Fallout Equestria: Taking Life By The Horns

by Pokonic

Eternal Empire

"I think he got banished and then thrown into a dungeon in the place he was banished to."

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Shining Armor is dead. Long live Shining Armor.

The captain of the Royal Guard and the Prince of the Crystal Empire died wearing his purple-and-gold armor, while standing. He was still standing, even now, one hundred and twenty seven years after the farce with the zebras, in the middle of Ministry Walk.

I was not impressed with the sight.

While one could say something about his stubbornness and determination to save Canterlot, the truth was that his very armor had fused to his bones and, to a extent, the marble platform he stood on. For all the stallion's bravery, he still burnt out entirely at some point and the Princesses began to take his place holding the shield, and for that, neither of them could escape.

He should have known better. He was the High General of Equestria, after all, and possessed one of the greatest horns in the nation at the time. He could have literally been anywhere else and survived. No place was attacked with the same ferocity as Canterlot, and anywhere else his shield-spell could have very likely have held through the worst of any megaspell volley. He could have developed the ability to filter out magical radiation through his shield as well. It was entirely within his power, and I did not doubt that he was able to do so, if he could stop the corrosion of the Pink Cloud.

But he stayed and died on a raised platform, in the middle of a public garden, alone. There was only a few bodies in this general area, a rare thing in Canterlot. Surely, ponies had long fled this place during the first hours of Pink Cloud attack; even the corpses of his fellow Guards tended to be further down on the mount, closer to the base of it, as they were involved in the pointless evacuation of civilians.

I did not come so far, to dread and dead Canterlot, however, just to stare at a dead unicorn. If I wanted to do that, I could have simply stopped at any one point and looked in a mirror.

This was, truly, pure catharsis. Finding him was a grand task, but one I decided I had the time for. It was not the ponies here that was the greatest threat to me, but rather the temptations of this city. I could go back to the school I once taught at, or attempt to bind a Canterlot Drake to my will. But I had not needed to do so, because I had a single task in mind.

With that thought in mind, I took a step forward. The grey, crumbly ground gave slightly under my weight, and wisps of dark pink vapor tickled at my hooves.

I ignored the sensation of the Cloud nipping at my heels, and got on the platform, and walked towards the corpse. In the pink-tinted lighting, I had to focus my sight to get a good look at the stallion, to tell metal apart from flesh.

Shining Armor was a large stallion, and I was never the tallest of ponies, and so I found myself looking slightly upwards, to look the stallion in the eyes.

Well, sockets, now. His face was quiet skeletal, with just a few bits of dried flesh clinging to the jaws. This irked me; even now, he had a expression of thoughtless determination on his face, as if he simply believed he could survive the Cloud with his own will by gritting his teeth and baring it.

"Your sister was a idiotic mare." I said calmly to the corpse.

Shining Armor did not respond to my accusation, as I expected.

I considered why I thought this was worth it. I did not consider myself to be a petty pony, but tracking down the corpse of a singular pony who didn't even know me especially well did strike me as slightly petty.

"Her consciousness is now merged with that of a magic school dropout and two of her cronies, along with an uncountable number of other unicorns. She is not in control. Far from it. She is a puppet to the whimsy's of a abomination, and there is nothing she can do. Her so-called Element of Harmony has failed her."

The Captain of the Royal Guard's horn was slightly frayed at the edges, perhaps a sign of immediate damage from prior overuse. It resembled a tangle of fibers along the base of the skull, binding the base of the horn to the forehead. The Pink Cloud had long since fused them to the very bone, giving his horn the appearance that it was sprouting out of the middle of a meaty bone-white flower.

"Your father was in Braylin when you died, and your mother sits in a wheelchair not a mile away from here, alone. She does not know you are here, and can never reach you because of her inability to walk and her lack of companions. She only has pictures of your dear sister, your little idiotic twit of a sibling who died screaming in a vat of her own creation."

I paused.

"I talked to her for a hour. She never mentioned your name. I would think she has forgotten you."

Shining Armor stood ramrod straight, like I was his very own commander. This amused me, and I continued to speak.

"Your wife abandoned you, you and your people. The Empire vanished a hour after Cloudsdale was destroyed, and the Princess of Love absconded along with the Empire. She is immortal, along with her traitor ponies, and she left you to die alone. Did you really believe the Crystal tribe would accept another foreign unicorn king?"

Shining Armor resembled a statue, in a manner of speaking. How fitting that he was now bonded eternally with his namesake, a monument of the old world.

I felt a brief amount of anger when I realized that Shining Armor was most likely the first pony to know that the Empire was gone, and yet he still followed his first two princesses.

"That pegasus guard you left in charge of the Empire's defenses flew into the sky the moment his tribe's capital was obliterated. He became the first general of the Pegasus Enclave's forces, and that position was already held for him before he arrived. He named his first child Skylight Sparkle. What madness convinced you to put a pegasus in charge of the defenses? They are loyal only to their own, like your precious crystal ponies."

