Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 55 - The Ghost in You

“Come on,” I mumbled, tapping the helmet and cradling it like a child. “I hope I don’t have to do some kind of blood sacrifice or something.”

“Maybe she’s dead,” Cube said, being extremely helpful.

“Of course she’s dead. She’s been dead the whole time I knew her,” I mumbled. “I know she’s in here. She always bounces back.”

I felt the helmet vibrate in my hooves. Slowly, it turned, the visor turning to face me and a pale crimson aura surrounding it.

“What happened?” Destiny asked, her voice weak. I could feel her gaze slide past me. “Chamomile! There’s--”

“I know,” I said, turning to look at it for a second. One of the hovering spirits was staring over my shoulder, a shade that was fading and indistinct around the edges, whispering just beyond the edge of hearing. I waved a hoof through it, and it dispersed, reforming a few paces away. “We’re in trouble again.”

“There was a huge burst of magic,” Cube said. “I assumed it had banished you, but I guess this one time I’ll admit I was wrong.” She scoffed.

“We’re outside the college,” I explained. “That’s why there’s no roof.”

“Oh good,” Destiny sighed. “I was worried everything had exploded.”

“No, no, that happened,” I assured her. “Everything exploded into ghosts!”

“I shouldn’t even be surprised at this point,” Destiny said, floating unsteadily out of my hooves. “The amount of energy must have been comparable to a megaspell! I wish I’d been conscious enough to get some readings.”

“And I wish I was unconscious so I didn’t have to deal with this mess,” I said. I got up and started walking towards the big group of students that had gathered in front of the college. The teachers were doing their best to corral them, but getting a herd of scared ponies to listen to reason while surrounded by floating black wraiths was a losing proposition.

“They’re about two minutes from a full-on stampede,” Professor Ornate Orate said when I trotted up to him.

I looked up at the sky. I could feel the magical pressure increasing. Something was clawing at the fabric of the world and it wasn’t going to be long before it ripped its way through.

“That might be just about on time for some unfriendly arrivals,” I said. “We need to get these ponies moving. They’re just sitting ducks out here. Take them into town and get everypony into cover. They must have somewhere they can go, a hotel or a big house or something.”

“Yes, yes, of course you’re right,” the professor agreed. He turned to the crowd. “Ah, everypony! Excuse me! I say, over here! I’m trying to--”

None of them were listening, even if they could over the chatter of the crowd.

“Right, okay, time to be the big mare in charge,” I said. I pointed DRACO up. “Give me a flare, and don’t hit anypony with it.” I flew up, hovering above the students.

The gun chirped, and a bright red firework shot into the sky with a loud crack. The crowd of ponies silenced themselves, eyes following the light.

“Do I have your attention?!” I yelled. “Good! I know you’re all scared and confused, but everything is under control! You’re going to be temporarily evacuated into town! The military is already on the way with emergency supplies and specialists! The teachers are going to break you up into groups and you’re going to stick with your group until the relief supplies come and the situation is resolved! It should only be a few hours, so you’ll just have to be patient!”

The students started to quiet down and organize themselves around the nearest teachers. I sighed and flew back to the ground.

“Where’s the Dean?” I asked. “He should be the one dealing with this, not me!”

Professor Orate shook his head “I haven’t seen Dean Snowfall since…” He swallowed and looked up at the school. The whole place was surrounded by roiling shadows. Every window and door was a flat sheet of black that absorbed all light.

“Right,” I sighed. “There are probably some missing students that didn’t listen to the fire alarms and stayed in their rooms or hid or something, too,” I rubbed my eyes. “What a bucking mess.”

“I didn’t think anything could go so badly you’d have to take charge,” Cube quipped. “Maybe I should skip town.”

“If I die, you can take over,” I promised her, patting her very carefully on the head. “Got any ideas on how to actually do that thing I told them we’d do and fix this mess?”

“I had one idea, but I have no idea where we’re going to find a balefire bomb,” Cube said.

There was a sound like steel being ripped apart in a shredder and the sky opened up, the lightning-toothed maw of a portal yawning wide above us and spitting out that huge blackened hunk of radioactive metal that had no business staying in the sky.

“Isn’t that one of the Cloudsdale defense force ships?” Destiny asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it’s the same one that was at the lab.”

