Burning Ashes
"Keep digging."
The sound of metal on dirt echoed in the wasteland, as the shovel clutched in Starlight's hooves hit the dry grey ground and struck through the dying surface. "Keep digging, keep digging," the unicorn muttered to herself, as thick, dark red blood oozed from the wound she'd opened in the earth. "Keep digging she says. Gotta keep digging. Hasn't dug a single hole since we've gotten here, but no, I need to keep digging. Let Starlight do all the work! Just because she doesn't have hooves she thinks I need to be the one who digs." With a grunt, she flipped the shovel over her back, ripping away the chunk of dirt she'd cut through. A shriek of pain resonated over the barren fields, as the fleshy insides of the earth were exposed to the air and dried out to lifeless grey.
"Shut up, Starlight." Sunset drove another sword through her chest. "This is important, and you know it." Her left eye fell out of its socket. The mare cursed, and grabbed hold of it with her magic, blood spraying from her horn as she used it. The eye was returned to its place, and the unicorn returned to her occupation, surveying Starlight's work while burying a knife in her own neck.
The mauled carcass of Trixie's body dragged itself forward from the empty lands around them, and what remained of her face stared at the three. "What are you digging here?" she asked in raspy tones, as one of her broken bones punctured her skin while she tilted her mangled neck to have a better look at the holes.
A new shriek came from around them as another chunk of flesh was ripped from the ground by Starlight's shovel. "Graves," the unicorn replied.
Trixie arched her neck a little further, and as a result broke it, her head now dangling aimlessly. "For who?" she managed to ask before passing.
"Not for us."
Sunset burst into laughter at the joke. It took three hours for her to stop.
Starlight had moved on to another hole, while Trixie's head had been cut and stuck on a pole, now resting impaled on the ground at Twilight's side. Her body had been fed to a wound the alicorn had opened in the earth, and the land's shrieks of pain had been more modest for a while, replaced by quiet sobbing.
"You're starting to slack. Holes aren't as deep as they used to be. They won't fit the bodies if you keep going like this."
"What goes in the holes?" Trixie asked, awakening from her slumber as Sunset's last traces of hysterical laughter finally died down.
"Ravens," Starlight replied, earning an angry look from Twilight, who had been planning to answer the question herself.
"False ravens," Sunset corrected her. "Gotta kill them all and then bury their bodies. Don't deserve to live, gotta free space for when the real raven arrives. Can't have all these fakers running around. Can't take up a God's name with no consequences." She slashed open her insides with a hacksaw.
"And what about the worms?" Trixie asked.
"Not enough space for all of them," Starlight replied, as another shriek went off.
"The worms will die on their own. No need to concern ourselves with them."
Starlight wiped away some blood from her brow, some of her skin ripping away as she did. "Yeah, but you hate them, don't you?"
"She hates them," Sunset echoed, as she cut off another chunk of her tongue. "Hates them, hates them."
"They worship false ravens." Starlight struck the ground again. "You'd kill them all if you could, right?"
"Kill them, kill them," Sunset echoed again.
Trixie's rotting head began to slide down the pike she'd been affixed to, as the tip poked out of her skull. "For what they did to the dove, right?"
"We don't talk about the dove here. We shouldn't soil her name."
Sunset's eye popped out of its socket again. "She suffers, does she not?" she said, moving to retrieve it.
"She suffers, worms and false ravens banquet. Gotta kill them all, make them suffer, make them pay. Build a better world for her, right?" Starlight huffed, her breathing tired.
"The dove will spread her wings again. It is not our business to concern ourselves with her life."
Trixie's head hit the ground, and the wooden pole began to cut through her maggot-infested flesh. "What about the sparrow?" she asked, a barely audible whisper.
"The sparrow could become great things, if he saw the light."
"The sparrow worships false ravens," Sunset yelled as she drove a screw through her heart, "The sparrow worships the cuckoo. The sparrow needs to be purged."
"We should show him the light," Starlight intervened, "even if it blinds him. Better a suicidal saint than a living heathen." As she lifted her shovel, a new scream tearing through the skies, her forelegs broke and ripped from her body.
Trixie sighed, "The cuckoo has grown fat, worms crawling into his mouth."
"The cuckoo shows cracks, time might wash him away."
"The phoenix?" asked Sunset, before cleaving her head in half.
Starlight lay useless on the ground, blood dripping from her throat. "The phoenix is dead, the phoenix is warped. The phoenix was a worm with broken wings all along. The phoenix was the lowest of scum, first of the false idols, and the world was tricked into worshipping them. Comes the raven, wipes away the filth. Drown the phoenix, it does not deserve to live."
"Comes the raven, wipes away the filth."
"Comes a new dawn, comes a new world," Sunset prayed, as her words sailed through the air and pierced the agonizing ground.
"Comes death to the unworthy, comes fire to purge the kingdom of the damned," Starlight cut in, her voice slicing through her body and Sunset's, lacerating the bleeding fields.
"Comes pain to the worms, comes the wind and their castles crumble," whispered Trixie, a deep gaping whisper that swallowed the sky, pitch black darkness raining down on them and on the wastelands.
The lumps of flesh and bone and marrow and blood and pain Starlight had dug through and thrown in a pile on the grounds melted and merged to one another, as tentacles of decaying flesh slithered from them and inside the four creatures' bodies. As black, eyeless worms, thousand mouths of the land's agony, tore through their corpses, as writhing tendrils of pain and blackness pierced their souls and filled their wounds, as they were moved like puppets by the force of corruption they had awakened and become one with, their eyes oozing shadows, the four opened their mouths, pools over the abyss of blackened hate boiling at the core of the being they now were, and chanted in unison, "Comes the end of the era of the broken, all praise and glory to the titan who'll break the gates. Hell for those who chained heaven, and agony for those who built their towers. Let the raven spread his wings, and let truth burn away the sinners."
And their screams echoed through the empty blackness, as the earth split to swallow the crawling mass of the wilfully unliving.