> Fallout: Equestria - The Untold Individuals
>  by FuzzyVeeVee
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> For Want Of A Purpose
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


For Want of a Purpose



* * *


        Within Tenpony Tower, the crowning jewel of beauty in what remained of Equestria, there were a hundred locales an intrepid mare or stallion could go to find peace or calm. There were the top floors, shrouded in their silent archives and dusty libraries, despite being so close to the Upper Market. There was Canterlot Row, an atrium of false trees amongst an open cluster of quiet café's and trickling recycled water located in the east wing. If a pony wished so, there were even the easing graces of Tendertail's Sauna and Spa on floor sixteen of the primary tower itself.

        For Flintlock, Tenpony's medical clinic was as far from any of those paradises as could possibly be found.

        Nestled into the lower floors, the clinic was a conversion of what used to be a collection of management offices. As a result, for all its sprawling labyrinth of private wards, no-where within it escaped feeling cramped in the thin corridors that visitors were permitted to meekly line. All the larger spaces had been, rightfully, dedicated to operating tables, pharmacy storage and patient accommodation. Busied staff hustled and squeezed past the waiting ponies, each trying their best to line the walls and not look as though they were staring at anyone else's eyes directly. Essentially, the 'elevator effect', only for twenty minutes straight.

        Within this hustle of awkwardly turned heads to try and identify every last scrap of unoccupied wall to stare at, Flintlock sighed and tapped his hooves upon the arms of a blue cushioned chair. Always blue cushions. Four other minor clinics in the tower, he'd visited them all, and it was always blue. Ponies had even started saying they were departing early for visiting hours in order to 'get a blue', with not a single denizen of the tower failing to know what that meant.

        Truly, Tenpony Tower had the most bleeding edge heights of social creativity.

        He settled his forehead into a hoof again and sighed. This place always made him feel testy and cynical. Something about being surrounded by a location whose sole purpose was to fix things that had gone wrong with someone's health just never sat right in his gut. The smells of antiseptic, the musty heat and the hushed voices everyone took and the dull, murmuring of the sick was an atmosphere that he had long since decided was impossible to relax in.

        “Flintlock, pull your head up this instant.”

        The voice hissed from beside him, drawing him from his internal monologue of complaints. Firm, but whispered, his sister was not one for beating around the bush when something was out of order. Sat in her flowing sunflower dress made by their mother, with her extravagantly tied mane tucked neatly behind her head, she gave him a disapproving stare that only a frustrated elder sibling could. Behind her, his parents, two aunts and cousin all turned their heads, the horns that signified their family's species all angling down a little. Gavel Swing, his father, half shrugged. He remained bolt upright in a suit sharp enough to slice cheese. His mother, Dress Sense only looked hesitant, as though she'd been about to say something, before remaining quiet. She instead went back to seemingly perpetually smoothing her pearly white satin dress.

        Shaking out his head, Flintlock pulled himself upright and smoothed out his waistcoat once again. Clearing his throat, a subtle courtesy of apology to the room at large for his slouching, before turning back to the front, angled only slightly toward his sibling.

        “My apologies. I'm just concerned for Grandmother's health. She's been in here so long this time.”

        “Mm...yes, quite. Best of hopes.”

        Flintlock's emotion bubbled to the surface, and he had to take a long and slow breath to force it back down. He knew very well that his sister, Radiance, had anything but the hopes that he himself possessed for a healthy recovery. It made the bile in his stomach raise to even contemplate the attitude some of his family had toward her.

        A young doctor, one that Flintlock knew as Helpinghoof from educational classes, wandered out of the staff room and cleared his throat.

        “Mrs Venture's family?”

        Flintlock dropped his hooves to the ground, standing up and fixing up his mane with his magic. Getting up an hour early to carry out his archive's duties in time to be here first would pay off.

        “Three family members at a time.”

        Before Flintlock could even bring himself to move, he felt the hoof on his shoulder.

        “Flintlock!”

        He grimaced, Radiance always seemed to turn his name into a stinging barb of a snappy reprimand; somehow managing to condense it into two syllables over the years.

        “Yes, sister?” He patiently breathed and replied as he was expected.

        “I do hope you are not rushing in? The young should always offer for the older, a gentlecolt should always offer for a mare and a brother should always offer for his sister. Little brother, there are others present in front of your family.”

        Flintlock turned around, biting down every bit of his mounting frustration to step sideways.

        “Radiance, it's Gran-”

        She had already swept on past him. 'Swept' was the appropriate descriptive. That dress of hers filled the corridor to either side, with its fragile patterned white hems dragging lightly along the smooth floors. Ponies cleared the way for her, recognising her immediately. Head held high, she accepted the attendant nurse's kiss to her hoof before turning to head into their Grandmother's room.

        Frustrated, Flintlock allowed himself one brief, internally rude moment of pleasure at the fact that wearing such a dress, she had to make a three point turn to get through the doorway in these thin hallways.

        His mother's hoof wrapped around his neck from behind.

        “She only tries the best for you, Flintlock. I do believe she's aiming to invite you to the Grand Ball this year.”

        “So that our family will be fully on the invite list and a member of the inclusive list, of course. I am thankful.”

        His mother jostled him. “It's for you. She believes it may help you to integrate more. I think you should listen to your sister more. Look where she's gotten herself.”

        “...yes, mother. Of course.”

        Flintlock shifted to the side, bowing politely to allow his mother past and then sat back down on the chair. His mother's words were little reassurance. This wasn't Radiance helping him. It was her ending his punishment. Speak publicly about your intentions to try and help the education system teach more about the world outside the tower and your own sister will socially expel you from the circles of interest to avoid association to the 'family name'.

        And when your sister was first in line to become master of the archives, that was a lot of circles. He hadn't had a social gathering in months, and goodness help a pony who might want to try to start thinking about meeting a close associate or even partner some day under those conditions.

        Flintlock sat bolt upright in the chair again, his parents passing into the ward before the doors closed again. The attendant stood on duty beside it, the letter he'd been so eager to try and give to Radiance still nervously tucked into his front pocket.

        While for others...

        Flintlock sighed, and went back to resting his hoof on his forehead.


* * *


        Visiting times were one hour for all attendees.

        The theory was to have time slots for parties too large for one visit. He could hope for a solid thirty minutes in there, if he was lucky.

        Twenty five minutes into his parents and Radiance's turn, Flintlock began to get restless, reading all of the chipper posters for a fourth time, or scanning over the pre-balefire magazines that some unimaginative type had still left out to read.

        Thirty minutes came and went. Feeling his hope crash inside, he looked back into the magazine, trying to tune out the gossip of his aunts. His cousin was wandering around in awe, trying to watch what doctors did, his bushy blonde mane bobbing as he kept asking nurses if there were any free job openings yet. A good colt, but Flintlock filtered it all out.

        The sights within the magazines always caught him by surprise. Of streets in the open air, just as extravagant as Tenpony itself that stretched from here to the Manehattan Gardens. Friendship City in its gleaming stone and metal above a crisp river. The colourful adverts for various locales of the city, and even some for civil grade firearms for defence. They looked clunky and cheap. Such devices were in stark contrast to the artistic and fluid designs of pony life elsewhere in those pages.

        Looking up, he sighed as the clock seemed to throw its arms around at high speed. Thirty five minutes in. Only twenty five left. Still that door refused to open again. Slowly breathing, trying his best to never appear flustered around others, he returned to reading the articles, before rather suddenly realising something.

        If he knew anything, this magazine must have been from the early years of the tensions prior to war, before the Ministry of Image began printing. Briefly, it occurred to him that it may perhaps be quite rare for that very fact.

        Standing up, he approached the nurses to inquire about perhaps trading for it to include in his little stash within the archives. They hadn't a clue about what they actually possessed, and all it took was a polite smile and an offer of a couple caps, strategically enough for them both to get a snack from the vending machine across the hall. Being the market-colt for the archives' supplies while you grew up left you with certain inherent skills you could pick up, if you were observant enough.

        It was at this moment, that the door to the ward finally opened.

        Farthest away from it, Flintlock immediately realised that his aunts and cousin were now 'in line' through social acceptance of immediate proximity.

        Radiance exited, the attendant who had kissed her hoof now making a half hearted move to hold out a letter for her, but leaving it far too late to catch her attention. Flintlock saw his father take it instead, smiling to the thankful buck.

        With his sister advancing to leave immediately, Flintlock stepped aside for her.

        “I shall see you back at the archives tomorrow?” Her smile was anything but genuine.

        Flintlock nodded, and didn't dare open his mouth to reply, or he feared the passively aggressive complaint he'd been working on for the last half hour might have slipped out. Yet now as he stared to the side and saw the ward door close again.

        Aggravated with himself, feeling his mind race in frustration and worry that all the time would be used up, he sank into the chair yet again.


* * *


        At the very sound of a handle turning, Flintlock was out of the chair. At a speed that was 'too fast to be considered polite' but just shy of 'someone might say something about it', he hurried to the ward. There were only ten minutes left before the end of visiting hours. Hustling past his aunts, he hastily thanked the attendant and trotted immediately inside, pulling the door shut behind him with his horn's magic.

        “Ah, ah! There you are, what kept you? Did you let them push you around until you were last again?”

        The first jovial voice he had heard that day.

        Alone in the room, cast by the hazy sunlight of an arched window on the outer walls of Tenpony onto the hospital bed, his grandmother, Skye Venture, was waiting. Her thin body was bound by small tubes and with a nebuliser mask for oxygen hung close to her head. The tired smile as she saw him was enough to lift Flintlock's spirit from all the waiting.

        “My apologies, Grandma.” Flintlock trotted over toward the far side of her bed, flitting the curtains open, as he knew she preferred. “Social circumstance and-”

        “Oh hush, and give your old granny a hug before you waste these prison hours apologising.”

        She wearily raised her horribly emancipated foreleg. Taking the strain for her, Flintlock gratefully leaned in to embrace his grandmother.

        This was his only time to ease off the social exhaustion that was Tenpony Tower's life. Venture was unlike anyone else in his family, and in many ways considered a black mark. His sister he knew harboured some resentment about it, and Flint was certain she had pondered on whether she would be happier for Skye Venture to finally pass away and remove that stain.

        The thought of ever wishing such a thing struck him deeply inside, that anyone could wish that upon her. After all, Skye Venture had done something no other member of his family had ever dared to do. She had left the tower.

        It wasn't entirely unusual amongst the ponies that lived there to occasionally go outside under heavy guard, but there was a difference. Venture hadn't just left for a trade mission or some outreach program, she had been an explorer. An adventurer. A rogue to the ponies of the tower, who had once left on her own for over six months and was presumed dead, before returning with stories aplenty and a number of scars to prove it. She had travelled to the frontiers of Equestria, and according to her, looked out upon the frozen north and the dusty hills of Appleloosa. She'd even been one to discover the lost manufacturing plant of Sparkle-Cola near the crater.

        Flintlock had always seen her as a hero to the family name and the source that had spurred his interest in learning more about what was out there and what had happened to the place he only ever saw through a window. Her whimsical tales told of far more than just the horrors that most believed of. But mostly, he was close to her because she actually respected his own interest in its history. Few did.

        “Those stuffy so and so's,” she sharply declared, “they come visit me, and all I hear from them is document this, letter that, sign this, confirm everything...you know not one of them so much as wanted a hug. That's where you're different, little Flint.”

        Flintlock flushed at the cheeks, “Grandma, I'm twenty eight...”

        “Oh? Oooh? That old? Then where is a beautiful mare for me to meet and embarrass you in front of?” She cackled, before roughly coughing. A hacking, sickly cough that barely shook the bed, as her frail body lay back down to draw the nebuliser over her muzzle again to try to breathe.

        Flintlock sat down to wait on her recovering, before his eyes caught notice of a letter that had been left at the foot of the bed. Opening it in telekinesis, he slid it out to read.

        Before he'd even got a few lines in, his eyes widened.

        “Hah, you saw that, huh? That's what I'm talking about, Flint.” Venture dropped the mask back down and leaned over the covers. “A will! A! Will! They want me to write one of these crummy things because I've been in here so often now. Your mother, I say...I never raised her to give such a child of her own that would shove a will in my face and tell me its for the family's good!”

        The sight of that form to fill in; with all of Venture's inventory pre-labelled on it and simply needing assigned to those left behind, set his blood boiling.

        “I cannot believe that they-”

        “Would want me to croak? Give me that, Flint. Come on. I'll show you what we do with that.”

        She took the letter, before simply tossing it over the other side of the bed and missing the bin by a good three feet. The sight, if anything, made Flint snort with laughter. The dismissive look on her face sold it, before she waved him in with a trembling hoof.

        “Now, little Flint, come on. Enough about my silly worries, I'm not disappearing any day soon. I might not be a spry and youthful adventurer any more, but the humour that the wasteland taught me never left. I mean, look outside this door when you leave. Some idiot on the sports gym rowing team put up a sign advertising them supporting the clinic outside. They put their slogan underneath, 'Every stroke counts'. Yeah, good choice for a clinic, you dumb ninnies.”

        Flint found himself chuckling, settling down in the chair beside her to pour her a glass of water. His family hadn't even done that.

        “Ah, thank you. Did they accept your idea, Flint? The one to tell all the little foals about how the kids outside live?”

        He shook his head.

        “I'm afraid not. They said that learning about the wasteland outside would scare the children too much and that the positives you told me about to put in the report were cherry picking...”

        Venture scrunched up her mouth. As an eighty five year old mare, that was some degree of disgruntled wrinkling.

        “What has become of the tower, little Flint? Frightening the children? Cherry picking? Riff raff and rubbish! I tell you, Flint, the ponies I met out there? The times I had? I saw more about life, love and emotion in one week out there, than I had in a year inside this cage. Here, here...”

        She pulled across a journal that Flintlock knew very well. He'd leafed through it enough times in his studies, mostly looking at the pictures of how iconic streets looked like now-a-days. It was only as he'd grown up, that he began to realise what his retired grandmother had truly done and seen, and that the ponies in it weren't like the life he had. As she flipped through the pages, her eyes filled with nostalgia, he could see her in her twenties to her fifties, beside all sorts of unusual characters. In scrappy towns, atop blasted mountains or standing atop the body of some giant lion-like beast.

        “Grandma, I've seen this a dozen times.”

        “Don't care. Look, look! This is not cherry picking!”

        Her hoof weakly pointed out a photograph of what seemed to be a shanty-town of old train cars and rusted walls. Various ponies surrounded her, mostly rough but all smiling. Notably, one winged one was what he knew was called a 'ghoul' outside the walls. Flintlock had never seen one for himself, and the thought made him queasy, but here the ghoul had one of the most heartfelt and joyful smiles he had ever seen.

        “New Appleloosa, Flint. I made sure to pass by there every time and they never changed. How's that for cherry picking? A wonderful group, passionate and eager, welcoming and practical. I'd give up a dozen no-life-skeletons in here for just one of them! And see? There?”

        Her hoof pointed to one mare. Mature, she held herself with surprising grace. Beside her legs there was a little filly with a green mane.

        “Old friend. Must have been twenty something years ago, during my last tour. I had to go after I heard. She was the town doctor, had that kid right there in that town. Even sent a letter to me at the tower about it, talking about raising a little filly out there where warm water doesn't come on command and the food schedule is whatever you can scrounge up. Damned if I know how you do it out there, but that's love, Flintlock. That's family. For all your sister talks about it, she doesn't know the meaning of the word. Ah, how I miss them sometimes...the foals always liked the fancy hats I wore for each trip, just for the sake of it.”

        Venture's face tightened as she looked over the photograph. Flint wondered if she might weep out of memories, and took her hoof in his to comfort her. That warm smile turned to him instead.

        “Thank you, little Flint.”

        Flintlock nodded, helping her to lift the glass of water to her cracked lips.

        “It's all right though, Grandma. I'm still in the archives, aren't I? I get to read a lot more about the world in there. I can finish a lot faster than Radiance thinks I can. And...and life is comfortable. She got me a new apartment on the upper floors so we'd all be up there. Three bedrooms now, all to myself. With a balcony overlooking the great market atrium. It was just some silly school wish I had...I'll...I'll manage. Maybe next year's curriculum?”

        “And you are happy?” Grandma Venture's eyes were piercing.

        Flintlock hesitated, and then sighed. “I'm disappointed, yes. But I could want for nothing now, she sorted everyth-”

        “Are. You. Happy? Flint, when was the last time you attended a social event?”

        “The winter ball?”

        Her eyes narrowed. “Which one?”

        Flintlock's heart dropped. “The one before last...”

        Venture raised a hoof and patted his shoulder.

        “Flint...little Flint...why won't you talk to your grandma? You wouldn't look like you do if something wasn't troubling you. Things usually are these days. You used to tell me about all the ponies you met and talked to. Now you come here every day and every time I see you looking at the floor like some lost puppy. Come on, now, out with it.”

        Doubt began to cloud Flintlock's mind. What could he even say? That his sister had ushered in a new era of prosperity for their family at the cost of having her micromanage things? That every day was just another short and comfortable trip from archive to markets and back again, before attending whatever family event had clogged that night up? That the one little burst of inspiration he'd had to maybe try something different had landed him in the doghouse and socially outcast him from much of anyone wanting to be involved with him, lest it invoke the displeasure of his sister for them to be seen with the 'black sheep' of the family?

        How to even word that without sounding enormously selfish, to complain from luxury.

        “I-” he began, “I don't really even know how to approach it, Grandma. It's just, I've not been very happy lately. I love my family. My parents, my cousin. My new home is incredible. I want for nothing material any more. Yet during the days, I just...well, it's hard to pin down to anything specific and it sounds particularly ungrateful to think out loud and-”

        “It's because your sister has such an overbearing influence on your entire life, isn't it? That every day just feels short and comfortable doing the same little things with little change, before family and social events clog up your whole evening and every thought of inspiration to maybe try something different gets you made an outcast and makes others not want to come near you because they don't want to risk offending a powerful family?”

         Flintlock stopped right where he was, his mouth hanging open. Skye Venture just make a wrinkled grin at him with one side of her mouth. She pointed a hoof at Flintlock.

        “They are wrapped up in their pointless games, Flintlock. But you, you've got good thinking. You wouldn't think all that if you-” She stopped, hacking roughly off the side of the bed, before sucking oxygen in from the mask. “If you didn't have some real problem with it. And I know it's not stupid, cos I wouldn't call me stupid. So stop thinking stupid, stupid.”

        Flintlock bit his tongue lightly, flabbergasted, as he tried to catch up with all that.

        “You mean...”

        “I mean, it's what I felt way back. You're lonely, my dear.”

        Flintlock knew she was right. The way his heart clenched at the hated word struck far too deeply to not be exactly what it was.

        “I just...” He began, before biting his tongue, barely knowing how to continue. For a pony who was proud of his own diction, this was difficult. “Her fortune pays for us all, I have access to that even if I don't own any of that. I love the food, I love my home, I love most of my family. I love the markets and the music. But every night, it's more than just coming home to an empty apartment on my own.”

        He leaned in, his forelegs resting on the bed.

        “I feel unfulfilled, Grandma...my interests are in a world already gone, and few want to hear of them. I am lonely, but I'm afraid it's my own choices and interests that made it that way, as much as my sister's.”

        Skye Venture was quiet for some time, her hoof patting her Grandson's gently.

        “Oh Flintlock...if only I were twenty years younger and able to take you out there with me just once.”

        His eyes shot open, as much fear as astonishment. “You would have?!”

        “I would...you love your history, you ought to have seen it while I could still have protected you. You've never yet been able to see that Ironshod Mark Nine Rifle you love so much, have you? New Appleloosa's store has got one...”

        She winked with a smirk.

        “I'm only sorry that I can't give you that now. Don't be held down by your family, Flint. It's better to accept less if it means you really get to live.”

        Across the room, there was a sharp rap on the door, the signal of visiting hour being over. Flintlock's face fell, but he felt Venture's hoof around his shoulders and rubbing his back.

        “I'll try to talk to your sister tomorrow when she comes to see if I've signed that useless thing. I want to know that you're happy, Flint. So you go out there and don't let them get to you. If you have to strike out on your own and open a shop on floor five, just to be your own pony, you do it. Become a teacher and do it yourself. Be a gunsmith for the guards. Whatever you do, I'll be proud of you, my boy.”

        She pulled his head in to gently kiss his forehead.

        “Thank you, Grandma.”

        “Here, take this.” She hoofed him her journal, ensuring he held it tightly first. “Have a good look through it again. Those ponies out there can teach us more than we think. Maybe you'll find something in there that gives you some drive to do something in here.”

        “I'll try...”

        “And you find yourself a lovely mare to bring me soon. You'll get around those blacklists. You're not the only pony in here tired of the pomp and gossip. I want to see you with company.”

        “I will, Grandma.” He smiled, laughing under his breath. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

        “Just take a chance if you have to, never be afraid to buck the rules a little. Now go on.”

        Flintlock stood up and tucked in her blankets for her before leaving. She gave him a goodwill gesture, before he left the one room in the tower where he could speak his mind to return home.


* * *


        The concourse of Tenpony was dimly lit at this time of the evening. Stopping briefly to collect a late supper of pastry and soft-stewed barley soup at the Gilded Gate café, Flintlock made his way home, carrying the warm mango tea in his telekinesis along with him. The elevator pony stepped aside for him, before wordlessly setting it to the upper floors. The young buck knew every pony here well enough by now to guess their destination if not told otherwise.

        “Home for the evening, sir?”

        Flintlock didn't much feel like conversation. “Yes, quite. Thank you.”

        Unperturbed, the smiling pony continued as he set it moving. “It must be nice, working in the archives. I've heard about the pay they get, and all the invites. No standing up all day either...”

        The youngster blushed at his accidental blurt about his role, but Flintlock didn't turn his head to see.

        “It's nice. Yes.”

        The elevator thudded to a stop, two floors above where they had left on the high rent and market district, the one that looked back down through long drops in the centre of the building to the market quarter. Anypony who was anypony in the tower would live here, just a few floors down from the broadcasting studio or the restricted sections held by the council. The large atrium it was all built from had used to be an open space for Ministry of Arcane Science political events and presentations, embossed with logos of Twilight Sparkle's cutie mark, or the general Ministry symbols on the walls. Now though, it served as the high living and markets. Flintlock hoofed the buck five caps, and trotted immediately out as the door slid open.

        “Good evening, Mister Flintlock.”

        “Good evening.”

        Walking the boards, Flintlock headed for his home. He smiled as he was expected to all those he passed. Exchanging 'good evenings' with just the required amount of pause to not be considered rude, the journey took longer than a simple trot would suggest.

        Eventually, however, he got to the stairs that led into his own home. Trotting up, unlatching the strong oaken door, he gratefully fell back into his own world.

        Flintlock's home was larger than most, his sister had pulled her strings well to acquire it for him. Newly laid floors over the concrete base permitted wood and carpet. The crackling fire to greet him in his main room told that the cleaners had come and gone, leaving him warmth to come home to. Through the back, the golden lights of the market were visible through the fence of the balcony. Mahogany furniture crowded the area, mostly centred around a soft chair before the fireplace, a bookshelf filled with things that should probably be in the archives and, of course, his study-desk.

        Dropping his saddlebag on the fireside chair, Flintlock closed off the balcony to drown out the noise, before sinking into the study-desk's cushioned chair with a sigh, his head in his hooves.

        The entire journey since leaving this place in the morning until now returning had been just like yesterday.

        And the day before that.

        And before that.

        But, he reminded himself as he gazed at the bathroom door, there were certain advantages.

        Twenty minutes for a hot shower and a change into soft cotton for the evening, Flintlock sat at his desk to finish his supper and read a book before bedtime, accompanied by the soothing tones of whatever the DJ was playing at this hour. It was all repeats with no news at this time of night, but the idea of a silent home felt too crushing to not withstand the same songs for the thousandth time.

        Briefly, he glanced across at his saddlebag, remembering what he'd been given to look over, but the effort to even collect it and start thinking about that again just felt too much for now.

        Instead, he pulled a copy of 'Manehattan District History' from his bookcase with his magic, settling in with his pastry and tea to eek out whatever he could from the night before the early morning would force him to sleep.


* * *


        A harsh knock rattled into Flintlock's skull.

        “Hmm, wha-huh?”

        Lifting his sore head from the desk, the early morning increase of the lighting making the sudden realisation of how long he'd passed out for abundantly clear, Flint groaned and sat back in his chair, back popping and stiff.

        Another series of thuds invaded his peaceful, wonderful home.

        “Hello! Urgent message!”

        Dragging himself from the chair, Flintlock rubbed his eyes and checked the clock. Thirty minutes to get ready before the shift at the archives began and everything started anew. Another shift, another too short chance to talk, another slow evening and awaiting word to be invited again to events if he 'behaved' with his ideas.

        Already, the motivation to do anything collapsed out of him. The urge to simply ignore everything was strong, but without that, there was nothing sustaining him. He had some money, but his sister controlled the funds, and Tenpony was not cheap.

        “Hello? Hello in there!”

        Flintlock reluctantly opened the door, praying it wouldn't be someone who would care about his unwashed and bedraggled state.

        Instead, a young colt stood excitedly there, probably from the lower floors, given his mane style. He wore the message runner's uniform, an armband, a saddlebag with a logo and a small hat.

        “Are you Mister Flintlock?” He chirped, holding up a letter in shaky looking telekinesis, along with a spare hoof.

        Nodding, Flintlock dropped five caps to his hoof and took the letter.

        “Thank you.”

        “Wow! You're welcome, mister!”

        The colt ran off, as Flint closed the door and moved back to his study-desk. Being up and about was stirring his mind a little. Yesterday had been a bad day with the news about his learning program being denied, perhaps today wouldn't be so bad. Radiance seemed to be more open to him accompanying the family again, maybe doing an overtime shift at the archives might be enough to get her to not see him so badly any more. Things could go back to the slow, but comfortable ways of before in Tenpony tower.

        His magic tore open the letter.

        And then his world collapsed.

        To,
        Mister Flintlock

        From Tenpony Infirmary, it is with the heaviest of hearts we inform you that as of half past three this morning, due to complications with respiration and immune system deficiency-

        He couldn't finish the letter. He just stared at rapidly blurring words held in shaky hooves. An empty, hollowed out gut feeling grew and grew. In bile, anger, frustration and denial, he threw the letter down to the floor.

        Collapsing into his chair, Flintlock put his head down and simply cried in a way he hadn't ever before in his sheltered life, wishing every minute that what that letter said could change.

        It never did.


* * *


        It always felt like most of Tenpony attended a funeral in some way. Ponies who likely didn't even know her shuffled through in groups to offer polite condolences before making their way out to the halls for a small meal, hoping their assigned table number was lowest.

        Beside the gilded coffin, Skye Venture's family stood in black. Flintlock's father held his wife with one hoof as she softly wept at the death of her mother. Radiance was stoic and upright, meeting everypony who came by and shaking their hooves, softly accepting their kind words with a strong smile. It was ever on her to not react, to show strength, to be the anchor.

        Flintlock, however, paid them no heed. While they met and mingled their way to accepting grief, he couldn't take his eyes from the source.

        Through the entire ceremony, he stood with one hoof against the smooth surface of the coffin, his eyes stinging and puffed red. Even when what felt like half the tower had come by and now shared their thoughts of Venture's earlier days before she started leaving the tower, Flintlock remained in the room with his grandmother.

        Only when a kindly undertaker spoke gentle words and guided him away did he finally leave, to allow Skye Venture her rest.


* * *


        The next week passed with aching slowness, with every indication that the next week would be the same.

        In the archives, Flintlock continued his work, sorting, organising and collecting the requests for books and documents. They came from anywhere, but mostly old Ministry scrolls for those who ran the top floors or long frayed magazines for fashion creators downstairs. Be it Crescent Loop, Beauty Cream or even the tower famous Splendid Succour, they would ask him to look out some long past year's catalogues for their research. He rarely got to see them directly, just working off of their tickets they left with the organiser at the front desk.

        Dark, quiet and musty, the archives left a lot of time to think, precisely the last thing that he wanted to do right now. Normally, he played the DJ's station on a radio while he worked alone, but the constant reminders of the places Venture had gone only served to gutpunch him again and again.

        Instead, he had taken to increasingly inane games to occupy his mind in the few hours it took him to finish his daily jobs, and then spending the rest of the time resting in the old sofa he'd found near the back. Long ago, some Ministry workers had to have dragged it in here for themselves, now it served the same purpose for a new master.

        Flintlock slumped on it, sipping his tea and flicking aimlessly through at the Ironshod catalogues that he'd seen a hundred times before.

        Quite without his notice, Radiance had entered and stood beside the sofa, until her voice shattered what element of peace he had managed to garner for himself.

        “Flintlock.”

        Spluttering, trying not to spray any tea, Flintlock coughed and struggled up to his hooves.

        “Rad-ah!” He set down the mug and nursed his stung hoof from the hot liquid dripping over the edge. “Radiance? I didn't hear you.”

        Her face was cautious, not smiling or seeming angry, as she trotted past him, eyes glaring at the catalogue he had been reading. Flintlock sighed.

        “Sorry, I've just finished everything for today. It was a quiet time so I-”

        “I know, Flintlock.” She cut in, smiling briefly. “You think I would give my brother a job that involved him having to do more work than was necessary? I'm quite aware, indeed it's why I offered it. You always were the sort to have alternative pursuits to want time to study or read...even if they weren't always the subjects I agree with...”

        That was so like his sister. Compliment, gift and yet leave a trace of authority in the same speech. All the same, the knowledge she had ensured to give him a job that paid well and didn't offer too much hardship was surprising.

        “Well, thank you.” He composed himself. “What brings you back here?”

        Her eyebrow raised. “I need a reason to visit my dearest brother? Aside from you being my only brother, hah. You've been awfully thin on the ground as of late. Either here or locked away in your home.”

        Flintlock bit down the remark he wanted to make, about whether her withhold invitations from him until his education submission passed away from current events might be more the reason.

        “I've just been seeking some quiet solace since Grandmother's death,” he muttered instead.

        “I understand.”

        'Like hell you do', Flintlock thought to himself, looking down to his tea again to cover the grimace on his face.

        “In fact it's because of her I came to collect you.”

        Flint looked up sharply, almost spilling more tea as he did so. “What?”

        Radiance smiled and nodded. “We have a meeting with her lawyer to determine where her possessions will go. The family has to decide what we do with it all given she did not sign a will, on account of how sudden the moment was. A shock to us all...”

        Her false faced gestures were beginning to infuriate Flint. The little, acted motions of her hoof to her heart as she said that made him want to storm out, but anything to do with Skye Venture had his attention at the moment.

        “Okay, I'll be there. She had the same lawyer as the rest of us, yes?”

        “Indeed. I shall see you there within the hour, Flintlock. As far as I know she didn't own much, but it has to be done. And please...before you go out to meet with us, get yourself looking proper. Your mane looks like it hasn't been done in days and you're covered from dust in here. We must be presentable, this concerns her memories and you must be respectful of that.”

        His hoof actually shook as he forced himself to instead canter directly past her before he said or did something he would really regret.

        “I'll be there.” He grimaced through clenched teeth.


* * *


        The lawyer's offices were situated just off Canterlot Row. A trip down the elevators and then a trot through the peaceful atrium would bring to a cramped little back-row of offices. The old administration wing of the Ministry had served well to be Tenpony's own outreach into returning legality to their lifestyle. Boring, humdrum and ruthless, it nonetheless was vital for the highly structured and often immaterial realities of life in Tenpony Tower.

        Those who worked there were likely the most stressed and rushed ponies in the tower, as indicated by the twitching, sleep deprived mess of a pony in front of Flintlock right now in the office on Basic Logic, a skeletal little stallion.

        Ironically, despite being surrounded by his family, Flintlock felt those very qualities made him the pony he most related to at the moment.

        “So uh...let's uh...let's begin.” He remarked, his nasally, thin voice thoroughly hiding how furiously intelligent he could be. He was the best lawyer in Tenpony, one that had helped Flintlock many times with his family's funding supporting it.

        “Please, lets.” Radiance sat directly in front of his desk. To her right sat Flintlock himself, while behind them were their parents, aunts and uncles. His cousins were lurking near the back too, even if they didn't expect much relevance. This was a family thing. They all attend, but foremost was Radiance, and because she was, so too was Flintlock on account of their 'in theory' being equal siblings.

        Even to Flintlock, who had been born here, the precision of Tenpony social requirements often left him quite bewildered.

        Basic Logic huffed and nodded, before moving around to his own chair and sitting down, turning on a recorder with his magic and sorting some papers.

        “On the last moon of this month, I, uh...hereby initiate the official log for the handing over of Skye Venture's belongings and possessions, both material and uh...in record, to her most immediate family.”

        What followed was ten minutes of legal wordings, assurances, statement of all their names out loud and agreement of terms before anything was to even begin. Basic Logic was furiously effective in ensuring every little detail was covered for, even before finally coming to his point.

        “Now that we uh...have that all settled. I shall begin the last will and testament of Skye Vent-”

        Flintlock's ears shot up as he hear that line.

        “Her will?!” Radiance stood up. “She signed a will? But she passed away without signing one!”

        Basic calmly gave her time to speak, before shuffling across a familiar looking crumbled piece of documentation. “This was dated, and filled in with her signature, Ma'am. It is an official will.”

        “When?”

        He read out the date, and after a brief mental calculation, Flintlock realised.

        It was an hour after he'd left her side for the very last time.

        Radiance stood in shock, and Flintlock pressed his hooves together on the floor tightly enough to hurt as he tried to keep himself controlled.

        “So...” Radiance began. “She did make one then. My apologies, Mister Logic, this was a surprise. Please, continue.”

        Flintlock didn't know what to think. What would she have possibly signed?

        “Ahem...uh, yes. Now, I will dictate her wishes, in quotation from here on after this sentence. Ahem! Uh...I do hereby present to the family what possessions I retain, of which I have left. To my darling daughter, Dress Sense, I bequeath my homestead itself; in knowing that she loved it dearly in her youth. Live well, my dear. While we had our shouting matches, I love you, and I am proud of you and the foals you raised. You made me a very lucky grandmother.”

        Behind him, his mother gripped hold of her husband, before resting a hoof on both his own and Radiance's shoulders. He felt the subtle compliment through that line, and choked back a tear to hear what were in effect Venture's own words to him.

        “Radiance, you were the pony that as you were born, made me a grandmother. To a lot of ponies in this short lived world that is a rare gift, even if those in here don't realise it. You clearly have your love of finery, and so you are welcome to the décor and storage possessions I have in the lower level facilities, whatever is still usable. I have a dress from my youth that I know shall fit you well, better than it ever did for me.”

        Radiance crossed her hooves over her chest. “I shall wear it well in respect.”

        “And to Flintlock...”

        Basic Logic hesitated, then looked further down, then back up. He stopped and glanced upwards a couple of times.

        Radiance tilted her head, “Mister Logic? For Flintlock...?”

        “Yes, uh...I...yes.”

        “Well?” Radiance snapped.

        Basic glanced at Flint once more and continued.

        “To you, I leave the collected worth of my accounts. Fifty...fifty thousand, six hundred and seventy eight caps in total...”

        The shock and gasps ran around the room before his sentence even got past the first 'thousand'. Radiance's chair scraped backwards as she launched up and leaned over to see.

        “Are you sure you read that right? She had how much in her accounts?”

        “I...I am right, Ma'am! It says right here, and I verified it with the treasury. She indeed had a reserve account that had been building interest her entire life, occasionally topped up in hard metal whenever she returned to the Tower from her excursions...other than one large deposit forty years ago...”

