired lands. Ponies were going to sleep.
Luna was standing on her balcony. It was time for her duty. She stretched her legs and leaned on her couch. Her horn started glowing a bright cyan, throwing small sparkles all over her deep blue mane. Her brows slowly closed and she felt slipping away.
When she opened her eyes again, Luna was floating over her physical body. She had taken an invisible and ghostly shape. On this plan of existence, Luna’s view was shaded and blackened as was the environment. She looked at her hooves. Pure white light was exuding of her body whose contours seemed unclear.
In this sea of darkness where the remnant colours seemed to be distorted, she could see islands of pure blue light. Each was picturing a pony or any living being experiencing a peaceful dream. The light turned bloody when nightmares and fears were overcoming an unfortunate dreamer.
It had been this way for eons, and she did not expect this fact to change.
Levitating, she elevated herself over the lands. She reached the upper parts of the atmosphere. Millions of lights were glowing in the grim dark. The silent of space was overwhelming. She liked it. The common reality was a noisy, deceitful and disgraceful place to stride across. Here, in this deaf place she was whole, she was a true goddess.
₰ ϡ ϗ φ ϗ ϡ ₰
Earlier…
Heads surfaced, breathing in loudly, coughing and swearing. Five strange forms swam aimlessly and clumsily to the beach where the car was dwelling, torn apart. Crawling in the sand, all the survivors felt the wet sand gluing to their hands, skin and clothes. Some spat and vomited the water filling their lungs.
The five had survived thanks to an ungodly luck. If the lake had not been here, they would have ended as pulp-like puddles on the ground.
The sun was low in the sky and dusk’s light was reverberating on dark and smoggy clouds miles away from here. The sky was a melting pot of shades of blue, deep purple and pink.
“Maria?” the hesitant voice of Ray asked. “How long it has been since we saw a nearly-clear sky last and… the sun?”
“Years…” She replied with a smile as she gulped out an ounce of water.
“Three hundred and eighty nine days.” Kreps specified and deadpanned: “At least we don’t have to see a burning solar storm.”
“Thanks egg-head,” Ray giggled as he passed away from exhaust, water was running from his dark brown hair.
Spread out on the shore, everyone was taking great delight in sinking their hands into the fine sand.
Maria tilted her head on her left. Not everyone was enjoying the situation… Verdugo was reanimating the kid, using his type of “kind” heart massage that only he had the secret. The child could have spat out his intestines that would have been unsurprising. Unlucky was a suited word in the end. It was the first time Maria paid attention to the young boy. He was very small and had suffered from malnutrition. His black hairs were badly cut and his face was bruised. He had been molested for weeks as old and new marks were placed on the top of each other.
Salty water came instead of the bloody organs. Trembling, the kid opened his eyes and looked at his saviour with a wandering stare.
On his own, Verdugo was also shaking. It was due to the pain running in the wound plaguing his shoulder. It was flooding blood again and everyone could see that how many times the injured man tried, he could not move his right arm. His limb was pitifully dangling, dragging along the sand when he was on his knees.
Three times, he palpated it with his working left hand, each time he frowned. And before Maria, Ray or Kreps asked him about it, he shouted in disbelief.
“It isn’t working. I can’t feel it beyond the wound.”
However he could still barely move his fingers. He kicked away angrily a scrap of metal which crashed in the lake’s water, drowning fast.
“Verd’, night is coming. Come here that I heal you up a bit.” Ray proposed as he got up, worries dwelling in his eyes. He cared about his friend.
Objecting, Verdugo surrendered when Ray, the leader of this group of stooges casted a stern and caring glance at the stinking and ugly hollow in his shoulder.
“Maria will be sad when she’ll bury your rotting corpse tomorrow morning.”
Verdugo acted as he had heard nothing.
The wound was naughty, but Ray tried his best to fix it without throwing up. Now the bandage was holding Verdugo’s arm tight to his pectoral, keeping it from bleeding out.
“It’s the least I can do, but we need to urge, we have no antiseptic for you.”
“I’m going to hunt something to eat. I’m starving,” Verdugo stated as a response, emotionless. “Take a look to the map with Kreps, I think it was on the back seat when the storm struck us.”
Ray’s mouth was hanging low. He tried to contest his wounded friend’s will to go hunt some wild animals, but Verdugo was as stubborn as a mule. And before he disappeared behind the bushes which marked a clear distinction between the dark forest and the beach, Verdugo called the only woman of the group.
