In solemn quietude, I followed a battered wagon, Dew Drops’ blood-speckled scarf billowing behind me in the chilling breeze.

Across the broken, half-buried road, the wind blew gusts of swirling snowflakes that clung loosely to the soiled fabrics of my battered barding. Beneath my vest’s kevlar plates, my bruised, livid flesh ached, sending sharp stabs of pain through my chest with every trembling breath I took.

I was exhausted. There wasn’t a single muscle in my body that wasn’t sore. Every step was a step made with aching exertion.

I glanced over my shoulder, and saw far-flung groups of ponies trotting distantly behind me, having merged back into the Crystal Highway from another road that bypassed the canyon I nearly died in several hours ago.

That other road must’ve been the one Night Sky and the others would’ve taken. The route I would’ve taken with them.

I sighed. It didn’t matter anymore.

Several miles away in the distance, Poneva’s tattered skyscrapers, towers that may have been taller once, loomed over the fallen city like tombstones, somber reminders of a better age. An age thrown away by the same ponies that preached their damned friendship across Equestria.

I looked around at the cold indifferent faces that passed by as wagons and ponies trotted past me. Where was that friendship now?

I certainly had none of it left. Nobody left.

I exhaled a trembling breath, and willed my legs to keep moving. I was almost there. I could already see the city walls and make out the pony-shaped silhouettes standing upon its ramparts.

Well, ‘walls’ was the closest word I could think of to describe what encircled the city. Erected between the city’s roads were immense, patchwork, junk-made obstructions that blocked off open roads between Poneva’s high rises, and barricaded intact buildings. Silhouettes hobbled across ramparts of junk and ladders that hung over the streets between the boarded up derelicts.

What with the terrors that lurked outside in the wilderness, it wasn’t too surprising that they decided to just build a huge wall to keep the monsters out.

Somehow, I was convinced that behind those walls, life was somewhat safer than life out there, despite what Duster told me. Hooligans and gangsters or not, I preferred to be shot at by other people, not eaten alive by some mutant abomination from hell.

My heart fluttered with distant hope. ‘Maybe,’ I thought, ‘Just maybe, I’ll survive this.’

All around me, the ruins became denser as I approached the city walls.

The blackened rubble and dilapidated metal skeletons that lined the streets were all that remained of the city’s surrounding suburbs and countryside. Off in the great distance beyond Poneva’s walls stretched only ruin.

As remote as Spring Song’s woodland cottage was, even it was not far enough to escape the infernal hellfire that scoured the earth. I wasn’t sure if it was possible for balefire to reach as far as it did. Poneva city rose up around me for hundreds of miles. It sent shivers down my spine thinking that one single bomb… one bomb could’ve destroyed so much. There had to be more than one …

It was hard to believe. But so was everything else I had seen so far in that frozen hell of a wasteland.

I sighed, glancing around me.

Snaking along the road that lead to the city gates was a thinning trail of shivering ponies. I paused for a moment and glanced over my shoulder. Behind me and around me, and at a cautious distance trotted ponies from all walks of life. Traders and their wagons full of machinery, medicines, canned foods, and the occasional firearms rattled past me. I shared the road with the infrequent slaver wagon which I met with a burning glare that turned away heads – slaver and slave alike.

I bared my teeth through an amused grin as a slaver with an assault rifle eyed me up and down and trotted to the other side of the wagon bed.

If it wasn’t the hatred in my eyes that was leaving them with their tails tucked between their legs, I wasn’t sure what was. I sure as hell didn’t scare Sugar Rum’s crew much when they tried to take me. I wondered what made things so different that time?

A wagon full of wayward travelers peered down at me from behind the sideboards of their rickety contraption, and shot me strange, ghastly looks. I narrowed my eyes at them and they looked away or busied themselves with invisible doodads in lame attempts to lose my attention.

One mare, as she led her pack animals through the snow, took one look at me and mouthed ‘holy shit’, before quickening her pace.

‘Why the hell is everybody looking at me like that?!’ I thought, ‘Did I step in shit or something?’

Those ponies looked like they just saw a ghost.

