Even in the distance, I could still see their village burning. Behind me, it was a dimly glowing ember in a sea of shifting snow. Their screams permeated my thoughts. Night Sky’s words blackened my conscience. It wasn’t right. They murdered those zebras, and they’d do it again if they could.

At the end of the day they’d get their caps.

I trudged through the fetlock deep snow, and at the end of the day, my hooves were still be empty. They did what I could not and could never have. They were doers. They were survivors.

And I was still a victim.

I made the choice of walking away from my only safe means of travel to Poneva.

I chose to be a good pony – at the cost of my stable. Every hour, every day spent out there was another day sheared off my stable’s lifespan. I wasted my time – I wasted their time! I threw out the window the time I spent with those mercs, all because I chose to have a conscience. All because I chose not be a monster.

All because I chose to be a good pony.

A darker part of my soul reasoned with me. I should have stayed with those mercs. I probably would’ve been in Poneva by then. I’d have a water talisman in my hooves and I’d be able to return to my stable, close those doors behind me, and forget about everything outside.

I threw my head back and screamed in frustration, stomping my hooves into the snow. I would have sacrificed those zebras a hundred times over if it meant my stable lived! Those surface dwelling scum shouldn’t have meant anything to me!

There was nothing left on the surface to save.

There was a reason why we never opened our doors … and the wasteland was it.

My stable … my stable was my world, and my world was my stable. I didn’t belong outside. My bloodshot eyes absorbed my surroundings: there was nothing but the chilling breeze as it blew powder over the pale dunes all around me. I was in the middle of nowhere.

Again.

All because I chose to be a good pony. The first ponies I met slaughtered my friends. The next group slaughtered an entire village of zebras. Was there anything that made those two groups different? What use was there being good if everyone I saw, everyone I met … wasn’t? It’d be a disadvantage. It’d make me weak.

It’d make me a dead pony.

For a moment, at Dusktown, I had hope. Hope that the darkness that wouldn’t leave that land didn’t blackened the hearts of everyone. I knew then as I plodded across the ashen drifts, that there were monsters in all of us.

There was a monster inside of Gail.

I knew that there was one in me too.

For hours that felt like days, I slogged through the snow as the faint twilight of day became darker and darker like light waning through the crack of a closing door. I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, and in the distance – watching me were a dozen hunched over silhouettes, stalking through the falling darkness.

Bloodletters.

I tried counting them, but the wind that swept across the drifts distorted their dark, canine shapes with gusts of powdery snow. They blinked red on my EFS at least two or three at a time, before fading away from my range of detection. They followed me, close enough to see me, but not close enough for me to see them.

It didn’t take sapience to know that there was one of me, and a hell of a lot more of them.

I didn’t know what to expect – I didn’t want to know what those creatures could do. I gulped. I needed to find shelter, or someplace I could wall off or hide in.

If that could even stop them.

The pace of my hoofsteps quickened.

I looked behind me once more. Their shapes bobbed and slunk in the distance … following me.

I approached a steep incline and slid carefully down a massive hill of snow until I felt my hooves sink into the powder. My momentum pushed my hooves deeper – until they clopped dully against solid stone. My PipBuck told me that I entered a different zone. The Crystal Highway.

‘Thank Celestia,’ I thought.

At least I was getting somewhere. I glanced over my shoulder and didn’t see a single bloodletter behind me. But just because I couldn’t see them, didn’t mean they couldn’t see me.

‘Oh fuck.’

My eyes darted across the snow, scrutinizing the jagged cliffs that loomed over me. I was standing in a wide crack in the earth. For miles behind me, and miles ahead me, the canyon stretched onward. Winding through it was an eight lane highway that ran off in both directions.

I glared at the hill over my shoulder. It was too steep to climb back up.

There was no way out. All that was left was a lonely highway that hopefully led me to Poneva. So I started walking.

I glanced around, my PipBuck’s teal glow illuminating the graveyard of overturned, melted autowagons before me. Their blackened, twisted metal frames were like skeletons, littering the snow by the hundreds for miles upon miles – far beyond what my eyes could see.

And yet I could still walk among them, through them, around them. I would’ve thought that the highways would be packed bumper to bumper as everyone fled from the falling bombs. Spring Song knew. She and her family knew that the balefire would come … and yet they didn’t try to run.

Those ponies and their autowagons didn’t try, either. It was as if they didn’t even known what was coming.

I absorbed with my bloodshot eyes the vast expanse of melted wagon frames, and the shattered lane dividers, and the fractured bones that poked out of the blackened debris. I tried to imagine a different world. I tried to imagine what the world looked like before the world burned.

Around me flashed lanes of bustling autowagons, rumbling up and down the asphalt roads – a normal business day in Equestria, just like in the books.

Life had been going on as usual.

Life had been going on as usual when the balefire ended all life.