“Maria, find the f’cking box and keep the kid from touching it… ever again,” Verdugo paused, pointing her with his finger. “Then give it to Kreps, it’s his own after all.”
He leaped silently in the forest after Maria had given him a long and rusty knife. She sighed, offended.
“He’s stupid,” Maria looked at the sky, searching for a sign which could have agreed with her.
“Insanely mad,” Kreps supposed, occupied to draw in the sand and curled up to avoid any pain easen the pain coming from his thorax.
“Nah… He’s doing his job. That’s what I ask him to. We must rely on each one’s skills remember,” Ray cut them off while he was trying to extract the shard of glass from his face, remains of his loved glasses. He glared at the forest’s edge. “And he will never change.”
Yes, he never changed and would never. Was he already a bloody killer before? They were all clueless. Only Maria could have known, she was the first to have crossed Verdugo’s blood smeared path. And the only one to have looked in the metal cylinder he was always carrying with him, and survived the aftermaths. As every random human, no one liked to be spied on. And Verdugo was an extremely spiteful person. What was inside the cylinder was as secret as what was lying inside Kreps’s metal box. However Maria had always stayed quite silent about it. She was afraid and also appreciative of him.
Maria always pictured Verdugo as a big brother while Ray saw him as a friend or an employee… It was depending of the time. Kreps on his own considered him as a colleague and a rival.
On the other hand, Verdugo had always been distant with everyone. He was always hanging away from them… but also from everyone. This applied to every situation, during the occasional peaceful meeting on the roads, during the trading with random voyagers or even during the deadly fights for survival, when he was not sinking a sharped edge in someone’s flesh. The exception was maybe Maria.
Ray and Kreps snapped out of their thinking.
“If I caught you stalking on me, I’ll make you eat your own balls,” The woman stated, staring evilly at her friends. “And this isn’t a joke. You eyeball, you’ll never see them all.”
Hiding behind the car wreck, she put off her clothes and dived into the lake. In apnea she examined the bottom of the huge loch where they fell into. She surfaced, breathed in and peaked again.
Kreps and Ray, afraid of their little fury, scavenged the remains of the car, avoiding casting a glance to the shore. Maria had always been modest; even more she seemed to fear people looking at her naked. She was a woman after all, usual target in the wasteland.
There was nothing much left around the car, speaking of functional things. They found one torchlight, wet matches, a lighter, a net, few meters of rope, two maps – one of Europe and another of the world – wet as well, and of course a large, heavy and indented metal box.
They struggled extracting it out of the car’s trunk.
Ray searched in his pockets, only to find wet dirt and few coins… He threw them in the lake. The key to the lock was missing. They sighed. During fifty minutes they tried opening it by force with an improvised crowbar, a rock and even Kreps’s head.
Nothing got done with it in the end.
“Hey, take that!”
Maria, now drying her long dark hair, threw them the key she had pull out of her jacket, hanging on the car, two meters away from her two male mates. Their tired and murderous stares fixed her. She laughed.
She had wrapped herself in a fabric, hiding her sickly thin body nearly entirely. Her skin was tanned, but time and a lack of sunlight had washed out her original tint.
In the box was tidied up half a dozen of weapons, knives and guns. Add to this armoury an old rifle, a shotgun, a long sword, two ice-picks and at least sixty or seventy cartridges of all sorts. Any witness would have a good insight of the group’s fire power. Wandering and stalking in the cities and abandoned military areas had always been rewarding, but also awfully dangerous. More than one scar was the reminder of such truth.
It would have been an even more impressive equipment if not all the weapons had been rusty and eaten up by time and climate. Moreover, most of the cartridges did not match with the present weapons.
The last part of the scavenging was to extract the useful components of the car, its battery, wires, lamps, oil and everything on what they could rely on in the future.
The sun had set at the horizon when Maria lit a fire. The warm was welcomed as everyone was shivering in the night’s coldness.
“Where are we?” Maria asked, looking at the map lying in front of everyone. It was written in German.
“Before today’s… incident, we were thirty kilometres away from Vienna,” Kreps showed with his finger pointing a position to the South-East of the city’s name. “We derived a bit from the chosen path because of the smashed roads. Remember we’ve passed the Alps ten days ago thanks to the Spring and,” he turned toward Ray. “You wanted us to go to…”
“Berlin,” Ray responded.
Kreps’s eyes brightened up.
Again, Maria would have liked to know why but a rustle in their back cut off their discussion. With his poorly sharped and broken knife drawn out, Verdugo was carrying a big animal. Blood from the flank of the thing was running on his grey rags.