I grumbled irritably as I plodded through the snow, their awkward stares tearing at my already frayed nerves. A wagon groaned past me to my right. A colt wearing a hat too big for his head ogled me with wide eyes.

I gave him the friendliest, most innocent grin I could muster. But my smile capsized when he let out a terrified squeak and ducked underneath the wagon’s sideboard.

"You little shit …" I grumbled.

I caught someone staring at me in my peripherals. I spun around and jabbed a hoof at him.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT?”

He swatted my foreleg away and pelted me with bottlecaps. “S-shit, just take my damn caps and leave me alone!” he cried, galloping away from me in horror.

“Yeah, fuck you too,” I muttered, a hoofful of caps now resting in the snow before me. “These are mine now.” I stooped over as ponies continued to avoid me, gathering up the caps in my hooves while mumbling obscenities.

I exhaled a shuddering, exasperated breath of mist and stopped for a moment to rub my weary eyes.

My hooves came away from my face encrusted with brittle crumbs of dried blood. I glared at my trembling hooves with grim, dark eyes. Down my chest, I saw that I was painted with it. Blood. Everywhere. My barding was a canvas of dark red splatters, grisly bits of hardened gore, and vicious bullet holes that perforated my chest.

If they knew that my barding was bulletproof, they might not have thought that I was some kind nightmarish zombie pony.

Hell, even my mane sported splotches of contrasting dark reds.

‘Yay. Highlights.’

It made my stomach churn. I wasn't sure what blood was mine, or who it belonged to. All I knew was that some of them were stains that couldn’t be washed away.

I remembered that mare I murdered. How she begged. Sobbed. Cried.

I remembered how easy it was to just walk away.

In my mind I tried to rationalize it. I tried to justify it – I kept telling myself that I never would have survived that massacre had I not done what I did.

Bait.

That was how I used her. She was bait. But she was a slaver, a shitty excuse for a pony. She was a bad pony, and bad ponies needed to get what was coming to them.

But then I wondered: what did that make me? Maybe she too had a family, a family who was wondering where she was and if she’d ever return home to put food on the table.

Like Sugar Rum.

I clenched my eyes closed and cradled my head in my weary hooves. The doubt slowly faded away as my mind reclined into chilling tranquility.

She was a slaver. Maybe she deserved to die.

I sighed a trembling, misty breath and watched it dissipate into the frigid breeze. I turned my gaze to my hooves, avoiding everyone’s frightened eyes … and kept walking.

In my weary state, I couldn’t risk attracting too much attention. I couldn’t risk getting into another fight. I could feel it … feel it in the throbs that clenched inside my skull. I was hungry and exhausted. My blood sugar was low and I was running even lower on ammunition – not that I needed to put a bullet in somebody, then and there.

My impeccable fashion sense was keeping most of them away from me, anyways.

I keyed my PipBuck’s inventory and scrolled through the belongings I logged in my saddlebags. Aside from my tools, which included my spade, twelve 10mm rounds and one health potion were all I had left.

I wasn’t even sure if I even had any fight left in me.

I didn’t want to fight unless I really had to. I was still a glorified earth pony with a horn for fuck’s sake. I needed to rest.

But most of all, I still had a promise to keep.

I couldn’t let Dew Drops down – I couldn't let my stable down.

A mile later and several minutes spent trying not to look at anybody in the eye passed, and Poneva’s corrugated walls and decrepit skyscrapers began to tower over me. I felt like I reached the gates to salvation. I was so close. So close, that I could feel the weight of a water talisman resting upon my hooves. I held up my right forehoof and gazed at it longingly, my leg shaking uncontrollably as it hung in the air, empty.

As I approached Poneva’s gates, I walked alongside a lonely wagon. It was noticeably different from the rest of the jury-rigged or built-from-scratch wagons that rumbled around me. It looked to have been a work of impeccable craftsmanship. Once.

The dark purple paint that covered its metal panels were stripped away in many places, scored by blades and gunfire. The low hum of a fusion core engine within reminded me that it wasn’t just some jury-rigged wreck.

I looked inside the wagon and what I saw startled the ever-living shit out of me.

