On the Road to '63

by niBBoi

Ashes

Juniper closed her eyes. She remembered.

She remembered boring and eerily quiet days with nothing to do than drink and wait. She remembered cold, long, and sleepless nights with the sounds of battle echoing over the horizon. She remembered marching out with her comrades and slowly moving through the scorching ruins of Vraks wondering what could have caused such terrible destruction.

Of course, Juniper already knew the answer.

Spirits rose amongst the Equestrians once more when a renewed offensive into the changeling heartlands tore through what little defenses the changelings could put up at the time. Soon, the Equestrian army was approaching the industrial city of Vraks but immediately encountered heavy resistance upon contact with the city's defenders.

In response, the air force intensified its air support as well as its strategic bombing campaign against changeling industrial centres. Equestrian planes dominated the skies and put fear into the hearts of any poor insect operating a tank or stubbornly holding a position. Near-constant air raids rocked practically every major changeling city with new and terrifying ordnance. Her majesty seemed to have focused a lot of the air support and the bombing raids on Vraks a couple weeks ago as the siege around the city devolved into a total slugfest, and the results were utterly devastating.

Juniper winced and opened her eyes. She breathed in the cold and crisp autumn air as she lay on her side, plush bedding touching her coat and a dull pain emanating from her withers. The faint odors of sweat, dried blood, and antiseptic assaulted her sense of smell, and the vibrant colors of sunny skies, red-orange treetops, and city ruins outside the open window filled her vision.

"Mornin'," someone in the room said.

"Good morning," Juniper softly replied.

It was her buddy Hay Bale. They both got wounded in an ambush a few days ago. Some changelings hiding in the rubble caught them off-guard while they were sweeping through one of the outer districts of Vraks. One of the bastards got a lucky shot and took Juniper down. Thankfully, however, the bullet only grazed her back, and Hay Bale got a similar injury.

Birds chirped outside as Juniper waited in silence for anymore talk coming from her friend. When the silence persisted, the mare continued her early morning musings.

Juniper's mind couldn't help but think about Hay Bale. He was a farm-pony before the war, but Juniper didn't know much more about him other than that he was their platoon's machine gunner.

She thought about that. She herself was just a fairly ordinary mare from Canterlot. Sure, some of her relatives were landed gentry, but her immediate family could hardly be considered aristocrats. Her parents worked actual jobs, and their home was simply a quaint, two-story townhouse near the city's plaza.

Stars above, she missed home. Her leave lasted for a while, and she got to spend last Hearth's Warming with her family, but if anything, that only made the ache in her heart more painful. Ever since the battles near Canterlot, the terrible things Juniper had been forced to experience had left her tired in a way few could ever understand apart from her fellow soldiers.

Juniper sighed. She was supposed to be off studying botany and forestry at a prestigious university in Canterlot by now. She wasn't planning to join the Royal Infantry Corps and trudge halfway across the continent blasting bugs and taking names, but few could have thought that all of Juniper's time running around her aunt's vast wooded estate during her childhood and all of her experience with trekking given to her by her father and uncle would make her a perfect fit for the Equestrian army's light infantry when she was conscripted.

Oh, she remembered how her parents cried when she broke the news, and she remembered the heartbroken look her father gave her that told Juniper how it should have been him instead of her. Unfortunately, her father had a physical condition that disqualified him from service, and her mother had a government job of overseeing local agricultural production that was apparently already important enough to disallow her from quitting and joining the military.

Eventually, she had to bid her parents farewell, and Juniper remembered crying herself to sleep in her bed during her first night of basic training. She also remembered being scared out of her wits when they finished training and were finally deployed thinking whether or not her unit was going to be sent to reinforce the absolute hell that was the southern sectors during the Battle West of Canterlot, and she remembered crying again when she witnessed the aftermath of the brutality that the changelings left in the wake of their retreat when the Equestrian army had liberated the towns west of Mareposa.

A cold gust of wind blew in from the open window, and Juniper sighed once more. She'd heard news from the front already. The army had finally declared victory over Vraks but at a tremendous cost, and while the changelings were reported to have lost a lot more, the Equestrian army had sustained horrific losses as well. The city of Vraks itself was then just a burning, lifeless husk that served as a glorified graveyard for the poor souls who fought in its treacherous spaces. Half the city was corpses and rubble and the other half was... just corpses. The dead were strewn about in every street, factory, and apartment building.

Juniper's thoughts turned to the few changelings that had managed to survive the siege. Most had already surrendered, but some were still stubbornly holding out.

Oh, what fools they were. Juniper thought about how blind those insects had to be to continue fighting in the bombed-out ruins of their home and not see that the war was already lost.

Another sigh escaped the young mare's lips, although she didn't feel so young anymore, as she stared out her window. By that point, there was little reason to continue the war. There was nothing left for the changelings other than cinders and ashes.

Author's Note:

"But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being;

Nor can the dead ever be brought back to life."

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/equestriaatwar/comments/14cic5o/ashes/