Shining Armor, I believed, already knew that Flash Sentry had lusted after his sibling, but kept him on for his own amusement. The alternative was far too strange to even consider.

"Your last act was a folly, Shining Armor. Nopony alive knows your name except for the few remnants of civilization that care for your sibling. You have no great monuments to your name. You have no great historical footprint to your proud family lineage. Your children died screaming in a necromantic inferno, and you chose the wrong place to defend in your last moments. Canterlot is known only for it's horrors and it's connection to the past, and even then you are barely known even to the ghouls who lurk here. You are a joke, a minor anecdote. A piece of trivia."

I paused, and slowly, without any force touched the dead stallion's horn.

"It is thought by even those learned ponies that remain that it was solely the Princesses that held the shield." I said, slowly applying pressure to the dead appendage, "Your last act, your most triumphant spell, was wasted on two dead deities. Harmony is a lie, a lie you died for. Everything you died for was a lie. Loyalty to your crown, the love of your wife and children, and the trust of your friends; all lies. You died for a war that was never going to end in peace."

I paused, putting more pressure on the horn with my hoof. I did not have much power in my old limbs, as my body was failing me long before my ghouldom, but Shining Armor's horn was weakened from exposure to the Cloud.

After a few moments, Shining Armor's horn popped off, leaving a moderate sized crevice in his skull. The faint smell of rot reached my nose suddenly, and vanished soon after.

Without his horn, Shining Armor could have passed for just another low-blooded earth pony, possibly from one of the hill tribes. How comforting; in the end, even the greatest among us all rot into the same sad shape.

I picked up the horn with my own magic, and turned to the side so I could examine it without seeing the corpse. It was a proud horn, certainty; I had previously made my way though the old Blueblood estate, to obtain certain items that laid there, and they were all the old blood of Unicornia. Shining Armor could have laid amongst any of those proud stallions and mares without looking out of place.

And now I had his horn, a key to many treasures.

It took me the better part of a month to find him, in this place. It was just a horn, albeit a very powerful one. The idea that this was all a petty way for me to talk to a dead pony wasn't too far out of my mind.

I looked around me. Canterlot was a crumbling pink-tinted ruin, pale marble tinted sickly dark hues like rotten teeth. What remained of the great unicorn-built capital was a rotting mess, a abomination. Only those rare places that were magicly warded has truly survived, and even then the Cloud is a insidious thing that eats away at the very roots of the mount. From the crystal caverns below to the tip of the castle, this place was dead.

I looked back at Shining Armor, who was already starting to crumple down onto the ground. His head was starting to deflate and sink inwards, like a melting plastic toy, and his limbs were only now beginning to buckle. My disturbance of his cranium was apparently enough to cause him to collapse, just like anything else in Canterlot.

"General, you mishandled this war." I said lowly, prodding the right knee slightly, so that the cloud-ravaged corpse appeared to kneel before me. I paused, as I smiled in the first time in many years. I felt muscles on my face that had long gone slack tighten at my command. The exposure to the pure radioactive power of the Cloud did me well, even if it pained even me to be here.

"You believed it would be not be any different than the sagas you read of, those of dragons and heros and villains. In this war, however, individuals did not matter. Hero's who stood outside the lines died just like every other pony. Those who slay dragons can die from bullets all the same, and one's own personal experience or cunning made no different to the zebra who ended their lives. The individual is only worth what blood he can spill, how many seconds he can contribute to battle before his death. Ponies are a kind where every individual is seen as special, and where you failed, general, was in trying to rectify that. The myth of a single hero and his merry band of followers permeated your military, and many foolish deaths by caused by this delusion. You were mistaken, in believing that individual ponies mattered when a hundred died every hour."

I placed the horn down on the ground near my left hoof, and began to channel my magic as I focused on the corpse of the stallion.

With a thought and slight pulling sensation from deep within, I ignited the corpse with a moderate amount of flame. The Prince's form melted like wax, and metal and bone became akin to a slurry, and I observed that the flame slowly became green-tinted, from the ambient magical energies of the place. I took a slight step back, tugging the horn with me, and observed that the smoke slowly coming off the stallion was tainted the slightest shade of pink.

Green and purple and pink and grey, that was what the body of Shining Armor became as it slowly melted into a puddle of necromantic goo. Green and purple like the dragon brat his sister had with her before it went into a dragon-sleep, pink and grey for his wife and the dead cold Empire he once ruled.

"The fact is, Shining Armor, war is not like your stories. War is what led the world to this state and war is all that remains. The remnants of the war you were in charge of keeps me and the brutal beasts that ponies have become alive. War never changes."

I stopped, and stared at the remains of Shining Armor. His remains were now a smooth, glassy black puddle, carbon and liquid death.

When I turned around, I took his horn with me.

I began to walk out of Ministry Square, to go to the very Eternal Empire I despised.

A unicorn's job is never done.

Comments

[dipycord]

I really hope this isn't dead it's awesome