“What the hell …” I murmured, as a black-coated pony met my stare. I gave him a wide-eyed look over and saw that he was a pegasus … except instead of feathered wings tucked at his sides, black leathery bat wings were folded behind him.

He stared through me with blank, shell-shocked eyes, his muzzle resting upon his hooves as he leaned out of the wagon to watch the snow drifts and ruins pass by. If the pony was in any way repulsed by my appearance, he wasn’t going to tell me. The callousness of his gaze sent shivers down my spine.

I turned my head low and chanced a glance at the pony’s face once more. He, like the other ponies inside the wagon had piercing, vividly-colored eyes, bat wings, and fuzzy, elongated ears that dwarfed my own.

The bat ponies looked worn to the bone, like they’d been through the depths of hell and back – but not without hell leaving upon them its marks. Many of them sported vicious scars that stretched down their muzzles to disappear beneath their frayed barding.

I didn’t want to imagine what sort of monster could have hurt them that way. Some wounds looked to be deliberately shaped, as if they were tortured, toyed with, or made to suffer at the hooves or talons of some laughing, insidious creature.

I wanted to relate their scars to snow furies … but from my experience, they were more of a force of nature than they were calculating torturers.

Inside of their battered wagon, the weary souls huddled together in silence as it rumbled along the road. Seeing people like that really made me question if I truly understood what suffering meant.

I slowed my trot to a walk and trailed behind them as they neared the gates. I spotted ponies standing on the side of the road. The bat ponies slowed as the others took notice. They trotted towards the wagon as it approached.

We came closer, and I saw that they were wearing matching barding.

Those ponies – with not a single mare among them, were garbed with an assortment of reddish headwear or barding, from scarlet bandannas wrapped around their muzzles, to do-rags tied around their cropped manes. Others simply wore barding that was of a shade relative to the color red.

‘How cute,’ I thought, darkly.

Unlike all of the ponies around me, they were all armed. Armed with guns that looked newer and better maintained than the weathered, and in some cases, tattered clothes on their backs.

One of the red ponies galloped back to the herd of unruly stallions with a bag of jingling caps. They erupted with boisterous laughter and shoved each other around, trying to get their teeth on that pony’s coins.

The pony stumbled away, spilling his caps before getting into a full on brawl with another. He bucked the pony away from him and swept up his booty, stuffing it into his saddlebag.

‘What fucking idiots,’ I thought. Those guards were far from conventional. Though I wasn’t even sure if the professional tone the word ‘guard’ had with it could even apply to that rabble. When I thought of a guard, I thought of Lightning Twirl in her well-pressed uniform and snugly-fitted kevlar vest.

But those ponies? Bullies – thugs – scum would’ve been even more appropriate.

I remembered what Duster said to me at the caravan: pay the toll, and you probably won’t have any problems. Probably.

One of them, visibly irritated by his empty hooves, turned his glare to the wagon of bat ponies and drew his shotgun, a devious grin stretching across his face. I stepped off the road and slunk back into the darkness. I couldn’t afford to get myself dragged in another massacre.

I had been doing a lot of that since I left home.

I pulled off Dew Drops’ scarf and slipped it gingerly into my bags. Its white stripes would give me away if someone shined a light on me – and I couldn’t risk that. Not in my current state. I lowered myself into the snow, shivering against its icy touch as I slid one hoof in front of the other.

My brown coat and dark blue barding melted into the night as I stalked through the snow and ruin beneath the shadow of Poneva city. I crawled, as quiet as the shallow breaths that slithered out through my cracked lips.

I paused, lying prone behind a broken retaining wall and peaking over the debris-littered snow drifts. Letting out a trembling breath, I scrutinized the red-garbed ponies that approached the wagon with narrowed eyes. They crowded around it like radroaches swarming a fallen morsel.

“Hey!” one of them shouted, raising a hoof to the wagon. “Pay up, or get the fuck out!”

I watched quietly, holding my breath as a bat pony mare dismounted and dug through her pockets. A hoofful of jingling caps fell into the hoof of a glaring red pony.

The toll collector glanced at his hoof, and snorted. He stood there, eyed the mare up and down, shook the sack of caps, and held her stare.

My eyes widened as he threw it to the snow.