The animal seemed like a big rodent, a very large rat with a small tail.
“What the hell is that?” Maria asked along with Kreps. Utter disgust could be read on their face.
Troubled stares welcomed him and his catch.
“It’s a coypu,” Verdugo replied with a raised brow. “A kind of beaver if you want to know the details,” He insisted. “There is lots of life around here, bears and stuff.”
“Is it… eatable?” Ray pouted.
“Will see.”
Annoyed, Verdugo fixed Kreps who was holding the map.
“Are you sure we’re still in Austria? I thought it was around Vienna that a chemical bombing has been performed by Russia or whatever... years ago.”
“I guess, I don’t know what the storm did but we got catapulted…” Kreps noticed blasé.
“We ain’t dead, that’s the first miracle,” Verdugo looked askance at Maria. “And the box? What about it?”
Maria’s jaw dropped. She raised her hand in a desperate and useless attempt to explain herself. No sound came out of her mouth. An amused smile cleared her face.
Verdugo, on his own tried to join the palms of his hands in a praying gesture, only to see his right arm was still not working. It added a straw to his current overloaded burden.
“What I’m gonna do with you all...” He whispered.
Ray, felling a conflict forthcoming eased the tension, pretending it would be easier to search for the dangerous box in the morning.
They grilled the dead animal and eat it up in silence. They first threw up. The taste was revolting, a mix between mud, fat and bitterness. It was like biting through sludge.
They ended up with a remaining hunger, assiduously clinging to their guts, and with an awful bellyache.
Later after the unsavoury meal, Maria came to see Verdugo’s state. He was lying in the frame of the car, complaining on the last available seat. Whatever the position he took, the pain was driving him insane.
Seeing Maria getting into the wreck he turned over the opposite side. He was still angry at her.
“Oh come on, stop rolling your dumb eyes.”
“You know if it wasn’t you I might have ripped off your neck.”
“I know, but I’m your sister after all.”
“You’re just my foster sister, “He emphasised on ‘foster’. “Remember that I didn’t sign for this. And I don’t want them to know,” He pointed Kreps’s and Ray’s sleeping forms near the fire. “I took care of your pretty ass since I raided that bandit camp three years ago.”
“I was fourteen years old, I was a burden, but you still kept me. And Ray and Kreps ain’t blind… C’mon admit it, you like me!” She teased him up.
“I like you because you’re the only one here that I can have a good fight with. Ray is too preoccupied in getting in touch with his parents again to endanger the cohesion of the group and Kreps… well he’s the egghead. He has his own strange plans. And I don’t hit the one who can repair my knife.”
“Eh you’re so stupid that I want to believe you do it on purpose!” She giggled. “You would like to do a Baraka.”
“It’s been a long time indeed. But I think my right arm won’t let me perform such… unfeminine sport,” He replied ironically.
Maria gave him back his spooky smile. This contest they had invented was indeed pretty dangerous, deadly sometimes.
“I’ll beat you again as I did over the ten last games, filthy barbaric!”
“Will see that. Tomorrow we head to the North-West. We gonna see if Vienna is still standing there.”
They paused, a long silent settled between them. Verdugo finally faced Maria, plunging his stare in the nut-brown eyes of the girl.
“Did you ever go there?” Maria asked genuinely.
“Nah! But it is said it is… was a beautiful place. An’ you?”
“No… Before the uproar I never went out of Spain…” She remained silent for several seconds. “Oh wait, I got something for you!”
She dropped a heavy case on Verdugo’s knees. She had hidden it behind her jacket the whole time.
“Where… you shitty liar!”
“It landed in a bush not far from the beach. Kreps saw it when he went pissing earlier.”
“Take this thing away from me…” Verdugo protested in disgust. “… And us, that’s a dangerous shit.”
“Yeah, yeah… You sure that’s radioactive?”
“I already said it’s Kreps’s box, I’m only the keeper. And he is the engineer, he should have kept it.”
After being casted away, Maria left Verdugo to his unsteady sleep. Before coming back to her warm couch near of the fire, she dropped the case in the water. ‘It is said that liquid can reduce radioactivity, right?’, she thought.
Sleepiness took over the camp as the moon was at his height.
₰ ϡ ϗ φ ϗ ϡ ₰
Luna was wandering around in her night sky. Looping and free as she never felt before, she moved carelessly over Equestria and the lands beyond. Sometimes, when a bright sphere was turning red, she was slowly closing and with a kind touch of her hoof spread peace in its heart.