I blinked, and all I saw was a grim reminder of the wartime past. With nowhere to go but forward and back, I slogged onward through the snow-buried highway, passing under the pitch black shadows of fallen bridges and the tattered cliffs that hung over me.

Lightning Twirl’s words echoed in my head, ‘Follow the highway, and you’ll get somewhere.’

That somewhere, I prayed, was Poneva.

I trudged onward, following a long wagon-sized path that was bulldozed through the steel graveyard. It looked like a stampede plowed through the lanes, knocking aside and crushing the twisted metal skeletons against the shoulders to make room for traveling wastelanders.

But the snow there looked like it hadn’t been touched in ages. The powder was fresh.

The only trail I could see was the trail I was leaving behind me.

By chance I came across a wagon that was flipped over so that one set of its blackened wheel spokes was pointing skywards. I lowered myself to my chest and peeked underneath it through the gutter between its hull and the snow that buried it. With grim curiosity, I waved my PipBuck at its mouth and caught a flash of white.

I started digging. I dredged the hole deeper into the gutter, sweeping the freezing powder away until I could see inside the pitch black interior of the overturned wagon. The light of my PipBuck’s screen parted the darkness like curtains on a stage.

Skeletons. Four of them.

Some of the bones were too small to belong to that of a full grown mare or stallion.

My expression went grim as I stared into the wagon’s charred contents. There was not a single piece of luggage in sight. They didn’t know. Goddesses, how didn’t they know?

I gulped down a heavy lump in my throat as I stared at a small, half-buried shape in the snow. It was a foal.

‘Mommy …’ whispered a tiny voice from the shattered, grinning skull that peered up at me.

‘NOOO!’

I leaped to my hooves and banged my head against the wagon bed. My PipBuck flashed. Shadows loomed over me.

I shrieked – squeezed my eyes shut, and scrambled out of the darkness, my PipBuck’s beam flashing against their broken bones, painting their dying, anguished shadows against the wagon’s innards. I wrenched myself out of the darkness, gasping frantically for my breath as I kicked my hind legs away from that cold metal coffin.

I stared into the darkness with wide eyes, the screams of Spring Song’s foals slowly fading away into the breeze. I sat there as the wind wept a solemn song, my heavy breaths hissing through my lips with wisps of white vapor. Many shuddering seconds passed before I finally made my way back to the wagon and, with my forehooves, swept them over the gutter, filling it with snow.

I left the wagon behind me. I didn’t look back.

Once more I began the long walk down the lonely highway, into the darkness as the snowfall thickened. I stopped every now and then to pan my PipBuck’s teal light across the frigid snow swirls. Even inside the thick fabrics of my barding, I was cold – but inside, I was even colder. Desperation was all that was keeping me going. That road would take me to whatever end awaited me. I just knew it.

If waiting for me there wasn’t the salvation my stable needed, I didn’t know if a life outside was worth living. The dead called out to me to join them. The memories of Spring Song and her foals still haunted me even after I buried them. I knew they weren’t real. They were long dead. But I couldn’t stop shaking.

I was soft, like putty, and the wasteland was leaving its marks.

The night was now pitch black. It felt like I had been walking for hours, alone, when a yellow light shined upon my flank. It engulfed me in its glow, painting my shadow against the drifts.

I turned wearily, my right foreleg held over my eyes, shielding them from the glare. My pupils contracted as a large black mass with a strobe light trained upon me approached. Its rumbling engine was getting closer. I gulped a heavy lump down my throat as I stood my ground, unsure what to expect. As the autowagon closed in, several silhouetted equine heads bobbed in my direction.

The black mass stopped. I waited for their maniacal cackles, for a hail of bullets, hell, maybe even a rocket propelled grenade. Instead, eight ponies hopped over the wagon’s sideboards, the vehicle’s light still trained on me.

I reached out with a trembling foreleg and flashed them with my PipBbuck’s beam. Eight hooded ponies in thick snow barding trotted toward me. Held in their mouths or hooves, or floating next to them were an assortment of automatic weapons. To my grim relief, they weren’t furies. But for some reason, I didn’t really feel very relieved.

A stallion with a machine pistol trotted up to me, my apprehension reflecting dully in his battered black goggles. I didn’t dare to make any sudden movements.

“Lookit what we got here,” he said as I shielded my eyes with a foreleg. “Where’re you headed, boy?” the unicorn stallion drawled.

I gulped, taking a step back, narrowing my eyes at them.

“What does it matter to you?”

The sound of someone yanking his weapon’s charging handle pushed me another step back.

“Just wonderin’. Not that many ponies go this way up to Poneva on hoof. In fact, not that many ponies go up this way to Poneva at all, let alone by themselves.”

I snorted. So that road did lead to Poneva after all. “Well, no shit,” I murmured. “If you knew already, why’d you ask?”

The stallion glanced over at the others.

“Thought that since we was headin’ that same way, you might like to hitch a ride with us,” he said, reaching out with a foreleg. He grinned under his hood.