The bat pony’s jaw dropped. “What!?”

He leaned in, baring his teeth. “You’re a hundred caps short, bitch!”

“I-I thought the toll was twenty-five caps!" she stammered in her strange, foreign accent. Her winged kin peeked over the sideboard, chattering with one another in hushed voices.

“The toll’s whatever the fuck I say it is, you bat-winged freak.” I glared at him as he stood on his hinds and folded his legs across his chest. “Now pay the fuck up.”

“Those are all the caps we have left …” she murmured.

He just threw his head back and laughed in the mare's face.

“We gonna have problems, bat girl?” the stallion growled, shoving her into the wagon’s sideboard. She grunted as the vehicle shook against her.

I clenched my jaw.

“Please ... all we want is to find shelter from the Tempest!” she pleaded, cupping her forehooves together. "We can’t survive out here … please – keep the caps – just let us go!"

The collector snorted as his cronies approached, “So ... you bat pony freaks think you can short change the Blood Brothers?” The gang of red ponies swarmed together, crooked bats, rusty pipes, and firearms in tow. They laughed, hefting their weapons and snorting madly – hungry for a fight. “Alright boys – show ‘em what happens to people who fuck with the Blood Brothers!” the stallion cried as the mob of barking red ponies surrounded the wagon.

Mares screamed inside as the reds prodded the ponies within with the ends of their weapons as if they were a gaggle of exotic zoo animals. The bat ponies huddled together and batted them away, frantically.

The guards that mounted the ramparts swung their floodlights to bathe the growing commotion in glaring, white light. The line of travelers behind them backed away, keeping a considerable distance between themselves and the firefight that was sure to erupt at any moment.

Perfect.

Fuck their tolls. Fuck those ponies. Fuck them and their stupid, red outfits.

It was the perfect opportunity to slip away unseen. I closed my eyes and listened as the cursing became shoving and the shoving became swinging. Bats and pipes banged heavily against the wagon’s sideboards as they threw punches and shoved each other away.

Perfect.

I crawled through the charred, concrete ruins.

I imagined myself crawling through the pipes at engineering … crawling beneath the steam clouds on the day my life made a turn for the worst. Head down, eyes forward. Head down, eyes forward. I was going to make it.

I stuck to the darkness like a shadow stuck to a body.

A voice cried out into the night. I froze.

“You fucking freaks!”

I peered through a crack in a retaining wall and saw a red crunch into the snow. The bat ponies hissed as the stallion’s brothers hauled him away, kicking and cursing.

His brothers reached for their guns – and a bat pony stallion rose up from behind the sideboards.

The reds stumbled upon their hooves. Some took a step back. Clenched between the bat pony’s teeth was a strange, bladed pistol that glowed with a dull green hue.

“Stay back! I mean it!”

CRACK!

Ponies screamed. I almost jumped out of my skin.

“Yeah – haha, stay down, fuckers!” a red shouted, his assault rifle smoking in the breeze as the bat ponies ducked for cover.

I shook my head. Things were falling through their hooves too quickly for my own comfort. My window of opportunity was closing. Fast. For some reason I found myself hoping they didn’t take the easy route and just shoot those ponies dead.

I could only hope that they’d take their sweet time. Distracted.

I lurched forward, not wanting to linger, crawling through the snow beneath a charred windowsill. I reached out with a foreleg and felt my barding tear.

Pain shot through my legs as stalagmites of icy, melted glass stabbed through my unarmored hind legs. I clenched my jaw, stifling a curse.

My ears perked. Hoofsteps plodded towards me. I curled up as close to the wall as I could, cringing as glass dug deep into the livid flesh beneath my coat. Half a foot of concrete away on the other side, two blood brothers propped up their bleeding comrade against the windowsill.

One of the reds snickered, “That little fuckface gotchu good, didn’t he?”

The other spat blood into the snow. “Fuck off – them ponies got some crazy zebra-jitsu bullshit!”

“They ain’t zebras, dumbass – they’re just bat ponies.”

“Well, no fuckin’ shit, asshole. But that prick hoofed my face twice before I could even count once!”