“You lead a charmed life, Chamomile,” Destiny said, before settling onto my head, the armor linking up. “Try not to get caught in another big burst of magic like that. I think I almost ended up on the other side, and I’ve still got too much unfinished business.”

A circle of magical light appeared on the ground in the middle of the crowd of students. They screamed in horror as the undead appeared among them, teleporting within striking distance.

Beams of harsh light struck out from odd angles, each one burying itself into one of the zombies, picking them off one at a time. Cube’s custom pistols flew through the air in her telekinetic grip.

“I got this,” Cube said, her voice strained. “It would be a lot easier if the stupid ponies here would stay still and not get in the way!”

“Can you cast a teleport spell?” I asked.

“I can’t get all of them out of here,” Cube replied, cutting me off. “That’s an order of magnitude or two more ponies than anypony could teleport at once!”

“Not for them, for me,” I said. I looked up at the ship. “Think you can get me up there?”

“You want a blind teleport to a haunted, magically shielded, moving cloudship?” Cube asked. She looked up at the ship, its bow glowing with arcane runes. I watched her do some quick mental calculations, tilting her head and thinking. “Yeah. I can do that.”

I nodded. “I’ll do what I can to cause trouble. If the necromancer is up there, maybe I can get the scissors back.”

“I’ll keep the idiots down here alive,” Cube said. Her horn started glowing brighter. She gave me a worried look. “There’s a small chance this could go wrong,” she warned. “I’m going to aim for the biggest open spot in the ship.”

“I trust you,” I lied. I was actually just really desperate.

She nodded, and the light consumed me.

---

The sensation of being teleported this time was like being squeezed through a straw and reinflating violently on the other end. I felt myself falling, caught myself in the air, and then my stomach started twisting like my lunch had enjoyed it even less than I did.

“No, no, no, not in here!” Destiny yelped, the helmet catches popping with incredible urgency and pulling away from the armor just in time for me to throw up. Bile splashed on the rusting deck below us.

“Sorry,” I groaned, wiping my lips. “I don’t even remember eating that…”

“That was a rough teleport,” Destiny said, the helmet turning a little while she looked me over. “This place has magical defenses and she just decided to shove you through them instead of trying to crack them! Amateur. I think you got here all in one piece.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Where are--”

A grenade exploded next to me, and shrapnel blasted into my right side. I felt the skin on my face tear, and I slammed down through an ancient shipping crate, throwing a plume of red-tinted dust into the air.

“Chamomile!” Destiny yelled, dropping down next to me. “Crap. Okay, um… everything’s fine! Stay calm! This isn’t as bad as when all your bones were broken!”

“You’re a terrible doctor,” I muttered, wincing when I tried to stand. “I think something’s lodged in my side.”

“There’s a hole in the armor near your liver,” Destiny confirmed.

“Oh good, just a major organ,” I said.

Destiny very carefully settled over my head. The gloom vanished from around me thanks to the low-light mode in the visor. “I’ll hit you with a healing potion to stop the immediate bleeding. Try not to get hit again. We’ve stress-tested SIVA too much already.”

“No kidding. Where did that shot come from?”

“DRACO tracked it that way,” Destiny said, giving me a nice big arrow. There was something comforting about having a green marker on my compass telling me where to go. I’d come through the top of the shipping container, so I kicked the door open to get out, knocking over a zombie that had been standing right there.

“Company,” I reported.

A few zombies turned to look at me, but the majority didn’t seem to be all there, just standing and waiting. The light flared around me, and I saw what they were waiting for. A massive circle was drawn in the middle of the deck, and they were marching into it in groups, herded by two armored Steel Rangers, one of which had just spotted me again and was bringing his grenade cannon to bear.

“I think we found their deployment area!” I shouted, ducking low and moving into the crowd. The few zombies that were aware or online or whatever it was you called it when they were moving lunged for me, but that worked to my advantage. The grenade that had been meant for me hit one of the jumping horde and blasted it apart, the shrapnel tearing through more of the undead and dropping a whole squad of them at once in a tangle of rotting, shattered limbs.

“They must be using it for the same reason we did! It’s the biggest open space on the ship!” Destiny said. Another grenade blasted a hole in the wall of undead. “If we can disrupt the enchantment we can keep them from sending more undead down into Winterhoof!”

“I like that idea,” I said.

