Original Link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Frs8wdJgnldxSmeFArk8ztCokM6qS1Iudl_VknpOddk/edit?usp=sharing

Two weeks went by since the demon Succubus had been defeated, but only three days passed since the last demon attack. Now that they had been spotted and the Underworld League reduced by a member, it seemed like Despair wanted to keep the pressure high on all remaining rebels. One attack followed the other, but the waves of demons were of vastly varying in strength and number each time. The elevated spirit of the rebellion was soon violently destroyed again. Little by little, one individual at a time, the casualties piled up and the already nearly broken rebellion only ended up shrinking up even more.

With each passing day, the quantity of injured allies increased, slowing down the wandership of the rebels more and more. It was another very draining time for Twilight, constantly having to stay alert and being ready to conjure a force field any given time. She frequently was so tired, she just fell over asleep, only to jump back up moments later at even the slightest noise. She and many others had to agree that they would gladly exchange the frequent assaults with the presence of Maud Pie again. At the very least, she allowed them to sleep. This seemed to be the main goal for the Guillotine of Hope. While the attacks she ordered may not be enough to take down the rebellion for good, they were strategically placed to allow them as little time to recover as possible.

With the beginning of the next week, the group finally reached the border of the forest. Finally, an opening allowing them to breathe in this claustrophobic forest. Everyone was feeling very sick of wandering around without any sense of orientation. But in front of them lay a long, flat plain, seemingly leading into a wasteland. Not exactly the most welcoming sight. Twilight let out a sigh as she started considering her options, turning around to what was left of the rebellion.

“Looks like we have to make a decision,” she started, dissatisfaction clearly shown in her expression. “Should we leave the protection of the woods and walk out into the open? Or should we stay?”

“Leaving the forest seems like a dangerous choice. But then again, we might risk starvation if we remain here,” Luna commented.

“Yep... if this darn forest made one thing exceedingly clear, it’s that it just can’t support us,” Applejack added.

Twilight waited a moment, hoping for any more comments. But the remaining members of the leadership circle as well as the individual rebels and the reapers remained silent. Twilight just couldn’t stop worrying about the way everyone was faring. Nobody really seemed to care anymore at this point. The purple mare eventually decided to end the silence.

“Alright. Who is for staying?” she asked.

Only few hooves raised into the air.

“And who is for leaving?” Twilight asked anew.

A minimally greater number of hooves rose up. Most of the rebels did not even vote. This really displeased Twilight. Where did the good mood and motivation go that had been present two weeks ago? How did it fade away so quickly? There was no real point in arguing about it, so she simply turned back around.

“Out we go, then,” she simply commented and started walking.

---

Only a day after they started strolling through the rocky planes, it became clear that things did not look any better for the rebellion now than they had been back in the forest in terms of food. Not only were their supplies dangerously low now, but also their water supplies started to dwindle. No river could be seen as far as their eye could reach and the few dried up plants provided barely any nutrition, let alone good flavor. The occasional snake slithering by at least gave the griffons some meat, but it was only a matter of time before the first rebels would start dieing from hunger and thirst. But there was no going back now. The forest had been seized by the demons anyway. A faint bit of hope remained, though, that maybe somewhere around this plain, there might be a place they could turn into their refuge. On top of that, the demon attacks had stopped, too. It seemed like they were still looking for the rebels in the twisty woods. A chance for them to disappear and rebuild again.

Tragically, the first death not caused by these creatures set in much quicker than expected. Just hours after they started walking, an arabian pony collapsed dead. He must have already been eating and drinking far too little while they were still in the forest. Some of the rebels expected of the griffons to tackle the corpse like wild beasts. But at this point, there were so few rebels left and they all spent so much time together that all rebels knew each other. Even the starved griffons would not dare to eat a creature they called a friend, giving him a proper burial and mourning his passing instead. The ceremony was very short, though. They could not let this start to slow them down, especially as more were surely going to die along the way.

By the middle of the third day out in the open, all rebels were just walking without thinking. Twilight was very drained. Her stomach growled, her head hurt from dehydration and her entire body was begging for nourishment and water. This reminded her just too much of her time wandering through the deserts and savanna a few years back. She already felt like she had experienced enough drought to last a lifetime. A teenage colt seemed to have noticed how drained she was and decided to walk over and offer her some trail mix from his personal gatherings, along with a flask of water. Twilight looked at what seemed like a royal feast to her at this point, but decided to hold herself back and only reach for the water.