‘Idiots …’ I mouthed as I glared down the line of ruined suburbs. Twenty yards. I was about twenty yards away from the gates. A carpet of inviting darkness coaxed me onward. I shook my head, grinding my teeth as the ponies outside continued berating each other.

That damned glass and those stupid shitheads were going to get me killed.

“Alright – alright everypony! Settle down!" the collector shouted over the rabid reds. His brothers ignored him, cheering over the screaming bat ponies as they shook the wagon from side to side. “I said settle down!”

They didn’t.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” He blasted the snow at their hooves with buckshot.

They got the message and backed off, lowering their weapons and muttering things about the collector’s mother. In the relative silence, I narrowed my eyes through a crack that ran down the wall, trying to see past a pair of hooves.

“Ain't got the caps, eh?" A sick grin stretched across his face as he ran a hoof down the mare's neck. “Tell ya what: you find something else to pay me with and I’ll let y’all in.” She winced, craning her neck away from him as he chuckled softly. "I always did wanna know what batd pussy tasted like." He reached a hoof into her barding’s collar below her chin, and parted it slightly.

She swatted away his foreleg, cursing him in her foreign tongue as the stallion’s brothers cheered him on.

“Take it off, batbitch!” I heard one of the reds outside the windowsill shout.

I reached out with a foreleg and pulled myself forward.

Glass shattered beneath me. I clenched my eyes closed and swore under my breath as chunks of broken glass stabbed into my barding.

“The fuck was that?” one of the blood brothers hissed, leaning over the windowsill. I dug my back as far into the charred concrete as I possibly could like a startled radroach.

“Come on, lil filly, just one kiss!” The mare threw her forelegs in front of her and shrieked as he slammed her into the sideboards and planted rough kisses against her neck.

“GET OFF ME!” she shrieked – and shrill cries erupted into the night. The mare’s kin shot out of the wagon and into the air, beating their wings frantically. They barked at each other in their strange language as the blood brothers whooped and cursed.

There was going to be blood. And I needed to get out of there – fast –

“Ey Rocky, hoof me your flashlight. Thinkin’ maybe I heard somethin’ back here.”

A black pipe levitated over the window.

Goddesses. No.

My heart nearly skipped a beat. ‘Fuck!’

I swore under my breath and dragged myself forward.

CRACK!

‘Shit!’ I threw a glance over my shoulder.

Somepony outside screamed. Then silence. I peered out of a crack in the wall.

The toll collector was lying in a heap, a glowing spike of superheated metal jutting out between his eyes.

Everyone fell silent as the stench of burnt hair and cauterized flesh dissipated into the breeze. A bat pony snarled, beating his wings and baring his canines with that glowing pistol clenched between his teeth.

“You bat pony FREAKS!” someone roared.

And all the gunfire in the world erupted into the night.

The flashlight plummeted into the darkness, cracking against my ribcage as the brothers galloped off. I exhaled a jet of air as I bit my tongue and drew blood.

That was my chance. I paused, and peeked my head over the rubble as the brothers pumped lead into the wagon’s frame. I watched the bat ponies duck below, the wagon’s paint and hull chipping away with every spark, with every flash – with every bullet that blasted into its thick frame.

Horror flashed across my face. I wanted to help them somehow. Somehow. But if I did, if I rose up from the rubble, guns blazing, I knew that there wasn’t a single damned way in the world I’d make it out of there alive.

There I was, again … watching helplessly as more ponies died.

But they were as helpless as I was.

I was horrified to know, that if I had to choose …

I’d choose me.

And I chose to get the hell out of there … while I still could.

Snow kicked up behind me. I darted across the rubble, ducking into the darkness of some derelict ruin. Gunfire flashed through the shattered windowpanes and painted my shadow against the ruin’s bare walls. The world blurred past me as every throbbing fiber of my being, every sore muscle, every hypoglycemic blood vessel in my body focused on reaching the gate.

Alive.

I heaved myself over a collapsed doorway.

I didn’t even notice the blood brother that was loitering outside.

My eyes widened as I blundered into him and tackled him into the snow. We wrestled around in the darkness as he screamed for help.

“Get the fuck off me!” the young stallion cried out, trying to draw his pistol.