        Flintlock just sat in shock as they bickered and argued. As his parents moved past and joined the discussion. As the others chatted relentlessly. He just sat alone and in his own mind as those numbers played over and over. It eventually hit him, the reason why.

        She'd found the Sparkle-Cola manufacturing facility.

        Of course.

        He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, of how she'd hid it all away. His respect for her mounted. She'd never dove into it, and kept her life just the way she wanted and never bothered with the rest of her fortune to flaunt it.

        Now she had given it to him.

        Flintlock simply didn't know how to process this.
        
        Then his foreleg was grabbed, as Radiance pulled him from his chair.

        “We need to talk.”


* * *


        Basic Logic's door slapped shut behind Radiance.

        “Flintlock, what on earth did she say to you after I left?”

        “Nothing about this! This is as big a surprise to me as anyone!”

        She trotted to the far wall, as the voices from within the office picked up in volume.

        “This was not expected, I had no idea she had such a reserve. Do you know what this means for us?”

        She was grinning, holding on to his shoulders.

        “With this sort of funding, the family will move up several places in the Tenpony fiscal fifty! We'll be able to move into our own hosting position! Flintlock, this is something we can use to solidify ourselves as a legacy family!”

        He really didn't know what to think of that either. Such a number kept repeating endlessly in his mind. Fifty thousand caps. You could do almost anything in Tenpony with that sort of money.

        “Flintlock, will you stop staring into space and listen to me?”

        Blinking, he shook his head and found his sister's intense eyes staring directly at him.

        “We have to get this into the family fund. We'll be invited to everything! The news bump alone, we'll be all anyone can talk about. A hidden fortune propelling this family. For us all.”

        “But...” Flintlock began, “What actually will we use it for?”

        “We could take over majority funding for the winter ball, perhaps...”

        Flintlock looked away, “But what would that actually do?”

        “It would be us to be seen doing it. Come on, let's get back in and sign that acceptance over, then we'll get to the bank when they open after the weekend.”

        “I...” Flintlock wasn't really looking at her, as she pushed him back inside.

        “This will be good for us all, brother. With this boost to the family, we'll all go up a few notches. You'll never want for an invite again! You'll have all of Tenpony at your hooves to choose from. We might even be able to move into the premier suites!”

        “But we're already in the upper-”

        She stopped and held him half way through the door. Flintlock could see Basic Logic behind her, trying to go through the signatures with the rest of his bewildered family.

        “Trust me. I got us to be this important. It's all about appearances.”

        Flintlock bit his lip, before drawing up. “Radiance, we're already in the top twenty families in terms of reserves, we don't even use ten percent of what we earn. The interest alone-”

        She turned stern. “I shouldn't have to explain this to you again, it's not about what we use. It's about social standing. It puts us closer to the top. You think you're living in luxury now? Just wait till you see what I can do with the interest gotten from this to put us over some trigger points.”

        “But why? Radiance, this is Grandma's money...”

        “Because that's what is important. She knew it. It's about family and respect. That's what life is. Now, get in there and sign that document to get them into your personal account. I'll come by on Monday to have it signed over to the family funds at the bank. Flintlock, you will give this money over to the family, it's what is expected of you. We've all done it before. It's what we do. Go on, quickly!”

        She gave him a small shove. Flintlock stared at her for a few seconds, causing her to nod her head in the direction of the waiting document on the desk.

        Feeling strangely hesitant, Flintlock stood over the crumpled sheet of paper and held a quill in his magic. In slow, overly hard gestures that ruined his normally florid signature, he put his name below that of his family's own markings.

        And in one signing, became the owner of fifty thousand caps.

        “Um...ahem, Mister Flintlock.” Basic Logic leaned over the desk, floating a cuboid package with him. “Madam Venture also requested this in her will for yourself. The large sum rather distracted us before I could read it.”

        Flintlock took the box, feeling not a lot of weight in it. Basic Logic, however, was already busy dealing with the document, not available to now answer questions on what it was.

        Leaving the office quietly, hugging his mother and father as they told him all the niceties of how she had loved him deeply to have left all that money, he left for home. Definitely home.

        He needed to think.

        And seeing his sister's watchful gaze on the way out told him without any further words about what that thinking was supposed to conclude.


* * *


        Now a very rich pony indeed, Flintlock sat beside his fireplace, unable to really decide how he should be feeling.

        The loss of his beloved grandmother still ate at his heart with cold grievance. Yet the comfort of his home and the fireplace warmed his body. The elation at knowing his personal accounts were fifty times larger than they'd ever been amongst a family that pooled its resources for influence was exciting, but tempered by the ho-hum thought that it actually made very little difference in his life living in comfort and ease of work.

        Except that he could choose what to do with it.

        But then his family had an expectation of him. Radiance had all but threatened what she would do if he were to choose anything else.

        And that was what tore at him. Here was his opportunity and yet here he was unable to use it. Setting up a business was expensive, and Radiance would likely crash any attempt he made. Not to mention whatever she might do to his social standing. It made him afraid, remembering everything Venture had said that he seemed lonely, to be cast out from his family, his only real access to Tenpony's social circle in any meaningful way.

        Making a loud groan of discontent, he slumped in the chair, pushing his hind legs out on the floor, covering his face with his forehooves.

        It wasn't worth losing her for this inevitable fall back to normal.

        His hoof knocked into something in front of the chair.

        Grimacing, he pulled himself upward and looked down, to just see that same small box Basic Logic had given him. The one that Venture had left him. He'd placed it down and forgotten about it, the one other gift from her will had been tearing enough at what to do.

        “Well...might as well see...” Flintlock muttered to himself, floating it up onto his lap and pulling at the strings to free the lid. Carefully, he opened the box.

        There were two things inside. One a note.

        And a camera.

        Flintlock's eye caught her journal still sitting on his fireside table for a second, before reading the note.

        Whatever you do, I'll be proud of you, little Flint. Life's an adventure, go live it.

        His hooves trembled, as he felt his eyes welter up and tears run down his cheeks. He simply hugged the box and its note to his chest, sobbing and smiling.

        When he opened his eyes again, he spent the next three hours looking through her whole journal, glancing back and forth from the camera that had created it. He saw his notes for the failed educational program on his desk. He saw his bookshelf and its contents.

        She hadn't given him a fortune.

        She'd given him an opportunity. A chance to decide something for himself.

        Looking at the things he possessed, and seeing how his life had struck out before on his own interests, a new idea began to form.

        Grabbing his coat, Flintlock got to his hooves and pulled it on hastily.

        For now he knew that he had to do.


* * *


        Four hours later, Flintlock emerged from the Office of Housing Management in Tenpony Tower, feeling afraid and yet strangely liberated at having just spent thirty five thousand caps. Empty space was extraordinarily expensive to come by in Tenpony Tower, even moreso to buy it outright and deposit enough for services.

        Yet even as spending the majority of a fortune in one go burned at him, he looked at what it had purchased.

        It was a little out of the way, it was never not going to be, but it was close enough to the main thoroughfares that ponies could easily find it. It had used to be a store of some kind, some form of outlet at least. Bare on the bottom floor, and with a cramped staircase at the back up into a single small room. A few tiny rooms offset it, one a bathroom. All told, about a quarter of the size of his current home.

        But this one belonged to him.

        Every cracked bit on the floor. Every broken wooden ceiling section. Every stain from days of old. It would need work, a lot of work to make this come true.

        Yet, for the first time since last meeting her, as he stood in the centre of his new venture; feeling the excitable shiver of potential and the unknown in his heart; Flintlock smiled.


* * *


        “You did WHAT?”

        Radiance raised her hoof as though intending to slap him, before controlling herself and bringing it down to instead toss her enormous mane away from her face. As if anyone would believe that was her intent all along to bring it up.

        Within her office on the high levels of the old Ministry grounds, near the Council's own chambers, Radiance was anything but her name in demeanour now.

        “I had a change in opinion, as I saw what she intended for me to do, to make a choice for myself. I bought an outlet.” Flintlock tried to keep his voice steady, his passionate idea struggling to sound logical.

        “She left that money to the family! YOU are a part of that family! Flintlock this is beyond ridiculous! Listen...”

        She marched around his chair, coming face to face. Her voice dropped, as she forced a smile to her face.

        “You are going to return to the Office of Housing, and you are going to explain to them that this was a horrible mistake. I can still pull a few strings, get a change in contract to return most of the money to us. I don't know what you thought you were doing, Flintlock...”

        Taking a deep breath, fighting to quell the fears inside, Flintlock stood up sharply.

        “I know exactly what I was doing, Radiance. I'm opening a...a museum.”

        Radiance's eye twitched. Her smile never wavered.

        “The education board won't accept my ideas to help inform people about what's out there. About what it once was. About the things that made it this way. About what it is now. The war, the tools of that war, the history of what surrounded them and what brought us all to this place! Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, don't you see? This is important, Radiance, it's important to me! Grandma saw that, she experienced it first hand! We're the exception in here, dear sister, we're the unusual ones amongst it all and yet so few of us even realise it! I want to bring the truth to them, because we're the only ones in a position to do it!”

        He fought for breath, sucking it in to finish what he'd mentally been preparing to say all day.

        “Equestria's at risk of forgetting its own downfall, and I intend to prevent that from happening. I'm going to follow in Grandma's steps, Radiance. I'm going to see for myself, so that I can show others too.”

        Radiance trotted to her desk, before putting a hoof on the bridge of her nose.

        “I never knew your foolishness had driven you to suicide, little brother...” She glared sideways at him. “You don't have a damned clue what it's like out there, do you?”

        “Then that's what I'll find out. It's just taken me this long to finally see it, Radiance. I got my cutie mark when I did a speech back in class, telling all my classmates a story that Grandma had told me. Since then...I've been ignoring the very thing I'm supposed to do. The very thing I want to do. Educate people, by bringing the truth to them. To preserve and to remember.”

        Radiance surged across the room and grabbed him around his neck, pushing her face to his. “You're going to get yourself killed, Flintlock! I've spoken to those who've been out there too. Raiding gangs! Mutants! Feral ghouls! Ponies who would shoot you down just to take that fancy coat off your back! Slavers who'd throw you in chains and sell you to some meathead rock farmer who wants a gentle little stallion for his tastes! You'd never survive alone out there!”

        Baulking, breathing faster, trying to control the fears of the outside he'd been trying to deal with, Flintlock shook his head.

        “There's good ponies out there too, sister. I'll find them. I won't be alone...”

        “There's no-one worth it out there, 'brother'. This is lunacy, you've let that mad old mare get into your head!”

        “She was a better pony than you will ever-”

        Radiance stomped a hoof on the wood loud enough to drown him out. “You've thrown away the biggest gift to our family in years for a chance to get yourself dying in the rain by some curb somewhere in a pool of your own blood! If you're refusing to undo this, then there's a lot you've got to lose, Flintlock...I'll see to that. So...”

        Her voice was shaky, as she stepped back and drew herself up.

        “Stop this madness now, or there will be consequences.”

        Flintlock felt the sweat rolling down his neck, as he put the chair between her and himself. This was it, he knew what those consequences might be. This was the moment when he had to back down or take the plunge into the utter unknown. The harsh reality awaited beyond this door. One word could change his life in a way that could never get back.

        “No.”

        She didn't say anything, before wordlessly turning and walking back to her desk-chair. Sitting down, surrounded by her extravagance, she pulled a file out from a folder and began to write a note on it.

        “Then, Flintlock...” Her voice was terse, unwilling, but seething with disgust. “...I'm cutting you off from the family funds. What you have now, that's all you have left...and you just spent most of it on a dingy outlet. Your current accommodations will be reclaimed to the family. Along with whatever's in it, unless you can prove it was purchased with your own account. You will receive no further invites via us to any events and don't even think about coming back to your job any more. Good luck finding income. I'm sure mother and father will convince me to keep you part of the family in a strictly legal sense because, well, they are our parents...but believe me, I would change that if I could.”

        Flintlock stood silently, suddenly feeling very vulnerable and isolated inside, but that last line struck a chord. Unexpectedly, he felt empowered by it, as though everything he'd thought had been confirmed.

        “If that...is truly how you feel, Radiance, then I can begin to see what Grandma meant by many of the things she said to me.”

        She didn't show a single reaction, only to instead lean back in her red velvet chair.

        “You don't realise what that land is going to do to you, Flintlock.”

        “And you don't realise what it has to offer, Radiance.”

        She stayed silent, before twisting her face. “You're no longer part of the archives, I just signed you to be made redundant from this job. You shouldn't be in here any more. You're on your own now. You've made your own mess, I'm cutting you off to lie in it.”

        Trembling, Flintlock fought to keep his courage up, as he turned and trotted to the door. Even as he laid his magic on the doorknob, he heard Radiance again behind him. She was always one to try to keep it going on her terms.

        “You'll come to realise how much you valued the help I gave you once you wonder where the money went. You've not even thanked me for doing it.”

        The implication, the subtle insult about his sense of self worth cut deeply to him.

        Filled with a controlled anger, he turned back to her as he held the door open.

        “There's a lot of young colts and fillies in this tower do odd jobs for tips, Radiance. They provide me help that, for a time I value, and thank them for it by providing a tip.”

        As Flintlock left the room, he dropped five caps on the floor for her, before shutting the door on her stunned face.


* * *


        There was so much to do, and it would take him weeks.

        Flintlock spent the first night sleeping rough in the outlet. By the time he'd collected anything from his old home, there were no open shops to purchase furniture or even a rug from. Almost everything he owned had been bought with the family's banked caps.

        Come the next few weeks, however, he began his work proper. With the fifteen thousand remaining, he set about renovations and rebuilding his own life from the ground up.

        Hiring work teams from the lower levels, he joined them in their tasks. Rolling up his sleeves on newly bought shirts to rid himself of the old, Flintlock nailed, painted and plastered with those he paid to do the duty. Straining his long neglected muscles, he helped lift crates of pre-packaged furniture from the workshops on the basement level to the upstairs room. Walking his hooves sore, he visited various market stands to barter for materials and stands for the museum front end.

        Each night, as he retreated upstairs amongst the spare wood and rows of tools to sketch and plan in endless sheets of paper that had been tacked to the wall. Lists of potential exhibits. New maps of the Manehattan area. Survival tips. Rumours and caravan timings. Marketing techniques for the museum. Legal papers to recognise its status within the tower for protection when he wasn't there. He signed his name more times in forty eight hours than in the previous twenty eight years.

        On the weekends, when the workers were resting and outlets were shut, he went about self education. Paying the guards to teach him to fire a gun, he found that his patient and precise magic was quite applicable to magical energy weapons. Spending caps to gain bribed access to their firing ranges, he practised with the very weapon that he had purchased. He visited the camping stalls to acquire a warmer cloak and tougher saddlebags. Whenever he found the time, he bought drinks for wasteland settlers visiting the tower, simply to hear their stories and cautionary tales on how to survive.

        With money dwindling, he set about a marketing campaign, paying for signs to point to the museum. They promised an opening in the near future, to which he began filling out some temporary exhibits by buying some old, defunct and broken weapon frames from the guards, along with hanging some copies of Venture's photographs on the walls.

        As work began to finalise on the museum, however, he finally commissioned the brass worker in the tower to craft for him a small plaque. One to commemorate the very pony who had made this possible, to thank her by presenting her forever within it. Bearing her cutie mark, he set it on the very front of the museum itself.

        With its final décor set, and his new home established, finally, at that point, Flintlock stood back and witnessed it all to take stock of what he had left.

        There was only a few thousand caps left in his accounts, but he'd done it.

        The museum existed. His own place. His own venture.

        Days more would pass, and then days again as he delayed out of nerves. Not knowing where to start, he waited near the entrance to speak to ponies again and again about what they were up to as they came into the tower. He listed various places and immediately crossed them off. Friendship City wasn't really accessible at the moment from gang activity. New Appleloosa was too far and involved leaving the city. Bronco was considered too rough, the caravans had stopped going.

        Yet, in a few weeks, there was one place said to be starting up.

        Just down the road, less than a day away, somewhere Tenpony was said to be linking to for trade. Safe, quiet. A little town called Cornerstone. Something about it touched him, a town just setting out for itself.

        It felt fitting.

        And so he asked about it, and found when caravans aimed to depart for it some point soon.

        Alone in his museum. resting his hoof on the plaque, Flintlock picked up his camera and hung it around his neck. He wore a thick weather cloak over his clothing. His laser pistol awaited him at the entrance gate. He had food and drink enough for three days out there before turning back. Just enough to experience it, to dip his hoof into the wild ocean.

        Just enough to try and prove Radiance wrong. Her warnings had filled him with dread. His grandmother's stories rung with their dangers in his mind. She'd been a vicious shot and an athlete, but Flint had only taken to the gym seriously in the last month since planning all this.

        Yet his eyes fell on the plaque, bearing her name and cutie mark, and it gave him hope. There'd be ponies out there who could help carry him until he could walk on his own.

        “Thank you, Grandma, for everything. You gave me the life I never had.”

        With that, he left behind his new home for the time being.

        Every step down the corridors was a step toward danger. He thought of the ruined and filthy buildings. The rough and fearful gangs. The unknown. A place where none of his experience mattered.

        Descending through the market, he tried to remember the other side of that world. The one he'd been told about. Honest types, full of love and friendship at its core. It had to be out there, through all the horror.

        As he passed by the last store, a hat store, something made him stop. Something his grandmother had said.

        'The foals always liked the fancy hats I wore for each trip, just for the sake of it.'

        Momentarily smiling through his fear, he went into the shop.


* * *


        The main doors of Tenpony were open, and the cold blew through them.

        That cold reached Flintlock's coat and cut to the bone. Shivering, he glanced at the guard as he hoofed over a purple tinted laser pistol. Holding it reverently, Flintlock tucked it into the holster he'd purchased.

        “Nice hat.” The guard scoffed as the fez on his head. It was hard to tell if he was respectfully amused or just making fun.

        “Just...just something to mark a tradition.” Flintlock muttered, before stepping back.

        “You sure you're gonna do this, buddy?” The guard shrugged, watching him with only half interest.

        Flintlock delayed answering, as he stared into the open doorway and the muddy light stemming through it, promising the harsh world beyond.

        Within the tower, he had lost much, even since losing Grandma Venture.

        But in her last days, she had helped him find something greater. His purpose, and his courage to make a choice.

        “Yes, I'm sure.”

        Raising his hoof, Flintlock held it upright for a few seconds, before letting it down and taking the first step of his own journey, the same one she had decades before.

        Tucked into his shirt, he bore her note.

        Life is an adventure.

        Go live it.


***






Flintlock artwork by Kalemon

> The Birdcage of Tincan
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Birdcage of Tincan


 


* * *


 

            The clattering of the wagon's metal studded wheels passing the gate's bottom rim rang out into the air, while the rustling of a small mountain of goods atop it was enough to wake anyone in the vicinity. Orange sparks flared as its heavy weight dropped onto the layered steel plates on the ground behind the town’s gate, as Dusty Trail's ride rolled onto the flat ground within. Its occupants, his family, bounced atop it as they dropped down one final time from the rocky entrance.
 
            Situated on the very outskirts of Manehattan, it was an ugly little town to Dusty's point of view. Enclosed, dense, and built of whatever could be pulled from the old wartime scrapyards a few hills over. Its high walls rose twice above a normal pony's height, but the squared, multilayered buildings squeezed into its small square interior were packed so tightly that he felt like his wagon was intruding upon the one open space it had in the centre. Ponies looked down from walkways on the second or sometimes third level of buildings. They came in only ones or twos, mostly older of age, wandering out of thin passages between dwellings to look at who had come to visit.
 
            Above them, though, was what always caught his eye. Chickenwire had been strung up to long poles mounted on the side of the container like buildings, forming a cage-like ceiling above the entire town.
 
            Tincan, it was called. When he'd first heard the name, he’d thought of the endless cans that had been pried open, found in ditches and abandoned shops. But whenever he came here, it reminded him that once upon a time those cans had been closed over, sealing whatever was inside them.
 
            With the clunk of an iron brace, the gate closing behind him only reinforced that viewpoint, the rollers supporting the heavy barrier scraping over the metal plates on the ground. He'd often wondered about those metallic slabs, until the headmare of the town had finally informed him of their purpose. Pull them away from the entrance, and it would leave a ten foot pit beneath them inside the gate, in addition to the ones outside as well.
 
            The product of a paranoid mind, he felt.
 
            Dropping the reins from the brahmin, he stepped off the platform and dropped to the ground, before offering a hoof to help his wife down behind him. He caught a glimpse of green out the corner of his eye, turned, and found a familiar sight approaching from one of the cramped passageways they called ‘streets’.
 
            "Light Beam! Golly, aren't you a buck and a half now? C'mere!"
 
            He met the young earth pony mid-way across the dry mud of the town's center, and flung his forelegs around the green coated colt in a big bear hug of a welcome. Lifting him off the ground, he squeezed tight, before holding him out to look at. The foal offered only a nervous smile and a quiet 'hi' in return, before being put down and clearing his throat. His voice was every bit as hollow and breathy as the scant wind in this cramped little town.
 
            "Mom'll be out in a bit, she said. I've to take you to her."
 
            "Handling guests now, huh? Growing up quick. Well, let's go see what Meadow has to say. Wander?"
 
            Dusty turned his head and shouted back to his disembarking family. Behind his wife, his eight year old son perked up, his bushy mane up the first thing seen on the back of the wagon; the foal sat atop its canvas cover.
 
            "Da'?"
 
            "Watch the cart, your mother and I are gonna go arrange trade tax with Meadow, ok?"
 
             The sandy coloured colt gulped and nodded. This was his responsibility now, and he'd been promised he'd get to do it this time. Wringing his hooves amongst the canvas of the wagon's stock cover, he nodded again. And then a third time, just in case those eyes his mother always said she had in the back of her head were watching.
 
            Dropping down on his haunches to watch his parents trot away, Wander began to feel an odd sensation. Seconds suddenly felt longer, like when he stared at the cooking pot to try and predict when it'd boil.
 
            Around him, most of the town's quiet inhabitants were idle. Older ponies rested on walkways and balconies. Some even waved at him, but he didn't wave back. He had to look guard-like. The guards around here weren't waving, after all.
 
            Shifting on the top of the wagon, certain he was sitting on the uncomfortable construction planks they'd found and hoisted into it, he rapidly came to the conclusion that guard duty was boring.
 
            Really boring.
 
            Beyond boring.
 
            Sighing, he opened his mouth.
 
            "Guarding stuff is so boring..." He muttered, just to confirm the fact out loud.
 
            The blue filly beside him stuck her head up from rummaging in the wagon, his father’s hat from inside it on her head, and some faded jewelry both in her hooves and looped over her muzzle.
 
            "I hate it too, just so boring! And every time I ring the bell to warn everypony I'm told they expected who it was I saw! Why even have the bell then?"
 
            "Yeah..." Wander muttered, before his eyes shot open, his head turned, and he yelled. Floundering backwards, he scampered and fell from the wagon, landing upside down on his father's seat at the front. Upending himself, he yanked his head back up to her level to catch her laughing. Her high pitched voice drove a gigglefit of epic proportions.
 
            "Where did you come from!?" His own voice broke, squeaking the words out. "How did you-"
 
            The filly spluttered and fought to calm her laughing for a second, before waving at him with both of her small -yet undeveloped- wings. Her body was a navy blue, while her mane was streaked in white and a lighter, clear air blue. "Just glided down, silly! That's my house over there and-ooh!"
 
            She never even got to pointing out her home, instead diving her small, skinny body head-first back under the wagon's canvas, amidst a clattering of metal and wood.
 
            "You've got spray paints in here? Oh! And there's a mirror! Is that a treasure chest? What's in the chest?"
 
            Her grinning head, somehow wearing an entirely different hat from his father's stock on her head already, popped back up from where she'd undone the straps on the cover to look at his gaping face.
 
            Wander shook his head in disbelief.
 
            "My da' says I've to watch the cart!"
 
            "My mom says I've to watch the town! Hey, you got any firecrackers? Someone told me traders had firecrackers."
 
            She gave him a toothy and hopeful grin.
 
            Looking back at the one pony wide 'street' his parents had gone down, Wander felt his mouth hang open in confusion and worry. What was a guard meant to do? Was he even supposed to do anything?
 
            Eventually, he mustered his resolve and clambered back up to look at her. She seemed about the same age as he was. Swelling his chest up, he planted his forelegs on the wagon’s backboard and sat before her.
 
            "Are you stealing? 'Cos I'm Wander, and I'm the guard of the wagon. And your cutie mark looks like its opening locks. That means stealing right?"
 
            Turning an old tourist map over and over in her hooves, presumably trying to find Tincan on it, the filly eventually gave up and dropped it back in the wagon. She didn’t look at him as she rambled. "Nuh uh. I got this for picking a lock on a chest. A trader had left by accident once, so we needed his info in it to find out where he was going next. Mom said it was to find things out and reach what I needed, not steal. And, um…”

She briefly looked at him.

“...is it still stealing if I just use something for a little while?"
 
            "Da' says that's borrowing. He told me that when we took some ammo for his gun from the griffon who shouted at us in the last town while his back was turned."
 
             Seemingly pleased with this answer, the filly shook her mane out, and settled down to play with a set of kitchen tools she'd found, swishing them around in her mouth like a sword. Within seconds, she spat one of them away after getting a taste of the frayed rubber mouthguard on a spatula. Her attention quickly moved on to something else. Him.
 
            "So you know how bad guarding is? 'Cos I hate it. I'm Night Sky. What's your name?"
 
            "I'm Wander Leaf. And it's my first time guarding, I don't like it already, I just want dinner now...hey, are you sure if you're allowed to be up here, cos da' told me to-"
 
            She looked up sharply, her head cocking to the side. "You've got a dad? What's that like?"
 
            He had to pause on that one. That was a weird question.
 
            "He's nice, and, uh...he's teaching me what everything is. Like where towns are. And he  likes to make me laugh with jokes. Like, a sandwich goes into a bar to get something to eat, what did the bartender say?"
 
            Night Sky had her attention all on him now, leaning forward with the corners of her mouth curling upwards.
 
            "I dunno!"
 
            "Sorry, we don't serve food here!"
 
            There were a few seconds as her big eyes clearly betrayed her thinking about it, before the little pegasus burst into laughter, falling backwards onto her back, hooves and wings waving amidst squealing little chuckles. Wander snorted and smiled, stepping up after her.
 
            "We don't serve food here!" She cried.
 
            "'Cos he's a sandwich!" He cackled, laughing again.
 
            The pair drew more than a few eyes at their loud guffawing atop the trader's wagon, laughing for far longer than was really necessary. Eventually, still getting little hiccups of mirth, they both sat back up.
 
            "Your dad sounds cool."
 
            Wander felt proud of someone saying that, and nodded, finally getting a moment to ask what had been on his mind. "I ain't ever seen a pegasus before, where'd you come from? Above the clouds? My da' says there's a magic world up there."
 
            Sky shook her head, "Nuh uh, I was born here. My mom's the head guardmare of Tincan."
 
            "Ooh, cool, the one da's talking to. Is she a pegasus too?" Wander's excitement gave him a hushed tone. "Is this a town of pegasuses?"
 
            Sky's shaking of her head grew more forceful. "Nope! Nope! She's an earth pony! And that was my brother he went with, Light Beam! He's an earth pony too!"
 
            "So was your dad a pegasus? How else did you become one?"
 
            Sky continued shaking her head for a third time in a row, but this time it was slower, and accompanied by her hoof coming up to scratch at her chin. She looked around for a bit, across the tiny windows that served as outlets in Tincan, or at the chickenwire rustling above them in the wind.
 
            "Dunno."
 
            "You dunno?"
 
            "I dunno."
 
            "Why not?"
 
            "Gone. Mom doesn't talk about him. Tells my brother not to as well. I tried reading Light's diary once to see if he said anything there, and he said he wants to go find him someday, but other than that he just talks about wanting a terminal every Hearthswarming and promising he's good."
 
            Wander screwed up his face. "He let you read his diary? I'd never let anypony read mine."
 
            Sky whirled her hooves in a little circle, "Well, uh...he may not have 'let' me so much as...well, I borrowed it."
 
            The trader's son gasped, both hooves to his mouth. "And he never knew?"
 
            Biting her lip, Sky blushed and bobbed her head side to side. "Nah, he found out."
 
            "He caught you?"
 
            "Not really..."
 
            "So how'd he know?"
 
            "I drew him with stink lines in it."
 
            Gaping at the proud, cheeky grin on her face, Wander could do naught but burst into laughter again, making Sky light up in pride at her grand plan.
 
            Their laughing, chattering and playing around on the wagon echoed through the small town, bouncing from rusted metal walls into the cramped little alleyways leading to sliding doors for individual housings. The sound of mirth made several of the ponies smile and cast an appreciative glance at the childlike fun.
 
            It was a rare sight in Tincan, for such an isolated and usually self sustaining town tended to demonstrate a monotony that gradually wore on its inhabitants. Many of them bore the trademark blank stare, but some took a moment to watch the foals and feel content. Tincan might be boring, with rooftop farms and only the very basics, but it was safe with Night Sky's mother in charge.
 
            Grinning and happy to have found somewhere to pause for a few days, Dusty re-emerged from between two buildings, shifting his rotund midsection awkwardly around until standing in the square again, followed by his wife and, behind her, the very mare herself, the head guard of Tincan.
 
            Dark blue by coat and mane over a strong, wiry body, her face bore a stern, accusing look seemingly just by default. Tight layers of leather formed up on her upper body, slung with a wooden semi-automatic rifle, two knives, and hanging set of hoofcuffs. Far from the look of a sheriff, she wore the appearance of a weathered adventurer past her heyday about her face and attire.
 
            She was Silent Meadow, and those watching the foals knew only too well what was about to happen.
 
            Ignoring Dusty's delighted proclamations of his goods, Meadow accelerated her gait and sharply marched across Tincan's square to the wagon. Biting upwards, she grabbed Sky's tail in her mouth and yanked hard. Yelping, the filly was dragged from the top, wings flaring to land unsteadily on her hooves. Looking up, she found the all too common look of her furious mother. Behind her, Light Beam poked out of a doorway, a meek look on his face.
 
            "Aah! Wait, Mom! I was-"
 
            "Was nothing! You are supposed to be on the south lookout! Why are you out here messing around with Dusty's wagon?"
 
            Sky backed off, hunching her hooves, ears, and wings all close to her little body, looking away from the withering stare of her mother.
 
            "I-I-I-"
 
            Dusty stepped forward a little, investigating the undone canvas on his wagon, and giving a little questioning look to Wander. The colt shook his head, and his father turned away.
 
            "Now, now...nothing's damaged. She’s just a filly. I'm sure she was just curi-"
 
            Meadow cut him off through volume, not even acknowledging the trader's voice.
 
            "Why did you leave it?"
 
            Cowed, Sky mumbled something.
 
            "Speak up, Night Sky!"
 
            "To look at things, was getting bored..."
 
            Meadow lowered her eyes, sighed deeply, and then stepped forward.
 
            "Dusty, I'll be back in a minute. Sky, come on!"
 
            Her hooves pushed the filly ahead of her, and again when she delayed. Hustling, chiding and hurrying her along. Sky had never so much as received even a quick smack on the flank, not even when she had 'borrowed' a picture book from a neighbour without telling, but she hardly wanted to give her mother reason to reconsider that position. Looking behind herself, Sky quickly cantered along, catching the confused and guilty eyes of Wander watching her from the wagon.
 
            "I'm going, Mom! I'm going!"
 
            She rushed ahead of her advancing mother, turning her lithe pegasus body into the thin gaps between buildings to go up the south stairs. Meadow was not far behind, clumping up the metal steps to the walkways on the first level above the ground, her intimidating gaze chasing Sky to the lookout porch on the wall.
 
            "This is not acceptable, Night Sky! What will it take to keep you doing as you're supposed to? What will it take?"
 
            She pushed the filly out onto the wall itself, where a small parapet jutted out. The chickenwire ran down from above, before being twisted into bracers on the edge of the thick steel sheet that functioned as cover in the event of a defence.
 
            "I don't know, I...I just wanted to see who was there and I was trotting before I knew and-"
 
            Meadow took a quick stare out the plains beyond the town, scanning the low, open roads that stretched toward the slow slope down to Manehattan's suburbs. In the other direction, small clumps of dead trees folded together in neat rows from what had once been pony-made forests. Tincan was isolated, despite being on a trade route. It could see for miles around, but had very little to see until someone a good ten miles from it, where one would finally enter more 'interesting' country. Ponies had once farmed here, leaving little room for post-balefire worth.
 
            Analyzing the horizon, Meadow saw nothing. No rising dust from hooves, other than a wagon she knew was still leaving from hours before. No glint of telescopes. More importantly, no shapes in the sky.
 
            Satisfied that nothing had snuck close during the lookout's time being absent of a pony, she turned to Night Sky once again.
 
            "I've told you before. Lookout duty is important. It only takes one observant raider to see if we've got a lookout who's bad at her job!"
 
            "But there's never any! And I'm a good lookout!"
 
            "The hell you a-" Meadow stopped herself, took a deep breath, and growled. "We've all got to do our part. Why do you think I put up the chickenwire? Why do you think I dug that pit? You've got to learn to be disciplined; no outside flying time for a week."
 
            Sky leapt up to her hooves. "Mom!"
 
            "No protests, it'll teach you a lesson. We're not Tenpony! Foals have to help as well. Now you get back to your job, and so help me if I catch you away from here again until sundown, all right?"
 
            Sky didn't reply. She just hung her head, the blue and white mane drooping.
 
            "All. Right?" Meadow insisted.
 
            "Yes, Mom..."
 
            Meadow stared at her daughter for some time, before turning and leaving the lookout, her hooves making the sheet metal they'd built the town from crash and clatter, until Sky was finally alone.
 
            Slumping at the parapet, she sighed and looked out at...nothing, really.
 
            And that was the problem.
 

*     *     *


 

            Two days later, seemingly little had changed. Sky's mother had kept her on lookout duty more than usual, leaving her sitting in what quickly began to feel like a cage poking out of the side of Tincan. On her mother’s orders, she was not just grounded from having any time to fly outside the town, but also from seeing Wander; on account of her 'reckless mischief'.
 
            Now, as night fell and she entered the final hour of her watch, the young filly leaned her body on the same section of wood on the parapet she always did, and watched the same direction she always did. Already, the plank had a Sky shaped mark in it, growing as she did.
 
            Quickly, Sky realised that two days could have been any amount of time. It just all folded together after a while, punctuated only by gut-punching moments of frustration and helpless impatience that she couldn't get to hang out of the only other foal in the town right now who wasn't her brother.
 
            It had always been this way. Her mother was strong; a survivor. She had turned Tincan from a vulnerable place, one that had suffered at the hooves of raiders twice before Sky's birth, into a resistant little bunker of a town capable of warding away roving bands. Sky could still remember hiding in her bedroom, hearing the shouts as a gang was warded away with a few warning shots, and that was as close as Tincan had ever come to another attack in her lifetime.
 
            Groaning, rubbing her head with both hooves and feeling her wings stretch with stiffness, Sky watched the darkening plains as the edge of the sun's light folded back over them like a retreating glow, running away from Tincan. There were little pockets of interest out there. Small barns, hovels, farms, thicket, and on clear days she could even see what looked like an out of town supermarket still gleaming from broken glass in the distance. Occasionally, she'd write wishlists of all the things she imagined might be in there.
 
            She couldn't help it. Anything new. Anything different. Anything to ward off the boredom of Tincan set up some involuntary twitch in her mind.
 