She liked this dawdling carefree spirit state. She could hear the stars twinkling above her head.
And each time she went here every night, it was always feeling like her first time. It was an unending and everlasting discovery.
She moved to the Bad Lands. She giggled when she sent a tiny spider in Chrysalis’s dream, only living creature the Hive Queen was scared of, ‘oh the irony’ everypony would say if they knew the truth. But Luna always kept this secret like a Pinkie Pie’s promise to herself.
She went to Warclaw, the griffon capital across the see. There she gave her most devoted salute to the Griffon Imperator which was dreaming of his youth.
She floated to the North where, as she found out that Shining Armour and Princess Cadance were having the same hot and sweaty dream, she linked their thoughts and dream for the night.
She also guided this old dragon in the Deep South which was desperately searching for the best position to fall into slumber.
She started coming back to her balcony, as the sun would rise within the hour. But she found herself attracted by a certain region of a certain forest. There, sleeping near of a lake, five spheres were shining along. These beings of light were absolutely different from what she had ever seen and experienced before.
In fact, each species has its own orb’s shape. Ponies’ was perfectly spherical when Griffons’ was a bit oval. And these five throbbing shapes looked like broken shards. Luna could not definitely call these… orbs.
Her curiosity being aroused, Princess Luna took a deep breath and put her hooves on the first shard, she bring it closer to her horn until they touched. A small bolt of lightning joined them both, and Luna sunk into the dream.
The place was a bright, magnificent and delightful meadow of yellow wheat. The wind was slowly brushing through the field, printing evanescent shapes on the tops of the crop. The breeze was carrying smells of fresh out of the oven bread and croissants as a dash of sugar and honey filled Luna’s mouth and lungs.
She longley breath in.
It was beyond describable. It was similar to standing into the greatest bakery a world would ever possess. She was into heaven or at least she thought that she had found what Alicorns’ Paradise could look like, feel like, taste like and of course smell like.
Resting in a recess of the field, surrounded by the warm cereals, Luna was savouring the moment when she heard laughter. Brought by the wind, the giggles flooded Luna’s mind as she sought for its source. On the top of the recess was toddling a strange, small creature.
Standing on two limbs, it was chasing a butterfly. Its hooves which in reality ended with hands similar to those of a dragon were devoid of claws. The cute creature was trying ineffectively to grasp the tiny blue and red insect.
The creature’s mane was composed of a long dark coiffure contrasting with the golden colour of the field. She had absolutely no fur. Her bare skin was pale. The wind was blowing, making her hairs fluttering.
Her cries and giggles echoed in Luna’s mind. The little, armless and lovely creature was running away.
“Child, wait!” Luna asked, raising a hoof toward what it looked like to be the dreamer.
Unfortunately no answer came from the running being as it started fading beyond the top of the hill. Luna launched herself in what appeared to be the dreamer’s tow. She ran for few minutes as if the hill was far higher than it seemed to be.
The child was on her knees, holding a teddy bear. But Luna could not have cared less about it; she was stricken by an unfair spectacle.
An ocean of burning buildings of every shape stood before her. The smoke was raising high in the sky. The smell of baking was suddenly chased away by the one of roasting and rotting flesh of livings. Her ears were flooded by thousands of screams.
Luna could not keep herself from crying.
“I always wanted a pony,” the child genuinely said, picking up Luna’s attention. “But mommy and daddy…” She hesitated. “…aren’t here anymore to gift me one.”
She grabbed Luna’s fur with her small and chubby hands and stared in her tearful eyes. Her look was earth-shattering. The child’s brown eyes were amazingly moving.
“Miss, do you know where are my daddy and mommy?”
The dream ended abruptly.
Even in this ghostly plan, Luna caught herself crying, her? Having tears rolling on her cheeks in this dimension where she was an absolute god? It was unthinkable. Even deeply-moved, her curiosity was still excited. And what she saw was quite amusing. One of the lasting spheres was flickering back and forth from blue to red.
It was titillating. She repeated the same procedure, came closer to the strangely shaped dream and dived into it.
It was pitch black. Luna was without a doubt walking on something but she could not see the ground or the ceiling. In fact she first thought she was blinded.
There was nothing but blackness… and her. The princess could see herself distinctly but once it was not her, she was blind. Her horseshoes echoed as if she was walking on a marbled surface.
She hit her head against an invisible wall. Lifting her up, she groped for what she crashed into. Luna felt the wall at the end of her hoof. She gave a little bang.