“Start by taking out those Steel Rangers. They seem to be in charge.” As if they weren’t also the most dangerous things in the room.

“Can DRACO punch through that armor? I lost my knife!” I could feel the empty place between my bones where it should have rested. I was pretty sure the broken edge was slowly regenerating, but I couldn’t run in circles for however long it would take for it to actually grow back all the way.

DRACO beeped, and a targeting box popped up, highlighting parts of the Steel Ranger armor and displaying various symbols.

“Of course it can,” Destiny said. “It wouldn’t be much of an anti-armor weapon if it couldn’t take out a Ranger!”

“Weren’t you on the same side during the war?”

“Focus on the important parts!” Destiny snapped. “I had a lot of enemies, okay? And so do you! And they’ve got repeating grenade rifles!”

I jumped, kicking off of a zombie to launch a little further into the air without committing myself to flight. DRACO barked at the apex of my leap, blowing a hole into the side of one of the undead Rangers and ripping his ribs apart. That would have been really fatal and deadly if he wasn’t just rotten inside. I ducked back down and ran for harder cover, because they were getting closer with the grenades and the zombie horde was starting to thin.

“We’re going to need headshots,” I said. “Or fire! Can we do fire?”

“You can have either armor-piercing or incendiary,” Destiny said. “I never did crack the zebra tech on their anti-armor rifles.”

I stopped behind a rusting box that was full of what had once been holiday decorations but the grinning gourds and plastic candy had decayed into garbage. An explosion rocked it, throwing streamers and faded confetti into the air.

“I almost wish I had one of those cursed swords,” I mumbled.

The box rocked with the force of another detonation. And that sort of gave me an idea.

“They’re carrying a bunch of explosives,” I said. “I have an idea.”

I explained it quickly, and Destiny agreed that it might work. She changed DRACO’s targeting parameters and I jumped out of cover, flying up and clear of the debris undead and otherwise on the ground. The Steel Rangers were slow to react, and that gave me just enough time for DRACO to line up its shots, the gun firing as soon as it had a good shot.

An incendiary shell punched through the thinner panel of the first Steel Ranger’s grenade rifle ammunition hopper, and the remaining ordinance detonated in a rapid-fire series of explosions, a plume of fire reaching all the way up to the ceiling above us. The damaged, rusting floor creaked and groaned, the inscribed circle flickering and fading before the deck panels finally failed, collapsing and dropping off the ship entirely, the wind tearing them away.

“They don’t build ‘em like they used to!” I shouted. A piercing wail of alarm screeched through the ship. I couldn’t tell if it was a bound spirit, a malfunctioning intercom, or just stressed metal being wrenched by aerodynamic forces.

The second Steel Ranger charged through the smoke and slammed bodily into me, tossing me back with weight and force I couldn’t match. I went flying into a mosh pit full of half-crippled shrapnel-blasted undead.

“Oh, you better hope--” I started, intending to say something intimidating and cool to get myself pumped up, but it was cut short with hooves wrapping around my body, pinning my limbs in place. I tried to kick myself free and immediately found out I had no leverage at all.

“Chamomile--” Destiny warned.

“I know!” I yelled. I was pretty sure she was going to tell me I was going to get my skull stomped in. I bit down on the trigger for the Cryolator and just aimed it as best I could, blindly spraying liquid nitrogen everywhere. A cloud of condensation fogged up my vision, and the limbs holding me down slowed. I pulled, and there was a sharp crack.

I tore myself free from the cage of bony hooves just as the Steel Ranger stomped into view through the fog. It lunged at me with unnatural speed. It was all I could do to throw myself aside, rolling on the deck and getting to my hooves an instant before it could trample me.

It was slow to turn, and I took advantage of that, emptying the Cryolator’s tank on the Ranger’s back end. Hydraulics ruptured in the thermal shock, and a layer of ice almost instantly formed, freezing its hooves to the deck.

“There’s a weak spot here, too,” Destiny noted. DRACO fired, and an explosive shell blasted against the rear plates, bending them in and cracking them where the cold had made them brittle. The undead pony half-collapsed, only held in place by frozen limbs. “The armor wasn’t great against spalling, and the rear plates aren’t reinforced. One shot to the back and even if the armor holds you get fragmentation inside.”

“Wasn’t that the most advanced armor ever developed?” I asked.