            And yet as she drew her eyes backward, she could see one line of dead trees perhaps five hundred meters from the walls. They were special.
 
            Those were as far as she'd ever been allowed to fly out to.
 
            From behind her came a series of shouts, breaking through the quiet of residents shutting themselves indoors for the night. Feeling that very twitch inside kicking up, she moved back a few steps to listen at the edge of the stairs.
 
            It was her mother.
 
            "Good luck, Dusty. You won't wait till morning?"
 
            The jovial tone of the trader replied after a short pause. Hunching close to the ground at the sound of her mother, Sky figured he must have been shaking his head first.
 
            "Gots to arrive before the brahmin herders do. Don't worry, with your maps and routes we'll be safe."
 
            There were pleasant goodbyes, and she even heard Wander being asked to say goodbye to the 'nice mare', before the clatter of metal studded wheels on steel plates announced the family's departure from Tincan.
 
            Rushing back to her perch, Sky pressed her little face against the chickenwire and tried to get a glance down the side of the wall at the road.
 
            Eventually, cast in the swaying and soft orange glow of a gemlight lantern, the wagon rolled out, drawn by the lethargic yet powerful bovine ahead of it. Wander and his wife sat up front, and Sky bit back a mutter of annoyance that she'd never even learned the mare's name, no thanks to her mother.
 
            But behind them, as the wagon wheeled around and passed her perch, she saw Wander on the back of it, half covered by the canvas, scanning the walls.
 
            "Oh!" Sky gasped, and drew herself up, waving as frantically as she could. With both forelegs. And both wings.
 
            After a few seconds, the sandy coloured colt jolted up and saw her, before beaming back. His smile looked enormous on his face, but it only lasted a few seconds, as he realised that the wagon wasn't going to stop. Even so, he waved enthusiastically.
 
            Sky kept waving to him, throwing her hooves back and forth as though they were trying to outwave one another, and she heard his silly laughter on the wind.
 
            But then, he was gone, too far off to see her against the black rust behind her body. She could blend in well, and in this case had no say in whether she did. She loved sneaking up to surprise some of the nicer old ponies in the town, or ambushing her brother, but now she wished she were glowing green if it meant enjoying one silly little waving game with a friend her age for a few seconds longer.
 
            "Night Sky, what are you doing?"
 
            Silent Meadow marched into the lookout, clearly having come here to watch the trader's progress, and Sky whipped her hoof down like it had been burned.
 
            "Just waving?" She answered, nervousness in her voice.
 
            Her mother sat down, eyes staring at the wagon with experience and wariness beaten into them. Sky knew her mother had once travelled the wastes before coming here, but she really never talked much about it all. She never talked about much of anything outside the here and now.
            
            Now, she seemed to be judging Sky's actions, before finally abstaining.
 
            "All right."
 
            The filly let out her breath, and waved again. It was permitted, and she was going to take all advantage she could of anything. Only, with her mother seeming calmer now, she felt a little more courageous inside to will herself to raise her voice.
 
            "Are they coming back?"
 
            "The traders?" Meadow didn't look away from the plains.
 
            "Uh huh."
 
            With a slow nod, her mother sank down onto one of the watch stools, and left her gun by the ledge.
 
            "Every few months. Bought our stocks well. Reliable. No danger to us. They can come back."
 
            Feeling her sunken heart lift again, Sky let herself smile. Wander would come back, so she had a playmate to look forward to!
 
            She joined her mother in watching the wagon go, before daring to speak again.
 
            "Mom, why are there no other foals here other than I and Light?"
 
            "Light and me." Meadow corrected quickly.
 
            Sky blinked, confused. "But you're not a foal."
 
            The sideways glare made her realise that perhaps she had missed something, and Sky quickly looked back to the wagon again.
 
            Dusty's family were just shadows atop it now, highlighted against the fading orange and purpose of the twilight hour. She could see the little shape of Wander pushing up front between his parents, and his father's foreleg wrapping around him against the cold. Both parents leaned in to their son together.
 
            Night Sky bit her lip, tapped her hooves idly, and started feeling the air becoming uncomfortably thick.
 
            "Mom?"
 
            There was only a hint of a sigh, but Meadow's voice was level.
 
            "Yes, Sky?"
 
            Taking her time, allowing a few breaths to pass through her lungs, Night Sky sat back and over thought every word she could say, before finally continuing.
            
            "I know you don't talk about it but...but was dad like Dusty?"
 
            Even in the open expanse of the Equestrian Heartlands, where the plains they were situated in were quiet at the best of times, the silence that followed felt somehow emptier. Silent Meadow, living fully up to her name, stared down at her daughter; her eyes were caught between surprise and anger.
 
            Following a low growl, she shook her head, her short mane only bouncing slightly in its tight knot behind her head.
 
            "No. He wasn't."
 
            Despite the news, Sky couldn't deny feeling her chest push out and her habitual interest in learning new things about others kick in. Those three words were ones she had suspected for some time, but never before had she heard them directly.
 
            Hearing a pony approaching, her replacement for the watch, Sky elected to try and keep talking, to hear more before someone else ruined the quiet moment.
 
            "What was he-"
 
            "Enough, Sky. Time you were in bed. You know the rule: eight o'clock for eight year olds. Come on."
 
            Taking up her gun and returning it to her side-saddle holster, Meadow ushered her out as an old stallion limped his way into the lookout. Giving Meadow a thin smile, and Sky a pat on the head, he sat down and rested his cane by the edge.
 
            Working her little legs ahead of Meadow's intense strides, Sky felt disappointment grip her heart.
 
            "Mom, what I was gonna say-"
 
            "Inside, now."
 
            Moving around the outer rim of Tincan, the walkway only just more than a pony in width between homes and the outer wall, they took the stairs down, before rounding back underneath them and stooping to open the sliding door to their own windowless lodging. Built from two old cargo containers, it was almost completely hidden between other homes on all sides, contributing to the blocky, stacked look of the town. They had to squeeze in one by one.
 
            Silent Meadow went in last. She could hear Light Beam muttering to himself over his workbench within, and ignoring the protests of Night Sky. She stopped in the doorway and turned, before returning outside and glancing upward at the chickenwire roof to the town. She scanned it, and beyond it to the clouds.
 
            Her eyes narrowed. She ran through a mental checklist private to only her mind. Eventually, satisfied, she turned and went indoors, pulling the container's sliding entrance shut behind her. As the air turned to a still heat, she began hustling her daughter through the first container to the second one, divided into two rooms. Her own, and Sky's one shared with Light.
 
            Sky tried again. "About-"
 
            Meadow stopped her with a raised hoof at the door, and turned off the buzzing, soon to fail lightbulb that hung from a rope on the ceiling. Finally, seeing both of her children's bright eyes staring at her in the dark, she let her shoulders slump and the softer side finally came out. Offering a weary smile, she began closing the door, watching Sky crawl under the covers with a frustrated grumble.
 
            "Maybe when you're older."
 

*     *     *


 

            Times in Tincan went slow, and one year might feel like a generation.
 
            Ponies came and went. Residents moved on from the dull life, or came anew to seek cheap taxes for accomodation. Within a year, the entire town could replace itself easily.
 
            The only constants were Silent Meadow, as she kept building her little fortress in the wastes day after day, and her foals.
 
            A constant that remained. And remained long through the winters. While the days dragged into becoming five long years, Night Sky did only what she could. To endure the crawl of lookout duty. To save up slowly to afford a radio off Dusty to help those lonely nights. To endure the increasing pressure of her mother's demands on life, learning, and law.
 
            And yet for how slow it went, every one of those rare days in which that Wander came back to play with always seemed to go by too quickly. Fleeting moments of joy, months apart, as they would play at being adventurers in the thin streets, or laugh at Dusty's jokes, until the wagon would once again depart and the grind resumed.
 
            And then, inevitably, the itch to do something -anything- to get a thrill or a rush would grow, and she would turn to hunting for prizes once again; continuing her adventures alone without her partner.
 
            And occasionally, discovering secrets.

 


*     *     *


 

            The vicious hellhound was unaware of her presence.
 
            Huge, hunched over, it snorted and shook its head, and Sky froze on the spot. Fear and exhilaration coursed through her every vein, and yet she held herself still. She was good at that. Years of watch duty had given her that power. The power to slide unnoticed below the fiercest of creatures' gazes.
 
            The power to take the item that would save Equestria forever from right under its nose.
 
            Holding her breath, she leaned forward, creeping with soft hooves past its stench and its heaving back, until she saw her goal before her eyes.
 
            Gleaming gold, bright as Celestia's sun, it rested behind an alarm system of diabolical ingenuity. The evil minotaur wizard had chosen its guardian and hiding place well.
 
            The hound shifted, turning to look to the side with sudden attention, and its big mouth creaked open, after inhaling with a searing wheeze.
 
            "Afternoon, Skip."
 
            "Aye, aye. Going well?"
 
            "Can't complain, mate. Far as Tincan goes."
 
            A lucky break! Sky slipped her hooves between the hanging beads and slid the item of her dreams off the shelf. Padding carefully, she backed off, leaving the unaware gaurdian behind her. Moving through the shopkeeper's housing, she peered out his door, before finally winding her way into the thin alleyways at the edge of town, barely controlling the gleeful beating of her heart.
 
            Equestria was saved, for now.
 
            Punching the air, Sky sat down, letting her fantasy go in place of a shivering excitement.
 
            "Yes, yes! Finally!"
 
            With an excited flurry of her hooves, she drew out the item. The one she'd always needed.
 
            The brass casing on it was rusted and marked; dented too. But the slightly hazy glass in the middle revealed its secret. A truth pointer! The small clock-face like object inside swung its way around four letters; but always seemed to point in one steadfast direction. Manehattan.
 
            It made sense, she figured. Ponies said that the voice telling them all the truth came from Manehattan, after all.
 
            Sky walked on toward a place to hide and play with it, rushing below a set of stairs to squeeze into a gap below a raised shipping container.
 
            She was so entranced by the wavering device, that she didn't even notice a pony was already in her hiding spot, until her head collided with theirs.
 
            The sharp knock on her forehead drew a sharp yelp from her, as the lance of pain shot through her skull enough to make anger briefly flare.
 
            "Hey, watch it you-"
 
            "Sky, watch where you're going!"
 
            Her anger overridden, Sky looked up.
 
            Light Beam sat rubbing his head, an infuriated look on his face. But even as she blinked and stared at him, her brother was frantically pulling items of clothing and food up off the ground to try and stuff them once more into a bag. His journal, amongst a stack of papers, had exploded from his hooves, landing between them, while the off-white sheets of ancient printer paper fluttered down slowly in the air.
 
            "You're staring down so much you just ran into me!" Light cried out, wincing.
 
            Picking herself up, and hurriedly grabbing the pointer from the ground, she just stuck her tongue out.
 
            "Well you should...should...keep your thick head higher up!"
 
            "What does that even-hey, isn't that Relic's compass?"
 
            Sky looked side to side, before finally tracking her brother's own eyes to the pointer in her hooves. Pouting, she held it protectively to her chest, twisting away and stuffing it within a sweater that was far too large for her skinny body.
            
            "No, this is the truth pointer."
 
            "Sky, you're fourteen, you know what a compass is. Mom taught us. She also taught us not to steal."
 
            "I'm not-" Sky raised her voice, before suddenly blushing at the cheeks, holding herself off the ground by flapping her wings, to match his taller stature and look him in the eye. She grabbed his face. "I'm just borrowing it, really!"
 
            His face squished in her hooves, Light gently knocked her away and fixed her with a stare his mother would be proud of. "Just like you 'borrowed' my sweater."
 
            "And you got it back!"
 
            "You're wearing it right now!" Light's voice pitched up in exasperation.
 
            She briefly paused and looked down, "...I was cold? What are you doing here? This is my hiding place! You haven't used it in years. What is this anyway?"
 
            Leaning down, Sky snatched one of the pieces of paper from the ground that Light's frantic recovery hadn't gotten to yet.
 
            "Don't!"
 
            He reached for the paper, but Sky bounced away, falling onto her back. Yelling at her, Light Beam dove, and they tussled, with Sky using her hind legs to kick and ward the larger earth pony away, even while she cast a look at the stolen document.
 
            The paper bore her brother's oddly neat drawing. All straight lines with careful writing. Even while thrashing and fighting, twisting her body to keep peering at it, she realised what it was.
 
            It was a map.
 
            And at the top of the map, near a town she knew was on the route to Manehattan from here, the word 'Dad?' had been written.
 
            "Dad?"
 
            She breathed the word, her ceasing of kicking giving Light pause.
 
            Running a hoof across his own face, dragging his features downward and squishing his muzzle, Light groaned. "Sky, I just...it's not-"
 
            Night Sky backed off until she could look out through the gaps in the stairs they were hidden below, before quickly returning to him once she was certain her mother wasn't approaching at the sounds of their bickering. Suddenly, the items strewn around his hooves made a lot more sense.
 
            Food, clothing, maps, the suppressed pistol their mother had given him for his sixteenth, waterskins, a sleeping bag.
 
            Wide eyed, hooves shooting to her mouth, Sky gasped. "You're going to sneak out after dad! I knew it! You said it in your diary years ago and now you're gonna do it!"
 
            Guilt was written all over Light's face, leading him to idly look at the wall. Yet at Sky's more direct accusation, he shook his mane, and wiped his sweating brow. The small space down here was nothing but dull metal and earth under a hot summer heat; but it wasn't the stuffy atmosphere making him perspire at the moment.
 
            "No! Not sneak! It's not like that! It's just a...I've been stashing stuff here for years so if I ever...urgh, why should I even have to explain this to you? You know what mom's like! If I ever wanna see him, I'll have to do it myself some day! I'm waiting for a job out there, Sky! Could be today if news comes in, could be next year, could be when I'm old enough to just walk out the door. I dunno, okay?"
 
            Turning her head away, she peered at the gate, where ponies were pulling the steel plates back into place. They were expecting someone today, and she knew who. Sky would never miss knowing when Wander would come back with Dusty's caravan. And the gatekeeper had said today might be the day. Her mind whirled; surely Light couldn't mean a job with-
 
            Outside of his diary ramblings as a foal, this was the first she'd even seen of him taking action. Their father had always been a curiosity to one day hear more about from their mother, not someone to go out and actually find.
 
            "You promise not to tell mom?" Light had returned to his normally quieter tone, tinged with a wavering fear.
 
            "Sure, but..."
 
            She took a long breath, and stared at him, flaring out her wings. This could be it. Something to finally let her spread her wings outside this caged little town.
 
            Until this moment, until seeing a path, she hadn't even known that urge had been growing steadily inside. A rebellious little feeling, a daring compulsion. And briefly, the thought of her mother didn't even cross her mind.
 
            "I wanna come with you when you do."
 
            There was a silence. Sky and Light had never seen eye to eye on many things, and their father was one of them. They each knew the other had always been curious, but every talk had ended badly.
 
            Light Beam slowly gathered the rest of his things, and bit his lip.
 
            His eyes hardened.
 
            And he scowled.
 
            "No."
 
            Shoving his astonished sister away, he marched past her with a gait that he could only have learned from his mother. Tossing his bag through the hiding place entrance, he squeezed through and made off down what passed for the main street in Tincan, carrying any evidence with him.
 
            Sky's mouth hung open.
 
            "No?"
 
            Frantically, she scampered forward, lithely pulling her bendy body through the small gap and catching up to him with ease, cantering behind her brother's determined pace.
 
            "NO?"
 
            "NO!"
 
            "Why not!?"
 
            Light Beam didn't even stop, "Because! This isn't your thing!"
 
            That last sentence was it. Sky felt a bubbling anger boil up inside her, and she surged off the ground. Flapping her wings, she flew down the thin gap between homes and dropped down in front of him.
 
            "What do you mean isn't my thing! He's my dad too!"
 
            Light stopped short of barging into her, but his nose came frighteningly close to hers. He was a quiet buck most of the time, but he could muster a terrible anger.
 
            "You never even knew him, Sky!"
 
            "Basically neither did you! And what, you're wanting to go with Dusty? Good! 'Cos then Wander's there and-"
 
            "That trader's son again? The one you're always running around playing at adventurer with?"
 
            Sky shrank back, then fluffed up her wings in annoyance at the accusation of her friendship being anything but a good thing. "He's not just some random person! I've known him since I was eight, remember. He's my best friend every time he comes, 'cos unlike you he actually plays and hangs out with me, and I'd spend time with him and not bother you if we went! Because he doesn't just sit in his workshop all day and I know he'd help us! We could do it!"
 
            Light Beam rolled his eyes, snarling his words.
 
            "You're not coming. I don't want you with me there. I’ll find him alone. You might be surprised what I'm actually doing to prepare if you'd ever stop getting yourself into damn trouble all the time for stealing, or wasting time having a stupid crush on some trader, Sky!"
 
            The sudden aggression in his reply caught her off guard enough that she dropped out of the air and hit the wall behind her.
 
            "I don't-I...well what else am I meant to do for fun around here? Mom doesn't let me do anything! Ever! She won't even let me out to fly if the clouds aren't thick now! And...and you don't know anything about Wander! You never make ANY friends! So how are you ever gonna find dad if you can't even properly talk to-"
 
            Both of their voices were just as equally interrupted. The one voice they both responded to by sheer habit was calling from nearby. In a town only big enough for any voice to carry to every resident, that wasn't hard.
 
            "Light! Sky! Come help make dinner! Hurry up, come on!"
 
            Their mother's voice brokered little room for arguing further; and glaring at one another with heated eyes, the siblings wandered off in different directions back home.
 

*     *     *


 

            The main room of Meadow's home was as tightly packed as any other location in Tincan. The single folded-out table pushed the three folded-out chairs around it back against the folded-in wall grill and folded-in kitchen top, and left the three ponies somewhere between about three feet of space between hard oak and metal bulkhead.
 
            The room was dark, for they had no windows. A sealed little home, anything but cosy. A perpetual game of fitting and changing the given furniture to occupy the scant space was the only way to make it work.
 
            They sat in silence under the whirring of a small fan fed through the wall for airflow. The silence was not unusual.
 
            Yet Night Sky was mostly prodding and pushing at her food, and not wolfing it down to get back outside to play with Wander as fast as was possible.
 
            Now that, Meadow knew well, was unusual.
 
            Narrowing her eyes, Meadow remained quiet. She hadn't heard their argument, but any mother could tell the signs when her children had been bickering again.
 
            Minutes passed, with nothing but the pregnant quiet, waiting for an icebreaker. Nothing but the clink of mismatching cutlery on a mixture of metal and wood. Light acted normal, but Meadow could see he was glancing toward herself every time she put down her fork.
 
            Her beady eyes never missed that. He was waiting for something. His back was tense.
 
            Silent Meadow never did miss those details. Little clues. Little hints as to what was to come. They mattered. Don't look and assume normal. Look and assume what it meant.
 
            Thankfully, she knew what it meant, and what he sensed she had to say.
 
            "I talked to Dusty."
 
            She only had to say the word 'talked', and Light's entire body jolted upwards. Yet to her surprise, Sky's eyes blinked around just as full of interest. Had Light told her?
 
            "Mom?" Light Beam was leaning forward.
 
            Meadow took a second to finish her mouthful, reached over to turn up the gas lantern, and dabbed her mouth with a faded napkin. One of two dozen identical ones from the old diner five miles to the east.
 
            Night Sky wished she knew why her mother was hesitating. It was a yes or no question, but their mother always chose the same answer every time they asked about the topic.
 
            Light was going to be disappointed, she never let them have any real freedom.
 
            Silent Meadow closed her eyes, opened them, and reluctantly spoke.
 
            "He's agreed to allow you to join his caravan as a guard."
 
            The slam of cutlery was synchronised from either side of the table.
 
            "He did!?"
 
            "You're letting him do it!?"
 
            Light's face was matching his name, beaming a surprised grin like he'd been told Hearthswarming was coming early.
 
            "Mom! Thank you! Thank you! I'll go see him tonight!"
 
            Meadow raised her hoof, chiding him. "Tomorrow morning. Let his family rest. We'll work out what you're taking, what he'll provide, and what you are to be doing for him. Dusty is a good stallion, he'll teach you more than I can here, and his route is very safe now."
 
            "Can I go too?"
 
            Sky's voice broke into the conversation with such haste that she nearly tripped over her own words, and had to swallow her mouthful before it sprayed out.
 
            "Can I...go?"
 
            Meadow's eyebrows raised, and hardened. Across the table, Light Beam was giving Sky a harsh look, one that spoke volumes about annoying their mother right now.
 
            "No." Meadow's voice was curt. She looked back down to her meal.
 
            "Come on! I can help, you know I'm really good at spotting stuff and staying hidden, and I'm better at meeting new peo-"
 
            "No,  Night Sky!" Her mother interrupted with a stern use of her daughter's full name. "You are not ready to go out there."
 
            "Yes I am! And if it's with Light, we can help each other!"
 
            Meadow shook her head. "He's a guard, I've trained him to fight. Not you. You wouldn't be able to handle raiders."
 
            Sky, desperate, let her mouth run before her mind.
 
            "I...I've handled raiders before!"
 
            Meadow, surprised, fixed her with a stare. Sky gulped.
 
            "I-I mean I've stopped a raid!"
 
            The intense glare from the older mare could corrode metal. Sky looked down.
 
            "Okay, I stopped Light raiding the fridge once. But c'mon! Can I join him next year then? You can teach me to fight like you did for him!"
 
            Meadow again went back to her food, as though it was already settled. "No, you're a lookout. You stay here. Enough of this curiosity, Sky. You've gotten yourself into too much trouble as is lately. Maybe when you're older."
 
            Nothing about that sounded even vaguely like what she wanted. Light was getting to go with Dusty, and as a result carry out his wish to look for their father, and she was being told to go to the same parapet, under the same chickenwire, in the same town.
 
            It was beyond unfair, and Sky felt the bile rising in her at this. Moreso as she saw Light refusing to meet her eye. He'd just ignored her.
 
            Sky quickly finished the last of her meal, eating between grumbles as her mother told Light of some of the responsibilities and routes he'd most likely be on. After they were done, Meadow took the washing, telling the two to head out while she reset the room for the evening.
 
            Light didn't waste time, marching to the door. Sky wasn't far behind. Her anger had been building throughout this. Light was only a couple years older, and Wander was the same age as her. Now both of them got to go out there, but she couldn't? Why couldn't she at least go on the caravan once? Why always just lookout and staying inside this boring, cramped town?
 
            Using her wings, she zipped through the thin streets to catch up with Light.
 
            "Hey!"
 
            He didn't look around as he answered.
 
            "Not now, Sky! You've embarrassed yourself enough. Why did you have to try that? You almost messed it up for me too if it looked like I'd planned it with you! You're always trying to ask her about dad, and she could have spotted it! You know how mom seems to do that!"
 
            Sky ignored his protests, rushing up and blocking him, before prodding his chest with a hoof.

“Why shouldn't I? You didn't even try to help me! You didn't even say a thing when I spoke up! We're brother and sister, we're meant to look out for one another! We coulda done this-"
 
            "Because I don't want you to go, Sky! I told you! I'm going alone, and that's it!"
 
            "What have you got against me? Why do you keep wanting me to not do it?"
 
            "Because I don't want you with me! You just make things worse! You always do, ever since you were born!"
 
            Sky gritted her teeth, shoving his chest to knock him into a wall. The corrugated metal warped behind him, and she barked her words out.
 
            "How could you say that!? That's awful! We both want to find him! Dad left both of us!"
 
            Light snarled, and knocked her back so hard that she slammed into the opposite wall.
 
            "Dad left because of YOU!"
 
            The words hit her like a harsh slap across the face. Sky curled back against the metal, away from his furious, accusing look, the heated words catching in her throat.
 
            "Wh-what-"
 
            "My dad disappeared the DAY you were born! You're the reason I never had him around! You're the reason I don't remember him! I was...I was only two!"
 
            There were angry tears in his eyes, dripping over his cheeks, a contrast to the ones of horror that now emerged on Sky's face.
 
            She couldn't believe this. She couldn't.
 
            "Light...no. No, that's...why? Why would you say that...it's not..."
 
            Light pushed her aside, Sky's limp body offering no resistance, and continued on his way to the workshops, muttering.
 
            "I don't know. I just don't know..."
 
            Pausing, he looked back at her, fury on his face.
 
            "But I know that means I don't want you anywhere near me when I find him."
 
            He left, departing on shaking legs around the corner.
 
            Sky felt herself curl up under her wings in the alley, shivering with envy and fear. But mostly a cruel, deep pain that no matter how hard she gripped herself, wouldn’t stop squeezing her heart until it hurt.
            

*     *     *


 

            Wander was crouched under the wagon, stumbling and pushing to get the replacement wheel spoke to snap into the frame. Scraping his hooves, grunting, he felt it crack into place.
 
            He only heard the fluttering a second before a pegasus careened into him, driving them both against the wheel as little but strong forelegs tried their very best to squeeze the life out of him.
 
            "Wha? Sky?"
 
            She didn't say anything, but he felt her bury her face into his shoulder, and let the tears in her eyes seep into his coat.
 
            "Sky...what's wrong? Sky?"
 

*     *     *


 

            Light Beam left that week. With his secret maps and clues stuffed in his bag, he mounted Dusty's cart and, for the first time, truly left Tincan.
 
            Night Sky had spent the days leading up to the departure around Wander, trying in vain to explain to him what was going on. He'd said he'd talk to his father, but Dusty wouldn't be moved to oppose Meadow. All the same, Wander's presence had been her sole comfort. She'd never let him see her cry before, but his unjudging eyes, and the careful hug he'd given her had allowed Sky a chance to try and recover.
 
            All the same, she didn't wave from her lookout to the wagon this time, as she saw her brother sitting upon it looking back at the town he no longer had to worry about.
 
            Tincan soon changed its population once again, as residents came and left.

But this time there were only two remaining who didn't leave, and Sky's world grew ever smaller.

    Two years later, the rains came.
 

*     *     *

 
            Months of horrendous weather were lashing the wastes. The clouds turned to black, and took what faint sun was left away from the denizens of the Manehattan outskirts. Night turned to grey, and grey turned to night.
 
            The thin streets of Tincan became small rivers heading downhill to the gate, and filled Silent Meadow's defence pits with a goopy, brown water. The main square was a quagmire of fetlock deep slush, and more than once the entire town had to unite and messily help wagons get back out their little home.
 
            Soaked through, Night Sky was sheltering beneath a wooden palette on the rooftops, just beneath the chickenwire mesh. She gloomy handed tool after tool to her mother. Meadow hung from the supports, welding vicious spikes into the top of the wire, pointing upward.
 
            When questioned why, she refused to answer, as always.
 
            She'd done the same when connecting spark batteries to the metal gates, electrifying them at night when they were shut and inaccessible.
 
            She'd done the same when denying Sky from flying any higher than twenty feet off the ground now.
 
            Tincan was ever more fortified.
 
            Sky was ever more enclosed.
 
            Yet as she handed another sharpened piece of rebar to her mother, she saw a figure come from the rains. Trotting through the clinging mud, pulling his hooves free with sucking, wet sounds on every step, Light Beam returned home through the gate.
 
            He'd had a growth spurt in his time away. He looked stronger, and more hunched at the shoulders. His mane was longer. He carried weapons he hadn't possessed when he left.
 
            Meadow stopped, and gazed down from behind Sky, her face inscrutable.
 
            Looking up from below his flattened, soaked mane, Light spotted his mother and sister up above, paused, and then silently began limping toward their home.
 
            Halfway there, he threw down his newly acquired rifle into the mud, and tossed his saddlebag aside, the look of failure about his being.
 

*     *     *


 

            Light Beam never spoke about his journey to Sky. He recounted the caravan job to his mother, but nothing of what else he'd been up to.
 
            Sky knew what must have happened, but something about the quieter, matured look in her brother's eyes gave her pause against even her curiosity inquiring further. Oddly enough, he never bickered after that, and would just sit with a sad look on his face as she and their mother were at odds.
 
            All she knew was that he hadn't found who he wanted and, after two long and hard years, he had finally come home in disillusionment.
 
            He went back to guard duty, and took the lonely, silent shifts during the night; the opposite of Night Sky's own ones for the day.
 
            Sky occasionally thought to ask if she could join Dusty's caravan, but every time the answer was the same, even when she had long passed the age Light had been at.
 
            "Maybe when you're older."
 
            When she grew to be yet older again, she asked again.
 
            "Maybe when you're older."
 
            And on her nineteenth, asked again.
 
            "Maybe when you're older."
 
            Along the way, along the years, she stayed in touch with her only friend. Sky and Wander had scant moments in every year, three or four times, to be around one another. To share problems, to share the fun. He began bringing her things every time he came back, and she began trying her best to return the gesture from the goods other traders bought.
 
            He grew, as did she. So did their friendship, and their bond.
 

*     *     *


 

            "Oh, it's so cool!"
 
            Sky held the gift in her hooves, a gasp and a smile competing for space on her face.
 
            A dark grey bandana stared back up at her, sitting upon the brown paper it had been contained in, prior to her frantic unwrapping.
 
            She hugged it to her chest, wings flapping furiously behind her in excitement, and a high pitched squeal of joy shaking through her.
 
            Wander was sat on her bed beside her, and mid-way through his bashful shrug found his upper body grabbed and yanked nearly sideways. Sky's wiry legs squeezed around him, and her short mane rubbed into his chest.
 
            "Thank you-thank you-thank you-thank you!"
 
            Cheeks red, Wander held her tightly, grasping around her back and rocking side to side.
 
            "Aww, you're welcome, Sky. Da' saw it, but I knew it would suit you."
 
            Enjoying the comforting warmth of another pony who actually wanted a hug, Sky felt reluctant to let go. Leaning her weight in, she sighed and looked at the bandana again.
 
            "I'm gonna wear it on watch tomorrow, it'll be so good for the winter. So, uh, how long are you here for this time? Last one?"
 
            The young trader took a deep breath, settling his body and rubbing Sky's back as he did. Morosely, he nodded.
 
            "Yeah...last one before winter sets in. We'll be here for a couple more days, just the usual."
 
            They separated slightly, yet he couldn't bring himself to uncurl his forelegs, instead letting her rest back against them. After an awkward second of silence, he saw her blush and chuckle as she realised how long they'd spent in contact, not letting go.
 
            He liked that look. Sky had grown into what Wander’s mother had teasingly described to him as a 'cutie'. Looking at her now, he could hardly disagree. With her maturing through her teens, the aloof silly-filly was now a quirky silly-mare. He knew people mistook that whimsical personality of hers for being naive and daft, but he'd spent enough time around her to know she was clever. Maybe not educated, maybe not sagely, and prone to what could charitably be described as 'alternative logic', but clever at what she knew, and a burst of happiness to be around.
 
            He knew well that he was about the only source of outlet for that delightful joy that she held inside. And while he felt lucky to be the pony that could experience that, he felt bad for her being so cooped up and grew impatient to see her each time.
 
            Just until his last visit, he hadn't realised that the time apart had built up so much fondness, perhaps more than fondness. He'd left wishing his goodbye hug had lasted longer.
 
            It was about then that he realised they were still holding on to one another.
 
            Sky had realised too. Feeling her heart start accelerating, she saw his eyes staring right at her. She felt surprised, and then more surprised that she actually felt safe and comfortable with it. Nopony had ever looked at her like that before, with trepidation and a nervous hesitation.
 
            After a moment, she realised that was exactly the look that was on her own face, and felt her forelegs around his midsection re-tighten.
 
            "So uh-"
 
            "Known each other a long ti-"
 
            They spoke at once, and quickly apologised at the same time.
 
            "I meant-"
 
            "Was thinki-"
 
            She bit her lip, feeling very silly, but breaking into laughter all the same. “Why can't we talk now? We managed it for ten years."
 
            Wander chuckled, and shifted to get comfortable, pulling her hip in comfortably against his. "Heh, yeah...true. I just...what you told me last season, the issues and...and you're really fun whenever I'm here. And how you always sneak up on me. Feels good to know there's...uh..."
 
            Sky snorted. "There's?"
 
            Wander looked away and rubbed his mane, before bringing the hoof back down to her cheek.
 
            "That there's someone who wants to be around me as much as I want to be around them, that they'd sneak up on me just to surprise me. And how much I like that. Guess then you know its someone real special that you got there to feel close to."
 
            Her eyes lit up, the thumping in her chest threatening to make her wings start twitching. She saw his eyes briefly glance at them, and batted the side of his head with one to hide her cheeks furiously blushing.
 
            They both paused again, but she felt his forelegs tighten, along with her own, as they drew closer. Her eyes began to close. Things, for once, felt a little daring. A little break from the monotony and imprisonment. A rebellion into her own feelings. No need to ask. Nopony to complain about it this time.
 
            Why not try?
 
            In long, aching seconds, she felt him nervously shivering just as much as she did, and felt the hot air of his breath on her lips, and-
 
            The door to her room opened slightly, and then burst open the remainder of the way a quarter-second later.
 
            "OUT!"
 
            Sky and Wander burst back from one another, just in time for a dark blue foreleg to grab and drag him off of her. This was no stern pull, Wander was thrown off the bed, staggering and falling onto his rump.
 
            "Hey! That's not-"
 
            "I said, OUT!"
 
            Silent Meadow had a look of cold fury on her face, placing herself between Sky and Wander, hounding him, shoving him, and grabbing him to drag and usher him out of Sky and Light's room, and out the front door to her house.
 
            "MOM! No!"
 
            Meadow didn't turn around at Sky nervously running after her, shouting and trying to get her attention. Her focus was on Wander.
 
            "We bring you in here to our town, but I do not give you permission to intrude on my daughter!"
 
            "That's not your choice for he-"
 
            The door slammed shut in his face, and Meadow turned to face Sky.
 
            "And you..."
 
            "What the hell was that? Mom, he's been my friend for like ten years! Why can’t-"
 
            Meadow stepped forward, pressing her face to Sky's. The two were the same height now, much the same colour, but Meadow's weathered face bore a heavy, intimidating focus.
 
            "I will not have my daughter gallivanting off with some trader's son! He'll only give you reason to try and sneak out with him. That's the last you'll see him. Dusty's contract is terminated this season. Come spring, he will not be back here."
 
            Sky gaped, and actually took a few seconds to process the whirlwind of consequences that had just been dropped on her. A hollow feeling came over her.
 
            "WH-WHAT!?"
 
            "You heard me. Now go get your kit ready, you're on the lookout tonight, Light's come down with something. He's at the healer no-"
 
            Sky didn't bother to listen to the rest.
 
            "That's bulls-"
 
            "Language, young mare! Now do as you're told."
 
            Sky stamped their metal floor, and snarled.
 
            "NO! No! I'm going to go out there and find him again! He's the only friend I have in this damn town, and he's never even here! At least he would give me a hug every now and then. Unlike YOU!"

    There was a stark, yet violently charged silence. Meadow closed her eyes, and sat down, carefully pulling out a contract from her filing cabinet with a shaking hoof. Night Sky seethed, slamming her hooves up on her mother's desk in their front room. She couldn't hold it back any longer.
            
            "Just because of whatever it was Dad did to you, doesn't mean you should do this to me!"
 
            Then, Sky fell silent, and she felt her rage snuffed.
 
            Her mother's head had turned to face her, and it bore a look that she had never seen before. Cold. Intense. A look beyond anger.
 
            Silent Meadow rose up, and her hoof came up sharply with her, raised up ahead of her head, tensing and swinging viciously down...only to pause in mid air, a hoof’s breadth from Sky's face. Sky shrank back in shock, eyes wide, backed and huddled into a corner.
 