“You should keep your supplies for yourself. You are still young and need the food more than I do,” she argued with an exhausted smile, taking only a small sip from the flask in order to swallow her pill with it.

The colt seemed disappointed, but just kept walking without any comment. Twilight felt bad that she needed to stamp out this little ember of benevolence and kindness, but every bit was counting at this point. Desperation overwhelmed them all. The rebels tried to at least keep up the strength of their leaders, but they as well were struggling. As that thought made its way through Twilight’s hazy mind, she decided to check on her friends, starting with the little bit of family she still had left.

“Shining, Cadence. How are you two holding up?” she wondered while focusing the married couple.

“Well, I’m doing mostly okay, I guess. But… Cadence, you are worrying me,” Shining Armor started, glancing at his wife. “You haven’t eaten properly in days and I can’t recall one moment you even reached for the water today…”

“I’m… fine… Don’t worry about me. Just give my rations to someone who needs it more than me,” the former princess insisted as she just kept walking.

“Sweetie… please. You are overdoing it. There is no point in starving yourself,” her husband pleaded, his eyes giving away that he was worried she would be collapsing next.

Cadence gave both Twilight and her brother a tired look. A slight sigh followed as a form of agreement, lifting up her water bottle by magic and taking a sip from it, followed by taking a bite out of a rather old and dry piece of bread. This relaxed Shining Armor, making him smile slightly and pulling his wife close by wrapping his left front leg around her neck.

Twilight, too, was showing some signs of relief. It was one thing if she drained herself, but another if any of her friends and family did that. Next, she aimed to head over to Applejack and Caramel, but after just one glance, she realized that it wasn’t necessary of her to check on them. They both still seemed in a relatively good mood, even though they were just as drained as everyone else. The purple mare watched as they shared their last bottle of apple juice and ate some pickled vegetables together on the go. It seemed like Applejack always got a bit more of both food and water than Caramel. He clearly didn’t mind this, though, even willingly giving her some of his dried berries. Twilight was getting the feeling that something was going on between those two, even more so than usual. As if they were planning something big for just the two of them. The purple mare decided to not investigate further, allowing them to keep their secret hidden for a bit longer and letting them plan some more.

Rarity suddenly appeared next to Twilight. She actually didn’t expect that anyone would be checking on her, too. The skin of the undead mare looked very dry by now and her movements were rather stiff. The silhouette of her bones, her ribcage, spine and hipbone in particular, could be clearly seen under the thin layer of fur.

“And how about you, darling? I saw how you rejected food from the colt and I heard what Cadence is going through. I couldn’t help but notice you are doing the same exact thing. Are you okay?” the undead mare wondered, her voice deeper now that her vocal cords had become mummified and sounding strangely… hollow.

“I’m fine as long as all of you are fine. I can actually manage to gather some moisture and nutrition from the air around us with my magic, so I don’t need quite as much as everyone else. What about you, Rarity?” Twilight asked back.

“To be completely honest…” Rarity started again, a slight hint of a laugh in her voice and smiling a bit. “I actually am very glad to be undead at this point. I mean… yes, it hurts… but it is a relief to know that I won’t be putting any burden on the others in terms of needing supplies. Frankly, the farther away I stay from moisture and food that can spoil, the better off I will be. I feel so bad for everyone else, though… With every day going by, it seems to me that all of you are becoming more and more like me…”

“I can only try my best to secure the survival of the rebellion and keep everyone alive. But what is my power good for if I can’t even do something as simple as use it to create food and water?” Twilight spoke with a sigh, leaving her head hanging.

“Actually, why can’t you do that?” her friend wanted to know.

“Technically, I can create things out of thin air. But you can’t imagine how fragile the balance of this world is by now. There are completely safe spells that turns ingredients into processed food, but that requires edible matter to be present in a decent quantity. Also, these spells always waste some of the matter. To create food and water out of nothing, I would have to dive deep into manipulating the flow of magic. I am really afraid of doing that. One small mistake could mean an environmental breakdown. I will only do this as a last resort, should we all be on the verge of dieing,” the purple mare explained.

“I’m afraid that won’t be all too long anymore…” Rarity finished, her dull eyes wandering among the rebels.

The zombie mare’s parents were not far behind and appeared to have been listening. Along with showing the same exhaustion as everyone else, they also seemed to still be unsure how to act towards their own daughter. They probably made some bad encounters with undead ponies before, making them fear she might suddenly attack them. Hopefully, as time passed by, they would come to understand that, even though Rarity was dead, she was still herself.