“First, you’re wearing the most advanced armor ever developed. Second, even if the Steel Rangers had decent gear, that suit is one of the early production models. They did fix a few of the issues later, like the temperature sensitivity.”

I punted a zombie head that tried to bite me and looked around, trying to orient myself in the big vehicle bay. “If you weren’t so tribalist about the zebras I’d think you were on their side.”

“That’s what they said about anypony who questioned the propaganda,” Destiny mumbled. “Stop! Movement!”

I froze and turned to see what she was indicating. Three ponies were standing in the gloom at the end of the cargo bay. They didn’t seem to notice me. I quietly approached them and heard them whispering. And I could see right through them. Literally.

“Are they ghosts?” I whispered. “They don’t seem like the shadow things the pyramid was making…”

“Do you think the yellow alert is real this time?” one of them asked. She was a young mare with a twist for a mane, wearing an almost skin-tight uniform that didn’t seem to fit the combat webbing over it.

“It has to be a drill,” the stallion next to her replied. I waved a hoof right through him and he didn’t seem to notice, but the touch sent a chill down my spine.

“You two need to stop complaining and get your gear!” the third pony snapped, an older mare with a few extra stripes on her dark uniform. “Drill or not the Shadowbolts don’t stand around waiting for the other hoof to drop!”

“Yes, Captain Rolling Thunder!” The mare saluted, turning and flying with the stallion, going directly through me before fading away. I shivered, feeling chilled right to my core.

The Captain turned her head, just a fraction of an inch, and just before she vanished, I swear she looked right at me.

“That was weird,” I said.

“It must be a kind of… lingering echo,” Destiny said. “There’s so much necromatic energy going through this boat that it’s pulling memories of the old crew out of the walls.”

“Good thing that’s not creepy at all.”

“They’re harmless,” Destiny said. “Like… somepony turning over in their sleep.”

---

“Okay, now touch the red and the green wires together,” Destiny said.

I leaned in closer to get a better look at what I was doing in the crusty old panel and carefully pressed the exposed ends of the wires together. There was a sharp spark and a wisp of smoke.

“That did it!” Destiny said. I looked up to see the panel flickering and restarting, green text crawling across the screen. “The power surge bypasses the lockout chip and resets the console in debug mode.”

“And that works for every Stable-Tec terminal?” I asked.

“Yeah, basically. They probably would have eventually fixed it, but…”

“But the world ended,” I said.

“That was certainly the main reason. In the more immediate sense, they weren’t all that worried about physical security and I can’t blame them for that. If somepony has actual physical access to your hardware there’s not much you can actually do to stop them from getting your data.”

I very gingerly tapped the keys on the aging keyboard. “I get it. Like how a safe can stop somepony for a while, but if they’re already in the room with the lock something has gone wrong.”

“Yeah. During the war we were much more concerned with other aspects of security. No password is secure enough if the pony who knows it has been taken prisoner or sells it to the highest bidder. Speaking of which, you’re looking at the code buffer now, so you want to try entering in some of the plaintext passwords here…”

It only took a minute and some gentle guidance, but I actually managed to do it. The light on the door turned from angry red to happy green.

“I did it! I hacked a terminal!” I gasped.

“I knew we’d eventually find one that wasn’t made of clouds and rainbows,” Destiny said. “If we weren’t pressed for time I’d have you try a few of the others.”

I opened the door, having to shove hard. Even if the lock was disengaged, enough waxy black muck had built up over the years that it fought the idea of actually opening up again. I really didn’t want to know what it actually was, because it smelled like rotting meat and sick. Half the ship was covered in it, patching holes in conduits and pipes and laid down over supports to form barricades and walkways.

“We’ve taken some of the pressure off them by taking care of the teleportation thingie,” I said. “If they can’t put troops down, it buys a lot of time.”

“The layout of this ship seems broadly similar to the Raptors we’ve been in before,” Destiny said. “We could bring the whole ship down if we go to engineering and you Chamomile at it.”

“Is that a verb now?”

“The only pony I know that’s a bigger nexus of disaster is Princess Flurry Heart.”

“You know I’m going to take it as a compliment that you’re comparing me to royalty,” I said. “Can’t go to the engine room yet, though. We need to find that necromancer. He has to be around here somewhere.”

“Just keep following the trail. I’m taking us towards the biggest source of magic on the ship.”