            The look on Meadow's face slowly shifted, her hoof shaking violently. She looked to it, as though in surprise, and her voice was straining to stay level.
 
            "I. Will. Protect. You. If you go out there to follow him, if you had wanted to go with him...you may be seen. I won't let that happen. I can't trust you not to be tempted. Go...go to your room."
 
            "I-"
 
            Meadow’s voice erupted in volume. "Do not test me, Night Sky!"
 
            "But-"
 
            "DO NOT!"
 
            The hoof finally came down, slamming wickedly hard into the very edge of the desk. Pens, books, and the failing terminal bounced with a clatter, and the bang shattered Sky's remaining nerves. She fled back to her room.
 
            Shuttering the door behind her, she dove into her bed, sobbed, and pounded the pillow again and again.
 
            Later, she heard the argument between her mother and Dusty in the distance, before the sound of metal studded wheels on steel plates rung out an hour later.
 
            Probably for the last time.
 

*     *     *


 

            During the event, outside their home, and sniffling from the mucus in his nose, Light Beam saw the young stallion run past in tears back to his wagon.
 
            He heard the shouting from within, and quickly knew what had happened.
 
            Remaining where he was, he just sighed and shook his head, turning around to instead go to the parapet, where he rested his head in his hooves and gave little thought to the job at all.
 

*     *     *


 

            Sky didn't bother getting up to do lookout that night.
 
            And yet, nopony came to fetch her for it.
 
            It hurt. It hurt so very much. Frustration welled up, but had nowhere to go. Guilt crept in and was cast away again and again. She knew it wasn't her fault, but it couldn’t stop feeling like it was. Eventually, she began to recognise what the true feeling was.
            
            Hopelessness.
 
            It was one she didn't like. She felt sick. She had a headache. Her eyes stung.
 
            How did it happen that she was stuck here? How was this protecting her? It was just a cage that grew more encasing with every passing year, as her mother's imagined threats became only more looming.
 
            Why? Why so much? Why only her? Why not Light Beam too?
 
            So many questions. And she could only think to a single answer.
 
            It took her an hour to build the courage. An hour of shaking and worry. An hour waiting to hear that one sound: That of her mother leaving the house again.
 
            And then she made her move.
 
            She had to know. After all this, she had to. This wasn't normal. This wasn't right.
 
            She had to.
 

*     *     *


 

            Opening the door to Silent Meadow's room felt like peering past the gates of Tartarus itself.
 
            Even as her skin tightened at the loud creak the door made, Sky's breathing grew ragged and inconsistent. She had always felt the thrill when stealing from someone she didn't like, or borrowing just for fun in Tincan, but this was different. This was very different.
 
            There were real consequences now.
 
            Her mother's room was small. Just a bed, and a couple feet of space to stand up in to one side of it. The walls were filled with crude sketches on yellowed paper, depicting enhancements to be made to Tincan. She saw plans for a wider external ditch, a second layer of wire atop, and even to add shielding metal plates on top above their house, and Sky's lookout spot to block sight from above.
 
            An old diary lay open, its days instead used for notes.
 
            'First day of Autumn. Cloud conditions: Light. Horizon conditions: Clear. Keep inside. Give night lookout only.'
 
            'Second day of Autumn. Cloud conditions: Heavy. Horizon conditions: Fog. Allow short flight. Give day lookout.'

    Heart thumping, she turned some more pages.

    ‘Fifteenth day of Autumn. Cloud conditions: Heavy. Horizon conditions: Light Mist. Allow sunset flight only.’

    ‘Sixteenth day of Autumn. Cloud conditions: Light. Horizon conditions: Clear. Keep inside. Give night lookout only.'

    The entries only continued, and she recognised every one of the shifts.
 
            "Mom...what?" She barely dared breathe too loudly, but the words crept out all the same.
 
            Frayed clothing, disassembled weapons, stocks of food for their home, and little else populated the shelves above. The ground held a torn piece of carpet laid over the cold metal.
 
            Shivering as though stuck on lookout in blizzard season, Sky began to hunt.
 
            Boxes of trinkets. Folders of old trade contracts. A pile of blankets. There were hidden stocks beneath a panel on the floor. Emergency food, lighters, water. More than any one pony would normally have. All of it in pre-packed saddlebags, ready to grab in a hurry. Enough for three ponies.
 
            She came across an old locket in a drawer. The drawer was locked, but that hadn't stopped her with some dextrous use of the surrounding tools.
 
            She'd gotten her mark for finding out things, after all. She wasn't about to let simple locks stop her.
 
            Popping the locket open, she saw it contained no photos. No surprise, she knew her mother had no camera, but it did contain a message.
 
            'To my love, for helping me find my hooves here.'
 
            She stared at it for some time, tossing the sentence over and over in her head, before hurrying it back inside. He'd been in Tincan, she knew that already.
 
            Down below the drawers, she found something more promising.
 
            A small safe, bolted to the floor and covered in a muddy set of overalls. Only big enough to contain perhaps a helmet at most.
 
            Holding some safety pins, sewing needles, and a metal rod meant for cleaning a pistol, she set to work.
 
            The work was excruciatingly slow. Every minute passing felt like a chance to be revealed. Her mother was on her rounds. She never had a defined time for them.
 
            Click. Click. Click.
 
            A pin broke, and she exchanged it with a thicker needle, sweat dripping into her eyes from the concentration, and horrible sense of tension growing through her whole body at the tiny movements it needed. This was the hardest lock she had ever tackled.
 
            Click. Click. Click.
 
            Click.
 
            Breathing in sharply, she felt something shift, and warily pulled at the door.
 
            It opened quietly, on well oiled hinges. So easily, in fact, that she banged it into the desk beside it.
 
            Heart in her mouth, Sky threw her shaking hooves inside. She had to know. She knew it would be something. Somehow, she just knew.
 
            It was.
 
            A sealed bag was contained inside. Nothing of strict value, unless that value was information on her father.
 
            It was everything.
 
            Eyes widening, Sky laid it all out on the floor.

A well crafted uniform. Beige and grey, with black highlights. Made of loose and yet tough material.
 
            A beret, light brown in colour, bearing a winged symbol.
 
            A cap badge for the beret, scarred and blackened. Its old symbol soldered over, disfigured into the shape of a cloud and a lightning bolt.
 
            A small note, stitched to what looked like an identification card.
 
            The card had the words 'Grand Pegasus Enclave' stamped onto it, along with numerous numbers, and a scored out area where a portrait might have gone. The note was handwritten.
 
            'My dearest Meadow, I am sorry. I am so very sorry. They will be watching, and they won't abide new pegasi being created by a Dashite. I have to go.'
 
            Sky read it five times, feeling like she was skipping over words in her haste, never able to read the entire short message in one go. She got into a muddle, until finally, she grasped the meaning.
 
            Light hadn't been incorrect.
 
            But he had been wrong.
 
            "Dad..."
 
            "Night Sky." Silent Meadow's voice was low.
 
            The young pegasus' blood froze. In her stupor, she had missed the gentle sound of the door opening. Shock running through her, she turned, the note in hoof, and saw the silhouette of her mother in the doorway. Imposing and still, eyes glinting down to look past her nose.
 
            Sky could find no words, other than a scared gasp.
 
            Meadow stepped forward, bringing a regretful look into view of her room's own weak lantern. The soft orange wavered back and forth, casting her eyes into shadow for a brief moment on every swing.
 
            "I am surprised. Surprised only in that you hadn't done this years ago."
 
            Her mother sounded exhausted, and Sky was certain she saw marks below her eyes. Her hooves dragged on the floor, and her words took effort.
 
            "Your father, my husband, abandoned us, Sky. Too scared for his own hide that another pegasus might attract them to him. A coward, who left us all behind, left me with the job of raising both of you in the Equestrian plains alone; with nothing but a useless, little, and defenceless town to hide us from the threat he fled from."
 
            Meadow advanced, and knelt down beside Sky. She was breathing hard, and Sky could only guess she had been torn over their argument earlier. This was a side she hadn't seen before.
 
            Sky remembered the raised hoof. Her mother had never struck her. Never. The shock of having almost done that must have been terrible to a mother. Now, vulnerable, she seemed too mentally tired to be angry about what Sky had now done.

    Meadow hung her head.
 
            "I should have told you years ago. I didn't want to scare you of what's above us. What can't learn of you, or they'll come. But I'll protect you. Don't worry, my daughter. I'll protect you, even though he didn't. But you must stay here."
 
            Suddenly, so much made sense. The cage. The spikes. The records of the clouds.
 
            But she didn't agree.
 
            "Mom..." Sky felt like her voice was tiny, "...I think he left to protect us. They looked for him, so he left to take their eyes off of us. It's been nineteen years, mom...they aren't coming."
 
            A flash of determination, of hardness, came over her mother's face, and she gripped Sky's cheeks in both hooves.
 
            "You're safe because you haven't been seen. They hunted him before we found Tincan, Sky. We ran from them together. We fought them together. We lost our friends to them. We saw them die around us. We lived off nothing to evade them. I refuse to let you have that life. I won't let them have my daughter. I won't."
 
            Her mother hung her head, those last words sounding so very tired.
 
            Sky shook her head, feeling guilty at having come in here, and struggling to keep her face dry.
 
            "I'd rather that life, and be with you both, as a family; than live in a cage, Mom..."
 
            There was a long silence, as Sky realised she had no idea what else to say.
 
            "Go to bed, Sky. Don't worry about lookout tomorrow. I'll do it. Maybe...maybe when you're older..."
 
            "But-"
 
            "Not now, Sky. Please."
 
            With surprising gentleness, Meadow guided Sky to her own room.
 
            Sitting on her bed, Sky sank down and looked up as her mother slid the door over, unable to make eye contact with her daughter, leaving Sky in the flickering light alone.
 
            There was a gap of a half hour before Sky heard the clunk of the safe closing again in the next room.
 

*     *     *


 

            Night Sky didn't know what to do.
 
            The soul crushing argument, the loss of Wander from her life, and the revelations about her father were only one side of the cap.
 
            The confusion and rampant emotion of what her mother was going to do was the another.
 
            It was playing havoc on them all, just like Light Beam had felt a year ago.
 
            Pacing in circles, Sky felt her breathing rise again. Anger rose, and she threw her pillow. Ten minutes later, sadness took over, and she sank down in tears. As night fell, an empty shiver led her to sit and do nothing, until impatience led her to demand questions of anything she could possibly talk to.
 
            Unfortunately, none of the furniture had any answers for the distraught pegasus.
 
            'When you're older'.
 
            She'd heard it dozens of times. It was the excuse every time. The reason to undermine her. The placebo to the next year. The endless promise.
 
            Now she believed one thing about her father, and she knew that this knowledge would not rest easy. Sky couldn't know for sure. Her mother couldn't know for sure either. She couldn't.
 
            What was the truth?
 
            How could she even find it out? But Sky knew, that was what she did. She found things out, and her curiosity would never let her stop thinking about this. It was terrifying to imagine this from now on; the thought of this on her mind for so many days, unable to stop playing the words over and over until they drove her to not even knowing at all what to believe any more.
 
            The same way they had hurt her mother.
 
            Shivering, holding herself, Sky looked up to where she'd always wished she had a window.
 
            And sitting on the panel that would have been the windowsill, was the truth pointer, its metal arrow sticking eternally in the direction of Manehattan.
 
            She stared at it for some long minutes. She couldn't, could she? Was that even possible for her? Could she dare go that far?
 
            "I...I..."
 
            She stammered, not knowing what she even meant to say, as she stood up and took it in her hooves, wings drooped behind her. Years before, she'd been convinced she could go with Wander and Light.
 
            Now, Sky wondered again over the aching hours, could she do it alone?
 
            As she thought of those around her, she knew she had to. Light Beam had retreated from the urge, defeated by failure. Her mother had been pushed to damaging levels of worry and hurt.
 
            It had to be her. She was the only one left who could find the truth before it was too late for all of them.
 
            Two hours later, the truth pointer was gone.
 
            And so was Light Beam's travel bag.
 

*     *     *


 

            She wore the bandana Wander had given her to cover the white streaks in her mane, Light Beam's thick sweater to ward off the chilly wind, and his saddlebag tugged to its tightest strap around her.
 
            Food would soon be discovered missing from her mother's emergency stocks, as would a blanket, and a map.
 
            In the lookout above her, she could hear the radio she'd bought muttering away, a DJ's drawling voice recounting events from across the wasteland. It gave her the confidence to keep moving. Keep pushing past every fear that crept in. That someone who knew the wastes was out there. Someone who might be able to help her find her father.
 
            Sky crawled through her hiding place, squeezing between the bottom dregs of Tincan toward the edge of the wall where she and her mother had been fixing the chickenwire. She knew it was easier to undo there.
 
            Ducking below the light from windows, using every ounce of stealthy care she had learned in her misadventures, Sky approached the little gap between the town healer's house and the wall itself, flew up, and began to undo the twisted wire; hoping that the sounds it made wouldn't carry too far.
 
            Yet mid-way through, she heard the sound of hooves approaching, and hid.
 
            Squeezing below the healing house's back steps, she was surprised as a strong flashpoint cast directly on to her, and the instantly recognisable voice of her brother, Light Beam spoke up from its source.
 
            "I know your hiding places, Night Sky. We both used them."
 
            Wary, guilt on her face, Sky sucked in air and stepped forth from the small gap. As she did, the light switched off, revealing the quiet form of her big brother standing behind it. Her eyes took time to adjust, but she could see he had a suppressed pistol on him.
 
            "And I also know what you're doing, Sky."
 
            She shook her head, backing away as he advanced, until her back was against the wall. His bigger frame became clear, mouth idle on his ever-neutral expression.
 
            "I...I..." Sky began, but couldn't find much to say. "I need to..."
 
            He stopped in front of her, and took his pistol up in a hoof.
 
            "I can't let you go into danger, Sky."
 
            "Light, please...don't take me back. It’ll only hurt more, hurt Mom more if..."
 
            He paused, raised an eyebrow, and sighed, before hoofing the pistol over to her.
 
            "So I can't let you go unarmed."
 
            The world fell quiet to Sky. The small pistol, its barrel shrouded in a thick suppressor, fell into her hooves, its click of the metal on the hard edge of her hoof all that she could hear.
 
            "Light?"
 
            He stepped back, and sat on the steps, sniffling from his illness. He didn’t look at her, only at his own hooves.
 
            "When I left, I was with Dusty and his family. I watched them from afar most nights. I saw them laugh, share jokes, and make Wander smile. They were all excited when his wife became pregnant again. I...couldn't believe what I was seeing."
 
            Light leaned on his hoof, and rubbed his long, drooping mane. He'd kept meaning to cut it.
 
            "Then I came back and remembered just...just how far we were from all that. Our family. Neither Mom or Dad are blameless in this, and I should have understood earlier that it's both of us, brother and sister, that its hurting. Instead, I blamed you. Way I see it now, Mom had her opportunity before, and I had my chance..."
 
            He rested a hoof on her shoulder, not looking directly into her eyes.
 
            "I suppose it's only fair you get your shot too. I'd rather risk her wrath letting you go to do whatever you have planned, than let this family stay broken any longer."
 
            Sky's mouth hung open, before she launched forward and hugged her brother around his neck. A few seconds later, his large hooves settled on her thin back.
 
            The pair stood and rocked for some moments. The first true embrace they'd shared as siblings in their lives that she could remember.
 
            "You know she'll come after you, right?"
 
            "I know...but I can fly faster. I just...I'm a bit scared."
 
            Light Beam released her, and took the map sticking out her saddlebag. 
            "Head north. Keep heading north until you find the river, then follow it left. That'll take you to the trade routes. It's about three days, so stay hidden when you sleep, and stop in every settlement you can. Speak to ponies. I failed because...because I didn't. But you, you're not like that. It should have been you who left with Wander. Not me."
 
            "Light..."
 
            He pulled her head down to the map, using his torch to illuminate it.
 
            If you're lucky, you'll find Friendship City along the way, but if not, then there's a new place that's been made. Look for Cornerstone. It only set up rather recently, but I hear it's safe on the way to Tenpony."
 
            She followed his hoof on the map, before he packed it away for her. Tucking his pistol away, she took a long breath.
            
            "Thank you, Light. Thank you, just...thank you."
 
            He made a rare gesture. A smile.
 
            "Get going, Sky."
 
            It was a monumental effort for her to turn, fly up, and crawl through the gap she had made. Turning at the top, she offered a small wave, and dropped into the blackness of the empty plains outside Tincan.
 
            Suddenly, she felt unrelentingly isolated. She'd been outside before, but never at night.
 
            It was a void, a dark and empty world past the light of her home. Her skin felt clammy immediately, like her limbs were locking up. But as she gripped the compass, her truth pointer, and spotted its glowing tip, she knew what she had to do, and what direction to fly.
 
            Trying to convince herself, Sky reasoned that she had been living in the hope of doing this. To fly. To move in the dark. To seek a meaning, and to find it.
 
            Spreading her wings, she took off. Flapping furiously to propel herself up off the ground. The cold air flowed beneath her, and soon, the wind caught her wings, helping her to surge forward, catch a current and glide into the night, passing by the small forest outcrop that had once been her limit, without even realising it had just gone by her. Her focus was only on what was ahead, for it couldn't rest on what was behind.
 
            In the dark of the evening, with her family needing her, even if her mother wouldn't see it...Night Sky finally lived up to her namesake, and set out to find her father.

    And the truth.


*     *     *




Night Sky art by InLucidreverie

> The Colour of Life
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Colour of Life


 


* * *


    The wriggling, soft bodied radhog snuffled through the freezing snow to find the dull, coarse soils. Amidst the towering, deathly quiet ruins, its nose was sending up cloudy, obscuring little wisps of irritating grey dust in its hasty efforts to rustle up something to eat. It was alone in a cascade of white and grey, half hidden by its own frantic efforts and gentle whirls of snow caressing the fractured city.

    Everything about it was gentle and hazy. Almost blurred. But the hard, imposingly straight and clear lines of the gun sights aligned over it were rigid and brimming with purpose to his eye.

    At a distance far enough that its irritating squeals were nothing but small ebs in the chilling wind, he impassively waited. Only waited. Still, like a moment caught in time, the snowflakes smearing out of focus across his vision between him and his succulent, warm prey amidst the ice.

    And so he waited. Waited for one more moment. The moment when fire would leap into the cold, and light the weathered chill with anger and intent.

    And so he waited. Waited, and observed every minute detail in his sights. From prey, to cold, and to what lay beyond:    a hopeful new life.

    Rainbows and flares of light cast rays from the mists behind the hog. They pierced the frozen wastes like lances thrown by the colossal pony standing atop the island. Heat radiated from its base, and died before it could reach over the dark waters to where he and the hog were. Those at its base were warming their hearths, so he had heard in his broken understanding of their skipping, difficult language; raising trees as coarse and firm as the soil, and hanging shining colours to cast out the winter’s emptiness, both its white chill and black darkness.

    He could watch it all at once. One circular vista showing the end point of his whole world.

    His sights jittered, the rifle’s cold metal shaking in his grasp as the hard floor lurched an inch below his laid down body. He calmly reset it to watch the lonely prey even as he heard the soft tread of a curious companion make her way into the room he had taken for his den.

    “Hmf! Your fire’s gone out! I told you to keep it going...urgh…” Her whipping tone struck his nerves like a warm knife, and he heard her thick clothing rustle and crease as she set to relighting it. “I know you’ve never experienced a winter here before, Ahrim. The least you could do is listen to me.”

    He waited, sights lined on his prey, and gently ushered his reply, his voice like a rifle jamming, rechambering, and trying again. “You told...me. It scared them to...see rifle.”

    The reply arced up to the roof, and he heard her voice accelerate, running wild to the point he had to race to keep up with her meaning. “Because you pointing it toward them every day IS scaring them. They have night-vision, they can see you even without this fire being lit.”

    He didn’t understand the term she’d used. “See I?”

    “Uh...glasses that see through the dark.”

    “Glasi za usiku?”

    He felt her stare burrow into his back, and fought off a traitorous grin at putting her in the same position she had put him in. Seconds later, warmth followed, a glow that crept into the lower edges of his sights as the pop of flame made his ear twitch. His shivering hindlegs felt the blood run wild and tingle as feeling returned to him.

    “If they are scared. Tell them, Nebula. Not at them. I need to hungry.”

    She scoffed at his choice of words. “Eat. You mean you need to eat.”

    “Yes.”

    Nebula dropped like a sack of rocks beside him, and he felt her itchy scarf rest on his spine as she leaned over to stare at the still landscape he refused to leave.

    “Why haven’t you shot it yet? It’s right there.”

    “Waiting for the right time.”

    She settled back, a curious presence that didn’t exist in the pale world ahead, even if she had been born of the colour at the centre of it all. He knew that. But he didn’t know why she left it, and brought her vibrancy away into the dead part of that same world. But as he waited, he heard her exhale.

    “Ahrim...they’re not letting you in. We’ve tried twice already, and you can’t wait out here forever. You’ll be frozen when the storms hit, fire or no fire. Why here?”

    “Only place that talks.” He curtly replied, and shifted his body on the uncomfortably rough boards of the room’s floor, following the nervous prey as it circled in place. He heard her frustrating curiosity through the sound of a pout, and sighed, “And...it is warm and safe in there.”

    “That isn’t an answer. There’s other places. Other villages to at least get a proper roof. What is it about us that’s got you so determined?”

    “Reached the end. End of...life?” He asked, and got only dead silence as reply. “Go no further, or nothing of me left?”

    He felt rather than saw her shake her head, her soft mane bouncing around her smooth shoulders. “I don’t get how you think, Ahrim. But I suppose that’s why I come out to your little den. Spend long enough on an island in the river, soon enough you’ve talked about everything to everyone. Least I’ve got you to come ponder over about just what you mean when you talk in weird strokes like that.”

    He didn’t shake his head. “You are...strange, Nebula?”

    Nebula shrieked in laughter. “Maybe. But by now I think you owe me an explanation. I’ve kept you company out here, and asked my people on your behalf, so why don’t you tell me something to pay it back? Why is this your ‘end’?”

    He paused, eyes fixed past the tempting hog, focused on the unreachable kaleidoscope exploding at the centre of his sights. Blurry snow blew away from it, smearing over the glass he stared through, giving every hard edge a soft, dream-like touch.


* * *


A searing yellow blaze beat upon the arid lands from an ochre sky, turning it firm and scathing with dryness, and yet sticky and unwelcome with blotchy sweat to all within it. Ghostly, enormous shapes surrounded him; they were hazy in the heat and erupted up from the plains with their looming plateaus and flat peaks. Like sentinels, they stared down at him. Accusing. He knew each of them by name. 

They had once been familiar. Homely. Safe. No longer.

His hooves softly split the dark cracks in the fractured patterns of the ground between them, sinking an inch into the burning earth to turn up a black mark. Every step added a new and stark imprint to the endless plains. Every step a new mark on the untouched wild, drawing a reluctant line away from its origin.

He wished it was not the case, but it was, and he felt the shame of having to stain the landscape with his route.

The green of life lay behind, and it still dotted about him, but it was fading. With every hour, the splotchy patches grew more lonely, until he had lost sight of them. At least without turning his head, something he did not dare to do. And so he stared ahead to a still world. His browned clothing sucked on to his body from dire sweat. His mane wilted like a flower. His rifle dragged him to the earth on its sling. Dragged him forward and down. Forward, away from his shame. Down, away from life.

His grandmother, respected by the tribes, had in her foresight seen to him, providing him what comforts he could carry and setting him on his way. The better option to the alternatives, she had said and insisted it upon him, before walking him to the edges of their life to watch him fade into the choking sandstorms. She would guide him, she had said, and told him to head toward the sun’s fire as it set. She would watch him from afar as only she could. Yet the promise felt hollow, and filled with a crushing fragility that it would never be what it once was again. It couldn’t be.

He did not know where this path ended. The valleys had none that he knew for sure. It all rolled from the mud of wavering heat on the horizon, melting together every evening with the dying sun’s haze. Thus, every night, he always turned himself toward the snaking blood in the sand, much as he sought to run from it behind him. The sunsets were a reminder, and somehow he felt like that was his true punishment.

Hoisting his rifle on its strap, holding the splendidly patterned carvings of siblings on its stock close, he trod on toward the end, aware there lay nothing but further descent from the life he’d known.


* * *


    “What did you even do to be exiled like that anyhow?”

    He couldn’t reply. Instead, he let his hoof touch on his rifle’s new trigger, and rested his foreleg over the bland, strong wood that he’d repaired the stock with. The clever prey was behind a pipe jutting out the ground. Left or right? He mused on the answer, which direction might it go?

    “Like, seriously. How far away even was that? To make you go this far? Not even to another place you recognised?”

    Ahrim did not even move his mouth. He heard her annoyingly tapping the brickwork of the ruined upper floor as she waited.

    “Speak to me, c’mon. What’s the point in that nonsense stoicism down here now anyway? Not like anyone here knows you to judge.”

    Her last attempt would not succeed. His focus was on the blocking pipe.

    Nebula sighed in defeat at the silence, and he heard her get up to pace back around the fire.

    “Right then, different question. How did you end up coming here then anyway? You could have picked any direction from the frontier, but you chose this one.”

    His sight wavering left to right, Ahrim saw the clouds of the hog’s nuzzling on the ground drifting to one side, and settled on it. “Followed the signs she left me.”

    “Signs? You mean there’s a road to follow between your home and here?”

    Focusing on one side now, sights ready, he waited for the hog to emerge. Briefly, he allowed himself a teasing smirk as he answered.

    “Maybe not for us.”

    He heard the confused tilt of her head through the ruffle of her thick clothing. “Excuse me?”


* * *


    His legs exploded through the wet grass, shattering the milky dew from the stiff blades. Rifle banging its broken bolt painfully against his chest on its sling, he sprinted for his life through the sickly green. Behind him, a flurry of talons and death tore over the rotten, mossy log he’d vaulted. His legs were heavy and soaked, tired and stiff from weeks of wandering, but he forced what was left of his life into them to push on.

    Snarling crept up his spine as he heard his prey-turned-predator voice its eagerness to catch him. Ramming through olive grass taller than he was, he didn’t even dare try to weave or lose it. The beast could out-turn him, out-run him, smell him, find him. And so he drove on, the dark foliage splashing his eyes and turning his flight into a blurry mess of motion and line toward what he knew by memory.
    
    And yet his forelegs found nothing on their next gallop but clean air. The ditch came up out of nowhere, closer than he’d thought it might be, and he went down. Head over hooves, he tumbled down the steep and muddy embankment, hitting stones and fallen branches on the way. Swearing aloud, he heard something crack terribly near his body before the shattering impact of the river bed’s rocks came up to meet him. His ribs seared, and his vision whirled in panic and pain as algae coated water stuck to his face and stained hide. Up above, rows of glinting teeth at the centre of a calico head, stained viridian from the mushy vegetation, stared down. It raced to the side, back into the grass to find a way down to him. It was desperate. It had to have been to chase this openly.

    He had moments to live.

    Hooves splashed as he rounded his mud-splotched body up, feeling the river’s shallow water curling around the cuts on his fetlocks. There was none of the brilliant sapphire, lush emerald outcrops, or lavish ochre he’d known at home here. Only messy, diseased greens in alliance with darkness. A shadow of the world he knew, one that sought to hurt him and make him fight for every day just to avoid horror. Yet every day, win or lose, it took something from him and ate away another sliver of his life. And as he stood, he felt the heartbreaking two halves of his rifle’s stock split from the fall as today’s toll.

    Limping, he splashed forward, heading uphill in the opposite direction to where the hunter had gone. Sharp, slippery rocks tripped his hooves, making them twist and skitter as he sought for some way back up to the other side. Behind him came a roar of thrashed water, and he knew he was no longer alone down here.

    He ran, pushing his body to keep moving that little while longer. Rounding the corner of the stream, he spotted a fallen tree and leapt onto its unsettlingly sticky sap-coated wood. He heard his pursuer rush up behind him, and leapt just as it rounded the corner, its forelegs slashing into the tree. Mossy wood crumbled like rotten flesh below it, and Ahrim fell against the edge of the stream. Hating how demeaning it must have looked, he frantically kicked his hindlegs to scramble up, feeling a terrifying rush of air below them as the wicked claws swept close. Stumbling, he got his bearings from the markings he’d left on trees to guide him, and raced forward before it could get out of the stream.

    On and on, the trees, grass, and slimy vegetation coiled and stroked over his body as he pushed and forced his way through, before he finally leapt again, and collapsed against the bark of a tree before his limbs betrayed him...and died.

    He could go no further. Caught in the hazy light, wheezing in the sticky air, he stared at the bushes, watching them shift and move. Stroking sensually back and forth, deceptive in their soft motions, they hid death.

    And death came.

    Bursting from the trees, it came in a flurry of needle-like teeth, terrifying barb-like claws, and coiled muscles. His heart turned to ice as he locked his gaze with the beast’s emerald eyes. On it came toward its run-down prey, seeing him helpless.

    Until suddenly, it fell. The ground collapsed, his last desperate defence around his camp coming through in his time of need. It disappeared, and he regretted to hear the unbecoming whine of the prideful beast as it found the end he had laid down for it. Breathing hard, Ahrim advanced and looked down into the pit.

    The beast had sought to slay him, but he didn’t begrudge it. He had, after all, attempted the same. Each wanted to survive out here in this place between life and death. Sliding down, he edged around the stained red points, and quickly knelt beside its front, not lingering.

    A respectful hoof on its trapped head, he upturned his knife with an accustomed toss and knew for one more day that he would hold on.


* * *


    Hours later, the light once again bled away. The cover of the trees above, half dead and half diseased, were like little dots of black-green to deny him the sky and the stars to navigate by. Not that it would have helped, for as he’d travelled, he had witnessed the clouds become unending; they choked the land in dark haze. Sickness was in the air here. He could smell it. Taste it. This was not a bountiful forest of verdant life. This was a broken land on its way to a quiet end.

    His fire was dying and, with regretful effort, he stirred it to life once again. The embers were lost in the thick shadow that wafted about him, the jade flames from melting copper dripping through his bullet mould offering little change in the hue about his camp from the surroundings. Even the smell of his prize was foul and empty; nothing like home. He hated these moments. These hazy, monotone hours when he had to sit and bear it. They were the ones that assailed him most.

    To fight it, he took on small fights. Ones to stir him as much as the fire. Tonight that was the wearisome carving of a new stock by hoof. Hours would pass; the shadows, clouds, and leaves coiling about his small spark in their sickly virescence. They were fighting with one another. For space. For height. For dominance, like all things trapped in this directionless mire. It held all he needed to remain alive, and yet being here seemed to draw that very life out of him to keep up. The beast had died because he had needed to live, but to live, he should not be here.

That was it, he rationalised. That was what this place was: a void of empty purpose, lush and alive by definition only. What was living if only surviving?

Dropping his half carved stock down, placing the sharpened thigh bone he’d been using to carve it by its side, he stared out across the clammy woodlands. Today, he had gone west, and almost died. Tomorrow, he might go south. The murky river through here was flowing north-east. Downhill. It would be easier on the way back then.

Behind him, his fire flickered dangerously, leaping to one side and then pulling into another, as the winds changed and froze his body. He blinked, confused. Something stood out to him, although he could not garner what. Still as the night, he leaned on the tree and opened his eyes to everything he could witness.

Out there in the dark, he could see trees swaying. Swaying to the north-east.

Shrieking in the air, a swarm of birds suddenly rounded on itself. They flocked toward the north, then east, their cawing ripping the night’s peace apart.

Nothing. It was nothing. But Ahrim knew better that nothing was only a canvas for one moment to take and use. His eyes searched, and something stirring within him until it overflowed with curiosity and he began trotting away from his fire. He took up his rifle’s sights, and stared through them. Across the other side of the sodden undergrowth, he had seen motions. For a moment, he thought it a beast, but the tap of hooves on wood lightly touched his ears. He crouched, and watched as he saw the forms emerge. Hunched, shuffling unsteadily, he recognised the fallen ones immediately. They moved with the wind, four of them winding their rotted bodies through the forest. They were not uncommon, but he traced their path to spy the broken branches and trodden grass. It was ramrod straight in one direction.

Turning to the north-east, focused with only a circle to see through, he could at last see the fine details of the world the way he preferred. Above their heads, from where their presence had driven the birds on their unending march, he perceived something. Nothing solid, but a change.

There were shifts in the hue of this limbo. On the horizon the darkness was lighter. The smallest perception of something polluting the darkness from beyond the ridge of the world, so imperceptible that he would never have seen it had he had not stopped to appreciate.

He snapped the sights down, and quietly returned to his work on the stock. First that, then the bolt. Yet now he stared north-east as he did so. In his mind, his plans had changed. Now he knew this to not be a pit, but perhaps a canyon.

And gently, he spoke to the providence that had sent the dead to find the dying his way.

“Asante, bibi…”


* * *


Nebula idly knocked two pieces of firewood together. She was lounged beside him, listening intently.

“Y’know, I’m gonna’ assume you mistranslated that part about why you decided to take that direction. You saw corpses and followed them...sure, makes sense.”

Ahrim’s crosshairs found the hog again, resting to the right of it as the stinging winds ripped the snow to the left. His sights jumped, the laugh in his breast kicking him unexpectedly. “It is as I...say?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Good.”

Nebula pouted, “No, I was being sarc-urgh, do you do that on purpose now? I can see the books back there. I know you’re learning enough to know what I meant.”

His mouth curled upward like a straining bow. “Maybe.”

“Ha. Ha.” She deadpanned, toying with the sling of his rifle. It made his sights waver slightly, and he narrowed his eyes. Shuffling on the stiff boards, he resettled the rifle, the brass bottom he’d replaced on the grip coming down with a dull tap. For a moment he lingered, watching the snow blow around the rainbow of colours in Nebula’s home down there. The lights were flickering now. Some on, some off, like sparkles bringing vibrancy into the night. He saw ponies blissfully exchanging poorly wrapped gifts, and lingered, watching two similarly coloured foals rocketing off their hooves together at the act.

After a moment, he weakened in his resolve to stay silent, and continued.

“We learned to respect the other place. To respect family who...hmm-walk it. Learn to see it.”

Nebula turned over, lying on her belly beside him. He felt her cool wave of a mane warm his shoulder as it snapped over him in the wind. “Ghosts? Next thing you’ll be telling me that you can see a pony’s aura too at this rate.”

“Maybe I can.” He shot back, even as he lined his real shot up.

“Oh, really?” She chuckled.

“Really.”

 “So what’s mine show about me then? Let me guess: Cleverness, passion and...confidence, right?”

“Desperation.”

Her hoof punched into the side of his ribs, and he huffed as his crosshairs flew off target. The hog’s image whirled ahead of him, sending his sights upward to focus on the city of light atop the water. He grunted, and felt the numb muscles in his face smirk.

“For what, huh?” She snapped playfully, her words easing over him, as warm as her mane had been. “You saying I’m needy? Or you think that highly of yourself?”

His grin was impossible to control, he couldn’t get rid of it. “Say...ing, you come a long cold way for company.”

    “Smartass.” She poked at him. “Give you a few books in pony language and suddenly you wanna’ be mister wisecracking.”

For the first time since she had arrived, Ahrim gingerly took his eyes away from the rifle. The time was not right. He could afford to wait. Sitting up, he left the hunting tool where it was, the duller metal of its new barrel fading into the grey of the world outside the city. Nebula lay beside it on her side, a welcoming grin on her face. Her ocean mane curled about her cool eyes, the eyesore of a winter jacket she wore obscuring her pale coat to make her stand out in the empty world. She came from a world of colour. She didn’t belong out here. He wiped his goggles to see her better, but still the edges of her body were hazy, like a warm and radiant aura.