I swatted it out of his hooves, the weapon landing a foot away in the rubble.

“Stop!” I hissed at him as I bashed him across the skull with a forehoof, silencing his cries. “Be quiet – I don’t want to kill you!”

He bucked me off his chest – clawing at the snow in desperation – trying to hoof his fallen pistol with a dazed look in his eyes.

I growled and threw myself on top of him. If he didn’t stop screaming, he was going to get me killed.

He was going to get me killed.

“You – mother – fucker!” I snarled as I dropped my hooves onto his face again and again, my mind reeling as fresh blood peppered my muzzle.

“H-help!” The pony shielded his battered face with trembling hooves.

In my peripherals I caught sight of the bat pony wagon – surrounded by half a dozen bloodied corpses. The bat ponies within unloaded with everything they had with terrifyingly pinpoint accuracy, cutting down any red that they saw.

That momentary segue was all he needed. Hooves slammed into my gut, summoning bile to my throat. Without a moment to spare, he wrestled me to the powder and trampled me beneath his hooves as he leaped to all fours.

Whipping his mane back, he screamed over the gunfire, “H-help! Runner! We got a –”

I bowed my head and galloped straight at him.

My horn plunged into his gut.

I wrenched my head away and ripped out of him in a splash of bloody gore. He stumbled backwards onto his hinds, whimpering helplessly with wide eyes, stunned – stunned as he clutched the ragged hole in his stomach.

He gasped for air and dropped his jaw. I knew what he was going to do next.

I didn’t even give him a chance to scream.

Not again.

I tackled him to the snow. The stallion writhed beneath me, knocking his pistol away into the darkness.

I felt my hooves wrap around his throat.

“Shut up … shut up ...” I hissed into his muzzle. He batted at me with his faltering forelegs, unable to scream as he gasped and choked. “SHUT. UP.”

I squeezed. I squeezed, and squeezed. Tighter, and tighter. His hooves pawed and flailed at my muzzle as I crushed his windpipe and cold sweat ran down my face.

My muscles tensed. My forelegs trembled. My heart quaked faster than I could breathe – but I didn’t stop.

Stars flashed in my eyes. A dull ringing invaded my senses. All I could hear was my quaking heartbeat and my frantic breaths. Dark veiny tunnels closed in around me, my face contorting into an anguished grimace as my lucidity plunged into the darkness … drowning like a ship sinking beneath the waves of a frozen sea.

I lost myself in his terrified eyes, the eyes of a pony who knew he was going to die. I gazed at the reflection that stared back, its teeth bared, its coat bathed in blood, and its darkened face sneering madly.

I felt nothing. I thought nothing. The stallion moved his mouth but I couldn’t hear a thing. Not. A single. Thing.

It only made me squeeze harder.

“I … won’t … be … a victim …” I heard someone whisper, distantly.

Muzzle flashes illuminated the darkening windows of his bulging eyes as his life ticked away with every suffocating second that dragged by. My hooves dug deep, tearing into the flesh of his throat. He wept a rivulet of blood that streamed down his cheek … down my hoof as I squeezed … and squeezed … and squeezed.

“You can’t stop me. Not this close. No one can stop me, now …”

It was over as fast as it began.

It was over before my brain even registered it.

Through the dark, veiny tunnels of my eyes, I gazed back at his bleeding, agonized stare. I collapsed onto my haunches over his lifeless corpse, peering down at my trembling hooves in horror. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I stumbled to my ungainly legs, taking shuddering gasps for air that did nothing to slow the pounding in my chest.

I bowed my head and saw in the darkness, beneath my hooves …

A pony.

There was a hole in his chest. There were bruises around his throat. There was a puddle of blood pooling around his still, unmoving corpse.

I almost wanted to scream.

But instead I cried. I sobbed hysterically, staring at my bloody hooves as I realized that …

That I did that ... I did that.

I murdered another pony.

I shook my head furiously, trying to clear my mind as I stumbled through the snow in a daze. I didn’t want to look back. I should’ve kept going. I should’ve kept galloping towards the gates while I still could. But I didn’t. All I could see was that stallion lying dead in the snow.