She jumped back as she saw a white wave spreading upon what she just knocked, embracing the structure then fading away. For a second, Luna saw a corner appear few feet away from her.
She got an idea.
Jumping high in the air, she fell heavily on the ground. This time, bigger white waves sprawled on a far longer distance. She saw two buildings standing in front of her.
She started running, thundering her silver horseshoes onto the ground, flooding this strange dream of her white shockwaves. A hollowed and silent city started shaping and blooming under her hooves as she headed to a monstrously large square. In its centre stood a gigantic fountain. Unfortunately, no water was filling its pond.
Silence came back as Luna stopped stomping the ground, but the edge of the buildings did not fade with this sudden stop. The white contours of the constructions remained. A deafened black and white city was circling the Princess. She was reluctant to say if she was feeling at ease or not.
There was absolutely no sound…
A… a jingling? A jingling reverberated throughout the city.
”When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon…”
Luna turned around. Far away from her, deep inside the shadows of a skimpy street, a floating and bouncing jawbone loaded of sharped teeth was closing in. The jingling intensified. Another bouncing jaw appeared, creeping out of the next street. Another came up, and a new one showed up, again and again until Luna found herself surrounded by these monstrous breeds of a mind she did not know or imagine to exist.
Stress filled up Luna’s mind, the fear crawled within her skin, climbing back up her limbs and her fur and gaining her chest. Luna felt like a sharpened and cold talon had tightened her beating heart and with its claws was trying to squeeze it out. Shivers ran through Luna’s mane.
She felt a void of love, of this good feeling of happiness inside of her mind. Everything had been replaced by utter panic. Her terror was so high it made her unable to move an inch. More than just feeling her heart tightened, this… was like having a hand crushing her inner being, and trying to rip off her soul out of her thorax. Never again she wanted to feel that way. It was unbearable.
“Make it stop! Please!!” She implored.
The jaws stopped, circling Luna and the fountain. Ready to strike and aiming at the throat, they were all drooling… waiting for her to move.
A strong hand grasped Luna’s neck. She was forced to turn back.
A muscled entity was staring at her, trying to understand something out of Luna’s range. He looked like and differed also from the first dreamer. He was not that tall. Well he was way taller than a random pony but Luna was clearly overcoming him in height, thanks to her horn. But the strength the creature was delivering outmatched everything Luna had faced before. Worse, she was unable to fight back when her opponent was only using one arm.
He was strangling her, his grasp was too powerful. Luna’s glance ran over his head, a skinny and plate head with a small black mane on its top, two dark green eyes and a mouth loaded of dental plaque. His skin was tanned and covered of scars. His chest was muscled, but the starvation made him look like a skeleton. What captivated the princess was that monstrous hollow at the level of his right shoulder. The wound was disgusting to watch, but no blood was flooding out.
“You’re hurt?” the princess hissed in pain.
Luna tried to ease the situation, losing any sense of manners. Sweat of stress rolled on her face.
Her interlocutor was not amused. He released his suffocating grasp and forced Luna to bend, pushing her onto her knees. His stare was frightening.
He started talking.
“My… my… my. What do we got here? I really am becoming insane,” The surprised creature laughed swiftly, ruffling the mane on his head.
Drawing out a long knife he jabbed her with its point. She shrieked.
“What a funny shape you’ve got here.”
Luna was bemused. He was a… lucid dreamer. That was unexpected… dangerously unexpected. Few ponies were actually able to perform such experience, and Luna always avoided those dreams. In fact, the orbs of each dreamer had to turn a slightly green when they was starting a “lucid dive”. The looping changes of colour of the creature’s shard had deceived her.
“My beloved subject, we shall let thou at thy dream as our duty forbids us to intervene within those who awaken in the sleepy Limbos.”
The creature laughed. It was a frank laugh, something he had not performed since… for a long period.
“I really am mad. First time my own dreams tell me that kind of crap.”
“We are the Princess of the Night, keeper of the dreaming realm. Thou violent creature hast an impolite behaviour. Shall We punish thy deeds tonight, bringing nightmares to thou?”
At her last words the creature frowned. Luna started regretting her sayings when the monster’s face distorted in a strange grin.
She tried to break the link between her and the conscious dreamer. Gob-smacked, she witnessed her powerlessness to escape from this ethereal place. The creature looked at the pond, anger could be read on his face. He sighed.