It seemed like only the reapers were still doing fine. After all, they could not die and were used to starving themselves at times. It even seemed like Fluttershy took it upon herself to train all the apprentices and reaper foals in self-control, so they would be able to make it through this time without ending up attacking their own allies due to hunger. Especially little Amber seemed to be handling this very well, probably having seen this coming in a vision and thus giving her time to mentally prepare herself. But since they never showed any expression, one would not be able to tell if these assumptions were correct. Better safe than sorry, Twilight figured, as she approached Fluttershy and Derpy Hooves.

“What about you and the other reapers?” she asked.

“You don’t have to worry about that. Feeling starvation and dehydration gnawing at you isn’t pleasant, but it won’t affect us for a while. But eventually, we will have to silence the demons we consumed again, or we will start to get weak,” Fluttershy explained.

“Let me know when that comes close to happening. I will figure something out,” Twilight requested.

Fluttershy nodded in response before letting her eyes lower to the heart-shaped pin on her cloak, as so many times before. Derpy didn’t seem to care about the lack of food and water at all. She still was posing proudly, showing off her black eye while keeping the empty socket with her glass eye shut over extended periods of times to put focus on the good one. A personal victory like that seemed to be enough for her to keep it together.

Now, Twilight spotted that Rarity’s parents were walking up to their daughter. Having spoken to the undead mare seemed to have made them a bit more confident now. But they still had insecurity written in their expressions, as well as grief now. The purple mare could only imagine how horrible it must be for them to have survived everything only to find out that their daughter didn’t. The fact that she was still walking around and speaking to them normally was calming them, but not truly making anything better.

Twilight eventually reached the former rulers of Equestria. As usual, Luna showed enormous willpower, determination and drive. Even though she was struggling just as much as everyone else, she remained unbroken, still pushing forward, still giving it her all in trying to win this war. Truth be told, she was an inspiration to Twilight. Her sister, though, was a completely different case. Several times, Twilight was worried they had left Celestia behind, because she made herself so unnoticed. She decided to speak to both of them.

“Luna?” was all she needed to say, as the dark fallen alicorn had been watching the whole time.

“I am doing well. I make sure to keep my strength up and I do the same for my sister,” she replied swiftly, but then gave Celestia a worried look. “I can barely get her to speak, though. It worries me deeply. I have never seen her like this before. Usually, I am the silent one…”

The white fallen alicorn kept walking with her head low, her ears hanging down and staring at the ground as if she didn’t hear anything. Just what was she thinking lately? What thoughts were running through her mind that she was constantly in this state?

“Celestia?” Twilight called.

No reaction. The former ruler of Equestria just kept on walking, kept on staring at the ground.

“Celestia!” Twilight repeated.

This time, she heard her. Celestia’s ears instantly moved up and her eyes went wide open as she lifted her head. She really had been so bemused that she did not hear them.

“Are you okay?” the purple mare wanted to know.

Again, Celestia did not reply. Her ears just started hanging again and her eyes returned to a half closed state, as well as lowering her focus to the ground. She even turned her head away, seemingly in shame.

“You need to talk to us… It eats you up and-” Twilight started, but found herself stopped.

The interruption did not come from any pony, zebra, griffon, donkey, cow, minotaur or reaper. It came from beneath them. An earthquake shook them all up and startled the rebels heavily after walking for hours in a trance-like state. Another wave of quaking ground followed. And another. Again and again, getting more intense each time. It quickly dawned to everyone what this meant.

“We can’t just ever get a break, can we?” Twilight growled angrily. “I guess it wasn’t Despair who ordered the assaults on us after all. It was him. Taking down Succubus must have infuriated him so much, he ordered other demons to push us out of the forest so he could personally take care of us.”

No name was needed. There was only one creature that could cause such earthquakes while walking. Moments later, a red aura appearing on the horizon confirmed their suspicion. Malice was on the approach.