I nodded and looked around. With all the waxy stuff piled up in the corners and walls, the interior of the ship was uncomfortably like being inside the belly of a living creature. “There’s no sign of undead down here. Are we really going the right way?”

“Slicing the locks is faster than fighting our way through. Don’t worry.” Destiny moved a window into my view. “As you can see by the rad count, we’re going right into the very heart of danger.”

“And, uh, I’m still really resistant to radiation, right?” I asked, looking at the numbers with growing worry.

“Sure. I’m monitoring your vitals. They’re great. Please do not ask for specifics.”

That definitely made me worry less. The good thing was, somepony screamed and that got me to stop wondering if my liver was in the right place and start worrying about somepony else, and it is just so much easier to deal with somepony else’s problems and ignore your own. It’s a great coping mechanism and I highly recommend it.

Destiny didn’t even need to say anything. She just pointed the way and I bolted, smashing through a half-open door that was in the way and into one of the long corridors running the length of the ship. The scream cut off, and I felt a surge of magic that rattled my teeth even more than my pounding run down the deck.

In the wavering light of her horn, a barricade appeared, scrap metal and corruption stretched across the hallway.

“We need to go around!” Destiny yelled.

I lowered my head and just went for it, jumping and shielding my head with my hooves and hoping for the best. The barricade shattered, the mortar holding it together tearing like festering flesh and the steel supports pulling free. I rolled to a stop on the other side, and the wall there had totally rusted through, letting me look down into a cargo bay that had become a scene right out of Tartarus.

The cargo bay door hung open with shards of broken hull plating around it making the thing seem like a maw, and a terrible altar had been built in front of it to serve as a dinner plate. Bone and cracked stone formed a slab covered in runes with a pony tied down to it with ropy loops of black vines. Blood poured down the angled face of the pitted stone and into a wide pool that sat like a well of gore in the deck, ringed by jagged edges of steel.

The pony on the slab struggled weakly. The zebra necromancer floated just above the sea of blood and raised a long, curved knife.

“No!” I shouted.

Undead that I hadn’t even noticed hissed and turned to look at me from where they lurked around the dimly-lit room. The necromancer didn’t pause, driving the blade into the pony’s chest. Emerald light erupted from the altar, and another huge burst of magic surged out. Through the hole in the hull I saw a lance of green energy shoot down towards the ground, lurching and tracking some target I couldn’t make out from this angle. The light faded at the same time the pony went limp.

“Oh buck,” Destiny whispered. “They’re using pony souls to fuel the ship’s main weapon!”

“Please, help us!” somepony shouted. I squinted through the gloom, and the light enhancement snapped on, revealing cages in the shadows, each one just barely big enough to hold the pony inside it. There must have been a dozen of them in tattered lab coats and uniforms.

I took a shot at the necromancer to keep him busy while I figured out what I was going to do. There were a bunch of zombies lurching into motion and coming right at me, but I didn’t see anything too big or dangerous. They were at best a distraction to me, but I needed to make sure I distracted them, too. If they got smart and took a hostage or something, I’d be bucked.

The shell bounced off a wall of magic that shimmered into visibility around the altar, reaching up from the edges of the bloody ocean. The undead zebra glared at me with three empty, glowing sockets.

I flew into a zombie and used it to break my fall, splattering it across the deck and sliding in the remains, head-butting a second one hard enough to send it to the floor in a heap.

“I’ll get you out of here!” I yelled. “Hang on!”

DRACO fired another shell at the necromancer and it was rebuffed. The zebra waved at the bleeding corpse of the mare on the altar, and the air cracked open. Pure white and black light shone through from the other side and something terrible and dark crawled from the rift, spilling out onto the pony like black oil.

“Sterile thaum levels are skyrocketing!” Destiny warned. The display in front of my eyes shimmered and the colors glitched. “What is it doing?!”

“I think it’s bringing in some help,” I said, taking a step back. The corpse stood up, the darkness clinging to it and enveloping it, light twisting until it was somehow in stark negative, shadows shining bright white and her coat as black as coal where the light touched it. She grew three sizes, a cloak of ragged night surrounding her.

She opened her mouth and screamed, and the whole ship shook around us.

“What am I looking at here, Destiny?” I asked.

“I have no idea. The magical signature is similar to the pyramid, and some of the undead from Stable 83!”