“Here are two options that are yours to choose. To wake up from a dream, you know that either you have to kill the dreamer,” he smiled again. “Or, you have to wait until the dreamer has finished his business down here.”
The creature waved at the steady jaws waiting to leap on Luna and him. They replied with a cacophony of laughter and clinking.
“So, here are the so-called choices. On the first hand you decide to kill me in the most horrendous way you could imagine…This is your…” He sniggered. “so-called punishment... Time to see if my own dreams are interesting.”
He drew out a bloodied and broken knife then placed it in Luna’s trembling hoof. Her stare was swapping between the suicidal monster and the bladed weapon.
“… or you wait until I wake up while you’ll be devoured by my over excited sprawling imagination, with me as a spectator.”
He snapped his finger, which made Luna focus.
“The choice is yours,” He said with dryness. His grin was skanky. “You have the choice, you rebellious dream of mine.”
Luna was aware that the dreamer thought she was a dream. Sometimes, the lucid dreamer was fighting to keep themselves awake within here. This kind of situation was rare but absolutely dangerous for watchers like Luna.
Now she was quivering, unable to understand the reasoning behind the monster’s saying, behind the choices she was given. She stared at her mind tormentor, she was going to ask for mercy, but the outcome came to be different as he became aware of the princess’s next sentence.
“Wrong answer!” He sadistically said.
Kicking the knife away from Luna’s hoof, the creature drew out of the blackness a sword and aimed toward Luna’s neck. The blow was fast and clear. The floating jaws leaped on the two shapes facing them.
₰ ϡ ϗ φ ϗ ϡ ₰
Luna escaped her sleeping state and howled with a deep and hissing breath. She started groping nervously around her neck, her shoulders and her chest. They were nothing, no blood, no flesh dawdling around, nothing.
Sweat streamed on her body as she regained her senses. She was still on her balcony, shaking. Celestia was standing in front of her, worries casted in her eyes. Her breath was heavy and loud.
Three guards were circling the princess in a security perimeter.
The moon had set and the sun had already swapped with its place high in the horizon, Celestia had taken initiatives.
“Lulu, you’ve worried us all. We couldn’t wake you up! What happened?”
Still feeling around her skin she started talking with a trembling and blabbering voice.
“Deep in the Everfree, they were five dreamers, I’ve explored two of their dreams,” She hissed, her eyes insanely wide opened. “The first one was disturbing, sad. But the last one…” She started crying. “The dreamer… he trapped me inside. It was scary. I never felt that way before…”
Luna leaped into Celestia’s hooves, searching for reassuring warmth while bursting into tears. She had forgotten about her etiquette. Only fear was bathing her mind. This already new situation shocked the three guards. Powerless in front of this pathetic play, Celestia asked for privacy. The witnesses drew back out of Luna’s room.
“Then it… that unknown creature… it… he talked to me and asked me two things I couldn’t do,” She squeezed her head between her hooves. “And he… he had that tremendous sword. He slashed me!”
The last word came as a screech, Luna was grinding her teeth. She stared into Celestia’s eyes, grieved and astray.
“I… I died down there… for the first time in my life.”
Luna cringed in her sister’s hooves. Celestia tried to give her a sisterly hug. But her sister never really stopped shaking. This play was earth-shattering, pitiful and unnerving.
The Princess of the Day called back her guards.
“Contact the Element Bearers! They have to find these five sparks in the night. Tell them to go in the Everfree Forest. Make sure they bring them back here,” She paused. “Nopony will ever harm my sister again nor will endanger my little ponies’ security. I want to know how they are. Bring them back here… peacefully.”
Celestia was visibly infuriated. The look of her crying sister was clearly an unbearable spectacle to watch. What did Twilight’s explosive experience have brought to this world? She looked toward the Everfree Forest far away in the horizon.
₰ ϡ ϗ φ ϗ ϡ ₰
Maria yawned, stretching her body. She looked around and saw she was the first to wake up. She had made a strange dream. But as usual she could not remember it clearly and soon this memory would fade away.
She laid on her back for basically twenty minutes straight, waiting for the sun to rise from behind the mountains standing high in the East. And then it showed up.
The sun was biting her skin. Two days of full sunshine was too hard to bear for somebody who had not seen it for more than a year. But on the other side, it was relieving. It reminded her of her old country, bathed by the warmth and the sunshine. A place once beautiful and where living was cheerful and carefree.
She decided to take a peak in the lake’s clear waters. Refreshing was the only word which popped in her mind.