I shook my head, backing away carefully. “I won’t be going anywhere with anybody …” Every hoofstep I took back, they took another forward. “I can make it there myself.”

“Come on, boy. It’s dangerous out here, bloodletters and haunters and furies and such. It ain’t safe out here on your own.”

“No,” I said, firmly. I made it that far by myself, and I was intending on keeping it that way. Alive, alone, and away from those ponies, whoever they were.

I turned and started to trot the other way.

His grin widened as he shook his head.

“Hold on, wait a sec!” he said, throwing a hoof around my shoulder. I glanced over – and he was so close. So close that I could see the scratches in his goggles.

“Stay the fuck back!” I growled, shoving him away from me.

“Hey – hey – hey!” He smiled, standing on his hind legs and holding his forelegs in the air. “I was just gonna say that you remind me of somepony.”

I clenched my jaw. I didn’t have time for bullshit.

“Oh really?”

He nodded at me, nickering, “Yeah, yeah, you ponies know this guy too, right?” He fell on all fours and turned to the others.

They nodded, creeping towards me.

“Mhm, I’ve seen him around,” said a mare as she unslung a battle rifle from her back.

The ponies leveled their guns at me.

“Yeah, he’s that one slave.”

My eyes widened. “N-no …” I stammered, “I’m not a slave!”

They all laughed at me, the other stallion approaching me with a long metal chain.

“You are now,” he said with a wide grin.

I froze. My mouth opened and closed with words I couldn’t find the courage to say. My eyes flicked to the holster that was slung across my chest.

“No,” I said, backing away. “I don’t want to hurt anybody,” I pleaded with them; I didn’t want any more blood on my hooves.

The mare laughed, “Hurt!? Hahaha – you’re surrounded, colt.”

In my mind I begged them to leave. I begged Celestia to make them go away. I didn’t want to kill. Again.

I eyed my holster.

The unicorn pony chuckled, taking a menacing step toward me. “Don’t even think about it,” said the stallion, levitating his machine pistol to my head. “You’re coming with us whether you like it or not.”

My lungs ached. Then I realized that I was holding my breath.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and when they fluttered open, I exhaled, slowly. They couldn’t stop me. I wasn’t going to let anybody stop me.

“Fuck. You.”

I leaped into SATS.

CRACK – CRACK – CRACK!

The stallion’s goggles exploded inward. The pony with the shackles dropped dead before he could even scream. My third, aimed at the mare with the battle rifle flew wide.

‘Shit.’

“You son of a bitch!” she snarled. My eyes widened as they slung their weapons.

They wanted me alive.

I tongued my mouth bit, my pistol discharging the last of its magazine as a stallion wrenched it out of my teeth. In a whinnying frenzy, he spun around and bucked me in the chest, punching the air out of my lungs. I staggered to my hooves – and the mare careened into me from the side, slamming me into the powder. Hard.

I screamed, ramming a hoof into her throat. She threw her head back for a moment, choking for air before I threw a haymaker into her nose, peppering my muzzle with her blood.

I blinked away the scarlet and snarled like a cornered animal.

“FUCK YOU!” I cried out as I bucked her off of me. I heaved myself away, kicking up snow beneath me as I scrambled for my fallen pistol – a breath away from my hooves.

‘– won’t – be – a victim –’

Someone kicked it away.

“NO!” And a hoof slammed into my face.

I tried to rise to my hooves, only to be grabbed by the shoulders and hurled back into the snow. I screamed and flailed as the stallion and the mare pinned me to the ground on my chest, my forehooves held behind my back.

“NO – GET THE FUCK OFF!”

I looked up and a mare with blue goggles rushed toward me, a carbine levitating beside her. She looked down, clenching her teeth.

“Sugar Rum, do it!” the stallion screamed. Her lips pursed. And she slammed the buttstock of her carbine into my skull.

Stars exploded in my eyes. Blackness overtook my senses.

That lull in consciousness was all the time they needed. With a dull clank, I felt the cold touch of frozen metal trap both my fetlocks.

I laid there in a heap, beaten and overpowered. There was nothing I could do.

“No …” I whimpered, as they rolled me over on my back, a chain tugging against my forelegs. ‘This can’t be happening …’ A rivulet of blood trickled down my forehead and over my brow as they dragged me back to their wagon.

In that moment, I lost everything. Dew Drops’ scarf, my family pictures – everything in my bags - my holster and my gun. I lost the only thing worth living for in that wasteland. I lost what Night Sky and her crew washed their hooves in blood to keep.

“You did us a favor,” the mare with the battle rifle said into my ear. I looked up into the wagon bed and half a dozen weary eyes peered back down at me between the metal bars of a steel cage. “Now the cut’s split between the six of us.”

I was fucked. Fucked. All because I decided to keep my dignity and walk away from those mercs. My only safe passage to Poneva.

Everyone in Stable 91 was going to die, and it was all my fault.

I was Red Dawn. I was a victim.

‘Now I’m a slave.’