She leaned her head on a hoof, resting on his frosty blanket. “And here I thought I was just being a good exemplary pony coming to check on you. And all I get for it is sass.”

Ahrim raised an eyebrow behind his blurry, stained goggles. “You are the one with the aura, Nebula. It is not...I to say how it say about you. I do not know words to convey.”

    Nebula chuckled, turning away and leaning over the broken wall to look at her vibrant, unreachable home in the distance. “So if you don’t know the pony words to describe me from it, what are they in your language then, huh?”

    He paused, and glanced down briefly as she faced away from him. “Nimevutiwa na viuno vyako.”

    She glanced over at him, eyes piercing through the snowy veil. There was a reassuring curve on her face. “Sounds lovely.”

    “It is an old saying of wisdom.”

She gave him an interrogating look, then shook her head, spraying strands of snow off of her mane. She gently laughed. The sound shattered the numbness of his den, and the snow pulled away, the winds changing as he dropped down by the fire opposite her. Nebula tossed a can of food, and it slammed reassuringly into his chest, dropping into his grateful hooves.

    “Quiet, stoic look but with exotic fancy words to tell us mares. You must have had fun so far with that attitude.”

    Tossing his knife up, catching it inverted, he pierced the metal to work away at it.

    “It was a surprise.”


* * *


Azure liquid wastefully sloshed across a slick cerulian top after the impact. The stained shot-glass had endured, but curaçao spilled, and nerve-wrackingly sharp talons released it to punch his shoulder.

“There! Get that blue fire in you! You look like you need it!”

The griffoness spoke painfully, her every word echoing around his skull. Ahrim peered up to her face, his goggles discarded around his neck.

“I do not lack...heat.” He pursed the words out, but they felt like churning waves in his mouth. Clumsy, uncertain, held up only by his eyes staring hard behind them.

Kalda, as he’d overheard her name to be, laughed and punched him again. “Just what  every hard-stallion claims about their life by their boats! Just drink it you idiot, you moping into your glass is giving me a migraine half the room away!”

Ahrim had no idea what she had just said. But as her navy feathers rustled impatiently, and she prodded the glass again, he settled on a clear understanding. With a swift motion, he threw back his head, and felt the bitter liquid sear down his throat. Ocean sweetness followed, and he slammed the glass down hard with a gasp. He had tried harder, but the crystal blue had caught him off guard, having been expecting a smoother flow from it.

Seconds later, he was almost thrown forward over the bar by a talon slapping hard into his back. The motion, combined with the sway of the ferry rocking on the river, made him choke and cough hard.

“Too much for you? Maybe we oughta get you one toned down, a cocktail? A Swimming Pool maybe?” She teased, and laughed. Several other patrons joined her, mostly other dangerous sorts who had loudly come in with her. Feeling their judging gaze, seeing some as little more than dark silhouettes in front of the winding indigo neon forming complex runic patterns on every side, he made sure to shake his head and fix her in place with a confident stare.

“Too distract.”

“On what, huh?” She crossed her ‘arms’, sitting back on the stool; wings intimidating, like a swell rearing up, ready to crash.

Ahrim had witnessed the waterways for weeks now, searching for an end to the sloppy midnight haze that coated this new land on his descent. He was already bruised black, purple and blue. His hooves were staggered, and his back weary. He had little reserves of subtle care left.

“On puzzle.”

Her dangerous beak turned upward, leaning her head on a claw and toying with a cobalt medallion about her neck. Every griffon here wore one. “A puzzle huh? Which one?”

He paused. He could feel their stares, and their silence, like the breath between waves on this new world’s shorefront. He let her wait, as he sipped his own drink, the liquid soothing the liquor's burn.

“The one where-” He muddled for the next word. “-I...curious, why griffon with many options want me...drank.”

There was a momentary silence, before the griffons exploded into hysterics at him talking back to their comrade. She raised her eyebrows, and even if he didn’t catch all her words, he heard her talk far more quickly than she intended.

“Cheeky bastard! What are you trying to say?” She glowered, raised up like frothing edge.

He held his ground, and he saw that alone surprised them. His voice rode the threatening swell. “I not know. You are one that...pro...claim drink to me over others. Exotic tastes?”

And then, the final touch, he smirked.

She stared at him, eyes wide as wary mirth bubbled up from the sea of dark shapes around them. Then, in a blurred motion, she surged forward.

And grabbed the bottle.

“I like this one!” She heralded, and the cheers from her squad split through Ahrim’s head worse than ever before, and yet it drew him in. To not care, to not worry. To join this world in its raucous end of life and just indulge in the still moment. He witnessed her pouring another of the sapphire drinks for him, and had it shoved into his hooves. He chuckled, feeling little guilt, and downed it with absolute willing.

Digging in his pack, he drew out a dark navy bottle, weathered and scratched with a milky, frothy substance within that left dots of bubbles staggering its surface. He saw her eyes directed at it, and he knew he had caught her like prey in a trap with the unknown drink.

“If that is what you seek…” He winked, letting his accent crash on the new shore about him, and let the arak fall in a thin streak amidst his cigarette smoke into shot glasses for them both.

She took it up and sniffed it, before scoffing. “I don’t even know if you’re playing it all up for me, you barcode bastard...but I’m into it.” The griffon grabbed the drink and necked it, before her ocean-blue and iron-built body satisfyingly squirmed before him. She coughed violently. “What is this shit?”

Ahrim just sipped his, the hurtful nostalgia mixing with the relief of the familiar, and raised an eyebrow. “A drink to not be taken alone in the evening.”

“It takes like piss.” She snorted, looking eye to eye.

“Another?”

“Hell yes.”


* * *


Ahrim crashed onto the bed, the dark tidal wave that was Kalda coming down onto him in the murky midnight blue of the moon’s obscured glow in the porthole. His vision was hazy, both from the scouring drink and the satisfying grip of the powerful creature he had tustled and grappled with through the door.

Bigger than him. Taller. Stronger. Like the beasts he had tracked before. He felt underwater, the world muffled and quiet, feeling more than seeing as her weight landed atop him. Lips and beak clumsily scrounged the moment for total escape. His hooves wandered, discovered, and indulged. For a moment he had no idea, was he predator or prey?

And a moment later, he realised he did not care. Or was it that it no longer mattered?

In passionate wordlessness, he felt the garbs he had worn all this way torn from him, and soon his cunning saw him return the favour with eager, wanting tugs. His world was soft, cramped, warm blue, appealing to so much of him. Twisting, feeling her delightful squirm to resist, he trapped her below him, and heard her too-casual joke about his kind and their tricks. His hunting grin twisted into a strained grimace as the piercings tip of her claws sank in, and somehow the pain only drove him to partake further.

To forget it all and let go off the edge.

Feeling her sweltering, hot breath from within the livid aquamarine tips of feathers about her face, her beak hidden from all but his own feverish mouth, he whispered an uncaring promise of raw sensuality, and heard her interested purr. In a moment, tease turned to need, and need turned to impatience. The escapism of a wanting desire took over. Pointless control was forgotten, and he experienced her aggressive snarls as much as her whimpered gasps. She raked his back in wanton lust, and he fought to stay afloat in the furious sea of passion as they let it all go and partook in one other, alone in their moment. Time forgotten.

Only after all had faded to a soft and frozen relief were things quiet. In the still evening, his chest heavy with effort and the melted, sleeping shape of a griffoness, Ahrim stared upwards. Satisfied, feeling more alive than he had in months, and yet painfully exhausted. Wild. Raw. More than he’d ever allowed himself under the presence of home.

The heady grin on his face had caught him off guard, and left him wondering what had changed. Inhibitions faded, he tried reflecting, but the effort was too much. All it left him wondering was the same as it had always been. Where now?

Out the window, far into the lazy night, he saw shimmering lights in the distance of the river. A monstrous pony rose above it, casting more light into the sky than any he had known, lighting the snowflakes beginning to fall from behind in a silent world.

Hearing the amusing growl of the griffon as he sought to get up and detach from her, he wisely remained still, lest he become prey. Instead, he stared at the lights. Lights had brought him this far to follow.

    It was still something. And that was all he needed right now.


* * *


Nebula accusingly coughed and held him in place with a pointed hoof, “Hey, you told me those scratches on your back came from a savage beast!”

    Ahrim shrugged, the edges of his mouth turning up. “I did not lie.”

    The pony before him gave a warm roll of her eyes, and she disturbed his fire with a stick idly. “Something about that confuses me though...sounds like you had fun. Long journey, a warm bed, and an intense night to share with someone. So, where’s the problem?”

    He wearily shifted, crawling back to his rifle to reassume his uncomfortable, patient watch. “Problem, Nebula?”

    “Yeah. Problem.” She kept her intrigue by the fire, not coming closer to him. “You sounded like something about it threw you off. Wilder than you expected? Not into it?”

    He blinked, wiping the front of the sights. The carved glass from a second scope he’d fashioned to replace this one’s broken front smeared. The hog was but a brown dot on a white canvas now, the snow crunching upon the ground. Red. Green. Blue. It all shone from behind it. Shapes were gone, and he was left with but an idea of what was truly there now, guided by form and colour.

    “It was fun.” He steeled his defences.

    “And there’s nothing wrong with that, we both know that. So why do you seem weirded out by it?” She pierced deep.

    Ahrim sighed, defeated. “Was...impulsive. I care less before speaking. How you say...tease? Joke? Very decided. Like hunting. More than home. Surprised me.”

    Nebula left him impatient as she thought that - for him - long explanation over. Eventually, her hoof melted the ice from his shoulder.

    “Y’know...maybe being down here isn’t just you losing who you thought you were.” Her words settled gently on his mind. “Maybe out here? Away from whatever happened? You’re just more free to be who you really are. Do what you feel like. Nothing wrong with being impulsive for fun or humour sometimes. You’re clearly in control of it.”

    He wanted to turn. He needed to see her face as she spoke. Met with nothing but the shaded, distant rainbow before him amongst the empty black and white. There was reassurance behind him and he suddenly felt like he needed it. Because she was right. His style of humour. His willingness to indulge. His desires. They were not different from before, just here they felt more open. There was more space for them to paint upon his life now that the world was new around him again.

    They were his.

    Yet, even as realisation began dawning over the dark winter’s night, and he was laying the strokes on how to thank and tease her at the same time to hunt a smile, his eye was pulled away.

    Through the staggered lines of snow, a darker hue stalked. Brushing aside the cold white, melting into the black, he saw it prowl into his world through the sights. A long streak of dangerous alablaster began to emerge, and Ahrim hushed Nebula’s jubilant talk of their own bantering humour. He saw it approach the prey. The hog. As it approached, the pig squealed and ran, but it was locked in place, part of this painting, by the chain he had set it to the ground with.

    And now, his true prey had emerged.

    Unable to see its detail in the thick, slow storm between them, he knew by its motion. Gently, he turned in place, his crosshairs penetrating the drift to judge the distance. His rifle had been broken, repaired, damaged, fixed, fractured, rebound, but it was still his rifle that he had prowled the long, warm plains with, and he knew how it would pull. About its kick to the right, and needing to always aim a little lower than common sense would imprint on a hunter. He had sought to keep that spirit even as he had felt it change in his hooves, mile by mile.

    All for these moments, when he could forget all the trials, and fall back into what he knew.

    He caught the arcing silver of the hog’s chain in the wind, and turned to the side, aiming left of the grey streak’s path, almost resting on the hog itself. It wouldn’t attack yet. Its own prey was squealing and pulling. It would wait till the target was exhausted. They always did. He had time.

    Time to fight the storm. Time to feel every angle. Every blow of the wind. Every slippery edge of the stone his barrel rested on. Every blink to wet his focused eye.

    It was worse than the storms on the plains, and he had nothing but shapes to aim at. Nothing was clear in the city. A hazy rectangle of grey opened. It was close to its own moment to strike.

    But with a small adjustment, Ahrim was closer.

    He heard Nebula’s cry penetrate the night as his rifle pistoned his bruised shoulder, and its purple flare lit the white flakes around them. Slow. Expanding. A thrilling sting penetrating into him through his body as the shine grew and grew from the barrel.

The chemical round’s unique report reflected for a hundred meters, dousing the empty world in magenta fury, its crack running back and forth between them and Nebula’s home. Spotlights from the colourful city flooded out to cast over him, and he saw the glint of sights aiming toward him, piercing the drifting cloud of his rifle’s smoke. Calm, he released the trigger, having startled the world into activity.

And yet there, before him, his target came into view with its grey body turning and rising up. 

It was not dead.

He felt a bubbling, oozing fear grip his stomach. The camouflaging sludge fell from its furred body, and he saw its venomous tail whip out, dripping from the tip, and its mauve wings snap to either side. Coursing, corrupted veins on the side of its shoulder around the hole swelled up and bruised, but it's piercing eyes stared at him.

Not the head. He’d missed.

Something had gone wrong.

“Bliksem…” He muttered, seeing the hybrid terror turn, its grey camouflage falling from its strong, regal, rosey body, and it stood to its full height.

And then, it leapt, surging through the whirling purple cloud that had erupted from the impact on its body before it even had time to dissipate. It moved so fast, its huge body drawing back and rocketing off with a snap of leathery wings.

He had only seconds to react, as its heavy, monstrous shape assaulted the air before it to reach him. He couldn’t believe its speed over the couple hundred meters between them.

    “What is th-” Nebula yelped as Ahrim grabbed the soft mare, hurling her through a hole in the floor into what was supposed to be his own hiding spot. Dropping a cupboard on top of the gap, ignoring her protests, he had barely enough time to leap to the side as the barbed tail fired past him through the window, its stinger impacting and splashing its venom over the burgundy carpet and shattering stained glass from the broken mirror. Eyes wide, he saw it flail into the still boiling vessel he used for making the paralyzing rounds, the last of the fire-scorpion venom he’d brought with him from home bubbling within.

    It toppled, and he saw it heading into the fire.

Its face crashed into the window frame, forcing through, teeth gnashing and chomping at the wiry hunter’s hindlegs as he dropped backward. Scrambling, leaping the noxious mixture creeping toward the fires, he fled into the next room of the ruined tenement, and dove for cover behind a once polished, now marred chest of drawers.

Behind him, the rich, combustible fluid met the embers, and ignited.

In a crump and a roar, the violet explosion blew the flimsy corrugated roof off his den. Ahrim felt his throat grasp and his skin turn to ice as the snow mixed with the hideous substance, coiling around him like a mist that warped through the building like an explosion’s fire. He heard scathing roars shake his eardrums as the beast took it in the face, and felt the building rattle. 

The beast’s roar was made of shivering fury and driven by vengeance; he knew this wasn’t over. He had to stay on it. Kill it.

Pushing the chest of drawers away, Ahrim unsteadily got up, his rifle’s strap pulling him to the floor. Grabbing the prepared liquor bottle from the bed, he ignited the rag with his lighter, and pushed around the door to hurl it at the creature.

    He didn’t expect it to be gone. In the haze of purple, eyes not leaving the empty window, he wrapped a scarf about his swollen lips and felt his eyes tighten and sear from its effects. Turning, turning again, he whirled and danced to the sounds that crunched and disturbed the violet mist, seeing warping flames from the explosion bearing the same purple shade as the residue that coated the walls and across his bedroll. The fire was slowly spreading. Lazy and weak, but stalking him as much as his prey as he stepped around it. The carpet was stepped in moisture, squishing beneath his hooves, and the heat of the flaming rag stung his hoof.

    Yet he was ever watchful on every hole to the storm outside.

    Then, he saw it. A disturbance, a ripple, a waver in the colour, like a stone in thick water.

    He hurled the bottle, searing the air in a long lasting line behind the tinged flame, and he heard it ignite. Mulberry surged with orange somewhere beyond his sight, and he heard that terrible roar grip his skin. The warm splot in the mist where he’d thrown it rose like a sun, landing upon the uncovered roof so hard that dust and wood sheared downward at him. Hooves savaging his rifle, he aimed and fired the last round of his home’s origin directly upwards. Puncturing the purple fog, it disappeared, and he did not know of its end.

    Like a spear, a sharp mauve line drove down, its bulbous appendage coming sickeningly close and crashing against his side. Missing by a scant inch, the wicked dark tip drove into the carpet. 

He fell. Again and again, the deathly lines stabbed, like cutting a paintbrush down and down to disturb and pierce the colour. He rolled and rolled, each impact coming closer, until he pulled a mahogany drawer from its housing and held it above him in time to see the stinger pierce it, stopping an inch from his eyes. 

Sizzling drips from the stinger marred his goggles from a tiny hole in its tip. Heart exploding in his chest, he used the drawer’s leverage to throw it to the side, and then drew and drove his knife deep into the whirling blur above him. Trapped outside the clouded mauve fire in the den, he heard it roar in anger, smashing the drawer to firewood.

    Grinding his teeth, skin boiling in the heat, Ahrim tore his stained goggles free and picked up his rifle. Its easy bolt rammed home the first of the smoother rounds of this world, and he became the hunter once more.

    Painfully stalking through the smoldering, poisonous house, he ignored the numbness. He ignored the dancing lilac pricks in his eyes. He ignored the swirling fear of his home’s own poisons tugging at every nerve. He knew it would not kill him. He could stay calm in its deadening embrace.

    Instead, he crept up to the sharp, firm stairs to the roof; his hooves soundless. His ears trained on the rampancy of the target. Every inch of his body moved in firm, rigid motions as his joints clasped together and his muscles thickened with paralyzing violet horror. It was seeping into him, but he forced himself to know that he had pierced it into what he hunted. It would be feeling it more than he.

    Climbing, emerging above into the tinged colours of snow that reflected the explosion’s fog below, he witnessed the hybrid limping on the jagged spars of the broken ceiling, staring down. It was sniffing, but it was a pathetic spluttering.

    Ten feet above it, Ahrim laid his barrel on the back of its head. He had merciful time. Time to control the agony. Time to finally make this hunt worth it.

    Time to win his worth and his life back.

    His hoof rested on the rough trigger.

    Its beady eye, stained with veiny flowing wine, turned.

    Ahrim’s heart stopped.

    Above the lilac tipped fires and hazy lavender mist, predator and prey locked eyes.

    His hoof tightened on the frozen trigger. Its legs curled.

    He let out a breath. It drew one in.

    And in one moment, they both moved.

    In one smeared second. One adrenaline fueled moment. Rifle fired, and beast leapt. Bullet flew, and claws reached.

The reliable impact of his stained stock penetrated his shoulder, before the shearing agony of a piercing claw carved up the side of his weapon and drove through him. He screamed. Driven backward, its wet foreleg clamped around him to pierce his body. Tumbling, its massive weight careening into him, and he fell. 

    They twisted, both struck. Both frozen by a paralyzing, far-off toxin. Predators. Prey. Both fell. Fell from the top of the stepped roof toward the chilling snow below. The cold numbness of his body met the crunch of matted and warm fur, and Ahrim felt the shock drive the life from him but for the searing burn of flesh in his shoulder as they hit a balcony and whirled. And then with one final crash, they both met the unyielding ground, and his eyes turned to black.

    There was nothing. Nothing to see. But everything to feel.

    A smooth talon tugged, and slid smoothly through agony as it retracted from his wet shoulder.

    He felt his target push up and lift him.

    Glinting stars spun, small colours that faded to the black and white once again. He hated it, he realised, hated it since he had come here. Now he felt the black and white pull him up again. Death and cold. It roared in his ear, and he accepted it at last. It was just the way of the hunter.

    “-t up! Come on!”

    Blinkered, he found his eyes worked, even if he couldn’t feel them. He felt wet. Damp. he could feel painful life pouring from his shoulder, and something pushing hard on it.

    And then, soft, softer than purple, he saw her. Soft blue, cool and comforting, wrapping him in itching red cloth.

    “Get up you stupid ass!” She screamed, and life finally rushed back to him. Gaping, he felt the mare yank his body up in a blitz of pain. Whimpering, he fell against her, his hooves tingling in relief from the poison. She was limping too, and he hurt to see her affected.

    “Nebula…?”

    “You stupid, stupid, stupid...ass!” She repeated, and almost punched him down, before turning, breathing hard. “You don’t take on those things alone! Come on, before it-”

    In a flash, her city lit up, its lights searched the ground until they found the commotion that had erupted on its borders.

    The hog nearby rolling over itself in now pointless panic. Eventually, they found the terror.

    It was still. Dead. The patient poison, and the bullethole in its cheek counting for all it needed. He had killed it.

    They stood together for a moment, and he enjoyed the soft crinkle of her neon jacket as the numbness faded. Pushing off of her, hooves scraping through the cold snow, tripped and fell next to his fallen tool.

    “Come.” Ahrim spoke, and got up, lifting his rifle by the rough canvas sling to wrap it around a shoulder. It seethed with every motion, but he felt victory drive him.

Nebula blinked, grabbed her own belongings, and gaped as he began to cut off the tail.

“A thank you would be nice? What are you…”

“Come.”

“Ahrim!”

“Come.”


* * *


    The white and black that the city so sternly warded away from its playful colour was now weaving its way right to the walls. The spotlights centred on it, picking out both it, and the bloody slur that slid behind it in the goopy, sticky slush. It came, legs dragging through biting snow, out on to the flexing boards that crossed bitter and still water and boldly toward their persistent guns; it reluctantly marched with its pained head high, through the gates, and dropped the remains of the city’s terror at the hooves of the great pony itself.

    Yet as it advanced, as it invaded the spectrum of life, the colours shrank back from it and gave way to a hazy yellow hue of dirty lights and quiet whispers with every step it took. It stood in sharp relief, a diseased, pus-like trail having followed it on the ground from the corpse. The air stifled under the judging spotlights that rotated to follow it, black blood sliding down its stained side to pepper the white between its uneven steps, clashing with the warmth beat upon it shoulders from above, turning the winter to desert.

    Snow turned to a mustard glow in the powerful beams of light, clumsily falling in thick, ungraceful clumps that melted under the heat of the lamps, and the beauty seen through a rifle’s sights fearfully hid itself the moment this new presence entered, leaving only the barren and pale remnants of yellow.

    Pausing within the clearing over the bridge, it ignored the nervous guard ponies that gripped their saddle-triggers and peered side to side, silently arguing over which would have to approach. To comment. To invite its presence in from the storm. To relight the colour. None did.

    There were murmurs, oozing like honey from the edges of the light. The terror’s killer, battered and hurt, stood impassive with its head slowly turning, goggles reflecting the cream glare.

Finally, he pulled them up to let them see his weary eyes, and he witnessed a collection of ponies approaching from the bronze tinged hooves of the city’s watchful titan. A tired unicorn stallion of advancing years and a haughty earth pony mare with brilliant gold pearls around her neck led them, coming to a halt just short. The stallion scratched the back of his head, looking at the severed tail with bewilderment. The mare turned up her nose at the rancid smell.

    His mouth thin, Ahrim stepped forward, and witnessed the mare step back in turn. The stallion remained where he was to accept what their home’s unwanted guest held out in his hoof. A stained bag, shimmering with decor and promises of tooth-rotting pleasure, and a loose branch of papayas, swollen with still ripe juice.

    “Safety now for the ponies. Gift for the...foal ponies.”

    His words were dry and quiet as the desert of yellow he stood under, the blood red of the tail’s end beginning to leak to either side. The stallion regarded him, scratching the back of his neck.

    “That thing been terrorising the caravans for sure…” He began with worrying uncertainty, eyes always glancing to the battered rifle by the figure’s side.

    Behind Ahrim, a gentle breach in the still scene followed him.

    “What are you all looking at him like that for?” Nebula’s voice pierced the thick tension like a beam of sunlight, and she stepped into the light. “Can’t you see what he’s done for you? He killed the manticore, Rain Cloud! I saw it myself!”

    “I can see that, Nebula.” He dryly followed, making a loud throaty sound as he thought something over.

    “Those gifts are most likely looted and stolen!” The voice was prissy and sharp as glass. The mare behind Rain Cloud peered around him, her mouth twisting into a long craggy ridge. 

    “Is not all looted in this plain?” Ahrim looked her confidently in the eye, holding out the treats. “Tradition? Greeting?”

“We’ve all seen you aiming at the caravans yourself. This is likely to remove your own competition. Where did that fruit come from? You can’t grow it, and we know you’re without caps!”

    He struggled to keep up with her accent and rate of speech. “Fruit from...far away. Another life. Seeking life here. This is common, how to say...gesture. To...greet.”

    “A life? Corpses for greetings?” She seethed, then shook her head. “This is the third time he’s dropped something dead on our doorstep. I do not abide it to my cats, and I don’t trust him for it either, Cloud! The council does not trust him in his little den out there, watching us!”

    Nebula spoke up, interrupting Rain Cloud’s slow breathing in to speak. “He’s been protecting you, Mrs Kittens! He’s a hunter, not an assassin! And he means the fruit and sweets is how his home would gree-”

    “By dragging cut up dead bodies into our town in front of the foals, and offering candy on top of it? He’s a killer, Nebula, and we won’t have him here! Didn’t you hear the rumours of raiders who talk their way in and then open the gates from inside? There’s a group in the area right now! They’re killers, and this is all he seems to be here! Friendship City has no need of the danger, or his ‘protection’.”

    Ahrim did not feel any anger raise. No red pierced the yellow haze about them. He could scarcely understand her, but the pointed hoof and dismissive shakes of her head were enough for him to grasp the expected reaction. Hooves pointing away from a home. Angered faces barking at him.

    It was not new. Not here, not elsewhere. He turned. Exiled.

    “It took him months to get here...he’s not-” Nebula began, but Rain Cloud waved a hoof, voice reluctant and drained.

    “Mrs Kittens represents the council, Nebula. She’s spoken.” He sounded reluctant to say it, but indicated the shining gates back into the empty darkness beyond. “I’m sorry, son. Appreciate what you did, but you’re not from here. So hanging out there, shooting things down and asking in? It’s scaring folks in here. They ain’t changing their minds on their decision. For what it’s worth I-”

    Ahrim didn’t pause to entertain Rain’s own powerless opinions. He simply began trotting, leaving his prize and its potential with them. The words deflected off the back of his skull.

    Rain Cloud sighed, and shouted ahead of Ahrim. “Plein Air, get the gate for our...guest.”

    Streaked in hatched yellow and black, the barrier between the two, the ward against the dark world opened to let the tracking hue of the lights die before they could even illuminate the other side of the bridge. Even as Ahrim made his way out, fighting to keep his head level, he heard Nebula angrily arguing with the council members behind him. Much as his bibi had in her own way. Now, as then, they didn’t see the truth. And now, as then, it meant nothing.

As soon as he was safely across the bridge, the spotlights cut, and the tall city once again began to twinkle with red, blue, green, gold, and silver; its happiness had returned the moment he was no longer present to witness it as anything but a small portion of the landscape.

Only now, white and black sunk down, and he walked calmly and quietly in their sight, making his way back to light his fire once again and stare at life from afar.


* * *


    Ahrim felt the blanket of snow thicken below each of his hooves. He trotted softly, quietly if he could, and carefully entered the door of his ruined den. With utmost grace he closed it behind him, even holding the icy latch down to silently let it click shut, before the whole frame fell off completely anyway. It was a ruin. Unable to hide from the scything blizzard, he painfully kept his bearing, as he stoically climbed toward the dead embers awaiting him.

    The purple cloud had been trampled and darkened, blown away to fade in the winds, or falling away to the shadows, and left it empty. His skin bore its remains. Invisible. Stinging. Running wild below his coat like a searing anger he did not display. He took up a needle, and sank it into his shoulder, breathing out in measured, calm motion to fight the medication calming the agony.

    Slowly, shivering with numbed pain, he sat and nurtured the flames back to life. His forelegs glided through the air around a dry, smooth stick in their rapid motions until fragile sparks glinted and began to grow under his protection. He could have used a lighter, but he found his hooves falling into the motion without thinking.

    Then, he stood up and watched them. The faintest of warmths failing to spread despite all his care. Calm, he lit a cigarette, took one breath, and set it upon a stone. He breathed, vapour flowing over his face as much as the tobacco in the frigid landscape. He exhaled steadily. Evenly. Carefully.

    And then savagely hurled his rifle against the wall.

It struck with such violence that the sights atop it shattered their glass and snapped the joining bracket clean off in a twang of broken metal. 

He marched toward it. Saw it broken. Felt guilt. Recoiled. He turned. And then again. He didn’t know where. How to express it. What to do. How to let it out. How to reduce it.

His knees felt loose, and the crushing weight fell upon him, driving him to stagger. He fell to his rump, and focused on breathing. Long inhalations. Longer exhalations. Keeping his eyes open, he opened his ears to the sounds. The crack and snap of the fire as he shovelled more wood in. The wind in the empty rafters.

Slowly, he reached a shivering leg down, and brought up his cigarette again. Slow puffs, letting each one linger and relax him.

His hoof came down to find a book under it. One atop a pile. One of those Nebula had given him.

He stared at it, and felt something rise in his stomach. All that time. That effort. That hope! For what!? 

The calm about him once again shattered, and he hurled it into the fire with a sharp, vicious motion.

Pointless!

He took up the next one. Its smiling ponies mocking and happy. He drove it in, and the flames roared about the new fuel, flaring up before him in bitter, jagged barbs.

Pointless!

Another, and then another. Harder every time. Speeding up. Book after book, until he upturned his bag in a sudden rage as he used it to dump all the remaining novels and guides into the conflagration. The fire, growing angrier and more uncontrolled with every thrown book leapt upwards, filled with passion and rage, searing a wicked mood of dancing shadows. Fury threw his hooves, and the tomes that had taught him the words of those here were scorched to ash in the inferno. His hurling foreleg caught his bag, slamming it upon the floor last of all as he shot upwards to his hooves with silent, restless anger.

The bag had spilled open, bottles breaking to let now very irreplaceable spirits and reserves waste and spill. Their bright colours bled into one another, dissolving as they spread and sank between the floorboards, disappearing and fading. Restless, he staggered, not knowing which direction to fall in. To limp in. Lost, he felt agony lance up his limb in scathing blood red as he swung hard and punched a hole in the plaster, lacking anything else to lash out at. At last, a single, anguished cry of frustration and hurt finally emerged, before he fell.

His hoof swollen and red, he dropped onto his front, feeling his vision grow blurry and wet. Snow fell upon his searing leg as his opposite hunched around his own head in regret at having done that. His pierced shoulder bled. The end of his hoof felt cracked. It hurt. It hurt so bad now. 

Shivering, frozen, he lay there and heard an unwanted and unwelcome choke finally creep to the surface for the first time since it had happened. It had been chasing him all this way, but he had always stayed ahead of it. Always moving on. Always indulging. Almost losing in the hunt. But now he had stopped, and dared to hope. And he had let it catch up.

It had reminded him that he was not here to find anew. He was here to die in exile. But worse, it had reminded him of all that had been lost.

    The numbing flakes fell too slowly, and time crawled by him. Far from the warmth he knew, he lay still in pain; numb and alone. Around him, he heard the sounds of others moving toward life, the crump and rock of ponies and wagons going to and from life. They passed right underneath him, never knowing. Never noticing. Never caring. Distant sounds in the black carried and welcomed them home safely, and yet Ahrim felt only the grip of freezing white and deathly black holding him prisoner, far from it. 

Slowly, the fire began to die, and with it absolute exhaustion crept in. The hope that had let him ignore the sting of the new scars and the weathered chips in his hooves now reminded him of the whole way. The whole, utterly pointless, way.
    
    “There’s always other settlements.” She had said as he had watched her bright, soft face light up his den for the first time, to pointlessly apologise for how the guards had repulsed his plight.

    She hadn’t understood.

    She’d never understood.

    It hadn’t been about finding a wooden roof and warm food. It wasn’t about finding existence. It never had been. Just surviving wasn’t enough to drag a stained soul across far lands. Life wasn’t just continuing to exist.

    None of it mattered now. Every time he had walked into the life they possessed, it had corrupted and frozen around him until he’d left. They wanted the same for him that the place he had stumbled away from had.

    Feeling his soaked clothing grip to his body like the icy sheets surrounding the city, Ahrim got up, a tear stained mask of black tragedy settled upon him. There was no life now. And that realisation left him feeling empty. Instead, in its place, he felt sheer instinct begin to grow. A hunter’s instinct. It took over, survival reasserting the priorities in his whirling, confused panic.

    There was a winter to survive.

He took up his rifle, and tore the broken sights off of it, eyes never leaving the coastline.

In the distance he could see a returning wagon, laden high. Alone.

Vulnerable.

Perfect.

Drawing a blood red square box from his ripped bag, hearing the rattle of brass from within it, he began to feed the deadly intent into his tool of survival with shaking hooves. Then, into the darkness outside, he left his den for the last time.


* * *


Years before, the ponies of the city of light had sought to expand their home’s glow.

Seeking to nurture the roads, they had lit the lamps that scattered the edge of the coast. Once brilliant white, they had decayed, now projecting only a sickly crimson glow over the mile beyond the city to try and ward off those who used to prey upon them in shadow.

It had failed. The stalkers had not cared.

Now it reflected the road’s legend. The last stretch that violence and death could occur before sanctuary. Over a hundred lamps in perfect spacing, bathing the riverside road in gore. The blood washed over its cobble and snowdrifts, crept over rusted bollards, and bled over the stone into the thick waters, littered with spars, wheels, and empty boxes. The graves of those born unlucky.

The Bloody Mile.

    A two-headed, vulnerable bovine slipped and hobbled down it. Its hide scrawny and emaciated, sloshing through red with tripping lunges on torn hooves. An unaware and young stallion sat hunched on the wagon’s platform behind them, mouth hanging loose, eyes low and fixed on home. Heaped mounds, the bones of the old world, clattered behind him.

    Tinged snow gushed and squirted either side of its wheels as they wounded the flat crimson sheets of the mile. The moaning axels cried out in their weary torture at the load. They were so very close. Close to failure. Close to rest and repair. A last golden hour for it all to go right or wrong. Life or death.

    And from the skeletal brickwork remains of a once bright shorefront, a frustrated and venting fury lurked. Tired of being rejected. Tired of the cold. Clad in a ruby-toned rag to blend in, its draped barrel raised, and spat the road’s name into reality.

    The first head of the ponderous cattle fell, its perforated cranium dropping, followed by its whole weight. The wagon shrieked, warping and splintering to a halt. Baskets and containers toppled, as did its scared driver. He fell into the blood, even as a second vicious crack set the second of his creature’s head to fall and snap the spar of his prizes.

    Focused, shaking eyes eased away from the hated rust of his rifle’s irons, and Ahrim stood. Every limb felt energised. His veins were pumping hard, heart twisting and thrashing. ‘Give over’, he could only think. Give over to survival. Wander. Hunt. Indulge. Why was this any different from the forest in the end? Why any different from the exile?

    It wasn’t. He knew that now.

    Weapon hanging, he stood to trot down to the shivering hostage. He came down a gutted slope of a building. Its insides spilled out to the road, until his hooves splashed in the falling, tainted gore of the murderous haze.

    He locked eyes with the stallion, but the look was not returned. The wagon driver was staring into the buildings further down, eyes wide.

    And then, from within the grisly street, came its deeper horrors. A warcry pierced the air, the wind howling down from the alleys to carry it with skin-piercing power. Dark, frenzied and spiked shapes of slaughter and carnage spilled forth, pouring into the snow. Clad in striped red and stained white that billowed behind them, their charge fell upon the road as a gout of murderous, wavering terror. Hooked knives, stained like a butcher’s carver, were waving like half crescents.