She surfaced. Something was afoot in fact. She now remembered that at the east of their position, they should not be mountains. They had already passed the Alps she kept saying, it was weird. She had to ask Kreps, but tickling the sleeping geek was like playing with amorphous goo… basically useless. A roaring plane could carpet bomb his ass that it would not even make him move a hair or arch a brow.
Once she went out of the water, she instantly wrapped herself in the same fabric than the last evening. She dried herself as fast as possible.
She looked at her back and put on her clothes. She jumped onto the top of the wrecked car, making his inhabitant grumbling in his sleep and cast a glare around her. She expected the sun to warm her up.
It was a magnificent beach positioned in a vast clearing of the surrounding forest. From her location Maria could see fishes swimming around the shore. She cursed the world for not having a line.
Speaking of the forest, it seemed inscrutable. The thick foliage of thousands of trees was hiding the sun from the lower part of the place. Maria was not claustrophobic, but thinking about wandering into that place was not giving her the best feeling.
She gasped.
Something had grabbed her leg and had thrown her on the sand. She screamed like a scared bird as she fell onto the ground.
“And bang you’re dead!” Verdugo scorned.
“Fuck off man; you’ve beat the shit out of me!”
“Yeah, it’s fun.”
“Your death will be long and painful!”
“And would you be so kind to tell me how?” He deadpanned.
She thought with a finger on her lips. An idea came up.
“If I kick up your ass during the next Baraka you’ll tell me what you were doing before the Uproar.”
“My little dear,” He sighed. “You can know about Ray, Kreps, this child,” he pointed the so-called kid, still sleeping on his handmade couch of sand. “But you know that I don’t want to talk about something which does not matter anymore.”
“Chicken?” She imitated the animal.
Verdugo was slung to the quick. He did not like to have his honour flouted that way.
“Okay, this is on!”
When Ray opened his eyes, he witnessed two furious noisy acquaintances fighting over a matter way ahead of his preoccupations. He rubbed his eyes before taking one of the last remnants of the beaver. He liked so much a cold rotten and sickly tasting meat as breakfast. But the hunger was driving him insane. He chew air, masticating the thick and dried saliva between his cheeks.
He called out loud the two demons to stop their fight right away. They groused before bending to his demand and joined him around the cold feast.
“I had a weird dream,” Ray said. “I saw you Verd’. You were wearing a ballerina outfit.”
Maria spat the chewed beaver out of her mouth, laughing out loud.
“Ah… ah… ah. I hoped I gave you a boner. ” The concerned party replied with a fake laugh and irony.
Maria raised her voice.
“I dreamed about a girl, me… I don’t remember, but I saw a blue and black unicorn in my dream. I felt like crazy. Unicorn? That’s silly…” Maria guffawed when she remembered some random parts of her dream.
“You’re becoming too soft woman! Bad habits are coming back,” Verdugo teased her, his voice seemed hesitant. “One step further and we’ll have to build you a kitchen to remain in.”
“Nah… just a moment of distraction. And you Verd’, did you dream?”
He stood up, pretending to examine his badly bandaged and oozing wound.
“Yeah I dreamt but that’s none of your business.”
Ray and Maria fixed each other with a worried look. Ray gave her a shrug. She applied the palm of her hand onto her forehead.
Ray often asked himself if this man who had helped, saved and defended him and his group so many times was nothing but a grieved hollowed body that did appear in the following of the apocalypse to keep them alive, like a guardian angel…
Few minutes later, the muted kid and Kreps had woken up and were voraciously, but with a pinch of disgust, eating the last drops of the beaver. But in fact, nothing could undermine the hunger of the group at the moment.
Maria was trying to catch fish bare-handed, task nearly impossible though while Verdugo was walking into circles at the opposite side of the beach.
Ray was surprised and worried about the kid. He did not talk, never told his name and seemed to be reluctant to have anybody moving closer to him. He was like a scared animal… a frightened pet which was always keeping a safe distance with its “masters” but was forced to follow them in order to survive another day in this world.
He was young, very young; maybe ten… twelve years old.
One of his incisors was missing, a milk tooth probably and he had numerous scars running on his face. He had black hairs and his skin was scarily ghoulish. Strange, he had amazingly light blue eyes that pierced from side to side whoever stared into.
His clothes were torn apart. With a hint of compassion, Ray tried to find a way to give him decent clothing. But he found himself also wearing remainders of such items. How long had it been since he last saw himself in a mirror?