Everyone started running again, panic fueling them with energy. The group was in total chaos, everyone running or flying around aimlessly, not knowing whether to hide, spread out or stay together. Twilight tried her best to keep them all together, but quickly noticed that one of her friends was missing. With a quick glance back, she came to realize that Celestia was frozen in fear. She stared at the advancing demon with wide open eyes and mouth, shaking all over as her limbs nearly gave in and she struggled to stand. Twilight had no choice. She gave a short signal to the rest, telling them to keep running while she turned around and back to the fallen alicorn, ready to defend her. Malice was still far away when he already began casting spells at them, an enormous barrage of black razor-sharp shards raining down from the skies. Within mere seconds, Twilight’s eyes turned white and her purple aura filled the air around them. She created a massive shield, trying to block off as many of the shards as possible, fearing they might be hitting the others. Almost instantly, a huge wall of black flames rushed over to them. Twilight cut her shield in half and placed it on the ground, letting the flames rush past her left and right, once again leaving a passage for the still fleeing rebels behind her.

But the other members of the leadership circle would not leave the two mares behind to fight this mountain of a demon. After all orders were given, Shining Armor, Cadence and Luna were the first to turn around and rush to Twilight’s aid, quickly followed by Fluttershy, Derpy, Applejack and Rarity. This was exactly what Twilight did not want. She just wanted them out of danger, no matter how much she was putting herself at risk for that.

Malice was now no longer just casually walking, but started running. The ground was shaking so heavily, the purple mare found it very difficult to remain upright and her friends as well kept falling over repeatedly as they approached from behind. Malice moved his arms out to the side, his magic ripping huge chunks out of the ground left and right of Twilight and Celestia. The flat sides which used to be the surface just moments ago turned towards each other and launched in their direction, threatening to crush them. Twilight clenched her eyes shut as she created two equally enormous purple walls of arcane magic, making the massive rocks crumble into many pieces on contact. Almost instantly after, Malice summoned his giant red scythe and held it ready in his right skeletal hand while his left rose into the air. The whole plain rapidly became brighter and brighter, the source of light coming from above them. Malice was now powerful enough to tear one of Luna’s stars out of the Aether and launch it down on them as a monstrous comet.

Twilight was stunned and shocked to see the burning mass rush down from above. She could barely react fast enough to manipulate the star’s path, making it narrowly miss the ground and instead fly at Malice. But the demon was prepared for this. A single upwards slash of his scythe was enough to cut the approaching star in half, letting the two pieces fly right past him and detonate off in the distance.

The demon commander finally came close enough to strike Twilight with his scythe. The force of impact was enormous as it came swinging from the side, colliding against Twilight’s force field wrapping around her friends and herself. Despite her best efforts, she could not prevent being knocked away, letting the comparably tiny sphere fly through the plain for miles before coming to a stop again. The shockwave of the impact tossed up so much dust, they couldn’t even see anything of the demon anymore aside of his red aura. But then the earth started to shake again. Twilight was getting ready for another blow of any form. But what actually happened next was something she could have never been prepared for.

All beings contained in the sphere could not believe their eyes as a colossal winged monkey leaped over them seemingly out of nowhere, pouncing Malice and trying to disarm him. It seemed like he as well did not see this coming. Not only was this creature so massive, it could actually match Malice’s size, but also seemed to have tremendous magical and combat abilities, as he could actually keep this seemingly unstoppable demon busy. Even more bizarre was the fact that hundreds of strange-looking creatures came rushing at them from the same direction this monkey came from. Twilight’s first instinct was to defend herself, but these beings were not out for a fight. On the contrary, they picked up the sphere the rebellion leaders were in and carried it away from the battle. As the figures of Malice and the mountain-sized winged monkey became gradually smaller, they found themselves reunited with the rest of the rebels and reapers, all running alongside their unexpected allies. It now dawned to all of them that these creatures looked like seemingly completely random hybrids of all sorts of animals, always consisting of at least two different ones. Only few of them even looked similar to each other.

“Beast men…” Celestia finally commented as she was now coming back to her senses and managed to process what was going on in all this chaos.

“You know them?” Twilight wondered, still heavily confused as to what was actually going on.

“Not really. I have only heard of them before,” the fallen alicorn continued.

“But they never leave their home country. That must mean…” Luna added, looking around in confusion for a moment. “Did we really end up this far away from Equestria? Are those the Southern Wastelands?”

Eyes kept darting around. The beast men kept running while carrying Twilight and her friends in their bubble as well as any weak or injured rebel who couldn’t run on their own. No answers were presented to their questions. Twilight had yet to figure out what they actually wanted with them, if the beast men were acting out of benevolent intentions or had their own plans with the last remains of the rebellion. But for now, they were out of danger and being carried to safety, the purple mare hoped.