Dead.

Far away, in another world nearby, the gunfire and screams were nothing but muffled bass drops beneath the ringing in my ears. There was a distant crash – and a bang. I turned and with my glassy eyes, I saw blood brothers stumbling away, rubbing their eyes, or cradling their heads. Some simply lay in the snow, dead.

In the confusion, I watched as the wagon puller leaped over the sideboards and yanked the wagon into the air.

I followed their wagon into the sky and into the darkness with my blank stare.

They made it.

But I needed to make it, too.

I snapped out of it, shoving to the back of my mind everything that scraped against my thoughts like hooves on chalkboard. I tore my eyes from the dark clouds. And ran.

No one could stop me. I galloped out of the darkness and across the final stretch as the blood brothers screamed at the dissipating fireworks display in frustration.

By the time they returned to their posts, frustrated and with empty hooves, I was already gone – melted away into the darkness.

I wiped away a single tear as I followed the shadows to salvation.

I stood at the center of a snowy intersection.

Ponies, clad in tattered, dirty barding trotted past me and around me like a stream parting around a stone. Their eyes, turned low, paid no attention to the filthy, shivering stallion that stood among them. Because I, to them, was nothing but another poor pony – like everyone else in those dark slums.

I gazed across the street with my bloodshot eyes, taking in my gloomy surroundings. They glistened dully in the ruddy red and yellow lights that flickered weakly in the snowfall.

Jutting out of the dirty snow were small, smoke-wreathed eateries – stalls and shanties that stank with the bitter, stomach turning stench of burned meat and over-steamed cabbages. All around me were hovels and gnarled concrete ruins that reeked with more than just the stench of vomit and alcohol, sporting flickering neon signs that barely clung to life, spelling out ‘liquor’ or ‘grub’.

I turned my head high and reality skewed inward as if the entire world was collapsing upon itself. I trembled uncontrollably beneath my blood-caked barding as the colossal, concrete ruins of the old city loomed over me, threatening to crush me underneath.

Distant gunshots, echoing shrieks, and pleasured moans coalesced into an uncomfortable ambience that scratched and scraped at my thinning sanity. There were too many people. Too many voices. Too many in one place.

My head was going to explode.

Whereas night outside Poneva's walls was silent, eerie, and haunting, night in Poneva was a claustrophobic mess of flashing lights and revolting sounds that made me physically ill.

Poneva was an alien world. But I was the alien. Any semblance of normality that my heart once held dear – warmth, comfort, safety – all of it was swept away, suffocated and trampled beneath the cold, grimy hooves of the underworld ponies that trotted past me. Poneva was the final nail in the coffin, a coffin that I felt powerless to escape.

I felt like I was going to be buried alive.

I took a step forward, and my hoof crunched through glass. The shards broke around my hoof, scattering dozens of jagged fragments across the dirty snow. For a haunting, dislocated second, I caught my reflections – warped and distorted across the broken glass.

My chin trembled at the disheveled wreck of my former self – my mane grizzled, my coat darker in some places with filth and dried perspiration. And the blood. Oh Goddesses, the blood … it was everywhere, all over me, staining my barding, my flesh …

… my soul.

I stared at my reflections, my chin quivering as I tried to swallow my tears.

‘That can't be me,’ I thought, ‘That ... that thing ... that monster can't be me. It just can't. I'm Red Dawn. Apprentice engineer. Shift C. Serial code F03RD82996. Stable 91.'

The monster glared back. A mad grin stretched across his lips.

‘I'm Red Dawn,’ I kept telling myself, ‘Apprentice engineer. Shift C …’

But he knew. His bloodshot eyes told me that I was wrong. Everything was so wrong.

‘I'm Red Dawn. Apprentice engineer. Shift... Shift C. Serial code... F... 0... 3...’

My reflections. My bloody barding. Those furies. Zebras. Slavers. Slaves. That blood brother. They all mocked me in silence.

"NO!" I hissed through clenched teeth, stomping the glass shards until the ghosts broke apart and died. "Not me..." A forehoof ran against Dew Drops' scarf as hot tears streamed down my cheeks. "You're not me..."