He looked toward the lake. The temptation to look at his reflection was teasing, but he did not want to see how ugly and wrecked he was. When he was gazing at Kreps or Verdugo, what he was seeing was two walking bag of bones whose faces were covered of unclean beard and scars, with shadows under their eyes.
Reaching his chin, Ray touched a rough mass of filthy hair and a small bald mark, his neck scar. He sighed.
Maria was his sunshine, always radiant even if she was skinny as hell and that she had developed no breast at all… thanks starvation. But she was always smiling and joking around in the group. Maybe she was the only thing keeping him and everyone sane from the madness of the post-uproar world.
He would have not been able to keep up without her around. Did he love her? He did not know. But what he was sure of was that he would defend her at all cost… because ‘light must not die’, he thought.
Verdugo came up with a clever invention. He had cut two long and resistant stick of wood. And with an intertwining of ropes, he made of the heavy metallic trunk where every weapon was resting something barely transportable. It required two strong pairs of shoulders to be manoeuvred. The case weighted nearly one hundred pounds.
“Okay, who start the tour?” Verdugo asked.
Everybody started whistling.
He, in spite of his injured right shoulder, and Kreps started carrying the heavy case as Maria was leading the tow, the “radioactive” box in her bag. Everyone was carrying a heavy pack on their back and even the soundless child was participating in the exhausting manoeuvre, wearing the wet blanket Maria used to dry herself.
Ray was desperately deciphering the map written in German, which was not a language he was mastering at all.
“Neu… Neusi… Neusiedler See. If this is the lake we’re going along, we’re at twenty… thrity miles from Vienna. If we go straight to its north we’ll find…Neu… Neusiedl am… Oh fuck! Why German names are so unpronounceable!”
Kreps laughed.
“No seriously that’s annoying!”
“You want to swap spaces,” Kreps asked, panting heavily.
Ray got muted and gave himself a minute of reflection. Ray got hold of himself.
“Okay, if we find that f’cking city we could find a road to Vienna. But if we don’t, we have to go to the North West. Should be easy no?”
He said this expecting a global nod from each of his companions. But everybody was focusing on not stepping on a devilish root which could make them fall. The forest was thick and Maria had to cut through with Verdugo’s knife. Weird and stressing sounds were popping intermittently. Branches cracked under everyone boots. And the lack of animals’ cries, howls and presence evidences was another straw on the camel back.
“Remind me to never come here again please,” Maria asked with a trembling voice. “And… Verdugo, don’t you say yesterday that you saw animals?”
“Yes… yesterday…”
A distant howl echoed in the forest, the first and macabre proof that something was still living in this remote place of Europe… But was it really Europe? The trees were slightly different. The sky was different. Everything looked similar, but also deeply changed. Everyone had witnessed that the colours were more vivid, flashy, or smooth, they could not find words to describe this impression. Kreps supposed this was the sunlight’s influence. They had stared to a greyish environment for so long their eyes had forgotten the true meaning of colour.
The sun was high in the sky and the group enjoyed each pause in the few clearings they passed by. It was relieving. One had to enjoy the little things a great mind said someday.
The trekking lasted for hours and the sun was low in the west now when they finally found something.
“Hey look! Here is the city!” Maria shouted as she cleared a way through a vast area where wild grass and wheat was growing chaotically.
On the other side of the field was standing a huge and abandoned construction of stone.
“In a few miles you’ll be able to admire an antic castle of whatever the fuck it could be era,” Kreps ironized, mimicking the voice of a low quality GPS.
It was indeed an old and remote place whose walls had been undermined by the time. No window was still standing intact and the area seemed to have been unvisited for eons.
“Okay,” Ray stopped everyone before they went out of the safe cover the forest was offering them. “Take some weapons out, we could encounter bandits and we have wounded peoples.”
He stared at Verdugo and Kreps who was both wounded and had grumbled all along the way. Ray and Maria had to swap with their position dozens of times during the walk. Kreps had a rib cracked and only Maria’s nimble fingers made him able to surpass the pain. Verdugo’s state was way more worrying. He had fallen several times on the way. The wound was infected and fever had started running through his veins. Within hours he won’t have any strength left to move and it will be the end of the trip for him. And this, Maria could not let it be. She would like to be more useful but she had to fight her friend’s fierceness and proudness.
Ray spoke to the mute boy who was hiding behind a tree.
“Look, I know you won’t talk, you won’t let us come close to you, I don’t even know if you understand us, but please… stay close and don’t make a silly move.”
They all stared at the castle and peered into the meadow waiting in front of them.
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