    All of them headed for the wagon and its prize.

    Caught in the moment, suddenly an onlooker to the impending violence, Ahrim stood stock still as he witnessed this land’s own hunters. Desperate and driven by bloody rage, they descended, and fell upon the wagon’s driver. He was grabbed, held down, and a hateful barb of metal sunk into his upper foreleg to pin him to the side of his own wagon. The hopeless and agonised wail penetrated Ahrim as well as any creature’s claw ever had.

    This was not hunting.

    The stallion’s head was held against the wood. He was crying.

    This was not respect for your prey.

    They were laughing.

    Something deep down, something important, something built of a substance that could scarcely be described as fury bubbled.

    And exploded.

    His rifle erupted in vengeful hatred before he even processed having raised it, and the leering shape before their plaything snapped backwards in a blur, splattering into a drift of blood, a curled spray of red liquid arcing up from them, as hooked as their merciless blades.

    They looked up as one, pinprick eyes swivelling, but he had not hesitated. The pain in his shoulder hurled his mind on and on, as he smoothly racked the bolt, dropped where he was, and unleashed hell. Steady. Tranquil in absolute lividness. A single point in the thick red hue.

They rushed as another of their number smacked against the cart. Howling, they came, bounding over the two hundred meters between them. How many, Ahrim did not know. Their edges bled together in the falling scarlet. He stood his ground. None of them possessed the means to kill from range. He could focus. Focus on the smooth grain of the wood against his body. The burred metal of the bolt. The hot flare of the muzzle. The cordite stink of the ammunition. The dryness of his eyes as he fought to not blink.

Whichever one was closest fell. Three. Four. Reload. Fire. Reload. Fire. A sequence he had repeated ad nauseum throughout his life.

    Track. Hunt. Kill.

    Track. Hunt. Kill!

    Track! Hunt! KILL!

    Each target fell, careening down in a spiral of flailing limbs. They didn’t scream. There were perhaps a dozen left. He couldn’t tell. They ran in a collective, desperate mass.

Too many. He hadn’t the rounds on him, and with the tenth, his bolt brought nothing more up.

Empty. He could feel their hooves pounding the sodden road, and ran. Wicked blades cut the space behind him, sent spiraling through the air as he fled into the buildings. Scrambling up the scattered bones of the slope, and ducking below a frame, he fell into the black, and they splashed in after him. Loud. Eager. Unfocused. He turned, diving through a shattered window and stumbled unsteadily into the red muck of a garden. Knives whistled, and he felt one sear his side before embedding in the ground next to his hoof.

Rifle painfully clattering around his seeping, wounded shoulder, he scrambled up. He could hear their jeers, their taunts that he had turned from killing them to fleeing. Turning into the next row, Ahrim paused, leapt the snow that had fallen through an open roof and collapsed wall, and settled into a pantry against the course stonework.

His lungs burned. He needed the rest.

    Hearing them crying out for his location, Ahrim sought to reload, cold metal in his hooves trying to slide stripper-clips in quietly.

    One of the murky killers followed as they poured through the doors and windows of the buildings, hunting for him. He smelled her before he saw her, and paused, rounds half loaded. Streaked in damp, flowing stripes of her camouflage pulsing in the cutting wind. She looked to and fro, her quivering and pinpricked magenta eyes severing the room in two to find him.

    Ahrim waited and, when he could hear no others, raised his rifle from behind her. She would turn as soon as the rounds were pressed in. Quaking, he took a short breath, mentally working through the motions he would need to do quickly.

    There was no honour in this kill. No prize. Not even satisfaction.

    They didn’t deserve that.

    He ran even as the echoes of his shot made them cluster and meld into one another in their race to find the source. Holding his shoulder every couple steps, they found the stairs, and raced up them before the unwitting target’s body lay still on the ground, thick blood melding with the haze in the air behind him. Every wound. Every death. They didn’t stand out here. They became a part of the road.

    Windows smashed, and they pulled themselves raw through it, tearing and bleeding until they were a swirling, maddened group in the room. They argued violently as to where he went, striking and clambering to hunt in wardrobes and cupboards. It chilled him. Images of them catching him up here, holding his limbs down, and the torturous knives falling from laughing faces scared his heart till it felt still. He couldn’t deny it.

    Taking a moment to gather himself, Ahrim sat and seethed directly above them. His stabbed shoulder from the beast was throbbing, staining him in the same colours as they bore below. He felt faint all of a sudden. He wasn’t sure if he could use his rifle now. In his anger, he had let it crash into his body time and time again, and now his right foreleg was a shivering, shaking mess. The agony grasped at the edges of his confidence. Pulling at it. Fraying away pieces of it. Degrading it piece by piece, threatening his will to fight back.

    But with any luck, he wouldn’t need it now. Instead, he drew his last bottle of akra. Homemade.

    Home…

    Far from there now. Fighting to keep anything of himself, he held the very last remnant he had with him. His clothes were torn, replaced. The poisons, used. The fruit, rejected. The customs, lost. His rifle had broken, been fixed. His sights. Its barrel. The trigger. The stock of himself and Al-

Every piece eventually. And this bottle all that was left.

Drawing his lighter, he took one last indulgent gulp of the stinging liquid. Stuffing the rag of his torn clothing into the bottle, eyes closed, he fought the hurt down. Drawing back his foreleg, he lit the rag, threw it off the balcony into the mass of violent hate below him. There was a shattering of his final belonging, and the crump and roar of his final gift going up in dark, charnel flames.

He didn’t even listen to the panicked stampede, or the high pitched screams. He simply sat still, head in his hooves, until the choking smoke was too much, and he limped free, adrift from all he had left.

The waterside was not warm. From fire and death, he stepped out, coat prickling, his red clothing meshing with the bloody mile all over again. He could hear the stallion whimpering, trying to separate his foreleg from the cart. Water from a sudden rush of wind blew upon the shorefront, splashing up, crimson mist crossing his face.

Blood. Like the red snow. Blood. Like himself. Like the stallion. Like the bodies whose warped stripes stirred in the wind. Like every step out here. Savage. Simple. It blended; melted like watercolours.

He felt heavy. Soaked. Bled dry in a way that walking hundreds of miles could never convey to the soul. It had been at most one minute, and yet it had left him empty.

Stopping, he opened his eyes to the carnage.

And the knife into his back sank deep into his momentary reverie.

Hot, sanguine metal erupted through him, and its bearer crashed into him. It crashed into the still reprieve with chaotic, dark thrashing. Gurgled anger spat over him, and he screamed from the lance of agony caused by a fiendish twist of the blade that ripped under the tendons of his shoulderblade. He fell, rolling end over end with the smothering corpse atop him. He felt the knife rip free, and the smoldering, blackened body straddled him. One veiny eye stared with singular purpose, hooves crashing down upon him as he warded and pointlessly fought. It was larger, it’s crisped skin scraped and hung. Mindless, vengeful, it pushed his head back, and he felt himself pushed back into the road’s freezing drifts of blood. It fell about his face, blinding him, numbing him. His throat constricted. He choked and kicked and beat fruitlessly at the burnt cadaver’s side, the ice burning the sucking slice out his back.

He realised he was going to die here. Restless corpses fighting over bones and blood, rejected from life.

His vision grew starry. A mess of silvery points. He could just barely see the face with its gleaming bone staring down at him, insanity driving a smile at having its revenge before its passing.

Everything pulsed. Darkness welled. Panic surged. His heartbeat thudded harder. Slower. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t cry out. His limbs weighed as much as a rifle.

A pained shriek came to his ears.

It was not his voice.

The stallion from the wagon hit the corpse like a cannonball, falling over it and splattering into drifts as he ripped it from Ahrim. Invigorating air rushed down Ahrim’s throat, and he gasped, roughly choking and retching. Everything was spinning. His head throbbed. He could see double. A vague after image of the burned one hammering a hoof down upon the wagon driver came to his eyes, and he let instinct take over.

Ripping a shred of his red clothing away, he wearily fell upon them. Dropping his weight, he caught the thrashing head, wrapping the fabric about the seared neck and drove the back ends over one another. Falling backward, he cried out at the stab wounds glowing hard with agony and felt the corpse’s sluicing, hideous back rub and smear his chest. Desperately, the stallion recovered and held down the body’s flailing legs, trapping it between them.

Together, they pinned it as it fought and panicked. As it made rasping, pleading sounds. As it jerked and began to grotesquely spasm.

Until it made one final groaning release, and its remaining eye rolled back.

Unclean. Drawn out. Imprecise. The antithesis of the kill.

But the definition of survival.

Sitting up, panting, bleeding, the pair looked to one another. Too exhausted to speak, the stallion tried to nod, and almost passed out. Ahrim watched him; a slumped and quiet figure on the bloody mile, now a survivor.

Slowly, with horrendous effort, Ahrim pulled his legs under him, and stumbled toward the wagon. He collapsed mid-way, his shoulder blade feeling something stretch suddenly snap within it; moving in unnatural ways with a hot iron sensation smoldering away. He whined in pain, falling. Dragging himself, using the body of the cattle, he got back up.

Survivor. Survival. Needs first.

Falling onto its caked boarding, he shook his head to clear the whirling red pricks, and stared into it to find what he needed. Potions, maybe. Medicine! Then, he would be on his-

“Electric! Electric, oh no!”

Nebula’s voice surged over the mile like a clean ocean wave. It swept away the gore before it, lifting the red mask over his eyes. His shaking hooves were already pulling the rare medicines from the cart, and its fresh food was set to enter his saddlebags, Ahrim turned his eyes.

Six ponies came running from the city, Nebula ahead of five armed guards. Casting up crimson snow behind them in the lamplight, the mare outran them all as she raced to the wagon stallion’s side, and hugged him as tightly as she dared. Tears of worry stained her face.

“Electric, oh thank Equestria...you...oh no, w-we’ll fix this! Oh thank anything and everything, you’re alive...you’re alive...”

The pair swayed and embraced. The guards paid attention to them, and Ahrim regretted knowing he had to disappear now, before he fell. The guards wouldn’t stand for it. He lifted the bundle of murky vegetables.

“It’ll be all right, sis’...”

Ahrim froze, the loot shamefully leaving his hooves. His eyes opened. Wider. Stretching. Staring into space. Slowly, his head crept around.

The stallion, ‘Electric’, spoke for the first time. Voice thin. He stared into Nebula’s eyes as he cried in relief. “It’ll be fine…” 

Nebula stared down at her brother, and pushed her head into his foreleg to get him up.

In the scarlet light, Ahrim felt himself turn sick. His stomach churned, his balance failing. He reached for the food again, and heard the shout of a guard. But it was miles away. Eyes fighting to keep from drifting he tried to lift the food, but it weighed more than the world itself.

With a shout, guards rushed, sloshing through the snow, barrels pointing with fierce intent. Scarcely hearing, Ahrim felt his legs go loose, and the pain swamped over him. Something buckled.

He fell into the blood, and lay still.


* * *


They played together. Laughter, silent and painful, arced between them and yet never reached. One shared, passing a flavourless herb, it never reached. The other carved bare wood to offer. It never reached.

    Two shapes shared a moment in empty time. 

The pair were galloping through a world without colour or sound. It had once had it, but no longer. It had faded. No, that was wrong, he knew. It hadn’t faded. It had been washed out. Stained. Ruined. 

Exiled.

“Don’t worry! Don’t worry, we’ve got you!”

Cold white. Cold white racing across the sky, burning lights dotted one by one.

The smaller shape paused, and turned. It was hazy, like a pastel sketch. Black and white fading into one another, curling upwards.

A lost smile.

“Please, will-”

“Out! Out!”

“But-”

“Let us do our job!”

Painful black. Warping and clenching. Dark shapes below a dark sun.

He reached out for her, but he could not feel her. He tried to move closer. To hold her. But he was clumsy and still. His own limbs felt like charcoal lines, frayed and jerking. The world was thick, like running through rustling and dry water.

“There’s too much, we can’t-”

It was suffocating. The worry. The unknowing.

The inevitable.

Yet as he struggled and fought with the void of empty colour, he felt a crack, like the shattering of a wooden stock. Ripping, tearing. Every inch driving the hot metal back through his body, the world broke in half. Fraying at the edges, ripping on all sides, the white expanse tore into stark black, and fell away before him with a shatter of crystal glass. She was falling, a still expression drifting away from white to black.

“We’re...we’re losing-”

“Keep going!”

A singular, last ditch hope against all reality.

Desperate, he threw himself into the dark to find her. Held in darkness between the world he knew, and the part leaving with her, he fell. Tumbling, reaching, grasping, clinging.

    And the tighter he held, the further she dissipated into nothing.

    Leaving him with nothing but black.

    “It’s over…”

    And at last, there was nothing. A final, peaceful nothing after the descent into blood and darkness, held away from the once beloved colours of life.


* * *


    Time.

    There was a passing. It felt like life, but then the realisation swept in.

    It was only time. Time with nothing to witness. Time with quiet. Time with empty feeling.

    But eventually, that time gave way to an end, and he felt the warmth of the desert sun draped light over him. A heated, colourless glow upon his numb body. Reassuring, homely, it began to grip him so tightly that it hurt, and he felt its damp tears.

    He couldn’t move to comfort it. To say he was also here. It hurt too much. But gradually, the pain became a relief. A reminder that there was still some part of him to feel at all.

    Impatiently, he felt it slide through him. Shoulder and back first, like a white-hot iron was being held into his body. But then came the cold sting in his limbs and on his cheeks. And then finally, the body-wide ache of his harsh trek.

    And with that, he could finally reach out. To catch her at last, to tell her he was sorry. That he should have listened. That he wished to be more like her.

    His soul grimacing, he fell as much as turned to grab hold of the warmth, and relished in the agony it took to do it. And like breaking the water, it all gave way to a soft, comforting serene blue.


* * *


    His face fell into Nebula’s chest, his forelegs grasping like limp rope about her shape; pulling, gasping, trying to grip and hold his head above the empty water to wherever she was.

    “Woah, woah, easy! Easy!” Her voice wrapped around him. Holding him still she caught his fall, and he felt himself exhale at last. Searing air invaded his cold lungs, and he caught himself babbling.

    “Nini kinaendelea? Iko wapi Alcionne?”

    “Sshh…” Nebula held him where he was, pressing his head to her chest even as she fought to cover him with the thin, smooth white sheet again. His eyes shot around, confused and wary. He was on his back. He was dry. It was no longer as cold.

    Then slowly, as her gentle hoof stroked his mane, his heart finally slowed, and he craned his neck to stare at the still room.

    Blinding white and clean. Pure. He saw cracks winding up strong cream walls, the black arcs of fractured lightning supporting drooping waves of corrugated metal against the cold. Only after he blinked could he pick out the glazed squares dotted along the walls, gleaming glass vials and sachets half hidden behind their glass fronts.

    A stab of tenderness pulsed through his shoulder and back as he looked down. Everything was wavering, but he could see more itching white stripes coating where normally they would not. Some were darkened in patches.

    The warm hoof rested above his eyebrows, and he quelled the throbbing resentment to be held like this. Right now, he didn’t care. Confusion began to settle, and he drew in a ragged, scraping breath.

    “What I...I say? The wagon-”

    “Don’t worry.” She hushed, and he felt her other hoof slide down his foreleg. Hard metal met them, heavily locking him to the flexing mattress. “You’re safe now. I...I don’t know how to thank you…”

    He disbelieving, guilty eyes looked up at her genuine, shaking gaze, and he saw nothing but honesty radiate from the mare.

    “I did...what?” He gasped.

    “Saved him, dummy! Electric Lemonade, my brother!” Thin mirth snuggled around her heavy words, and he felt a pleasurable squeeze through the pain. “The raiders, they shot his brahmin. They were going to kill him. He told me, told everyone how you drew them away, killed them. How he saw you taking the knife for him.”

    Nebula took a low breath.

    “I’d have lost a sibling if it weren’t for you.”

    Guilt crashed against the bulwark of her words. Ahrim felt a gnawing, horrific clarity come across the frenzy. He remembered his sights. The cattle falling like prey.

    But he also remembered sitting in the chilly snow, locking eyes with a relieved stallion. A stallion who could now see his sister ag-

    Nebula grabbed him as the spasm ripped across his body, drawing a bucket over as he retched, and felt searing bile in his throat as he bent over it to relieve himself of the sickness. He heard her telling him to take it easy. To stop. To lie still, but he had to pull himself up. The cutting loops of metal snatched and tugged him down, but he got his other foreleg up, slinging up in an arc, black and white blurring through the air.

Till he had it around her head, to pull it down, until her forehead rested against his. 

Eyes closed, he held the surprised mare there. Breathing hard, chest heaving, he felt much of it well up. The journey. The exile. The fight to find something. Some life. Something to replace the colour that had faded shade by shade to leave him with nothing to remind himself. Not even his own body, sooted and marked by this land. Scarred anew. Changed.

Only now did he realise what he’d truly lost, by confronting the reality that he had prevented another suffering the same.

Nebula, much as she was shocked, didn’t pull away. Instead, she slipped forward, and he heard a click on his foreleg. Suddenly free of his bonds, he had enough motion to hold her, and to hold tight as he quietly fought the last great battle of his journey: to accept what was now gone, and to understand what he was still capable of.

His eyes stayed dry, but he felt her firmly hoof wipe them anyway, pushing his wilted mane back up. He angled up, and looked at the mare who had been there this whole time. Who had been a lifeline without him even knowing, but he couldn’t yet smile.

But he could try to finally answer her question.

“I was hunting.” He began slowly, stopping quickly. “It went wrong. I became...lost. We both were. For too long. There was something, and I was hunting for it. And she…”

He quaked.

“The blame fell. And I had to hunt anew. But you cannot hunt what is already gone. You cannot hunt life back into being. You cannot hunt such colour.”

His chest rippled, and his wounds seethed. He ground his teeth, hooves on Nebula’s shoulders.

“But she would have still tried to go out and save it. I know this.”

Nebula held on to him. Even if she lacked the fine details of this strange wanderer, she believed his every word, and she felt the weight of the strokes he cast across whatever guilt or blame had sent him out here.

But she also knew what he needed.

“Then you should get out of that bed, hotshot.” She let mirth creep into her voice, energising his blood as her forelegs ran along his body and helped pull him to his hooves, looping a foreleg over her back, melding and keeping him standing upright. “And see where doing what you feel she wanted got you in the end. There’s been a few changes of heart after a life was on the line, you might say...”

“I do not-”

“Let’s go.”

“Neb-”

She shook her head, and guided him forward. Staggering, feeling pulled down by his efforts, he leaned on her, until she met the door...and swept the white, emptiness aside.


* * *


His eyes, stung by the blank white, now were seared anew.

    And were met with a cascade of texture and sensation.

    Dancing starfields of light and colour hung in peppered lines across the world. Flickering, joyful in patterns of ruby, emerald and sapphire, they swayed and bounced upon the energy of an active, living world. The ocean blue mare pulled him forth, and he felt his weary neck crane only up and up.

    Greeny-bronze dominated his sky. Tall, weathered, strong, and dignified, it stood high above his head, bearing gleaming angular diamond trees from its many holes and hard curves. But down here, all around him, bustled shouting faces below brightly-braided winter-cloak and around radiant smiles atop a gentle cream gravel. They melted from opening to opening around painted huts and pitched tents, gaudy yellow and blue on his right, and a sea of crashing, comforting orange to his left. Verdant grass swept before him in a perfect rectangle, where vibrant foals bounded and screamed and chased the thin streak of a maroon ball.

Then he was being guided. Shuffled through the colliding mass of hue and rainbows. He saw resplendent banners of embroidered silver and shining tangerine being hung from frosted trader windows. He saw rows of amber sculpts, rich navy books, neon yellow clothes, grassy blankets, and searing pink, bubbling bottles. He felt the soft massage of mellow blue from a violin’s entrancing work. He saw the shimmering speckles reflected on the still water past mahogany topped docks. He saw the ever so sweet untempered scarlet of a furious Mrs Kittens after slipping on glass-like ice in shock at him being there, before galloping off in a spray of glittering, snowy dust. It made him smile.

    Hazy, ochre tinted tufts whirled and clammered busily before his sight, and his eyes fell to chase them back to a sizzling, ravishing glow of warm flame and the searing, meaty blocks of succulent red and crisp brown. He squinted as foals ran past, two-tone scarves of pink and yellow streaming behind them, chasing a young rosey and lilac teen in a purple hooded top carrying a shimmering yellow sun on a stick.

    They circled and spiraled, leaving blinking afterimages in his sight behind the sparkling rod as they ran and ran about a raising, evergreen cone of fir and viridescent leaf. Already, smiles swarmed it, depositing crystal, topaz, and lapis gemlight across its body.

    Ahrim stood rock still in this one moment, and held Nebula close.

    And it all stayed.

    It remained.

    Even with him in it. Part of it. Part of the canvas of this world. It did not shrink away.

    He felt her foreleg reach up behind his head, and the soft pillow of her mane rest on the side of his neck.

    “What you said...that she’d try to save something.”

She turned his head, and through a ditch of patterned tents and past a staccato of shimmering candlelight upon the verge of winter’s edge, he saw the stallion from the wagon laughing in relief about a churning hazel mess of frothing mugs and barrel. Foreleg wrapped in soft white, Electric waved, and began limping forward, several of the guards coming with him, their relieved smiles growing.

Before Ahrim knew what was happening, the navy stallion also pressed in chest to chest, and he felt the delightful, welcoming pain of a clapping hoof over his bandages.

“Saved my hide. Threatened to cut the council out of my haul of medicine if they didn’t allow this. You’re a good stallion; Neb was right.”

There were thank yous. They surrounded him, wrapping him in their shocking meaning, but he could hardly process them, or determine the catastrophe that was the frantic flighty speech of ponies who were overcome with emotion.

But he heard Nebula’s long pause eventually break.

“I don’t know what happened, Ahrim. I don’t have all the details. Just...just a smudgy impression of what you went through.”

They released him, and he realised he was staring in shock to see Rain Cloud offering a small nod from the balcony of the bronze icon amidst the town. He looked back to Nebula, flaring light and iridescence blurring across his overwhelmed eyes, and her firm hoof stopped him by the cheek, his mouth hanging open.

“But it’s what you did for us...and maybe that’s all you needed, huh?” 

She winked.

“Whoever ‘she’ was. Whatever happened. Whatever it was you did wrong...at least for me? For us? For you to be here?”

And then she said it. Words that were so very heavy. So wrapped in warm comfort and cooling balm that he felt them lift him out of the dark. Out of the cold, to be with them in this world.

“I forgive you.”

Those three words.

Those simple three words. Even if not from the mouth he hoped them from, even if not from one who could say them with the true weight… he had never expected to hear them ever again. They shattered what he realised was but a fragile shield of cold ice around his heart, and let the emotions pour back in. He dropped, falling to his knees. Electric and the guards caught him, Nebula coming down with him, ushering them for space. Yet all the blinking lights, laughing colours, and draping shades turned wet and blurry as his eyes felt swollen and loose. His lips curled, as he heard Nebula continue. She lifted his chin to stare at his wet eyes, and finally saw the real stallion. Not the stone wall of snark and stoicism he’d put up.

But a grieving protector.

    She spoke quietly. Just him and her.

“If that’s all you needed. A chance to show you’d save what mattered this time. Just a chance. And from what you said, hey...bet she’d say it too. And that...that’s all that matters to us. Heh, especially at this time of year.”

    “I…”

    He paused.

    “I do not. I...how you say…”

    He mumbled. He turned again, disbelieving as he witnessed a pegasus sweep golden lace across the sky, winding and tying about post and monument. He looked to the stallions as they chattered nearby about what job Ahrim might do on his recovery, or where he might live, or that maybe he could do the job to a ‘Cornerstone’. Nebula’s soft motions brought him to drop into a bench as he tried again.

    “...understand the gratitude. To say. How to...put-”

    A hoof touched his lips. Nebula’s bright eyes captured his own, and a playful smirk took her over. Welcoming. Inviting to be happy. 

“You can say it in your own form if you want, Ahrim. It’s all right. You can say it’s something you’ve been ‘nimevutiwa na viuno vyako’ about wanting this for a while if you want.”

    “Nebula...” A releasing, unbecoming laugh suddenly emerged from him, crashing through the healthy, mournful relief. Surprised, he almost stopped, but then it erupted in splendorous, relieved light, like an aura that lit his face as his expression relaxed and grew soft. “That...That didn’t mean-”

    She giggled, and winked. “I know what it means, you rascal. You think we don’t have a library with a book on your language I looked up first chance I got?”

    In that brief pause, both exhaled sharply. One that grew to a laugh. And then an explosion of mirth and ridiculous joy amidst the dance of a hearthswarming winter, as he found himself holding her against his chest, nuzzled into her mane. Mixing, swaying amongst it all, together in the dotted twinkles of the city of lights. 

Finally, with others surrounding, and one close. He formed one part of the whole amongst the smatterings of every joyful hue thrown haphazardly out in a fit of long sought relief. It spiralled around him, warding off the cold and the pain to let them see who he really was.

To see a worn figure be brought back from the transparent grave, to again feel the touch of colour.

And once again, life.


* * *


Ahrim artwork by Alumix

> The Long War
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Long War



* * *


    Three harsh buzzes shattered the quiet of Equestria’s snow-tipped mountains, and everyone knew what they meant.

    They repeated, an audible cluster of harsh artificiality in an otherwise natural valley of yellow rock and irregular dusted bush that echoed back on itself until its sounds were confused and intermittent. Remote species of birds, disturbed by the racket, fluttered into the air and quiet mammals and seldom seen creatures scurried away from rows of sharp green tents amidst a plateau upon the valley slopes.

    Mere seconds after the buzzing started, an ambiance of frantic professionalism followed. Tent doors were flung open and ponies clad in khaki fatigues erupted forth at the gallop. Mugs of hot drink were downed or spilled and the clatter of weights in an outdoor gym preceded a barrage of shouting and organising into groups. A campfire was extinguished below a central pole that bore a dozen signs detailing the many hundreds of miles to each of Equestria’s great cities, and one to the most commonly known zebra capital. Firm words were exchanged. Standard issue canvas bags - every one of them bearing three butterflies - were thrown or telekinetically floated to and fro between the cramped, stuffy tents in the day's heat as eighty-six ponies ran to stations.

    Finally, the buzzing stopped and a warped mare’s voice, scarcely comprehensible in its fuzzy radio tone to any but who lived to wait on it, made an announcement with calm rigidity.

    “Stand to. Stand to. Incoming pads two through six numbering twelve casualty three minutes. Resus-team to two repeat resus-team to two. All staff present.”

    Dodging under guy lines hung with drying clothing and layers of camo-scrim, Second Lieutenant White Bishop of the Princesses’ Own Royal Canterlot hurried with them. Outside the insulated tents, the air was horridly dry and the sun so proudly displayed on half her regiment’s flag beat upon her. Long legs galloping, the earth pony ignored the stinging pain in her right thigh as much as she was ignoring the orders to stay bedridden. Already she could see five dots in the sky approaching rapidly.

    Five chariots. That was more than they’d seen in weeks.

    Gurneys and stretchers were being run down the so-called ‘Castle Avenue’, the stretch of dirt between chariot landing and the main infirmary tent. Limping, Bishop stepped out the way as a frantic resuscitation team dragged their heavy equipment, then hurried on behind them, using the clearance they were granted in the crowd to speed her way along. Each of the pads was set alongside a dirt landing strip cleared of thorns and bracken. Ponies were bent over, the clatter of instruments being prepared matched the growing pile of discarded packages from one-use emergency equipment. Bishop hurried to pad four, its assigned response unit understrength following a bout of regional heatstroke. Why Appleloosians hadn’t been assigned there was anypony’s guess, and Bishop’s recurrent frustration.

    The whistle of sky-chariots came over the wind. Each was pulled by two burly pegasi, the long-bodied wooden shapes behind them dipping and wavering in the mountain winds. She could hear the chatter on the ground-control’s radio as squadron attachees talked them down.

    “Strawberry Two-Six Strawberry Two-Six pad four repeat pad four.”

    “Pad four!” The pegasus’ tone was rasping and exhausted. “We’ll come around ninety degrees and face the wagon to you! Wagon, smooth or fast?”

    “Fast, fast, fast!” came the strained reply from the on-board frontline medic.

    One of the chariots dipped, and Bishop heard the heavy beat of wings approaching as it dove ahead, skipping the cue on a non-standard landing approach.

    “Corpspony, you aren’t our unit.”

    The voice caught her off guard, but she knew it. Bishop straightened up, grimacing from the pain in her leg and threw a salute even while turning, an eager smile on her face. A tightly uniformed stallion who insisted on wearing medals even here, with a frankly ridiculous thin moustache that in no way suited his red coat, looked over to her from the other line by the pad. “Sir, Second Lieutenant White Bishop! With respect, you’re understrength. I can help!”

    He looked at her, then at her bound thigh. With a stiffening of his upper lip, he nodded. “Speciality, corpspony?”

    “Not corpspony, Sir. Field medic.”

    “There’s a difference? Last month it was ‘combat healer’.”

    Bishop hesitated. She honestly didn’t know. Terminology changed so rapidly, sometimes month to month. Once it had been just ‘healer’, but over time it had become defined between field or backline, then ‘nurse’ as they were sworn to the same as hospitals, and then new more militaristic words started cropping up as Equestria’s muddling through the idea of forming a modern military had slowly progressed.

    She looked up at the hastily converted wagon from a mail fleet bringing their two or three casualties in. “Surgical and trauma trained, Sir. Canterlot University Hospital prior to service to the cause!”

    He wrinkled his mouth and nodded. “Perky, aren’t you? Take point three on the team you’re standing with.”

    Contented, he returned to organising the response team opposite the pad. Every pony knew their position: one team either side of the wagon. Point three put Bishop on the left mid-section of the outcoming casualty, responsible for common chest-area and barrel wounds and in support of airway sustainment. Flipping her saddlebag open, she upended it and tied it to herself, giving her an easy access toolkit of scissors, dressing, a set of needles bearing yet-unnamed pain relief that had been rushed into service only a few moons ago, sutures, tourniquets, scalpels, an intravenous kit and a host of tapes, gloves and antiseptic pads. A far cry from the clean boxes and prepared trays of med-school only a scant year ago.

    In a rush of air, the chariot swung its end around, and in a rough clank of metal-studded wheels, the pegasi at the front laid it down exactly where they had promised. Already, the shrieking and pitiful cries of panic and agony began to reach her ears, and she tried her best to suppress them. Put them to the back of her mind. Above, she could see the other chariots struggling to land as procedures started to break down on priority from half a dozen screaming medics conflicting landing priorities, each insisting they had the highest needs. It didn’t matter; her one was down, and that was all she had to think of now. Island of focus. That was what he’d said. Island of focus in the chaos.

    The ramp slammed onto the ground, and medics scattered from its unexpected angle toward them. The smell hit her like a wall. Blood, dirt, sweat and metal rushed into her nostrils. Three stretchers were borne out, becoming tangled. They bumped, one almost dropped their patient in their hurry. Bolt action rifles of various patterns and calibres tumbled off one. She saw one team rush to the wrong stretcher, expecting two, not three coming in. Between them, crudely bandaged earth ponies lay there wailing, one stained medic trying her best to staunch bleeding and pleading at someone to help. The one near Bishop was making the most horrific squeals she’d ever heard. Her eyes went wide at the sight, he was scarcely as old as she was, but blackened burns covered his left side, melding the cotton uniform onto his body.

    “Team two! Team two get to the right one!” The officer was barking, panicking as he saw his post starting to break down and struggling to shout loudly enough. He was new; he’d never seen a mass influx before. Bishop wouldn’t call herself a veteran either, but she’d at least seen a few months of duty, on both sides of receiving and being delivered here herself. She watched ponies arguing and spitting bile at one another over who was in the wrong spot. Some of them were leaning over until their helmets fell over their own eyes. Or worse, onto their patients.

Forget the island of focus.

“Pad four! Control yourselves and act like the oath you swore for Equestria!”

White Bishop raised her voice high. She hadn’t the powerful lungs of a drill square sergeant, but no-pony grew up in the private schools of Canterlot and didn't learn how to project. She saw heads turn, officer included. Her fine, articulated accent stuck out amongst the prominently Manehattan raised regiment around her, and as she stood up her lengthy height and striking black mane over a white coat and clean uniform made them pay attention.

“You there! You and you, Sir! Take that stretcher, see to his leg!” she snapped, her long foreleg pointing to each in turn, then down. “The rest on the right, middle stretcher, numbered from you down to you! GO! Rest of you fall in with me on the burn victim. Do your jobs like you were shown! The Ministry is watching!”

Finally, with some confident direction, the teams started to get themselves organised. Panic gave way to operations procedure, and she saw the training kick in. Kneeling down, Bishop finally let her attention drop to the squirming, crying pony before her. She took the precious anaesthetic shot from her pack and administered it without a moment’s hesitation, digging it into his shoulder. The slowing of their motions, and the horrid, high-pitched squealing turned to a slurred moaning. It gave her a chance to assess them. 

At first, Bishop didn’t understand what she was looking at; the piece of paper that the medic at the front had taped to his fatigues stated two gunshot wounds on the left side, but she couldn’t see any holes. Hideous burns coated the flesh, and even as she cut some of the blackened fabric from them, there were still none to be found.

“Four, holes on lower extremities?” she briskly spoke up to the pony on her right without looking away from the examination.

“None, Ell-Tee!”

Wrinkling her brow, Bishop paused, then made a decision. “All points, hold, roll onto good side. Three, two, one, roll!”

The casualty’s delirious mumblings suddenly returned to a horrific cry at the motion, but Bishop could finally see under them.

Two exit wounds, opposite the burns. Bishop felt her blood run cold.

Resting the pony back down, she double checked and found no entry holes facing the exits, but knowing the locations now, she pinpointed where they should be. Sick lumps of knurled flesh covered the physical wounds amidst the burns, and she realised with horror what had happened.

“Luna’s moon…” she whispered, then spat words in anger. “It’s true. Those sick, terrorising monsters! Okay, okay, triage done. Lift stretcher, get this pony to the main surgical tent immediately, carry report of two cauterised entry wounds, fourth degree left-side with internal burns.”

They stopped and stared in confusion. “Internal burns? How do you-”

“Move!” she barked, already cleaning her hooves and moving to the next casualty. Reprimanded, the medical team lifted the stretcher, hurrying off at pace.

It took another twelve minutes to clear the pad. The next casualty bore shrapnel, and the other concussion and heavy bruising of the head from an impact on the helmet that had saved their life. Bishop gave first treatment, before sending them on to the infirmary. The officer in charge of the pad  - a captain - remained quiet throughout.

Immediately, the weary pegasi beat their wings and the wagon was once again airborne, heading back up into the mountains to the ferocious cliff fighting taking place up there. Left on her own, an anomaly amidst the unit she’d been sent to for medical treatment, White Bishop stood and sighed in a pile of medical trash and the remnants of her own pack, taking a moment to breathe as the work moved into the camp itself. Her leg ached, now a burning that shot up into her hip, and the heat of the day suddenly reasserted itself on her after a quarter hour of frantic, sweaty work. The metallic tang of her canteen’s water was hardly a fitting counter to this dry, distant land on Equestria’s very frontier.

“Quite impressive, Second Lieutenant.”

She immediately knew the speaker was not a member of the Manehattan regiment. The words were too specific, lacking the fluid, almost grungy informality of that accent. Turning her head, she saw a yellow bodied and maned pegasus stallion in a thin grey jacket with pink tinted lapels watching her. The badge on his chest made his allegiance clear. She stood to attention with a twist of her mouth at the pain, but he waved her down. “No need for that.”