“The one with the evil coal fire and tar ghosts?” I asked. “I hated that place.”

“I wasn’t a fan either. I don’t think it’s much of a threat as long as that force field is up. We can concentrate on freeing the ponies here.”

I nodded, turned away from the massive scary pony, and it immediately stepped halfway through the energy field and took a swipe at me, smashing me into the wall with force that probably should have broken a few bones.

“Ow,” I grunted. “I thought you said--”

“I was wrong!” Destiny yelled. The thing charged me, and I tried to catch it, bracing myself. It was like touching ice, cold and biting and painful. I almost lost my grip at the sudden pain of the sensation, reflexes trying to make me let go.

“I hate this!” I yelped.

“It’s getting away!” Destiny shouted. I looked up past the halo of black surrounding the creature, and I saw the necromancer floating away, looking back at me before fleeing into the dark corridors of the ship.

“Buck!” I yelled. DRACO fired at point-blank range, and the monster shimmered like I’d thrown a stone into water. I twisted my grip and let go, the sudden release of force making it run right past me and into the wall.

I kicked it in the flank and ran away.

“Destiny, you got enough magic for a fire bolt?” I asked, fleeting across the room.

“Charged and ready!” Destiny reported. I jumped on a zombie and bounced off it into the air, spreading my wings and steadying myself so she could get a bead on the creature.

“Hit it!” I shouted. Destiny fired, and the magic washed through me, a wave of heat rushing up my spine and out of my body. The bolt of crimson magic crashed into the shadow creature and it shrieked, its body collapsing in on itself. The shadows faded, and the corpse of the mare dropped to the deck, bleeding black ooze and slime in a wide puddle around it.

“That worked,” I said. “Let’s get those ponies out.”

---

“Thanks,” the lead mare said, rubbing her fetlocks nervously. “I think I was next.” She looked over at the mare who’d died. “When they broke into the lab we thought we were going to die, and then when they captured us… we didn’t know how much worse it could get.”

“Do you know anything about them?” I asked. “What do they want?”

“No idea,” she said. “They don’t really talk. Not to us, anyway.”

I nodded. “That figures. It’s too much to ask to have some idea about their motivations.”

“So where’s the rest of your team?” the mare asked.

“Uh…” I hesitated.

“...Okay, well, what’s the plan for getting us out of here?”

“Sorry, we didn’t think anypony was alive up here,” I said.

I saw her expression fall. “There’s no escape plan,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I, uh…” I hesitated, then got a good idea. “I know!” I pulled a few catches free and loosened the chest plate of the armor so I could reach into my pockets, pulling out a brick of circuits and crystal the size of two packs of cards. “What about this thing?”

“That’s-- that’s a TeleBuck! Where did you get that?”

“One of the scientists we rescued from the lab gave it to me,” I explained. “I don’t know how to actually use it, but…”

“It’s fine, I can program it,” she said, taking it from me and walking over to the edge of the room to look down on the city below. “I just have to guess at the distance, add in a small safety factor…” She adjusted the small jumpers and knobs on top of the device.

“Can it take all of you?” I asked.

“Yes, but the capacitors will only work for one jump,” she said. “The design goals called for one TeleBuck in each fireteam. We were going to look at replaceable spark batteries, but we couldn’t keep the talisman from draining itself dry every time.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a step back. “When you get to the ground, look for a unicorn filly in uniform. She’s in charge. She can find somewhere safe for you to shelter.”

“You’re not coming with us?”

I shook my head. “I’m not done here. I’ll feel better knowing you’re safe.”

The mare nodded but obviously didn’t want to actually change my mind. The freed ponies gathered together, holding hooves, and she set off the TeleBuck. They vanished in a twinkle of blue light, and I was alone.

“Think they made it?” I asked.

“They just used an experimental teleportation talisman, guessed at the distance, and I’m sure that wasn’t enough power for all of them,” Destiny said. “Let’s just say I’m glad we weren’t stress-testing it with them.”

I nodded.

Something moved in the corner of my eye and I spun, ready to fire DRACO.

A pony glowing with pale light stood in the darkness, not looking at me. After a moment, he turned and walked away.

“Ship’s haunted,” Destiny noted.

“Yeah,” I mumbled, following after it.

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

she finds her quiet life turned into a horror story.

Shouldn't there be a horror tag, then?