“Sir. I wasn’t aware the Manehattaners had a Morale attachee.”

He smiled and shook his head. “They don’t. I’m more of a scout.”

Bishop raised an eyebrow. “Scout? The Ministry does scouting now?”

“Not of the enemy.” He smirked, and she sensed he was coming to enjoy the role the Ministry had been setting up of late. “That casualty, what was that? It seemed to rather shock those in attendance.”

Bishop sucked her cheek and looked over toward the surgical tent. She felt the fury rise all over again. A driving hatred that had been ebbing and flowing with every month out here. “Rumours are true. I’d heard them everywhere, that the zebras had bullets that erupt into fire when they impact. That’s almost certainly a confirmed case. They burned him inside and out, the poor kid. Didn’t look more than eighteen, and they’re throwing weapons like that at him!?”

She swung her eyes back to the Morale officer, but his calm collected reaction gave her reason to snort and look at the ground. She heard him click his tongue.

“I’ve seen it elsewhere in this theatre too. Terror weaponry. But I do declare quite the striking performance there in the face of it. Even cowed a superior through competence. Standing up, wounded yourself, fancy accent and - if I may say - a dignified and graceful look to you with height and slender limbs. ‘Act like the oath you swore for Equestria’, ‘the Ministry is watching’? I particularly liked the latter one but the former, perhaps more accessible.”

White Bishop felt trepidation in her gut. The Ministry of Morale was about keeping people happy, but something about this stallion’s casual chat was giving her hesitant feelings. He hadn’t even told a joke yet as most did; he just talked like this were some chat on a train platform. “This is about propaganda, isn’t it?”

“Very observant, Second Lieutenant. But no, I’m not looking to recruit anypony. We’re just making a little list of ponies who have a knack for standing out for the right reasons. Now, may I ask, how did you come to join the effort?”


* * *


    White marble gleamed in the spring sun, so brightly even the most hoity of Canterlot’s upper class had taken to designer sunglasses to protect them from their own white city’s reflected light. They stood in cliqued crowds about the grand bowl of Canterlot Square itself, the largest overhang on the mountain through which the river flowed prior to a several hundred metre drop over the edge. Lined with trees and bushes, it was a common site of festivals, event showcases and markets accessible both from the castle itself, the high district, and the low town equally.

    Today, it bore witness to the largest gathering White Bishop had ever seen.

    She’d already made her decision. She’d made it the day she’d heard the news.

    Trotting past stalls with offensively dressed stallions declaring the justness of war bonds and Royal Army displays helping foals to lift the heavy wooden rifles chained to desks, White Bishop hurried to make it to the front in time. Already crowds were pushing forward. There hadn’t been an announcement, but somehow everypony just knew it would be any second. The Princesses had a knack of that, making their presence felt long before they were even visible.

    “Donations! To those of you of such high esteem and good fortune, consider donations to victims and families of the Littlehorn Massacre!”

    The twins, both earth ponies, repeated their cries in tandem from loudspeakers. Behind them were racks bearing smiling photos of the lost foals along their stall. Near them, Bishop could see others. Some were busking or throwing booklets on the zebra homelands, others had small machines that could walk on their own with mechanical gears and were seeking investors. Protest groups shouted and argued over the heads of Royal Guards sweeping mighty wings to separate them.

    Bishop didn’t care about any of that. It didn’t matter. She’d made her decision. The scene in her family’s home that morning had been vile and troubling. She hadn’t expected them to understand, but the vicious shouting prior to her slamming the door and leaving had lacked all the eventual understanding she’d hoped they might come around to. The thought made her gut feel hollow. Even after the attack, they still wouldn’t see why defending Equestria was necessary and she hated to go without their blessing.

    With any luck, they’d come to realise this was too important to sit out in the end.

    Squashing through the crowds, Bishop finally wriggled her lanky body to the fences by the front, just as a staggeringly loud cry erupted from the crowd. Trumpets blared, banners dropped from windows, and confetti dropped from somewhere she couldn’t even see. Pegasi? Higher castle walls?

    She didn’t care - she could, at last, see the dark blue shape above.

    “Ponies of Equestria!”

    White Bishop felt revulsion vanish, replaced with utter glee. That voice! That loud, crowd defeating, confident tone! She had expected Celestia, not Luna!

    Wings spread, the younger of the ruling alicorns strode onto a balcony above them all. She raised a hoof, and quiet began to filter around Canterlot Square. “I come to you today with great news! Tidings and hope in the face of a fiendish menace!”

    And with those words, Bishop saw six ponies emerge either side of the princess.

    Six ponies she knew of well, and whom filled her with all the justification and commitment she needed. The plans, how wonderful they were, the ponies that brought Luna back to them all, would now bring about the end of the war with Luna at their head!

    Caught in the hysteria, Bishop screamed and cheered, so unlike herself, until her throat was hoarse and her joints ached from the frenzy of the crowd. Until her heart was filled with the cause.

    Until her name was signed on a document at the recruitment stands before she even left the square.


* * *


    Fire streaked from the night sky, howling like a gale. It arced, trailing sparks until it erupted. Tendrils of red, smoking heat exploded thirty feet off the rooftops below, popping and hissing in the rain. The evil sounds were followed only by terrified screams as the suffocating, lung-burning smog coiled and grew, sparks eating through clothing and flesh alike.

    “Fall back! Fall back to the next street!”

The major’s bellowed cry was scarcely audible over the earpiece, leading Lieutenant Bishop to look up from her work. In the thrice fought over neighbourhood of what was once a tranquil village on the slope of a dormant volcano, one of a brace in the valley that controlled access to the greater town beyond, the fire team she’d been attached to was dropping back. The soldiers leapfrogged in reverse, covering one another’s run out of the line of dark stone retirement homes with automatic fire from standardised rifles. This was the last thing she needed. Her body ached all over as it was. Sprains on both hindlegs, a still bandaged shoulder and a headache she was moderately sure might be a concussion were making her vision hazy. A grasp from below her made her focus.

“Don’t… Don’t leave m-rrrreee-” The mare below her, gutshot, padded at her.

“I’m not. Listen to me, this might get uncomfortable.” Bishop muttered as she worked, drawing one of her last ten Med-X quick injectors to slam into the mare’s flank. She’d had one already - two was beyond the recommendation - but Bishop had seen enough casualties to know her tools better than that. “Hold on! You! You! Help here!”

Two squaddies answered, forced to abandon their stationed grenade machine gun without the time to dismantle it. Bishop and the couple dragged the moaning mare with them on a tattered curtain yanked from a shop window. They ran up the slope toward the merchant square, toward the second line of defences that were already opening up over their heads with indirect mortar fire, trying to dissuade any vanguard chasing them. The pop-whine of shells passing over detonated amidst the already burning buildings, phosphoric mist blowing throughout where they’d been minutes before. The latest weapon the zebras had gotten to first, Bishop grimly figured.

Yet through the gaps in the haze, she saw flickers in the alleys and cramped stone gardens. Places the wavers of rising heat seemed to move differently. She swore, a word she only learned a couple years back - now they were firing at medics and the wounded in retreat? She bellowed in rage. “Cloaks! Third alley on the right!”

Their medical evacuation was exposed in the centre of a cobbled street, Bishop knew they had no chance of making it to cover. She grabbed the casualty’s rifle from the curtain as the sharp crack of suppressed fire smacked off the cobbles around them. “Keep moving! Don’t stop!”

Turning, White Bishop didn’t even try to run for a door or a window. She took a solid stance and laid the unfamiliar rifle’s irons over the alley before opening up with rapid bursts of automatic fire. Smacking rounds off the fences and gaps between buildings, the incoming fire lessened, and she saw blades of grass in the orange haze of the fires depressed. She looked behind her; the two pulling the curtain, and the limping, bleeding squad were still stumbling toward the t-junction ahead where the major was trying to orchestrate a desperate line of defence.

They needed more time, and she had nothing like the supplies on her as the only medic for ten miles to treat that sort of massacre. A bleak resolution stirred in her weary, years-worn heart. She took aim again and screamed at them as she pulled the trigger again and again, chasing every muzzle flash in the dark.

“You won’t have them! Not through me! Back! Get back you striped fuc-”

Her vision swirled. The impact on her armour was savage, crushing it into her ribs as it took the shot and threw her down in a crumpled heap like a yak had just bucked her chest.  She could smell her webbing burning and when she rolled, hot pain lanced through her midsection. Gasping, breathless, she saw the embers of the fire-enchanted round fall from the indent in her plate.

Everything sounded so far away. The crackle of flames, the thump of the mortars and the screams of those trying to pull back. Everything hurt, but it was muted beyond a veil of creeping black. A tiredness that threatened to swallow her. Her body felt numb and lifeless.

‘Oh Princesses, I’m paralyzed,’ she thought, surprised at her own resolved calm. Staring up, she could see through the trails of fire ripping across Luna’s beautiful starscape to the twinkling lights beyond. At the very least, it meant no more being out here.

But amidst the deep sounds, the call only went out.

“Medic!”

Before Bishop even realised the pain it was causing she felt her body rise, like it was moving before she could even think about it. Trailing the smouldering webbing with her, her lanky body rose tall to see the pair struggling up the slope, having been accidentally left behind. A stallion and mare, both unicorns, the former pulling the latter in a trail of blood.

On weary automatic, Lieutenant White Bishop raised her rifle, ignorant of the shots whining around her and sparkling flame on the stone walls, yelled out words she never thought of, and hurried down the slope again.

Behind her, a dozen others came galloping, screaming, hearts aflame into the firestorm. Suddenly Bishop found herself at the tip of the spear, the weight of their fire pushing the shadowy, misted shapes back beyond their own terror weapon’s breach in the village’s border. Skidding to a halt as she reached the pair, her hooves clattering, Bishop saw the cut artery immediately in the mare’s thigh, hit Med-X into it, and tied a tourniquet right above it. The mare’s shriek of pain despite the fast-acting drug had to be ignored. Already zebras were digging in, fire lashing by them, and she could hear the clank and whirr of robots coming up behind the attackers too. Between them all, they dragged the wounded mare with them. Somehow, miraculously, with pauses to turn and flay the degrading cottages with fire to keep the zebras’ heads down, they made it back up the slope and around the corner of the t-junction.

There, with her two battlefield casualties groaning, Bishop grabbed a radio operator to call for a medical airship and did her job all she could. Looking at the pair, gutshot, and cut artery, Bishop stood in the dark street under the glow of flashlights alone.

The gutshot she could treat with coagulant foam. It was critical and would take her full attention, but was not as bad as the mare’s artery. The latter however was such a slim hope to find and pinch, let alone keep for however long evac took to arrive. If it took more than ten minutes…

Sitting, long mane falling free of its binding behind her head, Bishop made her decision with a tired professionalism. She hit the mare with another Med-X to quell the pain, and took to work on the spilling gut-wound of the stallion. No-one argued with the look on her face.

Twenty five minutes later, the chopping of rotors and the drizzle of cloud-engines passed overhead, and there was one stabilised survivor and one black bag to take aboard. Bishop handed over the details, briefed the on-board medic, and then sat slumped against a wall below a smashed window as the battle drew down to desultory potshots in its new status quo.

Dragging a numbing shot out with shaking hooves, she pulled back her fatigues to fire it into her thigh. The thudding, burning pain in her heavily bruised chest faded, and the lukewarm water in her battered, original issue canteen did little more than sting her dry throat. She felt so tired, so detached, that she never even heard the approaching hooves.

“Quite impressive, Lieutenant.”

Downing the canteen, she saw him. That suave, effortlessly calm pegasus in the same effortlessly smooth Ministry jacket. He stood amidst a narrow street torn by ruined glass and blasted cobble, flames lighting up only one side of that smile. “It’s been some years, hasn’t it? Promoted up from Second? Long overdue, in fact long overdue once more. I dare say they will make you captain for this.”

White Bishop sipped again from her canteen, not moving to stand at all, yet her narrow eyes never left him. “Thought you’d long put me aside.”

“Oh.” He trotted forward, shaking his head with a brightness in his eyes. “We never forget anypony. You can trust us on that.”

“So I hear.” White Bishop kept her voice monotone and her throat croaked to speak. “What do you want?”

The pegasus - ‘Had he ever even given a name?’, she thought - stood off to her side, gesturing back down to the t-junction, toward the slope. “Like I said. Impressive. That line, ‘Forward for our friends, forward for Equestria! With me!’. You turned the tide to save a life. You have a knack for this.”

“Like hell I do.” Bishop snorted and looked away. “I didn’t-”

“You did, Lieutenant. I saw it all.”

Hazy memories of the mad rush were already blurring in Bishop’s mind. War had a way of doing that. Remembering the stupid moments, the dumb pranks and that day someone found a pile of zebra ration packs to spice up the mundane Equestrian ones. But five minutes ago? She could scarcely even remember if she’d hit anything. Bishop simply shrugged. “We say dumb stuff in the heat of the moment.”

An altogether too perfect a practised chuckle reached her ears. “Well, your ‘dumb stuff’ has caught our eye once more at a very opportune time. I have seen fit that your wounds will grant you some leave, and in doing so, I would offer you a chance to talk to some of my associates scouting the front. This war, it’s consuming years, and we believe we may have a way to help end it. A way to both give us a tool to cut it short in our favour, and to inspire those back home like you so inspired them today. We desire to bring harmony back to these lands, Lieutenant. We think you can help in doing so.”

“I’m not appearing on some stage.”

“Oh, you won’t, you can trust me on that.” He smiled, and Bishop found herself wondering how he always seemed to be creating new smiles yet never finished one. “You’ll be rather too busy for that. Contact the local Ministry of Morale hub in whichever base you end up in and they will put you in touch with the section of the Royal Army responsible for organising this.”

“Not Ministry specific then?”

“Indeed.”

Bishop thought for some time in silence. Ten, perhaps twenty seconds. He stood patiently. She sighed. “What the hell, I’ll see what it’s about.”

“Thank you,” he concluded. “Now, for my report… White Bishop, the triage you committed, the dedication to care, it’s quite something. That’s more than standard training. Where did this stem from?”


* * *


“Six Princess-blasted hospitals lacking enough staff to use even half the intensive care beds they have, lines out the door to A&E because the few GPs there are so saddle-sore from their jobs they’re taking twice as long and a metric wagon-full of manure about to hit their windows once the winter comes, and you’re going to damn well deprive me of one more?”

Doctor Weathervane barked the words, cantering over thousand year old tiled patterns, his harsh voice loud and uncaring of the dozens of junior doctors, trainee nurses and university faculty looking up or peering from ancient mahogany doors. “Where do you think all those wounded-in-action come after the front you uppity lank-stick!? Off home? No! They come here! I’m trying to fit six hundred a month into the facilities here, and the staff I need are all off at the front sending them to me! Not to mention half the ones I need to train you lot-get back in your rooms and learn, this isn’t a spectator sport you wretched curious welps!”

White Bishop trotted ahead of him, stomach clenched into what she could only guess was a rhomboid from how sharp and yet out of place the gut-pain was after she’d hoofed over her resignation from the University Hospital to her senior professor. Gritting her teeth, she looked back with one eye. “I’ve seen the reports out there, Doctor! The amount dying because there’s not enough healers at the sharp-end! I’ve got experience from here, and I’m fit and able; the cause needs me!”

“Celestia damn your cause, White Bishop!” Weathervane accelerated, coming around to block her path. They stood in the colossal ray of light cast by one of the twenty-five foot tall stained glass windows of the Royal Canterlot University Hospital’s education wing, a window that depicted a gentle mare in a white coat caring for a sickly old stallion. “There’s a dozen ponies that can do that job over a single one who can become a doctor! And you’re most of the way there already! I’ve got students getting their title and turning immediately around to teach another classroom to meet the demands of this yak-flanked nightmare!”

Bishop tried to meet his eyes. She couldn’t. Her heart felt the strength of her need to get out there, but this was hard. As hard as telling her family. She rolled her lips against her teeth and breathed out. “Doctor, Sir, there is a critical shortage of those who actually know what they’re doing out there too. Half of the patients we get back here are suffering from rushed malpractice. If… If I can take half of what I learned here out there-”

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Bishop?”

She stepped closer. “I have a chance to make a difference, Sir. You’ve been out there too! Why should I not have a chance?”

Weathervane grimaced, and Bishop briefly wondered if she’d just lit the fuse on a crate of dynamite. Instead, he grumbled quietly, his old eyes bleary. “It’s precisely because I have, and will again, that I know we need to be building doctorships here, White Bishop. We won’t lose this war out in the field, we’ll lose it back here if we lose those who will swear that oath and be what Equestria expects them to be. We have a moral duty to care! Not just by a sickbed, but to oppose anything that goes too far! And without ponies like that who will stand by those morals, those ethics, where will Equestria go when this escalates? We don’t need more soldiers for the meat grinder, we need doctors!”

“I’m taking those lessons with me, Doctor! I’ll save lives, improve the treatment in the field and bring what you taught us to them out there.”

“Bishop, it won’t work like that. Damn it - you’re so close, I can’t let you quit now! We need you here!”

There was a pregnant, quiet pause. Eventually, she breathed in. “Somepony has to try.”

“Try to what, Bishop?”

“I don’t know, Doctor. Okay!? I don’t know! But I know I can do this, and I’m going to try!”

Weathervane stared at her, and she saw a gradual, resigned sadness in his eyes. He didn’t nod, he simply looked down, and Bishop felt the weight of his disappointment rest heavy on her. He turned and walked away, speaking at a startlingly low volume. “You’ve already signed the contract with the army. Promise me this at least, Bishop. Remember what you aspired to once be. Don’t let them turn you into something else.”

    “I won’t. We’ll do it, Sir. We’ll save Equestria.”

    He turned, sighed deeply, and kept walking.


* * *


    Harmony Squad Post-Action Objective Outcome: Tactical Victory, Strategic Stalemate

    White Bishop’s hooves ached as she slowly typed out the end to yet another entirely mundane report, her will to dress it up nil at this point.

    In fact her whole body hurt. The shrapnel from a zebra pop-mine that had been lodged in her gut had a knack of finding ways to make her whole body hurt. Be it the old thigh wound that still acted up from too much marching, the seemingly perpetual headache she had from her sixth concussion in as many years, or the sluggishness that had come over her limbs. It felt like her muscles were strung thin, stretched and pulled and twisted too often. She smirked with dark amusement at the thought of a masseuse running screaming if they saw the rigidity in her back.

    Manehattan East-Side General Infirmary wasn’t helping. Even with a private room the yells of military and civilian mixed wards reached her through the walls. Calls for nurses who were dead on their hooves in their thankless, critical, often disgusting and entirely underappreciated job. Sudden cries of those suffering from Wartime Stress Disorder waking up to find they weren’t back in the trench. One old mare repeatedly shrieked for everypony to go to sleep. It was two in the afternoon.

    Lying back in her hospital bed, knowing she had at least a month more of downtime, White Bishop stared at the paint on the ceiling; it was fraying, despite the hospital being less than a year old. She ran the last mission through her mind. A deep, sweltering trail en-route to locate some suspected zebra magical shenanigans in the dark of a forest near three great peaks of the frontier. Always ‘the frontier’. Never anything of strategic geography. Just land. Empty land being fought over for the sheer sake of some invisible border that ninety percent of the ponies dying for couldn’t even point at with their hoof without a map if they tried.

    And Harmony Squad, great beacons of ‘the magic of friendship taken to the front’ or not, would still suffer when a mine filled with twelve-ounces of explosive shot hundreds of shards of barbed metal at you from behind a bush. Just the same as any other infantry. She’d been lucky ‘Tron had been in the way with his powered armour. Yet another ‘win’ by routing a zebra guerilla team that she was certain would be passed to script writers by the end of the month to become a great victory. Briefly, she wondered how many zebras the ‘wounded’ White Bishop would have killed while dramatically seething in pain to fulfill the mission. Probably tear off some clothing, make sure that cutie mark was visible in the recreations series for broadcast. Perhaps even tell the zebra commander ‘sorry for your interest in it, but you’re not my stripe’ for a pun and a quip before pulling the trigger. Commence cheering ponies in the street theatre.

    Hell, she could probably write it herself at this point.

    Sometimes she really regretted taking that offer. If that Ministry stallion (what even was his name again?) were there, she’d be all too eager to tell him to stuff any more of it. But then she’d hear the next mission. The next reason her skills were needed. The next downed pegasus they had to go pull out of the frying pan who needed a medic to come and gallantly rescue them. Then it would all kick in again, and her hooves would be moving to the door. Fast forward a month, and that pegasus would mysteriously be a Ministry Mare once the story got ‘adapted’ for the public - and probably on the moon.

    By the Princesses she still couldn’t believe they’d actually done that one. She’d thought it was a joke.

    Grumbling, she shoved the terminal trolley away from her bed and painfully swung around to get up. The mare next door was still crying out for everyone to go to bed, and some stubborn push drove her to disobey it. Her doctor (and an irony she knew that was) would have her neck for leaving the room, but she needed some quiet.

    Limping the green corridors, ignoring the confused look of passersby, White Bishop made her way out of the ward. The reek of antiseptic, body odour and the robotic chitter of the mechanical floating assistants brought in for the shortages gave way to a barren white and black tiled hall. Automatic doors hummed loudly, and Bishop passed by the elevators toward the one spot of solace she knew in the building. Around the sixth floor’s far corner, short of the cardiology suites, Bishop knew there was a nurse’s break room with a set of two seats by a small table at a window. It was empty, hard, and at midday the sun shone far too brightly into it, but it offered a view of Manehattan’s river and something other than the grey rock that characterised this brute of a city. The nurses never bothered her. Sometimes fame, however massaged from truth, had its benefits.

    Sometimes, she knew a friend in another ward would come by too: an old war buddy from the Princesses’ Own who’d taken up nursing after taking a shot in the field. A chance to complain together, hear who was getting promoted, and just for a moment forget it all.

    To Bishop’s delight, there she was. The unicorn looked up and smiled wearily, bags hung under her eyes but seeing the look on Bishop’s face immediately brightened up. “Ah, one of those days? Come on, get that tea on - proper stuff’s in the cupboard - and come over here.”

    “Proper tea? Now you’re spoiling me.”

    And so Bishop sat by the window and waited, complaining about the very nation she was watching in its final minutes.

    She was still there, on the opposite side of a tiny table and plastic flowers from her old comrade, when the flash lit up the room.

“What th-!”

“DOWN!” Bishop yelled, and the glass blew inwards with a concussive bang. She dove towards the nurse, but both of them were hurled across the room, grabbing the screaming unicorn even as lancing shards tore through them both. Thrown down, Bishop felt her friend’s weight crumple atop her, struggling to get up, one side facing the window.

Outside, Manehattan was torn asunder by scathing necro-flame that climbed and hunted every nook and crevice with hateful intent. Waves of viridescent horror broke across skyscrapers, some carried with it, tumbling down. Her ears felt like they’d burst. Bishop turned and gaped in disbelief at the scale, the magnitude crossing her from unthinkable sights, and watched it sweep in across them both. She inhaled to scream.

But nothing came out.


* * *


    The rumble.

    That was what she remembered most, the quiet rumble.

    Not the crumbling of the hospital as it slowly collapsed over the next week to leave an external shell. It was that quiet, ominous rumble in the embers, one she never truly realised the origin of. Wind that had been inaudible in the city before, perhaps. Or so many buildings falling in the days after that it became one continuous note. It could have been the storms created by the cataclysmic effects on Equestria’s ecosphere as the pegasi closed the sky.

    All she knew was that what could have been hours or days after she felt the searing itch below her flesh wake her into the nightmare beyond, there was a deep, shallow reverberation that only signaled the ruins. The deepest sleep she had ever creaked her eyes open from revealed only the dark green mist that enveloped the city in the year following the megaspell, wreathed about the graves of millions, a bright midday turned to darkness and deep shadow.

    Her clothing torn, the room blackened and ripped open to the corridor, her old friend a still body, decaying quietly. White Bishop’s eyes stung with the effort, and her throat felt indistinct and impossible to shout out through. Her vision swam, and she felt sluggishness reign supreme on her heart. She tried to move - and passed out. It could have been days more. Tiredness drained the time from her mind.

    But in her nightmares, reliving the green fire again and again, she knew only too well where the fires had come from, and she remembered an angry young mare on a mountainside searching for bullet holes.

It was tempting. To finally cease, and let it be over. To fall into that anger alone and let it be her final regretful bark of hatred toward those who had done this. But a noise scattered through the long drop into the black ocean of unconsciousness: scant wails, as a dead city slowly began to wake up. As those ones in millions remaining pulled themselves out of the rubble and found grim reality waiting. She heard their mournful voices echoing for miles in an empty city.

Lost. Terrified.

Hurt.

Pleading for help.

White Bishop felt a coughing gasp erupt from her throat, and wearily got up.


* * *


The reassuring hum of the Equuleus’ powerful Moon Drive a deck below did little to quell the haunting rumbles of the storms breaking over the vessel’s bow.

That same rumble. Even two centuries on.

Outside through the vessel’s thick window was a land of depths unknown. Of fates deeper and darker than any that had been thus far seen. Upturned slabs of ashen world heaved and groaned, rimmed by twisting hateful green that flowed from the gaps between and coiled about the scant remnants of what had once existed here. It stretched to distances impossible, and to violence unseen below a blanket of storms that carried it out into her world.

Her world. She hadn’t thought of those words with such power in a long time.

‘Captain’ White Bishop stood alone on the common deck of ‘her’ airship, and watched the blasted land roll by. Her own quarters lacked windows, and in some sense she was thankful for that, as she saw jagged fragments of Sweet Peaks below drawn apart by the fires that tore the very earth itself asunder. The balefire storm cracked and thundered in succession, ripping at the Equuleus’ hull. Embers slashed against the faint blue of the runic shielding protecting them, but there was no hiding the turbulence that would lift and toss them every few hours. A harsh reminder from the Grave itself that it could still reach them. Still affect them. Without Castor and Scuttler’s skills at the helm, without Ritzy’s direction, without Alloy’s runes or without Data, Flickerbeam, Leaf and Gallant maintaining the Moon Drive it would all come apart.

So many things had to go right. And yet several lifetimes told her that so often it took only one thing to go wrong.

She grimaced at the flash of green across the horizon, the clouds lighting, and curled her mouth in a snarl. “Do you ever shut up?”

A hammerstrike of thunder that shook the window in its frame and jostled the kitchen’s metal behind her was her only answer. She winced back, weary limbs and wearier spirit twinging at the violence in the sound. It sounded like a megaspell. It in some ways could well still be.

‘What even are you?’ she asked, the question hounding her mind more than ever. This place, this ‘Grave’ had torn open a whole new chapter for her. The megaspells shattering Equestria had been the end. The darkest day, exhibiting the true worst possible outcome. But now this - this apparition that promised that there were yet far far deeper depths to which the path war had led Equestria down could go.

That the fires could burn away so much more than she’d imagined.

They’d already burned her friends. Her home. Her. Even memories, it felt like. Burned so viciously that she sometimes struggled to remember portions of it all. Some names, like what was that bastard who’d set her up to be an icon even called? Or her friend in the hospital? She was sure she knew it, but it came and went.

And now, two hundred years on, the pit it had all fallen into had revealed that it wasn't even the bottom they'd all hit. It was merely a plateau, and that the depths were worse than she’d ever imagined. The body’s eventual passing was no longer a safe end, and the thought perplexed her as much as it did terrified.

The storms growled, ominous green thudding away within smoggy clouds of a thicker, sooty consistency than mist, like fire smoke stretching across a country.

This constant fall had all started with that one bullet, the way she saw it. The start of the terror-fires. And the fires had only spread all the way to now.

And it was still her standing in the path of the flames, being expected to try and figure out what she was even doing.

Below her, she saw the ground move. After a few seconds, she tweaked her glasses until the varifocal lens picked them out. Hundreds of moving forms, a wave of flesh, bone and violence following the ship on the ground below. ‘Converted’ as CPI would put it. ‘Graveforms’ as she’d heard Lance, Castor and Data say. All euphemisms, and Bishop would never tell them how inadequate she found the terms for what they represented. Selenite aside, no-one else on board perhaps understood the real horror that they implied as to where Equestria was going next if they were to fail.

Rolling her aching shoulders, feeling the long burns down her side itch, White Bishop stared down the very depths of the Grave itself. Somewhere deep down, she felt that old anger bubbling away. Her whole life, she’d watched fires ravage her home, her own body. It broiled within, and sometimes she was faintly sure it was all that was keeping her up. She’d sworn to do it. To her family, to her professors, to her superiors, to her country. And if that oath was all that was going to keep her fighting, was what would drag her to have to willingly set hoof into this nightmare and risk more than just her life, then that would have to be what she would do.

“I’m going to figure you out.”

The words were quiet, but intense. A whisper to be heard by the world outside that shimmering glass.

“No more, you hear me?”

She felt her nerves surge, and outside there was a fiendish crack of powerful balefire magic. Her eyes widened, and she saw the lightning bolt a fraction of a second before it struck.

With a shattering bang, it struck the Equuleus from above. She felt the floor buckle and spread her hooves to stay upright. Lights flickered, and she heard voices cry out from above and below. Plates fell from the table and the entire vessel lurched, turning a full quarter to starboard. An alarm began to cry, then was rapidly cancelled. In the quiet after the strike, the lights returned and the savaged vessel began to reassert its altitude and heading. Alloys’ runes had held, if barely.

Below decks, she heard a sudden scream and spark of something erupting with energy, but the storm held her gaze, like someone staring back at her. Past her eyes, to something deeper. She could hear someone, Leaf, shouting for her that someone had been injured.

Pulling herself back up, Bishop looked outside at the storm blowing away behind them. She felt a mocking dismissiveness, like a gesture with but a fraction of its power, its attention, had still hurt them, a reminder of how little they were. She could almost hear its intent.

‘What can you possibly do, old mare?’

The shout came again from below, and Leaf rushed upstairs, spotting her. “Bishop! Captain Bishop! Gallant’s taken burns to his claws! The capacitor overloaded in the strike! It’s still shorting out, come on!”

White Bishop didn’t look around immediately, the bright pegasus rushing below to repair the malfunction. She gave the storm one more stubborn glare first.

Then reached down to grab her medical kit, sling it once again over her tired, hurting body, and run toward the danger.


* * *






White Bishop artwork by Kalemon

> The Fair Chase and the Canned Hunt
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Fair Chase and the Canned Hunt



* * *


    The beast had struck three times now, and the ponies of Manehattan’s central districts were now growing wary to leave their towns.

    The first had been almost overlooked, dismissed as a feral ghoul attack. The second had made it clear that something was amiss in the quiet streets between isolated settlements in the urban jungle. The third had been so brazen that it had struck the Bloody Mile itself outside Friendship City. The swarm of guards that had responded to the screams found a terrified stallion quivering under his upturned wagon in the cold slurry of a dying winter. Brahmin slain by great gouges lay amidst piles of scrap. His stuttering voice told only of a dead tree that had come to life and attacked.

    Life went on through fear. Monster attacks were sporadic, but common enough that they knew what to do. Teams had spread, lighting fires on the dark roads to cover the approaches from Friendship City, to Cornerstone and all the way to Tenpony. Caravans moved in convoys. Hired guns stood up and made their keep. Talon Mercenaries and Dashites were recruited to scout from the air to sterilise routes of danger. And finally, known hunters were contacted. Some officially. Some not.

    And a word and a request for aid from a friend of the third attack’s victim had seen Ahrim join the hunt.

    He had gone to Friendship City. He had listened to the council’s reports. Spoken with survivors. He had viewed the scene of the attack. All of it had seen him surrounded by three dozen other individuals from various mercenary groups. They had galloped out, finding the likely trails, chasing and wary of the next vulnerable caravan.

    Ahrim had waited by the gate, and then trotted in the entirely opposite direction. That choice had led him far away from the rest of those trying to find it. Past the shorefront of Friendship City, through the hanging skyscrapers and deep into the wild heart of the city.


* * *


    Cold, scything winds tore through arched and gnarled trees heavy with long dead lights and bands of scorched banners. They bore promises of a festival that had never seen the light of day. Any explorer who went deep enough into the woods could even find collapsed remnants of tents and markets amidst what once was a clearing around a resplendent fountain. Now, simply a brownish vine covered nexus of silent death. Radiation had gathered there, trapped below the canopy from fallout, its untouched treasures of the old world still strewn across the ground. Prams lay on their sides and market stalls with unbroken cans and bottles of farm produce lay coated in moss. Across the water, past the open gap in the trees of a concrete skate park lay a small amphitheatre overlooking a covered bandstand where a whole big band’s worth of instruments were curiously intact where they had fallen.

    Ahrim looked down over it all with a quiet patience from the hill above it. Winding paths past shattered benches rose up to a line of statues above Central Park’s highest point, and half way up it was here he had made his lair between two roaring lions half obscured in thick bush. He lay on an insulated pad to keep him off the freezing slush that still pocketed Manehattan from the previous winter, using a detached sight from his rifle to peer from clearing to clearing, bolthole to pathway. Here, within the contained reserve of Manehattan’s rigid edges and crumbling monoliths, he felt a little more at home. While it was long dead, the organic landscape and natural brackets of tree and bush and river was more home to him than much of the city he’d now spent years in.

    And that was precisely why he had come here instead. The attacks hadn’t been territorial, and gave rise to a direction of travel. The spacing between them had been fairly steady. The attacks had taken similar amounts of prey. And in all cases, it had fled immediately after. All of which spoke to him a language not known to the city dwellers more used to localised threats. This was a beast that worked according to the rules of the plains. Travel, eat, move.

    All of that was why he’d known to come here, to seek familiar ground. If his hunch was right, so too would this elusive beast on its path, and he could end it before its travel found the other settlements on the other side. Or worse, if it set up shop to hole up. If it did, it could strike anywhere.

    And so he had taken to the hard routine, living in an area not much more than one and a half times his own slender body’s size for two and a half days now to acclimatise, blend, and observe. Wrapped in warm thermals matted with scent masking mud, and a non-glare set of goggles over his wrapped face, he had even let down his normally proud mane to tie behind his head and below a warm cap. His cold belly wrenched from lack of warm food and his head crawled with the itch of withdrawal. Leaning his head to the side, he took up a cigarette in his lips, rolling it around, but making no effort to take up a lighter.

    The wind ripped through the trees again, blowing around the hill, masking his position from being downwind. The howls had gotten tedious, and he had to temper frustration at it taking away his ability to listen for far off sounds. Instead he’d fallen back on sight and utter mundane patience. He had food in his lair, it clearly didn’t.

    His patience was finally rewarded by that very bit of knowledge paying off.

    On the third day, through a surprise blizzard of snow being blown by the edge of spring’s winds off the rooftops hundreds of meters above, Ahrim saw a tree he’d been watching for hours finally move.

    On the edge of the fountain’s clearing, beside the edge of what had once been a straight path lined with flower beds on either side, it creaked and distorted. Its angular body moved with a rigidity that snapped and clicked, like a careless pony stepping on a dry twig every time it shifted. A long, powerful and thin body arched back, as twisted and strong as the trunks themselves as it detached from its hiding place and dropped onto all four legs. Its body was lined with oak and walnut in place of muscles, leading to a wolf’s head highlighted in light pine streaks above its skull. A dull green lit up in two gaps like eyes, neither quite in parallel with the other. Taller than him by a full half again, and three times as long, the canine shape curled down and snaked its body around the trunk. Free of its lethargy, the cracks and snaps fell away into a silence of motion. Curiously, it began to rub itself against the tree, grinding and stripping the bark over its own body.

Smoothly, Ahrim reached his hoof to his side, counting the rifles as he moved for the third of the four in line. He never took his eyes off the wolf-beast as he made the immediate decision for a mid-calibre. Much as he wanted to observe, to learn, to admire this creature from afar, this could be his only chance. The wooden body might resist or at least only wound with a normal round from his carbine, but his most potent ‘dragon killer’ round on the enormous bullpup at the end could very well overpenetrate such an unusual hide. Instead, he took up an ancient griffon-made bolt-action stamped from before the war against zebras even began. Navigating his hooves around the long rifle as softly and smoothly as he would a mare, he drew it over and squeezed it beneath his shoulder.

The beast shifted. Its head suddenly whipped around, and Ahrim fell still. It wasn’t looking at him, but that meant nothing. It was listening. Perhaps scenting; he couldn’t tell from its unusual biology.

Minutes passed, and Ahrim began to feel an itch in his spine that he wasn’t trying to remain hidden any longer. A sensation drew through him, stiffening and turning his muscles heavy with leaden anxiety and thrill. The thrill of the hunt. A dangerous, easily addicting rush matched only in its power by the quiet hole it would leave afterwards. The beast wasn’t looking for him. It was watching him. Just as he was watching it.

There was no designated prey in this park now.

Slowly, Ahrim stood, bringing the long, long barrel up gently ahead of him. He slid from his lair into clear view, two hundred meters from the beast. Draped cloth dragged behind him like a camouflage cloak as he began to trot slowly across the slope of the hill, around his quarry. The wooden beast’s head remained perfectly still, almost facing away - an unclear shot. Each hoof taking slow motions, he quelled his own fears to keep steadily moving, trusting to its own curiosity to give him time. Time to find a better angle. He would not commit to wounding and chasing. A clean shot. A clean kill. That was the goal.

He stepped over the fragments of a park bench and statue, a mare’s head split in two passing below him. He never saw it, eyes trained only on the beast. Its legs sank, lowering. This was it. Heart thudding, he paused and dropped. The enormously long barrel of the griffon hunting weapon was trained. He could see past its shoulder. See the head. See those irregular glints of green eyes. In the post-winter gloom he could swear they had wisps of green smoke. Slowly, over the approaching din, he heard a throaty growling. A deep, mature sound to ward off others.

There was a crash in the distance. A collision of metal and splintering wood. He kept his attention. Hoof moving, he ignored the rising noise. A distraction now would be fatal. His hooves would never load this a second time before it could sprint the distance. Breathing slower, he tried to lower his heart-rate, sights squarely on the side of its head. Spine and brain-stem. Quick. Painless. Culled on its unfortunate wander into a place it never should have been. He could relate. He saw its head whip up at the horrendous grinding approaching, and swore as he re-aimed again. But the new angle brought his eyes to witness something else, something intermittently lit up in red at its neck.

The noise approaching exploded into being as an entire bush crashed down before the metal behemoth. Grinding treads spun and sparked on old cobble, sending them flying like shrapnel. Scathing lamps atop its stepped, mighty hull of corrugated iron burned daylight into the darkness of the forested park, illuminating both Ahrim and the beast alike. He winced, and in the blinding haze he saw the wolf-like creature turn and make to flee.

It only got ten feet before there was a mighty bang of compressed air, and a rattle of scything chain. A ten foot long harpoon of rusted metal whipped through the air, its hooked end shattering wood as it drove through the beast’s thigh. A savage howl squandered into a sharp whine and Ahrim witnessed it fall, its momentum carrying it into the bush it had been aiming for. Thrashing its body, it was dragged back out, the enormous vehicle winding it back with a clanking whirr of gears turning.

“You there! Rifle down! Who’s that?”

The voice made Ahrim wince, projected from loudspeakers either side of the vehicle. He could scarcely see it behind the light, but he could envision the weapons pointed his way. Slowly, he let the barrel dip and hung it loosely on a strap about his neck and shoulder. He heard hooves and saw shadows drop from the edges of the mighty vehicle, the sides five equines high in height. Thudding with electronic generators being shut off, the lights cut and Ahrim finally saw the rushing team hastening over toward him.

They weren’t raiders or any local gang he knew. They were mostly earth ponies in long winter coats of dark brown or matted green over khaki body armour, both coat and plates clearly taken from some army surplus. Bandoleers of ammunition, binoculars, manacles, bear-traps, chains and thickly bladed long knives matched the almost ubiquitous hunting rifles of all shapes and sizes carried among them. They were hunters. Three of them kept training the muzzles on him as they advanced, the remainder pushing toward the struggling beast. Blinking, Ahrim raised his goggles to see the vehicle they’d rode in only. A badly damaged armoured carrier, covered over with corrugated sheets and chickenwire. Its roof had been cut open and a crude cab built atop it mounting the harpoon launcher, while its shredded tracks had lost their road wheels in the middle, the tracks instead shortly banded around the remaining ones, creating four running sections instead of two. It was unmistakably an Equestrian Royal Army APC, a model Ahrim recognised. He briefly smirked and lightly blew air through his nose, a waft of mist emerging from his covered muzzle.

“Aw’right lads, cool ‘er off! He’s not a beast! Just keep ‘em under watch.” A charismatic, confident tone rang out, and a short, modest stallion of an ochre coat strode up and swung his hoof to knock up the barrels pointed at him. The newcomer had a tight bomber jacket, with dull green scrim-netting tied as a scarf at its fur-lined neck. One shoulder bore a section of a manticore’s pelt like a pauldron, while a radgator’s teeth hung from a necklace. He carried a heavy rifle, high calibre and of florid wooden design with gilded decor leading back to the bolt and barrel. It looked comically large for his height, but he carried it with a casual confidence that betrayed genuine skill. His scarred face looked delighted, eager, caught up in the throes of adrenaline as he approached Ahrim. He smiled up at the zebra, and tilted his head toward the thrashing beast. “Timberwolf! Had a good feeling, ‘cor she’s a big one ain’t she? Lookit’ ‘er!”

Ahrim turned his head, seeing five of the hunters spreading out around the lashing ‘timberwolf’. Even as he watched, it tried to spring at one of them, but the moment it tensed up, the harpoon glowed with a red heat, and the hissing of scorching wood filled the air. The great beast would scramble and whine, falling on its side to tug at the metal rod embedded into its bark, but the hook kept it in. Ahrim could see the wires running down the chain from the vehicle to trigger the unusual weapon. Twice more it would try to move, but the pulse of rapid heating would burn its fascinating hide, blackening it, making the proud hunter wail and howl. The hunters moved in, activating similar weapons, spears bound in heated wire, to jab and hound and torture the timberwolf’s aggression into submission on its side.

“Name’s Earth Stopper. Ah, yeah! Been trackin’ her a little while, ain’t we? Sorry to cut in line at the end there mate but hey, reward’s first come first serve, eh?.” Stopper winked at the zebra. Ahrim idly shrugged, face grim. Stopped seemed nonplussed, looking around at the way Ahrim had walked, tracing the zebra’s path from his lair even as the wolf yipped and howled in pain behind him. “You huntin’ her alone there, friend? Got a shot nearly? Pretty damn ballsy if you don’t mind my say-so. Done a lot of huntin’ have you?”

Ahrim didn’t reply, he kept his eyes on Stopper’s team, watching them bind and chain and noose the timberwolf. Some of them were laughing, hopping closer to tease their foe into biting, before the spears would lance in again. He heard savage, mocking laughter as they taunted it, mocking their capture. The mighty vehicle was turning, reversing its troop compartment toward them, converted into a large cage.

Stopper seemed unbothered. “Figure you gotta if you tracked her here and have the minerals to come in alone. Almost got her too. Nice old piece that is you got there. Griffon? Good rifles them. Tell you what, friend-” He clapped Ahrim’s shoulder, making the zebra turn his head impassively back to him. “You seem the quiet, capable sort. Whether you understand a word I’m sayin’ or not, you’re plains born aren’t ya? I can tell, if you figured this track out. What you say you hook up with us, huh? I’ll even throw in a share on that girl there. Quick decision I know, but I can always tell folks who know the good huntin’, an’ that’s the sort I work with.”

Their leader seemed eager, and Ahrim kept quiet, blinking with hard eyes. He was all too aware of the other hunters still holding rifles nearby, looking as wary of him as they were the magical creature they were goading and winching up into their cage. When no answer was forthcoming, Stopped tried again. He patted his own chest.

“Me-”

He made a gathering gesture.

“-want-”

He made to pat Ahrim’s rifle, and there was a sudden raise of barrels from behind him when Ahrim sharply pulled it away. “-you! Whoa whoa, lads! Ease off! It’s all right, it’s all right…” He waved his hunters back. “Ah, guess it’s not to be then. Just know you got a place with us if you ever need it, right? Well, best of luck to ya, mate! C’mon all, mount up! Got a reward waitin’ for us!”

There was a cheer from the others, the vehicle’s door clanking shut. The engine roared, and Stopper leapt onto one of the track-covers, pulling himself to the cab up top. He waved to Ahrim. There was none given in reply. Throbbing with power, the converted APC ground over dirt, pulverising the remnants of fallen statues as it gripped the ground and dragged its heaving weight to a startling speed. In the back, cowed with lancing red-hot tips waiting to dissuade any motion, the timberwolf lay curled around its impaled, blackened thigh.

Ahrim caught its green eyes for just a moment. His eyebrows sunk down, his face tightening.

He waited until the clanking monstrosity had left the entire park, its advance merely an echo amidst the hard ruins beyond the edges of nature to turn back to his lair. Climbing the hill again, he disassembled the hideaway with quick, sharp motions. The canvas was stripped out. The branches were strewn. The foil packets of his days of food were collected into his pack and the scant remaining grass he had laid on was left open to the sky. By the end, nothing would remain to mark his passing.

Finally, Ahrim hoisted and tied each rifle to his side, leaving his carbine around his neck to hold  against his chest. He stood up and disengaged the magazine, unchambering the one stored round with quick, fluid, grimly efficient motions. Storing it, he drew out another marked with a piece of blue tape, and reloaded with armour piercing rounds.


* * *


    As cold as Manehattan’s inner districts were, the outer suburbs felt deathly chill by comparison. Wind bit to the bone in howling gales surging in from the long, bare plains and down the mountains toward Shattered Hoof. Deprived of skyscrapers as shelter, most who dwelled here had retreated into the centre of the city. Only now were some starting to creep back out into the low, curving streets of once affluent commuters to reinhabit the two storey homes that once promised peaceful comfort to families.

    Ahrim could see which ones had been left abandoned for the winter. Traps lay open and visible in the soil gardens, warnings that less obvious ones may lurk for those trying to take advantage. Contraptions and water collectors hung between some roofs repaired using the parts of others around them. Many bore racks to hang meat from, or covered signs that no doubt promised trade stops prior to the city. Early birds for caravans, he figured. One in fifty had a fire within it. He stayed well clear of them, not leaving the road.

    He didn’t know the area, but the great treads had left deep, obvious tracks. Even without the wet slush that plopped and slapped on every hoof-step, the vehicle tore up the road and the earthen recreational fields it had driven clean over. He passed the rusted ruin of a foal’s playground and a small buckball pitch, the turned earth running alongside them in an arc out behind the houses. Manehattan didn’t really have a ‘limit’ or a clear border. The city had sprawled, grew and amalgamated with surrounding towns, giving it an impossible to define edge. But for what one did exist in the inconsistent outer limits, he knew he was near it, and that the vehicle was headed just that way.

    And so he followed, taking a persistent, easy pace that despite the ten hours of walking hadn’t left him breathless. He’d seen such vehicles before. In this post-war world, it wouldn’t run forever on its tank. He simply had to be patient.

    And his patience was paying off.

    Up ahead, he could see spotlights flickering into the muddy sky. Faint beams that traversed and scoured the clouds as though searching for the supposed civilization the ponies believed lay up there. Some minutes later, and a local shopping district crossed, and he could hear faint music booming into the air. By a collapsed gazebo at the centre of a cul-de-sac behind the shops and over a garden wall, Ahrim finally stopped and sat. Laying his four rifles down, their heavy weights on his sides a relief to ease off, he finally - gratefully - lit up and took a deep draw of the rich, earthy flavour. Before he exhaled, a soft scratching caught his ear.

    Directly across from him, within one of the splintered homes, he saw movement.

    It had been low, shifting around under a toppled roof. Tense seconds ran on, before a panel popped away from the side and he witnessed a vicious, barbed animal crawl out. It looked skinned, or rather mutated, perhaps one of their old domestic breeds or local pests. It pulled with it a pony’s partially eaten skull. Layers of spines ran down its back, and its long snouted nose turned to him, sniffing. It growled, rushing forward ten feet.

    Ahrim didn’t move an inch, and moments later it simply stopped, rasping and growling, raising its spines high. They quivered, and he was sure he could see liquid drip from the thicker ones. It was in the open, close and small. Easy to kill, deadly to let attack him. He kept his muscles loose, lying back quietly.

After ten full seconds, the varmint sniffed and turned, darting away again, grabbing its prize before disappearing around the house. Slowly, Ahrim raised his hoof off of the weapon, and blew out the smoke from his mouth.

Fifteen minutes and a cold meal later, he raised up again, grunting to get the weight of his packs back on, before proceeding once again toward the lights and sounds of merriment and energy.


* * *


    The hunters had made their home. And their home was more than just a building.

    The Strawhill Golf Club dominated the northern edge of Manehattan, a protected area of land six hundred acres in size. One of the ‘largest clubs in Equestria’, so boasted the lavish sign of a font Ahrim had to struggle to make out, with three separate eighteen hole routes, a mansion size clubhouse and a twenty foot perimeter wall surrounding the entire place. Woodland dotted it in a hundred places, and the dead grass was contrasted by bright sand still lying in clumped holes or by dank, green water that festered with algae in the various artificial ponds.

    Its wagon-park just outside the gates was the source of the beams and music. Rings of wagons, vehicles and tents played host to a shanty-town of exultation and steamy heat. Standing atop the broken pedestal of a statue on the road toward the club, Ahrim sat and scoped it out. Hot meat on barbeque was being held over an enormous bonfire at its centre, with caps changing hooves rapidly on each cycle of cooking. Racks of gun-merchants strapped their wares down, mostly rifles and shotguns, and loudly called out to the wandering hunters of their qualities. Dogs barked and excitedly dashed in their cages. Stallions and mares clad in colourful, indecent garb sauntered, flirted and sashayed their way in the crowds near a cluster of small caravans, inviting and promising before drawing their marks by hoof back to privacy. Raucous laughter from a pop-up bar followed some of their friends being taken in. Fires burned in barrels around, and at the very east side, Ahrim saw the enormous shape of the APC by the edges of the grandiose clubhouse. Most of it was rubble, long torn down by weapons fire and explosives of a previous owner’s decades forgotten conflict in the wasteland, but one wing was still in use.

    Seeking a better vantage point, Ahrim clambered down and wandered the edge of the forest surrounding the club, using the natural isolation of the rich to peer down upon the squatters using it. Over half an hour he cautiously moved away and back, trekking through the cold, windswept forest and lingering snow to find the angle on the clubhouse he needed. Several times he would pause, wait, and move. Eventually, he settled on a rocky ridge that could look down into the clubhouse’s garden itself.

    What he saw there made his body heat up all on its own without the need for the swathes of layered thermal barding.

    His blood boiled.


* * *


    “Hey there, mister exotic over here! We’re doing a first timer price, y’know? Eighty caps down from a hundred and twenty! That’s first timer to us, of course. You look like you know your way around a mare.”

    The drawling advertisement made Ahrim look at least, if only to look forward again in disinterest. She was scrawny, likely undernourished, and her pupils were far too wide. Pitiful. The affronted huff of annoyance behind him quickly passed to an identical shout to another stallion passing by. It was crowded in the camp, far more than it felt like from the ridgeline.

    The disgusted will to simply open fire from up there had been almost, almost overwhelming; to put a twenty millimeter round through the skull of whoever he detested the most. But they had vehicles. They were hunters. This place was isolated. Suicide for satisfaction helped no-one.

    And so now he walked through the smell of scorching meat, stained-in ale, thick sweat and crusted animal fat from the tanners and what passed for a taxidermist in the wastes.  Stalls and tents and overhanging a-frames crowded his every side. The hunters took notice. Anyone would of a zebra, but he walked like them, stared like them. They gave him little notice in the end. Even if they were nothing alike. Shouldering through the open bars, using his carbine’s stock to knock a strong drunkard away from his own lithe body, he made his way to the clubhouse.

    The remaining wing might once have been white, but now it was a muddled grey, angular and industrial age. Its side entrance (now it's only remaining and thus ‘main’ entrance) was guarded behind a table where hunters lined up to be led one by one into the garden. Minutes would pass, sometimes a full quarter, before they would re-emerge and the next would be led inside.

    Most of them looked delighted when they came back out, bearing an eager, impatient urge upon their face. They would run over to their teams, cheer, and start to load up. Every so often they would pass through the enormous gates into the golf course proper, high-hoofing another team coming back out in turn.

    Those running the tables recognised Ahrim immediately.

    “Decided to come give us a go after all, huh?” spoke the first, one of those who had held him at gunpoint while they had made their capture. “Boss figured you’d be here. Said he knew a real hunter when he saw one. Tell you, he didn’t stop yappin’ about you the whole time we came back.”

    Ahrim stared quietly at him. He didn’t shrug, instead just patted his carbine. The hunter looked at his confused friend and twisted his mouth.

    “Right, yeah, forgot. No Ponish. Oh, zebras. Uh… right, okay! See him? Him?” He pointed to the one beside him. “Follow him in. Get it? Follow? That’s a good stallion.”

    Gesturing broadly with his hooves, the second hunter waved and turned toward the clubhouse. Ahrim was walked through a state room, or what once was one. Now it was a trophy room. A burning fireplace dominated the wall, and above it were prizes lining every crevice they could. Pinned bloatflies, brahmin horns, a manticore head, coiled tentacles from some abomination and even a full stuffed dire wolf atop a thickly legged table. Dozens of them, interspersed with rifles of all calibres, often noted with their kills.

    On the mezzanine out back, just above the stairwell down to the gardens, Earth Stopper waited. Finishing a steaming soup in a mug, the earth pony looked over his shoulder at the approach and beamed broadly. “Well, well! If it ain’t my good friend the zebra, come to find the good huntin’! How do ya do?”

    He stood up, grabbing Ahrim’s hoof to shake it violently. He was dressed down to a formal shirt and tightly fitted velvet trousers, scarcely enough for the temperature, but he didn’t seem aware of it.

    “Shoulda’ told me, could have given you a lift there, mate. Walkin’ all this way, you’d have had to have second thoughts the moment we left. Ancient history, anyway. You’re here! Come on, let’s go for a walk.” Stopper clapped a hoof around Ahrim’s back, leading him toward the stairwell. “I know what you’re here for. You’ve got the look of the hunt in your eyes. Tell you what, since it was such a close run thing?”

    He turned at the bottom of the stairs. Ahrim could see everything. See the reason he was here all around him now. But he instead looked at the pony. Stopper tossed him a token. “We’ll give you one free, what’dya say, mate? Just take your pick.”

He swung Ahrim boisterously toward the garden.

Hidden from the camp of well over a hundred hunters by the gateway of the golf course’s wall, the clubhouse’s grounds had been transformed. Once stepped with colonnades, flower beds and greenhouses, it was now lined with cages, tents and electrified wire surrounding a corridor to the private doorway into the golf course itself. The smell of crackling ozone met the rancid stench of dried blood and fresh dung to assault his nostrils. All around him were creatures. Magical, mutated, natural. A dozen lethal creatures. Manticores, radgators, chimeras, and more. All captive, all waiting in cages for their gate to open. By the far end he could even see a familiar beast. The timberwolf lay curled and dangerous in its pen, eyes fixed on Stopper and himself. Handlers with sparkling rods waited and, at a shout from above them on an upper level, began to jab and shock a radgator. The huge, leathery beast coiled and hissed, but was driven through its open cage, contained safely within the electrified route toward the gate. Snapping at the sticks, it wandered out and into the enclosed acres of the golf course.

“Hope you weren’t after that one, mate.” Stopper grinned.

Ahrim ignored him, eyes staring around as though searching for his own choice.

There was more to it. The cages were one thing, but beyond the pedestals of the far garden he could see some lying as though asleep on trolleys. Strapped down. Tranquilised. A cockatrice was being wheeled into a grim tent staffed by grimmer ponies in red tattered aprons. Ahrim could smell the events within. And he could see the results here. The horror that had taken his eyes moments to adjust to through his scope and see.

    The bins of parts and cut tendons were obvious enough by the tents. The radgator waddling through the doorway had a wire bound about the top of its mouth, restricting its mouth’s width. He saw a manticore that had been grotesquely declawed, its wing-stems cut to leave it ground-bound. A bloatsprite with its mouth sewn shut to stop it spitting. All of them bore a blinking red dot on their necks or similar parts. He felt his heart tremble, and the blows of Stopper’s claps on his back made him stumble forward.

    “I know, I know, not exactly what us real hunters are used to. But I got a whole brace of pretenders out there wanting to feel like they are. You wouldn’t believe what they pay to be able to say they brought down a cockatrice. And now? The bidding race for the timberwolf we brought back again is all on. Damn thing managed to burrow under the wall last time. Killed the stallion who wanted her ‘real’ too.”

    Ahrim fought the urge to turn and put a burst into the stallion. He raised his shaking hoof, and jabbed it right at the timberwolf with a hard, meaningful look to this host. Earth Stopper let a slow grin spread. “Know what, mate? I had a funny feelin’... Even told ‘em to keep ‘er healthy in case you came along. So, want to book a slot? Finish what you started? I did offer one to ya. So if she’s your choice, tough luck on the others. And on my wallet. But hey, you and I… we’re the real hunters. We understand this, and I understand what you need here. So say the word?”

    He extended his hooves, smiling and nodding at the timberwolf.

    Ahrim took a long, long look over the garden from up close. At every enclosure. He traced the low walls and the electric fence to the door. The door toward hunting. The things unseen before.

    He slowly nodded.


* * *


    He had been told it would be twelve hours until they were free in the enclosure for the hunt to begin, and to return by then.

    Chaos broke loose within the second.

    The first shot tore off the locking mechanism for a manticore, a whip-crack of gunfire that echoed from outside the hunting lodge. The fragments falling to the ground, the enormous beast turned and stared at the door swinging open. In its deep, feral intelligence it recognised new land, but it had seen the others led out. Was this it’s time? The captors ran amok in panic, grabbing firearms and shouting to one another.

    Two, then three more shots followed. A cockatrice. A radgator. The timberwolf. Gates sprung open, magical creatures began to wander and stalk, fearful of the shocking fence. From atop the veranda Earth Stopper marched out and began to bellow orders.

    “Get those beasts back inside!” He screamed at his followers. “Get the land crawler running! Trace those damn shots! They’re all on the side facing the west, get over there!”

    Handlers rammed shocking poles through the cages, even as four more were shot open, but with room to move, many of the creatures burst out into the middle of the enclosure, hissing and swiping at one another on instinct, but the shouting and jabbing had angered them. A tide of muscle and flesh ran against the fencing. Behind it, hunters stared back confidently. They’d built this themselves, the charge would-

    The next shot was different. The others had been a high pitched crack of a mid-calibre rifle. The following was a deep throated boom that echoed four full times off the hills. A twenty millimeter dragon-killer round slammed deep into one of the shacks to a target that no-one that hadn’t been inside the grounds could have known was there. It perforated the wall and buried itself deep into the spark-generator within. Blue arcs of magical-energy sheared off it, erupting into the wood and setting the hut ablaze. Moments before the tide of beasts hit the fence, its charge went dead.

    Roars and howls filled the garden when ten tons of animals collided and burst it over. Hunters screamed, three of them trapped below it as it fell and were stampeded into a red ruin. The timberwolf leapt and broke the neck of one unicorn with a vicious grab and twist of its jaws. The manticores, declawed, still used their sheer strength and bulk to crush and swat. Other beasts were panicking and lashing out in their cages, breaking free in their hysteria. Continued shots freed those too uncertain, and then began to target the hunters on the upper floor. One dropped with a sharp yelp, a round embedded in his torso. The others dropped back and hid. Within moments, creatures swarmed over the veranda, and Stopper’s personal group was forced to flee as they rampaged throughout the clubhouse. Within a minute, that panic extended to the whole camp as enormous beasts poured forth and tore into the crowds, scattering to the forests through tents and wagons in their path. Pandemonium broke loose, peppered by the sounds of gunshots and bestial roars.

    Some made it, some didn’t. Dire wolves fled into the woods. One manticore was brought down by a whole crew of hunters combining fire. The other smashed through them and disappeared into the night. Earth Stopper tracked a cockatrice with his plains rifle, an enormous round ready and intended for much bigger prey. Sitting on the hood of the APC, he fired, and the deep-throated report of the round thumped his own chest. The cockatrice on the rooftops of the shacks exploded into feathers and red mist. He instinctively knew that there was no saving this, no coming back. His reputation would be in tatters, and initiating recapturing wouldn’t even be viable until the frenzy had worn off. 

    Right now, making sure he and his team survived was the most important thing. And he had a good hunch who he had to really take it out on before they caused more trouble.

    He pointed to the west, and leapt back into the cab.


* * *


    Ahrim saw the metal beast coming.

    He heard it first, the grinding tracks and its mighty engine starting up almost drowned out the chaos in the grounds below. He’d spent the last minute taking potshots at hunters who were organising, keeping them panicked and confused to break apart their attempts to contain it. Creatures were scattering in all directions now. He’d even heard one gallop past him.

    But now he knew his time was up. Stopper was coming right for him, as he’d figured he might.

    Shifting on his belly, he crawled over to his largest rifle again. Dragon-killer or not, he doubted even it could penetrate the skin of the armoured vehicle, and the cab atop it had been lined with armoured plates as well. It bounced and crushed trunks and bushes, scarcely a few hundred meters away, massive beams searching the edge of the woods for him. He was good, Ahrim had to admit, figuring that he’d been closer to aim at such small locks even during the panic? Stopper knew his craft, and the searchlights were right on the money about the distance he was likely at, and was driving the vehicle right there.

    Armour plate or not, that wasn’t his target. Ahrim pulled the trigger, and the deafening clap of the massive round barked out, lighting up the ground about him. One of the huge searchlights shattered, its bulb exploding in a flash of orange. The vehicle swung, veering back and forth evasively, one remaining light streaking over Ahrim once. He hoped the scant cover was enough.

    The responding pings of rounds snapping off the low rocks around him, and the resultant cracks of gunfire a quarter second after made it clear that it wasn’t.

    He didn’t bother to pick up his rifles. Launching to his hooves, Ahrim galloped back and away, carbine swinging around his neck. He ran uphill, veering and zigzagging as powerful rounds scattered around him. He could hear the massive vehicle catching up and hear the whoops of those firing from its cab. The ground rumbled and its sound assaulted his senses, he felt his heart clench at the thought of those treads running him over any second while sprinting for the treeline. Only when he passed between two thick trunks did he feel a sharp relief. Launching into a ditch, he rolled to the side and watched above him. Dirt shook and pebbles tumbled into the deep hole he had dug and covered with bracken at its approach. He held his carbine ready. Waiting.

    The sounds ceased ahead of the trees, and the engine began to idle. The spotlight cast back and forth above him, and after a moment he heard it traversing to the side, moving further along. Voices shouted to dismount. Ahrim fought the urge to loudly swear.

    Crawling along the ditch, under roots and rotten wood, he tried to stay quiet enough to reach the thickness of the prickly hedges. He felt cold, having taken off his thick padding to move faster, and the thorns tugged at his coat. Pushing in, he risked a look as he clambered out of the hole. Four torches were being swung around, and he could see a hunter ripping the bracken off his anti-vehicle ditch.

    “Clever little bastard, ain’t he?” one spoke.

    “Not clever enough.” He heard Stopper’s voice, terse and furious. It was impossible to tell which one was him.

    The temptation to fire was high, but he could hear other noises from the vehicle. For all he knew they had an automatic weapon ready with its crew, and if that opened up it wouldn’t matter if he got all four. He slunk away, trying to remember all the little tricks his home people had taught him. All the little hints he’d observed from Night Sky. Slow, careful, brushing his hooves across the ground rather than planting right down to avoid breaking the dry wood all over the forest floor, he backed up and put more trees between him and them. He had one more trick after all, one that might help even the odds just a little, if he could reach it.

    Moving between the scything beams of torches and the massive lamp on the APC, Ahrim fought his nerves to stay ahead of them. They moved faster, but he had a head start. The urge to rush was overwhelming, but he forced himself to stay slow, stay low.


* * *


    Earth Stopper swung his rifle around, the hunters either side of him keeping their torches aimed where he looked. They knew the formation for hunting active, intelligent prey. This wasn’t his first time with another equine out there. He wanted to scream at him, burning fury rising inside him at the damage this zebra had caused and the affront to his own genuine offer, but he knew better than to give in to the frustration of a hunt.

    Stalking between his team, he looked and listened with a zealous will. He could hear sounds every so often. Not enough to locate, but enough to direct, and he kept his team moving in. There was nothing but open ground for a kilometer around the outer edge of the ring of woods; if that damned striped bastard tried to flee, he’d be chased down on open ground. No, he had him now, and he let a smile cross his face. Kill or capture to set on the run in his enclosure? Either worked. Surely some ponies might pay well to hunt one of the kind who had burned their world to-

    He heard a sudden bang from ahead of him, and a deep impacting thud of wood to his right, and then a wretched squeal of agony, one that hollered out again and again. Spinning, he ignited his own torch to see Hoodlum, one of his veterans, shrilly crying out and holding his hindleg, leaning on a tree. Blood poured from the thigh, streaming down from the wound. Granola Twist rushed over to help him, but Stopper saw with horror that he’d been wrong. He wasn’t leaning to the tree. A railway spike had pinned him to the tree.

    He spun, tracing the angle of the spike and playing the torchlight across the dark woods. Left, right, until he saw motion. Raising his rifle, he fired after it, and moments later so too did his team. There was a second muffled bang of pressure out there, and Stopper felt the spike whip past his body to embed in the same tree above Hoodlum’s head. He snarled, the zebra had an air-pressure weapon to hide his muzzle flashes.

    “Get Hood to the crawler! Rest of you, with me!”


* * *


    Ahrim felt a panic rising inside, his hooves shaking as he tried to load a third spike and cycle the tank to repressurise again. Rounds at body level were tearing through the bush, and he could see three of them coming his way. Realising there wasn’t enough time, he dropped the railway rifle and bounded away again sideways. Shots followed, and he felt a brief beam of light catch him. Dropping immediately, rounds speared above, and he rolled down the slope beside him to get away from any estimated dropping of their aim. Sure enough, tufts of dirt flew up from where he’d have gone prone.

    These hunters were good.

    Swinging up, he hoped the fall hadn’t clogged his carbine, and opened up with a frantic burst of fire. Shouts of alarm went out, and he saw the torches turn off immediately. Moments after he fired, a heavy burst of fire from the APC stalking the edge of the woods in parallel with them ripped through trees and splintered trunks all around him. Ahrim crawled belly down under the fusilade, tracer fire whipping and burning overhead. Out of its cone of fire, he raised and let off the next third of his magazine in short bursts toward the massive lamp of the vehicle, being rewarded with the detonation of the final bulb, and a scream of pain from somewhere atop it. Any time to think good of the lucky shot was cut short by heavy rounds zipping around him, and three dark figures rushing. Switching to semi-auto, he slammed his body against a tree and snapped off three rounds at one of them, forcing them down into cover, before putting two more toward the closest. They dropped prone. He hoped he’d hit, but it was impossible to tell. The tree he was behind exploded in a mist of sap and bark, and he felt it growing thinner with every beast killing round slapping into it.

    At a guess, he had maybe four rounds left. He had spare magazines, but time to reload now? Briefly, he felt a longing for his classical model pistol back home, were it not mid-repair.

    Four rounds.
    
    Taking a sharp breath, he waited longer than he ought to at the tree, hoping they’d take the bait.

    “He’s pinned!” He heard Stopper shout. “You, you, move up on his left! I’ll watch the right.”

    Ahrim smiled. Sometimes staying quiet and letting them make assumptions about your language skills had its benefits.

    He swung out, catching the two hunters just as they emerged from their dark cover. They gasped, but he had them. Two pairs of double shots lit up the canopy, and he saw them drop. One of them still moaning in pain. It was the break he needed. Dropping, Ahrim grabbed his pack, dragging out a magazine and ejecting the other onto the floor. He’d find it in the morning if he had to, right now he-

    “Drop it! You bastard!”

    Ahrim froze. He hadn’t even heard Stopper start to advance, but the confidence and proximity in the voice made it clear that the hunting master had tricks of his own to move in quietly. Slowly, he spread his hooves, turning to see the shadowy figure of the hunter sat out from behind a tree, that monster of a rifle pointing directly at him.

    “At a guess, good dozen of my team are dead because of you,” spat Stopper, “and all they were doin’ was lookin’ for the same as you! What is it? Loot the house now? Wanted to hunt real people? You savage prick! You can damn well understand me, I saw that trick! Say something!”

    Ahrim remained silent, heart thudding, eyes fixed on that rifle. His ear twitched. The hairs on his neck bristled as he sensed the same feeling of being watched.

    “I’ve half a mind to let you end your time runnin’ for this! Runnin’ for your life in my enclosure, eh? Highest bidder, mate? How’d you do with a round through your leg and-”

    He paused, and his smile vanished. There was silence between them, but there wasn't silence in the forest.

    Stopper spun to the side, his rifle discharging in a bright flash of orange. The flash lit up the diving timberwolf for a fraction of a second as it pounced from the undergrowth. Wooden teeth savaged in, and the hunter shrieked at them closing around his neck. Ahrim saw the dark shape of blood erupting, and the scream turned to a gurgling moan. The pony’s body was thrashed, thrown, swung against trees and clawed under those massive paws like a chewtoy. He heard skin rip and flesh tear. 

Grabbing his carbine, Ahrim reloaded sharply. Behind him he heard Stopper’s voice end, and the snapping and bending of arcane wood crackled all through the trees. She didn’t growl or make a noise. Dragging the magazine in and racking the bolt, Ahrim spun again.

    When he came back up, muzzle pointed, the wolf had already finished her killing. Dripping with Stopper’s blood, she hunched her back, staring back at Ahrim. He knew his muzzle was shaking from adrenaline, pointed at those uneven eyes. One burst, that was all he’d get.

    Again, he stood pointing at her, the timberwolf gripping the ground and ready to move like a spring wound too tight. He slipped fully automatic on, a rare choice, and readied to pull and hold. It was the most he could do.

    The timberwolf stepped forward. Each motion was slow, deliberate. Her head stayed low to the ground, that huge back arched back. She stared him down eye to eye. Slowly, the great wooden beast backed away and turned, stalking off into the woods with a cautious gait. Every few steps she stopped, looking back, and Ahrim lowered his carbine down steadily each time. He watched the incredible creature as she vanished into the darkness, moving away from him, away from this unfamiliar place, away from Manehattan entirely.

    He waited in silence for some time. The moans of the wounded had passed into silence. Far down the slope, he could hear the aftermath of the breakout from shocked crowds. 

Slowly, he slung his carbine and trotted forward. The ground felt wet around Earth Stopper’s body, but he leaned in to slide something out, and lifted the weight of the ornate hunting rifle he’d carried. 

Slinging the rifle onto his back, he turned away to collect his own.


* * *